Verge turns 5, Google Home, and Assistant

Happy Vergecast day! Look we’ve got a new logo! This week, in honor of The Verge’s fifth anniversary and the redesign of the website, we start off the show by giving some behind-the-scenes details on the new things you see on the site and things we’ve changed. But don’t worry, we still have that weekly news you all subscribe for. Nilay, Dieter, Paul, and Dan discuss using the Google Home speaker and how it works with the Google Assistant. Also, we have reviews of the 13-inch Macbook Pro (yeah the one without the Touch Bar), Paul’s weekly segment “Cookie Pods,” and some great ad reads in between. 01:49 - The Verge turns 5 15:58 - Google Home 27:49 - Google Assistant 40:35 - Macbook Pro 1:06:27 - Paul’s weekly segment “Cookie Pods” We want to thank the listeners, new and old, for tuning in each and giving feedback on the show, we greatly appreciate it. A quote from Nilay on this week’s episode: “We launched The Verge basically on the back of this podcast. This podcast when Paul and I were doing it with Josh as the Engadget podcast was so popular that we could fucking leave and start a new podcast, our listeners came with us, and we were able to launch This Is My Next and then The Verge so it’s wild that we’ve done it for five years.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Nilay Patel?

  Hello. Welcome to this, The Vergecast. You are in a place of pure relaxation. This is your line. Cutting. For the night. Hello, welcome to The Vergecast. That was a really weird intro that Paul made us do because he's just playing flute jams on his iPhone.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  It's called, it's called breath flute.

• 0:28Nilay Patel?

  Breath flute.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Is the instrument, hot new app called noise.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the best part of the story is that Paul usually has his iPhone 7 headphone dongle permanently plugged into his iPhone.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  But had to remove it because the iPhone won't make any sound.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  It's true. So now the dongle is where it belongs, plugged into the headphone jack, or the headphone plug of my headphones. Because you can't lose this thing.

• 0:52Nilay Patel?

  You can't. It's the most important thing. Anyway, we're not here to talk about dongles.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Oh, but maybe we are.

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh, but we're going to.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Maybe a little dongle talk.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, this is The Vergecast, flagship podcast of Theverge.com, a website that is cooler than ever this week. We relaunched the whole thing, we turned five, we're like little people now. We're just wandering the world, wearing like regular clothes, you know?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  It's worth, we're totally potty trained as a website.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we kinda know what we're doing, but still just blow it all the time.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  What's first grade? Is five kindergarten?

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's right.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Five, six is kindergarten, yeah. Depends on if you're an overachiever or not.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  We know most of the letters of the alphabet, numbers, a little fuzzy around the edges, but we're getting there. No, we're five, uh, which is crazy. Actually, this podcast, I think about it, is a bunch of people, Dieter and Paul and I all started this thing, and Dan joined us in our first year.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Hey, Dan.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I'm here, I'm Neelai Patel, there's Paul Miller.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Hello, hello.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  In the studio, in New York. Uh, and Dan Seifert is with us as well. Hello, Dan. Hello, I'm here. Uh, so we've, we've been at this for five years, which is crazy. I am going to take this opportunity on this, our flagship podcast, to talk about our own website for a while. So we relaunched the whole thing. The first thing I will say to you is that it is crazy fast.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  Probably the number one complaint that we have ever gotten about The Verge, that I get from Paul Miller. All the time is that it was really slow. And I'll just get into like a little bit of backstory. So we launched the verge in 2011. Mobile was not the thing that it is now, which is crazy to think about. There was no like Facebook did its earnings this week. There's a billion people who have only ever used Facebook on a phone.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  That was not the state of the world in 2011. We launched the verge. We basically launched it for a 27 inch iMac. Like that was its canonical viewing experience was big desktop monitor. Uh, our mobile site at the time was m.the verge.com, which was a cut down version of the site. It was a own, own separate website. Wasn't responsive like, uh, we made it in 2013. When did we make it responsive? 2014?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Uh, 20, no responsive was like 2014.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  That, that was my biggest, when I learned about the word responsive, I was off the internet. And people were like, oh, we're going to make the verge responsive. I was like, yes, it's so slow. No, that's not responsive.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna make it a little bit slower.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Responsive means check, just, just check this out. And then you grab the corner of the browser window. And when you slide it different sizes, it works, which is great.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Which is a great idea. So, uh, anyhow, we launched it. We had apps at the beginning. Uh, we had, I believe we had a Windows app at one. I mean, it was crazy, totally fragmented experience. 2014, we made it responsive. We got rid of all the apps because apps, if you've been paying attention to the tech industry, it's very hard to break an app into anything meaningful in terms of distribution. I say, if you've been paying attention to tech industry like in air quotes, because you're listening to the show and I'm sure you do. Anyway, a lot of the cruff on our site was a remnant of us believing that it would be deployed powerful desktop computers on fast connections with big screens. So there's, uh, just a ton of JavaScript on the site. I will tell you right now, the thing that people are complaining about the most

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  that we will find some affordance for to bring back is we've lost the dropdown.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  That has had the article count. You clicked it and it showed you every article when you published. That was just a big JavaScript thing in the corner of the site. So we stripped out all of that old stuff. We made the site just, it's like 50. 50% faster in some cases. Yeah. Uh, it is just lightning fast now, but I think it's also, it looks sick on OLED displays. It's beautiful.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Dude, it looks so good on OLED displays.

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it looks really, it looks really good on an OLED screen. It's

• 4:34Speaker 03

  It also looks really good on the iPad.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  It look, it does look great on the iPad and I, Tablet Magazine's gonna make a comeback because of our

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Uh, if you, if you do miss the dropdown of the, the, the list of recent articles, we do want to bring it back. I will say that one of the things, one of the big decisions we made here, uh, especially this being this website that pays attention to the fact that more people look at the web on their phones than they do on the desktop is underneath our hero area, we are committing to being really aggressive at leaving that in a reverse chronological and not pinning too many stories that breaks that reverse chronological. So, uh, if you just go to the homepage and scroll down, one, it's really fast. In some cases, I think it's faster than loading up that recent stories thing. Uh, and two, like you will get a rev cron there, but we've heard you, we are gonna figure out something that we can do, uh,

• 5:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Later.

• 5:26Nilay Patel?

  And then the other thing I'll say is we think it's beautiful. Uh, there's an entire design system and that's actually the thing that we made.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  So if you think about us redesigning the website, that's the wrong frame because we are, we published so many more places than the website. For example, many people consume The Verge in the form of a podcast, which is distinctly not a website. Uh, we publish almost all of our videos to YouTube. We publish a whole bunch of other videos to Facebook. We publish Circuit Breaker videos on the Circuit Breaker Facebook page. In fact, we killed our video hub entirely.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  Because having tons and tons of video player, flash video players on a series of webpages is actually not how anybody consumes video. They just go to YouTube, the world's second largest search engine and search for videos. So all of our videos, if you click on video in our nav, it takes you straight to our YouTube page. Or if you haven't subscribed, YouTube will helpfully, uh, put a pop-up in your way to make you fucking subscribe. So subscribe to our YouTube.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Please, please do.

• 6:21Nilay Patel?

  Uh, please. We already have. If you're listening to this podcast, you're a deep Verge nerd, you're my people. But, so what we actually designed was a new design language called Pathways. Which maybe one of these days we'll print the entire style guide. We have this gigantic, formal style guide that the design team at Fox Media made us. And Pathways is just all about using lines and colors and shapes. We have a series of distinct brand colors. We have rules for the logo. We trim the serifs off the Verge wordmark to make it better on small screens. So first, we designed that.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:50Nilay Patel?

  Spent a lot of time talking about Pathways. We also had a number of other design systems in contention that all had, I would say, insane names. My favorite was Cyclical Pulse. I'm kind of sad we didn't go with that one because that one-

• 7:04Speaker 02

  You could have just called Pathways Cyclical Pulse.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  No, but they wouldn't have. It was, it was in there. There was another one that was like Illuminated Dreams, like crazy, amazing things. We picked Pathways.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  We spent a lot, a lot of time discussing fonts. And like Neil and I have been talking about the feedback and the best thing we could say is like, people love it, people love that it's fast. But like when people criticize it, they're criticizing our like actual choices. Like I'm not getting any responses from anybody that's like, eh, meh. It's all like, this is great or this is great, but I'm so angry about this font. And I was like, yes, great, let's talk about that.

• 7:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're, they're choices. It's weird because what we do 90% of the time on this show, on the site and our videos, is talk about other people's products and we criticize their decisions. So when we make our own product, it's A, it's very confusing from our perspective. Because we have to not be jerks in the product development meetings. And B, it's this, it's the only time really that we get the same kind of feedback that we often give to other people.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  I, I like the new font and stuff.

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Do you want to hear some super inside baseball about the fonts?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  So we were really tired. Our two big fonts, the sans serif was called Din Condensed and the serif, the old headline font was called Adele. And we were all really tired of Adele. Not Adele the singer, she's great.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:23Nilay Patel?

  This is Adele with two L's. It's a chunky slab serif font. We wanted to get rid of it. It's not good on video, it's all this stuff. We want to find something new, hipper. And they went through like a thousand options. And fonts are really expensive. So like there was a lot of hacks to like download fonts locally and then ping a local. Like it's crazy to make it all work so we could test it. And finally they're like, okay, we found a font. We don't want to tell you what it's called, but look at it. I'm like, that's great. They're like, it's, it's Adele Sans. You could have told us any other name, because in every meeting, we'd be like, Adele sucks, get it out of here. Yeah. So, I don't know. Look, here's what I'll say. I think it is, we just wanted it to be faster and sleeker and louder.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, that's the website. I hope you like it. I hope you like all the design. You're gonna see it particularly in video.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  Just get wilder and bigger and brighter. A lot of people have made like the Stranger Things reference.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Which is super like funny to me, because-

• 9:18Nilay Patel?

  Hilarious, because we were, we thought our old wordmark and a lot of our old branding was that 70's sci-fi.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  Which is where Stranger Things lives.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  So we are actively trying to like get out of it and get beyond it. I see the connection, but give us a minute. You're, we're gonna pull in a totally different zone with this, with pathways.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 9:40Nilay Patel?

  With the look, with video. And then the-

• 9:41Speaker 02

  We haven't even talked about the features of the website, besides the speed.

• 9:45Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna talk about the header.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  The header.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  It's the header. It's the most important thing.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, so there's, there's three things that like, you can kind of like, hear the inner voice of The Verge where we, we say hilarious, strange things to ourselves and to your audience. And that, that showed up historically in just the poll quotes that would show up on the front page. And if you don't follow Verge Poll Quotes, that's a great Twitter account that would aggregate those. We still have that. It appears in one place on the homepage. It's gonna appear in other places very soon. So that's pretty exciting. But the header, the thing at the top, so we've just got our logo, the new, you know, sans serif logo, where we can discuss the, the G in The Verge if you want at length. It's, it's there. It's huge.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  We have a dateline, which Neil, I can talk about, but like, it is like, it's nice to like, see the date there. It says something that I think matters. And then there's a little tagline there that we can change. And we can also change the background. And so if you are a loyal Verge reader, and you actually take the time to go to a homepage on your desktop, first of all, know that nobody does that but you, and thank you. And your reward for doing that is seeing some cool imagery that we can change up whenever we feel like it. And seeing, you know, a clever little tagline that sort of expresses how we feel about the day or what's going on on the planet. So right now, it's Tag The Verge as we record this. And so you, there's a little link there and you can go and submit your own taglines if you want to have it up there.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  You can also just tweet it with that hashtag and we'll, we'll keep an eye out for those. And- Maybe some clever joke that you make could appear on the front page of theverge.com.

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's gonna be the most fun.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  It's already been, we're already like overdoing it. I'm gonna be honest with you.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Well, it's, it's, it's two days in.

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  But like, we're already overdoing it.

• 11:34Nilay Patel?

  Like last night, I changed it to a Back to the Future Cubs reference, because the Cubs, it was like, we're just like, definitely overdoing it. But whatever, it's new. Let's have a good time. Let's party. And then we'll calm down when we turn six. Real grownups.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Because six-year-olds are totally calm.

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  But anyway, just so everybody knows, we launched The Verge basically on the back of this podcast.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:55Nilay Patel?

  That, that this podcast, when Paul and I were doing it with Josh, as the Engadget podcast, was so popular that we could fucking leave, start a new podcast, our listeners came with us, and we were able to launch This Is My Next and then The Verge. So it's wild that we've done it for five years. I will tell you, nothing about what The Verge is now is what I would have necessarily predicted five years ago, but it's been great every step of the way. And I think it's because we have such a loyal audience that cares. I think it's a lot because I love listening to everyone, even when you hate us. It's like really useful feedback. And I, we just wanna make something that's, that's great all the time for everybody. And I think we are better positioned, we are smarter, we know what we're doing a little bit now. When we started in 2011, just zero idea what we were doing.

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  So we kinda know what we're doing a little bit. We have a great company behind us. We have a huge video team. We have all these great people who work with us, who are doing crazy, surprising things all the time. I encourage everyone to go read Caitlin Tiffany's "Why You Should Have A Giant Jewel-Encrusted Cell Phone Case" post, which is just, just bonkers and hilarious and funny and smart in such an unexpected way. It was just the things we're able to, our science team is incredible. They actually, and this is like the opposite end of silly posts about jewel-encrusted cellphone cases. They have been running a series of in-depth exposes of sexual harassment at the Smithsonian. And it, it caused the Smithsonian to start an investigation, change its policies, and fire someone,

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  who was like an admitted abuser of people. I'd like, that's, that's the balance we can strike and the range that we have. It's, it's not at all what I expected our team to be able to do. It's, it's a, it's a greater ambition than I think that we had in 2011. But what I've learned is that there's no ambition that's too great for us. So we're gonna keep going. And now we're gonna talk about Google Home.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:43Nilay Patel?

  And if you have questions or feedback about the design, we're on Twitter. You know, you can find us. Almost all of you have. My email address for some reason and my home phone number. Very disturbing. So please just keep giving us your feedback on the design. We're really proud of it. We are literally, Dieter and I have our next meeting with the design and dev team on Monday.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  To talk about the next set of things we're gonna do. So it's not done by any means. You can, you can see that it's not done in some places, but I think the bones of it are great.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  The, the last thing actually before we move on is we should also talk about Verge 2021, which is a feature series put together by our features editor, Michael Zelenko. Hey, Michael, if you're listening, I hope you're listening. How's it going, man? Instead of like doing a retrospective of all the amazing things that happened over the past five years, we have gotten together a bunch of like really smart, really important people and asked them what the world is gonna look like five years from today and put together for a bunch of them like videos that like animate the things that they're describing, the crazy world of driverless cars and gender balanced workplaces, both of which seem like equally unlikely, but are coming. And that's really good.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Like, it's great.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's the most ambitious package we've ever

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:57Nilay Patel?

  run. It's running for the full month. It's like 10 total pieces and it integrates photography, video, design, our access to these people.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  That team is

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Super fun. It's really good.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Everyone take a breath.

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Google. Play the Vergecast.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Damn it. No.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  I've gone definitely. I thought I had like the safe voice on, but I definitely heard you.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  It's the most inceptiony meta thing you can do on a podcast. Command the Google Home to begin playing your podcast. Alexa can't do that shit.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, will it resume?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Can Google do that shit?

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  The Google Home can play virtually any podcast because that Google has

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  If you're listening to the Vergecast on Google Home and you say, okay, Google, play the Vergecast, will it?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Say, I'm already doing it.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  I'm already doing it.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Sucker.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Or will it start it over? Because I hope it starts

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  Multiple homes.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Alexa, buy a Google Home.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  I, I figure we'll start it over.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  I did that with songs and while it was playing a song and it just starts.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dan. So you review this thing. I have one in my house. Walt has one. There's, there's Google Homes floating all over the Verge team. But you review it, start us off.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you know, it's impossible to talk about this thing without talking about the Echo. And this is literally Google's take on the Echo. So everything that the Echo does now, the Google Home also does. And you know, we can get into the personal preferences between which one is better or not, but they're pretty close. And if you close your eyes, it's really hard to kind of tell them apart.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  But then, of course, go ahead, Dieter.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  No, I was gonna say, like, the fundamental question for me here, it's 50 bucks cheaper than the Echo. I think it looks better. Is this thing, like, the Echo, like, I don't know how many they've sold. A bunch, like, most people, like, if you're listening to this podcast, you know exactly what an Echo is. But is, like, the argument Dan and I have been having for the past month is, is this thing going to be really important? And is everybody gonna buy one? And this is gonna be the thing that, like, is a big deal and a bigger deal, honestly, than the Pixel phone. And.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, is this Google's new product?

• 16:59Speaker 02

  I kind of wanna say yes if they can get it into retail stores, like, the thing, it's what, 130 bucks?

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it's gonna be in, like, Targets and Best Buy.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll be everywhere but Amazon, right? So this, like, this could be the most important product that Google releases, like, in a year.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  They should just put it right next to the Chromecast and have a little placard that says, "Love casting things."

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, because people just love casting.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Do you cast? Uh, yeah, I guess that's a good question. Is it gonna be as big as the Chromecast was?

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Chromecast is $35 and it sold at Walmart. And it says, like, "Get free TV on it." It's like, you know, like, it's, it's the simplest way to get Netflix on your TV, and that's why people buy it.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  Because you just, like, push the button on your phone. Dan, I think you and I disagree on a very fundamental level with this thing.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  Right, it's, you're like, close your eyes and it's the same. And I disagree. I think it is slightly worse than the Echo.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Really?

• 17:51Nilay Patel?

  In really meaningful ways.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  And I was using it again last night, and like, they are, they are just deeply irritating, starting with the wake word. It is awful to say, "Okay, Google."

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I give you that one, I agree.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Oh, no, you got it, god damn it.

• 18:06Nilay Patel?

  It is awful to say, "Hey, Google."

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  Alexa is just a nicer thing to say.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when I was shooting the the Pixel review, I had to say Google like 30, 40 times per minute, you know, to like get my lines and like, once you say Google more than three times in a minute, it becomes a ghoul.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  It's like, okay.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  There's something to be said for the fact that most other assistants have a name.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:34Nilay Patel?

  There's way too much to be said of the fact that most of those names are female names and the assistants have female voices, but at least it's a person, right, or an anthropomorphized thing and you're having a conversation with in the form of a conversation instead of invoking a brand. I read Brian X Chen's review in the New York Times today and he's like, to get a sense of how annoying this is, just replace Google with any other brand and just walk around being like, okay Pepsi, like you don't want to do that.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  Nobody names their kid Google.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  And the irony is that, you know, the home is of all of them, the best one to have a conversation with because like you can actually ask a follow up questions, but every single time you ask it a follow up question, you have to say, hey, Google or okay, Google, which like totally ruins, now my phone's blowing up, totally ruins the experience of having a conversation with this type of thing. So like, that's kind of why I feel like there, it's like, when you look at what you would use it for at home, what most people use the Echo for, like you can, we could debate the sound quality and we can debate, you know, a couple of other things, but like really people use them as speakers to play music in their home primarily. And then maybe for a timer in the kitchen, if you have smart lights or smart home gadgets, you use them to turn on and off smart home stuff. And like,

• 19:52Speaker 03

  that's like what they all do. And you can ask it basically fast, uh, facts. But, uh, what I really wanted from the home, and I think what a lot of people expected from the home was the fact that it's running this supposed Google Assistant, which is supposed to be this really smart, deep AI system. And it's really not a great assistant. In a lot of ways and like it's not anything more than the Echo and I think a lot of people, myself included, were expecting a lot more from Google at the outset.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  So like, but when you say it's not a great assistant, like on the phone, like I think that the Google Assistant is better than Siri, better than Cortana, better than, you know, it's the best phone assistant, but that doesn't mean that it lives up to like what you think it ought to be capable of.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  But the assistant on the home is not the assistant, I mean, it is the assistant that's on the phone, but it's not the same capabilities, like basic stuff like adding an appointment to my calendar, I can't do with home or setting a reminder, I can't do with home, I can't send messages with it, like all the stuff that I'm used to using the assistant for on my phone, I can't use the home for.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  And some of that is because it can't do it and so it's because it's only tied to like a single Google account, which is like.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the other issue.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Google trying to do more with this than Amazon did with Alexa, because like nobody uses, you know, Amazon, not that there's such a thing as Amazon Calendar, like Amazon doesn't have ambitions to like tie into like your actual personal data.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  No one uses it, but you can connect it to a calendar and you can.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can, but like really they don't, that's like not the core thing that it does. Whereas Google says it is the core thing that it does, but everybody has more than one Google account, right?

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Or, or they're in a household that has more than one Google account.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, I have my main one and then there's the one I use to control a botnet.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:33Nilay Patel?

  Great.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  A botnet of IoT devices that bring down the Eastern Seaboard's DNS.

• 21:38Nilay Patel?

  Don't cross me.

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  So what, you don't have a botnet Google account? That'd be great, by the way. So there's that, but that's like deeper into the capability of the software. I'm still stuck on like using the thing. So Dan was like, it's got a, the speaker's fine. I think the Alexa speaker, the Echo speaker is better.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Really?

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're bad in wildly different ways, right? So the Echo speaker is super tinny and the.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Well, that's bad.

• 22:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think the Home speaker is super muddy.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  I, I call the Home speaker soft, like it's not as sharp sounding as the Echo and that makes the voice response sound better to me. Like, I like the voice of the Google Home better talking to me than the voice of Alexa, because it's not as piercing.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  It is like a better voice, too.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  Dan, you didn't have any problems with the microphones? It just didn't hear me a bunch.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Really?

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  And my Newark apartment is not like a massive zone.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Do you have bad wifi?

• 22:30Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  I mean, because Google, Google only has two microphones, Alexa has seven.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  My router looks like it could invade the earth at any moment.

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, it's just that little stuff. It's, the Echo works because it's a great hardware product paired with like a pretty okay assistant.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:47Nilay Patel?

  And they've added capabilities, but very few people use those, like Dan said, I think they use it to play music mostly, set timers. The promise of the home is that it's a slight, I think a slightly worse hardware product paired with theoretically a much better assistant.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Should they made it, made it more expensive so they could compete more on the hardware?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  What's worse about the hardware? Is it just the quality of the speaker?

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  It's just little stuff. It's the quality of the speaker. I prefer the dial on the Echo to turn the volume up and down instead of the touch thing.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  I think it could have used five additional mics, right? I don't know.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  But I mean, I, I will say aesthetically, I'd much rather have the home on my counter than an Echo. Like I, I, I never had a problem with the Echo's looks before, but then I look at it compared to the home and I'm like, man, this is like twice as big and, and two, way uglier than it should be. For something that like sits in the middle of my house.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, the Echo definitely looks like they made a prototype out of a steel tube.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, what if we just, uh, put this knob on it?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Well, the, uh, the little light ring at the top of the Echo has gone from like being just like a thing to feeling like really like Cylon aggressive. Like when it like spins around and looks at you.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Love that.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Oh dude, it's, it's like, I, I loved it at first, but it increasingly feels threatening to me.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  It's, it's very ominous to me.

• 24:03Nilay Patel?

  I take that as a sign that it's gonna work. Right? Like that it no, because sometimes it doesn't work. Like sometimes your voice bounces off a wall weird and it points at the wall.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, you're just a dumb robot. But when it, when it like looks at you, you're like, you're listening to me, buddy.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Is there another technology in your life that has become increasingly menacing? I feel like typically they like.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Increasingly menacing technology.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Fade into the background.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  That's a really good tagline for the Verge.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  So not only does like the, the, the light circle around and then stop when it points at you, but also while it's listening to you, it will like shift from side to side. Like it's scanning you and it's like, it's, it's just a very weird thing. And like the lights on the home, I think I wrote this, that they're much more approachable and like less offensive or menacing looking than, than the, the ring.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  I will, it's a much friendlier product.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Yes, friendlier is the better word.

• 24:53Nilay Patel?

  But I, I, I just don't.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  But nice guys finish last.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  You're all just assuming that, I mean, if you're going nice guy and you're going up against Chef Bezos, like you're dead.

• 25:04Nilay Patel?

  You're like, hey, Jeff. And he's like, I'm stabbing you right now.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  With a drone.

• 25:09Nilay Patel?

  I just, I feel like they, they kind of whiffed. Huh. You don't feel. I haven't used one yet, so I can't weigh in.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't feel as negative on it. I think that like, you know, for, for everyday use, I think it's fine. I haven't had the voice control issues that you've had in Eli. And, you know, I'm able to ask it to play my Discover Weekly and it just starts playing and ask all these things. And, and I've noticed that, you know, I use these things a lot for controlling smart home stuff because turning lights on and off with an app is a real pain in the neck. So with Alexa, I don't know, three out of four times it works and that one out of four times is super frustrating. So I've had a much higher hit rate with home for that kind of stuff. So that's like a better experience. But my disappointment is like I said earlier, like Google pitched this as like this virtual personal assistant. And it's just not yet.

• 26:00Nilay Patel?

  You're on personal Google. That was like the whole thing.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it barely knows anything about me.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to read this ad and then I want to talk about assistant for a little bit because the most interesting thing to me here is you just reviewed the Pixel. Which is sold on the back of assistant. Dan just reviewed the home. I think we should talk about assistant for a minute.

• 26:17Nilay Patel?

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• 26:59Nilay Patel?

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• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  I don't talk about the ads a lot. Squarespace has the best ad copy for me to read of all of our sponsors. Thank you, Squarespace.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Hi, print.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Build it beautiful.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  They built it beautiful.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. They built this beautiful.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  They wrote it, they wrote it nice.

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  Squarespace.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Write it nice.

• 27:46Nilay Patel?

  Write it nice.

• 27:49Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about Assistant.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, what do you want to know?

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, as, you know, Dan and I were like working on this review last night, what I was asking him over and over again was, why is it different than on the Pixel? And the comparison that Dan gave me was Siri is wildly different on the Apple TV than it is on the Mac than it is on the phone. I think this is the beginning of like, a huge mistake that all these companies are making.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Well, so, yes, you are correct. The Pixel, the Assistant gets instantiated differently in ALO than it does in Google, than it does in Google Search, Google Assistant on the Pixel than it does in typed out searches on the Pixel than it does on Google Home. It does different things in all four of those places. That is a thing that I would like them to resolve over time, and I don't get super duper vexed about it, like, they'll figure it out, right? I'm not super deeply worried about that. What does worry me deeply about the Assistant is it has repeated the original sin of Google since time immemorial, since Larry Page murdered Sergey Brin, like Cain and Abel.

• 28:51Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  It doesn't

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  That's why Sergey has to wear the shoes.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  Understand multiple accounts.

• 28:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  It ties to your primary Google account. If you've got a work account, it doesn't know shit about it.

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  And, come on, every, literally, everybody who works at this company, all 45,000 people, however many thousand people work at Google.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  100,000 people.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  100,000 people have a personal Gmail and a work Gmail.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  And they all have to use Hangouts at work, and I'm so sorry for them. They all

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  Use these products every day and they haven't figured out like they've barely got it working in Chrome, where it's not the worst thing on the planet to have more than one Google account, barely. And they build this assistant and they still haven't resolved this original sin. Figure it out, guys.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:42Nilay Patel?

  Make a setting where it's like, okay, fine, we can only tie it to one account, but yeah, you could like cheat your work accountant for it, all of your information from there.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not even smart enough to see shared calendars on my personal account. Like, we have a shared family calendar between my wife and I, and it's on my personal account. It's literally the only thing on my personal account that has any appointments and the Google Home can't see it. So it's like, it never thinks I have any appointments. It never thinks I have anywhere to go.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  I just want them to finish a product.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  You know, Google search is like a finished product. It's the thing that makes them the most money. It's really good. It works. Gmail is a finished product. YouTube is a finished product. Like, doesn't anyone at Google ever think like, man, our finished products kick ass?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  People love them and use them and they all generate tons of money for them.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Whole end to end design concept is real.

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  What if we finish the product?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Well, my question about Google Home is like, a lot of the answers on Google Assistant on the phone are like, here's a cool web search. I heard what you were saying and I searched the web for you.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I'll say.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  So how does it do that with Google Home?

• 30:48Nilay Patel?

  At my cousin's house last weekend and he is a TV in his kitchen. He's got the nasty cable box sitting on top of the wall mounted TV. And he's like, I've got to use all these remotes to turn on my kitchen TV. And I was like, we need to talk about this whole setup, but I can solve this one problem and program your Verizon cable box remote to turn on your TV for you. Like, look at the remote. I did the thing where you pull off the battery cover. It's usually the stickers there. It's like how to put it in learning mode.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  A sticker. So I was like, okay, Google, how do I program a Verizon Files remote? And it brought up the webpage, but it summarized the webpage for me.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  It did summarize. So that's the goal.

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  So like it brought up the card and I was like, I looked like a genius.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  Like I had like a robot butler from the future and I was like, I'm not going to tell you this.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  So did you do that with your phone?

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  And I tried with Siri and Siri was like, here's exactly the same web result. I was like, a click, I click it on this garbage.

• 31:46Nilay Patel?

  So like, I don't mind, as long as they repackage the web, I'm fine for them to rely on it.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, Google Home will actually like read that summary aloud to you. So it might kick off like four sentences of reading. I did some demos asking it for recipes and it would read like the steps of the recipe without telling me the ingredients I needed. So I asked her how to make pumpkin pie and it never told me I needed like canned pumpkin.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  But yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  So can I say a thing that I'm afraid of?

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  I wrote this thing like, I guess it was a year ago about the internet bundle. Like, the fact that these assistants just return one canonical result, it's, it's what you want, but man, does it create some winners and losers. It creates a lot more losers than it creates winners.

• 32:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  And like, if they decide not to get it from the web and they decide to get it from their, their good friends at, you know, Foursquare or Yelp, whoever is willing to chip in a little more cash.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  So this is happening all over the place now with Cast, right?

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, the new, the new Google Home app that Cast has been renamed to is hot garbage.

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  It is awful. Like, you no longer, they gave up on like trying to like have shows in it. And that, okay, fine, you were bad at that. So you stopped trying to do it. That's fine, I guess. Instead, it's just like, here's a bunch of apps that support Cast. It's like, why, why would I ever open this app ever again? It is, they made it from like a thing that like could potentially be useful to a thing that's utterly pointless.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  I think Amazon has dreams that I'll open the Alexa app from time to time.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  Literally have never opened that app, except to like reset the wifi on my.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  It's only there for troubleshooting.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Anyway, sorry, I interrupted.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  Echo Tap, that's the little one, the little Bluetooth one.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  Most buggy device my entire, my entire life.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Just, yeah.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  It just, I mean, like the, the big Echo is great. The little guy just constantly just loses its internet connection, but doesn't know it's lost its internet connection. So you talk to it, and it's like, I am going to play that song off of Spotify. I'm gonna do it. Just nothing happens. And I have to turn off. I don't know. Anyway, but I don't think anyone buys that one.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  You were saying that the evil deals are happening all over the place, and I interrupted.

• 33:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh, evil deals. So, Google with the Google Home, I think it's, it's, it's, it would be its coolest feature if it, they do all the things they say they're gonna do. But you can just say, you can tell the Google Home, like, "Cast The Verge on YouTube to my living room TV." You know, if you have CEC all set up right, which no one does, except for me, because I'm a huge nerd, it'll light up, it lights up my receiver, it switches the receiver input, it lights up the TV, switches the TV input, it gets it all right, and it just starts playing, which is awesome.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  Google says they're gonna like partner with Netflix, they're gonna do this thing, so you could be like, "Play Black Mirror on the living room TV," and it'll just like start doing it. If you, they could get all the way to "Play whatever, play the World Series," and like light it up. But that's, you gotta have a deal with Google to do it.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  It's not just like an open thing. It, unless Google gets the deals, which are very hard to get.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially with Netflix, apparently. They're not, they're not plugged into Apple's TV app.

• 34:50Nilay Patel?

  Um, Apple also can't get, they have single sign-on for the Apple TV. Yeah, only DirecTV and Dish are signed up for it so far as we know, and I'm almost 100% certain that the reason they haven't got the big cable companies to do it is because Comcast would rather you download the Xfinity app on the Apple TV and use that as your primary interface.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz it's, the Xfinity app is an entire, all, whole OS, all on its own.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  It's a, it's an operating system that runs on your iPad.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, how can you trust these people?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  I, I think this is why it would be great, like, like, if you think of like that, that old Apple commercial of like, in the future, there'll be this Apple assistant and like...

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  The Knowledge Navigator.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Is that what it was called?

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. If you think about that, what you conceived of as AI in the future was relatively personal. It was probably made by a company.

• 35:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  But it was personal, and it was smart in a personal way. It was smart about, like, it's not hard, like, theoretically, Dan, it's pretty easy to access your calendar. You could like take a piece of paper and write some dates on it. And you know, you'd have your information, you know, it's not a crazy concept that your information could be local to you and you would have access to it. It's when it has to be filtered through multiple different companies talking to each other, or just one big company talking to itself, in the case of Google, where it's weird and it's harder for these artificial intelligent things, or not really artificially intelligent, artificial insistence.

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  To access the information because they are not truly personal objects, they're corporate products.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  That you kind of get a weird license to.

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, it's weird because everything was that way before. We just didn't think about it because nothing, no single thing was all consuming.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  So your access to television through a cable box, there's just deals on deals on deals on deals, but it didn't matter because once you stopped using it, you did something else.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Well, but.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  And AT&T Time Warner wasn't there to chase you around the world, tracking your every move on the internet.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  The computer ostensibly, the personal computer, you had your recipes.

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  You had your spreadsheets, you had your novel that you'll never finish, and your calendar and your emails. All of those are basically text files that are local to your computer theoretically and searchable by one computer. And if an intelligence was local to your computer, it could work with that information.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  I mean, that's, that's Apple's pitch for the intelligence on the iPhone, right? It reads the emails and your contacts that are local on your iPhone and then tries to make some intelligence sense out of that, right?

• 37:31Speaker 02

  I'm still focused on the fact that Paul just laid down some real talk that I'm never going to finish that novel.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Real sad about that.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  It's actually in the extended cut, at the end of the phone call, when he, you know, teleconferences into the other professors, I know this video by heart, by the way, but teleconferences into the other professor's class to talk about dinosaurs.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  At the end of it, he hangs up and he looks wistfully off in the distance. The knowledge navigator is like, you're never going to finish.

• 37:59Nilay Patel?

  It's really weird. It ends. I'm just fucking super drunk and alone. Wondering why he's a failure. They predicted everything that would happen to me. John Sculley had a really dark vision.

• 38:13Nilay Patel?

  But also true. So right now, Assistant. Yeah. It's Google's biggest bet. Yeah. It's what they're talking about. They named it after the company. They got Apple running scared. Apple will literally call anything it can machine learning and AI. It's like when you unplug your headphones and music stops. Series on the case.

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's the world we live in. Where's that? Is it? What's your take? It's the best, but that's not saying much right now. Dan?

• 38:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, agreed. Like, on my phone, Assistant is far more useful than anywhere else, but it's still not. Not where I'd love it to be.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  Does anybody still have Tasker on their Android phones? I feel like all we've done is make voice activated Tasker. Yeah. Where you'd like, you'd plug in your headphones, it would start Spotify for you.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Deep, deep Android nerd cut from, uh...

• 39:00Nilay Patel?

  Remember Motorola built its entire own version of Tasker? Yes. And that was like a major selling point of the Droid? Is that the one that could do like location based stuff? Yep.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. A lot of the OEMs build that stuff now. So like LG, Motorola, like you mentioned. Uh, Samsung has it. You can set location based stuff to turn your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth.

• 39:19Nilay Patel?

  It's called STasker. Stasker.

• 39:23Nilay Patel?

  Weird. Okay, I'm gonna read an ad and then we're gonna talk about the MacBook.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

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• 40:12Speaker 01

  Do the math.

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• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about this MacBook. Paul, I want you to talk about the MacBook. I feel like I have done nothing but talk about the MacBook. I've thought about the MacBook. Dieter has one sitting on the table here.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I do.

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  Vlad just published the review of what I am referring to as the boring one with no touch bar.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  That's the one I have sitting in front of me.

• 40:52Nilay Patel?

  Touch bar ones, I feel a little annoyed, right? They were supposed to ship in two, three weeks. I'm seeing people, those dates are getting pushed back. But anyway, Vlad, I believe, wrote, he wrote the review of the boring one, and then he wrote a follow-up piece, which is a fascinating thing to run simultaneously, review, Windows laptops to consider instead of a MacBook Pro.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I know you were involved in this, so tell me, tell me what you're thinking about this, Paul.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think these are the, the obvious ones.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  My personal thing right now is that I always want to go more Pro.

• 41:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  In fact, I had a MacBook Air 11-inch for a long time, and I was very happy with it. I actually really liked the size. And I was like, I'm a writer. All I do is write, and I just write, write, write. And I don't need a big screen, because if I, whatever, if I've got all these browser tabs, that means I'm not writing. I should be writing on a small screen. And I went up to a 13-inch Pro because I was like, you know what? I'm kind of a bit of a developer now, doing some programming. And I wanted something more powerful to run, like Unity and Unreal Engine. I've gotten Premiere on this laptop, had done a little bit of that.

• 42:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  But like, a base model Pro is not that good at Unity.

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Or Unreal, or Premiere.

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  And it's really, it's basically good for writing and for developing, for sure. And so my, my thinking was like, can Apple do something special and bring the GPU closer to the Pro model people will actually buy? Not the $5,000 model.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  But the, maybe the $2,000 model with a GPU. Apple's like, you know what? People really like GPUs. GPUs accelerate so many things, almost every Adobe app.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Is GPU accelerated and so it can be super helpful and most of OS X and a lot of Apple's applications like Final Cut is super GPU dependent.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  That's there's a lot so much nuance there though, right? Like the Adobe acceleration doesn't work with the AMD GPUs that Apple uses.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Right. So exactly. So Apple said, no, actually, we're not going to do that.

• 43:04Nilay Patel?

  What's weird that they stuck with AMD.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  Everyone seems to believe that the Nvidia cards, the mobile cards are.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  I'm pretty sure AMD even knows that the Nvidia cards are better.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  But do the Nvidia cards, are they are they gentle on the battery? Because Nvidia historically not a friend to the battery.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  See, that's the other thing. So Nvidia's current current gen are basically like you're looking at like twice the power draw. Like if a laptop is like 20 or 30 watt, a MacBook Pro is like 20 watts, maybe like a like a laptop with like an Nvidia 1060 is like 60 watts or something like that. So obviously, Apple's probably not going to do that. But Apple just went to me in the other direction from where I'm wanting to go. I'm trending. I'm thinking about getting a thicker laptop with shorter battery life to do more pro things. And Apple made a thinner laptop.

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  And I just didn't need them to do that. And it looks beautiful. And I do like the new keyboard. I think the touch bar is interesting, but not really essential.

• 44:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  And it's just, it didn't help me. I feel like I'm a pro. I feel like I'm a pro person who uses a laptop for a job.

• 44:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  And the MacBook Pro doesn't help me in anything I want to do.

• 44:14Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter and I had this argument 20 minutes ago.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  Their naming is not helping them right now.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  No.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  At all. I think that the one that Dieter has in front of him, the boring one with two ports, no touch bar.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  That should be the MacBook Air.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's not an air.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  Harrison.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this is the this is a computer they intend for air customers. But like, the air should be a little bit lighter than this. It should have the wedge.

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  The, to me, and this is the argument, I think that the MacBook should have been called the Air.

• 44:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  And this thing right here should be the MacBook. And then the Pro connotes the touch bar. And that should have been the that's that like that makes perfect sense. There's the Air, the tiny itty bitty one. There's the MacBook, the regular one, the one that everybody gets gonna get. And then there's a Pro that has the the cool weird touch bar thing.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  So the only thing about that is that the MacBook famously is the that's the laptop that you get when you go to college because it's about a thousand dollars.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Obviously it's not.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  No. This is fifteen hundred dollars for the base model.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Without the touch bar.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, the whole new family is just like priced way higher.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  So there's the MacBook and then there's like the MacBook Pro in three different styles. Boring, touch, touch bar and fifteen inch touch bar.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Right. And that was the big thing. I mean, the, the, the piece we that Vlad did of PCs to look at. Almost all of those offer superior specs for less money.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Which for a while I felt like the MacBook Pro was like, you know, this is always typically pretty competitive.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  It's not competitive right now.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  I mean, to me, the, the big question and like, I can't answer this because I haven't used a touch bar for more than twenty minutes is like, is Apple right? Fundamentally, the difference between those, those more interesting, more higher spec PCs and the MacBook Pro is they have touchscreens.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  And Apple just.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Not all of them.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Well, except for the X, the thirteen, the Dell.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  No, and the HP Spectre, the real.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Spectre definitely is. Well, not the thirteen inch, but the Spectre X three sixty, which we have in that.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that one, but that's like a different spec. I mean, I mean, the Spectre, the like blinged out.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, right. But like fundamentally, Apple has gone from like being confident to being religiously sure that people do not want a touchscreen on macOS.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  I mean, I agree with them.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  In the current form of macOS, I don't want a touchscreen. They would have to change macOS pretty significantly to make a touchscreen actually useful.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  And like Windows did that and they screwed it up and then they did it again and they've gotten it mostly right, but they haven't gotten like developers to make apps for it yet. But the, the big, big question is like, all of the compromises on this thing, lack of ports, like lack of SD card slot. The processor isn't the latest, latest. The graphics card maybe isn't what people want. It's limited to sixteen gigs of RAM. Like all of those compromises, like.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Are dedicated to the proposition that what you want is a thin, light, long battery life laptop and you don't want a touchscreen. And like, that's a, that's actually a pretty coherent, clear set of decisions and bets. But, man, I just don't know. Because if you take, if you take away some of those compromises, put the SD card slot in it, put a regular USB port on it, do something, put MagSafe back on it, then all of a sudden you're much more willing to like, stick with that bet. But as soon as you have to start making those compromises, all of a sudden, it gives you a moment, it gives you a, a chance to go, huh, am I sure about those, that I really believe in those first principles as much as Apple does?

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Well, maybe I don't.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Well, and that's the thing, the sad thing is that what I actually do every day, this laptop would be wonderful for.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  But what I aspire to be, where I aspire to do 3D graphics and video editing and more powerful things and more interesting things, this laptop isn't going there. They're stripping, they're, they're telling me, Paul, you just browse the internet all day.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  You're never gonna write that novel.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  You're never gonna write that novel.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  You're never gonna write that novel.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  They're forcing you to write the goddamn novel.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  You're never gonna write that 3D graphics novel.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  I'm never gonna write that novel.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  You're never gonna make the multimedia CD-ROM, man.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I was so into director.

• 48:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was director.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  I had, I had director in the box.

• 48:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  And I was gonna make so much multimedia.

• 48:33Nilay Patel?

  I've authored a CD-ROM in my day. It was, it was basically a super fancy HyperCard stack.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  That's all they were.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a whole, whole time in our lives, it's gone, and now we can't do it.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Now we can't, because there's not enough USB ports.

• 48:45Nilay Patel?

  So, I have this story, it's really, so I have one of these two.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  The boring.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  The boring one.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  And I, you know, there's a nice 27-inch Dell monitor on my desk upstairs, 24, I don't know, it's a big Dell monitor. And it plugs into my 15-inch Pro with a mini display port.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:01Nilay Patel?

  Like you do. So, Apple, they give us the review units, they give us, they just gave me the review units and like, dongles.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Dongles for days.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna need in order for this to not be annoying.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  So, I go upstairs, like, take out the... USB-C to Thunderbolt 2 dongle they gave me, confidently plug in my monitor cable, plug it into laptop, fucking nothing happens.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:23Nilay Patel?

  I had to go on Apple's support site, the plugs are the same, but their Thunderbolt cable doesn't support.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Display port.

• 49:30Nilay Patel?

  Display port. You have to get a different dongle.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  With the same connectors on the end.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  To get many display port.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  Like that, I complain a lot about this, but you're blowing it right there. Right? When like the connector confusion is such that it's, everything is the same, but everything is also different.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  I mean, the tragedy of this is I am really bully on USB-C.

• 49:53Nilay Patel?

  I love USB-C. I think that's great.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  And Thunderbolt, I'm also bully for, like the app, like Apple's screw you live in the future, use dongles in the meantime on the phone drives me crazy. On the computer, I like want to believe because I want everything to use this connector. I really do.

• 50:06Nilay Patel?

  This Belkin Thunderbolt dock.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  You just like plug in one cable and like the whole world opens up to you, like literally every connector made for the past 50 years is there and power like.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  That shit's great. That's the dream. You sit down at your desk.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Only costs $400.

• 50:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, fine.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is, this is why I'm surprised. Simplest thing. Like, did you know, for example, that the right side ports on the 15-inch Pro?

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  Are dramatically less fast than the left side ports. Who on earth is gonna like?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:39Nilay Patel?

  Now you're saying, okay, Pro customers, we trust you to be smart enough to know which side of the computer.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Apple has had a laptop at some point, I feel like with USB 3.0 and one of the plugs, but like, cause like on a PC. It's blue, right? The USB 3.0 plugs are blue, but Apple wouldn't do that. So I think at some point it's had one plug that is USB 2 and one plug that's USB 3.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  I mean.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Okay. So this is why, why does Apple, I heard that Apple's maybe just never gonna make a display again?

• 51:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah. So that's what they told us. Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Because that's the way, the way you want to roll into the office is you pull out your laptop, you plug in that one little cable.

• 51:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  And it charges your laptop. It's the display and it's obviously.

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, that's what I do with my MacBook.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  It's the best. Right now I have to plug two things in.

• 51:27Nilay Patel?

  So what they told us, because I asked them, and I tweeted this, and it's like, one of the most popular tweets I've ever tweeted. I was like, so you partner with LG to make this display? Are you ever making another display? And their answer was like, no, like, we're not good at it. We're just gonna let LG be good at it and partner with them. So.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  It's like, you made, you make the iMac 5K, and you're really good at making displays, Apple. You're really good at it.

• 51:51Nilay Patel?

  But it's a super low volume business. They buy the panels from LG anyway.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  So like, it's just LG.

• 51:57Nilay Patel?

  So they partnered LG, they wrote the firmware, so like, the brightness keys, control the LG's brightness, the color profiles are all, it's the whole thing. And it's got the dock. But I've seen a bunch of people point out that when you buy your computer and your monitor from Apple, if something breaks, you just go to the Apple Store and fix it.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:14Nilay Patel?

  And Apple isn't gonna like, honor LG's warranty. I mean, it's just like, their move right now with these laptops, I think, there's just, I've never seen so much outcry around an Apple product. And I'm the guy who like, threw a temper tantrum over the headphone jack. But the deepest Apple nerds I know are like, I don't know if I want this computer.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we've been waiting for this computer for a thousand years. And then it comes, and we're like, ah, finally, buy. And then you.

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  You canceled your pre-order.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did it. I was like, oh, man, finally, I got, this is what I need. I bought it. And then I sat, and I was like, you know, I just don't know.

• 52:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  I just, I do not know.

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm gonna end up buying the computer, because I don't have any other choice.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  Or I'm gonna get, whenever Google puts out like, a sick Chromebook.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I tweeted this, huge mistake that Google doesn't have a sick Chromebook on the market right now.

• 53:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Huge, also huge mistake that Microsoft's still not that good at making an operating system.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 53:13Nilay Patel?

  Wow, Paul.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  It's the truth.

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  Get in there. Okay, explain that one.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Well, it's just, what was it? I was trying to work with the Surface Book a while back. And I was like, okay, this would be nice. This is an all-integrated Microsoft experience. And it's just like, they just, it kept on shocking me ultimately.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Like, literally zapping you?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  I was actually being shocked by the Surface Book. You know, most people, including myself, I just built a PC. So most people, the problem with Windows is that it's kind of this amalgamation because it's Windows, but then you've got this Nvidia application that kind of runs your graphics card a little bit. And then like your sound card is kind of from somebody else too. And then that, so you end up with all these different interfaces. But there's just the, the, the operating system still just is not that slick. It's not that unified. It's, it's still not as good at fonts as Apple is. Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  And, um, and also for, for developer stuff, like they've got like bash on Windows, but I don't think it's really comparable to having actual Unix under your operating system. So then you're like, well, okay, well, I'll get a Windows laptop and I'll put Linux on it. And that story is still not really improved. It's always about Wi-Fi drivers.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  And, uh, The oldest story. It's really, it really is. Before there was Wi-Fi, there was Wi-Fi driver problems.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  I read, I read on these forums.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Plug in my parallel port for my printer and the Wi-Fi driver doesn't work. What is Wi-Fi? I don't even know. You read on these forums. I just want LPD. And they're like, we're starting to get 802.11 in pretty, pretty good. And they're like, oh, but AC is out. And like, oh.

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  But Windows hardware, way more interesting than Apple's PC hardware. So, I mean, the Surface Studio is super impressive.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  It's different.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  Dell announced basically a clone, which is my new favorite trend in PCs. Microsoft holds some big event and they're like, we've done the most engineering. Pentos Penny is like out there. He's like thumping his chest. He's like, you know what you want? You want specs? You like specs? I got all the fucking specs. And he shows you the specs and the video plays and it's always like dubstep Alice in Wonderland. And then you're like, ah, I want that thing. And then like the next day, I was like, who, we also made one. It's a thousand dollars cheaper. When I was like, you like the Surface? Here's 90 Surface clients.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  It's great. I love it. But the hardware is way more interesting.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  And that's a weird spot for Apple to be in. Where the PC design is like, God, I wouldn't say opt completely to parity, but the stuff is way more interesting.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Well, and there's a gamut. There's processors for laptops that are similar to desktop class. There's the more, Intel's done this really confusing thing where they've basically made their mobile class and like higher end class laptop processors, both be called i7 and i5 instead of having an M series. And then there's even lower in or lower spec. There's all, there is a wide range of specs that people want. And there's a wide range of RAM. Like the RAM thing is, it's crazy to me because yes, it does draw a lot of battery to have a lot of RAM. Also, you know what? Sometimes people want a lot of RAM.

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  And like people, it's crazy. It is crazy to say this with Apple. Obviously, this has been Apple's thing forever. We'll just make one size and pretend everybody wants it. But I don't know. I feel like there's other sizes out there and I can be served by.

• 56:45Nilay Patel?

  This is Apple and I've read probably more like Apple Mac web frustration with these Macs than any other Apple coverage I've read in a long time. Because it's so interesting to me. And I think Apple is just getting used to being the dominant player. Like they're still not ready for that role entirely. Right? They still act like the underdog a bunch. They still think like everyone's doing it wrong. But in many cases, that's true. But the turn now is like they're the dominant supplier of computing hardware and software.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:27Nilay Patel?

  Everyone in America, yeah, it's like all they're they're the biggest one. Like they've got to, they sell the most phones of any single company, right? They

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Oh, they they're the latest strategy analytics numbers, they're they're down to 10% market share worldwide. iOS. Android is 90.

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  But of the

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, individual phones.

• 57:47Nilay Patel?

  Single, individual phones. I I just think they're, this is the, this is like their little moment of reckoning where they they have to have the more diversified product line. And almost everything they do, because there's more, there's just, they have more people who want different things in different places. And this idea that they can hit the sweet spot constantly is just getting them in trouble. Because the sweet spot, particularly for pros, is all over the map. And this thing you're saying, like, maybe I don't care about the battery life of this laptop, I just want it to be powerful.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:18Nilay Patel?

  You know what the normal answer for that is? Well, why don't you just get a desktop? And Apple's answer to that is, our desktop is from the Stone Age.

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  There's a hamster inside of it.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  Like, they they gotta solve that problem.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Did you ever go to the the App Store? And it's like, here's a game that came out like two years ago that we bet, we bet we sell a computer that runs something this good.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  I'm like, like, literally, what computer in Apple's line? Well, Mac App Store takes forever to load. Let's see, let's see, Google Categories. I'll get a good example for you guys, just real quick, just hold on.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  Nothing like shopping on the Vergecast.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  This has been Paul's weekly feature, Wait For Me To Load The App Store. He does it every week.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Okay, they got Civ 6.

• 59:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  That makes sense. Sure, sure, it runs great.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Definitely want to lock in a gaming purchase on the Mac App Store.

• 59:15Nilay Patel?

  Wow, that was a really harsh burn that just slid right by.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Call of Duty: Black Ops, who'd buy that Mafia 2? Oh, Mad Max, that was the, that was the game. Mad Max, it was on the cover page of the Mac App Store. For 30 bucks, you can get Mad Max. This is a 34 gigabyte game, which that's like most of your SSD.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Like, literally, who buys that on the Mac?

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  That's what I want to know.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. All I'm saying is, I'm gonna end up buying one of these, because my current work computer is just, I mean, it is just nuclear hot right now. Literally, the only thing that's open is Chrome.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  This thing is dying. I need a new computer.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  But...

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't have a choice.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Yes, you need a new computer, and it will be marginally better, but it's not that much faster.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Which is frustrating.

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I bought, uh, my wife, the 12-inch MacBook. It's about as fast as the, like, 10-year-old MacBook Air replaced.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What are you gonna do? I, I think this notion that Apple has that you don't need that much more power, and they can just make it smaller, lighter, and the battery lasts. That is fine for one class of people, but I think another class...

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Like, the person who has, like, three, three browser windows because they don't know about tabs.

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  Is this all just Intel's fault? I mean, is that...

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  A lot of it is Intel's fault.

• 1:00:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, Intel blew it with Silver Lake. Apple never used it, right?

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, the Surface Book had a bunch of weird problems that went somewhat under-reported, but they appear to be related to Silver Lake issues.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  I mean, Intel's just, I mean, the, they're not getting faster, faster.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Anymore. It's not getting, yeah, you, at the same power level, you used to get a nice leap every year, year and a half.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  Is this, is this Moore's Law has caught up to?

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Is the, uh, is, is the conspiracy theory that what Apple wanted to do was put an ARM chip on this, and then at the 11th hour, they decided they couldn't get it done, and they went, just went back to Intel?

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  If they do that, they're gonna do it on the, on the, the little MacBook first.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  What's the over-under on Apple in the next rev of this? Well, okay, three bets.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  We haven't, we haven't talked about Touch Bar at all.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll do that. I mean, we gotta review that.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  We gotta touch the Touch Bar.

• 1:01:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. I think the more interesting thing right now is the controversy of the thing existing.

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  Next week, we'll talk about the Touch Bar thing. But five years from now, will the Mac have a touchscreen, and we'll be writing retrospective posts about that one weird time they tried the Touch Bar?

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  No, so, so what's gonna happen? It's gonna have a touchscreen on the bottom.

• 1:01:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, that was the third one. The whole bottom is...

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  No, no, here's what's gonna happen.

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  And the top part is not a touchscreen.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Here's what's gonna happen. Five years from now, we're gonna be saying, "Apple really needs to release a new MacBook. They haven't done it since the MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar." Five years ago, and iOS, the, the iPad, you know, Pro Pro... It's gonna be called the Pro Pro. The iPad Pro Pro.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  It's not good right now.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Is, uh, is gonna, we're gonna be, you know, using that. Or like, you know, it just, it still can't do those two things that the Mac does. And it's still not quite open enough.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, let me tell you a very frustrating iOS story. You ready for this? So we're updating the whole Verge design. We've got all these new icons to get, you can have a GIF as your Facebook avatar. So like, we're gonna make the Circuit Breaker Facebook avatar, uh, this like looping video thing. You can only do that for, apparently from an iPhone. This is what Helen tells me.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  So she sends me in Slack an MP4. Says, download this, upload it to Facebook. Can't be done because I have no access to the file system.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  Can't make that happen. I can't, there's no button in Slack to saved a camera roll.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  When you do it, it's the wrong, it was the wrong format for the iPhone camera roll. So it didn't go, it just didn't take.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  I airdropped it to my computer and then airdropped it back. That didn't work. I Googled, where do airdrop files go? Nine million search results because no one knows the goddamn answer. Just, I get it. You want us to all use that thing? That's great. You gotta, you gotta give me one more little bit of it's a computer.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  I, I feel like I haven't, I feel like maybe Apple's just already there, but I don't feel that pressure from Apple anymore that they're trying to get us all to switch to full-time iOS users. Oh, it's, I, I think it's coming. Yeah, I just don't spend enough time. Read that Phil Schiller interview in The Independent where he like, he's like, eh, you don't need an SD card slot. You're fine. The other thing he said there is, look, the iPad and iOS is the operating system where you touch the screen and interact with it. And we're gonna continue to develop the metaphor there. The Mac is a place where you don't touch the screen and we're gonna have other metaphors there. And they believe that the future of computing is the iPad Pro. Like.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Like, I, I know that it's really hard because everybody believes that Apple believes in the Mac and I do too. Like, there's certain parts, like the Mac team obviously does. But I think institutionally, Apple doesn't believe in the Mac anymore. They believe in the iPad.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  Wow, that's a bold claim.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  And I'm not saying, if you ask any individual person at that company, all the way up to Tim Cook, they tell you that I'm a liar. But when you ask the institution of the company, the superstructure of Apple, it's just, it does not, it, it, it's focused on the iPad and on, on the iPhone.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  They, I just feel like they can't do that until they say, you know what? Everybody at our company for the past two years has been working exclusively using iPads.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  To make the next iPad.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  That's actually the thing I'm worried, I mean, the capital makes a lot of media. They also design things.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they program.

• 1:04:44Nilay Patel?

  Is Johnny Ive using like a nine-year-old Mac Pro? What, what does he use every day?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  Richard Horwath, the-

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe the problem is that Johnny Ive, the whole problem with this Mac is that Johnny Ive uses a MacBook Pro full-time. And didn't think deeply about the need for an SD card slot.

• 1:05:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, he's an executive now.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:05:03Nilay Patel?

  When I said I wanted a 15-inch MacBook Pro, dude, you're an executive, you don't need that, you just-

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sorry, he's using an iPad Pro, yeah.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but there's like, there's somebody at Apple who's like making the website.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm saying-

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  Doing the motion graphics.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Just figuring out how to carve the aluminium.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Nilay Patel?

  And like, that person presumably is just as irritated as everyone else. Right?

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  What are they doing all day? Like, do they not, don't they have like an employee feedback forum? Like, please update my computer.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, they should, they should absolutely dog food, like, if, if Apple wants to force us all into iPad, I bet, I bet the iPad Pro would become a really great computer if Apple, everybody Apple-

• 1:05:44Nilay Patel?

  You know what's gonna be really irritating is if the next iPad event, when they put up like the iPad with the A10X or whatever it's gonna be. And they're like, it's just as fast as the MacBook Pro. Well, cuz you put the shit processor in there. When they were doing this one, they put it up and they're like, it's a billion times faster than the PowerBook 170. Maybe you should compare it to a Windows laptop that costs $800.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  All I know is the next, the next 30 Verge casts are just gonna be a cycle of pain cuz I'm gonna be spending the next six months just trying out every single Windows tablet and laptop on the market.

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  That's be fun.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna probably do some of the same stuff.

• 1:06:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm gonna read this last. Wait, no, you gotta do your gadget corner.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Some fan.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  Paul's got a recurring segment that he calls.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Cookie pods. It's a lot like tortilla pods, I'll admit. It's a lot like tortilla pods, but it's with cookies.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  It's way dumber.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  It's a Keurig for cookies.

• 1:06:42Nilay Patel?

  I watched this video, I have so many questions, but go ahead.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Okay, Chip is a smart cookie oven. It looks like a crock pot, but it's really shallow. It's smaller than a toaster oven, which apparently you can make cookies in a toaster oven. I literally.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're the best. Okay. By the way, the most important part about Chip is that it's a capital P.

• 1:07:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's intercapped, and in the video, they refer to it as a hymn, which is very disturbing.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Wow, okay, well.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  Its name is Eric Estrada.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  So basically, you, it can cook four cookies at once, which apparently is enough for people.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  I don't know about that.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  That seems like a low number of cookies.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Wait, is it, is it one pod per cookie?

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  The, the pods, I think, are, they're, they're four, four packs. It's like, it's like about $5 for four cookies.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  Here's a main question I have.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Nilay Patel?

  They never show, they show the pod packaging, and they show the people, like, opening Chip lid and retrieving the cookies.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  They never show anyone removing the dough from the pod.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:47Nilay Patel?

  Cuz presumably you have to do that.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  I would assume.

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Maybe not.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Ow!

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  I don't know. Yeah, it's not.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  You don't remove the coffee from the Keurig pod.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not.

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, the whole point of the pod is you don't have to do it.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. It is, I, maybe it's a misnomer to call it a Keurig, because, yeah, in a sense.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Tortilla pods, but did you remove, did you remove the tortilla dough from the tortilla pod?

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  No, you don't.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  See, that's what I'm saying.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  But that, they show you in the video.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  That's the magic of Chip, it's science.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  I'm guessing that you have to somehow remove these four bits of dough into place.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  And then, of course, you scan the barcode, obviously, and then it knows how to cook the cookies. And you can choose chewy, regular, or crunchy.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  But, and so some people are mad about this, but you can cook your own cookie dough if you want.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  I see.

• 1:08:41Nilay Patel?

  Wow. So really, just upending the whole razors and blades models of pods.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can make your own blades.

• 1:08:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, which is what you want. You know, make your own blades.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  So they made a, they made a really expensive Easy Bake Oven.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  With Bluetooth and QR code.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Which will take down the DNS of the Easton Seaboard.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  It is not yet funded on Kickstarter.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  That makes people feel a little bit. The most important feature in the app, you can send one another Cookiegrams.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, of course.

• 1:09:09Nilay Patel?

  You gotta make it.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  Just buy points and shit.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  No, no. Yeah, they're at $18,000 pledged of their $100,000 goal.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  28 days to go, though, so we can all turn this around.

• 1:09:24Nilay Patel?

  Let's not.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Depending on what kind of world we want to live in.

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  You take however much money you were going to pledge this thing, and you just go buy some cookies.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Okay, Google.

• 1:09:31Nilay Patel?

  You will end up with more cookies.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Refill my cookie pot order.

• 1:09:34Nilay Patel?

  You could get, like, you could just buy cookie dough. Your phone's talking.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:09:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, I gotta read, I gotta read this ad. I'm, I have to say, I'm so excited about reading this ad.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:09:46Nilay Patel?

  I've never been more excited about an ad.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  I'm excited.

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  It's a little late because Halloween's gone, but just bear with me here. You ready?

• 1:09:54Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Final Scream by Lisa Jackson.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  It's every killer's favorite sound, the final scream. Don't miss Lisa Jackson's New York Times bestselling suspense novel. 17 years after a deliberate and violent fire destroyed her family, Cassidy Buchanan returns to her small hometown in the shadow of Oregon's Cascade Mountains. She wants closure, but instead, her presence ignites a fresh nightmare. Another fire, more deaths with one common denominator. Cassidy herself. Is she the target? A suspect? Or is a killer waiting in the woods, watching the flames rage and listening for the screams? Final Screams by Lisa Jackson is on sale now everywhere books are sold. Find out more information at www.lisajackson.com or kingsingtonbooks.com. Final scream!

• 1:10:47Nilay Patel?

  Alright, I think that was it. I think we've exhausted. We barely talked about dongles.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  Oh, man. We really could have, but we chose not to.

• 1:10:54Nilay Patel?

  When we get to touch our one, we'll get, we'll get deep into it.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  Dongle live. Dongle life. My, my, it's a real hashtag. It's happening on Twitter right now.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  Get it. It was one of our taglines in the. Yeah, that's my favorite one.

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure I'm the one who started the dongle life hashtag.

• 1:11:08Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  Back in the day.

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But then when I did the headphone jack thing, I tweeted your, your picture at the Apple event.

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  Alright, anyway, that's our show. It was a good one.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  It was our fifth birthday show. We're five, goddammit. How did we get here? No one knows.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  We just waited.

• 1:11:22Nilay Patel?

  Literally just. To be honest, I took a little break.

• 1:11:27Nilay Patel?

  That's why Paul's happier than everyone. Paul's like the least stressed person I know. He's like hanging out. Anyhow, somehow we turned five. Thank you all so much for listening to this show, for reading The Verge, for watching your videos, for all the stuff you do. We love it so much. We love having you around. You can talk to all of us. We love that, too. Paul is at FuturePaul on Twitter. Dieter's at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. Dan is at DCSeefert.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  With an EI.

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  With an EI. We're at Verge on Twitter. We're Verge on Snapchat. We're Verge on Instagram. Subscribe to us on YouTube. We switched to YouTube because you people complain so much and I gotta go subscribe. Get in there. And there's other stuff to listen to. Chris Plant hosts What's Tech every Tuesday. Control, Alt, Delete. Walt and I do that every Thursday. It was our 50th episode.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 1:12:08Nilay Patel?

  It's crazy town. We've been doing that show for a while. Congratulations. On the Recode side, Lauren Good, everyone's favorite, hosts Too Embarrassed to Ask.

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  Recently had Joanna Stern on.

• 1:12:16Nilay Patel?

  Recently had Joanna Stern on the show. Peter Kafka has Recode Media, which is wonderful if you're a media nerd like me. And Kara Fisher has Recode Decode, which is wonderful if you enjoy listening to carefree, powerful people, which I think we all do. That's it. Go to iTunes.com/TheVerge. All the shows are there. Give them five stars. Rate, review, do all the good stuff. Okay, Google, turn off the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Paul.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  Paul.

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  Final scream. Ooh. I'm not gonna do that. It was a final scream. You can't have two final screams. Oh my god.