Pod Insights The Vergecast James Webb Space Telescope to launch next week / cool gadgets announced this week About this episode Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Loren Grush discuss NASA's plan for launching the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to NASA’s Hubble telescope.
Second half of the show, the crew go through all the gadgets and software updates announced this past week.
Stories discussed this week:
NASA’s massive next-generation space telescope arrives in South America ahead of launch
NASA sets new date for James Webb Space Telescope launch
Five former SpaceX employees speak out about harassment at the company
Sony Glass Sound Speaker review: it’s not what it looks like
Analogue Pocket review: Game Boy games have never looked so good
Opal’s C1 offers DSLR-rivaling video quality in a small form factor
Dell’s Concept Stanza converts your chicken scratch to digital text
Amazon Echo Show 15 review: Alexa’s on your wall
Oppo’s Find N is an impressive first folding phone
Huawei’s P50 Pocket is a stylish clamshell foldable launching this month
Samsung’s working on a rollable smartwatch with a camera
Apple releases iOS 15.2 with App Privacy Report, Digital Legacy, and more
Apple scrubs controversial CSAM detection feature from webpage but says plans haven’t changed
Universal Control won’t be coming to macOS Monterey until sometime this spring
Adobe launches Creative Cloud Express, a new app that simplifies its powerful editing tools
Snap launches Story Studio, a standalone video editing app for mobile
Log4j is patched, but the exploits are just getting started
‘No easy solution’ for Tesla Cybertruck’s comically large windshield wiper, Elon Musk says
Chrome OS tablets are getting fancier but not better
Former FCC officials are worried about air safety fears delaying 5G rollout
Toyota is going to make you pay to start your car with your key fob
Delivery failed
How to sneak into a Bored Ape Yacht Club party
Matter’s plan to save the smart home
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Transcript 13,411 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? This week on the Vergecast, Alex Krantz and Lauren Grush join the show. We talk all about the James Webb Space Telescope. It's launching at the end of the year. Then it's a lightning round of gadgets and tech news taking us out of 2021. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.
0:13 Speaker 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.
0:58 Speaker 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.
1:47 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of 2022.
1:52 Speaker 02 Leading right into it because we're just, we're not going to do any 2021.
1:56 Nilay Patel? This is it. This is our last show of the year. It's true. I'm your friend, Neelai. Dieter Bohn is here.
2:01 Speaker 02 I am the guy wishing Neelai a happy birthday.
2:04 Speaker 03 Aww, happy birthday.
2:06 Nilay Patel? I was telling Dieter that I think odd numbers, they sound older than even numbers. So I'm turning an odd number and I just like, don't want to think about it. But next year will be an even number. I'll be like, it's my birthday. So it works. This is my theory of aging. Anyway, Lauren Grush is here.
2:21 Speaker 03 Hi, surprise, I'm here.
2:22 Nilay Patel? And Alex Trans is here. Hello. So it is in fact my birthday and I'm just going to admit it. I've barely prepared for this show. I just like, I just like hung out all day. I hope, just grant me this affordance.
2:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:35 Nilay Patel? Is all I'm saying. I didn't want to miss our last show of the year, but it was also my birthday. So Dieter is going to drive the show today.
2:42 Speaker 02 Neelai, for your birthday, I, um, I want to tell you that I have come around to believing that IR is stupid and IR blasters are stupid.
2:50 Nilay Patel? They're dumb. They've always been dumb.
2:51 Speaker 02 But I was thinking about it some more and I'm like, you know, it's still like a relatively easy, cheap, almost interoperable standard that anybody can use to communicate with anything else if they have the IR ports. So maybe it's sort of analogous to a headphone jack.
3:05 Nilay Patel? Maybe. The fact that wired headphones are trendy again is like my personal, it's like, it's like a victory for me every time I see one of those stories. Maria, who people might know that she's been in lots of videos, you know, she's one of the trendiest people on our staff. And she did, she had an Instagram story about her wired headphones the other day and I was like, I did it. That was me. I don't think that she knows that I think that. So Maria, if you're listening, just I want you to know you gave me that moment, that personal victory. But yeah, no, it's our last show of the year. Uh, we're taking the next couple of weeks off. We'll be back after CS. I hope everybody has a good break. But there's still like a lot going on, including a big thing happening towards the end of the year. That's why Lauren is here. The James Webb Space Telescope.
3:43 Speaker 03 Neelai, it's not just happening at the end of the year. It's happening currently on Christmas Eve.
3:50 Nilay Patel? What? Hooray. We're going to hit Santa with a telescope. We're going to hit Santa with a telescope.
3:59 Nilay Patel? Merry Christmas, boys and girls.
4:01 Speaker 03 No, I am doomed forever to cover some major launch on a really important holiday. That is just how these things shake out.
4:12 Nilay Patel? So it moved. It was supposed to be the 22nd and it moved to Christmas Eve. Why did that?
4:15 Speaker 03 It was supposed to be the 18th. Actually, it was supposed to be 20 years ago.
4:21 Speaker 03 And now it is happening on December 24th. Yeah.
4:26 Nilay Patel? All right, let's start at the beginning. What is the James Webb Space Telescope? It is a big deal. It's been people have been working on this for a long time. What is it?
4:32 Speaker 03 Yes, so James Webb, or JWST for short, is widely considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. You might be aware of some of its iconic images. It's currently orbiting around the Earth and it sees in optical wavelengths, but JWST is just going to be so much more powerful and more sensitive than Hubble. And it also sees in infrared light. So it's, it's a special type of light on the, on the part of the optical or the light wavelength spectrum. And the reason we use infrared to, to see in is because we're trying to look at some of the most distant galaxies
5:11 Speaker 03 in the universe. So these would be galaxies that are roughly 13.6 billion light years away. And that's an important number because we think the universe as we know it, after the Big Bang, was 13.8 billion years ago. And so because light it takes such a long time to reach us, if these things are 13.6 billion light years away, then we think that they formed roughly 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang. So we're basically looking at baby pictures of the universe is kind of how I think of it. And they're also moving away from us when they're, when they're that far from us, they're moving away from us because our universe is expanding.
5:54 Speaker 03 So they're, the farthest ones are moving the fastest away from us. And when you move away, The light from those galaxies gets shifted, it gets red shifted, so it moves towards the infrared side of the spectrum. So that's why we have this amazing new infrared telescope. It's going to be able to see all this infrared light from these distant galaxies and really show us like what the universe looked like when it was in its infancy.
6:19 Nilay Patel? So you said the successor to Hubble, I'm just, whatever, it's my birthday, I'm an old man now, I'm just gonna date myself. I was in like elementary school when the Hubble launched, it was a huge deal. The mirror was broken, they had to fix the mirror.
6:32 Speaker 03 Uh, yeah, don't remind me.
6:34 Nilay Patel? But this was like, I mean, this is like the highlight of fifth grade, it's like they fixed the mirror, right?
6:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:37 Nilay Patel? Does, I mean, I was like, I'm gonna be an astronaut, it didn't work out. Spoiler alert.
6:43 Speaker 02 You got a couple of billion dollars, you can still do it.
6:45 Nilay Patel? Well, yeah, no, now I'm just gonna like float around in Michael Strahan, it's great. But is the Hubble over? Are we, you know, like, sent it crashing in the ocean? What's going on with it?
6:52 Speaker 03 Oh, no, Hubble is definitely not over. It definitely won't last forever, but I know, we, Hubble is still a very valuable part of astronomy and continues to work to this day. This is actually, yes, it's called a successor, but really it's a compliment because Hubble has these amazing capabilities and Hubble actually saw some really distant galaxies. You know, there's this really great image called the Hubble Deep Field and it has all these incredible number of galaxies, far off galaxies that we were able to see with the telescope, but it just can't go back as far as the JWC will be able to. And so this is really just kind of adding to our knowledge and having an even more amazing tool at our disposal. But Hubble will still be a very valuable tool as long as it's up and running.
7:37 Nilay Patel? So what are the like the big, primary unanswered questions we're hoping to get answers to here, you know, beyond very, very pretty pictures of far off galaxies?
7:46 Speaker 02 Everything, right?
7:49 Speaker 02 Like basically everything.
7:50 Speaker 03 I mean, that's a pretty big one, Dieter.
7:53 Nilay Patel? You know, I'd, I'd, I'd never turn down a baby picture, don't get me wrong, but.
7:58 Speaker 03 Well, the the evolution of stars and galaxies is big. So we really wanted to know, you know, how the earliest galaxies evolved over time. Also, we want to have a better idea of just kind of the large scale structure of the universe. So, you know, one thing Hubble that was really great at was was proving that the universe is expanding. And so we really want to get like a better understanding of just how fast it's expanding and what that means for the future of the universe. And then probably the biggest thing, not the biggest, but one of the biggest things that JWC will do that nobody really even thought of when they came up with the telescope, you know, roughly three decades ago, is using it to
8:40 Speaker 03 look into the atmospheres of exoplanets. So exoplanets are planets that are outside of our solar system orbiting around other stars. And we didn't even know exoplanets existed prior to the 1990s. Obviously, people theorize that they existed, but we just didn't have a confirmation of them. And now we know about thousands of exoplanets because we've sent missions into space to actually find them and study them. But the problem with studying exoplanets is, you know, it's a really dark rock or gaseous object right next to a really bright star or sun. And it's hard to see that because the star's light drowns out that object. So the only way that we really can know that an exoplanet
9:24 Speaker 03 exists is through a technique called transiting. It's not the only way, but it's probably the best way. So basically, when the planet passes in front of the star, it like momentarily dips the star's light, just because there's a little bit of blockage there. And we can infer that a planet is there. But we want to know like what's on the planet, right? Because we're we're looking for Earth 2.0. We're looking for possible signs of life outside of our solar system. And the best way to do that is to see what's in a planet's atmosphere. But like I said, it's incredibly hard because there's it's getting drowned out by the star's light. So what JW's team might be able to do is because it's so powerful
10:05 Speaker 03 and so sensitive, is that it will be able to look at the edges of that exoplanet as it passes in front of the star or at the edge of the star and see the light as it filters through the edges of the atmosphere. Once that light passes through all those gases and all those molecules, it warps the light in such a way that we can actually tell what molecules are present, what gas is present. And depending on what gas is there, you know, then we might be able to infer if there are signs of life on the planet below because, you know, people, we put a lot of gases into our planet's atmosphere that wouldn't be there if we weren't here. Sorry, I hate to say it, but we're disgusting.
10:48 Nilay Patel? Look, I stand outside just shooting off my hairspray into the sun every day, being like, find us aliens. I got my Aquanet, just like looking for little green men.
10:58 Alex Cranz? We're gonna be looking for disgusting aliens.
11:00 Speaker 03 Yes, yeah, we're looking for disgusting byproducts of alien life. Neel, you're just doing your part to help other aliens find us.
11:09 Nilay Patel? I'm running SETI at home and I'm shooting hairspray into the sky. You said this was supposed to launch 20 years ago. I mean, it has, it has been like a long road.
11:20 Speaker 03 I believe the most ambitious projected launch date was in 2007, probably somewhere between 2007 and 2011. I mean, they first came up with the most, the earliest concept, it wasn't the iteration that we know now, but people started talking about having a telescope of this nature as early as 1989. And then, then it became more formulated in the 90s. And yeah, they had these really naive cost estimates of, you know, $500,000 to a billion dollars. And it would launch in 2007, between 2007 and 2011. Obviously, we overshot all of that. And now we're looking at a price tag of roughly, you know, nearly
12:04 Speaker 03 to $10 billion.
12:07 Alex Cranz? So you're saying it's a James Cameron movie?
12:11 Speaker 03 But that's also a great point that you bring up. Perspective is key here because, you know, this is going to revolutionize astronomy and astrophysics. And yes, 10 billion sounds like a lot of money, but it is chump change when we put it in the perspective of other things that we spend money on, you know, either from the federal government or like just how much we spend on potato chips, as somebody reminded me.
12:33 Alex Cranz? I just think it's wild that like, we're gonna see what happened right after the Big Bang.
12:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:39 Alex Cranz? I messaged you earlier this week about this because I was still stuck earlier this week thinking that the Big Bang was like a single explosion and everything exploded out.
12:50 Speaker 03 No.
12:51 Alex Cranz? So I think I messaged you just saying, what direction are they gonna look? And you're like, that's not how the universe works.
12:57 Speaker 03 No. Really, the way to think of the Big Bang is just that's, it sparked the expansion of our universe. And so that's how we, we, it's a, it's a very pivotal time, obviously, in our history. But yeah, it's, it's really when the expansion began. And it's, and it's, there are smarter people that can talk about this than me. But yeah, it's when the first galaxies and, and there was, you know, very basic elements in the universe at the time. And then they kind of formulated to form stars and form galaxies. So what we're really seeing is the first signs of that formulation of, of stars and galaxies coming together, which is incredible.
13:35 Alex Cranz? And we might also find dark matter, like we might be able to find dark matter or see dark matter with this?
13:42 Speaker 03 I have not looked into that as much, but yes, there are dark matter studies, but you pointing that out to me reminded me to look into it. But I've been more fascinated with like the exoplanet side and.
13:52 Alex Cranz? I mean, aliens are also cool. I get it.
13:57 Nilay Patel? So I hate to be the downer. We're talking about what we are gonna be able to do with this thing, but it's gotta get off the ground. It is itself very complicated. I've, I am always, I'm totally fascinated by the pictures of the mirror, which is this enormous mirror. They're launching it from the middle of nowhere. How, how are they getting it to where it needs to go, keeping it safe and getting it into the sky safely?
14:19 Speaker 03 That's the probably most wild part and the reason why everyone has such anxiety leading up to this is because it can't launch to space the way that it needs to be in space. It has to launch folded up because no current rockets that we have available are wide enough to get it in its full configuration out into space. So it has to fold up like, you know, a little origami figurine. And then, once it gets into space, it ignites this really complicated unfurling process. And you have to understand that the telescope is a mixture of hard and soft things.
14:59 Speaker 03 So the mirror, obviously, is this very intricate, gold-plated mirror, very tough, you know, stuff. But then, in order to make sure that it stays super cold, which is important because it sees in the infrared, it has to have a sun shield that is made out of this very thin, almost, it looks kind of like a plasticky material. It's called Kaptone. And that has to unfurl in space too, so that it blocks the rays from the sun. And so it doesn't get so hot. It has to, it has to operate at a temperature close to negative 400 degrees Fahrenheit. But this, this material of the sun shield is so thin and it's such a very thin membrane.
15:40 Speaker 03 And there are four layers of it. So there is a process in space where that sun shield slowly opens up. And, you know, it has to work or else the whole thing kind of falls apart. So that's just one of many different things that have to happen while it unfurls in space. And I think we are, we've been, I'm working on a story about that unfurling process. And the numbers I've heard is, you know, somewhere over 300 single points of failure.
16:11 Nilay Patel? Oh, great.
16:12 Speaker 03 Yeah. And obviously, it's what you think it means. It's like, that thing must happen, or else the entire thing does not work. And it's just a terrifying thing to think about. So, so yeah, normally when, I mean, not normally, but most of the time when I'm following a launch, we aren't happy until the thing separates from the spacecraft and then it unfurls its solar panels and it starts getting power. That's usually when we declare victory. But with JWST, we won't be declaring victory for at least another month, because that's how long it takes to unfurl and to get out to its intended orbit, which is a million miles from Earth.
16:52 Speaker 02 Oh, so actually, speaking of the intended orbit, can you explain why this thing is launching in the middle of nowhere? And actually, can you define middle of nowhere?
17:00 Speaker 03 Well, it's launching in Kerou, French Guiana, which is the site of Europe's primary spaceport. So this is an international collaboration. It's meant to be, you know, used by astronomers and scientists all over the world. And so, we made a deal with Ariana Space to launch the JWST on their Ariane 5 rocket, and their primary launch site is in French Guiana. And, I mean, for most launches, I don't know if this has to do with JWST, so forgive me orbital mechanics people, but the reason that Kerou is such a great site is because it's near the equator. And so, we really like to launch from near the equator,
17:42 Speaker 03 because that's where the Earth is moving the fastest. So you get a really, like, a little boost when you launch closer to the equator, when you're getting satellites into orbit. So that's why it was located there.
17:53 Nilay Patel? What are the next, like, that month, 300 points of failure? Are they clustered at the beginning of that month? Like, will we know right away? Or is it like, 30 days later, we're like, crap, 16 things have to happen today?
18:05 Speaker 03 It's a two-week process of unfurling. So, the Sunshield deploys over a period of many days. So there's really no time to relax.
18:16 Speaker 02 It's just a dull anxiety. Well, and to be clear, we can't, if something goes wrong, can we, can we send astronauts up there to, to fix it?
18:24 Speaker 03 No, not, not really.
18:26 Speaker 02 It's too far out. I wish, I wish everybody could have seen Lauren's face just now. No, no, no, no, no.
18:33 Speaker 02 Can Bruce Willis get up there with a drill and do something?
18:37 Speaker 03 Right now, we don't even have the capabilities in astronauts to where JWC is going because it's going a million miles from Earth. But even if we did, the telescope was not made to be serviceable like Hubble was. You know, from the beginning, Hubble was designed to be serviceable. So the way that they built the components, they built them in such a way that you could swap things out, fix them with certain tools, even they designed completely new tools just to work with Hubble. But with JWC, that was just, it was just not an option. Now, I did talk to some NASA folks about this.
19:17 Speaker 03 There are targets on it so that if maybe we want to try refueling it someday, we could do that. But if, say, an actuator just completely breaks, or if the sun shield doesn't deploy, or many other of these things happen, then we are kind of out of luck.
19:34 Speaker 02 Once again, the right to repair is so important.
19:38 Nilay Patel? Well, not so, I mean, the Hubble thing is like really, it was a totally different paradigm of space, right? Like, they thought the space shuttle would just be going up every day to fix satellites.
19:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:47 Nilay Patel? And so they like, I don't know, it was just like crazy to think that that's what we thought would be happening in space. And then like quickly, we're like, wait, that's it. We just launched another satellite. That's easier.
19:57 Alex Cranz? This is the Microsoft surface of satellites, right?
20:02 Alex Cranz? Very difficult.
20:03 Speaker 03 What you've ordered is what you get.
20:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Is there a reason that they designed it? I mean, it's been a long time. They're ready to launch it. But is there a reason that it's designed with so much anxiety built into the unfurling process? Could it have been more redundant?
20:19 Speaker 03 I asked that question and the answer is basically no.
20:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:24 Speaker 03 Just because there, I mean, there's this thing in the launch industry known as the tyranny of the fairing. And essentially what they're talking about, so at the top of a rocket, it's known as a payload fairing, and it's what covers the payload so that it doesn't burn up as you're launching to space. The problem with that is that the bigger you make your rocket, the more fuel you need in it, right? So at some point, you have to limit how big your rocket is, and that size limit is what often dictates the design of a satellite, right? So you can't launch something that's wider than the Falcon 9 on the Falcon 9 unless you fold it up. So that's, that's where this comes in.
21:06 Speaker 03 And this, and the, the thing is, they decided they wanted to have this mirror be how, you know, uh, over, I think, rough, it's like roughly more than 20 feet long, right?
21:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:17 Speaker 03 And because of that.
21:18 Nilay Patel? If you haven't seen a picture of this mirror, go Google. It's like a wild thing to look at.
21:21 Speaker 03 And because they wanted that size of a mirror, they knew they had to figure out a way to fold it up because there was no rocket that was going to be able, like, the mirror alone is too wide for any rocket available. Now, all the SpaceX people will come at me and be like, well, one day, we'll have Starship, and that could eventually launch really big telescopes, which Elon has definitely talked about, but that rocket is not available to us at the moment.
21:47 Nilay Patel? And then it's being delayed like day by day, right? 18th to 22nd, 24th. Why is that happening?
21:51 Speaker 03 Well, the latest was a communication issue between the rocket and the payload, as I understand it. But they think they have it resolved, but they're having a meeting at 6:00 PM on Thursday. So it's very possible that it could be Christmas Day launch by the time this podcast airs, which would be amazing.
22:15 Speaker 03 That was the latest thing. The other one, I mean, they had to push it back a few days because some clamp snapped and sent vibrations throughout the entire spacecraft that wasn't supposed to happen. So they wanted to make sure that that didn't damage anything. But you have to understand, we've never launched anything of this complexity ever before. And so, yeah, we have experience putting payloads on rockets, but we definitely do not have experience putting this kind of payload on a rocket. So everything that we've done before, it helps, but it's not, it's all a whole new experience. So of course, there's going to be challenges along the way because putting the most complicated space telescope
23:00 Speaker 03 on top of its rocket is just a completely new experience for us.
23:04 Alex Cranz? Is this more or less complicated from like a engineering perspective than putting somebody on the moon?
23:11 Speaker 03 Ooh.
23:12 Nilay Patel? Well, Alex would think the existential question.
23:14 Speaker 03 Oh, my goodness. I don't know.
23:16 Alex Cranz? Because I keep hearing that like, this is the most complex thing we've ever sent. And it's like, maybe we sent like three guys.
23:22 Nilay Patel? And they were emotionally complex.
23:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:26 Nilay Patel? I've watched it. You see First Man? That's like a, you know.
23:29 Speaker 03 That's a great question because once you're in space, the people can potentially, you know, fix errors. And I mean, obviously, it's really still very hard, but they can still have some agency over the spacecraft. If something goes wrong with JWST, we have to send signals to it from the ground. That's our only way of, you know, fixing it. But then again, it does not need life support systems or food or anything. So I don't know. This is a great question. Something for engineers to debate, who are not me.
24:06 Nilay Patel? All right. So this is hopefully happening Christmas Eve, maybe by the time you're listening to this, Christmas Day. We'll be looking forward to that. Lauren, last thing I want to ask you about, you wrote a pretty big piece about the culture at SpaceX this week.
24:18 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
24:19 Nilay Patel? Five former employees who spoke about the culture, about harassment. SpaceX is one of those companies that we just don't hear a lot about internally, but it seems like this was a big deal. There was another essay by one of these employees, whistleblower site called Lioness. It's hard to describe what Lioness is, but you can go look at it. Tell us about that story a little bit.
24:37 Speaker 03 Yeah. So one former employee decided, who just recently left, decided to pin this essay in Lioness. And the allegations that she made were pretty shocking. And so, you know, we kind of worked to find other former employees, mostly interns, I've realized, who worked at SpaceX to see if they could kind of corroborate some of her experiences. And they definitely did. And yeah, I would just encourage everyone to go read it. It's a rare glimpse inside of SpaceX's culture. And I think the main theme is that they all felt like they themselves experienced inappropriate behavior, or they saw other women and non-binary
25:20 Speaker 03 individuals experiencing inappropriate behavior. And when it came to whether or not to report it, they all had very different and inconsistent responses from the HR department or their managers, many of which that they did not see as adequate. And they all have their various opinions as to why that is. So I'll leave it to them to explain it. So.
25:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah. That piece is on the sun. It's just really great work. And I wanted to call it out before I let you go.
25:46 Speaker 03 Yeah, thank you.
25:47 Nilay Patel? So you can go read that. And then sometime around Christmas, Lauren will be crewing The Verge. It'll be Lauren, Santa, and the James Webb Space Telescope all together. All right. Thanks a lot, Lauren.
25:57 Speaker 03 Thank you.
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27:07 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Dieter, you've assembled a list of gadgets here for us to talk about.
27:13 Speaker 02 Usually, we save the wacky gadgets for the end, but it's, you know, it's the holidays.
27:18 Nilay Patel? I just want to tell people, usually, there's like themes in how these are ordered, but this list is just titled "cool gadgets."
27:27 Nilay Patel? So, look, Sony made a speaker that looks like a bong. And I just think that they deserve some credit for making a bong-shaped speaker. It's glass, it's got a light on it. The glass is part of the speaker, and it like does a little candlelight thing. And I don't know what's going on with CES this year. As of this recording, some of us are going. We'll see if COVID allows that to happen. This is the sort of thing that we would expect to see at CES. But I kind of like that Sony just said, you know what? Here it is. Here's the thing, we made this.
28:01 Speaker 02 Just blaze it.
28:02 Nilay Patel? There's a throwaway line. So Chris Welch reviewed this thing, it's called the Sony Glass Sound Speaker. There's a throwaway line, I was reading it, and like, he's just, Welch is like, Sony believes in this so much that this is the third generation of this device. And I, you know, there's like, there's just a handful of teams at Sony that I am desperate to know better. Like, there's the team that makes the party speakers. And they're like, here's what the frat boys need this year. And they have, they have to have that meeting. Right? They're like, and then there's, right next to them, I'm assuming it's very competitive, there's like the karaoke speaker department, right? And you can just see that they kind of overlap, but they don't. The party speakers are not karaoke speaker. Like, I know it.
28:46 Nilay Patel? I know that that's a fight inside the halls of Sony. And if anybody wants me to write that expose, I am ready and willing to do it.
28:54 Nilay Patel? Then there's like the high end home theater stuff that makes no sense department. Like here's a $20,000 short range projector that you can put one inch from the wall and it'll put up 400 inch 720p picture. And it's like, none of that makes sense, but I love that you've made 15 of these.
29:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:12 Nilay Patel? Then there's like the part that's like, we made yet another memory card format. Right? Like Sony just does, that's what they do. That's just a core part of their business. And then there's this group that's like the wacky gadgets that you would never expect. Like this one, it's a glass tube, has an LED in the middle that flickers like a candle. Why? But they've done it for three generations and running.
29:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:36 Nilay Patel? And I just want to know, I just, I just like, if those PMs call me, they can come on Decoder. If anyone knows, like, do they have a P and L? Do they have to go to like the Sony executive meeting and be like, you know, our budget for this year and our revenue really, really suggests that we should make a fourth generation of the bong candle.
29:55 Speaker 02 Here's, here's the answer. Are you ready?
29:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:57 Speaker 02 The amount of R and D that goes into making a bong candle speaker is so intense that the people who make it have to cut themselves off from the world. And so nobody has given them the message yet that there are no more WeWork lobbies to fill up with these things.
30:16 Alex Cranz? They're just out there, they're on like an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, working on this project. They just send missives back.
30:23 Nilay Patel? Like there's, there's some accountant at Sony with like a spreadsheet, right? That's like, like sales projections for bong candles.
30:33 Alex Cranz? Two.
30:34 Nilay Patel? And no one will pay attention to them. I'm just saying, I'll give you the whole show. Like that accountant, like talk to me.
30:42 Speaker 02 Yeah. Okay. Another cool gadget is the analog pocket. This thing is great. So it's a, it's a Game Boy. It's a modern Game Boy. They can play Game Boy cartridges. You can also get an adapter to play game gear cartridges. It is incredibly well designed. It has an amazing screen. Andrew Webster reviewed it. And I just, I look at this thing and I can see in my mind's eye, a box in my parents attic with my Game Boy cartridges.
31:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
31:09 Speaker 02 All I want to do is go find them.
31:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah. You should.
31:12 Speaker 02 So we, we had one here in San Francisco because Veron was taking photos of it for Andrew's review. And it is, it's amazing. It's, it, it feels great. The plastic isn't quite like ultra-premium, I guess is how I would say. It's like, you can kind of feel like there was maybe like the tiniest of cost cutting there. But in terms of like a thing to play Game Boy games, there's literally nothing better and they really didn't need to go this hard. But they did and it's amazing.
31:37 Nilay Patel? So is it the size of like the original Game Boy or like the Game Boy Pocket?
31:42 Speaker 02 Oh, it's like the original Game Boy. It's like a little tiny bit bigger, maybe even than the original Game Boy.
31:47 Nilay Patel? It's that big?
31:48 Speaker 02 It's pretty big. Yeah. But like, it feels comfortable, right? Because like the shoulder buttons are at the base of where the cartridge goes in. And it's got four buttons instead of two. Um, and so like, if you think about the ergonomics of your hand, uh, you, you don't want, if you're going to make it much smaller, you're, you're going to make a whole bunch of other trade-offs. And like, the trade-offs they chose to make was having a really great screen and the ability for it to do more stuff than just be a Game Boy, run Game Boy cartridges. It can, you could put the adapter in for Game Boy. And so it's like, it's a more interesting, versatile gadget than just a Game Boy game.
32:20 Nilay Patel? Well, the reason I ask is, um, not to give any budding young students this idea, but the Game Boy Pocket fit perfectly into the slide cover of a TI-82 calculator.
32:34 Nilay Patel? And so when I was in high school, we'd pretend that we were programming our TI-82s in calculus, but really we were playing Zelda. And so at the beginning of calculus, we would have, we would do it, but you would turn it on and the only sound you could not mute on the Game Boy Pocket was the startup chime, ding.
32:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:54 Nilay Patel? And we, we got caught because like,
32:57 Speaker 02 You weren't like going, uh, uh, in the middle of it or whatever?
32:59 Nilay Patel? We did that for like weeks on end. We're like, ding. Like, anyway, I was just, it brought back, I saw this thing and I was like, oh, I could probably slide this into a TI-82. Like, this is going to bring it back. I guess people probably slide their phones into their TI-82s now.
33:12 Speaker 02 People don't know the difference between you and me. Like you grew up rock and roll, playing Game Boy and your, your TI-82 thing. I grew up just like programming the, the TI-82. No, I did that too.
33:21 Nilay Patel? Games on the TI-82.
33:22 Speaker 02 Yeah. There's a little racing game. On the TI-82, come on. I've, we've done all that, but when the Game Boy Pocket came out, when we, I remember this, shout out to my friend Ryan. He was like, let me see that for a second. And he went, dink. And we're like, oh. The heavens opened.
33:41 Nilay Patel? This thing is great. I'm probably gonna buy one. I don't know why, but I'm super into it.
33:45 Alex Cranz? Well, and they reopened pre-sales this week for it.
33:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm still waiting for my playdate. Yeah, still waiting on my playdate. They had to push some stuff back, but good on them. They like, they were, they've been very transparent through the whole process. So I'm not actually agitating about it.
34:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah, they've been very open and they have sort of massive supply chain issues, right?
34:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:04 Nilay Patel? All right.
34:04 Speaker 02 Uh, man, actually, there's, there's something I want to talk about, but we're gonna talk about it later because now we're gonna talk about the Opel C1. This is a webcam.
34:12 Nilay Patel? I'm super into this.
34:13 Alex Cranz? I'm not.
34:14 Speaker 02 So Cameron reviewed it.
34:15 Alex Cranz? No one needs that.
34:16 Nilay Patel? Alex, your camera is off right now because it's overheated.
34:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, come on. This thing has a giant like heat fin on the back of it.
34:23 Nilay Patel? Like, I'm gonna buy one of these for you.
34:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:26 Speaker 02 So it's a high-end webcam with good, with like good microphones that are like supposed to be great at noise cancelling. They're okay, but it's basically like all the stuff that makes your smartphone a better camera than your average webcam. There's like, well, let's just make a bespoke webcam that's based on smartphone parts. So it's got, uh, the Sony sensor, I think from the Pixel 1. It's got a bunch of other like smarts in it. It's better at background blur than like Zoom's really ugly background blur. It's like 300 bucks, so.
34:51 Nilay Patel? It's expensive, but I was thinking about this, um, like my ZV1 that I use, I use a Sony ZV1 as my webcam.
34:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, same.
35:00 Nilay Patel? It is expensive. It was four or 500 bucks, whatever it was. It's complicated. Like, I would never send this to anyone else to use as a webcam because you have to monkey with the settings. You need a USB capture card, or you have to use Sony Imaging Edge, which is Alex's personal nemesis.
35:18 Nilay Patel? All that's a mess. But this thing is like a little more expensive than what you might spend on a webcam.
35:23 Speaker 02 Yep.
35:24 Nilay Patel? I think the sensor part of it's really interesting, right? We, we have not spent a lot of time on the show talking about the sensor from the Pixel 1 is like a great sensor. It was the software that made, it was, it's a Sony sensor. It is the same Sony sensor, but it's a software that made that sensor good. And they basically, with the Pixel, anyway, they ran it. To the edge of its limits and now they've had to go to a new sensor.
35:47 Speaker 02 Yep.
35:47 Nilay Patel? So it's like fascinating to me that they're using that sensor and it's like on the website, they're hyping up the sensor, but in the context of the show, we're like, here's this old sensor.
35:56 Speaker 02 Made, by the way, designed by the same person who designed the Google Clips camera.
36:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it does. It's like an all-star team. It's ex-Google, ex-Apple. What's really interesting to me is their pricing model. So you can buy the thing. Right now it's plug and play with Windows, plug and play with Mac, but if you want all the software features to like really get the most out of it, you need software. The software's Mac only right now and it's a subscription.
36:20 Speaker 02 Yep.
36:20 Alex Cranz? So it's like, do I want to just have my camera overheat every day? Or do I want to pay a subscription?
36:26 Speaker 02 I want you to, I want you to pay a subscription so bad.
36:30 Alex Cranz? I know what this room thinks.
36:31 Speaker 02 I will pay you a subscription. I will pay your subscription fee.
36:34 Nilay Patel? I mean, it's cheap. It's like, um.
36:36 Alex Cranz? It's like $4. It's very, I, I've been investigating the C1.
36:41 Nilay Patel? And right now it's free for early customers. So if you preorder it, it's free, they say. But it's just, it's one of those things, right? Like every one of these products is turning into a recurring revenue stream. So now you're, now a hardware webcam has like subscription software. The remote starting a Toyota requires a subscription.
37:01 Speaker 02 Oh, we're going to get to that.
37:02 Nilay Patel? It's just coming to everything. It's killing me.
37:04 Speaker 02 On the other hand, on the, on the flip side of that, I just bought this Garmin Venue 2 and I wanted to buy this watch face. And the way you buy the watch face is you read the description and the guy says, please PayPal me and make sure you PayPal me as a friend. So we don't have to pay the fees. And then a couple of days later, he gets back to you with the code to unlock the pro features, which.
37:22 Nilay Patel? Oh my God.
37:23 Alex Cranz? Incredible.
37:23 Speaker 02 I kind of love.
37:24 Nilay Patel? It's, it's very, it's very personal. It's very, it's like artisanal watch faces. I will say the OPAL, you should, it looks good. That's actually the point of this, all this. Like it is not just like a Pixel 1 quality video. They've done a bunch of computational photography stuff with that sensor. They've got an Intel chip in there. Cameron really liked it when he reviewed it. I'm like, I immediately emailed him. I was like, give me a code to buy this.
37:48 Speaker 02 We'll see. This next one is for Alex. It's the Dell. It's a concept device from Dell. It's called the Stanza. It's basically just a little tablet that you can like take notes on and then that's all it's literally all it does. And then you like tap the thing and it'll digitize it and it'll-
38:02 Alex Cranz? Or you can use it as a monitor, right?
38:03 Speaker 02 Sure. But I mean, let's not get too crazy here. The idea here is they're trying to simplify it down to the core idea of taking notes. And I just want to know, why isn't this e-ink?
38:16 Alex Cranz? That's, that's would be my question, too. That's why Dell didn't allow me in the room. No, I didn't. I didn't go. They probably would have allowed me. But when I said e-ink, they probably would have kicked me out.
38:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:25 Alex Cranz? But yeah, I just, I mean, I get it. I think that's the big push-pull, right? Like, a lot of people really want full color. That e-ink is terrible still at. So they're like, okay, let's do this. Let's try to like mimic writing, even though I think it's a lot worse.
38:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:41 Alex Cranz? Like, the writing experience on an iPad versus Remarkable 2 is just night and day different. But this could be cool if it comes out of-
38:49 Speaker 02 I don't think they're ever gonna make this.
38:50 Nilay Patel? This feels like a classic. It's, you know, it's CS time. There's some designers at Dell. Here's some stuff.
38:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:57 Nilay Patel? And they just did it kind of early, you know?
38:59 Alex Cranz? Yeah. It looks kind of like an iPad. Like, I got very iPad feelings from it.
39:04 Speaker 02 Yeah. Okay. Uh, wait, you know what? I'm going out of order. I was gonna say this in the Android section, but we're still in cool gadget zone. So here we go. The Oppo Find N. It is a new folding phone from Oppo, only gonna be available in China. Basically, take your standard Galaxy Z Fold 3, but instead, instead of having it be super tall, just make it a little shorter when it's closed. So when you open it up, it's almost square. And it takes the like weird doop-a-doo-doo chupiness strangeness remote quality of the other thing and makes it feel, I don't know, more like a human-sized like, like pocketbook or like a notebook or something.
39:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
39:42 Speaker 02 And it's just like, the build quality is really, really nice. And for a company that, you know, like, we're gonna get into some of the problems they've been having with the OnePlus, but for a company that is just rolling into foldable phones as a first entry, Sam Byford took a look at this thing. It looks great. It's a beautiful little phone and they didn't overextend themselves like Samsung did with like the under-screen selfie camera, you know, and the size of the screen when it's unfolded, they don't have to bother with a bunch of like multitasking questions because it's not quite big enough for that. It's just a nice big screen that folds up into a size that doesn't feel ridiculous.
40:22 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I think one of the things we keep talking about with folding phones over and over and over again is what is the final form factor for this technology? Like, what does a folding screen actually enable?
40:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:35 Nilay Patel? And Samsung kind of went big phone to big tablet, which is very Samsung. Like, it's just in keeping with their, it's what you would expect from them. They also went like flip phone to little guy.
40:46 Speaker 02 Right. And Huawei has got one of these now too, the P50 flip phone.
40:49 Nilay Patel? But I think this, this is like an unexplored middle zone is what you're getting at, right? Like, small phone to small tablet.
40:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:56 Nilay Patel? But like a small tablet is just a big phone. Like, there's something in there that's compelling.
41:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, like, it doesn't have the complications of like the two screens on like the Surface Duo, Surface Duo 2. I would like to see more foldable form factors, not just because I like seeing wacky phones, but like, LG has given up the ghost. So it's gonna come from places like Oppo, Huawei, Xiaomi, because Samsung's like set. And I think that for, in this zone of folding phones and in like, in the zone of like Android innovation, Samsung has had way too much leverage, at least outside of China, in terms of like, how people think about what the trajectory of phones should be. And so, I really hope that stuff like this will encourage other companies to do more experimental stuff. And
41:43 Speaker 02 like, experimental stuff that actually could be sold. Because like, TCL will show you wacky prototypes all day long, but no, they're, they're bad. I actually want to see more stuff get closer to like, actual production. And this is, this is a good sign. It's a good, good step on the way.
41:57 Nilay Patel? I'm looking at this Huawei P50 pocket that you just mentioned that we have on the list too, and it's, this thing rules.
42:04 Speaker 02 It's cool, right? It's got like two circles on it, one's for the display, one's for the camera array. It looks great.
42:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, it's funny because like, you know, this thing was not announced through the United States at all. Like, it was announced in a Harper's Bazaar China photo shoot.
42:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:19 Alex Cranz? But it looks like it.
42:20 Speaker 02 It rules because it was in a fashion photo shoot.
42:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
42:23 Speaker 02 Like, we have no idea. But I just keep looking at this. Like, what is the, what is the big question? Like, what form factor does this display technology actually enable that people want? And we've, we've only taken a couple shots at it.
42:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and like, we've only taken a couple, we've taken, well, there's more than a couple, but we've only taken like two, like, good shots. Everything else has been like, bad. Like, just like, you hit the uprights.
42:49 Nilay Patel? You just don't, like, don't it off the uprights? I mean, like, I get it. Like, there's other stuff. Like, LG will make you a $100,000 TV that rolls up at the foot of your bed.
43:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:00 Alex Cranz? Where's the phone version?
43:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like, that's what I want, right? Like, none of that stuff exists.
43:06 Speaker 02 What about the watch version? Because there's a patent for a Samsung watch that unrolls.
43:11 Alex Cranz? Yes.
43:12 Speaker 02 And expands out. And it's like, it's split down the middle for some reason? So if you're like, you want to watch a video on your watch, it's like split in the middle, which is incredible.
43:21 Nilay Patel? This is one of those patents where, like, you know, I've spent a lot of my life covering patent application. I looked at this one, I was like, shouldn't the patent examiner have sent this back with, like, you gotta try harder? Like, literally, the drawing is like, a watch and two fingers, and the fingers unpinch and the watch gets bigger. And it's like, guys, like, an eight-year-old could have come up with this idea.
43:42 Speaker 02 I also watched Iron Man 2. Come on.
43:47 Nilay Patel? I'm sure it is a much more complete patent application. It's just those first two pictures is like.
43:52 Alex Cranz? The way it rendered Thor.
43:54 Nilay Patel? Yes.
43:55 Alex Cranz? Is like, Thor's on half of the screen, and then just the axe on the other. This is incredible. I, like, I love that they were like, yeah, sure, patent, go.
44:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, movies don't ever put stuff in the middle of the picture. It's always on the left and the right. So of course, you know.
44:10 Nilay Patel? I love that you just started talking about how it rendered Thor with no explanation of the fact that one of the patent images is of Thor.
44:17 Alex Cranz? It is one of the, yeah, one of the patent images is of Thor. I didn't just, like, have that idea. I've already seen it. It's great. Thor's on it.
44:26 Nilay Patel? Very good. I don't know. But you got, these pictures are just, it's like, dink.
44:31 Speaker 02 So the last gadget is a thing that should be cool, but instead it's a disappointment. Jen reviewed it. It's the Echo Show 15, which is like the final form of what the Echo Show should have been, which is a picture frame. But.
44:46 Nilay Patel? It's got this widget system, which is not great. Like the smart home controls are really not great. And also, it's got this new fancy Amazon custom bespoke processor in it, but it's still slow.
44:59 Speaker 02 That's unforgivable.
45:00 Alex Cranz? Just, I'm looking at, like, I'm looking at one of the pictures she took, and I'm looking at the widgets, and the buttons look like they were designed in 2007. Like, the UI is just ugly.
45:12 Nilay Patel? It's funny, we were talking about fridges last week. Like, it looks like the Samsung fridge UI.
45:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:17 Nilay Patel? Like, this is what a Samsung smart fridge tablet looks like. And it's like, I don't know, did Amazon not get the memo that they did not set the world on fire with smart fridges? Like, I don't, I don't know. The photo thing is really interesting. So we had Dave Lampoon Decoder, and I was like, Alexa, da-da-da. Like, the thing holding me out of that ecosystem is that Google Photos is better than Amazon Photos. He was like, Amazon Photos was up to me. A week later, great at keeping the cards close. A week later, Amazon launched a huge update to Amazon Photos, iOS only.
45:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:48 Nilay Patel? So the app on Iowa, because that's, if you think about this, the most important place. Like, most of your photos are taken on your phone. You have a good iOS app, you're doing the auto import, great. Now you can feed them to Alexa devices. So, okay, the first bits and bobs of this are coming together. We're going to compete with Google Photos. But then it's slow. It's like, you might as well just get a digital photo frame at that point. Like, you're still doing better than having a slow computer on your wall.
46:12 Speaker 02 Well, so, here's my thing. Like, Amazon is trying very hard to create the ambient OS, right? They're trying to make ambient computing. They're even trying to, like, move beyond the whole concept of OS in the first place, and just have it be ambient computing. But there's a step in the middle before you get there, where, like, people still need screens, and they need to do stuff on those screens, and they need the stuff they do in those screens to connect to the rest of their life, and connect to their phone. And I don't know how often you interact with the Alexa app on your phone. But it's not fun. And you know, there's like shopping lists here and like there's like, we mentioned the pictures. There's the widgets for your smart home. There's like all of this
46:52 Speaker 02 stuff that looks like it's connected to a whole and complete ecosystem in the way that, you know, an iPad is, or even an Android tablet might be, but it's not. It's all like a veneer. It's the veneer of an ecosystem with a bunch of widgets on it. It's not an actual ecosystem, unless you are willing to bring your whole family in and use the Alexa app to do all your stuff.
47:17 Nilay Patel? I mean, I would say like, I would be more offended by this if the product was good. You know what I mean? Like, it's a giant slow picture frame. Yeah. Like, sure. Like, of course the software is kind of like, I can't keep like, that's what you, it's just weird that Amazon, this is true. I'll offer this criticism to Google too. They just put out that new Google Nest Hub. Yeah. Like, same design, new processor, they told us, still pretty slow. And now they're like, Google is adding, there's like a browser on that thing. You can just open webpages. There's an apps doc. And it's like, guys, you did not design these to be computers in this way. Like, you are overtaxing the hardware
47:59 Nilay Patel? here by turning them into baby iPads plugged into the wall. Yeah. Also, they're plugged into the wall. Why not put faster chips in them? Right. And like, we're just kind of like, it seems like they can't sell you a tablet. They know they can't sell you a tablet.
48:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. Dan actually just reviewed a couple of Chrome OS tablets and they're, they haven't gotten there yet. They're like, not there. You should still do, like Chrome OS is great. Chrome OS tablets are not.
48:22 Nilay Patel? So like, let's make these weird crappy tablets out of our smart home displays?
48:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:29 Nilay Patel? Is where they're going? And it just doesn't make any sense to me.
48:31 Alex Cranz? Well, they're just so cheap. Like, I mean, I guess, yeah, they have to be cheap, right? It's Amazon's whole thing is undercutting everybody else. But it's just like, looks like so cheaply made. It's got the super slow processor in it. And it's just like, zero effort. And, and there's the other side of it, right? There's the really, really, really nice, super expensive billionaires have it in their home, like, what this is aping? And isn't, can't there just be something in the middle for people who don't want to spend? No money on a garbage piece of technology like.
49:06 Nilay Patel? I would say the stuff that billionaires have on the walls of their homes is, uh, it's actually worse.
49:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
49:12 Nilay Patel? Like, have you ever, like, encountered one of those systems? I have a friend who, he used to install them and he's like, they're all intentionally designed broken so that our service contracts are more lucrative.
49:22 Alex Cranz? Hell, yeah.
49:22 Nilay Patel? Like, it's like, pretty brutal. But they're billionaires, whatever, just like, no.
49:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah, they don't care.
49:27 Nilay Patel? It's a good business model. It's good work if you get it. We gotta take a break, but then we're gonna come back and do, as promised, that we'll be sad about software updates.
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50:54 Nilay Patel? We're back, Dieter.
50:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, I front-loaded the fun stuff and now we're gonna have some sad stuff, which is software updates.
51:01 Nilay Patel? Merry Christmas, everyone.
51:02 Speaker 02 We'll say we'll have some fun at the end. We'll have a lightning round. It'll be okay. So, Apple got out a bunch of its fall stuff. So iOS 15.2 with the App Privacy Report and some weirdness with CSAM. Universal Control is still MIA on Monterey, but you can do SharePlay now. Hooray. And then, I don't know, like, Google put out a massive update for the Pixel 6, but it still hasn't arrived on a bunch here, at least here in the US. OnePlus had to pull its OS update for Oxygen OS 12. Just had, they just screwed it up.
51:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
51:35 Speaker 02 I think that everyone needs to take a beat on your big software updates. Just like, hold them back a little bit longer. Don't announce features till you can ship them. Don't do this. This fall in particular. I expected, you know, I expected a little bit of chaos last year from COVID and everyone learning how to work remote and whatever. But the fact that we've had so many major OS updates this fall just goes sideways.
52:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:04 Speaker 02 Is infuriating. And I don't know, I don't have it like a thesis here, other than I am seeing similar stories across Apple and Android.
52:15 Nilay Patel? So, can I, here's my shot in the dark.
52:17 Speaker 02 Okay.
52:18 Nilay Patel? I am like a huge proponent of remote work, so don't take this the wrong way. These companies are in like, kinda like, open conflict with their employees that return to office.
52:27 Speaker 02 Right.
52:28 Nilay Patel? And Apple's returned certainly its harbor employees. But we're seeing like, here's the fruits of 19 months of remote software development. I just like, I honestly wonder if maintaining that relentless yearly update schedule.
52:42 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
52:43 Nilay Patel? And maybe it's not just being remote. Maybe it's the stress of the pandemic. Like, I wonder if maybe they shouldn't have eased up on the aggressiveness of the yearly update schedule.
52:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:52 Nilay Patel? To just account for the fact that their workforces are totally distributed now.
52:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:55 Nilay Patel? I mean, I have no science behind this and I don't think Apple engineers should all go back to the office or whatever. I'm just saying like, it's...
53:03 Speaker 02 You can see those two things maybe colliding and this being a result.
53:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:06 Alex Cranz? I was gonna say like, Apple had already struggled with this. But also, I want to point out, there is one company that had a major update, just like last week, to all of its Android tablets that maybe run on e Ink. And it was wonderful. It's beautiful.
53:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, four people worked there. They probably all just got on a Zoom and wrote it together.
53:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah, and it was beautiful. I love it. So not everybody screwed up their updates this year.
53:32 Nilay Patel? There is a little controversy, the C桑 thing that you mentioned with Apple, there's some controversy that they changed the webpages and maybe it was going away. Apple tells us, nope, it's still coming. They're still working on it, still collecting feedback. So we'll see if that happens. The other part, I mean, iOS 15 is missing a lot of features, right? They're slowly rolling them out. Universal control not being there. This is like a highlight feature of all of it. And they're still, we don't know, spring, which is a long time away.
54:00 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I really want it. It's like a great feature.
54:03 Nilay Patel? The end of spring is like, now you're starting to start thinking about iOS 16 on this cadence.
54:09 Speaker 02 For sure.
54:09 Nilay Patel? Right? The end of spring rolls you, it's pretty close to June, which is when they will announce iOS 16.
54:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:15 Alex Cranz? Well, this is like when the MacBook Air, like the second generation MacBook Air is going to be coming out. And also finally, universal control.
54:24 Speaker 02 Yeah. There's this moment that has become lore amongst people that have watched Apple keynotes over the years. And I'm forgetting the OS, was it Snow Leopard?
54:32 Nilay Patel? The Snow Leopard.
54:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, where they got out and they're like, all right, here, the new features this year are none. Just bug fixes and speed improvements. And like, the crowd erupted in cheers.
54:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
54:43 Speaker 02 And I'm just saying, 2022, blank check to every major software company. Redo that keynote. Microsoft, Apple, Google, company that makes Alex's weirdo e Ink tablet.
54:58 Alex Cranz? They did a great job this year.
54:59 Speaker 02 Come out and say, all we're doing this year is cleaning stuff up. That's it. Like, Microsoft, just come up, you know what? The settings and the control panels thing, yeah, we've been, you know, we've been working on it. It's fixed. They're all in one place now. And that's the only feature we're shipping.
55:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
55:16 Speaker 02 All Apple needs to do is like ship the features they promised last year and then and bug fixes. Blank check. Do it.
55:21 Nilay Patel? I always think about the the local news test of the Apple keynote. Like, what thing are they going to announce that breaks through to like the local news or the Today Show or whatever?
55:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:31 Nilay Patel? And they're kind of like out, like universal control their ship and like, can you just imagine you're like a local news anchor being like, and now you can wave an iPad at your laptop?
55:44 Nilay Patel? But if they're if Apple announces, we're taking a year off to clean up all the bugs, like literally every local need like, the Today Show will do the full hour.
55:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:54 Nilay Patel? On Apple said they're just going to fix the iPhone. And like, you can just see like, it's like an earned victory for them.
55:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:00 Nilay Patel? All right, they're never gonna do it. Snow Leopard was the best I've ever made. I still think about it. I was at I was taking our trash to the I live in the woods. So I take my own trash to dump and they have a they have like a shed, like the electronics recycling shed.
56:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
56:12 Nilay Patel? And they had like an original iBook in there.
56:14 Speaker 02 Ooh.
56:16 Nilay Patel? And I was like, I should just take this home and run Snow Leopard.
56:21 Speaker 02 The other software stuff I wanted to talk about is, um, two things happened. Adobe launched Creative Cloud Express, which is a like a light version of its editing tools. And then Snap launched Story Studio, which is a standalone video editing app for phones. And I feel like the cycle of everybody realizing, oh, God, TikTok is a video editing app. And we need to catch up to that, but we don't know quite how. And like, what's how's it connected to our social network or not? Is going to be hitting and it's going to be hitting in waves over the next year or so. I'm not going to bring this back around to Apple Clips, although I really want to. But I don't know, I like, I'm excited to see another shot from other companies besides TikTok at innovating on
57:07 Speaker 02 the like mobile editing workflow, despite the fact that inherently, when I see Adobe announce a light version of its software, I hate it. Because I've used a bunch of their like, the way they used to think about mobile software. Their, you know, elements or whatever the heck they used to call that stuff. It was terrible. I believe Adobe can get it better now because they like seem to have a Clear mindset of how their stuff works on multiple platforms and cloud and whatever. But yeah, I don't know. I think it's time to to have a little bit more innovation in like the UI of video editing. I think TikTok has definitely led the way, but we are like, we need something that feels.
57:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
57:47 Speaker 02 I don't know. We need like that iMovie moment, like where there's like a coherent like, oh, I am rethinking how this thing works in a way that isn't sort of like tacked on, tacked on, tacked on in the way it was on TikTok and a little bit on Reels.
57:58 Nilay Patel? So I don't make a lot of TikToks.
58:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
58:00 Nilay Patel? It's not my thing. But I would argue that the iMovie moment actually already happened with TikTok. Like the TikTok video editor is complicated, but it works nothing like a Premiere or whatever. It doesn't even work like iMovie, which is bonkers and no one understands. It's its own thing and like users have different expectations out of it. And I think that's partially what drove Snap to do this, like.
58:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
58:24 Nilay Patel? The audience of TikTok users and Snapchat users is a Venn diagram. Like there's perfect overlap. It's both young audiences, as Alex Heath will always remind us. Snapchat is very popular. People, lots of people use it, just doesn't get the attention of the other platforms. So Snap making a tool that's better for TikTok just reinforces the affinity people already have for Snap.
58:44 Speaker 02 Right.
58:45 Nilay Patel? And I don't think Snap is going to make a TikTok clone. I think they just want people using its tools instead of thinking of TikTok as a creative space that then gets shared out elsewhere. So I think there's like the value here. And I think the reason Apple never got there with Clips is like, Apple, once you're done making the thing, Apple, there's no value to Apple once they're done.
59:07 Speaker 02 Right.
59:07 Nilay Patel? Right. It's just like, you're going to share it on Instagram or whatever.
59:09 Speaker 02 You don't feel good about Clips. The only person that feels good about Clips is me.
59:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but like, but they don't have like this big distribution network that is their business.
59:16 Speaker 02 Right.
59:17 Nilay Patel? Whereas with TikTok, getting you to participate in a TikTok economy is great for TikTok's business. So there's a huge incentive to make that video editor like fun to use.
59:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, Adobe doesn't have that ecosystem, but it seems like they're, they're starting to think about.
59:32 Nilay Patel? Doing a better job with with mobile and like that workflow.
59:36 Alex Cranz? I think they're only thinking about it because they have like a finite number based now, right? Like they have professionals, all of these young people and stuff no longer are going to go and buy Photoshop. They're not going to go buy Premiere. They never would have to begin with, but like they're going to go pirate or they're going to go get the GIMP. Uh, is it GIMP? Like
59:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
59:58 Alex Cranz? Free Photoshop like they need this younger audience that actively hates them because of the last like how difficult they've made the path to entry into Photoshop and Premiere. Like they actively hate them. And this is like, oh yeah, we can go for them, even though it's, I guess it's mainly this new software suite is mainly geared for like social media managers.
1:00:21 Nilay Patel? So Scott Balsky was on Decoder just recently and like, that's where Adobe lives. Right? Like Adobe is start to finish a commercial operation.
1:00:31 Alex Cranz? Right.
1:00:31 Nilay Patel? Social, their, their big competitors are not necessarily TikTok. Although TikTok creates the paradigms for the tools that Adobe has to live in. So they're very aware they need to participate. So they know. But their competition is Figma and Canva, right? You are, you own a flower shop and you want to do some Facebook ads. What tools are you going to use to make your, your Facebook ads? Adobe wants it to be their tools.
1:00:55 Alex Cranz? Right.
1:00:56 Nilay Patel? Like that's, that's where they live is like, the second you become a business, Adobe is like a hundred bucks a month. Where else are you gonna go? Yep. Like here we are. Uh, and I, I think that's the line for them, although that, that whole interview is fascinating because Scott's fascinating, but um, I, I, I do think they're not, they're not chasing teens need to care about Photoshop. They're, they're chasing the second you graduate to this is revenue, you're going to move to Adobe's tools.
1:01:23 Alex Cranz? Right. But are you going to move to them on your phone?
1:01:26 Nilay Patel? No, you're going to move them on your iPad.
1:01:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah. But like a less good version than what you can get on a computer. I don't know. It just feels like they still haven't answered, like they still haven't solved the problem.
1:01:37 Nilay Patel? What is a computer, Alex?
1:01:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:01:41 Alex Cranz? They haven't solved the problem of like the difference between Photoshop and Premiere on a computer or a laptop, excuse me, you know, something with an x86 processor and, and mobile-based stuff like.
1:01:55 Nilay Patel? Oh, they solved that problem with a format, a file format called Cloud PSD, which is just a lot. It's a lot.
1:02:03 Speaker 02 One, one last software update thing, speaking of like software updates, actually like spare a thought for systems around you because this Log Forge bug is not bug, vulnerability, it's out of control. And I, I actually don't have any interesting things to say about it. I'm happy that Cloudflare is like trying to block it off at a system level there, but.
1:02:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah, you're happy about it. You're happy that there's a centralized gatekeeper on the internet who's like, we're just gonna fix it. Man, that cuts both ways.
1:02:33 Speaker 02 It's rough, right? But like this, this is one of these levels of catastrophe where it's so big that it's, it's impossible to wrap your head around because it's big, but it's also like slow moving. So there's not like an immediate like, oh my God, this thing is broken and I feel it right now, or this hack just happened. Like this was the exact effect of it is this fundamental piece of Java is like broken and there's fixes for it, but it's gonna take a long time. And in the meantime, it's trivially easy to attack. And so get ready for bad stuff? Question mark, period.
1:03:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And I will say it's a great time for us to have hired a new senior security reporter, Korn Faith. Korn's doing a great job. Like literally, I was like, wow, just in the nick of time.
1:03:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:18 Nilay Patel? So Korn's headline is Log4j is patched, the exploits are just getting started.
1:03:23 Speaker 02 Right.
1:03:24 Nilay Patel? So we'll see. But, and by the way, this is like open source contributors choosing to work nights and weekends to fix this thing. The internet is a wild place. Like on the one hand, Cloudflare is like, we'll just stop it. Between you and everything is us, so we'll stop it. And on the other hand, it's like, we're a loose collection of volunteers and we'll fix it.
1:03:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:03:46 Nilay Patel? And like the dynamic between those parts of the internet is, I always think about it when things like this come up. It is underexplored, I think.
1:03:53 Speaker 02 All right. We should do like two lightning round things. I don't know. I made, I made a bunch of lists of stuff here. I personally want to ask why, when designing the Cybertruck, Elon Musk didn't think of the fact that it would need a windshield wiper?
1:04:06 Nilay Patel? And so instead it has one that's like eight feet long. There's a video of the Cybertruck testing. Yeah. I will say it looks sick, right? Like it just, it's a triangle car. I can't. They actually went and built a stainless steel triangle car like. Yeah. It's cool.
1:04:23 Alex Cranz? But do you want to drive it?
1:04:25 Nilay Patel? It's like, it's like tank wars, but in real life, it's great. The first design was too big, by the way. So they were always saying, we got to scale this down. It's clear. They didn't think about what scaling down would mean and like complying with road laws would mean. So even in the scaled down version, it's got the three lights across the front that mean it's an extra wide 80 inch car. Like big pickup trucks have those lights. So it's got those. They didn't think about where to mount the actual headlights. So the headlights are like at the bottom of the, you can't even call it a, it's the front of the triangle. Like, I don't know what else you would call it. The flat front of the wedge of the car, the lights are at the bottom.
1:05:04 Nilay Patel? It's got side mirrors that look ridiculous. And even Elon on Twitter was like, um, we have to ship the side mirrors, but people can do other things. She means take off the side mirrors. Yeah. Which is a horrible idea, but maybe you could replace them with cameras. And then this wiper, which is just a huge ass wiper, the size of the windshield. And I like, I know he was responding to someone else, but he was like, the wipers is what troubles me the most about the whole triangle car. And it's like, man, that is an incredible list of priorities.
1:05:38 Alex Cranz? Buddy.
1:05:39 Nilay Patel? Like, I made a triangle car. Here's the problem. The wiper, number one on the list. And it's like, there are many other question marks. Yeah. I've been saying this to Andy and Sean, our transportation reporters for a while. Like we are just in this incredible vaporware moment with EVs. Yeah. Everything is vapor. And so the Cybertruck was extremely vapor for a while. It's cool to see it running around on a track, but you see all of the problems from the initial design to reality expressed in this video, including this wiper and the wiper image just looks flatly ridiculous.
1:06:11 Alex Cranz? It just feels like it's getting more and more to that Homer Simpson designed car.
1:06:15 Nilay Patel? No.
1:06:16 Alex Cranz? Like I'm just waiting for the 64 ounce cup holder.
1:06:18 Nilay Patel? The Homer did not have a vision. This thing has a vision and it's what if the triangle was a car?
1:06:26 Alex Cranz? Slightly better vision.
1:06:27 Nilay Patel? I love it. Everyone should watch this video. It's great.
1:06:29 Speaker 02 Okay, last thing in the lightning round. We touched on this, I believe, before, but the fight between the FCC and the FAA over 5G at airports has gotten like to the point where they're just like sniping at each other.
1:06:43 Nilay Patel? So this list, so a bunch of ex-FCC commissioners wrote a letter being like, "The FAA is dumb."
1:06:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:06:50 Nilay Patel? Here's the list. Tom Wheeler, Democrat. Meekun Clyburn, Democrat. Julie Shonakowski, Democrat. Ajit Pai, Michael Powell. Like, you've got, like, it's just nuts. Like, these are people who do not agree with each other. Like, literally, people who reversed each other's policies at the FCCs immediately upon taking office. And they're all saying the FAA is overstepping their authority. "The FAA position threatens to derail the reasoned conclusions reached by the FCC after years of technical analysis and study." Nuts.
1:07:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:07:24 Alex Cranz? And this is the FAA saying that, like, 5G will destroy planes?
1:07:29 Speaker 02 They're saying it'll make it harder for certain systems to automatically land the plane under certain conditions.
1:07:35 Nilay Patel? Yes, there's an FAA study showing 5G interference with altimeters. But the argument is that many other countries have already approved this radio equipment in these bands, the spectrum bands. There's a great quote from Harold Feld from Public Knowledge, old friend of The Verge. He's like, "Either physics works differently in the United States, or the report at the center of this controversy needs to explain why interference hasn't shown up in any other country."
1:08:01 Alex Cranz? Maybe it does work different here.
1:08:03 Nilay Patel? You know, honestly,
1:08:04 Alex Cranz? We'll turn the web.
1:08:05 Nilay Patel? Here at the end of 2021, you could probably convince me of that.
1:08:08 Alex Cranz? We'll be able to see.
1:08:09 Nilay Patel? Birds aren't real.
1:08:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:08:11 Nilay Patel? All right. This is a good one.
1:08:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:08:13 Nilay Patel? For our last of the year.
1:08:15 Speaker 02 We haven't complained at all about the fact that Toyota is making remote start from a key fob part of a subscription service. I think cellular radios were a mistake.
1:08:23 Nilay Patel? Anytime you add a radio and a chip, someone is like, "What if you pay me some money every month?" That's the future of all technology. Soon to be the future of, you know, like, what was the last?
1:08:33 Alex Cranz? Refrigerator.
1:08:34 Nilay Patel? Refrigerators. Like, anything where there's like a server on the other end that might do stuff. They're like, "What if you paid us to use the server?"
1:08:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:08:43 Nilay Patel? It's gonna happen. That's my prediction for 2022. Rebellion against the services revenue.
1:08:49 Speaker 02 My prediction is no more software features for the whole year.
1:08:53 Nilay Patel? Oh, that'd be so great. Oh, that'd be so great if your prediction was right and mine was wrong.
1:08:58 Nilay Patel? That's my hope for you. Anyway, it's been a great year. We turned 10 this year. Thank you all for participating. We're going to take a couple of weeks off. I hope you get some rest, get to hang out with your families. You can send us nice tweets at the end of the year if you want to. Dieter is at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Cranz. Lauren is at Lauren Grush. I'm at Reckless. We'd love to hear from you. I want to just call it a handful of stories right at the end here. Sean O'Kane, congratulations, Sean. You just took a big new job at Bloomberg, but he has his last big feature about an EV startup. They're all vapor, I'm telling you. EV startup called Chanji, with a J, change with a J. It's really good. It's got everything. It's got, it starts with ayahuasca, and it just like goes from there. We ran a great story about sneaking into the board ape yacht club party. It's just really good. It's just-
1:09:42 Speaker 02 It's an incredible story. You have to go read it.
1:09:44 Nilay Patel? It reads like, um, like old school 90s tech writing, if you know what I'm talking about. It's, it's just got a vibe to it. It's really fun. And then Jen, who we mentioned earlier, wrote three gigantic pieces on Matter, the new standard. She did a Vergecast with Dieter about it. It's great. It's really fun. Tony Fidell is like all over the big feature, just excitedly talking about how he had the right idea because the thread was his idea. It's A+. Definitely worth reading. Okay, we've got a couple more decoders in the end of the year, but other than that, the Vergecast is off. So we'll see you in 2022. That's it. Rock and roll.
1:10:17 Speaker 02 Happy New Year.
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