The Vergecast - CES is back! Sony announces a car, everything has Matter, and Lenovo puts screens on top of screens

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

CES 2023 is in full swing! The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler parse the vapor ware from the cool new tech we hope to see ship this year. Further reading: Sony and Honda just announced their new electric car brand, Afeela The BMW i Vision Dee is a future EV sports sedan that can talk back to you Check out BMW’s color-changing concept car in action   Mercedes-Benz and ChargePoint are going to install thousands of EV fast chargers in the US The Ring Car Cam is now available to order for $200  Google’s new high-definition maps are arriving first on Volvo and Polestar electric vehicles  Google’s new split-screen look for Android Auto is rolling out to everyone LG’s latest Signature OLED TV receives all of its audio and video wirelessly LG wants to reinvent how you think of TV picture modes Sony breaks from tradition and won’t announce new TVs at CES 2023  Samsung takes on Apple and LG with its own 5K display for creative pros Dell’s new 32-inch 6K monitor gives Apple’s ProDisplay XDR some competition Samsung's latest Flex Hybrid is a prototype display LG’s 2023 OLED TVs are brighter (again) and make webOS smarter Samsung’s 2023 TV lineup bets everything on picture upgrades and AI tricks Roku does the obvious thing and announces its own TV line  TCL’s 2023 TVs have new branding and are gaming powerhouses Razer made a soundbar that tracks your head to optimize sound AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 mobile processors include a massive 16-core chip AMD promises RTX 3060 desktop graphics performance with new RDNA 3 laptop GPUs Lenovo’s new Yoga Book 9i laptop has a second screen above its screen Lenovo’s new ThinkBook has modular accessories that add LTE, a webcam light, and more Lenovo’s new all-in-one is all screen Lenovo made a Kindle Scribe The HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook is neat, but what’s with the RGB? Razer's Edge 5G handheld is coming to Verizon this month for $359.99 Delta and T-Mobile are making in-flight Wi-Fi free for all SkyMiles members Qi2: How Apple might finally harness MagSafe by giving it away  Philips Hue is getting a $130 app for TVs Samsung’s SmartThings Station is a smart home hub hidden in a wireless charger Kohler shower pods are here to turn your bathroom into a spa Withings wants you to pee on its latest device Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, get excited at CES 2023. Sony announces a car while everybody else updates their TVs, and Lenovo out of nowhere with the craziest laptop we've ever seen. All that, so much more coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools

means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data

and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of 2023. The whole year. A whole year.

Every morning when you wake up, think of me, Nelai Patel. Editor and Chief of the Verge and your friend. Or Alex Kranz, who is here? Yeah, I was like, think of me or Richard. Do you think of fake Nelai? Like, is fake Nelai coming back? Because I hear that those Twitter accounts are actually pretty easy to make still. Fake Nelai could come back.

It's just $8. It's true. Jeffrey Fowler made another fake senator on Twitter, another fake verified senator. I need to make a new fake Neelai using, my work email address again and my my home phone number it'll be fine nothing bad could come up if you have a twitter account that's over 90 days old that you want to donate to alics's situation by all means reach out to Alex that's it that's where the three of us are on the show welcome back to 2023 we've been off for a couple weeks we've got to see if we remember how to do the show

that we've been doing for years fine it's also cES the consumer electronic show is happening in Las Vegas. We got a big verge team down there. I am not there for like the first time in 12 years. I feel like the COVID years that didn't go don't count. They don't. Absolutely not. So I had like a 12 to 13 year run, many of which were memorably spent with Richard Lawler as babies. Memorably is probably not the correct word. No one can say for certain. What's the word for something you remember because you don't remember? There's a gap. But no, it's weird being at home. I found out that people do things in the first week of the year that I had no idea about. Oh, yeah.

Wow. Yeah. There's all kinds of action. Like time does not stop and get vortex into Las Vegas. I will say, and Richard, I don't know if you feel this way, I miss it. And I kind of, there's a part of me that wishes I was in Vegas. That part is very small. And I am beating in submission on the daily.

But there's like stuff happening at CES this year. There's a person inside of me who only exists when I wake up in the Marriott in Las Vegas. Yeah. And they are dormant the entire rest of the year. And just for one week, they run free. And I'm not really sure. It's like activated by zero percent humidity. Like the air is so dry that a different version of you comes out.

And it's like, what I need is a vodka soda and some swirly carpets and at least three full memory cards, SD cards of photos of laptops. And that's who I really am. And there's a part of me that's jealous. The other reason I'm jealous that I'm not there is this is Dieter Bones' first year at CES. as a Google executive. And I just, I just want to go to those meetings. Dieter, I miss you, buddy. I mean, I had talked to you all time with his friends.

I'm just saying, I can't wait to be in that position where I'm, where he's got like flax. Yeah. Like, you know, like press handlers. And there's, follow him around. Yeah. Oh, my God. Ah, I'm missing it.

And they're like, no, no, you can't talk to him. Just waving at him to stop talking every time he says anything. Yeah. I can't. That's the one thing I really miss. So you just text. There is a lot. lot of stuff coming out at CS. There's like a two-year pandemic hangover that appears to be breaking

in terms of gadgets. A hundred percent. It is the usual level of gadget announcements. Will the stuff ever come out? Will it be any good? Will any of us remember this a year from now? Who knows? But for this week of the year... You'll remember the car. Yeah, we got to be on the cars. For this week of the year, if you're into gadgets, this is like some of the most gadget fun you can have at CS and there's just a wild array of gadgets happening because this is matters first year. So there's a whole bunch of weird smart home gadgets. Sony's like, we made a car. We'll get to the car in a minute. Car is fully ridiculous. BMW is like, we also made a car with, it's made of E-ink and it talks. Just like a fully ridiculous CS. And there's obviously TV news and there's obviously

other laptop news. The Lenovo Yoga book 9-I, that's a two-screen. It's beautiful. And it comes with a stand to make it super tall. I just like... What have you glued two iPads together? We'll get to it. This is what happens when you let engineers stay at home for two years.

They have crazy ideas. And nobody's there to be like, stop. A super gadget ECS. We've got to talk about all this stuff. Real quick before we start, here is one piece of exciting Vergecast 2020 news. This is our first episode that we're, we're going to publish on YouTube. It's audio only.

We've got some cool graphics, some ideas. We'll be publishing some clips. If you've been on our YouTube channel or our TikTok channel, you've seen we've been doing clips and shorts of the Vergecast's video. We'll be doing more of that. We're building towards more video things. But we're actually just publishing the podcast on the Vergecast YouTube channel. First, this is our first public one.

There have been some secret ones as tests over the past few weeks. This is our first public post. We're really excited about it. We want your feedback. We know a lot of people listen to podcasts on YouTube. So we're coming to you. Let us know how it goes. And then let us know what you think of the clips and how those are working.

We've got big ideas to expand the show into video and onto YouTube in particular. So some exciting news to start the year. All right. Let's start with this car. So Sony a couple of years ago announced a car at CS. And it was the most vaporware car that has ever existed. Like I don't think it even had motors in it. They were just like, they were Sony.

handful of PlayStation announcements. Do you like Spider-Man? Here's our car. Sony at CS. There wasn't even a physical thing. There was a physical model of a car. I don't know if it moved. The idea of a car.

They showed videos of cars of things that were supposedly cars driving around. Yeah. And they were like, this was at the time when the vaporware car explosion was like fully happening. Yeah. So Sony asked his car. Everyone's like, this is vapor. It's never going anywhere. Then they announced a partnership with Honda to make cars.

And the name of the partnership is Sony Honda Mobility. So you see this is just a very literal situation. Yeah. Sony wants to make a car. Honda makes cars. Let's start a new joint venture. It's called Sony Honda Mobility. Cool.

This year at CS, Sony holds a press conference. Press conference is all over the place. I encourage you to go watch it. It's like Sony decided not to announce TVs at CS, which if you are an avid CES watcher, you know, this is a big deal because this is where all the TVs get announced. Sony's like, nope, screw it, opting out. We'll do TVs later. Here's the new PSVR 2.

Here's some movie stuff. Here's a Grand Turismo movie. Oh, by the way, here's our car. And so the Sony Honda Mobility Car will be a new brand. I can't even say it. I feel you. I'm so mad at you. It's called Afila, A-F-E-E-L-A.

And they showed off their first car, which, you know, looks like a shoe, as all modern EVs do. like a cross between a Honda accord and a lucid air. Like all cars now have the same like light bar vibes. It's like a low slung sedan. Yeah. They all look like Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg designed them in 2002. What two cars of the future look like? This.

You know like when you're a kid and you like are learning how to draw a car and you draw like this. Two wheels and a bubble. This is what you draw. Because I could not actually draw different parts. So I just drew one arc and then one. So it's called, again, I want to come back to the name, Afila, which if you go and watch the video, the poor man, he's, you know, he's like excited. And he's like, our new brand. And then he's like, Aphila. And there's, there's just not applause. Because no one believes that he said it. No one applauds that day. And the idea here is that Honda will build a car and Sony will stuff it full of screens that run Sony software and play Sony movies. That's the idea. It's like very, very, very very clearly the idea.

I like one of those things. But then there's one screen... Who doesn't want to pay $60,000 for a PSP to. Yes. The front of the car, the middle of the light bar, this is the thing that I'm absolutely obsessed with. And I really encourage you to go watch our super cut of this event. So there's the two headlights.

And then there's a light bar in the middle of the headlights. Almost all cars EVs especially have this light bar element in the middle of the headlights town, right? Yeah. It's electronic. Okay, that is... Sony's like, what if that was a screen? A straight up screen in the middle of the headlights. And then in the presentation,

to show you the things a screen could be used for. And one of them is just straight up advertising for Spider-Man No Way Home. So you're driving around and you're a Fila, and you've got Spider-Man No Way Home on the front of your car. You can also display the weather, which I think is amazing to display the weather to other people. It's helpful for the people you like just run on the ass of other people on the highway. You're like, I need you to know the weather.

So you would just be showing the weather to people backwards in their mirrors. I mean, it's perfect example of... Look, V2V didn't happen. We had to make it. We had to do something. And this was what you were doing. It's just Sony doesn't know why it's building a car. It's just very obvious that Sony has not yet figured out why it's doing this.

Honda knows why it's building an EV. Honda's got that part locked down. They're Honda. Sony's like, what we're going to add to is Spider-Man and screens. Where are some places we can put those things? and one of the places they settled on was the front of the car. It's very good. Afila.

Perfect. No notes. Aphila. Now, my personal afila theory is that, again, during what, what is the word for this when you have a memory that is defined by the absence of the memory? A blackout? Like you, I know I was in Vegas with Richard. I know, I know that.

And then I know I was at home. There are expense receipts, but what happened? Who can say? What is the memory? tastes like, does it taste like vodka, whiskey, regret? Yes. All of the above. All of it.

And I know that Richard and I are friends for life because of this memory, but I got nothing else. Somehow in the middle of this, that's when someone said, Afila. No. They wrote it down and then they found it later. No. What is the ultimate Vegas CES song in every presentation? It's I Got a Feeling by the Black I Peas. You cannot be, you cannot be in that environment without hearing that song.

There was at least two years where like the words of mazeltov rang out of every CS presentation because they were just playing, I got a feeling by the black eyed peas. And now we have a feel like I swear to God this is what happened. Like they, Sony and Honda were up in the club and that song was playing and I know what it's called. And now we have now we have to talk about this seriously for months to come. Years. Years. It's not coming out until 2026.

cried a lot that night, though. Like, they hugged. Coming out. It's not allegedly coming out. They said they're going to start taking orders in 2024, and they claim that they will ship the first ones in North America. They said the second half of 2025. Who are the people that are going to order this?

I mean, this is a pretty huge risk. I think it's de-risk by the fact that it's more or less a Honda, right? Yeah. Okay. So you know that they know how to make a car. Honda exists. They make cars. We drive them.

But then you've got. this like bonkers Sony integration where they're in the oh by the way the the whole car runs qualcomm tech and so it's a qualcom chip set qualcom qualcom quantum driving qualcomm interfaces like everything so how much battery life is it going to get versus the apple car like 30% less it runs really hot the camera though in some situations is better i love that there's a charging the screen on the front you can it could be a charging indicator they're throwing out the idea fully integrating at PS5. That's what I've always wanted in my car.

This is the single silliest CS announcement that I've ever covered. And if you've been listening to me at CS for a long time, you know that that is a high bar. We have covered some truly bonkers CS products. One year, Qualcomm hired the cast of Billy Madison to jump around in furry suits claiming to be the next generation of technology.

This is a real thing that happened. And this is by far the silliest thing that I've ever seen Because the entire point of it Dishaput brought a real kangaroo ones That's true For whatever The entire point of this car is to get you to subscribe to Sony software inside the car

I don't think this car is ever going to ship That's just my I'm calling it I do not think the Aphila will ever ship You don't think a car with an integrated PS5 And the ability to play Spider-Man on the grill Aphila will attempt to embody three main themes autonomy, augmentation, and affinity. It's bad. It's bad. I'm just telling you it's bad.

Okay, wait. If there's anything that Sony's good at, it's launching subscription service. That's never, that's never fail. And so, yeah, I'm taking, I'm taking the highest out on this, for sure. So you think people are just going to subscribe to own the car one day? It's going to be just like a, yeah, PlayStation Cloud game. All right. I cannot believe it's called the Eiffel. I can't believe that we all have to say it. I can't believe that they said it. I can't believe they paid some consulting company like millions of dollars. for this name. But I can't believe we've only done one pun about it.

I think, like, that's very impressive. It's just the beginning of the year. We'll come back to it. It's true. So that's, I would say this is the news out of CS is this Sony, Honda Mobility, new brand of a car. It's whatever one is talking about. I'm just calling it right now. This thing is pure vapor and will never ship.

Do you think they'll ever ship any kind of Sony car or just not this? It's not this. And even if you think about it, we talked about this show so many times. Like, this is not the kind of car that people are buying. People buy mid-sized crossover SUVs. So showing up with your weirdo sedan. Like, you can't even get the tax credits for this right now in the United States. The tax credits are all for SUVs.

You know the Tesla Model Y and the Mustang Maki aren't getting a tax credit because they're classified as sedans? So good. I mean, it's just fully silly. Just put a lift kit on it. They'll be fine. You like roll up to the IRS with your lifted Model Y. This is an SUV now. All right.

Other car stuff at CS. I'm just calling it. If you believe the afila will ship, let us know. If you work at Sony and you can show us a working production unit of the, we'll talk about it. But it's, I mean, it's called the afila. Okay, here's my other question. Will they change the name if it ever ships? No, they have to keep it.

They're committed to it now. I mean, they will absolutely change the name. But I think even now we need to say you cannot change the name. You made your choice. You got drunk at the club a couple of years ago. You bonded. You agreed. you can't, no takebacks.

It's a feel like, Will I am. He pops out of the trunk. He's like, here I am. You promised me. All right. Where is Will I am? How is he not involved in this? After all the tech stuff that he wants,

somehow this launches and he's nowhere to be found, that's suspicious. That is very suspicious. Did they name the execs who worked on it? No. If Will I Am worked on this, he would have been named the creative director of Afila. Theoretically. Which is his title with all the things he works on. We once did an article, and I think the headline is Will I Am is the Kiss of Death,

because every tech product that he has ever launched as a creative director has been a spectacular flop. Dan Sievert once published the headline like Will I.m's bracelet, like I don't want it to touch my body. It's Dan. Have you even encountered Dan Sievert before? He's not prone to bursts of hyperbole. No. And he's like, I don't want this thing near my body. Like, don't even want to look at it.

Touched his hair. He's upset. Yeah. It's been a couple of years since we've covered a bad while I am gadget. This is his moment. All right. We should talk about the BMW, the I-Vision-D. It talks.

It's your friend. Because this was the one that had the Arnold Schwarzenegger commercial attached to it, right? Yeah. Where he spends the whole time talking about how they're going to be best friends. And then he, like, helps a lady hook up with some dude. And they never show the most interesting part of the car. Yeah, that's the CES in a nutshell, is they have a celebrity. That's right.

They did a skit. They don't show you the product. Let me just give you. So the I-Vision. Vision D is kind of like a retro futuristic BMW. Right. It's got some like Camaro vibes in the front end, like 60s Camaro vibes in the front end. But it's got the ugly, everybody's doing these ugly hubcaps.

That's just like that means EVs. Yeah, they're bad. So I Vision D stands for Digital Emotional Experience, DEE. And let me just read this word to you. The headlights and the closed BMW kidney grill also form a common fidget to icon on a uniform surface, allowing the vehicle to produce different facial expressions. And what they mean by fidgetle is the combination of the word physical and digital. They were supposed to launch an NFT with this, but then they canceled it when the price is crashed

and they couldn't get fidgetle out of the press release. That's what happened here, because that's the only place where they use this word. It's very bad. The whole point of this is that it has this assistant, and then, And the inside of this car, we don't really know what the car is going to look like or if it really exists because all the pictures are renders. But the whole point of this is that it will talk back to you and that your driver, you can create like a metaverse avatar, which is going to be projected onto the side window of the car. Like, those are all things I do not want in my life. Yeah, this was the NFT car.

This was supposed to have your ape on the outside. And then they realized they couldn't do that. And they just, they still had the car renders laying around and they had to do something with it. They had already mocked those up. Wait, is that real? This was an NFT car? So they just dropped it. I mean, that must be the truth, because every single thing about it matches with

NFT reality. Mixed reality, you put your avatar on the outside. This is a tokenized vehicle. This is a metaverse experience from BMW. Right. And then they just didn't say the NFT parts because that's anathema right now. Yeah. Does it have the BMW logo on it?

Yeah. Yeah, it's got the Rando on the front. Okay, there it is. Very tiny. It is truly one of the strangest, strangest cars I've ever seen. You just got to go look at the pictures. It's all renders. This is the most of vaporware car we have ever covered.

Like, it does, even the prototype doesn't exist. It's great. I love it. It's so goofy. Anyway, BMW is a company charging subscriptions for heated seats. So we'll see if they're weird, non-NFT, NFT car succeeds. But what's annoying about it is that there's one part of it that is real. And they did last year, and they showed off in this giant render that kind of like destroyed all of my hope in humanity.

And that's that it has the e-ink panels that we saw last year, but in color. I mean. Because like we saw the cars last year. They had real cars driving around CES last year with real E-ink panels in it. And this year they have real fake cars driving around in real fake reality with actual real E-ink panels, which is this new like tech called PRN. Prism 3 from E-ink. And that's really, really cool. And I'm really annoyed because that's actually really, really cool, real technology

paired with, like, the cartoon car with your NFT on the face. Yeah. I will say that the fact that there are no actual pictures of the I-Vision-D makes me wonder. It's just all in motion. Yeah. And there's no real person driving it. It's always a cartoon lady driving it. Or it's, like, really far away.

Yeah. I guess there's one picture of a guy. But then in this picture, the car is all white. So again, I'm watching this video and it's blowing my mind. Why is that? I don't know why I don't know why the Terminator is here. I don't know why. Oh, yeah, no, you have to go watch the video.

This is what Alex is talking about this. This is what Alex is saying at the start. Like, the video is the most CES thing you can watch. The video is so good. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger is in it. But they don't show the panels. They don't show the panels. Except for the last shot where they're like helicopter overing.

They're helicoptering over the car. And then it's like, uh, rendering. Yeah. I don't know. I'm just saying... It's not a real car. Two of the most... But the E-ink tech is real.

The E-ink tech is real, but is it mounted on a BMW that exists? So, no. But it's like E-ink sent me... They sent me a whole thing talking about it. It's their four-particle ASEP system. And ASEP has two branches. And one is what you get, which is like E-readers, the new Gallery 3 color E-ink that's coming out later this year.

and then the other side is Prism 3, which is what is on this. And it's more like a mesh. It's not like actual panels. It's really weird. And I was like, oh, this is so exciting. Oh, it's on a fake car that will never exist and is all a cartoon. Yeah. I'm too disappointed.

I love it because I think the audacity of launching intensely vaporware cars at CS. For a long time, the way CS worked was we would see the insides of, cars at CES. Yeah. Because that's where the screens were. And we would hear about like whatever Q&X software upgrade was coming to like Jeeps next year. And then a week later at the Detroit Auto Show, we would see the outsides of cars.

Yeah. And now we're just going for broke on what about, we just showed you entire fake cars. What do we just showed you? A lot of really cool renders at CES with our big screens. It's a lot. All right. Some other car news at CES. Some good stuff here, Mercedes.

installing thousands of EV fast chargers across the United States. You're going to spend a billion dollars on it in conjunction with charge point. They're going to install 400 of these hubs, each with approximately six charging stations, key cities, major highways. This is good. This is good news. They needed to do this a long time ago. Did you see the part of the press release where they're like,

but we're not going to put it in like some weird, by the weird dumpster in like a shady area? These are going to be nice charging points in nice areas. Yeah. Oh, is that a problem? now? It's a huge problem now. Like, are they just, like, where are the charge? I always assumed the chargers were always in the nice areas because everybody drives

Teslas. Yeah, the Tesla chargers are generally a nicer experience. Even some of those are weird. Yeah. But like, your average electrify America single charger is like broken. They might be anywhere. Right. There's like coyotes howling in the distance.

Even if you go watch our Ford Lightning review video, we went to the charger on the highway. And it was next to the dumpster. That's true. And, you know, I have talked to many car CEOs, and I always ask them about this, and they've been punting. And I think them admitting that the chargers are by dumpsters is an important sign of progress. Like, step one, admit the chargers are currently by dumpsters. Step two, spend a billion dollars putting them somewhere else. So that's good news.

A good bit of CS News for Mercedes there. Other little stuff car-wise, ring car cam, who knows why anybody wants this? the little ring dash cam people were really interested in the story people love it people have dash cams most dash cams are made it by weirdo brands yeah they live with dash cam and they're like oh i recognize this brand but you don't want this brand go get like your weird never heard of before company the one that's one that isn't deeply embedded with the police already yeah great don't get the police one anyway it's finally shipping for 200 bucks the rings dash cam 200 bucks and then two little bits of google android auto

news. I mean, the first one is just hilarious. They have Google put out a split screen version of Android Auto for cars with widescreen displays a little bit ago. And now it's really not to everyone. And they made a little video there. And that's it's yes. Nice bit of Google news. It looks exactly like CarPlay. Like... Just identical. CarPlay from like three years ago. Yeah. Like Apple figured this out a while ago. Yeah. It's like it's fairly funny that Apple and Google are in the cycle of just fully copying each other. And neither one of these things is that good. Just putting it out there. They're both fine.

That's it. You cannot claim that they are anything better than fine, which is a meaningful step over what most car manufacturers could do. I was supposed to say, they're better than what the car manufacturers do. Because if I have to do Mazda's built-in system or Apple CarPlay, I'm going Apple CarPlay every time. The Mazda system is horrible. What, you don't like Honda's 2011 Android tablet? Right. This is like the curse of low expectations, right?

You're like, our bar that we have to beat is Ford Sink actively torturing you. Just kicking you in the place. The bar we have to clear, yeah, is Mazda deleting all the money in your bank account when you try to put in a navigation waypointer? Like, whatever it is. Yeah. It's a low bar. They cleared it. And the fact, and now that they are converging on the same sort of mediocre, like, eh, that said, Google has new high-res maps that it's putting out first in the Volvo EX-90, the new EV, and in the Polestar 3.

And so you can see Google's, and you know, Volvo and Polestar both use, like, Android as the infotainment stack. So you can see Google's pushing harder into cars. Like, they're owning more and more cars. They're doing Google built-in. Did we talk about Google built-in on the Vergecast yet? and how deeply confusing it is. Well, it's funny because they're redoing the same thing that happened with Android, where you have Android, and you also have Android with Google services

where you can get, like, Gmail, or in this case, Google Maps and YouTube, maybe, in the future someday. But everybody uses Android, but usually it's without Google Maps. Right, so, like Stalantis uses Android, but without any Google services. Then Honda just announced a new accord with Google Built-in, which is something... I can't believe they're betraying Sony already. But it's something. They're running something, but with Google services, like Google Maps. Yeah.

I think GM also has Google built in, which is something, but with Google Maps. But unclear whether it's Android Automotive. And then Volvo and Polestar run Android automotive, which is just Android and plus Google stuff. So now there's just these tiers of, like, Google being in your car. And you can see Google's strategy is basically whatever you want, as long as it's us. whereas Apple's strategy is nothing. They have a strategy. Do you remember?

We got to see the whole car play. Just the way the exhaustion appeared on your face just then thinking about it, that split second of no, I don't want to. And then Sony's strategy of what if the front grill of your car showed up to people, the weather, which is good. It's not, I mean, it's a service. It's helpful. For cars.

Where's the Samsung car? Why don't we have the Samsung car yet? That is strange at Samsung has. With Bigsby in it. Well, I mean, the, you know, the Hyundai group is there with Hyundai and Kia and all the rest. Yeah. That's who was supposed to be making the Apple car. You could see, Samsung just to walk down the street.

Yeah. Right there. Well, they were, they were busy. Damn. They had stuff going on. Providing the chips to the Sony car that doesn't exist. Okay, that's car stuff. I got to say, we started with the feel just because I wanted to get it out of the way.

I feel you. I'm not so much on Twitter anymore, but the number of people who tweeted me that we had to talk about it, feel it was very high, higher than anything else. But CS is a TV show. That's what it's really for. This is where the action happens in the TV world. Right. One memory I do have of CS with Richard is the HDDVD versus Blu-ray CES, which was incredible,

where this was going to be the format war year at CES. And then before the show started, Toshiba just caved and they tore down the HD DVD booth. You could actually see that you could actually see HDVD fall apart in real time, in real life in front of it. I've never experienced something like that before because it was like, you, it was like watching a dream die except the dream actually existed. Yeah,

it was truly bizarre. But this year, see us a little calmer. A lot of TV upgrades, some interesting ideas about picture modes. Like, we're in a mature part of a TV cycle, right?

We're not insisting. Like, HDR has come. They got it. They figured it out. Have they figured it out? We're done. Like,

they're like, okay, we know what to sell you. Yeah, I mean, They figured out, like, they know that their new thing is, they can't just force you to buy a new TV because of 4K. So they pivoted to HDR. And they've now realized that's not exactly great.

So they're just going to, like, kind of hang out and improve the TVs until they figure out some reason to really force you to upgrade again. Like, they're all really missing. Which will be 3D again. It's going to be Avatar 2, Way of Water is going to hit on streaming. And it's going to be 3D again, I promise you. For like a week. If you go back and read some of James Cameron's quotes about Avatar coming out on Blu-ray in 3D, and he was like, this shit's the future from back then.

Yes, he got distracted. Yes, it's been like four decades since that movie come out, but his heart is still pure. He thinks Home 3D is going to happen and Avatar is going to make it happen again. But it's true. Like Alex is saying, we are in a mature part of the TV cycle. Yeah. Like I think Richard, the way I would say it is, when Apple caved and added HDR 10 plus to the Apple TV, because Samsung wasn't going to break and add Dolby Vision.

Like, then you know, like, all the fights are over. There are no more fights. It's just incremental. But there's still some stuff. Alex, ATSC 3.0 news, your favorite? Very, very exciting news. Can you just tell people what it is? So, ATSC 3.0 is the next, like, broadcasting standard.

For the four of you and my mom, who still watch broadcast TV, I'm surprised she's not watching it in another room right now at her house. It's supposed to be better because you can not only get it through like an antenna, but you can get it through 5G. So like you and somebody else can both be sitting together on your couch watching live TV on your phone without having to go through spectrum or charter or whoever your provider is, just watching it over the air through 5G. So like theoretically, really, really, really, really cool, right? But nobody's actually adopting it. There's very few markets that have it. New York City doesn't have it, and it's a whole weird complex problem. We'll hopefully talk about more on a future episode of this show. But I'm in Dallas, Fort Worth right now. One of the largest markets in the United States. I think we've got like one station that has it. And it's crazy because ATSC 3.0 is like, it could solve so many problems. But everybody's kind of figured out, no, we don't want to do broadcast. We all want to have our little fiefdoms that you pay a subscription for. Yeah. We're just going to do that. Suck it broadcast, slowly die. And broadcast is like, okay.

ATSC 3.0, we're on 5G now. And so that was the big news. They did a test a couple of weeks ago, and they announced it this week, that they had successfully shown off like 5G over the air broadcasting in a moving car, which is like kind of hard to do, right? Like if you've ever had to mess with the antennas in your house to watch broadcast TV, now imagine doing that while driving 60 miles per hour down the highway. That's like not easy to do. So it is kind of impressive technology, but the fact that none of the market. are adopting it is bad. Yeah.

Well, because all those local news stations are getting sucked up into it. I mean, there's an entire, like, media ownership crisis. Well, it was interesting because one of the biggest ones was Sinclair, and Sinclair was actually part of this big announcement. So they, like Sinclair, who kind of has bought a lot of these broadcast stations, they're very committed to like ATSC 3.0. But also it's Sinclair who has a lot of issues. Yeah, they're also committed to not spending money.

Yeah, so we'll see. Come on it, guys. You can do it. I'm pretty sure there's one ATSC 3.0 broadcaster by my house up in the woods, and they have chosen to use the additional bandwidth, not for higher picture quality, but to shove more infomercials. Yes. In like sub-channels of infomercials. It's very good. Yeah, that was part of it. They were like, oh, yeah, we can do so many more channels on a channel.

So you can get a lot more advertising. And I was like, is that a good thing? And they're like, oh, yeah. It's not a good thing. All right, let's talk about some actual TVs. LG had a bunch of TVs. I actually want to start not with their weird wireless. TV we should talk about for a minute.

But with this picture modes thing, so if you will remember, LG owns WebOS. I feel like every year at CS is just me recapitulating the last 20 years of tech history. So there was, there was some... WebOS isn't dead. It's still here.

We should celebrate that. We should celebrate that every year. It should be a holiday, a national holiday. It's true. So the Palm Prix was announced at CS. What am I doing? In 2008, the Palm Prix was announced at CS. Matias,

Uarte, who now works at Google, is the out of design of Android and Google, he announced the Palm Pre, along with this new system called WebOS. You might have heard of it if you have ever listened to this show before. Many things happened, including the complete collapse of Hewlett Packard. And WebOS somehow ended up in the hands of LG, which used it not to make phones, but to put on their TVs. and their whole thing was they needed their own basically TV apps are all

HTML 5 apps. Yeah. So they needed their own stack to run HTML 5 apps. TV World by the still the most fragmented technology landscape in the entire ecosystem. Like phones are like Android and iOS laptops are like MacOS, Windows, a little Linux. TVs are Samsung has Tyson, LG has webOS. A bunch of people have Android from Google. A bunch of people have Android without Google. A bunch of people have Roku.

and then there's like yet more infinity craziness. Vizio runs its own weird thing. So TVs are totally all over the place. They all run basically HTML5 apps. LGWOS does WebOS. Their big thing is they introduced a character. This is a true story, Etsy S called Beanbird. No.

Who is going to help you. This is true. This is real. He's going to help you set up your TV. And the idea was that your TV was too hard to use. And Beanbird would help you. They've held on to this idea. Beanbird may have disused.

disappeared, but the idea that the TV should be more helpful, and LG can help you set it up and then target more advertising to you has persisted. Thank you, LG. So now they've got this thing where instead of doing picture modes, when you turn on your LG TV, it's going to show you images on the screen, and then you can click through them and tell them which ones you like, and then that will adjust your picture settings. And this is going to result.

So it's like going to the eye doctor. Yeah, it's the eye doctor. Which one do you like better? This one or the, like, you go look at the pictures on our site. You can see it. And this is going to result in the most bonkers, insane picture settings on grandparents' TVs of all time. It's going to be so bad. Fully blown out highlights, massive contrast, brightness cranes to oblivion.

It's going to be the worst thing in the world. Like, right now, I'm watching a show I can't talk about yet that's coming out on HBO. It's a beautiful, touching story of a dad and his surrogate daughter. and it is so damn dark. And every day my mom's watching it with me, and she's like, this is dark. I can't see anything. Can we turn the brightness up?

And I refuse to allow it because I've already calibrated her TV. And I'm like, no, this is what they intended. And this is just going to ruin the creator's intent. It's super sad. But it's also, I guess it'll make people happier with their sets. I know that our producer Liam was talking about... Will any of the automatic settings turn off the soap opera effect?

Because I feel like the answer is no. the TV manufacturers have just decided that's how you're going to live unless you go in and change. No, no, they have film mode now. They gave Tom Cruise a mode. Yeah. I hope it shows them a clip

when they're having to select. They're like, which one looks nicer to you? Minions, too, in super fast soap opera mode or not. And I hope they all choose the soap opera mode. I think we're about to learn that, one, LG is collecting a ton of data with this feature.

I mean, LG is the worst offender when it comes to running ads in their TVs. By far the worst. They're going to have the, they're going to be armed in the next meeting with, like, Tom Cruise and Christopher Nolan that people like the soap opera effect. And two, I think we're going to learn that people have just bonkers taste when it comes to picture quality. So they need the reference modes, which they're starting to add. But then they're doing this new thing where people get, I mean, you just think, it's called the personalized picture wizard. And it's going to show you six images and, like, step you through eight times.

And you pick the one you like. And there's AI involved. and a lot of TVs are going to look completely insane. What I don't get is why they don't just set everything in like cinema mode, which is calibrated to be exactly like what the calibration specs for all the people making it do, and then just change the brightness. Because people have bad taste. Yeah, but like don't let them have taste.

All right, Steve drops. Remove options. Just be like, no, you're done. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to charge your mouse on the bottom. I know what's best for you. I'm not asking that. I'm just saying, you know what?

It's supposed to look a little yellow. All right. We should talk about other TVs. It is supposed to look a little. You're correct. Yeah. People want bright and blue. I hate them.

It's exactly what we're talking about. And exactly what Alex is talking about, Samsung with their new TVs, they've got reluminol mode. Now, we've talked about the settings, but this is like a technology that they're building that translates from Latin to return the light that uses Samsung AI, of course,

to dynamically outline the edges. of on-screen elements and rebalance colors. It's supposed to help people with low vision. But as you said, you're going to come to your parents' house and you're going to find out that they have this thing on. And you are going to see something that you have never even imagined could exist on a display.

This is because we're all home from the holidays. We're all dealing with it. But it's there. It never stops. It never goes away. I turn off motion smoothing on a TV that I personally have turned off motion smoothing two years ago. And it just came back. And they denied it. They said, we don't even watch TV. And I said, no, it's back. And reluminow mode is coming. We should talk about this wireless

LG TV. This makes no sense to me. So it's super expensive. It has a breakout HDMI box. So you mount the TV in your wall. It's got a super thin power cord. And then somewhere else in your room, you plug everything into this box, which then transmits wirelessly to this TV. It's for the aesthetic. I mean, it's a 97-inch screen. We're assuming it will be extremely expensive. the last time LG showed off a concept ago, this TV itself was like $100,000 in the end. I'm just saying if you have the money for the intense concept 97-inch TV

that still needs power. You still have to hide the power cable. Do you not have the money to hide another cable? I think this is like, they're just doing a really nice service for installers who are realistically the people setting these TVs up, right? Like if you're spending the money

to buy a 97-inch TV. for however much this is going to be thousands and thousands of dollars, you're probably paying an installer to come in and install it and make it all look pretty in your house. And this is just nice for those installers, because instead of having to hide a whole bunch of cords, they have to hide a... One cord.

One cord. One cord. And that's one less than Samsung on their old high-end TVs, which had the breakout box and like the fiber optic cord. I'm just confused because didn't we do this already with like all those wide-eye demos we went to 10 years ago? Yeah, but this is bad. I mean, this is, they're sending 4K 120, 30 feet wirelessly, which is insane.

Yeah. The video would have been compressed then. This is uncompressed. Pure. It's processed in the box. The only thing on the screen is the display and no electronics or whatever. It's paper thin, right? I can't wait to see what happens when your kid is like microwaving some hot wings while you're watching a football game.

And it just craps out. Yeah, I don't trust anything wireless as I think our readers now. But I think it's cool. Like, I think if you can bring this, we've started to see Samsung slowly bring this like breakout box idea down into more affordable products. I say more affordable. I mean, like, what was it? The $3,000. The frame TV was on sale for $800.

This last, like, they brought those prices down. If you could do that the same with this, I personally would never do it because I love wires. But for a lot of people, those people who like to put their TV over their fireplace, even though you should never ever do that, this is like a dream come true. But you still have to run power. If you have to run a power cable, you can run one H-DMI cable. Yeah, but what about their Xbox and their PS5? But that cable just you run it into the breakout box, like the frame TV. You connect everything.

So you're just saying we should just have the breakout box. Yeah, I mean, that's what most TVs, they've just eliminated the cable from the TV, the panel to the breakout box. I know. But like, there was a long time where people were like, why do I need cordless headphones? They're bad and stupid. And they still are. And people still love it. We just did an entire episode on Bluetooth, Alex.

I know. And as everyone listening knows, I know nothing about Bluetooth. Nothing. No, I'm just saying like the limitations. I just don't get it. If you have $100,000 to put this TV in your wall and you've got to run power, what does the breakout box get you? One less wire.

One less wire. You can play physical games without getting off. couch. You can have everything, everything you've ever wanted. You can have your physical media archives, but you don't have to get off the couch to change the movie or the game. It's perfect. What could be better? You just have a big tower next to your couch. It's going to be great. The future. We're all still using this. That said, we don't know what the input lag. They won't say what the input lag. Other, we'll just quickly go through some other stuff. Roku announced its own TV line. The only thing I want to point out here, this makes sense, Roku's been making TV's

partnership with TCL for years. Now they're just putting their own branding on TVs. TVs seem like they're going to be one step down from TCL's TVs. They won't talk about specs and that usually means the specs aren't going to be top the line specs, right? Yeah. They'll be cheap. Yeah, they will be cheap.

Chris Welch wrote this up for us. He noted that the person in charge of Roku's TV efforts, former TCL executive Chris Larson, so they're just keeping that in the family. This feels like GM, like some things are a Buick and some things are a Chevy, but they're all the same car. It seems like what's happening with, because Roku's not making the TVs. They're definitely rebranding something. So it's TCL or high sense or whatever. Who knows? My guess is Insignia. Insignia is also rebranded whatever. Damn it. Yeah. Insignia is the best buy house brand, I think. Whatever, whatever they go to, that's who Roku went to. That's your Roku one too.

Speaking of TCL, they've got new branding. They have much higher in specs. And they're totally, they have decided that gamers are their market, which I think is pretty interesting, actually, because I think we have people on this on our staff. We definitely people like this on Polygon staff. The number of people who in the pandemic now have like multiple TVs in their living room so they can game side by side is fascinating to me.

Richard just gave a very knowing look off to the side. There are two TVs behind me for no one. So I think that's fascinating. And then Razor made a sound bar that tracks your head. in the room for, I mean, this is going to sound horrible, but they made a sound bar with IR trackers, like a connect, to figure out where your head is and then do surround sound based on where your head is in the room. Neither of you sound convinced by this.

I had the original Leviathan, and then I broke one of the cords on it, and they couldn't, they were like, no, we don't sell, we don't have replacements for that. I even went to, like, the PR guy. I did, like, the thing that you should never do as a journalist? And I was like, do you know if you guys make these replacement cords? Because I personally want one, and he's like, no, we don't. I can get you one. And I was like, no, I'm not going to take one that you, like, just go and take out of another box. You should just make these.

So I'm over Razor soundbars. Yeah. Well, this one is looking for your head with infrared. Yeah. Even more over this particular one. And it will find you. We actually didn't talk about Samsung. Samsung, as always, announced a ton of TVs.

And Chris Welch, I think, dropped this story into Slack when he was done right. He was like, this is an Eli's nightmare. Samsung is like all in on AI picture tricks, all in on remapping STR to HDR content, all in on more processing enhancements. Just in general, we've like hit the point where the panels are all pretty good. And so now all the effort to differentiate the panels is happening on the back end in software. And I would say, well, it's just correct.

This feels like my nightmare because it's all just weird processing tricks across the board. Turn it off off. is just show me the movie as it was intended to be seen. Please. What if we didn't do that? Auto-HDR remastering uses AI deep learning technology to analyze and apply real-time HDR effects on standard dynamic range content on a scene-by-scene basis. It's like, uh...

I don't want that. I really don't want you to do that. But people love really bright pictures. We'll see how it goes. Samsung now is like everywhere, right? They're making standard LCDs. They're making micro-LEDs. and they're making OLEDs.

Yeah, they're like just a full sack. Yeah. Are they good? Do you want to own one for more than a year? Remains to be seen. Here's my question. Is this final, like I have a early, I think a B7, B6, LG, OLED. It's totally fine.

You think this is the year? This is the year. Because I have a B7 and I don't want to be alone when I go and upgrade mine, so do it, Neil. Welch gave you the reason. He gave you the reason to get the new one this year. The one thing that we haven't talked about, what if they had a software upgrade that was good? There's something that changed in WebOS that he does like the way the notifications pop up.

Oh. So not everything is bad or the worst. And some of the ASTMI 2.1 features, maybe they'll even work this year. Yeah. We'll have hope. I have hope. You got to at least wait for QD OLED to like actually spread out. Like so far it's just Sony with their highest end model, which I know they bought from LG display.

but not even LG is making a TV with QD OLED yet. I would wait for that. I'm just going to get a reference monitor. Yeah, it's just like this TV is definitely good enough. And I mostly watch like ultra-compressed streaming content. Like, you know? It's fine. All right.

Alex put together a Plex server of only the finest uncompressed blueberry ribs. I got you. You're going to be watching Big Bunny for hours. Will they all be from the 1930s? Probably. We, the public domain. with Alex Krantz. Very good.

Look, there was a bunch of other CS display stuff. Samsung had a bunch of rolly, foldy displays, lots of prototypes. Hard to talk. Dell's 6K? Oh, yeah. Actually, a bunch of people came at the display, XDR, Dell and Samsung. Samsung 5K display. Dell had the 32-inch 6K.

That's pretty cool. It's neat to see a little competition in there. Like I said, CS is display show. So go look at the site. it's hard to talk about displays, especially go look at all the Samsung prototypes because they're cool as hell. They're just not products.

And I think the TV market is super mature. Yeah. Like the answer is like if you want a TV, you're not waiting for anything better right now. Like you might as well, which is how I justify all multi-thousand-dollar purchases. It's going to be a huge game changer next year. You need the new TV because it will have the NFT app store.

We're going crypto this year. That's my goal. I'm going to sell all of you tokens. We're going to do this together. We're not going to let We're not going to let the Fire sale on FTX tokens Go stock up Richard

Well once the marketplace is reopened And we can access things We're having a little problem But it'll be fine All right Like I said See S the display show Lots of TV news

Chris Welch has done an amazing job If you want all the details And the stuff Go read his coverage Go look at the TikToks And displays folding We've got to take a break We can come back

There's still more There's desktop There's laptops I'm sure Richard Will find a way To make that about crypto too. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer.

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I'm not. Had a little. But just... A little vodka. Talking about gadgets in Vegas for long enough, you get a little... Takes you to a place. Get a little tipsy. Get a little out there.

Suddenly you're just smelling cigarette smoke and you don't know why. I've had a great time. I got a text from an unnamed former colleague. And all it said was, I'm jonesing for a jewel. And I realized that I was, and I have it in years. And it's just, I think my body expects nicotine in early January. Yeah. Because of C.S.

It's just gotten used to it. It's just, this is when you smoke, bro. Like, where are we at? Liam's just vaping furiously. That's horrible. Don't vape. Kids, don't listen to us. Turn this off.

Get out of your car and run away from us. AMD announced a bunch of stuff. Alex, take us through it. Yeah, they announced a lot of stuff. AMD, this is kind of a big show for them. And they usually save some really big stuff for it. One of the big things they announced is like a really fast mobile GPU. The RX 7600 M.

It's expected this year in 2023. And they're promising basically Nvidia 3060 desktop performance. in a laptop, which is like really, really nice. We're not quite at like 4K, 100 frames per second, but we're definitely at that for 1080P, which is what a lot of laptops are at right now. So this is like going to be pretty fast. It's a nice bonus,

but we don't know what that power consumption is going to look like and just how much battery life these things are going to crush. I predict a lot. Yeah. AMD's gotten a lot better. at this, but they're still not, like, they're not Apple. Apple is just schooling everybody when it comes to power and performance, but... But not necessarily in the GPU side. Yeah, but I mean, kind of even in the GPU side, right? Like, it's not at the same level. An Apple GPU is not going

to ever give you the same performance, or an Apple chip isn't going to give you the same performance as one of these discrete graphics chips, but it's still, like, the power consumption is still going to be problem. This is still probably not going to be a 10-hour laptop. Right. I mean, I hope it is, but I highly doubt it. And then the other big news was new CPUs, all, yeah, new mobile processors. This is, they've got, including one that's got a 16 core chip, which isn't quite as many as one of the newer Intel mobile processors, which has a 24 core chip. And it's very, but it is very funny because these guys are still talking about cores and apples over here being like, no, we don't even have to talk about that anymore.

We've moved beyond that. Like, sorry, I'm just, I'm using AMD time to stand about Apple, and I feel really bad about it. But the Apple... You're going to call that for this. I am. But the processors are good. Well, I mean, it's interesting what they're doing here, because it's only 16 cores, but it's not like Intel's kind of big little arm style approach they're using on the new chips.

Like, they're all 16 are all big cores, I guess. Or like two, it's like two full eight-core chips squeezed into one is what it's described it. Yeah, yeah, I think we're starting to, I think what we're starting to see and we're going to continue to see is that AMD has gotten a lot of work out of infinity fabric, right? Like they've gotten a lot of play over the last six years out of infinity fabric, which is to let them to just bolt GPUs and CPUs together, just bolt core after core after core onto these processors and get a lot of power. And everybody else has really started to pivot in this other direction, this big little core. and AMD is doing a little bit of that too across the board, but they're a little behind. I'm kind of worried. I know a number of people have talked to Lisa Sue, the CEO, being like, are you guys falling behind again?

Are we about to see, are we going to get another bulldozer in a year or two? And obviously she's saying, no, they're not going to drop the ball catastrophically. And we're seeing a lot of work, like, good work in that mobile space, right? Like the Steam Deck uses an AMD processor. And their laptops have gotten a lot better, but they still got a lot of catching up to do. I would say they're still better than Intel for the most part. Like, these processors are still going to be faster if you can find them in a product than the Intel processors. But a lot of people are really going, no, I want something that is fast and has really good battery life.

I don't necessarily care about having the fastest thing in the world in a mobile chip. And how will they find it with these names? Yeah. Because I feel like we haven't gotten enough credit. They changed the naming scheme for the processors this year. Oh, my God. You don't like the names? So everything is a 7,000 series this year, and then the third number tells you how good it is, and not the first number like it used to be.

Yeah. Like you have to read a chart to figure out what the numbers mean now. Yeah, everything is a, I'll just read for Monica's post here. The potential star of the show is the quote, Dragon Range Zen 4, Risen 9, 7945 HX. This is their new naming stuff. I mean, that's the way they've always done it, though. Yes. I'm pretty sure this is the same naming scheme, right?

They've always had the first numbers the generation. They changed the, it's always been numbers like this, but they changed the way that the numbers go. It's still four letters, and then it's still four numbers and then a letter. But the first number is the portfolio year. So it's seven this year for 2023. The second number is market segment. So like the most powerful ones are nine. One is the one that you shouldn't buy.

The third number is the Zen architecture. so like one, two, or three. And then the fourth number is, I don't know what that fourth number is. I don't know. Feature isolation. I'm done. I've got nothing.

It's a five. Yeah. It's deeply confusing. The good news is the people who buy the chips directly to install in PCs directly will figure it out, right? If you're out there just like buying bare CPUs, you're going to figure this out. Maybe.

AMD had some problems with the wrong names on their CPUs during the press conference. as Tom Warren noted. They repeatedly called them the wrong thing. So what's driving the laptop you get no assurance? So AMD itself, but hopefully by the time they arrive on store shelves or your favorite online retailer, they'll be charts, whatever. It's the companies. It's the OEMs need to figure this out and then market the chips appropriately.

At the same time, I think, is this AMD chip faster than that Intel chip? Impossible for the regular person to know at this moment in time, especially to Alex's point about that. Well, impossible to even test. Yeah. Like, for the mobile chips, it's kind of, it's a toss-up. Because you can't do just an apple to apples. Nobody's going to be making the exact same laptop and just switching out processors anymore. Yeah, that said, enough of the laptops at CS are basically using the same chips and the same, like, the features that we're competing on.

Which very much echoes the TV conversation. Like, everything has gotten to a place of, like, being good enough from samey enough that we're now differentiating on absolutely bonkers features. which brings me. Sorry, I just, I can't be talking about rising chips when Lenovo was out there. Lenovo's a bunch of stuff. Lenova has a new think book with modular accessories, like an LTE module,

webcam light, all this other stuff. Cool new all in one with like a really neat stand. They made a phone, the think pad phone, which, none of this matters. The only reason that we're doing this show today is the EOBA book, my guy. Not the Eying tablet. They're weird Kindlescribe that no one will buy except for Alex.

It's the yoga book 9. eye, which is a dual screen laptop that has a stand that lets you stand both screens up in portrait configuration. Oh, yeah. And then like a removable keyboard that comes with it. And then just you got to watch the video. Go watch the video. Monica is like over the moon about this thing.

It looks so cool. It looks like two iPads. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited because we've been seeing this exact like concept for years. For a while, you couldn't go to a single meeting with AMD or Intel without them showing off a concept like this and being like, dual screens are coming. Microsoft was doing it too.

Everybody would have these big meetings. And they would show off this exact concept, but janky as hell. And this is like slightly less janky. Dual 13.3 inch OLED touch screens. It's coming. You can actually buy it. Extremely weird vertical stand. This thing is so like, I just like watch this video.

Watch this video to a slight remove. You've all seen Monica. You've watched her review video. She's been on the show. She's so captivated by this thing that she's like, check out this easy 10-finger swipe. It's like, I don't know about that. It's great. The thing looks amazing.

This is like why CS exists is this laptop. I can't wait to buy one. I'm 100% going to buy one and then realize that I have no need for this at all and not use it. But just look at the configurations. Are you going to return it? Like, do we need to just time how long it takes you to return it? Yeah, I mean, I'm going to have it. You just like, look at it.

You can put the, you can open it and then have both screens in portrait. So you like turn it sideways. So you can read like a magazine. Yeah, or like one full screen Slack and one full screen dock and the keyboards in front. You can swipe the, you can, and when the bottom screen is the keyboard, you can swipe the keyboard down to have keyboard in the front. and then you get a variety of status indicators that Lenovo thinks are important, but which are not important.

It's so good. It's haptic, so it feels like you're typing when you're typing? Yeah, there's no way that a laptop-sized touchscreen keyboard is going to feel good with its haptics. $2,100. 13th gen Intel Core, I said. Wamp, blub.

16 gigs of RAM, though. And it's going to ship in June as a pen. This is the future. Whatever E-Inc nonsense you think, you love it. I think the most exciting thing about, it is that the case and the pin and the keyboard are included. Yeah. That was the part.

I was like, done. It's a steel. How can you afford not to buy a Lenovo? Yeah. Instead of $2,500, it's $2,000 for everything. I can't even get the name right. I'm so excited about it. How can you not buy a Lenovo Yoga Book 9-E?

In the market for a Bluetooth keyboard? Have you considered the Lenovo Yoga Book 9-I? Which comes with a full laptop with a dual 13.3 introlets. I want it so badly. It's like when I'm like, I kind of miss not being at C.E.? like the sensation of walking into a hotel suite that has been arranged to display hundreds of laptops and like weird breakout boxes for TVs. Like I can smell that room.

You can smell that coffee. You can smell that coffee. Yeah. Yes. That one light little fruit salad in the corner kind of getting a little old. It's beautiful. No, whatever. It's a fruit salad.

I just, I'm envisioning getting on a plane with this and pulling out my dual stack OLEDs in front of me that reach above my. head. Yeah. And I'm no. No, first what you do is you walk you walk up and down the aisle of that plane, finding the one dude with the Samsung Galaxy Fold who's hot shit. Because that person is on every plane now. There's one dude with a stylist in a Galaxy Fold who's like, oh, ho ho, right? And then you, then you pull out your yoga book, just full vertical unfold. You throw your keyboard in his lap. You start typing with your foot while you hold that thing up like a scroll. Don't even sit down.

If I'm ever going to get kicked off a plane, that's how I'm going out. I'm not doing any of this, like, comfort animal stuff. I'm doing old-timey navigator, one foot in the air on a keyboard, holding up a double-stack OLED display. All right, that's enough. Other, do you want to talk about this Kindle scribe? I mean, it's better than the Kindle scribe because it actually lets you do more note-taking stuff.

but it's also worse in that it doesn't have an app store. It runs Android, but it doesn't have an app store. You can't side load a lot of image types, a lot of book types. It's very, very hamstrung. It's very clearly meant less for people who want to read and more for like people who used to buy the Sony e-paper tablets or it just lets you do markups of PDFs. That's who this is for.

And so like, cool, maybe it'll bring the price down on these no-taking devices. Lenovo's been playing around with E-E-ink for a really long time. I love that they're doing like an all-E-ink device, but I probably won't buy one. I'd love to review one. Lenovo, call me. Are you going to look at the ThinkWit Plus, which has a color E-ing screen on the back of a regular display

and you can swivel it around? Yeah, well, they've been doing that for a while, but now it's just color. This is the year for color E-ink. No, but now you can spin it around. It's on a swivel screen. You could do it before? Yeah, they had one with a swivel, I'm pretty sure.

Because they had the original ones, which was like the, like, it was a dual screen and you opened it up. And one side was e-ink and the other was color. But then at one point they're like, okay, we're just going to have a swivel. And you can just decide which screen you want to use. If the next time I see you, you're not trying to operate the verge on a color e-ink, think that. I'm being very disappointed. I got some work to do. I'll call you guys later.

Bye. I love the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook because it is a Chromebook with R.G.P. keys. I am 1,000% buying one of these from my parents. I love Monica's just like, but why? Yeah, Monica refused to count it. It's like the difference between her excitement over the yoga book where she's like, you just got to watch that video.

She's gleeful. She is gleeful to be looking at that laptop. It's infectious. And then she's like, why do these keys let up and no one can answer her? She also pointed out that the HP's elite line is for professionals in the pro line is for consumers. We're just like through, like words have no meaning for Heelopackard at this point. So HP Elite.

You can only be elite if you have a job. Enterprise, professional products. HP Pro for consumers. Very good. Buying a computer with your own money. Yeah. Not elite. Not elite.

But pro. It's real pro move. I'm super into this. I'm, I bought my parents a Chrome. Famously brought my parents of Chromebook years ago. It was the Chromebook pixel, the $1,000, first Chromebook, and it is now end of life. They got a message while I was home saying that it would receive no more software updates,

which is hilarious because it's just Chrome. So you've got to get the new one. It's years, so I've got to get them a new one. I can't get them on a pixel book. That's a way step down from a Chromebook pixel. And now you can buy them to HP Dragonfly proletariat. Yeah, I'd be like, you're a gamer now, Mom. It's like rainbow keys going.

It's going to be great. Any of my laptop stuff we should talk about? Should we talk about the Razor Edge? It's cool. Like, I mean, this is, Razor's been doing a lot of work over the years with making mobile phones. And they've been doing a lot of work over the years with making controllers that you can plug into mobile phones. And then they said, what if it's all one thing and we work with Verizon to sell it? Yeah.

And it's got 5G. Who doesn't have 5G? And that's exactly what I was missing from the Steam Deck was the ability to buy it on contract from Verizon. Yeah. 360 bucks. Wi-Fi only is 399. Think about that. Just, I mean, what a deal.

I'll go with the steam deck. I'm going to stick with the steam deck for right now, especially with Stadia dying in a couple of weeks. I just think it's very funny that the pricing here is like old school phone contract pricing. Yeah. So the Wi-Fi-only model costs $3.99. 5G model without a contract, $5.99. But if you sign the Verizon contract, $359.

See? Done. The math is like, this is how much Verizon is soaking you for. It's $200. So good. It's pretty good. I don't know. It kind of looks like a Nexus 7.

Every time I look at it, I'm like, it's a Nexus 7. It's a Fablet. The Fablet is back and Razor Reser resurrected the Fablet and said, what if you stuck it in between two sides of controllers and had something for all of your cloud gaming? So if you don't already have a Steam deck and you don't already have one of the other many like mobile PC handhelds right now, this is an interesting option. I think the big test here is really overrised since now.

can actually do cloud gaming like this, and we'll see. All right, we got to take a break. We come back. We got a little bit of a CS lightning round. It's not over yet. You're still in Vegas with us. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Upwork.

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Lightning round. Ready? Yes. Let's go. Let's go. All right. Delta and T-Mobile making in-flight Wi-Fi free if you have SkyMiles. Sounds great.

Also, if you just knew anybody with a T-Mobile fund number, you could have typed in that number for years, which I now feel comfortable disclosing. But it was weird before. It was like some flights it was like that, and in some flights it would not have that. So now it's just going to be all flights free, whatever. But there's this thing called Delta Sync.

They're not giving you this thing for free. They are going to target ads at you on this network somehow. They're talking about personalization, which is code for targeted ads. and as we know ISPs, mobile carriers in particular love to do weird ad targeting stuff,

love to collect data in weird ways. I just want to read these terms of service before this thing goes left. That's all I'm saying. Do they say how fast it'll be? It's supposed to be fast enough for streaming because it's via sat. It's not the old go-go stuff.

Okay. So we'll see. Delta's also doing a test with Starlink, I think. A bunch of airlines are testing Starlink on the side. But I'm just, I'm flagging this one because free in-flight Wi-Fi

is great, cool, whatever. When you add when you just like throw the word personalization into the mix, I'm like, oh, they're going to do some weird ad targeting. Yeah, think about what you're

what you're using that Wi-Fi for. Don't, don't go to certain places with this Wi-Fi. Also because kids are around. Also because you're on a plane, Alex. I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen. I've watched people just like

load up on their phone. I'm like, okay. We were flying home from Chicago. And Becky was like, oh, don't worry, darling is on the plane. I might watch that. like, no, you should not watch that on this plane right now. Not the place.

There's a new version of Chi, the wireless charging protocol, Chi. It's called Chi 2. Our reviews editor, Nathan Edwards, is so excited about this. Sean Hollster, ridiculously excited about this. Basically, what's happened here, unsurprisingly, there was Chi, the wireless standing, the wireless charging protocol. Apple took it, forked it into MagSafe. Put some magnets on it.

Put some magnets on it. did the coils, did some authentication stuff to charge at a faster rate, but still back compatible with Chi. And now Apple says, we're going to give the magnet stuff to Chi. That's going to form the basis of Chi 2. It'll allow for non-flat connectors, i.e. a watch. Very exciting all the way around. The magnets still will not be strong enough to hold up a phone, which is a huge miss. Just a huge miss for those of you like me who are addicted to buying car chargers for your phone. and unclear whether Che2 will be back compatible with MagSafe as it currently exists. So some bits and bobs here, but it looks like Apple decided that MagSafe,

which is like more or less not a success. It's a success in that it exists in the Apple ecosystem. And nobody adopted it. And people, like, you can buy accessories for it. But the magnets are too weak to do anything particularly interesting. It's just, it's weird. Like my favorite magsafe accessory is a little puck that I bought to mount by my bathroom mirror so I can watch TV in the morning while brushing my teeth. Does it work?

It's awesome. It rules. I highly recommend you spend $15 on a magsafe puck to mount next to your bathroom mirror so you can open YouTube in the morning. You're a YouTube TV in my case. It's great. Just do it. Richard doesn't look excited about that. I'm just confused.

I guess I'll find out in use now because now on Android we'll find out what a safe life is like. It's one of those things where because it's only been on iPhone, like, I've heard about it. I'm like, oh, that sounds cool. But I've never actually used it to find out what it doesn't do and like where the shortcomings are. It just doesn't do a lot. It's a wireless charging thing with weak magnets. But what is true is that every iPhone now has magnets built into the back of it. So other companies can make stronger magnets for things like mounts in cases, which are neat.

Yeah. But the combination of I want strong magnets, 15 watt wireless charging. in something that doesn't look totally ugly has eluded every, and you need to be certified by Apple. That you can't, you can't have all the things. Nobody's cracked that one. Nobody's pulled it off.

So we're getting there. I think the big question here is whether Chi-2 with magnets will be back compatible with MagSafe because I think the answer might be no. There's some shadiness there. A bunch of smart home stuff. It's a big year for matter. It's the year for matter.

It's the year for matter. It's, I would say matter has not, gotten off to a raging start. Apple had to pull it, right? Remember they did the update for iOS? It didn't go well and they pulled it. But there's new bridges. There's new Eve.

Yeah, I mean, so Jen's at the show. We're going to talk to her a bunch next week about this next Wednesday. But she says she's just seeing matter everywhere. She's seeing it. Everybody's like, hey, I have a new refrigerator with matter in it. A new TV. With matter. Like everybody, that's how they announce.

They announce all the stuff and they're like, and matter. So she's seeing just everywhere on the show floor right now. So the thing I'm really excited about is there's this new Phillips Hugh app that you can get on Samsung TVs and it will let you sync all of the lights on the back of your TV. If you put Phillips Hugh lights on the back of your TV, it'll let you sync it with all the content without having to go through a breakout box. But because they still want money, you have to pay $130 for the app. app. That's pretty good. You don't know if you can take that app with you when you, if your TV dies and you get a new TV,

well, you have to pay another $130. There's a bunch of questions about this. Also, like, why not just make Samsung pay for the technology and be like, hey, look, if you plug your Phillips hue lights into the new Samsung TVs, you can automatically sync. Yeah. There's just like a bunch of. Or you can go buy any number of GoV kits on Amazon for like 50 bucks. accomplishes.

But the Govi tip tips, you have to have like a camera pointed at your TV. This, you don't have to have anything pointed at it. You don't have to worry about like, oh,

I really need this to go through HTML 2.1 so that I can get the, and the box only does H.DMI 2.0. You don't have to worry about any of that. You can just be like, go.

It works for all the different apps on your TV and everything. So any like input to your TV, it does it. Yeah. But it's a $130 app. Right. That's where you lose me.

I understand the points you're making. I'm like the Govi kids like, 50 bucks you point a camera at your TV call today. Yeah. No more computers required. It's very exciting and very stupid. I love it.

Jen also covered the weird wooden plank matter controller. This is the thing I'm most excited about with matter. At the end of the day is now you can make different kinds of smart home controllers because they can talk to everything. So she was like, here's a cutting board. You can mount on the wall to turn your light sun and off. And I was like, yeah, I'm in it. Like, this is what we need. It's going to be good.

Exactly what we need. And lastly, we should talk about this Withings P sensor. You just stick it in your toilet and pee on it. And it tells you what your metabolism is doing. It's great. People really care about the P sensor. Yeah, I will say that the P sensor did remarkable traffic. Here's a line from this story written by Victoria.

It sounds relatively simple, but Withings is very serious about P. It took four years and 13 patents, but you don't have to do anything until it's time to recharge the reader or switch out cartridges. is the reader, the P-reader that you put in your toilet, USBC, my friends. Oh, yeah. We had a really long conversation about this in the editing process, because I just had all the questions. I was like, well, like, do you have to touch it all the time? Like, are you having to, like, reach down there and touch the P-Puck before to test it? And no, you don't.

You stick it in there. There's some cartridges. It comes with some gloves. So if you want to hold on to those gloves. Do you have to save the gloves between cartridge changes? I don't think you do. I think that's just like a polite thing. And the idea is anytime you pee on it, it'll detect it and do a test.

So sometimes you may have to like do some shifting to make sure you're not peeing on it if you don't want to test. Because it has like 100 cartridges. It's like 100 days of pee tests. We're not going to talk about the number one smart home story that at least surprise me. The shower pods, the colder. Wait, before we go on the shower pods, can I just read you this quote about data collection in the GDPR compliance of the P sensor? Yes. And this is a quote.

It's our company guideline not to allow anyone to look at that data. We still need to look at the details regarding law enforcement. Just don't let the cops look at my pee, dude. Don't show them my urine, please. Very good. All right, Richard, what was your number one? The number one surprise. People could not get enough of this story.

The shower pods are here to turn your bathrooms into a spot. They've got aromatherapy, shower infusion system. Apparently, more than magsafe when you're brushing your teeth, this is what the people need. I don't know. I didn't quite get it, but the girls would get it. This is for all the people who can still smell things. Yes. Kohler loves doing gadgets at CS.

Like, loves. Loves it. I think last year they did like a $10,000 toilet. For a plumbing company, they got big tech ambitions. They do. I mean, this is just, they're pods. You know, it's like a cure aromatherapods and like a shower that takes for pods. There's not a lot of tech.

And probably a subscription package for your shower. Like, I see the meth now. Yeah. Yeah. They're going to sell you more pods. Here's a quote from their press release. Kohler says the pods are safe to use on your entire body, which it's a shower. Has a lot of people asking questions this should be answered by my teacher.

You can watch every bit. Yeah, like if there was something that I assumed from the jump, it was, is this shower safe for my entire body? Very good. Who's making the pods that aren't safe for your entire body is what I want to know. That's what, right, the illegal pods. Yeah. Don't buy those illegal pods, people. I need to get into the Discord with somebody just making bootleg pods on their own.

Yeah, these pods burn me. Here's your business model, Richard. The design of the Spriggs shower pods are color-specific. We'll see if there's actual software DRM, but right now, right? The pods are a shape. They have to fit in the thing. $21 for a six-pack of single-use pods. Wow.

$24 for a single multi-use pod with eight uses. A multi-use pod with eight uses. do the math there. How many, how many, what constitutes a use? All I'm saying is they're going to charge you about $3 per shower, no matter which way you're going, $21 for six single use pods, $24 for multi-use pod that can be used eight times. Do you think the showerhead stops working if you don't have a pod in there?

Like you just aren't allowed to be clean. That's when it starts burning you, Alex. Or if there's a software update because someone's hacked the pod system? It's like warning, this is no longer safe for you. entire body, but we're not telling you where. Surprise. Enjoy the Collar Corporation. It's true that this is one of our top stories from this entire CS, and I appreciate all

of you for reading about the shower pods. One of my favorite headlines of all time was a Paul Miller, Ashley, Carmen, joint. I think Paul had the byline, but I think Ashley actually came up with the headline. It was just the word tortilla pods in all capital letters. And it was the whole story. Like, no further explanation. And it was like a startup.

selling a pod system to make tortillas. It's a very good headline. And all of the comments were like, you can just make tortillas. This is a deeply solved problem. Very good. Well, pods are back, everyone. CS is rocking and rolling.

There's tons of news on the site. I'm, like I said, I'm feeling I have the fomo. There's a part of me that's, for my own health. I'm happy I'm not there. It's bad to be there. It's bad to be in love. It's bad for you. But I miss our team.

I miss gadgets. I miss hotel rooms and the coffee smell. I still got the CES funk despite not being there. I miss walking out of Lenovo briefing believing in my heart that eight and ten finger gestures on a dual screen 13.3 inch OLED laptop is like the future of all computing. Like I feel that. But don't worry. There's more CS to come. They're on the show floor today, tomorrow.

They're wrapping up through the weekend. Alex, you said we've got more show to come. especially with Jen about matter. Yes. Jen and Chris and Andy, we're going to be chatting a bunch next week. It's going to be great. Very good.

All right, I got to go keep reading CS coverage. I can't stop. It's all on the site. I'm in the comments because I'm off Twitter. So you just find me in the comments of random verge articles, which I think is terrifying our reporters. Just like getting into fights in the comments articles. I should stop it.

But I'm here for you. Find me. You can tweet at us. You can tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. Alex is Alexa. Cranz. Richard is at RJCC.

I do check the replies every couple of days, so I might throw you a like if you hit me on Twitter. And you can find us on The Verge. We'll be back on Wednesday with more CES coverage. That's it. That's for Thecass. We're back on. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed. by Amanda Rose Smith.

Our editorial director is Brooke Mentors, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.