Amazon's 80 new products, Oculus Connect, and Xiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha

Stories this week: Amazon pushes Alexa privacy with new delete optionsAmazon’s new Echo Studio sounds like the future of smart speakersThe top 8 Echo products Amazon announced todayHere are all of the other new Echo and Ring products announced todayAmazon announces third-generation Echo smart speakerAmazon’s new $59 Echo Dot with Clock includes an LED displayAmazon’s Echo Buds sound good and are great at noise reductionUsing Amazon’s Echo Loop ring is like whispering a secret to AlexaAmazon Echo Frames preview: trying on the Alexa smart glassesAmazon’s new Echo Loop puts Alexa in a discreet smart ringAmazon follows up its Alexa microwave with a new Alexa Smart OvenAmazon is simplifying device setup with ‘Certified for Humans’ programAmazon announces Fetch pet tracker that uses new Sidewalk networkingAmazon’s new Echo Flex lets you put Alexa everywhere in your homeAmazon’s Echo Glow is a $29 lamp for Alexa dance parties and bedtime storiesAll the new features coming to Alexa, including a new voice, frustration mode, and Samuel L. JacksonJeff Bezos says Amazon is writing its own facial recognition laws to pitch to lawmakersFacebook says it will build AR glasses and map the worldOculus will add new social features powered by FacebookOculus Link will let you plug your Quest headset into a gaming PC to play Rift gamesOculus is launching hand tracking on Quest next yearFacebook acquires neural interface startup CTRL-Labs for its mind-reading wristbandOculus CTO John Carmack says ‘we missed an opportunity’ as the Gear VR diesXiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha is almost entirely made of screenThe OnePlus TV is finally here7 good and 3 bad things in iPadOSSamsung will let Galaxy Fold owners replace their screens once for $149 Please take our survey here: theverge.com/survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, we talk about Amazon's 80 new products. That's right, 80 of them. Facebook's Oculus Connect event, where they announced a new virtual world called Horizon, and a phone with a 600% screen to body ratio. That's The Vergecast coming up now.

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• 1:17Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast, well, really the only podcast of The Verge podcast empire at this time, but it's still a good one. I'm your friend, Neelai. We got a full, full house today. Dieter Brown is here. I am, I am, yes. Well done. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Ashley Carmen is here. Ashley hosts the other podcasts in the empire, but it's, it's on hold for now. Hi, Ashley. Hey. And Addie Robertson's here. Hey. So it's a week of events. And the reason I wanted Ashley and Addie to join us is there was a massive Amazon event. Dieter, you were there. Yep. And then, literally at the same time, there was a massive Oculus event, which, Dieter, you are precluded from talking about because your work's up.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  You should do the disclosures for me from now on.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'll just, I'll just disclose everything about everyone. It'll be, it's gonna be a weird, weird show. But these things happened literally simultaneously on Wednesday. Amazon in particular put out a ton of news. We're gonna go through all through it. Ashley and I were talking about the fact that Amazon is now into so many product areas. It's stepping on companies it has itself invested in. So I want to talk about that a little bit. And then Oculus announced a bunch of stuff that I want to talk about with Addy in particular. But let's start with Amazon. Dieter, you were there. Dan Seifert was there. What was it like?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  This is the third year that they've done this. The second, they, the second year, they actually, no, this is the first year they let us talk about it. They let us admit that it's happening ahead of time, which is interesting. We live blogged it because we could tell you that it was happening. Last year, they announced 70 things. According to Amazon's count, this year, they announced 80 things, eight zero things in the space of about an hour and 10 or 15 minutes. Like, just, just as an example, the, the flagship product of Amazon's hardware line, maybe not the most important one, but like the one that is most canonical, the thing that you think of when you think of Amazon hardware is the Echo, the, the original Echo speaker, right? They still make it. They, they updated it this year.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  The Echo speaker got, I kid you not, about a minute and a half of stage time. Their main product.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, what is there to say? It's like, it sounds a little less crappy and it's in different fabrics now.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that, that is exactly all there is to say about it. It got to the point where in order to just keep up on the live blog, I would just write the word new colon and then the thing that they announced. And I did that at least once a minute. Because otherwise, like you, I would have to write, and now they're gonna, they're leading up to talk about this thing. And now they're announcing a new thing. And like, just like, and now they are announcing was too much words for the speed at which they were going. So I just wrote new colon Alexa Ring for some reason, you know, over and over again.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  It's strange to me that they do not livestream these.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  They own a video streaming platform.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  A pretty popular one. They own AWS. They could just roll a new one if they wanted to.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  But they don't. And I kind of don't understand why. Is it just because it's so frenetic? Is it? Have they told you a reason for that?

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Uh, Amazon has this thing where they, uh, they have this, you can call it false, but they like to think that they're humble. Uh, they don't do a lot of fanfare, especially for hardware product releases. When they released the original Echo, I think we might've gotten like a half hour heads up and they just like put out a press release. So we were, we still didn't know what the hell it was. They just throw stuff out there. I think that they, if they wanted to, like, they don't even want to do this keynote. They would rather just like put all the products on the store and like, let us find them. Um, but they know they need to, to like, have us be a little bit aware of it.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  You're just searching for a speaker and all of a sudden number one best selling speaker bubbles to the top of your search results. And now you know what to buy. It's Amazon's thing.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  It is a weird sort of like humility though, because you're still doing a press conference, right? You still are getting on stage. You have a beautiful stage inside your spheres of like your, you know, indoor terrarium or whatever. Um, so yeah, I don't know. And they're definitely media trained enough to like be on stage and actually like perform well for a camera. Um, so it's, it's odd.

• 5:15Nilay Patel?

  So they started this whole thing by talking about privacy, which was a little strange. Because what they really started with was we're the first company to make it so that people couldn't, like our graders weren't listening to you.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  Which they only did because it was like uncovered by the media.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. They were the first one to get caught.

• 5:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So like they, it was very clear. They're trying to reframe the privacy conversation.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Like, yep.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  Look at how good at this we are. And then they were like done with it. And we'll go through it all. But by the end of it. They were like, we can track your dog with our new mesh network that will extend through your city and like precisely in space. And let's put more stuff in your kid's room. And did that, was that as whiplashy in the room as it, as it was for me, just like reading the live log?

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Yes, it was. Although a bunch of, they go so fast that you don't get a chance to stop and think, wait a minute, if you actually build the mesh network to track the dog, then what does that mean? Like by the time you're like, wait a minute, they've already announced three new things.

• 6:22Nilay Patel?

  The mesh network to track the dog sounds a little bit like, because isn't Apple planning on doing something mesh networky with like finding phones?

• 6:34Speaker 03

  What Amazon is doing, it's called Amazon Sidewalk. And they, there's this band, the 900 megahertz band of spectrum that is, you know, they're free to do stuff on it. It's not getting heavily used. And they want to be able to do location, or do data, or do something at distances longer than wifi, but shorter than like 5G. And they need it to be low power. And there are, you know, Internet of Things, things like Zigbee and Z-Wave and Thread and whatever the hell else. But none of them really hit that range, that sweet spot of long distances, but not super long, and also low power to like, do weather monitors or cameras at, you know, the end of your ranch, or whatever the hell you want. So.

• 7:20Nilay Patel?

  I love the idea that there's a fourth wireless protocol because like Jeff Bezos is like, dude, I need to cover my ranch.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that's kind of it. So they created this thing called Sidewalk. And it is not a like big, you know, new Internet of Things standard. It is an Amazon protocol that Amazon controls, that people can make devices for that's, that are supported by it, that is able to do that stuff for Internet of Things. And then it has the added benefit of being able to track stuff like a dog. And it also has the added benefit of being a mesh network where like, you, it can track stuff through the network and you know, that's They talked about it being super secure a bunch so that if you run an Amazon sidewalk network out of your house, you are you become part of the the whole mesh and they bragged they

• 8:08Speaker 03

  had covered like a whole city with just 700 of these things. And the crazy thing about all of this is it it actually started as a Ring project. It basically started as like the protocol that Ring was using for like smart light bulbs and stuff. And so that's why the fetch little, you know, dog collar, not the collar, but like the thing that hangs off the dog collar is a Ring product. Because like it started at Ring and then Ring is like, hey, we got this thing. It's pretty good. And I was like, yes, we're gonna make that bigger.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  So that's like a it's a science project, right?

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a science project. It's nowhere near ready. I asked many, many people to talk to me about it. And many, many people told me that it's very early days. So we're I'm still trying to get, you know, some like actual information on how technically it works and what the policies around it are. So like more to come. But they announced that they're like they're working on it. And they the interesting thing about this event in general is in a few different places, Amazon tried to recontextualize the way that it introduces new stuff. As like, this is this is a science thing we're working on. It's a science project. Or the the most interesting one to me is they have this thing that they're calling day one products, which are basically like stuff we want to make, but they suck. And we don't think that everybody should buy them, which is the ring in the glasses.

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is it's a little bit of a retcon. But this is how their product development cycles go. Like, yeah, the first Echo looked like a reference design. People like them. They spent money on the design. Now they look a lot nicer. Yeah, right. And you just see it. The Echo Auto literally looks like a reference. It looks like they bought a kit at Radio Shack and like assembled it and they sell them. Yeah. And like, maybe some people will buy them and they'll be successful. They'll make them nicer next year. So you can see how they do it.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  But like, the the thing about Echo Auto, it's actually instructive is like, they haven't widely released that thing yet. Right? It's still sort of in that weird invite zone. And so I think what these products actually are is just straight up market research. They want to get these products into a few more hands. They get the shine of saying we made a thing. Everyone's like, oh, you made a thing. Let's think about what the thing means, then talk about the thing. And then they get, you know, a few thousand more people or however many people buy them beyond just Amazon employees. And then they get to see how they get used. They probably have even more crazy tracking terms of service than a standard consumer product. And then they can iterate based on the things that they learn from the wacky products being used by the early adopters to make the better thing later.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  But privacy is what's most important.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm sorry. We're gonna be all over the place because they announced 80 things and they're all interconnected. So we started at privacy and we ended at, you know, a beta program for eyeglasses, like duh.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  And we should go through the actual things, but I think starting in privacy and ending with Ring mesh network that goes vast distances where we don't know the parameters, how it works. Plus Ring in general.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:59Nilay Patel?

  Which is basically surveillance systems that they get police departments to incentivize people to use. Like those things are, those are the Amazon controversies around these products, right?

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  Alexa's listening to you. It was not made clear that other, that human beings were actually able to listen to your recordings. Ring makes you feel safer. It is not clear that their marketing pitch around this lowers crime in your neighborhood versus does it actually is true? And it's really unclear if you want the police to just have unfettered access to cameras all over the place.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  So their Ring is like, they have a huge chip on their shoulder about that last point because that's what everybody thinks. And like, that's not what it is because the police can only look at recordings and only if you give permission and it's camera by camera specifically. Because I asked him about this because you're gonna put Ring cameras in the house. And so like, does that mean like cops can see what's going on in my house? And they're like, I'm so mad about this. The truth is, the only way that a cop will ever see information from a Ring camera is if you explicitly say, yes, you can. And then they only get to see a recording.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  Or what if they have a war, what if they have a warrant?

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Well, so here's the thing, like, all of that stuff is just a policy that Ring sets. It's not the law.

• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and everyone knows that the government is extremely respectful.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  The NSA has no, no desire to, to break into the ring.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  I've been telling you this for episodes.

• 12:22Nilay Patel?

  I, I think we agree that the government is to be hated and feared. All right, let's talk about real products.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  Because there is that, I just wanted to put that frame around it because they started with privacy. And that is the sort of underlying, I would say controversy or underlying context of everything Amazon's doing, which is they're really big. And it was, it's unclear how much they are watching, looking, sharing. And they need to get better at it if they want to be at the scale that this set of products indicates they want to be at.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  So that's, that's the context. But then they did put out a new Echo.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Well, no, no, hang on. The very first thing that got announced wasn't at the event. It was the day before the event when they unveiled the voice interoperability initiative.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  Nothing screams audience interest like voice interoperability initiative.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  They want, they want all speakers to support all voice assistants. And wouldn't that be nice? And they got everybody on board. They actually got a ton of people on board. They got Verizon and Qualcomm and Intel and Microsoft and NXP and MediaTek. And everybody except for Google, Apple and Samsung. Apple and Samsung have yet to respond to my request for comment about what they think of this thing. Google has responded and so far as I could tell, they were invited to it like the Saturday before they announced it. So like they got four days notice.

• 13:40Nilay Patel?

  So here's, this is like my international relations 101 college. This is what I remember from international relations 101 in college.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  You have, you have a hegemon and in the way that like small countries battle the hegemon is they form alliances.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:55Nilay Patel?

  But this seems like the opposite of that, right? Amazon is the hegemon and the way they're going to destroy Google and Apple, which own the phone is by saying, everybody who sucks. Now you can run on the Echo speaker.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Well, if you count the phone, then Google is definitely the hegemon because they have bigger market share for Google Assistant than Amazon does for Alexa.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  Sure. But so that's what I mean. It's like everyone, like no one in the world is ever going to buy a Verizon smart speaker. Unless Verizon literally hands one out for free when you buy a phone, which is.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Which they're gonna totally do. It's gonna happen.

• 14:25Nilay Patel?

  But now they're going to give out an Echo and say, you can say, hey Verizon. And then we'll like, we'll bill you a little bit more.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Amazon's literally already doing that with Orange in France.

• 14:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. And or what was the other one? Qualcomm, right?

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  Qualcomm is going to make a chipset and it's going to be in the Echoes now because Amazon supports it and everyone else can be on it.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  Or, I mean, whatever other voice assistant you might come up with, you can go partner with Amazon and your stuff runs in the Echo. So now you have an incentive to say, this is the platform we choose, not we're going to build into Google or make a deal with Apple or whatever.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this seems like a very aggressive move.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:03Nilay Patel?

  Not an interoperability move.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Well, it's a very aggressive move, but on the other hand, like, how scared are Google and Apple of the toothless, there's no dues, there's no membership fees, there's not even meetings yet, voice interoperability alliance? This is just a bunch of companies saying, hey, yeah, we should be able to make money off voice assistants, too. That sounds cool. Like, that's what the whole thing is right now. That's all it is.

• 15:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What do they actually do?

• 15:29Speaker 03

  They promised to work together. They promised that they will, you know, make things that can run other things.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  But there's one thing and it's Alexa.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Well, there's other things. There's the Beeb. There's Jingo on Orange. There's Cortana.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So this is if you want to talk to Cortana instead of Alexa, all you need is an Echo speaker in your house.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:49Nilay Patel?

  And then you can talk to Cortana directly instead of going through Alexa.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. The idea is that there's going to be like a few broad assistants, like Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, I don't know, throw Bixby in there if you want to. And then there'll be thousands of really deep assistants that are very good in their specific domain. So, like, I don't know, the cooking channel will make a voice assistant, right? And instead of having to go, hey, Alexa, talk to the cooking channel. Okay, now I'm talking to the cooking channel, blah, blah, blah, blah. You could just talk to the cooking channel and it will be good at the cooking channel things. That's the dream that they're pitching.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  That would be a slight improvement. It sounds like Microsoft has, if back in the day, Microsoft, we're going to come up with the Microsoft Windows Interoperability Alliance and everybody can run Microsoft Windows and also you can make EXE's that work on top of it.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  You will note that Microsoft at that time was a ruthless monopolist. I'm just saying, like, if you're like, yep, that sounds like a strategy Microsoft would have done in, like, the 90s, early 2000s, that is because at that time they were a ruthless monopolist.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  We should move on to hardware, but the last point on this thing is, you know how everyone who makes a voice assistant is in trouble because the speakers accidentally record stuff when they are not supposed to because of the wake word thing?

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  Imagine if you've got 50 wake words on your speaker.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  Like "Beeb". Beeb is one of my favorite songs by a K-pop star named IU. And that's, I love saying the word "Beeb" because it's a song I love. And now I've, now the speaker's listening while I, I commit crimes.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  Great, Paul. Okay, so there's the new Basic Echo, there's a new Echo Dot with a clock, which, I mean, it's literally an Echo Dot with an LED clock in it. It's 60 bucks. It seemed like the thing they were most excited about.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  It's the thing they're gonna sell the most of.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it goes into everyone's bedroom and replaces your clock. Great. They're excited about it. Then there's this Echo Studio, which I think we should take a minute and talk about. You, you got to see it, Dan had a whole, a little exclusive with it. We got a lot of photos on the site. It's basically a big speaker with a, it's like a bunch of mid-range speakers around, a subwoofer firing down and a tweeter firing up. And because it has the up firing speaker, it can do positional audio. They claim, I haven't heard it, I'm very skeptical of this. It can do positional audio, so then it can, you can pair it with a Fire TV and it can do Atmos, so it's like a soundbar. And then their 3D audio, which is like a music format. And this is the thing they were really pushing.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, they specifically went with Dolby's 3D audio format. There was, there was a lot of love for Dolby at this event.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  Dolby's riding high. Uh, there was a lot of love for Dolby at the Apple event. Dolby sends out press releases now that are, that are just like, "We did it again." Like, it's amazing. But the idea that you can buy two of these things, it's only 200 bucks, so it's very inexpensive. It does the room auto-tuning that the HomePod does, that the new Sonos Move does, where it listens to itself and like fixes the sound. Here's what I will say. One, it's cheap, right? So the idea that you can get a pretty good speaker for not a lot of money that can also just like, you can talk to it and turn on your, your Spotify is great. Two, the number one question I ever got about the HomePod was can I pair it with my Apple TV? So like if you have Fire TV stuff, this is great, right? You just like buy this, you don't have to buy a soundbar, it's great, it does all the things for you.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  It also has optical in, which is hilarious.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  On that Fire TV compatible, like there's been a lot of different Fire TVs, like, and I don't really know how you differentiate between all of the different Fire TVs. Is there some cutoff for compatibility or can you just?

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  We have to get our hands on this thing, I have no idea. But I think if you want Atmos, you need one of the last two generations of Fire TV. Um, cause that's what supports it and it's all wireless. So, um, you probably need to have a reasonable wifi setup in your house for latency issues. So like, maybe it'll do Atmos, I think Dolby is like doing the thing where everything is Atmos now. You know, like you can get headphones, you can get a laptop with built in Atmos speakers, which seems not right. So like, of cour-, it's like, it's the format that Surround is going to be in now. And so things that can decode it are Atmos, but it doesn't mean you're going to get the full, you know, seven speaker Atmos thing, but great, it works. What I will say about 3D audio and we just, it's funny because we usually do this. Every January Sony tells me that like some artist on the Sony roster, like,

• 20:14Nilay Patel?

  Pink is so excited about 3D audio now, right? Like I sit through it every year, which is, and I, Amazon made a video and they did a demo where it was like, the person was listening to it and they closed their eyes and like, where's the speaker? And they open the eyes and the speaker's only in front of them. And like, I thought there were speakers behind me and it's like, why? Who is looking for that experience where you have speakers behind you? Like, that's only useful in one situation, that's watching Jurassic Park.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Right, or surround sound with the helicopters, the helicopters start behind you and then they slowly go in front of you. You're like, whoa, it's like the helicopters were behind me.

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like the goal for music is to like be in a live environment, right? Where they're usually in front of you. It's not like Jimmy Page is like ducking out of the back, right? Like surprising you, like there's a flautist who like jumps out of the closet. It's like, I'm playing a flute now, like that doesn't happen.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  It's like you're in the band, right? With Surround?

• 21:10Nilay Patel?

  No, it just, it's so like, that's a thing. Like it just doesn't make any sense. That's not the point. The point is like, there's a reason that it has never, ever worked. Like, I have a quad channel decoder from 1972, and it just like never went anywhere because no one gives a shit. And also, most people just listen to their AirPods, which sound horrible. Like, people do not care about this. So I love that they're doing it. I love that Amazon Music is supporting it. But we're at the point now where they're like, we're doing HD quality audio. And you look at the specs and it's, it's CD quality, right? It's 41, 44.116, right, like, CD. And then they've got the new one, which is like slightly better.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  It's 3D. And it's like, people don't even, we're at the point where we're advertising literally the quality of CDs, which came out in like 1989, because people don't care. So I, I just hear, I see this 3D audio stuff and like, I don't, that's not it, right? Like, that's not what people want. They want like speakers in all their, in all the rooms. They want a service that goes everywhere they go. Amazon Music is not that service historically. It just, I, I don't know.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  The 3D audio is there. It's a marketing point. I think the, the main thing is, they were, they just were willing to make it bigger so they can get better sound out of it. It's bigger than of the other smart speakers. It's like, I don't know, you can hug it, but it's like, it's almost not huggable. It's like big.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  That, is that your, is that your size measurement?

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  Things you can hug? Alright.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Huh. For $1.99, who on earth should buy a HomePod?

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  No one should buy a HomePod. I, I, I, and I think that's like, this is the thing that makes it very clear that Apple just got it wrong with the HomePod, right? Here's a big speaker that sounds good. It's far more useful than a HomePod. It also runs Apple Music, because Amazon supports Apple Music. You do not need a HomePod in your life. And maybe, we don't know what it sounds like, right? Everything, every time they demo a speaker to us, it sounds good in the room. We gotta like, try it out. We'll see. Maybe the HomePod sounds better, maybe it sounds worse. But what I'm telling you is that people do not care. At the end of the day, the person who cares about how good a speaker sounds is like me and the people who follow me on Twitter. That is not a huge audience. If it was bigger, I would be selling them speakers, but I promise you, it's not big enough.

• 23:23Nilay Patel?

  So like, I think this goes after them. I think, I think Casey pointed out on Twitter, like, this is a huge shot directly at Sonos, who is one of their partners, because it's cheaper than the Sono stuff. But I think it looks kind of cheap. I mean, it's cheap. It's very plasticky.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I don't know. You'll, you'll have to see it in person, although you can't because it's Amazon. It looks slightly better in person than it does in photos.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I'm excited to try it out. I'm excited to pair, that you can pair two of them in a subwoofer and like build a whole surround sound thing. If this is a good way to get a decent ammo setup for like 500 bucks, I think that's awesome, but.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, if you, if you do that, if you're thinking that and you're willing to have two big speakers in your living room that way, that, that is the shot at Sonos because like, why would anybody buy a couple of surrounds and a playbase and a playbar? You know, you start adding those prices up and you're well over the cost of two of these things.

• 24:14Nilay Patel?

  So that's the speaker. We'll try it out. There's the new buds, which are interesting because they're partnered with Bose, which doesn't seem normal.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  So I've listened to the buds. Uh, I've worn the buds. I've talked to the buds. The buds have talked to me. You certain, I'm sorry, I'm doing the best present joke. Um, they sound, I think, pretty good, but I can't actually tell you if they sound great. They're comfortable, but I also wear Jabra 65 Ts, which are like noise isolating in ear headphones. And I think those are comfortable. A lot of people don't. They are pretty big. The case that they go in is huge, uh, but they do noise reduction. Not noise, uh, removal or what's

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  Cancellation.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Cancellation. They don't do noise cancellation. They only do noise reduction and they're using Bose technology for it. The difference between like full on cancellation and reduction, I don't know, man, like they're, they're fully truly wireless in ear earbuds. Like, how good do you think it's going to get? They totally worked. Like it definitely took the noise down to the room to like, you know, robber, robber, robber room to like room, right? So like it did, it did the job. And if you're listening to music while that happens, then you know, it's perfectly fine.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  But they, I don't know, man, they're, they're 130 bucks, I think, 120 bucks?

• 25:26Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  130 bucks. Um, that's super cheap, uh, for, uh, headphones that have active noise reduction. And I think that they're gonna, they're gonna eat Jabra's lunch and that really sucks for Jabra. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that, uh, they don't have wireless charging and they charge via a micro USB.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing. That is like the ultimate in app and Amazon cheapness that they're just stuck with micro USB. I bought a tablet from them, like a cheap tablet, just to like be a Sony controller. It charges over micro USB. It feels very much like 1985 in my house because of it. This sounds like an interesting product to me if it didn't have Alexa.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Well, so here's the thing about everything that they announced that talks to a phone, the buds, the ring, the glasses. You talk to Alexa, use Alexa for the hot word. I'm really sorry that I'm in this whole podcast and saying the words instead of doing it. So if I set your speaker off, but they all let you long press to talk to the phone's native assistant. And they're very careful to point that out.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they have buttons and you also don't have to like set it up, right? Cause they're Bluetooth. So you can just like not do it.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. The, the, the frames and the ring in particular are basically just Bluetooth headsets that also like talk to Alexa. Cause like you hit the button and it like answers a call or you hit the button, you hold it down and it uses a standard command to launch the native assistant.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  So Ashley, this is where I, I want to talk to you because the pricing here is really interesting to me. These are really cheap. They're made with partners. Amazon also announced like a smart oven, which I want to talk to you about, but you know, in the context of announcing it. Uh, they were like, our microwave from last year was the top selling microwave on Amazon. What a surprise, but like they, like they obviously made that happen.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  It's so dark. It's so dark. It's just like, yeah, obviously.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like you control the search results. Are you surprised?

• 27:12Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  People typed in microwave and you, you made them buy your extremely cheap microwave? What a surprise. So these are priced at 130. That's much cheaper than everybody else. They announced glasses. You have covered Focal, which is a startup that makes glasses. They announced a ring. There's other ring startups. They're basically just like, here are some form factors. We put some mics and speakers in them. Here we go. But it seems like they are, I mean, I would almost call this predatory pricing. Like they're obviously not making money on this stuff. There's no huge margin here. And you cover a lot of indie hardware startups. You talk about this all the time. Like how, how do these companies even compete with Amazon now?

• 27:45Speaker 05

  It was funny because, and I don't know if this is directly related, but today I got an email from June, which makes a smart oven. And they have, they put the oven on sale for $200 less.

• 27:57Nilay Patel?

  Of course.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  Still, I think $400 and Amazon's smart oven is 250. And the rest of the smart ovens are the Tovol, I think it was the Tovola is I think maybe 300. So it's not at, it's, it's close to there, but yeah, like there's. Everyone, I just don't see how this is gonna, they're gonna be able to compete. Because also, Amazon has a partnership slash, I mean, owns Whole Foods. So they can literally, you can scan Whole Foods products with their smart oven and cook it in your Amazon smart oven. Just like, oh my gosh. I feel for these oven people.

• 28:35Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they're, I mean, first of all, I mean, that's, you're very kind.

• 28:39Speaker 05

  I know. You always are like questioning why I feel for them.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, I, it's like their smart oven. It's hard, it's hard to be like, man, I wish your company, like, everyone sees the same goal you do. Like, they obviously see a different world than I think a lot of folks. But you said this to me yesterday, right? They're the ones who prove the market. They take all the risk. They build the products. They, they figure out what people actually want. And then, Amazon gets to come in with a much cheaper version, sell it for nothing, and integrate it into its supply chain where they actually make all the money.

• 29:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:10Nilay Patel?

  And destroy their company.

• 29:12Speaker 05

  And promote it on Amazon.

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  So like, when you, when you, I think you, you talked to a bunch of other oven companies, right? What's their vibe around this stuff?

• 29:21Speaker 05

  Well, this is the really tragic thing, is I really want an oven company to just come straight out and be like, "Yeah, we're screwed." But instead, they're like, "Well, you know, this just proved the market. We're so excited for people to see that smart ovens are great." And it's like, "Bro, that's not gonna happen." Or, "It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen with Amazon's smart oven." What are you talking about? You have to rely on Facebook ads. Amazon owns Amazon.

• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  Every time you get one of those quotes, you need to reply with like, the, the exact quotes from Ed Coligan at Palm and Jim Bosili at BlackBerry when the iPhone came out. And they're like, "This is great for us."

• 30:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:02Nilay Patel?

  We love it.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  Exactly. And so, we didn't, that's like the smart oven stuff. But then, Amazon introduced these eyeglasses that don't have a display or anything, so they're not AR, but they have microphone speaker in the arm, so you can talk to Alexa. Amazon is a main invest, and they introduced a ring called The Loop. Amazon is a main investor in this company, North, which creates focals, which do have a display, but they also have Alexa integrated, their smart glasses. And the ring that goes with the focal's glasses is called The Loop.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  I couldn't believe this. It was blatant. And the even crazier thing, and Neelai knows this, is, so I tweeted about this. I was like, man, that, that's blatant. Like, that's wild. And other tech reporters were like, yeah, wow, like, poor Focals, blah, blah, blah. The Focals people got mad at me.

• 30:55Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 30:55Speaker 05

  For tweeting this. Yes, it was insane.

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  Wait, why would they get mad at you?

• 31:00Speaker 05

  They were just like, this, they, they were saying that retail has existed for centuries, and retailers have always created white label products, and it's just competition. And I, I, I was like, do you have, like, Stockholm syndrome? What is going on?

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  Please give us more money because we're dying syndrome. And they want Amazon to continue to invest in them so they can't be bitchy, right?

• 31:24Speaker 05

  I guess, but the thing is, they don't even, the thing with Focals is, they can't even be sold on Amazon because they need to do custom fittings. And maybe there's a world in which they could, you know, do it, but they don't do it right now. And so it's like, yeah, people's introduction glasses that have Alexa in it are going to be Amazon's own glasses. They're not going to be like, oh, maybe I should buy the $700 smart glasses from this company that requires me to take a scan of my face to buy them. I don't know.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it also doesn't integrate with any of these platforms directly, right? I mean, that's like the problem with Focal.

• 31:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:55Nilay Patel?

  But, so, I mean, I mean, I get it, right? Like, if, I don't know, if you got, like, punched in the face, and then someone was like, man, you've got a black eye, like, over and over again, you're like, stop talking about my black eye. Like, I'll be fine. That's like, that was the, like, reaction that I felt. Like, they were mad at Ashley for pointing out that they had just been stabbed. Like, and it's like, you're, you're definitely wrong at the wrong person, but I kind of get it. Like, you probably, you're probably having this moment where you're like, well, I guess our company's over because our main investor just Sherlocked us. But here's the thing, like, these glasses aren't coming out, you know? Like, first of all, they look ridiculous. I mean, yes, but they, they look less ridiculous than other smart glasses. Sure, but they don't, they, I mean, we have a photo of Dan on the website where he's so mad about that photo.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  I wouldn't say it looks cool.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, Ashley has, like, Ashley, you have cool glasses. I would say probably one of the number ones, or like, reader, listener question you get is, where'd you get your glasses? And you refuse to tell people.

• 32:52Speaker 05

  I will never tell them. I tweeted it to one person, but that's it.

• 32:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you did?

• 32:56Speaker 05

  What, years ago, and I'm going to delete the tweet, so no one can find it.

• 32:59Nilay Patel?

  I see. But like, no one in the world would see these glasses and be like, where'd you get those glasses? They'd be like, yes, you bought glasses off the rack at Walgreens. That's what happened there. But they're also, they don't have a price. We don't know when they're coming out. They're, they, they seem like a research project.

• 33:15Speaker 05

  And they're invite only, aren't they?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, because they're day one.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it's the same with the ring.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. The, the ring, man, it sounds real bad. It sounds super tinny. And it's, it's kind of cute to like whisper into your palm and then like hold it up to your ear. Like, it's the sort of thing that you'll do a couple of times and enjoy. And like, if I were like, I don't know, nine, I think that would be the coolest thing, that I've got a robot on my finger that I can whisper secrets to and it can talk back to me. But in terms of like, a practically useful thing, err.

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I think this is like the, the main problem with all this Alexa stuff. And I read a lot of, you know, coverage of the event yesterday, got a sense of it. And, you know, like, there's the like, ooh, big tech is after you thing that you can supply to Amazon. We started talking about it in that sense, right? Like, there are real privacy concerns and there's, that there's a mismatch with their ambition. Like, yep, there's stuff to talk about.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  But like, there's nothing scary about these glasses to me. There's nothing scary about this ring to me. There's nothing scary about the Echo Auto to me, or like, any other, any of the places they want to put Alexa stuff. Because Alexa just like, isn't that useful, right?

• 34:24Speaker 05

  I mean, it is just microphones everywhere, though.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, who's gonna buy this ring? It can't do anything.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  What, what do you want it to do?

• 34:32Nilay Patel?

  It's, I have, I do not see a use for Alexa beyond setting timers and asking for music.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:40Nilay Patel?

  It just doesn't like, do very much else. Like, make unit conversions.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  You're you're you're wrong. It does a ton of shit that just very few people use or you don't use. So like, it's very good at like lists and to dos. You can set reminders. You can like send messages to family members. You can, in fact, get your calendar on to it. You can send messages to other Alexa users. So like, it does a bunch of stuff. But all of that is invisible or just like buried in their relatively crappy app that they still haven't made like like a must open thing. And I'm not saying that I'm not defending it. I actually don't use any of that stuff either, but like it's there. And I think Amazon's goal here is to figure out a way to get Alexa. Like we say, Alexa has to get out of the kitchen.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Now we say that Alexa has to get out of like the timer zone, right? It needs to do more stuff or make people aware, willing to try the other stuff that it does. The problem is to get anybody to do that extra stuff with Alexa, you have to like configure it. Whereas with Siri or Google Assistant, it's just there. It's already plugged into all your accounts and it just already knows all the stuff because it's on your phone.

• 35:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and like Siri has the same problem and it's it has all those advantages and Apple didn't take advantage of them. Right?

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  But it even even if it's sort of like not very useful state. I don't see a lot of people clamoring to be like, I love using Siri to to add something to my calendar. Because it can do it. It's built in and it actually works. And like I've done it several times. It's useful, but it's not like the killer app for Siri. And I just don't see another killer app for Alexa. It has all of these ability. It's like Microsoft Word, right? Like Microsoft Word has every feature that anybody could ever want. And they might all be useful to one person, but none of them are is actually a killer app. Aside from you can type into it. Right. And Alexa, the killer app is setting.

• 36:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the reason they put out the clock was there like a billion people ask for the time every day. Right? Like, okay, now we just like glued a clock onto the front of it. And now they're gonna stop. Like, that's good. People are gonna stop asking Alexa for the time. Right? They just like put it on the front. Or the Echo Show. The reason I'm in the Google ecosystem is because Google Photos and the Google Home Hub are a great combo. They keep making Echo Shows and they haven't spent any time working on Amazon Photos. And so it just seems like they they're assuming that you're gonna find all of the features of Microsoft work. Without doing any of the work to make those features actually important to you. So I just, I see all these other form factors. And we're gonna talk about Oculus in a minute, which is like another whole set of form factors and use cases.

• 37:24Nilay Patel?

  And how can we get people to be into it? And I feel like Amazon is just assuming the dominance. And when I read the other coverage, I feel like people assume Amazon's dominance. Without pointing out the fact that many of these products don't think that without understanding the fact that many of these products don't like sell themselves. Like, I couldn't tell you why to put Alexa on your finger.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  I mean, this, I feel like this kind of just speaks to the fact that like, Amazon has these manufacturing connections. It's not hard for them to just grab the eyeglasses, do a little development work. They have the people on it to do that work. They have the factories. They can build the hardware. It speaks to kind of this idea that you do need to have a valuable software experience behind it. Like, Google Assistant is well-built and they have software down. It seems like the hardware here is actually the easy part. And that's why these indie creators are like, well, we're going to build a better, like, a better experience for people. And they'll come for the brand. And it's like, well, maybe. But Amazon also controls the distribution. So you're kind of...

• 38:22Speaker 06

  Also worth noting that Amazon did not actually copy the North glasses also. Like, these aren't augmented reality glasses in the sense that virtually anybody except Bose, whose glasses are cool, would count them as. They are audio only. So like, they haven't even reached parity there.

• 38:36Nilay Patel?

  This is just like, where can we put Bluetooth headsets? Is it in your glasses? Is it on your hands? Is it in your ears? Like, right, where I understand that. I just think like, if North had a huge success with Focal, it seems obvious that Amazon would have made the thing an AR display, right? But they've had a medium, sort of like, they're not dead yet success. Which for an indie hardware startup is a lot. But they're not like market-changing. And so Amazon, I think, can just be like, here's this project. We're gonna get, we're gonna get an amount of attention that is not... Correlated with like the fact of the product actually existing, but it's a much more attention than you have gotten for your product that actually exists that

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  you're shipping, that you're working on, that is your business. And that disparity is just going to increase when they actually ship the thing. And that, that to me is like, the big question is, it's not even useful. I couldn't tell you why you want to talk to Alexa outside of your home. Because you do have your phone with you. You probably have a watch on your wrist that is going to set timers and play music. Why do you need to talk to Alexa outside of your home? Every time Dan reviews an Alexa product for the car, right? He, he just did Echo Auto. He's like, this isn't the thing you want. When he, when GM, GM announced that Alexa's coming to his cars next year, like his entry in the live blog was, people are going to be disappointed by this.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  And Nat reviewed a Ford Fusion like two years ago that has Alexa and she's like, why? Right? Like, that's the problem with Alexa is it doesn't have the connection. It can't send a text message.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's the thing you want to do the most is like, text Ashley, whatever. Why'd you push that button? Season four approved, right? Like, send that text, let's go. But like, you can't do that with Alexa. So like, where is that, where's that extension? And they didn't talk about it at all.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that the idea in their head is that if they can get you to talk to Alexa instead of pulling out your phone, like even twice a day, that they win. That they, they just need to, to get you to start using Alexa just a little bit more in lieu of using your phone. And that's why they want to put it on your face or on a ring or in your ears. Because it's not that it's better than your phone. They want, they just, they want you to not have to use your phone to like, check the weather. Right? Or, you know, do one other thing. Send a message via the Alexa messaging app instead of text messaging. They can just get that to happen a couple of times. Then they can get that shift that happens and you walk out the front door of your house and you stop talking to Alexa to change. Like, it's incremental for them, I think.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  That makes sense. All right, let's run through all the other stuff and then take a break and go back to Oculus. So they're simplifying device setup with a new program called Certified for Humans, which is very funny.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:18Nilay Patel?

  Because it implies that they have non-human customers.

• 41:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've been asking companies to like, have a, a normal humans in their like, product loop for a long time now, or like a normal humans in their like, privacy loop for a long time now, just have somebody there that's like, yo, this is dumb. Like, and they, you know, cycle them through. That's their plan is they have a panel of regular humans. That's funny. I don't know.

• 41:39Nilay Patel?

  What's the Echo Flex?

• 41:40Speaker 03

  The Echo Flex is a tiny, a square little box that you plug directly into your wall outlet that has Alexa on it. And it's so small and it like does not sound good. It has a USB port, USB A port on the bottom. So you can plug like accessories into it, like a nightlight or a motion sensor or something. It's very, very, very utilitarian. I think the idea here is like, you want to put Alexa dot in your room, but you don't want to have to buy a mount or deal with a cable or whatever. So you just plug this thing into the wall and there you go. But it's not, do not use it to listen to anything. Do not use it for anything other than like, you want a microphone in this room to continue to talk to Alexa.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this goes back to a conversation we're having on ambient computing for years. Like where do the mics and speakers go? And this is just more places to put mics. Although power outlets are not usually in convenient places for microphones.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. We'll see.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  I think it's like for the hallway or like the laundry room, you know?

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but isn't that like, aren't we getting to slightly terrifying situations? Like, sure, you need one in the hallway. Like, what are you doing in the hallway that you're there for so long that you can't wait five seconds to talk to Alexa in the next room?

• 42:49Speaker 03

  Sometimes the hallway is a calming place to be. It's like confined space. It like helps, you know, reduce your stress.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  The flip side of it, let's say Amazon made an iPhone like device, but you had to buy one of them for every seven feet of your home to interact with it. Cause it just doesn't come with you. I mean, I guess it makes sense why maybe they'd be interested in something like glasses.

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think it makes sense that they're, they're trying to figure out what other form factors to put the microphones in. But this one, we'll see. It just might, maybe it's just like me, like the power outlets in my house are all like at floor level behind furniture. It's not where you'd want to stick a microphone. Dieter, did you get to see the Echo Glow?

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't know, man. It's a, it's a spherical bulbous light.

• 43:36Nilay Patel?

  So it's just a light?

• 43:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  Does it have microphones?

• 43:39Speaker 03

  I don't think so. It's just a light and you know, kids will love it is their, is their whole pitch.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  Because kids love lights?

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  What does it do?

• 43:48Speaker 04

  Like Alexa, make glow be a different color, right?

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, or you can.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Is that the whole thing?

• 43:53Speaker 03

  You can boop it and it'll change colors by when you boop it. And it'll also do like dance parties. So if you like, you know, it's just, it's a cool, it's a colored light in your room. Like, how many like random different Hue lights just have different colors on them? It's that, but it's like something for your room. It's a nightlight.

• 44:08Nilay Patel?

  This is one of those things where you buy it and your kid falls in love with it in two years from now, like Alexa, like Amazon stopped supporting it. And you have to like sit your child down and be like, I'm very sorry that Echo Glow has gone to the API graveyard in the sky.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  It'll be very happy. Um, there's a farm there. Like it just, right? I mean, this is a thing that only exists because of a service. I don't know. Samuel L. Jackson, what's the story there?

• 44:31Speaker 03

  You can get a Samuel L. Jackson voice. I don't think we actually heard it during the presentation. It was very unclear if we were just hearing a commercial or the actual like version of his voice. Um, they're using, they're doing the thing that Siri does where they say that Alexa sounds better because they're using neural nets to make the voice happen instead of, you know, voice snippets or whatever. And they're like, well, if we could do that, then we can imitate celebrity voices with their permission. Cause gotta, gotta say that.

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  That's key. Yeah. So it's a Samuel L. Jackson deep fake.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that you have to pay 99 cents for.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Which is, I'm old. Back in the day when you had to buy like Tom Tom or like Garmin GPS units, you could, you could buy voice packs from them for the GPS units. And this is just that all over again.

• 45:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm into it.

• 45:15Speaker 05

  Do you think those celebrities have, um, voice assistant non-competes?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 45:20Nilay Patel?

  Abs, 100%.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  Like John Legend is Google Assistant.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. And he's probably all mad. He's like, you didn't tell me this was coming.

• 45:30Speaker 06

  I'm just waiting for this to get roped into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like everything is.

• 45:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is like the next Prime video deal. It's like, you buy, you buy like a Phase Six MCU movie and it comes with a voice pack for your Alexa.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  If you buy it from Prime, you can see it coming. It's all happening.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  Dang. Okay. We gotta find out about these non-competes.

• 45:49Nilay Patel?

  You gotta get in there. You gotta start calling some Hollywood agents.

• 45:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, we need to find out about the non-competes.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  You gotta see if John Legend's agent got like an angry text message like, what the, what the F, bro? Like, I just sit there recording for six hours and they're just doing a deep fake for Sam. Uh, that'd be amazing, actually. If John Legend was mad about his recording time. Okay, here's one. Ashley, you have covered this a little bit. You actually did, I think, a live "Why'd You Push That Button" at CES, kind of related to this, where they had please mode before.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:21Nilay Patel?

  Where you have to like, you have to say, "Please."

• 46:23Speaker 05

  It's for kids, to help them learn to be nice.

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  You have to be nice to the assistants. It seems like Amazon's also going the other direction now, where they have this frustration mode, where they, they can detect if you're mad, and Alexa will recover. All of that seems very fraught to me.

• 46:39Speaker 05

  It's terrifying to me. I don't want Alexa to know that I'm angry. I don't want Alexa to have ideas about my emotions. I like to operate, you know, the robot doesn't need to know about me. I also don't want the robot to apologize to me. I don't want the robot to guilt me.

• 46:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, you don't need any of this.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, when the robot starts to de-escalate you, you're like, "This is too much," right? Like, there's an element to this where I get it. Like, you know, if you just hit zero a bunch of times on a phone tree, it's like, okay, here's a person. But like, the reason that's effective for me anyway is like, the person will know what I want. It'll, it'll, it'll be like, better. Not that it's just gonna calm me down and then like, play the wrong song anyway, which just seems like what that demo was.

• 47:21Speaker 05

  I mean, this was freaky, because I just saw Ad Astra, and this is not a spoiler, but in Ad Astra, the new Brad Pitt movie, he does this psychological evaluation to an AI, basically, and it's analyzing his voice to determine his mental health. And I'm like, "Too soon, Amazon. Just saw that movie, and now you're telling me Alexa literally is analyzing my emotions and catering its responses to me."

• 47:46Speaker 06

  Oh, and it also runs a healthcare clinic account. So that's great.

• 47:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, it has a big partner with Berkshire Hathaway to do health services. There was reports that Alexa can now detect like sadness and frustrations a while ago. It is unclear if this is related to that, or whether it just knows that you're saying the same thing over and over again. I think we probably have to dive into how it works. But it is, we're at the point now where A, and I think this is actually really weird on Amazon's part, and they should stop doing it. Amazon, specifically Dave Limb, who runs the whole program there, insistently genders Alexa. Alexa is a she in Amazon's world. They, over and over and over again, which is super weird, uh, because it's a robot, and you should be able to change the voice if you want. You can make it Samuel L. Jackson. Is Alexa a she when it, when it's Samuel L. Jackson's voice? Like, they

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  didn't think it through, but they insistently gender Alexa. And now Alexa can tell when you're mad and try to de-escalate you, which in the wor- like, in the world of complicated feelings about, uh, relationships between the genders, like, that is like, right at the center of it. And I, I don't think they've thought through all of that in the way that Amazon tends to be pretty bad at thinking through all of that.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I don't use Alexa, so do they give you different, can you use a male voice with Alexa, or is it standard that one sort of female sounding voice?

• 49:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's that one and Samuel L. Jackson.

• 49:07Speaker 05

  Okay, got it. Yeah, because when we interviewed Google at CES, they made a point to say, you know, we have various options, different accents, things like that. They don't gender the Google Assistant.

• 49:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, yeah, Siri has different voices. Um, I think Google doesn't even assign names to the voices, so you wouldn't actually do it.

• 49:24Speaker 05

  They do colors, I think it is.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  It's colors. And look, I get it. It's like, this is, is fraught of a thing as, as there can be, but it's a robot and you're making choices about it. And Amazon, I think alone of the major companies, is insistently gendering this robot. They are insistent that it's a she. And then it's weird because they, they're gonna run into basically the politics of the moment without even, I, I don't, they don't want to, right? You're a company of Amazon scale. You, you have no desire to like wade into those waters, but because they made that choice, they have no, they, they just have to.

• 49:54Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't think people are debating it, though. I mean, the whole discussion around female sounding voices happened when all of these assistants were coming out. People were upset. And now Amazon's like, yep, we're going with she. Thanks for your thoughts. Like, we're going with it. Hello.

• 50:08Speaker 06

  I don't know. I just, I genuinely resent this all so much, not because of the gendered aspect, but because it basically insists that I should never think of a computer as a tool that I can use again. It should be a thing that like, I am appealing to. Like, I hate voice assistants and I can't figure out a way to, that I would not hate them because they're all based on this idea. Like, this idea that I am supposed to be like, having a conversation with a human and not using a thing.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, that came up at CES. We interviewed them was like whether you think Alexa is a tool or not and how you or sort of a companion and voice assistants going in the future.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, the new they're running ads, Amazon. And it's like, the kid goes to the grandfather's house and like plays a song the grandfather likes. And then the grandfather has the relationship with the Echo and the kid comes back and grandfather's like doing a bunch of Echo stuff. And it's like, yeah, like, that's really sweet. I understand why it's so appealing. But it's also like, your grandfather's alone, most like what you're telling us is like this old person has no choice. But to like, be friends with a robot, like, there's a dark side to that entire situation where it's like, we're subbing in human companionship for basically an if then table of commands.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Which brings me to narc mode.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. They go, they go to this long thing of like, my teenagers will talk to me, their noses in their phone. I really want to have a relationship with a teenager, but I can't. And the solution for that is I can talk to my teenager even less, because Alexa now will plug into the school's homework system, and I can find out my kids' grades directly from Alexa.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  That was crazy. I also love the idea that these textbook companies are going to hire developers to build them Alexa skills.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they absolutely will. Are you kidding me? If you're a textbook company and you have like, some weird Amazon revenue stream coming, you're like, yep, I'm in, whatever you want. Evolution, give like, take it or leave it, as long as you get that Amazon money.

• 52:05Speaker 05

  And they're gonna use it as a selling point to the schools. I hate the whole school selling stuff that all these companies do. It makes me sad.

• 52:12Nilay Patel?

  There's something Thomas Ricker has teenagers, and he's like, this is great. This is like, what I've always wanted.

• 52:18Speaker 06

  Wait, can you not check your children's grades already?

• 52:21Speaker 03

  No, you could fake them. Like, kids like, you know, in my day, you'd like, you'd get it, you'd get like a B and you'd like, you know, like, just tweak it a little bit to make it.

• 52:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, but now you're Really, literally only your kid brings home a piece of paper or Amazon?

• 52:34Speaker 05

  I think you have online login.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  Right? Dieter, it's a, you know, Dieter's like

• 52:40Speaker 03

  Portal. There's a, there's a whole, there's a whole TikTok meme of kids going to their grades page, clicking inspect element, changing the grade, and then having their parents come in the room and saying, see, look at my grades.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, I feel like I want to very strongly pivot this to why do you know about TikTok memes about grading?

• 52:59Speaker 04

  You know what? We're raising, we gotta raise a new generation of extremely competent children to run all this, all these gadgets. So now they need to jailbreak their Lexus to fake the grades. And I think that's a good thing.

• 53:12Speaker 06

  So they unplug the Alexa and then they learn to mimic its voice.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 06

  And then when you ask, they tell you.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 53:18Nilay Patel?

  Samuel L. Jackson is hiding under your child's bed, being like, he got an A. That's what you want.

• 53:23Speaker 04

  Back in my day, in the back pages of Popular Science, there's an ad for learn how to throw your voice and fool the bullies.

• 53:31Speaker 05

  I mean, you could hire Samuel L. Jackson on Cameo.

• 53:36Nilay Patel?

  See, that's what I'm saying. First of all, there are two, there's three things that need to happen here. First, everyone needs to stop saying, back in my day, like, like we're wizards. I don't know what's happening there. Two.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  I need a pristine recording of Samuel L. Jackson saying, A plus.

• 53:55Nilay Patel?

  Two, we have to stop helping teenagers fake the grades, which is what is currently happening. And three, we need to go to commercial break. We'll be right back.

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• 55:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. We, you know what I forgot to to mention is that there was this moment in the scrum like, Tito described, there's a media scrum after all these events. Google always does it. We're like, it's over. All the reporters go into a room. The executives like wander into that room. They look terrified. People stand in circles around the executives. They scream questions at the end. But that happened, right?

• 55:59Speaker 03

  So, uh, yeah, I mean, we were all hanging out, talking to the other execs. And then Jeff Bezos walks in the room. And, uh, I've been in lots of these like, crowd around the CEO moments. And so I didn't like immediately like, oh, I'm going to follow him and do it. I was like, I'm going to mosey up in a minute because usually they like, they have the CEO walk around the room when you get a chance. And I didn't. And so there was a scrum around him and he ended up like answering real questions. Um, not like great, but, um, he did have some okay answers to some things. And he said that, uh, that he's interested in coming up with, uh, face recognition legislation that Amazon like wants to participate in that. A couple of other things, uh, and then, you know, he bailed. So he like rolled in, talked to some journalists for a while and talked about face recognition.

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  I saw a few people being surprised or like scandalized by the fact that Amazon is, is going to write some ideas about facial recognition policy, but that's what companies do.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's like all legislation.

• 56:56Speaker 06

  But it should usually be scary when companies do it.

• 56:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know, like Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, just wrote an entire book. It's like ideas about regulation. He, he's on a media tour. Everyone's like happy to talk to him. Jeff Bezos is like, we wrote some draft ideas about like, that's what the industry does.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  Like it's not good or bad. It's just like a thing that keeps happening. What you want is a government that like takes those ideas and then like cares about people and doesn't just do what the companies want. That's up for grabs probably, but. Do you think that Amazon is like, has some ideas about what facial recognition regulation should look like? I, to me, is just not surprising at all. Like, I don't know, a bunch of like, ex Obama staffers work for Amazon. Why do you think they hired them? Just because they want to like, get access to, like, Barry, get over here. Uh, no, it's to write laws. It's like, advocate for them. Anyway, that's the end of Amazon. Addie.

• 57:48Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  Literally during the Amazon event, Facebook was holding an Oculus event, where they announced a whole bunch of stuff, including a virtual world where no one has legs, which seems very odd.

• 57:59Speaker 06

  I can explain that.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  Figuratively walk us through.

• 58:02Speaker 06

  So. This was, by the way, just a massive power move, because Oculus, Facebook announces Oculus Connect like, months in advance. And then Amazon's just like, yeah, no, we'll just upstage you, completely. On the other hand, it made everything at Oculus seem much less creepy. So. So Oculus, um, it, right now, its big product is the Oculus Quest, which it's released earlier this year. It's, um, basically Oculus just indicated it is all-in on that now. Like, they made the, uh, now Oculus Quest, you can plug it in with a USB 3 cable to your computer if you have a gaming PC, and it'll play Rift games. So, quote, "It is basically a Rift now."

• 58:44Speaker 06

  Um, so there's not a great reason to buy a Rift in a lot of cases, potentially. Uh, they added an update so that its inside-out cameras will do hand-tracking. So now you also have this whole new way to interact with it. And they are porting some Oculus Go, Oculus Go is their cheap, sort of, lower-end headset. They're porting some games to, or, and apps to the Quest, and they'll give you free upgrades, clearly sort of trying to nudge people onto the Quest. So VR-wise, um, also, Michael Abrash, who is, uh, their chief scientist, who usually comes on stage and is like, "In 10 years, we're gonna have some crazy VR world." He was like, "Yeah, for the foreseeable future, the Oculus Quest generation is what we're looking at. We're gonna have something in the future, it's gonna be a while, but right now, that's where we're looking, like, what we're doing."

• 59:28Speaker 06

  So, in some ways, that was a little bit anticlimactic, but it was also fairly practical. Um, and then they said a little bit about AR. And that was much vaguer and we know Facebook is working on it, but it's still fairly nebulous.

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Zuckerberg, I think, sat down with CNET to talk about why VR is the road to AR. And that, that's the argument, right? That first people are going to do VR and then we'll get to AR in the end and we'll build our own glasses. But that's very different than what basically every other company, most particularly Apple, is doing, which is a very much AR first.

• 1:00:03Speaker 06

  Well, and Facebook is also doing AR is the weird thing. Like Facebook Spark AR is on phones. Portal has AR aspects. Portal seems in a lot of ways really perfectly poised to take advantage of AR. Filters, like face filters are a huge thing and that's AR. So they're kind of doing it. It's just that most other companies don't have the big flashy VR space that they can also talk about.

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Quest is great. Like every time I put on a Quest, I'm like, this is great. This is the thing that five years ago, when we saw the first Rift, we were like, this is where it's going to go. Is that enough of a platform for them to keep building on? Is that going to do enough things?

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  It's really hard for me because I think Quest is just really too heavy. I think that it's a really fantastic product in so many ways. And then every time I try to put it on, I just feel like a hypocrite because it's just like uncomfortable and I don't enjoy being in it a lot of the time. But if you do not feel that way, which clearly many people do not, then yeah, I think it has a really fantastic potential. Like it does the stuff that people wanted it to do. It is extremely easy to use. It's like pretty well designed and they keep announcing stuff for it. They got a second version, a second episode of the genuinely very good Star Wars game, Vader Immortal, which is like a lightsaber game, the thing everybody wanted. They have 360 degree Beat Saber with Panic at the Disco, I believe, was the

• 1:01:24Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:01:24Speaker 06

  The new pack that they introduced. So they have like Imagine Dragons now on Beat Saber and they're going to do like this weird 360 mode. They're really pushing out stuff that you'd want to do on Quest.

• 1:01:34Nilay Patel?

  Is any of it taking? Do you see the pickup around Quest that sort of everyone assumed would happen?

• 1:01:40Speaker 06

  It's really hard to tell. They, Facebook is like their line is people are buying them as fast as we're making them, which unfortunately does not really give us numbers.

• 1:01:50Nilay Patel?

  We make one a day.

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  It certainly seems like people are enthusiastic about it. And there was a little bit of disappointment when Facebook initially announced the new Rift, that it was, the Rift S, that it was just not very exciting. But I've mostly just seen people be excited about, like, the quest is good and interesting. And hand tracking, while it is not necessarily a massive game changer, for one thing, kind of makes it easier to just deal with VR casually. You can just put something on, you don't have to fumble for your controllers. If all you want to do is tap a few things, then it makes it very, very simple. So it's like that kind of update that's good and interesting.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's interesting because before all this, it was last week, basically, they announced they were buying Control Labs, which is the sort of like neural interface wristband thing.

• 1:02:37Speaker 06

  Yes, Control Labs is really fantastic and fascinating. So they're, it is described as a mind control thing that depends a lot on what your definition of a mind is.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  This is, that is the most Vergecast thing that anyone has ever said, and I'm super excited to keep going.

• 1:02:52Speaker 06

  So it's a wristband that you put on, and it measures basically the, these very fine sort of neural impulses from your arm. And CEO of Control Labs has a really great line that is basically just, anything that tells, says it's going to plug into your mind, it should just be plugging into your arms, because those are like the interface for your mind. It is incredibly dumb to say that you should be like trying to go in and plug something in, the same way that you wouldn't like say that it was more direct and like efficient to like code in the absolute lowest level coding language. Like, no, that's not how you want to use computers or your brain. So he's very clear on the idea that this is a brain interface because it is doing things that are basically such fine motions that you're just like moving your fingers

• 1:03:36Speaker 06

  to a nearly imperceptible, like a literally imperceptible degree. You're just firing neurons in your arm. And so that's going to be the next interface.

• 1:03:45Nilay Patel?

  So you wear the wristband on your wrist, and then you imagine typing, and then typing happens?

• 1:03:51Speaker 06

  That is, so I've tried it, I tried an early version last year. That's kind of what it is. The way that I did it is that you start off actually moving your hands, and like you come up with a mode of like, here's how I'm controlling a thing. And then you just imagine it to an extent, like you, the way that now when I type, I don't think like I am moving my fingers, it's just a thing that naturally happens. Like, I think a word and it types. It's like a very weird, extreme version of that principle.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  So, you know, okay. Elon Musk likes to talk about how like typing like it's a very low bandwidth thing. We have high bandwidth for input, but very crappy bandwidth for output. Right? And the thing to know about your brain is it's very, very plastic. It can like change the way that it operates and remap what the neurons do all the time. So you get this thing on your wrist and you imagine typing, sure. But your brain can adapt to anything. So like what you should actually be thinking about is how many signals? Like, what is the bandwidth of output of the neurons running to your hand to manipulate your fingers? And it turns out it's pretty broad, pretty big. And so you can do other stuff with it beyond like one to one controls.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  So you could map, you know, bending the first knuckle in your pinky finger to turn right. And then map, you know, the first knuckle in your index finger to like increase the thruster. And like you, it just, you learn the controls over time and it becomes very intuitive because your brain is very plastic and can figure it out. And at the end of a day of training, you can fly a fighter jet with your mind.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  This is, uh, first of all, Dieter, I'll do disclosure for you.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's wife works for Oculus Division of Facebook.

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  God damn it.

• 1:05:30Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, homie.

• 1:05:31Speaker 03

  I forgot. I was really into this company, so excited. Addy actually got to try, actually got to try it. And now Facebook bought them and so now I have to disclose on this company too. Damn it.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  It's, look, it's the modern era, right? It's like, one day we're going to disclose that, uh, Google owns us all or something. It's going to be great.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  Disclosure Comcast owns NBC Universal, which is an investor in Vox Media. But, uh, we'll just keep doing it. It's gonna be awesome. Um, I love it. Monopolies are great. But like what you're saying is like, when my parents let me play video games because they're like, his hand eye coordination will get better. It didn't. I'm just going to be honest with everybody. It didn't, it didn't help. But I do think it's really interesting for like a huge variety of applications. So Addy, Facebook put out the, like the promo video for Horizon, which is their virtual world, which I really want to talk about. We're Nobody has legs, apparently. And the promo video is like, it cuts back and forth between the VR world and sort of like the, like IRL world. And everybody IRL, IRL world is like

• 1:06:31Nilay Patel?

  wearing a headset and waving controllers around. And that to me seemed like the silliest thing. Like, A, why are you marketing it this way? Because you're just reinforcing that you're gonna look silly and the people around you are gonna be confused. But B, like, it would be great if you were just still and like, it was reading what you wanted to do in VR. Because that would be, it would, it would make the barrier to entry much lower.

• 1:06:56Speaker 06

  I don't, can you actually imagine a video in which it cuts between people doing all this cool, fun stuff in a virtual world and then you cut back and they're just sitting stock still like they're stuck in the Matrix?

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  Is that the dream?

• 1:07:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, but you don't want to see it.

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  That's fair. Uh, what'd you think of that Horizon video? I thought it was very strange. I know people had a huge variety of reactions to it.

• 1:07:20Speaker 06

  So first of all, the foot thing. It's because you don't actually, like, you can map your hands in virtual reality very well. If you were trying to walk in VR, you either have to strap actual, like, tracking devices to your feet, uh, to track where your feet are going. Or you have to sort of extrapolate it. So then if you walk sideways, you do this bizarre thing where like, your body twists and your legs kind of do this sideways shuffle. And if you teleport, then what do your feet do? Like, feet are really wonky and look really weird. And that's why nobody has them, because we don't actually track them. Like, feet look weird enough in real life. So, it actually, I've tried virtual

• 1:08:00Speaker 06

  worlds, like, uh, Linden Labs, VR Second Life originally had, like, it had legs. And it was just the weirdest thing, trying to watch your legs move while you, like, moved with a controller.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, okay, I think that's fair. But it's, it makes the dystopian-ness of this particular promo video even more dystopian, right?

• 1:08:18Speaker 04

  And if the, if the claim is that if they had legs, it would look weird, they didn't solve the not looking weird problem.

• 1:08:29Nilay Patel?

  They're definitely trying to reset the baseline. You're like, this is fine. Man, these avatars with legs, that would be crazy. Like, that's a goal. But Eddie, what'd you think? It's called Horizon?

• 1:08:41Speaker 06

  It's called Horizon, and it looks a lot like there are several, like, sort of shared VR world. You go in there and have fun and meet new people places. Linden Lab has Sansar, which is both VR and non-VR. There's a company called Rec Room that looks very similar to Horizon. High Fidelity is the former CEO of Linden Lab, which is its own, like, you can create your own world kind of place. There are a lot of companies working in this space. And so it's going to be interesting to see if Facebook brings something new to the table here, and also if Facebook being Facebook causes problems. Like, because it is just has massive scale,

• 1:09:24Speaker 06

  it has some system where it's going to try to onboard people with these, like, guides that will set the tone, but not actually moderate, because it's launching in this closed beta. Like, it could turn out really weird.

• 1:09:37Speaker 04

  Is the, do you think the typical scenario is like, I'm in this space, hanging out with a few of my very close friends, or am I like venturing out into like, places with strangers? Because I feel like I've had very different experiences in VR where it's like, oh, I'm hanging out with my friend, it's like we're together, and this is the best thing in the world. Or like, oh, there's seven strangers here, and I'm terrified of all of them, because they could throw a virtual ball at my face. And it's just like high school.

• 1:10:04Speaker 06

  So Facebook's earlier stuff was, which it is now shutting down, which is like Spaces was all about, you want to go in with a couple of friends and hang out. They are now trying to open this up into a, you will meet new people through this the way you would by like going into the real world. So maybe you'll hang out with friends, but there will be people who, like, you want to go in and do some kind of, like, they have these games, you want to go compete with. They Look, we have a lot more ways of dealing with weird harassment stuff than we used to. Like, the sort of personal space bubble idea has gotten, like, making it easy to block people, like, making it hard for people to walk up and just grab you, that's gotten much more codified

• 1:10:45Speaker 06

  and robust. So I buy that they have much better ways to, like, stop you from feeling harassed in VR. It's still just not clear to me whether they're going to be able to get a world that's large enough to be interesting without being sort of generic or splintering. Like, I'm just not sure how they square the fact that VR is very small with, like, Facebook trying to build just massive-scale things.

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  And so, we haven't really talked about Facebook as Facebook in this part of the conversation, right? With Amazon, we were like, the context is Amazon and all of its things. This is like, one of the few times we've talked about an entire set of Facebook products without noting, I would say, the realm of Facebook things that are happening every day. But do you buy that they can manage a space like this? That their history in sort of mismanaging another space like this won't bleed over into Horizon or anything else they try to do?

• 1:11:45Speaker 06

  It's weird, because for a long time, like, it's easy to ignore this stuff because, to a large extent, Oculus just doesn't behave like anything else in Facebook. Like, Oculus releases games, like, normal VR versions of, but like, AAA, old-fashioned, single-player games. Like, that's a thing that just, they've done successfully that Facebook has never done. Like, I think that they could genuinely hire somebody to run, like, a small VR space that would be really interesting. It would not get them to the massive kind of scale that they want with, like, literally any other product.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, what's really interesting is, in the Horizon video, there's a mention of "you can build your own spaces," where you can do your own things inside Horizon, which, I mean, it sounds like coding. Like, you're gonna code your own environment where your own kinds of things can happen in there. Is that actually possible, or is that just, you can assemble a bunch of building blocks of what we already approved you to do? Because if you can, like, write code and create your own space, this thing has infinite potential. Right, like anything, it's a platform that anyone can build on. Or if it's just like Grand Theft Auto Online, where like someone just decided they're a driving instructor now. Right, and like that's what they're doing. Like, that's a much more constrained kind of world. By the way, the person, the reason I said driving instructor in Grand Theft Auto is a great Polygon story about

• 1:13:05Nilay Patel?

  how someone who was playing as a driving instructor was actually a serial killer in the game and was like role playing the whole time. Everyone should read that story, it's amazing. But like, is it, is it like an infinite buildable platform, or is it a world where people can kind of find edges of their own stuff?

• 1:13:19Speaker 06

  It's not really clear to me yet, and it hasn't, it's not opened yet, but it sounds kind of like Second Life, which to some extent does let you, like there are people who made stuff for Second Life, they genuinely created it, they sell it, they have, like there were whole little industries of people building goods for it. Or Sansar, you can sort of create your own spaces, but it's not quite codable, it is, seems like level editor-y.

• 1:13:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 06

  But that's still much more open than just, hey, you can build your own rooms and maybe you can like buy our stuff for them. Or like you can decide the way that you like play the house rules of Monopoly in this place.

• 1:13:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm like, I'm really interested in it, and like I said, I think Quest is, Quest is like the best product of its type. It doesn't even really have a competitor head up, does it?

• 1:14:06Speaker 06

  It doesn't, there's the Vive Cosmos, which does sort of maybe similar things. But there's not really another standalone, pretty mid-range affordable, but still very good VR headset out there.

• 1:14:20Nilay Patel?

  So you've been tracking VR this whole time, is this, is the Quest, is it gonna be the thing they want it to be? Where all the rest of the platform builds around it, or is, is there another inflection point where someone else might be able to enter?

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  I think that the Valve Index is interesting, because it seems like it's, if you're not familiar, it's the very, very expensive Valve headset that has really interesting controllers with like articulated fingers, I really love them.

• 1:14:47Speaker 06

  They used to be called the knuckles controllers. I think that you could maybe have somebody like Valve who repositions like this is our headset and we have a gigantic platform like Steam with the gigantic selection of games. And maybe there's like a couple really popular things like maybe we introduce like Portal for VR. Like I think that they could, somebody like Valve could probably undercut a lot on the sort of software front. Like they could get everybody to use an Oculus headset, but plug it into a PC and use Steam in theory.

• 1:15:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that doesn't, it's that the idea that you're gonna like, everyone's gonna play The Sims and it's gonna be that scale. That seems like the Quest is gonna get it, right?

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, the problem is that all of this is still happening at a scale that's small enough that you can't really extrapolate, I think, a straight line out to DR is going to be this massive thing. Like, I think we're still in the territory where it could be gaming PC scale where, yes, that's a huge thing, but it's not like everyone has a gaming PC.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just think like the Quest is like one of those things where it's not cheap enough and it can do enough where they can put it in Best Buy and everyone can buy it for Christmas. Right? And that seems very powerful in a way that, we have another story today that they, they killed the Gear VR.

• 1:15:59Speaker 06

  Effectively.

• 1:16:00Nilay Patel?

  And Carmack says, we missed an opportunity. And it's like, that was always the opportunity was just use your phone, but it never quite worked.

• 1:16:06Speaker 06

  Yes. The Gear VR was weird and CarMax has spent a really long time complaining about it, basically, because using, popping your phone into a thing, what he was saying today was basically like, look, if we had made a thing where you could just hold your phone up and it shrank and became a VR headset, that would be amazing. As it turned out, we created this really fiddly awkward thing that you had to like pop your phone into. And then also it drained your battery and like, nobody really wanted to use it more than once or twice. Like, the Quest, the way they moved was basically they want the ease of the, yeah, it's your phone, but it's a dedicated thing and it does not detract from the use of your phone.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  Well, and CarMax was talking a ton today. I just love John Carmack standing on a stage, talking rapidly for an hour and a half.

• 1:16:50Speaker 06

  He's so great.

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  It's just, it is my form of entertainment, but, and- But he and he says a lot of like straightforward, real hard truths. Like, one of the hardest things was is the fact that people had to pop their phone out of a case. So it's like a multi-step thing. But like, they've clearly tracked the, the, was it the retention rate? I don't know. How much people use their different products? And it is, it's clear that like, far and away, people use Quest more. Like, the Quest has finally, is like somehow over this magical hump of the, the setup. Cause even with the Rift, you know, if even if you use your gaming PC all the time, maybe you have to move a bunch of furniture or you've got some long wires. You gotta find everything, you know?

• 1:17:32Speaker 04

  Like, Quest is finally over this hump of it is so easy to use it that people will use it more than twice.

• 1:17:39Speaker 06

  Yes, which, to be fair, like, the Go was also, I should call it, its full name is Oculus Go, is better than the Gear VR 2. Like, it's stickier because all you have to do is keep it around and kind of charge it sometimes and put it on. Unlike the whole popping your phone out and putting it in somewhere and draining its battery process. But yeah, no, Quest, it does stuff, like, does much more than the Go. You can play a lot of stuff on it. And it's very, very easy to keep around and set up. And it's software updates, but it does not software update to the awkward extent that PCs can.

• 1:18:13Speaker 06

  So yeah, it's like, the only pain point is the literal it being on your head.

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, that's a pretty big pain point.

• 1:18:19Speaker 06

  But clearly, other people don't feel it as much as me.

• 1:18:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 06

  I have a weak forehead.

• 1:18:26Nilay Patel?

  That's, we're stopping there. Both of, all of these Virgus guys I've been so far have like, just careened into craziness. Uh, Addy, your forehead's great. Don't ever, don't ever feel that way about yourself. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back to try to, to try to take this episode of Virgus Cast home.

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• 1:19:43Speaker 09

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• 1:20:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul Miller.

• 1:20:16Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:20:17Nilay Patel?

  Every week, bastion of consistency. The thing I depend on, the only thing in these turbulent times that I can rely on, is your segment, which is always called...

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  600% screen-to-body ratio. Oh my god, this thing.

• 1:20:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh good, I think I know what it is. Good, good, good.

• 1:20:36Speaker 04

  Okay, so it's shall be me mix Alpha is a phone where the screen, you know, you've seen like those Samsung phones where the screen goes off the edge. Well, what if you kept, what if you kept going? And you went all the way around to the back? And so basically, the phone wraps around the edges on both sides. And then on the back, there's like a strip that has like the, where the camera is. So they're calling it, and so you don't need like a front-facing camera, obviously because you just flipped the phone around and you, you take selfies because there's screen, there's screen everywhere.

• 1:21:15Speaker 04

  So the Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha and they're saying 180% screen to body ratio. And I've seen other phones like this, like they'll have a phone, they'll have a screen on like the back or something. They'll call it like 120%. So what they're, what the math on this, this seems to be is that if you fully covered the front of your phone, that would be 100% screen to body ratio. If anything on the other side of the phone is more percentage, so it's more than 100%, right? So what I've been thinking is that if you made a phone that was a cube and all six faces of the cube

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  were fully screened, that would be 600% screen to body ratio. And unless, I mean, it's semantic, like maybe a sphere is technically infinite.

• 1:22:09Speaker 04

  But like, I don't know if you can beat a cube.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  Well, if the, if the front is 100% and the back is 100%, what are the curved sides? What percentage are those?

• 1:22:19Speaker 04

  Well, see, that's the thing. I don't think they're counting that. I think that's their big oversight.

• 1:22:24Nilay Patel?

  My God.

• 1:22:26Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say I love this phone? Like, I know it's

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  So beautiful.

• 1:22:29Speaker 06

  It looks like a cassette.

• 1:22:31Nilay Patel?

  It looks, it looks like a cassette. I love that the, the animation they're using, which appealed to me immediately is of it charging and the whole thing turning green, like the whole phone turning green while it charges, which I plug in my phone at night on my bed stand. This is not what I want to happen at all.

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  It made me remember my very first laptop I ever got was a PowerBook and it, um, it, it had a glowing green light when it was charging. And the first night, I was so proud of my new laptop, like, oh, it's this gentle glow. It's so beautiful. And then the next night is like, okay, that's a little bright.

• 1:23:11Nilay Patel?

  It breathes. Actually, Apple, they're like, it's like it's breathing and like pulsing out. I love this phone and I want one. That's all I'm saying. It costs like $4,000, right? It's like, it's another concept product, but it's one of those things where, okay, we've like entered the silly season with screens. We can do anything we want with them. They can take any shape we want. I want this phone. Please send me one. That leads me to, uh, I would say the most infamous of new screen shaped devices yet to appear, the Galaxy Fold.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:23:43Nilay Patel?

  Dieter.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  Uh, the day you're listening to this today, the 27th, if you listen to it the first day the podcast goes out, you can go buy one.

• 1:23:49Nilay Patel?

  For $1,980.

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  That's correct.

• 1:23:52Nilay Patel?

  From what I gather, it will still immediately break.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  Uh, so Brian Heeter over at TechCrunch, uh, there's a, there was a flaw on his after like, you know, less than a day or just over a day or whatever. Uh, mine is fine, but I'm also terrified of it.

• 1:24:07Nilay Patel?

  That's what you want. That's what you want for your $2,000.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  Babying it a little bit too much. Uh, so I, but I also had to like travel to Seattle for this Amazon event. So I'm like, I haven't used it a ton yet. The process by which you buy one is you have to go into a retail store to pick it up. And I, turns out this is optional, but they really want you to have this setup service where someone walks you through all of the warnings. And there are like 50 of them.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  And then after all of that, if it breaks, you can get it replaced once. Not if it breaks. If it breaks, it's a warranty. But if like, there's like a thing you don't like about the screen, you like, you let your fingernail touch it or whatever, you can get it replaced once in the first year for 150 bucks.

• 1:24:49Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:24:49Speaker 04

  This is like suffering for fashion, right?

• 1:24:52Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:24:53Speaker 04

  It's like, this is painful to wear, but I look amazing. I'm gonna do it. Cause this is the coolest phone that exists on the planet.

• 1:25:00Speaker 05

  You have a very different sense of fashion.

• 1:25:03Speaker 04

  I don't suffer for fashion, but there's a song by, of Montreal called We Suffer For Fashion. So I assume somebody's doing it.

• 1:25:10Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's suffering for fashion, but the fashion you're suffering for is a Samsung phone.

• 1:25:16Speaker 05

  For a green bubble.

• 1:25:17Nilay Patel?

  For a green bubble. Oh, wow.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  Rough.

• 1:25:20Nilay Patel?

  That is super hard. Also, most suffering for fashion is like, I'm wearing these clothes and I'm uncomfortable if they look great. This is like, I'm holding this phone and I live in terror that it will break at any second.

• 1:25:31Speaker 06

  We used to live in awe and fear of our electronics. If there was a like, physical bug in it, like a moth, then we spent days trying to find it poking through cables. This brings back our awe from the 20th century.

• 1:25:42Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  I like it.

• 1:25:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm buying a Galaxy phone. Screw this, screw this remix that I really want. What you, I mean, look, all of us, we've all spent so much time thinking like, we should use our phones less, we should be more mindful. A phone that at any moment could destroy itself. What better way to stop using your phone? Jeter, I want you to talk about iPadOS for five seconds and we should wrap up the show.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  It's 13.1 officially, iPadOS 13.1. It's out. I still think that Apple doesn't know what the like metaphor is for the UI. It's a mix between a spatial metaphor and a time metaphor. So your phone is like a time metaphor. It's like most recently used is how you go through your apps. And your desktop, it's a spatial metaphor. This thing goes over here, this thing goes over there. And so you can orient yourself, but the iPad mixes time and space. And, uh, you know, unless you're Einstein, that's really hard to understand.

• 1:26:33Nilay Patel?

  What you want from an iPad, the future of computing, is to have no idea where you are. 13.1, by the way.

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  Buggy. Still buggy.

• 1:26:40Nilay Patel?

  Still buggy.

• 1:26:41Speaker 03

  Still buggy.

• 1:26:42Nilay Patel?

  I think we need to have a conversation, uh, maybe not with an audience. You know, I gave the phones like a really high score because I was like 13.13, iOS 13 is buggy, but they tell me 13.1 is coming. The phones are still buggy. Like, I, I literally went to search for an app today and the phone was just stuck on the search screen. It would never go home until I restarted the phone today with 13.1. And iPadOS 13, uh, it's 13.1 effectively, uh, really good, kind of buggy still. Oh yeah, I think it's worse on the iPad than it is on the phone. Command tab, just like sometimes will just not work. It'll like leave that little like list of icons just up on the screen.

• 1:27:21Nilay Patel?

  While we were podcasting today, I had to reset the iPad because it got stuck. It wouldn't, the keyboard stopped working and I couldn't get it to start working again. Yeah, it's just, it's buggy. And this is why I didn't put out a review on day one of it being available. I just put out like, here are the things I like, here are the things that I hate. Because I wanted to see if the shipping product was buggy. And it is. Yeah. But you know what you can do now? You can plug in a flash drive. Yeah. It's a whole thing. I did, I mean, I did it like five times just to see if it would happen and it happened. It was great. You know what does not work in iOS 13.1 at all, at all, is the fancy U1 location thing with AirDrop. Oh, really? I mean, like they're like, it has a U1 chip. We got all excited about precise location, all that stuff.

• 1:28:04Nilay Patel?

  The first thing it's supposed to enable is like, you point your phone at somebody else's phone and it, there's a new UI and it pops up to the top of the AirDrop list in like a big circle. Yeah. So that circle, when you like go to AirDrop is an arrow with like moving lines around a circle, right? Okay. And so like you spin and like, it's like a compass, like the lines rotate, the circle rotates and like, the idea is you point the arrow at the phone you want and it like goes ding and then like the person shows up. And I will tell you that Heimgarten Berg and I sat in our office just waving phones at each other for like half an hour. We tried three, three different phones. We were doing, I was doing like moves, you know, try to, nothing, does, just does not work.

• 1:28:44Nilay Patel?

  And I've not seen anyone else say it works it either. And I, that's wild to me that Apple said this feature will light up in 13.1 and it just, as far as I can tell, does not work. There's a whole UI for it, but it does nothing. I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm thinking about how we will address the fact that we reviewed the phones based on Apple telling us that 13.1 would be, would be fixed and it kinda, I would say it's, it's more, it's better than 13.0, but it's still. Yeah. How about, how rough are our edges? Apple lies, question mark?

• 1:29:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I bought an iPhone 11 Pro.

• 1:29:20Nilay Patel?

  You did? Whoa. What color, what color, what color?

• 1:29:22Speaker 05

  I got the green.

• 1:29:23Nilay Patel?

  Of course you did.

• 1:29:24Speaker 05

  It's backordered till late October, mid October.

• 1:29:26Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:29:27Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:29:28Nilay Patel?

  Wow, I, we bought ours from AT&T, uh, they showed up like the next day.

• 1:29:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Nilay Patel?

  That's the secret.

• 1:29:33Speaker 05

  I was pissed. I'm like, you charged my credit card a thousand dollars? And now I have to wait two weeks unreal? But now I'm scared. I didn't realize I was 13.1 socks.

• 1:29:44Nilay Patel?

  It's a, it's a, it's an adventure that you're gonna be, I'm trying to hype you up now. It's great, it's fine. Um, it will make you reconsider, uh, your expectations of what swiping, uh, should do. Um, and what, and what, uh, working means. You know, it's like a very philosophical experience.

• 1:30:01Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:30:01Nilay Patel?

  You can send emoji stickers to people. Yeah. It's horrible. Um, you're like, what does it mean for this app to be open? If I open it and it closes immediately and I open it again, was it open the whole time? Like, it's like that kind of experience.

• 1:30:14Speaker 05

  I mean, my screen literally right now turns black occasionally and I don't know if it'll turn back on. So I feel like I'm used to this experience.

• 1:30:21Nilay Patel?

  The thing you're gonna know, you have a six S, the thing you're gonna notice immediately, I've seen this happen to like three people now. The camera is literally so much better that you are gonna use it. You're gonna like, you're gonna wanna take photos when you should, like, shouldn't. Just to like, show people like, look at you, you're like, you look great. And everyone's like, why did you take a photo?

• 1:30:39Speaker 05

  You know what sold me was your tweet about the night sky, even though there's no stars in New York City, so I'm a dumbass. But like, I was like, wow, the camera really can do things. That's cool. And then I was like, F it, I'm doing it.

• 1:30:53Nilay Patel?

  It, that stuff is super fun. Like, I don't know, I, I think I did, it was like 11:30 or midnight and I was like, outside. I might've told everyone it was like a Coke can, it was like 100% a can of Coors Light. Um, but like, just like screwing with that and be like, I took a photo of Saturn or Jupiter is wild fun. Google's, the Pixel 4 is supposed to have a dedicated astrophotography mode. I love that they're leaning into the fact that, um, people who've had several beers and who are outside are suckers for taking photos of the stars.

• 1:31:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I'm excited to hear your thoughts on the iPhone. I think that's it. There's a OnePlus TV. It's only in India. It's an Android TV. They made a whole bunch of promises about how it was gonna be different. It definitely just looks like an Android TV to me with a motorized soundbar that comes out from the bottom and the worst remote in the world. And I will just say this, if you were making a television and you end up copying the Apple TV remote, you have failed. You have made a horrible decision. But we're gonna try to get one when they come out here, because I think they're eventually coming out here. And I do think the idea of a motorized soundbar appeals to me personally. So we're gonna check it out. There were 80 Amazon products this week. Like, what do you want? What do you want from us? Uh, okay. We'll be back next week. Ashley, Addie, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:32:07Nilay Patel?

  We'll be back again soon. Uh, we are, uh, you might have noticed this, the show is, uh, I would say it's the iOS 13.1 of podcasts. Like, it's very good. It's a little rough around the edges. Makes you reconsider the whole product. But we are hiring an editorial director for podcasts at The Verge. To make our show better, to make new shows, to develop new pilots, a whole thing. Go to theverge.com/podcastjob. If you've made it this far, you are obviously interested in this job. Theverge.com/podcastjob. Check it out. Apply. We'd love to hear from you. We're also doing a general survey about podcasts to help inform that job. So go to theverge.com/survey. We do this every so often. It is tremendously helpful to hear from our audience in this forum. So go to theverge.com/survey. Let us know what you think. Go watch

• 1:32:51Nilay Patel?

  The Future of Music. It just wrapped up. It's Danny Deal's series. Charlie XCX was just on it. It's like, it is the, the best thing about The Future of Music. It's called The Future of Music, but I love it. It's so good. It's on YouTube. Check that out. You can also listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway. Ashley and I are like secret Scott Galloway fans. Love him. We're, we're gonna get him on the interview show and you're gonna do it with me. Oh, my gosh. Please. It's gonna be nuts. So check that out. You can also listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. If you are a huge media nerd, you probably know that Vox Media merged with New York Media this week. Peter interviewed our CEO, Jim Bankoff, and the CEO of New York Media, Pam Wosterstein. It's a thing. Go listen. You just listen to it. There it is.

• 1:33:33Speaker 04

  Can I pitch you an idea for a Verge magazine?

• 1:33:36Nilay Patel?

  Yes, we're doing print magazines now.

• 1:33:38Speaker 04

  Tape a Blu-ray disc full of shareware to the front.

• 1:33:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if there's one audience in the world that would buy a magazine for that, it's our audience.

• 1:33:45Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:33:46Nilay Patel?

  Done and done. Uh, you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless, Paul's at FuturePaul, Dieter's at Backlon. Ashley, what's yours?

• 1:33:54Speaker 05

  Ashley R. Carmen.

• 1:33:55Nilay Patel?

  Addie, what's yours?

• 1:33:56Speaker 06

  The dexterity.

• 1:33:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. That's a good one. It's one of my favorites because it's like supremacy of left-handed people, yeah?

• 1:34:02Speaker 06

  Uh, supremacy of right-handed people. It's, I am suffering under it as a left-handed person.

• 1:34:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, well, I'm a left-handed person, so every time I type it in, I'm like, yeah, she gets me. Um, okay. Tweet at us. We want to hear from you. That's it. That's the Rich Cast. Rock and roll.

• 1:34:13Speaker 04

  Paul.

• 1:34:32Speaker 09

  Want to know you're on the best path to the right car? At CarMax, the price you see is the price you pay. No negotiating, no last-minute surprises. Every car is CarMax certified and backed by a 10-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy with confidence. Want to shop from home? Go for it. You can come in when you're ready, take it for a spin, and buy however works for you. No pressure, no haggling, just the right car, your way. Visit carmax.com for details. Want to drive? CarMax.