iPhone 10th anniversary, Nintendo Switch, and the HTC U Ultra

You watched the live show at CES and now we’re back in podcast mode. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul get together to share some of their experiences from the Consumer Electronics Show, along with a review of what happened this week. The iPhone turned 10 on Tuesday, so the trio looks back to when it was first announced and discuss what will happen with smartphones in the future. There’s also lots of gadget talk: HTC’s U Ultra, the Nintendo Switch (!), and lots of throwback devices. This is a really good nerdy tech-centric episode of Vergecast, I hope you like it. 3:31 - iPhone 10th anniversary and the future of smartphones 19:03 - iPhone prototypes 22:38 - Macbook Pro battery life 31:38 - HTC U Ultra 46:02 - Nintendo Switch 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, let's start. Are we ready?

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, ready.

• 0:02Speaker 02

  I'm ready. I'm recording.

• 0:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 0:03Speaker 02

  Shitty audio.

• 0:05Nilay Patel?

  Is that the name of your DAW program? Shitty audio for Windows. Anyway, here we go.

• 0:14Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Theverge.com. You may notice that this week, The Vergecast is not a TV show like it was last week. It's just, last week was so produced, this is gonna be a free-form jazz odyssey. I'm Neil Patel. I'm here. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, in a different city this time. You're all alone in that room. It's very strange.

• 0:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm alone in the studio in New York. Paul is here. Hey, Paul.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  Paul got sick at CES because that's what happens in Vegas. So Paul, you're at home on a Windows PC.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm just looking through my Twitter moments. I don't see, I don't see anything.

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we don't appear to be live on Twitter right now.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Uh, this is the PC that I, it's great. It's great. If I need to start playing Overwatch for any reason during this podcast, I'm fully equipped to do so.

• 1:05Nilay Patel?

  Great. We'll try to keep you interested. I will say this, the dirty secret of most large tech podcasts that I've guested on is that many people are online shopping. What I prefer to do on The Vergecast is just tell the audience what I'm shopping for, which once again is a Pixel and once again is sold out. Just annoying.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Still, you still haven't managed to buy a Pixel?

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  I can't get a Black Pixel unlocked. A Black Pixel XL unlocked. That's all I want. Completely sold out forever. And I'm gonna have to find another shady Craigslist guy to come to my house.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  I'm currently shopping for the Elago W3 Apple Watch Stand, which is a little silicone thing that makes, that looks like a tiny little itty-bitty Macintosh, the original Mac.

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Mix that. Put it on the site.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  Best reason to buy an Apple Watch is to buy a stand that makes it look like a 512K Mac. Anyway, uh, my voice is going out. So I want to just tell the audience right now, the listeners, obviously last week, uh, we were at CES. We made a live show for Twitter. It was basically a TV show. Um, it was really fun. I want your Feedback on it. That show is really produced, really organized. The thing I didn't know about making a TV show was that it involves hours and hours of arguing about spreadsheets in different locations with slightly different groups of people. So that's what Dieter and I did at CES. We'd wake up in the morning, argue with Ross Miller about a spreadsheet in Slack for a few hours, then meet Ross. I was usually late, but Dieter would meet Ross in the lobby of the hotel. They would argue about Slack for a while.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  Then we'd all go to a four hour meeting and argue with Slack with like, argue about a spreadsheet with a different group of people. And then we'd have rehearsal where many more people argued about a spreadsheet. And then we made a TV show.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And the reason for all this, it turns out if you want to show decent video, when you're, you know, in a random conference area in Las Vegas, you need to have it ready ahead of time. And the people that actually put the video on the screen need to know what it is you're gonna talk about. And so we had to like decide most of our topics ahead of time. And that's a lot of work.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot of work, but for this, oh, and we also had, you know, there's huge lines of spreadsheet that said Paul brings gadgets, which is all, it's all we want. But that was that. Now we're back to a podcast. Real, real loose.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  There's no structure. There's no plan.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  There's nothing. No spreadsheets in my life anymore. Anyway, but we should talk about some news this week. I would say the only huge news of the week, and we're, we're recording this a little bit ahead of the Nintendo Switch announcement. So we can't talk about that too much, but the big, as odd as it is in the week after CES, the big news of the week is actually old news. It's that the iPhone was introduced 10 years ago this week. I don't know. How do you feel about this, Dieter?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  I still am angry that I stayed at CES while my friend and then colleague, Michael Ducker, who we both were writing for Trio Central at the time, he got to go to see the iPhone and I had to stay at CES. And I remember the phone that I had to blog about was, I want to say it was a random Sony phone and its big innovation is that it had media player controls on one side and the screen and the, you know, 10 key dial pad on the other side. And it was very small. And that was the phone I got to look at while he got to go look at the goddamn iPhone.

• 4:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Uh, so that that made me very unhappy. Um, I it also made me remember that when the iPhone first came out, uh, I wasn't sure that I wanted to call it a smartphone because it didn't run native apps.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  A very strange thing. Oh, yeah. It was a it was a whole thing.

• 4:30Nilay Patel?

  We should just do ancient pedantic tech history arguments on the show for an hour.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Platform like, anyway.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  It was.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  So that's that's my memory of the iPhone is just, uh, deep, deep jealousy that converted into a weird opinion about, uh, iOS, or back then it was called iPhone OS as a platform.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  So I was not a tech reporter when the iPhone came out. I actually joined Engadget in between the iPhone announcement in June when it was released. But Paul, you were at Engadget, weren't you?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I pulled it up. I pulled it up.

• 5:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Two thousand seven, January first, the on the ninth, I was live blogging the Dell keynote at CES. And here's a quote from the live blog, announcing the Dell Home Media Suite, based on a Dell XBS four ten with Core two Duo Vista DVD burner, speakers, webcam, twenty seven inch display, all in one printer, Linksys eight oh two dot eleven in router, HDTV tuner, including HD cable. So this is like, they're like a little package that they.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  What is it? What is an HD cable? An HDMI cable.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have no idea. Or or possibly like cable?

• 5:43Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so Paul, that's what that's what you wrote? No, it's gotta be HDMI cable. That's what you were writing on iPhone Day.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was like actually looking at Engadget's live blog of the Apple event while and other people in the audience were too, while Michael Dell was talking about.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  PCs.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  Because you were at CES.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  I was at CES.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, except for you. No, I was. Yeah, I was. I was in a law firm wishing I was at CES. And then I made that dream come true for.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Doctor Evil and and and Mini Me came on stage.

• 6:17Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. So this is like classic Dell.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  It was a real Dell, uh, situation. So I was surprised that it's been ten years.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Stuck up on me.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's funny because the current iPhone, it's not a lot different than that iPhone, except for the platform. Like, all the specs have been iteratively improved, but they haven't made like. You know, and it's it's 10 years. Like, that idea was so good that they were able to just refine it for a decade.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Well, didn't didn't Peter Thiel just come out saying, like, there's nothing they can do anymore? That you can't you can't improve the phone anymore. And like, you can't revolutionize the phone anymore.

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  So I actually, I was talking about this a while on Control to the issue. I think there's one thing they can do, and I it's a conceptual shift. You could you could put it down as a refinement, but I think the phone 10 years ago was built in a world of constraints. Right? So the the networks are limited, the screens are poor, the battery life was bad, the processor was slow. The phone, this phone now, it's like faster than the laptop I had when I was in college. Literally, the screen is higher resolution than the laptop I had in college. The broadband network it's connected to is faster than the computer I had in college. I I'm using that computer as an example because that computer was, no one thought of it as living in a world of constraint. It was a primary computing device, and it allowed me as a user to do all kinds of things.

• 7:36Nilay Patel?

  I I don't know that we've made the shift to thinking about phones as primary computing devices that should do all the things that computers can do. I think we still think of them as constrained devices. You can see Apple's kind of doing it on their other mobile platform, the iPad, but I don't see it happening in phones quite yet. And I that's a big turn that's, I think, remaining to be made.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  I couldn't, like, look at screens very much this week. My my eyes were hurting. So I had a lot of a lot of time to think. And I would, this is something that I've wanted for a long time, but I think maybe we're better equipped than ever. I really want mobile devices to help us become more more cyborg.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Like, you you were telling a story before we started the podcast about your turntable. And you put a phone on the turntable.

• 8:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Wait, you.

• 8:22Nilay Patel?

  I have an app.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, go over this, please.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  Do you want the long, hard, I have an app on my phone. I bought a turntable that randomly slows down, so I got to return the turntable. But I needed to verify that I, A, was not going completely insane. Because when that happens, it feels like you're in the Matrix and the cat's gonna walk by again. Like, the music just randomly slows down and speeds up again. So I I was like, looking online, I had to do this. It turns out like there's just apps for Android, iOS, lots and lots of apps. Where you basically you put a cup over the center spindle of the turntable, like upside down, so it makes a platform. And you put a phone on the cup and you, I don't know, what is this app called? It's called RPM or something. Uh, and you put the phone on it and it just makes a graph of how fast the record player is spinning. And I was able to immediately verify that my record player was like, uh, it was just like wavering in speed constantly.

• 9:11Nilay Patel?

  And then every now and again, it would just dip really hard. Uh, that's like 10 years ago, that is not a, you, I would have to like go to Radio Shack and like build something out of like parts to accomplish that goal. And now my phone can just do it. I can just turn a phone into that device very quickly.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Right. And so that, that, that image, I think combining the capabilities of phones like that with the, the sort of the natural user interface that I think has been kind of gimmicky so far, like Alexa and Siri. Uh, so if you could just point your phone at something and say, is this slowing down or am I crazy? You know, I, I saw this molecular sensor at CS and like you could point your phone at two different strawberries and it'll tell you which one's sweeter. Like, like if that had this natural interface, that's something that you, because you, you don't necessarily want to launch an app to do every, every single, you know, like I wanna, I wanna be like Rain Man and count all the toothpicks on the ground. I just wanna point my phone and say, how many toothpicks?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  You know, like, like this idea that we could be super humans in intelligence because these phones are so powerful. I feel like that should be the next step. Anyways, that, that's what I'm on.

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, how do we make better use of all the sensors in a phone?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Let me synthesize these two thoughts. Basically what you're saying is you want the iPhone in particular to open up and you want Android to be a slightly more powerful app platform. So that a bunch of the stuff on there isn't just a bunch of apps that are kind of like grown up Java is what I'm hearing.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  Paul has been complaining about Android being grown up Java since, I don't know, the first time we talked about Android. I mean,

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's, that's nine years old, right?

• 10:50Speaker 02

  And Apple opening up would be huge because a lot of these, there's such an AI arms race now, like a bunch of companies and Google's especially doing this. It's like, hey, we have this API. If you hit this URL with an image or some text, we can do something intelligent to that image. We can tell you how many faces are in that image. We can tell you if there are dogs. We could tell you the dogs are happy, you know, like

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  They have these APIs that are on the web that are basically open and, and sometimes basically free. If, if Siri hooked into those instead of just like Wolfram Alpha and Bing, you know?

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, can the iPhone be a little bit more open, I think is. The Apple's answer is, I mean, no, like, we're gonna make an integrated product, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, they made, they've made app extensions and there's like talk that maybe that'll get extended a little bit more, but I basically, man, you're gonna hate me so much, Neil. I'm gonna say a sentence.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm ready.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  And you're gonna get super pissed.

• 11:48Nilay Patel?

  Bringing the heat on a Vergecast. Yeah, I'm ready.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Here, here it comes. I basically take a Kantian view of this.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Continue.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  The categorical imperative.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  You're literally taking me to school right now.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  The categorical imperative is the basic basis of his ethics is, uh, if you're trying to decide if something is right or wrong, uh, just imagine that it was a universal law that applied to everything. So imagine a world without computers and everything is an iPhone. Does that seem like a world you want to live in? Would that be the best thing for most people? And the answer is no, because it's a closed platform and you wouldn't be able to do a bunch of the stuff.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  You wouldn't be able to make an iPhone, for instance.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Right. The counter is, of course, we don't live in that world. Computers are still out there. There are still trucks. But like so many more people are going to have phones going forward than, you know, desktop computers and laptops. That we should basically treat these phones as though it were the Kantian categorical imperative in that we just have to assume this is the computing platform for the vast majority of humans on the planet for the foreseeable future until we can get the shit implanted in our brains. And if that's the case, yeah, uh, I think that I would rather have a world where you can, you know, hack a little bit on these things, uh, rather than a world that they're like appliances with extensions.

• 13:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, you know where that leads you inevitably.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  Fundamentally.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  If you say WebOS, I'm leaving the podcast.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm gonna say something worse.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  The Motorola Atrix.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:23Nilay Patel?

  It leads you to a modular phone that can connect to a laptop shell and becomes your laptop or unplug it and you can connect it to a keyboard and mouse and it becomes a computer. Like that. It's great to say the phone is done, right? Which was Peter Thiel's argument, like, Apple doesn't have any innovation left in it. And he was like, pretty wide with it. I think, see, Dieter was on CNBC today and they asked him about it.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, they wanted me to say Apple was doomed. They really did. I really didn't want to.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  TV, much like this podcast, is built on, on conflict.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  I'm gonna make a prediction. You ready? You brought up the Atrix. If you don't remember, the Atrix was an Android phone. You'd plug it into this weird laptop thing and then it would give you Firefox. And so fundamentally, what it was, when you boil it all the way down, was a mobile operating system with a desktop class browser that you could look on a big screen. If you look at Chrome OS right now, it is a Chrome operating system that has Android apps, which is basically the mirror image of that. And when people talk about Android and Chrome OS getting closer and what the hell is Andromeda? And, you know, that's this code name that they're gonna come together someday. I actually think that's asking the wrong question. I think fundamentally what people want is the power of a desktop class browser like

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Chrome, tied to the utility and usefulness of apps on a mobile OS. And whether or not the kernel is like fundamentally Android or fundamentally Chrome, kinda doesn't matter. I think this year, we're gonna see somebody bring the Atrix back. We're gonna see a phone that has a desktop class browser on it. You might not get to use it when you're actually just using the phone, but when you plug it into a bigger screen, you will have access to a proper, real, good browser. And when it's a phone, it'll just be a phone.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  I like, I believe it.

• 15:03Nilay Patel?

  So, I mean, look, when you're on the mobile network, and we can argue for the rest of our lives about whether the bandwidth scarcity of mobile networks is real or not. But let's assume that-

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Let's do that.

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  Let's, let's never do that again.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  But when you're on the mobile network, like, fine. Like, power the phone down, whatever. You know, put it in a state where it plays nice on the mobile network. When I'm at home and the phone's plugged into power and I'm plugged into a display and I'm on my wifi, there's no reason my phone should have the same constraints, right? It should be as unconstrained as my laptop. I think that's kind of like, that's what I mean. That's the conceptual shift that needs to happen with phones. And they're still built on this idea of these really deep power, mobility, bandwidth constraints. And 10 years hence, like, I think we can let go of them. Actually-

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Here's the big question. The fundamental question for me is actually about the iPad. Like, if Apple were to make the iPad as like, open as the Mac, would it become a viable replacement? Because the iPad Pro is wicked powerful. And there's these rumors that there's gonna be a 10.5 inch. So you'll basically get a big ass screen in the 9 inch iPad form factor. And then, if you take the thing and tell me that developers can, you know, make stuff and I can do stuff on it without having to go through Apple's App Store and Apple approval process, I kind of believe that in a couple, 2, 3 years, that thing, that ecosystem of, you know, capabilities and apps would be robust enough that I wouldn't need my Mac anymore, or a Windows PC.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  I, I think both of you guys are just so wrong.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  I mean, the dream we're actually talking about is Windows.

• 16:46Nilay Patel?

  I want to hear Paul out.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  I think the Atrix idea is beautiful and I love it when it pops up and it's fun to flirt with. But I think it's always this, there's too many compromises. It's always this jack of all trades, master of none. And I, I was at CS this year, I saw the same ratio of, like, you know, brave iPad users that I've seen in like, years past. Like, you know, they are vastly more powerful. But I think it's a really, it's a form factor thing that keeps it, you know, and it's a lack of a mouse thing. I, I think certain form factors are designed to be powerful for certain tasks and should receive information in certain ways. I, I think web browsing will always be substandard on a phone.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  And, and I, the- Keeps on taking over more and more of our desktops, but our desktops are getting like slower and it's sucking more and more.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Could you imagine like every single like hardcore surface user is freaking out at us right now? Like all we're doing is talking about Windows. And like Windows Continuum, but Continuum doesn't have desktop class, desktop class apps. Uh, but the dream since like phones, smartphones have been smartphones. Has been all your stuff is either on this device in your pocket, or maybe it's in the cloud and then you can just have a bunch of dumb terminals. And the phones are definitely powerful enough to do that and have dumb terminals everywhere. This was the dream of the Folio. There was this thing called the Red Fly.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God, the Red Fly.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. What's up?

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Deep Cut with Dieter.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just saying.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  That's a video series we should do. Deep Cuts with Dieter Bone.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Deep Cuts with Dieter Bone.

• 18:24Nilay Patel?

  Or you just pull out, pull out really old failed products and talk about how they, they really are the dream.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think you want more to happen in the cloud and then you have the appropriate client per device. And maybe it's a web browser on your desktop. Maybe it's a really slick, fast app on your, on your phone. But, but trying to get a thick client.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Everybody's moving in that direction.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  On every device is, oh, and in Windows defense, they are, uh, emulating X86 on ARM. So they can have it all.

• 18:57Nilay Patel?

  Finally.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Which is a perfect example of the compromises necessary in this whole scenario.

• 19:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the other news around the iPhone was a bunch of prototype videos leaked of something. It looked so that the long standing narrative of the iPhone was Steve Jobs said, okay, we're going to do a phone. He pulled a tablet project, a multi-touch tablet project off a shelf, said, turn this into a phone to one team. And then to another team, he said, turn the iPod into a phone and we're going to have bake off inside of Apple. The, the version of the story that is out there, I think the Walter Isaacson book repeated it. A lot of people repeated it. Is that Scott Forstall had the like shrink OS 10, make this tablet thing work. And Tony Fadell had the iPod into a phone project and they were.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  Competitors and they were definitely rivals. Anyway, but one of these prototypes, something actually leaked that is an iPod with support for a SIM card and a dialer and stuff. And it had a weird, you should watch this video on the site. It's Sonny Dixon found the prototype, made the video. Good reporting there. But it had like a multi-touch click wheel. And then the iPod interface in like an aqua window above it looks completely insane. And the other thing is obviously like the junky first, junky is the wrong word, but the very ugly, very crude first iPhone prototype that we actually saw during the Apple versus Samsung court case. So the video of the comparison of the two. So yeah, it's out there.

• 20:28Nilay Patel?

  The narrative, the old narrative, Fidel versus Forrestal's back. But Tony Fidel, he tweeted about it and then we talked and he told me like the actual story. And I think one of the things that is lost that we don't have yet is like the real story of the iPhone. So 10 years later, how it was actually made and like the things that actually happened is still pretty murky. And now it's starting to come out. And so Tony's thing was first, they tried to make the iPod because their marketing department inside of Apple never wanted to lose the click wheel because it was such an icon for Apple. So that was like one of the impetuses behind making the iPod a phone. Then they realized they couldn't dial a number, which is a story we've heard.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  Then Steve Jobs said, put hard buttons on the butt, on the wheel, like the Nokia 3650, which is one of the ugliest phones ever made. They tried that and it failed. And then John Rubenstein left Apple around this time. Fidel took over the whole project and he killed the iPod thing and releases his version of the story. And they went with the OS 10 version. That to me is it's, it's some of the first real insight into the fact that Apple didn't know, like they tried a bunch of weird, bad ideas before they.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, they even tried letting Motorola take a crack at it with that, that iTunes phone, the Rocker.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  The Rocker.

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  One of the worst phones ever made. Like one, like in Motorola.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  I don't know, I'm looking at this.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  Has had many peaks and valleys.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  3650 right now.

• 22:01Nilay Patel?

  That thing, it looks like a piece of garbage, man. Like, that was Nokia's phase where they like, they nailed like the internals of what their feature phone would be. And then their next step was to like, put it in as many zany fucking cases as they could. So it was always the same phone and they were like, what if this one's purple and the buttons are in a triangle? This one's blue and they're in a circle, like, one of the craziest periods in Nokia history. And now Paul's gonna get one.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 22:29Nilay Patel?

  Paul's on eBay, Paul's on eBay right now.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Thirty-five bucks on eBay.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so Dieter, do you want to walk us through this MacBook? So that's the iPhone, it's been a decade of the iPhone.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:37Nilay Patel?

  I feel good about it.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  So, the MacBook stuff, so a couple of weeks ago, I mean, if you're listening to this, you probably know the story, but a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago, I don't know how long ago. Consumer Reports came out and said, "Hey, we can't recommend the MacBook because we've done a bunch of battery tests on a bunch of different models and we're getting wildly inconsistent results." Um, results that, like, in some cases, like, boggle the mind, like, we're talking like, differences from like, it lasts three hours, all the way up to it lasts nineteen and a half hours, which is like, no, that's not possible. Um, and so it, there's a whole bunch of kerfuffle about it. Um, and it comes out that the way that Consumer Reports does its battery test is very similar to, actually, the way we do our battery tests, but they, they're a little bit more, I guess rigorous is the word.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  They, uh, take a bunch of webpages, they put them on a local server, they connect the laptop up to that local server, and then they just refresh those webpages once a minute. Uh, but what they do is they dig into a developer setting, which you can find in Safari, and they turn off automatic caching, which makes sense if you think about it, because you actually want to like, load and render the webpage in order to run the battery test. Now, that doesn't actually reflect, uh, like, real-world use, most people leave their cache on. Uh, but then again, battery tests never reflect real-world use, they're mostly designed so that you can compare apples to apples, so you can just sort of see how a computer does on that relative scale. So you have a sense, if it matches your gut of actually using it, of how good the battery is. And that's precisely how The Verge does its battery test.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  We run a battery test, we loop, you know, a bunch of webpages, once a minute, we go through them. Um, and, you know, we try and standardize the brightness on the screen, we try and turn off all the extra services, we do all that stuff, but we're not claiming that it's like an, um... Objective B L, this is going to tell you exactly what your battery life is, kind of test, because that test doesn't exist.

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  And it's fair to turn off caching, you should note.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it totally is, yeah.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Right, because if one web browser on one platform has a better caching system than the other, the test becomes unfair.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Right. So it turns out that there was a bug in Safari on Sierra that like, like did something wacky with like reloading Favicons too often or something. I don't know, it was weird, but it's one of the things that may have affected the battery life on this test. So, Apple fixed a bug, Consumer Reports is rerunning it, but Apple was like, "This, this test doesn't reflect reality." And it's like, "Well, that's not the point. Battery tests aren't designed to reflect reality. They're designed to give you some sort of, you know, comparable metric across a bunch of different types of devices so that you can get a sense of whether or not it's true. And then, you have to actually use the damn thing, have your own experience of the battery life. And if either one of

• 25:21Speaker 01

  those things like seem wildly off from each other, you figure out what's going on." So, the end of this tale is Consumer Reports is going to retest. Apple stands by the battery life on these things, but we definitely experienced weirdly inconsistent results ourselves, especially on the touchbar version of the MacBook Pro. And so, as much as Apple wants this to be like, "Well, they screwed up, there was a bug, that's our fault, but their test was dumb because it had developer options on, that's their fault," and like, "Call this thing dumb." I don't know that the jury has rendered a verdict on the battery life on the MacBook Pro. I think it's more the case that we're going to need to wait a few months, see if

• 26:05Speaker 01

  some software updates sort of clean it up, and if people are complaining about it still. But as of right now, I feel like if you care the most about battery life, you should probably hold off a little bit and sort of see what people are saying one, two, three months down the road.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, Consumer Reports is now, there is in their recommended category. They say for the 13-inch with the touchbar, it's 15.75 hours.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  So, it seems like it really helped them out, but, but yeah, I think your advice is, is accurate. It's, I mean, this is with beta software. They had to use beta software to... To get this test to work, so.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  And there's a, there's a history here with Consumer Reports and Apple, right? They, they went, I think they went after AntennaGate, was it? Or was it Ben Gate?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  I think antenna.

• 26:55Nilay Patel?

  No, they, they did both. Um, and I think they, you know, they've been out front and with like, this scratches easily and this chatters and like the iPad gets real hot. And the pattern, I think Marco Arment was the first to point this out. The pattern is they, because they're Consumer Reports and they have this reputation, they say a thing that is true and there's an outsized response to it. The thing is like, usually not as like catastrophic, but it is ultimately true. Right? So like, the iPhone 4 antenna got redesigned because if you held the phone wrong, you destroyed the signal, which is not a great design. Uh, the iPad, whatever iPad it was that Marco pointed out, it did get really hot. I think it was iPad 3 or 4.

• 27:41Nilay Patel?

  Um, it is, they did, between iPhone 6 and 6S, make the case stronger.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  And I, I completely imagine that, that for Apple's next MacBook Pro release, they're going to talk about how they've really solved battery life. Which is, it's kind of nice, like this screw up, even if it was just a software screw up, will hopefully result in them putting actual focus on battery life, which is so important. Obviously, Apple always has, but it seemed like it was a, a side note this time.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  The German reported that they actually wanted to use a different kind of battery technology, something more like that tiered stuff that they use on the MacBook. And they couldn't get it done, so they just reverted to like classic cells.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I think this MacBook is, this is the MacBook that we're going to look back on years from now, is the one they made before they just went on on the touchscreen design. Like they, they went down this road. It's like.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Don't do it. Don't do it, don't listen to them. I don't want to touch my laptop screen. You know who touches my laptop screen? Babies. That's who touches. They don't even know any better and they touch my laptop screen. Do I look like a baby? I know we have another topic on our non-spreadsheet topic list.

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  But this is something I didn't get a chance to talk with you guys on the Vergecast at CES. But other than all the weird stuff, which is kind of my like job now to wander CES and find bizarre items. My story of the show was the laptops with the 1050.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Dell has an Inspiron 14, like this is like the classic laptop that's cheap enough to buy for your child before they go to college when you're not really rich. And I just knew so many people that got Inspiron as their laptop, college laptop. This is an $800 laptop with a 1050 in it. And you know, it's just more powerful. And like if you want to play video games or if you wanted to edit video, this is a much better laptop than almost anything in Apple's entire computer lineup.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Which is just bizarre.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't know why Apple sticks with AMD the way it does. I can't, people have offered me reasons, obviously there's like the thermal management and power management, but you're seeing the Windows makers just get out there.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'm guessing a laptop with the 1050 is definitely going to be bulkier than a MacBook Pro and it's probably going to get, you know, eight to 10 hours of battery life. But if some of these laptops come out and they get reviews with that good enough battery life, I really want to get one. I think it's just such a good value.

• 30:29Nilay Patel?

  I want that $9,000 Acer that we saw at CES.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  If you didn't watch the live show, you should go back just because there's no way for me to talk about this thing without you having seen it, but it's a massive widescreen curved, was it 21?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Something like that, yeah, yeah.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's just huge. It has a mechanical keyboard. It's like, you know, the fish that live at the bottom of the ocean and they evolve differently? It's that, but a laptop? It's just so massive and it's just the opposite direction of the way we think of every other device and I... I love it. Like, I don't know what to say about it. It's so not practical. But if I could come to work every day and that was my computer, I'd be like, yeah. This is how, this is how I'm doing it. Um, but that also, I mean, it had like, we literally were gonna prototype, you gotta be careful, but I looked at the battery meter, the battery's at 90%, it told me that it had an hour left. Yeah. Well, nothing has two power adapters.

• 31:32Nilay Patel?

  You need dual. That's great. I love that stuff. Uh, all right, let's talk about a phone. Did you want to talk about the HCCU Ultra? Which, according to Vlad, is just a catastrophic disaster of a phone.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  So I actually watched the-

• 31:48Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I just read this slug, the circuit breaker slug for this phone? HCCU Ultra headphone jack, bad design, features, price.

• 32:00Nilay Patel?

  Vlad just went for it.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  I watched their presentation for this phone last night. It was like 11 o'clock, 11 o'clock Pacific or something. It was pretty late. Um, and, you know, they basically got up and said a lot of, uh, meaningless words about, uh, you and HCC's focused on you and this is gonna, you know, make you more creative and change your life. And it was just insane. Um, so here's this phone. It's HCCU Ultra. It's a 5.7 inch Android device. Uh, it has a glass back. It is very thin. It has a camera. It has a Snapdragon 821. Um, whatever. It looks, it looks like a, like a Galaxy S7, but a little square.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  It looks like a Galaxy iPhone 7. That's what it looks like.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Uh, it has a secondary screen up on the top above the main screen where you can have like, stuff.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is literally just a collection of everyone else's ideas.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so and then the best part is it's got AI, guys. Hey, guys. Also, AI, it'll it'll tell you what the weather is on the place you're traveling to. It will notice what you do and don't dismiss from your notifications and give you less of the stuff you don't want and more of the stuff you do want. Just like, just like the most, we wrote this piece at CES about how like AI was like the worst thing that happened because all anybody did was just say AI and everybody just sort of trusted that meant something, but nobody trusted it. So it's just is a phrase that people add and it doesn't mean anything anymore. And that definitely applies to the HTC U Ultra. Here's what I'll say about this phone. Vlad wrote a really good piece. It's like all the

• 33:43Speaker 01

  things they did wrong with it. They didn't put a headphone jack in it. I, we should maybe have a longer conversation about headphone jacks. I'm starting to, I hate to say it, I'm starting to lose the rage. I'm starting to become inured to it. I'm starting to just accept that phones are gonna have 3.5 millimeter heads. I'm not embracing it. I'm just, I've been worn down and am now just, it's just, it's just happening. I can't stop it.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, I bought two sets of headphones recently. I bought a pair of Bose QuietComfort 35 Bluetooth headphones for my plane rides. I think you have them, right? Don't you have the same ones?

• 34:23Speaker 01

  I'm wearing them this very moment. It's how I'm hearing your voice.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  They're great. Although I will say our old friend Chris Siggler was right in that they have real floppy bass if you turn it up real loud. But whatever, they're great. Noise cancellation, great, great on a plane, wireless. My first pair of like really expensive Bluetooth headphones thoroughly enjoyed the experience, except for all the parts where I had to like use Bluetooth. But they actually have a pretty good Bluetooth chip and driver in situations. It's fine. I also bought the headphones Vlad recommended months ago, the like 36, 40, 36 or 40, I don't remember how much it was, it was months ago, the Carbo, the Zero Audio Carbo Tenors, which I will give Vlad credit. He wrote about them, instantly sold them out on Amazon worldwide. Like his headline was like, just buy these headphones.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  Like the whole, like, everyone went to buy them. They were not being sold in America at the time. So I bought them and they had to be shipped to me from Japan. It took forever. Now you can just buy them in America. Amazon stocks them in America. Or some anonymous Amazon reseller stocks them in America. God only knows how Amazon works. Those headphones are great. I think they sound better than the Bose headphones. Like absolutely sound better. Uh, they're really fun and they plug into my phone. So I'm at work and I like plug the, I walk into work, unplug them because I don't want to wear the huge Bose headphones on the subway.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  I throw them in my pocket. I don't feel about losing them. I don't feel bad about, uh, I said it. I don't feel bad about losing them like in any way, shape or form. They're not AirPods. I'm not like, I lost one and now I have to spend, I can just buy more $40 headphones as much as I want and they sound great. And I can plug them into my laptop, which I did a hundred times yesterday and today. I don't want to lose that and I don't want to like monkey with it.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Dude, I'm just saying that I'm getting worn down.

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  Someone's gonna send me a photo of the goddamn dongle and that I just want you to shut up. Whoever, right now, if you've queued up the tweet with the photo of the dongle, just back away. Like Paul said, don't touch your laptop.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Wait, when I, when I saw that the HCC Ultra didn't have a headphone jack, I wasn't filled with rage. That's all I'm saying. I had that rage deep in my heart and I just don't feel it anymore.

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  I suspect that Samsung will put a headphone jack on, on at least the next line of Galaxy phones.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Here's my thought process, Dieter. I see this phone and I'm like, oh, that phone, that phone's thin. Bad battery life. The thing that I've really learned is my primary inconvenience with this phone, with the dongle life is you can't have your wired headphones plugged in and charged at the same time unless you want to go like full dongle life and have the multi-dongle. And I don't want to go there. So, but with the iPhone 7, like I, I like watched Netflix all, all the way across the country. You just get Netflix offline and you just watch forever and it's great. And, and, and, and I did, I didn't have to worry about charging my phone. My battery life was good enough that I got my Uber in the morning.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  I flew and watched Netflix, got my Uber at night and got home and I made it completely fine. A year in with this phone, or with a phone with inferior battery life, this would be a huge problem.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  And this, this HTC phone looks too thin. It doesn't need to be that thin.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's only got a 3000 milliamp battery, uh, which is, uh, smaller than the Pixel, smaller than I think the S7 Edge even. Definitely smaller than the Note 7, but we shall not speak of that phone ever again. Here's what I'll say about HTC's phone. The presentation was a real downer, um, and you know how the knock on LG is all LG does is fast follow Samsung? And then add like a little, you know, hint of something different on top to make it not an exact copy of a Samsung phone?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  HTC is now doing that to LG. HTC is following LG. Who's following Samsung? And I don't know, I don't know how they turn it around. Like I, if I were HTC and I still wanted to make phones, I literally like, don't know what I would recommend they do other than make a better phone. But get this, uh, they didn't announce any carrier partnerships. Like it wasn't like, and it'll be out on these things. It's just, they're just making it. Uh, and that's some real like, that's, that's not the HTC of old.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  So this thing's going to come out in a couple of months and, uh, you know, we're going to review it. We'll look at it, obviously. But just, it's just like, man, HTC no longer relevant in phones anymore, man. Good, good thing they got the Vive.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. The funny thing is, is that I, I think they're becoming the sort of declared winner of this, this VR generation. At least that's the vibe I get. Like, that's where the excitement happens. Like even if you get sales numbers with Sony, like, all the developers are using Vive because it has the most flexibility. I don't know if that brand is strong enough to swing back into phones somehow, but it's interesting.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Well, you just take off the headset and then use it as a phone.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  I also will say, I can't.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  I was queuing up my next thought. It was really rude of me to, it's bad conversation.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  The first, I can't find this.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  No, the great thing about, the great thing about Eli's plan is you can like, wear it around your shoulder. Like, it comes with its own, like, carrying strap.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  One of those Motorola backpack phones?

• 39:46Nilay Patel?

  Paul, what were you saying?

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Wait, how do you, how would it be a backpack? You mean like a backpack PC?

• 39:51Nilay Patel?

  Do you, you know, remember those Motorola, like, the, the, it was like,

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:56Nilay Patel?

  Just before they got small enough, you had to like, carry them around in a shoulder bag?

• 39:59Speaker 02

  I'm getting you. I'm getting you. I know what you're talking about. I totally know what you're talking about.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  Sure you do.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Okay, so I can't find this picture anywhere on our site, but I swear, the first time I pulled up our post about the, the HTC U, you know how that, that lead photo of it has two clocks side by side?

• 40:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  I, I thought what I was looking at was a double wide phone.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  And that would be a bold move. Who's gonna do the double wide?

• 40:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Nobody.

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  BlackBerry, isn't that the, wasn't the Passport a square?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  No, LG already did it. It was called the LG View.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, oh my god. This is really, this entire episode of this podcast is us remembering bad phones. That's all we've done for like, 45 minutes.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, there we go. There we go.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I say one more thing about the headphone jack? It's actually not about the headphone jack. It's about something that I know Dieter cares about deeply, which is,

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Oh god.

• 40:54Nilay Patel?

  USB-C fragmentation. So, the headphones that come with the HTC U are, have a USB-C plug in them, but they only work with the HTC U. If you take those same, What are you doing? USB-C headphones and plug them into another phone, they won't work. This is already true. USB-C headphones are not always compatible with other USB-C jacks. That is a disaster. I, like, fine, you can make the argument that, and I think Vlad makes it effectively, lightning headphones are interesting because lightning has power, you can do all kinds of things, like, fine. At least it always works.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:33Nilay Patel?

  USB-C headphones, just all over the goddamn place. I, I don't understand why HTC would make that decision. Like, they're saving 20 cents on a part? Like, I don't, I don't see it.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  It's real dumb.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I can see video of Dieter, and I know the audience can't, what Dieter is doing on Skype right now is just silently shaking his head, looking sad.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, so these, these, these have...

• 41:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Paul, you can't even like finish the thought, right?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  The reason, the reason, the reason, HTC's reason for making these headphones is they have tiny little microphones in them so that they somehow are able to map the contours of your eardrum to give you better sound. They use sonar technology to map your inner ear so that they can customize the sound profile to you. And that theoretically, according to them, is the reason that they only work in HTC phones.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Okay, but.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Here's what I will say. Okay, go ahead.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  If you, if you. Ah. If you, if you got other USB C headphones, they would work with these, this phone.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Maybe. Who knows?

• 42:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the answer is like a hard maybe.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  If, if that's not true, then nothing matters.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  The, the industry group that is in charge of USB, it's called the USB Implementers Forum, has boned the entire rollout of USB C in about 15 different ways. It goes all the way down to the quality and consistency of their goddamned logo, which is, just looks terrible. And Apple and Google were two of the primary groups that are all, they're both part of the USB C Implementers Forum, or USB Implementers Forum, uh, that were pushing to the standard. And Apple decided to put it on their laptops and not their phones. Google was putting it on, you know, whatever, all the stuff. Um, but not all the stuff that they released last year in October, which is hilarious.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Um, but imagine a world where Apple decided to put USB C on a phone, on the iPhone, instead of Lightning. I know there's lots of talk about this. They'll never do it. Uh, there's a million good reasons, at least from Apple's perspective, why they wouldn't do it, including the thickness of the phone. Um, the quality of the actual like jack. Down the line, there's lots of reasons that Apple will never do this. And so I'm not suggesting that they will, although I wish they would. Uh, but imagine if they had. Do you think for even a nanosecond that Apple wouldn't like whip this situation into shape and everybody would like figure out how to make these things compatible across

• 44:05Speaker 01

  the board, including the iPhone because of the power of that thing?

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  Maybe just like Apple standard?

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 44:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, Apple would pick one standard, right? And then everyone would just use it because they have the most volume. Like they did with Firewire?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  They did it already with the web. They did it, they did it with the web with, you know, they were part of the W3C. They, they like, you know, were part of WebKit, you know, and now that's fragmented again and Google's off doing its own thing and, you know, whatever. But like the mobile web only happened because of the iPhone and Apple, while developing the iPhone, participated in the standards body and said, hey, this stuff works better if you do it this way on your websites. And so the only reason that like, honestly, like if, if they had not done that, it wouldn't, like we would have had to figure it on our own. Like they, they participated and it made websites on phones better.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  And they're, they just, they don't seem to be as engaged in this thing with USB C because like they don't care, it's only on their laptops, whatever.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  So I have in my notes here, by the way, the previous phone was HTC Bolt. The headphone dongle for the HTC Bolt does not work with the Moto Z, which is USB C2. The headphone dongle for the Moto Z doesn't work with HTC Bolt.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Like, I think I put this on HTC screwing it up. Like, I really do. I don't know why, it's just a hunch. I don't know.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  They just boned it? I mean, that to me, look, my argument about this the whole time has been, don't take away the simple universal thing in favor of something complex and proprietary.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Good job, Neil. I started this whole conversation by saying I wasn't mad and you managed to get me mad. Thank you.

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  That was Verchess, everybody. Once again, I'm the winner. See you next week.

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  Alright, let's do, we gotta stop talking about iPhone X.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I feel like you're, you're, you're gonna be better at talking about the Nintendo Switch than any of us. It's, it's gonna be announced tonight as we're like, as Andrew's producing this episode.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  The announcement will already have happened.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  So, everything that I say right now can be instantly judged. No one will have time to forget how wrong I am.

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  But it's happening, it's exciting.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the big question, I was talking to some people about this at CES, like, I, I don't have a good enough memory to know if, are people always this obsessed with Nintendo things, but then they don't buy them? Or is there actually something special about the Switch? I think it might be like in between those two things.

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, they were, so, go back, going back in time, until the Wii U, the answer was they were obsessed with them and they bought them so much, that Nintendo couldn't keep anything in stock. Then the Wii U happened, and now they're obsessed with them, and they wanna buy things like the NES Classic, and Nintendo is like, "Oh, we can't possibly put a chip with an emulator in a box fast enough for the demand, we're out of stock again." Which is ridiculous.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's ridiculous. But, I think that, to me, the Switch is, it's just such a compellingly bonkers hardware design, that I think people will buy. I don't, I don't know why I feel that way, but I just look at the gif of the guy in the plane that we have up, where he like puts it on the seat back and then like yanks the controllers up, and I have no idea why you would wanna do that, but I definitely wanna do it now.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  It's a power play.

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  It's airplane power play.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  So, I travel a lot now, and I, you know, I just got a PS4 Pro, and so I'm gotten back into like console video games in the way that I hadn't for a while, and I really like it, and when I travel now, I miss my PS4, and I miss just playing console games, and so I'm gonna buy the hell out of this, because it will be the thing I do when I'm sitting sad and alone in my hotel room in New York, 'cause nobody wants to hang out with me, instead of watching The West Wing on my iPad.

• 48:03Nilay Patel?

  Harsh burn dealer, I always wanna hang out.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  I'm really looking forward to, to that future.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  It sounds like we've let you down, Dieter.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. It also sounds like poor Lisa, right? Like, you're like, "I'm leaving. I'm taking the game console with me."

• 48:19Speaker 01

  She has an Xbox One and a PS4 sitting there. She's fine. Also, again, I've said this many times, she works for Oculus. She's got a rift with like the, like, motion controllers in a room that we've dedicated just for VR. She's fine.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  But let's make this purely theoretical. You're, you're a 38-year-old, first-time dad. You convince, you have a four-year-old, five-year-old child. You convince your wife that we should totally get this Nintendo Switch because the kids will love it and you'll love it too. You got a work trip coming up. Your kid loves Mario Kart and Zelda.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Where does the Switch go?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Oh, it goes with me.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  No, the Switch stays with this poor child.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Then the kid misses me even more.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  You made your bed when you used the child as an excuse to buy the Switch.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  I think it's obvious.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  I'm just telling you that it would, the, the, the feelings the child has for the Nintendo would get mixed up with the feelings the child has for her father. And they would just get all bundled up together in this weird, broken mass of emotion. My dad was never there. He never came to my soccer games. He routinely absconded with my Nintendo.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  My dad took the fun away.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  This is terrible. He worked so hard.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  This brings me back to my original point. This, this thing is so price-sensitive because it is a bit, a bit of a gimmick. I think the thing is, is that I don't think the Wii U was, was a bad idea, full stop. I think the gaming market was moving away from the Nintendo style at the same time as Nintendo was doing something weird. And the gaming market has continued in this more PC gaming style trend. And like the PS4 and the Xbox One are literally PCs. And sometimes run basically unmodified software from PCs.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  And they compete with PCs and they have a few exclusives, but the exclusives don't dominate that narration anymore. And graphics are amazing. And the Switch is something that is a lot different than that. And it's gonna play Skyrim, which is 100 years old. It's gonna play what is probably gonna be a great Zelda game, a great Mario Kart game, a great regular Mario platformer. But those are not Splatoon. What, great Splatoon 2 or whatever. Those are not what it's dominating. And everybody was like, oh Nintendo really gets the esports thing now because they put esports in their promo commercial. But Splatoon is not an esport.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Esports are dominated by PC games. Overwatch, League of Legends. Don't.

• 51:17Nilay Patel?

  Paul, all I'm saying is on Paul's headstone, I think it should say Splatoon is not an esports.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  So here's what's going on with the Switch.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  Here's why Splatoon is not an esports.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Here's what's interesting about the Switch. When you looked at the Wii U, you're like, okay, they've got this crazy idea, but it's really badly implemented. This tablet controller is kinda junky. It's got a resistive screen. The Wi-Fi play only works in the house and like the range is really bad. So, and it's not powerful. If I'm comparing the Wii U to an Xbox or a PlayStation, it's like, of course you don't get the Wii U. Cause it's like, it's a bunch of weird ideas that didn't get implemented very well. Right? So it was as much about the weird idea, but it was more about like, the execution was just awful. With the Switch, I think that the way people are going to look at it, they're not gonna look at it like a Switch versus a PS4, especially if they price it right. What they're gonna think is what I think.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Okay, I really like my iPad. I really like my iPhone. The games on it are good, but they're not really as good as what I can get at home. But with the Switch, if they can, if they can set it up as like a mobile platform that you can also play at home and have it in that context, its competition isn't going to be the Xbox and the PlayStation. Its competition is going to be like iPad games.

• 52:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  And in that context, it could be a huge win.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  I think that's a good point. But again, I think that's why prices is so sensitive here. I, I, I really think that $250 would be the sweet spot. The Wii U came out at 300 for the basic unit, 350 for the non-terrible.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  There's no way. Look, we're, we should just place our bets now because the, the, the listeners will know.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, by the time you listen to this, they'll know the answer.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying $400.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  No way.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm saying, uh, I think $400 sounds right. I think that if it's anything over 350 is a mistake. So there, I didn't make a prediction. I, I made a, a judgment.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  You guys are saying, well, I was gonna go risky and bet 250, but I don't have to be crazy. I'll just say 300 and I'll obviously win.

• 53:19Nilay Patel?

  Alright.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  This thing would failure, this would be a total fail, failure a dollar over 300. I am super excited about it. I think it's really great and I'm glad. Yeah, but in a sense, it's like a fulfillment of the Wii U vision, but.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:36Nilay Patel?

  I know, I'm definitely gonna end up buying one.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  The other nice thing here is that they, they made, it, it's less dependent on developers like coming to Nintendo and doing something weird. Developers just basically have to port old games to it.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  The Wii U required really rethinking your software if you wanted to take advantage of the controller in the, in the living room. And that didn't happen and it was sad.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait to get one of these. That's all I'm saying. It's like, it reminds me of, uh, like, classic Sony hardware arrogance. Right? Where it was just like so overdesigned and like, you could do all these things and the, the software is probably gonna let us down in some critical way, but it's so crazy that I just, I need it closer to me.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  This is, this is your Clee. This is a Clee.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  It's that crazy Clee with like the flip around.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  The camera.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  Keyboard, the camera. Bad phones on the Vergecast. That's, that's this.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  That wasn't a phone.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  That wasn't a phone.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  That was a PDA.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  No, didn't they make a Clee phone?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 54:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they did.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Someone's gonna correct me, but I don't think so.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna correct you right now. Hold on.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  Fast Googling on the Vergecast, the best radio.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Phone. Oh, man, I printed.

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  The NR70.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Around was def- that was definitely a PDA. The screen flipped around. It had an insane keyboard.

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. There you go. Don't, don't, don't step to me on old ass Palm OS gadgets.

• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  I forgot they ran Palm OS. The, the software was so much less important than the hardware. I forgot they ran Palm OS.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  You know, the crazy thing about these, they had like a phone button on them. Because that's to pull up your address book. So you could call people with the phone numbers that you stored on.

• 55:31Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  I actually did that with, uh, there was, one of the very first Bluetooth phones available in America was an Ericsson. It had a monochrome screen, but it had Bluetooth and I like spent just weeks figuring out how to tether with it, uh, on my Palm OS device and I managed to like, be able to tap on the thing and then pull the phone out of its little holster, which was a little screw that screwed to the back of the phone and it could like swing on your belt on a little plastic clip. So I could like pull out my phone, dial the number, put my phone in my pocket, put the, pull up the PDA, dial the number, put the PDA in my pocket, whip the phone off my belt and it would be ringing. It was the best.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Finally, convenience.

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

  Can I read you the specs of this thing? It seems like a thousand dollars.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Wait, which one are you looking at?

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 56:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm looking at the uh, the NR70, PEG NR70. Which everyone, if, just, when you, when you get, when you get home, Google this. Uh, it was, I'm sorry, it was $600, not a thousand dollars. $600, it has a 1/10th of a megapixel digital camera, which is amazing. Uh, fastest Palm OS device out there. 66 MHz processor. Uh, the line in the mobiletectreview.com write-up I'm reading says, "Speed freaks and gamers take note."

• 56:47Nilay Patel?

  Uh, 320x480 pixel screen, higher than Pocket PCs. Uh, I mean, just these, the, the, the, the distance we've covered in the past decade is ridiculous.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  You forgot the best part.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  What's that?

• 56:59Speaker 01

  It came with a, uh, memory stick.

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  It did.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Wait, well, this one says,

• 57:03Speaker 01

  It's a memory stick slot.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  This one says, "Save files on optional memory sticks."

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, memory stick slot.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  Hey, did we go through CS and Sony didn't, Sony didn't announce a proprietary memory format?

• 57:15Speaker 01

  How's that possible?

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  It's, look, it's the end of an era. It's also, I think, the end of the Vergecast.

• 57:23Nilay Patel?

  Unless anybody else has a bad old mobile device to talk about.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  We should mention that cars exist.

• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  Shout out to the eMate 300.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  There's a lot of cars out there in the world and people are driving them. Look out.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it was Detroit Auto Show this week, our transport team did an amazing job. Paul, do you have a specific car you'd like to shout out?

• 57:43Speaker 02

  No, I, no.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll, I'll just say the one that's important. Waymo,

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  which is a terrible company name, that's Google's self-driving company.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  I was just sitting here appreciating the fact that you had to say that word out loud and we just sat here in silence.

• 57:59Nilay Patel?

  We just, we just, it just sat in the room. Um, it's funny, everyone still calls it Google, but it's Alphabet's self-driving car company, Waymo, which was spun out of, and fuck this, anyway. Fuck everything about this.

• 58:17Nilay Patel?

  They, uh, they shut off their Chrysler Pacifica.

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. They, they're like, it's designed for self-driving hardware, which really to me looks like a whole bunch of plastic surrounds for cameras, which is fine.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, they, it was, it's like better integrated, but like not that much better.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it really looks like they hired a bunch of like street tuners who like usually put ground effects on Civics and they're like, just make these cameras look kinda conspicuous.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  They look like Celine Musa. Anyway. That's a car, whatever. Look, Paul's right. Cars exist. Uh, they're slowly becoming autonomous. Uh, and you should read our coverage of that from the Detroit Auto Show.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  I'm more interested in this Chris, Chris Latner guy. You know about him?

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  So he made the Swift programming languages, which is the sort of the successor to Objective C, which still hasn't completely replaced it, but a lot of people like it. I think it got good uptake. I don't think it's solve all world problems. But his project before Swift was L L V M. And that is like, that's just ascendant. That like basically runs the world as far as like, it's like the open source project that is like made almost any, like something that we're gonna start seeing in the future is this thing called WebAssembly. Where you can basically use any programming language that would compile down to bytecode, but compile it

• 59:47Speaker 02

  to WebAssembly and then it could be delivered to a browser like JavaScript is, except in like a more concise way.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  But you have to be like better, like you have to manage memory and stuff like that. Anyways, L L V M is gonna be a big bridge for that and it's, it's gonna be like a huge deal and L L V M, I think it's like, I mean, that's his like, that's his Moby Dick. That's his huge achievement. So I don't, he, he doesn't really have to achieve anything else. He's, he's, he's already a total legend in software.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. A bunch of people have left Apple recently. Uh, some, many to Tesla, many to other places. That's the thing. It's another one of those memes that's floating around. Like, people are leaving. It's getting a little stolid. Is that a word? It seems like a word. That's definitely a word.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, another meh note to end the show. That's where we are.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  Speaking of stolid.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  What's that, Paul?

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  Look, I'm saying, go watch the three episodes of Vergecast Live from last week. They're high-energy, they're scripted, they're super-produced, there's segments, there's teleprompters, there's me and Dieter ranting to camera. I have so much makeup on. We're wearing so much makeup. Megan was there. She was amazing. She was hyping it up. You want that? You watch that. This episode of the show is us coming down, swinging the pendulum all the way back to just a couple of friends having a time.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  We did a great job. I just thought it was funny to say.

• 1:01:20Nilay Patel?

  Stolid.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's been a stolid time with you as well, Paul.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, that, my god, that is the end of the show. We'll be back next week. Presumably, we'll have prepared. Who knows?

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  There's other shows to listen to. Control+Delete is back. Walt and I talked about TV and the iPhone, and still great job stories, as always, on that show. Lauren Good, who was on the Vergecast with us last week, hosts Too Embarrassed to Ask, which is wonderful. I think she and Kara- Features me this week. Scott, Dieter Bohn on it himself, just the family out, just doing it this week. Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media, which is wonderful, and Kara Swisher hosts Recode Decode, which is all fine podcasts that you can listen to and learn about the tech industry. And also, just listen to the three of us talk about old phones. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Paul.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  Cut through the night.