The Vergecast - Facebook becomes Meta / Pixel 6 review / Macbook Pro review

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss Facebook's new name. Dan Seifert joins to discuss the reviews for Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro as well as MacBook Pro. Mark Zuckerberg on why Facebook is rebranding to Meta Facebook’s new name is Meta What is the metaverse, and do I have to care? Facebook’s Oculus Quest will soon be called the Meta Quest Oculus users are getting a new metaverse home Facebook is adding a mixed reality platform to Oculus Quest Facebook teases ‘Project Cambria’ high-end VR / AR headset Amid the fluff, Meta showed an impressive demo of its Codec Avatars Eight things we learned from the Facebook Papers  Facebook’s lost generation Facebook says it’s refocusing company on ‘serving young adults’ Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro review: finally, more than just good cameras The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro will arrive with a day-one update Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake chips usher in a new generation of … Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2021) review: a bigger and better ... Apple AirPods (third-gen) review: new design, same appeal  Adobe brings a simplified Photoshop to the web Sony Xperia Pro-I: A camera first, phone second  Samsung announces cloud gaming for Tizen TVs, offers no further details Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Alex Heath, Alex Cranz, and Dan Sefer, join the show. We talk about Facebook's rebranding to meta, what Zuck is doing in the Metaverse, some of Facebook's new hardware ideas. Then we talk about the Pixel 6 reviews, the MacBook Pro reviews, a little lightning round. Spoiler, we go over. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal.

tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all?

I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star. Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Metaverse. And if you didn't see that joke coming, I don't know what you've been doing, because that was a truck that was, Coming over the bridge. There you go. I'm Eli. I'm your friend.

That's Dieter Bone. I'm a sentient disclosure machine. This one's going to be a tough one for a Dieter. Can I just say before I introduce everybody else at the end of our event last week. Which was amazing. Thank you to everybody who came. Incredible. Deeter and I were on stage.

We were just taking audience questions after Dieter's. premiere of Springboard, his documentary. Available on Smart TV apps now. Someone asked a question, and it was about Facebook. And so Dieter had to say disclosure out loud in a room full of people. I literally just said the word disclosure. That's all I just said, so disclosure. And then everyone started clapping and cheering.

The room erupted. And I was just like, I need to send a video this to like a, like a journalism professor. Like we did it. We have people are cheering, transparency in the press. I don't know how we did it, but we did it. Anyway, that was amazing. Disclosure, I think the next group of people is pretty rad. Alex Cranz is here.

Yeah, I'm, whatever an emoji is going to be in Facebook Metaverse. That's me. Alex Heath is here. Two Alexes, once again. Hi, I am tired. You've had a run this week. And Dan Seafrit's here. It's all-star crew.

Hi. Yes, I am also tired. If you really want to know, some like, Inside Baseball, our producer, Liam is on the call, too. Hi, Liam. Hello. He's just muted. You can't hear him. Okay, a lot to talk about this week are reviews of the MacBook Pro and the Pixel 6 went up.

We'll get to those in a little bit. Facebook has rebranded itself as meta, a scoop that Alex had last week. Alex talked to Mark Zuckerberg. There's an interview with Boz, Meta's new CTO that's coming on Decoder next week. There's more Facebook papers, revelations. But we have to start. with clearly the most important news. Alex, do you want to take us through it?

The cloth? The cloth. Guys, the cloth is going to just become a reoccurring picture, I think, of this show. This is your brand. It's my brand. People are going to start cheering when you say the cloth. When is the review coming, Heath? I need the review.

Apparently four months, four to six months. Apple made a polishing cloth. It costs $19. It is sold out. and the New York Times wrote about it today. Just to set the stage for what Alex is going to do. And, you know, I can't wait to just feel the fiber count. I just, I'm going to write like 5,000 words.

Like, you thought the Zuckerberg transcript was long wait until I spend time with this cloth. There's some drama with the cloth. Apple is refusing to disclose the specs in a non-attributable statement to, the New York Times, and Apple spokesperson said that the cloth was made of non-woven microfiber, but declined to elaborate. So we don't know how many cores. We do not know how many cores. Can I just laser focus on that?

I will say that it's definitely multi-threaded. That's it, everybody. Look, the Verges 10, it's been one decade. We had a good run. And now we're going to shut down the website. That's the end of that. Can I just laser focus on an Apple official said an interview based on the condition the New York Times not quote or identify her? It's a cloth.

Like I realized that I freaked out when it was like on device local photo scanning potentially like they need to be on record for that. And I feel morally convicted of that opinion. Not identifying yourself to say the cloth. This is what she said. The official said the cloth was very effective. Like, don't quote me on that. What are we doing? Paraphrase me, please.

I know why, because I would have found this person, and I would have said, where is my cloth? All right. Enough of that. Every, by the way, I'm picking an Apple, but every tech company plays these games, and it drives me bonkers, personally. You make this stuff. Just talk it. It's fine. Anyway, on to the actual news, which is that I have a,

cloth for you, Alex. Oh, my God. The actual news is the Facebook rebrand to Meta, which I have to say, I think we called last week on the show. I think we were pretty convinced that that's what it would be. I wasn't. I was convinced it was Horizon. I'm very upset.

Horizon definitely sounds like a health insurance startup. Like, it always has. I was ready for it. It always will. He's going to do like a thing with his hands, make a sun rising with his hands. It's going to be great. Zuckerberg during this Connect. keynote came very close to making a sunrise with his hands.

Yes. So, Alex, there was a keynote, and you talked to Zuck and Boz. Walk us through it. There was a keynote that was, I think, especially full of vaporware this year. It was mostly a bunch of CGI of Zuck's imagining of what the Metaverse could be, playing games with your virtual avatar disembodied friends in a space station, playing with little virtual animals in AR that run around. on the grass.

None of it exists. I would say 80% of what we saw in this Connect keynote probably will never exist in the form it was shown in. But the name is very real. And that logo, that logo is thick. Oh, my God. With two Cs. Can I congratulate? To be clear.

One of our senior video folks of Aaron Pavik raced out to Menlo Park and took a picture of them changing the sign in front of the Facebook headquarters. to say meta. Like, they did it. They were ready. Yeah, that was heroic. That was heroic. So basically a couple hours before the keynote started, they put a giant cloth, not apples, of course, but a cloth over the like sign by Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park.

Then, like, all of a sudden on Twitter, everyone's like trying to get the angle of, like, the people painting the new logo on, drawing it on the sign. What is it? It's like this infinity type thing. and yeah, V-raced down there, got some great photos. And they really did this, like, just orchestrated. Like, everything changed at once. You know, like all the execs on Twitter are changing their Twitter handles, their bios.

And, yeah, it's meta. It's meta. And it is meta in the fact that it is meta. Just a lot of layers to this. But, yeah, I talked to Mark Zuckerberg about it. And we covered a bit of ground. He had some things to say about, like, that I had never heard him talk about and how they're excited about kind of blockchain smart contracts for the Metaverse.

We talked about Succession. You know, I asked him, are you still going to be CEO and chairman in five years? And he said, probably. I was really hoping you meant the TV show. I wanted to hear his thoughts on Shiv. Disclosure, that's my only joke in this section. My partner works for, I guess, meta now. Meta.

Well, that's the thing. So Oculus, the Oculus name is going away. as part of this, it's now going to be the metaQuest, the meta portal, which is such a horrible... It's not great. I can't wait to edit those reviews. So the reasoning that Zuck gave you, and the transcript is on the site, you can read it, and then next week we'll have interview with Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, and the coder that Alex said, it's great. But the reasoning Zuck gave you was, this is getting confusing for people.

Facebook is a product. People didn't want to log into their quest for the Facebook account, and people really did not want to log in. into their Oculus Quest for the Facebook account. There was a lot of backlash to that. I think this may just kind of surprise people. One of the main reasons that they changed the brand of the company that has been the same for 17 years as one of the most recognizable brands in the world

is because Mark got concerned that people hated logging into Quest with their Facebook accounts. There's another solution to that. Make Facebook good? Like maybe don't force people to log in Facebook. But it's not, it's not, it's not meta enough. Well, no, no, no.

Like, you would think that it might be, you know, the Facebook name being dragged in the mud constantly by the media for all the problems, all the, you know, hate speech, misinformation, the toxicity of that brand. No, like the first thing he talked about was like logging into Quest. And I just, I think that's an important, it shows his frame of mind and like how he has actually legitimately obsessed with this stuff and is thinking almost like exclusive. about this more futuristic, like, phase of the company and not really at all what people are focused on right now.

He's, he's thinking about, like, people's concerns with a product that maybe has 10 million headsets in circulation, maybe, like, definitely Facebook's smallest product besides portal. Yeah, I just, but here's, like, the good faith pushback on that. Fine, I buy it. The reason people don't like logging into their Quest headsets with their Facebook accounts is because Facebook is associated with toxicity and sharing things you don't want to share. Of course, but my point is that the vector of the like concern for him is the quest. It's not like Blue App, which shows you just how obsessed he is with this stuff.

Is this like the moment that they're unifying all of their hardware under like this new name and stuff, right? Because like the portal also nobody wants because Facebook and they're going to do these glasses and nobody wants them because of Facebook. And this is kind of their way to be like, yeah, now we're into hardware, fully unified, under this new dumb name. And also Facebook's over there. Forget about it. It doesn't exist. You can't see it. That is definitely part of it.

And there's going to be this new unified account system. And the details are very slim, but it's going to include Instagram, Facebook WhatsApp, which has been separate this whole time. A meta account system that you can have that will span everything and you can choose if you want to drop it into an app or the quest or whatever. or the meta smartwatch, whatever else is coming. It sounds like they haven't ironed that out, though. He was pretty vague about it, but he said part of this is he wants, like, a brand that supersedes everything that is not one of the apps, and obviously one of the apps that has the most toxicity tied to its name.

But he used the word, like, iconic. Like, Facebook is the most iconic social media brand with me, like, three times, which is, like, his way of saying, like, I'm not totally throwing this team under the bus. Mostly. But yeah, it was a very interesting interview. I mean, he was pretty blunt. And I was like, look, man, like everyone's going to say you're doing this just a distance

from all the scandals of the past, you know, a few weeks. The whistleblower Francis Hogan, the Facebook papers that we and others reported on. And he was like, that's ridiculous. He was like, we started this over six months ago. He said, I've been thinking about this actually for years, formally kicked off the project six months ago. And he was like, if I didn't think we were running towards something versus running away from something with something this big, changing the name, then I wouldn't be doing it,

which, like, believe that if you want. But it was fascinating. The whole rebrand story is fascinating to me. He made employees inside Facebook sign separate NDAs to work on the rebrand because it was so top secret. And, yeah, it was, it's been an interesting week. It's kind of wild to me, though, that he's saying he's not running away from it when he, like, very much admitted by saying, like, oh, people were horrified to log in to Facebook on their quest. Why, Mark? Like, what's the next step to that? Yeah.

That's why I keep coming back to you. You have admitted you're running away. Like, maybe not from the papers themselves, the most recent scandal. But, like, yeah, you're running away. Like, don't hide behind the portal and the quest. What's he going to say, though? Yeah. Like, Alex, it's true.

I'm running away. Like, that's fine, right? I spend a lot of time interviewing executives and sometimes. Sometimes you just have to like psychologically evaluate what's happening to you when you're talking to them. Like they have to be on message. Fine. The thing that gets me is on the one hand, this might be great for Facebook and its set of problems because a new person will end up in charge of the blue app while Mark is dancing in the metaverse. Fine. On the other hand, that new person could be horrible and do a bad job and be less.

accountable because Congress will still want Mark Zuckerberg to show up, and he will have even less interest in what is going on with Facebook and say even less interesting. You know, like, there's just a problem here where, yeah, I, Casey wrote this in Platformer the other night. He was like, the reaction to a lot of this is really boomer, which is very funny. He's like, so many people are just assuming that smartphones are the end of time and there won't be a next thing and no one's going to build it and that no company should invest in building it. We should only solve the problems we've seen in front of us today. I'm somewhat of

that opinion. There are a lot of problems we don't know how to solve them, right? Like, I don't have a plan for social media moderation at scale. No one does. Like if you go and talk to the experts are like, no, this is an intractable and possible problem that we're just going to be saddled with until we shut them down or agree that the problem looks like this and just solve it every day. Zuckerberg not paying attention to that and then trying to build a virtual world where that problem is everything. Like you live in a digital world. Everything around you is content moderation. You just, it's the matrix of content moderation. Like what, what gets to be there? Who gets to decide if it's there? What blockchain system transfers ownership from the Roblox

metaverse to Facebooks? Do they have the same rules? Like, that, All that is is a content moderation problem. The technology is very complicated and worth investing in, but the experience is someone will be in charge of reality. And I just like, and he had Nick Clegg, right? He like, they try to gesture at it. But it's just weird, like running away from the blue app moderation problem to the metaverse is like, what if I just upped the difficulty level on this?

The Matrix movies turned out to actually be really hopeful because it, the Matrix might be controlled by a hyper-intelligent AI that wants to destroy humanity, but at least it's, like, consistent in their rules. And you know it's going to happen there, unlike the Metaverse. Yeah, and if you ever ask them, they put you into a room with a little man

and he just puts you in sleep. And they're like, this plan is evil, but I don't care to understand it. I'm sorry, I'm excited for the fourth movie. It's going to be great. I talked about that, actually, too, with Boz on Decoder a bit, and I think he had some interesting things.

to say it's coming out early next week. I do think it's going to be a little different. I'm not sure we're going to get the one to many kind of instantly broadcast. Anyone can see public comments type environment in what they're building. Like we have in 2D Facebook, it is more kind of people-centered. And that's like what Mark kept coming back to is that he wants this to be centered around people and not apps. Like he wants people to be the locus of control.

And like maybe blockchain somehow helps that. But I don't really know. but yeah no it's a huge open question it's like do we trust this company that obviously can't moderate its current platform and he told him that he was like we've just managed to piss off everyone with like how we've run Facebook today just like kind of implied in that as like we're doing the best we can if like we piss off both sides so they did have nick Clegg who's their at a policy and it was very funny right so mark is like in his virtual world and then he looks at what is now a meta portal and he has this conversation with Nick Clegg

And Nick Clegg is on the other side, like, talking to a portal on a TV. So, like, Mark is, like, safely at home. And, like, Nick is at the office. That's the way it was like, you're at work, Nick. What's up? And he was like, Nick, how are we going to keep the Metaverse safe? And Nick was like, we're going to think about it from the beginning. Right.

And that went on for a while. Did you buy it? What did you think of this little presentation? I asked, like, Baza question, too, in Decoder, like, so if I'm using Horizon, which is Facebook's Metaverse software, Roblox meets Minecraft, am I just going to be able to interact with my friends or friends of friends or is like a stranger going to be able to just like come up to me in VR maybe aided by an algorithm and like start doing who knows what to me?

Because like my very few interactions I've had in VR and I've done a couple actual Horizon demos and like they have this venues thing which is like concerts in VR. The interactions have not been great. Like one time a guy came up to me and was like, where are the chicks, man? And like, this was like one of my first times interacting with a stranger in VR. Wow, I'm excited. That's going to be great times.

Yeah, and like it's going to be a problem. Like, I don't know if they can totally foresee how much of a, yeah, problem this is going to be. But they are, you know, boss talks about like principles of like, you know, don't surprise people. And then they surprise people by linking the Facebook account to the quest and pissing everyone off. Right. So like the track record's not great. I will definitely acknowledge that and I think they do too. But they have gotten spanked quite a bit over the last five years and I think that is informing a bit of how they're approaching this. I have a question for the room real fast. Is the term metaverse going to be over now because like Facebook has effectively branded it? Like are other companies going to continue to use it to describe this matrix VR space? Are they going to have to switch to something else because they want to. pull away from the Facebook branding. Has Tim Sweeney, like, angrily tweeted yet?

Because he, that was, it was his word too. Yeah. This word is snow crash. Like, this word predates, like, all these people. And it's like a dystopian sci-fi novel from the 90s. And I was like, Mark, did you ever think that you were using a word about, like, people escaping a crumbling society to talk about the future your company? And he was like, he was like, yeah, it's a con.

This is like when Elon Musk said he was a big fan of parasite. You get it. That's a great movie. So amid all of this in the naming and the branding and the vapor, they did announce some products or some things they're going to do. They've got a new high-end AR VR VR headset, which is funny because they said they were never going to do an Oculus Pro, and that was technically true.

They're not using the Oculus brand anymore. Yeah. They really lawyered their way. way through that one. Congratulations to everyone. Yeah. It's mixed reality. So it's going to have a full color high-res video pass through and face body eye tracking for kind of realistic avatar expression. But will I still look like a memoji? Like, like will I still look like the Nintendo Wii me aesthetic from 15 years ago? Like, how real are we getting here? Um, the higher-res versions of that, but the

first versions do look like Nintendo. Nintendo was like so prescient in that design. But they're also working on these Kodak avatars and they showed a demo of this. And it was just one of their researchers standing and he's talking to the camera and he's like, by the way, I'm not real. And they're like, oh my God. And then they and then they do the green screen pullback and like he's of avatar and he looks like skin real. So that's going to be, talk about uncanny valley. But the first version is going to be these kind of Memoji, we type avatars. A tremendous

moment during the keynote, by the way, was Zuckerberg was like, let me dress my avatar. I walked over and then he was like an astronaut. He was wearing a spooky Halloween outfit and then he picked the exact same outfit he was wearing. And it was like, you really showcase the wealth of identity options. It was very funny.

Yeah, it was funny. It was droll, I would say. But Cambria, interestingly, based on what I know about what Apple's working on, is very similar to the first kind of headset we're going get from Apple, which is a high-end mixed reality. So instead of like full VR, it's showing you a video of the real world through the cameras that can mix graphics by cheating by just using the video feed. So it's going to be pretty interesting, I think. We're going to start to get some new experiences there. It's going to be expensive. Probably, you know, they're not going to sell that many.

That's next year. They also teased, but didn't really show the air glasses. They're calling them Nazare. There's no timing on those, but they're working on some UI stuff. They did some more vaporware presentations of someone making a text, you know, with like looking at their living room and there's like a text field above it. And like all these demos, why are they still people playing board games on tables? No, no, no, no, Apple's been doing AR demos for 45 years now. Like Steve Jobs was born. He was like, I've got a vision and it's chess, but the chess board isn't there. I mean, they have been doing these demos forever. They do not have a, killer app. There is one killer app for AR and it is seeing people's names.

Yeah. And Facebook is obviously like uniquely suited to deliver that app to people. And that's fine. But like apart from that, it's, it's measuring stuff. It's putting couches where they shouldn't be. And it's like playing board games. It's like no one else has any other ideas for this. Turn by turn directions would be sick. Well, you know, building like a car or something. something being guided by someone else to tighten some pipes.

That's the enterprise metaphor. Oh, sorry, sorry. Well, this was buried in their announcement there is that they're working with BMW, and they didn't say really what it was for, but this is part of the Nazaree AR glasses. They're going to, they're going to AR display the turn signals on PMW. So we're just getting the Pontiac, Aztec again.

That'd be great. If you could just like walk the streets and every car looks sick. Oh, speaking of Grand Theft Auto coming to VR. That's bad. That's the snow crash. Steer away from snow crash. Don't do that. So here's my question on a technical level about these headsets.

And you reported when you were at the information on apples. Now we've got the Facebook one, right? It's a full-color passer. So you've got an LCD screen or an OLED screen in front of your face. and then you've got a camera shooting out in the world. The camera is going to look at the world for you. It's going to pass through some compute. Some computer is going to do something to that image.

And then it's going to display it on that screen. That's all just latency to me. That is me just walking, like bumping into things because my body is moving faster than what I can see. And like, I don't, no one's really talked about it yet. But this interim solution of full color pass-through video is like where everyone's going. and the first thing I like if you do a pass around the Oculus Quest here right now there's a delay and if you perceive that delay like you're like I this is super cool but I don't know where my hands are exactly and that's really weird it's fine for like picking up your water bottle right it's but it's it's

you can't walk around the world that way you will trip on a pet yeah you shouldn't yeah you shouldn't you're going to look like you're from snow crash walking around yeah like the latency thing is going to be solved. And I think I wouldn't be surprised if this headset is pretty impressive in terms of that. And they're going to have eye tracking. And like that helps with like the graphics being more focused and low latency where you're looking. So yeah, I'm excited to try this thing. I totally understand the reservations of Facebook having body eye face tracking or meta, excuse me. But God, this is going to be like the next month of my life is. I was reading the transcript of your boss interview.

and there's a point where he calls it Facebook and you correct him that it's meta, which is very good. You're like meta and he just like cruises through. He's like, that didn't happen. It's very good. It's going to be very confusing. Do you think broadly, and we should talk about the Facebook papers quickly because that happened also. Remember those?

Do you think this is going to distract or otherwise divert attention from the the enormous series of weeks about Facebook's internal operations and the dissent within that company? I think it already has. Like, and yeah, I mean, remember the Facebook papers. That was literally like Tuesday. It was Monday. Oh, God. Okay, Monday. You're right. Yeah, no, I think it has for this week. I think we may return to it. But, you know, I can't say that that wasn't part of the plan, right? Because, like, the consortium, which we were a part of, set the embargo for this week, not. knowing at the time what would be happening this week.

I reported the week right before that the rebrand was coming. And now everyone's like conspiracy theory. Like Facebook is changing its name to like change the Google search results from the Facebook papers to this because now it's meta. Just based on my own like personal anecdotes, I get way more normal people like who don't follow tech asking me about the name than anything I've heard from the papers, you know. Well, and the stock looks like a you right now. it just like cratered and just shot straight up when they announced meta.

The new ticker MSRV, MSRV. I think we're going to see more of it, but yeah, I think they think this is going to help them move away from it. And it definitely gives like everyone a morale boost of like, oh, we're, you know, we're this cool reinventing company that's like focused on the future. And I asked Mark, I was like, look, is this about recruiting? And he was like, took a beat. it was like, that's a good question.

This is what I mean about the psychology of interviews. You're like, that pause is the answer, and then there's whatever they'd say. Yeah. So, no, it's definitely about that as well. It's about morale and it's about recruiting. Look, if you're, like, evaluating an offer between Apple's, like, mixed reality team and Facebooks, and then you're like, well, now I can tell people I work at meta, maybe you'll take the job. I don't know.

Maybe it will change your mind. Maybe not, but. Anyway, sorry. I wouldn't have to be the answer question. or the capital riots. I might tell people where I work. Exactly. Look, I work at Meta.

But, yeah, we did report on the papers, and it connects to this because the story I did was about how they're freaking out about losing younger people. The very next day, Mark Zuckerberg comes out on earnings and says, I'm telling all my product teams to focus exclusively on young people. And, you know, all these metrics showing that teens are, like, not posting on Instagram as much. They're definitely not losing the blue app.

Like, this is probably going to be the first time that an entire generation just, like, skips getting on Facebook, which is like a while to think about. So you and I talked about this before your story went out. Yeah, sure, I can see that. The thing that confounds me is that young people routinely turn into old people. And old people cannot stay away from Facebook. Like, they're just like, there's a switch in your life. For us, it was we had a kid.

And then all the parent groups and the school group and the, you know, where are the trick-or-treating events by, like all that's on Facebook. Very true. Give it on TikTok. You want to find a plumber. It's like, you go to faith, like all that stuff that makes you old, that just makes you understand in your heart. All that responsibility comes crashing onto you and you run to Facebook to resolve it.

Facebook is a utility for old people. That's fine. It's also a utility for extremely disturbed people to spread their views. But there's an enormous amount of just like adult utility that is baked into that app that is unavoidable. And Facebook is like, screw this. Young people.

I mean, I think they're saying we got that. So, like, we don't need to do anything else. Like, all their data is like, over 30,

we're fine. We're growing. We're crazy. See what I mean? Where is that growth coming from? It's coming from people turning 30. No. But like,

I see what you're saying, but it's not just, it's not that people are joining and then getting older. That has been happening for 17 years. What is the first, for the first time happening in the last few years, is like people are not joining.

So like young people are just not using the service. And on Instagram they're using it less for the first time. And so they're going, our population is going to die. And also like they've done. There's a huge gap between 30 and death. Well, yeah. It's like, well, I'm scheduling a trick or treat run for my four year old.

I'm dead. Tomorrow I die. And you're dead. I got to say the huge gap between 30 and dying, now that I'm over 30. I agree. Before I was 30, but yeah,

really is there? Yeah, it's like, we're dead. When you're like, yeah, when you're like, I thought it was 25.

Yeah. I will admit that my 25th birthday party was ridiculous because I was like, it's over tomorrow. I didn't win the Fields medal. My God. That is a deep cut of a joke. Three of you are going to get that and,

I got it. Pull over and really think about your lives and I apologize for that. But I just, that's, even the young people that aren't using it today are going to get older. and need that set of utilities. They will age into Facebook, is what I'm saying. And that just doesn't...

No, they don't think so, because what's happening is a lot of, like, new platforms are taking the time away from them in a way they've never seen before. Interesting. And what they've done research, and they've shown that Instagram, like, teens on Instagram, they influence what their household does. They tell their younger siblings what is cool. So the younger siblings then never get on. They tell their parents what is cool.

And, yeah, you can't get off Facebook because you're doing your trigger-treating marketplace stuff on there. but like if your teen is constantly telling you hey this thing is where I'm on this is cool like all the old people got on Facebook I remember because younger people college students were on there and then all the old people were like how do you do kids and they showed up and it was the worst day ever like this is not a phenomenon that like is hard to understand like the young people tell everyone else what is cool and they're losing young people for Roblox for Fortnite and so hence pivot to meta. I cannot wait to schedule playdates in Fortnite. Just hop into Fortnite. I honestly don't know if that's sincere or not. 30 foot.

It feels sincere, but it also feels like a living nightmare. That to me is like I just, they've got a, any other company. And I understand what you're saying. And I even think it's probably accurate that if you don't start using Facebook,

when you get to the point that you need a, utility like Facebook, you might choose something else. Next door. Right. So that's like a competitive. Facebook, but weirder. Like, yeah. There's all of that, right?

But to me, the core of this is if you just open the blue app, it's not well designed. It is just like chock full of stuff. It is hard to use. They tried to make it into a super app like we chat is in China. And that strategy kind of backfired and all the problems landed in their lap. Oh, they're still going that direction. So you think so? So,

Oh, yeah. I just like, what we're here. So here's our plan. We've got some olds. They're stuck with us. We're going to just try to like make them live their lives in this app. But young people, our product managers are really thinking about you. There's just something there that isn't coherent to me.

No. And the presentations that we put in the story, Facebook's lost generation, you can find it on the verge.com, are so cringe. And there's ones that didn't even include that are like brain scans of like a young person's brain and like bullet points going like, you know, teens are susceptible to social pressure. And like how do we increase engagement with like their desire to, you know, it's just like it's total cringe. It sounds like a robot wrote it. And what they've realized is that for Facebook, they need to be linked in for like 20 to 30. And so Facebook, Facebook,

is going to literally start looking like LinkedIn. They're going to let you post your resume, find jobs, and they causes, they want you to find causes, whatever that means. And they want to do mental health. It's like, oh, my God. Like, it's, yeah.

That'll fix it. It's bad. It's bad. Done. Okay. They got it. So that was the big Facebook paper story. I would say, you know, we were in that consortium. Alex had to look through all the stuff.

Lots of stories came out from it. it. We did a roundup of kind of the big themes we saw. More to come. More to come. There's more documents. Are you going to write like a poem about this branding change? And if you do what? I've seen some Limericks on Twitter. I feel like I can't really contribute, you know, beyond what I've seen. But does that mean that those limericks are part of the metaverse? Oh, my boy, Peter. It's like, he's just the man. Man's like, I made it 10 years. How do I ship this thing down? I've been quiet for the past 15 minutes. since how long I've been working on this joke.

It's good. But I just want to call it the other story that we ran with Casey. Casey wrote it for Pop. We're going to be published with us. Facebook content moderation, right? That's their business, whether they like it or not. They rank countries by amount of resources they put into content moderation. And so the United States in India are tier zero, all the attention.

And there's a lot of countries at tier three, which is no attention unless something bad happens. Oh, that's not good. And you can you get you don't I don't have to tell you you can already guess what countries are in what part of the list right like the ones where they make money Yeah Are at the top of the list and poor countries are at the bottom of and it's just like what are we doing guys It's almost like a for-profit corporation running international discourse is that idea That so I get the part of the Metaverse thing for me is like Mark is like man these countries suck Dealing with actual country suck what if I just make me?

my own world. And like your, your fortnight skin is going to block chain into, yeah, we're like, we're done. No country is here, just Zuckerberg's world. I don't know. But there's more to come from the papers. It is not, it is, it is still the story. Like, they can do this.

I feel like Congress still thinks it's, I don't think Congress cares as much about the betterverse as the giant. Amy Klobuchar is not out here being like, you, you got me. She's like, they just sent me my headset. She's too busy sending me a daily email. That's just because you're from Minnesota. That's just Minnesota. Nice, man.

No, but in many ways, I wonder if the reaction from them is to make great. It's easier to break up Facebook now. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right? You've got this holding company. You've got three apps in it. We're just going to take one away from you.

It's just a brand. It's not easier. They're all the same tech, the same people. All the founders, the people who actually had a different view of the world have left. Like there's nothing to strip apart. If you took like Instagram out of meta, it's literally just a bunch of Facebook product managers. Like they're going to have all like been getting paid in Facebook and now meta stock.

Like it, the tech is the same. I just don't buy it. It's just a brand. I just think that's Facebook, if you take them out, they'd be like, now we can do what we really want. And they're like, they pull out the presentation. It's like, teens love dancing. I can go for it.

Just flows in the metaverse. They changed the stock ticker, too. They had a really, they had impressed. It was FB, which was like pretty good. Yeah, MSRV. MSRV. And now, you know, Matthew Ball has meta for his meta-UTF. And, you know, good for him, good for his SEO.

Oh, my God. That's amazing. All right. Alex, thank you. You've had a long week. I suspect it's only going to get more complicated from here and out. I just want to say you're officially our Metaverse Beat reporter. that's your new title.

I apologize to me. I relinquish. I relinquish. I am senior cloth reporter. Yeah, go find out. Go find out. Get some cloth scoops, man. It's even this out.

Here in the dirty real world, we need cloths. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go drive an hour south of Long Beach, and I'm going to go look in the containers, and I'm going to find the cloths. I'll report back. Get out there. Alex is in a dingy, like, world's best tech reporter. Just rowing out.

Yeah. Where are they? All right, buddy. Thank you so much. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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Everybody take your glasses off. your AR glasses. Back here in physical reality, there's new hardware to talk about. Yeah, things you can touch. And also, Deeter can talk now,

which is great. Let's talk about real things that actually exist and aren't mediated by computers like the pixels' photography. Oh, wait. Oh, boy. Just kidding.

What is the photo? That's the end of the verge. It's the end of the Virge. Tell us how you feel. They're great. They are. very good executions of Google's smartphones, which we've kind of been waiting for for a long time. And my only real knock against them is not a surprise that they are just huge. So like,

if you don't want big phones, it's not the phone for you. If you do like big phones, then you're probably going to like these. How big? I haven't seen one yet. These are, they're within like millimeters of the 13 Pro Max. So like the 6 Pro is effectively larger than the 13 Pro Max. And the regular six is like a millimeter too shy or whatever. So like they are big phones. They dwarf a 13 pro. They dwarf a pixel five. They dwarf the like pixel three or pixel four if you had those in the past. Like there's no small option here. It is no fit in pants. You get a big one or a bigger one. Yeah, but I mean, here's how I feel about this. I do wish that there was a small version. Google's been making the smaller versions of Android phones for a while. They still have the A's, although

even the A's are pretty big. Aren't that small anymore. But like Android phones are really big news at 11. I kind of feel like Google's tried everything. They might as well just try saying screw it, let's make giant phones. I think it makes sense. Just because someone's paying less for a phone, like they might be with the pixel 6, which has a great price, great value, it doesn't mean they want a smaller screen. Very often they want a bigger screen. I was at my local Best Buy the other night and they had the pixels on display among like a whole row of Android unlocked phones. And they had next to the one pluses and there was Motorola's and there was Samsung's on one end and apart from them all looking identical like they look really similar they all have big screens because that's

what people are buying and like it makes sense uh I think you know Google's proven many years that it can't actually sell pixels so I want to I want to push back on the idea that this is what people are buying because I think it's what they're buying because it's the only thing provided like if you want a high end phone well if you want a high end phone if you want a high end phone that's not the Nobody bought the small high-end pixels in the past. The pixel 3 was small. Nobody bought pixels in the past. Exactly.

So if you're going to sell pixels, go after the market that buys. I mean, I really hate to say it, but like companies have been making smaller phones from time to time. And then they stop. And they don't stop because they're bold. They stop because no, no. They're half-hast. I want it to be true. I want it to be true that there will be lots of small phones out there.

But like capitalism works. The market has sent signals. and they just, they don't sell as well. And so small phones are like doomed forever to be intermittently made and available and interesting, but the new standard is like six inches and above. I hate it. And there are like tangible benefits to having the bigger phone. Both of them have big screens and people love big screens.

Both of them have big batteries. In my testing, I know there's been a lot of different testing results out there from different reviewers, but in our testing, which was not just me, but a lot of staff contributed and helped to it. We got excellent battery life. Whether you went with the pixel six or the six pro, the big batteries make big battery life. So like they lasted all day easily. End of the day, you didn't have to worry about it when you plug it into charge or wireless charger, whatever, you're going to have 35, 40% left. Like these are the things that people matter to people is like battery life, screen size and camera. Yeah. And so like it makes sense to me that they're doing

this. This is a wait, can I just say the econ word for this is a expressed preference? Like people lie all the time. But then the money actually tells the truth. And like an iron law of the tech industry is like, people will tell you anything. But if you put a gigantic cheap screen in front of them, they're like, that one. I want that one. And like, we just keep fighting this reality. It's just wild.

I hear like constantly from people. I want small phones. So they're all just like liars? Yeah. Next time someone says that to you, just call them a liar to their face and see how that goes. I'm going to. That's my new way of handling this. Just calling people liars.

That said, I do think that-slapped them and walk away. The 6-0 is like on the borderline of being too big. And I like, I like big phones. And like, I have big hands. And like, I'm like, oh, it's pretty big. Yeah. Yeah. And they're really slippery.

The glass backs on these is like, it almost feels like it's greased slick. I've had them fall off of wireless chargers, fall off of my desk. I put it on the arm of my sofa and it slides off of that. It just, like, slid off your desk. right now, didn't it? Like, you looked at it and it just, you know. They are super slippery. Literally, I have a wireless charger at the back of my desk. I put it down there, like,

20 minutes later, it slid off the back of my desk and, like, hit the floor. Like, this happens. You're going to want to put a case on these things. They're big, they're slippery. Google's cases stink. I recommend checking out third parties. I don't have any recommendations other than they can't be worse than Googles.

You know, so put a case on it, and you'll probably be happier. Okay, so they're big. We also know that the build Quality is like not super ultra Samsung quality premium. We talked about this a bit, Neelai and I did when we did the special edition Vergecast, where we have an interview with Rick and Sondar. You should listen to that. But the thing we couldn't talk about, the thing we could talk about now is camera results.

So like where are we landing on camera? Because this is like the big question. Yeah. So it's been interesting because like the big story here this year is that Google finally upgraded the camera hardware. It's got a new sensor, new lenses. It had been using the same hardware for like four years in pixels. these new sensors, the main sensor, which is in both phones and the ultra-wide sensor, which is in both phones,

are much bigger than they were in the past. Bigger sensor means more light, better image quality. That's kind of just like a known axiom. And they've got, you know, Google's advancements in computational photography. I will say right away, they are very good. The main sensor takes excellent photos. And when we compare them head-to-head with the 13 Pro, it's often a toss-up. Sometimes the iPhone looks better. Sometimes the pixel looks better. I put this in the review. It really comes down at personal preference, which is like kind of what we've been saying for years. At this point, they both take excellent photos. We've been saying it for years, but the last two to three years, we have been saying that everybody else caught up and in some ways have surpassed the pixel.

Yeah. In extreme edge cases, they had surpassed. I would say that, you know, those edge cases are much smaller now. And if there are any, it's like, it could go one way or the other. The thing that was most remarkable to me, though, with the especially particularly the main sensor, is you hear about these big hardware advancements and you expect a big noticeable leap forward over, say, like, what the pixel 5 produced. But in like everyday situations, oftentimes the pixel 5 and the pixel 6 produce very similar results. They're not especially more detailed.

They're not especially sharper. Part of that reason is because Google's using a 50 megapixel sensor and it's binning or shrinking the resolution down to 12 and a half megapixels, which is effectively the same as a 12 megapixels on the pixel 5. So you're not like getting a great leap in detail. There are some areas where like in extreme low light it will be better thanks to that bigger sensor. There's a little bit better dynamic range, but you really have to be looking for these. And honestly, if you're looking for a huge upgrade going from pixel 5 to a pixel 6, you might not see it. But the one area that I do think is a big upgrade and it's frustrating because it's only on the pixel 6 pro is in the

telephoto camera. And the telephoto camera is like the first telephoto. photo camera on a phone that I've actually enjoyed using. All of the other ones I've used, whether it was the iPhone, even the 13 pros, Samsung's Ultrasoom or whatever, they're like fun gimmicks, but they're noticeably bad. It just produced like bad images. And so when I first started using the six pros camera, I was just like, wow, this is a telephoto that I can actually use. It does the things I want from a telephoto. It gets me closer to the subject. It like does better what we call compression. So when you are using a longer lens, it makes lines straighter and it kind of like compresses your subject in a very flattering way, especially if you're taking photos of people.

And it does actual like separation between the subject and the background, which we've had to use software tricks for so many years. And now we're finally getting the hardware that can do it. And it just, to me, it looks so much better. Yeah. So the iPhone 13 pro is 3x. This is 4x. But it's also like slightly higher quality. So with the iPhone 13 pro, we're like, this telephoto is good, but we love it for portraits. So we took some amazing portrait photos. The pixel 6 pro, it's like, yeah, it's really good for portraits also. But also it's like actually useful for Zoom. And they're super res zoom when you get to, I think that lets you go to 20X is still,

you know, not great. But it's way better than what Samsung does when it starts to throw software stuff, right? Right. And like even I did some side by sides with the 10x zoom. That's an actual optical 10X. on this S-21 Ultra. And because that camera isn't good, the 20 or the 10x digital zoom from Google's good 4X optical camera produces sometimes

better, more pleasing results. So that's why I say when it's the first one I actually want to use, it is reaching that level of quality where it lets me do things with a phone camera that I haven't been able to do in the past. And like that is an advancement to me. And it's frustrating that's only available on the 6 Pro and not on the 6th. But that's where we're at. We got to come back to 6 Pro versus 6.

Before we leave camera, we've got to talk about video. It's been the entire life of the pixel. We're like, a sense of pixel two anyway. It's been like the camera, oh my God. Then that's a slight decline. Now it's back. But it's too bad about the video. That's a bummer.

They are really behind on that. This year, Google promised that they fixed it, that they've applied all of their HDRNet algorithms to frame by frame with the video. And that it's cool now. They've caught up, everybody. Did they do it? You know, too bad about the video.

You know, it's an improvement. It's definitely better than prior pixels. But that was, as Dieter kind of alluded to, a pretty low bar. It's very interesting how the video is seemingly treated differently by the pixel versus still photos. It processes colors differently in video than it does in still photos. If you have a lot of saturated colors like reds or oranges or greens, it like amps up the saturation of those

and it almost turns them like day glow neon in a video in the same exact scene that you take a photo, a still photo with the pixel and it will produce a more muted, natural, high contrast, but not nearly as extreme kind of look. And it was just like fascinating to see that in action.

So there's color weirdness. Somewhere inside Google like, you know, people complain a little bit less about Samsung's video. Let's just do that. It's like what Samsung did to still photos four years ago. Like, Samsung's, you know, come a long way, but this is like, that's what it reminded me of.

And then there's, like, other weird things. There's four different image stabilization modes, supposedly for, like, you know, different activities or whatever. None of them are particularly great. They're not as stable as what you get on the iPhone. And they produce a lot of weird artifacting and there's jitters and there's, like, weird exposure shifts. It doesn't handle that smoothly. So, like, yes, it's a better video. You can shoot 4K 60 frames per second as long as you want.

The phone will not heat up or overheat it. at least, which was a problem with the Pixel 5A. You should just get a GoPro? Well, I mean, if you care this much about video, you should get an iPhone. And like, you can talk to any number of YouTubers who are like very into the Android ecosystem and they have an iPhone in their back pocket for B-roll because like it's the only thing they use it for because the video is actually very good and usable on the iPhone. So Google's still got a ways to go there.

I don't know if it's processing tweaks. I don't know if the HDR algorithms just like don't mesh well with video or whatever, but it would have been nice to see more improvement on that front. Yeah. There. All right. Last camera thing is another color science thing. So we're just talking about video.

Google talked a lot more than we expected about having better photos for darker skin tones. How'd that go? It seems like some of that is not just bluster. They're actually doing stuff. But it's not like exactly perfect for everybody. It goes back to a lot of that personal preference thing. what we saw in our testing, what we saw from other folks' test results, was that it does do a better job of lightning darker skin tones so that they're not in a shade or shadow, especially in backlight. It's like, it's more like just lightning darker skin tones is a thing that lots of cameras have done and that's like actually incorrect.

What they're doing is they're exposing it more correctly and they're having like more correct color. And in some cases, they're allowing the skin tone to be more accurately darker, but not have it just be like completely hard. see and inconsistent with the rest of the photo. Is it's a little bit of dynamic range, but it's also color. One of the things I talked a lot about was making sure that darker skin tones didn't look ashy, especially when there's things like side light or backlight. That happens when you just like turn up the exposure, right? That's one of the things that can happen.

They've done a good job solving for that. But there's still pixel photos, which means... Which means they are high contrast. They tend to be a bit over-exposed, and they are extremely detailed. So I recommend Nicole Nguyen over at WSJ did a really great article where she took photos of a bunch of people with different darker skin tone and complexions, and she used the new pixel, the iPhone 13 Pro, and the S-21. And she asked them what they felt about it. And it seemed like universally they said that the pixel was more accurate, but also universally, they liked the results from the Samsung better. It was softer.

It was nicer for portraits. It wasn't highlighting skin blenishes and other things that maybe we don't want to have when we're taking a picture of ourselves. We want to present our best selves. I mean, this is like the heart of the, I mean. Yeah, this is it. This is like here we are. The pixels are accurate, but you like the Samsung better. Well, it's also, but what are you, right?

If you have a person with darker skin, like I am familiar with a history of camera technology that is bad. at my skin. Right. And so, like, that familiarity actually plays a role in, oh, this is better, but I like the thing that I am familiar with. And that, I don't know, like, we could do what is a photo for another five hours right now. Like, yeah, what is your perception of yourself as mediated by another person's imaging? Ooh.

That's some verge cast. We got to restart the verge. A big part of it, I think is particularly with the pixel photos is how sharp and detailed they are. And when we worked with some of our staff who have darker skin and had them look at the photos and compare, that was their reaction. They said, it's too detailed. I don't want it to be as sharp when I'm taking a photo of myself or I'm posting a portrait. And that is something that also goes back for a long time with photography. Photographers years ago used to slap Vaseline on the front of lenses to hide blemishes because they couldn't do it digitally. Now, you know, there's

different levels of processing. And I think that the fact that pixel can capture so much detail is really impressive and really cool, but it doesn't work for every situation. It doesn't work necessarily as well for portraits. And I think the iPhone or Samsung phones do a good job of presenting the right amount of detail without overdoing it and without it showing too many blemishes and things like that that people don't necessarily want to see. Not too long ago, Google made a big, loud blog post about how they are turning off all of their face-moving by default. And the rest of the camera industry should follow because it's causing, you know, issues with self-image to have aggressive face moving on by default. So yeah, this is a complicated subject.

All right. It's an absolutely complicated subject. It is not a new problem. To Nelai's point, you know, the film industry has been biased towards lighter skin tones for decades. Since the beginning. Since the beginning, film was developed to expose lighter skin tones that carried right on through to digital cameras. It carries right on through to the phones that we're using today. I applaud Google for approaching it and talking about it and starting to figure out ways to address it. And hopefully we see more and better improvement going forward across the board, not just from Google. So two things left. I don't know. I want to rush through them, but you have argued that these are the best Android phones available today. And I'm also curious, well,

there's two of them, which one do you prefer? So one, let's back up. Let's talk about best Android phone. That's, that's a claim. Yeah, it's a claim. And a lot of it is because when you look at the entire package and including price. And price is a big factor here, especially with the Pixel 6, but even with the Pixel 6 Pro as well, they are undercutting the competition by a significant margin

and still offering this level of performance, this level of features, this level of build quality and unique for Google, this level of support that you don't necessarily get. It's like One Plus back in the day, right? Yeah, it reminds me a lot of One Plus,

and in fact, it undercuts one plus back in the day. Yeah, it's funny because like When I was thinking about these, I was like, I don't know why anyone would buy a Oneplus phone at this point. If you're looking at a premium phone, One Plus is now their phones, if they don't discount them or put them on sale, there are $1,000 or they're $800. They are fully up there. And now Google's offering its experience with the pixels, which is very similar in software, better support, better cameras, you know, arguably different, maybe better designs if your personal taste there, for less money. And so why would you, what is the selling point for One Plus?

Again, Samsung, it's a little bit different of a conversation. I think that Samsung definitely produces better hardware. Samsung's fit and finish is top-notch. Like, the S-21 Ultra is a gorgeous piece of device. The seams are perfect. The design is nice. The way that the rail blends into the camera hump is clever, and it feels like jewelry almost,

which often is used to describe the iPhones. And it's right up there with Samsung. Google's not there yet. Like, it is not hard to find sharp edges with these. it is not hard to find gaps between the glass and the metal frame if you're looking for it. So if you're extremely particular about build quality specifically, Samsung definitely has an edge there. Samsung also has an edge in screens because it produces all the screens and it reserves the best screens for its own phones. So, like, you know, you can see a difference between the Pixel 6 Pro screen and the S-21 Ultra screen.

The question is, at what point does that difference become worth $3 to $400? And I don't think it's that big of a difference. that it's worth $3 to $400. I went with the Pixel 6, not the pro, because I didn't think that the pros features were quite worth the 300 bucks. I'm really sad about the telephoto, but I feel like the pixel 6,

the regular one, is like more honest and appropriate price to like the way it looks and feels. Nelai, you had feelings about the pros screen. Do you, did any of them change since we last spoke? I do not think this is the best Android phone available. It's, well, here's what I'll say. It's the best Android phone available because you cannot buy a Samsung phone.

That was the argument that Dan Hibon. me with. I was like, all right, you got me. Like, Samsung can't make enough phones. Like, all right. To clarify that. X21 phones have been basically out of stock all year. They're hard to get from carriers.

Carriers, it seems like, are putting a lot of push behind the pixels. And it's like working in Google's favor because these are what's available to sell. So there's that part of it. But yeah, I would just say, like the pixel six, great phone. You get what you pay for from the price. You get more than you pay for. You get more than you pay for it. On the pixel six.

The tensor features, it's faster than you would expect. Like, all the stuff is there. The pro is like, I just don't like holding it. And that is, it's a bit, it's like a 40. The reason I've been quiet this whole time is like, that's what I have to contribute to this conversation. It's hicky to hold. And I just think for, once you hit, once you hit, like, close to $1,000, it's got to be great.

You got to love holding it. And then Dan's like, no, whatever. Everyone puts them in cases. And then the cases Google sent us are. even worse the whole so like you know

it's like the classic Joanna Stern line like for $200 more you can get a like yeah for $200 you can get a MacBook Air first of all

yeah which should be an amazing purchase decision you can get an S21 Ultra with one UI4 or whatever the number is at now if you can find it if you can find it

I would I would much rather have Google software I'd rather have Google's camera for the most part. And so it's like, it's not, we do not live in a perfect world where you can have everything that you want and you cannot have

like the best Android phone is like Samsung Harder with Pixel Software and they stopped making Google Play editions 10 years ago. And then here's the other thing I said. The team that made these phones is HTC. Like it's easy to forget, but Google bought HTC's

phone division for billions of dollars. This is maybe the second set of real phones they've played, right? It was like the 5A was their first. Yeah. I believe the 5. The 5? Yeah. Actually, it might have been the 4A.

Anyway. It was the 4A. Continue. So this is their first shot, that HTC team, first shot at a flagship phone. It's weirder that it's less nice than their flagship phones from like 2015. That HTC like won, right? The HTC1 was an amazing phone ever made. Best phone.

Although, I got to tell you, that's killing me. Go find an HTC1 and pull it out. I'll go get one right now. Hold on. And look at the seams. Like, oh my God, he's doing it. He's walking off. He just left.

There he goes. This makes me wish I still had my Google Play edition, 1 and 7. Oh, man. He's looking for it. This is good radio right here. He's coming back. He's real mad. He's got what he's got.

What's he got? What is it? It turns out. hydrogen. He got the HDC tablet out. What is that? I forgot what HTC product I had sitting on top. Yeah.

No, it's... I don't know if flyer's gonna make you face there. It doesn't even turn on anymore. I'm surprised the battery is... The HTC1 was incredible, but if you just, if you pick it up and look at it, you're like, oh, there's more, there's like more plastic here in the rails that I thought. And like, the seams are like pretty big, right?

Yeah, fair enough. For the time, it was amazing. But that's, that's the deal with the Pixel 6 Pro is like, oh, this would have been top of the line build quality. We're calling it a jewel and we're amazed by it in like 2017, 2018. This year it's like, oh, yeah, Samsung and Apple have been refining their ability to, like, make glass flow into metal for 10 years. And they're way better than you are. So Google's just behind.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is like where Samsung was with the S8. And so if this had come out the same time as the S8, we would be saying they're just as good as Samsung. Both probably in screen quality and in build quality. But the S8 was, I don't know, four or five years ago now. And so to Deird's point, there's been a lot. refinement there and a lot of tweaks and a lot of adjustment and screens have gotten better.

Here's where I land with the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro, their first generation. And will Google continue to push? Will they continue to invest? Will they sell enough? Can they make enough? Apparently they're like they've got wait lists now. You know, they want to sell $7 million, I think, is like the number that's been floating around, which is like 1% market share, which for the pixel would be amazing.

So if they have a second generation, there's already rumors about the, the 10th or 2 process. They're like out there. Night to five Google's got it. You know, if they continue to work and they don't do what Google does, which is like, oh, we try it really hard. Oh, just kidding. No, we're not. This has the potential. And like for a first gen thing, it's good. But it's not, it's not all the hopes and dreams realized.

Pixel 7. That said, if you are in the market for an Android phone this fall, you are going to have a hard time getting something better than the Pixel 6. Agree. Because literally you will have a hard time. literally you will have a hard time finding anything in stock, but including the pixel six. But even if everything was in stock and, you know, prices aren't discounted weirdly or whatever, the pixel six is an excellent phone. I have no hesitation recommending it to anyone with the only caveat being you have to deal with a big phone.

But you get big phone benefits, like I said earlier. Literally big deal. And I hope next year, maybe the pixel seven, they'll put that telephoto camera in the seven and not the seven pro, but we'll see. All right. I still think, I don't know. Just get the six. Like, just do yourself the favor and don't worry about the pro, even though you like the telephone.

Oh, sorry, there's one last thing. The fingerprint sensor is slow and dumb and bad and oh my God. No, it's the best Android phone you can get because it's the only Android phone you can get. Yeah, the fingerprint sensor is definitely a step backwards, I would say. It's slower than the rear-mounted ones. It's less convenient to use. You know, we always say never buy something with the hope that it gets better through software updates, but it is something that maybe they can tweak with software updates and maybe

they can improve it. But it is, it is in terms of like, there was a big concern about the tensor chips having, how is their performance going to be. And in day-to-day, everyday things, everything that I do with the phone, the performance is right up there with the Snapchat and Triple-8. Performance of the fingerprint scanner is not up there. It is noticeably delayed. It does take a few seconds or maybe a few tries to read sometimes.

So Google's got some work to do there. Yeah. All right. We got to take a break. We can come back. We got MacBooks to talk about still. We've got a lightning round. It's going to be great.

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com. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. We're back. We did it. So here's what I don't recommend. Don't throw yourself a gigantic party. And then have to publish two gigantic reviews while publishing the Facebook files and then cruising into Facebook renaming itself.

And having one of your editors out of commission because he got hit by a car. That's bad too. Don't put all that together. Don't get hit by a car. Don't recommend that generally. And I'm just saying if you can just move the news away from your party, you will not, you'll be happier. That's what I got you. So we, you might have noticed this on the site.

We didn't hit the review dates that everyone else hit for the pixel. We want to take some extra time. And we certainly did not hit the review dates from MacBook Pros. I have never been happier to have missed a review date. Why is that? Because what we really wanted to know about these machines was how much GPU do you need? Yeah. How will the battery life actually be compared to the M1 error, the M1 Pro that we test?

the last year because those were spectacular computers. Yep. And the extra time let us actually figure it out and, you know, we're reasonably good reviewers. Monica is an excellent reviewer. I give you all that, even all that, I don't know that we would have sussed out the battery details

if we had rushed. Yeah. It takes a while to do intense workloads and using it and it takes a while to do like day to day using it and there were multiple versions of the computer and the intense and the day-to-day stuff, in particular M1 Pro versus M1 Macs, turned out to be really fascinating. So, like, what happened there?

So the thing I didn't realize going through Apple's presentation, like, early, that there was a reason they're all called M1 ships. They're just different collections of the same bits and bobs and some extra stuff. So all the cores are the same. All the CPU cores are the same, whatever. Yeah, like roll up to Taco Bell and tell them how much cheese you want, called Apple, tell them how the GPU you want. That's actually really good.

They're the Taco Bell of chips. Only, only it's not like grade C beef. It's grade A processors. Yeah, it's like the best Taco Bell and amazing. So the thing I didn't realize was that carrying around all the extra GPs, they're still on. They don't turn all the way off. Right.

And sometimes they get used. Like the computer's like, I got these GPs. We're just going to do stuff with them. Yeah. and that just has an impact on battery life. It feels like we gave ourselves an extra week with the laptops, not to take it easy, but to do more stuff, and that took a lot of our own battery life. Well, especially when the battery life was 16 hours.

It's like there's only one way to repeat that result. It's to do it again. Another 16 hours. Well, so actually, to be clear, we were using these pretty hard, an entire extra time we took. Like, there was no slacken on any. I want to second. The 16 hours was the 16-inch M-1-Pro results.

You get slightly less. Was it like 11 for the M-1-Max? So the M-1-Pro, 16-inched M-1-Pro, ran for 16-hour, Monaco was using it for her workday, which looks a lot like mine, Chrome, Slack, Zoom calls, YouTube videos, the whole thing. The 16-inch M-1-Pro that we had, 16-GP cores, 16 hours. Nice, tidy set of numbers there. If you're in a numerology, this is great for you.

I had an M-1-1-1-1-1-1. M.1 max, 32 GPU cores. Same 100 watt hour battery. 10 hours on the battery. Right. And like there's some variances there, right? We're not, we're just using the computers. We think that is the most realistic thing you can do.

So, yep, I don't know. Like maybe I had more Chrome tabs up, but like we ran them several times. And these are numbers we got. When you had an external monitor plugged into the M1 max and I was like, a lot of people asked me about this. Yeah. What is it like with a monitor? on battery, battery left fell to seven hours because you let it even more GPUs. And then the 14-inch

M1 Pro that we had was about 10 and a half hours, which more or less matches the 13-inch MacBook Pro in the air. Pretty much. Yeah. But it has a bigger battery. So when you hear these hours numbers, you might be tempted to just compare them to hours numbers that you hear from actual companies. But when we talk about our workday, like we consistently get no more than two-thirds of what a company claims when they claim battery life in our like our workday stuff. So when we say 16 hours and 10 hours, we're like, whoa, this is good. When Apple or Dell or whoever says 16 hours or even 10 hours, we're like, yeah, okay, we'll see.

And it ends up being like eight and six or whatever. Those 16 or 10 hours that someone was using that computer, sitting in front of it, interacting with it, doing, you know, their work. And we don't let the display turn off. We don't let the display turn off. But they're not like streaming a video and just letting the computer do that on low power for 25 hours. Yeah. And Apple's test is just like ridiculous.

It's 21 hours of 1080P Apple TV playback. Right. I mean, that's what I'm doing this weekend. Who doesn't buy a $4,300 computer to watch 1080P videos a day? So that was just like the most fascinating thing to me is I walked away from this being like, unless you know, unless you already know, you're listening to this. And in your mind, you've already identified a hardcore, multi-threaded GPU workload. You should buy an M1 Pro. because the software ecosystem around these machines is not we're still in the transition so

you still end up running a bunch of soft and also we're still in the transition apple's chips and apple apple historically has weird ideas about GPUs and everyone else is like no no right like and so like that is a big turn that like the whole industry has to make to light up all these extra chip cord when it happens final cut pro is like 10 minutes faster to export a video than Premiere. Well, so this is why I wanted to say. It's like you may have heard us talk about software needs to catch up to Apple's weird ideas before, like specifically with like the Mac Pro, you know, when we last reviewed

that big honker. But here we're saying it, but we're saying it at a different level because the performance here, even with a lot of the software not being optimized, is legit great, right? Yeah. Like your day-to-day performance is amazing. The thing that really depends on is in your own. work, are you limited by CPU in memory,

or are you limited by the GPU? Yeah. Which does Chrome use? Everything. Chrome is like, it's steam powered. You got to fire up the old generator. Chrome is actually optimized for M1, right? These battery left numbers are on Chrome.

They're not on Safari. So that's like pretty good. I never heard I did a Google Meet meeting. The fan didn't turn on. I know everyone's dying to know this information. What? What? We had an idea for a battery test where we'd have an Intel machine and one of the M1 Pro machines do a Google meeting at each other and just see when that was, that was, we were like, this is just a huge waste of time.

We know what's going to have, like, the Intel machine caught on fire. What a surprise. I'd watch the video. The performance disparity with the GPUs is real, but most software isn't going to address that performance disparity. And then on the other. Where did we see it the most? Like, I know that in your,

you have after effects got updated and we saw and and it got updated it's still technically not arm optimized it's running in rosetta but it got updated to use all those extra GPU cores and it seemed like it was a really good example of like if you use after effects that's one of those things where it's like it happened for you course help you and our mac pro got a lot faster and after effects too same almost by the same delta right so our intel based mac pro with amd gpues got way faster because of this one update from Adobe our senior motion director Grayson he literally said I thought I would be dead before Adobe released this multi-core rendering. He's like I just never expected this to happen and like the computers got faster but they're not they didn't get faster because of Apple Silicon

they got faster because Adobe was like we have released this product and then our Intel machines got faster too by the exact same amount so there's a lot at play here I the thing that was just surprising to me is you're like, oh, you don't think like, oh, I'm carrying around this like heavy extra GPU, but you are. And like, I'm just saying, unless you absolutely know what it's going to be used for, like, it's not, I don't think it's worth it. I just love that like, I think for years now, even with Max, which are terrible at gaming, most people, regular people, not pros, use the GPU for gaming and stuff. And in this case, like, I haven't heard a single person, anybody talk about it.

Like, this really is for pros. This is not like... So, this is like kind of... It's priced for pros. It's priced for pros. And people are excited with the GPs. The game benchmarks are not there. Yeah.

Like, you talk about unoptimized software and, like, Apple's weird GPU ideas and developers being, like, nah. Like, the game industry has, like, long gazed at Apple and been, like, nah. Nope. Nope. Right. It's not as easy to run boot camp now anymore.

like all the tricks that you used to use on Intel Max to run games on them, which never ran great anyways, are like now harder with the M1 and with Apple Silicon. So we did a couple of benchmarks. Tomb Raider in particular runs native on Mac. A game from 2013. No, no, it's 2018. We did Shadow. We did the newer one. But if you have the M1 Max, you can get 85, 87 at 1,200p resolution frames per second, which is.

very playable, great result for that game. We did see probably the biggest delta between the pro and the Macs in that test. The pro got something like 42 or 44. So that is where those extra GPU cores are being leveraged. Yeah, but Monica's point is you can buy two Zephyrus machines and have money left over.

Yes. And get a better shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark. Yeah, yes. Do not buy these for games. And play other games way easier. Guess what's really hard to play on a Mac? Fortnite. Yeah, Monica actually looks directly.

lead a camera and is like, do not buy these to play games in the review. I love it. So that was like a big question. I think you're correct. Like we are really focused on work stuff with these machines because that other universe, like, even if they were great at games, there are many other hurdles. Yeah. To get games on a Mac that are just prevent.

It's just like not part of the deal. I just love that like, they're like, no, we're done. We're done here. Yeah. So, okay. You wrote a lot of words about this. It's a lot of MacBook pros. But at see what I did there.

But at the end, you didn't give them tens. So let's hear about this. I did. I was very close to giving the 16 inch M1 Pro 10. The 14 inch M1 Pro great machine, I just think 10 hours of that. It's a great machine with a lot of performance. But when Alex actually edited a video, battery. The battery lasts for four hours.

Right. Okay. So like I just, it's great. It's a great machine. It feels like a 9.5. Because even though the performance is great, I think the combination of performance of battery life is what got us close to a 10 with the air. The 16 inch,

16 hours. Actually with the air. Like performance price, battery life, all those together. Right. And the 14 is expensive. It's a $2,000 computer. And if you want to get enough RAM, you have to spend $400. That's ridiculous.

It's really a $2,500. not there's a little there's a little copy at there but we can talk about it um the 16 inch m1 pro 16 hours of battery life fastest performance you ever seen beautiful display great keyboard although monica disagrees with me she prefers more clicky keyboards ports like all the stuff right it's like here's this thing this is what am i complaining about right and then i'm me and then we found things to complain about

but we were like very close to oh this is just a 10 and then you start looking and you're like it's thirty one hundred dollars the ports are actually not the top spec ports which just seems like you know Apple makes a lot of margin I get it but HDMI 2.1 would be like if you want to plug in a variable refresh rate display to match

the laptop's own variable refresh rate display yep you can't use the HMI port you need a dongle because Apple doesn't support g-sync they support this other standard called adaptive what HDMI did they go with it's 2.0 it's just for an external display Yeah. 2.1's right there.

It's like everyone else. It costs you like $500 TV with an H.DMI 2.1 port. So that's just weird to me. The RAM situation where the base models only have 16 gigs of RAM, which for computers is expensive that you might use for a long time or importantly might use for work,

you are just adding a $400 RAM tax to the price of all these machines. And I would say the fact that it's unified memory across GPU and CPU and whatever is like a concern there. But that's turned out to not be a problem. that turned out actually pretty great, but still 16 is enough. That people are saying justifies the cost of the RAM,

because you are actually adding RAM to the memory card, which is historically more expensive. I don't know, man. All I know is 16 gigs is not enough for a pro machine. Yeah. And so every price they're quoting, automatically it's a $400 penalty for the RAM. And then just like dumb stuff.

Like stuff that, you know, I told Apple bad, they're probably going to issue an update to Monterey and fix. Like I was trying to watch the Facebook presentation yesterday over the HTML port on my TV. And I sent the audio out over HTML to the TV. And I just did weird stuff. Like, the video

started blitching. The audio started repeating itself. And I was like, this is even more dystopian than it was before when Marks Zuckerberg was. Like, that just shouldn't happen. I thought it's just, all that stuff to me is like, you came real close. You bring a lot of this stuff down to the air or a smaller pro or a cheaper pro.

Like, we're going to end up having this conversation. I'm sure by that time HGMI 2.2 will be out and Apple will ship a 2.1 port and we'll just be in the stance again. But I just think the price and some of the little rough edges pushed me out of saying this at 10. But the battery life and the performance made it like we had we talked about it a lot. Anything else with these things? This way. Nope. The blooming is like better. Oh, you said you prefer looking at this and you do Apple's $5,000 pro display XDR. It justify that. That is a crazy. Okay. I can. We spend a lot of time we that display. People have that display, right? Like, yeah, it's in reality now. And one of the things about doing a review is like, here's how I feel. And then like, reality gets a hold of it. And you're like, man, I hope I was right. So we gave that display not a great score, if you will remember.

And our head of production, Marillo in the studio who works on like, before us, he worked in the color shop at the Game of Thrones. He like took one look at that thing. And he's like, the light falls off on the edges at Vignettes. There's color shit, like bad. And then once you hear they see it. So that is very true. And other people have noticed that there's just shadowing on the edges of that display. Yeah. That's always been a problem for me. The other thing is that that display is also fuller rate local dimming, lots of LEDs, the whole deal, as fewer zones than this display. Ah. So it blooms more on black. Right. And it's a huge display. So when I'm saying it blooms more in black. I'm like, it blooms a lot. You see it. You just see it. Like you are watching a video. The

The controls come up over the letterbox. The whole bottom of the display turns gray. You just like see it. It's like impossible to not see. And how much is the display? $5,000. Oh, yeah. And we actually, Becca has had it for quite a while.

It's like a real pandemic victory for her. She was not supposed to have it. But she's had it. And we brought it back to the office to shoot this video. And I was asking about it. She's like, this color thing is real. When I call her on this display, I roll my chair over to where the color. window is so I'm head on with it.

Wow. Even the slight angle of being in the middle of the display. Yeah. None of that all the MacBook Pro display is like perfectly even. It is beautiful. The HDR stuff is the technology behind how they're doing HDR is incredible. Right. The color management they're doing with the display, the fact that they can run the backlight hotter in just like some quadrants

and they're doing it in real time, high refresh rates. Like you move the HDR window around the display. you do not see any transition. The content is just bright wherever it goes at the same. It's like really impressive. Like it's impressive because you can't see it. Right. I had to like show to people and be like, this is what's happening.

It's like kind of nuts. So it's just like that is all very good. There's like a tiny bit of blooming, but we showed it to people because they asked this about it in a perfectly dark room. With the brightness turned all the way up. Right. I could not show. to anyone in any normal sort of like come with me into my layer and I will show you the blooming

and it's just not it's not there you know it's like if you're off access and you're maybe watching a movie perfectly night you'll like see it but like whatever then it goes away but I think you see that with like every TV that's not an olet yeah blooming is it's a very familiar look for a full array local dimming that but it means that the black levels are perfectly black it means that if you hate the notch you can black out the notch and it's perfectly black. And that to me is like the right tradeoff on this kind of machine. Like I'll take a little blooming because I've, I now have a laptop with perfect black levels. And I'm not running an OLED display, which has another set of different kind of tradeoffs. Right. Right.

All right. Anything else? Do you want to talk about display profiles or do you want to not have the switchcast last four hours? I was ready to talk about him. I was here for it. The only thing I'll say is Apple is marketing on these machines is right it's a lot of relative specs it's a lot of saying things that are maybe not what you'd expect it's it's weird right so the battery life is all relative it's all relative to some baseline that you don't know what it is the performance is all relative it's twice as much performance as a computer you don't own battery life five hours more than a computer you don't own like okay the display line is the same it's up to 1600 it's 1,000 nits sustained brightness.

You hear a thousand nits sustained brightness. You're like, I can turn this computer up to a thousand nets and sustain the brightness. Absolutely not true. You can turn the computer up to 500 nits. Does it have to be out in the sun? No, you can just like, that's the max brightness of the thing. You get 1,000 nits when you're watching HDR content because the whole thing brightens up.

And then the peaks of the brightest part of HDR can hit 1,600. Okay. So in order to get HDR, you need to like turn on an HDR video. make the window almost full screen, but not go into full screen mode, and then put it behind and then put it in. No, no, it's only the content. That's very, that's actually common for TVs. Oh, wait, I got it.

Two, though. You take your computer stuff, you put it into a video that's live streaming in HDR, and then you access that. Right, so like apps can turn on Chrome HDR mode. So if you get, there's actually a software called Calman, and you get Calman, and you do like a little white box, and then you do black. and you set it to HDR, you can sometimes get it to pop

all the way up to whatever the peak brightness of. Because you have to do it for like, that's how you have to test TVs too, because this peak brightness thing is the same. So you can't technically do it. You have to spend $3,000 on the software. You're going to have to spend another $30,000 on the colorimeter. But you'll do it.

It's a good thing these MacBook pros are so affordable. Yeah. I'm like going through with Apple because I want to make sure to get it right. And they're like, you know, lots of apps already support. EDR, which stands for extreme dynamic range, everyone. Not HDR, which I don't know what that's like, whatever, man. So, you know, if Microsoft wants to ship a version of Excel that tells the system that the spreadsheet is requires. Yes.

Do it. Like, they could do it. Do it. I don't know about like display longevity and all, like, whatever. But, yeah, the system is designed to run. The thing that's different from a TV is the display on a TV only has. two modes, right? Yeah.

There's no, there's no seamless brightness switching on a TV, really. This thing, when you, we can run it in the mode, in the HDR mode, but the computer is like extremely smart

and the display is extremely advanced. So it is indistinguishable, color, like the whole thing is indistinguishable from the regular mode. Yeah. Until you light up the HDR content and then just that part of the window is an HDR.

And it's just, it's super cool because unless a huge display in Earth is standing next to you, being like, look at how cool this is, you would never know. That's dope. And that is super cool. There's a photo in our review. We tried to demo it as best we could in the video as well, where you can see the

YouTube window, which is playing the HDR content, is much brighter than the surrounding UI or whatever that is also being shown on the screen. And that was not like Photoshop editing or anything like that. That's what it looks. And if you have a new iPhone, it's like very familiar, right? If you take a picture on the iPhone, you open the photo, the photo gets brighter, it's that. without any transition, which is super cool.

Yeah. Well, we, we're going long next year. We need to stop, I understand. But we have a lightning around. I just want to say, I think this trip transition is an unqualified success for Apple. Yep. The thing that is not an unqualified success is convincing their ecosystem of software developers that their ideas about chips are right and worth the development time to specialize,

as opposed to writing software that works on all the chips. And I don't know how that's going to play up. Yeah, but Apple might, like, their ideas are very good. Yeah. All right. We don't have time to talk about a ton of this, but I guess Intel announced 12th-gen Alderlake, and it seems like they're the chips we've been waiting for, sort of, from Intel. Like, we've got to see them, but.

They're the one they've been promising for almost a decade. Yeah, they're the ones being promising for sure. Yeah. We had a very funny moment in the review where we were taking photos, and I was looking at the photos. I was like, oh, I really like this photo, but. The Intel headline is on the front of the screen. And like, this is the most womp-womp headline combo for this movie. Like, if we just got it, like, try today.

We have different headline up there. Yeah. But these are the new seven nanometer chips, finally, that are also called, like, something else because they can't decide on names. Their naming's all wrong now. And it's their whole transition to a different philosophy instead of just, like, going crazy. Yeah. Like, the last generation.

a bunch of this architecture stuff, they tried to backport it to the larger nanometer process, and it was kind of a mess. But these are the things that Intel has been working towards for quite a while. They're not the same architecture of the, you know, the M1 chips. It's still, that still is a whole separate thing. So, like, you might, we're not going to see M1 style, like, improvements. But in terms of waiting for Intel to, like, do the things that they've been promising, these are the chips.

So I'm really excited to see. These are not seven nanometer. Their Intel 7. They're Intel 7. 10 nanometer. I was just doing the same thing because I was like, somewhere Heim is like losing his mind. He was already slacking me. He could just sense it.

Sorry. Yeah. Intel 7 means 10. That's what I mean about. This is what they wanted to do to us. It's like dog ears. There was a new paperwhite came out. A new Amazon Kindle paperwhite.

And if, if all you. cared about was USBC Gratz. If you wanted like, if you wanted like buttons, a proper bezel to hold on to while you're reading, any of that, you're out of luck, but. Incorrect. This is perfect. It has the different color temperature for the screen. It has the bezel on the bottom, which having used an oasis for the past two years is better

than the bezel on the side. This is perfect. He brought it over to me. He's like, look, look last week. And I was like, all right. Oh. Just like, disappoint. appointment through my entire body.

My wife is a gigantic Kindle reader, so I bought her an oasis to replace her old paper white because I bought you the nicest one. And she, within a week, she's like, I hate this thing. Wow. It doesn't last long enough. Yeah. It's a battery. This is so dumb. If you're reading in bed, you have to hold it

up. You can't like rest it on like the covers because the bezel's too small in the bottom. So anyway, I'm going to buy this because now I have to like repent for my what I thought was a nice thing. It's very good. Then I have to be like, welcome, you have to charge this with a different plug. Then there's no way to win this game.

You're doomed. Let's go wireless. Just toss it on your phone charger. You got to put more stuff on it. Okay, go ahead. Speaking of wireless charging, the new AirPods, Chris Welch reviewed them. They've got MagSafe, if you want them. They seem great.

Maybe, I don't know if I want to spend that much on like the basic AirPods, but like they do all the stuff. They've got 3D TV. I mean, excuse me, spatial audio. They seem really good. Like, I would maybe prefer these over the pros because I don't actually. actually use ANC that much? I was so excited about the MagSafe because I forgot phone MagSafe exists. And in my head, it was just the little plug that's now on the Mac Pro.

And I was like, wow, why did they do that? That's so dumb, but I love it. Just completely forgot. There's a couple interesting notes with the new AirPods. Obviously, they've got that new shape that is more similar to the pro. So Chris is a very interesting test case because the original AirPods do not fit in his ears. these fit much better. And he was able to keep them in his ears longer.

They didn't fall out and things like that. However, for people that the original earbuds did fit well, they might have had the opposite experience. Nicole over at the WSJ, she said the opposite reaction. They fell out of her ears. So one size fits all earbuds. I wish all of the earbud companies would make little dummy ones for like $5. So I could just see if there. That's free thing.

let's let's do it please all right uh dobi photoshopms on the web we've now hit a new point of going over which is our producer is telling us to stop i don't think that's ever happened before all right i'm just going to say spatial audio is dumb and that'll be the end of the show it's so dumb thank you for listening everyone um also i s 15 has a new spatialized audio button which if you're an old head is like you might as well put that thing in stadium mode like what are you doing man i'm telling you it's a scam i'm telling you someone's nephew figured out like an accounting gimmick at a record company and that's why spatial audio exists yeah if you're that nephew call me something everyone find a nephew all right that's the show uh we're ending it with if

you're that nephew call me that's a fine place to end uh we might just like you know take a break uh the verge is over now it's been a long week no we'll be back next week We got Boz on a decoder. We're actually going to run that on Monday. That'll be cool. Dieter, you've got Tuesday episode of The Vergecast? I do.

Stay tuned. It'll be exciting. It's a secret. And then we'll be back next week of the show. I'll say once again, it was great to see everybody who came to the event. It's like, I'm still riding that high,

even though we've even, it made it a lot easier to get through this week. I was like, oh, people, people care. Like, that was great. Thank you so much for all the people who came. Thank you for all the people who tweeted us. Amazing. Watch Dieter's documentary Springboard.

secret history of the first real smart phone now in apple tv we figured out the captions issue it all works go download our app watch our videos it's great you can tweet it us i'm at reckless deeter's at back lawn alex is alex h crans the other Alex Alex E Heath please tell him he's the new senior metaverse reporter that'd be great for me Dan is DC Seifert that's it we got to end this thing that's for chest rock and roll get a shot