The Vergecast - CES 2016 Day 4

Episode Date: January 9, 2016

Today on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, Casey, and Nicola gather together one more time at CES 2016 and chat about what they saw, what they learned, and what is next to come post-CES. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast on the 500th day of CES 2016, the show that never sleeps or stops or produces any product news. No, it's our last day here at CES. I think you can hear the sleepiness in my voice. But I'm Neil I Patel. I'm joined here today by my friend Casey Newton. Good to be here. You got to talk right into that mic.

Can I talk right into the mic and tell you that it's good to be here. It's good to be here. Dider Bone is here. I am Deter Bone. I'm still here. My girl Fumo's here. Hello. What up?

I'm just dying to know what you've been up to. Yeah? Nicola just appears randomly at CES. But you appeared on the show yesterday and you disappeared. Then you appeared at a party I was at and you disappeared. Yeah. No, we have had some weird run-ins. Yeah.

Only run-ins. Yeah, only run-ins. I want some quality time. We're here now. Yeah, that's true. We have one hour, I guess. Let's grind through some quality time together. Let's spend some goddamn time together as family.

What do I do? Oh, it's a really great question. You will turn. Well, let's start with Casey. So, Casey, what do you want to have to a TES? What do you've been seeing? What do you've been talking about? Well, I mean, Neel, as you know,

CES falls somewhere outside my core interest. I'm not a big Internet of Things guy. But I did check in. Is there any big Internet of Things guys? That man right there is a huge Internet of Things person. That's Wi-Fi actually has Intel's Curie chip. Yeah, that is a Bluetooth straw. So what I've been doing is going to the live blogs of the various multinational corporations,

your intels and your invidias and your Samsung's, and I think there was one more LG. And this is going to sound like a joke, but the thing that I've been most excited about are household appliances. Because they're useful in ways that are serious. For example, a washing machine that also dries your clothes. Why did it take us until 2016 to get a good one of those? I don't know. But we have one now, and by we have one, I mean, it will become commercially available and remain unaffordable to me, probably.

But I thought that was very cool. And then the Samsung Fridge has a 21.5-inch touchscreen in it, and you can send all sorts of, you know, crazy trolls to your friends there. I read your live blogs. And I have to say your enthusiasm for these products now was not matched. It was not apparent? No. It was no.

Yeah. Well, I think it was one of those things where the more I thought about it, you know, even as I was cracking wise, because how can you not? I dropped a few F-bombs. Everyone should read Casey's live blogs of these events. There's one where they said there's literally nothing this washing machine can't do and Casey just goes, that is a bold claim. It was a very bold claim.

But what's funny is some of the companies that I was making fun of started to reach out to me to go meet the people I've been making fun of. So, for example, Dolby, you know, which is just like a middleware company that doesn't actually sell to consumers, was continually interrupting other presentations. to be like, hey, we put Dolby in this. It was like Dolby's entire role at corporate presentations. Like, we put some Dolby in this, you guys.

And so they hired this, like, James Bond looking character named Giles Baker to tell the world about this. And so I was, like, making, you know, various James Bond jokes in the live blog. And then I got an email the next day that just said, Giles Baker would like to meet with you. And so yesterday, I went with my tail

between my legs to Dolby and met with Giles Baker. And he explained to me all of the different kinds of Dolby that Dolby into things. And it was very lovely. What's his favorite kind of Dolby? Well, I'll tell you the most sort of bromantic moment that we shared together. They took me into the Dolby testing lounge, where they have a sort of high-end but commercially available TV and like Clipsch sound system. And Jals Baker and I sat on a sofa and we watched Justin Bieber perform an acoustic version of what do you mean at an insanely loud volume. And I honestly had like chills. Like the hairs on my neck

we're standing up. And so, Giles Baker really, you know, left me with a lot to think about, yeah. You know, it's interesting,

is Theverge.com, now, it's the case he's installed some Dolby. Yeah. Just get that pine Dolby experience. Look for Dolby on the box.

That's what I have to tell you. Oh, my God. If you haven't read, right, I'm so tired. It's a long week. Look, I played Blachack until 5 in the morning.

Let's just be honest and direct. It's Las Vegas. Did you win or lose? I watched somebody else insist that they were lucky in winning while spending somebody else's money. And then she took that money. She took whatever.

Because it was someone else's money coming in, she decided that she had doubled her money and walked away. Not paying back. It was, anyway, like it's Las Vegas. Yeah. And I'm an easily tempted human being. Sure.

Would you say that you know when to hold them or when to fold them? That's not Blackjack. But it's a sort of. You know what to hit him or when to quit him? I would say that I'm getting better at knowing when to quit him. Okay, that's good.

In my 35th year, I think deciding when to quit him is a thing I'm going to focus on. Right. So when 5 a.m. came around, you said, yeah, that's probably enough for tonight. Yeah, I consulted the flowchart that I've been developing on my phone. And it said, are you lonely by yourself in a casino? And the phone said yes. Right. It's funny.

Nicola, what are you going on to? mostly looking at things you can put on your wrist and if you should or shouldn't do that basically yeah should I put something on my wrist I would say I have very thin wrists no okay thank you no I'm not gonna go with no

because he has a computer with him I feel like most of the time yeah I've been looking at all if you have a computer with you don't need something on your wrist yeah because it's doing the job that there's the thing in front of you Why would you want that? Oh, you've been looking at watches. I thought you were looking at fitness trackers.

Oh, yeah, and those. Yeah, but. Connected bracelets even. Oh, my God. Whoa. Some of e-braced. I don't know. It's not a brace.

Don't shorten it. It's not good. Yeah, no. But no laptop can do what a fitness tracker can do. No, no laptop can do what a fitness tracker can do. That's what you just said. You said you shouldn't put anything in your wrist because he has a laptop. Okay, fine.

He can put whatever he wants in his wrist. Fine. Why is this so hostile? I feel like you've been looking at a lot of products that made you kind of mad. Yeah. Tell me about those. The maddest I got was whenever there's jewels put on something for women. We talked about this yesterday, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just more of that, more of jewels on things. Man, today, we made a video. It's going to be great. You're going to love it. It's me and Lauren. Yeah, Lauren good? Yeah.

Yeah, putting stuff on your wrist. Real magic. What was the ugliest thing that you've seen? Wow. Wow. I mean, her immediate thought was your face if she didn't want to say it. Yeah, Nicholas is on fire today. She came in, sat down and started throwing jabs.

Yeah, this is a really, actually, no, I was telling someone that CES is releasing my inner snob. Like, I try to keep it quiet, or at least internal. And I'm just, like, saying things out loud that are just mean and judgmental. And based on appearances. Wow. Yeah. Why is that? I don't know.

Is it C.S or is it Vegas? No, this is not Vegas. We're not in Vegas. This is CES. I would say CES is the most Vegas thing that I guess we're here. I would say... But I'd come here every year. I would say barring like probably a cumulative four hours.

I haven't been in Las Vegas. I've been in CES. I saw Cher's farewell show in Las Vegas, and that was the most Las Vegas thing I never seen. That sounds like it. Yeah. At the very end of the show, before we had even. stopped clapping. Share was on a helicopter back

to Los Angeles, which tells you a lot about the way that people feel about Vegas at the end of their time here. And also, the crowd kept clapping. We felt like fools. We kept expecting her to come out and take a bow. Little did we know. Should we see a show tonight? Yes. Wow. Is Britney playing tonight? We're going to find out... No?

The crew knows. Our producers are fully aware. In case you're wondering what people do over there while we're recording the Vurchase. Scour Stubhub for Britney from David Andrew are scouring for Britain tickets. I did see Chris Brown last night.

Andrew's website is Britneyspirassupan.com. Yeah. You saw Chris Brown where. Oh, play. Yeah. How was Chris Brown? Oh, man. How far do we want to go into this?

All the way. Tell the whole story. Well, okay, so, like, being in a club here is so weird when it's like a brand-sponsored event because it's all the, like, C-S. Oh. Jacket and Lanyards like everywhere in the club, and it's so weird.

Putting your hand over your face isn't going to hide you to these people. They still see you. But it's like the club is full of mostly that. And then there's like, that's probably like a healthy 89%. The drinks are free, so you drink them. And you don't stop drinking them. What Hemingway Nightwear are you from? The drinks are free.

The weird thing about the parties here is that usually... The ocean is roaring at me. The weird thing about the parties here is that evening. is that many things, but the artists that are scheduled to perform actually go on at regular hours. And usually, like, anything you go to, you're like, oh, there's a gas rate,

they're going to be on at two in the morning or something. So Chris Brown came on at, like, maybe 11, like a really reasonable hour. Started by himself, mostly played, like, kind of slow jams. Like, it wasn't, like, a hot intro. And then four male dancers appeared later. Yeah.

And then they would go away with that. sponsored this party. Did I miss it? I hear video. Oh, yeah. That's the thing that they do here. Yeah. We went to the Twitter Spotify party in search of Drake. When we got there, we were told that Chromio was playing, but then Neil and I walked

into the stage area, and they just had a boom box playing juveniles, back that ass up. Which was not very Chromio at all. It was very confusing. But no, Drake. I mean, they lured us there with Drake. What, how did they say? They said Drake will be playing.

The classic, Doreme. But wouldn't your mind be like he couldn't possibly be in a Spotify event that would be not possible because of Apple music, right? Oh. What? You didn't do that in your head immediately? Well, his manager was there is something else we were told. And earlier in the day at a Twitter event, I had run into Flowrida who was there trying

on headphones from a company that Twitter has taken a minority stake in for literally no reason that anyone will tell me. Twitter invested in a headphones company. they built a little kind of city environment in the Cosmopolitan Hotel. So there were like these little storefronts and you could go in and they were meeting rooms. And it was like very elaborate and very well done and like it all looked very cool. And one of the storefronts was a headphones store. The company's named Music, M-U-Z-I-K, Twitter took a stake in it.

I have no idea why. And who was in there when I walked by trying on headphones, none other than Flo Rida himself. Do you recognize him by face? Oh, no. Obviously somebody had to tell me that it was Flowrida. I mean, of course, are the songs. Yeah, of course. I'm not living under a rock over here, people.

But I do not know what he looks like. I don't know what he looks like. Mostly because he won't return my calls to set up our first date. Oh, you an Uncle Flo? Yeah. Did you mention to him that his name is actually just the word Florida with space? I wanted to, because I think when he finds out he is going to be so embarrassed. He's like, what have I been doing for the last five years with his name?

He loves Florida so much that he was like, you know what my rap name is going to be? Florida. Right. I want mine to be Cal a foreign name. And just see if that could kind of catch on. Actually, we should talk about headphones for a minute. Let's get into it. These are terrible.

Who got these four? No, I'm just going to go on. The Andrews is crying to corner. This is the part of the CS where you just start emotionally abusing each other. No, so every year there's an Apple leak at CS. Oh, yeah. There's all, Apple always, you know, I'm a conspiracy theorist. I believe that this stuff happens for a reason.

But no, if it were happening for a reason at CES, they wouldn't have waited until today. But why is it every year? Anyway, it always happens. What a surprise that happened again. So the Apple Week is confirmation that Apple's going to cut the headphone jack out of the next iPhone, make it yet even thinner. It's just fuck battery light.

And they're going to build wireless beats headphones, like earphones. Those earbuds. It was wireless earbuds, which finally became a real thing this year at CES. Right, they're everywhere. And they'll pack in some garbage earpods to plug in the lighting board. Oh, okay. So the actual included ones, we do not think are going to be wireless. Obviously, the thing that they're going to say is we don't need a headphone jack anymore

because you're going to buy these sick air. Now, I mean, talk to me about the audio quality. That's the big Apple League of the show. What is the audio fidelity of wireless earbuds? So it's gotten like five years ago. It was bad. It's gotten way better. Bluetooth headphones are pretty good now.

It's APTX. AppDX, yeah, but... Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because I'm already getting, you know, only mediocre sound from Spotify, right? I have, like, very nice headphones when I'm at my desk, but, you know, Spotify, so it's, you know, 320 KBPS.

I don't want to degrade that any further. I don't think you'll be able... I don't think that signal path is going to get... You know, by adding one piece of... Like, they're not... They're going to do something, but you're probably wanting to hear it because that information is probably gone.

Yeah. What if they're not Bluetooth? What if they come up with their own custom proprietary wireless standard? That's very Apple, but they wouldn't. Because then you can only use them with a phone, you know? So does this feel like the sort of inevitable future, or is this Apple tinkering for the sake of tinkering? Apple's in a real Samsung place lately, right?

I mean, I definitely have used smartphones that didn't have headphone jacked. Like the trios didn't, HTC made a bunch of phones that were, it had this weird video. We hated it. It was the most annoying thing. What was HGC's connector called? It was like some USB It wasn't USB And then you had plug in dongles

It was mini USB but it was like a trapezoid Instead of proper mini USB Man that company should just continue Slowly dying Poor HTC It was the HTC Multifunction Audio adapter I remember because it had a catchy name

Was you a wireless headphones Like individual wireless earbuds I don't want to Yeah Why not They're gonna make me though I guess Or you can just use regular booth the headphones one assumes um because it's another thing to misplace

exactly like the tangle i can find it what you know what's cooler are the over-eared or buds well i like the idea of having over-ear but in my woman-on-the-go lifestyle i just can't be encumbered that's a busy millennial I'm a busy young millennial um wow it's true um but yeah no i need that i have to It has to go in my bag. It has to go away. It can't have a precious, like, this thing that's as big as a sandwich. Like, he carries sandwich all the time.

Only a piece of gum. That's the rule. These headphones are nice, but, hmm. Break sandwich rule. I don't know. I think Coney Audio Jack is such an enormous mistake. It just seems like they're just doing it to do it. Like, yes, the connector's been around for, like, 100 years or something crazy.

Yeah. Am I the only person who would get really? really excited if this year's leak had been, like, the iPhone 7 will be, like, three millimeters thicker, and the battery life will be, like, 12 hours longer. No, you can buy, but you can buy an ugly battery case. I mean, like, that's the thing that they want, right? Like, it's funny, like, Joanna Stern's review of the iPhone's success was great. Literally, she, like, walked around the street and, like, people are like, I want longer

battery life, and she's like, now you can press the screen, and they're like, no, that's not useful to me. Um, I, it's just like, they're, I think they're, They're just finding ways to make it ever thinner for no discernible reason. Yeah, and to be clear, I don't think the iPhone has terrible battery. Also waterproof. Oh, yeah, waterproof. It was a thing that they were leaking out there. Yeah, and I mean, that's genuinely useful, right?

People do break their iPhones because they drop them in the toilet. My brother himself, I think, has lost, like, eight phones in the toilets. So that's great. But change is happening. Wait, eight? I know. No, not that many. But between him and his wife, like, they're always, like, scrounging around for an upgrade

because somebody either dropped it or, you know, into the ocean. or that kind of thing. They were placed under some sort of curse. I don't know. Dropped into the ocean is kind of amazing because you're not to be above the ocean. They spent a lot of time. They spent a lot of time parasailing, kite surfing.

Very active. Waterproof is great. I just think they're, I get that wireless, like Bluetooth headphones are a thing. They're a big market. People buy the hell out of them. But I just think that that is the thing that people won't buy an iPhone

because it does not an iPhone jack. Yeah. They'll be like, you know what, I invest it in headphones or I just like wrapping a chord around something and putting it away. Like, I have no interest in wireless earbuds robots. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's going to have a huge effect on sales one way or the other. Again, it's just not the leak that I would have been looking for. I have no interesting charging wireless ear phones.

Last year what leaked was the MacBook. Hang on. If Apple, if you want to live in the Apple world, they are going to expect you to charge every night a phone. earbuds and the watch. Or buy a lightning set of headphones. Or buy a lightning adapter from the headphones. It's just like a silly thing. Right.

Like suddenly headphones don't want it. You think it'll come with a lightning adapter? I think it will come with lightning earbuds. Yeah. The world's worst headphones. Do you remember the video when they put out the earpods? And Johnny I was like, I have studied sound for hundreds of years. It's like, you know, finally did it.

You know, something that I do a lot is I charge my phone while I'm like taking a call, you know, which I take on my ear pods. That's just, like, is all that stuff just going to go away? The more I'm thinking about this, I guess, the less excited I am about. Because I charge my phone in while using the headphones all the time. Yeah. Because if you, yeah, if they're there and your phone's there, then where are you going to talk? How is it?

How are you going to do that? You have to hold it? We're going backwards. Oh, garbage. Such garbage. Yeah. I don't know, man. I didn't make the leak.

But every year there's a leak. Last year was an actual hot new laptop. Yep. This year it's what I think is a retrograde decision about the headphone tracks. Oh, you got to talk about Peach. So, ready? So here's the real news. Yeah, let's step outside of our Las Vegas bubble right now.

Is it back or did you destroy it? We can see right now. I took down a social network today. I probably shouldn't take credit for that because I'm actually not sure if I did. But what I can tell you is that Peach. Dot Cool is the hottest thing on kind of media Twitter and early adopter Twitter. Oh, my God. So last June, actually, I wrote a big story about an app called Bight,

which was created by a guy named Dom Hoffman, who's the co-founder of Vine. So he's, you know, had a lot of success building these social networks. Bight was this crazy creation tool. You could use it to do almost anything, and that was sort of its undoing. Nobody really knew what to do with it. You know, you could add gifts, texts, photos. You could make music and put it into the app. So it looks like they sort of create a little side project,

which is called Peach, which is a little bit more straightforward. You can add a text update, you can post a photo, you can do a drawing, but it adds in these things it calls magic words, which are kind of like Slack commands. So you can type in GIF and it'll bring up a little box to search for GIF. Or you can type in here and it'll let you post your current location. And then, as you'd expect, you can add a heart or you can comment. The best part of the app is that it kind of took Facebook's poke feature

and then expanded it into this range of eight or ten actions. So you can boop someone. you can wave at them, you can kiss them, you can put a ring on them. Can you poop emoji them? You cannot poop emoji them, but you can quarantine them, which is amazing. I quarantine TC. Yeah, well, rightly so. So that's like kind of a weird, fun mechanic where it's like they've kind of created their own little language.

So, like, I just thought people were tweeting about this. I got on the beta last week. Didn't really think much of it because with these social networks, you honestly never know what's going to take off and what isn't. There seems to be sort of no rhyme or reason to it. in this particular case, it's a little bit silly and it's a little bit dumb. And that often is enough to get an app about 100,000 users. And so we'll see if we're also talking about this on Monday. But right now, I'm getting, you know, like dozens.

I'm getting blown up on Peach. I'm getting blown up on Peach. And I'll be moving all of my social networking there. Are you on the Peach? No, I just found out about it in the traffic. It has the best URL of any social network, which is peach.com. That's great. Maybe Peach.comorse would have been better, but Peach.comle is, you know, the best.

that I'm aware of. I get stolen a lot lately. Oh, really? Yeah. Stolen is really interesting. I don't know what's going. So stolen is a game, sort of moving right along to the other kind of big viral phenomenon,

which I haven't written about yet, but want to. It was created by a guy who had previously worked at Zinga, so he kind of knows about how to create these viral apps, but had been working on this journal app called Hayday, which had some nice qualities about it, but just wasn't taking off. So they decided to see if they could save the company by creating a viral game.

Wow. And so they created this thing called Stolen, which was based on a previous thing that they had did that was called Friends for Sale. And in Friends for Sale, like your friends had like pet avatars and you would steal them or something like that. What Stolen does is it lets you steal Twitter avatars.

So I can go on a stolen and you get a certain amount of money, virtual currency to start with and you're worth a certain amount of virtual currency and then I could buy you. So let's say you're 10,000, I buy you for 10,000. and if somebody buys you, like, shortly thereafter, like, your stock goes up, and you get a cut of the sale,

and the person who stole you the first time gets to, like, keep whatever, like, the difference is between what he bought you for and what he sold you for. You should just see Nicholas face right now. I love this. She's so excited about this concept. It's very, I was very skeptical about it, but I've been playing for the best of a lot of days. Why are you so excited with this? I don't know. I'm trying to, like, think why.

The problem with CES is your brain doesn't work all the way. Again, it's also a Las Vegas range. Yeah. No, I don't know why I like this so much, but I really like it. I think people are going to love it because it lets people be on pedestals above each other. People love ranking. And also, too, like, I think for a lot of us on Twitter, there's always somebody cooler than you on Twitter that, like, won't follow you back. If I'm stolen, you can just buy them.

So there's something, like, very empowering about the idea of, like, I know who my first buy would be for sure. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. It would be Bieber. No. You can't afford it. He's 99 million coins. What?

Yeah, it's too many coins. Although you can buy more coins. I mean, that's obviously. That's how they monetize it. Right. But you can actually have plenty of fun on stolen for free, which is something like that. I just got a lot of notifications. It's like, you have been stolen for $20,000. And like, leave me alone.

Oh, you're getting Twitter notifications about it? Yeah. Because I'm sure people get excited when they steal you. Once you own them, what can you do with them? The only thing you can do is if they're not stolen from you, like, they generate some sort of currency. So, like, you visit the app once a day. Am I mining Bitcoin by accident? You probably are.

What's happening? It's probably a big Bitcoin mining team. Did you see the heater that was here? No, was it a Bitcoin heater? There was a shared, this is actually like a cigarette. I need to Google. No, no, no, it was like a heater for your home, and it has like computational ability and it connects to a shared computing cloud service.

And so it generates heat for your home by like mining Bitcoin and like doing other things. Wow. And so the waste heat is like used to heat your home. It's like ridiculous. And then they're like, we need this cloud. storage thing because you don't you don't need computational resources evenly so we have to send you some to like heat your home when you're not doing it I got to find this it was amazing that sounds like somebody really overthought the concept of a heater yeah yeah

like it must use so much electricity I just Google it must be so inefficient relative to a regular old heater I find it project exit exergy I know it was here it was at showstop or Pepcom or what my man's I went to. And it was such an only-at-C-ES product where I was like, what is this? And I'm like, it's a heater. It mines Bitcoin. It's like, that's usually the other way.

You went to a fucking crazy booth. I went to a totally normal booth today. There's one like right there. It's just a company out of St. Louis that makes everything. Yeah. And they go, they've got a design center in Hong Kong or Shenzhen.

And they just, we want to make a hard. coverboard, well, this is one the factories make, we'll make ours look a little bit this way. Yeah. And we want to make a blender. We want to make an alarm clock. They make like 15 different kinds of alarm clocks. And you probably have one in your house or in your hotel room because they've got 50 white labels. Right.

And it was just, like, fascinated to go in there and, like, what is your CES like? Well, my CES is, like, convincing Walmart to, like, buy my stuff and put it in the, you know, the checkout aisle. Wow. And, like, but they had, like, good stuff, like, fine stuff. Nothing there was, like, utter garbage. And even if it was, it's like, well, somebody will get rid of it somewhere. But like the thing, I mean, I wrote a whole piece about it, but the thing that I realize is like the worst stuff here is like 20% better than it was

two or three years ago. Same thing with the best stuff. And so like, yeah, go out and buy a crappy Bluetooth speaker. You'll be fine. I'll tell you, I'm thinking about it. I had the same jambox for like four years, but now like the battery won't charge. So it only works if it's plugged in. So I'm in the market.

Yeah. they've got ones that float they've got ones with suction cups you guys watch this video it's Dieter and Waltz and I walked around yeah that sounds fantastic he told me stories

about the history of CS No we had a story who pitched it It was somebody I don't know I still don't get it Somebody who is like CS is the only place on earth

Where everyone is constantly wearing a backpack and it's exceptional I don't know if that's true Yeah That man's wearing a backpack High school What's a backpack I see a lot

people who don't have back back. Sorry, I applaud you for turning out when I said stuff backpack. But there isn't one. There isn't one. We have to stop. We have to stop. A, this is terrible radio if you're in a car. B, we are literally just yelling at people.

We're engaging with the audience. I run a backpack. You brought a backpack? Yeah, I wanted to fit in. What kind of backpack should you ring? A backpack is cool. What's that? What's cool?

What's cool? What's cool? A backpack. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Let's hear it. Why?

I don't know. I mean, one, the weight distribution on the messenger bag makes no sense. It's terrible. Well, that's not true. Yeah. No, it's so bad. You got to wear it high tight, and then it's more even. Okay, now we're wearing the messenger bag high tight. Yeah. All right, fine. We're done with this. You know what you need to talk about? I just realized, and I've been, like, Wi-Fi's at,

and I can't get the whole story, but maybe you guys know it. There was a raid on a hoverboard company here. We're sitting inside a crime scene. Yes. Yeah. The federal officials raiding. at the behest of one wheel. But then Segway is here,

like just over there. Razors here with a hoverboard. And Swagway, the world's worst name company, like, shouldn't Segway send the cops to Swagway? You know, and there's a case to be made. Anyway, they released a product called the Swagtron,

which is actually just a robot Sam Schaeffer. He just says outlandish things about blocking. Beef. bus beef oh my god anyway can somebody walk me through

the federal raid so yeah so one wheel didn't want their stuff their patented things stolen by other companies how were their patents on this like the whole point is that

they're no patent that's what anyway it sounds like somebody reinvented the one wheel we're done shut a day anyway so they got

some kind of patent and so they another company Like whenever anybody makes a hoverboard, immediately the same thing is made by everybody else. They all talk to each other in these factories. Yeah. And so like, if I want to go make a Bluetooth speaker, I go, I fly out to Shenzhen and I go to like 15 factories and they all say, well, these are the kinds of Bluetooth speakers we make.

And I say, okay, how about that one? And they're like, cool. And I said, okay, can you like put a flower on it so it's at least unique? And they're like, yeah, sure, here's a flower. And the same thing happens with the hoverboards. And so whatever parts, whatever factory, I'm guessing, made their stuff, like it just got all stolen. So some of those companies end up coming out to CES, and they, you know, a bunch of these, a bunch of the bigger companies are tired of it. So they, like, told the feds, and the feds are like, yeah.

And they went and raided the Changzhu First International Trade booth or building and took them out. That didn't take them out. That's harsh. Took them away. The penalty for hoverboard patent infringement is summary execution immediately on a trade show floor. Which I look, because normally we write these patent stories and they're so impenetrable, but like a good old-fashioned raid, where you feel like you're in like prohibition era America is amazing.

So it happens way more often in Germany. So every year there's some MP3 raid story. So there's, MP3 is patented. The Frownhofer Institute. I don't know if you know this. Say the Institute again. Thank you. Yeah.

You know, us patent officinados or anyway, whatever. Every year there's some company, it doesn't pay the license for MP3 and they put out MP3 players in every year the German authorities raid EFA. And I have like, I have written this story or re-blogged this story

like for a decade. Yeah. Like they did it again. The cop showed. And it's just funny that it's, I've never really heard about it happening here. Well, what's fascinating to me... But like, why would you pick that company

and not any of the others? They're bigger? I don't know. They've been trying to get a... With send them a message? They've been sending them cease and desist and they told them don't come to the show and then they came anyway.

Oh. And so I'm like, okay, well, we're doing this. But what's fascinating to me about the hoverboard story. The CEO's swagway, like, got an alert in his phone. It's like, the cops are here. Everybody pack it up. Gets on his little one wheel and starts wheeling out here. He's like, no one can know.

What were you saying? What's fascinating to me about hoverboards is, like, I don't even know if we can call some of these things knockoffs. Because, like, it's hard to know where the original actually was. And so they're all, like, knockoffs of each other. So the term, like, here's the genuine article and here's the fake version of it. doesn't really even apply. And that's happening across, like, across, like, all of the tech industry right now.

It doesn't happen with, like, you know, the laptops, the phones, the brands that we have. But all the other little gigaaws that you can get in your house, there's other versions of it everywhere else. And the line between what's real and what's the knockoff is really vague. And we only noticed it with hoverboards because the fucking things were lighting out of fire. Yeah. It's funny, the marketing line for two different hoverboards here is, like, this one won't explore. load. Yeah.

It's like, that's a really low bar. And it's like, Swagway is like the Swagtrod. The battery is protected so it won't kill you. The battery is protected by like being encased in aluminum

which case if it does fail, it's going to fail way more spectacularly. Also, if I'm a strapped hole now. Also, if I'm 13, you know a tagline I don't want to hear? This won't explode. Sell me on the danger. Like,

my tagline for a cool teen hoverboard would be like, this thing will take you Right off a fucking cliff, bro. Yeah, mom, I want this one. Put a skull and crossbones on it. I feel as though as our designated teen reporter. You're moving farther and farther away.

Actually, Caitlin is our designated teen reporter now. She's been a great teen's at CES story. All the stuff that was branded and marketed for teens. She found the Kodak booth as well. Oh, yeah? Yeah. She was like, I love it here. Yes.

Yeah. It's a great place to be. It's funny that both of you like zeroed it on this one experience. That is really funny. And she's like, why is there? a selfie spot here. Yeah. What's your favorite place at CES here? Is it the Kodak booth? My favorite place at CES. Um, no, it can't be that because it's not that good. There's got to be something better. Mine's the drone zone. Wait, what was it? Have you been to the drone zone? What did you just

think of? I don't know. I don't know if I like anything anymore. You got to go to the drone zone, I'm telling you. Two days and you're wrecked. I'm done. You just can't handle it anymore. I rescheduled my flight to go home later because I got here later, and I'm like, I wish I was gone. I'm sorry. It's like, we've just been here for a week. I know. We have like four days to go. It's scary.

We don't have four days to go. We're going to be here until December. Yeah. What else happened at the show? What are we to talk about? What are some other themes? We wrote a bunch of stuff today. So Nick Statt had an awesome story about how Amazon was the secret-of-ing most interesting thing here.

Yes, we definitely have to talk about that. Talking about this all day. Well, go ahead. Well, no, you can go. You've been talking about that. Yeah, I'm tired of talking about it. God damn it. All right.

We are so angry and snippy. Snippy on the verge cast. Everyone needs to take a break. Let's all just... Let's leave about 15 minutes of dead air. Like the audience. You know what great radio is? Is moments of silence.

My new podcast, moments of silence. So the story is that Amazon, you know, whenever CES happens, we email the companies. Are you going to be there? You're going to be there? And Amazon's like, nah, we're not showing up. There might be some stuff with, like, Alexa, but don't worry about it. And we're like, okay, cool.

I guess we won't plan to, like, think about Amazon at CES. And instead, Alexa and the Amazon Echo is basically the thing that's actually winning the fight for what's going to be the standard for the smart home. And they've done it in this really clever way where Apple's like, we made HomeKit, we made a standard, build our standard into your stuff, and we're going to get the whole industry,

and we're going to fight Google, we're going to fight Samsung smart things, and we're going to win. We're going to fight it. have a good, grand old ecosystem battle. It's going to be VHS versus beta all over again. We can't wait to get into it. And Google did the same thing with Brillo, but they're like,

it was really weird when Tim Cook caught up on stage and said that. And Samsung's doing kind of the same thing. Everybody's got different shades of like, we're open, where we have it's easy to use, blah, blah, blah. And Amazon, meanwhile, it's just like, yo, like, here's how to do it. And you don't need to buy into our whole ecosystem. We'll work with everybody.

We don't care. Like, we'll work with if this and that. We can just, here's how it is, go do it. And everybody has the speaker in their house because it's, you know, $150 now. And so, like, all of a sudden, they're just like, they're the coolest way to deal with your smartphone here at CES. And everybody else that's like got way more money and way more effort invested in, like, building a massive smart home ecosystem. It's just like watching Amazon walk away with the mind share of this is how you control your smart home. Right.

I think it's amazing, actually. That, like, I think I've said this on the show a couple times. The Echo is the best gift they gave at Christmas because it's so, I mean, this is literally a framework company of every product, right? It demands nothing of you at any time. You plug it in the wall, you leave it alone. And then when you want stuff, you, like, talk to it, and it delivers things to you. And, like, the range of things that's starting to deliver to you is, like, getting hot. Like, if Apple instead of, this is ridiculous, and, like, there's probably good reasons Apple made this decision.

But instead of doing the watch, if they had made an Echo-like product and said, we're going to start to add, intelligence to the rest of your home and now series in your kitchen all the time. Why didn't they do that? People would have bought the fuck out of that. They should have done that. It would have been like, I mean literally that like Apple would have been like this is revolutionary. Instead of Amazon's, they're getting super quietly. And all of these smart home products need an interface and the interface cannot be yet another app on your phone. And there's no good interface that controls everything at once from a single app, which is basically a smart things model. It's fine. Yeah. So the idea that they all need a great voice interface, like,

If you're one of these smaller companies, if you're Belkin or whatever, there's no way you can hire the researchers and the designers, the intelligent people to build a great voice interface with the Wimo Switch. So you just get Amazon's for free. It's a kind of an incredible move. I agree with everything you said, and I still hate voice interfaces. Really? Yes.

Series still gets stuff wrong for me all the time. No, but have you used an echo? I haven't, no. One of the genius things that Amazon did is they just paid more attention to the microphones. And the microphones on the echo are incredibly good. And, like, that's actually probably the most impressive part of that hardware. It's not the speaker. It's not the Wi-Fi.

The speaker's, like, pretty middling, actually. Yeah, it's not that great. All I know is that in any case where I could send a text rather than use my voice, I would almost always rather send the text. Oh, we should talk about bots. Yeah, which is sort of one of the, you know, a tangent that comes out of this piece that I wrote this week about how in Silicon Valley so much of the attention right now is turning to these messaging interfaces, which are powered by bots.

So it's kind of two things, right? One is, in this day and age, messaging just dominates the way that we do everything on our phones, right? Like, if I were to walk by any one of you at any time during the day, like the thing you were using would probably at least have messaging in it if it weren't actually just messaging. So, you know, everybody who's struggling inside the app store right now is thinking, hmm, well, maybe we can use that interface to link together a bunch of other kinds of services

because there are so many APIs out there. And so they're starting to write these bots that can do almost anything. And some of them are really sort of horizontal, like Facebook, And I type in anything I want. Facebook M tries to make it happen. And some of them are very vertical, where it's like, this is an app that helps you get fit, and you have this conversation via text about what you want.

People love this kind of interaction. I don't think they love voice. In fact, after my piece, somebody who I know who works closely with Apple and Google told me that internally the traction that Google Voice and Siri have gotten is considered to not be great. Google Now, yeah. that Google Now and Siri are not seen as huge successes inside those companies in terms of the traction that they're getting.

And I don't necessarily think that's because they're bad products. I think it's just because it's not in our nature to want to open up our mouth and look for the microphone and make sure that we know the right command. It's more opaque than a DOS prompt. And so that's just something that I think that these companies are going to have to work on. At the same time, I also agree with everything that you said that when it comes to the smart home in particular, or you don't necessarily want to have to get out your phone and be like, you know, turn these lights blue.

And so maybe the smart home does become the place where the voice interface is executed the best. Right. I think you don't want to look crazy in public. Yeah. Right. That's a goal, I think, for any technology product. Does this make me look insane in public? Yep.

And that is why the Bluetooth headset is like a niche product. But when I'm home and it's the echo, I'm like, I'm literally just like, yo, play some music. Like, hey, what's the way? What music do you have plugged into your echo? Smooth jazz. It's just my prime, whatever prime. It's the worst.

I got to like get on my music again somehow and then get it up to time. It's turning me into a real dad because it has every Wilco record. And it's just like, it just knows. It knows it like whatever. Like I'll settle for every Wilco record. You don't settle for Wilco record. You feel blessed that Wilco is in our lives. I really want to change the voice prompt, the thing that lights it up from Alexa to fuck it.

So I can just say fuck it play some Wilco. and like it'll just do it fuck it order me more Oreos exactly I think that would be wonderful fuck it another pint of Ben and Jerry's I don't know if there's anything that you can't say to Alexa

isn't better by saying fuck it beforehand it's that timer fuck it what's the weather fuck it set a timer for five minutes it's like I just keep and that's like a thing that you can do in your home and like you just say it out loud and like things begin to happen

I don't know man I think that I think the Siri and Google thing is because you have to, the microphone of the phone isn't good. It often doesn't work. It needs, like, the echo because it's plugged into the, literally plugged in the wall and, like, stationary. It gets better. Like, my niece and nephew love it, because when you ask it, like, the circle lights up and the light points at you. And I think all the smart home stuff, it's, like, we're just in this minute where we're just, the phone isn't, like, we know its capabilities and how we're building these other experiences.

When Siri came out, the first thing Paul Miller said was, why can't I write to you? I have this interface. Why can't I just type at you? Because that's an artificial, like, that's, and it's funny that we're now at the point where we're basically typing in AIs. Yeah. Because we don't want to be crazy and probably. And I'm one who thinks that Siri would be tremendously more valuable if it did have a texting interface. Right.

Yeah. And the benefit to Apple would be think about if it did become very popular, think about all the data that it's feeding into Siri. and training it. I think there's a real opportunity there. Can I say something? Then Cortana. You guys are going to get really mad? Well, Cortana, yeah, but you know what else?

Had a really great text box, so you could just type anything into it. There's a WebOS. WebOS. Yeah, it's a keyboard just all the time there. So if you wanted to do something, you just open it up and start typing, and then it would happen. Was that feature called Just Type? It was called Just Type. It was wonderful.

That was a wonderful operator. The dream of WebOS is still alive in a series of LGTVs that no one will purchase. The setup Have you gone and seen TVs yet, Nicole? Yeah, they all look the same. They're big and square. Some are curved. Some are curved.

Have any of these TVs convinced you to buy any television? No. What's it going to do? You're so mad. What's it going to do? The only thing... Everything feels boiled down to like real animal instincts at this point. There's like literally waves of anger like emanating

from you like heat. When you say waves of animal instinct, do you mean that as you look around the show floor, you're just thinking like, how do I protect my family for a bit of that might emerge? Yeah. Yeah. You know, Nicholas doing that thing

where you look at an animal and you like see what parts of the body or steak. You're like, oh, I see. That's the, but she's doing that with people. Is she like a 1940s cartoon? Yeah. I might be. Her tongue falls out of her mouth in a staircase.

Well, something that I enjoy at our time in CS I often drink with Casey. I mean, Casey gets a little drunk. Talks like a 40s gangster. I do. For some reason, I'll have like three old fashions and all of a sudden it's,

say, what's the big idea? That's amazing. The best part of CES has been the alcohol with coworkers. Absolutely. It's like any war. You fight some like horrible battle and then you like,

you just like go get the beers and talk about what happens. What we're going to do when we go back to New York is we're all going to sit around a VFW hall and keep talking about CIS. There should be like VFW halls but for retired bloggers.

where they just gather around with their laptops and smoke. Isn't that Twitter? That's Twitter? Smoke and tweet. Oh, that's awful. What else happened? We got a few minutes left. What else happened in the show?

I just want to point out that the peach. dot cool story is number one on the website. Come on. The story is people want to know about the hottest new social networks. Yeah. I mean, I have to say this. Oh, I remember what I was going to say about Siri and search. It's funny because if you think about it,

Apple has two different messaging interfaces on iPhone already. if you swipe right, you get a search box that's somewhat intelligent and tell you things. But you cannot type into that what is the weather and get a serial result. Exactly. And it's like you could just combine those things and get there. That's exactly where I want it to be. Yeah. Yeah. And then as long as we're talking about that screen, let me 3D touch the app icon suggestions.

You know what I'm dying to, oh, and then like pop it open? Yeah. So you're like, you know what I really need is when you search for an app? I need it to tell me on what fucking screen it is. I would love that too. I don't know. It's a problem. Where is it?

Can you just take me to that? that screen instead of what the reason that no one will ever saw that problem is because the average person probably only has one screen of apps in the future wait your problem is you can't so like if you have apps and folders how many pages you have like up there in folders why I navigate my phone no but I how do you find the apps to put them in folders yeah find all my banking apps take take 10 minutes it's not 10 minutes it's like it's a fun hobby for the subway this is a man who fought me for three months over switching his

Google authentication app. No, don't tell them. Don't tell them. They'll hack it. They're all hackers. Don't tell them what I'm doing. I'm scared of them. I used triple factor authentication.

You can't possibly be cracked. Wait, is that a challenge? Yeah. What is the hacker psychology? Let's just have a gentleman's agreement with the hackers. I moderated this Mr. Robot panel, and the dude, I don't remember. One was the vice president at Mandia, and the other one was the chief security officer

taining these huge security companies. And the one guy was like, I investigate some of the most heinous and disturbing computer crimes that ever exist. Yet, I know that there's nothing I can do in my personal life to protect myself. So I just use my credit card all the time. It's constantly getting hacked. You just got to live with it. It's like, that was terrifying. Wait, so people come after this guy because they know that he's essentially like the computer cop. And they want to mess with him. Yeah. So, look, I hung out with some computer cops.

Like you do. What's the big idea with these computer cops? Like you do, me and the boys in blue. Just getting down. The long arm of John Law. Checking you into the old gray bar hotel. That's our show, everybody. No, he was like, there's nothing you can do.

Like literally, and their thing was like, everybody should turn on two-factor. That's about those bests. And they're like, don't use garbage companies. Right? He was like, peach that cool. Yeah. They're like, don't give. And I was like, I was like, dude, you know, they ask the audience question, like,

who here use the same password for everything? And like half the audience like sheepishly raise their hands. And they're like, you're idiots. And they're like, who here has a burner password for companies they think are garbage and will leak their data? And like half the audience raise their hand. So, yeah. So, I mean, I don't consider them burner passwords.

So I sign up for new apps every week now, and I generate an individual password for all of them. It took me a long time to gum around to that, but once I did, I started to feel a lot better. Someone's playing in it. Okay. I'm just saying those are the lights that usually come on when the car is about to move in reverse. I'm not going to die on stage. I'm not going to die today. It's not at CES.

Not by the hand of this focus. Oh, that would be the worst. No sink operated vehicle shall kill me this day. There's some cool ways to die in Las Vegas. Getting backed over by a Ford Focus is not one of them. Ass end of CES. Save me inflatable Bluetooth speakers.

All right. I don't know. He just put up a headline that says this is a CES gadget Conan O'Brien called the Titbit. Yeah. I think we've done everything we can do here. Oh, I know what that was. She was on this stage during that interview. Yep.

Also, we had Palmer Lucky out on stage yesterday. Yeah. Also, by the table. time this is out, I don't think it'll be a surprise. We had stormtroopers on the stage. Yeah. Yeah. We did actually a lot.

We should, so we're obviously very tired when talking about nonsense. Nicole, do you have any more nonsense you want to talk about? Oh, nonsense? Yeah. Are you going to a party tonight? Yeah. What are you going to?

Oh, I got options. Oh, my God. Yeah. Are you doing like the CES Vegas Tinder on the side just to check it out? No, I quit Tinder. Oh, right. Remember? And I stuck to it, and my life's way better.

Way better. I feel weird about using Tinder in like strange cities that you only visit once a year because you're like, all right, great, I matched with a dental student. That's good. I'll just put that in my back. I don't like hashtags. We should do a story about the way married people talk about Tinder. Like it's a wonderful playground.

Yeah, there's a mic in there. It is a little bit of just like a self-esteem engine. I mean, I guess ultimately that is why you use it when you visit another city is that, you know, somebody thinks you're cute and you think they're cute and. you know, in another world, maybe you just quit your job and move to that city and live with them. You know? Or you can just assess your local value. Yeah. I mean, you know, while I'm waiting for live blogs to start,

it's nice to be like, can I start a life with this person? Instead of live blogging about Nvidia self-driving car lunchbox. So did you match with anybody? Yeah, some nice matches. And they'll be hearing from me. Stay tuned. No, seriously, we should just, like, we should just do a man on the street when find many people. I'm like, what do you think Tinder is?

They're like, instant fucking. It's just, it's the app that has sex with you're right. Yeah, it's Uber for adultery. It's the one where you just push the button and then babes show up, right? It's like, that's how, anyway, Trey let me use his Tinder ones.

Yeah. He was real mad at you. Yeah, I had, I don't, my Tinder game, he was like, what were you typing? It's all like, hello, I am a man. He's like, you got a, you're out the game. dude never again all right so we got to we got to wrap up thank you everybody who's listened to our show thank you these people most of them work for us so

thank you for continuing your employment at the verge.com uh he's like takes like he's like fuck this uh thank you for using that terrible tv as a monitor for low these many days um anyway we have done so much at c s there's obviously this show, which is great. There's many episodes of that. We did a podcast with Walt here, but we also did tons and tons of videos on the stage. Everybody from the CEO of Fitbit, I said Palma

Lucky was here. There were Stormtroopers here. Just tons of stuff on the stage. We looked for that. We had a really cool video with The Next Generation of Big on Mindstorms. I think it's awesome. We did tons and tons of other videos that are on, and I think this is cool if you're like in the future media.

We've been recutting the video. and targeting towards different platforms. So the main place to see everything, everything's on YouTube, go there, subscribe to our YouTube page. You can watch everything from CS. There's some really great ones. But then if you go look at our Facebook page, the videos are actually slightly different,

which I think is really interesting. And people are watching the hell out of them there, too. So our Facebook page, like, watch videos there. I want to call out a couple from today that are amazing. Lauren Grush wore an exoskeleton, like a robot exoskeleton, that instead of giving her superpowers, made her an old person.

So there's like a VR headset that like fucked with her vision And like made her move really slow Like gave her arthritis And she, that video is incredible Especially because she's so tired And at the end she just begs you to subscribe to the YouTube channel And the most defeated telepoints you've ever heard

She's like, please Scott It's like yeah Gun to have a gun to my head They demand that I say this in every video So that one's great And then Lauren and Sean Our two space cadets went to the NASA booth And a rover drove literally over their body

They laid it on the ground the road. It was super fun. There's just tons of videos to watch. Please watch them off the YouTube page or the Facebook or wherever the hell it is. Anywhere but Go 90, the worst of all the game experiences. But do make sure to add The Verge on Peach.com. On Peach, dot cool. We will be pumping in lots of content there shortly.

And Nicola and Kirsten, you have snap again today? No, I haven't seen her all day. Well, Kirsten's been out in the world Snapchating, so look at us on Snapchat. I have to say, just wrapping up to the show. relatively boring show, relatively quiet, not a lot of big flashy product news, but lots of things that are very cool. And just looking at, it's funny to look at our site and be like, oh man, there wasn't that big breakout chart beat explosion of traffic on the website. But then we made all these videos of things that are legitimately fucking cool here and people are watching

the hell out of them because there's so much cool stuff here that isn't news. Right? It isn't a big headline that's going to like explode because Samsung are, whatever, did the next thing. It's pieces of technology that legitimately look like the future or a piece of the future or something that will change your life. I mean, I'm just like, we have a bunch of cars, we have a levitating speaker. It's ridiculous. It's funny because I said, like, I was going to read some inspiring things and it's like levitating speaker, the swagtron. But anyway, but like... We went to the neon museum. We went to the neon museum. We saw a styrofoam drone. We saw a hydrogen fuel cell phone charger. So it's...

Instead of having to charge the battery, you have these, there's like little things inserts. You put it in, it turns it into a fuel cell and we'll charge your phone so you can just carry additional power with you. Wow. That's ridiculous, but that's not a headline. That's like a new product, right? It's not news from CES, but you just see how people are responding to the videos of being able to see what these cool new things here look like. And it's actually kind of inspiring and powerful. So I know it's terrible. I know Nicola is like, she's staring me like I'm an awful person for even daring to say something. I'm looking at you and I'm seeing what you would look like as a cartoon dog. I can see it really clearly. I don't know if we use legal here.

A cartoon dog? Yeah, I can see it right now in the state of being that I'm in right now. I think you would be a mouse. Me? A mouse? Like a cute mouse. You know what I'm not. I was a lot of bunny rabbit personally. That's something with ears.

Yeah. It's gigantic. Disney is sending federal officials to shut it. It's got to go. Mickey Mouse. It all has to end. Sorry, Pocahas. I'm just yelling copyrighted for.

raises to see if Disney were arrested. How much longer before this Vergecast will be shut down by a police raid? Let it go. I hope I'm on one. All right. That was our show. Please, like I'm saying, there's so much cool stuff to look at from the show. Thank you for sticking with us on the podcast. And I actually won't be on the Vergecast next week. Deter will be hosting, but we'll

be back to our regular... Because I'll be at a place. Oh, yeah. Think about where I'll be. Got surprises coming. Now we're just making clicking sounds. God, Kilman. We're in Vegas for another full day. The show's not even over. Tomorrow's the last full day of the show.

We just refuse to acknowledge it. No, tomorrow's the day when you can walk around and buy stuff on the cheap. That's what we should do. We should try to buy stuff on the cheap tomorrow. That's a good idea. Anyhow, we're back to a regular verge schedule starting immediately on Monday. Only everyone will be a little bit more tired and a little bit wiser, and our family will have grown ever stronger because we have suffered this pain together.

That was it. Right.