iPhone 8 review, Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE review, and Apple TV 4K review

Last week, we brought you The Vergecast live from San Francisco after the Apple event. This week, The Vergecast is back in NYC for Apple reviews week. Nilay Patel, Paul Miller, Lauren Goode, and Dan Seifert go through the reviews, including the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE, and the 4K Apple TV. There’s a lot more in between that — more leaks about the upcoming Google event! — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 02:51 - iPhone 8 and 8 Plus review 35:32 - Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE review 1:00:26 - Apple TV 4K review 1:24:27 - Google leaks 1:27:19 - Paul’s weekly segment “DOG FOOD PODS” 1:29:40 - Google is buying part of HTC’s smartphone team for $1.1 billion 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?

  This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Qualcomm Snapdragon Gigabit LTE. With download speeds up to seven times faster than typical home wifi, Snapdragon Gigabit LTE can turbocharge all of your connected apps. You can stream 360 degree videos in 4K resolution with minimal buffering. You can access files in the cloud nearly as fast as you would if they were stored on your phone. You can download hours of movies or music in a matter of seconds. To learn more, visit snapdragon.com/gigabit today.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge Media Empire. That sounds good. Also, it's a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we are the best part of that network as well.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Like the best node.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  If we're the empire, what is the Vox Media Network?

• 0:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, we're an empire.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  What's it called on BitTorrent?

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  That's it.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  The one, the good things to connect to on BitTorrent. Not just peers, but like super peers?

• 1:05Nilay Patel?

  It's something like that. Magnets?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  That's something else.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  It's got a link.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  Super Cedars.

• 1:12Nilay Patel?

  We're that. You will notice that we are not live this week. I want to thank everybody who came out to the live show in San Francisco last week. There was like 200 plus people there, 250 people there. They were all great. We like talked to all of them. I shook all of their hands, then didn't have hand sanitizer. But I'm not sick. So all of them were very clean.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Good job being a clean audience.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  That's what you want. It was super fun. It was really nerdy. It was a great show. It was just a great time. But we're back in the studio. Dieter is not here this week. He's working on a super secret thing that I think all of you are going to like very much. But I'm here. I'm Neelai. Paul's here.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  Dan Seifert's here. Hi. And a little bit later on, Lauren Good's going to be joining us to talk about the Apple Watch. So full crew, tons of news, big week of news. We should maybe just get into it? Let's get into it. Do you want to do some jokes?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  We could do some jokes.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  No, let's get into it. So.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  Last week was Apple News Week. This week is Apple Reviews Week.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Ah, yes.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  Is basically how I'd put it.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  It's the most wonderful time of the year.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  The most exhausting time of the year. Um, I got other, but I, by the way, the Verge Video Crew is like heroes. They've, they've just been up all night and day producing all three of these Apple review videos and a bunch of other stuff that's going on, so props to them. Um, but the iPhone 8, did that review. The 10, off in the distance, looming. Don't even think about it right now. Full screen design, just a notch steadily rising over the horizon. A black bar of chaos coming for us all. That's great. But we, we reviewed the 8 and 8 Plus and they're fine. I think my, my, uh, my deck was, it's an iPhone.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Indeed it is.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  And I, I particularly wanted Dan here because he reviewed the S8 and the Note 8.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:05Nilay Patel?

  And one of my lines was this design of the iPhone 8 is actually way behind the S8. So I want to talk about that with you in particular. We should maybe whisper about the iPhone 10 looming again in the distance. But it's an iPhone, right? Like the, the 8 is an iPhone. It has a glass back. It supports wireless charging. The wireless charging is just as slow as wireless charging has always been.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Actually, it's slower than what you get on other wireless charging.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, because it's not.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  It's not fast wireless charging. It's regular wireless charging.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  So here's the color on that. Right now, their wire, Apple's wireless charging system, based on the Qi standard, will drive, will draw five watts of power, which is the same as their little wall charger they ship with the phone. They're releasing a software update to iOS 11 that will let them draw 7.5 watts of power.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  I believe so, yeah.

• 3:56Nilay Patel?

  Is that fast charging?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, it's hard to say if it's exactly the same as what Samsung calls "fast wireless charging", but it probably gets it closer there. I don't remember off the top of my head the spec for Samsung's fast wireless charging, which is actually... Based on Qi but built on top of it. So like you need a Samsung phone with a Samsung fast wireless charger or fast wireless compatible charger to do it.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  A real Apple move.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Samsung says that their fast wireless charging is 1.4 times faster than standard wireless.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it sounds like 7.5 watts.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  That's about 7.5.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So even even fast quote fast wireless charging is pretty slow. Especially now that we've got like fast wired charging, which is like really fast.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  And to be clear, the iPhone 8 is also getting the USB C fast charging?

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  So this is, I think, very confusing. So most fast charging on Android phones is enabled by Qualcomm chipset. Cause they all basically have the same Qualcomm chipset.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  Apple, you may remember, is suing Qualcomm. Not really using Qualcomm chipset, but I think they know they have to say they have fast charging. So they they're saying they have fast charging. What they mean, and I think this is where it gets a little wonky, is that on the regular adapter they ship in the box, same as ever. If you plug it into an iPad adapter, it goes pretty fast. And this is where the USB C thing comes from. If you buy their USB C to lightning cable and the MacBooks 29 watt USB C adapter.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  AKA spend $80 in charging accessories.

• 5:38Nilay Patel?

  Then you get 50% charge in about 30 minutes. But I just used it with my iPad charger and iPad chargers like everywhere.

• 5:47Nilay Patel?

  And that got me to 40% in 30 minutes. But here's, I have used an iPhone with an iPad charger forever. I always buy the higher spec charger. So I don't.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  I I think.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  It's like, they're like, it's fast charging.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  I I don't think the iPhone has like supported faster charging, at least not officially.

• 6:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Even if you use the iPad charger, like you can use it and it'll charge fine, but I don't know if it officially.

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  But when I plug it, when I plug my seven into an iPad charger, it charges way faster than with a wall plug, the regular wall plug. I think a lot of people do that.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like I do it too. I'm just saying, I think it might be a little bit of a placebo effect.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  No, it's definitely faster.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Okay, alright.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  But now I think it's officially faster.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, Apple's never said it's faster. And Apple's never directed anyone to go plug their phone into an iPad charger to get faster speeds. But now it's saying, if you buy the MacBook charger, which I think with the cable, it's gonna cost you like $80.

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  It's ridiculous.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  You will get faster charging in that advertised spec.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  But of course, you have a MacBook charger because you've been doing nothing but buying brand new MacBooks with USB-C ports this whole time.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and not being able to plug your iPhone into them.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, you gotta find a special cable. Anyway, I think all of this is, this is all kind of already worked. And now it's like a little bit more official and they're calling it fast charging to compete with the fact that Android phones have what you might call fast. Like they have like chipset support, there are fast chargers, they go really fast, right? It's like 50% in 10 minutes.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the way that fast charging always works is that if you have a totally dead phone from, starting from zero, it'll charge up to 50% really quickly. So that's why you get that zero to 50 in 30 minutes, or zero to 40 in 30 minutes or whatever. And then it tapers off really hard. So getting that next 50% can take up to two hours. But, you know, if you're stuck in an airport and you only got 10, 15 minutes to charge, it's great.

• 7:39Nilay Patel?

  So that's the iPhone 8. It's a bunch of, it's a bunch of charging talk.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Everything you expected with a bunch of confusion around charging.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  What would a new Apple product in 27 be if it wasn't for cable confusion?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Here's the real dream. Here's what you can do with the iPhone 8. You can charge it and also listen to music with the included earbuds.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Well, you know, now that you've got wireless charging.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Delicately hold your head near your nightstand so you don't bump it off the wireless charging stand.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  Now you gotta buy AirPods.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  But I guess you could then charge it, listen to music too.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go. Until your AirPods die.

• 8:20Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I want all the Vergecast listeners to do. Go to the Apple Store and buy all of the charging accessories. Please run exhaustive tests and then we'll just talk, you just send them to us and we'll talk about it next week because this is very tiresome. But internals of the iPhone 8. Interesting, right? Same chip as the iPhone X or X. Everyone in the world is calling it the X.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  I almost refuse to call it the X. I say X so many times.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  I think they did that on purpose. I think they know people are gonna call it the iPhone X. It solves the 8, 10 problem. Like, I was out with friends and they're like, "Why does the 8 exist if there's a 10?" And then a lot of them are like, "Where's the 9?" And they were like visibly uncomfortable with the idea of it not being a 9.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  It's over in the graveyard with the Galaxy Note 6 and Windows 9. That's where the iPhone 9 is.

• 9:11Nilay Patel?

  So I think they did it. It's clever. I think it's a very clever move to call, have everybody call it the iPhone X. Have it officially be the iPhone. Great, you did it. But same processor. I thought this story was great. You know, we went to the event, went to our meeting, and they were just very direct, like, "Yeah, you know, our old chips had boring names. Now they have interesting names."

• 9:34Speaker 02

  I mean, it's such a funny thing to me that Apple is directly answering the fact that Qualcomm calls its chips Snapdragon. And Samsung calls its chips Exynos. And like, I forget what Huawei calls its chips, but like Kirin or something. It's like Kirin. Yeah, I think it's Kirin.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  Not Bexynos?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Hexynos.

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  Snapsynos.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  But like, I think that's hilarious and it's such a like thing that you don't expect Apple to acknowledge. And especially like such a stupid thing. Like, who gives a crap if it's called Bionic or whatever? Go walk down the street, find somebody with an iPhone, which will take you half a second, because everyone has one, and ask them what chip is in their phone, and they're not gonna know. They're not gonna care.

• 10:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I get it, right? Like, if you can, why wouldn't you? If I could just like go around branding everything in this office, I would. I'd be like, "Here's the desk of power." Like, fine. But it's the same chip, the wide-angle cameras on all three phones, 8+, 10, all the same. Optical stabilized, f1.8.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Deeper pixels.

• 10:45Nilay Patel?

  And then the difference really in the cameras, the dual camera, is that the X has a second optically stabilized f2.4 telephoto, and the 8+ not stabilized f2.8. These are totally wonky details. I don't think it'd matter to anybody under any circumstances. But those are the facts.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, crucially, I think that the thing that hasn't changed from the seven plus is is they've upgraded the cameras across the board and they're all new sensors, but the telephoto sensor is still an inferior one to the wide angle one.

• 11:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  It's better than the telephoto sensor that was in the seven plus, but it's still not as good as the wide angle.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  I think that is all fundamentally there for the portrait mode stuff and not necessarily for the zooming stuff.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  But as Paul was saying, the sensors are also different, still 12 megapixels for the wides, but slightly bigger and Apple says they have deeper pixels.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Which I'll admit, I did not look into to actually figure out what that means.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  I asked them what a deeper pixel was and they actually responded by saying it's deeper.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  So their their answer to me was it has a deeper light well that captures more photons.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  So.

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  Which implies that camera sensors are made of buckets.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:04Nilay Patel?

  Which I thoroughly enjoy as a metaphor for camera sensors.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  All the yeah, if they're they're buckets that collect drops of light.

• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  So the deeper the light, the less the deeper the bucket, the less likely that those drops of light are going to spill into the other bucket next to it. This it's actually deeper pixels is like it sounds like in a crazy Apple marketing thing, but it actually has existence before Apple used it in in in image sensor design.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Just to make sure I'm getting this right, so I'm imagining a grid of of sensors.

• 12:32Nilay Patel?

  A bucket.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Light sensors, right, a grid of buckets, square buckets.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  In each bucket, it detects light and Apple is saying that those buckets are now deeper. So that like.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  So what happens is when you have pixels at the pixel level, light can bleed from one to another.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  And then you get things like chromatic, well, chromatic aberrations is a lens thing, but you get things similar to that effect where you get like reds and greens and stuff that blur like a lot on the pixel level when you zoom in really, really close on the detail. A deeper pixel helps or is designed to help prevent that spillover.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  So it's like a it's like a lens hood per pixel.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, there you go. It's a mud flap.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  It's a barn door.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Barn door.

• 13:20Nilay Patel?

  Why not?

• 13:22Speaker 02

  How many metaphors can we throw at this?

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  And then the screen on the eight is True Tone, which I turned on and then I turned off.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  True Tone is one of those great technologies that you're not supposed to think about. And it just makes your experience better.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  It's nice.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  You don't notice it until you turn it off, or if you do turn it off, but like, I use it on my iPad Pro all the time and I love it and it's great to look at my iPod post.

• 13:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have left it on. It's been great. Cool. Um, and that's it. You said you like that it's heavier. I do like that it's, so the glass back is definitely heavier. The phone, it feels ever so slightly thicker. It fits perfectly into iPhone 7 cases. I think it actually is thicker. I'm just saying in terms of when you hold it in your hand, it is definitely a more substantial. Hand feel, if you will, a substantial hand feel. Thank you, Dan, for this moment together. It feels. Good in the hand. It feels good in the hand? Okay, alright, great. Anyway, um, yeah, it feels.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  It's not as slippery.

• 14:18Nilay Patel?

  It's nice to hold.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:20Nilay Patel?

  But it's still gigantic. The plus in particular is gigantic. And so my, you know, I reviewed the thing. We leaned way hard into, well, it's boring. Let's just like acknowledge that it's boring in this video right at the beginning. So like we calmed it way down. We didn't like overproduce it. I thought it was fun to do.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  But at the end of the day, my feeling with this phone is like lots of people bought an iPhone 6. And they've just held on to them. They're out there. They should probably get a new phone. And so like they're gonna go and they've got, I don't know, AT&T Next or Verizon has Edge.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Jump.

• 14:58Nilay Patel?

  T-Mobile has Jump.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Maybe they're on an iPhone payment plan from Apple.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Apple has their own payment plan. They're just gonna like get a new phone. Like they've paid off the old phone. They've been making payments. You just like go trade in your six and get an eight and you'll be happy. And that, to me, feels like, like, this is what I called it in review, like, the default.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  It's a Toyota Camry.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like, your lease is up, you get a new Camry.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  It's, it's, it's, the Toyota Camry, I thought about this earlier today, is like the best way I can think about the iPhone 8. It does everything really, really well. It has all the latest safety technologies. It is, uh, super reliable. You're not gonna have any problems with it. And it's also maybe the most boring thing on the road.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  What part of the Camry do you think maps to having giant bezels?

• 15:41Nilay Patel?

  Is it, is it the super aggressive headlights or the weird pokey rear taillights?

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  All the lights in the Camry are offensive.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. That pillar between the door, you know, like the iPhone X has the suicide doors.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Ah, there you go. Yeah. So, so iPhone X has no B pillar. There we go. It's the B pillar in there. The iPhone 8 is an excellent phone.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Obviously, one of the best phones on the market, and it's also extremely boring, like.

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  And kind of expensive.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  And kind of expensive. Camry's not expensive, but like.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  If you got, if you got the Lexus version of the Camry, what do they call that?

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  E300.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  E300. There you go. It's a Lexus E300.

• 16:16Nilay Patel?

  ES300.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  ES300.

• 16:17Nilay Patel?

  The Carnards are coming for you.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Do you see them justifying this $50 price bump?

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because they, they bumped the storage.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  I think it's such a lame bump, though. Like, they should have bumped the storage as.

• 16:28Nilay Patel?

  256, they didn't bump the storage.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and, and they should have bumped the storage as part of the new refresh.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  They should have dropped it $50. It's like, oh, here's our boring phone.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So then, so then here's.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  The boring phone will cost less money.

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  So I want to.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Like Costco.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  You know, like, this is the Kirkland of the iPhone.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  Buy 50 iPhones. But it's, but like Costco, it's what, it's like the iPhone box has been scaled up to, like the cereal boxes at Costco. You just open it, there's 90 iPhones.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  I want to talk about cameras, but I, just on this point of pricing boringness, the report's out from the analysts. Take them or leave them, but they're saying iPhone 8 demand is pretty flat. Everyone's waiting for the iPhone X.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Well, when you think about, they're all basing off pre-orders. We're recording this and the iPhone 8 isn't even in stores yet. It's, it comes out tomorrow.

• 17:21Nilay Patel?

  I have one now.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Yes, you have two. Aren't you cool?

• 17:25Speaker 02

  But like, they're basing all of this data off of pre-orders. Who is the customer that pre-orders a phone at midnight? Pacific time of day goes up.

• 17:32Nilay Patel?

  Traditionally, all of them.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  No, not all of them. Not all of the customers.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  When was the last time an iPhone was sold out? Okay.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  The customer that does that is the customer that's going to want to wait for the iPhone X. The customer that does that is the enthusiast, the one that cares. They're the one that know the difference between the 8 and the 10. Of course, the 8's demand is going to.

• 17:49Nilay Patel?

  I know a lot of people who don't even know the 8 exists.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Isn't going to peak until January, when you like, you know, get to the average customer that's waltzing into their Walmart and Best Buy and, and Verizon store or whatever, and they're like, "Oh, my iPhone broke. I need a new phone." And what is the one that they have in stock? It's the iPhone 8.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  What I want the listener to know is that when Dan was saying that, he was doing a jaunty walking motion with his arms. Deedally, deedally.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Listen, I like to provide visuals. But like, you know, that's when the iPhone 8 demand is going to reach its highest, or when its sales are going to do the best, or when it's like in the stores and just the average person is buying it because they're not caring about the latest and greatest. And maybe they don't want to spend a thousand bucks on a phone. They don't want to think about it.

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's the question, right? Has Apple successfully segmented their line? Where only enthusiasts are going to want the 10, the sort of regular person buys an 8 and is happy. And they're not, you know what I mean? Like, that's a big move. They haven't been able to pull that off before.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't see, but like, it's interesting that they're doing that now at a year when the lineup is more crowded than ever before. The 6S is still available. The 7 is still available.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  So I know why the 6S is available.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yes, you can share that in a second. The 8 is available, and then you've got the 10, and you still have the SE available as well. I mean, like, you walk into an Apple store and there's six iPhones staring at you on almost every price point that you can think of.

• 19:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the cheaper ones are there for emerging markets. So we said this, actually, I think we said this on the show last week, the editor of Gadgets 360, Kanal Dora, told me that the 6S is by far the best-selling iPhone in India.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  But, I mean, I don't doubt that at all, and it makes sense there, but like, it's also still available here in the US. So like, you'll still be able to go into an Apple store and buy 6S, or order a 6S from apple.com.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  Which, by the way, has a headphone jack.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  And 16 gigs of storage.

• 19:42Nilay Patel?

  Hey, three songs listened to in the most conveniently way possible.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  I feel like, right now, if someone put a bullet through my iPhone 7, and it was just totally dead.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm looking at your iPhone 7 now, and it's halfway there, but...

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's halfway there, but it's not actually dead yet. I think I'd just get another iPhone 7.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  So Jeff Fowler reviewed them for the Wall Street Journal, and that was basically his advice. He's like, just buy a 7. Don't spend the money to buy an 8. If you're the sort of person who doesn't want a 10, don't just, you don't need to step down one. You can actually save more money.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  It does put that, the 8, in that really weird spot, because the lineup is so crowded this year, and there's so many different options available. So like, if there wasn't the other ones available, and it was just the 8 and the 10, I think that makes, like, the 8 would be, you know, super popular. Of course, you know, that said, the 8 is the one that's going to get a lot of the marketing push, so.

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Apple told me that they're going to go hard marketing the 8 and the 10 simultaneously, which I think is fascinating, like... That's if they start calling it the 10 in the ads and there's like, they're just gonna run into that.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm I'm kind of in a position where like, my mom is due for a new iPhone this fall and like, she's coming from a 5C, so she's like, literally anything in the store will be an upgrade for her. And I'm like, I don't do, she doesn't need an eight, she doesn't care, like, heck, she'd be happy with a 6S.

• 21:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, she keeps it that long.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Do I get her a 6S?

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, no, if she's got the 5C, I think if you, if you were the sort of person who keeps a phone that long, you should actually buy a more expensive phone.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's that reasoning, I get it.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  At the same time, like, basically, with most iPhones at least, you can guarantee that, or you can, don't have to worry about getting software updates because they're gonna get delivered to it for a longer time. But, I don't know, we'll see how it goes.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so, now we gotta talk about it. So, Paul's sitting there with the Essential phone. That has an edge-to-edge LCD. With a big, silly notch at the top.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  It's not a big silly notch, it's just a little cute little notch.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  I would say it's a completely forgettable notch, which is also what I feel like.

• 21:43Nilay Patel?

  That's true, you can barely see it. But it's, it's still got.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  It's like a little hole punch.

• 21:48Nilay Patel?

  It's got a notch. That's my, my only point is got a notch, and then you can decide how adorable that notch is or is not.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  On your own time.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  You can make that.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Off the clock.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  Off the clock. Adorable rating.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Okay, but I'm here to work. Let's talk about notches.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  So, Apple could have done an edge-to-edge LCD. There have been other edge-to-edge LCD phones. They didn't do it. They kept the design the same.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  Obviously, the 10 has an edge-to-edge OLED with, I think, a much less adorable notch.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  But the difference with the 10's edge-to-edge, and you can see it on the Essential phone, is there's no bottom bezel.

• 22:29Nilay Patel?

  Right, because they've got to do the electronics for the backlight, I believe.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Right, exactly, for the LCDs, yeah.

• 22:33Nilay Patel?

  So, but my question.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Also, there is serious light leak at the top of the Essential phone.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I've noticed that too. But my question is, can you price a phone like the iPhone 8 against its nearest competitor, which is actually the Galaxy S8, in terms of price? It's like no contest the S8 is a better piece of hardware, right?

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, like, you'd look at the two, and one looks like the same thing you've been looking at for four years, and one looks like the future. And like, if that matters to you, it's a pretty obvious. Obvious call that the S8 is the more appealing looking phone. I mean, it gives you, I mean, you said this in the review, the 5.8 inch Galaxy S8, which is this quote, "smaller one," has a way bigger screen than the iPhone 8, and is not that much physically bigger. It's got glass on both sides, it's got the sloping curved design, it's got, you know, those tiny little bezels. You know, all of these things are things that like make the S8 visually more appealing than an iPhone 8, which is, an iPhone 7, which is, an iPhone 6S, which is an iPhone 6.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  So, I mean, it's, it's like, and especially if they're at the same price point, it's, it's an interesting thing where like, you can go into a carrier store and say like, "I'm gonna spend $650 on a new phone," or $700 on a new phone, and there's the iPhone 8 staring at you, and then there's an S8 staring at you next to it, and like, the visually, the more appealing one is the Samsung. Like, that's a world we live in, and that's like, very strange.

• 24:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  To say that, but, I mean, I, I, virtually anyone that picks up the, the S8 is like, "Wow, this is really nice, and feels really nice, handles really nicely."

• 24:12Nilay Patel?

  And no camera bump.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  No camera bump.

• 24:14Nilay Patel?

  Just a thing I'll point out.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Terrible fingerprint scanner.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  Terrible fingerprints.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  No camera bump.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  And miserable eye recognition, right? Like, it just doesn't work. Actually, I do wanna talk about camera, I've been threatening to talk about cameras. So you and I disagree here. I think that the iPhone 8 and the Pixel, they're very different. The Pixel is like a very accurate camera, it produces pretty good, flat images. The iPhone 8 produces extraordinarily pleasing images. Some of the processing that Apple's doing is wonky. It's like they split the difference between where they were in Samsung, and kinda landed in the water sometimes. But on the, on the whole, they like, they're doing a good job, they're saturating the images more. I think portrait lighting is their way of doing some of the crazy face smoothing that Samsung does automatically, cuz it definitely smooths your face a little bit.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Especially in selfies.

• 25:03Nilay Patel?

  But you think the S8 takes better photos.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think that they... It really depends on the situation and in certain circumstances, the S8 will take a better photo. In certain circumstances, maybe the iPhone 8 will take a better photo. I don't think that you can definitively say one is obviously better than the other.

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  And, and like, the, the thing that with Samsung photos is um, you are most likely viewing them on your Samsung phone, which already has a very vibrant punchy display. So it makes that appearance that they're like oversaturated and over sharpened even a little more aggressive. So if you move them over to your computer, look at them on a different device, you'll notice that they're like way scaled back from what you were seeing on your phone. So that kind of like actually works against Samsung's favor when you're using them because you're like, oh my God, that's so saturated. But the, I think that like Samsung does a really awesome job when you're taking a portrait of somebody of metering for the correct thing that you're taking of. Like it knows you're taking a picture of a person, it meters for their face and not the background.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  And in all the comparisons I've done side by side in those situations, which are mostly just taking pictures of my kids. The Samsung one is the image that I prefer because it metered for the subject I was taking a picture of and not the background or just getting an average of the whole frame like the iPhone tended to do. So that meant that like maybe it was a little bit brighter and maybe, maybe the colors were a little more saturated. But I mean, I, I'm not, when I'm taking photos of my kids, I'm not like there like documenting to preserve the uh, exact situation. I'm there to like capture a memory and like look back on it and be happy with it and be pleasing. And like when I look at the image, I want the image that like looks better. Like even if it's not technically, you know, clinically accurate, right?

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Um, and I think that most people would say that about their smartphone photos. They're not photographers, they're not scientists, they're just want to take photos that they're happy with.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  And I think this is the split the difference moment for Apple because they, they know that, they see that. I think there's a lot of, you know, there's like DSO, DXO mark and display made out there. Those companies basically get paid by other companies to like consult on their cameras.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  And then give very high scores.

• 27:17Nilay Patel?

  It's a great racket, by the way. I wish somebody would pay me to consult on their thing and then be like, it's great.

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  But you know, like they're, they're the only benchmarks that exist, basically. And Apple is getting crushed in those benchmarks. And I think they see. People look at Samsung photos on Samsung screens and they're like, colors are bright and vibrant. And they made a little bit of a move to get there. But I think that move like let, because they don't want to. It's like you can sense their lack of enthusiasm for that move in some of these photos. But what they always say is we aim for realism. We want it to be true to life. You can filter it to hell and back if you want after we're done, but we're gonna start with real. And like, I don't know, I just, Samsung photos to me just look crazy sometimes. In a way that like the pixel tends to look very accurate and flat.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  And the iPhone tends, I think they've, again, they split the difference like. They've done kind of like a half-hearted job of already filtering the photo for you, which looks better than before. I don't think the difference between the seven and eight is huge at all. It's like literally like they tweaked a couple sliders. Also, you can tell the pixels are way deeper.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  The depth of the pixels is just.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, we're gonna do like a huge camera shootout where if we're to talk about the Pixel 2 is like leaked.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll probably wait for the Pixel 2 to come out to do that. But like, I mean, I guarantee you what's gonna happen at the end of that. And like, this is based on years of jaded experience. You're gonna have a hard time telling these things apart. They've gotten to the point where, and it's a wonderful point to be, where the cameras in all of them are so good. The processing behind them is so good. The autofocus is so fast that like, it's not, uh, the differences between them are not great. If you're playing at that premium level, if you are looking at phones that are less expensive and cheaper. Then yeah, you know, the first thing you give up is that image quality and the camera quality. But if you're playing in the premium field, you're gonna get a really killer camera on there.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  And you really have to like, like pixel peep and compare side by side to notice a difference, which is great. Which means that like, you don't have to buy a phone based on its camera. Like you can think about other things that you want. Like, do you want a screen that's edge to edge? And do you want waterproofing? Which is also becoming a thing that like most all premium phones have. So I think that's a great thing, but like when you compare them head to head and you get like really into the nerdy like battles of it. Like the reality is the differences in that great between them.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  Unless you buy an essential phone.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Unless you buy an essential phone.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  Not waterproof.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Which is not waterproof and also has a bad camera.

• 29:54Nilay Patel?

  But like adorable notch.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  But like, you know, that was our biggest criticism. This is a $700 phone that's playing in the field of premium phones and doesn't have a premium camera. So like, it's a nonstarter. Those are table stakes.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. So that's the iPhone 8. Is there anything else to say about the iPhone 8?

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Uh, wait for the iPhone 10.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  That's basically, it's coming.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  All the things that like, I will say this, all the things that make the S8 appealing against the iPhone 8 are negated by the iPhone 10. Like if you do that same comparison with the S8 versus the iPhone 10, the iPhone 10 looks more appealing because it like has all those features.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  And a big notch at the top.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  I don't think the notch is a big deal. I don't think it's gonna be a problem at all.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  100% on team embrace the notch, I've decided.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  I'm on team, forget about the notch because November 4th, it comes out November 3rd, right? November 4th, nobody's gonna be thinking about the notch. They're gonna have forgotten about it.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  Are you crazy?

• 30:45Speaker 02

  They're gonna have forgotten about it. They're gonna, they're gonna be using it and they're gonna forget it. Just like the Essential, we were like, when this phone was announced, we were like, oh, the notch is gonna be a really annoying thing and it's gonna be obtrusive and it's gonna get in the way. And then you use the phone for five minutes, you're like, oh, I forgot about it.

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  Okay, you're crazy for two reasons. Here are both of those reasons. One, five people have the Essential phone. So no one even knows what they're saying. We can't find them. If you have one.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  Paul's one of them.

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Paul's here. He thinks it's adorable. This is a loner to be honest. Please come to my website adorablenotchornot.com and let us know what you think. Only five people can visit it.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Hotternotch.com.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, that's rough. But the Apple design community, ex-Apple employees on Twitter, they're all freaking out about this notch.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  And they're all basing it off of screenshots and pictures and like mockups. They're not using the phone in real life yet. And so that's what my point is, that once you use it in real life, you're gonna forget about it.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  The chance of the people who are all fired up about it getting it in their hand.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, they're never gonna admit they're wrong, but like, I'm just saying the average person's not gonna give a rest.

• 31:46Nilay Patel?

  The number of, of like, long philosophical Apple blog, blog posts about what the notch, when they, it's gonna be, I'm so looking forward to it. But here's why I'm on team embrace. I think Apple has made a bunch of bad decisions about what iOS 11 should look like on the 10. Because I don't know if they know this, but it's an OLED screen and that just, most of the background should be black.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  And all of their backgrounds are white.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  And I don't, it's very confusing. Like you, it actually uses more power to do that in OLED.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  I mean, I hear you, but like if you look at Samsung's default interface, it's all white.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because they're copying Apple. Like just Apple, Apple can just like go the other way now.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  So I think app developers are going to solve the notch problem incredibly fast by just blacking out those two ears.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, honestly, I, I agree that I think that should have been Apple's solution. It's like blackout those two year ears, leave them as like the ability to permanently see the time, your battery life and your signals and whatever other indicators are up there. Uh, and, and then just use from the notch below as content.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Um, but.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. It's coming. So that's the eight. Basically wait for the 10 is what we're saying. Uh, I'm going to read a quick ad and then Lauren Good's going to join us. We're going to talk about the Apple TV and the watch, which was Lauren caused quite a stir this week about the watch. But let me read this ad real quick.

• 33:05Nilay Patel?

  Attention, there's been a last minute change to the advertising. Paul is excited to read the MeUndies ad.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  There's an important time every podcast's life where they get sponsored by MeUndies. And today is our day.

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  Take it away, buddy.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  You want to look good in your underwear and be comfortable, right? But that perfect balance is hard to find. Don't sacrifice style or comfort. Check out meundies.com and find the best pair of underwear in the world.

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm sold.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  MeUndies will be the most comfortable pair of underwear you will own. Made from a sustainably sourced, naturally soft fabric that is three times softer than cotton. Ultimate feel-good undies for when you want to feel naked, but not be naked.

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  Why are you so angry about the underwear?

• 33:56Speaker 01

  I'm excited. I'm excited. MeUndies has recognized this as a valid podcast for selling underwear.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  You sound like a general delivering orders.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  It's like a, it's like a downfall over.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Should I read all the bullet points?

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  Yes, all of the bullet points, please.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Hundred percent satisfaction guarantee. They guarantee you will love your undies or your money back. Okay, so right now, MeUndies has an exclusive offer just for our listeners. Never, ever heard before on any podcast. Get 20% off your first pair and free shipping. This is a no-brainer to try. 20% off, free shipping, and 100% satisfaction guarantee. What are you waiting for? To get 20% off, free shipping, and 100% satisfaction guarantee, and get the best and softest underwear you will ever own, go to meundies.com/verge.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  That's meundies.com/verge. This is a limited time offer. Who knows if MeUndies will ever sponsor us again?

• 35:10Nilay Patel?

  I think I know.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  So what are you waiting for? Start wearing the best underwear of your life. It changed my life. Hmm. I guess reading this ad has changed my life. It's time to let MeUndies change yours. Go to meundies.com/verge right now.

• 35:32Nilay Patel?

  Hey, Lauren Good is here. Lauren?

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 35:35Nilay Patel?

  How you doing?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  I'm doing okay. I just wanted to remark that it's 2:12 in the afternoon Pacific time, and my watch has hit 10% battery life.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Are you?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  But I did use LTE quite a bit this morning. Tried to. Sometimes it worked. I called Neil I from it this morning.

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  It sounded great, actually. I was very suspicious of the demo onstage, because, you know, they had the woman on the paddleboard.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  And she was waving her arm, and I was like, this audio sounds very compressed. But Lauren called me for a watch. It sounded great.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Lauren, were you using the AirPods when you called?

• 36:05Speaker 03

  I was not. No, I was just speaking to the watch.

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  Sounded really good. So Lauren, I want to talk about Apple TV Lights, but I feel like we have to just get into it with Lauren. You caused quite a stir this week, along with our friend Joanna Stern of The Journal. Both of you published your Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE reviews, and both of you basically said, "I can't recommend it. It doesn't work." And then Apple sent hit squads after both of you. You've escaped. You're currently in an undisclosed location. But walk us through...

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Calling us from a surfboard.

• 36:34Nilay Patel?

  And, exactly. Lauren's just paddling in the middle of the ocean, under the waves. But...

• 36:41Nilay Patel?

  It's funny you said it's 212 and my watch is 100%. Like, your review is meticulously detailed with timestamps, basically, of experiences you had with the watch. Walk us through what happened with it for you and where your thoughts are now.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Sure. So, I actually ended up with two review units because the first one proved problematic in other ways. When I first got the loner unit from Apple of Series 3 with LTE, I also got a new iPhone 8 that was connected via AT&T. So, both the watch and the phone were on AT&T, just to make that clear. Some people were upset that I didn't mention that in the video. Within the first full day of using the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE, I noticed I was having both issues making cellular calls happen. And with Siri specifically, Siri was really the first problem I had. One of the new features of the watch is that Siri is supposed to audibly talk back to you from the watch when you're using it, and that wasn't happening.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  And then, when I was using Siri to try to initiate phone calls and text messages, because, let's be honest, it's a really tiny little display, and so tapping through it can be annoying. And so, I was trying to use Siri as much as possible. Siri just kept getting stuck and wasn't, just didn't seem to be able to connect. I think that the latter issue was also related to the problems I was having just with Wi-Fi to LTE connectivity. But the first issue of Siri not responding was definitely a problem. So, Apple gave me a second review unit a couple of days after I received the first one. And that one, I was able to get audible responses from Siri,

• 38:23Speaker 03

  but I still had the issues where I would leave my desk or walk away from my apartment. I would either leave my phone behind, or I would have my phone turned off or have it on airplane mode. And I would expect to get cellular service. And instead of getting cellular service and seeing the three or four green bars, or whatever you're supposed to see to indicate LTE service, the watch would appear to want to connect to some type of Wi-Fi network nearby, and then just kind of get stuck on that. And there's no manual way to turn off Wi-Fi on the watch, so I had no option, and I had no way to really tell the watch, "Okay, don't connect to Wi-Fi, default to cellular." Because I'm away from my phone, there's just no way to do that. But really, at the end of the day, you shouldn't have to do that.

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  The watch should just work, and it's not working the way it should.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  I think that's the major point here, right? Like, Apple released a statement to you about unauthenticated Wi-Fi networks. Then there was a lot of, like, Apple blogging follow-up about captive portal networks.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of captive portals.

• 39:26Nilay Patel?

  Um, the captive portal thing, by the way. Never have I experienced the words "captive portal." "Hurled" is an insult, the way Twitter reacted to this yesterday. Uh, you just don't understand captive portals. And it's like, no, I've been in hotels before. But, the, the, and then Apple, you know, they said to us, "One of the fixes is that you could go on your Mac, and you could open your Wi-Fi settings on your Mac, not on a phone, and delete all the networks, and that would sync over to iCloud, and you wouldn't connect to captive portals anymore." Which is insane, just from the jump, for many reasons. One, uh, you shouldn't have to do that, that's one.

• 40:10Nilay Patel?

  Two, a lot of people with iPhones and Apple Watches don't have Macs, right? So like, you can't. So that's just broken for those people. And, three, Lauren, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think that describes all of your problems, like, at all, right?

• 40:28Speaker 03

  No, there were definitely, um, there were definitely spots where I was walking or just basi- basically walking, um, I'm like trying, like I, I wasn't really running that hard. Um, where I knew myself that I, I didn't think that I had ever connected to that wifi network before, whatever it was. So whether it was walking through an apartment complex that is not my own, that is blocks from my own apartment complex. And, and me thinking, yeah, I've never, I've never signed into wifi here before. I don't think there's a captive portal network here. And yet the watch would sort of get stung, uh, excuse me. And then, and yet the watch would sort of get hung on, um, on wifi. It happened at a shopping mall

• 41:11Speaker 03

  where I don't think that I've ever logged into wifi before. Um, it happened near the office here, you know, like just, just far away enough from the office where I'm thinking, yeah, I don't think I've ever, I've ever logged into any type of wifi network here before. Um, so it's really unusual, but then there were times, I mean, I should mention as well, like there are times that it worked. Like I called Neelai from a coffee shop, uh, or a bagel shop this morning and, um, I've never logged into that bagel shop before on wifi and, and for whatever reason, the call worked. Um, so it's just like, it was just a very inconsistent experience. I also discovered, uh, which is not, I guess this is the way AT&T works. I also discovered that if the phone was turned off or in airplane mode,

• 41:53Speaker 03

  I couldn't send a text message to Dieter who's on Android, um, through the watch. So there are like these weird little things, um, that the watch is doing in terms of its prioritizations and its handoff between connectivity. It's just like, frankly, I just don't think it should, it should work this way. And we're, you know, we're pretty, we're pretty nerdy. We really try to troubleshoot when we review. We really get into this stuff and I think a lot of our audience does too. But I think about, um, people who maybe don't want to spend the time trying to troubleshoot their wristwatches and like this should, this shouldn't be happening this way.

• 42:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think that's the main point. There was so much yesterday about what's wrong and like, do there, is it actually broken or is this like a bug that you can fix? And it's like, it's an expensive device with a promised capability and you, uh, probably shouldn't have to understand how that's gonna work in order to use it. You should, it should just work, which is like a very classic Apple thing. Uh, it feels like the- That the bar has moved for Apple in terms of like it just works. It used to be it's gonna make a whole bunch of decisions for you that you may or may not like, but it will work as it's promised to work. And if you hate those decisions, you should like get a Windows PC or something. This one just feels like it made a whole bunch of decisions and they're still not the right ones.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  And also, they haven't, they don't have music yet.

• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Like, I, I, I'm glad that you did all this work to test the connectivity to talk to Siri, to make phone calls, but I'm never gonna make a phone call. The whole reason I'd get LTE on a watch would be for streaming music.

• 43:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Is there a timeline on that, Lauren?

• 43:27Speaker 03

  We believe it's coming next month. I think Apple has said it's coming next month, but we don't know for sure. And also, it's just, it's just kind of a, it's not ready thing. I mean, it's, it's hard to get a straight answer as to why this, this isn't launching at the time the watch is launching.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  I'm curious to know, and, and I guess we'll find out whenever Apple issues its bug fix for this Wi-Fi issue. I, I'm very curious to see if that resolves all of the connectivity issues. Cause when I look at the Apple Watch and, and Lauren, we, we talked about this through while we were doing edits on your review. It's like, the one difference between the LTE Apple Watch and other LTE smartwatches is where the antenna is. And other LTE smartwatches have put it in the band, which carries a lot of problems. It's uncomfortable, it's stiff, you can't change it, it's very obvious why Apple didn't do that. But the LTE signal works and is reliable. And then Apple made a big deal on stage about how they're using the screen as the antenna for this, this connectivity. And I'm curious if that has something to do with it.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Maybe that's not as reliable as other methods. Apple's never been great at wireless radios, especially in its mobile devices. The iPhone's wireless radio is not nearly as strong as other phones. So I'm just curious as to how much this is gonna be a design and hardware issue versus a software issue. And I guess we'll just have to find out and wait when they issue bug fixes.

• 44:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  The only explanation we've heard so far is that it's a software thing. But we may hear more in the coming days.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  And a bunch of other reviewers didn't have any problems, to be fair. But I suspect that those people never left their houses.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  So I saw him say, no.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, you know, for all, you know, to be fair, uh, I believe Nicola at BuzzFeed swam out to Alcatraz and, and, and it worked for her. I don't know why it didn't work for Lauren on a surfboard much closer to shore, but it didn't.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  Because there's a captive.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  The only thing we can do.

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  There is a shark waiting for you to log into his webpage authentication system.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  It's flipper fine.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  The weirdest thing about the, um, the, the most interesting thing about the surfing example, which we showed in the video, and, and I should just give a quick shout out to our video producers who we started shooting the B-roll for this video, you know, throughout the week, all week and, and, um, and then we had to make all of these last minute adjustments and changes because of the issues. Um, but when we tested it on the surfboard, that was one of those instances where it either showed disconnected with a red X at the top of the watch, or it showed one bar of cellular of, of LTE and you can see it's like it's green, right? So it's either if it's connected to wifi, it's a blue wifi signal of disconnected, it says disconnected in red letters. And then if there's LTE, it shows in green. So

• 46:16Speaker 03

  it was like vacillating between disconnected or one bar. And so I was able to make a phone call to Veron Povic very briefly from my wrist while on a surfboard. But, um, but what's interesting is that I took a full fledged phone call from my phone on the beach, um, like feet away. And that was, that was fine.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  So it could have been the distance between being out in the water versus the shore that made all the difference. Um, or it could have just been that the watch was falling down a week or six.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  So here I think is the ultimate question with the watch, right? But presumably they'll fix the software. Apple's good at that historically and they'll ship it and it'll work. And if it's not some weird antenna problem, it'll be fine. But why are they rushing this out? What is the, they have no competition in this space, like none, as far as I can see.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, they could just ship it in December and be fine.

• 47:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. As long as they get it out in time for people to buy, you know, I don't know, it's taken a stocking. Do you step, put like a $400 watch in a stocking? As long as they take time.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  If you're Michael Scott.

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  For that moment, right? Like the Black Friday watch sale will be the older generation. It's not, you know, like, as, as long as they get the new one out in time for that holiday shopping period. It's it's fine. As far as I can tell, it's just fine.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  I mean, it's

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  Why rush it out?

• 47:33Speaker 02

  It's a great question because from based on reporting, I believe from Bloomberg and others, this is already delayed a year. Like, they wanted to put the LTE watch out last year and they couldn't do it because the components weren't miniaturized enough. Or maybe they were working on the screen antenna or something like that.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  There was like a 56K Real-Earth Robotics modem sitting next to the one.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  So like, it's already, you know, based on reports later than Apple had anticipated or wanted to push it out. And so why why rush it out now is a great question. Lauren, do you feel like it's buggy in any way except for because it's got WatchOS 4 too, right? It's like, is that polished? Or is it just the connectivity? Like, what's the split there?

• 48:09Speaker 03

  I really like WatchOS 4. I gave that two thumbs up in my review and didn't really have anything negative to say about WatchOS 4. I did discover today that the heart rate tracking features of WatchOS 4 won't work on the very first Apple Watch, the OG, which launched in 2015. It will only work on the Series 1, 2, and 3. The Series 1 came out the same time as the Series 2 because they essentially renamed the original one, Series 1, and gave it a new processor. Anyway, you have the very first Apple Watch, you won't get all the features of WatchOS 4. But I liked WatchOS 4. I would say my three biggest issues with the watch were the fact that the first unit I had didn't have a working Siri. So that marred the experience.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  The second was the handoff issues, the connectivity issues. And then the third was was battery life and just how badly battery life was impacted by LTE.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Lauren, I have a question for you. Had the connectivity been working as advertised, do you think that it's worth the cost of admission? Because we're talking about a more expensive watch, and we're talking about a monthly service fee.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  That is when you get into the more subjective aspects of a review, because that's when you start to weigh the costs and benefits of something that actually works. And so that value proposition is going to be different for different people. For me, I personally would not, even if it had been perfect working connectivity and I had those few magic moments of LTE working when I like absolutely needed it, I just still don't think I would pay $400 upfront, plus the $10 per month on top of my monthly cell bill to have the, that, um, those rare conveniences because I happen to have my phone on me a lot. But I have heard a lot of other people say, leading up to the event and since the event, uh, when Apple first announced this, that they were really excited about the possibility for this.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  What do you guys think? Would you, would you get, would you pay extra for a smartwatch with LTE?

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Uh, I would not. And, and I think that it comes down to, um, the smartwatch as it stands now, including the Apple Watch Series 3, is still an accessory to the phone. And like, I've worn, just like you Lauren, you know, we've, we've both been reviewing these things forever. Uh, and like, I've worn every single smartwatch that's ever come out and, you know, there's this notion or this ideal that people have that they think they're going to use their phone less or look at their phone less because they have a smartwatch. And the reality is that the smartwatch, it maybe it gives them notifications on their wrist or whatever, but you're still pulling your phone out of your pocket to do anything. Cause like, doing anything on the smartwatch is still a chore and still frustrating.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  So like, there's very few instances I can think of, and none of which actually fit into my own personal life, but that where a connected smartwatch is actually going to be useful to me. And they're like, you go for, you're, you're a runner or you go to work out at the gym. Uh, if anybody's seen me and you know that I don't do those things, um, then it, then yeah, that's awesome because you don't want to bring a phone with you and you still want to be able to like, send, get their, uh, get a phone call or text message if you need it, but you're only gone for like an hour or two or whatever. Or if you like, you know, run out to the corner store to get something and you forget your phone at home, well, you're covered by your watch or whatever. But like, those are like pretty niche scenarios and, uh, you know, I, personally for me, that's certainly not worth paying extra money for.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Um, and I don't think we're at the point where like the watch is like an independent enough device to where you can actually justify its cost of a monthly service plan. That, that's me. Like you said, you know.

• 51:41Nilay Patel?

  Especially not for the same price as an iPad service plan. Yeah, like if

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Exactly. There's so much more like I'm I'm one of those people that actually pays extra to connect my iPad to the network because I always want connectivity with my net to the network on my iPad. But like, I could do a lot of stuff on my iPad that I can't do on a watch for obvious reasons.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  This was $2 a month. I'm big. Yeah, sure.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  But 10 is like, what? What?

• 52:05Speaker 02

  And if you and if you like

• 52:06Nilay Patel?

  money.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  And they're doing the promotion now. So they're like, you know, first three months are free and waive your activation fees. What if you get this in February of next year?

• 52:13Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I don't understand about the first two months are free. That implies that at the end of that three months, you will have, you'll be like addicted to it.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  You're like, I can't live without this. I think a lot of people are like, I can super live without this.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Because guess what? I still have my phone with me all the time.

• 52:29Nilay Patel?

  Phone.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  Paul, what about you?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. What? I can save $10 a month and get longer battery life.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  I I'm still not really a smart watch person.

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I I find no utility. I want to.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  One thing, and maybe Lauren, you can and I'll opine on this as well. I don't think the series three Apple Watch changes the equation for either of you or for someone who's like not a smart watch person.

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  It doesn't. It doesn't make the smart watch more appealing if you already are like not have decided that like, that's not for you.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  I don't mean that.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would agree with that. I think we we've seen, Dan, you've reviewed a lot of LTE smart watches before.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  Well, not a lot. There are only so many out there, but the Samsung version and the LG version. And I think, of course, you can make a whole argument about operating systems and what ecosystem you're getting tied into. But I think if you're the kind of person who heard about those watches and you weren't super excited by that idea or thinking like, oh, yeah, that's something I should consider now, then I don't see how this make. I don't see how this makes that happen either.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I but in they've been focusing it on health and fitness over time. Like, I cannot think of another watch app that exists that I want, right? Like notifications, fitness tracking. It's what we all suspected when the watch came out would be it's like killer apps. They still are, right? And now you have a little bit of like run while streaming music.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  I like to check the time.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Mostly what I do with a watch on my wrist.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Do you look at your watch to check the time?

• 54:05Speaker 02

  I've been a person that's been wearing a watch on my wrist since I was like eight years old. I'm wearing a smartwatch today.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  What is it?

• 54:11Speaker 02

  This is a Galaxy, or it's a Samsung Gear S2.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  That looks nice.

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Couple of years ago. Thank you.

• 54:15Nilay Patel?

  No flat tire?

• 54:16Speaker 02

  No notch?

• 54:17Speaker 03

  That one does have an LTE option, right?

• 54:18Speaker 02

  It does. This is, this one does not have that LTE option because I just don't find value in that. But like, if I'm not wearing a smartwatch, I'm wearing an analog watch. Because that's like, I feel comfortable with it on my wrist because I've been wearing them forever. And that's how I check the time and especially how I check the date. I get really mad if I'm wearing a watch. It doesn't tell me the date.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Lauren, do you look at your wrist to look for the time?

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do now, actually. I'm going to make a statement. I hope this isn't a huge generalization, but it kind of is. Oftentimes, you guys are wearing pants that have pockets. And so your phone goes in your pocket throughout the day. So even if you step away from your desk to grab a coffee or go to the restroom, whatever you're doing, your phone is always with you. There are times when I don't wear clothing with pockets. And so then I step away from my desk and I actually don't have my phone on me. I mean, it's still within range. It's like 10 feet away. But then if I need to check the time, I look at my wrist.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, Lauren, I think the only solution to that problem is to carry a microwave everywhere. No, this is true. Megan Fruchmash and I were recording a promo for the Mr. Robot Show, the after show that we're doing. And I just like put my mic pack in my pocket and she went for hers. And she was just like, you know what? Women's pockets are not designed to be useful. It was just like, very true. Rack discovered it. It's a whole thing.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Here, this is an interesting, so I like to listen to audiobooks and podcasts almost all the time when I'm not like working at my computer. So if I get up to go to the restroom at work, right? I bring my phone with me. I have it in my pocket, my man pockets. And I have my headphones in.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  If, if I could get up from my desk and seamlessly keep listening to what I was listening to. And leave everything behind and everything's just like all the audio just starts streaming through my wrist now into my AirPods that I've now purchased.

• 56:04Nilay Patel?

  And then I gotta solve that captive portal product problem before that. I mean, like first it just has to work.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  But like that that does sound something to aspire to. Like that doesn't seem like we're there yet.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  And that's like one of those ideals that people have about smartwatches that have not really panned out in reality. And like, I was talking about this with Ben Popper yesterday and he's like, he's like, man, it'd be awesome if I could just like, you know, put my phone away and still feel like I'm not completely disconnected. And I'm like, that's a great ideal. Like, in my experience, I have my phone on me more when I'm wearing a smartwatch because I'm using my phone to fidget with the smartwatch or like to set up the smartwatch or to control the notifications of the smartwatch. Like, I end up looking at my phone more. Or I like, you know, get a notification on my, uh, on my wrist and it's like too much of a chore to read it and click the link that's in it or whatever it is. And I just

• 56:57Speaker 02

  pull my phone out anyway. So like, I, I don't think that ideal has borne out in reality.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm definitely gonna start texting you more links. So Lauren, right now you can't recommend it because, you know, it doesn't work. But assuming it works, I mean, like, that's true. Like Lauren was on CNBC yesterday, like, can't recommend it. Joanna, her headline in the journal was like, I can't recommend this to you. Assuming they can solve the bugs and there's no timeline for that. So that's a big assumption. Is this like a worthwhile upgrade or is this just a, you actually, you know, run so much that it's worthwhile to pay the money?

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Um, so I really don't want to be Debbie Downer on this, but I do want to point out one more thing about that, which is, um, Apple's battery estimate, battery life estimates for Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE. Um, they're saying it can get the same 18-hour battery life as the other watches. That is actually based only on a half hour of working out per day with LTE. Once you start to exceed a half hour of working out in workout mode using LTE, the battery life is actually going to drain more. So my argument for that is, I mean, I don't- Often run more than a half hour because I'm not as big of an outdoor runner as I used to be. But a lot of people go on really long outdoor runs and a lot of people go on really long hikes, for that matter, that last much longer than that.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Uh, so the value is, and then there's no streaming music right now. So the value proposition even for workout people isn't necessarily there yet. So I would say if you really, really love the idea of LTE and on your wrist, and you loved the idea of it even before these reviews came out, then once this is fixed, this might still be worth it to you. Because you're going to be that person who's like, I already factored into my mind that I'm going to pay $10 a month for this intermittent convenience that I might have. Um, but otherwise I would say just go with the series three without LTE.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it seems like the move. Okay, I'm gonna read one more ad and then we're gonna talk about receiver lights and surround sound, which is what everyone came for.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Codex.

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  Everyone loves a good codec conversation. Do they?

• 59:01Nilay Patel?

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• 59:46Nilay Patel?

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• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so can I, I'm just gonna put this out there. I did not know how many home theater spec nerds were in the world, and I did not know-

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure you did.

• 1:00:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it's a number, it's a number far higher than I anticipated. And they all read the thing, the Apple TV review today. So, we had the iPhone review, Lauren's watch review, and then I reviewed the Apple TV today, all back to back.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  You can see them all on theverge.com/guidebook?

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you can use our offer code, VERGE, just type it in. It's theverge.com is our offer code, find the nearest browser, type it in, you get the Verge for free.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Unlimited free content.

• 1:01:02Nilay Patel?

  So, Apple gave me the Apple TV, they're excited to give it to me because I've been on this podcast a lot, talking about how I want all the lights on my receiver to light up, I want Dolby Vision, I want Dolby Atmos. I just want it all to work. It's very hard to get that all to work. They were really pumped, I met with, you know, them, their executive was talking to other people. Took it home, plugged it in, and basically was extraordinarily disappointed. And to explain my disappointment, I had basically no choice but to write 2,300 words about video mode switching, which is not what you want to do with your time in life, usually. But we did it, Dieter was editing it, Dan edited it, and I basically said to Dieter,

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  "This has an audience of one person, which is John Syracusea, who I know complains about this stuff on his podcast, but also is like the person who used to write the 30,000-word OS 10 reviews for Ars Technica."

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's like, it's like a snack of a review for him.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, as a little baby-

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Little nibble.

• 1:02:00Nilay Patel?

  But it's like, literally I thought in my mind that this has an audience of one person. And the thing has exploded today, so there's a lot of AV nerds out there. Here, to me, and I talk to Apple a lot about this. Here's the problem with the Apple TV. Fundamentally, is that Apple didn't make a TV. And the more I think about this, the more it's obvious to me that this is the problem.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  We really need to get Gene Munster as a guest on this show.

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  No, they don't, they're, they're not in control of the panel, right? The, the physical display of the thing.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Well, more importantly, they're not in control of the software that controls the panel.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  What, I mean, like, anybody can make the panel, but if, if Apple came out with a TV, where they're gonna source the panel from LG, like they do on the IMAX.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  They're controlling the software that drives that panel.

• 1:02:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they're not in control of the panel.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:49Nilay Patel?

  What I mean, the panel, I mean, the software. Right, there's a TV connected to your Apple TV, and they really cannot control that TV. So, instead of doing that, and this is true on the old Apple TV too, uh, they just put it in the best mode that they think they can find. So, on the old Apple TV, it always runs at 1080p, 60 Hz. So, you can think of it as a 60 frames per second refresh, right? And everyone has complained about that for years, because movies are shot at 24 frames per second, so to display them on a 60 Hz TV, you have to, like, interpolate frames, you have to do all this stuff. If you're a huge nerd, it looks bad. I think you have to be a massive snob to care about that, like, it's not...

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  It would be nice if they switched modes, but 99% of people can't really see it.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  I can spot a any TV, anywhere.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  I don't even need a A/B, I don't even need a A/B test. Just show me a TV, I'll tell you.

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  What hurts it to?

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Nilay Patel?

  This is so wacky.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  The, the, the TV at the San Francisco office that we watched.

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's like motion smoothing.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Nilay Patel?

  It's not doing that.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's different.

• 1:03:59Nilay Patel?

  It's not, that's way different. I can spot motion smoothing a mile away, too. And it looks like garbage.

• 1:04:07Nilay Patel?

  So, on the old Apple TV, they run everything at 60 Hz. And people complain about it because they want to run it at 24 Hz, but whatever. On the new one, 4K HDR, they run the TV at 4K HDR all of the time.

• 1:04:21Nilay Patel?

  And they won't switch back to SDR, the normal dynamic range. That means everything on the TV gets converted into HDR. And their conversion is bad. Like, it's not good. So when we went and watched The Dark Knight, or other movies on HBO Go, or other movies from other services, or other shows, or whatever, they were getting pumped up to HDR, even though they're not HDR content. And so it just looked bad. iTunes, and I think this is like some Apple bubble. I was like, this looks bad. They're like, well, did you watch The Dark Knight on iTunes? Because we remastered it.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Oh, right.

• 1:04:59Nilay Patel?

  So like, okay, so I went and watched it on iTunes. It looks great on iTunes. Apple actually has the best encoding ever for iTunes, because they go to the studios, and they only have one device, and they master it for their one single device. And that's the end of that. And it looks great.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Which, to be honest...

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  Is choice. That's awesome.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  And that pushes further your theory that they should just make it TV.

• 1:05:19Nilay Patel?

  They should just make the TV.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Which, literally, until this very moment, after, after, I mean, I worked in gadget. I've been in gadget news for 12 years. And since all of that time, Gene Munster's been writing reviews, like, rumors that Apple will come out with a TV. Never thought it was a good idea, right this moment.

• 1:05:38Nilay Patel?

  Right, when I told you they encode their own shit. So it doesn't, it does this weird thing with Dolby Vision and HDR 10, where it does, they just won't mode switch. They said to me, we think it's inelegant to mode switch, which is the most Apple thing I've ever heard. They had some good points, too, which is like, some, like, bad TVs, when they mode switch, sometimes just like fail out. And they put up that weird green HDMI screen, right, if they don't get the handshake right again, whatever. But like, if you're buying the most expensive TV streamer on the market, I suspect you have a TV that can handle it, right? It feels that way to me.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  And, and you have to have, like, a really bad TV to have those issues. Like, the one that we always refer to as like the best TV to buy this year, it's not an expensive TV. It's $600.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Roku TCL TV.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  TCL Roku TV. That's not going to have issues much.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  So the, so the, the video output of this thing looks great in HDR and Dolby Vision. And everything else looks weird. You can set it to not do that, right? Like, you can change the output setting. But when you do that, it lowers the refresh rate and then the interface looks bad. Because you want the interface, the animations of the interface to run at 60 hertz. But if you set, on my TV, my TV only supports Dolby Vision at 30 or 24. So if you set it to Dolby Vision at 30, then the interface looks stuttery. Because what you want it to do is switch to 60 frames per second for the interface and then switch to the native resolution of the movie when it's playing the movie. But they won't do it because it's inelegant.

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like, at some point, something is going to look bad. Because Apple has only picked one mode and that mode is not actually the best mode for most things. So that's like the video side. And on the audio side, it doesn't light up my Atmos light because they don't support Atmos. Yeah. And so I asked them 100 times, "What's going on here?" And they finally, uh, said, "Look, it's, it's not a hardware limitation. We can do it. We're gonna do it." And they said, "I was allowed to report," so we put it in a review. At some point, it's on their roadmap, they're gonna support Atmos on this Apple TV. They won't really tell me why. But I strongly suspect, mostly because Dolby has published a document saying this is true,

• 1:07:59Nilay Patel?

  that the reason they won't support it is because Siri on the box needs to come out of the speakers. So they need to take all of the audio coming in from the movie and like decode it. So they get the audio back, mix Siri's voice to it, re-encode it and send it back out.

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  Oh, so that was gonna be my next question. Hi, I wasn't even sure if I was still a part of this segment. I've been, I honestly have been writing a news story.

• 1:08:24Nilay Patel?

  Hi Lauren.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  No, it's fine. I'm just ranting about lights.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  So that, so that, that has to happen for streaming. It's not, this is not for downloaded content.

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  No, it's the whole thing. So like, if you're playing downloaded content, right, you're still streaming audio through the converter, right? You're, you're playing it in real time. Yeah, it's outputting audio to the TV. Right, at some point in your signal chain. So every other device doesn't decode the Atmos stream. They just pa, they bitstream it. Yeah. They pass it through and then your receiver or your TV. The obvious thing to do. Right. That's doable. It's very doable.

• 1:08:59Nilay Patel?

  But Apple wants Siri to always work. And so they're afraid that if they do the Atmos pass through and you push the Siri button, your receiver will-

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Here's a solution. They put a little speaker on the Apple TV itself and Siri talks to that.

• 1:09:14Nilay Patel?

  This is just my suspicion. And again, it's based on the fact that Dolby has literally published a document being like, "Let's talk about how Dolby works on the Apple TV." And they're like, "It all happens on the thing." And it literally says right there, "Because Apple makes a Siri into the thing." And Apple's like, "We'll do it in a software update." I'm like, "What's the holdup?" And they're like, "Mm, mm, mm." And I'm like, "Oh, it has to be this."

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  Can you imagine, try, I mean, this is like 10 times worse than trying to explain captive portal networks to be, like, this is, imagine if Siri just didn't work on the TV box and people would lose their minds because Siri can already be incredibly frustrating and then, and, but then being like, "Well, here's a white paper on how this is supposed to be working and why it's not." I, I actually kind of understand Apple's approach to this.

• 1:09:56Nilay Patel?

  Right. I, I completely understand because it's so hard. All of these problems, to even identify the single problem, requires endless explanation of why that problem exists. So why does HBO Go look bad on the Apple TV plugged into an expensive LG OLED TV? Let's talk about refresh rates and mode switching.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  That's why this review was 2,500 words.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  With a sidebar, man. Our video team was like, "Keep this under five minutes." So I was like, "I don't think I can."

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  To be, to be clear, is the, is the problem with the way that they mess with footage that's not HDR, the framerate stuff, or the, also the color? Like, when you're watching Game of Thrones, is it color or framerate or both?

• 1:10:39Nilay Patel?

  Game of Thrones looks okay-ish.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  And probably fine because HBO made it themselves. And Apple went and worked with HBO and HBO spent the time on its own stuff.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  Even, even through the HBO Go app?

• 1:10:52Nilay Patel?

  HBO Go looks worse than HBO Now. So that's, I, that's weird.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 1:10:56Nilay Patel?

  There's all kinds of stuff going on there.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Good to know.

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  But.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  What do we, I believe that's what we call.

• 1:11:00Nilay Patel?

  I'm quitting television.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Fragmentation.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  It's super fragmented. But the, the problem, the, the, okay, so the problem.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  It's just insane, just, just tell.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  The problem is the, the, when you play The Dark Knight on HBO Go.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  It's a bad encode of The Dark Knight. It is worse than the encode of The Dark Knight on iTunes. Right? So it has built in problems. Then you're not putting the TV in 1080p SDR where it knows, okay, I'm a 4K HDR TV. I'm getting a 1080p standard dynamic range signal. I am good at interpreting that to look the best on this panel. Because the software is running the panel. Presumably the software has been designed to run that panel. It doesn't know, it just thinks it's getting a 4K HDR signal from the Apple TV. The Apple TV doesn't know anything about the panel. So it's just making a bunch of sort of averaged out decisions about what to do with SDR to remap it into 4K HDR.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  Those decisions on average make bad encodes look worse. So when you watch The Dark Knight, it's a bad encode. It makes everything much brighter and all of the noise just jumps out at you. It gets real sharp and contrasty and shitty. And it wasn't just me who noticed that. Dave Katzmeier at CNET, who I think is probably the best TV reviewer in the industry, called out exactly the same problem. Matthew Panzerino at TechCrunch, he was tweeting about it all day today because he just got his review in it, noticed the same thing. So it's, the problem is because they won't switch modes, SDR content looks bad if it's a bad encode. If it's a really good SDR encode and iTunes is full of them, it looks fine.

• 1:12:44Nilay Patel?

  But your life of streaming content is full of shitty SDR encodes.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Is, is this a problem if you have a lower level TV that's maybe 4K and not HDR?

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it's a problem for a 4K TV.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Or 1080 TV?

• 1:12:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, a 1080 TV is fine, but then why would you buy this if you'd buy the 1080 one?

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  What about, what about YouTube? You said YouTube's not?

• 1:13:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so, and then YouTube.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  Apple and Google have like literally a company level format war about 4K video on the web. Apple supports HEVC, MP4, they're on that side of that world, the patent pool world. YouTube bought a company a couple of years ago, made their codec royalty free, it's called VP9, that's what YouTube generally supports. Apple won't support VP9, so Safari in a Mac generally won't play 4K YouTube. iOS won't play 4K YouTube. Chrome on the Mac, because Google can do whatever it wants in Chrome, can play 4K YouTube. But Chrome on the iPhone, because iOS is locked down, can't play 4K.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  tvOS, subset of iOS, the YouTube app can't bring in its own VP9 encoder and play 4K. So like, they have to solve it.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  So I guess they're Team Softy.

• 1:13:58Nilay Patel?

  What? What is the opposite of crispy? Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  Team soggy?

• 1:14:04Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. The real issue is YouTube is actually the biggest source of 4K HDR content available. I mean, it's like mostly like MKBHD and demo reels from like high sense TVs, but it's out there and you can watch it and it's great. There's a bunch of like, let's play PS4 Pro stuff that's like super fun to watch in 4K HDR YouTube. None of it available to you. And that, this is all just limitations. Like if Apple wanted to unlock TVS a little bit and let Google put the VP9 codec on it, they could. And it's not like the iPhone, where you're like gonna run a software codec and run the processor hot and drain the battery. The thing is plugged into the wall and has a vent at the bottom.

• 1:14:46Nilay Patel?

  You will never know that it's like running less efficiently than the hardware decoder. So it's just like, all of the video side is a bunch of decisions about, well, we can't control your panel, we don't trust mode switching, so we're just picking a mode. Which was more or less fine when they were upscaling to 1080p and running in 6 years. Like it wasn't great, but it was fine. They have not solved the HDR1 is too complicated and makes things, makes particularly bad encodes look way worse. And then on the audio side, again, they say it's coming and I think they've, they are, they won't do it without Siri. If you can't push the button and Siri doesn't talk to you at most, it's not gonna happen. And so who knows, that's like, just give me the switch. I need two switches.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Nilay Patel?

  This product would, I would have given it a nine if they'd given me two switches. One, to disable Siri and enable Atmos. Fine, I'll take it. I don't get Siri. I never use Siri on this thing anyway. And two, enable mode switching. Just give me those two software buttons. No, it's like, they say these things are coming, right? I strongly suspect that after all of this outcry, that they will enable mode switching.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  I think, you know, the, the, are you gonna buy it question really comes down to whether you have content in iTunes or not. Because like, as you made this point in the, in the review, uh, Neelai, like, your 4K HDR TV has a lot of smart apps that are optimized in 4K HDR and all the content you stream through those is great.

• 1:16:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Speaker 02

  So like, the only reason to buy this is for the iTunes content.

• 1:16:19Nilay Patel?

  And if you're not in that world. Movies in iTunes, they're getting upgraded for free. That is enormous value.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Nilay Patel?

  That alone, if you have a big enough iTunes library, justifies the price.

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  And they'll all be good encodes.

• 1:16:29Nilay Patel?

  And they'll all be great encodes because like, Apple has its like, I don't know, team of encoding ninjas that like wander through Hollywood studios. Uh, I mean, that part, uh, so I've been really down on it, but like, that part of it, Apple is one of the most powerful companies in the world. It has great relationships with the music industry and the movie industry. They go to the movie industry. They, they're pushing the industry towards 4K HDR because they have the clout to do it. They've released a high-end device that's connected to their ecosystem. They handle the encodes for the industry. Um, they told me that the industry had expressed some of these concerns about HDR remapping. And they, you know, they'd proven to them that iTunes encodes could look good this way. Like, they are operating at such a high level

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  when it comes to where does the video, like, when the video, when the movie leaves a director's hand, how is it gonna look good when it shows up on a TV? Like, they, probably the highest level in the industry. They're right up there. They're, you know, super tight with Dolby, although apparently the Atmos engineers are locked out of that pizza party.

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  Sorry, so salty about it. Like, they're, they're the ones who are gonna figure it out. Just, there's no one else competing at that level. They're gonna figure out TV. The problem is that until they make the screen, they have to let me adjust their box to work better with my display. Right, you just have to let me do it. Like, you make a Mac, right? You can plug a Mac into a monitor, and you can go fiddle with the monitor settings on the Mac all day and all night to make your monitor look good. That's exactly where they need to land out with a TV. Or they just need to make the monitor and have it all auto-calibrate. And like, the more I keep ranting about this, the more I'm like, I need to assign myself the piece. It's like, Apple should just build a thousand dollar TV.

• 1:18:11Nilay Patel?

  Because if TCL can build a $600 Roku TV that everyone loves, I guarantee you, Apple can build a thousand dollar 55-inch TV that runs an A10X chip in this software that is perfect. And like, they should just do it. Because this controversy is not worth it to them, I don't think.

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  The bummer about-

• 1:18:29Nilay Patel?

  If everyone would buy that TV, they would buy that TV in a heartbeat.

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  The bummer about all of this on the high end, and, and again, you made this point in your review, is that like, this supports Dolby Vision HDR, which is the best HDR in the market. But it doesn't support Dolby Atmos, which is the best audio system on the market. So there's no way, and there's no device that does both.

• 1:18:48Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Like, like-

• 1:18:49Nilay Patel?

  The Chromecast Ultra does both. Many, many people have reminded me of that. But do you know the problem the Chromecast Ultra is? Uh, support for both Vision and Atmos, uh, comes device by device via firmware updates.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  And you have to use your phone as a remote.

• 1:19:03Nilay Patel?

  And you have to, so, whatever, but like, it, the Chromecast Ultra won't do Dolby Vision to my 2016 OLED, one of the most popular TVs released last year, until Google updates the firmware on the Ultra.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:19:14Nilay Patel?

  And I just haven't done it yet. What are they doing? Everything is the worst. Apple just make a TV.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  A whole other podcast.

• 1:19:21Nilay Patel?

  Do you see what I'm saying? They should just make a TV. Yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  I have questions about your thoughts on the interface. Because one of the things that we still hear a lot from people is that they just want from Cast because they don't want an interface. They just want it, they just want to stream from their device, which I personally don't agree with. I like having a destination to go to on the screen and I don't mind the, the apps like experience, but is anything drastically different about that?

• 1:19:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no. It is largely the same. Siri is like a little better at sorting things. You can be like, show me 4K HD movies and.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  It's, it's mastered in 4K now. That's the big difference, right? The, the interface is.

• 1:19:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, the whole interface is in 4K HD. Um, you can't tell. Right? Especially because you should run that interface in dark mode anyway. You're like, those icons are brighter. Like, who cares? Um, uh, yeah, there's nothing notably different. Um, you know, that, that TV app that they released, it's sort of like, it, it goes under noticed. It will be, I talked to a senior executive at Apple, it will eventually become the home screen of the TV, of the Apple TV. But it's, they need to populate, they need to get apps to support it and populate it with content.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  For people who have not used the TV app, what happens when you open the TV app?

• 1:20:31Nilay Patel?

  So, the TV app is not, it doesn't actually have any video itself. But it's, it, all the apps that support it, plug in, send it data about what you're watching, how far along you've gotten, and then it can make recommendations about what's in all your other apps. Apple can promote content that's in other apps. Apple can do things like put Planet of the Apps on the first touchscreen, in case you want to have that experience in your life. So it's basically, you, you download Hulu and Amazon when it comes to it, and ESPN and CNN and, I don't know, whatever else. And it'll show you like, here's what's in your iTunes library, here's what's popping on Hulu, here's the stuff you've watched, here's what you can finish watching in all these apps. It, it'll kick you into those apps.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:14Nilay Patel?

  But then you can come back to it.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  I thought that was already the default.

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  And the, and the big holdout is Netflix.

• 1:21:18Nilay Patel?

  The big, the big holdout is Netflix because they don't want to share the data with Apple. But Apple says that once you get Hulu and Amazon in the TV app, the combined catalog of the TV app will be so big, they'll be competitive with Netflix and they think that, da, da, da, they think that'll all work itself.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know what they don't have? Wet, hot American summer.

• 1:21:36Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, the point of all this is that this is a mess that fills me with rage and I can barely explain it because it is so infuriatingly complicated, but

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  So if you want the, if you want the

• 1:21:48Nilay Patel?

  I just want all the fucking lights, man.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  You want the simple digestion of all of this? If you don't, aren't a heavy iTunes content owner already, just go buy a streaming stick of your choice.

• 1:21:59Nilay Patel?

  Buy a Roku Premiere Plus. That's what you should buy. It's $79, $89 somewhere.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  I have one. It's great.

• 1:22:07Speaker 03

  You know what? I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take it. Oh, go ahead, Paul.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Oh, you go ahead.

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say that we haven't seen all the fall hardware launches yet.

• 1:22:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:16Speaker 03

  So don't rush on by anything right now. That's my, my.

• 1:22:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I will tell you, I was looking at prices for all the competitors yesterday. Amazon Fire stuff kinda getting discontinued out of stocky. It's happening. And there's that leak of the one with the dot, right? Out of stocky.

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  There, there was, there's actually a leak of Amazon's stuff in the past week and then just today, our buddy Dave Zatz leaked some info that Roku's got some new stuff coming.

• 1:22:42Nilay Patel?

  That's not funny.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  That's not funny, but you know, like Lauren says, it is the season to not buy something. So just wait.

• 1:22:50Nilay Patel?

  Don't buy any of these Apple products we just reviewed. Don't buy anything else.

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  That is the, the one, what you just said is the one thing that is kinda like blowing my mind is Apple just released a suite of flagship products and we're saying, don't buy any of them.

• 1:23:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  That has never happened in my career and it's kind of like mind boggling.

• 1:23:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  On behalf of our comment section, I wanted to point out that there's a device named the Nvidia Shield TV.

• 1:23:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  And it's now $179 and it's got a lot of specs.

• 1:23:22Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna review the Shield.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  I have, I reviewed the Shield.

• 1:23:25Nilay Patel?

  No, you did a hands on. Trust me.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  No, I reviewed it. But you can go answer your

• 1:23:29Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I know about your quote unquote review of the Shield because a thousand people have pointed out to me, you didn't give it a score and you didn't tag it correctly. So it doesn't show up in the taxonomy of the site when you look for set top box reviews. So thus you did not review it according to the many lawyers who populate the internet and are aware of our site taxonomy. So I'm gonna re-review the Shield now that it's cheaper because everyone is all up on me about it.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  Get some Plex.

• 1:23:56Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna, we're gonna pirate everything in the world.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  So many movies.

• 1:24:01Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna, we're gonna plex the shit out of it. There's, we're gonna trans, we're gonna pass through Atmos Bitstream from whatever the pirate pay gives me.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  I gotta tell you, on the Shield, Sonic is awesome. You thought it was good on the Apple TV? Wait till you get a controller in your hands, and then you're Sonic 2 forever.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  No, the $179 Shield does not come with a controller.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  No, get the, get the one with the controller.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  I could buy an Xbox.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  You can, you can also buy an Xbox.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  I wanted to play video games.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  The hilarious point that we're at.

• 1:24:27Nilay Patel?

  Should we talk about these Google leaks for like two seconds? You wanna run through them?

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  Uh, sure, let me pull them up.

• 1:24:32Nilay Patel?

  And then we can, we can wrap this. We're way over time.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  So if you haven't been paying attention, Google has an event on October 4th. It's its annual fall event for hardware. They, last year this time, they announced the Pixel and the Google Assistant. Uh, the Google Home, probably a new Chromecast, bunch of other stuff. Uh, so basically all the stuff, or what, well, we don't know all the stuff, but a whole lot of stuff that is expected to be announced that on October 4th has been leaked. Uh, you can go look at what the Pixel 2 is gonna look like. You can look at what the Pixel 2 XL is gonna look like.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Black and, okay, everybody needs to look at this Pixel 2 XL, black and white. It's got a little, little tasteful orange button on the side. It's the sexiest, I've only seen it from the back, but I am...

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  It does look pretty good.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  I, I know we're not even supposed to use that adjective.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  It's a banned phrase.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  For, for gadgets, because it's been overused in the past, but man.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  What phrase is that?

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Sexy. But the Pixel 2 XL, black and white, that little orange button is really attractive, and I'm very happy about it.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  I think it looks very nice. Uh, there have been a lot of leaks for the Pixel line, uh, in the past six months. And so if you look back, you can probably see what the front of it looks like. Uh, that one, the Pixel 2 XL, I believe, is expected to be an edge-to-edge screen. The Pixel 2, not the XL, is supposed to be different or whatever, but it's smaller.

• 1:25:51Nilay Patel?

  I'm buying the hell out of these phones, live on this show.

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  Um, but, those say, so the Pixel 2s have been leaked to high heavens. But the things that haven't been leaked and just came out were this new miniature Home, which we're expecting to maybe be like a competitor to the Echo Dot, so it's like a little tiny Google Home. So that might be interesting. And then, finally, a new Chromebook Pixel, which is allegedly called the Pixel Book, and it's gonna cost 1,500 bucks or something.

• 1:26:16Nilay Patel?

  And I'm buying the hell out of that.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, like $1,300 optional stylus.

• 1:26:20Nilay Patel?

  And then I'm gonna turn all those things on, and they're not gonna have iMessage, and I'm gonna go back to my prison.

• 1:26:27Nilay Patel?

  That's real.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  I don't know why you bother buying Android phones.

• 1:26:30Nilay Patel?

  Cause I love them. They're so crazy. This is what Dieter was pointing out to me when the whole notch controversy is going down is like Android phones are fucking insane. And it's fine. Like all the, you're just crazy. Like, like this screen curves around the edge. This screen has a whole button, set of buttons around the curved edge. When you look at this phone, it might turn on.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  You could get an Android phone with a keyboard.

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  That's how crazy we're talking.

• 1:26:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  You can get an Android phone with a Bixby button.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  And if you're like me.

• 1:26:58Nilay Patel?

  There's a dog butler on this phone.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  You actually turn off the Bixby and then you just have a button that does nothing. So I have an $800 phone with a button that does nothing.

• 1:27:08Nilay Patel?

  Man, the button, button debate continues to rage. Dan, if you aren't aware of this.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  Dan and I are on Team Button.

• 1:27:14Nilay Patel?

  Button.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Button.

• 1:27:15Nilay Patel?

  He's reprogramming all of our minds to pronounce this word incorrectly.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  Speaking of dogs.

• 1:27:21Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of dogs. Oh, there's a segment.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  There's a segment I do every week.

• 1:27:25Nilay Patel?

  Which we did not forget.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  And it's called Dog Food Pods.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  It's happened. A pod style subscription service model for, for buying dog food. It's not very pod like, but it's called Ya Doggy or, or Ya Doggy. I'm not sure how you're supposed to say it. It's a smart dog food scooper. That I don't know how it works, but somehow over the magic of Bluetooth and, and, and it's supposed to, it senses every time you scoop food. And so it knows that you've scooped all the food and then it orders more of the dog food.

• 1:28:12Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  It reminds me of those coffee.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  It's bad.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  Coffee makers that have the Amazon. Was it Amazon Dash built into it that like you run out of coffee beans and it like orders more coffee beans?

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Dash, but instead of just a button like, oh, I'm out of dog food. I can push a button and get more dog food. This is always sensing when you're scooping.

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  It also reminds me of that cup of water, that water cup. What was it called? The vessel? That would tell you how much water you drank?

• 1:28:38Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes. One of the late nights made fun of that. Was it John Oliver? Someone pour that thing to shred.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, for, you know, for good reason.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  The other nice part, this is actually slightly convenient for feeding your dog. Cause this, this is actually a situation with, with my apartment's cat is I never know if she's been fed or not. So I have to like text my roommate, has the cat been fed or she's just being asshole because she's a cat? And um, this, this will, this will let you know if anybody's fed the dog today.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Unless I guess it gets jostled.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  How much, how much does this wonder gadget of the future cost?

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  Forty or 50 bucks.

• 1:29:16Nilay Patel?

  Wow. It's a scoop?

• 1:29:18Speaker 02

  A scoop.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  Ya doggy.

• 1:29:21Nilay Patel?

  I think that's, it's, we can end it there. Don't buy that either.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  Why a doggy? Would you say that? Ya doggy? Or ya doggy?

• 1:29:29Nilay Patel?

  I think you say ya doggy.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  Ya doggy.

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  I, I think it's ya doggy.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  Ya doggy.

• 1:29:33Nilay Patel?

  The internet ordered you more food. All right. Again, please don't buy anything that we've mentioned on this show.

• 1:29:39Nilay Patel?

  It's the only advice I can give you.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  Speaking of buying things, Google bought like a bunch of HTC?

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  They bought some employees from HTC.

• 1:29:46Nilay Patel?

  There's so much news this week.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  1.1 billion dollars.

• 1:29:49Nilay Patel?

  They bought the powered by HTC team. It wasn't just a bunch of employees. It's the team at HTC that makes the things for other people, which for the longest time was HTC.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:29:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like HTC was an OEM. They made phones for Verizon. They made phones for, I don't know, Sprint.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:30:05Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they made, they made Palm's phones actually for a minute there. Um, so that, that the powered by HTC team, which is the heart of HTC, was purchased by Google. Google also got a bunch of HTC's patents. HTC. Whatever remains of it is still gonna make phones. Very unclear who will do that.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Maybe they could be powered by Google phones.

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, HEC will then contract Google to make its next phone. That would be the ultimate irony.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  In my mind, I want this to be like, Google, Google's like, ah, man, we really got bit by that time when we bought Motorola. I mean, maybe it worked out for us, but it just, it wasn't super successful. Oh, shoot, a squeezable phone? Oh, my gosh.

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  Yes, that's, I mean, if you're not aware, the HEC's gimmick of the year is you can squeeze the sides of the phone to do things. And the new pixels are rumored to have this function. Like, Google saw, of all things, in HEC's portfolio. Google saw that as the value.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Squeezeability patents.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  That's my dream.

• 1:31:14Speaker 03

  I don't know about you, but when I'm about to give all of my personal information to a Google Assistant, I just want the sides to be squeezed as I'm doing it.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, you what it is, is like, you get madder and madder as more information's given away, and you just keep squeezing the sides of the phone as your grip gets, gets more intense. And then your Google Assistant comes to life.

• 1:31:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. God, okay. Don't buy anything. Just chill. You got an iPhone 7? Just hang back. Say, put that money away. A lot of things are coming out. And then we're gonna review them all again.

• 1:31:49Speaker 02

  Theverge.com/guidebook.

• 1:31:50Nilay Patel?

  Theverge.com/guidebook.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  By the way, I went to theverge.com/verge or offer code VERGE for a Ford. Really disappointed.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  Oh, so that one expired, sorry.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  It's too late to get 20% off your Verge visit.

• 1:32:06Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I have an offer code for the merch. Anyway, look, next week, I'm gonna do a house ad for our own t-shirt store and offer you all an offer code. Which will just be offer code.

• 1:32:16Speaker 02

  And you could get the emails t-shirt.

• 1:32:18Nilay Patel?

  Email t-shirt destroys. That is our show, we are way over time. Lauren, thank you for coming on.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me, and I'm sorry that I've been a little less engaged this segment. Not only because you are the number one TV nerd that I know, and I figured it's better just to let you talk about it, but because I was writing a news story. So go to theverge.com.

• 1:32:35Nilay Patel?

  I think what Lauren just described there is that Lauren did something way more valuable with her time than I just.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Lauren posted her scoop.

• 1:32:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  While talking to us.

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  And it wasn't a yadoggy scoop.

• 1:32:46Nilay Patel?

  See, see what I'm saying?

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  I just, that was the best, Dan. I just, we should just end it at that.

• 1:32:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dan, thank you. My pleasure. I don't know, I don't know what to do. Paul, you're fine. You're welcome. There are other podcasts to listen to, including Lauren's podcast, Too Embarrassed to Ask. Lauren, who'd you have on the show this week?

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  We had Anne Wojcicki on the show this week. She's the founder of 23andMe, which is a well-known genetic testing company, DNA testing company. And we had a lot of questions from people about how secure it is to basically, to accompany like 23andMe. And we asked her a lot of questions about that. So be sure to listen.

• 1:33:24Nilay Patel?

  Very cool. You host that show with Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher has a podcast called Recode Decode, which is excellent. And Peter Kafka, also on the Recode team, has a show called Recode Media, which I personally love very much. And then we're, I promise we're gonna have more of our shows sometime. I asked Casey. It is, it is an empire. Casey Newton owes me a one-page for the show he's thinking about. It's gonna be, it's gonna be something. But anyway, that's our show. Thank you for listening to that insane surround sound rant. But I think that's why you come here. Anyway, that's it. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul. Goodbye.

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  Paul.