Pod Insights The Vergecast The TVs, monitors, and laptops at CES 2024 About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz are discuss all the things with screens announced at CES 2024.
Further reading:
I’ve looked through LG’s new transparent OLED TV and seen something special
Samsung’s got its own transparent display.
Samsung’s new OLED TV could make annoying glare a thing of the past
Samsung finally puts the TV at the heart of its smart home
The Frame has become such a hit that Samsung is making a speaker version
Intel’s new 14th Gen mobile processors are here for 2024’s gaming laptops
Lenovo’s latest 2-in-1 crams Windows and Android into one device
Razer gaming laptops at CES 2024: Blade spec bumps and display upgrades
Alienware’s M16 R2 trims the behind for less power and more portability
MSI Claw hands-on: the Steam Deck rival with Intel inside
MSI’s Claw is an Intel-powered Windows competitor to Valve’s Steam Deck
What if your Samsung flip phone could flip further?
Apple Vision Pro launches February 2nd
Apple Vision Pro prescription lenses will cost $149 extra
Xreal’s new AR glasses are aimed at the Apple Vision Pro
Asus targets Apple’s Vision Pro (with M2) with the AirVision M1
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 12,694 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
0:40 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to Richast, the flagship podcast of mobility solutions here at CES 2024. That's if you spend enough time at CES, you just start to talk like that.
0:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
0:53 Nilay Patel? You just can't help it.
0:54 David Pierce? You start saying the word innovative.
0:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
0:56 David Pierce? Like as all parts of speech and just lose all track of what's actually words.
1:02 Nilay Patel? You just look around, there's companies here no one's ever heard of.
1:05 Alex Cranz? Enabled by AI.
1:07 Nilay Patel? Enabled by AI to solutionize the future of innovation.
1:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah, with HK, with 8K and 5G.
1:13 Nilay Patel? 5G, it's all, it's all happening all at once. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. I'm here at CES. We're here in a Kia connected home, which means we're above a number of Kias downstairs, which I'm told are powering the home.
1:24 David Pierce? Which is kind of cool. We also have a view that I would call like regal above CES.
1:29 Alex Cranz? Oh, yeah.
1:29 David Pierce? We're sort of gazing upon our kingdom.
1:32 Alex Cranz? I feel very powerful.
1:33 Nilay Patel? We're slightly above the Google booth right next door.
1:37 David Pierce? It's nice. It feels right.
1:38 Nilay Patel? What's up, Android? Uh, David Pierce is here. Hi. Alex Franz is here. Hi. There's a whole Verge team here at CES, a huge number of people. We've been out on the show floor. It's the day after all the press conferences. There's an awful lot of news here at CES.
1:53 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:53 Nilay Patel? And David, you have some sort of gambit to organize our two CES shows.
1:57 David Pierce? I do. So we have to do two shows this week at CES. And the thing about CES is it's just a grab bag of things.
2:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
2:05 David Pierce? And so we, we broke it into two things. Today, we're going to talk about things that are mostly screens. I believe you called them screen gadgets.
2:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
2:13 David Pierce? And then on Thursday, we're going to talk about all the things that aren't screens. Yeah. Do these things blur together? Yes. All the time. Is the Venn diagram of them mostly nonsensical and made up in my head? Yes. But this is, this is what we're going to do. So today is the screens day.
2:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
2:28 David Pierce? There's like a version of this where we were like, okay, it's kind of a car show. It's kind of a TV show. Let's talk about those things. But it's just like, we're going to do screens and no screens.
2:37 Nilay Patel? It's a better organizing principle than CES has for itself. Which this year is just a mishmash of ideas. They're like, AI, do you want AI to do it? At one point, VW announced that you could just talk to ChatGPT in the car.
2:51 David Pierce? Sure.
2:52 Nilay Patel? Which seems like, I don't know if you guys are aware of this, ChatGPT often makes things up. So just being confidently lied to while you drive is now a feature of the new VW.
3:02 David Pierce? There's so much of that this year where somebody is just like, well, we made a product last year. And now that product, but also ChatGPT. And nothing else. Is that new?
3:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Is that what you want?
3:15 David Pierce? Like Telly, the, the free TV we've talked a bunch about on the show, their new thing is you can talk to ChatGPT to get like recommendations for stuff to watch. Which I think is hilarious because to your point, ChatGPT loves to like make up movies that don't exist. So you can just like invent movies out of whole cloth and then not watch them on your free television.
3:34 Nilay Patel? While the show is advertising to you. We should actually start with TVs. So if you don't know, CES is a consumer electronics show. We're here in Las Vegas. It is the biggest industry trade show there is. That does not mean the entire industry is here in an odd way. Apple, for example, is not here, but Apple loves to upstage CES. So they announced the Vision Pro earlier this week. We'll, we'll get to that later in the show. Microsoft isn't here. They all have employees here and people here wandering around. But in terms of announcements, CS, it waxes and wanes. Yeah, that's right. Google is here, but Google didn't make a lot of announcements, but everything runs Android. So technically millions of Android products were announced here at CS. So it's a real grab bag of things. The good thing about it is that everyone is here. Right.
4:19 Nilay Patel? Everyone's talking. If you're a tech reporter, this is fish in a barrel. Yeah. You're just in Las Vegas and everyone is holding a drink and ready to tell you a story about something. And in fact, ready to tell you how much they think the Vision Pro costs to build, which has been the best gossip of the week for me, just people yelling numbers, making up numbers out of them. But the history of CS is that this is a show where TVs are announced. Yeah. Like in the long history of CS, the one constant that has held the show together and really given it its sort of center of gravity is the TV industry shows up here, they show you new TVs, the buyers from retailers like Best Buy and Amazon and I don't know, Circuit City, Circuit City still exists, they show up. RCA has a big booth here, so everybody's coming back.
5:03 Nilay Patel? Liam is telling me Circuit City no longer exists. Rip Circuit City. But anyway, the buyers from those big retailers show up, they debate about what will be the hot trends in TVs to sell this year. They place their orders and then later in the year, the TVs show up on the retailer shelves. That's been the pattern, still the pattern here at CS, although interestingly Sony has broken this pattern now two years in a row. Yeah. No TVs at CS and the big Sony booth at the end of the hall has no TVs in it. Wow. Like there are TVs to show you other Sony stuff, but there's not even like a whisper of like Sony's TV models. Right. It's like PlayStation stuff, some camera stuff, half a car, then the rest of the car that Sony's building with Honda, which we'll talk about on Thursday, they're just out of the game.
5:45 Nilay Patel? Like Sony wants the high, high end of the TV market and then the rest of it is kind of up for grabs. Yeah. So we should start with the other announcements, but that to me is just the fascinating turn of the show as I think about the tech industry. This has been the place where TVs get announced and Sony's opting out. Samsung and LG, which obviously dominate the TV market. They are doing stuff, but they're, I don't know, they're kind of like, what if the TV was clear? It's like they're, they're in that zone with it. And then the, the cheaper brands, the TCLs, the high senses. Uh, I want to talk a lot about mini LED. They're coming up fast.
6:18 David Pierce? Yeah, it feels like for the big companies, they've gotten kind of less and less practical over time with what they show off. These are just sort of like tech demos. And some of them are very cool tech demos.
6:28 Alex Cranz? Well, I think they, they plateaued, right? Like the technology has plateaued, so.
6:32 David Pierce? Well, so I don't think that's true, but I think people don't care anymore. Right? Like the technology keeps getting better, but my ability to experience said technology has like long since plateaued. So the only thing to do is like get real weird with it.
6:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
6:46 David Pierce? And I think part of what we were going to talk about in a little while is like monitors, which are now on this run of like getting better to the point where you're not going to start to notice the difference anymore. But there was just like more to do with computer monitors. Whereas like, if you want a kick ass TV that is too high res for you to know the difference anyway, you've had that for a while.
7:04 Nilay Patel? Oh, my friend, I'm ready to talk about this. All right. So we should talk about some news because I think there's, this year at CES, I think that has been true for a minute. It's about to stop being true again in a really exciting way. So the news, Samsung, LG, LG has a new transparent OLED TV. Uh, it's the T.
7:20 David Pierce? The OLED T.
7:21 Nilay Patel? OLED T, that's.
7:23 Alex Cranz? TVT.
7:23 Nilay Patel? TVT, that's, that's what they're calling it.
7:27 David Pierce? T for see through.
7:28 Nilay Patel? It's clear. It has like a black thing that you can motorize, pull down to make it not clear. But then you can make it clear again. Uh, Chris Welch looked through it. He was blown away. He can read that piece. I went and looked at it on the show floor. It's just out.
7:40 Alex Cranz? Did you notice a crucial thing about it?
7:43 Nilay Patel? No.
7:43 Alex Cranz? So one of the, one of them, they had, they were playing like Wheel of Time on it.
7:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
7:47 Alex Cranz? And they had motion smoothing on.
7:48 Nilay Patel? Ooh.
7:49 Alex Cranz? On their like invisible TV, well, transparent TV that everybody should care about, motion smoothing. That was just like.
7:56 David Pierce? Somewhere Tom Cruise is furious.
7:58 Nilay Patel? I didn't, I didn't actually see content. I just saw like CES demo reels.
8:02 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
8:03 Nilay Patel? Like water falling, you know? Flowers opening.
8:07 Alex Cranz? They were beautiful.
8:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
8:09 Alex Cranz? This such.
8:10 Nilay Patel? And then you saw real content.
8:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah, there was like, there was one TV like in a corner and it was playing just some of Wheel of Time being like, isn't Amazon Prime great? And I was like, hmm, is it? And also motion smoothing.
8:21 Nilay Patel? Yikes.
8:22 Alex Cranz? I turned into Tom Cruise for a moment. I almost kicked the TV in.
8:26 Nilay Patel? Does the transparent TV have film neck remote? Because I'd like to enable it, please.
8:29 Alex Cranz? I was like, can I have a remote real quick? I just need to fix something for you.
8:32 Nilay Patel? Show up at CS with an LG remote, just like. So that's, that's LG's big announcement. Samsung has its own riff on a transparent display. They're very excited about all that. Samsung has, Samsung famously is now doing QD OLEDs, quantum OLEDs. That's the panel Sony's using and it's, it's high end OLEDs. They're doing anti-glare on that. Here's my argument to you about all these TVs. OLED is hitting a weird, interesting peak. So the sort of base technology of OLED is like where it's at. Samsung displays with quantum dots in front of OLED pixels to make them brighter. LG is doing the micro lens array, which is, I mean, all this is really cool. They're just like trying to make the OLEDs brighter.
9:11 Alex Cranz? Right.
9:11 Nilay Patel? But the fundamental technology is like hit its point and it's gotten to about 77 inches and that's kind of how big they can get them. Uh, LG, LG can get to like 83.
9:20 Alex Cranz? But do you need bigger?
9:22 Nilay Patel? So here's, here's what's happening. Uh, and those are expensive, like a big OLED TV is like pretty expensive. Like a Sony A80 is like a pretty expensive TV. That's four, four grand, right? And that's about as big as like, like 83 is, right? That's basically it. If you walk on the show floor, you see mini LED TVs are everywhere.
9:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
9:42 Nilay Patel? TCL is all in on them. High sense is all in on them. High sense, uh, is picking up from Samsung. They know that people think like OLED is good. So high sense is like, ours are ULEDs. Yeah. Just the longest time Sony or Samsung was like QLEDs. It's like, you think people are so stupid.
10:02 Nilay Patel? Truly, you think people are so dumb.
10:04 David Pierce? They'll do it.
10:05 Nilay Patel? So if you if you're not caught up on this, the thing that is happening with backlights on LCD TVs, an LCD TV can't make light by itself, it can make the color, so you need to put a backlight behind it. Those backlights have basically gotten more and more advanced over the years. They started out with literally fluorescent lights on the side of the TV. They didn't look great, like old, old LCDs, literally fluorescent lights on the side of the panels. Then you got into like LEDs behind the panels. That's where you get LED TVs, that's what people are always talking about. Then you started adding local dimming. You started turning those LEDs on and off in zones. Then there was a hilarious spec race over how many zones of local dimming you can have.
10:42 David Pierce? That was the best.
10:43 Nilay Patel? That was good. Which is
10:44 David Pierce? Thousands of zones.
10:46 Nilay Patel? Right. And then you, what do you, what's the next thing? You make the LEDs themselves smaller, you pack more on, you get more zones. You're now up to like 6,000 zones, 60,000 zones is like one of the claims. I don't know if that's true or not.
10:56 David Pierce? Too many zones.
10:58 Nilay Patel? Looking at this thing, I was like, God, this same company put a U in front of the LED to confuse people, like whatever you want, man. So this thing, if you look at these TVs, the backlights are really bright. They have really, really, really well-controlled local dimming and they look amazing.
11:12 David Pierce? They do.
11:12 Nilay Patel? And they're cheap as hell to make because they're just still LCD TVs. And the core LCD technology is all the way at the bottom of the cost curve, like all the way
11:21 David Pierce? We've been doing this for a long time.
11:22 Nilay Patel? Forever. And what we've been iterating on is the backlight. So now the backlight is starting to come down the cost curve. This mini LED, and this is like year three or four that we've been talking mini LED. This is the year that it's down the cost curve. And the thing that these manufacturers are doing is they're not saying, we've made a better, cheaper 65-inch TV. They're saying, what if you bought a 98-inch TV? Oh, that's too much. And TCL has a giant display that's like, we are the number one provider of 98-inch TVs in the country. And this is our fastest growing like model.
11:56 David Pierce? There's this amazing graph in the TCL booth that they have printed up next to one of their TVs. That is like percentage growth of various sizes. And all the other ones are, you know, like steady growth from 60 to 70, steady growth, steady growth. And then the highest one is like 398% growth. And it's like, first of all, that means you sold 16 TVs and now you sold 40 TVs. So like, cool. Great job.
12:20 Nilay Patel? Get out of here, you magic magician.
12:23 David Pierce? But I do think like we we've talked about this before and and like you in particular are kind of an OLED purist.
12:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like I came very close to buying an OLED Sony and I was like, couldn't do it.
12:33 David Pierce? But I think all these companies are correctly betting that most people are less obnoxious than you about TVs. And thus will buy something that is 95% as good as OLED for a literal fraction of the price.
12:49 Nilay Patel? And brighter, right. And this is the thing, the in basically what you lose is off axis viewing. So OLED looks perfect from basically any angle, LCD screen, you're familiar with LCD screens. You get wide enough, things get weird, right? But it's still pretty good on these TVs, especially when the TVs are huge.
13:06 David Pierce? Yeah.
13:06 Nilay Patel? It's actually very hard to get off axis on a 98 inch TV.
13:10 David Pierce? You need a big couch.
13:11 Nilay Patel? I'm four miles away to the left. So you have this huge TV. It's really bright because you can make an LCD really bright and like you have to go look for the blooming.
13:20 David Pierce? Yeah.
13:20 Nilay Patel? On some of these manuals, not all of them, they're going to be all prices and shapes. But I'm just telling you, this is the year that that technology just like enters the mainstream. And I think it will probably take the default big TV size from 65, maybe not to 98. But it'll go from 65 to 75 pretty fast because it's going to be cheaper, bigger and brighter. And it's going to look in a store almost as good as the OLED.
13:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:44 Nilay Patel? Like almost as good as you like, I really had to look on the show floor and the show floor is like a bad environment. It's like bright and crazy and all the TVs are cranked up to to 9,000 nits or whatever.
13:53 Alex Cranz? And they're playing like the best content to make the TV look good.
13:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
13:56 Alex Cranz? There are no blacks. You you cannot see.
13:58 Nilay Patel? So this is the demo that in particular, T sale is doing. There's a big TV.
14:02 Alex Cranz? Uh huh.
14:02 Nilay Patel? And it's like, you know, it's a flower over black.
14:05 David Pierce? Yeah, or like an Edison light bulb just kind of lighting up in the middle of it.
14:08 Nilay Patel? They're trying to stress the TV.
14:10 David Pierce? And they have a few that are settings. Were you playing with the button?
14:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah, you can push the button. You can basically put it in a mode that's assuming it's an old backlight. And you turn it on and it does the mini LED backlight and it looks, it looks really good. Now, this is totally controlled demo.
14:22 Alex Cranz? I'm just remembering.
14:22 Nilay Patel? I'm not going to promise you that this is perfect, huh?
14:24 Alex Cranz? Do you remember like 10 years ago when Vizio did their 100 and I think it was like 120 inch TV?
14:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
14:30 David Pierce? Yeah, yeah.
14:30 Alex Cranz? And it was the ugliest.
14:31 David Pierce? And everybody was like, this is preposterous.
14:33 Alex Cranz? Like you could only check it out like in a giant warehouse because that's the only place the TV would fit. And it was garbage TV.
14:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
14:40 Alex Cranz? It was just the ugliest TV possible.
14:42 Nilay Patel? That's when they, that's when people started doing really intense local dimming demos.
14:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:47 Nilay Patel? Uh, and TV companies will still, like the drop of a hat, a TV company will go to someone like, here's a TV without the TV. It's just the backlight and they'll show you like half the screen has a TV on it. And the other half is just the backlight.
14:58 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:59 Nilay Patel? Look at the backlight move with the image.
15:01 Alex Cranz? And you just watch Sandra Bullock like spiral out and turn into lights.
15:05 Nilay Patel? Pretty good. Pretty good demo all around. I'm just saying this is the year you see it on the show floor this year. It's everywhere. And you know, my prediction is always rooted in my firm belief that people will pick big cheap screens. And so if you can give people a screen at 65, say, that is almost as good as an LED but cheaper, they're going to pick that one.
15:24 Alex Cranz? Oh, right.
15:25 Nilay Patel? Especially they can't tell. And then if you get, and it's brighter, which is always the thing.
15:29 David Pierce? Like to that point, actually, like it makes me think of the, the test Marquez Brownlee does every year with the smartphone cameras. And every year what wins is just the brightest camera.
15:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
15:38 David Pierce? It's like, people don't want anything else, but it's just if it's bright and there's lots of colors. People are into it. And it's the same thing. You, you see it in a store. It's the same thing. It's why they crank the brightness to 50,000%.
15:50 Nilay Patel? But the, the thing that I think is just like really interesting is like, oh man, like, what if the baseline size of a TV gets even bigger next year? And it's, you're no longer picking 55 and 65. You're picking between like 65, 75.
16:04 Alex Cranz? And 85.
16:05 Nilay Patel? And 98. This could be kind of wild.
16:07 David Pierce? My wife steadfastly refuses to buy a TV above 50 inches for our house. She just thinks anything over 50 inches is like outrageous and unnecessary and no one should have it. And the number of choices that we have under 50 inches is getting so small.
16:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
16:23 David Pierce? So like it's crazy.
16:24 Alex Cranz? And the TVs aren't very good at that size.
16:26 David Pierce? No, they're trash. You can't buy a good TV at that size, which is why we have like.
16:30 Nilay Patel? You gotta get to 55.
16:31 David Pierce? Crappy TCL Roku TV. Could you tell Emma this, please?
16:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
16:34 Alex Cranz? Can you like blackout the 65 inch on the box and just?
16:38 David Pierce? They go, I promise it's 50.
16:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah. Don't worry about it.
16:40 David Pierce? I thought the other one was 50. Like, no, that one was 30.
16:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah. See, they, they measure them differently now. It's fine. It's fine.
16:45 Nilay Patel? Don't measure the TV. So that actually brings us to like the next thing that's happening here, which is, for all of this talk about fancy backlight technologies and good looking pictures, the best selling TV in the country is the Frame TV.
16:57 Alex Cranz? Hmm. You're a nemesis.
17:00 Nilay Patel? It's the proud owner of
17:01 David Pierce? Those two things totally square for me, right? Like, if you're gonna put this increasingly humongous thing in your home, like an 85-inch black panel, just looks ridiculous.
17:14 Nilay Patel? I see. In my mind, that looks like a symbol of success, stability. Uh, but you are correct. Most people do not just want a wall of black in their house. Uh, they would prefer to have a middling, single-backlight, extremely bad LCD panel. Just showing some art. Uh, the frame is wildly successful.
17:35 David Pierce? Yeah.
17:36 Nilay Patel? Uh, it is, it dominates Samsung's TV sales. They, they love it. Uh, it is, I'm just gonna tell you, it is not a great TV. Like, it's a find. It will do the job. They've updated it nothing this year because it is basically fine and they're just, they're flying off the shelves. The update for the frame this year is that now in art mode, the refresh rate lowers to 60 Hz instead of just staying at 120.
17:58 David Pierce? Sick.
17:59 Nilay Patel? If you have been following like cell phones for any period of time, you're like, oh, this is four generations behind variable refresh tech. And cell phones, and Samsung's like, no, no, this is plugged into the wall all the time. We're going down to 60 to show a static image of a painting. The frame is a monopoly. I'm just telling you right now, the frame is a monopoly. They feel no competitive pressure and they're like, whatever. You want some art?
18:23 David Pierce? Yeah, everybody's out here now making things that they want to be frame competitors.
18:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
18:28 David Pierce? And what they are is just television.
18:31 Nilay Patel? Right. So TCL has an art store. It's unclear what that is. They have a, there's just a sign on the show floor that says TCL art.
18:39 David Pierce? Yeah.
18:39 Nilay Patel? And art is written in like marker font.
18:41 David Pierce? And all it is on the booth is a TV with a bunch of paintings around it. And it's like, I think you fundamentally misunderstand what the frame is doing.
18:48 Nilay Patel? Uh, HighSense has, it looks like a Jetsons TV. It's their art TV. Yeah.
18:52 David Pierce? Okay.
18:53 Nilay Patel? So everyone's trying to come at this idea, which is the TV should look good once off. And I think Samsung just has such a dominant position here that they just do not. Care, it would be cool if the TV was better.
19:04 David Pierce? Well, but that's also one of the reasons I think the transparent displays are interesting is because like, and this is the stuff we were talking about last week too, that these things are sort of increasingly furniture and there's a feeling like this should blend into the rest of my house instead of just being a gigantic black thing.
19:20 Alex Cranz? To the point, the LG one is is furniture.
19:23 David Pierce? Right.
19:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's got like shelves.
19:25 David Pierce? Throwing it with, right, with all this other stuff on the stand. And yeah, I think that's really cool.
19:30 Alex Cranz? I think it's like, very, very cool. I would almost want to get one. But like Chris Welch pointed out, the picture's kind of garbage when you just want to watch TV. It's like, it's worse. But it's better than the frame, at least.
19:43 David Pierce? So is everything.
19:44 Alex Cranz? No bar, but better than the frame.
19:46 David Pierce? No, I think that's right. But I think that trend, I think, is super interesting, even though we're not getting what we should have, because the transparent thing is also going to cost a billion dollars. And it kind of sits in a really awkward way in that it's actually going to call more attention to itself than a normal TV would, because we're all kind of conditioned to not notice TVs.
20:04 Alex Cranz? You set the fireplace on for it the whole time. You're like, I have a wire frame fireplace.
20:09 David Pierce? Yeah, like the fish tank mode, just 24/7. Yeah, I love it.
20:13 Nilay Patel? The fish tank thing is so cool.
20:15 David Pierce? I swear, that was the moment it clicked for me, because I was like, oh, this is going to fancy doctor's offices.
20:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:19 David Pierce? Like, that's who's gonna use this.
20:20 Nilay Patel? That's what you want, the bleeding edge of OLED technology. You're like, we'll get some fish in your doctor's office. All right, Samsung did announce some other stuff in the TV zone. I'm just gonna read you one. And here's what I'm gonna do. First, I'm just gonna say this word to you, and I want you to guess what you think this feature is.
20:37 Alex Cranz? Oh, boy.
20:38 Nilay Patel? Samsung announced that its new 24 TVs will feature, in addition to workout tracker and techno gym, which I think are self.
20:47 David Pierce? Perfectly understandable, yeah.
20:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I get those.
20:49 Nilay Patel? Samsung tail.
20:50 David Pierce? Samsung tail.
20:51 Nilay Patel? Tail.
20:52 David Pierce? T A I L.
20:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:54 David Pierce? Is it an acronym?
20:55 Nilay Patel? Nope.
20:55 Alex Cranz? Is it like Paw Patrol? This is like for children?
20:59 David Pierce? Oh, that's good.
21:00 Nilay Patel? It's not for children.
21:01 Alex Cranz? Okay.
21:01 David Pierce? It's like, it's like, okay, this is, this is my official guess.
21:04 Nilay Patel? Cops that are dogs.
21:05 David Pierce? It's.
21:07 Alex Cranz? With tails.
21:08 David Pierce? It's, it's pet mode for your television.
21:11 Alex Cranz? Oh, yeah.
21:11 David Pierce? Instead of turning it all the way off and showing art, you show like puppies running around.
21:16 Nilay Patel? That's good.
21:16 Alex Cranz? Or squirrels.
21:17 Nilay Patel? It's wrong, but it's good. It's, it's dead wrong, but it's good.
21:20 David Pierce? Alex, what's your guess?
21:21 Alex Cranz? Well, it was Paw Patrol, but not like.
21:23 Nilay Patel? It's just a Paw Patrol.
21:25 Alex Cranz? Just Paw Patrol.
21:25 Nilay Patel? You push the button, dogs come running out and solve crimes.
21:28 Alex Cranz? That'd be great. I would love that. Ooh, um, something related to wifi?
21:34 Nilay Patel? No.
21:34 Alex Cranz? No?
21:35 Nilay Patel? No.
21:36 Alex Cranz? HDR.
21:37 Nilay Patel? Nice.
21:37 Alex Cranz? I'm just gonna start listing words.
21:38 Nilay Patel? Those are just features of the TV.
21:42 David Pierce? Bob's.
21:44 Nilay Patel? All right, Samsung Tail.
21:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
21:46 Nilay Patel? Enables real time video consultation with a vet in the comfort of the user's home.
21:51 Alex Cranz? See, we were close.
21:52 Nilay Patel? From basic care tips to advanced advice, Dr. Tail has a range of questions covered. Users can act with veteran experts in real time whenever they need. This is a startup that Samsung saw at like a Samsung Dev Day and they're like, yeah, Dr. Tail, you're part of the TVs now. And now it's just part of the TVs.
22:11 Alex Cranz? I.
22:12 David Pierce? That's so good.
22:13 Alex Cranz? It's so good.
22:14 David Pierce? The most Samsung thing. Do you remember when Samsung had all those apps called like Milk?
22:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:20 David Pierce? You can get Milk Music.
22:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
22:21 David Pierce? And it's just like Samsung sees a weirdly named startup and it's like, yes, that's it. Let's do it.
22:25 Alex Cranz? That's like a good.
22:26 David Pierce? Come be on our gadgets.
22:27 Alex Cranz? That's a good business model. You just like come up with a startup that's, wouldn't make sense. Put a weird name on it. Be like Samsung.
22:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
22:34 David Pierce? Would you like to bundle this on an Android phone?
22:35 Nilay Patel? Big tech companies, very few of them can buy companies anymore. All right? This is a problem. Lena Con's really ruining, unless it's Dr. Tail and Samsung TV. In which case, she's fine. Last piece of Samsung news, speaking of Frame, such a hit. Uh, Samsung expanding the franchise. They've made a Frame speaker, which I still find utterly perplexing.
22:56 Nilay Patel? Because it's just a speaker behind a picture?
22:59 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
23:00 David Pierce? That's it. It really is like, imagine you took
23:02 Nilay Patel? A picture.
23:03 David Pierce? Bluetooth speaker and just hid it behind a painting.
23:07 Nilay Patel? This is what I'm saying.
23:08 Alex Cranz? Samsung did it for you.
23:10 Nilay Patel? Right.
23:10 David Pierce? So I'll be honest, I don't hate this at all. It does not need to exist.
23:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
23:15 David Pierce? But I love that it does. It's like Ikea makes some of this stuff too, where they're like, what if our lamp was also a Sonos speaker? I'm like, what if, what if Ikea? It's a great question.
23:24 Nilay Patel? It does seem like Samsung has made one turn more innovative than Sonos and Ikea in that it appears you can pick your own picture in the Samsung Frame speaker, which I don't know if you've been following frame technology, key element in the analog frame world.
23:43 Alex Cranz? Huge fan of that.
23:44 Nilay Patel? Ikea was like, no, this is just one, one picture of sparkles.
23:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Ikea was like, do you want it to look like a hotel room in your house all the time? We got you. Let's go.
23:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So that's TV news. It's again, I wouldn't, I'm not saying there's like one standout TV here apart from the transparent one. It's not like the year that like plasma TVs were introduced to the year that, you know, OLED kind of broke and we're like, oh, this is the future.
24:08 David Pierce? I do think you're right, though, that this is like, we're gonna look back at this as like the, oh, this was the year we saw all the mini LED TVs.
24:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
24:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:14 Nilay Patel? And then I think this is the year that TV sizes starts to get bigger. And I think that's fascinating. Like if you are running a movie theater chain and you're looking at people buying 98 inch TVs for their house that look really good. I don't know, man.
24:25 Alex Cranz? What do you put that on, though?
24:27 Nilay Patel? A 102 inch wall.
24:30 Alex Cranz? I'm just like, I'm thinking of the furniture situation there. I need a, like, basically for me specifically, I just need a much larger credenza to put a TV that big on it.
24:41 David Pierce? That sounds right.
24:41 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:42 Nilay Patel? We'll come back next week for the AV furniture show.
24:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:47 Alex Cranz? It's just me with a measuring tape.
24:49 Nilay Patel? All right, we gotta take a break. The frame is a monopoly. All right, I'm just telling you right now. If you are out there, you're a TV maker, put some competitive pressure on Samsung. This thing needs local dimming tomorrow. We'll be right back.
25:06 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer St. Louis, Missouri.
25:39 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Verchass CS1, the Kia Connected Home, gazing out. I don't see Dieter out there.
25:46 David Pierce? We are reliably told he was there at some point.
25:48 Alex Cranz? I a hundred percent saw Dieter out there earlier.
25:50 Nilay Patel? Shaking my fist in the direction of the Google booth. Lots of other gadgets here at CES.
25:54 Alex Cranz? Lots.
25:55 Nilay Patel? Alex, you've been paying a lot of attention to laptops, monitors, the gaming gadgets.
26:00 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
26:01 Nilay Patel? What's, what's, what's going on in Windows world?
26:03 David Pierce? Well, gaming first of all has been kind of like weirdly the story of CES, right?
26:06 Alex Cranz? Gaming has been really here, like used to, you could have one person kind of covers gaming stuff reliably. And now it's like, oh, maybe I need to assign more people to cover this next year because.
26:16 David Pierce? And it also kind of felt like gaming stuff was always sort of off on its own. It was like, here's like the gamer section of CES.
26:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
26:22 David Pierce? But now it feels like even these like extremely mainstream brands are mostly making gamer things.
26:28 Alex Cranz? Yes, they all are like HP is doing it and, and Dell. And I mean, they were already doing it, but Lenovo like is even kind of leaning more into their gaming stuff. They, they even introduced another, one of those external GPUs that everybody does every couple of years. And we're all like, yeah, this will be the year and it's never the year. But Lenovo was, Lenovo was out there doing it. I think they're remaining thinking more for professional reasons, like using the GPUs for AI. But I think that's also why we're seeing more gaming stuff is because you need really powerful GPUs for AI and also for gaming. And so it's like, okay.
27:01 David Pierce? Yeah. And that would also explain, I guess, why it seems like a lot of all this gamery stuff is getting slightly less gamery. Like my theory with gaming stuff has always been that it's just, those are the people willing to spend money on fancy things and high end specs.
27:14 Nilay Patel? Oh no, I have a way spicier take.
27:16 Alex Cranz? Oh yeah?
27:16 David Pierce? What's your spicier take?
27:17 Nilay Patel? If you want to make a young person buy a Windows computer, it has to be a gaming computer.
27:21 Alex Cranz? Yep.
27:21 David Pierce? Well, that's interesting.
27:22 Alex Cranz? And that's why like all, all the gaming laptops were saying.
27:25 Nilay Patel? 25% spicier than needs to be. Please direct your emails to alex.cranz@theversical.
27:30 Alex Cranz? I agree with him.
27:32 Alex Cranz? I totally agree with him. Uh, but no, so we saw like a lot of gaming laptops this year and they were all like, I wouldn't feel weird pulling it out at a coffee shop. Like I'm older now. I don't really wanna pull out something and it's got a bajillion lights on it. Yeah, you can hear it from space because it sounds like it's about to go into space. I'm trying to like avoid that in my life now and
27:53 David Pierce? You still wanna play sick games at the coffee shop?
27:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I still wanna play Baldur's Gate forever at the coffee shop until they ask me politely to leave. And it feels like that's much more possible now. One, because the processors have gotten better. The CPUs are a lot better. The GPUs have gotten smaller and are very efficient. Um, the batteries are getting a little bit better. And two, they just start making these laptops and, and thinking about the rest of us. Or more specifically, they're thinking about, as I heard over and over and over again, this will work really well in your dorm room. And I was like, my dorm room, okay. Mine? No, not mine. Someone's dorm room. And, and so that, that's really what they're positioning for. It's for the college kids who, who are coming in and they don't want like an adult, the laptop their parents have.
28:35 David Pierce? Right.
28:36 Alex Cranz? But they also just don't necessarily want like neon green lights and stuff all over their laptop.
28:41 David Pierce? They wanna like play games, but also take the thing to class.
28:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah. And so we're seeing a lot of laptops. A lot of them have new white colorways. That was a big thing for, I think both HP and Legion were both introducing laptops that were like white and they look really, really nice. And you can turn the, you can, you know, you've got RGB keyboards and then if you don't want that, you can turn it off. And that just seems really, really nice. But we saw one from Legion or we saw one from Lenovo. We saw one from HP, Alienware. Uh, the, the Dell one, they actually, they used to have a really big exhaust fan on the back and they still do for their more powerful ones. But the, the new, the M16 R2, they got rid of the butt. There's like a big butt on the back of the laptop and they just said, nope.
29:19 David Pierce? Classic Alienware move.
29:21 Alex Cranz? Yeah. They like
29:22 David Pierce? Chopping the butt.
29:23 Alex Cranz? Chopping butt.
29:24 David Pierce? Alienware.
29:24 Nilay Patel? Well, first you add the butt. They've got two moves. Let's see. I was like, this is the butt year. And then next year is like, get rid of the butt.
29:32 Alex Cranz? But it's really is.
29:33 Nilay Patel? You know, they used to make the iPod like skinny and fat, then wide, narrow.
29:38 David Pierce? You just take a dimension and pull it every year.
29:40 Alex Cranz? It's actually very accurate. That is what happens. A lot of times they're like, the butt got too big. We have to shrink the butt. And so this year they like, they took it completely off. They've still got it for their, for their higher end ones. But for like the forty, seventy and below, they're like, we don't actually, for the Nvidia forty, seventy and below, they're like, we don't actually need to have all of that exhaust. We don't need all that heat and stuff. We're fine. You can do enough for gaming and, and that's true. Like, most games nowadays aren't as demanding. Like the really popular ones, you know, the Fortnite, the Baldur's Gate, just not as demanding.
30:09 David Pierce? It feels like after all these years of trying to make like the one laptop that could be all things to all people, ultra powerful and ultra portable and everything, they're finally finding like a pretty good middle ground that isn't for anybody at either side, but actually hits like the middle eighty percent.
30:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
30:25 David Pierce? In a way better way.
30:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah. And like, I consider myself a gamer. I play a lot of video games. I don't want the huge giant laptop.
30:32 David Pierce? Right.
30:33 Alex Cranz? I like, I don't want to carry it. It's super heavy. I don't want to try to power it. Some of the times you can't even bring the chargers on the plane. Like, I want, I want something that I can play most of my games at reasonable enough. That's why I like the Steam Deck. That's why it's a really fun device. That's why we're seeing a lot more of these like little handheld PCs where you can play that. Like the MSI Claw was the new one this time. Which I really, really like. Not as much as Sean. Sean loves the MSI Claw.
30:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
30:58 Alex Cranz? But also, I, I don't like it because the controls on it. Have you seen the controls?
31:02 Nilay Patel? I haven't seen it.
31:03 Alex Cranz? Okay. So Steam, like the Steam Deck has the little, the little touchpads. And when you can control it and it works like a mouse. Everybody else who's doing this right now has just joysticks and, and a D-pad.
31:14 David Pierce? Hmm.
31:14 Alex Cranz? And it's just not as good. I'm like, part of why I like the Steam Deck is I have a bajillion inputs. And now it's like.
31:20 David Pierce? And they're all super customizable. So you can do any kind of weird thing you want with your Steam Deck.
31:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah. And so they're now like, okay, what we're going to do is pack in like a little Intel processor. We're going to make this thing really, really fast and not give you super great controls. But you are getting much better displays. Like the MSI one, the MSI Claw has like a variable refresh rate. It's got a decently sized battery and it's got the, the hall effect joystick. So you don't get the drift and stuff.
31:46 Nilay Patel? Wait, so there's something like Intel processor news. You said that the Claw is, it's got a newer Intel processor in it.
31:51 Alex Cranz? Right.
31:51 Nilay Patel? Intel's got its new fourteenth gen mobile processors here. That's sort of making all these gaming laptops go.
31:57 Alex Cranz? They announced it like. I think a week ago, two weeks ago, they announced it right before CES.
32:02 David Pierce? Yeah.
32:02 Alex Cranz? And it's the new Meteor Lake. And they're just really, really good processors. I feel like for the last couple of years, you would always go to an event and everybody would be like, we're going to make really thin laptops next year, like fan free, really cool laptops, just like Apple, and it's going to be awesome. And it never happened. And now it's like, oh no, they can actually do it. Like Meteor Lake gives you these really, really thin laptops. It's giving you these really, really cool handheld gaming devices where you can actually have a lot of power in a fairly small thing and, and still have the good thermals. Because that's also the big limitation. Like you can't do really fast gaming if the processor overheats, which it will.
32:39 David Pierce? If your device is on fire, it doesn't play games.
32:41 Alex Cranz? If your hands are melting, holding on to it, that's bad. And, and they, they've, it seems like with, with Meteor Lake, they've finally found that balance. And like, I'm, we haven't gotten to check out a lot of these things.
32:53 David Pierce? I was going to say, I feel like I've heard that specific story so many times. Yeah. And Qualcomm is out here being like, we did it, guys.
32:59 Alex Cranz? But I think it's.
33:00 David Pierce? Our batteries last 37 hours.
33:02 Alex Cranz? I think the difference is typically the laptop makers don't like buy into that hype. Like the process, the Intel will come out and tell you this is the year. And then laptop makers generally will be like, this is not the year. We may release like one as like a pity.
33:16 David Pierce? Right. They'll often run like a whole generation behind just for that reason. Because they're like, we don't trust this new thing. We're, we're going to wait this out a minute.
33:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because they're the ones that are going to get yelled at.
33:23 David Pierce? Everybody is. Yeah.
33:25 Alex Cranz? But this year, everybody jumped on it. Everybody has stuff. They're really, really embracing it. So it feels like we're finally like, I think it was 2017, 2018, where I was seeing these super thin laptops. And they'd be like, next year, this is going to come out. We're going to show you this for real. And I'm like, cool. And it never happened. And then this year, like, it really feels like it's happening. And it's not just with the gaming ones too. It's also like Lenovo's got a new ThinkBook 13X, I believe it's called. And it is just like, it's super, super skid thin. It only weighs like 2.2 pounds. It's got a magnesium body, so it's like stainless magnesium. So it doesn't get fingerprints at all. Everything else in the Lenovo booth was covered in fingerprints. And that one, that one worked. I was like, hey, it does work. And it was just like, it feels like a toy.
34:10 Alex Cranz? But it was a full laptop. And I was like, I, I just covet this. I just want to own this laptop now. Because it is so thin and so light. It was like the old MacBook.
34:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
34:18 Alex Cranz? And I was like, oh, it's, it's that.
34:20 David Pierce? I really hope that's true. Cause it's like, to me, running around looking at a bunch of these laptops, there's been the sort of normal CES glut of just like weird ideas about laptops. Where there's some that they're like, what if we had foldable screens and you saw a Lenovo one that runs Windows and Android? And sometimes they're just like, what if everything about the laptop, we just moved six inches to the left? And then that was a laptop. But there's also just a bunch of them this year that they're just like, oh no, we just made a better laptop that is good. And it feels like, especially what, the last three years, Apple has just like run away with the best laptop to use every day as a regular person.
34:59 Nilay Patel? This is what I'm saying about the gaming PCs. If you want someone, if you want to knock someone off the default of buying a MacBook Air, you need to show up with video games.
35:10 David Pierce? Right. Which is, I think, part of why Apple is now pushing the Mac as a gaming platform.
35:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
35:15 David Pierce? Harder than ever, because they're trying to undo that a little bit. But that only works for the Windows manufacturers to the extent that you have also made a pretty good laptop.
35:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
35:25 David Pierce? Because like, I'll figure out another way to play games. And like, Microsoft is doing Game Pass, which is going to be playable on these other devices. So like, that specific thing is going to fall apart if these Windows manufacturers can't figure out how to make just like an everyday, very good laptop that is also better for gaming. And like, that is, it's starting to spin.
35:43 Nilay Patel? But let me ask Alex about the most incredible device here at CES. It's the Lenovo ThinkBook, which I believe you've seen.
35:52 Alex Cranz? I've seen all of the Lenovos. Yeah.
35:54 David Pierce? Sorry. Can I just, can I just stop you real fast?
35:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
35:56 David Pierce? It's called the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid.
36:01 Nilay Patel? It's very important.
36:04 Nilay Patel? My apologies, the Gen 5 hybrid family. I'll be releasing this as a note.
36:09 David Pierce? Gen 4 can get out of here.
36:11 Nilay Patel? As you know, I've always valued the contributions of the Gen 5 hybrid family. I meant no disrespect.
36:19 Nilay Patel? I have so many Gen 5 hybrid friends.
36:23 Alex Cranz? Your best friend is Gen 5.
36:25 Nilay Patel? It's like somehow I'm gonna take this joke and actually canceling myself. I don't know how, but it's coming. No, you saw this thing.
36:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
36:35 Nilay Patel? It is literally two computers.
36:37 Alex Cranz? It's just two computers.
36:38 Nilay Patel? Attached with a hinge.
36:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
36:40 David Pierce? Really?
36:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
36:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So it has a Qualcomm processor in the screen and an Intel processor in the base, right?
36:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, the base of it is, is just a Windows machine. And then the top of it is, is a tablet. And when you pick it up, you're like, oh yeah, that's a tablet up there. Cause it kind of like has that little wobble. It's not as bad as sometimes, remember the early, the early ones where they put the tablet up and then the horrible little keyboard? And you'd pick it up and you'd be like, I could never use this. It's a little more balanced than that, but it's still got that like heft to it because it's got a 14 inch tablet like in the top of it. And what was interesting was you really just like pull it off. You don't, you don't have to press a button. You don't have to do anything. You just like grab it and yank.
37:20 Nilay Patel? Because it's its own computer. It's its own batteries, have two batteries.
37:22 Alex Cranz? It's got two batteries.
37:24 Nilay Patel? So this is like, I love this product.
37:25 David Pierce? Do you remember the, the Microsoft Surface Book?
37:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
37:27 David Pierce? That was one of those things that like, I don't think anyone bought it except for like six people, but those six people.
37:32 Nilay Patel? My niece and nephew had Surface.
37:33 David Pierce? I loved it.
37:34 Nilay Patel? Bizarrely.
37:34 David Pierce? That had like a rabid fan base of people who liked it for exactly that reason.
37:38 Nilay Patel? It's like the base had a battery and a GPU.
37:41 David Pierce? Right.
37:41 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
37:41 Nilay Patel? So this made this, the base of the Lenovo ThinkBook plus Gen 5 hybrid.
37:46 David Pierce? It's a Windows computer.
37:47 Nilay Patel? Is just a full on Windows computer.
37:50 Alex Cranz? Just a whole one.
37:52 David Pierce? I actually really love this.
37:54 Alex Cranz? It's like, it's a weird fun idea. They were like, oh, we, we asked, hey, can you communicate between the two? Like if you're working on something and you pull it off, the pull the, the tablet off, you can keep working. They're like, no. It's it's two computers.
38:09 David Pierce? It's like a full Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
38:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah, you will have to transfer all of your files in order to do it.
38:14 Nilay Patel? They didn't even build like an app to fake it.
38:16 Alex Cranz? They're they're working on that.
38:17 Nilay Patel? They're working on it.
38:19 Alex Cranz? There was also like the separating the two is a little difficult because it's it's a it's it's a sample. It's it's not ready for release yet. They said it's absolutely going to be better when the when the thing finally comes out. So I'm excited to try that out.
38:30 Nilay Patel? $2,000.
38:31 Alex Cranz? $2,000.
38:32 Nilay Patel? And they haven't figured out they haven't figured out the detach. I'm just reading from Alex, she's being nice. This is very nice. The converting process was also dead simple, just yank on the tablet until it disengages. The sample version I tried would sometimes need some coaxing to separate.
38:49 Alex Cranz? Just a little, I was like, at one point, I was like, maybe it just doesn't come off. Maybe like this isn't the laptop I'm supposed to be looking at.
38:55 Nilay Patel? Maybe this isn't the Gen 5 hybrid.
38:56 Alex Cranz? Then the guy came over and was like, no, no.
39:00 David Pierce? You just gotta want it.
39:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
39:01 Nilay Patel? That's great.
39:01 Alex Cranz? And then it worked fine after that.
39:03 Nilay Patel? This is a classic CS product.
39:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it was the delight.
39:06 David Pierce? Road really hard for the Asus Transformer lineup for years where you could dock your phone into a tablet and then dock that tablet into a keyboard and it was just all the devices all at once. I'm so happy this thing exists.
39:18 Nilay Patel? CS exists again to sell TVs to unwitting masses and also to have the Motorola. What was it, the Axiom?
39:26 David Pierce? The Atrix.
39:26 Nilay Patel? The Atrix.
39:27 David Pierce? The greatest phone of all.
39:29 Nilay Patel? The Atrix, they had a lap dock.
39:31 Alex Cranz? I wanted it so bad.
39:32 Nilay Patel? And then the the Transformer and then this guy, just if you can shove two computers into one computer.
39:38 David Pierce? Yes.
39:39 Nilay Patel? CS is the place for you.
39:40 David Pierce? I was describing CES to somebody this morning as half just a place to show off things that Best Buy might want to buy. And then half just companies saying, is this anything?
39:53 David Pierce? It's just, they're just like, uh, Vsong wrote a whole thing about like a wood paneled litter box that will also weigh your cat. It's like, that is the most is this anything gadget I've seen in forever. And I love CES for that.
40:06 Nilay Patel? I have a question.
40:06 David Pierce? You just walk by and it's people who are like, I'm from France, is this anything?
40:10 Nilay Patel? Does it weigh your cat before and after? Like, given the nature of a litter box?
40:15 David Pierce? Really good question.
40:16 Alex Cranz? Hmm.
40:16 Nilay Patel? By all accounts, you could also back into weighing something else.
40:20 David Pierce? Right. It would know what's left. It's a really good question.
40:23 Nilay Patel? I don't know what that data is for.
40:25 Alex Cranz? Why would you need? I just don't. Her cat's apparently too large to use it.
40:29 David Pierce? Samsung tail will tell you.
40:31 Nilay Patel? My apologies.
40:32 Alex Cranz? She's, yeah, she's gonna be holding up Samsung tail.
40:34 Nilay Patel? Okay, so I want to ask about two more things. Every year, Razr usually
40:38 Alex Cranz? They do a thing.
40:38 Nilay Patel? They do a thing, right? It's like a project about the, but it seems like a pretty chill this year.
40:42 Alex Cranz? Pretty chill. They did have like a pad that you can like sit on for your seat and it will like kick you in the butt when you play video games.
40:49 David Pierce? You would say it's a haptic cushion, I think they called it.
40:52 Alex Cranz? And that's, Sean, Sean was kind of impressed by it. He was like, this is fun. But that, that technology's been around for a while. Like, a lot of people have done that before. And as with a lot of these Razr CES things, they, they never come to fruition.
41:05 Nilay Patel? They're very good at getting attention.
41:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they're very, I mean, I love it. Yeah. Like the year they brought in the Razr laptop and it had three screens. And I was like, next year, this is gonna exist. It never.
41:14 David Pierce? No. Speaking of things you'd love to take into chemistry class.
41:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
41:18 David Pierce? Hell, yeah.
41:19 Nilay Patel? And then there's a Samsung flip phone called the Flipple?
41:22 David Pierce? Okay.
41:23 Nilay Patel? What is this called?
41:24 David Pierce? Once again, Eli, I am in the position of having to correct you on very important naming things. There are two new Samsung display folding screens. Uh, I am on the record as I believe flip phones are the future and folding phones are mostly stupid. Samsung has two new flip phone concepts, both of which basically go not quite 360 degrees because it runs into each other, but it like folds all the way open. Uh, one is called the Flex In-N-Out. All one word.
41:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
41:50 David Pierce? And the other is called, we should, we should talk about this. The other one is either called the Flex Lippel.
41:56 Nilay Patel? Okay.
41:57 David Pierce? Or the Flex Liple.
41:59 Nilay Patel? I just want to point out that Flipple is a better name.
42:01 Alex Cranz? It is a hundred percent better.
42:03 David Pierce? Uh, it is, I believe, a portmanteau of the words light and simple.
42:07 Nilay Patel? Oh, no.
42:07 Alex Cranz? So Liple has to be it because Lippel's hysterical.
42:11 David Pierce? It does have to be Liple.
42:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
42:13 Nilay Patel? You're right.
42:14 David Pierce? Liple sounds more like a medical condition that you'd have.
42:17 Nilay Patel? Liple sounds like a medical condition. Doctor.
42:21 Alex Cranz? Like, what's what you take for your heart? Lippel's like the thing you get diagnosed with.
42:26 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's right. But these things are like.
42:29 Nilay Patel? It also rhymes with something.
42:32 Nilay Patel? But just.
42:33 Alex Cranz? We all know it's getting diagnosed when you have Liple, okay? We all know a part of the body is getting diagnosed.
42:43 Nilay Patel? We got David.
42:44 David Pierce? We do all know.
42:45 Nilay Patel? It's day one of the CS show. We broke David Pierce. It's gone.
42:49 David Pierce? I just.
42:50 Nilay Patel? But so you like the phones?
42:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah, you like them. The L I P L E.
42:55 David Pierce? Yeah, just again, it's like, on the is this anything scale? Everybody comes every year to CBS and it's just like, look at this crazy thing we made a screen do. LG has a big booth of the bending OLEDs. The competition for like wildest array of screens this year is kind of a bummer, actually.
43:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah, we really toned it down. LG and Samsung have really toned it down.
43:17 David Pierce? Yeah, normally they're just like, we have a wave of 600 televisions.
43:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
43:21 David Pierce? That you can walk through. And this year LG's thing was just like, I don't know, 20 of the transparent TVs that just move back and forth.
43:28 Alex Cranz? Not a single tunnel.
43:29 David Pierce? Not that cool. Yeah.
43:31 Alex Cranz? Very exciting.
43:31 David Pierce? So I think Samsung is doing stuff with phones that I continue to think is really interesting. And part of the appeal of something like this is that because it can fold all the way around, you don't need an outside screen and an inside screen, which could in theory make this thing cheaper and easier to manufacture.
43:49 Alex Cranz? What?
43:49 Nilay Patel? But then what happens to the inside when you unfold it?
43:53 David Pierce? It becomes the outside.
43:54 Nilay Patel? So it's just nothing.
43:56 Alex Cranz? You can customize it.
43:57 David Pierce? Yes.
43:58 Alex Cranz? Beautiful pictures of Will.i.am in his Mercedes.
44:00 Nilay Patel? I do, and we'll, we'll talk about this on Thursday. Alex is doing some important foreshadowing here.
44:06 David Pierce? Yes.
44:06 Nilay Patel? Will.i.am wrote a song about infotainment systems. CS, everybody.
44:10 David Pierce? We have until Thursday to figure out a fair use way to play the whole song on the broadcast.
44:15 Nilay Patel? All right, we gotta take a break. Uh, we, we should talk about the Vision Pro announcement.
44:19 David Pierce? Yeah, we should.
44:19 Nilay Patel? It did hit this week. We'll be back. We'll talk about that.
44:28 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
45:00 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. CS day one. It's day one.
45:04 Alex Cranz? One-ish.
45:05 Nilay Patel? Yesterday was day zero.
45:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
45:07 David Pierce? Yeah, that's right.
45:08 Nilay Patel? I get this wrong every year. I've been coming here. This is like my 15th year and I still don't quite know what day of the show it is. I think it's day one. Lots to talk about at CS. We've got another show coming later this week, all the rest of it. There's still news happening. We should end though, this episode by talking about the thing that didn't happen here, but that will probably dominate the year in tech coverage, no matter what, the Apple Vision Pro.
45:31 David Pierce? Yeah, which is a screen gadget and thus fits the rubric of our episode.
45:34 Alex Cranz? It's like mini screens.
45:36 Nilay Patel? The most screens. I heard a rumor, like I said at the top of the show, people at CS are just full of speculation over the screens, the Vision Pro, how much this thing costs to build, whether Apple is making any money on it, whether they're not making any money on it. So we already knew the price.
45:52 David Pierce? Yep.
45:53 Nilay Patel? Industry should take it out from Apple. Apple announces things like, here's a price in a release window. They said early 24 and they meant it.
46:01 David Pierce? Yeah.
46:02 Nilay Patel? So they said early 2024 and they meant it. End of January, they announced, February 2nd, this thing's shipping, $34.99, $3,500 bucks for a 256GB model. Unclear if you need more storage in your face computer. Who knows?
46:18 David Pierce? To be fair, that's going to be like four minutes of spatial video, as far as I can tell.
46:23 Nilay Patel? Spatial video on iPhone, where you can record it right now, it's 130MB per minute.
46:29 David Pierce? It's real big.
46:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
46:30 David Pierce? That's not small.
46:32 Nilay Patel? That's a...
46:33 Alex Cranz? You gotta think in TikTok minutes, not like...
46:35 David Pierce? I see. That's fair. Okay.
46:36 Alex Cranz? Real minutes.
46:37 David Pierce? Right.
46:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I would say that the press release announcing Vision Pro deeply confused. It does not have any AR or MR apps really mentioned. Apps mentioned in the press release include fantastical and Slack.
46:51 David Pierce? It really seems like this is an iPad for your face. And what we've heard from developers is that Apple is going way out of its way to tell them not to call it AR or VR or MR or XR or any of the other thousands of things. Like, Apple is very specific that these are spatial computing apps. And I don't think that's going to work. I've been wrong about Apple's ability to make things into buzzwords before, but that one doesn't really work for me. But it really does seem like, at least at the beginning, I've been talking to developers... Really for the last six months about this and the number of folks that I've talked to who are either sitting it out at the very beginning because they haven't spent enough time with it and aren't sure what to do with it
47:36 David Pierce? and don't want to ship a crappy app just to have something there the first day or people who are saying basically everything we're doing is based on an iPad app anyway. That's kind of the starting point for these Vision Pro apps. We're just going to ship the iPad app and we'll figure it out from there.
47:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but I just want to give you the list. So Apple's own press release. I'm just going off very directly. Here's how Apple is communicating about the Vision Pro. They say it's shipping, it's coming out revolutionary operating system and user interface. Vision OS, you can use your pinchy pinch to select things, eye tracking, eye tracking when I saw it looked was amazing. Then they're like, you can immerse yourself in environments, which is a straight up VR feature.
48:14 Alex Cranz? Yep.
48:15 Nilay Patel? Right? That's interesting. The first thing that they tell you about it is that you can put yourself somewhere else. So it's a VR headset. Fascinating to consider. It's the first thing they say. Then they say, here's all the stuff you can do. Bullet list, an infinite canvas for productivity. First bullet in the list, fantastical free form, Jigsaw Space, Microsoft 365 and Slack. It's like, all right, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to Hollywood and I'm a Slack. Right? Like if you just read the press release, that's where you land.
48:45 David Pierce? Yeah.
48:46 Nilay Patel? In Apple's own messaging. I think this is fascinating. Maybe this is the best Slack experience anyone has ever had in their entire life.
48:51 Alex Cranz? Hmm.
48:52 Nilay Patel? It's just interesting that this is what they're landing on. Then the ultimate entertainment experience. Uh, so you know, they're very proud of these displays, more than 4K TV free try. Apple TV plus Disney plus Max, all their services on a screen that feels 100 feet wide. Okay, that's with HDR video.
49:09 David Pierce? Can I tell you a big TV? Fun conspiracy theory I have about this, which is that Apple deliberately doesn't mention Netflix because Apple and Netflix are beefing over all the stuff in the Apple TV plus app. I have no evidence for this. That's how I feel.
49:21 Alex Cranz? I would believe that 100%.
49:23 Nilay Patel? Users can also enjoy new interactive experiences like encounter dinosaur. Uh, VR app. So I'm just, again, I'm just reading their press release. I don't, I'm not saying these things are good or bad. I'm just saying, if you just read how they're talking about it, they have described to you a VR headset. Yep, yes. Fascinating. Then gaming experiences, access games in the App Store, including 250 titles on Apple Arcade. This is where I think the iPad for your face comes in. Yeah. Because what, what do we know about the Quest? The thing that sells the Quest is games. Fundamentally, games and Supernatural, which is a fitness game. Yep. That's what, even Meta refers to the Quest as games console. It is by far the, you might think the Vision Pro is going to blow the Quest away. But it is currently the market leader. So it's the thing you compare to.
50:08 Nilay Patel? Super Fruit Ninja, What the Golf. These are iPad games, right? Like. Yeah. It's just, I'm just, and then the next one is Memories brought to life. Spatial videos and photos. This is fascinating. The people I know who have tried this thing say it is very convincing. I am very excited to try it. I've been taking some spatial videos. Excited to try it when we get our hands on one of these things. But that's limited to people who own an iPhone 15 Pro. Right. So that very, like, it, I think it costs $3500. I'm assuming that's a pretty big overlap of Apple customers. And then it's the, then it's the stuff, right? Spatial FaceTime, where you get your avatar, you can talk to it, but you need two Vision Pros to pull this off. Fascinating. If a user is wearing Vision Pro while on FaceTime, they appear as their persona, while others joining from Mac, iPod, iPad, or iPhone appear in a tile.
50:53 Nilay Patel? Okay, like, we just have to see this stuff work, but that's still, like, this is the cutting edge stuff. You can't really use it. Yeah. Because you yourself will not experience this. Right, right.
51:05 David Pierce? Right, it's actually possible.
51:06 Nilay Patel? Persona to someone else.
51:08 David Pierce? Right, if you're on a Vision Pro and everybody else is on a different Apple device for FaceTime. It's, it's actually not going to be a great experience.
51:17 Nilay Patel? Right.
51:18 David Pierce? It'll be fine, but like, it won't be, again, it's, it's a face iPad. That's what that will feel like.
51:23 Nilay Patel? What will you look like? That's it, by the way. Then, then we get breakthrough design, then we can talk about that stuff. But that, in terms of experiences you can have in the headset, that's Apple's list. So iPad stuff and VR stuff? And it's, yeah, it's just funny that the first thing they describe is you will go somewhere else, totally VR. And then they describe productivity, then you can play games from the App Store. And then, and then this personas thing. You know, like, I, again, I've worn one of these things. It was very compelling when I wore it. It's the best VR experience I've ever had. Yeah. But if Apple wants to break through into the spatial computing and they think the future is augmented reality, actually very unclear where the augmented reality part of this headset comes in.
52:02 David Pierce? Yeah, I think the productivity is probably going to be the closest thing that we see there.
52:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:07 David Pierce? I mean, one thing I noticed, and again, it's possible this is just like the way that it's written in the press releases, Apple mentions that there are sort of specific spatial games like made for the Vision Pro and doesn't say that about any other app. So it's like, I think there's a decent chance that what we're going to get is like fantastical with a different border in the Vision Pro. And I think that's going to be a lot of these apps where like
52:30 Alex Cranz? Translucent.
52:31 David Pierce? They're just going to get rid of the Chrome in their apps so that it feels more like a floating rectangle and that's going to be the Vision Pro app.
52:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:38 David Pierce? And I think this question of like, what does a spatial calendar look like is going to take a while. And I don't know if that's a thing people want or if that's worth working on or if it's going to be meaningfully better than an iPad app in front of your face, but it doesn't seem like anyone has really cracked that.
52:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:57 David Pierce? And I think Apple is betting that some combination of FaceTime and just like the interface is going to be the killer app for people. Cause like to your point, the eye tracking is awesome.
53:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:08 David Pierce? The pinchy pinch thing, at least in the demos that we've gotten is fantastic. Like it's just fun to use the thing. And I think for at least this first version of a $3,500 gadget, that might get Apple far enough.
53:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah, my theory is that Apple does not really want people to buy this one. Like it's scale, right? They're going to make 500,000 maybe. I think that's the rumor I heard in terms of like
53:30 Alex Cranz? That's a lot.
53:30 David Pierce? That's the thing I've been hearing a bunch this week is how many does Apple think it's going to sell?
53:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:35 David Pierce? That's the other number everybody's talking about.
53:37 Nilay Patel? The thing I heard yesterday is they're actually capped by how many displays that can be made. We'll see, right? They're, they're at the bleeding edge of display tech. So we'll see. I just think that Apple does not want this three, this version of this thing to be a mass consumer.
53:51 Alex Cranz? Right, because it's, it's a developer's kit, like
53:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah, they just polished it up to
53:54 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that's why we don't, that's why everything in it is, is kind of weird and, and we don't know what the killer app is because they don't know what the killer app is. So they're Like, here's our thing. Please don't call it VR or AR, even though that's what it is. And, and I get why they're doing that. They, they wanna like, they're late to that game. And so they don't wanna be, feel like they're late to that game. So spatial computing is the thing. And it sounds like it is really, really cool, but it's also just very clear that they don't know what they're doing entirely.
54:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And so let me just tell you what you get for your 3500 bucks. You get the headset. You get the solo knit band and the dual loop band.
54:32 David Pierce? Sick.
54:32 Nilay Patel? Which are the headbands put around your head. A light seal and two light seal cushions. The light seal seems like a thing that you gotta finagle with and get exactly right because you gotta block out a light. The Vision Pro cover, very important, polishing cloth.
54:46 David Pierce? Don't just skip over that.
54:47 Nilay Patel? It's for 20 bucks. It's a lot. Free polish cloth, the battery, the USB C charging cable and the USB C adapter. I think we continually forget, Vision Pro has two and a half hour battery life with an external battery pack.
55:00 David Pierce? That you wear on, in your pocket.
55:02 Nilay Patel? On a cable. I, I'm just saying, I, I agree with you. I think this is a developer kit. I think they need developers to get their hands on this thing. They need people to start using it. They need to collect some data about what it's for, why it's, why it exists. And I think that is just the most unlike Apple I've seen any product in quite a while. Even the watch, which I criticized heavily at the beginning, and it took them three tries to figure out the watch.
55:23 David Pierce? Yeah.
55:23 Nilay Patel? And now it's a huge success. And already it's a huge success. But the, the watch was like a shotgun blast of ideas about what you could do with a computer on your wrist. Down to you will flirt with people in school by sending them your heartbeat. But that was like a complete Johnny Ive thought.
55:38 David Pierce? Yes.
55:38 Nilay Patel? Not a good thought.
55:40 Alex Cranz? It's a fun thought.
55:41 Nilay Patel? Not a thought that landed anywhere, but he was like, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna put your fingers on your wrist. Then you're gonna read your heartbeat and someone else is gonna feel your heartbeat and they will know that you wanna go to the movies.
55:53 David Pierce? The Vision Pro is like comparatively a little, is this anything?
55:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's, it's got that vibe.
55:58 David Pierce? Yeah. And what's weird is there's nothing at CES trying to compete with it.
56:02 Nilay Patel? There's a couple of things. Sony announced a fake headset that doesn't exist.
56:05 Alex Cranz? Unreal.
56:06 David Pierce? But that, that they're just imagining as like a content creation device. It's, it's a camera more than it is anything. But then Yeah, we saw XREAL, which is making the sort of like AR display glasses. It's doing more like degrees of freedom and they can see depth and all this stuff. Like they're pushing towards this thing, but everybody else is still on this. Like, we're gonna take something that looks passively like glasses and then try to make it more and more powerful over time. No one, at least as far as I've seen, is trying to do the whole swing so far.
56:37 Alex Cranz? I mean, Meta is very clear, like Meta is, right?
56:40 David Pierce? Oh, sure, but Meta's not really here doing stuff either.
56:43 Alex Cranz? I think the thing is, Apple, we're looking at it as like, oh, is Apple, why is nobody competing with Apple here? And that's because Apple is late to the party and Apple has to actually compete with everyone else.
56:52 Nilay Patel? Everyone else already launched their failed VR headsets two years ago.
56:55 David Pierce? And three and four and five years ago. Yeah, yeah, but no, and I also think what I've heard from a bunch of people this week that the fact that the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, the ones that actually look like real glasses, have been such a hit with people is changing a lot of folks' mind about actually the way to approach this. And I've gotten a lot of confidence from people over the last couple of months, but even including at this show, who think Division Pro is wrong in a way that people don't usually bet against Apple products and are convinced that if we can take something that is closer to looking like a normal thing you'd wear out at a place like CES and not a pair of ski goggles on your face, we can get that to powerful faster than Apple can get Division Pro to like socially cool.
57:38 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
57:39 David Pierce? And I think Apple usually wins that race, but this is kind of the hardest it has ever had to try to do that. And I just think it's gonna be so fascinating. But I am sort of bummed that no one here, like this is the year Samsung should have been like.
57:52 Nilay Patel? There's a rumor that Samsung and Google are gonna do.
57:56 Nilay Patel? It doesn't have local dimming, but it'll show you artwork anywhere you want. There's rumors that Google and Samsung are gonna do something again.
58:03 David Pierce? Yeah.
58:05 Nilay Patel? We'll see.
58:05 David Pierce? Cause that went great the last time. Remember the Galaxy Gear, how everybody had one of those?
58:09 Nilay Patel? We've run this, we've run this experiment before. Maybe we'll see, but that is, I will say, where CES is great. I love the gadgets, I love talking about TVs and laptops that are actually two laptops bolted together.
58:21 Alex Cranz? Put them together, XZibit would be so happy.
58:24 Nilay Patel? But I suspect we're going to spend the year talking about the Vision Pro. I think that's right. Because it really, you know, Apple's betting on it. It's a big new category. A lot of ideas contain that thing. And I agree. I think there's something to the fact that the meta glasses are doing well and people like them in a way that we I usually don't see this. Sean Holster is here. He's taking a lot of videos at a lot of the little events. He's been wearing a phone, sort of like on a chest mount, so he could like show people with his hands. And our commenters on TikTok and on the social platforms are assuming that he's taking with the meta glasses. Oh, interesting. Which is super fascinating. Like, they've already broken into consciousness such that people think that that's the camera he's using. And we and like Veer and our director is like, no, it's an iPhone.
59:07 Nilay Patel? All right. I think that's it for the day one. It's day one, Liam. Day one. Day one of CS. It's always day one. There's lots more on the show. We got to do an entire show about not screens. Yeah. And Alex has to talk about ATSC 3.0. Some of the non-screens. We haven't talked about a car yet. Right. And they're all it's all cars here at CS, which have are not screens for David's rubric. They're not screen gadgets, but they do have screens. Shut up. Don't worry about it. It's gonna be fine. Things that roll and things that don't. That's the new split. We'll be back a little later this week with that episode. In the meantime, if there's stuff you want us to go check out at CS, you have questions about some of the stuff you're seeing. We're here, like I said, for a tech reporter standpoint, this is fish in a barrel. We can go find out almost anything you want, except what the Vision Pro is for. That'll be for later.
59:53 Nilay Patel? All right, that's it. That's for Chast. Talk to you all.
1:00:00 David Pierce? And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.
1:00:32 Speaker 04 Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every 5 seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.
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