The Vergecast - Essential phone review, Charlottesville online, and Space Craft

Episode Date: August 18, 2017

On The Verge’s flagship / only podcast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul go through the weekly rundown of news that hit the site this week. The show begins by addressing the accumulation of online hate as a result of the Charlottesville attack, and how it’s affecting the topics we cover. Also, the Essential Phone is out today, and Dieter had the chance to review it. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss where phones like Essential are headed with this release and the other upcoming releases this fall. We’ve got a new segment for you as well! Loren Grush, science reporter and friend of the show, steps into the studio to talk about her new video series Space Craft, where she finds out what it takes to be an astronaut in modern-day space programs. There’s a whole lot in between, so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. Here’s a list of stories we talked about on the show: 05:46 - Charlottesville attack puts a spotlight on online hate 23:09 - Essential Phone review 43:25 - Headphone jack still missing 49:43 - Space Craft episode 1 with Loren Grush 1:09:30 - Paul’s weekly segment “You say surveillance, I say sousveillance” 1:11:52 - Eclipse toolkit 1:14:07 - Samsung’s new fitness smartband leak reveals offline Spotify support, 5 ATM water resistance 1:14:48 - Apple is reportedly investing $1 billion in original video content 1:15:42 - Walmart’s Vudu video streaming service is coming to Apple TV on August 22nd 1:19:03 - Intel announces its next-generation Ice Lake chips unexpectedly early 1:22:02 - iOS 11 has a “cop button” to temporarily disable Touch ID 1:23:32 - Meet the streamers using Twitch to pay for college 1:23:42 - The Docx games: three days at the Microsoft Office World Championship 1:24:03 - Science doesn’t explain tech’s diversity problem — history does 1:25:12 - Paul’s podcast “Why watch people play video games?” If you enjoyed this podcast and want to hear more, let us know what you want to hear! We’re starting some new podcasts soon and want your feedback. In the meantime, you might want to check out Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, and Too Embarrassed to Ask hosted by The Verge’s Lauren Goode! You can find them all in iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and anywhere you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Theverge.com. It's a show about technology and culture and stuff. Notches. Here's what I'm going to tell you. By the way, I'm here. I'm Neil A Patel. Paul is here. Hello. Deeter's here.

Paul has been... Hi, Dieter. Paul has been... Sorry, I want to get into this. The most important news of the week. Sure, I bet. Paul can... I'm going to ruin your pitch.

Which is the thing I do on the show constantly to everyone. It's my psychological... manipulation as the editor-in-chief, people come on the show, I say, you've been working on a thing, and then I make you talk about it, and then you have to do it. Theoretically.

Yeah, it hasn't always worked. But I like to think it's, anyway, Paul isn't pitching me on a video idea. Go ahead. It's called Spex. Yeah. And there's a drum solo. Yeah.

It's like, don't, don't, don't, don't, and then, like, fills, like a whiplash drum solo. Yeah. And each hit of the kick drum, you see a different spec, 256 gigabytes or 11.6 inches or 1366 by 768 inch. Just different specs, just specs. And that's the whole video.

And it builds to... The end of the drum solo after one minute. It obviously builds to a light switch rave party. Yeah. Obviously, you take this into your heart and it fuels your life. But your point was every, like, every spec, if you're a true nerd, it really means something. It has a meaning to you. Like, oh, man, I remember 1024 by 768.

Yeah. That was the iBook resolution. Yeah. That's what I think of. 1366 was every notebook. But at the end of every single one, it's just going to be just a killer, just like single chord, like guitar riff. Just ring! And it'll just say adreno.

It'll just end on adreno. every time. The last one is just Adreno. All right. Well, Paul now has to make this video. Yeah. If you, he's been soliciting drummers in the hallways. So what I need now is just a bunch of specs.

So at me your specs. Yeah. What's your favorite spec at, at Future Paul? Just hit him with the specs. My, my spec right now is M.2 in VME SSD. What? That's an SSD that communicates with the computer over. the PCIE bus instead of SAT.

Ooh. All right. That's a high-end spec. It's pretty high-end. Yeah. I'm more interested in, like, the specs of the people. Classic specs. Yeah, like, eight gigabytes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, like, a really important spec for a long time. What was the RPM of the original Zune's hard drive? Yeah, 3.5 inch. That's like a good spec. It's like a spec that really meant a lot for a long time. Is FireWRoh 400 to me? Like, the spec that nobody seems to talk about anymore is near and dear to Paul's heart is pixel density.

Paul is a well-known pixel density enthusiast. Yeah, that's fact. But a lot of people still have MacBook errors and need to know about pixel density and that they're missing out. But everywhere else is just sort of, you know, fine now. Yeah, we went to 4X. Right. And then it kind of dropped off. They talk about pixel density mostly now in VR.

And there's a new metric that they're coming out with that's like pixels per degree. Like you can break vision into like degrees, which is a little more math than I was hoping for. Well, the iPhone 4 was 326, right? PPI. That was the floor. And now everything is way above it and no one because all the screen size are crazy. Like here's what I'm saying. You have to make this video.

But it has to lead. It has to, oh, it has to land on. the most important spec of all. Whatever that is. Adrino. It's not bad. Do you mean Arduino? No, never mind.

What's Adreno? I recognize that name, but I forget what it is. Isn't that the Qualcomm? It's the GPU Qualcomm. Yeah, yeah. So it's not a spec. It's a brand. Yeah, you should make another one that's just like marketing hogwash.

Oh. Oh, yeah. Retina. Adrino. Centrino. Just like words that were marketed. with no specific meaning next time. And that will be set to a flute solo.

All right. Well, if you have specs, you can send them to Paul. If you have concepts of technology-related phrases and the instruments to which they correspond also send those to Paul. Yeah. This is his new video series. This is our pivot to video. Apparently.

What's your big video strategy? Sounds in words. All right. So after that, we're. and pivot right to Nazis on the internet. You ready? Oh, God. This is a brief interlude because we have a lot to talk about it.

In fact, I'll say this right now. Today, on this show, on this podcast, Deter is going to talk about his review of the essential phone. It's a big deal. It's coming. Yep. Deeter has it. It's a square.

By the time you're hearing this, you will have already read it and watched the video, hopefully. Because this is coming out after the review goes up. If you're in your car. This is a sneak preview. that for the thing that you've already seen. We're recording it before the review. It goes up.

So there you go. If you're in your car, pull over, watch the video, and then get back on the road. That's what I was suggesting to you. Anyway, that's coming. But I don't really want to talk about Nazis on the internet. Dieter and I discussed it before the show began. We're not, like, enthusiastic about it. But it is, again, the biggest story in tech is super heavy this week.

Last week, it was the Google memo. This week, a thing that is happening, that we should. just acknowledge is that there was a extremely hateful rally in Charlottesville. There were Nazis. They had Nazi flags. They were just Nazis. I saw the Nazi flag. They were there. Our president doing whatever he does. He's out there. Foxcom actually ran a really interesting piece today called corporations or the New Conscious of America, not churches. Which I think is fascinating. You should go read it. But so many, many corporations are speaking out against Nazis, which is not something you'd have expected to have to happen in 2017, not what I predicted in my end of the year rundown last year. Yeah.

But it's happening. And a lot of those corporations are tech companies who run major platforms on the internet. And they are now kicking the Nazis off their platform. So Spotify kicked a bunch of racist hate groups off of Spotify so you can't listen to their music, Twitter and Facebook. are shutting things down, YouTube is shutting things down, and then there's another class of providers that is really much more interesting. I know Dieter has a lot of thoughts here. So GoDaddy kicked the Daily Stormer, which is like the Nazi publication off of GoDaddy's

servers. Cloudflare, which is, how would you describe Cloudflare? It's a CDN. Yeah. They're a content distribution network. I'm on it. But like how would you describe that to the average person? Typically, a CDN is you basically have the basic host and then to spread that information geographically so that it's cached closer to the end users, it goes through a CDN.

Like the classical one was Akamai. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The other thing a CDN can do is protect you against a distributed denial of service attacks. So if a bunch of people try and flood your website with traffic, since the CDN spreads it out a bunch of different areas, it's one of the ways. There's other ways. It can make sure that your website stays on the Internet when people are trying to take it down by flooding it with traffic. Yeah.

So that is an important one in the case of Cloudflare because Cloudflare basically fired the Daily Stormer as a customer. So their host said we can't have you anymore. GoDaddy said you're off our servers. Cloudflare said, we're not going to. going to put you on our CDN, which is the thing that protects you against attacks. So I think Cloudflare's CEO actually put out a letter that said our first requests, like saying these people are violating your terms of service, actually explicitly said, kick them off Cloudflare so we can dedos them, which is a fascinating problem in this world. But they did it anyway. And Cloudflare,

you should go read it. They were actually very explicit. Like, we're kind of in control of the internet. Like, if we don't protect you or other companies like us don't protect you, you're not on the internet, which means we have control of speech, but here we think the case is clear cut. We're okay with it. But, Deter, you were saying that leads to a number of very interesting problems as the internet gets more and more platformized. Yeah, I mean, just there's a lot here, and I don't think we have time to get into it. My thinking on it is, I don't know, we'll call it nascent. But you know how when there's like trolls in the comments section, and they get booted and they yell but free speech.

And then we or whoever they get booted from, like, yeah, sure, free speech. But that's sort of like in the Bill of Rights for America. It's not in the terms of service for my website. Yeah. Right. That's basically what Cloudflare said is, look, I can do whatever I want. I'm the CEO of a private company or, you know, public company.

I'm a CEO of a company. And so I, you know, I can choose which customers I want to have. And I don't want to have these guys as a customer. So goodbye. But then he immediately in that letter turned around and said, what I just did is very morally suspect because that makes us not content neutral. And I don't know how I feel about that. I think we can all pretty much agree that not having Nazis as customers is a good thing.

But right now we're watching companies like Google, Apple, PayPal, Cloudflare, GoDad, whomever, you know, do the thing that we want them to do. But it's because, you know, their terms of service aren't laws. They're just, you know, things that the company decided it would do and would want to act. Yeah, wait, just to be clear about that. And so, yeah, yeah, yeah. Companies can change their terms of service at will, right? Like, we cover that all the time.

Like, if their terms of service didn't let them do that, they could just change their terms of service and then do it. It wouldn't even be hard. Right. Right. It's a weird little corner case. Yeah. And so to me, the big question is, does the bill of rights, do these ideas of, like, human rights, mean anything on the Internet at all when everything on the Internet gets run through companies that have at will terms of service? And it's a complicated thing because I don't want to sound like the people that are claiming free speech, free speech for, you know, white nationalism because I think they're being disqualified. ingenuous when they claim, you know, yell free speech. However, right now we're like in a place where like through the largesse of people who I think are fundamentally good people like

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai and Sachi Nadala and, you know, other CEOs, they're doing the right thing because of public pressure and so on and also because they're good people. But if one of those big, massive, powerful control-the-in-net kinds of companies decided to actually be evil. I don't know what we do about that. I don't know if, you know, how we want to hold them to account. So it gets into this very, very, very, like, cyberpunk messy discussion about, you know, our lives moving away from the state into, like, corporations and, like, you can spin it out in a million different crazy ways. But I think for me, where I'm at right now is everything here in this past week has moved so quickly that we're going to, in the next month,

months and years, like, look back and be like, wow, we made a lot of decisions without really thinking about what they mean. And so far, I'm pretty happy with all the decisions that most people are making with regard to dealing with this issue from the corporate perspective. But how much of this is like, do the thing you think you think is right and then justify it later and how much of it is acting from first principles and how much leverage do we as citizens have on the first principles of those companies. Well, so I'll say two things. One, they are reacting to their customers in the form of consumers.

Yeah. Protesting them, right? So GoDaddy has like a business issue in that people who might sign up for GoDaddy are like tweeting at the company and the CEO saying, I'm not going to do business with you if you keep these Nazis on the platform. So there's, I don't know. I wouldn't call it like a market reaction, but there's like a PR. Well, no, I think like a market reaction is.

I think a fair way to put it. Like, if I decide that I think Google is evil, I'll go use, I don't know, Bing or something, right? But, like, that works in theory, but in practice, as we've seen with the net neutrality issue, your ability to choose a different company because you disagree with its social decisions, gets pretty constrained pretty quickly when it comes to the Internet. Yeah, and especially at the infrastructure. So what I was saying was, GoDaddy is kind of their marketing to consumers, and they actually sell something so you can withhold your dollars.

Right. Google doesn't really sell you anything. It's very hard to withhold your dollars from Google's ad network. It's just coming at you whether you want to or not. And then a company like Cloudflare, I would just wager that most people have no idea it exists. Right. So the decision makers for spending money in Cloudflare, you have to, A, know it exists. B, know that, you know, your favorite company is.

protected by Cloudflare CDN and then rally enough people to tell that company to get off CloudFle. Like that's a lot. That's, yeah. And like in the face of Nazism, this thing that I'm worried about is so like abstract and nuanced that it's sort of like it's easy to just twist it and say, oh, well, you're defending Nazis, which clearly I don't want to do. And so it's a sort of thing where even talking about it in a public way is very difficult. That's why a lot of people read that letter from Cloudflare from the CEO. And it was like, I don't know, I read it like three times now. And I think it's very, very open and smart and honest about like how complicated this gets

and how quickly it gets complicated. Yeah. I think it's a lot simpler. And maybe, I don't know, I, if you listened to the show last week, well, I do. But there are reasons. I'll get into it. But if you listen to the show last week, we had what I think was a pretty careful conversation about sexism in the tech industry.

We have a lot of thoughts. We wanted to make sure we got it right. Deeter and I were talking afterwards. We both felt like we'd been hesitant on the show because we have very strong opinions, but we wanted to make sure people could listen and felt engaged. And I think for the large part it went well.

Like, you know, it was a complicated, heavy conversation. We had it. We did it very carefully. I am way less careful about Nazis. Like, those motherfuckers want me dead. Like, it's just, like, very simple. Like, I'm not white. so I don't have any reservations at all about being like, no, no, no, make them go away.

Like, it's very, to me, there's no moral quandary here when, like, I see that. Like, it just doesn't, like, it's literally a threat to my person. So, like, that is just so clear for me. I've been having this weird set of interactions on Twitter where I'm like, I hate Nazis. And then someone's like, but you should listen to them. And I'm like, but what they're saying is I should know. What are you doing? And like, I don't, I think what you're saying, Deeter is correct.

Like, you can, there's only one side there. I think as you start to pull it back into other realms of speech, then I think you do have to be content neutral. But I don't know that you have to be fully tolerant. And I'm just very comfortable being like, yeah, I'm probably, there's probably a great argument against what I'm saying. But just get rid of the Nazi. Like, that's very clear to me. I don't see any, I don't see months from now as being like, oh, man, we made that Nazi decision.

We didn't think it through it. Like, it's pretty obvious. One of the arguments against this kind of obviously voluntary, not government censorship, but this sort of corporate censorship, is that any kind of censorship can, like, send dissent, like, underground. Yeah. And that it festers underground. So I'm curious what you guys think about that.

Yeah, I don't, I'm with you, right? I'm mostly... Create sort of a solidarity and a persecution complex for this set of people. Right. And you can make the argument that it is better to have the daily stormer out on the open web so that the people who need to report on it can just go look at it. Right. And there's the long argument that sunlight is the best disinfectant, all these things.

And the cure for bad speech is more speech. this is what they teach you in law school about the First Amendment. Like that is generally the thrust of First Amendment principles. It's interesting. Like the thing, the last straw for Cloudflare was a post on the Daily Stormer saying Cloudflare is one of us. And PewDiePie just came out with a video where he's like, you know, pretty disappointed in like his past of Nazi jokes, which I do. I personally do not think we're that offensive. But the thing that he's really disappointed about is that it's like, man, these daily stormer Nazi people think I'm one of them.

Yeah. And I don't want that no matter what. And so there is this aspect of like realizing, oh, now that I know what they're saying and they are saying, I'm good, maybe I'm doing something wrong. Yeah. I think that's fair. Like these are all very difficult questions. I don't, this is what I mean. We were very careful last week.

I am just not, I don't, I personally do not feel any need to be careful in the face of people literally saying that the color of my skin should make me leave America. It just doesn't seem like I need to engage with that argument in a serious way. And I think that's, it's just really, like, I haven't been doing it because it's not a good use of my time. But that's what I want to reply to everyone at Twitter who's like, but you got to, you got to, you got to pretend. I'm like, no, I don't. Like, I personally have to do nothing. Like, I am allowed to say, like, you should punch a Nazi in the face. Like, it's fine.

It's, like, firmly where I live. But I think these platforms are going to, once they open the door, I do think they're going to be asked to make these decisions again. And they're going to need to have some rational thinking behind what content neutrality actually means for them in a way that you don't need to when it's Nazis. You just don't. I just firmly believe that you don't need to protect Nazis on your content neutral platform. I think that ultimately threatens the neutrality of the platform you're trying to build because it means you won't have people engaging. I mean, if the U.S. federal government ran cloud flare, we could have that discussion because they're enjoined by the Bill of Rights. But they don't.

And so we don't. Yeah. I mean, like, I don't know, if you're Google and, you know, you're trying to serve the world in your Apple or Microsoft and your customer base is the world, it actually starts to threaten you in a very specific way. Anyway, this was supposed to be a small digression about Nazis, but I just wanted to bring it up. I want to make sure we talked about it because it is, I read the site twice through over the past week as you're prepping for the show. and it is by far the biggest story happening in tech right now. Like if we talk about the web on the show constantly, whether it's living, whether it's dying, probably dying. That's just the fact.

And this is the thing. This is the moment when the power of the platforms is incredibly apparent is a moment like this. When you have a group of people and it's not just I set up a web server and now I'm giving my content to this open network. It's I rely on massive privately owned platforms for everything I do in this space. Well, you should probably consider that in some way. And I think that issue is being engaged with on a lot of different levels of alternatives to Twitter and alternatives to HTTP and like the bit coinification of things. Like there is a lot of work at decentralizing the internet. Yeah.

So it's not like this is all there is. But right now, this is all there is. Well, hopefully Nazi coin fails. Anyway, do you want to talk about gadgets? Maybe. All right. Maybe. I'm sad.

Here, I'll read an ad. Maybe we need a pallet cleanser, an ad palette cleanser. Advertising is the greatest pallet cleanser capitalism has ever devised. I think we're all in agreement about that. So I'm going to read an ad. We're going to take a break. This ad is going to be the pickled ginger of commerce. That's good.

It's going to be the glass of milk after the spicy chicken wing. Is that a thing? That's a thing. I don't know. I'll have to try that next time my Popeyes. This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Squarespace. Whatever your next big idea might be, count on Squarespace to help you create an eye-catching online platform that brings it to life. where they need a portfolio to showcase your work, a store to sell your products and services, or a blog to share your ideas,

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Start your free trial at Squarespace.com today. If you enter Offer Code Verge, you get 10% off your first purchase. Again, that's Offer Code Verge. V-E-R-G-E. You get 10% off your first purchase at Squarespace. All right, Dieter. We have other phone news here. Let me just set this up.

Do you care about any of it? Not really. I want to talk about essential. But let me do some context and then you get into it because I know you have lots and lots of thoughts. We are in the middle of like the lull, right? So we know the iPhone is likely coming in September. We know there's a pixel two.

We know there's probably some sort of new Samsung device off in this world. Dieter's holding up the essential phone to the camera. What a braggart. What a troll. But the essential phone is out now. Essential, hilariously, has sold nothing, has made nothing, is now valued over a billion dollars

so that's crazy they're going to be out on Sprint Amazon, Best Buy this company is in the middle of the lull before all the big stuff comes out they're trying to make the splash and you have the phone

tell us about the phone. I do. I'm hot and cold on the phone. Super hot on it and then I use the camera and I'm not so hot. Yeah.

Yeah. That's not good. Right. So, I mean, here's the first thing I'll say. I adore the hardware. I think that I've got this in the video and that's in the review. We have for 20, not 20, at least 10 years now made jokes about, like, phones are just going to turn into the monolith from 2001. Just, like, featureless black slab.

And this is a featureless black slab. Like, there's just no other way to describe it. Really, really close. Okay, it's got some rounded corners. The corners are slightly rounded. It's like the edges on the thing are just rounded enough so they don't like cut you. Yeah. But like it's literally made out of stone.

It's ceramic on the back. And so for me, I think that this is, this is my favorite phone hardware that I've touched in like a year. And I've been talking to, you know, Dan and Vlad about it. They're like, you are being, you like this too much. And they're like, isn't it, like, is it really better than, say, the Galaxy S8? And it is for me, just like my personal aesthetics, I described it to Vlad this way. I'm like, look, look at a jaguar. It's all curvy and it's, like, really proud of itself for being curvy.

Like, it's ostentatiously curvy. The car. Or the video game console. Yeah. The Atari Jaguar. Although I will say the animals are often quite high and mighty. Yeah. But if you look at, say, like, a Volvo, it's boxy and it's proud of it, right?

It's like, it's okay to be boxy. And this thing, it's not a knockoff of an iPhone. And that is like the highest praise that you can give a phone right now. Because the pixel looks like a knockoff of the iPhone, right? Yeah. It's got just pure, clean Android. And I think that, like, half of that is because Andy Rubin, who made Android wanted a pure clean Android.

And half of it is because they are just rushing this thing out the door. I know it's delayed and late. But, like, the camera software isn't quite done. I think if they had more time, they might have done, more stuff. He talked a little bit about wanting to have more AI built into the UI.

So, like, smart replies in Gmail. He wants that kind of like automatic suggestion stuff to be in more places. Anyway, the camera's just not ready. It's a dual sensor camera. So it has a color and a black and white sensor, both 13 megapixels. And the idea is, like,

the black and white can get a bunch of light data and the color can get a bunch of color data. and then you can put it together and there's not a whole lot of noise and everything is great. But in practice, it's just like, the photos look like, I don't know, man,

they look like iPhone 5S photos or like iPhone 6 photos. That's not good. Yeah, it's like they're fine, they're great in daylight. I think they're too yellow. I actually went, I went and told them what I think,

and so they sat me down with one of their engineers who worked on the iPhone, like tuning, tuning the iPhone camera for five years. worked on the iPhone 7 camera. And she's like, look, like, we liked our photos to be a little bit more naturalistic, and Google is really punchy with their HDR. And, you know, we're making ours punchier over time, but I really like the iPhone aesthetic.

I mean, I made the iPhone aesthetic. And so I respect that. But at the end of the day, like, it just doesn't pull off what it's claiming to pull off, especially in low light, which on something like a One Plus phone, you know, you'll take it. But this phone is $700. And, you know, it's still cheaper than I think it's heads-up competitors, the Pixel XL and the iPhone 7-plus.

But I think that at that price point, like, you need to be up in that top tier of camera quality. And this just isn't. And I haven't even talked about the modules yet. But that's like, as a phone, that's where I feel it's at. But in your opinion, what is the percentage of blame on the physical sensor and the software, which the software could theoretically get better. So. I know that's hard to judge.

They say that, yeah, they say the software is going to get better. There is an HDR mode in development, and we did see a portrait, you know, okay background thing when we went to visit Playground, which is essential. Like, that's whole complicated. I'm not going to get into that corporate weirdness. So, and I also will admit that the Google camera, like, leaked, basically, and, like, somebody hacked it so that you could install it on any. phone that has a Qualcomm 835 and an adreno or whatever the GPU is. And so I did install that camera. And I was actually pretty happy.

I don't know if it was like taking full advantage of the two sensors set up and all of that stuff. So I would say that I think it's 65% software fixable and 35% the sensors probably aren't very good. Like especially in low light, they don't have like the, you know, giant pixels that you get on a Google Pixel. Do you know what censor it is? I don't. But even though I'm saying it's 65% software, that doesn't mean that I believe

that they can make it 65% better by fixing the software. Because even though I trust that they're going to release updates for this thing, how many times have we over the years complained about a camera on an Android phone and had the manufacturer say, oh yeah, no, we know. But it's just the first round of we're going to fix it. It'll get way better soon. And then it never does. Yeah.

And what's weird is every time. Android camera. competition right now is insanely good, right? The U11, the HECU11 has a great camera. The S8 has a terrific camera. The pixel has a terrific camera. Vlad is pretty aggressive in saying all of those cameras are way better than the iPhone 7 plus camera.

And, you know, I have one of those and I have a pixel XL and they're pretty close. I think that the step change from the 6S camera to the 7 camera is very small to my eye. I know the plus has a portrait mode and all that stuff, but just taking a picture, the step change is very small. If they can't beat a 6S, they're in a bad place. So I know you want to... Yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of sample photos up on the website, and so you can go look at them yourself.

I took two different versions of the camera firmware, actually. They updated it while I was reviewing it. So I had to go outside and retake all my photos. And you can just see it. Like, it blows out, highlights. It doesn't handle situations where HDR is really helpful. It doesn't handle low light as well as it ought. And in ideal situations, it's just kind of too yellow.

So I know you want to talk about modules, but to me the standout thing is this bezelless, the top with that little cutout. Yep. How do you feel about it compared to like the S8? No, it's super great. You don't see it unless you look directly at it. It just disappears into the phone. It doesn't interfere with the operation of the phone at all. It just, I don't know.

I think having the screen go up there feels better. better. It will be interesting to see how people feel about this method of doing it. Like they're doing it, Sharp's doing it, versus what Apple is doing with the iPhone 8, where it's more like bunny ears rather than like most of the screen. Interestingly, I said, why did you go with LCD instead of OLED? And we started this thing 18 months ago, and 18 months ago we needed to get going faster, and it was easier to get a cut out of LCD than it was out of OLED. but the rumor is Apple's going with OLED

so I'm wondering if maybe they just couldn't get the supplier because Apple had it all locked up but it being LCD means that they do have to have a little bit of a chin on the bottom because you need somewhere to put the light to drive the screen but it's pretty small chin so I don't mind it too badly

What about like when you're hold How do you hold it in landscape And you're watching your favorite Netflix series Love season two I don't know you just hold it Love is a bad copy When you go into landscape, it does letterbox the video so that the, you know, selfie camera doesn't occlude the video, doesn't, like, cut off the video.

There are a couple of times where, like, if something will go full screen and it will, like, hide something. But, like, whatever, it's, like, 95% of the time, it's, you don't even see it, it's completely invisible. It really sounds like they're rushing this thing out if that is a real problem. Yeah, I think they are rushing it out. But I also think, I mean, I talked to, I talked to Andy Rubin for. like 45 minutes yesterday over the phone. And I basically asked him that. And he basically said, look, I feel like there's a duopoly out there. I feel that nobody is trying to take Apple's business model and succeed with it. And I think that it's totally possible to make money off

of selling phones. So I'm going to do it. And I also feel like it's okay to be an open company. And so, you know, why was it delayed? He says that it was delayed because when they sent it out for carrier certification, the carriers found a bunch of bugs and they had to fix more than they expected, right? Isn't there just the one carrier? No, they got to get it certified on everybody because this is going to be a worldwide phone. It's going and tell us, expect more carriers in the future. There's like 50,000 radio bans in this thing.

Sure. Because if it's just Sprint, like, if just Sprint is fucking up your universe, like they're like, this is really bad. Like you're in a bad spot. But if it's everybody, I understand. I think they're rushing out the door, but I think that the perception that they're rushing it out the door

is because we know kind of more than we usually do about a phone's development because they've been working so hard to hype it up and like talk about it. Right. Like they took a whole bunch of reporters into the playground headquarters

and showed us all of the stuff. And like lots of companies do that, but not a lot of companies do that before like they make their big splash too. And they don't, they usually do it to like one person not to a whole, you know,

gaggle reporters. Do you think that they're rushing to beat the iPhone? I mean, that would be the, if I had to take the most pessimistic view, is they have to own this cycle and the lull before the iPhone. And this is the deep wall. They don't have much time, right? They've got like a month. I actually think that the big competitor to this thing,

sure, it's the iPhone, but really it's the pixel. Like, the only reason to get this instead of a pixel is because you want a phone without the glass shade or with no logo, right? If you really believe in the module system, maybe. But we don't know enough about whether or not that's going to succeed yet. And history has taught us that modules don't do super well. Yeah, talk about the modules. Okay, so my bias is that I have a soft spot for modules.

Yeah. Dating back to the Hanspring Visor. I think just there it is. The only module I've been able to try is the 360 camera, which is itself a hair buggy. I think the quality on it, I'm not a pro at, like, judging things. 360 cameras with the quality is like medium. Hilarious. Hilarious story.

The camera has a fan in it and when you're not recording the fan inside the tiny little camera blows some hot air. If I had it here with me, I'd let you listen to it. Does it make a little like coughing something? No, it's just like a Yeah, it's a little fan. It's a little fan sand.

That's adorable. That's what you want from your phone. A fan. When you record it turns off, it's fine. But the tech behind it is simple. There's the pogo pins for charging, and then the rest of it is just straight up wireless USB. And, like, he is planning on putting out the reference so anybody can stick it in their devices and anybody can make modules for it. And that is interesting to have a system of gadget, like wireless USB and just a couple of pogo pins for charging.

I like that. It's different what Motorola is doing. So Motorola, it's like shaped to the phone, which is great for putting it in your pocket. but otherwise if you want to get a different phone or change it, you're screwed. So this magnet system, it's not great for putting stuff in your pocket. You can't leave it on there as easily. But it means that if three years from now they want to stick the magnets and the wireless USB on the other side of the phone, or you want to stick it on his like home speaker or you want

to stick it on some other gadget because LG decided to jump on the hype train for, you know, wireless modules, you could do that. So technically and philosophically, I think it's very interesting. Like, practically and, you know, I don't know, pragmatically, are they going to be able to, like, make and sell enough of these to, like, make it an interesting market. Nah. I mean, they got to sell a lot of phones. Like, it just seems real hard. The number they keep saying is, look, we're a tiny startup.

If we sell a million phones a year and we've got, like, a good. margin. Like, imagine we're making a $100 margin. There's $100 million a year in profit for a company that's two years old. That's actually really good for a startup. So that's what they're saying. I don't know if they're going to hit a million films a year, first of all. And even if they do, Andy Rubin himself admits, like, that is not an interesting market for consumer, like, electronics companies to make modules. So what he really needs is to make more products that these modules can fit on. And he needs to convince other manufacturers to adopt this white. wireless USB module standard. That's a lot. I'm just going to say, that's a lot. To build your business model around, I'm going to make accessories and the accessories are going to drive interest is bonkers. No, no, no, no, no.

All of the stuff we have been talking about, everything we've just been talking about boils down to glorified marketing and a little bit of cash flow for his actual dream of unifying all of the disparate systems in your smart home under the ambient OS, which, you know, is an AI and a system that allows you to seamlessly communicate via Siri, Alexa, Cortana, smart things, Brillo. Oh, my God. You know. Fred.

Don't forget thread. Thread, right? So you saw that thing too, right? Well, so what they have is they have a 3D printed dummy of it, right? And then they have the 4.5 inch circular screen on like a breadboard, you know, just an exposed electronic board. and it's cycling through a bunch of different screens that are like, imagine if it did this.

And so I'm like, okay, what does it run? Well, I'm not going to tell you. Okay, well, can developers make apps for it? Yeah, okay, so what language? Well, we're not going to tell you. Okay, well, so, you know, so like there's a lot they're not willing to say about it yet. But if you look at the images, like you see logos for Spotify and Alexa and

Cortana and Sonos and Cortana, all of which run on Android. So it's probably all built on Android. Android. But it's, you know, it's a big 4.5 inch circular display and you, it's a mix of voice and touch. And that's about as much as I can say, really, not because I know more, but because that's like you can only speculate so much based on like four or five screenshots. Yeah. I'm trying to, what's a good parallel to that kind of company? It's like, okay, there's a bunch of stuff happening in this market, but it's a bunch of different company that's all confusing and it's too hard and it's annoying,

we will step in and deal with it for you. That's Apple. That's what you're describing. Is it? Apple makes its own... Well, are you talking about, like, being the... Well, so the difference is, like, Apple consumer product. Apple's a closed ecosystem.

Right. And he's trying to build an open ecosystem. He's trying to, like... Are you describing, like, what is the ultimate consumer middleware company that just, like, glues everything together for you? Yeah. I don't think consumer middleware. Like, the logite.

harmony is the most successful consumer middleware that has ever existed. That's a good one. And then what's number two? Like Sonos? Sonos isn't though because Sonos just they've grown into that role. They let you plug in a bunch of different music apps into a unified system. Yeah, I just don't. Yeah. It's just so not the same. It's like they make speakers and then the music, like the music app companies mostly don't make speakers. So I'm not crazy in thinking there aren't a ton of examples when this works. Yeah, the Logitech Harmony. That's your best case scenario. A bunch of IR blasted middleware commands. That's what you want in the world. So, Deiter, should people buy this phone?

No. Yikes. Oh, man. Look, no, look, I put my SIM card back in it. I turned off I message. Like I said, this is like in terms of basic hardware and like a basic Android experience. It's my favorite phone. I like this better than the GS8,

but the camera's not good enough. And spending the money on this phone, you know, a month before the iPhone and two months before the next pixel just seems like a big, silly mistake. You should wait until a Pixel 2, pixel XL2 comes out,

and you should maybe wait for the iPhone and see if they can make some upgrades to the camera on the essential phone. I will say the pixel... And then you can make a pretty informed decision. The pixel has a huge problem coming its way, which is it's going to be the only phone with bezels. No, there's two pixels.

There's two pixels. There's two. There's the pixel, which is the phone with bezels with dual speakers and squeezy technology, and it's made by HTC. But Android Police had renders of the Pixel XL2, which looks much closer to something like, you know, an LGV, whatever, the V30, whatever that's coming. Or the LGG6 or the, um, you know, the Galaxy S8. My hunch is that the LGV-30 is like the foundation of the Pixel XL2. If I had to, that's my crazy idea. That's my crazy hunch.

I know it's not like the same thing, but because it's not a Nexus, but. I don't know. That's been the move they've been making. Yeah. Like, I mean, that's like, Google has a long history of being like, cool flagship mid-tier manufacturer. We will now take it from you. I, uh, I almost dropped my phone today and I like grabbed it all of suddenly.

And then I was like, oh, shoot, I just squeezed it. And then I remember that I don't have a phone that has squeezed it just. So somehow it seeped into my mind. Oh, you found your dongle. My sister-in-law, Bethany Miller, the kindest human on the earth. Yeah. Sent me my headphones and dongle that I left at her house. Very nice.

On our family union. And so now you're using that one because of love instead of the fancy one that you bought. The fancy one I bought was bad and it had noise on the line. Look, there's not a lot I'm going to say here except that I was 100%. right about the problems of the dongles. Also, Dieter, no... I left my dongle, no headphone jack. It comes with the USBC dongle.

It's very nice. The cord is like fabric wound. Yeah, yeah, yeah, great. Got fabric on it. Super excited about that. Definitely, definitely left the USBC dongle and my Bluetooth headphones at the office a couple days ago and had nothing to listen to on the way home

and had nothing to listen to on the way back in the next day. Oh, this is the other day, because you have AirPods in right now. Well, that's... I'm talking to you on Skype for my computer. That's why. Yeah. But Pixel not supposed to have headphone jack. Essential phone doesn't have a headphone jack.

iPhone probably not going to... I get a lot of tweets right now, every new pixel leak where it shows no headphone jack, people are going to complain about that too. And I say to you, I am, it is still bullshit. This is my line from the review. I say, I'm going to continue to be a curmudgeon about this. I don't care. How do we make it your guys' fault?

That there's no headphones jack? The complainers. People come up to me. Random strangers approach me now. And they say things like, I love this phone, but I hate that it doesn't have a headphone jack. Dieter, no, you weren't there. Helen and T.C. came to my place upstate, and we went over the ridge of the mountain to, like, take a photo. And there was another group there, and they asked us to take their photo.

And I, like, took the dude's iPhone. And I asked the question, I ask everybody, whoever hands me a phone, what do you think of this phone? just me doing some reporting trying to understand it five minute conversation about that phone jacks I was like I don't want to be this person TC's just laughing at me

I didn't I just said what everyone was thinking I'm not like the the banner men for this particular issue but if you want me to complain about it no no no no no no let's be very clear you're the dude

at the front of the army holding the banner about to get trampled by the horses. It's like a lot and rushing into rooms to tell me they don't like this thing. Here's what I'm worried about. I'm worried about curmudgeonly capture. Your personal brand and your website benefits from the fact that you complain about lack of headphone jacks, which could lead you to actually push manufacturers to removing headphone jacks more often so that you make more bread.

Yeah. So we get more clicks and we have more pages and then put the ads on the pages and more people see their ads. That's how the internet works. Look, it's dumb. And I think it's particularly dumb. It is particularly dumb for Android manufacturers who do not have a Bluetooth headphone product nearly as good as AirPods to sell. But it does make more sense with USBC. Because Apple has clearly done some sort of magic that makes it impossible to make a good one of these headphones jobs.

one of these dongles, one of these adapters. Like the third party don't exist and they're hard to find and the one I found that had four and half stars on Amazon literally had noise on the line. It feels like I know this dude who has a gadget blog, talks about gadgets every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, just checking. I've now signed Paul two stories on this podcast. I'm going to write about it.

It's just, yeah. I mean, Hime just did the video for us at Circuit Breaker about how USBC is still a total mess. I haven't tried out the dongle and like this versus the HCC's implementation of the dongle. And I haven't had the will to get into whether or not the USBC dongle on this thing is like standards based or not. Oh, yeah. That's a follow up. Deere, you're assigned the, did you make the same idiotic mistake as HTC? Andy Rubin post.

Ah, it's a mess. We're generating so much content theoretically. That's why you come to the Vergecast. Promises of things we might not do. Anyway, look, maybe I'll write the thing about, I just think Apple got away with it because they're Apple.

You're going to get a new iPhone. It's a thing that happens. It happened to a lot of people. They ship the headphones in the box. It's great. Whatever. But there's a reason that people like leap across train tracks to tell me about their lack of affinity for the headphone jack

removal because it's annoying. Well, there's a reason why people like Android because they can actually have a choice about these things. So yeah, I mean, I think that's like a, the danger for the Android manufacturers who are doing this is that Samsung is still the biggest one. They

figured out how to make their phone real small, have no bezels, look beautiful, have this thing that people want. And if you're in the store and you're looking at the two phones that are pretty similar that run the same operating system and one has more features what are you going to do especially if there's not the great Bluetooth headphone story like AirPods sitting next to it anyway that has been this week in headphone chat rants with the verge cast i'm going to read an ad

here's what's going to happen i'm going to read one more ad uh you might have noticed Lauren grush has a new show on the verge called spacecraft it is very cool it's very fun it's up on YouTube now, you should go watch the first episode. As we did with Lauren Good Show, Next Level, I talked to Lauren Grush about spacecraft. We're going to run that and we're going to come back. Then some other things are going to happen. So let me read this ad.

We're going to listen to Lauren. We're going to come back. This episode of Virchast also brought to you by Parachute, which makes incredibly beautiful sheets. It's bed sheets. Parachute products are all designed at a headquarters in Venice Beach. Their sheets have a modern, clean design that works with any style of home. the natural colors and minimalist styles are gender neutral.

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Plus, Parachute offers a 60-night trial, so if you don't love it, just send it back with no questions asked. That's parachute home.com slash verge for free shipping and returns. Can I say I wish I had the back envelope design on my pillowcases? Yeah. Because I got really long pillows accidentally and like relatively short pillowcases. And those pillowcases just poop those pillows right up. Well, I know an offer code for you, my friend.

Hey, Lauren. Hey, Eli. It's really funny because everyone has heard me on the show saying, Lauren to another Lauren for four weeks. You are Lauren Grush. But I'm also another LG. We have two Lauren's, both with a G last name. This is true.

I think Lauren Goode refers to you as LG1. Which is not right. We're equal LG1 and LG1A. She just skips me that because I was here before her. But I was here before her like a week or something. I just like LG1 because it makes you sound like a rocket. I don't even think about that. Yeah, I like that.

Anyway, so you, so if you have been listening to Vergecast, you know, we had Lauren Good Show next level. Lauren came on. Which was awesome. It was really great. And she was on the Vergecast every week to talk about her episodes. That show, that first season has ended. And now the first season of your show, Spacecraft has kicked off. Yeah.

So we're doing the same thing. Tell us about spacecraft. So spacecraft, well, at least the first season of spacecraft is all about, you know, what it takes to go to space as a person, you know, being an astronaut. So we go through space suits. We go through the different types of VR and simulation training. Health. Health is a big thing. I think a lot of people don't think about when it goes to space.

The microgravity environment isn't hospitable to people. You know, having lived on Earth with the gravity, taking that gravity away is bad for you. That's like my dream. Take it away. Yeah, maybe for a little bit. But living in space, you know, is. It takes its toll on the body. And there are other aspects of space, too, but we'll get in.

You'll have to watch the show. Sorry, you plug it. Do the interview first. Right, right, right. Sorry, sorry. And then, of course, it all culminates with actually experiencing zero-g. What does that mean? You also have to watch to find out.

Is everything you say going to end with watch to find out? Look, I've just learned how to really plug this show so well. So here we are. So what was the genesis of you wanting to do this kind of show versus, I mean, you've been making space videos for us for a long time. Yeah. Why this specific kind of show? I just really wanted to be much more immersive in the process. I mean, it's always fun to go out and see a rocket launch, but you're so far away.

And, you know, the human experience is tactile. It's, you know, you want to be there and experiencing and seeing these things up close. So I really wanted to kind of take people into that experience through my own eyes and experience that way. So, yeah, it was really just more about putting myself into these weird situations and then just letting the chaos ensue. Yeah. But you have like history, right? At the beginning of your show, you often say your parents are rocket scientists. Yeah, growing up, both of my parents were engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

And so I always had a bit of a taste of the space life, if you will, if that's a thing. That's the next show. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Space life. Yeah, but even then it was kind of, you know, I was observing on the outside. And so this was really just an attempt, a selfish attempt on my part to get to go and play with all these fun toys that astronauts get to play with. Well, that's like the best part when you get to have your work line up with the thing you want to do. Exactly.

That's good. So tell us about this first episode. So the first episode is all about spacesuits, but specifically we're focusing on the next generation of space suits. Right now, you know, when you wear a space suit or if you're an astronaut, you're going outside of the International Space Station, and your spacesuit is kind of attuned to doing spacewalks in lower Earth orbit. But if we go to other places, let's say the moon or Mars, you're going to need a completely different type of suit because you have to consider the gravity of the location you're going to. You have to consider the atmospheric composition. Not all of space is the same temperature. You go through different extremes.

And also dust. Dust is a big thing. You don't have to worry about that so much in lower Earth orbit. But if you go to the moon, dust can get in your clothes. And if you don't properly prepare for it, you know, then it can kind of muck up systems. So you want to make sure that you properly take care of that. So in the first episode, we try on different lunar and Mars. prototype suits and you'll see that it's not the most comfortable experience. And I'll admit that

it has to do with the fact that I'm trying them here on Earth, but it just goes to show that it's not as easy as just zipping up a suit. It's a very complicated process. It takes a while to get in the suit and it takes, it's not, I think the guy that I talked to made a good point. It's very hard to contain a human in a bag of oxygen, basically. And there's that scene where the suit's being pressurized and you're just like, completely uncomfortable. And once it pressure, so yeah, it's another thing about your suit. So you have to be pressurized because you basically are kind of containing.

You're trying to recreate a small part of Earth's atmosphere in this suit. It's not totally Earth's atmosphere, but you still need that pressurization. That's a big deal. And once they did that, it felt like I was in a big human balloon and trying to move my arms. I was getting just a workout from trying to maneuver my hands, you know? Wow. Because the suit is kind of like actively pushing against you, you know? So, I mean, it might be different on Mars, for instance.

Mars has one third the gravity of Earth. So the weight of the suit too probably wouldn't be, it wouldn't feel as restrictive. So that's one thing to consider. But I definitely think that people who want to live on Mars, you might want to reconsider that idea. Just going outside is impossible. I'm just saying it's not going to, you'll never go for a stroll again.

And if that's the only way to walk around on Mars is in the suit, it's not for me. So when you were trying on the suit, this is like the number one question we got after your first episode aired. You're trying on the Big Mars suit. It looks crazy, by the way. It's like striped. It looked like an old-time football uniform.

It's a wild looking thing. I think my favorite part was the torso. It looked like I had a really long body because the way it connected was over the chest. And so it just kind of looks like I have this really long stomach. Anyway, continue. But there's a part you couldn't film. And we put up a slide that's like we weren't allowed to film this. Right.

And everyone wants to know exactly why. So it's very murky. And I talked to a guy who does space law at, um, the university. And it's because of these things called ITAR restrictions. And it might not just be ITAR. There's also another similar type of restriction EAR. I have to look up that acronym. But basically, it's rules for how you can transport technologies and not just transport them physically, but the knowledge of technologies. So since they were building this suit for NASA, for their government purposes.

I believe there are some restrictions in terms of exporting via video the knowledge of how the suits can be put together. Does that make sense? Yeah. So there are not as many restrictions, though, on, or it looks like, there may not be as tight restrictions

for suits for commercial purposes. So maybe the suits that are being used, well, see, then again, I was going to say the commercial cruise suits like SpaceX and Boeing are making, they might not have as many restrictions. However, they will be used by NASA astronauts. So it's a very

complicated process. And we later learned that we might have been able to film it. It might not have been that big of a deal, but just to be on the safe side, we... You don't want to show the button that says weapon system and game. So, yeah. I mean, those restrictions are insane.

In the early 2000s, I think Apple wasn't allowed to export Power Mac G4s, because they were technically super computers. Is that part of ITAR? Yeah. Like they were technically supercomputers and there were export restrictions on supercomputers because they could be used to like make weapons.

And it was obviously ridiculous and they were just like computers. Yeah, I believe what happened is they reclassified spacesuits from ITAR to the EAR which is kind of similar. But it was technically classified, space suits were classified as like military type material so kind of in the same class as weapons.

That's crazy. Anyway, it was funny because when I talked to the space lawyer, he was like, I try to put ITAR out of my mind because it gives me such a headache. Because there's so many different rules and regulations that you have to adhere to when it comes to stuff. I love that there's one, a space lawyer, and B, the space lawyer has like specific irritations. We should just do a whole season on space law because I find it fascinating. That is the worst ABC prime time show. Space law. Says you.

I think it's great. No, I'm into that. So you tried out in the Mars suit. it was heavy Yeah Really pressurized It does look insane Right

But then you also tried on a moon suit Yeah so that one was lighter Just because it was a training suit I believe we weren't Maybe they had like taken apart The actual prototype so we couldn't put it on But I don't think you can actually I'm not sure if you could have taken the prototype outside

So this was like allowed us to go and pretend to be on the moon Except we were in a field in North Dakota Right next to the highway Which is very moon-like. Yeah, exactly. I wonder if, because you could kind of see the highway from where we were, so I wonder if people were driving by and we're like, but that thing, that thing sits out there all the time. So maybe if you're just driving by. Local voters, like, we got to cut that university funding.

What is happening over there? No, actually, the thing that they have out there is really cool. It's a Mars lunar habitat. Yeah. And it's, they try to make a whole self-containing habitat. And it's not fully done yet. So I don't know if we showed some parts, but they're actually making an entire module. for growing plants.

And they do a lot of testing out there, isolation testing or like training as if they were on a 30-day mission or something on the moon. They can't leave. The only way to leave is to go out that rover and into the spacesuit and walk around that way. So they actually live in that hab for 30 days at a time?

Yeah. Because in the show you're like, here's a bed and here's a kitchen. I was like, what is this for? No, they're actually living there. And eventually it'll be bigger, but I believe there are only a few modules that they could have moved to.

so but in the future if someone you know gets angry with somebody else they can go to another module but just imagine that's another thing you have to think about is if you're getting upset with somebody hopefully you don't but you're stuck with them in this little space for a little while wow you can go for a walk in the suit so you had to like go through the hab into the rover making air quotes the rover module and then you jumped into the suit yes so basically they had a handlebar this was another part we didn't film just for safety's sake but um It had a handlebar above the suit. Like, if you saw, it was kind of the back of it was connected to the rover.

So they unzipped that part. You put your feet in first. You hold yourself kind of with the bar and put your feet in. They helped me get my feet situated. And then I put my hands in, and then they zip me up in the back. And then if you look, I clasped a lever of some kind, which unhooked me from. from the rover and it let me go free. And then you ran around.

And then I ran around. I think I did a little more than they wanted me to because they said people get tired really quick, which I did get tired. But they were like, we try to stay close to them in case, you know, something goes wrong. So what were the big differences between obviously ones, a testing suit? Yeah. It wasn't pressurized. It wasn't fully pressurized.

I didn't have any kind of life support system on the back. So if you saw there is a big backpack, I don't think it was filled with any kind of technology. So it was lighter that way. That was nice. It was still pretty hot. There's a big, you know, there's insulation running through the suit. And we also noted that normally when you're wearing these suits, you have like a liquid cooling pressure or not pressure, undergarmament that you use. And it has tubing that goes through and douses you with, like, cold water.

So that's usually used to regulate your temperature. We didn't put that on. So I got sweaty really fast. So what's like the purpose of training in that suit? What are you trying to learn how to do if you were somebody actually training? I mean, the idea is just to get a feel for what it's going to be like to work in that suit. A big part of the suits are the gloves because if you're going to be working with tools, your gloves really have to be both pressurized and dexterous, which is very tough because it did feel like I had big sausages for fingers.

And the gloves didn't quite, I mean, I think I was a little too small for the suit, so my hands didn't fit all the way. So when I was picking things up, it felt a little bit clumsy. But yeah, that was really, it's hard to show without you being in the suit. But those tasks that I had where I just had to pick up a ball or had to, I think there was one time it was like I had what looked like a dust sweeper. And I had to pick up the ball with that. And I think the one we showed was maybe like my fifth attempt or something because I had to just kind of moving it didn't work. I had to swing it as hard as I can to get that momentum so that the ball went in. Yeah.

And so that was just doing that. It's the easiest stuff here. So it really was eye-opening how just how much the suit limits your abilities when you're out there. This all just reminds me in the video you made it CES where you got in the huge mech suit. Yeah. It made you feel like you were an old person. Yeah, I mean, they're not all that dissimilar. Now, I do want to say, I don't want to feel like a bad-mouthing these suits.

There are amazing, amazing feats of engineering. The fact that these things can keep you alive on another planet is insane, but it just goes to show all the things that need to happen in order to keep you alive don't necessarily equate to a comfortable experience. Right. So in terms of what you saw, obviously this is a university that's working in partnership with NASA, Yeah. Compared to, so compare that to what's happening with commercial crew, what the private companies are building, what NASA already has.

What are the main differences? I think it's just different. I think everybody's kind of using the same technology. I wouldn't say one way is more ahead than the other. I think it's just a different, different ways of doing business. So these newer companies are kind of all vertically integrated, so they're all doing stuff in-house. Whereas with NASA, I mean, this was the University of North Dakota's research. program. They got NASA funding to make the suit for NASA. It's just, it's just a different way of,

I guess, contracting materials and whatnot. I wouldn't say the tech, like, one company is more advanced in technology and the other, maybe in little places, but yeah. Well, I mean, really the question is like, is Elon Musk in his basement building a suit that's going to blow everyone away? And it sounds like maybe the challenges are so steep that the answers are all the same. Yeah, I would say There's no one way to make a space suit, but they all have to do very similar things, right? They have to be a very flexible yet strong material. They have to keep, you know, oxygen flowing. And, you know, they have to do all those things they talked about earlier where, you know, protecting from dust or, you know, the weight has to be a certain way.

I think there are some kind of their images of spacesuits floating around online. I cannot confirm if they are real or not. But, and they look pretty good. I'm sure SpaceX's suits will, you know, use similar technology. I think the ones that they're making those. So there are different types of suits. They probably are making the kinds that you use when you launch to space. So those are suits that will keep you pressurized in case of a depressurization event.

So they're not going to be full exploration suits like the ones I tried on. You're just wearing them during launch just in case you have a bag. day and you're exposed to vacuum all of a sudden. So you're not really supposed to be in them for a very long time. These are probably, the ones that I tried on are probably meant for longer duration, walks, you know, exploration on other planets type thing. Yeah. Man, it all sounds incredibly complicated.

Yeah. I'm going to stay on Earth. So what's your next episode? When does it come out? Next episode comes out on Tuesday. And this one is all about simulations and training for the job. You know, if you recall, astronauts do have job descriptions. So spacewalking is one of them.

So we're going to be learning how to do spacewalking through VR training. And we'll do some other things with VR as well. Look at you just keeping the T's alive. I want to give it away. Well, I've seen it. So I think it's great. I won't tell anyone about it. I'm going to say it.

I'm just going to say this out loud. Lauren drives a rover. It's a fact. It's a real thing that happens. It is the coolest VR thing I've ever seen. It's like a fake rover with projected screens. That's it. This is an audio show.

If your imagination took you to a place, that's great. But you can actually see it on the video on Tuesday. I will say we're doing something different with this show the next level. So next level, it was the show was everywhere, kind of in the same form. This show, spacecraft is on YouTube as a show. And then on Facebook and other places, we're kind of cutting it up to make it a little bit more focused. just because you kind of had these, like, discrete experiences in every episode?

Yeah, I would say there are chapters within each episode. Like, there was the Mars suit, and then there was a lunar suit. And then the next episode, we have driving a Mars rover, and then we have VR spacewalking. And then something else that we won't tell you. Well, that's awesome. So you've got four episodes of this coming.

Yeah. And I will say our finale is amazing. I just, I'm going to say that. You should follow through through the end. And who knows what that will be? Who knows? Lauren actually gets on a rocket and goes to space. Don't oversell this.

The working title of the show is Lauren goes to space, and I love that title, but it was just a promise we were not able to keep. At no point has Lauren actually gone to space. But soon, we'll get there, I think, in our lifetime. Sure, if you want to pay my ticket, that would be great. How much does the verge budget have for that? Please go to patreon.com slash Lauren at the verge.

Send Lauren to space. Please, thanks. that's how Patreon works. Anyway, thank you for being on the show today. You'll be back next week. Everybody go to YouTube. Just go to the verge page on YouTube, spacecraft right at the top.

Watch the first episode. Let us know what you think. You can get a hold of Lauren. What's your Twitter? At Lauren Grush. At Lauren Grush on Twitter. L-O-R-E-N. Oh yeah.

L-O-R-E-N, not like that other Lauren. Not that A-U nonsense. Finally. Finally, some Lauren on Lauren Shade on the Vergecast. No, everyone's great. They're all my favorites. I love Lauren. Lauren Grush on Twitter.

Send your feedback on the show. Watch the show, look out for it on Tuesdays, and we'll talk to you again next week. Awesome. Thanks. Well, Lauren is great, as always. You should really watch spacecraft. It is, I think, one of the most fun shows we've done, because she loves space, and it just, like, absolutely comes through. Anyway, Paul.

Yeah. Every week. Mm-hmm. You do a thing. What's that thing called? It's called, you say surveillance. I say sous-svalence. Okay.

So this is kind of. Sadly topical. It's this body cam. It's like a wearable body camera called Shonen on Kickstarter. But they're really embracing the idea of, I mean, they don't use the word as far as I know. But it's this idea by a wearable computing pioneer that's like a personal hero of mine, Steve Mann, who came up with this term Seuss Valence, which is the idea that you have a camera. And when you walk into a space that has like security cameras where you're being.

surveilled by the man, you for the safety of all, you know, because they always put that sign for your personal safety, we're recording or something like that. You know, for your personal safety and for your protection of other people, you record things yourself by wearing a camera on you. I've seen a bunch of these. Yeah. And so a lot of them are used though for like, like memory, like just recording your life. But this, the idea behind this is actually, because this one also like live streams. So you can like, like, live stream to like Facebook or YouTube. Yeah, it's called

Shonen. It's on Kickstarter. It's a camera that you wear. Yeah. We've done, but that's like, we've done a couple of those stories recently. This is like a weird trend of these products now. Wearable cameras? Yeah. But are they suzvailants friendly?

Hmm. And I think... I feel like that was the the edge on this one. If you are wearable... Front row is for capturing experiences. I see. But this is for like crowd-based security. This is, yeah, yeah. It's for that protester life. This is for the protester life. Yeah. The people are like scheduling their Sundays around Marches. Yeah. I like that. I like that that's a market opportunity in these United States. It means that people are coming together. Did you see that the iPhone has a mode where you can hit the

power button like on iOS 11 like five times and it will jump into like, do you want to call 911 or do you want to turn off, you know, touch ID. Well, Deeter happily, that link is in our next round, or lightning round of gas news. But in honor of the eclipse, I'm retitling it, the eclipse round. Which does not suggest speed the way that lightning round does, but it's a thing that happens in the sky, so I think it works. And at different times and for different durations at different degrees, depending on where you are geographically. Yeah. What's the sound of an eclipse?

we got this yeah we're there I was at Adorama the big camera store here in New York you may have heard of Adorama if you ever purchased a camera of any kind

because then the ads will show up and they were all of them were overwhelmed with the number of like eclipse hunters who were coming into the stores trying to buy filters they were totally sold out of filters

they were totally sold out of the eclipse film like the actual film that you need to shoot the eclipse. They were sold out of like raw sheets of filter material like huge rolls of filter material that people were cutting their own filters out of for their cameras,

completely sold out of that. They looked exhausted. They were like people are always coming in here. We're opening boxes of the eclipse glasses. We saw out of them in seconds. And one of them says the other, we were just not prepared for this. It just looked like it can't go into war.

I'm scared. I'm not going to be. be ready for the eclipse because we're putting out great content on our website about how to be ready for the eclipse and I'm reading it. Yeah. I'm like, oh, I'm not doing any of these things. Get some glasses. I should just get some glasses. We're all going to go outside. It'll be great.

Apparently you're supposed to go buy a Volvo in order to watch the eclipse. Oh, really? According to Volvo's marketing department. Yeah. Because they have a giant sunroof. It's a real road trip moment. The saddest eclipse related marketing thing that has happened to us is that Chiquita Bananas sent all of our science.

reporters, a poster where the eclipse, the sun part of the eclipse, was a banana, and it's a poster that says the banana moon is coming. Yeah, those ads are on our website right now. Yeah, I'm embarrassed to even be saying it because it was obviously a stunt, but it kind of worked because I was like, oh, banana moon's funny. Eclipse fever's here, and that's why we're having an eclipse round. Okay, you ready? Samsung's new fitness smart band leak reveals offline Spotify support.

I think little Spotify gadgets are going to be a huge trend because the shuffle's done A lot of people use Spotify The Mighty was on Kickstarter, it was a big thing, just came out I think Spotify and the go That's my take I went for a run the other day, carried my iPhone Horrible experience

Yeah, kind of got some neck pain for like holding it out there You're holding it in front of you? No, I just like I was running One arm was moving differently than the other arm Yeah You got any one of those armbands. Yeah, that looks stupid. Does it look worse than you holding your phone in front of you?

I think so. All right. Apple reportedly investing a billion dollars in original video content. This is going to be terrible. Sounds like a billion dollars that they will miss spin. It's like a stimulus. It's like an economic stimulus. Oh my God, Paul.

That worked. Now it did it. Oh, my God. Can I? I'm just saying what they've made so far is I want to tell you what I think of it but we have to cut it from the podcast all right I hope I hope it's good you always want more good things but they are not they've not proven a great track record here I can't even watch plenty of the apps man I open on my Apple TV it's the first thing it suggests to me every time because it's the last thing I watched inside the TV app so it's always there and I'm just like I'm not this this screenshot of Will I am is just staring at me and he's judging me, but I'm not doing it. Anyway, next one, and I think that, okay, you're going to have to come with me in a flight of fancy here. You ready?

Voodoo, which is a streaming service that only, like, 4K nerds use, announce that's bringing an Apple TV app out soon. Here's my conspiracy theory. The only reason, they've not been on the Apple TV yet because you can't buy things without paying Apple to tax in an app. Right? So Voodoo is a rental service. There's no reason to put your app on their platform because you got to pay Apple the money. So why would you put a thing there?

This is the reason Amazon wasn't on there forever. There's rumors of a 4K Apple TV. Voodoo's huge advantage right now. The reason I use them, they're the only place you can really buy a huge or rent a huge collection of 4K HDR movies. So now that you've bought all that stuff, you want to buy a 4K Apple TV. You need to be able to access it. Otherwise, you're mad at Voodoo. I think this points to that 4K Apple TV.

happening in this next event. It seems so long overdue. I don't see why they want it. Yeah, it's time. I mean, it's very eager to be there in the, it was in the home pod league, right? Yeah. 4K, HDR, H-TR-10, Dolby Vision, the whole deal. It's the thing that I want.

I'm going to buy that thing instantly. And then I'm going to throw the remote out the door, out the door, not the window. That's how little I disrespect it. Speaking of Smart TV stuff I've got last year's Vizio P65 So I did get the new update with the apps built into the TV that are like web apps and Man it's so bad

It's super duper bad Yeah Like this TV was not built to run an interface Yeah super wasn't especially one that was built off of like streaming HTML apps off the cloud Just just terrible Is it slow or bad it's slow. They're different.

Also bad. Yeah. That's a killer. That's the worst combination when bad things happen slowly. Yeah. Like it was just bad, but it was quick. You're like, oh, this is terrible. At least it's over.

Now I'm just watching a video, right? Like, I think TV devices that are like, because at the end you're just watching a stream. You're done. There's like, everything bad about TVs gets a pass because at the end you just like watch a thing. Navigating bad slowly is killer. Are the, but it's like really not architected for it because it's not even doing it

natively, right? It's streaming HTML5 and then calling a Chromecast stream and then casting it. There is some native stuff, like the menus for like adjusting the TV settings is now native, but I feel like everything else is streamed. In order to do it, they had to ship

me a brand new remote because it didn't the original remote didn't have a D-pad, a five-way. And of course, the new remote has six buttons for random services because they're now taking that sweet sweet crackle money. So my TV remote has a crackle button on it.

Here's what I know. If you in your life. I dream that I hit that crackle button and it doesn't launch the crackle app. It just fucks with the sound on the TV and just makes everybody sound like crackling. That's what I want. Here's what I can tell you. If you are in a position in your life to ever just take the crackle money, just take it. What are they going to do?

They're going to be mad at you? You're like, you took the money. You ever did anything. You're like, yeah. Sorry, crackle. That's my theory. Please buy my new TV, which has a useless crackle money. All right.

Paul. Yeah. Intel announced the next generation ice lake chips. Unexpectedly early. What's going on here? I don't understand it. Yeah. I mean, Intel's basically, you know, Intel's kind of backed off of the, like, the TikTok thing.

So you can't expect them, like, every new generation to, like, jump down in, like, process size. The bigger problem I'm having, and I know I am a professional technology writer, and I should have figured this out. by now, but I had a real hard time with KB Lake and Sky Lake. Yeah. There's two things that end in Lake. Yeah. And I just get them confused. And one is newer than the other.

And I'm 90% sure, KB Lake is newer than Sky Lake. Now we're going to have Coffee Lake, which is possibly the 8th Gen. There's Cannon Lake, which hasn't been announced yet. There's just everything. And then there's Ice Lake. Yeah, which is like 10 nanometer. So everything's a lake, and I'm never going to keep it. Is there a relationship with this, or are they just bad at names?

I don't know. I don't know. I, to be honest, I haven't dug far enough into this to actually understand it, and so I don't want to mislead anybody. But I will say where I'm out with it right now is I'm confused about the lakes and that, you know, Intel is coming out with its eighth-gen process. We've been on KB Lake. Yeah.

We're going to have a new theoretically considerable bump. But it's also a little confusing, and you can't assume it will have as big of a jump in power as you typically expect with a new Intel generation. Because Intel seems to be scrambling a little bit now that it actually has a competitor called the ND. They're just not going to update the MacBook Pro is fast enough. That's like, right, they skipped a whole generation and they relate to this. All I want is my computer's so old. Anyway, it's just hard to buy a computer right now. That's where I'm out with it.

Dieter. I don't know why Intel calls all their processors, uses Lake for everything. It implies a relationship, but I don't think there's own. Anyway, Dieter. Yes. Android O is probably not named Orangina. What if it is? That's correct.

Look, it's Oreo. Stop being coy, putting a little octopi in the betas, Google. We all know it's Oreo. There's nothing else that you could possibly call it. It's not orangina. It's cute, but come on. Just let it go. Why are they teasing all of this?

You know, it's getting to be late August And they've had the release candidate for Android O out for a little while And they want to get the thing out the door At or before they release the new pixels So like they're just building up There's nothing else to do right now I think it's going to be if you're Google I just do

How is Orangina a dessert? It's not it means full of sugar That's true There you go. Dessert Sotas. That's my new thing. All right. We haven't talked about the cop button.

I think that's it. You miss anything? Just to be clear, the cop button is not to, you push this button a lot of times and then like, hey, cops, everything is available for your bruiser. It's the opposite of that. It's the opposite of that. Right now, a big problem with touch ID, forthcoming the face unlock, is that cops can just, like, grab your finger and put it on there and lock your phone and search your phone. They probably shouldn't do that. Probably legal.

Face unlock, they just point at you. Right. Definitely not illegal. Like, now they're not even making you do anything except have a face. Right. Which I believe is legal. So iOS 11, you click the side button five times. It'll lock the phone, give you the slider to call SOS, and then require you enter your passcode.

So, like, you're in a sketchy situation. You're just like, click, click, click, click. Was that five? Soon it was five. Now you're protected against your face being used to unlock your phone. Which I think is extraordinarily clever, to be clear. Like, that's neat.

That's a neat idea. Okay, that was a show. Star of the Nazis, ended with cops. The Vergecast, everybody. That's what it's always like. Healthy dose of Android skepticism in the middle. What more could you want from this show about technology and culture?

Basically nailed it all. I want to call out two stories, well, three actually, that we did on the site this week, that are just really great that you should go read. One, Megan Farokmanesh, who's been on the show a bunch, wrote a story about college students who are paying for their tuition by streaming Twitch, which is awesome.

Just go read that. We did a story that is just so adorable, like made my heart explode about high school kids who compete at Microsoft Word in office. And there's like an Excel 2016 champion from America. That's right. So go read that. It's called the Doc X Games, which is a perfect name. And then Sarah Jong and Rachel Becker, we actually talked about this piece that they were working on on the show last week, wrote a voluminous, extraordinarily well-researched, extraordinarily well-written piece about the Google memo and the history of women in tech, particularly in computer science.

Just read it. It's one of those things I keep saying it's, it is one of the most important ongoing stories we're going to cover forever in my mind. but read it. It's just very smart. They're both extraordinarily smart. Sarah is an incredible reporter with a lot of depth in the history and the culture of the valley. Rachel is one of our science reporters

engaged with the science very deeply. Just read it. Take it in. It's, I mean, I helped them work on it. I think they just did it trying to stop and it's fascinating. But those three stories, I just want to call them out

because we talk a lot about gadgets, but there's a lot of stuff that happens at the verge. I want to start calling out some stories at the end of the show. Okay, that's it. There are other podcasts to listen to. Lauren Good, host To Embarrass to Ask on the Recode side.

That's great. You should listen to that. Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media, which is wonderful. Karras Fischer host Recode Decode, Decode things. All that's available on iTunes. Go look for it. I put an episode on Verge Xters this week. Yeah, it's you and Dan, right?

Talking about Twitch. Why would anybody watch people play video games? That's pretty cool. And I will tell you, Ashley Carmen, who's been on the show bunch, and Caitlin Tiffany, who's actually been on the show before, too. They are working on a pilot for their new series, which I won't give away too much, but is going to be awesome. That'll be out in a few weeks. So lots of stuff to listen to you right now.

You can listen to Paul on extras. You can listen to the Recode podcast on the Recode side. All of it's on iTunes. We have more new podcasts coming. I'm very excited about all of them. You can find us on Twitter. Dieter is at Backlon. Paul is at Future Paul.

I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. Tweeted us. Talk to us. And we'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Snip.

Snip.