The Vergecast - AirPods, exploding batteries, and yeah Apple

Episode Date: September 16, 2016

After a week of swimming in Apple news, the classic cast of Nilay, Lauren, Dieter, and Paul get together via the internet to get deeper into their reviews of the new products and talk a little bit about their effect on the near future of consumer tech. 01:38 – Galaxy Note 7 recall 13:01 – Apple Watch 20:13 – AirPods / Bluetooth 32:44 – Autodesk Graphic ad 33:43 – watchOS 3 39:03 – iPhone 7 53:00 – Wealthfront ad 53:37 – Paul's weekly segment "Costco Cool" 57:11 – Lightning audio round Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Theverge.com. Today's episode is very special because literally everyone is remote. So I am here. I'm Neil Patel. I'm in upstate New York. Paul Miller is here. Where are you, Paul? I'm in the studio.

Where are you guys? Paul's all alone. Ready to do a Verge cast. Lauren, good is here. Lauren, where are you? I am in Palo Alto. And Dieter Bone is here. Dieter seems very angry.

Where are you, Dieter? I'm just angry and general. No, I'm in our San Francisco office. I'm only technically remote. Okay. Okay. So we're here. It's good.

We're good. Yeah. It's been, I will say it has been an absolutely bonkers week at the verge. We've done so much stuff. I want to shout out like our other section. So the science section this week has been incredible. You should go read Alessandra Petenzo's piece on Kava, which is a bitter root that you mash into water and then drink and it's a muscle relaxant, but it might also destroy your liver. So you've got to really

balance that one out. Go read that. The transportation section this week, just out of control. All the self-driving cars. They literally just found all the self-driving cars in America and then had them drive them around. So Andy Hawkins went to Pittsburgh, drove an Uber self-driving car. Tamara Warren went and rode around in Ford self-driving car and actually spoke to the CEO of Ford, Mark Field. So just a big week around the site, entertainment section, cranking way as always, but I just want to call them out because this podcast, what we have been working on for the past week, the people on the show, is obviously a flood of Apple news and a little bit of exploding Samsung news. Just a little smidge. And right as we actually went on air here,

Samsung has officially recalled the Note 7. They have... I think you should say finally, officially. Finally, that's true. Finally, after way too long, they have recalled the note seven. So if you have a note seven, this is like public safety announcement. Go to go to Samsung.com. There's a banner atop of screen or go back to where you bought it and trade it in. You can get a new one with a new battery. You can get an S7 or an S7 edge for free. Samsung now, literally this is breaking minutes ago. Samsung has 92 reports of the battery overheating in the United States, including 26 reports of burns, 55 reports of property damage, including fires in cars in a garage. But just stop using your Note 7. And there's stats out there in the world that people are just still using them at the same rate as before, which is the story we're in today as well. So if you're listening to this, you have a Note 7. You've been very brave. We commend you.

Go get a different phone. If you know somebody with Node 7, go get a different phone. So I just want to talk about that for five minutes and we can do all the Apple stuff. The Note 7 is no longer a viable device, right? Is anyone going to buy a Note 7 after this? no it is remarkable how quickly a phone that's on fire can burn down your brand they're going to have a hard time recovering i think right samson of a note i think my big question is it the note samsung had a big opportunity in this cycle with the note which we reviewed very highly dan thought it's a great phone it is a beautiful piece of hardware

except for the exploding you know and apple took this year off in terms of design they it iterated the iPhone 6 design. They could have come, and they have, you know, I know everyone's laughing at the headphone jack, but they have a headphone. Like, there's things to market about their phone that are clearly differentiated from Apple's phones, except it blows up. I think the danger for Samsung here, and I really, I don't know how badly this will affect, but you know how people still sometimes call their phone a droid? Yeah. It's not called the Note 7. It's the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

And I really feel like a lot of people call them Galaxy or my Galaxy phone. And, you know, it's got that curved edge screen. It's got a lot of Galaxy style features. It really hurts, I think, the whole Galaxy brand, at least. Yeah, because as far as we can tell, the S7 has not been exploding. It's just the note. Yeah, it just seems like Samsung had the, this opportunity in whether or not they could have capitalized on the opportunity, who knows,

and whether or not their attempt to capitalize on the opportunity would have been successful, who knows, but they certainly do not have the opportunity anymore, right? Like, it's gone. And the question is like, is it they had, they responded, I think basically within 24 hours, saying, oh, yeah, no, we're going to do a sort of a thing. You can go trade it in, sort of a soft recall. And it took them a really long time. to get to this like formal official start turning the wheels of the consumer government to like do a full on formal recall.

We actually ran a story earlier today before they went formal with this full recall of saying people are being dumb and still using their note phones. The other thing that they have been, I think, remarkably slow on is how widespread this is. Now, you could say the difference between like 30 out of however many million they sold or 92 over out of, of however many million they sold is like a tiny percentage. But once you've got numbers creeping up to a hundred and you've got like jeeps and garages burning down, like that's a thing that you should not have messed around with. And I think in retrospect, they're really going to regret not having moved more decisively right away.

Yeah. The question is like compared to previous battery incidents, the one I keep thinking about is 2006 when Sony made lithium ion batteries were exploding Apple laptops, Dell laptops, Sony laptops. It took months for the Sony battery recall to happen. And eventually it became like Dell recalled 4.1 million batteries, which at the time was the biggest consumer recall ever. So this is definitely a tighter timeline. But Samsung definitely like dilly-dallyed for a minute. They didn't quite fess up to the seriousness of having phones in people's pockets. and everywhere with them and like going like lighting up like they they went through the process

but it didn't seem like they had the urgency and now it finally seems like they do yeah this is a sad story look if you have a note don't use it stop don't use it like trade it in don't use it uh corey seeka in the new york office if anyone's listening to this find corey take his phone throw it away um because he refuses to stop using it oh my goodness it's convenient i mean this is like the problem right you totally depend on your phone and you never believe that anything bad is going to happen to you. So what are you going to use a note five like people in the olden times? Like what am I going to wear seatbelt?

Like come on. You guys see a tweet that went viral yesterday where someone, someone said, uh, we have an exploding galaxy and we have an iPhone without a headphone jack that is basically the perfect metaphor for this year's election. I think you all can figure out who is who in that scenario. Don't say it. exercise for the listener. Please don't tweet it else.

Yeah, I just said, you know, the S7 is only about six months old. So, Samsung has six months, presumably, before they put another S-series galaxy phone. And they're just going to have to deal with it. Which, by the way, is going to be the Galaxy, Samsung Galaxy S8, comma, the successor to the phone that exploded in every single news article about it. Right. I mean, they're just going to, it's someone at every piece.

we're going to write it. Hopefully they don't explode because that's what people think about Samsung funds. But we'll see if it fades over the next six months. I will say it's just a shame because the Note 7 is a good phone except for the exploding. It's just... Except for the exploding and their lack of transparency because that really, the exploding battery enough creates a sense of distrust among consumers, but then just feeling like you don't really know what's going on with it or whether it's officially recalled for

an extended period of time is not good either. Meanwhile, the other thing to compare to you, go ahead, Deeter. As I said, meanwhile, the other top two stories

on our website right now are T-Mobile is telling iPhone 6, 6 plus and S-E users that if you update to iOS 10, you're not going to be able to connect to their network, so don't.

And if you use the gift search in iOS 10, I message, there's a, you know, halfway decent chance you're just going to get some hardcore porn showing up. It's a bad day for phones.

Today is a very bad day for phones. The T-Mobile thing is ridiculous. Just flat out ridiculous. And I actually, I don't remember who was in the office yesterday, told me that they had updated their phone to iOS 10 and now their T-Mobile sucked. So it's real. So here's the thing, though. I'm having the T-Mobile problem. It was dropping before I updated iOS 10.

Yeah, so they gave everybody unlimited data and then, no, I don't know. It goes to like no network. And you have to like restart your phone and that sometimes that works. Everyone's while turning like an airplane mode on and off works. But it's typically you have to restart your phone to get back on the network. Wait, but Paul, I have a bigger question, which is, so you still use your phone as a phone? What do you mean? I'm just kidding.

That was a really bad joke. Nobody left. No, no. You're talking about, obviously you're talking about cellular data, but also decide. I'm going to stop. I have not failed. To your point, I have not. failed to make a phone call or receive a phone call because I have not tried to make a phone

call and nobody's tried to call me. Okay, don't, don't think I'm some fuddy-duddy making phone calls. I love phone calls. But, but definitely just very clear we're all on phone calls right now. Well, Skype. No, right. Skites. Can I definitely miss some text messages and it's kind of, it kind of sucks. Because you don't, your phone doesn't like alert you when you. you have no service. Yeah. It's a pretty, it's a pretty, it's a pretty sad scenario.

Actually, as I think about it, I'm pretty bad and I'm having a bad time and I thought it was just me. And now that I read about this T-Mobile problem, I'm angry and I want a bit of a rebate. Also, can I talk more about T-Mobile? Went in to trade in my phone, get that free, quote-unquote iPhone 7. And they, you got to get on the new unlimited plan. Yep. That's how they get you.

So they got me. So I'm going from $60 a month to $75 a month. But unlimited. Guys, imagine it. Can't wait until you try and tether on that thing. That's going to be a blast for you. But guess what? Unlimited.

Except with limits. Very specific limits. And also no service. It's not unlimited. It's un-carrier unlimited. And the double un-created. creates a negative. An unservice.

It's a carrier limited. It's an unservice. Lauren, can I tell you a secret? When Dieter moved to San Francisco, both of us were like, because we sat next to each other in New York and we talked all day. So when he moved to San Francisco,

we practiced making phone calls so that we would know how. Yeah. Because we hadn't done it. We had to like practice hanging up. up and like ending the phone call at the appropriate time. Oh my goodness. You know,

he's like, we're going to have to get good at this. And I was, it's really hard. Is that both of you guys are married. So at some point, I imagine you had to like maintain a relationship involving phone calls to a point where,

you know, you were able to keep things going. No, man. I had a long, I had a long distance relationship for the first year that I dated, uh, my wife.

We just didn't, we just didn't, on the phone for that year because talking on the phone is too freaking hard. Yeah. No, Becky and I both lived in Chicago when we were dating and we definitely dated over G-chat. So maybe you said that Google Blue messaging so bad. G-chat is like a very warm, romantic spot in my heart and it's gone. Nobody uses it anymore.

Every now and again, Becky hits me on the G-chat. I'm like, oh, the fire's back. Well, now, you really, you, well, now you guys. guys have an abundance of phone calls because there's so much going on that you basically can't get off the phone with each other. Yeah, we've been on the fun a lot. So, okay, let's get off the sad stuff, the exploding phones, the carriers that don't work. Let's got it on the fun stuff. And Lauren, I know you might have to go a little bit early. So I want to start with the watch because you have the new Apple Watch Series 2. You've reviewed it. I'm going to throw this out there.

I think Lauren's review and video of the series 2, one of the best videos we have ever made. It's so good. So go watch that. I've been running watchOS 3. I love watchOS 3. I think it's great. I was saying to Dan Seafurt earlier, it's still like a little useless to have a smart watch.

Like it's fine. But now it's like a fun useless. It's like a fun gadget useless, you know? I'm into it. It's not fighting me anymore. But what do you think? So first off, thank you. Those are super kind words.

And I'm not just saying this, but I also think while you're looking at videos, you should go check out Neely's iPhone 7 video because that is flipping fantastic. And clearly I have picked the wrong category of things to review in my life because Niela gets to go to bars and eat these awesome burgers. And I'm like, I'm trying to swim 500 yards in a pool and not die. Do you think you burned as many calories in your video as Nelai consumed in his video?

I mean, it's quite possible because I was the same beer in all the shots. I carried that high life for like an hour and a half. That burger looked delicious, though. I never ate it. We took so many pictures of it. It got cold and gross. Oh. Oh.

Well, yeah. I mean, the point of the watch was to work out with it because Apple is officially positioning it as a health and fitness tracker. When it first came out, it was like, look, we made a smart watch. And by the way, you can track your activity with it because that's become very popular now. And this time they were like, oh, new one has built in GPS. You don't need your phone with you anymore for GPS. We've improved the water resistance. We added swim workout options.

Now when you go into like the other workout options, you can name it something specific. And here are like a list of 26 exercises you could possibly ever want to do. And like they just, and they did like social sharing and the activity app now, which they hadn't done before. but I wrote in the review. It's kind of a testament to what other activity tracking companies have been doing, like follow your friends and support your friends and all that stuff. So it's a fitness tracker. But interestingly, since that review came out,

a lot of people have written into us or tweeted at us and said, are you guys going to review the version one watch with the updated processor? Because Apple is also still doing the first Apple Watch that they announced in 2015, and it's a little bit less expensive. It's $269, but they updated the processor. So hopefully it's not as slow. So there are still people out there that are like, hey, that's great. There's this GPS Apple Watch now, but I'm still interested in the $269 one with the supposedly

faster processor and how does that work? So at some point we're going to have to take another look at that. It's $100 less, right? It is $100 less. Yeah. And by the way, that is still, if you're just looking for a basic activity tracker or wrist wearable. $269 is still more expensive than like almost everything we looked at.

Like Dieter and Dan and I went through the edits and we were like, oh, okay, you know, it's more expensive than Pebble. It's more expensive than the Samsung Gear Fit 2. It's more expensive than the Microsoft Band, which we don't even know if that still exists in its current form, but we'll continue to exist. It's more expensive than like a bunch of Android watches and like and all the stuff. So it's still pricey. But I mean, Apple's always going to charge a premium.

and I think some people are still going to be willing to pay that just to say they have an Apple Watch. Yeah. Here's my question. This is maybe a little tangential. I felt like the most Apple-like moment in the keynote, other than the word courage, which is great, was when they demonstrated the speaker ejecting the water. Yeah. And I see that you've noticed, you noted this in your review.

Does anything else do that? Is that just Apple being absolutely brilliant or am I just unaware of how things are waterproofed? Because that just, I just got like little tingles. I was like, oh, yes, we solved water ejection. I mean, it is kind of cool when you think about. So other waterproof gadgets don't need to eject the water because it could just flow out because their speaker holes aren't like small and weird. But I guess I haven't seen other smart watches that would also have small speaker holes

that are also fully waterproof that, like, I don't know what else would even need to do that at this point. Well, yeah, Lauren was saying something. Where you're saying, Lauren? Oh, no, it's okay. So that's exactly right. Which is part of the value proposition of the Apple Watch is, well, you can use Siri with it, right? And you can speak into it if you get a phone call. Not that anyone wants to make an entire phone call through their wrist, but, you know, you have these options of voice control and listening to things through it.

So they had to leave the speakers in, whereas with something like a waterproof garment, like they don't put microphones and speakers in their watches for the most part, possibly at all, I'm not quite sure. So you're right in that, like Apple had to keep the ports. They couldn't just say, well, let's get rid of the ports. They could have, of course, but they didn't want to get rid of all the ports to fully waterproof it in that way. They had to leave the ports as part of the smartwatch experience.

So it is kind of brilliant. They were just their next line of thinking, was obviously, well, then how do we just push the water out? And I personally have never seen any other watch or wearable that says we're going to create a mechanism built inside of it, along with all the other components we have to fit into this tiny little thing that basically dumps the water out. Yeah, I can't wait for the, like, I fix it tear down where they run that mechanism in like ultra slow motion so we can see how it works. Because I was expecting it to like try and thump, like make a bass sound. but it's more of like a mid-range tone.

It's a really weird sound. It's kind of tinny. It sounds a little bit like a mosquito. Yeah, I guess it's a tiny speaker. Wait, maybe I can do it right now. I don't know if I can do it. Let me let me know. And then we'll do the big reveal.

Okay, so I just water-locked it. I'm going to take it off and hold it up next to my ear. It is water-locked at the moment. Let's see. Let me know if you guys, uh, wait, this is a silly question. I'm wearing the AirPods. There's the reveal. Oh my God, this whole time.

Wait, wait, wait, what side is the, I don't even know, hold on one second, I don't know what side the microphone is on. So, Lauren is doing this. Okay, okay, I got it. Ready? I'm going to, I'm going to do the water thing. Okay. Do you hear that? Yeah, it sounds like a dot matrix.

Yeah, wow. It's just, it's like one of those, it's a weird technology sound that hasn't existed in a long time. It's neat. But for the listener, there's a big reveal. Lauren has been talking to you through her AirPods this whole time. I bet you didn't even notice or you did notice. Whichever one it is, you were running. Yeah, Lauren, you're wearing the AirPods and you wore them with the watch.

So I wore them a bunch of the phone. We talked about it later, but you wore them with the watch specifically for like running around and stuff. How they do? Yeah, they did surprisingly well. So we, Neil and I both have a pair. Walt Mossberg has a pair. And we are not going to be reviewing them until we, get full ready production units because right now we have pre-production units. Some people have put

up reviews already. My advice would be, I mean, you can read them if you want, but wait for ours, right? And I think our audio guys are going to be really, they're going to get really into this too. That said, my overall experience so far has been surprisingly positive. When Apple first announced them, I thought this is ridiculous. Apple has come up with a $160 solution for their removal of the headphone jack that um look like you have like mini cigarettes hanging out of your ears and and then i put them in and i paired them with the iPhone and then once i paired them with the iPhone they automatically paired with watch and i was like wow that's pretty cool and then i they it's a little bit of struggle to pair them with my old 2012 macbook pro but that's a whole other story and then i and now i've been

switching between the watch and the phone and like it's crazy like you just take that them out of the little case, little dental floss case, and you pop them in your ears, and they're just paired. I have not had to repair them. When I take them out of the case, I get a little pop-up on the iPhone that shows me how much battery life is left. The case charges them, so you throw them in the case, you don't think about it that they're charging. Obviously, they're Bluetooth, so they're working over Bluetooth, and they will work with other things, but this W-1 chip that Apple has created and the whole sort of the like the passivity is that the right word the passiveness of the experience of them has been has impressed me quite a bit so far you know like what did you think did people

notice when you wore them by the way where people like stopping you on the street and asking you know are those no really a man in new york city walking in the street wearing giant white earrings surprisingly no one no one pays attention um it's just it's just like a thing uh the one person when I was writing the iPhone review I was sitting in a coffee shop for a long time writing it and the only person

who noticed was the barista and I think it's because I kept buying coffee and they like rolling up with these things in the years but then they were very excited but no no one really paid attention

but I think that might just be a New York thing they're fine I don't think they sound great I think they sound just like the ear pods and the ear pods to me have never sounded great I also find the earpods shape to be tiring in my ears. So I'm actually wearing the wired earpods right now to do this podcast.

And I can just, it's just a shape of my ears, right? Like they don't fit well. So after a while, I think they kind of get a little tiring. But that's me. I think there are people out there who like love them. They're really interesting. They're among the most interesting products Apple's ever put out. They're really forward thinking.

I think that Bluetooth W1 stuff, it's worth, I think we'll probably, when we get to the phone, I really want to talk about it in detail. Like, the fact that Apple is like extending Bluetooth in this way is fascinating and it's great that they did it.

But I think it's just... You might say they also embrace Bluetooth by sticking with it. And now they're extending. Yeah, and then soon they'll extinguish it, you might say. Yeah, I think it's a little... It's not a problem with the watch.

You know, it doesn't bother me. The watch is like a small thing. But with the phone, if you're going to take away the open audio connector, the headphone jack, and then you're going to also own the biggest headphone company in the game in beats. And then you're going to say our products are going to work best. And everyone else gets the old experience. Like, I don't know. I just don't know if that's like particularly.

It's totally within Apple's product. It would have been nice if they said, and we will be licensing the W1 just like. Oh, screw it. I mean, you can say, look, if you can build a chip that. can talk to our APIs. This is like down a total wormhole. I want to finish talking about the watch, and we can come back to this.

No, I like this conversation a lot because I hadn't really thought about that idea of them licensing the W1 and saying, here, have at it, make some stuff. We're still going to make better. I don't think it's, that's fine. Apple's got its own silicon team.

Like, that's fine. They built their own chip. But if you look at the other half of the equation, right, there's the chip in the headphones. And then in iOS 10, my 6S now has that new experience. with the N.W1 headphones. Max running Sierra have that experience.

Watches updated to WatchOS 3 have that experience. So there's an enormous platform software side component to this as well. And they could just say to everyone else, like, here's the API to connect to the better pairing experience. If you can build a chip that competes with ours, have at it. And maybe they'll say that. And I push the company very hard on that. And they were really receptive to being pushed.

it's Apple, so they said nothing in return, but they weren't surprised that I was asking those questions. And maybe they weren't surprised because they know that I'm on this tear about open audio interconnect standards. Because, you know, sometimes you got to get on a tear about open audio interconnect standards. But they weren't surprised and they said, look, you know, we're Apple, we do everything in secret. We haven't had, we didn't, the stuff wasn't out, so we can talk about it. And now the partners are going to come talk to us. And we'll have those serious conversations when we have them. And we're not making any promises, but we'll have.

And it's like, they know. They know that that's a thing. If you're, if you're going to exist in the wireless world, they keep calling it the wireless world, by the way. The world by nature is wireless. So it's kind of like a metaphysical issue.

But, you know, they know that, like, Bluetooth is bad. And they built an extension of Bluetooth to make it better. The AirPods are very impressive. There's, I didn't notice, like, any latency issues. I think if you play games,

there's, like, latency issues, but whatever. I mean, they're wireless. They'll get better. So they took the big jump. And the question is whether them taking the jump as the big, important platform vendor, if they're going to bring the rest of the world with them or if they're just going to keep preferencing themselves. Can I tell you guys a couple stories from the other side? Yeah. Yes. How us people who don't review Apple products live? So literally the day of the Apple announcement, onward, I've started walking away from my computer or phone while I still have my headphones

plugged in. So the other day, like, I, like, knocked a Diet Coke off my desk. Almost, my laptop almost fell off a table. So it's been really dangerous. And it's a weird subconscious thing pushing me toward, you know, I was programmed probably like Manchurian candidates by the keynote to want wireless headphones. So today, in the mail, I get some wireless headphones from a company for review. And I won't say, it's not an embargo, but I'm not going to say the name of the company because I need to talk to them and figure out what's going on. Because it didn't come with like a manual or anything. I'm like, this is great.

They're wireless, but they also come with a cable. I get best of both worlds. There's like four cables in the box. I plug one of them into my computer. What? And it's only in mono for some reason. I don't know what's happening. And so I push the Bluetooth button.

I guess I'll just go wireless. Push the Bluetooth button. And it's like, please install our app. Oh, no. And so you've got to like install an app and I can't. And then when you have the app open, if you try to push the connect button and the app, nothing happens. They're not showing up on my iPhone. Was it Jabra?

Was it Jabra? No, I'm not going to name. There you. But it's, it's just like I have not. I, it's bad. It's bad. Especially because we're seeing this wave. And if you look at Circle Breaker lately, it's like every other post is a new headphone.

Like a bunch of headphone companies have seen this as their moment to announce a weird new kind of headphone. And so there's a lot of headphone companies trying to add a bunch of crazy features, but a lot of them end up needing some sort of app. And that doesn't make the Bluetooth process better. It makes it even worse than it is already. I mean, here's the thing about what you just said that stood out to me. everything you said was very intelligent, a very intelligent observation, but what jumped out at me is they didn't come in the manual.

Headphones should not come with the manual. They shouldn't need a manual. You should just take them out and be like, you plug them in and you pop them your ears. Or if they're wireless, you look at them and you go, oh, okay, there's the three button mic and remote, and here's where I plug in a little micro USB to charge them.

And you go on with your life. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, there should be an L and an R. and you're like great. Yeah. You know, it's interesting is the, you know, the iPhone has Apple paid. It has an NFC chip in it.

And a bunch of Android manufacturers do NFC Bluetooth pairing, which generally, in my experience, has worked. I wouldn't say great, but it's worked well enough that I don't think it's going to fail, which is like a big victory. And they're not doing that. They built this other thing. So there's just like, it's the beginning. That's what I think of it with the AirPods. It's the beginning.

And there's going to be, it's cool. It's a cool. beginning. But, you know, the design is crazy to me. I just think they look good. And the fact that the rest of the ecosystem doesn't get the benefit of the software update on the platform is, I suspect it will change. I think there's going to be enough pressure on Apple will change. Just as, you know, the comparison to me is they opened up iMessage, they opened up maps, they opened up Siri. They, you know, they're in this mode. of letting other vendors into their platform at a deeper level.

And you can go out and buy a pair of great headphones and like push the button on them and the screen will pop up and show you the battery life and they'll be automatically paired to all your devices. That's a net benefit to Apple platform customers. I don't know why they're going to be like, you know what, we have to protect beats, which is already the best selling brand. I think they'll be fine. But we'll see.

But overall, like AirPods are cool. They're one of those Apple products where they have so little because they're not, gadgety, there's no like buttons or settings. There's not much to say. It's like, yeah, you put them in your ear. They work. Lauren sounds fine. Yeah. No manual. No manual. You look at them and you're like,

or it looks like dental floss. You open it. It's not dental floss. They're little earbuds. One says L. One says R. And then there's like a little LED light and it flashes a color. That lets you know stuff. What if it was dental floss, though? That'd be incredible. Someone should make an AirPods. By the way, the AirPods accessory.

that we've been hating on Circuit Breaker are hilarious. Like the chords that wrap around your neck and like the the loops that go around your ear to make them fit better as sport headphones. All of that is bonkers. I think I want ones that aren't white. Yeah, do you see the render of the black ones? Some guy made a render of black AirPods and they look wild. It's a pretty good idea. That's a good idea.

I don't even know. To your point, Neelight, like I don't think your AirPods sound very good. So I don't think I want AirPods. But man, I want that wire pods. wireless life. Yeah. I'm gonna end up buying beat solo threes.

I can feel it coming. I don't want it to come. Deeter, that solves the plane problem because they have a 3.5 millimeter back and a cable. You know,

I use the beats on-air headphones and it solves a plain problem. But I don't know what the solo threes do. I know, sorry, I have the Bose one. Bose uses a 2.5 to 3.5,

which is hilarious. Oh, my God. 2.5 on the headphones. Everything is terrible. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm going to take a quick break here. We're going to read an ad. We'll come back.

We've got to talk about the phone. We've got to get deep in the phone. I actually want to talk about the watch just a little bit more because I think that what Lauren was talking about with the first model getting the upgrade is really interesting. We should talk about WatchRest 3 for just half a second. But let me read this ad. This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Autodesc Graphic. If you're looking for a professional vector design app, you should take a look at Autodesc Graphic. Graphic is a full-featured app for making icons, illustrations, U.

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or check it out on the App Store. All right, so Lauren, real quick, I want to just wrap up the watch real fast and then go on to the phone. I think the naming of the watch right now is a little confusing. So there's a series two, which is the new one. the series one, which is the old one with a new processor, what is the first one called? Apple Watch.

I've heard people call it the series zero, which I don't think is the official name. And also that one was named like Apple Watch Sport, Apple Watch, Apple Watch Edition, and all that is like, gone. Now they're just Apple Watch an edition. Isn't it named, Let's pretend it never happened? Seriously, they blew up the software. They put a new processor in it.

like, sorry Lauren, go ahead. You just gave me an idea. No, you just gave me an idea. That's what we should name our new conference room

in our new office. Let's pretend this didn't happen. That's actually a great name for a conference room. It's so great. No, we're having a competition to name like the six

conference rooms that we have in our new San Francisco office and we're all trying to come up with the best theme for the conference rooms. Yeah. That's great. Well,

if you have suggestions, Tweet. Oh, my God. Is that how you say that? La Croix, Lecois, Lecois? Lecois. I don't even know. I believe it's LeCroix.

They have some crazy flavors, so I suggested LeCroy. I have to say, let's pretend this didn't happen is maybe the best thing for conference. It's fantastic. Yeah, we're right. Peter, we're going to submit that. But I'll say this. I have a series zero, if that's what we're going to call it. I'm not sold on that name.

I updated it to WatchOS 3. It took hours and hours. The longest update process in years. Like, at one point my phone told me it would take 15 hours. And then it went to two hours. and then it took about two hours. It's great. This watch is so much faster with OS3,

and they cleared off all the junk. The dock of apps is great. I mean, like, it's great. Again, I have to spend so much time figuring out what notifications come to the watch and what should go to my phone because I get so many that I have to do all of that. And so right now it's like Crazy Town.

But I think it's such a substantially good update. I think it's the best update of the bunch of iOS 10, Sierra, TVOS. whatever, the watchOS3 is the best update of the whole bunch, in my opinion. I agree. I think it's really good. I think watchOS2, they were obviously trying to address some of the speed issues, and they had moved some of the app logic from the phone over to the micro apps on the watch and the hopes that that would do the trick. But it turned out that like even just making that little incremental change with watchOS2 wasn't enough. So they went and

they sort of redid not the whole UI, but a lot of the interactions that you have on the watch. And I don't know if you agree with this, but it felt to me like with the first watch, they were really trying to push this idea of like, you can do stuff on this watch. Like, you will want to look at your Instagram photos on the watch or you will want to request an Uber from the watch rather than just getting an Uber notification on the watch. And like, I think, you know, like I would get the New York Times notifications and then you sort of get the headline and scroll down. And it's this like wholly unsatisfying experience because you're not getting full content. even if there is, you're not going to want to read the full content on this tiny display.

So now it seems like it really is just, okay, here's a doc for the apps you use the most. You're going to have a very limited amount of interaction, like, within those applications. And by the way, here are your notifications. And like, that's great. It's sort of all you want it for plus the health and fitness. And then things like Apple Pay, which are baked into the functionality of the watch. So it seems to me like it just all makes. more sense. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's really what it comes down to. This thing makes sense now in a way that before when I put it on, I'd be like, I'm just going to fight it. I'm going to fight it the whole day that I have it on and try to figure out what's going on with it. So that, yeah, I just wanted to wrap up because we hadn't really mentioned OS3 and it's so good. Like, it's good. And I think it speaks to something on Apple that they took it on the chin with that first watch. And then they just rebooted the entire, entire idea of the interface.

That's good. Good on them. Have you, have you tried out many of the third party apps yet, by the way? Like the new watchOS 3 optimized ones. Yeah, I haven't really. I need to do that. Yeah. I mean, like, they're watch apps. I don't know. I don't, the one that I love, the one watch app that I love, it's so nerdy and so stupid. But I have to two factor into things so many times a day that having Offie, which is the two factor cloud thing that I, that Dieter made me use basically. having that on my wrist and I have it set so I just have to click the button and it shows me and shows me the account I want. That's amazing. And I know there's like one passer does it and Android Wear watches do it, but the Apple Watch was just not able to do it before and now it does. And it's like, this is pretty great. This is legitimately a good reason to have this thing in my wrist all the time. That is such a good idea. I'm adding that right now. Yeah, it's cool. I mean, there's better, like there's cooler apps out there. But that's the one where it's, I have this idea that no wearable can be successful

unless it's useful all the time. And, you know, like, you wear a watch as jewelry. So it's like useful. People understand what's on your wrist. And then to be able to make it more and more useful, I think is important. And I don't think Apple really had that killer app outside of fitness before.

And so they've leaned into that. Anyhow, let's talk about the phone. So I reviewed the phone. And I wrote 4,500 words. And then John Gruber picked out all of the times I said the word headphone. And there is you, which is fine. And I like John.

I get the point that he's making because he, I think the word headphones was in his review zero times because he's bought in, right? He's like, he's going to do what Apple says and he's going to move on and that's his thing. And like I'm happy to have that argument. But I think this device is really transitional. And I think Apple knows it's transitional. And, you know, in the process of reviewing, you go and fact check and you try to do as much reporting as can. And they, you know, I talked to them a lot about what transitions they were trying to make. And they're really aware that they have to sell the reason for the headphone jack going away. And they said to me, look, the leaks helped us and hurt us.

Everyone knew it was going away, but we hadn't been able to make our case. And so their presentation, their conversations with me were a lot about making the case. Honestly, I hadn't really thought about this before at any great length. And if you're a listener to this show, I encourage you to think about it, because I think it might be surprising. We have basically given up on wired speaker systems. I don't you, I have a huge stereo at my house. It's like a big pioneer receiver and big speakers and it runs the home theater and the home theater sounds great. But I have not thought about physically plugging in a phone to that thing in years. And I used to physically plug a phone into it all the

time or an iPod into it all the time, or I plug it into a dock or something. Now that one has Airplay and it has Apple TV with Airplay, but I don't even use Airplay anymore. Apple is like kind of abandoned Airplay and it's less competitive than used to be. I use my Echo and I yell at it. I use my Amazon Tap and I yell at it. We have like boom speakers, which I use over Bluetooth. My car, I run the audio over Bluetooth. We have Sonos. Like everything, I have wireless speakers everywhere. And I think that transition has been well and made, which I think I hadn't really thought about before. But then all of my headphones are still wired. And I prefer the way they sound and they're more convenient. I don't have to charge batteries. And so, you know, like Dieter is saying, like the

Bose ones, you can get the cord for the edge cases, a lot of the big cans, you have the cord for the edge cases. So it's like, okay, I get it. I'll buy that this transition can be made because we kind of silently already made it. But I don't think the value of the other parts of the phone actually make up for living through the transition. I think once it, once a, once a, once a, once all the transitions are made, the overall value will be very high. But the dual cameras in the 7 plus, they only have the zoom feature. They don't have the depth feature yet. It's not clear if they're going to do all the other crazy shit you can do with dual cameras. The ecosystem of adapters and cables and stuff you need to like charge the phone and listen at the same time aren't there.

The iOS 10, we're opening it up to the world. You get that experience if you have an iOS 10 phone anyway, so you can, like, experience that without having to get a new phone. There's just a lot of unproven platform bets in this phone that spending money on it right this second, you're not going to actually see the value over a 6S for another minute. And that's just kind of my general takeaway. And I, you know, Walt did his review too, and he and I were talking. And he, Walt and I are obviously very different writers and reviewers. And we took wildly different paths.

And we sort of arrived at the same conclusion, which I thought was interesting. So when you say that, you know, there's just a lot of bets that are being made here that you don't have, you're not going to get the value out of it, out of them, you know, the day one or day 30 until the ecosystems build out. Are you, do you have a sense of whether these bets that these ecosystems are going to exist are going to work? Like, especially with the headphones thing, but in general, it seems to me like everybody's

just assuming that Apple can make ecosystems happen just, because it wants to. And they've got a pretty good track record. But, like, are they, do you think they're going to be able to do it again? Right. So I think there's, there's two ways to think about it. And I didn't, like, get deep into it because I don't know which one's right at all. So I didn't even feel, like, comfortable laying it out.

But I'll do it here because we can argue about it. So one is, like, Apple is really good at USB transitions, right? They dropped all their old legacy interfaces and put USB on the Mac and the USB ecosystem exploded. They dropped all the old USB connectors from the MacBook and put out USBC. Now there's a bunch of USBC adapters in the world. It happened. They're good at it. It's done and done.

And like, we can see the train coming and things are rolling. They dropped 30 pin for lightning and now there's a lightning ecosystem. Fine. But on the other hand, last year they put 3D touch in the phone and 3D touch is like a useless gimmick that nobody uses. And like some people are going to tweet at me like, I use it all the time. I'm constantly previewing links. But it is so far from a core piece of the end. interface experience that it's like whatever, you put right click on the phone. And most people

don't like, like the reason you didn't have right click on the Mac for years is because it's hard to use and most people don't find it. So which one is it in which of these bets? You know, like it's going to take a minute. Maybe the hardware ecosystem will develop, but aren't you better off buying into a phone that needs to participate into this hardware ecosystem a year from now when it's built out? And on the flip side, it's, well, I message stickers are really fun. And there's a lot of them already. So, like, you got to balance it all out.

Oh, Dieter, I'm coming for you. Guys, the battery on my right AirPod just died. Just an FYI. I'm only hearing you in my left ear. Wait, did you put it up in the dental floss? Kind of like wearing a jawbone. No, should I? Can you do them one by one?

Can you, like, charge one and use the other? Yeah, chain them. Yeah, everyone wants to do that. You can do it. You can do it. It'll be a chain listener. So this is, This is slight

So Nila, I was surprised that you were almost relatively positive about the headphone situation. That was my impression from the review. And I realize the way you're saying this makes sense why I was excited about it because I enjoy living through transitions. Like I enjoy like, man, I was there

when we made all these switches and it was crazy, you know? I didn't know. to put my floppy disks. Like I have so many floppy disks and like to buy a USBC. Yeah. Not USBC. USB floppy drive from Macball or whatever. Well,

I just think what Neil, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what I'm getting from what you're saying and from your review is this idea like at a very high level that headphones for a long time were democratic. I mean, what it came down to was how they fit in your ears, like your personal preferences, your price range.

And by the way, how good they are. Like any company could come out of the blue, like, 2006, Jay Bird starts. And they're like, we're going to do wireless Bluetooth headphones. And eventually we're going to make them really good, right? Or a company like Bose is like, hey, we're going to make some of the best headphones you can buy and we can charge $300 for them. Or like, in some cases, you could get like pilot headphones that are like $900. I mean, you know, you can really like run the rain.

But it's a democratic thing. And this essentially undemocratizes that. Yeah, that's the issue. Bluetooth is not a good experience for most people. And we played the game where we went into our review closet and paired every Bluetooth speaker we could find to the iPhone 7. And then we just looked at that screen and we're like, this is a mess. Like it's not everybody has 90 Bluetooth devices,

but if you're going to be in a totally wireless world, you might have a bunch. You might have a Sonos. And to use a Sonos, you got to use another app. You got to either use the Sonos app right now or they're rolling it out to Spotify or whatever. And iOS as a platform doesn't know you're doing that. So you're playing music through Spotify through your Sponos. And then you like open YouTube and now you're like, now everything's crazy and YouTube is never going to come out of your Sonos.

Why? I mean, like those are, it's just like the little, it's all, they're little edge cases, but they actually crop up right when you don't want them to. And they are terrible. right? Like, if you're going to spend money on a bunch of sono speakers, maybe you want to play your Apple music through them without having to like leap into the Sonos app, but Apple and Sonos haven't made the deal to let Apple music control the Sonos. Like, that wasn't a problem when we just plug the things in. So it's like, Deeter always talks about this. Like, do we want the market to be regulated by competition or by deals that we don't have any transparency into? Yeah, Googlecast slash Airplay scare me for those reasons too. I mean, it's just, it's fine. I mean, look, it's fine.

And I think Paul, what you're saying is, like, you're surprised at how relatively positive I was. I was, too, because I hadn't realized that I completely stopped listening to all speakers with wires. And I think it's interesting that all the ones that you listed are not battery power. No. No, they still have wires. I mean, they have AC, they require AC power.

So you're, I mean, I've got a, I've got a, I've got a, but you're not. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a Bluetooth speaker at home. And I, if that now when I want to use it with my iPhone, phone, I manually pair it, and when I'm done, I unpaer it. Because otherwise, every time I come home, it starts sending sound to this Bluetooth speaker, and I can't get it to stop. It's just like, it's, okay, I'm going to use it. And like, I don't want it to go to that. I only want it to go that speaker when I actually want it to go to that speaker. It's just like a little bit

frustrating that it's so fiddly, like, interacting with all these things. You can, by the way, 3D touch directly into Bluetooth now. So there's that. And finally, it's like force us to use 3D touch. As far as the proprietary stuff goes, I've, you know, Nelai's actually been talking a little bit lately about how it's weird how we haven't seen much innovation in airplay for a while.

And I would actually be okay with Apple, like trying to innovate on that, even if it's proprietary, because at least it would be a step forward into like a more coherent control system for audio devices. The problem with, Google cast, by the way, isn't that it's proprietary because it's actually not. Anybody can make

anything on the cast standard. I think TiVo did it. A bunch of other devices you can just cast to. You don't need Google's permission. It's just that casting is still kind of buggy. And it also is really, really garbage for

direct audio. It only works from streaming off the internet, which of course leads to like the last point that like we need a higher bandwidth local networking solution. that's better and stronger than Bluetooth, but is also better than one-to-one communication than Wi-Fi currently is,

which apparently the next version of Bluetooth is hopefully going to be able to do. So once again, I just want to tell you all that Bluetooth will be better next year. Yeah, Bluetooth 5. Isn't it expected to come out sometime? Well, it's supposed to come out early next year. Yeah, but here's a question.

Will Apple support it? right like they're fine they have Bluetooth 4 they've built W1 they can be like look Bluetooth is the underlying protocol and the best experience is on our proprietary headphones like that's how you go from embrace to extend to extinguish is by saying you know what we're just we're fine like we're going off in our own direction and forking a wireless standard is terrifying to me because at least with plugs it's like oh man I got the wrong plug because look see when I try to plug it in can't the wireless is like, well, I don't know.

No, I was using, when we were editing the video or shooting the video in the studio for the iPhone, I was like, man, it's quite near. We need some music. I ran upstairs to the review's closet, which Deeter, I'm sorry to say, I've been treating like my own personal toy store these past couple days. Shocked. And I grabbed. I was like, you know what? We got to do it right. And I grabbed the beats speaker, the pill, like the full size one.

And I brought it downstairs and it wasn't charged. And I just sat there like an. idiot for five minutes trying to figure out why the micro USB plug I had wouldn't get into it. And I was like, oh, it's, oh, it's lightning. And like, it was just the saddest thing because there's, you're not ever used to anything but an iPhone taking lightning. And I'm just sitting there like, I don't, I don't get it. Like, I tried like three cables. It was the worst.

I didn't tell anybody until now. And now I told everybody. And that's going to be that for me. Eli, I'm not sad, sad story. and Andrew maybe afterwards you can put like the sound of little violence in it um no we're really though I I truly enjoy your anecdotes I think like they there's such a good picture into like what is I don't know how people are how boring my life is what did you do last that I put a bunch of blue jean speakers to my phone if your life is boring then all of us I'm

really boring lives uh but um I have to go so go be free I'm sorry what wait Lauren you've had you had the phones along with the watch. Give me, give me 30 seconds review, lightning review of the phones. Okay. Camera is great. Headphone jack is not as bad as I thought it was going to be so far. And I am still not used to

the home button. And this is an iOS 10 thing specifically. I am, I have swiped to unlock my phone about 1,113 times. Still. Yeah. That's going to take a minute. So that's my 30 second review. All right. Lauren, thank you for being on.

Bye, guys. That's a good time to read and add. I'd like to thank our friends at Wellfront for sponsoring today's Virchcast. They're a financial advisor that can help you invest your hard-earned dollars. They combine financial experts with Silicon Valley engineers, and they've built a modern financial services company that helps tailor plans specifically to you, making it easy to reach your financial goals. Wealthfront has low fees and no trading commissions.

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What time is it, buddy? It's time for a special segment that I like to do every week called Costco cool. Oh, my God. No. I mean, yes. And I realize I'm not very good at saying Costco. How do you try to say? say Costco.

Costco. So you just don't say the T. Costco's getting a free one here, man. It's implied. Costco, cool. I like to say Sam's Club swag. Okay. Okay, so here, and we mentioned this earlier, the Echo Dot. Yes. Right? Okay, but here's the thing. So there's a new Echo Dot. It's 50 bucks. That's great. It's great. And everybody loves Echo Dot. And I'm actually really thinking about getting one of these because I don't want a tall cylinder to play music through, but I do want Alexa. So they're $50, but the cool thing is that they come in packs.

You can get them in multi-packs, like a Costco. So if you buy five dots for $50 a piece, you get one free. If you buy 10, you get two free. And a six-pack is $250. and a 12 pack is $500. So that's what you need. So I just really, and I love this picture that is literally a 12 pack. It's like a takeaway for like, for like takeout food.

But I just don't understand whether they're all then individually packaged. But I bet each one says not for individual resale, just like every Kirkland product. They did this with their, their like cheap $50 fire tablets last year. Oh, that's right. So Amazon just loves making. in six packs. Yeah, it's Costco cool. We should talk about the dot because it went away for a while and people thought it just didn't work. It was sold out. It was sold out in Amazon parlance. No one ever knows how much

they sell. By the way, Apple did the same thing. They announced last night they were sold out of iPhones without really seeing any numbers. So maybe they made five. Who knows? They probably made more than that. But it's like the joke with Amazon's. I never tell you how many in Apple's doing the same thing. Either way, the interesting thing to me is it's called echo spatial something ESP. Echo spatial perception. That's what it is. ESP. So now you get a bunch of echoes in your house. And if you talk, you say Alexa, only the one closest to you will light up. Which is

like, that's the step to having the intelligence in your house everywhere. That's the step to how or whatever. I'm very excited to try that at. Yeah. And I'm guessing you could do more intelligence based on that. Because if you had one in each room, it's like if you say turn the lights on in here, turn them off elsewhere. I would love to use the word elsewhere in a conversation with Alexa, and it knows where you are, so it turns the lights on where you are and turns them off in the other parts of the house. That would be cool.

That really is a dream. I remember I read this when I was a kid. It's like Bill Gates's house has this thing. When you walk through the house, it tracks where your body is, and it changes the temperature. Like, we're pretty close to that. Yeah. I mean, it's also a little crazy, right?

Like, Amazon is going to be able to know where you are in your house, like listening to you breathing from room to room. But so far, yeah. I mean, look, they had a great product place from a Mr. Robot, which meant the echo on this robot didn't get hacked. So if, you know, maybe they'll just product placed their way into the rest of the hacking in real life. Okay. So a couple of other bits and bobs just to wrap up.

The TVOS also came out, but didn't have the single sign-on feature that I was so excited about that made TVOS like interesting. So there's like series a little bit better. There's a dark theme now. But the real update to TVOS was you just had to sign on your cable provider once. And it would like figure out all the apps you were authenticated to. And you wouldn't have to like sign this them over and over again. That's not out. And Apple just hired Peter Stern from Time Warner Cable to come do cloud services.

So Apple and TV continues to be the dream that will never come true as far as I can tell. They have a new guy. So maybe the new guy will do something good. I have a theory. I think that the reason they haven't put the cable single sign-on thing in yet is they are still working out the quiz that it's going to happen when you punch in your cable credentials that's going to verify your age and determine whether or not you are your parents. They're like, are you really the subscriber for this? Or is this your moms? Who was, you know, the vice president in 1954?

Oh, that's right. you're not. I identify this object and it's like an old-fashioned telephone. Wait, hold on. Vice President in 1950. Do you know how to use a rotary dial? Do you know what a rotary dial is?

The Vice President 54, old Tricky Dick Nixon. And that's the answer. You should have to yell tricky Dick Nixon. Okay. So the reason I brought that up is we didn't talk a lot about the cameras on the phone.

The cameras are a little bit nicer. You can go look at the photo comparisons. The brighter. I love that the first. front-facing cameras, now seven megapixels. Although I don't know why they didn't just make it eight, because then it would have been the same as the old back cameras, and that would have been a big move.

But whatever, it's seven. It's much nicer. It's brighter. Back camera, faster lens, 1.8, it's better. But the dual camera, the feature isn't shipping. And the TVOS feature isn't shipping. There's, like, there's kind of this, AirPods aren't shipping.

There's kind of this thing with Apple right now where, like, a bunch of stuff just didn't hit the deadline. So, I don't know, I thought that was interesting. Yeah. Apple now surveying people about headphone use on MacBook Pros. I will say, fine, you're going to take the thing away from the phone. It's a wireless world we're out there. The comment reaction to taking away the headphones on laptops, universally negative.

Not one comment on our site that was like, yeah, this is a good idea. It's a wireless world. I think that one's going to be a little bit harder for them. It's hard. It's hard to say that we've put a 0.05% larger battery. because we I don't know the exact math on that but I think I'm pretty close but no but like the deal with the phone is like you do other things with that lightning port you charge from it you can plug headphones to it you can I don't know plug in USB adapters or SD card readers or other you know

other crap can go into that lightning port at least in theory even if nobody does it but what's the other crap that you'd want to do with a lightning port on a laptop. Charge it? Yeah. Maybe. You could finally charge your iPad Pro pencil.

Yeah. That's what you want. Yeah. Like all the stuff that you'd want to do, you can just do with USB or USBC. Yeah. I used to say, I'm like, Deeter, I have your old MacBook,

which I've like just come to a door, even though I don't know what you did, the battery, because it's not very good. It's slow and underpower, but it's so small and like great. And traveling with that anchor adapter that has a USB and for regular USB, this is the future. This is the thing I've always wanted.

I'm going to throw one brick at my bag and a handful of cables to charge stuff, and it's going to be fine. And it's great. So, like, I'm very happy with USBC, but, man, if you have to use USBC headphones on a Mac and lightning headphones on a phone, that's like the nightmare scenario.

And maybe Apple will just ship another dongle. Okay. last one. This is an all Apple lightning round. The Mac Pro is now over a thousand days old, which is crazy to me. Do you think we're going to, you think Macs are coming this year? God, they better. There's so many sad, sadnesses. I don't know what I'm saying. So the, the, Nvidia's graphics cards are out and they're great and they're putting them in laptops. They would be wonderful for a MacBook Pro, but maybe a little bigger than Apple typically wants to get. So there's not really the fancy new graphics card for a MacBook Pro.

Also, Apple likes to use AMD typically. So that's a problem because AMD isn't showing up. Intel still hasn't come out with the MacBook Pro version of the new KB Lake generation. So, like, there isn't a monumental leap for Apple to leap to. They could redesign the case with relatively similar internals. But if they want to have like some huge spec bump, I don't feel like the components are there right now. Yeah, as far as what I've seen, which is sad and I really would love for there to be new Apple computers. Today's episode was also brought to you by Autodesk.

Autodesk graphic is the specific product that's sponsoring today's show. It's not just the whole company, but Autodesk Graphic is a full-featured app for making icons, illustrations, UI, and UX, or anything else you'd need out of a professional vector design app. Don't go consumer when it comes to vectors. Go professional. It's available on your Mac, phone, and iPad so you can design without compromise on the go. It's the vector design app you've been waiting for for your iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Visit graphic.com to learn more about Autodesk Graphic or find it in the app store. I mean, I would just take a computer with a graphics card that didn't flicker out or a battery that worked because those are my two choices right now of laptops.

But, you know, small, small demands. And that's it. We've gone a little bit over. It's been a great show. I've got to say, I'm going to do it again. I know this is all Apple. A bunch of other stuff happened on the site this week. Go look at it. Jordan Goulson drove the Chevy Bolt, which is GM's electric car that actually

came out before the Tesla Model 3. It kind of looks like a nuclear shoe or one of the transformers that you know is going to die. So it's not like a beautiful thing, but it's an important car. So like go read that. Like just stuff all over the site. Just a great week on the Verge. We were dominated by Apple reviews, so that's the show this week. But go check out the site. Also, we have tons of other podcasts. Sorry to say, Virgi SP is. is over. Emily has decided to leave the media industry achieving everyone's longstanding dream. But so she's, Emily has gone from the verge. We thank her for a time. It's been great two years with her. ESP is over. We're going to come back with a bigger, better science show sometime down the line.

But there's other stuff listening to Chris Plant does What's Tech, which is amazing. Lauren Good, who is on the show today, does To Embarrass to Ask. And then on the recode side, Peter Kafka does Recode Media, which is one of my favorite shows, and Kerosw does Recode Decode. So tons stuff to listen to, listen to everything, go to iTunes, uh, you know, do whatever it is that you do in iTunes and then give us five stars everywhere or go to iTunes.com slash verge and find all our shows. You can also hit us up on Twitter. I'm reckless. Paul's future Paul, Dieter's back on. Lauren Good. Warren Good. Is that it? Is there anything else? Oh yeah. Cizur vodka. Cut through the night. Paul. Rockscatch. Thunder before lightning.