The Vergecast - Android 10 official release, IFA 2019 dispatch, and Facebook Dating launches

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

This week on The Vergecast, there's a new "portable" Sonos speaker, Android 10 is now available on all Pixel phones, our reporters at IFA 2019 run through the announcements from the field, and Facebook brings their dating feature to the United States.  Discussed this week: Sonos CEO Patrick Spence: “There’s no category of audio that I don’t think we want to explore”Sonos’ first portable speaker is the $399 MoveAndroid 10 officially released for Google Pixel phonesAndroid 10 review: permanent betaGoogle Assistant’s Ambient Mode turns Android devices into smart displaysGoogle can’t fix the Android update problemPhilips Hue gets Edison-style light bulbs, a smart plug, and updated Hue Go lampAmazon, Roku, and the battle for your TVAnker is putting Fire TV in a soundbar for the first timeAmazon announces new Fire TV Cube with Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and ‘Local Voice Control’LG’s new G8X ThinQ bets that two screens are better than a foldable oneHow Samsung fixed the Galaxy FoldFacebook Dating launches in the United States todayNike’s Adapt Huaraches will let you ask Siri to unlace your shoesApple iPhone 11 event rumors ranked from mind-blowing to no wayApple Music launches on the webTouch ID and Face ID could coexist in 2020 iPhones, says reportApple may release a new Apple TV with an A12 chipThe New York MTA would like you to stop dropping your AirPods onto the tracks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Android 10, a bunch of news from Ifa. In fact, we have a field report from the crew at Ifa. Get into Facebook dating and we do a little preview of the Apple event next week. That's coming up on the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

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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 the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media universe. It's good. It's a universe.

Dieter Bone is off. He's the ExoXO Festival in Portland. So if you're there, just wander up behind him and say USBC. And then he'll just start talking. And then say, gossip girl. Weird. It's a weird thing to say, I'm Neil, I'm your friend. That was Paul Miller.

Hi, Paul. Hello. In Dieter's stead, we've had to replace him with two people. Dan Seaford is here. Hello. Ashley Carmen is here. Hi. How's it going?

Good. All right. It's here. It happened. Technically, summer is not over. But I've ominously been saying to our editor, summer is over in an effort to get everybody back to work. It's true.

I just wandered the hallways saying summer is over ominously. But like, gadget season is here. It's EFA in Berlin. We've got a crew out in IFA. This show's going to be a little bit different. John Porter, Tom Warren, Chris Welch are in Berlin. This is true. They just sat down and recorded some Vergecast in Berlin while we were sleeping. So we're going to run that in the middle of show, a little field dispatch. I'm hoping that it's actually, they're talking about tech news, they're not just going to clubs in Berlin as a field dispatch. You never know with them. But they were there. There was an Amazon event. There's all kinds of gadgets coming out there. Then we got to.

You got to talk about Facebook dating with Ashley. Obviously. And there's an Apple event next week. Like there's just so much going on. But let's start with, I think some news, it's like a personal importance to me and to Dan, which is that Sonos put out a speaker. Obviously, you're listening to the Vergecast. If you're in the feed, you know we interviewed Patrick Spence, who's the CEO of Sonos this week,

talked a lot about the move. If you want a deep dive into Sonos speakers and literally how to run a company, that's a good thing to go listen to. But let's quickly go over the news. So talk about the move, Dan. So the move is like a big deal for Sonos. It is the company's first quote portable speaker. It's got a battery in it.

It works on Sonos's like Wi-Fi system and AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect and all that stuff that all the other Sonos speakers do. But it also for the first time has like functional Bluetooth that you can pair your device to and use like a Bluetooth speaker. So you could in theory take this thing out to the beach or the park with you instead of a U.E boom or whatever Bluetooth speaker you happen to own already. and be using a Sonos speaker out there. It's $400, and it's huge. It is very large. If you haven't seen our article, go pull over on the side of the road,

look up the article, and check out the picture. There's a picture of the Sonos move next to the Sonos one, and it's like the Sonos move could eat the Sonos one, and it's like six and a half pounds or something. How would you describe this size? Is this like two pineapples stacked on each other?

they're sideways. It's like a healthy watermelon. Okay, so we're going fruits. We're just fully in the produce section. 27 Kiwis carefully arranged. But the point is it's not the type of thing that you can just be like walking out the door, throw in your bag and like go. Like, like this is like if you are taking it with you, it is like a pack that you are taking unless you are the sort of person who regularly runs out the door with two pineapples. I don't know what your life is like. If you are like, it's pretty normal for me to leave the house. with a medium watermelon. Maybe. You never know. And this will be helpful because you got it, it has a handle. It does have a handle. It doesn't have a strap and it doesn't have like a place

to bolt a strap to it. But it does have like a molded handle in the back so you could pick it up. And they're very proud of the handle. They're actually very proud of the design of this thing overall. So two little notes like the tweeters because they know people are going to be sitting around it. The tweeters actually fired down into this extremely custom waveguide channel which is neat. It's like some sono stuff. It is not blizzard. It is not bluer. It is shadow black, which is a color they tested a lot. It's black. It's like a very darker.

I'm someone who like really cares about matching blacks. It's a black that shows fingerprints very easily, as you can see in the pictures in the article. But like it's supposed to not be all the way black so it doesn't absorb too much heat and not fade. It's not white because I get super dirty. It's like they're very thoughtful about these kinds of details. I talked about them with us a lot.

And then it sits on a little base with pogo pins to charge. Yeah, I mean like I said that they're getting that this is like quote, portable speaker. I think real the use case for this is you are a Sonos customer or you want Sonos in your house and you want a speaker that basically lives in your home in like your living room or your kitchen or wherever it is that you want to put it. And like 95% of the time, it just sits there on the base and you use it like any other sonos speaker. And then like that five or 10% of the time you want music out on your patio because you're like barbecuing or it's a nice weather or whatever. You just like pick the thing up and move it to the patio. And it doesn't even probably need to

switch to Bluetooth at that point. It can just run on the battery for 10 hours and you're outside all day and you don't have to worry about it. And then when you're done, you just kind of put it back in the house. Like I don't really see people traveling with this kind of speaker. Well, so I, um, there's a guy in my neighborhood who has like a crazy like $100,000 jacked up Jeep Wrangler. I bet like, like, I wanted to ask him. I think it was like still under embargoes so I couldn't. I was like, would you be interested in a 400-odd Bluetooth speaker? And I think the answer is yes. I'm going to find out. I'm going to do some reporting this week. I'm going to exclusively talk to people with like six-figure jeeps. I mean, it's not the only one, but it's like when most people

hear Bluetooth speaker, they think of a UE boom that costs them like 80 bucks or something like that. And it's like the size of two soda cans on top of each other. This is like not that product at all. It's very different. So I have a sono set up and we had some friends over for Labor Day and we were like running around the house. And I had never thought about it before, but I instantly came up with like six different ways this thing would have been useful. Right? Like we were outside in the yard. We were out by the grill. We were like, I don't know, just running on being idiots. It would have been useful in a way that my Bluetooth speaker is annoying. And then if we were actually, I think the Bluetooth part of it is actually like, if you're going to make one that moves, you have to have some facility to take it away from your house. But I agree with you. I think mostly this is about you want a Sonos experience somewhere near your house in range of your Wi-Fi. And this makes it much easier to do that.

Yeah. Most of the time, you'll use it on Wi-Fi. It has. the same voice control features as the Sonus one, so you couldn't like yell at it to, you know, tell Alexa or Google Assistant to do something. And that will all function wirelessly, even on battery, as long as it's on the Wi-Fi network. When you do go over to Bluetooth, you kind of lose all of those features. So you don't have the ability to Bluetooth, or stereo pair, if you really wanted stereo pair to Bluetooth speakers like these. You don't have the voice controls. You don't have the true play tuning that we haven't talked about yet, but the new thing with is that it automatically uses Sonos' true play tuning.

So it's like older Sonos speakers, you had to wave an iPhone around a room for 30 to 60 seconds to map the room and then the speaker would adjust itself. This is smart enough to use its own microphones to adjust itself to the environment, which is great because it's something that you're moving all the time. It seems to be a lot like the HomePod where as soon as you turn it on,

within 30 seconds, it's adapted itself to the room and adjusted its sound as well. But a lot of those cool, nifty smart features, you really aren't going to benefit a lot from when you're on Bluetooth. It's just a Bluetooth speaker. So my favorite little bit, and we should talk about the other two ones. And again, there's an entire podcast of Patrick's Metson's that you can listen to. My favorite little bit, the battery is removable because it's supposed to, like,

Sonas is like these things should last for like a decade. The batteries are going to last three years. Eventually we're just going to sell replace some batteries. It's not removable in the sense that like you're out and about and you like keep a second one charged so that you can keep the party going for 20 hours instead of 10. it's removable in the sense that like after three years of use or I think Sonos estimates like 900 charges it's not going to hold its charge anymore so you can like take the bottom apart with a couple of screws and swap out the cell there's like a handy little plug or whatever and they

say that they will be selling more or replacement battery packs but we don't know how much are going to cost yet but they'll be available at some point. 350. No, I love that and like they actually didn't take as much credit for it as like I wanted to give them. Spence was like, well, it's not a phone. It's easy to do, right? They're like, it's big. We had the room. But so many products have sealed in batteries and they just expect them to be disposable and here they actually thought about it. Every other Bluetooth speaker on the market falls into that. Like, can you change the battery on a U.E. Boom? I don't think so. I bet Hyam

can. I'm just putting it out there. I bet Hyam Gartenberg can change the battery in a UV boom. I mean, this is also interesting, though, because it is in a certain way a recurring revenue model. Like, not in this exact moment, but in a few years, it does generate some cash for them if this becomes a popular product. You mean the battery? Yeah. Like every three years, everybody swaps better. It guarantees as opposed to just buying, like, yes, you could buy a new speaker, but, like, it's expensive. I think this was, it had to happen. Battery pods. This, I don't own a Sonos. Obviously, everyone at the verge, like has Sonos, loves Sonos, but I've been waiting, and this actually almost might be the one. I think this might be it. Is it the one at $400?

Well, that's, first of all, $400 is obscene for me. me. Second of all, this thing is freaking huge. When I saw that photo, I was like, wait, what? Yeah. I have to put that on my shelf over my bed? No way. I think like the price and the size for like the 9 million existing Sonos

people that have like Sonos systems already and they're like, oh, it'd be great. I can take it out of my house like Nilai said earlier. That's not going to be a hurdle for them. They'll pay the $400. They'll be happy with the size. I think it might be a hurdle for non-Sonus customers. Like, $400 is a huge layout for

a single speaker. So I think that's why they made the one I sell. Maybe. Wildly different product, but yeah. This kind of seems like a portable home pod though, right? That's kind of, yeah. Like, what if you could have a home pod that was portable?

I mean, nobody bought the home pod as it is. What is the argument you're making? What if you could have an unpopular product made by a different company running a different operating system? Well, so that's the way they made the cheaper one. I mean, I'm curious.

At 179. No, that's a nice place. And it'll probably get discounted away too. At 179, however, it is not portable, has no battery, does not do Bluetooth. Right. I mean, the thing is the portable is what was attractive to me because I have a deck. I mean, my speaker can be, I have a speaker in my room right now and it's fine. Yeah.

But like, I need something. I love that sits on a base already, so it's charged. I have to worry about micro USB or whatever. To USBC. Yeah, see, no, yeah, and this is fine. But like, now I can take it outside. I need a portable speaker. Yeah.

My life is portable, you guys. You got to be in the move. Yeah, always. You're the person with like the watermelon bag that's just waiting. Dude, I have two bags at all times. It's actually a problem. All right, Dan. The other big news this week, Andrew 10 hit, Deter reviewed it, was not necessarily impressed.

Right? He called it a permanent beta. He talked a lot about the gestures, which are the iPhone set of gestures. If you talk to Deter, he is actually surprised at how much backlash there is on the gestures. He actually likes the gestures line. I think he says this in the review as well. That he, after using them for a while, he prefers the gestures over the button system. However, there is, it is a huge change.

It does affect things like app drawers and things like that, hamburger menus and what have you. And maybe there's a lot of people that are resistant to change, probably out there, and they might not like it. But Google gives you the option to go back to buttons if you want. Yeah. So it's out. You can get on pixel phones a handful of other phones. The other thing Deeter wrote this week is that you were probably not going to

get it because the Android ecosystem is very, very bad at updates. Yep. And we'll stick this in like the show notes or the post on the side or something, but he made a graph of like the upgrade curve and he put a vertical line at six months and a horizontal line at 50%. And literally nobody hit the center of the graph where it's six months more than 50% of their phones have been updated, except for Nokia, which is shocking. If you want updates and you don't want a pixel phone, I guess Nokia is the way to go.

Yeah. But it's just a very strange situation. Adira wrote a great piece. It actually sat at the top of the site a week, right? Just pulling apart why Google has so many problems updating these phones. It's like a huge mixture of things, including the fact that Android is fundamentally the open source project. But Android 10 is out.

You got a pixel phone. You're using it. What do you think, Dan? It's fine. I don't mind it. I like the gestures too. Like, I've got it installed on a pixel 3 here. And like, I wish I had these gestures on other Android phones.

So in a year when Android 10 actually arrives on other phones, I'll have them, which is cool. But like, it's really not fundamentally different. And Dieter says this in the piece, like aside from the gestures and maybe some new permissions for privacy things, like, day-to-day use case scenarios are not that much different than it was on Android 9. So, like, so much it was happening with Android within the Play Store and with Google Play Services that, like, the actual platform updates are becoming less and less, like, impactful every time. Here's a problem I'm having with the gestures. Maybe, Dan, you can solve this for me. All right. I've got an app.

It's buggy. It crashes or it's doing something bad. I want to force. Did you write that app? No. My apps are always excellent. Void of bugs. So I want to get to the multitasker so that I can swipe it away, right?

And I feel like maybe it's just a bad habit. I typically, I would go home and then I go to the multitasker and then I pull. I don't know. For some reason, Right now, if you're on the home screen, then you swipe up, right? You don't get multitasking. You get the app drawer, right? You need to swipe over to be in an app, and then you swipe up to be in the multitasker,

and then you swipe back to the app that you want to get rid of because it's the most recent one. It's like the hardest app to have pulled up in the multitasker is the one that you were just in, and that's the one I want to force close, because that's the one that's buggy. I think you just got to swipe up and hold, and then you get to the multi-tack. Like, if I'm on the home screen and I swipe up and hold, Then I get to the multitasking screen. And then the app's there and I can... Am I just bad at swiping?

Nothing makes for more compelling radio than two people discussing and swiping. So, I mean, but this talks to, like, the fundamental problem with gestures is discoverability. And, like, you really do have to relearn how to use your phone and all the muscle memory you have from tapping buttons and placement and things like that is going out the window. And, like, it's going to hurt for a week or two weeks or whatever, however long it takes for you to get used to it. Once you're past that hurdle, then, like, you're probably fine. And you might like the gestures, you might not. I think most people do like the gestures once they're past that, but those first week or two are probably

painful. Ultimately, I think that that's the strongest argument in favor of Google changing these gestures. Like, yes, they copied Apple. Yes, they look and feel a lot like the iOS gestures. But if they are to stand any hope of converting people from the iPhone, they cannot expect everyone to relearn those gestures. Right. And like, once there's a market leader, like, if I was to make a new car and I was like,

it doesn't have a steering wheel. It has a series of tubes that you blow into and they're located strategically around your head. Like, figure it out what, like, you're doomed. That was definitely, like, the first three versions of Android. But, like, you have to, like, all the pedals are in the same place. The steering wheel is the same place. The horn's in the same place.

Like, most cars, like, the wipers and the transmission are all in the same place. Although I will say that transmissions are getting increased than the esoteric, which I love. Like, now they're just, like, a series of buttons and knobs, like, randomly located throughout a car. But like all that stuff is standardized and no one yells at Ford when they put out a new car and they're like, you copied the steering wheel from BMW. Like it just doesn't happen. And I think you're seeing that a lot here with these sort of navigation systems. They're copying from each other and eventually they're just landing in the same place because it's kind of rude to

your users. They are landing where WebOS was. Wow. I mean, look the thing. The theater's not here. Somebody's got to say it. Someone's got to say it. It doesn't copy and stuff like this like there was a lot of copying in the early days and i remember there being lawsuits over i'm sure that was kind of that was mostly like that apple samson stuff was was was look but not feel can is feel not copyrightable or patentable uh are you killing me like remember like pulled a refresh yeah i wrote about all these patents i made a great video remember uh creighton our old producer he and i ran around i believe it was mobile world congress looking at all of the ways people were designed

around apple slide to unlock patent and it was Oh, right. It was like crazy town, right? And Apple's slide to unlock Patton was extremely specific. It was like, this icon moves from here to here in a channel. It's like it has to move along one axis, not multiple axes. So then like Sony had one that like went up and down. Like it was so crazy.

Yeah, I mean, it's, I think those days are over. I don't think anybody, you know, like Apple and Google, like their frenemies, Android exists. You know, it's like, I don't think that Apple has a lot of call to go and sue over this stuff in the way they did at the very beginning when they were morally upset with Samsung. Like that whole market has settled down. And Samsung, their, you know, number one rival is also one of their biggest suppliers. So I think that stuff is just like wound itself to a close. But ultimately, like, Apple pulls from Android just as much. It's just a little quieter, I think.

Android users are pretty vocal about it when Apple copies. Yeah. We're all just borrowing from WebOS. We're all just slowly retracing the footproof. Soon, apps will just be websites. I mean, that's the goal. I mean, they already kind of are. But, like, Deeter and I were talking about the fact that there's a bunch of TV news at

EFA this week. Tom and Chris and John are going to talk about it in their EFA segment, so we won't overdo it. But there's, like, new Amazon Fire TV soundbars. There's a new Roku sound bar. There's, like, One Plus is making a TV. Like, there's all this, like, TV action out in the world, right? And it's wild because everybody has their own TV operating.

system in a way that no other kind of computing supports. Like there are but two smartphone operating systems. There are but two major desktop operating systems. And there's Paul running Linux. This is your year. Servers have a little bit more diversity because you've got Windows, Linux, and Unix. Yeah, but that's like in the consumer world, most things are this kind of like duopoly, right? Yeah, yeah.

Well, on TVs, it's Samsung has ties in and Vizio has like, Vizio World, I don't know what their OS is called. LG's running WebOS. Sony runs Android. Like, Roku runs Roku. Amazon runs FIRE, which is like a variant of Android. And it's because all of the apps are just HTML5 apps. Because you don't have to like do any computer stuff.

Like the only thing you ever do with a TV app is like get a video stream and play it. So they've all moved to HTML5 is their like app vehicle. They like wrap it in different ways. Which means the operating system layer is where all the action is, which is completely upside down. I really hope we move past this HTML 5 app era because they're not they're not fast. No. They're not like waiting five seconds after every button press on my Vizio is not ideal. And I know there's some serious hardware in this thing. This is a 4K 65 inch television. You know, it's powerful. It can do HDR, you know. Like it has it does upscaling. Like it obviously has hard.

hardware inside it that can do stuff that's kind of like a GPU. But it's it's it seems like just a really bad software renderer doing the worst job at HTML 5. Yeah, Vizio world OS. Turns out there's only so many like OS performance engineers in the world. And they work at Apple, Google and Microsoft. And like, but it's wild because all these companies are their own OS. But really it's because they can they can basically just like get their own not pay licensing fees and then Netflix will ship them an HTML5 app that's like a lightly tweak to run on their platform and that's fine. And they can put in all the data collection software they want. Yeah, everyone wants to own their own platform and the nightmare of that reality playing out is that Tyson runs in your TV and like that's the way it goes.

Anyway, we'll let the EFA crew actually talk about EFA TV news, but there's a lot going on. Last little thing I want to talk about before I take a break, there's other Google stuff going on. And it's Google Assistant and Smart displays. And Dan, I kind of don't understand what is happening. Neither do I. I'm so confused. Something happened with Android Auto this week. And so now there's like three or four, there will be three or four different ways to access Android Auto in your car, which is super confusing.

And then like Google's Nest Hub Max is coming out really soon. And so like that's a assistant display. But Lenovo was like, wait, we've got a tablet that becomes an assistant display in a dock now. And like, so it's like an Android tablet, but when you put in the dock, it loads this like assistant dashboard interface. But it's not like the hub interface. No, it's a totally different interface. Which would have made perfect sense. It's called ambient mode.

Yeah. But why wouldn't that just be the thing that the home hub does? It actually looks more useful than what the home hub does on like the ambient stuff. Like the home hub is like if all you want to do is look at photos and like see pictures of your kids and family and travel and whatever you. The home hub is great. But like if you look at a home hub hoping to get some information. it's actually pretty bad. Like, it'll tell you the time and the weather, and that's about it.

Whereas, like, this one on Lenovo's tablet, this ambient mode, you could get it to show, like, upcoming calendar appointments and other information. Okay. I mean, conceptually, I'm really into this because I like the idea that you have, like, a smart display with mics in, like, a trim-down interface sitting in a dock. So you can, like, turn on the lights and it, like, stab at it. And you don't have, like, mucky with an app to, like, turn off the lights. You can just, right? You have this, like, controller. And then when you need to, like, inevitably reset your Wi-Fi lights, you can, like, pull it off the dock and the Android app is right there.

It's, like, very smart for a smart home controller to have that sort of backup interface. I have an iPad mounted in my kitchen as a smart home hub controller or whatever, and I would love to have an interface like this on my iPad that just displays all the time. Apple will never give that to you. Widgets? I know. Yeah, it's widgets. You can get, like, kiosk mode, and you can run one app. Yeah, so I've run the home app, which tells me nothing.

Well, doesn't Google's home, speaking of weird operating systems, doesn't Google's Home Hub run a weird operating system? Like, it's like it's a stripped down thing reaching up to be as functional as this, where this is using basically Android. So obviously they have unlimited functionality that they could put in. Yeah, we had Rishi Chandra on the show, who's the product manager in charge of all this stuff, or the VP. I don't know, type. He's the home hub honcho. Yes, that's right. The Triple H of Google in charge of home products.

Fancy title. And he like basically laughed at me directly when I try to ask him what operating systems all these use. He's like, why do you care? Who gives a shit? Like consumers don't care. And I was like, but I don't understand. This one runs supercast. The Lenovo one runs like some weird Lenovo one.

And this is stripped down Android. The Lenovo runs Android things. Yeah. And then the Home Hub runs something built on Cast. and then this thing runs on top of Android. Like, yes, it is all over the place. On the same theme with Google, Google now has three driving apps for Android,

and Dieter knows what's going on with them. And the answer is, who knows? Why do you care, do you like? I just, like, Google, I think with the deck for this Android thing was why does Google do everything twice, which I think is like a deep, like a deep call from Deeter's soul, Like, if you see him at XOXO, XO, just walk up to me like, what's in your soul? And he'll be like, why does Google do everything twice?

Like, it's such a fundamental, why can't Google focus and just move products iteratively forward instead of always starting over? I think is a fair question to ask at this time. But there are driving apps. I am very excited for Google Maps to just sort of slowly turn into Android Auto, which it should just do. It kind of does. if you're using the latest version of Android Auto on the car display side of things, you plug in your phone, Maps loads up immediately.

Like you are thrown right into Google Maps. Yeah, but I don't have Android Auto in my car. And so I mount my phone, my gigantic phone with a display that is almost as big as the display in my car. And then I just like load Google Maps. And that's great because I don't mind. And that should just turn into Android Auto. Like why do they have a separate Android Auto app? Well, so that's like the whole story here is that they,

were getting rid of the separate Android Auto app with Android 10. But because some people don't have a display in their car or they use the Android Auto interface on their phone like you're just described, they want it back. So Google said that they were going to launch a Google Assistant Driving mode, which turns the assistant into some sort of driving interface. But that's not ready yet. It's taking too long to develop. So Google's like, okay, we'll bring back the Android Auto app for now until we're done with the Assistant driving mode. And then it's goodbye to the Android auto app again. You know, one of those runs on Cass, too, and runs on Android things. Anyway, all right, that's all the Google stuff. We're going to take a break. We're back.

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Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Are we back? Yeah, I have a question. Yes. How do you guys feel about the Phillips Hugh Edison style light bulbs? I don't necessarily expect you to have feelings. When I saw this, I was like, what is going on here?

I have a lot of feelings about this. It's really weird. I have a home full of LED Edison bulbs. So I'm already cheating. Right. Right. There's no, like, crackling warmth coming off my old style. That's okay. You're doing good for the environment.

But they look cool. My take on them is hue bulbs in general, like the normal LED ones, are pretty dim. Like, they're not very bright bulbs. Edison bulbs or Edison designed bulbs are also very dim. So, like, we're putting these, like, two things that are dimmed together, and they're just going to be, like, terrible. bulbs. No, the dimness isn't going to like multiply. No, no, it gets worse.

Believe me. There's like a frost on the glass or something. Yeah, 33 for two of these? That's Hugh, baby. They're like the cheapest ones. All right. They're just really late to the trend is the thing. Yeah, but like think of all of the restaurants in Brooklyn.

I know. I was like great. Every Williams are a restaurant. Anyhow. Ashley, there's a big announcement in kind of your zone of the world this week. Well, you know, like Instagram. dating ads. Oh, no, for sure. Yeah. So we have two married people on this show. You guys aren't hyped on this. I quit Facebook. All right. The audience will love this announcement.

Facebook dating is coming to the United States. And this is a big deal because honestly, I didn't think he would reach this point. I did not think Facebook dating would ever. You think you would make it. No, I did not. And so it's exactly what sounds like. Facebook dating, the whole selling point is that you can, you don't match with anyone you're mutually friends with, so you're not going to find your aunt or your cousin or whatever. You're only going to see strangers, and you can match based around events and groups

so you can go, if you RCP to a concert and other people have opted into Facebook dating, you can look at the RSVP list, and it will tell you who's single, who's available, and you can kind of match to meet up at this event. So that's like the big selling point around Facebook dating. Wasn't sold on this. I haven't been sold on this.

It's been around. It's been in a bunch of countries, except for the United States. Until today, I went to their launch event, and they added a new integration. So they have this feature called, quote, unquote, secret crush, which I have some ethical issues with. But secret crush lets you pick. I think it's up to nine or something, a group of people of your Facebook friends, and now your Instagram followers.

Instagram followers? Yes, this is what. Not the people you follow. Oh, because that would, like, reveal it. Yeah, because the thing is, if I follow like Ariana Grande and I have a crush. on Ariana Grande, like, why would I pick her as my secret crush? It has some people who are following you already. You know what I mean?

All right. Because they're invested in you. So the... I would have picked Ariana Grande. Just flat out. Right. Everyone would. So that's why they didn't do that.

But the secret crush feature, which is totally a growth hack and wrong, now applies to Instagram. And this is when I was like, whoa. I'm on Facebook dating. This reminds me of the top E on MySpace. It's exactly like that. Why do you think it's morally? Okay, so basically how this works is that once you pick your secret crushes, they have to be opted in as well to Facebook dating, and it will tell them they have a secret crush.

The only way to find out who their secret crush is to pick their own secret crushes. And once they pick their own secret crushes, if they mutually pick the same person, you get a match and you find out that you guys both had a secret crush on each other. This is so dumb, as I'm even saying it out loud. But it's like... It's going to get everybody to do it. Exactly. It's going to get everybody to do it. I mean, if you find out someone is a secret crush on you, oh my God, I'm totally picking my secret crushes. Unless you're Ariana Grande and you're like, yes, it's everyone. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Do you think there's like a pent up, like, let's say there's 500,000 existing IRL secret crushes that convert into about 250,000 Facebook matches, right? Because you lose some. Paul's straight doing like romance math right now. I'm saying, could you have like a, like the Facebook dating marriage apocalypse where like everybody like two years from now is all getting married because they all suddenly discovered their secret crush?

No. That's a good dream, right? Like whoever, like the product manager of secret crushes is like, you know, it's not morally dubious in exactly 48 months. We're going to, we're going to see our first secret crush babies. Oh, they already brought it up. Really? At the launch day, we're like, we can't wait for our first Facebook dating wedding. Wow, I was just saying the craziest idea that I had.

Yeah, no, it came up today. That's like a point of pride for all dating apps. They brag about how many New York Times wedding announcements mention their app. So I have a question for you, Ashley, since you cover this beat and know this far better than I do. It seems to me, someone who never uses dating apps, that there are already a lot of dating apps out there. And this market is pretty well saturated. So why is Facebook doing this? Aside from like it got bored copying Snapchat features, so now it's just copying dating app features.

Honestly, I don't fully understand why Facebook wants to be in the dating app market. I think it is a behavior that's already existed on the platform. So that's kind of what they point to like, oh, people have been meeting in groups and through, you know, their old high school sweethearts or whatever on the app already. So we might as well make a dating feature. But I genuinely don't really understand. I don't. And they talked a lot today about how Instagram DM sliding obviously is like the culture. And so if you have a crush, you just slide into the DMs and you hope it works out. This is kind of like getting rid of DM slides, I think.

Well, it's not on Instagram, right? It's in Facebook. Right. But that's why the Instagram integration is so interesting to me because now that you can identify your secret crush from Instagram, I don't have the DM slide. It brings you, it brings the Instagram people over to Facebook, which is so smart because when it was only Facebook, Facebook friends, or just Facebook in general, I was like, I don't care. Like, I'm not redownloading Facebook. There's no way. But as soon as they were like, oh, you can tell your Instagram followers who you have a crush on. Did you read download Facebook? This is where I think is morally dubious. Like, just some like gamification, like find your secret crash. Yeah, it's sketchy. Oh yeah. It's on the order of like candy crush, sketchiness, right?

Like the next step of this is like find out your secret crotch if you do all of yours and pay us $399. Or like, we'll show them to you faster if you pay $3.99. Like, they say they're not going to do paid, but I mean, this is... He's going to make you pay in Libra. Like, that's what they're going to do. But, like, the more, the dubious part of this is, hey, we lost all these people on Instagram. Now we're going to make them come back to Facebook.

It's brilliant, adding the Instagram integration. That's the only way you're going to get young people to use Facebook dating. Yeah. Like, I'm intrigued now because I'm like, oh, I like Instagram. Maybe I have a secret crush on Instagram. I don't. I have no crushes. My life is so lame, you guys.

So kind of like building on what Dan was asking, you cover the only company in the dating app world. Right? I mean, like there's but one company. It's IAC. They own Match Group. They own Tinder. I mean, they own all of them. Yeah.

Except for Bumble. Bumble, which they are suing. That's a whole thing. So one day, eventually they're going to own each other. That's the end of that lawsuit. But there is no other competition, really. And so this is like the first big competition for match group. Match always says they're like, well, people use more than one dating app.

We don't see it as a like you win them all or not. And that's true. Like people use multiple dating apps. So I do think Facebook dating doesn't necessarily spell doom for Match Group. Really? I don't. I think people are going to go. Facebook dating might become the hot thing because it's like, oh, who's on here?

I'm curious. But at the end of the day, it's all just the dating app. Like you'll go on all of them. I don't because I'm above that. Well, like, Tinder mince money for Match Group, right? I mean, like... Tinder is the moneymaker for Match Group. So if this cuts into any Tinder usage at all,

doesn't that hurt Match? Oh, for sure. Yeah? That's like the danger. But I do think people will pay for Tinder, and they'll still use other dating apps, too, I think. So, I don't know. Match could be in trouble.

It's just, we are constantly talking about competition, and, like, this is one area where it's just a monopoly. But you can also. use the dating apps for free. I mean, yeah, I don't know. I honestly don't necessarily think it's going to take down Tinder. I just don't. I think I monitored a little bit of Facebook dating while it was abroad because I was like, okay, how's this experiment going? This is why I did not think it was going to come to the U.S. because everything I saw online was negative. All the users I saw abroad who were using it never said anything nice about Facebook dating, and it all sounded like terrible

experiences. So I think Facebook's, I think Facebook's user base is going to be bad. And I think people are going to need to go to Tinder and Hinge to find good people. Yeah, even with the Instagram integration. Even with that. Because once you do the secret crush thing, it's like, okay, done. Yeah, I'm out. Yeah, maybe you're done then. That's the only thing I'm interested in.

We'll never know, but I would love to know. Like, you have, I don't have Facebook on my phone anymore. Me neither. You don't, but you might reinstall it for the secret crush thing. Like how long that app stays on your phone after you get this first hit? Well, all right. Here's my other question. It seems like the way easier money for Instagram is to just,

take my credit card. I know. You really want them to. I just, I bought another car charger. No. Niall has a problem. Where is my piece? Nelai, I signed it.

I'm going to make it public now, so you shamed into writing it. I found heaven or whatever through car chargers on Instagram or like finding the greatest car charger ever made on Instagram. Here's why you should buy car chargers in Instagram. First of all, you're supporting the American Dream, right? Like two kids in a garage. They found some Alibaba listing. they took some photos, they made a way over the top video,

and all the videos are like people throwing phones in their cars. Like, check it out, bang! And like, magnets. And, like, that's just the dream. Like, you want to support those kids, right? You're learning how to start a business. Then the thing comes, and it really is some, like, Colliebopper repurposed garbage.

And, like, that's reality, and that's just who you are. But you helped. It's like the lemonade stand of Instagram. Second, if it does work, you're like, oh, that was a nice upgrade. See? And it's like, there's no stakes here. Are you willing to say how much money you've spent on Instagram car chargers?

It is clearly over $200. And I'm now getting targeted for just bizarre shit. Moen made a device called The Flow, which just turns the water off in your house. And like there's a whole ad, it's $400. And the ad is like some father knocking on the door to get his kid out of the bathroom to go to school. And he like pulls out his phone, like hits the button, and the shower turns off. It's like, this is horrible. Like, why would you cut all of the water in your house?

Who is this for? It's for you. They've targeted you. Oh, yeah, they know. But it's like, I'm getting those ads now. And it's like, I don't want this. Oh, my God. Yeah, I got the real, like, there's the goods wrote a whole piece.

It's like, why are Instagram ads all so hot? Mm-hmm. And I think it was Rebecca. And I was like, my Instagram ads are not like this. Yeah, you're like, wait. Nothing about my Instagram ads are all. Nothing about my Instagram ads. are on.

Mine are all socks, and I've never bought socks on Instagram, but I get a lot of Instagram ads for socks. There you go. And then there's just other news that the Instagram started hiding like counts. And this is actually quite controversial because everyone got it wrong, because you can, in fact, still see your likes. Like, you can see your own metrics for the world can't. Everyone took Instagram hiding likes.

It was like, oh, no, the influencer economy is going to tank. That's not true. If anyone says that to you, just like, no. Because that's not true. you can still see your own likes and also influences have crazy metrics that they have behind the scenes about like how many people follow them per day, how many

stop following them per day, what posts they engage with, which they didn't, click through rates, all sorts of things. They're beyond the likes. They're fine. So why would Facebook call them down too? Because there's not like the Facebook influencer world in that way. Right. So this has nothing to do the influencers. So Facebook now is thinking about hiding likes on posts and really I think it comes down to just

relieving some of the pressure to post. because you're aware of how well your photo is going to do. Yeah. I mean, if you post permanently. That's why stories is so popular. Because you're like, oh, no one knows how many people are viewing this. And if they viewed it, enjoy. Like, it doesn't matter what it is.

But when it's permanently on your grid or permanently on your Facebook page, you're like, I want to make sure it gets good engagement so that everyone thinks I'm cool and popular. So if you hide that pressure, people are more willing to post. I see. Possibly whatever they want. Like, I know that if you post a photo with your face in it or something, thing, you're going to get more likes versus if you post a photo of like a waterfall.

Yeah. Just facts. I got to stop posting waterfalls. We should all aspire to post more waterfall picks. Yeah. But. I like the photos I take of waterfalls. And that's perfectly fine.

But are you aware of how many people like those photos? Not many. Okay. This is going to turn into a therapy session pretty soon. Everyone tell us your Instagram strut. All right. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back.

John and Tom and Chris, going to do the EFA roundtable. I think that they did this late at night. So you just roll with it because I think it's a little wild. Do that. We're going to come back and then we're going to wrap up with some iPhone news. Check it up. Support for this show comes from Whatnot.

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And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all. all of the features mentioned in today's episode. clod.a.ai slash vergecast. So we're here in Berlin for EFA 2019. We've got three of our biggest announcements from the show that we just want to talk through and get a bigger, better insight into. So I'm joined by Chris Welch,

who's the news editor here, and Tom Warren, who's our Microsoft editor, and I'm John Porter, I'm the international news writer at The Verge. So Chris, you were at Amazon's event last night where they showed off a couple of new products. What have they got for us?

There's a new second generation Amazon Fire TV Cube, which now has Dolby Vision, which is the big addition there. So that was missing from the first model. And that's there. We saw a bunch of new Fire TV editions, which are TVs made by other companies that run the Fire TV software. And one of those is the first OLED TVs, which looks really nice. And it also has built-in microphones for Alexa, which might raise some privacy concerns, but some people might want that. So then there was a soundbar that also has the fire TV stuff built in. It's just fire TV and all the things was the theme of the night. So like talking about the the TV, the fire TV additions, like have you ever tried out once yourself? Because they've been North America exclusive until now. So this is like their big international rollout to the UK and Germany. Right, right. Yeah, I think somewhere in Canada as well. But I mean, they're fine. They're on fire TV software. The TVs themselves are okay quality. So I think Amazon's trying to step that up with the OLED model, which is made by a company called Grundy. which has some history here in Germany apparently but is not going to be too

recognizable to other folks but but it looked nice and what's nice about the fire TV editions is you can plug in the antenna that you might have in your house so you can just stream channels through there and watch those as part of like the whole thing there's a guy that pops up so it's a nice like fully integrated situation so like what do you think of Alexa as a means of controlling a TV so it's what I've tried out the the fire TV stick with the Alexa remote in the past I found that, you know, it's, it's, Alexa works okay, but it seemed to be really selective with what it like could and could not do. So like when you have these, these fire TV editions and you're actually building Alexa more, more closely into like all the operation of the TVs, do you think that kind of helps Alexa actually be a viable way of controlling these TVs?

Or is it kind of like a weird outside? I think it does. I mean, they're always stumbles. You were there last night and they tried some demos that didn't work out too well. So they always have some mistakes. But now they have this new. local voice mode or makes some commands faster if you want to scroll to the right or left or just basic commands are much faster they don't have to ping a server and get help anymore so that element just like basic navigation should be a lot faster but as far as like opening apps Netflix they'll do all that stuff just fine play songs so all the basics i think it works pretty well yeah they're like the the fire tv cube i think is interesting that's that's that's something that again hasn't like all of these things

are like at least the the two that already exist have kind of been north america only so like the big things seem to be that they're actually becoming international. So of course, the other one is the Firetabee Cube, which, I don't know, it seemed to have these, like, grand ambitions of controlling your home, your whole home media center. And I feel like that never really came together, but it wasn't ever really Amazon's fault, right? It was just because the ecosystem of IR Blasters and HDMI CEC just, like, isn't, isn't really equipped to be able to deal with these things. Right, they're saying that there's a team that's based here in Berlin that actually does all the IR commands and all of those device support,

such they work on all of those devices, and they're trying to add more and more every month, it seems like. But you're always going to have things that just don't work perfectly. One command works and one doesn't, and things just don't turn on at the same time. It's the world of IRR at blasters. It's just... Yeah, that's it.

I think everyone at some point has really optimistically bought, like a universal remote, and they're like, finally, this will work. But then, yeah, like, all of these devices seem to work in slightly different ways. They go to sleep at different times, and then the remote just doesn't quite work in the same way. There's no one perfect solution, but when it works fine, and it does most of the time, it's pretty nice. It's a nice thing to just say, watch this show, and all of it just lights up all at once and starts playing,

and so when it works, it works, and most of the time it does. Cool, fair enough. You also get a chance to check out LG's, it's, it's foldable, but it's not quite a foldable. Foldable, and it's a case that has a second screen in it, so you can fold it open and you get to 6.4. inch displays to work with. What is LG doing? It's called the LGG8X. It's got the usual specs for 2019,

Snapchat 855, all the usual RAM and storage options. Good cameras. There are some fun camera modes. There's an ASMR mode for a video camera, which just makes the microphone a lot more sensitive, so you can whisper to it and unwrap things and just make a bunch of weird YouTube content, I think, is what they're going for.

But the big story is that. second screen. So you just plop the phone into a case and then it just lights up and you can move apps across. You can watch a YouTube or Netflix video on one screen and just browse the web on the other, write email. So it's... So is that going to... Can that scale one app across two screens? Are you always limited to having two apps across the two different screens? So LG's first party apps can scale across and also Chrome. They showed a demo that Chrome is the one app that they're using that can actually span the one with both displays if you want to have like just a super wide web browser, which has a break in the middle,

so I'm not sure how often you would want to use a web browser in that way. But you can like, you know, like the LG Gallery, you can like choose a thumbnail on the left side and it pops up on the right and things like that. But as far as like third-party apps, like Google Photos or Netflix or things like that, really on them to kind of add support for it, which I can't imagine it's going to be too late.

Well, it feels like LG's in this unfortunate position. If they built a thing that seems like it could be okay with the right amount of app support, but unless you're kind of sitting there going, oh, I can't wait to use LG's own photo viewer, right? Then there's just that limitation of the Android platform that it's just not set up for devices with two screens. Yeah, I mean, it's nice in the way that you can just kind of take off the case

and just have your standard phone when you want that, just nice and thin in your pocket. And then when you need that enhanced larger screen, you can just take that with you. So I think there's something to that idea, but it'll be interested to see how much support this gets if people really buy it. And like, will it cost money or,

well, the carriers that just sell it for free with a phone. That's a big question, too, because if you have to pay for it separately, I think it's going to face pretty far odds to... And then, can we talk about notches? Notches. Can we? So the phone is a teardrop notch, and so does the second screen for no obvious reason. I mean, LG says they wanted to do symmetry, so it looks the same.

And also, I think it was cheaper for them to buy the parts from their supplier. Just like... They've got like a bulk order on the mic. Right, exactly. They put in the bulk order. So you've got... a real notch with a camera in it and a fake notch on the other side. And there's just no camera in that notch.

No camera? Just a little cut out of the screen. Yeah, a little slope notch. It's not that offensive. It's just really bizarre. But that's the way it is. I feel for LG. I feel like LG tries so hard. And every single LG phone, it has a thing, you know, whether it's like, was it the quad-dac they had? Yeah, the phone still has that. Most of their phones have that. I mean, their hardware is great. and the software, they showed off some new software UI that's going to come soon, and that makes their software a bit better. It's still LG software, so it's not the best around. But the hardware is great. The cameras are there, as always. You've got the lot of the camera.

I think that's really damning by them. They give you, like, more of the, more of manual control over video and stills and things like that than a lot of other phone makers do. So I think, you know, the hardware's there. They just can't seem to really stand out from Samsung just seems to always overshadowed them. And it's happened here too at the Galaxy Fold. But then, so if it's got that quad-dac, then does that mean it still has a headphone jack? Does. So is that the only flagship in 2019 that has managed to hold on to that? It's one of the few remaining, if not the only. So, yeah, that's still a saving grace. If people can put their money where their mouth is, all those people

that complain about the headphone jack disappearing, and if they really care, if they really can't live without it, then LG sales, theoretically, right? Yeah. through the roof. All right. So from like LG's weird foldable slash not foldable accessory,

Tom, you've actually tried out an actual honest to God foldable device. I have, yeah. The Samsung Galaxy Fold.

Is it, okay, did you manage to break it? I suppose is... I tried. I tried super hard. I was like, I'm going to get my damn nail

underneath that bezel and rip this screen off. But it didn't work. Didn't work. No, they seem to have fixed that part of it. Whether they fixed

the rest is, yeah so so like when you're holding it could you kind of could you tell that this was a device that had been reinforced like did it look like they've kind of gone too far in the opposite direction or anything i think it feels like a little less and it looks and feels a little less like prototypy i guess okay like it feels a little bit more polished oh sure okay it just felt like the hinge was a little bit more sturdy then exactly how many months has it been because it must have been was it back in april april so yeah it's been like five months it's a long time Here's a long time. So you got to hold it, did you get to hold it? You get to fold it yourself?

Yeah, yeah. We literally went into room. They were like, here's your fold, go wild for like 45 minutes. Really? Since they were not, because the video I saw on Twitter was a Samsung rep like handling it. And the joke I made was that like Samsung wants everyone to know how resilient its fold is. And then it has like this spokesperson, handling it with literally a white kid glove. Yeah. That's, that does not suggest that this thing is resilient. But you guys would just, you got your dirty, grubby. hands on it. Yeah, no, we went wild. We sat there playing around with it. I was folding and unfolding it like crazy. Um, like some of the stuff they've done to like the hinge. So the gap between the hinge and like the displays has been reduced. Okay. We should

effectively stop dirt from getting underneath it. Yeah, that's the problem with ours right. The like a bit of dirt got underneath and just seemed to like wedge itself in the crease and yeah. We think we think there was like a bit of debris underneath the screen that basically just made it go haywire. We didn't peer off the screen. protect, well, not screen protector, but, you know, the protective film, as it's called. Yeah, the actual screen. We didn't do that, although many others did. But yeah, like, so they, the hinge work is like the main stuff and that, and putting that screen film underneath the bezel, like a, you know, a big improvement. Because I think if people pulled that out of the

box, I started peeing that off, it'd been in, yeah, disaster. But yeah, so that, that's one part of the hinge. And also when you, you know, when you fold it in, like, flat, into the candy bar sort of phone. The actual gap in between has been reduced as well. Okay. So you know like there's like a like a wedge almost in the middle. That's been reduced slightly as well. So that should mean when it's in your pocket less like lint and stuff and fluff

and that should get in between hopefully. And then the other big thing is at the top and the bottom, they've got these like plastic caps now. Okay. They look a little strange. I guess if you open it up and you're like staring at them, then it's like, okay, it looks strange, but like you're not really going to notice them.

It's like looking at someone's ear for too long. Yeah, like anything looks weird if you kind of over-examine it, right? And my ears look super weird if you stare at them. I please don't tell me that while I'm trying to have a normal conversation. Yeah, so they put these caps on and they're supposed to, I think, they're kind of like there to protect the hinge, reinforce it a little bit more. And also, I think, like, to stop the protective film from, like, you know, coming off in that point.

And then in terms of, like, software and stuff, I mean, I remember from our review, we didn't really have, well, I mean, obviously it's a first-generation device, so the software's never going to be, like, 100% perfect. But have they made any, have they taken any R&D time and kind of put that into making the software scale better or anything? They've done sweet FAA. Really? Like, literally, yeah. Like, I asked them, like, what have you done? Software-wise? And they were, like, not a lot.

anything they've done, or like they told me about, was the navigation bar. So you can have it on the Android navigation bar, if you pick the navigation bar, not like the gesture stuff that Samsung has. You can have it on the right of the display. You can have it basically across the center, like across both, I don't want to say both the displays, but you know what I mean. Or you can have it on the left-hand side. That's pretty much the only software improvement. That's a real like 0.1 software update. Strange. Like, yeah, you'd think, within five months that they, like if they're serious about this thing, they would have read the software a little bit and found different ways. I'm curious to see how they can make the interaction between the cover

display and the main tablet displays, shall we say, a little bit more, you know, a little better. That's cool. Thank you so much, Tom. Thank you, Chris. Back to you, Neelai. Back to you in the States. Back to you in the studio. Run VT. Yeah, I think it was late at night. That's my guess that it was very late. night there in Berlin. All right, Paul. Yeah. Every week. That's right. What is it? I do with a segment constantly every week. It's called, if my shoes turn green, it's time for crime. Nike. Nike has got these new adapt hurraches. I don't know how to say it. It's a shoe that they make. And it's got

powered laces, right? But importantly, also it has LED light. But importantly, the laces and the LED lights, which can change colors, can be controlled by Siri, specifically Siri shortcuts. So what I'm conceiving of a situation, we all know that teenagers love to go skip school and do crimes. So you're in class and you're like, yo, teach, I got to open up my calculator app on my phone. and they, so you do that, but it's actually a serious shortcut. And it changes the color of your shoes to green automatically, very secretively. And now all your friends who can see your shoes, no, it's time for crime. What do you think?

What kind of crime are we talking about here? Oh, just, you know, you've seen television. Does it have to be a running-based crime? Teens are always, always doing crimes. No. Do you jump really high to do this crime? No, it's a cool crime that doesn't really hurt anybody, you know? I see

one of those friendly crimes right for taste it's like letting out fireworks yeah yeah exactly something like that or like writing like hate the principal but with chalk so it's easy to wash off don't do any of these crimes

also don't create a code where your shoes change color before you deface the school Paul was not good at crimes that's what I've learned from this conversation. Like, oh, I wonder who did this. It's the kid with the yellow shoes.

Green, green shoes. Adapt hurraches will be released on September 13th. All right. Enjoy your criminal shoes. All right. There's an iPhone event next week. Dieter and I are going. I think Viren's coming with us.

There's like some drama, right? There was like a thing that leaked, and then the person who leaked it retracted it and said it was fake, had a bunch of iOS 13 dates in it. But I think we know. Just based on the rumors that there's an iPhone 11, which replaces the 10R, an iPhone 11 Pro, which replaces the 10S, and then an iPhone 11 Pro Max. 4GLTE. One of the worst.

Yeah, we used to make so much fun of HTC for their names, the droid incredible 4GLTE, the HTT, the HTC touch prog, 4GLTE. These are real phone names. But anyway, the iPhone 11 Pro Max. I was hoping that stealing my daughter's name would only last for one year. I was wrong. It's forever now. She's going to outlive these phones. I'm just putting it out there.

It's just a fact. There's a world in which she will never know that her name was popular is like streaming service garbage and Apple phones. But we'll see. But I think we know that's going to happen. There's a bunch of rumors about these phones. I think we know that there's going to be a time of flight. light camera, perhaps a wide angle lens in the back. I think the big news is that the 10R is just becoming the phone, right? The iPhone 11 is now sort of the not the highest end phone, right? It's

like the go-to, here's the one, and then there's a tier of phones above it. And that to me is like a real interesting shift for Apple, right? They're probably going to sell a lot of iPhone 11 pros. I don't think that's going to be any weirdness there. But it does seem like that's a lot of. a big shift for them that they made with a 10R. That they're mid, I don't know if you even call it the mid-range phone, but sort of the middle phone, because they're going to be expensive. But the middle phone is the main phone and not the best phone. I'm still upset they're doing the thing where the smaller phone is more expensive.

Oh, the small, yeah, yeah. Because now I'm like, oh, I really need to upgrade this year, and I just don't want to have a big phone. I don't. Yeah. So I have to go for the middle phone. Do you have a 10 or 10S? Oh, no.

I still have a 6S. Oh, you're done. You're out. I've held out. I've held out. Did you get like a battery upgrade? Oh, this is a Frankenstein. Yeah.

All sorts of weird things happen. You've got like a sci-fi phone. It's got like other people's parts. New home button, new screen, new battery. But you know what Ashley has? A headphone jack. This, I do. I do, I do.

Yeah. I mean, they're hard to like, I'm just going to tell you. It's hard to let go to headphone jack once they're gone. I know. I've held on to this one for so long, but I've told myself this was the year. My favorite story of this week, by the way, is the New York MTA, telling people the stuff using Maripods and the stuff. way because they have to stop and go get them.

Tell the story because it really is the best story. Well, it's just like 20, 20, so over 20. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is considering issuing a PSA to ask commuters to not take their AirPods on or off while entering or exiting trains. The number of lost AirPods first spiked in March after Apple released AirPods 2. There's been a considerable uptick this past summer. Due to the heat and humidity on subway platforms, it makes the ears enhance of New Yorkers, pretty sweaty. Do we think this is how Gene Munster lost all of his? His number is like crazy, right? He's like... Yeah, he says he's lost 10 pairs of AirPods. MPA workers use an eight foot pole

with two rubber claws at the end to grab items, but the retrieval can take a while. It's just really good. Maybe they should just have like DIY retrieval. Like leave the claw. What if your headphones were connected to your phone with the wire? I know AirPods are expensive, but like I just feel like if an AirPods falls out of my ear between the subway car and the platform, like that is just all. lost. Like, I'm not expecting to ever get that airpot down. Well, many New Yorkers are, Dan. Yeah, that was the most shocking to me is all these people who are that dedicated, that they're like, I will wait hours to get my one.

AirPods are expensive. I know they're expensive, but I would be the same as Dan. I'm like, eh, it's over now. I don't want to wear that thing. Ew. Well, I mean, if you're like sweating an AirPods off your face and it falls the ground, you can't be like, I've got sanitation problems. Anyhow. Okay, so let's just go through some of these rumors. You have a big list. Big new camera square in the back of the pro.

We think there's a wide-angle lens. There's some action about maybe better low-light photography by combining more of these lenses. Multi-angle face ID, which is just a wider field of view for face ID. Slow-motion selfies seem quite strange. That's just a thing. They're going to make the video camera on the front better. This one is weird where they might.

move your eyes when you use FaceTime to make it look like you're looking at camera. I think that's brilliant. I also think it's brilliant, but it's nuts. Reverse wireless charging and can charge AirPods. No one thinks, no one thinks there's going to be a 5G iPhone this year. That will come next to it with the iPhone 11S Pro Max 5G. Just putting that name out there now. Better water resistance. 3D touch is going away.

The 6S had 3D touch, right? Do you ever use it? Yeah, sometimes. Yeah. To open notifications from my lock screen. It's that and previewing links. but every link that I preview isn't at. Yeah, and also this is a not real Apple screen, so it's crap.

Dan, do you ever use 3D Touch? I haven't had 3D Touch for a while because I bought a 10R last year. So, like, I've largely forgotten about 3D Touch. Yeah, I think it's fine. I will miss certain things. It might take a minute to get used to it, but I think it's fine. And then new collars, no USBC, which we all expected. And then there's this rumor that came out today

that next generation of iPhones will actually have touch. ID in the display over a large portion of display, and it will work in combination with face ID, which that's a lot of biometric authentication. But there's rumors about the next generation of iPhones coming out today, which is interesting. So I think we're, I would expect to see most of these things happen on the iPhone. I think the big questions are, are they going to do a watch? Probably, it seems likely. What will they add to that?

There's some rumors of sleep tracking, which could be interesting. But other than that, they're so far ahead. And then I think we're going to see another event in October. Yeah. So, like, you know, the rumors all year have been that there's going to be a 16-inch MacBook Pro at some point this year. I would not expect to see it next week. And like whatever iPad refresh they do will probably not happen next week.

Yeah. And then there's been a lot of rumors about an updated Apple TV. I strongly suspect they will make no mention of it. They will just quietly update the Apple TV with the new processor in the background. Because they've got a whole streaming service to launch. They're not going to put out a new Apple TV and then be like, and it has all the same content as before. Right?

Like they've got to show you the Oprah show or the, you know, the morning show or whatever they're doing, the boring company. I feel like, you know, the current Apple TV is pretty powerful and like I don't know what adding more power to a current Apple TV does. I think what a lot of people would like Apple to do and they probably won't do it, but is come out with something that's cheaper that is competitive with the Fire TV sticks and the Roku sticks and stuff like that. because right now the Apple TV is like four times the cost of those things. Yeah, I literally think it's the oldest chip that they're manufacturing is in the Apple TV, right? It's the A10. So I literally think they're just going to move it along and be like, okay, you've got the one that the iPads use. Good on you and like get out.

Like that's all they need to do. Right. And then they can put out the cheaper one in the future. But there's no way they're going to make any announcement about updated Apple TV when they, their big announcement is actually the streaming service. It's like the day they launched the actual Apple TV plus. streaming service and have, you know, pricing and you can watch more on a trailer. Do we think we're going to get an actual date for that this week or next week? I doubt it.

I think all that will come later. I mean, it's supposed to come, right? I think we're going to see some service-y stuff because it made such a big deal out of it. And, like, the phone is the home of the services. And the iPhone is a story of services now. A recurring revenue bundle. Multiple concurrent, confusing recurring revenue bundles at home on your iPhone. So they got to say something

But I don't think they're I don't think they're gonna go all the way with the TV one That's just my guess Especially if the only bumped the hardware is in A12 And then I think that's it Like I think this is a very focused Here are these phones I think these phones have leaked a lot

I'm always excited to go Like who doesn't want to go to a spaceship It's iPhone week Summer's over Begin where we ended But one last thing Apple related They put Apple music on the web today

which is just a wild who was asking for that and the only answer I can come up with is like Windows users. Yep. Like there's enough Apple Music Windows users that they had to make a website. Well, think about it like, you know, you're at work. You're an Apple Music subscriber. You're stuck with a

Windows PC at work and like you can now listen to it on your PC at work. But why wouldn't they make a Windows app? Do anyone make Windows apps? A rough chuckle from Dan to end the Vergecast. Also, just to point out, since we brought up recurring revenue for the last time, tile sent out a really sad PR package today related to the Apple event. So Apple is rumored to be making a tile competitor, a Bluetooth tracker,

so you can put it on a big thing. You can put on your backpack, your wallet, whatever, and you can track your stuff. And today, tile, I think I have this package upstairs. I haven't picked it up yet. But I saw online that they sent out Bose headphones to reporters with a note saying, if you're headed to Cooper Tino, like, basically don't forget about us. Because we also have, they literally mention Cooper Tino. And they are, it sounds like very afraid.

Yeah, I mean, they should be. Indie hardware. So are you. Those are roots. Like Apple has done plenty, I feel like, to make Tiles life, like, difficult already. Like, it's not like it's the most elegant integration with the phone. Yeah, no, the phone actively fights what Tile is trying to do. Right.

It's like, oh, you would like to maintain a persistent Bluetooth connection that tracks our location. Have you heard of us? We're Apple. No, thank you, sir. But if they make, look, Apple's got to face all the same questions about privacy and location tracking with this stuff too. Yeah. But at the end of the day. Tiles literally create an entire mesh network of people's things.

Yeah. It's terrifying. All right, that's a virtual cast. Dieter and I will be at Apple on Tuesday next week. That event starts at 10 a.m. Pacific. saturation coverage on the verge as you would expect. Interview episode next week, by the way, is Mike Isaac, who just wrote Super Pump, The Battle for Uber.

That was a really fun conversation. Check that out next week. We went back with the chat show. Tech season is underway. Reviews, events, the whole thing is happening. It's going to be wild. You can listen to Ashley's show, why you push that button.

The whole third season is out. Just binge it. Binge it over the weekend. Binge it. Go nuts. You can watch the future of music with Danny Deal on our YouTube channel. That show is super fun.

You can check out RICO. Code with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway. Ashley and I are both Galloway fans. It's happened to me. Oh, really? It happened to me. Oh, wow. I met him. I never thought the day would come. You used the word Rundle, so I was like somebody's been listening. Wow. It's fun. It's like a good... I love Scott. He's a real... I would say he's an influencer of business. That's a good way to put it. A disfluencer. You'd also listen to RICO and And Land of the Giants Rise of Amazon hosted by Ricoh's Jason Del Rey. That's all wherever you get your podcasts, which is actually a fight between Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Ashley, which one's better? You're a podcast reporter. I need Spotify. There it is. The upstart coming in. And you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Ashley was yours?

Ashley R. Carmen. Paul? Future Paul. Dan. D.C. Seafurt. And if you're at Exo XOXO in Portland, please just walk up to Deeter and say USBC. Just see what happens.

I would like to know. Do that and tweet it. me, it'd be great. All right. We'll see you next week from Apple. Rock and roll. Paul. You've got to say whatever Deeter says. It's promo code. Propo code.