The Vergecast - CES 2022: all the TVs, concept cars, laptops, and gadgets announced this week

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz run through the huge amount of products announced at the Consumer Electronics Show 2022 this week — from QD-OLED TVs, to EVs, to a hair-coloring gadget. All the stories discussed: CES 2022 will close a day early because of COVID concerns CES 2022 will introduce HDMI 2.1a, another confusing new spec Sony announces the world’s first QD-OLED 4K TV, coming later this year Sony is joining the Mini LED TV bandwagon in 2022 Samsung promises ‘groundbreaking’ new TV feature: NFT support Samsung’s latest Frame TVs have a matte screen that looks and feels more like real art Samsung’s new 2022 TVs bring Nvidia GeForce Now and Google Stadia gaming Samsung’s new TV remote uses radio waves from your router to stay charged LG announces its largest and smallest OLED TVs ever as part of 2022 lineup LG TVs now have a built-in health platform The Samsung Odyssey Ark is its largest curved monitor yet Chevy Silverado EV revealed: GM’s best-selling truck goes electric General Motors announces electric versions of the Chevy Equinox and Blazer SUVs BMW’s IX M60 is a dual-motor performance EV with 280 miles of range  BMW debuts its new color-changing paint technology at CES: E Ink Sony pivots into cars with Sony Mobility and a Vision-S SUV prototype at CES 2022 Dell XPS 13 Plus hands-on: is that... a touch bar? Asus will release a 17-inch foldable OLED laptop this year Lenovo’s new ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 has an eight-inch secondary screen Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake chips arrive at CES 2022 for its most powerful laptops ever Intel’s upcoming Arc GPUs inch closer to their debut with latest OEM update Intel announces 5.5GHz capable 12th Gen CPU Nvidia still has no idea how to pronounce the name of its best gaming GPU Google will spend 2022 trying to match Apple’s ecosystem integrations The OnePlus 10 Pro’s official specs are not the least bit surprising The Galaxy S21 FE officially joins Samsung's crowded mirage lineup Why AT&T and Verizon are feuding with the US Government over a last-minute delay to 5G L’Oreal’s newest gadget takes the mess out of coloring your hair Sony confirms PlayStation VR2 name and Horizon game Samsung’s tiny Freestyle projector is fun so get over it Anker’s new Nano II 100W USB-C charger is the smallest 100W GaN charger yet The Motorola MA1 is a dongle for wireless Android Auto Razer’s new Zephyr Pro mask has the voice amp feature we wanted all along Black + Decker’s $300 Bev vacuums up a Keurig-shaped hole in the robot bartender space Are we ready for the smart front door? Masonite thinks so This breathing PC case looks like it’s alive Podcasters are letting software pick their ads — it’s already going awry Pete Buttigieg is racing to keep up with self-driving cars Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Verstcast, Alex Cranz joins the show. We talk about CES 2020. It's here. There's new TVs from LG and Sony and Samsung and everybody else. There's wacky products. There's exciting products. It's CES coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool.

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Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and rebukes. for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th.

Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of virtual CES attendance. Ooh. Because it's CS. We're back. Hello, we're back. Welcome to 2022. I'm a friend Eli.

Dieter Bonas here. I'm a quantum dot. Oh, wait, no, I'm not a quantum dot. I'm a quantum dot. Oh, wait, no, I'm not a quantum dot. You won't know until you observe me. But then we'll forever change you. Alex Cranz is here. I am. I can't top that. There's layers, layers of nerdiness, et cetera. Like I was saying, it's 2022. Welcome. We're back. I hope you had a good break. It was very restful. We missed you. And the verge year doesn't begin until after CES. That's how I always think about it. Because you can't be like, happy New Year, a fresh start. And then be like, CES. You got to be like, we're going to be like, we're going to.

just get through this. And then we're going to start 2022. Although 2021 is still with us. How many weeks has it been, Eli? Since 2021. Since we were promised on a website.

Joe Biden's 16 days ago. Joe Biden promised to, well, 17 by the time of this and this. He promised a website that you could get a free test kit from. I have been assured that such a website

will be delivered in January. Ooh. This administration, I will say, much more willing to talk about their plans than the previous one. Pete Buttigieg was on Decoder this week actually talking about EV infrastructure.

So, you know, they still have to put out a website. I don't know if they have a Squarespace account yet. They got to do it. Get on WordPress. And Biden yesterday gave an address about COVID. And he was like, we've lit up so many more testing sites. And to find them, just Google it. And I get what he was doing.

Yeah. Right? He was like, use the tool you're familiar with. The hard part is the testing sites. We did that. Just use it. But everyone's like, so your solution to COVID is Googling it. That's where we are.

So we're going to just set that aside. We're going to keep counting the days until there's a testing website because I can't help it. But it's CES. Like it's happening. Yeah. It is ending a day early because of COVID concerns. We didn't go in person. Most media outlets didn't go in person.

Lots of companies pulled out. But it's still happening. There are people in Vegas right now. I will admit there's a part of me that's very jealous of them because there's a lot of photos of cool stuff. Like, I can talk about this HP Dragonfly Chromebook for the next hour. Oh, my God, it's so good. Can I just tell you my favorite thing about the in-person CES experience is there are people

who are taking the underground tunnel and the Teslas that they built between the areas of the United States and there's traffic. And there's traffic. There's like literally less than a tenth of the planned attendees showed up and there's traffic in the tunnel. It's just like, have you heard of trains? Oh, my gosh. It's very good.

But you can say even that's smaller, and I will say, it feels like a lot of companies that had CS announcements decided to, you know, if you're not going to get all the reporters in the room, you might as well just take all the attention for yourself on an otherwise slow week. So there's a sense that a bunch of stuff got held back. There was a lot of last minute scrambled. Yeah. Even so, it's like pretty good. I, my first thought was, you know what, this is better than I expected, but I wasn't expecting much. But as the week has gone on, I'm like, this is a better than average CEO. Yes, both in terms of like stuff I think is actually going to ship and in terms of cool concepts. I think maybe we could have seen some more wacky concepts and maybe some of that got held back because we can't go there and look at it. But if, you know, I don't know, this would have been my 13th or 14th consumer electronic show in my life, which is a lot of those. I would have put this in the top five.

Wow. Yeah. I will say that the lack of wacky concepts is due to what I have been calling the local news, product effect. Like a lot of companies show up at CS with products designed only to hook the local news producer of your local news station

into being like, in the future, your bathtub will sing to you. Right? And that's like local news bait and it's like that we do have that. We have. But there used to be more of it and there's maybe less this year because there's not as many local news producers on the ground.

Let's get into it. CS, the TV show. My Hearts with TVs. If you're a virtualist listener, you know that we're, I could We're going to try to go through this quickly. But, you know, the heart of CES is living room stuff, TVs and soundbars. And so we got to start TVs. So Sony beat LG to an OLED technology punch, which is pretty remarkable. Well, Samsung.

And Samsung, yeah. Sony's the first one to do it, like release it or show it off. But Samsung's panel is what's in there. Whoa. Yeah. So we were expecting Samsung to announce a new kind of. of OLED panel. And then they didn't. And then Sony announced it, but it's using a Samsung display. And if you're not familiar or you don't remember, when people say Samsung, they need to

really distinguish between the consumer electronics company and like Samsung that makes boats and shit. And there's another one of those that Samsung display, which provides the displays for many, many devices, your phones and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so Samsung is providing the display for Sony's new OLED TV. And the point of this OLED TV is that it's a quantum dot OLED TV. Which means more colors, more brightness? More brightness. So typically when you have an OLED, it has, the colors get created by a filter, a color filter, and that sucks up a lot of the light. And quantum dots don't suck up as much light as a filter. They let more light through. So you can get a much brighter OLED picture than you could with a standard OLED. We've had quantum dots on LCDs for

quite a while now, but it's a new thing for OLEDs. And this is the traditional knock on OLEDs is you get the perfect black levels, but you don't get the searing brightness of HDR. Correct. This is at least the conventional wisdom. So like OLEDs traditionally crush the blacks. Like if you wear a dark shirt, I think everybody on this call on the Zoom right now is wearing a dark shirt.

And we would all look like we're just wearing like black cardboard on an LG OLED that's properly calibrated. And this is supposed to be able to actually. pull those colors out and show them more. So you're not going to crush your blacks. You're going to get more detail instead of getting blown out with all your whites because it's not using like a big white flashlight on top of the OLED like LG's technology kind of does. So like it's tweak. I don't know for most people, I don't know if it's going to be a huge difference visually for like Dieter and I and other like, you know, everybody on this call, a lot of people listening.

it's probably going to be massive because we're going to be like, oh my God, you can just barely see this one shade of red. Yeah. I mean, if you want to have a good time, just talk to Chris Welch, our TV reporter this week. He will talk to you about QD OLED just all day long. He's very excited. Right. Because fundamentally, and I'm the sort of person who always has picked OLED because I like the black levels. Same.

But the tradeoff is you don't get the brightness. You lose a little tiny bit of that subtle color gradation that Alex is talking. about. And most people are like, yeah, but there's not gray bars above my movie. Right. Right. And so maybe you've solved this trade-off. What's fascinating by all this is, it's a Samsung display panel, but it's in a Sony TV. Sony, well, we'll get to the Samsung TVs. Samsung just refuses to acknowledge it like Dolby Vision exists, like in their TVs. Like, it just doesn't, it's not real for them. Sony is all in on it. So like now Samsung display is making panels for Sony TVs that support Dolby Vision, but Samsung still isn't.

It is just a wild mess of corporate politics there. Sony TVs are also very expensive. And I'm assuming that one of the reasons they were able to move faster to the new panel technology is because they're just like, whatever. We're different just paying $800 more for our TVs anyway. And they're going to sell like, you know, 15 of them, right, at the prices these will be. I wonder, though, how expensive they'll be. Like, because the Sony, because Sony's still doing its regular OLEDs with the LG panels. them. So we're still going to get those. And then we're getting like this step up. Is it going to be

like a grand more? Like three grand more? Would somebody really pay three grand more for like slightly better colors? Yeah. I mean, Sony kind of just banks on it. Yeah. At the end of the day, I think so. They're aspirational. Yeah. The top of their line is always like, well, it's the most expensive. And I think there's a market of people who are like, just giving you the most expensive one. And they're going to be fine. The flip side of this, which I think is really interesting. So we're pushing on the OLED stuff, and then we'll see this across the other companies, too. Mini LED is kind of showing up is that middle ground between full array local dimming LCDs, which is basically the whole market, and OLED, which is kind of encroaching more on the top.

So now you've got mini LEDs, which give you some of that black level. It's basically, I mean, we're familiar with this now because it's in the MacBook Pro. It's in the iPad Pro. Some TVs have had it. But now it's hitting that sort of mainstream price point. is like the middle ground. Yeah. I need to buy a gaming TV, TV for the basement that I'm going to play video games on,

watch the movies sometime in the next year and a half, and I'm having a super hard time deciding. Really? Yeah. We bought the TCL Series 6 or Class 6, whatever they call it, that's submitting LED for my mom, and I've been like calibrating it and stuff. And like the difference between it and regular LED is not as big as I'd hoped. Like the blacks are still there, but the haloing is the thing that always gets to be able to

LED TVs where you have that just like gray halo around bright spot stuff and it's still there like it's still very very present we're watching for all mankind and everybody's a little gray blob still oh yes gray blobs on the moon awesome uh I mean with this this this blooming it we pointed out in the um in our iPad pro and macweb pro like if you go looking for it on those devices you'll find it yeah on a TV there's like often oceans of black yeah in a way that I don't know like macOS is not designed to give you oceans of black all the time I think, Deider, why are you, why are you torn? Oh, because I, it's the, it's a basement, so it's dark enough where I could definitely do

OLED and be perfectly happy. But I don't know if I want to spend the money or take the risk on first gen of QD OLED. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm in my 40s and my eyes aren't that great anyway. So, you know, do I really need the absolute best thing or do I need an extra $1,000? Well, here's what I'll tell you. Sony's new mini LED backlight tech. technology is called XR Backlight Master Drive. Oh, boy.

And that's what you need. That's the other thing I'm missing from CS is like just being and like having the marketing terms just like it's like in giant signs thrown at you. Yeah. And be like, what is the XR backlight master drive? And there's no way of knowing. I'm pretty sure that's something for metal gear for. I mean, that is kind of the other piece of the puzzle.

We don't think about like the panels are made by a handful of companies, LG Samsung. the software controllers, that's actually the money for these manufacturers. So Sony runs its LG panels way differently than LG. I imagine they're going to run their Samsung panels way differently than Samsung, most notably in supporting Dolby Vision. And so I think with mini LAD, right, that is a complicated backlight timing algorithm that you have to develop. So it's one of those things you kind of see it with full array local dimming,

the standard technology, although we're several generations into it. So they're all kind of the same now. This early mini-l-D moment, we'll see. Yeah, and there's also, like, LG is jumping in a micro-LED, which is like the ones where you can build a giant panel. Samsung's been talking about that for a long time. I was actually not expecting LG to hop on that bandwagon, but they're doing it.

I have no idea if the stuff is ever going to reach the point that mini-L-ED is at now where it is, like, creeping into the mainstream. I kind of think no, but they're still making the concept TVs that use it. One wall of the basement. Micro LED display for gaming. There it is. So what I would say is Sony, you will know we have not talked for one second about Sony software because they're just like, Google will do it.

And then we'll put ads in it. And that's fine. That's truly how the Sony TV software experience. I say this as a person who owns a Sony TV. That's very much how it works. Samsung and LG, yep, they've got some hardware pieces of the puzzle. They've got some cool stuff to talk about lots more software shenanigans. So much more.

But Sony did make a camera that will yell at you if you sit too close to the TV. It's perfect. Which is very funny. I love it. But Samsung is like, I don't know, they made some new TVs. They put a matte display on the frame, which I think is way overdue, actually. I mean, there's a matte display on the 2021 frame. I know this because I own it.

And when I look at it, I see that it's matte and I feel happy. And then the overhead lights come on. And then I see the overhead lights in the TV. And I'm just going to spend the next two years being angry that I did. didn't wait. Oh, no. That's the real bummer with TVs. Yeah. It's like, once it's on the wall, you're like, well, I'm stuck with you. With a phone, I'm like, I don't know, I'll trade it. Okay, so they added a better mat display. They added the new remote that harvests RF frequencies from your Wi-Fi and stuff to charge an addition to solar. Love it.

They announced some curvy gaming monitor, whatever. That's the hardware. The real stuff is like, now it has NFT support. Now it's got more smart home stuff. Now it's got Stadia and G-Force now. They're all in on this is a software platform for us way more than any of the display stuff. So I actually think the gaming bar could potentially be cool. I mean, they read into the home screen for Tyson, whatever. But it's not just...

Somewhere the Tyson team is like, God damn it. The gaming bar isn't just to like stream games. It's also there to like configure settings for your local console. I think Samsung TV is 22. A lot of them are going to support VRR up to 144. So when that starts to happen for consoles, getting that stuff configured and getting your settings right, if there's a dedicated game bar on the TV for that,

that is potentially like a selling point. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. The reason I think streaming boxes still sell is the, every processor and every TV is underpowered. And then over time, they just get choked out, right? So I don't know how much Stadia needs local processing support. I don't know how much J-Force now needs it. The whole point of it is that you don't need a lot.

Right. But I would still be like, you definitely need more than a TV vendor is inclined to give you. Well, and app makers aren't inclined to update those, right? Like, they're not updating those apps as much as they are for Android, for Apple and Roku and Amazon. Like, Samsung and LG WebOS, they kind of live in a sad space, where sometimes you get the update. It looks really, really cool. but a lot of times you wait a lot longer than everybody else for the cool stuff, or you just never get it at all.

And it's like, okay, well, I have this TV I spent $2,000 on, and I have to immediately go spend $100 or $50 or whatever on a dongle to make it work properly. Yeah, but the dongle will have a processor that sometimes faster. Right. Samsung used to do. Remember they had those, like, boxes you could plug in? Yeah. Yeah.

They made one update of the box, I think. Like, someone actually went back and looked, And they, like, one or two, like, update boxes were ever released in the history of Samsung doing that. It's interesting because Samsung is thinking about the processors. Like, I mean, it was two years ago the last time we did an in-person CES. But I remember going to, like, their big black box room where they show you everything in super detail and say, never report on this ever again. But then, like, we all report on it a week later. It's great.

And they are caring about the processors. But they're, but it's weird because they're not caring about that part of it. just only focused on like how it can upscale and how it can like fix signals and make it look better. And they're not caring about the fact that they also have to run all of Tyson on it and make it not run like slow garbage. Yeah. And it will run like slow garbage. I mean, it might not. You know, the idea with all these, all the platforms, apart from Apple, is that they're fundamentally HTML5 apps. Yeah. Sorry, Deitor. So you've got WebOS. I'm just like pre-apologizing. You've got WebOS running on the LGTV. It's supposed to run HTML5. HTML 5 app, they can move very easily to Tyson or Android or whatever, and in practice,

it just doesn't happen. Yeah. So we'll see. It is exciting to see the gaming, the cloud gaming stuff come directly to the TV closes a very important loop. Yeah. But we just don't know how any of it's going to actually work. I hope that this NFT thing is a one and done.

We don't see that on many, many more TVs to come. Just that's all I have to say about that, because I don't want to start playing more. I mean, it's just an app. It's not like, it's not, the thing isn't like, mind. mining like to I don't I don't want I don't want the bandwagon effects

just that but back to hardware guess what the Teeter that's a star's it goes guess so wait hold on

Samsung makes the frame of course they're going to make the NFT viewer app for their no I think you can like you can browse and maybe potentially buy I have to double check this

I could be wrong but I don't know man if you can explain to me why the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Dragon was worth four times, ten times as much as the other balloons, then I will accept that there's an NFT app for the Samsung TV. Well, it's either money laundering, which, you know,

or they marked it as more rare than the other one. But I have rare on what? I'll tell you, I made it slightly rest rare with one click of a mouse button. Verge staff favorite TV of the show. Guess what it is? I know. I don't know. You have to guess.

What is it? Is it, well, it's not the Odyssey arc. No, we're going to come to that in a minute. Favorite TV of the show, the tiny little LG OLED. That's right. The 42-inch OLED, everyone's favorite TV is the smallest one. Because it's a proper LG quality OLED that maybe could work as a gaming monitor, but it will actually be a good TV in a small space, which has been surprisingly hard to come by it.

Yeah, I'm super into it. I thought I use my horrible Samsung Curve TV as a Zoom monitor, and I was like, I should get this to replace my Zoom. I was like, why am I spending money on Zoom? And I had like a, like a, the walls closed it on me for one hot second. So LG is like another kind of same idea, right? They biggest and smallest, but they're like, here's our new health platform. Yeah. And now you can do health stuff in the pandemic on our TVs.

And it's kind of an old idea, like maybe one of the oldest ideas for TVs is like interactive doctor conversations. Like I'm sure we could dig up AT&T marketing from the 80s. that was this idea. But it's also like, okay, maybe we're there now. Or I could just like open my laptop. Get on a call. But this is like the dream of convergence, right?

Like the idea was that you would turn the living room into a computer space with your Microsoft Windows Media Center tower. With your cable card in it. It was going to be great, Alex. I wanted that so bad. And then we entered into this moment where it's like, okay, the TVs are giant iPads. and we're still like, I don't know, I'm going to plug this Roku into it, just because all I want to. But we're like back there. Yeah.

I don't know. I'm always fascinated by kind of the TV space at CES because a lot, like, we get the QD OLED and we get these like really big technological leaps. And then we get stuff like this and 8K where it's like TV companies looking for a reason and not really like kind of coming up short. They're like, yeah, this is really cool. And we're like, it's cool. but why, but it's cool. And then we just don't talk about it the next CES. Like there was no real talk of 8K this time around.

There was all these conversations that just didn't happen. All these things that just kind of like they let, I'm about to get really debatery here. When you're a debater and you have to like maintain, you know, your flow, you can't drop any of your cases. And they just drop it all of them, like constantly. And are they going to pick them up in a couple of years? And we're going to be like, no, you dropped it on your. your last rebuttal, you're over here. I don't know, but it's, yeah, it just, the LG thing felt very like looking for a reason to exist.

Yeah. You know, there's so many, like, cameras on top of TVs this year at CS. Yeah. Right? There's the Sony one. The LG health platform has a little webcam. So you're like, it's like, dude, just put Zoom on the TV, right? Like Skype on the TV.

Like, there's a lot of grandparents out there who are like, I just want to do this on my TV. Google Duo. And there's a Facebook portal, or I'm sorry, a meta portal. And that's it, that's your choice. And it's like you just don't, they haven't quite seen the real opportunity. Yeah. And they haven't opened the app platforms enough to enable that thing. Right.

So, yeah, I'm with you. I always think of the, my CS test is like, is this the first generation of your bonkers idea? Or are you showing me like the sixth generation gigantic Sony party speaker? And it's like, I know you are super committed to this idea that makes no sense. there's a team somewhere that's like this year the RGB LEDs in our party speaker can produce more colors than ever before

and it's like you've been thinking about this for six years this is the six I love you that's my test never stopped sending us at press release did you did you iterate so slowly on the most ridiculous idea anyone's ever had before we go to the Odyssey arc

we should talk about H-D9 2.1a do we have to It's so confusing I'll talk about it when they make it understandable to my mother. That will not happen. Yeah, it will never happen.

But like if they, if they can, or my brother, he likes TVs. And if I said, if I started talking to him about 2.1A, he would like punch me in the boob and walk away. He'd be like, this is very upsetting. I don't care anymore. I'm tired. Stop talking to me. And it's just like, it's so purposely baffling.

And I understand they're trying to make it easy, right? H-DMI 2.1A is supposed to be like everything that's already there, but better. But they're not thinking about how people actually live and use these devices. They're not thinking about how everybody's selling it, markets it. Like, they're just living in a very- Oh, I think they are. This is what I've come to, I'm just embracing the dark here. Yeah, go for it.

I think there are 100% thinking about that stuff. And like what we have come to learn as we, through Dieter's standards episodes of the show over the past year that we've spent more time paying attention to them these standards organizations are not they're they have no authority right they're not in charge of shit they're just like yeah they're the student council for tech companies right they're inherently political organizations that they only exist because the companies know they have like a collective action problem of plugging things into it. each other and making sure they work. The engineers at the companies are like, yeah, plug fests are a

fun idea. We'll just like, right? Like there's like an end. There's a idealistic engineering component to it. But they're run by business people who are like, we need to sell stuff. And if you make the label require all the features, that'll cost too much money. And they're the people on the standards committee. Right. It's, it's, I've, I've just given up hope that the standards committee is an idealistic organization with our best interest in heart. I'm like, no, it's more like a necessary political evil that everyone hates and that it will always be captured and horrible. And all we can do about it is yell. So here's what I think we should do. Are you ready? We should just give up on numbering systems because like the problem with 2.1A is you can you can still pick and choose which parts of the

spec you support. Right. That's fundamentally the problem. You can't just get the highest number and trust you get everything, right? Right. We live in the digital age. We can make anything display on a screen or print on a box we want to. Why are we using numbers? We should just use emoji. We should our grid.

And so it's H-DMI clown face. And then you just, you go shoot a chart and then clown face just lists the things that are supported by clown face. And that's it. That's the whole game. And so you just know that if you have a PlayStation, you definitely need to get crying emoji, HTML,

and then it'll work. And it's like on the little cable. No, but then you can't do a lockdown PlayStation compatible logo that you sell for money. But you can print the emoji on the cables and on the port itself.

And so you will just be able to look and see what the compatibility is every time. This is perfect. There was an, what I would call a nerd race moment in our newsroom the other day where I think, was it Hym?

Heim discovered a USBC cable with an LCD monitor in it that tells you the charging speed but then Marquez tweeted it first and sold out before we could write it out and it was like we lost the nerd race it was very entertaining but you get right like we could make everything

smarter I'm just telling you the incentives are like that's how you end up with firewire and I link and it's like Sony mate you why don't you just use the same no it's because anyway there's a report this week in what high five that Apple's going to ditch

Bluetooth the next version of AirPods I'm just saying, like Gary Graves, who I've met. He's an excellent audio engineer. I got to meet him at the home pod when they did the launch. He's very clever. Love talking to him. But he gave this quote to what high five that's like, yeah, we would like more bandwidth. That's all I will say about Bluetooth at this time.

It's like, they definitely did the thing where they embraced Bluetooth. They extended it with the H1 show. and their extensions, and now they're like, and now we will continue to hug you to death. Yeah. That's what Microsoft did with the web. I'm just putting it out there. That strategy had a name, embrace, extend, extinguish.

The end. Did you see there is a, sorry, I'm way off topic now. We were going to do TV fast, by the way. That was the plan. It was the plan. There's that great Twitter account, internal tech company emails. Yeah.

And there is one this week where Bill Gates is emailing Nathan Merveld about Java. And he's like, I'm losing sleep over Java. It's so good. He's losing sleep that Java will become the operating system, which is... It's very good. But Nathan Mervold replies, he's like, I don't think we need to embrace an extent Java at this time. No, but the best part was Bill Gates is like, it's affecting my creativity. I need to start writing more deeply emotional Java emails.

Dieter, it's affecting my creativity. And then the reply Murvald is like, you need not lose sleepover Java at this time. All right. We got to end this very linear conversation about television's best in show at CS 2022 from The Verge is the Samsung Odyssey Arc. Yeah. You got to tell them to that means. As you all are aware, as everyone far and wide knows, the Samsung Odyssey Art, it's a 55-inch 4K

curved gaming monitor that you can use in portrait. So it just lofts over you. The pictures are incredible. It's Omni Max, but for your desk. But vertically, you've never seen anything like it. I have to say we dunked on this when we were writing it up. Originally Sean was writing it, we kind of dunked on it. And then it came out and I've never seen Sean more upset.

He was like, it's so cool. Why? He's just so upset. said. He's like, it's just giant screens. Yeah. I mean, you just got to see the picture. Like, there's just a picture of like an executive at a gaming desk or a gaming chair.

And this thing is just, it's got, I don't know how to describe it. I just want three of them, a globe of displays around me. It's very good. No one knows how much it's going to cost, of course. But I'm definitely going to buy one at the end. Well, I mean, just

to point out, curve monitors, awesome. Curve TV is terrible. Yes. And curb monitors that you can put into portrait mode, so they go over your head. Double awesome. It's just a picture of this dude, just like, he's leaning back. This chair just like staring up.

I'm excited to watch you do like a Zoom call with that, with your camera on the top of it, like just looming over your head. You always have to like lean all the way back at your chair. I don't want, look, I'm getting up in the ears. I got to fill in the top before I let people see it. Samsung curved gaming monitor leads to rise and hair replacement sales across America. Everyone's buying hats for some reason. It's like it comes to the free beanie for you older gentlemen out there.

No, this thing is great. It's exactly, like to Deere's point, it's going to come out. Yeah. We know they're going to ship this thing. But it's also just an absurd idea. It is kind of like the best kind of CES thing. It is ludicrous. It is fun to look at.

It's fun to talk about. out and it's going to ship. Yep. It's not just total fake. Like, for example, all of the cars at CS. Good transition. So I'm playing this game called Vaporware Cars. In my head, there's an orchestra that sings Vaporware Cars every time I see one of these cars.

Vaporware Cars. So there's a couple we should talk about because they're fun. There's the BMW IX concept with the E-ink sides. You're bringing it first just because, I mean, this is a car made for Alex. It's all I want in life. Literally people are tagging her on Twitter being like, Alex, they made a car for you. I'm just so happy. I've never been happier.

Can you describe what it is really quick, though? Just like the full concept of it. Okay, okay. So E-ink, as you may or may not know, is actual, like, ink. And it's suspended in, there's like white and black pigments and they're suspended in a fluid. And you run electricity through them and they go black or white. And this is just that fluid suspended all over a car. So you can just have a giant E-ink, you know, Kindle display is your entire car.

But it's not squares. It's the body panels of the car. Yeah, it's a body panels. And like it looks like a normal car, not a car with like Kindles glued to it. Yeah. That would be incredible. Which we would also accept. Yes.

Just glue them on with some super glue. But, but yeah. So it's actually, it's like, it's because it's, you know, it's pigment. The same thing is like paint fundamentally similar things. It's kind of similar, but it's like an actual liquid. And it's so it's in motion, whereas, you know, paint and pigment is not. And it's just neat. It's really cool looking.

And you can control it with a button, I guess. And theoretically, you can. The panels are on the wheels too. So the wheels are constantly changing, which is very trippy. But it wasn't on the gas cap it looked like from the footage we saw. So like everything changes in the gas cap. So I think the charge of the car. So I think the charging port moves.

He's like, no. You just stay the same color all the time. That's you. That's how you know. This is where the electron goes. I mean, the thing looks cool. I have like the usual concerns. Like, what if it gets rained on?

What if there's a hailstorm? What if you drive to Walmart and you park anywhere? What if someone keys your car full of electrically activated fluid? It's a great concept. Total vapor, right? Yeah. The IX underneath it also might be, is like, vapor. My definition of vaporware, by the way, is vapor till it ships.

You can announce anything you want until the day people can just go out and buy it. It's vapor. Now, do you mean go out and buy it like beyond chip shortage? Like, I want to go out and buy a Mackey right now and I cannot. No, that car is shipped. Yeah, it's shipped. You can, under some duress, you could acquire yourself a Mackey. A person that is not the maker can own the car.

That means it's not vapor. But like this, this BMW, it's, you know, it's an M60. It's supposed to go zero, 60. It's got a long range. It's like it looks like a dope, you know, fast crossover. And I trust BMW to ship something. But until they do, you're saying it doesn't count. It doesn't count.

You got to ship the car. Do you accept that there's levels of vapor? There's like kind of thick vapor that's probably likely to ship. And then there's super thin vapor. Like what's the difference between this and like, I don't know, a Faraday future? So I, under most circumstances, I would grant you that there are levels of vapor. Yeah.

And we're going to end with the Silverado, which I think is the hardest question of all. The car industry has taken such advantage of people's excitement about EVs and delivered so few EVs. I'm going to be extra harsh on them. That's my personal. That's where I'm at is we have to stop asking people for a $100 deposit on cars that aren't shipping or that have slipping ship dates. The cyber truck this week, ship date delayed. Yeah. It's shocking.

We got it. We got it. And Tesla ships cars, right? Like they're in the same boat as B&W. Eventually, they will probably ship that car. When? The IX same deal. Right.

When? And they, you know, the car industry is also really good at being like winter 2022, which is when like April 1st or whatever the last day is. So I'm just being extra harsh. So the IX double vapor, right? A paint job you'll never be able to buy. Although Alex will probably still want it. If she was in Vegas, we'd be like, Alex is in jail.

Yeah. 100% arrested. IX, same deal. Mercedes announced the Vision EQX. This is a concept through and through. Concept through and through. Yeah. It has like crazy, crazy, like, battery life too, right?

So there's two things to know about this car. It's someone opened up Photoshop and used the skew function on an Aston Martin DB5, and that's what this car looks like. That's all they just like stretched it out and they're like, okay, it's a concept car. And they're claiming it's important because it's got 680 miles. of range. Yeah. So, yes, it's important to make EVs with longer range to deal with range anxiety.

Does this actually do anything there for that? I don't know. But can I tell you why I think it's the most vapor of all? Yeah. Like the most vapor of all. And I agree. It's concept car. Because Aston Martin will be litigious.

No, because the Mercedes logo on the picture is an obvious, like, Photoshop stamp and it's not centered on the hood. Wow. I don't know if even the concept car exists. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. Like, is this just surrender that they blew it at the end? Like, at the last minute, they're like, Tim, the intern, get the Mercedes logo on there.

So, okay, hang on. That is the most vapor. But it's not the, there's like a poison vapor car, like an actually offensive vapor car at CS. And I'm sorry, it's the Sony Vision S. You don't believe it's real? I am just livid at Sony for this thing. Wait, why are you livid? So they had a vision that a couple years ago, and they said,

we're just playing around with some ideas. And then this year, they rolled out an SUV version, and they're like, you know, last time we said we were just playing around ideas, but this year we're founding a brand new company called Sony Mobility, and we're going to explore making this real. And it's just like, why? Like, are you actually going to make a car, Sony? Do you actually have the abilities?

Do you have any started building a supply chain? Do you, like, can you do it? Like, at best, you're like, what, three, four years away from pulling that off? Unless you've been doing it in secret and nobody knew about it, which I doubt. Can I just say there's a video where they show off a remote driving via 5G linking Tokyo and Germany in real time? It's like, no, no, you didn't. Yeah. You can't do that.

Have you used a 5G network? Are you aware of what that's like? Yeah. I don't think. I don't think so. What if there are any airports between those two cities? What happened? Just a quick counterpoint, though.

What if there is actually out there a secret supply chain and both Sony and Apple are using it to make their cars? Like we live in the wizarding world? Like it's in between. Like, they're subterranean, like, village where they're building all of the cars. Yeah. You could be just throwing it out there. Okay. I would say that these cars, the thing that really gets around these cars, it's like, they don't look good.

Yeah, they're so ugly. They just, they look like, you know, when you buy, like, kid toys and it's like car. It's like, that's what they are. Like, here's a car. And then on the inside, you're full of Sony user interface. Like when I think the future of mobility, I think Sony software. Yeah. And that's really the promise of all this stuff is like you're going to recreate a software environment inside the car.

The cars will eventually drive themselves and then you'll get all this user attention back and blah, blah, blah, blah. You'll play Spider-Man inside your car. Yeah. Right. Thus bringing the Sony circle of life together. What kind of storage is this car going to have? It's definitely going to be a memory stick of some kind. My belief, and after asking the people on Twitter, I believe the wheels will be a new kind of proprietary Sony memory form.

Oh, I like it. Yeah. The Sony memory wagon. I agree. Total vapor. We'll just go through the other ones. Cadillac announced a vaporware, autonomous car. Of course, it did.

Chrysler previewed their airflow concept, total vapor. The screens in that, and that's a partnership with Amazon. Oh, boy. I don't quite understand why Amazon is saying this to me, but Amazon emailed me today and said, the tweets you shared of the interface of the screens is not accurate. And they have not followed. I was like, what's inaccurate from your press release? There's an Alexa logo at the top.

And then what looks, I will tell you, like Android 3.1. Like, I'm not saying it is Android 3.1. I'm sure it's like a riff on wireless. But the design sensibility of early 2000's Android tablet is alive and well in Chrysler's Vaporware car. Yeah. They're just really into Hollow, man. What do you want?

Anyway, Amazon told me it's inaccurate. So I will update the tweet if they show me a real design. Vaporware car. Volvo said it will have unsupervised highway driving approved Vapor I promise. It's confident it can get it. GM announced basically the same thing. VW is going to make an electric microbus a vapor car. Like just on and on and on.

Like all this stuff. Like, just let me buy a car. Do you know what I want to do? I want to buy a car with a battery in it. Yeah. There's four of them. Yeah. Do you know how expensive a RAV4 Prime is right now because it's the only car available

with a battery in it? Their dealer is selling RAVs. Rav4s for $100,000. Incredible. Because there's so much demand for EVs and no actual EVs. Yeah. I'll be so harshest to say, Ford, this, week announced it was doubling F-150 lightning production again to 150,000 units. This is a car we have

seen. I have seen them move. Yeah. Vaporware car until it ships. Like that's where I'm at with every EV company. So now, here's the hardest one. Chevy announced a Silverado EV at CES. This is important because Americans buy trucks. They do. Right. But it looks like an avalanche, right? It does look like an avalanche. And do people buy the avalanche? It's got a midgate. Like, there was, there was a small but ferocious band of avalanche owners. It does not look like the regular Silver Auto.

Right. Which is what you would expect. F-150 lightning looks just like the F-150. They just did some light stuff on the front, basically, right? This new Silver Auto EV looks totally different than the currently shipping brand-new silver auto, which is a fascinating decision.

A big screen on the inside 17-inch LCD infotainment, 11-inch driver view, super crews, four-wheel steering, right? It's like somebody took the avalanche, and they really like smushed it with the Rivian together. Yeah, I could see that. Oh, Rivian, another vaporware

car. Yeah. Like, they've sold 500, two Rivian employees. Anyhow, this car is based on the Hummer EV, which is shipping. Is that a vaporware car? It's like, they've sold like four of them. Okay. So it's

technically shipping. Okay. But this one isn't. and its ship date is not until late 23, which is probably 24. And the car it's based on is only barely shipping. Is this a vaporware car? I say yes. I mean, sure. I mean, by your definition, yeah.

It has a date and a price. By the way, the price starts at $39.9 and goes up to like $100,000. Well, I mean, that's how it goes with trucks. I mean, that doesn't surprise me at all. Can my vote be it's ugly enough that I want it to be vaporware? It is not a beautiful truck. It's not. It is very confusing.

Is it just the diagonal pillars over the bed that make you think Avalanche? Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Well, they did that for aerodynamics. Yeah, it's a weird looking truck. Speed. I'm just saying, I'm at, even though I believe that Chevy will ship this product, even though they've done the things that we demand of every company at C.S.

Give us a ship date and a price, right? Yeah. So I always joke about it. No price, no release state. I'm still like, yeah, it's not out yet. It doesn't count. That's where I'm at. I'm sorry,

I'm being harsh, you know, and you can make it up to me, Chevy, but shipping the truck. I'm just, I'm being harsh by this all year. Like, they got,

we, we need to put batteries in people's driveways, not gas engines. Yeah. I say this is a person who owns a ridiculous, extremely inefficient gas. I'm like,

need to get rid of this thing. So. But like at our current rate of replacement when people, you know, the average rate of replacement of cars in the U.S. We're looking at, you know, 15 to 20 years to like get gas engines off the road like at least and like we need to move way

faster than that we can't do that unless the cars there are cars there are a lot or everyone gets a hundred thousand dollar rap four prime yes i mean you want you want to talk economic stimulus i try to get andy to ask pete buddhajic if you would buy this question was rejected uh but anyway andy did talk to secretary of transportation pete buddha judge on decoder but charging networks but evy safety all the stuff you should go listen to that that That was another bit of a CS thing. This was supposed to be the fast segment, and it absolutely was not. I hope you're ready for, like, what promises to be a 19-hour version.

We're going to take a break and come back and talk about everything else that happened at CS. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work?

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You can use Grammally's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Grammarly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Okay, we're back. is the non-vaparware segment.

Yeah. This is the nuts and bolts of computing segment. And we're going to start with stuff that hasn't shipped yet. Folding OLED laptop. Actually, I want to do this a little bit out of order from what we had. We should start with the chips and then move to the laptops that may have some of these chips, right? What do you want to do, Intel or AMD? Intel?

Intel. All right. So 12th-gen-Elder-Lade chips. These are important, I think, because, you know, most people assume they want to get an Intel laptop, even though EMD is hard charging. And Intel is making gigantic claims for these, that they are more powerful than the M1 Max on the MacBook Pros, which maybe they are, if you have a nuclear power plant nearby. They didn't say much about battery life, is what I'm getting at, and they're a power draw. But, you know, like the story with Intel, it has been for

a while now, was when are they back? What are they going to start really, really, you know, getting back in the game and push it. And maybe this is like the possible start of that? I don't know. What do you think? I feel like no. Because the only ones they announced, they announced laptop processors,

but it's only the 45 watts, right? I think 45 watts, the H-series processors. And that's usually the stuff you find in like workstations and gaming laptops. Yeah, the giant gaming laptops. Yeah. When we start seeing the Y series

and U-Series and all of the other like stuff that actually actually appears in laptops that most people buy, then I'll be like, okay, they're serious. And when it's as good as the M1. Yeah. Well, the other thing that Intel talked about was the ARCGPUs, but no actual updates there. So like Intel getting into the GPU game, here we go. Let's just keep waiting for that, I guess.

I think they announced more OEMs we're going to use them. Was that the plan? This is like the third CES in a row where they're like, don't know. Yeah, GPUs, GPUs. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Nope, not happening today. Although, to be fair, that's not too far from what Nvidia is doing with its GPUs in terms of your ability to get one. It is probably easier to get an Intel GPU right now than a 30-80.

Yeah. Ti or T, depending on how you want to pronounce it. Yeah. InViby has no official recommendation. It's supposed to be titanium, right? No, they officially said this week, there is no official pronunciation. Say it however you want. Yeah.

That's good. I like that. You don't even have to use the letters T or I. It could be, you know, Nvidia 3080 moo. Yeah. Very good. Did you see that with the Alder Lake stuff,

they put out an Apple graph of performance. Yeah. Per watt. I don't love the bad graphs for taking over our industry. No. No. Oh, they did say what tests they were using in tiny print at the bottom. But it was still just like random relative scales of like,

I think the Y axis was from zero to 100%. Yes. It was just like, I don't know what this means at all. I don't think, like, I don't think it's fair to say they're taking over because I think Intel was one of the people that invented the bad performance graph that doesn't actually mean anything. Like, they're very good at making these. And you're always like, oh, wow, wait, wait, you're comparing it to a laptop from six years ago.

Yes, of course it's going to be better. Okay, so that's Intel. we'll see. They're still in the transition with the new CEO. Yep. They could surprise us. Kind of a little more confident, a little more planted, more iterative. Yeah. So there's the Risen 6,000 laptop chips. They're iterative improvement. They're claiming double the graphics performance, but it's the same Zen 3 architecture. I think it's six nanometer process on these. So it's like it's not a huge jump, but it's like they're continuing to make good laptop chips.

And I don't know. We'll see what these alter. like X-R, but if I were to buy a gaming laptop this year, I think it would probably be a Risen 6,000. Well, and they actually announced CPUs for laptops that everybody can buy. So they announced kind of their Y series, or I think equivalent. So thank you. I appreciate it. They did announce their next desktop chips for the second half of 2022, the Horizon 7,000.

These are on a new architectures at 4, and they're on the 5-9ameter process. So we'll see. like step change maybe don't know I think the step change is do they we've been assuming that AMD will overtake Intel because the chips are a path to overtake Intel's

chips right but Intel is still a force right and it's the standard do you think this is the year? I don't know if it's the year just in terms of raw volume but in terms of you know people in the know making a choice I think that this could be the year yeah I mean again second half 2022

is a hazy Vabrous. Yeah. I think we're seeing a lot more for years and years, if you wanted to review a laptop that was made in AMD and Intel

variance, you could only get Intel. The companies just wouldn't send you AMD and we're starting to see it more. And I think this year we're going to like almost constantly see

AMD laptops being handed out to reviewers instead of Intel. And for me that feels like the big change. Because Intel still has like what 95% of the server market.

Like it's, not going away, but I think for personal computing, this might be the year for AMD. Maybe. We'll see. We'll see. I don't want to say confidently, because then I'll be wrong and everybody will yell at me. But it feels pretty good. Yeah. That's what I'm asking. It feels like, it feels like maybe, yeah. Especially, I think especially with Apple being like, our computers don't need power. Okay. I would say the Nvidia CES keynote experience has always been an impressionistic sort of hour or two of my life. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You never really know what they're announcing, but it seems,

it's kind of the same here, right? With the 30, they did one year with like, was it the 2060 or the 3060? They announced it CES and that was like kind of a surprise and kind of a delight. But this year was like very just bread and butter, Nvidia, being like, yep, here's some, iterative updates. Surprise, we're doing 3080 TI and 3070 TI laptop GPUs. Like, yes. I could have predicted that. I could have written that story before you announced. All right. So let's talk about the laptops. This Dell XPS 13 plus. Oh yeah. You got to read Monica's piece on it. It's like Kool-Aid man. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, here's what I'll say. First, I'm going to start by giving Dell a compliment.

Most companies, when they have a hit product, just ride that product with no changes for as long as they can. Into the ground. The, and the XPS 13 is. a hit product. The X-JS-13 plus is the opposite of riding a successful design into the ground. It is more like, I don't know. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like honestly like I was like someone will disrupt us if we don't make an invisible trackpad first. And they like alone, you know, like they're down in Austin, like just running around in circles. Like, ah. Like they've convinced themselves at this problem that exists. It is nuts. This is one of the most nuts-looking laptops I've ever seen.

Totally flat keyboard deck. The track pad is just, it's not there. Like the whole bottom deck is track pad? Well, no, not the whole bottom deck is trackpad, but it's a flat deck and then the track pad is under one section of it, but there's no demarcation of where the track pad is. Okay, so it's worse than I thought. And then it has a touch part, like a thing that can only be described as a touch bar, not an LCD screen.

Unless you're in the room with somebody who works for Dell, in which case they will Punch you in the face. But all the function keys are a capacitive touch function row. Yeah. This feels like... I'm just going to read the Monica quote. A capacive touch function row, which refers to little LED buttons on a flat bar that you can tap to fiddle things like brightness and volume. Dell insists this is not a touch bar, parentheses, but it is, I mean, a bar that you touch to toggle things.

So anyone else, anyone else whose brain immediately jumped to that conclusion, you are valid it and I see you. Like, that's where Monica got. too. Yeah, yeah. We're not done with the weird things in this laptop. Continue. By all means. The keyboard is also completely flat to the rest of the deck. Yes. The flat keys, always risk when you see a brand new keyboard design. Hopefully it's okay. Monica is like, you know, she's like, she's not going to make a judgment yet. And then last, but not least, guess what it lacks? This is the best part. Oh, no. A headphone jack. Oh, no. What do you do?

Johnny I've made this. This is his laptop. Yeah, this is Ives revenge. He went over to Dell and made this. It's incredible. He like whispered to Tim Cook. He's like, I'm going to Texas. I won't tell you what I'm working on, but you'll know.

Then we got the XPS 13 plus. I'm assuming it's Dell. I'm assuming they're going to keep the standard XPS 13 design around forever because that's what Dell does. But I will say it is rare to see a company mess. with its hit product this dramatically. Yeah. Like if they were like, this is our design laptop, we'd like, oh, yeah, it's weird.

You made some weird choices? You think this is a Mustang Makii situation where they made the crazy laptop and then someone said, actually, we should call that an XPS. It's pretty good. Ooh. But why did they follow that person's advice?

Yeah. I don't know, man. One of the strangest products at CS is here. All right. Then there's the Rogg, Zephyrus G14. Which white laptops are a theme? Sure, yeah. I mean, we're just excited for this laptop because, like, the Zephyrus G14, you know, G13 are consistently our favorite gaming laptops in terms of like price per performance and just overall usability.

And we're very excited about these ones because they have webcams. Yay! Will it be good? And they look like laptops, not like something you would take to a LARP. Very good. And then, all right, Dieter, your tweet about this, I think. summed it up, this Asuse, foldable OLED

where I think your tweet was, I wish I could tell you it's going to be good, but I cannot. Yeah. So it is, if you remember Lenovo made one of these, it's a full screen that folds in half, so it's a foldable thing, and then there's a keyboard that can sit inside the sandwich when it's fully folded.

So there's several points of possible failure here. There's the physical failure of the screen. There's like the failure of ergonomics of like, will this, you know, actually be comfortable views? Will they get the keyboard right? Will the keyboard sit the thing correctly?

Whatever. There is the software potential failures of like, does Windows do what you want it to do in these different, you know, form factors when it folds and unfolds and does stuff? You know, there's price. It'll probably be super expensive. So yeah, there's a lot of ways this could go sideways. But I will say, not to put too fine a point on it. I trust Aces to make a wacky experimental device that could actually be decent

more than I trust Lenovo's wacky experimental devices. Interesting. Lenovo ThinkPad, Lenovo ThinkBook, go to town. I believe you, that thing is rock solid. I will buy the hell out of that thing and trust it. Lenovo, we're trying on a new farm factor. How many times did they screw that up over the past few years? How many times?

Should we talk about the one that had the E& keyboard? No, we will not. It's terrible. but that the think pad is like the definition of don't mess with the hit product yeah although they kind of did this year a little bit there's a z series now yeah yeah there's like there's like there's like the cool one yeah but yeah you're right when lenova's like we're going to go beyond the think pad dna it's like don't do don't do it actually speaking of no we should talk about this thinkbook plus which okay every time i love the idea of a big screen in the laptop tech it's one of those like super

futuristic concepts, right? Yeah. Yes. And I think the giveaway for whatever you see one of these products in our life is what the manufacturer has chosen to put on that display. And it's usually just like statistics about the computer itself. So Lenovo has put a battery meter, like a giant eight inch battery history graph. It's like, you know, I don't need that at all.

Right? A lot of times you'll see like bandwidth or you'll see like processor graphs. And it's like I don't truly if I needed this information, I can get it. I do not need it at all times. And I think this is why they haven't taken up. No one knows what to do with these displays. Your idea was watching TikTok. Yeah, I would have TikTok on my keyboard deck all day long.

That'd be great. Is it touch? Can you touch the display and like do stuff with it or do you have to use the mouse? Not only is it touch. You can write notes on it with a stylus. Yes. is why reviews editor Dan Seaford is livid about this thing. So mad.

Because he's left-handed and he loves to take notes next to his computer. And so this would be perfect for him, except he can't because the one note is on the other side and he'd have to take his left-hand over the keyboard. Oh, my God. I'm also left-handed. I'm also livid now. Maybe they'll make a think book plus Gen 3-L. Yeah.

That would be actually amazing if they may have to make right and left-handed versions of this thing. I don't. I don't know, man. It's another great CS product. It's going to ship. It's really silly. And at the end of the day, what are you going to put on this thing?

And will Microsoft OneNote support it for five years? And the answer is absolutely not. Yeah. The end. So that is laptops. Again, Monica is doing a great job just trying to implement all this stuff. That's right. There's photos everywhere.

There's a bunch of phone stuff. Google traditionally has a huge presence at CES. So the interesting thing about Google is Google's traditional huge presence. since it started four or five years ago, has always been Google Assistant. And this year, it was supposed to be Android and better together. They're, like, their brand for all these devices working together.

And they announced, like, over a dozen ways that they're going to try and make an ecosystem of, like, integrations and things working together to try and compete with Apple. So they're going to do auto-switching for headphones. They're going to put your text messages on a Chromebook. They're going to let you use nearby share to Windows PCs, although only HP and Aces, I think. They didn't actually make it work with Windows.

They actually had to work with the Ombuds. So there's some Google Microsoft fight happening there that I don't understand. What else? Like fast pairing will also work with like your Google TV. And so you pair it to your Android phone and then you, you know, bring your headphones under your Google TV and they're just there through your Google account. Like all the stuff that Apple users get, they're trying to bring as much as they can to Android users.

Yeah. I think the question is you have to conceive of Android is not Samsung's Android. Right. Samsung has got a bunch of this stuff already in the Samsung world. Yeah. So, like, are they going to be able to push it out to Samsung phones and then to Windows? Or is this, you have a pixel in one model of a Assuse laptop? Yeah, that's an excellent question.

I asked, and they said that a lot of this stuff, it isn't going to require like a point update to the OS. They can push it out through Google mobile services. So at least there's that. But what do you think the launch dates are? Coming months. Oh, boy. There's a couple coming weeks, and there's one second half of the year, I think. Early days, Deuter.

Yeah. Remember, I mean, Google's like the all-time leader in vaporware announcements, so I won't ding them too hard. I'm going to order from a restaurant later with Google Assistant via AI. It's going to happen. It's definitely going to happen. They announced a Dolby surround audio for YouTube TV on some devices. It's thousand shit. But that's like Google's shipping cadence has since Google has existed been like,

I don't know, whenever. Yeah. And so it's actually fun. Like events like CS are, I think, difficult for Google because they have to line up. They have to like walk around the kindergarten that is Google engineering and like get them all together. Look, I think this stuff is great. You know, the integrations are great. I just think fundamentally they've got to get it onto the phones people have.

to make the case that the integration is valuable. Because in the Apple ecosystem, the integration is the reason you buy all the stuff. Yeah. The thing that I don't understand is why they haven't figured out how to get this to work with Chrome. And I'm talking about nearby share in particular. The fact that there's not a decent AirDrop alternative

for Android users is wild to me. Yeah. Like just write a helper app for Windows. That might be what they're doing it, but they're just shipping it on HP devices first. That's hilarious. Okay. New 1 Plus 10 Pro specs.

So they announced Chinese availability, and then they teased a picture, and then they've announced specs, and we're just like, there's like five announcements for this phone. I still don't know what it's going to cost. It's to cover the U.S., at least as of this recording, they could tweet it out right now,

and I wouldn't be surprised. It looks good. You know, the concern here is, can One Plus recover from the garbage 2021 it had with Oxygen OS? and just like they've had all sorts of problems and they've definitely lost the fans, right? They like the shine is completely off of them

now that they're basically, you know, integrated with APO and, you know, I mean, they've always been there, but now they're running oxygen and they're supposed to be a new OS and like it's very, very messy and there's very little trust for them right now. Yeah. And honestly,

their opportunity was this last year because Samsung had so many problems delivering. Yep. And they missed the window. Yeah. Speaking of Samsung, new S-21 F-E, and then there were some leaks today of the F-20, S-22. Yeah, which it should be very soon. But I don't know.

What's going on with Samsung? So the S-21 F-E is, it's like a low-cost S-21 with like, I don't know, slightly worse cameras maybe, but like same processor, slightly worse build quality. It's a phone that should not exist if you're like, if you pay attention to the phone that you buy. It's like more expensive than last times as F-E. So it's like, it makes sense for Samsung because like, They can make more profit off it, I guess, but it makes zero sense for a consumer. Go buy an S-21 used or refurbed or, you know, on discount. If this thing gets discounted to the wazoo, then maybe.

But it's also weird that, like, we know the S-22 is right on the corner. They could have just called this in the S-22 F you know what if it would have been fine. Honestly. The S-22 of these leaks, like, I don't know. The design is all over the place now. Every single one looks different. The Ultra is, like, separated. itself out because the ultra is going to have an onboard stylus we're expecting.

So it has a complete, it's basically a note. Yeah. And it has the worst looking camera bumps ever. Is that a bump or is it the whole thing just thicker? It's hard to tell in this. There's a tiny, there's like it, there's a little bit of a bump of, you know, metal around the camera lenses. So it's sort of like, I don't know, iPhone 6 style bump.

You know what I mean? They'll probably, they'll probably do the thing where they take the picture just a certain angle to make you think there's not camera bumps there, but there actually are. So I don't know. I actually love the S-21 design language and the way that the rail like merged into the camera bump. I thought that looked great. It seems like they're doing something similar-ish with the regular S-22. But I don't know.

We'll see. I don't want to completely prejudge it. I want to see it in person. But in photos, it just looks dopey. Yeah. We'll see. And we got to end with phones. It's CS.

We got to do some 5G news. That's just, that's the long. So the Iron Law CS is 5G hype news. I'll just point to Russell's explainer. AT&T and Verizon have still not lit up their mid-band 5G spectrum, which they spent billions dollars on in fairness because the FCC and the FAA are fighting and now that like the airline flight attendance union is in the mix because there's some worries that radar altimeters and planes will be affected by midband 5G usage and the mitigation strategies.

It's a mess. It's a mess. And it, like, the CEOs of 18th and Verizon are, like, writing fiery letters to, to Mayor Pete, you know? It's very good. But it's a mess. And I think it's funny. Like, after all this time, we still don't have the 5G networks. We have lost the race, my friends.

Yeah. It's well, well lost. In this particular bureaucratic infighting, we were talking about it for a few weeks on the show. It's very strange how things are lining up. Like, you don't usually see the FCC, like, pole rank. you know, but like the Democrats and the Republicans the FCC are all just like shocked and horrified. Yeah.

They're like, this is what we do. Frequency stuff. Well, Verizon canceled an event or delayed an event. It'll come later. They did announce, you know, that it's coming in a couple of weeks. I think they're calling their mid-C band stuff, ultra-wide band or UWB or something. They're like giving it the same branding that they give to the millimeter wave stuff.

So that's going to be exciting and confusing. It might not have exactly it, but there's definitely some like confusion. there with the way they're branding it. They also revamped all of their plans. So there's like get more, do more something, something. It's truly unlimited now, but they don't call them limited anymore. It's a lot. But theoretically, you can get an unlimited plan without a data cap from Verizon now. Theater, this is so stressful. It's affecting my creativity. Nil, I bet you that in order to sign up for Get More, you probably need to sign up for their new, like, you know, affiliate super cookie thing that they do where they track you more, I bet.

I'm 100% certain. I bet it's called Track More is what they should call it. Every time a carrier changes its pricing schemes, it's to get you sign up for something done. That's my theory. Okay, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back and do some. I mean, literally we have it listed here as MISC. And that, what better way to end your CS experience than MISC? We'll be right back.

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access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. We're back. Okay. We just got to pick some of these. Yeah. Can't do that. I am going to start by picking the Samsung

freestyle projector. So Samsung announced a tiny little can projector. It runs Tizen. It has a cool little mount. You can like rotate it 180 degrees. You can set it up anywhere. You can write it off a USBC battery pack.

You know, like, point, it has color correction built into it. So you can point it at a wall that isn't white. And it will figure out the colors and make it look good. You can screw it into a light bulb socket. You can screw it. It's an optional adapter

that lets you screw it into a light bulb socket and point it down at a table, which is incredible. It implies so much about the homes that Samsung thinks this is going to go into. Like, everyone just has like chandeliers over their tables. like hanging pendant lights. It's amazing. The thing is, looks cool. I, like, am a smart projector

addict. I, like, bought in an arms race with only myself last year, started with an anchor nebula. Yeah. And then ended up at, like, a straight, a dead ahead 4K projector with a little bit of a very stupid, like six models in between. So I think this is really smart. I think smart directors are really cool. one, run size in two, it is $900. It's so expensive. It solves all the problems you have with a little portable projector. You can keystone it, you can have it, like, not take up the full. You can have it, have the picture not be the full size of the screen.

So you can, like, shrink it down and put it over to where your wall actually is without moving the projector around, which is smart, the color. Like, all the stuff that I've been trying to get, like, not be horrible with my little anchor portable projector, this thing solves for $900. 900. And I think it's only, what, 500 lumens? Yep, 550 lumens. So it sounds like you wait a year and a half to when it's marked down to 350. Yeah. This is definitely going to be a Black Friday special. This is going to be a deal, guys. Just wait. I pre-ordered one. You did? Oh, wow. See, once you get in the game, you're like, oh, another projector. And then you have like a room full projectors that you forgot to send back to Amazon. You're just like a motion artist now. I will say before it got too cold, I watched almost three football games outside. And I was like, I did it. And then I got too cold and I was like, why do I own this thing? Gosh, I spent a lot of money on this idea. You've got to get the fire pit now.

Yeah, I know. All right. Alex, what's yours? Ooh, that's a tough one. Because I really like that Sony confirmed that the PlayStation VR2 name is PlayStation VR2. Because it's just, thank you, Sony. I really appreciate that.

But I also, I really dig the, the L'Oreal, the new hair guy. This is super cool. I've only, I don't know if you guys have ever died your hair. I've only done it twice. The second time was to repair the first time. Oh, the high school years. It's college. It's college.

Oh, it's bad. Oh, my friend. It was rough. But this is, this is the color sonic. And the idea is there's like a cartridge because, you know, they had to get in on the cartridge thing. The cartridge and you put it in and you just brush it through your hair. And it will change your hair.

color. I think it's going to be a lot more involved than they're currently selling it. And there's still things like you still have to bleach your hair if you want to change colors and you've got dark hair. There's a person with black hair. Like, oh, they're the same like, no. It's a very light tint. But I like, you know, L'Oreal, they got their start making hair color and they're really, really good at it. They've actually kind of shipped some of their previous products like this that they announced at CES and we all forget about. They ship it. Nobody buys it because it's super expensive, but they're saying that this is going to be like something you could buy in a Target, I assume, for $600. And so, yeah, there's potential here.

It's very vapory, but I like the idea. I like the idea and I like that it looks like a finished product. Like, it really does look like a cheap thing I would buy at Target to do my hair. So I'm like, okay, you've got the look down. This feels like bad ideas and cold duck on a Friday night. and break bake cookies. Let's go. Well, I was good at bleaching my hair. Actually, then dyeing it to a correct shade of blonde.

Often the step I missed. I'm into it. What I actually appreciate about it the most is like, it's not like a dumb Wi-Fi gadget. Yes. It's just like it's a mechanical technology engineering gadget. Yeah. There's nothing smart about it.

There's no like, we're going to change your color hair. They also announced like a big, a big like, I don't know, facility booth that they're going to have at hair salons. I struggle to think of a single hair salon I've ever been to that would have this booth where you can get the color done and like test out different colors. Because, you know, everybody has a phone now. So why would I go to this booth? But great.

Cool. Look, it's a Saturday night. What are you going to do? You're going to get a hair color booth the local salon. Pay $400 while somebody makes fun of you. It'll be fine. I do appreciate that this whole. This whole thing implies that there's a market of people who bleach and dye their hair.

Well, I sleep saying bleach because I'm aware of what I need to do. But there's a market of people who dye their hair often enough that you can sell hair diapods to them. No, I know, I know a lot of women in particular who do dye their hair and they're dying at every, you know, especially people who grow gray early and want to keep the color in. This would be like a huge, huge deal for them. So I think like if it works and they do it well, it really is just. as simple as, I don't know, washing your hair, having it wet and running this through, game changer, like, massive, massive change. If it's affordable.

Curring pods for hair. I love it. Yes. By the way, the pod revenue model alive and well at this year, CS. All right, Dieter, what's yours? You both took my favorites. So I am going to pick the most CES thing. We're not going to give this our most CES award, I don't think. But to me, if you want to talk about things that just are CES,

what if your front door was smart? No, I mean, this is like every company is like, what if your, what if the front door was a different experience? So it's the Masonite M. Power, no vowels there, by the way. M. Dash, B.R. Smart door. So here's the idea. And I hate this so much that when I first saw it, I was like, this is stupid. And then Jennifer wrote the post, talked to me about it. And now I love it. And I want one. because it's CES. So it's a front door that has spots for a Yale lock, a ring people camera, lights, you know, just like everything you would want to like power in your front door,

like the doorbell, the light, the camera, like that stuff, the smart lock is built into the door. But theoretically, it's modular. So you could like switch from something to something else when it eventually. Like a door. Yeah. Well, you know, like when the Wi-Fi goes out on your smart lock, you'll be able to get another smart lock and not replace your entire door. But that is also currently a feature of my existing door. But so like the thing that's smart about it in theory is the door has power and it routes power to these parts of the door where you are inevitably going to watch smart things.

So you could just like have a door with electricity and then you can put in the smart gadgets that you want. and a wire to the doorbell and aware to the light and aware to the other things. Just like run one wire to your door and then you have your smart gadgets there. But like it's so, yes, like it works with the Amazon key because of course it does, right? Just like everything. Matter is like the big story. We don't need to talk about it too much here. But like all this stuff is going to be, you know, supporting matter, I'm sure.

So your front door will support thread pretty soon, which is very exciting. I'm dying. It's perfect. Can I just read this paragraph from Jen's post? And we haven't had Jen on the show yet. Gen 2 is our new smart home reviewer. The thing the Dieter just described, where you're like... Empower.

Empower. Where you're like, huh, that's smart home thing, sounds dumb. And then you talk to Jen, and you're like, oh, that sounds pretty good. That's Jen's vibe. Yeah. Right? So for Jen to produce the following paragraph, currently, you do need three apps to use your door.

Yes. This is the most disappointing aspect of the door from a user perspective. It's just like, oh boy. So it's a door, it's a door with power cables rounded into it. That's what I'm getting out of this, right? Finish the paragraph. But from the including Yale door lock doesn't work with ring. Although Yale makes a Z wave lock that does.

I mean. All right. I don't know, man. But I will say, okay, a door with pre-built power cables in it is smart. Yes. So you can buy this and just rip everything out. Just put what you want. Yeah, it's modularity.

It's the dream of every CES gadget. Couldn't they just sell it without all this stuff in it? Yes, because then it would be a door. Just sell it at Home Depot. That's very good. I do appreciate that it, okay, you pick the door. Well, I was going to pick the Black and Decker Bev thing, you mentioned. Yeah, that's my next one.

So every year at CS is a robot bartender. And for many years in a row, I would make Casey Newton get drunk with me at various CS events, trying out various robot bartenders. There's a very famous ice luge that pour a syrupy concoction down it, and I would make Casey drink the ice luge with me. So every year, there's a robot bartender. This year, Black and Decker, Power Tool Company, uh, released. I don't think it's vapor. I think they're actually going to ship it because it's so simple.

No Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, no app. You put in a DRM pod of mixers. So the pods have barcodes on them. So you've got to buy the pods. You buy your curing pods. And then there's just a bunch of like stainless steel straws. And you just go buy whatever hooch you want and like put it in there and the regular old bottles. Is one of them for like,

Seltzer? So you can. Yeah, there's a water tank. I don't know if they've, I don't know if they've, I don't know if they've, I don't I don't know if seltzer is in the mix, but there's a water tank. Okay. It's got to be seltzer. That'd be insane if it wasn't.

And then you like push the button for strength and then it reads the barcode on your like old-fashioned pod. And then it just sucks up the, the, the bourbon. It spits it in the cup with the rest of the pod. And it's like, I definitely could have done that on my own. Like, you know how would you say? It was like, you could just squeeze the bag. It's like, couldn't I just peel open the pot? It's very good.

I appreciate it. I've graduated to the old man level of drinking. Okay. Where I no longer require mixers or ice. Oh, okay. I'm just like, whatever. I don't have time for this. I seem to dull the pain.

I need to happen right away. But there was a time when I've been super into this. But it's very silly, and it's a very hilarious that's from Black and Decker. Yeah. And also the underlying technology is from a startup that wanted. do all the Wi-Fi stuff. But I think they found in Black and Decor a partner that was like, what if we take all the smart stuff off it and just dump the pods in the glass?

Done. It's very good. By the way, the startup is called a Bartesian. Eli, you missed the best part. It does have a party mode where it has LEDs to light up the bottles. Yes. That's good. If you walk into somebody's party and they wrote up bartenders in like party mode, you're like,

oh, this is going to be a good party. Like, there's a commitment here that I can see. Version two of this thing is built into a Sony party speaker. Yes. Just mounted right on top of it. Look, the market for that thing is front parties through and through. This too. All right, Alex, you got one more?

Ooh, I don't know. Probably the breathing power case, PC case. That's really good. The cyber power PC case. It looks kind of like it's breathing. And it's, I'm trying to think of how to describe it. For most angles, it looks like a normal. PC case. And then the front has all these little triangles that open up to like suck air in and they look kind of alive and alien and neat.

Yeah. They're like little they're little flappy triangle flaps. Yeah. And they're just kind of like doing the thing. I'm into it. Yeah. It's just like nice. And it's it's really going to exist. It's it's really shipping. And cyber power, you know, makes good products. This will probably be pretty good. And it may sell for like two, I think. Yeah. These adjustments are not limited to simple open and close, but rather opening and closing and adjusting in real time to every degree of temperature change. Yes. That's the quote.

I've always wanted a PC that sounds like the departure sign at the Frankfurt airport. Yeah, that's one of those big... I don't know if they still have it. But it's one of the big flappy clickers, you know? I love the idea that, like, you turn on any video game and the flaps will all just open. And that's it. It's like, well, we've detected several degrees.

of temperature change. It's good. All right, Dieter. And there's a lot of stuff. There's the robot shelf, which is great. There's actually, we didn't get it in the show notes, but eargo has some new hearing aids that automatically adjust their volume based on ambient noise. And hearing aids are going to be a big product category for 2022.

But you know what? We started making a joke about it at the beginning of the show. I got to go with the HP Dragon Phi Chromebook. I don't even know if this is technically CES, but it just got announced. Yeah. It is the pixel book that I have been waiting. waiting for. It has a 3x2 screen. You can get it at a pretty high resolution if you want to. The touchscreen, it flips all the way around in 360 mode. There's magnets on the back, so when you

flip it around, it actually holds together. It's got 32 gigs of RAM. It's got 12th gen Intel processor. It has a big enough battery. It looks like it's well made. I have no idea what's going to cost. I'm sure it's going to be way too much. But all of the crap that I have wanted out of a Chromebook that's actually premium that you haven't had since the Pixelbook 2 is, is this thing. I wouldn't even say the pixel book, too. I would say the Chromebook pixel. Oh, so I think the pixel book too, the pixel book managed it more.

The Chromebook pixel was great. The pixel book did okay. But this thing, this dragonfly man, ha, it's everything. It's like, oh, yeah, like stop compromising and making a Chromebook that's like, oh, God, 60 by 9. Oh, God, it's not powerful enough. Oh, God. It doesn't make sense to spend $1,000 on a Chromebook for anybody.

I mean, the answer is no, I'm sorry. But if you like ChromeOS and you have $1,000 to spend on a Chromebook, this is finally the Chromebook that should have existed for the past two years. It finally exists. The Chromebook Pixel occupies a special place in my heart because I bought one for my mom, which is an insane thing. I wandered around the streets of New York City, like asking strangers. Like, I'm going to buy my mom a $1,000 Chromebook. And they'd all be like, who are you? And she uses this day and she loves it.

because she doesn't have to think about it. It just does web stuff, and then she closes it and goes away. And I'm going to upgrade her to this dragonfly. Oh, it has a fingerprint sensor too. Yes. And a privacy screen, just like. It has a webcam cover.

Like, yeah, it's just a very smart. It has a mute button for the microphone on the keyboard. So you can just hit it and the mic is off. Yeah. It's like, again, I only love this because I've been waiting for, like, Samsung promised like that they were going to make one. Like that we thought that was it. It was going to be the next time Chromebook, wasn't it?

We had like nothing great for like the perfect Chromebook last year. And so now we've got it. And I will probably buy it. Yeah, I'm definitely going to buy it. I'm going to end by saying PlayStation VR2 confirming the name is no. I think my last one is this Motorola MA1 dongle for wireless Android. Okay. Because there's a huge market of wakadoo wireless carplay adapters.

They're very wackadoo for carplay. And they're not great, but there's a lot of them. And many of them are actually the same like Chinese sourced guts. Just in different cases by different flyby night startups, whatever. Not so many Android Auto ones. There's one that's like an Indiegogo one. Yeah, there's a handful. Like, it's not like unheard of.

But we haven't had one from a trusted brand like Motorola. Oh, wait. Whoops. Yeah, so this is like a Motorola brand licensing deal from what's the name of this company? Oh, SGW Global. Yeah. which describes itself as a motorist strategic brand partner. Yeah.

That's how I describe it last relationship. I need a module that does both carplay and Android auto because we're a cross-platform family. What you need is a new head unit because that's the only way you're going to. You have to plug your phone into it then? Yeah. No, no, you plug the dongle into your car. Okay. And the don't have to plug your phone into anything.

Huh? Do you have to plug your phone into anything? No, no. This is a whole point. Like, new cars have wire. wireless charging pads and wireless carplay or an indoor auto. Yeah. So, like, the dream is you get in a car, you're like fling the phone onto the wireless pad.

It starts charging and then CarPlay lights up and you're like into gear and you're off. Yeah. But so actually, the most important thing about this is how quickly does it boot up and get the Wi-Fi going and get the connection going? Because, like, I could take a minute. And the wireless CarPlay ones are notoriously bad at that. And they introduce like. So we'll see.

I'm just saying on the CarPlay side, it's been messy. On the Android side, it's been not so many like ones to buy. We'll see. I think ultimately, this isn't going to happen until the car is directly supported. But it's my last CES gadget. Like, oh, that's fun. All right. Anything else we missed?

I mean, obviously, it's yes. There's a ton of stuff. There's the new Zephyr Pro mask, which has a voice stamp in it and probably still isn't good at actually filtering anything. It still makes you look terrifying when you wear it. Yeah. There's yet more door locks. By the way, the door lock.

in camera doorbell situation at CS is out of control. Yep. Like the tech companies have realized that entering a home can be made more complicated and they are in it. The matter stuff, like there's a lot of matter-ish action at CS. There's a lot of smart home. Matter promises. Matter hasn't launched yet.

That's true. There's a lot of matter promises. I mean, there's just a lot of stuff at CS. It's good. There's a giant LG OLED gaming throne. Yeah. Which is also vertical. which is my favorite work from home gadget.

There's a new anchor charger that is very, very small, and you can plug two or three things into it. And I'm pretty excited to have another tiny GAN charger because I never stopped buying them, apparently. Yeah. I mean, look, it's CS. There's all kinds of stuff. It's all on the site.

There's vaporware cars for days. Weeks. At this point, if you can draw a car, you can probably get someone to give you $100 deposit for it. It's all good. All right. We're going to wrap it up. we had Pete Buttigieg on Decoder.

We've got Qualcomm CEO, Cristiano Amman, and Decoder next Tuesday. So that's being pretty good. We'll have more from CS on the site. I'm sure the news is going to lead into next week. When we're back, the Vergecast, it's 2022. The Vergecast is back. You can tweet at us. I'm Matt Reckless, Deer's at Backlon.

Alex is Alex H. Cranz. It's a podcast. I got to leave you with a podcast note. Ashley Carmen wrote a great piece today about programmatic podcast advertising and how it's going real sideways. Go check that out. It's part of Hot Pod. our new newsletter about podcast that actually runs.

Very good. That's it. That's for a chest. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.