Pixel 2XL screen saturation update, an iOS11 bug, and Harmony Link hub services shut down

There’s a lot of little tech news this week, and we’ve got the perfect podcast to sum it all up. This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter run through topics like Samsung’s ad that mocks the iPhone, the update to Pixel 2 XL screens, and Logitech shutting down Harmony Link hub services. Also, The Verge’s video series Next Level is back! Lauren Goode returns to talk about the season premiere, which deals with creating holographic videos, and how that can be used to preserve memories. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like obviously Paul’s weekly segment “One 2 Won (One)” — so listen to this whole show to get everything you need. 02:23 - Samsung returns to mock iPhone X buyers in latest commercial 06:06 - An iOS bug won't let some users type 'I' 15:02 - Google updates Pixel 2 XL with new 'saturated' color display option 18:21 - How big of a problem is the Pixel 2 XL's screen, really? 21:32 - Next Level S02 E01 with Lauren Goode 43:36 - Logitech will brick its Harmony Link hub for all owners in March 52:49 - Intel and AMD team up against Nvidia to produce a new laptop chip 59:32 - Paul’s weekly segment “One 2 Won (One)” 1:02:26 - Justice Department pushes back against AT&T–Time Warner merger 1:10:32 - Broadcom may acquire Qualcomm amid existential legal battle with Apple Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This episode of 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 resolution with minimal buffering. You can access files in the cloud nearly as fast as you would if they were stored on your phone. You can download hours of movies or music in a matter of seconds. To learn more, visit snapdragon.com/gigabit today.

• 0:27Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Absolutely. Somebody tweeted at me today, "I listen to Ezra Klein's show. He didn't mention you."

• 0:40Nilay Patel?

  Wow. I'm gonna make this be happened by hook or by crook. Mostly by telling Ezra about it. Anyway, I'm Eli Patel. Paul Miller is here.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:53Nilay Patel?

  Dieter Bohn is here.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:55Nilay Patel?

  How's it going, man? We missed you last time.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  I am awesome. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I was with my family, who is great. Are great. There's more than one of them.

• 1:03Nilay Patel?

  Family first, I say, but only after podcasting.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  We actually have a packed show. There's lots of little news, but importantly, Next Level, Lauren Good's show about technology in the labs, is back. Season two is underway. She's done it again. She went and found another level by gum. So she's gonna join us and we're gonna talk to her about the episode she just did, which is about people making memories in VR headsets. So like, parents capturing their babies in volumetric VR so they can go look at the kids again. USC Show Foundation is capturing Holocaust survivors and holograms so people can actually interact with them as other crazy stuff. So Lauren's gonna join us later, and that's gonna be really fun. As always, I'm gonna plug Caitlin Tiffany

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  and Ashley Carmen's podcast, Why'd You Push That Button: The Other Ship in This Fleet? Potentially a cooler ship. They might be a really cool ship. They're a really cool ship. They are, they're the, they're the better ship. But anyway.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  They talked about sharing streaming passwords.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  They talked about sharing streaming passwords this week. Super fun episode. Why'd you push that button? Still just sitting at the top of all the charts on all the apps. Doing great on Spotify, interestingly enough. So go listen to that in iTunes, podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen podcasts, go check out that show. Paul and I are hosting a circuit breaker show. There's all kinds of stuff going on, but most importantly, this show is packed to the gills with news. And I want to start with the most important news of the week, which is that Samsung put out an ad.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  That has a guy in it and his haircut is shaped like the notch on the iPhone 10, which is just the funniest thing. And Paul, I know you, you in particular, have many thoughts about this.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  I will. It's very subtle for Samsung, right?

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  It is very subtle.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  They, they did the, the commercial with, I believe there's a thing called love. I forget the name of that band already, because it doesn't matter.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  The darkness.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Their one hit.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  That was the darkness.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  They had two hits.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  They did ads with the darkness.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  The darkness definitely had two hits.

• 3:06Nilay Patel?

  What was your other hit?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  I can't.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Okay, well, first thing I should say, I did not scroll down Tom Warren's excellent post.

• 3:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  And see this screenshot of the notch haircut.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  The notch haircut is real.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Hilarious and amazing. It's make, okay, I loved this ad.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  Just tell, tell people what the ad is.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Okay, there's a guy and he, 2007, gets the first iPhone and he's like, hey, guess what I got? He like picks up the phone, guess what I got? Then he runs out of storage, you know? Then he gets like the next iPhone and it falls in the water. And meanwhile, his girlfriend is having a, a great time with her Samsung products.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, big screens.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, when her phone, she, she gets his information using a stylus.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  I will say at no point during this ad, does touch which, touch wiz make any sounds.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:59Nilay Patel?

  Which is horrible, nor is it, is she shown operating touch wiz. Just putting that in there.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Uh, uh, uh, the real culmination is her phone's charging on some wireless dock.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  And he's got dongles.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  And he's got so many dongles.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  Fifty dongles, yeah.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  But here's what, what I loved about this ad. If you think about the traditional template for a commercial, it's like, you without this product, not cool.

• 4:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  You with this product. All the people of the opposite or same gender come flocking.

• 4:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  You are sexually attractive and better because of this product. What the story here tells is that he meets someone with a different, a phone of a different operating system, and they love each other.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  They take care of each other. They look out for each other. Yeah, there's a, there's a decade of a beautiful relationship built with two people with phones.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  Different platforms.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  She never says, why are you on the green bubbles? Or he never says that to her, presumably.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  He accepts her for the green bubbles that she, and she accepts him for all his doggles.

• 5:07Nilay Patel?

  It's perfect.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  And so I, I just like that, like, you know, they make some, like, all sorts of great digs at Apple for, for various things. And obviously you could criticize Samsung for a lot of things, but they don't hinge the relationship's success on which phone he chooses. I just thought that was a great, great commercial.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  I think it's a hilarious commercial because the iPhone 10 is gonna like blow Samsung out of the water. Yeah. It's like a week later, right? Like last week was the big iPhone. We have it, reviews. It's a week later and it's, people are loving the thing. And emoji karaoke was a phenomenon.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Except when they try and type the letter I.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should, so we should talk about that. I think that, we should, we, a lot of phone news happened this week. I know, there's a lot of phone news every week, but the two phones we have been talking about the most recently, Pixel XL2, iPhone 10. iPhone 10 appears to be off to a strong start. You actually get it in not a great timeframe, but it's like three weeks now. It's not, people thought you would just not be able to get one.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:02Nilay Patel?

  You can get one, it's about three weeks from the Apple Store. But hilariously, Apple has like a machine learning problem that seems to be the, the undercurrent here, where when you type the letter I, the autocorrect replaces it with like a question mark box and the letter A.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And so just the Unicode glyph for like, I don't know what this is.

• 6:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I, I can't render this text.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  And some people are just rolling with it. So you like, look at Twitter, I get texts, and it's just like, fine, this is the letter I now. We're changing the language, it's just move on. Some people, you can change, you can like, set up a text replacer. I turned off autocorrect on my phone, which is a way you can fix it. Not recommended strategy because I am bad at typing, I realized, without autocorrect. So I'm just, I'm just sending crazy misspelled text messages all the time.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  I think there's something.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  I don't have a 10 yet. Is this happening to everybody?

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  It's iOS 11. Yep. So it's like a, it's like a bug that spreads. It's really weird. So it started like I sent.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Like a virus.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  I sent, yeah, it's the wrong kind of viral marketing campaign for Apple. So I sent it in to our tips line overnight when it started happening and I saw some tweets about it. And like Vlad couldn't reproduce it, right? It hadn't spread there yet. And now it's like everywhere. Apple put out a software update today. But for all of their like machine learning, we do AI to differential privacy. It's like, oh, there's a downside here. And sometimes the downside is like really stupid.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so you have a theory, you were saying?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Well, no, I just, I just feel like autocorrect is, is, is incorrect. I've got, I've got a note on this somewhere.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Actually, I have an autocorrect story while Paul looks. You know, there's this, there's this, there's this Twitter joke where you like type in a phrase and then you let the keyboard's autocomplete keyboard finish the phrase.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  So it's like, you know, I was born and then let autocorrect tell your life story or whatever. So I thought this was funny and I thought I'd make a joke and my joke was instead of I was born or I died or whatever the joke might be, my joke would be hail Satan. And then let autocorrect finish the, the sentence. And it worked and I got a lot of people on Twitter to say hail Satan, which was my goal.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  But I had to mute it because it was too much. But here's the fascinating thing. Hail Satan is not a phrase that most people type, it turns out. And so everybody's keyboard, both Android and iOS, follows nearly the same thing, including the official Church of Satan account, which by the way is very thirsty on Twitter. And the phrase that follows hail Satan on everybody's phone is basically hail Satan was a good night.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:47Nilay Patel?

  Sure, I get it.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  I don't know what that means.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, once most of the people who say that.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  So it's definitely, it's definitely basing it on just the previous word, not the previous two words.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  No, it depends on the platform and the keyboard that you're using, but it can't base it on more than just the previous word. Google's very good at it. Swift key actually did this before anybody, and now everybody kind of bases up on more than just the previous word.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Okay, this is my autocomplete thing. The keyboard should autocomplete based on words in your current document. So this happens to me a lot. If I'm writing about somebody, like some proper noun.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Um, or, or, uh, like at church, I write Bible words.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  And I use that word over and over. It should like, I feel like that should be one of its first suggestions. The other thing is that if I type a word that is in the dictionary, that's what I meant to type.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  I'll, I'll fix it if I, if I did the wrong dictionary word.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  But don't assume that I didn't mean to type that word, because that word is in the dictionary. I didn't misspell anything. If you can't find the dictionary, maybe you can replace it.

• 10:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  That's where I'm at right now with autocomplete.

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  Just turn it off. I've been living a wild life of just sending random strings of letters to people and realizing most people know what I'm trying to say. It's completely out of control.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  I'll turn it off, see what happens.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Um, Neil, you should old man it and use the microphone button to dictate into your phone.

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's probably the mood.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I've done it. It's great.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  Machine learning bug.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Surprisingly good.

• 10:23Nilay Patel?

  Turns us all into maniacs screaming at our phones. Um, the other thing to note, um, we have this too. iOS 11 adoption is behind previous versions. So I will say this. Um, at the end of the review video, the iPhone X review video, I just like lightning round answered some questions. And the last one I answered was, is iOS 11 still kind of janky? And I was like, iOS 11 is still kind of janky. And everyone got mad at me. Um, because that's what happens on the internet. But iOS 11 is definitely pretty janky and I think people are holding back from upgrading because they've heard so much about it.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  There's this meme out there like, "Well, I just updated and now I guess I have to get a new phone. Thanks, Apple. You make it slow, so we have to get a new phone." I don't feel that with a typical Apple update, but a lot of people seem to feel like that's the case.

• 11:10Nilay Patel?

  So I asked, actually during the review, I couldn't figure out where to slot this into the review. But you know, Apple's very proud of the X. The X is screaming fast. It's basically the same internals as the 8, but it feels a thousand, I don't know if it's the gestures, I don't know if it's the app switcher, what it is. It feels way faster than the 8 to me.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Really?

• 11:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's wild. Like, switching, I think it's mostly like app switching is so, so fast on it. Like, you just swipe along the bottom and the previous apps just like are there and ready to go. So there's just a perception of speed. There is, this is a complete tangent from even this other tangent, but so it goes, it's the Vergecast. The ordering of apps when you switch is enough to break your brain. So

• 11:55Speaker 02

  What?

• 11:55Nilay Patel?

  So like, say you're, I don't know, you're in the Twitter app and you slide left to right along the bottom to go back to Gmail.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:03Nilay Patel?

  At some point Gmail becomes the first app. So then you can't swipe right to left to go back to Twitter.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  But if you did it right away?

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you did it right away, but if

• 12:13Speaker 02

  If you did it right away, it's there. But as soon as you switch, then it goes into the previous slot in the most recently used list.

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  Right. And if you, yeah, so like

• 12:20Speaker 02

  It's almost like if you have a bunch of cards on a phone, you want to order them spatially and then be able to rearrange and stack them.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  It's exactly WebOS, but WebOS kept, it locked the spatial relationships of the apps.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  iOS does not lock

• 12:33Speaker 02

  And it grouped them.

• 12:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's not doing any of that. So like, it's just, if you start to think about the apps that way and you're like switching around and trying to swipe on the bottom, you're not in any order. You're in some order that at some point can be reset to another order. Anyway, my point of all of this, circling all the way back around is app switching is great because the phone feels really fast and Apple's justifiably proud of their massive performance lead. And I was like, if you have such a performance lead, you have all of this headroom and you know you're not using all of it now because your operating system and apps run on phones from two years ago, why is it that people always complain that their phones get slow with a new upgrade? Because the iPhone 7 still potentially has tons of headroom. The iPhone 6S still has tons of headroom.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  Right, people, most people are not playing tons of games on these phones. Then you can, and the App Store will send you the right binary for your phone anyway. So what is the, what is the point of all this headroom if every two years, people think their phones slow down? Like, and they're like, yeah, it's just a conspiracy theory. We can't prove it. You know, we can't prove that it's not true because people just don't believe what they want to believe. Um, and they said that the only time this has ever really been a problem is the iPhone four. So they, they did whatever update for the iPhone four, and then the next version of iOS came out. And fours got really, really slow and they spent a ton of time fixing it to make the four fast again. But I think that question is, Apple's got all this headroom.

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  There's no way that a two-year-old phone should feel slow if every single year they're like, this is the fastest phone ever made. You should get more than two years of use out of it. And like, I'm with you, like, I rarely feel like a new iOS update makes my thing slow, but it's such a meme.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, people feel it for some reason.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  There's something that I think is interesting.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  I do know my phone slows the hell down when I haven't updated apps in a while. I'm like, oh yeah, sure, update all. Oh. And then I just have to walk away from the phone for a half an hour. They have a bunch of animations in iOS that are almost a second. They should just have them.

• 14:32Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this is why I think my Pixel feels really fast.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can turn, in fact, Neil, on your Pixel, you can go, you can turn on developer options and just turn off the animations. Oh my gosh. You could adjust the speed of the animations and basically make them, make them go away. What a dream.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  Swipe around this phone and this is a Pixel XL2 I'm handing Paul, like, it's a rocket ship because nothing animates or anything's hardly animated at all. And it's just like, you're just banging it out of things. I showed somebody my Pixel one, like, this phone's so fast. It's like, it's way behind the curve now. But it still feels really fast with the animations. Anyway, speaking of Pixel, um.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's the thing that happened. I, I think, Dieter, you don't have this update, but I have this update. Google put out the screen saturation upgrade.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  I'm gonna spend the rest of the Vergecast tapping the update button, by the way. This is so frustrating.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  So the way this update works, I think Google is very unhappy about having to do this. Um, so the, the Pixel XL2, when it launches, everybody knows, had like. Many, many questions about the screen that started with these colors are kind of muted to is the screen burning in to the other whites grainy, the shift, the blue is shifting everywhere. The one thing they could definitely solve in software was the color saturation. So they put out an update, they said it's going to work a lot more like the Pixel one. They insist on calling it an unmanaged color space. Like you're venturing into like Mad Max shit.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  I would read a sci fi novel that explored the unmanaged color space.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Here's the quote from Mario Cranz, I'm sorry, I can't pronounce your name. From the update that they said, this is what our update's going to do. The saturated mode puts a display into an unmanaged configuration, similar to how the Pixel one operates. The colors will be more saturated and vibrant, but less accurate, similar to how most other smartphones display vibrant colors. We give consumers the option. Yeah, you know what you should pick? To choose color saturation. It looks so much better.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  This is like a parent whose kid just loves ketchup sandwiches.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  You idiot.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  I will, I will prepare you a ketchup sandwich because I do not want you to starve to death. But you're so stupid.

• 16:41Nilay Patel?

  Do you eat ketchup sandwiches?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  No, I.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  You hate them.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  I was a good kid.

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  Now I have to try one. Who knows what I've been missing out on? Like most other smartphones, I love a good ketchup sandwich. Uh, so I switched mine, James Barham switched his, we're both like running around.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  James Barham switched his? He was a huge proponent.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  He loved it.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Of the original.

• 17:02Nilay Patel?

  But he switched it and now he's all happy. I think it looks way better. Uh, I think if they.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  I think Google is not giving it to me out of spite.

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  I think if they had shipped this by default, all of this other stuff would have.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Would have gone away?

• 17:15Nilay Patel?

  It would have gone away because he wouldn't have had, people would have still talked about blue shift, it's still super annoying. This screen is tall enough that. I can see it from the top to the bottom, just when I hold it. If I don't line it up exactly right. So like if I load up a white.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  You can see what from the top.

• 17:31Nilay Patel?

  The blue shift. So if you just hold the phone, hold it in your hand. And if you don't, if you don't line it up right, you can just see the blue shift from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen when you're just looking at it. You don't have to like go look for it. So people would have talked about that, I'm sure. The whites are still grainy, like you can see grain on the screen. But if the colors had been bright, I think a lot of people would have forgiven the other stuff. Where it would have been a smaller tech nerd thing. But you line up all the things, including the, hey, this display looks dull, hey, the thing. Anyway, it's out. I love it. If you have a Pixel XL2, you should just put it in that unmanaged, live that life. Live that unmanaged life.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  They gotta deliver it to me first and I, I'm not. Maybe if I switch, maybe if I switch my carrier to Project Fi, that'll jump me to the front of the line. I, I know I can manually install it, but I, I have not done that.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, you and Vlad had a fight on the website about how big of a problem the screen really is.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  What's a fight?

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  It was a, it was a good natured debate.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  It was a tiff. Yeah, we brought back, uh, we brought back, uh, ping counter ping. So, uh, by the way, I can get into why we call it ping counter ping. We had a very long argument about branding, that branding at the foundation of the verge. So I'm, this is my phone. I bought this phone. I actually bought the other phone too, uh, the two. Been using it, saw the stuff about the screen. I was very worried about the burn in possibility. Google says it's not a problem. Sure, I trust Google. Uh, the image retention is very difficult to see, uh, for me. You can see it. I'm, I'm trusting it's not going to get worse over time. Uh, and when you look at that and it's like, oh, well, that's bad. Expose that extensive shouldn't do that. That's true. On the other hand, I just want a big dumb screen. I, the, the screen on the two is too small.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  And I don't want a Galaxy S8 because I hate TouchWiz or sorry, the Samsung experience, which is what it's called now. I'm waiting for my iPhone X to arrive, but I tend to prefer Android over iOS because, uh, Android doesn't have ridiculously stupid notifications.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Like iOS does. And so I look at the spectrum of phones out there and the Pixel 2 XL is the one. It has the best camera. It has a big dumb screen. It has good software. It has very good battery life. It has all the things except the headphone jack.

• 19:50Nilay Patel?

  And that's why my SIM card is going back in my Pixel 1.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Your SIM card, dude, just stop it. You need to stop talking about how you're gonna use a Pixel. You just do. Like-

• 20:00Nilay Patel?

  I used one for like two weeks. It was like, great.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  And what, and what are you doing now?

• 20:05Nilay Patel?

  It's in this iPhone 10, which is a lovely object that I enjoy holding.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Because of iMessage. You're never leaving iMessage.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  It's really hard.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Just admit it.

• 20:14Nilay Patel?

  You know, the worst part is that the phone automatically re-enrolled me. And so now I have to like, do it again. I have to get out of it again. I'm gonna do it, though.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  If you, it's weird that it auto-reenrolled you because iPhones used to do that to me, but they seem to have stopped. There might be a special Dieter flag that says, don't auto-reenroll Dieter because he'll bitch about it on Twitter.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, probably. Oh, iMessage. Alright, I'm gonna read an ad. There's still, like I said, lots of little news, but all of it important in its special way. I'm gonna read an ad. We're gonna talk to Lauren. And we're gonna come back with more of this, The Vergecast.

• 20:50Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Parachute. Parachute products are all designed at headquarters in Venice Beach. Their sheets have a modern, clean design that works with any style of home. The natural colors and minimalist styles are gender neutral. Parachute incorporates thoughtful design details like back envelope closure on their pillowcases and soft rubber buttons on the bottoms of their duvet covers. Easy to mix and match between all of their colors and fabrics. So, visit parachutehome.com/verge for free shipping and returns on your own set of sheets. Plus, Parachute offers a 60-night trial, so if you don't love it, just send it back, no questions asked. That is parachutehome.com/verge for free shipping and returns.

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  Lauren, good.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Mila Patel.

• 21:33Nilay Patel?

  How you doing? Your next level is back. You're back on The Vergecast to talk about it. This is so exciting.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  I'm coming to you from another dimension right now, and it is my hologram speaking. That's how you know next level, season two, has begun.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the, the, the theme of this episode is Lauren takes slightly different forms in every episode. No, you actually do have a theme. We'll talk about that. So Next Level's back. We, if you've been listening to Verchass, you know, Next Level was Lauren Good's show, where she looks at the tech that's in the labs, not the stuff we can buy. We had Lauren on every episode of that show, every week that that first season was on, to talk about it. We're gonna do the same thing, obviously, this season. But this season, you have a theme. You're trying to, you're trying to focus in on one part of the puzzle here. So what's going on with that?

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, when we were talking to different companies and research institutions about the things that we were interested in looking at this season, we started to realize in some of our early production meetings that we were stringing this theme together, and a lot of it had to do with just the human impact and the human element of things. And granted, tech impacts all of us in some way, so you could argue that all of tech, or almost all of tech, has an impact on the human experience, or alters the human experience in some way. But this felt very strongly like the theme that was emerging this season. And I felt that there was no better way to kick it off than to talk about people turning their loved ones into holograms, because that's, that's what we do.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  You know what I always think about?

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Now, apparently.

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, I want to talk about the episode, because the episode is super fascinating, and I think equal parts, like, heartwarming, and then extremely creepy. But it occurs to me, as I was watching it, so much of what I rely on technology to do for me is to have a better memory than I do. Like, I have a crap memory. It takes me so long to remember, like, a face and a name. I forget what I ate for breakfast. This, like, I'm just a terrible memory. The only thing my memory is good for is remembering specs of phones from, like, 20 years ago. And that's great. It served me well in this career. As, like, a social human being, I'm like, who are you, typically, Matt? But your, this first episode is all about not just,

• 23:46Nilay Patel?

  like, augmenting your memory, or assisting your memory, but creating, like, an entirely new kind of memory with VR. And it seems, I'm just so curious about that. Like, tell them what the episode's about, but then I want to talk about that sort of, like, new kind of memory, because it was such a theme with the people that you talked to.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, may I recommend that you lay off the scissor vodka? Because that may help with your retention of information.

• 24:14Nilay Patel?

  It's already gone, right? Like now I'm supposed to just have some fun.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  No, it's true. You kind of get to, I mean, I've been there. You get to an age where you start to think like, oh, am I just, am I getting a little bit older? Or is there too much information in my brain? And I just can't possibly remember it all? Or have I been drinking scissor vodka? But, uh, but yeah, so, um, so the episode is about a couple of different studios. Um, and they both happen to be in the Los Angeles area where people have been using, um, holographic video to create these little time capsules of people. And they really, the episode really runs the gamut. We started at a studio that's been making, like, doing this side project where they've been using the technology they have at their disposal to make these holographic videos

• 24:59Speaker 03

  of people's kids, like, think like LA moms bringing in their kids. And instead of getting baby photos made, they're getting holograms made. Uh, and then we kind of ended up in doing our research at the total other end of the spectrum where we ended up at USC's Shoah Foundation. Uh, Shoah Foundation, uh, fun fact, was founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994. And the foundation has been devoting itself for the past 20, 23 years to capturing testimonies of people who survived genocides. So they're all about researching genocide, which is just one of the, you know, the deepest, darkest topics you can sort of dive into.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  And, um, I was able to talk to a Holocaust survivor, survivor as a hologram. Uh, it was the combination of, they had captured him in holographic video, but they also had developed their own natural language processing system where when I was speaking with him, I could ask him questions as though he was right there and he would answer in this very sort of natural way because they at some point had spent a week. Asking him 1500 questions and getting those answers in the database and getting his likeness and his being in their database and created this thing. And so it, you know, it's like really crazy to think about how our minds kind of perceive and consume media now. And for the most part, that's on a flat 2D

• 26:22Speaker 03

  display or 2D, you know, flat 2D environment.

• 26:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  But is the future of like talking to people in the, like in the future, when they may have changed, like if you're a small child now, but then one day you're grown up, right? Like, do you go back and experience that interaction with that child in a way that actually feels real? Or do you talk to someone who's no longer living in a way that feels real? And that's like, that's where things got really crazy.

• 26:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that to me, that's the turn, right? Like, that's not a kind of recollection we've ever been able to have. And so that, it's funny, you really did run the gamut of things you'd want to experience, right? Like, I'd like to play with my kid again versus this is an indelible, important part of human history that we need to talk about and like hear firsthand accounts of. But let's start with the kids, because that is where your episode started. So they sat down in a room, it looked like kind of the Matrix bullet time. How, like, how do they capture that?

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's funny that you say Matrix, because this particular company, they used to be at a soundstage in Culver City where scenes from The Matrix had been filmed. So, yeah, I feel like if I can just work the Matrix into every episode in some way, we've succeeded. Well, if you don't mind, I would love to just back up a little bit and talk a little bit about how I found this story. Because this company, which is called 8i, they, I had done a report on them in January or February of this year. So I had spent a day down at the company in Culver City at the time and just learned how they were making volumetric video. And for the most part, they're doing a lot of content around

• 28:01Speaker 03

  cute pets and celebrities and NBA stars. And think of it, a lot of it is like marketing, right? Like, I'm going to insert this hologram of Jon Hamm into an app right around the time that his movie is coming out at Sundance.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can you quickly explain what volumetric video is?

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah. So, there's been a lot of talk about 360 video, or spherical video, and it's being used in VR. Think about when you're wearing a VR headset and you're looking at an environment around you. You're looking around and you're seeing like, you know, a new wall, or a different floor, or you're in like, a video game environment, right? Like, you're experiencing 360 video, but you're looking at the things around you. With these kinds of video assets, the cameras are all pointed inward. So, they, instead of capturing things, they may also create a VR environment for you to experience it in. But for the most part, the cameras, you know, think of like, 50 cameras being pointed at you, from all angles, and capturing you, or an object, or an animal, or whoever it

• 29:00Speaker 03

  is, in your full volume. So that when they place that video asset into a virtual environment, you're able to go up to it, and walk around it, and peer into its eyes, or look at the underside of it, and just see the volume of it in a way that you wouldn't be able to see normally.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  And this is like a big deal for VR? Yeah, absolutely. So, this is like, the next step for VR, right? If you think about the classic 360 video camera, we've covered a ton of them on The Verge now. It's like a lens, and you like, stick it, and like, captures the world around it. But the next step is to put things in the world, so that when you're wearing the headset, you can like, walk around the world and look at stuff, right?

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. So that when you experience objects in that world, the objects feel real in volume. I mean, we have volume as beings, or objects have volume. So, it's kind of creating that in a digital environment. And, it's still very expensive, and it's highly technical, so there are, of course, barriers to making it, but this company has been doing it. And when I first visited them, on a reporting trip earlier this year, someone who worked there just said, very like, offhanded to me, you know, like, there's this woman who came in, early on, to do kind of like, a spec test for us, you know, like, we needed a baby and a mom, together, and we were gonna just test them out, and see how they looked in volumetric video. And her experience was so, the mom's experience was so emotional, that she kept coming back.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  She ended up coming back. I think she's been back four or five times now. And she's, she's come back every six months or so to get updates of her child. First, her first child, Reese, and then her, now her second child, Wilder. In, like, have them made into holographic format. So that she can either on her phone or in a VR headset, kind of go back and visit them from when they were tiny little babies. And they're still pretty small. I mean, I think Wilder's one year and the little girl is now nearly three. But I heard this and then this person said, yeah, and like some other people in the area, like employees and friends of the company have also been doing this. And I was like, hold on a second.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  Hold up the bus. What is happening here? Is this just like some LA thing? Or is this, is this like really happening? And, and so just due to timing and, you know, we, we get caught up in so many stories of The Verge. I didn't have time to come back and revisit the story until now, but we thought this is perfect for next level. We need to really explore what people are doing here. And that's kind of what got the wheels turning.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So they capture the mom and the baby. And then she was wearing, what, just a regular Vive headset? And she could like go back and look at the baby again?

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, because originally, when she first started doing this, it was a couple of years ago. We, there was no AR kit or AR core. Right? So you weren't just looking at it on the phone. So she, so they, they processed it and rendered it for her and they put it on a, I don't remember what tower it was, but yeah, she put on a, she put on an HTC Vive. And she started crying. And she told me this and I wasn't there when this happened, but she told me she became very emotional. Other people at the company who had been observing her reaction to the material said they got emotional. And, and she was like, I've never experienced this before. And like, she described this feeling of looking down and Seeing her baby when her baby was still a baby and wanting to hold it.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  You know, there's like this great imagery of her kind of reaching her arms out as if to hold it and she stepped back into her own body and she just had, she had this like crazy experience and she was like, I'm, yeah, I would love to keep coming back to do this. Which is funny too, because she described this woman, Ashley, and she's, she's really interesting to interview. She described herself as not a very techie person. And I think that's a thing we often kind of have to remind ourselves because we're so involved in tech that most of the general population has not experienced VR headsets. So when you, when you do experience it and you have that kind of reaction, then you kind of, then you kind of see the power of it. But until you, until you see that, you just see a bunch of geeks with these giant ugly headsets on their faces.

• 33:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, crying in a VR headset is like not a thing that most people think about doing.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  Because the experience is, it's so, it's so focused on games right now, right? Particularly the higher end VR. I think these kinds of experiences, like a new kind of memory is so, it's just so fundamentally interesting. And if it is your memory, then of course it's even more important to you. Whereas if-

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Like, would you ever say you've had an experience in a VR headset where you've cried? Or what would you say is the most powerful VR experience you've had so far? Or AR?

• 33:37Nilay Patel?

  Um, yeah, I've never been emotional. I think the most powerful ones for me have all been the, you know, it's the, the room, it's going to look like you're standing on a cliff and are you, are you going to take this step? Right?

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:49Nilay Patel?

  Even though your brain knows you're in a room, your body just believes that you're standing on the edge of some height and you just won't do it. And I think that's great. Okay, we can, we can definitely terrify people in VR. But like, can you create, uh, can you create another kind of feeling? And so I think this is, when you go to what USC is doing, the show foundation- To me, the danger of, hey, you can go look at your own kid and you can like get lost in the past, when maybe you should like take the headset off and like play with your like real child, seems like valuable. Like, there's something there that's like, maybe we don't need those kinds of memories, right? Like, you can't, it's emotional, it's

• 34:29Nilay Patel?

  important, it might sell a bunch of headsets, but like, is this more valuable than photos? And I, I don't know the answers to those questions. But then you go to what USC is doing, and it's obvious that we need at least those kinds of memories, because primary source history is so important. So when you were with the ADI people, did you ask them about the value of that memory? Or did you just take it as part of a piece with sort of what USC is doing?

• 34:53Speaker 03

  That's a really good question. Because ADI does what ADI does, of course, when you ask executives there, they all say the volumetric video is better, because that's what they do. So if you say, well, what's the difference between looking at a photo of your kid on your iPhone versus looking at it in, in a volumetric format, they'll say, well, it just is more real, it's so much more immersive, you can walk up to them, you can walk around them. One woman who I spoke to there, an executive, who, interestingly enough, came from Twitter, she, she showed an Instagram video she had made of her son when he was little, in volumetric, one of them was a hologram. To this day, I'm still not sure which one of her kids was a hologram in this, in this Instagram video. But there was one that was like really little and just about a year, and like, did the, you know,

• 35:38Speaker 03

  one-year-old baby stumbling drunk thing, because they can't walk very well. And then there was one that was a little bit older, that, that was able to stand and walk, and, and they were juxtaposed with each other. And she was like, see, like, this is more interesting. In some ways, she was saying this, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but like, this is more interesting than just looking at a flat 2D photo.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  So I think like, the point that they sort of make, it's not a very good answer right now, but the point is that- Well, it's more emotional. It's just more emotional when you experience it that way versus versus another way. And at some point, ADI thinks that we're going to be popping into photo booths or popping into department store studios and making holograms instead of flat photos. That's like their vision, which is pretty, which is pretty wild to think about. I think in USC's case at the Shoah Foundation, it actually does make a little bit more sense that they would marry this very realistic video with natural language processing because in this case, like, the testimonial actually makes sense. These

• 36:37Speaker 03

  people who are genocide survivors, especially the Holocaust, as opposed to more recent genocides, you know, they, they won't be around for very long, for much longer. And, and so we want to be able to interact with them. Like, right now, someone like Pinkus Guder, who was one of the survivors I spoke to, he can go to classrooms, he's still around.

• 36:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  But at some point, he's not. So how do people learn from him then? And I think that's, that was very cool to see.

• 37:01Nilay Patel?

  So that's actually a question that came up in sort of the comments that I was reading. And I know that you love it when I read your comments and ask you questions from them. But

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Were they good?

• 37:10Nilay Patel?

  They were great. But the, you know, one of the commentators was saying, how, how long until we do the capture and then an AI is just answering questions directly? And, you know, it's not quite a person anymore. It's like the representation of a person's thoughts and memories. And they're the ones out doing the teaching. And then like, obviously, how do you control? Like, are they thinking through all of that? Or are they just trying to make a more interactive experience?

• 37:36Speaker 03

  ADI didn't really have a concrete answer when I asked that. I think they're just about, still about getting their tech into the market and seeing where holographic assets go from there. I did talk to Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Shoah Foundation, and ask him specifically about that because they're already at that step where they're using NLP. And so for me, it's like, okay, well, what happens when you start to add in neural networks?

• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Right? And

• 38:04Speaker 03

  And he said that right now, they're making a very clear distinction between what their holograms do and say versus what he calls an android.

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  You know, he kept saying, well, you know, there, there's an android and then there are these real people and we're just capturing them. And he was very clear to say that whatever Pinkus or the other survivors who've been captured as holograms, whatever they're saying right now, those are words they've actually said. They might respond to you in a natural way and answer your question in a way that feels like they're right there, but th- those are phrases and sentences that those people have said themselves, they're not being manipulated at all. But he said that future is inevitable. Like, he was so clear on, this is where we're going. And we've already seen stuff with just flat video being manipulated.

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  You know, to show something Obama supposedly said when he really didn't, right? But there's so much digital data that lives out there now that people are able to cobble it all together and make something of it that is fake. And it's a really big ethical question and nobody has the answers right now. Like, I wish I had something more insightful to say than that, but we don't have the answers right now, but it seems like it could very well happen, that these assets, these holographic assets become, take on lives of their own.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I certainly don't want to suggest that a parent, like, looking at a hologram of their kid is, like, trivial, but the stakes of that being manipulated are much lower than the stakes of living history being manipulated. And it's all the same tech, so it's one of those situations where if ADI gets really good at it, they have to, they're gonna have to plan ahead before somebody does something bad, or if, you know, the Showa Foundation is saying this future is inevitable, some of, they, they, they're definitely gonna have to think about it first before the bad actors start using the stuff. And I think that problem, as we've seen over and over again in tech particularly recently, is really hard. And it's just, the stuff is so interesting and like-

• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  You know, as they're saying to you, the emotional power of the technology is so great that of course people are going to want to use it for different kinds of things. And it just seems like that is obviously the next set of questions to be answered.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and not losing sight of the fact, too, that pretty much every major tech company right now is getting into this space. Apple and Google have their own AR and, in Google's case, VR platforms. Microsoft just announced that it's doing these holographic studios in San Francisco and London where people can, you know, rent out the space to tape holograms. And then, let's talk about Facebook. I mean, Facebook, you know, they have Oculus. They've been experimenting a lot with this idea of social VR and recreating people as avatars in VR. And Facebook has a little bit of a problem right now with manipulation on its platform. So when you start to, you know, I don't want to connect too many dots, like, sort of in an alarmist way, but when you start to think about the bigger picture stuff, you could

• 41:00Speaker 03

  definitely see how manipulation of media could really have, I don't know, just have a big impact in this type of, this type of video format.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I think that's a good place to end, on the darkest possible note.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Yes, dystopian.

• 41:16Nilay Patel?

  Sadly, you and I are out of time this week, but tell the people where they can watch Next Level, where it's coming out, how they can look at it, how they can watch this episode, and a little tease of what your next episode's gonna be.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Absolutely. You can go to theverge.com. We have a landing page dedicated to all the Next Level episodes. You can also go to youtube.com/theverge, and you can find Next Level there. It's on Facebook, I think it's on Twitter.

• 41:39Nilay Patel?

  It's everywhere.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  What did I say last, I was gonna say last season, I think I said it's being beamed directly into your brain. So I'm gonna have to come up with some other, this season, we're gonna deliver it directly to your backyard by drones.

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 41:53Nilay Patel?

  The future's coming for you. What's your next episode about?

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Speaking of, next episode's about drone detection technology. So, yeah, drones are getting more popular. If you're a hobbyist, you currently don't have to license your drone in the US. Drones are, you know, they're getting in the way sometimes if you're at a natural disaster site or near an airport. And so, we're talking to some people who've been testing technology that will help maybe keep drones at bay, but we'll see.

• 42:22Nilay Patel?

  I will say, as the current operator of an unlicensed drone, I'm not sure I'm into this, but I'm very, I'm ready, I'm ready for the episode.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Oh, you're really gonna dig this episode, then.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm ready for it.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually ended up at an airport down in Southern California where we went on a patrol. We go on this patrol on the runway, they clear the runway for us, and we get in this giant Tahoe, and we're on a patrol with this tech. And there was, all of a sudden, you hear this, like, this crazy beeping because the tech has spotted a drone in the distance. And I saw the real-time reaction of airport operation specialists being like, "What's that drone doing over there?"

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  Whoa.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Like, it's, it's pretty wild, so you guys have to check out this episode.

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, that sounds super exciting. Next Level comes out, what day?

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Tuesdays.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  Tuesdays, Next Level. Everybody tune in, check it out, YouTube, Facebook, all the places you are. Lauren, thank you so much for being on the show. We'll see you again next week.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Thanks, Neil. See everyone next week. Bye.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Lauren was great. Next Level is great. I'm so happy we do that show. It makes me, and that episode, you have to watch it, it's just... It's very good. It's very good. And the VR baby situation, very disturbing. I get it, it's just fundamentally disturbing. All right, like I said, lots of other little news. I really want to talk quickly about what's happening with Logitech, because I think it speaks... It's like, the news itself is so small and stupid, but I think it's something we're talking about. So, Logitech obviously makes Harmony remotes. They had a product in 2011 called the Harmony Link, which was like, basically a Wi-Fi IR blaster. It's what it is. It's just how many years are gonna go by and I'm still talking about IR blasters.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Are you, are you okay though?

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  I'm not great. Uh, so Harmony Link was a little wifi IR blaster. Connected up to Harmony servers. Harmony, earlier this week said, "We're discontinuing it, no longer supported. Go buy a new one, the Harmony Hub, which is the same kind of thing." People freaked out because they bought this thing, it's working. They're just sitting in their house working.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  They didn't say, "It's no longer supported, it will stop working."

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  It will stop working because it needs, when you push the button on your phone, it goes up to the cloud and then down to the thing.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:32Nilay Patel?

  Which is an insane way to trigger an IR blaster fundamentally, but that's what they decided to do. Like.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  That's really absurd.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  It is bonkers crazy that you like push a button on your phone and it connects to a cloud service. And then the cloud service connects to your IR blaster and then it's like, "TV, volume up." That just doesn't seem great, but that's what they did. They sold it. People apparently liked it. So people have a working control system in their house and Logitech said, "We're done with this. We're just breaking it."

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  There was an outcry. Here's my favorite part of this outcry because Logitech had to address this today too. Logitech's forums censor the phrase "class action lawsuit." So you can't type it into the forums. They had to make an excuse. It's like, "That's because of our, our forum service agreement." But really they just censor the phrase "class action lawsuit." So Logitech came all the way back around. Anybody who has a link of any kind. I think their head of product is out there saying like, "If you just send us your old link and be like, I got it somehow, we'll, they'll just send you a new hub." So they've committed to a mass swap of Harmony Links for the new Harmony Hub, which is a much more capable product.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  How does that?

• 45:45Nilay Patel?

  It connects to Alexa and all that stuff.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Benefit from?

• 45:49Speaker 01

  They want to keep people in the ecosystem and they don't want to, they don't want to keep running the service to support the link.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  What are their additional effects?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Well, Logitech keeps them in the ecosystem and like, and then what do they get from those people?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Well, presumably they buy the next one. They stay in the ecosystem.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Buy the next one.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  I currently am thinking about buying Universal Remote and I was looking at buying a Logitech. Um, but it's a little bit too much remote for me right now. I, I've got all the HDMI C E C stuff going, which works. Like HDMI C E C works, which is to say medium.

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  It's like, HDMI C E C is like having a family of arguing siblings and you have like one side of food.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  My Vizio remote with the five-way D-pad, now it does successfully operate my Apple TV. So I don't need it. I don't need the Apple TV remote. Unless I want to talk to Siri, which I don't need the Apple TV remote.

• 46:42Nilay Patel?

  What if you want to play one of the many great touchpad swiping games available for the Apple TV?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Oh my God. But all I want is a button that launches the Netflix app on the Vizio and it comes with one. That's great. And then it also has a crackle button, which I don't want.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  Very confusing.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  You know, voodoo, I know, something stupid. And I just want a remote that has like the five buttons I actually want. And, or like just color codes that I can program, but I don't need a touchscreen. I don't need to spend hundreds of dollars. I need a remote that costs six bucks that I could just program. Doesn't exist.

• 47:14Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't exist. Um, especially because so many, you have to, you want to integrate it. So like what Logitech is getting is you'll buy the, you'll get the hub now for free. And you're going to connect it to Alexa and then you're going to use the Alexa skill. I mean, you're going to be all sticky. And then the next time you want to like, they're getting happy customers. That's what they're getting. Then you probably buy more Logitech stuff because now you're happy and you can type class action lawsuit into the forum now. But the, the real issue here, and I, it's come up. I'm just curious what you guys think, is when you buy products that are utterly dependent on a cloud service. Now you're buying like this long commitment to a company, but they will either charge you a monthly fee for, which I think is what they all want to do, or you're just

• 47:56Nilay Patel?

  betting that they won't go out of business, or otherwise decide that cloud service is too expensive to run. And I just like, it's, this is a small thing. I don't think a lot of people have Harmony Links, but it's one of those where you piss off the people who do, and it becomes a story throughout tech.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Well, the, you know, Canary just did this with their, and they had to double back as well. They like changed the functionality of the product. I think how it should work is that almost any product should work, do some basic function without the internet, and then possibly receive new functionality over time. Seems like how this link should have worked is it would receive new techniques and capabilities over the internet, but it shouldn't have to ask the internet every time it does anything. And then, and then you can clarify, and then you can have cloud services that like, like we're going to store

• 48:54Speaker 02

  some stuff in the cloud for you, like Canary was doing with video, that like are clearly delineated and can go away, but you have some sort of core functionality that is local that, that, and so the end of life of a product is, we will no longer continue to update it, which is bad because of security and stuff, but whatever. And that we won't offer these cloud services anymore. But that there, somehow we described to you when we sold you this product, that there is a core functionality that this product that will continue to work.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, so I have a Logitech One, just like the last of the Harmony remotes, or the Harmony One, the last of the Harmony remotes before. Things just got out of control with Wi-Fi connected IR blasters. And to reprogram it, I have to go talk to a cloud service. And I think like that to me is like, I don't need this in my life. Right? Like, just let me give you an app with all the codes in it. And I plug it into a computer, I'll run the app, I'll program the thing. But Logitech wants it to be smart and they want to update the database over time. So this piece of hardware that's going to work forever, because it never needs to talk to the internet, will get bricked by software supports online if I get a new component. And that's like, okay, I can sort of make that trade, I think, seems fine.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  But the, it's going to stop working because, well, there's not a lot of link owners and we really want to focus on the hub and running that service expense. But break them all.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Break them all.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but also Harmony's web services suck. Like, it's not like they took, they needed the resources to make this, the thing better. It's like, man, everything's pretty janky. Let's shut down the oldest one.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Theoretically, like, how much did the link cost when it first come out?

• 50:39Nilay Patel?

  I don't even remember. It was, I mean, it's

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Call it 250 bucks. Whatever. I don't know. Whatever. Some, and it's, it's theoretically a five-year-old product.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  It, do you think that 250, like, should Logitech have, have said, "We'll continue to support this product after three years, but we're going to charge you two bucks a month"?

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a choice, but...

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  Or, you know, just tell everybody, "Hey, in six months, we're discounting this. All of you get a discounted Harmony hub." Or, they, they just mismanaged all of that messaging. Anyway, for sure. The point of this is really not the Harmony link, because, again, I think very few people had them. They just happened to be very vocal. I think it's, we just have to be thinking constantly about, when you buy the thing that's actually an avatar for a web service, you might have actually purchased nothing, which is not how we think about hardware usually.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  But if you make, I'm, I'm doing it again. You guys ready?

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  If you make the thing open, jailbreakable, unlockable, devmodable from the jump, then when your web service inevitably dies, Users that love that product for whatever insane reason can band together, unlock the thing and do stuff with it. This is exactly what happened with WebOS. I'm just saying, you can go to Palm or Palm CE or whatever it is, WebOS CE, that that whole thing and you can go and you can install a Twitter app that still works and has been updated for 280 on your touchpad or on your Palm Pre 3. You've got to be a huge crazy nerd to make a Palm Pre 3 work in this day and age. But it is possible because you can get the thing going and you can type in the Konami code and you can go.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  If Apple goes belly up tomorrow, every single iPhone on the planet is gone. And that's a bummer. Like, maybe, maybe these things should be a little bit more unlockable and openable from the beginning. And then that protects us as consumers from if the cloud service goes down.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Agreed 100%.

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  Midwestern man rages against cloud.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  That's not what it's just about.

• 52:46Nilay Patel?

  No, I agree with you there. Jailbreak all the things. All right. Paul, I want to ask you about this story because I think it's really interesting, but I don't really understand it. Something is happening at Intel.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, my God.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  So they have teamed up with AMD, which is not a normal thing to have happen.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:04Nilay Patel?

  Historically, the greatest rivals in the world. Intel, AMD.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  There was a time.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  Michael Jordan, Larry Bird.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  There was a time.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  But historically fierce rivals.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:17Nilay Patel?

  Now, whatever. Well, AMD is making a comeback. Anyway, they, they, they, they've teamed up to make a new chip to rival Nvidia. But then Intel also hired an exec from Apple and AMD to lead its own GPU effort.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Right, so Apple or Intel hired Rajakoduri, who had worked at AMD and before then he worked at Apple and before that he worked at AMD and before that he worked at ATI.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Which AMD bought. So a graphics chip legend, apparently. Here's what surprised me. I assumed Intel did not want to do a good job.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Intel has been making integrated graphics forever. And they basically, they're like the baseline, like basically Intel integrated graphics chip can barely run World of Warcraft. And it can do some really good stuff with like, you know, like video transcoding and video playback. But that's basically what they, what they're for. And, you know, an integrated chip is sharing RAM between GPU and the CPU. It just, you know, it's just got a, a real serious performance ceiling. But I didn't know that there was anything stopping Intel from creating a discrete graphics chip, which it seems like what they're doing with AMD.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  They're partnering with AMD to make some sort of, of discrete graphics that are still bridged very closely to the CPU. So this should hopefully work really well.

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  The video is bonkers. The video is like a lot of sweet, like swoopy CGI and then like rectangles stacking on other rectangles. While the narrator's like.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  That's what GPUs do.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And the narrator's like, only Intel can stack these rectangles in this way with our high-performance rectangle stacking technology.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  So the thing is Nvidia's discrete graphics for laptops are getting way better recently. And they're, you know, the, the new Surface Book. Yeah, I think it's the Surface Book. There's so many different surfaces. It's one of the surfaces.

• 55:29Nilay Patel?

  I think it's the book.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  It's getting like a Nvidia 1050 or 1060.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  So you're getting good graphics in smaller form factors and it's cool. And the other thing is Intel's always done a really good job at providing drivers for its integrated graphics. So like a lot of times when you're running Linux, you can barely even work with a discrete graphics card. But you always got that trusty Intel integrated graphics. So hopefully, like this, this could be the, the final great Linux laptop. Also, also it means, also it means, also it means you might get the final great Apple laptop. Because Apple has avoided these Nvidia chips for whatever reason.

• 56:13Nilay Patel?

  Cause they hate games.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  They hate video games and gamers.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it just seems like their Intel's trying to make a move and they they're like, "Internet of Things, that'll be Intel. Like, we're making modems now." And now they're just refocusing on, "What if our laptop chips are really good?" Yeah. Which seems fascinating to me. But what's the timeline here? I have no idea. It's like, it's only like, five years before they figure it out. No. I bet this chip is gonna be in laptop. It's gonna be part of Intel's eighth generation. The Intel AMD hybrid thing. Yeah. That'll be soon. Yeah. But they're just booting up their own graphics. Intel making GPUs, I have no idea. It just seems weird to, in the same breath, as we're teaming up with AMD to rival Nvidia,

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  to then be like, "Also, we've hired this person who used to work at AMD." To rival AMD and Nvidia. I don't know. I don't know. They're like, "These graphics, people love them. We should get good at that." I have a cousin who has a nephew, and he just loves graphics. He's so into computers. He could just do anything with a computer. He says graphics are the future. Alright, I'm gonna read an ad, and then we, uh, we're gonna have a conversation about mergers. Ooh. Everyone, no, we're gonna talk about interesting things, but also mergers. This episode of The Vergecast, brought to you by The Art of Shaving. What is the secret of a well-groomed guy, Paul? Shaving?

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

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• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  Every week, I have a bad week, but I know I can look forward to The Vergecast, and sit here and listen to The Art of Shaving ad, and get to hear Neelai say, "Oud Suede." Oud Suede. I prefer to say Vetiverstron.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  Green lavender and coriander and cardamom. Each of these colognes has been carefully assembled for a distinctive scent. I did not know you assembled colognes, but you take an oud, you take a suede, you put them together. Got an oud suede. The Art of Shaving offers a convenient replenishment service that allows you to save on your favorite products while never having to worry about having hair on your face. The sentence isn't finished, so I'm just guessing that's what it says. Our listeners will receive 15% off their first order and free shipping by using the promo code VERGE. To get this offer, go online to theartshaving.com, use that promo code VERGE to get 15% off your first order and free shipping. So again, visit theartshaving.com for the special offer, or if you want to see a grooming

• 59:26Nilay Patel?

  expert, go into one of the many retail locations undoubtedly near you. All right, Paul.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  In the rundown, it is now huge and yellow.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  It's...

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Also Comic Sans.

• 59:42Nilay Patel?

  Comic Sans. It's red text highlighted in yellow. The text is so big, it just says Paul Segg, and then I had to scroll to another page for meant, but every week you do a segment.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  Which is called...

• 59:56Speaker 02

  It's called 121, and you spell out one, then it's the number two, and then you could say W O N.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  I don't know, or just O N E.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Two, to your own taste. And it's about how in VR, we're making everything, again, that already exists in real life. And Logitech is coming out with this thing called Logitech Bridge. Right now, they've only seeded it to like 50, or they're gonna give it to 50 developers to like try it out. But it uses HTC's Vive Tracking Disk thing. They're a little like, I don't know what you, how you even describe it. It's basically, it's like a beacon. It's like, here I am in 3D space, and then that connects to a whole Logitech keyboard.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  And then in VR, you see a one-to-one representation of the keyboard in VR, and when you push the keys, the keys go down. But the real crazy thing, and I think they're using the Vive's front-facing cameras for that, is they can see your hands as well. So you see your hands floating out in front of the keyboard and the keyboard is just a 3D model being rendered, but it's in the exact space that your actual keyboard is. It's this, this one special Logitech keyboard is. And then you can see yourself type. So now you can type in VR. They did. They solved it.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, you need it.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  I, I think you need, especially if these VR things get like higher resolution and you really wanna stay in there. If they're, if a VR headset was both lighter and higher resolution and you wanted to hang out in there and do work in there, you definitely wanna see the keyboard and this is one way to do it.

• 1:01:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I'm just saying Matrix was typing, or Matrix, Neo was typing in the Matrix all the time.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you gotta type.

• 1:01:47Nilay Patel?

  You gotta type. One to one.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  One to one.

• 1:01:51Nilay Patel?

  But why would it be W O N?

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's just.

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  One, because you've won against the reality of typing. VR keyboards don't break.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Well, but this is based on a physical keyboard that could break.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  That's, that's the real question. If you break this keyboard in real life, does the VR one break too?

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  So we'll find out.

• 1:02:13Nilay Patel?

  Get in that headset.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Be one of 50 lucky developers.

• 1:02:17Nilay Patel?

  All right. I wasn't lying about merger news. There's two things happening in this world. One, we don't have to dwell on either one of them, but they're important. AT&T is trying to buy Time Warner. We've talked about it a lot. Justice Department says, hey, AT&T, you wanna buy Time Warner, you gotta sell Turner, which owns CNN, or you gotta sell DirecTV. Effectively.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Or the Justice Department didn't say that and it was somebody floating the idea to see what would happen because CEO Randall Stephenson said today, no, they never said that to me. That's crazy.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. He also said, I'm never selling CNN.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  So obviously the, the, this is interesting to me for a variety of reasons. One of which is the operating rumor. I wouldn't even call it a theory. The rumor is that Donald Trump, President of the United States, hates CNN, was against the steal when he was a candidate. Now he's president.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Donald Trump hating CNN is not a theory. That is a fact.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  Okay. That's a fact, but you put all the pieces together to make it the rumor. And so he's saying, I, I wanna punish CNN and the way I'll do that is I'll force AT&T to sell it if they wanna buy Time Warner. I'll block this deal to punish CNN. It's out there. It's definitely out there. It's been reported that way in some publications. Other publications are reporting other things entirely, which, one of which is the career lawyers at the Department of Justice don't like this deal because media consolidation and letting giant companies get bigger is bad, right? And that's their job is to block deals, block mergers for anti-tush reasons. So it's, this is the moment we're in. And where I'm at is,

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  I actually don't think distribution companies should buy media companies. I think it's healthy for all the media companies to compete for access. So the canonical example here, disclosure, Comcast, investor in Vox Media, which is a very disparate company, but Comcast bought NBC Universal. NBC Universal is a media company, Comcast is a distribution company. They had to sign an agreement with the Department of Justice, a consent decree saying, we will never preferentially treat NBC content on our networks for a period of years. For like five years. For five years. It's expiring.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  And then it's gonna get good.

• 1:04:37Nilay Patel?

  It's crazy. So Netter Charlie's out the window. They can prefer anything. Even during the time of that agreement, Bloomberg is saying, hey, Comcast and its cable grid put CNBC up there and we are buried at the bottom of the list. Why can't we go up there either? They're obviously preferring themselves. And it's like, where do you go?

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Where's up there? You keep on pointing up. I don't know where you're talking about.

• 1:05:00Nilay Patel?

  Channel grid on the other. Channel guide.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:05:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So actually placement in those listings is hotly contested.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  And apparently not alphabetical.

• 1:05:09Nilay Patel?

  It's not. It's definitely not alphabetical. It's grouped. Placement in those listings is such, like, it's so conflict ridden that there's a special court inside the FCC that handles these disputes. So like, the golf channel is suing some tiny cable company.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  This sounds like old people's stuff.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right? But this is why you don't. Which, which is why the internet's better. Cause you just type in the thing you want and it comes to you at the same speed.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  Let them merge and be old together.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  I make bad old person decisions. While I watch Twitch.

• 1:05:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but you don't want, you don't want AT&T to slow down Twitch. Cause it's owned by Amazon, which competes with HBO.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Let them do their bad old people thing so that they can die off as a company quickly.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  But AT&T is not going to die because, because DirecTV's channel listings are preferred, right? They're going to continue to succeed. And the issue is, Amazon and HBO compete. So AT&T on its mobile network wants to punish Amazon.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  AT&T gets, well, for one, I'm not an AT&T subscriber, so they can't really do it right now. But if they find a way to get between me and my Twitch TV, I think Jeff Bezos will be there.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  Uh, sorry, Paul, Paul.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  Verge editorial guidelines require you to refer to him as Swole Jeff.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sorry. Swole Jeff will probably rappel from a helicopter and deliver to me. My streaming content that I desire.

• 1:06:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh, by a drone.

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  He can get, he could buy a Whole Foods, you think he can't get me a like a 1080p stream?

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  So what I'm saying is if you're AT&T, you're saying, hey, Jeff. Swole Jeff.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  I just somehow have agreed to this term.

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  JB, let me talk to you. You got enough money to buy his grocery store.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  Give us, give us some extra money to stream Twitch. And he'll say, no, you don't make HBO pay that money. You just give it away for free. And AT&T is like, yeah, we own it.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Whatever. Let them fight it out. They're old, rich people. They can do whatever they want.

• 1:07:15Nilay Patel?

  No, that's bad. That's terrible. So that's why you don't want AT&T to own Time Warner, because you don't want that fight to exist.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  They can fight all they want.

• 1:07:24Nilay Patel?

  But what's going to happen is that you're.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  In the meantime, you don't get your Twitch TV.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  Right, until they pay.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  I think I'm going to get my Twitch TV is my theory.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  Based on?

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  The things I know. I get my Twitch TV and old people fight about listing their stupid TV channels that don't matter.

• 1:07:47Nilay Patel?

  All right, Paul Miller's antitrust doctrine.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  Old people are doing stuff, but I'm still watching Twitch. Anyway, this is a... I don't know how to impress upon the average human being that the AT&T Time Warner deal is a huge thing, and that Trump is blocking it, potentially out of spite? Or he's not blocking it, and a bunch of lawyers with like, you know, books on antitrust law. That appears to be not the case.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  What powers does the president have to direct the Department of Justice?

• 1:08:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, they work for him. Yeah. It's part of the executive branch. Um, so what's interesting is, before Trump took office, a lot of people were like, "I hate this idea, but it seems legally okay, because they're not competitors, so they're not merging and consolidating power in the market. It's their vertical merger." And now, the same person who said, "This is probably fine," he's on the head of antitrust at the OJ, and he's like, "Ah, we should block it." And it's unclear why he's changed his mind. Peter Kafka wrote a great article in Recode about it.

• 1:08:47Nilay Patel?

  It's out there, and I think what is particularly of note and interest to Verge Cast listeners is this is going to be very distracting for AT&T. Right? AT&T's desire, Verizon's desire, is to Comcast's desire is to capture media companies and then use the media company content to differentiate their products, which is a fair desire. It is not to compete on quality of service. So Verizon's desire is to own AOL and Yahoo and whatever, and then track all your activities across the entire web, and build an advertising business to compete with Google and Facebook. Maybe you like this, maybe you don't.

• 1:09:27Nilay Patel?

  One outcome is that they've signed a huge deal with the NFL, and now you cannot stream NFL content on any mobile network except Verizon's mobile network, which is super annoying. AT&T's desire is to buy Time Warner, and have Game of Thrones stream for free, HBO stream for free, CNN stream for free on AT&T networks, and you have to pay through the mechanism of data cap to stream it on any other network. Comcast bought NBC. Literally prevented from doing those things. The, the consistent analysis is it's basically two different companies. They just shared some leadership, but they operate completely independently. The conditions will expire. It will be very fast for Comcast to start doing things like preferential streaming of NBC content.

• 1:10:08Nilay Patel?

  I think all of that's bad because in the middle of that is they are all competing with Amazon and Netflix. And they will do bad things to deteriorate those and promote their own services via the mechanism of their networks. I think that's when the net neutrality debate is going to come to its conclusion. Cause nobody wants that. And Netflix is very good at making that argument. The end, that's my merger story for the day. There's another one out there, which is much more boring.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Oh, Broadcom?

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  Broadcom wants to buy Qualcomm. Qualcomm spawned apart.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, Qualcomm spawned apart, but it's like the immediate reaction to Broadcom was among everybody else who was, isn't a tech nerd was like, what? Who, what? And then among tech nerds was like, they make crappy modems. I don't understand. I mean, they make other stuff like they're, they've, they've got the money to try and buy Qualcomm.

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. How could they be more? They're not. They're a little bit smaller, but they know Qualcomm is failing. The, the only thing that's super interesting about this is Broadcom literally moved its headquarters to the United States. And the next day they're like, we're buying Qualcomm.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  Like they moved in, they opened their doors like Qualcomm, come on over.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Maybe they can call the new company Comcast.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  All I want is.

• 1:11:23Nilay Patel?

  That's the end of the Vergecast, everybody. We're done.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Somebody on, somebody made the joke that all, all we want from Broadcom and Qualcomm is to agree on how many Ms belong in the word Comcast. They each have a different answer to that question and it's very annoying.

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  I always type them both with two. Oh, that's the worst. All right. That's it. Like I said, a lot of little news this week, but all pointing at big things.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  What about the Xbox?

• 1:11:45Nilay Patel?

  I answered, oh, Xbox One, Xbox One, Xbox One, Xbox One, Xbox One. Their most recursive name in history. It came out. We had it on Cigar Breaker Live.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  We did.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  I will say this. That shit is hot as hell. Like, I don't mean like good.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  Stand behind it while it blasted.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it was so hot. Megan was wearing a necklace, like a metal necklace. And the necklace got like warm to the touch because the Xbox One X blasts so much hot air out of it. It was like uncomfortable to stand near.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's something to keep in mind. Also, I don't know, maybe I'm dumb, but it just feels like what is the point of a console anymore?

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  To have it and then play games on it? Yeah, no, I'm team console. I am not going to deal with building a PC. I am not as serious a gamer as you. I just want to play my Horizon Zero Dawn. I want to play my Doom. And I want to not have to think about it. And a console, like, that's its entire purpose is to let me play games and not have to think about it. I love that.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  But that's the thing is they're trying to make you have to think about it. Like, well, do I get this one? So it runs at 30 frames per second 1080p? Or to get this one? So it runs at 60 frames? Per second 1080p? Or what if it could be in 4K 60? I don't, you know, it's just like,

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  I feel like right now should be like the glory times of a console. Where the consoles are getting a little old, but the games are so optimized. That you get like they're coming fast and quick and great. And instead, we're just still, it's all about specs, which is what PCs excel at.

• 1:13:26Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, how many lights on the Xbox One X? Just the one. Okay. Atmos, but no vision. Dan keeps giving me TV boxes to review. Like I have a new TiVo. The F is that, man? Thanks, Dan.

• 1:13:41Nilay Patel?

  The TiVo app, by the way, in the iPhone 10. Pure garbage.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  They never updated it for the iPhone 6 screen size. Sounds like it's the wrong screen size, but zoomed. It's just an incredible mess. That's the whole review. I'll publish a review, whatever. It's nice. It's pretty, blah, blah, blah. The app is a hot mess. And that's it. It's been a long episode. Lots of little news. We're in that moment. Where all this stuff is out, holiday shopping season.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08Nilay Patel?

  The news is going to be up and down here.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  It's time to spend time with your family.

• 1:14:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, go home, make a ketchup sandwich for your mom, just like she used to make for you.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  I do want to say 280 characters on Twitter is fine.

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  It's fine. It's been, it's come in handy a couple of times.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Every, every day I'm like, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna like quit Twitter and like a storm of hatred. But then I'm like, whatever. I don't want to be, I don't want to be a part of a mob.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  The Twitter story. It's just there and I can't get rid of it. Um, that's it. There's a lot of stuff in this world that The Verge is making right now. I implore you to watch and read and listen to all of it. So, like I said at the top, Ashley and Caitlin got a great new podcast, Why'd You Push That Button? Go listen to it. It is rocketing up the charts. It's just the best. They're also taking audio messages now. So people are like recording voice memos about their own button stories. They're gonna do a holiday spectacular.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  You can email them at [email protected].

• 1:15:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Check that out. It's, it's just so great. It's one of my favorite things. Um, Lauren Good, who is on the show today, is doing Next Level. Go watch Next Level. Lauren's also got a podcast, Kara Swisher, called Too Embarrassed to Ask, which is wonderful. Kara Swisher has a podcast called Recode Decode. Peter Kafka has a podcast called Recode Media. All those are great. Part of the Vox family. There are no other podcasts in the Vox family worth listening, especially not Ezra's Kleins.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  What does Ezra Klein produce? Why, to, I'm just interested.

• 1:15:35Nilay Patel?

  You just want to know, you just want me to say the names of his shows?

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  I'm just curious about other ships.

• 1:15:39Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're not, whatever. They're fine.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Neil is just mad that this is called The Vergecast and Ezra's show is called The Ezra Klein Show.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  It's really irritating.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:15:49Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, uh, there's tons of wonderful Verge and Vox stuff in this world to listen to. Go listen to it all. Uh, and there's lots of videos being made, just all kinds of stuff. We're doing the Circuit Breaker Live Show on Twitter.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Which is a lot of fun.

• 1:16:02Nilay Patel?

  On Tuesdays. It's super fun. We're basically pairing things with Bluetooth and seeing how well it goes.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  We're just hanging out.

• 1:16:07Nilay Patel?

  And the answer is medium. I would say we bring Ashley on to that show and force her to pair Bluetooth things. And it goes about as well as you expect every week for an hour. So watch that on Twitter. The replay's on the site on Wednesdays. And then Russell, Megan and I are doing the Mr. Robot app after show. We actually had Sam Esme on the show this week. And we were on USA. We were on the TV.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  Real TV.

• 1:16:28Nilay Patel?

  Great fun. Uh, so if you're watching Mr. Robot, check that out. And that is it. Well, that is The Vergecast. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:16:36Nilay Patel?

  Promo code.

• 1:16:56Speaker 01

  You