The Vergecast - Facebook F8, Galaxy S8, and Juicero's fate
Episode Date: April 21, 2017Here we are! Another episode of The Vergecast. It’s been a busy week, which means lots for Nilay, Ashley, Dan, and Paul to talk about on the show. Facebook’s F8 developer conference took place thi...s week so there’s lots of weird updates with AR, social VR, and mind reading. "It's two sci-fis at once," Paul says. And of course, the Galaxy S8 has been reviewed! Dan gives us his first-hand impressions, what his favorite features are, and whether he prefers it over the iPhone and the Pixel. And wow there’s a whole bunch of other stuff we talked about so listen through it all to keep feeding your brain 01:37 - Juicero offering refunds to all customers after people realize $400 juicer is totally unnecessary 06:34 - Samsung Galaxy S8 review: ahead of the curve 29:25 - Facebook F8 conference 2017 54:23 - Paul’s weekly segment “One day, not so far away, it may be possible for me to think in Mandarin and for you to feel instantly in Spanish” 55:39 - Plastc swiped $9 million from backers and just completely vanished 59:35 - Nintendo is reportedly planning to launch a miniature SNES before Christmas 1:00:17 - Intel's next-generation SSD technology is finally ready and it's really, really fast 1:00:51 - Slack is adding AIM-style custom status messages Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com, a multi-channel media experience.
Here's what I'm going to tell you.
My name is Nilai Patel.
That is all I'm going to tell you for this week, because I'm actually remote.
So I'm looking at a Skype feed of Dan Seifert.
I waived, but I forgot this is an audio program.
Waved at me for the radio listeners.
Paul Miller is here.
Hello.
And Ashley Carmen is here.
Yo.
So they're all in New York in our fancy studio, and I am sitting in a closet on vacation, which is great.
I'm really excited to be in this closet.
Are you on island?
I'm not on an island.
Because when it says Nilai vacation, I just assume island.
I think for like a long part of our history together, when I've been on vacation, it's been very coastal, very each oriented.
But this time, no, I'm just in the mountains.
It's good.
I'm in a, it's great.
Is there a lake?
There's not a lake, but we have a creek.
Creek is very nice.
Okay, that's pretty close.
Is it a Creek or Crick?
I'm a Creek person?
I don't know about you guys.
I'm more of a Creek person.
Here's the situation.
I have barely paid attention to tech news.
I know that Dan is here because the Galaxy S8 reviews came out this week.
There was a bunch of Facebook news, which I chose to completely ignore.
And I would stress this to the listener, if you can find a way to ignore Facebook for a week,
you will be happier and your life would be much more pleasant.
But I want you guys to tell me all on Facebook.
And then the only piece of tech news that has truly broken through to me on vacation is there's a juice machine that isn't very good at juice?
Right?
There's juicerro.
It's like an $800 juice machine.
Is that the case?
Jucero.
Jake Castanakis has been on the juicerro beat for a year, I believe.
which is deeply depressing.
Can someone just walk me through what's going on,
Chisarro?
Ashley, are you up to speed on the situation?
Yeah, I pretty much think
there's the machine
and it ships with these proprietary pouches
that have juice in them
and Bloomberg discovered
that you could cut open the pouches
and squeeze the juice out.
You don't even need to cut them open.
You just squeeze them.
So apparently you buy this $700 machine
which has been reduced to $4.4.
$400, so it's a bargain, go scoop it up.
Yeah.
And it will squeeze these bags that you pay like $7 to $10 for to get a cup of juice.
And all the machine does is squeeze them.
So.
No, but the machine, it has like a QR code scanner.
It's got Wi-Fi.
It's got all that other stuff.
It just squeezes bags.
Let's be real about what this machine does.
Does it order the bags for you?
I'm trying.
I'm trying to be a Gucero stand here.
It reminds, it tells you when the juice is expired.
Yeah, but you know what else tells you when the juice is expired?
The date that's printed on the bag.
Yeah.
So anyways, Bloomberg discovered that you can just squeeze the bag with, like, human hands and human grip,
and they can actually squeeze out a cup of juice faster than the machine can press one out with their bare hands.
So that's the big controversy.
And Jucerro, just before we came on today, Jucero published a medium post, of course,
because how else does a startup communicate with the world but through a medium post?
defending its machine.
We got to start getting the startup.
But also there are offering refunds.
Oh, they are?
Yeah.
To the three people that have bought Juceros.
If you, yeah, if within the next 30 days,
no matter when you bought a Jucero, you can get a refund.
That's really pretty nice.
It's just shocking to me.
Like, I've tried not to pay attention to too much tech news,
but the Jucero story, it was unavoidable.
It was literally everywhere.
Even though like Facebook had a big event, there was like, I had to go, you know, I was excited about S8 review day and I went and read all those and watched all those videos.
But the Jucerra story just through every channel available to me was communicated.
The smart juicer was a scam.
I think that shows the power of Jucero.
Like, it really, there is something in the back of our minds that tells us all the time that we should probably eat more fruits and vegetables.
But we fight it.
We fight that urge or impulse.
I don't have that voice.
Or conscience.
And Jucerro's like, hey.
The back of my mind's like, why aren't you eating a donut?
Isn't they like a smart cookie machine?
Yes.
Yes, there is.
No, there's tons of machine.
There's like there's a machine.
I wrote about this week that there's like pico brew that does like craft beer.
Now they're adding a pico still.
So you can make moonshine if you have.
The proper license.
Is it moonshine if it's illegal?
But I think so.
I think it's still, I think that's the best.
This is the worst idea for a Dukes of Hazard reboot of all time.
So all that stuff exists.
The Duke boys, they're smart still.
But it doesn't, it doesn't touch on our conscience.
It's just like, well, that would be fun as a fun experiment because I'm having a midlife crisis.
But Giuseo transcends that.
I think that's why everybody cares.
I think it also is just kind of like the peak or Nader.
of the absurdity of Silicon Valley.
Yeah, I do want to say, my cousin loves the juicerro.
I just want to put that out there.
Her company has two machines,
and she seriously texted me,
because she didn't know I knew about it,
and was like, the juicerro's amazing.
Does she love it to the point where she spends her own money on it?
No, that's the thing.
She gets it for free,
but she uses it multiple times a day.
She just absolutely is in love with it.
So, I need a texter about this name.
If I could use it for free multiple times a day,
I still would not drink the juice that it produces.
That's just because you're not, like, you just need to get healthier, man.
Yeah, that's nice.
I'm just not into juice.
We got to quantify your entire life.
We got to wrap you up in fitness bands and reminder apps.
It's going to be great.
And you act like that's not my life already, Neel.
That's true.
All right, so that's Juicero.
I'm just shocked that it's the tech news that shattered to the mainstream this week.
But there's two other big things in use,
and I think we're probably going to spend the whole show
on these two things.
And the first one, Dan, you reviewed the S8 this week.
I did.
I have reviewed two of them, actually.
I did.
You're into it.
Yes.
Tell me all about it.
So I reviewed the S8 and the bigger version, the S8 Plus,
which has a bigger screen.
And they're really great devices.
They're made really well.
The screens are killer.
The design is really cool.
They're kind of like one of those head-turning things
that everyone sees it,
and they're like, wow, this is really cool.
They perform really well, cameras are great, battery life's good, performance is good.
Software is actually not terrible, which is kind of a rare thing to say for Samsung.
So, you know, if you're a company that's coming back from probably the biggest public relations crisis of the past couple years in technology,
and you need a product to take you there to bring you back, I think the S8's a really good product to do it with.
So I want to get on the software because there's the whole explosion.
note seven, you started your review video by being like, I don't know if this phone will explode.
I know, that's the thing. We didn't know if the note seven was going to explode.
Like when I reviewed the note seven last year, I gave it a really high score and said it was
amazing phone and you should go buy it. And then they started exploding. So like,
I, you can't predict that. What I can say is that Samsung's put a lot of time, money and
effort into making sure this won't happen again. And we've said it here in the past that
like we are pretty sure that Samsung knows the stakes this time around that if it
word. Like you said, Nilai, it can't explode. Like, it just can't because Samsung cannot allow that
to happen again. Right. So there's that part. I think it's just worth setting that aside. We've done
the conversation about the exploding phones so many times now. Yes, we have. I want to talk about
the software on this phone because we, the design is beautiful. You know, you obviously got to play with it
in the hands on. We've talked about it. The fingerprint sensor seems a little ridiculous to me, but
go deeper on the software for me.
Like, what have they done that makes it good?
Well, it's more or less, more likely what haven't they done to make it bad than what they did to make it good.
Because, like, Samsung history is, with software, is to pile on a lot of stuff on top of what Google provides with Android and make it either difficult to find these things, difficult to use, or just kind of plain annoying.
And then Samsung's never really had a great eye for design in software,
so it was always kind of ugly.
This time around, they actually do have decent software designers.
So the design of the software is much more pleasant to the eye.
The menus are nicer looking.
The icons are nicer looking.
The home screen launcher that comes out of the box is really clean and simple.
So that's kind of been addressed.
And then a lot of the old things that Samsung was known for,
they've kind of put aside or put them deep into the settings menu
where if you want to go turn those features on, you can do it, but you can also live your
entire life without ever having to disable something annoying or deal with it if you don't care.
And I think that's the big change here. And they've been working towards this for a couple of years
now, but really it feels different with the S8. Like, it feels like you can start, like, set this
phone up with your accounts when you first get it or whatever, and then just use it and not have to
spend an hour and a half figure out how to turn off these bloops and blips and, like, weird
eye tracking stuff and like other dumb features that never really work that great.
Samsung has like a fitness app, right?
Samsung has a whole, it's a fitness platform called Samsung.
So in that case,
get it right, Paul.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
So in that case, Samsung's fitness platform is just not in your face.
And so you could just go, are those apps pre-install?
The app is there.
But if you never open it, like you never, you don't have to deal with it.
That's great.
The other thing is that like for years,
Samsung's been criticized for duplicating Google's apps.
So there's two email apps and two gallery apps and two browsers and all this other stuff.
And that's still here.
But, you know, I think it's less of a problem now than it was in the past because Samsung's apps, in some cases, are actually pretty good.
And they're better than Google's versions.
I actually like using Samsung's browser app better than Google Chrome.
Internet?
It's called Internet.
And it has a bad icon and a dumb name.
I want to use a browser called TCPIP.
It's just raw text, like the Matrix.
It only supports AskiArt.
Just a bunch of packets and headers.
Yeah.
But anyways, to my point, you know, the Samsung Internet's a really great browser.
It actually mimics a lot of the things or emulates a lot of the things that Apple does with Safari on the iPhone that makes web browsing on the iPhone really nice.
So, you know, Samsung does a better job there.
In other cases, I prefer Google Photos over Samsung's Gallery app.
Vlad would argue the opposite.
So, like, there are where, there's progress that Samsung's made here.
The issue is that it still puts both on the phone and doesn't give you a choice which
one you want unless you, like, go through the hassle of disabling them, which is still
kind of a weird, wonky process.
You said you're using a different launcher?
Yeah, my day-to-day launcher on my Android phones.
I prefer EV launcher, which, I don't know if we've ever actually covered, but someday we should,
which makes it really easy to, like, search for things and launch things.
but I'm also a power user that's like switching between a dozen different phones every week.
I think the average person can use the launcher that comes out of the box and not have any issues with it.
It's really fast. It's really clean. It's really simple.
Yeah. Every time I pick up a new Samsung phone, I find myself thinking, well, here's what I would do or probably most of our listeners would do or most of our staff would do, which is I'm going to start getting away from Samsung as much as possible.
It's a beautiful piece of hardware.
I just want it to be kind of as stock as possible
in terms of Android.
There's a bunch of stuff I have to do to make that happen.
And then I always think about
most people don't do that.
Most people just use whatever Samsung defaults for them.
And sometimes it's better and sometimes it's worse.
But on this phone, it seems like
they've toned down that disconnect
and the stuff that they are kind of defaulting you into
is pretty good.
Yeah, that's pretty much my take on it as well.
Yeah.
That is a huge step forward for them.
It is.
There's a lot of step forwards in this with the essay in general that, like, are addressing
things that we've complained about on Samsung phones for a long time.
And they're individually, they're like small steps.
Like we just reported today that none of the carrier versions in the U.S., whether you buy it
from Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile or Sprint, none of them have carrier logos on the phone,
which is like a silly little thing, but Samsung phones have always had, like, the carriers
slapping their brand all over in garish ways.
You think of like the Galaxy Note 2 from a few years ago
where Verizon literally put its logo on the home button
of the phone in such an obnoxious way.
And now we're at the point where there's no Verizon logo
on the phone whatsoever, which is like a big step.
It's like a small thing, but then you add it in with the software's better
and the design is better and like the support is better.
And all these other things add up to like actually fixing a lot of these
Samsung problems.
Now, like, Verizon still runs amok and, like, steamrolls its apps onto the phone.
So maybe that's, like, the next step.
Maybe next year, Samsung will get to the point where it's like, no, Verizon, you can't put Go-90 on this.
But, you know, the company's getting there, like, step by step very slowly.
But overall, it's adding up to a better experience for everyone.
I just want to point out that there's no escaping Go-90.
Right?
Like, Samsung traded that you're not putting a logo on the S-8 because the next
version of the note is just going to be called the Go-90.
It's like a dedicated button on the side.
Every time you pull the stylus out, Go-90 launched it to close it again.
If Verizon had Go-90 back when the Note 2 launched, I would not skip a beat if that
actually happened when you pulled the stylus out.
I have no idea how this information reached me because I don't think I've ever even visited Go-90.
You have no reason to it.
I don't even know.
Is it a website or is it just?
I don't think he can.
I have no idea.
It's an app on Verizon phones.
Ashley, you're the closest thing we have to a true millennial.
What's your Go-90 watching me?
Excuse me.
I've been on Go-N-N-G-9.
Oh, whoa.
She has a Go-90 deal.
You can watch every season of Fringe.
It also has Ashley Carman.
I've literally been on Go-90 with Snooky and Jay-Wow.
And I'm going back on it.
Are you really?
I swear.
Oh, that's incredible.
You can use it for free.
One of my very favorite Ashley's memories is when she got the email from Stucky and Jay Wound.
She was like, should I do this?
And there was just like a moment of silence in our office.
We all thought about it.
We're like, yes.
Yes, you should.
The risk is low because no one will see.
Yeah, I really.
Yeah, no one saw that.
Dude, I'm downloading Go 90 right now.
Wow, you were going to go so much 90.
Zero rated Go 9.
Speaking of buttons that no one uses.
As Dieter likes to always make fun of me for saying buttons.
Buttons.
The slight Britishism in every video fan.
But there's a button on the side of the phone that launches Bixby.
It can't be remapped.
Correct.
What on earth is going on with Bixby?
Not a whole lot.
Bixby out of the box in its current state pretty much does two things.
It has a home screen panel that is very similar to the Google Now panel on Google's pixel and Google Now launchers
that shows you cards of information,
like your upcoming calendar
and weather and news snippets.
And then in the camera,
you can use what's called Bixby Vision,
which will scan a product or object,
and then perform a search for you
either on Pinterest to find similar images
or Amazon to let you buy more of that product,
or it can, like, translate text and stuff like that.
It's pretty much what Google Goggles did five years ago.
I never remembers Google goggles.
I think about Google.
goggles every day. Yeah. And it's
like what Google Translate does. Like
you know, you reads the words and then it'll
translate them from one language to another.
But the big promise of Bixby is that it's supposed to be
this voice assistant that, that like
is your buddy on the phone and it doesn't do
anything of that yet. The voice thing hasn't
launched. So when you push the
Bixby button, which you have to push twice,
it will launch the home screen panel.
Wait, what? Yeah, if you push it once, it does nothing.
If you like double click it, it'll launch
the home screen panel. Which I think
is actually kind of a blessing in disguise.
because you accidentally push it all the time.
And if you're doing something,
you accidentally push a button,
you don't want it to launch Bixby,
which would be really annoying.
So I think that's actually kind of a clever workaround.
It's a clever workaround to like a problem of their own creation.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Like, we made a button that you accidentally push all the time?
Yeah, it's on the left side of the phone.
It's almost exactly parallel to the power button on the right side of the phone.
So like it sits, I'm left handed, so it sits right under my left thumb.
If you push both of those buttons at the same time, the phone should do something amazing.
Like that, that's like the, like, it turns on all the lights and starts screaming.
That'd be cool.
You know, or like.
So long as it doesn't explode.
Yeah.
So, you push, you push both buttons in for 30 seconds and the phone explodes.
Well, the only people that use Bixby for the foreseeable future, just people that don't know Google Assistant.
Well, Google Assistant comes with the phone, right?
So Google Assistant is on the phone, and it is, it works the exact same way that works on the Google Pixel or
other Android phone, you long press the home button, and it will launch Google Assistant.
The thing is that, like, the usage rates of any virtual assistant are pretty low.
Like, not a whole lot of people are using Google Assistant on a Pixel.
Maybe Pixel owners are because they tend to skew more enthusiasts, but, like, on a Galaxy
S7, which also has Google Assistant, not a whole lot of people are using that.
Not a whole lot of people even use Siri if you look at the repeat usage rates of that.
So Samsung was clever in putting a dedicated button that only launches Bixby.
It totally fell on its face when it forgot to launch Bixby with the phone.
So it is largely a useless button.
Do they tell you a reason?
Not like other than like it wasn't ready for launch.
I imagine that there are probably a thousand engineers at Samsung that were crushed
when they were like, we're not going to have this ready for launch.
Yeah.
Also there's like there's definitely a graphic designer with like the dog with shoes logo.
who's like, no one will ever see this.
I feel really bad for that dog.
I mean, in my mind, it's a complete character that exists and has adventures.
I mean, they could do like a clipy thing with the dog on the screen.
Well, isn't the question, you know, when you have a big new phone,
you're supposed to have one big new feature that helps you market it.
Right.
And Bigsby was seemingly supposed to be that feature, right?
They did the whole press round before the phone launched just about Bixby,
and then they had the phone launch.
Yeah, I think Samsung was actually trying to manage expectations for Bixby.
They knew from the get-go that Bixby on the S-A is pretty limited.
Even when the voice assistant features do come, which are supposed to come,
they're saying this spring, they're going to be limited to like eight Samsung apps.
It's not going to do a whole lot.
So I think what Samsung was trying to do was manage expectations and be like more forward-looking
for the future of what Bixby can be.
Because it's never going to, like at launch it was never going to be great.
Then they kind of like fumbled launching it as well.
So like there's no nothing to like market around there.
They really,
the thing that they can market around with this phone is a screen.
That's the unique feature.
And really what sells this phone.
But you're right.
Like there's no like big new,
it does X that, you know,
the prior phone didn't do type of thing to market with this.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we got to,
I got to ask you this.
The S8 versus the pixel.
Oh,
S8 all the way.
Why is that?
I, you know,
was funny. I was doing my review and I had been using both phones for about a week or so. And I turned
on my pixel because I read that there was some sort of software update to check on it.
And I turn the thing on and I'm looking at it. I'm like, man, this phone just looks stupid.
Like, it just looked like so, like, I have a regular pixel. So, like, the screen looked all
small and dumb and traditional looking and the design is so boring. And, like, there's nothing
to get excited about when you look at a pixel. At least for me, as, like, I'm a, like,
a hardware gadget nerd.
Like, I look at the S8 and I'm like,
whoa, that looks like the future of phones.
The pixel looks like yesterday's phone.
And the same thing with the iPhone.
Yeah, exactly.
And then like the thing that was different to me,
it was like, you know when the iPhone 6 launched
and you got used to that 4.7 inch screen?
And then somebody had, like, you know,
one of your relatives has an iPhone 4
and you pick it up and you're like,
this feels like I'm using a postage stamp.
Like, that's what it felt like when I picked up the pixel
after using the S8s for a week.
And so, like, it's just a screen.
So you're saying hardware-wise, it just wins.
It's a screen, but like, when you think about your smartphone, your smartphone is the screen.
Like, that's the thing about your smartphone.
That's all you interact with.
It's all you look at all day.
And, like, that drives your experience.
And, you know, the S-8 provides a different experience because of its screen.
But with Samsung software.
With Samsung software.
Which, like I said, I ain't mad at.
Yeah.
I'm going to have to dive in.
Okay.
So then here's the harder one.
This is the one that gets you phone calls and tweets and emails and people coming to your house.
If you could just say your address out loud before I ask you this question,
that'd be great.
S8 versus the iPhone right now.
Oh, right now?
I think the S.A. is way more interesting of a device.
Why is that?
It's just, again, it's the same comparison to the pixel.
Like, you look at the iPhone 7, which might as well be looking at the iPhone success or the iPhone 6.
You know, those look like yesterday's idea of what a smartphone could be and look like.
And the S8, warts and all, because it's not.
not perfect, looks like what tomorrow's vision could be. And like you can easily see this is where
the industry is going towards. And it's just a way more exciting device on that level. It also performs
really well. So like if you do go for the S8 instead of the iPhone, what are you really given up?
You've got to switch to Android. So there's the inherent Android things that are different than iOS,
but you still get a great camera, you get great performance, you get reliable battery life,
and you get a great screen. So like for most people, that covers all their needs.
right? Have we talked about the camera?
What's, where's that? I mean,
it's great, right? Yeah, I mean, it's a top
tier camera. How would it compare to the pixel or
the seven? For me,
I don't see too much of a difference between this and the
pixel. You know, certain people might find different
things, nuances here and there that they prefer
one over the other. The reality is
that, like, at the end of the day, both of them are
very good cameras that are very easy to use.
I really like the way that the Samsung
takes pictures. One of the things that really
struck me was the way it handled
difficult exposures of portraits
with a backlight behind them,
which is a very hard thing to take a picture
of usually your subject becomes very dark
and kind of muted.
The Samsung knew that I was taking picture
of a human
and exposed for that instead of the background.
And so the image came out a lot better
and side by side with an iPhone 7,
the 7 did not manage the exposure as well.
And so it was a really dramatically different image.
And so that's like one of the difficulty things.
Like there might be other areas
like maybe the Google Pixel is a little bit sharper in low light,
extreme low light situations.
But honestly, if you buy any one of these phones,
you're going to get a great camera and be really happy with the pictures it takes.
That's what it comes down to.
And Samsung's got filters.
They've got lenses, which I found hysterically fun.
I'm such a cynic.
And like nobody in the world would expect me to like these things, even myself.
And I love these Snapchat knockoff filters because it lets me play with these fun things
without having to use Snapchat.
I think that's really what it came down to.
They're really good, too.
I was saying, like, I use Snapchat a lot.
I love the lenses on Snapchat, but Samsung's are awesome.
You can use multiple people in them, like three people, which you cannot do with Snapchat.
You can use the front and back camera.
The thing is that you can share them everywhere.
So, like, you can take these photos and message them or put them on Instagram or tweet them or wherever it is.
You're not confined to Snapchat's world.
Yeah, it was cool.
I thought they did a really great job with it.
They're also terrifying.
Yeah, I like the one where you get to eat ramen
Yeah, the ramen's good
I like the steak eating one
These are animated
Yeah, they're animated
And so you can like shoot video with them
And they like do things and then
Like if you open your mouth
You eat a fish
Right, there's one where your face is a seal
That's what happened to me today
Is it ate a fish
And Samsung has a live photos knockoff
That like they call motion photo
So you can like
Capture the motion of the lens
How does this share out?
This is the big problem with live photos is they share out.
When you share a motion photo, you have a choice of sharing either a still or a video file.
Oh, so it's just a regular old video file.
Yeah.
And I'm assuming the filter stuff is just video files too, right?
Yeah, I mean, I guess because you can, the filter, like, is live on the camera of viewfinder when you're using it.
So you can hit the shutter button to take a still or you can record video of it.
Like, it's just overlays, whatever you're looking at.
Yeah.
It's just, all that stuff is really great.
and then I find the sharing of it.
This is super wonky,
but the file format problems with sharing,
the neat camera tricks
actually inhibit the sharing of them.
So live photos are great,
but they only work 10% of the time
because there's nowhere to share them to
unless you open Google's MotionSills app
or do some other work to it.
There's a GIF mode in the camera, too,
that you can actually just create straight GIFs.
But if you're doing a video,
you can just put this on Instagram.
Right.
Yeah, like I can upload a video to Twitter
of me goofing off with it.
Apple just came out with a
JavaScript API
for
its live photos.
So you could put them on the web.
Oh, the web.
Remember that?
If only Deter was here to talk about the web.
Remember that thing?
It's an open platform.
Yeah, I love it the most.
So actually, we should transition.
I think filters a good time
to transition over to what Facebook is doing
in F8, which means I need to read an ad
real quick, and then we'll come back and talk about some Facebook, which means I just want to
point out, you will talk about Facebook, and I will continue to pretend Facebook doesn't exist,
which is going to be great, I think.
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You know how I became an expert in all gadgets?
As that?
To start at Engadgett.
I got the job and I was like, well, shoot, I don't know anything.
So I made a spreadsheet of not a real spreadsheet.
It's just like a text, text document.
So it's not a spreadsheet.
I don't like grids.
Grids just box you in.
Yeah.
And it was a list of all the different categories I could think.
think of and then like the best one of each.
Yeah.
That was like my own homebrewd research to become an expert gadget blogger.
When we interviewed Ross Miller for his job at Engadgett, he was coming to us from joystick.
And we were talking to him on the phone.
And I think Josh asked him what he knew about netbooks because netbooks were really hot at the time.
And Ross only much later admitted that he rambled for 30 seconds while he furiously was
Googling netbooks in the background.
Was he visiting netbooknudes.com?
Yeah.
Anyhow, let's talk about Facebook.
What happened?
So Fast and the Furious Eight
is the first film in the franchise
since Paul Walker's death.
Yeah.
And it's been, I mean, it's pretty hard for me to move on.
So I haven't watched the ESW.
So I don't know anything about it.
What I know is that it broke records.
It beat Star Wars in the box office.
Yeah.
F8.
Look it up.
Google it.
Fate of the Furious.
I installed a fancy new LG OLED in our media room downstairs here.
And fancy new den and receiver.
And it's got all the speakers and it's got the Atmos.
And the first movie we watched was Furious 7.
And that movie is really long.
It's like two and a half hours long.
long two hours and 20 minutes or something.
And it took us three hours to watch it because Becky has never seen a fast and furious
movie before.
So we had to keep pausing it.
So I could be like, that person is dead.
Or they thought she was dead, but she's back to life.
But that person's dead for real.
And like we literally, and by the end of it, she's like, this is just a soap up.
Did you tell her the appropriate order to watch the movies in?
I mean, it got deep.
It's very highly debated.
But I will say we watched it in 4K HD.
And it was incredible.
I'm going over.
And I highly recommend everybody get a 4K HDR2.
Oh, there's a whole rant here about how hard it is to make it all work.
But it's choice.
Did Becky agree to watch this because the TV was not curved?
Yeah.
Wait, how did you, maybe I missed it.
How did you get the 4K version of the film?
Is this a 4K Blu-ray?
I had to buy it from voodoo.
Oh, nice.
Voodoo.
There you go.
Okay.
So F.A. is Samsung or, you know what?
Facebook.
Facebook F8 is their big developer conference, and they listed a lot of crazy things that they've been working on.
I'm really excited about this VR Hangout app.
They showed it off.
I don't know.
It was almost, maybe it was like six.
It turned off last year.
A while ago, yeah.
So it's out now for the Oculus Rift.
And I feel like maybe we talked about it then, but I just find it, the thing that is like really breakthrough to me.
So this is like a hangout.
It's like a social VR experience.
There's a lot of those out there already.
There's alt space.
There's rec room.
But this, you, like, hang out with your buddies in, like, a virtual space, like a 360 panorama
photo or whatever.
And you can do little activities together.
The thing that's most interesting to me is that you can video chat with the real world
from the virtual world.
Like, there's also, like, a selfie stick.
So, like, this idea, it's a really.
weird mix of virtual and real that I really hadn't thought of before I saw their original demo.
And so that exists now.
So I'm pretty excited to check that.
I haven't played with it yet.
But just this idea of videoing, a real person, and then you can show them your virtual world.
I mean, it's really something I'd kind of want for almost any VR game because VR is so
isolating.
And maybe you could have, I mean, typically you have headphones on too.
So, like, even if there are people in the room watching what's on the monitor, if there is anything on the monitor, like, it's still really hard to communicate.
So, like, this idea of, like, video chatting someone into VR and showing them what you're doing, that's pretty exciting to me.
Doesn't it just feel like Facebook's end goal here is to make us all brains and vats?
Yes.
Well, the end goal is mind control as detailed by the judge reports write up of the other stuff they announced.
So they've got like a cool new skunk works division,
and they are doing mind reading and hearing without...
With your skin.
Hearing with skin.
Yes.
Yeah, but this is led by Regina Dugin, who actually is like notable.
She was at Google before.
She, like, ran DARPA.
She's a big deal.
Yeah.
Right?
So they hired her to do the crazy stuff.
And this is some of the crazy stuff, or is it real?
She says this isn't just cocktail conversation.
This is real.
They are really doing this.
Where was this thing?
One day, not so far away, it may be possible for me to think in Mandarin and for you to feel it instantly in Spanish, Dugan said.
They have a prototype of that, of the skin one.
Where you hear with your skin?
Yes.
How do you hear with your skin?
Basically, at least from what I understand, it's like,
You wouldn't be able to speak full, have a full long conversation, but it would be more for like a few words.
Like right now they can understand a couple colors and shapes.
So it would be more like probably if I said hello in Mandarin, maybe it knows to listen for that and it can say hello on your skin with a vibration.
And you get used to those vibrations, note that tell you it's hello.
Yeah, the sensor is like the inside of your ear, but then it outputs it as vibrations on your skin that you can learn to hear.
here quote on quote what is facebook it's like i i understand what facebook is doing with vr right they're
trying to draw you further into their platforms i'm sure they're going to you know stick advertising
in the virtual realms that you live in um zucker burger keeps saying things like why would you
buy an expensive tv when you can buy a tv for a dollar in vr i love that quote that's because
ashley has a very anti-tiv agenda i just that was funny every gadget maker's like dude stop
Well, there's actually a lot of reasons that you would want, you wouldn't want.
This is what I mean about brains and bats, right?
Like, his whole thing is to blur the line between our reality, the Facebook reality, and then the completely controlled virtual Facebook reality.
The building eight stuff is really neat, right?
How do we augment the human body that's been doing its focus for a long time?
I think it's fascinating.
But you connect it back to what they're trying.
to do with VR, when they're trying to say, like, regular life is bad.
But if you are just an avatar in the Facebook world, we can make everything cheaper and better.
Well, so there's that, but there's also AR, which now is the hot thing that everybody talks about because we love our trends.
So they announced like a platform for developers that can make AR apps kind of using Facebook's AR technology and Facebook's trying to put it.
It's camera everywhere.
But that's actually really cool because like with Snapchat, which they've obviously worked on these AR lenses, like that launched this week too, Nilai.
Like Snapchat developed these AR lenses that are super awesome.
You can superimpose a rainbow far off in the distance or in the room with you and you can walk around the rainbow and it's like it's in the room.
But it's not open source.
So it's like Snapchat's technology.
And the fact that Facebook is opening that up to people that they can now make those lenses is actually, I think.
a major advantage.
Yeah, like, I have learned enough in, like, game development stuff now that, like,
it's very easy to take a 3D, it's pretty easy to make a 3D model, and it's pretty
easy to animate it, it's pretty easy to add, like, interactivity to it and stuff like that.
If you could do that using something like Unreal Engine or Unity, and then it's, like,
Facebook's like, hey, you want that to be in our camera app now?
Like, absolutely.
Like, you just make a weird toy.
that sits on your desk and you look at it through your phone.
Like, I mean, I'm definitely thinking like the next great Tamagotchi,
is it Tamagotchi or Tamagotchi?
I say Tamagotchi.
And that's great Tomogachi.
But Dan also says buttons.
But it's buttons.
Buttons.
Button.
A button.
I think AR, and this is something I brought up a million times in this podcast,
but I'm just going to do it again because the AR is hot.
Everybody has, so hot right now.
Everybody has to read Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinji.
where he just fully explores a world where you have basically contact lenses in and a brain interface,
which is the other thing that Facebook is working on like a brain click.
Like being able to detect brain decisions to do on off, like real simple things initially
or like to dismiss a notification that's clouding your AR vision, I'm sure.
Yeah, there's a guilt flash sale and you want to get back to,
AR, so you got to click it.
But Rainbow's End, they have these, you know, it's basically completely augmenting their vision
and just every, the whole world is touched by this augmented reality.
And it's just so fascinating.
And there's so much that's possible with it.
And it's, there's a lot of it that we're, we're very, very close to.
And it's all going to be kind of developed on our phones in our camera apps now with
Samsung and Facebook, Snapchat, and presumably Apple.
And then at some point, it's going to be in our eyeballs.
And it's going to be great.
And if I chose to see Ashley as not just a woman wearing a red sweater, but a tomato,
just a very large tomato, I'm sure there will be an app for that.
I mean, I'm excited about AR.
Like what if you could just see all those Snapchat rainbows right now just through your glasses?
Oh, I love it.
I'm really pumped about AR.
Like, and I like that unlike VR, obviously, where you're.
you're closed off. You said it's an isolating experience. AR, you're still in the world.
Although you might be in an empty room looking at a bunch of stuff and not even realize it.
Well, yeah, if you buy that, if you buy that $1.A.R. TV instead of the VR TV, maybe spend
$2 for the AR TV. And then your buddy has AR glasses too. You can watch, you can watch AR TV together,
but actually be able to see each other for real. This is a black mirror episode, right?
The Black Mirror episode is what's happening.
No.
Yeah.
It's called Silicon Valley is a loop.
No, but there's actually like, why would you ever buy a VR TV?
Like, just like if you dive into that concept, the reason you buy a new TV is the physical properties of the TV are improved, right?
So it's a bigger screen.
You want to buy a VR TV.
But that's, but that keeps coming up.
It's not the first time Zuckerberg has brought it up, right?
But the reason you buy new physical things is because the physical things are
I could imagine a very vibrant economy for buying digital objects because...
Well, I mean, there's already exists, right?
They're in games all over the place.
Yeah, yeah.
Some of the biggest, I mean, the second life, obviously, is like the classic example.
But Valve makes most of his money, as far as I can tell, offering decorative items,
including hats and character skins and 3D models of guns on Steam.
And people buy them, they resell them, they buy these like loopbox type things to like basically gamble on whether or not they'll get a valuable gun pack.
They literally gamble.
There's match fixing scandals in the counterstrike world.
because these people are basically betting their high value three digital objects and people
throw games to it's it's it's really wild and really exists and if someone made like a really
cute or clever 3D object that I could add to my like virtual space that I like to hang out in
you know I could imagine but that would require a very like one kind of big unified platform
or some sort of open platform,
which is kind of harder to imagine
with the sort of companies
that are working on this right now.
Right, especially because they're all making...
They're trying to all give it away for free
to monetize it with ads,
and I think that's sort of the looming, dark specter
of what anything Facebook does.
The context for F8,
in all of this incredible future thinking,
to me I thought was fascinating
because Casey on Sunday
published a big piece looking at instant articles two years in.
They launched instant articles on Facebook with a huge amount of fanfare.
There was doom and gloom.
Two years later, you know, we're on it.
Circuit Breakers on it.
But it's not great and no one likes it.
And it hasn't done anything for us except turn some pages into instant article pages.
Facebook Live, another massive product launch for them.
And literally, you know, there was a murder on Facebook Live, right?
before F8 and Zuckerberg addressed it by being like,
we're very sorry.
No, on to the next thing.
And it's the amount of thought they put into
what these products should be
and what Facebook is now
versus what they want the products to be
and what they want Facebook to be.
There is some kind of disconnect there
that I think is,
it's just very troubling
that Facebook as a company
isn't, they don't think about
what the people actually do with the products.
They think about what they want the people
to do with the products.
And I don't think they've
designed around that stuff very well. So, like, all the VR, like the videos of the VR chat app
are, like, hilarious, right? Because it's a bunch of people being like, hey, another person's
calling me. And they're like, we threw you a party. And they're like, I'm hanging up on you.
And they're like, no, I'm in an office. We're taking a selfie. And it's like, have you thought
about how people might actually act in this thing? Have you looked at it? Are you worried about
what they actually might do? Have you thought about the privacy settings you'll need if you can post
to Facebook with your brain without thinking.
Like, that's the stuff I want to see Facebook talk about more in public because they're
just doing a bad job with the products they already have, let alone the, you can think it
and post it to Facebook interface that they might be building somewhere secret.
I mean, what's the biggest update to, like, Facebook's core?
The thing I'm thinking of is the reaction, like, instead of doing.
just like that you can be related stories yeah they did but no have any of you seen stories in your
main facebook app i just tweeted yesterday how empty my stories yes yes i haven't seen stories i don't use
the facebook app uh actually actually do you want to tell me is is any of this i know like you like
snapchat you're a big fan of the filters as facebook just relentlessly cloned snapchat does any of that
changed the equation for you no because i think snapchat and facebook are just
different companies and I think that like it's obvious that Facebook is worried about Snapchat.
And maybe it's because of Snapchat's audience, like the coveted teens or something.
I don't fully understand why they're so worried about Snapchat.
I feel bad for the uncoveted teens.
Yeah, the ones who aren't on Snapchat.
But I'm sorry, Facebook's not cool.
Like, it's not.
And as much as they're going to build out their lenses and,
Open it up to developers, like one really cool thing.
I know Addie wrote a little piece about this,
and then I covered the news a while ago is,
I believe it's a live, Facebook Live.
They're doing makeup overlays in AR,
which is really interesting to me on Facebook.
And that's so cool that that exists,
but like, I don't know, it just doesn't change the game for me
because, like you mentioned earlier, with sharing,
I don't go on Facebook.
So I'm not going to use those lenses.
It's just what it is.
And I don't think the teens are on Facebook either.
What about Instagram?
Instagram, well, it's just such a different platform.
Like, I don't think the lenses and stuff applied to Insta.
But what do they do?
But Instagram is Facebook.
Right.
So, like, if I were Snapchat, I would be much more worried about Facebook than the other way around.
Because, like, the reality is, and credit to this, to Farhads column in the New York Times this week or last week, Facebook has the network.
and yeah, there may be younger people
that are not using it as much anymore,
but in aggregate, Facebook's network
dominates. Like, when you take
how many people are on WhatsApp, how many people are using
Facebook Messenger, how many people are using Instagram,
and how many are using Facebook in general,
Facebook can
wholesale
steal Snapchat's features, which is done,
and just put them on each one of those networks
and have a billion users
instantly using those features
or exposed to those features. And, like,
Snapchat just can't play at that scale at all, and it'll never will.
Like, it's never going to reach that scale because Facebook can just, like, take it what it's doing,
and then it, like, neuters what's interesting about Snapchat.
I do think it's interesting that you say, like, Facebook will never be cool,
and there is something about that Snapchat has been so pioneering in this stuff,
and it is being copied by everybody, but there's a point where it's like,
if one company makes a thin laptop and the other company makes it a thinner laptop,
It's like, well, you're the winner now.
You have the thinner laptop.
Yeah, I mean, frequently.
But if you copy something like these Snapchat filters, you kind of do look lame.
But in the history of Silicon Valley and technology, the guy that was first or the group that was first doesn't always win.
You know, like Apple's done this and dominated all of these markets by not being first to the MP3 player, not being the first smartphone, not being the first tablet.
It is who can take this idea that maybe somebody else came up with and apply it better or bring it to a wider audience or improve upon it in some way.
And that's what wins in the long run.
Yeah, but Apple did the iPod before Microsoft did the Zoom.
And is Facebook putting filters, are they being the Zoom?
No.
The Snapchat's iPod?
There's a lot of Zoom people who are going to really, really, really take a lot of Zoom.
Gumbridge with this.
Like, the people who love the Zoom love the Zoom.
It did wonders for preserving
the Zoom's business. I don't think anybody
loves Facebook like people love the
Zoom. And you should put that on my
headstone. That's the last quote.
That's the only, like,
that's the problem. No one loves Facebook.
Yeah. People in developing
countries, I think, love Facebook.
Maybe. Facebook is like the
phone book. No, but like
I don't think Google is cool.
Right? I think Google is wonderful.
Google's cooler than Facebook.
And I think it's...
I think so, yeah.
You know, people think of Google as a tool.
I mean, that's what my assumption is.
My point is that people love Google, right?
And, like, that can change your perception of how cool you think it is.
But people truly, deeply love Google and the products it creates.
Apple, I think people love Apple to death.
They think it's the coolest.
There are people who love Microsoft.
There are people who love Snapchat.
there are people who love Instagram.
I don't know anybody who sits around who loves Facebook.
And the little indications of it are all over the place, right?
Like when we cover a big Microsoft event, our audience, like floods our site with traffic.
There's tons of interest in it.
I'm sure a lot of people are going to have strong opinions about the conversation we had about Samsung earlier.
But when we cover F8, it's like we do it because it's a huge, important, influential company.
but the amount of interest is low because people just, they don't love it.
I think that speaks more to our audience, anything else.
Because there's like giant swaths of the population that do love Facebook and are on it all the time.
If you love Facebook, tweet at Dan Sefert.
It's not going to be Virchcast listeners.
It's true.
It's true.
I think it's developing countries and moms.
There's two social networks that my wife uses, Facebook and Instagram.
And that's it.
She doesn't use Twitter.
She doesn't use space.
But does she love Facebook?
She, you know, it's the one that she spends all of her time on.
It's where she connects with all of her friends and family.
My wife is a Facebook Marketplace Ninja.
She is the reason that your Facebook app has a Marketplace tab on it because she's the only human that uses it.
But she sells things on it, like, freezing.
She just buy and sell things from herself?
What is that happening?
Well, she sells things, like, ridiculously on Marketplace, like, all day long, all the time.
And, like, she uses Facebook all the time.
She doesn't use Facebook stories, and she doesn't use a lot of the, like, other
maybe all the features,
but she's in Facebook all the time.
And there's a lot of people that are like that,
that are in Facebook all the time.
But I use Twitter all the time.
Do you love Twitter?
Like, I hate Twitter and I'm in Twitter all the time.
That's what I'm saying.
I don't find...
Yeah, but you don't use Periscope all the time.
Like, Facebook is trying to get you to do different features,
and you're just saying your wife doesn't do those features.
She doesn't do all of them, but she does some of them.
The old native Facebook.
She likes, well, she used, the way she experiences Facebook is on her phone,
so it's always the mobile app.
And she uses some of those features,
But I don't, what I'm saying, what I'm saying is using it, like I use Facebook too.
I'm not in love with Facebook, right?
Like, I think the perception of Facebook is ultimately one of distrust.
And people use it, but there are never like massive social campaigns of like chain letters.
Like, dear Facebook, I do not give you my copyrights.
Like other companies don't face that stuff because that level of distrust isn't.
Because that also speaks to how dominant Facebook is among everyday people, right?
Like, it is the most used service.
And, you know, then you have things like silly chain letters saying, you know, if you post this status, Facebook won't take your identity or whatever it is.
Because it's not enthusiasts and tech nerds and whatever that are using it.
It is everyone.
I'm curious, I don't think we have the four of us anecdotally.
I don't think we can talk about whether or not people.
people love Facebook the way they love Apple and Google and Microsoft and Amazon. Like,
it's just so clear to me that people love a company like Amazon. Like, they love, people
love Amazon. I love Amazon, right? It's like, I want their bets to succeed because their
bets traditionally have, like, brought more value to me as a consumer, somebody who spends
money with them. When Facebook does new stuff, I often find myself wondering, how, like, how is this
going to be bad? Right. Like, how will this negatively impact me? And that,
That switch, I think, needs to get flipped for them to continue to succeed with some of these big, important bets.
And I would actually, I'm very curious, like, the people listening, if you love Facebook or you know people who truly love Facebook in the way that if we had an argument about IOS versus Android.
Different than obsessed or used it a lot, but like love the company.
I'm just curious.
Facebook fan boys stand up.
Just to make this like just very honest.
obvious comparison. When we criticize Apple, like there's a, and it's our audience, I understand all the
caveats, but there's a group of people who always respond with Tim Cook knows what he's doing,
or Johnny Ive knows what he's doing, and there's a plan, and they trust and believe, and they
passionately want that plan to succeed. I don't, like, the Zuck knows what he's doing,
apart from wants to dominate the world. That part isn't there. And I'm curious, again, if you're
listening. I would tweet at me. You can tweet it Dan, tweet to Paul. You can tweet Ashley.
Just communicate with us. And let us know because I'm very curious. Okay, on that note,
I'm going to read another quick ad. And then we've got a little lightning rounds to get to you.
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Okay, so Paul, every week, you do a thing. Without fail. Without fail, you've never
street it up. And it's always
always been called.
One day, not so far
away, it may be possible for me
to think in Mandarin and for you to feel
instantly in Spanish. Oh my God.
You can't use the thing we've already talked about.
Can't I? I don't know.
I don't know if this thing has rules. I just think it's
no rules. It's just the best line.
It's like two sci-fis at once.
Is there a real gadget? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's called
Knops. I'm not really
try to say it. K-N-O-P-S.
There are earplugs that are adjustable.
So they're like for like going to a loud concert, right?
You want to get earplugs so that you don't go deaf.
And but these are earplugs for that purpose, but they're adjustable.
Like they're like these rings and you can like twist them to like adjust how much audio you want going in.
But check this out.
You'll never believe it.
There's no app.
They're not smart.
There's no electronics.
You don't have to charge them.
They're just like these dumb little earplugs with the little twisting knobs.
And I thought that was pretty cool.
Are these real?
He's a Kickstarter?
It's a story.
Not real.
Of course.
Didn't we just cover like a Kickstarter that scammed people out of $9 million?
Yep.
I just wrote about it.
And I can't remember the name of plastic.
A P-L-A-S-T-C.
Was this one of those credit card?
Yeah.
It's like a credit card.
How many times are they going to try and make fetch
happen with this because like,
well, it's an old,
Dan, that's the end of the Vergecast, everybody.
We're going to let Dan go
and think about what he's done.
Mean girls references are always
accepted here, Dan.
But thank you, Ashley.
I would say the threat,
you gotta go deep cuts on Mean Girls now.
It's true.
Like she doesn't even go here.
Yeah, see, that's a good.
Ashley with one.
Okay, plastic.
Yeah.
What happened?
Well, so it actually wasn't a crowdfunding campaign.
They just accepted pre-orders.
This was back in 2014.
The Verge covered this card.
I wasn't here, but apparently there was a big boom in this idea.
It's like coin and a few other startups that have tried to do this idea.
Yeah, physical cards that hold your credit card numbers, multiple cards.
And so this happened in 2014.
They earned more than $9 million in money for pre-orders.
It's been three years.
Today the company announced that it's filing for bankruptcy.
It laid off all their employees.
They're closing their social media channels and their customer care lines.
So don't try to call in or email in them because no one's answering.
Do they never ship anything?
And they will not be shipping anything.
And nothing has shipped.
Does it look like they were working really hard and they just failed?
In their post, which they had like a what happened part, they said we were looking for funding in February of like $3 million and it fell through.
And then we were looking for funding a few weeks later for $6 million and it fell through.
So, sorry.
Yeah.
Startups.
Yeah, it's just this idea of trying to fix credit cards by putting them into one device has been tried so many times.
And there was just one that we reported on like maybe a month ago that someone was trying to do it again.
And I just don't know why they won't let this idea go away.
I think it's because people keep insisting on using those phone cases that are also wallets, which I completely don't understand.
I have no problem with those.
Yeah.
I'm kind of curious to try one, if I'm being honest.
Well, I just, like, the idea of constantly bringing my credit cards out and then, like,
handling them as much as I use my phone terrifies me.
But it feels like if I just had the one card, I would be okay with.
I wouldn't have, I wouldn't lose everything.
That's my theory.
Unless you lost that one card.
And then you would have lost everything, literally.
Well, do you pay with your phone?
I love paying with my phone.
I have found Apple Pay has been way wonkier lately than it was when it was.
it first came out. And I think it has to do with how they remapped the home button to unlock the phone.
So when I first came out, there was still slide to unlock. So you would just pick up the phone and
like hold it to the thing and put your thumb on the sensor and it would like pay. And now there's
like a number of things that might happen. And I think I'm just, I'm probably just doing it wrong.
But I found that Apple Pay is way wonkier for me because of that home button remap. And I'm doing it less,
even though I want to do it all the time.
Yeah.
It's a, look, my life is very complicated.
It's full of huge problems.
I don't use, I mean, the whole switch to chip has caused me so much social anxiety.
Like the idea of presenting my phone on the off chance they'll be able to pay with it.
But half of the time I won't be able to.
And I'll have to have more awkward conversations and misunderstandings and I'll like mumble something.
You want to save you money.
There's nothing more awkward than trying to pay with your watch and it failing.
Because at the first, they're like, wait, what are you doing?
And then it doesn't work.
That's incredible.
Okay.
What else happened this week?
Any lightning round notes?
I hear there's a new S-N-S classic that Nintendo might do.
Oh, yes.
That's S-N-E-S for the.
I like saying S-N-S-N-S-S.
Well, the rumor is that Nintendo is going to bring one out for the holiday season,
much like they did with the Ness classic.
And I'm just like looking at.
this and I'm like, oh, so this is a game that Nintendo's going to play every year from here
on out. They're going to tease us with these classic things, Stoke nostalgia, produce maybe
four of them, put them on the market and then remove them from the market until the next one.
I look forward to buying the Switch Classic in four years.
Oh, my God. It's all happening.
Any other crazy gadget news? Can you wrap this thing up?
Intel released its 3DX point SSD memory.
Just basically the future.
It's basically between RAM and NAND, you got 3DX point.
And I'm very excited.
We need to build a PC.
Absolutely.
Let's do it.
The next episode of the podcast is us, just like Foley effects of us building a PC,
like quietly swearing and screwing things together.
Oh, I got the thermal pace all over.
Someone will definitely get cut.
or get thermal paste in their eye.
Oh, yeah.
Also, Slack launched officially the statuses,
which I'm very excited about.
It's like an away message.
I love it.
It's like an away message.
It's just not very, I've had it all week.
I would like to say that it took Verge staff all of 30 seconds to abuse the Slack
away message.
Yeah, we got in trouble.
Yeah, we got in trouble for having too much fun with our status messages.
This happens when I'm not around.
No fun at all that.
We need the pro fun police.
The police that require you to have a lot of fun.
The thing I've noticed about the Slack thing is everyone can use different emoji to signal the same things.
So they've quickly come to me nothing in my mind.
That's the problem.
That's essentially the issue is because everyone wants to stick emoji next to their name.
So now if you like, you can't quickly glance at the list to see what the status of.
You have to hover over everyone's name to read their little.
status message.
We just want attention.
Give us attention, Dan.
Look at this picture.
What does it mean?
Figure it out.
Like, I'm looking at one of our wonderful,
esteemed editors,
and he has a bug with a leaf next to his name,
and I have no idea what that means.
Our copy editor is jiggly puff.
I mean, she's out.
Yeah, that's what that means.
Okay, that's it.
Sorry, I was scrolling through
to make sure we didn't miss anything,
but we actually talked about the thing
I was just going to bring up.
So that's it.
I'll be back next week. I'll know what's going on in the world of technology. I won't be lost in the woods. These beautiful people will be back. You'll be back. In the meantime, there's plenty of other stuff to listen to you. We have just a handful of control Walt deletes left before Walt retires. So I encourage you to listen to those. Walt and I talk to at the S8 a bunch on his show. Lauren Good, host Too Embarrass to Ask, which is wonderful. Keroswisher hosts Recode Decode. And Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media, which if you are a media nerd, it is.
almost required listen.
Other than that, you can contact us on Twitter.
I'm at Reckless.
Paul is at Future Paul.
Dan is D.C. Seafert.
Correct.
Yes.
Ashley is Ashley R. Carmen.
Yeah.
Do it.
Tell us if you love Facebook or not.
I'm actually dying to know the answer to that question.
And we'll be back next week.
Rock and roll.
Paul.
