Pixel 2 first look, Pixel Buds, and Google Home Max

Another week, another tech event: on Wednesday, Google had its fall hardware event. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter try to fit everything they want to say into 90 minutes. Dieter had some exclusive looks at the products, and was able to talk to CEO Sundar Pichai and senior vice president of hardware Rick Osterloh, so the crew lets Dieter talk this week to get more of the details. There’s a whole lot in between that — including everyone’s favorite segment “Micro is more mini than mini” — so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 01:46 - Google event 13:12 - Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL 29:02 - Google Buds 51:43 - Pixelbook 1:02:14 - Google Home Mini and Max 1:10:30 - Google Clips 1:26:18 - Paul’s weekly segment “Micro is more mini than mini” 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.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge.biz. I've really settled on .biz for that joke. And part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and I have an important update on the Vox Media Podcast Network and our status within it. Today, I saw Ezra Klein, my friend and enemy. And I said, "Hey, man, you know, I've started this beef with you on the podcast." And he looked at me and said, "Oh, I haven't been listening." So that's where we are with that. But part of the Vox Media Network, the flagship podcast of The Verge, and quite honestly, the entire podcasting industry. So I am Neelai Patel, I'm the Undertruth Verge. Paul Miller is here.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:48Nilay Patel?

  And the man, the legend, the complete Verge hero byline dominator, Dieter Bohn is here.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, can we like clap for Dieter?

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, some claps.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  That's very kind of you. I want to point out that I still didn't write more posts that day than Heim Gartenberg.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Don't worry, you keep practicing.

• 1:07Nilay Patel?

  So the Bohn Zone, in effect, where this is all, basically an all-Google show with a side of open standards complaining. That's what we're gonna do today.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  And just to be clear. It's almost like it's a Vergecast.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  If you didn't go to theverge.com yesterday, you know, a lot of people, you know, it's a multi-

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  Multi-platform experience.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so maybe you weren't there, but there was definitely a moment where our whole hero, full of, I don't know, 20 stories, all written by Dieter Bohn, with exclusive, never-before-seen information about everything Google announced, it was pretty amazing.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so Google had its big hardware event yesterday. I'm gonna, Dieter, I'm just gonna do a tiny little bit of inside baseball. So if you, I've been watching the tech industry for a long time, you know, companies have big events, they invite some journalists in early, get some pre-briefs, you know, in the magazine days, you get the big cover of the magazine, they invited Dieter. But what we decided to do was instead of writing the one big feature, how Google's gonna do a thing- We split it up, which is cool. So Dieter wrote a piece on the new Pixel phones. He wrote a piece about the new Google speakers, wrote a piece interviewing Sundar Pichai, wrote a piece with the Raghasthilo, because that's the way the media works now. People want focus. So it was like a big new experiment. We would love your feedback and what you thought of it. If you want us to instead, write one big magazine feature, print it

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  on paper and mail it to you, that is probably not feedback that I will accept, but I'm eager to hear it.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I, you know, you want to hear my feedback?

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  I loved it.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I thought it was super fun.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  I felt super well informed.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Was it too much? That's, that was the thing. I just like, you couldn't, you couldn't read it all.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  If there was something at the moment, I ended up reading probably everything, but if there was something at the moment I wasn't focused on, I wanted to dive into more information about one thing, like overall hardware strategy, or this phones in particular, or these Pixel but, you know, like, I, I could go where I wanted to and learn so much information about all these things that like typically at this stage, we're still scrambling for details.

• 3:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  The other piece of inside baseball is journalists, like everybody are pretty competitive. And when the story went up, I definitely had to go into hiding at the Google event for about an hour so that nobody would murder me.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  That's okay. We, we get mad at other people and they get stuff. It happens all the time.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  It's good.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  No one's actually mad.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  This is why it's inside baseball. No one cares. Do you want to know about the stuff? We had a bunch of stuff for you to know.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  We had all the stuff.

• 3:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like our friend David Pierce had the, the insight on Sonos history. Good for David. We're happy for him. Overwired. Read that one story, but don't read anything else.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  You should just know, if you didn't look at the time length of this podcast, it's probably going to go long. So just buckle in, be prepared for a longer than usual Verge cast. I just, I just, I have to say

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  that without a hint of irony or self-awareness at all, Neel I said before we started to Andrew Marino, our intrepid producer, Andrew, we're going to go 90 today.

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  They've been long recently. There's a lot to talk about.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  All right, let's do it.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter, you know everything. Let's start.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  I know quite a bit.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  You you hung out with Google for a while. By the way, one of our listeners tweeted me last week and they're like, Dieter knows everything because he's not talking during this Google segment.

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  Good, good catch. So you spent a ton of time with Sundar. You spent a ton of time with Rick Osterloh, who's the head of Google's Harvard division. Just tell, give us the broad overview, what they announced and your kind of overall thoughts and we'll dive into products.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Sure. So the main thing to know about what they announced, I think, is they announced a grand total of eight different things. Two phones, an insane standalone camera, a new laptop, a new VR, version of the VR headset, headphones and two speakers. That's eight. Yeah, there you go. The camera and the headphones are brand new product categories. And so this whole question, and this all happens in the context that they just, you know, acquired 2,000 engineers for a billion dollars from HTC. So the whole question for Google has always been, are you really serious about this? And the best way to answer that question is by selling millions upon millions upon millions upon millions of products. Google's not there yet. So instead, they answered that question by like, we're entering new product categories.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  We're hiring a bunch of engineers and here's how serious we are. And we can get into like the product philosophy, but the bottom line for both Sundar in one way and Rick Osterloh in an entirely different way. The thing that makes these products different is that Google is better at AI than anybody else. And these products are either infused with or directly inspired by AI. Their dream is to make products that wouldn't be possible if they don't have AI in them. And they're like on the road to getting there. And in some categories, they've actually gotten there.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that you use that line, right? The reconfiguration of the standard integration line, hardware and software plus AI. What's interesting to me, I only started thinking about this yesterday. The line actually used to be hardware and software and services. And what's happening is the AI component is actually filtering in to replace that service component. So the, I think the best example of this ever. Was the iPod and iTunes. So you bought a piece of hardware, it worked, was tightly integrated with a good piece of software at the time called iTunes. And that was tightly integrated with a service called the iTunes Store. And that was

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  Seamless and great and worked incredibly well. By the way, iTunes files were DRM free and played on any device in the iPod.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  I needed to wipe a Mac today and it took me an extra 20 minutes because of iTunes.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  All I was saying was iTunes files were sold DRM free.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Not always.

• 6:51Nilay Patel?

  Not always, but Steve Jobs himself said, I want to do this. I don't want DRM on these files.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:59Nilay Patel?

  Made it so you could buy an iTunes file, play it anywhere. I buy a little headphone jack. Just a thing I'm thinking about.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  My thought is, we are now in a place where I think the, the tight integration of hardware and software is, I think we are taking that for granted now. Right? That's a thing you need to do to make a great mobile device. Google got there. Samsung is pushing it on its own way. Microsoft is pushing, they're literally making their own hardware. We've come to the place where the big software platform vendors have realized that in order to compete with Apple's particular advantage, they need to make their own hardware. We've been talking about that for a long time. The services layer is really interesting because Apple has its own services. It prioritizes its own services and its hardware in different ways.

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  So that we were just talking about before the show started, the Apple Watch, if you have the LTE version, you can only stream Apple Music on it over LTE. For a variety, I mean, there's good reasons for it, like battery life, because you know, they optimize for their own service. But we're entering a place where now the service layer is getting integrated into that puzzle. And I think what Google is trying to add on to it is saying, well, we have this massive advantage in AI. So we can make your devices smarter and that, you know, Google is known for its services. So they're actually moving into that next piece where they're saying, we're going to help you make better decisions with all the data we know. Which is a pretty intense competitive advantage for them.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  It's funny, I really loved this Google event and I'm like pretty hyped on Google right now in hardware. I still don't buy the AI thing. Like, I've been using it.

• 8:36Nilay Patel?

  No, no, you're totally right. They could, it's a thing that, like, you, they have to prove it. Like, keep going.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  I've been, I've been, I used the essential phone for a couple of weeks. So I was like using a lot of Android. I don't follow a lot of sports, but I do watch Seahawks games. So every time there's a Seahawks game, I have to Google, when are the Seahawks playing? Google has figured this out about me and now Google will surface to me the score of whatever Seahawks game is on, on my lock screen of my Android phone.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  So like they figured it out and good for them.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  But you know what? I don't normally watch live games. I was home with my parents. Now that I'm home here in New York, I always watch on Game Pass like the next day. So I have scores like turned off of my NFL mobile app where you actually have settings for that.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  I'm sure.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  There are settings buried deep in the Google app for that.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Tell Google that the AI is like, thank you for thinking of me.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. What I, what my problem is like they'll, they'll do that for me for the Vikings, but I also want them to do it for me for Packers scores, but only when the Packers are losing and they haven't figured that out yet. That I only really want to know the score and the Packers are losing, but oh, so like.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  You're my favorite.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  The other piece of this.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Great offense.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Is, uh, uh huh. Yeah.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  How's your, how's your, how's your entire offense on the Vikings? Is it great?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Uh, they all have, they, they don't have knees. A single one of them.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  They just, they're just like, just like walking around with peg legs. That's, that's how that's going for me.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  So it's like, you know, Google flexing and look what we can do, but some of it is a little bit of like hand waving. It's a little bit of watch the ball or it's a little bit of, you know, don't look over here, look over there. Because fundamentally and like Rick Ostrow said this, he said, do we have an advantage in hardware? No. Apple is just dominating them on processor speeds and.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  I also frankly think in terms of the raw hardware of like a camera lens and maybe even the sensor itself, they also are losing out to the iPhone. I can't say that for sure. We got to see, they might be using basically the same sensor as the Samsung S8. Who knows? But at least in processors and also in like some other stuff like access to like super high quality screens that bend and have notches and blah, blah, blah. They don't have it or they can't get it in the way that Apple can. And part of that scale and part of that's they just haven't been doing it as long. And so some of this stuff, when, when Rick Osterloh talks about, you know, Moore's law is ending and Dennett scaling, which is the thing where when the processor gets smaller, it presumably uses less power is also like not working anymore.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  So there's, everything is the same. And like, yes, when it comes to Android, everything has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and you know, something above three gigs of RAM. Great. You, good job. You are differentiating from all of those people, but it's not fair to say that compared to Apple's stuff, that processor innovation is stagnant because Apple, so far as I can tell, is doing a very, very good job of continuing to innovate on processors.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that that points to Google's potential market with this hardware. And we should talk about the specific products, but they're going to eat their ecosystem, right? If you make the Android phone with the best camera, I just sincerely doubt people are going to buy the Samsung phone for Samsung software, right? They're just gonna buy the phone with the best camera. And Google pretty clearly makes that product. Hopefully, I mean, we have, again, wait to see with Pixel 2, but it's been true with the Pixel for a year. Now, the difference is that Google actually didn't manufacture the Pixel. It was like an idea. It was like an apparition that floated through our world.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Which they addressed on stage.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then they immediately sold out.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  How did they address it on stage?

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  They said, we're gonna like make more of them.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Or like that we didn't make, the Pixel was a great phone that we didn't make enough of or something like that.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  They like very directly said it. So I mean, they already ran out yesterday. Hopefully they're going to make enough. But I mean, that seemed to me. Their market that they're gonna take from is gonna be Samsung and LG and HTC first. And we are almost certainly gonna talk about the cost of ecosystem switching.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  Convincing iPhone owners to switch will be a harder lift than convincing other Android phone owners to buy a nicer camera.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 13:12Nilay Patel?

  But let's talk about the phones.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Pixel 2 XL. You just look at the specs again, you know, standard, top-tier Android specs. Uh, what is a 5-inch screen? That's the Pixel 2. It has big, stupid-ass bezels on top and the bottom.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  It's like, look at this, Sony.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like, what are you doing? Come on! Um, and, you know, like, you look at that thing and you're like, oh, well, that, that, that must be the super cheap one, but it's still 650 bucks. Um, the nice thing is that it has the same camera as the 2 XL. They don't reserve anything for nice with the thing. And those bezels also have dual speakers in it. Um, the 2 XL has a 6-inch screen. It's 18 by 9. It's got curved edges. People have been calling it edge-to-edge. I don't think that's true. Uh, it does have dual speakers, so the bezels on the top and the bottom are pretty big. Um, but it also has bezels on the left and the right. It just does.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Um, and, and so the thing looks like, it does not look like the future. It just doesn't. Uh, and it's, it's, it's fine. It's like a totally good-looking phone, I think. I think it has good design. Uh, but it's, it's a different kind of like phone design. It's a phone design that's meant to be, I, I keep saying this, so I feel like I'm repeating myself, but it's, it's meant to be pragmatic instead of flashy.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Couple of quick questions. So, the curved corners of the XL screen, what happens when you're watching YouTube videos? Does, are there black bars on the right and left?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  So, huh, here's a, here's a, some fun shit that Google does because YouTube is just loves playing hijinks and games. You already know that the only way to get picture-in-picture on Oreo is to subscribe to YouTube Red. They block it in Chrome for picture-in-picture, and it- Only works in YouTube Red if you pay subscription in the YouTube app. If you want to go full immersive screen and have the corners covered or whatever, you are able to double tap on the video finally and have it go full screen edge to edge and zoom in. Or you could just leave it letterbox like normal because it's an 18 by nine screen. It's launching first on the Pixel and will come to other devices later. So they made a custom feature in the YouTube app for the Pixel.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  And then it eventually will get rolled out to other things that you can double tap to get a full zoom on the YouTube video.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  That's the software hardware integration we were hoping for.

• 15:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm about to flip a table here.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  YouTube has all of the power inside like Google's content business right now.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, of course.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Google Play Music didn't get mentioned until the very, very end. And I guarantee you the only reason they mentioned Google Play Music at all is because I know for a fact that Google employees read our live blog during the keynote and they saw me pointing out that they have said Spotify four times. They've said YouTube Music five times and they haven't said Google Play Music a single fricking time. And then at the very end, they're like, oh, Google Play Music exists too. It's like, oh, you're so kind.

• 16:12Nilay Patel?

  They got the note before I walked on stage, like, you gotta, you gotta say it.

• 16:17Nilay Patel?

  By the way, this is true of every company that we cover. They all read our live logs. Companies have requested that we send Casey to live blog their events. And I'm like, you know, he's gonna burn you to the ground. That's what he does there.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  No, but we'll be really cool. Okay. A second question. Yeah. My first impression when I saw the first Pixel in the flash was like, oh, that's chunky.

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Did you get that vibe with the Pixel two, specifically the small one?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, the small one is not not chunky.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  It's not not chunky?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  It's not not chunky. It's got like nice rounded edges and they did this really clever thing where they they put a paint of some, you know, some sort of hybrid coating, they call it over the aluminum. So it almost feels like plastic, but it's not like, I don't know the precise dimensions off the top of my head, but it doesn't feel like a like radically thin phone.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Right. Not like a, like a S8 or something.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like I said, these things don't feel like the future.

• 17:12Nilay Patel?

  Is the little one is similar to the original Pixel as it appears to be?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's very, very similar to the original.

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's what I figured. It's the bigger one that has the, it's the new design.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  The stuff.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:24Nilay Patel?

  I love the design of the bigger one. So if you watched Paul and I on the Circuit Breaker Show on Tuesday, which I encourage everyone to watch, Tuesday is at 4:00 PM Eastern.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Live.

• 17:32Nilay Patel?

  Live. So we've got our little like tweet screen is built into an iMac G4. Our producer literally hollowed out the screen and mounted a surface in it. And but we were like playing with it and we've got a bunch of old gadgets back there on the set. And all of them are so much more fun than new devices. Like the hilarious comedy of the iMac G4 is wonderful. The Tangerine iBook G3 we have is-

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Has a carrying handle?

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  Has a handle. And they're they're just exuberant devices. And we were talking about how so many new devices from every company, they've gotten so minimal that they're they're like really demanding of you. They they're like sometimes hard to hold and-

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, they don't have various ports. And they're just very complicated, like austere things. And then the Pixel 2 XL in particular just seems very friendly.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  That orange button-

• 18:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Black, white, and orange button. I mean, we obviously saw it in the leaks, like, man, that- I'm so sad that they don't have a version that's black, white with the orange button in the small-

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Small edition. Because that is such a good look.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  So but but you've held it and played with it. Is it is it as like, I don't know, happy in person?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I mean, it's it's it's very accommodating. How about that? Like, it it it's comfortable. Like, it's like a it's like a very, very nice, high-end, target potato peeler with like the really nice handle.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  Like an OXO. Is it OXO or OXO?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  Let's say OXO. People, whichever one I tweet, someone will tweet right back. Or which one I say, someone will tweet right back.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  It's XOXO, like in Gossip Girl. I don't know.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  I love Gossip Girl. Do you want to do an hour on Gossip Girl?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Talk Gossip Girl. Thanks for coming, Derek. It doesn't have a headphone jack, but that's really not worth talking about. We should probably just move on.

• 19:30Nilay Patel?

  We'll get there. Talk about the camera. I don't want to just like, everyone knows it's coming, man. It's like a tightly coiled spring over here.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Camera.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  It has a 12 megapixel camera in the back, eight megapixel on the front. They have these things called dual pixels. So each pixel's got a couple of sub pixels, so it can read left and right. And Google is leaning way, way, way into HDR. Every time you hit the shutter, it's taking somewhere on the order of 10 photos, just all the time. And then it algorithmically combines all those photos to do stuff. So we've seen them do HDR. I don't know if you remember, but last year we didn't trust HDR plus on the original pixel. And so we did our camera test, turning it off.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  And Google's like, no, you're dumb. Turn it on. You don't, you don't understand. And we're like, okay, sure. HDR sucks, but we'll try it. And like, oh no, Google was right. It was really good. So they're using all of that stuff to do a bunch of camera tricks. So they're using machine learning to do portrait mode because they can detect faces, but also they can actually extract the data out of the two sub pixels that are less than a micron apart to get it, make a depth map. They are, they, they added OIS to the camera, so that thing moves around, but they're able to leave it on in video. So the OIS module is moving around, but they can track it in real time. And you're shaking the camera because you've got a shaky hand. They can track that in real time. They can combine the data from both of those shakes into a really stable video.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Those things that you've just listed, sound like some of the best software chops that they're bringing to this.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  They don't sound like AI to me. They sound, they sound awesome.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  It's machine learning.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  And I guess, yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  So here's, it's funny. I actually asked Sundar, I asked Sundar about this. I was like, you know that like people, everybody's confused because AI isn't precisely the same thing as machine learning. And there's also, you know, like deep learning and blah, blah, blah. What do you, what are the, what's the difference? When Google says AI and what it says machine learning, what does it mean? And his answer was, nah, I don't care. It's fine to call it all AI. It just, it just gets more people excited for it and you know, we need to hire people. So if everybody's excited about it, we'll be able to hire them. So it's fine.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  It's like, whoa, he just doesn't care. There was one more machine, the only thing I wanted to point out with the camera, and it was, oh, uh, low light. So the pixels are a little bit smaller on the sensor, which is bad, but the lens is brighter, so that's good. Uh, but they have optical image stabilization. And what most cameras with optical image stabilization do in low light is they leave the shutter open for longer so that they can actually collect more light. Cause you can, cause you've got stabilization to account for shake, right? Google just doesn't. Like, they could have left the shutter open for longer in low light, and they're like, nah, our algorithms are fine. We got this. And they just like, keep it fast and just take a bunch of photos in low light and use HDR to fix it.

• 22:13Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Like, they are confident as hell in this thing.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, they gave the camera to DXOMark early. So like, the day the Pixel was released, and DXOMark had very cleverly been like, the iPhone 8 is the best camera. And then like, the next day, they're like, the Pixel's the best camera. There's a lot of conspiracy theories floating around about DXOMark and Display Mate. Just that they, you can pay them for consulting services.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  And so if you pay them, they might.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Then they'll come and tell you how they test things and...

• 22:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, if you pay them to build a thing, it's like if you pay someone to teach you how to take the SAT and then they take the SAT for you.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  Or you pay someone to write the standardized test, you're like, how about you take this test?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  But this is the line I loved in your write-up, Dieter, that, like, that exudes this confidence. Talking about the dual pixels that are less than a micron apart. They're really close to each other, and it's really, really noisy, Chow says. But guess what? We have algorithms for that.

• 23:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they know. I think that's, I think that's great. And again, like I'm saying, if you want to buy an Android phone, the best camera, there's a real chance that the thing you're gonna buy is Google Pixel 2.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Well, there was an algorithm for a headphone jack.

• 23:31Nilay Patel?

  I'm just looking at this page right now. I got the Pixel 2 XL, black and white.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:39Nilay Patel?

  You know, I don't care, 64, 128, I just want the phone. Seven to eight weeks.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  Are you kidding me?

• 23:45Speaker 02

  You didn't, oh, that's right. You didn't order right away, because it's tradition, you order on the Vergecast.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, now it's tradition that I'm stymied every week that I want this phone. I just, just.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Don't worry, they'll have plenty of the.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  I can get the black one in three weeks, but who wants the black one?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Nobody.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  I got the black one.

• 24:03Nilay Patel?

  It's not the one to get. And I think the blue one on Verizon is even worse. It's like, you have to solve this problem. You made a great phone.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  It's real bad.

• 24:12Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna talk about it forever. You just can't get it. And it's very annoying.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  You think maybe like, that's, that's, that's the thing that they've done on the back to like placate Samsung? Like, hey, we're making this thing, but don't worry, we'll never, we'll always be out of stock. The S8 is fine.

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  I mean, oh wait, the, in the, the blue little guy is just on Verizon.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  And that's six to seven weeks. So all of the ones that you want, you either, now you're locked into Verizon the other way. I, I just don't.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yep. Uh, the white, clearly white, the five inch Pixel 2 unlocked five to six weeks.

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's, this is the one thing they needed to solve. If they had just been like, it's the new Pixel, it's the same as the old one, but you can buy it now. That, it might have done better than a great phone you can't buy.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Can, can we talk about some, some other interesting things before we get to headphone check? Always listening, uh, for, uh.

• 25:10Nilay Patel?

  For music.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  For fake Shazam.

• 25:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  I will say, I was like, oh.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  What do you think about that?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Well, first thought was only tens of thousands of songs, right? That's not enough songs. But I, I pull out Shazam to detect weird songs. But I'm always too slow with Shazam. And even if I'm not too slow, Shazam doesn't get it.

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  So it can't be worse than the status quo of Shazam.

• 25:37Nilay Patel?

  If it's always on and it's like, just, it's tracking what's ambient, it's like, it's, it's Despacito. That's what it is. It's always Despacito. The Bulgarian national anthem.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  But there's multiple versions of Despacito. There's the one with Justin Bieber. You know?

• 25:55Nilay Patel?

  They actually, it's not actually 10,000 songs. It only recognizes Despacito. But Despacito plays so often that they can fool you into thinking it's always active.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  By the way, when I saw this, when I saw this feature demoed, the, their sample song was, uh, Look What You Made Me Do.

• 26:12Nilay Patel?

  Of course it was, the other song.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  And I was, I was like, why, why is it not displaying I'm Too Sexy on the screen? It's clearly getting it wrong.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  Dead silence in the room from the Google employees.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they were not impressed. Um, man.

• 26:25Nilay Patel?

  All right. Do you want to talk about the thing?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  No, it's fine. Yeah. Let's talk about the thing. Do you want to save it to the end and talk about other products or you? Cause we've got seven other things or six other things.

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  Emotional turmoil over here, man.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, we need 60 minutes to talk about the headphone jack. Where do we put the 60 minutes?

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  This episode of the Vergecast brought to you by Squarespace. Are you ready to start your new business? Make it stand out with Squarespace. They got beautiful templates created by world-class designers. Squarespace makes it easy to turn your idea into a new and unique website, which will be great.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  If you want to put a headphone jack on your website, Squarespace can help you do it.

• 27:02Nilay Patel?

  Are you interested in propagating the open web?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  No coding necessary.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  Make a website with Squarespace.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  But if you want to code, you can still code.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Squarespace lets you do both.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  You can showcase your work, your blog, you can publish content, you can sell products and services of all kinds. DonglesForever.com, built on Squarespace, in just a few clicks. You can customize everything from look and feel to settings and products. You can use Squarespace's analytics to help you grow in real time. Not to mention, everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box. And with over 200 extensions to choose from, Squarespace offers a new way to buy domains. Best of all, there's nothing to install, patch, or upgrade ever. But if you have a question, Squarespace has award-winning 24/7 customer support to help. A dream is just a great idea that doesn't have a website yet. Make it a reality with Squarespace.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  That's a good one.

• 27:52Nilay Patel?

  That's their best one yet.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Man, that's a really solid line right there.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  Head to Squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code VERGE to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com, offer code VERGE. A dream is just a great idea that doesn't have a website yet. That is a throwback to a simpler time.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Oh, you know what does have a website now? It's not just a dream.

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  What's that?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Uh, wait.

• 28:23Nilay Patel?

  Paul made a website today. He forgot its own domain.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Intentionalsqueeze.com.

• 28:29Nilay Patel?

  Yours?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:31Nilay Patel?

  You just made it up?

• 28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Google said that you can't accidentally squeeze the Pixel 2. It requires an intentional squeeze.

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  What are you gonna do with this website?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  It forwards to the, um, just like click to feel and swipe to go home.

• 28:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Forwards to the Verge newsletter.

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  I like it. We gotta, you gotta make your pod website.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  It's a promise you've made me and this audience. All right. Want to talk about this thing? Okay. It's a symbol.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:06Nilay Patel?

  So we used to have open interconnects, standards, if you will. And now we are rapidly headed into a world in which listening to things requires multiple computers to talk to each other. And those computers are all part of ecosystem lock-in.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  So Google did the same thing Apple did. They did it in a more Googly way. So basically, we're talking about the Pixel buds. It's a whole combo platter. Dieter, you want to tell us what the Pixel buds are?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Uh, Pixel buds are neck buds made by Google. They sit outside your ear. They fit in your ear with a clever little cloth loop doohickey that like slides through the headphone. They have a touch sensitive, the whole body of each headphone is capacitive. So in theory, it could do in-ear detection, but they haven't figured out how to do it yet. You control it by swiping on the left or the right earbud or tapping it or holding it down to talk to the assistant. It has some advanced features. It can fast pair with Android phones. As soon as you like open up the little case, a little notification drops down on the Android phone that shows the headphones, their ID, a little picture of them and their current battery level. And you just tap pair these and they pair. They also, when you hold your finger down on the, the side of the right earbud,

• 30:19Speaker 02

  it will automatically start recording your voice right away. And then start sending it as soon as it gets, you know, a secure connection, Bluetooth connection to the phone. So you can tap your right earbud and say, what's the weather? How do I get home or whatever, without having to say, okay, Google? And the latency of like- Getting a response to the assistant is much smaller because you're not waiting for any like confirmation beeps or anything. Those are the neckbuds.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and the translate feature is exclusive to the Pixel.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Did they give an excuse?

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I asked, they told me. There, it's not an excuse. I think it's probably a real thing. So the way the translate feature works is I hold the phone out to you. You're speaking French.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  Sure you are. I talk into the headset, the phone spits out French at you. You speak French into the phone, it spits out English into my Pixel buds. So they're like, we had to do custom audio routing to light up all of the headphones and speakers and not have them be confused.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  And it works with specifically with the Google Translate app, not the Google Assistant. So it also needs to be able to route all that information to the Google Translate app, not just randomly to the phone.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  So there, yes, there's a level of integration there, hardware, software, services, it's a whole thing. But I think this is just gonna be a pattern. And this is why I'm all freaking out. So the pattern is a company takes the headphone jack off the phone. And then they're like, we know you're gonna be mad about this. Here's a set of wireless headphones. Great. That's what Apple did with the AirPods. But because Bluetooth is a little shaky, they're building, somebody tweeted me, embrace and extend. They're building these custo, that's what Microsoft used to do to web standards. They're building custom control layers on top of Bluetooth. And because it, their, their own products are like, well, we, now we own the whole stack. We can do cool new features, which is great.

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  But what's happening is the big open interconnect, which was the headphone jack, is gone. You've got a shaky open standard interconnect in regular Bluetooth. And then you've got like the walled garden of the first party product that's better than the Bluetooth product. Right? And this is like a big deal because, so I'll just, I'll, I'll use Apple as an example, but I think Google's doing it too. But we've had a year now with Apple W1 products. So you can get AirPods, you can get Beats X, you can get Beats Solo, I think they just put another one. There's four choices of first party headphones that work great with an iPhone. And then there's like the second class. Of Bluetooth headphones. Traditional Bluetooth.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  So I have Bose QC35s. I think, Dieter, you've got QC35s too. They're great.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  I do, yep.

• 33:05Nilay Patel?

  Every now and again, they just don't work right.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  It just, as a point of clarification, Bluetooth 5 won't do this fancy pairing stuff that Apple and Google are doing right now.

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't appear so. Right? So Bluetooth 5 is the open one. So yeah, so then on Android, Google owns the stack.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  So a company, and Vlad told me that he's already gotten pitches from other companies, they're saying, hey, we're headphone makers. We now support Google's fast pairing. So Google is Google. They've made some special affordances in Android to make Bluetooth better. But they're custom. The headphone maker has to go and like support them. And that doesn't mean you get fast pairing on the iPhone. They're just regular old Bluetooth headphones on the iPhone. So now, I think, Dieter, you said this to me yesterday. Bluetooth is fragmenting. Right? The thing, you're gonna buy expensive headphones for one device and they're gonna work great with that device in that ecosystem. And the second you take them somewhere else, you're, you're gonna fall back to regular old Bluetooth.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  Which, again, I know people are gonna tell me it's great and it works fine, is rife with problems. A thing that's happening in Bluetooth 5 is the chipmakers are doing something along the lines of what Apple's doing with W1. They're putting basically a microprocessor next to the wireless chip and doing some more aggressive control and quality of service stuff. So maybe it'll be better. Turns out, though, three phones out with Bluetooth 5, like mainstream phones.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  No products.

• 34:33Nilay Patel?

  No Bluetooth 5 products. So you're months and months away from that. And that's like fundamentally, my problem is, we've gone from a world where you could, there's a huge market of headphones. And you could, you as a consumer, could prioritize whatever you wanted and get fundamentally like a similar experience across everything that you want. I want flashy ones, little ones, I want in-ear ones. I want giant ones with cat ears, like Megan Verkman has, like my favorite that I see in our office. Now, it's like, you're gonna buy the first-party headphones that are guaranteed to work the best with your phone. And all the other stuff is gonna fade into like the second class of the market. And then on top of it. You're gonna go buy a smart speaker that runs an operating system and an OS and is tied to a service layer.

• 35:17Nilay Patel?

  And you're Amazon Alexa. You can't say Alexa, play this song on Apple Music because Amazon and Apple don't have a deal. And when you buy the new Sonos system and Sonos in the app supports Apple Music. But you want to use Alexa, which is the voice assistant it supports now. Now you're locked out because Sonos is just a skill in Alexa. And Amazon actually controls the music layer inside of Sonos. And they say Spotify is coming soon, but it's not here yet. So we've gone from a world of relatively open choice for consumers across their entire audio ecosystem. To this move where we're killing the one guaranteed open interconnect that enabled the big market.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Just the aux, the aux.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Just very simple, everybody understands it, it's almost everywhere in the world. To vendor lock-in, ecosystem lock-in. And if you have ever listened to the show, you know that nothing irritates us more than ecosystem lock-in.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  So, so I, I have a kind of a pet theory about walled gardens.

• 36:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  And, and it almost seems like it's, so you, so let's forget about the physical headphone jack, right?

• 36:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just a symbol.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Let's just, that's just a symbol.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Just a symbol.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Um, and I will say it's been very disappointing. One, it's really annoying that Apple doesn't move to USB-C. Because I think if Apple moved to USB-C for a plug, we could at least get a standard headphone jack of, of USB-C.

• 36:42Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  That would be theoretical, because right now, like.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  But even to a USB-C.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  A USB-C phone comes out like which headphone.

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, is it the weird HTC riff?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  And nobody knows.

• 36:53Nilay Patel?

  Is it the, the standard riff?

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Hopefully that gets resolved pretty soon.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  So let's say.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  By the way, as long as we're talking about standards, there's just another example here, which is moving pictures. Uh, Google has motion photos, Apple has live photos, they have different file formats. And, uh, nobody supports either one really out in the world. And, uh, that's a whole other thing.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, continue.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  So.

• 37:14Nilay Patel?

  Standards.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  So I have a, I have a theory.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  The internet's most exuberant standards podcast.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  So.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  So if you just rename the Vergecast to IEE.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Go ahead, Paul. I triple E, I'm sorry.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  All right, please go ahead. If you get rid of all these physical plugs, you had basically a situation where Bluetooth headphones existed. They worked, but they were not great. Yeah. Apple came out with an extremely proprietary solution. Yeah. That is only supported by the AirPods and then by its Beats sub-brand. But with innovation. So like, the way I visualize it is like, you create a walled garden. Mm-hmm. It's like a nursery. Ah, yeah. Where you nurture new ideas and new technologies. Um, before, instead of starting, like showing up and knocking on the door of a standards body and saying, we should get a new.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  You just create a kind of a proof of concept. Now you have Google doing it, but it's not, it's exclusive to Android, but it doesn't seem like it'll be. It's not going to be completely exclusive to Google or some sub-brand of Google headphones, because they don't have that. But they've got one. They'll have one headphone. They've got the one. And then possibly third-party manufacturers won't do as good a job as Google, or Google won't certify them very well. We'll have to see, but you still have, remember, we started Bluetooth, not great. Yeah. We had Apple W1, great, but very limited. Now you have Google, maybe, maybe a little watered down. But more accessible.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  I see it trending towards we could end up with, maybe it takes until Bluetooth 6.0, but like one standard. Don't, please don't, please don't say Bluetooth 6.0. That's like, I'm just saying. Ten years away from now. Like, I don't, what would be the alternative? Like, you could have Google, Apple could have shown up and said, here are the open specs for W1. If you adhere to this, you're good. You don't even have to pay us a licensing fee, because we want tons of these out there. Right, so I think W1.

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  This is gonna be very nerdy. W1 is very confusing to people. I think it's somewhat intentionally mysterious. But it's a chip in the headphones and a software driver in iOS. That's all that's going on there. If you're Bose, I don't know if anybody can compete with Apple and chips, but maybe there's a Bluetooth chip vendor out there that's like, "We got a chip that's better than W1." You can buy that chip, but without the associated software support in iOS, you're just hosed. Right? So, Apple could say, "Here's how to talk to the software stack in iOS with whatever chip you want." They do it all the time because they support, say, Wi-Fi. They support regular Bluetooth. Like, that's a thing that they know how to do.

• 40:14Nilay Patel?

  "Here's how to talk to the software on this phone through a wireless protocol." They're not gonna do that. Apple wants you to buy AirPods. Barring that, they want you to buy some Beats. Great. And it's Apple's prerogative. I don't like, I fully support them in that. Google, like I said, they're Google. They're a little bit more open. Are they gonna take the Android Fast Pair code and send it to the Bluetooth Standards Body? And then the Bluetooth is gonna make it part of Bluetooth 5.1 EDR Plus? Who knows, right? But all of that work has to happen. And in the meantime, it's not just headphones. It's like the entire ecosystem of things that you listen to, like speakers. So, you're gonna, you just end up in this world where you've bought the AirPods because they work right now.

• 40:58Nilay Patel?

  You're not buying stuff based on the promise of a forthcoming Bluetooth standard. And that further locks you into the Apple ecosystem. Now, if you want to switch phones, your expensive headphones are gonna work less well.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Just to be clear, the incentive, like, Paul, for your dream, I want to believe in your dream that you, you make a walled garden so that you can nurture the beautiful flower because out in the rough winds of the desert of Standards Bodies, it would just get destroyed.

• 41:25Nilay Patel?

  The way we talk about Standards Bodies makes them sound so exciting.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Dieter's on the money with how he described my beautiful vision. Under the baking hot sun of the committee meeting, it would just wither and die.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  It's definitely a conference room that only has water and not even soda. Like, that's a Standards Body.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  How do you guys visualize the walled garden? I view it as like an isometric like gardening game, like nice 8 bit graphics.

• 41:55Nilay Patel?

  We gotta make a game called the walled garden.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Surrounded by hedges.

• 41:57Nilay Patel?

  If you're a game developer, you're a little bit bored and you want to make a game with us called walled garden.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:02Nilay Patel?

  Email us.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  You can figure it out.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, so Dieter.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  So contrary to that vision. Like contrary to that vision, there is no incentive for once the flower is hardy and thriving in the walled garden to let anybody else plant it. Like, Apple and Google, their incentive is to become the Monsanto of ideas, where the seeds, they control the seeds. And in order to buy in, you've got to buy the seeds from them.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  But they don't do that everywhere.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  This idea that they're gonna, they'll, they'll create a little bit of a standard and then they'll just give it away. Like, I want to believe that, but if the standard become, their proprietary thing becomes successful, there's no incentive for them to give it away. Now, Google is slightly better at this, and Apple has done this with web stuff, with WebKit in particular. But I think that because phones are getting more expensive, people are paying more attention to their margins, it's very clear that every single one of these companies knows that they can't just sell the phone, they gotta sell other stuff around the phone, and that's just the trend. And so, why would you give that money of selling the stuff around the phone away?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Apple, it used to be, they didn't, I mean, they would have liked to, but they were just too busy trying to make enough of the damn phones, that focused on making the phones better, that they weren't thinking that deeply about, about the rest of the accessory market, right? I mean, look at the very first Bluetooth headset for the iPhone, it was not good.

• 43:36Nilay Patel?

  It was beautiful.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  And their cases were, eh. But, so yeah, so all these companies are incentivized to create other things you can buy for the phone, that make that phone better, that, and they're incentivized because you're gonna want to buy the next phone in two to four years. Well, you should buy the one that works with the other stuff that you bought, right?

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  And that's the concern.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  Also, all of these companies, and this is where the nightmare comes in. The nightmare. All of these companies are doing voice assistants. So they want to be in control of the primary interface of the voice assistant in mobile, which is having headphones in your ears and speakers they control and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So of course they're gonna do it. So the nightmare, I just want to point out, the nightmare is Samsung's gonna open the door to the garden, like, we've been working on this for a long time, and the monster known as Bixby headphones is coming for you.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  I have to go into their garden to meet Bixby headphones.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  Right, you have to clamber through the tall weeds of Samsung's water drop effects.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Or at least press hard on a button on the side.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't work anymore.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, you have to intentionally squeeze the Bixby button. Uh, but you know what they're gonna do? The S9 is gonna come out, it's not gonna have a headphone jack, and they're gonna be like...

• 44:56Speaker 02

  That Sonos Alexa thing that you probably described, where like it works with this, but not Spotify yet, not Apple Music, and like you gotta figure out what the commands are and all that stuff. Um, that, that problem scenario, there is a solution to that scenario, which is just use all Amazon stuff, Amazon Music, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Speakers. There's a solution to that. Just use all Google stuff, Google Assistant, YouTube Music, Google Home Speakers, and you're done. Like, the, the, the problem of like, how do these things talk to each other, is getting solved first by just, just buy all the stuff from one company, and they'll figure it out for you, and only as an afterthought, interconnecting. Um, again, I think Google deserves credit for trying to do a little bit of work here,

• 45:40Speaker 02

  so their assistant can't do as, uh, many skills as Alexa, but that's because they're trying to make them like, work with more natural voice stuff.

• 45:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Uh, but Alexa's actually catching up in that department. Um, and so we'll see, but...

• 45:53Nilay Patel?

  The ecosystem lock-in is real... We, I mean, I think...

• 45:57Speaker 02

  The internet bundle, the whole, it's, it, bah, bah, bah.

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  I got him, I got him, I killed Dieter, everybody.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  What's the internet bundle?

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  It's when we...

• 46:06Speaker 02

  The internet bundle is that when you want to use an intelligent assistant... It answers, it does a thing for you, but that thing it does for you is dictated by a deal, a backroom deal between two companies, not by like a neutral search platform that gives you the best possible thing. And this literally just happened with Google yanking YouTube off of the Echo Show speaker because they didn't have the right backend deal. And so now, if you want to watch a video on your Amazon speaker, you don't get what you want to get because there's not a backroom deal. If you go to it on your goddamn laptop, you just go to DuckDuckGo or Google or Bing or whatever, and it finds the thing for you because there's no need for a deal.

• 46:49Nilay Patel?

  I got him. You didn't think I could get him, but I got him today. We went from headphone jacks to Deter lamenting the open web in like, it took 25 minutes, but I got there. That, I'm, I'm just saying.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  I'm gonna build a goddamn statue of a headphone jack.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  It's just a symbol. It's just a symbol for choice and openness. And I just don't, maybe this is just me, I just don't want to buy all Apple shit, or all Google shit, or all Samsung shit. I want to buy the best thing, and I want the best thing to be driven by like, pretty vibrant competition in a market where lots of people are buying lots of things. And instead, what's happening is, there are four choices of headphones that work great with the iPhone. There is one choice of headphone, right now, that's guaranteed to work great with the new Pixel. And it's just, that's not great. I don't want it, my headphone choice to be determined by what phone operating system I run. I think that is stupid.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Let me tell you a story. It is, I mean, actually, this should be a realistic story, not a, not a, not an impossible story. So, the Pixel XL Black and White has come in stock. It is March 2018.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  I got all excited for one second. And Nilay is on the Vergecast and he sees magically, oh my gosh, this thing is in stock. And he hovers his mouse pointer over the buy button. And then he gets a text message and it's a blue bubble. And it reminds him that if he buys that Pixel, he's going to have to deal with the pain of dropping iMessage. And then we will have the entire Vergecast derailed and we will have literally the same conversation we just had for the past half an hour. Yeah. All over again. It's definitely. March 2018. It's definitely. Put it on your calendar.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  I'll be there. So I, I, I wrote, I wrote something that's going up tomorrow morning that kind of, you know, that touches on that. I, I was really struck by this event. I felt like Google's try, is trying really hard and especially Apple or Google's trying really hard in a way that like lines up with my interests. Like I like neck buds better than true wireless headphones. So it's like, well, I'm glad Google's making neck buds. I like the look of these phones. I just liked a lot of little things that Google was doing. I like that their phone is $50 cheaper because Apple did not need 50 more dollars from me for a boring phone that they just released. Like they should be sorry. They should, they should put $50 off.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  We're sorry this is an eight and that you're going to look poor compared to the iPhone 10 people, you know?

• 49:24Speaker 02

  So you got that glass back. You like squeezing things.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Google put the best, the, the same camera in the big phone and the small phone.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  And as a small phone person that like lines up with my interests. So, and so as a person who I, I have traditionally sort of been fine with like, this is how the world works. Apple wants me to be just all in their ecosystem all day long. So I will model my life around that as much as makes sense, you know? I'll still use Google Docs. I'm not crazy. I'm gonna use Pages, but uh, I, I'll be fine with that. And what Google presented to me was a fairly holistic picture of what if, what if you switch teams, Paul?

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  What if you, what if?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  What if you just came all the way in?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the piece ends with, you know, green text, blue text. But uh, my line, which I think is very poignant is that if I, if I leave Apple, go to Google, I won't be leaving iMessage. The platform that runs iMessage left me.

• 50:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  It's good. Yeah, I know. It's real good.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

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• 51:15Nilay Patel?

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• 51:41Speaker 02

  Does this still work?

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  Anytime you want. Pixelbook, do a trick.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  It's a $1,000 Chromebook, less than the rumors.

• 51:47Nilay Patel?

  Here's my, so it's a, now you know everything. It's beautiful.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  It has.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  It really is beautiful.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  Big silly bezels around the screen.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, they claim the, the line on the bezels is, it's easier to hold in tablet mode. It's like, of course, that's your line on the bezels. The other line on the bezels is if they had gone with smaller bezels, it might have added thickness to the laptop because they would have had to put the drivers for the screen somewhere. Also a line I don't believe because I've seen Dell's laptops and I know that they could.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  I've also seen the iPad Pro 10.5.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  Which is like a beautiful piece of hardware.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so yeah, the bezels are too big. But the the keyboard is the best take on a thin keyboard I have ever put my fingers on. It's point oh eight, no, it's point eight millimeters of travel, which is like twice what a MacBook is. But it feels like not as clacky. It feels more like traditional keyboard. It's way better than the the Surface Pro keyboard attachment thing, Bob. It's way better than the MacBook. It's a very, very good keyboard, I think. Like, I typed on it for, you know, off and on for a couple hours over the course of a couple of days.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I think, you know, there's been a lot of like, why would you buy a thousand dollar Chromebook? You had in your piece, you know, Google sells a lot of Chromebooks to education. Those kids are growing up. They're going to college. They're happy with the Chromebook. They're just gonna buy this one because it's the nice one. I think that's an interesting read on it. My read, though, is, and that's kind of Google's messaging. My read on it is, this is the shot at the iPad Pro. Right? It's

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  It runs mobile apps. We, Dieter's had horrific experiences running Android apps on Chromebooks. So we'll see how well it does. But they were like, Android app developers are customizing their apps for this device. They showed off Snapchat running as an Android app on this thing. Casey lost his mind. He's like, it's a step top.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  That's how I read that line in LiveVlog.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  That's how Casey talks.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  He tweeted, I want to spend the rest of my life writing about how Snapchat saved itself by pivoting to laptops. Which is incredible. But, you know, they're obviously doing the work with the Android developers. So we'll see if it's better. But if it is, it's a huge hypothetical if. Now you've got a device that runs mobile apps, but also has a desktop class browser and a keyboard. And that is the iPad, that's the one thing the iPad Pro was missing in my mind.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Do you even need to go after the iPad Pro?

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  Savage.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Like, I love the iPad Pro. I think it's a really great niche product. I just don't think it's...

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  But it's Apple's vision of the future of computing, right? So if your bet...

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Keep looking.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  If your bet is that people are gonna abandon the traditional complexity of the desktop operating system and the laptop, and they're gonna go towards these more mobile things that they're more familiar with, that are a little more sandboxed and controlled, well, definitely the one thing that the iPad doesn't have is the ability to do Google Docs great, or the ability to go anywhere on the web and get the full desktop experience.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Use a mouse.

• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  Or use a mouse. So I just, to me, the comparison is not, why would you buy a $1,000 Chromebook? It's why would you buy this iPad Pro when you can get... Again, the huge hypothetical here is how well these Android apps do, but you can get basically the most interesting Android tablet thing that has ever existed. I don't, I don't know.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  The Android part is irrelevant to me. I've been using a Windows laptop primarily for a couple of weeks, and I use it like a Chromebook.

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  You know, partly, and I also edit in Adobe Premiere, something I couldn't do very well on my Mac laptop, and I definitely couldn't do on a Chromebook. And I also played a lot of Steam games, I guess. This is a terrible example.

• 56:03Nilay Patel?

  I used the shit out of Windows. I edited the registry. I switched to Edge.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  This is a really good example. Like, I'm sure that Google did a bunch of work to make games work better. This Chromebook has got, I think the base model's got like eight gigs of RAM, which is just a stupid amount of RAM for running Android apps. This is why it has so much storage, so that you can put a bunch of movies and games on it.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  I think it's safe to assume that Android apps are going to be kind of meh. And when you compare it to especially an iPad, it's stuff like games where you are not going to get the value out of a Chromebook or out of a Pixelbook that you would get out of an iPad. Like, the iPad is going to have better apps. It's going to have better games. It's probably going to have better photo and video editing software for the very near and medium and far foreseeable future. I know that Adobe is promising to like make their Premiere, or not Premiere, make their Creative Suite apps really great on Android to run really well on the Pixelbook. I just don't believe that they're ever going to feel like anything other than like third-class citizens compared to what they could do, what you could do on Windows or a Mac with them.

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  I just specked out the top-end Pixelbook, which has an i7, 16 gigs of RAM,

• 57:21Nilay Patel?

  and a 512GB SSD. I suspect that's supposed to cost me like $1,600, but they won't even show me the price, and it just says "Join Waitlist." And there's a checkbox here that says, "Send me Google Store special offers."

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 57:40Speaker 02

  They must not have the top one available? There's no way they sold out of it. Maybe it's just not available yet.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, do I need an i7 in my Chromebook?

• 57:48Speaker 02

  No. The mid-range one is an i5.

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  Four to five weeks!

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  Take my money!

• 57:58Speaker 01

  It's just so hard to... Okay, what about the pen? I actually thought, like, I'm not huge on Google Assistant or really any of these assistants yet, but like, I kind of like what they're doing with the pen. I feel like you probably could figure out how to do that with a mouse interface, but, you know, highlighting stuff and then having the Google Assistant find stuff for you quickly is pretty cool. I do so many reverse Google image searches.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  I mean, the idea that you'd spend 100 bucks on a pen to do, like, to like circle a thing on a screen so you could search for it, don't do that. It's just, just don't do that. That's crazy time. They should have made some kind of feature where you could do it yourself with, like, your finger. Maybe there'll be a button for there somewhere. It's a Wacom pen. It's got angle sensitivity of something, and it's got pressure sensitivity of something. It doesn't need to be paired because it's just a Wacom pen. The thing that they claim is that it has 10 milliseconds of latency, which... Really? Cause I think the iPad Pro is 20 milliseconds of latency. Is that right?

• 58:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  I, um, there's no way they did that.

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  But you also like, what are you gonna use it? It's like the A11 Bionic is so fast. Like where's Adobe Premiere for the iPhone? Right? Like, what are you gonna use it for? Like, Google needs to get Android apps that need that.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  The stylus.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  Performance.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:20Nilay Patel?

  I mean, James Ferrimark, he's super excited about it. Cause he loves his.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  He loves his Chromebook Pixel and he's like, maybe there'll be some apps, you know, like do some photo stuff on it. But you've.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe. Uh, there'll be Lightroom, sorta.

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Right? Um, you can draw, you can, it'll do handwriting recognition. Uh, I tried that, that actually worked really well. Like you can open up the software keyboard and switch to handwriting and just do that. Uh, that actually worked remarkably well. Um, but like having low latency is there for drawing. That's why low latency really truly matters. And I just, I'm sorry, I do not believe that there, that Android multimedia apps are anywhere near the quality of iOS multimedia apps.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  I just don't see it. And that's a big problem for selling this pen.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I don't think the pen is the point. I think the pen is there again, because it's the one to one with the iPad Pro. So if you're gonna make that comparison, like, oh, it has a pen too.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  But really, it, I use this MacBook Pro. It's funny cause I Excel open right now. So it's a bad comparison, but I mostly use this thing, uh, like a Chromebook.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, especially, especially if you're going after students, like, like, like you were saying in, in your piece, Dieter, like, you've got a really good web browser and, uh, which you use Google Docs and basically do everything in.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  And then you also can watch Netflix on it. And like, like, I would love if the commercials for this show in tablet mode, or like those, like that tent configuration or whatever, you know, and you're just watching Netflix.

• 1:00:58Nilay Patel?

  Cause like, can I just say, I hate that. I, when they, they're like, it's a four in one. You can use it like a tent. You can use it in cinematic.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  But it's, no, but it's.

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  Nobody does that shit.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  It's better than the Microsoft.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  It's two in one.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  The Microsoft commercials where like, I'm a strapping young professional and you like, like seamlessly transitioning, like, like, like, like a kung fu person from like,

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  situation to situation. And now I have to remodel my house and now I have to, you know, like, no, like people, surf the internet and they watch Netflix on their laptops.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  When Microsoft finally buckles and makes a Surface Laptop that has a 360 hinge, uh, cause they're gonna do it.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  They're gonna call it a five in one, cause you can set it on its side with it halfway up and like do portraits.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  I feel like tent mode is underappreciated. Yeah, I'm like watching a thing.

• 1:01:51Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  How, when's the last time you used tent mode?

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Like, my laptop can't.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  I used it in Niagara Falls. It was great.

• 1:02:02Nilay Patel?

  It was, I totally have a girlfriend, dude.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  I just haven't met her yet.

• 1:02:11Nilay Patel?

  Should we talk about the speakers? We should talk about the speakers, although I feel like we've said the important things about the standards of the speakers. We should talk about the speakers. We should also talk about Sonos, cause they had an event on the same day. They're getting somewhat under, underplayed in all the Google hype, but a lot of speaker news yesterday.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Google Home Mini is a small Google Home, the end. It's 50 bucks, the end. Uh, Google Home Max is, um, an iPod Hi-Fi, but you can't plug an iPod into it. It does the auto thing. So I, I told the story in the, in the piece, but like they, they picked up the, the big ass speaker and stuck it in the corner and the bass went from normal to like,

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  so that like, like the, like the voice of the devil when you play the, the record backwards. Um, and then like 10 seconds, it just stopped being weird and sounded normal again. So that was impressive.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  You know, uh, we'll review it, uh, we'll play it really loud and be like, this is really loud, it sounds good. Um, but. I don't know if Google can truly, truly make the case that you should center your like audio life around this thing. It's like, if you want a really cool, nice speaker and you're a Google person, this is a cool, nice speaker, stick it in your den, because you have a den, if you're the kind of person that's going to spend 400 bucks on this thing, right?

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  I had a little bit of-

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Otherwise, I don't know.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Hi-Fi on the brain, because, because all this, talking to Neil, I so many times.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Because like, I have like, I have, um, I love my bookshelf speakers, but they're kind of like, they're kind of getting old and they're like, there's some noise in the amp and stuff like that. So I would like new bookshelf speakers. These are a little expensive for that, but it'd be really cool if like, they tried to do like a soundbar. Because like, a lot of home theater audio stuff, I find inferior for music. It's designed for playing, um, movies. So this, you know, it was appealing to me, like, this is getting, you know, be kind of in a music mode or in a spoken voice mode.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  So I said, so look, I need to be, I was talking to the engineers, like, I need to just, just to just, I'm sure I know the answer to this, but just, just confirm for me that this is not meant to be used as a soundbar. Trying to get sound, you know, from your TV synced up to this thing would be a huge hassle. Nobody's going to stick a receiver up to it. And they're like, yeah, no, we don't, we don't mean to use it as soundbars. Great, thank you. You're not like, I just imagine how hard it would be to, like, if you're, you know, streaming a movie on TV, sometimes the audio gets out of sync when you've got a wire running. If you were to try and handle that wirelessly, you know, like with a Chromecast or something, that would be, that would be insane. There's no way anybody could pull that off. And I kid you not, it was about 30 seconds of silence while like, four engineers stared at each

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  other and had smirks on their faces.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, wait, maybe you are working on that.

• 1:05:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they have to be.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  That would make a lot of sense. That'd be helpful.

• 1:05:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. And you could, if you, if you're in the ecosystem and you have a Chromecast.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  It's very easy for the Chromecast to sync the audio and video, because it will be able to do the- The round trip time to the speaker.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:21Nilay Patel?

  And I can delay the video.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, but that's kind of just along the like, I can, I can visualize a Google soundbar.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  And how, and this sort of pragmatic theme that I think you'd very accurately, you know, ascribe to most of these announcements, like it makes sense that like that Google would introduce something that made it easier to have okay to great sound, not the best sound, but you can improve your movie watching experience.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you this, I have had my finger on the buy button of the new Sonos speaker since it was announced yesterday, literally a half dozen times because it's the dream. It's a good Sonos speaker. It's got the whole Sonos system. It plays nice with multiple music services. I know it's going to be relatively future proof. I trust them as a company to not try and lock me into anything, but I haven't clicked buy because I do not yet believe that that dream of I'm going to be able to use any voice assistant I want on it and it's going to work as well as a first party system could possibly be true.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  So Dan was pointing this out yesterday. There's a lot of Alexa devices that are part of the sort of like works with Alexa thing. So you can like buy a Raspberry Pi and install Alexa voice services on it. And he's like, none of them as yet have been as good as the Echo Dome. So I think the last one he reviewed was the Echo B4 thermostat, which has Alexa in it, which seems very clever. Like it's right on the wall, stick it there. It's all collapsed. And he's like, it's just not as good. It can't do a bunch of the stuff the first party Alexa devices can do. So I think Sonos has a much deeper partnership with Amazon. They've had to do a lot of work to make this go. So maybe it's all going to be

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  fine. But that's like, it's a big open question for me.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  So here's my open question. The new Sonos is also going to work with AirPlay 2. So I have two questions. One, I still don't know what the hell AirPlay 2 is.

• 1:07:22Nilay Patel?

  I have a minor answer. I have a minor answer to that question.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Two. Okay. Okay, good. I want you to give it to me. Two. Why is Apple making just the one big crazy HomePod speaker? And not just saying, oh, yeah, sure. Here's Siri in a speaker. Done. They would sell a kajillion of them.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I, the second question is more important. AirPlay 2 is a minor answer. As near as I can tell, it's a slightly more robust AirPlay that enables multi-room speakers. That's it.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't think, I don't think it changed anything really deep about it.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  They should have called it like Siri Player, AirPlay 2. And what AirPlay 2 means is that it comes with Siri.

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. The HomePod thing is really interesting, right? Because Amazon had its event last week. They put out like 900 things. Every shape and size of Alexa that you want is now available to you. At every price point from like $35 if you're a Prime member on the third Tuesday of the month to like the most expensive Echo show, which is like $279. You can just see that that's the price range people want. Like, you can make the argument, Amazon doesn't quite know where the sweet spot is, or you can make the argument that Amazon is doing what Apple used to do with the iPod, which is like price them at every 50 bucks. Google's putting out the range because some people want the big speaker. Some people want the medium one. Some people just want it to talk to a thing and get answers back. And Apple's is just like one giant monster.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Nilay Patel?

  That's as expensive as anything.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  It might sound good. It does the same sort of, or supposedly does the same sort of real time audio correction as the Google Home Max. But man, just in terms of sheer amount of choices, getting into that assistant smart speaker interface world, Amazon and Google are just sitting there with like super cheap products. It's just, come on in. Do you want to turn on your Alexa voice? Try this cloth covered puck.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  Whereas Apple's like, set up HomeKit on your phone. You may or may not kill yourself when it's over.

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  None of it's great, but that's just my.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Is it, is it just a function that Siri, they just, they know they're not going to get Siri caught up to Alexa and the Google Assistant and they don't want to look bad?

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  Apple should put out a $50 puck. It's clear that that is where the action in this market is.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  They let people talk to Siri on all sorts of phones. I, this, this goes along with.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  You can talk to Siri on your goddamn watch. Like, why not just, just put, put the, take your watch, the whole thing, and just stick a, stick it on a speaker instead of on a wrist and call it a day. All you have to do.

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  What do you do with all those leftover Series One watches?

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  This goes along with my sensation that Apple just is not in sync with me anymore. Like, that they would, you know, that they, they are not even trying to discover where I am at or what I'm interested in.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What you're interested in is notches, my friend.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  I love, I mean, I do love a good notch.

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't?

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  But I'm not going to pay $999 for a notch.

• 1:10:24Nilay Patel?

  You're on my eight.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  I might get a Pixel 2, I don't know.

• 1:10:28Nilay Patel?

  Green bubbles. I gotta read this piece tomorrow.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  Green bubbles.

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  Okay, last one, Dieter. Clips. The most complicated one we're saving for last. I mean, we could talk about, do you want to say one thing about Daydream View before we go to clips? You, one sentence. Uh, I, I have nothing to say about Daydream View. Here's mine. VR is dead. Let's talk about clips.

• 1:10:52Nilay Patel?

  Nothing makes me happier than knowing Facebook went all in on VR and it's gonna fail.

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  It's like, that's right, Zach. You bet wrong. Alright. Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus's VR division.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  I can tell how biased your laughter was.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  If my life fiction comes true, I have to quit The Virgin, go live in the country because I won't be able to afford rent.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's fine. You'll be able to buy any speakers you want out there.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  Clips.

• 1:11:27Nilay Patel?

  Clips.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  I think Clips is the most polarizing product that they announced.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Because half the people are like, this is like Dan Seifer is like, this is, this is garbage. This is creepy and lame and what are they doing? And Ben Popper is like, this is amazing. I want this right now. I want this so badly. It's also polarizing in terms of like who, how quickly you get it. So for me, I'm like thinking about like the future of photography and moving images and how does it work? And so a camera that uses AI to take little motion clips. I like, I went all the way into the weeds right away of like, how does it work? And what do the clips do? And how, how are they encrypted and does it use Wi-Fi direct? Like all this stuff. And Neelai, I said, it's a tiny little camera, but instead of you hitting the shutter button, it just sits there and AI looks for interesting things. He's like, oh, that's great. I was like, I think it costs too much.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  He's like, no, it's perfect.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The parents who get it are going to get it instantly.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Was it $2.99?

• 1:12:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's $2.49.

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. It seems very clever. It's a very Google thing to do. Intel put out a press release last night. It does all the AI locally.

• 1:12:36Nilay Patel?

  Intel put out a press release last night. It's an Intel chip in there. They bought an AI chip company a while ago. It's like their first big use of that chip. They're very proud of it. Visual processing unit, I think they're calling it. It's one of those great terms. VPU's, that's what you want.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  And Intel's trying to inject itself into the neural network land, which is dominated by GPUs and then like chips that Google has made itself by like creating its own like intermediate language.

• 1:13:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  They're like trying to be like this arbitrator of this industry that they did not found. But like, good for them being involved.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  What's, what's really fascinating about the Clips thing is I, I said, this is a new kind of camera. We haven't seen a camera trying to do this.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. We haven't seen a company try to make a camera that's like, does this specific thing before. And I have been getting people emailing me shitty Kickstarter's ever since the posts went up like, "No, no, it's like this life logging camera." "No, it's not. It's not a wearable camera." "It, that thing just takes pictures." "It's like this other camera that has like a sticker on the back and you can stick it on the wall." "No, it's not." "It's like a security cam because the security cam looks for interesting footage." "No, it's not. This is mobile." "Like, the, the slice of like, you know, weird camera categories, action cams, drop cams, "security cams, wearable cameras, blum, blum, blum, blum, to go on down the line."

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  "The fact that Google looked at that landscape and like, had a thing that hadn't precisely been "executed on before, at least not by a company that you've ever heard of, is really kind of remarkable."

• 1:14:11Nilay Patel?

  So I was on CNBC yesterday to talk about Google stuff and I really like the hosts I'm on CNBC. They're all very smart, but it was just like clear, like it's a complicated thing and they didn't know it. And they were like, "GoPro stock has dropped today because Google announced clips." And I was like, "Ha, I, I don't think that those things have anything to do with each other "because this does not compete with GoPro." And then I said, "Here's what it does." And the host said to me, "Oh, it's like a security camera." And I was like, "No, it's not." "It, you know, like, looks for this thing." And the other host, after the, after the segment ended, he was like, "Oh yeah, you know, I've, I've got "an outdoor camera at my country house and like, it looks for stuff." And I was like, "I, I have one of those too, but it, also not this."

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, the number of things that it's not is like so much higher than the number of things that it is.

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna have to seed a ton of, like, they're gonna have to go on every morning show, Sundar Pichai is gonna have to like, have that awkward conversation with Megyn Kelly. He's like, here's a picture of my, like, they're gonna have to like, figure it out.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  So they have, they probably are gonna, they're gonna hire a team of like, 50 parents with toddlers and 50 people with cute dogs.

• 1:15:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  And they're gonna send them out in just a giant assault, a wave into every morning.

• 1:15:28Nilay Patel?

  Instagram influencers for days. Are you an Instagram influencer? You're getting a Google Clips tonight.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:15:33Nilay Patel?

  It's already in your house.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  A few things, a few things.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Watching you.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  The video quality does not look very good.

• 1:15:39Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  It's a seven second clip, I forget the frames per second, but it's a burst photo, it's not a video.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:15:46Speaker 02

  The, what's the difference between a burst photo and a video? Hmm, let's get philosophical, but like, that's why it looks the way it does.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Well, but no, but just, no, it looks like, it looks like somebody blew on the lens, you know? It's like, I know it's, I know it's wide angle, but it's just like, the fidelity of the image does not look great. Also, did they tell you why seven seconds is, is the magical time? Like, what if I do something really hilarious and it's, it takes eight seconds to really pull off?

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  They didn't really, I imagine it's like, how, how much can they get? How much can they analyze? It does a bunch of like, clever trimming things, so it's not always precisely seven seconds. So if you reach and grab your hand to pick it up, it'll be like, oh, there, he's reaching to grab it. You don't want that, and they'll cut that off. If you're holding it and your hand is too shaky, they'll grab like, three seconds where it's stable and, and throw away the rest. Um, so, yeah, I'm not sure why seven, but that's the average of how long the clips can be.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  One thing that really struck me from the announcement, the way they announced it and the things that they emphasized, like, it looks like a camera. And there is a light that's on and you know it's recording. It seems like they really learned their lesson from Google Glass.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  Like, and, and, and that this, you know, this is definitely along the, the lines of something like that Google Glass is, was trying to, like, there will always be a camera right there, right in the moment, so everything could be captured. This is like a completely different vector to come, come in on, but.

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  Well, we talked about this last week with, uh, Amazon's little Echo alarm clock. Like, they're training you, Dan had this idea that they're training you to be okay with cameras, by like, making it cute and putting in an alarm clock. Then Google's doing the same thing, it's training you to be okay with cameras by making it cute.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  I've never really had this huge fear. I mean, I've had a laptop for my entire adult life that has a little camera at the top of it, you know, like I've had a camera around me at all times. Feel like I'm, I feel like I'm pretty good with it, but I understand that's an issue for a lot of people.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Ben wrote that piece today, right? It's like, this thing is creepy as hell, but I want one immediately. Yeah, I think that's, that's gonna be a lot of people. And you can just like turn it off, like put it away. I think Google Glass is like, there's someone in this room with me and he's a cyborg. It's always a he and they're, they're, they're watching me. Uh, I don't think that's gonna be the case with Clips. I think the case with Clips is like, just set it there. But they are gonna have to do a full on hundred percent like morning show holiday marketing push. And then, not to belabor this point, actually make and sell the device, which does not seem to be a thing they're good at.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  A strong suit.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you can't buy the buds yet either. I know nobody has actually tried, but I'm a crazy person, so I did. And then, yeah, they're six to eight weeks out on a bunch of this stuff. And I don't know when the Clips is gonna become available.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Okay. So after all of that?

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  After all of it.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  That was emotional.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  You think Google's serious about hardware?

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  I, I saw all this stuff and then got all the briefings and learned everything I could about it and then went to go have a nice walk and sit at a park bench with Sundar Pichai to ask him about everything. Um, and I was, I was focusing. I wasn't reading the news. I was like, I'm not gonna get distracted by Twitter right now. Um, went and talked to him and asked him about the ethics of AI. And he immediately said, I feel a huge responsibility when we get stuff wrong in search. And I was like, great, that's a good answer. We talked all about all this stuff about how AI is gonna change the interface of your phone. And every time you open up your phone, you do the same thing in the AI. Just know that lovely conversation. Go home, transcribe the things, start writing my article, uh, call Neil, I say, hey, I think I got it. It's, I think I know what

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  the article's gonna be. And he's like, yeah. Uh, what was his answer about 4chan? I was like, why the hell would I ask Sundar Pichai about 4chan? And then he's like, oh, you don't know, for the last 14 hours, everyone's been flipping out because Google put 4chan in its top stories box. You know, when people search for this thing, and it was totally fake news, because it was a conspiracy theory that they were spinning.

• 1:19:52Nilay Patel?

  On 4chan.

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  And on 4chan, Google promoted 4chan.

• 1:19:56Nilay Patel?

  It's just not a good look.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  So then I had to go through this whole, yeah, I had, I had to like, go through this whole rigmarole of like, uh, did he know? Cause I didn't know. And did he think that I knew when I asked the question and that's what I was referring to or not? And when, did he know? And if he knew, then fine. If, did he know that I didn't know? And this whole thing. End of the, end of the story is, if you read the top of the article, I didn't know that anything was going on. He had a vague idea that something was going wrong. And so he was in part referencing the fact that Google had allowed 4chan to be promoted on Google search. The end.

• 1:20:32Nilay Patel?

  I thought his answer, his answer should have been, I'm immediately personally modifying the Google algorithm so that we don't surface noted troll message boards in the top newsbox.

• 1:20:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:44Nilay Patel?

  But barring that step.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  If I had talked to him like an hour later, that might've been, if I talked to him an hour later, that might've been his answer. Like, to be very fair, like, he, like, he got there, the thing was starting to bubble up and he's like, I should get briefed on this, but instead I have to go like, sit down with this schmuck Dieter Bone.

• 1:20:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  And talk to him for an hour about AI.

• 1:21:01Nilay Patel?

  He did, he sent me that.

• 1:21:02Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:21:02Nilay Patel?

  It was weird. I was like, Sundar is using the word schmuck. It's weird. Doesn't sound like him. What Mark Zuckerberg is not, like, Google and Facebook are in this conversation together. What Zuckerberg is not saying, as loudly as he needs to be saying, is, we should be held accountable for this. Right? He's, they're trying to chart a path that's like, we're a neutral platform, people are going to do what they want to do, we're protecting the integrity of elections in Germany, we're not going to tell you how, right? Like, they're, they're, they're being very opaque. Google, to Sundar's credit, although I think they have to do better, at least he's saying, "Hold us accountable, we screwed this up." Right? And like,

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Nilay Patel?

  Hopefully, they actually do better because everyone just held them accountable.

• 1:21:48Speaker 02

  But yeah, the second part of that is actually doing the thing and being transparent about the thing that they're doing.

• 1:21:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  I actually think Facebook has done a slightly better job at like actively saying, "This is what happened, this is what we know, this is what we're doing." They got pushed into it, they like tried not to do it in the first place. So Zuck is doing a worse job in like taking responsibility, but a slightly better job in saying, "Here's what happened, here's what like we're working on." Google's gonna be speaking to Congress, I think November 1st, maybe? And I want to know what ads on Google were there to like during the election. I want to know if they think they got gamed by Russia in some way. I don't think we have as much information about what, you know, the Russians trying to influence the election did on Google as we do what they've done on Facebook and Twitter.

• 1:22:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, see, I think Google with the 4chan thing, they walked themselves into a place where they're in a conversation with Facebook in a way that

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Nilay Patel?

  They weren't previously.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  Just the biggest dumbest unforced error, what do you do, like, huh, anyway.

• 1:22:56Nilay Patel?

  But on the same time, they were on YouTube. Charlie Warzal, who's doing a great job BuzzFeed News, tracking this stuff, pointing out, YouTube is full of misinformation, it's bubbled up to the top. So they've got some work to do. We're ending on a real down note here, so I'm gonna ask the question I started to ask before you talked about this.

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:23:15Nilay Patel?

  All this stuff, you saw this stuff, met all the people, talked to all the people.

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19Nilay Patel?

  Is Google serious about hardware?

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  Until you tried to buy a phone today, I would have said yes.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  They're they're serious about it. I don't know, but like in order to truly be serious about it, they have to sell it in volume and they're not quite there, but they're serious about it. They're like, you don't enter two new product categories if it's a hobby, right? You don't you don't acquire half of HTC. You don't build a giant new building in your campus for all your hardware engineers to move into. The question of what are they serious? The answer is yes, but what we don't know is it yes, because we're going to make a ton of money on it. It's going to be, we're going to make as much money as Apple does, or whatever. It's like, it's going to be half, it's going to like, be half our business next to ad sales. Or if it's, we're gonna, we're gonna make hardware so that we've got

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  a little bit of, you know, hedge and a little bit of cherry on the top of the ad money sundae. That's that's less clear to me.

• 1:24:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just wish they'd built a factory as well as that huge building. They could use AI.

• 1:24:26Nilay Patel?

  Something. I think you're right. It just seems clear that in order to ship the AI stuff they want to ship, they have to make some of their own stuff. They can't wait around for Samsung to get out of its own way with its own software, right? Like, they need to be in control of the user experience in a pretty significant way.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  How? I think honestly, it also seems clear that if things go south with Samsung for one in one way or another, they need to have the chops to spin up their own high end hardware thing and actually sell stuff in volume. If Samsung says, screw it, we're going Tyson, that's bad for Android, that's bad for Google. They need to, they can't just on a dime, start making Samsung quality phones.

• 1:25:09Nilay Patel?

  Right. Or if just hypothetically.

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  They've, it's a hedge.

• 1:25:12Nilay Patel?

  Samsung's phones started exploding, or hypothetically, the CEO of Samsung was caught up in a scandal so enormous, the entire government of South Korea fell apart. Or it's just, who knows? Just things could happen. And they would definitely have meaningful impact on Samsung. Nothing. Samsung will never go anywhere.

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  Actually, here's a question. Samsung disappears tomorrow.

• 1:25:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  Like, the whole company implodes. Who is more hurt by that? Google or Apple?

• 1:25:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's tough.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  Might be Apple.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  More hurt by that? Oh, because like they can't get their components?

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  They use Samsung screens and Samsung chips. Google can get by using other stuff.

• 1:25:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:26:02Speaker 02

  Think about that.

• 1:26:03Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  Put that in your Pixel and something. I don't know.

• 1:26:07Nilay Patel?

  Put that in your Pixel and then think about owning a Pixel someday.

• 1:26:12Nilay Patel?

  Put that in your shopping cart and then wait patiently for eight weeks.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Six to eight weeks.

• 1:26:18Nilay Patel?

  That is our show.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:26:19Nilay Patel?

  No?

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  Every week.

• 1:26:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. I'm sorry, Paul. I forgot.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  I do a segment. And nobody ever forgets. Not even me. I never forget. It's called, "Micro is more mini than mini." And this is the exciting, that's like a little mnemonic I use to remember the different ports. Cause there's mini USB, which sounds very small.

• 1:26:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  And then micro USB, which is what you use to charge your phone and your Xbox One controllers and your PlayStation 4 controllers, but until now, you've not been able to charge a PlayStation Move controller with micro because they came out in the PS3 era. But Sony is refreshing some PlayStation VR stuff, that pass-through box. Now does HDR.

• 1:27:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Which is very exciting.

• 1:27:11Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  But they're changing the-

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Oh, that's actually very exciting.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  They're changing the Move controller, so it's a micro USB now.

• 1:27:18Nilay Patel?

  Finally.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  Good job, Sony.

• 1:27:20Nilay Patel?

  Maybe I'll buy one this weekend and then-

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Wait six to eight weeks.

• 1:27:28Nilay Patel?

  Alright. That was great.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:27:30Nilay Patel?

  It's really, I didn't, I'm sorry, I forgot. It's okay. Love you, man. All right, there's other podcasts to listen to. We are done for the day. There's other stuff to listen to. Lauren Good, who's on the show a whole bunch, has her own podcast called Too Embarrassed to Ask. Guess who's on it this week? Rick Osterloh. Hey. With a little company called Google. I sent in a question. Where's my phone? Dot com, Rick.

• 1:27:54Nilay Patel?

  I didn't do that, but I should. Kara Swisher hosts Recode Decode. Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media. There's a number of other podcasts in the Vox Media Podcast Network, of which, again, I remind you that we are the flagship.

• 1:28:09Nilay Patel?

  Ezra Klein has a show.

• 1:28:12Nilay Patel?

  Our rival show. We both definitely listen to one another's shows.

• 1:28:19Nilay Patel?

  Listen to all that stuff. It's great. We've got new shows coming out on The Verge side. Kaitlin Tiffany and Ashley Carmen have a great new show coming up called Why'd You Push That Button? I'm so, so excited about the show. It's gonna come up later this month. And I'm excited to preview this to you. Not preview, just leak it. Leak some information here on The Verge Cast. Casey Newton podcast. Yeah. What's it called? I told him I think it should be called Casey Newton Show, but he rejected that idea. But it's coming. It's gonna be something else. So all that's happening. Well, what if it's called the Snap Top Experience? See, it's a different title every week. Yeah. But it's, it's all, the rumbles are rumblin'.

• 1:29:02Nilay Patel?

  So stay tuned to The Verge Podcast Network, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, of which we are the flagship in total. I get it. I get it. We're the flagship. We're a Venn diagram with a ship on top. We're the best boat, Neil, I. Okay? I get it. The finest boat in all of audio. And you're the captain of the boat. I'm the captain now. All right. That, for better or worse, was our show. Please tweet at us. Dieter's at Backlon. He has the answers to all your questions this week. Paul is at FuturePaul. I'm at Reckless. Love your feedback. Go into iTunes, leave a comment about headphone jacks, and then hit those five stars. That's what we want from you. And we'll be back next week. Thanks so much. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  Promo code.