The Vergecast - 328: iPhone XR review, Google Home Hub and Yoga Book C390

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss Nilay’s review of the iPhone XR as well as reviews of the Yoga Book C930 and Google’s Home Hub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Vergecass listeners can try it all free in ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. That is ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire. and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media podcast situation. That's good. No, we have two now, so we're officially a podcast network again. And the second one, why did you push that button. Back, season three, new episode just went out this week on basically creepshotting people in public,

which I think you should, everyone should listen to. Ashley and Caitlin did a great job with that. So you're listening to the Vergecast now. I'm Neelai. Paul is in Hawaii. Hi, Paul. Hello. How's Hawaii?

It's great. It's beautiful. So, well, I have a story, but we should say hi to Dieter, too. Hi, Dieter. Hello. I'm smack in the middle of you, too. I'm still in California. So it's just a real moment we're having.

In my mind, the only good thing about California is its proximity to Hawaii. Wow. That's where I'm at with California. It's harsh. Yeah. I mean, that's not totally unfair. No, California is wonderful. Paul, tell me your story from Hawaii.

Okay. Well, so I've been spending a lot of time at the mall. There's a really big mall here. And so, well, there's a Verizon store, went to the Verizon store, got the Pixel 3. Yeah. And then I switched my number over. I'm like, I'm just going all in. But it was, you know, it was reckless.

because everybody, I'm out of wedding, and everybody at the wedding is communicating on WhatsApp. WhatsApp can only be on one phone at a time. Uh-oh. So I moved WhatsApp over to Pixel 3. I think my numbers ported. I'm not really sure. But I left the charger,

which is this is my only USBC device currently. I left the charger in a car. It's like, hey, no problem. I'm walking distance from a 7-11. Go to a 7-11. They don't have USB. chargers. What?

Every other phone is USB I know. What kind of phone chargers? Do they not have phone chargers at all? They had micro USB and they had micro USB and they had lightning. They had micro USB chargers? Yeah.

So do you also go back in time or did you just go to Hawaii? No, that's just how it is most places. It's hard to get USBC. I disagree. You know, you know what they say in Hawaii, Yolo. That means relax. Wow. Yeah, in Hawaii, they say,

don't worry about USBC. See, Paul, what you should do is go out you should go out and buy a Mate 20 Pro because then you could use a Mate 20 Pro to charge the Pixel 3. That's probably my only solution at this point. Yeah. Or you can go to another store.

You can go back to the mall that you're spending all this time. There's a lot of choices out there for you. How do you like your Pixel 3? It's great. I like the multitasking. I don't like the Google search app. I need to.

I like Googled something and it was a whole page of like, here's a Wikipedia article. Here's like seven other people who are like this person. Here's another row of random people. Here's another Wikipedia. And then like you scroll all the way to the bottom and it's like top result, the actual URL I was searching for. Yeah.

So I got to get my. I got to get my workflow down. But I like it. I like it as a device. I think it's beautiful. Yeah. You know that those mobile search results are a hotbed of European regulatory activity, Paul. They're coming for you.

They're going to fix that for you. Duck, took, go phone. $40 premium. All right. By the way, I said, I started introducing why did you push that button? And I said that I introduced us. I never told the audience what they should do after they listen to the Vergecast. So listen to us on the Vergecast.

And then stop and then go listen to why you just push a podcast because it is indeed wonderful. Okay, this week is jam-packed of stuff. iPhone 10R reviews happened. I got a little little baby scooplet out of that review. We should talk about that. Google's night site for the pixel is like leaked. And so we can talk about camera stuff. Dieter, you reviewed just a strange Lenovo thing.

I did. That's a good time. And then there's an Apple event next week Where I think I can say with a stunning amount of certainty That we'll see a new iPad pro Because it just keeps leaking So we got a lot of stuff talking about So let's start with a 10R

I reviewed it It's a strange thing to review a phone That is substantially Similar to the one you already reviewed And so you get a second crack at it Yeah. And so I was talking to James Baram, our creative director, and I was like, this is weird. I feel like I'm just repeating myself.

And he goes, you know, the real problem you have is the 10S review was just an iterative update to the 10. So it's like your third round of does face ID operate? It's your third round of are these gestures a good idea? And so you just like set all that aside. And what can you focus on with this phone? That all being said, I read everybody else's reviews. and everyone else landing on the same thing, which is correct.

Everyone's right, which is this is the one you should buy, which is a strange, extremely strange place for Apple to be in where their flagship product is not actually the one that most people should acquire, where their most expensive phone

is being positioned by its, you know, sort of a class of reviewers as you have to be crazy in some way to go spend that money when you can get this one. Yeah. So I have a million questions for you, Neely.

My first one, having read your review, watched your 14-minute video. By the way, message to the Verge video team, if Nilai gets to make 14-minute videos, quit telling me to mine, I have to be like 13 or under. I promised them eight, by the way. I just want to be really clear. I said, I think I can do this in 5 to 8, and then there was a microscope, and it's just all kind of show. We had my pixel, we had my pixel three review at like 1430,

You know, like, we got to get it down to under whatever the iPhone 10S was, and that was 1333. I know it. And we got it down to like 1332. I was like, stop shaving seconds. It's fine. And then you roll out with 14 minutes on the iPhone 10R, which we already all never heard anything about. Anyway, I mean, a quick 14. I've watched everything, read everything you've had to say.

I edited your review. We've talked about it on the phone. We've gone in great detail. You've put everything that you have to say about it out there. Just you get one. word to answer this question because after all of the information, I still just kind of want you to tell me, is the screen good? It's fine. That's two words.

It's, well, the word is fine. The answer, when you're like, you get one word, my answer was, it is fine. The word is fine. It's lawyering my way through that one. It's fine. It's, you know, it's not great. I don't know. I don't know if I'm just super picky.

I have been told by many reasonable people that I am. So I believe that I am. But at the same time, I know that we have built an audience of tens of millions of nerds who like to read about technology products, right? Like 40 some million people read The Verge every month. or you know, or watch her videos

or listen to these podcasts. And so it's hard for me to be like I'm especially picky. Like I know there's all these people out there who feel the same way as I do about some of these things. And then on the flip side of that,

it's like, I say it's fine. And, you know, an army of YouTube commenters tells me that I've, I'm cheating everyone because it only is technically it has an 828P display

instead of a 10, like the YouTube comments are insane and they're they're delightfully insane in a way that I appreciate like I want there to be arguments about pixel density and resolution in this world and what if you if that's a thing you want you just have to put up with the fact that they exist yeah so here's what I'll say I didn't put this in the review because it's so hard to quantify and it's impossible to show but I'll say it to this this group into the Verchess audiences I think they'll know what I mean the the most bothersome thing about the screen to me is that if you are using a 10s or even using a 10,

the lamination, like the thickness of the glass between your finger and the pixel is noticeable. I can't possibly show this. You have to notice it. There's like a, you can see that it's a different experience. It doesn't feel quite as much like the immediacy of the pixels aren't there. And then on the corners, there's a little bit of haze. and a little bit of, like, around the edges because of that extra thickness. Matt Panzerino at TechCrunch described it as a drop shadow

around the edges of the display. That's a very kind. Yeah. And he, Matt typically does not harsh on Apple, and he, in that specific way. And he called it right out. So, yeah, it's just a lesser display. And I find the brightness cut

when you turn it off axis. to be insane. Right. Like, I would not want to have this thing in my hand all the time. Other people that I gave the phone to couldn't even see it. Right. So when you hold the phone off access,

I think that, you know, they had to re-engineer the backlight. They had to make the backlight even. There's a bunch of stuff they had to do to make that work. When you turn the phone off access, even just a little,

the brightness drops. It's super noticeable. We put a GIF up. It's in the video. There's a little bit of a pink shift, too, but it's really the brightness drop that gets me. And so the phone is so big that the way I think I hold phones pretty close to my face. So some part of it is always off access to my eyes, right? Especially as you can move

over your hand. And so it shimmers at me, right, in this really distracting way that I just can't unsee. Again, other people that I show this thing to did not notice that at all. Like literally, I was like, do you see it? Like, it's great. And they're like, what are you talking? talking about. And this GIF is in comparison to the iPhone 8. Right. Previous Apple LCD. So I have always said before Apple did an OLED that I prefer Apple's display tuning. I think their LCDs are nicer to look at than Samsung's OLEDs. And people get mad about that. But Samsung's OLEDs are so oversaturated and crazy that I just prefer the more natural look of their LCDs. So I was expecting, oh, this will just be another

Apple LCD and for the most part it is, but that that shift, that brightness off axis shift and the color shift is really noticeable to me. And then sort of the, the lesser immediacy versus the 10S is noticeable to me. Right. Now, millions upon, and so, you know, my review, I said if you decide, put a dollar amount on how much you care about the screen, is it $250? And then, you know, every commenter is like, it's the screen. Of course it's the most important thing. Um, And, you know, I don't want to get into a fight in YouTube comments. But to me, it's like millions of people by shit LCD TVs, right? Like they signal to the world that they don't actually care about how it looks.

Millions of people buy cheaper Android phones with lesser displays. So there is an argument that you're paying, you know, you're paying this Apple premium. You get their latest processor. You get their latest camera. You get, you know, a beautiful thing, which is not to be discounted. And you get this lesser screen in it, and that accounts for the discount. I mean, you get a bunch of others.

You know, it's not made of stainless steel. It only has the one camera in the back. It has LTE advanced instead of gigabit LTE. There's stuff. It has one gig, less of RAM, although it's pushing so many fewer pixels that comes as a matter. So there's a bunch of stuff you don't get.

But really, day-to-day, most people should buy this one because it's cheaper and the screen is fine. Yeah. It's like, should everyone in the world go buy an OLED TV? like I bought one shouldn't should most people like

no you'd never demand that I wish I bought one okay so you said it shouldn't be discounted which brings me the next question and this might actually be for Paul there's been a kerfuffle that everyone's like oh my god they the cheaper iPhone the less expensive iPhone is such a good deal

they finally did it and compared to the you know last iPhone low end iPhone it's like not a great deal like 750 is still a lot for a phone right feels like a lot to me

I did not like spending $800 on the pixel 3 I lose that fun I mean the high I think the pixel 3 and the iPhone 10er are uh we're calling it the iPhone tenor by the way

oh good yeah are expensive this does solve this does solve that problem that I highlighted in the iPhone when the iPhone 10 came out there was the rich people phone and then there was the phone for the pores, which was the iPhone 8.

Now there is a phone for the middle class, I guess. If you want an iPhone, if you have to have an iPhone for whatever reason because of IMessage or your favorite app is on it, or for some reason you have to have an iPhone, but you are actually on a budget, you probably get an older phone than this, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I do see this as a phone. As a phone for a cheap. Yeah, but there's a lot of adequate phones that still exist in the lineup that are cheaper than this. But this does seem like a pretty strong middle class iPhone. Yeah. Are you suggesting that they should have made a brown one? Like, it should have been brown on the back, and then the bezel around the screen should have been like a really, like, dark green color.

And then it could have become the avocado toast of iPhones. The millennial phone. It'd be wild if they let you do color combos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's expensive, but compared to, you know, so the 8 plus is there. The 8 plus is only $50 cheaper than the 10R, which to me is like kind of damning, right? Like the idea that you're going to get the older design, the older chip, the older camera, older everything,

but what appears to be a nicer 1080P panel and then for $50 more you can get bet literally an upgrade of every other thing and maybe like a sideways move on the screen or a downgrade on the screen for $50. It really suggests that cost of that screen is the thing that's keeping it, you know what I mean? So yeah, I don't know.

Like should you buy an 8? If you want a small phone, you have but two choices in Apple's lineup. You have last year's phone, the eight, or you can pay a lot more money for a 10S, or you can go try to find a 10 while the last remaining stocks exist, which is once again last year's phone. So like that... Or you can buy a palm phone and have a phone for your phone and have it. No, you can't. You have to buy a regular phone and then buy a palm phone.

What's the cheapest phone on Verizon that you can buy to have a palm phone as a second phone? So that was like, you know, one thing. Like, we got to talk about the screen. We talked about the screen. It's, it's, everyone should go look at it. I actually love to know what people think. Go look at the screen. Go to the Apple store.

Go to the Apple store. Look at this thing. Just like, let me know if you think it shimmers the way I think it shimmers. Because it was super noticeable to me. But again, I, I think I'm, I'm quite picky with these things. Then there's the camera. And the camera is the one that I wasn't expecting people to be unhappy about. about in this way.

And it's like the most consistent feedback I've gotten from the review. So it has just, it's the same camera on the front, which is, it's like a fine camera. It can do portrait mode with a true-depth sensor. And then on the back, it has the same 12 megapixel F1.8, smart HDR main lens. It does not have the telephoto lens.

But it can do portrait mode on the back, kind of the same way Google's doing it. It can use its, you know, focus pixels. phase contrast thing and figure out some depth. Apple only lets you do portrait mode on people because they were very insistent that they think Google gets it wrong too often. So they spent their time doing ML learning on just people for portrait mode to work on the

iPhone 10. That's what the pixel too ostensibly, they, no, maybe it was one of them. Maybe it was a selfie. I think the selfie camera only worked on people anyway, whatever. Sure. But so the interesting thing is that the iPhone 10S, in the iPhone 10 that have two lenses, they can do portrait mode on anything

because they can use that second lens. So the way it works is you turn on portrait mode on the iPhone 10S and it switches to the second lens, which is the telephoto, and then it uses the wide angle lens to calculate depth, right? Right. You only have one lens. You have to take the photo with the brighter lens.

The telephoto lens is F2.4. It captures less light. It appears to me to have a lesser sensor. so you're using this lesser camera and you're using the wide angle lens to figure out depth. On the 10R, you've only got one bright lens and the best sensor,

so you use that, to take the photo, and then they usually cut it out and do their cool blur. That means the portrait mode on the 10R works better in low light. Just hands down, absolutely does. They were open about it. Like, we're using the brighter lens.

And so I point this out in the review, and people are like, does that mean the 10R is a better camera than the 10S? And the answer is like only in the limited case that you're trying to take portrait mode photos in low light. Of people. Of people. Which is mostly what you take portrait mode photos of, so I can't imagine.

That's not something I do. I take so few portrait mode photos. I think it was a big deal. And it is just the reaction that the 10R, you know, use of the wide angle lens for portrait mode is a reason you should buy the 10R versus the 10S is just out there. Apple would not tell me if they would ever enable the 10S to do portrait mode off its wide angle lens. It's obviously a very complicated situation

because you switch to portrait mode, you're in the wide angle, you can only do people, but you switch to the telephoto, now you can do anything because you have the two lenses. That seems like an interface nightmare. Very un-apple. So I imagine next year they'll figure it out in some way. But for now, if, you know,

the main thing you do with your camera is portrait mode in the dark, you should buy you 10R. Otherwise, the cameras are identical. And I asked them very directly, hey, is there any difference here? And they were insistent that the cameras are identical. They're running the same software.

The one thing they did tell me is, and you either believe this or you don't. But there was beauty gate in which people thought the selfie camera was doing a beauty filter on faces and smoothing things out. And then conspiracy theories about the child. Chinese market and have it. But crazy town. Apple said, no, no, no, that's not the issue. We're not doing that. We would never do that. They're very insistent. They don't do that stuff.

They said we smart HDR had a bug in which, you know, it takes four frames, one of which is a long exposure. And it was picking the wrong frame is the base frame with the selfie camera. So it was picking a blurrier exposure from the selfie camera. And then when it was doing the HDR merge into that. It was getting a slightly blurrier effect on the face. And they say in 12.1, we'll fix it. So that's got to come out.

It's in public beta now. If you have, you can go get it and see if it's fixed. I don't have it yet. Because I can't, I'm not allowed to put it on review devices. So that's why I don't have it yet. But you can go and check it out and we'll check it out when it happens. Yeah. So every time there is a big phone release, there's always a series

of gates, right? Series of things that people are mad about the phone. So for the pixel three, there's a scratch, there's a problem with RAM in certain situations. It'll close apps in the background, depending on what other app you open, which isn't really enough RAM issue. It's a like RAM management issue. There's like speaker crackling that some people are experiencing, you know, like down the line. And like, it's like some gates are like, yeah, like, you probably should have caught that. Some gates are like, did you use it before you started selling it? And the

smoothing thing on the iPhones is one of those where it's like like, did you use it? Like everyone's saying this thing. A bunch of people are coming to your defense saying it doesn't exist or like our eyes are wrong and that we're looking at it wrong. And the details there,

we just can't see it with our human eyes. And it's like, but if it was just a bug, like how did you not? I don't know. That seems like the thing. kind of bug you catch. And like, I'm not accusing them of lying

and saying that, like, this actually, they shipped it one way and then it turned out, people got mad so they're claiming they found a bug to fix it. Like, that is not what I'm saying. But it's also just weird. Right? Like, okay, so I have a,

I have a crackpot theory. You ready for the crackpot theory? I am. And I, there's, I don't have any evidence to support this. But, so it's a crackpot.

I just want to be very, clear. This is my theory. I think the, the, the, there are two, there are two big things to know about the iPhone 10R and 10S cameras versus previous ones. Um, one, the rear sensor, the main sensor is like 30 some percent bigger, but they run it more aggressively at the same sort of exposure level than the previous camera because they want more light. Like Apple is chasing light in a very aggressive way. So they got a bigger sensor, it can collect more light, but they run it at a higher ISO or a longer shutter speed at the same sort of brightness level in the world because they want to collect more light. So it produces noiser images because they're very confident they can get rid of that noise. This is a thing they told me. The second thing to know is the thing that they're doing as they try to collect more light is they merge a bunch of exposures together and one of them is a longer exposure. right? So they have this longer exposure,

which is going to collect shadow detail, which is what they want most of all. So I think they wrote this code where they want to run the sensor real hot and run the exposure real hot and then do a bunch of noise reduction. And all that, they did all that work

for the rear camera and they just did it again for the front camera and just use the code again. And they forgot that the front camera, this is a crackpot theory. They forgot that the front camera isn't stabilized.

So the rear camera is, optical image stabilization. Right? So if you run it... Copy and paste job. Right. So they just like forgot that this setting on the front camera, this hardware feature on the front camera isn't there.

So you're running it real hot. You're keeping the exposure open longer, but you know it's stabilized, so you'll get a sharp image. And then you do it again on the front camera without the stabilization, so you get a blur your image at the same... But you don't see it because your computational photography

is so good at fixing blurry problems that you just end up with a photo that just is a little bit smooth. Right. So on the back camera, you've got this like noisy picture and you do all this noise reduction and that ends up with some smoothing. On the front camera, you've got a blurry picture and a noisy, some ISO noise and you do noise reduction, but it's already blurred to begin with and it looks like you applied a beauty filter because you didn't have that stabilizer. That's just my total tin pot theory that they just ran the same code twice and forgot that they weren't getting a stabilized photo

out of these settings. Again, that would be hilarious if it were true. Crazy town. So, like, we're picking the wrong frame. They're picking the one with the most light in it and merging back into it instead of picking a darker, sharper one. Right? You see what I'm saying?

Yeah. All of this is a lead-up. So they're going to fix it. It's 12-1. You can go check it out. All of this is a lead-up to say that I am now convinced iPhone's smart HDR photos look insane. They look insane.

And I have come to three rounds of reviewing this camera now. The 10S and then Dieter got the Google Pixel 3 and we, you know, what else are we going to compare it to? We're going to compare it to the 10S. We like did a whole other round of photo comparisons. And then this camera, which is the same as the 10S, what are we going to compare it to the pixel 3? So our third round of taking photos of smart HD art or second round against Pixel 3. And so, Deeter, I know you, um, I know you were frustrated by this, and I've come to find it very charming.

But James Barham, our creative director, is a total pixel stan. Whatever that camera does is the best thing for James, because he loves it with all of his heart. That's not true. To be clear, like, he does judge it, but like, he loves it so much that, yeah, that you end up, like, worrying that. He loves its flaws. He's like, look at that. It's just, everything is smudged in pink, but that's, that's like, that's like, You know, it's like amazing.

But, you know, he's very, he's hypercritical of all photos. But he's very fond of the pixel camera. And he's fond of it for this reason, which I have now come to believe as well. I'm less charming and British than James. So I'm going to say it differently. But James is always saying the pixel camera is photographic, right? It takes photos that remind him, and he was a longtime film photographer. It reminds him of shooting out film.

It has quirks and foibles. The images are contrasty, which is the thing we've talked about a lot. It's using all of its HDR in service of taking what he refers to as images that look photographic. The iPhone camera, on the other hand, and Apple actually told me they're doing this on purpose. They shot a bunch of photos. They looked at how they appeared. And they said to themselves, these look different than what people would expect, but we think this is better. This is a choice that they made.

iPhone photos just blow out contrast and shadow in images. They make everything look like you brought a reflector or a light to clean up the shadows. So it looks like you had a fill flash on a face to even out the light on a face. It looks like you brought a reflector to even out the lighting on a person. Like it's crazy town. And sometimes it's great. So like you're shooting a sunset. the iPhone will do

just sort of naturally do it better. It'll just like figure out it'll evenly expose the whole thing and you'll get that sort of dramatic sunset and the lights on the buildings or whatever. But if you're shooting like a person, there's a photo in our review. I just took a photo while they were shooting Mario

taking so obviously of herself and it literally looks like we were on a photo set. We brought lights, we lit it, everything was evenly bright in the entire frame. And it just, we were outside at a bar. Like the bar at a tent

and there were some skylights, so it was a little bit, the light was a little bit diffused, but we were literally just at a bar. They did not think about lighting this bar perfectly, I assure you, and that photo looks perfectly even. And so some people might really like that.

I just think, if you are used to how photos look, you're going to think these photos are a little bit artificial. And I, Apple... But you also, you also said that you were getting used to the camera and now that you know what it's doing,

you're able to, like, I don't know, control it, or at least like you know what you're going to get when you take a photo so you feel like you're, that it's not doing like stuff that is bonkers that you don't expect anymore. And you kind of know more of what you're going to get when you snap the shutter button now than you did like a month ago.

Yeah, like a month ago. Yeah. So it always, always, always wants everything to be exposed right. Every single thing in the frame. It wants a perfectly even exposure. So the one place where I can consistently break it is let's say you have a small human in your life and she's always like very small and like shadows shadows tend to completely envelop her.

So, yeah. So if that subject is always in shadows just by the nature of the fact that most shadows are bigger than her and there's a light source in the background, the iPhone will meter for the window and then it will try to bring up the shadow that she's in. in to bring out the detail in the shadow. Right? So Max is sitting in a chair. The chair is in front of a window or there's a window adjacent to it.

The iPhone will correctly expose the window because it has, the only way we can do that is by shooting a shorter shutter. And then it will bring up, it will use its long exposure and bring up the shadow, right, the cheese in. So I end up with this perfectly exposed window in like a tree out the window. and then a noisy photo of the baby, right? Because it's brought up the shadow detail for the baby. That's, like, not what you want. And you think they could figure out, like, that's a face. You're very good at faces, as you've insisted with your portrait mode.

Like, get that right and let the window blow out. I don't care about the window. And so, like, what I'm saying is I now know what it's going to do. I know it's going to make that decision that everything should be even. So I just won't take that photo. Whereas I think the pixel... will generally figure it out that what you want is the person

and you're probably less worried about the window. So that's what I mean. Like, I've gotten better not wandering into the errors that it will make. But at the same time, it's aggressive, let's even this out and make a good-looking photo is weird. So we put some test shots up of Maria.

One of our video producers, she like, did, shooting this movie is super fun. Mario and I ran around Williamsburg taking selfies of ourselves. So there's a photo of Mario in the bar. There's two photos of Mario in the bar in our review.

One is she's standing in front of a pinball machine and one she's like sitting on a couch and a totally dark corner of this bar. The pixel photos are like probably not great. But right, she's really red. It's kind of blown out. Like it's super contrasting and weird. The

iPhone photos look good. They also look nothing like reality. Like you would not know that Mario was being lit by red lights in this room, or the red light of the pinball machine was lighting her. And that was really the only light in the space. You would just think, there was some light in this room,

and it caught it, and it faded out the pinball machine. So, Paul, I leave it to you. Would you rather have more accurate photos or more pleasant photos? Would you rather have a capture of reality, or would you rather have a usable photo that's nice to look at?

I can't even, I can't even decide. Yeah, I don't know how to decide. Like, how do you, is, if you're evaluating this. I got, I got Pixel 3. I'm going with the Pixel 3 aesthetic. But I do, it does seem like the thing to do, now that this is all software, I just like, you know, like maybe when you wake up today, like, what mood are you in?

What do you want your photos to look like? And you just pick. It's like picking Instagram filter, but before you take the photo. Yeah. Because if it's all software now, we should just be choosing. You shouldn't have to make a $1,000 purchasing decision to decide what aesthetic and what priorities you want your phone camera to have? Deter, what would you pick?

I mean, I'm not going to get a 10S or a 10R just because I can't buy three phones or five phones or 10 phones every year anymore. So I'm going to stick with my 10. I do have a pixel 3. And I tend to pick the pixel 3, but I don't know. I mostly take pictures.

of my cat. Yeah. And I like the things that Pixel 3 does to pictures of my cat. Yeah. You know, my, this metaphor is going to break down and be confusing.

And I can do portrait mode with my cat too. But just, just run with me on this extremely broken metaphor. All right. You know how like video cameras and movie cameras

are extremely advanced now? Yeah. Red makes a camera. It can, like, do anything. Camera. Are you saying cameras these days? Cameras, you know,

cameras these things. They're like, they're like, they're like, they're like, They're like video cameras now. Yeah, yeah. We did this last week.

Like the ones Peter Jackson uses. Yeah, yeah, PJs. PJ cams. Right? You know how they're. So Peter Jackson is actually a great example here, right? Cameras in your pajamas. Yeah.

Oh, Pete is like, man, I got these cameras. I can do anything. I'm going to shoot the Hobbit at 48 frames per second. Right? Yeah. And everyone's like, Pete, what do you do? And you're a crazy person. And he's like, but the camera, look at how cool it is.

I'm just going to turn this dial. and we're just going to turn up to 48, and that's my movie. And then everyone was like, that movie looks insane. Right? Or motion smooth. So just because you can doesn't mean you should. Right. Or motion smoothing.

Samsung's like, all video will be shown at 240 frames per second, right? And they take the West Wing and now it looks like a play. Because what you're saying is cameras or Apple's camera engineers and software engineers are the equivalent of Peter Jackson. Like a guy who has like a nice house. Like the living room's pretty big, but it's not like, holy crap big, but he nevertheless decides to put in, I don't know, four like $10,000 speakers in there because he can't. Well, no, that's me. Hold on.

What are you saying? What are you saying, Bone? No, I'm saying that movies are shot at 24 frames for second for a reason. Right. TV is shot at 24 frames for a second for a reason. That's how you expect it to look. look, there are valid scientific arguments for why we want to shoot it this way and preserve this blur and create this cinematic feel. And when people try, when Peter Jackson tries to make a movie at 48, it looks really weird and the experiment fails.

When TV manufacturers try to interpolate frames and create smoother motion on 24, people don't like it, and Hollywood directors wage war to get the default turned off. So there's a way you expect things to look. I when when James tells me over and over again that the pixel looks photographic what he means is it uses its technology stack it uses HDR and produces a better version of the thing that you expect right right it produces what you expect it's just really nice what Apple is doing is they're they're flattening the the light in the photo so much from shadows to highlights that it looks fake and the only metaphor I have is This is what happens when you run a 24 frames per second thing through a motion smoother, and then it looks like a play. But isn't there an argument to be made that Apple is just accepting that everybody just looks at these things on phone screens anyway? They insisted to me that this is not the case.

This is my third shot at it. Right. So I came in. I was like, is this true? Like, are you chasing the Chinese market? Are you just trying to win Instagram? And they said, no, we want to make a great camera. We just, we know these photos aren't as contrasty, but we, we think you can add the contrast back in if you want it, but we'd rather give you as much even lighting and detail as we can.

Right. So it's the opposite argument. The argument is that you will edit an iPhone photo more, which I don't think is true. No. Or you're Peter Jackson. You're just like, yes, these hobbits are so smooth. I'm so powerful. What else is there to say about this phone?

I think the size is dumb. You think the size is dumb? I think the size is dumb. I think that they're, if you want a small, like you were said it earlier, if you want a small phone, you're kind of odd options, right? You can only get the 10.

That's premium. 10S. Yeah. Is Apple mad about that? They're like, great. Yeah. I mean, you can buy an eight. The eight's way cheap.

You can buy an eight. It'll probably last for several years. Yeah. Apple seems very convinced that people pound the table and they want small phones, but they really want big phones. Yeah. Yeah.

The numbers are clearly out there in the market research. So someone's got to come out with a small phone that's so wonderful that it changes people's mind about smart small phones. Yeah. You can't, you can't just make clam. Have you heard of my friends that play them? You can't just plam it up. I mean, in a sense, they are trying to create a whole narrative around the small phone. I don't know if it's enough.

I will say that Google's NightSight, Deeter, you have it, right? The NightSight feature for the Pixel 3 is out. If what you want is... So someone... It's not out. So as of this recording, it's not out yet, but like there's an APK that you can download. It's an XDA and some Android police might have it an APK mirror. And it is like the version of the camera that will support NightSight site.

And it might not be the final shipping software. So the experience might change. Like, you have to hit the back button in a weird way, and, like, I can see why they haven't released it yet, and I'm hoping that they make a few changes to it before they do. So that's, that's point one. Point two is, holy crap, it works. Long, long, long, time, verge readers will remember the drama with the Nokia phone that we caught them shooting a DSLR to prove their video, like on a rig to prove video stabilization,

and they made it look like it was supposed to be the camera. And so we called them out, and they invited us out to, like, Central Park at, like, 11 o'clock at night to take low-light photos to prove that this thing could take low-light photos. And so we did that, and for the time, they were pretty amazing. And it basically just took long-ass exposures. NightSight takes long exposures, but not in the way that you think. I mean, I don't have the full details right off the top of my head, but, like, when you take the photo, it's, like, hold still, and it's like, like, it says hold still gathering light, but I think it's taking just a bunch more, not necessarily long exposure.

There's probably longer than before, but it's just getting a bunch of more data in. And so even if there's subtle movement, like I took a picture of my cat this morning when it was still dark because that's what I do. And, you know, it's a cat. It doesn't sit perfectly still. But there wasn't as much like blur and blah that I would have expected if it were just a big long-ass exposure. And yeah, like you could just get just incredible lighting that feels completely uncanny and unnatural out of this thing.

So that to me is that if you buy, if you have a pixel and you're like, you know, I don't want photos that look like reality at night. I want a pleasing. It's like, well, okay, Google gave you a button. And that to me a mode. I'm excited to play with it. I haven't installed yet. How hard is it to install? It's easy.

Vlad has a whole set of these sample photos and they're astonishing. He did one of his headphones and nearly, it's nearly dark. He took a picture of his headphones and you can read the serial number, which to Dieter's point, like there's clearly, at least somewhere in this algorithm, a relatively short exposure so that details are not blurred.

Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. Okay, we're going to read a quick ad. And then Liz is going to do this. week and Elon, and we're coming right back. This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Have you ever let a bot network amplify negative stories about your company?

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Burge cast listeners to try it all for free at ziprecruiter.com slash verge. That's zip recruiter.com slash verge. ZipRecruiter, smartest way to hire. Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else. Welcome to this week in Elon. I'm your host, Elizabeth Lepado, deputy editor at the verge. So how about the Tesla profit? Pretty wild, right? I mean, honestly, who needs reality team? TV when you have Tesla. Because while Elon Musk was spending the third quarter publicly shooting himself in the foot, Tesla managed to get itself to profitability.

I would find this unbelievable in a television show, but here it is happening in reality. So that happened. And you know what's even weirder? It was a normal conference call. Nobody got yelled at. Nobody got called boring. You know, it was, I was like kind of impressed. But I will say that like, in context,

Watching Elon Musk impersonate a normal CEO is like a little bit like watching a trained cat circus. Because you're just like impressed. You don't know who was responsible or how much training went into this thing. This could be coming from Elon himself for all I know. Like he could have just decided to straighten up and fly right and is now flying right. But, you know, it was something. There were a bunch of things that were talked about on the call. I was actually a little bit surprised that Musk didn't spend more time sort of taking a victory lap about the profitability. because it was a surprise.

You know, stock was up $10, I think, after market. It was not bad. So the company has $3 billion in cash, which is more than the second quarter of the year. Great. And it's the first profitable quarter since 2016. Although it has to be said that Tesla has never managed to make a profit for an entire year.

But the way that this was being sort of presented was that this might be actually a turning point where Tesla is just profitable from now on. Now, obviously we're going to see whether that happens or not. You know, there's the fourth quarter. they post another profit, great. So stay tuned. But one of the things that was interesting about it is that Tesla nearly doubled production of the Model 3 from the second quarter to the third this year. And in fact, the company made more cars than it could deliver. So that was a challenge.

But it turns out delivery is easier to solve the manufacturing, or at least that's what Elon Musk said on the call. So it looks like they did pretty well. They also said they're, you know, pulling in a pretty good margin on the car because of a reduced cost of raw materials, which is a little boring for like a consumer tech point of view, but if you care about this company is an ongoing thing, it's a good sign. And then the other fun part of the earnings call, Musk said that he has approved the final prototype of the Model Y. So that's the SUV in their line. Full volume production isn't going to happen until 2020, but the final prototype is done. Also on the call, Elon Musk talked about the Tesla pickup truck, which he is probably the most excited about, or at least that's what he says.

That's cool. And he mentioned the solar roof is getting closer to reality. So it was all and all pretty big week for Elon and not in the way that we're used to. It was like a big positive week. So while he was out here for a couple months, pretending to take Tesla private, deciding not to take Tesla private, beefing with Azealia Banks, among others, taunting short sellers, getting into a fight with the SEC, then settling with the SEC. Like, while all of that was going on, Tesla Function. mentioned. Nice work Tesla. That's this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lapado. I will see you next week. All right. Dieter. Yes. You reviewed the logo the logo book, the Lenovo yoga book, the Lenovo yoga book, C930, which is like the update, right? It's the last one.

I would say that I read this review and I felt a deep sense of heartbreak and loss from you. Yeah. I mean, this was a, this was a. You hold. The first time you pick it up, you're like, oh my God, this, yes, finally, everyone thinks it's a bad idea to type on screens, but someone's going to get it right, and it's going to be worth the trade-off, and you're going to have something amazing, and this thing is tiny and light, and then you, like, open it up and you're like, oh, cool, there's like a touchpad that, like, covers up part of the keyboard and use it, so the touchpad's big enough, but then the keyboard can also be big enough, which is, you know, the nice thing about software keyboards is they can adapt to your needs, and this does that, and that's great, and it still stays small, And then you start to use Windows, and Windows is, like, fast enough to do basic stuff. Like, you're not going to want to run Photoshop, but, like, you can have six apps open and a bunch of tabs, and, like, it handles it. And yet it's still tiny. And you're like, hooray! And then you type your 20th word, and then you're like, oh.

I like, I like, use some word, like, you get exhausted or tired using the keyboard. Like, I could just imagine. You're just working so much harder to correctly type. Well, so it does the thing where, like, if you, if you hit like caps lock instead of A, and it'll use some AI stuff to, like, figure out what you're supposed to do, just like a software keyboard or on a phone, we'll do some of that autocorrect stuff.

But that's actually not the problem. I thought the problem would be it's exhausting to not have a physical keys that you push down. I thought it would suck to need to use your fingertips and, like, have to worry about fingernails. and, you know, like typing on glass over time, like it would just hurt your fingers. I thought all that would be a problem. Turns out that the actual problem

with typing out a piece of glass instead of a physical keyboard over time is you can't just rest your fingers on the damn thing because they think you're typing. You need to like, uh, oh, I'm typing, and then, uh, hold them over the thing. Because, like, if you're just, like, sitting at your computer, like, you might just have your finger gently resting on the home row, you know?

And that's fine. And that works. I feel like I want to put a, new t-shirt in the verge store that's like buttons are good and it's like a movement and all of us okay Dieter how did how did you let it come to this because because last like reading this review it's like old yeller but like you get it like the boy he's going to love the dog you know it's his best friend and it saved him from that bear that one time but how did you convince yourself that maybe this was different which way that that i should kill that i should kill the dog that the dog

was worthy of love. How did you let your hopes get this high? Yeah, did the yoga book save you from a bear? I think what was that inciting? What made you love the dog? Because it has an e-ink screen and so you can, when you hold it like, you know, fully flipped around with just the e-ink screen, you can take notes on it and the refresh rate on the e-ink is just high enough where it doesn't feel unnatural to write on it and take notes on it.

the feel of the glass is good. It's so thin and so light and so tiny. And it does so much better as just like a basic Windows computer than I expected. Like the first five minutes of this device, you're like, oh my God, this is it. They did it. And then 20 minutes later, you like tried to switch modes and you waited and it didn't work. Like one of the things that happens with this is that when you flip the hinge past 180 degrees, it's like, oh, you probably want to use this in some sort of tablet mode. So I'm going to turn off one of the screens, right?

And maybe you want to just use Windows in tablet mode so it turns off the E-ink screen, or maybe you want to use the E-Nx screen to take notes and you don't want Windows active, the LCD in the back, so you double-tap it, and then Windows becomes, that screen goes dark, and then you can just take notes, right? All that seems fine, although each, that mode switching takes 10 times longer than it should. But in order for it to trigger this, you're going to go into a tablet mode and you only want one of these screens to be active at a time, it uses like the detector of how far the hinge has bent.

And I would say one time out of 10, maybe one time out of eight, that sensor gets confused. And so you just open the laptop up and it thinks you want to use just one screen or the other, even though you want to use both. And then you have to sit there and flap the goddamn thing back and forth until the sensor gets it right. No, we're not done. How much this thing cost? A thousand dollars.

One thousand dollars. All right. $1,000. We're not. This conversation is over. No, I figured out the love. Okay. Okay.

It sounds like there's an alternate universe version of this device that actually works perfectly. You can rest your fingers on the keyboard and it knows you're not typing. The screen is so responsive. It always switches modes really quickly. Yeah. The AI typing is so good that you don't really miss type a lot. This is an alternate universe for Lenovo knows how to make software. and then you think in that case

this would actually be a good device. I think that this could have been maybe not like, oh my God, everyone should go by this thing. This is the future of computing kind of device, the way that Intel is trying to make these devices happen. But I think it could have been a device. It's like, look, if you just want a really tiny computer

that you can write on, this thing is great. Like, if, you know, if you can, if they had just made this, the E-ink side of it work better. Like, the way this thing basically works is the E-ink screen is literally just like a USB accessory to Windows, right? It runs its own software. It has its own firmware.

It communicates basically over the USB protocol to Windows. So it, like, it says, no, I'm a keyboard. No, I'm a sketchpad. Now I'm a, you know, e-reader. Send me a PDF to look at, right? So it's basically like Lenovo took a Windows tablet and attached this, like, thing that they made to it. And that's, you know, there's a lot of really clever things about that.

But they, the thing that they made, the E-ink screen that runs a bunch of stuff, is bad. And that's, it just, that's it. And if it had been better, then, like, I would have been able to be like, you know, if you are a doctor who needs to sit and, like, actually look at your patient and you want to take notes on a thing, and this would be great because it's light and you can carry it around. You can, you know, stick it in one of your big doctor pockets in your lab code or whatever. But I just, I, there are not a lot of people who I think should suffer through the weighting that you have to do on the mode switching on this thing to really use it. Okay.

$1,000. Yeah. Well, and if it costs $500 or $700, then I'd be like, you know, like, maybe you might be interested in this instead of an iPad. Maybe, you know. But I look at this thing and I look at the Surface Go and I, I, I, you would be so much better off with the Surface Go. Like, you should, if you're interested in this idea of a tiny computer that runs Windows, you should get a Surface Go. Okay. The Surface Go.

You know what doesn't cost $1,000 and it's wonderful? The Google Home Hub. No. Oh, okay. I mean, you can segue either way you want. We'll segue one to the iPad after the next. Next break. No, the Home Hub.

It's $1.49. Yeah. It's great. It's really pretty. Do you have one? Have you seen one? I have just recently seen one again. Yeah.

I'll just tell everybody right now. The interview episode next week of the Vergecast on Tuesday is Ivy Ross, Google's VP of Hardware Design, and Rishi Chandra, who is the VP of Home and Nest. So I just talked to him about it. I won't give too much away, but Rishi told me he's like. Like, look, the display is not, like, special. It's just a part that we bought. The special part is the color management they're doing to make it look like a photo.

And that color management is extraordinarily good. Like, the ambient light color temperature sensing and stuff they're doing, they, like, you know, they did a bunch of Google stuff. They pointed a bunch of lights at it. I think they also were really smart about how they did, like, whatever the finishes on the glass, It's like a little bit matted, but it doesn't look fuzzy like matted glass can sometimes look. So they did it on purpose. Yeah.

They, their comp, the thing they wanted it to look like was a printed matte photo. Right. So they had it. They literally printed out a photo in a frame and put it up. And then they did their damnedest to make it look like that. Yeah. It works. Yeah.

You should read Dan Sefer's review of the thing. It's very good. I will tell you in like working on that review, we spent. more time trying to come up with nice metaphors or nice language or clear language to describe just how great it is to look at this display and just how like shocking it is that it's always the right brightness it always looks a little bit more like a photograph than a screen

and it's just it's it's just right all the time I'm just gonna it doesn't look like other screens I can hear you say that a million times and that I see seven-inch display, the classic screen size for a cheap, bad Android tablet, and I see the price, and I just can't believe you.

I just have to see it. I have to go to Best Buy and look at this. I can't trust you. I mean, there is, you can't. There is a... The truth comes out. There's an argument we made that, like, 150 might actually be a little bit expensive, right?

Like, I should think it's relatively cheap, but, like, I am not unconvinced by the argument that, you know, This thing is pretty cheap in terms of its hardware, and so they could maybe have gotten the cost down a little bit. Yeah. Also, I think this – I tweeted – and actually I think Sundar retweeted, a buck 49 for a really great photo frame that works with Google Photos

is a pretty remarkable Trojan horse for Assistant. Yeah. This thing is like a holiday winner. Like – No, no, $149. Huh? I mean, it's assistant, sure. But I'm more excited about this thing being a Trojan horse for breaking the monopoly that ICloud Photos has on my family.

Yes, it will do that too. I cannot wait to give one of these to every single person in my family, all of whom use iPhones, all of whom share beautiful moments with my nieces and nephews that I never get to see in ICloud photos. And I'll be like, if you use Google Photos, then everyone will get this on their kitchen counter and they will love it more and they will love your children more and therefore you should switch. They will love your children more is a lot. Yeah, that's true. And then once they're using Google Photos, I'll be like, you know, you're using Google Photos. Do you really need to keep you using I message? Yeah, good luck, buddy.

I have tried to wield the power of the baby. to break the eye and it's, it cannot be done. It doesn't work? The baby has almost infinite power, but nothing can break eye message lock in. Maybe your baby's just not cute enough. I don't think that's true.

I can be honest with you. The baby is like two steps away from me and Instagram influencer already. She didn't have her own account. Anyway, so I tweeted this, sooner I retweet it. Two things.

One is a story we have to chase, actually. One is pot. So people are like, that's great. I don't want Google to track me. which is fair. The switch on the back

is a hardware switch for the microphone. Oh, interesting. Electrically disconnects the microphone. So you can just use it as a Google Photos device. Yeah. So that's cool. So you can just do that. Here's the other part, though.

If you do decide to use it as an assist device, you click it over, you turn it on, Google will then, and this is a story we have to write, but Google will then demand that the Google account associated with your home device, turn on a bunch of tracking settings. So then you have to turn on web and app tracking. You have to turn obviously voice assistant stuff,

and you have to turn on some other one. Saying I want to use Google Home and Google Assistant, so I'm going to let Google track my web and app activity is like, oh, it's search tracking, which also sort of makes sense. Renee Ritchie from Imor has been banging on about this for years, that he wants to try Google Assistant, but in order to use you have to turn all the tracking on, he refuses. Yeah.

But I think this is the one where for the Google Home Mini, it felt like you're buying Google Assistant, this is the thing, you know, like whatever. Yeah. I think tying it to Google photos and the fact that people just want a great photo frame and using that to ladder into app tracking is too much. So we should write that story. They understand that privacy aspect like, hey, we get it. you probably don't want us to be like using certain parts of your data for other stuff. So we'll do all. Look at all the AI we do on your phone.

So they obviously are aware of this. It would be a great upset. I feel like I wouldn't even want to like get this for my parents or something. But if I could say here's this thing. You use your voice, ask for recipes. It's not like you don't have to connect it to your whole entire life. You just ask it to play a YouTube video, ask it for recipes. Like if they had a track.

free version of this. Yeah. Maybe it costs $40 more. And this isn't a secret, by the way. It's just, it's, here's support. com.

Blah, take that again. This isn't a secret. Like, here's the support article on Google.com. So three things you have to turn on are web and act. You have to turn on

web and app activity which saves search activity in apps and browsers and gives you customized experiences and search maps and other Google products. You can also choose to save Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services. The second one is device information, contacts, calendars, apps, and other device data to improve your experience with Google.

And then obviously voice and audio activity, which recognize your voice and those speech recognition. Great. So the one I think that most people will care about is web and app activity where you're allowing just to use the Google Home, you have to allow search tracking. You have to allow website visit tracking. I don't, why, I guess. I don't want you to do that. You know, if you buy an Alexa product, Amazon doesn't demand that you install, like, an eye tracker in your home

to see what you're looking at. So there's a little bit of a breakdown there. I think we should probably, it would be better if Google allowed you to have a more cut down experience. Google's settings for privacy and just settings in general are getting, especially on Android, ever more complicated. I swear to God, every time I go to, like, try and fix a thing or look at a thing or figure out what's going on with the thing, especially with, like, the Google Home app now, you just get bounced into, like, a random screen of settings, and you don't know if it's a Google search setting, or maybe it's a Google Assistant setting, or maybe it's a Google account setting, or maybe it's an Android setting. You don't really know. You're just like, oh, I want to change the thing. And then all of a sudden, just like waiting for a system. I was like, what? Why? Why? What is happening here? It is actually, it is worse than Facebook in some ways. trying to like find a thing and know what the parent of that thing is and whether that parent is

search or home or assistant or something else yeah i mean it's necessarily worse than facebook and facebook is just facebook and sometimes it's instagram and whatsapp right like that's all you get google is like is this you're a device setting or a service setting or a you know assistant is just a cloud-based idea that is manifested by some device you know it's like that's a lot of metaphors, just a lot of paradigms to manage. It's definitely worse. I wish it was easier. And I do wish I could turn off all that tracking.

Also, again, I don't want to completely blow the interview episodes. It's coming on Tuesday, and you can hear Rishi respond to this himself. But I was like, what's up with, hey, Google? When are you going to change it? And he told me that people are getting used to it. But he, as you might imagine, this was a little bit more heated. So just wait for it on Tuesday because I gave him a lot of shit

Ivy Ross, by the way, I won't blow any of that. She is a delight. I think she's the best thing to happen to Google design in a long time. Yeah, I'm excited to hear this. So check that out.

Okay, let's have an ad. And we'll come back. Paul do his thing and we'll talk about this Apple event. This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Merck. They're going to play an ad for you now. Check it out.

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Paul. Yeah. Every week, my dude. Uh-huh. What happens? What happens, Paul? What time is it? What time is it?

What time is it? Are you excited? Come on. It's gone. Well, he did the old yellow thing. It's called Touch a Tree, Touch the Future. Oh, every week. Always.

And you know what? Frankly, I'm offended that you forgot. All right. Touch a tree. Touch a tree. Touch the future time. Yeah. So this is a Kickstarter for Mui.

MUI. It's an interactive wooden, it's a two by four. It's a two by four that you put on your wall. And then it's kind of like a like, a display that like you touch the wood and then it like lights up and it's like a low-res display and you can like control your smart home with this and you can like change the temperature. But it got me really thinking if you imagine this but like a slightly higher resolution, like a little more pixel density, you can have a phone that is just a block of wood.

Yeah. It could have all right? because you've got capacity you've got a way to display information you can capacity have a capacitive touch screen and you probably find a place to put a battery in there

now you just have a woodblock for a phone I would definitely use a woodblock phone yeah also it's all the huge problem in my life which is Max loves phones it's genetic I think and she will literally she doesn't you know she can barely set up

but she will fling her tiny body dangerously across any surface across the vastness of space and time if she sees a phone. Like she will corkscrew around, she will begin reaching. She'll like do a backflip. And then she gets it and she just immediately puts it in her mouth, which is a delight if you're testing. For example, say the IP 67 rating of the iPhone 10R. So if I had one that was a block of wood, I'd be yeah, go ahead, get the phone. See if you can pick it up, baby.

Yeah, that's right. So you think she would be confused? by the block of wood aspect? We bought her a fake phone in an effort to keep her from the real phones and she's too smart for us. Yeah, yeah. She's like, this palm phone is bullshit.

You know, the argument that, hey, maybe... I got Paul. The argument that maybe smartphones aren't addictive that maybe, you know, we just need to hold ourselves back and whatever. And like, it's just, problem, if a, like, the very, the second conscious thought a child has is give me that

damn phone. Yeah. Before they even know what it is. Yeah. Maybe we do have a problem. It's, I mean, I just never. She sees us use the phone. Like, she has a phone and her face.

Because we're always taking photos of her. But it's not like we, like, she's not watched a movie yet, you know, like, she's never been shown FaceTime. But, like, that's my mom. So you'd think that she would, really what she wants is my mom. Maybe she thinks the phone is. grandmother. There's a lot to unpack here, but all I know is that the kid loves a phone.

And if my phone was a woodblock, it might solve that problem. So I'm in. Yeah. Paul, send me your brochure. Well, it's just back Moey on Kickstarter for $4.99. All right. I'm going to get this thing. Apple event.

This Apple event. Take us through. I have one big question. What matters more? the rumored iPad Pro update or the rumored MacBook Air update? What is more important? The I... No.

Yeah, right? Yeah, unless they make significant software tweaks to iOS 12, new iPad hardware doesn't get you anything. Uh-huh. Whereas the MacBook Air has been so desperately in need of an update. That's one argument. The second argument is that a new MacBook Air is just them bowing to the will of the market for once

because that's all anybody wants. And it's, well, whatever, it'll just be a computer. Like another Mac that they don't update for the next 10 years. And the USBC on the iPad is a revolution. Because it changes it into a real, honest-to-god computer that you can plug stuff into. So here's my thinking. one of these two things will be the best $1,000 computer that Apple offers.

Yes. Depending on which one it is, that is the most important one. Right now it will obviously be the MacBook Air. Well, it's probably going to be the MacBook Air unless Apple does something new for the iPads that makes it a better computer. Okay, so here's my big question. Go ahead, go ahead. Dieter, by own, please. So here's my answer to this question.

The new MacBook, Air MacBook, whatever they do, is going to matter more to more people because more people will buy it, because more people have been waiting for Apple to make a really good laptop because they haven't bought into this new generation since it got started with the little itty-bitty MacBook. And it's time for them to have a mass market laptop that people actually want. And there's such a big pent up demand for it that it will be the more important device

because more people can do it. But the iPad Pro will be the more interesting device because it will point more clearly to a future of computing thing. It will, and it will be, I think, the better $1,000 computer so long as you know how to make iOS do what you want. And that is the problem. They've built up iOS from a really simple OS to something pretty

complicated, but there's always that one more thing you wish it could do. And unless they're willing to somehow open some floodgates of access somehow to like make that happen faster, to solve that one more thing problem for more people faster, it's going to be the better computer, but only for the tiny sliver of people that know how to like, know what happens when you need to go into the files app in the iPad, which is still one of the most confusing things on planet Earth. So I have a series of questions about the iPad. Yeah. Well, I have one question and one demand. Yeah. But the one question is itself a series of questions. Do you understand what I'm saying? Okay. I do. So the big circle, the question,

is what happens when you plug USBC stuff into an iPad? Yeah. That is the question. Sub-question one, I think the answer is you plug in a charger and it charges. Okay. Okay. You plug in a display. it will I don't know yep you plug in you plug in an ethernet dongle

it'll give you it'll give you internet we think who knows yes you plug in an ethernet dongle you plug in a

one of the fiber dongles we have for our sand at Fox Media that needs a driver on a Mac yeah

no idea okay you plug in a hard drive the world explodes I just I just keep going You plug in, you plug in a sound card. What?

A USBC. You plug it a DA. Oh, like an AMP? Yeah, no, yeah. Like an M audio, like sound card. Like, you know, a thing. Hmm. Here, I got one for you.

You ready? Yeah. You're ready. Hang on an external GPU. Oh, sorry. Yeah, an external GPU. You plug in a mouse. Do they make USBC mice?

Sure. Oh. No, I don't know about that. You plug it a mouse into a dungle. Did they use a mouse? You plug in a USBC to USBA dongle, and then you plug in a printer from 2001. Like one of those like translucent plastic IMAQing. That's like the most likely thing to work, I feel like.

Like an HP printer that needs like Colorjet Pro drivers? Printer drivers are on a tangential trajectory to all other technology. It's like it's just a different, whole different world. and sometimes you can just print things. Okay, I'm with you. But right now, so if you plug in a strange printer into a back, like MacOS 10 will be like, I identified your printer,

it will go to the cloud to Apple's printer driver service, and then it'll be like, you have a brother laser printer, some driver was installed in that works. Are you saying that Apple will have built for iOS, a printer driver service that will get installed on iOS? What I'm saying is that brighting printer drivers is such a weird part of technology. That's probably like the third thing that the operating system does when it's booting.

It would have been more work for them to take the drivers out of their kernel. I understand. So it's just probably it's inside of iOS dormant. Okay. So you're right. It's right. Yeah, it's part of the mock kernel. It's a lot.

So that's like one huge set of questions. You put a USB support on it. Now it's a quote-unquote real computer. Are you going to, will iOS support drivers for wacky shit? Yep. Who knows? Okay, so that's one thing that. No, but the big one to me there is, honest to God, the hard drive.

If you plug a hard drive or a USB stick into this thing, and then you want to open a file in an app. Yeah. So this is my demand. You ready? Here's... Yeah. Right now there is one such experience you can have with an iOS device where you plug in a storage device, which is the camera connector.

Yeah. Right? You can buy an SD card adapter and plug it into the bottom. Mm-hmm. And then you can plug an SD card. And amazingly, the only app that will allow you to recognize that SD card adapter is the camera app. or like the photos app. So if you are me

and you shoot a bunch of raw photos that you want to put into Lightroom, I have to use my Mac to get those photos in the Lightroom instead of just dumping hundreds of raws into my ICloud-synced camera roll. The fastest way for me to blow through the storage

on my phone is to use the SD card adapter with my fucking iPad. Like, just stop. it. Just be like, here's it. Lightroom. Adobe, you guys know about files, right?

You have some idea of how image files work. Would you like to just handle this situation yourselves instead of round tripping through the Photos app? And I'm sure Adobe,

Scott Belski, was just on the show. I'm sure he'd be like, yes, Apple, I would love to do that. That would have made us put Photoshop on the iPad five years ago instead of finally just doing it

today. That's my demand. Just let other apps address the file system. directly instead of round-tripping through Apple's abstractions. The end. That was the Vergecast. So if you're wondering why the event is disrupted next week by someone screaming,

let me be wondering who that person in the corner of the live stream is, that'll be me. No, I'm excited. It would just be a, so Phil Schiller gets on stage. You know what gets on stage and introduce the iPad. It just just yell like, plug it out of C-cardi! Do you have a printer? I brought a printer. It's like us in a hands-on area.

Storm the stage at the printer? Just like, no, we're doing this right now. I'm going to bring an external GPU to the hands-on area. We're going to see what happens. I'm sure they have answers to some of these questions and not some of the others. I do think the MacBook error is just it will be the more, it'll be the product more people care about. Yeah. In this early money.

Yeah. A lot of people care about the iPad. Yeah. Everybody that has asked me about the iPad Pro, I get it, should I get it? Should I get it? And I was like, I sit down and then I ask the series of questions that you always ask somebody when they're thinking about getting an iPad Pro. And at the end of that discussion is me telling them and being right that they should save $700

and just get the cheap iPad and it will do everything that they want. Yeah. And then they're like, cool. I don't believe you. And then they go buy an iPad Pro and they don't use it. Like, you should use a $1,000 computer. Well, it has a nice to screen. The only person that cares about that is you.

We started this whole episode by me saying, I don't think that's true. All right. You know what I hate? Like, again, in reading these reviews, there was this consistent theme. I did it too. I'm to blame. but everyone did it, which is only tech nerds

will care about this. Yeah. No, I just don't buy it. I think there are the people who listen to this show. Clearly they have nothing better to do, except obsess over pixel density.

But there's like millions of people who really care. I swear to God. We should have a meetup. We should start a website for them with a podcast. It'd be great. Someday. And then the last little Apple thing,

the iPad Mini update and Airpower in 2019. Sure. I believe it. I don't believe the iPad Mini will ever be updated again, ever. Why do they hate it so much? Why do they hate that computer? I don't know. It's weird, right?

They really do hate it. Well, I think because they sell iPhone 10S maxes. Like, why do you need iPad if you have that thing? If they were to, What happens if you try and build, oh my God, wait a minute. You know, there's Mac Mini Mokolo, the people that used to that were building

like server farms based off Mac minis because they were great and blah, blah, blah, blah. They're very sad now because they suck hard to do that. If you put a fully functional USBC port on an iPad Pro, you could build a server farm with iPad Pros. Think about it. If you could run software, on iPad codes

and not just Apple's sandbox of happy software times. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I want Christini. Bring Apple support Christina to... If you're listening to this...

And you know of a tiny USB printer. You have a tiny USBC printer. You want to like sneak a USBC printer. Yeah. Like if you are aware of a tiny USBC printer that I can like put in my jacket. pocket.

Or you can adapt, you can have a doggle. There's tons of those. Let me just tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. I'd love to hear about the smallest printer you're aware of. Actually, it doesn't have to be a printer. Battery powered, ideally.

If you're in your car, pull over. We haven't asked to do that yet today. Pull over and tweet at Reckless the USB accessory. You want to see him plug into an iPad Pro to see if it works. Yes. I love that. The strangest thing you can think of. It could be a printer.

It could be, I don't know. some USBC thing or even just USB thing that you want to know what happens when you plug it into an iPad Pro and he will provide that service for you. You know, eventually, no, you should absolutely do this because eventually we're going to have to review this thing

and the whole review is just going to be a montage with me plugging things into it. Yeah, so if you give me something good, we'll like put up your, just do it. Tell me what USB. It can't be expensive. That's be cheap. Do you think it'll power things

like you plug in like a USB fan? Oh, for sure. All right. This is off the rails. That is it for the Verge gas. We've already gone over. Paul's got to get back to Hawaii. Is this like sunset there now?

The light is like beautiful. What they say here is surfs up. Oh, God. All right. Paul's never coming back from Hawaii. It's great here. I hope you find a self-insurer. I'm going to a picnic.

And as we said, this episode of VersaC has brought to you by Merck. We've got a little ad for you. Check it out. Here it is. Merck scientist Daria Hazuda has failed. countless times. But from those failures, medical invention was born. From years of trial and error researching infectious diseases, Dr. Hazuda has helped to develop medicines that help treat HIV and hepatitis C. For the next generation of inventors, Dr. Hazuda's passion, coupled with her commitment to eradicating the world's toughest diseases,

proves that failure is a teachable moment. Daria is just one of the many Merck-Syodorian. scientists dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent at Merck.com slash inventing for life. All right. We love you. That was a Vergecast. We'll see it.

We'll see you after the Apple event next week. Dieter's going to be in town. So we're going to do it a little bit early. So we'll see you probably Thursday next week. Check out the interview episode on Tuesday with Rishi and Ivy from Google. That was a really fun episode. It's coming out on Tuesday. We've got more of those interviews.

I would love to hear who you want me to interview because it's really fun. Listen to why did you push that button. That show is incredible. It's just incredible. Just go listen to Ashley and do a great job. Check out Verge Science on YouTube. They just went over half a million subscribers, which is incredible for a channel that is just over five months old. Just think about that.

It's wild. And you can listen to Karras Fisher to Recode Decode and her new show Pivot with Scott Galloway. And you can listen to Recode Media. Peter Kafka, all that is wonderful. We will see you next week. Rock and a lot. Promocode!