The Vergecast - Gadget news, FCC's final proposal, and Vlad

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

Here’s The Vergecast. This week, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul plow through a week of news starting with (no surprise) the FCC’s ongoing mission to destroy net neutrality. This was also a week full of new gadgets — from the new Microsoft Surface Pro, to the Jamboard, to a $9,000 laptop, we walk you through the things we saw and reviewed in the Circuit Breaker world. Also, even though we filled our time, we added a bonus segment in between it all: Vlad Savov, a fan favorite of the show, stops by and quickly breaks down what is on his mind and what gadgets have piqued his interests. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff discussed on the show, (sorry, this show is an hour and a half), so listen through it all for more. 03:27 - Breaking down the FCC’s proposal to destroy net neutrality 32:36 - Inside the mind of Vlad 49:38 - And now, a brief definition of the web 51:03 - Microsoft's new Surface Pro has 13.5 hours of battery life and LTE option 56:22 - Microsoft has created a Surface USB-C dongle for “people who love dongles” 1:00:12 - DJI's $499 Spark is the company's cheapest and tiniest drone yet 1:04:43 - Google made a $5,000 whiteboard — and it’s weirdly fun 1:06:14 - Samsung responds to complaints about HDMI switching, will offer a firmware update 1:10:57 - How Anker is beating Apple and Samsung at their own accessory game 1:11:54 - Acer Predator 21 X review 1:14:14 - Paul’s weekly segment “Vroom Vroom goes the car” 1:17:00 - TV lightning round Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. A multi-channel media experience about technology and emotions. Can I just admit to everyone that I'm having an emotional week? You can. So Paul is here. Hi, Paul. Hello. Deeter is here. I am also having an emotional week, but not as much as you.

It's just the three of us this week, OG Crew. But yesterday, I recorded the last episode of Control Out Delete with Mr. Waller. Mossberg. We put up his last column today. I have some news to share that is much happier than that, which is that on June 9th, Dieter will be in town here in New York City, and we'll be recording the last special episode of Control Out Delete live in New York City at the School of Visual Arts at 6 p.m. School of visual arts, 6 p.m., New York City. Ticket stuff is coming soon. We'll explain how that works. I'll just, I'm just full transparency audience.

I've been waiting all day for the link for someone, because I'm not in charge of, I run a lot of things. I don't run ticketing systems. I've been waiting for somebody to give me the link, the buy link, so I can put up the post. I don't have it yet. Working on it. They're good people, they're working hard,

are settling out some things. So I believe the tentative plan is I'm not actually going to be on the live Control Walt Delete, but I'm going to be in New York so that every time they say my name on Control Walt delete, I'll be in a dunk tank and I'll get dunked. Deeter's just going to get live Slack notifications that we're talking about. But no, it's going to be one last, it's, we did 75, you know, pre-recorded standard episodes

of control, out delete. We're going to do one last live episode with Deeter. We're going to have, you can come if you want, June 9th, 6 p.m. School of Visual Arts. I assure you there will be a post on the site for that. So that is, it takes the bitter and makes it sweet. is that a thing it's bittersweet it's sweet and bitter

bitter I think there's like a pill now that you can take they're like coats your tongue oh no there's like a weird fruit oh is there a fruit that does it like a weird fruit that you eat that make I don't know it's the whole thing that's what live shows are

like a weird fruit it's like a weird fruit for your body but anyway June 9th but anyway today was both the last control lot delete of the regular kind and waltz's last column went up so I'm in a little bit of a mood

I got to say, and we're down to one podcast. Yeah. I will say that last week on the show, I asked for more podcast ideas. I specifically said, please don't just say Vlad. Right. Many of you failed to listen. So we might have something for you a little bit later in the show. But we're good.

We're still, you know, there should not just be one solo flagship. We're not just like a pirate. And it's not like we did a bad job with the Armada. Yeah. All the other ships are destroyed. The Spanish destroyed our flotilla. It was a voluntary, amicable, well-deserved retirement. Yeah.

Of a ship. He sailed off and literally into the sunset. Anyway. But because we have some fun stuff to talk about in the show. A little surprise for the Vodd people coming up. But I want to start heavy. I'm in the emotional place to start heavy. There was heavy news this week.

We're going to start heavy. So we're going to start with net neutrality. There's a bunch of other stuff. I promise you. If you don't want to be heavy with us, just skip ahead. And then there's like a good time waiting for you. But if you're in the emotional zone with me, this is where we're starting. Net neutrality.

So. For or against. Damn it. I actually have a whole thing I'm writing next week. I think it's going to publish on Monday. It occurred to me throughout this entire debate that I don't actually care about net neutrality. for its own sake. It's not actually...

It's not actually... ...first draft with me of this, and I gave him a 16-point comment, and then I deleted all the swear words. Yeah. And I don't think he's going to accept any of those words. There are a bunch of swear words in there. Anyway, so I'm working on it.

But I want to start there with the listeners. So I talk about neutrality a lot. Paul and I debated a lot. Ejit Pye and his army of trolls who work with him at the FCs, who literally troll me on Twitter, so I don't even feel bad about calling him that. It's not really about the policy, right?

The thing is the consumer product that you buy, Internet access, is often overpriced and bad. There are lots of reasons for that. You can either try to attack it and saying there should be more options in the market. There should competition. Things will get better. Generally, when there's competition, things get better. Or you can say, wow, this is really hard. The way that the market is structured, competition doesn't seem likely.

We should make it. We should have public policy in place that says they can't do the things. that people don't like. That's like the whole structure of the thing, right? If you have an internet service provider, Comcast, I always pick on Comcast, disclosure, Comcast investor in the box media. If you have Comcast and they start blocking BitTorrent, which they have done, and you can't reasonably switch to another provider to register your outrage at such behavior,

well, you're screwed. We should probably make a rule that says I can't do that. So that's like where I'm at with net neutrality, right? Like the thing itself, I'm just firmly on the side of, of these companies are basically monopolies. There's very little competition. They tend to raise prices and not make the service better over time. We're not going to fix it.

I just don't believe it. So we should probably have some regulations. That's like a reasonable place to start a policy disagreement. But this is the week that Ajit Pye and the other Republican commissioners of the FCC put out what they call their notice of proposed rulemaking. So they kicked off the official. start of the process by which they roll back net neutrality. So this isn't the plan. That's actually like an important point. This is not their plan. These are like questions. Yeah, they're like searching plaintive questions about the nature of the regulatory state. But I mean, how often does this,

hey, we want to make some rules, everybody tells us what you think. Here's what we think. We're going to make some rules, but tell us what you think. That's basically what this is right now. I would describe these as very leading questions. We had Gigi Sone, who. is a very smart person. She used to be a counselor to Chairman Wheeler when he was on the FCC. She wrote an analysis of it and was like, basically what this document is, is a series of leading questions that presuppose the answers and use a lot of ISP-funded studies to draw conclusions, but conclusions in the form of a question. So I've pulled some out here. So the NPRM is out. It came out this week. We have a bunch of stuff on it to read on the side if you want

get deep into it. Jake wrote a great piece noting that 2.6 million comments were filed in between the draft and this final version and they made no changes in responses to those comments, which I think is fascinating. They made some changes in response to like legal posturing. So when the inevitable lawsuit comes, they're in a stronger place. But the millions of people who have commented, their views are not reflected. But there are some lines here that I think are worth reading. And they're specifically about what we think about is net neutrality. No blocking, no throttling, no paid prioritization, the stuff that people don't like and they don't want their ISPs to do. So here's a line. We emphasize that we oppose blocking lawful material. The commission has repeatedly found the

need for a no blocking rule on principle, asserting that the freedom to send and receive lawful content to use and provide applications and services without fear of blocking is essential to the internet's openness. That sounds good. But then here's the searching plaintiff question. Do we have reason to think providers would behave differently if the commission were to eliminate the no blocking rule? Is the no blocking rule necessary or burdensome on smaller providers? This is what I mean by leading questions. They're like, well, they're not doing it now, but if we took the rule away, maybe they just wouldn't do it anyway because everyone agrees. I think that's very strange.

Here's the same question for no throttling. Does the no throttling rule prevent providers from offering broadband internet service providers with differentiated prioritization that benefits consumers? Does the no throttling rule harm latency-sensitive applications and content? Does it prevent product differentiation among ISPs? If we eliminate the no-blocking rule, should we also eliminate the no-throttling rule? It sounds reasonable, but what they're saying is we might not have any rules at all for the internet. Well, and they're also like, they're setting up a particular kind of like burden of proof, right? Like, please prove, it's also like asking people to prove a negative.

Like there's a flip side to asking a lat leading question, which is, if we didn't have this rule, would they do something, you know, has anybody done something bad that shows that we need this rule? But the flip side of that question is, has this rule actually, like, done anything bad to these people, right? Yeah. And, like, I think the answer to both of those questions might actually be a little bit fuzzier than partisans on both sides of this issue would want to admit. But, like, throwing it into that, like, muddy, proven negative-style waters sort of means that no matter how you rhetorically respond to that question, you end up in muddy waters, and then they could just say, well, it's muddy, we're going to do what we want. Yeah. So, I know you want to say something, Paul, but let me just

read the next two. So paid prioritization. For example, could allowing paid prioritization give internet service providers a supplemental revenue stream that would enable them to offer lower price broadband to end users? What would be the impacts on new startups innovation? Does a no paid prioritization rule harm the development of real-time or interactive services? Should the commission impose restrictions on these business models at all. This makes it seem, and I just want to be really clear on this, that one outcome is that Comcast would start to do paid prioritization. Netflix pay us. You'll go faster. And then they'll have more money. And then they'll take that money. And instead of just like counting it as profit, they'll use it to make your prices lower,

which is never going to happen. Like that is not the incentive. structure of a publicly traded corporation at all. Well, it is. Actually, no, that's not true. It is the incentive structure for a publicly traded corporation if they need to compete on that price. Right. But if they don't, which they don't.

Right. It's sort of like, you're right. So I think one thing that's really interesting is that there are four national wireless carriers and just T-Mobile trying to be more competitive has made that market more competitive. one actually competitive company, right? But that is not the case for Spectrum in New York City. There are very few companies that can head up compete with Spectrum in New York City for wired air.

I've got an optimum versus Fios fight in my neighborhood. Oh, yeah? What's that like? A Fios, a tangentially related person to Verizon. I do not think this is a Verizon employee, but somehow I believe he receives a commission if I sign up for Fios. Yeah. And he's like, he's like into negging.

He's like basically like shows up at my door and it's like, your internet sucks, doesn't it? Yeah. And I'm like, I bet you can't do this. I should. And I,

I, um, maybe I'm not the strong, emotionally solid person I like to believe I am. Yeah, I got like mad at the door because he called me a liar. I, um, I said I got a certain amount of speed down and speed up.

And then he's like, well, why don't you benchmark it on the phone? So I did the Google speed test on my phone and was slower than what I said. And he was like, see, it's that slow. I was like, this is not my typical experience with my service. And it's like, well, that's what the phone says. And so I closed the door. Wow. That is crazy.

I want to work towards a situation where he gives me a good discount on Fios and I can move over to Fios because it would be an upgrade. Yeah. But I don't have to lose my pride. Yeah. And he realizes that I'm a smart man. Paul, you need to do the reverse neg. You need to neg right back, I think.

You'd be like, you know, Verizon keeps lessening its investment in fiber internet to the home. Yeah. How do you feel about that? I don't believe that. Verizon's in this for the long haul. Give me Fios before you lose your job. That's terrible. All right.

So here's another one. This is like the least controversial net neutrality rule of all. No one has ever disagreed with this. It's the transparency rule. So if they're going to do stuff, they have to tell you. I don't know if anybody has ever disagreed with this rule. We seek comment on whether to keep, modify, or eliminate the transparency rule. When the commission adopted the transparency rule in 2010 and enhanced it in 2015,

it found that effective disclosure of Internet Service providers network management practices, performance and commercial terms of service promotes competition, innovation, investment, and user choice and broadband adoption. Yeah, that seems true. We continue to support these objectives and seek comment on whether the existing transparency rule is the best way to accomplish them

or if there are other methods we can employ. I just read that and what I see is what we're looking for is support in the record for us to not have these rules at all. And then, Deeter, I think this is to your point, right? This is, in my mind, how they're asking these questions really speaks to something deep. So here's one question about all four rules. Could the continued existence of these rules, the net neutrality rules, negatively impact future innovative, pro-competitive business deals that would not by themselves run a foul of merger conditions or established antitrust law?

That sounds fine. But it means what Chairman Pye is trying to do is apply the boundaries of antitrust law to what the FCC does. does. That is not actually the FCC standard. That is the Federal Trade Commission standard. The FCC standard is the public interest. So if he's saying, I don't, I'm trying to go to a different legal methodology for evaluating these things that is the house that is inside the house of a different agency. And that's exactly what he did with broadband privacy, right? He said the FTC is better at regulating privacy in the FCC. We're going to roll back this broadband privacy rule. I think this whole document, when I read all these questions together, what you get is the sense that, and this is what Gigi wrote on the site too, that they want to eliminate all the rules, eliminate all of the authority for the FCC to pass new rules, and then change the entire standard by which we evaluate these practices.

Not from, are they in the public interest? Are they providing consumers with better service at lower prices? But would this run afoul of antitrust, which is a much radically higher standard for evaluating corporate behavior? And one that's out of the FCC's domain in the first place. It's transferring stuff over to the FTC, right? Right. So a good example here is Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and locking out Netscape, like ran afoul of antitrust law because they were tying things together.

Comcast blocking BitTorrent doesn't live in that zone, but I would argue that most consumers who experienced that were unhappy about it. Right? And the market of the Internet was harmed by it in some way. So if you're going to say it has to reach that like Microsoft level, it really changed the equation. I know what you're saying. I don't get that exact impression from the language. It sounds like are there any interesting opportunities on the table that are currently barred by these rules? But that don't go so far as to violate antitrust.

Like is there is what's in the gray area? Is there a zone in there where you feel like you could be more innovative and do more interesting things? or make more money if we didn't have this rule and we want to hear examples. Yeah. But we're not saying we're going to condone violating antitrust or fight the FTC or just want to know of examples of business opportunities. Yeah. And so this comes back all the way to the first thing I was saying, which is if what a Jeep pie was proposing to the American consumer was that just listen to me, I'm going to get. rid of these rules and you are going to end up with 20 broadband internet service providers and they can do whatever they want and you can pick, I'd be like, yeah, I'm with you. Go crazy. I do not

think that this leads to that. I think that this leads to the existing broadband providers getting richer, potentially building bigger networks, but through that process actually becoming more powerful and less responsive to competition. And I just think that this is in a danger zone, right? Where the only measure of success that you have is like how much money AT&T is spending to build out its network, which is his primary measure of success, capital expenditure. All you're measuring is like those companies getting bigger. You're not measuring new entrants into the market.

You're not measuring head-up competition Verizon Fios versus what was the other one you have? I always forget if it's spectrum or optimum. I believe it's optimum. Yeah. That is actually kind of the measure. How many choices for wired broadband does the average American have? If that was the measure and we were saying, well, we passed the Title II rules and the average number of choices went down to one, I'd like, ah, that sucks. If we get rid of all these rules and we agree that the measure is going to be, do the average American suddenly get two or three choices for wired broadband?

That would be a very interesting promise because, like we see in the mobile market, T-Mobile zero-rated one service, Verizon zero-rated two, T-Mobile zero-rated three, and they all ended up at unlimited data plans because that's what consumers want. I don't believe, for the most part, that the government has the power to effectively give users more choice or better prices. What they do have is the power and usually the responsibility to stop consumer abuse from companies. False advertising, like predatory practices, that kind of stuff. Well, there's this other line here. Everything about these guys, by the way, is, like, they all just remind me of, like, freshman dorm, like, smoking.

It's just the tone of everything they write. Internet service, they're asking if Internet service riders should be telecommunications which is the heart of the question. Internet service providers do not appear to offer telecommunications defined as the transmission between or among points specified by the user of information of the user's choosing without change in the form or content of the information is sent and received. That makes no sense. That is exactly what you think the internet does.

But their argument is broadband internet users do not typically specify the points, in quotes, between and among which information is sent online. Instead, routing decisions are based on the architecture of the network, not consumer instructions. That is such a, like, to me, that's beyond the abstraction of how all of us think of the internet. Like, I go to YouTube, I'm like, I would like YouTube to giving this video, not I want YouTube server five located in Mountain View to send me this video. I don't think anybody thinks of the Internet that way.

The whole idea of how are we changing the standards by which we judge the conduct and how are we changing the language by which we describe the network, that to me is where I think they're avoiding the issue of does the FCC operate in the public interest? Like, how should the Internet work? How should the average American experience the Internet? And if you don't have a lot of choices, then I think we absolutely should make rules about what every internet service riders required to provide you. Because lots of people only have one choice. And I don't see where that new competition is coming from.

Space. We're going to beam the internet. Dieter, I can see Dieter on the camera just staring off into space. I'm going to say something controversial. Yeah. I actually, I've been thinking about this burden of proof thing. Yeah. And like to me, all of these arguments which get pretty wonky and technical sort of boil down to, you know what?

If we didn't have the rules, is anything bad going to happen? Probably not. If something bad happens, we'll deal with it. And we reflexively, or I reflexively like, yeah, no, I don't trust you. One, because I do think something bad will happen. And two, I don't trust you or believe that you'll actually do something about it if something bad does happen. But the controversial thing is like, you know what? I am perfectly happy to try to have the burden of proof put on us that taking these regulations

away could cause something bad to happen. Like, that's fine. I don't, I actually don't know rhetorically that it should because we've already litigated this once. But if he wants to litigate it again and make us prove that if they take these rules away, something bad will happen. Fine. I mean, we'll do it.

I think that that's a perfectly reasonable thing to be expected to do. I think it's not being done in a way that is like adheres to the principle of like charity and honest, you know, discussion and rhetoric. But nevertheless, like the, I think the thing that is actually like recoil, like makes me recoil about this is that I don't trust that they're asking these questions in good faith. But I like, if someone were asking these questions to good faith, I would very happily like have that discussion. And so the question is like, do we engage in the discussion about if we take away? net neutrality rules will things go bad? Do we, like, do we want to be, like, honest, even though it feels like they're asking these questions in a dishonest way?

And, like, I don't know, I actually am less against being, I don't know, the sucker who, like, honestly answers a dishonest question. Like, that's fine. Yeah, I disagree. How do I phrase this? All of the big internet companies are now putting out marketing materials that are like, we support the open internet. We believe in net neutrality. Just not Title II. Pye has been out there. This thing opens with, we believe in the open internet. Yeah. By the way, open internet is a interesting

phrase. It's a super interesting phrase. It's better than close the internet. Whatever that means. But, you know, they're all out there saying that, right? Like, we know you're worried about these behaviors and we agree with you. They're not the right behaviors. And then this whole document, this whole document that seeks to put into the record evidence about what rules we should have asks questions about whether those rules are needed. So the starting point of the rhetoric is we agree that there should be no blocking of content on the internet. Straight up. The carriers have said it.

The FCC has said it. This document says it. And then the next question is, that said, do we really need a rule that says you shouldn't block things on the internet? you could reverse that and you can say, well, if we all agree, then we're going to write this rule down and you're not going to do it and it's not a problem and it's not a cost for you. Well, I do, I don't know. Do we need a rule that says we shouldn't murder people in America? Like, we have a lot of those rules. We all know we shouldn't do it.

I think these are good questions. I really do because I think it's important to understand exactly why we have a rule. Because I think to make this a little more concrete and a little less theoretical, if you describe Net New Trouty. If you describe net neutrality five years ago, it would fairly obviously say that it's bad that T-Mobile makes some videos 480P but gives you an unlimited amount of them. Or that some music services are free to stream, but not necessarily all of them. They have to have a deal with T-Mobile. And I remember when that came out, it sounded pretty shady and like this isn't going to work out. And T-Mobile is probably going to like pick winners and,

It's not going to be good. Instead, what I have now is an quote-unquote unlimited mobile internet connection. I haven't thought about my data cap in ever since I switched over to it. Every once in a while, I'm bothered that the video that I'm watching on LTE is not perfectly HD. 99% of the time I'm not and I'm very happy with the situation. And so, you know, going in an ideological way, this is a thing that a company is doing that sounds against the spirit of a thing that I believe in. And then having experienced it practically, I think I'm fine with the current situation. And I don't know, I think on this show, T.C. and I have, like, had the debate. Like, I didn't, I don't know how to read T-Mobile zero rating, right? Like, the way that they were doing it was really interesting. the way that 18T and Verizon do it is not nearly as open, right?

They just straight up on cash and everything else is slow and your thing is fast. Right, like that is how they operate their zero rating schemes. Those are different, right? And like when Tom Wheeler's FCC looked at these things,

they explicitly said the way T-Mobile is doing it doesn't appear to be a huge problem, but the way these other guys are doing it does appear to be a problem. And you can make that event. valuation in the public interest. The other thing that I'll note, and I keep coming back to this, the mobile market is not

super competitive, but it's way more competitive than the fixed broadband market. Right? You haven't had that experience between Fios and optimum. So here's a fixed broadband theoretical. Right now, a lot of consumer routers do the throttling and prioritization. They sort of list the ports that they're going to like, I'm going to always keep a little bit of bandwidth for VoIP, a little bit of bandwidth for Skype or something like that.

Right now, I who configure, no, no, it's my roommate's router. I have my own router and it works fine, but it's leaching off my roommates router. Oh my God. Did you double nat your roommate's router? It's terrible. All right. So like right now. I think I know why your internet sucks.

In my apartment, if someone starts downloading, something on Steam, you can't load a website. Right. Like, it just sort of, it just breaks because steam takes all the bandwidth and it's not, you know, our traffic isn't shaped and it should be shaped by us with a better router. Yeah. Or just one router that works properly. Well, it's a long apartment.

We need to. You know what? Don't worry about it. I'm going to get you an hero. Thank you. but an ISP could offer this service, quote unquote, like, hey, we'll shape your traffic. We'll prioritize for you. Yeah.

And we think you're going to like it. Inside of the old net neutrality rules, that was in there. Reasonable network management practices, as long as they're transparently disclosed, super okay. Like, there wasn't a, like, the ISPs are like, look, we need to be able to do this. And the rules were, they reflect that. I just think the difference is, what if there was a rule saying you couldn't have your own router on that network? What if the ISP said, we'd love to give you a lower price, but you've got to rent this exact router from us? Like, that runs afoul of the no locking idea.

What if they say, we're going to be cheap Wi-Fi, but you have to buy a mobile phone from us. That runs afoul, right? Like, what if they say only certified, we'll give you the fastest possible bandwidth, but only certified devices connect? can connect to your home network. That takes us all the way back to AT&T saying we're going to sell you the phones ourselves. And the FCC acted in that case and said, no, people should be able to connect whatever they want to your network. We're just in that zone. And what scares me about these questions, I think either of this is kind of what you're talking about, like, these are great questions.

They are fantastic thought starters for us to sit around in a coffee shop or bar and talk about. They're not great questions to completely reset the public policy of like billions of dollars of infrastructure investment in America. And it sounds like the question both of you have is, is FCC abdicating a responsibility to consumer protection? Yeah, because that is their charter, right, to operate in the public interest. And I look at this and there's another whole thing here, which we don't have time to do. We got all kinds of other stuff to do. actually fun things to talk about. But there's a whole other thing here where the FCC is not allowed to like whipsaw, right?

They have to, regulatory agencies are required to like maintain some stability. That would be nice. So they're not allowed to just capricially change their mind when there's Democrats or Republicans. So Pai has to prove to a court because there's inevitably going to be a legal challenge. It's proved to a court that the market conditions have changed such that this policy is, it's required for him to change it. And two, that he went into this rulemaking with that, with an open mind, that his mind wasn't already made up. On the first, it's, you know, Harry, he's, you know,

people are going to argue about whether network investment is up or down. There's a lot of evidence on both sides, actually. I think there's more evidence on the, I think the fact that the CEOs of these companies all told their investors that everything was fine and, like, all full steam ahead, while they all thought Hillary was going to won is, like, pretty indicative of the fact that it wasn't a big problem. And then he's got to prove that his mind isn't already made up.

And he's running around. He kicked off this process by saying this is a fight we're going to win. And it's like, so your mind was made up. So we'll see. Anyway, Deeter, I wanted to talk about your definition of the web, but I think we should probably do some fun stuff. It's too late, yeah. How heavy can we go today? You know what's fun?

Vegetables. I want to talk about the web. All right. Well, let's do this for the, we're going to go long today. I'm just telling the listener, we're going long today. Wherever you were driving in your car, take the long way. Whatever clothes you're ironing, iron some more. Double irons.

Okay. So a lot of you people out there for chess listeners, my favorites, people deepest in my heart, tweeted at me and said what you wanted was Vlad. I did that for you. Vlad was in New York. Did not tell me why, but I love seeing him. I know why. Why was he here?

He's taking photos of headphones. What else does he do? Anyway, look. I mean, you got to do that in New York. Come on. I brought him into the studio yesterday while he was here and recorded the Vlad Savov lightning round. So I'm going to read this ad,

then you're going to get a pure dose of Vlad. Then we're coming back. We're talking about some fun stuff. It's going to be great. This episode of the Vergecast brought to you by The Art of Shaving. What is the secret of well-groom guy? The Art of Shaving.

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step into one of the many retail locations near you. Vergecast listeners, I have a special alert. Vlad Sabov is in the New York office. He's sitting across from me in the podcasting room. Now, as you know, last week I issued a call on the Vergecast for new podcast ideas. I specifically said, you can't just ask for Vlad. I want show ideas. Many of you failed to heed these instructions

and just asked for Vlad. So here he is. He's right in front of me. How's it going, Vlad? Hello. So we're just going to do, we're just going to do five minutes inside the mind of Vlad Savov.

You ready for this? I think so. What are you doing in New York? Because I don't know. He's just looking at me. He's smiling. So my boss doesn't know why I'm in New York. This is dangerous.

We could tell people that it was fulfilling their request, right? He just showed up. And just warmed their hearts that would listen. The truth is, I came over to San Francisco. to the Bay Area to do Google I.O.

So I showed out photos for the live blog. I hang out with Dita, and then Dita said, go to New York. I listened. Yeah. And I turned up here. I will describe the trip as reverse Santa Claus trip, essentially. So, you know how Santa Claus goes around the world and drops off presents for people? I've done exactly the opposite.

I've come with no luggage at all, just empty bags, and I'm just picking up gadgets. Yeah. Right? So what I have done is, I've gone from California, where you have a ton of really fascinating, but small-scale headphone companies who, when they ship me stuff, there's all these customs issues that we need to get through

and nobody customs understands that review unit can go back to the United States and you don't need to pay taxes, whatever. It's a mess. So I just pick things up myself. We shot, I don't know, thousands and thousands of photos here in the New York office

with a professional photo team. So that saves me having to do it myself when I'm back in London. And now I am set with a billion gadgets, mostly headphones, that I have to review over the next couple of months. All right, what do you got? Oh, it's fantastic.

Well, I've got the biodynamic zelento, which may be supposed to be pronounced ex-salento. Oh, my God. Which would be awesome. I would tease them about it, but actually they are really fantastically good in-ear headphones. Yeah. They cost $1,000. I also have the Fender FXA-9, which nobody seems to be aware of. Even Fender have been horrible publicizing the fact that they exist.

You show these to me. They're in-ears. They're like silicon-molded, right? Yeah, they're kind of like custom ones, but not custom. They say that they fit something like 95% of people's ears. Those costs $1,200. So just like Top Gear, I'm giving really hardcore consumer advice, you know, for daily purchases, weekly purchases. But here it is, like a little preview.

The Fenders, $200 more than the biodynamics, but they don't sound anywhere near as good. Yeah. So I could actually make a viable argument for why you would spend $1,000 on any headphones or the biodynamics, and then just say, okay, I'm done spending money on that. category of device. Yeah. I would just fall in love with these headphones because you can do that. Defenders, not so much.

They have a very particular tuning, which some people might love, but I feel most people want. Yeah. So that's in-eers. I also picked up a pair of Shure SE 545 in-eers as well, which are from 2014. Yeah. Like, I think the review pair that I have was made in 2014, and you just kept it in story. That's like Shores way.

They keep one model forever, right? Yeah. Well, you say that funny enough, but it's called S-E because it's a lot. second edition. And what it did, sure usually a really purist about their sound. What it did was people asked them, the same way that our listeners asked for me, and then

here I am, people ask them, we need more bass. Say it magic word. Tweet Vlad three times, he shows up in New York. Exactly. Do it every week. So people said, we need more bass. So what you did, okay, we'll give you a second edition of the 545s in here's. And that bass that they have is just

gorgeous. Like, it's not too much. They didn't like go over the top. They didn't go into beast territory, but it's just to the point where I feel like I love it and I want more. Yeah. And it's because they're not giving it to me that I love them even more. I see. They tease me. Yeah.

This is my relationship with technology. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. The absence of the deepest base. Right. Well, they go deep. Yeah. They have extension. It's just, the quantity is just right to where I always want more.

Yeah. And that is how a good relationship should go, personal or with technology. And finally, this is the most exciting thing. The Asto and Kern can. K-A-A-W-N. It's another $1,000 product. And when I present it to people nowadays, they are like, what is it? Well, you showed to me yesterday.

I freaked out. Yeah. First question is, what is it? Second question is, who is it for? It is a portable media player. They still exist. Yeah. Okay, but it is two inches thick.

It has two headphone jacks. It has two SD car slots, two USB ports. So it has USBC and micro USB. 4SD and microSD. And it has 64 gigabytes of storage on board. It is a massive, beautiful thing. And it has this volume rocker, which you were even asking me, hang on, is that a fake sound that it's making? But it has a mechanical thing where you roll it.

It's a loud mechanical click when you twirl it. It's fantastic. It's not a rocker. You're right. It's like a cylinder of ridged metal that is just excellent to touch and hand. It's good mechanical input devices are leave their own. This is like on a, it's basically the world's ultimate iPod. Yeah.

Right? Ultimate in every respect. Okay, ultimate in terms of size, ultimate in terms of ergonomics, because he also has physical keys. And that's the other thing, again, purism about this. Everything else, the back button is a back button. Here is just rewind, okay?

It's a physical. I did this. Because the thing runs Android, and you're like, that's a back button. You're trying to tap it, and your music changes. And you're like, why isn't it going back in the interface? So it has a rewind and a fast forward, hard buttons, a play button, home button. That's it.

all physical controls. Okay, first of all, the Android, I think it's something like Android 5. Something, custom version of it, it is slowest sin. Yeah. Okay. And the display is not of a high quality. But there's a trouble, again, with smaller companies, they can't source the high, well, they don't sell as many devices, so they can't source the high cost OLED displays

and so on. So that's a shame. I mean, if somebody, like Samsung, wanted to be able to advice like this and put an OLED screen on this, I would just gush over it. I mean, I love it as it is. And again, when people see it, they're like, but it's so huge and does it even fit in a pocket? It fits in a pocket, yes.

The difference with it is when you actually plug in a good pair of headphones. Again, that thing with the biodynamic Zolentos, I put those on when I was in our San Francisco office. I sat down and I would just anchor to my seat. It didn't even matter what music I was listening to. I'm listening to MP3s because as far as I'm concerned, if I don't hear the difference just listening to basic MP3s, it isn't that much of an audio upgrade.

Yeah. I'm not paying $1,000 for something that will make me chase around for flag files and whatever else. I want just the basic, immediately accessible upgrade for that sort of price. And I'm literally just anchored to my seat. And I'm like, no, I'm not getting up. Like, I've got work to do. I can't. I can't.

The way I describe it is it's kind of like an accordion with a soundstage. So the way you listen to your music is like right around your nose, let's say, or around your eyes. And then this thing just expands it. And a bit of audiophile jargon here is holographic. where everything is three dimension around you. So you don't hear just left and right stereo. You hear like a zigzag where the music goes forwards and backwards and so on. I'm just, yeah, it's terrific.

It really is terrific. And again, everybody asks me, after they find out what it is, they're like, oh, people still make those. Yeah. The second question is, who is it for? And I can't give you a solid answer other than to say, as a gift, this would be terrific. For the person who has everything, you buy them the world's most complicated MP3-3.

Many of us are that person in terms of gadgets. Like, if you bought me a laptop, I'll just shrug and be like, okay, I'll add it to my other ones. Yeah. If you bought me a phone, I'll be like, come on. Come on. It's like buying me socks at this stage. All right. Let's switch to phones.

Phones. Because you, I mean, again, it's a lightning round. And when I say we were going deep into Vlad's brain, what you just heard was unadulterated feed of headphone information. That's what it's, that's where he's at. Nowadays. But the other side is phones. You have deep thoughts on phones. You recently wrote a thing called Google is boring

or it's time for Google to be boring What's going on in the Android world? What are your thoughts? You probably use, between you and Dan, you probably switch between more Android phones than any other people I know. Give me your layer of the land on the Android side. Well, the Android side is the pixel.

I think the pixel continues to be underrated by most people. Yeah. And I was just having a chat with somebody from Samsung recently and he asked me, why people, why people saw religious about the pixel? What is it about the phone besides the camera? and I said, there is nothing besides the camera.

Nobody's religious about the pixel as a device. It isn't great in terms of industrial design. It's batteries and special. It's audio, I will tell you, it's terrible. Yeah. I refuse, like, by Dynamics and Lentos, I do not plug them into the pixel. It is sacrilege.

Right? This is, like, the greatest argument for why Apple removed the headphone jack. It's like, I'd rather you just remove the headphone jack instead of giving me this garbage. Really? Its speaker is bad. Audio out of the headphones is bad. Is the Bluetooth bad when you pair of Bluetooth? offense to it? No, really, too. Oh, good example. It's fine unless you cup the glass bit at the

back of the pixel. Really? And it just cuts everything off. Wow. Total death grip for connectivity. Yeah. And this is... Why isn't that on our website? We got a whole website for stories like that. Literally the moment this is posted, it will be on our website. Okay? So there you go. You're wrong. For once, okay? One time, Neil Life Potent is wrong. Ever made an achievement. I think, Birchcastle is there's other. There's many other times. But I would say, no, you don't give yourself enough credit. You're like me, you're right, like 99.9% of the time. Yeah, but they find that point one.

And I thank them for it. It gives the rest of us some opportunity to speak. The pixel, to me, is just a standout smartphone of any kind, okay? iPhone as well. I could go to the iPhone 7 today. You know, I have one in my bag, my backup phone is on iPhone 7. But the camera of the pixel is just exceptional. It takes photos I can't take with any other phone, so that's it for me.

That is the big decision maker. Then you have the Galaxy S8, which is, for the vast majority of people, the perfect phone. It is terrific. Like, its design is so good. It's performance. It's display. I mean, I can't, it's camera just sitting as good as the pixel, but that's it. You have Samsung, you have Google, and I do feel like they have just distinguished themselves on higher tier than everybody else.

Then you have guys like One Plus who keep doing really good things. Industrial design-wise, they just kicked out this old black version of the One-plus three. which is just extremely gorgeous. I mean, a massive battery insider as well. I would definitely use that if it wasn't using the pixel. They just partnered up, I think, with famous camera company to improve their cameras. I think they partnered up with the XO, the guys who did the benchmark.

So that is, again, promising for Oneplus. Honestly, Android is kind of a, it's in a weird situation because the biggest sellers, the companies are growing the most are Chinese, and they're firmly focused on the Chinese market. So Vivo and Opel, the fourth and fifth biggest smartphone manufacturers, have doubled their sales over the past year, but almost all of it is either in China or in nearby countries in that area. And they just don't make their way out here west, where, as I say, it's Samsung, it's Google now with a pixel.

And really the only other company that I have faith in is LG. Yeah. Like around this time last year, I wrote an Android Deathwatch, and the people, the companies on the list were HG, and Sony. And just today, we reported that, well, it's going to be a couple of days ago once we posted it, but whatever, Sony's cutting off its mid-range phones to focus on its flagship devices, which, you know, my way of rephrasing the headline is Sony's discontinuing its mid-range phones to focus on discontinuing its flagship phones. Yeah. It's a dead end with Sony. And I feel like that's the same way with HDC, which is a damn shame because I've loved HECC for the longest time.

But they're not showing anything positive. Like everybody else is moving to no bezels. HGC is like, no, we're fine. We'll have massive bezels on our phones. And you know how the iPhone doesn't have a headphone jacket, nobody's in love with that as a feature? We're going to keep doing that. Yeah, I don't know what HGC does except not make enough pixels.

That's correct. Yeah. My working theory is that HGC only sells like a dozen phones every month. And then Google said, guys, we're going to do a phone. Can you cover this for us? And HGC were like, yeah, we've got this. But guys, it's going to be a really popular phone. It's going to be the first Google phone.

Can you cover it for us? It's going to be a big order. And then HACC thought, oh, so big order, so like 20 phones, smartphone can cover it. And nobody, like, sat down and communicated the whole, we need to produce a ton of these to satisfy demand. Like, the pixel's biggest problem is that, not being able to produce a problem. Yeah.

All right. So, end of lightning round. What is your biggest obsession right now? What's the next thing that Vlad is obsessed with? Well, I'm still stuck on headphones. I will tell you. Well, actually, let me ask you this. There's a thing, wait, that you just talked about headphone jacks.

You amongst our entire staff were like, this is fine. the future of headphones is digital interconnect. Are you still there? Well, I did say the future is digital interconnect. I saw the benefits of it. Yeah. I saw the potential of it, but nobody, aside from, like I say, these more niche and boutique companies

who are doing their own lightning cables, and sure, the company that nation is doing it, Ordezzi led the way last year. A bunch of them are doing lightning cables, and when they integrate the digital to analog converter in the lightning cable, and when they integrate amplifiers into that, they just automatically make the sound better.

They don't depend on the iPhone to produce good sound for their headphones. So I see the potential. It would be great if Apple are the ones we're embracing it. It would be great if the hardware manufacturer is like Sony, right, are pushing that. But Sony is actually pushing for better Bluetooth audio, which again, I don't mind. You know, if they make Bluetooth audio work brilliantly,

the way the Apple makes it with a W-1 chip, I'm not going to complain, right? I am not somebody who just wants a wire for the sake of a wire. I want it for the sake of the quality. If you can do the quality without the wire, then I'm all thumbs up about it. But I will say, okay, the reason I am stuck on headphones is because unlike phones, there is just an endless diversity with headphones. You know, to me, I have to do this.

It's like vegetables. Okay? Nobody knows how much diversity there is. What is your favorite vegetable? Oh, tough question. He's really, I want you to know that he looked down and has lost. Spinach. There we go, spinach.

Two years ago was carrots. That's correct. I've moved on. All right. Important flat update. moved on from carrots and spinach. But seriously, with phones, you see all these lines which are just parallel lines among every company.

Yeah. Right? You can't break out of phones like with this Astero and Kern can, which is like two and a half inches. I've literally shown it to a phone design and he's like, dude, I would love to put one of these volume, clicky things in my device. But like his device is like tiny. Yeah. It's a piece of paper.

So it has no room for it, right? So phones have a lot of things would just have to be a certain way and you can't break out of it. With audio, with headphones, people are doing these alien designs, and every single one of them is slightly different. Yeah. It's some particular way. It's almost like a fingerprint. So it's really, really hard for you to just grow bored with headphones or vegetables.

Spinach. Have you tried the W-1 headphones? Are you an AirPods person? I have. I am not myself an AirPods person, but I totally see the benefit of them. And everybody who's using them, you're just psyched and loves them. So I can see the point. Listen, if you don't listen to podcasts, if you're listening to podcasts, if you're listening to

to radio, meditation, whatever. I'm sure that's great. Me, I want, like I was saying, the extra bass with the Shures and whatever else. I'm about that music quality. It's perfectly fine for people to prioritize different things. I've used the W-1 with the beats, solar freeze. Yeah.

With an iPhone. And that stuff is just stupid, how good it is. Yeah. Just in terms of range, keeping it always connected, never dropping out. It's super impressive. Like every single phone. Like, if everybody's doing that with Bluetooth,

then you and I can, can stop winging about the lack of headphone jacks. Yeah. But that's not the case really so far. We'll see. Sony is pushing, right? They're contributing code to Android now to make Bluetooth better. We'll see. All right. This is Vlad freeform time. You get to say one thing. Tell the Vergecast audience one thing that they need to know from Vlad.

Low-carb diets are the future. Oh, my God. That was truly, I want you to know, that was a complete top-to-bottom Vlad experience. All of it is there. You got it. We'll try to get him to show up in New York randomly and do this more often. That's it. Flat out. Say flat out.

Flat out. Flat out. Flat out. But we're back in. Yeah. That was flat. We'll do more Vlad. That was supposed to be five minutes, and I'm reliably told that I was, in fact, 17 minutes.

Also, the fact that we covered everything from, like, Android fragmentation in China to spinach being better than carrots. I don't know that I can give you a more pure Vlad experience every week. I don't know that you can handle it as a listener. But I love that man. Anyway, let's talk about some fun stuff. Yeah. Spinich, more spinach.

We're not going to talk about the web is what you're saying. Did you do a whole thing in the definition of the web? If we're not going to talk about it, I just think everybody should read it because I feel like it's just what the verge was made for. Yeah. It's to draw the sort of person to a place on the internet to have a discussion about something like this that's very important to us. I can read this in podcast ad style. Do you care about the future of the web? Are you interested in the nerdiest topics about what the web is?

Go to my website, theverge.com, and enter offer code Deeder. For 20% off, pure knowledge. The title of this article is, and now, a brief definition of the web, which is a weird way to start a headline. And now. But I did it so that anytime anybody from now on needs to complain about the death of the web or talk about how Google AMP or Facebook instant articles or whatever the hell is coming next is like undercutting the web, we can just end every article with a link that says, and now, a brief definition of the web.

It's great. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. We need one of those permanent sidebars that we can do now. Yeah. We can do this. It's a new course feature. We just make a sidebar and you can put in any post you want forever. Thinking about it.

Anyway, fun stuff. Gadgets. Gadgets. Paul, you want a gadget blog? I try. All right. No, some big gadgets. Microsoft had a whole other surface event.

Surface Pro. Not a five. Can I say Panos Penne trolling the entire internet by being like, there's no Surface Pro 5? And then putting out new Service Pro is kind of great. Here's my big question with this. So they're claiming 13 and a half hours of battery life. Partly due to KBelake, but also partly due to Windows.

Yeah. So how much did they do in hardware versus how much did they do in software, which is theoretically, I mean, it's good. Every laptop gets the benefits of the software improvements. Are there KBLake chipset features that need to be optimized by Windows? No, it's just window, not that I know of. I mean, you should also note that they are claiming outsized battery life for the Surface laptop in particular because it's running Windows 10S, which means it's limited to stuff from

the Windows store. They want to use that there's a bunch of crap that is like legacy Windows stuff that can like break your battery life. So to me, I mean, I have so many feelings about the Surface Pro. I'm very curious to see how this thing handles Chrome. I'm very curious to see how this thing handles. handles other legacy Windows apps besides Edge. And it's also notable, I think, that Microsoft's battery life claims are based strictly on,

like, streaming video or looping video, which is a radically different test than we do. It's a radically different test that a lot of people do. And it could just be that those battery life claims are pegged to optimizations against video. It's not like, it's not dissembling to base a battery test on video. It's a perfectly normal thing to do. But you need to test these batteries up against a multitude of factors, not just something that Windows happens to have been optimized against. Because video has a special chips that are only for decoding video.

Well, it's interesting. Years and years ago, running video on your laptop was the thing that killed the battery the fastest. And now it is the thing that will make the battery run the longest. Because they've done so much hardware optimization around it. But you want to talk about trolling from Panos Penae? Let's talk about his comments on USBC. Wait, wait, wait, before we go there, because that's great.

But also, they're not, they have a whole family of Surface devices now, right? They have a desktop, they have a laptop, they have the Surface Pro. They're not calling the Surface Pro a tablet anymore. They're calling it a laptop. Well, they're wrong. They're just out there being like, it's a laptop, which I think is fascinating.

You think they're doing that to screw with IDC in their way that they calculate PC sales? That is an interesting conspiracy theory that I now wholeheartedly subscribe to. Oh, ho. Nailed in. That is what I think. Wow.

The 12 surface pros they sell a year are going to really bump that number up. I want to, like, create, like, a special pair of pants with, like, ridges right above the kneecaps that's designed to, you know, because you know that little flap that comes out of a surface. Yeah. That is bad for laps. Now it slots into the pants ridges, and now it's super great for laps. Ooh. Right? Yeah.

Well, you get on that. I could get it in the Microsoft store. This really is the complete Verge experience right now. Like 40 minutes on net neutrality. And then Paul being like, I want custom tablet pants. Laptop pants. Yeah, it's a laptop pants. The other thing I'm excited about with the Surface Pro is that there's a core I5 version that is fanless.

And the fan on the, I've got a Surface Pro 4 that I, you know, break out every now and then does spit up more than I'd like. and I love having a fanless computer, so I'm using the new MacBook. The idea that I could have something, like not just a core M processor, but a proper Core I-5, and have it be fanless, is very intriguing to me. Is definitely the Core I-5? Yes. What's interesting is... Oh, God, what if I'm wrong?

Because remember when... This is why I was so mad about this, because I knew it was going to make our jobs harder. Oh, that they, like, they call it a Core I-5. Yeah, Intel rebranded at some of its... CoreM processors as. Yeah, with the CoreM wink and nod series. You know, in the Service Pro video. No, it's CoreM3 and Core. I'm pretty sure it's a proper Core I-5.

Okay, cool. In the video, they, when they, you know, Microsoft makes these, like, beautiful videos for all their new product. I love them. I think they're, like, the most fun to watch. But in the video where they're introducing New Service Pro, they like, they're like, no more fan. And they, like, do, like, the fade wipe to remove the fan. but then it fade wipes back in and it's like an LTE chip set.

And it's like, really? That's cool. I'm into that. I love, I've never understood why Apple doesn't put wireless chipsets in their computers. If I have a service phone has a wireless chip set.

Beautiful. Yep. Also, in one of those, either of the service laptop, I think it's for this one, they use the same B-roll of like diamonds like shooting into the sky in a dome

that movies with Mikey uses in his intros to his YouTube videos. Hey. Fun fact. Okay, talk about USBC. Because whatever Microsoft is doing with USBC right now is very confusing. So we know they didn't put it in the Surface laptop.

We now know they haven't put it in the Surface Pro. And I have been pointing out that literally everybody else that matters in the industry is trying to push this future forward. Intel just made licensing for Thunderbolt chips free. They're going to build it into future versions of their CPUs. Apple is pushing it. Google is pushing it. Samsung is pushing it. Huawei.

Everybody's pushing it. But Microsoft is like, nope, not. for us it's not ready. And so Tom Warren, obviously asked Panos Penae about it. And he said, I love the technology in Type C. I believe in Type C. When Type C is ready for our customers to make it easy for them, we'll be there. Which, I don't know, that's a little bit mean to your customers.

Maybe, like, they've got this line that, like, customers, like, they've seen customers with Type C devices, like plug in a phone charger and they think the phone charger should charge their device and it doesn't. And then they're sad. Like, I don't know, man. It's a really low opinion of your customers. Yeah. But then my favorite, if you love Type C, it means you love dongles. Yeah.

We're going to give a dongle the people who love dongles. Yeah. Like the, like, we're not going to participate in like helping this future happen. We're going to stay with the stuff that people know and understand. But you know what? Screw it. We'll make a don't. Because why not.

I don't understand how this don't work. He calls it a dongle, not an adapter. It's amazing. I'm so happy that Microsoft is doing this. It's just the best troll. How does this thing work? It is a... I haven't seen a picture of it, which is super annoying.

So it's supposed to plug into the surface connector, right? Correct. I think it's a surface connector, and then it's just got, like, an empty USB port on it. An empty USB-C port? Yeah. Does it operate at the full bandwidth of C? Yeah, but I don't know if it'll support Thunderbolt. Right.

So, because the service... Because otherwise, the service connector is, like, the shit. Yeah, it does a bunch of stuff. But I don't... Like, I just don't know how that works. I mean, you can plug a full hub into a surface connector, right? Like, Microsoft is really keen on its surface hub, which has, like, got, like, crazy display ports and high bandwidth USBC, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you just, like, plug in the little magnetic wing on the surface connector, and you get all that stuff. So, like, the connector, Microsoft's proprietary thing is, yeah, it's, I don't know what it is technically, but, like, it's got the bandwidth and it could do the stuff. And so theoretically, like, you should be able to get most of the benefits of USB. through this dongle. The question is, like, is the dongle any good? How is it constructed?

Here's what I want. I want a keyboard from the Surface Pro. Yeah. An actual keyboard. Uh-huh. Maybe a little battery in it. That's always nice. Some USBC slots.

Oh. There you go. Logitech, I just gave it to you. No, no, but that's a different connector. The Surface connector is the actual fan wing power thing. The keyboard connector is a different thing. And I don't know if you can transfer that much data through the keyboard connector. No, I'm saying.

Whatever. Let the keyboard do that, but then you just have a little USBC bus and a little power. Yeah. And click it on the side. That's interesting. Lodge attack. Balkin. Oh, they're gone.

Bring a Lodge. My boys. Lodgy and Belks. No, they're called Lodgy now. They're accessories. Oh, shoot. Oh, God. I hope Belkin doesn't change its name to Belks.

Belks. Belks. They have this really bad awkward, like, hip-hop-based campaign. No. All right. Yo, yo, DJ Belks. No. No, you went there.

Sorry. Lodgy and Belks are like, you're like a British thug, and those are your two enforcers. Yeah. Logi, Belks. Get in here. Dongles for everyone. All right. More gadgets.

This is awesome. I got to see this in action today. DJI put out the Spark drone. It's $500. It's just a little guy. It's like. The center of it is smaller than an iPhone. Obviously, a little bit thicker.

It's got a camera. It's got four little wings. It folds up. It's real tiny. I hear it weighs about the same as a can of Coke. Yeah, but here's how you control it. Do you see this today when Ben was trying it out? Oh, I didn't watch it, though.

So you can fly it with an app on the phone. You can buy a controller, but you don't need any of that stuff. You just double-click the power button and hold it in your hand, and it takes off. And then you take a step back, and you hold out your hand. And it just finds your face and it finds your hand, and it just follows your hand around. It's like you're flying the drone with the force. It is so cool. And then to have it take a picture, you just put your fingers together and like the classic director framing.

Like your other hand, you make a little rectangle with your thumb and your forefinger. I guess it's an audio show. So you do that and then you put your hands down and then it takes like four pictures. Wow. And then if you're outside, you can like fling your hands out and you know like fly really far away and take a picture. You know, this made me think. So there's a... It's so cool.

I believe it's an MIT. I should, I'll try to find out for sure, but there's a, some college did a, like a research project where they, you could program drones to get you a type of shot. Yeah. Because like there's like storyboarding and there's like the language of film. It's like there's closeups, there's like wides and there's like two shots like where, you know, so like you tell it in advance how you want it to frame people and it will move around automatically trying to keep that frame even while people are moving while also not bumping into it's just like because we already have some smarts in our phones that like try to like you know like you take a bunch of pictures and you get rid of the ones when

people are blinking or something like that in automatic you know light detection but like having having intelligence make framing better as someone who personally cannot frame a photo to save life is very exciting to me I'd like this idea I'll think find out who actually did it. Yeah. Well, I mean, but DJI does a lot. All the drone manufacturers do that now in some way. What's happening with drones is they got the cameras in the air.

Right. And now the cameras, and they've added lots of cameras, now the cameras are flying the drone. Right. And they all do, like, computer vision to do cooler and cooler things. And now they've just gotten to the point where you don't even need a controller of any kind. The drone will just follow you around. Like, it literally detects your hand in the air. And when you put your hand down, the lights turn red and just stays where it is.

until you put your hand up again, the lights turn green and it starts falling your hand again. Dude, it's wild. What I think is the most interesting about this is, like, we just spent the first however long of this show talking about competition. DJI has no competition, but they act like they're hunted. There's like, yeah, there's other company. GoPros, like we have drones.

They just fall down. Like DJI acts like it's hunted. If they are a company on the run, they're like, whatever, here's another one, it's smaller, We added more software features. We're doing all this stuff. And Unique has a big investment from Intel. They got a Real Sense camera.

It's GoPro. They're trying. They're trying, right? But there are other companies out there. But DJI is just so far ahead of the market. And they just keep going and going and going, which I think is awesome. Like, there are a few companies that I think run that fast and have taken. I think when we first started talking about drones, we all thought of, like, the Phantom.

Like, I have a Phantom 4. It is great. I love it. It's super fun to use. But it's like huge and bulky and like you got to manage all kinds of batteries and whatever. Now this thing is literally the size of a phone. The Mabic is basically the phantom in a much smaller package. They're just making them more and more and more consumer friendly in a way that I think very other few companies are keeping up with.

It's, I don't know. Like I think this is the moment when regular people start to have drones in a way that they just start using them all the time. and that like unlocks the next set of things versus you know I think we ran that post on like Christmas Day two years ago that was just like dad's crashing phantoms because they're like relatively hard to fly yeah yeah now it's like anybody can have this thing and it follows your hand around takes pictures that's gonna it's gonna change stuff okay it was MIT I was right at first you got it nice uh Google made the jam board did you play with the jam board I played with the jam board at the Google next cloud conference. Jake, Castronakis, went out and played with it in Google's New York offices slash labs or they intend to develop future products. I don't know.

It's $5,000, which seems expensive, but it's still cheaper in a surface. It basically runs like a big-ass Android app, and you can do like hangouts calls with it. But you apparently can't send your video and what's on the whiteboard at the same time, which is really dumb. But I don't know. I would love to have one.

There is no way in hell I'm going to convince, you know, our company to buy a bunch of them. I don't know. We'll see. I think it's cool. I think it looks cute. I think that it's pretty smart. I think that it's going to take a while to see if anybody really needs it.

Yeah. I'm super into it just because I love dumb silly hardware. It's dumb and silly. It looks like a big kid's tablet. I think that's the interesting thing. Like the collaborative drawing is almost like a tutorial exercise for like web developers. learning about web sockets. Like, as far as web technologies go, you throw up a canvas and find a way to draw into it,

and then you share that with web sockets, and all of a sudden, everybody's drawn on the same canvas. It's like, it's almost trivial. Obviously, it's a lot more work to make it polished and good experience and to make it look nice and stuff. But like that software side of this is so trivial, and then it's tied to this super expensive harder. It's interesting. Okay. Paul. Yeah.

You have a victory for consumers. What did I do? You got Samsung to issue a firmware. Oh, gosh. I haven't issued it yet. You know what, to be honest? I feel a little dirty. Why?

I don't know. Tell the story. Okay. Then have the emotions. So Chris Welch dropped this link in the other week where it's like, hey, there's like a bunch of people in this Samsung forum complaining about how their TV's H-TMI switching is like over the top and erratic. And it's kind of hard to tell exactly what's going on because it's either the TVs have HTML CEC features that are like not possible to disable, even though there are options to disable it or there's some other HTML feature.

But basically when they detect any device waking up, the TVs will switch to that device. And certain devices, it's really bad with, especially. the Nintendo Switch, which somehow is sending this signal to TVs more than it should while it's asleep, it will say, hey, I'm going to wake up. And so people's TVs will switch to it all the time, and it's really annoying for people. So I just wrote this up very straightforwardly, and I asked Samsung for a comment. A week later, they got back with me and said, Samsung has been following the comments on our community thread, and we will be issuing a firmware update early this summer that

will address this behavior and provide the level of convenience that was intended. So not calling it a bug. A level of convenience that was intended. Look, that's all anybody's asking for. Because obviously, this is a good feature. Like, if you turn on a device, a lot of times that means you want to watch something on that device. But not always. And especially not when it's supposed to be just asleep.

So hopefully this fixes it and that would be great. I think this is like the peril of HTMLCEC, right? Like, my Apple TV does this all the time to everything in my stack to the point where I turned off CEC in my house. Yeah. Really? Yeah. So I just, I turned on the remote. It's like, what?

Me? Here I am. Yeah, no, it's pretty bad. I've turned on CEC and gotten rid of my Harmony 1 remote. At my LG TV that runs WebOS, I actually use that. It's a comedy of errors, but I use that to run everything because it's the best way to get 4K on that TV. And that is CEC controlling everything. But when you have like multiple devices that are all competing for that, it's a nightmare.

Well, it's weird that CEC is not, as far as I know, on any of the big video cards. Maybe ATII does it, but like none of the good NVIDIA cards do it. And I have a 1070, which is plugged into my TV. And what I would love is when I wake up my TV or wake up my computer, it switches over to it. And I've been thinking more about the whole, I don't want to rehash last. week. But this whole, my whole problem with Google Assistant and it like didn't, I just want to have a conversation with Google Assistant. It's like, yo, Google Assistant, I know you know about Chromecast. Tell me how you work with Chromecast and we can Chromecast better together. But what I really want

is, is basically, if I could say, hey, Siri, or OK Google, switch. Sorry. Sorry. Paul just let up his phone. If I could say one of those magic words. my TV would switch to what I wanted to watch. Yeah. Like if I want to watch Chromecast, I could just talk and I'd start watching something on Chromecast, which is in my TV. And then when I'm done and I wanted to switch back to my PC, I want to have to go find my remote and switch the input. That's literally all I need for my remote. The only thing...

You can do that if you, like, live in a CEC world with Chromecast. Yeah. But you have to... It's another like ecosystem. Look, here's my point. People were mad on the internet. Paul, well, to notice, the verge written article, Samsung's engineers have to write a firmware update.

That's all you really need to know. I don't like that power because I don't like that responsibility. I think we should use that power all the time. Like required firmware update of the week. Our new series. That's good. That's good. The intended level of convenience.

If we can constrain this to firmware updates that would provide the level of inconvenience that was intended, then please hit me up on Twitter. Can we call the series the intended level of convenience? Yeah, that's great. That's great. Okay. Last, well, I'll do this one fast. I want to call out Nick Statt, who wrote, I think we talked about it on this show ages ago. Anker is like this quietly powerhouse company that sells everyone's batteries in Amazon.

And I was like, we should pro about Lanker. Nick went and did it. Talk to the CEO, talked to a bunch of people who work there. That story is great. You should read it. It's basically a bunch of ex-Google engineers who had played around

in the Amazon marketplace. And their first product was laptop batteries. Second product, a replacement battery for the HTC sensation. And there's a quote in the piece where they're like, yeah, our battery was better than the OEM battery. And he's like, that got us a lot of attention.

And it just took me back to a time when a replacement battery for the HTC sensation could like launch your company. But anyway, you should read it. It's a great. Super happy Nick got it. He did a great job on it. Go read that. Last, I know even around this, Paul, Heim Gartenberg reviewed the Acer Predator 21X, which is a $9,000 laptop. Which he would bring to meetings.

He brought some meetings. He took it to a coffee shop. method version of reviewing. Where he would bring it to meetings and he'd like take notes or be writing posts while we're having a meeting and it'd just drown out everything with his typing on the mechanical keyboard. Yeah. It's a crazy machine. You got to watch this video. There's a scene where he has it in a coffee shop and the woman behind him doesn't know what's going on just staring at him.

He's like drinking coffee and typing and like doing his voice over and the woman behind him is just like huge eyes. just like, what, what are you doing? Anyway, he said it was unnecessary, but he ended on, I think, an important note. The world needs these things. Someone's got to go over here. All right. I'm going to read another ad.

We've gone way over. I just really want to, quick, Paul, you brought up TVs and how they work. I just want to point out something carriers are doing. All of them are doing TV things. So I'm going to read this ad. We'll talk about that real quick. And then we'll wrap this thing up.

We've gone way over. It's been great. This really is like an OG verge cast. When they used to run like two and a half hours for no reason. There's no limits. No limits. It's the internet. It's only the limits we place on ourselves.

Also, whatever the carriers say that we can and can't do. This episode of the Vergecast brought to you by Tile. What if you could find anything in seconds, Paul? Live that life. Now with Tile, the tiny Bluetooth tracker that makes finding your things easier than ever, you can do that. Simply attach tile to your keys, your wallet, your laptop, even your bike, anything you don't want to lose. Finding your things is super easy. Just open the free Tile app on your phone to see your lost item on the map.

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That's gettile.com slash verge. Okay. So Paul, every week, you do a thing. Every week I do a segment. It's called Vroom Vroom Goes the Car. And actually it's two guys this week. I hope that's okay. Sorry to mix it up.

The shows is going long today. Just get it. Vroom Vroom goes the car. Fruhm Vroom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so there's a Vio Z. It's so hard for me to divorce Vio from Sony because it's like half of what Sony means to me.

But anyways, Vio, a random Japanese company, made a Mercedes-Benz edition of a laptop with like... Did you just call Vio a random Japanese company? Yeah. There's a lot behind that. I know. I know there's a big story. Yeah. But it's not Sony Vio.

Yeah. But Vio. Vio. They made a version of their Z-Flipp laptop that has... has all this Mercedes-Benz brandy, which it's egregious and it's gross. But like Porsche made a laptop recently. Sure, sure. Nobody wants it.

But the startup noise is a vroom-rum. It's really a car making. A room-brum. It makes a like a room-vro. Like it's a gear-shifting car, which is funny because like their flagship image that they want to put on this laptop is an electric car. But anyways, it's a car noise when it boots up. I think that's funny. But also this Sphero Lightning McQueen.

Have you guys seen this? Yeah, it looks dope. So Spiro did the... Even though I hate Cars and the BB-8. I'm getting this from the whole office. I feel like Cars, this is at least a mid-tier Pixar movie. But it's like a lot of people's least... I don't know.

It's got like words of wisdom from Paul Newman in it. It's a great car. It's a great movie. The first one. I read somewhere recently. I read this long thing about how Pixar's falling off. Yeah. And one of the lines was Cars is by far the worst Pixar movie.

Yeah, that's what I don't get. I don't understand it. What's worse than cars? Well, to say that cars... See? That's it. No, like planes. Like, they made a fucking movie called planes. That was a Disney.

That was Disney? Yeah. Whatever. My point is that to hate cars, you have to hate the underlying premise, which is that the movie Doc Hollywood is bad. Because it is basically the movie Doc Hollywood. And I refuse to admit that the movie Doc Hollywood is bad. That's all I'm saying.

Stay strong. I'm here. for it. I like cars better than a toy three. So just put that out there. All right.

I don't know about if I can stay with you on that one. But this car is real this, you just have to go look at it. Look for Sphero Lightning and Queen

because it's, you think it's going to be an RC car, but it's like, it's like animated. It's crazy. Yeah, it moves around. It does some stuff.

Yeah, the mouth moves, the eyes blink with like an LCD. It's great. Check it out. All right. A little bit, a little bit of a TV-related lightning round and then Vlad does

another 45 minutes. That's not true. Just three headlines. I just want to put them out there. The CEO of Verizon confirmed the company's plan to launch streaming TV service. You can now use Alexa to control Dishhopper DVRs. This one's interesting to me. YouTube TV now supports AirPlay.

They still don't have an app on the Apple TV. You can airplay the Apple TV. And then the CEO of AT&T, which is buying Time Warner, was like, yeah, when we get done buying Time Warner, you know, we'll reconfigure things from mobile. Like maybe we'll just do like 20 minute episodes of Game of Thrones because that's what the phone people want. Which is like a headline you can read in a couple. We had a big argument about it. Like he was just offering an example.

He wasn't saying we're going to make 20 minute episodes of Game of Thrones. But he was definitely like, this is the sort of thing I want to do. And he also said at this investor conference, we're already thinking about how to curate that library and turn it into mobile stuff. So maybe it's like Game of Thrones. It's definitely other time Warner content. That's a lot of. How do we watch TV? Where does it come from?

What does it look like news in one week? And my sense of it, and this relates all the way back to net neutrality, the big mobile carriers are all trying to become TV companies. That's their move. They own these big networks. They want to program TV on it. They want to charge you for it. They want exclusive content.

What's funny about this is we spent most of like the late aughts, like 05 to 2010, watching a bunch of broadband providers and TV providers thinking they could get into the mobile space. They still do it from time to time. But, like, you know, Dish had all sorts of stuff. They bought a bunch of Spectrum. I think Comcast was buying Spectrum. And, like, they were trying to get into that, and they couldn't.

And now the wireless carriers are, like, so rich. They're like, well, actually, we're going to go do your stuff now. Well, and even, like, rewinding further, the, the, this is something Tim Kelly talks about a lot. Like, when people first heard of the Internet, like, oh, we'll have, like, newspapers and TV channels on the Internet. Yeah. Well, that's ridiculous. Like, that's not what the internet is. It's loosely, well, you have to read Deidore's piece to know what the web really is.

You know, it's linked information, you know. So the idea of sitting and watching a TV channel is so antithetical, and I hate it personally. I don't want TV. If you call your thing TV. I thought you met the internet. I was like, oh, boy. No, no. If you call your thing TV, I'm, like, that's immediately like one thumbs down.

Maybe you've made such a great thing that the following subsequent thumbs-ups will bring me to find a way to watch it on my own terms. But, like, you've already biased me against it by calling a TV because TV to me is you creating a stream of information that you think some generic person will enjoy. And I'm a cool, unique snowflake. and I like, you know, I like some of my favorite stuff right now is basically funded by Patreon. Yeah. Like stuff that is, is, like the fact that someone pitched something to a television network and went through that whole process and got a hundred executives to decide that this was a good idea means I probably think it's a bad idea. I don't know. I think this like this TV moment is it's just fascinating to me.

The cable companies were so long denied that cord cutting was happening. And now it's definitely happening and impacting their businesses. Like ESPN is going under because fewer and fewer people are paying for ESPN. Yeah. That they're trying to. There's something valuable about TV, but they're trying to push it into these other spaces. or somewhat less interestingly just deliver TV over the top, like download YouTube TV and you can watch just straight up TV with the DVR.

I don't know. I think they're just missing something really important about what people want out of the internet and how you can compete with it. And the YouTube TV thing to me is fascinating that they didn't just put an app on the app store. Yeah. I have a lot of guesses as to why, because they have an iOS app, and it's not that hard to take an iOS app for the phone and put it on the Apple TV. But I bet they want people to sign up right from there and Apple wants to take a cut.

Or Apple wants to do its own TV service and they're restricting exactly what YouTube TV can do. And so these endpoints of how does a big screen work? It's just, it's getting more and more and more complicated. And then you have the C of 18T being like, but what if we take the stuff for the big screen and make it for the small screen? And it's just, it's just wide open chaos. So here's a funny thing. You know, I've used PlayStation Vue. I've used the direct TV stuff, whatever it was.

And I switched over to YouTube TV because I was like, oh, like they did a DVR properly. It's like up in the cloud where I want it. And it, you know, works across more devices. And like, this sounds great. This is exactly what I wanted out of a TV service. They might not have all the channels I want, but this is what I want. And you know what? I barely use it.

And I definitely, like, every time I think, oh, man, I should like get this show in my DVR. I'm like, why the hell would I bother? going through all the work of trying to find a show and make sure that it's saved properly in my DVR, when instead what I could do is just get it on demand or get the best parts of it on demand on, you know, YouTube breakout clips. Like, it's all of this work to take a bunch of like TV metaphors, especially the DVR metaphor, and convert it to, you know, a 2017 world. Turns out, at least for me, to be like just a total whiff.

Like, just give it to me on demand like Netflix does or do. don't bother me. Yeah. I mean, but then you get running to things like live events, right? Like,

yeah, where does go? That's why I'm staying subscribed is so that I can watch like five things a year, which is insane. Basically.

But there it is. I will say, though, on the flip side, I do sometimes enjoy just sitting down and be like, what's on? And like, that's fine.

But it's a pretty minor thing in my life. Anyway, my point is it's chaos. Exciting chaos. We should probably do something. I'm just going to pitch more story ideas on the version. We are doing something.

We're doing something. We're doing something. Yeah, it's a secret. Okay, well, if you're a competitor to The Verge, you heard nothing. No. My version of what's on now is Twitch.com. Really? Yeah.

Maybe you should do something on Twitch. Like, just live stream you all day long. I would love that. The Paul Show. Yeah. I'm looking for more time to play Factorio. You need like long interrupted sessions. Yeah.

So. The intended level of convenience with Paul Miller. Now streaming at Twitch.com. That is the Vergecast. I would like to thank our producer. Andrew Marino for all that he does, including editing this nightmare together, which he's going to have to do. But there's other stuff to listen to. Sadly, none of them are Verge podcast any longer. There's back episodes of the Vergecast. Listen to those. Those are great. There's back episodes of Control Out Delete.

75. Listen to all 75 in a row. Do that. And then I would like the listeners to submit me a one-page essay on common themes. Yeah, what would you say the narrative? Like, I like, I've found a couple podcasts in my life where I've, like, found them, loved them and had to listen to the back catalog. Yeah. What would you say the narrative or just one of the themes that someone might get from that story? From the 75 episodes of Control Delete? I actually just went and listened to the first one again. Like, we didn't know what we were doing.

So they've gotten much longer. That's one part of the narrative. The other one is Walt's desire to tell stories about. what came before, I think went up as the time went on, because there's so much about what's happening now that's in infancy that relates to how products we take

for granted now were once in their infancy, and Walt saw all of that evolution. I love doing that show. Can't thank him enough for doing it with me. Go listen to that. Like I said, we're doing one more live episode of Control Out Delete. Dieter's going to be in town, he's going to be on it. It's June 9th, New York City's

Dunk Tank. School of Visual Arts. I'm going to build that dunk tank for you. June 9th, School of Visual Arts, 6 p.m., live, control, out delete. As soon as I get that ticket link, there will be posting the site. We'll tell everybody about it. We'd love to have you to come. Get to hang out with me and Walt and Dieter afterwards. It's going to be super fun.

There's also other podcasts listening to. They're wonderful. Lauren Good, or talented, wonderful senior editor. I was too embarrassed to ask. Walt's going to be on that one, actually, soon. Kara Swisher host Recode, Decode, which is super smart. My favorite, because I'm a media nerd. Peter Kafka host, Recode Media.

Go listen all that. It's all on iTunes. There's a new, like, iTunes of iOS. media page shows all of the Vox Media podcast. Go check that out. Rate them all, review them, get into them. And we next week will be at the Code Conference. It's a fact. A lot of big names at the Code Conference. Big, big names. Hillary Clinton, first big onstage thing happening at Code Conference. Andy Rubin is going to be there. Andy Rubin. A lot of rumors, some news from the Roobes. They have tweeted that they're going to make a big announcement on May 30th,

which lines up with the Code Conference, which is very interesting. Indeed. Return of the sidekick. But we'll be there. We'll cover it. Recode will have all the coverage. Of course, we'll have highlights for the consumer audience over on the verge side. And we'll be doing a podcast from there. Casey, Lauren, Deeter, and I will be doing, if you listen to last year's code conference, Vergecast, it was pure nonsense. We're going to try to do a little better this time. Are we? We'll see what we can do. And then it's WNBC. So crazy few weeks ahead of us.

But we'll be back next week. Thank you for listening. That is the Rochcast, rock and roll. Paul. Snip. Brum, brum. Snip. Goes the night.