The Vergecast - Ford F-150 Lightning review, stress-testing earbuds, and a Galaxy foldable Q&A

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

02:33 - The Verge's David Pierce brings in deputy editor Dan Seifert, reviewer Allison Johnson, and managing editor Alex Cranz to answer Vergecast Hotline questions about Samsung's new Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Z Flip 4. 24:18 - Chris Welch returns to the show for more earbuds voice call testing, this time on the NYC ferry with the new Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro and the Google Pixel Buds Pro. 41:18 - Nilay Patel shares his experience reviewing the Ford F-150 Lightning, and the troubles with its touchscreen control panel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of Loud Engine Sounds. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently sitting in my basement, playing Mario Tennis, on my Nintendo Switch, on my television, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but is actually a very big deal to me. You might have heard me complaining on the show a couple of weeks ago about all of Nintendo's stupid proprietary docks and cables for the Switch, and a bunch of you reached out to recommend that I buy one product. The Ganky, Janky, I don't know, it's G-E-N-K-I, and the product is called the Converi. I bought one. It works perfectly, and I'm very grateful to everyone who recommended. Anyway, we have a great show for you today. We're going to talk about Samsung. We're going to answer a bunch of your questions about Samsung's new phones, the future of flip phones, and what it's like to be a green bubble. We're also going to continue our testing of wireless earbuds to see if we have a new

best choice for voice calls and Zoom meetings. And Neil I Patel is going to come on and tell us about all of his adventures with the Ford F-150 Lightning. All that's coming in just a sec, I just have to win this tournament real quick. Fun fact about me, I'm not good at most video games, but I'm really good at Mario Tennis. If you ever want to play, get at me. This is the Vergecast. See in a second. 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 Verchcast. 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. Welcome back. Last week, as you probably already know, if you've listened to this show,

Samsung held yet another unpacked event and launched a bunch of new stuff. We wanted you to be able to imagine something different, an entirely new way to think about your smartphone. There's the Galaxy Z-Fold 4, which folds to get, like a hot dog bun, and then there's the Z Flip 4, which flips closed like a hamburger bun, plus some headphones and watches and all sorts of other stuff.

It's a lot to sort through. So we asked you to send in whatever questions you had about the phones in particular to our Vergecast hotline, which, the number, don't forget, is 866 Verge 1-1. Call us, ask us all your questions. In this case, we got some great ones. Thanks again to everyone who called in, it's super fun hearing from you. Please keep calling. To answer all of your questions about Samsung, which were weird and all over the place, I brought in a panel of Verge experts, Deputy Editor Dan Seafert.

Hello. Reviewer Allison Johnson. Hello. And managing editor Alex Kranz. Hello. I think we're going to get through a bunch of questions because a lot of people have a lot of thoughts about Samsung. Let's start. I think our first question is from Leo.

Hi, David and Verge crew. This is Leo calling from beautiful West Michigan. I'm one of those mini iPhone mini or other compact phone fans. There are dozens of us out there who like small phones. Currently rocking a way too big Pail-6, and I'm wondering, is the Z-Flip 4 finally what I'm looking for in a small Android phone? I really miss my Sony Xperia Z-3 Compact, and I don't know if I want to switch to the iPhone.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts about size, and if not Z-4 flip, what are my options out there for small phones? And do you hear any rumblings of anything coming down the bike? Thanks. Okay, first of all, I really miss my Sony-Experia Z-3 Compact is a sentence you will only hear on the first. verge cast. So congratulations to all of us. But also, I really like this idea because it had never really clicked for me that like maybe this new run of flip phones is like the small smartphones we

were promised. I think this is very interesting theory. Dan, you're making a face. Why are you making a face? I hate to pour cold water on that, but it's what I do as someone who's used the folding flip phone. I'm here to tell you that they are small when they're closed and fit in your pocket very nice. So if that's what you want from a small phone is like to fit in more places easier, whether it's your pocket or a purse or a bag or whatever, yes, they do that. But when I think of a small phone, I think of I can use this easily in one hand. And that is where they do not work well. Because it takes two hands to open up the flip every single time, unless you want to like jam your thumb under there and gouge the screen as you do it. Don't recommend doing that with your $1,000

phone. And then when you open it, it's a 6.8 inch screen. It's a big. phone. So it's not like it's like easily reachable with one hand, like to scroll down from the top or reach across with your thumb or anything like that. It becomes a big phone. So in my mind, no, these do not solve the small phone desire because they are not easily used by one hand. But I think Allison probably has a suggestion for you. I sure do. Let's hear it. Now, this is the little kind of, I guess, dark horse of 2022, the Asus Zen Phonphon. 9. I have used it. I haven't fully reviewed it yet because a couple of things have come up, but it's a little one. It's a compact, is like a truly compact Android flagship. It's got

top of the line processor, really interesting camera system where the stabilization like moves the whole camera around. There's just a lot of cool stuff about it. It's like IP68, there's a headphone jack. I hold it in my hand and I'm just like, this just feels right. We established on this show very recently, Allison, that 6.1 inches is the correct size for a smaller smartphone. Does the Zen phone pass the test? So here's the asterisk on that. 6.1 inches is my, like, I concede that not everybody wants a small phone. Like, I want a small phone.

Everybody else seems to want a giant phone. So I think, like, 6.1 inches is where we can all kind of, like, agree. And that's okay. I review a lot of Android phones. So as my team has pointed out, my perception on what a small phone is has been skewed. I took the pixel 6A out of the box. I was like, look, a tiny phone. Everybody quickly corrected me that it was not tiny.

So yeah, I think I'm an unreliable narrator here. I like a small phone. I'm desensitized to giant phones. So it seems to me, like the true answer for Leo here is like if what you want in a small phone is that it is like smaller and will fit in your pockets. more easily, congratulations. The flip phone is great. If what you want is like an actually small phone that you can hold in your hand, either buy the Zen phone or just get over it and come live in the large phone world

in which we unfortunately all exist. Yeah. Which I feel like is the right answer. Like if you want a small phone, just stop wanting a small phone. It feels like the correct way to live your life going forward. I don't know if that's how I would put it. Yeah. Look at a Zen phone nine.

It's lovely. I like it. Okay. So next up, we have another call about screen. actually from, I believe a caller from Aurora, Illinois. Hey, I have a question about folding phones and video aspects ratios. If you're watching YouTube at a standard like 16 by 9, how much bigger is that video actually getting when you go from the outside screen

on like a Samsung folding phone to the inside screen? It seems like a lot of that would just be extra letterboxing and then just like marginally bigger video itself. All right, thanks. Have a great day. I believe I am the person on this podcast currently who has used folding phones the least. So you all tell me, I think this is a perfectly fair question, though. Like what, if you're just looking at a 169 video on this, you know, giant ass internal display of the fold, what are you really getting? You do get a bigger video picture.

And yes, you do get black bars above and below it, especially if you turn the phone into landscape mode and your full screen that YouTube video, the open fold. the open fold phone is roughly a four by three aspect ratio. You know, it's not exact, but it's close enough. So you will get black bars above and below it. However, within those black bars, you still get a large video. Like I can put a Pixel 6 Pro above the video and it's like the same size. So when you full screen it, you are getting like a big, big phone size video when you're playing it. What's interesting about it, though, is if you don't full screen it, then you get like all this extra

UI that you don't get on normal phones because it behaves like a tablet UI. So you get the right rail of suggested videos, you get your descriptions, your comments and things like that. So like it depends on like where you want to use this extra space that you have, but you can make more use of it than if you just had a standard, a slab smartphone with a giant screen on it. Also 16 by 9 is like a very popular aspect ratio. It's hugely popular on YouTube, etc. But it's not the only one. All of TV up until what, like the mid-2000s was in four-by-three. Some movies were in four-by-three. Like, you've got even narrower aspect ratios, like 1.85 and 2.39 and all of these super cinematic ones. So, like, there's a lot of different types of screens, and I think we saw,

like, Microsoft even saying, four-by-three is actually a really good display size, because it's going to give you all of those different ones feeling kind of nice. Yeah, I think the best way to think about it is like if you've ever watched video on an iPad. It's going to be a very similar experience to that. You're going to have black bars above and below it. Those will change in size depending on what aspect ratio it is. But this is very much like having an iPad mini that folds in half. And so all of the compromises that you get with that, but all the benefits that you get to. Okay. Alison, what have you found in testing the Z fold for so far? Are you like a full screener or do you do the like big phone size video plus all the interface around it? It's kind of dependent on like

how I want to be sitting. Like, sometimes you want to lay down and not hold your phone. So I think that's the, like, I've used this phone more for us. Like, it is a truly small screen experience, having it on, like, the cover screen. But you can prop that up and play video. You can have it open in the L shape and watch a teeny tiny video that way, which kind of stinks, but you don't have to use your hands. Somewhere someone on Samsung's marketing team is so happy.

The amount of time they have spent being like, look, you can put this thing on a table, fold it into the L shape and watch videos. And I guess it's good. Like, who knew? It was worth it. I like propped it up like a book, I guess, where it's like open. And I had a TikTok playing on one side, which that even kind of works. So many different things you can do with it.

So you open it up, you go split screen, TikTok on one side, reels on the other side. And just infinite doom scrolling forever. fight. The two of you fight it out. That was helpful. Thank you all. Let's move on to the next one. A lot of people have questions about screen size, which I guess is fair. This is what folding phones are all about. Our next question comes from Kevin. Hey, Gorgecast, what is a computer? My name is Kevin. And my question is, with the Z-4-3, there are already issues with things like the Google Feed and YouTube, the YouTube apps,

basically having side column unless you were turned into what, I guess, essentially a landscape mode. So now that they've made the screen shorter on the D44, doesn't that mean that landscape of real estate has been made smaller? Like, are those apps going to populate properly? They already had issue. Yeah, let me know. Thanks. Alison, I really want to know what you've seen so far because I think this is a thing Samsung has been tinkering with over the last few years with, like, how apps should render it different screen sizes and when you open the phone versus when you turn the phone versus when it's closed. Like, has Samsung figured out how apps are supposed to look on all these screens yet?

I mean, I think they've gotten pretty close. To me, like, the difference is, you know, with the phone closed using the cover screen, does it feel like a normal phone? Does it feel just super thin and weird and claustrophobic? It's all right. Like, it's good enough. I don't think the screen size difference is big enough to make any kind of big difference in how much video, you know, and how things render or, like, how much content you can get on

the screen. It's just a matter of like, is it a little more comfortable to use? And for me, it's been the first day of using it. I was like, I feel like I'm aiming at these really tiny, you know, keys on the keyboard. But I got used to it after about a day. And I think it's, it's like 90% there to where it's a big enough screen that you feel comfortable being like, yes, this is my phone. Does it feel less like a TV remote now? Because that was always my issue with the early folds was that when they were closed, it felt like you were holding this like impossibly long TV remote. It's still a little remote-ish.

Okay. Almost there, but you still get that vibe. And Dan, Android is supposed to solve this at some point, right? Like, isn't Android 12L going to be the magic thing that fixes everything for us? The Fold 4 does run 12L, or it's based on Android 12L with Samsung's optimizations on top of it. So it does have that. What 12L really does, though, is really kind of hard to say. we've only seen 12L on a big tablet and then this Fold 4.

So we haven't seen it on a lot of places yet. Mostly what you see it on in the Fold 4 is the little taskbar at the bottom, where on the Fold 3 or the earlier models, you had like a task bar you could like swipe in from the side of the phone to launch apps from. Now it's going to be at the bottom, similar to how MacOS and Windows worked and things like that. And I think that like there are a couple of things that Samsung does to help you, decide how you want the screen to render apps, like you can go into settings and adjust the screen

zoom so you can say, give me less zoom, so I fit more stuff on the screen, or give me bigger zoom, so I got bigger icons and it's easier to read and stuff like that. And that will impact how certain apps render because that will adjust whether an app says, oh, I'm displayed on a tablet and I'm going to show my tablet interface or, oh, I'm displayed on a phone and I'm just going to be a big phone interface. So that can like tweak things a little bit. I think that the difference between the fold three and the fold four is really not that significant, even though, like, on a spec sheet, the aspect ratio is slightly different and the screen size measure slightly different. The difference in practice is not that huge. So like an app is likely going to display

exactly the same on the fold four as it did on the fold three. And we kind of like did a little bit comparisons. We know that YouTube definitely does, like it's exact same way on the fold three and the fold four. So there's like, you know, some tweaks you can make to it and things like that. And it's really going to vary depend on what apps that you are really into. Famously, the one app that really does not like foldable phones is shocker Instagram. And the way that it opens on the inside screens is it opens in a essentially a letterbox format. So, Samsung has like built software to handle Instagram. So you can see Instagram without it like zooming in and cropping out everything really horribly. But like that was Samsung fixing it because Android does not really fix it.

So before we move on, the thing I have to know is how zoomed in is your phone. Dan, for anyone who is not familiar with Dan Seafurt, uses bigger font on his computer than almost anyone else I know. So I just feel like, I just need to know. Like, are we a right in the middle guy? Are we a zoom all the way in guy? Like, where are we at? I was tinkering with it today, actually, because, of course, I also tinker.

I've got the zoom set all the way to the plus, and then I make the font smaller. I tried it the other way so that I could have, like, more space, but just make the font bigger and that made like the interface elements all weird. So like big UI small text. Yeah, I think it's actually the default UI size because there's two. At least on the fold three, there are two settings. There's default and then more space. And so I've got it set on default and then I just take the font back one notch so that I can fit more stuff in the screen. All right. And then just hold it closer to my face, I guess. Just ramp up the prescription on your glasses just real quick. All right, let's move on. So next up, we have a question from Justin.

Hey, David, it's Justin. Jay Mitch and your Twitter DMs. I wanted to know if the new Z Flip 4 has USBC display port out or USB HDMI over USBC so that I could do decks or just mirror my Android phone to my AR headset so that I can watch movies in bed without bothering my wife. That is my dream setup, a small, foldable device that I can put in my pocket and then plug into a huge display. None of the other flips had it. And I was waiting to see if they would announce it and they didn't say anything at the event.

And I can't find any information on this anywhere. So I would appreciate an answer to this question. Thanks, man. To address Justin's question, we can confirm that the flip-for does not support Samsung decks. And we are very certain that it does not support video out over USBC. But we'll be testing that in the future. So stay tuned. But TLDR, I would not expect it to do what you're hoping it to do, unfortunately.

any idea why not Samsung has made this big deal about decks for so long this is an odd line to pick to not put it on So this is pure speculation here But I think that when you are running like video out over USBC on a phone And if you're running a desktop environment like decks or things like that it's very taxing on the phone's processor and it's taxing on the thermal system And the one thing with the flip phones is that they do not have as good thermal management as the larger devices or the other devices and so they will throttle their processor faster than say a fold will or an S-22 ultra-will. And I know I think PCMag did some side-by-side benchmark comparisons with temperatures and everything like that.

And they noticed that the flip-for was throttling faster than the fold four did. So that would be my guess is it's a performance management system thing, limitation or whatever. But it would be like I think his idea is really cool. And like it would be like a really cool idea if it did work. Just to confirm really quickly, the fold does support deck. right, and all the other HTML out stuff? That's correct, yep.

Yeah, so the fold is like the full computer in your pocket deal. But unfortunately, the flip, it does not. Justin, when you figure this out, report back. We want to know. All right, we have one more question before we go here. It is slightly different, but we're going to answer it anyway. This is from Gordon. This is Gordon.

Thanks, guys. I have not received a text back from the last two women to give me their phone number. Obviously, I'm an Android user. Is it time for me to just give up on the fight? for independent text messaging platforms and buy into an iPhone. I wish I could say I'm not this desperate, but I am definitely desperate enough to pay $3,000 to migrate my entire digital life. Thanks.

I got this. Okay, Alex, go. Hey, Gordon, I hate to tell you this, but it is the green bubbles. I confirmed this. Wow. Not with Gordon specifically. I had a friend, and he was having trouble. he had at least two women say to him,

it's your green bubbles. I don't want them in my life. It could be the green bubbles. It could be a wide variety of things going on. Are you looking at the green bubbles on your phone more than you are talking to the woman across from you? That could be part of the problem. But no, I think it's okay to migrate

because iOS is superior in the United States and will help you a lot more than Android will. But I think also if you love your Android, phone. And a lot of people do. At least like one person on the Vergecast loves their Android phone. If you love your Android phone, keep it. Because out there somewhere as a woman who loves her Android phone. And when you text her and you pop up that green bubble and you're like, here it goes. Here's another one. She's going to reject me because of this green bubble. She's going to go, oh my God, there's another one like me. And that's like a love connection right

there for you. So like, honestly, I think you should keep it. Don't, don't change your devices. to try to get with a girl. Jez's focus on being really awesome and cool, which it sounds like you are, and keep holding out for that green bubble girl, because I swear she's out there somewhere. I just can't believe that we let you get through a whole thing after you said. As everybody knows, iOS is just better than Android in the U.S.

That's just like a thing you said. And we're just cool with that, apparently. I'm out here speaking the truth, David. I'm just speaking truth to power, and the power is Android. I don't know what's going on. Listen, I'm a blue bubble and my wife. is a green bubble and we mostly get along, okay.

Aw. That's inspiring. But here's what I wonder is, is the correct answer to just give them some other, like, should you give them your Instagram handle? Should you just be like, oh, no, I use Signal. And then they'll be like, oh, wow, such great personal data policies and then fall in love with you even harder. Like, is there a better answer than your cell phone number out there that we can give?

Like, I only use Signal because I care about your privacy and mine. Yeah, exactly. Our love is end-to-end encrypted. It's like done. Lock it down. End-to-end encryption. Woo! All right, Gordon, let us know how it goes. We're all rooting for you. Dan, Alex, Allison, thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you.

We are going to take a break, and then we will be back to continue our testing of earbud microphones because I just need to know if I bought the right headphones. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify

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That's upw-o-r-k-com. Upwork.com. Welcome back. A couple of months ago on this show, I found myself with a question. Which wireless earbuds should I buy to use for phone calls, Zoom meetings, and all the voice dictation and chattering with Siri I do all day. We talk a lot about sound quality with headphones, but I really just wanted to know about microphones. So I sent Verge reviewer Chris Welch, who is a good sport, to a coffee shop,

to test out a bunch of different wireless earbuds to see how they sound specifically for voice calls. This is the outdoor seating. There are several people out here. There's music playing overhead. Someone's like, Paul, shortly next to me. The pretty clear winners of that test were the Apple AirPods Pro and the Sony LinkBuds, which both had the clearest detail in the voice and took out a lot of background noise. I actually ended up buying a pair of LinkBuds after that test,

and I have to say I love them so far, but I'm always looking for something better. And since that test, two new earbuds have come out. There's the Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 Pro, which came out at that unpacked event last week, and the Google PixelBuds Pro. So now, obviously, we have to put those new earbuds to the test along with the winners of the last round to see who is the current champion. But we wanted to up the ante with the test this time. So we actually put Chris on a boat.

Like I said, he's a good sport. The New York City Ferry, to be exact, which is a very noisy and chaotic part of the city. It has engines, waves, people talking, helicopters, wind. It should be terrible for headphones. So let's see how this goes. Chris Welch, hello. Hello. It's good to be back.

Tell me where you are right now. Your location and setup is deeply hilarious to me at this moment, which we force you to do, and I'm sorry. So tell us where you are. We are down at the Wall Street ferry, waiting to get on a boat. I want to come up with a new way of testing earbuds. That's not the everyday just out on the street stress test. So we thought we'd go on the wall.

water on a nice day. It's finally pleasant out in New York again. There's a helicopter overhead, so we've got all sorts of things happening here. Yeah, we came out of the coffee shop test being like, okay, this was good, but they all did like relatively well. My big takeaway was like great job earbuds. So it was like, okay, we need to like let's break these things and see how we do. Okay, so which earbuds are we using right now? How are we doing? Right now these are the AirPods pro, the standard bear for the iPhone at least. And usually pretty company, pretty good. there's more sort of low-level rumble than we had the last time where it like it sounds like somebody is sort of breathing into the headphone. Okay, so this is not great noise cancellation of the announcements there.

I was much more impressed at the coffee shop. This is rough times. We're getting on the boat. All right, it's boat time. The guy at the ferry just said hello. He wants to work at the verge. We got a fan here. So it's good.

We didn't even plant that. That was amazing. While we're still here, let's switch to, let's do the link buds real fast. Now we're on the link buds. Hopefully they sound as much. Will they sound lovely? This sounds like I can hear the noise cancellation happening all the time. I can hear you pretty clearly.

These are open earbuds. So I also hear everything else. I went back and forth on the open ear thing a lot, and I would assume that as you get it like onto the ferry, you're not going to be able to hear me at all when we try to do this. Yeah. So we'll see how the engine roar treats the use. Your voice sounds better than you did on the AirPods,

but it's slightly less pleasant just because it's like there's clearly way more processing going on. It's more gated. Because I think the AirPods do a, they do an okay job of kind of splitting the difference. That's why I'm curious to hear on the ferry how hard these things go and what it ends up sounding like. But just in terms of like raw background noise, I'm getting much less from you now than I was with the AirPods, which is interesting. Good job. Sony. I think you can switch one more time before you get on the ferry? How much time do we have? Sure. We can give it a go. Should we do the Galaxy Buds next or the pixel buds?

Let's do the Galaxy. They're the newest ones. These are the brand new Galaxy Buds 2 Pro. Just announced at the event alongside the fold four and flip four, $230, I believe. and so far I'm a fan of the sound quality. This is my first real call test, so we're putting them through the ringer. You sound bad. Yeah.

Like, I can hear you. I can understand everything you're saying, but it sounds like you're sort of yelling at me like through a pillow, if that makes sense. Okay. But I can hear everything you're saying, and the noise cancellation is really good. I'm hardly hearing any background noise at all.

You just don't sound very good. Yeah, there are people shouting. There's a guy on a bike riding around. There's a lot of background noise, so if you're not hearing any of that, that's good. but the pillow thing is less than ideal. I will say this is the worst one of the three we've tested so far. But it's still, it's again, it's kind of like where we were the last time.

It's like it works. I wouldn't recommend like calling the president of the United States from these headphones in this situation. But like it's fine. It'll do the job. Okay. Well, we're getting aboard the boat right now. So it's time to change the scenery and the sound and see how we make out. All right.

We are now aboard the ferry. And like I can tell it got noisier, but it's like it's not particularly painful for me to listen to still. Yeah, that's impressive. Because in real life here, like we're right next to the engine and it's just quite intense. So I can hear you still, but it's definitely just a constant roar. So if you're not hearing that too badly, then all right, champ. I'm not sure how often people work from a ferry boat, but we're not here for that reason.

We're here to just show what these things are capable of. And I feel like it's like even if you don't want to work from the ferry, like I had this literally yesterday. I was on Amtrak on the way home. and I had like a three and a half hour thing. And it's like, it's another one of those where it's like sometimes it's very loud because there's announcements and people are talking. And sometimes it's like relatively quiet and just sort of going. And so I feel like knowing that it'll at least be okay, even when the noise is really bad,

actually it's very useful for me. Okay. So before the fairy leaves and stuff gets crazy, even crazier, let's switch to the PixelBuds Pro and get our last quick test here. You are on the Google PixelBuds Pro. Yes. How do you like these in general? We haven't talked about this on this show yet.

Yeah, I'm a fan. They've got multi-point to compare them to two devices at once, which the AirPods and Samsung's and even the Sonys of the world cannot do. So that's a nice little thing. I've had a few calls, indoors, you know, very basic stuff. I haven't had many complaints, but how do they sound on a boat? I would put these kind of right in line with the AirPods, actually. I'm definitely getting that sort of baseline, sort of white, noisy hum, but not in any particularly

unpleasant way and your voice sounds pretty normal. So I think it's trying to sort of split that middle ground too of like not over processing, but also not getting all of the noise out as a result. Right. Okay. That's pretty good then considering. Google, their last few earbuds, the pixel buds too in particular were pretty terrible. So you said like none of the issues and the dropouts that those had. So I've been very happy about that. Sound quality is great. We're going to have spatial audio later this year with the head tracking, all that stuff. Yeah, they're definitely Google's best I'm kind of impressed. The only thing that is annoying me is there is this one band of high-pitched audio that's coming through. And when you're not talking, it kicks in even harder. So it's like,

it seems to be trying to figure out how to find your voice and not getting it quite right. But then when you're not talking, it's noise cancellation is really good. Apple was kind of pulling everything out, but like a sort of subtle white noise. This is definitely, there's like a little bit of a screeching happening. It's like the train car on the railroad tracks noise a little bit. Interesting how each company tunes their algorithms, you know, to pick out certain frequencies. So I guess it comes down to preference or what I do, but at least you can hear me pretty well. Yeah, can you hear me okay? How are you? How am I doing? You hear everybody fine. We're going to stay on the boat and keep going to our next destination on the ferry.

Wait, is the ferry moving? Oh, yeah. The ferry's been moving. Yeah. Wow. I didn't even hear the fairies start to move. I expected a big horn or something. It's got a big engine behind us, you know, but none of that's coming through in the earbuds. So pretty good. While we're here, why don't we go back and do the other two? Let's get the AirPods and the Sony's, so we have all four sitting at this table. We're back on the AirPods Pro. We're still docked, so we don't have the movement sounds, but still pretty loud. We're at the same table we were at before when the pixel buds were super quiet when I was not talking, as I'm saying.

Apple might let through a bit more noise. I kind of can't believe I'm saying this. The pixel buds sounded better. You can very much tell that Apple is, like, obsessed with making your voice still sound like your voice. Like, you sound the most like you on these. But as a result, I'm definitely hearing more background noise. Like, I can hear the people talking as they walk behind you in a way that the pixel buds would not. I'm still getting that same kind of like high-pitched wine.

So I think it's kind of even with Google on that front. But, like, Google is definitely more aggressive than Apple on this front, but it seems like almost as natural. I'm kind of impressed with the pixel buds here. Interesting. Not what I expected. These AirPods are known upon, and they will see what happens with the rumored air. Pods Bro, too, I think, that might come around this fall. We've been out for a while.

It's time for something new to Apple, I think. I think we're getting close to it. Should we do the link buds now? Yeah, let's switch to link buds. We're back to Sony's link buds, so I can hear everything around me. I can still hear you, but I can imagine, like, if we go up the top on the boat, it's going to be very, very dire, very quick. So for now, I can still make you out.

Chris, I have really disappointing news. What? These are not as good. The pixel bleds might be the best one so far, which I would not have. bet at all would be the case. But this is like, it's still sort of that same thing. It's like, it's trying really, really hard to process and I can hear it happening. And so it's, everything is kind of coming up and then coming down and then coming up and then coming down and everything is a little topsy-turvy. You sound more pleasant to me on both the AirPods and the pixel buds.

Wow. Fascinating because these were far and away, the championed like the coffee shop setting. But here, they seem to be struggling with all the factors around. So, All right, well, while you're still moving, let's go back to the Galaxy Buds and see if they can come out of last place in this test. Yes, the brand new Galaxy Buds 2 Pro 2, whichever you prefer. Like I was saying before, the Samsung's best sounding air buds yet. By far, the noise cancellation is great. Almost at Sony's level.

Maybe it's just, just shy. The noise cancellation on here is pretty good. Like, I'm not getting a ton of background noise, but you sound by a mile the worst of the four we've been. testing here. It's very muffled and like you're talking to me through the wall of mud. I'm not sure if that's like mic placement or what they did differently. But yeah, that's not great to hear. Spend $230 on earbuds. You don't want to hear that you sound like you're talking to mud. Let's do one last test. We're going to throw out the link buds

and we're going to throw out the galaxy buds. And we're going to take the AirPods and the pixel buds pro up to the top of the ferry where things are going to get even crazier. And that's where we're going to do our final test here. It's going to be windy. It's going to be noisy. It's going to be a very big test for this. Let's see who wins. All right. We're on a moving ferry. You just went under the bridge. It's a beautiful day here in New York. It's a delicious. It's a nice day. We're on top of the ferry. A lot of folks around talking. It's a full gang up here. So worst-paced scenario for any set of year, but it's sort of being on a point. This is pretty bad. I caught about 80% of that.

say. Apple's doing a good job here of making it, like, I suspect if it was just unprocessed audio, this would be like unlistenable and I would have to take my headphones off. So it's canceling out most of it, but unfortunately that also includes your voice. So I think we have officially reached the do not make phone calls on top of the ferry portion of the proceedings here. Don't make phone calls. We do. We've got to project. It's really loud. We all just freak out the other fair with passengers. Listen, the last time we did this, we scared everybody out of a coffee shop. So I think the least we can do is. to scare everybody off the ferry today.

Shall we switch to the possible new winners, the PixelBud's pro. Let's do it. I have high hopes. Let's see what happens. All right. PixelBud stress test. These are the PixelBuds Pro atop of ferry in New York City. We are about to dock, though, so it's not quite a fair comparison versus, I mean, the engine's on.

No, but we're not at full speed right now. You sound substantially better than you did on the AirPods. I think we might need to do this test when we're fully moving again because it's, this is usable. Right. Whereas the AirPods were like, I would just hang up on you and tell you to call me later. But yeah, this is too good to be true. I think we're going to have to wait until you're back out on the open C for this one. Okay.

All right. It looks like we're moving again. We are at speed once again. This is better than the AirPods. I cannot believe this. Better than the AirPods. Okay. I'm coming through.

Like, no words are getting cut off. Nothing. You're not losing me at all. The AirPods were definitely clipping. you occasionally. It was like I could get all of your sentences, but you were kind of coming and going. But this seems like it's pretty clean. That's impressive. Turn and face your head directly into the wind. Let's make this as hard as possible.

Okay. Pacing into the wind, speaking to you at a fairly normal volume for a ferry. I can hear the wind in the earbuds, so is that coming through? I can hear you fine. This is insane. I kind of can't believe it. That was. worked. Like, we could have a call like this, and I don't think I would ever be like, Chris, are you on the top of a ferry calling me? Well, props where they're due, Google. Like, I would guess right now that you're, like, walking down the street and there's like a breeze, right? Like, but that's what it sounds like. It definitely doesn't sound like you're on top of a very loud ferry. There's a breeze all right. Yeah, this is impressive. I mean, I can hear you. It's fine, obviously. The active noise cancellation is pretty good. You get someone noise with all your books that have that, I think. But I'm large. They might have found her favorite new pick for very earbuds or any kind of extreme circumstances.

Didn't expect a footballist pro to come out on top today. All right. Well, this is, we've learned something here. I'm now looking sadly at my Link Bud's S and I'm like, do I, did I make the right decision in buying you? I'm going to go look at Amazon for a while and just see how I feel. Okay. Well, we've got to find their way home now. Back to the office.

But this has been fun. Well, thank you. Go back to quieter places and we'll hang again soon. All right, that's it. See you soon. We're going to take a break, and then we're going to talk about pickup trucks. Neil I Patel just finished reviewing the Ford F-150 Lightning, and I don't know anything about pickup trucks, but he tells me it's a big deal. We'll be right back.

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MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Welcome back. So I should confess this right up front. I am not a truck guy, not even a little bit. But I'm fascinated by the Ford F150 Lightning anyway,

because this is Ford trying to take its most iconic vehicle, maybe the most iconic vehicle that anybody makes, into the electric truck of the future. And I think whether Ford can pull that off might say a lot about the whole car industry's attempt to go electric. Neil I Patel spent a bunch of time over the last several weeks racing around upstate New York in a lightning, hanging out at Home Depot parking lots because apparently that's what you do when you're a pickup truck guy. And he wrote a review for The Verge about all of it. It's up now.

I'll put the link in the show notes. And what surprised me most about it was that the Ford F150 Lightning is a truck, yes, but it's also basically just a really big tablet on wheel. And I love talking about tablets. So I told Neely that he had to come tell us about this Ford tablet, whether touch screens of the future of cars, and whether Ford's software design can match its pickup prowess. Hi, Neal. Hey, buddy.

So you're a truck guy. One of the more surprising developments of my entire life. Have you always been a truck guy? Like, when did Neel Patel truck guy become a thing? Well, I've always enjoyed a truck. Okay. Like, you grew up in Wisconsin, there were trucks around. I've always thought trucks were neat.

The idea that I would own a pickup truck and then consider purchase. a second pickup truck, that's pandemic. That's just pure pandemic outcome. Yeah, I mean, pre-pandemic, NELI was much more interested in like an unnecessarily fast BMW than a second pickup truck. City cars. Now I'm like country cars. Yeah, but it's good. Okay. So the reason I bring this up is we're going to mostly talk about the F-150 Lightning as like a gadget because I think that's how you mostly think about it. That's how you mostly reviewed it. So we're going to talk mostly about that. But like real quick before we do, put this thing in like future of cars context. for me. Because I don't, all I know is that Ford sells a lot of F-150s, and it would be good if they

were electric, I guess. Like, this thing seems to matter a lot. Tell me why. Yeah, I think that's the basic. So pickup trucks are the most popular vehicles in America. The F-150 in particular is the most popular vehicle in America for like 45 years running. Wow. And that's not a consumer number. That's a vehicles in America number. That is contractors, that is delivery people, that is fleets like people buy F-150s for their businesses, huge companies, buy hundreds of F-150s at a time. So the most popular vehicle in America, they obviously are huge. They've gotten incredibly big over time. If you look at an F-150 from the 90s, they look teeny.

They're little baby cars. Yeah. They're heavy. They have big engines. They have a lot of emissions from the big engines. So if you can electrify that, and in particular, electrify it not for consumers, but for that huge number of commercial customers. that don't often drive more than 300 miles in a day, right? So they can come home and they can charge back at their depots.

That's what Ford calls it. You've, like, made a huge impact on emissions. There's just an opportunity here to electrify a lot of cars at once, because you're aiming kind of at the biggest part of the market. Okay. So if I'm Ford, then, I would basically try to make the F-150 lightning as much exactly the same as the F-150 that has been the best-selling car in America for 45 years as possible. Like, changes little.

as you possibly can and like hope nobody notices seems like a very good business strategy in that sense. And to some extent that that almost seems like what Ford did here, like almost but not quite. It's an F-150. My joke is like Ford literally did not redesign the wheel. It's the F-150 steering wheel, F-150 seats, F-150 body panels, F-150 windshield wipers, F-150 everywhere. Then some minor tweaks. The tail lights and headlight have the little LED surrounds. The interior is like, depending on your view of the touchscreen, a little bit nicer than. the platinum F150 because it's just been redesigned a little bit. And obviously it has that drive train.

And it can just go real fast in a way that very few F150s can go real fast. That's fair. The headlights thing, there are very few things in the world that drive Anna, my wife, as crazy as like non-standard headlights and tail lights. And every time we drive at night, she's like,

this should be regulated. All headlights should have to be the same. And the thing the Mustang does where like the lights sort of tick outward drives are absolutely insane. So I'm sure the F-150 lightning is going to do the same thing. thing. So one thing that's true across car design is everybody wants the cool LED headlights. They're like really thin and look really neat. They don't make enough light. So if you actually look at where the real headlights are in cars, they're all over the place. They're like hidden. So it looks

like the cool lights or the lights, but then the real lights are like hidden somewhere. There's just somebody shining a flashlight behind it. Yeah. Okay. All right. So the software is the thing, right? And it's like everybody seems to have decided that Tesla's idea of like, what if we just put a giant ass portrait mode screen in the middle of the car is the correct idea. And before we even get into the specifics of it, are we sure that's the right idea? Like, I'm just, I like buttons. Buttons are so good. Give me like dials. And the F-150 you have, if I'm remembering right from seeing your video, is like, big landscape screen and there are a bunch of buttons at the bottom. And I'm like, that is a future I can get behind. So my F-150 is a generation behind. Okay.

So it's not the new F-150s. The new F-150s have a 12-inch landscape screen, climate control buttons underneath it. I have the older model, which is smaller, tinier screen that really is just like for the radio. And then buttons, I'm in love with the buttons. Give me more buttons. I'll take the buttons. The thing you're talking about cars as computers, it's not, the infotainment screen is like the smallest piece of that puzzle. So like a normal car from early 2000s was actually like 19 computers. And those computers are all built by various suppliers. And the job of the carmaker was to like buy those computers and integrate them. And they would integrate them using like a pretty slow networking standard called like canvas or like whatever it is.

The big Tesla innovation is like what if the car was one computer? Sure. Or what if we designed all those computers and we networked it all with like Ethernet? And like you talk to car people and they're like single twisted pair Ethernet is the biggest revolution in automotive. And you're like what Ethernet? You're talking about Ethernet, right? But it's real that like being able to send more data. faster, more reliably,

aground a car, and control all the software of the pieces. You need an interconnect for that. So Ford isn't all the way there. Like, Rivian is like a, is an all-Ethernet, networked vehicle. They've written every line of code in that car. It's the future in that way. It's the same way the Tesla is the future.

The lightning is like, again, right in the middle. Like, they have a drivetrain that's new. They want to do over-the-year updates and be able to update the software all across the car. Still lots of supplier components, again, because you've got a bunch of F-150. stuff, lots of supplier components flowing through it. And the thing that is expressed to you is like, oh, it has a big vertical touchscreen. Fair. So it's like the touchscreen is like the last

piece of the puzzle when you talk about the car as a computer. What they're really talking about is previously we we basically like lightly connected a bunch of individual computer-like modules. And now we're the whole car is one big computer. Which I guess is like I keep having to remind myself like that counts as a large innovation. It's like, well, in everything else we did this a really long time ago. Yeah. And like if you really, the car company's traditional car, they're all in this, like, their executives all use the business language. Like we're on this journey of transformation. And what they mean is we had no idea how to write a line of code before. Right. And now we have, that's all we do. Like to the exclusion of we know how to make wheels. Like they can buy wheels. They're like actually what will differentiate the cars is the software engineering in the cars. But they never had to. There's a story about like VW. They launch. this massive program to write all stuff from the cars. It was like, this is like 10 year failure because they're just not good at it in a way that a clean sheet company, like a Tesla or Rivian or Lucid or whatever, they start by hiring

the software engineers. I feel like given that this touchscreen is like the thing, we're going to treat this thing like a classic like Verge smartphone review. So I went back to like 2012 and I found all the categories of our smartphone review and they fit hilariously well into the construct of this car. So the first one is the hardware, which is just like the thing itself. Like, is this a good screen? Do we like?

Do we like the touch? What's the hand feel? Like, Eli? Yeah, it's slow. It's a really fast truck with a really slow screen. I have this line that I've been sneaking into reviews for years and got cut out of the video because I said it like in a very frustrated way, which is that life is too short for slow computers. And the F150 Lightning is like the ultimate example of life being too short for slow computers.

Like, it's slow. The truck is fast. Like at any moment, you can crack a huge grin by just going fast in this truck. Yeah. One of the fastest production trucks ever made. I got into a race with a Corvette, held my own again, like a brand new Corvette Stingray, held my own in a pickup truck. That's cool.

Like, that's really fun. Then you're like, I need to do anything. I need to turn on the seat heaters. And you're like, I hate it. So there's just this big discrepancy in like, when you're like the hardware, like the truck is a beautiful truck. The frunk is cool. but the actual hardware of the screen.

The screen is nice. It's, you know, retina display. It's thick in a way that all automotive screens appear to be needlessly thick. If you look at how it's designed is actually little. It appears to be off center because the sensor for Blue Cruz is like next to the screen. So like they've just like rejiggered the F150 interior. Everything about it seems to nice. It's just slow.

Yeah, describe slow to me because there's like I pull down on a menu and it, the sort of old Android thing where it would like lag ever so slightly behind your finger. that's like one version of slow. Then there's the version of slow where it's like I press a button and seven seconds later or something happens. Where on that spectrum does the F-150? Because I would also think this is literally like slow touch screens are like literal life and death in a car like this.

It's pretty high stakes time to like make things happen when you press buttons. Like how slow is slow here? It's both of those things, but sporadically. Oh, even better. It's unreliably slow. I think the touch latency part is connected to this overall slowness. So there are many times when you, like, swipe on the screen to, like, swipe through the cards at the bottom. And, you know, like, this isn't keeping up with me.

But it's not that the touch screen is, like, not registering your touch events. It's that the thing is slow. And nothing's not, nothing's happening. So, like, in a smartphone, we like, does it have 120 hertz touch sensitivity response or whatever? And it's like, maybe it does. But the computer is so slow. It doesn't know what to do. So, like, it is a touchscreen.

It is slow sometimes. But I think that is mostly related to sometimes. as you touch it and it just needs a beat. Right? Like, I want to switch from the radio to the maps and it's like what we're going to do. Okay, we're going to take the radio away and it'll be blank for a minute. And then let's go ahead and fill in the map window. And then where are we?

All right, let's pull down the data for your location and then like draw on them. And it's like all this is just happening. Whereas, you know, on a smartphone, you swipe between absence instant. And there are cars that are instant now. And this one is just slow. And this is, I'm skipping ahead to the software. section of the review now. But you described this well, and I still can't figure it out. This is like Ford's software, but it's kind of Android, but it's going to be even more Android over time.

So it's not Android at all right now. Oh, okay. So right now Ford's main software is called Sync. And Sync has this like long tortured history. They first built it with Microsoft on Windows CE. This is like ancient sync. Then they kicked Microsoft to the curb. They've rebuilt it on some proprietary stuff. I think there's some Cunuchs in there. Like now Ford, owns it. Then they've updated it now to Sync4. That's Sync4 is in most of their cars. The Mustang Mock E and the Lightning have Sync 4A, which is just Portrait Sync. It has like some portrait features, I guess you could call it. Like it's not those little widgets. And then what is the big move is they're going to toss all of that out. They've signed this huge deal with Google.

They're going to rebuild all of sync on Android using Android automotive and with Google services. Oh, this is gas that we've been talking about. Google Automotive Services. Gas. It's common. So this was a big deal. It took years in the making. Farley just, CEO Jim Farley just signed this deal with Google. They're very excited about it. They hired Doug Field from Tesla and Apple to run all of Ford's EV stuff,

and he's going to be in charge of all this software, too. The problem is none of that's coming out forever, like in terms of the lightning. New cars at the end of 2023 will have this new version of Android sync. But the lightning probably won't get it. Why? Until there's a new generation of the lightning. That's just my understanding. And I think even inside of Ford, this is somewhat confusing.

So I talked to Jim Farley when the lightning first started shipping, and I said, what's going on with Android? And he said, yeah, you know, second half of this generation. Then I got a call from someone who would know, and they said, you need to change the electrical systems of the car to support the new software. So, like, maybe there'll be like a mid-cycle refresh, but I don't think the lightning or Machi in this form are going to get it. All that is to say, like, you're using this software, and you're like, man, this would be

great if they would update the software, but all of their software engineering energy is pointed at the new platform. And so there's supposed to be some big update for this version of sync coming. Don't buy anything based on the promise of software updates, I think is always our advice. And this is like a pretty good example of that advice because you know that there's a dead end here. Okay. Slowness aside, it seems like car UI is very much like an unsolved problem. And we've talked a lot about like car play's plans to take over the universe on this podcast, which I continue to think are fascinating and potentially insane. But just watching your video, it's like Ford has a lot of ideas about like side scrolling menus that don't strike me as like the way that I would like to

interact with my car. Okay, there are hours of me ranting about the software to make it into the video. I'll give you one example. First of all, nothing is labeled. There's oceans of pixels in this car. And like oceans. It has more pixels than almost any car I've ever been in. It's like a 15 and a half inch or something, right? It's huge. It's a 15-5-inch screen and it's like a 10-inch instrument cluster. And like a lot of it, to your point from before, is like they're just simulating a Ford F-150 from 1985. Like there's like lots of those like old school icons in the instrument cluster. And it's just like, I don't know, is that a picture of an engine? Like, like, sure. Like, I don't, I know what that means. Like, here's the letter C next to a thermometer. Like, you know, if you're

a car person, like, you know what these means. But like, they made those icons because they all they had was like LEDs and they had to ship them to 100 countries or whatever it's like dudes you got pixels just like right out engine temperature like whatever it is so like there's just like an infinity amount of that going on which is even more frustrating when you see the size of the screen like the instrument cluster is basically empty it's rarely full of information it's a huge screen then you've got the center screen the big one and like the top row of it has icons in it that are just as inscrutable as like the Android status bar. Oh, God.

Like, there is one in it that, you know, that little, like, asterisk sign that you see on the side of an ambulance. Uh-huh. So the entire time I had this car, there's that symbol with a line through it. And I was like, is it just telling me I'm not an ambulance? But, like, you can't tap on it. It doesn't tell you what it is. And I, like, what is this?

And all it means is that 911 assist is off. So if you get an accident, the car will not call 911 on your behalf. Totally useful. piece of information to know, I suppose, putting it permanently on the screen without any way to tell you what is going on when you have a 15-5-inch touchscreen is ridiculous. You could write out 911 assist is off without trying very hard. That's a thing screens do. Yeah, it's right there.

Then there's like two different connectivity icons, one for your phone, one for the internal LTE radio. When you've got your phone on the wireless charging pad, there's just a picture of another little icon of a phone up there. And so like it just for all the world feels like your phone is disgusting. connecting from the head unit when really it's just rattling around the wireless charging pad. Why? And then you like click, you would never know this.

To change any of the settings of the truck, you have to click a picture of the truck. Like there's a picture of the truck in the upper left hand corner and you're like, yeah, it's the truck. And you would never know that almost all of the settings are buried in the picture of the truck. So you click on the picture of the truck. This is why they cut it out of the video. I just want to be clear. I just did this like an outward to a camera. It drops down a menu.

and the menu is divided into two sections. One is labeled settings and one is labeled controls. And God knows the difference between these things. And then you go into the controls and there's like little buttons and you can clip between them. And then all of the buttons in those are labeled settings. And it's just like, what is happening? Like, did anybody look at this and like pay attention to what words we're using? Because we seem to be using all the words interchangeably is though they're a taxonomy of.

And like, this is how we would review a phone. Like, if we were reviewing a new operating system, we would go into this in extraordinary detail and be like, the settings, the new version of Windows have been moved from here to here. Like, you know, Apple changed window management on the iPad. And we'd like, as we have, we would like hammer away at scrolling your mouse to the bottom, write this open stage manager. And we don't do that with cars. Right. And I'm just looking at this car. I'm like, if anyone did this to this car seriously, you would just throw it out and start over.

The way you're describing it makes it sound like they hired a bunch of people who had like deliberately never looked at a screen before. And they were like, let's just start this from scratch. Like we know, we have just decided as a society like what a settings menu looks like. And like should it be the gear icon? Maybe not. But it doesn't matter. And we all know that's what it means. And it's like we just don't need new ideas about how to get to settings menus.

Like we're good on that front. Let's fix other things. Yeah. At almost no point does this thing trade on your knowledge of how computers work. Which is crazy because that's, again, it's like this is the most. moment to, if you're ever going to do the like skeuomorphic nonsense that's just like, let's help everybody understand it as quickly as possible, this feels like the time. Yeah, but and then on the flip side, they've got all these like old school weird unlabeled icons

like in the instrument cluster. Right. So like the part where you're like simulating the old F150. And then on the other hand, you're like, what if we try to invent settings taxonomy from scratch? It's like you're not, you got to do one or the other all the way. And like in this case, I just think. for it is a little trapped between two worlds and they've got this like gigantic Android

refresh coming where presumably because they're working with Google, well, I mean, it's not like Android status bars or like a bastion of clarity, but presumably they've got some people who are versed in user interface design like helping them along the way. So it's just that part of it to me is like I think I say in the video it's caught between two worlds. It's held back and it's held back because it's not going far enough I think in either direction. That's fair. Do you figure it out eventually? like it's it's like part of this makes me think that like the best case scenario here is it's kind of like getting into somebody else's car where you like reach where the volume knob is and actually that's the temperature knob but like after a little while you sort of get the

muscle memory back and you figure it out like did that happen with the lightning? Yeah. You know, I end the video by saying if I could find one to buy for a reasonable price because dealers are working like crazy and they're hard to buy, I would trade in my gas truck. Right. Sure. The part where I don't have to pay for gas for a truck that gets 16 to the gallon on a good day and it's faster than my truck

and it's like fun to have and the frunk is useful yeah I would just try if I could get one I would buy one but that's a like that's a in spite of the software in spite of the software right it's not like a deal breaker it's if you are the sort of person

who pays attention and values good software this is going to drive you bonkers every day but it's survivable which I think is like where the car industry has been for a long time the thing you're describing is is it eventually just ignore Yeah. And the answer is yes, to some extent. Like, you're not going to dive into the settings of any car every day and like mess with it. The thing that is not ignorable is the touch stream climate controls, which are just the worst. And they're the worst in every car. And they should be illegal. And here, you're like, I want to turn on the seat heaters and you're just stabbing in an unresponsive touchscreen. And that's the worst. Or you're like, I want to turn on the, I want to change the vents. And you have to like open a full screen menu with a renderer.

of the car that is split into three zones and, like, light up the zones. And you're like, my mom's car in the 80s had this solved. Like, why are we redoing this? And then you look at the gas f-150s and they've got hardware buttons. And you're like, I could have, this was fine. Yep. It should either be a dial that goes up and down or an up button and a down button. Those are the two answers. And those are the only two answers. Yeah. So, like, there's a part of it that's totally ignore. Like, yes, you'll be occasionally annoyed because you have to use the built-in maps to plot a charging route. It's slow but survival and I used it. Yes, you'll be occasionally annoyed because wanting to change the radio station while you're in the map requires an awful lot of clicks.

Fine. It's annoying. The climate controls are like, I hate this. Like almost a deal breaker. Not quite because like really they just want you to set a temperature in it auto, which I think a lot of people quietly do. So maybe not the worst depending on who you are. But for me, I was like, I hate, I hate all of this. Okay, fair enough. All right. Last thing on the Verge review checklist before I let you go, it's cameras. And this is another one that fits oddly well in your experience of the F-150 laying. Tell me about the cameras on this car. My favorite thing about new cars is that cameras are getting really good. And they're like super high-resolution. So this is no exception. Super high-resolution cameras, really nice touchscreen. Like the cameras on my old

F-150 are like garbage, like VGA, tiny low-res touchscreen. It's like, I think I'm going to hit another car. I don't know. Maybe. Who knows? This thing has like all the cameras all over the place. You get the top down 360 view. You can look out the front at the big screen, all high res. They're doing all kinds of weird camera warping tricks to give you all these views. So there's a little distortion at the edges, but like it's me who notices these things. Like our video people are like, what are you talking about?

And I was like, look at the discussion. The thing that kills me at the cameras. So again, on my truck, there's a hardware button above the screen. You push the button. It pops you into the cameras. You just do whatever you want. You push the button again. You change the views.

Amazingly simple. amazingly efficient, super useful. This thing is like three taps into the cameras. When you put in reverse, it obviously automatically opens the cameras. But any other place, you got to like tap your way into the cameras. Do you have to like hit the truck and then like front truck, front left truck camera? Yeah. No, so I think, yes, I think you hit the truck and you got to like open the cameras and you got the cameras on the screen.

Then you've got a landscape view at the top and then a 360 view of the truck below it and like a T shape. Okay. Great. Then there's a little menu button in that bottom part. and you click on the menu and that gives you all the views. So so far, like, annoying, but not the end of the world. Like, maybe too many clicks, lots of touchscreens, but big screen, high-res cameras. Sure.

So you're like, maybe this tradeoff is worth it. Then you're like, you've got it open, the menu to switch cameras. You pick a camera. Then for some reason, that menu will just close itself all by itself all the time. So you're like, wait, there's so much room on this display. Why was this a menu to begin with? And then why does that menu hide? To what end is this menu hiding itself?

because it's not covering anything up. Yeah, it could show you so many cameras. Yeah, it could show you all the cameras all the time. You could open a camera and still have controls to see the other cameras. And it's just shit like that that just drives me bonkers. It's like, this truck is so smart. With Blue Cruise, it can happily drive itself down a bunch of major highways. Incredible technology.

Like, best driver assist I've used, and it's on a mainstream truck. Very cool. And you're like, I just want to look at the rear camera. And it's like, no, we're going to close that on you. not at this time, sir. All of that just needs to, like, just an interface designer needs to go through this thing and do the things that interface designers use.

Here are the things that people use most often. We're going to promote those to the top of the interface so you can get to them quickly. Here's the things. Here's the user pathways through all the rest of the stuff. We're just going to organize that into a coherent system. And we're going to take all the garbage and we're just going to hide it in the back of settings.

And everyone will be fine with that. And instead it's just like, what if it was a maid? with no destination. It's like, I need you to stop it. What if you explore your truck through a VR render of your truck? You know that thing you do

when you get a new gadget and you know, like play with the settings? Like usually I find that to be just a delight. Like I'm going to mess with this setting and I'll come back to it. With this, yes, still a delight. Extremely fun new gadget.

Many, many settings. But in the back of my mind, there's always the fear. I will never see this screen again. I have no idea how I got here And I have no idea how to get back. And in the worst case scenario, you literally cannot get home at the end of it. And that's just that's where you are.

Yeah, I mean, there's that, well, that's like the charging thing, right? Like you've got to find chargers that can charge a thing fast. And all of that happens in Ford's maps. Because Apple's maps and Google's maps have no idea of where chargers are. Interesting. And like where the fast chargers are. And Ford has that information in its map. So, you know, one note I was anticipating about CarPlay and Android Auto is like everyone in every car view is like, you can just use CarPlay and Android.

auto. It's like, no, actually, if you drive an EV, you can't, right? Because you spend an awful lot of your time on trips plotting out your charging stops. And Ford's system for that is better because it's tied to the actual range of the car. So the car knows how much battery has left. Sure. And it's just sort of plotting you a route. And Ford also knows where the fast chargers are because it runs the charging network in a way that Apple and Google did not. So every part of this is like, oh, you got to use their software again, huh? You thought you could escape it. You thought you're going to use CarPlay. A cool guy? No, thank you. So all this, and you're still the coolest guy in the Home Depot parking lot, and you still want to buy one.

Old guys who are wandering up to me, just saying congratulations. I've never had that happen with a review product before. I was like, it's not mine. They're like, take good care of it. I was like, again, we have to give it back. And he's like, congratulations one more time. That's like a reverence around the street. Because one thing that is true of EVs is people know they're fast.

Yeah. So when you've got the fastest car in the parking lot, like all of the trepidation, like, they'd ask me the range. They'd be like, is it fast, though? And like, it's so fast. Like, Ford's got a hit. I think some of it will be fine. The software piece, if they really want to make that turn into being the tech company, that it seems very clear they want to do, that is a long road.

All right, well, good luck buying one. I know it's been a journey. So Godspeed. Yeah, we haven't even talked about that, but these things are being marked up like $50,000. So we'll see. If anyone has one, they want to flip to me. Just let me know. We'll negotiate it.

All right. Neil is off to keep calling dealers about buying a lightning, and we've got to go to. That's it for the Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is tons more coverage about it. everything we talked about at theverge.com, and you can also follow all of us on Twitter. Nelai is reckless. Chris is Chris Welsh. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Allison is Allison Joe 1. Dan is D.C. Cepert, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie

Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you've thoughts, feedback, feelings, paella recipes, or ideas about headphones, you can always email vergecast at the verge.com. Alex, Nelai, and I will be back on Friday to talk about crazy-looking monitors, John Deere, hackers, Android 13, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.