The Vergecast - 332: Pixel Slate, Google Fi, and Section 230

Episode Date: November 30, 2018

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul are back from Thanksgiving and ready to spill the beans on the tech news you may or may not have been paying attention to this week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A decade ago, during experiments on board the Space Shuttle Columbia, Merck scientist Paul Reichert discovered conditions that crystallize a specific protein. By studying these crystals, Paul and his team determined all new ways to improve the storage of structurally fragile medicines, devising life-saving drug delivery methods. Paul is just one of many Merck scientists dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent at Merck.com slash inventing for life. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.mobie.combe.

Your single source for your local website needs. Which is actually true because Paul is sitting at a local website design company right now. Hi, Paul. By the way, the verge.comboe.combe does not work. That's Deeter, everybody. Hi, Dieter. Deeter's here. Sorry. I'm your friend Neli.

It's good to see you again after last week. I don't listen to last week's show, which I didn't host, but I'm told it was great. Just like, yeah. There wasn't a show last week. I recorded a solo podcast about my turkey experiences, but I did it publish it. Oh, good. Too blue. Too much.

Well, I hope everybody had to get Thanksgiving. I hope you all turned off motion smoothing on your parents' TVs. Yes. I'm just going to admit to everyone that I went Black Friday crazy with my dad, and I purchased no fewer than three televisions. What? Yes, it's just absolutely true. One for my parents' kitchen, one for my parents' bedroom, and then one for me.

I've made up a great excuse. that our old plasma TV was too heavy to hang on the wall for our apartment, and that justified it was published. Wow. I don't even know if it's true, but I keep confidently saying it, and that's enough. Here's the question. Yeah. And it's an important one.

Did you ask your wife about the TV? Because the last time you went on and bought a TV, you went on and bought a curve TV, and it caused no end of problems. Well, I bought a Sony A8F, which is a super high end OLED. I think it'll be fine. I'm not, but is it flat. It is flat. I got a great deal on it.

So that's why I didn't buy an LG. And so we're getting, like, we're getting rid of everything in our apartment because of the baby. The baby is very small and very demanding. So she needs all the space because she's starting to, like, move around. So we're getting rid of everything. The TV stand, all this. So you got to mount the TV on the wall. So your plan is to mount everything on the wall out of her reach.

Yes, just slightly taller than the baby every few months. Everything will just move higher than her until she's like 18 and everything is seven feet off the ground. Instead of the door jam Where you measure their height or whatever Yeah, it's just the TV is just moving up the wall So anyway, so the particular reason I wanted The Sony was it has a speakers built into it And it has a subpo for output

So I don't have to get a sound bar Because that's pretty good speakers I just got this like amusing Anyway, that was fun But yeah, I went Black Friday insane All of these TVs came with absolutely insane motions Moving turned on To the point where my family was like

Please stop talking about this We would like you to stop talking about the motions. Anyway, this episode of The Vodcast is going to, I'm going to just let you know. It's mostly going to be Deter screaming about the future of computing and how it is broken. So, Deider, let's start. You reviewed the pixel slate this week, coming hot on the eels of my iPad Pro review. I think some people in the audience caught it. We both started our reviews, our review videos, exactly the same way, which was.

Yep, by design. I know what to say about this thing. Or I don't know where to start with this thing. So let's begin. Why don't you know where to start with the pixel slate? What is it? Who is it for? What is it?

What does it run? Who should buy it? What should they do with it? Why is there no headphone jack? What were they thinking with the keyboard? I don't even know. This is a bit of a tangent, but I watched a lot of television in the past two weeks. And I noticed a few ads for pixel books.

Yeah. I didn't see any ads for pixel slates. Yeah, well, maybe that's because they were trying to decide whether or not they were going to ship it in the first place. I mean, look, before we get too, too deep, like I did give it a 5.5. We were talking about a 5. We were talking about even lower. The reason I went with that score is if you are a particular kind of person, this thing will actually be pretty solid for you. In particular, if you're like, if you use it like a pixel book and every now and then you just want a, tablet. It can do that job in a certain way. Okay. But in the same way that Neely, I was like,

I'm done making excuses for the iPad. I have to be done making excuses for Chrome OS. All of these companies like, we are inventing the future of computing and it's a new kind of paradigm for how computers work. But everybody's answer for what the future computing is. And we can go through all four big screen platforms. I basically think of these things as anything bigger than a phone but still has a screen. We can go through the big four, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, and iOS. And if you look at what they're saying is the next phase of what computers are to replace the laptop, all of those answers are bad. And I don't, I don't understand it. Like, off the back of my head, back of my head, uh, back of my head, whatever. For Mac, it's Marsa Pan apps. And those Marsa Pan apps are just

badly ported iOS apps. For Chrome, it's tablet mode and Android apps. And the Android apps situation has gotten way better over the past 18 months, but it's still pretty bad. And in tablet mode, it's horrendous. For iOS, it's the camera roll, moving everything for the camera roll. And for Windows, it's, you know, whatever we're calling Metro apps these days, Windows Store apps running on, you know, 64-bit and running on Arm. And they still haven't caught up there either. So you look at all of the solutions for what we're supposed to get instead of just a MacBook air or a Dell XPS 13 and everything that's supposedly moving computing forward is terrible. And I don't get it.

So it's weird because there's just been like a three week now conversation about the iPad Pro and whether you can use it. And I think that conversation is really fun actually. So John Morrison made a bunch of YouTube videos on his channel about until today about you know, musicians using iPad and what they're using it for. He edited a whole one. There's endless number of I more articles with Renee Richie explaining exactly how you can use an iPad 4. I think that's great.

I think it's super interesting to have people out there making the pro iPad all the time case. All of them hit the same point that I sort of focused on, which is at some point you're going to hit a wall. Right. And here's the wall you're going to hit. We know what it looks like. And here's how to get around it. And you can kind of take two rhetorical approaches to the existence of the wall. One is, it's fine, I'll help you get around it.

I'm your friend. Like here, throw me the rope, right? And then there's sort of where I'm at, which is, why is this wall here? Like, it's well known. We've known it forever. And that's with the iPad. I think with ChromeOS, if you're going to give people a tablet-y thing with a keyboard thing that clicks into it, you have to be at least as good as a Surface or an iPad Pro.

And it just seems like they're really far away from that. And because fewer people even use that platform, there's less, John Morrison is not out there making Chrome OS videos about how to get Spotify to not look insane or how to navigate the file system problems. Like there isn't that huge cohort of people who are like, I'm going to advocate for this platform and help you figure it out. And I think that's like an even bigger problem. There is a very active Crostini subreddit.

So if you want to run Linux applications on your pixel slate, Yeah, so they're the people that get the 5.5, yeah. I mean, here's a song that's been in my head what I think about the iPad Pro and the pixel slate nonstop. It's a surprise, I think. Are you going to sing? It gets to this thing that Neely was talking about that you always hit some sort of weird wall, and you can get around it, but you got to, like, figure it out. And that song, if you don't know, is going on a bear hunt. I was expecting Cornflake Girl by Tori Amos.

No, no, no. The children's song going on a bear hunt. It's going on a bear hunt, but I'm not afraid. And then there's always like, oh, what's that thing? And sometimes it's hall grass or sometimes it's mud. And then it's can't go over it, can't go under it, can't go around it. I'm going to have to go through it. And then you just like repeat it with random stuff that kids think is funny to have to go through.

This is a real window into Deeter's upbringing in Minnesota right now. Yeah, I'm not going to sing the song. But I will say the original lyrics mentions a pistol. And if you try and find the lyrics now, everybody tried to like get that out of the song. I think that's inappropriate. Because if you're going on a Bearhout, you really should have a rifle and a pistol, but whatever. But there's always something. And I get the arguments to say we're just being Luddites, we're just asking these things to recapitulate how a windowed laptop system works.

That's not the point. Like, I would be happy. In fact, I enjoy trying out new user interface paradigms. It's my favorite thing. It's probably the number one reason that I was a WebOS fan boy back in the day is because it had a new idea of how a phone user interface. should work. And so there's lots of interesting new user interface ideas, and I want to encourage more of them. But when you have the bear hunt inevitable thing that you have to slog through, you have to have some sort of fallback or some sort of solution. Or, you know, you're just

telling people figure it out and you can't. And, you know, you could go back to floppy disks, right? Or the headphone jack. All the solutions for this thing that supposedly moves things forward are frustrating. And it's okay to point them out and say that they're bad, but nevertheless like the idea of moving computing forward. And most of the discussion around can you use these things as your main computer, they confuse us saying this thing is bad with us saying this idea of the future computing sucks. Like the idea of what the future of computing could be great,

but that doesn't change the fact that right now it's bad and companies should be called out for it. What are these new user interface paradigms that you're seeing? Because I feel like there's a shortage of them because I feel like that's the only way to solve some of these problems. Like you can't just make a phone big and you can't just make a Windows desktop touchable. There needs to be a third way. So what are these new ideas? So on the iPad, right, the multitasking system of the iPad is a pretty dramatically new paradigm. for how you should interact with apps and think about apps and spaces and groups.

I think the ChromeOS one to me, I want to you to talk about this more, is super interesting because they've layered Android on top of a desktop browser effectively. And so that's just a crazy mashup of ideas there. I think Microsoft, because they didn't have any mobile thing to turn to, is actually done the best job of saying, okay, well, our laptops are just kind of like tablady now. Like, here's a Surface Pro. I saw Dan using his the other day in a meeting. I was like, that thing looks great.

He's just, like, swiping away. He's, like, folding it up. It's, like, under his shoulder. Like, they had to, Microsoft had the most amount of constraint because they had nothing else to rely on. So I think the surface line is the closest to what is a full-fledged operating system on a tablet look like, but it's still Windows, right? Like, you still run into that, just some weird moments with that operating system

because it's still fundamentally Windows. But, tell me more about the Chrome OS stuff, because that gluing together of Android and Chrome OS seems, it just seems unfinished to me. It is unfinished. The big UI, and maybe this isn't quite, like maybe it's UX, I don't know what it is, but the big idea for Chrome OS and a little bit for Windows is everything that's good about apps on your phone should also apply to your big screen computer. You should have apps that are as like, I don't know, bite-sized or single-use utility, lightweight,

iterate as quickly as they are on phones, all of that stuff, should also work for you on a big screen. And, you know, there's like, you know, how to split screen work and all that stuff. But fundamentally, what ChromeOS is saying is there are web apps and they are really good at certain things. But for the places where you hit those limitations, you should get all of the benefits that you get from mobile apps there. And then somewhere in between those two things, if you need power user stuff, Android is going to be, at least for now, until future, whatever, is going to be the framework for building those slightly more powerful apps. And honestly, at the end of the day, if you really need to get to that higher pro level, you're going to do something like Crostini. You're going to do some other Linux thing or whatever.

It's not meant to be like a – and the way the iPad is like the pro user is like the creative user who like makes media stuff for the pixel slate. For ChromeWOS in general, the pro user is like the app developer or the web developer, right, the coder. But again, like once you get to that point, the actual experience of it falls down really fast. In theory, it's great. In practice, it's like, you know, I harped on Spotify, but I could have harped on, like, YouTube music or a whole, any number of Google apps that just are not designed to work well on a big screen.

And that's on top of the way that ChromeOS is being Androidified. It's not just that you can run Android apps. It's also getting built into, like, the core of what the thing is. So, like, it's got the quick settings menu. There's some other, like the keyboard is basically Android so far as I can tell. There's a bunch of Android-y things in it. And that's not going super well. And the best clearest example I can give you of how they haven't finished the job here is Nathan Ingram over at Engadgett.

If you read it, he wrote a little preview. He didn't write a review yet because he didn't have time because his review unit was completely busted and crashing into a boot loop for a different reason than my first review unit was. His was boot looping because he's like me has reviewed a bunch of Chrome books. and so he's got a whole history of like stuff that gets synced on his Chromebook. And it was trying to, because they had introduced this new feature that allowed your Chrome launcher to have its app icon synced across different Chrome OS devices, which is a great idea. Your app launcher always looks the same and like you understand where your stuff is. And anytime you open up a Chromebook, your stuff is in the same place and you can wipe it and get a new one.

And that's awesome. But there was enough history there that it was trying to install the same app, put the same app icon, in the same place on his app launcher, and that was causing it to boot loop because it was trying to put, you know, like, Spotify and YouTube in the same position on the app launcher, and that crashed the device. That's incredible.

Right? Like, finish it. And this has been what ChromeOS has been since the beginning of ChromeOS, of they iterate it so quickly out in the public. Every six weeks, there's a new version, and that's incredible for security. It's great for getting new features, but it also seems to have meant that they're giving themselves permission to ship things that are half baked.

And that's fine if you're talking about a $250 thing that's going to, you know, maybe education or like, you know, just like a couch computer or whatever. Like students across America are like, what is this boot loop? I guess I won't learn any science today. I mean, the fast iteration is fine. But when you get to the stage where you're selling a $1,300 machine or $1,000 machine or whatever, that is meant to compete head to head with the iPad and a MacBook error and a Surface Pro. Like, no, you got to ship a finished product. And they just, they didn't.

And not to harp on the fact that I watch television too much, but the pixel book ads are all about, hey, this doesn't ever break. Remember all these bad things from computers where they break, ours don't break. Those are the iPad ads too. It's interesting that message is the same message. Yeah. The really cognitively dissonant thing is I like, I love the pixel book. I don't like the slate.

They're basically the same thing. One, you can just pull the keyboard off, which is an insane thing to say. But the form factor of the pixel slate, the bugs that are on it, the Bluetooth bugs that are on it, the form factor makes you run into the tablet UI problems away faster. And it just has some like fundamental software, possibly hardware, but I think they're software bugs. But as on the pixel book, it just, when you use it as a laptop, it feels fine. The craziest thing about using the pixel slate is when you have the keyboard attached, everything feels fast and fluid and dynamic, and you can resize windows and everything just, like, works pretty well. And, like, you got to open up an Android app and it looks funny or whatever, but you only use it for, like, listening to a little bit of music here, like, editing a photo there, whatever you use your Android app for. But then when you switch either one into tablet mode, the UI is just broken.

like if you try and go into the multitask view or you try and like drag a window to the left or right you're literally looking at lag of like a second but it should be you know less than 20 milliseconds so how can it be so good in laptop mode and such garbage in tablet mode? Do they answer? Do you ask them? The answer is that we'll fix it in six weeks

when the next version of Chrome OS comes out, right? Like that's always the answer and that's always been the answer and you can't have a big flagship device come out right before the holidays and have that be your answer. Yeah. I feel there's like a deep sadness

to this conversation for me because like two years ago I bought my parents a Chromebook Pixel. Yeah. I bought the most ridiculous one because I wanted to last. And that computer to me seemed perfect for what they do,

which is browse the web. And they could figure out almost anything to happen on the web and the quick updates and the security stuff all seemed great. And I've been wanting to sort of update it. Like, yeah, it's been a couple years.

It's still really fast. and the pixel book has those giant bezzles, and I know that if they flip it in a tablet mode, it will get crappy. And then the slate is just like, I don't want to put, I'm not doing this to my family. But it just seems like that moment

when a tiny, fast-focused computer that was simple to use, that people understood right away, as they glom Android into it, it's just getting farther and farther away from the thing that people liked in the first place. Yeah, I think that's true. C-Net had a really good headline for their review.

They said it was the, the anti-Ipad pro in both good ways and bad. And like that's it. Everything that's good about the pixel slate is the stuff that's bad about the iPad. Like I had Michael Moore ship over the exact same box of USB junk that Nelai had. And I plugged a bunch of stuff in and like, yo, I installed a printer driver on this thing printed directly to an ancient HP printer. It worked.

Like it will not, it will try and do the stuff if there's support for it in the US. So everything that the iPad can't do in theory, the pixel slate does. It has a real file browser that if the app bothers to update to see it, will work with whatever app you've got. But then it's the anti-Ipad because you know what the iPad is? It's stable and the animations are fluid and it feels fun to use. And the pixel slate is not. Yeah.

Why do they ship it? Would they just rush it out for the holiday? I did not specifically get on the phone with somebody and be like, stop ship it. Don't ship this thing. What are you doing? Sure. But like, you just get the sense that.

They rushed it out for it. It's just one of the, every now and again, there's like a great product that you can tell they wanted to hit that date. And so the product just like bombs, right? Because it's just not finished in time. That is what this feels like. And it's weird because Google's hardware division is supposed to be more cohesive, right? It's more unified. There's a person in charge of it.

And that just didn't, I don't know. It's like the phones, the phones have a handful of weird problems this time around that are getting fixed. Here's what Google's hardware division needs. they need a Jobsian type figure. It should be Rick Osterlo, who's in charge of the hardware division, who a week before launch gets in a room and screams at everybody and cancels the launch. Yeah. Or they get scared and they fix it.

Like, we haven't covered this extensively because it's like sometimes it's just forum complaints and sometimes it's much more real. But there have been like a pretty big raft of problems with the pixel phone, right? Yeah. And like they're fixing them and blah, blah, blah. And yeah. But like there's a bug where like you take a picture and then it just doesn't appear in your camera rule. Right? Or there's a bug where if you open up the camera app in a third party app, then the main camera app will crash. Right. Like that's use this stuff, people. And when something crashes, don't think like, oh, it's Google, they'll fix it.

Like, if you're in Google and using the stuff, you run into these things, you need to be like, no, this has to be a perfect appliance. Like, I don't want a perfect appliance, right? Because that's that way lies iPad, iOS limitations. But you got to move in that direction a little bit. Is it just Google? Like, they just, they're like, everything's the web. We'll just fix Google.com. on the back end and no one will notice. And it's like, you can't do that with Bluetooth. Yeah, right? You can't.

Every Google product has a Bluetooth product. It just seems like, well, the Bluetooth is broken. Like, it should come with a sticker. It's like this. The Bluetooth will be broken for several weeks. Well, and the slate in particular, like I had, like, my headphones would disconnect, I don't know, once an hour, if not fat, more. And then when your Bluetooth headphones disconnect, Chrome OS, when you're playing music

from an Android app, doesn't think, like, oh, I should stop. it just keeps playing. And so I'd be like on the plane. And then all of a sudden everybody is listening to my music. And I wouldn't know it because I'm wearing like noise cancelling headphones. Oh my God. Oh, hi. It's sorry.

And then other times it would just like turn off. And I would be able to turn it on and I have to reboot it. Well, that's horrible. Yeah. Okay. Well, 5.5 for the pixel slate. Future of computing still involves a lot of finagling. Yeah.

It's weird that all these companies are like rushing into this direction. And yes, like we're going to talk about iPhone sales number. You know, Apple's not disclosing their unit sales anymore, and they're kind of hiding the fact that no one really knows what the iPad is up to. It just seems like the push for you should have a tablet with a flippy detachable keyboard is not rooted 100% in what people actually want, right? It's rooted in like a very sci-fi conception of what people should want. But I just look around and all these things come with keyboards attached to them.

And they're shown with keyboards attached to them. And like the iPad case, people are arguing about, it with me on Twitter, like, it's kind of meant it's less easy to take the keyboard off the iPad now because it wraps around the whole thing. It kind of feels like you just leave it on there forever. And it's like, well, you guys are just building laptops. Those are just laptops. They're just like, crap. Do people just want laptops? It seems like, did you talk to the laptop people? And that, to me, is that it's going to keep breaking down over time, right? I mean, I love devices of flippy keyboards. Be able to, like, put it into a tablet mode and

like sit on the couch, move it a little bit closer to your face and watch the thing or mess around on the web or play a game or whatever. It's great. But you don't want to do it quite that often. And you really don't want the thing that sucks as like a laptop in order to get that. And I mean, we're just going to we're going to keep on coming back around over and over again to the fact that like the surface got it right. Because we make fun of it and it's like awkward and the kickstand like digs into your knees and like they had to do the little thing with a magnet to get the keyboard stable and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But fundamentally, if you want a thing that you can use as a tablet every now and then, just the physicality of, like, where does the keyboard go? There's, like, only so many, like, potential solutions for it.

And I... Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. I feel like Apple did that smart connector. They moved it, and it's going to be harder for people to make keyboard cases now because they've got to wrap around the whole back instead of just clipping on to the bottom. But I am eager to see what third-party keyboard stuff does the iPad. Okay. We have to take a break.

We can come back. Talk about Project Fi, which just a little more Google stuff. And then I've just got some yelling to you. Maurice Hilliman developed vaccines for some of the world's most devastating diseases. He's been called one of the true giants of science, medicine, and public health in the 20th century. Yet, he's not a household name. That changes today. Dr. Hilliman was on the forefront of discovering, developing, and inventing many vaccines that have helped save and improve lives

worldwide. Dr. Hilliman's impact on public health is undeniable, and his passionate commitment continues to inspire scientists in medical research laboratories to this day. You've always known his inventions. Now you know who's behind them. Merck has been working to discover and develop vaccines for more than a century. Dr. Hilliman was just one of the many Merck scientists throughout our history who've been dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent today at Merck.com slash inventing for life. Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else,

welcome to this week in Elon. My name is Elizabeth Lepado. I'm the deputy editor at The Verge. And I'm coming back after being away for two weeks. And so I'm just going to do a speed run through the biggest news so far during that period. So let's start with SpaceX. Elon Musk has renamed the BFR to Starship, kind of the spaceship and upper-stager starship. The rocket booster used to leave Earth is going to be known as the super heavy. The crew dragon, the spaceship for shuttling astronauts to the ISS,

will get its first launch on January 7th. It's a test launch. There will be no people aboard. Also, it looks like SpaceX has raised $250 million in loans, which is $5,500,000,000. million less than they initially sought, at least according to a Bloomberg report. So Elon Musk has tweeted that he's interested in working with Daimler Mercedes on an electric version of the sprinter van. An electric version of the sprinter van is actually already in the works, suggesting that, you know, it's a pretty good insight about it being a good van. But Tesla and Daimler have collaborated before. Tesla supplied electric power trains for a couple of their cars. So this might be, you know, Musk having ideas on Twitter before he checks them out,

or perhaps this is opening a future discussion for future collaboration. Also, Tesla, Elon Musk told Axios that Tesla was single-digit weeks away from death during the Model 3 ramp up. You may remember that during this entire period, Musk was adamant that Tesla was doing well. So, you know, people clutch their pearls, as I suppose people want to do. There have been more senior executive departures from Tesla, a senior securities lawyer, which is the kind that might potentially oversee Elon Musk's Twitter use, per the SEC settlement, and the head of physical security, who has gone after less than a year. The Model 3 may not perform so well in the winter.

It turns out that the windows and charging plug sometimes gets stuck. A new software update is coming to fix these issues. And finally, Mexican authorities have problems with the Tesla-Kila trademark. Musk tweeted that he intends to, quote, fight big tequila. While I was in tequila last week, and I can tell you it's a lovely small town, I would not characterize it as big. Ah, onwards and upwards to the Boring Company. Elon Musk made a Pondy Python joke about a real-life job opening, and after a lawsuit, the Boring Company is abandoning its plan to dig under Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Okay. Is that all of it? I hope that's all of it. But I will say that like the absolute pace of news that happened suggests to me something else. As you may remember, if you have listened to this before, one of the things that I like to talk about is the way that there is this very sort of divided narrative about Elon Musk. You know, there are all these people who think he's a hero, all these people who think he's a villain and just about nobody in the middle. And like I was looking through like there's this entire like incredible news flow. And I was realizing maybe something that's probably contributing to this.

And it's that there's so much news that you have to cope with it somehow, right? And like my own personal narrative, which is like this is just a rich guy. They do things. I don't know. Is first of all not super compelling as a narrative. But second of all, it doesn't really provide me of a way with a way to like sort this out. Right. Like if your whole thing is Elon Musk is a genius, then like this kind of news flow, you're like, oh, it gives you a perspective, right?

And so you know which things to pay attention to and which things you don't want to pay attention to. And similarly, if your whole thing is like Elon Musk is a villain, then you know what things you want to pay attention to and what things you don't want to pay attention to and you don't have to like just take the whole fire hose in the face. Because necessarily any narrative is going to leave out some amount of relevant facts. That's just how narratives work when you construct them from reality. And so it seems to me that one of the reasons why this keeps happening is just that people are trying to cope with the absolute flow of news. And part of the reason why we have this segment in the first place is that, I have to cope with the flow of news. And I'm trying to basically give you a weekly recap so that you can also cope with it.

But yeah, that's this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lepado, a deputy at the verge. And I will see you next week. All right, we're back. Dieter. Yes. What on earth is going on with Project Fi? So it's called Google Fi now.

Yeah. So if you don't know, Project Fi is Google's cell phone service. It is a MVNO that sits on the top of T-Mobile. Sprint and U.S. cellular. And they just made it official that it's a Google thing now and not just a project. So fine. They're also offering beta support for iPhones and then just a whole, they're like official support for a whole bunch of Android phones.

So it'll work with any phone. And it's actually a really polarizing service. So the thing that polarized me for it is I didn't trust that Google would keep maintaining it. And I don't know if I could trust giving my phone number to Google. Because like, look what they did to Google Voice. Look what they did to Hangouts. Look what they did to do or aloe, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, do I really want a primary communication service to be a Google service?

Because are they going to hang on to it for a few years? So that, I think, is, like, a little bit safer now. But it's also polarizing because the model in which you pay for stuff is, like, either amazing and perfect for you and your needs, or it actually kind of sucks. And basically the way it works is your phone line's 20 bucks, and then data costs $10 per gig, and then international roaming is totally free. and that's it, but there is a caveat that once you hit 15 or 16 gigs of data, they start throttling you unless you want to pay extra, then you can pay 15 bucks a month for data after that. So for some people, that means, like for me, for example, I'm on Wi-Fi enough that I manage to not use, you know, more than, I don't know, 10 gigs of data, 8 gigs of data, you know, maybe actually less than that, like 5 gigs of data a month.

And so my phone bill could come out to, you know, 50, 80 bucks. and that's actually like cheaper than what I'm paying for Verizon right now, right? So that's great. Plus it works if you travel internationally. But if you're the kind of person that uses 11, 12, 13 gigs of data or more a month, it can get pretty expensive, pretty fast. But then it gets even more complicated because FI does the one thing that nobody else does, which is they will let you put a FI sim in as many data devices that you want and not charge you extra for them. So really? Yeah.

So the reason I like FI is I've got a phone with a phone number or whatever. and I use it as my second line because I'm a crazy person that wants to have two phone lines. But I buy the LTE version of the iPad. I just bought the LTE Surface Go, which we could get into if you want. And it costs me literally nothing to get the to put the LTE in there per month unless I actually use it for LTE, which means that I've always got a device that has this backup data built into it if I need it, and it doesn't cost me anything month over month, which is great. So you've signed them all up, but you're just not using it.

Yeah, well, it's just sitting there. And then if I need it, it's just there. So, I mean, Windows is actually really, really, really good at this. If you can get the LTE version of the Surface Pro and then they just release the LTE version of the Surface Go. If your Wi-Fi is garbage, it just quietly, silently switches over to the data connection and things just keep going. And it's no problem. So why did you buy an LTE Surface Go? Because I have an unhealthy obsession with tiny computers.

What do you do with the Surface Go? So I only got it yesterday, so I'm still thinking through that, but I did review the original one. I bought it to figure out what I want it for. Well, no, like, here's the thing. It is not super powerful, so you can't use it as a full-on laptop replacement. But because it's not super powerful as a tablet, you're, like, not tempted to, like, go crazy with work stuff, but you can do it in a pinch. And so basically, it's a tiny computer that, unlike an iPad, won't limit me if I need to do some work stuff. It just takes a little bit longer.

And that taking a little bit longer is actually weirdly an incentive for me to, like, not when I am out with it, just do work stuff, but instead read books or, you know, watch some movies or do other sort of tablet-y things on it. I'll be honest. Like, it's a privileged position for me, but it is, like, an experiment to see how I feel about having a Windows tablet be my, like, secondary non-laptop device instead of an iPad. Yeah. Or a Chromebook. But I want to try it. I'm excited for it. Well, it makes sense.

On the topic of Project Phi, I wanted, what I got the pixel. I could do a whole Google experience, and it does seem like a more modern phone carrier, and I like that it's bundling services together. But, man, I don't trust Google not to cancel something at all. Like, I really wish every Google project, like, you could scroll to the bottom of the page, and it would just say, like, roughly three years. Or it would just let me know how long. So the fact that they change the name, and it's not a project anymore, is actually kind of

a big deal. Right? Yeah. Because it is a big indication that they might keep it around. But I don't know. They've killed better named products. Yeah. Google Reader.

Every time we talk about a wireless service, you end up talking about the asterisks for 45 minutes. So like the unlimited service on Verizon or like T-Mobiles, you know, free services. Are they really net neutral or not? Like, down the line. With Google Fi, the asterisks are how much day do you use? Are you using a pixel phone or one of the, like, blessed up Motorola phones? that are actually able to switch between Sprint T-Mobile or blah,

because if you don't, if you use it on iPhone or something else, you're basically using it on T-Mobile as an NVNO. And David Brodick over at Android Police pointed out that being an NV&O on T-Mobile is not necessarily great experience because the back-end contract may mean that if T-Mobile feels throttle, it's more likely to throttle or it feels congested, it's more likely to throttle an MV&O before it throttles a first-tier T-Mobile customer,

so it's possible that you're going to get worse service. Like, you end up down a pretty deep rabbit hole, even with Google Fi, even with its relatively simple, you know, plans. Yeah. I'm just going to continue to stay in AT&T jail until someone comes to my house and breaks free for me. Yeah, it's all I can do. I will say on that topic, this is a total tangent, but Google's, I forget what they're calling, I think they're calling it quick. Google's like upcoming hot new protocols for the web are going to be adopted as HTTP 3. Okay.

And one of the hot new features is that a typical, like, web connection, you have an IP address, right? And so the service you're talking to knows who you are because your IP address. Well, with all these fancy ways to switch between services, or you hop to Wi-Fi or you change carriers midstream or something like that, that's very confusing as a service provider. So apparently, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but HTTP3 has. this way of just giving you a unique ID so you can hop between service providers but have a still seamless like application experience. Wow, there are no privacy or tracking implications to that at all. Something to look out for.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Google's going to give you an ID number. Just fireup news. Ycom or combinator.com. You can have some great, great controversy there. Perfect. A friend of the verge, ex-reg editor, hero to all.

Walt Mossberg has been going on a Twitter tear about why would anybody ever use Gmail or Google. I'm switching to duck, dot go and Apple Mail to protect my privacy. It's the whole thing. And he's kind of not wrong. Yeah. Wow. I haven't looked at this thread, but I know what I'm doing with my time tonight. Okay.

Speaking of controversy, Casey Newton, let me guest host his newsletter this week. I just want to talk about this for five minutes, and then I can be done ranting and raving. We can move on to something else. It's going to be more than five minutes. So there's a new Congress. There is a lot of investigatory, regulatory, scrutiny being applied to tech companies. As we speak right now, this is a true story. Laura Lumer, who is a sort of far-right reactionary person who was banned from Twitter,

has chained herself to the doors of the Twitter office in New York, screaming things like, you want to steal my tweets in real life because she was banned from Twitter, right? So there's a streak of conservatism saying the platforms are biased against us. And so you end up, and then there's this aggregatory scrutiny that's happening. So you end up with Ted Cruz a few months ago asking Mark Zuckerberg at a congressional hearing, aren't you supposed to be neutral to get the protections of something called Section 230? And Mark Zuckerberg looked it in with his robot eyes and said nothing of substance. That's Mark Zuckerberg.

And then two days ago, Senator Elect Holly from Missouri, who is the current Attorney General of Missouri, tweeted, we should take, the new Congress should take a hard look at Twitter. status exempt from liability under Section 230 because they're supposed to be a platform for a true discourse of political thought. And I'll just add, like, this is a thing worth, like, actually understanding pretty, like, pretty deeply, at least at a basic understand what the law says level, because I am sure that this is going to come up when the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai finally talks to Congress next week. Yep.

So I wrote about it and I said, why do Republicans keep making fools himself over this? which I think they're getting willfully wrong. But a lot of people get this wrong. So I just want to explain it. So the backstory here is kind of wild. In 1995, Stratton Oakmont, which you may remember is the shady investment firm from the film, The Wolf of Wall Street, sued. This is all true.

sued Prodigy. You may remember Prodigy is the dial-up internet service operated by Sears. Just go with me on all of this. 1995. Stratton Oakmont sues Prodigy because they have a user. on their investment message board saying Strattonokmont is shady, which, as immortalized by the film, The Wolf of Wall Street was true. But Stratton-Ockmont says, this is defamatory.

We want you to pull it down. Your prodigy, you're the ones with the money. You owe us the money. Prodigy goes to court. The court says, well, you moderate your message boards. You are exerting editorial control over these message boards, and that makes you the publisher of this content. You are now liable for defamation.

Prodigy says, well, like 60,000 posts a minute on Prodigy, like we can't do that. We have to shut it down. If we're liable for all this stuff, we have to like quadruple the size of our moderation team. Everything will be slow. This isn't going to work. Which if you think about it is exactly what the platforms say today, right? It's too hard to moderate this whole thing. So Congress passes a law.

It's called Section 230, the Communications Decency Act. It was written by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, Colin Lucker on our team, literally just interviewed him about Section 230 in the future of it. You can go read that. But Congress passes Section 230. It says two things. Number one, what says a lot of things? But the two most important ones are, number one,

no provider of interactive computer service will be treated as a publisher of the content on that service provider as somebody else. So we're just flatly saying these platforms are not publishers. They can't be held liable for decimate. There's no conditions.

There's no, you have to do X, Y, and Z, you have to be neutral. It just says, no provider of an information service shall be treated as a publisher. Sure. Okay. It's one sentence, super easy to read. You can go look it up.

There's a link to it in the post I wrote with Casey. Number two, this is the important one. If a platform in good faith takes steps to restrict or remove content it finds obscene, defamatory, harassment, whatever, even if that stuff is constitutionally protected, if in good faith they're moderating their platform against this stuff, they won't be held, they won't be treated as though they're in charge of it. Right. So two pieces of the law in response to Stratton-Okmont v. Prodigy. One, they're not publishers.

We're affirmatively saying interactive computer providers are not publishers. Two, we're saying even if they moderate, if they're doing it in good faith, and even if they're removing stuff that is otherwise constantly protected, they're still not liable for the other stuff. That's the whole law. What does good faith mean? Good faith is not like a, I think that's where the misreading really comes in. Good faith, Twitter is doing this in good faith. Does any listener of the Vergecast think that we think Twitter is a well-run company? They should not.

Do we think Twitter is a well-run company? It is absolutely not a well-run company. Are they moderating their platform in defensible good faith? Sure they are. They publish rules. They talk about those rules. Those rules are available. They're transparent insofar as they're transparent.

Most of the moderation actions on Twitter happen in accordance to those rules. When there's an outcry, they apologize. They try it harder. Then there's another outcry. It's Twitter. But it's obvious good faith. They're saying these are our rules. Does YouTube operate in good faith?

YouTube is also super frustrating for everybody he uses YouTube. But do they have rules? Is there a system? Can you see the system? Can you understand to some extent how YouTube's moderation works? Sure you can. That's like all it really takes. There's no like, are we telling people we're neutral, but then we're secretly not?

No, it's like, can you see the operation of the thing? Like, that's what good faith means. Are you not lying to people, right? Are you doing mostly what you say you're going to do? And good faith is not mean you're perfect. And it certainly doesn't mean your content neutral. So if you take this law and try to apply it to the Donald on Reddit, right? Reddit owns the whole platform.

They let moderators make whatever rules they want on every subreddit. You would not want a law that says, well, the Donald has to be content neutral, right? They delete shit left and right that they don't want to see. You would not want a law that says the kitten subreddit on Reddit has to keep things that are off topic if it's about puppies. Right? So you have to like give people affordance to shape the platform they're on. And there's no rule saying it has to be neutral. It just has to be in good faith.

But that's a pretty low threshold as long as you're telling people what you think your rules are. So I think everybody's getting this upside down, particularly conservatives who want to say Twitter is a publisher. All these platforms are banning conservatives or publishers. And I think the reason they want to say that is, hey, you're making content decisions. So you should be liable for those decisions. But if you misread 230 in this way, what you're really saying is Twitter, we're threatening you by eliminating 2,000. entirely, and now you're liable for every tweet is defamation or actionable. So really, we can destroy Twitter.

We can destroy YouTube. We could destroy Reddit if we eliminate 230 because there's, if Reddit is responsible, financially responsible for every post on Reddit, that isn't a company anymore. It's just a lawsuit machine. So like 230 is a law that enables the internet. The question is on the sort of the left wing side, and this is what Wyden talks to calling about, we want them to moderate. This is the law we wrote.

The law we wrote gave them complete immunity, but we did. gave them the freedom to moderate. They should moderate harder. We should not have Nazis on Twitter. And on the right, they're saying, well, you're deleting right-wing voices. We'll just take the whole thing away. And now you're totally responsible for being a publisher. And so this law is like the foundation of every platform on the internet. Our comment section does not exist without Section 230. We just can't, we would have to shut it down. Just to be clear on that, because I missed that the first time I read this, we are, the verge is a publisher. Yep. But the comments, because they are coming from a source that's not us,

We are not a publisher in the context of the comments. No. So we are liable for what we publish, and then we provide an interactive computer service or comments on our forums. And we are not liable for what people do there. Now, if you have participated in our comments, you know that I will ban you at the drop of the hat if you're rude. Or if you use the word bias incorrectly. I won't do that. I might do that.

Don't try. Don't try. But you know that we moderate our comments. We want that to be a polite place. We moderate the shit out of our YouTube comments. We like do it all the time. We had to ban a bunch of flat earthers the other day in one of Lauren's videos. Should we have the protection to do that?

I would argue that we should. It's not confusing what we're doing. But yeah, so what we publish, the verge gets sued, right? People get mad at us. We get sued for defamation. It happens. We take it. We have a law firm.

We do the work because we think we're right. But we can't be liable for every person in our comments. So the law makes a distinction between what we do. So what was the big push a couple of years ago of Facebook should be called a public? Right. So Facebook operates in the shadow of 230. So does name a company, Etsy. Like every company that has user content operates in the shadow of 230. So if you say Facebook comes out in the world and says, we're a media company, right? They're now responsible for everything published on Facebook. We're no longer the provider of an interactive computer service. So I think they were very hesitant to say we're a media company now because they knew that removing this legal protection would kind of destroy their business. But we all think of them as a media company because, Well, shit, they buy and distribute a lot of media. Mike.com laid off everybody today because their entire business was one Facebook watch deal that Facebook took away. They had no more revenue and they're gone.

That sounds like a media company. But like Facebook is like, we're a platform and we're going to stay a platform. And so I think that's that big push. Like you should call yourself a media company if you are one. And these platforms are saying, no, we're platforms. We're just going to hide behind the shield. So the nuance here, I guess, is if a company, disclosure of my wife works for Oculus Division of Facebook, If the 230 is like pretty unambiguously a good thing.

However, it has enabled companies like Facebook and to some extent Twitter to do the things that a media company does and like mess with the world of media. But get to call itself a platform and not call itself a media company. So there's some sort of like, is there some sort of nuance that we could do with this 230 thing to be like, yes, you are protected. Please moderate in good faith. By the way, if you do some stuff that like seeps in. into basically being a cable channel or a media company or whatever, then like there's some line we can draw once you go over it into media land that we can start talking about some other standard for you.

I mean, that's where we are now, right? So 2.30 is a lot from the 90s. The Internet is radically different. The number of platform companies that operate at scale has shrunk, right? Right. There's not very many of them. You could write one law just for companies with more than a billion users. You hit a billion users.

You have a different set of responsibilities. So there's like that kind of chatter out there. Paul, you will be interested in this. You could write one sort of law that says, if you operate a network or a platform, you have to be neutral to the users and provide an open playing field for that. Right?

You're a dominant provider of a service, and everyone relies on you. We're going to regulate you and say, you're perhaps a common carrier. And you can't impose editorial control. Right? Like, you can map this to net neutrality, like, instantly. All those words sound so good going down.

It's like honey. It's just when you look, look, one interesting thing about this is this idea of what are the individuals' rights in this scenario. You know, I am investing my time on this platform. I'm building an audience, and the platform obviously gets value from me. And so theoretically, I'm abiding by a terms of service, and I've basically agreed that they have the copyright now of all my tweets or some. I don't know what that status is. You're saying you haven't read the terms of service that you agreed to.

You know what? Please don't tell anybody, but I have no idea what my legal rights are as far as my tweets. But it is content that I generated and that I, it's from my mind. I think that feeling, because, yes, I don't think that this is, you know, going after Twitter with this 230 thing is a good idea at all. But I also think that Twitter has been demonstrably biased against conservatives and against conservative ideas and against ideas that it does not agree with. Wait, Twitter is a user community or as a company? As a company.

So like that's like up for debate, right? Like Casey would totally disagree with you. Sure, sure. But that is definitely a feeling that I have and that a lot of people obviously, mostly they're conservative, have. And so you start to really resent this company and fear this company that you've spent years of your life building connections, building an audience, building relationships on this platform and generating content for this platform. And this company has so much power over that situation. Right. So that's a relationship that

Americans now have with monopolies across their economic lives. Right. So like, know what would be great if Twitter had a competitor. Yes. That would be great. What if that competitor wasn't banned from the app store? Sure. I don't know, man. Like, what if there wasn't a monopoly and app distribution?

Like, you keep going down the line and you're at monopolies at every single step. And I think this 230 thing is both a product of a time when it was not clear. That's how the internet would work. And now, I think in the modern context, you do have both Democrats and Republicans talking not changing it, but in different ways. So again, the Democrats, you know, they're like, we're going to pass Fasta and Sesta and say, if you are Backpage.com and you are knowingly making a ton of money on ads that might be related to sex trafficking, like, you're liable for that.

And like, backpage.com goes away. And, like, there's an ongoing number of ripple effects for, like, sex workers in America who are now are saying, we're less safe because we can't use the Internet for our work, right? Like, was that in 1995, did they think that was going to happen? look that we would be having this conversation now? Like, no, but we've modified the law in that way. There are other carve-outs you could make. You could make the platform is liable for directly inciting violence, right?

You could absolutely do it. There's all kinds of carve-outs. You could say above a certain size. If you've got 90% of the market for tweets, Twitter. This is how it looks. Paul, this comes down to you and me disagreeing about one thing in particular, is the existence and persistence of monopoly, right? Yeah.

What if the carve-out is, as soon as you apply an algorithm that ranks what order things are displayed in. Right. I think that is probably the most interesting one right now, right? Is Facebook algorithmically favoring some news over others? And does that make sense? Is Google? Is Twitter? And so it's really hard.

This law was not, it did not see that far into the future. So I think next year you're just going to see a lot of 230 action. And so the reason I wanted to rant and rave about it is because it is fundamentally a simple law to understand. You can go read it. It's written in English. It's not like the constitution. You know what I mean? Like it was written not so long ago by people who were thinking about the internet. It is just a few sentences long in the sort of active portions. And you can just understand what happened between Stratt and Oakmont and Prodigy and how Congress responded and where we are. And then you hear people just get it wrong. And it's like,

you're just lying. You're just making something up so you can yell at Mark Zuckerberg and everyone knows it's wrong. And I think that's like, for the Veritas audience in particular, all of us, regardless of like political inclination, we should just like start from a very objectively true place and then make some policy determination. And like you can be, you can think like I do, which is these monopolies are not going away and we should impose them with some amount of rulemaking that accepts the fact that they're very powerful and they should have some different obligations. Or we can do something I think what Paul would like more, which is like we should create conditions in which their competitors are able to,

to compete with them. But you can't have monopolies at like the access level, the app store level, the cloud flare level, the user level. Like, all those companies just have too much power, like up and down the chain. So neutrality will solve everything. That's been my speech. And now, you know what? I always say, I always say

bringing back Tom Wheeler. Yeah, Paul. It's weird. You've moved out to Washington. You just start screaming and bring back Tom Wheeler everywhere. This is an advertising segment from our friends Adele Cinema talking about how binge watching has changed everything. Check it up. Kayla loves TV.

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but where and when they watch it. And this is great news for Kayla. I used to feel truly embarrassed about the amount of binge watching that I engage in, but I feel grateful that the culture is totally supportive of this type of hobby that I have. If you're a person who can never say no to one more episode, check out the Dell XPS 13 with Dell Cinema Technology. For incredible sound, color, and streaming, it's the laptop for people who watch things on their laptop from Dell computers.

All right, thanks to our sponsor Dell. Learn more about Dell Cinema's Amazing Color and Intel Core I7 processor at Dell.com slash XPS13. That's Dell.com slash XPS13. Okay, Paul, every week, you do a segment, which I believe is called Bring Back Tom Wheeler. Yeah. Well, actually, I'm going to change it this week. It has a different name.

And that name is Smart Yoga Pants. Oh, good. Oh, my God. Yeah. I'm so excited for these. Let me tell you why it's called smart yoga pants on this very special week. Yeah. Because I've discovered on the internet, smart yoga pants.

There's nothing more to say. Okay, pivot yoga, right? Their pants, you put on the pants, and then the pants are smart. And they know where your body is, and then they put your body up on a TV. which kind of reminds me, now that I think about it, there's this book that I found, I think, it's like at a used bookstore or something like that. There was a concept of before the internet was really,

back with the internet was like Gopher and Usenet before the web, there was this idea that what we were going to do, moving into the 21st century, was that we would digitize the real world, and we'd have this digital representation of the real world. And that was kind of what the network would do. be like. But instead we made like websites. And I think, but more recently, you know, think of like ways and the whole self-driving car arena and then smart yoga pants. I like I like things that are

digitizing the real world and I don't know. It's cool. I like you go from self-driving cars to smart yoga pants. So basically they measure how well you're doing yoga. Yeah. Well, they tell you mostly you're doing bad yoga. Good. All right. So you talk to your smartphone and you say, how's this look? Pivot. How's this look? And then it will tell you how to move your knee. All right.

So that you're doing yoga. And that on the level of self-driving cars in terms of innovation is what you're saying. Basically. Or ways. All right. We have a, let's do a quick lightning round. Apple claims the iPhone 10R is its best selling phone will not say how many it has sold. The quote from Jaws, is every week it's been on sale, it's been the number one selling iPhone. Yeah.

Every day of every week that it's on sale is what he said. Jaws is kind of like a straight shooter. We've talked to him a lot. He doesn't usually dance around, but I will say the follow-up question was how many, and he wouldn't tell C-Net in that interview. I'm trying to remember if I predicted this or if I'm predicting the complete opposite.

I'm sure somebody could remember. I think every reviewer predicted the iPhone 10R would be the one to buy, right? Like down the line, I think I said it, Joanna said it, Lauren said, like, just down the line, everybody who touched this thing. So this is the one most people should buy. It's a deal. It's a deal. It's the iPhone you want with the screen that you'll live with.

But everyone, you know, it's like cheaper. It has the edge to edge, has face it. Everyone knew, everyone kind of suspected it would be the one most people buy. The question is whether iPhone demand overall is soft. So the Wall Street Journal had a piece about supplier orders being cut. has been the usual sort of cast of analyst characters doing their thing about supply that's being cut. And then there's Apple saying this now, which is out of character for Apple, right? Where they're trying to do an interview about Project Red, and they get asked this question,

and they're prepared for it in this way. And they're not just saying we don't disclose numbers. So there's some narrative changing happening here in a way that they don't usually do. And because last quarter they said we're not going to do unit numbers anymore, it is likely that Apple will never say a number for iPhone sold ever again, which has let everyone to think that the total number of iPhones sold is going to stay flat or go down. Maybe everybody's just buying Mac minis. Everyone's like, I got to take my iPhone budget and throw it as Mac Mini.

That would be incredible. If next year they're like, actually, we're going to change our mind on the unit sales thing because we just want you didn't see this MacMini number. That's like the dream. All right. Chris Welch reviewed the Roku speakers, which I think we all laughed at heartily. But he says they sound really good and they're really simple to set up. And I have changed my, I think a lot of people are going to buy these.

I think everybody with the Roku TV who is like, need some speakers, they can just like, boop, and then they'll have it. Here's my favorite part of his review, though. Comes with two remotes. One is just a record. The other remote has a button on it with two interlocking squares. And when you push it, the voice assistant just says, this feature is not yet available. And Roku will not tell him what the feature is. What?

It's literally just a TBD button. It just does nothing. And they won't say what it's going to be for. They won't say what it is. So part of his review is just sort of idly speculating on what that icon could be. So, yeah, he's like normally I wouldn't recommend a product that is obviously unfinished that has a button that's TBD, but it's pretty good and cheap. And then, wow. Sometime down the line, the button will do something.

It's even better. It's going to be even better. Why does it need two remotes of the? first place. One remote is a TV remote and the other remote is like a little square that you can like carry around your house and like push a button. It has two macro buttons.

Actually everything about this product is hilarious. It has two buttons labeled one and two. You would think that they are programmable like start Netflix buttons. They are macros to the voice assistant. No. So you push it and it issues the play rock music on Spotify command

quietly to the voice assistant. It makes the speaker whisper a voice command? No, no, no. It like does it inside. So to program it, you like, hold the button down. You're like, play rock music on Spotify and you let go. And the next time you push the button, it issues that command internally. Oh, I wish it made it. I wish it said it every time out loud. That would be so good. But in your own voice. It's like higher, it's like buying a robot to push your touchscreen for you. Yeah, exactly. It sounds like someone was working on a Kickstarter for these speakers that would work really well with Roku TVs and Roku just bought them and they were like, hey, we've got this one more feature.

Roku's like, don't worry about it. Just ship it. I just, like the three buttons on there. Anyway, so that's square remote with the one that you're supposed to take it around your house with you and just like fire off a voice command macro hybrid whenever you want. All this to say, these are apparently wonderful products. Yeah, they sink really fast. They work really well.

like sound reasonably good. They're cheap, but it's just like this remote is deeply hilarious. Motorola just doing its Motorola thing, just putting giant batteries in a new MotoG7 power. I feel like Motorola is quietly successful. I hate the Pixel 3

battery life. I almost think I have a defective unit. Uh-oh. It just doesn't get me through a day. Helen had to get a new one. I think you should swap it. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, it's just, yeah, it's not cool.

I feel like the pixel three has, you know, the pixel two came out? I was like, I love this phone, I want to use it, the screen makes me sad. And it was like, every day I was like, can I deal with this screen? I feel none of that with the pixel three. I don't know why. You don't covet it, you mean? The pixel two, like the camera was so much better that I was like, every day, I was like, can I make enough? Like, can I just give up on looking at things with my eyes?

Like, well, I just deal with it today. And the answer was always no, but I thought about it. Pixel 3 is like the screen looks pretty good, whatever, the camera's pretty good. But it doesn't. All these little problems around the edges, they just keep me away from it. I don't know. All right. DJ Osmo Pocket, tiny handheld gimmel that shoots 4K.

I feel like this is a very Dieter bone product. Very hype for this thing. The good thing is you just got a laptop for editing this footage. Yeah, right? Editing 4K out of Surface Go. That's just going to be the best. No, I'm excited. It has a USBC port on the bottom, and then you can buy an adapter to plug a microphone directly into it,

which is like the thing that everybody who makes like portable camera things seems to forget that you also want audio that doesn't suck. It's got a cool little modular system so you can plug crap into the side of it. You can use your phone as a viewfinder. It's tiny. It just looks like it's a blast. And not for nothing. You remember how much fun and how much we all love the flip cameras? Yeah.

It's like a flip camera for 2019. And I just, I love that idea. We got to give one to Kara Swisher. Do you remember she did a whole video series where she was charged in the Silicon Valley offices with her flip camera? Yeah. It looked and sounded awful, but it was just raw Kara Swisher. Yeah. Why are you stupid?

You can actually do it with stabilized video. Stabilized 4K. She could automatically stitch together a nine frame, like, panoramic thing of an office where she's asking people why they're stupid. It's a good show. Rico, D-Go. I'm going to plug it at the end of this one. Lastly, Microsoft reported will be a Surface Studio monitor in 2020, which seems right. It seems like they should absolutely do that.

So I can live my dream of standing at my desk, swiping Trello cards at people. Just think about it. I was like, swipe. And then like your screen turned red. I was like, Neil I has assigned you a story. That's still my workplace dream. I don't know. Did you get a Surface Studio out there?

We reviewed one. I don't have one in San Francisco. Dan had it, right? We should, yeah. I'm going to take Dan's away. I'm going to start swiping. I wanted to use this chance to mention that in the spirit of buying discounted things for the holidays, Bitcoin's really cheap right now.

Oh, my God. Get out of here. Get out of here with your Bitcoin scam. Are you a dealer now? Is that what you're doing out there? No, I'm what they call, and this is a formal disclosure, a hodler. Yeah. That means you

that you buy Bitcoin that you hold on to. Do you have a Lambo yet? I have zero lambos. So not a successful hodler. Isn't that the end goal of hodling? It's about the long term. I believe in you, buddy.

Anyways, it's at a great discount. No, stop it. That's spoken like a true hodler. You're trying to ramp up demand. I see you. I watched the Wolf of Wall Street. All right. You should listen to Wadju push that button this week.

This was the third of their Instagram series. They talked about what makes a place Instagramable. Our old social media manager, Zanem Hustain, was on that show. She's wonderful, so you should listen to her too. You should listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. You should listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. All wonderful shows, happy that everyone is asking everyone else why they're stupid on the internet. It's great.

You can listen to Virchast's Interview. episode. Next week, we're going to have Carolyn Cinder's who wrote a long, Casey and I are going to interview her later today. Actually, that's coming out next week. She wrote a long history of harassment and speech on internet platforms, which is great. I'm excited to talk about that with Casey. And you can check out the verge everywhere of the verges on every platform

to usually slash verge. And you can go on iTunes and you can get the button and give us a review, which I want you to do for five stars. That's it. Rock and Roll. Goodbye. Paul. promo code.