Google's Rick Osterloh shows off new Pixel and Nest hardware

Vergecast hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn attended Google's hardware event on Tuesday and sat down with SVP of Devices & Services Rick Osterloh to discuss Google's new products: the Pixel 4, the Pixelbook Go, the Nest Mini, and the Pixel Buds 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:53Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody. It's Sam from The Vergecast. We have a special extra interview episode this week. Dieter Bone and I went to Google's big fall hardware event and sat down with Rick Osterloh. He's in charge of all of Google's hardware efforts. That's Pixel phones, it's Nest Minis, it's Nest Wi-Fi, it's the Pixel Buds. They announced all of that stuff at the event, including the extremely leaked Pixel 4. We talked about all the new products, including whether Google's going to go big on marketing the Pixel 4. What's going on with that new camera? Whether Soli, the new radar motion controls, are here to stay. We also went in on the new Pixel Buds, the new Pixel Book Go. And we ended with, it's true, a deep dive into whether the thread standard in the Nest Wi-Fi routers is for real or not. It's the most Vergecast thing we can do. And Rick was a good sport, did it with us. Check it out. It's Rick Osterloh, Google's SVP of Devices

• 1:37Speaker 02

  and Services on The Vergecast.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  All right, Rick Osterloh, SVP of Devices and Services at Google. We're here at the Google's Fall Hardware Event. You just announced a lot of things in a very, I would say, a very low-key way on stage. They just sort of happened. Oh, here's a Wi-Fi router. A new laptop has appeared. The Pixel 4 is here. That's fun. Tell us about what you announced today.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Sure, we announce a lot, but I think we started out just kind of framing the vision a little bit of what we're after. And we have this idea about AMBIEN Computing, which is trying to bring help to people wherever they are, whenever they need it. And so that's kind of like the main foundation, and a lot of the products supported that idea. We announced a new pair of headphones called PixelBuds, and they work with Pixel in any Android phone. And they also are a great stereo headset, and they give you really fast access to the assistant. So that's one of the key things we talked about today. We talked about two new Nest products, Nest Wi-Fi and Nest Mini. Mini's really simple propositions, refresh to the first Mini product. It's got double the bass, double the bass, and a tariff.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Starting from a low floor. Yeah. You double a small number, it's still pretty small. It is called Mini. It is called Mini. They're small. And usually, you know, smaller speaker usually has less bass. But this one, we've added a lot more to it. It sounds really good, actually. And it's got a tariff of machine learning capability. I'm sure someday we'll figure out what that all means. But it's intended to bring more helpful machine learning to the device itself, so you can run it on the device. And it's got an easy way to hang itself on the wall, too. So if people want to wall mount it, now that's easy to do. Comes in a couple of cool new colors. Sky is my favorite. Excuse me, Nest Wi-Fi was the other big Nest announcement. And so this is extending

• 3:23Speaker 03

  the range of the original Wi-Fi product, Google Wi-Fi product. It's now going to be able to cover about 85% of homes with two points. One of them, we call it the point, the thing that's usually not the bass next to your router, but the point that's out somewhere in your living room or kitchen, also kind of combines the capability of a Nest Mini speaker in it. And so we think that'll be a nice two for one. So it forms a great mesh router. It also has great speaker capability. And then, you know, we announced PixelBook Go, new laptop, starts at $649, runs Chrome OS. Nice design, really light, quiet keys, feel great. I think people like it. It's more affordable price for the PixelBook line. Still, you know, still $649, but it's, we think, a pretty cool offering.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And then Pixel 4 and 4XL. We talked a lot about that on stage, but I think the key areas of focus are new camera system with great zoom capabilities. We've added a lot to the overall computational photography story with the product. You know, I really like the live HDR capability that lets you see what you're going to take in the image, which is really important with these computational photography techniques because it's like can be really different what you see on the screen versus what the picture actually is. But I think we've really closed that gap. And then the new Google Assistant is very important. It's fast because it runs on-device machine learning for a lot of the speech processing. We took the data center model and we shrunk it. So it runs mostly on the device now. And that's so you'll see it's a lot faster and the UI is different. So it gets out of the

• 4:53Speaker 03

  way a little bit of the user and I think that'll help the user experience a lot. And we've included a new technology, radar technology called its code name Soli. It's been under development for many years at the company. And we put it in Pixel 4 first and you can do gesture commands with it. So it's useful for things like snoozing alarms. And we also use it to warm up all the sensors when you go and do face unlock. So face unlock happens pretty quickly. So that's a little bit about the news we had today. It was a lot. We also talked a lot about privacy and security and our approach to sustainability, which I think are pretty key areas of focus for us.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  So with the Pixel 4 specifically, it seems like you are trying to pull off a lot more this year than you do in the previous Pixels. You've got Face Unlock, you've got Soli, you've got the high refresh rate screen, you've got another camera upgrade. I'm definitely forgetting the new Assistant. So like this seems like a true flagship phone for you. The thing that I've always knocked you for is you haven't treated like a true flagship phone when it comes to marketing and trying to sell just a ton of them. So can you talk a little bit about you've made an incredible phone. How do you make sure that you sell it to an incredible number of people?

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. You know, we're one of the key things is we've been pretty measured in our distribution approach to date. And so now we're going to be available like from day one on all the major US carriers. And I think that's going to make a big difference. So we announced we'll be on AT&T and T-Mobile and Sprint and Verizon today. So that's great. You can also buy it on Locked from us or Best Buy or other places. And of course, supports Google Fi as well. So that'll be a key thing. When all the channels that people are primarily buying these products through or selling your product. I think that'll help us a lot. And of course, we have a lot of marketing push behind it as well.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Well, so a lot of marketing pushes is kind of the key, right? There was a bunch of marketing push around the previous Pixel phones. Is it going to be substantially more? Are you going to go make sort of the investments that your big competitors make in marketing?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  You know, we think they're pretty significant. You'll see a lot of our advertisements around. It'll be in a lot of live events. We also do a lot on YouTube. We found that we can reach the people we're trying to reach in YouTube. I mean, it is.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  How very convenient.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. Wouldn't you know? YouTube is a handy marketing capability. But I mean, at the same time, it's sort of obvious too. Like we're selling a phone that brings together the best of Google services. So a lot of those people are going to be using Google services. So it's a good place to.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  One of the narratives of the overall phone market is like it's saturated, right? You don't, there's not a lot of new customers. There's not a lot of people in America who don't have a smartphone who want to buy an $800 flagship phone. So you've got to convert, you've got to either switch people from the other ecosystem or you've got to convert them out of being a Samsung owner or LG owner or something. Is, are you actively thinking about that challenge?

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, everyone who buys one of our phones is probably coming from something else. And that's just, that's a mature market. And so, you know, and, and the thing they're coming from was probably pretty good. And so it's super important to keep trying to improve the user experience. And you have to make it better and better every year. And this, and the upgrade cycles are really slowing down. So, you know, often what we're looking, and I think you said this actually in a recent podcast, but like most of the people we're making product for are actually people that own like a Pixel one or Pixel two, or, or maybe something else, you know, like an iPhone seven or something. So there, this is actually a really big upgrade for them.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  And, and can be quite a big difference because they've skipped like two or three. Iterations and generations of product. And so it's, you know, we're trying to make it easy for someone to use a Pixel for the first time, trying to make it so that the setup experience is easy if they're coming from a different ecosystem, that the conversion process is okay. And we now have included with all the new Pixel 4, Google One support, so they can like have live support and like if they run into something they don't understand, they can call someone and like they'll literally walk them through how to get through it. And so, so hopefully that'll help a lot. It's certainly, it's certainly hard to convert people to a new product and ours is definitely different.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  I mean, it's how we as Google want the experience to, to show up to our users and we hope people like it.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  So a big part of that is Soli.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Is that a science experiment? Is this something you're committed to for generations of phones? Is you're just gonna see how it goes and make a call a year from now?

• 9:18Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I think, well, we're definitely gonna continue working on it for the long term. I think it's gonna be useful for phones and other things too. Like it, it's probably not very hard to imagine how it might work in like something in your home. There's a ton of pretty interesting applications that could come from it too, that we're experimenting with. I mean, gestures are kind of obvious, like, I think it's also one of the, one of my favorite things is like if you walk away from your phone, it locks, things like that. But we can also do some pretty interesting stuff around things like sleep tracking. And we also think we can probably get a pretty accurate read on heartbeat. So like this technology's really.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  If you have a Soli sensor in the phone right now, how does it detect a heartbeat? Or how could it detect a heartbeat?

• 10:01Speaker 03

  It's all it is is just like.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Just waves.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  It's just waves.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  Waves of love coming off everybody.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  And then signal coming back and we try to figure out what it is. Like what are we reading? So we think we can do pretty interesting things like that. Now, they're all research experiments right now, but we do believe that we can land some of these in the, in the coming quarters.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  How did you decide on the, the feature set that you're including in the Pixel phone, specifically for motion sense? Cause it's, it's just a handful of things. And I, you know, I, I used Soli three years ago and I was able to do, you know, wacky things like rub my finger and thumb together and like adjust volume. So there's many, many things you could have included. How'd you land on this set?

• 10:37Speaker 03

  Well, these were, these were a combination of very common use cases and also things that we thought were really useful. And, and like quite frankly, things that we knew we could really get right. Cause it is. There's a lot of other things that are possible, like we just mentioned, but you know, it's you have to have them be completely right for them to be truly useful. So we knew that like this in and of itself was hard enough, like you saw in the video, like someone moving a coffee cup, you really don't want to skip to the next song when that happens. But the face lock, face unlock capability along with this was really useful. Like that made it so that it could be pretty performant. And those are just a couple of examples of things that we knew we could get right and

• 11:21Speaker 03

  that we're going to be, you know, people are going to unlock their phone about 100 times a day. So that's going to be something that is pretty useful.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  To just to answer the question, you got, you're all committed to Soli. It's going to be a feature of the products. You'll see it across sort of the Google hardware ecosystem in years to come.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  I think so. Yeah. I mean, we'll, we'll definitely keep working on it and see where we think it's going to be the most useful. But like, you know, gestures at a glance when you're listening to music at a high level seems like a pretty useful capability to me. So we'll, we'll keep working on it and hopefully we can get it right and get it in some more products.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  So this was the first phone, I think that 3A was technically the first phone that the HTC team that you guys acquired helped you develop. This is the first flagship phone with that big team involved. What's been different about that process versus sort of the previous flagship Pixel phones?

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Ah, well, I mean, we're a lot bigger now and you know, you're starting to see the capability of, of our Taiwan team really come into play. I mean, they're so experienced that they've done a lot of really interesting technology developments over the years. So we're psyched to have them a part of our organization. They're awesome. I mean, they're very good at product and we've really enjoyed getting to work with them. And so, so, you know, now they're, we're one large functioning organization that knows how to ship together. And I think that's a really key thing that's actually quite hard to figure out with new people coming together is like, how do you actually make a good product and ship it? There's so many thousands of interactions that happen every day between people in your

• 12:51Speaker 03

  organization that it's, you have to, you know, come to a common language of how you develop things and what's important and what's good enough and what your focus areas are. So we're.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  What did having that team let you do that you, you don't think you'd have been able to do before?

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, for sure, Pixel 3A is a great example, but they completely developed that phone. So it was done entirely out of our Taiwan team, and they did a great job with it. And now, it's like, everything is intermeshed. So we have, you know, all the stuff we're building, our roadmap, they're involved in it some degree, and in many cases, they're doing full products. So a lot of it is just a function of scale. Like, that's a key thing. They also have some really terrific expertise in wireless, and RF and mechanical engineering, too. So it's super helpful as well that they're in Asia, and they're very close to our supplier, so that, many of our suppliers. So that is a tremendous help.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  So if they're super good at RF and wireless, why was this not the moment to make a 5G phone?

• 13:51Speaker 03

  5G's still pretty early. And, you know, we could have made a $1,200 phone, like everyone else, and we didn't, because we didn't think a $1,200 phone was the best thing to do right now. I think 5G will be interesting eventually, but it's early. And so, we'll keep working on it, but we don't, you know, we didn't feel the timing was right for us now.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Do you know why 5G is a race? I ask everybody who makes, even remotely involved in phones. Is 5G a race? And if so, why is it a race? And what happens if we lose?

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Like, a worldwide race?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't know. See? That's, everybody makes this face.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  For the listeners, there's a face, and it's the face you would imagine Nilay was making if someone asked him if it was a race.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  I don't think it's a race. I just wanted to make sure we got that reaction.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  It doesn't feel like a race to me. My point of view is that, right now, 5G, 5G has a lot of, like, fundamentals that could be better, you know, like, that are useful. I mean, like, you're gonna get more capacity out of networks. You'll get reduced latency. You'll get better IP support. So there's a lot of positive things that can come of it. But it's just like, everyone is in the process of upgrading, and it's gonna take a very long time. And so, the other key thing is, there's no super obvious driving application right now. Frankly, I think Stadia is one of the, one of the things that would be most interesting on 5G, because of reduced latency and things like that. Like game, cloud gaming.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  But you know, it's, it's different than with 4G where it's sort of like you couldn't watch video on 3G, but you could on 4G and you couldn't really browse on 3G, but you could on 4G. You know, something that fundamental, I don't, isn't yet clear how it's going to change with 5G. So we'll see. I mean, you know, I think if, if we're able to get things like millimeter wave in a lot of places, like I'm sure stuff we're not thinking of will come up when you have two gigabits per second of bandwidth. But it's, you know, today it's more like a hotspot.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Uh, so let's shift to the camera, the feature you are shipping, not the 5G radio that you're not.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  So the camera's like been the big differentiator of the Pixel line for years now. It's the reference standard that we hold up all the other smartphones against. I think Apple did a pretty good job this year. I enjoyed Mark Lavoie on stage, taking his shots. You could tell he was, he was very pointed at some of what he was saying, particularly like the fact he was like, anybody can understand what's happening here. It's not mad science. How are you thinking about that camera as a differentiator moving forward? How are you thinking about the look of the Pixel? It has had a very, like a very distinctive look over time. Is that still the thing that's going to market the phone for you? Is it a package? Where does it live in the context of this device as you are trying to sell more and more of them?

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, I think it's, it's a key pillar of who we are. It's also something that I think is like, it's like, as I look back on the last four years, it's, or last four generations, it's like, it's so, it's such a great strength of Google that we were able to build on. Like, I think it's a great example of how we hopefully bring forward Google hardware going forward, which is we have this incredible technology strength in research around imaging. And then we're able to combine it with some. Interesting hardware design and create a user experience that we think best represents like our latest technology. And so we were very fortunate to have people like Mark and many others like him who were

• 17:20Speaker 03

  working on like cutting edge imaging science. And every year we've tried to bring their latest research and latest work to market. And you know, this year, that obviously the key focus was really on Zoom. That was a enormous area of focus. We, we combined some pretty interesting concepts with optical zoom and super res zoom that we shipped last year with Pixel 3. And, and the results are, it's pretty cool. I mean, like, I think people are going to find zooming is now actually a really viable thing to do on smartphones and it, you know, in the past, I'd say results have been mixed and a lot of users are a little bit worried about actually doing it.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  So when you're picking like what thing you really want to focus on for the camera year over year, you Zoom, you had Night Sight last year. It seems like for Pixel at least, video always seems to fall at the bottom of that stack. The video quality in Pixel is not as good as a bunch of other competitors. Is there a reason you think that consumers don't want that? Or is it just like there's every year, it'll be the next year's priority?

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Also, you pointed out Google owns YouTube. So it seems, it seems very odd that we're not, and there was like, there was a lot of YouTubers in the audience today. I saw them all floating around, a lot of Instagrammers. These are people who care about video.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say our video is bad. Our video is actually usually rated pretty, pretty well, but some of the stuff we're doing lends itself best to, you know, when we're taking like a lot of images at once and fusing them. At the moment, it's pretty cutting edge to do that with single shots. Doing that across a continuous stream of video at like 30 or 60 or even more frames per second gets pretty hard. But I think it's something, it's a challenge that we want to take on eventually for sure. And I, you know, like I said, I think we are doing some interesting things in video for sure, like doing like EIS and fusion with OIS. It's like, you know, it's hard things to do, but our video quality is usually rated pretty

• 19:12Speaker 03

  well, but I definitely think our, our still imagery is, is pretty top notch.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  To point at one specific feature, you shoot 4K video at 30 frames. I think a lot of people like to see it 4K 24 or 4K 60. The Samsung phones, which use the same processor can do 4K 60. Why is that still not happening on a Pixel?

• 19:31Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, it's something we'll focus on in the future, I'm sure.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Okay. And then, just in terms of the camera itself, obviously, Google's strength is in the algorithms, it's in the tone mapping, it's in HDR Plus. Is it the same sensor? Is it a new sensor? Is it off the shelf? How are you thinking about the actual hardware of the camera?

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, most of the stuff for, most of the core components are things you'd buy from the supply chain with, you know, we've made some changes to specifications and, and things that we require specifically from it. But they're, they're mostly from components that are close to standard. Things that you buy from our suppliers, and most of the magic happens in software and some custom hardware afterwards. Like, you know, some of the computation afterwards. So that's, that's been our approach. And I think it's going to be our approach going forward. Like, it's, it just makes sense for us to leverage the, all the great capability we have in machine learning and computational photography to get to better results.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Is it the same sensor for the, the zoom and the wide-angle lens, or are they different?

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Those are different. Those are different.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  And they're both just off the shelf, and you're thinking you can get farther ahead? That, I mean, that's like a big advantage, right? You're saying our image processing capability is going to remain far ahead of the competition, so we can not spend all of our, sort of like, bill of material dollars on.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we want to be able to upgrade it. You know, I think, like, that's, we try our best to make sure that the camera keeps getting upgraded over time. And there, there are some times where you run into hardware limitations, either with the main processor, or the sensors or lenses, but definitely, like, a lot of our approach being in software is what lends itself to bring down, you know, pretty much the same capability that was in Pixel 3 to Pixel 3A. It takes a while to get, sometimes you get, you get a lot of margin to be able to have good performance on, like, a very high-end SoC. So it takes some engineering work to get it to run more efficiently on lower-end processors and things like that. But like, because it's software, you can often bring it down.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  And so that's, I think, a little bit of an approach we'll, we'll try to leverage in the future. Make sure we introduce things at the high end and then bring them into more affordable price points over time.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Will we see that, any of the features in the Pixel 4 camera come to the Pixel 3 and 3A?

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Hopefully, some of them. You know, we'll be working on it shortly here. But it's, a lot of it is like measuring performance and making sure we can do it or not. Some, some of the stuff we're doing around zoom, I think, would be hard to bring. It's like, some of it really is dependent on the new sensor and lens. But we'll do as much as we can to bring it to all our products.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Actually, get off the camera just a second. You've got Face Unlock, you've got the Pixel Neural Core that are both enabling things that are much, much faster than I could do in any other Android phone. Are those things that you were thinking of as like being pixel specific? That if you want the new Assistant, you need to use a Pixel. If you want good Face Unlock, you have to get a Pixel and you're not going to be sharing that with partners?

• 22:23Speaker 03

  I mean, over time, we might share things with partners. I think that's like to be determined in the future. But certainly right now, if you want them, you've got to buy a Pixel. A lot of the work was like really hardware specific. For Face Unlock is a great example. I mean, that is, you know, there's four cameras that are doing it. It's leveraging basically a set of cores that run our machine learning algorithms really fast, run TensorFlow Lite. And so that's like a really key part of the system design. That is unique to us. So that's why it's not super portable and it would be hard for it to be. There is a lot of computation happening to understand like, is that really you?

• 23:08Speaker 03

  And so, so, you know, for, for Google Assistant, I think it's a pretty similar thing. Like having the models run in a performant way on device is hard. And it took us a lot of engineering to get to that place. And so like with anything, like there's a trade off for performance versus portability. And this is one of those cases where we're trying to do more and more on the device. It lends itself to better and better performance. We think in the future, it can be a building block on which you could do more and more private things that are on the device. And, and so it's, you know, it's something that is a technology direction for us that maybe is a little bit different, but it's something that I think is important in today's world.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  So we're basically getting to my favorite topic, which is platform lock-in, which brings me to the Pixel Buds. I mean, look, the future of headphones is like platform specific features for the computers in your ears. Pixel Buds have some platform specific features with the ambient, or I'm sorry, the environmental noise detection, some of the Assistant features. Are you thinking of those as, as a part of the Pixel ecosystem or as a part of the Android?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Android. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's some stuff, we'll be able to do most things on Android, we think. We'll definitely be able to do everything on Pixel. And we'll probably not be able to do a lot of things on iOS. And so like, you know, we're still in development of it. So a lot of it's like TBD and everyone, everyone makes their own OEM specific customizations. So, so it's certainly going to be a challenge to figure out exactly what we can make work really well across a number of products. We know things are going to work really well on Pixel. So we can certainly make promises about what's going to happen on, on those devices.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Why, why Spring 2020? What's the, what's the delay? I mean, it, it's great that you announced them. I'm glad I got to see them, but the ones here like don't work. I couldn't hear them.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Oh, mine work.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Well, hand them over, man. He's putting them in. This is horrible. My favorite thing is when-

• 25:07Speaker 03

  I can't hear you. I'm sorry. Oh wait, no, I can because there's a spatial vent that allows just the right amount of environmental noise.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  This is horrible. What I like most about our show is when executives just openly taunt us all the time with unreleased products. It's great. It's my favorite thing that happens. How do they sound? Are they any good?

• 25:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're good.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Oh, great.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  They are, I mean, it's-

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Perfect unbiased review.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Take it from me. The most objective person ever. I think the, the key thing is the design itself lends itself to good sound. So the, it is a partially occluding design, so it will mostly cover your ear. There is a, a small vent that allows some of the, like basically the pressure equalization and also some sound in and out, but not a lot. And then we talked about the adaptive sound techniques we're doing so that we automatically adjust volume depending on the environment. And then we, there's a lot of other things that we're still working on for on-device machine learning that will change how you experience the product depending on your environment.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  So I think, I think that's, it's not done, which is why it's not available today.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  We wanted to make sure we got the product right and we also don't have a major event between now and I/O, so we wanted to make sure people knew about it. But that was the approach for today. I, I think they're going to be great. I'm really excited about them. I think the access to the system will be great, too. And the size, I think, is the right size for this kind of product in this space.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  Do you think people are gonna walk around wearing headphones in their ears all day long, 24/7?

• 26:38Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't think so. But I think people will wear them for, like, kind of any time they're alone. I mean, that's a possibility. They might start to really, like, I've found it su- I love listening to podcasts, like Vergecast.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  It's a good plug. Thank you. Really made up for the taunting earlier.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  1.7x speed.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  That's how I do it, too. Don't worry about it. Although, listening to our show at a faster speed is like, we already talk so fast. I watch all of YouTube at 1.75.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Me too, with captions.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Totally. That's the way to do it.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Basically reading a slideshow at that point. It's like, I'm going for it.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Oh, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about is, uh, what is your flash to flashlight ratio?

• 27:17Speaker 02

  That was, thank you. Nothing is, nothing made me happier than seeing the flashlight meme on stage today. Yeah, I don't know.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  1 to 1,000 for me.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  I've only accidentally taken flash shots in the last, like, year.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Well, so let me ask you, let me ask you if this is a flashlight use.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  So I was in a restaurant. It was very dark and the baby was, like, dancing. I wanted to take a video of her. It was too dark, so I turned on the light. But that, it didn't flash. It was just on. So it's technically a flashlight, right?

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Think, what is a photo?

• 27:49Speaker 04

  We're not going there.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  And did everyone around you go bonkers?

• 27:53Speaker 02

  No one liked the fact that I was shining my light in this, like, dark.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  I think, I think flash should be banned in public places.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  This is great. Rick Gostelow takes on the New York Times, live on the Vergecast. I can see the headlines now. This is great.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  If we're banning flash, why isn't, why is night mode a separate mode and not just, like, a thing that turns on when it's dark?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  I mean, HDR Plus is really good.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  I mean, night mode is good when it's really, really dark, but most of the time HDR Plus is gonna be really good.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  And so, and that keeps getting better and better. So I think, I mean, you know, we chose to keep them in separate modes. We might change that in the future, but that's, we feel like those are, like, when you kind of almost can't see anything, it's pretty clear that night sight's gonna be a good time to use it. And, and we also give you a hint, like, you'll, you'll see in, in Pixel 4 especially, it's very good at it. So when, like, the light level's at a certain level, you just, like, it comes up and says, "Try night mode," or night sight. You!

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Ew.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  So that's like a, right, you've got more sliders in the camera now with the brightness and the shadows. Like the UI is actually giving more and more control to the user. That is a, that's a philosophical direction to go in versus we're just going to handle everything for you, which many of your competitors do. How are you thinking about how much control to give the user? How many, how many sliders to put over the viewfinder? You now have a very nice live HDR plus viewfinder.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Right. It's constantly evolving. I mean, I think like cameras are getting very complicated. I mean, they've always been complicated, but they're now complicated in new ways. And so, you know, there wasn't a few years ago, there wasn't in smartphones of portrait mode that was something that was great. There wasn't night sight that was great. Even photosphere panorama type things were kind of not really great, but now they're pretty good. So the question is, do you want to do these things automatically for users and get it wrong some of the time? Or do you want to make it so that it's really deterministic? And, and so we've chosen that approach, but if we get very good at anticipating, we might change directions. I mean, that is something that we think we could probably be very good at. But for now, this is our approach and it's something we think is right for the Pixel camera.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  And it's consistent with what we've done.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  So let's talk about the Pixel book go.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Sort of the other big.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Why was now the moment for Google to launch a $650 Chromebook? Cause historically you've had very premium, high end Chromebooks.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Well, we just felt like that was a space where we could do something interesting and different. I mean, it was clear that like at a thousand dollars, the Pixel book was only going to reach a certain number of users. And we, we saw a pretty clear opportunity to cut about a third of the price out and make something that was pretty compelling. We figured out how to, you know, how to make the case that looked nice. It was designed consistent with the rest of our line. We were pretty happy with that. And we wanted to take another crack at making great keys on a lower priced device. And so, so that was really the inspiration for it. It wasn't, it wasn't like any major technology change or something. It was more like, let's, let's try to do all the things that people liked with the original Pixel book at a slightly lower price.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Is that why you have what's like an eighth gen Y series processor in there?

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Well, it's more like, are there really major improvements?

• 31:02Speaker 03

  I mean, like, if you look at like, power performance in that space.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  There's really, it hasn't been incredibly fast moving. Like, Moore's Law truly has flattened out, especially when you look at power performance curves. And so in a, in a, in a portable laptop, it's pretty hard now to build things that are at the higher end of performance of a fan. Um, and so we didn't want to have a fan. And it was pretty key, you know, we felt like we could make all the performance we needed with that hardware and with our latest software on Chrome. And so, I mean, I think, I think people, I've been using it. It's my, it's my full-time driver and it works really well. So, yeah, that's why we went with it.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Is there, is there not an ARM ship that you could use? I mean, that seems like the other choice in the.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  I mean, certainly, I think that's a possibility, especially in the future. Um, you know, ARM performance is getting better and better. So that's, and Chrome Web Services supports ARM as well. We haven't made one, but other people have. And, and, you know, I think they're getting really good. So I think that could be a real possibility in the future.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Is that something you actually see happening that flip to sort of more ARM-based laptops?

• 32:10Speaker 03

  I think there'll be more and more. I think there'll be more and more. It also brings in like people who are normally used to making ARM-based products, like, you know, more phone, phone manufacturers.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Your thousand phone engineers in Taiwan.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Like your one thousand phone engineers in Taiwan. Seems like we're gonna make a list of people who are used to making ARM-based products.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Some of those people.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  A lot of them.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Or others like them. Yes.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  So Nest.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  You're in the transition. Is it over?

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Nest is fully part of Google.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  It's fully part of Google.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Are you gonna spin it off again? Because this is, if I just keep. By the clock, you should be ready to spin Nest back out. Just into the history of history. So it's fully part of Google. We were talking at Rishi Chandra outside, and he said something to me, which, uh, I actually found quite surprising, uh, which is that the Nest Wi-Fi is like the cornerstone product. Like, everything else is gonna be built off of that. Y'all don't really talk about the Wi-Fi products much. This is the first time we've talked about it, maybe two years publicly.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  Well, we haven't shipped one in a couple of years. Although the software, we do, I mean, to be fair, it's a, it's like a very different paradigm for like Wi-Fi, you know?

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  You have an app that's actually useful and it updates and the, you know, we update the devices, kind of like they're like a phone. I mean, they get frequent updates. I think we've done 15 or something since it was introduced. So we think about it a little bit differently. And this Nest Wi-Fi product was sort of a natural evolution. It was like, okay, it is the cornerstone of a house. You can't really have for, you know, smart homes. You can't really have a lot of rich capabilities if you don't have coverage. And that was the original motivation for the product. It was pretty clear that there was a market need and like it is, it sold very well. Beyond our original expectations for sure, certainly mine. And there were some fairly obvious things we felt like we should do to the product to make it better.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Like if you're going to have a device outside, like in your kitchen or living room, might as well have a speaker in it. Saves you from having yet another device in your room. And, uh, and so that was kind of a, a easy thing to add to the product. And I think it's going to go quite well.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Is that the, the mics and the speakers in the, the Nest Point, I think it's called. Is that functionally identical to the Nest Mini?

• 34:21Speaker 03

  I, I don't.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Is it less good than Nest?

• 34:23Speaker 03

  I probably have to caveat and say it's not identical, but it's super close. I mean, it's, it is very close to the Nest Mini and its capability. You know, the sound quality will be very similar. The range that it'll be effective is very similar. So I think people who are interested in having either or will like that product a lot.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Are you, so when you think about Wi-Fi as the, I'm just getting to the thread question. Let's be honest.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  I'm just working my way into it.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  Just jump right to it, man.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Yes, jump right to it. You gotta have, you gotta have most Wi-Fi in your house.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  I mean, that was another reason to to refresh Wi-Fi.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  It's to add thread.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Add thread. Yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  For, for which devices did you need to have Thread support?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Thread at this point is like a religion. It's not like a, it's, it might not even be real. Like there might not be a Thread radio in the device. But you might just be saying it so that we keep writing it until someone invents a Thread radio. What is Thread for?

• 35:09Speaker 03

  It's so you can do local networking at low power.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  But there are no Thread devices in the world.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  No, there's some, there's some phones or some, some light bulbs.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Some light bulbs.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that'd be like, turns out you have a lot of lights in your house. It's kind of important.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  When do you think the thread is this? Thread will be better next year.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, like Wi-Fi is like close to Nest Wi-Fi is like close to, if not the best selling Wi-Fi router at any given time in the US. And it's definitely the best selling mesh Wi-Fi system. And so, you know, I think after a certain period of time of that being in market, suddenly the market opportunity becomes much more interesting to people who are making thread enabled devices. And so getting it in Nest Wi-Fi was like a super important priority. We wanted to make sure things that were selling well were now creating like this base of homes that were now available to target for, you know, someone who might make a thread based device. And that the kind of basic premise that you might have a light bulb that has a hub.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Then connects to Wi-Fi that then connects to their cloud, connects to your cloud. It's like totally wrong, completely architecturally wrong in every single possible way.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  And so like the need is obvious, but there hasn't been an enabling solution until that. So someone has to build the enabling solution and the ecosystem might trail behind, but we're going to like drive it. We're going to try to make things happen. And clearly, I mean, I think like the most obvious use case is that light bulb.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  You know, you shouldn't be able, it should have a direct connection from like, anyway, I think.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, I'm, I'm happy that we're doing our part in thread awareness.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Yes, that's good. Thank you.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Most people in the world are only aware of the thread exists because we make fun of it.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  You're, you're in the.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  We sell, we sell ribbons. Thread awareness.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Thread, thread detection.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Some light bulbs are available. No, but is that why, why thread and not Z-Wave, right? Amazon supports like 55 protocols in their routers. They just invented a new one.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, at one most basic level, we've been supporting thread for a while with Nest. It's something that we think is the right direction forward. We think it has some advantages in being IP based and then and having a good power profile. It's, you know, over time, pretty easily combinable with things like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips. So we, we think like it's a good direction for the industry and, uh, and that's why we're getting behind it.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Let's end on Stadia. Uh, it's, it's shipping soon.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Get it.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  November 19th.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  And pixels are going to be the first phones, I think, certified to run it. What, what makes a pixel able to do it and not sort of the, the broader range?

• 37:44Speaker 03

  It's just like, we've been able to test it for a long time.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. What is that experience to me like on Pixel phones for people?

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Well, first off, it's just going to run on Wi-Fi to start. So like it'll be like you're playing a game in Wi-Fi. Now, I think like you can't really tell the difference other than the screen's small. Like everything performs the same as it would on a laptop or on your TV. It's pretty immersive. So like you're probably not going to be moving most of the time or at least, you know, you personally won't be moving. So like the experience is really rich. It's trying to bring AAA games to any device you're on. And it works really well. Like we've been testing it extensively at work. Sometimes my kids ask me, are you actually working, Dad?

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  And it's a very fun part of my job. And, you know, we have a great team. Phil Harrison leads our team, industry vet. Got a bunch of great people working on this product. They're very excited about it and so am I. I think it's going to be very, very interesting for the gaming industry when it comes out.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  How much is it going to cost?

• 38:44Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, we'll, I think we'll announce full pricing in a little bit, but like

• 38:50Speaker 03

  you can buy the founder's bundle and then you get like a number of months free in service. You get new game and you get the controller. It's 129, so go buy it. It's a perfect gift for Black Friday and holidays.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Really snuck it in there.

• 39:05Speaker 03

  For giving me that.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Literal mic drop of a plug. The Pixel buds sound great. Stadium works.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Yes, it works.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  It's available for the holiday.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Why do we even bother reviewing this stuff?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  I know, it's all help. No, just don't. You don't need a new phone. Just use the flash and old one.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  I can help you.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  It's perfect. All right, Rick, thank you so much for enduring this as always. We'll talk to you soon.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys. It's great to see you.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  All right, my thanks to Rick Osterloh for joining me and Dieter on the Vergecast. We'll be back on Friday with the chat show. There is lots to unpack from Google, lots to think about. We've got devices, we're starting to review them. There's so much more to talk about. We'll see you on Friday.