The Vergecast - Amazon announces Ring security drone, new Echo devices, a gaming service, and a whole lot more

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

Nilay, Dieter, and Dan discuss all the important announcements from Amazon's fall hardware event this week, from a security drone for your home to a new cloud gaming service. Stories discussed this week: CDC removes guidance about airborne spread of the coronavirus Averting a COVID-19 vaccination crisis will take careful communication Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house Ring announces new line of security cameras for cars Amazon will launch a new location-tracking mesh network system later this year Amazon’s fall hardware event: the 13 biggest announcements Amazon redesigns the Echo with a new spherical design and a custom machine learning processor Amazon’s new Echo show 10 moves to look at you  Amazon’s Echo Show smart displays will soon stream Netflix video Amazon’s AZ1 Neural Edge processor will make Alexa voice commands even faster Alexa’s latest upgrades help it listen to multiple people and ask clarifying questions Amazon unveils new Guard Plus subscription for $4.99 per month Amazon announces new cloud gaming service called Luna Amazon’s Luna game streaming service is powered by Windows and Nvidia GPUs Amazon announces $29.99 Fire TV Stick Lite and upgraded Fire TV Stick The latest Eero mesh Wi-Fi routers support Wi-Fi 6 iPad 2020 review iOS 14 and iPadOS review: iPhone revolution, iPad evolution iOS 14 basics: how to add widgets to your iPhone’s home screen Fitbit Sense review: enough bugs to raise your heart rate  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, we go through all the stuff Amazon announced at its event, Ring, Echo, Luna, a game streaming service, new Eros. We talk a little bit about the new iPad review, iOS 14, and the Fitbit Sense. Coming up now on the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools

means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data

in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star,

Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Ammom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. Flagship podcast of Ambient Computing. Remember the days when we would just talk about ambient computing and everything seemed fine?

Yeah. But we're computers everywhere. And now we're like, what if there were less computers everywhere? I'm Eli Patel, I'm your friend. Dieter Bone is here. Hi, everybody. Dieter brought a soundboard this morning. Okay.

Dan Seaford is here. I'm here. Hello. We have a lot to talk about. Amazon had a gigantic event yesterday. That's why the show is coming out a little late today. We literally just had to go back and think about all of the things Amazon introduced yesterday. It was only like a couple dozen this year instead of like 75.

It was, it was, Dieter and I live logged it. And about halfway through, I was like, we, we got to, we got to stop trying to keep up. We're not going to be able to. Let's try a different approach. Dan, I believe you called it the Slamazon. It was, it was a lot of yesterday. So we got a lot of that stuff to talk about. Also, iOS 14 came out.

iPadOS 14 came out. Dieter reviewed an iPad. Dieter is very late in Apple Watch review as people keep tweeting at us. But before we begin, as always, I'm just going to remind you, it has been 28 weeks. since the president of these United States said there would be a website architected by Google. He really complimented Google at that price.

I really encourage you to go back and watch it. He's like, Google's been great. They're definitely doing this thing. There was a flow chart. 45,000 Google engineers are going to build a website that you could go to and get tested. None of that exists. It's been 28 weeks later, is the status.

Just honestly, go back and watch that press. Think about how confident he was in saying that stuff. about the reality of testing in this country today. Next to that, obviously, COVID remains a biggest story in the world. We are covering it. I encourage you to subscribe to Marybeth Griggs newsletter. Marybeth is our science editor. She has a new newsletter called Antivirus.

She's tracking developments in COVID, particularly around vaccine research. There's a flood of that news is coming out. It's hard to keep track of it. The newsletter is the best way to do it. Go check that out. Vorg.com slash antivirus. Two stories. I want to flag before we begin with.

the other stuff. The argument about how the virus works and about how to communicate about vaccines is getting very heated. If you're listening to the show, right, this is a show about science and engineering fundamentally and making products. The vaccines are a product. And virus transmission is like a, it's just science. It's like, here's how the thing works and here's how you solve the problem. So the CDC had some guidance about the virus being an aerosol. They pulled it back. That is very politicized. And then communicating about how the vaccine will work, what you might have to do to take it, you might need two doses.

We have two stories on the site. One is about the CDC guidance. You should go read that for sure and understand how that communication is being subverted. And then understanding how we need to communicate about vaccines, very important. Nicole has a story about that. So go check that stuff out. It is very important. The virus remains the biggest story in the world.

The fight for racial justice remains one of the biggest stories in the world. That stuff colors everything that we. We do, but it's hard to just constantly talk about it, and there is a lot of techniques. So let's talk about some techniques. Amazon event. Very strange. Yeah. A little bit of an infomercial.

A little bit of an infomercial. I actually talked to Dave Limp, who's the SVP of devices and services after the event. He seemed very tired, but that couldn't be true because he didn't actually have to do an event live, but I guess he was speaking a bunch of press before me. And I told him, like, you know, you could, you could have taken longer than 45 minutes to announce 20 products. Like every other company does. And he just said flat out, nobody wants to sit and stare at a screen for more than an hour. So I wanted to get it done fast. I appreciate that.

Yeah. That's a man who has Zoom fatigue right there. That's a man who spends his life on video conferences, just making a decision about how long his video conference will be. I believe it's probably Amazon chime fatigue, but yes. Yeah. Well, they have a Zoom partnership. I bet they've been testing it on their echoes. Actually, one of the most under-sort of under-remarked pieces of this event,

just speaking of Zoom, is they announced that, like, fire TVs, you can plug a Logitech webcam into them. Yeah. And they have a Zoom partnership. And soon you will have, like, the cheapest possible Zoom box available to you. Yeah. And they just glanced over it. I was like, wait, hold on.

It's over. It's gone. See you later. If we were still in our offices, the number of people that would be like marching into meeting rooms and chucking out the meeting system that we have there, just like installing fire TVs. I mean, absolutely. But so I actually in my, I've now set up my basement and so it has spaces in it. So I do different things in different spots, which if you have the ability to do it, I highly recommend. Just because you're not, you can't sit in the same place all the time.

Like in your office, you move around. In your home office, you're just rooted to one spot. So my horrible curved TV, this legendarily bad curve TV, is now my Zoom monitor. And it's great, except it's two things that you hate in one. Yeah. It's like, I hate you. But it's great because I've mounted my little RX100 in front of the TV. So it looks like it's so small.

It doesn't block anything because you've got to be huge screen and a tiny camera. Well, it blocks one person on the Zoom grid. So I'm always deciding who it's like it's a combination of who I will appear that I'm looking at when I speak to them. Yeah. It's not perfect. But then also who I will not see. It's a lot. But if you have a cheap old TV, just like lying around that you notice you with and you can plug like a $39 firebox into it with a USB port and a lodged check webcam, like that suddenly makes the Zoom working from home.

I promise you putting Zoom on it. much larger screen and getting far away from it changes your entire relationship to the thing. Yeah, getting far away from it is like, I actually had an executive in a big company, like hit me up after I had posted my DSLR set up. And he's like, that looks great, but what you really need to do is sit five feet away from it. Trust me. And I was like, cool. When I have an apartment that allows me to move five feet away from my desk, I will do that. This is why everybody should move just far away into the woods. But I, these are my two work from home tips after all these months of the pandemic.

One, create different spots for different tasks. Even if you're just moving three feet, like the place where I have meetings is literally three feet to my left. It's not that far away, but it's just a different spot. And then get just if you have an old TV or a big monitor, just like set that up for Zoom and then go really, really far away from it. Do you have to argue with your wife as to who's booked the meeting spot, just like that real in office experience?

of, oh, no, someone's in the meeting room right now. I got to find another spot. I should really, really introduce that back into our line. Just to add that little bit of office friction into the home office working situation. No, she's a lawyer, so she's on calls. So what I did, I got her AirPods, and she's like, no, I'm not wearing these. So what you could do is that you could go to check to see, the worst part about checking for a meeting is like walking up to the room and seeing somebody's in it. So you could buy a ring drone and fly it over there.

All right, yeah, we should talk about this event. So I see what Dieter's doing. Well, it was partially related to the event. So just a lot. I will say that this just like on a meta note over the top, we've now seen all the big companies do it. Right, like Google basically was like, we're not doing it.

Here's some press releases. We're just going to tweet our announcements. Like, we don't want those. Although they do have something on the 30th. So we'll see when they actually try what happens. But yeah. Samsung, One Plus basically had fake live events.

Right, here's what we would do if we had a big crowd, weird in its own way, but tracked with what you have. Apple is producing infomercials. Like, we should just be honest about what Apple events are now. Amazon, which actually produces infomercials. Like, there are blink and ring infomercials

on television right now. Yeah. Produced an infomercial. But they didn't stream it live. They didn't stream it live. That's a weird thing. It was like only us press got to see it. So, you know, you, the audience had to follow our live blog and our coverage, which is great for us.

We want to reading our live blog, obviously. Yeah. But it was very odd that every other company has streamed their press events this year live to the public. So you could just go to YouTube and watch it. And Amazon was like, nope. Yeah. Not going to do that. And so that's a weird middle zone.

But the one thing I will call out, none of the presenters were speaking to the camera. like to us, they were all speaking to some unknown interrogator just off screen. And it made it feel more like an infomercial than anything I've ever seen. I was like, who are you talking to? Who are you explaining this to? Why do you keep saying you? Who is this person? It was very, very strange.

But it got enabled, on the plus side, enabled Amazon to bring in a bunch of faces we haven't seen before, which is always good. We saw a lot of products. We got to start with this camera drone. Yeah. That was, I mean, it's the thing. So it's the ring always at home cam, which is quite a name. It's a drone. It's a drone that sits in a little box and it's shaped like a T, the drone.

Like it's a square and then there's a vertical piece that comes down. That's where the camera is. The box has like a hole. And so when the drone lands, the stem of the T goes into the box and it just looks like a cube. And then the thing takes off and flies. Yeah. So it's like, it's like imagine like in a Greek myth that there. a box with problems in it and then it opens.

Yeah. So this, this camera, flying drone camera, I think elicited more reactions from people. I mean, that's what they wanted it to do. So I will, a thing to understand about it is that right now, it's vaporware. And I, right, there are people who made it and they're on Twitter and one of them tweeted how Proudy was to people. I'm sure they've worked on it. I'm sure there's a physical product somewhere. Well, and also, it's not like there's any impossible technology in there. Like, there's nothing there that couldn't have been built at least a year ago, probably two years ago. Right.

Sure. But it's not, if you look on Amazon.com, they're not selling it yet. Right. We have not seen one fly. Like, the pieces, I feel confident calling it paperwork. Like, they announced a thing. It looks really cool. We're confident Amazon can build it. But we haven't seen one, they're not selling it. We don't know what's specs. We don't know what's battery. Like, the number of things we don't know make me confident. Also, just historically, Amazon has very flashy,

flashily announced drones. Remember Prime Air? Oh, yeah. So, you know, there's like some history here. But, you know, they announced it. They got the, the hype bubble that they wanted around it, because it's cool. And then the questions about why would you want Ring of all companies,

which has all, like, like, Ring has had stories where contractors in other countries have just been logging in watching ring cameras. Yeah. That's like a real thing that's happened. They've had other security lapses. They have this partnership with police departments that seems a little Fourth Amendment tee.

You know, like you may be on both sides. But it's just, it's got, you know, it's got some Fourth Amendment vibes to it. Do you want the police to have unfettered access to a camera in your home? Like,

that's a open question. And do you want, like, I don't know, do you want Jeff Bezos to be like, I'm going to tell you. a fly today and just like fly around your house. Yeah. Let's see what you need to order from Amazon.

Oh, you're running low on paper towels. At the same time, it's cool as hell, right? Like, it's super sci-fi to say, I'm not at home. I'm worried I left the stove on. I'm going to fly my drone over to it. Yeah. Right? And then do nothing about it.

The ad that they made. The ad that they made was the most infomercial thing I've ever seen. You know how the infomercials people are like, Oh my God, I can't handle all this pasta. I need a solution for us. They had this, this, you know, like, prototypical, like, thief with a knit cap, like, open the door. And then, like, the guy, the guy walked.

Like a bassist in an indie band. I'm sorry. Nothing about him was intimidating. And he was scared off by a drone. He literally said, oh, no. I'm sorry. I have a feeling like, like, that's, exactly the reaction Ring wanted to that video.

Yeah. Because it like, you know, it takes the scariness down quite a bit in a notch when you're just laughing at the bumbling crook breaking into the house going, oh no. But it's it's also hilarious. Well, so, you know, it's funny. Ring's entire like method of operation is to be scary or to scare you, right? I mean, that's, you talk to the CEO of Ring, they found it for security. Yeah. They do this weird, like, TikTok of like heartwarming. scary, heartwarming scary.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. I just, if they had been like, we made a drone that can fly around your house remotely to see if you left your keys on the dresser, like, the panic of the thing goes away. Right. There are lots of reasons I would want to look around my house when I'm not in my house that have nothing to do with, you know, scaring away the drummer for a funk band. Like, I just don't want this to happen. The number one reaction was, holy shit, this seems bad.

Number two reaction was my cat will destroy this. Like lots and lots of pet reactions to this thing. Yeah, or your pets will be terrified. Like, again, and I think this is part of the, part of the reason they announced it was to get all these reactions so that when they actually announce it, right, and they give it to people and they message it out and they, we have review briefings and we have all of these questions that they're prepared.

So in that sense, I think it is very smart. In the other sense, it's, I think, Deeter, your piece went up just before we started recording. They just keep pushing the boundary, right? Of what is acceptable to have a giant corporation with computers you don't own in your house. And that, you know, on some level, it's like, we talk about big companies all the time. Like, yeah, I would want just the three or four big companies that are a little bit responsive as opposed to some fly-by-night operation where I can't, I can't see into their cloud services. You know, like, we have some layers of trust inside of Amazon. We know how it works.

We know who the people are. We know they're not going away. Yeah. They're definitely not going away. They don't need to sell the data. They make plenty of money in other ways. Yeah. They're definitely going to use that drone to be like, you're out of paper towels.

Like, that's going to happen. Wow. So, like, the problem that I have here is with this drone particularly, but with, like, all of Amazon's creepy products. And this is, like, what I tried to get in the piece. And I don't know if I managed it or not. But, like, every time Amazon announces is. creepy thing. You're like, but what about, like the very first, but what about they have an answer for it? So for the drone, it's like, but what about hackers? They're like, well, you can't

actually remotely control it. It doesn't have that capability. Like, blah, blah, blah. Okay, but what about privacy? Well, the cameras are like in the, in the box, in the Pandora's box when it's, like, set down. Also, it's really freaking loud, so you'll know when it's looking at you. What was their line? Privacy you can hear. It's privacy you can hear. Which is a great line. I want to commend them on this line. Yeah. That is not how privacy, It's also a great way to spin the fact that a drones are noisy and they didn't do anything to, like, make it less noisy. Now it's a feature. Oh, well, you can hear it, so you know what it's recording you.

I just like the idea that you'd be in your house and you would hear like this tiny plastic drone just like roar to life. You'd be like, oh, my privacy is being invaded. I should go see what's happening. The problem is that, like, the reason I have a hard time knowing what to feel is every time. they announce something creepy, like there's a list of six but what abouts, and they have an answer for those six. And then you're like, well, now I'm exhausted. I don't know what to worry about next. And then like a million people buy the thing and install it in their house. And then six months later, you're like, oh, wait, I figured it out. And it's like too late. Yeah. So I think that's the drone.

The drone, like I said, is I'm sure it's real. I'm sure the people who are excitedly tweeting about having worked on it actually did some work. Still vapor. Right. We have to get it. They have to ship it. okay. I think it's a good what's the thing I'm looking at? It's a good symbol of all of the problems. Right. There's a better word than symbol. Just tweet that me.

Cynicdochi, whatever it's how it's pronounced. Yeah. Okay, it's that's that. That's the word. Yeah. It's a small thing that's representative of the big thing.

Yeah, that's right. That's the word. Was there a movie about a funny house? Oh, well, if you know how to pronounce it, just tweet an audio memo, Deeter. We'll take it from there. The one that's real, really, really real. is sidewalk, which, Deeder, when you said a million people will install it, right?

Sidewalk is a mesh network that only works if a million people install. It only works if you can get that massive installed base and the network effect of literally building a network on the unlicensed 900 megahertz band to do location tracking, all this stuff. You've been thinking about sidewalk for a long time. Just walk people through what it is. So on a basic level, it's a mesh network. and if you want to know where you left your keys, you have one of those little sidewalk tiles attached to it,

and all of the nodes in the sidewalk network are like, where are the keys? Where are the keys? And the keys are like, I'm here, and then it securely lets you know where the keys are. So it's kind of like how tile works, where any iPhone can see a tile, but you can't like, but it's still secure, right? So it's a way to locate something through a mesh network.

And they're using that 900 megahertz spectrum, which means that it's like completely unregulated. They can go about half a mile with it. And they also can actually transmit data more than just location. So they can send out little IoT controls, right? They can, I don't know if it's quite big enough bandwidth for like a full camera feed, but it's like in that zone, right? And so what Amazon is doing is they're just building gateways for sidewalk into their most popular products,

into the ring products and the echoes. And they will, I don't know if this is public or not, but they are also going to make a little cheap gateway if you just want a sidewalk gateway to control your cameras or whatever smart home gadgets you've got that run on sidewalk. And what's going to happen,

it's launching this fall, but what's going to happen is this thing is going to basically blanket cities within, I don't know, a year, honestly, because it's just in all the stuff that people are just buying. And so they're going to have this mesh network of things that can do IoT things

blanketed across, you know, densely populated areas in very, very short order. And that's cool, right? Because now all of a sudden, if you want to, say, have a car computer that can detect car crashes in your car, like Ring makes, and you don't want to have to pay Verizon

a $10 monthly fee for a stupid thing that you plug into your ODB port. Like Nelai does. Like Nelai does. You can buy this $60 gadget from Ring that does that and uses the sidewalk network. And without paying a single dime to a carrier, this thing is able to communicate anywhere in a densely populated area. So this is Amazon's, what I think is important to understand about this is

compared to Zigby, which is also in a bunch of Amazon products they announced, which is the, I don't know, the Goliath of like smart home networking standards. It's just there. It will never be better. It will never be worse, but if you buy any number of light switches or smart things stuff, right? There's this low power networking standard in the hub and the hub bridges between

Wi-Fi and this thing. But that is your network. Right. Right. Zigby is your network. You've set it up. It's your Zygby network. Everything gets authenticated to it. It's yours. Somebody walks by with another Zygby device and just pop up on your network. Sidewalk is a mesh network, a public network. So I've

got a new echo. Because like it's Everything that happens on it is private. You can't, like, go dip into, like, everything is, like, in a secure tunnel, right? So you can't go dip in and say, I want to talk to that thing over there like you can on the web or the internet. There's no, you know, everything has to, like, be authenticated to talk to another thing. Sure. I'm getting at the point, if you drive by my house and you see my Wi-Fi network and you know in the password, there's no chance you're connecting to it.

Oh, correct. Yeah. Sidewalk is made so that if you're coming by your, I'm driving by your house. Yep. With my car. I get in a car accident. my car, my ring car computer uses your sidewalk signal to communicate. Right.

And Amazon has like, one of the things they seem to think people are worried about is that people are going to like have to pay a lot of bandwidth for somebody else's sidewalk network activity. So they place strict caps and the amount of data that sidewalk nodes are allowed to transmit and receive. I mean, that's like hilarious. Like, of all of the problems with this that you are worried about, someone like going over your comments. Umcast data cat because there's been too many car crashes. It's like very low on the list. Whole new meaning of war driving. Yeah.

Yeah, that's horrible. Wow. So, but that's like, that's one of those things where it's just happening when you buy an echo. It's enabled. It's enabled by default. You can turn it off, but you can't. But it's on. Yeah.

And like most, what's that screen going to look like? Enable sidewalk to track your device. Like, you know. what it looks like. You can see in your head. There'll be a privacy freak out. And then six months after that, they'll enable you to ask Alexa to turn it off. Which is how they do these things.

Can we just skip to the end? Why don't they see the steps? So that's a big deal. I mean, that's like an Amazon encroachment that, I mean, you should read your piece today. But between the cameras, there is a test balloon to see. And then sidewalk was a test balloon. No one paid a lot of attention to it. And then this year, here it is.

It's just in all the stuff. And I think we should talk about these car computers. The fact that they made this car adapter that will be useless unless there is a sufficiently built-out sidewalk network around you is a statement of purpose. They're now selling a product that only works if sidewalk is deployed at scale. Yeah. If you just, if the network never happens, it will work for like car break-ins when it's sitting in your driveway the end. But like that's not what they intend for it. Yeah, I mean, so I do pay Verizon for one of these.

It's medium to bad. Whatever. It's Verizon. Yeah, I mean, it has a pretty user interface that's useless. And it is connected. So if the car gets an accident, it looks and it happens. But the one that it replaced was a company called Automatic. They made, it was very popular.

Yeah. And it's, again, you know, we were talking about Apple. They just sort of wandered into the space of kid trackers with the iPhone. and they're just going to crush that space. This one from Ring, if it works, we'll just crush the space of connected car trackers. Now, it's got to work. Sidewalk's got to be deployed.

But Automatic was bought by Sirius XM, which never made any sense. Why did the radio company buy a car tracking company? And the only thing you could get to was there's a lot of serious radios and cars. And that was it. Like, somebody put that deck up and they're like, we should own more car stuff.

And they're like, yeah, buy that company. Well, did they... And they're like, this was a bad idea. They shut it down. Is the plan to build that technology into every serious radio? Like we're already, we already convinced every car to put a stupid ass fit on the roof. And so we might as well do this too. Well, anyway, I'm just saying like that is a standalone product that company, even

inside a serious failed and they just like went away. Yeah. And then all the carrier ones are just like medium to bad. Right. So the ring comes in. They make one. It can detect car crashes. It can hopefully do some, hopefully it has a better user interface because Amazon.

Right? Like, but it's dependent on this network. And I think that's a really interesting place for Amazon to go. And the way they sold it was these are ring products. So they're about security. And so people are worried about their cars getting stolen or broken in. Dash cams are very popular in lots of countries are medium popular in the United States, but in other countries are very popular.

They announced a dash cam that records the inside and the outside of car. If it senses a break-in, it'll automatically start recording. It does have an LTE modem, so it will send footage. I mean, this stuff, they're expanding sort of the remit of ring. None of these devices have like Alexa, right? Like they're not made to be echoes. Like there is an echo auto, but these are security devices that ring made in a car. Right.

Yeah, I think they'll work with Alexa and like you can, with the, especially with the dash cam, like you can, there's a thing that I'm sure we'll talk about where you can say Alexa, I'm being pulled over and it will start recording and uploading that footage to the cloud. So there's got to be, this is another one of those things, just like the drone, where it's not coming until next year. We haven't actually physically seen the products and stuff like that. But there's got to be some microphones on there that are listening for Alexa voice commands. And it interacts that way, but it's not meant to be used as like Alexa play Taylor Swift. Like that use case is very different and not really what these are designed for.

Like you said, these are designed as security products. They're very much the ring mentality and not the echo home assistant mentality. Yeah. Well, so that thing, it's remarkable that Amazon announced a dash cam and the only use case beyond someone's breaking into your car that they suggested it would be good for was being pulled over, alerting your family to the fact that you're being pulled over and then recording the cops, right? I would suggest that as a watershed moment in it like consumer technology history. And obviously we just published an entire package on recording the police. So maybe it's more resonant with, me and us, but that is, I think, as an advertised use case for a huge technology company that has itself wanted Pentagon contracts, right? He's like actively try to get them. I think says a lot about what we think cameras and cars are for, right? It wasn't a lot of, there was no mention of if you get into an accident, you're going to call

your insurance company. Right. And that's the usual dash cam. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's like dash cams have been pitched on like you're trying to. make sure you're not getting in an insurance scam,

someone's nailing you, and you have footage of evidence of what happened. This pitch is wildly different. It's, you know, make sure you're not, or if you are getting, receiving, you know, some sort of abuse or something from authorities and police, that you're getting footage of it and recording it and as more of a safety factor.

Yeah, and I, just, that's usually remarkable. Like, I just think about where we've come for Amazon to just be comfortable saying that this is what we're doing. And everyone to be like, yeah, that makes sense. Like, water, head moment. The dichotony, of course, being rings very close partnerships with police departments

and ring being like a tattle on the police departments through this. Yeah. It's just that conflict. It's like glaring and wild. You got to own both sides of the supply chain. You got to create the, create, yeah. Do you think the police

departments will get Fourth Amendment here on footage of themselves? See? It's just the Ring, the Fourth Amendment, just crashing into each other. And then there was the third one that they announced. Which is, they announced it as a product, but as a product, it's a, it's a little USB stick. Yeah. It's called the ring car connected car API, something.

Right now cars have lots of cameras on them. So if you have backup cameras, you have other cameras. If you have lane keep assist or adaptive crew control, you've got other cameras in your car that are helping you do that. So they said, well, we can just use those cameras, plug in this USB stick. they'll work with Ring and suddenly you've got you're using all of your cameras for security purposes.

This is a beautiful idea and of course the only company that announced a partnership with was Tesla. The only company that knows how to like issue a software update to a car. Yes, the only company that just think about the steps of that, right? You're going to find a USB port

in your car that will be useful. Big, big step. And then that And then that USB port will be reprogrammed to access data from all the cameras, which are all now running through one computer system. Yeah. And you'll have some interoperability. That's not.

This is not Ford can't do that. I promise you. So they announced it with Tesla, any sort of new Tesla, you plug it in. Your Tesla cameras can now be used as part of your wing system. I think that is so cool. It's piggybacking off of Tesla's existing century mode. So you need to have century mode. your Tesla, which I think most all the recent models have, but that is Tesla's own little security

thing. You turn that on, and when you leave your car, and it will record, you know, around it. And so basically, Ring is tapping into that, taking those feeds, sending them up to Ring systems. You can see them in the Ring app and so on and so forth. But I don't know if any other car that offers that, to be honest with you, anything close to Century Mode. Yeah, and I think this is one of those, like, it would be cool if my Tesla worked with my ring, and it's all on the same app. So now it does. That's neat.

I just, the idea that they're going to walk into Fiat Chrysler and be like, hey, let's, how many USB ports are in your car? Like, and they're going to push that you can, like it's never going to happen. But I like the idea that the car companies, the way the car companies were pushed to support car play.

Yeah. I like the idea that these sorts of devices, they will get pushed to eventually support it. So I think that's all of the rings. Well, there's one more super important. one, and it ties into this idea that Amazon announces creepy thing, Amazon announces answer to the creepy thing.

And that is, they're on this journey to, like, actually secure ring cameras instead of just letting people reuse their passwords on them. And they've taken the next step. And you wrote about this. Can you, like, Philson real quick? So basically, that next big step is they are going to bring end-to-end encryption on the video feed, which means that it will be encrypted on the camera side. And the only way that you can decrypt it is basically with the key that's in the mobile

app on your phone. it is generally considered the most secure way to transmit things right now ring says its stuff is encrypted it's not end-to-end encrypted so it's the next step of that but that's going to break certain integrations that exist like I think something like the Tesla Car Connect might not work if it's end-to-end encrypted because it's being shared through a different system things like accessing your ring camera feed on an Echo show device is going to break, things like sharing your footage is going to break. So it's a higher level of security. They are not going to be enabling it by default. You'll have to turn it on because

it will change the experience a little bit. But if you want that security there, I know it's something that people have criticized Ring for a long time and have been asking for a long time, and so they're enabling it. I think the other part of this announcement that's also very interesting and addresses a lot of the criticism that's come against Ring is that they are also allowing you to turn off the neighbor's feed in the ring app. The neighbor's

feed is like the most controversial thing inside the app outside of the police partnerships and it is if you buy a ring product you are basically automatically entered into it and you can't really escape it. Now they're giving you an opt-out option so that you don't see the feed you can't contribute to the feed, so on and so forth.

So they are like you said, Deeter, they do this really creepy thing and then and they, like, roll it back six, 12, 18 months later, they give you the options for it. I'm happy to see that they are addressing these criticisms and they are giving you options. I know that, like, Dean Neely and I have talked about this a ton. If you want a doorbell camera,

the best one on the market is ring, and it also comes with, like, all this baggage of the neighbors app and the police partnerships and all this stuff. So, like, there's that real conflict there. If you want to ring camera, you'll be able to opt out of neighbors. You can already opt out of the police partnerships. it helps you make some more choices as a person buying a thing and gives you a little bit more control over what it's doing

and where that footage is going. If you're not familiar with the neighbor's feed, imagine your Facebook feed that's filled with people saying, I'm mad about this news article and I'm afraid of this person that doesn't look like me. Imagine that, but for your neighborhood. I'm mad about this person's messy yard, and I'm afraid of this person that walked by my camera.

And here's a video clip of it. Yeah. Here's a video clip of the person that I'm mad at in my driveway. That's the worst possible interpretation. Like, it does in some cases, like, they bring argues that it like knits communities together and you get to meet your neighbors and blah, blah, blah, blah, but there's like, there's definitely like an unforeseen consequences of an algorithmic feed being inflicted upon you with contents you weren't expecting, sort of vibe to it. So that that's all true and it's very serious. My neighbor, I'm in the woods now. Like, I just live in the woods.

My neighbor's feed is just people seeing bears. Literally, it's like, I saw a bear on my camera. We all talk about whether we saw bear. You just open up your phone and instead of seeing horrible news stories, just like, bear. Yeah, it's like, there was another bear today. It's a lot.

It's a lot of neighbors are money to put your trash away. But in more densely populated areas, all those concerns are very true. So that's the ring stuff. By the way, you know that thing about you turn on in and encryption and experience changes? I find the whole, like,

I'm going to tell my Echo show to show me my ring camera integration to be so slow as to be useless. I disagree. I use it all the time. Because I'm working from home. My office is like on the lower level of the house. I often have headphones on.

If a doorbell rings and like a delivery is there or something like that, I don't know what happens. So what I've got an echo show like right there. Someone rings the doorbell. It brings up the video feed like within, you know, five to ten seconds. And I can be like, oh, my delivery arrived and I can go get it. Like I don't use it to interact with the person. I think that is like the weirdest thing to do to talk to someone through a doorbell. But I do use it as like, oh, someone actually rang the doorbell and like, you know, my neighbor's at the door and they're asking something or, you know, the package arrived.

So like I do find that useful. So like turning on into end encryption would break that experience for me and not be something that I'd probably want to do because of that limitation. But I'm saying 10 seconds is too slow when the keyboard player from the strokes is breaking into your house. That's all I'm saying. That 10 seconds, to me, is like way too long. right like the doorbell rings and like you're just sitting there like I don't know it's I'm gonna we'll split it I'll turn it on you'll you'll you'll keep being robbed by various indie musicians it'll be great we're gonna take a break we still have more Amazon stuff to talk about we'll be right back

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That's upw-R-K.com. Upwork.com. All right. So we talked a lot about Ring. It's funny. It's an Amazon hardware event. We haven't even talked about the echoes yet. Yeah.

New echoes, they look radically different. Dieter, walk us through him. There's spheres now. The echoes are spheres. The regular echo is a big sphere, and the echo dot is a small sphere. And you can get a small sphere with a clock on it if you want. They just made them into balls. That's what they did.

So do they all have sidewalk? Actually, I got to check. Okay. What are the sidewalk bridges, according to Amazon? Ring, floodlight cam, cam, cam, wired, ring cam mount. Echo, second generation, third generation, echo dot with clock, third generation, echo first, echo dot first, second and third generation. Echo plus, first, second generation, Echo show five, Echo Show eight, Echo Show 10, Echo Spot, and Echo Studio. So that's like everything but the first generation Echo.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, that kind of undoes my theory about why there's spheres. So my theory, well, so what drives a hardware upgrade cycle? We know the answer. It's making it look different. So you make it look radically different. You make it a sphere. You make it look nicer and people will upgrade and then they'll get sidewalk. But that undoes my theory because everyone's getting it whether they want to or not. I mean, they still change the looks so people buy it. Amazon's answer to this was they saw the reaction to the original sphere, the echo spot that had the little

clock face on it and people loved it like, oh, we should make everything a sphere, that'll be fun. They also claim that they can get better sound out of it because they realize that most people aren't sticking their echoes in the middle of the room so they don't really need 360 sound. They still have it, but they don't need, like, but they actually want better sound at the place where it's directed to the front, because most people do stick it in a corner against the wall.

So the sphere lets them change the shape of the speakers and the direction of the speakers to get better sound for the way that most people use them. That's their claim. I think the more likely answer is what Nealai said, that just like Apple redesign the iPod Nano every year to make you buy one, they redesign the Echo. Yeah, I mean, they went from a fabric-covered cylinder

to a fabric-covered sphere, and it looks cool. The one thing I don't like about it is they move the light ring to the bottom, which in their videos makes it. it seems much more apparent because it's shining off the surface of the thing it's sitting on. But what's the main thing I want to know from any of my smart speakers is when is it listening? And having a light ring at the top and having it be the most prominent design feature, which it has been for the longest time, was good. And now it's at the bottom.

And like, I don't know. Well, again, we have to actually see them. Maybe it is way more prominent because it's lighting up the surface it's on. That's what they're, but in the videos, it's all on like white surfaces. So if you put this on a black granite countertop, like, are you good? So I think that's really neat. The new Echo Show is really neat. It has a motor in the screen.

It kind of reminds me of the old I'm actually for, the sunflower I'm actually for. So you, like, it follows you around. Like, you talk to it and it'll swivel to you and show you stuff, which I think is so cool. And they made a lot of big claims about how the motor is very, very quiet. Yeah, Dan. How does that work? So it uses the camera on there, it uses some computer vision algorithms.

It also uses Amazon's existing audio-locating systems. So like when you speak to an echo speaker, kind of knows where your voice is coming from through those algorithms. This takes the next level with computer vision, and it like finds the shape of a person. Amazon told me that they're not doing facial recognition, they're not doing any identifying things.

They're just looking for shape of a person. And then that image that is used to create that shape is immediately discarded. But basically what it does is when you say Alexa at this thing, the thing will swivel around to wherever you are and face you. It's a lot like that GBO robot that was, you know, a massive failure, but beloved by so many people that did buy it. But it's minus the personality of that. It is still just an echo show and it does the echo show things. It's just like if they told me that like most people are using these in the kitchen, they're moving around the kitchen, they're cooking a recipe, preparing meals, doing dishes, what have you.

they're not always right in front of the device. And so if you're making a recipe and the screen is showing you the steps on the recipe, as you move around, you go to the fridge, you go to the stove, et cetera, it'll just kind of make sure that you can see what the next step is. And then it also uses this for video calling.

So just like Facebook's portal that does digital pan and zoom to keep you in the frame no matter where you move around, this is doing that. And then it's also got that motorized base that will swivel to keep you in the shot. So it's kind of neat.

I think it looks wild. Like you said, Nilai, it's like that iMac, but then it's also like the GBO. And it's like this blend of the two. So I'm very interested to try this out. I use an Echo Show in my kitchen all the time. We use it to manage our grocery list and timers and smart home stuff and whatever. So it'll be very interesting to see if this makes the experience any better or if it's just a neat party trick. Yeah.

You know, it's funny. I'm looking at you. The audience can't see this. but I'm looking at Dan, and I can see that behind you, Dan, is a Nest Hub with pictures of your family on it. And it's like, Amazon's failure to just make a good photo service is what will keep Nest hubs in everyone's house. Because they're by far the best photo frames in the market. I'll say this. I'm not going to have two of these in my kitchen.

And I'd rather have pictures of my kids than a swiveling Alexa. Amazon has a great cloud backup service with the photos service that it has. it does not have the AI level that Google has to show you the pictures you actually care about when you want to see them. You have to manually program all that. And that's the smart stuff that makes the Google one so great. But yeah, I hear you.

It's just such a, like, they run AWS. They're constantly talking about AI. Just like, do the thing. Yeah. It is to me, like, what would make me switch from Google to Alexa? It's that. It's photos. And I think this hardware is cool.

their hardware is they have more hardware right the ring stuff the integration like the car stuff they have a broader suite of products and services the hardware is cooler now in some ways but the one thing i want is i don't know why they haven't figured it out um they have some voice stuff too i thought this demo was really interesting yesterday again i say demo it was like absolutely an infomercial we have no idea it was just like obviously scripted um but they had a demo where two people were having a conversation and then one of them said Alexa join our conversation and Alexa lit up and they said we want to order a pizza and they Alexa went out and found a pizza and then they ordered Alexis by the way Amazon just like insists on gendering Alexa

as female they keep referring to it as her and once you listen to them do it enough like you start to do it I encourage you not to do it it it's a robot it's a robot that can speak in the voice of Samuel L Jackson it is definitely not a curve. It's just a robot. Anyway, so the two people ordered a pizza, they said, what are my options? They got all the way to ordering pizza, and they said, make it a large, and it went

from immediate to a lunch pizza. And what they were supposed to demonstrate, oh, and then they asked it for a movie, and Alexa told them about movies. And what's supposed to demonstrate is, again, because we didn't see it live, what it is illustrating, not demonstrating, is Alexa has natural language capability,

it can join a conversation, it can understand context. It knows that multiple people are talking to it and can distinguish between them. All this is very advanced. The demo was definitely a phone tree to order a pizza and then movie phone, which is like, you know, it's like all these demos are so advanced and then the actual thing is movie phone.

Welcome to the movie phone. Yeah, exactly. So the specific sort of new thing where I think Amazon has an edge over even Google is, like Google will let you say the keyword and then ask a follow-up question. and it'll have a slightly more natural back and forth. What Amazon is saying it can do is you start it with the keyword, and then you can have that back and forth conversation where you don't have to keep saying the keyword over and over again.

But you can also talk to somebody else in the room, and the echo knows whether or not you're addressing it. So I could be like, you know, Lexa, order me a pizza. Hey, do you want pepperoni? Yeah, put pepperoni on it, Alexa. Hey, what about olives? Yes, olives too. No, not, you know, like you can go back and forth.

and it supposedly knows whether you're addressing it or somebody else in the room. The hilarious part of this is this is exactly how I order a pizza in my house. I call the pizza place and I'm shouting at my wife, which one are we getting? Okay. Are we getting half pepperoni? No, okay. Do you want a salad? Yes.

Okay, can we put a salad on it? Like, that is the thing that happens every single time we order a pizza in this house. So, like, it'd be kind of cool to have a robot to do that for me. Have you tried seamless? It's a lot simpler. Like, visual user interfaces are very good at this. That's the thing that I think is funny with all these demos. Like, what we have described is a very complicated human computer interaction.

Yeah. But to the end that it is deployed, there is a much more efficient human computer interaction available. And, like, there's a reason movie phone's out of business. Yeah. Like, no one wanted to listen to a list of movies. They just wanted to see a list of movies. So I think that, and I don't mean to denigrate the actual technology.

They built, I just think that there's a reason they demoed this on an echo show. And again, I say demo. They illustrated it in their infomercial on an echo show. Because the echo show is presenting the information visually while it's talking to you, which is,

I think, much better and clear. Like, I honestly wonder the main echo, the sphere, do they think that's their main product? Or do they think the show is the main product? That's interesting. When I spoke to Miriam Daniel ahead of the announcement, she's the VP of Amazon's Alexa and Echo devices, the screens are quickly becoming much and much more popular,

according to her in terms of sales, in terms of purchase, and really in terms of usage time. People are using the screens more than they would use an audio-only one because there's that extra interaction level. So it's, I could, I could see three, four years down the road. The only audio only Alexa's or echoes out there are the audio file ones for the Echo Studio and the really budget Echo Dot. And there's no middle Alexa because that one has a screen. Yeah, I think it just seems like that's converging.

Like I much prefer seeing what the computer is doing. And even in that, the case of like ordering a pizza, in just if you go, if Amazon, releases this video. What I was watching was, here's a robot listing things at me, and there's no chance of them, A, paying enough attention, or B, we'll remember the first thing in the list. But with a screen, you could just touch it. If, like, you don't want to use the voice commands. It gives you more flexibility in how you're interacting with it. So it can become a more traditional touch interface, or it can be a voice commanded one or what have you. It's just, especially for complex things like was illustrated in the demo, a screen is definitely going to be the better

experience. Yeah. Well, we didn't think there would be much to talk about with Echoes, but there turns out there was more than we thought. Turns out there's a lot. Amazon also just quietly announced a massive game streaming service. Wow. Called Luna. There's a controller. It's built into fire TVs as a channel that you can subscribe to. There's other channels. They are going to have Twitch integration because they own Twitch. There was like an extremely infomercial portion of this stream where like they brought in Twitch streamers and the Twitch streamers all said the keywords that they were supposed to say. Like this is from Amazon?

That's crazy. Yeah. I guess to take this home, right? I was like, that was the one that killed me. You guys run this on AWS? It's like, no, I don't. No, thank you. I don't believe that any of this happened for real.

Like there's like somebody in the corner like waving $100 bills and knocking with a WS. That's like Switch works, right? The chat is every time someone clicks a button you get a hundred dollar bill. It's just the AWS. It's like AWS. A.W.S. But it is.

I'm sorry. But it's like this is the moment of game streaming services. Last year was the moment of TV streaming services. And this is the year of game streaming services. So now Amazon has one too. They do own Twitch that they do have some credibility in the space. Yeah. As they're fond of reminding us.

I think the pitch for a gaming streaming service, including the words we own AWS is bonkers. Like no one cares. Yeah. Right? Like Microsoft owns Azure. Google owns Google Cloud. Yeah.

But the claim is that you can trust them on latency. Right. But you can just buy AWS. Yeah. Like any, like it's the whole point of AWS is that anyone can just get the services of AWS. Yeah. Anyway, Cedar Walk us through Luna.

So it is a game streaming service. It works very much like Stadia in its technical details. It's got Windows computers in the cloud. And then you have a game controller that communicates directly to those things via Wi-Fi rather than via a Bluetooth or USB thing to your device. And that allows them to more easily and with less latency work on more devices. So it'll work on fire TVs, I think PCs and Macs. And it's coming to Android phones.

but it won't be there at launch, which is interesting. And then very interestingly, when we're going to come all the way back around to this, maybe, it will work on iPhones as a progressive web app. Ooh, I'm very excited to talk about this. Last, and maybe we should talk about this first, is the business model is not the same as GamePass Ultimate from Microsoft,

where it's just like all you can eat. Microsoft just going to buy every studio can to include their stuff. It's not the thing like Stadia where it is a la carte. You've got to buy, you know, the game and there's like maybe a couple free ones, whatever. It is a channel model. It's a cable model. So you get like the games in Amazon's channel, like a Roku channel or a Fire TV channel, for its subscription fee. And then you can subscribe to other channels that provide other bundles of games.

So I think the first one they've announced is Ubisoft because Ubisoft just like they'll just work with anybody. They're like the Lenovo of game companies. Some random, like Microsoft or Google are like, hey, we've got an idea for a form factor. We don't know if it's any good. And Lobo's like, we'll do it. We'll make it. Yeah. If you heard about Assassin's Creed, it's on your platform now.

It's on everything. Yeah, so Ubisoft is like going to have, they're going to be one of the launch partner channels and presumably there's a bunch more coming. So it's an interesting business model, right? So Amazon is like offering money to publishers or, you know, offering channels to publishers. They'll probably take a cut. Who knows what the percentage is. If you want to subscribe to Amazon's thing, you end up in this weird netherworld of like,

can I buy a game al-a-card? I don't know. Do I want to subscribe to Ubisoft's bundle or do I just want the Luna bundle and like down the line? Yeah, I mean, I think the rollout on fire TVs is interesting. They have a massive installed base of fire TVs. All you really have to do is buy their controller and then sign up. And now you've got potentially a very good game console. They have to sell all of that to people who are,

already thinking about spending $500 on a very good game console, right? Because they're in that console cycle now and who, for better or worse, have been conditioned by Stadia to be like, maybe this won't work. Yeah. And for the mass market that has never heard of Stadia,

they have to be very clear about whether or not what the latency is going to feel like, right? Because if, you know, I've never heard of Stadia, I go to Amazon.com and, like, they've got a game controller, I can turn my fire TV into a full-on console, that seems great. I'll pay 60 bucks for that. Sure. Bam. And then they get it. And then, like, the thing sucks in the way that, you know, game streaming services can suck if you don't have

incredibly good internet at home. That's bad for them. So they got to be really careful about that. Yeah, and this is the controller works the same way. And this kind of leads into why they can do it as a progressive web app on the iPhone, right? All that's really happening is they're streaming you a video. And your controller doesn't connect locally to anything. Your controller is directly connected to their cloud service. So you need upstream latency to be very low. And you you need downstream latency very low. Great way to sell new euros. Yeah.

That's a pretty good way to sell the heroes. But it's like what can't Amazon fix is Comcast. Yeah. Right? And like the Comcast deciding that streaming 4K on Peacock is more important in a network level than low latency gaming. I'm just going to say the words net neutrality to people. But that's right.

That is now a decision Comcast is able to make. I need to disclose a Comcast. a Comcast investor in Box Media, which blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you understand. You can say any company you want, AT&T, Verizon, Fios. The networks are able to manage their networks in a much more direct way now because Netatrality is gone. All these game streaming services are going to run up against the need for low latency in a way that they cannot guarantee to any customer because they don't know what your network

conditions are. As long as we're disclosing, I'll disclose my wife. I think it's called like Facebook Reality Labs now, which makes Oculus, which is technically a game streaming console. or game console, and we're talking about games. So Luna hasn't launched yet. You have to sign up for early access. And Amazon does these early access things

in different ways for different gadgets. When you sign up to ask for early access for Luna, it asks you specifically what your up and downstream bandwidth is. Wow. Yeah, they're going to limit it to people with good bandwidth to start maybe. They'll probably want to test a range. Yeah. I just think we're at the point with game streaming services now

where there's definitely too many. Yeah. right and so there's like four right that's too many you love competition i do love competition what the hell man has the comp like they haven't all launched they're not in the market the competition hasn't like done the thing where it makes them all better where you're switching costs are low right like yes there's competition and i do love it i'm excited for it i just think you stretch this out into the market like in video games classically there's only two, there's two big ones in Nintendo, which, like, lives in this own alternate gigantic universe.

It's still an unproven idea is what you're getting at. It's like, yeah, it's all of these coming to the market. It's not proven that this really works well or can give you a really great experience for all the reasons that Deeter mentioned. And you mentioned with latency and not knowing what your network is, but they're still all going to do it. And so, like, I can see where that's like, can we just get like one of these to launch and be like, oh, this is a great idea. It works great. And then the competitors come in and then the prices come down and all that fun stuff. Yeah, it feels like they're all in. on like pricing models instead of making it work. It works if you are in a certain narrow bandwidth,

that I am like right on the edge of that narrow bandwidth, of having good bandwidth. I have put somewhere in a neighborhood of 100 hours into Stadia and somewhere in the neighborhood of, I would say, like 30 to 40 hours into GamePass games, Xbox Game Pass games. I have very good fiber at home. And I run into a problem like every three gaming sessions.

I'll be like, yeah. And two out of the three are like, okay, this is fine. This is great. I'm not a hardcore gamer. I don't need like super fast millisecond latency, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, it works in a narrow band. And the question is, will it work in a wide band of everybody? But I see what you're doing here, Neelai.

You're trying to keep me from talking about WebOS. I am. Well, I mean, it's amazing that fundamentally these game streaming services are just sending you a video file. They don't really need apps, right? Well, you know, it's unbiased. clear what they need in order to make a good, low-latency game streaming video file work in a browser because, and Gaggett actually got to try it. Luda briefly, they talked to the product managers over at Amazon.

And here's a fascinating thing. The WebOS joke, by the way, is that Luna was like a subsystem in WebOS, and they made web apps, and that's really funny. The interesting thing is Amazon worked with the Safari engineers at Apple to make sure that Safari had the necessary capabilities in order to make Luna good and make Luna work. Which means that it didn't, and then it did. So there's like something about the latency,

something about communicating latency, something about knowing that, I don't know, a Bluetooth, Wi-Fi thing exists on the same Wi-Fi network maybe. I don't know what precisely they got Safari to do, but they actually had Apple chain safari so that Luna could work, which is fascinating.

because whatever they did, I bet you that Microsoft could use it or be interested in it. This is great for Apple. Right? Apple's saying, don't come at the App Store. The App Store is the App Store.

We're happy to build with you on the Open Web. Yeah, well, historically, there's been concerns that they are not, that they are saying, go on and use the open web and make a web app, but then actually they don't provide the things that a bunch of app people want in a web app. Apple cares a lot about security, and they use that as a reason.

for not putting in certain features, like, I don't know, connecting to Bluetooth or something, right? And so the interesting thing here is the pressure on the App Store, they're trying to use the web as a release valve, but then that forces them to actually improve the capabilities

of their web product, which is very interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's also Amazon. Like, what is the big story with Apple and the app store? And the app store is, like, who gets the deals? You know what Amazon does? They sell a lot of headphones.

And they get deals. And they get deals. And they, you know, like the Apple TV app is on the fire TV. Like we, we just walk through the whole deal with the antitrust documents. Kid a regular,

if you were, if you were a different kind of competitor to Apple, if you're Google and you want Stady to work as a web app, and then is Apple going to let its browser team go work closely with Google? No, they're not going to do that. Right? Like, they're just not going to happen. So that's super interesting.

I'm eager to see what this web app looks like. I'm eager to see just basically the install process, right? you still want an icon on your home screen. And so you're going to click on it and it's going to launch Safari and it's going to be Safari. And that's not the best flow. Well, the install process is going to be weird. You'll click on it. It'll launch Safari, but it won't have Safari's Chrome.

And you could do that right now with an iPhone. But it's like it's still just a little bit less elegant than it is for just an app store thing. And there's also a discovery problem, right? Because people don't think to go look on the web for an app. Yeah, but I'm confident Amazon can advertise on Twitch enough to solve that problem. That's fair. Feels like they can get a deal. Dan, you mentioned Eero.

We should quickly talk about ERO. There's new EROs. They have Wi-Fi 6. There's new Wi-Fi 6 years. Yeah, they're like a year later than a lot of their competitors with bringing Wi-Fi 6, but they're here now. They've got two levels. They've got the Eero 6 and then the Eero 6 Pro. So you've got the basic one and the pro one.

Those products are, I think, are more real than. what we talked about earlier with Ring and stuff, because those are like shipping the end of October, I believe, or early November. I can say that personally, as someone who works from home all the time, it has to stream video calls all the time. I'm very excited for the new EROs. I'm very excited to try them out.

I've tested some Wi-Fi 6 routers in the past, and there's a lot of speed that you can get out of them, but the user experience is always kind of janky. So I'm very curious as to if ERO is able to make a better user experience. I already know they do with the Wi-Fi 5. I spoke to Nick Weaver real briefly. He's the CEO of ERO after the event yesterday. He answered some really crucial questions I had.

Like, yes, you can mix and match the new Eros with old Eros. So if you're an existing ERO customer, you can buy the Wi-Fi 6 euros and just add them to your network, which is something that you can't do with any other MESH network that I'm aware of. And they don't degrade. They don't degrade. Right. They won't make your whole network Wi-Fi 6. It will be Wi-Fi 6 when your device, like your phone or your computer,

is talking to a Wi-Fi 6-Ero. And if it talks to a Wi-Fi-5-I-Fi-5-I-O, it'll be Wi-Fi-5. And then the link between a Wi-Fi-5-0 and a Wi-Fi-6 will be a Wi-Fi-5 connection. Because that was one of the original problems with Wi-Fi 6, right? If you had a Wi-Fi-6 network and, like, a Wi-Fi-5 device, like whistling down the street for a half a second, then you would, like, degraded Wi-5 until everything was Wi-Fi-6 again, right?

but like, you're in the solve that problem. Wi-Fi 6 is backwards compatible. So if you have Wi-Fi 5 devices, they will connect to a Wi-Fi 6 network, no problem. They'll just run at Wi-Fi 5 speeds. But if you have Wi-Fi 6 devices,

you will get Wi-Fi 6 benefits. But the real benefit to Wi-Fi 6, especially in a mesh network context, is that it allows much faster connections between the individual nodes. So you can have, if you've got gigabit internet service at home, you probably know that over Wi-Fi,

you're not getting gigabit internet speed. Bede, part of that is because your device can't go that fast. Part of it is because the mesh nodes have to transfer the data and pass it along, and it gets bottlenecked there. Wi-Fi 6 opens up those bottlenecks a lot, and it really helps with the bandwidth there. So there's a lot happening with these. They're very interesting and cool. They're a little bit different form factor.

The Eurobeacons are gone. So if you had those from a couple of years ago, they don't have an option for that. These have to be plugged into the wall with a wire and you set it up on a counter or shelf or something like that. Some of them have Ethernet ports. Some of them don't, depending on which level you get. And what was the other thing? There's something else that I wanted to say about them as well.

And I can't remember. What's interesting the regular and the pro? So the difference between the regular and the pro is the regular is only two band, which means that it has a 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz. Your devices will connect to it just fine. The pro has a third dedicated backhaul band, which is what it uses to communicate between the network. So if you have gigabit internet service at home, you're going to want to step up to the pro.

You're already paying for gigabit internet. You might as well pay more for the pro experience to make use of that bandwidth. If you have anything less than gigabit, if your internet service is 400 megabits, 300 megabits, you're not really going to gain anything by going with the pro. At least from an internet connection speed perspective, you can probably go with the less expensive ones. And they are pretty inexpensive. I think the three pack of the base models is $279 or so, which is pretty aggressive for Wi-Fi 6. A three pack of the pros is more like $600,

which is where we're seeing a lot of the premium Wi-Fi 6 routers at, so it is an investment for sure. But again, if you are an existing Euro customer, maybe you don't need three new Wi-Fi 6 pros because you can kind of mix and match with what you have and make it work to cover your home. So it's all pretty interesting. The other thing that Nick told me is that these are not Wi-Fi 6E,

which you may have heard about. That is yet another Wi-Fi 6 standard that is coming later. So these are Wi-Fi 6 standard. not six E. They should call them seven. You switch to numbers for a reason. Use the numbers. Yeah, no, no, 80211 AXE.

Yeah, it's bonkers to try and wrap your head around. But I don't, I'm not aware of any weirdly Wi-Fi 6e devices on the, that are available at this point anyways. There are plenty of Wi-Fi 6 devices. Every iPhone since last year is all the current laptops are, things like that. So there's a lot of, uh, uh, Wi-Fi-6 devices out there, and it's pretty interesting to see. Do we know if the Xbox and PS5 are Wi-Fi 6?

The Xbox is not. I am not sure about the PS-5. Okay. And it's just like, that's the, as we push, that's the thing that drives no bandwidth in your house, usually, is your game console, right? Yeah, absolutely. You're still going to want to hardwire those, probably. If you have the option to do that.

I'm going to start selling, like, a 20-pack of Ethernet cables on Amazon, really. Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi H, Wi-Fi Hardwire. That's my new thing. I'm a millionaire. All right, we got to take a break. We've got to really quickly talk about our iOS reviews. We'll be right back.

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We're back. Dieter, how customizes your iOS 14 home screen? I have been too frigid busy reviewing the Apple Watch and it's not done yet, and I promise it'll be done soon, to go hard on the widget stuff. But the widget stuff is fascinating. So if you don't know, like, you can put widgets on iOS 14 and, like, widgets let you make, like, series shortcuts that, like, you can customize the look of the icon. So you are now finally able to put whatever kind of theme you want on your iPhone home screen. You can do anything you want as long as it's not having an icon in the lower right with nothing in the upper left because Apple. Yeah, yeah, it has to flow in.

But yeah, but the problem is use these shortcuts because it's using the Siri shortcut system. It needs to cycle through to the Siri shortcut screen before it'll cycle into the app. So you like, you've just, you've taken your ultra-fast fastest processor ever put in a portable device gadget in the history of mankind thing. And you've added like a two-second delay every time you launch an app in order to do this. The trick the teens have told me is you turn on reduced motion and accessibility. Oh, and then you don't get the animation. Yeah, yeah. Apps opening.

So it just beeps at you. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing what's happening right now. I like that. This is like, I love this whole trend. My niece told me she spent six hours customizing her iPhone home screen. It looks crazy. It's amazing.

People are sending it. People are tweeting us amazing ones. Did you see the one where every app is a picture of the CEO? Yes, that one was great. Perfect, beautiful. This is such a great example of emergent behaviors that companies had no idea what happened. Like Apple demo shortcuts.

And they're like, you can make a routine that you say, hey, Siri, search for my AirPods and like, no one's ever going to do it. Instead, it's like teenagers on TikTok have customized their home screens to be exactly about one direction. And Apple's like, well, crap. We knew we never wanted anyone to theme it, but they used shortcuts to theme their, I love it. It's great. So what I love is like the iPhone launches. And I'm just imagining the meeting where, like, you see what happened to MySpace?

Never to us. We're never allowing that. We're never going to let the mess that is custom MySpace homepage has happened to the iPhone homepage. And yep, nope. That's where you live now. Apple. Good job. Congrats.

I love it. But yeah. It's funny that it started with widgets, which are like the big iOS 14 thing. There's an app called Widget Smith, which, you know, just sort of became the center of the whole thing because you can make custom widgets with custom fonts. And that just exploded into this. shortcuts thing. And it's so funny that people,

when we were reviewing iOS 14, it's like, oh, there's not a lot here. I was like, widgets on the home screen. Cool. And now everyone's like,

iOS supports theming. It's like, no. That's not what's happening at all. It's doing a lot of lift there in that sentence. But it's great. I, you know,

I, this is one of those things where you're laughing at me about wanting competition before. Any Android phone, can look as crazy as you want it to. But no one is switching to make crazy home screens. You give them the capability, even in this crazy sideways way.

And they're going to do it and do things you don't expect. And like, this is a cultural moment that's enabled by very janky technology. Yeah. Imagine if they just gave people the capability. It's weird how you have to build up the desire for it to turn into this thing, as opposed to if it had always been there, no one would have been. I guess teenagers would have always done it.

But it's just weird that became a moment because they prevented it for so long. Yeah, I mean, if you want to have your faith in humanity's ability to make good design, just go visit the Samsung Galaxy theming store and look at the most popular page.

And you'd be like, oh, nobody knows what they're doing. Okay. Teenagers are doing a great job with the iPhone. All right. So I would say that's the top line of the iOS 14 review. Like there's iPad stuff to talk about, but I mean, I don't know. I have IS 14.

I used half a widget one time. Everything about it seems very much the same to me. It's very, very samey. I haven't spent the time to customize icons and stuff like that, but I used the widgets a lot. Like, I was super thrilled to be able to stick a calendar widget on my home screen. So I knew when it was coming up. And I've got a weather widget. And then, like, I've got an email widget.

But the thing that's really, I've observed is that, and I think this time, ties back to the fact that Apple basically gave developers one-day notice on their iOS 14 final release. I look at how many widgets I've available. I've got like 200 apps on my phone, and there are 14 apps to support widgets right now. Normally, there would be dozens of apps taking advantage of these new features, and I'm just not seeing it, and we're still, like, what are we, a couple weeks out now from the release, and it's still only a handful of apps that are really leveraging it. So I'm curious to see where it goes.

Maybe there will be like more developers will come out with more options for widgets and things like that. And they'll become more useful. But right now, I like the calendar. I like weather. And I like my email inbox. It's like, we're so boring. It's like, we're making full custom themes. I know.

You just get a smart watch. Put your calendar on your watch. It'll be fine. I'm going to say a thing. And at the end of the story is Neely crying in the corner. Oh, God. I think that every widget system has like two to three years in it. And then it degrades and it gets abandoned and it berefts and it doesn't get maintained and it dies.

And this happened to Android. And it absolutely happened to the dashboard on the Mac. And it sort of happened even to the dash, the sidebar thing on the Mac. I think it happened to all sorts of different versions of weird little, you know, widget-y informational things on Windows and Windows 10. And so my question is, you only see 14 available widgets. now, it'll, you know, in six months, it'll be, you know, 100. But my question is, what's it going to look like in two years?

And my hunch is that unless Apple is able to pull off something that nobody's ever pulled off in the history of computing, that this widget ecosystem is going to be kind of meh in two years. But it's funny because I just- Calendar widget. Yeah. I mean, right, what are these widgets really? Their status displays and there are many apps that want to just show you a status display.

It's funny because I just said get a smart watch. but what are Apple Watch apps but widgets? And like the entire Apple Watch ecosystem is like, right, whir. Well, actually, I'm in the process of viewing the Apple Watch, and I disagree. Really? The Apple Watch app ecosystem is actually much better

than people give it credit for these days. There's like a bunch of stuff, like the stuff that I would want on a watch is basically there. It's just not good. But the complications. I don't think you've gotten out of the realm of, The complications are pretty good. And so, like, you know, I wish there was more options for different Apple Watches or, you know, creating your own Apple Watch Face.

That would be nice. But what you can do is, like, give yourself four different Apple Watches for, like, different, four different kinds of activities that you engage in. And because those apps exist, they have complications, which are, you know, either a button to launch the app quickly or just a little bit of status information. And so in the past year, I have, without noticing it, found myself using like a half dozen Apple Watch apps, like, all the time. And I had, I, like, it wasn't like, oh, wow, this is good now. It's just like slowly accreted to the point where I've got, you know, three, four, five Apple Watch apps that I'm just using. Yeah. And you're using them through the complications, like you mentioned.

Like, my experience is I'm not going to the app list and scrolling and tapping or using the honeycomb grid or whatever launching apps. I am looking at my list, oh, I've got an upcoming appointment, and I tap that to see what the details are. And that takes me all the way into the appointment of the app past the launch process and everything. That's the interaction model with it. And to your Deider's point, that's meant that there's a lot of Apple Watches now that you need, or Apple Watch apps that you need installed on the watch to power all of that experience.

Yeah. Can I tell you the status part of this, like, give yourself multiple watch faces for multiple tasks thing? I've made a cooking watch face, and I specifically chose the cooking watch face because it has on the watch face itself the ability to start a stopwatch, which means that I can have the watch face of stopwatch, the stopwatch app complication,

and a timer complication. So I can have two stopwatches and a timer, which is literally the only way to get multiple timers going on the Apple Watch. And that's what I do. And now with WatchOS 7, Dieter can share that watch face with all of you listeners.

I could, yeah. We should sell it on Etsy. That's what they're doing with the theme packs. Let's do it. We should talk about the iPad too. iPad OS is out. They added scribble. It's only good for short little bits of text.

They released the eighth generation base iPad. I think it is, my reviews up, you can go look at it, but it is bordering on criminal that they only offer it with 32 gigs at the base storage and that there's no multi-user for this thing. It's like I'm tired of, and that's not even like freaking out about USBC,

which is what you expect for me in the Vergecast. Not even getting into that. I'm tired of giving them a pass on those two problems. Yeah. I mean, the iPad is one of those things where they keep, I said this in the iPad Pro Review, like two years ago.

They keep saying like it's a new product and it is just not anymore. Like it is the thing that it is, it is nearly a decade old. You can't be like, it's a baby. Like, sorry. Like you've made your choices and here they are. And like you're not learning how people use iPads.

absolutely no. I will say that like the base model being cheap, if you are buying this thing as a Netflix machine or the one your kids are going to break is like, that's good. But you do hit that 32 gigs like almost instantly just with video caching. Like it just happens to video apps over time.

You want to talk about this Fitbit sense and then we can get out of here? Sure. Yeah. So I guess the Fitbit sense is remarkable in that It is the counterpart to the series six with blood oxygen monitoring and all this stuff. Fitbit packed a bunch of sensors into this. They're charging basically Apple Watch prices for it. It's like $330. That's about what you'll pay for an Apple Watch at this point. And it's still a Fitbit smartwatch.

So I would not buy this if you want to buy a smartwatch. If you want like advanced health tracking stuff and you're in the Fitbit ecosystem, it's great. The watch, the blood oxygen monitoring system is not great. It only works through a singular watch face, and you can't do on-demand blood oxygen measurement. It only measures in the background while you're sleeping, which is odd. But to the same point, we've seen, I think Dieter is seeing this in his experience with the series six. We've seen a lot of other reporting around how the series six's blood oxygen monitor is not super accurate or helpful. and it's kind of unreliable

so the fact that you can't do on-demand blood oxygen with the Fitbit is probably an okay thing but it's still a Fitbit so like it's not hugely different from the Versa before it except it just has a few more sensors built into it and our experience right now it's kind of buggy the animations are janky they removed the actual one physical button

that was on the Versus and replaced it with this like capacitive thing that really doesn't work that well. So they've got some work ahead. You can apparently buy it now, but I would probably wait till they start ironing out a lot of these bugs that we experienced. Here's my question.

By the way, everything Dan said about the blood oxygen thing and the Apple Watch is true. Having seen a couple generations now of Fitbit products since Google announcement wants to buy Fitbit, what do you think Google thinks it's buying? I'm dead serious. Are they buying hardware shops? Are they buying software?

What are they doing? A loyal user base. It's buying a network. Like, I wear a Fitbit tracker on my opposite wrist. I don't care about the smartwatch features. I care about the fitness tracking features. And I've got a database of, I've been wearing it every day for X number of years. And I've got a large database.

I'm like in that ecosystem. I'm a user. Like Google would be buying all of that on the smartwatch side of things. I have no idea what they think they're buying. But at least from like the fitness. tracker, loyal user base. There's a lot of Fitbit fans out there. And what is the thing?

The Apple Watch is still, no matter how good your collection of timer apps on that watch faces, Deeter. The Apple Watch is still notifications and fitness. That's the thing it does. And like Google buying a little bit of a head start in a fitness, like at least makes them, I don't know. I agree with you.

Also, we don't know if that deal's going to close. Like still antitrust review, right? So, but that's what you would be buying is, Head Start and his fitness when you know that's one of the two killer apps for your big competitor. All right. Apple Watch 6. You haven't done the review yet, but you're going to, right? Yeah, it's happening.

I promise I'm going to finish it. It's going to happen. Usually I assign you as stories in here. I'm just going to assign you the thing you've already promised to do it. We'll also have Deeter's working on the series 6. I've got the SE. I'm also testing family setup. So we are getting some real.

world experience using family setup, which is one of the more interesting things out of the Apple Watch announcement this year. So stay tuned for that. I've just, I guess, given myself a deadline. Yeah. Dan has strapped an Apple Watch to a child. Amazing. The things we do for The Verge. And then Joanna's going to be on the Tuesday show, right? Yeah. So as everybody probably knows by now, Nelai has a brand new podcast that's coming called Decoder. So he's busy developing that, which means I'm taking over the Tuesday show for a little while. And we're trying to do deep dives on hardware reviews. And the idea is we do the hardware review

and then we give you the director's notes to it by me talking to somebody else who's reviewed the thing. This time we're going to do it before I've reviewed it. But it'll be fine. So Joanna's going to come on. We're going to do a really deep dive

on the process of reviewing the Apple Watch and what it's like to review the Apple Watch and just stuff that didn't make it into our full reviews that are going to go up on our websites. So check that out on Tuesday. I'm excited to get a window and to join his video pitch process.

Yeah, yeah. What food is this shaped like? That's when you know a product is doomed When Joanna's like it looks like a food What yeah what piece of food Am I gonna slap on the screen of this I love it that'll be very exciting All right as we've gone over

It was inevitable It's funny that Amazon managed to do all this an hour And we needed an hour and so it goes I will tell you we talked more about ERO than Amazon did Sure did You can tweet at us Dan is at DCCFurt Dieter's at Baclon. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. Deeders show coming out on Tuesday. That's going to happen. I am working on Decoder. You can you can just go subscribe to the Recode Decode feed and Decoder will take it over. So go listen to Kara's got like her greatest hits up on that feed right now. So go subscribe to Kara's greatest hits. And then I will, you know, I will match that standard. Sure. Definitely going to do that. That's going to be great. Very excited about that. Go subscribe to all that stuff. I mentioned Marybeth's newsletter at the beginning, Anivirus.orgh.com slash antivirir.

That is just a weekly roundup of vaccine news, virus treatment news. We're trying to make just a single trusted resource so you're not buffeted by crazy all the time. Virgil.com slash antivirus. It's very good. It has certainly given me a perspective on all the stuff that's going on. That's it. We've gone too long. Rock and roll.

Hey, make a plan to vote. Wear a mask.