328: iPhone XR review, Google Home Hub and Yoga Book C390

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss Nilay’s review of the iPhone XR as well as reviews of the Yoga Book C930 and Google’s Home Hub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

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• 0:33Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast Situation.

• 0:40Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 0:42Nilay Patel?

  No, we have two now, so we're officially, we're officially a podcast network again. And the second one, Why'd You Push That Button, is back, season three. New episode just went out this week on basically creep shotting people in public, which I think you should, everyone, everyone should listen to. Ashlyn Kaitlin did a great job with that. So you're listening to the Vergecast now. I'm Neelai. Paul is in Hawaii. Hi, Paul.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 1:06Nilay Patel?

  How's Hawaii?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  It's great. It's beautiful. So, well, I have a story, but we should say hi to Dieter, too.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Hi, Dieter.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm smack in the middle of you two. I'm in, still in California, so it's the real moment we're having.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  In my, in my mind, the only good thing about California is its proximity to Hawaii.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  That's where I'm at with California.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  It's harsh.

• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, that's not totally unfair.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  No, California is wonderful. Paul, tell me your story from Hawaii.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Okay, well, so I've been spending a lot of time at the mall. There's a really big mall here. And so I was like, well, there's a Verizon store. Went to the Verizon store, got the Pixel 3.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  And then I switched my number over. I'm like, I'm just going all in. But it was, you know, it was reckless.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Um, because, because what everybody, I'm at a wedding and everybody, the wedding is communicating on WhatsApp. WhatsApp can only be on one phone at a time.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh oh.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  So I moved WhatsApp over to Pixel 3. I think my number's ported, I'm not really sure. But I left the charger, which is, this is my only USB C device currently. I left the charger in a car. It's like, hey, no problem. I'm walking distance from a 7-Eleven. Go to a 7-Eleven, they don't have USB C chargers.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  What? Every other phone is USB C?

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  What kind of phone chargers?

• 2:38Speaker 01

  I was surprised too.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  Do they not have phone chargers at all?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  They had micro USB and they, they had micro USB and they had lightning.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  They had micro USB chargers?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 2:47Nilay Patel?

  Do you also go back in time or did you just go to Hawaii?

• 2:51Speaker 02

  No, that's how, how it is most places. It's hard to get USB C.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  I disagree.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  You know, you know what they say in Hawaii? YOLO. That means relax.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Yeah, in Hawaii, they say, don't worry about USB C.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  See Paul, what you should do is go out, you should go out and buy a Mate 20 Pro because then you could use a Mate 20 Pro to charge the Pixel 3.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Hmm, that's probably my only solution at this point.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Or you could go to another store. You could go back to the mall that you're spending all this time at. It feels like there's a lot of choices out there for you. How do you like your Pixel 3?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, uh, it's, it's great. I like the multitasking. I don't like the Google search app. I need to, I, I like Googled something and it was a whole page of like, here's a Wikipedia article. Here's like seven other people who are like this person. Here's another row of random people. Here's another Wikipedia. And then like you scroll all the way to the bottom and it's like top result, the actual URL I was searching for.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  So I gotta, I gotta, I gotta get my workflow down, but I, I like it. I like it as a device. I think it's beautiful.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  You know that those mobile search results are a hotbed of European regulatory activity, Paul. They're like, they're coming for you. They're gonna fix that for you.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Tuck to go phone, $40 premium.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  All right. By the way, I said, I started introducing, why'd you push that button? And I said, then I introduced us. I never told the audience what they should do after they listen to the Vergecast. So, listen to us on the Vergecast, and then stop, and then go listen to why'd you push that button, because it is indeed wonderful. Okay, this week is jam packed of stuff. iPhone XR reviews happened. I got a little baby scooplet out of that review. We should talk about that. Google's night sight for the Pixel is leaked, and so we can talk about camera stuff. Dieter, you reviewed just a strange Lenovo thing. I did. That's a good time. And then there's an Apple event next week, where I think I can

• 5:01Nilay Patel?

  say with a stunning amount of certainty that we'll see a new iPad Pro, because it just keeps leaking. So, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about. So, let's start with the XR. I reviewed it. It's a strange thing to review a phone that is substantially similar to the one you already reviewed. And so, you get a second crack at it. And so, I was talking to James Barham, our creative director, and I was like, this is weird. I feel like I'm just repeating myself. And he goes, you know, the real problem you have is, the XS review was just an iterative update to the XR. So, it's like your third round of, does Face

• 5:43Nilay Patel?

  ID operate? It's your third round of, are these gestures a good idea? And so, you just like, set all that aside. And what can you focus on with this phone? That all being said, I read everybody else's reviews, and everyone else landed on the same thing, which is correct. Everyone's right, which is, this is the one you should buy, which is a strange, extremely strange place for Apple to be in, where their flagship product is not actually the one that most people should acquire. Right, where their most expensive phone is is being positioned by its, you know, sort of the class of reviewers as you have to be crazy in some way to go spend that money when you can get this one.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have a million questions for you, Neelai, and my first one, having read your review, watched your 14 minute video, by the way, message to the Verge video team, if Neelai gets to make 14 minute videos, quit telling me that mine have to be like 13 or under.

• 6:41Nilay Patel?

  I promised them eight, by the way, I just want to be really clear. I said, I think I could do this in five to eight, and then there was a microscope, and it's just all kinds of shit.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  We had my Pixel, we had my Pixel 3 review at like 1430, and like, we gotta get it down to under whatever the iPhone XS was, and that was 1333, I know it, and we got it down to like 1332, and I was like, stop shaving seconds, it's fine. And then you roll out with 14 minutes on the iPhone XR, which we already all, never, anyway.

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  It was like a quick 14.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  I've watched everything, read everything you've had to say, edited your review, we've talked about it on the phone, we've gone in great detail, you've put everything that you have to say about it out there, just, you get, you get one word to answer this question, because after all of the information, I still just kind of want you to just tell me, is the screen good?

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  It's fine.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  That's two words!

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  It's, well, the word is fine. The word, the answer, when you're like, you get one word, my answer was, it is fine, the word is fine.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  Just lawyering my way through that one. It's fine. It's, you know, it's not great, like, I don't know, I, I don't know if I'm just super picky. I have been told by many reasonable people that I am, so I believe that I am, but at the same time, I know that we have built an audience of tens of millions of nerds who like to read about technology products, right? Like, 40 some million people read The Verge every month, or, you know, want to, or watch her videos, or listen to these podcasts, and so it's hard for me to be like, I'm, I'm

• 8:30Nilay Patel?

  especially picky. Right, I know there's all these people out there who feel the same way as I do about some of these things. And then on the flip side of that, it's like, um, I say it's fine and, you know, an army of YouTube commenters tells me that I've, I'm cheating everyone because it only technically, it has an 828p display instead of a 1080p. Like, the YouTube comments are insane and they're delightfully insane in a way that I appreciate. Like, I want there to be arguments about pixel density and resolution in this world and if that's a thing you want, you just have to put up with the fact that they exist. Yeah. So, here's what I'll say.

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  I didn't put this in the review because it's so hard to quantify and it's impossible to show, but I'll say it to this, this group and to the Virtus Audiences, I think they'll know what I mean. The, the most bothersome thing about the screen, to me, is that if you are using a 10S or even using a 10, the lamination, like the thickness of the glass between your finger and the pixel is noticeable. You can't possibly show this. You have to notice it. There's like, you can, you can see that it's a different experience. It doesn't feel quite as much like you're, the immediacy of the pixels aren't there. And then on the corners, there's a little bit of haze and a little bit of, like, around the edges because of that extra thickness.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Matt Penzirino at TechCrunch described it as a drop shadow around the edges of the display. That's very kind. Yeah. Uh, and he, Matt typically does not harsh on Apple and he, in that specific way, and he called it right out. So,

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  yeah, it's, it's just a lesser display. And I find the, the brightness cut when you turn it off axis to be insane. Right. Like, I would not want to have this thing in my hand all the time.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  Other people that I gave the phone to couldn't even see it. Right? So, when you hold the phone off axis, I think that, you know, they had to re-engineer the backlight, they had to make the backlight even, there's a bunch of stuff they had to do to make that work. When you turn the phone off axis, even just a little, the brightness drops. It's just, it's super noticeable. We put a GIF up, it's in the video. There's a little bit of a pink shift too, but it's really the brightness drop that gets me. And so the phone is so big. The way I, I think I hold phones pretty close to my face. So some part of it is always off axis to my eyes. Right. Especially as you like move your hand. And so the, it shimmers at me. Right. In this really distracting way that I just can't unsee.

• 11:14Nilay Patel?

  Um, again, other people that show this thing to you did not notice that at all. Like literally, I was like, do you see it? Like it's great. And they're like, what are you talking about?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  And this gif is in comparison to like the iPhone eight.

• 11:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. Previous Apple LCD. So I have always said, um, before Apple did an OLED, that I prefer Apple's display tuning. Um, that, you know, I think, I think their LCDs are nicer to look at than Samsung's OLEDs. And people get mad about that, but Samsung's OLEDs are so over saturated and crazy that I just prefer the more natural look of their LCDs. So I was expecting, oh, this will just be another Apple LCD. And for the most part it is. But that, that shift, that brightness off axis shift and the color shift is really noticeable to me. And then sort of the, the lesser immediacy versus the 10s is noticeable to me.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:05Nilay Patel?

  Now millions upon, and so, you know, my review, I said, if you decide, like put a dollar amount on how much you care about the screen. Is it $250? And then, you know, every commenter is like, it's the screen. Of course it's the most important thing. Um, and, you know, I don't want to get into a fight in YouTube comments, but to me, it's like millions of people buy shit LCD TVs. Right. Like they, they signal to the world that they don't actually care about how it looks. Millions of people buy cheaper Android phones with lesser displays. So there is an argument that you're paying, you know, you're paying this Apple premium. You get their latest processor. You get their latest camera.

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  You get, you know, a beautiful thing, which is not to be, um, discounted. And you get this lesser screen in it and that accounts for the discount. I mean, you get a bunch of others, you know, it's not made of stainless steel. It only has the one camera in the back. Um, it has LTE advanced instead of gigabit LTE. There's, there's stuff. It has one gig less of RAM, although it's pushing so many fewer pixels that come into this matter. Um, so there's a bunch of stuff you don't get, but really day to day, I, most people should buy this one because it's cheaper and the screen is fine.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:17Nilay Patel?

  It's like, should everyone in the world go buy an OLED TV? Like, I bought one. Shouldn't, should most people, like, no, you'd never demand that.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  I wish I had bought one. Okay, so you said it shouldn't be discounted, which brings me to my next question, and this might actually be for Paul. There's been a kerfuffle that, uh, everyone's like, oh, my God, they, you get the, the cheaper iPhone, the less expensive iPhone is such a good deal. Um, they, they finally did it. And, uh, compared to, um, the, you know, last iPhone, low end iPhone, uh, it's like, not a great deal. Like 750 is still a lot for a phone, right?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Feels like a lot to me. I did not like spending $800. On the Pixel 3. It was not fun.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the Pixel 3 and the iPhone XR are, uh, but we're calling it the iPhone XR, by the way.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Oh, good. Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  This, this does solve, this does solve that problem that I highlighted in the iPhone. When the iPhone XR came out, there was the rich people phone, and then there was the non, the, the phone for the pores.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Which was the, the iPhone 8. Now there is a phone for the middle class, I guess. Like, if you want, if you want an iPhone, if you, if you have to have an iPhone for whatever reason, because of iMessage or your favorite app is on it, or for some reason, you have to have an iPhone, but you are actually on a budget, you probably get an older phone than this, right?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I do, I do see this as a phone for all.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  Cheap.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's a lot of adequate phones that still exist in the lineup that are cheaper than this. But this does seem like a pretty strong, middle-class iPhone.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Paul, are you suggesting that they should have made a brown one? Like, it should have been brown on the back, and then the, the bezel around the screen should have been like a, a really, like, dark green color, and then it could have become the avocado toast of iPhones?

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  The millennial phone. It'd be wild if they let you do color combos.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, you know, it's expensive, but, uh, compared to, you know, so the 8 Plus is there. The 8 Plus is only $50 cheaper than the XR, which to me is like, kind of damning, right? Like, um,

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  The idea that you're gonna get the older designed, the older chip, the older camera, older everything.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  But what appears to be a nicer 1080p panel. And then for $50 more, you can get that literally an upgrade of every other thing. And maybe like a sideways move on the screen or downgrade on the screen for 50 bucks. It really suggests that cost of that screen is is the thing that's that's giving it, you know what I mean?

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  So, yeah, I don't know, like, should you buy an eight? If you want a small phone, you have but two choices in Apple's lineup. You have last year's phone, the eight. Or you can pay a lot more money for a 10S. Or you can go try to find a 10 while the last remaining stocks exist, which is once again last year's phone.

• 16:27Nilay Patel?

  So like that.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Or you can buy a Palm Palm phone and have a phone for your phone and have it.

• 16:30Nilay Patel?

  No, you can't. You have to buy a regular phone and then buy a Palm phone. What's the cheapest phone on Verizon that you can buy to have a Palm phone as a second?

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  So that was like, you know, one thing like we gotta talk about the screen. We talked about the screen.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  It's it's everyone should go look at it. I actually loved to love to know what people think. Go look at the screen, go to the Apple Store, carrier store, look at this thing. Just like, let me know if you think it shimmers the way I think it shimmers, because it was super noticeable to me. But again, I I think I'm I'm quite picky with these things.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  Then there's the camera. And the camera is the one that I wasn't expecting people to be unhappy about in this way. And it's like the most consistent feedback I've gotten from the review. So it has just, it's the same camera on the front.

• 17:21Nilay Patel?

  Which is it's like a fine camera. It can do portrait mode with a true depth sensor. And then on the back, it has the same 12 megapixel F1.8 smart HDR main lens. It does not have the telephoto lens. But it can do portrait mode on the back. Kind of the same way Google's doing it, it can use its focus pixels, face contrast thing and figure out some depth. Apple only lets you do portrait mode on people because they were very insistent that they think Google gets it wrong too often. So they spent their time doing ML learning on just people for portrait mode to work on the iPhone 10.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  That's what the Pixel 2 ostensibly, they, no, maybe it was one of them, maybe it was the selfie, I think the selfie camera only worked on people. Anyway, whatever.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  Sure. But so the interesting thing is that the iPhone 10S and the iPhone 10 that have two lenses, they can do portrait mode on anything because they can use that second lens. So the way it works is you turn on portrait mode on the iPhone 10S and it switches to the second lens, which is the telephoto, and then it uses a wide angle lens to calculate depth.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Right?

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. You only have one lens, you have to take the photo with the brighter lens. The telephoto lens is F 2.4, it captures less light. It appears to me to have a lesser sensor. So you like, you're using this lesser camera and you're using the wide angle lens to figure out depth. On the 10R, you've only got one bright lens and the best sensor, so you use that to take the photo and then they just like cut it out and do their cool blur. That means the portrait mode on the 10R works better in low light. Like just hands down, absolutely does, they were open about it, like we're using the brighter lens. And so I point this out in the review and people are like, does that mean the 10R is a better camera than the 10S? And the answer is like, only in the limited case that you're trying to take portrait mode

• 19:15Nilay Patel?

  photos in low light.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Of people.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  Of people. Which is mostly what you take portrait mode photos on, so I can't imagine. That's not something I do, I take so few portrait mode photos, I didn't think it was a big deal. And it is, the reaction that the 10R, you know, use the wide angle lens for portrait mode is a reason you should buy the 10R versus the 10S is just out there. Apple would not tell me if they would ever enable the 10S to do portrait mode off its wide angle lens. It's obviously a very complicated situation because you switch to portrait mode, you're in the wide angle, you can only do people, but you switch to the telephoto, now you can do anything because you have the two lenses. That seems like an interface nightmare, very un-Apple. So I imagine next year they'll, they'll figure it out in some way.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  But for now, if, you know, the main thing you do with your camera is Portrait mode in the dark. You should buy a 10R. Otherwise, the cameras are identical and they, I asked them very directly, hey, is there any difference here? And they were insistent that the cameras are identical, they're running the same software. The one thing they did tell me is, and you, you either believe this or you don't, but there was beauty gate in which people thought the selfie camera was, was doing a beauty filter on faces and smoothing things out. And then conspiracy theories about the Chinese market and have, but crazy town. Apple said, no, no, no, that's, that's not the issue. We're not doing that. We would never do that.

• 20:47Nilay Patel?

  They're very insistent, they don't do that stuff. They said, we, smart HDR had a bug in which, you know, it takes four frames, one of which is a long exposure and it was picking the wrong frame as the base frame with the selfie camera. So it's picking a blurrier exposure for this, from the selfie camera. And then when it was doing the HDR merge into that, it was getting a slightly blurrier effect on the face. And they say in 12, 12.1, we'll fix it. So that's gotta come out. It's in public beta now. If you have, you can go get it and see if it's fixed. I don't have it yet. Cause I can't, I'm not allowed to put it on review devices. So that's why I don't have it yet, but you can go and check it out and we'll, we'll check it out when it happens.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So every time there is a big phone release, there's always a series of gates, right? Series of things that people are mad about with the phones. So for the Pixel 3, it's, there's a scratch, there's a problem with RAM in certain situations, it'll close apps in the background, depending on what other app you open, which isn't really enough RAM issue, it's a like RAM management issue. There's like speaker crackling that some people are experiencing, you know, like down the line and like, it's like, some gates are like, yeah, like you probably should have caught that. Some gates are like, did you, did you use it before you started selling it? And the, the smoothing thing on the iPhones is one of those where it's like.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Like, did you use it? Like, everyone's saying this thing. A bunch of people are coming to your defense, saying it doesn't exist, or like, our, our eyes are wrong, and that we're looking at it wrong. And the detail's there, we just can't see it with our human eyes. And it's like, but if it was just a bug, like, how did you not? I don't know, that seems like the kind of bug you catch. And like, I, I'm not accusing them of lying and saying that, like, this actually, they shipped it one way, and then a ton of people got mad, so they're claiming they found a bug to fix it. Like, that, that is not what I'm saying. But it's also just weird, right? Like-

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so I have a, I have a crackpot theory. You ready for a crackpot theory?

• 22:58Speaker 02

  I am.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  And I, there's, I don't have any evidence to support this. But, so it's, it's a crackpot. I just want to be very clear. This is my theory. I think the, the, the, there are two, there are two big things to know about the iPhone X10R and XS cameras versus previous ones. One, the rear sensor, the main sensor, is like 30-some percent bigger, but they run it more aggressively at the same sort of exposure level than the previous camera, because they want more light. Like, Apple is chasing light in a, in a very aggressive way. So they got a bigger sensor, can collect more light, but they run it at a higher ISO

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  or a longer shutter speed at the same sort of brightness level in the world, because they want to collect more light. So it's a noise, it produces noisier images, because they're very confident they can get rid of that noise. This is a thing they told me. The second thing to know is, um, the front, the, the thing that they're doing as they try to collect more light, is they, they merge a bunch of exposures together, and one of them is a longer exposure. Right? So that's, they have this longer exposure, which is going to collect shadow detail, which is what they want most of all. So I think they wrote this code, where they want to run the sensor real hot, and run the exposure real hot, and then do a bunch of noise reduction.

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  And all that, they, they, they did all that work for the rear camera and they just did it again for the front camera. And use the code again, and they forgot that the front cam, this is a crackpot theory. They forgot that the front camera isn't stabilized. So the rear camera is optic, has optical image stabilization. Right?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  So this is a copy and paste job.

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  Right, so they just like forgot that this setting on the front camera, or this hardware feature on the front camera, isn't there. So you're, you're running it real hot, you're keeping the exposure open longer, but you know it's stabilized, so you'll get a sharp image. And then you do it again on the front camera without the stabilization, so you get a blurrier image at the same, at the same.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  But you don't see it because your computational photography is so good at fixing blurry problems that you just end up with a photo that just is a little bit smooth.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  Right, so you've got, so on the back camera, you've got this like noisy picture and you do all this noise reduction and that ends up with some smoothing. On the front camera, you've got a blurry picture and a noisy, some ISO noise. And you do noise reduction, but it's already blurred to begin with and it looks like you applied a beauty filter. Because you didn't have that stabilizer. That's just my, it's total tin pot theory that they just ran the same code twice and forgot that they weren't getting a stabilized photo out of, out of these settings.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  That would be hilarious if it were true.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  Crazy town, so like we're picking the wrong frame, they're, they're picking the one with the most light in it and merging back into it instead of picking a darker sharper one and, right, you see what I'm saying?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:51Nilay Patel?

  All of this is a lead up, so they're gonna fix it, it's 12-1, you can go check it out. All of this is a lead up to say that I am now convinced iPhones Smart HDR photos look insane. They look insane.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  And I, I've, I have come to, it's three rounds of reviewing this camera now. The XS and then Dieter got the Google Pixel 3 and we, you know, that, what else are we gonna compare it to? We're gonna compare it to the XS, we like did a whole nother round of photo comparisons. And then this camera, which is the same as the XS, what are we gonna compare it to? The Pixel 3, so our third round of taking photos of Smart HDR, our second round against Pixel 3. And so, Dieter, I know you, I know you were frustrated by this, and I've come to find it very charming, but James Barham, our creative director, is a total pixel stan. Whatever that camera does is the best thing for James because he loves it with all of his heart.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  That's not, that's not true. Like, to be clear, like, he, he does judge it, but like, he loves it so much that, yeah, that you, you end up like worrying.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  He loves its flaws.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  Like, he's like, "Look at that. It just, everything is smudged in pink." But that's, that's like, you know, it's like amazing. But, you know, he's, he's very, he's hypercritical of all photos, but he, he's very fond of the pixel camera. And he's fond of it for this reason, which I have now come to believe as well. I'm less charming in British than James, so I'm gonna say it differently. But James is always saying the pixel camera is photographic, right? It takes, it takes photos that remind him, and he was a longtime film photographer, it reminds him of shooting on film. It has quirks and four bulls. The, the images are contrasty, which is a thing we've talked about a lot. It's using all of its HDR in service of taking what he refers to as images that look photographic.

• 27:41Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone camera, on the other hand, and Apple actually told me they're doing this on purpose, that they, they, they shot a bunch of photos, they looked at how they appeared, and they said to themselves, "These look different than what we're, than what people would expect, but we think this is better." This is a choice that they made. iPhone photos just blow out contrast and shadow in images. They make everything look like you brought a reflector or a light to clean up the shadows. So it looks like you had a fill flash on a face to even out the light on a face. It looks like you brought a reflector to even out the lighting on a person. Like, it's crazy town. And sometimes it's great. So like...

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  You're shooting a sunset, the iPhone will do, will do, just sort of naturally do it better. It'll just like figure out, it'll evenly expose the whole thing and you'll get this sort of dramatic sunset and the lights on the buildings or whatever. But if you're shooting like a person, there's a photo in our review, I just took a photo while they were shooting Maria, taking selfies of herself, and it literally looks like we were on a photo set.

• 28:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, we brought lights, we lit it, everything was evenly bright in the entire frame. And it just, we were outside at a bar. Like, the bar had a tent and there were some skylights, it was a little bit, the light was a little bit diffused. But we were literally just at a bar. They did not think about lighting this bar perfectly, I assure you. And that photo looks perfectly even. And so, some people might really like that. I just think, if you are used to how photos look, you're going to think these photos look a little bit artificial.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  But you, you also, you also said that you were getting used to the camera and know what it, now that you know what it's doing, you're able to like, I don't know, control it? Or at least like, you know what you're gonna get when you take a photo? So you feel like you're, that it's not doing like stuff that is bonkers that you don't expect anymore? And you kind of know more of what you're gonna get when you snap the shutter button now than what you did like a month ago?

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like a month ago. Yeah, so it always, always, always wants everything to be exposed right. Every single thing in the frame, it wants a perfectly even exposure. So the one place where I can consistently break it is, let's say you have a small human in your life, and she's always like very small, and like shadows, shadows tend to completely envelop her.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  I'm tracking so far.

• 30:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so if that subject is always in shadows, just by the nature of the fact that most shadows are bigger than her, and there's a light source in the background, the iPhone will meter for the window, and then it will try to bring up the shadow that she's in.

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  To to bring out the detail in the shadow. Right, so Max is sitting in a chair, the chair is in front of a window, or there's a window adjacent to it. The iPhone will correctly expose the window, because it has. The only way you can do that is by shooting a shorter shutter. And then it will bring up, it will use its long exposure and bring up the shadow. Where the cheese in. So I end up with this perfectly exposed window in like a tree out the window. And then a noisy photo of the baby. Right, because it's brought up the shadow detail for the big. That's like not what you want, and you think they could figure out, like, that's a face, you're very good at faces. As you've insisted with your portrait mode. Like, get that right, and let the window blow out. I don't care about the window.

• 31:16Nilay Patel?

  And so like what I'm saying is, I now know what it's gonna do. I know it's gonna make that decision that everything should be even, so I just won't take that photo. Whereas I think the pixel will generally figure it out that what you want is the person, and you're probably less worried about the window. So that's what I mean, like, I've gotten better at getting it not wandering into the errors that it will make. But at the same time, it it's just, it's, it's aggressive, let's even this out and make a good looking photo is weird. So we put some test shots up of Maria. Or one of our video producers, she like, did, we have, shooting this review is super fun. Maria and I ran around Williamsburg taking selfies of ourselves. So

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  there's a photo of Maria in the bar, there's two photos of Maria in the bar in our review. One is she's standing in front of a pinball machine, and one she's like, sitting on a couch in a totally dark corner of this bar. The pixel photos are like, probably, they're not great. But, right, she's really red, it's kind of blown out, like, it's super contrasty and weird. The iPhone photos look good. They also look nothing like reality. Like, you would not know that Mario was being lit by red lights in this room. Or the red light in the pinball machine was lighting her. And that was really the only light in the space. You would just think there's some light in this room, and it caught it, and it faded out the pinball machine. So Paul, I leave it to you. Would you rather have more accurate photos?

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  Or more pleasant photos? Would you rather have a, a, a, a a capture of reality, or would you rather have a usable photo that's nice to look at?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I can't even, I can't even decide.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know how to decide. Like, how do you?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  I did decide. I got, I got Pixel 3. I'm going with the Pixel 3 aesthetic. But I do, it does seem like the thing to do now that this is all software. I just like, you know, like, maybe when you wake up today, like, what mood are you in? What do you want your photos to look like? And you just pick. It's like picking Instagram filter, but before you take the photo.

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Because if it's all software now, we should just be choosing. You shouldn't have to make a $1,000 per just seeing decision to decide what aesthetic and what priorities you want your, your phone camera to have.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, what would you pick?

• 33:33Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm, I'm not gonna get a 10S or a 10R just because I can't buy three phones or five phones or 10 phones every year anymore. So I'm gonna stick with my 10. I do have a Pixel 3. And I tend to pick the Pixel 3.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  But I don't know, I mostly take pictures of my cat.

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  And I like, I like the things that Pixel 3 does to pictures of my cat.

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, my, my, this metaphor is gonna break down and be confusing.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  And I could do portrait mode with my cat, too.

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  But just, just, just run with me on this extremely broken metaphor.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  All right.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  You know how like video cameras and movie cameras are extremely advanced now?

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  Red makes a camera. It can, it can like do anything.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Camera. Are you saying cameras these days?

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  Cameras. You know, you know, cameras these days.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  They're like Hollywood types.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  They're like video cameras now.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  We did this last week.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Like the ones, the ones Peter Jackson uses.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. PJ's PJ cams. Right? You know? So Peter, Peter Jackson's actually a great example here. Right?

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Cameras in your pajamas.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Old Pete is like, man, I got these cameras. I could do anything. I'm gonna shoot The Hobbit 48 frames per second. Right?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:47Nilay Patel?

  And everyone's like, Pete, what are you doing? You're a crazy person. And he's like, but the camera, look at how cool it is. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna turn this dial and we're just gonna turn it to 48 and that's my movie. And then everyone was like, that movie looks insane. Right? Or, uh...

• 35:04Speaker 02

  So just because you can doesn't mean you should.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  Right, or motion smoothing. Samsung's like, "All video will be shown at 240 frames per second." Right? And they take your, they take the West Wing and now it looks like a play. Because Samsung has...

• 35:16Speaker 02

  So what you're saying is cameras, or Apple's camera engineers and software engineers are the equivalent of...

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Peter Jackson.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Like, a guy who has, like, a nice house and, like, the living room's pretty big, but it's not like, "Holy crap, big," but he nevertheless decides to put in, I don't know, four, like, $10,000 speakers in there 'cause, like, 'cause he can.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's me.

• 35:39Nilay Patel?

  What are you saying? What are you saying, Bone? Um, no, I'm saying that movies are shot at 24 frames per second.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  For a reason.

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  Right, TV is shot at 24... Prestige TV is shot 24 frames per second for a reason. That's how you expect it to look. There are valid scientific arguments for why we want to shoot it this way and preserve this blur and create this cinematic feel. And when people try, when Peter Jackson tries to make a movie at 48, it looks really weird and the experiment fails. When TV manufacturers try to interpolate frames and create smoother motion on 24, people don't like it and Hollywood directors wage war to get the default turned off. So there's a way you expect things to look. I, when, when James tells me over and over again that the pixel looks photographic,

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  what he means is it uses its technology stack, it uses HDR, and produces a better version of the thing that you expect. Right? It produces what you expect, it's just really nice. What Apple is doing is they're, they're flattening the, the, the light in the photo so much, from shadows to highlights, that it looks fake. And the only metaphor I have is, this is what happens when you run a 24 frames per second thing through a motion smoother and then it looks like a play.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  But isn't there an argument to be made that Apple is just accepting that everybody just looks at these things on phone screens anyway?

• 37:11Nilay Patel?

  They insisted to me that this is not the case. Again, this is my third shot at it. Right, so I came in, I was like, is this true? Like, are you chasing the Chinese market? Are you just trying to win Instagram? And they said, no, we want to make a great camera. We just, we know these photos aren't as contrasty, but we, we think you can add the contrast back in if you want it, but we'd rather give you as much even lighting and detail as we can.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  So it's, it's the opposite argument. The argument is that you will edit an iPhone photo more, which I don't think is true.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  No.

• 37:45Nilay Patel?

  Or you're Peter Jackson, you're just like, yes, these habits are so smooth.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I'm so powerful.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  What else is there to say about this phone? I think the size is dumb. I, I, I'm just gonna say, I think the size is dumb. I think that there, um, if you want a small, you said it earlier, if you want a small phone, you're, you're kind of out of options, right? You can only get the 10.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Premium.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  10S. Yeah.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  Is Apple mad about that? They're like, great.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:13Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you can buy an 8, the 8's way cheap.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  You can buy an 8.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  It'll, it'll probably last for several years.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:20Nilay Patel?

  Um, I, Apple seems very convinced that people pound the table and they want small phones, but they really want big phones.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the numbers are, are, are clearly out there in the market research. So someone's got to come out with a small phone that's so wonderful that it changes people's mind about smart, small phones.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  You can't, you can't just big clam.

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you've heard of my friends at clam.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Kids clam it up. I mean, in a sense, they are trying to create a whole narrative around the small phone, but I don't know if it's enough.

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  I will say that Google's night sight, Dieter, you have it, right? The night sight feature for the Pixel 3 is out. If what you want is-

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so someone, it's not out. So what, as of this recording, it's not out yet, but like, there's an APK that you can download. It's an XDA and some Android police might have an APK mirror. And it is like the version of the camera that will support night sight. And it might not be the final shipping software. So the, the, the experience might change. Like, you have to hit the back button in a weird way. And like, I can see why they haven't released it yet. And I'm hoping that they make a few changes to it before they do. So that's, that's point one. Point two is, holy crap, it works. It, I, long, long, long time Verge readers will remember the drama with the Nokia phone

• 39:44Speaker 02

  that we caught them shooting a DSLR to prove their video, like, on a rig to prove video stabilization. And they made it look like it was supposed to be the camera. And so we called them on it and they invited us out to like Central Park at like 11 o'clock at night to take low light photos to prove that this thing could take low light photos. And so we did that and for the time, they're pretty amazing. And it basically just took long ass exposures. Night sight takes long exposures, but not, not in the way that you think. I mean, I don't have the full details right off the top of my head, but like, when you take the photo, it's like, hold still. And it's like, it says, hold still gathering light. But I think it's taking just a bunch more, not necessarily long exposures, it's probably

• 40:30Speaker 02

  longer than before, but it's just taking, getting a bunch of more data in. And so even if there's subtle movement, like I took a picture of my cat this morning when it was still dark, because that's what I do. And, you know, like, it's a cat. It doesn't sit perfectly still, but there wasn't as much like blur and blah that I would have expected if it were just a big, long ass exposure. And yeah, like, you could just get just incredible lighting that feels completely uncanny and unnatural out of this thing.

• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  So that to me is the, if you buy, if you have a Pixel and you're like, you know, I don't want photos that look like reality at night. I want, I want a pleasing, it's like, well, okay, Google gave you a button. And that to me-

• 41:14Speaker 02

  It's a mode.

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  A mode. I'm excited to play with it. I haven't installed it yet. How hard is it to install? It's easy.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Vlad has a whole set of these sample photos and they're astonishing. Like the what he did one of his headphones and nearly it's nearly dark. He took a picture of his headphones and you could read the serial number, which to Dieter's point, like there's clearly at least somewhere in this algorithm, a very relatively short exposure so that details are not blurred.

• 41:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna read a quick ad and then Liz is gonna do this week in Elon and we're coming right back.

• 41:56Nilay Patel?

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• 42:38Speaker 03

  Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else. Welcome to This Week in Elon. I'm your host, Elizabeth Lopato, deputy editor at The Verge. So how about the Tesla profit? Pretty wild, right? I mean, honestly, who needs reality TV when you have Tesla? Because while Elon Musk was spending the third quarter publicly shooting himself in the foot, Tesla managed to get itself to profitability. I would find this unbelievable in a television show, but here it is happening in reality. So that happened. And you know what's even weirder? It was a normal, it was a normal conference call. Nobody got yelled at, nobody got called boring. There were, you know, it was, it was, I was like, kind of impressed.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  But I will say that like, in context, watching Elon Musk impersonate a normal CEO is like, a little bit like watching a trained cat circus. Because you're just like, impressed. You don't know who was responsible, or how much training went into this thing. This could be coming from Elon himself, for all I know. Like, he could have just decided to straighten up and fly right, and is now flying right. But, you know, it was something. There were a bunch of things that were talked about on the call. I was actually a little bit surprised that Musk didn't spend more time, sort of, taking a victory lap about the profitability, because it was a surprise. You know, the stock was up $10, I think, after market. It was, it was not bad. So, the company has $3 billion in cash, which is more than the second quarter of the year. Great.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  And it's the first profitable quarter since 2016. Although, it has to be said, that Tesla has never managed to make a profit for an entire year. But the way that this was being, sort of, presented was that this might be actually a turning point, where Tesla is just profitable from now on. Now, obviously, we're gonna see whether that happens or not. You know, there's the fourth quarter, and if they post another profit, great. So, stay tuned. But, one of the things that was interesting about it is that Tesla nearly doubled production of the Model 3 from the second quarter to the third this year. And, in fact, the company made more cars than it could deliver. So that was a, a challenge. But it turns out, delivery is easier to solve than manufacturing, or at least that's what Elon Musk said on the call. So, it looks like they did pretty well. They also said they're, you know, pulling in a pretty good margin on the car, because

• 44:52Speaker 03

  of a reduced cost of raw materials, which is a little boring for, like, a consumer tech point of view, but if you care about this company, it's an ongoing thing. It's a good sign. And then, the other fun part of the earnings call, Musk said that he has approved the final prototype of the Model Y. So that's the SUV in their line. Full-volume production isn't gonna happen till 2020, but the final prototype is done. Also on the call, Elon Musk talked about the Tesla pickup truck, which he is probably the most excited about, or at least that's what he says. So that's cool. And he mentioned, the solar roof is getting closer to reality. So, it was, all in all, a pretty big week for Elon, and not in the way that we're used to. It was like, a big positive week.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  So, while he was out here for a couple months, taking, pretending to take Tesla private, deciding not to take Tesla private, beefing with Azealia Banks, among others, taunting short sellers, getting into a fight with the SEC, then settling with the SEC, like, while all of that was going on, Tesla functioned.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Nice work Tesla. That's this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lopato. I will see you next week.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  All right, Dieter.

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  You reviewed the Lenovo Yoga Book, not the Logo Book, the Lenovo Yoga Book C930, which is like the update, right?

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  The last one.

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  I would say that I read this review and I felt a deep sense of heartbreak and loss from you.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, this was a tough one to get through.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  The first time you pick it up, you're like, oh, my God, this, yes, finally. Everyone thinks it's a bad idea to type on screens, but someone's going to get it right, and it's going to be worth the trade off. And you're going to have something amazing, and this thing is tiny and light. And then you like, open it up, and you're like, oh, cool. There's like a touchpad that like, covers up part of the keyboard and use it. So the touchpad's big enough, but then the keyboard can also be big enough, which is, you know, the nice thing about software keyboards is they can adapt to your needs. And this does that, and that's great. And it still stays small. And then you start to use Windows, and Windows is like, fast enough to do basic stuff. Like, you're not going to want to run Photoshop, but like, you can have six apps open and a bunch of tabs, and like, it handles it, and yet it's still tiny. And you're like, hooray!

• 47:12Speaker 02

  And then you tried to type your 20th word, and then you're like, oh.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  I like, I like, you were, you some word like, you get exhausted or tired using the keyboard? Like, I could just imagine you're just working so much harder to correctly type.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Well, so it does the thing where like, if you...

• 47:33Speaker 01

  And then...

• 47:35Speaker 02

  If you hit like, caps lock instead of A, then it'll use some AI stuff to like, figure out what you're supposed to do, just like a software keyboard on a phone will do some of that autocorrect stuff. But that's actually not the problem. I thought the problem would be it's exhausting to not have a physical keys that you push down. I thought it would suck to need to use your fingertips and like, have to worry about fingernails. And, you know, like, typing on glass over time, like, it would just hurt your fingers. I thought all that would be a problem. Turns out. That the actual problem with typing out a piece of glass instead of a physical keyboard over time is you can't just rest your fingers on the damn thing because they think you're typing. You need to like, uh, I'm typing and then uh, hold them over the thing. Cause like, if you're just like sitting at your computer, like you, you might just have

• 48:20Speaker 02

  your finger gently resting on the home row, you know? And that's fine and that works.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I want to put a new T-shirt in the Verge store that's like, buttons are good. And it's like a movement and all of us.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Okay. Dieter, how did, how did you let it come to this? Cause, cause last like, reading this review, it's like old yeller, but like you get it, like the boy, he's gonna love the dog, you know? It's his best friend and it saved him from that bear that one time. But how did you convince yourself that maybe this was different?

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Uh, which way? That, that I should kill, that I should kill the dog or that the dog was worthy of love?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  How did you let your, your hopes get this high?

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Did the yoga book save you from a bear? What was that exciting?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  That's basically my question.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  No, I love my hopes get this high because it has an E-ink screen and so you can, when you hold it like, you know, fully flipped around with just the E-ink screen, you can take notes on it and the refresh rate on the E-ink is just high enough where it doesn't feel unnatural to write on it and take notes on it. The feel of the glass is good. It's so thin and so light and so tiny and it does so much better as just like a basic Windows computer than I expected. Like the first five minutes of this device, you're like, oh my God, this is it. They did it. And then 20 minutes later, you like tried to switch modes and you waited and it didn't work. Like, one of the things that happens with this is that when you flip the hinge past

• 49:47Speaker 02

  180 degrees, it's like, oh, you probably want to use this in some sort of tablet mode. So I'm going to turn off one of the screens, right? And maybe you want to just use Windows in tablet mode so it turns off the E-ink screen. Or maybe you want to use the E-ink screen to take notes and you don't want Windows active, the LCD on the back. So you double tap it and then Windows becomes, uh, that screen goes dark and then you can just take notes, right? All that seems fine, although each, that mode switching takes 10 times longer than it should. But in order for it to trigger this, you're going to go into a tablet mode and you only want one of these screens to be active at a time. It uses like the detector of how far the hinge has bent. And I would say- One time out of 10, maybe one time out of eight, that sensor gets confused.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  And so you just open the laptop up and it thinks you want to use just one screen or the other, even though you want to use both. And then you have to sit there and flap the goddamn thing back and forth.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're done.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Until the sensor gets it right.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  No, we're not done.

• 50:45Nilay Patel?

  How much does this thing cost?

• 50:47Speaker 02

  A thousand dollars.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  One thousand dollars, all right.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  One thousand dollars.

• 50:51Nilay Patel?

  We're done. This conversation is over.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  No, I figured out the love. Okay.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  It sounds like there's an alternate universe version of this device that actually works perfectly. You can rest your fingers on the keyboard and it knows you're not typing. The screen is so responsive, it always switches modes really quickly.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  The AI typing is so good that you don't really mistype a lot.

• 51:14Nilay Patel?

  This is an alternate universe where Lenovo knows how to make software.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  And then you think in that case, this would actually be a good device.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  I think that the, this could have been a, maybe not like, oh my God, everyone should go buy this thing. This is the future of computing kind of device, the, you know, the way that Intel is trying to make these devices happen. But I think it could have been a device that's like, look, if you just want a really tiny computer that you can write on, this thing is great. Like if, you know, if you can, if they had, if they had just made the e Ink side of it work better. Like the way this thing basically works is the e Ink screen is literally just like a USB accessory to Windows, right? It runs its own software, it has its own firmware, it communicates basically over the USB protocol to Windows. So it like, it says, no, I'm a keyboard, no, I'm a sketchpad, no, I'm a, you know, e-reader, send me a PDF to look at, right?

• 52:10Speaker 02

  So it's basically like Lenovo took a, took a Windows tablet and attached this like thing that they made to it. And that's, you know, there's a lot of really clever things about that. But they, the thing that they made, the e Ink screen that runs a bunch of stuff is bad.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  And that's it, that's it. And if it had been better, then like, I would have been able to be like, you know, if you are a doctor who needs to sit and like, actually look at your patient, and you want to take notes on a thing, and this would be great because it's light and you can carry it around. You can, you know, stick it in one of your big doctor pockets in your lab coat or whatever. But I just, I, there are not a lot of people who I think should suffer through the waiting that you have to do on the mode switching on this thing to really use it.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  $1,000.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and if it costs 500 or 700 bucks, then I'd be like, you know, like, maybe you might be interested in this instead of an iPad. Maybe, you know, but

• 53:17Speaker 02

  I look at this thing and I look at the Surface Go and I, I, you would be so much better off with a Surface Go. Like, you should, if you're interested in this idea of a tiny computer that runs Windows, you should get a Surface Go.

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay. The Surface Go. You know what doesn't cost $1,000 and is wonderful? The Google Home Hub.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  No. Oh, okay.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you can segue either way you want. We'll segue to the iPad after the next break. No, the Home Hub. It's a buck 49.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  It's great. It's really pretty.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Do you have one? Have you seen one?

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  I have just recently seen one again.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  And I'll just tell everybody right now, the interview episode next week of the Vergecast on Tuesday is Ivy Ross, Google's VP of Hardware Design, and Rishi Chandra, who is the VP of Home and Nest. So I just talked to him about it. I won't give too much away, but Rishi told me, he's like, "Look, the display is not like, special. It's just a part that we bought." The special part is the color management they're doing to make it look like a photo. And that color management is extraordinarily good. Like, the ambient light color temperature sensing and stuff they're doing. They like, you know, they did a bunch of Google stuff. They pointed a bunch of lights at it.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  I think they also were really smart about how they did like, whatever the, whatever the finish is on the glass. It's like, a little bit matted, but it doesn't look fuzzy like matted glass can sometimes look.

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  So they did it on purpose.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:50Nilay Patel?

  They, their, their comp, the thing they wanted it to look like was a printed matte photo.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Right. So they had a, they had it, they literally printed out a photo in a, in a frame and put it up. And then they did their damnedest to make it look like that. And it works. Yeah, you should read Dan Seifert's review of the thing. It's very good. I will tell you in like, working on that review. We spent more time trying to come up with nice metaphors or nice language or clear language to describe just how great it is to look at this display and just how like shocking it is that it's always the right brightness. It always looks a little bit more like a photograph than a screen. Um, and it's just, it's, it's just right all the time. I, I'm just gonna. It doesn't look like other screens.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  I could hear you say that a million times and then I see seven inch display, the classic screen size for a cheap, bad Android tablet. And I see the price and I just can't believe you. I just have to see it. I have to go to Best Buy.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  You just have to see it. Yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  I can't trust you.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  I mean, no, there is, you can't. There is, there. The truth comes out. There's an argument to be made that like 150 might actually be a little bit expensive, right? Like, I still think it's relatively cheap, but like, uh, there's, I, I am not unconvinced by the argument that, you know, this, this thing is pretty cheap, uh, in terms of its hardware. And so they could maybe have gotten the cost down a little bit. Yeah. Um, also, uh, I think this, I tweeted and actually I think Sundar retweeted, a buck 49 for a really great photo frame that works with Google Photos is a pretty remarkable Trojan horse for assistant. Yeah. This, this thing is like a holiday winner, like. No, no, it's not assistant. Huh?

• 56:39Speaker 02

  I mean, assistant, sure, but I'm more excited about this thing being a Trojan horse for breaking the monopoly that iCloud Photos has on my family. Yes, it will do that too. I cannot wait to give one of these to every single person in my family. All of whom use iPhones, all of whom share beautiful moments with my nieces and nephews that I never get to see in iCloud Photos. And I'll be like, if you use Google Photos, then everyone will get this on their kitchen counter. And they will love it more and they will love your children more and therefore you should switch. They will love your children more is a lot. Yeah, that's true.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  And then, once they're using Google Photos, I'll be like, you know. You're using Google Photos. Do you really need to keep using iMessage?

• 57:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, good luck, buddy. I have tried to wield the power of the baby to break the iMessage, and it cannot be done.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Does it work?

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  The baby has almost infinite power, but nothing can break iMessage lock-in.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Maybe your baby's just not cute enough.

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's true. My baby is like two steps away from being an Instagram influencer already. She didn't even have her own account.

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so I tweeted this, and I retweeted it. Two things. One is a story we have to chase, actually. One is, so people are like, "That's great. I don't want Google to track me." Which is fair. The switch on the back is a hardware switch for the microphone.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 58:12Nilay Patel?

  Electrically disconnects the microphone, so you can just use it as a Google Photos device.

• 58:18Nilay Patel?

  So that's cool. So you can just do that. Here's the other part, though. If you do decide to use it as an assistant device, you click it over, you turn it on, Google will then, and this is a story we have to write, but Google will then demand that the Google account associated with your home device turn on a bunch of tracking settings. So then you have to turn on web and app tracking. You have to turn, obviously, voice assistant stuff, and you have to turn on some other one.

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  Saying I want to use Google Home and Google Assistant, so I'm gonna let Google track my web and app activity is like, oh, it's search tracking is the other one, which also sort of makes sense, but...

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Renee Ritchie from iMoore has been banging on about this for years, that he wants to try Google Assistant, but since in order to use it, you have to turn all the tracking on, he refuses.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I think this is the one where, for the Google Home Mini, it felt like you're buying Google Assistant, this is the thing, you know, like, whatever. I think tying it to Google Photos, and the fact that people just want a great photo frame, and using that to ladder into app tracking is too much. So we should write that story.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  They understand that privacy aspect like, hey, we get it. You probably don't want us to be like using certain parts of your data for other stuff. So we'll do all, look at all the AI we do on your phone. So they obviously are aware of this. It would be a great upside. I feel like I wouldn't even want to like get this from my parents or something. But if I could say, here's this thing, you use your voice, ask for recipes. It's not like you don't have to connect it to your whole entire life. You just ask it to play YouTube video, ask it for recipe. Like if they had a tracking free version of this.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Maybe it costs $40 more.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  And this isn't a secret, by the way. It's just it's here's support.google.com. Blah, take that again. If this isn't a secret, like here's the support article on google.com. So three things you have to turn on are web and app. You have to turn on web and app activity, which saves search activity on apps and browsers, and gives you customized experiences in search maps and other Google products. You can also choose to save Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services. The second one is device information, contacts, calendars, apps and other device data to improve your experience with Google. And then obviously voice and audio activity, which recognize your voice and does speech recognition. Great.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  So the one I think that most people care about is web and app activity. Where you're allowing, just to use the Google Home, you have to allow search tracking. You have to allow website visit tracking. I don't why, I guess, which I don't want you to do that. You know, when you buy an Alexa product, Amazon doesn't demand that you install like an eye tracker in your home to see what you're looking at. So is there a little bit of a breakdown there? I think we should probably, it would be better if Google allowed you to have a more cut down experience.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  Google's settings for privacy and just settings in general are getting, especially on Android, ever more complicated. I swear to God, every time I go to like, try and fix a thing, or look at a thing, or figure out what's going on with the thing, especially with like, the Google Home app now, you just get bounced into like, a random screen of settings, and you don't know if it's like a Google search setting, or maybe it's a Google Assistant setting, or maybe it's a Google account setting, or maybe it's an Android setting, you don't really know, you're just like, "Oh, I want to change the thing", and then all of a sudden, just like, waiting for assistance. Like, what? Why? Why? What is happening here? It is, it is actually, it is worse than Facebook in some ways, trying to like, find a thing, and know what the parent of that thing is, and whether that parent is search, or home, or assistant, or something else.

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's necessarily worse than Facebook. I mean, Facebook is just Facebook. And sometimes, it's Instagram and WhatsApp, right? Like, that's all you get. Google is like, is this your device setting, or a service setting, or a, you know, Assistant is just a cloud-based idea that is manifested by some device. You know, it's like, that's a lot of metaphor, that's just a lot of paradigms to manage. It's definitely worse, I wish it was easier. And I do wish they could turn off all the tracking. Also, again, I don't want to completely blow the interview episodes, it's coming out on Tuesday, and you can hear Rishi respond to this himself. But I was like, "What's up with Hey Google? When are you going to change it?" And he, and he told me that people are getting used to it, so

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  they're thinking, but he, as you might imagine, this was a little bit more heated. So just wait for it on Tuesday, because I gave him a lot of shit. Ivy Ross, by the way, I won't blow any of that, she is a delight. I think she's the best thing to happen to Google design in a long time.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm excited to hear this.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  So, check that out. Okay, let's have an ad, and we'll come back, Paul'll do his thing, and we'll talk about this app later.

• 1:03:24Nilay Patel?

  This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Merck. They're gonna play an ad for you now, check it out. This is Merck.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  Maurice Hileman developed vaccines for some of the world's most devastating diseases. He's been called one of the true giants of science, medicine, and public health in the 20th century. Yet, he's not a household name. That changes today. Dr. Hileman was on the forefront of discovering, developing, and inventing many vaccines that have helped save and improve lives worldwide. Dr. Hileman's impact on public health is undeniable, and his passionate commitment continues to inspire scientists in medical research laboratories to this day. You've always known his inventions, now you know who's behind them.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

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• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back from the ad. Paul?

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  Yeah?

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  Every week, my dude.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  What happens?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Well, I always...

• 1:04:49Nilay Patel?

  What time is it? What time is it? What time is it, Paul? What time? Are you excited?

• 1:05:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, he did the whole yellow thing.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  It's called Touch a Tree, Touch the Future. Every week, always. And you know what? Frankly, I'm offended that you forgot.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  All right. Touch a tree, touch the future time.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so this is a Kickstarter for MUI. MUI, M U I. It's an interactive wooden, it's a, it's a two by four. It's a two by four that you put on your wall.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  And then it's got like, like a display that like, like you touch the wood and then it like, like lights up. And it's like a low res display and you can like, control your smart home with this and you can like, change the temperature. But it got me really thinking, if you imagine this, but like a slightly higher resolution, like a little more pixel density. You could have a phone that is just a block of wood.

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Right? Cause you got capacity, you've got a way to display information. You can pass, like you have a capacitive touchscreen and you probably can find a place to put a battery in there. Now you just have a wood block for a phone.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  I would definitely use a wood block phone.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Nilay Patel?

  Also, it's all the huge problem in my life, which is Max loves phones.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  Genetic, I think. And she will literally, she doesn't, you know, she can barely sit up, but she will fling her tiny body dangerously across any surface, across the vastness of space and time, if she sees a phone. Like she will, she will corkscrew around, she will begin reaching, she'll like do a backflip. And then she gets it and she just immediately puts it in her mouth, which is a delight if you're testing, for example, say the IP sixty seven rating of the iPhone ten R.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  So if I had one that was a block of wood, I'd be, yeah, go ahead, get the phone, see if you can pick it up, baby. Yeah, that's right.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  You think she should, she would be confused by the, the block of wood aspect?

• 1:07:04Nilay Patel?

  We bought her a fake phone to keep her from the real phones. Uh, and she's too smart for us.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  She's like, this palm phone is bullshit.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  You know, the, the argument.

• 1:07:21Nilay Patel?

  I got Paul.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  The argument that maybe smartphones aren't addictive, that maybe, you know, it's, we just need to hold ourselves back and whatever, like, and like, it's just our problem. If, if, like, the, the very, the second conscious thought a child has is, give me that damn phone.

• 1:07:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  Before they even know what it is.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Maybe we do have a problem.

• 1:07:42Nilay Patel?

  It's, I mean, I just, she sees us use the phone, like, she has a phone in her face, because we're always taking photos of her. But it's not like we, like, she's not watched a movie yet, you know, like, she's never been shown a FaceTime. But like, that's my mom, so you'd think that she would, really what she wants is my mom. Maybe she thinks the phone is her grandmother. There's a lot to unpack here, but all I know is that, uh, that she, the kid loves a phone, and if my phone was a woodblock, it might solve that problem. So I'm in.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  Paul, send me your brochure.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Well, it's just a back movie on Kickstarter for $4.99.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  All right. I'm gonna get this thing. Apple event.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  This Apple event.

• 1:08:22Nilay Patel?

  Take us through it.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  I have, I have one big question.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  What matters more? The rumored iPad Pro update? Or the rumored MacBook Air update? What is more important?

• 1:08:38Nilay Patel?

  The i, no.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 1:08:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, unless they make significant software tweaks to iOS 12, new iPad hardware doesn't get you anything.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:08:51Nilay Patel?

  Whereas the MacBook Air has been so desperately in need of an update. That's one argument. The second argument is that a new MacBook Air is just them bowing to the will of the market for once. Because that's all anybody wants. And it's, well, whatever, it'll just be a computer, like another Mac that they don't update for the next 10 years. And the USB-C on the iPad is a revolution.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Because it changes it into a real, honest to God, computer that you can plug stuff into.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Right, so, so here's, here's my thinking. One of these two things will be the best $1,000 computer that Apple offers.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Depending on which one it is, that is the most important one.

• 1:09:42Nilay Patel?

  And right now, it will obviously be the MacBook Air.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  It's probably gonna be the MacBook Air unless Apple does something new for the iPads that makes it a better computer.

• 1:09:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so here's my, my big question. Go ahead, go ahead, Dieter.

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  Okay, so here's my answer to this question.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  The new MacBook Air, MacBook, whatever they do, is going to matter more to more people because more people will buy it because more people have been waiting for Apple to make a really good laptop because they haven't bought into this new generation since it got started with the little itty bitty MacBook. And like, it's time for them to have a mass market laptop that people actually want. And there's such a big pent up demand for it that it will be the more important device because more people can do it. But the iPad Pro will be the more interesting device because it will point more clearly to like, a future of computing thing. It'll, it will, and it will be, I think, the better

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  thousand dollar computer so long as you know how to make iOS do what you want. And that is the problem is they've built up iOS from a really simple OS to something pretty complicated, but there's always that one more thing you wish it could do.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  And unless they're willing to somehow open some floodgates of like, access somehow to like, make that, make that happen faster, to solve that one more thing problem for more people faster, it's gonna be the better computer, but only for the tiny sliver of people that know how to like, know what happens when you need to go into the files app in the iPad, which is still one of the most confusing things on planet Earth.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  So, I have a series of questions about the iPad.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, I have one question and one demand.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:30Nilay Patel?

  But the one question is itself a series of questions. Do you understand what I'm saying?

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  I do. So, the, the, the big circle, the question, is what happens when you plug USB C stuff into an iPad?

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  So, that is the question. Sub-question one, I think the answer is you plug in a charger and it charges.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay. You plug in a display.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  It will, I don't know.

• 1:11:56Nilay Patel?

  Yep. You plug in, you plug in an ethernet dongle.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  It'll give you, it'll give you internet.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  We think. Who knows?

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  You plug in an ethernet dongle, you plug in a, one of the fiber dongles we have for our SAN at Vox Media.

• 1:12:12Nilay Patel?

  That needs a driver on a Mac.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, no idea.

• 1:12:15Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Uh, you plug in a hard drive.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  The world explodes.

• 1:12:21Nilay Patel?

  I just, I just keep going. You plug in, you plug in a sound card.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Well, a USB C.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Plug it a.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Oh, like an amp?

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, yeah, like an M audio, like sound card, like, you know, thing.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Hmm. Here, I got one for you. You ready?

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  You ready?

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Hang on, let me, let me ask. GPU. Oh, sorry.

• 1:12:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, an external GPU.

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  You plug in a mouse.

• 1:12:42Nilay Patel?

  Do they make USB C mice?

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:12:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  No, I don't know about that. You plug in a mouse into a dongle.

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you plug in.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  USB mouse.

• 1:12:52Nilay Patel?

  You plug in a USB C dongle. You plug in a USB C to USB A dongle. And then you plug in a printer from 2001. Like one of those like translucent, plastic IMAC printers.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  That's like the most likely thing to work, I feel like. But like.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  Like an HP printer that needs like Colorjet Pro drivers?

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  Printer drivers are on, on, on a

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  uh, tangential trajectory to all other technology. It's, it's like, it's just a different, whole different world. And sometimes you can just print things.

• 1:13:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm, I'm with you, but right now, so if you plug in a strange printer into a Mac, like, Mac OS X will be like, I identified your printer. It'll go to the cloud, to Apple's printer driver service. And then it'll be like, you have a Brother Laser printer. Some driver was installed and that works. Are you saying that Apple will have built for iOS? A printer driver service that will get installed on iOS?

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  What I'm saying is that writing printer drivers is such a weird part of technology. That's probably like the third thing that the operating system does when it's booting.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  It would have, it would have been more work for them to take the drivers out of their kernel.

• 1:14:10Nilay Patel?

  I understand.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  So it's just probably is inside of iOS dormant.

• 1:14:13Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so you're, and you're right, it's right. Uh, yeah, it's part of the mock kernel.

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so that's like one huge set of questions. You put a USB C port on it. And now it's a quote unquote, real computer. Are you gonna, is, will iOS support drivers for wacky shit?

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:14:34Nilay Patel?

  Who, who knows? Okay, so that's one thing that.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  No, but, no, but the big one to me there is honest to God, the hard drive. If you plug a hard drive or a USB stick into this thing, and then you want to open a file in an app.

• 1:14:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So this is my demand. You ready? Here's.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Nilay Patel?

  Right now, there is one such experience you can have with an iOS device, where you plug in a storage device, which is the camera connector.

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  Right? You can, you can.

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  That thing.

• 1:15:02Nilay Patel?

  You can buy an SD card adapter and plug it into the bottom.

• 1:15:07Nilay Patel?

  And then you can plug in SD card. And amazingly, the only app that will allow you to, to recognize that SD card adapter is the camera app. Like the photos app. So if you are me, and you shoot a bunch of raw photos, you want to put into Lightroom. I have to use my Mac to get those photos in the Lightroom. Instead of just dumping hundreds of raws into my iCloud synced camera roll. The fastest way for me to blow through the storage on my phone is to use the SD card adapter with my fucking iPad. Like.

• 1:15:46Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:15:47Nilay Patel?

  Just stop it. Just be like, here's Lightroom, Adobe, you guys know about files, right? You have some idea of how image files work? Would you like to just handle this situation yourselves instead of round tripping through the, the photos app? And I'm sure Adobe, Scott Belsky, who was just on the show, I'm sure he'd be like, yes, Apple, I would love to do that. That would have made us put Photoshop on the iPad, uh, five years ago, instead of finally just doing it today. That's my demand. Just let other apps address the file system directly, instead of round tripping through Apple's abstractions. The end. That was the Verchess.

• 1:16:26Nilay Patel?

  So if you're wondering why the event is disrupted next week by someone screaming.

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  If you're wondering who that person in the corner of the livestream is, that'll be me. Uh, no, I'm excited.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  It would just be, so Phil Schiller gets on stage, you all get on stage and introduce the iPad and just, just yell like, "Plug it SC card in."

• 1:16:49Nilay Patel?

  Do you have a printer? I brought a printer. It's like us in a hands-on area.

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  Storm the stage with the printer, just like, "No, we're doing this right now."

• 1:17:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm gonna bring an external GPU to the hands-on area. We're gonna see what happens.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  Please.

• 1:17:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure they have answers to some of these questions and not some of the others. I do think the MacBook Air is just, it will be the more, it'll be the product more people care about.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18Nilay Patel?

  In this early mode.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. A lot of people care about the iPad.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Demand is there.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Everybody that has asked me about the iPad Pro, I get people, "Oh, there's no iPad Pro, should I get it? Should I get it?" And I was like, I sit down and then I ask the series of questions that you always ask somebody when they're thinking about getting an iPad Pro. And the end of that discussion is me telling them and being right that they should save $700 and just get the cheap iPad and it will do everything that they want.

• 1:17:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  And then they're like, "Cool, I don't believe you." And then they go buy an iPad Pro and they don't use it like you should use a $1,000 computer.

• 1:17:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, it has an extra screen.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  The only person that cares about that is you.

• 1:18:03Nilay Patel?

  We started this whole episode by me saying, "I don't think that's true."

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:18:11Nilay Patel?

  You know what I hate? Like, again, in reading these reviews, there's this consistent theme. I did it too. I'm to blame. Uh, but everyone did it, which is, "Only tech nerds will care about this."

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I, I.

• 1:18:23Nilay Patel?

  I just don't buy it. I think there are, there are the people who listen to this show. Clearly, they have nothing better to do, uh, except, you know, obsessive or pixel density. But there's like millions of people who really care. I swear to God. We should have a meetup. We should start a website for them, with a podcast.

• 1:18:43Nilay Patel?

  It'd be great.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Someday.

• 1:18:46Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then the last little Apple thing, the iPad mini update and air power in 2019.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  Sure. I believe it.

• 1:18:53Nilay Patel?

  I don't believe the iPad mini will ever be updated again, ever.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  Why do they hate it so much? Why do they hate that computer?

• 1:19:01Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  It's weird, right? They really do hate it.

• 1:19:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think because they sell iPhone XS Maxes.

• 1:19:09Nilay Patel?

  Like, why do you need iPad if you have that thing? If they were to, if they were to.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  What happens if you try and build, oh my God, wait a minute, you know, there's Mac mini Mokolo, the like, people that used to were building like server farms based on off Mac minis because they, you know, were great and blah, blah, blah, blah. They're very sad now because they, it's like hard to do that. If you put a fully functional USB C port on an iPad Pro, you could build a server farm with iPad Pros.

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  Think about it.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  If you could run software on iPad Pros and not just Apple's sandbox of happy software times.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yep.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  That's why I want Christie. Bring Apple support Christie to.

• 1:19:56Nilay Patel?

  If you, if you're listening to this.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  The iPad.

• 1:20:00Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and you know of a tiny USB printer? You have a tiny USB C printer.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  You want to like sneak a, sneak a printer in?

• 1:20:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like if you are aware of a tiny USB C printer that I can like, put in my jacket pocket.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Are you going to adapt? You can have a dog.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  There's tons of those.

• 1:20:17Nilay Patel?

  It's something that's tweeted me. I'm at reckless. I'd love to hear about the smallest printer you're aware of.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  Actually, it doesn't have to be a printer.

• 1:20:24Nilay Patel?

  Battery powered, ideally.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  If you're in your car, pull over. We haven't actually do that yet today. Pull over and tweet at reckless, the USB accessory you want to see him plug into an iPad Pro to see if it works.

• 1:20:37Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I love that.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  The strangest thing you can think of. It could be a printer, it could be, I don't know. Some USB C thing, or even just USB thing, that you want to know what happens when you plug it into an iPad Pro, and he will provide that service for you.

• 1:20:51Nilay Patel?

  You know, eventually, no, you should absolutely do this because eventually we're going to have to review this thing. And the whole review is just going to be a montage of me plugging things into it. Yeah. So if you give me something good, I'll, I'll, we'll like put up your, just do it. Tell me what you, it can't be expensive. It has to be cheap.

• 1:21:07Nilay Patel?

  Do you think of the power things like you plug in like a USB fan? Oh, for sure.

• 1:21:12Nilay Patel?

  This is off the rails. That is it for the Vergecast. We've already gone over. Paul's got to get back to Hawaii. Is this, is it, there's like sunset there now? The light is like beautiful on the

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  What they say here is surf stuff.

• 1:21:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God. All right, Paul. Paul's never coming back from Hawaii.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  It's great here.

• 1:21:30Nilay Patel?

  I hope you find a self.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  I'm going to a picnic.

• 1:21:37Nilay Patel?

  And as we said, this episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by Merck. We got a little ad for you. Check it out. Here it is.

• 1:21:42Speaker 04

  Merck scientist Daria Hazuda has failed countless times, but from those failures, medical invention was born. From years of trial and error researching infectious diseases, Dr. Hazuda has helped to develop medicines that help treat HIV and hepatitis C. For the next generation of inventors, Dr. Hazuda's passion, coupled with her commitment to eradicating the world's toughest diseases, proves that failure is a teachable moment. Daria is just one of the many Merck scientists dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent at merck.com/inventingforlife.

• 1:22:29Nilay Patel?

  All right. We love you. That was the Vergecast. We'll see you. We'll see you after the Apple event next week. Dieter's going to be in town. So we're going to, we're going to do it a little bit early. So we'll see you probably Thursday next week. Check out the interview episode on Tuesday.

• 1:22:43Nilay Patel?

  With Rishi and Ivy from Google. That was a really fun episode. It's coming out on Tuesday. We've got more of those interviews. Love, I would love for you to hear who you want me to interview because it's, it's really fun.

• 1:22:54Nilay Patel?

  Listen to Why'd You Push That Button? That show is incredible. It's just incredible. Just go listen to it. Ashley and Kaitlyn do a great job. Check out Verge Science on YouTube. They just went over half a million subscribers, which is incredible for a channel that is just over five months old. Just think about that. It's wild. And you can listen to Kara Swisher to Recode Decode and her new show Pivot with Scott Galloway. And you can listen to Recode Media, Peter Kafka. All of that is wonderful. We will see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Promo code.