The Vergecast - CES 2021 / Samsung’s S21 lineup and Galaxy Buds Pro

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Monica Chin, and Chris Welch dive into all of the important announcements from both inside and outside of CES — including Samsung’s new flagship S21 smartphone line, the many new TVs with HDMI 2.1, Mini LED, webOS, and the next laptops with new chips from Intel and AMD. Further reading: Samsung Galaxy S21, S21 Plus, and S21 Ultra first look: polished design (and prices) Samsung’s Galaxy S21 phones come with plenty of features — but not a charger Samsung’s Galaxy S21 phones don’t include microSD card support You’ll never believe it, Samsung made a black phone Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro review Samsung’s 2021 TVs have dramatically better picture, thanks to Mini LED Samsung made a solar-charging Eco Remote for its latest TVs LG’s 2021 TV lineup includes its brightest OLED ever LG is overhauling its webOS TV software — and maybe ruining it LG Display announces its smallest OLED TV panel yet Sony announces 2021 TV lineup with 4K gaming at 120Hz and improved picture Sony promises streaming quality nearly as good as 4K Blu-ray on Bravia Core movie service Intel’s latest 11th Gen H-series chips promise the fastest ultraportable gaming laptops yet Intel’s 12th Gen chips look to challenge Arm and Apple’s M1 CPUs later this year Intel has to be better than ‘lifestyle company’ Apple at making CPUs, says new CEO AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 5000 mobile processors promise 2021’s best gaming notebooks AMD says RDNA 2 GPU-powered laptops will arrive in the first half of 2021 Nvidia announces $329 GeForce RTX 3060, available in February Nvidia is bringing its RTX 3080 to laptops on January 26th Asus ROG’s 2021 lineup includes its first convertible gaming laptop (ish) Asus updates Zephyrus G14 and G15 with latest AMD and Nvidia chips Asus’ 2021 laptop line includes two new dual-screen ZenBooks MSI’s new GE76 Raider Dragon Edition Tiamat is a tribute to an ancient goddess Lenovo’s new Legion gaming laptops go all in on AMD’s latest Ryzen chips Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 hands-on: a new direction Acer’s new Predator Triton 300 SE is an ultrapowerful, ultralight gaming laptop MSI’s new Creator 15 comes with RTX 3000 graphics  Razer has created a concept N95 mask with RGB and voice projection LG teases its Rollable phone again LG’s Rollable phone is real and launching in 2021 Weird flex: TCL shows off two more of its rollable, extendable display concepts Watch this flexible LG gaming TV bend from flat to curved Finally you can have ice cream at home thanks to ice cream pods Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, Chris Welch, Monica Chin, joined Dieter and I to talk about the week at CES and the Samsung Galaxy S-21 event. Got new TVs, new laptops, new phones. All come now on the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need.

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To Vergecast this week, we did one earlier in this, week with Casey and Addie talking about what's happening across the social platforms with moderation president tech policy to the COVID update in that one go listen to that that is a huge and ongoing story that we're going to be covering very deeply but concurrent to that because it cannot be stopped CES happened just a freight train barreling through through the night anyway I'm Neil I'm your friend I'm here Dieter Bon is here I'm the tenor in your sea shanty. That's good.

Are you tenor? I don't know. All right. And to help us talk about CS, Chris Welch is here. Hello again. And Monica Chin is here. Hey, what's up?

Dieter CS is like a, I don't know. I don't know how to describe CS this year. It didn't, we're not in Las Vegas for the first time in like a decade. You and I aren't in Las Vegas. I'm not hung over. Strange.

Which is weird. It's just weird to feel normal. I'm just drinking coffee. That's what's happening right now. Samsung was not at C. At all. Well, they had TVs, but yeah. Just describe how CS has operated this year and this other Samsung event that happened. So it was all virtual. We did have some people in New York did get to go look at some stuff. In particular, Chris got to go and look at, I think, some TVs. And Monica,

you got to go see a laptop at Samsung space. But everything was like half hour keynotes. There were a couple of one hour presentations. There were a lot of just pictures and press releases, a lot of gifts. What's weird is it feels incredibly different to us in this podcast, but I think for people that don't actually go to Las Vegas, it was like just like about maybe the same, honestly, because if you don't go, you just see pictures and videos and we talk about the stuff. We just didn't get the benefit of being able to physically hold or look at a bunch of of the stuff that we've been writing about, which is a bummer.

The other thing I'll say, everyone's like, is it up year or down year for CES and, you know, CES is dying, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that's true, I still believe that CES is a show where you learn about what is going to happen in consumer electronics over the next 24 months, not where you learn what the thing that you're going to buy tomorrow. And that is why it feels so disappointing to people is people have been set up to believe that you see a tech keynote and then you go buy the product right away from Apple and Samsung and Microsoft and everybody else. And that's just never what CES has been. But I don't want to be like a CES apologist. It was like not the best year. We have about the same amount of big announcements, but there's just no long tail.

Once we tell you about the top 10 things here, normally at CES there's another 500 things. And this year there's like another six. Yeah, I think last year we did like 10 minutes on a backpack. Yeah. Maybe that's like for the past. But I'm curious, people should tweet at us and get at us about, I mean, obviously there's a whole distracting new cycle going on this country. But that note that like for most people, it just feels like pictures of laptops. And it doesn't matter if we were there in person or whether

the company just sent us pictures of laptops. Like I'm curious how that felt for the, for the people paying attention. Anyhow, so we're not going to start with CS. Technically, we should start with the Samsung and the Galaxy S21. It's out. There's another, there's another Galaxy S phone. It has the S21 Ultra has five five, five, five, holes on the back. Yeah. All right. I don't know how else

describe the design of this phone. It's starting to look like Lytra concept phones with like 16 cameras. Like we're headed in that direction. Yeah. So the S-21, the Ultra, the story with the Ultra,

it's another big Samsung phone. It has four cameras on the back, two telephoto an ultra wide and wide, plus another hole for a laser sensor. It's got a selfie camera. It's like the ultra phone. We should talk about the fact that it's black, which is apparently. The video.

I want everyone to stop listening to this. And then go watch the video Samsung made to talk about how black their phone is. When it comes to design, black isn't just a color. It's all colors in one. It's bold yet understated. Black is classic. Style. Luxury.

Elegance itself. My belief is they made that video knowing people with Dunk up. Oh, for sure. My belief is somebody in Samsung HQ said, we're making a Vantablack phone. Go buy Vantablack. And they went to go by Vantablack, and they're like, oh, shit, this is really expensive and really hard to make. And so then they decided to do knockoff Vantablack, and they made a whole video about it. And then they called it Phantom Black, which if you're not listening closely...

I didn't even think about it. Sounds exactly like Vantam Black. I did not even think about that. Vantablack, if you haven't made paying attention to the, I don't know, it's the blackest black. It is a material that absorbs light. It is very hard to use. It's very expensive. There's like patent trolling associated with it.

It's like a whole thing. So Samson made Phantom Black, which is very funny. But I think they made a parody of an Apple video so people would dunk on it and pay attention to it. Oh, for sure. That's my theory of this video. Anyway, so they, the ultra is. is on black. What are the rest of the S-21s?

So that actual story, the real story with the S-21, this year is, you know, the ultra-Z-E-elcho, it's $1,200 bucks. But the regular S-21 starts at $7.99 now, and the S-21 Plus is a $9.99. So they brought the prices down a little bit, which is fascinating because last year at the S-20, they realized that, oh, wait, we need a cheaper phone.

So they made the S-20 F, which we actually really liked. But it means that if you're looking at the S-21, It is not the sort of thing that you can get with, say, the iPhone or previous years the S-20, where you just like, you decide you want the new flagship phone and then you pick the sides that you want and pop-pop-p-p-p, you're done and you don't have to worry about the details that much. You actually do have to worry about the details quite a bit. The regular S-20 is a polycarbonate back instead of glass. The S-20 and the regular S-21 is a polycarbonate back instead of glass.

The S-21 and the S-21 plus have a different camera system, which normally it's like whatever, like we don't know, but we think, we hope that this year on the S-21 Ultra, Samsung fixed its 108 megapixel camera. With the S-20 Ultra, it was a big whiff with the S-21 Ultra. It's a new generation of the sensor, and Samsung has promised me that they have fixed their demosayaking or their re-mosaiking, and they fixed, you know, some of their face filter stuff. And, you know, Samsung camera promises. But what it means is if you do want one of these phones,

you actually need to think about it a little bit about how big you want to go, but also what features you want. Speaking of features, you will not get MST the cool, like, magnetic credit card thing in the U.S. You also... Really? Yep, that's gone.

There's no micro-SD card slots anymore on the Samsung phones, so say goodbye to that. And, you know, of course, there's no AC adapter in the box. Is the MST thing just like NFC 1? Right, because MST was a thing where it like faked out a card reader. Right, yeah. So you still get NFC, of course, but I think that, I don't know, they're just saving a buck or whatever. It was like the coolest part of Samsung pay.

I know. I'm not sure why anybody's going to use Samsung pay anymore once that's gone. Right, it worked everywhere because it faked out the regular reader as opposed to like the sort of like hit or miss NFC experience that exists. Yeah. Oh, well. I will say that NFC is more hit. than miss for me most of the time now. I can use an

NEOC payment system 90% of the places I go. Yeah, you live in San Francisco. Here in the woods, where I only go to two stores, 50% hit rate for me on NOC. You have to pay with like bear pelts, right? That's what you do.

I actually have to go hunt some bears after this in order to feed my family. So the line is getting more complex. And then Nate, This is like the weirdest thing to pay attention to, but we went S, S, you know, Galaxy S3, Galaxy S4, Galaxy S10, Galaxy S20. Right. We skipped, we skipped nine Galaxy S's. And then now we're at 21.

Right. They just don't care, do they? Well, it matches the year, right? And it also, it keeps them from having this weird TikTok with the numbers on the iPhone. I think that's what their real goal was. They just wanted to get away from that and not have that tension. Oh, I see. Which, sure.

Do you have, we have them, right? Yeah. So there's a review embargo, but I can give you some impressions. I have the S-21 Ultra and I also have the regular S-21. The S-21 Ultra is, in fact, very black. I'm not going to give you camera impressions. I have some thoughts, but I'm going to be really coy about it because I haven't taken quite enough pictures to feel confident. But yeah, I'm more optimistic than I was with the original S20 Ultra, which you could tell right away was problematic.

And, you know, it's a Samsung phone. It's a big, big-ass Samsung phone. I don't know what to tell you. Yeah, I like that they change the design of the camera bump. Oh, yeah. So the rail around the side, it's curved. And so the S-Fadent Ultra does have a slightly curved screen whereas the regular S-21 and S-1 Plus are flat. Chris is shaking its head because why are they doing curved screens?

It's not that bad. And I will say, it's not that bad, I will say that I went out and bought myself a iPhone 12 Pro Max because I've got to do head-to-head camera comparisons and also just big phone comparisons. The S-21 Ultra is way better to hold than the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Just straight up, it's better. It's a little bit narrower. The sides have that Samsung curve to it. the weight just feels slightly easier to handle. Yeah, it's just like those extra little millimeters wider

that the iPhone is and like the extra little millimeters of the bezel that you can see on the front compared to the curve here that lets it be narrower. It actually matters. Can I give everybody a window into what working with you is like? Dieter slacks me. I didn't wait for him to say us. Dieter slacks me and he's like,

I think I need the 12 Pro Max to compare the Ultra 2. And I was like, oh, I'll send you the review unit. And like by the time I was done typing, He's like, that'll be too slow, I bought one. Yeah, I mean, you know. Going from the mini to the max, by the way, is a real, real. Oh, sorry, we haven't even mentioned that Ultra supports the S-Pen, and there's a new line of S-Pens that are separate accessories.

I feel like the S-Pen conversation in a normal time in American history. Like, we would have done an hour on, like, Samsung's product line, and what does it mean for the S-Pen to come to the GalaxyS line? Well, it's Wacom support. They've implied that they're going to allow third-party S-pens. It's the whole thing. And wither the note. Yeah.

And I'm like, well, there's also a coup. So I think the note's going away. Like, I don't know. Like, it's very hard to get worked up about the future of the Galaxy Note. I think it's interesting that Samsung's going to lean into the stylus finally, like all the way across its line. That's the thing they can do that I think Apple will never do with its phones. Yeah. So.

Well, this is my whole thing with Samsung. Samsung, maybe they're doing with the stylus. only on the ultra, but Samsung is so bad at realizing the things that it makes that are good and keeps on focusing on making bad versions of stuff that they're jealous of. And A1 of this trend is Bixby, but we could also do it with fitness. They made a whole like a TV-based fitness thing to compete with Apple Fitness where the camera watches your body. I'm sure it's fine, but it's like it's a knockoff, right?

Meanwhile, they've got the stylus stuff. They've got decks, which I know it's been around and whatever, but like wireless decks is genuinely cool now. And just on and on and on. And I just wish Samsung would be Samsung instead of trying to be like medium Apple. Be yourself. Yeah. The Samsung story. Well, you know how Samsung is extremely itself.

How's that? It's with the Galaxy Buds, which are very much not like AirPods at all. Chris, you review the Galaxy Buds this week. How are they? Yeah. For 200 bucks, they're Samsung's best earbuds. yet. They sound the best of them. I mean, they're not quite on par with like the best of the best of true wireless earbuds, but they also don't cost as much as the best of the best.

But yeah, some of the features are clearly inspired by the AirPods Pro. They have 3D audio for movies. I couldn't test that because it only works on the Galaxy S.21 right now, of course. And now they can actually switch between your Samsung devices, just like the AirPods Pro can switch between your Apple devices. So those two things are pretty close. But Samsung, has a pretty clever thing where if you talk, it'll actually turn down the volume of your music by itself, and then it'll go into the ambient sound mode. And so you just start talking, and that just happens instantly. So if I like the coffee shop and you just want to pay for something, it's pretty handy. Sony's done that on its 1000XM4 headphones, but this is the first time

that I've seen it on actually some earbuds. What if you're listening to music and you start singing? If you talk to yourself, it happens to, or sing. Yeah. So if you're someone who often speaks to yourself. You'll hear yourself. It'll just be reminded that you're extremely awkward. If you start talking and it turns off the, it goes into transparency mode and turns down the music so you can hear somebody else reply to you, how long does it stay in that mode? Or like, if someone's talking to you, do you have to every now and then go like, but a bit, to keep them in transparency mode? How long does it stay? So it waits for you to stop talking and you can choose between five, 10, or 15 seconds for the time frame for it to stop.

I usually like to listen to people for more than 15 seconds. No, no, no, no, no. You just got to say like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, or some kind of like vocal thing. The Samsung tells me really, they've been talking too long. Wait, so the timer re-ups every time it hears you talk? Yeah. All right.

I don't know. I have very mixed feelings about this as somebody who mumbles to himself all the time. Like, I don't need to be reminded that I'm just quietly talking to myself all the time. the switch between Samsung devices automatically is that's a Samsung proprietary feature? Yeah, so that only works on Samsung phones and tablets. It does not work on Samsung laptops, which is kind of where it loses to the AirPods Pro,

since those will work on your Mac and your iPad and your iPhone. So there's one thing missing from that setup. But yeah, I mean, it seems like Samsung's kind of trying to lean in on its whole ecosystem of gadgets and phones. And so it's very Apple-ish, but most of the features do work. on all phones. But they actually don't support the iPhone anymore, which is kind of wild. They just don't support the iPhone. It'll work, but there was an app for the past earbuds where you can they change the settings and do all that stuff. And that actually just does not work on these earbuds anymore. So for some reason, they just kind of left the iPhone behind

on this one. I guess they kind of know that there's probably not too many people using these with their iPhone, but that's a real like imagine the meeting moment. Right. where they're doing the development chart and there's like iPhone app is like one box in the flow chart and they get to it and they all just look at it and they're like, we know right? And then like someone...

You hear the clicking on Zoom and the box disappears like it just goes away. In the Android truly wireless earbuds world, there's always the what is the what is the one true alternative to the AirPods? Are these them? I think so. I mean, these are them. I think the Jabber 85Ts are still a good choice.

The Bo is quiet comfort earbuds. are good as well. Those are kind of like platform agnostic, whereas these really do kind of target the Samsung customer more. But even if you have like a pixel or some other phone, I think these will do you pretty well. The noise cancellation isn't the best, but it's fine. I mean, it cuts out like a decent chunk of the outside noise. And so, yeah, sound qualities, satisfactory, not mind-blowing, but these are 200 bucks versus like 230 for the AirPods Pro or 250 and 270 for the Bose as you go up from there. So not a bad package in all. So I'm noticing that you're wearing the AirPods max right now, Chris. They're good for monitoring on a podcast. All right. Well, we burned through the phones. That's because, as Deeter said,

we will have a review soon and we'll probably devote a lot of, well, ish. One presumes that we'll eventually review these phones. So we'll come back when we do that. We'll spend way more time in the S3 ones. Need to talk about them because they have this week. We're going to take a break. Come back. talk about what happened at CS, starting with some TVs. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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All right, we're back. Chris, HDMI 2.1. We told you to wait before you buy your next TV and now you know why. We saw this train coming. And actually kind of like a lot of TV news at CS this year. Yeah. Like my frame for it is that 4K HDR is now the commodity product. Like that's just table stakes.

Like we're done talking about it. Yeah. Every TV has it. It's cheap to make. It's everywhere. So now we got to do something else. And that feels like 2.1. It feels like better display technology.

Right. And to some extent, 8K. Which please stop. Can we just wait? Can we just hold on? But let's start with Samsung. We've been talking about Samsung. A couple big things from Samsung this year, right?

Yeah. So I went in person to actually go see their new TV lineup, which felt like the old times. And so their new LCD sets use what's called a mini LED. So the best LCD TVs today use what's called full array local dimming, where they have like a few dozen lights behind the display to kind of light up and dim based on what's on screen. And so mini LED just kind of goes beyond that idea and makes them much smaller and just crams in a ton more. So for LG, they're also using this tech, and they're putting up to 30,000 of these LEDs in their TVs.

So it's a big difference, and it lets the TVs kind of have much better control over contrast. And if there's like a bright thing on screen, you won't get any kind of like Halo or the blooming effect. You can sometimes see on LCD TVs. And so Samsung's look really, really nice, some in person. And they also have this new game settings menu. So like if you have like a PS5 or an Xbox, you can just kind of shortcut your way to seeing all the key settings there, ERR and E-RK and that sort of thing. So, yeah, it's not like a world of difference over last year's TVs, but they do look better and

they do look nicer. And I kind of want one. So mini-L-D is a backlight technology. Right. With the thousands of LEDs behind the screen to light up. Yes. And micro-lid is like the holy grail next big TV technology from what people hope. Right.

Micro-L-D is the one where they make, like, segmented TVs. You can make them any shape and size you want, right? Right. And we're just not there yet. Not quite there yet. Samsung did announce 110-inch version of their micro-l-D TV. So it's no longer modular. It's still going to be extremely prohibitively expensive for anybody, I think.

But, yeah, now they are putting that into like a more standard form factor. But, yeah, that's like the next great hype machine is microl-l-D. Because it has, like, most of the best things about OLED, self-lit pixels, and it shouldn't have burn-in or any of the downsides that OLED has. But for now, I think the best TVs that most people will buy this year are going to be the mini-l-D side of things. Can I just point out Samsung also spent a decent amount of time in its keynote on new accessibility settings and options. My favorite of which was you can change the size of the ASL translator in the lower right-hand corner and like in biggin that little portion of the screen so that you can see it more easily. I think that's great.

I think that with some of those features, they're just doing it for the, feel-good headlines, but if you improve accessibility settings, I don't care what your motives are. I think it's great. Sure. Yep, there was that. And there was also, there's a new remote that comes with some of these TVs. It's an eco-remote. It's made from recycled plastic, and it uses solar power to recharge the battery inside.

So instead of constantly swapping for AAAs, you just put it on your table and it charges up and stays that way for a few years. So that's pretty neat. I think this is dumb. I think this is dumbest thing. Different takes on the verge casts, everybody. Look, how much carbon does it take to make a solar panel system for a remote? Like, how expensive is that environmentally to make? Six.

Compare that, that's a six. It's a six. I bet you, over the lifetime of a remote, the triple A's that you would need to swap out on the amount of environment numbers that it would take to make those triple A's is probably a three. Because there's a huge, there billions of them are made a year. Everyone knows how to make them. These remotes, like, it lasts three years on a charge anyway from the solar panel. I just think that they did this because, ooh, it's blah, blah, blah, blah.

Like, good on you for making it recycled. But I just don't think that when it comes to the carbon footprint that Samsung has, that its remotes are remotely important. I think that that is probably fair. I was more thinking the, well, how much sunlight is in mind? Oh, it does the internal solar panel thing that a lot of, you know, solar, quote unquote, solar gadgets do. So if you've got incandescent bulbs, it'll, like, it will survive. And again, like, it doesn't need much.

It's a remote. So, like, it will last a long time. Yeah. Actually, we haven't done a deep dive on the remotes of CES, right? Because Samsung has its TV software, LG. LG updated its remote this year. The proliferation of like service specific buttons is getting out of hand on all these remotes. Like we started with a Netflix button and we're down to like a crackle button. Yeah, the remotes are changing. I think for the first time LG put on like the usual Netflix buttons and prime video. And more important to LG, though, is they made some pretty big software changes to web. OS or if we can still call it that. So there's Samsung. Mini LAD is great. Like I never wanted to buy an LCD TV before.

Many LID is like I got to go see it. It's a very hard to judge from photographs. Like I miss being in CS just to look at the TVs and see what they're like with my own eyes. Even though it's CS, they're all in like blindingly bright mode. But, you know, I want to see it. I'm excited about it. It feels like, okay, they're starting to compete. On the flip side, LG, right?

They're still pushing ahead with OLED. and they've upped their software. So let's talk about what LG did. Yeah, so they've got, there's new OLED panel in their G1 series, and it's their brightest panel yet. That's always been like the main downside for OLEDs is they don't get quite as bright as LCDs. They are gorgeous and stunning, but if you like put them in a bright room, they might be a little bit underwhelming.

And so LG says this new G1 series can get brighter. They aren't really saying how much brighter than past models, but it seems like they're trying to like get over that hurdle, that hump for OLEDs as they keep pushing forward. But like I said, they also have some many LED TVs. if you want that as well. So they're trying to like tow this line where they say, well, these mini LID TVs are awesome, but still not quite as good as OLED,

which is the ultimate in picture quality. And there's a new bigger size of OLED. I think it's 83 inches. And so both LG and Sony have giant OLED TVs this year. So I'm pretty happy about that. And very jealous of anybody who gets one of those. Deere, tell me about this new version of WebOS. So they have made it just like a bog standard smart TV interface

where it's like you hit the home button and you see a big home screen as a bunch of tiles, some of which happen to be ads. And then as mentioned, there's more buttons on the remote. I don't know if Beanbird is still around. We've got to see. Can you just tell people what Beanbird is? Beanbird was a little bird shaped like a bean

that would help you understand how your smart TV worked. And it like bounced around and then did things. And like you could like see it hanging out on a beach when you were done setting it up. and that was cute. The original version of WebOS on TVs, it had like this blade system where you'd hit the home button

and then you would see all your options across the bottom and you could like run through them that way and it had a little pointer or whatever. So I tweeted, I didn't tweet the thing I should have tweeted, which was, look how they massacred my boy. But I did say I was very sad about it.

And everyone replied with the correct meme, so thank you everybody for that. And one person did reply saying that they were on the original team and they fought tooth and nail and it was a huge battle to get the original version of WebOS with the blades and the whole, like, new idea about how a smart TV should work. LG didn't want to do it. And the team that made it was like, no, no, trust us, this is good.

And it was good. And then everyone liked it. And then some time passed and everybody moved on. And LG said, ha, just kidding. We want some more ads. And now we have a new version of WebOS. Yeah. I think we did the whole HTML2.1 show.

And we had Bill Baxter from Vizio on it. And he was just pretty blunt. He's like, most of our customers don't even need the inputs anymore. Everyone just uses our software to watch streaming services. We're unavoidable. And you got to pay us. That was the word he used. It was unavoidable.

Yeah. He's like, particularly for a company at the scale of Vizio or Samsung, like, there they are. Like, they're running the software. If you want to put your service on it, like, you got to pay him. Who's the bad guy who says, I'm inevitable? That's Thanos. Thanos. Yeah.

Smart TV software is the Thames. of your your software life. I'm willing to buy that conceptually. I will say Bill Baxter as a person is the opposite, the opposite of that personality. But yeah, this is like the push, right? Like,

why is HBO Max and Peacock not on Roku? Because Roku's like, we're unavoidable. You got to pay us to be here. And they haven't solved that problem. That is the case with Samsung. That's the case with every other smart TV operating system you can think of. And so I think LG.

was like, oh, we should be more unavoidable. And what we're sad about is like their old system was extremely avoidable. Like I have an LG smart TV. I never use that stuff. I don't even look at it. So I guess, I guess such is the future. Chris, Sony did some stuff. Speaking of smart TV software, they've switched over to the new Google TV stuff, right?

Yep. So their TVs are going to ship with that software on board. And now they are actually all going to have. the full HDMI 2.1 suite of features. So the company behind the PlayStation 5 is now ready for the PlayStation 5, just a few months later. But, yeah, their TVs look great. They are not doing any of the fancy new screen tech like mini LED.

They're still doing just usual full array, but their TVs are great. And they also do OLEDs. And so, yeah, they've got both of those options for you. So Sony stuff may not be that exciting, but Google TV is, like, really good. I've been using it, and I'm glad they're upgrading for Android TV to it. I'll also say, even if you think Sony stuff is boring, all is forgiven because they're making a drone that carries alpha cameras is designed for it.

And that's very exciting. That's cool. I would say there's also some amount of pure opportunism in that announcement because DJI is banned from the United States. So you're Sony and you're already the like one of the biggest providers of broadcast technology and everyone's DGI drones don't work anymore. You're like, what's up? Like, do you, like, at the bottom of your, like, $5 million NFL contract shopping card, it's like,

would you like to add a drone? Yeah. You just go for it? You think it's like, they started development on it? The day that band happened, they're like, oh, shit, let's get this done. I'm sure. Get the CES teaser ready, everybody. Yeah.

But I appreciate opportunism. There's also a new streaming service from Sony called Bravia Core. This, I don't understand this at all. That promises to stream at near 4K Blu-ray quality. And so it's pretty bold Promises to explode your data gas You're gonna watch 10 minutes of a movie And the police are gonna come to your house

And take your SIM card away So promises to stream at extremely high quality Like A current 4K stream is what Like 18 to 20 megabits a second And a Blu-ray is like 100 to 200 Right Somewhere up there

So a massive jump in data Being transferred to house more quality all that's great. It does not seem like what you can do is just sign up for it and go. You get like vouchers when you buy a TV. Yep. So you buy a Sony TV. You get some vouchers to get some movies

that you keep, I think. And then there's also like a free streaming section where you kind of hop in. But yeah, it does seem like this is only available to Sony customers. And I assume it's only Sony movies from their studio, I would imagine. But yeah, if you really want to watch bad boys for life

in pristine 4K quality. This is what you've been waiting for. It is one of the most Sony announcements ever. Like, extremely proprietary format, only for their products, impossible to purchase. Like, it is the memory card of 4K streaming.

I don't know what else to say about it. But it's great. I love it. And then lastly, we've been talking about smart TV software. Roku announced it's the biggest selling smart TV OS. That's obviously on their, the biggest selling smart TVOS in North America, that's obviously on their line of somewhat inexpensive boxes. But on TCL TVs, TCL has become a player

because of Roku. But they announced more TVs. They're trying to get bigger than being the commodity Roku TV provider, it seems like. Yeah. They said, we're going to be eight, everything's going to be 8K within like some period of time. Like, okay, guys, great. But they also, this was supposed to be the year that T.C. ACL went from like, we're trying really hard, guys, pay attention to us to like, no, no, we are serious. We are going to supplant LG in the hearts and minds of American consumers. They wanted to do it on phones. They want to do it on TVs.

They just, they wanted to go big. And I think the fact that they couldn't have a gigantic installation booth to, like, intimidate everybody, hurt them. But that's what they wanted. This was, they, they, they puffed their chest out about a mini LED. They had a bunch of new phones. They had a bunch of concepts. And so I think they're going to continue to be like the go-to brand for value TVs this year. But I do not know if I believe them when they say that they're going to have really great high-technology TVs.

And I also don't care about 8K yet. And I know I should, but I don't. Yeah, DCL's promise is we're going to put 8K across the line, right, Chris? Yeah, I hope that promise doesn't really lead to higher prices. So I'm kind of worried about that aspect of it. But, yeah, they're on their third generation of a mini-LAD. So they are kind of saying, well, what took you so long, Sam? song and LG. So they're kind of, like Dieter said, beating their chest about that. So

hopefully the new 6-series 8K will be around the same prices before. I don't know what content you're really itching the watch at this point as ever. But yeah, so we should know. Yeah. It's a weird place for them to get. One of my favorite, this is like the dumbest meme that's going on, but Fox has started using like a YouTuber rig during NFL games. Right. It's just a Sony A7R. on a gimbal. It looks cool as hell, but it has super shallow depth of field. And everyone to tweets about it is like, I love Fox's new 8K camera. And I'm like, you can, there's a part of me before the fall of the republic where I would like spend my Sundays on Twitter being like,

no, we read about this. It's just shallow depth. And now I'm like, the government is falling apart. It's like a different mind frame for Twitter. But I think like the 8K, people don't know it is so you can just like glue on any expectations. And so TCL will have one bigger number in the store than everyone else. I think that's actually important to them. Well, see echoes. Okay. That's TVs. It's a lot of stuff. Also at CS, lots of chip news, lots of laptop news. Monica, take us through that. Yeah. So the biggest announcement, the one that I'm most excited about is AMD's Risen 5,000 mobile processors. The company claims they're going to power 2021's best gaming notebooks. Intel basically said this about their processors, too. But I'm more excited about the

AMD ones. Are you saying that you believe one, but not the other? It's, we're going to have to wait and see, but I'm more excited about AMD. You know, we have their whole lot. They have a bunch of eight core processors. Intel says they have one coming, but they don't have it yet. So for the moment, the gaming laptops we have that we know about, the majority of them are our AMD Rise in 5,000. We also have Intel announced Tiger Lake H, its latest. 11th Gen 8 series chips. They kind of talked about their 12th gen chips, which are called Alder Lake,

but we don't really know a ton about those. They're coming much later this year. And then, of course, Navidia announced its G4s-R-TX-3000 GPUs. So together the RTX-3,000 series, and the Ryzen 5,000 series are going to be in a dump of gaming laptops that you're going to see over the next few months.

So actually, let's get this, this Alder Lake 12th-gen thing out of the way, and then we can talk about the stuff that's actually going to be real this year. So the story with this thing is they're doing some sort of games with the sizes and powers of the different cores to try and make it more competitive with Apple's M1 CPU, right? Yeah, so these are hybrid, these are going to be hybrid chips, which are, they basically have some cores that are super powerful

and some cores that are less powerful. This isn't the first time that Intel has done this. They have a line called Lakefield. field, one of those is in the Lenovo X1 fold, but Lakefield processors are sort of intended for mobile devices that is like really portable devices that are kind of low powered to the X1 fold as an example of that. Their claim is that Alder Lake is going to be much bigger than that. It's going to be in a lot more kinds of devices. There's going to be a desktop one as well. We don't know a ton about like how exactly that's going to work. So for the moment, I'm just

treating that as a claim. I have no idea if that's, you know, what that's going to to look like. Yeah, I mean, we've been, we've been dunking on Intel for how long? It's been a while, some of which I think is a little bit unfair, but yeah, but they've got another new CEO coming, which is a Pat Gelsinger. He just gave in all hands and the Oregonian reports that he said to the entire company, and I quote, we have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing than a lifestyle company in Cupertino makes. I get it. Wait, I totally get it. Like, it's a good dunk. Yeah. Right. They're all smarting. You got to bring him back. And he's saying, like, our only business is making chips. We should be better at it than a company that does other things.

You know, because we also make watches and chips and computer. Yeah. I don't know that they, like, I think Apple would have a dramatically different view on what it is they make and the importance of its chip division to what it is they make. But I understand why he would say it. Uh, Gelsinger, importantly, by the way, was the guy who didn't get the job when they gave it to Bob Swan, like the last CEO. Right. Like it was. And so I think the Intel board was like, ooh. Yeah. Mulligan. But it is true.

I mean, they're on notice. They, they need to do good job this year. They really do. So what do you think of these 11th gen H-series chips? Yeah. So, I mean, there are only three of them that, that we have now. And this isn't, this isn't like a big surprise. anything, but they max out at four cores and at 35 watt TDP. So they are, you know, when you,

when you put them on paper next to the AMD Horizon 5,000 series, they are significantly lower power and they have half the thread count of AMD's top like six chips. So, you know, when it comes to multi, multi-core power and when it comes to TDP watts, AMD is just significantly, From what we have now, AMD is significantly ahead at this point. Intel, their big thing last year was emphasis on single core power, and they did do a lot better in a lot of cases on that. We're sort of waiting, though, because they have, Intel says they have an eight core series processor coming later. So I think that that is sort of what, that's going to be what AMD has to worry about when it comes.

But we don't have, we don't have details on that yet. At the moment, we only have sort of the lower power stuff. And then AMD's Verizon stuff. I mean, it's seven nanometer and that's fun. I mean, it's just fun to say that they got there and until then. But is there anything other than just like they made a faster version that's, you know, that's important this year? Yeah. So it's on, it's Zen 3.

Most of them are Zen 3. Oh, okay. So Zen 3 is like the new architecture. Not all of the chips are actually Zen 3. some of the U-series processors are still Zen 2, which is kind of annoying because it's a little confusing. I don't think that most people are going to know, like, are going to know to look up, like, is the Zen 2 or Zen 3? So I wish I didn't do that. Can you just briefly tell us what, like, these architectures are and why Zen 3 matters?

Basically, the reason it matters is we have desktop Zen 3 already, and we know that it does much better than desktop Zen 2. So, you know, that means we're pretty optimistic about what Zen 3, about, what Ryzen 5,000 mobile is going to look like. And, you know, obviously we haven't gotten to try them yet. But, you know, when AMD says they're going to be a lot better, I am optimistic about that. So the way that CS usually goes is we get a bunch of announcements. Oh, there's NVIDO, but we'll get there. We get a bunch of announcements with chip companies.

And then, like, as soon as those chip announcements end or the last one ends, 5,000 laptops can announce. And the big deal this year, I think, is the gaming laptops. We should get to all of them. We're going to. But just real quick, maybe not real quick, Nvidia also had its thing. It was not six hours long, which is strange.

But they announced a bunch of stuff for laptops, right? Yep. So is their new RTX-3000 series for laptops? There's the RTX 3070, 3080 that are coming on from the 26th, and then 3060 laptops are coming on the second. So they say they're a lot faster, you know, standard stuff. They're using Dynamic Boost 2.0 is something I'm excited about. That's a technology that it uses AI to balance power between the CPU, the GPU, and the GPU memory.

But it works on like a per frame basis. So they say that's going to lead to much higher frame rates. I hope so. We're going to see in the next few weeks as we start getting these in. I mean, the big claim is like you put all this stuff together and it should be possible to buy a reasonable gaming laptop that can do 1440 90 frames for second, right? That's that is the hope. Yeah. Yeah.

So these thousand laptops get announced. Which ones do you care about? I know which ones I'm excited. I'm excited about the one with the TMAT on it, with the dragon on it, because, you know, dragons. Although they, anyway, I'll get to that. But which ones actually matter to you? Yeah. I mean, obviously, there are a lot.

The boring answer that I'll give is the Zephyrus G15, which really looks like last last year's Zephyrus G14, but they made it an inch bigger. So it's not like there's anything like super new or super groundbreaking about it. but I'm really excited to, you know, I think that I basically thought last year that if the Zephyrus G14 had been a G had been the Zephyris G15 or had been a 15 incher, it would have been like by far the best 15 inch gaming laptop out there. And that's a really competitive field. I mean, there's the Razor Blade 15. There's like a million MSI things. So I think the Zephyris G15, if it's like the Zephyrus G14, which all signs say it is, is just going to be really,

really good. And that's going to have, that's going to have AMD processors and Navidia processors as well. Another thing I'm really excited about is then is Asus announced a bunch of new Zenbook duos, which are dual screen laptops that have like keyboard in the front club. Yeah, the keyboard in the front club. They have one primary screen. They have like a secondary screen in the keyboard deck. So they have a bunch of those coming out. And I'm always just really excited to see like how, how they're trying to convince us to actually use a dual screen format when form factor when it adds so much to the price and puts the keyboard in the front. So there's, those are going to have, those have gotten spec bumps as well. They now have the Navidia 3,000 series. Some of them do. And I think, and yeah,

in the MSI thing that you meant, MSI has one coming out called the GE76 Raider Dragon edition. They always do these like things that have silly themes, but I think they're a lot of fun. This one is based on an ancient goddess called Tiamot, who, you know, was supposed to be supremely powerful and vengeful, and they're claiming that their laptop is too. And so the lid of the laptop has design that I think is very cool. It's engraved. It's, um, it's inspired by ancient Babylon and has much of dragons on it. Um, so definitely check that one out. I like that they're finally making like, like rigorous arguments for why they put dragons on the laptops. Like, before they were just like, dragons are the shit.

And now they're like, let me tell you about the ecosystem of dragons that we're participating. Also based on the ancient Babylonian goddess Tiamat is the Tiamat from the Greyhawk and Forgotten Realm's Worlds, the five-headed chromatic dragon goddess, also in Dragonlance, which is where I at first, but she's not named Tiam out there. And it's perfect for a laptop because it's five colors. It's a chromatic dragon. That's the whole point of the thing.

And of course, you need RGB different colors on your laptop. So, like, everything is lining up to be perfect on this laptop. I promise you. We have all been poisoned by, like, Disney-style world building. Like, that's what's happening here is, like, now there's going to be, like, five streaming Star Wars movies about these laptops. Well, their last laptop that they put out that was kind of, like, funny like this was, it was actually based on a, it was a space ship panel.

It was a panel that had fallen off of a spaceship. And they had, like, a guy who worked on Star Wars, design it. And it was very cool. A lot of people, it's very controversial. Some people think it's really ugly, but I think it's awesome. That's great. Okay. Most important question, will anybody who's interested in any of these laptops,

whether they're run by AMD or Intel, whatever version of the NVIDIA graphics card they've got in them, be able to buy any of this shit? Will any of it actually be available? Or is it going to be like the story with NVIDIA's graphics cards and all the next-gen gaming consoles that's just like, they're just going to be sold out for the entire year? You know, it's so hard to know. I mean, I want to be optimistic and say yes. You know, I think that, you know, when you look at the desktop,

the desktop GPU shortages that we've had with AMD and with Navidia, I don't think we didn't see quite the same shortage of laptops last year. The exception, I would say, was the Zephyr SG-14. That was really impossible to buy. So, you know, I think I'm a little more optimistic that there will be supply of these than, you know, compared to the desktop GPUs. But, again, it's a weird year, you know, so it's always hard to say. It's very possible.

I do think that the new Zephyrus, it will probably be difficult to buy. If you can get your hands on one of those, definitely do. Can we briefly talk about this thing that, to me, is the dream gaming laptop, the thing that we were promised we started getting external GPUs? It's the, what is it called, the Asis Rogue Flow, our, RG flow. RG flow X-13. So I find this laptop

incredibly confusing. What it is, is it's a 13-inch 2-1. It's AcesR-G, so it's like, it's a gaming company. They're selling it as a gaming laptop. The processor is powerful. It's AMD's Risen 5980-HS.

That's one of the flagships. But the GPU is a GTX-1650, which is an entry-level GPU. I wouldn't say it's like a terrible GPU, like our worst GPUs, but just paired with that processor, I don't really understand. Like, it's just incredibly outclassed. And, you know, we reviewed a couple laptops last year that tried to pair a 1650 with, with a really powerful H-Series processor.

And it just didn't give good frame rates, not the frame rates we'd expect from that level of chip. So the way the ASUS is trying to get around this is they're bundling it with an external GPU called the ROGXG mobile, which they say is going to get. give it desktop performance. So on the one hand, that's cool. I mean, it's cool that you have a 13-inch laptop that with an external GPU, you could give you desktop performance. That's not something we necessarily expect. On the other hand, the first thing is the price of those two things bundled together is $3,000, which is just, I mean, that's like for that price, you can get any number of great gaming laptops that have the hardware that you need in them where you don't need an external GPU.

You can just play on them, which I think is a big benefit. And the other other is just like, I don't know how much I want. Like, like, the benefit of a 13-inch gaming laptop, like, the reason you would want that, I would think, at least personally, is so that you can, like, bring it around and play games all over the place. Whereas needing to have an external GPU to do that would not, like, that just to me, defeats the purpose of having to be so portable. So I just, you know, I think it looks like a great laptop.

I wish that they were just selling it as a regular laptop with a regular laptop price, because then I would absolutely buy it. I think it's like, it looks awesome. But as a gaming laptop at that price, I just, I'm confused, is what I am. Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, it's like you want the laptop you take to work. It's ultra light. You throw on your backpack and not heavy and whatever. And then if you want to play games, you plug in the external GPU.

Everything is perfect. But doing that into 13-inch form factor, I guess you're right. That is a little bit weird because, like, why not get up? No, you want to be the person at Starbucks who has an external GP. Right. It's sitting there with the external GPU on your desk, like plugged into the wall. Yeah, like, I would just rather have a 15-inch. that I can bring around with me.

It's a little heavier, but I can actually, you know, get really good frame rights on it, like the good frame rates that I want. Okay, that's gaming laptops. We've got, we're going to go along, everybody. What about,

is there any non-gaming laptops that you want to talk about? I love that you called the new Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 a regular-ass Chromebook because that's what they made. That's, I mean, that's what they did.

They gave up. Do you want to talk with that or any other other laptops that we saw this here? Well, it's still like bright orange. It's still bright orange, but it's like, And they tell them, Monica.

So the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 is, you know, the title is a little bit of this leading because it's not really a sequel to the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook. It isn't that it's the second device to literally have the name Samsung Galaxy Chromebook. But it's not like an upgraded version of the Galaxy Chromebook. It is very much a step down in terms of like features that it has. And in terms of price. So it's like half the price of the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, which I thought the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook was just like too expensive, so I'm glad to see that they got the price down.

The base processor is a cellar on, which is a very entry-level processor. I wouldn't really recommend that anyone, the model that 699 has an Intel Core I-3, which is a decent processor, but it's still, you know, it's lower power than the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, which had a Core-I-5. It's a slightly worse screen. The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook had an OLED, and the Chromebook 2 has a Q-LED, which is not an OLED. even though the names are similar. And, you know, there's some other things that they tell. I think there's not like a camera on the keyboard deck anymore.

There's not like a stylus garage. They took out some of the like flashy, fancy stuff that the Galaxy Chromebook had. But it still looks similar and that it's still, in that it's still bright red. The screen still is pretty good because it is a Samsung Q-led and those are still pretty good panels. It's a little heavier. So, you know, there are like some, they basically bumped it down in like most areas. But they also bumped it down a lot in price. So I'm optimistic about this Chromebook.

It seems like Samsung basically gave up on the, like, let's make a super premium Chromebook that's really expensive, like, shit that they were on last year and just decided to make like a normal Chromebook that can compete with other Chromebooks at the mid-range price point, which I'm happy about. I'm excited to try this one out. But it does mean that there's no successor to the pixel book. It just does not exist. Samsung tried it last year.

They just bombed. And so if you want a premium Chromebook, sorry. Yeah. There's one that looks kind of promising called the AISC Chromebook CX-9, which AISS said has military grade durability. That looks very nice. Who doesn't need to use a Chrome-based operating system at war? The one other laptop dimension that I thought was kind of cool is there's a think pad called

the ThinkPad X-12 detachable, which is like a Surface Pro type idea. It's a think pad where the screen pops off, and you can use it as a tablet, but it still runs Windows. So I think that's pretty cool, too. Well, the thing I love about that one is they made a Surface clone, but you can tell it to ThinkPad immediately. It's like it just looks and feels and you could tell it to think pad. So like Microsoft wanted people to copy the surface, and this is a copy of the surface, but it has its own identity, which I'm really happy about. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, it's a little similar to the idea of the Lenoo X-X-1 folds that came out earlier this year. in that it's a tablet with a keyboard you can bring along with you.

But I think this one will probably be a little bit more of a practical purchase for people who are looking for that tablet think pad form factor because it's not $3,000. And the keyboard is actually a real keyboard and not like a tiny toy. So I think that people who maybe like the X1 fold, but it's just too much right now could definitely look at this one. All right. There's so much more at CS. We got to take a break.

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That's cloud.aI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. We're back. Deider, this was like your favorite thing at CES. What? This mask. It was the thing I hated the most. Yeah.

The absolute most I first saw it. I just, I was like, I literally tweeted, no. So Razor has made a mask. It's a concept that has RGB lights, which is the exciting part. But I was terrified it was going to be COVID profiteering, right? Just like, and it's not, actually. It's just a concept mask. It has interesting features.

So it will be N95 certified. if they do make it. It looks like the mask you're not supposed to wear with the vents, but that's where the filters are. And then the rest of it is clear so people can see you talking. It has a silicone thing for your nose bridge so it won't fog up your glasses. They're working with THX to put a microphone and a speaker in it

so you're not muffled when you speak. Amazing. So it's just like it amplifies your voice. It's great. And it looks dope. And like the lights can light up your mouth in the dark and then you can get other colored lights on it and whatever. To be clear, Razor also changed

over one of its manufacturing centers last year and created a million, like, actual masks and donated them to health care workers. So, like, that's the part that actually matters. But yeah, with this thing, I went from, oh, God, to like, okay, like, yeah, go ahead and make that. That would be cool. It's much better than some of the other COVID stuff we've seen at CES here. There's, like, a million UV lights, which, you know, UV lights work, but come on. And then there were a bunch of people saying that you should, like, buy their temperature sensor and, like, external temperature sensors on like the, you know, the IR thing they shoot at your forehead. Not the science on those for like COVID screening is, well, let's just say that no one thinks

it works. So there were a few of those where I was like, I wish you hadn't done that. But on the whole, I was expecting it to be a health gadget like catastrophe at CES this year of just terrible COVID-related things. And for the most part, that didn't happen. So I'm pretty happy about it. Yeah. run us through some of the other concepts we saw at CS.

So LG did rolling things again. They love to roll. They love just rolling. I feel like they built the rolling OLED thing and they're like, where can we put this? And every year there's like a hackathon. And they just like, what if a TV rolled up into this? Yeah. So it's a rolling phone now.

It's called the Rollable. And they say they're going to make it. It's going to, I think it'll probably be part of their explorer project thing, which is what created the LG wing, which is the flippy, rotatey, whatever the hell you want to refer to that, the T phone. This thing is going to be, we were worried about folding phones and durability,

but like this is going to have a motor, like, is there going to be anything behind the screen when you roll it up? Are you actually going to be able to touch it and like have it, like, I'm very dubious that this is actually a good idea to make. Well, we've learned that flexible screen designs, durability is not the first thing,

but they check off the list. Well, TCL also shows, off a bunch of rolling things. TCL. Oh, God. Go ahead, Chris. Please. Okay.

So TCL is showing like some foldable and rolling stuff. And there's this one video where this guy's on a hike and he pulls out this like scroll and unfurls it. And it's like something like straight out of like minority report that shows his location and like photos he's taken recently. And so yeah, not exactly something that we're ever going to get anytime soon. But they did actually show like an actual real world demo of it. But there it's a static image. It's like nothing resembling what the video showed. But, you know, it's concept-y.

It's CES. It's fun to kind of think about. What you want when you're on a hike is a scroll that you have to use both hands to open and use both hands to hold it open. And then out in the woods, an incredibly fragile screen, bendable screen, that is displaying your stuff on it. And then if you need to interact with it, you know, both your hands are active. So, you know, you just touch it with your nose to, like, interact with it, just like you do on your Apple Watch. I think that's the idea, right?

You need to let it out. Just take a paper mat, my man. That's all you needed, you know. The other thing, so LG, actually, we didn't talk about monitors and all, but, like, I'm kind of excited about some of the new monitors this year and supporting HMI 2.1 using for gaming. But LG showed a TV that bends from flat to curved, and maybe I've been poisoned by CES, but I was like, oh, yeah, I want that.

Yeah, no, I get it. I totally get it. We all dunked on curved TVs for five years. The curved monitors are great. But, like, this is, like, a, curved gaming TV. But yeah, like, you know, it's flat when you want it. And then when you want a game, you like put your chair directly in front of it and then you curve it around you. And it's great. Yeah. I feel like everyone needs like a like a gigantic button that says game mode and like

the TV curves and the lights go down. Razor actually had a concept where there was like a, it's a chair, but there's like a screen that folds or rolls around the chair. I don't like quite understand it. But that's an idea they have. I love that like on the one side, there's like VR. which is express best in like the Oculus Quest 2, which is like inexpensive. And on the other side, there's like, what if a TV rolled around your chair

and you lived in a video game? It's like they're very, that's like we're just, we're going in two wildly different directions. All right, we got to wrap this up. Any last crazy CS gadgets? We got to talk about the ice cream pod thing

because everyone flipped out about it. It's an ice cream maker that you put a can in and so it's pod based home ice cream maker. That's the whole thing. But everyone was like, oh, my God, I'm so excited for this. Tell me more about it. I don't, I don't know. Like, my mom sent me a link to this thing and was like, oh, this is great.

I looked up where I could buy it. Amazing. That's what's awesome. No, this is like, every CS has one, right? Like, several years ago, it was like the smart fork. If you ate too fast, it started vibrating at you. Yeah, yeah. It's called the happy fork.

It's the same as weight-shaming people. It's exactly the fork that made you hate yourself. But that was like a viral sensation It was like the local news gadget I think the ice cream maker is like this year's CS local news gadget Yeah Curry, but for ice cream is a really good pitch

Yeah The thing is like it's it's bigger than your oven It's so huge Worth it Still down yeah All right well CS it's not quite over There's me a little

Yeah well I'm still getting the emails Not quite over and not quite the same Missy Loss of it Yeah, I have very mixed feelings about not being in Las Vegas right now. They're mostly related to how my body personally feels. But I do miss seeing everybody. I miss playing a lot of gadgets. I miss taking pictures of weird stuff at CS.

So hopefully we're back there next year. But there's, like I said, there's going to be a little bit more news, I think, coming out. Not big news, but just like little stuff coming out. We'll have a bunch of wrap up stuff. Chris, thank you, Monica. Thank you. No problem. Thank you.

You can tweet at all of us. Chris Welch is at Chris Welch. Monica is at MC squared 96 Dieter's at Backlon I'm at Reckless We'd love to hear from you We'll be back next week With another show

We'll be that's what we do now We're back Is what I'm saying Yeah We're already working on next year's holiday Spectacular That's how I'm thinking about it All right

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