The Vergecast - Amazon’s Kindle Scribe, printer problems, and earbuds on a bike

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

Today on the flagship podcast of hardcopy peripherals: 02:27 - David Pierce and Alex Cranz chat with Dave Limp, SVP of devices and services at Amazon. Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is an E Ink tablet for reading and writing 24:04 - David also tries to answer a listener question about why it feels like printers haven't improved in years. Best Printer Buying Guide (Consumer Reports) 39:55 - Lastly, Becca Farsace tests out which earbuds sound the best when calling from a bike ride. Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II review: noise cancellation domination Apple AirPods Pro (second-gen) review: same look, better everything else Google Pixel Buds Pro review: the sweet sound of redemption Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Hard Copy Peripherals. I'm your friend David Pierce, and while I'm not doing anything interesting today, because it's been raining for like a week and there's nowhere to go. And so all I do now is sit here and try to get my hands on an iPhone 14 Pro Max. The phrase not available today at 12 nearest stores is starting to drive me truly, truly insane. Every day I check, every day it's not available. Anyway, fun show coming up today. We're going to talk a bunch more about the Kindlescribe, including with the executive in charge of it at Amazon.

And we're going to try to see where it fits into the broader E-Inc tablet market. We're also going to dig into the printer industry and try to figure out why it feels like printers haven't changed or improved in decades. And then we're going to put Apple's new AirPods Pro and some other new models up to our brutal earbuds microphone test. All that's coming in just a second, but first I'm going to see if I can get a phone in like Indiana, which me luck. This is the Vergecast. See in a second. 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.

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We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Welcome back. Today, the first thing I want to do is dive back into Amazon's event last week. Specifically, the Kindle Scribe, the new 10.2-inch e-ink tablet that's meant for both reading and writing. Scribe does this with the world's first 10.2-inch 300-p.i adjustable frontlight display. I think this thing is kind of sneakily fascinating. It's called a Kindle, yes. But even to hear Amazon describe it, this is definitely more than, just a reading device. It's about way more than just selling you more books.

Alex Kranz, as I'm sure you know, is my comrade in all things E-ink. Right after the event last week, she and I spent some time with Dave Limp, who's the Senior Vice President of Devices and Services at Amazon, which basically means he's the guy in charge of all of Amazon's gadgets. And we asked him to give us some of the big picture plans for the Kindle going forward. First, I want to play you a bit of that conversation, and then Alex and I are going to talk a bit about where we think the Kindlescribe fits into the market. So let's just get into it. Here's Dave Limp when we asked him, why make this device now?

And more importantly, in a world where lots of startups and companies are making E-Nc tablets like this one, what took so long? Yeah, it's the Kindle. I think the team wanted to build for a long time too. But sometimes, you know, you have to wait for the technology to catch up to the vision. And so I think there's two things that converged to make this possible. The first is the display technology. and our ability to build a display stack up that made sense. Because, you know, we could have built a writing-only device years ago, but you can't put Kindle on that. Like, it has to be world-class reading experience, or you don't get to use the name Kindle. It would have to be some new name.

So there's some things that we have to have in a paper-white display. And these days, if you're not 300 PPI, it's a non-starter. If you can't do a front light that is really uniform and beautiful, people have just come to expect that from Kindle now. And so that display stack up took a little bit longer than we would have thought. Secondarily, then you have to build a writing experience. I would call it a whole experience that is up to what people expect from writing. And, you know, the state of the art of writing on things has moved forward a long way.

And so you have to have the latency and you have to have it very, it has to feel like writing. And so you get to play with various waveforms on the e-ink display. And once those converge, then we felt like we could build something we loved. And so here it is. You talked about like the display technology being kind of up to stuff. We've had these 300 kind of PPI displays in smaller forms. Was it really you needed a 300 10 plus inches? Yeah.

There's probably a dimension in there. I think you could probably, you know, anywhere from 9.7 inches up to you probably 11. You could have built a form factor. But you want it big. Like what you find with writing is writing on something small, those we have in the lab too, is it's just doesn't, it's not comfortable. You end up feeling cramped how you're writing and it doesn't really make sense.

I even find that writing on small tablets. You know, it doesn't work as well. You kind of want to put your palm down. You want to rest it. So there was kind of a sweet spot for the display. I think the side effect of that was, and again, we'll know more, once more customers see it, but at least from our beta participants

and I can speak for myself, is that the reading experience is surprisingly better. I mentioned this somebody yesterday. We used to have a 9.7-inch. Kindle product was called Kindle DX a long time ago, right when I got to Amazon. And there's not a lot of those left active. I should get the actual count, but it's probably thousands of them left. But they're the most passionate vocal minority I've ever met. I probably get an email on the Kindle DX alias once a week from somebody saying, please, make another DX. And so we didn't call it that this time. But hopefully those customers will find a path to upgrade to this. Some of the competitors in the space, like in the United States, we don't see a lot of E-ink stuff.

I think Amazon, you guys are the biggest seller of E-ink products. But in China, we're seeing a ton of these e-readers and these e-reading products from like BigMe and books and stuff like that. But they're funky. I would not have my siblings or my mom used one. I've tried, and it's ends in failure and sadness. But is it because that ecosystem for E-ink is just not developed enough to go to, like, say, Android and do full Android or kind of the full Kindle tablet experience in an e-ink form? Yeah, I think there's two reasons we haven't gone that direction. I mean, yeah, you can buy

an infinite number of probably, you know, reflective display kinds of things out of China. Firstly, and just kind of back to what I've said in the beginning, which is, you know, we wanted it to be a great reading experience and writing. If you were designing a writing-only product, you would do many different things differently, right? In the form factor and how you would lay out the board, everything. But I think secondarily, when you look at this product, Kindle Scribe, in this case, we really worked at getting something that when we did add writing, it felt like a natural extension of it. Sometimes when you think about how some of those other products, they feel like they're tacked on to a tablet OS. Yeah. And, you know, I don't think customers care

what operating system is running inside of a Kindle. They care that. The reading's great and now the writing's great. And the other thing that comes along with, though, as I mentioned it in the launch event, but is one of the things I love about Kindle is it is distraction-free. It's very subtle, but when I'm reading, I really don't want to get the notifications. You know, I have a couple of VIP contacts, and they pop through almost everything on my phone. One being my wife, the other being my boss. And so, but I don't want that when I'm deep into a book and I love it. So I think that having a more a bespoke solution gives you some of those side benefits without having to block them or hack the OS or do other things.

What do you make of the sort of state of this market? Obviously, it's a lot more people own these things in countries like China than do in the states, but there's also a couple of companies out there, like, remarkable who have been making these things for a little while. Like, where are we in the evolution of like this particular space? Yeah, I don't, I haven't tracked too closely the writing only market segment, you know, of people that are just after writing. For all I know, they're doing well, I don't know. I can't really opine upon that. I do think that the pandemic, you know, was an awful experience by any dimension.

One silver lining of it was that people did rediscover reading, you know, and I think reading leads to better literacy, and I just think people are more educated if they read more. And so I think that was a side benefit. And so the Kindle call it readers in general, but I can speak. for the Kindle, it started growing pretty substantially during the pandemic. And lots of categories this year are not growing in consumer electronics because there was a lot of pent-up demand. They got pulled forward into the pandemic. We're also in a different economy than we were last year at this time. But Kindle continues to grow. It's a category that's been around for 15 years. I wouldn't say it's one of these things where it's hyper growth again. But I do find that people are kind of circling back to the classics in some way. In the case, of Kindle reading, there's a whole generation of people growing up now that are kind of also loving physical books again. You know, we see that on Amazon. So there's some interesting trends happening. And I think by bringing writing and merging it together, you know, I think we'll find Kindle lovers that will also love this. But I think we might find a whole new audience

that might adopt this. I don't know how big that is, but, you know, we always kind of start with the products we want. And we write that working backwards. Sometimes we are the customer that's in mind. And, you know, this is definitely the Kindle that I want. I did have that thought in the briefing ahead of this that, like, if any company was ever going to create this, it would be the one that is famous for having six-page documents that everybody reads at the beginning of a meeting. It's like, yeah, of course, of course the executives that Amazon would like a device like this to work with. Here's my morning right here, a whole pile of six-page documents. There you go.

So if you want to know what next year's products will look like, it's sitting right next to me. Just like flip that around to the camera. Just hold it up. You don't have to say anything. Purposely held it from backwards forward. So you didn't get a glimpse of the future. We're done with Dave Limp, back in the studio. Me and Alex. Hi, Alex.

Hi, this is a good time. He's a good hang. I like Dave Limp. He talks about technology and doesn't sound always like a person who runs a technology company, which I appreciate. Appreciate it. It's nice. I want to talk more about like this market the Kindle Scribe is coming into.

Yeah. Because I think the E-Ink writing tablet feels like an idea that is overdue and has kind of happened already and feels like it's maybe happening more than people realize. But if I'm not mistaken and correct me if I'm wrong, this kind of seems like if you and I could have sat here and tried to force Amazon to build the relatively reasonable Kindle we wanted. It would have been a lot like this, right? Yeah. I would have preferred some page turning buttons. And I would have preferred the ability, like actual Android, but Kindle was Amazon is never going to be like, yes, we're going to put Android on your device so you can get all of our competitors and use their book readers.

Of course they're not going to do that. That is true. I actually hadn't even thought about that. But it is like totally anathema to the whole business model of Kindle because their whole thing is they don't make money on the hardware. They make money when you buy the books. And if he's going to let us get cheaper things to read elsewhere, what is the point of Kindle for Amazon? I hadn't even thought about that. I get why they elected not to put Android on it. Do I want Android on it? Yes. Do I understand why Amazon is almost never. going to do that. Yes. Take me through the competition here a little bit because I know I'm in a position where like I am hopelessly devoted to Amazon at this point. I've just spent so long buying Kindle books that I'm just going to keep reading on Kindles because that's just what I have. But you are not in that boat, which means you have a much freer reign of what's out there. So what is out there? I mean, there is a lot out there. There are some people who are making just note taking

devices and reading is kind of an afterthought. And I think remarkable is obviously the most well known of those guys. People like the new Remarkable, right? The Remarkable too. Yeah, the Remarkable too. They like it because it really is just about writing. You know, Remarkable went out of their way to say, how can we replicate that pin and paper experience in E-ink? And they do it better than anybody else. Like, hands down, just better than anybody else. Everybody else, there's little, like, sacrifices you have to make. And it's cheaper, too, than the scribe, right? Like, but also you are not getting Amazon. You are not getting e-books. You can put e-books. You can put ebooks on a remarkable. You can put PDFs on a remarkable. You can do a lot with Remarkable,

but it's fussy. It's not like a super smooth experience, especially for e-reading, because most people are buying their books from Amazon, and then they have to convert them and then put them on the Remarkable. Nobody wants to do that. Right. And then there's also like the Supernote, which is really similar, like to the remarkable, very focused on the writing experience, very focused on being, on replicating that kind of like A4 paper experience, which is why it's called like, the supernote. the A5 and the A6. Thank you to listeners. Somebody said,

Alex, why do you never mention the supernote? And it's because I always forget the supernote exists. So here I am for you guys, reminding people that the supernote does exist. And people like it. Like, it's got a very small,

very passionate fandom. And then once you kind of start to move away from that, you start to see it's primarily like these Android e-ink tablets that we've talked about before. And for me, the absolute stand out there is the books.

I've been using them for two or three years now. And I really love the products. think they are on the right track. But it's also, I'm never going to buy my mom a books. I tried to get her to use one last Christmas. Did not go well. Just like the worst thing I've ever done. Worse than the time I try to set up a password manager for her. Oh, wow. Awful. But it seems like the books thing, I have never actually used one of these devices, I should say. And it seems to me that what they're basically trying to be is just a full on Android tablet, but instead of like an LED or LCD screen, it has an e-ink screen. But other than that, it's trying to make as few changes

as possible. Is that right? Right. I don't think that's necessarily the purpose. Like, it really wants to be an e-reader. It really wants to be a note-taking device. It just says, oh, you want the Play Store? Yeah, we can give you the Play Store. Is it going to be a good experience? No, because the Play Store is not designed for E ink and everything's going to be slow and obnoxious. But if you want to use your Nook reading app, if you want to use Libby, if you want to use the Kobo app, you can use all of those. That's what I do. That's why I, that was why I initially went that route was because I wanted to get away from Amazon. I wanted to try and have that experience without being locked into Amazon. And that seemed like the best choice. So why doesn't that work?

That sounds like the dream. I think that is the dream. I think right now, it's not user-friendly. Like, for me, the kind of mark is my mom loves to read. Can I give my mom this e-reader and she just go and read? And no one does that well except for Amazon. And Amazon only does it well with Amazon products. Cobo's out there saying, well, we do it too. And also, you can go to the library through us. And that's not true because I got my mom a COBO Reader. And you guys can all do the next time she calls to try to figure out how to get a check out a book on the COBRA reader. We'll just have it do on the verge cast. We'll just spend an hour and a half on the verge cast teaching my mom how to do it. Her and the librarians at her local library.

So most of the experiences just aren't user friendly. And that's because nobody in the United States really cares about that. Right. Like, in the United States, the market is Amazon. That's the market. And Kobo's out there, like, picking up the pieces at Walmart. Right. There's Amazon, and then there's the people who do not want Amazon products. That's the only reason you don't buy an Amazon product.

100%. And so everything else in this market right now is very niche in the United States. It's a different story in China. E-readers are a lot more common there. They don't care about Amazon. Nobody over there really uses Amazon devices. But everybody wants to read. It's why you're seeing all of this, like, proliferation in China, of all.

all these different e-readers is because there's actually a market for it there. And China can also, a lot of those companies can afford to do smaller runs and really kind of figure things out, whereas we just don't see that in the United States. Nobody wants to experiment at that scale in the U.S. with hardware. I feel like Amazon over time has tried to push in some new, like, ways of thinking about books. Like they did the Kindle Singles thing, and there was like a serials thing that they were doing. And none of that seems to have taken off. And I think part of me wonders, will devices like this as they get bigger start to change some of the content that people want? Or are we just stuck in a thing where it's like, I want books or I want like the internet. And if I

want the internet, I'm going to go to a different thing. Like they're that middle ground you're talking about like the web books and that kind of content just doesn't seem to exist here. And I wonder if it ever will. I think it does exist. And I think people have really found ways around Amazon's Waldgarten. If you look at the, the biggest kind of American webbook spaces. They're primarily fan fiction, right? They're primarily Wapad and A.03. And both of those have figured out how to put

stuff on an Amazon device pretty quickly. And a lot of those readers also are younger and they're just like, I've got a phone. I don't need this. Whereas I want to be able to read and not worry about my notifications popping up. So I want an e-reader where my notifications are going to pop up. And that's what I get with the books. I can just go

and I have no idea if any of you text me. If you hadn't called me, I wouldn't know that I needed to be here for this call today. That's not true. I was working very hard. But like, that's what you see a lot of people say, no, I just want something to focus on writing and reading and doing that. And that's what this crop of products in China is doing. They're just saying, we're going to give me the Android experience, but a little limited. You're not going to be answering your emails on this unless you really want to and also want to cry. Fair. Instead, you want to read. You want to take notes. We got you.

Okay. So to that point, actually, the reviews to come on the Kindlescribe, it's supposed to come out before the end of the year. I don't know when. I didn't want to wait. But let's assume this is everything that Amazon claims that it is, which like Kindles have been very good for a very long time. I don't think it's insane to believe Amazon when they say this thing is going to work pretty well. Is this thing going to light the world on fire? Like, does this appeal to Kindle people? Or is there going to be like a watershed moment where all of a sudden everybody wants one of these devices? I think we're closer to that watershed moment with this device because it's got two things going for. One, it's got a bigger display. And people, as much as I hate it,

People do love bigger displays. They want a big screen. And Lip talked about the really loyal DX fans. They're still out there. And there's a lot of them. And there's a lot of people who are getting older and they want to blow up the text as big as possible. And I've seen it when they blow up the text as big as possible on that six-inch e-reader. It's like four words per page.

I know. It's crazy. And so they need at least seven. And this will give them those seven words. So I think you're going to see a lot of people embracing it for that reason. And I think the writing is going to be useful. But like, I think Amazon has kind of programmed everybody in the United States to think that the Waldgarden is the only way to go. And so it's going to be really hard for people to understand that there are other ways to do this.

It's not just the Amazon way of living in this Waldgarden, only having access to Kindle books, only having access to your Word docs and PDF in doing annotations on them with this device. No, I think that's totally right. And I think the idea of like a digital handwriting notebook seems like the kind of thing that when we get it right is going to be massively successful to lots of people. And it's going to be super interesting to see if this is the one. Yeah. Like if they can figure out the UI, if they can make the UI really interesting and feel snappy because that's one of the problems with the E-ink. Because E-ink that refresh is just slow, slow, slow. Yeah.

And even at its fastest, it's still glacial compared to everything else we do. And that's just a huge limitation. And they're fixing it. They're improving on it. We're seeing year after year, ink is getting a lot better at that refresh rate. And that's the thing they're very focused on because they know that like until the refresh rate gets up to stuff, nobody's going to adopt this at other things.

As long as you see that gross ghosting and the flash as it refreshes the entire page, people are going to be like, you icky. So I think if they can figure out like ways around that refresh problem. And we've seen like books has gotten decent at it, remarkable's gotten decent at it. You don't feel that sluggage. necessarily with those products. If Amazon can figure that out, I think it starts to get people excited about it. We'll see with the scribe. I would probably hazard like the scribe too will be the big watershed moment rather than the scribe one as much as I want that moment. Yeah. No, I would guess that you're right. But we're going to come back on here whenever they do ship us one to try out

and we'll talk about it. I'm so excited for that day. Whoever gets to review it. It's going to be me. I'm going to fight everybody at the verge. I can't wait to fight you, David. We'll save it for the podcast. Yeah, I like this plan. All right, we need to take a break. And then we're going to come back and talk about a gadget category. We don't talk about much on this show. Just printers. You don't think about them. You probably think yours sucks. And I tried to figure out why. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, Not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot-com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible.

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Welcome back. So a couple of months ago, we asked you to call the Vergecast hotline and ask us all your burning tech questions. You should still do that, by the way. The number is 866 Verge 1-1, and we want to hear everything. We've gotten a lot of really great questions,

but there's one in particular that I just have not been able to stop thinking about. Here's the message. Hi, this is Jacob. I've got a question that I think a lot of people will resonate with. I have a printer in home that doesn't work, and I want to know why don't any printers work, and why hasn't a company disrupted the printer market? Thanks. Bye. This message just hit me right in the face. Why isn't there any innovation in printers?

So, for the last few weeks, I've been trying to figure that out. The first thing you should know is that the printer market is humongous. If you include everything that is theoretically printing, businesses, governments, advertising, 3D printing, basically the idea of taking a digital thing and using a device to make it a physical thing, this market is hundreds of billions of dollars in here. But let's narrow it down a bunch and just talk about the printers you might buy

or that a small business might use. You know, the boxes you buy at staples and stick in a cupboard and use to print concert tickets and Amazon return labels. Four companies make up about 85% of that market, according to the research firm IDC. HP is the leader, then Epson, then Cannon, then Brother. The printing market had a big boom during the pandemic.

With so many people at home dealing with work and school, they just needed to print more stuff. Things have slowed down a bit since then, but the market is still huge. A 2019 estimate said that 62% of U.S. households owned a printer, and that number has definitely gone up since then. The other thing you should know is that just the basic job of printing is actually really, really hard. Paper is an organic material, and no two pages are exactly alike. Feeding that through a fast-moving machine, which everybody always wants to be smaller and cheaper, and as a result, everything gets really hot and really complicated, is really hard. I bet your printer still jams, mine certainly does, but there is plenty of evidence that things are getting better.

Still, though, printers are printers, right? They're super annoying to set up, and they throw these unintelligible error messages whenever anything goes wrong. The printing market is the same few companies making the same kinds of devices that they've made for forever. This is what our buddy Jacob really wants to know about. Why is it still like this? So I called up two people with radically different views on the printing industry. Diana Soroka, the global head of HPs consumer printing services, and Corey Docterau, an author and blogger and a fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Let's start with Diana, who I called with a simple question. Is there any innovation happening in the printer industry? What cool stuff is going on that we don't know about? She said yes, which of course she would say, and she pointed me not to a specific printer, but to an app. It's called HP Smart, and it's designed to be the main and much better way that you interact with your printer. There were times in the past where it could take people up to an hour to get their printer

up and running. And I would say if you look at current technology today, no one has the patience for that. And with our HP Smart app, absolutely new printers today, certainly within 10 minutes, you're up and running. So I think some of it is an article of the past experience. And if you've taken that long to set up a printer, and all you want to do is see that first page come out with whatever content you wanted on it

and you're waiting and going through different issues with your Wi-Fi connection or whatever else. It's so much simpler now. The smart app is how you set up your printer, but you can also use it to print photos from your phone or see how much ink you have left and even like print a piece of lined paper or a blank Sudoku board you can fill out.

I think it makes sense to abstract a lot of this stuff over to your phone. And I do think the idea of printers being more generative is really interesting. Instead of having to find a template online or download an image just to print it, it'd be cool to just say, print me a lined 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, or I need 10 sheets of paper with blank spaces for answers numbered 1 through 10. Amazon has a service called Print with Alexa that is thinking about similar stuff. You can just say, print my shopping list right before you leave to go to the grocery store, or print today's Sudoku right when you sit down to do it.

It's a good idea and it makes things easier, but I don't know that that counts as like earth-shaking innovation. And this is one thing I heard from folks across the printing industry. It's not so much that people want their printer to do fancy, crazy new stuff or want a router in their printer or a speaker in their printer. It's that they just want their printer to be easier to use. Yeah, printer is doing printer jobs. And we want to make sure, like I said, that that's as easy as possible.

One way HP has tried to do this is through a program called Instant Ink, which is a subscription service for ink. You pay a monthly fee depending on how much you print, and HP automatically sends you the ink you're going to need to get it done. Diana said it's been a huge hit. We've enough to think about, and no one wants to worry about how much ink is left in that cartridge when they all of a sudden realize they have to print, I don't know, their child's book report, which is suddenly 20 pages long and they weren't planning on that. And it's 10 o'clock at night and they're like, oh, geez, now what? I'm going to run to the store and figure out how to deal with this. This is the moment I knew I needed to call Corey Doctoro. Corey is a long, long, long time critic of the printing industry.

And his argument for why there's no exciting innovation in printers is that basically there's no incentive for printing companies to do anything innovative. I think one of the things that makes people so angry about printers is that we seem to have passed the threshold where buying a good printer means that you have a good printer. Like, if you have $16,000 to spend on a ticket from Los Angeles to London, you will get a really comfortable chair and someone who will like actually care about your comfort and they'll serve you a really good meal and then another really good one when you get up in the morning and so on, you could spend $16,000 on a printer and it would still be garbage. Ultimately, though, I would say Corey's not mad that printer's jam. I mean, he is, but he's especially mad that the industry works the way that it does. And he's particularly mad about the fact that if you want to buy ink for your printer, it's a lot harder than it should be.

We actually do have something new in printers, which is third-party ink. Yeah, the printers aren't very durable and they do these things where it's like, oh, you know, you've printed X,000 pages, therefore we're going to brick ourselves or whatever. But all of that stuff, including that bricking, all of that stuff can be solved by altering the firmware of the printer so that it accepts third-party ink, so that it resets its page counter to zero and so on. What he's describing is the way a lot of markets work, right? Somebody comes in, builds an accessory or a replacement for a small part of a successful thing, and sort of eats them from the inside. Corey gave me the example of Apple, which built keynote and pages in order to copy what was great about PowerPoint and Word, and then tried to compete with Windows that way.

But in the printer industry, like some others, Corey says the law has made that all but impossible. And it starts with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. It's a law that says that if there's an access control that restricts access to a copyrighted work, like the firmware of a printer, then removing that access control, selling someone a tool to remove that access control is a felony. It's punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Basically, Corey argues printer companies have spent the time that they might spend innovating and building new products on figuring out how to prevent any other company or developer from doing so. And then, once they had all of your printing life all to themselves, they focused on just getting all the possible money out of you.

And he argues that things like instant ink are nothing more than just a naked money grab. You can see why the street would love it, right? You can see why Wall Street would love it. They've gotten out of the product business except incidentally. In fact, you could even imagine HP exclusively licensing the ability to make HP printers to third parties and ink. and HP would just be in the extracting rent for ink business. I asked Diana about this criticism, by the way, and she said basically that's just not how she sees it. Well, the first thing is the business model,

as it exists today in the market, is you buy your own printer. Okay, so you own the printer, you purchased it from wherever your favorite retailer is, and it's yours to print whatever you want. You can enroll an instant ink at the time you set it up. You can enroll a month later, two years later, whenever you find interest or you find that subscription service of value to you.

And while you're on the social, service, we shift you what we call subscription cartridges, and that's part of the service. It's part of being able to leverage the firmware and the technology and the printer to be able to run the service for you. If at any point in time you cancel, we let you know that at the end of that particular billing cycle, that you'll have to return to purchasing what we call traditional cartridges. So it's not about holding your printer cartridge. It's just saying when you're on the service, you pay for pages and we monitor that. And when you're not, you're back to printing in the traditional way. So no hostage printers out there.

In fact, what she said is that not only do people like this world in which they don't buy or think about their own ink, they feel the same way about printers and paper, too. Pretty soon, actually, you might start to see subscription printers becoming a thing for a lot of users. We actually called it instant ink platinum, just as a simple branding for the purposes of our test. We pick three printers and we put them out in the market. And basically, it's a very simple enrollment flow. you pick your printer, your page plan, you have the option to add paper, and you get amazing printing taken care of forever. What that means is 24 by 7 support. Your printer breaks, we get you one the next day. For one low monthly price, you truly set it, forget it. So now you're not even

worried about the printer itself, the printer hardware, anything that could go wrong. And of course, you can upgrade that printer along the way. We'll always be messaging you if there's a better printer for you. This debate turns philosophical really quickly and is actually a story about much more than just printers. It's about the fight between openness and innovation on one side, Corey's side, and simplicity and convenience on the other, Diana's side. There aren't many times you get to have both, and printers definitely don't seem to be one of them. So what do you want? A printer that just works that you don't have to think about, or the best printer ever made, at least one better than anything you've seen before. I'm increasingly not sure you get to have it

both ways. But Corey, at least, thinks we can. You know, when the DVD players were like five or 10 years old, people just forgot that we used to be able to record TV or if they remembered it, they were like, there must be something intrinsic to the DVD player that makes it hard. It was just a design choice, right? Like, people have forgotten that you can have federated social media or interoperable app stores or any of these other things. They just like, they just don't remember that it's a possibility. And you have to make people know what's missing. You have to remind them what they're missing before you can get the political will to get people to have it. And, you know, I think the printer companies would like us to just forget that printers ever worked and that weren't a rip-off.

Oh, before we go, here's another voicemail we got about printers. Hey, Verge casks. My name is Nick. I'm from Colorado. I'm calling to ask a question about wireless printers. My wife and I have a HPNV-5,000 series that's on the fritz, and I need to replace it with something that's maybe a little bit more efficient on ink. just figured wireless finish to be a fun niche topic to talk about. Thanks for help. I don't have a perfect answer for this one, except that I have a brother laser printer,

and it serves me pretty well, and I hardly ever have to think about it, and that's basically the goal. But in the course of researching this episode, I spent a lot of time asking around and researching to figure out what you should look for in an everyday printer, and I did find some pretty straightforward tips for getting it right. Here's three.

One, buy a laser jet printer, especially if all you need to do is print simple things like return labels and word documents. They're often a little more expensive up front, but much cheaper and easier to maintain over time. And if you only print every now and then, like I do, the toner in a laser jet printer lasts much longer than the ink in an inkjet. Buying advice number two. Go black and white if you can, since that'll be even cheaper to maintain. Here's what Consumer Reports said in a really great buying guide that I'll link to in the show notes.

It says our research shows that people print lots and lots of text in black and white. rarely print graphics and almost never print photos. And that's where monochrome laser printers excel. They print crisp text and they print it fast and economically. Our survey data says they're generally more reliable than inkjets in the long term, which is why many of the survey respondents who bought laser printers really love them. It's good advice. I totally agree with it. Buying advice number three.

If you print photos, but only a few times a year, don't buy a fancy printer. Just like save the address for the nearest Michaels or Kinkos and spend a few bucks when you need to instead of a lot of money for a thing you'll rarely use. If you do print a lot, though, there are some great photo printers out there, and you should shop based on the cost per page as much as the actual cost of the printer. That number, the cost per page, will be what really determines how much you spend on printing. And quick bonus buying advice number four, the all-in-ones are actually really good now. Not that long ago, I remember someone telling me that the best printers were always the dedicated ones, and that adding

more features made the printing worse. By all accounts, that's not the case anymore. You can get a scanner, printer, even a fax machine if that's how you roll, and it can do all of those things pretty well. Printers maybe kind of suck still, but they're also pretty good. Okay, we need to take a break, and then we're going to come back and we're going to test some new earbuds, including the latest AirPods Pro. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips

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MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Welcome back. It's time for, if I'm honest, my favorite segment on the Vergecast, our earbud voice call tests. I know there's like a few of you out there who absolutely hate this segment. And for those of you, please know this is probably the last one of these will do for a little while, but also I love it, so I'm just sorry.

In past episodes of this show, we've had Verge reviewer Chris Welch take wireless earbuds on wild stress tests so we can hear how well their microphones work, because microphones matter. They matter for voice calls and Zoom, obviously, but increasingly also for Siri and voice dictation and more and more of our day-to-day phone interactions. We took Chris to a busy coffee shop, and we put him on a ferry, and we stress-tested the heck out of everything we could find. So far, the two sets of earbuds to make it out of our tests and into our future tests have been Apple's AirPods Pro and Google's PixelBuds Pro.

But now it's tech review season and more new earbuds have hit the market. Most recently, we have the Bose Quiet Comfort earbuds too and a new second generation update to the AirPods Pro. So we had to put those to the test. Chris Welch wasn't able to join us this time because, again, it's tech review season. So this time we had senior video producer Becca Farsachi take the new earbuds and our past winners on a bike. ride in Brooklyn. The question was, are wireless earbuds good enough to take some calls from your bicycle commute? We were testing wind. We were testing park noises. We were testing all kinds of stuff. And Becca, who has spent a lot of time with these earbuds for her video reviews, is going to help us

find out. Becca, hello. Hi. Where are you? What is happening here? Yes, I am in Prospect Park, better known as Brooklyn's backyard. We're going to be doing some loops. We are. So the schick here is we always try to put these in like deeply unpleasant places that are horrible for everyone to listen to, which is precisely the point. So we're going to try to fix this. But let's just set everybody up here. You have a helmet on, which is good, good and safe. Of course. And if I'm looking at this correctly, we're on video right now so I can see your face. And it looks like I'm inside of your bag. Is that correct? I just want to give people the vibe of what's happening here. Close. So I have a very cheap phone mount that I use on my bike. So you are inside the phone

amount. And what headphones are we listening to right now just to just to start things off? So these are like $20 wired Apple headphones, except they are so old that they have the eighth inch jack on them. And I'm using them with my S10, which still has a headphone jack and it's so hard to let go of because of that. I support this. But in theory, this is the best sounding thing we're going to hear, right? It's all downhill from here. You're not moving yet. You're on wired earbuds. Like, this should be the best we get, right? That's correct. Yes. And now, there's someone backing up, so that should maybe not help so much. But correct. Hey, this is the world. This is what we're here for. All right, we're getting out of here. We're on the road. Okay.

Oh, excuse me. All right. Well, then stop when it's safe and you're not going to die. Switch headphones. Let's do, we have four to test today. So let's start with the one that won our last test. Let's do the PixelBuds Pro from Google. Let's try those first. You got it. All right, David, these are the PixelBuds Pro. I love that. because pixel buds, the OOG with the cords, had swipe up and down volume controls. And these also have that, and I just love that legacy. It is a nice thing. These headphones are $200.

They have pretty solid ANC. If you have an Android phone, you know, you have that quick pairing option, which is great, pretty much standard at this point. And they sound pretty good. All right. Well, let's go for a ride. Let's hear how we do. All right, here we are.

We're going to chase this NYPD car. All right, so we're taking on some good wings here. The NYP car is on three wheels. It's a beautiful day in Brooklyn. What do you got for me, David? You sound like you're riding a bike in pretty heavy wind. I can hear you, but it's pretty quiet. Like, it's very clear Google is, like,

working really, really, really, really hard to kick the noise at your headphones. I'm not getting much background noise at all, but I'm also not getting much of you. Okay. There isn't much background noise except for the wind. But even I can hear all the wind that these buds have taken up. Try a slowing down. Just give me like a like a nice gentle coast and see if it like I want to kind of know where the wind goes from

manageable to not really manageable because this is pretty rough. Okay. So this is at like a nice Sunday cruising speed. Okay. You know, I'm just shooting along. There's a horse. There's two horses. There's all these, um, children screaming.

Can you hear them at all? Hardly at all, actually. This is actually pretty manageable. You're still, it's clearly like compressing your voice just right down to the middle. so I'm not getting much of anything interesting around you, but I can at least hear you pretty clearly as you ride like that. Oh, hell yeah. I would say this breeze is like a very light breeze on a summer day.

You're not in a windstorm, but it's also not no breeze. And I hear it a lot less. I got a car coming up on my right right now. And I see parks. Oh, you could grab the back of that bed and coast. Okay, so a thing I just noticed that you just confirmed a theory that I had, which is that what it sounds like is, happening is when these buds only have to cancel the wind, they do a pretty good job. Because when it was

in that quiet phase, I could hear you really well. But then it's like as soon as another thing comes up and it has to do two things at once, it starts to kind of fall apart. Like you got way worse when the car showed up, even though I couldn't hear the car. And then it got better as soon as it was gone. So what's worse? Like canceling out the noise and also making my voice funny or just letting the noise be because I am outside and those sounds happen. This is such a good question. I feel like the right answer is somewhere in the middle. but to me it's like I would rather hear nothing than hear everything. Just personal opinion. Like listening to someone who appears to like be inside of a concert talking to you on a phone is just a nightmare.

And so I'd rather just be like, I can't hear anything call me later than just be like overcome by all the insane noise of your life. Wow. Okay. Interesting. Because I have the opposite opinion. Often I'm on the phone with my parents and they're like, you do sound bad. What's going on? You know, it's like that sort of like level of concern.

and I just have to be like, no, it's just a car going by. And if they could hear that, then they wouldn't worry that I'm, you know, dying. Fair. But then the flip side of that is every time a car goes by, it's going to sound like your building exploded. This is true. All right. I think we're good on this one. Go ahead and pull over and let's switch to the next one.

Let's do the Bose headphones next. Oh, you got it. Ready to connect. These are the Bose quiet comfort earbuds, too. And I often refer to them as the QC2s. Okay, so the thing with these, before we test the real thing, is the noise cancellation on these, according to Chris Welch, who reviewed them, is like, unbelievable. Has that been your experience, too? Is it incredible? David, unbelievable. You want main character energy in your life? Get a pair of these. Put on some, I don't know, song from your teens and walk down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. You are the main character. 100%.

That is all I've ever wanted. It's the dream. Let's go for a bike ride. All right, we are on the road. It's a bit breezy over on the side of the park right now. Oh, interesting. So the bows are, I'm hearing the breeze, and as soon as I start to hear it, the bows are canceling it out for me. We've seen this feature from a few buzz, but I didn't know that these ones had that, so that's cool. I'm getting some interesting stuff from you here. Like, on the one hand, it's basically doing the thing where it is, it just compressed your voice to like one teeny tiny frequency. So you sound like you're coming through a phone call, basically, which is fine. I can hear you fine. It just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just. just super, super, super compressed. But I'm getting more wind noise. And I guess it's wind noise than I expected. It sounds like someone is sucking something through a straw is the only way I can describe it. And it's very odd. Is there a lot of water in the cup or is there no water in the cup?

Are we like slurping? No, it's like right at the end of the cup when there's like a little bit of water. But mostly you're getting it's like the last bit of the milkshake straw bit. It's not great. I don't love it. I would say you sound worse, but I can hear you better. And you're going pretty fast. I am going faster than I was at the end of the pixel buds.

And I will say these buds stick out the most from the sides of my ears. Like, they're pretty chunky on the outsides, which I used to dock buds for. But I don't know. If you have that great of A&C, I can have some shockiness. Yeah, that's understandable. All right. Should I pull over and switch? Yeah, I think so.

Let's do the first-gen AirPods real quick. We'll just do those quickly and then switch to the new ones. Okay, you got it. These are the first-gen AirPod pros, so they should have a pretty good mic quality. Yeah, the thing I've liked about the AirPods in our past tests is that it's a pretty good middle ground of like it does pretty good noise cancellation and pretty good mic. It's not the best at either one, but it's like good enough at both that it tends to work for most people. And the thing is, for me, at least the transparency is the reason the AirPods are great. Yes.

It's like leaps and bounds better than anybody else is. Yeah, it really does feel like there's nothing in your ears at all, which is what I love about the Sony link buds as well, because they're, you know, quite literally have holes in them. But, you know, the danger is I have a feeling in 10 years, like ear doctors are just going to be banking. Like, if you're looking for a career right now, go learn about the ears because we're all going to have gunked up, funked up ears. Yeah, we're all just going to be deaf in a decade, too. All right, let's go for a ride. I'm already hearing more background noise than either of the other two, which, is interesting.

All right. We're on the road. It's a bit breezy. We've got that cross breeze again. I'm not going too fast yet, but there's a pretty good headwind coming along. Okay. You sound pretty good so far. I mean, one of the things I'm realizing here is that like the main thing a lot of these

companies are doing is trying to cancel wind noise. So it's not super shocking that they're all pretty good at canceling wind noise. But the fact that they're able to do a lot of wind noise and some other stuff, that's where it kind of seems to vary, which is interesting. I'm going down a bit of a hill here So we're going to take on a little bit more wind To good baseball fields I'm crossing where the Nighthawk Cinema is

The exit to that And the city bike rack that never has city bikes Because it's at the top of the hill And well, you take the bike down, not up That's for sure Yeah, how's that? It's gotten substantially worse I can still hear you okay

But we're sort of veering Towards the pixel buds thing Where its answer is just to make you very compressed and very quiet. Ah, ooh, yikes. Yeah, turn up that volume. The good news is none of these are like absolutely failing the test so far, which is nice, unlike the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro from the last time, which absolutely failed our test.

This is all like varying degrees of like it kind of works so far. All right, so I'm about to hit a big, oh, there's a guy playing a saxophone. Can you hear the guy playing the saxophone? He's playing one single note. All I hear, I was going to say all I hear is one single note. It just sounded like just one, two, two, two, of the saxophone. It was one.

He must be, you know, just warming up that read. So we're about to hit a big hill. We're also about to have some horses. Do you want me to bomb down this hill or do you want me to change? Let's switch before you do the big hill because I think we're going to put the AirPods Pro 2 through the hardest test of them all. So let's see how it does.

All right, cool. These are the AirPods Pro second gen. So these are the new ones, which are ostensibly basically like slightly better at everything without being like a gigantic earth-shattering new thing, right? That's correct. A lot of folks seem to think they are earth-shattering. And I think that's because if you've had a pair of AirPods pros

and you use them regularly for more than like a year and a half, they start to like dump in every way possible. And so when you do get a new pair, you're going to be like, oh my God, this is the greatest thing ever. But if you're looking at them in terms of like the full market of earbuds and outside of ecosystem, they're good. Okay. If you shout out to the video go watch it, we did like a,

cool A&C test and Owen Grove and Jasmine Lewis, my two directors with me. Like, we just put our heart and soul into that one. So go check it out if you haven't. It's a good one. Yeah, we'll put that link in the show notes. It's a good video. Thanks, good. All right. So we have a big, big downhill to do here. So we're going to put these two, the probably the hardest test of anything we've tried so far. Let's see how we do. Yeah. If you ever see me in Prosco Park going down this hill, even when I'm not testing my quality, I'm screaming. So this is nothing new. First, we're starting out next to some horses. And here we go.

Yep. Hello, good friends. Have a great walk. Oh, I heard a lot of horses that time. More horses than usual on that one. I got a little close. I was a little excited. And they were talking to me.

I love a good, you know, talk to that. All right, we are taking on the wind. We are still at the top of the world. Okay, here we go. We are taking. There's always a bumper. Okay, good. This is what I was hoping for.

We successfully broke the test. Okay, could you hear any of that? It's one of those things like, you know, when you can hear through the wall that somebody is talking, but you can't hear any of the stuff that they're saying, that's essentially what I'm getting you right now. I can tell you're talking. I just don't know what you're talking about. I don't think that. You were through the wall.

It's spooky. It's still relatively windy. I will slow down now, though, and we'll do a little bit less. Edwin. Yeah, get us back to the Sunday stroll pace, and we'll see how we do. Yeah, so we're strolling. I have to imagine this sounds pretty good. There's like a small breeze.

Again, it's like a fall day breeze. There's not too much outside noise. There's some traffic when it's not moving quickly. The thing that is amazing me about this is how similar all four of these have been performance-wise. The distinct vibe that I'm getting here is basically like avoid going very fast if you can while talking to people. But like it works in a pinch. This is the kind of thing like I think if you are like riding your bike and need to ask, Syria question, like it would probably work.

You know what I do find, though, is like a total disaster is speech to text. I mean, it's usually not great, but whenever there's the least bit of outside noise, wow, does it tank? Yeah, that is fair. Almost any pair of headphones, even in good conditions, speech to text seems to get, like, substantially worse for me. And I've never totally understood why that is. I mean, all of these earbuds, right, they're all using Bluetooth of some sort.

Yep. And so there is a point where it's like it can only get, good on that standard, which is why, you know, we had those rumors about Apple, like, creating their own standard, which I was about to be so mad if that was true. So it's not true yet. Maybe in three years when they put out another generation of the Airpod Prozies. Yeah, it's, even Apple has basically said, like, we have maxed out the limits of Bluetooth. If you want it to get better, we're going to have to figure out something else. So it's going to be interesting to see. All right, Becca, thank you for bringing us on your bike ride today.

We've, we've been through a lot together. So I'm going to let you go. This test was super helpful. I learned a lot. I'm surprised I heard you as much as I did. And we will definitely be sure to check in with you next time another earbuds are released into the world. Super. I'll talk to you all soon. One overall takeaway here, which I know we say every time, is that actually most of these are pretty good now, as long as you're in a good spot. If you're at home or in a quietish office, you'll probably have good luck with all of these high-end models. But as you heard, things get messy when the world gets louder. I think I probably wouldn't recommend long phone calls from the middle of a bike race on any of these headphones, but you got to do what you got to do sometimes.

Just talk loud, I guess. Oh, and here's a really crucial piece of info. Becca's bike ride ended up at the Prospect Park Zoo, so we got one last very important test in. Here's how the AirPods Pro 2 would handle a phone call if you were hanging out with a bunch of sea lions. Whoa. Whoa, what was that? Wouldn't you like the low? Hold on. He'll be back. Wow.

Okay. So if we've learned one thing so far, it's that nobody prepared for sea lions. Nobody has prepared for this. This is, oh, my God. And with that, that's it for the Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there's tons more coverage on everything we talked about

at our still very newly redesigned website, Theverge.com. There's new stuff coming there all the time. Keep checking it out. You can also follow all of us on Twitter. Alex is Alex H. Kramm. Becca is Becca Farsachi and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norey Donovan is our executive producer and Brooke Mentors is our editorial director of audio.

The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, or still use a Kindle DX and really want to talk about it, you can always email Virgcast at theverge.com. And I know I mentioned this already, but we're still working on an episode all about cybersecurity and we're going to do a full-on call-in show answering your questions. We've got some great ones already. but if you have a cybersecurity thing you can't figure out or a crazy mystery, you don't know what's going on

and there might be something nefarious happening, call us 866 Verge 1-1 or send us a voice memo to Vergecast at the verge.com, and we'll get back to you if we think we can help. Alex Neely and I will be back on Friday to talk about the Google event. We're going to get pixel phones, pixel watches, all kinds of other stuff,

and all the other tech news of the week. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.