Siri, Sierra, Photokina, and Allo

Apple ended our summer with the release of both new hardware and software. Now that fall has finally arrived, we await the next big tech event...from Google. This week on Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, Ashley, and Dieter float between these two rituals with reviews and rumors about both companies. Throw in a bit of prosumer camera talk and we’ve got a show goin’. 01:17 - iOS10 11:18 - Siri 15:02 - macOS Sierra 21:31 - Apple rumored to buy McLaren and Lit 23:06 - Autodesk Graphic ad 24:05 - Photokina, cameras, and photos 34:55 - Northeastern U ad 35:47 - Google Allo, Assistant, and upcoming event 52:14 - Paul’s weekly segment “Medium format in the moonlight” 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.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of verge.com, a website about your life.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, is that what it's about?

• 0:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's about how we live, how we talk, how we breathe.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  I was wondering why you guys had those pictures of me.

• 0:17Nilay Patel?

  I'm Neelai Patel, the host of The Vergecast and founder of a small vodka label called Scissor Vodka, Cut Through the Night.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Cut Through the Night.

• 0:25Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller is here.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:27Nilay Patel?

  Hey, Paul, what's going on?

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Dieter Bohn on the phone.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  What?

• 0:31Nilay Patel?

  That's a rhyme.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  What do you want?

• 0:33Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's angry. Dieter's been in a real mood lately. Ashley Carmen is here.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 0:37Nilay Patel?

  Ashley was sternly instructed to, quote, "bring the heat."

• 0:40Speaker 03

  And I use the fire emoji.

• 0:42Nilay Patel?

  So, a lot of promises from Ashley, we'll see how that goes, but I expect this to be a very warm podcast indeed. I know what that means. Look, it's been a weird week, I would say a slow week, but full of moderate-scale controversies, opinions.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's a slow week, or it's the hottest week, depending on how much you care about prosumer camera gear.

• 1:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  The answer is so much, Paul.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  I knew it.

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  But it's also the week people got their iPhones 7, so a lot of early reactions. Let's just get into it. Dieter, you reviewed iOS 10.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  I would say four to five days late, but you did it.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  You got it out there. We actually, we did wait a minute on it because I think it's great, but the real thing with it is that apps can now plug into so many different parts of the operating system. And Dieter, very cleverly, gave himself a longer deadline because he was waiting for apps to update so he could use the whole thing. So, Dieter, why don't you talk about that a little bit?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  I think it's pretty great. I think that I wanted to wait for useful apps in iMessage and in Siri, and I was not rewarded for waiting. It's fine. You can call an Uber from Siri. Some of the stickers in iMessage are cool. The more interesting thing is the fact that they exist in the abstract, that these apps no longer have to live just inside their icons, but... Like the big three things to know about, well, the big three things about in terms of where apps live is they can be inside iMessage and do things to make it look like a, I think I called it a phantasmagoria. It's just too much for me. They just, they just learned a lot from Snapchat.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  They can be in Siri, but only certain categories and classes of apps. And I would say about half the time you're using Siri, you're talking to Siri and then it's like, you need to finish this in the app. It's like, okay, well, why didn't I just open the fricking app in the first place? And then there again in widgets, which were there in iOS nine, but they were like hidden off in a corner of the OS. But now they're like, you swipe left from the home screen, they're there. You swipe left from the lock screen, they're there. You swipe left from the notification screen and they're there. And as a person who has been trying to make widgets or home screen widgets useful in my life since, I kid you not, like 2003, deep in my heart, I want widgets to be a thing. I want them

• 3:10Speaker 02

  to matter. I want people to use them. I want them to be useful. I know that that's never gonna come true. Uh, cause they never have, but like, I still believe.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Are you, I'm sorry, are you a confabulator user? Were you a confabulator user?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  That's like,

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Isn't that the predecessor to?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  That's like,

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was the third thing that Apple ever Sherlocked. Do you remember this?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Oh, they didn't buy it?

• 3:35Speaker 02

  No. Do you know what's Sherlocking, Ashley? So in the, like the early 2000s, Apple had this long history of coming out with new versions of the operating system and the hot, The Mac operating system. The Mac, yeah. Mac OS. Mac OS. And the hot new feature would always be, they would like go and look at all the third party utilities and like pick when they liked, not buy it, copy it and roll it out. So there was one called Watson, which everybody loved and Apple released one called Sherlock.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  It was called Watson.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And the poor guy is like made Watson was like, well, fuck you guys. And Apple's like, yeah, it just happens. And then confabulator was a whole widget platform that people loved and Apple rolled out dashboard and just killed confabulator. Yeah. Like they've done it over and over and over again.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Uh, Yahoo, Yahoo bought confabulator.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yes, Yahoo bought confabulator. Uh, fun fact, confabulator users, uh, your email's been hacked. Yeah. Bad choice.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Should have let the Watson flow over you. Or sorry, the Sherlock.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  The other problem I have with iOS 10 is, oh, it's not a problem. All that other stuff is great. The problem is like, the interaction model for notifications is just broken. It's just fundamentally broken. You have to like 3D touch everything now. And like the swiping does different things depending if you're on the notification panel or if you're on the lock screen. And you never can tell if you've got a million notifications, which one of those you're in. So you'll like start swiping on notification, nothing will happen, you don't know why. I don't understand why Apple can't just steal this one thing from Android and just make the notifications consistent. That's all I want. Yes. Whenever I get a notification and move or touch my finger to that notification, I want it to do the same thing all the time. Is that too much to ask?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  I have a short-term memory for interface conventions. So, but I know that everything I try to do in iOS 10 is wrong. So I know I must have been trained by iOS 9 to do a different thing, but I don't remember what it is. And yeah, I keep on dismissing them.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  The 3D touch on everything.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  I don't know how.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  You have to push really hard.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, just from now on, the rule for iOS 10 is just push really hard on everything all the time. Just, just jam your finger into that screen. Jam your finger onto the home button on your iPhone 7.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  That's a pro tip.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Just get really, really aggressive with the thing and you'll be fine.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the 3D touch didn't go off. So I gotta say, first of all, I think iOS 10 is way better than iOS 9.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  It's super polished in so many ways.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  It makes a lot of sense. I like the iMessage stuff, but mostly because I controlled it or just to the level that no one, no one previously thought possible. It's like, all that's fun and it's great and it's like, good to see them open up. But the, the 3D touch, it just feels like it didn't go off last year. No app developers really got into it. So Apple was like, we're going to force people to know it's there.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  By hiding shit in it. And it just, ugh. Like the fact that you can, maybe this is good, maybe people do this all the time. Maybe I'm just crazy. But the fact that you can now 3D touch any icon on the home screen. And one of the options is always share this app.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:46Nilay Patel?

  And then you can share a link to the app. It's like, no, I'm never going to share Instagram with anyone. They already have it. I'm never ever going to share fucking messages like.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Oh, no, but you got, you got, that's the only way you can get people to use ALO with you, man.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  I just, it's just so silly. It's like, I don't, it just feels like they, they needed to do something. So they tried, you know, there was like a team that was like the 3D touch team.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  They weren't getting enough love.

• 7:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it's like, let's add pressure sensitivity to anything. And they walked around all the rooms on campus. And they're like, hey, what happens when you, when you push hard on the screen in your app? And they were like, nothing. And they're like, name a feature of your app. And they're like, I don't know, sharing. And again, that one. What? No, no, where? It's right clicked.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is right clicked. The one thing I like it for is podcasts.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  It basically shows like the four most recent podcasts. This is my first 3D touch phone. I'm learning a lot.

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Oh, you've got the seven.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Oh, that's another place where widgets can show up is under 3D touch.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  Everyone, wait, everyone let's stop.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:51Nilay Patel?

  I didn't see this before. Paul picked up his phone. He's sitting on table. He's, you know, 90 degrees from me at a small circular table. His phone was sitting on the table. I saw it there. I didn't realize this. Paul went to pick up his phone to begin, you know, exploring 3D touch. And revealed that he has just left the headphone dongle plugged into it. Just no headphones, just a fucking dongle.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I only got one.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  So wrong. And gross.

• 8:21Nilay Patel?

  Every argument I've ever made about this thing is exemplified in that moment. It's not, is it fine? It's probably fine.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  You know what's not fine?

• 8:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Is that T-Mobile hasn't figured out how to activate, T-Mobile really wanted me to buy the iPhone seven from T-Mobile.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  And I went along with their plan. I was like, okay, T-Mobile, if you think you got this, oh, we got this. So they sent me one in the mail after I paid for it and it came to my house with a SIM already in it. And I can get phone calls on it.

• 8:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  And make phone calls on it, but I can't, the data is not activated. I think it might have something to do with, because they simultaneously put me on this new plan.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's unlimited, Paul. If you can figure out how to use it, you'll have all the.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Maybe that's their trick. Man, if we don't let them use any data, we can call it unlimited.

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  No limits. Be free to do nothing.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Uh, but this is just, this is just like my personal play. I haven't like found other people talking about this. It's just like my special cursed gadget hell that I always find some way to make something not work.

• 9:26Nilay Patel?

  But that's why you're here.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  I thought we were gonna not talk about the headphone jack.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm not the one who leaves his dongle plugged in. It's so, he's like waving.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  He's hanging anyway. Oh my God. They should make like a, like a wallet chain, but it's a headphone jack dongle slash chain. And then you could like have it looped around, you know, like your wallet.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  Ashley, if I feel if there's ever a time for you to bring the heat, it's in response to the wallet chain iPhone case idea.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  I'm telling you, man, bring it back.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm just gonna say no. I don't think I need to say anything else.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  I didn't say it was a good idea. I just said that they should do it.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  So iOS 10, we gotta stick, we did the phone forever last week. iOS 10. Do you have anything, are there any other big thoughts? Like the fact that they're breaking down the walls of their various things, but they're not letting you set a default email app.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Like you want it like, you want to use the iPad Pro as your main computer. And the thing that holds you back is like, there are things like deep into the OS that like you can do on a Mac that you can't do on an iPad. Or you can do on Windows that you can't do in an iPad. And sometimes you don't want to do that stuff and that's fine. But like having the option every now and then is actually kind of important. And rather than just like saying, okay, we figured out the security model, we're going to open this stuff up for power users. Apple is just like opening tiny little doors. It's like, you guys know what an advent calendar is?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's like, it's the advent calendar. And then every, every day leading up to the day when iOS is actually useful. Apple lets you open up one more door to get a little chocolate of usability. And, uh, you know, we're on, we're finally now on like, I don't know, December 17th of the advent calendar. And we've just hopefully got just a few more days, uh, AKA years to, uh, to have it be on par in terms of like the flexibility you actually need from your primary. Very computer.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Basically, all I want to know is, I don't use Siri. Should I be using Siri?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Okay. All right, cool.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, really. No.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't think it would change my life at all.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  I try to use Siri a lot. Like, I want it. I want it to work. It never works. The best it can do, the best use for Siri is when you, if you know Siri can't answer your question, it is a slightly faster way to search the web.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I like it for alarms. Last night, my, my phone was out of arm's reach. So I said, "Hey Siri, set an alarm for 7:00 AM," and then I slept in.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  I think your phone just-

• 11:52Speaker 02

  If you use, um, like-

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I try to do that so that everybody's phone would go-

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Yours did. No one else's.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  If you use Apple reminders, it's good, uh, but I don't. If you use, like, sometimes it's okay for, like, setting calendar stuff. But yeah, I don't know. I use it in the car. That's it.

• 12:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I tried to make it call me an Uber yesterday. But Uber has the continual problem of not actually knowing where I am. So allowing the robot to just ask a car to go somewhere, somewhat at random, not working for me.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  My, my phone thinks that I live where I used to live like five years ago, and I can't find the one setting that tells my phone-

• 12:27Speaker 03

  To make that your home.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Where I actually live. So I definitely would not trust it for Uber. But wait, with this new app integration, Dieter, can you make Siri add reminders to a different thing? Because that would be great. I, I use reminders. That would be really nice.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  It does not do that. Um, all of these intelligent assistants, the only one that's actually open is Alexa. Everything else is super locked down, and you gotta, like, form a partnership. Siri is slightly more open in that they have an API for different apps to talk to it, but they're only allowing certain categories of apps, and that would be calls, messaging, payments, photos, ride-sharing apps, CarPlay stuff. Uh, so like, you can tell it to turn the heat down in your car, and, uh, workout apps, but like-

• 13:13Speaker 01

  So we gotta wait to open a few more advent calendar doors to get reminders integration.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Which is like, I don't know, fine, but also, I don't know, it's app, it's super Apple. It's different from Apple in the past. They're not like way locked down, but it's- Still like, you gotta wait for permission from Apple to do the thing that you want to do in your computer, rather than just doing the thing you want to do on your computer.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  I just want to say my least favorite part of iOS is that I always have a bunch of notifications on my lock screen. And I used to be able to just clear like a couple and then all of them would clear. And now I have to go through all of them manually.

• 13:46Nilay Patel?

  Now, do you have it? Which phone do you have?

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Um, iOS six, or the six S.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh, just hold the button down.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  You force, force touch the X at the top and you can, you get a clear all button. I'm telling you.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Can't believe you weren't forced touching.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  All you have to do in iOS ten is just push shit really hard.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  But wait, when I forced touch, I thought it gives me the reply.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Force touch the X.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  No, no, the X.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Of the X.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you hold the X down.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Maybe we should do like, like a, like some service.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Right now, I'm like.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Some service. Is this what? Oh, go ahead.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Hold on, let me make sure that's true.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Like a little how to guide. Does that work?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it works.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, wait.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  It's like, here's how to use iOS ten. It's like, you're pushing this hard and it's a little image that shows how many pressure, how much pressure.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:27Nilay Patel?

  You can set it's adjustable.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  What's the metric for pressure?

• 14:29Speaker 03

  But if I'm just on the lock, okay.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is, you know, really, really like metaphorically rich.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  You gotta like up your, up your Newtons.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  Poor Casey. This is all just gonna go bad for Casey.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I was talking about the PDA.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Newton message pad.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I was thinking of just.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Casey Newton.

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  Casey dropping the hammer. But that's not immediately what we think of when you hear Newton's a force. Casey's rap forthcoming rap album, dropping the hammer, lead single, Newton's a force.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Newton's a force.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about Sierra. So I installed Sierra today and then immediately got an email from our Studio IT team saying, don't install Sierra. You'll break the Terra Block. The Terra Block is a video storage solution that we have, but I don't use it.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  Cause I mostly just type into Twitter, but I didn't, I installed it. I have Siri on this thing now.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Hey, could you copy and paste something real quick?

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't work. I haven't gotten it to work. Dieter, have you gotten Universal Copy and Paste Store?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  No, I'm, I am refusing to install Sierra because my favorite Mac utility, Carabiner with a K, which lets you remap the caps lock key to any button you want, doesn't work yet.

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  Woo, you gotta wait for it.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  That is so hyper-specific.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Wait, you need a special utility to do this?

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  I feel like I do that from my system preferences.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  You feel like that, but you're wrong.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  My caps lock is, oh, maybe to make it a key command.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I have it mapped to F17, which doesn't exist on a keyboard, but F17 launches Alfred.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Dieter has deep thoughts about the caps lock key and its overall utility.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, you can.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  She hasn't been around for the past five years.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  You can switch it to control, option, or command, or caps lock. So I have it set as control. Okay, well, you can't do magical, imaginary function keys.

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, this computer is, this particular MacBook Pro is dying so hard that I was like, you know what? I can't make it worse.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:21Nilay Patel?

  I would say it's moderately better, but it is very much, I mean, we've talked about the Mac on this show so many times. There's just nothing happening here. Like adding Siri to this and some tiled windows. It's very much like using the web browser and Slack and Twitter app on my Mac.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Well, so Jake wrote the review for it, and his thoughts actually lined up really well with what I thought in the preview, which is that Siri's the least interesting part of it. The most interesting part is that they basically brought iDisk back. And although it's been buggy for people, the dream of like regular normals being able to have their desktop and documents folder magically synced to the cloud is like a really good idea. Hopefully, they can like nail the implementation a little bit better. That's like cool.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I will say that the first thing that happened when I installed Siri on this Mac and it rebooted, a window popped up that said, would you like to sync your desktop and documents folder to the cloud? And I was like, yeah, that sounds great. I'll be able to look at all the screenshots on my desktop from my phone. And then I said, okay, and then it said, syncing 48 gigs of stuff. And I was like, I don't, I don't need my desktop in the cloud right now. Like, you know what?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  Don't need that.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  And you gotta pay for that, too.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  It's, yeah, I mean, and of course, like, look, if you have a medium-good internet service and you'd like eight bucks a month, I'm your guy, because I'll just sign up for it and forget about it.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  It happens with, I think I'm paying for Tidal still, the last Tidal customer, Neel Ipatel. Wait, Ashley, I forgot to ask you, is iMessage blowing up your world?

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Uh, not at all.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Really?

• 17:46Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  I was so excited about it and none of my friends care. And none of them are even using any of the features. We use GIFs occasionally.

• 17:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm the one in my group of friends who's just like, lasers! Every message lasers!

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Everything is the forced touch. And it's like, who wants to do that?

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, not just to slide up.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  For the effects.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Like, I don't want, and to react to something if to force touch on them, like, it's just too much.

• 18:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  I don't want to go through those steps.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  But the stickers are great.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  The stickers are great, especially Dami's stickers.

• 18:14Nilay Patel?

  Did she make a sticker pack?

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Me and Paul got exclusive previews.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  They're in the beta for Dami's sticker pack.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my god.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  It's all happening. This is why you listen to Vergecast, so you can buy our products and services in other places.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  And I don't want to blow up her spot, but it got rejected from the app store.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  What? Wait, what?

• 18:35Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 18:36Speaker 03

  No, I didn't know that.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  We might have to edit all of this out of the podcast.

• 18:39Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Uh, because she said it as 4+, and one of the stickers says IDGAF.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my god.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Are you kidding?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  That's what she, that's her theory.

• 18:50Nilay Patel?

  Man.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Apple's profanity.

• 18:52Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it technically is one.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  And they took like a week to review that.

• 18:57Nilay Patel?

  There was a meeting.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  I'm sure there's like a lot of stickers flooding in.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  There was a meeting, they put up a sticker.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Such good stickers.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  They use keynote.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that stands for fudge?

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  There's like a judge. It's like, no, no, I've overruled. I wish there was an App Store court.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  I feel bad for Dami.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  You know Apple's show, Planet of the Apps?

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Should be App Store court.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  It should be App Court.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  That's so smart.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  And it's just rejected app developers going in front of Phil Schiller, who's dressed in like a wig and judges robes.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Do you think Phil Schiller should be Judge Wagner, though? Who should, who should the Wagner of App Court be?

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  It's got, it's gotta be Schiller, that's what I'm saying. But like, in a long wig.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Wait, and Eddie, you could be the bailiff.

• 19:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, see, it's all coming together for you, isn't it?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  And then there's like shady behind the scenes dealings where first-party developers at Apple get stuff into...

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Because they're like, trading favors.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like Miyamoto's like, what if I had my own App Store page that just said notify instead of buy? I'm sure it was like, meet me in the parking lot.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  That's so annoying because every time I open the App Store now, it's like, Mario Run, it's the best new app. I'm like, oh, they released it. I've fallen for it three times. I've signed up for notifications three times. Because what if this is the time? What if they forgot to notify me?

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  Is it ever the time?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Well, apparently not.

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so Ashley, what's your messaging app of choice?

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Oh, I use message.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you just don't use any of the effects?

• 20:20Speaker 03

  No.

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna hit you with some lasers. Once, once you like really understand what lasers is and what it's for.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  I've tried to get my friends to use it. Like, I'll do it to them because I'm like, do it back. I want to see what it looks like. And then they don't. And I'm like, that was the whole point.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  No one's ever even tried it.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  I did find a use for, there's the one that like lands the thing and it shivers.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:40Nilay Patel?

  And my friend told me that he was like going on a second date with a girl and I was like, ooh, and I did that. And it like shivered on the screen and he was like, I hate you. Because it, it, it completely encapsulated the like 90s teen show like, woo.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Why, why aren't there Taptic Engine iMessage effects?

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  Where you can just buzz them?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Where it could like have special buzzes on the messages.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Oh, like a duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.

• 21:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, do you know what my favorite Taptic Engine gimmick is right now? It's so stupid. It's the breathe app on the watch that reminds you to breathe. When it's telling you to inhale, it like, it taps you ever faster to make it feel like the watch is expanding. Yeah, only, only.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  That does not sound relaxing at all.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  I bet that sounded great.

• 21:31Nilay Patel?

  So two other Apple things and we should move on. Actually, they're the same thing, but in different ways. Apple rumored to buy McLaren, the super car company. The super car company, but also a super car company. And Apple rumored to buy Lit Motors, uh, like a motorcycle self-balancing startup.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  That'd be cool.

• 21:49Nilay Patel?

  The car stuff just kinda, kinda.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  They're buying some AI stuff too.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  McLaren denied it, but they, the tense was weird. So it was like they denied, they're like, we haven't had any talks today.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  I just want it to be true.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  I just like, there's a part of me that like, man, if I had that cash, I'd be buying a lot of companies.

• 22:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  So it's just like, please, Apple, let me live vicariously through you.

• 22:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, they buy.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  I can buy McLaren in a fantasy world.

• 22:15Nilay Patel?

  We did, Jordan Golson did a great story for us. It was like, this breaks perfect sense. And like, a lot of it makes perfect sense. Like McLaren is super high-end, material science people. They're obviously great at building cars. They like, they're deep in carbon fiber and surfaces and control engineering, like all this. And the last one was like, and our office was designed by the same architects as Apple's office.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  And you know, that one's like on Tim Cook's list. He's like, ooh.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  We won't even have to change the furniture. Just move right in. Anyway, that stuff's happening. I don't, you can speculate, but the Apple car stuff continues to be hot, even in face of reports kind of earlier this month that they were rebooting the project. But it's out there. It's some news. I'm going to read an ad and then I actually do want to talk about Photokina. And I know Ashley has some hot fire about printed photos to talk about.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  So it's such hot fire.

• 23:06Nilay Patel?

  If you're looking for a professional vector design app, you should take a look at Autodesk Graphic. Graphic is a full-featured app for making icons, illustrations, UI and UX design and everything else you'd expect. And professional vector design app. You can open, edit and save raster or vector images, layered Photoshop or Illustrator files, CSS, SVG, PDF, any other file format you can think of. You can open an AI file and export it to clean CSS code or web-ready SVG with just a few clicks. It's available on your Mac, on your phone, and even on your iPad. So you can design without compromise anywhere you go. And this iPad app isn't a companion app for the desktop version. It's fully-featured design software that pros use to hand-draw vector illustrations, create gorgeous logos and mock-up websites on the fly. So if you have an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, Graphic is the vector design app you've been looking for

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  to make your Pro the device you use for design work that you'd otherwise leave to your desktop. Graphic is the last 2D design app you'll ever need and it's available for the price of a few decent stock photos. Just visit graphic.com to learn more about Autodesk Graphic or check it out on the App Store. And we're back. So Photokina happened.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  Vlad wrote a great piece for us. Photokina, you know, we go to a few of these smaller trade shows a year. This is usually a really fun one because cameras are fun and they're beautiful to look at and all that stuff. This one seemed really down.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Really?

• 24:19Nilay Patel?

  There was like a big, you know, Fuji put out a crazy medium format digital back. Canon rev the M series, which is a mirrorless thing, which is exciting because you can use the family of Canon lenses with it. But overall, very down. And Vlad's point was, look, there's only two companies that really make sensors. Canon and Sony. Everyone else is dependent on them. And smartphones are just generally getting so good that the entire bottom to middle of the market is getting eaten away.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that bottom and the middle thing has been going on for a while. What, I mean, the thing that I thought was really interesting is that the, the top end, like the pace of innovation, isn't happening at a place where there's any need to replace what you currently have.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think there was, there was the moment when smartphones ate the point and shoot and everybody wanted to buy either a cheap DSLR or a mirrorless rig. I certainly did. I suspect a lot of our listeners did that. And it was fun. It's like cool to carry on one of those like vintage rangefinder-y mirrorless rigs. And they are spectacularly beautiful things. So it was like fun to have them. But like, I don't know, the iPhone 7 Plus, that depth feature rolled out in the beta today.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  Wow. It's so amazing.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You see them playing with it?

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Mark took a photo of me and I was just like, damn.

• 25:27Nilay Patel?

  You're like, I look good.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Wow. I look great today. No, but I mean, I was just, I was blown away, actually.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  Two of our video people went outside, Andrew, went outside and shot test photos of Andrew and Bryant Park and the cops stopped them.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Really?

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  Because they brought a reflector. And he thought it was like an illegal professional photo shoot. And they're like, no, it's just an iPhone.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so that, I mean, that looks really good. So like, the improvement now is eating into the mirrorless rig. And also, there's no reason to buy a new mirror. If you bought a mirrorless camera three years ago, there's not much of a reason to buy a new one.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Right. I'm sure, there was a point where, yeah, we already take photos, like, what do you need more resolution for? Unless you're like, need to like crop way in on your photos or something like that. You don't, you don't need a ton more fidelity. I guess probably cameras are mostly, man, I'm just making this up, but I would imagine.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  What they do is they steal your soul.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Cameras steal your soul is the problem. Never look into the lens.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  But the glass, the glass is the, what is the, why can't I think of the word?

• 26:37Speaker 02

  The bottleneck.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  The bottleneck.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Hey, you want to start that sentence over and we'll just edit this part out?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  The glass is the bottleneck.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  God, that's so well said. You're so eloquent.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Because the sensors are amazing, and the camera will be like, you know, $2,000 and it's like all the camera you'll ever need, right? But then you need to spend $15,000 on glass to really do the whole thing.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Here are the things that would get me to buy, like, if I were to, if I needed something like a DSLR, I would buy one that's a couple of years old. If I were to want to buy something new, they'd either have to radically improve the connectivity, so I'm not dealing with like garbage, like, get my phone to connect to the camera's Wi-Fi network, maybe Bluetooth next year will be better, but they need to like, make the thing feel like it's connected to the internet in a much more tangible way than it is, but they haven't done that. Or, and the thing I'm actually waiting for is like, these new medium format cameras, like, they're getting close to feeling like a more traditional DSLR, and like, that is what I want. I, like, that's why that Fuji is really interesting to me, but you know, it's like a pretty first gen, but like,

• 27:42Speaker 02

  I don't see any reason, if the camera's not going to be radically connected, to buy a new DSLR, unless it is one of these medium formats, and like, in a year or two, when they get like, a little bit more mature, like, that would be my reason to upgrade. Otherwise, I don't see the value.

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think, I was just looking, you know, when you, there's like the new photos in iOS 10 and on Sierra, so like, you know, whenever you like play with the photos app, you end up looking at old photos. And like, five years ago, I took fewer photos, but they were all way better, because I was either going out with my Canon S Series, which was like a really nice point and shoot, or I was taking my DSLR out, and now I just use my phone. So I take way more photos, but they're all of noticeably lower quality, because I'm just like, I was taking a photo with my phone, and I used to have to think about it a little bit more. And like, I don't, I don't know how I feel about that trade-off at all.

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, I have so many better photos of vacations I took three years ago because I took all those photos on a D7000, which was a pain in the ass to take everywhere. But it was a tank, and so I actually stopped worrying about hurting it. But I took it everywhere, and it was a huge pain to lug it around, but I took better photos with it. And now I just like take my phone. And I have way more photos of all the vacations I've been on recently.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  I feel like that's how I feel with like film cameras, though.

• 29:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Like, if I have a film camera or like a disposable even, I have to think about what I'm taking. And that adds some levity to it.

• 29:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Whereas, I would never bring a big camera on, on a vacation because I'm like, I have my phone. Like, I'll just do whatever. But if I have that film, something about the film will make me more.

• 29:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, you have a whole riff about like-

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Well, I'm more just, I'm like, who's buying cameras?

• 29:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Honestly, I'm serious, because I don't know anyone who's bought a camera in the past.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  Not even like film cameras? I have a bunch of like arty Brooklyn friends who have all bought silly film cameras in the past year or two.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  I mean, I know people bought like Instax.

• 29:40Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  I don't know anyone who bought a DSLR.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Or any nicer like point-and-shoot type camera.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  Right. But the Instax thing is like really interesting because it's, it's blown up. I see them everywhere.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. That's what's cool. That's what I was saying, like, I wrote about two cameras, one of which is like a joke, the Michael Kors in stacks. But I feel like they speak to a trend of like, maybe it's just consumer, like, like-minded consumers, like me, who are, just want to buy these more tangible objects. Something that they can actually have fun with and not spend a lot of money. But it's different than your phone, so it's fun.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Wait, how much is the Michael Kors?

• 30:17Speaker 03

  I think it was like $140.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay. It's $140?

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  Is that a lot for an Instax, or is it just branded?

• 30:23Speaker 03

  No, Instax is $120.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so it's $20 for like-

• 30:26Speaker 03

  I believe it was only $20.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  It's like a champagne plastic and a logo.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Let me double check.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Kors Premium.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  The Michael Kors signature on the back.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  You know, Lady Gaga is Polaroid's creative director. I'm just, she never, she never did anything with that. But Michael Kors, he figured it out.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  To be honest.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  Ashley, if I'm buying an Instax camera, which one should I get?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Not the Michael Kors.

• 30:48Nilay Patel?

  Come on. No, I mean, like.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  That's literally $30.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  That's like what, that, like, the good compact cameras, like, the really good mirrorless cameras, they're like $1,000.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  And that, the Instax would be a lot cheaper. If you want to have a tangible object, but you don't want it to be your life savings.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's more just fun. And that's what cameras should be.

• 31:09Nilay Patel?

  But you also read about the HP Sprocket printer, which, one of the best posts on the site this week, just because it's so.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Paul made me so happy this game.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  This is really great. This is really great. This is how it happened. Sean was like, hey, HP sent me this thing that I, I don't want to deal with. You want to check it out? So I walked over to Sean's desk. He handed it to me. It was covered in pictures.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  Tell the people what it is.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Of happy vacation women.

• 31:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a portable Bluetooth printer made by HP.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Happy vacation women, by the way, the best unreleased Pet Shop Boys album of all time.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  So I opened the box. I was like, this isn't for me. And I closed the box and I walked over to Ashley, handed it to her, and then went back to my desk.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  I just love that Ashley wrote this. It's basically a review of the product without a photo of the product, or even a photo of its output. It's just pictures of things that you can make in the app that are just blatant trolls of people sitting around. If you know, you don't know anything about our office, you're in your car, you're listening to this, you're cruising down the highway, you're having a good time. Here's a situation in our office at The Verge every day. There is a couch cabal.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  It used to be kitchen for a brief period.

• 32:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. When did it move from the kitchen to the couch?

• 32:18Speaker 03

  We got rid of the orange couches and got the really bad ones briefly.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  So here, yeah, there was a couch cabal. We bought new couches that were way nicer. There was like a mutiny. Everybody went into the kitchen. We threw the new couches away, brought the old couches back. This is irrelevant. The real power in The Verge, it's not me, it's not Dieter, it's the couch cabal. It's terrifying. Like, I don't go over there.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  Not hip enough for the couch cabal. But if you know where Ashley sits usually on the couch, and you look at this post, you're like, she didn't even get up.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  She literally wrote this up and is sitting right here.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  And one of the, one of the photos that she printed out is a screen cap from a Facebook Live.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Ashley, you did a really good job. Tell us about Sprocket.

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Um, it is a Bluetooth printer. You can print from your phone. I think the shtick is you're supposed to print your Instagrams, but the app is way better because it lets you put stickers and write on the photos.

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  But it's silly.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  But silly. Oh, it's a joke. It's hilarious.

• 33:20Nilay Patel?

  And it's like $10 a print, right? It's like some-

• 33:22Speaker 03

  It is, I believe, $10 for 20 prints, which are stickers.

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Like physical stickers.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't want stickers in their house?

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Exactly. But this is what I was saying to Paul is that I don't know what to do with these photos. Where do you store them? I have a real question. Where do you store real things? Like photos?

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  Where do you store them?

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  Tangential media is a real thing.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Where do you put it?

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  I, uh, I had to search for a rack to put like a media bookcase.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:47Nilay Patel?

  They, like, the market for those is so collapsed that they're all bad.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Like, are you looking for one with, like, all those, like, slots for, like, individual that, like, keep each one separate?

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, this used to be like a, like a large part of the market.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Well, could-

• 33:59Nilay Patel?

  You have a lot of printout photos. Like, you could do scrapbooking. And there's, like, boxes. There's finders. There's photo albums.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  How do you feel about a cork board?

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  I feel like if I was gonna get heavy into physical media right now, I'd go looking for a cork board.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  Go cold cork board.

• 34:14Nilay Patel?

  Paul's pinning up VHS tapes to a cork board.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, uh, we're gonna do one more quick-

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Wait, we didn't find out how Ashley feels about cork boards.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Paul, obviously no.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know. See, that's why we asked.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  There it is. Circuit breaker team on fire today. Uh, I'm gonna do one quick ad. We gotta come back. Dieter, I wanna talk about ALO. Uh, I wanna talk about the Pixel event that's coming up. I wanna talk about the HTC Bolt. I got a line in here about the HTC HD2.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, yes. It's a whole, there's a whole thing. So, listen to this advertising. Take it into your soul, and then we're gonna come back. We'll talk about Google.

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

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• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  cohort of online innovation students. Get started today by visiting msinnovation.com. That's msinnovation.com.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  So we're back. Dieter, tons of Google stuff going on. You reviewed ALO with the deck, "This is fine," which is amazing. And then they're starting to hit, they're doing a big ad campaign about their event coming up next month. Let's just go through it all.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  So ALO is a text messaging app that Edward Snowden very much does not want you to use.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Snowden tweeted our link.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  He like tweeted it like five times. So I wrote the review, and then when they were like telling me about the app, they like told me that they were changing their data retention policies. It's basically the same thing as Gmail. They're going to keep the stuff and it could be subpoenaed, etc. So I was like, "Oh, I should write that, too." "Wait, I'm busy." Plus, Russell is way smarter about this stuff than I am, so I let Russell write it. And so his story went up, and Edward Snowden saw it and just went bonkers. And, you know, he's not wrong. So it's fine. Like, do you want an app to send little bits of text and stickers to somebody? ALO can do that.

• 36:43Nilay Patel?

  Finally.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Do you want an app where you can do Google searches without having to leave the app? Allo can do that, too. But it's not like a full, as full a conversational text bot as you might want, but it's, you know, fine. But do you want an app that you can use from more than just one single phone? Nope. Do you want an app you can use from the web or from your desktop? Nope. It's like, that's a problem for me. It's probably not a problem for the vast majority of humans on the planet. But the vast majority of humans on the planet have got a million other apps to choose from, so.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And they're already using WhatsApp.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Right. Google did a very good job achieving a very small goal.

• 37:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  To be, to be clear, there is like an incognito mode or something?

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Yes. They call it incognito, which is hilarious. I don't know. It's like, it's like, they might as well call it like this is for sexting. But you, that encrypts it end to end. It never gets stored on Google servers and you can set the messages to auto-destruct after they've been read by your recipient. And when you start an auto, if you like started incognito chat, so starting a regular chat, like the chat's still there, so it doesn't go away. So it's like, not that much more inconvenient. So you could just use incognito for everything and it would probably be fine, but it's not the default. And maybe you, you know, maybe you want the default. I don't know.

• 38:10Nilay Patel?

  The thing is, you would switch this because it has all these other features. And I feel like Ashley telling me that new features in iMessage haven't even like gone anywhere. Even though they're already in the thing people are using is not a good sign.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  No, the only feature that would, that it's like actually unique and compelling is the Google Assistant. And, uh, you know, like if I'm in a chat and I, I really, really wanna, you know, look up how old, you know, Zach Galifianakis is right there in the middle of the chat without having to leave, then sweet, I have that option. Google wants you to think like you can find restaurants with it and you can. But really the, the highest, best use of the Google Assistant is looking at Vikings Packers highlights to show Neil Hightower.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  I hate you. You're fired.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  What if, what if?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  I mean, I love you, Dieter. You've been a good friend and couldn't have done this without you, but this is where, this is where the ride ends, man.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  I'm sorry.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  It's all over.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  He was a great guy.

• 39:04Nilay Patel?

  He was great. Paul, Paul, I hope you know what an executive editor does.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  I have literally no idea.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  That's alright, I could probably get a job throwing footballs for the Packers.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Actually, that's true.

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  How was your deep ult?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Google Assistant was like your buddy in iMessage or an app in iMessage.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm surprised that that hasn't happened.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  How would that feel to you? Do you think, do you think if, if, if, if one of your contacts was Google Assistant in your primary chat app of choice, would you just talk to Google Assistant?

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Maybe, like, the, the problem is, like, the promise of a bot of like the Google Assistant is that it's a conversational search instead of a, you know, a big, empty, white box or a voice that you hope gets the answer right. But we don't know how to do that and Google doesn't know how to give it to us or teach us how to use it. And even if it did, it's not ready for that conversational thing at the depth that you want. Like, when you type a search into Google, uh, and it gets it wrong, or like it doesn't give you the thing on the first page, you just click to the second page. When you speak at Google or at Siri and it screws it up, you're like, oh, well, I don't need to use this anymore and move on with your life. But when you're in a chat and like, you're talking to something and it gets it wrong, like in a chat, it's frustrating.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Like, if I were using iMessage or talking to you, Paul, and I said something and you didn't know what the hell I was talking about, I would be annoyed at you and think you were dumb. And that is too often how you feel when you're chatting with the Google Assistant.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was listening to a podcast about machine learning and, and it was really interesting that so many of these advances in search and in like image recognition and stuff has been based on machine learning. But it's, most of the like current machine learning stuff is you train something on a large data set.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And then it operates going forward based, based on that training. And then you can do a new training later on. But there, I, as far as I know, there aren't many techniques in vogue that are being used by a lot of these companies that do continuous and like bespoke learning, if that makes sense.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Right, well that's-

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Because I always wonder, it's like, well, Siri must be getting this wrong a million times a day, so you'd think Siri would get better at this, but they don't get better at this very quickly. And, and you would, you would hope, there's like a feedback thing and, and Google Allo and stuff, you'd hope- They could get better at this, but I feel like right now, machine learning isn't set up in such a way that it will rapidly adapt to how people talk to it.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, this is one of the reasons I think Google decided to keep your chat data on its servers rather than delete that delete them so that they can train up the assistant. They say it's for these like smart chips. That's, that's the other thing. Like when you, when you get a message in allo, you instead of just typing out reply, it gives you like suggested replies that are ostensibly based on your voice. And it could also like read the picture. So if I send you a picture of a dog, one of your little suggestion chips will be like, oh, a cute dog.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  But aren't they kind of there? There's a way they can get into this. They can't do all that stuff, but the Google keyboard is an iOS.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  And not on Android.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  But they can just weave that in. They can weave some assistant stuff into the keyboard.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  I turned off Google keyboard. It was like broken like half the time.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  It's way better than iOS 10.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Well, maybe I'll try it again.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know if it's the iOS keyboard stuff is improved or Google's that were both, but it, I will say make more typos in Google's keyboard than Apple's keyboard.

• 42:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so do I.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  It's weird. It's a weird thing, but uh, it's useful. Anyway, Google Assistant rolling out in allo, that's the first one.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  It seems like their event is actually the big kickoff for assistant with the new phone.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Google Home, all this other stuff. The Pixel phones have leaked. Do you think they look amazing?

• 42:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  I think they look kind of bad. They look aggressively non-amazing.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, but with like a weird glass thing on the back.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and Google is kind of hyping. I mean, they don't typically hype their events like this. There's literally, they're literally putting billboards and statues up.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  With like hashtag made by Google.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Like they, I mean, that's a pretty big promoting for an event.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, well, and the phone.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  This is not an advertisement for a product. Yeah, an outline of a phone. It's like, imagine this shape, but Google made it.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Which, which is not that aspirational in some sense. It's like, imagine the thing that you totally expect a phone to be by now, but Google's making it. Like, that's not promising. Imagine a reimagined phone. It's, it's literally the opposite. It's imagine exactly what you expect a phone to be, but from Google.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I mean, it's been so long since Google tried to sell Nexus phones and as anything other than like, hey, the nerds can go buy this on our website. They advertise the 6P and the 5X.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, a little, but like, they didn't, they didn't go this big with them.

• 44:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like, there's, there's rumors, like, there's rumors of the phone, but then there's also rumors of Google Home. There's some sketchier rumors of a 4K Chromecast. There's even sketchier rumors of, like, this could be an entire suite of products that are all tied together with Assistant in some way. And that feels like worth Google saying, the next version of Google is Assistant, as expressed on all these devices.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  But is that, is that enough? Wait, I mean, would you switch from an iPhone to get Google Assistant?

• 44:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  I'm such a downer today.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  You're a real downer. You're supposed to bring the heat.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't use Siri. I don't, I personally don't care about Assistant. That doesn't change my life for me. Like, until they can literally deal with my 401K and tell me what's happening in there, I don't care about the personal assistant.

• 44:52Nilay Patel?

  So Siri woke up every morning and was like, "The market's up."

• 44:54Speaker 03

  And she was like, "Hey, let me go call people to figure out what's happening with your account."

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Like a real secretary.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  A real secretary, like, if Facebook's M is supposed to be.

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. Which is actually just-

• 45:05Speaker 03

  I am all in.

• 45:05Nilay Patel?

  Facebook M is actually real secretary.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. But I am down with a free secretary. Like, I want a free secretary. So, until that can happen, I don't care about Assistant at all.

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  What's the last thing holding you to your iPhone, though? Is it just iMessage?

• 45:19Speaker 03

  iMessage and I like the design.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Well, the new-

• 45:23Nilay Patel?

  For me, it's just iMessage.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  The new phones look like an iPhone, so you'll like that design.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I didn't think they were that ugly.

• 45:28Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, what do you think they can do to, like, break out? I mean, that's the real question, right? What, what, what, what can they offer people that breaks away from Samsung? I mean, here's the thing. The long story with Google is they can't make their own hardware because they're piss off their partners. Most of their partners have collapsed in one way or another.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:45Nilay Patel?

  Samsung is the last partner standing. They can't piss off Samsung. Literally sold Motorola to bring Samsung back into line and use their software without screwing it up, right? Like, that was the explicit trade they made. Sold Motorola to Lenovo to not compete with Samsung. Samsung's gotta behave themselves. But now, Samsung's phones are exploding.

• 46:04Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, yeah.

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, how much do you have to worry about annoying Samsung when Samsung is tanking their own brand? By literally having defective hardware that's hurting people. Like, I think they have a big opportunity to like, be like, you know what? We're just doing this on our end.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  How much of this, like, do you think is gonna hang on, like, "Hey, we're Google, and we made a Google phone," and how much of it is gonna hang on Daydream? Which we're also waiting for this year, right? Presumably, these phones are gonna be Daydream phones. If they're not, oh my god. But, yeah.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if they make a phone and they're like, "Here's Daydream, here's our VR experience, buy this phone, YouTube VR is now a thing." That's pretty cool. But all of the VR energy, as far as I can tell, is going into PSVR. It's going to high-end gaming experiences, Oculus. By the way, Dieter's wife works for Oculus. There it is. There's your disclosure. But all that, at least as far as, Paul? I mean, you're looking at me with, like, a quizzical look on your face.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  I just don't know what... You can't put any energy into Daydream right now because there aren't any Daydream devices.

• 47:07Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  And the developer kit of it is not at the similar spec or standard of... Like, with Vive and with Oculus, there were developer kits that seemed germane to the eventual product that would be released, so you could start working on stuff. There's tons of VR content, and if Google comes out with a good VR product, I'm guessing a lot of it will work on the phone. So, I think Google could definitely outdo Gear VR, especially because they're supposed to come with, like, controllers of some sort, which would, I think is Gear VR's biggest problem. It's by making a controller optional, you make it so that hardly anybody has one.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  So you have to have, like, these controller-less experiences, basically, that can all be controlled from the touchpad on the Gear VR. So I think there's a lot of room for VR to be way better in mobile, which is basically make it more like the desktop VR.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, see, I mean, that could be the other thing they roll out, but I...

• 48:07Speaker 01

  But VR just doesn't sell things.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  No one's gonna buy a phone just like this.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  VR is a thing that's a beautiful future and something to be enthusiastic about. It's not something that competes with iPhone.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  It's gotta stop being about... It's gotta start being a thing that you buy something for and not about being a beautiful future. Like, we've had that for four years now. Disclosure, my wife works at Oculus, but man, I'm so tired of VR. VR is the new "it'll be cool next year," right? We make the joke about Bluetooth, like, it's gotta stop being the thing that'll be cool someday. Yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Well, I then maybe I'm just ready to put a line in the sand. It does not feel like VR is a thing that moves millions of units.

• 48:49Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think so. I think having it as an add-on to a platform that's moving millions of units is a thing that will accelerate it.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  The thing that makes it the thing that sells millions of units is retail availability, right? It's it's selling it someplace other than store.google.com. And they've never they haven't done that for the Nexus line since I don't know when.

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I though I will say, though, if you're AT&T or you're Verizon and you are tied up and you've got two suppliers and Apple who kicks you around and Samsung. Whose phones explode. Has whose phones explode, you are probably very interested in saying, you know what? We've got the Google phone now. Yeah. And like building hype for yet another product in your store that people might be interested in versus just doing Apple's bidding and like concocting weird network management schemes that don't work. Like, you're probably excited.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Hurt Paul's feelings.

• 49:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, turning off Paul's access.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  I'm still sad about the modular phone.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Ara.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wanted that.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  Everybody wanted that. Google wanted that.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Dieter, you saw it, though, didn't you?

• 49:59Speaker 02

  I saw the the most recent prototype.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was real.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  That's that's.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  That's something to get hyped about.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, except it's, you know, never coming.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I know. Now I know.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  That's the something like Ara is the exact reason why I have just no trust in Google making hardware.

• 50:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they haven't been traditionally good at it. The only hardware product Google's ever made that's been a success is the Chromecast. And a Chromecast is great.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna once again say this, it is the simplest idea that Google has executed. It is so much better to stream things to a Chromecast than to use almost anything else that I have in my home.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  And you can buy it in a Costco.

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it's cheap. But like, I have the Sunday Ticket app, right, to watch our first games.

• 50:51Nilay Patel?

  It's like emotionally devastating for me that they lost the Vikings. Anyway, and to watch the last game, the last game was the first game of the season. I tried to, there's an app for the Apple TV. The Sunday Ticket app for the Apple TV is so bad that it is not obvious how to make the video fullscreen. Do you know how you make the video fullscreen on the Apple TV? You pick up the physical remote and hit the physical play button, which is also marked pause.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, that seems like a dangerous thing to do. It's like, what if I stop the progression of this video that I'm hoping continues?

• 51:23Nilay Patel?

  What about this thrilling live event? What if I just hit pause to make it bigger? That is not how that should work. This is what I finally figured out, and it looks bad. I tried it on the Xbox. The Xbox always messes just from the get-go with the NFL. And then I opened the app on my iPad and streamed it to the Chromecast and it's perfect HD because all it's doing is pulling an authenticated stream. It's not trying to do anything else, which is all I want it to do. Because if I want to look at stats, I have a phone and an iPad and a computer. I don't need it to do all that other stuff. That's the only Google hardware product that works well because it literally tries to do nothing. It's like, can you tell me where there's a video? I'll play that video. That's it. No other ideas. That's what the Pixel phone should be.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Well, I doubt the phones that are trying to do nothing.

• 52:10Nilay Patel?

  Damn it. All right, well, that event's coming up. The leaks come in fast and furious, but it's time for everyone's favorite recurring segment.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  A medium format in the moonlight.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, come on.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Okay, so on this segment, every week I talk about a hot new medium format camera that I'm really excited about.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Every week. Fujifilm made a super port, I mean, it's not pocket-sized, but for a medium format camera, which this basically is, made a very compact, lightweight, usable camera body. And it has just the biggest sensor in it. It's a sensor that's bigger than a 35mm, like 1.7 times larger than a full-frame 35mm sensor, which basically means is that you got more room for the pixels to get more light, and that's gonna be wonderful. And I just...

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Medium format shots, like the photos that like you see in a museum, or like awesome like portraits that you see in magazines that are like just like, they just kind of make you do a double take. Like there's just some really beautiful photos out there. And you can take great photos with any camera. But I have, there's something about medium format photos that just really get to me sometimes. And it's exciting to see a compact, less than $10,000 is the quoted price. Camera that has just a huge 51.4 megapixel sensor.

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm into that. I'm buying one.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  And it's gonna change everything.

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  I just need $9,000.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  I'm also, yeah.

• 53:55Nilay Patel?

  Hang on, I'm gonna read a few more ads.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  I'm also excited, this is not full frame, so sorry to work this into like my, my medium format in the Moonlight segment that I do every week. The, the new, the GH5.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Successor to the highly popular GH4. Which is like a Micro 4/3's camera that did 4K.

• 54:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  And is like, just does really good video. And the GH5 will do 4K in 60 frames per second.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Which is very exciting at like a very low, like probably less than $1,000 for the, for the body.

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  So you know, I'm gonna buy a camera. I love buying cameras.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. What if all of your memories were in 4K 60 frames per second?

• 54:39Nilay Patel?

  My god, then you would know exactly how drunk I was.

• 54:44Nilay Patel?

  That's actually the thing, when you, when you go back into my photos, you, you begin to realize that we.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  That you're an alcoholic.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  Yes, in my early twenties, we drank a lot. But we had these small cameras and they didn't work well in low light. So we developed all these weird ways to compensate for the fact that we had the flash turned on. So we, we would like, hold our hands in front of the flash and like bounce it. We would put beer bottles in front of the flash and like tint the frame. And all of that was so much fun. And now I just have this phone that's like, pretty good at everything.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Where'd the magic go?

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  Constrict leads to creativity, Paul.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, I'm gonna get a point and shoot camera. I'm gonna buy a $100 Canon point and shoot camera and take a lot of really bad photos.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Today's episode was also brought to you by Autodesk. Autodesk Graphic is the specific product that's sponsoring today's show. It's not just the whole company, but Autodesk Graphic is a full-featured app for making icons, illustrations, UI and UX, or anything else you'd need out of a professional vector design app. Don't go consumer when it comes to vectors. Go professional. It's available on your Mac, phone, and iPad, so you can design without compromise on the go. It's the vector design app you've been waiting for, for your iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Visit graphic.com to learn more about Autodesk Graphic, or find it in the App Store.

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, that's the show this week. Thank you so much for listening. There's tons of other stuff to listen to. Control, Alt, Delete with Walt. We talked a lot about his WatchOS 3 review, which is why we left out of the show. Listen to that. Chris Plant has What's Tech, featuring Chris Plant. That's wonderful. That comes out, I believe, on Tuesdays.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  And I think they talked about the exploding batteries.

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  They did. What's Tech with Chris Plant, featuring Chris Plant, comes out on Tuesdays. They actually did a thing on Galaxy Note 7s this week. And over on the recap side, Lauren Good, who's on the show quite often, has Too Embarrassed to Ask. Kara Swisher has Recode Decode, and Peter Kafka has Recode Media, which is one of my very favorite shows. All kinds, all kinds of stuff to listen to. Check it all out at iTunes.com/verge. You can hit us up on Twitter. Dieter's at Backlon. Paul's Future Paul. Ashley is Ashley R. Carmen.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  Wow, I'm so impressed with you.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  Thanks. Thank you for that mild praise. And I am at Reckless.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Hey, Neela. Hey, hey.

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  I want to, I want to add one thing to our end of show rundown. You ready? Thanks to our producer, Andrew Marino, who is a hero for dealing with our garbage.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  Andrew is at Andrew Marino with a U.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, Andrew.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  Andrew, edit the show, but don't edit the show.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Have we never been thanking Andrew this whole time?

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  I know!

• 57:27Speaker 01

  We're monsters.

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  Andrew, edit this out.

• 57:32Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it for this week. We're back next week. I feel like next week's gonna be kinda fiery again. I'm into it, I'm ready. Bunch of Verge editors, oh, actually, there's some hype next week. Next week, Elon Musk, SpaceX, doing a huge press conference to talk about their plan to go to Mars. "We're gonna shut down the whole Verge and run it as in-depth as we run an Apple event," which makes me so excited. That is a long-running dream to do science coverage the way that we do tech coverage. So, watch for Lauren Grush and Liz take over the site. Liz is actually in town next week. Casey's in town next week. Thomas Ricker is in town next week. A bunch of our editors are in town for a little Verge 2017 planning, so we'll try to, well, particularly try to have Liz and Lauren on the show to talk about Elon Musk next week. So it's gonna be a crazy week next week, we're super into it, and we'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Paul.

• 58:18Nilay Patel?

  Rock and roll. Paul.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  I heard that the 1,000th person that retweets our live blog coverage gets a free trip to Mars. Is that true?

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's actually just small town in Pennsylvania.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  No, is there a Mars, Pennsylvania?

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  Should be.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  I love you, look that up.

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm thinking of Hershey. I was thinking of the other candy company. Come on!

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Mars is a borough in Pennsylvania.

• 59:00Nilay Patel?

  There you go. A borough.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  In Butler County.