Amped on sparks

This week on Vergecast, our usual team of Nilay Patel, Paul Miller, and Dieter Bohn bring in senior editor, tech expert, and friend of the show Dan Seifert to discus Samsung and their new Galaxy Note 7. Dieter gives us his review of the Xbox One S, and the Flag Ship goes deep into Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages and what this means for the web. 01:28 - Xbox One S 15:43 - Google AMP 37:15 - Paul's "The gadgets have eyes" 41:16 - Galaxy Note 7 48:40 - Samsung 57:29 - TV talk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Hello, people. Jaeger fans. This is The Vergecast.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Chuck Jaeger.

• 0:08Nilay Patel?

  Chuck Jaeger. Here's what I want to tell you before the show begins, this show, The Vergecast, the one that you're listening to. We've been talking about Four Loko and Sparks. You might remember Sparks as an ill-fated energy drink with booze in it in 2002, and you might remember Four Loko as an iller-fated energy drink with booze in it from 2006. We literally had an argument about the timeline of the release and qualities of these beverages.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  They both appear to exist, but they've been, I would say, neutered.

• 0:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, the man doesn't let them exist anymore.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  You know, neutered is a really good word for that, given they took Tori out.

• 0:40Nilay Patel?

  Fair. Anyway, look, I'm sitting here with a beer and a Red Bull, and I'm ready to party. This is The Vergecast. I'm Neelai Patel. Paul Miller's here.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:49Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's here.

• 0:50Speaker 03

  Yo.

• 0:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm making this joke again.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Don't do it.

• 0:52Nilay Patel?

  It's the Fablet edition. Dan Seaver is here because he reviewed the, not reviewed, he went to the Note 7 event.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Yes. I played with a Note 7.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  I don't think you're a Fablet. I think this is the Fablet edition of the show.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for clarifying.

• 1:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I love the functionality and flexibility of Dan, but he's hard to put in my pocket. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a one-handed experience.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. This show's over. I haven't even had the Red Bull or the beer yet, and it's already off the rails. It's a real Four Loko kind of moment. Anyway, we gotta get started. We only have Dieter for a little bit, so know that note conversation is coming. But Dieter actually reviewed the Xbox One S this week.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  I did.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  And it's a smaller, prettier Xbox. Tell me about it.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  It's a smaller, prettier Xbox. The speeds of it are technically faster, but in terms of like actual use, no difference. Like, sorry, like, if you are incredibly, incredibly perceptive, you will notice some differences in like the menu, or like, like the rendering of some games or whatever. But honestly, all this thing is, is an Xbox that doesn't look like an insane, ridiculous VCR.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  And they got rid of Kinect.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  And the power break.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  And the power break.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would say the Xbox One...

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  Remember, there's that great picture of the top of the Xbox One, the first one that was released, and the top of the PS4. And the PS4 was like a miracle of Sony hardware engineering. And the Xbox was like, Steve Ballmer assembled a PC.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  You know, let's just put that in perspective. The PS4 was a miracle of engineering in comparison to the abomination that the original PS3 was. So...

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  The original PS3 was a supercomputer, and I will not have you speak ill of it. It was round, it was large and in charge.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  It had an emotion engine.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  It was bulbous.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  Motion engine.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Cells and everything. Alright, so I derailed that with 10-year-old talk of PS3.

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Hey, look, there's still people who want to talk about that.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  No, but like, this is like a mid console cycle. So like, talking about the cycle of consoles is relevant here. So they, or a mid console cycle console. Anyway, they, it's three years since the first one came out. Sometimes we wait a little bit longer for like the Slim Edition, but the original Xbox has not been doing super well. So they put this thing out. It's 300 bucks for the cheapest one. You can spend 50 or 100 bucks more to get more storage. And I don't know what to tell you, like, it's an Xbox. And they, the thing that they did by getting rid of Kinect and making it smaller is they put the focus back on like the things that you expect a modern like media console to do, which is like give you Netflix and give you games. And that's what this thing is for, that's what the new interface is for.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Like Cortana is there, but like you use it to find those things, basically. If you really want to be the person that uses the IR Blaster to control your entire living room, you can. I will say this, my biggest complaint about it is that it accepts HDMI CEC on the input so you can control it with like your TV remote, but it does not kick out HDMI CEC commands. So if you want to use it to turn your TV on, you have to make sure that the IR Blaster on the front of the console has a line of sight to your television.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  By the way, if you're wondering what that horrible noise is, that's me hissing like a cat.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  I was getting like a snake vibe, early on.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Wait, so...

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  Literally, nothing has made me more angry than everything Dina just said.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  How do you get it to face your TV?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, what, you put your Xbox on your coffee table and then pointed at your TV?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  It can face away from the TV, it just can't be hidden away inside a cabinet. I bought this thing because I'm a crazy person.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  Are you gonna have it control your TV, or are you gonna switch inputs like a normal person?

• 4:31Speaker 03

  I'm gonna switch inputs like a normal person, but I put all of my shit in my TV in a console where like the doors are closed, so it looks nice and clean. And so, the only way to have this thing turn my TV on is to reset up my IR repeater from Logitech, which I have and love, but don't technically need right now because all of my gadgets don't need IR anymore to be controlled. Because I've got a Vizio TV, I've got an Apple TV, and I've got the Xbox One S, all of which get controlled over Bluetooth controllers, basically.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, but yeah, so like, right now, my living room setup is completely infraredless, and I feel pretty okay about that.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  That's pretty cool. Alright, I got a question for you, Dino, though, because you said you bought it.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  But if we read your review, the main-

• 5:19Speaker 03

  I, I, yeah, nobody should buy it.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Don't buy it. Like, who buys this thing?

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Nobody, nobody buys it. If, like, I have this whole, like, loop of if you already have an Xbox One, the only thing you're getting out of this is HDR, which is fine for movies, we don't know if it's gonna be worthwhile in games yet, so you gotta wait to figure that out. Those games aren't coming out till, you know, later this fall, or, you know, this winter, which means that, like, you might as well wait for Project Scorpio's coming next year. Oh yeah, by the way, Project Scorpio, coming next year, it's gonna actually support real 4K games, not just upscaled 4K games. So if you waited this long to buy an Xbox, you might as well wait another year for Project Scorpio. And, you know, third, if you just don't have an Xbox but you really love Microsoft games, yeah, you should buy this one. But if you really love Microsoft games, you already have an Xbox!

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  So like, the only thing that's really good about this is, if you wanna go get a good 4K UHD Blu-ray player, those things are still pretty expensive, and like, 4K streaming boxes, you know, it's like, kind of a mess to figure out. So if you, like, have a 4K HDR TV, and you, like, really care about that stuff, and for some reason, you haven't picked up a Blu-ray player yet, or a streaming box yet that supports it, then yeah, this is a good, relatively cheap choice, plus you get to play Xbox games on it. But like- Once you start like slivering down who it's for to these like narrow, narrow things, you start going kind of shrug. The full story on the Xbox is like, Microsoft is going to be releasing consoles all the time now.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  They want to like put it on like a yearly cycle, maybe? Like, they want to, they want to just keep doing it. And so, the truth is, what this Xbox is for is, it's the cheap Xbox. It's the low-end, inexpensive Xbox for when the Scorpio comes out. So, when you go and you're like, "Oh, I want to get an Xbox," you will decide how much you want to spend and get that Xbox, and this is the one that's going to be at the low end. They just can't say that out loud yet.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, yeah, where are you getting this yearly cycle from?

• 7:22Speaker 03

  They've been talking about how they want to like, change the way that the console cycle works. So, the, you know, games that work on the Xbox One will work on the Xbox One S, will work on Project Scorpio. Games for Project Scorpio will still work on the other Xboxes, they just, you know, work at different resolutions.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Right, but what about, what about on the Scorpio 2?

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Well, Microsoft is basically saying like, they want Xbox to be a platform for games and not like, a console that you buy every seven years. They don't want to have these massive shifts in like, you know, shifts and jumps in like gaming hardware for consoles. They want it to iterate in the same way that PC gaming is able to iterate.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Right, which I like the three-year cycle for that, three or four years, sounds fun and interesting, but that every, like, like, the, having like a sliding window of which Xboxes work with which games and being confused about which one, that sounds a little scary.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Or, or getting stuck in the position where you just bought something in two years or less later, like you're not able to play the game you want.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  They want to make it more like the PC gaming world, right? Where...

• 8:29Speaker 02

  But the PC gaming world works like that because you can buy the part and like, upgrade your PC pretty easily. You can't do that with a console.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  And also with the PC gaming world, you can buy the brand newest game, nobody's going to tell you no, and you can run in at really crappy settings if you want to play it, just for the content.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  Why couldn't you do that on Xbox?

• 8:45Speaker 03

  That's what the idea is for Xbox.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Well, that's, and that's what I'm guessing is Microsoft might... Like say, oh, sorry, this, this title now is not gonna run on-

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, of course. It all depends on them actually keeping their word and having a relatively long window of compatibility for older Xbox, Xboxes, Xbox Ones.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  I guess that's what we live through right now on like phones and tablets, right?

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, kind of. I mean, does anybody really care if it iPhone games target the newest, I mean-

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's a different conversation because like the, the apps and games on a phone or tablet typically run on most every device that are out. And like, there are a few high-end ones that are maybe limited to like Nvidia's processor, but like, they're very niche.

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't think, every year, Apple does the iPhone demo and they're like, our newest graphics chip.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  It's almost as good as the Xbox.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  And then everyone just plays Pokemon Go anyway. So it's like-

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  And they demo the game and I always sit there and I'm like, this is beautiful. It's great. It's almost as good as an Xbox 360. But who is, who on earth is buying a new phone to play this game? And then they buy, play Pokemon.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  There was actually a pitch of Samsung with the Note 7 as well. Their Vulkan gaming API support.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Vulkan's actually hot shit. It's really cool. And it's, it's gonna hit more Android phones soon, but like the fact that Samsung was out ahead on Vulkan, even though there's no, no real content for it yet in like a massive way. Uh, like they deserve a, a little thumbs up for that. So a little thumbs up to you, Samsung.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  The smallest of thumbs up.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Can't confirm that was, he really only half raised the thumb.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  It was like a Bob Dole thumbs up.

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  I'm just, I just, like, I mean, the way that Dieter explained it-

• 10:22Nilay Patel?

  The 4K PS4 with VR, I'm just gonna buy that. I'm gonna wait to buy the new Madden.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  I, well, I like the way that Dieter explained it with, with the, with the whole, you know, they wanna like release hardware more often and stuff like that. Kind of makes the most sense, but that was my biggest question is like, why release this, release this now when Scorpio's coming next year? And console generations are usually multiple years apart.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  Cause this is the cheap one. This is the cheap one.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Like you said, it's, it's the cheap one, which is still 400 bucks, but-

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Well, it won't be next year.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  Does Microsoft have a plan for Scorpio? I feel like both Sony and Microsoft have, have said like, the, the good one's coming. You know, like the full kit one.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Just, just you wait.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  But like, they haven't, they're, it's like they're both making plans against each other's shadow plans. Like Microsoft's like, ours will have a microwave. And Sony's like, ours will also have a microwave.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  But it will also be convection.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  It's just like this thing, they're just like dancing the spec sheets back and forth without really talking about what it is. And I just, I just want the PSVR. That's like, just give me that.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Madden in VR?

• 11:28Nilay Patel?

  I just want a VR thing in my house that is not the big Oculus nonsense and not the garbage of the...

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I finally got to play PlayStation VR for the first time and it was fine. It was great and the headset is pretty comfortable. Not as comfortable as Oculus. I don't know why everybody's saying Sony headset's the most comfortable, but um...

• 11:48Nilay Patel?

  Cause it looks the coolest?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  It does look really cool, but it needs more power.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  It needs more graphics power and, and so you definitely want, if you can, to get the new PS4 for VR.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  Which I desperately want to get, but then what if Scorpio is like, it comes with like two VR headsets? I mean, that's like, that's the game these companies are playing right now. What were you gonna say, Dieter?

• 12:08Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, I'm sure that Microsoft's goal is to have Scorpio be more powerful than the Sony PlayStation 4K, whatever the hell we're calling it. Like, I'm sure that's the plan. Like, note that like, Microsoft didn't, isn't even willing to come out and say who it's partnering with for who's gonna make the VR headsets for the Xbox.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanna believe that, but also it took them three years to put the same components of the PlayStation 4 into a box the size of the PlayStation 4.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  Wait, you don't think you know who Microsoft is gonna partner with? I think it's like really obvious.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's just, it's interesting that they won't say it. Right. This is the part where I have to remind people that my wife works for Oculus. I have no inside information.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  Get out, Dieter.

• 12:55Nilay Patel?

  Pedal your sparks somewhere else.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Still misled.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  No, I know. So Dieter's accused, but I mean, it's like, Microsoft and Facebook are historically tight.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Microsoft screwed over Oculus with the game controller shipments.

• 13:10Nilay Patel?

  That's fair. Uh, so yeah, Paul Merlaki's like in a rage.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  He's like, I won't give you my headset.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Shoeless, right?

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  Shoeless Rage.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  I cannot hear his name without thinking about the fact that he doesn't wear shoes.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  He's trying to kick down a conference room door, but it's just...

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  I know these controllers are in here. I'm gonna ship him on time. I just gotta keep working on this door. Shoeless Rage, the Palmer Lucky story. Sorry, Palmer, if you're listening, just...

• 13:42Speaker 01

  I love the work that you're doing.

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  You're doing a great job, buddy.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  You're inspirational to the whole VR community.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  And also my new book about hobos, Shoeless Rage. No, the historical fact, Facebook, Facebook just put out a press release saying it was gonna switch all of its internal business software to Microsoft Office. Like, that's the tightness.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Maybe it's because Office is a good product.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  They're competing on bots.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  They're not. No, Microsoft is making canvases. Facebook is making agents. They're all the same words that mean nothing.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  And nobody's using them.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  Literally no one will use them. Alexa, play Creedence Clearwater Revanche. Can I tell you a story?

• 14:22Speaker 03

  You are such a bad person.

• 14:28Nilay Patel?

  So stupid. So we are shooting the Mr. Robot after show, and that's my little plug. And on the first episode, there's an Alexa on Mr. Robot. So I had it on the after show so we could, like, talk about it being on Mr. Robot and what they were doing. And like, this demo, one of the characters asks Alexa when the end of the world is, which I just did accidentally tell the people listening in their homes. Shit, and Alexa has an answer. So, we had it, and we're like, "Taking the show." And before the show, we were just using it to, like, listen to music. And I was like, "We need some, like, good time music, like, it's like, behind the scenes." It was like Creedence. So I had it playing Creedence, like, during setup. And we're like, in rehearsal, in the live rehearsal for the show.

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, "Do the demo." So like, "Alex, when's the end of the world?" And she's just sort of playing Creedence, just like blasting. And like, the lawyers are like, "We don't have the rights to do that! Is that what's gonna happen? Like, we can't, we cannot play Creedence on this show." Anyway, we got through it.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  The lawyers.

• 15:29Nilay Patel?

  We made it. Yeah, the NBC execs, like, the Mr. Robot execs were there, and they're like, "We can't clear Creedence at this time."

• 15:37Speaker 02

  We can't afford those rights to

• 15:39Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I don't know what we're saying. Anyway, Dieter, come on back. We're done talking about Oculus.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Okay. Are we done talking about Xbox?

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  We are, we are. So there's, there's one more thing that I really, I desperately want to talk to you about. You in particular, because I think you and I have very similar ideas about this, but you are so much smarter about this stuff. Google.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Oh shit.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  This week announced that it's bringing its accelerated mobile pages AMP. So right now, Facebook has instant articles. So if you're in the Facebook app on your phone, you click an article with lightning bolt, it slides you over into a custom article page. The verge supports it. So you see a verge, particularly circuit breaker articles are all instant articles. Fox.com has them. There's a bunch of instant articles everywhere. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, instant articles all over the place. Google has a competitor to this called AMP. Right now, AMP pages only show up. If you search for something on Google, you see a carousel of news results and you click it, you see the AMP page. So we support AMP as well.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  And there's like a little logo.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  There's also a lightning bolt.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  It'll let you know.

• 16:40Nilay Patel?

  Google is now, when you do a search on mobile, their plan is for the actual results, not just the carousel, the actual results to lead you to AMP pages. Which is, which is a real something. Isn't that right, Dieter Bohn?

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they're like, it's in a developer phase now. So they want to collect feedback and whatnot. I don't even know where to start with this story because there are so many different ways to like, come at it. I do know where I end, which is me frothing at the mouth complaining about the open web dying and everybody is going to live in a completely fragmented world controlled by Apple, Facebook and Google. So, how do you want to get from here to there?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  So let's talk about how it's on the surface of benefit to people.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Oh, well, the benefit is radically obvious. AMP pages are shit hot fast. They load incredibly quickly.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  And they use less data and all that other stuff.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  And they use less data. They, and the reason that they are so fast is they are way more limited in what you're allowed to do and what kind of ...jinx you're allowed to play than full HTML webpages. They're just, it's just like a subset of HTML. They're actually, it's built on top of HTML. I mean, technically, like, Apple News and even Facebook instant articles are similarly built on HTML tech. But like, Google stuff explicitly is like, really obviously built off of HTML and feels like it's part of the web. It, you can have it, you know, have a canonical link to the full webpage or a canonical link to itself. It's like compatible with it, you can look at it in a browser, yada, yada, yada, yada.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  So there's a lot of really good benefits to this technology. The question is, are all those benefits worth the various trade-offs that come with it? And like, I can list them all and they just keep kind of growing. So, number one, you, unless you want to completely refactor everything you're doing, you need to now be supporting not just your HTML pages, but your AMP pages. And what inevitably happens whenever you need to support multiple platforms is one of them gets attention and one of them doesn't. So, I'm sure you know lots of, you know, apps that like, don't seem to be getting that updated all that often and get kind of buggy and crappy. No, apps, like publication apps, right? Like, they, they, they keep up their webpage but not their app, or vice versa.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  And like, having to support multiple platforms means that like, some of those platforms are going to get short shrift. On top of that, AMP isn't as fully capable as full HTML. So although Google will tell you that like, there's all kinds of cool stuff happening and eBay just started supporting it and this travel app can do app-like stuff on it, it's still not going to give you the full, like, what the web is capable of that, you know, it just can't do that. On top of that, you have to like, be able to actually make multiple versions. Like, are you going to make a webpage? Sure. Are you going to make an Apple News article? Okay, let's see if we can get the partnership right. Sure, maybe. Right. Are you going to make a Facebook instant article? Okay, sure, it's another thing, but maybe it's not that hard. We'll make sure we get a partnership there too. Are you going to make an AMP version?

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Well, it looks like I don't have to set up a partnership, so that feels nice and open and, but it's more work, but okay, sure, I'll do it. And all of a sudden, just to like, be on the internet, you have put yourself into like, publishing four different versions of the same Thing and deciding what you do or don't get to opt out of gets really hard because like, are you going to bail on Facebook instant articles? That social is where the traffic is coming from. Are you going to bail on AMP? Well, 20% of like your views, your total page views are like coming from mobile search. So you like feel backed into a corner to support this new platform. Additionally, I mean, I just, I could just keep going.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  So, so the point about the, the whether or not to choose to support AMP, right? Is that Google says they're not going to be prioritizing AMP articles specifically, but it's like a de facto prioritization, right? Because Google prioritizes speed and AMP articles are faster than normal. So if you aren't supporting AMP, you're hurting yourself in a Google ranking.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  You could still show up in the listings without AMP.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  But, but, but you're, if you're, if, I mean, these are things that like publishers and media companies, like we work for Agonize over, but like, you know, if you don't, if you don't, if you're not doing AMP and your competitor's doing AMP and you're really kind of covering similar topics, Google's, the competitor article is going to float in the top.

• 20:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Google, like Google, Google saying, we don't favor AMP, but we favor faster pages. By the way, AMP is the fastest page. Is like, I don't, I don't favor fast cars, but I do prefer a Lamborghini.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  It's like, the thing, I want to figure out about this, like my personal website, I made it with like hand coded HTML. There's static files that are served off of like Amazon S3 bucket. They have no, yeah, they have no weird functionality. They should, they should qualify as AMP because I am using the subset that is AMP. So I wonder.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  You can, you can flag it as an AMP article, but like, there's other things besides that where I start to get into like the fears of control, right? So although Google will tell you up and down that it is an open source project, you can go look at the stuff on GitHub, anybody can make contributions, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, like Google gets to decide what is and isn't in the spec. And there's other, there's other weird things like an AMP page can either get served from your Amazon S3 server or whatever server you choose to serve it from, or you can flag it to like be allowed to be cached from Google servers. If you do that, it goes from like pretty fast to holy shit fast because Google knows how to cache stuff all around the world and you know, that'll be closer to the phone that's loading it, you know, it's just going to be faster.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Which is part of how Facebook Insta articles work as well.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, Facebook takes, just takes your stuff and then re-renders an IA page. There's the, the devious thing with Facebook is.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  IA, Instant Articles, is built on URLs, right?

• 22:28Speaker 03

  So are AMP.

• 22:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, but AMP is like, at least, a subset of the web. I don't know. It's like, it's part of your webpage in a way that an IA page is not.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Well, the, yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  You can't direct link to an IA page.

• 22:43Nilay Patel?

  So when you look at the world through Facebook, which is how people using their phones tend to look at the world, and you see a URL, up until about now, that URL has pointed to one thing, right? It's literally a uniform resource look at it. It's pointed to one resource. Now, there's Facebook's version of the resource, there is the actual resource, the webpage, and there's the AMP version of the resource.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  And the AMP, the AMP page and the webpage are generally tied together, as far as I can tell. But the Instant Article...

• 23:16Speaker 03

  It's, it's the canonical URL. So the AMP page says, "The real canonical version of the URL is over yonder." Uh, but I'm giving you this one because I know it's, it's faster.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  But Facebook is, is like remapping URLs inside of the Facebook web.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 23:32Nilay Patel?

  Which is just crazy. So if you, but if you click a link in an Instant Article on Facebook, and it's another Instant Article, you don't actually go to the web, you load another Instant Article. So now you're fully outside of the web.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  Which is, I know that that sounds very weedy, but just, like, the web, the web is built to be, like, literally the thing that connects us all.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  And Facebook is gluing a superstructure onto the web, sucking at all the information, and one day, they're gonna like, what, you know, there's like this visual metaphor where it's like, you replace the structure with like sugar crystals, and then you like, you pull the thing out and everything collapses. Does that make any sense?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  This, I'll give you a better metaphor.

• 24:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Uh, Facebook is embracing and extending the web right now. And the third part of embrace and extend is extinguish.

• 24:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the web is dead. That's like what I'm saying. Like, I would not, if you asked me to start a media business right now, I would start a YouTube channel. Like, straight up. I would just be like, you know what, Marques Brownlee? I love you, dude, but I'm coming for you. Like, uh, right, it's like, it's a better place to make a business than... A website, a thousand percent. Because where are you gonna put your stuff? Where are you gonna make your money? Where is your audience gonna be? All of those questions.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  That still doesn't get you out of the problem that you are publishing to a platform that's not under your control. Like, the nightmare scenario here, I got in a huge debate with this with somebody last night. Gabe from Techmeme, actually. Not that he was debating me, but I was like trying to explain it. The nightmare scenario is with Google AMP, Facebook gets an article, Apple News if it still mattered, is that they will exercise control over the way that we distribute information out to the world. And the beauty of the web is that nobody gets to control it other than like a crazy consortium of a bunch of people arguing with each other. And that sucks, and that's really boring, and it's led to like the shitty situation of the state of the mobile web right now. It's really bad.

• 25:27Speaker 03

  But would you rather like run through that bad process where you are guaranteed that there's not, you're not going to hit the darkest timeline of Google deciding winners and losers or Facebook deciding winners and losers? Or do you take the fast way? You know, this is like some real Star Wars, you know, dark versus light shit right here. Do you take the fast way where you get the faster webpages or quasi webpages? But you run the risk of going down the darkest timeline of these big companies deciding who gets to publish, who doesn't, and what the rules are?

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  So today, here it is. It happens all the time. Today, Facebook said, "We are gonna start doing keyword scanning in headlines published to Facebook to figure out what is clickbait and like remove it because our users don't like it." It's literally the word police. I'm not saying, by the way, fully in support of this idea. This is great. This is a great idea. But Facebook is like, "We noticed that when you use 'you won't believe in a headline,'" that's right, we're just gonna disappear you. That's a scary kind of power. Like, they could choose to deploy that power to like anything.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Did you see that their example was of clickbait? Gizmo techno, gizmo tecco, gizmo tecco.com. Gizmodo's like up in arms that this is them calling out Gizmodo because Gizmodo like had a bunch of really good scoops about like how Facebook decided what wasn't news back, you know, a few months ago.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  Look, that's probably fair, but I bet the good people at Techno Buffalo are fucking pissed.

• 27:03Nilay Patel?

  Come on. Techno Buffalo didn't do anything wrong to you. They just picked a really esoteric name. Does anybody know? Why the Buffalo? They got a good YouTube channel. Why the Buffalo? I've never understood the name.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't get it. I don't know either.

• 27:17Nilay Patel?

  And Facebook hates their clickbait headlines.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  If you, if you know why, why the Buffalo and Techno Buffalo, please tweet at DCSEIFERT.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  DCSEIFERT.

• 27:30Nilay Patel?

  That's a good, it's a good, didn't Mark, Mark Linsangan was there?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, Mark was there.

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he did great work. And then he, his work was so good. We like reeled him.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  I, I just think on this whole thing that everybody's a bad actor. I think the publishers have made a bunch of shitty, shitty webs. Meryl Streep is wonderful. And a national, national treasure. A global treasure, I would call her.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Paul, Paul gives no opportunity for anybody to besmirch the name of Meryl Streep. Stops his point.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what kind of show you think this is.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Stops his point, derails and to make the point that Meryl Streep is unimpeachable.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yes. Um, but to resume my point.

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen The Devil Wears Prada?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  Best fucking movie. I will, The Devil Wears Prada is the movie that when it's on TV, I stop and just watch the rest of The Devil Wears Prada. And the real, and Becky's always like, you think that you're Anne Hathaway. But you are the villain. And then I'm like, that is all.

• 28:30Nilay Patel?

  Carry on, Paul.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Publishers have made a bunch of slow-loading shitty websites and just piled more and more shit onto them to make them slow and terrible for users. And companies like, companies like Facebook and Google want all power and control of someone's entire day all the time and, and of all information. And so the, everybody's just kinda, you know, I don't know. I don't know.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  I have a more evil view of this. Like, the web displaced apps on a PC, right? Like, the web browser became, the web became the new platform. There was zero switching costs between web browsers. So for a while, we could all use IE and then decide IE was too slow and then go to Firefox and then Firefox is too slow and then we went to Chrome and then Safari came out and then we went like, back to IE, like, a never-ending platform war was happening, but the cost was so low, we didn't think about it that way. That was great. Now there's a new platform war, but the browsers are baked into the OS. So there's incredibly high switching costs for the web, right? Like, mobile Safari is what you get on an iPhone. Basically, Chrome is what you get on Android phone. I know that the Firefox people are gonna come screaming at me, but come on.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  Just look in the mirror. Think about what you've done.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 29:50Nilay Patel?

  But we've come to a place, I'm fired up, man. I've had like, three sips of a Red Bull and half a Stella and it's like a four look of...

• 29:58Speaker 01

  I like how you say, "Think about what you've done about Firefox, who has like, consistently been probably the most pro open standards, open web..."

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  They were idealistic and pure and innocent.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  And they made a shitty browser because of it.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, bro. Anyway, but now we're at a place where it's who owns the icons on your phone? And Google basically owns the browser icon on your phone. To this day, even Safari, you open Safari, you almost certainly search for something on the web as opposed to going directly to a homepage of a website, unless it's theverge.com, which you go to right now, several times in a row. But you generally search for something and they own mobile search at a really high level. Facebook obviously owns like, five apps, the billion users on your home screen. Twitter owns one, one sad app.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  300 million users, still.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  There they are. But it's who owns, you know, Google owns YouTube, which is like, the default. I wanna watch a video about something, I click on this icon on my phone and go get this video. It's who owns those icons is that's the war. And all of this, let's make the web faster is about making the experience inside of those platforms faster, which is to Paul's point, like they want to own more of your day. But none of that reflects or extends the idea of the web is the uniform way that we distribute information and the actual competition, action fervor happens on the display of the web, which is where all of the power used to be. Who owns the web browser used to be the power. And that's why there's so much competition.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  We all used to switch web browsers every 18 months. Now it's, I have an icon. How much power can I exert over everyone else to make the experience in this icon better?

• 31:40Speaker 03

  And the methodology of exerting that power is fundamentally different now than it was back in the web, especially for publishers and for people that made stuff on the web. Like if I wanted to compete, I made, you know, I wrote better, I took better pictures, I made a faster website and we would compete head to head on those terms. But in this dystopian hellscape future, if I want to compete, I score a better deal with Apple than, you know, my competitor. And the actual like direct competition of like the quality of the webpage and the journalism is secondary to who scored the better deal.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Sounds an awful lot like the music industry.

• 32:19Nilay Patel?

  Or cable television.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, like old, old media.

• 32:24Nilay Patel?

  But that's where we are, right? Like we've, we've created, mobile created a new class of gatekeepers. I mean, on the, in the halcyon days, the desktop web, the gatekeepers were like AOL.com and Yahoo.com, now known as AOL Yahoo, powered by Verizon. But like those are, that was as much gatekeeping as existed at that time, right? You, there were like these massive portals that would like, you know, send you traffic or whatever. And now it's, if face, if people, enough people click on the Facebook icon, Facebook will send you a bunch of stuff and they can exert control over everything.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Wait, are you saying the web is dead?

• 32:58Speaker 02

  So I think you need to write a new article. The internet was fucked two years ago. The internet is dead now.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  I wrote, before you guys hired me again, I wrote, I wrote, maybe the web should die.

• 33:09Nilay Patel?

  Really? Why, why should the web die?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Because publishers, like The Verge.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  That's fair. We hired you right back. The Inside Drop by Paul Miller.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I assumed you'd read it.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh, was that that word file you sent me? Shoeless Rage dot doc?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  I wasn't shoeless by choice, I was just poor.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  And I really appreciated the job, Del.

• 33:37Nilay Patel?

  Terrible. Put your shoes on, Paul. And walk right out of here. No, I mean, the thing that Dieter's talking about, where everyone had instant access to everything all the time, that was the web. You could be a publisher as one person in a bedroom. You can't build that business anymore because of Facebook. Like, you couldn't start The Drudge Report today. You probably couldn't start something like Daring Fireball today.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  And, yeah, and the thing that's incentivized clickbait is Facebook.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Like, Facebook's like, hey, we hate clickbait. You know why clickbait exists? Because Facebook.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  No, it's because people click on it.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, but where would you put that before?

• 34:18Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Right?

• 34:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, on the internet.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:21Nilay Patel?

  You'd put it in.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  How would anybody see it?

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  We got accused of clickbait at Engadget in 2007, all the time, when people were reading our shit in RSS feeds.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Yes.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  All the time.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Clickbait is.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller would write, like, this Motorola StarTech is the one to beat. And he'd be like, clickbait, Paul.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  You'll never believe how then the new Nokia engages.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  The Motorola Zoom, one tablet to rule them all.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  I think clickbait is a word that happened after Twitter and BuzzFeed.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  Nope. No way, man.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Really?

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  No. No way. I think, I think clickbait and the curiosity gap headline that BuzzFeed pioneered and Upworthy pioneered, that's, that was like the moment that clickbait became a thing that people understood. When, when that style of headline that was like, hyper optimized for social, that you won't, you like.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  But you're saying we were being shitty and tricking people into reading our terrible stories back in the RSS days?

• 35:17Nilay Patel?

  Generally think any article they don't agree with is clickbait.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  So we, we would write, like, Windows Phone, they're trying again, or Windows Mobile 6.5. Remember that?

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  We got accused of. The honeycomb. We got accused of clickbait every time we wrote about Windows Mobile 6.5, because we'd be like. Yeah, it still only supports resistive touchscreens and doesn't have any real apps.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  What is this clickbait nonsense?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  I feel like there was a capacitive touch.

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  They were, they were resistive.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  For 6.5.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  They were resistive.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  There was one. At least it had like a hard surface.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  They had a hard surface, but it was still resistive.

• 35:50Nilay Patel?

  There's like one engineer at HTC who's like, I can do it. And Microsoft is like, that noble engineer, whoever he is.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  We're gonna slap our honeycomb launcher.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Let's move on. I'm gonna find this.

• 36:02Nilay Patel?

  Do you say let's move on so you can refute my Windows Mobile 6.5?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Capacitive.

• 36:09Nilay Patel?

  Now, if you're listening in your car, for the next few minutes, drive silently.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  HTC HD2, first Windows Mobile with capacitive touchscreen.

• 36:15Nilay Patel?

  The HD2 was a phone that wouldn't die, remember?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Boom, boom.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  They ported Android to it.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Take it back. Eat your words.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  That was the one noble HTC engineer.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I said.

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  Remember they brought it on the Engadget show?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  And I was right.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  I also remember that was, that phone had a 4.3 inch screen, which seemed enormous at the time.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Gentlemen. Goodbye.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, do you have to go?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  I have to go.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  You know what? Why don't you walk away to the sound of this pre-recorded Citibank ad?

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:45Nilay Patel?

  Goodbye, Dieter.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  The Vergecast, as you know, is supported by Citi Cards with Android Pay. How cool is it that we live in a world where you can use the same device to listen to the Vergecast and buy your morning coffee, groceries, and more? Did I mention that it's a super fast way to pay? Just use your Citi card with Android Pay at the register. Get in, get it, and get going. Download the Android Pay app on Google Play or visit citi.com/androidpay to get started. Android Pay is available for eligible Citi Consumer Credit and Debit Cards. All right, we're back. Paul?

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:18Nilay Patel?

  It's time for your recurring, consistently named segment.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  The gadgets have eyes.

• 37:25Nilay Patel?

  Woo, hit me.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is not a full product yet. This is a prototype, but Intel is working on a depth sensor for the HTC Vive. And it just looks badass the way it's bolted on to the front here.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Bolted on is right, gee.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  And like, the Vive is kinda weird, like, I don't think the Vive holds. Holds the magic leap as well. So like on Oculus, a lot of people put the uh magically. No, that's not the right word for it. What's it called?

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  Leap Motion.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Leap Motion. Thank you. Thank you.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  Literally just combined words.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  So the Leap Motion lets you see like right in front of your face. So you can put your hands up and you can use like your hands. It's really fun to interact with things like that. But this new Intel sensor is like putting like a connect on the front of your head.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  And so it can like, like 3D map and scan your room and show you when you're about to run into a cat or your couch or something like that. Cause the, the Vive has like a pass through camera, but it doesn't like have the depth sensor. So I just think that would be really cool. And I also really like the idea of someday having a VR headset that has enough sensors outwardly facing sensors on the front that it could give you really great vision.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  So like you want something that you could wear walking around the street? And it has enough sensors to see and map out the street in front of you as you walk so that you don't run into people? But then you can also like zoom in like four blocks ahead or something like that.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, like maybe so that you have superpowers, but I also think it would just be hilarious if we completely re-engineered the eye. Put two eyeballs in front of, of a screen that blocks our vision and then the screen, you know, it's just cool.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  Two eyeballs in front of a screen.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Think about if you're putting sensors on the front of a VR headset and then passing that information to a computer that then passes it to the screen that's in front of your eyes on the inside of a darkened VR headset. What you are doing is creating new eyes, right?

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Right? You're creating eyes for your eyes.

• 39:32Nilay Patel?

  I'm into this. And then you would add probably notifications?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Probably a lot of notifications.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  What, what would you do if you had bionic eyes? Eye message.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Well, there's actually a lot of research about this early on in like the wearable computing thing of what a passive notification could be, you know, like the it's kind of the equivalent to like tying a string around your finger, but like something that just kind of vaguely reminds you of something and you tie that information. So like, one of the researchers had, and I think he ended up actually working for Google, had like, like a little light go off in the corner of his vision and it was just to remind him to like sit straight, sit up straight. And you couldn't hardly even really see it, but it just passively, I don't know. There's some cool psychology to that. But that's probably more for augmented reality.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  The lights in your room changing when it's time to like, do something different.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that. Yeah. And then that, just like that is a memory cue to you to like since memory, you know, we have since memory. Start using since memory.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  I mean, like, if you really want to go back to that, then that would be like the sun going down and telling, you know, primitive man to go to bed.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  And then the sun coming back up and that tells primitive man, it's time to wake up.

• 40:49Nilay Patel?

  But future man is wearing an HTC vibe with an Intel depth sensing. I mean, this thing looks like a, like a giant shark fin. I don't know how to describe it. By the way, the tweet was deleted. This is now a leak.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  This is great.

• 41:01Nilay Patel?

  The Intel engineer tweeted it, but then deleted the tweet. But the photo lives on.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Because the gadgets have eyes.

• 41:07Nilay Patel?

  Gases have eyes. Oh, that's good.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. See what I did there?

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  Good segment.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 41:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Let's transition. Just call Dan.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Dude, speaking of eyes, the Galaxy Note 7 also has eyes.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Because it's got an iris scanner and you can use your eyes to unlock it.

• 41:24Nilay Patel?

  You might say it's eye-rich.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Why would you ever want to do that instead of using your thumb?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  That's a great question. And I'm not convinced that you would.

• 41:31Nilay Patel?

  I would like to note for the record that Dan just did finger guns at Paul when he said that's a great question.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  I did a double, I did a double snap into finger guns.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  You did not make the finger gun sound, which is a requirement on the show, which is.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  I think I heard like a silent eh.

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  Alright, finger guns aside, tell me about the Note.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  So, so the Note 7, it is, the Note 7 is not the Note 6, for whatever reason, so that, you know, Samsung sells against the iPhone 7. Yeah, so, I mean, like, if you're a huge nerd, you know that it's actually the 7th note in the generation because they had the Note Edge a couple of years ago, so it's the 7th note that Samsung has produced, but last year's was Note 5, this year's is Note 7. The real reason is because the iPhone 7 is coming this year and Samsung doesn't want to sell something with a 6 next to the iPhone 7.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Well, it also makes sense. This is, the specs of this are the same, like, generational specs that are in the galaxy.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  The Galaxy S7, yeah, so it brings parity with that.

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, why don't they release them at the same time?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. It takes some time to stretch the screw out.

• 42:32Nilay Patel?

  Come on!

• 42:33Speaker 02

  So, yeah, the Note 7 has an iris scanner in addition to a fingerprint scanner, which is a first for Samsung. I think it might be a first for Android, at least for any Android phone that somebody would have actually purchased. Microsoft put an iris scanner on the Lumia 950 last year, so it's not the first on smartphones, but Samsung's argument is that it is a more secure system than a fingerprint scanner, and we've seen a few reports lately about fingerprint scanners getting spoofed with 3D printing, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, there's that. It's kind of just like, the Note line has always been kind of Samsung's line, a product to like, throw out its craziest technology and like brag about its technology advancements, and I think part of that is here with the iris scanner. I tested it out, it definitely works, it uses infrared, so it can work in really low light, and it's

• 43:17Speaker 02

  pretty quick if you line up your eyes right. The only thing that's weird about it is you turn the phone on, you have to swipe the screen over to do it, then it starts scanning for your eyes, and you have to bring the phone kind of like awkwardly close to your face, because it won't work with it if you're further than 18 inches away or so. So, it's pretty awkward.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  You have to press the home button, swipe the screen,

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  and then put the phone really close to your face to unlock, instead of just...

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Correct, instead of just putting your thumb on the, on the home button to, to do the, the fingerprint scanning. You can also use it to lock a section off of the phone that has content and apps and, and stuff like that if you want like super secure privacy stuff, but I think that most people are probably never gonna use the iris scanner.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  I mean, like, it's a, it's a party trick.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  It's definitely a great party.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great party trick. I think the real world, you know, a fingerprint scanner is way more practical and secure enough for the vast majority of things.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  And then you like-

• 44:06Nilay Patel?

  Is that the only thing that's new?

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. I mean, like, technically, like-

• 44:10Speaker 01

  It's got higher resolution pin drawing, right?

• 44:12Speaker 02

  It's got advancements. It's got like, so like, the screen is dual curved, which is new for the Note line. It's similar to the Galaxy S7 Edge, but the curves are a little less dramatic than the Edge. The back of the phone is curved the exact same way as the front, so the whole thing is like, super symmetrical. And it like, feels really cool in your hand. It's just really like, polished and well done. And it's got the same size screen, it's got the same processor and RAM and camera and kind of like, all the internal guts are the same as the S7 Edge and the S7-

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna buy this phone.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Waterproof, water resistant.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  It has a headphone jack. We should talk about that.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  It has a headphone jack.

• 44:44Nilay Patel?

  So they like, threw shade at Apple.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was really, it was, it was so forced. But yeah, they, they were like, "And it has a headphone jack. Just saying. I don't know, I'm just saying, it has a headphone jack." That's like, literally what-

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  Didn't they say some other stuff too?

• 44:57Speaker 02

  They, uh, threw shade at the fact that they include the stylus. You know, it's not an extra thing that you have to buy on top of the phone or the device. Uh, it doesn't require charging.

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  Zero human beings would buy a stylus for a phone. It's an aftermarket accessory.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, hey, Apple sells the pencil for a hundred bucks.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  That's the whole hook of the Note, right?

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, the reason you buy a Note, well, I think the reason you buy a Note is that you want a big screen. That's really the reason. The stylus is like, there. I don't think, after like, the honeymoon period, a lot of people use the stylus. Samsung says it's like, rising in importance in the things people want, but the reality is, they want a big screen. The Note is a premier big screen phone.

• 45:31Nilay Patel?

  If you use the stylus in your Note, tweet at DCC.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  I hate you so much.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  Draw a little, draw a little picture.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  So I bought a Note 5 myself, because Note 5 was a really great phone last year. And, uh, I used the stylus for a couple of weeks, and then I just like, forgot about it, because it's a phone.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  You use, you use the stylus with your, uh, with, uh, Evernote on your iPad, right?

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I really tried to make that work too. Kinda haven't done that in a while either. I really want the stylus dream to come true. Just really want to make it happen and it's always

• 45:57Speaker 01

  I like stylus theoretically because I drew like all through childhood. I always had like a pad of paper and a pencil and I was always drawing and it was like this would be great to have like a stylus always with me and I could do a little sketching.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  But I'm just bad. I'm not a good drawer and I can't take notes with handwriting.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the, the mobile operating systems aren't doing you any favors either. They're all built to be used with your finger and like, so a stylus is pretty redundant unless you're using very specific things of writing notes or drawing. Uh, Samsung added a few functions to the S Pen this year. So you can like use it as a magnifying loop and for translation. The coolest thing is that you can create these gifs from video.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Why would you need your pen to do that?

• 46:40Speaker 02

  I don't know why it's tied to the pen, but you have to use the pen to do it.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  But it's really cool because you could like start up a YouTube video, grab three or four seconds right away and make a gif from it instantly, which is, which is pretty trick.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  It's another parlor trick.

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm getting this phone.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  That's more than parlor trick because man, you want to make funny gifs on the go and tweet them right then.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I suppose. I think I'd probably just search for it.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  I have an entire.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  I'm tired of seeing the same gifs. I want more gifs.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, I have an entire thing about like TV shows have, the way we watch TV shows have changed completely because people watch them on computers instead of on televisions. And I can insta gif every, like Game of Thrones.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a riff with this though. And that's Samsung says if the content is DRM protected, can't make a gif with it.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  And like, there's like a, a security DRM level in Android. So like, if you're trying to use, like you can't screenshot Netflix on Android. You won't be able to use this gif maker on Netflix on Android.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  What's the point?

• 47:37Nilay Patel?

  It's the fucking police, man.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  The man.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  If these were decentralized.

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  DRM police. This is what happens when you kill the open web.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  That's why torrents are still alive.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  Paul, we're, this is another Mr. Robot show. Last night, a literal, like literally a torrent freak came into our IRC channel during the show while the show was airing and was like, what's up? Where's the torrent of this episode? And everyone in the IRC channel is like, it's literally still on the air. Like you, you can't have a torrent right now. And then there was just an argument about what the best place to torrent Mr. Robot was in the official Mr. Robot IRC channel. And then finally someone was like, maybe we shouldn't do this here. And they all left and went to different IRC.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  They went to the unofficial Mr.

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  That show. Well, on Free Now, there's Mr. There's V Corp, which is the Verge's Mr. Robot channel. There's the official Mr. Robot channel. And then there's the one that hates us, which is F Society. And F Society is like, very mad at us. They don't like that we exist. But they're the renegades. They're trying to hack us.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:34Nilay Patel?

  Our moderator got like booted. He keeps on getting hacked and IRC takes out of the channel. Anyway.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  So in addition to the note, we actually got some insight into how Samsung like builds phones.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. So Sam Byford did an interview with Samsung's chief designer. His interview was kind of like right around the time of the S7 launch. But we just published it this past week. And it's a really interesting look and candid look at the decisions and the the thought process that Samsung goes through when it's been developing these phones, which have now had, for the past couple of years, Samsung has put design given much higher priority than it had in the past. But like, it comes with a lot of compromises that we don't usually hear about, like, things like, you know, when the S6 came out, didn't have expandable storage or waterproof resistance. And so like, that was pretty much just a thing that Samsung couldn't do in time, and they had to ship the product. So there's a lot of those really interesting things about like, how Samsung thinks when it's

• 49:28Speaker 02

  developing products. Totally, totally killer read, really interesting. Sam asked a ton of great questions and actually got answers on them. So if you're interested at all in the product development process, or like, how that phone in your pocket actually came to be, it's a great read.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  I have to Samsung has come an extraordinarily long way. I was playing with the Moto G4 upstairs.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  All the phones have sort of just arrived.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Hundred, $199 phone, by the way.

• 49:51Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Vlad hated it. But in terms of a P, like, compared to where industrial design for phones was even like, two years ago.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:58Nilay Patel?

  That thing is a revolution. Right? It's just like, it's actually well constructed. It's not like well designed.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  It's well constructed. It's got a good screen. Usually, like, you're used to garbage screen. It's got a competent camera. You know, it's like, all the stuff that.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  They did have a competent camera.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  For 200 bucks? Think about what they got for 200 bucks before that. Paul used a phone that was 60 bucks, and its camera was a literal shoe.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  So awkward.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  It was a shoe. I was like, I wish I had a shoe.

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  I was like, I keep hitting myself when I try to.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  But like for for 200 bucks, I mean, it takes like, even if it was as good as the iPhone 4, and I think it's probably better than an iPhone 4's camera. It's 200 bucks like.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, that that sets up the you were saying to me earlier, the GS7, last year, the GS7 was by far the best phone.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the the S6.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  Yes, because it has the best camera.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Best camera phone. Yeah.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  And then now the note, but all the other phones are sort of like at parity right now.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you go, if you go buy an Android phone, especially, you are looking at the premium things. We're talking like 550 bucks and up. You're looking at the same processor, the same amount of RAM, largely comparable cameras, same screen resolution. So like what it comes down to is which design do you like better? Or, you know, maybe there's slight differences in battery life. Maybe the slight differences in display, but really it comes down to which which phone do you like better to look at and use every day? And that's that's a great thing.

• 51:20Nilay Patel?

  There's also like a a layer of do I trust this company to give me stuff for updates?

• 51:25Speaker 02

  There's there's there's some of that. There's some of do I trust this phone not to break? I mean, there's some minor things like Samsung has its water resistance, which kind of sets it apart from others, which I think is a super useful thing that that every phone should have. But for the most part, the like, the the experience of using it is going to be largely the same across almost every major premium phone that you look at.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm buying that.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Is this Gorilla Glass 5?

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Is this better?

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Every year they come out with a new Gorilla Glass that they say is better than the last one.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  I always forget the name of it, but I'm still blown away at that Moto Force.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  So so what Motorola Motorola does with on the Force is they have a different kind of display that they do call shatterproof. And it's actually a plastic screen. It's not, it's it's a multi-layered plastic screen, so it's not a glass. It's not Gorilla Glass. Gorilla Glass 5, I'm sure of it will shatter if you drop it like, maybe it'll shatter less. Maybe you have to drop it harder. But it'll shatter.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm buying that. Let's wait for Nexus. This is the thing. I'm switching Android. I'm ready. I'm so ready because the iPhone 7 is going to come out. We think it's.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Without a headphone jack.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  Now, that's a snake.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  You're gonna vote with your feet, Neil? Like?

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  This is a kitty.

• 52:38Nilay Patel?

  This is the worst podcast in history right now. No, it's gonna come out, whatever. And the story of that phone is not gonna be its design or its feature set or whatever. It will be the camera. Right. We can see it and already in the leaks, cameras way bigger. They might do this dual lens thing. Like, the story of that thing is gonna be the camera. If that is the story, then like, maybe it's time to take a year off. And next year, they'll put out their weird, all glass, like, alien phone that like wraps around your face. Yeah, no home button. Like, it knows you. It just like comes to your house, you know, it shows up at your house. It's like, hey. And you're like, I love you now. And then you just have it.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  How'd it be great if one-

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  That's how I feel about the iPhone.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  If one year, like, Apple just gave everybody the next iPhone.

• 53:23Nilay Patel?

  They're like, we have a trillion dollars in the bank.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Did you guys, you guys, when you turn like, was it 18 or whatever, Gillette sends you your first razor? Did that happen to you?

• 53:32Speaker 02

  That, I believe, that's in the US, when you turn 18 and you have to register for, what do they call it? For the draft?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Gillette will send you a razor. That's where I get, they get it from, I think.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  That's what happened to me.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  Shouldn't have dodged the draft.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Could've gotten a free razor.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  Should've gone to NAMM.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  That lasted you for a week and then you had to spend forty dollars?

• 53:52Nilay Patel?

  Selective service.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  It's called, they did that.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I signed up for it too, but I also got Gillette razor, my first razor.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Which lasted a week and then you had to pay forty dollars for a plane.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  It's time, this is the phone that we wanna give to the world.

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  We've been saving up all this cash to give the world a phone.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  I believe that in Apple's mindset, every time it releases a phone, it's giving the world a phone. But it also wants you to give it seven hundred dollars.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  But they have almost enough cash to literally give everybody in the world the iPhone 8.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  You know that, there's like the, in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there's a guy who has the spaceship that's like the most black spaceship?

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Zafar Bebelbrocks.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like the most black. No, it's, it's the rocker guy. And you open it, it happens like full speaker.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Oh, you're right.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  That, when I, I, actually, I think the next, the iPhone that's coming out this year will be iPhone 6 SE. I, I feel it, they won't, they won't iterate the number until it's like a different design.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  What about next year?

• 54:49Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone 7, what I think will be iPhone 7, every time I picture it, I just picture like the most black phone. Like, it's just like, like, you hold it.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Aren't they already talking about a black phone?

• 54:59Nilay Patel?

  Setting up themselves up for. Like, it's a, it's a black piece of glass. With a display that literally sucks your eyeballs out of your face.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  And then you lick it to unlock.

• 55:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you just hold it to your face and then it molds itself around your face. And the antennas are built directly into your skull. And if you put your hands on your skull, your service goes down.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  You scratch your head the wrong way.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Tropical.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  We tested hundreds of thousands of skulls in our Anico chamber.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  I just can't wait for the future. It's gonna be great.

• 55:33Nilay Patel?

  I was just saying, there's so much hype around the seven, but this one, it's obviously gonna be a camera story. Like, that's how I feel about it.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  And like, that's really interesting. And if it... I just don't know how much incrementally better you can make the camera on a phone right now. Such that I'm willing to give up like the phone I have. So like, why not take a year off before the phone that literally changes everything about how we view ourselves, society, and one another?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  Maybe they'll call it the iPhone X, because it's the 10th year of the iPhone. I stole that theory from Gartner, one of our great interns, by the way.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  Gartner.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  In all credit.

• 56:07Nilay Patel?

  As a family, are very wise.

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

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• 56:28Nilay Patel?

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• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  Let's, let's end here. This is like big news in the world. Two, two things happened this week related to TV. We started with the Xbox. As always, TV is my favorite thing to talk about. Who, who will defeat the TV? No one. The answer is no one. It will be a mess for the rest of our lives. But Peter Kafka recode broke some great news. Great news. Had a good scoop. Apple, after years of trying to get a TV service, after Eddie Q walking around in sandals and Hawaiian shirt, trying to get a deal, has apparently decided a different tack. Instead of actually launching a TV service, you're gonna take all the apps in the Apple TV, suck in all the data about what's in them, and actually just build a guide, content guide for the TV.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Isn't that obvious?

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  This is just the content and the apps, right?

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So you would

• 58:11Speaker 01

  This isn't helping you watch cable TV better.

• 58:14Nilay Patel?

  No, I mean, so that's the thing. So Apple, there's kind of like two classes of apps in the Apple TV in general. There's the VOD stuff. So there's like HBO Go and Netflix. And then there's actually a huge number of live channel apps. So like you can watch CBS Live on the Apple TV or whatever. You can watch ESPN.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  So Apple will help you search through that.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  So like you, you turn on your Apple TV, presumably, this is kind of the scoop and the rumor, you'll turn on Apple TV, it'll show you, but basically a K-Lux guide. Like here's some stuff that's on that you can watch live, and here's some like VOD stuff that you might want to watch. And then you click it and it will automatically launch the app, open the appropriate stream and send you in.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 58:53Nilay Patel?

  But they won't actually build the service. Their goal is to get all the apps in one place and then do it. And Peter's point in the article, which is really interesting, is they already have so much of this metadata because of Siri. So they might be able to just do it now, or they might need permission, or they might just be letting people know they're gonna do it.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  They already had some sort of search interface for

• 59:11Nilay Patel?

  They just have Siri.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  They have some very basic search.

• 59:13Nilay Patel?

  No, but it's

• 59:14Speaker 01

  This will be better.

• 59:15Nilay Patel?

  No, but this isn't search. It's, it's

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  The main interface of the Apple TV right now is a bunch of tiles.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  Clear that from your mind.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  And

• 59:26Nilay Patel?

  Dream up.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  And resurrect a cable box.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  A cable box without the cable card.

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, no, I don't know.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Who with apps?

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  So they also, so the cable company is interesting because they also have, these are two other dynamics playing out. Apple also is rolling out single sign on for its apps, which was, I thought was a big story at W W C. And everyone just made grumbled, boring sounds at me.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  You really do love TV.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  It's my favorite goddamn thing.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  I mean, if you've ever sat through signing into every goddamn app on your Apple TV, then single sign on is like a.

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  But so, yeah, so you, you buy Comcast, you buy Time Warner, whatever. You get your authentication password for TV everywhere. You sign in your Apple TV and then all your apps automatically work. Apple knows what apps you get.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  So you are still paying for cable.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  And you could switch over to your, your cable box if you wanted to. But theoretically you pay for cable and then you don't use your cable box.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  You don't pay the rental fee.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Ooh, you pay for cable, but don't pay for the cable box at all and just have Apple TV.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  Easy, but yeah, sure, why not? Anyway, but this, that's, that's a version of this. You sign into your cable credentials. Maybe you pay for a skinnier bundle, fewer channels, some other thing. You don't rent a cable box, you get this Apple TV. Sign into it. Apple talks to your cable provider, knows what you're authenticated for, pulls down those apps automatically. Populates a guide with, here's what's streaming live right now. And here's some stuff that you might like. And if you want to like dig into the HBO catalog, you like press HBO Go and you get the HBO Go app.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  What would be interesting, I wonder if cable providers would like this because if, if they really liked it and like got buddy buddy with Apple, which is hard to imagine right now. Like, like you search for something that you do want to see. Like somebody told you about this hot new show on CBS called Zoo. And it's like, oh, it turns out you don't have access, CBS is a bad example. Cause everybody has, but you don't have access to CBS for some reason. And, and then they upsell you right then. Like for me, to be honest, like I know Apple wanted to do this with phones. Apple would love to just sell you a phone and like, you just turn it on and it's like, hey, which carrier do you want?

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Well, that, I mean, that's essentially what they do with the iPad now. Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  And so if you could buy an Apple TV, like in someone like me, it's like, I've never had cable.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  And it's like, okay, here's your cable options.

• 1:01:39Nilay Patel?

  This is the great dream of service.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  So this, then Comcast is finally going to get Paul Miller dollars. They never caught Paul Miller dollars before.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  The fear for a cable company.

• 1:01:47Nilay Patel?

  No, but Comcast is regionally limited from providing that service to you because you live in New York City and Time Warner is your provider.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Nilay Patel?

  So you would have to buy Time Warner internet and then somewhere Comcast would have to get a deal that allowed them to sell channels to you over the internet in a region that they don't currently operate.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  What if, what if you could, I have Time Warner internet.

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  My god.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  What if I could sign up and have prorated one day of Time Warner internet to watch a Time Warner show I want to watch right then? And then it just disappears.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  I mean, that's just, that's just buying the on demand episode though, right?

• 1:02:24Nilay Patel?

  What I'm saying is, it's like just baby steps. Cause once you get all the way to what you're talking about, Apple might as well just sell you the service.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:30Nilay Patel?

  Right? They might just like bill your iTunes and whoever gets some money in the end, but they can't get that deal.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:36Nilay Patel?

  Right? They don't have that deal. So they're, they're building all these half measures along the way. And it's just fascinating to me because it's, it's still not enough, right? Like it, it's a really good idea. It will make using Apple TV much nicer. But they rolled out the Apple TV and said the future of TV is apps. And then they're rolling out a guide that abstracts all of the apps away.

• 1:03:00Nilay Patel?

  And gives you the guide.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  To their credit, the apps got the content onto the thing and now they need a way for you to find the content.

• 1:03:06Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  I feel like we're, I feel like this is progress.

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Let me, let me say the second TV thing. Cause this is, this is up and Peter's very well sourced. I'm sure this is correct, but it's Peter's scoop. This is all connected to the fact that Apple has been rumored for years for wanting to build a TV and they killed that project. And Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg what TV to buy in 2006. Walt bought that TV. That TV just died. It was a Pioneer Elite Plasma. Just made kissy fingers.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:33Nilay Patel?

  Beautiful. Goodbye. A lot of sounds.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Nilay Patel?

  On the Verge yesterday.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  All that for loco.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  Dude, living that loco life. Anyway, so Walt's TV died. He bought a new LG Ola TV. He reviewed it. We talked about it for an hour on Control of the East. You should listen to that. Here's the thing that happened for real in our lives with the Verge yesterday. Walt likes the motion smoothing on his TV. He wrote about it. He was like, it's a buried, confusing setting. He and I disagreed about it with this edit went back and forth forever because I was like, turn it off. He's like, no, I like it. He's like, I was like, you can't, you can't say you like motion smoothing in America in 2016. It's like not politically correct.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  America's not ready for this.

• 1:04:12Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, he likes it. He put it in there. We talked about it and we, we got to a great place in the edit where I was like, you wouldn't even know how to turn it off. Like, it's so confusing. And he was like, yes, that's exactly right. So we put it in there. He tweeted out the column, Ryan Johnson, the director, writer-director of the next Star Wars movie, like tweeted at Walt, turn off your motion smoothing.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  He tweeted disappointment at Walt.

• 1:04:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he tweeted sadness. Uh, one of the tweets was Samsung, Achilles, Mossberg, every great hero has a tragic flaw. Uh, which most of them think Walt, Walt has been like chastised by the internet today. I feel, Walt's like a genius. Like, I love working with him. It's, our podcast is great. Editing his column is wonderful. No, he turned it off. Like, literally so many people tweeted him, turn it off. He tweeted today. I, I understand now, video purists, I've turned it off. But that gets to the point, like, TVs are so hard to use, which is what Walt's column was about. And we're adding now this other entire layer with this Apple's potential guide

• 1:05:12Nilay Patel?

  that still doesn't make your TV necessarily like look or perform better. It's just a way to get it content better. And at some point, I'm going to sound like Gene Munster here. At some point, Apple like does all these half steps and they have the service and they have the deals and da, da, da. Isn't it then time for them to just like suck it up and build the TV? That like doesn't call it true motion and do motion smoothing? By the way, you should turn motion smoothing. If you're listening to this and you're at home and there's motion smoothing on your TV, I want you to shut it off and go turn that shit off. Like, shut off the podcast and you're not allowed to listen to it again until you've turned motion smoothing off on your TV.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I feel like if they did, they would just like license like a good panel like the L G O led one.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, I mean, when you think about an iPhone, the parts for the most part are licensed. The, the screen, Apple does not produce a screen if they buys them. So yeah, I mean, that would be.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  I always feel, felt like a weird fit for them, but I'm sure, I'm sure they could like convince you that this is great for some reason. I mean, but the thing is, what I truly want.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  I can't believe we're talking about Apple making a TV.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  I want a dumb, I want a dumb screen.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Almost fall 2016, but.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  I want, I want somebody to dare to make a completely dumb screen.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  That's what Vizio did. Vizio made that TV.

• 1:06:23Nilay Patel?

  Dieter just bought it.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  The Vizio P series that came out in 2016 and soon to be the M series too, I think. They do not have an O S. It's all controlled.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  This is great. I'm sorry that I didn't know this.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  I wrote a feature about it.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. He wrote a feature, Chris Welch wrote a great review of it. It's all on the verge.com, media company on the current internet. Also in AMP and Facebook instant.

• 1:06:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Load this up in Facebook instant.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  So that was the problem.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  Maybe search for it in that open web of yours.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  I'm sorry. I feel like the worst person. No, but Paul, I mean, like, that's what, that's what a lot of, I think, you know, enthusiasts have been asking for. And so like, you know, I don't care about the stupid smart TV interface and stuff like that. But when you think about like the average person, they turn the TV on, they, they need to go somewhere. It needs to take them somewhere, whether that's to take them to cable, input one for their cable box and they understand that concept. Or it's to go to the Netflix app. Like I have a Vizio, I use the Netflix app on my Vizio because it's the only real easy way I can watch 4K content. From Netflix is by the Big Ten.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Which is one of the reasons I'm excited about the Xbox one S. We didn't talk much about that, but.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, there's other ways to get 4K. I could buy a Fire TV that has 4K. I could buy the Roku.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  It's just like, you don't want to use, have to use the TV operating system.

• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  But I understand that some people do.

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  I mean, I think, I think that's probably for the average person is the most straightforward, but as Walt's column points out, it is still a dumpster fire.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Nilay Patel?

  Okay. And on that note, it's time to talk about 10 more things. We're done.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  You know what's another weird thing? I was like trying to find like jailbreaks for TV operating systems. Like most of them run on like Linux or Free BSD or something. There's very few TV, because there's so many different models, I think it's hard to like, pick one to be the hackers TV. There's no like

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  And they all run proprietary operating systems, right?

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  No, that's typically based on Linux.

• 1:08:17Nilay Patel?

  You say there's no hackers TV?

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Like, what is the hackers TV that like, I was like, I want something that is like, the, the, what's the, the link says WRT 100?

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Uh, WRT 54G, I believe is what you're thinking of.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  I know what you're talking about. So why would you want to do that? You can just plug a PC into a TV.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they have a computer in them.

• 1:08:37Nilay Patel?

  You can just glue a Mac Mini to the back of the TV.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  There's a computer in the TV, why can't I do things with the computer in the TV?

• 1:08:43Nilay Patel?

  Because those computers are-

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Think about it, like, when you turn on the TV, you don't know what's gonna happen, right?

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  I mean, there's a computer in a car. I mean, this is the same argument, right?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  You could change what's on that computer and what it does when you boot the, the computer, things happen, like-

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  You can break it.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  I was looking into this for like, an art project I wanted to do. It's like, you want it to be built, you know, one has to like bolt on a Raspberry Pi to a perfectly good TV when there's a whole computer inside of every TV, basically.

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  Do you know you can follow The Verge on Twitter, on Snapchat?

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  I wasn't aware.

• 1:09:14Nilay Patel?

  At Verge. No, Paul, you're exactly right, but here's the thing, nobody, the effort it would take to hack the computer in a TV, there, like the-

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  It's too high, when you could just take the HDMI cable and plug it back in.

• 1:09:23Nilay Patel?

  No, there's that, but like, not everybody has the same TV, like Samsung makes 90 models of TVs.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  And I think that's why there isn't the hackers TV.

• 1:09:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, somebody has probably hacked a TV, and they're like-

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Tweet me at DCCver.

• 1:09:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, tweet DCCver if you hacked your Samsung PIZEN TV.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Remember the mentions?

• 1:09:40Nilay Patel?

  No, I bet somebody like hacked their TV and like, then went on like Hacker News or Slashdot or something, and was like, "I hacked my TV", and everyone's like, "What model?", and like, they typed in like, a 30-character Samsung model, and everyone was like, "I don't have that TV", and that was the end of that conversation. Anyway, uh, that's it, we're out of time, sadly. We had a good one, rocking, rolling. Sounds, FourLoco, Sparks with two X's. We're at Verge on Twitter, Verge on Snapchat, Verge on Instagram. Hit us up on iTunes, press five stars, if you think about any fewer number of stars, shut your mouth. Uh, What's Tech with Chris Plant, it's on Tuesdays, Control+Alt+Delete hits on Thursdays with Walt and- Myself, Verge ESP with Emily and Liz is on Fridays. There's a bunch of other podcasts on Rico's side. Long as it has too embarrassed to ask. Paul's gonna say something.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  I have a special announcement. Andrew, can I say this? We're gonna do the Describe Pictures podcast as a special edition.

• 1:10:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  Episode.

• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  Thousand Words with Paul Miller.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Domi. Domi's gonna help.

• 1:10:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm there for it. Well, look out for that. That was Verge Cast. We'll be back next week. See ya. Rock and roll. Paul. Words.