Pod Insights The Vergecast Switch 2, Steam Deck, and the next-gen console wars About this episode Handheld gaming looks like the future — so why isn't it more popular? The Verge's Sean Hollister joins the show to talk about some new data about the handheld console market, what it says about the Steam Deck's dominance, whether the Switch 2 might change everything all over again, and why Sony and Microsoft don't appear to be in the game at all. After that, David reports on his trip to Florida to see TGL, the golf league aiming to bring the sport to new places and new fans, with the help of a truly enormous amount of technology. Finally, we answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline about iPads — and more specifically, one particularly good reason to upgrade to the Air or the Pro.
Further reading:
Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming shipments
Steam Deck OLED review: better, not faster
Lenovo Legion Go S review: feels good, plays bad
Asus ROG Ally X review: the best Windows gaming handheld by a mile
MSI Claw review: an embarrassment
A night at TGL, the would-be future of golf
From ESPN: Inside the making of Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy's TGL
From Wired: Robotic Putting Greens. Mixed Reality. Loud Spectators. This Is Golf?!
Apple iPad Air 2025 review: what the M3 upgrade really gets you
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 15,966 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the handheld gaming wars. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting here messing around with a new phone. It's the Nothing Phone 3A Pro. I think this phone's actually sort of interesting. Nothing in general has like big, cool ideas about smartphones, but I've talked a bunch already on this show about how I suspect this is going to be a relatively uninteresting year in smartphones. Flip phones and foldable phones aren't quite ready to go fully mainstream. And I think the iPhones and galaxies and pixels of the world just aren't going to be that interesting. So, one of the challenges for myself this year has been to find new, interesting ideas about smartphones. And I think the thing in this phone, it's called the Essential Key,
0:48 David Pierce? and it's basically a button on the side that is designed to be an AI input. It's not like visual intelligence in the way that, you know, Apple is trying to do stuff or all the complicated multimodal systems. This is just, right now frankly, it's a glorified voice recorder. But the idea is that it can also do things like take screenshots and just ingest information from you as you use your phone and then store it, organize it, make sense of it. That's actually a thing AI is set up to do relatively well and strikes me as a pretty good idea. It's super, super limited on this phone. It like barely can do any of the things that I thought it might be able to do. But, cool idea and seems like the sort of thing that if AI is going to come into smartphones, this is what it should look like. Anyway, we are not here to talk about really AI or smartphones today.
1:33 David Pierce? We're going to do two things on the show. First, I'm going to talk to Sean Hollister about some data that he got about how the Steam Deck is doing compared to all of the other gaming handhelds out there, and what it says about where the Steam Deck and the Switch 2 and all the other handheld consoles might go next. After that, I'm going to tell you a story about a golf tournament that I went to. I went to West Palm Beach, Florida to see a thing that is, if not the future of golf, a future of golf, or at least it desperately wants to be. And I think what that looks like and what that means and how you even do that is really interesting. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about it. Then we have a question from the Vergecast hotline. Lots of fun stuff coming in this episode. I'm very excited about it and I hope you enjoy it.
2:17 David Pierce? All that is coming up in just a second, but first, this thing lights up all the time and it beeps at me and nothing has a lot of weird interface ideas that I need to go turn off. So I'm going to go do that. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.
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3:04 David Pierce? Welcome back. All right, let's talk about video games. I'm not the world's most qualified person to talk about the bleeding edge of video games. I should just be honest about that. I have a PS4 right here and I have an original Nintendo Switch. That's where I do most of my gaming. I've been waiting to upgrade to a PS5. I don't know what for, for something. It's just that all of the games I wanted for so long were on the PS4. And then I mostly became a Switch person and I play some PC games too. But like, I am not the person, the absolute cutting edge of PC graphics for everything, which I think might be the reason I'm so interested in handheld gaming, which seem like they have the possibility
3:48 David Pierce? to give me what I want, which is something easy and portable and uncomplicated, but also give me access to this new generation of games. We've talked about handheld gaming a lot on this show, from the Switch to the Steam Deck, to all this stuff from IONEO and other companies that are flooding the internet. But it turns out that the market is a little bit different than I expected in some ways that I was a little bit surprised by. Sean Hollister on our team got some data. He's been testing all of these things and he understands where we are in this space and where it's headed. So I figured this is a good time to get into it. Let's check it out. Sean Hollister, welcome to the show. I get to do this a couple of times with you recently. This is very exciting for me.
4:30 Speaker 03 It's so good to be here.
4:32 David Pierce? We were talking just before we started recording about why we are both so interested in gaming handhelds. And I think the reason for you is because you you use a lot of them and care about them and are interested in them and have them. I have no rational reason for my interest in this category. I think I think gaming handhelds are like the most interesting hardware category on earth. And yet, the only thing I play video games on is my like first gen Nintendo Switch that sucks. Just like, this is the thing I care about.
5:02 Speaker 03 You say it sucks, but a moment ago, before we started recording, you told me that you were happy with it.
5:07 David Pierce? I am happy with it. So the thing that I learned is, we we talked about this last fall and you guys, I would say, did a heroic job of trying to sell me on a Steam Deck, which I did not buy. Potentially should have, and and we should come back to that, but I did not buy it. And what I did instead was just resolve to never unplug my Switch ever again. And now it is, it is a, it is a console that sits here on my desk plugged in and it works just fine. That's it.
5:34 Speaker 03 I thought the Nintendo Switch was a revelation to what it came out. It it it really felt like that. As soon as they got over the hump of it just being only a Zelda machine, it was like, this is amazing. You have games that are the same games when you're docked and the same games on the go. They are the full games. You can play through full games now, wherever you are, at any given moment, on the toilet, of course, and everywhere else you might go in your daily life. Not just there in front of your big 4K TV. And so that is, that was a revelation for me. And then the Steam Deck, when it came along, was, and now those games can be this giant library of games that you've owned on PC for a decade. And it can be the new PC games that are coming out, and it's not just restricted to, again, Zelda and Mario.
6:18 Speaker 03 And I'm like, okay, revelation on top of revelation. I am so sold. You just need to figure out all these bugs, Valve. And they did, over the course of like, three to nine months, and then they started selling more of them. And apparently, though, the market isn't as big as anybody hoped or expected who talks about this as lovingly as you. And I do.
6:37 David Pierce? Yeah, so let's let's actually start there. I think there are a few pieces of what you just said that I want to I want to poke at. But you wrote a story recently where you you got some new data about how well the Steam Deck is doing, but also how well the Steam Deck is doing compared to its competition. Can you just walk me through a little bit of what you learned?
6:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'll walk through it my way first, and then I want to walk through it like the way everybody else is reacting to it. Because they're two very different ways. I wrote a story, and I'm just going to read you the headline really quick. Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming was was my headline, which I put out on the third birthday of the system launching. So I was like, OK, let's do this as a curtain raiser. Why not? I didn't actually grab this data thinking it was going to be for the third birthday. It just happened to be a nice coincidence that when I started writing it, I was like, you know, if I hold on to this two more days.
7:30 David Pierce? Love when that happens.
7:31 Speaker 03 Publish it on the birthday. Why not? But so so so I went out and I asked, I actually got tipped off during CES. Somebody was like, I asked them, you know, how big is the total addressable market for for gaming handhelds anyway? And they're like, well, according to the latest IDC numbers, it's probably IDC numbers. Let me talk to the guy at the IDC who compiles numbers. Yes. And and I was I was so happy that guy at the IDC who compiles numbers, whose name is Lewis Ward, by the way, was willing to share some of this with me. What I thought this was going to be about was we know the Steam Deck has sold millions, multiple millions. But how big a deal is it compared to the Windows handhelds? Because there've been Asus ROG Ally, ROG Ally, for those of you who are nitpicky about that.
8:16 David Pierce? It's rog. I don't want to hear it. It's it's rog. Listen, I understand the acronym. It's rog.
8:22 Speaker 03 I say rog. I get made fun of every time. It's great. Lenovo Legion Go, the MSI Claw and so on. And at least two of those have had a big presence at retail, you know, Best Buy. You go there, you can buy two different kinds of Asus ROG Ally, and you can buy your Lenovo Legion Go. And I was like, well, the things that everybody can just go buy, they probably have a big chunk of the market right now, right? And so what Lewis told me, what he showed me, was that not so much. The Steam Deck is like it probably around 4 million, and the Windows handhelds are probably around 2 million.
8:58 David Pierce? Total.
8:58 Speaker 03 So total. This is cumulative, not not per year. This is like. Since, but you're getting into the way everybody else is reading this. So since, since 2022 and the Steam Deck came out, and of course, the Steam Deck had the entire first year 2022 to itself. So yeah, big head start, building a new category. What a lot of other people took away from my story is handheld PC gaming is going nowhere fast. It's tiny. It is tiny compared to PCs. It's tiny compared to, you know, probably desktop graphics cards, probably tiny compared to gaming laptops. It's very tiny compared to Switch, of course, which sells more in a quarter than all of these have sold in three years, even now that everybody knows the Switch 2 is coming.
9:41 David Pierce? There are somewhere in the range of like six-ish million handheld game consoles out there that are not the Switch.
9:48 Speaker 03 Yeah. With the, with the exception of China, China is like currently, and they're working on this, it's currently a hole in the IDC's estimates. By the way, these are estimated shipments, not
10:00 David Pierce? Right.
10:01 Speaker 03 actual consoles and not sold. So shipments. So theoretically, shipments does include things like handhelds that are currently at retail and haven't been sold through yet, or handhelds that are being stockpiled. It also may include, because IDC is basing these estimates off of supply chain things, like big batch orders of components going from somewhere here in, you know, in Taiwan, or somewhere in China, to the United States, or to Europe. It is worldwide. But it may also include, you know, they bought a whole bunch of components for a handheld that hasn't been shipped, or even maybe announced yet. We don't know for sure that these are like actual handhelds. But given what some of the other estimates out there, given what Valve has said about the multiple millions, these
10:43 Speaker 03 numbers seem right. The one hole is China. IDC has not necessarily gone, one, to look at what is being sold in China, because again, it's tracking supply chain components that are being shipped out
10:56 David Pierce? Right.
10:57 Speaker 03 of China. So maybe there's a decent sized handheld gaming market in China. IDC is also not tracking the few, and I've always called them boutique sellers of handheld gaming PCs, like GPD, IN Neo, OneX Player, there's other like
11:12 Speaker 03 Ones like this that might also sell a bunch of Windows handheld gaming PCs. But when we look at like their Kickstarter's, we're talking about thousands of units, not millions of units. So we don't think they're making a big dent yet. We just don't know.
11:27 David Pierce? So even in the very best case scenario, we're dealing with a very small thing here.
11:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, it's small. And, and, and is small like, is that good at three years? That's, that's like the question. And AMD's Frank Azor will be like, we're inventing a new category. Three years, you know, this is great. You look over at smart glasses, you look over at Meta's Ray-Bans. Meta's Ray-Bans are like at what, 2 million? And so, you know, they're, they're talking about ramping up quickly to 10 million per year at some point. Just Essilor Luxottica, the glasses maker, working with Meta on smart glasses, just one firm, pretty big firm, just one firm, from 2 million cumulative to like 10 million annually.
12:15 Speaker 03 Maybe there's room for win, for Windows or for, for, for handhelds that play Windows games. Let's put it that way, to go that direction. But I don't know, it's, it's not growing fast and it did grow a bit and then it shrunk in 2023. The year that, that not, that, that it was no longer just Valve with the Steam Deck. It was also the ROG ally, it was also one of the Legion Go. Say, uh, shipments, estimated shipments nearly doubled. But then they halved again in going into 2024. So maybe a bit of trough of disillusionment.
12:56 Speaker 03 Maybe a lot of people bought those ROG Allies and Legion Goes or even Steam Decks and decided to return them or decided that they hadn't as many as they wanted in the market. And they, nobody needed to buy another one right now. Maybe it's a wait and see thing. Maybe some of those people are like, well, why would I buy a Steam Deck when I'm sure a Steam Deck 2 is coming? Better things on the way.
13:19 David Pierce? I have, I have different, let me throw two theories at you. And I, and I want to see if, what you think about either of these. I think there is one theory that holds that actually the people who play PC games and the people who want a relatively speaking, low powered machine for playing games on the go is like, th- those Venn diagrams do not overlap at all, right? Like, if I am the person who is building a gaming tower to play games on my giant screen with my integrated GPU, I don't want a Windows handheld because it won't play the games the way that I want. That's one theory. I'm not positive how much I buy that theory, but that's one theory. The other theory is just that these devices aren't very good.
14:03 David Pierce? And I think the, which is why I want to talk about the Steam Deck, because I think the question of how good is the Steam Deck really is actually like the most interesting question in this category right now. Because all the other ones seem to suck in, in one form or another. Like you just reviewed the, the Lenovo Legion Go S, which was supposed to be the one and super duper isn't the one. And it, it just seems to me that maybe what is happening is this is like a discerning group of people who would want something like this right now. And they're looking at all of these devices and saying, oh, these are bad. I'm not going to buy any of them. Is it just that simple?
14:41 Speaker 03 I want to accept, but also reject this idea that these things aren't very good. And that, that it's like such a discerning audience. Okay. What I see anecdotally, but all the time are reports of people, you know, in Reddit, in social media, in my comments, in et cetera, saying, my gosh, I didn't know I could do this kind of gaming on the go. Or I'm a lapsed game PC gamer or, or a console gamer who never got into the PC space to begin with. And wow, there's just, there's all these riches at my fingertips now. All these riches, literally the palm of my hands. I'm taking with me everywhere. I don't see a hundred of these every time I walk into an airport.
15:26 Speaker 03 Sure. These days I'm seeing like two or three when I walk into the airport. I'm like, okay, that's great. It's great to see that many of them. I think that if, if, if I were to put my finger on one thing, I think it's awareness that a good one of these exists, that the Steam Deck is very good or that.
15:44 Speaker 03 One of the Windows handhelds with a Steam Deck-like OS on it is very good. That's like a nerdy niche, which most people are not going to go that they're not going to go install Bazite on their thing. And if they're coming from the I'm a lapsed PC gamer, they're probably not going all the way to Bazite right away. I think that that message could well be getting washed out by a bunch of other things that seem to suck. Because if I'm getting into this market and I'm like, handhelds are super cool. And my first, and then I go to a store and I look for a handheld and that handheld is the original ROG Ally or the original Legion Go. And I'm like, oh, I heard about this Steam Deck thing, but Windows, Windows are where my games are.
16:29 Speaker 03 And that Windows thing looks great. And it looks like it's not too much money either. Those things are on sale. I might well go buy that Asus ROG Ally or Lenovo Legion Go and then be like, what is this bullshit? The battery dies after an hour. These controls feel a little bit weird in my hands. I have to touch the screen constantly to get, to make things to go where I want and to launch this program. And to like, I have to, when you open the box of one of these things, you plug it in, you turn on your Asus or your Lenovo, and then you spend 45 minutes installing mandatory updates and adding away prompts for
17:12 Speaker 03 dark pattern prompts for various pieces of Microsoft software that you don't want, subscriptions that you would never pay for before you even get to the Windows desktop to begin installing your games through game launchers that may not be there yet. And then you have to go and touchscreen your way through a web browser to go download them first. What is this bullshit? If that is your first experience getting into handheld gaming, handheld PC gaming, you're going to think that the whole category is bullshit too. And I don't know why Microsoft has not addressed this meaningfully. If you instead... Trust a company that's mostly known for games, not for hardware, and has had some weird failings in hardware in the past,
17:56 Speaker 03 to ship you a console that uses Linux, an operating system that you're likely wholly unfamiliar with, and do not know whether it will play your games. And in some cases, people will rightfully say it will not play certain games. It did not play your FIFA.
18:10 David Pierce? Did not.
18:11 Speaker 03 It's not gonna play. Yes, it's not gonna play your Call of Duty, which you, please do not try to play Call of Duty on a seven-inch screen, regardless of whether it's Windows or Linux.
18:22 David Pierce? Right.
18:24 Speaker 03 If you jump through the mental hoops of, oh, there seems to be a lot of mental friction here, and then you turn that thing on, you will be confronted with a wonderful experience that is designed for handheld gaming and plays lots of games you can get very cheaply. Games often will come out on PC before they come out on consoles if they are, especially from the indie variety. Like, if you wanted to play Bellatro, which is now an amazing addiction on phones.
18:52 David Pierce? Yep.
18:52 Speaker 03 It was an incredible addiction on handhelds, like the Steam Deck first.
18:56 David Pierce? Totally. So that's a really interesting way of thinking about it, because I think there is a piece of that that is just like, these devices make you ask a lot of questions and ensure a lot of things that buying a PlayStation doesn't, right? Like, you buy a PlayStation and you are going to plug it in and it is going to play all of your games the way it is supposed to play your games. And the whole handheld space, even the things that do that passably well, it's not as straightforward and simple and obvious, and you have to just cross-check compatibility and quality and do a lot more work. So what we need then, this is where I come around to, like, where on earth are Sony and Microsoft in doing this?
19:40 David Pierce? Because what we need is the thing that is just the simple one. And my next question for you was gonna be, why hasn't the Switch?
19:49 David Pierce? Sort of turned everybody on to the idea that this is a thing that's possible because it's been so successful. It's been out for a long time. It is truly mainstream, the idea that like I can hold this device in my hands and play video games. But I think it's also true that Nintendo just sort of permanently exists off to the side of the rest of the gaming world. So what we need is something that is as straightforward and simple and mainstream as the Switch, but for these other kinds of games. And that is the thing I feel like the Steam Deck has not yet accomplished. And it seems like you agree with that.
20:18 Speaker 03 The Steam Deck has not accomplished it in the market yet, but it has accomplished becoming the wake up call for those companies you just named, for Microsoft and for Sony. Microsoft and Sony, for a very long time, have known the wisdom in the industry is that you cannot compete with Nintendo on a handheld. Every handheld that has faced off against Nintendo from the earliest Game Boy days has utterly failed beyond
20:49 David Pierce? That's interesting.
20:50 Speaker 03 A very specific pair of niches. The PS Vita was, had a wonderful niche of indie games. And both the PS Vita and PSP had a great niche in Japan very specifically, and some other countries that rely heavily on wonderful transit, public transit. When you have a public transit country where handheld gaming is valuable and you might have several other people on that train with you to do like local networked things together. The DS Light did a great job of that from Nintendo, but also the PSP and Vita did some good jobs of that for Sony.
21:32 Speaker 03 But for the most part, for the entire history of handheld gaming, the collective wisdom has been, don't mess with Nintendo. And if you are going to make a handheld, it's the place that you shovel things that aren't going to maybe do as well on your big console. You'll make some games for that thing, but they have to be, you know, small ports of things that you think might work there. And anytime you spend one of your game ideas there, like Gravity Rush on the Vita, or Uncharted on the Vita as well, those games are going to be watered down versions because you don't want to put your A-teams on that. You don't want to take too much ammunition away from your primary console to do that. Well,
22:17 Speaker 03 First with Nintendo and now with the Steam Deck, the realization is that maybe handheld gaming is the future. Maybe this is an existential crisis for them. If they don't have some irons in that fire, then maybe they miss out on what gaming is all becoming. Because the Switch and the Steam Deck again prove that it doesn't have to be the port of the game. It doesn't have to be your B team putting a game on there. It can be any game that runs on your main system. Any game that doesn't require the horsepower of a constant AC plug into the wall. That can be portable now.
23:01 Speaker 03 And portable also doesn't have to mean outside of the house. It can mean your couch. For many people, it means your couch. So Sony got started with the PlayStation Portal for those couch folks. Right. And the Portal, for all we know, may have sold better than all these PC gaming handouts so far. But right now it just plays your game streamed from your PlayStation box. You're on the couch with somebody else. Maybe they're watching TV. It's a controller with a screen much more than it is like an actual console. Yeah, but it lets you be with somebody else who's watching TV on the main screen. And then you can do the thing next, which is also what I do with the Steam Deck. And I also stream my PlayStation from the Steam Deck because by the way, the Steam Deck doubles as a PlayStation Portal if you install the right app. Chiaki, go look it up. It's amazing. Yeah.
23:46 Speaker 03 Now, they also know they need to make real handhelds. And both Microsoft and Sony, one praised the Steam Deck as it came out and was like, this is great. We're going to put some of our games on there because they want that money from the games right now. Both Sony and Microsoft have realized that putting games on PC is basically existing games on PC. Their existing PlayStation games, their existing Xbox games, if they put them on PC, it's like printing free money. For the most part, there's a little bit of work involved in, you know, in getting it ported properly, but. Pretty much printing free money. And both of their strategies have shifted over the years from we have to sell a box
24:29 Speaker 03 and the box will have an attached rate of games for sure that justify making the box to we want to be in the business of selling games. The Xbox is every screen you own. That's what Microsoft says, not just internally, but in its advertising now. Sony's been moving that direction too. And so both of them praised it. They started putting their games on it. They started not only putting their games up, but, but making sure the games ran well on a handheld form factor, making them Steam Deck, you know, verified. And they've dropped hints that they will have bigger handhelds later. The reports, which I should cite both of them to Bloomberg, by the way, are that Sony
25:13 Speaker 03 and Microsoft will have something in the next few years, not right away. It's not a reason to not buy something existing right now, but in the next few years, they're both looking into this, they're both building around this.
25:25 David Pierce? What is the holdup here? Like the, the Steam Deck has been out long enough that people are demanding a new one because it seems to be at the end of a cycle before there should be a new one. And yet we're still at a few years for Sony and Microsoft. And I think the, the reason I'm particularly interested in this is from Microsoft's perspective because like you said, Microsoft is on this whole game pass, all your games everywhere, every screen is an Xbox thing. And it strikes me as the most obvious thing in the world for Microsoft to just build a handheld console and say, well, you're streaming most of your games anyway. You don't even need a ton of power. Here is what amounts to a controller with a screen. Let's go nuts. And yet we're still at a few years out.
26:08 David Pierce? Like it, that just does not make sense to me.
26:12 Speaker 03 My, my gut is that it's infighting. I think, I think not every, I think not every team at these companies is convinced. There have been some major restructurings at Sony recently. In terms of like who, which, which people have the power and which departments. It's Sony Interactive Entertainment, I should say the, um, the games arm, PlayStation, we call it. And then on the Xbox side of things, there's always been infighting forever.
26:38 David Pierce? Yeah. Microsoft not famously the chilliest company in the world.
26:42 Speaker 03 And the key thing there has always been Windows versus Xbox and more recently, Windows versus services versus Xbox. And so there's been, there's been the question of, do you make an Xbox handheld? Or do you make a Windows handheld? Do you make both and have them cannibalize each other and, you know, dilute your marketing message? Do you let the handheld cannibalize the Xbox? All of these kinds of conversations have probably been percolating for years now. There are, there are some canceled devices in the past too. And we, we reported on Xbox tablet years ago, we reported on Xbox
27:23 Speaker 03 streaming stick. They've, they've thought about ways to, you know, to branch this out. And at the end of the day, they've, they've canceled the ones we've heard about rumored coming out at some point in the future. There, there have always been questions about, you know, whether they can just go straight to streaming instead of local performance hardware, which is also very key. If you're building a handheld, because you think in three years, the world is going to be streaming all its games over the internet, you're building a very different handheld than if you're assuming that people are going to have to run that game on the actual hardware with all of that performance that's required for it. Historically, cloud gaming has gotten better over time in terms of the image quality.
28:08 Speaker 03 But at the end of the day, it's, it's, there's so many like fricking questions in people's minds of what's going to work? Will I own my games? Is your house close enough to the servers? What happens if other people in your house suddenly use the internet? People's home routers and wifi points aren't really designed to be like, I'm going to make sure that this one device's connection is rock solid unless you are an IT admin setting that up at your own home with that proper quality of service. Nvidia and Microsoft have worked on baking some of that into the router, some of that, you know, but. You can't expect the average person to buy one of those things and just have it work yet, and that we don't know when that's going to change.
28:50 Speaker 03 So I don't know how far Microsoft is down that road, but we did. So at CES, we caught up with Jason Ronald, whose title is VP of Next Generation at Xbox. And he says that the idea is going to be bringing the best of Xbox to Windows.
29:10 David Pierce? Okay.
29:11 Speaker 03 So boiling that down, they still want to do the big platform play where they help a lot of Windows handhelds happen, which is great for them because they sell Windows licenses on those handhelds, and then they sell Windows subscription services and apps, and they can say it's also a PC and all these kinds of things. But the big problem with Windows right now is you turn it on and it's Windows, and they would like what you see to be Xbox. They would like what you see, and I would like what you see, to be, here are your games, instead of here is 45 minutes of installation and prompts.
29:47 David Pierce? Right. It's like set-top boxes. Like when I turn on the thing, you should show me the things that I am here for and nothing else. It's pretty simple.
29:55 Speaker 03 There are so many things on top of that that you could theoretically do, and that Steam Deck does, that I don't think a Windows handheld that is Xbox tomorrow would necessarily do. The Steam Deck has touchpads, two of them, that let you play decades of PC games more easily because many of them expect you to have a mouse cursor to do things. Steam Valve has worked tirelessly to make sure that the controls are the most customizable, not just of any handheld, but of any gaming device ever made, so that you can map any of them to do any number of things, and not just map one-to-one, but also create chords,
30:36 Speaker 03 multi-key chords that do various things, or fine-tune exactly how far your character or camera turn when you move it this much based on the gyroscope. I have a setup in a first-person shooter game, which, by the way, you can play first-person shooter games on a Steam Deck because of gyro, because of wonderful gyro. I can set it up so that when I do a quick movement or press a certain button, it will rotate me exactly 180 degrees in the game, or exactly 90 degrees to the left or right, snap turns and things like that. There are layers upon layers of customizability that you can do there. And they've set up a community profile system where if you don't want to spend any time mapping
31:17 Speaker 03 controls, you can just load a set that somebody else has made and upload it to the internet and be like, I wonder what this does. Here is the mapping. It shows right you on a, on a, on like a picture of the Steam Deck. Here's how all these things work. And you're like, oh, that sounds great. I'll download that and try that. Wow, that one didn't work for me. May download another one, try that. Now I have controls that feel native to this system for a 10, 15 year old PC game, if you want. Um, the other thing that I think will be difficult for Microsoft to do if they just attack this as here is a new layer we're adding on top of Windows is that many games don't run as well on Windows. Let me back up.
31:59 Speaker 03 Many Windows games do not run as well on Windows as they currently do on Linux on a Steam Deck.
32:08 David Pierce? Seems bad, Sean. Seems bad.
32:10 Speaker 03 It's not great. It's not great. Recently, I had somebody from Microsoft reach out to me on my Lenovo Legion Go benchmarks and ask me, um, are you sure you turned off this setting and benched it that way? Cause we've noticed some errant behavior. And I'm like, yep, noticed that behavior. That's why I turn it off every time.
32:27 David Pierce? That's rough. So this makes me think that the Steam Deck and Valve in general is maybe like one very big marketing budget away from being able to make this thing happen. Cause I think in a very real way, like there is Xbox, there is PlayStation, and then there's a huge, big, giant monster gap all the way down to everything else in terms of like the way that people think about gaming brands. And if you're Valve, your options are don't try to compete with that or basically spend billions of dollars trying to compete with that. And at least from what I've understood of Valve over the years, it's not interested in like having Super Bowl commercials every year where it tells you about Steam Decks.
33:12 David Pierce? But it also seems like based on sort of your experience and again, what we've seen in these IDC numbers is like, to the extent that this market exists. The Steam Deck is winning it. And if I'm Valve, what I should be doing is saying, we have a pretty commanding lead here. What we need to do is grow this market as fast as possible, because everybody thinks it's going to be the next thing. And somehow, no one else is doing a good job. And so it's like, where is Valve pouring gasoline on this fire to make it a bigger thing all of a sudden?
33:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, to some degree, I really think that if there were, you know, demo stations in every Best Buy around the country, and if there were, you know, mall pop-up stores and things like that, that yeah, they could sell a lot more of these. The other hand, I don't know how much they care about pouring gasoline on fires.
34:05 David Pierce? It's fair.
34:06 Speaker 03 They're a very small company. They're, I don't want to say they're very focused, because, because one of the tenets of Valve is that you can physically or virtually roll your desk around to different jobs there if you want.
34:19 David Pierce? Yeah.
34:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, this is this, they, they, they put it out in a handbook they released, I want to, I want to say in 2012. I guess they wanted to attract some new employees at that point. And they're like, oh yeah, if it ever snows, you don't come into work. This was before remote work was really a thing. You just work from home. If, if you want to join a new project, the way we do new projects around here is somebody will say, I've got a new project, and people roll their desk over there. And the projects that have the most desks are the ones that we're working on. So, because all the desks have wheels, and they decided to do it that way. A little different now, they're a little more distributed. But I hear the rolling desks are still a thing as of the last time I was there in 2023. So, um, I don't want to say that they're, they're focused, but I do want to say that
34:59 Speaker 03 something like that would require a lot of concerted effort from the kinds of people that maybe Valve doesn't spend all its time hiring. It doesn't spend on
35:12 Speaker 03 Marketing so much or retail, it's not, it's not its thing. It wants to build, it wants to build games. And certainly somebody could step in and say, hey, you know, Best Buy could say, oh, we'll do it for you. But Valve also wants to have pretty strong degree of control. They want to make sure the message is right. They want to make sure they're, they're seen as this benevolent entity, which many PC gamers are happy to hold them up as because, you know, hey, this Steam Deck wouldn't exist without them. And look at all the way they handle themselves with this game and that game. And they must have poured a ton of money into this that they're not recouping to make the Steam Deck happen to begin with. Then other people are saying, well, yeah, but they take 30% off of all of these games in Steam.
35:56 David Pierce? Yep.
35:57 Speaker 03 They make ridiculous amounts of money. And I don't know. What I'll say there though is I don't know if they would just say yes, because to anybody else want to do it for them because they like that amount of control.
36:08 David Pierce? That's fair. So, but it does seem like we're, we're due for a race. If you believe this market is going to get much, much bigger in the coming years, and I think you and I both do. And I think if we're wrong, it's because people are stupid, not because this isn't a good idea. So I just, I'm going to plant that flag now. Like handheld gaming is, is the future we should have. I fervently believe that. But anyway, if that is the case, if, if the 6 million you talk about is going to turn into 60 or 100 in the next however many years, it seems to me that the race is essentially can Valve convince the world that the Steam Deck is good
36:46 David Pierce? before somebody else can build a really good Windows or Xbox handheld? Is that the race? Is that where we are right now?
36:57 Speaker 03 I think that Valve would be fine if they didn't win that race. And I, I don't know, I don't.
37:06 David Pierce? I don't know why that frustrates me, but that frustrates me.
37:08 Speaker 03 It frustrates me too. It frustrates me too. Like I want everyone to experience the glory of PC gaming and the glory of handheld gaming. I want those two things for everybody and I want them to be intertwined. But, but Valve, I feel like they think about a lot of these projects as we.
37:31 Speaker 03 We want to uplift our people, our PC gamers. Here is another thing that would make, that we want for ourselves, that we want our PC gamers to enjoy. And now that they have that, you know, yes, Valve has said there's going to be a Steam Deck 2 someday and a Steam Deck 3 someday and so on. They're planning this as a generational thing with maybe up to four of them that they were willing to be like, yeah, we think we're going to do that. But, but I don't know if they feel like they need to go much further, as long as somebody is letting people do this. And so, yeah, I think they will keep doing it, but I think they might be fine if the sales are just enough
38:15 Speaker 03 to, you know, recoup what they put into it when they combine the handheld and the game. But yes, as, as a watcher, if somebody wants this stuff to happen, yes, please, um, find the chip and the screen that'll make it happen. I wrote another story. I wrote a story, uh, what handheld PC makers should do to fight the Switch 2. And I wrote it because there was like a lot of interest in the Nintendo Switch at that moment. But I do believe that there was this moment for me where I was buying all my indie games on Nintendo Switch. I was like, I want my Mario, my Zelda, obviously, but I also want to take all these other beautiful games I would otherwise not have the time to play with me on the go, to the bed, to
38:58 Speaker 03 the couch, et cetera, where I can find the time to play them. And I was doing that for Switch and as soon as Steam Deck came out, I was like, I can do them there. Better, cheaper, longer, uh, without typing my password into Nintendo Store every time, um, and, and dealing with the Nintendo things around that. And now I was buying all my indie games on Steam Deck. And maybe there's this moment now where the Switch 2 could be that next platform where people do that. If Nintendo decides it wants to be the place where all these indie games live, and if it just massively overhauls its store, uh, it has attracted.
39:43 Speaker 03 The same kinds of games as the Steam Deck. And it has Nintendo behind it and it's going to have so, so very many more sales than any of the handheld gaming PCs for a very long time to come. If previous Switch sales are any indication, if they don't screw it up royally and make it a flop like the Wii U, which by the way, the Wii U has also sold more than all these handheld gaming PCs, it's neither here nor there, but people love to bring that up when they're talking about my earlier story. So, so I give this advice, like if you want to build the system that's going to beat the Steam Deck and that's going to meaningfully compete against the Switch 2, it's gotta have a true handheld operating system, not just a fresh coat of paint on Windows.
40:28 Speaker 03 Yep. But it's also gotta, it's gotta have a great screen, it's gotta have a screen that doesn't suck up too much battery life, that doesn't suck up too much processing power, but it also has to have a chip. It has to have a chip that is more efficient than anything else that we've seen on the market, save the Steam Deck, and it needs to be more powerful than the Steam Deck chip to get us anywhere further. And that's what Valve keeps saying it's waiting for. Interesting. Because that chip doesn't exist yet, or if it exists, you know, nobody's been able to talk about it publicly yet. The chipmakers, they build chips for the big slice of the market. They build them for the laptops. They build a few of them for the tablets, like the Surface Pro.
41:12 Speaker 03 They don't build chips that are designed to go in anything much smaller than a laptop, unless they get some custom or semi-custom orders for that. And so when Sony's building a new PlayStation, when Microsoft's building a new Xbox, they order semi-custom chips. They say, I want this chunk of AMD graphics and I want that chunk of AMD CPU. Pair those things together, give me some custom interconnect, give me some custom logic. Bake this as small as you can in terms of nanometers on a wafer so that we can get good yields out of that, and that's what I'm gonna order for my future console. Right, and give me 30 million of them. Exactly, give me a lot of them. Valve did the same for the Steam Deck.
41:58 Speaker 03 But none of these other handheld gaming PCs have that style of customer semi-custom chip. They've got a laptop chip, which AMD did some extra work to change the power profile, make it a little bit more efficient because they know we're not going to be throwing as many watts at it in a handheld form factor. But fundamentally, they do not have the efficiency that you need to build something that scales down to low wattage, long battery life, like the Steam Deck. Instead, Windows manufacturers have to brute force it by putting in twice the size of battery, like Asus did with the ROG Ally X.
42:37 David Pierce? Right.
42:38 Speaker 03 Great system because they did that, but imagine if it had more efficient chip. Valve keeps coming out and saying, one of their developers in particular, one of the Steam Deck designers, Pierre-Louis Graffay, I hope I got his name right. Sorry if I butchered it just now. He keeps having to shoot down every new rumor, oh, Valve's going to use this new chip in their new thing. He came out and said, we're not putting the Z2 in a Steam Deck. And until I reviewed the Lenovo Legion Go S, which has the Z2 in it, I did not know why. And then I reviewed it, I'm like, this Steam Deck is beating this new AMD chip. How is that possible?
43:17 David Pierce? That's a tough comparison. Yeah. So maybe what we're actually waiting for, rather than a bunch of belief in this new industry, is just somebody to build the chip and like floodgates will open when suddenly this thing is possible. Because that trade-off you're describing is what everybody wants. Right? Like that is the thing that unlocks this. And maybe that is the thing that we're waiting for, more than anything else.
43:40 Speaker 03 Who pays for the chip is the question.
43:42 David Pierce? Right.
43:43 Speaker 03 Is it Qualcomm that wants to get into the gaming space, started toying with it, with the Copilot Plus PC chips, but didn't really get there? And then suddenly Qualcomm, who's a giant player in modems and is beginning to be a small player in laptops, becomes the handheld PC gaming chip. And this stuff has to move to ARM, because Qualcomm makes ARM chips. And all of a sudden, you're running Steam on ARM and running Windows games on ARM, which people have experimentally done and it kind of works. And there was even some code in the Valve codebase suggesting that Valve has maybe experimented with this too. Or is it, is it Microsoft building?
44:23 Speaker 03 Something special is Nvidia. Nvidia is the one who, by the way, Nvidia is the one that builds the chip in the Nintendo Switch. Nvidia, that's Nvidia graphics in there. It's Nvidia, even CPU, I believe, Nvidia. Does Nvidia say, well, we've, we've already got this chunk of handheld gaming market. Why don't we have all the handheld gaming market? And again, things move to ARM and we're running Windows games on ARM and, and so on and so forth. Is it a bunch of these PC makers banding forces and saying AMD, instead of giving us a laptop chip this year, how about we all foot the bill for something better for handheld gaming PCs? And then we're, we're all on the same footing as one another, but we were there anyway.
45:08 Speaker 03 And now we think we can sell a lot more than. Well, if you look at 2 million cumulative sales for handheld, for Windows-based handheld gaming PCs over the past, you know, two years, maybe they can't afford to do that quite yet. Maybe it'll be longer before that happens.
45:24 David Pierce? Yeah. Somebody's either gonna have to go all in or something is going to have to happen externally that winds back, it seems like. I have to say, this is all really validating my theory that I made the right call by just buying into the Switch and never unplugging it and it's gonna be fine for a while. This is all making me feel better about that decision.
45:43 Speaker 03 Ah, dude.
45:44 David Pierce? All right, Sean, we gotta take a break, but thank you for coming on as always. Good to see you.
45:48 Speaker 03 Thanks.
45:49 David Pierce? All right, we gotta take a break, but then we're gonna come back and we are going to talk about the future of sports and why the future of sports is really humongous, truly gigantic displays. Because of course it is. We'll be right back.
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46:41 David Pierce? Welcome back. I want to tell you a story about golf. But I promise, if you don't care about golf, it's not really a story about golf. It's a story about huge screens and arrays of nine projectors and digital sensors everywhere, and a big existential question about the nature of reality. And I guess, sure, a little about golf. So a few weeks ago, I got on a plane down to West Palm Beach, Florida, to go see a match in a new league called TGL Golf. The golf I went to see wasn't on this big, beautiful outdoor course, though there are lots of those in West Palm Beach. I was indoors. I was in this small arena called the SoFi Arena that had only been open for a few weeks. I'll explain how the game works in a minute,
47:25 David Pierce? but first, let me just walk you through the arena. Outside, it's just a big white box with a giant SoFi logo on it. It honestly looks more like a data center than a sports arena when you kind of get there. You walk in the door, and there's a TV set for filming pre-game shows. There's a merch store, and there's really not that much else. This whole thing, honestly, to stand there feels barely finished. It has a bunch of high-top tables and a few bar carts that all just kind of appeared on the polished concrete, and that's it. There's a walkway that goes all the way around the edge of the building, and it's all kind of like this. But there's another structure inside of the building, and this is where all of the good stuff happens. It's like a mix of a movie set and a sports arena. So just picture this with me.
48:09 David Pierce? If I'm standing in the middle of the arena, I'm on a flat patch of turf in the middle of a space that feels maybe a little larger than a football field. On one side of me, there's a round area, which has a couple of sand-filled bunkers and a small hill and a bunch of different golf holes around it. That's the green. That's the spot where every single TGL hole ends. It's 41 yards across, and the whole thing sits on a turntable, so it can rotate up to 180 degrees. There are hundreds of tiny actuators underneath the green that can change its shape and its slope in just a few seconds, too. It's one green, but it can be almost anything. That is where all TGL golf holes end.
48:51 David Pierce? They begin on my other side, where players stand on a patch of grass that's actually grown in a field outside of the arena, and they hit balls into a giant screen. And when I say a giant screen, I mean a giant screen. It's 53 feet high and 64 feet across. And however big you think a 3,392 square foot screen looks in person, I promise you, it's way bigger than that. In between the screen and the green, there's just tech everywhere you look. So as I'm standing here, there's a robotic camera wheeling around like a go-kart capturing video from these super low angles. There's a sky cam overhead on wires, like the ones you see at an NFL game, filming everything from above.
49:34 David Pierce? There are sensors I can see, there are sensors I can't see, there's a huge lighting grid up above. This is what I mean by it feeling like a movie set. There's no sense here that the technology is separate from the field. There's a huge sensor array just a few feet behind every golfer as they swing. And that robot camera I mentioned does this cool swoopy motion thing in front of them before just about every shot. It all adds up to something that feels like a cross between a movie and a video game and a sporting event. It's a little bit Wii golf and a little bit professional golf, and I have to be honest with you, I kind of love it. Okay, this is probably the point where I should explain how TGL works and why it works the way that it does.
50:19 David Pierce? The how is both weird and fairly straightforward, at least for our purposes. Here is how Ricky Fowler, who's a pro golfer, explains it in a YouTube overview that TGL made a while ago.
50:30 Speaker 04 There are two sessions. The first, triples, a nine-hole, three versus three alternate shot. The second, singles, six holes of players going head-to-head.
50:41 Speaker 04 Each hole is worth one point. If tied at the end, an overtime determines the winner. TGL is also bringing to golf a shot clock, a ref, a timeout to ice the golfer, a hammer to raise the stakes, and the players are all mic'd up to get you in on the action.
50:54 David Pierce? There are more rules than that and some quirks to the system, but it's ultimately not terribly complicated. It's just golf as a team sport. It's really fun. I had a good time at the match I went to, which was really competitive and went into overtime, which was a chip-off, sort of like penalty kicks in soccer, but they were just chipping to get close to the hole. Super fun. The vibe of the whole thing is more goofy exhibition match than like high-level golf tournament, but it's a fun thing. And actually, the thing that surprised me the most was that most of that tech, including that giant turntable green, works pretty seamlessly. You don't even really notice it as it's happening. TGL is, above all, a TV show. No one who makes it is unclear about that fact.
51:36 David Pierce? It's 15 holes long instead of 18, so that a whole match can be played in two hours of primetime television. Matches are early in the week so that they don't conflict with the golfers' more important tournaments, and they're in the early evenings to fit with the rest of ESPN's schedule. Hell, the whole thing is in Palm Beach because that's where a lot of the golfers live, and so most of them can just drive to the matches. One of them, I won't name who because it wasn't their fault, almost hit me with their car in the parking lot, but that's not important. The reason the TGL arena looks like a movie set is because, more than anything, it is a movie set. This thing is a product made to be watched on ESPN. The TGL folks actually borrowed from lots of other sports in making this TV show work.
52:17 David Pierce? All the players come in with these wrestling-style entrances that were lit by the same person who did some of the wrestling entrances.
52:24 Speaker 05 The 2020 PGA Champion and 2021 Open Champion, a two-time member of the US Ryder Cup and President's Cup teams, make some noise for Collin Morikawa!
52:40 David Pierce? During the match, the players are miked up, so you get lots of the banter you might hear from players in a football or a basketball game. And honestly, hearing golf pros trash talk is pretty fun.
52:49 Speaker 06 I played with them all day Saturday at Pebble. He didn't hit one shot like that.
52:53 David Pierce? The overhead sky cam is also borrowed from the NFL, and it adds some really cool stuff to golf. In a normal tournament, you'd never get to see a shot from directly overhead. And I've been seeing golf lovers all over really geek out over getting new views of pros' form and swing because it's right over top of their head. The reality is all of this adds up to something way more interesting on television than in person. When I went, it was late January, and it was the fourth ever match in the history of TGL. The match I went to was actually a big one. It was Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, who are two of golf's biggest names and two of the best players of this century, and two of the investors who actually made TGL happen. And they were facing off against each other, or at least their teams were.
53:35 David Pierce? Noah Khan and Niall Horan were hanging out in the team box right across from my seat. They seemed like they were friends, I don't know. The baseball players, David Ortiz and Mike Trout, were in the house. It was a whole thing, you know? It was a big celebrity evening in West Palm Beach. The TGL folks are pretty much all either golf people or TV people or both. And they're still clearly learning how to make great arena sports. They had only just hired folks to come and like fire T-shirts into the crowd to get people psyched. But there were still a bunch of commercial breaks where all of us in the audience just kind of sat and waited for things to start up again. You never notice how long a commercial break is until you're just sitting there quietly waiting for sports to start. At one point, the in-arena announcer alerted us that we were coming back,
54:20 David Pierce? like we were like a sitcom crowd supposed to cheer as we came back from commercial. There wasn't a big applaud now sign, but it honestly felt like that might be coming. I knew all of that would be the case, though. They're pretty straightforward, once again, that this is a TV product first and foremost. Even Tiger Woods would tell you that. I really went to West Palm Beach to find out one thing and one thing only, which is the big question that I and a lot of other people have been wondering since we first heard about TGL. Is this golf? Can you replace a golf course with a screen and a turntable and still call it the same sport? We actually started getting answers to this question pretty quickly. In one of the very first matches of the season, Tiger Woods, maybe the greatest golfer of
55:04 David Pierce? all time, stepped up and hit a shot from about 100 yards out and just absolutely drilled it into the water. He hit it way, way, way too long.
55:21 Speaker 07 I think, I think that up box goes too far. I think the up box goes hot.
55:27 David Pierce? He hits the ball into the screen and the screen shows the ball bouncing off of the green and into the water. And the water, by the way, is kind of shoddily rendered because I don't think anyone thought we'd need to look at the water very much. And Tiger just sort of stares down, like he's confused that this just happened. Golfers this good can usually tell how a shot went the second they're finished swinging. And you could tell this ball didn't do what he expected. A little while later, Tiger hit another short shot like this one and hit it way left. He didn't like that shot very much either. He threw something, I think a tee, at the tracking sensor behind him as he walked away. And since he had his mic on, it was pretty clear how he felt.
56:07 Speaker 08 That sucked. Thank you, sir.
56:10 David Pierce? And then, not long after that, Tiger hit it into the water again. And this time, all he did was look at the screen and laugh.
56:19 Speaker 07 How many penalties have we had?
56:22 David Pierce? Tiger's team, which is called the Jupiter Links Golf Club, got absolutely demolished in that match. Tiger talked the whole thing up to him just not playing well, but a lot of people started asking, is the technology here actually working? We've all seen what Tiger Woods can do with a golf club. So when it goes wrong, are we going to blame him? Or are we going to blame the technology? There's this saying in sports that ball don't lie. The idea is that whenever something happens that feels wrong, the game itself kind of autocorrects. It's karma, basically, but for sports. There was this NBA player, his name was Rasheed Wallace, who would famously yell, "Ball don't lie", when he'd get called for a foul, but then the player who he didn't think he fouled would miss the free throw.
57:06 David Pierce? I think Rasheed Wallace might have invented this saying. I'm honestly not sure. But the message is simple. The game tells the truth and the ball keeps the score. On a real golf course, we'd know what happened if Tiger Woods' shot went into the water. It would mean that Tiger hit a bad shot. Ball don't lie. But in this case, we didn't see where Tiger's shot went. We saw the beginning of the shot, and then it hit a huge giant screen, and then a half second later, we saw an animated ball fly through the air, bounce off the green and hit the water. There is an awful lot that happens in that half second that is designed to make sure that the virtual ball still don't lie.
57:44 Speaker 09 So there's this pole here that's got two cameras. You go further up, little green lights on the back. Oh, yeah. Two more there. And then the same on the opposite side.
57:53 David Pierce? That is Andrew McCauley. He's the CTO at a company called Tomorrow Sports and the technical mastermind behind all of TGL. From the turntable to the screen to the sensors to the cabling that puts it all together, that's all Andrew. And right now, as he and I are talking, he's standing on the middle of the TGL Arena turf, right behind the tee box, pointing to a bunch of different stuff and explaining to me how it all works. Each of those poles with two cameras that he mentioned is a full system from a company called TopTracer, which tracks a golf ball through the air. TopTracer is everywhere in golf. If you go to a driving range, there's a decent chance you're using TopTracer tech just to see how far your shots go. This is the same idea, just way more complicated.
58:34 Speaker 09 There's a redundancy and an accuracy play to this. From the redundancy standpoint, we could lose three systems. We could be down to just one pair left. Sure. Still get an accurate trace. With all four running... They do, this is where it differs a little bit from the range. They stitch together the results from as many as it gets, so all four.
59:00 David Pierce? Is it?
59:00 Speaker 09 And chooses.
59:01 David Pierce? Does it like improve linearly that way? Like is having four things pointing at it gonna give you better data than having one or two or three?
59:08 Speaker 09 That won't be linear because there's probably, there's a, there's a point where it's not gonna matter.
59:12 David Pierce? Okay.
59:13 Speaker 09 But.
59:14 David Pierce? But it helps, more than one helps, okay, okay. In addition to the Top Tracer cameras, which are capturing the flight of the ball in stereoscopic 3D, there's another sensor array right behind the tee box, lower down on the ground. This is called a launch monitor, and it's made by a company called Full Swing.
59:30 Speaker 09 One thing that Top Tracer doesn't do is give us that anything from moment of impact. It's just looking at the ball. If you go fly from the rough, the ball behaves that way and it models it that way. If you don't, it doesn't. So, but we added, Full Swing's obviously the sim, the big simulator game software customized. And we added there an array of their launch monitors so that we could also get moment of impact information. That gives us stuff that Top Tracer doesn't, like club speed and things like that. I don't think it does with a club. It gives us a second spin number as well.
1:00:08 David Pierce? I called up Andrew later after this conversation and asked him to explain to me again how all of this stuff gets combined to figure out what happens to the ball. Basically, what he said is it starts as soon as a player walks up to the box to hit their shot. The screen switches to show that their spot on the course, pointing at the hole, and everything resets.
1:00:27 Speaker 10 Yeah, so we've activated the system to be watching, right? And then as soon as the ball is hit and starts flying, the first thing that happens is the Top Tracer tracking system observes that ball flying and it's 35 yards to the screen. And it starts to calculate or extrapolate like where that ball would have continued to fly, what trajectory, speed, angles, etc., would that ball have continued to fly on if that screen hadn't happened to be there to stop it flying? In parallel with that, the full swing radars that are behind the tee box give us moment of impact information. So that's where we get the club head speed from.
1:01:11 Speaker 10 We get some spin information from that. Top Tracer also gives us spin with their calculations of the trajectory. So I think, as I mentioned, you know, when you were here, this is customized versions of all these people's technology and they're layered together to make this kind of a, you know, one, one of one tech stack for, for tracking golf balls accurately in an, in an indoor, short field environment, if you want to call it that.
1:01:40 David Pierce? Okay. So it's taking like one set of data is the, the impact. And that's if I'm right, that's basically what you get from, but like a normal simulator, right? It's all about that, like immediate impact.
1:01:53 Speaker 10 Yeah, most, certainly launch monitors, simulators that are based on just a launch monitor sitting down by the ball and capturing that moment of impact. And then they extrapolate what would have happened from a relatively small amount of data.
1:02:07 David Pierce? Okay.
1:02:07 Speaker 10 Since we're capturing, using Top Tracer data, we're watching the actual ball fly a long period of time and then extrapolating the rest of the flight. So that's much more like a, well, Top Tracer is, is a, is a range, right? It's the number one technology and range is out there tracking balls, right? So, you know, it's the best in the business in terms of, in terms of that. So, so we're actually tracking the flight of the ball and then extending it versus taking moment of impact information and extrapolating it from that, if that makes sense.
1:02:35 David Pierce? Sure. Why 35 yards? I feel like obviously if you were just going to do the entire length of a golf course, that sort of defeats the purpose, but like, would it be better if it were 50 or 75 or a hundred yards of data that you could get?
1:02:50 Speaker 10 The 35 yards was, was absolutely based on the testing and the algorithms and the, and the logic that says that's, you know, with some room in there. That's more than enough to get all the data you need to be accurate for the rest of the shot. And then we literally, size of the building, size of the field of play, how much real green do we want, as much as we can get.
1:03:16 David Pierce? This is all designed for, like Andrew said, accuracy and redundancy. And after those messy Tiger Woods shots at the very beginning, a lot of people had a lot of feelings, but TGL seemed to still be really confident that its technology worked. But lots of fans weren't. There were theories floating around that TGL chose to not use better technology because Tiger Woods is involved with Full Swing, or that something in the physics engine of the TGL system was just fundamentally broken. The thing is, and I think this is the problem, there's really no way to know for sure. And for an organization like TGL that wants to be seen as a real honest to God sport, that is a hard problem to solve. This is easy in the real world, right? The ball goes where the ball goes.
1:04:01 David Pierce? And even in a video game, at least everyone's playing by the same rules in a game that is typically consistent. But when we combine the real world and the virtual one, and the virtual world's job is to figure out what's going on in the real world and then make guesses about it, the translation gets really tricky. There's been a couple of other issues along these lines over the course of the season. A few weeks after that Tiger Woods night, Tommy Fleetwood, another very good professional golfer, stepped up and hit a really confusing shot.
1:04:36 Speaker 03 What just happened?
1:04:38 David Pierce? Fleetwood got up, swung the club normally, hit it really well, and according to the screen, hit it about 40 yards instead of the 167 that he needed. That's like a shot that I would hit on a bad day on the golf course. Pros don't hit those shots, and Fleetwood hadn't either. This time, it turns out there was actually a pretty simple explanation.
1:04:58 Speaker 10 What actually happened was that the top trace system that I talked about, sitting there waiting for a golf ball to start flying through and track, it tracked the golf ball and Tommy Fleetwood hit a beautiful divot with that shot that flew in a beautiful arc. And unfortunately, we tracked that as well as the golf ball and the system decided that that was, that was the shot that got hit.
1:05:23 David Pierce? What that means is that Fleetwood hit the ball and at the same time chopped up a bunch of grass with his golf club when he did. That's what a divot is. The tracker, instead of picking up the ball, picked up the divot and tracked it like the shot.
1:05:35 Speaker 10 So it was what we call an invalid reading in the rules. It was fairly obvious very quickly to us what had happened. So we were able to huddle with the rules official, inform them, and they were, tell the referee, hey, that this is a invalid reading. Our rules say that a re-hit is allowed for no penalty. Please do that. And within a few seconds, that's what happened. And Tommy hit the shot again. And there was no issues with the second one.
1:06:01 David Pierce? Like Andrew said, that's in the rules. It went fine. It was a tough look for TGL, but everyone got past it pretty fast. But it's also just, in a way, fundamentally wrong, you know? I saw the ball fly. I saw him hit it. And it didn't do what the screen said it did. That will never stop feeling strange. And every time it happens, it gets a little harder to undo. Andrew says that TGL can fix problems like that, and that in fact, they've made changes to the tech even since that match and that Tommy Fleetwood shot. But he does know there will be more edge cases. And there's another challenge that the team is trying to sort out, which is that no matter how big the screen is, it's still just a huge, two-dimensional thing. When the TGL team was starting out, they looked into 3D screens,
1:06:44 David Pierce? bigger screens, smaller screens, more screens, screen arrays. And Andrew did say he'd love to have as much screen as he could possibly have. He at one point pointed up to the gap between the screen and the ceiling and was basically like, what if there was more screen? But this one is humongous. And you still can't see it the way that you see the real world. Which I think created one of the most fascinating moments of the whole year in TGL, which again, happened to Tiger Woods. So it's his turn to hit. He steps up, and he leans over to somebody and asks how far away he is.
1:07:19 David Pierce? Again, this is Tiger Woods we're talking about. So he knows what to do to hit the ball 99 yards. And it would be different if it were 101 yards or 96 yards. That's how dialed in these guys are. These tiny differences matter. But the thing is Tiger misheard. He wasn't 99 yards away. He was 199 yards away. And so this happened.
1:07:40 Speaker 07 No, I heard you say 99, not 199.
1:07:44 David Pierce? I'm gonna have to do some investigative journalism. What the hell just happened?
1:07:48 Speaker 07 No, I heard 99 yards. So I grabbed my 56 and I hit 100 yards.
1:07:54 David Pierce? This just wouldn't happen in real life golf. I mean, I guarantee you and I would both know the difference between being 99 yards away from something and 199 yards away from something. You know what I mean? But in Tiger's case, in this moment, he's 35 yards away from the screen. He's always 35 yards away from the screen. He has to rely on the technology to tell him the rest. The TGL players have actually been saying all season that this has been one of the biggest challenges. They play by sight and by feel, and you just can't get that hitting the ball into a screen, even when it's a really big screen. The same is true on the green, by the way. One thing I heard Tiger say is that the fact that the TGL green is the same green, but
1:08:36 David Pierce? also a different green every single time because they're able to change its rotation and its shape, really tripped him out. It's the same hole over and over, but it's never, ever the same hole. And wrapping your head around that turns out to be really complicated. Ultimately, this is why I think the TGL question is fundamentally a technology one. Can this be golf? Or is it just something else? Take out all of the issues that there have been. The truth is, TGL doesn't even need to play by the rules of golf or even of physics or course design. There are already a few holes in the TGL world that are played around lava or on almost impossible terrain. So like, why not play TGL on the moon or in some wild Tron-looking universe?
1:09:21 David Pierce? The TGL folks say that they're trying to strike a balance there, but it's a tricky one. They want it to feel real. They want people who care about golf to care about this. But they also need to embrace what's possible here. And at least from where I sit, the more TGL tries to feel like outdoor golf, the more obvious it becomes that the tech just can't get there. That balance is tough for the golfers, but I think it's even harder for viewers. How are you supposed to trust the technology, especially after seeing all the ways it can fail? There's something pure and honest about sports. You watch the game and one team wins and that's it. You, fine, complain about the refs and stuff and everything's always unfair when your team loses. But fundamentally, the game tells the story. Ball don't lie.
1:10:05 David Pierce? But here, I look at the YouTube comments on every TGL video and they're all just like, how am I supposed to trust the physics engine here? TGL wants you to bet on these matches. That's actually a big part of the plan. Are you gonna bet on golf? Or are you gonna bet on computers working like they're supposed to? And are those the same thing? Wouldn't it be easy to tweak the computers to make people miss those shots? There's just something unknowable here, something removed from real life that feels hard to overcome in a way that even playing a video game doesn't feel so hard to overcome. The morning after the match, I went to, the TGL folks were doing a tour for a bunch of golf creators, showing them how the tech works and letting them hit into the huge screen to get a sense for themselves. I just sort of sneakily jumped the line in jeans and sneakers,
1:10:50 David Pierce? grabbed a club and stepped out in front of the thing.
1:10:52 Speaker 04 All right, I gotta hit one good shot here. I feel like I'm nervous. Whew. I don't even have anybody watching.
1:11:02 David Pierce? The TGL team told me that the whole setup, this whole arena, is designed for there to be one sweet spot, where all the on-screen depths and viewing angles and everything aligns exactly right. And that spot is right here, in the center, on the tiny patch of grass where the player hits from. It's kind of true. Standing there in the center as the grass slopes away down from me and toward the screen 35 yards away, it does feel more like I'm hitting a ball on a golf hole. But it also feels like I'm hitting into a really big screen. I hit five shots, some of which went okay, and some of which went, well, not okay.
1:11:40 Speaker 04 Ooh, that's not going anywhere.
1:11:43 Speaker 09 That's been a tragedy.
1:11:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, just seeing if it works.
1:11:46 David Pierce? This was frankly, very embarrassing to do in front of a bunch of golf professionals, all of whom seem to have gorgeous swings, even though they're in marketing or IT. But you know, I'm here for journalism, right? Got to see what happens when you suck. And they did promise me that I'm not the worst they've ever seen. But they did also make me promise not to reveal which celebrity hit a shot so bad it broke part of the screen on the side where it shows the scoreboard and stats, which is why there's now a net that covers that screen. I really enjoyed my TGL experience. I've enjoyed it all year and TGL has been a hit this year. It's only year one and basically everybody who works there tells me they have lots of ideas about how to make it better for next season. That has to do with both the technology and with the way that the game itself is actually played.
1:12:30 David Pierce? They all understand that even the rules of this are not fixed yet. There are also still a lot of golf purists and fans who think the whole thing is weird and bad and just kind of hokey. But the ratings have been solid. People are talking about the league. Tiger and Rory and the others seem to be having fun, honestly, and that might be the most important part. The playoffs start this week and I'll definitely be watching. I've been watching more of this season than I actually expected. But the question is still right there and someone is going to need to answer it. Is this golf or is this video games? Does the distinction even necessarily matter? And when one of the world's best golfers steps in and whacks the ball into the screen, what is supposed to happen? In the real world, ball don't lie.
1:13:14 David Pierce? But on the screen, it can actually do pretty much whatever you want it to. But you at some point have to decide what that is.
1:13:22 David Pierce? All right, that's enough golf talk for now. We need to take a break and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Verkess hotline. We'll be right back.
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1:14:08 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Let's get to the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 VERGE11. The email is [email protected] . We love all of your questions. Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions about gadgets and which ones you should buy this year, which is very good timing because there's a lot of new gadgets coming. So I think we're going to get into trying to make sense of this giant run of new stuff, especially in the smart home world, a lot over the next few weeks. More to come on all of that. For now, we have a question about iPads. We've talked a lot about iPads on this show, and I promise we're going to stop, but I confess I find iPads fascinating. So this is kind of a question, kind of a comment. Here it is.
1:14:51 Speaker 11 Hi, David. My name is Ben. I'm a senior in college. I'll be graduating here in a couple of weeks. Wanted to talk about iPad. I know you recommend that everyone stick with the base iPad, and that's probably a good recommendation for most people, but I wanted to advocate for the iPad era just a little bit for one group of people in particular, which is college students. I like, many of my friends in college use an iPad for note taking and use an app like Notability or Goodnotes. And I don't know if you've used either of these apps, but they're a lot better for the type of note taking that college students do than Apple's inbuilt Notes app.
1:15:31 Speaker 11 And they also tend to be pretty intense on iPads. Like my 2021 iPad Pro can get pretty warm while I'm working with a big document in Notability. So, you know, the other thing I wanted to say is a lot of college students come out of high school with some gift money or some more money to spend. So $550 for the extra headroom with the M3 processor now, I believe it is, for an iPad Air is pretty reasonable because, you know, I just had to replace my laptop halfway through college because my XPS15 crapped out on me. And I think that spending the additional money upfront to get that more headroom,
1:16:14 Speaker 11 especially for someone who's using the iPad for something that's not just Netflix, is probably worth it, in my opinion. I think that's what a lot of people are doing in school, and I think that's where the biggest chunk of iPad Air users come from, especially when it's $550 with an education discount. So that's just my thoughts.
1:16:36 David Pierce? I picked this one to play this week because this reflects feedback we've heard a lot over the last several weeks, in a few ways, actually. One is just that it turns out that people who want to take notes with a mix of a keyboard and a pencil, much more popular than I expected. That sounds sort of silly to say now, that is like the whole purpose of the iPad, but I've always thought of that as kind of a cool feature, but one of those things that you think you're gonna want to do a lot more than you actually want to do, and that most people gravitate towards one or the other. But I think in certain parts of the world and in certain kinds of jobs, and certainly for students, which is a thing I heard a lot about the last few weeks, that is really powerful.
1:17:20 David Pierce? That mix of, I can set this down on a desk and use it like a laptop with really long battery life, but I can also just flip it flat on the table and use it with a pencil, super powerful. And I think that, as we said in the hotline here, is one of the best cases, both for the iPad in general, but also for upgrading from the base iPad to something like the Air or even the Pro. You get the better accessories, you get that versatility, you get just the sheer everything-ness of the iPad. And if you're gonna buy an iPad, the point is to get something that can do things your laptop can't, right? Like, I really think if you are thinking about, should I use this as my main computer? The question is not, will it be better on an iPad, or will it be more seamless on an
1:18:05 David Pierce? iPad, or can I do more stuff on the iPad? Because the answer is usually no. The iPad is a pretty locked-down system compared to the Mac or Windows. But there are things you can do on it, like physically, that you can't with a Mac. And so if you start from, I need something I can write on with a pencil sometimes, of course you should buy an iPad. And you should buy something that gives you access to the best accessories. So that, right there, might be the best case I've ever heard for an easy upgrade from the base iPad to the Air or the Pro. Thing number two... There are apps like Notability and Goodnotes, both of which are fabulous apps, by the way. Notability in particular is one of the apps that Apple will often show in its demos
1:18:49 David Pierce? to show you how good some of the new features are. It requires a ton of processing power. It does really interesting stuff with handwriting. It's built in some of the AI features. Notability in particular, I think, is like one of the best and most iPad-y iPad apps anywhere. It's excellent. And it is, as we were just talking about, the kind of thing you can't do in the same way on any other device. And those things do want a lot of extra performance. So again, if you want to do something like that, I think I may have slightly overrated how powerful some of these powerful apps need to be, right? I think a lot about things like Photoshop and Lightroom and Logic and Final Cut, these like heavy graphics intensive editing processes that some people do
1:19:34 David Pierce? and some people like to do on an iPad. But there is a level below that that is like, I just need to have lots of images in my notes and I need to be able to write quickly and I need to be able to flip between a thousand pages and do the character recognition and search. And that stuff requires real performance. And you can do it on a base iPad, but again, you will notice the difference. So I think that's meaningful. Thing number three, and this is another one I've been thinking a lot about the last few weeks. The price of an iPad is not a simple thing to understand. I think this is true of phones too, in a way that with laptops, it really isn't. Laptops kind of cost what they cost sometimes that are on sale, but the price there is reasonably assumed to be the price most people are going to pay. Not true with iPads. iPads have huge corporate discounts.
1:20:19 David Pierce? iPads have huge education discounts. You can often get last year's model on a pretty big discount. You can find them on like holiday discounts in a way that a lot of Apple products in particular don't get discounted. So the idea of I can upgrade a little and either get last year's model much cheaper or this year's model with some discount that I have access to. And thus, instead of spending, you know, $300 more on an iPad, I'm spending like $150 more on an iPad, then the upgrade becomes... Comes very compelling. So I think this is a path that I maybe have underrated in thinking about the iPad. I still think that if you are a person who wants to like, hold an iPad in your hand and watch movies on a plane,
1:21:00 David Pierce? or give it to your kids so they can play games, or I don't know, do the New York Times Spelling Bee every morning. That's like, perfect iPad activities, and they are so well-served by every iPad in the line, including the base one. But there is a kind of base productivity device that the iPad can be that isn't quite laptop replacement. In fact, part of the point is that it's not a laptop replacement, but it is almost that kind of thing. It can do things your laptop can't, it can do things your laptop can, but it gives you that same kind of all-in-one machine. You do want the performance upgrade there, especially if you're gonna use it even through all four years of college, right? Like, that's, that's a long time in device cycles.
1:21:44 David Pierce? And I think buying something with more power based on the idea that I might wanna do more with it, and also, it's just going to get harder to do these things over time, that's a great reason to upgrade an iPad. So I just wanted to share this because this, and all the feedback I've gotten like this, has really changed how I think about the upgrade path of an iPad. And I think Apple really would like to lead you all the way up to the Pro. And I think that's harder, right? Like, I think the leap from, "I need all this stuff, so I should get an Air", all the way up to like, "Oh, look at that screen, and it's so thin, and now I'll get a Pro for several hundred more dollars", that's a bigger leap. But the one from the base iPad to the iPad Air, that says, "I just need to like, use this device instead of just look at it",
1:22:27 David Pierce? I think is real. So, that's how I've been thinking about it, and just wanted to share. Also, I'm hopefully going to get a base iPad in front of me here very soon, and we will be able to compare these things for real. Because right now, I have four iPads stacked on my desk, and as soon as it's five, I will have all the answers. And I'm very much looking forward to it. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other iPad use cases you'd like to tell me about, you can always call the hotline 866-VERGE11 or send us an email at [email protected] . We absolutely love hearing from you and we are so grateful always to everybody who reaches out. This
1:23:09 David Pierce? show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poor. Vergecast is Verge Production, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about everything going on at Doge, everything going on in tech, more AI news, more gadget news, because that just keeps happening. There's lots going on. We will be on top of all of it. We will see you then. Rock and roll.
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