The Vergecast - Amazon's 80 new products, Oculus Connect, and Xiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

Stories this week: Amazon pushes Alexa privacy with new delete optionsAmazon’s new Echo Studio sounds like the future of smart speakersThe top 8 Echo products Amazon announced todayHere are all of the other new Echo and Ring products announced todayAmazon announces third-generation Echo smart speakerAmazon’s new $59 Echo Dot with Clock includes an LED displayAmazon’s Echo Buds sound good and are great at noise reductionUsing Amazon’s Echo Loop ring is like whispering a secret to AlexaAmazon Echo Frames preview: trying on the Alexa smart glassesAmazon’s new Echo Loop puts Alexa in a discreet smart ringAmazon follows up its Alexa microwave with a new Alexa Smart OvenAmazon is simplifying device setup with ‘Certified for Humans’ programAmazon announces Fetch pet tracker that uses new Sidewalk networkingAmazon’s new Echo Flex lets you put Alexa everywhere in your homeAmazon’s Echo Glow is a $29 lamp for Alexa dance parties and bedtime storiesAll the new features coming to Alexa, including a new voice, frustration mode, and Samuel L. JacksonJeff Bezos says Amazon is writing its own facial recognition laws to pitch to lawmakersFacebook says it will build AR glasses and map the worldOculus will add new social features powered by FacebookOculus Link will let you plug your Quest headset into a gaming PC to play Rift gamesOculus is launching hand tracking on Quest next yearFacebook acquires neural interface startup CTRL-Labs for its mind-reading wristbandOculus CTO John Carmack says ‘we missed an opportunity’ as the Gear VR diesXiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha is almost entirely made of screenThe OnePlus TV is finally here7 good and 3 bad things in iPadOSSamsung will let Galaxy Fold owners replace their screens once for $149 Please take our survey here: theverge.com/survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about Amazon's 80 new products. That's right, 80 of them. Facebook's Oculus Connect event where they announced a new virtual world called Horizon and a phone with a 600% screen-to-body ratio. That's the Vergecast coming up now. 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 news. nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast of the flagship podcast.

Well, really the only podcast of the Verge podcast empire at this time, but it's still a good one. I'm your friend, Nelai. We got a full house today. Dieter Bone is here. I am. I am. Yes. Well done.

Paul Miller is here. Hello. Ashley Carmen is here. Ashley hosts the other podcasts in the Empire, but it's on hold for now. Hi, Ashley. Hey. And Addie Robertson's here. Hey.

So it's a week of events. And the reason I wanted Ashley and Addy to join us is there was a massive Amazon event. Dieter, you were there. Yep. And then literally at the same time, there was a massive Oculus event, which, Deeter, you are precluded from talking about because you work. You should do the disclosures for me from now on. Yeah. I'll just disclose everything about everyone.

It'll be great. It's going to be a weird, a weird show. But these things happen literally simultaneously on Wednesday. Amazon in particular put out a ton of news. We're going to go through all through it. Ashley and I were talking about the fact that Amazon is now into so many product areas. It's stepping on companies it has itself invested in. So I want to talk about that a little bit. And then Oculus announced a bunch of stuff that I want to talk about with Addy in particular. But let's start with Amazon. Dieter, you were there. Dan Seifert was there. What was it like? This is the third year that they've done. done this. The second, they, the second year they actually, no, this is the first year

they let us talk about it. They let us admit that it's happening ahead of time, which is interesting. We live blogged it because we could tell you that it was happening.

Last year, they announced 70 things. According to Amazon's count, this year they announced 80 things, eight zero things, in the space of about an hour and 10 or 15 minutes.

Like, just as an example, the flagship product of Amazon's hardware line, Maybe not the most important one, but like the one that is most canonical, the thing that you think of when you think of Amazon hardware is the echo, the original echo speaker, right? They still make it. They updated it this year. The echo speaker got, I kid you not, about a minute and a half of stage time. Their main product. Well, what is there to say? It's like it sounds a little less crappy and it's in different fabrics now. Yeah, I mean, that is exactly all there is to say about it. It got to the point where in order to just keep up on the live blog, I would just write the word new colon and then the thing that they announced.

And I did that at least once a minute. Because otherwise, I would have to like, and now they're leading up to talk about this thing. And now they're announcing a new thing. And just like, and now they are announcing. It was too much words for the speed at which they were going. So I just wrote new colon, Alexa ring for some reason. over and over again. It's strange to me that they do not live stream these.

They own a video streaming platform, a pretty popular one. They own AWS. They could just roll a new one if they wanted to. But they don't. And I kind of don't understand why. Is it just because it's so frenetic? They told you a reason for that? Amazon has this thing where they have this, you can call it false,

but they like to think that they're humble, and that they don't do a lot of fanfare, especially for hardware product releases. When they released the original echo, I think we might have gotten like a half hour heads up and they just put out a press release and we still didn't know what the hell it was. They just throw stuff out there.

I think that if they wanted to, they don't even want to do this keynote. They would rather just like put all the products on the store and like let us find them. But they know they need to to like have us be a little bit aware of it. You're just searching for a speaker and all of a sudden number one best selling speaker

bubbles to the top of your search results and you know what to buy. It's Amazon's thing. It is a weird sort of like humility though because you're still doing a press conference, right? You still are getting on stage. You have a beautiful stage inside your spheres of like your indoor terrarium or whatever. So yeah, I don't know. And they're definitely media trained enough to like be on stage and actually like perform well for a camera. So it's odd.

So they started this whole thing by talking about privacy, which was a little strange because what they really started with was we're the first company to make it so that people couldn't like our graders weren't listening to you. Right. Which they only did because it was like uncovered by the media. They were the first one to get caught.

Yeah. So like they it was very clear they were trying to reframe the privacy conversation. Like look at how good at this we are. And then they were like done with it. And we'll go through it all. But by the end of it they were like, we can track your dog with our new mesh network that will extend through your city,

like precisely in space, and let's put more stuff in your kid's room. And did that, was that as whiplashy in the room as it was for me, just like reading the live log? Yes, it was. Although a bunch of, they go so fast that you don't get a chance to stop

and think, wait a minute, if you actually build the mesh network to track the dog, then what does that mean? Like by the time you're like, wait a minute, they've already announced three new things. And he's like, oh, no, go back. The mesh network to track the dog sounds a little bit like, because is it Apple planning on doing something mesh networky

with like finding phones? What Amazon is doing, it's called Amazon Sidewalk. And there's a band, the 900 megahertz band of spectrum that is, you know, they're free to do stuff on it. It's not getting heavily used. And they want to be able to do location or do data or do something at distances longer than Wi-Fi, but shorter than like 5G. And they need it to be low power. And there are, you know, internet of things, things like ZigB and Z wave

and thread and whatever the hell else. But none of them really hit that range, that sweet spot of long distances, but not super long, and also low power to like do weather monitors or cameras at the end of your ranch or whatever the hell you want. I love the idea that there's a fourth wireless protocol because Jeff Bezos is like, dude, I need to cover my ranch. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of it. So they created this thing called Sidewalk.

And it is not a like big, you know, new internet of things standard. It is an Amazon protocol that Amazon controls that people can make devices for that are supported by it that is able to do that stuff for an inner of things. And then it has the added benefit of being able to track stuff like a dog. And it also has the added benefit of being a mesh network where like you can track stuff through the network. And you know, that's why they talked about it being super secure a bunch so that if you run an Amazon sidewalk network out of your house, you are, you become part of the whole mesh. And they brag they had covered like a whole city with just 700 of these things. And the crazy thing about all of this is it actually started as a ring project.

It basically started as like the protocol that Ring was using for like smart light bulbs and stuff. And so that's why the fetch a little, you know, dog collar, not the collar, but like the thing that hangs off a dog collar is a ring product. Because like it started at Ring and then Ring is like, hey, we got this thing. It's pretty good. And I was like, yes, we're going to make that bigger. So that's like a, it's a science project. Right. Yeah, it's a science project. It's nowhere near ready. I asked many, many people to talk to me about it,

and many, many people told me that it's very early days. So I'm still trying to get, you know, some, like, actual information on how technically it works and what the policies around it are. So, like, more to come. But they announce that they're, like, they're working on it. And they, the interesting thing about this event in general is in a few different places, Amazon tried to re-contextualize the way that it introduces new stuff. as like this is a science thing we're working on.

It's a science project. Or the most interesting one to me is they have this thing that they're calling day one products, which are basically like stuff we want to make, but they suck and we don't think that everybody should buy them, which is the ring and the glasses. Yeah. It's a little bit of a retcon, but this is how their product development cycles go. Like the first echo looked like a reference design. People like them.

They spent money on the design. Now they look a lot nicer. Yeah. Right. And you just see it. The Echo Auto literally looks like a reference. It looks like they bought a kit at Radio Shack and like assembled it and they sell them. Yeah.

And like maybe some people will buy them and they'll be successful. They'll make them nicer next year. So you can see how they do it. But like the thing about Echo Auto, it's actually instructive is like they haven't widely released that thing yet, right? It's still sort of in that weird invite zone. And so I think what these products actually are is just straight up market research. They want to get these products into a few more hands. They get the shine of saying, we made a thing.

Everyone's like, oh, you made a thing. Let's think about what the thing means. Then talk about the thing. And then they get, you know, a few thousand more people or however many people buy them beyond just Amazon employees. And then they get to see how they get used. They probably have even more crazy tracking terms of service than a standard consumer product.

And then they can iterate based on the things that they learn from the wacky products being used by the early adopters to make the better thing later. but privacy is what's most important. Yeah, I'm sorry, we're going to be all over the place because they announced 80 things and they're all interconnected. So we started at privacy and we ended at, you know, a beta program for eyeglasses. And we should go through the actual things. But I think starting in privacy and ending with ring mesh network that goes vast distances where we don't know the parameters how it works.

Plus ring in general, which is basically surveillance systems that they get police departments to incentivize. people to use. Like those things are, those are the Amazon controversies around these products, right? Yeah. Alexa's listening to you. It was not made clear

that other, that human beings were actually able to listen to your recordings. Ring makes you feel safer. It is not clear that their marketing pitch around this lowers crime in your neighborhood versus does it actually is true.

And it's really unclear if you want the police to just have unfettered access to cameras all over the place. So their ring is, like, they got a huge chip on their shoulder about that last point because that's what everybody thinks. And they're like, that's not what it is because the police can only look at recordings and only if you give permission and it's camera by camera specifically. Because I asked them about this because you're going to put ring cameras in the house. And so like, does that mean like cops can see what's going on in my house?

And they're like, I'm so mad about this. The truth is the only way that a cop will ever see information from a ring camera is if you explicitly say yes, you can. And then they only get to see a recording. Or what if they have a war? what if they have a warrant? Well, so here's the thing. Like, all of that stuff is just a policy that ringsets. It's not the law.

Yeah. And everyone knows that the government is extremely respectful. The NSA has no desire to break into the ring. I've been telling you this for episodes. I think we agree that the government is to be hated and feared. Right, let's talk about real products. Yeah. Because there is that.

I just wanted to put that frame around it because they started with privacy. And that is the sort of underlying, I would say, controversy or underlying context of everything Amazon is they're really big. And it's unclear how much they are watching, looking, sharing. And they need to get better at it if they want to be at the scale that this set of products indicates they want to be at. So that's the context. But then they did put out a new echo. Well, no, no, hang on. The very first thing that got announced wasn't at the event.

It was the day before the event when they unveiled the voice interoperability initiative. Nothing screams audience interest, like voice interoperability initiative. They want all speakers to support all voice assistants, and wouldn't that be nice? And they got everybody on board. They actually got a ton of people on board. They got Verizon and Qualcomm and Intel and Microsoft and NXP and Media Tech. And everybody except for Google, Apple and Samsung, have yet to respond to my request for comment about what they think of this thing. Google has responded.

And so far as I can tell, they were invited to it like the Saturday before they announced it. So like they got four days notice. So here's, this is like my International Relations 101 College. This is what I remember from International Relations 101 in college. Okay. You have a hegemon and in the way that like small countries battle the hegemon is like form alliances. Right. But this seems like the opposite of that, right?

Amazon is the hegemon and the way they're going to destroy. Google and Apple, which own the phone, is by saying, everybody who sucks, now you can run on the echo speaker. Well, if you count the phone, then Google is definitely the hegemon, because they have bigger market share for Google Assistant than Amazon does for Alexa. Sure. But so that's what, I mean, it's like everyone, like no one in the world is ever going to buy a Verizon smart speaker, unless Verizon literally hands one out for free when you buy a phone, which is something. Which they're going to totally do. It's going to happen. But now they're going to give out an echo and say, you can say, hey, Verizon, and then we'll like, we'll bill you a little bit.

more. Yeah. It's all right. Amazon is literally already doing that with Orange in France. Right. And or what was the other one? Qualcomm, right? Like,

Qualcomm is going to make a chip set and it's going to be in the echoes now because Amazon supports it and everyone else can be on it. Yeah. Or, I mean, whatever other voice assistant you might come up with, you can go partner with Amazon and your stuff runs in the echo. So now you have an incentive to say, this is the platform we choose, not we're going to build into Google or make a deal with

Apple or whatever. Right. I mean, this seems like a very aggressive move. Yeah. Not an interoperability move. Well, it's a very aggressive move, but on the other hand, like, how scared are Google and Apple of the toothless? There's no dues. There's no membership fees. There's not even meetings yet. Voice Interoperability Alliance. This is just a bunch of companies saying, hey, yeah, we should be able to make money off voice assistance too. That sounds cool. Like, that's what the whole thing is right now. That's all it is. Yeah, what do they actually do? They promise to, they promise to. work together. They promise that they will, you know, make things that can run other things. But there's one thing, and it's Alexa. Well, there's other things. There's the Beeb. There's

Djingo on Orange. There's Cortana. Yeah. So this is, if you want to talk to Cortana instead of Alexa, all you need is an echo speaker in your house. Right. And then you can talk to Cortana directly instead of going through Alexa. Yeah. The idea is that there's going to be like a few broad assistants,

like Alexa, Google assistant, Siri, I don't know, throw Bixby in there if you want to. And then there'll be thousands of really deep assistants that are very good in their specific domain. So like, I don't know, the cooking channel will make a voice assistant, right? And instead of having to go, hey Alexa, talk to the cooking channel, okay, now I'm talking to the cooking channel, blah, blah, you can just talk to the cooking channel and it will be good at the cooking channel things. That's the dream that they're pitching. That would be a slight improvement. It sounds like Microsoft has,

back in the day, Microsoft, we're going to come up with the Microsoft Windows Interoperability Alliance and everybody can run Microsoft Windows and also you can make dot EXEs that work on top of it. You all note that Microsoft

at that time was a ruthless monopolist. I'm just saying, like if you're like, yep, that sounds like a strategy Microsoft would have done in like the 90s or early 2000s. That is because at that time they were a ruthless monopolist. We should move on to hardware, but the last point on this thing is, you know how everyone who makes a voice

assistant is in trouble because the speakers accidentally record stuff when they are not supposed to because of the wake word thing? Yeah. Imagine if you've got 50 wake words on your speaker. Like Beeb. Beb is one of my favorite songs by a K-pop star named IU. And that's, I love say the word Bebe because it's a song I love. And now I've, now the speaker's listening while I commit crimes. Great, Paul. Okay, so there's the new basic echo. There's a new echo dot with a clock, which, I mean, it's literally an echo dot with an

LED clock in it. It's 60 bucks. It seemed like the thing they were most excited about. It's the thing they're going to sell the most of. Yeah, it goes into everyone's bedroom and it replaces your clock. Great. They're excited about it. Then there's this Echo Studio, which I think we should take a minute and talk about.

You got to see it. Dan had a whole little exclusive with it. We got a lot of photos on the site. It's basically a big speaker with a, it's like a bunch of mid-range speakers around, a suburb are firing down and a tweeter firing up. And because it has the up-firing speaker, it can do positional audio. They claim, I haven't heard it. I'm very skeptical of this. It can do positional audio.

So then you can pair it with a fire TV and it can do Atmos, so it's like a soundbar. And then they're 3D audio, which is like a music format. And this is the thing they were really pushing. Yeah, they specifically went with Dolby's 3D audio format. There was a lot of love for Dolby at this event. Dolby's riding high. There's a lot of love for Dolby at the Apple event. Dolby sends out press releases now.

They're just like, we did it again. Like, it's amazing. But the idea that you can buy two of these things, it's only 200 bucks, so it's very inexpensive. It does the room auto tuning that the HomePod does, that the new Sonos move does, where it listens to itself and like fixes the sound. Here's what I will say. One, it's cheap, right?

Yep. So the idea that you can get a pretty good speaker for not a lot of money that can also just like, you can talk to it and turn on your Spotify is great. Two, the number one question I ever got about the home pod was can I pair it with my Apple TV? So like if you have fire TV stuff, this is great, right? You just like buy this. You don't have a buy a sound bar. It's great. It does all the things for you. It also has optical in, which is hilarious. On that fire TV compatible, like there's been a lot of different fire TVs. Like, and I don't really know how you differentiate. between all of the different fire TV. Is there some cutoff for compatibility? Or can you just... We have to get our hands on this thing.

I have no idea. But I think if you want Atmos, you need one of the last two generations of Fire TV. Because that's what supports it. And it's all wireless. So you probably need to have a reasonable Wi-Fi set up in your house for latency issues. So, like, maybe it'll do Atmos.

I think Dolby is, like, doing the thing where everything is Atmos now. You know, like, you can get headphones. You can get a laptop with built-in Atmos speakers, which seems not right. So, like, of course, it's like, it's the... the format that surround is going to be in now.

And so things that can decode at our Atmos, but it doesn't mean you're going to get the full, you know, seven speaker atmos thing. But great, it works. What I will say about 3D audio and we just, it's funny because we usually do this. Every January, Sony tells me that like, some artist on the Sony roster,

like, Pink is so excited about 3D audio now, right? Like, I sit through it every year, which is, and Amazon made a video and they did a demo where it was like the person was listening to it and they closed their eyes and like, where's the speaker? They open the eyes and the speaker's only in front of them. And I thought there were speakers behind me.

And it's like, why? Who is looking for that experience where you have speakers behind you? Like, that's only useful in one situation. That's watching Jurassic Park. Right. Or surround sound with the helicopters, the helicopters start behind you and then they slowly go in front of you. You're like, whoa, it's like the helicopters were behind me. Yeah, but like the goal for music is to like be in a live environment.

right where they're usually in front of you it's not like jimmy page is like ducking out of the back right like surprising you like there's a floutist who like jumps out of the closet it's like i'm playing a flute now like that doesn't happen it's like you're in the band right with surround no it just says it so like that's a thing like it just doesn't make any sense that's not the point the point is like there's a reason that it has never ever worked like i have a quad channel decoder from 1972 and it just like never went anywhere because no one gives a shit and also most people just listen to their AirPods which sound horrible like people do not care about this so I love that they're doing it I love that Amazon music is supporting it but we're at the point now where they're

like we're doing HD quality audio and you look at the specs and it's it's CD quality right it's 41 44.1 16 right like CD and then they've got the new one which is like slightly better It's 3D. And it's like people don't even, we're at the point where we're advertising literally the quality of CDs, which came out in like 1989 because people don't care. So I just hear, I see this 3D audio stuff. I'm like, I don't, that's not it. Right. Like, that's not what people want.

They want like speakers in all the rooms. They want a service that goes everywhere they go. Amazon music is not that service historically. It just, I don't know. The 3D audio is there. It's a marketing point. I think the main thing is they were, they just were willing to make it bigger so they can get better sound out of it. It's bigger than the other smart speakers.

It's like, I don't know. You can hug it, but it's like, it's almost not hugable. It's like big. Is that your size measurement? Yeah. Things you can hug? All right. For 199, who on earth should buy a home pod?

No one should buy a home pod. And I think that's like, this is the thing that makes it very clear that Apple just got it wrong with the home pod, right? Here's a big speaker that sounds good. It's far more useful than a home pod. It also runs Apple music because Amazon supports Apple music. You do not need a home pod in your life. And we don't know what it sounds like, right? Every time the demo speaker to us, it sounds good in the room.

We got to like try it out. We'll see. Maybe the home pod sounds better. Maybe it sounds worse. But what I'm telling you is that people do not care. At the end of the day, the person who cares about how good a speaker sounds is like me and the people who follow me on Twitter. That is not a huge audience that was bigger.

I would be selling them seekers, but I promise you it's not big enough. So like I think this goes after them. I think I think Casey pointed out on Twitter like this is a huge shot directly at Sonos, who is one of their partners because it's cheaper than the Sonos stuff. But I think it looks kind of cheap. I mean, it is cheap. It's very plasticy. Yeah.

I don't know. You'll have to see it in person, although you can't because it's Amazon. It looks slightly better in person than a dozen photos. Yeah. But I'm excited to try it out. I'm excited to pair that you can pair two of them in a subwifur and like build a whole surround sound thing. If this is a good way to get a decent ammo setup for like 500 bucks, I think that's awesome.

But yeah, well, I mean, if you do that, if you're thinking that and you're willing to have two big speakers in your living room that way, that is the shot at Sonos because like, why would anybody buy a couple of surrounds and a playbase at a playbar? You know, you start adding those prices up and you're well over the cost of two of these things. So that's a speaker. We'll try it out. There's the new buds, which are interesting because they're partnered with bows, which

doesn't seem normal. So I've listened to the buds. I've worn the buds. I've talked to the buds. The buds have talked to me. You certain, oh, sorry, I'm doing the best present joke. They sound, I think, pretty good,

but I can't actually tell you if they sound great. They're comfortable, but I also wear Jabra 65 Ts, which are like noise isolating in-ear headphones, and I think those are comfortable. A lot of people don't. They are pretty big. The case that they go in is huge.

But they do noise. reduction. Not noise removal. Cancelation. They don't do noise cancellation. They only do noise reduction. And they're using Bose technology for it. The difference between like full on cancellation and reduction, I don't know, man. They're fully, truly wireless in-ear earbuds. Like how good do you think it's going to get?

They totally worked. Like it definitely took the noise down to the room to like, you know, roba-ra-ra-ro-ro-ro-ro-room. Right? So like it did the job. And if you're listening to music while that happens, then, you know, it's perfectly fine. But they, I don't know, man, they're 130 bucks, I think, 120 bucks? Yeah, 130 bucks.

That's super cheap for headphones that have active noise reduction. And I think that they're going to eat Jabra's lunch, and that really sucks for Jabra. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that they don't have wireless charging and they charge via micro USB. That's amazing. That is like the ultimate in Amazon cheapness, that they're just stuck with micro-US. I bought a tablet from them, like a cheap tablet just to like be a soundist controller. It charges over micro USB.

It feels very much like 1985 in my house because of it. This sounds like an interesting product to me if it didn't have Alexa. Well, so here's the thing about everything that they announced that talks to a phone. The buds, the ring, the glasses, you talk to Alexa. Use Alexa for the hot word. I'm really sorry that I'm in this whole podcast. I'm saying the words instead of doing it. So if I set your speaker off.

but they all let you long press to talk to the phone's native assistant and they're very careful to point that out. Yeah, they have buttons. And you also don't have to like set it up, right? Because they're Bluetooth. So you can just like not do it. Yeah. The frames and the ring in particular are basically just Bluetooth headsets that also like talk to Alexa because like you hit the button and it like answers a call or you hit the button. You hold it down and it uses a standard command to launch the native assistant.

So Ashley, this is where I want to talk to you because the pricing here is really interesting to me. These are really cheap. They're made with partners. Amazon also announced like a smart oven, which I want to talk to you about. But, you know, in the context of announcing it, they were like, our microwave from last year was the top selling microwave on Amazon. What a surprise. But like they obviously made that happen. It's so dark.

It's so dark. It's just like, yeah, obviously. Yeah, like you control the search results. Are you surprised? Whoa. People typed in microwave and you made them buy your extremely cheap. microwave? What a surprise? So these are priced at 1.30. That's much cheaper than everybody else. They announced glasses. You have covered Focal, which is a startup that makes glasses.

They announced a ring. There's other ring startups. They're basically just like, here are some form factors. We put some mics in speakers in them. Here we go. But it seems like they are, I mean, I would almost call this predatory pricing. Like, they're obviously not making money on this stuff. There's no huge margin here. And you cover a lot of indie hardware startups. You talk about this all the time. Like, how do these companies even compete with Amazon now? It was funny because And I don't know if this is directly related, but today I got an email from June, which makes a smart oven. And they have, they put the oven on sale for $200 less. Of course.

It's still, I think, $400. And Amazon's smart oven is $250. And the rest of the smart ovens are the tovala, I think it was the tovala is, I think maybe $300. So it's not at, it's close to there. But yeah, like there's everyone, I just don't see how this is going to. they're going to be able to compete because also Amazon has a partnership slash, I mean, owns Whole Foods. So they can literally, you can scan Whole Foods products with their smart oven and cook it

in your Amazon Smart Oven. Just like, oh my gosh. I feel for these oven people. I mean, first of all, I mean, that's, you're very kind. I know. You always are like questioning why I feel for that. Well, I mean, it's like they're smart. It's hard to be like, man, I wish your company, like everyone sees the same goal you do.

Like they obviously see a different world than I think a lot of folks. But you said this to me yesterday, right? They're the ones who prove the market. They take all the risk. They build the products. They figure out what people actually want. And then Amazon gets to come in with a much cheaper version, sell it for nothing, and integrate it into its supply chain where they actually make all the money and destroy their companies.

And promote it on Amazon. So like when you, when you, when you. I think you talked to a bunch of other oven companies, right? What's their vibe around this stuff? Well, this is the really tragic thing is I really want an oven company to just come straight on and be like, yeah, we're screwed. But instead, they're like, well, you know, this just proves the market. We're so excited for people to see that smart ovens are great. And it's like, bro, that's not going to happen.

Or it's going to happen. It's going to happen with Amazon Smart Oven. What are you talking about? You have to rely on Facebook ads. Amazon owns Amazon. Every time you get one of those quotes, you need to reply with like the exact quotes from Ed Colligan at Palm and Jim Basilio at Blackberry when the iPhone came out. And they're like, this is great for us. Yeah.

We love it. Exactly. And so that's like the smart oven stuff. But then Amazon introduced these eyeglasses that don't have a display or anything. So they're not AR, but they have microphone speaker in the arm. so you can talk to Alexa. Amazon is a main investor, and they introduced a ring called The Loop. Amazon is a main investor in this company, North, which creates Focles, which do have a display,

but they also have Alexa integrated, their smart glasses, and the ring that goes with the focal's glasses is called the Loop. I couldn't believe this. It was blatant, and the even crazier thing, and Nelai knows this, is, so I tweeted about this, I was like, man, that's blatant. Like, that's wild. And other tech reporters were like, yeah, wow, like poor Focles. The Focles people got mad at me.

What? For tweeting this. Yes, it was insane. Wait, why would they get mad at you? They were just like this, they were saying that retail has existed for centuries. And retailers have always created white label products and it's just competition. And I was like, do you have like Stockholm syndrome? What is going on?

No, they have, please give us more money because we're dying syndrome and they want Amazon to continue to invest in them so they can't be bitchy, right? I guess, but the thing is they don't even, the thing with Focles is they can't even be sold on Amazon because they need to do custom fittings. And maybe there's a world in which they could, you know, do it, but they don't do it right now. And so it's like, yeah, people's introduction glasses that have Alexa in it are going to be Amazon's own glasses. they're not going to be like, oh, maybe I should buy the $700 smart glasses from this company that requires me to take a scan of my face to buy them. Yeah. And it also doesn't integrate with any of these platforms directly, right?

I mean, that's like the problem with focal. Yeah. But so, I mean, I get it, right? Like, if, I don't know, if you got, like, punched in the face and then someone was like, man, you've got a black eye, like over and over again, you'd like, stop talking about a black eye. Like, I'll be fine. That's like, that was the, like, reaction that I felt.

Like, they were mad at Ashley for pointing out that they had just been stabbed. Like, and it's like, you're, you're definitely wrong at the wrong person, but I kind of get it. Like, you're probably having this a moment where you're like, well, I guess our company's over because our main investor just Sherlock does. But here's the thing. Like, these glasses aren't coming out, you know? Like, first of all, they look ridiculous. I mean, yes, but they look less ridiculous than other smart glasses. Sure, but they don't, they, I mean, we have a photo of Dan on the website where he's so mad about that photo.

I wouldn't say it looks cool. I mean, like, Ashley has, like Ashley, you have cool glasses. I would say probably the number one sort of like reader, listener question you get is where'd you get your glasses? And you refuse to tell people. I will never tell them. Oh, that's great. I tweeted it to one person, but that's it. Oh, you did?

Years ago and I'm going to delete the tweets. I know I can find it. I see. But like, no one in the world would see these glasses and be like, where'd you get this glasses? They'd be like, yes, you bought glasses. off the rack at Walgreens. That's what happened there. But they're also, they don't have a price. We don't know when they're coming out. They seem like a research project. And they're invite only, aren't they? Yeah, because they're day one. Right. And it's the same with the ring.

Yeah. The ring man, it sounds real bad. It sounds super tini. And it's kind of cute to like whisper into your palm and then like hold it up to your ear. Like it's a sort of thing that you'll do a couple times and enjoy. And like, if I were like, I don't know, nine, I think that would be the coolest thing that I've got a robot on my figure that I can whisper secrets to and it can talk back to me. But in terms of like a practical useful thing, or... Well, so I think this is like the main problem with all the Selexa stuff. And I read a lot of, you know, coverage of the event yesterday. Got a sense of it. And, you know, like, there's the like, ooh, big tech is after you thing that you can just apply to Amazon. We started talking about it

in that sense, right? Like, there are real privacy concerns and there's that there's a mismatch with their ambition. Like, yep, there's stuff to talk about. Yep. But, like, there's nothing scary about these glasses to me. There's nothing scary about this ring to me. There's nothing scary about the Echo Auto to me or, like, any other places they want to put Alexa stuff, because Alexa just, like, isn't that useful, right?

I mean, it is just microphones everywhere, though. Yeah, but, like, who's going to buy this ring? It can't do anything. What do you want it to do? I have, I do not see a use for Alexa beyond, setting timers and asking for music. Right. It just doesn't do very much else.

Like unit conversions. You're wrong. It does a ton of shit that just very few people use or you don't use. So like it's very good at like lists and to do's. You can set reminders. You can like send messages to family members. You can in fact get your calendar on to it. You can send messages to other Alexa users.

So like it does a bunch of stuff. But all of that is invisible. are just like buried in their relatively crappy app that they still haven't made like a must open thing. And I'm not saying that I'm not defending it. I actually don't use any of that stuff either. But like it's there. And I think Amazon's goal here is to figure out a way to get Alexa. Like we say Alexa has to get out of the kitchen.

Now we say that Alexa has to get out of like the timer zone. Right. It needs to do more stuff or make people aware, willing to try the other stuff that it does. the problem is to get anybody to do that extra stuff with Alexa you have to like configure it whereas with Siri or Google Assistant it's just there it's already plugged into all your accounts and it just already knows all the stuff because it's on your phone yeah and like Siri has the same problem and it's it has all those advantages and Apple didn't take advantage of them right right but it even even if it's sort of like

not very useful state I don't see a lot of people clamoring to be like I love using Siri to add something to my calendar because it can do it. And it's built in. And it actually works. And I've done it several times. It's useful. But it's not like the killer app for Siri. And I just don't see another killer app for Alexa.

It has all of these ability. It's like Microsoft Word. Right? Like Microsoft Word has every feature that anybody could ever want. And they might all be useful to one person. But none of them is actually a killer app aside from you can type into it. Right. And Alexa, the killer app, is setting, I mean, the reason they put out the clock was there like a billion people ask for the time every day. Right. Like, okay. Now we just like glued a clock onto the front of it. And now they're going to stop. Like that's going to, people are going to stop asking Alexa for the time. Right. They just like put it on the front. Or the echo show. The reason I'm in the Google ecosystem is because Google Photos and the Google Home Hub are a great combo. They keep making echo shows and they haven't spent any time working on a Amazon photos. And so it just seems like they, they're assuming that you're going to find all of the

features of Microsoft work without doing any of the work to make those features actually important to you. Does it make any sense? And I just, I see all these other form factors. And we're going to talk about Oculus in a minute, which is like another whole set of form factors and use cases and how can we get people to be into it. And I feel like Amazon is just assuming the dominance. And when I read the other coverage, I feel like people assume Amazon's dominance without pointing out the fact that many of these products don't think that without understanding the fact that many of these products don't like sell themselves. Like I couldn't tell you why to put Alexa on your finger. I mean, this kind of, I feel like this kind of just speaks to the fact that like Amazon has these manufacturing connections.

It's not hard for them to just grab the eyeglasses, do a little development work. They have the people on it to do that work. They have the factories. They can build the hardware. It speaks to kind of this idea that you do need to have a valuable software experience behind it. Like, Google Assistant is well built down. They have software down. It seems like the hardware here is actually the easy part,

and that's why these indie creators are like, well, we're going to build a better experience for people, and they'll come for the brand. And it's like, well, maybe, but Amazon also controls the distribution. So you're kind of... Also worth noting that Amazon did not actually copy the North glasses also. Like, these aren't augmented reality glasses in the sense

that virtually anybody except Bose whose glasses are cool would count them as their audio only. So, like, they haven't even reached parity there. This is just like, where can we put Bluetooth headsets? Is it in your glasses? Is it on your hands? Is it in your ears? Like, right, where, I understand that.

I just think, like, if North had a huge success with Focal, it seems obvious that Amazon would have made the thing an AR display, right? But they've had a medium sort of, like, they're not dead yet success, which for an indie hardware startup is a lot. But they're not, like, market change. changing. And so Amazon, I think, can just be like, here's this project. We're going to get, we're going to get an amount of attention that is not correlated with, like, the fact of the product actually existing. But it's much more attention than you have gotten for your product

that actually exists that you're shipping, that you're working on that is your business. And that disparity is just going to increase when they actually ship the thing. And that, that to me is like the big question is it's not even useful. I couldn't tell you why you want to talk to Alexa outside of your home. Because you do have your phone with you. You probably have a watch on your wrist that is going to set timers and play music. Why do you need to talk to Alexa outside of your home?

Every time Dan reviews an Alexa product for the car, right, he just did Echo Auto. He's like, this isn't the thing you want. When GM announced that Alexa's coming to his cars next year, like his entry in a live blog was, people are going to be disappointed by this. And Nat reviewed a Ford Fusion like two years ago that has Alexa and she's like why right like that's the problem with

Alexa is it doesn't have the connection it can't send a text message right like that's the thing you want to do the most is like text Ashley whatever why'd you push that button season four approved right like send that text let's go but like you can't do that with Alexa so like where is that where is that extension and they didn't talk about it at all yeah I think that the idea in their head is that if they can get you to talk to Alexa instead of pulling out your phone like even twice a day that they win, that they just need to get you to start using Alexa just a little bit more in lieu of using your phone. And that's why they want to put it on your face or on a ring or in your ears because it's not that it's better than your phone. They want, they just, they want you to not have

to use your phone to like check the weather, right? Or, you know, do one other thing. Send a message via the Alexa messaging app. It's a text messaging. If they can just get that to happen a couple of times, then they can get that shift that happens and you walk out the front door. of your house and you stop talking to Alexa to change. Like it's incremental for them, I think. That makes sense. All right, let's run through all the other stuff and then take a break and back to Oculus. So they're

simplifying device set up with a new program called Certified for Humans, which is very funny. Yeah. Because it implies that they have non-human customers. Yeah. We've been asking companies to like have a normal humans in their like product loop for a long time now or like a normal humans in their like privacy loop for a long time now.

Just have somebody there that's like, yo, this is dumb. Like, and they, you know, cycle them through. That's their plan as they have a panel of regular humans. That's funny. I don't know. Fine. What's the EchoFlex? The EchoFlex is a tiny, a square little box that you plug directly into your wall outlet that has Alexa on it. And it's so small and it does not sound good. It has a USB port, USB A port on the bottom so you can plug like accessories into it, like a nightlight or a motion sensor or something. It's very, very, very utilitarian. I think the idea here is like you want to put an Alexa dot in your room, but you don't want to have to buy a mount or deal with the cable or whatever. So you just plug this thing into the wall and there you go. But it's not do not use it to listen to anything. Do not use it for anything other than like you want a microphone in this room to continue to talk to Alexa.

I mean, this goes back to a conversation we're having on ambient computing for years. Like where do the mics and speakers go? And this is just more places to put mics. Although power outlets are not usually in convenient places for microphones. Yeah. I don't know. We'll see. I think it's like for the hallway or like the laundry room, you know. Yeah, but isn't that like, aren't we getting to slightly terrifying situations?

Like, you need one in the hallway? Like, what are you doing in the hallway that you're there for so long that you can't wait five seconds to talk to Alexa in the next room? Sometimes the hallway is a calming place to be. It's like confined space. It helps, you know, reduce your stress. Well, the flip side of it, let's say Amazon made an iPhone-like device. but you had to buy one of them for every seven feet of your home to interact with it because it just doesn't come with you.

I mean, I guess it makes sense why maybe they'd be interested in something like glasses. Yeah, I mean, I think it makes sense that they're trying to figure out what other form factors to put the microphones in. But this one, we'll see. It just might maybe it's just like me.

Like the power outlets in my house are all like at floor level behind furniture. It's not where you'd like to see the echo glow. Yeah. I don't know, man. It's a spherical, bulbous light. So it's just a light? Yeah. Does it have microphones?

I don't think so. It's just a light, and, you know, kids will love it, is their whole pitch. Because kids love lights? Yeah. What does it do? You say, like, Alexa, make glow be a different color, right? Yeah, or you can... Is that the whole thing?

You can boop it, and it'll change colors when you boop it. And it'll also do, like, dance parties. So if you, like, you know, it's just, it's a colored light in your room. Like, how many, like, random different... hue lights just have different colors on them. It's that, but it's like something for your room. It's a nightlight. This is one of those things where you buy it and your kid falls in love with it in two years from now.

Like, Alexa, like, Amazon stops supporting it. And you have to, like, sit your child down and be like, I'm very sorry. The Echo Glow has gone to the API graveyard in the sky. Uh-huh. It'll be very happy. There's a farm there. Like, it's just, right? I mean, this is a thing that only exists because of a service.

I don't know. Samuel L. Jackson. What's the story there? You can get a Samuel L. Jackson voice. I don't think we actually heard it during the presentation. It was very unclear if we were just hearing a commercial or the actual version of his voice. They're using they're doing the thing that Siri does where they say that Alexa sounds better because they're using neural nets to make the voice happen instead of voice snippets or whatever. And they're

like, well, if we can do that, then we can imitate celebrity voices with their permission because you've got to say that. That's key. Yeah. So it's a Samuel Jackson deep fake. Yeah, that you have to pay 99 cents for. Which is, I'm old. Back in the day when you had to buy like TomTom or like Garmin GPS units, you could you could buy voice packs from them for the GPS units. And this is just that all over again. I'm into it. Do you think the celebrities have voice assistant non-competes?

Oh my God. 100%. Like John Legend is Google Assistant. Yeah. Yeah. And he's probably all mad. He's like, you didn't tell me this was coming. I'm just waiting for this to get roped into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like everything is.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is like the next prime video deal. It's like you buy, you buy like a phase six MCU movie and it comes with a voice pack for your Alexa. Yeah. If you buy it from prime, you can see it coming. It's all happening. Dang. Okay, we got to find out about these non-competes.

You got to get in there. You got to start calling some Hollywood agents. We need to find out about the non-competes. You got to see if John Legend's agent got like an angry text message. Like, what the, what that, bro? Like, I had to sit there recording for six hours and they're just doing a deep fake for Sam. That'd be amazing, actually, if John Legend was mad about his recording time. Okay, here's one.

Ashley, you have covered this a little bit. You actually did, I think, a live, why'd you push that button at CES, kind of related to this, where they had please mode before. Oh, yeah. You have to say please. It's for kids to help them learn to be nice. You have to be nice to the assistants. It seems like Amazon's also going in the other direction now where they have this frustration mode, where they have. frustration mode where they can detect if you're mad and Alexa will recover. All of that seems

very fraught to me. It's terrifying to me. I don't want Alexa to know that I'm angry. I don't want Alexa to have ideas about my emotions. I like to operate, you know, the robot doesn't need to know about me. I also don't want the robot to apologize to me. I don't want the robot to guilt me. Yeah. You don't need any of this. Right. Like when the robot starts to de-escalate you, you're like, This is too much, right? Like, there's an element to this where I get it. Like, you know, if you just hit zero a bunch of times on a phone tree, it's like, okay, here's a person. But, like, the reason that's effective for me anyway is, like, the person will know what I want.

It'll be, like, better. Not that it's going to calm me down and then, like, play the wrong song anyway, which seems like what that demo was. I mean, this was freaky because I just saw Ad Astra, and this is not a spoiler. But in Ad Astra, the new Brad Pitt movie, he does this. this psychological evaluation to an AI basically and it's analyzing his voice to determine his

mental health and I'm like, too soon Amazon, just saw that movie and now you're telling me Alexa literally is analyzing my emotions and catering its responses to me. Oh and it also runs a health clerk clinic now so that's great. Yeah, exactly. Well, it has a big partner

with Berkshire Hathaway to do health services. There was reports that Alexa can now detect like sadness and frustrations a while ago. It is unclear if this is related to that or whether it just knows that you're saying the same thing over and over again. I think we probably have to dive into how it works. But it is, we're at the point now where, A, and I think this is actually really weird in Amazon's part, and they should stop doing it. Amazon, specifically Dave Limp, who runs the whole program there, insistently genders Alexa.

Alexa is a she in Amazon's world. Over and over and over again, which is super weird because it's a robot, and you should be able to change the voice if you want. You can make it Samuel L. Jackson. Is Alexa a she when it's Samuel L. Jackson's voice? Like, they didn't think it through, but they insistently gender Alexa. And now Alexa can tell when you're mad and try to de-escalate you, which in the world, like, in the world of complicated feelings about relationships between the genders, like, that is like right at the center of it. And I don't think they've thought through all of that and the way that Amazon tends to be pretty bad at thinking through all of that. Yeah. And I don't use Alexa. So do.

Do they give you different, can you use a male voice with Alexa or is it standard that one sort of female sounding voice? Well, it's that one in Samuel L. Jackson. Okay, got it. Yeah, because when we interviewed Google at CES, they made a point to say, you know, we have various options, different accents, things like that. They don't gender the Google assistant. Well, so, yeah, Siri has different voices.

I think Google doesn't even assign names to the voices. They didn't do colors, I think it is. It's colors. And look, I get it. It's like this is as fraught of a thing as, as there can be. But it's a robot and you're making choices about it. And Amazon, I think, alone of the major companies is insistently gendering this robot. They are insistent that it's a she. And then it's weird because they're going to run into basically the politics of the moment without

even, I don't, they don't want to, right? You're a company at Amazon scale. You have no desire to like wait into those waters. But because they made that choice, they have no, they just have to. I mean, I don't think people are debating it though. I mean, the whole discussion around female sounding voices happened when all these assistants were coming out. People were upset. And now Amazon's like, yep, we're going with she. Thanks for your thoughts. Like, we're going with it. Cool though. I don't know. I just, I genuinely resent this all so much not because of the gendered aspect, but because it basically insists that I should never think of a computer as a tool that I can use again. It should be a thing that, like, I am appealing to.

Like, I hate voice assistants and I can't figure out a way that I would not hate them because they're all based on this idea. Like this idea that I am supposed to be. like having a conversation with a human and not using a thing. Yeah, that came up at CS when you interviewed them was like whether you think Alexa is a tool or not and how you, or sort of a companion and voice assistance going in the future. Yeah, you know, the new, they're running ads, Amazon. And it's like the kid goes to the grandfather's house and plays a song the grandfather likes and then the grandfather has the relationship with the echo and the kid comes back and

the grandfather's like doing a bunch of echo stuff. And it's like, yeah, like that's really sweet. I understand why it's so appealing. But it's also like, your grandfather's alone most, like, what you're telling us is like, this old person has no choice. But to like be friends with a robot. Like there's a dark side to that entire situation where it's like we're subbing in human companionship for basically an if then table of commands. Which brings me to Narc Mode. Go ahead.

Oh, my God. They go to this long thing of like my teenagers will talk to me, their noses in their phone, I really want to have a relationship by a teenager, but I can't. And the solution for that is I can talk to my teenager even less because Alexa now will plug into the school's homework system and I can find out my kids' grades directly from Alexa. That was crazy. I also love the idea that these textbook companies are going to hire developers to build them Alexa skills.

I mean, they absolutely will. Are you kidding me? I'm here a textbook company and you have like, like some weird Amazon revenue stream coming. Like, yep, I'm in. Whatever you want. Evolution, like, take it or leave it, as long as they get that Amazon money. And they're going to use it as a selling point to the schools.

I hate the whole school selling stuff that all these companies do. It makes me sad. I was talking to Thomas Ricker as teenagers. And he's like, this is great. This is like what I've always wanted. Wait, can you not check your children's grades already? No, you could fake them. Like, kids, like, you know, in my day, you'd like, you'd get a bee and you'd like,

you know, like just tweak it a little bit to make it. Yeah, but now you know really literally only your kid brings home a piece of paper or Amazon? I think you have online login. Right? Deeter, it's a, you know, Deeter's like, portal.

There's a whole, there's a whole TikTok meme of kids going to their grades page, clicking inspect element, changing the grade, and then having their parents come in the room and seeing C, look at my grades. Deeter, I feel like I want to very strongly pivot this to why do you know about TikTok?

Talk memes about grade-changing. You know what? We've got to raise a new generation of extremely competent children to run all these gadgets. So now they need to jail break their Alexis to fake the grades. And I think that's a good thing. So they unplug the Alexa and then they learn to mimic its voice. Yes. And then when you ask, they tell you.

There you go. Samuel L. Jackson is hiding under your child's bed. He got an A. That's what you want. Back in my day in the back pages of popular. science, there's an ad for learn how to throw your voice and fool the bullies. I mean, you could hire Samuel L. Jackson on cameo. See, that's what I'm saying.

First of all, there are two, there's three things that need to happen here. First, everyone needs to stop saying back in my day. Like, we're wizards. I don't know what's happening there. Two. I need a pristine recording of Samuel L. Jackson saying A plus. Two, we have to stop helping Tina. major's fake their grades, which is what is currently happening.

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you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back. You know what I forgot to mention? There was this moment in the scrum.

Like, Teeter described, there's a media scrum at for all these events. Google always does it. We're like, it's over. All the reporters go in a room. The executives, like, wandered to that room. look terrified, people stand in circles around the executives, they scream questions at them.

That happened, right? So, yeah, I mean, we were all hanging out, talking to the other execs, and then Jeff Bezos walks in the room. And I've been in lots of these, like, crowd around the CEO moments. And so I didn't, like, immediately like, oh, I'm going to follow him and do it. I was like, I'm going to mose you up in a minute. Because usually, like, they, like, have the CEO walk around the room and you get a chance. And I didn't.

And so there was a scrum around him, and he ended up, like, answering real questions. Not, like, great. But he did have some okay answers to some things. And he said that he's interested in coming up with face recognition legislation that Amazon wants to participate in that. A couple other things. And then, you know, he bailed. So he like rolled in, talked to some journalists for a while and bailed and talked about face recognition. I saw a few people being surprised or like scandalized by the fact that Amazon is going to write some ideas about facial recognition policy.

But that's what companies do. Yeah, that's like all legislation. But it should usually be scary when companies do it. Yeah, I don't know. Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, just wrote an entire book that's like ideas about regulation. He's on a media tour. Everyone's like happy to talk to him. Jeff Bezos is like, we wrote some draft ideas about, like, that's what the industry does.

Yeah. Like it's not good or bad. It's just like a thing that keeps happening. What you want is a government that like takes those ideas and then like cares about people and doesn't just do what the companies want. that's up for grabs probably but the idea that Amazon is like has some ideas about what facial recognition regulation should look like

to me is just not surprising at all like I don't know a bunch of like ex-Obama staffers work for Amazon why do you think they hired them just because they want to like get access to Obama like Barry get over here no it's the right laws it's like advocate for them anyway

that's the end of Amazon Addie yes literally during the Amazon event Facebook is holding an Oculus event where they announced a whole bunch of stuff, including a virtual world where no one has legs,

which seems very odd. I can explain that. Figuratively walk us through. This was, by the way, just a massive power move because Oculus, Facebook announces Oculus Connect like months in advance. And then Amazon just like, yeah, no, we'll just upstage you completely.

On the other hand, it made everything at Oculus seem much less creepy. So. So Oculus, right now, its big product is the Oculus Quest, which it's released earlier this year. It's basically Oculus just indicated it is all in on that now. Like they made the now Oculus Quest, you can plug it in with a USB 3 cable to your computer if you have a gaming PC and it'll play Rift games. So, quote, it is basically a Rift now. So there's not a great reason to buy a Rift in a lot of cases potentially.

they added an update so that it's inside-out cameras will do hand tracking. So now you also have this whole new way to interact with it. And they are porting some Oculus Go. Oculus Go is their cheap sort of lower-end headset. They're porting some games and apps to the quest, and they'll give you free upgrades, clearly sort of trying to nudge people onto the quest. So VR-wise, also Michael Abrash,

who is their chief scientist who usually comes on stage and is like, in 10 years, We're going to have some crazy VR world. He was like, yeah, for the foreseeable future, the Oculus Quest generation is what we're looking at. We're going to have something in the future. It's going to be a while. But right now, that's where we're looking, like what we're doing. So in some ways, that was a little bit of anticlimactic, but it was also fairly practical.

And then they said a little bit about AR. And that was much vaguer. And we know Facebook is working on it. But it's still fairly nebulous. I mean, Zuckerberg, I think, sat down with CNET to talk about why VR is. is the road to AR. That's the argument, right? That first people are going to do VR and then we'll get to AR in the end, and we'll

build our own glasses. But that's very different than what basically every other company most particularly Apple is doing, which is very much AR first. Well, and Facebook is also doing AR is the weird thing. Like Facebook Spark AR is on phones. Portal has AR aspects. Portal seems in a lot of ways really perfectly poised to take advantage of AR. filters like face filters are a huge thing and that's AR so they're kind of doing it it's just that

most other companies don't have the big flashy VR space that they can also talk about I mean Quest is great like every time I put on a Quest I'm like this is great this is the thing that five years ago when we saw the first Rift we're like this is where it's going to go is that enough of a platform for them to keep building on is that going to do enough things it's really hard for me because I think Quest is just really too heavy I think that it's a really fantastic product in so many ways. And then every time I try to put it on, I just feel like a hypocrite because it's just like uncomfortable and I don't enjoy being in it a lot of the time. But if you do not feel that way, which clearly many people do not, then yeah, I think it has

really fantastic potential. Like it does the stuff that people wanted it to do. It is extremely easy to use. It's like pretty well designed. And they keep announcing stuff for it. They got a second episode of the genuinely very good Star Wars game, Vader Immortal, which is like a lightsaber game, the thing everybody wanted. They have 360 degree beat saber with Panic at the disco, I believe, was the new pack that they introduced. So they have like Imagine Dragons now on Beat Sabre,

and they're going to do like this weird 360 mode. They're really pushing out stuff that you'd want to do on Quest. Is any of it taking? Do you see the pickup around Quest that, sort of everyone assumed would happen? It's really hard to tell. Facebook is, like, their line is people are buying them as fast as we're making them, which unfortunately does not really give us numbers.

We make one a day. It certainly seems like people are enthusiastic about it. And there was a little bit of disappointment when Facebook initially announced the new Rift, that it was the Rift S, that it was just not very exciting. But I've mostly just seen people be excited about, like, the Quest is good. and interesting. And hand tracking, while it is not necessarily a massive game changer, for one thing kind of makes it easier to just deal with VR casually.

You can just put something on. You don't have to fumble for your controllers. If all you want to do is tap a few things, then it makes it very, very simple. So it's like that kind of update that's good and interesting. Well, it's interesting because before all this, it was last week, basically, they announced they were buying Control Labs, which is the sort of like neural interface wristband thing. Yes, control labs is really fantastic and fascinating. So it is described as a mind control thing that depends a lot on what your definition of a mind is.

That is the most verge-cast thing that anyone has ever said, and I'm super excited to keep going. So it's a wristband that you put on, and it measures basically these very fine sort of neural impulses from your arm. And CEO of Control Labs has a really great line that is basically just anything that says it's going to plug into your arm. your mind, it should just be plugging into your arms because those are like the interface for your mind. It is incredibly dumb to say that you should be like trying to go in and plug something in the same way that you wouldn't like say that it was more direct and like efficient to like code in the absolute lowest level coding language. Like no, that's not how you want to use computers or your brain. So he's very clear on the idea that this is a brain interface because it is doing

things that are basically such fine motions that you're just like moving your fingers to a nearly imperceptible, like a literally imperceptible degree. You're just firing neurons in your arm. And so that's going to be the next interface. So you wear the wristband on your wrist, and then you imagine typing, and then typing happens. That is, so I've tried it. I tried an early version last year. That's kind of what it is. The way that I did it is that you start off actually moving your hands and like you come up with a mode of like, here's how I'm controlling a thing. and then you just imagine it to an extent. Like you, the way that now when I type, I don't think like I am moving my fingers.

It's just a thing that naturally happens. Like, I think a word and it types. It's like a very weird extreme version of that principle. So, you know, okay. Elon Musk likes to talk about how, like, typing, like, it's a very low bandwidth thing. We have high bandwidth for input, but very crappy bandwidth for output, right? and the thing to know about your brain is it's very, very plastic. It can, like, change the way that it operates and remap what the neurons do all the time.

So you get this thing on your wrist and you imagine typing, sure, but your brain can adapt to anything. So, like, what you should actually be thinking about is how many signals, like, what is the bandwidth of output of the neurons running to your hand to manipulate your fingers? And it turns out it's pretty broad, pretty big. And so you can do other stuff with it beyond, like, one-to-one controls. So you could map, you know, bending the first knuckle in your pinky finger to turn right and then map, you know, the first knuckle in your index finger to, like, increase the thruster. And, like, you just, you learn the controls over time and it becomes very intuitive because your brain is very plastic and you can figure it out.

And at the end of a day of training, you can fly a fighter jet with your mind. This is, first of all, Deeter, I'll do disclosure for you. Yeah. Dieter's wife works for Oculus Division of Facebook. God damn it. Sorry, honey. I forgot. I was really into this company.

So excited. Addie actually got to try it. And now Facebook bought them. And so now I have to disclose on this company too. Damn it. Look, it's the modern era, right? It's like one day we're going to disclose that Google owns us all or something.

It's being great. Disclosure Comcast owns NBC Universal, which is the best for inbox media. We'll just keep doing it. It's going to be awesome. I love it. Monoplies are great. But like what you're saying is like when my people, parents let me play video games because they're like his hand eye coordination will get better it did it didn't

i'm just going to be honest with everybody it didn't it didn't help but i do think it's really interesting for like a huge variety of applications so addy facebook put out the like the promo video for horizon which is their virtual world which i really want to talk about where nobody has legs apparently and the promo video is like it cuts back and forth between the VR world and sort of like the like, IRL world. And everybody in IRL world

is like wearing a headset and waving controllers around. And that to me seemed like the silliest thing. Like, A,

why are you marketing it this way? Because you're just reinforcing that you're going to look silly and the people around you are going to be confused. But B,

like, it would be great if you were just still and like it was reading what you wanted to do in VR. Because that would be, it would make the barrier or entry much lower. Can you actually imagine a video in which it cuts between people doing all this cool, fun stuff in a virtual world and then you cut back and they're just sitting stock still like they're stuck in the Matrix?

Is that the dream? Yeah, but you don't want to see it. That's fair. What did you think of that Horizon video? I thought it was very strange. I know people had a huge variety of reactions to it. So first of all, the foot thing. It's because you don't actually, like you can map your hands in virtual reality very well.

If you are trying to walk in VR, you either have to strap actual tracking devices to your feet to track where your feet are going. Or you have to sort of extrapolate it. So then if you walk sideways, you do this bizarre thing where like your body twists and your legs kind of do this sideways shuffle. And if you teleport, then what do your feet do? Like, feet are really wonky and look really weird. And that's why nobody has them because we don't actually track them. Like, feel it weird enough in real life. So it actually, I've tried virtual worlds like Lyndon Labs.

VR Second Life originally had, like, it had legs. And it was just the weirdest thing trying to watch your legs move while you, like, moved with a controller. Yeah. Okay. I think that's fair. But it's, it makes the dystopianness of this particular promo video even more dystopian. Right.

And if the, if the claim is that if they had legs, it would look weird, they didn't solve the not looking weird problem. It would look weird. They're definitely trying to reset the baseline. You're like, this is fine. Man, these avatars are the legs. That would be crazy. Like, that's a goal.

But Eddie, what do you think? It's called Horizon. It's called Horizon. And it looks a lot like there are several, like, sort of shared VR world. You go in there and have fun and meet new people places. LindenLat has SANSAR, which is both VR and non-V-R. There's a company called Rec Room that looks very similar to Horizon. High Fidelity is the former CEO of Linden Lab, which is its own like you can create your own world kind of place.

There are a lot of companies working in this space, and so it's going to be interesting to see if Facebook brings something new to the table here. and also if Facebook being Facebook causes problems, like because it just has massive scale, it has some system where it's going to try to onboard people with these like guides that will set the tone, but not actually moderate because it's launching in this closed beta. Like, it could turn out really weird. Do you think the typical scenario is like I'm in this space

hanging out with a few of my very close friends or am I like venturing out into like places with strangers? Because I feel like I've had very different experiences in VR where it's like, oh, I'm hanging out with my friend. It's like we're together and this is the best thing in the world. Or like, oh, there's seven strangers here and I'm terrified of all of them because they could throw a virtual ball at my face. And it's just like high school. So Facebook's earlier stuff was, which it is now shutting down, which is like spaces was all about you want to go in with a couple of friends and hang out. They are now trying to open this up into a, you will meet new people through this the way you would by like going into the real world.

So maybe you'll hang out with friends, but there will be people who like you want to go in and do some kind of like they have these games. You want to go compete with. They look, we have a lot more ways of dealing with weird harassment stuff than we used to. Like the sort of personal space bubble idea and like making it easy to block people like making it hard. making it hard for people to walk up and just grab you that's gotten much more codified and robust. So I buy that they have much better ways to stop you from feeling harassed in VR. It's still just not clear to me whether they're going to be able to get a world that's large enough to be interesting without being sort of generic or splintering. I'm just not sure how they square the fact that VR is very small with like Facebook trying to build just massive scale things.

And so we haven't really talked about Facebook as Facebook in this part of the conversation. Right? With Amazon, we're like the context is Amazon and all of its things. This is like one of the few times we've talked about an entire set of Facebook products without noting, I would say, the realm of Facebook things that are happening every day. But do you buy that they can manage a space like this, that their history and sort of mismanaging another space like this won't bleed over into Horizon or anything else they try to do? It's weird because for a long time, like, it's easy to ignore this stuff because to a large extent Oculus just doesn't behave like anything else in Facebook. Like Oculus releases games, like normal VR versions of, but like AAA old-fashioned single-player games. That's a thing that just they've done successfully that Facebook has never done. Like, I think that they could genuinely hire somebody to run like a small VR space that would be really interesting.

It would not get them to the massive kind of scale that they want with like literally any other product. So, you know, what's really interesting is in the Horizon video, there's a mention of you can build your own spaces where you can do your own things inside Horizon, which, I mean, it sounds like coding. Like you're going to code your own environment where your own kinds of things can happen in there. Is that actually possible or is that just you can assemble a bunch of building blocks of what we already approved you to do? Because if you can write code and create your own space, this thing has infinite potential. Right. Like anything, it's a platform that anyone can build on. Or if it's just like Grand Theft Auto Online where like someone just decided they're a driving instructor now.

Right. And like that's what they're doing. like that's a much more constrained kind of world. By the way, the reason I said driving structure and Grandin thought it was a great Polyon story about how someone who was playing as a driving instructor was actually a serial killer in the game and was like role-playing the whole time.

Everyone should read that story. It's amazing. But like is it like an infinite buildable platform or is it a world where people can kind of find edges of their own stuff? It's not really clear to me yet and it's not opened yet, but it sounds kind of like second life, which to some extent does,

like you, like there are people who made stuff for second life. They genuinely created it. They sell it. They have, like, there were whole little industries of people building goods for it. Or Sansar, you can sort of create your own spaces. But it's not quite codable. It seems like level editor-e. Yeah. But that's still much more open than just, hey, you can build your own rooms and maybe you can like buy our stuff for them. Or like you can decide the way that you like play the house rules of monopoly in this place. Yeah. I'm like, I'm really interested in it. And like I said, I think Quest is like the best product of its type. It doesn't even really have a competitor head up, does it? It doesn't. There's the Vive Cosmos, which does sort of maybe similar things. But there's not really another standalone pretty mid-range affordable, but still very good VR headset out there.

So you've been tracking VR this whole time. Is this, is the quest, is it going to be the thing they want it to be where all the rest of the platform builds around it? Or is, Is there another inflection point where someone else might be able to enter? I think that the Valve Index is interesting because it seems like it's, if you're not familiar, it's the very, very expensive valve headset that has really interesting controllers with, like, articulated fingers. I really love them. They used to be called the Knuckles controllers. I think that you could maybe have somebody like Valve who repositions, like, this is our headset

and we have a gigantic platform like steam with the genocels. gigantic selection of games, and maybe there's, like, a couple really popular things. Like, maybe we introduce, like, portal for VR. Like, I think that they could, somebody like Valve could probably undercut a lot on the sort of software front. Like, they could get everybody to use an Oculus headset, but plug it into a PC and use Steam, in theory. Yeah. But that doesn't, it's the idea that you're going to, like, everyone's going to play the Sims, and it's going to be that scale.

That seems like the Quest is going to get it, right? Yeah. I mean, the problem is that all of this is still happening at a scale that's small enough that you can't really extrapolate. I think a straight line out to D.R. is going to be this massive thing. Like, I think we're still in the territory where it could be gaming PC scale where, yes, that's a huge thing, but it's not like everyone has a gaming PC. Yeah, I just think like the quest is like one of those things where it's not cheap enough and it can do enough where they can put it in Best Buy and everyone can buy it for Christmas. Right. And that seems very powerful in a way that we have another story today that they killed the gear. VR. Effectively. And Carmack says we missed an opportunity. And it's like that was always the opportunity was just use your phone, but it never quite worked.

Yes. The Gear VR was weird and Carmack has spent a really long time complaining about it, basically. Because popping your phone into a thing, what he was saying today was basically like, look, if we had made a thing where you could just hold your phone up and it shrank and it shrank and became a VR headset, that would be amazing. As it turned out, we created this really fiddily awkward thing that you had to like pop your phone into and then also it drained your battery and like nobody really wanted to use it more than once or twice.

Like the quest, the way they moved was basically they want the ease of the, yeah, it's your phone, but it's a dedicated thing and it does not detract from the use of your phone. Well, and Caramek was talking a ton today. I just love John Carmack standing on a stage talking rapidly for an hour and a half. It's just one of my favorite things. It's just, it is my form of entertainment. And he says a lot of like straightforward, real hard truths. Like one of the hardest things is the fact that people had to pop their phone out of a case.

So it's like a multi-step thing. But like they've clearly tracked the, was it the retention rate? I don't know. How much people use their different products. And it is, it's clear that like far and away people use Quest more. Like the Quest has finally is like somehow over this magical hump of the setup. Because even with the Rift, you know, even if you use your. gaming PC all the time. Maybe you have to move a bunch of furniture or you've got some long

wires, you've got to find everything. You know, like Quest is finally over this hump of, it is so easy to use it that people will use it more than twice. Yes. Which, to be fair, like the Go was also, I should call it, full name is Oculus Go is better than the gear VR too. Like, it's stickier because all you have to do is keep it around and kind of charge it sometimes and put it on, unlike the whole popping your phone out and putting it in somewhere and draining its battery process. But, yeah, No, Quest, it does stuff, like does much more than the go. You can play a lot of stuff on it. And it's very, very easy to keep around and set up.

And it's software updates, but it does not software update to the awkward extent that PCs can. So, yeah, it's like the only pain point is the literal it being on your head. Well, I mean, that's a pretty big pain point. But clearly other people don't feel as much as me. Yeah. I have a weak forehead. That's, we're stopping there. Both of all of these Virchites I've been so far,

I've like just careened into craziness. Addie, your forehead's great. Thank you. Don't ever feel that way about yourself. We're going to take a break. We'll be back to try to take this episode of the Vergecast phone. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner,

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bastion of consistency. The thing I depend on, the only thing in these turbulent times that I can rely on is your segment, which is always called. 600% screen-to-body ratio. Oh, my God, this thing.

Oh, good. I think I know what it is. Good. Good. Okay. Okay. So shall be, me mix alpha.

is a phone where the screen, you know, you've seen like those Samsung phones where the screen goes off the edge. Well, what if you kept going? And you went all the way around to the back. And so basically the phone wraps around the edges on both sides. And then on the back, there's like a strip

that has like the, where the camera is. So they're calling it. And so you don't need like a front facing camera, obviously, because you just flip the phone around and you take selfies because there's screen there's screen everywhere. So the Zhao Mi Mix Alpha, and they're saying 180% screen to body ratio. And I've seen other phones like this, like they'll have a phone, they'll have a screen on like the back or something.

They'll call it like 120%. So what the math on this seems to be is that if you fully covered the front of your phone, that would be a 100% screen to body ratio. If anything on the other side of the phone is more percentage, so it's more than 100%, right? So what I've been thinking is that if you made a phone that was a cube and all six faces of the cube were fully screen, that would be 600% screen to body ratio.

And unless, I mean, it's semantic, like maybe a sphere is technically infinite, but like I don't know if you can beat a cube well if the front is 100% and the back is 100% what are the curved sides what percentage are those well see that's the thing I don't think they're counting that I think that's their big oversight here

my god can I just say I love this phone I know it's so beautiful it looks like a cassette it looks like cassette I love that the animation they're using which appealed to me immediately is of it charging and the whole thing turning green,

like the whole phone turning green while it charges, which I plug in my phone at night on my bedstand. This is not what I want to happen at all. It made me remember my very first laptop I ever got was a power book. And it had a glowing green light when it was charging. And the first night, I was so proud of my new laptop, like, oh, it's this gentle glow.

It's so beautiful. And then the next night is like, okay, that's a little breath. It breathed. They're like, it's like it's breathing. And it would like pulsing out. I love this phone and I want one. That's all I'm saying. It costs like $4,000.

It's like it's another concept product. But it's one of those things where, okay, we've like entered the silly season with screens. We can do anything we want with them. They can take any shape we want. I want this phone. Please send me one. That leads me to, I would say, the most infestine. of new screen-shaped devices yet to appear, the Galaxy Fold.

Yep. Deeter. The day you're listening to this today, the 27th, if you listen to it the first day the podcast goes out, you can go buy one. For $1,980. That's correct. And then from what I gather, it will still immediately break. So Brian Heeter over at TechCrunch, there was a flaw on his after like, you know,

less than a day or just over a day or whatever. Mine is fine, but I'm also terrified of it. that's what you want. That's what you want for your $2,000. Babying it a little bit too much. I also had to travel to Seattle for this Amazon event, so I haven't used it a ton yet. The process by which you buy one is you have to go into a retail store to pick it up. And it turns out this is optional, but they really want you to have this setup service

where someone walks you through all of the warnings. And there are like 50 of them. And then after all of that, if it breaks, you can get it replaced one. Not if it breaks. If it breaks, it's a warranty. But if there's, like, a thing you don't like out the screen, you like, you let your fingernail touch it or whatever. You can get it replaced once in the first year for $150. Sure.

This is like suffering for fashion, right? Yes. It's like, this is painful to wear, but I look amazing. I'm going to do it because this is the coolest phone that exists on the planet. You have a very different sense of fashion. I don't suffer for fashion, but there's a song by Of Money. Montreal called we suffer for fashion, so I assume somebody's doing it. It's suffering for fashion, but the fashion you're suffering for is a Samsung phone.

For a green bubble. For a green bubble. Oh, wow. Rough. That is super hard. Also, most suffering for fashion is like, I'm wearing these clothes and I'm uncomfortable if they look great. This is like, I'm holding this phone and I live in terror that will break at any second.

We used to live in awe and fear of our electronics. If there was a physical bug in it, like a moth, then we spent. days trying to find it poking through cables. This brings back our awe from the 20th century. Yes. I like it. Okay. I'm buying a galaxy phone. Screw this. Screw this memex that I really want. What you, I mean, look, all of us, we've all spent so much time thinking, like, we should use our phones less. We should be more mindful. A phone that at any moment could destroy itself. What better way to stop using your phone? Jeter, I want you to talk about iPad OS for five seconds, and we should wrap the show. It's 13.1, officially iPad OS 13.1. It's out.

I still think that Apple doesn't know what the metaphor is for the UI. It's a mix between a spatial metaphor and a time metaphor. So your phone is like a time metaphor. It's like most recently used is how you go through your apps. And your desktop, it's a spatial metaphor. This thing goes over here and this thing goes over there. And so you can orient yourself. But the iPad mixes time and space.

And, you know, unless you're Einstein, that's really hard to understand. What you want from an iPad, the future of computing, is to have. have no idea where you are 13.1 by the way. Buggy. Still buggy. Still buggy. Still buggy. I think we need to have a conversation, uh, maybe not with an audience. You know, I gave the phones like a really high score because I was like 13. 13. 13, 13 is buggy, but they tell me 131's coming. The phones are still buggy. Like I, I literally went to search for an app today and the phone was just stuck on the search screen. It would never go home until I restarted the phone today with 13.1. And iPad OS 13, it's 13.1.

effectively. Really good. Kind of buggy still. Oh, yeah. I think it's worse on the iPad than it is on the phone. Command tab, just like sometimes will just not work. It'll like leave that little like list of icons just up on the screen. While we were podcasting today, I had to reset the iPad because it got stuck. The keyboard stopped working and I couldn't get it to start working again. Yeah, it's just it's buggy. And this is why I didn't put out a review on day one of it being available. I just put out like here, the things I like here are the things that I hate because I wanted to see if the shipping product was buggy and it is. Yeah. But you can do now, you can plug in the flash drive.

Yeah. It's a whole thing. I did it. I mean, I did it like five times just to see if it would happen and it happened. It was great. Yeah. You know what does not work in iOS 131 at all, at all, is the fancy U1 location thing with AirDrop. Oh, really? I mean, like, they're like, it has a U1 ship. We got all excited about precise location and all that stuff. The first. first thing it's supposed to enable is like you point your phone at somebody else's phone and it there's a new UI and it pops up to the top of the air drop list in like a big circle. Yeah. So that circle when you like go to air drop is an arrow with like moving lines around a circle, right?

Okay. And so like you spin and like it's like a compass like the lines rotate, the circle rotates. And like the idea is you point the arrow at the phone you want and it like goes ding and like the person shows up. And I will tell you that Heimgartenberg and I sat in our office just waving phones at each other for like half an hour. We tried three different phones. I was doing like moves, you know, try to, nothing.

Does just does not work. And I've not seen anyone else say it works yet either. And that's wild to me that Apple said this feature will light up in 131 and it just, as far as I can tell, does not work. There's a whole UI for it, but it does nothing. I don't know. I'm thinking about how we will address the fact that we reviewed the phones based on Apple telling us that 13.1 would be fixed. it kind of, I would say it's more, it's better than

13-0, but it's still Yeah. How about how rough around the edges? Apple lies, question mark? Yeah, I bought an iPhone 11 pro. You did? Whoa. What color? What color? I got the green. Of course you did. It's back

ordered till late October, mid-October. Really? Wow. We bought ours from AT&T and they showed up like the next day. Yeah, that's the secret. Pissed. I'm like, you charge my credit card a thousand dollars and now I have to wait two weeks unreal but now I'm scared I didn't realize I was 13.1 sucks it's a it's a it's an adventure that you're gonna be I'm trying to hype you up now it's great it's fine it will make you reconsider uh your expectations

of what swiping should do um and what and what working means you know it's like a very philosophical experience no you can send emoji stickers to people yeah It's horrible. You're like, what does it mean for this app to be open? If I open it and it closes immediately and open again, was it open the whole time? Like, it's like that kind of experience. I mean, my screen literally right now turns black occasionally and I don't know if he'll turn back on. So I feel like I'm used to this experience.

The thing you're going to know, you have a success, the thing you're going to notice immediately, I've seen this happen to like three people now. The camera is literally so much better that you are going to use it. You're going to like, you're going to want to take photos when you should like shouldn't. just to like show people like look at you you like you look great and everyone's like why did you take a photo you know what sold me was your tweet about the night sky even though there's no stars in new york city so i'm a dumb ass but like i was like wow the camera really can do things that's cool and then i was like eff it i'm doing it that stuff is super fun like i don't know i think i did that

it was like 1130 or midnight and i was like outside i might have told everyone it was like a coke can it was like 100% of Canacors light. But like just like screwing with that and be like I took a photo of Saturn or Jupiter is wild fun. Google's, the Pixel 4 is supposed to have a dedicated astrophotography mode. I love that they're leaning into the fact

that people have had several beers and who are outside are suckers for taking photos of the stars. Like, yeah. Well, I'm excited to hear your thoughts on the iPhone. I think that's it. There's a one plus TV. It's only in India. It's an Android TV. They made a whole bunch of

promises about how it was going to be different. It definitely just looks like an Android TV to me with a motorized soundbar that comes out from the bottom and the worst remote in the world. And I will just say this. If you are making a television and you end up copying the Apple TV remote, you have failed. You have made a horrible decision. But we're going to try to get one when they come out here because I think they're eventually coming out here. And I do think the idea of a motorized soundbar appeals to me personally. So we're going to check it out. There were 80 Amazon products this week. Like, what do you want from us? Okay, we'll be back next week.

Ashley, Addy, thank you for joining us. Thank you. We'll be back again soon. We are, you might have noticed this show is, I would say it's the iOS 13.1 of podcasts. Like it's very good. It's a little rubber on the edges. It makes you reconsider the whole product.

But we are hiring an editorial director for podcasts at the verge. Make our show better. Make new shows, develop new pilots, a whole thing. Go to theverge.com slash podcast job. If you've made it this far, You are obviously interested in this job. Theverge.com slash podcast job. Check it out, apply.

We'd love to hear from you. We're also doing a general survey about podcasts to help inform that job. So go to the verge. com slash survey. We do this every so often. It is tremendously helpful to hear from our audience in this form. So go to the verge.com slash survey. Let us know what you think.

Go watch The Future of Music. It just wrapped up. It's Danny Deal series. Charlie XX was just on it. It's like it is the best thing about the future of music. It's called the Future of Music. But I love it. It's so good. It's on YouTube. Check that out. You can also listen to Recode Decode with Kara

Swisher. You can listen to Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway. Ashley and I are like secret Scott Galloway fans. Love him. We're going to get him on the interview show and you're going to do it with me. That's going to be, it's going to be nuts. So check that out. You can also listen to Recode Media of Peter Kafka. If you are a huge media nerd, you probably know that Vox Media merged with New York Media this week. Peter interviewed our CEO Jim Bancoff and the CEO of New York Media at Pam Wasserstein. It's a thing. Go listen. just listen to it. There it is. Can I pitch you an idea for a Verge magazine? Yes, we're doing print

magazines now. Tape a Blu-ray disc full of shareware to the front. I mean, if there's one audience the world, it would buy a magazine for that. It's our audience. That's what I'm saying. Done and done and you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at Future Paul. Dieter's at Backlon. Ashley, what's yours? Ashley, R. Carmen. Addy, what's yours? The Dexterityarchy. Oh yeah. That's a good one. It's one of my favorites because it's like supremacy of left-handed people, yeah? Supremacy of right-handed people. I am suffering under it as a left-handed person. Oh.

Well, I'm a left-handed person, so every time I type it in, I'm like, yeah, she gets me. Okay, tweet it else we want to hear from you. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll. Paul.