HTC Vive Flow announced / Apple Watch Series 7 review / Apple's Oct 18th event preview

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Adi Robertson discuss HTC's new VR headset the Vive Flow. Also: Apple, Google, and Samsung all have events next week. The crew discuss what to expect. Further reading: The $499 HTC Vive Flow is VR for people who don’t like VR I have a hard time believing your wearable is good if you had to Photoshop it onto a model Magic Leap somehow raised $500 million to make another AR headset Facebook execs tease VR prototype hardware with new photos Apple Watch Series 7 review: time and time again Apple announces October 18th event after months of Mac rumors Apple exploring AirPods that take your temperature and monitor posture: report Google announced its Pixel 6 event on October 19th Watch the Pixel 6 Pro get put together and taken apart in leaked videos Google Pixel 6 leak teases Magic Eraser feature, plus five years of Android security updates Google says it’s dropping Material Design components on iOS in favor of Apple’s UIKit ‘Pixel Pass’ is Google’s rumored response to Apple One Samsung announces Unpacked 2 event for Wednesday Oct 20th, right after Apple and Google Samsung tries to prove its foldable phones are tough in a new test video VanMoof’s new V e-bike is its fastest ever Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Addie Robertson and Alex Fran join the show. We talk about HCC's new lightweight VR headset, preview the Apple event next week, the Google event next week, and the Samsung event next week. And we wrap it all up with some talk about our party. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of reality. You weren't expecting that.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  It's the whole thing. All of it.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  All kinds of mixed, augmented, virtual, whatever you want. We got it here at the Vergecast Reality Mart. I'm Neil, I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  I'm your chum.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, very nice. Addie Robertson is here. Hey. Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:15Alex Cranz?

  I'm your pal.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  We're all friendly today.

• 2:18Alex Cranz?

  We're friendly today.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  We're all in a good mood. There are a lot to talk about. There's an Apple event next week. There's a Google event next week. There's a Samsung event next week. Most importantly, though, there's a Verge event next week.

• 2:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  It's a real thing that's happening. 10 years in the making. After one decade, they finally let me through a party. We've earned it.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  It's been a long planning process, too. 10 whole years to plan this party.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  It's all I've been doing.

• 2:43Alex Cranz?

  You just open a Google Doc.

• 2:45Nilay Patel?

  I've been taking. Yeah, I've been taking notes about what this party should be in the background of the show while you all have been talking for 10 years.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  You think I'm always so distracted? Ooh, another party idea. It is, in fact, our 10 year party. It is also an event. It is called On The Verge. It is October 22nd and 23rd in New York City. We have quite a lot of things going on. Dieter and I are going to be host of Vergecast with Joanna Stern and David Pierce. Notable Verge traders Joanna Stern and David Pierce. We, we're gonna, I'm just gonna tell the Vergecast audience this. I'm gonna give away the game a little bit. If you look at our feed, we're missing one episode, right? So we numbered the episodes.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  So there is not a Vergecast 69.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 3:33Alex Cranz?

  Nice.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  I appreciate you. So we're gonna do it. We're gonna make it and we're gonna pull the headlines from that moment in history.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Which are amazing.

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  Which are.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  I don't want to spoil any of them, but oh my God.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  So that's gonna be good. We've got some ideas there. Dieter is gonna, can we give this away, Dieter? Sure. Dieter and I are gonna talk to Nick Weaver, the CEO of Eero, and we're gonna yell at him about specs, which we're told people like when we do. Liz is gonna do a panel on NFTs in the metaverse. That's gonna be wild. Ashley's interviewing some Clubhouse folks. Casey's gonna do some Casey stuff. We have DJs. There's a party. There's an open bar. There's art installations. It's gonna be nuts.

• 4:16Alex Cranz?

  I'll be at the bar, by the way.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  Alex will be at the bar. We've thought a lot about what we want this event to be. We just came from the Code Conference. We obviously talked about it on the show. The Code Conference is, right, it's power. It's CEOs and celebrities. We didn't want to do Code Junior. We wanted to have a party for people who've been reading The Verge for 10 years and do cool stuff. Not that Code isn't cool, but you know what I mean? Like, we want to make it for you. So we're very excited about it. We have selling lots of tickets. You can go to voxmediaevents.com/ontheverge, enter code dollar sign 99 now. Come see us in New York. We would love to see you.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  The 99 now brings the price of a standard ticket down to, I believe, 99 bucks. And that includes the price of four drink tickets. And I don't know if you've ever tried to get or pay for a drink in New York City, but it's basically a free ticket, if you think about it that way.

• 5:04Alex Cranz?

  It is a free ticket.

• 5:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's gonna be great. And I will tell you this, the Verge team is gonna be there in force. The first time we've all seen each other in like, two years. Yeah. So I'm very excited to see everybody. I've only seen Alex in person once.

• 5:19Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  It was great. But like, that's weird, right?

• 5:24Alex Cranz?

  We saw each other once. We're like, nice to acknowledge you.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, there you are. But there's lots of new folks at The Verge. I'm excited to see all them. And I'm excited to see all of our readers and friends come out. So if you are in or around New York next week, we would love to see you. Okay, that's enough promotion. They even had a promo code. I mean, come on. Yeah.

• 5:44Alex Cranz?

  What's the promo code again?

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  Dollar sign 99 now.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  All caps.

• 5:48Nilay Patel?

  They really went for it with the promo code. They're like, make it harder. Put a dollar sign in there. Wait, this doesn't have both a capital letter and a number. I mean, it's like...

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  It's not eight characters. Okay, I'll stop. But we'd love to see you. All right. News. We got news. Addy, you're here. I feel like we have you on the show to talk about very complicated regulatory issues and then hilarious VR headsets. And I, as Elaine, I think I'm most jealous of your lane.

• 6:19Speaker 04

  I mean, is there really a VR headset that's not hilarious?

• 6:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, this one is like particularly hilarious. So we have lived in a world dominated in VR. You know, many companies came and went. Right now, it's pretty dominated by Facebook. There's a new one from HTC this week. Tell us about it.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  So HTC, which as you might remember, it makes the Vive headset. It also makes several permutations of the Vive. It was like the absolute sort of original VR with motion controls, has now released a $500 headset called the Vive Flow, whose deal is basically that it doesn't have motion controls. It's a little more complicated than that, but it's, so it's a very, very light headset. It looks basically closer to sunglasses than you'll find any VR headset looking like, but that's also not saying a ton. It's like gigantic bug eye sunglasses. Closer is doing a lot of work there. Yes. And it's

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I just want to be clear. You can't see through the lenses, right?

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Correct. No, it looks like sunglasses. It's not sunglasses. It's displays. And then it has two cameras on the front. So you can do like pass through cameras so they can turn on a video feed, but that's just the same thing you can do on lots of VR headsets. It fits on like sunglasses, so it also doesn't have a strap. It's like little glasses arms. And it doesn't have a controller. It's going to have motion like hand tracking. And normally what you do is you use an Android phone. You connect it and it works like basically a laser pointer. It's a sort of remote control. There's an app. It doesn't support iPhone for what seem to be sort of complex technical reasons. And the goal is that it's supposed to be for

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Very still VR activities that they promote it as being it's really, really good for meditation. It's good if you want to watch 360 degree video. It has an external battery pack, but the battery pack lasts, it's saying four to five hours, which is way longer than you'd get on, say, the Oculus Quest 2. But it's also not super clear about building a really compelling case for why you would spend $500 on it yet.

• 8:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have to be honest with you. I'm so stuck on how it looks because it looks like a pair of glasses with the arms and the lenses that I, I feel like the first thing they're going to have to educate people on is that it's not glasses. Like it's, I know it's not glasses and I'm looking at it and my brain is like, oh, those are glasses.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I looked at it when we, so we did a demo. It was in like downtown New York and go up to the space and there's this person looking at me through the glasses. And I'm like, are those AR glasses? No, no, they are not.

• 9:06Nilay Patel?

  And then second, the, do you have a sense of the complicated technical issue that makes it Android only and not iOS? Because that is a wow way to cut your market down to nothing right away.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  Maybe I shouldn't say complicated so much as it's like, I shouldn't really even try to speculate about it because HTC didn't really explain it to me. But it seems like it's a, you need some level of control, like you need some level of access to the sensors. Like it's basically you using a gyroscope. You need to be able to sync really closely with it. And it seems like iOS just doesn't let you do that.

• 9:44Nilay Patel?

  Huh. So you're holding the phone and you're just like waving the phone around in VR and the motion detection of the phone creates the laser pointer you're talking about.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Right. If you remember Google Daydream from a billion years ago, it works a lot like that, only instead of a little plastic remote, it's a phone.

• 10:00Alex Cranz?

  Why did they go with a phone instead of just a little plastic remote?

• 10:05Speaker 04

  The argument is it's because if you're putting this in a bag or your pocket, you don't want to have extra bits to like carry around with you. You want to just use things you already have.

• 10:15Alex Cranz?

  There's already like a purse, right?

• 10:19Speaker 04

  This is one of those things where I'm gonna have a really hard time describing the rationale for all these things because I think the rationale is bad. My biggest problem with it is HTC at this event, they have this huge pitch about how it's really great for older VR users, people who just want to come into VR for the first time, people who want to use it for therapeutic purposes, people who are stuck in their house because they have mobility issues. They pitched it as being for boomers specifically. But the problem is that those are the people who are A, least likely to have a phone, like a smartphone, and B, if you end up using motion like hand controls, those are also probably the people for whom that's going to be the most tiring and awkward.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  And hand controls even now are just really finicky, even if you have incredibly strong, fine motor skills. It's just, it's like the worst control system possible for the thing that they're saying they want to do.

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the, the falloff of users at pair this device with another device. Like, there's just a cliff there. We're like, oh, I fell off the cliff and I'm never gonna climb back up it. Because it's difficult. And then that category of users also very likely to have the other platform of phones. I do like that you have a quote from one of the app vendors. It's like, this is for the huge boomer population. That's great. I appreciate that. What operating system does it run? Where do the apps come from?

• 11:47Speaker 04

  So HTC has a VR headset flavor of Android, basically. It has a sort of custom operating system that in general is pretty good. The thing is that this is coming on the heels of the Vive Focus 3, which is a really strong headset that is just not aimed at consumers at all. It's a pretty expensive, but very sophisticated standalone headset. So the interface looks a lot like it. It's using some subset of the apps. You can go on the Vive port store, you can get this pared down version of the store that only supports the kind of things that this works for, which again, they're talking

• 12:28Speaker 04

  about as being sort of productivity meditation. You can mirror apps from a phone, so you can watch Netflix on it.

• 12:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I love it. Like, they gotta take a shot, right? Like, everything else, the Quest 2 is just sort of like eaten the consumer market. And it's a fine product, but... I'm not willing to just give it all to Facebook. I'm happy for them to take shots at it. I think the other thing that I'm, as I was reading your coverage, like, they're trying to change the form factor of a headset, right? Into glasses instead of a thing that mounts on your head. And that seems hit or miss.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  I just don't think it's there yet. I think that they've, this headset, it is super light. It's really, really very light, which is partly what you would expect when you have a mandatory battery pack, um, that you've offloaded the battery onto. But the, it's just still, I think one of the issues is that it is not as adaptive for different head sizes. I always have trouble with this because I'm just, I'm a relatively small person. So it's really hard for me to tell what the experience feels like if you are sort of the average person that they tend to test these with. But it just, it's not even that it's uncomfortable. It's that you put it on and it slips down your nose and you see half the screen.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  And they have swappable gaskets, which, uh, that's the sort of part of the mask that goes between your face and the lenses of the headset. And that's great. It makes it better, but it's still a thing where you're just trying to be really, really careful. And it feels like you're just balancing this thing on your head. And that's just, that's not relaxing. That's not fun. And I'm sure there are people for whom it does work, but it's really frustrating that when HTC and Oculus have recognized that it, there is a huge demand for alternate straps on other headsets, that they're just not even trying with this.

• 14:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:21Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it feels like they're not even trying at all with this headset. Like, there's just nothing about it makes sense. I don't understand who the audience is. I don't understand like the point of it. Like, we already, we already had the sit still and put your phone in some cardboard glasses, like VR experience that this seems to be like giving.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  The main benefit is that it sucks less than that. So it genuinely does feel a lot better. And you don't have to put your phone into a thing and use up your entire phone battery on a really bright screen. It has advantages. It works a lot like the Oculus Go, but it's still, it has tracking cameras, so it feels a lot more natural. I like the fundamental things it's doing, but yeah, it's just, I get the feeling they just made this thing in a lab and they were like, this seems cool. And then they sold it.

• 15:11Alex Cranz?

  It looks cool. Like, I don't know, I know we're all thinking it looks stupid, but at the same time, it like.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no, I think it looks like cool. It looks ridiculous, but I think it's fun and I really like that they designed it this way.

• 15:23Alex Cranz?

  I feel like it's something that like 10 years from now, we're all going to be like, man, you know who got it right? And we all made fun of it? The Viflo. Like, I feel like it's one of those things where we're going to look back on it and be like, oh, we should have been slightly nicer. We shouldn't.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 15:38Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  No, the thing that I want is I want them to make that headset. I want them to make the awesome Johnny Neumann bug eyes design.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  But I want them to give me a strap. I want them to give me something that I actually want to wear and that I think I would be able to recommend to people to want to wear. I don't want it to recommend someone thing where I'm like, yeah, no, it's great. You can put it in your pocket, but once you put it on, it's going to be incredibly frustrating. Nobody wants to get in VR again after that.

• 16:02Alex Cranz?

  Were there really big, like, technical, like, kind of breakthroughs they made with this to get it that small, besides offloading the battery to this little silly pack?

• 16:15Speaker 04

  It's kind of hard to tell without knowing a lot about the internals, that I think they sort of just stripped some things down. So it has two cameras, a lot of headsets have four. You can manage to get that, like, you can kind of pare down the electronics there. I think that also just reducing the sheer amount of plastic in it probably helps quite a bit. For context, it's, I think, something, it's like less than half the weight of the Oculus Quest 2.

• 16:48Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's light. That's nice.

• 16:51Nilay Patel?

  So two things. One, Alex, we're doing all this like 10 year, we're gonna do it like we're doing a big retrospective 10 year package.

• 16:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:59Nilay Patel?

  The verge actually turns 10. There is not a single review that we have looked back at because we're gonna publish like greatest hits. We have not looked at a single one yet, Dieter, I think, where we're like, oh, we should have been nicer. Almost all of them are like, ah, we should have been way meaner.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  I'm being clear, this is not a review. This is me putting the headset on, I play around with it. It's possible, I don't know, try it and I'll say, actually, when I put this thing on a few times, it's great. My first impressions were just not strong and they were not strong in very fixable ways.

• 17:30Alex Cranz?

  It has like Neo, do you guys know the Neo Geo Pocket? Do you remember this thing?

• 17:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:36Alex Cranz?

  This handheld? It has real Neo Geo Pocket energy to me where it's like, there's a lot of cool ideas happening here. There's a lot of things that are like, we're gonna just take for granted 10 years from now. But there's also a reason that most of people don't know what the Neo Geo Pocket is. I think the same thing here.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  You're home now.

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  The thing, no, the reason I wanted to talk about this, and there's some other VR news we should talk about. But I, Addie, I wanted you on to talk about this because, one, we are constantly surrounded by all of this metaverse talk. Like, it is just the air we breathe now, the weird, extremely on drugs air that we breathe now, that like, the virtual worlds are coming.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  God, I wish there were drugs.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  Nope, it's just venture capital. But we are still, we're at this weird place where we're almost taking the hardware that will enable AR and VR for granted. Right? And there's one product that's very popular from Facebook. Then there's some targeted products, HTC's other products. There is HoloLens from Microsoft enterprise product. There are just not very many consumer oriented, mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality products. Like they just, they're hard to make. So this one is the first one where I've seen like a consumerized form factor with interesting ideas

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  that are different than where we have been for, what is it, seven years now? Since like AR headset started to be a thing. It's been a long time and this is the first real different riff on it that I've seen. So even if there's problems, I think it's important for us to be like, yeah, people are taking shots at consumer. AR and VR devices because no one really knows how they're gonna come out. No one knows how they're gonna be.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  I think the counterpoint to that is that it's really weird that people tend to assume that if you're not a hardcore gamer, you don't want motion controllers. So a lot of people really like Supernatural, right? It's this VR fitness app. You can't do anything like that in this. You can't do it because they don't have motion controls. They don't, it's again, pretty finicky to just keep on your head if you're doing intense fitness. There was this product design that HTC had a while back that was the concept for a fitness headset. It seemed like a great idea because that's exactly the kind of thing that people I think really want in VR. And this is just going the other direction. It's just, it is pushing in a direction that I feel like is not even VR at all. And it's really frustrating that

• 20:13Speaker 04

  VR that uses hand controllers and VR that really lets you use your body and that is full featured is getting painted as this thing that only hardcore gamers want, when I think that's just absolutely not true.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you, Supernatural is an interesting case, right? So if you look at how they market themselves and who they are marketing, it is not people you would think of as gamers and that's their audience acquisition, right? Like people that you, just like regular people who like want to use that thing, want to use a fitness app are buying this headset and controllers and using it and figuring out how to charge it and buying the anchor. Like, that's just a different conception of the market than gamers are gonna play VR games, which is where this all kind of started. I think that has carried through. The other thing that I think is, that you're hitting on that I think has just been like a kind of a big realization. Is it really good VR makes you super aware of your body because you're moving around?

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  You just feel like you're doing something else. Like, that's one example. There's most of the games that I play in VR are like, involve moving around. Like, the ping pong game is still like, one of Oculus's most watched games. Like, you're definitely like, oh, I'm moving. This thing is like, you're gonna be really still and you're gonna like float away into space. And it's like, it cuts against almost everything that. I think a lot of the game developers in the Oculus have figured out about what makes the Oculus fun.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Without providing the thing that I think a lot of people do want, which is a super no-frills, I just want to watch 360 video headset, where it has a pretty simple controller. It's often a thing like film festivals or schools want, where it's really easy to swap devices between people, i.e. a smartphone controller is not really great for that.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  And it should cost less than the Oculus Quest 2, not more.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like I said, what's interesting to me is, we all are taking it for granted that there's going to be AR experiences and VR experiences. And then you're like, "Look", you're like, "Yep, there's like, three things that can enable that right now." And two of them are like, very expensive. And then there's some weird glasses that give you the bug eyes. And like, we should pay a lot more attention to them.

• 22:27Alex Cranz?

  This could have been the supernatural machine. I just get kind of upset about that. Like, you're explaining it to me, and I was like, "Oh, man, this would be great for supernatural." And then you got to stationary. And I was like, "Now it is useless for supernatural." I just...

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. When does it come out?

• 22:43Speaker 04

  The pre-orders actually started today, and it's shipping in November.

• 22:47Alex Cranz?

  How is the view on it? How is like, is the quality better than like, the Quest?

• 22:54Speaker 04

  The field of view is 100 degrees, which is smaller than, I feel like the sort of standard is 110. That's roughly the Quest. But you don't really notice it. It feels, I think, after a certain point, VR headset FOVs kind of blend together. I didn't really have problems with the optics when it actually fit.

• 23:12Alex Cranz?

  Well, like, the resolution, though?

• 23:13Speaker 04

  The resolution is, it is 1.6K per eye, which is not like, five focus out of this, three like, out of this world, but it's totally doable.

• 23:26Alex Cranz?

  So are you like, seeing all the pixels? Because I think that's the thing that always, like, messes me up with VR, is you can see all the pixels on the screen.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  If you wear most current-gen VR headsets and that bothers you, then it will probably bother you here.

• 23:40Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  All right. So that thing's coming out. There's a little bit of other VR news I want to talk about. We should start with Facebook. Zuckerberg, who's the CEO of Facebook, and Boz, who's the new CTO of Facebook. Took a lot of photos themselves wearing prototypes. Did we learn anything from them or are they just goofing?

• 23:58Speaker 04

  I think the thing that Alex Heath pointed out is that we learned that they have a prototype that looks a whole lot like what people think Apple's AR headset is going to look like.

• 24:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  AR VR headset. It is hard to read too much into this because they tend to, Facebook Reality Labs just shows off prototypes that never turn into anything. It's done that before. It's shown off like VR gloves, things that just it's working on, but you shouldn't take as being a roadmap to a product. But it's definitely interesting that they're being much more open with showing this stuff off when they've been a little bit more cagey and a little bit more focused on, we're just going to show things that clearly are internals and are not a thing you could even possibly mistake for a consumer device.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think it's funny, the Zuckerberg photo, he says it's a retina resolution prototype, which Alex, to your point, high resolution, but like, Apple made up the phrase retina resolution. Like, they just invented it out of nowhere, so you can't see the pixels and now everyone has to use it. That one looks kind of chunky, right? It's like very prototype-y. The one that Boz is wearing in the tweet absolutely looks like that render. The reason Heath knows that is because he's the one who broke the story about what the headset would look like at the information. So it's like seared in his brain. But yeah, that is fascinating to me that I don't, I just, it's weird that there's not as much design divergence in this market yet.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, maybe it's because it does such a fit on your head and the technology is all kind of the same, but like, we're many years into it and we're still like, all right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put a shoebox on your face. That's, that's as far as we've gotten.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  I think they've converged a surprising amount. If you remember the PlayStation VR, which is a thing that we are probably going to be seeing more of soon, given that PlayStation, Sony seems to just be teasing a PlayStation VR2 all the time now. But PlayStation VR was super weird looking. Headsets used to be really divergent. And I think they've kind of coalesced onto, A, no matter what you do, you're never going to look cool, so you might as well be utilitarian. And B, there are like two consumer headsets now, until we get something like a PlayStation VR2.

• 26:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then the last piece of X Reality News, Magic Leap, which I feel like just telling the history of Magic Leap would be another 20 minutes, but Magic Leap is a company. They raised a lot of money. They fell apart. They got rid of the CEO, but they've now raised another half a billion dollars to make an AR headset.

• 26:28Alex Cranz?

  I love it. I wanna, I'm just the respect for these people and how they just get money.

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  They do just get money. They demoed it on CNBC. They've got a Magic Leap 2 and they're like, it's got the largest AR field of view. And then what they sort of like mumbled through is that they meant vertical field of view. And it's like, a little bit, not horizontal field of view, which is the same. I keep coming back to that. There's like a checklist of AR stuff you need to build, right? To make an AR headset. The first is the display technology. And no one has one. Like, we're all still putting LCDs in front of our face, right?

• 27:09Alex Cranz?

  Well, Magic Leap isn't.

• 27:11Nilay Patel?

  It's still, it's right in that zone. They were, remember they were.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  No, Magic Leap's a, it's a transparent waveguide. It bounces stuff. So there's stuff where you're staring directly at the screen, and there's stuff where the screen's bouncing light off something else, and then it's projecting the light in front of your eyes. Completely different.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  But I think the something else for them is still an LCD display.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  No, they, as far as I know, they use waveguides, which are like, just layers upon layers of glass, and they beam it through and it refracts.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Same with HoloLens 2, I believe.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:43Nilay Patel?

  Right, but that's fundamental.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus. I've been very quiet for this whole conversation.

• 27:48Alex Cranz?

  You're so close.

• 27:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, there was also the, there was the one that shot that beamed the image into your retina that I, that I did some time ago.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, the.

• 27:57Nilay Patel?

  Avogat, Gliff.

• 27:59Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:59Nilay Patel?

  The Avogat Gliff. Actually, between Dieter and, I mean, Addie's got the library of headset photos. But Dieter's like Avogat photo is like on the walls, like in billboards in China. It has been pirated beyond belief. No, but the, the, the way, I understand what you mean about the waveguides. But the, the Avogat was like a very novel application of a technology, right? It was like a totally different way of getting your eyes to see an image. Waveguides are still like a thing that's in front of you that you have to see through. And their image still comes from a bunch of LEDs. And like that to me is like, it's still right in the, there's just something there about

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  the display technology that is not allowing the thing to happen. Like it's the big problem. Then there's the processing problem. Then there's the battery life problem. Then there's the operating system problem. And then there's like the application layer problem.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  And the control problem and the social problem.

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then like, who gets to augment reality problem?

• 28:57Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, control, just like literally how you use the controls. No one's come up with a really great control like interface method yet.

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:04Alex Cranz?

  The Hololens one is pretty good, right? Like, I used that and I felt like they figured it out. And he was looking at me. Yeah. You disagree. I can see it on your face.

• 29:14Speaker 04

  I think that the hand tracking, the problem with hand tracking is that hand tracking is not super reliable. That it is largely reliable, but imagine that you click a, you have a mouse trackpad and like every one in every 10 times it fails, you're gonna, that's gonna drive you crazy. Like, the great thing about a hardware button is that a hardware button almost always works. And I just don't think that the AirTap system, while, again, I think it's super technically innovative and I really applaud them for doing it. I just don't think it's a great control method yet.

• 29:42Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  I really like rings. I like the idea that you'd have these rings on your finger and they're most, it's mostly motion tracking, but also you have these buttons and you can like click them and they're kind of like brass knuckles. I don't know. I think I saw that in a patent once.

• 29:53Alex Cranz?

  That sounds really, I, I am now on board with that one. That one sounds incredible.

• 29:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But the Magic Leap, at the beginning, right? Remember their line was they're gonna hack the GPU of the brain?

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  Because

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  It's incredible. All of that was about a display technology, right? They were gonna beam light into your eyes.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Right. Which they abandoned midway through development because they couldn't miniaturize it.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. And remember there's that great picture in Wired of like the light pipes coming off of, it was great. It was great. So now they're, they're chasing after this, but they've lost, Magic Leap had all kinds of famous people on board. They'd hired all these artists. It's just like unclear. They're chasing this technology now. This enabling AR technology. But it's unclear if this is the thing that iterates to like, the final one? Or if they're still trying to build the, hack the GPU of the mind tech? Or even once they get there, like what applications it will run. But I'm happy to have another half billion dollars. It's just, if you just look at that stack of problems, they're pretty narrowly focused on the first one now, which is the, the display problem.

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  And all of the rest of them are just way more complicated.

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  And I'm saying way more complicated, even though the display problem is, as yet unsolved.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  You have to kind of split it into consumer AR, which is still absolutely nobody's even started to crack. And enterprise AR where it's just, you're trying to do a specific thing, or I don't know, trying to put factory overlays on an airplane so you can learn how to do troubleshooting. And I feel like it's just people think Magic Leap can build that thing and that thing is worth the level of investment.

• 31:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that's what, that's what Microsoft has built. Right. That is their whole, well, that's their pitch, like, um, I don't know, I, in the before time, I like, you could go to a basement in Redmond and they'd be like, do you want to change the spark plug on this ATV? And they'd be like, here's the hollow lens, like follow the steps. And he'd be like, I did it. I don't think that's, it's often that simple. Also, people have been changing ATV spark plugs without, that's, that's for a long time. But like, they built that thing and they were partnered with a bunch of companies to train people. I just, every time I, I think about AR, we talk about it. That stack of problems starts with the first hardest one, which is the display problem. And it ends at the, who gets to augment reality?

• 32:25Nilay Patel?

  Did you see the video that James posted, James Vincent posted this week on the site of real time image replacement?

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're replacing a, yeah.

• 32:34Nilay Patel?

  Did you see it?

• 32:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  So it's like filming cars down the street and then in real time is being replaced with like bugs or like spaceships.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Okay. Replacing the cars with hover cars and then they replaced this person with a much shorter cartoon character.

• 32:49Alex Cranz?

  And then a giant whale splashed into the room and everybody cheered.

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  The ultimate magic loop, I don't know. But just imagine if you're wearing these glasses and like someone else next to you is wearing glasses and you're like, man, look at those cars. Like, I don't see cars. It's like, you think Facebook is a problem now?

• 33:08Speaker 04

  I don't know. I mean, look, I understand that. And I think that that's a valid concern. But it also relies on a pretty intense level of people not realizing that they can take their glasses off. I don't know. Like, should we contact, contact lenses? And I'll, I'll get a little more worried about that. But I don't know. I think that people have at least adapted to a certain level of functionality with, say, the CGI in movies. Like, people don't think that the Avengers are real. Mostly.

• 33:36Alex Cranz?

  Mostly, mostly.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Look, they want them to be real. That's not the same thing.

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  That's true. I just, I watched that video and I look at the air glasses and I'm like, oh, man, like,

• 33:47Nilay Patel?

  it might not be great that Facebook is in the lead with this technology. In terms of divergent fractured realities, like, what's one company?

• 33:56Speaker 04

  We shouldn't talk about facial recognition unless I am gonna rant for ages. Like, facial recognition and surveillance is the thing that I'm really worried about with Facebook and AR stuff. Like, when you just have a camera in front of your face all the time.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they are, they've, one, they've already built it with Ray-Ban. Did you see, um, Ray-Ban posted like an Instagram ad for their glasses with Facebook?

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 34:17Nilay Patel?

  And all of the replies are like, no, no, we're not doing this. Like, this is creepy.

• 34:25Nilay Patel?

  And maybe it's bomb, maybe it's troll, like, I don't know. But it was just one of those moments where I was like, oh, the people get it. Like, you don't, you don't want these. What's the killer app for AR, though? Right? I look at a stranger or somebody I've met before, and it tells me their name. Like, I would, you tell me what ideals of mine I need to compromise to get there. I'll, like, seriously consider it.

• 34:47Alex Cranz?

  That's my end game.

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  If I could just remember people's names, I'd be the most powerful person in the world. That's, I've always believed this. It has not incentivized me to get better at remembering people's names, but it's a core belief that I hold.

• 35:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we gotta take a break. Addy, thank you so much for joining us. We'll have you back the next time there's an AR headset or a complicated legal issue to unpack.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  Or both at once.

• 35:12Alex Cranz?

  That's when the Apple AR headset comes out.

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  With a lockdown on the shore. All right, we'll be right back.

• 35:21Speaker 05

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• 35:50Speaker 06

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• 36:21Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Dieter, your watch this week. You reviewed the Series 7 watch, and there's an event next week. Let's start with the watch.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  The watch is the Series 7. It's like a millimeter bigger, both sizes. But the important thing is the screen is bigger and it's all more durable. And I didn't really express this well in the review, but the important thing about the screen being bigger is actually that the bezels are smaller, if that makes any kind of sense.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Like, it just, it looks nicer. Honestly, my take, like, I started the review by saying, here are the questions that are important to ask about your watch, not about this watch, because all of the questions you might have about this watch are less important than whether or not your watch is still good, because your watch is almost surely still good. And if it's not, go get this watch. It's great. It's amazing. I love it. It's the best smart watch. Nobody else is competing. Nobody else can compete on iOS because it's locked down so much. And on Android, like... We will see if somebody besides Samsung makes a Wear OS watch worth a damn. Samsung's Wear OS watch is worth a damn, but it's so Samsung up that I don't think it's worth buying if you're not a Samsung user.

• 37:31Alex Cranz?

  Ties and super fans.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  I just went straight to like the dark part.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  They're out there.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Let's talk about wearables. I'm going to talk about how I'm depressed about the ecosystem. No, like the watch is great. I don't think that the features that are exclusive to the Series 7, there's a couple of watch faces and then the little type E swipey keyboard thing. Really need to be. There's one that puts the numbers around the edge and I think the reason it's exclusive is if you had a bigger bezel, this watch face would look super dumb. It would be readable, but it would look dumb with a bezel around it. But yeah, man, it's great. Like it's, it's, it's a stupendous watch. I was re-watching my review video made with Verin and I just was like, you know, it was like the third time I previewed it or whatever. And I realized that if you just listen to the tone of my voice in the

• 38:20Speaker 02

  review and like you pay attention to what I got more excited about something, you would think I hate this thing. I'm just like, the watch, the watch is great, but let me tell you about how I'm mad about Ant Plus. The watch is great, but why does Apple, you know, it's like, uh, all the stuff that I'm frustrated with, I get more excited about, I guess. But yeah, it's a very good watch. I, I kind of, it's kind of the long and the short of it. They're still selling the SE, which I still think is like worth buying, you know, you compromise in a few things. But they're also still selling the Series 3 for like, I think it's super cheap. It's still like 200 bucks. And that one, huh, I don't know.

• 38:58Alex Cranz?

  Don't do that.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  I don't think you should buy that one. I hate saying, don't buy the cheap one because like it does most of the stuff that the more expensive ones do. And it's like perfectly good as a fitness tracker and it's like, Apple supports it with software very well, et cetera, et cetera. But.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  No, dude, you can buy a 40 millimeter refurbished Series 4 for 249.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, do that. Absolutely do that.

• 39:19Nilay Patel?

  Right. You can, but the 44 millimeter refurbished Series 4 is 270, 270 bucks. Buy that.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

  Like I would not buy a new Series 3.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  The most inspiring thing about picking this angle of like, tell me whether or not your current watch is like failing you before you think about what's interesting about this watch is I had a one guy who's still using a Series 0.

• 39:40Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  And it's, he's like ending the day with over 30% battery life, which is wow.

• 39:46Nilay Patel?

  Screaming stuff all the time.

• 39:50Nilay Patel?

  So here's my big question about the watch. They haven't really added new sensors. It seems like there's a new chip. It's a very familiar one. They've made the screen bigger.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  And if you just think about the, I'll just give it away. I was on John Gruber's podcast. I said this to him too, and we both struggled with it. If you just think about what has made people upgrade their Apple Watches, like why I have upgraded, it has been the largest screen on the Series 4 was instant and immediate upgrade for me. And then always on was an instant and immediate upgrade for a lot of people after that.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Yep. Those were the same for me. Yep.

• 40:25Nilay Patel?

  And now I'm looking at this one. I'm like, oh, the screen got even bigger. And I'm like, but it, my watch is great. I also don't leave my house very much.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  The screen getting bigger on the 4, it was, it, it didn't make that big of a functional difference, but it made a big enough one where it felt, it felt like something new and better. It didn't feel so constricted. The bezels on the 3 and earlier, like you looked at it like, oh, it's like got squared off edges and it just felt constrained. From the 4, 5, 6 to the 7, you know, it's like, what's the, the old movie trope where like you're watching something? And then all of a sudden like it gets, it gets fully widescreen. You're like, oh, I'm in it now. You don't, it's not that kind of moment. The Series 4 was like that moment. The Series 7 is not.

• 41:11Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's like one, the case is like one millimeter larger, right?

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but.

• 41:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  It's like, it's not that noticeable.

• 41:21Alex Cranz?

  I guess my big concern before it came out was that it would feel, even though it's not a lot bigger, it would feel bigger because that screen's so much bigger. It doesn't feel like that.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Doesn't feel bigger. Not that to me.

• 41:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just keep coming back to like, people like bigger screens. That always drives an upgrade cycle in every part of our industry. People like always on screens. Driven upgrade cycle. Like, there's this one, the next time around, they can't make the screen bigger again. Like, what is the upper bound?

• 41:51Speaker 02

  They can, they can, they can try harder on battery life. They did not aim higher on battery life. And this is the thing that actually makes me unhappy is they're still saying we're aiming for 18 hours. And it's like, you, I would have taken a smaller screen and more battery life. In a heartbeat, I would have done it. Because I like to use it for sleep tracking. And so like, you have to deal with this dance of a charger in the morning, and for how long, do I charge again at night? It'll like, send you warnings if you're not charged up enough before you go to sleep, and blah, blah, blah, blah. So the other, other new thing is that it comes with a USB C charger, instead of a USB A charger. And the coils have been set up slightly differently. They're all still backwards and forwards compatible. They all still work with each other, whatever. But it can charge faster off of the USB C

• 42:33Speaker 02

  plug. So that's all fine. What's just like deeply fascinating is if you look at the USB C end of the plug, look at like, your Apple USB C plug, and like, how long is like, the white plastic part at the end? Right?

• 42:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  The white plastic part on the end of the USB C charger for the Apple Watch is one and a half times bigger. It's like half, it's half is getting longer. It's bigger. It's longer. It's a longer plug. Hmm. And I asked why? And they said it was like, spreading out the electronics for heat. And I was like, that doesn't make sense. It's not like the thing draws that much power. Is this, is this like, a sign of USB C plugs to come from Apple that they're all going to be just like, a little bit longer? And of course, Apple doesn't comment on, you know, future

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  products, or whatever. But yeah, it's a different shape hunk of plastic next to the USB C plug. It's longer.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  Weird. Maybe it doesn't draw a lot of heat, but right, they're pushing more power through inductive to make it charge faster.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, the, the watch can't take like, it's not taking like, you know, five watts. Like, it's not, it's not a monster.

• 43:38Alex Cranz?

  Well, it supports fat, does it support fast charging now? And it didn't before?

• 43:43Speaker 02

  Well, it's faster. But it's not fast charging like your phone is fast charging. Maybe, maybe like, USB C pushes enough that they needed more like, space to slow it down before it hit the watch. I don't know. It's wild.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  That's hilarious. Yeah. Okay. That's the watch. It's very nice.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  It's very nice.

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  But I, you know, I think everyone's waiting for the next time around. There's all these rumors of new sensors and new capabilities.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Well, so the rumors like really hurt this thing's reception because everyone was expecting a big redesign and they didn't get it. And then what we got instead was some pretty iterative stuff. And so everyone feels disappointed. And I think that's all fair, but I also think it's fair to start recalibrating our expectations of like what year over year improvement looks like. Right. The watch had pretty massive year over year improvement for a very long time. And I think that time is over for a while. Like you look at, unless there's like a big new generation of Intel chips, you look at year over year improvement of, I don't know, the Dell XPS 13 or whatever. And you're not expecting like a revolutionary change. The, the Surface Pro was the same damn computer for four or five years. Right? I think that's where we're going to be with the watch.

• 44:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Did you read, we covered it on the site, but Business Insider had a big story this week about Apple's health division.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:58Nilay Patel?

  Lack of focus, some weird ideas about running their own clinics. It turns out that that's like running a medical clinic is like harder than Apple thought would.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  I think it's funny because like my parents are doctors, like they could have just asked them.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Well, it's also that like the, the, the context you need to understand for the health sensors you have in your watch. You know, again, I say it every time. It's not a medical device. It's not a diagnostic device. And so the, the amount of work that you can do with the data that this thing can actually accurately glean from your body. There is a huge gulf between like cool, fun, track some sleep and fitness stuff and, you know, have a little bit of quantified self data or whatever. It's a fault detection and like genuine medical purposes. And I think that Apple assumed that they would be able to cross that gulf at the same pace that they've gotten to where they are now. And the answer is you can't, and you definitely can't unless you have a very, very clear purpose.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  And that the article was really good at showing that they did not.

• 46:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There's also just like a feedback loop problem. You can generate data. And maybe you can make your sensors really good at generating clinically valuable data. Then you gotta get people to do something about it.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think there's still a geigo. I think it's not garbage in, garbage out, but it's like, it's like recycling and.

• 46:25Nilay Patel?

  There's been some studies that like the heart rate tracking is really reliable.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Heart rate, heart rate, I'm with you, yeah.

• 46:32Nilay Patel?

  Even like the, the new blood oxygen sensor, I think there was a study, like a peer reviewed study that said it was like in the same accuracy band as clinical devices, but none of it is approved, like none of it's like FDA approved. So doctors can't rely on it. They can rely on it to say, we're going to measure you with an actual medical device. But I think the problem is like,

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  identifying a healthcare problem and then solving it are actually two different things.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:00Nilay Patel?

  And I, it's a good piece. You should read it. I think they, I think they did a good job. I would, the comparison I, I will draw is like, they also don't know what they want to do with a car. And like they keep taking shots at these huge ideas without a clear sense of what they want to do with it. The difference between the two is the car is a quote unquote secret.

• 47:23Nilay Patel?

  They've now hired like every car engineer in the world and fired that person. Like it's not so much secret anymore, but the, the watch are like very loud, like the advertising for the watch is like a, is a health device now. And I, I think that is the, they're going to add more sensors, but they need, they need a purpose. They need a thesis for what it's going to do. Anyway, the IP is good. All right. Let's talk about next week where I feel like the thesis is I've got some money and Apple's going to get it.

• 47:51Alex Cranz?

  You're giving, giving them some money next week.

• 47:54Nilay Patel?

  I would straight up do like a Tesla style hundred dollar deposit on a Cybertruck. Like right now, just like, I want this MacBook Pro with whatever chip it's going to be. It's not an Intel chip.

• 48:05Alex Cranz?

  Well, which, which one? Cause we're probably going to get two.

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  16 inch MacBook Pro with a, you know, M1X or M2 custom Apple GPU. Yeah. Maybe some ports, maybe SD card.

• 48:16Alex Cranz?

  SD card, so, oh yeah.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  Num, num, num. Like, why, why have an event? Just take the money. Like I got Apple Pay on my phone. Put up some dialogue box. Like instead of telling me what's on my Apple TV that I'm already watching, just be like, push this button to receive MacBook Pro and I would push that button.

• 48:34Alex Cranz?

  Are you going to have like two screens up for, one's the live blog, the other one's just refreshing the store?

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Are you excited for the potential of a mini LED display?

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  No, it's, I don't even care, man.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  Like all of my spec nerdery, whatever. I'm excited about opening a Chrome tab and the fan not turning on. Yeah. On a 16 inch display. My, my favorite, since we all, we all were expecting, you know, the two sizes of MacBook Pro with the M1X or M2, or whatever they call it, uh, two Thunderbolt, two USB-C ports, maybe even USB type A ports, maybe even. They're not putting a USB A port on this thing. Are you crazy? That, that'd be great. I'd take it. Um, okay. There's no, there's not gonna be A ports. But my favorite like prediction, I think it was Neil Dash was like, what if, we heard they're getting rid of the touch bar at the top, but what if they just inverted it? And it was like, oops, all touch bar. No. Or they did keyboard in the front and a giant screen with a whole track pad. I mean,

• 49:35Nilay Patel?

  there's some like, you know, bonkers Windows ideas I can live from. Yeah. But yeah, if they get rid of the touch bar, they add an SD card slot, you know, whatever Apple silicon chip they're gonna do. And then, you know, I'm in the LEDs, it's like just icing on the cake for me.

• 49:49Alex Cranz?

  Take the fans out.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I bet these are gonna have fans, right? What, what we know about the M1, yes, the air doesn't have a fan and it's thermally gated in terms of performance. And the 13 inch MacBook Pro has a fan and is not thermally gated.

• 50:02Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  So like, these are gonna have fans, but like, I'm excited to try to make those fans turn. I guarantee you that Google Meet and Chrome will make those fans turn.

• 50:14Nilay Patel?

  But I'm also excited, like, I will say as somebody who's been fighting a 16 inch MacBook Pro, I, that thing needs a hundred watt USB-C power supply and USB-C does not like that. It is, that thing is in a fight with its own power supply all the time. I've had to reset its power controller, like the SMC, like a dozen times. Those, those USB PD controllers have gotten better than when they were in that version of the MacBook.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  And maybe, maybe they'll, they'll, they'll support the new 240 spec. Who knows?

• 50:46Nilay Patel?

  But I'm, my big guess is that the M series chips are not going to require 100 watt power supply.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Oh, that's probably a safe bet.

• 50:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I would be shocked.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  Not a guarantee, but it's probably a safe bet. Yeah.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Alex Cranz?

  That's the next Verge cast.

• 51:04Nilay Patel?

  It's just me talking about the power supply of the new MacBook. I'm talking about any specs. I'll be like, let me tell you about the power supply.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  Actually, can I, can I tell you something crazy about USB C? So have you ever wondered why there are Thunderbolt or USB C ports on one side of a Mac, but not the other on the lower end Macs?

• 51:21Alex Cranz?

  Yes, constantly.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Getting data at a proper Thunderbolt speed from one side of the laptop to the other requires like a little booster in the middle to just go that distance. And they don't want to spend the extra money to put the X controller in.

• 51:35Alex Cranz?

  That's incredible.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  So it's, it's just, it's much, much cheaper to just have them on one side.

• 51:39Nilay Patel?

  It's just a little guy going, get on.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like the coach at a rally. Go, go.

• 51:47Nilay Patel?

  You got it.

• 51:49Alex Cranz?

  They don't want him. They, they, they fired him.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  What's interesting to me about these Macs, even though it's like, they're not announced, like, we don't know for sure everything that's in them or whatever, is other than the mini LED screen tech, there's not like a big idea, right? The, the original MacBook, MacBook, little baby MacBook, the big idea is we're going to make it really thin and have a crazy keyboard. And then the big idea with the MacBook Pro is, you know, we're getting rid of the ports and we're putting a touch bar in it. And like.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  A five-year disaster of an idea.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:21Alex Cranz?

  I loved that touch bar.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Don't even start. What's wrong with you?

• 52:25Nilay Patel?

  You love the Apple TV remote.

• 52:26Alex Cranz?

  I love it. Yeah.

• 52:29Nilay Patel?

  Alex showed up, I was gonna say Alex showed up in the Verge and she's like, two things you need to know about me. Love the touch bar. Huge apologists for the Apple TV remote. It's like, what? Did we screw this up?

• 52:40Alex Cranz?

  And I still got hired. Hell, yeah.

• 52:45Alex Cranz?

  I just, no, I think, I think it's like, I think it is emblematic of what you're talking about of like, Apple doesn't have really big ideas in this space. Because like, the touch bar, there was potential there. And no one ever explored it. And Apple went out of its way to make sure no one explored it. Like, it was always kind of terrible. And, and you know, there, there wasn't like, a lot of like, developer support for it or anything. And, it could have been cool.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  I mean, if you were willing to spend three weeks taking a self-taught course on how Better Touch Tool works, it is very cool.

• 53:20Alex Cranz?

  Better Touch Tool is amazing. Like, that's, that's how I convinced somebody, I bullied a coworker at my last job, into using, into liking the touch bar. I'd be like, use this one app.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  We have to stop talking about it. What we need to talk about is how it's going away.

• 53:34Alex Cranz?

  It's going away, and that's for the best.

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  Reign of terror is finally coming to a close. They needed an answer to touchscreen laptops.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? And their answer was the touch bar. And then a little bit later, the answer was, eh, we're just gonna turn the iPad into a laptop.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  Right? But if you think about when the touch bar came out, it was before the iPad as a laptop era began.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  It wasn't a computer yet. Now it is.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. They weren't doing flippy cases and styluses and multitasking. It was, so they're like, well, you want a touchscreen? How about this crappier touchscreen?

• 54:09Alex Cranz?

  The crappiest, tiniest.

• 54:13Nilay Patel?

  So do you use Better Touch Tool? I use the thing called POC, which literally I use just to disable it. Just to make that a series of fixed things that I can't accidentally touch. So I hope they get away with that. They do, I beg.

• 54:26Alex Cranz?

  I, I will miss accidentally hitting that escape key. That invisible escape key. I will miss that the most. That didn't go bad for me, ever.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Oops, old touch bar, I'm telling you.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  So they're gonna be 16 and a 14. Then, they still have the 13. You think they're gonna leave that at M1? Or they're gonna replace the 13 inch Pro with the 14 inch Pro?

• 54:47Alex Cranz?

  They gotta replace it, right? Because the 13 MacBook Pro, like, is fine, but not great. You gotta go to 14. Everybody else is at 14.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  I bet they don't. I bet that if, if the 14 is gonna have mini LED, why would they, they'd have to do an entirely different build to get the other screen tech in there. So I think it's gonna stick around as like, the, the weird one.

• 55:08Alex Cranz?

  The Apple Watch 3 of laptops.

• 55:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. So then there's that. And then, then the differentiation is you got two with an M1, and then you got the two with whatever this new chip will be called. The big question is, they're not going to use AMD GPUs in these anymore, right?

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Probably not.

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  I, that seems like a very safe assumption.

• 55:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  So then the big question is, what are they going to do to compete with Nvidia and AMD? Who are not Intel? Like, the last time they did this, they're like, we're going to beat the dominant chip vendor in our space. And everyone was like, you mean Intel? And they're like, uh huh? And that was, everyone's like, that's gonna be easy. Right? Like, that was a low bar to get over. AMD and Nvidia are not Intel. Like, their parts are power hungry, but they are extremely high performance, and people really like them.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:07Nilay Patel?

  So like, a big question for me is like, what are they gonna, how are they gonna do that? Like, what's the strat? And then how are they gonna get their app vendors to support their wacky new GPU idea, which they are already not great at with their AMD chips?

• 56:24Speaker 02

  I mean, for the laptops, I think the answer is, they're not worried about it. They're not gonna be gaming machines, whatever. They, they do just fine with Adobe and a few other stuff. They've got enough apps that code to, you know, their Metal APIs and whatever. I think that they can push that question to the ARM-based Mac Pro.

• 56:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's getting punted to like, next year, when the new trash can comes out.

• 56:51Nilay Patel?

  Always gonna call the trash can.

• 56:52Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 56:53Nilay Patel?

  Maybe.

• 56:54Alex Cranz?

  It's a cheese grater. Excuse me, excuse me.

• 56:56Nilay Patel?

  Cheese grater. Yeah, the trash can, the trash can was Apple's previous wacky GPU idea that didn't go anywhere.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:02Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm just curious. Like, that to me, in terms of, here's big ideas. Yeah, we expect the form factor the same. They're gonna backtrack on, they've already backtracked on the keyboard. They're praying they backtrack on the touchbar and ports. Maybe they'll have anything. But the real innovation here is gonna be in the GPU, and we have no idea what they're gonna do.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:26Alex Cranz?

  Well, maybe also battery life, right?

• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, I hope so. If the M1 airs or any indication like it kind of comes along.

• 57:34Alex Cranz?

  I haven't charged mine in weeks. That's not true. I charge it like once a week, but I also don't use it as often. But like,

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, you don't have to charge your laptop.

• 57:45Alex Cranz?

  It legitimately gets better battery life than my iPad Pro. Like,

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:51Alex Cranz?

  I don't have to charge it nearly as often. I don't have to worry about it. I can do like a whole day of work on it and a lot of work and still have juice left over. And I don't see that a lot in the PC space in the 14 and 16 inch area. And that's like, I think that's a place where Apple could like, okay, maybe its GPUs aren't going to be as fancy. But also, everybody works from home now. So they've got like, other computers that can do that. But a big screen and a big battery life. Oh, that's nice.

• 58:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if they put out the 16 inch and it's just the M1 with a gigantic battery and they're like, this will last for four days. I think we'd be like, dope.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  So there's, there's one more big idea for the Mac. That's actually a small idea that Apple refuses to think about. And there's a bet currently about how long until they give up and do it. And that's just make it a touchscreen. Stop being so precious about it.

• 58:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm about to lose this bet, aren't I?

• 58:52Speaker 02

  There's no way this is a touchscreen. Number one. And number two, I don't know when they're gonna, when they're gonna do it.

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  No, wasn't the bet between you and me and Joanna?

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you were like, they're gonna do it next year, next week, the next MacBook.

• 59:05Nilay Patel?

  So I've already lost.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  Let's, if you're listening to this, just ignore it.

• 59:12Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be shouting out from the audience at the, the Vergecast party when she's on stage. Just to remind you.

• 59:20Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have to bring this up. I don't remember what the bet was for.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  We'll go look it up.

• 59:24Nilay Patel?

  Fair, but they have to do it sometime, right?

• 59:29Speaker 02

  No, they don't.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  You know, like, like, here's, here's Apple's willingness to be obstinate. They're on iOS 15. And just to piss me personally off, they won't let you set multiple timers in the clock app. On the iPhone.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  You can do it on the watch.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  I like the air pros for the watch for multiple timers.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  That was very good. We'll see. We'll put that in the realm of, I looked at Big Sur and I still look at Big Sur all the time. Like, you should be able to touch most of these controls.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Big Sur has better, better touch targets than Chrome OS. I'm not kidding.

• 1:00:13Nilay Patel?

  That's, yeah, you're not wrong.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So that's the, the big rumor next week is the Mac with Pro. And like I'm saying, if it, the bar is like, don't blow it.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  It's not really like, it's just deliver the level of improvement that you delivered with the M1 Air. And then everyone will be thrilled. We're also, what, we're expecting, anything else?

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  They didn't announce AirPods at the last event and there was a bunch of rumors. This seems like a weird fit, but those are still out there. There's like, I mean, we're not due for an iPad Pro, I don't think. So I'm not really holding out hope for that.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  Although, you know, the last iPad Pro, they're like, what? We're putting M1 in it.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  So maybe they're gonna be like, M2, but that'd be weird.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  That'd be weird.

• 1:01:01Alex Cranz?

  I hope it's the AirPods, though.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Well, why wouldn't they release them with a phone, though? That's, that seems like.

• 1:01:07Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna get like the video of the person working on their computer, taking it to different places, and then the slow zoom as they reach into their pockets to pull out the AirPods. That's, that's what's gonna happen.

• 1:01:18Nilay Patel?

  Are we, wait, AirPods or AirPods Pro? Cause there's a rumor that the AirPods are due for a full-on redesign.

• 1:01:23Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  And this is the time to do it before the holidays.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  And then AirPods Pro, there's some rumors, they're gonna like rework those a little bit to.

• 1:01:33Alex Cranz?

  I feel like we heard a lot of AirPod Pro rumors early on this year, and then it all disappeared. And it just became AirPods 3.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's rumors that they're gonna do some, some like really future looking stuff, like monitor your posture, stop you from hunching over and also take your temperature in your ear.

• 1:01:48Alex Cranz?

  I don't want that.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  But that's, that's years off, or at least a year off.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I, I worry about those things, like, I'm like, I'm not, you're really assuming that I'm never taking these out of my, my, my head.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Nilay Patel?

  Like, no. No, thank you.

• 1:02:04Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's the Apple stuff. Like I said, we're going to cover it. Next week is going to be nuts, but Apple's first. We're going to take a break and when I come back, we got to talk about Google and Samsung, who are also next week. We'll be right back.

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• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. So, Apple is on Monday, and I feel like a theme of our conversation was we're, we know it's going to happen. We're just excited for it. Google is on Tuesday.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  I would say in a similar way, we extremely know what's going to happen.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  We know the most. The giant billboards and NFL football game ads and...

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  I don't. What's left for them to do? Tell us the price and the release date and show us some more camera samples?

• 1:04:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and hand them out, I guess.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  So there are some rumors, so.

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  So there's a Pixel 6 event, was what we should say.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro. We've seen teardown videos, like, there's some, like, assembly and disassembly video that was, like, you know, sent out to factories or something, and so we just got to watch those, which is incredible. There's a rumor of a magic eraser feature, so you can erase people in photos if you don't want to see them.

• 1:04:40Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 1:04:41Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Notably not the infamous chain link fence example from the Google I/O.

• 1:04:47Alex Cranz?

  Well, if the person paints a chain link fence on their face, hopefully you'll be able to delete them.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  And then there's also a rumor that they're gonna do a Pixel Pass, which is the thing that everyone was waiting for Apple to do with the iPhone, which is they'll bundle a bunch of Google services together and a payment plan for the Pixel.

• 1:05:05Alex Cranz?

  That sounds nice.

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  So the big question, now that I think about it, is like, the phone has been extremely leaked.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  We're familiar with it. We need to know the price. The big question, if they do this entire event and they're just like, here's the forthcoming ad blitz for the Pixel 6 and the 6 Pro, here's our marketing plan with Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile, here's where the stock will be, I'd be like, that is more than I've ever heard about that plan for a Pixel ever.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  They're not gonna, that's not, that's not gonna be part of the launch event. They're gonna, they're gonna lay out their marketing PowerPoint.

• 1:05:43Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm saying this would be better for, better for us in terms of understanding what, how serious they are with this one. Cause every year we're like, are they serious this year?

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  But like Pixel Pass, Google One subscription, all those bundles are cool, but they, like, the reason that Apple One is, as interesting as it is, is they've already gotten people to pay for most of those things.

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, a lot of people pay for Apple Music and Apple TV Plus, and I don't think as many people pay for games, but they want them to. You can't breathe at an iPhone without it asking you to pay for iCloud.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:20Nilay Patel?

  I don't know that Google has that demand to bundle up and then be like,

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  Just YouTube Red.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  The deal. Right, it's YouTube Red, which is great. It's YouTube Premium now.

• 1:06:29Alex Cranz?

  Excuse me, sorry.

• 1:06:30Nilay Patel?

  So I'm just saying, like, it's cool if they make it, but they gotta, they need to market the phone first. They need to get people on the train.

• 1:06:37Alex Cranz?

  People have to buy the phone.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  The other thing is, like, the reason the iPhone 12 and now I think the 13 sold so well and probably are selling so well, isn't just people saw Apple's deals on apple.com. They got aggressively sold the phones by carriers with trade-in deals and SPFs and, you know, free and blah, blah, blah. Will Google be able to secure those same sorts of deals and that same level of carrier promotion? Especially after all the carriers have just done a month of it with Apple. Are they gonna, are they gonna re-up it again with Google? I don't know. Part of me thinks that, like, the smartest thing Google could do is just start releasing these things in, like, July, so that they could just get the carrier deals ahead of Apple's deals.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  But that's like, that's, to me, the real question is, have they made the backroom deals that they need to make to actually get carriers, especially here in the US, to push it? Because, you know, Google's historically been really focused on the Pixel in the US, a couple other markets, apparently they're big in Japan. But if they can't win here, they're not going to win anywhere else.

• 1:07:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  Especially when you're up against everybody that's making Android phones in China, or Pixel even plan, and you're up against Samsung. And like, Samsung's having a hard time selling phones. They're having a hard time making phones, because of the chip shortage. But like, if Samsung is struggling right now, relatively speaking, what are the chances that Google won't be?

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  No, this is what I'm saying. Samsung's struggling right now because of some external factor, the chip shortage, is an opportunity for Google to go and win.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  If they've just got, like, a cache of phones that they've been making for a year before the chip shortage started, or what?

• 1:08:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. We remember, we still kind of don't know what chip is in this thing.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  That's fair.

• 1:08:24Nilay Patel?

  Right. So we know what Samsung is using.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  Right. So I don't know, like, maybe they've got an opportunity here with a different ship vendor and a different supply. Although, don't we think it's an XMS chip?

• 1:08:36Alex Cranz?

  I think that was the theory, right?

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  What's a computer?

• 1:08:40Nilay Patel?

  So we don't know. All I'm saying is if in a normal year, Google announcing this phone and saying, we're doing it. We're taking it serious. It's a first real flagship and then trying to take share from Samsung is like a dicey political proposition. Right. They're going to piss off their biggest vendor that is always threatening to go do some ties and stuff. This year, they're like, well, you didn't make any phones. We did. Everybody check out her pixel marketing and they they can just be like, sorry, like, you know, times are tough all over.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  You made a whole bunch of folding phones in the middle of a pandemic recession.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  That wasn't the right move.

• 1:09:18Alex Cranz?

  How's that working?

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  That's all I'm saying is that they have an opportunity here. And so I'm joking that what they should do is hold an hour long event about their marketing strategy. But when it comes to the outstanding question about the pixel phones, I would get more from that. Where they just like PowerPointed me through their carrier co-branding deals than another presentation on the camera, which they already told you about.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  The camera is actually a big open question. They need to see, they need to prove they can be competent in video, which they have yet to do full stop. And everyone caught up and surpassed them in camera quality, right? They haven't changed the pixel camera since like the two or the three. So they need to show that they are back, that they are like up there or winning again. And I don't think that that's the thing that they can definitively, they could say that they have in their launch event. But like, the real question will be, when we review them, have they actually done the thing that they brought the pixel back to being class leading? Or at least competitive? Because if the pixel doesn't have a competitive camera, then the only reason to buy it is because you like Google's version of Android.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  And I like Google's version of Android, but I don't hate Samsung so much that I wouldn't use it to get a better phone.

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think it's interesting to think about what class leading camera means right now.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just, they all are. Apple introduced photographic styles like you can make it look like a Samsung camera. You can make it look like a pixel like they've all converged more or less than a set of looks. They've all converged on HDR. The pixel was way ahead because HDR was an actually novel technology and it took Apple and Samsung two or three years to catch up.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:11:01Nilay Patel?

  To the original HDR implementation pixel had. Then you've got crazy zooms and this one appears to have a crazy zoom. Then you've got video and they saw video like we're not at a place where we're saying we need more resolution. We're not a place where we're saying we need a different, better, more natural looks. Like we're, we're at a very technical place of camera quality now.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  Apart from video, which I agree with you. So it's, it's just like how they're going to prove that point is going to be interesting. I think the astrophotography was not like people are like, I gotta throw my iPhone in the river and get.

• 1:11:32Alex Cranz?

  I was the only one excited about that.

• 1:11:36Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I'm excited for it. I mean.

• 1:11:40Alex Cranz?

  Have we heard any other like rumors? Are we going to get like, I don't know, a new computer or anything from Google this year? Is there any other hardware? Is it just going to be the pixel?

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Rumors? I mean, there was, there was a rumor of like a charging dock, like a wireless charging thing, not a dock, but you know, a pad.

• 1:11:59Alex Cranz?

  No clips though.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not expecting a new version of clips.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  If you're not familiar and why would you be? Cause who remembers it? Google made a standalone baby camera that was just like the pixel camera with no screen. It was called clips and the idea was you wouldn't take the picture. You would just set it down and it would know when to take the picture. They didn't make a second version of it.

• 1:12:21Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:12:22Nilay Patel?

  That thing was, it's funny. I haven't much like, I'm like, oh, that was fun. Yeah, but creepy.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So Google, we all, we knew when their event was for a long time, then Apple announced theirs.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  Apple officially on Tuesdays.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Nilay Patel?

  They announced it on Monday. So, okay.

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  Very nice of them.

• 1:12:39Nilay Patel?

  And then Samsung, it's like the last minute. It was like, yo, we're gonna do an event next week. They could have waited one week and had a whole week to themselves.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:12:50Nilay Patel?

  They didn't do that. What is Samsung doing next week?

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  Uh, it's unpacked part two.

• 1:12:55Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  The invite has stuff about, you know, everyone is really personal and everything is, you know, you get to express yourself. And then the graphic has got a bunch of different colored panels coming together into cubes. So my guess is that what we're looking at is you'll be able to, if you want to buy one of Samsung's uh, wonderful flip phones, because those are the kinds of phones they're selling now, you'll be able to like customize the colors of the two sides of it. That's my guess.

• 1:13:28Alex Cranz?

  I don't know if I need a streaming event to tell me about that.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know either. Maybe they'll go back to being truly deeply weird and they'll just like, it'll just be like a, you know, 45 minute long vision quest.

• 1:13:45Alex Cranz?

  Oh, what?

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm just reading this quote that you read. I'm gonna read the whole thing to people.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:13:49Nilay Patel?

  Our, our users are multifaceted and live life in so many colorful, interesting and unique ways. As such, the technology they use every day should reflect their individuality.

• 1:14:00Nilay Patel?

  Join Galaxy Impact 2 to see how Samsung is opening up new experiences for self-expression through technology.

• 1:14:06Alex Cranz?

  Oh, so we're gonna get like, instead of a BTS edition phone, we're gonna get one for each guy in the band.

• 1:14:17Alex Cranz?

  I'm pumped.

• 1:14:19Nilay Patel?

  It does, it just does seem like a bunch of colors.

• 1:14:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Nilay Patel?

  Patterns. A whole event for that seems strange to me.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  It also seems strange to me, but I don't know. I did the whole video about how phones can be thought of as fashion objects. Maybe they'll just, it'll just be like a, like an actual like runway show.

• 1:14:40Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna see your face. They're gonna, they're gonna do a cut of it.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely did not license my face, my likeness, any part of me to Samsung.

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  Amazing. I mean, that's just a packed week.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then we got a party on Friday to celebrate being done.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm so excited. All right, Dieter, you told me we could not leave this episode without talking about the VanMove V.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:15:03Nilay Patel?

  E-bike.

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  You were hyped about?

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  It is pretty exciting. It's the V, not the five, which is odd. It's a pedal assist e-bike. That's what VanMove makes. You know, there's technical details. It's got suspension and it's got two hub motors, but the key point here is it goes 37 miles per hour or 60 kilometers per hour.

• 1:15:24Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  It's got a 700 watt hour battery, so it'll go for a while. And it is only going to be like relatively cheap. I think it's going to be, yeah, 3,500 bucks, which for that class of e-bike is pretty impressive. And VanMove's thing, and Thomas Ricker wrote a great piece on this, is they are really trying to push local governments to change rules around e-bikes to allow for transportation like this. And hopefully cities to like, change up roads to like make space for transportation like this. Cause I don't know, man. A bike going nearly 40 miles an hour in a bike lane in a city? No, thank you.

• 1:16:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that seems nuts.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  So you'll be in the lane. You'll be, you'll be out there with the cars. And if you're out there with the cars, like, please wear a helmet. But also, our cities are designed to accommodate and make a ton of space for ever increasing SUVs. And, you know, giant trucks and whatever. And a lot of that, a lot of those trips could be done with something like a bike. And so VanMove is trying to push that. Again, everybody knows I've become radicalized by e-bikes and I want everyone to be on an e-bike, whatever. If you're able to do it. But there are other bikes in this zone. There are other like pedal assist or there are like electric motorcycles that happen to have pedals on them, so they count as bikes.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. When you're going 40 miles an hour on this thing, are you pedaling?

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  You need to pedal.

• 1:16:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And you can pedal at 40 miles an hour.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Well, there's gears and then there's a motor. So you're you're pedaling as you're basic, you moving your feet is basically the equivalent of pushing on the gas pedal. You just have to keep moving it. It's kind of the long and the short of it.

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  I will say this bike looks sick and I want one immediately.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it looks sick.

• 1:17:14Alex Cranz?

  It's super dope.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  But the pedals here are like, the line between this and like just a motorcycle is incredibly fuzzy. So like, what sort of training does a rider need to have to be going 40 miles an hour on one of these things? Will the streets be designed to accommodate it? Will they be safe around cars? Will cities allow it? Like, all of those questions are like, shruggy? Like, not even Amsterdam, the like, the Eden of biking, the greatest place in the world to own a bike and to get around on a bike, is ready to deal with a machine like this. You can go, you can buy one and go rogue and, you know, ride around, bomb around New York City, like people do with a Super 73 or whatever. But Venmo got a huge infusion of cash recently.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  They're like, they're seriously hard charging and they want to, you know, them and a bunch of others, they want to like, this is the future of transportation, they hope. But like, no one is ready for it yet.

• 1:18:15Nilay Patel?

  This thing is faster. I had a gas powered scooter in law school in Madison. It was called the Honda Ruckus. It could barely crack 40 miles an hour.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  This thing is faster than that, which is just bonkers to think about.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  And it's 3,500 bucks. And it's all electric.

• 1:18:31Nilay Patel?

  Alright, I'm buying one. And I'm not buying a Pixel 6 on the show next week. I'm gonna buy a-

• 1:18:36Alex Cranz?

  How fast does, does the one that Josh did that great story on, the Aero?

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't think that's capped. I don't, it might be like a 28 class 3, but those things are pretty easy to mod to go a little faster.

• 1:18:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  You're talking about Josh's delivery worker story.

• 1:18:55Alex Cranz?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's like, you buy those from like a vendor and they've got shops everywhere that like mod them and repair them for you.

• 1:19:01Alex Cranz?

  Let them go 50 miles an hour.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Alex Cranz?

  Whee!

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  Okay. We've gone over, my friends.

• 1:19:08Nilay Patel?

  We have.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  So, next week, come to our party. VoxMediaEvents.com/ontheverge. I want to say that's correct, right?

• 1:19:18Nilay Patel?

  I hope so.

• 1:19:18Alex Cranz?

  Neil is gonna have to pay for a bet onstage.

• 1:19:24Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:19:24Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:19:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Vox Media Events slash On The Verge.

• 1:19:30Nilay Patel?

  Offer code $99 now. We'd love to see you there. Dieter's gonna premiere a movie that he made about handspring.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  Well, it's a short movie. It's like a half an hour.

• 1:19:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a movie.

• 1:19:40Alex Cranz?

  It's a movie.

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  A documentary. I mean, the whole thing is gonna be wild. We'd love to see you there. Come to our party. That's what I'm saying. Pay us money and go to our party.

• 1:19:51Nilay Patel?

  Stop parties, right? You can tweet at us in addition to coming to our party. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Addy is at TheDexterYaki. Dieter's at Backalun. I'm at Reckless. Decoder this week was Dave Limp from Amazon. Next week, it's the CEO of Jeep, Christian Niñez, who we talked about hybrid cars quite a bit. That's happening. And then, Dieter, you've got something special happening on Tuesday.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  We're doing special episodes of The Vergecast. We did the Surface Stravaganza last week. We will do maybe one or two more sort of tech event or review focused things, but we also are gonna have some episodes focusing in on really specific nerdy, but hopefully fun things. Little hint, I didn't know that little detail about how USB C on the MacBook works just randomly.

• 1:20:40Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 1:20:43Alex Cranz?

  Is this how you get your RCS episode?

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not gonna say that you're wrong.

• 1:20:48Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. All right. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  Get a shot.

• 1:21:12Speaker 07

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• 1:21:48Speaker 08

  Support for this show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything, ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to CoreWeave.com/ReadyForAnything.