Chat for Android, Nintendo Labo, and Motorola (like a) G6

It was a slow week until Google decided to attempt another fix for Android messaging and Nintendo made the entire staff fall in love with cardboard. Nilay’s still on paternity leave, but Dieter and Paul are joined again by Technology Editor Natt Garun to explain it all. We also jumped on the hot-button issues like the Russian ban of Telegram and how Alexa Skill Blueprints aren’t Turing complete. And, of course, Paul’s weekly segment “Ring-a-ding-ding” has all the insightful Bluetooth MIDI accessory commentary you crave. 1:20 - Chat for Android 20:48 - Telegram 29:22 - Nintendo Labo 37:41 - Amazon Skill Blueprints 41:09 - Motorola G6 43:44 - Paul’s Weekly Segment "Ring-a-ding-ding" 46:39 - New free Spotify 48:51 - RIP vaunt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Did you know that 16 million new collar jobs will be created by 2024? To help fill them, IBM's new education model will give high school students workplace experience and an associate degree. 90 P tech schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put smart to work. Find out more and how at IBM.com slash P tech.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, or since Neelai is still on paternity leave, I will say greetings, mobile accomplishers. I am Dieter Bone. I am joined by Nat Garin.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  And Paul's here too. Hi, Paul. Hello.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  How you guys doing? Good. Good. So I think this episode, we're going to bring back something in honor of Motorola's announcements. I think that this episode needs to be sponsored by Scissor Vodka. Cut through the night. Cut through the night because Motorola released the G6. It's like a G6. It's like a G6, but it's Motorola's version.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  It's not the G6.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  That is actually great.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  No, but we'll get to that. We'll get to that. There's other stuff. So as you're listening to this on Friday, because I guarantee you that you downloaded it right away, right when we released it, because I don't know, actually, maybe you didn't. Anyway, on Thursday night, we released a story. I released a story worked on by a bunch of other people, made a great video about Android chat.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Or actually, it's just called chat. It's just called chat. Just called chat.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Not to be confused with Google chat.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Not Google chat. It's Android chat. Not G chat. It's not G chat. It's not. G talk.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  This is already starting real great.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  It's not hangouts. Not ALO. So almost to the day. So we, we went down to Google. We talked to the person who's now in charge of the communication team. It's a new executive and he, he actually lives in Australia, but he like telecommutes and then he flies across. It's pretty, he just moved to Australia. Anyway, he made, he made Google Photos good. One of the, one of the people on that team is now he's trying to fix Google messaging. What's hilarious is when I was writing this story, Google Photos, no, I'm sorry. It was Facebook because Google Photos didn't know the timestamp. Facebook popped up a five years ago today thing and it was a picture of me and Ellis Hamburger.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Having just left the Google campus when we wrote the exclusive on how they were creating this app called Hangouts.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  No way.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  That was gonna fix their text messaging problem forever.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  No way.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, go, if you scroll back through my Twitter feed, like, a couple of weeks, you'll find a picture that I posted of me and Ellis, and it was because I was working on their next solution, five years later, Android Chat. And I'm sorry, just chat. It's not Android Chat, damn it. I wrote 4,000 words about the thing, man. Okay. Go ahead.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Let me see if I can explain this, and then you can tell me how I'm wrong.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Okay, and then you explain it, and then Nat explain it, and then we'll see which one of you is more right.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Okay. It's competition. I like this.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  No. Okay.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  There's a new standard, spearheaded by Google but not owned by Google, that the carriers are adopting. It's fancy new text messages with read receipts and video. And all sorts of stuff. Except, basically, no encryption. And Google is putting that in chat, and anybody could conceivably put it in chat, but because Google's putting it in chat, it will be popular on Android phones, but it probably will never come to iOS, so what is the point?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  It's pretty close.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know, the way I've been seeing this, it's like, it's kinda like if BBM came back, but then they're like, "Oh, but carriers have to be the one to, like, activate it." It's, I gotta say, I literally don't know what's different about this, other than the fact that there's just one app now.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  So, what's, just, the simple explanation is, imagine if SMS didn't suck. The end.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  It's like SMS 2.0?

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, except it's called RCS, except RCS is terrible, because RCS has been around for 10 years, Rich Communication Services, and nobody, everybody made different standards, so it sucks. So, Google made this thing called the Universal Profile, which is, "Hey, everybody, your RCS should actually work." And everyone's like, "Fine, okay."

• 4:31Speaker 02

  So, it's like a spec?

• 4:32Speaker 00

  It's a spec. And, uh, calling something RCS sucks, because I'm not gonna be like, "Hey, man, send me an RCS." Uh, so they're calling it chat.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Everybody's calling it.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Everybody's calling it chat. Google managed to convince all the carriers not to call it Verizon Super Duper Messaging 4.0+ with premium add-on, whatever. And then the other piece is, Google is going to make its Android Messages app the default on a bunch of different manufacturers. Samsung's also going to support it because they don't like Android Messages. And it will be the chat client.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  And then, the last piece, which we totally buried the lead about, like, if we, like, the Vergecast is about jokes and we have given up on the easy jokes. They're pausing investment on Allo, quote-unquote, pausing investment. They're basically taking everybody that worked on Allo and they're having, they're saying, "Yeah, you know what? Just don't work on that anymore."

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Why?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Just leave it.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Why should I ever try? I get why Google, it sounds like a good idea, Google.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  So did Allo.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Why should I ever believe Google on anything when it comes to messaging? Why will this not be?

• 5:44Speaker 01

  But also, why did they use the word "pause"?

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Because they're not-

• 5:47Speaker 01

  That's like pausing your gym membership and saying, you're like, "I'll go back." Like, "Yeah, I'll definitely go back." Like, "But no," but you're not.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Uh, I, I think because like, they don't want to shut it down tomorrow because that'd be a terrible thing to do to the 30 people that use it. Right? Um, they also, if you think about it, Allo is the only, they've got, they've got Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Chat, I think it's called? Which is their Slack competitor. That's what Hangouts turned into. They've got Allo, which they're pausing, but Allo's their only consumer product that offers and, that has an option for end-to-end encryption. And so, like, SMS, or sorry, RCS, I'm sorry, sorry, chat, uh, is, is like, the carriers control it, so Google won't have any thing that they're doing to do that, anyway.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Can you chat, quote-unquote, through Allo?

• 6:37Speaker 00

  No, Allo doesn't support, um, SMS or RCS.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Okay, so while Apple, who did this 100 years ago-

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  ...allows you to easily move between green texts, which suck, and blue messages, which are great-

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Google, who's been working on this problem for literally five years, at least, minimum,

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  can't even give you that much unification.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  So they used to do that with Hangouts, and then they took it out because it was too confusing, I think, and also because the carriers maybe didn't like it, I don't know. The thing to know is like, Google couldn't make iMessage in 2018 because the carriers basically wouldn't let them, right? They could, but it would be a nuclear option. And like, there's actually a bunch of leverage that Verizon and, I don't know, Telefonica and whoever have over Google, is my understanding of it.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  What do the carriers gain from having these non-encrypted messages go over their networks?

• 7:36Speaker 00

  They get to see who you're talking to and who's talking to you. They, if they're in control of the rich text messaging platform, then if IKEA wants to talk to you about your furniture, if they want to send you a little video that tells you how to put it together, or Virgin Mobile wants to send you a plane ticket that actually has a plane ticket in the text message, they can't do that right now. They have to use iMessage, or Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp, or whatever. All they can send everybody is a text. And so, all of these companies want a universal standard for being able to send good chat messages to people. And so, the carriers, and the carriers can charge those companies a bunch of money to do that.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  And so, there's a revenue stream there. It's gonna be, the GSMA, the consortium of carriers thinks it's gonna be, I think it was $74 billion in the next six years.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Be able to send me spam? Is this spam, or is it like truly? I mean, the airline ticket is a nice example. Instead of having to click a link and go to the browser.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  We don't know yet. I mean, the only, the only stuff we've seen so far is like Subway sandwiches supports it, Virgin supports it, like.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  But there's no reason that has to be unencrypted.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  Well, it's not about the encryption. Well, no, yeah, you're right. There's no reason it has to be unencrypted. But encryption's hard. And Verizon and AT&T like doing things when the government asks them because then the government doesn't get mad at Verizon and AT&T when Verizon and AT&T go to the government and ask for more spectrum.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's not fun.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  World sucks. Let's burn it to the ground. Start over.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  It's capitalism. But Google tried to do like, like ALO was like a Facebook Messenger or a WhatsApp clone, right? It was just a completely owned and operated service. And they just didn't get anybody to use it. It was perfectly fine. They could have added text as like an alt if they wanted to at some point, but they never did. And so, whatever. Now, chat will fall back to SMS. So here's the other thing is will Apple ever support it? Who knows? So there's gonna be this weird-

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Purple text.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  There's gonna be this weird, bizarre world where it'll be Android's version of the blue bubble where like, I want to send somebody a message and it'll fall back to SMS because they're using an iPhone, right? It's gonna be weird.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  I've always used Android, so I've been on like the green bubble and I've never seen what it's like to be in the green bubble.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  What chat apps do you use?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  I use Hangouts.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  You use Hangouts? Really?

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. I still use Hangouts.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  You, you gotta move on.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I feel like I keep coming on this show and it's like, why do you do the things that you do?

• 10:05Speaker 00

  No, people love Hangouts. Hangouts has got a huge group of people-

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Also, Hangouts is the only place where the blobs still live.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  They like forgot it's there. We're screwing up by reminding them.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. People love blobs.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Hurry, change the subject.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Does chat have the blob emojis?

• 10:21Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't have it.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  I doubt it. I'm gonna say I doubt it.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  It's available on Sprint right now, but I don't think it's called chat yet. And then you have to wait for your carrier to turn it on. RCS, the universal profile is available on Sprint right now.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Is it launching first on Sprint?

• 10:34Speaker 00

  It's already on Sprint.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  The home of all great-

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Right?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  You know what else Sprint has?

• 10:43Speaker 02

  I'm having flashbacks.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  What do they have? You know what else Sprint partners with? Like, Tidal?

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  They've got really good partners there.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Okay, but no, you're Google. You are Google.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  You have the power of Sundar Pichai.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Bam, right now.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Here's what I would do.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  What would you do?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Take ALO.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Ask people, when they're using the phone, if they want upgraded messaging features or whatever. Have them sign an agreement. Then all of your Android friends, you message them in the default texting app of the phone.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  You message them.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  You'd iMessage it.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  You'd iMessage it.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, you'd turn iLO into iMessage.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  They have a huge market share. They could totally iMessage it.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  And then, then you get all that iMessage advantage of you hate all your friends that don't have blue texts.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  You know?

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Uh, like, maybe even phrase it. B, B green text. You're. And SMS on Android comes in as a blue text.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you're Google.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Create all this confusion.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  And you're doing this. I'm, uh, I don't know, let's call me Verizon. And I'm the GSMA. I'm Verizon and I'm Orange and I'm Deutsche Telekom.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  And I see that my SMS revenue's gone away. It's going away very quickly. And that Google's swooping in to take what's left of whatever the replacement might be. I can't make a bunch of money off of businesses.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  Uh, because you have gone and done, gone and done it. You gone, you done, gone, done it.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  And done the SMS thing, done the iMessage thing. What do I do? Well, do I switch to Tyson because I'm mad? Probably not, because that's terrible. But you know what? Who gets to, who gets the final word of what shows up on Android home screens and what gets to be the default apps?

• 12:28Speaker 00

  The carriers do. So you know what I do? I make my own browser based off Chromium because it's open source and I make Bing the default search engine.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  I buy a email, I make some crappy app developer create an email app that is, you know, I get to look at the data on it because I'm an evil carrier. And I make that the default email app and you have to like go find Gmail. I replace the Google Assistant with something else, right? Like, the, they could do a bunch of stuff to start like slicing into the revenue streams that Google makes off of Android to retaliate for the revenue stream that they would feel like Google's taking away from them.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Well, it seems like Google ran away from that fight.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Google could have done, if Google had done this five years ago or seven years ago, it would, they would have, they would have gotten away with it just like Apple did with iMessage.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  It wouldn't bother me if it wasn't, if it was encrypted by default. If there was a standard that was encrypted by default, but this sounds like Google chose something that was less good for their customers in order to appease carriers who, your, your, your description of what a carrier would do to customers doesn't make it sound like the carriers are, have their best.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Who's defending the best interests of Android users?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Well, right.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Anybody?

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Well, so one of the arguments they make is that the people just use the default texting app anyway, because like SMS works for everybody and so everybody ends up using SMS. And so somebody finally has to step up and fix SMS. At the same time, every other thing they've tried short of going full iMessage has failed completely. So what else are they supposed to do?

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Well, you definitely wouldn't want to go full iMessage.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Can I defend my Hangouts usage for a second? So like, for people, like, I don't use Android Messages that much. I use Hangouts because most of my friends have a Gmail account. Therefore, that makes sense for me in terms of what iMessage or like iCloud or whatever all the iPhone users use. But like, you know, I have Google Photos. It would like tag my friends for me, even though I think Europe is suing Facebook about it. But yeah, like it'll tag my friends for me. It'll make it easy to share Google Photos stuff with my friends because all my friends are in my contacts and have a Gmail account. And then therefore that also just inherently means they can use Hangouts. Like, I don't see a problem with that. It's an easy app. It has the blobs. It has GIFs.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  It has different Google Keyboard stuff that you want to use with it. Like, I don't see an issue.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  So, so that, and that says that that's like Google's WhatsApp.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, like, yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  So what are you gonna do if, you know, I'm sure nothing, I don't know, I'm gonna ask, but assume that Hangouts is gonna just sort of continue to work as like, you know, basically G-chat for a little while longer, but that at some point they like, it starts to falter and they sort of let it like die, like they're doing with ALO. What are you gonna do? Are you just gonna switch to chat to these RCS Messages? Are you gonna switch to something else?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  If it's directly tied to like the phone numbers I already have in my account, you know, or like the Gmail's that are there. Like, I think the important thing, like, the thing that made it easy to use Hangouts, it's because like, most people I know, I have either their number or their email. Therefore, using Hangouts is very easy because it's already there. It's like, if chat brings all those in, and helps me transition very easily from Hangouts to chat, sure, that could be a potential, like, solve for finally moving on. But if I have to, like, start all over, I don't have any, like, history, like, I have no context of like what the last message is with this particular contact was. Kind of sucks. It's like, I just, you know, starting over sucks.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  When people buy a new phone, they don't like setting it up. They buy a new computer, people don't like setting up. People just don't like to set up things. If the transition is smooth, possibly. But I don't know, I really don't have a problem with it. I use it every day. And if it goes away, like, sure, I'll relearn to use it, but hopefully the transition is not drastic.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Wait, which, where will you go if it goes away?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess I have to go to chat, or go, I mean, Android, will Android Messages continue to exist?

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. No, Android Messages is the default app now, and they're gonna make a desktop client.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  And it supports chat.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  And it supports chat. That's the whole thing. So chat is, you know, you're not gonna go download chat. Chat is just gonna get turned on when your carrier decides to flip the switch inside Android Messages.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  I see, okay.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  It's just gonna appear, like magic. And the Google Assistant will be in there. Google's whole thing is, we can add a ton of features to Android Messages. We don't need to control the entire transport protocol.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  I see.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  And so we can do everything we want just by owning the app, and the carriers can control the transport protocol. They can do whatever the hell they want with that, as long as they stick to the universal profile. Also, on the backend, Google offers like server services that support.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, then I guess I'll go back, then I guess I'll go to Android Messages, because like, that is my backup.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, you theoretically won't lose anything except like your history.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is, I guess, fine.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, right? It's like, fine. It's like, aloe. That was my, that was my aloe review. This is fine.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  This is fine.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  There's no blobs, but it's fine.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm giving up.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, you say you shouldn't trust Google. I do not disagree. On the other hand, like, there's nothing left to trust. They gave it away. They're just like, they don't make a messaging app anymore. I mean, they make like 20, but they don't make one for you.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just, I don't, yeah, again, it's just like, who in the world of Android is fighting for the users? And it's fighting for the best interest of the users. It's not obvious to me who that is supposed to be, or who it actually is.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  But like-

• 18:12Speaker 02

  And I feel like Google does a lot of things that are like, okay, carriers, enough of that, or they like try to re-architect Android so it can't, it's harder to mess up.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Google tries to have a partnership with the carriers instead of an antagonistic relationship. So in like, in a certain sense, this decision from them, like, I know I'm needling you by saying this, but like, this is just the market at work. They're just doing what the market tells them. And the market isn't just us, it's also the carriers.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  But they could potentially, I mean, Apple has found a huge upside in how it did iMessage.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  So the thing I'm angry at Google about is not seven years ago, right after iMessage came out saying, okay, now we're doing the same thing.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Right. And just to clarify-

• 18:51Speaker 00

  They'd just done that, we would, everything would be fine, and we'd have like iMessage versus Android, whatever.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  They could fight forever about it. I mean, just to be clear, Apple is, has not seen to the best interests of its users by not opening up iMessage.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Apple should ship an Android app.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Would be the most amazing, this is great timing for it, too.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  If Apple's response to chat is to bring iMessage to Android, oh my God, that would be so much fun.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  That would be, that would be great. And that would be wonderful. And so Apple's not blameless.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  That would be great, but I, at this point, I've been, I'm fully embraced being the green bubble, that I would just do it out of protest. Just refuse to download out of protest.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  I mean, when I use an iPhone, I don't turn on iMessage, because getting out of iMessage is so painful-

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  -that I refuse to get back into it again.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Well, half the time, like, my friends ask me all the time whether they should switch to a Pixel or like an Android, and they're like, well, if I lose iMessage, then like, that's literally the only reason they don't not buy an iPhone.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Yep. They super know it, too.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  On that standard Vergecast note, I'm gonna read an ad, and then we're gonna talk about more text messaging, at least a little bit, I think. Yeah, all right.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  By 2050, the world population will reach nearly 10 billion people. 10 billion people. And food production will need to grow by 70%. But what if artificial intelligence could help? Farmers are already using it to help increase crop yields. Watson and the IBM Cloud provide access to weather data and analyze satellite imagery to help them monitor soil moisture levels and reduce water waste. So as the population grows, just like food grows, more food can be put on the table. Let's put smart to work. Find out more at ibm.com/smart.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  All right, I've talked a lot about chat. I am, I'm done. I'm done having feelings about text messaging, except we have to have feelings about Telegram. What is going on with Telegram? It is very confusing. I saw a picture of the CEO without a shirt on. He, I don't, it's not appropriate. It's not cool anymore to call somebody a hunk. Dude's a hunk.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Why is that not appropriate?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, why not?

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Nobody says the word hunk. It's like, it's like from like 1984.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Dieter, would you say Dwayne The Rock Johnson is or is not a hunk?

• 21:11Speaker 00

  He's, he's very hunky.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  He's like a chunky hunk. He's like over muscled.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  That's not nice. Chunky is like, unless you're like describing peanut butter. There's no chunky that is like positive.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  I'm a chunky in the vein of peanut butter. Like, his muscles are like rocky and they stick out.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Ew.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  He's a rocky hunk.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Would you call him The Rock?

• 21:33Speaker 00

  He's craggy. I would, I would call him The Rock.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  We have completely derailed.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  What is happening to Telegram? Someone give me the basics.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  The basics is Russia wants encryption keys for Telegram to operate in Russia. And Telegram is like, no. And Iran and Russia and a bunch of other countries, well, no, just those two. Iran temporarily banned Telegram at some point, but Russia was straight up like, well, you can't operate here if you won't give us encryption keys. And subsequently, that means that... I think they like took down parts of AWS to make this happen.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  They like banned a bunch of IP. They're like, oh, well Telegram uses these IP addresses. So we'll ban those IP addresses. And it was the same IP addresses that a bunch of other apps use, right?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Right. And subsequently, because of that, a bunch of video games got taken offline. Like, people couldn't play Splatoon.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  It got super messy, super quickly. And yeah, and people were upset because like Telegram, in that part of the country, like, is the internet, I guess. Like, people use it to communicate with each other, yes. But also, like, they read stuff online. Like, that is their Facebook.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I didn't know about these channels of Telegram, how hugely popular they are.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, in other parts of the world, WhatsApp usually is their internet. Like, people use it to read the news, you know, check prices for random stuff, like, you know, follow up with their communities, unlike, or neighborhoods, or like, you know, it's very localized. Like, people use it for commerce. It's like, it's quite insane how they really just use it for more than just texting each other. So Telegram is that in Russia. So it's a big deal. I don't think people have been able to access it through VPN, have they?

• 23:12Speaker 00

  There's been, like, there's been ways. There's, there, like, people have been talking a little bit that they found some workaround.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  So Vlad talked to a couple of people in Russia, and it ends with this just amazing quote from this Anton guy, who is quoting his own mother.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  "Thank God, repressions are handled by such incompetent idiots. My family remembers full well how it was when they were carried out by professionals."

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Which is, which is, I don't know, it's great. Like, you can't trust government. Everybody knows that.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Governments are gonna do horrible, bad things. But the hope is, is that they're so incompetent at it, that they won't do a good job at actually repressing something.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Well, what's funny is this, this kind of goes back to iMessage a little bit, right? So I remember way back in the day, a bunch of governments got real angry at BlackBerry because they did not have their servers hosted in the local countries. India was actually one of these countries, I think Brazil. And they got, they- Ended up capitulating and hosting their server in India's jurisdiction so that India could, if they wanted, try and go like, look at the data. But they, they had, they had previously, and they tried to route everything through Canada, and they would not open up to governments to let them snoop on BBM messages. I don't know what the current state of what's going on with BBM now is, and if I mischaracterize what happened back then, I apologize. But the point, I think, is Telegram, I think the CEO, like, he had to bail in the country

• 24:42Speaker 00

  a while ago, so that he, like, would be able to continue to run the thing. There's also Signal, and there's, now there's iMessage, and now Google's not doing, not doing anything, whatever. There's also WhatsApp with Facebook. And if you're gonna pick, if you, if it matters to you to have a chat app that's encrypted, that is protected from being subpoenaed or snooped on, the first thing you need to do is, like, look at the technology itself and be like, is this actually secure? Is it audited? Does the Electronic Frontier Foundation say, yep, green light, this is fine? But then there's a second step, which is, do you, the company that makes it, is it possible for them to look at your stuff? If there, is there some key they could grab? Most of the time, the answer is yes, sometimes the answer might be no.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  And if the answer is maybe, or yes, like, you have to pick your messaging app based on whether or not you think it's likely that the company that makes it is going to stand up to, like, the Russian government, and the Iranian government, and the US government? That's a very, very heavy load to put on, hey, what chatting app do you use? What texting app do you use? Like, that's crazy town.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  I mean, ideally, you'd have a system that's been developed in the open, so that whoever is physically, or whoever, whatever entity is actually putting it on an app store or something like that, doesn't really even have the ability to do it. But I'd say, I mean, right now, it looks like props to Telegram for, for how well they are, seem to be resisting these asks.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  I mean, it was basically the whole point, the Telegram, because Telegram and Signal kinda showed up around the same time, with a pretty similar, and like, people have reasons to prefer one over the other. I feel like Signal is developed a little more in the open, so it's a little easier to, like, audit how secure it is, but...

• 26:32Speaker 00

  I don't know. Good for them. So, just last month, March 27th, the EFF published a big, like, series of articles. And it's called "Secure Messaging: More Like a Secure Mess."

• 26:48Speaker 00

  And they straight up say that we can't, we can't give anybody a recommendation. We can't, we, the EFF does not have a recommendation for what texting app people should use. So, for example, Signal has strong security, but its reliability can be consistent. WhatsApp is user-friendly, but they can also undermine encryption. I'm trying to quote here. I mean, also, just a general distrust of Facebook. Right. So, like, there's no, like, go-to answer, "Pick this one," right now. But there is one thing that you can do to be a lot more secure than sending messages in the clear. Yeah. I'm sorry, Google. I'm sorry, Google, but that's so dumb.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Well, I'm, okay, I think it's, it's not end-to-end encrypted, but it is, it is like, whatever the, the step below that is. So, it's encrypted in transit, but like, it can be read on the server. So, like, the carrier can look at it. But like, if you're snooping on my Wi-Fi, you can't read it. So, it's like SSL, right? You know what I mean? So, SSL, blah, blah, blah. Still. Still. Yeah. I don't have anything, I don't know, we don't know what's gonna happen next with Telegram. It's like an ongoing story as we record this. But the important thing is go to James Liam Cook's tweet of Durov, where he has a screenshot of, um, of this guy in the desert. And his Instagram post is also amazing, because he says, "My favorite movie is 300."

• 28:09Speaker 00

  And he, to compare himself to, like, you know, 300 people fighting off a giant army. The creator of Telegram. The CEO of Telegram, yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Do you think, do you think he planned that before this happened? Or was he like, "This is happening, fly me to Dubai," and like,

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, it must be.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  "Compare me to..."

• 28:26Speaker 00

  It's so genius. So, he tagged it "Putin Shirtless Challenge." So, he's straight up, like, tweaking Putin in the joke about him being shirtless all the time.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  I, I see, and that's why he's on the horse, because Putin, yeah, I get it.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  I mean, look at those abs. I just can't.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  It's very troubling. I just, I'm getting old, okay? And like, I've developed a paunch and I am nervous. Okay, we're moving on.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Well, I will definitely check out this, this interview that Vlad did.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Because it gives you this insight. I feel old for not even knowing about Telegram channels. And just, I know it's probably mostly a cultural thing, but it's cool that people, you know, don't just rely on Twitter to subscribe to news. Like, people are just like, hey, I'm gonna join this underground gossip stream and get completely unverified things. And that's just, I trust that more than state-run media, so here we go.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Uh, so this entire Vergecast, I've been sitting here staring at a cardboard piano. And I haven't touched this thing much at all, but Nat, you, you just played with it?

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Tell me about, Andrew reviewed it, but tell me, tell me about it.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  So, Dami and Andrew, Andrew reviewed it, Dami actually played with it a lot more. She made it seem super cool. And I was like, well, Dami did it, so I wanna play with it. So, no. So, I grabbed it out of the closet and played with it. And it's super cool. Um, I think it's like just the most, one of the most creative things. It's like, you never think of cardboard being this exciting, and it is. And I'm just impressed with the way that all these different pieces kind of fit together. It's like, kind of like a jigsaw puzzle when you grow up playing jigsaw, but like, in 3D. And, yeah, you like, put the switch on it, it becomes kind of a dock. You stick the joy con in the back and the IR, like, sensors read the machine. And then, like, we have the piano one in front

• 30:21Speaker 01

  of us, so you can play with it. And it's like, kind of accurate, kind of crazy that, you know, each key, yeah, it has a really good feel. Like, you press, like, you press down, it's very satisfying. Um, yeah, it's just kind of nuts that something, you know, like, a flat cardboard can turn into this, like, 3D magical thing. And it's like, really creative, really cool.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  I'm not sure why it costs so much, but I guess you pay for creativity.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Wait, what are the, do you know the prices? There's like, one of them's like seventy or eighty.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, the robot one is more expensive.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, it, like, the cheapest variety kit, I think, is like, at least seventy dollars. So like, that'll come with the keyboard, that'll come with the fishing rod. It'll come with like, the little robot thing that you can build and you'll like, like an RC kinda thing. Um, yeah, and then it goes up from there, the, the robot is more expensive because it's just more involved. But it is really cool to put on and like, walk around. Um, Paul and I played the robot, like, destructor game, which is really cool. Um, you basically strap two parts to your feet and you stomp around and the other two parts you hold with your hand, you punch and you like, can fly around, you can turn into a car. It's just super fun.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  And it's, it's very, like, it, for the first time, like, I, I own a video game, I play video games, like, I think of myself as like, an adult person be, playing video games versus putting on the labo and playing with the labo. You literally feel like a child and, and not in a bad way, in like, in a very like nostalgic, creative, like, inspiring way. That makes you feel like, yeah, like, creativity is fun.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  It reminds me of, um, was it in, uh, in Calvin and Hobbes, what is, what was that called? The transmograph?

• 32:11Speaker 00

  The transmograph, yeah, yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Basically Calvin, all of Calvin's inventions were just literally a cardboard box. And whatever he wrote on the side was the function. But within this, I feel like Nintendo's created a way that like, it actually does something.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like-

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Oh, this is a robot, sure Calvin, no, actually, it turns out it's actually a robot.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  I mean, like, it, it does cost kind of a lot, but it does remind me of feeling like, when I was a kid, when I was a kid, I didn't have like, a whole lot of toys, right? So you had to be inventive, like, you had a piece of paper, you like, you drew a house, you drew a paper doll, you drew like, folded something and made a plane, right? Like, you got creative with what you got. And like, this feels like the next level of what being creative with what you got means. Like I said, it is expensive to buy a Switch and, and the kit, but like, once you have it, it is really cool to like, kind of, think back to those moments where- You kind of make do with what like this thing you got and like it just there's so many different possibilities out of this one thing like Paul and I were trying to make

• 33:12Speaker 01

  a music machine with it it comes with a keyboard which you can easily play as a piano but we also programmed it so that it would work with the robot kit so every time you stomped and punched it also played keys so you were like a walking piano

• 33:26Speaker 02

  So I wired like like because you basically have four inputs there's punch left punch right and stomp left stomp right Right And so with those four inputs just wire those to keys I've got the but you can also just put it as like touch let's see if there's any audio on here

• 33:47Speaker 02

  This is a real great demo Not my best work so okay so I did I guess I just didn't follow the coverage like closely enough with this I was not aware that they were doing like a whole The full labs thing Node based programming environment which I I just recently got I got an iPad mostly for doing music and I got this software called Audulous which is for making your kind of own modular synths and it's all about like you have little pieces and you wired them together so I was like oh I'll make a computer out of them Yeah The thing is you can make a computer just from NAND gates which is an AND with a NOT function Yep

• 34:30Speaker 02

  The two logic gates that are in here because the way they split it up is you have input so like you shake a joy con or that you you look an IR sticker or you press a button or something that's an input and then there is like the middle which is like logic like if and AND and NOT statements so like for instance for the robot

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Because the, when you're standing up, you're always playing that piano note. I added a not so that if, unless you lift your leg, it won't play it. That's why when I just push play, it just played that all the time. And then there's the output, which can be sound or flashing, something like that. But because you have and, and you have not, you can basically build, you can build all possible conceivable computers. Given enough memory and time.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the only, yeah, because you only need true or false, you need if, and, or. Or if, and, or, or not.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  You need and, or, and not, but if you have and.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  If you have and and or, you can build if.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  And if, if you have.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  God, this is all logic 101.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  It's Boolean logic, you don't need if, but it's and, not, and or are the main ones. But if you have and, and you have not, you can create a NAND, which is a not and.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  And with three NAND gates, you can create a OR gate.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  So you can like, if you, if you have NAND, you can make everything because you have not and and.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  You can make all computers. So like on Audius, I made, the nice thing about Audius, which I, hopefully Nintendo will like, I'm scared that they like maybe phone this in a little bit. It's a little bare bones.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. The screen, you can't see it, but it.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  It's just covered in boxes.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  It does not look good.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Dami's, so Dami did a project with the Toycon garage with, um, she took the piano, she didn't really use any kit. She kind of just built her herself.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  No, yeah, she and Meg together. So Dami coded it so that, so you can resize the boxes because like some of them you can program it so that when you touch it, it makes, you know, it responds. So she programmed it in a way so that the boxes were long enough so that they look like guitar strings. And then so that when she touched it or like stroked through all the keys, it sounded like she was playing guitar. And then Meg, our production person, helped her build a guitar out of cardboard so that she can slot the switch into that and then pretend to be playing a guitar, which is like amazing.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  And then she assigned buttons on the Joy-Con to change which chord she's strumming.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Right, so for frets, yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  And she played Rainbow Connection. It's amazing. Her logic diagram, that's like surely there's like a simple, like,

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Tommy, you're just so naive, like, there's gotta be an abstraction.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  No.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, like,

• 37:20Speaker 02

  There's not a lot of abstractions built into here. Like, you can't sum something up into a function, as far as I've discovered so far.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  But I mean, the fact that she went through the lengths of like trying to understand it and clearly like made this like John convoluted mess, but that worked. I think that's pretty cool, like, no one would ever think that you can do that with a switch.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  It's also more complicated, or not more complicated. It gives you more power than what Amazon is providing with Amazon Blueprint Custom Skills.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Ooh, have you looked through those?

• 37:50Speaker 00

  It's a good transition I just made there.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  That is a great, great transition.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  As far as I can tell, Amazon's Blueprint Custom Skills are not Turing Complete.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  You basically could just like make it say a thing when you say a command.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  You know, my favorite one, there's one for babysitter.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  So you load it up with the need to know information for your babysitter. Like, this is my baby's routine, here's our emergency contact information, here are the allergies and stuff like that.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  That's kind of like,

• 38:22Speaker 02

  So the babysitter could say like, Alexa, where are the diapers?

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  And Alexa knows.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's clearly also for like Airbnb hosts, for when you come over and you're like,

• 38:31Speaker 00

  That's really smart.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  So you show up and you're like, how do I do this? And then Alexa is like, hello, guests?

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Alexa, what's the Wi-Fi password?

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  See, the thing is, is like as basic as this is, there's a lot of useful things, like they've got some games built into it. They have like a flash card thing.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  So you can create your own like flash cards where it will like ask you a question and also have the answer and also be able to store a hint.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's clever.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  There's a lot of, I think it's actually a great idea.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  The whole thing about like, is this thing, in order to like qualify as like a real computer, one of the things that some people say, and I'm not necessarily in this camp, is that you need to be able to code it on it directly. You need to be able to create your own thing on the thing. Or you need to be able to create your own thing for the thing and not have to wait for permission from some company out in the world to let you create a thing for the thing. So, an iPad counts, because like you can sign up for a developer account and make an app and load it directly onto your iPad if you want to, right? I wish that there wasn't gatekeepers for distributing that app, but that's a whole other matter. Obviously, like, Apple II, Macs, like PCs, all that stuff, like you can, you can make your own apps for those things. And so, the question with Alexa is, how, how

• 39:46Speaker 00

  much skill is required to make your own quote-unquote "apps" for Alexa? And it feels like they're beginning to create an ecosystem where they're building up to a place where, like Nintendo did with the Switch, that I could theoretically want to like make any arbitrary thing for Alexa as a regular user, not just as like a pro developer who throws it into the Alexa store.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  See, there's some, in your logical chain there, that you conflated two things.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Being able to...

• 40:13Speaker 00

  I didn't use the right NAND gate.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Being able to program any computer is a very important thing to me.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  It being automatically easy is sort of assuming that software development will be easy.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  And based on the scope of what you're trying to accomplish, it's not necessarily going to be easy. The nice thing is, but, and, Amazon, I believe, is doing a pretty good job engaging at a bunch of different levels. So there are really advanced APIs that developers can take advantage of. You can go to like glitch.com and get just a sample project that you can just copy and just start coding your own Alexa skill with JavaScript, and it's basically ready to go out of the gate. And then, these blueprints are very simplistic, possibly too simplistic to truly be interesting or useful, but maybe it'll people, give people the taste for it, I don't know.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Uh, what else happened? Oh, the Motorola phones. We gotta talk about the Motorola phones. Uh, cuz we did the scissor vodka call out. Uh, I don't know, Motorola released like eight phones? Okay, it was like five phones?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  That's a lot.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was like, and they're confusing too.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  One was like a G6.

• 41:23Speaker 00

  One is like a G6. Okay. What are the phones?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  There's the, the, the G6 and the G6 Play.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  Also, there's the G6 Plus, but it's not coming to the US, or at least right now.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  And there's an also E5.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  E5, the E5 Play, and then there's the E5 Plus and the E5 Play, and there's also just the E5.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Why do they need so many phones?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Also, this naming convention.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  How do you guys feel?

• 41:51Speaker 00

  They all have different processors, they all have different batteries, it's just like, hit every single price point for every single region. It's like, make, just make one, make one Motorola. Also, the fact that like Motorola, like when, when Motorola used to release phones, it was like a big deal. And now it's just like, yeah, sure, you threw some more out there, nobody's paying attention. It's like really kinda sad.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  But it has removable battery, one of it does.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Just one, and like, at this point, I don't know, like, I, I think the capacity is pretty low, so like, what's the point? But, sure.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  This hitting every SKU is like, I don't, I don't really even know how Motorola is doing these days. So is this working for them?

• 42:27Speaker 00

  It must be. They keep doing it. But like, this is like, stuff launching in Brazil and Mexico, and then a bunch of APAC regions and other LatAm, Latin America regions. But like, none of this stuff is like, oh my god, flagship. These are all pretty middle of the road phones.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  And there is a middle of the road market.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  So that's the, the G6, the straight up G6 is a Snapdragon 450, which is like a mid-range processor. The Play has a 427, the Plus has a 435.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  The E5 Plus, like.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Sorry, yeah, the E5. The E5 Plus has a, yeah, and they all have like two or three or four gigabytes of RAM, decent sized batteries.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  They're like 200, 250 range.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  I mean, it's fine. It's fine.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  It just makes me sad because I loved the Moto X so much.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Back in the day.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  True, true.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  It was so good.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  The thing about this, they also embrace this whole like, I think like I first mostly noticed it with the HCC U11 or where like the back is like this like glossy glass.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  That looks like a different color kind of or like when it reflects.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  It's a real trend right now because the P20 Pro does that.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  The Honor 10 was like leaked or announced, yeah, earlier today and it also looks insane. Like I'm kind of into it.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. Paul, every week.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  You betcha.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Every single week, we make this joke and the joke never changes and neither does the name of the segment.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Really consistent joke that nobody ever gets tired of. Nobody ever wonders have I gone too far?

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Uh, this week, like every week, uh, is my segment called Ring-a-Ding-Ding.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Enhancia, have you seen this wireless MIDI ring? So there's like multiple, there's an.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Oh, I know what you're talking about.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  There's multiple of these now. I think, I think it happened all at the same time because maybe some like Bluetooth chip got real cheap, like some maybe combo Bluetooth accelerometer chip, but there's multiple of these now that basically, oh, and Bluetooth over MIDI is, is a thing.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Or sorry, MIDI over Bluetooth is like a pretty well established protocol. Basically you wear this ring and instead of like using like an expression slider or knob on your keyboard, you wiggle your fingers.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  And you add expression to what you're playing. I just, I like this idea of, um, something I've thought about for a long time is the bandwidth of, of input. And so like a, a high bandwidth input is an analog input typically. Where a digital input, like if you're controlling a mouse, all you're really controlling is the X and Y.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  X and Y, yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  And a Boolean of whether you're clicking or not. But an analog input can be very expressive and so I like the, I just like this, putting these rings on and you just add more variables of how you can perform and express music. It was just called Enhancia's Wireless MIDI Ring.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  And how much is it?

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Oh, shoot.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  No, sorry.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  She really, you got, coming with the hard questions. Because it's on Kickstarter right now. It's about $260 as a early bird.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  So it's, it's expensive.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  What I do enjoy, at the very least, about these like alternative inputs for music, including the labo, is that like I feel like it has a nice appeal for some people who may have like limited mobility. Like for the labo, yes, you can play it as a regular piano, but you can also just like attach it to the robot thing. And then you, all you have to do is just kind of like move your arm or your leg to play music. And it's kind of nice that you don't have to have like the dexterity of someone who is able to move both fingers in different ways. Because I can't, I've tried to learn different instruments, I've tried to learn a guitar, I just can't do it to save my life. Just cannot move two fingers or two hands in different ways at the same time.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Can you do the thing where you tap your head and rub your body?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Probably not. But the, you know, moving your hand around with the ring, I can do that. Like stomping your legs to make music, I can do that. I think that's kind of nice.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Um, man, I feel like we blasted through stuff way faster than I expected. I guess like we talked a little bit about what we expected from Spotify. We had been expecting them to release hardware at their event next week. And now we're sort of maybe leaning towards, no, it's just going to be like a new redesign of the free Spotify. And Nat, you and I and Danny like sort of blasting through, like they like put it out early for like some free users or something. Like it's very confusing.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like it. I don't have it yet, even though I'm a free user and I'm proud to be one. So Spotify, what's up with that?

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Well, I created, I created a brand new account. And when you create a brand new account, apparently you have a chance of getting it. And so I did it and then I had it and then Micah and Danny and Nat were like, look at this, look at this, look at this. I'm like, it just, it just looks like crappy Spotify, you guys. I don't know what to tell you.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  It looks fine, first of all. It looks fine.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  It works. The only thing that's new here that I think is worth talking about is the Play On Demand playlist, because the one thing about free is that most of your music is shuffle, which, again, is fine. But yeah, like, they'll have a few playlists now where you don't have to listen to it on shuffle. And, but most of it will still be on shuffle and it'll mark it with this, like, blue icon that says you have to listen to it in shuffle.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Sure. That's basically the only new thing. I think another new thing is when it's playing, I believe it'll, like, show, like, a full-screen

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Album art thing, yeah, okay.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Which, fine, that looks nice. But that's really the only thing worth mentioning. I think, like, radio, the radio button's a little more hidden now.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Which, okay.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Sure. But yeah, like, there's nothing super, super crazy about it. If you're not super attentive, I don't think that you will notice a lot of these changes. Really, the only thing that you're gonna notice is the fact that there is now playlists you can play on demand, which, cool.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, they've gotta do something more than this minor redesign if they're gonna hold a whole damn event for it, is my thinking.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  True. I agree. I don't know.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Hard work.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Hard work. How about you can program your own Spotify playlist?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Love ideas.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Wait, wait, what about Vaunt? Oh, god, yeah, we should've talked about that earlier. So, last night, so we're recording this on Thursday, last night, The Information had the scoop that Intel was spinning down the new devices group, N D G. And the new devices group is part of the group that made the Vaunt smart eyeglasses. I think they were called Superlight, which is their code name. And, uh, so I, you know, said, "Hey, Intel, I did a whole thing on this, is this true?" And they're like, "Ah, yeah, it's true."

• 49:23Speaker 00

  So a bunch of people are gonna get laid off. They're gonna try and find them other jobs within Intel. There were, the information said that reportedly there are about 200 people left in the division. This is a group that like worked with Tag Heuer to make a smartwatch that had an Intel chip in it. It's the group that made those like oak weird, super weird Oakley glasses that had like earbuds and were supposed to be like aware of their surroundings. And then they made this, you know, these smart eyeglasses.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  They didn't have a lot of hits.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Not a lot of hits. And again, like, to be very clear, like, the number one question with these things wasn't like the core technology, which was really cool, but not like, oh my god, you like cracked the matrix. It's just like, you found out a really clever way to use some basic technology, to use a super low-power kind of laser and shine it in this little box down in the lower right. Bloomberg actually did a story not too long ago saying that like, you know, this technology's not that good, right? And they're like, they're not wrong, it's just, it's a very clever implementation of it. But the big question was like, can they actually get anybody to make these things? Because Intel never does a good job at that. And then on top of that, can they not become Pebble? Which is to say, become a third-party platform that never fully integrates well with a smartphone?

• 50:36Speaker 00

  And like, we were waiting to figure out how they're gonna try and answer those questions. And I think the answer is, the CEO of Intel is too busy keeping his company from imploding to, you know, spend time thinking about that? I don't know, like, Apple's bailing on Intel is the rumor on Macs. Spectra hasn't gone away. Like, man, I would not want to be Intel right now.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Well, and, you know, we didn't have this on the list, but you know, Facebook is gonna make its own chips now?

• 51:06Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, I saw that.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  I mean, this is just something that's happening-

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Mostly for servers though, right?

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, but it's something, I mean, so much of what we do is happening in, in the cloud. And so, anything that needs to be done billions of times a second, or, I don't know. I don't know how many times a second, Facebook does things, probably trillions of times, it can probably be optimized by like a specialized chip.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  And so, there's tons of work in these really hyper-specialized chips. Google's doing it for AI. It's also happening on our devices, but, I don't know. Like.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  But why can't Intel pivot to making these specialized chips?

• 51:48Speaker 02

  I don't know. They have such good like foundries, right?

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it might be that, or it might be that like, these things happen in small enough batches where it like makes economic sense to just go ahead and make your own. Like, and it's easier to make a chip now than it used to be, and so you don't really need Intel to like come in and do it for you because it'll take longer to work with a partner than just do it yourself? Question mark?

• 52:09Speaker 02

  In my mind, in my mind.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  That's how you say question mark, T.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  In my mind, Intel.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  People can't see, but what I literally did was like the shrug emoji with my eyes about as far to the back of my head.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Weirdly closer to the blob version of the shrug emoji.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  The blob is me.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  In my mind, Intel is still on the leading edge as far as like, uh, process size.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Right? Which is very important and kind of like is the ceiling on how good a chip can be. So if Intel could pivot to be like, hey, you designed this RISC-V chip, we'll build it for you.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  I mean, that sounds, that sounds exciting.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. I don't know. I just. I, yeah. Intel's gonna continue to do Intel's thing, but like, Windows wants to make ARM laptops, but they're not very good. There's like a bunch of like stuff that's happening and it's themes like, if you look over the past couple of years and you look at the new stuff that's coming out or that's rumored to come out. Where is Intel on any of it? Modems to compete with Qualcomm, I guess, like, but, you know, they're still making computer, like, they're great for gaming laptops. But then again, if you're buying a gaming laptop, what are you, what chip are you actually thinking about?

• 53:28Speaker 02

  What was, what was Intel's mobile chip, X scale? What was the chip that they had? They had a mobile chip in like, like you get in like an iPack or whatever.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's whatever.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Oh, but they were.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  I mean, what do you want?

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Intel's good at like, running away from a market right before it's interesting.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  They're, they're floating around the Internet of Things market and they've got their drones. They got their cute little drones.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. There you go. Well, every four years, we'll have Olympics with drones in it.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Okay, what did we learn today? We learned that Telegram is fighting the man and hopefully they'll win. We learned that Nintendo makes the best programming platform available today. And we learned that you can't spell aloe without a lol.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  I'm really proud of that one.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  And The Rock is a chunky hunk. That, my friends, has to be the Verge cast. If you'd like to listen to other things that are not full of terrible jokes, I recommend Why'd You Push That Button, Season 2. There's also, I don't know, there's Twitter where there are terrible jokes. I am Backlon, Nat is Nat Garen.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yep, TT's. And if you'll excuse me, I'll be over there still crying about Dea's joke.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  I'm sorry. Paul's Future Paul. We are also on Instagram and, I don't know, other places. You should rate us on Apple Podcasts. You can also listen to Recode's podcast. Kara has Recode Decode. Peter Kafka has Recode Media. And we'll be back next week, maybe with Neelai, maybe not with Neelai. It's hard to say. You never know. You want to give him time. Yeah. He deserves the time.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Find out next week.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Promo code. Rock and roll, Paul. Nat, what's your sign off?

• 55:22Speaker 01

  I don't have a sign off.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  Snip, snip?

• 55:23Speaker 01

  No, snip, snip.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  There it is. Nice.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  By the end of this podcast, the one you just listened to, nearly 10,000 new malware variants will have launched. But now, AI can help you protect your data from threats wherever it lives with IBM Security. Let's put smart to work. There is, of course, more that you can learn at ibm.com/smart.