Zuckerberg's smart home, Android Wear, and CES predictions

As the year ends, Nilay, Dieter, Paul, and Ross gather together from across the country via Skype to sit down and bring up what’s been troubling them this week. Nilay can’t stand Mark Zuckerberg’s video about his home AI, Dieter doesn’t know what laptop to take to CES, Paul feels that emoji is too totalitarian, and Ross...is already in holiday mode. Grab a glass of eggnog (from justthenog.com) and sit beside the fire with your favorite tech luminaries of 2016. 04:11 - Mark Zuckerberg’s “smart home” 14:56 - Rogue One talk (level 4 spoilers 16:51-18:01) 17:59 - laptops 22:42 - Apple, Macbook batteries, and new desktops 26:23 - Emoji consortium 28:52 - AirPods review 34:58 - Android Wear 43:34 - CES 2017 predictions 55:08 - Paul's weekly segment "WebOS still exists, Dieter. Are you sad?" 59:19 - Dieter note 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Can we do an ad for like a eggnog subscription service?

• 0:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Justthenog.com.

• 0:09Nilay Patel?

  Just the nog. And it's, it's nothing. It's just a field, right? And you just type your credit card number into the field.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 0:15Nilay Patel?

  And it, you know, on the server side, it's very advanced. It figures out who you are, figures out your address.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 0:21Nilay Patel?

  And then nog shows up.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 0:23Nilay Patel?

  Just a card field. Justthenog.com.

• 0:29Nilay Patel?

  Hello, this is The Vergecast. We don't have any ads today. We don't really have a show rundown. It's, it's sort of a loose holiday get together. Andrew's gonna play a roaring fire sound effect for us. Just some old friends who started The Verge together a long time ago. I'm Neil Patel. Dieter Bohn is in San Francisco. Hey, Dieter.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Hello, I am here.

• 0:50Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and Miller twins, together in New York. Ross Miller, Paul Miller. No relation, but still twins. Hello, boys.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  We do look pretty twinish today.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Do we?

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Not really at all.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  I'd like to point out that Ross Miller is drinking, is that almond milk or just real milk?

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Unsweetened almond milk.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  Oof.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  We're out.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  I was hoping it was eggnog.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was hoping it was eggnog too.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  No, just without the nog.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  When was the last time you had a glass of milk?

• 1:16Speaker 03

  It's probably been a decade, I gotta say.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  I do every time I, if, if things are going bad in my life, I go to the convenience store and I get a sleeve of Oreos. You don't want to get a whole package because you'll eat a whole package, but just one sleeve and then like a thing of milk. And then I dip the Oreos and sip the milk, but then you run out of Oreos and then I typically have a glass of milk at the end of that process.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  This is, this is why you get more than one sleeve because you really have to match the Oreo and milk ratio.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  That's impossible. It's impossible to.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  I drink, I drink strawberry quick milk solely as a troll for friend of the verge, ex-hype desk sitter Sam Sheffer, who for a period was obsessed with like high-quality chocolate milk. So I would just drink, you know, Nestle's

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  Strawberry.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Strawberry milk to piss him off. It was a good troll.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  I'll say this, I, I'm at home in Wisconsin, the dairy state.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  And as I was coming upstairs, I'm recording in my childhood bedroom in Wisconsin, by the way, which is incredible because it's cleared out of all things, except for my bookcase, which is mostly empty of books now. There's two cases of old Zip 100 discs.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  No zip drive. Two copies of Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, which I'm just admitting now.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  What?

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  I didn't, I never read this book in, in AP English 12. But I have two copies of it. So that's great. And my parents have placed a fax machine in here in case anyone wants to send a fax, which is very, very confusing.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Wait, wait, Neela, I have a factual question. So

• 2:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  I was listening to a football game. It was the Packers versus the Seahawks when the Seahawks got destroyed by the Packers. And I was listening

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  Great game.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  To the Green Bay broadcast.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  On the radio. And I got, there was like an ad for, for cheese curd McDonald's something?

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I gotta run to the local McDonald's.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  Run to the local McDonald's and verify this for me.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  I listened to those broadcasts too. And there's a lot of ads for dairies. Anyway, my point is, as I was coming up the stairs, I went downstairs to get a soda. So I could like drink something during the show. And I asked my mom, hey, do you want something to drink? And she said, no, I'm just gonna make some chocolate milk. And it occurs to me that very few people say that to me since Sam passed off this mortal plane. And

• 3:42Nilay Patel?

  R.I.P. Sam. And two, she was gonna prepare it. It's like a very Wisconsin thing. Anyway, this is a show about technology. It's the flagship podcast of theverge.com. Like I said, it's today's a loose episode. What's going on, boys?

• 3:55Speaker 00

  I'm just looking up Lord Jim on Wikipedia. Go ahead.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  Lord Jim, terrible book. I mean, I don't know.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  You haven't read it. You haven't read the book. You can't say if it's terrible.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, Mrs. Breach, my 12th grade English teacher. You know what? I want to start with something. I'm all fired up about something. Do you guys see the video, the Zuckerberg video with his fake home assistant?

• 4:15Speaker 03

  The Morgan Freeman Jarvis?

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so I'm gonna tell the listeners. Every year, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, jovial figurehead of our surveillance state, he does a project. So one year, he taught himself Mandarin. This year, he ran 365 miles in 365 days. But he also is like, I want to code every day, but I can't commit to the Facebook codebase because I'm the CEO. You know, the rule of Facebook is if you break something, you have to drop everything you're doing and fix it. And I can't be, you know, I can't make that commitment. So I'm gonna write my own smart home. I'm gonna name it Jarvis. So he wrote an app for his phone. He built a bunch of smart home controls. He's calling it

• 4:54Nilay Patel?

  artificial intelligence. And he released a video, which is very bad and is a lie. And this video is like, it's the most, in a year in which Facebook, public trust in Facebook for a variety of reasons, plummeted to the ground, for fake news, for lying about their internet plane, which crashed because they flew it too long and were utterly reckless, great Casey Newton story about that, for just any number of reasons. Mark Zuckerberg releases this video, which is him pretending that his AI assistant that he wrote himself is literally the most advanced artificial intelligence home product that has ever existed, voiced by Morgan Freeman and in a cameo at the end, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  It's so bad. Like, people have these, right? Like, I have an Echo. My parents have an Echo. I just connected their Echo to their Nest last night. All of you have homes and Echos in your houses. You know what they can do. Zuckerberg's like, yeah, Morgan Freeman, I wrote, in my spare time, I wrote a smart home and artificial intelligence products that speaks Mandarin to my baby in a soothing Morgan Freeman voice. I just, I'm watching this.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, you're lying. And I can't figure out why he's lying to us.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Okay, which?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Well, okay, what's like backup? Like, there's some things he's not lying about, right? Like getting a voice assistant to recognize you and turn your lights on and off. Like the echo does that presumably he's managed to do that too?

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Right. And the T-shirt cannon, according to like the Fast Company piece, like it did happen. Like that is like a part of the process.

• 6:30Nilay Patel?

  But firing off a T-shirt cannon from a voice assistant is trivially easy. So you can set up an if this, then that channel and an echo and a switch to fire a T-shirt cannon. So I'll come to your house. I'll build you a T-shirt cannon tomorrow. You know what I'm saying?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  So that's not fake.

• 6:45Nilay Patel?

  Just name your price.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  So the lie is not that he did these things. The lie is that it is, oh, my God, so advanced. Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, which is on my Facebook. And so theoretically Mark Zuckerberg is my wife's boss. But that's the lie, right? That this isn't as awesome as he implies that it is.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  And there's a big Fast Company, gauzy Fast Company write-up. And the thing broke so many times that the Fast Company writer was like, it didn't work a lot. My point is like, why do you do this? Right? Like, let's say your goal in life is to make, write your own smart home assistant. Great goal. You do it. It kind of works. It kind of doesn't. Why then elevate it to the point of I, Mark Zuckerberg, personally wrote this thing? And then make a video that he pushed, you know, it has like 20 million views on Facebook now. And I'm assuming most of those people don't realize that Zuck is lying, right? I just, I don't understand the motivation be for that. Like, you should watch this video.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  And if you know how this stuff works, you know that Morgan Freeman can't emote, right? Like Alexa can't emote at you and Morgan Freeman's voice is like cooing at a baby. And it's like, nothing can, if, if, if Zuck solved the problem of synthesized emotional speech, like he should quit Facebook.

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  He should just do that. If he solved a problem of like, super contextual voice switches to Arnold Schwarzenegger than yelling at your, like, he should quit the company he started after he quit Facebook because he solved the motion and start another company. Like, these are the biggest advances in artificial intelligence.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  His, his write-up is totally nerdy and completely straightforward. He has like an art, like he outlines the architecture. He lists like the programming languages he used. He mentions some of the features that it does and how it operates and is completely not overhyped. And then the video just makes it all look way more seamless and a little more advanced than it is. But like, I think that most, most of the features that he mentions in a nerdy, technical way are kind of presented in kind of like a slightly better way, but there's still like the same features that he mentions in his, his write-up.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  I think that's the Facebook story. Like what you just described is everything Facebook 2016, right? They did a bunch of stuff. The actual details of it are pretty nerdy and straightforward, but nerdy. And then the way they talk about it is so over the top that at the end of it, you're like, well, you lied. We built the drone to fly around on solar power and beam internet to the ground. That's really cool. Here are some nerdy details. We're going to change the world with this and bring people out of poverty with our drone. Well, you're, okay. It's a noble goal. By the way, the drone doesn't work and it crashed. Like, well, you just lied. Like you lied. Everything, literally every Facebook story to me feels like this video in a nutshell.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  I was going to put this in another context, which is, I have been watching today, Bill Gates's 1995 Comdex keynote. He also wrote a book called The Road Ahead, and I don't know if you all remember this, but I'm gonna go a little Walt Mossberg. Bill Gates was obsessed with building like the perfect home of the future in the 90s. And that's all that Microsoft ever talked about. And there's something about being an insane billionaire, you're no longer allowed to code the product yourself directly anymore. And so you're like, sitting at home and you're bored and... So you start making a smart home like I you know what we should we should watch here.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  A hundred micro computers and the software that controls them.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Everything that like 90% of what Jarvis does, other than like the speaking Mandarin. Bill Gates had like built his house in the 90s to do. It was just all based on like pins that you put on your body and then it could tell what room you're in and it would just do stuff.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  As you move through the home, the pin that you've programmed allows you to hear your choice of music on the information appliance nearest you. Even as people in different rooms listen to their own favorites.

• 10:52Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what my my favorite story about Bill Gates, the road ahead is is that he wrote it and published it and the internet happened and he pulled that version. Quickly rewrote it.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  To account for the existence of the internet.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  But why do billionaires need to make smart houses need to make their own houses like insane? This is exactly what I would do with my spare time.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like a boyhood dream.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  This is.

• 11:14Nilay Patel?

  But my my point is.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  My boyhood dream is to be a rock and roll star. Actually, technically my boyhood dream was to be a school bus driver.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  Wait.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  But then later.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  But if you want to like drive a school bus on Saturday, like.

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you've got those out of order. Like first you try to be the rock star and then you land at school bus driver. And then you.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  No, well, when I was five, I thought that the school bus driver was really cool. So that's what I wanted to be when I grew up. And then later I discovered that that was not an ambitious goal.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  So like you saw Otto from The Simpsons and it's like, oh, he could do both. He is a failed rock star and a school bus driver.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Oh, that's true.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  My dad straight up motivated me by saying if I didn't get good grades, I'd have to be the garbage man. And I was like, that sounds like fun. They get a truck. And he was very disappointed.

• 11:55Nilay Patel?

  My point is this smart home stuff is super accessible. I actually saw Farhad was tweeting about this video too, from the Times. And he was like, I can do everything in this video with an echo and a bunch of WeMo switches. Except for the cooing in Mandarin, but you can get this. You just go buy it. And I don't understand why he spent. I think maybe that's the point is he spent a year of his life doing something that's super commercially available and he wanted to make it look better than it was because otherwise everyone would be like, yeah, you made it. You made a crap Echo.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, but it's like he just took, he just took some, it's like if he had taken a year, would you be angry if he took a year off to like whittle and like showed off the like driftwood that he carved into a little, you know, bird? You'd be like, you could go buy that bird anywhere, but like he like learned a skill and the skill he learned was to do the thing that the Echo already does.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Right. That's not a skill.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  He already had the skill. The skill is coding.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yes, which, which is, it's a real thing. Wiring things up to work together is not automatic. And also, most of the products that we can buy right now are not designed to work together. And, and, and I, what he describes and what he did is like my vision for what I want computing to be like, that you buy components and then you wire them up to do the behaviors that you imagine, not like the narrow range of behaviors that, that some company imagined for you.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  I'm with you. I'm, I'm, I just don't know why he made a video that's a lie. That's the thing. Like, that's the term. Like, if I had to offer a criticism of Facebook, it is that their instinct is to do the thing you said, which is perceive a vision of the future, work steadily towards it diligently, and then right at the end, when they realize they've achieved incremental progress, lie about a bigger vision. Right? Like, that's the, I don't know. I'm just, I watched this video and I freaked out. Like, Facebook has had a year of mastering the art of deceiving people. Like, in big ways, small ways, they said, we're not a media company, we're not a tech company. Yesterday, he's like, well, we're, we're like the next generation of both.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Maybe you're a little bit of a media company. Yeah, yeah.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like, they, they just, you know, fake news is not a problem. Uh, yeah, maybe we should hire a bunch of fact checkers to mark all the fake news on our platform. Like, they just keep backing themselves into this. I don't know why this video in some way is the most frustrating thing they've done. I think it's.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  I think you're jelly. You sound pretty jelly to me.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  You like so jelly.

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  I just want Morgan Freeman in my house.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  I know.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  Or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Arnold Schwarzenegger cooing Mandarin at a baby is an amazing mental image.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think he made that movie in the 90s. Now that's just kindergarten.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  It's either that was just the Mandarin dub of kindergarten. Great movie. Speaking of movies, right before we started the show, I was saying I was gonna take my niece and nephew to see Rogue One. And Dieter, you reacted very negatively to that idea. They're 11, this niece and nephew, by the way.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so here's the thing. I can, I can tell you why taking a 11 year old to a movie, this movie, I think is not a great idea, but I don't know if I can tell you without spoilers. Would you say that Rogue One is the John Wick of Star Wars movies? No, it's not. It's not like that violent. Like, you know, it's like the, there's, there's like one, like, straight up terrifying scene that Kwame wrote about. And, you know, there's, there's lots of like, guns and blasters and killing and, and, you know, war stuff.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  I don't know if I can tell you why I think it's a bad idea without spoiling the movie. So you have to give me permission to give you a spoiler right now for me to make the case.

• 15:54Nilay Patel?

  Give me, rank the spoiler from one to 10. Like, it's so spoiled, it's no longer worth watching, or yeah, I probably guessed. That's one.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  I can, I can give you a 10 spoiler, or I can give you like, a five spoiler.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  Can we, can we work it to back to three?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Can we work it back to three?

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think a three spoiler.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Cut out a key verb, maybe.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  This counts as a three, but like.

• 16:20Nilay Patel?

  Use the, use the consonants.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  If this turns out to be more than a three, I, you cannot be mad at me for what I'm about to say.

• 16:28Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  You have to all promise me I will not be pissed.

• 16:31Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'm gonna do. If you're in your car and you haven't seen it yet.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Hit mute for the next 30 seconds. Numbering systems.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  30, it's only gonna take me 10 seconds.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, Dieter will do, okay, 10 seconds. Dieter will do the spoiler. And then I'll, I'll come back when you unmute it. I'll, I'll rate it for you.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Okay. All right, here we go. Spoiler in three, two, one. At least one character that they will care about in the movie is going to die, and that will suck for them.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  I think, okay, that's a four. Cause I think.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  It's a four, okay.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  Cause you know what the next movie is. The next movie is Star Wars, and none of those people are in Star Wars. So presumably.

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  You know, it makes sense. Okay. But, you know, they're 11.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  I just, I.

• 17:14Nilay Patel?

  They should, they should face death.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  My, my brother took our, like, my nephew, who was like, I don't know, eight, seven or eight, to see The Force Awakens. And man, I, I mean, I guess I'll spoil Force Awakens. That, uh, that one scene with the one thing that happens, it was real hard on him. He just like, he, he spent the next, you know, couple of months, all of a sudden talking about death quite a lot and trying to figure it out.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  Well, what about?

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  But, but he's a bone. That's like in your blood. Like every now and again, Dieter's like, let's talk about death for a while.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that could have been a viable lesson of like, A-list actors who have very tight contracts and didn't want to do another movie anyway, and decided, hey, I'll just do it for the hell of it.

• 17:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, I'm gonna take him. Uh, I have another story about my niece and nephew, which is, uh, they, they were in a Best Buy. And I, my brother-in-law said, if you could get any laptop here, what would you get? And they totally ignored the Macs and picked Surface Books.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 18:14Nilay Patel?

  Which I think is fascinating.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  The Surface Book.

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  The Surface Book. They love the, uh, niece loves the touchscreen. Uh, Dylan, uh, my nephew, uh, he's related to me, very much wants to be a DJ when he grows up.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  Says every DJ.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  For him.

• 18:32Nilay Patel?

  Says every DJ has a MacBook. This is a thing that he said to me very confidently. Uh, and then my sister's 2011 MacBook Pro is such garbage with Sierra that he's off Macs and fully in love with the Surface.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Wow, wow.

• 18:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's a real situation. I mean, I don't, you know, they don't, they don't speak for all the tweens and, you know, they don't have the, you know, they're not like pro tweens, like they don't have pro needs. Uh, and they don't really care about ports. So they're, they're good. But anyway, it's been fun. It's been fun hanging out.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  I have a, I have a laptop crisis right now. I have review units of the Yoga 910, the Spectre X360, the Acer something Spin 7 that's bad, uh, Surface Pro 4, uh, and, uh, MacBook Escape, MacBook Pro Escape.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  And I'm thinking that my dinky MacBook isn't going to be powerful enough to get me through CES. And every night for the past week, I've gone home and like laid out, oh, and I have a Chromebook Pixel two, laid out all these laptops before me and just like stared at them and wondered which one I should take. Like, this is like the most egregious problem in the world, that I've got like 15 laptops that I have to choose from. But I, I don't know what I'm gonna end up taking to CES. I really don't.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the same problem. Cause I have my 15 inch MacBook, old MacBook Pro, which is dying. I have also a MacBook Escape review unit and I have your old 12 inch MacBook. And as I was packing to come home, I literally ended up putting two laptops in the bag. And then I was like, this is ridiculous. The only thing I'm doing at home is slacking and using Skype. So I brought this one home. And I can bring, I can bring this MacBook Pro, the new 13 inch MacBook Pro with, with the actual function keys. I can bring it to a crawl anytime I want. Like, it's just a bunch of Chrome tabs and like, one too many things going on. And it's like, you know what? I give up.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I want like a rating, like a standardized rating. Like this is how many Chrome tabs you can have before your life will suck.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  That's the new review scale we need. You want to change the review system at The Verge? That's the number.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Because I've been, I've been noticing like, or, or the search field in Slack. Basically, if I have Chrome open and I try to search in Slack, it's slow. Or if I get about-

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Slack is basically just Chrome, right? They switched it over to run on Electron or whatever. And so it's basically just another Chrome tab.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Everything is a Chrome tab. I have like a, like a, my desktop mail client is a Chrome tab. Everything's a Chrome tab.

• 21:03Nilay Patel?

  Man, it would be great if Google released a laptop that was optimized to run Chrome. Because I would try that. If only they had such a product line and put out one great product in it. And then, you know, updated that product. Hmm. Way to go, Raul.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Good job, holiday shoppers.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  If there was a new Pixel, I would buy a new Pixel and I would, I would figure it out.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  You know, I, I really think like the time has never been more right for, for it because, because where I'm at is like, I'm pretty into Windows right now because like I can play video games on it and I can like do things on the computer. And the Mac is for Slack and Chrome. And Apple is like really embracing that and, and doesn't really think, see the computer as anything more than Slack and Chrome. And, and that's what a Chromebook is.

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  So I want to say, so there's a lot of backstory here, but I'm not like, this MacBook is not plugged in right now because USB C means if I plugged in, the microphone generates a 60 cycle hum, which Andrew, our wonderful producer, I don't want to torture him with on this recording. In the 23 minutes that we've been talking, the battery has gone from a hundred percent to 86%. And all I have open is Slack, iMessage, Audio Hijack and Chrome. And Skype, obviously Skype.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Hey, and you don't get to know how much battery life is left because they took the, the timer away. And speaking of the batteries of MacBooks, apparently.

• 22:31Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, I didn't update. I have two hours and 18 minutes left. This is my new thing. I don't update my software because they, they make it garbage. So I just live in the past and then get hacked. Anyway, let's keep talking, let's get off this one.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  The MacBook battery thing, you want to talk about the MacBook battery thing that from?

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  I was going to talk about Apple in, in general. So there's the MacBook battery thing. So Mark Gurman at Bloomberg had an incredible scoop about basically the future of the Mac division. And his point is like, no one cares about it anymore. There's no dedicated OS or Mac OS engineers. They tried to do some crazy stuff. My guess is that what they were trying to do is use the new contoured battery that they have in the 12 inch MacBook in the bigger MacBooks and they couldn't do it. That's just a guess, but they tried to use a new fangled battery.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Like the thing is square. Like, why do they need to contour batteries? Okay, whatever.

• 23:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe they were gonna make it look different and they couldn't.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Oh, that could be.

• 23:24Nilay Patel?

  Right? They were gonna, I mean, all the rumors were they were gonna taper the Pro as well. But, so that his story, basically, the key scoop in it is they were gonna use a better battery, a newer battery in the Pro, and they couldn't get it done. So they reverted to the older battery design, which is why the battery's bad. And then it's laced in with like a bunch of scooplets. Like, if you've been paying attention to how Apple software teams are protected, you know that all of it rolls up to Craig Federighi. So technically, you've always known that it's just one software team. But his scooplet is like, there's no dedicated macOS team. His other one, which I will say was someone disputed to me yesterday,

• 24:06Nilay Patel?

  someone in a position to know Apple disputed, said they wanted to update the Mac Pro, but they couldn't figure out how to keep manufacturing it in the United States. And they thought about moving it to China, and that's obviously politically risky in the current climate. So they're just letting it ride. So that was in the Bloomberg piece. Someone who might know some things told me that that was wrong. So take from that what you will. But just basically a bunch of noise around the Mac.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  And Tim Cook said that they're gonna make some good Macs. What was that?

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that reassuring letter.

• 24:35Nilay Patel?

  He didn't say Macs, though. He said desktops.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  Desktops.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  So someone at Apple, you know, they have like a forum, like town hall forum system. And they said, what's going on with the Mac? And Tim Cook wrote back, "Desktops are important to us. We have great desktops coming out."

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  So I'm going with...

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Strong, strong promise right there.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, he was like, "Desktops can do things. They can have more kinds of I/O," which I thought was an amazing thing for Tim Cook to say. "They can have bigger screens. They can be more powerful." All things that are true of desktops, by the way. All things also traditionally true of laptops compared to mobile devices. But he's focused on desktops. I don't know, man. It's a moment. It's a Windows moment. That's all I'm saying.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  It's just, it's just Windows is so, so sad.

• 25:22Nilay Patel?

  And then Vlad wrote, you know, in Sunday area, Vlad editorial headline, "MacOS is becoming legacy software," which...

• 25:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm doing the kissy fingers right now. You can't see it in your car as you drive. Imagine me doing kissy fingers because that is, that is like a perfect vallatorial.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Wait, are the kissy fingers like a moi? Or like kissy fingers like when you like kiss your hand?

• 25:43Nilay Patel?

  Like a chef, like a chef. I think it's delicious.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Like a moi.

• 25:47Nilay Patel?

  Paul, Paul, no.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  I, I, I don't think y'all can see, but Paul Lilly did the hand gestures just to make sure. At least I was aware.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Ross knows.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Of the difference in the moi and the practicing kissing on your hand.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  By the way, both emojis that routinely failed to make the cut at the Unicode Consortium. Like someone's like, I've got this emoji idea. It's just, it's a person kissing their own hand. No one wants this. Update the eggplant.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  God, I would love to be in those meetings.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  Have we ever talked about how emojis are, are kind of totalitarian and like, it's like somebody else defining the constraints of what your language is?

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like French.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the French language has an institute like that's like government sponsored. Is that how it works?

• 26:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's, and they literally like won't, won't let words from other language infect the French language.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Right, but the emoji is a non sexually explicit language.

• 26:52Nilay Patel?

  I don't, what?

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Have you seen the peach butt?

• 26:55Speaker 00

  It's a language without profanity or procreation.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Well, but humans have defined profanity and procreation into the emojis. We've taken that, we've heightened emojis to the sense of, yeah, we can be dirty with that.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's like mostly what emojis are for, as near as I can tell.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Right, but, but, but they're trying to quell it. They're trying to, maybe this is, maybe this is what's wrong with Japan.

• 27:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't. It's like, that's why the birth rate in Japan is down.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, but they were way into these emojis early on.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  It's just, it's just a bunch of people showing up on dates with actual eggplants.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  With actual eggplants.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  I brought you, I brought you eggplants and peaches. I don't, I don't know what you were expecting.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  I just don't like that, like a company can like show up and like, hey, here's some new vocabulary that you are allowed to have now. We've decided you have more vocabulary. Oh, and some of the words that you used to use are different now.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  But like, what we don't know, cause like there's sticker packs, there are Kim emojis, like, I mean, there's a unicorn extortion that sets a baseline, but like, we're now.

• 27:57Nilay Patel?

  Can we just, okay, so I will agree with you this, Paul, it is, it is somewhat evil that a group referred to as a consortium does anything. No consortium has ever acted innocently.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  So that's like a fact.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  But like, did you all read Megan Frockman's interview with like, the guy who like designs emojis and is part of the consortium on theverge.com?

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  I did.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  It's good, right? Yeah. Like, he doesn't seem like a bad guy.

• 28:23Nilay Patel?

  He's just a stormtrooper.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  He never seemed bad, no.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  He just, he just fell on orders. It's up above. Follow the money, Dieter.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  He's just, he's just getting the emojis published on time. That's all.

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  So I was, so it, in France, the word computer was not allowed and they referred to them as ordinateurs. I mean, this is like the whole.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  It's a better word anyway.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  The whole, yeah, well, but the whole French language is top down.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:49Nilay Patel?

  Which is neat in the sense that, you know, it's very French. This is a terrible conversation. Let's talk about AirPods.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, they fall out of Sean O'Kane's ear. They fall out of my ear. Uh, but everybody seems to.

• 29:01Nilay Patel?

  They what? Don't fall out of mine. Don't fall out of Warren Gidds.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's like 50 50, I guess. I don't know. I think, I think most people will be fine with it, but you definitely got to try it. The thing that interests me is that everybody pretty much universally says, huh, they work way better than we expected. And, you know, it's a hassle that you can't adjust volume on them, but without talking to Siri, but like the, take the thing out of your ear to pause is neat. I like the, the wireless sounds good. They actually sound maybe slightly better than regular AirPods. Like the thing, like.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  We always complain about zero rating with carriers because like the you you get a thing that seems good, but ultimately, long term, it's bad for the industry. And the like, the thing with Apple's proprietary Bluetooth stuff that seems good, it works, is like, maybe ultimately, all other Bluetooth headsets that don't have Apple's proprietary chip in it are just going to be worse by comparison. And like, that's weird to like, complain about something being better. I don't actually think that. But we now live in a world where the stuff that gets made by Apple or gets the chip from Apple is going to be fundamentally better than the stuff everybody else gets, and fundamentally better just in Apple world.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  And, you know, that's Apple's job, right? But it's still like, I don't know, there's a little, little tiny piece of me that's like, ah, they had just made it a universal standard, because that never goes wrong, universal standards.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  If only they talked to a consortium somewhere.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  If only they'd brought a PSEG plant to the wireless consortium.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Well, Neil, you've been using it. What do you think?

• 30:42Nilay Patel?

  I think the things that people are praising about them are more true than I or anyone else would expect. So they definitely sound better than AirPods, which is surprising, because they look the same, and they have more stuff crammed into them. They fit my ears, at least, really well, which I feel like my ears changed. Like, when I tried them on at the event, they fell right out. But I guess I figured out how to stick them in my ears, right? The, you know, take, take an ear, take an AirPod out of your ear, and the music magically pauses. I think it's really neat. Like, you know, the little Apple delightful touches of the thing are great. The thing that I don't buy is much, is the

• 31:25Nilay Patel?

  notion that this is somehow more convenient than a pair of headphones, because they're not, right? Like, a thing I do all the time with a pair of headphones is I take them out of my pocket, and I put them in my ears with one hand. Do it all the time. I'm on the subway, I reach in my pocket, monkey, you know, I have Beats, which have the flat cable, the flat rubber cable, so they don't tangle. I put it on a pocket. I like find one earbud, stick it in my ear, grab the other one, which is attached to it by a wire, stick it in my other ear, grab the cable, plug in my phone, walk away. Right? Like, maybe I do that five times a day. Cannot do that with AirPods. Just can't.

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  You gotta take the thing out of your pocket. You gotta flip it open. You know, I still, I don't trust them yet. So I gotta look at my screen and make sure they paired. I gotta take one out, not drop it, get it to my ear, take the, it's like, it's a lot of fiddly work.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Just leave them in your ears all the time, man. Never take them out.

• 32:20Nilay Patel?

  You can't because you have to charge it.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  Right? If you're on a flight, a long flight or something, you gotta, you gotta stick them back in the cave, only for 15 minutes, which is probably good for you. Take a little break from listening to stuff. So, I don't know, man, like, I'm, I'm a clumsy person. I lose things. I look at these, I look at the idea that I have to pay $70 to replace one if I lose it. And I'm just like, is this, is it worth it? Like, what am I getting out of this that a pair of headphones didn't give me already? Except for worrying about a battery life and losing it. Or in, you know, getting stared at because I have white things sticking on my ears. Is that, is that maybe I'm just old? You know, it was my birthday recently, the sun, the earth revolved around the sun one more time. My body marched towards its inevitable demise. Maybe I'm just an old guy now, but, uh, really depressing show today.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  I will say, sorry, everybody. Happy holidays.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Something positive about dongle life. I, because it's cold now, my headphone cable is like more rigid. Like, does this happen to you? Like, it's less of a bendy, regular rubber. The rubber like gets harder when it's cold. So it's like sticking out more. So it gets caught on doorknobs more.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  Huh.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  And I was coming into my house.

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  Wait, what?

• 33:33Speaker 00

  This is all happening to you guys?

• 33:34Nilay Patel?

  Caught on doorknobs?

• 33:36Speaker 02

  How, how, how?

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  Dude, my headphone cables get caught on doorknobs all the time.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  The worst is when it's not just a knob, but it's like the actual handle.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, is it more likely because of the weather?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, because it's more rigid. So it's like sticking out more. It's not as slack.

• 33:51Nilay Patel?

  Okay, okay.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  So walking into my house, gets caught on the doorknob, breaks out from my phone, right? But my phone, which is in a loose jack of pocket, doesn't come out of my, my pocket and fall on the ground and break. It just, the headphone cable broke away from the dongle.

• 34:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  So, phone safety.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  That's what you want. You want little extenders of all your cables.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  You remember when the

• 34:16Nilay Patel?

  Failure.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  The Xbox had those breakaway cap, the original Xbox.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  This is like

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Remember when Apple laptops had MagSafe?

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  What was, what were those original Xbox controllers called?

• 34:32Speaker 03

  I think

• 34:32Speaker 02

  They had a nickname.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Because they were really big, right?

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Fatties?

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the, one of the guys who was like involved in its development was, is actually like trying to put together a project to get them remade again.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  The Duke.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  The Duke.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  Duke?

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  Huge. I'm looking at a picture right now. Why did it say Xbox in such a giant logo in the middle?

• 34:52Speaker 00

  In case you forgot.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, what am I playing with? Oh, it's an Xbox.

• 34:56Nilay Patel?

  What am I tethered to right now? Dieter, you want to talk about Android Wear?

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, uh, Dan had a little Android Wear scoop. So, Google tells us that version 2.0 of Android Wear, which we've been wondering what the heck, is actually happening. It's happening, uh, next year. And Google is going to put out two sort of flagship Android Wear watches. They're not making them themselves, so this isn't Google hardware. So you should think of it a little bit more like the Nexus program than you do like the Pixel program, like it's

• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the super successful Nexus program.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, we're all sort of assuming it's going to be

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  Didn't result in Google eating all of its own partners and making its own hardware by itself inevitably.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Right. Well, it's actually, it's actually worse with watches because in addition to, you know, the standard like tech companies that have either not been making it or just backed out of making it in the future, like Motorola. They also are like, basically like handing like the core of like, here's how you make a watch to like Michael Kors and Fossil and, you know, anybody else that wants to make an Android watch from the fashion world, they can just like stick this Android module in and design the casing around it and have an Android Wear watch. Uh, so Everybody like the the conventional wisdom around wearables now is that the only company making any kind of money on them at all or selling in numbers is Apple and maybe then Samsung and then Fitbit is owning the, you know, the health tracker space, basically.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  And Google's response is like, oh, well, we'll have these two that are like a sort of the flagship. We're all assuming it's going to come from Huawei, but they wouldn't say. And then everybody else can make them too. And so they're like, they're building, they've got this market of like, that's all like cut into these little slivers of all these different OEMs. None of them are going to reach appreciable market share. And we're definitely going to be having this conversation a year from now of like, it's going to be Apple and then Samsung and then Fitbit, if they don't implode. And then just a bunch of Android Wear. Like what Google needs is for Android Wear to be like, considered its own category. So people aren't looking at how many did LG sell? How many did Huawei sell? How many did?

• 37:06Nilay Patel?

  Which they've accomplished with Android, right? There's the Android install base versus the iPhone install base, but nobody, nobody counts individual.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  What the?

• 37:15Speaker 00

  One of the conversations just be, wow, these Android Wear watches sure are nice.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  I mean, maybe we'll see like the, the big deal with Android Wear 2.0 is that it can basically run apps a little bit more natively and be a little bit less dependent on the phone, which is interesting in an iPhone context because they can work with iPhones. And that means that they can have like a store, they can have apps that can do stuff on the watch without having to depend on, you know, the phone to help them out.

• 37:46Nilay Patel?

  But they can't, they can't have a particularly robust store though, right? They can't have paid apps on their store because Apple will take the tax.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Well, no.

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  There's like, there's a hard limit.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  No, but what I'm saying to you is the watch is its own computer platform. And so you could just go to Google Play on your web browser, say, oh, that looks like a neat watch app, buy it. And then the watch is able to get Wi-Fi completely independently from the iPhone and you can install apps on it directly. It'll just shoot it over the next time it sees a watch on Wi-Fi. And so they could theoretically have paid apps on the watch for people that use it with an iPhone if they wanted to. But like, that's fine. We'll see if they try and do that. The crazier thing is these watches are going to support Android Pay if they have an NFC chip in them. And that will also work for iPhone users. Because again, it's just like a little Android device on your wrist that could theoretically

• 38:36Speaker 02

  exist completely separate from the phone. And so they are gonna try and take on Apple Pay by selling Android Wear watches to iPhone users and have them pay with Android Pay with their watch.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  But would the Android Wear watch work? I mean, could they send that signal through the iPhone? Or does it need a consistent connection or some kind of persistent connection to actually pay?

• 38:56Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I don't know. Like, it's NFC chip. I have no idea if it'll like go through the iPhone or not. Like, it's possible we could see like a showdown with Apple over this. We'll see. But like, it's semi-autonomous. It's like, it's like an Uber car. It can drive on its own, but you probably shouldn't let it.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is, this is the thing. It's the same as AirPods and other W1 things. Like, the market of things that can connect to the iPhone is not nearly as robust as it should be, because Apple controls the stack and they don't want to be on such a stack. And I'm sure everyone's gonna yell at me and say, that's how it's always been. But don't you want competition for the Apple Watch? So the Apple Watch gets better? Isn't that a thing that you want? Like, don't you want competition for wireless headphones so that they get better and cooler instead of?

• 39:50Speaker 02

  I mean, this is like part of the story of Pebble failing, right? They couldn't get the access to do the stuff that they wanted to be able to do on iPhone. They could do most of that stuff on Android pretty well. There's a million other things that went wrong at Pebble. So like, this isn't like iPhone being locked down killed Pebble. But like, it's a little part of the story. They had to do a lot of crazy weird workarounds to get sort of basic smartwatch functionality out of Pebble watches paired to iPhones.

• 40:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Hmm. But the Android Wear watch connected to iPhone won't be able to respond to an iMessage, which is still the only reason that I think anyone should have a smartwatch. There's not a lot of other reasons, right? It's to get notifications and act on them.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  And if you can't act on the notifications, like you're doomed.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  I just think people fundamentally want a smartwatch. And if anybody ever comes up with a good reason to have a smartwatch, I think that actually would be pretty successful. This is my, this is my new vibe.

• 40:48Nilay Patel?

  Don't like, it's not, I don't, it's, they're not selling gangbusters.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  They aren't because there's no reason, but people want a reason. If someone in a, in a, in a, like a, one discreet Super Bowl commercial could communicate to me something that I can finally do, that I've always wanted to do, that I can do now that I have this Android Wear watch. I think they would do really well.

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  But like.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  I have no idea what it is.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Also, even people do concepts, like they haven't figured that out yet. There's like, the dream isn't really there.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  What if you could teach my baby Mandarin?

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  But then you would always be near your baby. You should just teach the.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 41:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna leave you with my watch.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, put the watch on the baby.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  Hey, wearables for kids, hot, hot market. Been watching the circuit breaker flow. There's a lot coming through.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  You know, I keep reading these things that are like, the Echo will be the most, you know, voice assistants, like the Echo will be the most important thing. You know, the next phone, smartwatches eventually, we're all just gonna put AirPods in our ears and watches on our wrists and the phone will die. I just don't buy it. Like, I think there's a reason giant phones are popular. I think really big screens are very valuable to people, right? And like, why, why, like, very few of these things can do anything better than me looking at a big screen. I think responding to text messages and looking at notifications is absolutely one of those things. And everybody I know who has a smartwatch is somebody who spends a lot of time on their feet talking to other people.

• 42:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, um, it's like, I know a woman who works in art gallery and she's not allowed to use her phone when she's like, talking to clients in the gallery, but she's always responding to texts on her Apple watch because it's not as intrusive. It's stuff like that that I think is really valuable, but I haven't seen anything else.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 42:35Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  I like having the weather on my smart watch.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I like.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  I like it's it's a stuff we always talk about like like Paul, you're like waiting for like the killer app that'll make everybody be like, oh, I need a smart watch now like what I can't what what would it possibly be? It's responding to text messages. It's like getting little tiny bits of information. It's health tracking. It's Apple Pay or Android Pay or whatever. Like, that's that's where we're at. Like, it's such a tiny screen. It's got to do something else. Like, maybe with like, proper, good Siri and Google Assistant stuff on it. Like, that could be compelling. I do, you know, bark at my watch all the time to like, remind me of stuff. So that's helpful. But like, I don't

• 43:21Speaker 02

  think there's like, one thing that is going to, oh, we didn't think of that. Oh, my God, why didn't we think of that? Now, everybody wants a smart watch. It's just going to be like, everybody's going to have a different reason. That's it's hard to build a big market out of that.

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  Can I read an absurd headline to everybody? You ready?

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  LG is launching five new phones at CES, along with a new stylus. What are we? What are we doing? CES is coming, by the way. We're off next week and then, I don't know, we're gonna go to Vegas. It's gonna be great. But CES is coming. We're doing this show, presumably with much higher energy levels, live.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Way higher.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  On video.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  I'm so pumped.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  Dieter and I are gonna just rail some cocaine, go on camera. It's Vegas. Why not? No, we're gonna do the show as a video stream, bringing back the hype desk. Megan, Megan, who was on the show last week, is gonna sit at the hype desk. She's gonna be doing all kinds of stuff, talking to people on the tweets, watching live streams. It's gonna be really fun. We're gonna have guests, we're gonna have gadget demos. Paul's gonna be on it. Ashley's gonna be on it. Lauren Good is gonna be there. We're forcing Casey to come to CES, just to do Periscopes, live on Twitter.

• 44:30Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great. Three days at CES. I should have done. I keep forgetting to say this at the top of the show. This is the most important thing. We're doing it live. CES, Virg cast is gonna happen. But anyway, CES is coming. What do you think, Dieter? You want to? We only have a couple of minutes left here. Give me some CES predictions.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  I think the big story at CES this year is might actually just be smart cars. And I don't mean specifically like actual smart cars, because like Faraday Future is gonna try and pretend that they're not falling apart. Apple and Google are out and they're like, they've got Waymo and they're gonna let other car companies make it. But the actual like silicone and platforms that run these things. Every year Nvidia does a big Nvidia show and it's like long and boring as hell. But this year, they've got the main keynote. And I don't think that other chipmakers like, I don't know, call it Qualcomm, call it Intel, call it, I don't know, some other random ARM thing, Marvell. I think everybody's gonna really be trying to get in the game of

• 45:26Speaker 02

  supplying the parts and pieces that make up a decent smart car that doesn't have an insane giant rig of crap on the top of the car. So like, I think that's gonna be, we're gonna move from like, yeah, we could do it to like, okay, it's happening. Now let's make it happen a little bit better and a little bit less likely to run over bicyclists. That I think is, that's gonna be the thing. Like, it's gonna be a lot of talk about what makes a good smart car, what, how powerful does it have to be? Do you have to upgrade it? And can we make a system that like the entire industry can use, rather than like

• 46:06Speaker 02

  every single car company on the planet has a different system. I think that there's, there's gonna be an attempt to like consolidate power in the smart car space.

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, do you mean in terms of like the processors they all use or?

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  The communication protocol? I mean, that's kind of like saying there's.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  I mean, yes and no.

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  They're car suppliers, right? I mean, they all have, they all have processors in them now. They, they all have, I don't know, power window control units, like. It feels like what's more important is the like standardizing the underlying communication protocol that makes them smart, not the, they're all going to do it differently, right?

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Uh, maybe. I think that they're like, these things are much more like tightly integrated. Like you've got a camera that needs to talk to the brake pedal and the acceleration and you've like, building that system, they might all do it differently, you know, like the power windows, like you say, but I think that these companies are going to be making the case that they can basically do a better job of that integration and providing a lot of the stack. It's, it's not like PCs. You've got Intel gives you the chip and Microsoft gives you the software and, uh, you know, Dell puts it all together into a case and then they sell it to you. Like, I don't think separating those things out works as well with autonomous cars than it, as it does in like a computer. I think it's, it needs

• 47:31Speaker 02

  to be a much more tightly, more carefully integrated stack of technologies. And we don't know what that's going to shake out to because right now everybody's sort of just doing it on their own. And I think that, uh, a bunch of companies at CES this year are gonna try and like, clear that up and become the company that like, provides that to people.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  So it'd be maybe a little more like a, like a video game console where you need like, you, you need to know what the, all the specs are and you can promise certain performance and stability.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  Right. And still powered by Nvidia, nine times out of 10.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  Home consoles are typically AMD.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, Nvidia just wants the cars real bad. But I don't know.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  They're getting the Switch.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  They're doing the Switch.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  That's like saying, like the company that ultimately does that sort of thing is like a Delphi, right? Like one of the biggest tier one auto suppliers in the world, like. That's the job that as a company they're organized to solve. Like, are you building a car? Like, do you need to integrate a bunch of disparate systems in it? Like, Delphi to the rescue. Like, here they do it for, you know, every GM car is like, integrated by Delphi. I just don't see like, one company winning that race. Like, I think there's gonna be a way that self-driving works, and a bunch of companies are gonna build towards that way. But like, Tesla is not gonna do it the same way that GM does it, right? And GM is not gonna wanna do it the same way that BMW does. Because ultimately, they have to sell like, a better product. They have to sell competitive products, right?

• 49:03Nilay Patel?

  Like, if they're all the same car underneath, and you're just slapping a differently-designed shell on it,

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  I think the car companies like, lose something really important to their identities.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Right, but like, are these car companies gonna be able to do what Nvidia and Intel do?

• 49:21Nilay Patel?

  But they already don't. What we think of as car companies are like, financial shenanigans. They don't really make anything, right? They do assembly, they have plants, they do a bunch of core design, but they have these huge networks of suppliers. And the suppliers are the ones that sell to multiple companies, and there's exclusivity arrangements, and hundreds of thousands of patents involved. And like, it's that set of companies that is gonna figure it out for all the carmakers that ultimately like, make, market, and distribute products. I just don't, I don't think this CES is the one where Ford is like, "We figured it out, we're gonna give it to everyone else." Like, I think we're gonna see a bunch of companies like Delphi, and Nvidia, and AT&T for some reason, which seems to be very involved in this sort of thing.

• 50:06Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna say like, "We've developed systems that talk to standards." Like, that is really important. But the, George Hots is gonna be there with an Android phone and a dreams. I can make any car self-driving.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  But what I'm saying, like, while they're like, there's this tension between like, the BMW and the Ford should both like, speak the same language, so when they're on the road together, they can like, communicate instead of just look at each other. So there's like, movement in that direction. But there's also like, gonna be a genuine tussle, because like, no one's gonna say, "We figured out how to buy our thing." But a few people are like, saying, "But we wanna be that, that company that does that." And it's not just Ford. Like you said, it's, again, it's Nvidia, it's, you know, AT&T. It's, you know, Intel, it's Qualcomm, it's whomever.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  Maybe they need a consortium.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:55Nilay Patel?

  God.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  We definitely, we don't want, we don't want cars with sex. Like, that would be bad.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  The high level.

• 51:03Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that what cars are for?

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Not if the consortium has anything to do with it.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  So you have sensors that definitely have to get smaller so that the, there's not a huge tumor on top of the car. And that, and we're already seeing some of that. I, I do think that, that like, by the time these things are truly mass market, I'm gonna, I'm imagining there's going to be like a couple,

• 51:36Speaker 00

  chip manufacturers that make chips specifically to process the kind of information. So like a GPU is better than a CPU for, for processing this sort of information. But a custom design chip is, is even better and much more efficient. And like Google now uses like its own custom chip for machine learning. And there's just like a new custom chip that came out for like motion planning for, for robotics. And it's because Moore's Law, which I always bring up on this podcast, is letting us all down. The, there's a lot of processing that is needed to take in this many sensors and make this many decisions in real time about them.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  And I think while Nvidia is going to be wonderful for the early stages and for the prototyping and maybe, you know, the first generation. I think once this is mature, there's going to be custom processors for it.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Actually, speaking of processors, do y'all think we're gonna see Windows running on ARM? Where you think we're gonna see some like ARM machines with Windows 10?

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I'm almost like sure of it, but maybe not on the show floor, but as like backroom prototypes.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:48Nilay Patel?

  I think there's gonna be a lot of laptop action at CES. I'm just going out on a limb. I have no reason to back, like, nothing to back that up. No reason to believe it. But I think all of these companies know the Windows open. See what I did there?

• 53:03Nilay Patel?

  And they're gonna show off a bunch of stuff cuz they they know they can they know they can they can stake a claim to being the more innovative laptop maker right now. And they would be stupid not to take that opportunity.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm excited for USB C. I just wanna see weird things with USB C. USB C has potential for a lot more power, a lot more data throughput. It's just like even just the idea of these like LG monitors that you just plug your laptop in with one cable and it's charged. It's a USB hub. The video goes over that cable is like really exciting to me. It's something I've wanted for a long time. So I think there could be more cool USB C things.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Paul, I want you to just take a picture of every single USB C dongle that you find.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  That's basically my goal. That's basically.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's that's your only purpose.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  I wanna live the dongle life full, full on.

• 54:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited for USB C, but I feel like weird accessories at CES are like one of the only reasons CES should continue to exist. Like, that's why what's the show's there for is like a weird vendor that's like, we made a USB powered like chair, you know, like, yes, that's why I'm here. Uh, Ross, are you coming?

• 54:19Speaker 03

  I am coming. I am, I am coming. Well, so there's two reasons CES exists. One is that the other one is my favorite thing. Every year, we weirdly, and I mean it earnestly, we always get excited by some fridge or washing machine thing that we just were not expecting. Like last year, it was the Samsung fridge that would check spoiled food. I don't know. It's the one thing like I never see coming and I'm like, oh, huh, that would be fun.

• 54:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  Uh, I granted, I don't live in a place that could ever have a fridge that big, but I do like knowing that that someone is doing that.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Can I, can we add this podcast on on a special Dieter note?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Is it gonna be depressing?

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  Wait, the whole podcast isn't a Dieter note?

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  That should be your section. Wait, Paul, there's a thing that we do every week. Paul, are you ready to do it?

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  All right. And then we'll end with the Dieter note.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  The new section.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  You know, speaking of Dieter, the section that I do every week is called WebOS Still Exists, Dieter, Are You Sad?

• 55:20Speaker 00

  This week, LG combines WebOS, lasers and lumens into another reason to replace your TV. It's just a pretty cool, like, small form factor laser projector made by LG, running WebOS, this podcast's official operating system.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  It's true.

• 55:40Speaker 00

  And it doesn't look anything like WebOS and sad.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  The Vergecast, just type. Oh, God. It's a type line. It's great. No, I think this projector looks cool. Like, I definitely saw this thing and had visions of, like, getting rid of my TV and my entertainment console and finding a way to, like, light up all of my gear that I need to watch TV, PlayStation, Apple TV, blah, blah, blah, like, underneath my couch, and then, like, building a rig to have this thing, like, flip up from the back of the couch and when we watch TV and then have it go away and then I just have a big, empty space. I think that'd be cool.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, hang it from the ceiling or something like that.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  No, but that's not why you need, that's not why you need a WebOS projector. You could just do that with any projector. The reason that you have this is because you don't need all the other garbage, right? There, as far as I can tell, there are no other smart projectors. So you just have this thing, and you just, like, put it out, you just plug it in, it gets on the wifi by itself, it boots up its presumably kick-ass WebOS Netflix app, and you're off and running.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  So sure.

• 56:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, Ricker gave this what I would say is, like, a super glowing right-up, because that is a cool idea, right? Where Yeah. you, you just have a projector, and it just comes up, and it's all ready to go, and then it goes away.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  I don't want my home audio to flow over Bluetooth, personally, but, um...

• 57:05Nilay Patel?

  No, I think it's clear that Bluetooth, Bluetooth is garbage, and we're gonna end 2016 just knowing it in our, oh, there's probably gonna be a bunch of Bluetooth 5 stuff at CES, right?

• 57:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:15Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. I hope so, yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  I really hope so.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  And then we'll just be disappointed by that in 2017, and then Bluetooth 6 is gonna fix it in 2018.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 57:23Nilay Patel?

  That's exactly right.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, smart. I think there are a couple smart projections. They're typically like meant to be more portable than this. So this like is actually a pretty good blend of size, power, and web OS. Anyways, that's my weekly segment.

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  Can I just point out that Caitlin Tiffany has been just relentlessly updating a story about Spotify sending weird corn ornaments to people who listen to a lot of corn on Spotify? And she just updated again. She's up to like five updates of, and she keeps doing it like, like really formally. She's like, I have received a screenshot of a correspondence between a corn fan named Sophie and the Spotify cares customer hotline on Facebook. This is great. This is, see, this is what we need in our lives. It's more, well, we need far less corn, but more ornaments. I don't know how to bridge that gap. Ross, what are you excited for at CES?

• 58:13Speaker 03

  Besides the fridges and washing machines, I just want to see dancing drones. I love dancing drones.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  It's happening. Oh, Dieter, what was your, what was your note? Or was it the?

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Oh, so Alcatel, which is, or no, I'm sorry, TCL, which makes Alcatel. Anyway, TCL, Alcatel, blah. They, they bought the exclusive rights to make BlackBerry phones and they're, they said they're gonna announce a couple of them in the next year. And I just want to point out, I went on a Twitter rampage about this about a week ago, that this company, TCL, now owns both BlackBerry and Palm, and they're choosing to make BlackBerry phones and not Palm phones. I think that's a huge mistake.

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we're all doomed.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  All right. I think we should wrap it up there. I'm gonna just apologize to the listener. This, I hope you listen to this while you were drinking. You know, like if you have real friends, I hope that you didn't make them listen to this with you because talk to your friends. But if you don't, I hope that you enjoy just this hangout vibe of Vergecast. It was good for me. It was healthy. I'm alone again in the dark in my childhood bedroom, just where I want to be, talking to my friends on the phone. But, you know, we're gonna come back. There's gonna be a lot of news at CES. We're doing this big show. There's other podcasts to listen to. Walt got super fiery in control of Delete yesterday. Thinks Apple had a bad year. Thinks Facebook had a worse year. Thinks Samsung is doomed. Go listen to that show. That's on iTunes.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  Lauren Good hosts a great show called Too Embarrassed to Ask over on the Recode side. Peter Kafka had Kara Swisher on his show Recode Media. She went on a rampage, said the entire media needs to do better in 2017. That's worth listening to. And then Kara herself hosts a show called Recode Decode, which is great because it's more Kara. So go listen to all that stuff. You know, it's the holidays. Go, you know, this is my family. These are my Verge people. I love you, brothers. Go find your family. Go drink some eggnog. Find, we start a website called justthenog.com. Just go to that website, type your credit card number into it. Paul will ship you some eggnog. Well, don't do, if you're listening to the show, I presume that you're smart enough not to go to a strange URL and just type your credit card.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  No, I just, I just want to own it now. That's it. I'm just gonna own it.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  Don't do any of that.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Please do, please do.

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  But if we actually start that business, then do that. I will let you know when you should go to justthenog.com and type in your credit card.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  You should go right now.

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  Wait for my signal.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  I can build this. I can zuck this up.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  All right, Paul, you got, you got, you got 24 hours to make Justin.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  It will be a text, it'll be a text field and you can type in your credit card number and then that will be stored in a database.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it won't ship you eggnog, right? And it won't make a fake video of like a fake UPS person bringing somebody eggnog. And we're like, oh yeah, no, it's super real. It's been a year on it. But really, we're just stealing credit card numbers.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  This is great.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  Zuck it up, Paul.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  This has been a, this has been a good hang, guys.

• 1:01:10Nilay Patel?

  It's been a good hang. That's what I'm saying.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. Thanks for doing this. Merry Christmas.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  Happy holidays.

• 1:01:16Nilay Patel?

  Whatever it is that you celebrate, happy that. Happy materialism.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Paul.

• 1:01:20Nilay Patel?

  Paul. Rock and roll.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Paul.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  Paul.