Amazon announces Ring security drone, new Echo devices, a gaming service, and a whole lot more

Nilay, Dieter, and Dan discuss all the important announcements from Amazon's fall hardware event this week, from a security drone for your home to a new cloud gaming service. Stories discussed this week: CDC removes guidance about airborne spread of the coronavirus Averting a COVID-19 vaccination crisis will take careful communication Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house Ring announces new line of security cameras for cars Amazon will launch a new location-tracking mesh network system later this year Amazon’s fall hardware event: the 13 biggest announcements Amazon redesigns the Echo with a new spherical design and a custom machine learning processor Amazon’s new Echo show 10 moves to look at you Amazon’s Echo Show smart displays will soon stream Netflix video Amazon’s AZ1 Neural Edge processor will make Alexa voice commands even faster Alexa’s latest upgrades help it listen to multiple people and ask clarifying questions Amazon unveils new Guard Plus subscription for $4.99 per month Amazon announces new cloud gaming service called Luna Amazon’s Luna game streaming service is powered by Windows and Nvidia GPUs Amazon announces $29.99 Fire TV Stick Lite and upgraded Fire TV Stick The latest Eero mesh Wi-Fi routers support Wi-Fi 6 iPad 2020 review iOS 14 and iPadOS review: iPhone revolution, iPad evolution iOS 14 basics: how to add widgets to your iPhone’s home screen Fitbit Sense review: enough bugs to raise your heart rate 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?

  Today on the Vergecast, we go through all the stuff Amazon announced at its event, Ring, Echo, Luna, a game streaming service, new Eros. Talk a little bit about the new iPad review, iOS 14, and the Fitbit Sense. Coming up now on the Vergecast.

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• 1:05Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, flagship podcast of ambient computing. Remember the days when we would just talk about ambient computing and everything seemed fine? There would be computers everywhere. And now we're like, what if there were less computers everywhere?

• 1:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm Neelai Patel. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  I'm your Huckleberry.

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Hi, everybody. Dieter brought a soundboard this morning. Okay. Dan Seifert is here.

• 1:31Speaker 04

  I'm here. Hello.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  We have a lot to talk about. Amazon had a gigantic event yesterday. That's why the show is coming out a little late today. We literally just had to go back and think about all of the things Amazon introduced yesterday. It was, it was, it was only like a couple dozen this year instead of like 75. It was, it was, Dieter and I live logged it and about halfway through, I was like, we, we gotta, we gotta stop trying to keep up.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  We're not gonna be able to. Let's try a different approach. Uh, Dan, I believe you called it the Slamazon. It was, it was a lot.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  Slamazon 2020. Yeah.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  So we got a lot of that stuff to talk about. Also, uh, iOS 14 came out, iPadOS 14 came out. Dieter reviewed an iPad. Dieter's very late in an Apple Watch review as people keep tweeting at us. But before we begin, as always, I'm just gonna remind you, it has been 28 weeks since the president of these United States said there would be a website architected by Google. He like really complimented Google at that. I really encourage you to go back and watch it. He's like, Google's been great. They're definitely doing this thing. There was a flow chart. Forty five thousand Google engineers are gonna build a website that you could go to and get tested. And that, none of that exists. It's been 20, 28 weeks later is the status. Just honestly, go back and watch that press con. Think about how confident he was in saying that stuff and think about the

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  reality of testing in this country today. Next to that, obviously, COVID remains the biggest story in the world. We are covering it. I encourage you to, to subscribe to Mary Beth Griggs newsletter. Mary Beth is our science editor. She's got a new newsletter called Antivirus. She's tracking developments in COVID, particularly around vaccine research. There's a flood of that news is coming out. It's hard to keep track of it. The newsletter is the best way to do it. Go check that out, verge.com/antivirus. Two stories I wanna flag before we begin with the other stuff. The argument about how the virus works and about how to communicate about vaccines is getting very heated. Yeah. You know, if you're listening to the show, right, this is a show about science and engineering fundamentally and making products.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  Vaccines are a product and virus transmission is like a, it's just science. It's like, here's how the thing works. And then here's how you solve the problem. Um, so the CDC had some guidance about the virus being aerosol. They pulled it back. That is very politicized. And then communicating about how the vaccine will and what work, what you might have to do to take it. You might need two doses. We have two stories on the site. One, one is about the CDC guidance. You should go read that for sure and understand how that communication is being subverted. And then understanding how we need to communicate about vaccines, very important. Nicole has a story about that. So go check that stuff out. It is very important. The virus is, remains the biggest story in the world.

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  Fight for racial justice remains one of the biggest stories in the world. Uh, that stuff colors everything that we do, but. It's hard to just constantly talk about it and there is a lot of tech news. So let's talk about some tech news. Amazon event, very strange.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  A little bit of an infomercial.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Little bit of an infomercial. I actually talked to Dave Limp, who's the SVP of Devices and Services after the event. He seemed very tired, but that couldn't be true because he didn't actually have to do an event live, but I guess he was speaking to a bunch of press before me. And I told him, like, you know, you could, you, you could have taken longer than 45 minutes to announce 20 products, like every, every other company does. And he just said flat out, nobody wants to sit and stare at a screen for more than an hour. So I wanted to, I wanted to get it done fast.

• 5:04Nilay Patel?

  I appreciate that.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:06Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's a man who has Zoom fatigue right there. That's a man who spends his life on video conferences, just making a decision about how long his video conference will be.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  It's probably Amazon chime fatigue, but yes.

• 5:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, they have a Zoom partnership. I bet they've been testing it on their Echoes. Actually, one of the most under sort of under remarked pieces of this event, just speaking of Zoom, is they announced that like Fire TVs, you can plug a Logitech webcam into them.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  And they have a Zoom partnership and soon you will have like the cheapest possible Zoom box available to you.

• 5:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  And they just, they just glanced over it. I was like, wait, hold on. It's over. It's gone. See you later.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  If, if we were still in our offices, the number of people that would be like marching into meeting rooms and chucking out the meeting system that we have there, just like installing Fire TVs.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, absolutely. Um, but so I actually in my, I've, I've now set up my basement and so it has spaces in it. So I do different things in different spots, which I, if you have the ability to do it, I highly recommend just because you're not, you don't, can't sit in the same place all the time. Like in your office, you move around. In your home office, you're just rooted to one spot. So I, my horrible curved TV.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, legendarily bad curved TV is now my Zoom monitor and it's great, except

• 6:29Speaker 05

  Oh, so it's two things that you hate in one?

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I hate you. But it's great because I've mounted my little RX 100 in front of the TV. So it looks like

• 6:40Speaker 05

  Oh, because it's so small, it doesn't block anything because you got a huge screen and

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, it blocks one person on the Zoom grid. So I'm always deciding who it's like, it's a combination of who I will, it will appear that I'm looking at when I speak to them.

• 6:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:52Nilay Patel?

  Because, you know, it's not perfect, but then also who I will not see. It's a lot, but I, if you have a cheap old TV, just like lying around, you know, and you can plug like a $39 firebox into it with a USB port and a logic check webcam. Like that suddenly makes the Zoom working from home. I promise you putting Zoom on it, a much larger screen and getting far away from it changes your entire relationship to the

• 7:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, getting far away from it is like, I actually had a, a, a executive in a big company, uh, like hit me up after I had posted my DSLR setup. And he's like, that looks great, but what you really need to do is sit five feet away from it. Trust me. And I was like, cool. When I have an apartment that allows me to move five feet away from my desk, I will do that.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  This is why everybody should move just far away into the woods. But I, th- these are my two work from home tips after all these months of the pandemic. One, create different spots for different tasks. Even if you're just moving three feet, like the place where I have meetings is literally three feet to my left. It's not that far away, but it's just a different spot. And then get just, if you have an old TV or a big monitor, just like set that up for Zoom and then go really, really far away from it.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Do you have to argue with your wife as to who's booked the meeting spot? Just like that real in-office experience of, oh no, someone's in the meeting room right now. I gotta find another spot.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  I should, I should really, really introduce that back into our life, just to add that little bit of office friction into the home office working, uh, situation. No, she, I mean, she's a lawyer, so she's on calls. So what I did, I got her AirPods and she's like, no, I'm not wearing these.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  So what you could do is you could go to check to see, the worst part about checking for a meeting is like walking up to the room and seeing somebody's in it. So you could buy a Ring drone and fly it over there.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  All right. Yeah, we should talk about this a bit.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  See what Dieter's doing. Well, I was, it was partially related to the event. So just a lot, I will say that. This, just like on a meta note over the top, we've now seen all the big companies do it.

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, Google basically was like, we're not doing it. Here's some press releases. We're just gonna tweet our announcements. Like, we don't want this.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  Although they do have something on the 30th, so we'll see when they actually try what happens, but yeah.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  Um, Samsung, OnePlus basically had fake live events. Right? Here's what we would do if we had a big crowd. Weird in its own way, but like tracked with what you have. Apple is producing infomercials. Like, we should just be honest about what Apple events are now. Amazon, which actually produces infomercials. Like, there are Blink and Ring infomercials on television right now.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  Produced an infomercial.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  But they didn't stream it live.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  They didn't stream it live.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  That's a weird thing. It was like, only us press got to see it. So, you know, you, the audience, had to follow our live blog and our coverage, which is great for us. We want you reading our live blog, obviously.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  But it was very odd that every other company has streamed their, their press events this year live to the public. So you could just go to YouTube and watch it. And Amazon was like, nope.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Not gonna do that.

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  And so it's a weird middle zone. But the one thing I will call out, none of the presenters were speaking to the camera. Like, to us, they were all speaking to some unknown interrogator just off screen. And it made it feel more like an infomercial than anything I've ever, like, I was like, who are you talking to? Who are you explaining this to? Why do you keep saying you? Who is this person? It was very, very strange. Uh, but it got, it enabled, on the plus side, enabled Amazon to bring in a bunch of faces we haven't seen before, which was always good. We saw a lot of products. We gotta start with this camera drone.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:40Nilay Patel?

  That was, I mean, it's the thing. So it's the Ring Always-at-Home Cam, which is quite a name. It's a drone. It's a drone that sits in a little box and it's, it's shaped like a T, the drone. Like, it's a, it's a square, and then there's a vertical piece that comes down. That's where the camera is. The box has a, like a hole. And so when the drone lands, the, the, the stem of the T goes into the box. And it just looks like a cube, and then the thing takes off and flies.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it's like, it's like, imagine, like, in a Greek myth, that there were a box with problems in it, and then...

• 11:13Speaker 05

  And then it opens.

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So this, this, this camera, uh, flying drone camera, I think elicited more reactions from people. I mean, that's what they wanted it to do. So for I will, a thing to understand about it is that right now it's vaporware. And I, the, there are people who made it and they're on Twitter and one of them tweeted how proud he was to people. I'm sure they've worked on it. I'm sure there's, there's a physical product somewhere.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  Well, and also it's not like there's any impossible technology in there. Like there's nothing there that couldn't have been built to, at least a year ago, probably two years ago, right?

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  But the, it's not, if you look on amazon.com, they're not selling it yet. No one, we have not seen one fly. Like the pieces, I feel confident calling it vaporware. Like they announced a thing, it looks really cool. We're confident Amazon can build it. But we haven't seen one. They're not selling it. We don't know its specs. We don't know its battery. Like, the number of things we don't know make me confident. Also, just historically, Amazon has very flashy, flashily announced drones. Remember Prime Air?

• 12:19Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, there's like some history here. But I, you know, they announced it, they got the, the hype bubble that they wanted around it because it's cool. And then the questions about, why would you want Ring of all companies, which has all like, like Ring has had stories where contractors in other countries have just been logging in and watching Ring cameras.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  That's like a real thing that's happened. They've had other security lapses. They have this partnership with police departments that seems a little Fourth Amendment-y. You know, like you may be arguing about that. But it's just, it's just got, you know, it's got the, it's got some Fourth Amendment vibes to it. Um, do you want the police to have unfettered access to a camera in your home? Like, that's an open question. Um, and do you want, like, I don't know. Do you want Jeff Bezos to be like, I'm gonna take a fly today and just like fly around your house?

• 13:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  Let's see what you need to order from Amazon. Oh, you're running low on paper towels.

• 13:13Nilay Patel?

  At the same time, it's cool as hell, right? Like, it's super sci-fi to say, I'm not at home. I, I, I'm worried I left the stove on. I'm gonna fly my drone over to it.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? And then do nothing about it.

• 13:30Speaker 05

  The ad that they made was the most infomercial thing I've ever seen. You know how the infomercials, people are like, oh my God, I can't handle all this pasta. I need a solution for this.

• 13:42Speaker 05

  They had this, this, you know, like prototypical like thief with a knit cap like open the door. And then like

• 13:49Speaker 04

  In the middle of the day, by the way.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  The guy walked Like a bassist in an indie band. I'm sorry. Nothing about him was intimidating and he was scared off by a drone.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  He literally said, oh no.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  I have a feeling like, like that's exactly the reaction Ring wanted to that video.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Because it like, you know, it takes the scariness down quite a bit of the notch when you're just laughing at the bumbling Yeah. crook breaking into the house going, oh no. But it, it's, it's also hilarious.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, you know, it's funny, Ring's entire like method of operation is to be scary or to scare you. Right? I mean, that's, we talked to the CEO of Ring. They founded it for security.

• 14:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. They do this weird like Tik Tok of like heartwarming scary, heartwarming scary. Right?

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  I just, if they had been like, we made a drone that can fly around your house remotely.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  To see if you left your keys on the dresser, like the, the panic of the thing goes away.

• 14:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  There are lots of reasons I would want to look around my house when I'm not in my house that have nothing to do with, you know, scaring away the drummer for a, for a funk band. Like I, I just don't want this to happen.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  The number one reaction was, holy shit, this seems bad. The number two reaction was my cat will destroy this. Like lots and lots of pet reactions to this thing.

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Or, or your pets will be terrified. Like

• 15:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  Again, and I think this is part of the, part of the reason they announced it was to get all these reactions. So that when they actually announce it, right? And they give it to people and they message it out and they, we have review briefings and we have all of these questions that they're prepared. So in that sense, I think it is very smart. In the other sense, it's, I think Dieter, your piece went up just before we started recording. They just keep pushing the boundary, right? Of what is, what is acceptable to have a giant corporation with computers you don't own in your house? And that

• 15:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and on some level, it's like, we talk about big companies all the time. Like, yeah, I would want just the three or four big companies that are a little bit responsive as opposed to some fly-by-night operation where I can't, I can't see into their

• 16:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  cloud services, you know, like, we have some layers of trust inside Amazon. We know how it works. We know who the people are. We know they're not going away.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:14Nilay Patel?

  They're definitely not going away.

• 16:15Speaker 05

  They don't need to sell the data. They make plenty of money in other ways.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're definitely going to use that drone to be like, you're out of paper towels. Like, that's gonna happen.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  Wow. So like, the, the problem that I have here is with this drone particularly, but with like, all of Amazon's creepy products, and this is like, what I tried to get in the piece, and I don't know if I managed it or not, but like, every time Amazon announces a creepy thing, you're like, but what about, like, your very first, but what about, they have an answer for. So for the drone, it's like, but what about hackers? Like, well, you can't actually remotely control it. It doesn't have that capability. Like, blah, blah. Okay, but what about privacy? Well, the cameras are like, in the, in the box, in the Pandora's box when it's like, set down. Also, it's really fricking loud, so you'll know when it's looking at you. What was, what was their line?

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  Privacy you can hear.

• 16:59Speaker 05

  It's privacy you can hear.

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  Which is a great line. I want to commend them on this line.

• 17:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  That is not how privacy works.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  It's also a great way to spin the fact that drones are noisy, and they did do anything to like, make it less noisy. Now, it's a feature. Oh, well, you can hear it. So it's, you know when it's recording you.

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  I just like the idea that you'd be in your house, and you would hear like, this tiny, plastic drone just like, roar to life. You'd be like, oh, my privacy is being invaded. I should go see what's happening.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  The problem is, like, the reason I have a hard time knowing what to feel is, every time they announce something creepy, like, there's a list of six but whatabouts, and they have an answer for those six, and then you're like, well, now I'm exhausted. I don't know what to worry about next. And then, like, a million people buy the thing and install it in their house, and then six months later, you're like, oh, wait, I figured it out. And it's like, too late.

• 17:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I think that's the drone. The drone, like I said, is, I am sure it's real. I'm sure the people who are excitedly tweeting about having worked on it actually did some work.

• 18:02Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  Still vapor, right? We have to get it. They have to ship it. Okay, I think it's a good, what's the thing I'm looking at? It's a good symbol of all of the problems.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Right.

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  There's a better word than symbol.

• 18:14Speaker 05

  Cynic dochi, whatever it's, however it's pronounced.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Okay, it's that, it's that word.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a small thing that's representative of the big thing.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's right. That's the word. Was there a movie about a house? Oh, well, if you know how to pronounce it, just tweet an audio memo, Dieter. We'll take it from there. The, the one that's real, really, really real is Sidewalk. Which, Dieter, when you said a million people will install it.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:40Nilay Patel?

  Right? Sidewalk is a mesh network that only works if a million people install it. Only works if you can get that massive installed base and the network effect of literally building an, on, like a network on the unlicensed 900 megahertz band to do location tracking, all this stuff. You've been thinking about Sidewalk for a long time. Just walk people through what it is.

• 19:01Speaker 05

  So, uh, at a, at a basic level, it's a mesh network. And if you want to know where you left your keys, you have one of those little sidewalk tiles attached to it. And, uh, all of the, all of the nodes in the sidewalk network are like, where are the keys? Where are the keys? And the keys are like, I'm here. And then it securely lets you know where the keys are. Right? So it's kind of like how tile works where tile, like any, any iPhone can see a tile. But you, you can't like, but it's still secure. Right? So it's a way to locate something through a mesh network. And they're using that 900 megahertz spectrum, which means that it's like completely unregulated. They can go about half a mile with it. And they also can actually transmit data more than just location. So they can send out little IoT controls, right?

• 19:43Speaker 05

  They can, I don't know if it's quite big enough bandwidth for like a full camera feed, but it's like in that zone. Right?

• 19:50Speaker 05

  And so what Amazon is doing is they're just building gateways for Sidewalk into their most popular products. And the Ring products and the Echoes. And they will, I don't know if this is public or not, but they are also going to make a little cheap gateway. If you just want a sidewalk gateway to control your cameras or whatever smart home gadgets you've got that run on Sidewalk. And what's going to happen, it's launching this fall, but what's going to happen is this thing is going to basically blanket cities within, I don't know, a year, honestly, because it's just in all the stuff that people are just buying. And so they're going to have this mesh network of things that can do IOT things blanketed across, you know, densely populated areas in very, very

• 20:33Speaker 05

  short order. And that's cool, right? Because now, all of a sudden, if you want to, say, have a car computer that can detect car crashes in your car, like Ring makes, and you don't want to have to pay Verizon a $10 monthly fee for a stupid thing that you plug into your ODB port.

• 20:51Nilay Patel?

  Like Nilay does.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  Like Nilay does. You can buy this $60 gadget from Ring that does that and uses the sidewalk network. And without paying a single dime to a carrier, this thing is able to communicate anywhere in a densely populated area.

• 21:09Nilay Patel?

  So this is Amazon's, what I think is important to understand about this is compared to ZigBee, which is also in a bunch of Amazon products that they announced, which is the, I don't know, the, the Goliath of like, smart home networking standards, right? It's just there. It will never be better. It will never be worse. But if you buy, if you buy any number of light switches or smart things, stuff, right? There's this low powered networking standard and you need a hub, and the hub bridges between Wi-Fi and this thing. But that is your network.

• 21:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  Right? ZigBee is your network. You've set it up. It's your ZigBee network. Everything gets authenticated to it. It's yours. Somebody walks by with another ZigBee device, it'll just pop up on your network. Sidewalk is a mesh network, a public network. So I've got

• 21:55Speaker 05

  Semi-public, because like, it's, everything that happens on it is private. You can't like, go dip into, like, everything is like, in a secure tunnel, right? So you can't go dip in and say, I want to talk to that thing over there, like you can on the web or the internet. There's no, you know, everything has to like, be authenticated to talk to another thing. And then

• 22:12Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I'm getting at the point, if you drive by my house, and you see my Wi-Fi network, you know, and the password, there's no chance of ever connecting

• 22:18Speaker 05

  Oh, correct. Yeah.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Sidewalk is made so that if you're coming by your, I'm driving by your house, yep, with my car, I get in a car accident, my car, my Ring car computer uses your sidewalk signal to communicate.

• 22:31Speaker 05

  Right. And Amazon has, like, one of the things they seem to think people are worried about is that people are gonna like, have to pay a lot of bandwidth for somebody else's sidewalk network activity. So they play strict caps on the amount of data that sidewalk nodes are allowed to transmit and receive.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's hilarious. Like, of all of the problems with this that you are worried about.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  Someone war driving around.

• 22:55Nilay Patel?

  Comcast data cat because there's been too many car crashes is like very low on the list.

• 23:00Speaker 05

  Whole, whole new meaning to war driving.

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, that's horrible. Uh, that's horrible then. Um, so, but that's like, that's one of those things where it's just happening when you buy an Echo. It's enabled. It's enabled by default, I assume.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  You can turn it off, but you can't like.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  You can turn it off, but it's on.

• 23:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  And like most, what's that screen gonna look like? Enable sidewalk to track your device? Like, you know what it looks like. You can see in your head.

• 23:26Speaker 05

  Well, any year there'll be a privacy freak out and then six months after that, they'll enable you to ask Alexa to turn it off. Which is how they do these things.

• 23:33Nilay Patel?

  Can't we just skip to the end?

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  Why don't they see the steps? Um, so that's a big deal. I mean, that's like an Amazon encroachment that, I mean, you should read Deere's piece today, but between where the camera is there as a test balloon to see, and then sidewalk was a test balloon. No one paid a lot of attention to it. And then this year, here it is. It's just in all the stuff. And I think we should talk about the, these car, uh, computers. The fact that they made this car adapter that will be useless unless there is a sufficiently built out sidewalk network around you is a statement of purpose. Like, they're now selling a product that only works if that, if sidewalk is deployed at scale.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. If you, if you, if you just, if it, if the network never happens, it will work for like car break-ins when it's sitting in your driveway, the end. But like, that's not what they intend for it.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, so I do pay Verizon for one of these. It's medium to bad. Whatever.

• 24:32Speaker 05

  It's Verizon.

• 24:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, it, it has a pretty user interface. It's useless and it, it is connected. So if the car gets in an accident, like something happens. But the one that it replaced was a company called Automatic. They made, it was very popular.

• 24:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:48Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, you know, we were talking about Apple. They just sort of wandered into the, uh, the space of kid trackers with the iPhone and they're just gonna crush that space. This one from Ring, if it works, will just crush the space of connected car trackers. Now it's gotta work. Sidewalk's gotta be deployed, but Automatic was bought by Sirius XM, which never made any sense. Why did the radio company buy a car tracking company? And the only thing you could get to was, there's a lot of Sirius radios in cars. And that that was it like somebody put that deck up and like we should own more car stuff and they're like, yeah, buy that company.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  Well, did they?

• 25:21Nilay Patel?

  And then they shut it down. They're like, this was a bad idea. They shut it down.

• 25:24Speaker 05

  Was the plan like build that technology into every Sirius radio like we're already, we already convinced every car to put a stupid ass fit on the roof. And so we might as well do this.

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, anyway, I'm just saying like that is a standalone product that company even inside a Sirius failed and they just like went away.

• 25:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:39Nilay Patel?

  And then all the carrier ones are just like medium to bad.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? So Ring comes in, they make one, it can detect car crashes, it can hopefully do some, hopefully has a better user interface as Amazon, right? Like, but it's dependent on this network. And I think that's a really interesting place for Amazon to go. And, you know, the way they sold it was these are Ring products. So they're about security. And so people are worried about their cars getting stolen or broken in. Dash cams are very popular in lots of countries or medium popular in the United States, but in other countries are very popular. They announced a dash cam that records the inside and the outside of the car. If it senses a break in, it'll automatically start recording. It does have an LTE modem. So it will send footage. I mean, this stuff, they're expanding sort of the remit of Ring. None of these devices have like Alexa.

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like they're not made to be echoes. Like there is an Echo Auto, but these are security devices that Ring made in a car.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  Right?

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think they'll, they'll work with Alexa and like you can, with the, especially with the dash cam, like you can, there's a thing that I'm sure we'll talk about where you can say, Alexa, I'm being pulled over and it will start recording and uploading that footage to the cloud. So there's got to be, we, we, this is another one of those things, just like the drone, where there's not coming until next year. We haven't actually seen, physically seen the products and stuff like that. But there's got to be some microphones on there that are listening for Alexa voice commands. And it interacts that way, but it's not meant to be used as like Alexa play Taylor Swift. Like that use case is very different and not really what these are designed for. Like you said, these are designed as security products. They're very much the Ring mentality and not the Echo home assistant mentality.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, so that that thing, it's remarkable that Amazon announced a dash cam and the only use case beyond someone's breaking into your car. That they suggested it would be good for was being pulled over, alerting your family to the fact that you're being pulled over and then recording the cops, right? I would, I would suggest that as a watershed moment in it like consumer technology history. And obviously we just published an entire package on recording the police. So maybe it's more resonant with, with me and us, but that is, I think, as a advertised use case for a huge technology company that has itself wanted Pentagon contracts, right? Is like actively try to get them. Um, I think says a lot about what we think cameras and cars are for, right?

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  It, it wasn't a lot of, there was no mention of if you get into an accident, you're going to call your insurance company.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  Right. And that's the usual dash cam. Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's like dash cams have been pitched on like you're trying to make sure you're not getting in an insurance scam. Someone's nailing you and you have footage of evidence of what happened. This pitch is wildly different. It's, you know, make sure you're not, or, or if you are getting, receiving, you know, some sort of abuse or something from, uh, authorities and police that you're getting footage of it and recording it and, and as more of a safety factor.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I just, that's usually remarkable. Like I just think about where we've come for Amazon to just be comfortable saying that this is what we're doing. And everyone would be like, yeah, that makes sense. Like watershed moment.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  The dichotomy of course being rings, very close partnerships with police departments and ring being like a tattle on the police departments through this.

• 29:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  It's just, it's just that conflict is like glaring and wild.

• 29:05Nilay Patel?

  You gotta own both sides of the supply chain. You gotta create, create. Yeah. Uh, do you think the police departments will get Fourth Amendment here on footage of themselves? See fourth, it's just the ring, the Fourth Amendment just crashing into each other. Uh, and then there was the, the third one that they announced, um, which is. They announced it as a product, but as a product, it's a it's a little USB stick.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  Called the Ring Car Connected Car API, something. Right now, cars have lots of cameras on them. So you have backup cameras, you have other cameras, if you have lane keep assist or adaptive cruise control, you've got other cameras in your car that are helping you do that. So they said, well, we can just use those cameras, plug in this USB stick, they'll work with Ring and suddenly you've got, you're using all of your cameras for security purposes.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  This is a beautiful idea. And of course, the only company they announced a partnership with was Tesla.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  The only company that knows how to like issue a software update to a car.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  Yes, the only company that, just think about the steps of that, right? You're gonna find a USB port in your car that will be useful, big, big step. And then that, and then that USB port will be reprogrammed to access data from all the cameras, which are all now running through one computer system.

• 30:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  And you'll have some interoperability. That's not, this is not, Ford can't do that. I promise you. So they announced it with Tesla, any, any sort of new Tesla, you plug it in, your Tesla cameras can now be used as part of your Ring system. I think that is so cool.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  It's piggybacking off of Tesla's existing Sentry Mode. So you need to have Sentry Mode on your Tesla, which I think most all the recent models have, but that is Tesla's own little security thing. You turn that on and when you leave your car and it will record, you know, around it. And so basically Ring is tapping into that, taking those feeds, sending them up to Ring Systems. You can see them in the Ring app and so on and so forth. But I don't know of any other car that offers that, to be honest with you, anything close to Sentry Mode.

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think this is one of those, like, it would be cool if my Tesla worked with my Ring and it's all on the same app. So now it does. That's, that's neat. I just, the idea that they're gonna walk into Fiat Chrysler and be like, hey, let's, how many USB ports are in your car? And like, and they're gonna push that you can, like, it's never gonna happen. But I like the idea that the car companies, the way, the way the car companies were pushed to support CarPlay.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  I like the idea that these sorts of devices, they will get pushed to eventually support it. So I think that's all of the rings.

• 31:44Speaker 05

  Well, there's one more super important one, and it ties into this idea that Amazon announces creepy thing. Amazon announces answer to the creepy thing. And that is they're on this journey to like actually securing cameras instead of just letting people reuse their passwords on them. And they've taken the next step then you you wrote about this, can you like fill us in real quick?

• 32:01Speaker 04

  So basically that next big step is they are going to bring end to end encryption on the video feed, which means that it will be encrypted on the camera side. And the only way that you can decrypt it is basically with the mobile key, the key that's in the mobile app on your phone. It is generally considered the most secure way to transmit things right now. Ring says its stuff is encrypted, it's not end to end encrypted. So it's like next step of that. But that's going to break certain integrations that exist. Like I think something like the Tesla car connect might not work if it's end to end encrypted, because it's being shared through a different system. Things like accessing your Ring camera feed on an Echo show device is gonna break.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Things like sharing your footage is going to break. So it's it's a higher level of security. They are not going to be enabling it by default. You'll have to turn it on because it will change the experience a little bit. But if you want that security there, I know it's something that people have criticized Ring for a long time and have been asking for for a long time. And so they're enabling it. I think the other part of this announcement that's also very interesting and and addresses a lot of the criticism that's come against Ring is that they are also allowing you to turn off the neighbors feed in the Ring app. The neighbors feed is like the most controversial thing inside the app outside of the police partnerships. And it is, if you buy a Ring product, you are basically automatically entered into it and you can't really escape it.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  Now they're giving you an opt out option so that you don't see the feed, you can't contribute to the feed, so on and so forth. So they are, like you said, Dieter, they do this really creepy thing. And then they like roll it back six, 12, 18 months later, they give you the options for it. I'm happy to see that they are addressing these criticisms and and they are giving you options. I know that like Neil and I have talked about this a ton. If you want a doorbell camera, the best one on the market is Ring. And it also comes with like all this baggage of the neighbors app and the police partnerships and all this stuff. So like there's that real conflict there. If you want a Ring camera, you'll be able to opt out of neighbors. You can already opt out of the police partnerships. It helps you make some more choices as a person buying

• 34:13Speaker 04

  a thing and gives you a little bit more control over what it's doing and where that footage's going.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. If you're not familiar with the neighbor's feed, imagine your Facebook feed that's filled with people saying, I'm mad about this news article and I'm afraid of this person that doesn't look like me. Imagine that but for your neighborhood. I'm mad about this person's messy yard and I'm afraid of this person that walked by my camera.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  And here's a video clip of it.

• 34:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like, here's a video clip of the person that I'm mad at in my driveway.

• 34:37Speaker 05

  Like, that's the worst possible interpretation. Like, it does in some cases, like, they bring argues that it like nits communities together and you get to meet your neighbors and blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's like, there's definitely like a unforeseen consequences of an algorithmic feed being inflicted upon you with content you weren't expecting. Sort of vibe to it.

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  So that's all true and it's very serious. My neighbor, I'm in the woods now. Like, I just live in the woods. My neighbor's feed is just people seeing bears. Literally, it's like, I saw a bear on my Ring camera. We don't talk about whether we saw a bear.

• 35:09Speaker 05

  You just open up your phone and instead of seeing horrible news stories, it's just like, bear.

• 35:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, there was another bear today. It's a lot. It's a lot of neighbors reminding you to put your trash away. But in more, more densely populated areas, all those concerns are very true. So that's the ring. So by the way, you know that thing about you turn on end-to-end encryption and experience changes? I find the whole, like, I'm gonna tell my Echo show to show me my Ring camera integration to be so slow as to be useless.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  I disagree. I use it all the time. Because I'm working, working from home. My office is like on the lower level of the, of the, the house. I often have headphones on. If a doorbell rings and like a delivery is there or something like that, I don't know what happens. So what, I've got an Echo show like right there. Someone rings the doorbell, it brings up the video feed, like, within, you know, five to 10 seconds, I can be like, oh, my delivery arrived and I can go get it. Like, I don't use it to interact with the person. I think that is like the weirdest thing to do, to talk to someone through a doorbell. But I do use it as like, oh, someone actually rang the doorbell and like, you know, my neighbor's at the door and they're, they're asking something or, you know, the uh, package arrived. So like, I do find that useful. So like, turning on end-to-end encryption

• 36:22Speaker 04

  would break that experience for me and not be something that I'd probably want to do because of that limitation. But.

• 36:28Speaker 05

  I'm saying 10 seconds is too slow when the keyboard player from the Strokes is breaking into your house.

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  That's all I'm saying. That 10 seconds to me is like way too long. Right? Like the doorbell rings and like you're just sitting there. You have like, I don't know. It's, I'm gonna turn, we'll split it. I'll turn it on. You'll, you'll, you'll keep being robbed by various indie musicians. It'll be great. We're gonna take a break. We still have more Amazon stuff to talk about. We'll be right back.

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• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  All right. So we talked a lot about Ring. It's funny. We talked, it's an Amazon hardware event. We haven't even talked about the Echoes yet.

• 38:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  New Echoes, they look radically different. Dieter, walk us through them.

• 38:28Speaker 05

  They're spheres now. The Echoes are spheres. The regular Echo is a big sphere and the Echo Dot is a small sphere. And you can get a small sphere with a clock on it if you want. They just, they just, they just made them into, into balls. That's what they did.

• 38:41Nilay Patel?

  So do they all have Sidewalk?

• 38:42Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Actually, I gotta check. Uh, okay. What are the sidewalk bridges? According to Amazon, ring floodlight cam, cam wired, ring cam mount, echo, second generation, third generation, echo dot with clock, third generation, echo first, echo dot first, second and third generation, echo plus first, second generation, echo show first, second generation, echo show five, echo show eight, echo show 10, echo spot and echo studio.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  So that's like everything but the first generation echo.

• 39:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  Okay, well, that kind of undoes my theory about why there's spheres. So my theory, well, so what, what drives a hardware upgrade cycle? We know the answer. It's making it look different. So you make it look radically different. You make it a sphere, you make it look nicer and people will upgrade and then they'll get sidewalk. But that undoes my theory because everyone's getting it whether they want to or not.

• 39:38Speaker 05

  I mean, they, they, they still change the looks when people buy it. Uh, Amazon's answer to this was, um, they saw the, uh, the reaction to the original, uh, sphere, the echo spot that had the little clock face on it. And people loved it like, oh, we should make everything a sphere. That'll be fun. They also claim that they can get better sound out of it because they realize that most people aren't sticking their echoes in the middle of the room. So they don't really need 360 sound. They still have it, but they don't need like, they actually want better sound at the place where you, where it's directed to the front because most people do stick it in a corner or against the wall. So the sphere lets them like change the shape of the, the speakers and the direction of the speakers to get better sound for the way that most people use them. That's their claim. I think the more likely answer is what Neil I said, that just like Apple redesigned

• 40:23Speaker 05

  the iPod Nano every year to make you buy one. They redesigned the echo.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, they went from a fabric covered cylinder to a fabric covered sphere and it looks cool. The one thing I don't like about it is they moved the light ring to the bottom, which in their videos makes it seem much more apparent because it's shining off the, the surface of the thing it's sitting on. But what's the main thing I want to know from any of my smart speakers is when is it listening? And having a light ring at the top and having it be the most prominent design feature, which it has been for the longest time was good. And now it's at the bottom and like. I don't know. Well, again, we have to actually see them. Maybe it is way more prominent because it's lighting up the surface it's on. That's what they're in the videos. It's all on like white surfaces. So

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  if you put this on a black granite countertop, like, so I think that's really neat. The new Echo Show is really neat. It has a motor in the screen. It kind of reminds me of the old IMAX G4, the sunflower IMAX G4. Uh, so you like, it follows you around. Like you talk to it and it'll like, it'll swivel to you and show you stuff, which I think is so cool. Uh, and they made a lot of big claims about how the motor is very, very quiet. Yeah, Dan, what's, how does that work?

• 41:38Speaker 04

  So it uses, uh, the camera on there, uses some computer vision algorithms. It also uses Amazon's existing audio locating system. So like when you speak to an echo speaker, kind of knows where your voice is coming from through those algorithms. This takes the next level with computer vision and it like finds the shape of a person. Amazon told me that they're not doing facial recognition. They're not doing any identifying things. They're just looking for shape of a person and then that image that is used to create that shape is immediately discarded. But basically what it does is when you say Alexa at this thing, the thing will swivel around to wherever you are and face you. Uh, it's a lot like that Jibo robot that was, you know, a massive failure, but beloved by so many people that did buy it.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  Uh, but it's minus the personality of that. It is still just an Echo Show and it does the Echo Show things. It's just like if they told me there that like, most people are using these in the kitchen. They're moving around the kitchen, they're cooking a recipe, preparing meals, doing dishes, what have you. They're not always like right in front of the device. And so if you're making a recipe and the screen is showing you the steps on the recipe, as you move around, you go to the fridge, you go to the stove, et cetera. It'll just kind of make sure that you can see what the next step is. And then it also uses this for video calling. So, uh, just like Facebook's portal that does digital pan and zoom to keep you in the frame, no matter where you move around. This is doing that. And then it's also got that motorized base that will swivel to, to keep you in the shot. So.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  It's kind of neat. I think it looks wild. Uh, like you said, uh, Neil, it's, it's like that iMac, but then it's also like the Jibo and it's like this blend of the two. Uh, so I'm, I'm very interested to try this out. Uh, I use an Echo Show in my kitchen all the time. We use it to manage our grocery list and timers and smart home stuff and whatever. Uh, so it'll be very interesting to see if this makes the experience any better, or if it's just a neat party trick.

• 43:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, it's funny. I'm looking at you. The audience can't see this, but I'm looking at Dan and I can see that behind you, Dan, is a Nest Hub with pictures of your family on it. And it's like, Amazon's failure to just make a good photo service is what will keep Nest Hubs in everyone's house because they're by far the best photo frames in the market.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  I'll say this.

• 43:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm not gonna have two of these in my kitchen and I'd rather have pictures of my kids than a swiveling Alexa.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Amazon has a great cloud backup service with the photo service that it has. It does not have the AI level that Google has to show you the pictures you actually care about when you want to see them. Like you have to manually program all that. And that's the smart stuff that makes the Google one so great. Uh, but yeah, I hear you.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  It's just, it's just such a, like, they run AWS. They, they're constantly talking about AI. I just like, do the thing.

• 44:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  It, it is to me, like, what would make me switch from Google to Alexa? It's, it's that. It's photos. And I think this hardware is cool. I think their hardware is, they have more hardware, right? The Ring stuff, the integration, like the car stuff. They have a broader suite of products and services. The hardware is cooler now in some ways, but the one thing I want is, I don't know why they haven't figured it out. Um, they have some voice stuff too. Uh, I thought this demo was really interesting yesterday. Again, I say demo. It was like absolutely an infomercial. We have no idea. It was just like obviously scripted. Um, but they had a demo where, where, uh, uh, two people

• 45:07Nilay Patel?

  were having a conversation and then one of them said, Alexa, join our conversation. And Alexa lit up and they said, we want to order a pizza. And they, Alexa went out and found a pizza and then they ordered. Alexis, by the way, Amazon just like insists on gendering Alexis as female. They keep referring to it as her. And once you listen to them do it enough, like you start to do it, I encourage you not to do it. It's a robot. It's a robot that can speak in the voice of Samuel L. Jackson. It is definitely not a her. Um, it's just a robot. Anyway, so the two people ordered a pizza. They said, what are my options? They got all the way to ordering pizza and they said, make it a large and it went from medium to a large pizza. And what they were supposed to demonstrate, oh, and then they asked her for a movie and they, Alexa told them about movies.

• 45:51Nilay Patel?

  And what it's supposed to demonstrate is, uh, again, because we didn't see it live. What it is illustrating, not demonstrating, is, uh, Alexa has natural language capability. It can join a conversation. It can understand context. It knows that multiple people are talking to it and can distinguish between them. All this is very advanced. The demo was definitely a phone tree to order a pizza and then movie phone, which is like, uh, you know, it's like, all these demos are so advanced and then the actual thing is movie phone is.

• 46:21Speaker 05

  Book of the movie phone.

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 46:23Speaker 05

  So the, the, the specific sort of new thing where I think Amazon has an edge over even Google is like, Google will let you say the keyword and then, uh, ask a follow-up question and it'll, and like, have a slightly more natural back and forth. What Amazon is saying it can do is you start out with the keyword and then you can have that back and forth conversation where you don't have to keep saying the keyword over and over again. But you can also talk to somebody else in the room and the echo knows whether or not you're addressing it. So I could be like, you know, Alexa, order me a pizza. Hey, do you want pepperoni? Yeah, put pepperoni on it, Alexa. Hey, uh, what about olives? Yes, olives too. Uh, no, not, you know, like you can go back and forth and it supposedly knows whether you're addressing it

• 47:07Speaker 05

  or somebody else in the room, which is very advanced.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Is this is exactly how I order a pizza in my house. I call the pizza place and then I'm shouting at my wife. Which one are we getting? Okay. Are we getting half pepperoni? No. Okay. Uh, do you want a salad? Yes. Okay. Can we put a salad on it? Like that is the thing that happens every single time we order a pizza in this house. So like, it'd be kind of cool to have.

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  Have you tried Seamless? It's a lot simpler. Like visual user interfaces are very good. Uh, that's the thing that I think is funny with all these demos. Like what we have described is a very complicated human computer interaction. But to the the end that it is deployed, there is a much more efficient human computer interaction available. And like, there's a reason movie phones out of business.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  Like, no one wanted to listen to a list of movies. They just wanted to see a list of movies. So I think that, and I don't mean to denigrate the actual technology they built. I just think that there's a reason they demoed this on an Echo show. And I, again, I say demo. They illustrated it in their infomercial on an Echo show, because the Echo show is presenting the information visually while it's talking to you, which is, I think, much better and clear. Like, I honestly wonder, the main Echo, the Sphere, do they think that's their main product? Or do they think the show is the main product?

• 48:33Speaker 04

  That's, that's interesting. When I spoke to Miriam Daniel, head of the announcement, she's the VP of Amazon's Alexa and Echo devices. The screens are quickly becoming much and much more popular, according to her, in terms of like, sales, in terms of purchase, and, and, and really in terms of like, usage time. People are using the screens more than they would use an audio-only one, because there's that extra interaction level. So it's, I, I, I could, I could see three, four years down the road, the only audio-only Alexas or Echoes out there are the, the audio file ones for the Echo Studio, and the really budget Echo Dot. And there's no middle Alexa, because that one has a screen.

• 49:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it just seems like that's converging. Like, I much prefer seeing what the computer is doing. And even in that, the case of like, ordering a pizza, in, just if you go, if Amazon ever releases this video, what I was watching was, here's a robot listing things at me, and there's no chance that I'm, A, paying enough attention, or B, will remember the first thing in the list.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  And with a screen, you can just touch it. If like you don't want to use the voice commands, it gives you more flexibility in how you're interacting with it. So it can become a more traditional touch interface, or it can be a voice commanded one or what have you. It's just, especially for complex things like was illustrated in the demo. A screen is definitely going to be the better experience.

• 50:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, we, we, we didn't think there would be much to talk about with that because with there turns out there was more than we thought. That's a lot. But Amazon also just quietly announced a massive game streaming service. Wow. Called Luna. There's a controller.

• 50:21Nilay Patel?

  It, you know, it's built into Fire TVs is a channel that you can subscribe to. There's other channels. They are going to have Twitch integration because they own Twitch. There was like an extremely infomercial portion of this stream where like they brought in Twitch streamers. And the Twitch streamers all said the keywords that they were supposed to say like, this is from Amazon? That's crazy. I get to take this home, right?

• 50:49Speaker 05

  That was the one that killed me.

• 50:51Nilay Patel?

  You guys run this on AWS? It's like, nah, I don't. No, thank you. I don't, I don't believe that any of this happened for real. Like there's like somebody in the corner like waving hundred dollar bills.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  That's like Twitch works, right? The chat is every time someone clicks a button, you get a hundred dollar bill.

• 51:11Nilay Patel?

  It's just the AWS rep is like AWS, AWS.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  But it is.

• 51:21Nilay Patel?

  But it's like, this is the moment of game streaming services. Last year was the moment of TV streaming services. And this is the year of game streaming services. So now Amazon has one too. They do own Twitch that they do have some credibility in the space. As they're fond of reminding us. I think the pitch for a gaming streaming service, including the words, we own AWS is bonkers. Like no one cares.

• 51:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:43Nilay Patel?

  Right, like Microsoft owns Azure, Google owns Google Cloud, like.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, but the claim is that you can trust them on latency, right?

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  But you can just buy AWS.

• 51:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:53Nilay Patel?

  Like any, like, it's the whole point of AWS is that anyone can just get the services of AWS.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, Peter, walk us through Luna.

• 52:00Speaker 05

  So it is a, it's a game streaming service. It works very much like Stadia in its technical details. It's got Windows computers in the cloud and then you have a game controller that communicates directly to those things via Wi-Fi rather than, you know, via Bluetooth or USB thing to your device. And that allows them to more easily and with less latency work on more devices. So it'll work on Fire TVs, I think PCs and Macs. And it's coming to Android phones, but it won't be there at launch, which is interesting. And then, very interestingly, and we're gonna, we're gonna come all the way back around to this, baby. It will work on iPhones as a progressive web app. Woo, I'm very excited to talk about this.

• 52:43Speaker 05

  Last, and maybe, like, maybe we should talk about this first, is the business model is not the same as X Game Pass Ultimate from Microsoft, where it's just like, all you can eat, Microsoft just is gonna buy every studio it can to include their stuff. It's not the thing at like Stadia where it is à la carte, you've gotta buy, you know, the game and there's like maybe a couple of free ones, whatever. It is a channel model. It's a cable model. So you get, like, the games in Amazon's channel, like a Roku channel or Fire TV channel for its subscription fee. And then you can subscribe to other channels that provide other bundles of games. So I think the first one they've announced is Ubisoft, because Ubisoft just, like, they'll just work with anybody. They're like the Lenovo of game companies.

• 53:28Speaker 05

  Some, some random, like, Microsoft or Google are like, hey, we've got an idea for a form factor. We don't know if it's any good. And LoL is like, we'll do it, we'll make it.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Have you heard about Assassin's Creed? It's on your platform now.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  It's on everything. Yeah, so Ubisoft is like, gonna have, they're gonna be one of the launch partner channels and presumably there's a bunch more coming. So it's an interesting business model, right? So Amazon is like, offering money to publishers and, you know, offering channels to publishers. They'll probably take a cut, who knows what the percentage is. If you wanna subscribe to Amazon's thing, you end up in this weird netherworld of like, can I buy a game à la carte? I don't know. Do I wanna subscribe to Ubisoft's bundle or do I just want the Luna bundle? And like, down the line.

• 54:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that the rollout on Fire TVs is interesting, like they have a massive installed base of Fire TVs. All you really have to do is buy their controller and then sign up. And now you've got potentially a very good game console. They have to sell all of that to people who are already thinking about spending $500 on a very good game console. Right? Because it's where they're in that console cycle now and who, for better or worse, have been conditioned by Stadia to be like, maybe this won't work.

• 54:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, and for the mass market that has never heard of Stadia, they have to be very clear about whether or not what the latency is going to feel like, right? Because if, you know, I've never heard of Stadia, I go to amazon.com and like, they've got a, they've got a game controller. I can turn my Fire TV into a full-on console. That seems great. I'll pay 60 bucks for that. Sure. Bam. And then they get it. And then like, the thing sucks in the way that, you know, game streaming services can suck if you don't have incredibly good internet at home. That's bad for them. So they gotta be really careful about that.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And this is the, the, the controller works the same way. And this kind of leads into why they can do it as a progressive web app on the iPhone. Right? All that's really happening is they're streaming you a video and your controller doesn't connect locally to anything. Your controller is directly connected to their cloud service. So you need upstream latency to be very low and you need downstream latency to be very low.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  Great way to sell new euros.

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a pretty good way to sell new euros. But it's like, what can't Amazon fix is Comcast.

• 55:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it like, the Comcast deciding that streaming 4K on Peacock is more important at a network level than low latency gaming.

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm just going to say the words net neutrality to people. But that's right. That's, that is now a decision Comcast is able to make. I need to disclose the Comcast investor in Vox Media, which blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You understand. You could say any, any company you want, AT&T, Verizon, Fios. The networks are able to manage their networks in a much more direct way now because net neutrality is gone. All these game streaming services are going to run up against the need for low latency in a way that they cannot guarantee to any customer because they don't know what your network conditions are.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  As long as we're disclosing, I'll disclose my wife works for, I think it's called like Facebook Reality Labs now, which makes Oculus, which is technically a game streaming console or a game console. And we're talking about games. When you do, so Luna hasn't launched yet. You have to sign up for early access and Amazon does these early access things in different ways for different gadgets. When you sign up to ask for early access for Luna, it asks you specifically what your up and downstream bandwidth is.

• 56:39Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 56:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're going to limit it to people with good bandwidth to start maybe, or I don't know, they'll probably like want to test a range.

• 56:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just think we're, we're at the point with game streaming services now where there's definitely too many.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:51Nilay Patel?

  Right? And so.

• 56:53Speaker 05

  There's like four, right?

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  That's too many.

• 56:56Speaker 05

  You love competition.

• 56:57Nilay Patel?

  I do love competition.

• 56:58Speaker 05

  What the hell, man?

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  Has the, like, they haven't all launched, they're not in the market. The competition hasn't like done the thing where it makes them all better, where you're switching costs are low, right? Like, yes, there's competition and I do love it. I'm excited for it. I just think you stretch this out into the market. Like in video games, classically, there's only two, there's two big ones in Nintendo, which like.

• 57:23Speaker 04

  It's still an unproven idea is what you're getting at. It's like, yeah, it's all of these coming to the market. It's not proven that this really works well or can give you a really great experience for all the reasons that Dieter mentioned. And, and you mentioned with latency and not knowing what your neck network is, but they're still all going to do it. And so like, I can see where that's like, can we just get like one of these to launch and be like, oh, this is a great idea. It works great. And then the competitors come in and then the prices come down and all that fun stuff.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it feels like they're all innovating on like pricing models instead of making it work.

• 57:56Speaker 05

  It works if you are in a certain narrow bandwidth. And I am like right on the edge of that narrow bandwidth of having good bandwidth. I have put somewhere in a neighborhood of 100 hours into Stadia and somewhere in the neighborhood of, I would say like 30 to 40 hours into Game Pass games, Xbox Game Pass games. I have very good fiber at home. And I run into a problem like every three gaming sessions, I'll be like, bleh. And but two out of the three are like, okay, this is fine. This is great. I'm not a hardcore gamer. I don't need like, you know, super fast millisecond latency, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, it works in a narrow band. And the question is, will it work in a wide band of everybody? But I see what you're doing here, Neelai. You're trying to keep me from talking about WebOS.

• 58:39Nilay Patel?

  I am.

• 58:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, it's amazing that fundamentally these game streaming services are just sending you a video file. They don't really need apps, right?

• 58:49Speaker 05

  Well, it's unclear what they need in order to make a good low latency game streaming video file work in a browser. Because, and Gadget actually got to try it briefly, they talked to the program managers over, or the product managers over at Amazon. And here's a fascinating thing. The WebOS joke, by the way, is that Luna was like a subsystem in WebOS and they made web apps and that's really funny. The interesting thing is, Amazon worked with the Safari engineers at Apple to make sure that Safari had the necessary capabilities in order to make Luna good and make Luna work. Which means that it didn't, and then it did. So there's like something about the latency, something about communicating latency, something

• 59:31Speaker 05

  about knowing that, I don't know, a Bluetooth, Wi-Fi thing exists on the same Wi-Fi network, maybe. I don't know what precisely they got Safari to do, but they actually had Apple change Safari so that Luna could work. Which is fascinating. Because whatever they did, I bet you that Microsoft could use it or be interested in it.

• 59:53Nilay Patel?

  This is great for Apple.

• 59:55Speaker 05

  Right? Apple's saying, don't come with the App Store. The App Store is the App Store. We're happy to build with you on the open web. Yeah, well, historically, there's been concerns that they are not, that they are saying, "Go on and use the open web and make a web app." But then actually, they don't provide the things that a bunch of app people want in a web app. Like, Apple cares a lot about security, and they use that as a reason for not putting in certain features, like, I don't know, connecting to Bluetooth or something, right? And so, the interesting thing here is the pressure on the App Store. They're trying to use the web as a release valve, but then that forces them to actually improve the capabilities of their web product, which is very interesting.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's also Amazon. Like, what is the big story with Apple and the App Store? And it's like, who gets the deals? You know what Amazon does? They sell a lot of headphones.

• 1:00:45Speaker 05

  And they get deals.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  And they get deals. And they, you know, like, the Apple TV app is on the fire TV. Like, we just walked through the whole deal with the antitrust documents. Kid a regular, if you were a different kind of competitor to Apple, if you're Google and you want Stadia to work as a web app, is Apple gonna let its browser team go work closely with Google? No, they're not gonna do that. Right? Like, that's just not gonna happen. So that's super interesting. I'm eager to see what this web app looks like. I'm eager to see just basically the install process, right? You still want an icon on your home screen. And so you're gonna click on it, and it's gonna launch Safari, and it's gonna be Safari. And that's not the best flow, but...

• 1:01:26Speaker 05

  Well, the install process is gonna be weird. You'll click on it, it'll launch Safari, but it won't have Safari's Chrome. And you could do that right now with an iPhone. But it's like, it's still just a little bit less elegant than it is for just an App Store thing. And there's also a discovery problem, right? Because people don't think to go look on the web for an app.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I'm confident Amazon can advertise on Twitch enough to solve that problem.

• 1:01:53Speaker 05

  That's fair.

• 1:01:54Nilay Patel?

  It feels like they can get a deal. Dan, you mentioned Eero. We should quickly talk about Eero. There's new Eeros. They have Wi-Fi 6. People have been waiting for it for a long time.

• 1:02:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're like a year later than a lot of their competitors with bringing Wi-Fi 6, but they're here now. They've got two levels. They've got the Eero 6 and then the Eero 6 Pro. So you've got the basic one. And the Pro One, those products are, I think, are more real than what we talked about earlier with Ring and stuff, because those are like shipping the end of October, I believe, or early November. I can say that personally, as someone who works from home all the time and has to stream video calls all the time, I'm very excited for the new Eros. I'm very excited to try them out. I've tested some Wi-Fi 6 routers in the past, and there's a lot of speed that you can get out of them, but the user experience is always kind of, kind of janky. So I'm very curious as to if Eero is able to make a better user experience.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  I know, I already know they do with the Wi-Fi 5. I spoke to Nick Weaver real briefly. He's the CEO of Eero after the event yesterday. He answered some really crucial questions I had, like, yes, you can mix and match the new Eros with old Eros. So if you're an existing Eero customer, you can buy the Wi-Fi 6 Eros and just add them to your network, which is something that you can't do with any other mesh network that I'm aware of.

• 1:03:12Speaker 05

  And they, and they don't degrade. They're still Wi-Fi 6.

• 1:03:16Speaker 04

  Right. They won't make your whole network Wi-Fi 6. It will be Wi-Fi 6 when your device, like your phone or your computer, is talking to a Wi-Fi 6 Eero. And if it talks to a Wi-Fi 5 Eero, it'll be Wi-Fi 5. And then the link between a Wi-Fi 5 Eero and a Wi-Fi 6 Eero will be a Wi-Fi 5 connection.

• 1:03:33Speaker 05

  Because that was one of the original problems with Wi-Fi 6, right? Is if you had a Wi-Fi 6 network and like a Wi-Fi 5 device like whistling down the street for a half a second, then you would like degrade to Wi-Fi 5 until everything was Wi-Fi 6 again, right? Now, but like, Eero solved that problem.

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  Wi-Fi 6 is backwards compatible. So if you have Wi-Fi 5 devices, they will connect to a Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6 network, no problem. They'll just run at Wi-Fi 5 speeds. But if you have Wi-Fi 6 devices, you will get Wi-Fi 6 benefits. But the real benefit to Wi-Fi 6, especially in a mesh network context, is that it allows much faster connections between the individual nodes. So you can have, if you've got gigabit internet service at home, You probably know that over Wi-Fi, you're not getting gigabit internet speeds. Part of that is because your device can't go that fast. Part of it is because the mesh nodes have to transfer the data and pass it along and it gets bottlenecked there. Wi-Fi 6 opens up those bottlenecks a lot and it really helps with the bandwidth there. So there's a lot like happening with these.

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  They're very interesting and cool. They're a little bit different form factor. The Euro beacons are gone. So if you had those from a couple of years ago, they don't have an option for that. These have to be like plugged into the wall with a wire and you set it up on the counter or shelf or something like that. Some of them have Ethernet ports. Some of them don't, depending on which level you get. And what was the other thing? There's something else that I wanted to say about them as well and I can't remember.

• 1:04:57Speaker 05

  What's interesting, the regular and the pro?

• 1:04:59Speaker 04

  So the difference between the regular and the pro is the regular is only two band, which is means that it has a 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz. Your devices will connect to it just fine. The pro has a third dedicated backhaul band, which is what it uses to communicate between the networks. So if you have gigabit internet service at home, you're going to want to step up to the pro. You're already paying for gigabit internet. You might as well pay more for the pro experience to make use of that bandwidth. If you have anything less than gigabit, if your internet service is 400 megabits, 300 megabits, 200 megabits, you're not really going to gain anything by going with the pro. At least from an internet connection speed perspective, you can probably go with the less expensive ones. And they are pretty inexpensive. I think the three pack of the base models is $279 or so, which is pretty aggressive for Wi-Fi 6.

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  A three pack of the pros is more like $600, which is where we're seeing a lot of the premium Wi-Fi 6 routers at. So it is an investment for sure. But again, if you are an existing Euro customer, maybe you don't need three new Wi-Fi 6 pros because you can kind of mix and match with what you have and make it work to cover your home. So it's all pretty interesting. The other thing that Nick told me is that these are not Wi-Fi 6e, which you may have heard about. That is a yet another Wi-Fi 6 standard that is coming later. So these are Wi-Fi 6, not 6e.

• 1:06:16Speaker 05

  Call them seven. I just, you switch to numbers for a reason. Use the numbers. 802.11 A X E.

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's bonkers to try and wrap your head around, but I don't, I'm not aware of any really Wi-Fi 6E devices on that are available. At this point anyways, there are plenty of Wi-Fi 6 devices. Every iPhone since last year is, all the current laptops are, things like that. So there's a lot of Wi-Fi 6 devices out there and it's pretty interesting to see.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  Do you know if the Xbox and PS5 are Wi-Fi 6?

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  Uh, the Xbox is not. I am not sure about the PS5.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  Okay. And it's just like, that's the, as, as we push, that's the thing that drives no bandwidth in your house usually is your game console, right?

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. You're still gonna want to hardwire those probably. If you, if you, if you have the option to do that.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna start selling like a 20 pack of ethernet cables on Amazon, really. Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi H, Wi-Fi hardwire. That's my new thing. I'm gonna be a millionaire. All right, we gotta take a break. We gotta really quickly talk about our iOS reviews. We'll be right back.

• 1:07:27Speaker 07

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• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Dieter, how customized is your iOS 14 home screen?

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  I have been too friggin busy reviewing the Apple Watch, and it's not done yet, and I promised it'll be done soon, to go hard on the widget stuff. But the widget stuff is fascinating. So if you don't know, you could put widgets on iOS 14, and widgets let you make Siri shortcuts that you can customize the look of the icon. So you are now finally able to put whatever kind of theme you want on your iPhone home screen. You can do anything you want as long as it's not having an icon in the lower right with nothing in the upper left because Apple, yeah, it has to flow in. But yeah, but the problem is you use these shortcuts because it's using the Siri shortcut system.

• 1:09:42Speaker 05

  It needs to cycle through to the Siri shortcut screen before it'll cycle into the app. So you've taken your ultra-fast, fastest processor ever put in a portable device gadget in the history of mankind thing, and you've added a two-second delay every time you launch an app in order to do this?

• 1:10:01Nilay Patel?

  The trick the teens have told me is you turn on reduced motion and accessibility.

• 1:10:06Speaker 05

  Oh, and then it flickers.

• 1:10:08Nilay Patel?

  You don't get the animation of the app's opening, so it just beeps at you.

• 1:10:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  It's amazing what's happening right now.

• 1:10:14Speaker 05

  I like that.

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  This is like, I love this whole trend. My niece told me she spent six hours customizing her iPhone home screen. It looks crazy.

• 1:10:24Speaker 05

  It's amazing.

• 1:10:25Nilay Patel?

  People are tweeting us amazing ones. Did you see the one where every app is a picture of the CEO?

• 1:10:31Speaker 05

  Yes, that one was great.

• 1:10:33Nilay Patel?

  Perfect, beautiful.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  This is such a great example of emergent behaviors that companies had no idea would happen. Like, Apple demo shortcuts. And they're like, you can make a routine that you say, "Hey Siri, search for my AirPods." And like, no one's ever gonna do it. Instead, it's like teenagers on TikTok have customized their home screens to be exactly about One Direction. And Apple's like, "Well, crap."

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  We knew, we never wanted anyone to theme it, but they use shortcuts to theme their, I love it. It's great.

• 1:11:07Speaker 05

  So what I love is like the iPhone launches and I'm just imagining the meeting where they're like, you see what happened to MySpace? Never to us. We're never allowing that. We're never gonna let the mess that is custom MySpace homepages happen to the iPhone homepage. And yep, nope, that's where you live now, Apple. Good job. Congrats. I love it, but yeah.

• 1:11:29Nilay Patel?

  It's funny that it started with widgets, which are like the big iOS 14 thing. There's an app called WidgetSmith, which, you know, just sort of became the center of the whole thing because you can make custom widgets with custom fonts. And that just exploded into this shortcuts thing. And it's so funny that people, when we were reviewing iOS 14, it's like, oh, there's not a lot here. There's widgets on the home screen. Cool. And now everyone's like, iOS supports theming. It's like, no.

• 1:12:00Speaker 05

  Is doing a lot of lift there in that sentence.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  But it's great. I, you know, I, this is one of those things where you're laughing at me about wanting competition before. Any Android phone can look as crazy as you want it to. But no one is switching to make crazy home screens. You give them the capability, even in this crazy sideways way, and they're gonna do it and do things you don't expect. And like, this is a cultural moment that's enabled by very janky technology.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Nilay Patel?

  Imagine if they just gave people the capability. It's weird how, how you have to build up the desire for it to turn into this thing. As opposed to if it had always been there, no one would have been, I guess teenagers would have always done it. But it's just weird that it became a moment because they prevented it for so long.

• 1:12:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, if you want to have your faith in humanity's ability to make good design, just go visit the Samsung Galaxy Theming Store and look at the most popular page. And you'd be like, oh, nobody knows what they're doing. Okay.

• 1:13:07Nilay Patel?

  But teenagers are doing a great job with the iPhone. All right. So that's, I would say that's the top line of the iOS 14 review. Like, there's iPad stuff to talk about, but I mean, I don't know. I have iOS 14. I used half a widget one time.

• 1:13:22Nilay Patel?

  Everything about it seems very much the same to me.

• 1:13:24Speaker 04

  I

• 1:13:25Speaker 05

  Very, very samey.

• 1:13:26Speaker 04

  I, I, I don't, I haven't spent the time to customize icons and stuff like that, but I use the widgets a lot. Like, I was super thrilled to be able to stick a calendar widget on my home screen. So I knew when it was coming up and I've got a weather widget. And then like, I've got a, an email widget. But the thing that's really, I've, I've observed is that, and I think this ties back to the fact that Apple basically gave developers one day notice on their iOS 14 final release. I look at how many widgets I have available. I've got like 200 apps on my phone and there are 14 apps that support widgets right now. Normally there would be dozens of apps taking advantage of these new features. Uh, and I'm just not seeing it. And it had, and we're still like, what are we, a couple of weeks out now from the release?

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  And it's still only like a handful of apps that are really, really leveraging it. So, uh, I'm curious to see where it goes. Maybe there will be like more developers will come out with more options for widgets and things like that. And, and they'll become more useful. But right now I like the calendar. I like weather and I like my email inbox.

• 1:14:23Nilay Patel?

  It's like, we're so bored. Even teenagers are out there making full custom themes.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:14:28Nilay Patel?

  You just get a smart watch, put your calendar on your watch, you'll be fine.

• 1:14:31Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say a thing. And, uh, the end of this story is, uh, Neelai crying in the corner.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:14:37Speaker 05

  I think that every widget system has like two to three years in it. And then it degrades and, uh, it gets, it gets like abandoned and it bereft and like, it doesn't get maintained and it dies. Um, and this happened to Android and it absolutely happened to the dashboard on the Mac. Um, and it sort of happened even to the dash, the, the sidebar thing on the Mac. Um, I think it happened to all sorts of different versions of, of weird little, you know, widgety informational things on Windows, Windows and Windows 10. And so my question is, you only see 14 available widgets now. It'll, you know, in six months it'll be, you know, a hundred. But my question is, what's it gonna look like in two years?

• 1:15:17Speaker 05

  And my hunch is that, uh, unless, uh, Apple is able to pull off something that nobody's ever pulled off in the history of computing, that this widget ecosystem is going to be kind of meh in two years.

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  But I'll also like my calendar widget.

• 1:15:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, right, what are, what are these widgets really? They're status displays and there are many apps that wanted to show you a status display. It's funny, cause I just said, get a smart watch. But what are Apple Watch apps but widgets? Yeah. And like the entire Apple Watch ecosystem is like, mer, mer.

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  Well, actually, I'm in the process of viewing the Apple Watch and I disagree.

• 1:15:57Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:15:57Speaker 05

  The Apple Watch app ecosystem is actually much better than people give it credit for these days. There's like a bunch of stuff, like the stuff that I would want on a watch is basically there. It's just not good.

• 1:16:09Speaker 05

  But the complications-

• 1:16:10Nilay Patel?

  I don't think you've gotten out of the realm of-

• 1:16:11Speaker 05

  The complications are pretty good. And so like, you know, I, I wish there was more options for different Apple Watches or, you know, creating your own Apple Watch, uh, watch face. That would be nice. But you can't, what you can do is like, give yourself four different Apple Watches for like different, four different kinds of activities that you engage in. And because those apps exist, they have complications, which are, you know, either a button to launch the app quickly, or just a little bit of status information. And so, uh, in the past year, I have, without noticing it, found myself using like a half dozen Apple Watch apps, like, all the time. And I had, I, it wasn't like, oh wow, this is good now. It just like slowly accreted to the point where I've got, you know, three, four, five Apple Watch apps that I'm just using.

• 1:16:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you're using them through the complications, like you mentioned. Like, my experience is I'm not going to the app list and scrolling and tapping, or using the honeycomb grid or whatever, or launching apps. I am looking at my list, oh, I've got an upcoming appointment and I tap that to see what the details are. And that takes me all the way into the appointment of the app, uh, past the like launch process and everything. Like, that's the interaction model with it. And, and to your, Dieter's point, that's meant that there's a lot of Apple Watches now that you need, or Apple Watch apps that you need installed on the watch to power all of that experience.

• 1:17:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. Can I tell you the status, uh, part of this, like, give yourself multiple watch faces for multiple tasks thing? I've made a cooking watch face, and I specifically chose the cooking watch face because it has, on the watch face itself, the ability to start a stopwatch, which means that I can have the watch face's stopwatch, the stopwatch app complication, and a timer complication. So I can have two stopwatches and a timer, which is literally the only way to get multiple timers going on the Apple Watch.

• 1:17:53Speaker 05

  That's what I do.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  And now with WatchOS 7, Dieter can share that watch face with all of you listeners.

• 1:17:58Speaker 05

  I could, yeah.

• 1:17:59Nilay Patel?

  We should sell it, on Etsy. That's what they're doing with the theme packs. Let's do it.

• 1:18:05Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we should talk about the iPad too. iPadOS is out.

• 1:18:10Speaker 05

  They added Scribble. It's only good for short little bits of text. They released the eighth generation base iPad. I think it is, my review's up, you can go look at it, but it is bordering on criminal that they only offer it with 32 gigs at the base storage and that there's no multi-user for this thing. It's like, I'm tired of, and that's not even like freaking out about USB C, which is what you expect from me on the Vergecast. Not even getting into that. They need, I'm tired of giving them a pass on those two problems.

• 1:18:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, the iPad is one of those things where they keep, I said this in the iPad Pro review like two years ago, they keep saying like it's a new product and it is just not anymore. Like it is the thing that it is. It is nearly a decade old. You can't be like, it's a baby. Like, sorry. Like you've made your choices and here they are. And like, you're not learning how people use iPads. You absolutely know. I will say that like the base model being cheap, if you are buying this thing as a Netflix machine, or the one your kids are gonna break, is like, that's good. But you do hit that 32 gigs like almost instantly, just with video caching. Like,

• 1:19:23Nilay Patel?

  it just happens to video apps over time. Uh, you want to talk about this Fitbit Sense and then we can get out of here?

• 1:19:30Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah. So I guess the Fitbit Sense is remarkable in that it is the counterpart to the Series 6 with blood oxygen monitoring and all this stuff. Fitbit packed a bunch of sensors into this. They're charging basically Apple Watch prices for it. It's like $330. That's about what you'll pay for an Apple Watch at this point. And it's still a Fitbit smartwatch. So I would not buy this if you want to buy a smartwatch. If you want like advanced health tracking stuff and you're in the Fitbit ecosystem, it's great. The watch, the blood oxygen monitoring system is not great. It only works through a singular watch face and you can't do on-demand blood oxygen

• 1:20:13Speaker 04

  measurement. It only measures in the background while you're sleeping, which is odd. But to the same point, We've seen, I think Dieter is seeing this in his experience with the Series 6. We've seen a lot of other reporting around how the Series 6's blood oxygen monitor is not super accurate or helpful, and it's kind of unreliable. So the fact that you can't do on-demand blood oxygen monitoring with the Fitbit is probably an okay thing. But it's still a Fitbit. So like, it's not hugely different from the Versa before, except it just has a few more sensors built into it. And our experience right now, it's kind of buggy. The animations are janky.

• 1:20:54Speaker 04

  They removed the actual one physical button that was on the Versa and replaced it with this like capacitive thing that really doesn't work that well. So they've got some work ahead. You can apparently buy it now, but I would probably wait till they start ironing out a lot of these bugs that we experienced.

• 1:21:11Speaker 05

  Here's my question. By the way, everything Dan said about the blood oxygen thing on the Apple Watch is true. Having seen a couple generations now of Fitbit products, since Google announced it wants to buy Fitbit, what do you think Google thinks it's buying? I don't, I'm dead serious. Are they buying hardware apps? Are they buying software? What are they doing?

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  Loyal user base. It's buying a network. Like, I wear a Fitbit tracker on my opposite wrist. I don't care about the smartwatch features. I care about the fitness tracking features. And I've got a database of, I've been wearing it every day for X number of years, and I've got a large database, like, in that ecosystem of a users. Like, Google would be buying all of that on the smartwatch side of things. I have no idea what they think they're buying. But at least from like the fitness tracker, the loyal user base, there's a lot of Fitbit fans out there.

• 1:22:05Nilay Patel?

  And what is the, what is the thing? The Apple Watch is still, no matter how good your collection of timer apps on that watch face is, Dieter, what is, the Apple Watch is still notifications and fitness. That's the thing it does. And like, Google buying a little bit of a head start into fitness, like, at least makes them, I don't know. I agree with you. Also, we don't know if that deal's gonna close, like, still antitrust review, right? So, but that's what you would be buying, is a head start into fitness when you know that's the, one of the two killer apps for your big competitor. All right. Apple Watch 6, you haven't done the review yet, but you're gonna, right?

• 1:22:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's happening. I promise, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, gonna finish it. It's gonna happen.

• 1:22:45Nilay Patel?

  Usually I assign you as stories in here. I'm just gonna assign you the thing you've already promised to do.

• 1:22:50Speaker 04

  We'll also have, Dieter's working on the Series 6, I've got the SE, I'm also testing family setup. So we are, we are getting some real world experience using family setup, which is one of the more interesting things out of the Apple Watch announcement this year. So stay tuned for that. I've just, I guess, given myself a deadline.

• 1:23:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. Dan has strapped an Apple Watch to a child.

• 1:23:12Nilay Patel?

  Amazing. The things we do for The Verge. And then Joanna's gonna be on, on the Tuesday show, right?

• 1:23:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, as everybody probably knows by now, Neelai has a brand new podcast that's coming called Decoder. So he's busy developing that, which means I'm taking over the Tuesday show for a little while. And we're trying to do deep dives on hardware reviews. And the idea is we do the hardware review, and then we give you the director's notes to it by me talking to somebody else who's reviewed the thing. This time, we're gonna do it before I've reviewed it. But, you know, it'll be fine. So Joanna's gonna come on, we're gonna do a really deep dive on the process of reviewing the Apple Watch, and what it's like to review the Apple Watch, and just stuff that didn't make it into our full reviews that are gonna go up on our websites. So check that out on Tuesday.

• 1:23:52Nilay Patel?

  Very good. I'm excited to get a window into Joanna's video pitch process.

• 1:23:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:23:58Nilay Patel?

  What food is this shaped like? That's when you know, that's when you know a product is doomed, when Joanna's like, "It looks like a food."

• 1:24:06Speaker 04

  What, yeah, what piece of food am I gonna slap on the screen of this?

• 1:24:09Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. I love it. That'll be very exciting. All right, as we've gone over, it was inevitable. It's funny that Amazon managed to do all this in an hour. We needed an hour. So it goes.

• 1:24:21Speaker 04

  I will tell you, we talked more about Eero than Amazon did.

• 1:24:24Nilay Patel?

  We sure did. You can tweet at us, Dan is at DCCFert, Dieter's at Backlon, I'm at Reckless, we love hearing from you. Dieter's show coming out on Tuesday, that's gonna happen. I am working on Decoder. You can, you can just go subscribe to the Recode Decode feed, and Decoder will take it over. So go listen to that. Kara's got like her greatest hits up on that feed right now. So go subscribe, listen to Kara's greatest hits, and then I, you know, I will, I will match that standard. Sure, definitely gonna do that. That's gonna be great. Very excited about that. Go subscribe to all that stuff. I mentioned Mary Beth's newsletter at the beginning, antivirus, verge.com/antivirus. That is just a weekly roundup of vaccine news, virus treatment news. We're trying to make just a single trusted resource so you're not

• 1:25:07Nilay Patel?

  buffeted by crazy all the time. verge.com/antivirus. It's very good. Has certainly given me a perspective on all the stuff that's going on. That's it. We've gone too long. Rock and roll. Hey, make a plan to vote. And wear a mask.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

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• 1:26:18Speaker 02

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