Pod Insights The Vergecast CES is back! Sony announces a car, everything has Matter, and Lenovo puts screens on top of screens About this episode CES 2023 is in full swing! The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler parse the vapor ware from the cool new tech we hope to see ship this year.
Further reading:
Sony and Honda just announced their new electric car brand, Afeela
The BMW i Vision Dee is a future EV sports sedan that can talk back to you
Check out BMW’s color-changing concept car in action
Mercedes-Benz and ChargePoint are going to install thousands of EV fast chargers in the US
The Ring Car Cam is now available to order for $200
Google’s new high-definition maps are arriving first on Volvo and Polestar electric vehicles
Google’s new split-screen look for Android Auto is rolling out to everyone
LG’s latest Signature OLED TV receives all of its audio and video wirelessly
LG wants to reinvent how you think of TV picture modes
Sony breaks from tradition and won’t announce new TVs at CES 2023
Samsung takes on Apple and LG with its own 5K display for creative pros
Dell’s new 32-inch 6K monitor gives Apple’s ProDisplay XDR some competition
Samsung's latest Flex Hybrid is a prototype display
LG’s 2023 OLED TVs are brighter (again) and make webOS smarter
Samsung’s 2023 TV lineup bets everything on picture upgrades and AI tricks
Roku does the obvious thing and announces its own TV line
TCL’s 2023 TVs have new branding and are gaming powerhouses
Razer made a soundbar that tracks your head to optimize sound
AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 mobile processors include a massive 16-core chip
AMD promises RTX 3060 desktop graphics performance with new RDNA 3 laptop GPUs
Lenovo’s new Yoga Book 9i laptop has a second screen above its screen
Lenovo’s new ThinkBook has modular accessories that add LTE, a webcam light, and more
Lenovo’s new all-in-one is all screen
Lenovo made a Kindle Scribe
The HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook is neat, but what’s with the RGB?
Razer's Edge 5G handheld is coming to Verizon this month for $359.99
Delta and T-Mobile are making in-flight Wi-Fi free for all SkyMiles members
Qi2: How Apple might finally harness MagSafe by giving it away
Philips Hue is getting a $130 app for TVs
Samsung’s SmartThings Station is a smart home hub hidden in a wireless charger
Kohler shower pods are here to turn your bathroom into a spa
Withings wants you to pee on its latest device
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 16,232 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? Today on The Vergecast, get excited, it's CES 2023. Sony announces a car while everybody else updates their TVs. And Lenovo, out of nowhere, with the craziest laptop we've ever seen. All that and so much more, coming up right after this.
0:16 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:12 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast for 2023. The whole year.
1:18 Alex Cranz? The whole year.
1:19 Nilay Patel? Every morning when you wake up, think of me. Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge and your friend. Or Alex Krantz, who is here.
1:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I was like, think of me or Richard.
1:29 Speaker 03 Did you think of fake Neelai? Like, is fake Neelai coming back? Because I hear that those Twitter accounts are actually pretty easy to make, still.
1:36 Alex Cranz? Fake Neelai could come back.
1:38 Speaker 03 It's just $8.
1:39 Nilay Patel? It's true. Jeffrey Fowler made another fake Senator on Twitter. Another fake verified Senator.
1:44 Alex Cranz? I need to make a new fake Neelai using my work email address again and my home phone number. It'll be fine.
1:51 Speaker 03 Nothing bad could come of that.
1:52 Nilay Patel? If you have a Twitter account that's over 90 days old that you want to donate to Alex's situation, by all means, reach out to Alex. That's it. That's where the three of us are on the show. Welcome back to 2023. We've been off for a couple of weeks. We've got to see if we remember how to do the show that we've been doing for years. Fine. It's also CES, the Consumer Electronics Show is happening in Las Vegas. We got a big Verge team down there. I am not there for like the first time in 12 years. I feel like the COVID years that I didn't go don't count.
2:21 Alex Cranz? They don't. Absolutely not.
2:23 Nilay Patel? So I had like a 12 to 13 year run, many of which were memorably spent with Richard Lawler as babies.
2:30 Speaker 03 Memorably is probably not the correct word. No one can say for certain.
2:34 Nilay Patel? What's the word for something you remember because you don't remember?
2:38 Speaker 03 There's a gap. But no, it's weird being at home. I found out that people do things in the first week of the year that I had no idea about.
2:44 Alex Cranz? Oh, yeah.
2:44 Speaker 03 It's wild.
2:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there's all kinds of action. It's like time does not stop and get vortexed into Las Vegas. I will say, and Richard, I don't know if you feel this way, I miss it. And I kind of, there's a part of me that wishes I was in Vegas. That part is very small, and I am beating in submission on the daily. But there's like stuff happening at CES this year.
3:06 Speaker 03 There's a person inside of me who only exists when I wake up in the Marriott in Las Vegas.
3:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
3:12 Speaker 03 And they are dormant the entire rest of the year. And just for one week, they run free. And I'm not really sure.
3:17 Nilay Patel? It's like activated by 0% humidity. Like, the air is so dry that a different version of you comes out. And it's like, what I need is a vodka soda and some swirly carpets and at least three full memory cards, SD cards of photos of laptops. And that's who I really am. And there's a part of me that's jealous. The other reason I'm jealous that I'm not there is this is Dieter Bohn's first year at CES as a Google executive. And I just, I just want to go to those meetings. Dieter, I miss you, buddy. I mean, I talked to you all the time as friends. I'm just saying, I can't wait to be in that position where I'm, where he's got like flax.
3:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
3:57 Nilay Patel? Like, you know, like press handlers and there's.
3:59 Alex Cranz? That follow him around?
4:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Oh, my God. Ah, I'm missing it.
4:03 Alex Cranz? And they're like, no, no, you can't talk to him.
4:05 Speaker 03 Just waving at him to stop talking every time he says anything.
4:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I can't.
4:10 Nilay Patel? That's the one thing I really miss. There is a lot of stuff coming out at CS. There's like a two-year pandemic hangover that appears to be breaking in terms of gadgets.
4:19 Alex Cranz? A hundred percent.
4:20 Nilay Patel? It is the usual level of gadget announcements. Will the stuff ever come out? Will it be any good? Will any of us remember this a year from now? Who knows? But for this week of the year.
4:30 Alex Cranz? You'll remember the car.
4:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah, we gotta talk about the cars. For this week of the year, if you're into gadgets, this is like some of the most gadget fun you can have. It's CS and there's just a wild array of gadgets happening because this is Matters first year. So there's a whole bunch of weird smart home gadgets. Sony's like, we made a car. We'll get to the car in a minute. Car is fully ridiculous. BMW is like, we also made a car with, it's made out of e-ink and it talks. Just like a fully ridiculous CS. And there's obviously TV news and there's obviously other laptop news. The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, it's a two-screen.
5:09 Alex Cranz? It's beautiful.
5:09 Nilay Patel? And it comes with a stand to make it even super tall. It's like.
5:13 Alex Cranz? What if you glued two iPads together? We'll get to it.
5:16 Speaker 03 This is what happens when you let engineers stay at home for two years. They have crazy ideas.
5:20 Alex Cranz? And nobody's there to be like, stop.
5:22 Nilay Patel? A super gadgety CS. We gotta talk about all this stuff. Real quick, before we start, here is one piece of exciting Vergecast 2023 news. This is our first episode that we're going to publish on YouTube. It's audio only. We've got some cool graphics, some ideas. We'll be publishing some clips. If you've been on our YouTube channel or our TikTok channel, you've seen we've been doing clips and shorts of the Vergecast's video. We'll be doing more of that. We're building towards more video things, but we're actually just publishing the podcast on the Vergecast YouTube channel. First, this is our first public one. There have been some secret ones as tests over the past few weeks. This is our first public post. We're really excited about it. We want your feedback. We know a lot of people listen to podcasts on YouTube, so we're coming to you.
6:07 Nilay Patel? Let us know how it goes and then let us know what you think of the clips and how those are working. We've got, we've got big ideas to expand the show into video and onto YouTube in particular. So some exciting news to start the year. All right, let's start with this car. So Sony, a couple of years ago, announced a car at CES. It was the most vaporware car that has ever existed. Like, I don't think it even had motors in it. They were just like, there were Sony, handful of PlayStation announcements. Do you like Spider-Man? Here's our car. Sony at CES.
6:36 Alex Cranz? Was it, there wasn't even a physical thing? Was there?
6:37 Nilay Patel? There was a, there was a model of a car. I don't know if it moved.
6:41 Alex Cranz? Be an idea of a car.
6:43 Nilay Patel? It was.
6:43 Speaker 03 They showed videos of cars, of things that were supposedly cars driving around.
6:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and they were like, this was at the time when like the vaporware car explosion was like fully happening.
6:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
6:53 Nilay Patel? So Sony has this car, everyone's like, this is vapor, it's never going anywhere. Then they announced a partnership with Honda to make cars. And the name of the partnership is Sony Honda Mobility. So you see, this is just a very literal situation.
7:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
7:04 Nilay Patel? Sony wants to make a car, Honda makes cars. Let's start a new joint venture. It's called Sony Honda Mobility. Cool. This year at CES, Sony holds a press conference. Press conference is all over the place. I encourage you to go watch it. It's like Sony decided not to announce TVs at CES, which if you are an avid CES watcher, you know, this is a big deal because this is where all the TVs get announced. Sony is like, nope, screw it, opting out, we'll do TVs later. Here's the new PSVR 2. Here's some movie stuff. Here's a Gran Turismo movie. Oh, and by the way, here's our car. And so the Sony Honda Mobility car will be a new brand. I can't even say it.
7:43 Alex Cranz? I feel you.
7:44 Nilay Patel? I'm so mad at you. It's called a Fila, A-F-E-E-L-A. And they showed off their first car, which, you know, looks like a shoe. Is all modern EVs do, like a cross between a Honda Accord and a Lucid Air. Like, all cars now have the same like light bar vibes. It's like a low slung sedan.
8:08 Alex Cranz? Yeah. They don't look, they all look like Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg designed them in 2002.
8:14 Nilay Patel? What do cars of the future look like? This, it, you know, like when you're a kid and you like are learning how to draw a car and you draw like?
8:20 Alex Cranz? This.
8:21 Nilay Patel? Two wheels and a bubble.
8:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah, this is what you draw.
8:23 Speaker 03 Because I could not actually draw different parts. So I just drew one arc and then wheels.
8:28 Nilay Patel? It's, it's called, again, I want to come back to the name, a Fila, which if you go and watch the video. The poor man, he's, you know, he's like excited and he's like, our new brand. And then he's like a fila and there's, there's just not applause because no one believes that he said it.
8:45 Alex Cranz? No one appraises that name.
8:47 Nilay Patel? And the idea here is that Honda will build a car and Sony will stuff it full of screens that runs Sony's software and play Sony movies. That, that's the idea. It's like very clearly the idea.
8:59 Alex Cranz? I like one of those things.
9:00 Nilay Patel? But then there's one screen.
9:02 Speaker 03 Who doesn't want to pay $60,000 for a PSPD?
9:04 Alex Cranz? Yes.
9:05 Nilay Patel? The front of the car, the middle of the light bar. This is the thing that I'm absolutely obsessed with. And I really encourage you to go watch our supercut of this event. So there's the two headlights. And then there's the light bar in the middle of the headlights. Almost all cars, EVs especially have this like light bar element in the middle of the headlights now, right?
9:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's electronic.
9:23 Nilay Patel? Okay, that is Sony's like, what if that was a screen, a straight up screen in the middle of the headlights?
9:28 Alex Cranz? Charging screen.
9:29 Nilay Patel? And then in the presentation, they show you the things a screen could be used for. And one of them is just straight up advertising for Spider-Man No Way Home. So you're driving around and you're a fila and you've got Spider-Man No Way Home on the front of your car. You can also display the weather, which I think is amazing to display the weather to other people.
9:51 Alex Cranz? It's helpful for the people you like just run on the ass of other people on the highway. You're like, I need you to know the weather.
9:58 Nilay Patel? Backwards. So you would just be showing the weather to people backwards in their mirrors. I mean, it's, it's perfect example of.
10:05 Speaker 03 V2V didn't happen. We had to make it. We had to do something and this was.
10:08 Nilay Patel? It's just Sony doesn't know why it's building a car. It's just very obvious that Sony has not yet figured out why it's doing this. Honda knows why it's building an EV. Honda's got that part locked down. They're Honda. Sony's like, what we're going to add to it is Spider-Man and screens. Where are some places we can put those things? And one of the places they settled on was the front of the car. It's very good. A fila.
10:35 Alex Cranz? Perfect. No notes. A fila.
10:37 Nilay Patel? Now, my personal a fila theory is that, again, during what, what is the word for this? When you have a memory that is defined by the absence of the memory?
10:47 Alex Cranz? A blackout?
10:47 Nilay Patel? Like you, I know I was in Vegas with Richard. I, I know, I know that. And then I know I was at home.
10:54 Speaker 03 There are, there are expense receipts, but what happened? Who can say?
10:57 Alex Cranz? What does the memory taste like? Does it taste like vodka, whiskey, regret?
11:03 Nilay Patel? Yes. All of the above.
11:06 Speaker 03 All of them.
11:06 Nilay Patel? And I know that Richard and I are friends for life because of this memory, but I got nothing else.
11:11 Speaker 03 And somehow in the middle of this, that's when someone said, "Afeela."
11:16 Nilay Patel? No.
11:17 Speaker 03 They wrote it down and then they found it later.
11:20 Nilay Patel? No, what is the ultimate Vegas CES song in every presentation? It's "I Got a Feeling" by the Black Eyed Peas. You cannot be, you cannot be in that environment without hearing that song. For, there was at least two years where like the words "Mazel Tov" rang out of every CES presentation because they were just playing "I Got a Feeling" by the Black Eyed Peas. And now we have a feel, like I swear to God, this is what happened. Like they, Sony and Honda were up in the club and that song was playing and I'm like, I know what it's called. And now we have, now we have to talk about this seriously for months to come.
11:55 Speaker 03 Years, years. It's not coming out until 2026.
11:58 Alex Cranz? They cried a lot that night though. They hugged coming out. It's not allegedly.
12:03 Nilay Patel? They said they're gonna take, they're gonna start taking orders in 2024. And they claim that they will ship the first ones in North America. They said the second half of 2025.
12:13 Alex Cranz? Who are the people that are gonna order this?
12:16 Nilay Patel? I mean, this is a pretty huge risk. I think it's de-risked by the fact that it's more or less a Honda, right?
12:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
12:22 Nilay Patel? Okay. So you know that they know how to make a call.
12:24 Alex Cranz? Honda exists. They make cars. We drive them.
12:27 Nilay Patel? But then you've got this like bonkers Sony integration where they're, and oh, by the way, the whole car runs Qualcomm tech. And so it's a Qualcomm chipset, Qualcomm, autonomous driving, Qualcomm interfaces, like everything.
12:43 Alex Cranz? How much battery life is it gonna get versus the Apple car? Like 30% less?
12:48 Nilay Patel? It runs really hot. The camera though, in some situations is better. I love that there's a charging, the screen on the front, you can, it could be a charging indicator. They're throwing out the idea of fully integrating a PS5.
12:59 Alex Cranz? That's what I've always wanted in my car.
13:00 Nilay Patel? This is the single silliest CES announcement that I've ever covered. And if you've been listening to me at CES for a long time, you know that that is a high bar. We have covered some truly bonkers CES products. One year Qualcomm hired the.
13:16 Nilay Patel? Cast of Billy Madison to jump around in furry suits claiming to be the next generation of technology. This is a real thing that happened. And this is by far the silliest thing that I've ever seen because the entire point of it.
13:30 Speaker 03 Dish brought a real kangaroo ones.
13:32 Nilay Patel? That's true.
13:33 Speaker 03 For whatever.
13:34 Nilay Patel? The entire point of this car is to get you to subscribe to Sony software inside the car. I don't think this car is ever going to ship. That's just my, I'm calling it. I do not think the Afeela will ever ship.
13:45 Alex Cranz? You don't think a car with an integrated PS5 and the ability to play Spider-Man on the grill.
13:51 Nilay Patel? Afeela will attempt to embody three main themes, autonomy, augmentation, and affinity. It's bad. It's bad. I'm just telling you it's bad.
13:59 Speaker 03 Okay, wait, if there's anything that Sony is good at, it's launching subscription service. Let's never fail. And so I'm, yeah, I'm taking the high side on this for sure.
14:10 Alex Cranz? So you think people are just going to subscribe to own the car?
14:12 Speaker 03 It's gonna be just like a, yeah, PlayStation cloud game.
14:14 Nilay Patel? All right.
14:16 Alex Cranz? But a car.
14:16 Nilay Patel? I cannot believe it's called the Afeela. I can't believe that we all have to say it. I can't believe that they said it. I can't believe they paid some consulting company like millions of dollars for this name, but.
14:25 Alex Cranz? I can't believe we've only done one pun about it. I think like, that's very impressive.
14:29 Nilay Patel? It's just the beginning of the year. We'll come back to it.
14:32 Alex Cranz? It's true.
14:33 Nilay Patel? So that's like, I would say this is the news out of CS is this Sony Honda mobility new brand of a car. It's whatever it is talking about. I'm just calling it right now. This thing is pure vapor and will never ship.
14:44 Speaker 03 Do you think they'll ever ship any kind of Sony car or just not this?
14:47 Nilay Patel? It's not this. And if you, even if you think about, we talked about this show so many times, like this is not the kind of car that people are buying. People buy midsize crossover SUVs. So showing up with your weirdo sedan, like you can't even get the tax credits for this right now in the United States. The tax credits are all for SUVs. You know the Tesla Model Y and the Mustang Mach-E aren't getting a tax credit because they're classified as sedans?
15:09 Alex Cranz? So good.
15:10 Nilay Patel? I mean, it's just fully silly.
15:11 Alex Cranz? Just put a lift kit on it. They'll be fine.
15:14 Nilay Patel? You like roll up to the IRS with your lifted Model Y.
15:18 Alex Cranz? This is SUV now.
15:20 Nilay Patel? All right. Other car stuff at CS. I'm just calling it. If you believe that a Fila will ship, let us know. If you work at Sony and you can show us a working production unit of the, I will, we'll talk about it, but it's, I mean, it's called the Fila. Okay. Here's my other question. Will they change the name if it ever ships?
15:37 Alex Cranz? No, they have to keep it.
15:38 Nilay Patel? They're committed to it now.
15:39 Alex Cranz? I mean, they will absolutely change the name, but I think even now we need to say you cannot change the name. You made your choice. You got drunk at the club a couple of years ago. You bonded, you agreed, you can't, no take backs. It's a feel.
15:54 Nilay Patel? William outside of the truck. He's like, here. You promised me. All right.
16:03 Speaker 03 Where is William? How is he not, how's he not involved in this? After all the tech stuff that he
16:07 Alex Cranz? This is the most him.
16:08 Speaker 03 Somehow this launches and he's nowhere to be found. That's suspicious. That is very suspicious.
16:12 Alex Cranz? Did they name the execs who worked on it?
16:14 Nilay Patel? No, if William worked on this, he would have been named the creative director of a Fila.
16:18 Alex Cranz? Theoretically.
16:19 Nilay Patel? Which is his title with all the things he works on. We once did an article and I think the headline is William is the kiss of death because every tech product that he has ever launched as a creative director has been a spectacular flop. Dan Sevier once published the headline, like, William's bracelet, like, I don't want it to touch my body. It's Dan. If you've encountered Dan Sevier before, he's not prone to bursts of hyperbole.
16:44 Alex Cranz? No.
16:44 Nilay Patel? And he's like, I don't want this thing near my body.
16:47 Alex Cranz? Like, don't even want to look at it. Touches his hair, he's upset.
16:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's been a couple of years since we've covered a bad William gadget. This is his moment. All right. We started with BMW, the iVision D. It, it talks.
16:58 Alex Cranz? It's your friend. Cause this was the one that had the Arnold Schwarzenegger commercial attached to it, right?
17:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
17:04 Alex Cranz? Where he spends the whole time talking about how they're going to be best friends. And then he like helps a lady hook up with some dude and they never show the most interesting part of the car.
17:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that, that's CS in a nutshell is they have a celebrity.
17:16 Alex Cranz? That's right.
17:16 Nilay Patel? They did a skit. They didn't show you the product. Let me just give you, so the iVision D is a kind of like a retro futuristic BMW.
17:23 Alex Cranz? Right.
17:23 Nilay Patel? It's got some like Camaro vibes in the front end, like sixties Camaro vibes in the front end.
17:29 Alex Cranz? But it's got the ugly, everybody's doing these ugly hubcaps.
17:32 Nilay Patel? That's, that's just like, that means EVs.
17:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they're bad.
17:35 Nilay Patel? So iVision D stands for digital emotional experience, D E E. Let me just read this word to you. The headlights and the closed BMW kidney grill also form a common fidget to dull icon on a uniformed surface, allowing the vehicle to produce different facial expressions. And what they mean by fidgetal is the combination of the word physical and digital.
18:02 Speaker 03 They were supposed to launch an NFT with this, but then they canceled it when the prices crashed and they couldn't get fidgetal out of the press release. That's what happened because that's the only place where they use this word.
18:16 Nilay Patel? It's very bad. The whole point of this is that it has this assistant and then in the inside of this car, we don't really know what the car is going to look like or if it really exists because all the pictures are renders. But the whole point of this is that it will talk back to you and that your driver, you can create like a metaverse avatar, which can be projected onto the side window of the car.
18:37 Alex Cranz? Like, those are all things I do not want in my life.
18:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, this was the NFT car. This was supposed to have your ape on the outside and then they realized they couldn't do that. And they just, they still had the car renders laying around and they had to do something with it.
18:49 Alex Cranz? Like, oops.
18:50 Speaker 03 They had, they had already mocked those up.
18:51 Nilay Patel? Wait, is that real? This was an NFT car?
18:53 Alex Cranz? So they just dropped it?
18:54 Speaker 03 I mean, that must be the truth because every single thing about it matches with NFT reality, mixed reality. You put your avatar on the outside. This is a tokenized vehicle. This is a metaverse experience from BMW.
19:08 Nilay Patel? And then they just didn't say the NFT parts because that's anathema right now.
19:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:13 Alex Cranz? Does it have the BMW logo on it?
19:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah, yeah, it's got the round eye on the front.
19:17 Alex Cranz? Okay, there it is. Very tiny.
19:20 Nilay Patel? It is truly one of the strangest, strangest cars I've ever seen. It's, you just gotta go look at the pictures. It's all renders. This is the most vaporware car we have ever covered. Like, it does, even the prototype doesn't exist. It's great. I love it.
19:35 Alex Cranz? It's so goofy.
19:37 Nilay Patel? Anyway, BMW is a company charging subscriptions for heated seats. So we'll see if they're weird. Non-NFT, NFT car succeeds.
19:44 Alex Cranz? But what's annoying about it is that there's one part of it that is real. And they did last year and they showed off in this giant render that kind of like destroyed all of my hope in humanity. And that's that it has the e Ink panels that we saw last year, but in color.
20:02 Nilay Patel? I mean,
20:02 Alex Cranz? because like we saw the cars last year, they had real cars driving around CES last year with real e Ink panels in it. And this year they have real fake cars driving around in real fake reality with actual real e Ink panels, which is this new like tech called Prism 3 from e Ink. And that's really, really cool. And I'm really annoyed because that's actually really, really cool, real technology paired with like the cartoon car with your NFT on the face.
20:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I will say that the fact that there are no actual pictures of the iVision D makes me wonder.
20:36 Alex Cranz? It's just all in motion.
20:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:39 Alex Cranz? And there's no real person driving it. It's always a cartoon lady driving it.
20:42 Nilay Patel? Or it's like really far away.
20:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
20:44 Nilay Patel? I guess there's one picture of a guy, but then like in this picture, the car is all white.
20:51 Nilay Patel? Again.
20:51 Speaker 03 I'm watching this video and it's blowing my mind.
20:53 Nilay Patel? Why is that?
20:54 Speaker 03 I don't know why I don't know why the Terminator is here. I don't know.
20:59 Nilay Patel? Oh yeah, no, you have to go watch the video. This is what Alex was talking about. This is what Alex was saying at the start, like this is the video is the most CES thing you can watch.
21:05 Alex Cranz? The video is so good.
21:06 Nilay Patel? Like Arnold Schwarzenegger is in it.
21:07 Alex Cranz? But they don't show the panels.
21:09 Nilay Patel? They don't show the panels, except for the last shot where they're like helicopter overing, they're helicoptering over the car. And then it's like, eh, rendery.
21:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
21:18 Nilay Patel? I don't know, I'm just saying.
21:19 Alex Cranz? It's not a real car.
21:20 Nilay Patel? Two of the most.
21:21 Alex Cranz? But the e Ink tech is real.
21:23 Nilay Patel? The e Ink tech is real, but is it mounted on a BMW that exists?
21:27 Alex Cranz? So, no. But it's like, e Ink sent me, they sent me a whole thing talking about it. It's their four particle ASAP system. And ASAP has two branches and one is what you get, which is like e readers, the new gallery three color e Ink that's coming out later this year. And then the other side is Prism 3, which is what is on this. And it's more like a mesh. It's not like actual panels. It's really weird. And I was like, oh, this is so exciting. Oh, it's on a fake car that will never exist and is all a cartoon.
22:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
22:07 Alex Cranz? I'm deeply disappointed.
22:08 Nilay Patel? I love it because I think the audacity of launching intensely vaporware cars at CES. For a long time, the way CES worked was we would see the insides of cars at CES.
22:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:20 Nilay Patel? Because that's where the screens were and we would hear about like whatever Q and X software upgrade was coming to like Jeeps next year. And then a week later at the Detroit Auto Show, we would see the outsides of cars.
22:31 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:32 Nilay Patel? And now we're just going for broke on what we just showed you entire fake cars.
22:37 Alex Cranz? What we just showed you a lot of really cool renders at CES with our big screens.
22:41 Nilay Patel? It's a lot. All right. Some other car news at CES, some good stuff here. Mercedes installing thousands of EV fast chargers across the United States. You're going to spend a billion dollars on it in conjunction with ChargePoint. They're going to install 400 of these hubs, each with approximately six charging stations, key cities, major highways. This is good. This is good news. They needed to do this a long time ago.
23:03 Alex Cranz? Did you see the part of the, the press release where they're like, but we're not going to put it in like some weird, by the rear dumpster in like a shady area. These are going to be nice charging points in nice areas.
23:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
23:14 Alex Cranz? Oh, is, is that a problem now?
23:16 Nilay Patel? It's a huge problem now.
23:18 Alex Cranz? Like, are they just like, where, where are the, I always assumed the chargers were always in the nice areas because everybody drives Teslas.
23:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah, the Tesla chargers are generally a nicer experience. Even some of those are weird.
23:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
23:29 Nilay Patel? But like your average Electrify America single charger is like broken.
23:34 Speaker 03 They might be anywhere.
23:35 Nilay Patel? Right. There's like coyotes howling in the distance. Even if you go watch our Ford Lightning review video, we went to the charger on the highway and it was next to a dumpster.
23:46 Alex Cranz? That's true.
23:48 Nilay Patel? And, you know, I have talked to many car CEOs and I always ask them about this and they've, they've been punting. And I think them admitting that the chargers are by dumpsters is an important sign of progress. Like step one, admit the chargers are currently by dumpsters. Step two, spend a billion dollars putting them somewhere else. So that's good news. A good bit of CS news from Mercedes there. Other little stuff car wise, Ring Car Cam, who knows why anybody wants this, the little ring dash cam.
24:17 Speaker 03 People were really interested in this story.
24:19 Nilay Patel? People love it. People love dash cams. Most dash cams are made it by weirdo brands.
24:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they love a dash cam and they're like, oh, I recognize this brand, but you don't want this brand. Go get like your weird, never heard of before company.
24:31 Nilay Patel? The one that
24:32 Alex Cranz? Dash cams.
24:33 Nilay Patel? One that isn't deeply embedded with the police already.
24:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:36 Nilay Patel? Great.
24:36 Alex Cranz? Don't get the police one.
24:37 Nilay Patel? Anyway, it's finally shipping for 200 bucks, the Ring's dash cam, 200 bucks. And then two little bits of Google Android Auto news. I mean, the first one is just hilarious. They have, Google put out a split screen version of Android Auto for cars with widescreen displays a little bit ago, and now it's really out to everyone. And they made a little video there and that's it. Yes. Nice bit of Google news. It looks exactly like CarPlay, like.
25:03 Alex Cranz? Just identical.
25:05 Speaker 03 CarPlay from like three years ago.
25:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
25:07 Speaker 03 Like Apple figured this out a while ago.
25:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's like, it's fairly funny that Apple and Google are in the cycle of just fully copying each other. And neither one of these things is that good. Just putting it out there. They're both fine. That's it. You cannot claim that they are anything better than fine, which is a meaningful step over what most car manufacturers could do.
25:33 Alex Cranz? I was supposed to say they're better than what the car manufacturers do. Cause if I have to do Mazda's built in system or Apple CarPlay, I'm going Apple CarPlay every time. The Mazda system is horrible.
25:44 Speaker 03 What, you don't like Honda's 2011 Android tablet?
25:48 Nilay Patel? Right.
25:50 Nilay Patel? This is like the curse of low expectations, right? You're like, our bar that we have to beat is Ford Sync actively torturing you.
26:00 Alex Cranz? Just kicking you in the pants.
26:02 Nilay Patel? We have to clear, yeah, is Mazda deleting all the money in your bank account when you try to put in a navigation waypoint or like whatever it is?
26:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
26:11 Nilay Patel? It's a low bar.
26:13 Alex Cranz? They cleared it.
26:14 Nilay Patel? And the fact, and now that they are converging on the same sort of mediocre. Yeah. That said, Google has new high-res maps that it's putting out first in the Volvo EX90, the new EV, and in the Polestar 3. And so you can see Google's, and you know, Volvo and Polestar both use like Android as the infotainment.
26:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
26:35 Nilay Patel? Stack. So you can see Google's pushing harder into cars. Like they're owning more and more cars. They're doing Google built-in. Do we talk about Google built-in on the Verchess yet? And how deeply confusing it is?
26:46 Speaker 03 Well, it's funny because they're redoing the same thing that happened with Android where you have Android and you also have Android with Google services where you can get like Gmail or, or in this case, Google Maps and YouTube maybe in the future someday. But everybody uses Android, but usually it's without Google Maps.
27:01 Nilay Patel? Right. So like Stellantis uses Android, but without any Google services. Then Honda just announced a new accord with Google built-in, which is something.
27:11 Alex Cranz? I can't believe they're betraying Sony already.
27:14 Nilay Patel? But it's something. They're running something, but with Google services like Google Maps.
27:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
27:20 Nilay Patel? And GM also has Google built-in, which is something, but with Google Maps. But unclear whether it's Android automotive. And then Volvo and Polestar run Android automotive, which is just Android and plus Google stuff. So now there's just these tiers of like Google being in your car. And you can see Google's strategy is basically whatever you want, as long as it's us. Whereas Apple's strategy is nothing.
27:45 Alex Cranz? Do they have a strategy? Remember? We got to see the whole car play. Just the way you, the exhaustion appeared on your face just then, thinking about it. That split second of no, I don't want to.
27:56 Nilay Patel? And then Sony's strategy of what if the front grille of your car showed up to people the weather? Which is good. It's not, I mean, it's, it's a service.
28:06 Alex Cranz? It's helpful.
28:07 Nilay Patel? For cars.
28:08 Speaker 03 Where's the Samsung car? Why, why don't we have the Samsung car?
28:11 Nilay Patel? That is strange that Samsung has.
28:13 Alex Cranz? With Bixby in it.
28:14 Nilay Patel? Well, I mean, the, the, you know, the Hyundai group is there with Hyundai and Kia and all the rest.
28:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
28:19 Nilay Patel? That, that's who was supposed to be making the Apple car. You could see Samsung just to walk down the street.
28:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
28:24 Nilay Patel? Right there.
28:26 Alex Cranz? They were, they were busy.
28:28 Nilay Patel? They were busy providing the chips to the Sony car that doesn't exist. Okay, that's car stuff. I gotta say, we started with the feel just because I wanted to get it out of the way.
28:37 Alex Cranz? I feel ya.
28:38 Nilay Patel? I'm not so much on Twitter anymore, but the number of people who tweeted me that we had to talk about a feel was very high, higher than anything else. But CS is a TV show. That's what it's really for. This is, this is where the action happens in the TV world.
28:50 Alex Cranz? Right.
28:51 Nilay Patel? One memory I do have of CS with Richard is the HD DVD versus Blu-ray CES, which was incredible, where this was going to be the format war year at CES. And then before the show started, Toshiba just caved and they tore down the HD DVD booth.
29:07 Speaker 03 You could actually see that, you could actually see HD DVD fall apart in real time, in real life in front of them. I've never experienced something like that before because it was like, it was like watching a dream die, except the dream actually existed.
29:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it was truly bizarre, but this year CS a little calmer, a lot of TV upgrades, some interesting ideas about picture modes. Like, we're in a mature part of a TV cycle, right? We're not insisting.
29:32 Alex Cranz? Like HDR has come, they got it, they figured it out.
29:36 Nilay Patel? Have they figured it out?
29:37 Alex Cranz? We're done, like, they're like, okay, we know, we know what to sell you. Yeah, I mean, they, they figured out, like, they know that their new thing is, they can't just force you to buy a new TV because of 4K. So they pivoted to HDR and they've now realized that's not exactly great. So they're just gonna like, kinda hang out and, and improve the TVs until they figure out some reason to really force you to upgrade again. Like, they're all really missing.
30:01 Nilay Patel? Which will be 3D again. It's gonna be Avatar 2, Way of Water is gonna hit on streaming and it's gonna be 3D again, I promise you.
30:08 Alex Cranz? For like a week.
30:09 Nilay Patel? If you go back and read some of James Cameron's quotes about Avatar coming out on Blu-ray in 3D, and he was like, this shit's the future from back then. Yes, he got distracted. Yes, it's been like four decades since that movie came out, but his heart is still pure.
30:24 Nilay Patel? He thinks home 3D is gonna happen and Avatar is gonna make it happen again. But it's true, like Alex is saying, we are in a mature part of the TV cycle.
30:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
30:32 Nilay Patel? HDR, like, I think, Richard, the way I would say it is, when Apple caved and added HDR 10+ to the Apple TV, because Samsung wasn't gonna break and add Dolby Vision, like, then you know, like, all the fights are over, there are no more fights, it's just incremental. But there's still some stuff. Alex, ATSC 3.0 news, your favorite?
30:53 Alex Cranz? Very, very exciting news.
30:55 Nilay Patel? Can you just tell people what it is?
30:57 Alex Cranz? So ATSC 3.0 is the next, like, broadcasting standard. For the four of you and my mom who still watch broadcast TV, I'm surprised she's not watching it in another room right now at her house. It just, it's supposed to be better because you can not only get it through, like, an antenna, but you can get it through 5G. So like, you and somebody else can both be sitting together on your couch, watching live TV on your phone, without having to go through Spectrum, or Charter, or whoever your provider is, just watching it over the air through 5G. So like theoretically, really, really, really, really cool, right? But nobody's actually adopting it, there's very few markets that have it. New York City doesn't have it, and it's a whole weird, complex problem.
31:42 Alex Cranz? We'll hopefully talk about more on a future episode of this show. But like, I'm in Dallas-Fort Worth right now, one of the largest markets in the United States. I think we've got like, one station that has it? And it's crazy, because ATSC 3.0 is like, could solve so many problems, but everybody's kind of figured out, no, we don't want to do broadcasts, we all want to have our little fiefdoms that you pay a subscription for.
32:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
32:03 Alex Cranz? We're just gonna do that, suck it broadcasts, slowly die, and broadcast is like, okay, ATSC 3.0, we're on 5G now. And so that was the big news. They did a test a couple of weeks ago, and they announced it this week, that they had, like, successfully shown off, like, 5G over-the-air broadcasting in a moving car, which is like, kind of hard to do, right? Like, if you've ever had to mess with antennas in your house to watch broadcast TV, now imagine doing that while driving 60 miles per hour down the highway. That's like, not easy to do. So it is kind of impressive technology, but the fact that none of the markets are adopting it is bad.
32:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah, well, because all those local news stations are getting sucked up into.
32:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
32:43 Nilay Patel? I mean, there's an entire like media ownership crisis.
32:46 Alex Cranz? Well, it was interesting because one of the biggest ones was Sinclair and Sinclair was actually part of this big announcement. So they like Sinclair, who's who kind of has bought a lot of these broadcast stations. They're very committed to like ATSC 3.0, but also it's Sinclair, who has a lot of issues.
33:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah, they're also committed to not spending money.
33:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah. So we'll see. Come on it, guys. You can do it.
33:07 Nilay Patel? I'm pretty sure there's one ATSC 3.0 broadcaster by my my house up in the woods. And they have chosen to use the additional bandwidth, not for higher picture quality, but to shove more infomercials.
33:18 Alex Cranz? Yes.
33:19 Nilay Patel? And like sub channels of infomercials. It's very good.
33:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that was that was part of it. They're like, oh, yeah, we can do so many more channels on a channel. So you can get a lot more advertising. And I was like, is that a good thing? And they're like, oh, yeah.
33:29 Nilay Patel? It's not a good thing. All right, let's talk about some actual TVs. LG had a bunch of TVs. I actually want to start not with their weird wireless TV, which you can talk about for a minute, but with this picture modes thing. So if you will remember, LG owns WebOS. I feel like every year at CS is just me recapitulating the last 20 years of tech history. So there was there was some.
33:49 Speaker 03 WebOS isn't dead. It's still here. Like that, that we should celebrate that. We should celebrate that. It should be a holiday, a national holiday.
33:56 Nilay Patel? It's true. So the Palm Pre was announced at CS. What am I doing?
34:03 Nilay Patel? In 2008, the Palm Pre was announced at CS. Matthias Duarte, who now works at Google is the head of design of Android and Google. He announced the Palm Pre along with this new system called WebOS. You might have heard of it if you have ever listened to this show before. Many things happened, including the complete collapse of Hewlett Packard.
34:26 Nilay Patel? And WebOS somehow ended up in the hands of LG, which used it not to make phones, but to put on their TVs. And their whole thing was they needed their own, basically TV apps are all HTML5 apps.
34:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:39 Nilay Patel? So they needed their own stack to run HTML5 apps. TV world, by the way, is still the most fragmented technology landscape in the entire like ecosystem. Like phones, like Android and iOS laptops are like. macOS, Windows, a little Linux. TVs are Samsung has Tizen, LG has WebOS. A bunch of people have Android from Google. A bunch of people have Android without Google. A bunch of people have Roku. And then there's like yet more infinity craziness. Vizio runs its own weird thing. So TVs are totally all over the place. They all run basically H95 apps. LG has WebOS, does WebOS. Their big thing is they introduced a character. This is a true story. Etsy is called Bean Bird.
35:20 Alex Cranz? No.
35:21 Nilay Patel? Who is gonna help you. This is true. This is real. It's gonna help you set up your TV. And the idea was that your TV was too hard to use. And Bean Bird would help you. They've held on to this idea. Bean Bird may have disappeared. But the idea that the TV should be more helpful and LG can help you set it up and then target more advertising TV has persisted.
35:40 Alex Cranz? Thank you, LG.
35:41 Nilay Patel? So now they've got this thing where instead of doing picture modes, when you turn on your LG TV, it's gonna show you images on the screen. And then you can like click through them and tell them which ones you like. And then that will adjust your picture settings. And this is gonna result.
35:56 Speaker 03 So it's like going to the eye doctor.
35:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's the eye doctor. Which one do you like better? This one or the like? You go look at the pictures on our website. You can see it. And this is gonna result in the most bonkers, insane picture settings on grandparents TVs of all time.
36:11 Alex Cranz? Like it's gonna be so bad.
36:12 Nilay Patel? Fully blown out hall, highlights, massive contrast, brightness cringe to oblivion.
36:18 Alex Cranz? It's gonna be the worst thing in the world. Like right now, I'm watching a show I can't talk about yet on it. That's coming out on HBO. It's a beautiful, touching story of a dad and his surrogate daughter. And it is so damn dark. And every day my mom's watching it with me. And she's like, this is dark. I can't see anything. Can we turn the brightness up? And I refuse to allow it because I've already calibrated her TV. And I'm like, no, this is what they intended. And this is just gonna ruin the creator's intent. It's super sad. But it's also, I guess it'll make people happier with their sets. I know that our producer Liam was talking about.
36:56 Speaker 03 Will any of the automatic settings turn off the soap opera effect? Because I feel like the answer is no. The TV manufacturers have just decided that's how you're going to live unless you go in and change.
37:05 Nilay Patel? No, no, they have, they have film mode now. They gave Tom Cruise a mode.
37:08 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I hope it shows them a clip when they're having to select. They're like, which one looks nicer to you? Minions 2. In super fast soap opera mode or not, and I hope they all choose the soap opera mode.
37:21 Nilay Patel? I think we're about to learn that one LG is collecting a ton of data with this feature. I mean, LG is the worst offender when it comes to running ads on their TVs, by far the worst. They're gonna have the, they're gonna be armed in the next meeting with like Tom Cruise and Christopher Nolan, the people like the soap opera effect. And two, I think we're gonna learn that people have just bonkers taste when it comes to picture quality. So yeah, they need the reference modes, they're starting to add, but then they're, they're doing this new thing where people get, I mean, you should just pick, it's called the personalized picture wizard, and it's gonna show you six images and like step you through eight times, and you pick the one you like. And there's AI involved. And a lot of TVs are gonna look completely insane.
38:03 Alex Cranz? What I don't get is why they don't just set everything in like cinema mode, which is calibrated to be exactly like what the calibration specs for all the people making it do, and then just change the brightness.
38:16 Nilay Patel? Because people have bad taste.
38:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but like, don't let them have taste.
38:22 Nilay Patel? All right.
38:22 Alex Cranz? Remove options. Just be like, no, you're dumb.
38:25 Nilay Patel? I want you to do, I want you to charge your mouse on the bottom. I know what's best for you.
38:30 Alex Cranz? I'm not asking that. I'm just saying, you know what? It's supposed to look a little yellow.
38:34 Nilay Patel? All right, we should talk about other TVs. It is supposed to look a little. You're correct.
38:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
38:39 Nilay Patel? People want bright and blue.
38:40 Alex Cranz? I hate them.
38:41 Speaker 03 It's exactly what we're talking about. And exactly what Alex is talking about. Samsung with their new TVs, they've got rhino mono mode. Now, now, we like, we've talked about the settings, but this is like a technology that they're building that it translates from Latin to return the light. It uses Samsung AI, of course, to dynamically outline the edges of on-screen elements and rebalance colors. It's supposed to be, it's supposed to help people with low vision. But as you said, you're going to come to your parents' house, and you're gonna find out that they have this thing on, and you are going to see something that you have never even imagined could exist on a display. Relumino mode.
39:15 Nilay Patel? This is because we're all home from the holidays. We're all dealing with it, but it's there. It never stops. It never goes away. I turned off motion smoothing on a TV that I personally turned off motion smoothing two years ago and it just came back and they denied it. They said, we don't even watch this TV. And I said, no, it's back and relumino mode is coming. We started with this wireless LG TV. This makes no sense to me. So it's super expensive. It has a breakout HDMI box. So you mount the TV on your wall. It's got a super thin power cord. And then somewhere else in your room, you plug everything into this box, which then transmits wirelessly to this TV.
39:52 Alex Cranz? It's for the aesthetic.
39:53 Nilay Patel? I mean, it's a 97 inch screen. We're assuming it will be extremely expensive. The last time LG showed off a concept, this TV itself was like a hundred thousand dollars in the end. I'm just saying, if you have the money for the intense concept 97 inch TV, that still needs power, you still have to hide the power cable. Do you not have the money to hide another cable?
40:16 Alex Cranz? I think this is like, they're just doing a really nice service for installers who are realistically the people setting these TVs up, right? Like if you're spending the money to buy a 97 inch TV for however much this is going to be thousands and thousands of dollars, you're probably paying an installer to come in and install it and make it all look pretty in your house. And this is just nice for those installers because instead of having to like hide a whole bunch of cords, they have to hide.
40:42 Nilay Patel? One cord.
40:43 Alex Cranz? One cord.
40:44 Nilay Patel? One, one cord.
40:46 Alex Cranz? And it's, that's one less than Samsung on their old high end TVs, which had the breakout box and like the fiber optic cord.
40:52 Speaker 03 I'm just confused because didn't we do this already with like all those wide eye demos? We went to 10 years ago.
40:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but this is, I mean, this is, they're sending 4K, 120, 30 feet wirelessly, which is insane.
41:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
41:04 Speaker 03 The video would have been compressed and this is uncompressed, pure, it's processed in the box. The only thing on the screen is the display and no electronics or whatever. It's paper thin, right?
41:13 Alex Cranz? I can't wait to see what happens when your kid is like microwaving some hot wings while you're watching a football game and it just craps out.
41:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't trust anything wireless as I think our readers know.
41:25 Alex Cranz? But I think it's, I think it's cool. Like, I think if you can bring this, we've started to see Samsung slowly bring this like breakout box idea down into more affordable products. I say more affordable. I mean, like, what was it, the $3,000?
41:38 Nilay Patel? The Frame TV was on sale for 800 bucks this last.
41:41 Alex Cranz? Like, they, they, they brought those prices down. If you could do that, the same with this, I personally would never do it because I love wires. But for a lot of people, those people who like, like to put their TV over their fireplace, even though you should never, ever do that, this is like a dream come true.
41:57 Nilay Patel? But you still have to run power. If you have to run a power cable, you can run one HDMI cable.
42:02 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but what about their Xbox and their PS5?
42:05 Nilay Patel? But that cable, just you run it into the breakout box, like the Frame TV. You connect everything.
42:09 Alex Cranz? So you're just saying we should just have the breakout box?
42:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, that's what most TVs, they've just eliminated the cable from the TV, the panel to the breakout box.
42:17 Alex Cranz? I know, but like, there was a long time where people were like, why do I need cordless headphones? They're bad and stupid, and they still are, and people still love it.
42:25 Nilay Patel? We just did an entire episode on Bluetooth, Alex.
42:29 Alex Cranz? I know, and as everyone listening knows, I know nothing about Bluetooth. Nothing.
42:37 Nilay Patel? No, I'm just saying, like, the, the limitations, I, I just don't get it. If you have $100,000 to put this TV in your wall, and you've got to run power, what does the breakout box get you?
42:50 Alex Cranz? One less wire.
42:52 Nilay Patel? One less wire.
42:53 Speaker 03 You can play physical games without getting off the couch. You can have everything, everything you've ever wanted. You can have your, your physical media archives, but you don't have to get off the couch to change the movie or the game. It's, it's perfect. What could be better?
43:07 Alex Cranz? So you just have a big, like, tower next to your couch. It's gonna be great. The future.
43:11 Speaker 03 We're all still using this.
43:13 Nilay Patel? That said, we don't know what the input lag, they won't say what the input lag is. Other, we'll just quickly go through some other stuff. Roku announced its own TV line. The only thing I want to point out here, this makes sense, Roku's been making TVs in partnership with TCL for years. Now they're just putting their own branding on TVs. TVs seem like they're going to be one step down from TCL's TVs. And just like, they, they, they won't talk about specs, and that usually means the specs aren't going to be top of line specs, right?
43:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they'll be cheap.
43:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah, they will be cheap. Chris Welch wrote this up for us. He noted that the person in charge of Roku's TV efforts, former TCL executive Chris Larson. So they're just keeping that in the family. This feels like GM, like some things are a Buick and some things are a Chevy, but they're all the same car. It seems like what's happening with, because Roku's not making the TVs. They're definitely rebranding something. So whether it's TCL or Hi-Sense or whatever, who knows? But my guess is-
44:03 Alex Cranz? Insignia.
44:04 Nilay Patel? Insignia is also rebranded, whatever.
44:07 Alex Cranz? Damn it.
44:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Insignia is the Best Buy house brand, I think.
44:10 Alex Cranz? Whatever, whatever the insignia, whoever they go to, that's who Roku went to.
44:15 Nilay Patel? That's who Roku went to. Speaking of TCL, they've got new branding. They're, they have much higher end specs and they're totally, they've decided that gamers are their market, which I think is pretty interesting, actually. Because we, I think we have people on this on our staff, we definitely people like this on Polyon's staff, the number of people who in the pandemic now have like multiple TVs in their living room, so they can game side by side is fascinating to me. Richard just gave a very knowing look off to the side.
44:43 Speaker 03 There are two TVs behind me for no reason.
44:48 Nilay Patel? So I think that's fascinating. And then Razer made a soundbar that tracks your head in the room for, I mean, this is gonna sound horrible, but they've made a soundbar with IR trackers, like a Kinect, to figure out where your head is and then do surround sound based on where your head is in the room. Neither of you sound convinced by this?
45:05 Alex Cranz? I had, I had the original Leviathan and then I broke the, one of the cords on it and they couldn't, they were like, no, we don't sell, we don't have replacements for that. I even went to like the PR guy. I did like the thing that you should never do as a journalist. And I was like, do you know if, if you guys make these replacement cords? Because I personally want one. And he was like, no, we don't. I can get you one. And I was like, no, I'm not gonna take one that you like just go and take out of another box. You should just make these. So I'm, I'm, I'm over Razer soundbars.
45:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Well, this one is looking for your head with infrared.
45:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah, even more over this particular one.
45:38 Nilay Patel? And it will find you. We actually didn't talk about Samsung. Samsung, as always, announced a ton of TVs and Chris Welch, I think, dropped this story into Slack when he was done writing. He was like, this is an Eli's nightmare. Samsung is like all in on AI picture tricks. All in on remapping SDR to HDR content. All in on more processing enhancements. Just in general, we've like hit the point where the panels are all pretty good. And so now all the effort to differentiate the panels is happening on the backend and software. And I would say, well, it's just correct. This feels like my nightmare because it's all just weird processing tricks across the board.
46:19 Nilay Patel? And all I really want is just show me the movie as it was intended to be seen.
46:24 Alex Cranz? Please.
46:25 Speaker 03 What if we didn't do that?
46:28 Nilay Patel? Auto HDR remastering uses AI deep learning technology to analyze and apply real time HDR effects on standard dynamic range content on a scene by scene basis. It's like, uh.
46:38 Alex Cranz? I don't want that.
46:39 Nilay Patel? Really don't want you to do that. But people love really bright pictures. We'll see how it goes. So Samsung now is like everywhere, right? They're making standard LCDs. They're making micro LEDs and they're making OLEDs.
46:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they're like just a full stack.
46:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
46:54 Alex Cranz? Are they good? Do you want to own one for more than a year? Remains to be seen.
46:58 Nilay Patel? Here's my question. Is this final? Like I have a early, I think a B7, B6 LG OLED. It's totally fine. You think this is the year?
47:09 Alex Cranz? This is the year because I have a B7 and I don't want to be alone when I go and upgrade mine. So do it, Neil.
47:14 Speaker 03 Welch gave you the reason. He gave you the reason to get the new one this year. The one thing that we haven't talked about, what if they had a software upgrade that was good? There's something that changed in WebOS that he does like. The way the notifications pop up.
47:27 Alex Cranz? Oh.
47:28 Speaker 03 So they, not everything is bad or the worst. And some of the HDMI 2.1 features, maybe they'll even work this year.
47:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
47:36 Speaker 03 We'll have hope.
47:37 Nilay Patel? I have hope.
47:38 Speaker 04 You gotta at least wait for QD OLED to like actually spread out. Like so far it's just Sony with their highest end model, which I know they bought from LG Display, but like not even LG is making a TV with QD OLED yet. I would, I would wait for that.
47:54 Alex Cranz? I'm just going to get a reference monitor.
47:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's just like this TV is definitely good enough. And I mostly watch like ultra compressed streaming content. Like, you know?
48:03 Alex Cranz? It's fine.
48:04 Nilay Patel? All right, Alex, put together a Plex server of only the finest uncompressed Blu-ray ribs.
48:10 Alex Cranz? I got you.
48:10 Speaker 03 You're going to be watching Big Bunny for hours.
48:13 Nilay Patel? All right.
48:13 Alex Cranz? Will they all be from the 1930s? Probably.
48:15 Nilay Patel? We, the public domain with Alex Cranz.
48:22 Nilay Patel? Very good. There, look, there is a bunch of other CS display stuff. Samsung had a bunch of rolly foldy displays, lots of prototypes, hard to talk.
48:31 Speaker 03 Dell 6K?
48:33 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah, there actually a bunch of people came at the proto display XDR Dell and Samsung. Samsung kids 5K display Dell had the 32 inch 6K. That's pretty cool. It's need to see a little competition in there. Like I said, CS is display show. So go look on the site. It's hard to talk about displays, especially go look at all the Samsung prototypes because they're cool as hell. They're just not products. And I think the TV market is super mature.
48:58 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:58 Nilay Patel? Like the answer is like, if you want a TV there, you're not waiting for anything better right now. Like you might as well, which is how I justify all multi thousand dollar purchases.
49:07 Alex Cranz? It's gonna be a huge game changer next year.
49:08 Speaker 03 You need the new TV because it will have the NFT app store. We're going crypto this year. That's my, that's my goal. I'm going to sell all of you tokens. We're going to do this together. We're not going to let, we're not going to let.
49:20 Alex Cranz? There's a fire sale on FTX tokens. Go stock up, Richard.
49:22 Speaker 03 Well, once the marketplace is reopened and we can access them, yes, we're having a little problem, but it'll be fine.
49:29 Nilay Patel? All right. Like I said, CS is a display show, lots of TV news. Chris Welch has done an amazing job. If you want all the details on the stuff, go read his coverage, go look at the TikToks and displays folding. We got to take a break. We come back. There's still more. There's desktop, there's laptops. I'm sure Richard will find a way to make that about crypto too. We'll be right back.
49:54 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.
50:42 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. There's still more CS stuff to talk about. It does feel like I'm a little drunk. I'm not.
50:49 Alex Cranz? Had a little.
50:50 Nilay Patel? But just.
50:51 Alex Cranz? Little vodka.
50:52 Nilay Patel? Talking about gadgets in Vegas for long enough, you get a little. Takes you to a place.
50:56 Alex Cranz? Get a little tipsy.
50:57 Nilay Patel? Get a little out there.
50:58 Alex Cranz? Suddenly you're just smelling cigarette smoke and you don't know why. Having a great time.
51:02 Nilay Patel? I got a text from an unnamed former colleague and all it said was, "I'm jonesing for a Juul." And I realized that I was, and I haven't in years. And it's just, I think my body expects nicotine in early January.
51:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:18 Nilay Patel? Because of CES.
51:20 Alex Cranz? It's just gotten used to it.
51:21 Nilay Patel? It's just, this is when you smoke, bro. Where are we at?
51:26 Alex Cranz? Liam's just vaping furiously.
51:28 Nilay Patel? That's horrible. Don't vape, kids. Don't listen to us. Turn this off. Get out of your car and run away from us. AMD announced a bunch of stuff. Alex, take us through it.
51:38 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they announced a lot of stuff. AMD, this is kind of a big show for them. And they usually save some really big stuff for it. One of the big things they announced is like a really fast mobile GPU, the RX 7600M. It's expected this year in 2023 and they're promising basically Nvidia 3060 desktop performance in a laptop, which is like really, really nice. We're not quite at like 4K, 100 frames per second, but we're definitely at that for 1080p. So, which is what a lot of laptops are at right now. So this is like gonna be pretty fast. It's a nice bonus, but we don't know what that power consumption
52:23 Alex Cranz? is gonna look like and just how much battery life these things are gonna crush. I predict a lot.
52:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:30 Alex Cranz? AMD's gotten a lot better at this, but they're still not like, they're not Apple. Apple is just schooling everybody when it comes to power. And and performance, but
52:41 Speaker 03 But not necessarily in the GPU side.
52:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but I mean, kind of even in the GPU side, right? Like, it's not at the same level. And and Apple GPU is not going to ever give you the same performance. Or an Apple chip isn't going to give you the same performance as one of these discrete graphics chips. But it's still like the the power consumption is still going to be a problem. This is still probably not going to be a 10 hour laptop.
53:05 Speaker 03 Right.
53:05 Alex Cranz? I mean, I hope it is, but I I highly doubt it. And then the other, the other big news was new CPUs. All, yeah, new mobile processors. This is, they've got, including one that's got a 16 core chip, which isn't quite as many as one of the newer Intel mobile processors, which has a 24 core chip. And it's very, but it is very funny because these guys are still talking about cores. And Apple's over here being like, no, we don't even have to talk about that anymore. We've moved beyond that. Like, sorry, I'm just, I'm using AMD time to stand about Apple. And I feel really bad about it, but the Apple.
53:40 Speaker 03 You're gonna call that for this.
53:42 Alex Cranz? I I am, but the processors are good.
53:44 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, it's it's interesting what they're doing here because it's only 16 cores, but it's not like Intel's kind of big, little arm star, arm style approach they're using on the new chips. Like, they're all 16 or all big cores, I guess. Or like two, it's like two full eight core chips squeezed into one is is what it's described as.
54:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah, I think we're starting to, I think what we're gonna, we're starting to see, and we're going to continue to see is that AMD has gotten a lot of work out of Infinity Fabric, right? Like, they've gotten a lot of play over the last six years out of Infinity Fabric, which is to let them to just bolt GPUs and CPUs together, just bolt core after core after core onto these processors and get a lot of power. And everybody else has really started to pivot in this other direction, this big, little core. And AMD is doing a little bit of that, too, across the board. But they're a little behind. I'm kind of worried. I know they've talked, a number of people have talked to Lisa Su, the CEO, being like,
54:40 Alex Cranz? are you guys falling behind again? Are we about to see, are we going to get another bulldozer in a year or two? And obviously she's saying, no, they are not going to drop the ball catastrophically. And we're seeing a lot of work, like, good work in that mobile space, right? Like, the Steam Deck uses an AMD processor and their laptops have gotten a lot better, but they still got a lot of catching up to do. I would say they're still better than Intel for the most part. Like, these processors are still going to be faster, if you can find them in a product, than the Intel processors. But a lot of people are really going, no, I want something that is fast and has really good battery life. I don't necessarily care about having the fastest thing in the world in a mobile chip.
55:21 Speaker 03 And how will they find it with these names?
55:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
55:24 Speaker 03 Because I feel like we haven't got enough credit. They changed the naming scheme for the processors this year.
55:28 Alex Cranz? Oh, I got it. You don't like the names?
55:31 Speaker 03 So everything is a 7000 series this year? And then the third number tells you how good it is and not the first number like it used to be?
55:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:40 Speaker 03 Like, you have to read a chart to figure out what the numbers mean now.
55:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah, everything is a, I'll just read from Monica's post here. The potential star of the show is the, quote, Dragon Range Zen 4 Ryzen 9 7945HX. Rolls right off the top.
55:57 Speaker 03 Their new naming scheme.
55:58 Alex Cranz? I mean, that's the way they've always done it, though. No, I
56:01 Nilay Patel? Yes, this is what they've picked.
56:03 Alex Cranz? This is the same naming scheme, right? They've always had the first number as the generation.
56:07 Speaker 03 They changed the, it's always been numbers like this, but they changed the way that the numbers go. It's still four letters and then it's still four numbers and then a letter. But the, it's, the first number is the portfolio year. So it's seven this year for 2023. The second number is market segment. Uh, so like, the most powerful ones are nine, one is the one that you shouldn't buy. The third number is the Zen architecture, so like, one, two, or three. And then the fourth number is, I don't know what that fourth number is. I don't know. Feature isolation. You, I'm done. I've got nothing.
56:37 Alex Cranz? It's a five.
56:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's deeply confusing. The good news is the people who buy the chips directly to install in PCs directly will figure it out, right? If you're out there just like buying bare CPUs, you're gonna, you're gonna figure this out.
56:53 Speaker 03 Maybe. AMD had some problems with the wrong names on their CPUs during the press conference, as Tom Warren noted. They repeatedly called them the wrong thing. So what's in the laptop? You get no assurance.
57:04 Nilay Patel? So AMD, but hopefully by the time they arrive on store shelves or your favorite online retailer, they'll figure it out. They'll be charts, whatever. It's the companies, it's the OEMs need to figure this out and then market the chips appropriately. At the same time, I think, is this AMD chip faster than that Intel chip? Impossible for the regular person to know at this moment in time, especially to Alex's point.
57:25 Alex Cranz? Well, impossible to even test. Like for the mobile chips, it's kind of, it's a toss up because you can't do just an apple to apples. Nobody's going to be making the exact same laptop and just switching out processors anymore.
57:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's enough of the laptops at CS are basically using the same chips and the same, like the features that we're competing on, which it very much echoes the TV conversation. Like everything has gotten to a place of like being good enough for samey enough that we're now differentiating on absolutely bonkers features. Which brings me, sorry, I just, I can't be talking about Ryzen chips when Lenovo is out there. Lenovo has a bunch of stuff. Lenovo has a new ThinkBook, which with modular accessories, like an LTE module, webcam light, all this other stuff. Cool new all-in-one with like a really neat stand.
58:13 Alex Cranz? Looks gorgeous.
58:14 Nilay Patel? They made a phone, the ThinkPad phone, which, well, none of this matters. The only reason that we're doing this show today is the YogaBook 9i.
58:21 Alex Cranz? E-ink tablet?
58:21 Nilay Patel? Not the E-ink tablet, their weird Kindle scribe that no one will black some for Alex. It's the YogaBook 9i, which is a dual-screen laptop. It has a stand that lets you stand both screens up in portrait configuration and then like a removable keyboard that comes with it. And then just, you gotta watch the video. Go watch the video. Monica's like over the moon about this thing. It looks so cool.
58:45 Alex Cranz? It looks like two iTads.
58:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
58:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like this, I like, I'm really excited because we've been seeing this exact like concept for years. For a while, you couldn't go to a single meeting with AMD or Intel without them showing off a concept like this and be like dual screens are coming. Microsoft is doing it too. Everybody would have these big meetings and then we show off this exact concept, but janky as hell. And this is like slightly less janky.
59:14 Nilay Patel? Dual 13.3 inch OLED touchscreens.
59:17 Alex Cranz? It's coming. You can actually buy it.
59:19 Nilay Patel? Extremely weird vertical stand. This thing is so like, I just like, watch this video. Watch this video to slight remove. You've all seen Monica. You've watched her review video. She's been on the show. She's so captivated by this thing that she's like, check out this easy 10 finger swipe. It's like, I don't know about that.
59:42 Nilay Patel? It's great. The thing looks amazing. This is like what YCS exists is this laptop. I can't wait to buy one. I'm 100% going to buy one and then realize that I have no need for this at all and not use it. But just look at the configurations.
59:57 Alex Cranz? Are you going to return it? Like, like, do we need to just time how long it takes you to to return it?
1:00:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna have it. I just like, look at it. You could put the, you could open it and then have both screens in portrait. So you like turn it sideways.
1:00:12 Alex Cranz? So you can read like a magazine.
1:00:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, or like one full screen Slack and one full screen dock and the keywords in front. You can swipe the, you can, and when the bottom screen is the keyboard, you can swipe the keyboard down to have keyboard in the front. And then you get a variety of status indicators that Lenovo thinks are important, but which are not important. It's so good.
1:00:29 Speaker 03 It has haptics, so it feels like you're typing when you're typing?
1:00:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there's no way that a laptop sized touchscreen keyboard is gonna feel good with its haptics. $2,100 13th gen Intel Core, I said, womp, womp, 16 gigs of RAM, though. And it's come, it's gonna ship in June as a pen. This is the future. You, whatever e-ink nonsense you think you love.
1:00:52 Alex Cranz? I think the most exciting thing about it is that the case and the pen and the keyboard are included.
1:00:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:00:59 Alex Cranz? That like, that was the part I was like, done.
1:01:01 Nilay Patel? It's a steal. How can you afford not to buy a Lenovo?
1:01:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Instead of 2500, it's 2000 for everything.
1:01:07 Nilay Patel? I can't even get the name right. I'm so excited about it. How could you not buy a Lenovo Yoga Book 9i? In the market for a Bluetooth keyboard? Have you considered the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i? Which comes with a full laptop with dual 13.3 inch OLEDs. I want it so badly. It's like, when I'm like, I kind of miss not being a CS. Like, the sensation of walking into a hotel suite that has been arranged to display hundreds of laptops and like weird breakout boxes for TVs. Like, I can smell that room.
1:01:35 Alex Cranz? You can smell that coffee.
1:01:35 Nilay Patel? Crackle of old coffee. Yeah.
1:01:37 Alex Cranz? Yes. Mmm. That one like little fruit salad in the corner, kind of getting a little old. It's beautiful.
1:01:45 Nilay Patel? No, whatever. It's the fruit salad.
1:01:46 Speaker 03 I just, I'm envisioning getting on a plane with this and pulling out my dual stack OLEDs in front of me that reach above my head.
1:01:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:01:54 Speaker 03 And I'm not.
1:01:55 Nilay Patel? No, first what you do is you walk, you walk up and down the aisle of that plane, finding the one dude with the Samsung Galaxy Fold who's hot shit. Cause that person is on every plane now. There's one dude with a stylus and a Galaxy Fold who's like, oh, oh, oh. Right? And then you, then you pull out your Yoga Book, just full, vertical unfold. You throw your keyboard in his lap, you start typing with your foot while you hold that thing up like a scroll.
1:02:21 Alex Cranz? Don't even sit down.
1:02:22 Nilay Patel? If I'm ever gonna get kicked off a plane, that's how I'm going out. I'm not doing any of this like comfort animal stuff. I'm doing, I'm doing old timey Navigator, one foot in the air on a keyboard, holding up the double stack OLED display. All right, that's enough. Uh, Arthur, do you want to talk about this Kindle Scribe?
1:02:43 Alex Cranz? I mean, it's, it's better than the Kindle Scribe because it can, it actually lets you do more note taking stuff. But it's also worse in that it doesn't have an app store. It has, it runs Android, but it doesn't have an app store. You can't sideload a lot of image types, a lot of book types. It's very, very hamstrung. It's very clearly meant less for people who want to read and more for like people who used to buy the Sony ePaper tablets. Where it just lets you do markups of PDFs. That's who this is for. And so like, cool, maybe it'll bring the price down on these note taking devices. Lenovo's been playing around with e-ink for a really long time. I love that they're doing like an all e-ink device, but I probably won't buy one.
1:03:27 Alex Cranz? I'd love to review on Lenovo. Call me.
1:03:30 Nilay Patel? Are you gonna look at the ThinkWip Plus, which has a color e-ink screen on the back of a regular display and you can swivel it around?
1:03:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah, well, they've been doing that for a while, but now it's just color. This is the year for color e-ink.
1:03:41 Nilay Patel? No, but now you can spin it around. It's on a swivel screen.
1:03:44 Alex Cranz? They had one with this. Yeah, they had one with a swivel, I'm pretty sure. Because they had the original ones, which was like the, the, the, like, it was a dual screen and you opened it up and one side was e-ink and the other was color. But then at one point they're like, okay, we're just gonna have a swivel. And you can just decide which screen you want to use.
1:04:01 Nilay Patel? If the next time I see you, you're not trying to operate the Verge on a color e-ink ThinkPad, I'm going to be very disappointed.
1:04:08 Alex Cranz? I got, I got some work to do. I'll call you guys later. Bye.
1:04:10 Nilay Patel? Um, I love the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook because it is a Chromebook with RGB keys. I am 1,000% buying one of these for my parents.
1:04:21 Alex Cranz? I love Monica's just like, but why?
1:04:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Monica refused to count this. It's like, the difference between her excitement over the YogaBook where she's like, you just gotta watch that video. She's, it's gleeful. She is gleeful to be looking at that laptop.
1:04:35 Alex Cranz? So happy.
1:04:35 Nilay Patel? It's infectious. And then she's like, why do these keys light up and no one can answer?
1:04:41 Nilay Patel? She also pointed out that the HP's Elite line is for professionals and the Pro line is for consumers. We're just like through, like, words have no meaning for Hewlett Packard at this point. So HP Elite.
1:04:54 Alex Cranz? You can only be elite if you have a job.
1:04:56 Nilay Patel? Enterprise professional products, HP Pro for consumers. Very good.
1:05:01 Speaker 03 Buying a computer with your own money.
1:05:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:05:04 Speaker 03 Not elite?
1:05:04 Nilay Patel? Not elite. But Pro.
1:05:08 Alex Cranz? It's real pro move.
1:05:10 Nilay Patel? I'm super into this. I'm, I bought my parents a Chrome, famously brought my parents a Chromebook years ago. It was the Chromebook Pixel, the $1,000 first Chromebook. And it, it is now end of life. They got a message while I was home saying that it would receive no more software updates, which is hilarious because it's just Chrome.
1:05:27 Alex Cranz? So you gotta get the new one.
1:05:28 Nilay Patel? It's years, so I gotta get the new one. I can't get them in Pixelbook. That's a way step down from a Chromebook Pixel.
1:05:33 Speaker 03 And now you can buy them the HP Dragonfly Pro Leotariat.
1:05:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah, you're a gamer now, Mom. It's like rainbow keys going. It's gonna be great. Uh, any other stuff we should talk about? Should we talk about the Razer Edge?
1:05:46 Alex Cranz? It's, it's cool. Like, I mean, this is, Razer's been doing a lot of work over the years with making mobile phones, and they've been doing a lot of work over the years with making controllers that you can plug into mobile phones. And then they said, what if it's all one thing and we work with Verizon to sell it?
1:06:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:06:04 Alex Cranz? And it's got 5G.
1:06:05 Nilay Patel? Who doesn't love 5G?
1:06:06 Speaker 03 And that's exactly what I was missing from the Steam Deck was the ability to buy it on contract from Verizon.
1:06:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:06:12 Nilay Patel? 360 bucks Wi-Fi only is 399. Think about that.
1:06:16 Alex Cranz? Yes. I mean, what a deal. I, I'll go with the Steam Deck. I'm gonna stick with the Steam Deck for right now, especially with Stadia dying in a couple of weeks.
1:06:24 Nilay Patel? I just think it's very funny that the pricing here is like, old school phone contract pricing.
1:06:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:06:29 Nilay Patel? The Wi-Fi only model costs 399. 5G model, without a contract, 599. But if you sign the Verizon contract, 359.
1:06:39 Alex Cranz? See?
1:06:40 Nilay Patel? The math is like, this is how much Verizon is soaking you for. It's $200.
1:06:44 Alex Cranz? So good.
1:06:46 Nilay Patel? It's pretty good. I don't know. It kind of looks like a Nexus 7. Every time I look at it, I'm like, it's a Nexus 7.
1:06:52 Alex Cranz? It's a Fablet. Like, the Fablet is back and Razer, Razer resurrected the Fablet and said, what if you stuck it in between two sides of controllers and had something for all of your cloud gaming? So if you don't already have a Steam Deck and you don't already have one of the other mini, like, mobile PC handhelds right now, this is, this is, this is an interesting option.
1:07:13 Nilay Patel? I think the big test here is whether Verizon's network can actually do cloud gaming like this, and we'll see. All right, we gotta take a break. We'll come back. We got a little bit of a CS Lightning round. It's not over yet. You're still in Vegas with us. We'll be right back.
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1:08:08 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Lightning round. Ready?
1:08:11 Alex Cranz? Yes.
1:08:11 Speaker 03 Let's go.
1:08:12 Alex Cranz? Let's go.
1:08:13 Nilay Patel? All right. Delta and T-Mobile making in-flight Wi-Fi free if you have SkyMiles. Sounds great. Also, if you just knew anybody with a T-Mobile phone number, you could have typed in that number for years, which I now feel comfortable disclosing.
1:08:25 Speaker 03 But it was weird before. It was like some flights it was like that, and in some flights it would not have that. So now it's just gonna be all flights free, whatever.
1:08:31 Nilay Patel? But there's this thing called Delta Sync. They're not giving you this thing for free. They are gonna target ads at you on this network somehow. They're talking about personalization, which is code for targeted ads. And as we know, ISPs, mobile carriers in particular, love to do weird ad targeting stuff, love to collect data in weird ways. I just want to read these terms of service before this thing goes live. That's all I'm saying.
1:09:00 Alex Cranz? Do they say how fast it'll be?
1:09:01 Nilay Patel? It's supposed to be fast enough for streaming because it's ViaSat. It's not the old GoGo stuff.
1:09:06 Alex Cranz? Okay.
1:09:06 Nilay Patel? So we'll see. Delta's also doing a test with Starlink, I think. A bunch of airlines are testing Starlink on the side. But I'm just, I'm flagging this one because free in-flight Wi-Fi is great, cool, whatever. When you add, when you just like throw the word "personalization" into the mix, I'm like, oh, they're gonna do some weird ad targeting.
1:09:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah, think about what you're using that Wi-Fi for. Don't, don't, don't, don't go to certain places with this Wi-Fi. Also because kids are around, but like...
1:09:30 Nilay Patel? Also because you're on a plane, Alex.
1:09:33 Alex Cranz? I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen. I've watched people just like load up on their phone. I'm like, okay.
1:09:41 Nilay Patel? We were flying home from Chicago and Becky was like, oh, don't worry, darling, it's on the plane. I might watch that. I'm like, no, you should not watch that on this plane right now.
1:09:49 Alex Cranz? Not the plane.
1:09:52 Nilay Patel? There's a new version of Qi, the wireless charging protocol Qi. It's called Qi two.
1:09:58 Alex Cranz? Our reviews editor Nathan Edwards is so excited about this.
1:10:01 Nilay Patel? Sean Holster ridiculously excited about this. Basically, what's happened here, unsurprisingly, there was Qi, the wireless standing, the wireless charging protocol. Apple took it, forked it into MagSafe.
1:10:13 Alex Cranz? Put some magnets on it.
1:10:14 Nilay Patel? Put some magnets on it, re-did the coils, did some authentication stuff to charge at a faster rate, but still back compatible with Qi. And now Apple says, we're going to give the magnet stuff to Qi. That's going to form the basis of Qi two. It'll allow for non-flat connectors, i.e. a watch. Very exciting all the way around. The magnets still will not be strong enough to hold up a phone, which is a huge miss. Just a huge miss for those of you like me who are addicted to buying car chargers for your phone. And unclear whether Qi two will be back compatible with MagSafe as it currently exists. So some bits and bobs here, but it looks like Apple decided that MagSafe, which is
1:10:55 Nilay Patel? like more or less not a success, but it's a success in that it exists in the Apple ecosystem.
1:11:02 Alex Cranz? And nobody adopted it.
1:11:04 Nilay Patel? And people like you can buy accessories for it, but the magnets are too weak to do anything particularly interesting. It's just, it's weird. Like my favorite MagSafe accessory is a little puck that I bought to mount by my bathroom mirror so I can watch TV in the morning while brushing my teeth.
1:11:21 Alex Cranz? Does it work?
1:11:22 Nilay Patel? It's awesome. It rules. I highly recommend you spend $15 on a MagSafe puck to mount next to your bathroom mirror so you can open YouTube in the morning. Your YouTube TV in my case. It's great. Just do it.
1:11:34 Alex Cranz? Richard doesn't look excited about that.
1:11:36 Speaker 03 I guess I'll find out in years now because now on Android, we'll have, we'll find out what MagSafe life is like. It's one of those things where, because it's only been on iPhone, like I've heard about it, I'm like, oh, that sounds cool. But I've never actually used it to find out what it doesn't do and like where the shortcomings are.
1:11:51 Nilay Patel? It just doesn't do a lot. It's a wireless charging thing with weak magnets. But what is true is that every iPhone now has magnets built into the back of it. So other companies can make stronger magnets for things like mounts and cases, which are neat.
1:12:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:12:06 Nilay Patel? But the, but the combination of I want strong magnets, 15 watt wireless charging, and something that doesn't look totally ugly has eluded every, and you need to be certified by Apple. That you can't, you can't.
1:12:19 Alex Cranz? Nobody's, nobody's cracked that one.
1:12:21 Nilay Patel? Nobody's pulled it off. So we're getting there. Well, I think the big question here is whether C2 with magnets will be back compatible with MagSafe, because I think the answer might be no.
1:12:31 Alex Cranz? Hmm.
1:12:32 Nilay Patel? There's some shadiness there. Bunch of smart home stuff. It's a big year for Matter.
1:12:37 Alex Cranz? It's the year for Matter.
1:12:39 Nilay Patel? It's the year for Matter. It's, I would say Matter has not gotten off to a raging start. Apple had to pull it, right? Remember they did the update for iOS. It didn't go well. They pulled it. Uh, but there's new bridges. There's new Eve.
1:12:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I mean, Jen, so Jen's at the show. We're going to talk to her a bunch next week about this, um, next Wednesday, but she says she's just seeing Matter everywhere. She's seeing it. Everybody's like, I have a new refrigerator with Matter in it. A new TV with Matter. Like everybody, that's, that's how they announce it. They announce all this stuff and they're like, and Matter. So she's seeing just everywhere on the show floor right now. So the thing I'm really about, excited about is there's this new Philips Hue app that you can get on Samsung TVs, and it will let you sync all of the lights on the back of your TV. If you put Philips Hue lights on the back of your TV, it'll let you sync it with all the content without having to go through a breakout box.
1:13:36 Alex Cranz? But because they still want money, you have to pay $130 for the app.
1:13:43 Nilay Patel? That's pretty good.
1:13:44 Alex Cranz? You don't know if you can take that app with you when you, if your TV dies and you get a new TV, well, you have to pay another $130. There's a bunch of questions about this. Also, like, why not just make Samsung pay for the technology? And be like, hey, look, if you plug your Philips Hue lights into the new Samsung TVs, you can automatically sync.
1:14:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:14:06 Alex Cranz? There's just like a bunch of.
1:14:07 Nilay Patel? Or you can go buy any number of GoV kits on Amazon for like 50 bucks and accomplish this.
1:14:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but the GoV tip kits, you have to have like a camera pointed at your TV. This, you don't have to have anything pointed at it. You don't have to worry about like, oh, I really need this to go through HDMI 2.1 so that I can get the, and the box only does HDMI 2.0. You don't have to worry about any of that. You can just be like, go. It works with all those different apps on your TV and everything. So any like input to your TV, it does it.
1:14:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:14:35 Alex Cranz? But it's a $130 app.
1:14:37 Nilay Patel? Right. That's where you lose me. I, I, I understand the points you're making. I'm like, the GoV kit's like 50 bucks. You point a camera at your TV call today.
1:14:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:14:45 Nilay Patel? No more computers required.
1:14:47 Alex Cranz? It's very exciting and very stupid.
1:14:49 Nilay Patel? I love it. Jen also covered the weird wooden plank Matter controller. This is the thing I'm most excited about with Matter. At, at the end of the day is now you can make different kinds of smart home controllers because they can talk to everything. So she was like, here's a cutting board you can mount on the wall to turn your lights on and off. And I was like, yeah, I'm in it. Like this is what we need. It's gonna be good.
1:15:10 Alex Cranz? Exactly what we need.
1:15:11 Nilay Patel? And lastly, we should talk about this Withings pee sensor. You just stick it in your toilet and pee on it and it tells you how your metabolism is doing.
1:15:19 Alex Cranz? It's, it's, it's great. People really care about the pee sensor.
1:15:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I will say that the pee sensor did remarkable traffic. Here's a line from the story written by Victoria. It sounds relatively simple, but Withings is very serious about pee.
1:15:36 Nilay Patel? It took four years and 13 patents, but you don't have to do anything until it's time to recharge the reader or switch out cartridges. The reader, the pee reader that you put in your toilet, USB C, my friends.
1:15:46 Alex Cranz? Oh, yeah.
1:15:46 Nilay Patel? That's
1:15:46 Alex Cranz? We had a, we had a really long conversation about this in the editing process because I just had all the questions. I was like, well, like, do you have to touch it all the time? Like, are you having to, like, reach down there and touch the pee puck before to get to test it? And no, you don't. You stick it in there. There's some cartridges. It comes with some gloves. So if you want to hold on
1:16:05 Nilay Patel? Do you have to save the gloves between cartridge changes?
1:16:09 Alex Cranz? That's just like a polite thing. And the idea is anytime you pee on it, it'll detect it and do a test. So sometimes you may have to, like, do some, some shifting to make sure you're not peeing on it if you don't want to test. Because it has like 100 cartridges.
1:16:27 Nilay Patel? All right.
1:16:27 Alex Cranz? It's like 100 days of pee tests.
1:16:28 Speaker 03 We're not going to talk about the number one smart home story that at least surprised me. The shower pods, the Kohler.
1:16:34 Nilay Patel? Before we go on the shower pods, can I just read you this quote about data collection in the GDPR compliance of the pee sensor?
1:16:41 Alex Cranz? Yes.
1:16:41 Nilay Patel? And this is a quote, "It's our company guideline not to allow anyone to look at that data. We still need to look at the details regarding law enforcement." Just don't let the cops look at my pee, dude.
1:16:53 Alex Cranz? Don't show them my urine, please.
1:16:55 Nilay Patel? Very good. All right, Richard, what was your number one?
1:16:58 Speaker 03 The number one surprise, people could not get enough of this story. The shower pods are here to turn your bathrooms into a spa. They've got aromatherapy shower infusion system. Apparently, more than MagSafe, when you're brushing your teeth, this is what the people need. I don't know. I didn't quite get it, but the girls can get it.
1:17:13 Alex Cranz? This is for all the people who can still smell things.
1:17:15 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:17:16 Nilay Patel? Kohler loves doing gadgets at CES, like loves, loves it. I think last year they did like a $10,000 toilet.
1:17:22 Alex Cranz? For a plumbing company, they got big tech ambitions.
1:17:25 Nilay Patel? They do. I mean, this is just, uh, they're pods, you know, it's like a cure aromatherapy pods and like a shower that takes pods. There's not a lot of
1:17:34 Speaker 03 And probably a subscription package for your, for your shower. Like, I, I, I see that. I see the method now.
1:17:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah, yeah, they, they're going to sell you more pods. Here's a quote from their press release. Kohler says the pods are safe to use on your entire body, which
1:17:48 Nilay Patel? it's a shower.
1:17:51 Speaker 03 Has a lot of people asking questions that should be answered by my
1:17:54 Alex Cranz? You can watch every bit.
1:17:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like if, if there was something that I assumed from the jump, it was, is this shower safe for my entire body? Very good.
1:18:04 Alex Cranz? Who's making the pods that aren't safe for your entire body is what I want to know.
1:18:08 Nilay Patel? That's what, yeah, right? The illegal pods.
1:18:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah, don't buy those illegal pods, people.
1:18:13 Speaker 03 Need to get into the discord with somebody just making bootleg pods on their own.
1:18:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah, these pods burned me. Here's your business model, Richard. The design of the spring shower pods are color specific. We'll see if there's actual software DRM, but right now, right? The pods are shaped, they have to fit in the thing. $21 for a six pack of single use pods.
1:18:32 Alex Cranz? Wow.
1:18:33 Nilay Patel? $24 for a single multi-use pod with eight uses. A multi-use pod with eight uses. And do the math there.
1:18:42 Alex Cranz? How many, how many, what constitutes a use?
1:18:46 Nilay Patel? All I'm saying is they're going to charge you about $3 per shower, no matter which way you're going. $21 for six single use pods, $24 for a multi-use pod that can be used eight times.
1:18:56 Alex Cranz? Do you think the shower head stops working if you don't have a pod in there? Like you just aren't allowed to be clean?
1:19:02 Nilay Patel? That's when it starts burning you, Alex.
1:19:05 Speaker 03 Or if there's a software update because some, because someone's hacked the pod system.
1:19:08 Nilay Patel? It's like, warning, this is no longer safe for your entire body, but we're not telling you where.
1:19:12 Alex Cranz? Surprise.
1:19:12 Nilay Patel? Enjoy the caller corporation. It's true that this is one of our top stories from this entire CS and I appreciate all of you for reading about the shower pods. One of my favorite headlines of all time was a Paul Miller, Ashley Carmen joint. I think Paul had the byline, but I think Ashley actually came up with the headline. It was just the word tortilla pods in all capital letters.
1:19:35 Nilay Patel? And it was the whole story, like no further explanation. And it was like a startup selling a pod system to make tortillas.
1:19:44 Alex Cranz? It's a very good headline.
1:19:45 Nilay Patel? And all of the comments were like, you can just make tortillas. This is a deeply solved problem. Very good. Well, pods are back, everyone. CS is rockin' and rollin'. There's tons of news on the site. I'm, like I said, I'm feeling, I have the FOMO. There's a part of me that's, for my own health, I'm happy I'm not there. It's, it's bad to be there. It's bad to be in, it's bad for you. But I miss, I miss our team. I miss gadgets. I miss hotel rooms and the coffee smell.
1:20:15 Alex Cranz? I still got the CES funk despite not being there.
1:20:19 Nilay Patel? I miss walking out of Lenovo briefing believing in my heart that eight and 10 finger gestures on a dual-screen 13.3-inch OLED laptop is like the future of all computing. Like, I feel that. But don't worry, there's more CES to come. They're on the show floor today, tomorrow. They're wrapping up through the weekend. Alex, you said we've got more show to come, especially with Jen about Matter.
1:20:41 Alex Cranz? Yes. Jen and Chris and Andy, we're gonna be chatting a bunch next week. It's gonna be great.
1:20:46 Nilay Patel? Very good. All right, I gotta go keep reading CES coverage. I can't, I can't stop. It's all on the site. I'm in the comments, because I'm, you know, I'm off Twitter. So you just find me in the comments of random Verge articles, which I think is terrifying our reporters. Just like getting into fights in the comments articles.
1:21:02 Alex Cranz? They're having a great time.
1:21:03 Nilay Patel? I should stop it, but I'm here for you. Find me. You can tweet at us. You can tweet at me. I'm at reckless, Alex is at Alex Cranz, Richard is at RJCC. I am, I do check the replies every couple of days, so I might throw you a like if you hit me on Twitter. And you can find us on The Verge. We'll be back on Wednesday with more CES coverage. That's it, that's Vergecast. Back on.
1:21:26 Speaker 04 And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice, or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected] . This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter's, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it, we'll see you next week.
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