The Vergecast - Elon Musk buys 9.2 percent of Twitter / OnePlus 10 Pro review / QD-OLED monitors and TVs

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Verge managing editor Alex Cranz leads this week's show with Dan Seifert, Liz Lopatto, and Allison Johnson to discuss Elon Musk buying stock in Twitter, Allison's review of the OnePlus 10 Pro, and the newest monitors and televisions in 2022. Further reading: Elon Musk buys 9.2 percent of Twitter amid complaints about free speech Twitter will appoint Elon Musk to its board of directors Twitter is adding an edit button  Elon Musk tweeted his way onto Twitter’s board — now what? What Elon Musk could mean for Twitter OnePlus 10 Pro review: settling in The OnePlus 10 Pro is the best phone I won’t recommend to most people Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 and S8 Plus review: welcome to the S ecosystem Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra review: when bigger isn't better Alienware’s QD-OLED monitor sets a new standard for gaming displays It’s hard to believe Samsung’s new matte The Frame is actually a TV I saw Samsung’s first-ever QD-OLED TV, and it’s impressive The real Magic Mouse is made by Logitech, not Apple Great Scott! DeLorean sets a date for its electric resurrection (again) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Tap in with us. Hello, and you are listening to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Edit button. I'm your host for today, Alex Cranes. Milai is clearly not here, as you know, because you're hearing me talk. But don't worry, we've got some great people here. Dan Seaford is here, talking about phones. Hello. We got Liz Lapato here to talk about edit buttons, right, Liz? That's it. Nothing else happened. Yeah, I'm certainly not talking about Elon Musk again. No, we're definitely just going to be here to talk about the Twitter

edit button. That's the biggest news of the week. Nothing else happened this week. Very, very quiet week. We've also got Allison Johnson is going to be on the show later today. We're going to talk about the one plus 10 pro. She reviewed it. That's going to be really exciting. But first, Liz, how's Elon doing? Well, I feel like Elon has made some real strides for the shit posting community in that, you know, he's now invited himself to the Twitter board. So for those of you who haven't been paying a ton of attention to Twitter, which I don't blame you, it's a strange place. Elon Musk has been one of its power users for quite some time, so much so that Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter C. has said that he's like the ideal Twitter user, which I would just like you to ponder in silence for a second.

All right. So the ideal Twitter user should like threaten people and promise subs? And break federal laws. And break federal laws? Yeah, pretty much. Listen, I, you know, long time listeners will remember that I was at the Elon Musk defamation trial for tweeting about how one of the guys involved in the cave rescue in Thailand, was a pedophile. And in that sense, I suppose, Elon was ahead of the curve because now it seems like a lot of people are out here calling each other pedophiles. So thanks, Elon.

No, so he filed some paperwork indicating that he'd bought, I think, 9% or maybe 9.2% of Twitter. He's been complaining about, like, free speech, basically, saying that, like, too much stuff gets removed. And your friend and mine, Casey Newton, who is a sole proprietor of his own newsletter, has written a little bit about something that stuck with me, which is that people actually seem to like moderated platforms. And TikTok success is partially because of that. It's most moderated platform. And it's also like Facebook's biggest competition. And Twitter's like way kind of, like, to be clear, a lot of us are on Twitter. Everybody on this podcast is on Twitter.

A lot of our listeners are on Twitter. We are the minority. The vast majority of the world is not on Twitter and never has been. They're on something reasonable. They're on some other reasonable platform that is not for people who have internet brainwurbs. And, you know, Godspeed to them. I personally, I embrace my brainworms that I've gotten from using Twitter all these years. What I don't get is, like, did Elon do this because, you know,

He really wants to just bring shit posting into the mainstream. Like, was this like an advocacy purchase on his part? Or was he just like, I got money to burn? So long time Elon followers will remember that he can be somewhat whimsical in his use of money. So you may remember he couldn't buy the onion, which he's a fan of. And so he created his own sort of satirical thing called thud and then pulled the plug on it like right after it launched. Just hit with a thud. That's right.

You know, Elon's got this whole history with Twitter from, you know, his SEC violations from saying he was going to take Tesla private funding secured, except it wasn't. And, you know, threatening journalists occasionally sometimes stealing memes. And so as a practical matter, you sort of start to wonder, like, well, what does this mean? And, you know, Twitter spokesperson, Adrian Zamora, has said that Twitter is committed to impartiality in development and enforcement of its policies and rules and the day-to-day operations and decisions. are made by Twitter management and employees. And I will see. I will see. I don't know.

I feel like I was seeing a lot on Twitter of various Twitter, like higher-ups, kind of feeding the Elon frenzy, like promising him an edit button. That's right. So Elon, of course, is already trolling on Twitter. And he has polled to ask if Twitter should add an edit button. And then the CEO of Twitter has said that the poll will have important consequences. So it does suggest that there's like some sort of something going on. And then Twitter came out later. It was like, by the way, we've already been working on the edit button. This has

nothing to do with Elon. This is cloud chasing. All of that. Sure. See. You know, I do think it's interesting that the platform's like top shit poster has the keys to the castle. And like he joined the board as part of a standstill agreement saying that he isn't going to buy more than I think 14% of Twitter, which we'll see. I mean, we already know that my guy kind of takes a dim view of some of these agreements, especially with ones with the SEC, so we'll see how that works. But, like, I also think that, like, part of what's fun here, fun, I'm sorry. Like, I don't know.

Big air quotes on that fun. Fun is that he's managed to do this in such a way that he's also managed to basically give a middle finger to the SEC because this is, like, fun with corporate forums with Liz Lapato. I love it. I'm here for it. If you are an activist shareholder, like for instance, Elliott Capital Management, who got involved with Twitter last year and was part of the reason why I think Jack Dorsey is no longer CEO.

And you've bought into Twitter because you want to do some cool shareholder activism. You fill out a form 13D in which you disclose what your purpose is. But if you're a large institutional investor from, like, I don't know, Black Rock or something like that, and you're just like going to have like a passive stake, you fill out a full form 13G. And so Musk initially files a 13G, and then the same day he filed paperwork to join the board. And like, I can't speak to like Elon Musk's mind because, um, I can't. Yeah. I don't know. Like maybe that was an honest mistake. Shit happens. I do know that he has previously tweeted that SEC is an acronym and the E stands for Elon's. I know that he's gone on 60 minutes to inform us.

he doesn't respect the SEC, and like he's certainly beefed with them about what he can and cannot say on Twitter, because part of his settlement around the go-private thing was that he was going to run material tweets by a Twitter sitter, like a lawyer, you know? Yeah. And then he didn't, and the SEC went to court, and then, like, the judge was like, this is stupid. You guys figure it out. And so they've sort of been, it's been kind of in a lull for whatever. You know, so I wrote about that. And then, like, after I wrote about it, he refiled with a form 13. the activist form. And we saw when his buys were. And it seems the 13G seemed to be late. And the 13D suggested it was very late.

And so, you know, like, again, like, I don't know lawyer stuff. Well, I mean, like, even just this week, we saw another instance of where, like, SpaceX has to go completely redo a permit because they didn't do the paperwork right the first time. So it sounds like a lot of his companies struggle. with doing paperwork appropriate in proper fashion. You know, and again, like people are getting it mad, but I'm kind of sympathetic to this because I also have trouble with the DMV. But I mean, one of the things that the amended filing proved, as our local favorite Matt Levine points out, is that he definitely should have filed earlier because that new filing shows

when he was buying each day. So he started buying at the end of January. And then had 5% by March 14th, at which point he should have filed a form. buy like, I think March 24th. And then went on buying and then later filed his form. What I keep wondering is like, Twitter for the most part, has not been a good buy, right? Like, it's stock is just done fine. It's not a stock you buy to make money. Yeah. This is not an investment that's going to take you to the moon. And yet, well, Elon is now buying it. And Elon has like a history of being able to tap into the meme stocks. And it feels like he's trying, like, is this Elon wants an edit button?

Or is this Elon wants billions through meme stock manipulation? Or excuse me, meme stock saviness. I would never want to imply that someone is manipulating the market. So here's the thing. As I think we all discovered with Tesla, which to me is the original meme stock, there are a lot of people who trade on their feelings. And I think that's maybe the most interesting part of both cryptocurrency and the stock market is that like it's people are putting money on their feelings and I can watch it in real time. And, you know, I love that.

And so there's a possibility that he just bought into Twitter because he likes Twitter and that he, I don't know, billionaires have hobbies just like the rest of us and maybe their hobbies are different, right? Yeah. But what did happen is that when he bought in and it was announced that he had gotten in, the shares went up 27%, which I think was the biggest pop Twitter's had since that's IPO,

which is interesting because it is, again, getting absolutely clobbered by TikTok and Facebook and so on. So, okay, this I think puts the SEC in an interesting position because, like, one of the things about Elon Musk brings to a company is a shareholder value, which you can see when he sends the stock up just by buying in. And the SEC's job is to protect shareholders. And so if you remove Musk from the board, then potentially that hurts shareholder value in the stocks fall, right? Right. So if you're the SEC, like, what do you do here? And like, the answer is, I don't know, but I think we're going to find out. But in the meantime, I do wonder if this means we're going to see Twitter moving more towards crypto. Because obviously, one of the other things that Elon Musk can influence by tweeting is the price of something like Dogecoin. Yeah. And you may remember he went on Saturday Night Live. Dogecoin promptly shit the bed. So there's just like a sort of a lot of externalities here to keep track of. So you're saying that like Elon could be going on to Twitter, maybe because he likes it,

maybe because it's like billionaires have hobbies and that's buying into large social media companies. Peter Thiel did the exact same thing repeatedly and has made a lot of money off of it. Like I guess that is a billionaire hobby. Well, Peter Thiel, in fairness, got into Facebook early and before it was public and made more money than God on that. And this is Elon coming in real late and like to kind of a failing platform that he happens to like. Is he going to make more money than God? I don't know.

Liz, I want to ask, we talked a lot about the stock. I'm curious as to like how much of Elon being on the board and like how much is this, can we expect this to influence Twitter's product? Like how much power does he actually have by owning 9.2% and having a board seat? Does, like, the CEO have to, like, do what Elon says now when it comes to, like, adding features or, you know, whatever whim he might happen to have at the moment? I think he's a really important shareholder at this point, right? Like, you don't have to do everything he says, but you do have to keep him pretty happy because, again, if Elon Musk exits the stock, then so do all the meme investors. So, you know, that potentially hurts all the rest of your investors.

And so now, like, this is, like, a question of, like, what do you do to keep Elon happy? which is I think why we're seeing Twitter's CEO helping him troll. Because obviously, like, if Elon is having fun on Twitter.com, then you want to help him have fun on Twitter.com. In terms of product decisions, I actually don't know. The sort of the function of the board is to be, like, kind of like the council of elders or whatever and, like, the CEO's, like, kind of boss. And that's not always true at companies, including Facebook, where, like, Mark has special shares.

so he's always in charge of Facebook and everybody else can fuck off. But Twitter doesn't have dual-class shares like that. It's all the same thing. So there isn't really protection for people who want to remain in control and not listen to Elon on that level. In terms of what the board does, like a lot of it is advisory, a lot of it is high-level strategic stuff. And I do think that having somebody in the room who actually actively uses Twitter

is probably a good thing, because as I think we've all discovered from, like, Twitter's, like, decisions, like, a lot of people who work there just have no fucking clue how the power users use it and mostly don't care. And so, like, you'll do, you know, there was, like, that viral tweet about, like, users trying to get, like, Twitter to stop harassment and Twitter being like, oh, yes, the star button is now a heart. Timeline goes sideways. That's right. So, so there is a world in which having Elon Musk on the board, I do think is a net positive for Twitter, not least because he is someone who has a lot of followers. And one of the things about Twitter that I think is sort of terrible is like, the more followers you accrue and the better at the platform

you are, the more unpleasant the experience becomes, the more likely you are to have people just like drive by hate rating, you know, and like. My God, his notification tile must just be awful. Like his notification. have, like, has he looked at his notifications in years? Yes. He still responds. He replies all the time. It's like, how does he manage this?

Like, I can't handle it, and I have a fraction of a fraction of that following. Yeah, I just, I'm very curious how Elon is managing that many followers as effectively as he does. You would think he has better things to do, but apparently not. I think this is fun for him. I think this is a hobby. And so, like, in that sense, like, I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing that he's on the board. And like the other thing that I'll note is that, you know, as of like last May, consumers had lost more than $2 million in cryptocurrency to scammers that were impersonating Tesla and SpaceX, you know, CEO Elon Musk, right? Yeah.

That the FTC announced that that like in that six-month period, people lost $2 million. There is an ongoing problem of people pretending to be Elon Musk on Twitter to create scans and take people's crypto. So, you know, having actual Elon Musk on the board seems like. like there might be a little more impetus to do something about that, maybe. Yeah. Because I imagine he's not super fond of having scammers and his mentions all the time, pretending to be him and like ripping off his fans. Well, we've talked about the product decisions and how he may or may not affect that

and stuff that the board is doing. But I think the big kind of question is free speech, right? Like Elon has a very different approach to speech moderation online than Twitter than most of the established social media platforms. How much of that are we going to see, are we going to see Twitter, like, slowly transform on the moderation front? We could. It's helpful to think, I think, back to PayPal because one of the things that was true at PayPal is that they didn't do a lot of confirmation of customers. And they lost a lot of money trying to acquire customers from scammers because they just weren't doing the kinds of things that one might do to avoid being scammed, essentially.

So there is a possibility that Elon is going to be advocating for the Wild Wild West, you know, with all of this stuff. And like, again, like his first official comment on all of this is, oh, hi, lull, right? Right. Yeah. Like, this is just, he's having a good time. I mean, that's one of the things that, like, that's like the appeal of Elon is that you never know when he's being serious. You never know if he's doing this for like strategic regions or not. And I know a lot of his detractors would say he's, you know.

just a big showman. He doesn't actually have any strategy behind it. I think even Peter Thiel has alluded to that in the past, but there always seems to be a little strategy to what he's doing. He is a billionaire. He has accrued enormous amounts of money. I do think the chaos is a strategy because it keeps people paying attention to him, right? I've been to a lot of events where he's spoken and has said something that people weren't planning for. I'm thinking specifically of the nearer link where he was like, oh yeah, and we're in monkeys now. And one of his chief scientists was like, oh, I didn't know that we were announcing that today. Okay. You know, like, it's, it keeps things exciting. It makes sure that people are paying attention to him because he's unpredictable. He's not

Tim Cook, you know, you kind of know, you kind of know what Tim Cook's going to say before he gets on the stage and it's going to be kind of boring. And like, Elon Musk is definitely not boring. So, you know, if he's, if he's going to do like viral polling and sort of, you know, like weirdo product suggestions. Like that might suck for the CEO of Twitter. I don't know how it's going to work out for us users. But I do think that this is an interesting thing to just kind of keep an eye on. And I think our, again, our friend Casey Newton wrote about this quite well. You know, like it's hard to predict Elon Musk's next action, either because that's a strategic thing that he does or just because he's kind of flying by the seat of his pants, who can tell.

So I think right now trying to be like, oh, well, this means that Twitter is going to be free speech central or this means that Twitter is going to make certain product decisions. Like, I don't think we get to know what this means for a while because it's just impossible to read this man's mind. Yeah, like the edit button, they were working on it. They'd announced they were working on it eons ago. It's like this was pure just fun trolling. Just happened to be like nice. timed. But I do still want to talk about the edit button because I personally am terrified of an edit button on Twitter. Like I just keep thinking of the platforms where you could edit.

Tumblr? Yeah, Tumblr. Like Facebook, I think you could even kind of do it in the very, very early days. And like, do we really want people to be able to go back and edit what they say and one, like disrupt the course of history to some respect, right? Like, that's really bad for historians and people looking back on this stuff for archival purposes. but it's also like you can make people say some really weird stuff with an edit button, I assume. I mean, there's a lot of like technical solutions to all those problems. I mean, whatever Twitter decides to do, like they say that they're rolling this out or we'll be testing it for Twitter Blue users, which is their paid subscription service. So yes, it looks like you're going

to have to pay to have this edit button. But I mean, they could do things like putting a timer on it, so you can only edit within 90 seconds or something. A lot of people want to use edits for fixing typos. and right now the solution is to delete the tweet. So, like, if it had a window that you could edit, just like you can undo emails that you send in Gmail, you can set various, like, 10, 15, 30-second windows. Or maybe they could do, like, a way to show edit history, which I think how Facebook handles it.

I actually used Facebook in a long, long time. But, like, if you make any edits, you can look at the history of it and see the version of, like, what it was before and what it is now. Those would kind of, like, address a lot of those initial, concerns about somebody changing something that's part of a public record. But the other part of the thing that Facebook, or I mean, excuse me, Twitter announced this

week is that, like, Twitter doesn't really care about historical records. Like, you know, they announced this week that, like, when you delete a tweet, it's going to break every single embed of that tweet, which historically did not happen. If a tweet was deleted and it happened to be embedded in an article or another place using Twitter's native embed tools, you would be able to see what the text of that tweet was. Now it's going to be gone. They're using some hacky JavaScript that you can kind of disable and get around it, but most people aren't going to. So most people are just going to see a blank spot there where a formerly deleted tweet was. So like, I don't think

Twitter really thinks or cares that much about historical record. I think it wants people to use its service more ephemerally than archivally. So, you know, it wants people to be uninhibited and speak their mind and share things easily and not feel like it's going to live there forever for them. So it wants shit posters. It wants shit posters. But why doesn't it have a native way to automatically delete your tweets?

Like, they don't serve that. They don't have that feature. So I don't know. Twitter's a weird company to try and figure out its thinking behind. So I gotta say, like, I definitely feel like Elmo and the hellfire here about the edit button. like bring it on like don't like time limit it like don't don't do anything reasonable with it like

this is already yeah this is twitter like it's already chaotic it's a mess like it's a place for like people to like be absolutely wild online and it's like entering the arena and like if that's if that's what we're going to do let's just let's go all the way there like why the fuck not yeah just absolutely blow it up. Well, I think it's going to be very interesting any way we kind of look at it. Like, who knows? Is it going to become the shit posting Supreme? We've said shit posting so many times on this podcast. We are definitely hitting our quota of shit posting mentions. This is what you get when Neely doesn't show up. Nobody stops me from swearing. We're sorry. Nilai is actually going to have to come through and manually bleep out every single one.

That's what he's going to be doing on the plane. Just bleeping them all out. Well, first thing probably us at the same time. I feel sorry for the people sitting next to him on the plane. It's going to be rough. But Liz, thank you so much for coming and chatting. That was my pleasure to be here. Always fun to say hi. Liz is going to go.

We're going to take a break. And when we get back, Allison is going to be here. We're going to talk about the one plus 10 pro. There's a whole bunch of monitor reviews. There's some Samsung tablets. It's going to be fun. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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You reviewed a big phone today. I did. They're all big. Let's be honest. Physically. There are no small phones. anymore and there's no Nilai so we can talk about how good small phones are. Dan is totally outweighed here. We win small phone superiority. Yeah, I will I will say that Allison is the one who

also reviewed the iPhone SE and her main thesis on that was this screen is too small. So I just want to like put that out there. But let's talk about the 1 plus 10 pro, which is a very different phone than the SE. Yes. Okay. It's it's large. But I actually for a big phone, I, I, like how it feels. It has that slightly taller 20 to 9 aspect ratio screen. So it just feels like a little bit nicer in your hand. And that there's tons of things I really like about it, like, personally, but it's really hard to recommend. And it just comes down to two things. It does not work on AT&T 5G. And it never will, apparently. It's like the reverse of the original iPhone. Right. Just you can do only not this carrier. We'll work on Gena 5Sysus when it comes out.

Oh, that's the question, isn't it? That's like, I think a lot of people care. I think a lot of people want to know. I'm going to start asking all the OEMs about Jenna five sis and see. Do you support Gena 5Syses? Yeah. With the straight face. Yeah. Yeah. So it's no, no 5G on AT&T. It'll work. You can use LTE. And it's worth saying that 5G on AT&T and T right now is not that special, but it will get better over the next few years. So that's where that's kind of a major point against the 10 pro.

And that in the camera system is fine, but it's just not, for a flagship phone, it's just not keeping up kind of year on year with when you have the Pixel 6 Pro right there or the Galaxy S22 plus. It kind of sucks to be like, yeah, it's just. fine, it's okay. I feel like for $900 your phone probably needs to be more than fine. Yeah, yeah, I think so. What I thought was so funny was that like, you still really like this phone.

Like, it's not great. But what is, is it just charm? Is there like a charm to the phone? I think maybe. I think it charmed me. Well, first of all, it's green. Instant bonus points. It's scored on a curve now.

I put a plus one right next to the same. score because it's green. It's like a shiny green too. We really miss an opportunity to make a one plus joke, but I'll leave it. Oh, cute. Okay. I'll show myself out. Yeah, it's like this kind of slender form factor.

It has this, the kind of like one plus mystique, I feel like, and I don't know if it's just that I've been reviewing like a thousand Samsung phones, but it just feels really kind of leak and grown-up, the interface. There's not a thousand things pre-downloaded. It feels like a phone a grown-up would use not to be, yeah. It's a departure from like what the pixels are doing now, right? Like the pixels, especially with Android 12, are very colorful and bubbly and cartoony to an extent. And that is not this, right? Like if you want a more suit and tie type of experience. That's what I want for my phone. It makes you feel like a little more powerful.

I'm like, maybe I have my life together using this phone. Like, do you pick it up and you know what an IRA is immediately? Yes, and I know whether I have one? That's a great question. Yeah, Android 12, especially with the pixel phones, is kind of all about, you know, material you and the colors that throughout the system matched your wallpaper and it's fun and it's quirky. And I like it when I use the pixel six, but I picked up this phone. And it is, you can customize it for sure, but it still has like a little bit of a one plus

flavor to it. And I'm sort of, I think I like it. I think I like it a little better. That's wild. Just a little more nice. Yeah. It's fancy. I felt a little fancy.

using this phone. A little top hat, a little monocle. Yeah. And an IRA. Like, wow, this. I opened an IRA and I walked with a spring in my step. But it's still, it's $900. And it's not as good as the other phones in that range, right?

Like the camera quality is not as good. Yeah. And it's, One Plus is still really leaning on this Hasselblad kind of partnership they introduced with the 9 series last year. And their line with that is that the color science is informed and tuned by Hasselblad, you know, legacy camera maker. But is that sort of like how, what was the phone maker that was like, yeah, we use like a and our, uh, Huawei had a, yeah, Huawei had a like a partnership for a few years. But yeah, so like Huawei and likea, that, that whole partnership was kind of proven to be a little bit of,

just PR smoke. Like it was just some marketing speak. Is Hasselblad in One Plus the same way? They've made some allusions to, down the road, it could mean that Hasselblad has more of a hand in the design of the hardware, which is more interesting.

Like, will they really? Is this Hasselblad's like medium format, big cameras? And this is like, what? This is a tiny sense. sensor on your phone. Maybe they'll go the Sony route and it'll be something you can like clamp onto the back of the phone that is a medium format sensor. Just a big old lens. Just slap it on there.

But just to clarify, for now the 10 Pro, just like the 9 Pro, the Hossblood partnership amounts to software, interface slash features, maybe color tuning if we believe what they're saying. And a logo on the back, right? like they're not involved in the lens or the sensor or anything on the hardware side of things. Okay. But the color tuning, are you seeing differences in it versus like Samsung's aggressive thing? I mean, I can see a difference between, but it's a really kind of general. Like I can see what Samsung's doing. I can see what a pixel phone is doing.

You know, one plus, it's nice. I think the colors look nice. And I prefer it over a Samsung. I just wouldn't go as far as like, this is Hasselblad color. You know, it doesn't just scream at me. Like, it's some kind of magic color science. It's nice. Yeah.

What is Hasselblad color? Yeah, I was going to say, that's like not like a, like I feel like if you speak to photographers, a lot of them will know like Canon Color is very famous and well known known. And if you go back far enough, you've got like Kodak and Fuji and the film stocks have like their own colors. But, like, I've been really invested in photography for decades, and I could not describe Hasselblood color science to you.

Yeah, that was my impression, too. Someone get Fuji film color on a smartphone. That's the phone all the time. I'd be into that. Why has Kodak been spending all of this time with terrible CES booths and not making actually good products when they could be like Kodak color? Because Kodak's barely a company at this point. Yeah, exactly.

Like, this is very just licensing right there on the table. You'll get like $5 for every phone. You'll make $20. It'll be great. Like, come on, Kodak, sign on. So the 1 plus 10 Pro is, it's kind of a weird launch, right? Like, we're getting it late. It's like three months after it came out in China,

but we're getting it now finally in the U.S. And it's only available through T-Mobile. Could you, like, kind of explain, like, what they're doing with, like, the launch of this phone? and like, does it feel like this company is invested in this phone or like we should care about it? Like, it's just seems very weird to me. Yeah, it's, you know, more than one person I think has felt like the U.S. launch, particularly is sort of an afterthought for One Plus. It launched in China and January.

There were a lot of, you know, specks dribbling out ahead of that. So it was very much a known quantity before it made it here, aside from the price, which I think is pretty good. It could have been worse, $899. Because it's less than last year, right? Like it's lower than the 1 plus 9 pro was last year. Last year, obviously, we had the 1 plus 9 non-pro that was even lower, but that was lower tier features and things like that, right? Right, yeah. And the 10 pro or the 9 pro that we got in the U.S.

the higher storage capacity tier. So it was more expensive. This is sort of like meets everything in the middle and it feels about right. But yeah, it sort of feels like a launch that is sort of fallen flat. And I wish there was more exciting stuff to say about this phone. It's good. The charging, I think we should like mention again because they get that right. You know, it's 65 watt wired charging.

and you get a charger in the box. What a concept. I feel like that's the perfect segue to talk about the Samsung tablets. Because you don't get a charger. Yeah, it's like, how are you charging these tablets that do not include a charger in the box? Well, I've got one of those like hand crank things

that you like hand crank to run a flashlight and then I plug it into the tablet. Yeah, no, so I finally review the Tab S8 family of Tad. tablets. They will be live on the site tomorrow morning as from when we're recording this. You'll probably have seen them by the time you hear this. But yeah, so Samsung is the Tab S8, the Tab S8 Plus, and the Tab S8 Ultra. They are premium level tablets. They start at $700 for the cheapest one. And the most expensive one is like $1,500 before you even add things like a case or a keyboard or anything like that. And none of them come with a charger in the box, which I just think is an absurd thing for a product of a, this price and this type. There's like, Obviously, Allison knows very well. We're kind of used to phones not coming with a charger in the box at this point. Because you can always use your phone charger from before. That's the assumption is you have a phone charger already and you can use it from before.

I don't really buy that assumption. I think a lot of people just end up buying third-party chargers because yesterday's phone charger is not as powerful as today's phone charger and doesn't charge your devices quickly. But that problem becomes magnified on the tablets because there's so much bigger. So if all you have is like this dinky five-watt charger from your phone and you're trying to charge just $1,000 tablet, it's going to take like forever to charge the giant battery in this thing. And they support up to 45-watt charging, but in order to do that, you have to buy a separate charger. So not only are they expensive, but they also kind of demand that you buy another charger. I feel like if I opened the box and I pull out my big $1,500, $14.3 inch.

14.6. 14.6 inch tablet that I've spent $1,500 on. And I pull it out of the box and I do not see a charger. I'm contacting Samsung because I'm sure there's a mistake. I would write a letter. I mean, that's what I did. When I got the review units in, I opened them up and I contacted Samsung. I was like, is this right?

And they're like, yeah, no, that's how it is. So, you know, it's a bummer. They have their reasons. I think the reason is fundamentally profit margins, not the environment or anything green of that sort. But going into this, you should know that you're not getting a charger with it. That all said, I've had the privilege of reviewing a lot of Samsung tablets over the years, and the general consensus every single time is the same old Android tablet story of like Android tablets are poorly supported. They don't have optimized apps.

They're not as good as the iPad, so on and so forth. And this time around, that still is the case, but it's not like the full story. And especially with the tab S8 and the S8 Plus, which are the lower, the less expensive ones. So they're like $700 and $900. The ones you would actually want to buy. Yeah, the 11-inch model and the 12.4-inch model. They are basically updates to the tab S7 line from two years ago. If you happen to have a Samsung phone and you are like invested in the Samsung ecosystem,

you're a Samsung phone user, maybe you've got an S-21 or 22, or maybe even a full. and you've got Samsung Galaxy Buds and things like that, there are a lot of things that makes sense for you to buy a Samsung tablet instead of an iPad now. So there's integrations where you can send your text messages from the tablet, just like you would on the phone, or obviously any apps you buy on the phone are going to be available on the tablet,

which wouldn't happen if you bought an iPad. Other integrations that iPad and iPhone users are familiar with, like the ability to turn on mobile hotspot on your phone right from the tablet is now available. So there's these kind of like integrations that if you are bought into the Samsung family of products, I can like squint and see the reason why you would buy a Samsung tablet at this point.

I want to know who those people are. Like I know in Korea that makes a lot of sense because Samsung is just like the number one phone in Korea. There's two phone companies in the U.S. that sell phones, right? It is Apple and Samsung. So like I think there are a lot of people in the U.S. US who kind of fall under that. They got a Samsung phone because, like, second most popular company.

Very few people want to buy pixels, and very few people actually buy One Plus phones. So, I mean, a lot of people own Samsung phones. A lot of people own Samsung earbuds to go with their Samsung phones that don't have headphone jacks. So, like, makes sense. The earbuds thing, I should say, is, like, very similar to Apple's ability to switch your AirPods from your phone to your tablet automatically. Samsung's basically adopted that feature for its own devices now. So if you have Samsung Galaxy Buds and they're connected to your phone,

and then you go pick up your tablet and start playing music or a video on that, it will automatically switch the audio over, which is like a great convenient feature when it works. It never works. Keyword. It always activates. Like if I get a notification on my phone, it'll be like, oh, do you want me to switch over?

And I'm like, no, I don't want you to switch over. Yeah. I mean, like, even Apple doesn't have that, like, ironed out entirely. I'm not going to try and say, like, anybody's really figured that out completely. But it is a feature that I personally use all the time between Apple device. it's nice to have it on the Samsung side of things. It's nice to have those quality of life things. But that only works if you have Samsung's products.

If you have a pixel phone or if you have any other Android phone, you lose out on all of those integrations. And so it makes less sense to buy a Samsung tablet at that point. You start to lose a lot of those advantages. And then the conversation becomes like, well, okay, maybe you should just buy an iPad because you're going to lose these integrations. You're not going to get the benefits of them. I personally think that the tab S8 is the most compelling of all three,

which is a smaller one, because the way that I use a tablet is for like watching video and reading magazines and reading books and stuff like that. And a smaller size is much easier to do that with. If you are more into like maybe game streaming, which is one thing that Android does do better than iOS, maybe the larger screens would be more compelling to you. But I think most people should probably stick to the tab S8 or the tab S8 plus and let's let the ultra, let's let that bake for a few more years before we start spending big bucks on that thing. Ultra's the one with a 14.6 inch screen. It's a dazzling display. It's a lovely screen to look at.

But realistically, I remember many, many years ago, I think HP did an Android tablet that was like 17 inches. Samsung had a 17 Android tablet. They tried to pitch it as a kitchen TV. And it came with a built-in kickstand. And you're supposed to put it in the kitchen and watch TV. Yes. But it wasn't even framed as like a tablet so much,

outside the fact that it had a touchscreen. Whereas this is very much, like, you buy it, it comes in the box, there's no keyboard or anything. That's a $350 add-on. Okay. Which is a lot of money. And so it is a tablet, first of the foremost, and it runs Android, and it has, like, mobile software on it. And my opinion of this, and I should say always that a review is an opinion, based on my experience using it, is that this is the size of a laptop, especially once you have a keyboard. It's as big as a laptop.

It's as expensive as a premium laptop. And so the expectations of it, of what you can do with it, should go up and are commensurate to what you expect from a laptop. And it does not hit that because it runs into the limitations of being a mobile operating system very quickly. Okay, wait. It starts at $1,500. So it starts at $1099 for the base model, for just the tablet, and $350 for the keyboard.

But you can spec up the tablet with more storage to, I think, in the neighborhood of $1,500 just for the tablet itself. The model that I reviewed was like $1,200. And how much storage do you get there? The base model, I think, is 128 gigs of storage. It does have a micro-sd card, so you can, you know, you can upgrade the storage. I'm just going to throw this out there.

You can get the ASUS ROG Flow Z13, which is also a very large tablet. Yep. For $1,900. And it includes the case with the keyboard, right? And a terabyte of storage. And RAM and Windows. So it actually works as a keyboard.

computer. It can run PC games. It can run, like, I'm just... Or if you look outside of tablets and just like what you could spend money on instead, you can get a MacBook error for a thousand bucks, you can get a Surface laptop for that price. You could get... I mean, I really think, like, the Assuse gaming tablet is not going to satisfy the customer looking at these Samsung tablets because it's thicker, it's heavier, it's not svelte and sleek and stuff like that. But Microsoft's Surface Pro devices certainly are. And like, the reason to buy this over a Microsoft Surface Pro, if, like,

this is like the segment that you're playing in or looking at, like, doesn't make it a lot of sense. It doesn't really add up yet. And part of that is because you run into software limitations really quickly. Either the apps aren't, like, I'll give you this example. We use Slack here at the verge. We rely on it. We use it day in and day out. Slack does not have a tablet optimized app, which means that the Android app for Slack is stretched to cost 14.6 inches. And it's just like, it just like stretches it across, and you've got all your little, tiny little names of your conversations on the left side and nothing from the rest of the screen. And then you click on it and you got like, I mean, it's absurd. And like, yeah, you can use the split screen function.

So you could say, like, I've got slack in one side and the browser on another or whatever. Right. Or you could switch to Samsung's Dex mode, which is like they try to force a desktop windowed mode onto Android. and that works about as well as you would expect. They try to make it feel like Windows or MacOS, but it like doesn't. You run into issues really quickly. Like going back to Slack, Slack is now in like a little window,

and you can't really easily adjust the text size. And so scaling is all weird and wrong. Or some apps just don't launch, or like window management is fussy. Like it's good for like in a pinch if you need to do something with more windowing, but like I could not imagine. I tried. I could not work on it all day long.

just like I hit too many frustrations. I'm sorry. I just keep being like, who is this? Who is the person? Who is the Dex user so obsessive? I want to talk to, like, are, are you, did you look at this 14.6 inch starting at a $1,000 tablet? 1100.

That cannot do any of the things Windows could do. That could do iPad OS things kind of similar. And you, you bought it. Like, you. You wanted this device. I mean, look, like, people buy iPad Pro 12.9s that are priced out to $2,000. I don't know why. I mean, that's not me, but there are people that buy that.

But I think that's 12.9. Like, it's small. I can fit that in a bag. It's practically pocketable. The difference is there is, obviously, Apple has a much stronger ecosystem of software support for the iPad than Android does. And, like, that's just, like, a hard reality. And maybe you can, like, thread that needle where, like, all the apps that you do care

about or you can live. entirely within Samsung's apps, and you don't run into that problem. But it really does not take long to find an issue with, you know, or trying to run an app on an Android tablet that does not work well on it. So there are people out there that, like, do that on the iPad, and maybe Samsung's thinking they will do this for the Tab S8 Ultra. But what I really think is, is Samsung is doing its thing where it is throwing ideas out into the market and seeing what happens.

And they are like, we've got this 14.6-inch OLED screen. It's really cool. it's 120 hertz. We want to put it in a product. Let's just slap it onto a 5mm thick tablet and see what happens. And we'll charge a lot of money. Not a lot of people are going to buy it,

but we'll learn how they use it and we'll tweak it over the next generation and generation. But they could have just made a cool laptop. They do make laptops. It's the Samsung we're talking about. They make everything. Yeah, but a 14.6 OLED display in a laptop? I'd like, all right.

Look, if you are the product manager in charge of the Galaxy tablet line, you are like, screw them laptops. We're making a tablet. I got this screen. We're using it. Maybe it's aspirational. It's like you sell the smaller tablets by being like, we have this big one.

It's like the bottle of wine. I mean, that's certainly a part of it. You see it. You're like, oh, man, I can't. That's too much. I'll go a couple steps down. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that might be part of it.

But I also think that Samsung is experimenting in public. They did it with the Galaxy Fold. it took three, two and a half, three generations to really become a product that was like we can start to say like, oh, wow, we're really seeing the usability of this. The first one, as everyone knows, went really bad, really south really quickly. If you look at the history of the Galaxy Note, the first Galaxy Note was not that great. It was kind of big and chunky and limited, and like it was made fun of at the time for having a big screen.

Obviously, Samsung understood that big screens were kind of the future, but if you look at every single Galaxy Note after that, it was optimized. to become smaller and easier to use and have an even bigger display and so on and so forth. So like this is the way Samsung works. I'm not surprised by it. This is the first iteration around this. I think in a couple of years they're going to do it again and maybe they'll have improved the software somewhat.

Maybe, you know, Google keeps floating this idea that it cares about Android tablet software again. And so maybe in a couple of years that will have materialized into something more substantial. You have invested a thousand dollars minimum in this tablet. And if you wait, three to four years, you'll really, that's what it really kicks off. Cardinal rule, do not buy something today hoping you're getting something out of it tomorrow.

Like, buy it for what it is today. And I don't think you should buy this one yet. I think the more cardinal rule is never buy an Android tablet expecting Google to go and invest in Android. I mean, that's why Samsung is in its position now. Like, Samsung built decks specifically because Google was not investing in Android tablets. And so, like, they had to build it on their own.

And as a result, it's kind of like this weird side project that gets not much attention every year, and really the development on that has been really slow. But that is a very clear, obvious response to, like, Google doesn't care about Android tablets, but we don't really have any other mobile operating systems around because nobody wants a Tysent tablet. So, like, what are we going to do with it?

Somebody wants a Tysen tablet. There's, like, one TV, smart TV user that just loves Tisen. They actually can explain the difference between it and Android. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Anyways, the goal. back to it, like, I think that the Tab S8 and the Tab S8 Plus do have their, like, place.

And, like, I think they're too expensive. I would love for Samsung to do something that's more competitive on, like, the iPad airfront, really, like, kind of the meat of the market of, like, people who are buying tablets. But if they have, if they take what they did here and move it down market some, I think that, like, they could have a potential or, like, a good, compelling story there. I just think the ultra is, is, needs more time. We'll check in in a couple years. A little more time. And there was one more big display this week, which was a, Cam did a review of the Alienware. Alienware's new QD OLED display. You want to take a stab at naming that product name on the microphone? I'm not even going to try to do it from memory. This, the, the very catchy

alienware AW-34-23d-D-W. Rolls right off the tongue. Just like, Del, I will never understand why they just refuse to give cool names to things. Like, they give cool names. It's called Alienware. And they're like, no, but that's as far as we hit Alienware, that's as cool as you get. Everything else after that has to be, like, completely forgettable. Like, I don't know how, like, nobody's going to go in and say, I want the AW3423DW when they want to buy this thing. Right?

Nobody. Well, what they'll say is I want that QD OLED screen. So, like, this is the first QD OLED. on the market. I mean, we've seen a bunch announced, a bunch were announced at CES. This is technically the first one that's arrived, even though if you try to buy it today, I think Cam was telling me that you will get it at the end of June. So they are like massively backordered, a little supply chains, but it shows there's probably high demand for it as well. But it's really interesting because QD OLED is this new OLED technology that is supposed to solve a lot

of the traditional complaints of OLED. It's brighter. It's got better color reproduction. It's got more things to help mitigate or extend its longevity and lifespan and things like that. And it's very interesting to see it deployed in a gaming display versus a TV. And so if you are looking for the best gaming monitor at the moment and are willing to wait two months to get it, hard to recommend anything else. Yeah, like, I'm very excited about this thing, honestly. I think this is kind of one of the cooler things we've seen in monitor technology in the last few years.

Oh, really? The studio display webcam didn't do it for you? Yeah. I mean, you know, I really wanted the webcam. That's not a hard thing to do. Everybody should be, like every monitor maker should be putting a webcam in. This is like the easiest lowest stakes win you can have. Yeah.

To be fair, Dell did not. So the alienware alphabet soup does not come with a webcam. What I think is the real difference and what makes this alienware monitor kind of exciting and the studio display kind of disappointing in many ways, is that Apple did not innovate at all on the display side of things, which is like the most important part of a monitor is how it looks and the technology it uses to display photos and pictures and colors and things like that. And they did not.

It's the exact same thing as what we've known for quite a while. This is innovating on that, and this is a new technology on how a screen is actually displaying things. And it's got a fast refresh rate, so when you're gaming on it, it's very smooth. It's got awesome color reproduction. It's got incredible viewing angles. there's some pictures in Cam's review of coming at it from like 170 degrees from the side, and it's still full of saturation and like popping off the screen. It's everything you know about your iPhone screen on a 34-inch canvas that's two feet from

your face. And so it's like really quite incredible when you're playing games on it, but even if you're just like using it as like a standard monitor. We tested it with both Windows and Mac. Mac, you might be hit or miss with the HDR modes, but the refresh, worked on a couple different Macs. See, I don't judge the monitor for this because I'm using

an LG monitor right now with HDR, with my Mac Studio, and Apple's HDR mode is not... I mean, to be fair, Windows HDR is not great either. Yeah, like, neither company has figured out like what HDR means, and even, like,

we're seeing that with games too. Unless you're in film and TV, HDR is like extremely hit or miss on whether or not it will just make a garbage out of your display. Just like... I use an HDR monitor with my Mac and I have to have HDR off

because when I turn HGR on, it just washes the whole... Yeah, everything just washes out. And sometimes when you play a game, sometimes you'll be like, I'm going to turn on HDR mode and everything just descends into darkness. And you're like, okay,

I didn't actually need it to be a candlelit scene. Like, I feel like candles put off more light than this display does. And so I'm not going to knock it for that. I just... Also, I just think it's a really... cool looking monitor and I love that like somebody is actually caring about picture quality and not just speed in a monitor that's meant for consumers. Because there's a lot of people like, like picture quality is usually very expensive. Right. And especially like when we're talking about gaming monitors, it's usually the last thing on the list of things that they care about. Gaming monitors prioritize input time or input response. They prioritize refresh rate. They prioritize size. And they don't even really prioritize resolution because most gaming monitors are 1080p or 1440 still.

This one is still 1440. It's an ultra-wide, so it's like 34-whatever by 1440. So it's not a 4K monitor. It's not a 5-K monitor at all. It's not that like super sharp fidelity. But the colors are amazing. And the gamets that it covers are amazing. And that's what we are not used to seeing in the gaming monitor world.

And so like it's a big step forward for that in that it is giving you these incredible colors and visuals and also being a really killer performer on games. Like I just want an OLED display that's fast, but also like high enough resolution that I don't see every little pixel on my monitor when I'm looking at it. Like it feels like this should be a thing that people do. Like you could, I mean, you could do that. You could stick a 4K OLED TV on your desk. It's just enormous. No, but you still see the pixels because a 4K OLED TV. You just scoot back.

Yeah, like just scoot way far back. Like my cordon, my headphones doesn't go that far. You have to get a new headphones. Like, I don't get it. Well, that's the QD. Hold on. That's the Alienware, AW-3423D-W. An absolutely terrible name for a very, very cool monitor.

We're going to take a break. And when we're back, we're going to do a lightning round. There's a bunch of smaller gadgets and technology news. Let's do it. Alison, are you going to stick around? You want to do the lightning round with us? I'm in. Let's do it.

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Claude. com. And we're back with the lightning round. There's a lot of stuff. I'm going to start, actually, because that was not the only QD OLED display we saw this week. More QDs. I'm sorry, Nilai's not here.

He's not here to, like, keep me from going on display tangents. It's like, I have all the power right now, and I'm going to use it. I think he's going to be upset that he missed this, because we're having some really great display conversation. We're having some, this is fun. And Samsung is showing off its new QD OLED TV. We didn't go to CES where I think some people saw it.

But Chris Welch went out and saw the display and was like, all right, yeah, this is legit. And he saw it in the TV version. And that means like Samsung and all these other people, when they do these TV like displays, like showoffs, they usually have a couple other TVs there. and they always say, we're not going to tell you what the TVs are. And they're very obviously like a Sony and an LG display. And it's like, thank you for putting a small piece of black tape over the Sony. But we know what it is. And he got to go and he saw it like with the other TVs.

And he's like, oh, no, this is this is legit. This is very, very cool. And like, you can see it. And 90% of people probably won't care. And I'm like, I'm the 10%. So I'm like, yes. These are premium TVs. So, like, you know, they're the higher end of the market, and, like, that, you know, person buying that is probably a little more discerning.

I think it's exciting that Samsung is finally playing in the OLED space on TVs. We've known Samsung makes OLED screens for phones, tablets, and laptops for a very long time, but, like, we've not seen them on TVs. So it's exciting that they're here and they're this good from what we can tell. Obviously, we'll be reviewing it and have more final, you know, real world impressions later. But they're going to be expensive, too. Yes. Like, you will not be finding one of these for sale. This isn't your Black Friday $1,000 OLED TV.

Like, you're not going to find the deal on this. Yeah, this isn't like the BX or the CX when it goes on sale. This is the old school OLED where you're absolutely going to put some money into it. Yeah, at least this year. I mean, give it a couple generations and the prices will certainly come down. But it's exciting that they're here. It's exciting that effectively LG has been like the only LG display. I should say, which is their display subsidiary or division,

has been like the only player in consumer OLED televisions, especially in the U.S. If you got a Sony, it's got an LG panel. Obviously the LGs have an LG OLED panel. So now we've got like another option. We've got competition. Competition. Competition's great.

It's great. Where's my E-Inck TV? That would be terrible. That would be the ugliest. They make E-I-Inc monitors for you, Alex. And they're terrible. I tried to use one. And I was like, I couldn't even,

I like open Slack and I had it in dark mode and so it was just like all black on the screen. I couldn't see anything. Like I couldn't even refresh because I was like I don't know what's happening. It's just darkness. Do not, I mean you can try it. I encourage everyone to try something once

but you'll do it once and you'll be like, yeah, she was right. That was bad. The other Samsung thing that Chris got to see is the latest frame TV and I think like to your point, Alex, like about most people not caring about the QD OLED versus OLED debate. People love the frame. People love the frame.

Like the frame. TV is like super popular. I think it like scratches an itch that like people feel. Like they don't like having, this is the reason that everyone has this idea of projectors being so great. And I think we talked about this in the past because they don't like a big black square on their wall that just sits there and takes a space all the time. So Samsung's solution is to make it display art. And this year it's got a matte display so that it actually looks more like art as opposed to a screen that's showing you something, which is very cool. I think that's, and Chris, and says it's very convincing, you have to, like, really get close to it to realize that it's

actually a screen that's emitting light as opposed to something that's more, you know, passive. Well, the sacrifice you're making, because, like, doing the mat display and stuff, that affects the quality of the display. In theory, Samsung claims it doesn't, but, you know, again, we'll be testing it out for sure. It absolutely affects, like, everybody would be doing matte displays if it didn't affect the quality. But I think for 90% of people, that's a, that's a, that's a, that. I'm honestly, I'm still kind of stunned that Samsung has this thing that sells pretty well.

It's very popular. People love it. It's very aspirational technology. And not a single other TV company has been like, man, we should make like a TV that doesn't look ugly. Like, low stakes. Like, just make it look like a cool frame. And everybody's like, no, we're just going to make the black square real square. And the frame is not new.

It's been out for like half a decade at least. So like there's been, there's lots of times. for other manufacturers to get in this. I think, you know, it depends on the technology that they rely on. LG loves its OLED TVs, right? That's like their premium flagship technology. You can't leave a static image on an OLED TV.

It will absolutely degrade the panel and then you'll have burn-in. So like Samsung's using LCDs and mini-LEDs here that it can get away with that much easier than, say, LG could. But, you know, why isn't TCL doing it or whatever the other brands? I wonder what the power bill is like.

Maybe that's the reason, Because you've got a TV on for just 24-7? Well, they have the sensor in there, right? So, like, it turns off if nobody's in the room. And then if someone's in the room, it comes on, and it's got the ambient light sensor and adjusts it and all this. I think the, like, if you look at, like, the power usage on them, I think the max usage is, like, 60 watts. It's not a ton. And so, like, that's like a light bulb was 20 years ago.

So. Couldn't it be E-Aink? Did we come full circle? Because if, but what if it was E-A-A-ink? But what if it was E-ink? One of it's like you just roll an e-ink like how the LG rolling display, you just roll an e-ink display in front of it and you're like, bam, beautiful black and white art. Yeah. That's it.

That is a, somebody can take that idea. I just put it out there in the world. Alex would buy that. Like I would buy that. Like, Alison sounded like she might almost buy it. Yeah, sure. I get one. Yeah, like, see, two customers.

I would want it to run the Kindle app. Read e-books on my e-ing TV. Just really enjoy it. All right, Alison, what's the news that you love today? I was just really loving Andy Hawkins back to the future jokes with this Delorian story. It's, I don't understand cars. I don't follow cars. But there's a Delorean that's going to be an electric vehicle in the future.

So they say. So they say. There's a very, like, dubious. kind of vibe to this article they promised this before, I guess? Yeah, it'll presumably go 88 miles per hour. It will presumably not run on nuclear fuel. It won't run on a blender or free process? I mean, it will actually, depending on where you live, it will be running on nuclear power

because you're going to have to charge it and maybe you get your power. So, oh, my God. But can you get to the future that way? I do not think you can get to the future. Yeah. But, yeah, Deloria, like, was this big, like, car company? They didn't really make a whole lot of cars, right? No, they have a very famous fall from Gray story.

John DeLorean had a lot of legal troubles, which eventually tanked his company. And so they became iconic when, you know, Back to the Future came out in the mid-80s, and Doc Brown turned his old DeLorean into a time machine. Any time I see one on the road, I still scream. Yeah, well, I mean, they're very rare. Yeah, it's like seeing a famous person. No, I don't even scream. When I see a famous person, I'm just like, yeah, okay.

Like, I saw I Billy Blunt runtime in the street. I was like, oh, yeah, she's tall. And I kept on. I see a Delorean in the street. I'm like, oh, my God! Yeah, and there, you know, there's a whole lot of, like, community of, like, restorers that keep them alive, but they are getting older,

and the parts are becoming less and less available, so the odds of you seeing an actual Delorean on the road are becoming less and less. But this is like a new car with the DeLorean brand, you know, it's a new company, you know, so on and so forth. This is a lot like when somebody was like, we're going to launch a new Atari console. And we're like, oh, yeah, good luck with that, buddy. When you show us the console and we can play games on it, we'll believe you. Yeah.

So they say August 18th, 2022. We will see more. So like right now they've shown the left tail light. That's as much as a computer could render. of the 3D render. They couldn't finish the rest in time for the announcement. You don't have a right taillight

without a left taillight, so they're off to a good start, I think. Yeah. It looks like this might have a side view mirror. At least one. At least one. It's brake lights. So when it's driving and it hits the brakes,

presumably you'll be able to see out of one tail light. But yeah, this is probably, well, maybe August, we'll see something for real. maybe August we'll see yet another very obvious 3D render because if it wasn't an obvious 3D render, we would have seen more than the tail light. Just throwing that out there.

Just possibly. I'll mark my calendar. I'll check in and see how that's going. You work with Andy on it. You guys do reporting. I just assigned myself that one. Dan, what's the big news that jumped out to you this week? I want to just highlight Sean Hollister had a really great piece on Logitex

what he calls it the magic mouse, but it's like not Apple's magic mouse. Everyone knows Apple's magic mouse is the one that you have to like flip it upside down to charge it and you can't charge it while you're using it. Well, Logitex mouse that's actually been out for like five years just charges forever on its mouse pad.

And it's like a wireless mouse that wirelessly charges on its mouse pad. And it's very, very cool. It's been popular for a long time. But, you know, there's always something cool out there that's been popular for a while, but it's really interesting. Yeah, the magic mouse, the real appeal of the magic mouse, Apple's magic mouse, is that you can scroll sideways easily. Timeline goes sideways.

That's it. Everything else is, like, terrible about it. Like, the ergonomics are awful. The fact that, like, you can't use it when you need to charge it is mind-numbingly stupid by 20-22. But you can scroll sideways. Can you scroll sideways with Sean's Logitech mouse? You know, I suppose if you have the scrolly wheel, it's like a very, traditional gaming mouse is the thing. It's like it looks like any other Logitech gaming mouse.

It's just you put this special mouse pad under it and it automatically charges it, which is like you never have to plug the thing in and you have the freedom of wireless control without the wire slowing you down when you're, you know, 360 nose pad. You got to embrace the mouse in the pad. You know, looking at it, I don't think it has a sideways scroll wheel, but pro tip, if you hold the shift key and use the regular scroll bar, it goes sideways. But yeah, it's a fun piece that Sean talked to Logitech. He like kind of got their like perspective on it. They say it's very popular, which is not surprising. Gaming mice have been come very, very popular over the past couple of years. This is one of them. But they like haven't iterated on it in five or six years. So it's kind

of just like sat there and done its thing and kept going. I love it. I love it. All right, that's the show. if you're listening to this, you should also be listening to The Decoder. There's a great one this week with Julia Alexander, former Verge employee. Now knows everything there is to know about streaming and had a wonderful conversation with Nelai. Super fun. I'm Alex Kranz at Alex H. Kranz on Twitter if you want to get a hold of me. If you want to go yell at Nelai and tell him never to leave again, never to fly in an airplane again, unless he misses another show.

You can get him at Reckless. If you want to talk to Dan, it's D.C. Seifert. Allison is at Allison Joe One and Liz is at Miss Lepado. That's the show. I'm not going to say rock and roll because I'm not Nilai. Have fun. Later, y'all.