Radio Better Offline: Kyle Barr, Alex Cranz & Michael Fisher

Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of one of iHeartRadio's satellite studios in New York city. Ed is joined by Kyle Barr of Gizmodo, freelance writer Alex Cranz and content creator Michael Fisher (AKA Mr. Mobile) to talk about the weird and fun gadgets that are still getting made, both in the US and abroad. Latest newsletter: How To Argue With An AI Booster - https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue-with-an-ai-booster/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue-with-an-ai-booster/ Latest premium newsletter: How Does GPT-5 Work? - https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-does-gpt-5-work/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-does-gpt-5-work/ Meshtastic Explainer: https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1bpa7hu/explain_meshtastic_to_me_like_i_have_a_learning/ https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1bpa7hu/explain_meshtastic_to_me_like_i_have_a_learning/ CyberDecks: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberDeck/ Alex Cranz: https://bsky.app/profile/cranz.bsky.social https://x.com/alexhcranz Kyle Barr: https://x.com/KyleBarr5 https://x.com/alexhcranz https://gizmodo.com/author/kylebarr https://gizmodo.com/author/kylebarr Screw Foldables: Lenovo’s Rollable Laptop Proves There Are Better Uses for Flexible Screens https://gizmodo.com/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-gen-6-rollable-review-2000637995 https://gizmodo.com/lenovo-thinkbook-plus-gen-6-rollable-review-2000637995 Framework Laptop 13 Review: Wait, Did I Actually Have Fun With a PC? https://gizmodo.com/framework-laptop-13-review-wait-did-i-actually-have-fun-with-a-pc-2000590685 This Gaming Handheld’s External Battery Isn’t as Dumb as You Think https://gizmodo.com/this-gaming-handhelds-external-battery-isnt-as-dumb-as-you-think-2000639520 https://gizmodo.com/this-gaming-handhelds-external-battery-isnt-as-dumb-as-you-think-2000639520 I Flew Insta360’s First Drone With a 360-Degree Camera, and It’s DJI’s Worst Nightmare https://gizmodo.com/after-using-this-360-drone-ill-never-look-at-flying-cameras-the-same-way-again-2000641466 https://gizmodo.com/after-using-this-360-drone-ill-never-look-at-flying-cameras-the-same-way-again-2000641466 Michael Fisher: http://threads.com/captain2phones Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSOpcUkE-is7u7c4AkLgqTw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSOpcUkE-is7u7c4AkLgqTw Motorola Razr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGTkjchlVJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGTkjchlVJk Light Phone https://youtu.be/fRRNSEb1DAQ?si=uTZ6lOw1925K2y05 https://youtu.be/fRRNSEb1DAQ?si=uTZ6lOw1925K2y05 The Minimal Phone https://youtu.be/atYcpCoghnc?si=uxybVX3iyyCVn1Tu https://youtu.be/atYcpCoghnc?si=uxybVX3iyyCVn1Tu TRMNL https://youtu.be/Ax792f2RbIY?si=bRCEmDh_Bd362Wwg Galaxy Z Flip 7 https://youtu.be/1WLIY7oObvU?si=4KIgxuROrMHCJCEx Better Offline listener deal: Get $15 Off Where's Your Ed At Premium! Deal goes until the end of August. https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/better-offline-discount YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. BUY A LIMITED EDITION BETTER OFFLINE CHALLENGE COIN! https://cottonbureau.com/p/XSH74N/challenge-coin/better-offline-challenge-coin#/29269226/gold-metal-1.75in --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:39Speaker 01

  Every small business owner has that one moment that could have broken them, but remarkably, it didn't. Hi, I'm Kathleen Griffith, co-host of The Unshakeables, along with Stevie Barron, CEO of Chase for Business. We have more incredible stories of overcoming the impossible still to come in season three. Listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts and learn more at chase.com/podcast. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase and Company.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:23Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I am of course your host, Ed Zitron.

• 1:39Ed Zitron?

  And we are in a very intimate podcast studio on like Ninth Avenue. And it's a wonderful day. The last episode, we got lost, but it will not be happening this time. All of you were very kind with the notes you sent. One of you said, why don't you take a backup? Thank you. We never thought of that. It's not like there was another issue that could have happened in the fucking radio station. Anyway, today we have a wonderful Gizmos and Doodads episode. On my right, I have the wonderful Michael Fisher, Mr. Mobile himself.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  Ed, nice to be back. Thank you for having me.

• 2:08Ed Zitron?

  And so happy to have you here. Alex Cranz, the wonderful Gizmo and Gadget Queen.

• 2:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm so excited to talk about the Gizmos.

• 2:14Speaker 04

  Me too.

• 2:15Speaker 05

  But not the gadgets.

• 2:16Ed Zitron?

  And I'm knocking my phone over. That's staying in the episode. That's where my elbow goes.

• 2:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what you feel about gadgets.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Good luck.

• 2:22Ed Zitron?

  And there we go. That's what we do before every episode. And Kyle Barr of Gizmodo is here as well. Hello, I exist. And he does exist. So this episode actually came from an idea of, I told you all this now, went on Amazon, typed in gadgets. Because I was like, I haven't, like, I mostly spend money on, like, Diet Coke and occasional baseball games and flights. And, like, weird protein snacks. I don't really, like, so I was like, you know what, I want some doodads. I want to see what gadgets are going. Typed in gadgets into Amazon. Fuck all the pit. It was like phones and laptops. I'm like, I don't need a new phone or laptop. I'm happy with those. I want something weird and stupid. And I genuinely was like, wait, why is it so hard to find these? You go on a tech site these days. It's all about fucking AI. So I brought you all together to talk about the weird stuff you've been looking at. And Michael,

• 3:06Ed Zitron?

  one of my favorite things you do is you've been the flip phone.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:10Ed Zitron?

  Foldable advocate. And honestly, I'm deeply jealous you're on Android. I'm so addicted to Y message, but.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  It's so much fun.

• 3:16Ed Zitron?

  You have so, you've got, you've got a device in front of you.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  I do. The Honor Magic V5.

• 3:21Ed Zitron?

  Which you cannot buy here.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  One of the world, you cannot buy it here, no. One of the world's thinnest foldables, the thinnest foldable if you decide to lie about it in your spec sheet.

• 3:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's gorgeous.

• 3:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And this thing is, and obviously we'll have links in there, but this thing is you can see the crease, but you can't really when you're looking at it.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  No.

• 3:36Ed Zitron?

  I find these things magnificent. I realize that they're imperfect, but I think they're just lovely. And there's rumors that Mark Gurman was tweeting earlier about Apple's foldable. Please do it. Please do the Apple.

• 3:48Speaker 05

  That's all I want.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  Cosine. Yeah, they agree.

• 3:50Speaker 05

  I mean, I want this, but not Android and sold in the United States.

• 3:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  And no huge camera bump.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  Oh, see, I like the camera bump. I think it gives it all kinds of character.

• 3:59Speaker 05

  I mean, it definitely.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  Slap a big, what is that, the quad Oreo? The quad stuff or whatever? Slap a big one of those.

• 4:05Ed Zitron?

  I prefer, so this thing has a giant circular like blob coming out of it like a giant.

• 4:11Speaker 04

  Moon crater.

• 4:12Ed Zitron?

  Like the size of a thing you would stick like a phone onto a magnetic phone thing, like a fairly large circle. I prefer that to the weird boils coming off my iPhone.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Camera bump, the pills.

• 4:25Ed Zitron?

  Get a case on, so you've now got a like a raised bit with three and I don't know, I don't like that. I don't think it looks good.

• 4:32Speaker 05

  I like that it capture captures all of the lint.

• 4:35Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  Anytime I put it in my pocket, I'm like, oh yeah.

• 4:38Ed Zitron?

  A bunch of crap on and also just a new thing for me to scratch.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's it's the best. I love it.

• 4:43Ed Zitron?

  I I think that that what we're running up against though is we're approaching the limits of the current interfaces we have. I think that we are the current tablet phone interfaces and the current laptop phone interfaces. I just kind of maxed out and I'm wondering if the next thing is just foldables and extendables and all this shit.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Not according to Mark Zuckerberg.

• 5:02Ed Zitron?

  Mark Zuckerberg.

• 5:05Ed Zitron?

  Mark Zuckerberg has re he has reimagined his AI department four times in the last year.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 5:11Ed Zitron?

  It's so cool. I love that this he's going to apparently release a wrist thingy.

• 5:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, no, he's he's doing the wrist stuff so for better tracking.

• 5:20Ed Zitron?

  What is so do you have any idea, Alex, what he's doing?

• 5:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, so his whole conceit until AI came around was that the metaverse was going to be the next big thing. He's he's since changed his tune, except for presumably at, what is it, Connect back in next month? And one of the things he's doing is making it easier to track. You track your hands and stuff when you put on these headsets. Whether it's the the Apple Vision Pro or the Oculus.

• 5:44Ed Zitron?

  Which is cool.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're cool. But when you put them on, you do hand tracking and it's kind of like, okay, but not great.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like good enough for some like games like, but even then you're just still using the controllers anyway.

• 5:57Speaker 05

  Right. And and this this this bracelet, you know, we've seen this before. I think Leap did it like 10 years ago.

• 6:02Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  And but it really it's meant to just try be better at tracking you and tracking your hand.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  To be clear, you have to be in VR for this to mean anything, right? You have to first have an Oculus on your head.

• 6:13Speaker 05

  Be wearing glasses that have that's that's the whole thing. Like they're they're moving towards the one day when they can do the glasses, but. We've been, they've been, everyone's been promising glasses for ten years.

• 6:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  But props, though, we have to, I have to say, their Ray-Bans are outstanding for content capture. I think we all agree on that. They're really, really good from a phone call perspective, for listening to music.

• 6:33Ed Zitron?

  Wait, wait, wait, phone call, what, how's the phone, how's that work?

• 6:35Speaker 04

  It's just, it's a Bluetooth connection to your phone, just like earbuds.

• 6:38Ed Zitron?

  Oh, so it just connects?

• 6:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, because you've got the, I'm putting my hands in front of the mic. Take that back. Yeah, yeah, because you've got the microphones in the nose piece of the glasses, so it listens really, really well.

• 6:49Ed Zitron?

  And you can hear music using the glasses?

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, the little speakers shooting into your ears over there. They're really, really good.

• 6:56Ed Zitron?

  That's really, I hate and love this.

• 6:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's cool, but it's also Meta.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, the tragedy of it is that those are practical benefits that we all love about them, and they have a pretty good camera. But Meta refuses to market them as such because they want to market them as an AI tool. So it's like, no, you gotta use Meta AI to ask what you're looking at, and what's the best pool shot I can get on the billiard table? It's like, no, shut up.

• 7:17Ed Zitron?

  I love that fucking use case as well, because it's like, I don't walk around being like, what the fuck is that? What the fuck is that? What is that? Just like, sorry, everyone, this is my first rodeo. Like, I'm just like constantly surprised by everything. But I hate that it's them, it's the Onion thing, the worst person you know.

• 7:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  That's a pretty good point.

• 7:34Ed Zitron?

  But, but the thing is, Kyle, you, you actually, talking of glasses, you were looking at this Insta360 thing.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 7:42Ed Zitron?

  Where you were wearing these Robotnik glasses.

• 7:46Ed Zitron?

  It was like connected to a drone. No, this thing, I will link to it in the notes. This thing looked fucking cool.

• 7:50Speaker 06

  So, those glasses that almost make you look like Cayman Rider, like that Japanese superhero. It's all part of this giant apparatus from Insta360, you know, they make 360 cameras. Okay, so what are they gonna do when they make a drone? Well, they just slap a 360 camera on it. Okay, but then they also add the pair of goggles that's similar to the DJI goggles that you already can get. But this one makes you able to kind of look around in a 360 space. So as you're flying around, you literally can turn around and see below you, see above you, see whatever is happening around you. It is cool. Um, as far as like flying around, uh, you know, it's, there's other drones like FPV drones which also have like a lot more maneuverability.

• 8:34Speaker 06

  Uh first person uh view so it's almost like you're you can do flips and stuff.

• 8:39Speaker 05

  Like when you're in a video game.

• 8:41Ed Zitron?

  That's so cool.

• 8:42Speaker 06

  So but this one is is more just like experiential. You can say it's like a quote unquote immersive. That's the word they like to use, but I prefer to just say you're you're you're a big floating head in a glass jar. High above.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  Video games that's just that's awesome.

• 8:58Ed Zitron?

  I like even though I know in your review you were like it's imperfect. There are issues and actually what were the issues?

• 9:04Speaker 06

  So I mean, it's not like the best flyer. Uh there was problems when you're trying to bank. It'll just stop.

• 9:11Ed Zitron?

  What do you mean by banking?

• 9:12Speaker 06

  When you're trying to turn. Like uh and this isn't actually a product yet. It's not out in the open. It's gonna be in like twenty twenty six. This is just like the first iteration and they're trying to show it off to people and they're really trying to make it like a thing. It's also gonna cost like probably more than two thousand dollars. I can already tell.

• 9:29Ed Zitron?

  I can't hate. The thing is, this is not meant to be like for everyone and I'm glad someone's doing something different. Look around a bit. If you go like going in a weird canyon or something, oh go and fly it like above some like. I like the I'm glad that there's something happening.

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  I just covered something that is almost exactly the opposite of this, right? Where the this is this total immersion thing that you use outside. And I just got done covering terminal, which is this little tablet for the home.

• 9:58Speaker 05

  I hate that thing.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm excited to hear why you hate it. Hold on, let me let me tell you what it is. Uh terminal take out all the vowels because it is in fact two thousand eight. And you put this in your house. It's like a hundred fifty bucks or something. It's just an e Ink screen that gives you ambient information throughout the day. It's like uh one of these Google Home or Amazon things that has a screen, except the screen is much less distracting. And it is ju- it only refreshes once every five minutes and it doesn't listen to you. It doesn't do anything like that. It just tells you the weather. Tells you when the next train is, tells you how many city bikes are at your your desk.

• 10:30Speaker 05

  But it doesn't always refresh and so you're like, oh, it's not gonna rain. And then you just go outside and you're like, well.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  Whoops. Yeah. So you're right, because it's it's this very hackery thing. Not only do you have to tell it like, it's not like an iPad where you're like, okay, refresh every five minutes. It's like, okay, now you have to go in and tell all the tools you added that you want them to refresh every five minutes.

• 10:51Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  It's like a Pebble smartwatch circa 2012. It's like, okay, well, we've got to tweak it.

• 10:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  You've got to mess with it.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  You have to tweak it so much, but it was, I don't know, I really wanted to like it, but the slow updates and it's just, it's very hackery. And I was like, I'm a tool today. I don't know, maybe it was just a day.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  I liked having to put the effort in because here's the thing, I take the ferry everywhere, right? I don't take a subway because I don't have a subway near my house. But to do that, you had to like, go get the API yourself from the ferry website and like, plug it in and do all this crazy stuff.

• 11:20Ed Zitron?

  That's insane.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  It was fun, though. You want to nerd out? I'm nerding out.

• 11:24Ed Zitron?

  Okay, no, this is great. No, you're right. I know. I like this whole thing. And is it super customizable? So it just requires the API?

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, depending on what you want to do.

• 11:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it's like, what, a hundred bucks?

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Hundred fifty, something like that.

• 11:36Speaker 05

  It's just a little.

• 11:36Ed Zitron?

  Any subscription?

• 11:37Speaker 04

  No.

• 11:38Ed Zitron?

  Wow. So is it, when you say the API from the ferry, do you, can you code? Did you have to code it in? Or is it just you give it a token, the API token, and it refreshes the data?

• 11:47Speaker 04

  I'm doing kind of stolen valor, stolen valor for nerds because I'm like, no, you just follow the instructions of the thing and copy and paste the thing.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  That's fine. Someone smarter than us has come before us and we love them.

• 11:56Ed Zitron?

  I put a table of contents into my newsletter today and I had to like, learn, get my editor to do the HTML and then explain how it works. Yeah. No, this is, that's part of being online. It's like learning, standing on the shoulders of giants.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:09Ed Zitron?

  Like, like you get two kinds of editors. You get the one that's just like, I'm just a casual racist. And then you've got the one which is like, I'm actually the expert in homebrew on PlayStation portables.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:18Ed Zitron?

  And I, I'm like in the middle of you two. I like the idea, but as ever, I'm like, what shit do I actually need to know? Every few seconds, other than like what the last thing someone posted was.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think if I were, if I was like a YouTuber, if I was doing that sort of stuff, I'd probably want it more. I'm just in my house smoking weed. So it's like, I just need to know, am I going to get rained on when I go sit on the deck? And it's sometimes good at that. And I haven't plugged it in in at least a month.

• 12:44Speaker 06

  Give it, give it another go.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll, I'll plug it in when I get home.

• 12:47Ed Zitron?

  This actually reminded me of something that you posted about Kyle as well, which is the G P D win five, which is a, one of Cranza's favorite industries. The portable P C things.

• 12:57Speaker 06

  So fun.

• 12:58Ed Zitron?

  Because we're talking about like real, just like rinky dink shit. It has an extent, an external battery.

• 13:03Speaker 06

  Yep. Um, so imagine, you know, you got your Steam Deck like handheld, except, you know, the battery life keeps dying. You're like, oh, that sucks. If only it had a bigger battery. Well, they have a bigger battery. It's just attached to a cable and you just, you have to, you can slap it onto the back of it.

• 13:19Ed Zitron?

  Have you held it yet?

• 13:19Speaker 06

  No, no. Uh, I mean, this, a lot of these companies, like, you know, a lot of the jankier handhelds are all like China based companies.

• 13:26Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 06

  They're all just like cranking them out routinely, like G P D. This is the fifth one, so.

• 13:31Ed Zitron?

  I have the G P D win four.

• 13:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:34Ed Zitron?

  And it is, I love it and I fucking hate it. It is so large. It is so much larger than it. It doesn't feel as large until you've used it for one minute and you're like, oh.

• 13:44Speaker 05

  But it scratches that itch, doesn't it?

• 13:45Ed Zitron?

  Oh, it does. It feels just like a PlayStation Portable if I take three of them together. But I went and watched the video and this thing, just for, for the uninitiate, is just a Windows tablet in a PlayStation Portable handheld form. And it's cool when it works. You can play Hades two and it looks great, feels great.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  They took the keyboard off this year. It's not, it doesn't have a keyboard?

• 14:02Speaker 04

  No, no keyboard. Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 06

  So that's.

• 14:04Ed Zitron?

  Wait, I swear there's one with a keyboard you can slide up. That feels like. Four? I'm pretty, yeah. And I like G P D, by the way, because they do just crank out these insane looking, like a, yeah, we've got a ten and ten point four inch tiny laptop with the worst keyboard you've used in the world. It sucks, but it rules. And you're like, ooh, why did you make this? Who's buying this? And it's like every Kickstarter is ten million. You're like, ah, criminal enterprises.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  No, no, no one is buying these things, but we are all loving them.

• 14:33Ed Zitron?

  I love that they're experimenting, but I actually, this is my controversial, I don't mind the external battery.

• 14:39Speaker 06

  I don't either, is the weird thing. Because, okay, I've. I already have to do that, like with my Switch 2, I just review, there's, there's a case that I got that has the external battery, you slap it on to the back and now it's lasting four hours instead of two. You already kinda have to do that with a lot of these handhelds, unless you're just sitting at home, playing it on your bed where you have the cable right next to you and you're like, "I'm running low", plug it in and go do something else or something, you know?

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, you get the, the 10-foot USB-C cable

• 15:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  And, and then you get the even longer power cable and you plug everything together and you've suddenly got 20 feet of reach.

• 15:13Ed Zitron?

  I mean, the, I've seen, I've seen a few people derisively talking about this external battery situation, it's like, "I don't know, I love my Rog X Ally, I really do", "but that motherfucker, if you leave it, it's like you hit sleep and it just, you're like, this will sleep", "and you come back in an hour and it's dead, it's just, oh, it woke up."

• 15:31Speaker 05

  Well, that's because the, the Windows machines really struggle with powering down, like these handhelds.

• 15:37Speaker 06

  I'm just gonna say, I'm glad nothing has changed in Windows for the last 20 years.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  Never, yeah, it will never change, Windows will always be the most inconsistent handling of power.

• 15:45Ed Zitron?

  I think Microsoft is truly evil, I, I think that Microsoft, like, they have like such an open goal here with handhelds, they have companies, I know that they're doing Xbox Rog Ally X, and I saw fucking Tom Warren on The Verge going, "For the first time, you just hit a button, you go to Windows", "actually, Tom, you could do that with all the Rog's, fucking", "but it's just like, they, they're like, "We're releasing a special Xbox", "did we change Windows in any way?", fuck you, customer, you piece of shit.

• 16:10Speaker 05

  Well, and usually-

• 16:10Ed Zitron?

  We laid off everyone who did that.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  I, I will say, usually it's not Microsoft's fault, it's usually these other companies are just not building the drivers and stuff to properly handle power management, but it is also Microsoft's fault because the Xbox Rog, what? I didn't even hear about this, tell me more.

• 16:27Ed Zitron?

  You didn't hear, it appears to just be a Rog Ally-

• 16:30Speaker 06

  It is basically a Rog Ally.

• 16:31Ed Zitron?

  Don't they have a weird, like, handheld-

• 16:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, there, there's the Xbox grips that come along with it.

• 16:35Ed Zitron?

  I love, I love the Rog, I want that, I want those grips so bad.

• 16:39Speaker 06

  So this is the thing, you don't even need to get the new one, really?

• 16:42Ed Zitron?

  They sell the grips?

• 16:43Speaker 06

  Well, no, because if you want the grips, then you have to get the new one, but the whole like, thing with it now is that they've changed the software, they're saying that they've limited enough on- A number of stuff on the backend so that it should run better, it should sleep better, so it should be better with power management. And this is a lot of shoulds, right?

• 16:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 06

  Because none of us have actually, you know, put it through its paces like over a long term. Uh, I just think that Microsoft is trying, but they're doing it so late. And it's coming off of like a bunch of stuff that happened recently with Xbox that made them look really bad.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  So it looks like they're trying too hard. Right? They, they had a handheld, it was long rumored. I remember Tom was covering it at the Verge and then they just abruptly killed it because they realized.

• 17:25Ed Zitron?

  I wasn't sure how far along that was even.

• 17:27Speaker 05

  Well, my understanding was this fairly far along, but they were entirely dependent on streaming to, to handle it.

• 17:33Ed Zitron?

  They got a, they got a.

• 17:34Speaker 04

  Xbox Game Pass.

• 17:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, Game Pass is great. I, I, I use it on my Steam Deck, but it's not great enough to do it that way.

• 17:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we're not there yet.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:44Ed Zitron?

  This actually reminds me, I wanted to ask you about this at some point. Um, you said something about GeForce Now install and I've seen stories about this. What is this GeForce Now install thing? Cranz?

• 17:55Speaker 05

  I mean, I just know GeForce Now, you tell me.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  Okay, well, okay, uh, GeForce Now, they, they just released an update. So GeForce Now is a streaming service. You have to play your own games. Uh, versus like, you know, other like Xbox's cloud gaming thing where you can use their games and like you're paying for the service. This one, you're paying for the service to use their servers to download the games and play them remotely.

• 18:16Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 18:16Speaker 06

  Uh, they've just added a thing where supposedly you'll be able to just kind of use your whatever games, like not even on their list. As long as a developer opts in, whatever that really means if they're already opted in properly. Uh, then you can just rent out space on their servers to download that game. And then basically just have a Shadow PC to play those games.

• 18:39Ed Zitron?

  Interesting.

• 18:39Speaker 05

  That's been going, I mean, there was the company Shadow.

• 18:42Speaker 06

  Yes, that's exactly what I'm.

• 18:43Ed Zitron?

  Still around.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, are they?

• 18:44Speaker 06

  They are.

• 18:45Ed Zitron?

  Service sucks.

• 18:46Speaker 06

  They're just really expensive. They're.

• 18:48Speaker 05

  And I mean, Nvidia, the reason they're likely doing this is they have a lot of server space. They have a ton of server space because it's Nvidia and they've currently made everyone's 401k beautiful.

• 18:58Ed Zitron?

  For now.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  Uh, for now, for at least the end of this month.

• 19:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  Um.

• 19:04Ed Zitron?

  Till Wednesday.

• 19:05Speaker 05

  Till Wednesday.

• 19:05Ed Zitron?

  We don't know that.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  But, but yeah, that's why they're doing it is they have all this server space and it's like, why not make a few extra bucks? Because it's not, it's not going to be a huge money driver for them, but there are people out there who wanna play their games remote. They used to be able to do that. When it first launched.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Yes. That'll get a little more popular once we get one of the more gadgety elements of phones back, which is this, remember Samsung Dex? This sort of desktop simulator that lets you use your, plug your phone into a monitor and keyboard and mouse.

• 19:32Ed Zitron?

  Oh my god, I forgot about this.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  Well, it's been just decrepit and gathering dust for ages. It hasn't been updated in a meaningful way in a long time. But now that Android, Google's building it into Android 16 as this kind of mode that will not require you to have a Samsung phone. You can have any Android phone running 16. But one of the things I did was, I thank you for reminding me about Shadow because I forgot. Last time I reviewed Samsung Dex, I used Shadow to play like Titanic Adventure Out of Time and other CD-ROM classics from my youth. And it was absolutely great.

• 19:59Ed Zitron?

  But wait, wait, wait, what does Dex actually do?

• 20:02Speaker 04

  It's so you plug your phone into a monitor and keyboard and mouse.

• 20:04Ed Zitron?

  Do you need a dock or something?

• 20:06Speaker 04

  You do not, the USB-C to HDMI, whatever. And then it just creates a desktop environment like Windows. Except it's Android, it's your phone. So you don't have to find a Wi-Fi hotspot. You've already got a cellular connection. You don't have to move your files to it because your files are already on your phone.

• 20:19Speaker 05

  Atrix promised us this.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Indeed.

• 20:21Speaker 05

  Fifteen years ago.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  And the pad phone.

• 20:23Ed Zitron?

  The Atrix, what was this?

• 20:24Speaker 05

  It was the Verizon. Yeah, Motorola Verizon.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  AT&T.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  Is it AT&T?

• 20:28Speaker 04

  It was.

• 20:28Ed Zitron?

  Never trust them.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  Atrix 4G, yeah.

• 20:30Ed Zitron?

  Never trust that fucking guy. Well, actually Motorola's good now though, they've got the Razer.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  The Razer Ultra, we love that. We love a wooden phone in this house.

• 20:37Speaker 05

  Thank you, Lenovo.

• 20:38Ed Zitron?

  It's wooden?

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Indeed.

• 20:39Ed Zitron?

  It's got wood on it?

• 20:39Speaker 04

  You got wood, you got Alcantara if you want to get it really gross overnight. And then, what, fake?

• 20:46Ed Zitron?

  Wait, what do you mean gross overnight?

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Leather and like? Yes, yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 05

  Alcantara is like a fabric. And that was what they put on the palm rest for the surface. And it can get dirty because it's fabric.

• 20:58Ed Zitron?

  I want a velour one.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:00Ed Zitron?

  Just flipping out of velour.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  A razor?

• 21:04Speaker 05

  But like two months in, after you do like a New York summer, it's just gonna be so disgusting on the front. No one will ever borrow it.

• 21:11Ed Zitron?

  You drop it, it like just absorbs all the soap.

• 21:14Speaker 05

  But you know, then it's your phone. You've got a nice patina, no one will ever touch it because they'll be disgusting.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  Like, yeah, I think that's great.

• 21:21Ed Zitron?

  I, and I will say it, I want Apple to do this fucking flip phone. I want them to do something different. I'm tired of, I want my, I have the most giant phone. I occasionally go back to the smaller iPhone. I hate it, I want the big one again. Except I want an even bigger one. I want Apple to do foldables so bad.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  You don't need to wait for a foldable, I got just the thing for it. You ever use Clicks for the iPhone?

• 21:42Ed Zitron?

  I have a click, I have a clicks. I have a clicks. Disclosure. I am a co-founder of clicks. You co-founded clicks. I bought one. I sent you a picture of me using it. Which I appreciate it. Thank you.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  That makes it big. Just use that. It makes it clicky too.

• 21:55Ed Zitron?

  No, the thing is, I don't have a trouble typing on a phone at all. I just want the screen, I would like my screen to be twice the size.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  Well, you could just carry an iPad.

• 22:03Ed Zitron?

  I do carry an iPad and I love the iPad Pro. I really do.

• 22:07Speaker 05

  Do you use it for taking photos?

• 22:08Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm not my dad.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 22:11Ed Zitron?

  No, I love my dad. He pulls out his iPad Mini and it's just like the most like.

• 22:15Speaker 05

  He's like, put it down.

• 22:16Ed Zitron?

  No, no, I love it. I love the fact that he's into the iPad because I got him his original iPad. Whenever, like the second, no, it was the first iPad Mini I released and my dad, he loved hearing this. And he loved it. He uses it all the time. And I consider like that the best sign of technology if like. Like an older user. Like an older person who's just a regular person who does like a business job and like listens to the radio and watches the news. Like what are their use cases with it? And the fact that he picks it up and uses it like as a pic, as a, as a picture taker, that's the term. Picture taker is right. I think it's lovely. And I think. The beauty of a foldable. And oh, look, it's me. He's, he's photographing me and I can, that's actually really cool.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And I get back to my thing that the UX situation, we're just at the limits of the current UX.

• 23:00Speaker 05

  I think so.

• 23:00Ed Zitron?

  And also my controversial opinion, which is the Vision Pro is amazing when it works.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  It's so heavy.

• 23:07Ed Zitron?

  It is, but when I say when it works, I mean, we're talking 4% of the time. Have I told any of you what's happened with my Vision Pro?

• 23:13Speaker 05

  Tell us.

• 23:14Ed Zitron?

  So I, I got told by my good friend Matt Bamberg, who told me that Metallica was on the Vision Pro. I'm like, a big, heavy thing that's kind of lost its way and we're not really sure why we engage with it. Sounds like Metallica. So I get this thing, I put it on, it goes, you need to update. I'm like, fuck yeah, okay, I'll update. I update shit all the time. I let it start downloading. I pick it up, I put it down. I pick it up, the UX doesn't load again.

• 23:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:37Ed Zitron?

  You have to keep this thing on your fucking head while you update it. Yep. It's like a 15 minute long update. This feels like just the easiest thing in the world for them to fix. And it's just, it's so annoying because there are, there are like several minutes at a time and I'm using the Vision Pro. When I can make it work, which is not at the moment. Well, I'm just like, damn, this feels like the future. It's a giant screen. It like, I can grab things. And then like the headset moves three centimeters.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:05Ed Zitron?

  And now it's out of focus.

• 24:06Speaker 05

  Have you used a Quest, like the newer?

• 24:08Ed Zitron?

  I have the Quest 3 and it's just like, even then, my strange skull.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:13Ed Zitron?

  Like, lots of people love measuring my skull for different reasons, but it's just like the Quest 3 doesn't feel right, but it feels better than this.

• 24:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:22Ed Zitron?

  But the Vision Pro has these moments, and I think it's just because the, it's less about the Vision Pro, more the idea of, yeah, an interface that we could reach out and grab and move around with our hands.

• 24:30Speaker 05

  It's cool as hell.

• 24:31Ed Zitron?

  And it works when it works, but it doesn't work very often. And it's just, the problem is, is every article is either, this is the most amazing thing, which it is not. Or it's, this completely sucks, which it does a lot of the time.

• 24:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. Where, where it's, it's in a journey phase, right?

• 24:48Ed Zitron?

  I wish all the money from AI had gone into this, not because I think it would be particularly successful, but we'd get, we'd get somewhere quicker.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  It did go into it at Meta for a couple of years.

• 24:57Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, forty-two billion dollars went into experiments, doing air quotes. Yeah.

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• 26:09Ed Zitron?

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• 27:14Speaker 06

  I mean, that's what Android XR is supposed to be, right? It's gonna be, first, Samsung's Project Muhan is just gonna be, you know, Apple Vision Pro, but with, yeah, it's, so, Samsung's making a Vision Pro, uh, it's gonna have very similar, like, micro OLED displays. I don't know if it's gonna go the full, like, 4K, 4K, or whatever bullshit, but it'll just be like, you know, uh, it'll be Android's version of Apple's Vision OS. It's just gonna be a little bit more AI-focused, because it's all full of Gemini. Yeah, because it's Google.

• 27:45Ed Zitron?

  I was using these Vichy glasses, have you heard of these?

• 27:48Speaker 06

  Yes, I've used them.

• 27:49Ed Zitron?

  They're weirdly intriguing.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  X-ray ones, the ones that...

• 27:52Ed Zitron?

  You just put them on, you have a USB, it doesn't try and be fancy or nothing, you just have a cable, you put it in your phone, and it, you have them on your glasses, and it looks pretty big.

• 28:00Speaker 06

  That's that's the best thing about like, you know, I I like AR glasses because I just like secondary screens. It's like, okay, you know, they're good for a plane. They're just a little bit expensive, but yeah, they do what you need them to do.

• 28:12Ed Zitron?

  Then I put it on the plane. I'm like, oh, right. I don't want to look straight ahead. Like, it was just like immediately just like, this is cool. Can I move it? Nope. This is attached to my fucking face.

• 28:22Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 28:23Ed Zitron?

  But there is something here, I swear to God.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  No, there there is something there.

• 28:28Ed Zitron?

  There's so much more here than generative AI. Like with generative AI, I have not had a goddamn moment of peace in two years, but also not a goddamn moment where I've been like, okay, I kind of, I kind of see it. And there were moments with the vision. There's moments with the quest.

• 28:41Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 28:42Ed Zitron?

  Where I've been like, okay, like horseshoes and hand grenades.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:45Ed Zitron?

  Steam game where you can just like pick up guns and it's like extremely realistic.

• 28:49Speaker 05

  And it just feels so good.

• 28:50Ed Zitron?

  And it's satisfying, like exactly the kind of moment that you're like, this is great fun technology. I fucking love the future. Like the same thing when I, I remember when I got the original iPhone on singular wireless in Penn State. And I remember the moment of like, wow, I don't have to wait for my voicemail. Wow, I can just type out a take and I can move apps. This is cool. Those moments are there with XR and VR. I'm actually like, I'm not like a fantasist about it. Most of the shit sucks.

• 29:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, I think what Google is going to say is that they've invested in AI. So that the AI can go and actually fix all of the problems that the brilliant scientists and researchers haven't been able to do to actually make a pair of good looking XR glasses that you can wear on your face that aren't going to be so heavy.

• 29:33Ed Zitron?

  It's so funny.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Well, so I I spent almost the entirety of last CES looking at displays. Cause I was going to cover other things and then I very quickly realized the most interesting stuff on the floor was was eyeglasses for AR, you know, um, applications. And I used the even realities G1. Have you used these?

• 29:49Ed Zitron?

  What are these?

• 29:50Speaker 04

  These are some very normal looking glasses that if you're a Harry Potter fan, you're you're really a fan of them because they kind of make you look like that. But they don't look like they have tech in them. In fact, the first ad I saw for them, I did not believe that they existed. I'm like, you guys are just hitting me with a render and this is vaporware. It's never going to launch. And I saw him on a friend's head and I'm like, wait, are those they? And you put them on and they have a monochrome. War games-esque, like green text.

• 30:13Ed Zitron?

  I've seen these on Instagram.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Dude, they are, and they, look, they do very few things, but they do them all pretty damn well.

• 30:21Ed Zitron?

  I saw Chris Velasco, the legend over at Washpa, talking about them.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  They're great. I kept wearing them for weeks after the review. And what they do, and caveat, I'm a sucker for notification dashboards. Terminal, smartwatches. This takes your smartwatch, puts it on your face. And so if you're just interacting, you're fine. And then you look up and then you have a little dashboard.

• 30:40Ed Zitron?

  You have to look up?

• 30:42Speaker 04

  No, you can set it so that if you get a notification, it pops up right in front of you. So if I'm looking at you, I'm actually reading my messages and it's creepy. So I keep that off.

• 30:49Ed Zitron?

  I'm, I'm the other way around though, where I'm like, I wouldn't want this on all the time, but if I could look up just to take a look.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:55Ed Zitron?

  Cause if I see a notification, I want to chew on it. I want to take a look. What'd you got for me?

• 30:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 30:59Ed Zitron?

  And I love this. And again, is this super useful? It's useful. Is it too expensive? I assume, yes.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  Probably. I forgot how much it costs.

• 31:07Speaker 05

  They look like you have to wear a leather duster with them whenever you wear them?

• 31:11Speaker 04

  That's, that's the thing. So this is my main complaint with all the other stuff you're talking about is like the, I'm sorry, I always bring out Xreal just to like beat on them, but like great technology, but when you wear it, it's like.

• 31:20Ed Zitron?

  What is Xreal?

• 31:21Speaker 04

  You put on sunglasses, but you have like four inches of, I don't know, foam between them and your eyes. Like they just ride so damn high and they're just, just because of the.

• 31:28Ed Zitron?

  What is Xreal?

• 31:29Speaker 04

  They're like, what, what you just described for airplane viewing. They're like, you know, wearable displays.

• 31:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, they've been doing it for years.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  But they're also working on an XR thing for Android. Are they? Yep. Okay. Display technology doesn't require to sit like, you know, on your forehead.

• 31:43Ed Zitron?

  Vision Pro by now if they'd have put the $400 billion into this shit. Like that's, that's the actual thing. If they wanted to invest in the future, and even if it's not XRVR, if they put hundreds of billions of dollars into the next interface, and their argument would be, oh yeah, well, AI is the next interface because you can just talk.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:00Ed Zitron?

  No, I can't. No, I can't at all. I have a British accent. Do you know, I have to have British Siri sometimes.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:07Ed Zitron?

  Cause sometimes Siri just goes, I don't, I don't.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  Oh no, my.

• 32:10Ed Zitron?

  I don't fucking.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  A lot of my family has really strong Southern and Texas accents. It's incredible. Like it has not, nothing has improved from when Google first and out, first issued like voicemail where we would transcribe it. Nothing's improved. Siri, Android, any of them, if they've got a really strong accent and they're talking like this, then my God, it is not gonna fucking work.

• 32:30Ed Zitron?

  Oh my God, just talk it out.

• 32:33Speaker 05

  You have to.

• 32:34Ed Zitron?

  People in the south and people in like Baltimore just fuck.

• 32:36Speaker 05

  Just absolutely fuck.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  Give me that phone. Uh, question, actually, did you know that when you go to Europe, the Android dictation engine, uh, changes?

• 32:44Ed Zitron?

  No, uh, GDPR, I assume, or something like that?

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Uh, I don't know why. All I know is when I'm in Europe and I'm trying to type and I'm like, no, I'll come to you, period. It says period. I have to say, no, I'll come to you, full stop.

• 32:55Ed Zitron?

  Oh, that makes more sense.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's pretty smart.

• 32:57Speaker 05

  That's cool.

• 32:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, if you go around in England being like, period, uh, people don't look at you the same. At the end of every sentence, like, oh, you seem fine. Uh, but it's, I do think though that this is, this is a very dread infused time. It's very doomery. But then I see these little folder, I see the fun device. I'm like, the tech industry does actually have other things. It's just, I think we might have maxed out software. I think we may have reached the limits of what software can do based on what we have as computing devices.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  I would, I, I think it's something else.

• 33:32Ed Zitron?

  I'm sure it's not fully at the limits, but I'm just saying, as far as consumers go with using stuff, but what, what do you think, Alex?

• 33:39Speaker 05

  I would say that it is more laziness of the large companies. The Apples and the Samsungs and the Googles and the Microsofts, the Lenovo's, I mean, well, the Lenovo actually, they, they have fun.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  They're actually better than Microsoft.

• 33:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, Lenovo's actually really good at like, we're going to experiment and they're, they're a Chinese company.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  They're always trying something.

• 33:58Speaker 05

  You know, a lot of, but the primarily these American companies making gadgets and stuff, they don't try. All of their interested in is how can I get you to replace what you have in two years?

• 34:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  That's it. And, and instead of being like, how can I get you to replace what you have in two years by completely redefining the entire industry? They're like, now you can use magnets.

• 34:18Ed Zitron?

  It's longer.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  And it's like, well, that's cool, but am I really going to upgrade my phone just for that? I might.

• 34:24Ed Zitron?

  No, I.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  And the people in this room might.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  I definitely would, but, but you're right.

• 34:27Speaker 05

  But with the people outside of this room.

• 34:29Ed Zitron?

  I really have a case for that. It's also, I think they've tried to do everything with one device, which is great, but that's where you bump up. Like, the limits of entertainment, I think, are we're reaching especially because watching, I, I will, I'm done with people telling me to watch. I don't know how people watch fu- like, full movies on their phone. Even the biggest, most hugest phone.

• 34:47Speaker 05

  Well, they're young. They, they started.

• 34:49Ed Zitron?

  No, I mean, I mean, older people too. I mean, I've met people, and it's like, on like, a six-inch phone. And it's like, what the fu- this is worse than an airplane.

• 34:58Speaker 05

  My brother did that. He watched Sinners, like, on his iPad. And he's like, why does everybody like Sinners? It's not very good. And I was like, how'd you watch it? Like, you know, in the middle of the day with the lights all on, on my iPad. I'm like, well, of course you didn't like it.

• 35:09Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  Get it together, sir.

• 35:11Ed Zitron?

  Watching the good, the bad, and the ugly. I'm like, and on a Droid 2.

• 35:16Speaker 05

  You're not paying attention.

• 35:18Ed Zitron?

  That was a good phone. I liked the Droid 2.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  That was.

• 35:20Ed Zitron?

  And also, just to be clear, you can do experiments that suck. I did also try the BlackBerry Storm back in the day. With its like, it was a screen where you could just like, do hap- it was like, you could press, it felt like you were pressing in, but it felt. It did. It floated on a button. It felt bad. It felt like. It was bad. A slightly harder version of poking some, like, Greek yogurt. It was, which is not the sensation I want while typing.

• 35:45Speaker 05

  No one wants that.

• 35:46Ed Zitron?

  And it like, had a g- a clunk to it.

• 35:48Speaker 05

  Was it, that was the one that, like, BlackBerry was like, this is gonna save us the apple.

• 35:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it was their big, it was so, it was like the homomobile of phones. It fucking ru- I love them for how bad it was.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. They were like, we're gonna, we don't need this multi-touch stuff. We got this.

• 36:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we go. You want your screen to move.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:07Ed Zitron?

  You ever want a screen that feels, that makes you feel bad every time you touch it? And everyone else is like, we're working on that with different ways. That it's, I, I also think that, that it's nice to see, hear that there's some fun as well, because the AI stuff. And I'm not gonna make this a big complaint fest about AI. You got the rest of the episodes. But there's something joyless about large language. It's not fun. I'm not using any of it and being like, oh, how whimsical. Like, oh, you're having. They don't seem like we're having, they're having fun. We're not having fun. At least with some dorky insane phone, you're like, okay, what?

• 36:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:40Ed Zitron?

  What are you gonna fuck me up?

• 36:41Speaker 05

  I mean, the vibe coders, the vibe coders are having fun.

• 36:43Ed Zitron?

  No, they're not. Read the vibe coding Reddit. It's a bunch of people talking like they've been captured by North Korea.

• 36:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:49Ed Zitron?

  Like, it, it's straight up like, I love doing this every day. My, I've put three months of my life and thousands of dollars into this, and I have eight paying customers.

• 36:57Speaker 05

  It's the best thing in the world.

• 36:58Ed Zitron?

  It's so funny and you you read and they're like, yeah, I don't get how this happened. And someone will be like, yeah, you don't read code. You can't understand how this can. Well, I asked it to tell me. It's like, yeah, that's that's the problem. But it's like, there's nothing dorky or funny about it. Even the metaverse was more fun than this.

• 37:16Speaker 06

  It was more fun to make fun of.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  No, I was like, the metaverse, that first time you put on that stupid Windows headset and you had your big Windows Playhouse and you go and you put a giant dinosaur in it. And then you ask your coworker to try on the headset and they're like, why the hell is a giant dinosaur staring at me? Like, that's fun, but you can't do. Yeah, it's it's hard to troll people with with AI. I mean, you really have to like, you really have to think about it.

• 37:40Ed Zitron?

  That's the thing, though. People trolled a little hard because I why what I also enjoyed was watching during the metaverse. Regular journalists be like, I'll check out this VR chat thing. And just like getting the worst people online, a bunch of people dressed as knuckles, just doing racism constant, just like endless racism.

• 37:58Speaker 05

  And if you have thirteen year olds.

• 37:59Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just thirteen year olds saying the worst shit you've heard in your life and like, I am I'm here from a business magazine. It's like, fuck you, piece of shit.

• 38:08Ed Zitron?

  No, it's great. I think the journalists need to see the real internet occasionally.

• 38:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you can do that with with.

• 38:13Ed Zitron?

  You can just do that with the internet. You've been able to do it for decades. It's just, but the metaverse also, you saw some people try some weird shit. You saw a lot of grifters and all this crap, like whatever. But it was like, at least someone was having fun. Mark Zuckerberg was lying. But also, people didn't really full ask the metaverse. I wish that they had put this kind of money into it. Because we would have got one really shit thing and one really funny thing.

• 38:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I mean, they they, to an extent, they did put the money in, like, Apple spent a lot of money on Vision Pro.

• 38:43Ed Zitron?

  Did that because of the metaverse. I think that they were planning it anyway.

• 38:46Speaker 05

  Really? I think I always felt it was like, we need to play catch up. Everyone is talking.

• 38:50Ed Zitron?

  They've been, yeah, I I can see that.

• 38:52Speaker 05

  Apple can cook chases.

• 38:54Ed Zitron?

  Been two, three, what, it came out twenty twenty four? I don't think they've only been working on it two years. Maybe they accelerated it.

• 39:00Speaker 05

  They'd been, they'd been working on it for.

• 39:02Ed Zitron?

  Steve Jobs would have fucking killed them. Can you imagine Steve Jobs fighting about that?

• 39:05Speaker 05

  He never would have let that be.

• 39:06Ed Zitron?

  Someone to death with one of those.

• 39:09Speaker 06

  Wasn't the idea that they were creating glasses first and then they're like, this is the step towards the glasses and now? Well, there was all that talk, whether or not they're actually making the glasses. Now they're back on, whether or not they're going to be smart glasses or AR glasses. It seems silly.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, everybody was like, okay. And this is, this is the dumbest part of the generative AI moment is 10 years ago, everybody was like, we're going to have smart glasses, but they're going to be, you put them on and you talk to somebody because Alexa's doing it and there's Siri and all of this. So we're going to do it just like this. It didn't work because we don't know how to interact audio wise with, with computers and stuff. It's not just like it is in Star Trek. It's actually more complex.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 39:52Speaker 05

  You have to consider multiple users and stuff. So everybody's like, okay, how else can we do this? Well, we'll do the metaverse and we'll do these AR glasses. And then they were like, wait, we can't figure out how to make these glasses small enough with battery life, with good vision, like we can't do all of that.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  And then generative AI came out and everybody was like, you know what we're going to do? That Alexa shit again.

• 40:11Ed Zitron?

  I love that as well because Alexa didn't work.

• 40:15Speaker 05

  It still doesn't.

• 40:15Ed Zitron?

  And they were like, well, we'll make a new one that works worse.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 40:19Ed Zitron?

  And it's, I haven't, have any of you used Alexa Plus yet?

• 40:22Speaker 04

  Not yet.

• 40:23Ed Zitron?

  Not only in demos. Damn, I was, I really, when I read about that and they're like, it's worse and it can, you can be like, yeah, make me a recipe for like chicken pasta and it will tell you it. And I just think that people need to accept that voice is not a good interface. Just in general, I don't think, it needs to be perfect, perfect.

• 40:43Speaker 05

  I think it requires so much more training of ourselves, right? Cause like you get there.

• 40:48Ed Zitron?

  But I don't want to be trained, I want to use the thingy.

• 40:50Speaker 05

  But you are trained, like we're all trained, we're trained to use our phones.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  For limited use cases, like, you know, turn the lights on, turn, open the garage door, whatever, like, but, but beyond that, you know, to your point, like it's, it's required to be usable by such a wide swath of humans that it's almost impossible to do.

• 41:05Speaker 05

  And we all want to do it just like Star Trek.

• 41:07Ed Zitron?

  I also think, I also think it has a very flat view of tasks. I think that most people think that it's going to be, well, people like Sundar Pichai or Andy Jassy think that people go into their house and they go, and I will do this and I will do this, not me. I'm like, what about that YouTube? What about that Chrome thing? Oh, I should read this article. No, wait, fuck, I'm meant to send an email. Send an email. Okay, fuck, no, I haven't got the information for the email. Shit, why am I, why is it so fucking hot in here? I need to make it cold in here. Fuck, it's cold. I want to put this YouTube back on. Oh, yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can't multitask at all.

• 41:34Ed Zitron?

  Right, but also just can't do any context switching. It cannot do it.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  And, and, and I will do something which I think would be tantamount to suicide on any other day. I will defend an L L M on your podcast.

• 41:45Ed Zitron?

  Okay, go on.

• 41:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:46Ed Zitron?

  All right, no, please.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  I feel like it's probably a good mechanic for training these things to do exactly that because I have found the one enjoyable bit of using L L Ms I have found. Is that I'll talk to Gemini live a lot because I, I'm very used to, as we all are, doing a Google Voice dictated search for what I'm looking for. But I love that Gemini lets me talk to it like my brain actually works. I'm like, thinking about this thing, it's like a wrench, but it's not, it's like a ratcheting socket. That's probably not ratchet. Anyway, it's a vacuum cleaner adjustment, you know what I mean? And then she'll be like, oh yeah, totally got it. Here, here's what it is.

• 42:15Ed Zitron?

  But that's, and that is.

• 42:16Speaker 04

  Her return to, to be fair, we will be 20% wrong, but at least she's gotten me.

• 42:21Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm not disagreeing with you. This is the use case of L L Ms, which is they are better at inferring meaning from what we say. And they have found a way to do that, which is just better search, which gets back to the thing that you were saying, Alex, about how these companies are lazy. Because why doesn't, why didn't Google have this 10 years ago? How are there no other ways to do this? And why is Google still not really like this in the search engine part? You have to go into Gemini and even when you, you can't type in to Google search that kind of thing.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  No.

• 42:49Ed Zitron?

  When you try and, I, I will type in like site, the information, a term, and it, it will be like, I don't fucking know, man, because I didn't write dot com.

• 42:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:56Ed Zitron?

  Because it could, it's just, I don't know what, what possibly could site, colon, the information mean? Oh, you added a dot com, it's a website, my bad. Like, I'm only worth, we're only a market cap of $4 trillion. Fuck you.

• 43:09Speaker 05

  Well, they would say you should be using Chrome to do it.

• 43:12Ed Zitron?

  I wasn't Chrome.

• 43:13Speaker 05

  Oh, no!

• 43:14Ed Zitron?

  I wasn't. I'm still in Chrome a little bit because certain websites don't work because we live in the future.

• 43:22Speaker 05

  I tried to switch to Coggy's mobile browser. Worst experience of my life.

• 43:26Ed Zitron?

  I switched to Firefox and I hate it.

• 43:28Speaker 05

  It's sometimes some things just work better.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  I live in Chrome. Especially since Pocket died.

• 43:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Now I have to use Chrome for all my mobile bookmarks and it has all my passwords. Oh, man.

• 43:38Ed Zitron?

  That's actually another thing that really grinds my gears. Bookmarks are the same still. I don't use bookmarks because I'm chaotic and every time I save something, I forget where I saved it.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  I just assume I'll remember everything?

• 43:51Ed Zitron?

  I actually, no, I genuinely, I genuinely do. Like, I remember.

• 43:55Speaker 05

  No, same, same.

• 43:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and it works out.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  And I'm like, oh my god.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  He's horrified by this.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  I remember everything but at exactly the wrong time.

• 44:03Ed Zitron?

  No, I remember everything.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I should look that up.

• 44:05Ed Zitron?

  As long as I have the weirdest cues, like several words. If you read my notes for my newsletter, they're insane. It's like three broken sentences with like a question mark and a typo. I'm like, that's 16,000 words, babe.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, hold up. I didn't have this on my list, but there's a gadget for that.

• 44:20Ed Zitron?

  What is it?

• 44:21Speaker 04

  The plowed or plod.

• 44:23Ed Zitron?

  Plod.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  AI recorder things.

• 44:25Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 44:26Speaker 04

  Right?

• 44:27Ed Zitron?

  What is this?

• 44:28Speaker 05

  Those didn't work, I thought.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  They work pretty well. In fact, you could say they work too well. They make a little card, credit card sized thing. It's very thin. It's very impressive. It's metal. It's cool sized.

• 44:37Ed Zitron?

  They have a necklace, too.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Now, this is the notepen. This is the thing that works too well. They had a bug. You want to know what the bug was?

• 44:42Ed Zitron?

  What was it?

• 44:43Speaker 04

  That fucker would record when you didn't ask it to. I have four hours of me snoring at CES on the notepen. And I was like, hey, guys, you have to fix this because it's the one thing it can't do. And they're like, ah, yes, we're replacing those affected units. I'm like, yeah, you damn well better.

• 44:56Ed Zitron?

  I'm so sorry, though. Now that isn't impossible to buy device.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  That's what I said in the review. That's what I said.

• 45:02Ed Zitron?

  Anyone who knows that happened to you, I wouldn't be able to buy it.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  Nope. I don't trust it.

• 45:06Speaker 05

  You probably have because we all have phones. And phones have definitely done that, too. I've more than once had my phone just be like, I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. And I was like, I was on the fucking toilet. I didn't mean you to catch that.

• 45:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I like my HomePods, but they do occasionally hear me and just go like, I don't know what that meant. It's like,

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:24Ed Zitron?

  I was screaming to myself, thank you.

• 45:27Speaker 05

  I was just watching TV.

• 45:28Ed Zitron?

  I was just mad.

• 45:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:29Ed Zitron?

  I was just saying some of the words that I say inside when I am upset.

• 45:33Speaker 06

  Joe, even the PS5, the PlayStation 5 has that ability. You don't know it because nobody enables it, but it actually works. You can like talk into the controller and control the PS5 that way. And I turned it on and I just keep forgetting to take it off. And now I'm just like, I'm just talking with my brother and then the PS5 is like, are you sure? And I'm like, what do you mean?

• 45:51Ed Zitron?

  No PlayStation 5. That's why I'm talking.

• 46:05Speaker 00

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• 47:10Ed Zitron?

  I don't know. And I just, I want them to do more fun things. I'm so glad. The fact that you, Michael, have this flip phone talent, I keep looking at it and just being like, hmm. But there's the trifold now, right? We love the trifold, yes.

• 47:25Speaker 05

  China is actually doing, a lot of these Chinese companies are doing really interesting stuff, right?

• 47:30Speaker 06

  They're innovating.

• 47:30Speaker 05

  Like Huawei is doing it. Lenovo is doing it.

• 47:34Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  Apple is like, we'll get there in five years after everyone else has done it.

• 47:37Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 47:38Speaker 05

  We can like test it there and make sure.

• 47:40Ed Zitron?

  One thing I will say is you can't do contiguous. Touch between the windows.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  So yeah, when you're running two apps side by side, you well.

• 47:46Ed Zitron?

  I am exactly that kind of asshole.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Android demands you like you select your focus. Yeah. So you can't be doing them both at once.

• 47:51Ed Zitron?

  And that's the weird thing like Apple used to like they had the Apple Hi-Fi. They used to take fun risks. And then Steve Jobs would kill the family, everyone involved.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  Well, they and they failed at a risk. They the air air drut, air dock.

• 48:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  The charging plate.

• 48:05Speaker 05

  Air power.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  Air power.

• 48:06Ed Zitron?

  The listeners, there was this thing that now exists in 19 different forms where they were going to do this block. We could put your AirPods, your Apple Watch and your phone. And they would talk about it every few months and they'd be like, it's just around the corner.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  They announced it. They like showed records.

• 48:21Ed Zitron?

  It was like a big thing. They announced the Mark German would just put out. It's like, no. This is not going to. And it and it was it just they just canceled it one day and then Anchor and several hundred other companies.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Well, it was different.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, you go ahead.

• 48:34Ed Zitron?

  What was different about this?

• 48:36Speaker 05

  So so what Apple was trying to do was like, take those those coils, the charging coils and stack them on each other. So it's one real small spot. So you could throw it on anywhere on the pad and it would charge.

• 48:47Ed Zitron?

  That is cool.

• 48:48Speaker 05

  Whereas everybody else is like, no, you have to have your little spots. And I love, I've got, I've got one and it's great. I use it all the time. But air power would have been slightly cooler, except for it was like melting things, I thought.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  I they couldn't figure it out one way or the other.

• 49:00Ed Zitron?

  Oh, wow. Customers are so demanding.

• 49:02Speaker 05

  It's like, oh, I melted a hole in my.

• 49:04Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  But now we have like MagSafe, I've added the need for it, right? Because the magnets are a better friend. Like it's like you don't, it doesn't matter that you need to like discreetly place it because the magnets are going to put it there anyway. And that's better for a bunch of reasons.

• 49:15Ed Zitron?

  I will say there is an anchor thing I have at home that I don't replace out of spite, which is it's one of the things where the Apple Watch component flips up. So the the circle, except that thing, there are so many times I put it on, it just does not stick for some reason. And every time it happens, fuck, piece of shit. Do I replace it? Fuck, no.

• 49:34Speaker 05

  No, you just don't have your.

• 49:35Ed Zitron?

  I paid my $50 and I will get every dollars worth of 10 years later, I'll replace it when I throw it from the window.

• 49:43Speaker 05

  I mean, that's like all my GAN chargers. Gallium nitride.

• 49:47Ed Zitron?

  Now, there's a gadget. We love gallium nitride.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  We love gallium nitride here.

• 49:50Ed Zitron?

  No, we really do. I genuinely.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  I mean, that's how you know it's a bunch of like nerds who love gadgets. Cause we're all like, yeah, yeah.

• 49:57Ed Zitron?

  And if you've not heard of gallium nitride, I've mentioned it before. It's the thing where they basically found a way to make plugs smaller and batteries smaller. I actually have like these amazing anchor things. There's just all this cool shit that came out of it.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  It's so great.

• 50:08Speaker 05

  Ugreen makes really good stuff, too.

• 50:10Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm. Ugreen?

• 50:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, Ugreen.

• 50:12Ed Zitron?

  I thought they were just a slot brand.

• 50:14Speaker 05

  No, they're real people.

• 50:16Ed Zitron?

  They, they, they.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, but they're real.

• 50:17Ed Zitron?

  I have one in my bag right now.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  And they're actually good because I've been looking for anchor alternatives just because I like.

• 50:21Speaker 05

  I, I've used a bunch of you. Yeah.

• 50:23Ed Zitron?

  No, I like anchor mounting things.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, they got a lot of recalls.

• 50:27Speaker 05

  Recalls. Things have gotten a little more expensive. Ugreen and there's a few others.

• 50:31Ed Zitron?

  I like, I like anchor.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  So they committed the ultimate sin long ago for me. The same thing. Allbirds did the same thing. Everything company does that, that, that achieves scale is they go from building something interesting looking in a fun color with a weird shape to like, ah, no. Eighty percent of people buy the boring black rectangle. So now that's all we're gonna show. Anchor's variety is black or white.

• 50:50Ed Zitron?

  I, I somewhat disagree.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  Oh, come on.

• 50:53Ed Zitron?

  Just because of the Nebula X one which we talked about. It's this insane like $3,000 projector.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:58Ed Zitron?

  You can put it in a weird angle and it will still keystone in. They do claim it's like, oh, you hit a button and it just works. Not for me. I, I am the person you should bring every new thing to before you say that because it will break every.

• 51:10Speaker 05

  Has there ever been a projector that just works?

• 51:12Ed Zitron?

  But it does. It gets about as close as you can. It sets up in like a minute. You can keystone it at the weird angles. It's fucking cool and it looks weird and it's like really nice. And like the wireless speakers just work and the.

• 51:21Speaker 05

  How much is it?

• 51:22Ed Zitron?

  It's $3,000 fucking dollars. It's so expensive.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Good news. If you Google it, you will get your first three results are cheaper alternatives that they're being paid to be put there.

• 51:31Ed Zitron?

  Nice. I, when I bought my GPD for WIM4, I ended up getting scammed by a Google ad. I, I had some, and I, it, it was just, I was buying it. I was excited to get it. And I saw, and I, I am so resilient to these things. So I was like mad at myself.

• 51:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:45Ed Zitron?

  I emailed fucking GPD. I emailed Google. I was fucking, I was like, listen to me. Fuck, no, no, I didn't. No, I was, and to be fair, GPD got back to me like, holy shit. Like, we're gonna contact Google. Google did not. GPD was actually very concerned, like.

• 52:00Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, cause that's like their whole brand.

• 52:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And it was just like a Chinese guy's Gmail as well. Like he had a fake, a perfectly good GPD website.

• 52:08Speaker 05

  Did he just mail you a box?

• 52:09Ed Zitron?

  No, I, I cancelled the payment. Like, put it on a credit card because. These things happen. Haven't for a long time. I was quite embarrassed, but no, I like Anchor and they occasionally will do something like the Nebular X1. However, yeah, they are mostly just blocks. They have them in different colors now.

• 52:26Speaker 05

  I mean, the batteries, I have one that's like mint green.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 05

  It's lovely.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  I got like a pink one in my pocket.

• 52:32Speaker 06

  I mean, Anchor's, Anchor's like, you know, charging brand. It's just kind of stayed, but like all the other shit they're doing with all their other sub-brands, because now they have like 12. Uh, you know, they have that, uh, UV printer. That's really cool.

• 52:44Ed Zitron?

  Wait, what is that? What is this?

• 52:45Speaker 06

  Uh, so UV printers, they basically use a UV light on UV activated ink to.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  So sort of like thermal printers?

• 52:53Speaker 06

  It kind of, but it, there's less heat involved since it's just light.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:57Speaker 06

  So it, you'll like, it'll just, you can technically print on almost anything and it can print in 3D quote unquote. So if you like, you know, you're looking at oil painting, it has those like raised edges where, you know, the oil thickens. It, it can technically do that. It's, it's really, it's very cool. Um, and I got to use it. I printed out a meme on, on a, on a little magnet and, uh, it, it looked really nice. I can't wait to actually try it out more.

• 53:24Ed Zitron?

  Uh, it's. How much is this thing?

• 53:25Speaker 06

  It's, uh, I probably around like 1300 dollars. No, it was, it was more than that.

• 53:30Ed Zitron?

  It's like, but that like a 3D, a good 3D printer is that much?

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Now, is this like one of those printers that I saw a number of years ago that is kind of like a mouse and you like run it over the surface you're printing on or?

• 53:39Speaker 06

  No, this is a big unit, uh, but it's like other three, other UV printers are like gigantic. And this is like a tabletop one, which is why it was like big in the maker space for like a hot minute. Uh, I don't know where it is right now and I've been trying to get a review unit in and Anchor, if you're listening, please.

• 53:54Ed Zitron?

  So I actually do have a question for all three of you. I keep seeing things on Kickstarter, but I haven't touched Kickstarter in years because of all the shit. Is it trustworthy still? Is it still dodgy?

• 54:04Speaker 04

  Depends on who you're going, like some companies, big companies will use Kickstarter to validate the market. Like Unihertz is famous for this. If you want an interesting phone, Unihertz is there for you. They make all the like BlackBerry revivals, all the ones with weird quarter, you know, you're huge. They have a screen on the back for no reason.

• 54:19Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, you'd, you'd love it.

• 54:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, just try it.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  Every launch they do is on Kickstarter and they, you know, I think they also use it as a PR thing because they know they're going to exceed their goal on the first day.

• 54:29Ed Zitron?

  But it isn't 2013 anymore. Try, I run a PR for, I know that doesn't work anymore.

• 54:33Speaker 05

  But yeah, yeah, you'll see that with like. It's mainly the big brands. The smaller brands, I would still be a little like...

• 54:39Speaker 04

  They're still dodgy.

• 54:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, because you just run into this. I mean, it's just the practical nature of building gadgets.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Hardware is really difficult. Can confirm, yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 05

  And it's only going to get more difficult over the next, because of the tariffs and stuff, I suspect.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 54:53Speaker 05

  Especially Americans are going to have, you know, until we get manufacturing in the United States again. It's going to be a challenge.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  I look forward to that happening.

• 55:01Speaker 05

  Any day.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  There's one that I actually invested in, which is technically a gadget. Now, I was going to save this to the very end because no one could possibly care about this if they didn't follow the moon landing program in the 60s.

• 55:13Speaker 05

  Tell me more.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  Okay. This is a watch. It is called the D-Sky Moon Watch, D-S-K-Y. And it is not a smart watch. It is not an LCD and all this stuff. What they took, there's an Apollo Guidance Computer from the moon capsule, and they shrunk it down to the size of a watch. Oh, my God.

• 55:31Speaker 05

  Oh, my, hell, yes.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  It is not just an aesthetic reproduction. It is literally the same computer replicated.

• 55:36Speaker 05

  That's cool as hell.

• 55:37Speaker 04

  So you can program it with like old 60s noun verb, you know, combinations. And what I love, my favorite thing about it is, you know, in the 60s, you didn't have LEDs. Well, we have to have LEDs in the watch to do stuff. They came up with color filters to make the LED match the incandescent bulbs of the 60s. Like, it's perfect. It looks like an oscilloscope, kind of like...

• 55:56Speaker 05

  I don't need this, but I'm going to get it.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  That's what I said. The minute I saw, I think...

• 56:00Speaker 05

  Holy crap, it's expensive.

• 56:02Speaker 04

  How much is it? Eight hundred ninety bucks or something like that.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  On their website, it's six hundred and fifty-nine pounds for the Americans.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah. Anyway, I'll let you know if I get it, because I have backed it. But what does it do? It tells the time.

• 56:17Speaker 05

  It looks cool.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  It also... Yeah, that's fine. It also is the Guidance Computer, so you can program it to... It is limited by your imagination and your coding ability if you know 1969-era code. Of course. Yeah. Which I do. But it's all open source, so you can actually do whatever you want with it, uh, which is really fun. It also has GPS for some reason. I don't know. I don't know what else.

• 56:36Ed Zitron?

  Fuck it, while we're there. It's, yeah, I, I'm so glad. I wasn't sure coming into this whether we'd have more doodads. It seems like there's still a healthy, but there's just not in America.

• 56:47Speaker 05

  Well, no, there is.

• 56:48Ed Zitron?

  You can get stuff here. No, sorry, you can get it here, but it's not American companies that seem to be driving this, like, Anker's Chinese?

• 56:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, well, I've got a couple, actually.

• 56:59Ed Zitron?

  Oh, please, please. I'd genuinely like to know.

• 57:01Speaker 05

  Pebble?

• 57:01Speaker 04

  Uh, Pebble?

• 57:03Ed Zitron?

  Okay, Pebble is back.

• 57:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, Pebble's back because we want it.

• 57:08Speaker 04

  Their regular watches.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's just they're doing-

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Never should have died.

• 57:12Speaker 05

  Never should have died. They're, they're doing E Ink watches again. They start shipping this month. I definitely ordered both.

• 57:18Ed Zitron?

  What do they do? How much do they cost?

• 57:20Speaker 05

  You know, they're just watches.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  Well, they're smart watches.

• 57:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're smart watches. They've got, they've got, they've got, um, you know, they've got heart rate monitors in them. They do notifications.

• 57:29Ed Zitron?

  Is it Bluetooth or NT?

• 57:31Speaker 05

  Um, ooh, I don't remember. Bluetooth, is it? And it's, and it's just, it's just a watch and you can, you know, they, they have a very robust user community.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  That's the killer.

• 57:40Ed Zitron?

  And then what, like apps and such?

• 57:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. So that was the thing. I mean, Pebble was the first one doing apps on a watch and they did it well. And people liked it and then they sold, right?

• 57:49Speaker 04

  They sold to Fitbit, who was then, who were then bought by Google immediately.

• 57:52Speaker 05

  Right. And, and it just-

• 57:54Ed Zitron?

  And then died.

• 57:54Speaker 05

  It killed it and the guy got it back, got the, the rights to Pebble back. And he's like, he's just out there making cool as hell watches.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  Yes. And, and I think the user community is the, is, is the thing, like, cause all these, I love a smart watch, but the ones from Google and Apple are kind of soulless of necessity because they're corporate products and they're-

• 58:10Speaker 05

  They're meant for the wider consumer, yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 04

  Exactly. Whereas the Pebble is like, wow, who made this weird ostrich watch face that's like, oh, some guy in Denmark. Oh, that's cool.

• 58:18Speaker 05

  I mean, the Pebble watch, my, my best friend, she goes to Orange Theory. She, she's like very, drinks her Starbucks, very, I love her. But she does not give a shit about smart watches and she's not gonna care about the Pebble. If I told her about it, she'd say what? And whereas an Apple Watch cares about, yeah. And it's just a perfect gadget.

• 58:36Ed Zitron?

  And how much was it again?

• 58:38Speaker 04

  I don't know. Two hundred something?

• 58:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:40Ed Zitron?

  It's not bad.

• 58:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 04

  And he's only making small batches, so it has, it could be cheaper, but he's only doing ten thousand or something like that.

• 58:47Speaker 05

  How much I spent on, on these watches.

• 58:50Speaker 04

  Right, that's credit cards.

• 58:51Speaker 05

  I spent a lot.

• 58:53Ed Zitron?

  That's future Alex's problem.

• 58:55Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 58:55Speaker 05

  I already paid for it all, so it's not, it's past Alex's problem.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 05

  I just get free stuff now.

• 59:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  That's how I think of it.

• 59:02Ed Zitron?

  Exactly, that's how it works.

• 59:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Now, I, boy, any other American?

• 59:06Speaker 04

  American company, the Lightphone. The Light Company.

• 59:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I didn't get a chance to watch your video.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  What a trash friend you are.

• 59:13Ed Zitron?

  Okay, well.

• 59:16Speaker 05

  I watched it.

• 59:16Ed Zitron?

  There's only one person I have Telegram for, and that's you, so.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  You don't even use that anymore, don't lie to the listeners.

• 59:22Ed Zitron?

  I don't use it, that's why I miss your messages. But anyhow, so, wait, so this Lightphone, was it good or bad?

• 59:27Speaker 04

  The Lightphone three was a, a very, well, it was a very seven out of ten experience.

• 59:33Ed Zitron?

  Ooh.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  Uh, because it was basically half unfinished when I was covering it.

• 59:38Ed Zitron?

  And what does it do exactly?

• 59:39Speaker 04

  Very little. It lets you do phone calls, text messages, and then a handful of apps that are meant to keep you as disconnected as possible. You have maps, you have, you will, you will never have email, you will never have social media, uh, you will not have a web browser. But like, things to get you from point A to point B, except, right now, no payments, no Lyft, no Uber, none of that stuff. So it made life very difficult. I tried it for two weeks, I found I had to carry an iPad mini along with me, which the Lightphone does generate a hotspot, so you can use.

• 1:00:09Ed Zitron?

  That's cool.

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  Like, you know, if you want to pop up in a laptop, I really enjoyed experimenting with that lifestyle again of reverting to the late nineties when we had to decide to be online.

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  And then decide to be offline.

• 1:00:20Ed Zitron?

  Well, I, I decided to be online all the time.

• 1:00:24Ed Zitron?

  Not really.

• 1:00:25Speaker 05

  My mom needs to use the phone, so sometimes.

• 1:00:28Ed Zitron?

  But this thing, is it, what kind of screen, is it like a black and white screen?

• 1:00:31Speaker 04

  So that is, it's, in my opinion, it's shining achievement. Like, this is a remarkable piece of hardware. I love picking it up. It is like, if you blew up an Apple Watch to, you know, by 4X the size and made it out of black metal and glass, and put a knob on the side to control your brightness, and the screen is black and white, but it has this diffusion filter on it. It does have a camera with a nice chunky dual-stage shutter button.

• 1:00:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's okay camera, though.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  Uh, it's actually better than I expected, to be honest.

• 1:00:59Ed Zitron?

  But it's black and white.

• 1:00:59Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, the display is OLED, so it is a black and white interface. And when you fire the camera, it activates the color OLED.

• 1:01:07Ed Zitron?

  This thing's so cool.

• 1:01:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Ed Zitron?

  But also, it's like the opposite of what I want.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Is it?

• 1:01:11Ed Zitron?

  But I'm abnormal, I need to be, I love, I love being connected always.

• 1:01:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 1:01:16Ed Zitron?

  I'm like a problem.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  Try it, try it. I, the second weekend, I was like, I get it. I get why people who like talk about presence and intentionality, I hadn't gotten that.

• 1:01:26Ed Zitron?

  But I also have the steel wool of the Buddha. If I need to focus on people, I can just not look at my phone.

• 1:01:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, and I think this is.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  What's it like to have restraint?

• 1:01:33Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  I'm unfamiliar with that.

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  I think this is a thing we see, though, from American gadgets. A lot of the American gadgets are about disconnecting. They're about taking a step back. Um, and as we all look at our phones.

• 1:01:44Ed Zitron?

  I was checking off mine.

• 1:01:45Speaker 05

  But, but that is the thing.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  The minimum, yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 05

  You know, it's about how do we disconnect from Google? How do we disconnect from our corporate overlords? How do we disconnect from social media? Those are the, the things driving a lot of American ingenuity and gadgets. Which is like, cool, but culturally like, oof.

• 1:02:03Ed Zitron?

  I also don't.

• 1:02:04Speaker 05

  Where are we as a culture if that's the driving point?

• 1:02:06Ed Zitron?

  I also understand, like, that is cool, but it's also sad.

• 1:02:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Ed Zitron?

  Because it's, I get the sense that other countries, when they look at technology, they see like, oh, like, regular people like, oh, what could it do for me next? Now everyone's like, ah, is there a fucking way that I could stop using? Versus, like, Kate Natapolis from BI Business that wrote a few years ago, I think, this thing is like, I love my phone, stop trying to get me off my phone. Make my phone better. And I kind of subscribe to that. And I know I'm a freak for like liking the phone and being online all the time. But nevertheless, it's like this sense of, I want to get away from big tech. I want to get away from my phone, I want to do this. It's very sad. And also, they're clearly building towards it by making, oh, we'll just control the shit for you. You have no control, you have no industry over this.

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  So there's a flip side to this and then I'm gonna stop talking about phones.

• 1:02:53Ed Zitron?

  Please.

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  There's another philosophical approach done by a company called The Minimal Company. The minimal phone. Now, they are much smaller than Light. They also have some problems fulfilling orders. I think their customer service and whatever. But their phone is a good idea because the phone, it does the opposite of the Light phone. It gives you all the apps you want, but the display is e-ink, so you don't want to use any of them. But you can if you need to, like Uber, which I needed a billion times on the Light phone and didn't have it.

• 1:03:18Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:03:20Speaker 04

  That was really, really cool. The minimal phone idea is a very cool one. And I'm a nerd for this, but they put a QWERTY keyboard on there, which I also like.

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. That's just cool.

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  TCL is making a phone, well, they made a phone last year. That's their NXPT paper phone that you can't get in the US.

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Speaker 06

  And you can like swap it between a fake like e-paper screen and to a regular screen. Yeah, it's not, it's not actually e-paper, I know. But it looks, it has like a kind of like, you know, sheen to it that makes it look less.

• 1:03:50Speaker 05

  Or you can just go and spend $10 on a matte glass for your phone. That's, that's what I did. Cause I looked at that stuff and I was like, oh, this is cool. I'll just put matte glass on my phone and I get the exact same experience.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  I should, I would stop talking about phones, but you just made me think of another one.

• 1:04:06Ed Zitron?

  This is my podcast. Talk about the phone. I don't care.

• 1:04:10Speaker 04

  Fairphone 6.

• 1:04:11Ed Zitron?

  What is this?

• 1:04:12Speaker 04

  I have not paid attention to Fairphone almost at all because it's a bit about repairability.

• 1:04:16Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:04:16Speaker 04

  Which is important, but I don't really care about it. So, okay. Uh, Fairphone 6 has a big neon green switch on the side. And when you flip it down, it turns from a regular Android phone into a dumb phone.

• 1:04:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  And I like that physical trigger. Because yeah, you can do it with a custom launcher. Yeah, you can do it through umpteen software options. But having a switch seems to suggest more intentionality is, is required of you. And switching out of it feels like more friction, a little more friction.

• 1:04:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:43Speaker 05

  It's a little more friction, but it's also less friction in the setup, right?

• 1:04:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, true.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, because if I, you know, you can do that with an iPhone, you're gonna spend a very long time. Dicking around with your iPhone to get to that point.

• 1:04:54Ed Zitron?

  Yes. I think a lot of these problems come down to the fact that just notifications have become an invasion of our privacy that when you look at your phone, it will be like, hey, it's Etsy again. Yeah, you bought one thing seven years ago. You didn't delete this app. Do you want to look at flowers?

• 1:05:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:08Ed Zitron?

  And you're just like, leave me the fuck on and Apple's just like, we don't give a fuck.

• 1:05:12Speaker 05

  And New York Times used to do breaking news for everything. They'd just like every damn thing. They'd be like, you know, Beyonce is gonna be in New York. Great. Why is that?

• 1:05:23Ed Zitron?

  You can't fix this as well with with the phone. It's the companies. They've made it worse and they make it worse every day.

• 1:05:30Speaker 05

  And they're like, well, we'll give you control.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  You have to do way too much work to do it. To your point, you have to do way too much tweaking.

• 1:05:35Ed Zitron?

  You can't tweak the notifications.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  Well, if you have an Android phone, you can.

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that's the thing where like.

• 1:05:40Ed Zitron?

  Put iMessage on a fucking Android.

• 1:05:42Speaker 05

  You want to be able to go to your phone and just say, fix it. And Google keeps promising that. And have they delivered?

• 1:05:48Speaker 04

  Someday.

• 1:05:48Speaker 06

  I mean, speaking of the Fairphone, like, there's a Framework is making really cool laptops.

• 1:05:53Ed Zitron?

  I was just thinking.

• 1:05:54Speaker 06

  I really, really like Framework. And like, I don't want.

• 1:05:58Ed Zitron?

  Tell the audience about it.

• 1:05:58Speaker 06

  Framework's laptop where all you kind of have to do is like, you get a bunch of the parts and you slot slot in the SSD, you slot in the RAM, and you kind of put the screen bezels on and then you put the keyboard on, you screw everything in. It's like, oh, it's a laptop now. You've built it. I mean, it's it's fun because the company makes it really easy to do. So you make, yeah, it's Legos. You you make yourself feel smart, even though they literally put everything out there for you and you just did it. But it also means you can repair it, yada, yada, yada. But the I like, yeah, you can upgrade it. I like the feeling of like, ownership, because half the problem with ownership is that I don't feel like I actually own the thing. I bought the thing and they're managing my life for me. They're putting all the software on it that I don't want. They're putting this program on.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  They change how you use it with UX updates.

• 1:06:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So I want to own the thing by like, controlling what goes into it. And I feel like I want more products that have that ability to just like, I can just control the hardware at least, if not the software. Like, if I could control both, I'd be in a happy place. I'm more nerdy, but. Imagine if like every laptop had that ability to just like take off the back and like just swap things around.

• 1:07:07Speaker 05

  Well, you were seeing that in gaming laptops for a long time when more framework came along, right?

• 1:07:11Speaker 06

  Quite a few of them, you can still swap the RAM, right? Yes, some of them, although some of them are more soldered on, like some of the smaller 14 inches are still. Which kind of makes sense.

• 1:07:20Speaker 05

  One of the tricks here is just for laptops, order the business laptops because they usually do have much more upgrade ability because the big companies are like, no, we're not going to pay you that much for RAM. We will replace the RAM ourself, or you will die and never get our business again. And so they fix it for them. Like, that's why you see that from Dell and Lenovo and others.

• 1:07:41Speaker 04

  And the build your own stuff, Kyle, do you follow the, or does anybody follow the cyberdeck building community?

• 1:07:46Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  What is? I have a blast. If you, Ed, if you want to have a gadget, you know, binge, I would say just Google cyberdeck builds on YouTube.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  It's basically people are trying to like relive the Neuromancer book. And they're just building cyberdecks for the Neuromancer.

• 1:08:01Speaker 06

  What is a cyberdeck? Oh, my god.

• 1:08:03Speaker 05

  I was like, you don't know William Gibson? I'm familiar.

• 1:08:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, Neuromancer, kind of like that whole cyberpunk era aesthetic, the idea of a like cyberdeck, it's like you literally plug into the internet, you know, you have this deck that you, and you sit down in a chair and you plug yourself in and you're literally a body and like the whole like idea of a metaverse kind of stems from this, except it's a lot more grungy and a lot more punk.

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:08:31Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:08:32Speaker 04

  But the deck itself is like, part of it is like, it's personalized to you, right? Like, you build it yourself. So it takes the form in modern day with what we can do of like little laptops, like, kind of like the GBD stuff, right?

• 1:08:44Speaker 05

  Netbooks.

• 1:08:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, netbooks.

• 1:08:46Speaker 05

  I loved netbooks.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  I, I miss netbooks.

• 1:08:50Speaker 06

  So what is the functionality of a cyberdeck, though? What's it meant? In modern day, it's just basically with a little laptop.

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  It's just to be cool.

• 1:08:57Speaker 06

  But the idea is that you're doing it yourself and it's your own and you're making it like, I mean, I don't know, like, are they, are they using like Raspberry Pis and stuff like that?

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Often they'll be built on a Raspberry Pi or something like that. But if you want functionality, the. Meshtastic is another good thing to look at.

• 1:09:14Ed Zitron?

  Meshtastic?

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  That is like these little pocket terminals that are being built around, what is, I had to look it up. An ESP32 system on a chip. Yeah. Enables a lot of cool stuff and a meshtastic network is like node to node. You're not on the internet necessarily, like each phone or each terminal is its own, is a node, so. What did, um, Jack Dorsey just dropped an app for this.

• 1:09:36Ed Zitron?

  Oh god.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  I mean, I've. Bit Chat?

• 1:09:37Ed Zitron?

  He's dropped several apps.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Ed Zitron?

  He's dropped a lot of things.

• 1:09:40Speaker 04

  No, I'm trying to remember. That's an app for the iPhone and like if we all had Bit Chat, we could talk to, text each other without connecting to the internet, like it's a direct peer to peer.

• 1:09:47Ed Zitron?

  I like that.

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  And the meshtastic, like there's a lot of handheld hardware, they all look like Blackberries, they're all really cool, they're little mini CyberDex. And it's just to utilize that network and you, again, you can build your own a lot of the time if you're more skilled than I am.

• 1:10:00Ed Zitron?

  So I'm gonna wrap it here and I wanna end with a message that everyone should go and support Steve Burke over at Gamers Nexus, who Bloomberg has been fucking up by doing bullshit YouTube DMCA. He's coming on the show next week. This is a ridiculous situation, Bloomberg should be fucking ashamed of themselves, the legal department and everyone involved. Other journalists, including at Bloomberg, should see this as an offense against journalism. And not giving him support is tantamount to not having solidarity with your peers. Steve is doing some of the best work out there. And I realize that's kind of a grim thing, but one of the reasons I love all three of you is you really, in the same way as Steve, get into this stuff and actually know it and love it and are excited about it. And I think that that is a dying art within journalism, especially within tech.

• 1:10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Ed Zitron?

  And I hope everyone's enjoyed this episode, because I certainly fucking have.

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  So much fun.

• 1:10:46Ed Zitron?

  It's nice to talk about stuff and like, sure, there's bad things going on and it can be kind of grim out there, but there's still people making dorky little innovations out there and it's worth remembering that the tech industry is not all bad. Which does not mean that AI doesn't fucking suck. Bing bong.

• 1:11:00Speaker 04

  [laughing]

• 1:11:01Ed Zitron?

  Michael, where can people find you?

• 1:11:02Speaker 04

  They can find me on YouTube at The Mr. Mobile, T H E M R M O B I L E, or on threads at Captain Two Phones, it's Captain the number two phones.

• 1:11:09Ed Zitron?

  Oh, Miss Cranz.

• 1:11:10Speaker 05

  Most places, Alex, H. Cranz, Blue Sky, Threads, all those places.

• 1:11:15Ed Zitron?

  And Kyle?

• 1:11:16Speaker 06

  You can go to goodsmoto.com and just look at the review section because it's me and like two other guys.

• 1:11:22Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah. You can find me, of course, at betteroffline.com and on the podcast you're listening to, please subscribe to my newsletter and hit the premium as well. We will have some really fun episodes coming up. We've got, of course, the interview with Steve Burke from Games Nexus next week. I will work out a monologue later today. I am really loving doing this show. Things are about to get spicy. I have the spiciness in the air, so looking forward to the next few episodes as things begin to collapse because that's where we're going. Peace out, everyone.

• 1:11:56Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:13:01Speaker 00

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  Sponsored by GSK, the makers of Extenture, Depamocumab ULAA. If your asthma keeps interrupting, it may be time to try something else. Extenture is an ultra-long-acting prescription maintenance treatment for severe asthma, eosinophilic type, ages 12 and older. It isn't for sudden breathing problems. Extenture is the first and only add-on treatment that can help deliver protection from asthma attacks with two doses a year. Just one dose every six months. That's a lot of time for everything in between. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get help right away for swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or trouble breathing. Don't change or stop medicines, including steroids, unless told by your doctor. Report if you have a parasitic infection.

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