The Vergecast - Apple’s Unleashed event / Facebook is planning to rebrand the company / Google holds Pixel 6 event

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss Facebook's plan to rebrand the company with a new name, the products announced at Apple's Unleashed event, and what happened at Google's Pixel 6 event. On The Verge is happening October 22nd and 23rd, and you’re invited  Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name The 8 biggest announcements from Apple’s Unleashed event Apple announces 16-inch MacBook Pro with new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors Apple announces new 14-inch MacBook Pro with a notch Apple’s new MacBook Pro has a notch Apple is ready to admit it was wrong about the future of laptops Apple’s new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors take its in-house Arm-based chips to new heights The new MacBook Pros have one big question mark: battery life PSA: the MacBook Pro 14-inch’s $20 power brick upsell is probably worth it Apple brings MagSafe 3 to the new MacBook Pro Apple’s new 140W charger can fast charge a lot more than just your MacBook Pro macOS Monterey is officially launching on October 25th Apple’s HomePod Mini gets three new color options Apple announces third-generation AirPods for $179 Apple quietly added a MagSafe charging case to its AirPods Pro, too A piece of cloth to clean your Apple devices will cost you $19 Apple Music’s new voice-only plan costs $4.99 per month The biggest announcements from Google’s Pixel 6 event Sundar Pichai and Rick Osterloh think the Pixel 6 is Google’s breakout phone Google Pixel 6 and 6 Pro have big screens, big ambitions, and small prices Google’s Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro finally bring new camera hardware in addition to software The Pixel 6’s Tensor processor promises to put Google’s machine learning smarts in your pocket Snapchat says the Pixel 6 is ‘the fastest phone to make a Snap’ The Google Store is open again, and Pixel 6 delivery dates are all over the place Samsung is adding new watchfaces to the Galaxy Watch 4 Samsung will now let you design your own Galaxy Z Flip 3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Alex Heath and Alex Cranz joined the show. We talk about Facebook's new name, what is going on with Trump's social network. The Apple event with new MacBook pros. I'm very excited about those. The Pixel event and a little bit more on the Vergecast coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes. in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporting.

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. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Alex Heath's typing noises. I'm so sorry. We're here. We're all together in person.

It's weird. I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Dieter Bone is here. I am, I don't know what I am. I'm here. You're here in person. It's a huge victory.

That's true. I'll tell you why in a second. Alex Heath is here. In the metaverse. No, you're here in person. Alex Cranz is here. I'm also here in real life. Isn't real life, is that metaverse though, if you think about it?

I need this to stop. I just, I want to tell the audience this piece of information, which is very important. As you can tell by the delighted giggles that we have already started the show with, this is the first Vergecast in almost. two years, maybe more, in which we have all been together in the same room. We don't know how to do it. We're going to talk over each other. We're very giddy.

Andrew, our producer, just reminded us that he can't fix it when we talk over each other. Oh, no. Because all of our microphones are in the same room at the same time. We're going to get through it. But we're very excited. We're all together because the Verges 10-year birthday party is coming up. By the time you're listening to this, we'll be at our venue. You will have just minutes to buy a ticket and show up.

We hope you do. Hurry, do it. I'm not even going to tell you the link. It's too late. Just come. Just show up. Just show up. Come to New York City from wherever you are.

Yeah. And be like, where's the verge? And all of New York will be like, Spring Studios. They all know where it is. All the cat drivers are like, oh, yeah, Spring Studio, the Verge. They're shutting down Broadway for the door. It's going to be great. But we're all together.

The Verge is turning 10. That's very exciting. And honestly, this is where I normally just sort of like look at Zoom and let the delay. take us into the next piece. But now I'm just like looking at a bunch of people. Yeah. It's weird. All right.

There's actually quite a bit to talk about this week. We got to start with Heath. Alex Heath. Alex has been doing non-stop media hits for publishing a story that I will tell everyone. We did not think was a big deal. Alex broke the news. The scoop that Facebook is strongly considering rebranding its company. Not just consider.

I mean, name TBD, but it's happening. Okay. I'm willing to say that. You know, I'm trying to hedge for me. Yeah, I'm trying to give you the app. But we feel pretty good about it. We don't know the name. Alex, tell us what's going on.

Yeah, Facebook, the company. So not Facebook the app. And I think that's been lost in translation based on some of the news hits I've been doing. The Facebook company, which owns WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Oculus is going to change its name for the first time in 17 years since it started in a humble Harvard. dorm room. And... As a hot or not clone. Yes.

And it's happening next week. No, you're putting the stake in the ground. It's happening next week. Yeah. The thing is with Facebook, since Mark controls it unilaterally, you know, he could always change his mind. And actually, as our friend Casey Newton followed up the other day, and what is that?

The day's blurr yesterday. He hasn't decided. So there's a short list. And, you know, maybe by the time this comes out, he will have decided. But the game, the guessing game, lives on. So I'm going to do a little... media inside baseball here. Yeah.

So Alex calls me. He's like, he's got this story. When you're just like, do the basics. Do we feel good about it? Yeah. We think we got it, da, da, da, da. We don't have the name. So both of us are like,

like, is it a story? We don't have the name. Like, they're thinking about it. Alex is very as confident then as he is now. I'm like, ah, well, let's do it. We got it. We're going to put it. This thing is like a media phenomenon.

Oh, my God. Not having the name for some. reason has made it a bigger story than having the name. We could not have predicted that. I mean, it's been great. Colbert had some great names, which has been on Trevor Noah. The best name I've heard, BuzzFeed published a quiz, you know, what name do you want. Many hilarious names on that list, many very dumb ones.

The one that was, I think, overlooked the most was BuzzFeed 2. Which is just great. Nothing to stop on. What is a spectacular? Yeah, it was just very good for BuzzFeed. to be like Facebook should name itself as well as me. The things I've learned about reporting on Facebook is people have strong feelings about Facebook. And they also have strong feelings about names.

I should have figured that people would have strong feelings about this given the news that Facebook has found itself in recently. But no, I did not expect AOC to be quote tweeting, Klobuchar, Blackburn. You know, when you get congressional consensus on something, it's always magical. And the consensus is that'll fix it. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess we, I should say, the focus of the name change is to reflect Mark's vision for the Metaverse, which he talked on this very show about with Casey Newton earlier this year. Nothing about anything going on in the Facebook world. Yeah.

Totally. Unrelated. The Facebook world is like three apps that are in crisis and one hardware division that isn't. And Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark. And Hawaii wave flying. Being like, man, I wish I could spend more time in that hardware division that isn't in constant crisis, right? Amen. Right.

So you change the name of the company to whatever, Zuckerberg Productions. And then Facebook, the app, is like has its crisis. And Instagram has its team crisis. Like, whatever. But Oculus doesn't say Facebook under it. Right? Like you, that would be, that's like the rationale here, right? Disclosure.

No, sorry. My partner is an employee of Facebook Reality Labs, which is Oculus now renamed. And I don't know, I actually don't know, but Oculus may have Facebook under its name because you recall not very long ago, Facebook was like, hey, all the apps are by Facebook now. Right. So this, years ago, is it years ago, two years ago? It was 2019. Yeah. It was when they started putting the name under everything.

Yeah. If you will recall, under anti-tress pressure at that time, Facebook was like, we're merging all the messaging services and we're going to be Facebook under the apps. And they're all going to be encrypted and share a thing. Everyone thought this was a very clever plan to make the company too hard to split up, which It's got the same name. Very strange. And now we're at the point where you want parts of the company to be so split apart just in terms of brand recognition that the problems of Facebook don't spill over to the thing. So I will ask you now, Alexie.

Will it fix it? I'm staring off into the New York skyline. I'm going to say no But I do think it's a moment Where they're trying to say look like yes We invented social media and all of the ills that that entails But we are going to be so much more for better or worse You know and like it's kind of we talked in like

There's Google and alphabet and what we could talk about that if we want But like I do think this is a little different because it's not mark hiding necessarily It's kind of the opposite. He's actually saying no like this is what I'm about and like he told Casey and he's told me and he's told others like I want to be known for this. I don't want to be known as like traditional social media. It's kind of wild concepts, you know, for the guy who invented social media essentially. But that's how serious about this stuff he is. Which, you know, I don't even, but the problem is like nobody even knows what the metaverse is.

No one. Like that's all the questions I've been getting is like, you know, like cable broadcasts. Like, can you explain the metaverse? I'm like, well, originated in the 90s and this novel about a disqual. Have you read Neil Stevenson? Yeah, you know, like it was people escaping from a dystopia to immerse themselves in a virtual world. You know, it's a little bit analogous to the current situation we find ourselves in. Have you seen the movie Ready Player 1?

You know how at the end of that movie they win and then their solution is to turn it off? Right. That, but you don't turn it off. Keep it on. And also, yeah, it's owned by Mark Zuckerberg. But, like, maybe his ambition is to be known for the Metaverse. Great. I buy it, right?

Like, every big tech company right now kind of wants to be focused on the next, maybe not the Metaverse. Like Apple's like, great, we did the iPhone. Tim Cook cares about health. Yeah. That's actually what Apple's about. That's what Apple's going to be known for, whether or not that is reflected in any of the products now.

Right? They're like, we made a Peloton clone. This will be our greatest contribution in society. Facebook is all in on VR and the Metaverse away from their, like they're all bored of their own products. Yeah. Google's like AI, like all AI all the time. Here's a phone that we made.

This phone is a small window into the future of AI. It's a strange moment where almost every company, right, Jack Dorsey is like Bitcoin. That's what I do. And every company is... What's Microsoft doing, though? They got HoloLens. It's the Enterprise Metaverse. It's just weird.

If you just look at every company, they're all like, well, this got boring. Yeah. I mean, they're not wrong. It's gotten boring. Like, I get, like, we are in this kind of, like, weird, not inflection point. We're not to the inflection yet, but we're in this point right before it where you're like, okay, something's coming. It's coming. We don't know what.

And it's really interesting that Facebook is like, yeah, it's on the horizon, right? Yeah, which is a name. It's a potential name. So they have this, like, Roblox meets Fortnite on Oculus thing that's been in private beta for way longer than they originally said. That's called Horizon. And they recently changed it to Horizon Worlds. It hasn't even come out yet. So, like, my thinking is that could be an umbrella term because they have Horizon workrooms,

which is the thing I tried that was really weird with Zuck in, like, a virtual conference room a couple months ago. And so Horizon's probably on the short list, if I had to guess. Zuckerberg also owns meta through his philanthropy arm. It wouldn't be the first time he's swapped assets that way was, like, his philanthropy arm. So it could be meta, but the meta ticker is owned. So that's, you know, they'd have to change the ticker, you know, the stock ticker, which is just like a fun little inside thing. I would just like all of these companies to just take a minute and go visit TCL or Sony or even Samsung and just be like, hey, you got bored with TVs. You needed to sell more of them.

Tell me what your 3D TV experience was like. Were you able to create out of thin air a desire for a new thing based on a hazy idea? and just let them tell that story and then go back and decide how much they want to bet on Bitcoin or the Metaverse or whatever else. It's a real reinvent the wheel moment for a lot of them.

They're just like, yeah, yeah, we figure this out. No, I mean, you're video. Well, they're just like out of people. Yeah. Right? They're like, they're out of growth and the thing they're doing, so they've got to find new growth.

And they've all picked something. I will point out Alphabet actually did not change its stock ticker. They added one, right? Didn't they add like a weird thing? No, their stock sticker is still G-O-O-O-G-L. I mean, FB is pretty good. I mean, FB's pretty good.

Yeah. So, you know, there's like a million ways to do it. Yeah. So Snapchat rebranded itself to Snap, because now they're a camera company. Notably, they added no products. Spectacles. But that's that still like it. And a lot of people went to vending machines.

Yeah. Sure. That's Snapchat's distraction. It's like, we continue to make these glasses with camera and them. But they don't have an Instagram to. Snap. Right. Snapchat.

Alphabet did something much more dramatic where all these companies were like floating around inside of Google and they... You mean alphabet? No, they were inside of Google. The driverless car program was like a bunch of weirdos dragging down the Google bottom line. Right. So they reorganized the entire company into a company called Alphabet and gave them all subsidiaries and said, you have to be real companies now.

Yeah. Except for you, Nest. No one knows what to do with you. You sit right next to me. You wait right here. And so like Waymo is like a real company now. Right. And the rest of them...

It's a... I mean, the answer is the rest of them are like in... Calico health. Yeah. And also, like, it did not take very long for Sundarbichai to just become the CEO of Alphabet also. Yeah. What have you accomplished? Well, you got to hide Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Yeah. Right? I mean, like, these moves are somewhat familiar. Yeah. But this move is very much just, they're not going to make Instagram its own company. They can't do it because then Amy Klobuchar shows up and be like, well, you've already done half to work, Mark. Yeah. It's like you're going to break up, what?

Yeah, I mean, it's going to be dramatic, but like I think Mark's been, and like, I don't want to pat this show's back too much, but like we actually, Casey's interview with Zuck did start the whole metaverse news cycle in July. Like, that was not a word in the corporate vernacular. And now Enterprise Metaverse is a thing that I can just make. Now Nadella's like Enterprise Metaverse. Good job. Thank you. They all need something. Okay.

So there are many days upon which this could happen, right, in the next week or so. What are those days? What are weeks? Well, it's going to be an interesting week for Facebook. So Monday, Facebook let us all know on the Twitter that 30-ish news orgs are going to dump a bunch of internal documents that Francis Hogan. the whistleblower headed previously leaked to the Wall Street Journal. So that's happening Monday, or next weekish. And then earnings- Hey, look over here. We're called Horizon now. Yeah.

Yeah. Earnings is the same day. Snap just reported earnings. They got hurt by Apple's ad-tracking changes. Everyone expects Facebook to be hurt the most because they rely on that data the most. It's probably going to be a pretty nasty quarter for them. So that's Monday. All that's Monday. Earnings would be a good time to renounce a corporate rebrand that leaked prematurely. The plan was to talk about it Thursday at Oculus Connect, which is not even Oculus Connect anymore, it's just connect. And it's basically Facebook's new conference. It used to be F8. Now this is the Zuckerberg show every year. And I think we'll still be there. But maybe they'll talk about it Monday or hint at it. But they've been denying it to everyone who's been asking that, you know, don't comment on

rumors and speculation. But just to underline it again, Alex Gotti, he broke the news and Casey followed up and platformer the next day saying more sources I told him. And this is the thing that made me for the most, that Zuckerberg wanted the name to be a surprise. And it still is. It still is. The name itself. But you wanted to be more surprising than what people were guessing, which I would just suggest is not a good thing to put on your list of reasons to rebrand your company.

Like, did we surprise Katie Not Apollos at BuzzFeed? Enough. It's like not high on the list of reasons to choose the name of the company. Everyone has guessed every possible name now. Like Colbert had some good ones. Pinsurrectionist. That's good. Best Fun Times America website.

Zuckerverse, the Washington football team. The Washington football team is my favorite by far. I'm betting on meta. I think it's like very obvious that they've got to pick something boring. Yeah. That signals what they want. Meta seems obvious. I mean there's, but Zuck's like, ah, not surprising enough.

Horizon just seems very like. Verizon. Horizon Company. ZT&T. Well, Horizon Company is the fictional tech. company that Jessica Chastain works for in scenes from a marriage story or whatever it's called, the new HBO show. Oh my head.

Was it like leaked in advance? Yeah. I don't know. Playing a really long game. It's wild. I'm getting daily emails from some random sports betting gambling website I've never heard of that is like people are betting, I guess this is real money. I don't know if it's crypto or Doge or what, but like people are betting on things.

And right now the lead is the Facebook, followed by Metanet, followed by Persistem. These are really bad. Who is betting on the Facebook? Yeah. Who? People who just watched the social network for the first time. Yeah, I don't, I wouldn't take that bet. That's a bad bad.

There's some really bad names in the list that people are betting. I'm like, these aren't, it's not actually a race. Like, there's not a chance that any of these who will surprise win. Like, Zuckerer isn't going to change it to the Facebook. I promise you to. It stands out there to just like. We did it. T-H-H-E.

Remember when Apple dropped the computer? We're adding the, the. You know one saw this coming? Oh, man. What if it's just called the? That's on the list. I've seen that everywhere. Everyone has made the same joke on Twitter 5,000 times.

Okay. So, but you're saying it's going to happen maybe next week. It could happen earlier. I mean, the thing with Mark, like, he does when I say he controls, I mean, he utilitarian, like, he can do whatever he wants. So, like, he could post it on this page right now. Like, we could be recording and it could, yeah. But it's something incredible. I'm changing the name of the verge right now.

Oh, my God. Okay, so that is that beast of news. I'd say we have, it's been 10 years. We've assumed a lot of things about how a lot of stories would go. I've never been so wrong about the impact once. We've always shot like 10 p.m. We were like, should we just run it in the morning? I think no one's going to read this.

It's very strange. And then like Casey's like, get on Twitter spaces and it's like 800 journalists like immediately. That was very funny. That's one story. The other story that broke late at night, which we need not spend as much time on, but which is very funny and also involves a social network, is at 9 p.m. last night. As we're recording this on Thursday.

Yeah, we're recording this on Thursday. 9 p.m. on Wednesday. President Trump. Former President Trump. Donnie is a column. The former is important to me. I understand. Okay.

Announced a new social network called Truth. Truth social. Truth Social, on which Donald can post his truth. It is exactly as clever as that sounds. And it is going to be owned by a larger media company, TMTG, which is way too close to Teenage Media Turtles every time I say it. And that company is going to go public via SPAC. Right, via the Digital World Acquisition Company.

Which is very good. So we have a full explainer on this. I just want to point out one thing for the Verchcast audience. I've heard this man announce a website before. The website went up. The truth social went up. People were registering Mike Pence?

No, it didn't go up. People found a sign-up link for the website. Right. Which is not public. And then they started registering account names, including Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Yeah, it's incredible.

The person who had Mike Pence, I think, is accountless deactivated. Which is very good. We found the terms of service. There's a pitch deck. This media company is going to compete with Netflix, with Disney Plus, with Amazon Web Services. The Tam, and the Tam slide is like all of tech.

Yeah. It's like everything. It's an uncancellable digital community, and it's literally a picture of the Earth and the moon. In case you were, like, they're very forward-looking. The tiny moon. Doesn't the Yula, the Yula says that part of agreeing is that you can't criticize the service? Yes. So it to everyone, except for people that don't like it.

But it also, I think the terms of source also included something about how you can't use excessive caps, which is like you know someone put it in there so that we would dunk on it. Like that was intentional. You're not allowed to use too many capital letters in the posts on Truth Social. They know. They're trying to keep share out. Truth Social, you can go on the app store right now and look at, you can pre-order on the app store, which is very funny. The screenshots that they've used are all fake posts from media brands that did not agree. And one of the posts, the at Chevy Trucks account announced a 22 Tahoe EV.

Like the diligent reporters we are, we asked Chevy. Chevy was not aware of this project and gently reminded us that there is no 2022. Tao EV. The most important clarification of all. They're like, we're not making this car. So it's like just whatever, get it out there that there's no. We're not ready yet. Don't get people excited.

The New York Times. Obviously, an early partner with Truth Social. Yeah. They told us that they would be sending a letter. Incredible. Look, it's fine. There's Rumble, there's Parlor, there's Getter, there's these companies, the big tech companies, they all need competition. I'm happy for there to be more competition in the world.

But I would just suggest that the SPAC, where they're going to go public, there's already a public company, the stock is already up, it's going to buy Trump's company and this sort of reverse public offering idea. Liz and Sean and Mitchell have a full explainer of how SPACs work and how this SPAC would work. a lot of this seems like a bunch of people are going to give money to a Trump company and the Trump company is not on the hook to ever ship an app. Shocker. Isn't this company based on like the Cayman Islands? Yeah, there's a lot of sketch under all this. Maybe they'll launch me.

They won't. We'll see. I just... Maybe don't put your money in that spec? One of the things that deeply frustrated me throughout the entire Trump presidency was that he would say or do something. Yeah. And everyone would just fully believe that it was going to happen. Right.

And we would operate in the frame of Trump is definitely going to sell TikTok to Oracle. And we'd be like, no, he's not. But we have to act like he is. We don't have to pretend that anything happened here. He did not tell Google that they were making this website. We don't have to buy it in this way. And I'm already seeing that glimmer of this, maybe a little more jaded, because we've all seen the competitors to Twitter come and go.

We all know what he wants to. He needs a platform if he's going to run it. And I understand it all. This is a hard product to make. Couldn't he just go by Tumblr? Like it's out there? No, Tumblr's on by automatic. They like it.

They're happy. Okay. Yeah. It's like the future of Red Press. There's like got to be a distressed social media. Tumblr's already gone through enough. I mean, never mind. Okay.

That's to make a live journal joke. And that guy is too painful for me. I mean, the man is a live journal. He's a walking, emotional. I will say there's one slide here where they're like, what if tech monopolies didn't rule the world? And they've chosen to illustrate it with the Twitter bird at the top, sort of shining a rectangle of blue light on like the Apple, Google, Facebook logo.

It's a real strong grasp. It's like, what is Twitter at the top? That doesn't make, are you in your, this is, like, you just have to look at this pitch deck. It's very good. I love the idea that he's going to launch a Twitter clone and then compete with Disney Plus in the same minute. Like he's got the MCU unlock. He's got like his own. The multiverse.

Yeah. The multiverse. I will say one more thing about this and then we can move on. Is it about ABBS? No, it's not about ADPUS. In the documents, in what we see, the argument is all media fragments on ideological lines. And all the tech companies are hopelessly liberal. So this is the time for a conservative network.

On the next slide, it says a Big Ten approach. And then, like, five slides after that, it's like, but it's also conservative media. That's fine. Yeah. You can do that. That's competent. Again, Trump, Josh Hawley, Ron, like, there's all these proposals to reform 230. There's this crazy law in Florida.

They're all based on the idea of the government mandating neutrality. So Josh Hawley, his proposal is like nuts, right? the FTC will create a new commission, they'll review everybody's moderation proposals, and make sure they're neutral. DeSantis is like, unless you own a theme park, right, this is how you have to moderate your service. If you're doing that on one hand, and on the other hand, you're like, I'm making a conservative social network. The thing the government is doing is making your business illegal. And that's just like... Do we think that's actually going to happen?

No, it's just, this is what I mean. Like, taking it seriously, you can take it seriously. you can take it seriously. Everything that they're doing on the other side of it is proposing things that would make an ideological split of social networks illegal. Have they thought that through? I don't think they've thought that. Is that really what this would mean?

Is that you couldn't have like a conservative social network? How would you have a conservative? What would you do on a conservative social network? You would amplify conservative things. Sure. Well, that's inherently not neutral. There is no such thing as neutrality. Well, welcome to the Vergecast.

This is ridiculous. If it's a liability thing, I understand that. If we're talking about like platforms need to be like their algorithms need to be liable for what they do, that makes perfect sense to me. But the idea of the government somehow mandating neutrality is like absurd. But this is every 230 reform proposal. Yeah. I'm just saying like that the heart of it is incredibly unconstitutional. Welcome to the Vergecast.

Also, what is neutrality is like a great Vergecast question? We do another hour on that. But yeah, this is the dynamic of all of these is you do something because you're mad about 230 and you end up in a First Amendment problem, which is why the Florida law with a theme part exception hit the courts and was immediately put on hold. And the judge was like, have you heard of the First Amendment? It's the first one. It's not a complicated idea. So I would just point out this besides getting the lawyers from Chevy trucks mad at them, besides the SPAC complications. which, again, I'll just point you to our post because Liz and Sean do a better job at that than I ever will.

And besides the inherent conflict between what they would like to change the law to be and the business case for the company, they're also not good at making websites. So just please hold that. It's coming for AWS. Oh, God. Disney Plus. I would like to see the Trump Avengers movie. It would be pretty good. Okay.

We're going to take a break. We've got to talk about Apple had an event this week. A lot has happened this week. 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,

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Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. We're back. It was only Monday. Six years ago, when I declared Victor. I'll tell you, we know, Deeter and I know, with certainty. What do we know? I don't know. That many people at Apple read our live vlog.

Oh, yes. And listen to this show. And there was a sense of satisfaction that we felt. They were like, we did it. Are you going to shut up now? Here's your port. Leave us alone. You're kind of like, no, we got to come up with more stuff.

But we're happy to do you. Tell us about this Apple. So it came out, announced some new AirPods, like the mid-range AirPods, in between the pros and the regulars. They seem nice. I'm excited for them a little bit. A little shorter, right? Yeah, like the pros, but they don't have the pro-ear things. They don't have ANC.

They added MagSafe to AirPods cases, which is like, has that ever been a problem for you? Once. But you wanted a magnet to connect it to the wireless charger. It already has Chi. Yeah. But now you can just, like, throw it on it. Now it has magsafe. Is it the watch magsafe or is it the big puck?

It's the puck. The watch is it magsafe? I don't think. It's magnetic. That's not branded magsafe? I don't think so. Yeah, I could be wrong. Let me know.

I'm sure you will. They also announced a thing, like Apple Music Voice, which is deeply confusing. I think it's $4.99 a month and you can, it lets you ask for, like, a genre of music instead of, like, downloading specific songs that you want to. listen to. I have a question about it. Okay. Because I was editing a story about it and I still didn't understand.

Spoilers. How does it, like, can you use your phone? Yeah, I think so. No, no, no. When you open the music app on your phone, it just shows you your previous searches and suggestions for what you can ask for. Yeah. Who wants this?

That's my next question. Dan is the one who figured this out, like immediately he clocked it. He's like, there's a special deal the labels will provide that has this kind of access that Amazon did for Alexa, and they just gave it to Apple, is our assumption. Well, so importantly, Spotify does not work on the HomePod Mini. Right. So Apple wants to sell lots of HomePod minis. It is the tiny, colorful cornerstone of a smart home strategy for Apple.

Fine. But you can't use Spotify on it. Okay. The two things people do with their smart speakers, they set timers in the kitchen, a challenge for Apple. Yeah. Just one of those mountains to climb. And they ask for music.

So if you can't use Spotify on it, the barrier is you got to pay for a whole other music subscription and move over. Or you pay a small amount of money and a HomePod can play some music at you. Yep. I feel like, and maybe this is just because I am all in on the Apple ecosystem for the home, that you should just pay for full Apple music. It is a weird product. I'm not going to lie. Because then you can use your phone, which I do often. But it's also like just Pandora has not closed down.

You can still there. Just saying. But anyway, Amazon has this deal. Apple, like, here's this thing. You don't have to pay 15 bucks a month. You can pay five. All of this was a preamble to the new MacBook pros. The home pods.

Oh, the new colors of the home pods. One of them is an orange. Apple made an orange. It's very funny. I'm one of two people excited about that. They still make home pods? HomePod midis. Oh.

Yeah. Yeah. We just call them home pods now because they like by the way. They canceled the big one. two types of Alexes. Yeah. The more expensive sonos without as many services, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, cool. Well, in Siri. Yeah. It's cute. Yeah, it is cute. And it can be a home kit hub instead of me having a headless Apple TV in your attic. I feel like the...

It's just the thing that I do. The real welcome to the Vergecast moment for Alex Heath here is you thought we were going to talk about the MacBook Pros. We have 40 minutes on thread border routers for you. Oh, 15 minutes on the clock, right? So the Hubbond Mini supports this thing called thread It's a border router

There was big thread news today But we're not going to get into it We're going to talk about the Macbooks The cloth And the cloth There's a $20 polish It's back ordered three months Oh my God

16 inch I'm going to get there I swear to God 14 inch They added back the ports There's three Thunderbolt ports There's a magsafe port Which is basically just

USBC power but it has a magnetic charger on the end of it. There's an HDMI port. My friends, there's a headphone jack. There's an SD card slot. It's very exciting. It's everything I've ever wanted from a computer in 2015. And the worst named processor.

Okay, so they needed to have an updated version of the M1 that you have in the Mac Mini, in the MacBook Air, in the base-level MacBook Pro, a computer which should no longer exist, but it still does. And it'll be, well, they call it the M-2, will it be the M-1-X? it be. And they're like, ha ha, it's the M1 Pro. We're like, oh, cool. Okay, sure, M1 Pro. And that means that there's more cores and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then there's also the M1 Max, which is the one with even more cores. Not the Pro Max, which is another thing. They put those words on the iPhone. In this case, the pro and the max are distinct things. We were very confidently told when we asked

after the name that Apple believes people knows what the words pro and Max mean. And you're like, no, no, no, no, no. Have they ever tried to Google? You all been walking around this circle a little too much, my friend. Google Apple TV and tell me your results and tell me if they actually were what you were searching for. We should get into the processors, but just to round out the rest of the laptop. Promotion display, so it has a high refresh rate. There is a notch at the top of the display, which I'm sure we'll have many discussions about. Heath is shaking his head no.

Why? Why not? You know what? We're not going to talk about. with the processors. We're not going to talk about the display and mini LED and all of that stuff. We're not going to talk about it's a throwback to the original

tie book design and I love it. We're going to talk about the notch for the next 45 minutes. The notch is fine. It's a stain. The notch is a stain. They're giving you more screen and you're saying no thank you. Yeah, I am. Okay. Wait, did you say you liked the original titanium power book? Yeah, it was the best.

I think it was great. Oh. It was a real status symbol when I was in. The G3 Pismo. The Pismo? Oh my gosh. the pinnacle of laptops. Here's to deal with a notch. There's already

the vattingable bays. Yes. Yeah. That was the, oh my God. I'd be like, hold on my zip drive. No, no.

CD. Yeah. I think my Apple was like, they made it and they chased, I had one of those. Yeah. And they're like, making most of this laptop hollow

is a little problematic. If you're in your car and you're under 45 years old, I want you to pull over. and Google Apple Pismo G3 So the keyboard deck

was hollow There's nothing in there And that's where the batteries went Yeah But you could also just run one battery And also like a CD drive Or zip drive And I'm just telling you

It was I had one too I loved it Oh my god We're so off the rails here And you could put the You could switch out the processor I may be spray painted mine

In a college dorm room This is also the area where you could unclip the keyboard and just remove the keyboard to put a Wi-Fi card in. And again, I'm just reminding you, Apple quickly realized that making a portable product that had only moving but fully removable parts to not do a lot for durability. I'll miss it forever. This one is all sealed up. Yeah. Well, no, actually the bottom comes off pretty easily, it looks like. And that's another thing reminds me in the tie book.

It has pentelopes, of course. So the notch, swear to God. So it's there. They should have given us face ID, but they didn't. It's there because they have a couple extra sensors, and it's a 1080P camera, finally. Although, yeah, anyway, they just gave you more screen, and they had to cut out a notch in the middle of it. Everybody, the vast majority of people, leave a menu bar at the top. The vast majority of apps, when they're open, don't put anything in the space where the notch is because they don't have that many menu items.

I get that you don't like the way it looks, but I see you holding an iPhone that has a notch on it now. I hate it. Do you even notice it anymore? Yes. You get more screen. In what circumstances do you notice that notch? Except for now when you're angrily looking at it and angryly looking at me.

Wide screen, like when you flip things over and you're like, oh, there's that. Would you rather it was just more bezel at the top? Yeah. Okay. Okay. On the Mac, you can have a utility that does that for you. Okay, I will say. I do think it's very funny that this was the year they made the audience.

iPhone 13 notch smaller. Yeah. It has a face ID sensor in it, a very good camera. Yeah. And all the other sensors it needs. A speaker for your ears. Uh-huh. And then they're like, here's a gigantic notch.

Yeah, yeah. With no face ID. Uh-huh. A 1080P camera. Like, I don't know, man. It's just a lot. It's like a pixel. What was the pixel with a doofy notch?

Was it the pixel four? Oh, whoof. Giant notch on that thing. Do the MacBook guys talk to the iPhone people? No, they don't have a lot to talk to each other. So that's why the notches. They had no idea. We are going to review the thing.

We will see the notch. We will experience the notch. I understand the notch is controversial. I am sort of confident. This is a computer that they're going to ship in dark mode. They're going to hide that thing as much as they're already hiding it in pictures. Whatever, it has a notch. So we should talk about the processors.

Yeah. Yeah. So they have added more fast cores. So I think they swapped out to the like, like mid-range cores added two more fast cores, so they have more power there. They, you know, the GPU cores, they went with their own GPU. They didn't, there was no weird shenanigans there. They are all in on their own GPU and their shared memory architecture stuff,

which is very interesting. And honestly, like, from pro to max, you're just like picking GPU cores. And like, there's some CPU core stuff, but you're just like how many GPU cores do I want? And number one, how do you know? I have no idea. Like how does, like, we don't know what these core numbers mean yet because, like, the architecture is so new. There's no way to judge. You just start like, well, I'm going to throw some money at this and see what happens.

And boy, did I. Even in, like, the, even in, like, the discrete GPU space, they don't talk about the cores. They don't talk about that stuff a lot. Like, for years, they kind of would discourage you if you even wanted to, like, report on it. They'd be like, no, no, no, we don't. But the core numbers on, like, Invitational. and AMD and AMD is are absurd. It's like 4,000 kuda cores.

Yeah, yeah. They're all like made up things. Yeah. And so it's like the same here, but they want us to talk about it. Well, so just to be, let's be specific about the chips. So the regular M1,

it's four efficiency cores. Okay. And then they're binning it in weird ways. Yeah. And then there's a bunch of high performance scores. The M1 Pro, up to a 10-core CPU, two efficiency cores, and then some numbers. So less efficiency cores.

and then up to a 16-core GPU. Okay. Whatever that means. Yeah. The max, 10-core CPU, up to a 32-core GPU. So you really are just sort of like adding from M-1 to M-1-max. You're just like trading at the first level, trading efficiency cores for performance cores. Right.

And then just stapling more GPs onto the thing. Give me some more GPU. And you can get the ultra-maxed-dout processor on the 14-inch, not just the 16-inch. That's great. Importantly, the Macs also supports more memory, unified memory up to 64 gigs, and then twice the memory bandwidth. Yep. The bandwidth is incredible. And so their demos are like, we're running seven, 8K videos at once.

And you're like... Yeah, me too. I have a question. Is what I do. Do I have to spend $10,000 for more RAM? No. No, you can't get... 6,000.

You can't. The RAM is built right onto the chip. You're done. You get what you get when you buy it. But it is, you know, that's expensive. The whole thing is expensive. Actually, the price of this thing, what bothers me about this is if I get the MacBook Air, I get an amazing computer, 9.5 out of 10 with no ports. Two Thunderbolt ports, that's it.

And then if I want ports, I have to buy everything else that comes along with the pro. If I just want an HTML port, I have to get the notch and, you know, the insanely powerful processor. They're a little bit chunky, but I'm fine with that. The thing that's exciting about it being chunky, even with like the feet, is they might be adding battery, so that's exciting. But they also might just be adding thermal headroom, which is a very new thing for MacBooks. So they showed us some charts. Oh, charts. So last year at the M1, they showed us charts.

Yeah. The charts had no labels in the axes. Right. And they were like, here's our power performance per watt curve. And I hear someone else. The other one wasn't labeled at all. This year, to their credit, they added labels the axes. They specified what computers they were comparing themselves to.

Finally. Well done. This event moves so fast, and the name of the computer was in the bottom right that we didn't quite realize it was happening until later, but they did it. Yeah. Okay. The X axis, power. That's a unit. I get it.

Watts. Totally. The Y axis was labeled relative performance. Yeah. And the M1 Mac topped out at 100. So just by sort of process of elimination here, you just like finish the equation. The unit is a units of M1 performance. Performance doing what, Neelai?

No one knows. And then they're like, see, the other computers use a lot more power at the units of M1 performance. And you can see our new computer is like three times as fast because it's curving up and over 100 to 300. It's a big line. 300 watts. And they're like, we labeled the graphs for you. That's what you wanted. And I'm like, but. And then they were like metaverse. So I get what they're trying to say. Yeah. In good faith, I understand what they're trying to say. No matter where you look on this graph, compared to Intel and AMD and Nvidia, we're way down here. We're using way less power at the same amount of

performance. Yes. Our relative performance is way better. Units of M1 performance. And then, you know, their claim is that they are more, they're faster than a 3080 in an Intel laptop or whatever. We have yet to find out. There are some benchmarks hitting GeekBench and stuff that are like, eh, but we'll see. We don't know the specs of those. But next year, what I'm looking for is like a unit. I think they do it specifically to irritate people like us so that we're all like, man, I bet it's not going to be that good. Because they would just tell us if it was that good.

They would just show us real world benchmarks. And then we're going to go out and we're going to review it. And it'll be like the M1 last year where we were like, this is going to be stupid. There are no labels. We don't know what this is. It can't be that fast. And it was that fast. It was fast and the bad life was long.

Yeah. It lived up to the vague promise. I cannot recreate that graph. I have no idea how to recreate that graph. And so when they're like, well, it was proven out. I feel that. It was emotionally. The graph is emotionally.

But I actually do not know if the graph is true to this day. And I think they do that on purpose, just to have us have these feelings right now. It's all about the feelings. Well, that's why you're here for the Vergesse. What is the graph? One last thing about performance, Apple says that it will perform the same, whether you're on battery power or not. So unlike a lot of laptops, when you unplug, it doesn't immediately throttle everything down.

Yeah. That's really nice. We'll see. They also, you know, they do a sizzle of developers. The M1's been out for a year. Lots of developers are, for example, the Chrome team has been an M1 version of Chrome. Very excited to run Google Meet in Chrome on this thing and see if the fan turns on or if the computer explodes, which is what my current laptop does. They showed a demo of Adobe Premiere.

Yeah. Which is like, whoo. Launching. Launching. Yeah. They, they, this is so real. They're like, look at all these streams of 8K video and final cut. And then they're like, the Adobe Premiere product manager is here.

And she was like, it loads so snappily. Yeah. And I got it. And I was like, you got 400 megabytes per second of memory band. Like, okay. But Adobe's on the case. Yeah. So they're very proud of this laptop.

I am very excited about it. Well, there are questions to be answered. Battery life is one. Yep. Micro, mini LED screen. Mini LED screen is it going to bloom the way the iPad does. Yep. We'll see.

We'll see. The iPad isn't bad, but it does it. Yeah. How is it going to charge? Sure. The charging situation of these computers, USBC's a mess. And so from what we understand, the 14-inch and its stock configuration does not fast charge. You can pay $20 for a 96-watt power adapter that will fast-charge the 14-inch.

So technically, the laptop fast-charges. It's just the adapter that comes in the box does not provide enough power to fast-charge it. But why? Because it's more expensive to buy the good ones. It's like a GAN charger now. They're like doing the stuff. That's the cost of a whole cleaning cloth. throwing cleaning pot money away.

Having purchased a number of GAN 100 watt USBC chargers, just buy apples. That $20 is so worth it. Is your time worth $20? The answer is yes. Just take the upsell. I am saying that Alex Heath has to review the cloth. Yeah. Ooh.

I want to read it. I want to read it. Show suck the cloth in the Metever. Can I NFT this? I volunteer. I'm going to get it in like six months. It's off the coast of Long Beach. With everything else.

Container ship full cloth. Luxurious white boxes of cloth. Tim Cook is in his supply chain meetings. We're like, get that boat in the dock. Send someone to China right now. In two years, it's cloth is a Fortune 500 company. Like services is out. Cloth is in.

Claw subscriptions part of Apple One now. We love it. We think you're going to be really delighted with this year's cloth. Okay. Then the 16 inch. Yeah. The 16 inch comes with 140-watt USBC adapter and the MagSafe cable. Yep.

And the only way it will fast charge is if you use the MagSafe cable. Correct. Only way. The other ones won't do it. Okay. They will support up to 100, but they won't support the new 240. So here's my theory. USBC is so confusing.

Yeah. that Apple was like, we're just going to make a power connector. And you will know by looking at the end of the cable whether it supports fast charging. That's such a weird idea. And we will just not discuss the fact that this was our idea. They invented USBC and it is now this crazy disaster. And they're going back to differentiating the ports in the way they look. Actually, power cable is good.

There's no other reason I have MagSafe on this thing, except for the you don't trip over your laptop. But it has been five years of people tripping over their laptops. So, like, we're all in on it. But I think that I swear to God they add it because the other end of the MagSafe cable is USB. That's correct. Yep. So I swear they added it back in just so you would know this cable will fast charge this machine. Because the thing about USB, PD, especially when you're getting into 100 watt and especially the new 240 watt standard is the cable needs to support it, the cable itself.

And I don't know if you've looked at a drawer full of Apple cables, but they all look the same. I've never been more embarrassed to work for like a tech news site than when I was trying to set up a dual monitor display. I set up with this laptop and figure out the cables and the ports. And I was like, should I mind the right industry? I don't understand any of this. Like they all look the same. I'm imagining someone who doesn't work at a tech site. I'm trying to chain together two monitors.

It's not great. But that's my theory. We'll get him and we'll review and we'll see. we're going to do the thing that we do and plug a bunch of stuff in. Yeah. And then disappointedly write down where it doesn't work.

What else from this event? They didn't really get into Monterey much at this event because like most of the good feature isn't launching with the OS apparently the continuity, but it's launching October 25th. I think Nealai is really excited for Monterey. It is one of the ugliest operating systems. You're offended by the

notch. I'm offended by almost every visual decision in Monterey. Yeah, I mean, I don't blame you. Just the thing where you click on the menu bar and it's the many, the Word looks like a button and the menu drops below it. Like, what are we doing here? I'm avoiding it as long as possible. I got to say when they did the Safari tab, like browser redesign and stuff and I walked it back and then this and like they're not shipping.

I don't, it's kind of Apple's, it's not how it used to be, man. Yeah. Yeah. I think they're still figuring out what they want it to look like. Yeah. But the problem is that it's shipping very soon. So I skip, I skip every OS update at this point. Yeah, you can't do it immediately because you'll just not have a working computer.

Unless, like me, you're like, I would really like these ports. Oh, and there's no touch bar. Oh, God, we didn't even bring this up. In the event, they, I mean, this event was the fastest event Apple has ever had. Like, even Tim Cook was at the end. He was, by the way, like, in a field, just standing in the long grass, Tim Cook. Someone tweeted the picture of him in the field was like, oh, that's where the AirPod was. Perfect.

But even at the end, he was like, you know, he's a. He's got his drawl. But even he was just like, that was great. We love it. We've got so many things. The HomePod is here. They have my clock blah, blah, blah. I was like, watch.

Everybody take a beat. Just take a breath. But they race through it all very fast. And the touch bar, they race through it in like particular speed. Yeah. They're like, now we've got full height function keys that replace the touch bar. That's great. See, on the next thing.

Full height. Full height. They also claim that the keys feel like a mechanical keyboard. Which is just like, I don't know, man. We'll see. A million to hurt. suddenly sat up with their chairs. Oh, really?

I was like, I don't, what are you playing with? What are you just got away from everyone hating you? Which kind of switch, though? I mean, there's lots of different. What? Dark energy, are you summoning to this computer? Just don't say it. Keep it to yourself, Apple.

This is like when Jobs announced OS 10. I don't remember this. When he first announced OS 10, he had, like, announced the kernel they was using. Yeah. He was using the Mock kernel. And he kept saying, it's very Linux-like. And it was like, you, just think that the press is stupid and they know that keyword and you're like just glue that idea

on it's like none of this is the same man um anyway we're going to get the computers we're going to test them out i'm very excited apple there was so much demand for this apple's website slowed down yeah people are posting up their receipts for their new macbook pros i'm i'm confident that there was more interest in this than the iPhones this year 100% people were more excited they more amped, they were happier about it. The iPhone is like, spending the money again. I hope I can see these camera improvements,

but the cloth. That's what actually everybody called me about. Do you get that thing after an Apple event? And sometimes Google and Samsung too, mainly Apple, family and friends will call you and be like, what should I get? Yeah. They asked about the cloth.

They didn't actually, though. Nobody asked about the cloth. But they were like, should I get the cloth? And you're like, oh. And you're like cloth. Yeah. Acted cloth. All in on the cloth.

A thousand cloths. What are you calling that? One charger. What did you tell them? I was, I guess, 14 for me, just because I like smaller. I like to carry things and I have tiny, tiny shoulders. So it's helpful for me. But it seems, yeah.

I mean, I haven't bought it yet. I'm going to wait because I bought the 2016. Yeah. I'm going to wait until next generation because I bought the 2016 touchbar. I was ready because I've been on like the first, the 20s. That was a scissor key. Yeah. I did the retina, 2012.

It was great, but it's bad. And it died. Then I did the 2016 touch bar, and I was like, yeah, this is going to be it. I went through three of them in a year. It's good to skip the first major. And so I've even blogged, like, don't buy the first generation. And I was like, I'm going to do it. And I was like, you have blogged this.

You have told yourself not to. Yeah. I'm the one who's like, wait for the reviews. And I'm like, I'm the review. Shit, I bought it. That said, Jim Bankoff, if you would like to start issuing since you inch MacBook pros to employees in Vox Media. Yeah.

I'll gladly take the owl. You got to start to lie. You got to tell you you're a video editor. You're going to get that air unless you're like, I edit videos all day. I'm in the midterverse. All right, we're going to get them. I'm pumped to get them. If you have questions about it, let me know.

We're going to figure it all that. We're going to take a break. We've got to talk with these pixels. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

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MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. We're back. This week, a lot happened this week. Yeah. Also, we're doing this in person, right? Yeah. Usually, I've got my little recorder with a clock that tells me how long we've been talking.

Yeah. This could have been six hours. No, no. We're over? We're a little over. All right. Let's keep going. Let's keep going.

How long have we been here? It's just so nice to see everyone. The sun slowly setting. So Google had already announced the pixel. They had announced it, and they put up ads for it, and they had commercials for it. And then they had an event. They launched it. Yeah.

They actually launched it. You may have heard in this Vergecast feed that I interviewed Rick Osterlo and Sundarpa Chai, if you haven't in the feed, just listen to it next or, you know, later. Pause. Go back. Listen to that. We got the prices. They are lower than I think a lot of people were expecting. 599 and 899 for 128 gigs, which is like good value, I think.

They claimed to have done the thing they needed to do with the camera, both in terms of photo and video. We shall see. And they also showed off a bunch of AI demos that take advantage of tensor, their new custom processor. There was like super fast translation. They had Marie Kondo come on their stream, and they had her translate with the pixel. It's cheating. She's just like throw away your stuff. I mean,

I know what she said. They, they should. It was a very strange moment. I was like, what is happening? She's like, have less stuff. And I was like, no, buy this phone. It was like, ah. They spent a remarkably long time talking about how their camera is more equitable

and how it does a better job with darker skin tones that they brought in panels of photographic experts to help them tune their ML models so that the camera would do a better job with darker skin tones. So that's very interesting. They maybe spent more time on that than talking about, you know, the telephoto lens or, you know, the precise specs of the camera itself. Or even the custom processor. Well, they spent quite a lot of custom processor, but yeah, yeah. So that's interesting.

And then, I mean, I don't know, it was an hour long. It felt like the opposite of the MacBook event in terms of pacing. It was very, very slow. I wasn't really sure who they were talking to. Because on the one hand, it's like, if you're trying to go mass market here, you shouldn't be leading with, like, super chip stuff. But if you're trying to get the nerds, you need to have gone a little bit deeper on speeds and feeds than you did.

So I thought the camera stuff was good in that going all in on telephoto lenses and whatever. Like, everyone does that now. Yeah. Saying we care a lot about the quality of pictures we take and making people look good and the people being divert. Like, that was where. Google won with a pixel to begin with. Right?

They had a look. They were thinking about artists and paintings. They're good at achieving that look programmatically. If they can pull it off. Yeah. And to be clear, it seemed very sincere. I'm not saying that, oh, they say this thing and, you know, it's just, you know, lip service or whatever.

It seems like they actually put a ton of effort into it. And we are constantly, this joke, like, what is a photo? These existential questions that we ask on the show all started with Google's photo technology. in their very opinionated decisions about what a photo is and how it should look. So if they can do that again and pull that off with this camera, that will be a step forward. One interesting thing about the main sensor, it's huge. That's why the camera bar is huge. It is a 50 megapixel sensor, but they're binning it, I think the phrase that the guy uses like analog.

So they're bidding it at the sensor. They're not binning it in software later. Okay. So you can only get a 12.5 megapixel photo out of this 50 megapixel. sensor. And so I was like, well, why didn't you just use a 12 megapixel sensor? And like, oh, you know, we wanted to find the best sensor we could, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it like, it became pretty clear that like there wasn't a good 12 megapixel sensor they could get. The best they could get was probably this 50 and then, you know, they're bidding it. Yeah. Which is interesting.

Is it because Apple bought on a 12th. I mean, that's historically what happens. Yeah. And then the last thing, well, there's a bunch of other things. But the last thing I think we really had to talk about is they brought on Evan Spiegel from Snap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your boy. Yeah. Whoop, whoop. Tap to snap.

Tap to snap. All the youngens. Taping to snapping. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the story, you can double tap pixels to do something, to launch something. And they've given Snap special access to when you double tap, even if your phone is still locked, it can bring up the Snap camera, even with your phone locked. Oh, that's cool.

And then you can still, you know, snap your snap. You can tap to snap your snap. And then you can unlock it and go in and do whatever. So that seems cool. It's also cool that they are doing a better job. giving Snap access to like the good parts of the Google camera and system because quite often on Android third-party camera apps are not getting access to the good stuff and they're often crap. This is a very deep, you could tell was a deep deal because like Evan was the one announcing it.

Yep. And Snap has done these camera integrations. Like I don't know if you guys have looked at like the Samsung phones, but Snap's just like in there. Like the lenses are like in the native camera. Yeah. And like the bitmojis are in the keyboard, like the pre-installed keyboard. And so they're doing this platform play that is honestly pretty unique. Like no one else is doing this right now.

And like Evan Spiegel gave a stat that they have about 300-ish million daily users, but they reach 500 million people. And that's like that difference is all these integrations that they're doing with all these different OEMs. So it's interesting strategy because they're not getting any money from this. It's not like they're making money by people using their lenses in the pixel. But it does kind of... Are they like branded? Like, are you always going to know that that's the snap? Yeah, I mean, and it kicks you into the app quickly and all that.

So, like you, they get that. But I think it's more just they're a camera light. Like we were saying earlier, they're a camera company. And so they're taking opportunities with everyone except Apple, obviously, because Apple won't let them do that. But to, well, never say never. But like, you know, they're taking these opportunities to integrate at the phone level, which is, you know, Facebook wanted to do that for a while. They even did that HDC phone, you know, like every social company has thought about this or wanted to do it. And I think Snap's finding a really unique way in.

And Google needs their AR software stuff, I think, to differentiate, because Google's AR stuff is kind of a mess. Yeah. And doing it at the camera level is really interesting because, like, like Facebook tried to do like the whole thing. Yeah. Right? And that's just, even then it was.

I love that phone. Yeah. I'm just putting it out there. HGC first. It was a good phone. It had its charm. Yeah. With the chat bubbles and all that?

Yeah. Chatheads. Yeah. Which I always read at its Chatheeds. That's the new name. Chathie. Oh, my. God, yes.

That's pretty good. Wait, don't they own chacha? Because that was the phone with the keyboard. Yes. My God, I forgot about it. Yeah. Oh, God. The chacha.

The problem with celebrating your 10-year anniversary is that you keep thinking about things that have happened. The past 10 years. Like, I have been useless. We've hired so many people. Like, how are you? I'm like, five years ago. You, like, sound did not exist until. Yeah.

So what's going to happen at the 10-year party is Neely's going to get on stage. He's about going to be. introducing the whole thing. He's going to start talking and he'll hear me from the, you know, the back of the stage. And I'm going to whisper just so he can hear me and nobody else. I'm just going to say, Cyboard. And he's going to die. I'll just fall over. It's going to be a problem. So that's a pixel. We're going to review it. So we talked about this. We have them. We are not allowed to talk about the software yet. Or the camera. Or the camera. But we have held them. I said this. We did a little pickup after the Rick and Sundar interview.

that interview is great. Enjoyed hearing from them. They're all in on this is it. They did that story with us, with you. They did that story with the Wall Street Journal. Yeah. Right? Where they're telling their investor audience,

this is it. Our hardware division is going to do it for real. We're competitive with Samsung. This is every year. No, but this is real. They definitely were sandbagging in the last couple years. Really? I feel like I've heard this narrative before.

They spent however many billion dollars on HTC. Sure. This is the first flag. flagship phone from that team. That's what they told us last year. The cheaper ones were the HTC team, but they had made the, this is it. I'm just telling you, go and hold the pro, especially the white ones. And you will be like, the black one, not so much.

Yeah. What is it? Is it the feel? Like, why? It feels like a first-gen flagship product. It feels like a one plus, like six. You know what I mean? It's not like an early Samsung phone with a crush.

Yeah, yeah. Bump on the back. And it does have the last. ledge, the bar, the shelf. They need it to look different. It's like a Kinkak bar. The regular one, yeah, it's, it looks fine. Are they doing any deals, like, with Verizon and AT&T and stuff?

They do have some deals. They're better than I expected. They also have some shenanigan-type deals on their own websites when they ran. See, they really are getting into it. The website's super crashed right after the event. Right, because the pixel store team was like, well, eight people are coming. I will tell you that I have, you eyes one of them. I've waffled between the press.

and the regular. And this is not any of the review stuff. It's just like size-wise and just feel-wise. And so I plugged in both like buying the Pixel-6 pro from the Google store and buying the regular Pixel-6. I was like, yeah, I'll trade it in my Pixel-5. If you go to buy a Pixel-6 pro with a perfectly good Pixel-5, they'll give you $405 for a Pixel-5. It's wild. If you go to buy the regular Pixel-6, they'll give you $366.

They'll give you different amounts of money. So there's definitely shenanigans happening with trade-ins everywhere. It's just the way that. Phyllons work now. I'm not judging too harshly. I'm just saying my first reaction and it has remained my reaction to the pro in particular, especially the white ones. That's a review headline.

But yeah, but we have, now we're here altogether. Yeah. We have a bunch of units. I've seen a black pro much nicer. I haven't seen any of them. Well, after this. After this, I'm so excited. We'll set up the gauntlet.

Did you all see Lauren Good's tweet that the only thing keeping her from switching from iPhone is I message? Oh, yeah. I mean, Lauren has been on many episodes of this show where she's like, so I message got me again. Yeah. Yeah. She wrote a whole article about it that I believe was cited in one of the internal Apple emails. I'm trying to get Dieter to talk about RCS.

That's the, that's a goal. Not going to do that. This show's not long enough. Oh, my God. Anything else you want to talk about with the pixel? No, I mean, we're at the point now where we have a lot of reviews to do. Yeah. We would like to hear from you.

We're also the point now where we have to go prepare for this party that we're throwing. Yeah. There was a third tech event, by the way. Samsung announced you could customize. It was not a third tech event. It was not a real event. There was Google loudly saying, we are going to attempt to take phone market share. And there was Samsung saying, hold up.

The only place to take it from is us. Because Apple has everyone in the prison of iMessage. And they announced what colors for the flips? Yeah. And customize the top and the bottom and the hands. It was the most remember us event that has ever occurred. I wish they'd just like said that. Yeah.

Just been like, hey, we're just going to go over all of our stuff again. We're making your chips for you, Google. Watch your back. Slow zoom in. No, Samsung also had an event. They did, technically. I think our event is going to produce more news than this. I'm like actually pretty confident about that.

Same. Same. of our event, it is happening. By the way, if you've been listening to this show for 10 years, like, thank you, that's remarkable. I'm not going to do the whole thing. We're actually turning 10 in November. That's what I'm going to tear up on the show.

Okay. That's my plan. Yeah. And this is just like a preview. Yeah. But we're having our event. We have, there will be news. Nick Weaver from Ero will be there.

Razor has promised to show off some products. If you look at our website, you'll be able to guess what products they are. Because they actually announced them. You're interviewing some folks from Snap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they're SVP of content and partnerships. So that's everything that's not the chat part of SNAT.

So we're going to talk about creator economy, maybe some crypto, maybe a lot of fun stuff. Yeah. Liz is doing a Metaverse panel. Oh, my God. It's true. Meta-Covin will be there. It's like a real thing. Wow.

I'll be at the bar. That's where the news is going to get made. I was like, I heard the here's the original NFT. It's got gin in it. Dieter's premiering his handspring documentary. It's true, I am. Very excited. It's going to be great.

And then the first thing that we're doing, the kickoff true, like pure fan service, Joanna Stern and David Pierce, Verge O.Gs are going to do a Verge cast with us, and we have some ideas. It's going to be good. And then I don't know if this will get out. Our other executive editor, T.C. Sotic, has brought in a memory expert. Oh. She's like a memory world champion.

She has memorized a list of 100 tech products from the past 10 years. And Dieter and I have to compete with her in like a flash card game. We're going to lose. It's going to be great. So we'll see. So a lot happening in our event. It's going to be really fun. If you can make it, we're very excited to see you there.

If not, we'll make some news. We'll share some stuff from the event. The Vurchase will definitely go out. But for now, we have gone far over, like way over. Yeah. So it's keeping you company as you drive to New York City to come to the party. Yeah. Also, we're definitely just going to, like, miss some deadlines over the next few days, so just bear with us.

Oh, Lord. It's going to be complicated. Anyway, we have gone way over. It was delightful to see all of you in person and do this in person again. I've missed it very much. You can tweet at us. I'm reckless, Dieter's at Backlon. A couple of Alex is here.

Alex E. Heath. Alex H. Kranz. Yeah. High five. Kranz. Kroft. Krolet. Got it.

That's it. Rock and roll.