Pod Insights The Vergecast Oculus Go, Movies Anywhere, and Windows Phone died again About this episode We’ve got a bloggy Vergecast today. In between review weeks, a few things popped up in the news that Nilay, Dieter, and Paul needed to talk about. Google is integrating video chat into a phone but still not text; you can now watch all the movies you’ve purchased online in one place; Apple is on a “hype cycle” talking about AR; and Windows Phone died again.
But that’s not all. There’s a whole lot in between that — like the segment Paul does every week, “You know Dan, the duck face is no longer cool” — so listen to it all and you’ll get it all.
07:28 - Android Messaging rant
18:49 - Hollywood studios join Disney to launch Movies Anywhere digital locker service
26:07 - Google will “permanently remove” Home Mini feature that led to constant recording
32:21 - Apple hype cycle
38:02 - Oculus announces new $199 self-contained VR headset called Oculus Go
49:59 - Windows Phone is dead
58:17 - Paul’s weekly segment “You know Dan, the duck face is no longer cool”
1:01:50 - Amazon finally makes a waterproof Kindle, after 10 years of Kindles
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Transcript 12,835 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Qualcomm Snapdragon Gigabit LTE. With download speeds up to seven times faster than typical home Wi-Fi, Snapdragon Gigabit LTE can turbocharge all of your connected apps. You can stream 360 degree videos in 4K. With minimal buffering, you can access files in the cloud nearly as fast as you would if they're stored on your phone. You can download hours of movies or music in just a matter of seconds. To learn more, visit www snappingdragon.com/gigabit today.
0:27 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge Media Empire, which is a sub-empire to the Vox Media Podcast Empire. Wait, that doesn't make any sense. Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. The whole Verge Empire is not a sub-empire. The Venn diagram is that our podcasting empire is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Can we get back to the boat and captains? Because I was doing really good with- I'm the captain now. Yeah, there you go. We're about to have sub-boat, submarines. So this is The Vergecast. It's a show about technology and culture and- At some point in the next 10 minutes, Eli is going to introduce us. Dieter Bone is in the studio today.
1:11 Speaker 01 Hi, everybody.
1:12 Nilay Patel? Hey, Dieter.
1:13 Speaker 01 Hi, Eli. Awesome.
1:14 Nilay Patel? It's good to see you. It's good to just see you, man. Paul Miller is here.
1:18 Speaker 01 Hello.
1:18 Nilay Patel? And as always, Iron Man, Neil Patel, the captain.
1:22 Nilay Patel? I don't know what that means. So we're going to start a little bit differently today. We're going to promote ourselves. I'm just going to be honest with you. Just a couple of minutes of promotion. So are you saying that we're not going to just get right into it? We're not going to just get right into it.
1:36 Speaker 01 I will tell you a true story. Less than an hour and a half ago, somebody told me that I was too humble. And I need to be more shameless in promoting.
1:47 Nilay Patel? See, we're taking that advice. Whoever that person was, I hope you're listening to this. No, we have a bunch of stuff going on. I just want to call it all out. Just pay no attention to the fact that I'm involved in two of the things. So if you love this show, we get a lot of requests to have The Vergecast be a video show. I'm really against that. We've done it in the past. We did it CES in January. We've done it all kinds of different ways in the past. It's been fun, but I will just tell you this. I think people listening to The Vergecast are interested in things like user data. When we made the show an audio-only show, our subscribers started going up. It seemed like people were happier with us. It was easier for us to make the show. It's easier for us to talk about things like smart home standards and the open web when we don't have to figure out how to illustrate them in video.
2:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Because they're obviously very wonky. So I think The Vergecast needs to remain an audio podcast, but we have always known people want to watch us play with gadgets. So we have a new show, Circuit Breaker Live. It's on Twitter. Paul and I are on that show. Dieter has been on that show every week, the two weeks that we've done it. We've been running videos of Dieter. Ashley Carmen's on that show. Jake Hestrak is on that show. Heim's on that show. We're bringing in people from around the Verge staff. Ben's been on it. Megan's been on it. It's basically just us goofing around with gadgets for an hour. It's every Tuesday at 4:00 PM Eastern, live on Twitter. The replay is on the site the next day on the website. I could go into the media economics of that, but no one wants me to do that. I'm just telling you. It's
3:15 Nilay Patel? on Twitter, live, 4:00 PM Eastern. There's also, we slice out bits and put those on Twitter, too, and then you can watch replay on the site. So if you love The Vergecast, you've always wanted a video version of this, that is very much what we're trying to do with Circuit Breaker Live. Check that out. That's one promo. Mm-hmm. That was good. It was good? Yeah. I'd watch it. I really like being validated in real time. The second show, if you're into Mr. Robot, which actually is one of my favorite TV shows, I will admit, the second season, last season, a little slow. Season three looking good. Everyone's saying it's bouncing right back. It's really good this season. It's clipping right along. We're doing the Mr. Robot digital after show again this year. So once you're done watching Mr. Robot on USA on Wednesdays, click over to their Facebook page. There's actually ads on TV for our show, which is wild. You can jump over to their Facebook
3:59 Nilay Patel? page or their YouTube page, or I think our, it's everywhere. Just find it, and you can watch me, Russell Brandon, Megan Fruchmash, do the after show. We did our first episode. Last night, Wednesday night, Portia Double Day was on the show with us. Just a good time. If you're into Mr. Robot, check that out. It's happening right now. So that's my, the two things I'm doing that I'm promoting, I apologize for promoting myself. But here's the real thing that I'm actually excited to promote. I've been talking at the end of the Vergecast for weeks now about Why'd You Push That Button, the new podcast with Caitlin Tiffany and Ashley Carmen. It is great. I commend the both of them and our producer, Andrew Moreno, for putting up with my incessant feedback on this show, but it's so great,
4:41 Nilay Patel? I couldn't stay away from it. It's starting next week, October 17th. You can already go into iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen and subscribe to it. It's there. It's called Why'd You Push That Button. And we've got a little promo for it that we're gonna run on this show right now.
4:55 Speaker 02 Do you turn red receipts on?
4:57 Speaker 03 Have you ever super liked someone on Tinder?
4:59 Speaker 02 Do you have your ex's Netflix password still after all these months, really?
5:04 Speaker 03 Are you liking pictures that celebrities post on Instagram, maybe of their butts?
5:08 Speaker 02 We 100% see you doing that.
5:11 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Caitlin Tiffany.
5:13 Speaker 02 And I'm Ashley Carmen. And in our new podcast, Why'd You Push That Button, we are talking to everyone. We're talking to our friends. We're talking to parents. We're talking to product designers, all about the itsy-bitsy, tiny little decisions that technology forces us to make.
5:28 Speaker 03 We're gonna talk about super likes, read receipts, sending nudes, stalking people on Venmo, liking things on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, all the little weird behaviors that you do.
5:41 Speaker 02 And how they impact our lives, because they have strange social repercussions, as we've learned. You can find us anywhere you typically listen to podcasts. We're on Spotify, we're on Apple's Podcast app. Really, we are everywhere. Our first episode is going live on October 17th, so please listen. It would be really great if you did.
6:01 Speaker 01 That is really good.
6:02 Nilay Patel? It's really good.
6:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, like, ah.
6:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
6:05 Speaker 01 Ah.
6:06 Speaker 04 It's like a real podcast.
6:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so they know what they're doing. Yeah, it's been really, I will say this, this has been the one podcast that we've had, so everyone's like, it'll be like the Vergecast. I'm like, don't do that, because this is a mess. This is, and all, you know, lots of listeners, they're in to the mess with us. But just, this is not a model for your life. Don't be like us. Yeah, so it's really great. Their first episode is on Superlikes on Tinder.
6:29 Speaker 04 When is the, when is the Venmo episode?
6:31 Nilay Patel? It's coming, man. They're, they're just wait for it.
6:33 Speaker 04 I'm not saying I'm not gonna listen to the Superlikes episode, but I've been really curious about how, how to, how to Venmo.
6:42 Nilay Patel? Go ask them. Uh, it's coming. We're gonna do, we're, we're trying to do this one seasonally, so we're gonna like 10, 12 episodes, take a break, come back.
6:48 Speaker 04 This is very exciting.
6:48 Nilay Patel? Um, but yeah, their, their pitch for it was, we make these apps, product designers design choices into the apps, and then users make those choices, and there's actually a gap, and we're just gonna investigate the gap. And I think that's just one of the smartest and, quite frankly, vergiest ways of thinking about technology, and they're, they're off to the races. So, next week, October 17th. This ends the hype portion of the Vergecast.
7:14 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:15 Nilay Patel? If you've been skipping ahead, this is a good time to stop, but don't.
7:18 Speaker 04 If you like, if you've got that 30 second skip forward, we can put a little padding right here so that you can get back and...
7:26 Nilay Patel? We know, we know why you pushed that button. So now, Paul.
7:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:30 Nilay Patel? We can get right into it.
7:31 Speaker 04 Okay.
7:31 Nilay Patel? And I'm gonna demand, when Dieter talked to me, that's something that he insisted on tweeting last night. Which is Google's messaging situation.
7:38 Speaker 01 Look, none of this is new.
7:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
7:41 Speaker 01 But I have been thinking nonstop about the fact that there are 2 billion Android users right now. And, near as I can tell, at least a billion of them are using, like, Google Play versions of Android, official Google versions. The other billion is, you know, in China and whatever. And the fact that Google insists on playing nice with carriers and letting them give it a go with RCS.
8:07 Nilay Patel? Their new messaging. It's a new messaging standard.
8:09 Speaker 01 That, they, they think people are using ALO, which nobody's doing that at all. I'm done. I am, I'm just, I'm sick of it. You have a billion users. Whatever fear you have that carriers are gonna switch to Tizen is unfounded.
8:26 Speaker 01 Google, you have a ton of leverage. Just use it. Just take Allo, build it into the SMS app, build it into messaging, have it work like iMessage where if you detect an Allo on the other end, then it'll send it via Allo. And if it doesn't, it'll send it a regular text message. You already have Allo on iPhones and you already know people's phone numbers, so you can do it. This isn't the standard Android rant where people are like, I wish they just had SMS inside Allo, so I only had to have one icon on my home screen. No, just do the lock-in thing. Do the Apple thing. Just do it. Because you will instantly gain a billion users
9:07 Speaker 01 for your messaging app, instead of the 50 that you have now. And I won't have to fight with basically everybody about which messaging app I communicate on them with. Because like, my parents are like, well, it's MMS, but MMS is screwy, so sometimes I try and do Facebook Messenger, but then they forget to use it. And some people are WhatsApp, but also they're not. And then some people are Facebook Messenger, but also they're not. And there's Signal and like, there's, you know, the giant folder of shitty messaging apps. And if Google just did the iMessage thing, they'd pick up a billion users and people would just start migrating to it. And because they're
9:45 Speaker 01 happy to put that shit on iPhone, it would just win. Well, it would, it would win compared to whatever it is they're doing now. Would it
9:55 Speaker 04 It would be a win for Google.
9:57 Speaker 01 Would it
9:57 Speaker 04 Would it beat WhatsApp?
9:59 Speaker 01 It might not beat WhatsApp. I think it would have a really good chance of taking on Messenger.
10:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:04 Speaker 01 They have a pretty decent chance of taking on iMessage.
10:06 Nilay Patel? So I have two questions, and then a follow-on suggestion.
10:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:10 Nilay Patel? This is how I'm choosing to format.
10:11 Speaker 01 By the way, here's how I ended the rant.
10:12 Speaker 04 A tertiary comment?
10:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, go ahead. I'm an open standard zealot, and this Google messaging shit is too much even for me.
10:20 Nilay Patel? So that's my first question.
10:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:21 Nilay Patel? To the floor.
10:24 Nilay Patel? I don't, there's just a lot of Model UN coming out of me right now.
10:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:27 Nilay Patel? That's not very googly, right? Like, that's not their play.
10:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:31 Nilay Patel? Usually.
10:31 Speaker 01 No, it's usually not.
10:32 Nilay Patel? Their play is, we're gonna force the standard to be the standard, and it's gonna be open, and then we'll provide the service layer inside the standard that everybody likes.
10:38 Speaker 01 That's a very nice play when you are dealing with people who, whose interests are not to screw over consumers.
10:46 Nilay Patel? Right.
10:46 Speaker 01 But who they're dealing with here are carriers. And so the idea that you can just assume the best of everybody else in the ecosystem does not apply.
10:54 Nilay Patel? So how did SMS win and MMS win?
10:56 Speaker 01 Like, because there was literally nothing else except for like BBM, but that came later.
11:00 Nilay Patel? Right.
11:01 Speaker 01 And also because SMS was a thing that worked by accident. It was not designed for texting. It was like an extra thing that they threw on top of, you know, the cellphone standard so they could like send like, you know, messages about whether or not the network was working.
11:17 Nilay Patel? Mm-hmm.
11:17 Speaker 01 Not actually meant for communication. It was a hack. And everyone was like, oh shit, we have this hack. And then it just kind of grew from there. So that's why SMS won that first round. It lost the second round because it's a garbage thing.
11:31 Speaker 04 Wasn't Apple's original, maybe it was just with FaceTime. Didn't Apple originally say like, here's our thing, but then we're gonna open it up to other people?
11:40 Speaker 01 They did, yes.
11:40 Speaker 04 Why couldn't Google do that?
11:42 Speaker 01 They could do that.
11:43 Speaker 04 Where they just like, here's our thing, we're gonna force it into the-
11:45 Nilay Patel? So that's what they're trying to do with RCS.
11:47 Speaker 01 Well, but so, no. RCS is controlled by the carriers. Google has a, like, a suggested implementation.
11:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
11:54 Speaker 01 And they will offer you RCS like backend services if you're a carrier, so that you don't have to worry about how to set it up. But it's up to the carriers to figure out how to do it, and none of them are incentivized to really do it, and they all have slightly different takes on them.
12:09 Nilay Patel? I mean, that's MMS. I mean, that's actually the problem with MMS.
12:12 Speaker 01 Right. The, the context here, like, the thing that like haunts this discussion is that AOL Instant Messenger is getting shut down.
12:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
12:21 Speaker 01 And the thing that convulsed instant messaging back in the day was there was AOL versus ICQ versus MSN.
12:30 Nilay Patel? Versus Google Chat, G Chat. And AOL and ICQ basically merged.
12:34 Speaker 01 Well, AOL bought ICQ.
12:36 Nilay Patel? AOL, yeah, bought ICQ. And then the government was like, hey, no, you guys got to open up and interoperate. And then that happened, but something in that process ran into the beginning of the switch to mobile. And everything just sort of started spinning down.
12:51 Speaker 04 There was a phase there where, because Google Talk.
12:55 Nilay Patel? We had like two years of beautiful interoperability.
12:57 Speaker 04 What was that, what's the, what was that open one called?
13:00 Nilay Patel? The Google Talk was. The XML RPC standard that allowed everything to work together.
13:05 Speaker 04 Gmail was like, like a, like a, a email server.
13:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
13:09 Speaker 04 But for, it's the message, your Google account was like a, a server for this open standard. And you had like the nice white label version if you're using Google Talk.
13:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So this is my suggestion.
13:19 Speaker 01 Is that the government come in and say everything has to interoperate?
13:22 Nilay Patel? I'm not going to suggest that this current version of our government do anything. I would prefer if they would just stop, which I think is the first time I've espoused a conservative principle. If the government could just stop for a while, that would be great. Just shut up. All of you, just please don't do anything.
13:40 Speaker 04 It's all I ever wanted.
13:41 Nilay Patel? Don't pass any laws.
13:42 Speaker 04 Don't do anything.
13:43 Nilay Patel? Don't speak. Yeah, we agree.
13:44 Speaker 04 Don't show up for work.
13:46 Nilay Patel? It would be great. If, if, if the entire government, federal government would just stop showing up.
13:51 Speaker 01 You know what we should do?
13:52 Nilay Patel? That would be great.
13:52 Speaker 01 We should buy everybody in the government Nintendo Switches and just like load some games on there. And they're like, oh, what if I just?
13:59 Nilay Patel? I mean, if anybody.
14:01 Speaker 04 Or just drop them a link to like a clicker game, like once a day.
14:05 Nilay Patel? Donald, can you crush the candy? That's not, I don't know how Candy Crush works.
14:11 Speaker 04 It's not a clicker game.
14:12 Nilay Patel? I'm sorry, Paul.
14:12 Speaker 04 It's a, a shape matching.
14:15 Nilay Patel? It's a match three is what they're called.
14:17 Speaker 04 There you go.
14:18 Nilay Patel? I only play AAA games because I'm a real gamer.
14:21 Speaker 01 It's not also true.
14:23 Nilay Patel? No, there's a great piece in Motherboard about how the model that the government used to to open AOL and so Messenger could be applied to Facebook. It's very smart. You should go read it. That's not actually my suggestion. My suggestion is way more, way dumber.
14:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:39 Nilay Patel? Way stupider.
14:40 Speaker 01 Let's hear it.
14:40 Nilay Patel? Google should just rebrand like ALO or Hangouts or whatever as Gchat, which everyone loved. Everyone loved Gchat.
14:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:50 Nilay Patel? And be like, here's Gchat for mobile. Remember this product you loved? We've brought it back. It's virtually the same. It's just on your phone now.
14:57 Speaker 01 Neelai, that is a great, great marketing plan for 40-year-olds. Nice job.
15:02 Nilay Patel? It's, people would use it. People still use Gchat.
15:05 Speaker 04 My mom loved, I, I thought, I always thought of it as Google Talk. Am I thinking of a random thing?
15:12 Nilay Patel? It was like, it was a whole thing.
15:13 Speaker 04 It was rebranded as Gchat. Like, if I was in my email, my mom could talk to me.
15:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
15:18 Speaker 04 She loved that.
15:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Remember when all the services also had open APIs? So you could download like one client.
15:24 Speaker 01 Yep.
15:24 Nilay Patel? Like trillion.
15:25 Speaker 04 Pigeon.
15:25 Nilay Patel? Pigeon.
15:26 Speaker 01 Pigeon.
15:27 Nilay Patel? Uh, the, the.
15:27 Speaker 01 ADM.
15:28 Speaker 04 ADM.
15:29 Nilay Patel? ADM was amazing.
15:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:30 Nilay Patel? So we've begun the Vergecast by talking about open standards once again.
15:34 Speaker 01 By the way, if you didn't believe Neelai that like this would make a good video show, we just proved you wrong.
15:41 Nilay Patel? You don't want to look at us while we're talking, I assure you.
15:45 Speaker 01 Do you want to see me gesticulate wildly with my hands?
15:48 Speaker 04 We're making that open standards face, you know?
15:51 Nilay Patel? Alright.
15:52 Speaker 01 Anyway, that had nothing to do with any news, other than it just made me angry because I just think about it.
15:56 Nilay Patel? It's, it's time for us to all think about, are we gonna, it's flagship phone time.
15:59 Speaker 01 Well, they just announced the Pixel 2.
16:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Are you gonna switch ecosystems? It's a whole thing. And what, what does Apple have? But I was talking to somebody, because BlackBerry put out the BlackBerry motion this week.
16:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:09 Nilay Patel? Uh, and it just, it came up, like, someone was like, what about this new BlackBerry? And I was like, I don't know, why would you want a mid-range Android phone? And they're like, man, I used to love BlackBerry. I was all on BBM. And it occurred to me, uh, that BBM seemed like the ultimate lock-in for BlackBerry, but it was actually brittle. And the minute they lost an advantage, people abandoned BBM.
16:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:29 Nilay Patel? And so iMessage is like, we talk about iMessage lock-in constantly, but I wonder if it's that, it's as brittle.
16:36 Speaker 01 Interesting.
16:37 Speaker 04 It's like the Titanic.
16:40 Nilay Patel? It's a great ship.
16:41 Speaker 01 No, I don't think it's like, I don't think it's as brittle. I think that iMessage has a much wider user base. And it has a user base that involves more personal relationships than BBM did. And that's a little bit unfair to BBM users. They definitely talk to their friends and family on it. But there are way more people using iMessage to talk to their friends and family. In specifically like group chats. Um, it's also way more deeply embedded into teen culture and youth culture. Uh, than BBM ever was. BBM was like, nah, it would like, it was, it was niche relative to the scale of iMessage. Right.
17:23 Nilay Patel? Two weeks now, by the way, that I brought Gossip Girl up on the show.
17:25 Speaker 01 It's great.
17:26 Nilay Patel? I'm winning.
17:26 Speaker 01 Good for you.
17:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
17:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, there were some comments on the.
17:28 Speaker 01 Wasn't the writer of Gossip Girl have a new show coming?
17:31 Nilay Patel? What were you saying?
17:32 Speaker 04 Uh, there's some comments, actually, I want to know about the Gossip Girl thing. But there were some, some comments on the piece I wrote about, you know, I felt like Google's tryharding. And of course, I had to end my piece about iMessage. And so most of the comments were about iMessage and WhatsApp. And so, yeah, some teams were saying like, at my school, you are not cool if you can't be in iMessage group texts.
17:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:58 Nilay Patel? Yes.
17:58 Speaker 01 That's the thing.
17:59 Speaker 04 Just full stop.
18:00 Nilay Patel? And Neil Dash wrote a great piece ages ago about blue bubbles versus green double. I just got a blue bubble on my phone.
18:06 Nilay Patel? Actually, I have a good tweet about the blue bubbles.
18:08 Speaker 04 Which showed up on your computer.
18:09 Speaker 01 I'm reading another one of my tweets on the air. Apple has the message that they tell you that cool people are blue and lame people are green. Google's messaging strategy, the thing that they imply to you is the person who shows up on your front door. I'm not, it could be a particular religion, but it's multiple religions. And Google's implied message to you is, have you heard the good news about rich communication services?
18:36 Nilay Patel? That was a tweet?
18:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:38 Nilay Patel? It's a very wrong, complicated tweet.
18:41 Speaker 01 We gotta go back to 140 characters really quick.
18:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah, do you have 280? What's going on with the band?
18:46 Speaker 01 We're moving on.
18:47 Nilay Patel? We actually have to talk about real news, not just my complaints. On the same sort of thematic vibe. Yeah. This is actually quite exciting to me. Okay. Probably only to me. Headphone jacks. It's not headphone jacks. Uh, Disney launched a new thing. Yes. Called Movies Anywhere. They've, they've always sort of had a digital locker for movies. So if you buy a Disney movie and you have Disney app on some other platform, you can watch a Disney movie. The new one, Movies Anywhere, they got all the major studios to work with them. Yep. Importantly, they also got Apple to work with them. Yup. So now if you buy a movie on Google Play or Vudu, it'll show up in iTunes. If I buy a movie in iTunes, it'll show up on Google Play and Vudu. Which is crazy good.
19:28 Speaker 01 I could not believe that this happened.
19:30 Nilay Patel? It's finally happening.
19:31 Speaker 01 They're gonna, something, there is some catch. There is definitely a catch where you do this and you have the beautiful cross-platform dream and you're not locked into any single like content provider's platform, but also they get to like. There's like a courtesy of iTunes watermark. Light your bed on fire when they feel like it. They get to sneak into your house.
19:53 Nilay Patel? We haven't used it yet.
19:54 Speaker 01 Watch the, watch the movie with you.
19:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah, exactly. Our DRM is very personal. It's the police show up at your house.
20:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:02 Nilay Patel? They're ready to arrest you at any moment.
20:04 Speaker 01 Doesn't this seem like it's too good to be true? Does it work retroactively on stuff I've already bought?
20:07 Nilay Patel? So we have not, you can sign up to like, you have to sign up for the app and then you get the app. So we're still waiting. Last night when I tried to sign up, the whole website was crashed. Which shocking amount of demand for digital locker services, I have to say. Oh, I'm signing up right now on the podcast. I mean, that's what we're here for. Online shopping. So I sign in with Google, Facebook or manual login? What do you think? You're eventually gonna have to link them all, right? And I, this is, I think, one of the, here, so this is one of the, the. Oh man, I'm just checking boxes on terms of service without reading them right now. This is gonna be super fun. So what I'm saying is I think this is one of the big catches here. You're eventually gonna have to link all these accounts. You're gonna start sharing a lot of data. Yeah. They all do different things with that data, so. You just have to be aware.
20:49 Speaker 01 They get to know that I've watched Wonder Woman like four times already.
20:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:53 Speaker 01 Can I just?
20:54 Nilay Patel? You have to use the Movies Anywhere app, which seems strange to me.
20:59 Speaker 01 What, to get them from place to place?
21:01 Nilay Patel? It's unclear. So the mechanics of how it works are still a little unclear. I've, there's already been reports that, you know, iTunes just starts showing you movies, which is great. It, there's a whole thing with iTunes, right? The new Apple TV 4K, you buy it, Apple automatically upgrades your library to 4K HDR. Is that gonna pass over to the other platforms where those movies are priced a little bit higher? Are they gonna be in a price war because now you can be across all the platforms?
21:26 Speaker 01 I found, I figured out the catch. In order to connect iTunes.
21:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:29 Speaker 01 Movie Store to Movies Anywhere, you have to open the iTunes app.
21:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:35 Speaker 01 Which is the worst.
21:36 Nilay Patel? It's terrible.
21:37 Speaker 01 Keep going.
21:37 Nilay Patel? I mean, we just promoted a podcast, which demands that you open it.
21:39 Speaker 01 Here's, here's an argument in favor of this being a video show.
21:43 Nilay Patel? Logo for Key. So that, so Paul is showing me the logo. The DRM technology that Disney uses, that they've all signed up to use.
21:49 Speaker 01 Is a fanciful.
21:51 Nilay Patel? It's a, it's a key with a Disney logo in the middle.
21:53 Speaker 01 And the, the, the lock, the, the, the.
21:57 Nilay Patel? That is just the jaws of DRM.
21:59 Speaker 01 It's a dragon head. No, but it's got a Mickey Mouse. Look at that.
22:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like Mickey Mouse turning into a dragon to eat your files.
22:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:06 Nilay Patel? And to kill consumer rights. Um, it's called Keychests, a billion on that DRM.
22:11 Speaker 01 Okay.
22:11 Nilay Patel? But, the dream now finally is that if you're on every platform but iTunes and use Movies Anywhere, you know, like, I wanna watch Wonder Woman, and you click the button.
22:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:21 Nilay Patel? And it presents you a list of retailers.
22:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:24 Nilay Patel? So they might have to compete on price because you're gonna wanna buy from.
22:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, but on the Apple TV, you can only buy from iTunes.
22:29 Nilay Patel? On the app, because it's Apple.
22:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:31 Nilay Patel? So, I think this is really exciting. I think this is like, that moment of, we're just gonna start buying movies on our TVs for real, and it's, we're not gonna be locked in the ecosystems or platforms, has arrived. It also, I think it's really interesting that Apple just launched the Apple TV 4K. They did this whole thing about 4K HDR movies, they're pricing them lower, they're. Upgrading all your, your library content, yes?
22:55 Speaker 01 Y'all, I'm looking at a library that includes all of the movies I've ever purchased on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, and Amazon. MoviesAnywhere.com/My-Movies.
23:06 Nilay Patel? So can you, when you hit play, what happens?
23:08 Speaker 01 Um, uh, well, I don't know. What, what do you want me to hit play on? Obviously, uh, Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift, right? Yes.
23:16 Nilay Patel? We're all, we're all just admitting to ourselves what's happening.
23:18 Speaker 01 Uh, it's just playing right here inside the web player in my browser.
23:23 Nilay Patel? Interesting. So if you, now if you go-
23:25 Speaker 01 I bought, I bought that particular movie on Google Play. I wanna see if it's gonna have the fast forward and rewind controls.
23:29 Nilay Patel? So now if you go into iTunes on your computer, does it show up there?
23:32 Speaker 01 Uh, that is an excellent question. Library. Keep, keep, keep talking while I- This is so exciting.
23:38 Nilay Patel? No, this is great radio.
23:39 Speaker 01 This is, no, I'm not even kidding. Like, this is-
23:42 Nilay Patel? There's suspense.
23:42 Speaker 01 This is crazy. This is actually really exciting to me.
23:44 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so they, what they've done is they've linked all their DRM subscription services. They've all agreed to use Disney's DRM. But the context that I wanna provide is like, Apple just made this big move to have a lower prices.
23:57 Speaker 01 Do not see it in iTunes yet, but I'm not worried about it.
24:00 Nilay Patel? So Apple's made this big move to have a lower prices and upgrade your existing library. It is unclear if that carries forward. And also, we just had this long Apple TV 4K review, and it's the most expensive stream on the market, bar the Nvidia Shield. But the only reason you'd buy it is because you have a huge iTunes library. And now, it doesn't matter, because you're, right? You're gonna be able to migrate that library and watch it in other services, or the movies anywhere.
24:26 Speaker 01 I'm still shocked that this happened.
24:29 Nilay Patel? Right.
24:29 Speaker 01 I never would have expected this to happen.
24:31 Nilay Patel? So I'm, I'm convinced that Apple made the deal with the studios. Disney not part of that 4K HDR deal with Apple.
24:38 Speaker 01 Hmm.
24:39 Nilay Patel? Right? So Apple made this deal with all these studios-
24:42 Speaker 01 Yep.
24:42 Nilay Patel? To get the cheaper pricing on 4K HDR, to have the retroactive library upgrade. Disney not part of that deal. Disney doesn't have a lot of 4K HDR content yet. It's Pirates 5 and, um, Guardians 2. But, you can see where Disney was saying, you have to be a part of this in order for us to do the other thing. And I bet that this is a huge part of that negotiation. Comp, deals. What do we talk about? Open standards and deal making?
25:07 Speaker 01 Uh, find another catch. When you sign up, you get some free movies, and one of them is, uh, Pirates of the Caribbean and Dead Men Tell No Tales, which is a huge bummer.
25:14 Nilay Patel? What is that?
25:15 Speaker 01 Is that 5?
25:16 Nilay Patel? I have no idea.
25:17 Speaker 01 Maybe Disney should make a messaging service. Right?
25:21 Nilay Patel? I assume they have. So that's exciting news. I like, we'll see how it goes. We're gonna do a lot more testing and screwing around with it. Because honestly, I'm excited about it. And so is Brian Bishop. And so is Chris Walsh. So we're
25:32 Speaker 01 So am I.
25:32 Nilay Patel? We're into it. All right.
25:34 Speaker 04 Uh oh, I'm getting an error page.
25:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like apparently so popular, it's crashing.
25:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'm trying to connect. My iTunes account is already connected. I'm working on my Amazon account.
25:44 Nilay Patel? I was playing the paperclip game last night.
25:46 Speaker 01 Hmm, yeah, yeah. Real popular.
25:48 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And it just died on me.
25:51 Speaker 01 Oh.
25:52 Nilay Patel? I was so close.
25:53 Speaker 01 You should, have you played Space Plan?
25:54 Nilay Patel? No.
25:55 Speaker 01 It's good. It's on phones now, but it's better in a browser. And it's, it, it, a little bit less of a commitment than the paperclip game.
26:01 Nilay Patel? But I was like, really
26:03 Speaker 01 It involves potatoes.
26:04 Nilay Patel? So it's the Martian? All right. All right, Dieter. You, you, you got into a story this week about the Google Home Mini.
26:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I can't take credit for this. The, the story is Artem over at Android Police.
26:20 Speaker 01 Somehow noticed that his Google Home Mini was acting up. He saw the lights on it. He was happening to look at his My Activity. Fun fact, if you use Google Assistant on any device, you can just, and you can do, also do this on Amazon. You can look at the history of all the queries. And his history was just thousands of random recordings of his house. The thing was constantly recording, on and off, on and off, on and off, all the time. He discovered, and Google verified, that the Mini had a feature where you could hold your finger down on the top and that would, you know, trigger the assistant to ask a question. So you didn't have to say, okay, Google. And so I think Google just screwed up the capacitive button with the fabric on top.
26:59 Speaker 04 It's like a hardware problem.
27:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
27:01 Speaker 01 And so, wrote the story, you know, about what happened over at Android Police. Google put out a statement. They've just, they, they fixed it right away. They disabled the top button. And we're like, okay, maybe they'll bring it back. They'll figure out if they can fix it with software. And out of an excess of caution and to make everybody feel good about this thing not listening to them, they've turned off the top button, capacitive button entirely. Now you can just turn the volume up, turn the volume down. That's it. I don't think you can tap it to even stop it at this point.
27:28 Nilay Patel? Really?
27:28 Speaker 01 I haven't tried it.
27:29 Nilay Patel? Can you, can you mute the microphone still? Oh, that's on the side. That's a switch.
27:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, the muted, the mute thing on the Mini is a whole other issue. Dan did the review. And if you ask Google to mute it, it will mute. But you can't unmute it unless you go to the switch and like Toggle it.
27:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
27:42 Speaker 01 So the switch doesn't actually necessarily guarantee what the state of the thing is. Anyway, that's fine. I think the Google Home Mini sounds way better than the Dot. And the Google Assistant is a little bit more natural to talk to than the Dot than Alexa is. But Alexa has a huge advantage in ecosystem size. And Alexa now is starting to begin to support multiple voices, which was Google Home's primary advantage, to be honest.
28:09 Speaker 01 So yeah, like, think of the number of ways that a home speaker could launch, could be botched.
28:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
28:16 Speaker 01 And it accidentally records everything that you say is everybody's literal worst fear.
28:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
28:23 Speaker 01 And that's what happened. Now, it happened on pre, like, early release devices. They didn't tell us they were beta, but they were handing them out at the Google event. They're giving them to reviewers. None of this will affect actual retail models.
28:36 Nilay Patel? Right, because you'll plug it in, it'll do a software update.
28:38 Speaker 01 Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
28:39 Nilay Patel? So I'm willing-
28:40 Speaker 01 But in terms of PR nightmares, this is at the very top of the list.
28:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I agree with you. But it's not the problem. I don't know. The problem itself is so stupid. Right, like, the problem isn't-
28:55 Speaker 01 They screwed up the button.
28:56 Nilay Patel? Google engineered the thing to listen to you all the time, or the problem isn't Google got hacked, or the problem is like, the assistant just woke up one day and became self-aware and started listening. The problem is they broke, they fucked up the design of a button.
29:08 Speaker 01 Yep.
29:09 Nilay Patel? Right, and the button is the record button.
29:10 Speaker 01 Yep.
29:11 Nilay Patel? And that is just stupid.
29:12 Speaker 04 Right, yeah, the number one fear is a malicious company making a voice assistant. But the number, I, I think a big fear for Google right now should be, are we good at making hardware?
29:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah, right?
29:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that's a bigger problem. I think another fear is like, will we just get lumped in with Facebook and be, seem malicious? Because that, right, there's like ads on, Russian ads on Google too, like-
29:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:36 Speaker 01 But yeah, you're right. The main problem is like, we're a hardware company now. This button doesn't work. This mute switch doesn't do what it says.
29:46 Speaker 01 I don't know. I mean, I'm inclined, again, to me, if I could just say something other than, "Okay, Google." Hey, Google, you can say, "Hey, Google." I don't want to say "Google." I don't want to run around yelling brands in my house.
29:57 Speaker 04 I just, I just watched a not-good movie with the guy from Breaking Bad and James Franco.
30:05 Speaker 01 Oh, like the dad or something?
30:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, he's the dad and James Franco's the scary boyfriend of his daughter. And he has this, like, voice assistant throughout the whole home named Justine. And as soon as, and it's always listening to everything, and as soon as you learn that in the movie, you're just terrified. Because every single conversation is being monitored and everything, everything's a secret. I don't know, like, I feel like I'm not that, I'm not kind of one of the paranoid people mostly, and I don't really worry about companies doing stuff like this. But it is really scary if a company was doing it.
30:46 Speaker 01 Uh, when this story broke, I will, I will just tell you that, like, several people in The Verge, the Vox Media San Francisco office, I won't name names, but several people were like, "Told you so." Why did anybody, why would anybody put one of these things in their house? This is, this, "Told you, I told you, don't trust these companies." Like, it just reified everybody's worst fears.
31:05 Nilay Patel? Again, this is why I'm saying it's just dumb, right? Like, the problem is dumb, but the fear is real. And validating the real fear with a stupid problem is not the mistake Google should make.
31:17 Speaker 01 Yep.
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32:21 Nilay Patel? So here's the thing we noticed, just as we were prepping the show.
32:23 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
32:23 Nilay Patel? Very quietly, Apple's in like a pretty intense hype cycle around AR.
32:29 Speaker 01 Was that a crack about how Tim Cook speaks?
32:32 Nilay Patel? It's very soothing. I would have said very soothingly, Apple. It's not quiet. It's just soothing.
32:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:38 Nilay Patel? He speaks forcefully, confidently, but in a soothing way. You're gonna pay a thousand dollars for this phone and you just do it. Show up one day and do it. Anyway, but it's, I think it's a little under the radar, which is strange for an Apple hype cycle. So they're not out to tech publications. They're out to like Vogue.
32:53 Speaker 01 They're with Vogue and the Independent in the UK.
32:56 Nilay Patel? Um, Johnny Ive just gave a design interview to a Japanese magazine. Like, they're out. Apple executives are out. They're not always out, right? So it's interesting that they're out.
33:05 Speaker 01 Yep.
33:05 Nilay Patel? And what they're talking about is AR, which is interesting because when The Eight came out during that launch event, they actually kind of underplayed it. They know that the apps aren't there yet. There's a lot of cool demos, but the sort of broad market of AI, AR killer apps isn't sort of there. So they were like, we built it. It's here. It's gonna be awesome.
33:26 Speaker 01 I think that, I'm curious at how short a memory people have about Tim Cook going out and talking speculatively about exciting potential of technology. Because the last time Tim Cook was on this kind of a hype cycle, it was about TV.
33:42 Nilay Patel? Sure was.
33:43 Speaker 01 And that turned it-
33:45 Nilay Patel? No, it was about the watch.
33:46 Speaker 01 Okay, fine. Fair. Fair. Whatever.
33:49 Nilay Patel? But we've seen this pattern repeat twice.
33:51 Speaker 01 Right. And I don't know. It's, he's, they're doing a very good job of not overselling it. But it's also, I'm curious as to-
34:03 Speaker 01 What Apple's actual end goal here is and what they're counter-programming? Because I kind of doubt they're that worried about Google hardware, for example.
34:10 Nilay Patel? I sincerely doubt that. I think, I think they know that, well, maybe not they know, but I think they, they are aware.
34:18 Speaker 01 Yep.
34:18 Nilay Patel? That the iPhone 8 is just not. And I, it, you know, the rumblings about iPhone 10 supply. The last rumors, and they're just rumors, I'm just saying them, I don't know if they're true. Is that it's hard to build the projector for the Dots. And so the supply issues around the 10 are still out there. So building a cycle around, hey, you can, all of these iPhones, from the SC on up.
34:43 Speaker 01 Right.
34:44 Nilay Patel? Can do AR, and that's cool, that's something we're inventing.
34:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, and they're doing a good job of tempering expectations about that AR is. They're hyping it, but also undercutting the hype a little bit, like in the same breath. So the headline that everyone is talking about, and this is mostly from Vogue, but I, I think it was the same thing in this independent story is, "Apple is not, doesn't believe that the technology exists." I think the exact quote is, "The technology itself doesn't exist to do that in a quality way," referring to AR glasses. So when people are like, "Oh, my God, augmented reality," Apple's being really clear that it is on a phone. But I love, sorry, I just, I'm trying to work my way towards quoting Tim Cook and the, this, the most amazing quote he gave to Vogue.
35:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
35:21 Speaker 01 And I've been trying to like preamble and make it natural, but I'm just gonna say it because I love it so much.
35:26 Nilay Patel? It's, it's something.
35:27 Speaker 01 "We don't give a rats about being first. We want to be best in creating people's experiences." Uh, you know, so they don't care about making the first AR, it's a little Google swipe, but we don't give a rats about being first.
35:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
35:39 Speaker 01 It's not, it's not rats hyphen hyphen. No.
35:43 Nilay Patel? You just, you can say ass, Tim. You just can.
35:47 Speaker 01 Not to Vogue.
35:48 Nilay Patel? Yes, you can.
35:51 Speaker 01 He's just, he's a polite guy.
35:53 Nilay Patel? Oh.
35:54 Speaker 01 That's as emphatic as you've heard Tim Cook.
35:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
35:57 Speaker 01 I get it.
35:58 Nilay Patel? I, I think it's interesting that the, the line is like, "The technology is not there for us to make these glasses." Because Apple invents technology.
36:06 Speaker 01 Hmm.
36:07 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, it's a weird kind of construct for them.
36:12 Speaker 01 It's like, "We're not good enough at our jobs." Do you think him saying-
36:14 Nilay Patel? I don't think it's like that, it's just, it's just a weird- What it's like we can't go to the store, we can't go to Fry's and buy this thing.
36:20 Speaker 01 The technology doesn't exist to do that in a quality way. Cause magically just had a little bit of a tiny little thing where they maybe.
36:28 Nilay Patel? Their thing is like the size of a refrigerator. You have to mount a beer keg to your back and like walk around. Um, I mean, like people are trying to do it. Microsoft has HoloLens.
36:36 Speaker 01 Yep.
36:37 Nilay Patel? Right? So these are all swipes that their competitors.
36:40 Speaker 01 Right.
36:40 Nilay Patel? Who are making products that do this stuff. And I guess what he's saying is like, that's all garbage. So what he's saying is their technology is not quality.
36:50 Speaker 01 Yep.
36:51 Nilay Patel? But their whole thing is that they invent technology. It's just a weird formulation of that phrase.
36:56 Speaker 01 Right.
36:57 Nilay Patel? What they, what like another way to say it is like, we look at the products in the market and none of them are doing it in a quality way. Wink. Johnny Ives in the lab right now.
37:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:06 Nilay Patel? Walking around in circles.
37:07 Speaker 04 That is the preamble to every great Apple keynote announcement.
37:11 Nilay Patel? Right.
37:11 Speaker 04 So this was, this was impossible to do. Nobody could do it.
37:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
37:16 Speaker 04 But we did it.
37:16 Nilay Patel? But we actually, so it's just a weird construction. That's all I'm just, and like it's in every use talking. I'm sure it wasn't like. Yeah. He wasn't like at the whiteboard being like, how do I say this exactly? But it's just. Just tonally from Apple, like usually what they, they say nothing until they say everything.
37:31 Speaker 01 Right.
37:32 Nilay Patel? And now he's like out there in the independent. He's like, we're gonna, we're gonna plant a lot of seeds. And they are. It's gonna be the next app store. And I would just point out. That's probably, AR is great. It's probably more true than anything else they've done, but they also said that ad about like the iMessage app store. And the watch app store and the TV app store. Like their solution to things is like, it's an app store. And it's fine. But I don't know. It's just they're in, they're in this hype cycle. I just thought it was worth pointing out.
38:02 Speaker 01 Yep.
38:03 Nilay Patel? I think another reason they could be in this hype cycle is because Oculus just had Oculus Connect.
38:06 Speaker 04 Ah, yes.
38:07 Nilay Patel? Which is their big event. So they're counter programming the big VR push from Facebook.
38:11 Speaker 01 My standard Oculus disclosure, by the way, is doubly important because my wife is actually in one of the hype videos.
38:18 Nilay Patel? That's great.
38:18 Speaker 01 FYI. Yeah.
38:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
38:20 Speaker 04 So.
38:21 Nilay Patel? You wanna go through it?
38:23 Speaker 04 Though there's a lot to go through and I. I really feel like.
38:27 Nilay Patel? By the way, the disclosure is that Dieter's wife works for Oculus. Not that she is routinely cast in videos.
38:35 Speaker 04 I feel like there's so much going on here. I still think that, okay, so I feel like the fundamental foundation for this Oculus event is, you know, Mark Zuckerberg gets on stage and without saying, "I'm sorry VR hasn't succeeded yet," says that for 15 minutes.
38:56 Speaker 01 And Did he at least apologize for the boneheaded, I'm gonna put a cute cartoon character in the middle of Hurricane Ravage, Puerto Rico?
39:05 Speaker 04 He did, he apologized on Facebook, but not at the event.
39:08 Speaker 01 Okay.
39:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, on Facebook he was like, "Sometimes we get," you know, like the standard corporate apology.
39:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay, sorry, keep going.
39:16 Speaker 04 And so he kind of like, he listed a bunch of different ways. One, VR can help paralyzed people by allowing them to visualize their legs and therefore build neural pathways to regaining motor function. That's awesome. VR can help businesses and help have remote workers and have meetings and stuff like that. VR can allow you to have these experiences. So you can, one of their announcements was you'll be able to do like, watch live concerts and live, I think it's called venues or something like that. Watch live concerts, live sports, which I think is, you know, some of the best VR experiences
40:01 Speaker 04 are kind of passive, just watching entertainment with other people. So I think that's cool. VR will allow you to have like this expanded virtual workspace. So they're redoing their basic PC software to pull on a lot of your PC, which is one of the best experiences on the Rift, is something called big screen. And so the fact that they're building a whole interface for using your PC within VR is kind of cool.
40:27 Speaker 01 By the way, speaking of big screen, I'm just gonna point out that they've set up the Oculus system disclosure, etc. That if you, in the Oculus ecosystem, if you block somebody in any Oculus, any app in Oculus, it will block them across all Oculus Store apps.
40:44 Speaker 04 That's good. That is really exciting to me. Because I actually, the best part of VR for me is the social experiences. Facebook's Spaces thing is an amazing experience. And everybody should try it. And the nice thing about it is even if you don't have VR, you can watch your buddy, like, live stream on Facebook and like, see into, you can watch somebody on a live stream, if they're in VR, and then they're video chatting with somebody in the real world. And that integration, I've been excited about forever, and it is actually, is really great. But then there's, yeah, there's this desktop thing. And so the actual products
41:24 Speaker 04 that they announced is a $200 standalone headset that's basically a Gear VR with the phone hardware built in.
41:33 Speaker 01 Using an LCD screen, by the way. Interesting.
41:37 Speaker 04 Get some ghost in. Oculus, Oculus Go. And, and then they also teased, again...
41:43 Speaker 01 How powerful is the Go? Do we know yet?
41:46 Speaker 04 I'm assuming it's probably just like a medium to high-end Android phone.
41:52 Speaker 01 The only reason I'm asking is because it's an LCD, it's cheap. Did they just, like,
41:58 Speaker 01 buy a bunch of Gear VRs and a bunch of mid-range Android phones and like glue them together?
42:02 Speaker 04 The first, the first phone that could run, like, that was announced with the Gear VR was the, the S6?
42:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
42:11 Speaker 04 So...
42:12 Speaker 01 Well, Carmack always claimed that, like, OLED was the only thing that was fast enough. Although, this LCD screen is quote, a quote-unquote "high-resolution, fast-switch LCD screen."
42:21 Speaker 04 Huh. Anyway.
42:23 Speaker 01 So that's the thing, though. That's, that's the one to finally buy, in my opinion, right?
42:26 Speaker 04 I, I don't know.
42:28 Speaker 01 There's still a divide between mobile VR and like desktop VR.
42:31 Speaker 04 Right. Now, now we're gonna have a tri-divide. Because the other thing that they're really hyping...
42:35 Speaker 01 A tri-divide.
42:36 Speaker 04 A tri-divide, if you will. No, you shouldn't. No, no, take it back. So they talked about Santa Cruz, which they had shown last year, which is their standalone... Head headset that has actual motion tracking, inside out tracking. So you can, because the Oculus Go, like the Gear VR is just like, you know, turning around 360 in space, which is not nearly as immersive or fun as being able to actually move around. So they have this inside out tracking Santa Cruz headset. It will have these modified touch controllers that it will also track. So you can have tether free experience where you're, you're moving around and you can use your hands.
43:20 Speaker 04 And those are some of the absolute best experiences. And I, I think that will be absolutely wonderful and great. But I feel like all three of these products. Wait, what's the third part of the Trivide? The Rift, which is PC based. Right. All three of these products, they're not converging, they're, they're diverging. Because some of the, my favorite things to do on the Rift, like big screen. And like, I'm very excited about this new, like, basic Rift software for the PC. Is, is sort of integrating your PC experience and, and something Zuckler were talking about, having this virtual workspace. If you think about like, working with other people, you want your VR headset to be kind of linked to your computer.
44:01 Speaker 04 So that's like one pathway where it's, you have a PC based experience and your VR is augmenting your PC. Your VR is not just powered by your PC, but it's augmenting how you interact with your PC. I find that very interesting, very cool. Then you have the, the middle way of Santa Cruz, which is gonna be really good for entertainment. But that's it. It's not a PC. It's not a PC. And then you have that mobile experience where it's, it's good for very, very passive entertainment and really simple experiences. And they don't look like they're going towards each other at all. And also, you know, they have these new, like redesigned Oculus Home stuff. I think that's what they're calling it.
44:45 Speaker 04 Like you're, you're basically your, your starting area is something now you can customize. Which worked so well when Sony did it forever ago. It's like a little bit like Second Life. And that is a really fun thing. Cause I, I become very anxious going into a social experience with strangers in VR. But the number one reason for me to have VR is to hang out with friends. So being able to go to their customized space, that's wonderful. But those are different avatars and different experiences and different interactions than Facebook Spaces.
45:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
45:18 Speaker 04 Which is another thing. And so I just don't, like, I, I, I appreciate that they are throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. And, and we're probably in that stage for VR, but I think we're just in like a, I think the most successful thing that we'll probably see in the next few years is like their B to B type stuff.
45:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah, their video conferencing thing.
45:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, if you think, I mean, if you think of like early days of PC, it's like something like you kind of get a custom, custom computer with like a cu- custom software for your specific business application. It's relatively easy to develop VR games and experiences. So they've done really good at that. So I can see a lot of like custom, useful, one-off experiences for businesses.
46:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but you need way cheaper headsets for that, right? You gotta, everybody in the conference room needs a headset. That's like a big deal.
46:06 Speaker 04 Yeah. And so, yeah, do you do that with a bunch of Oculus Go's? Or do you do that with a bunch of Santa Cruises but no PC access? Maybe like the, the captain of the meeting has a Rift? And everybody else is in a Santa Cru-?
46:19 Nilay Patel? From now on, I will be known as the meeting captain.
46:22 Speaker 04 Anyways, I'm, I'm confused. I don't know where it's.
46:24 Nilay Patel? So the thing you're saying about, uh, big screen, I've noticed this as I've been using AR apps on the phone. AR apps interact with the world, right? They're augmenting actual reality. So putting things into space requires you to actually have that much space.
46:38 Speaker 04 Uh huh.
46:38 Nilay Patel? Which is like weird. It's a thing. It's just, you wouldn't consider it. Like, I'm gonna play this IKEA app. You're like, I'm gonna put a couch in here.
46:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:45 Nilay Patel? You're like, oh, couches are huge.
46:47 Speaker 04 Very big couches.
46:48 Nilay Patel? They're like, this is gigantic. But when you're fully in VR and you're like, I wanna look at a big screen, you're in an infinitely sized virtual world. And it's actually those, to me, those use cases are diverging, right? You're physically in a small space, but you want to be in a big space. You need to go all the way into VR.
47:06 Speaker 04 Right. And space is, is more about connecting you kind of with real world things like a 360 degree or something like that. But, oh, that's my other point. Rift is kind of low resolution to actually use a computer. So while it's one of my favorite ways to use a computer, it really hurts your eyes after a while because it's really hard to read text in VR. So they also had to get more powerful on that end. I don't know what to do. What I really want is the return of VRML.
47:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
47:33 Speaker 04 I think. We need an open stand.
47:36 Nilay Patel? Oh, God. The show is really taking a turn.
47:39 Speaker 04 For creating virtual spaces.
47:40 Nilay Patel? I can see our producer just started rubbing his eyes.
47:44 Nilay Patel? He was just like, oh, God.
47:48 Speaker 04 All these virtual spaces, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in them, but they're not connected. And I think that's one of the cool things about AR is that it's connected to one big shared reality that we're aware of, which is reality.
48:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Built on an open standard.
48:06 Speaker 04 Built on an open standard, by God.
48:08 Nilay Patel? Oh, God, Paul. All right, it's time for an ad. Let's pay some money our other god.
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50:00 Nilay Patel? Oh, we gotta talk about Windows Phone.
50:02 Speaker 01 Hey!
50:04 Nilay Patel? It's all over. It's kind of something. It's weird that they announced this with tweets. The number of things that have been announced with tweets this week.
50:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:13 Nilay Patel? So Joe Balfiore, who's a pretty well-respected, well-liked Windows executive, Windows Phone executive, he was on the team. We did a lot of interviews with Windows Phone coming out. Took a break from Microsoft, back to Microsoft on the team.
50:24 Speaker 01 He had like a spirit journey.
50:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
50:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:27 Nilay Patel? He just, somebody asked him about Windows Phone this week, and on Twitter, he's like, "Yeah, it's over. Like, we'll do security updates and bug fixes, but..."
50:34 Speaker 01 Building new hardware features slash hardware aren't the focus. Sad face.
50:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's done.
50:41 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
50:42 Nilay Patel? They're just letting that go. He's like, "We couldn't get the apps." But he just announced it all, just kind of quietly on Twitter.
50:47 Speaker 01 He also just went in and admitted, "We tried very hard to incent, you know, get people to make apps, paid money, wrote apps for them."
50:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
50:56 Speaker 01 We all knew this was happening, but the volume was just too low for most companies to invest. Another sad face.
51:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
51:02 Speaker 01 I have a conspiracy theory.
51:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
51:06 Speaker 01 You wanna hear it?
51:06 Speaker 04 Please.
51:08 Speaker 01 I think Microsoft is still gonna make phone hardware.
51:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, it's no coincidence.
51:12 Speaker 04 Running.
51:14 Speaker 01 I am not, I am not assuming anything beyond the fact that Microsoft really enjoys making hardware, and I don't think they're gonna not make phone hardware in the future.
51:23 Nilay Patel? And I would just point out, Balfiore himself said he's using Android phone.
51:28 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
51:28 Nilay Patel? Bill Gates, the spirit leader of all Microsoft.
51:32 Speaker 04 What if though?
51:33 Nilay Patel? Recently admitted that he's using an Android phone.
51:35 Speaker 04 What if?
51:37 Nilay Patel? Microsoft makes a lot of apps for Android now.
51:39 Speaker 01 They made a new Home Screen app?
51:40 Nilay Patel? They made a new Home Screen app. They, you can buy a Samsung Galaxy S8 Microsoft Edition.
51:48 Nilay Patel? I'm not, I agree with you.
51:49 Speaker 01 We're not saying, we're not saying.
51:51 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying.
51:52 Speaker 01 We're not saying.
51:53 Nilay Patel? We're just saying.
51:54 Speaker 04 What if though?
51:55 Nilay Patel? There's just a lot of puzzle pieces on the table.
51:57 Speaker 04 It had MS Boot Camp.
52:01 Nilay Patel? Switch it.
52:02 Speaker 04 And you could buy a CD-ROM of iOS.
52:07 Speaker 04 And it ran both.
52:08 Nilay Patel? Incredible.
52:11 Nilay Patel? That's gonna happen.
52:12 Speaker 04 That would be the full reversal of an industry story.
52:17 Speaker 01 There are so many ways that it could go, though, if they did it.
52:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:20 Speaker 01 Like, would they go the Amazon FireOS route and then get in another fight with Google? Because they lost the last one when they fought over YouTube and Windows Phone.
52:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:28 Speaker 01 Or would they try and make it a full Google Play device and have Google apps competing? It's very, who knows?
52:34 Nilay Patel? Hmm.
52:35 Speaker 01 Would they try and make an app store like the Amazon app store? Cortana and Alexa are best friends now. Maybe it'll run FireOS.
52:44 Nilay Patel? They're best friends who do not communicate well. I'm just, they don't communicate well. But that is, I hadn't thought about that.
52:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:51 Nilay Patel? Microsoft.
52:52 Speaker 01 There's so many ways this could go.
52:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:54 Speaker 04 One of the, when Google announced that they're putting the search bar at the bottom of the Pixel 2, which I was really excited about, Dan showed me Microsoft's very nice Android launcher.
53:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:05 Speaker 04 That has the swipe down for search feature. And you can even, you can change the search to Google search.
53:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:12 Speaker 04 So it's very useful.
53:15 Speaker 04 They're doing some good stuff for Android.
53:17 Nilay Patel? Let's take a moment, though, and just recall Windows Phone. What I personally would like to recall is our many reviews of Windows Phone.
53:25 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
53:26 Nilay Patel? We're like, we were threatened with physical harm because we were like, there are no apps here and this operating system doesn't work right.
53:33 Speaker 01 No, again, beautiful failure. Beautiful, that was like the headline of Vlad's story. Lots and lots of very good ideas. Unified messaging app.
53:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:47 Speaker 01 Very good idea. A home screen that wasn't just a grid of icons, but actually showed you information dynamically in a way that was easy to manage and looked good and wasn't garbage widgets that were designed four years ago for a version of Android that was four years old. Very good idea.
54:03 Nilay Patel? So you're talking about HTC?
54:08 Speaker 01 Most Android widgets are hot garbage. I'm just telling you, almost every single Android widget you will try looks like a butt.
54:17 Nilay Patel? What was HTC's Android skin called?
54:19 Speaker 01 Metal butt. Oh god.
54:21 Nilay Patel? Blink Feed?
54:22 Speaker 01 Blink came later. Now I'm forgetting.
54:25 Speaker 04 We're all talking about the mechanical alarm clock with a sun probably behind the clouds up above it.
54:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. Anyway, and the other thing that was great about Windows Phone is more so than
54:38 Nilay Patel? Sense.
54:39 Speaker 01 Sense. More so than any other operating system at the time, including iPhone, they built an OS that felt fast, fluid, and responsive in its core UI. Not necessarily in like full-on web rendering or whatever, but the core UI felt very, very fast and fluid even on like low-end bare minimum hardware.
55:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
55:02 Speaker 01 They architected a phone OS that in its core principles and ideas had a lot of like morally righteous, good things in it. Except, it came too late, it was very tied to Bing, nobody bought it.
55:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
55:19 Speaker 01 And it failed. And they rebooted it like six times. You remember when we had the scoop that Windows Phone, seven devices weren't going to get upgraded to eight, and everyone got real mad and they're trying to be true, and then Windows Phone eight devices didn't get upgraded to ten?
55:33 Nilay Patel? Literally my entire experience covering Windows Phone has been people being mad at me.
55:37 Speaker 01 Yep.
55:37 Nilay Patel? For just saying very obvious things. Like, the Lumia 1020 is a great phone with a cool camera, but it doesn't have an Instagram app. And they're like, use this weird third-party Instagram. And it's like, that's not the answer. I feel anxious and panicked talking about Windows Phone.
55:55 Speaker 04 There's a real-
55:56 Nilay Patel? We just got railed in the comments.
55:58 Speaker 01 Every time.
55:59 Speaker 04 There's a part of me that really wants somebody to try again with-
56:05 Speaker 04 I feel like part of the promise of Windows Phone, I definitely did not spend a lot of time using Windows Phones. But part of the promise was this company will design the UI.
56:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
56:16 Speaker 04 And app makers will deliver functionality that you can interact with through this common UI.
56:22 Nilay Patel? Yep.
56:23 Speaker 04 And that's the Unix model. And I find it to be exceedingly beautiful and it makes people theoretically into very powerful users because they can just chain interesting, and Unix can chain cool commands and like standard commands and then something custom and do really powerful, interesting things. And I feel like we're still very far from being that powerful on mobile. And I want that dream to rise again.
56:53 Nilay Patel? It's real far away, man.
56:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
56:54 Nilay Patel? It's not, it's not happening. But I will say the UI ideas for Windows Phone, I would put them in two categories. One was basically giant fonts.
57:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
57:05 Nilay Patel? And that's every, like iOS 11 is giant fonts for days.
57:08 Speaker 04 Yep.
57:09 Nilay Patel? And there, I think there's a lot of Windows Phone snaking its way into iOS, at least from that sensibility.
57:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
57:15 Nilay Patel? The other thing that I don't think anybody's picked up on, maybe a little bit in Android, is the idea that those home screen fragments were quick links into specific features of apps.
57:28 Speaker 04 Oh yeah, they're deep links. Yeah, yeah.
57:29 Nilay Patel? And that was super cool.
57:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
57:31 Nilay Patel? So you could program your home screen not with like app icons, but specific features.
57:36 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
57:37 Nilay Patel? Which was, I just thought was the smartest thing.
57:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, you're just starting, like, that's been in Android for a while, those like app shortcuts. But they're just starting to see real support and it's not really picking up that fast. We'll see what happens with Oreo once more than 15 people have Oreo. Because it makes it way easier, but I'll see.
57:56 Nilay Patel? It's a little, there's a little, iOS plays some games and it's definitely not the same.
58:00 Speaker 04 No.
58:01 Nilay Patel? But I thought that was, that model where everything isn't an app, but it's just different little collections of features that you want to assemble into a UI.
58:09 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
58:10 Nilay Patel? Ah, it was neat.
58:10 Speaker 04 Hmm.
58:11 Nilay Patel? R.I.P. Windows Phone. Missy. Do we? Steven, you hop. All right, Paul.
58:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
58:20 Nilay Patel? Do you know on the rundown, I made this font really.
58:25 Nilay Patel? I don't want to forget.
58:26 Speaker 04 Every week.
58:27 Nilay Patel? Every week.
58:27 Speaker 04 You never forget.
58:28 Nilay Patel? I never, except for last week. And several weeks before that.
58:32 Speaker 04 All right, the, um, every week I do a segment is called, you know, Dan, the duck face is no longer cool.
58:40 Nilay Patel? Ooh. Wow.
58:41 Speaker 04 Yeah.
58:41 Nilay Patel? It's a harsh segment to do every week.
58:43 Speaker 04 That was Ashley's harsh Dan burn today, because we were talking about the Casio TR Mini, which is, it's a compact, like, like, it looks like a, like a little circle makeup mirror type thing, but it's got a selfie cam in it. And so on the base is an LCD, so you can kind of frame your shot. And then the middle, or in the top part, there's a ring of LEDs. And it actually does, it does portrait lighting like Apple, but with real LEDs. So you can actually get different.
59:16 Nilay Patel? You know, you could buy a phone case, like the Kim Kardashian iPhone case that has real LEDs around the front.
59:20 Speaker 04 But this, but this one, you can, it can have different modes. So different ones are on or off. So you can get different lighting looks, right? It's not just about having one.
59:29 Nilay Patel? Is there a spooky one where it lights from the bottom?
59:31 Speaker 04 Hopefully.
59:31 Nilay Patel? Okay.
59:32 Speaker 04 Hopefully there's a spooky one. Anyways.
59:35 Speaker 04 Looks really cool. It's got a 21 millimeter wide angle perspective, which seems weird for a selfie cam, but I guess that's what's cool. I don't know. Ashley's really excited about it, so I'm excited about it. It, I don't like taking selfies, but, um,
59:51 Speaker 04 this looks like the coolest. I, I just like, I like one-off gadgets that are, are, are for a very specific purpose. And this is definitely the most selfie-specific camera I've seen in a while. And it's $500.
1:00:05 Nilay Patel? There you go. That's the news.
1:00:07 Speaker 04 They also have a $900 one, which I don't know how it works. The TR-80, I guess.
1:00:14 Nilay Patel? That is nuts.
1:00:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:00:15 Nilay Patel? Does it just make phone calls on the side?
1:00:17 Speaker 04 I don't think it's a phone.
1:00:18 Nilay Patel? Okay.
1:00:19 Speaker 04 I think it's just a selfie camera and then it connects with Bluetooth to your phone to get the.
1:00:23 Nilay Patel? I think the main thing is like taking pictures of yourself is like gone from being a thing you do on the side of your phone to a thing that you want to do.
1:00:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:00:30 Nilay Patel? And now there's hardware products that are built to optimize for that.
1:00:33 Speaker 04 Like if someone came out with, like if Red came out with the self, this 8K selfie camera.
1:00:38 Nilay Patel? It would have some insane name, like the Drake Dragon.
1:00:42 Speaker 04 The dragon within.
1:00:44 Nilay Patel? The dragon within.
1:00:45 Speaker 01 No, it'd be, it, you know, you know what it would be? It'd be like a little dragon. They'd call it a wyvern.
1:00:49 Nilay Patel? Ooh, that's good. That's a deep Dragon Warrior reference. That's, is that game on any of the little Nintendos?
1:00:57 Speaker 04 Dragons?
1:00:57 Nilay Patel? Dragon Warrior.
1:00:58 Speaker 04 Oh, Dragon Warrior.
1:00:59 Nilay Patel? It's one of my favorite games.
1:01:00 Speaker 01 Uh, I have lots of memories of Dragon Warrior.
1:01:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:01:02 Speaker 04 Is that like Dynasty Warrior?
1:01:05 Nilay Patel? No, it was Dragon Warrior 3, I think was the... There were wyverns. You killed the, you killed the hell out of wyverns.
1:01:11 Speaker 04 Oh, they're not, I don't know. Dragon Warrior.
1:01:13 Nilay Patel? It's a good game.
1:01:14 Speaker 04 Are you a dragon, or do you fight dragons?
1:01:17 Nilay Patel? You fi- you're a dragon warrior. You, I think you are a dr- there's a dragon.
1:01:21 Speaker 01 And there's, there's lots of blue blobs everywhere.
1:01:23 Nilay Patel? There's blue blobs. You gotta kill, kill slime.
1:01:24 Speaker 04 But you're talking about Dragon Quest.
1:01:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Dragon Warrior. Alright. Riveting radio here. This should be a video show.
1:01:30 Speaker 01 The reason there's so much silence here is I'm just mad at Eli for not actually playing real Dungeons and Dragons.
1:01:35 Speaker 04 Was published as Dragon Warrior in North America.
1:01:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:01:38 Speaker 01 Ah.
1:01:39 Speaker 04 Huh.
1:01:39 Nilay Patel? Well, who knew? Anyway, one more thing.
1:01:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:01:41 Nilay Patel? I just want to bring up real fast.
1:01:42 Speaker 04 I guess I'm from Japan.
1:01:48 Nilay Patel? Oh, man.
1:01:50 Nilay Patel? There's finally a waterproof Kindle. That's, I just wanted to point out.
1:01:53 Speaker 04 We did it.
1:01:54 Nilay Patel? Took forever.
1:01:55 Speaker 01 So I knew Lauren.
1:01:56 Nilay Patel? It cost $250.
1:01:59 Speaker 01 I knew Lauren Good was going to meet with Amazon. I didn't know what, I didn't know what the meeting was, and I told her, I don't care what it's about. I don't care who you're meeting with. I don't care what they have to show you. You need to walk into that room with a bottle of water and pour on whatever they show you. If it's a pad of paper, or they're like giving you notes, if it's a new Fire TV, if it's a tablet, I don't care. Just pour water on it, because it is absurd that there's not a waterproof Kindle. And it was waterproof Kindle, so everything worked out.
1:02:27 Speaker 04 I have a theory about this. You know how when, uh, music services started coming out and that the Beatles were these big holdouts?
1:02:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:02:35 Speaker 04 And it took them like a decade to come around?
1:02:38 Nilay Patel? Mm-hmm.
1:02:38 Speaker 04 I feel like that decade, there's a lost generation of people who don't care about the Beatles, because they couldn't listen to the Beatles.
1:02:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:02:47 Speaker 04 I think we might be in that situation with people taking baths.
1:02:51 Nilay Patel? Hmm.
1:02:53 Speaker 04 You got a generation of people who couldn't take baths.
1:02:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah, cuz you can, you can bring your phone or your Kindle into the bath.
1:03:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:03:01 Nilay Patel? Ah.
1:03:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:05 Speaker 01 It's very dangerous to do so.
1:03:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, and what are you gonna buy a paper book just for baths?
1:03:10 Speaker 01 You ever watched, like, there's movies of, like, old timey writers, they'd, like, be in their clawfoot tub, and they'd have, like, a tray, and they'd have a typewriter.
1:03:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So are you suggesting now, because phones are waterproof, and there's a waterproof Kindle, baths will experience a resurgence?
1:03:23 Speaker 04 Or possibly that you, they, they waited too long, and baths have already died.
1:03:28 Nilay Patel? Bath.
1:03:28 Speaker 04 And it will be hard to revive the bath. But we'll hope.
1:03:34 Nilay Patel? We'll be tracking this story closely on the verge.
1:03:37 Speaker 04 I literally thought when I saw this, like, oh, I could take baths.
1:03:42 Speaker 01 Do you ever walk into a hotel?
1:03:44 Nilay Patel? Paul is finally taking a bath.
1:03:45 Speaker 01 You're walking into a hotel room, and you're not really a bath guy, but it's a stand-up shower instead of a bathtub, and you have a little bit of a disappointment, like, oh, well, I guess I don't have that option. Not that you would ever do it, but if you really wanted to.
1:03:56 Nilay Patel? First, let's, let's just, let's, okay, first, baths are gross. So you're just in a tub of dirty water, going to a hotel, and being like, hmm, this standing pool of water is something I, what?
1:04:11 Speaker 01 Haven't you ever been sick while traveling, and, like, just need to take a hot bath? Cause, like, you, you traveled and got sick?
1:04:18 Speaker 04 Or, you know, the trick in Vegas, you fill up the bathtub with water so that it evaporates into your hotel room.
1:04:23 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, that's a, that's a real move, you should do that. It's how I managed not to get sick at CES two years running.
1:04:28 Nilay Patel? I, just everything about the concept of the hotel bathroom grosses me out. I like, I, I want as little to do with that space as I can, so that's just.
1:04:38 Speaker 04 I love when there's still, uh, phones in the hotel bathroom.
1:04:41 Nilay Patel? Oh, yeah, like corded phones.
1:04:42 Speaker 01 Corded phones, like, what, who's spending that much time?
1:04:44 Nilay Patel? Anyway, so Kindle's out, it's waterproof.
1:04:47 Speaker 04 We can take baths again.
1:04:48 Nilay Patel? Get right in the bath.
1:04:49 Speaker 01 It's bigger than the current Kindle Oasis, uh, by a little bit, the pages apparently turn faster.
1:04:54 Nilay Patel? They integrated the battery instead of having the battery.
1:04:56 Speaker 04 The lighting is more even.
1:04:57 Speaker 01 Aluminum on the back.
1:04:58 Nilay Patel? I just don't know why they didn't make the eighty-dollar Kindle waterproof, which they certainly can do.
1:05:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't know.
1:05:03 Nilay Patel? But I guess the only upgrade anybody wants is waterproofing, so they're just gonna upsell you. Sand in the Whole Foods with a bottle of water, pouring it over a Kindle all day long. Whatever. Who am I kidding? I'm gonna buy one. Anyway, that's the Vergecast. It happened. Isn't that it? Yeah. I mean, there's other stuff. You want me to talk about Qualcomm smartphone patents? No. It was a quiet week. Mostly we made shows. We didn't make a lot of shows. Well, you made a lot of shows. You were there. I was there too. I gotta tell you, Circuit Breaker next week, we did a little tease of it this week, what's happening next week, but it's gonna be ridiculous. One of the products on the Circuit Breaker show next week is literally taller than Ashley. It's gonna be amazing. It also has a built-in reggaeton. I'm gonna crash the show.
1:05:45 Nilay Patel? Dieter's gonna be on the show. It's gonna be great. So, tune in to Circuit Breaker. That's Tuesdays for live on Twitter, replays on Wednesday. Mr. Robot Show, Wednesday nights after Mr. Robot, and next week, Why'd You Push That Button's coming out. We'll probably stick an episode of that in this feed. So if you see it, don't be surprised. In fact, what you should do is listen to it and then go subscribe. Definitely subscribe. Alright, you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless, Dieter's at Backalon, Paul's at FuturePaul. You can leave us a review on iTunes. Click those five stars, tell everyone you love us. You can email us at the email address of your choice. I recommend [email protected] . Casey Newton Podcast in this world. It's coming. Find us on G-Talk.
1:06:28 Nilay Patel? Open Gchat and just see what happens on your phone. Oh, Gchat. Why can't I remember the name? You just can't get it right, because they ruin the brand. Anyway, that was Vergecast. G-A-L-O. Thank you for listening. Rock and roll. Paul, promo code. Oh yeah, promo code.
Previous Pixel 2 first look, Pixel Buds, and Google Home Max Next Pixel 2 review, KRACK, and Microsoft's Surface Book sequel Page updated October 17, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
