The Vergecast - Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review / Spotify is acquiring two major podcast tech platforms / The LinkBuds are Sony’s strangest earbuds yet

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Monica Chin discuss phones, laptops, and chips announced and reviewed this week. Senior reporter Ashley Carman joins the show to discuss the latest podcast industry news. Further reading: Samsung’s Galaxy S22 phones are the safe bet OnePlus Nord CE 2 review: a great Oppo-tunity Realme 9 Pro and Pro Plus announced with color-changing new design Oppo releases official images of new Find X5 flagship phonet Apple reportedly plans to reveal the first iPhone SE with 5G in March AMD’s new Ryzen 6000 H-series processors are launching in laptops starting today Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review: the price is no longer right The Asus ROG Strix Flare II Animate: feature-packed, but overpriced Cooler Master’s Sneaker X PC case has a lot of sole Intel's first discrete Arc desktop GPUs are coming in Q2 2022 This DIY ultracompact computer has a mechanical keyboard Samsung teases new Galaxy Book and more at February 27th event Spotify’s COVID problems are bigger than Joe Rogan Spotify is acquiring two major podcast tech platforms Spotify wants to beat YouTube at audio Spotify reportedly paid $200 million for Joe Rogan’s podcast Hot Pod Summit is back at On Air Fest 2022! The LinkBuds are Sony’s strangest earbuds in years — and surprisingly good Audio-Technica’s new $200 earbuds promise an impressive 20 hours of battery life Garmin’s Epix 2 multisport watch made me a touchscreen convert Garmin's Fenix 7S Sapphire Solar makes the case for smaller fitness watches iFixit has a Steam Deck teardown — and will officially sell replacement parts from Valve Disney is developing planned communities for fans who never want to leave its clutches Google is bringing Chrome OS to PCs and Macs Facebook rebrands News Feed after more than 15 years Elon Musk tells a judge the SEC’s ‘endless’ investigation is stifling his free speech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Monica Chin joins the show. We talk a little bit about the phones that are coming out ahead of MWC, AMD's new Risen chips, and the Esus-Rog Zephras G14, which contains that chip. Then Ashley Carman joins the show. We talk about Spotify's big acquisitions. Then a little bit of lightning round. That's all coming up on the Vergecast 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 they, building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in.

Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBee. All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome to the Redshift. The Flag Shape. We are the flagship podcast of Shape Rotators. Get it behind the sports cells. Well, we were beginning the show. That's Dieter.

I'm Neely. I don't know what I'm doing here. Welcome to the voyage.com. Alex Kranz is here. I am trying to figure out which of the chipmunks we are because so many people listen to this podcast so quickly. Oh, yeah. A shocking number of people were like, we only listen at like 2X. Please let us know which chipmunks we sound like.

I feel like I'm in the die. I'm the dudes like hanging out of the sun. You're Dave. That's his name. Dave. Why aren't you deep in chipmunk lore? Come on. Name all the chipmunks and the chipmets.

That's Monica Chin, by the way. Hey, Monica. Hi. Monica is going to help us run through some laptop and phone news from MWC or a little preview of MWC. And then Ashley Carmen's going to join us later. By the way, the other thing I want to call out, the number of people who wrote to us about Bing and why they use Bing.

The volume was so high that I was like, uh, we have to assign a, story. So our fellow, umar wrote a story about it. It was great. Thank you for all the people who wrote in. That story was illuminating. I tweeted it with the word apparently. I wrote apparently people use Bing and like Microsoft was offended. So if you're at micro, like the PM of Bing is like, it's my goal to switch Nilai to Bing. So good luck. We're going to have to up those rewards tears, buddy, but you can get there. Well, actually the there's been a whole thing. Someone wrote a post about how the quality of Google search results has gone down. And they have.

I tried to search for Farhad Manjou's article today. And I just searched for his name. And the first thing that popped up was somebody copying the New York Times, not the New York Times article itself. Amazing. That post is great. It's about how people are appending Reddit to their Google searches. So only searching Reddit directly.

Yes. Because then you get real people talking instead of like SEO recipe spam or whatever. I could do like a full hour on how the entire news industry. Oh, we are so off topic. If you're in your car, I need you to pull over, pull out your laptop, open Chrome, hit Command Q, or just open up preferences inside Chrome, and then I want you to click on search engine, and then click on manage search engines, and then if you'd like, you can add any search engines you want and change the shortcut

or even change your default search engine to include site colon reddit.com. So you can change your default search engine and include all sorts of alternate search engines with your own keywords on them. It works really well. That's how I search the verge. Anyway, I strongly recommend in both Chrome and Microsoft Edge that you play around with adding custom keyword search engines to your universal bar at the top. The Vergecast, everybody. You can do it in Alfred, too.

You can do it in all the little hotkey search things. You can program as many as you want. The nice thing about doing it in Edge or, yeah, I think Chrome, too, is it will sync across different computers, but not to mobile, because the mobile version of these browsers apparently doesn't count. I don't know. Welcome to the Verchast, the flagship podcast of Alfred Power Tips. 1998's hottest podcast. Amazing. Very excited for all the Alfred users to ping us.

You know who you are. Everyone else has no idea what we're talking about. Because, you know, Sherlock is a built-in search on Alfred. They'll use Quicksilver. What are you talking about? Oh, my God. All right. MWC preview.

That's what we came here to talk about. That's what the people pay us the money for. the money being nothing, it's your attention. This is an advertising business. Anyway, the S-June twos are out. Allison Johnson currently reviewing them. We've got our hands on. They seem very safe.

But there's a bunch of other phones coming up that we see come in MWC. What's going on there? So MWC is traditionally the place for a bunch of not Samsung companies to announce phones. But past few years and this year I think also, everyone has figured out that like if we just do the announcement ourselves, it'll be fine. So they're still hitting that sort of vague target around MWC, but they're not necessarily being announced at MWC. We'll have to see what happens. So there's the One Plus Nord CE2 that John just reviewed.

There's the Real Me 9 Pro and Pro Plus. We also have seen some images and teases of the ApoFindX5, which is their flagship phone. All of these are BBK phones. So, you know, One Plus is now kind of like Apo. They're just a subbrand of Apo. And RealMe is also another one of these subbrands that will eventually, I'm sure, get absorbed into Apo when they get bored with it. And I don't know, like they all seem fine. To me, the most fascinating thing about the Nord C2 and especially the Real Me 9 is it seems like media tech is like getting into phones that are halfway decent and you don't just laugh the phone out of the room because it's running a media tech processor.

very interesting. Well, so that's kind of like the classic pattern, right? You've got the low-end brand, and then everything kind of gets fast enough, and they become, right, they're now just like a decent mid-range performance because the tippy top of performance is ridiculous for most people.

Right. But I guess what I'm saying is like, I've never considered a media tech phone to be allowed to be called like high mid-low-end or, you know, mid-range or whatever. Like it's always been like, oh, well, sorry. I mean, do what you can. But now it's like, oh, Media tech, okay, which is surprising.

How much do you think this is driven by cost, right? Like, One Plus, I think you could argue that they have left their low cost roots behind. But they were kind of the lower cost phone for a while, right? Flagships at mid-range prices. Real Me is definitely in that lower cost tier most often, right? Do you think it's, well, these media tech chips are cheaper and we can just use them and maybe they're fast enough? Or is like, who, that chip shortage sucks and media tech is, ooh. Right?

Like, here we are, huh? They just got a box of them. Yeah, boy. I hadn't thought about that. It could be both. I just, I wanted to tell a nice story about, you know, good job, Media Tech. But yeah, maybe it's just like, well, the bin of Qualcomm 635s is empty. What else do we got?

By the way, the name of this, the name of this processor is in the Real Me 9 Pro is the MediaTech Dementity 920. Yeah. Dementity. Yeah. that is definitely a word. Honestly, I like it better than Intel. So, you know, I think we talked to this last week. I asked the CEO of Qualcomm on Decoder, like, yeah, why is every phone in America

a Qualcomm chip? Right? And he hemmed and hot, and he was finally like, the carriers are only certified Qualcomm chips? So, like, a real question is, like, are the carriers going to support any of these phones? Yeah. In the U.S. at least, unknown. Yeah.

They look cool. I like the Real Me. It's like a sparkle back. Yeah, it changes color if those are, like, sunlight. It's like, yeah, like hypercolor. The 90s are back. We got a vibe shift coming and the real me nine pros at the forefront of the vibe shift. Be ready.

If you don't know what Deeter is talking about, you are blissfully not online, but our sister publication, New York Magazine, and their vertical to cut, published a piece called A Vibe Shift is coming. You just should read it. No one knows what it means. But it is like an all-time great headline. And it's just like basically a boy is done to like, maybe we're older and things feel different or it boils down to no one will ever be cool again.

And those are the two pulls. But a vibe shift is coming and hypercaller phones are it. I guess the other phone that's going to be in, not in NBC, but around Mbc is, you know, we're getting up to like expecting Apple's spring events. And they're probably going to introduce the iPhone SE, which will be the first one that has 5G. And I wish that I could be happier about this, but I really am not happy about like the iPhone SE form factor. I feel like it's at this point, like, the idea of like having a cool, new looking phone that is nevertheless, like, low cost has hit everywhere. And that the fact that the iPhone

SE, I know people still love that form factor, whatever, I just, I feel like it's time to update something there more than just throwing a 5G radio into it. You think that's all I'm going to do. You don't think they're going to go full screen, face ID? All that stuff is cheaper now, right? All that stuff is cheaper. But you know, it's even cheaper than that. the bin full of touch ID buttons. What? They don't have a bin full. I love that like the idea that like someone just keeps making them and they're like,

I hope they use them. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, look, I think ultimately Apple knows the carriers are desperate. Do you see this the other day? The headline, the top headline on CNN.com was not Ukraine. It wasn't Sarah Palin Sue in the New York Times. Well, none of that. it was looming 3G shutdown could affect more than phones.

And I was like, I don't know, like I understand there's a lot of management turmoil at CNN. Like, I don't know what tech editor was like, I got it. 3G shutdown top of the scene. But like, it's real. It's coming. My car is going to stop working. My car will keep working. But I will no longer be able to use the remote app on my Volkswagen because it is on 3G.

And they say maybe we'll make a model. for you next year maybe but like I I can no longer use my phone to like lock my car if I need to I'm gonna get you one of those crazy Android tablet head units oh god this is this is this is gonna be this is gonna be the worst gift I ever dip you like one of those like $1,200 it's basically it's like a media tech Android tablet but it's your car radio can it adjust my climate though because like oh yeah integrated into the screen yes it can't These things are nuts. Okay.

Okay. They're not good. And when you read any of like the car forms of people who put them in, they're like, I don't know why I did this. Like the YouTube videos are like, I put a Tesla radio in my car. Dot, dot, dot. I regret everything. Are the bootloaders locked?

Can I load a custom ROM onto them? You know, Dieter? I think you're going to find out when I buy you one of these things. Anyway, so the, to bring this all the way back around, yes, the carriers are desperate to turn off their 3G networks, to reform the spectrum. use it for other things. Apple knows that. That's how they're generating the sales they're generating. Yep. So if you're like, okay, fine, we're going to, we're going to just go after the low end and collect these carrier subsidies, right? Like, you can just make a 5G iPhone SE and just assume AT&T and

Verizon will just like throw them out of trucks. Yeah. We'll just drive down the street, flinging on people. Yeah. It's sort of, it's really opportunistic. Like Samsung makes a phone at every $23 price point, just like clockwork, no matter how much you want to spend, Samsung has a phone at that price point, full stop. And Apple wants to make sure that when the coming carriers must get everybody to replace their phones no matter what apocalypse comes at the 3G shutdown, those last stragglers, they need to have an iPhone SE sitting there because otherwise they're going to, those people that don't want to spend the full amount of money are going to end up with an Android phone.

And that's unacceptable. I just think that's like fundamentally fascinating. that we are definitely in a moment where more of Apple's strategies being driven by the carrier world than I think we've talked about a lot, but you can just see it, right? That's where the upgrade cycles are coming from as a carrier is desperately trying to get people into these new networks. And now that they've solved their FAA problems, actually use their mid-band spectrum. So what happens in like two or three years when everybody's upgraded?

Yeah, I don't know, 6G. We're going to start racing the 6G. Like, it's like, I don't want to say it. I'm saying half a joke. That's definitely what's going to happen. Oh. I mean, AT&T is launching 6G next week, right? They're just going to rename it for the hell of it.

Yeah. Just add a little line on the 5 and they're like, we did it? It's 6G. Someone sent me a picture. Evan tweeted at me and his phone had a bug and it just says G at the top. He's like, where am I in the race? And I think you've won. I think that's fundamentally that's winning.

When you no longer know, you've transcended G's. Yep. I think the last MWC adjacent thing to talk about, which brings us into talking about a whole bunch of laptops, is Samsung has teased a Galaxy Book. And I frankly don't know what's going on with Samsung and laptops. It always feels like they're like giving it the old college try because they'd feel bad if they didn't, but their heart is never really in it. And am I wrong, Monica? Are they going to, are they going to like? The last Galaxy Book Code is actually very, very good.

It's our best page. like it was really excellent. But they've definitely put some out in the past that were more experimental. So it's always, it's always hard to know which category they're going for. But I do think that the progression of Samsung laptops in the past years has gotten, like there's been significant improvement and I think significant, like, progress in the pragmatics sector.

So should we be hype for this February 27th event? So I'm looking forward to it. I mean, I'm looking forward to trying it. I think, I mean, like I said, the last Galaxy book was really one of my favorites that I reviewed last year, to be honest. So I hope they fixed the right things. Is it going to be like a 14 inch? Is it going to be a 15 inch?

Like, do we have any idea of what the size of this thing is going to be? No one has told me. Maybe that's what it is, is that there's like, there's a hype cycle for other laptops. I wouldn't be surprised if there are multiple sizes, but. Yeah, I think for me, it's that there's not like a rumor hype cycle for Galaxy books in the way that there are for other Samsung devices or even other Windows laptops. And so it's just sort of, they land and it sort of doesn't feel like it's part of the same, like, excitement wheel as other, you know, consumer electronics. But yeah, no, I'm excited to check it out.

They're not like HP or Dell or even nowadays Assuse where there's lots of experimentation. There's lots of like kind of cool things setting the tone for the rest of the laptop. Samsung is very much like, yeah, we do this pretty good. Well, I disagree with that. I think in the past they actually, actually have like things like the Galaxy Book Flex and the Galaxy Book S have been like types of things that no one else is doing. And for a while that was really what they were known for is like these aren't laptops that people are necessarily going to buy. Like they're not really going to sell well. That probably. But they are doing like these kind of wacky things. Like one of them's like 0.02 pounds and one of them has this processor that no one else has. And the Galaxy Book Pro I think was sort of one of the first times. I've seen them really try to do like a MacBook Pro like competitor that people might actually buy instead of the MacBook Pro. And I think the Galaxy Book, the most recent Galaxy Book Pro, like the regular one, not the two one that we reviewed, is one of the lightest laptops you can buy. Like legitimately, there are almost no laptops of that size that are lighter. And I think that was a

really big accomplishment. And that's one of the reasons I think it's so great. Was it lighter than the LG Graham? I don't know because I never actually reviewed the 13 inch. I've never reviewed an LG gram of that size, so I'm not sure. But at minimum there are like maybe two or three laptops that are lighter than the Galaxy Pro 13. It was really like astonishingly light. So that's one of the things that the Samsung light, I think, really has going for it. And obviously, I always like to see very light laptops that don't compromise a lot of

things, which we've seen a lot of other companies doing recently. Well, on the other end of the spectrum, we're starting to see a Ryzen H-series laptops. And you actually reviewed one of them. Yes. So what's going on here? So I'm currently talking to you from the ROG Zephyrhus G14, which has AMD's RISN-9-600 Hs. It's the first Risen 6,000 processor that we've gotten to review so far. We ran some games on it.

We ran down the battery. It's been interesting. What does that mean? Do you want to just go into my general? Yeah, let's do it. I mean, I want to hear what's going on with like the Risen H series, like, these and laptops. like what's that generation mean? And I'm really curious about the G14

because thanks to you, I stand the G14. It's my boy. I love it. And I'm curious about the new one. The G14, for those who are unfamiliar, has been one of the Virgil's favorite gaming laptops for the past couple years.

And a big part of that has been that it's just unbelievably affordable for the benefits that it offers. So when it came out in 2020, it was showing these like crazy frame rates and it was like significantly less expensive than basically everything else that was delivering those frame rates. The reviewers just across the board were astonished by it basically. Like they'd never seen a laptop of this size delivering these frame rates at this

price and the battery life to top it all off was like the longest battery life we'd seen in a gaming laptop at that point. So ever since then, Aesuz has been slowly bringing up the price of this laptop. So the one we reviewed last, it was like $4,500 more than the one we reviewed in 2020. And this one is even more expensive than that one. So it fixed a lot of the problems that we had with the last generation. The last generation has 16 by 9 screen. This one's 16 by 10. The last one didn't have a webcam. They put a webcam on this one. The webcam was actually pretty good, I think, like better than most laptop webcams that I've tried. They kept a lot of the same things. Like the keyboard and touchpad on the Zephyrus G-board, you have always

in like some of my favorite keyboard and touchpad on laptops, period. Like, people ask me, like, what's the best laptop keyboard? And I will say the G14 is, like, one of my favorite ones. We argued about this when we were doing the Macroquiview. One of the problems with the keyboard on the last generation was that there was some flex in the deck. And so people, like, Nila, would get annoyed when they would, like, press down and it would depress the deck. But they actually made the deck, I think, much sturdier on this one. And that's a very big improvement.

Like, I was trying really hard to depress the deck, and I could not. So, I made a lot of things a lot better. The other thing they did was they, the past generations have had NVIDIA GPUs, and this one is all AMD, so not only does it have an AMD chip, but it has an AMD graphics card. So they made all those changes, and at the price of like 1499 or 1599, which was the original price of the G14 in 2020, this would be just like a phenomenal buy. It's performing pretty well compared to things at that price point and to things like in the upper 1000s tier. And when it comes to the chassis, there's really like nothing wrong with it. Like the only thing I really had to claim, I was like they took that there's no fingerprint sensor. And I wish there was.

But like that's like a really tiny thing. The screen is fantastic. Like it's unloosely bright. Really like everything that is great. But the unit they sent me is 2499, which is just really, really expensive. and now down other units for sale for less than that. But they didn't send me those, so I have no idea how those units perform. I suspect they're better buys, but I wish they'd send me those,

but I can't speak to the value them because I don't know the frame rates they're going to put up. They have like different, different GPUs, different like RAM configuration, stuff like that. So I just don't know. The only one I have is the 2499 one, and this one is not worth 2499 because that price point is just, that is like how much like the best 15 inch laptops on the market cost. Like that is just like, that is like the big leagues. That is a much higher price tier than this device has been in the past. If you're going to pay that much for something, it should be like solidly outperforming

something you can get for $1,800. And it's just not on the games that we tested compared to like the Razor Blade 14 with an RTX 3070 compared to like the Zephyrus G15 with an RTX 3070, both of which are like at least several hundred dollars less. This is not, not only is it not decisively being those on every title, which it really should be if it's charging this much, but like it's below them on, like, noticeably below them on some of the titles that we tried. So do you get the other trade-off? Do you get longer battery life, less heat for the new chip? The things that you get for that price are one, you get this fancy little thing on the lid

called the anime makers. So not bad. Yes. You're like, let me tell you about the dancing LEDs. No, this is this thing. They've got to keep. It does the same thing. I love it. Like you can put like words on it. You can have to say like, hi, mom and like whatever you want. You can, there are fun things you can do with it. But like it doesn't impact your like gaming experience, right? Because it's on the lid.

So LED sign on the lid. Got it. Battery life. There's a 16 by 10 aspect ratio. Yes. Which is great. That is a big thing. I'm very happy about that.

Yeah. It's 32 gigabytes of RAM, which is hard to find in a 14-inch laptop. most of the Blade 14 units and the G15 units that we tested both had 16 gigabytes of RAM. So that is a bonus. And it has longer battery life than most gaming laptops in the industry because gaming laptops, if we are familiar, like a lot of them will last like two hours. So this lasted about like seven hours and 50 minutes for me, which is like pretty good. But it's not good if you're comparing it to last year's G14, for example, or the G15.

So it is still like a downward trend when it comes to the Zephyrus line. Like the previous one I think lasted like over nine hours. Like it was like unbelievable battery life. And that was again a huge part of why this laptop was like worth so much money, which is like, seems like it being chipped away at. Gaming battery was also not great. I got like less than an hour of Red Dead Redemption 2 gameplay, which like, it's still like, you know, on other and A&B systems I've gotten like an hour and a half.

So it's, the battery left here did not blow me out of the water the way that I think something that costs this much should. So those are some, so you are getting some extra benefits over, say something like the Blade 14 or the Zephyrus G15 with the 16.9. But one, those two laptops both have models that are coming out this year that we don't know the details of. So they might also, if you want to wait for those models to come out this year, they might have some of the same. things going on. And I just, I don't think, well, I think the benefits are worth paying some for. I don't think they're worth paying like $650 more for, which is like how much more this would be than an RTA, a blade 14 with an R2x 3070. Like, did it just give a reason for why this thing is so much more expensive? Is it like trying to chase Razor and be like, well, you're paying for

design? Or is it just like, is it the shortage of chips? Is it just? Well, there's an LED sign on the front. You can make it say, yeah. I mean, but the real reason is probably that the, the, Those damn fancy lights are just causal mic. It's $100 an LED. Let's talk about this from the perspective of the processor, right? This is the showcase for the Ryzen series every year. The entire Intel world, I don't want to say the Intel world. Let me say, yes.

The entire X-86 world is like in the shadow of what Apple has done with its M-Series chips. You know, we reviewed the MacBook pros. We think there's going to be M-2s coming out this year. Those are all the rumors. doesn't it seem odd that, right, this is AMD's best effort. AMD does not have the process problems that Intel has, right? They've been ahead of the curve. Is it a little odd that, you know, their latest and greatest in sort of the showcase device

is not outperforming where you'd expect? When we're doing, like, CPU gaming stuff, we usually run CSGO. That's like a famously CPU heavy title. So we compared to the last, the last G14 that had Horizon 9, 5,900, HS. So the exact same processor as this, but like one generation before. We saw like some frame rate improvement, but it wasn't like blowing the last one out of the water. You know, when you compare the battery life that we're getting here to the battery life that we're getting from Apple's M1, like even the M1 max, like there is still a very, very significant gap,

especially when you look at how long it can last like playing a game on battery, like that Delta gets even bigger. Which as we know, Apple's like battery performance that you get for, from one of these new M1 machines on battery is not that different from the performance you get while it's plugged in, which just doesn't seem to be the case here. I think this is a very competitive year for chips, as we know. Like, Intel has its new olderly generation, like it's coming out guns blazing. And I think A&D needed to do a little bit more. We're comparing it to the M1, but that's not really fair because the M1 doesn't have the gaming capabilities. Like, okay, theoretically it has the gaming.

Yeah, it doesn't have the games. They're not games. for it. So I always kind of am a little cautious about comparing those two because they're totally different. Like it's different architectures. It's different use cases for the most part. And this one, it does sound like it wasn't as good battery-wise as last year's model. What was last year's model like an Intel? Was it an AMD?

No, last year's model was the, as I said, the, the Ryzen 9-5,900 H.S, which is this processor, but one generation earlier. Okay. And AMD didn't make a significant, like, a massive earth shattering graphics update to it or anything. And it was with an NVIDIA RTX-3060. So they swapped that out for an AMD GPU in this one. And so you think that that should be, like, these are both AMD, like, AMD's like engineering them to work together. Like, you'd think that should be delivering better results, especially because the CPU, this is like a monstrous CPU.

Like, we know that this CPU is very powerful and it's clearly, you know, based on these CSGO results we're seeing, it's doing its job. But when we look at the games like Shadow the Tomb Raider that leverage the GPU a lot more, the AMD pairing is just not doing as well as we're seeing from AMD and VD-NVIDIA systems. So, I mean, we got to talk about,

if we're talking about the games and GPUs, we've got to talk about the other big news this week is that Intel's ARC desktop GPUs are actually finally maybe going to ship in like Q2. Do you think that these are going to be worth a day? I'm kind of excited to see these because they've had really interesting people working on them. They've been working on them for a long time. They are really bullish about them and Intel can't be bullish if they can't deliver because

we will all make fun of them when we test them. It's very easy to go and make claims and then we can test them and be like, no, you're wrong. You can't do that in GPUs. I mean, people try, but you can't, really. And so I think there's something kind of interesting here. And it sounds like the third generation of this, they just announced. So they said they're going to be working on this third generation. It's called Celestial, which is, what a name.

That's some Dementity right there. Like MediaTech, Intel, they're all just hanging out being like, what's the worst name we can come up with? But the Celestial is actually supposed to take on that ultra-enthusiest market, which is the 3090, the really high-end, $1,000 GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. And that, like, okay, if you're so bullish that you think you're going to be competing, on that level in three generations. Like, that's... Can I just read the...

I just looked at this roadmap. Can I read these names to you? Oh, no. So this generation is called the Alchemist. Yeah. And then, by the way, talk about a shitbox graph. Okay, this graph has no X axis.

The Y axis is just labeled performance with no units. And then the chips are all identical. And they just kind of like curve off into the distance. on no time horizon, right? Like no idea. It just is labeled a multi-year roadmap. Yeah. And then there's no X-XIS at all.

So is it 50 years? Is it tomorrow? Who knows? But these are the names. Q1, 2022, Alchemist. Yeah. Love it. That's a great class.

The next one, whatever timeline this is, is the battle mage. Yes. Oh, so that, I mean, look, if you think you can stand up to Elmond in this thing. Like, I got something to cover for you.

This battle mage is going to change the game. This is the best D&D shit I've ever seen. They should stop at battlemage. I agree. Then there's Celestial, which they've just obviously started to work on, to ship what is time? There's no X-axis. Who knows? Well, no, but once you max out your levels, the only thing left to do is take on immortals.

And so, like, you progress. Well, but hold on, my friend, because the one after that... send into a new plane and we won't even need these anymore. Right, but then you fall right back down to Earth as a druid. What? That's the fourth one. How does Druid come before battlemage? Like, are they going?

Oh, you know what it is? Actually, I got it. They're going for dual class. Yeah, yeah. This isn't multi-class. They're going for dual class. So they level up from alchemist to Celestial. And then they like start over at day one with Druid.

And then eventually they've got a dual class. class celestial, you know, arc mage. If I'm reading this correctly, Dieter is correct. Ah, yes. Because I hate you. So I don't know what these letters mean. There's just a lot of letters here. But under Alchemist, it's labeled X to the E HPG, like X to the power of E.

Yeah. And then battle mage is X to the E2. I'm not sure if that's X to the E squared or X to the E. E2. I feel like Heim is going to get really mad at me for this entire conversation. And then Celestial is labeled X to the E3. Yeah. And then Druid is labeled X to the E next architecture.

You're right. So Celestial is the end of the road. Yeah. And then you, right, then you lose all your weapons and you start over in the state of nature. What names were pitched that they said, now, Druid's better? I just got to say, like, meanwhile, Apple's like, I don't know, M1. Hang on. To be fair, Apple gets itself in like weird corners with like the A13 Z bionic neural engine, right?

Like they definitely start tacking on stuff. Druid Max Pro. Just call it a wizard and be done with it. I love it. Actually, like the other thing we need to talk about with names, and it's related to maybe a sense of confidence, is project end game, which is Intel's plan to do low latency streaming and they're going to put ARCGPUs in the cloud.

Everybody's going to turn to dust at the end. Yeah. Right. They're not going to feel good. That was a really bad Marvel joke. Sorry. First of all, Project Endgame is incredible, right? It definitely implies

they're going to murder Robert Tani Jr. I don't know what their game. A lot of people are going to be very mad at them when this happens. The ruin in the franchise, man. Yeah. It's just a real problem. Blackwater should have gotten a funeral,

and Intel's walking right back into that conversation. But like, okay, so the idea is you're going to put a bunch of ArcGpus in the cloud, and then you can stream access to them for a low latency computing experience. Well, right, there's two choices here. One, it's like just a compute service and other people can build front ends on top of it. Or two, they're just like building up full-on G-Force now, Stadia, Xbox, game streaming competitor, right? How many times have we?

We heard something that made us think that maybe Intel is going to do something direct to consumer and we're like, are you? And then they chicken out at the last minute. Like every time. Like there's no way that Intel is going to do a direct to consumer service. Like maybe they'll go to Enterprise with this. Maybe they'll try and like convince Nvidia to make it the backend for, you know, something. I don't know. Like, they'll 100% go to Enterprise for this.

Like GPUs are in hot demand. everybody wants GPU servers. NVIDIA's killing it in that space. And this is like, they've got to take them on because currently Intel effectively owns the CPU like server space, right? Like, I think they still have 90% of ownership versus AMD. And this is watching, now they've been watching NVIDIA eat their lunch for years in the GPU server space.

And they've got to compete. Like, this is absolutely a business, B2B play. So the one way you might know it's a B-TV play is that they didn't really announce Project Endgame for which is again, just an incredible name. They just like rolled it out as part of a presentation to investors. Like they had their investor meeting and like here's all the plans. Like here's our supercomputer roadmap and what Zion's doing. And oh, by the way, we're announcing something called Project Endgame. And I'm just like, I'm just a map.

Imagine like the Morgan Stanley analyst being like, we believe Project Endgame will be a game changer for innovation. Investors should take note of Project Endgame. That's just a ridiculous situation. Anyway, we're getting the Project Endgame is this year, we're told. After the first ARCPUs ship, we shall see. As Monica was saying, this is like a big year for chips. It's a very competitive year.

And what's like A&D, got a little, and you went with a refresh. So we'll see what happens next year. There's a bunch of other stuff. We have not talked about this PC case that looks like a sneaker. Rest assured, there's a PC case that looks like a sneaker, like a cyber sneaker. It's very good. There's some mechanical keyboard stuff. But we've gone way over at Monica. Thank you so much for joining us. We were like 20 minutes and it's been like 40. So I appreciate you. You're welcome. We're going to take a break. We'll be right back with Ashley Carman. Talks Spotify. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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So we were going to have you on anyway because you are hosting a big event for us with Hot Pod Summit. I want you talking about that. You are right Hopod, which are newsletter about podcasts, which is very funny because now when people tweet angrily about podcasts,

I get to say, well, I don't know, man, we run a newsletter about podcasts. You have to believe it. I know. I saw you drop that move. It's a whole thing. Anyway, hot pod son it's happening. I was like, we should just do a little promo segment.

And then more endless Spotify. And they won't stop it. They just won't stop. Let's start with this little like Rogan scoop that the Times had because I think it's important. But then I don't want to talk about that anymore. I want to talk about the acquisitions because they're actually really important. Yeah. But the Times had a little kind of like an earth-shattering Rogan scoop this week.

Yeah. So, Virchcast listeners are well aware of the Spotify. Rogan drama that's been going on for the past month. But what they might know have heard us discuss is that this deal that Spotify made with Rogan to exclusively license, distribute, promote, and monetize his content was for $100 million. This was initially reported in the Wall Street Journal. The Times reports this week that it actually was for at least $200 million, potentially more, and covers three and a half years.

So basically at least double, double an astronomical number. Yeah. Can I just, if you're Spotify, and you see everyone using this 100 million number, do you, you just like, don't you know that eventually someone's going to figure out that it's a different number at some point? I mean, they got away with it for over a year. Yeah. Yeah. Also, like, Spotify is basically like speed running being a platform. It's so true.

Right. Like, if we've been doing this with Facebook forever, name any YouTube, just name them all. Like, first you're like, roll in. the press and try to make them write nice things, then it's like, we'll lie about content moderation. And now it's like, we'll ice them. And right. And they're going to end up at where all the other big platforms have gotten, which is gigantic press shops that are constantly engaged. I don't know if you saw this last week.

Alex Heath and I were laughing about it. Facebook put up a job listing for just a crisis PR person. Aw. And like the listing is like explicit. They're like, when anything bad happens. You have to go research what our best arguments are and give them to executives so they can say them to the press. I love it. God.

It's a whole job at Facebook. I'm sorry, meta. So I think Spotify is just not there yet. But I know what journey you're on. Like, Godspeed, enjoy. Like, you know, it's it. They just need a Rogan comms person. They're like, anytime the press mentions Rogan's name, you must know what to do.

Yeah. I just, I don't know. Live, Love, love, Spotify. Anyway, um, um, like, Ashley's like more exhausted by this than I. But, like, I'm finding it hard to not be perfectly sarcastic all the time. Anyway, that's the Rogan stuff. Next to that this week, they announced two acquisitions. And I feel like the acquisitions, you had a great piece.

They're competing with YouTube. That's a great frame for it. But I feel like the acquisitions are not getting the attention they deserve because people kind of just don't understand how podcast money works. So tell us what the acquisitions are. And then let's try to unpack that a little bit. Yeah. So this week, Spotify announced that it is acquiring both chartable. and pod sites.

Have those deals closed? I don't think they've closed yet. Okay. So that's why I'm saying they are acquiring. I'm sure it will close, but I don't think they have officially. So both of these companies work on attribution and tagging within shows. So essentially like traditionally in podcast ads, for example, there's promo codes, vanity URLs. This is like sort of what we had to work with if you were an advertiser.

It's like, oh yeah, I saw someone went to that, use that promo code. Okay, we can say it was Vergecast. These companies are able to use tags in the actual RSS feed and then pixels on websites to basically say, oh, the person at this IP address listened to this ad. Then we saw that they came to the actual website. Okay, they like took action. And essentially is just a way to measure ROI. So this is really critical for a company, for everybody. But Spotify especially is interested in this because obviously their whole podcasting is advertising.

And they want to be able to offer the most robust analytics, proof that it works. They need to prove that these advertisers should be spending money. So that's why they invested in both these companies. It was just kind of like shocking that they bought up both because those are like the two biggest names in the space. And they compete, right? Like at the end of the road, you need some sort of analytics to prove that your ads work so you can go tell advertisers to buy more ads because they worked. And you kind of pick one or the other, right? Yeah, I think some people might have used both, but it was because like, chartable, you could use more for measuring your marketing.

But yeah, no, they were fully seen as like competitors. So Spotify buys two competitors. What I think is like hard to grapple with is you think of Spotify, and especially in the context of Rogan, Rogan's exclusive. So like, how does Spotify compete in podcasting? And you think it's like exclusive in the player. But then there's Apple with RSS and Google with RSS and YouTube, which is a huge player. But the reality is Spotify owns Megaphone, which is the dominant platform that serves podcasts. I will now disclose our podcast is served by Megaphone.

So when we're done here, Andrew is going to edit the show and he's going to upload it to Megaphone. And that is what will distribute it everywhere. So now Spotify has the technology that can insert the advertising tags into those RSS feeds that your Apple Podcast player uses. They own that whole chunk. Like, that's the monopoly. That's the money. Like, if all of the money in podcasts, if you want to buy a podcast ad from almost any company, at some point the dollar you pay that company will flow through a Spotify technology.

Yes. My hunch is that, like, I could be speaking out of turn here, but I do think pixels and trackers are like not that. Like the back end, the beautiful display in the analytics is complicated. But I think for like a big company, they can probably build their own pixel. and trackers. So I imagine what we'll end up happening is all these big networks

will have their own internal trackers and then the smaller guys are, yeah, going to be with Spotify. But that's a lot of people. That is a lot of people. Not everyone can go out and build their own tracker.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just looking at the megaphone list. It's like our logo is on there, disclosure, but like Marvel. All of Marvel's podcasts are served by megaphone. CNN, like all the big publishers

are with megaphone. So they're already bought into some part of the Spotify experience. And what is crazy to me is when you think about competition and podcasts, everyone is looking at players, like PocketCast exists. But those are all front-ends. That's like saying other web browsers exist.

All those other web browsers are front-end to Google's monetization stack. Like, you run around browsing the web, like, Google's just, like, making money. And you're not like, oh, there's a lot of competition in web advertising. Like, it's Google and Facebook dominate web advertising with Amazon increasing, but different because it's all on Amazon's platform. It's just like utterly fascinating that no one has paid attention to Spotify slowly gobbling up most of the monetization stack. Hey now, someone has paid attention. Is there a reaction from the podcast industry for this?

Usually when this stuff happens, like, yep, you cover it really well in Hot Pod, but there's like, I don't know, aftershocks of like people being like, indie podcasts are dead. Yeah. I think it's more of a like damn Spotify's eating this industry vibe. Honestly, I've, like, surprised at how little reactions I've seen. I think this speaks to that maybe a lot of people just are confused by ad tech in general, and it's not something that, like, it should inspire a lot of strong feelings, but it's complicated. And it's a big topic. And I think perhaps people just don't know what to think of it yet.

But this is why when we have this event next week, I think it's going to be spicy. Yeah. I think like probably everybody in this event is like either you had this week, like soon everyone at Hoplot's Summit will work for Spotify. It's scary. It's kind of sad. Like diversity is fun. Let's get some different voices and different, you know, opinions in the mix that all don't just work for one company and also don't need to like have approval to talk.

So put that in the context of competing with YouTube, right? Because I'll say this. The number of people who are like, put the verge cast on YouTube every day or any podcast or whatever it is because people consume podcasts on YouTube like crazy. And it seems like because YouTube is the kind of thing it is. is the podcasters like to get better analytics out of it? Yeah. So basically, like, when this deal happened, yes, this is super interesting as far as Spotify wanting to just own the entire tech stack and dominate podcasting.

But for me, when I heard it, I was actually thinking about it in terms of them really just making moves to directly compete with YouTube and start to build a wall against them. Because essentially, like, YouTube without trying very hard is a major podcast player. And they have amazing analytics. Like, it's basically Google Analytics. Like, you can have an amazing. dashboard. You know what's going on. You know who's watching your videos, where they're watching, what they're doing when they're watching. It's wild how much info you can get. And so YouTube recently

made its first real podcast hire. They started allowing free background listening on YouTube music in Canada, kind of hints that there might be some movement in podcasting there. And truly, if YouTube just allowed people to also upload their RSS and have their audio analytics alongside their video analytics. I mean, Spotify's in trouble. They're already doing all the creator work that Spotify wants to do. They already have a programmatic ad product that works really well. It's freaking ad sense. Spotify's in trouble. They just don't have the audio component. And that to me seems like the easy part almost. So I think that Spotify is trying to really build up what it can offer so that more people stick with it than go to YouTube or anyone else. I was joking before he came on with

I'm just going to walk around the hot pod summit next week in either. say to people, man, I wish Apple had fixed this earlier or what was the other one, Deeter? Well, what I actually think you should do is you should, when someone's complaining about Spotify and their distribution and how everything's going through one point, you'd be like, actually, no, the solution is really simple. Syndication will mean that the podcast be reached from multiple, you know, different distributors. He was so proud of it the first time and he was even more proud of it the second time. The way your face lit up just then. So, Ash, do you think Google, like, knows that it's sitting on this?

Yeah. Because they were going to spin up Google podcast, right? That was a thing they were going to do. And they kind of backed into YouTube is actually the solution. It's interesting because the New York Times has been doing a little more podcast reporting. And it's spurned into action by an intrepid young reporter. So they wrote about, they write a lot about moderation on the platforms. And they basically will point out, you know, some bad actors are using podcasts and they're

freely available on Apple or Google or whoever. And Google's comments on the record to them have been like something along the lines of like, yeah, we're just a search engine. We are not going to like block RSS feeds essentially. And so what's kind of interesting, I think, if kind of reading between the lines here is if that's how Google podcast sees itself as like kind of the traditional just the interface for the RSS feeds, YouTube is more like the Spotify, which is user generated content that's hosted on YouTube. Like I'm sure. If that same problematic podcast was on YouTube, they would have a different statement and maybe it would act.

But I think that's kind of the two differences we're seeing in Google strategy. So you think they're going to like lean into, okay, YouTube podcast is a thing. Don't use Anchor if you're just getting started. Use a YouTube audio tool. If you're a big podcaster, don't use a megaphone. Use the YouTube's tool to distribute. And we'll give you the Google ad tech stack and our analytics and send them out into the world. That would be huge if they do it.

I mean, you know, it's sad. Like in podcast line, I'm like, they hired one person. They did it. But like, that's a big deal for us. So again, it's entirely possible that in six months, this guy no longer works on podcasts. But I think this could be where they're headed. I am curious actually for your take, Neelai, because one of the angles I didn't really explore much is sort of how this tagging technology could relate to like Apple blocking, tracking across apps. Yeah.

And I wonder if Spotify just is like, well, we're not going to be able to see what website you went to. Just, I don't know. I guess I'm just curious if this could relate to that at all. So that, I was thinking about this a lot yesterday. RSS is fundamentally so dumb, simple. I don't know that Apple can do it because all you're really doing, right, you're just, someone's like, I want your podcast. They go to the Apple directory.

The Apple directory is just feeds. And then you make the request. and all that is happening there is all those requests are having a tag, like just a long string of hex, appended to the URL. So they can, and then that same tag is appended to a tracking pixel. So they just know, like, okay, the person who downloaded made this RSS request in the URL is the person who went over here. That's, I think, different than a third-party cookie because it's the URL of like first impression. Like you're making the request and saying, okay, here's your URL for RSS from. now on, right?

Yeah. I don't know. Dieter, if you have any thoughts, that seems, it's pretty hard for Apple in its podcast app to somehow fight URLs.

Yeah, but I think it's easier for Apple to do it inside its own podcast app. I could see solutions. I mean, they're like, they've got subscriptions now, right? So they are, they're doing some advances,

but like the precise way that they would handle tagging in the like open podcast directory that like pocket casts and overcast and everybody else can plug into, getting tracking tags and, you know, more advanced analytics out of that, I agree, is like very difficult.

But I wouldn't go so far just, I don't know, in principle to say that I think that that would block them from doing more advanced analytics inside Apple podcasts itself. No, I meant blocking Spotify's analytics. Oh. Right. So the way they block third-party cookies is they're just like, if your website loads and it calls a cookie to another domain, that request is blocked. Right.

And from like a technical level, there's some comprehensive. complication there, but from a conceptual level, it's just like the dumbest thing. They're like, is this on your domain? It's not. You're blocked. And that means you can't track people across sites. Oh, so can Apple stop them appending a tracker to the end of a URL? I don't know. I think people at Apple are smart enough to use grep and, you know, delete everything after the question mark in a URL. Like, come on. But I think the people that's what Spotify are smart enough to form a URL different. Right. Like, that is the dumbest arms race in tech. If that's where we're at, right? I mean, but we've been in dumber places.

Come on. I guess I just wonder if it's like a preventative measure for Spotify with the death of the cookie to buy this and have this advantage of like we have, yes, it's RSS. We can close the loop for you. Yeah. And it's primitive. But like if this is a competitive advantage actually to just own this tech stack, I guess. That's what I mean.

Like at some point, you have to pay to use chartable or pod sites, right? Okay, so now you're a business and you make $100 a year in advertising. Well, you got to pay some money to a megaphone to serve your podcasts. You got to serve the podcast. You got to pay some money to your analytics vendor to prove to your $100 a year client that their spend was worth it. So now you're like, even if it's some teeny tiny rates, okay, you made $75. You paid $25 to Spotify. Well, that's like, okay, all the dollars in.

podcasts one way or the other are going to end up in Spotify. And so I think what chart, I can't remember if I got this right. They're going to let Charitable be open and anybody can use it and pod sites are going to keep to themselves or the other way around. Charitable is going to be integrated into megaphone and a Spotify spokesperson told me today that you can, you just have to have a megaphone account. So I think it could be free, but you don't have to host. I got it. Yeah, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, I'm just like, open this app on your phone and you get a podcast. Behind it is an entire engine of money in Spotify, just like Google, if you look at the ad tech stack and there's multiple layers, Google owns the number one or

number two player in every component of the ad tech stack. They've monetized the web at a high rate and they are the dominant player in web monetization. Spotify now owns the number one or number two player in every component of the podcast monetization stack. It looks exactly like Google. and your, you know, your front end that's the open podcast system is just a front end to a Spotify monetization funnel, just like your browser is a front end to the open web, which is really Google's monetization funnel. And like, I don't know, paging Lena Kahn. Yeah, is there going to be antitrust about this or is everybody just like, well, it's podcast, whatever? For Ashley. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. She's like YouTube hired one guy. Yep. YouTube hired one guy. Nilai said no one's been paying attention to this, but one person has. I meant like, it doesn't know. I know. I'm just like, it takes a lot for people to get excited about podcasting.

You paid attention. We both did. But I'm just saying it's Rogan. Yeah, like everybody's paying attention to Rogan. So suddenly like my mom knows what a podcast is, which is exciting in all of my conversations. Hold on. Lots of people knew what podcasts were. Yeah, a lot of people knew, but like.

The technical underpinning of podcasts and how why Spotify is making a business. this out of it is because at the end of the day, just like YouTube, lots of people are going to make shit for no money. Like Spotify will not have to pay people to make things. They will somehow find a way to monetize it. That way could be Spotify's programmatic ads, which they can now dynamically insert and they're already doing. Or they're going to do their own, but they're going to serve them in Spotify's tools and then track them in Spotify's tools. So instead of paying the music industry every time somebody streams, every time a podcast is monetized,

Spotify will take a cut. And that is a way bigger and better business to be in the music. Just like YouTube, like, quit YouTube originals. Like, wait, why are we paying to make Cobra Cuy? Like, you idiots will just make shit for free.

Like, way better business to be in. And I, like, that story is huge. Outside of whether, you know, like the word podcast only implies that you use RSS to serve it. That was the other one. Yeah. You can just walk up to any group of podcasters and be like, you shouldn't call them podcasts unless they're all our sass.

And you can just like fit into any conversation at any time. I dare you to do that at least once during the day. 100%. Just any conversation, any group of people you can walk up to them and be like, I wish Apple had done this earlier. We're going to have a town hall where anyone can speak their mind. I'm just going to stand up and be like, I wish Apple had done this earlier. I will call to you. So you know now.

Let's say let's talk about hot pots on it. What's going on there? Yeah, so Hot Pod Summit. We're kind of advertising here, but it's invite only. So, sorry. Maybe some people on this podcast are listening. But it's going to be really cool. We're talking about YouTube. Specifically, we're going to have the head of Rooster Teeth's podcast on. We're going to have Marquez to talk about how he uses YouTube. We're going to talk about programmatic advertising. We're going to have two creators, one of the co-hosts of Who Weekly and a co-host of Celebrity Book Club to talk about how they use Patreon and Discord and all of that. We're going to talk about

how public media and indie networks can compete with big tech money to even retain talent. There's another one, but you know what? I got like four out of five. We're going to have a moderation panel. Casey will be on stage to do the moderation panel, which will be another spicy one. That'll be good. All right. Well, that sounds exciting. I'll be there. So it'll be fun. Get to see everybody. Ashley, thank you so much. I'm sure Spotify never stops. We'll just see you again soon. Yeah, I'm sure. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. All right, we're back. Lightning round time. We're going to get that soundboard one of these days. Dieter, these link buds, Sony link buds.

So imagine a tiny donut and then put it in your gear. And that is what these are. I love these. I am a known fan of open ear headphones in some way, shape, or form. You can ride them on your bike. I don't think you should wear both of these. I think you should leave one ear open with these. But the more I've been working from home and trying different earbuds out,

the more I find I value like comfort more than sound isolation. When I go back into an office that will change completely. But right now, if I can't wear your headphones for like four hours, then I want nothing to do with them. Yeah. I find my AirPods pro hurt after a long time. Like on a plane. I'm like, oh. Yeah.

So these are just like they're like they're more open because it's a donut in your ear instead of like completely sealing your ear canal. They look very strange. also this picture that Chris Welch took of the case where he's like from one angle the case looks smaller than the earbuds case from another angle it does not it's just like one of the funniest photo jokes that we have sort of like take like done in years like unintentionally hilarious photo joke it's very good more earbuds

audio technica's got new earbuds 20 hours of battery life 200 bucks yeah that seems like good I mean they're huge but I mean the earbuds are huge themselves. Yeah, the earbuds are enormous. Yeah. My favorite earbuds of all time. You ready? You ready for this? Oh, boy.

Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus. Because the battery was incredible. They were rock solid. They were cheap. You had wireless charging. And they just were easy to use and cheap and worked better with more devices than

AirPods do. I have no idea if these will be in that class. But I loved the huge battery life on those. And so, I don't know, diversity in earbuds. If you need 20 hours of battery life, it's good that you have a choice. It's always kind of wild to me, though, that, like, earbuds still aren't that good. Like, if you compare them to wired earbuds, like, my $100 sure 215s from 2014, give me better sound and everything else than my AirPods pros.

Welcome, Alex, to the Vergecast. It frustrates me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's lightning round. Really uncompressed wired audio sounds incredible and shit Bluetooth compression sounds bad. What a surprise. We just keep convincing ourselves.

We just keep saying, yeah, these are fine. They're like a McDonald's burger. Like. Dang. Apple gave an interview to our friend Michael Singleton at Billboard this week. This stat was hilarious. The whole thing was like 50% of people are using spatial audio. And it's like, dudes, it's on by default.

That's a horrible number. 50% of people are going in and turning it off. Yeah. Like, you're pushing it as hard as you can. Okay. But as part of that, he was like, yeah, I know people want lossless, but there's no wireless protocols that would support lossless. And it's like somewhere like the APTX team at Qualcomm was like, dudes, we announced that last year.

He's crying in a corner. Dude, the loss list is like a thing that Qualcon has. And they're like, no, it does not exist. It shall not exist. What will happen is that we're going to take all the low end out of your audio, and when you turn your head, it's going to sound weird. Have you ever wanted the singer to be in your right ear? We'll just turn your head.

They'll want it. Anyhow, Thomas Rooker, the Rick Dog. Reviewed the Garment, Epics II, multi-sport watch. Yep. He loved this thing. Yeah. And the Victoria's song reviewed the Phoenix 7S, which is like the smaller version. They're a little bit different in what they're for and what they do and their screen technology is different.

They look cool. Yeah. The Epic 2 seems very impressive. It's got a touchscreen that you can turn off. Having converted to Garmin, I've got a venue here in the last year for when I use an Android phone instead of an Apple Watch. I got to say the slope from, do I want to get a Garmin watch instead of a standard smart watch to I need to be an Apple. athlete who goes out into the woods is very steep. Like I just,

I like, I feel bad when I am not like on a trail now because I have this, this thing. Yeah. Garmin watches are like legit. They've gotten really good. And, um, they've got like a rabid fan base and,

and, you would, you would think that there would be more. Dieter's just thinking about being on the trail right now. Yeah. That was that side. He's like, looking at his watch is like,

I could be on a trail right now. It went away from us. I Fixit is going to officially sell Steam Deck replacement parts from Valve Which is fascinating Yeah They have the tear down But the announcement is

Val is like giving them the parts to sell Yeah You can do this when you're going to sell a thousand The thing You know what was actually for me The most exciting part of that story Was that it looks like the hard drive Or the solid state drive

Is going to be easier to replace We thought Because I bought the 64 gigabyte one And we'll have to immediately replace it So this was just really good for me personally All right. Google is bringing, so Google bought a company called Neverware, which a long time ago, they announced this thing called Cloud Ready, where you could put ChromeOS on like any computer. I put it on a bright pink Sony of IOP. That's why I brought this up. Did a whole story. Oh, okay. Here we go. Anyway, Google had bought Neverware. And now they're announcing this program where they're going to do installers for old PCs and Macs. Yeah. I'm thinking about putting it on my old single USBC port MacBook, like the MacBook, like 12 inch MacBook. Ooh, that could be interesting.

I'm guessing it's still going to be slow. That computer is slow. I bet you the battery life will be about 20 minutes on that, too. Well, one of the problems with Neverware was they had no GPU drivers for anything. They were just like too little of a company, so particularly embedded Intel CPUs. So I couldn't get the drivers. So everything was very slow. I hope he will never live again.

Like I gave it to Max. Like it's her toy computer now. She likes it. But there's a lot of PCs that are right, not going to make it to Windows 11. Well, the big question here is right now it's like, I think you need to sign up for it and they're thinking it's for like businesses and schools. So like will they make this available to you to just screw around with on your, you know, single port MacBook? Or is this a we want to only serve schools that have fleets of old computers and we want to make sure that they switch to us instead of stay with Windows? How do they monetize it?

Unclear. Like is it monetize it all? They get you to not use Windows. Yeah. I mean, honestly. like they already give ChromeOS away. Like, it's Google. So, right?

The whole, the entire web is a front end to monetization. Then they sell Google, you know, they sell the Google workplace. Google Workspace. Yeah, I think it's called. Google workspace. Something. They sell the Google Office apps to schools. So that's a part of it.

But the real thing is you're not buying an iPad and you're not buying a Windows PC. So I think it's fascinating. I love the idea of like things getting a second life. And there is, it is true that there's, a whole lot of PCs out there that are not going to make it to Windows 11 that are still fine. God. Let's do the two Facebook things at once. Facebook is on a tear of rebranding things.

And I will say there was reporting out of all hands this week. They had an all hands or announced this. They're like, what will all these name changes do? None of this is a different strategy. Well, they haven't hired the PR person yet to fix it all. Well, they elevated Nick Clegg to like president of Facebook to deal with policy because Mark just wants to live in the Meta. Anyway, Facebook rebranding itself to Meta.

Meta is rebranding the news feed to just feed because people hate news. So that'll fix it. And then Facebook employees are no longer Facebookers. They are metamates. No. Disclosure. I hate this. Metamates.

And then they pick this line for the Navy, which is like, ship's shipmates self, right? Which means like, think about your ship. Then think about your ship. You're right. Now it's meta, meta mates me. Is there new? That's the new. It's good.

You know, when a company starts breaking out the military metaphors, you definitely know they feel confident. They're doing great. They're living their best. Very good. Metamates. I think of you all as my metamates. Last two. Elon.

Eland. His lawyers filed a motion telling a judge that the SEC is chilling his free speech because they keep investigating his tweets. Is that a Tesla take? Yeah. I don't know, man. I just, okay, here's my thing.

I would say on the internet, a pattern I have, like, caught is that people will just say legal words. Hmm. Like, their magic. Pro bono. Yeah. HIPAA.

Like, you're just like yell shit, fair use. And then you're like, you just assume that you've, and like free speech has become one of these phrases. Right? you're just like Ron weaseling your ass off. You're just like, Section 230.

Like, yeah, that'll do it. It's dropping me nuts. Anyway, he got, he had to pay the $20 million fine. He was required to step down as Tesla chairman after the, after the stock price tweet, right? I'm taking Tesla private,

funding secured. He had to do that. They said he had to monitor his tweets. No one knows that they were, did that. And so now he did another tweet that he said Tesla would make around 500,000 cars. This contradicted the company's guidance that they would make between 360 and 400,000. So in the context of a public company CEO, how many cars you ship is a big deal?

That's how much money you're going to make. So that's like material information if the company is saying $100,000 fewer cars than your CEO. So they're like, you can't do that. So he's effectively mad that he can't like just rip on a bong and tweet whatever he wants. Yeah. Anyway, the end of this all is Musk said the SEC was making unconstitutional power grab. This true thing. And then the judge to the lawyers in court said, come back with your reasonable pants on.

Wait, I didn't even get that right. The judge said, come back with your reasonableness pants on. Yes. Which is even weirder when you've settled this down. So then now. you have later Musk was like did the poll where he's like,

should I sell 10% at my stake in Tesla? He was already going to do it because he had to. So it's like a joke, you know? But when he did it, the Tesla shares dropped. So the SEC is like,

he can't be doing this to people. Anyway, this is all nuts and he's just out there yelling free speech when he's the CEO of public company he can move the stock price. Anyway, I need a word for magic word

lawyering. If you just like look at Twitter, it's everywhere. Just like people just screaming legal terms of art. I got it. Amicus tweet. I was going with Muggle Attorney. Oh, Muggle Attorney's really good.

You say the magic words, but they don't do anything. All right. If you got ideas, tweet them at me. Okay, last one. Disney is developing planned communities around the United States. They're called story living. So you can live your story life at Disney. What's wild is this isn't the first time they've done a planned community.

Right, they've got celebration, which is like apparently a very strange place to live in Florida. Yeah. But now they're going to do story living by Disney. Yeah, but the plan with story living is like they're going to have storylines sort of integrated into like your shopping trip to go buy, you know, groceries or something. So everything will be part of a Disney storyline. Can I just read these two sentences? members of the public will be able to visit Cotino, which is the name of the first store living community,

by purchasing day passes, while a section of the development will be set aside for residents aged 55 and up. So it's a zoo for retirees. Yeah. Where do they make the soil and green? Under the fountain. Okay, okay. The algae filters down.

I just love the idea of like America reconstituting itself as a series of theme parks. And then we have to like, in their service by Amazon warehouses. And then we have to like drive through the badlands to get from one heavily guarded day past theme park to another. Like, let's do it. I've watched that movie so many times. It was rad.

Charlie's Theron was great. No. The odds will definitely be in our favor. I'm going to move to story living. All right. That's it. We have gone far over. It was a delight.

You can tweet at us. Dieter is at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Cran's. Ashley is Ashley R. Carmen. Monica is MC squared 96. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. It's like a great time. Tell us about Bing. It was good. I want to call it Becca's video about shooting wildlife photography. So good. Very good. Just go watch it. It's a delight. It was like emotional at the end. It starts with it starts with P and it ends with like tears. It's a full journey. Some troloquism in there. It's just you go places. All right. That's it. Rock and No.