The Vergecast - Google announces Pixel 5, Chromecast with Google TV, and Nest Audio

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

Nilay, Dieter, Dan, and Chris discuss all the announcements from Google's fall hardware event from this week, as well as Sonos suing Google for infringing five more wireless audio patents. Links: If you’re sick this fall, you’ll probably get two virus tests The coronavirus pandemic by the numbers Google announces the Pixel 5 for $699 Google announces Pixel 4A 5G with larger 6.2-inch display for $499 Verizon has an exclusive Pixel 4A 5G that’s $100 more expensive Google says the Pixel’s Soli radar and Motion Sense will return Can the Pixel 5 camera still compete using the same old aging sensor? The Pixel 5 and 4A 5G play it safe Google Chromecast (2020) review: reinvented — and now with a remote Google announces new Chromecast with the new Google TV interface The new Chromecast with Google TV won’t officially support Stadia at launch Google Play Movies & TV is now Google TV but it’s not the same Google TV that runs on Android TV on the new Chromecast, it’s an app New Chromecast works as a cheap but unsupported xCloud streamer The Home Depot is selling a new Google Chromecast that hasn’t been announced Sonos sues Google for infringing five more wireless audio patents The new Roku Ultra has Dolby Vision and improved Wi-Fi performance Roku is adding support for Apple’s AirPlay 2 and HomeKit later this year Roku’s Streambar is a compact soundbar with built-in streaming smarts Google’s new Nest Audio smart speaker is official, costs $99.99 A week with the Xbox Series X: load times, game performance, and more Microsoft’s new $549 Surface Laptop Go aims to compete with Chromebooks Microsoft’s updated Surface Pro X has a faster processor and new platinum color option Apple Watch Series 6 review: minute improvements The Apple Watch heart monitor sends too many people to the doctor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about all the new Google News, Pixel 5, Pixel 4A5G, the new Chromecast with Google TV, the Nest audio, and a little bit about the new Surface Laptop Go and Surface ProX that's coming up now on the Vergecast. 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. Hello, and welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast with mid-range Android phones.

True to our roots. That's where we started. That's where we've landed. I'm your friend, Nelai. Dieter Bon is here. I'm your chum. Your chum. That's good.

It's like a real fish and chips kind of relationship. Dan Seaford is here. I'm here. I'd like to keep this in acquaintance. Chris Welch is here. Hello there. Why don't I torture everybody like this? That's right.

Chris is just like, hello. Lots to talk about this week. We are in just the thick of gadget season. There was a Google commercial that we all watched together as a family. I don't know. Let's call it. New pixel phones. A new Chromecast.

I'm dying. to hear the story of the Chromecast from Chris Welch, who just finagled one early. There was, there's new Roku stuff, there's new Microsoft stuff, just a lot going on. And then we're, we're cruising towards what we think will be Apple events. We're in October, recording this October 1st, sometime this month, there's going to be Apple stuff. So the thick of gadget season. But, you know, you know where we're going to start. It's been 29 weeks since President Trump.

intimated to the country? Intimated. Well, is it an intimation if you hold up a flow chart? Suggested strongly with the visual aid that there would be a virus testing website built by, I believe it was 6 to 7 million Google engineers. And they were going to make it, and you could go to the website and do some symptom checking. And if you needed a test, you would drive up to the parking lot of a right aid or a Walmart

or something, get a test, and the website would give you the result back right away. That website doesn't exist. It's been 29 weeks since that has. happened. There were debates. You might have seen this disastrous Trump Biden debate that occurred. One of the things that I just, I would just ask everybody, like, the reason I keep bringing up the website is it's like the best way to evaluate promises that this government makes. So 29 weeks since that happened. However, on the flip side of COVID news, if you're in New York state or New Jersey, actually a few other states around the country, but New York and New Jersey just

released their exposure tracking apps that work with the Google and Apple exposure tracking API. So I put it on my phone today in New York. You don't have to log in. You don't need a user account. You just put the app on your phone. It starts doing the thing. Obviously, this only works if everybody does it. And they're using Bluetooth flow energy signals to modulate distance.

You spend 10 minutes within six feet of another phone. And then somebody with that phone reports a positive test. Everybody gets beeped and says, hey, you might have been exposed. So that obviously only works if we all do it. It's what we got. So if you're in New York, New Jersey, one of these other states that have the app out. I would encourage you to download it. The privacy risks, as near as we can tell, seem very minimal, and the potential upside seems very high. So that's out now. Just two other

COVID stories. We hit 200,000 deaths from COVID. Maribeth Criggs, our science letter has a new newsletter called Antivirus, where she's tracking developments of vaccines, tracking the science of the virus. Her newsletter this week was about the numbers of the virus, trying to make them feel more real, as she pointed out. Those numbers are getting big, but every one of those people is a person who had a life. So really powerful newsletter from her this week. Check it out, verge.com slash antivirus. And then Nicole Wetzman, our health reporter,

wrote a story saying, you know, this fall, if you're sick, you're probably going to end up with a battery of tests, probably at least two, one for the flu and one of the virus because those things are going to happen in parallel. So just a preview of, I think, what's to come in the fall with COVID. Obviously, there's an election coming. Who knows what's going after that?

But we keep tracking it. It's still the biggest story going. Hey, go get a flu vaccine. if you haven't. There you go. Download an app, get a vaccine. You need an app

and a shot. It's our new marketing. It's not great. I don't think it's going to sell well. It's a pandemic pickleback. That said, Google, Google event. This was a strange one.

So we've seen now every big company figure out a way to do a big tech event when they can't do one live. Google's first cut at it was just not. Apple does these

like swooping around their Apple Park campus and then, you know, jaunty, you know, product managers run up and present products and then the drone flies to some other spot. Samsung just kind of does a Samsung thing. I don't know how to characterize Samsung's thing. It's just, you know, fine. And then this one, Google, was very much like Amazon, where it's full of people talking to somebody who's just to the right of the camera and you're not sure who it is.

One person at this event talked directly to camera. Rick Osterloo. No. No. Salina Gomez. She talked right to me. Yeah, into your heart. I felt that Selena was talking directly to me about how she uses YouTube music collaborative

playlists when she collaborates with K-pop groups. And I thought to myself, I believe this. I believe that that is actually how that works. Nil and I were talking that we actually, like, this one in particular was hard to, like, not slip into just full-on cynicism. I don't know why, but it was like this was the one where, So, okay, sorry. Every time we do one of these live blogs, for years, for a decade now, you do the live blog,

you come out of the live blog, and you're like, what just happened? I wrote words on a website, and they meant things. And you go back and you look, you're like, I understood it was happening. I wrote it down, but you don't remember it. Yeah. You got to go back and read it again and watch the thing again every time. This one, I've had that feeling in real time as they were talking to me. It's because everything leaked.

Yeah. Like every piece of this thing leaked. So we knew the Pixel 5 was coming. We knew that Pixel 4A5G was coming. We knew this new Chromecast was coming. We knew it because it's cool. Just started selling it early and Chris went to bought one, which is terrific.

We just knew all the things were happening, right? Even so, you know what I think it was? And I felt this too. Usually Deeter and I split up. We think of it like a football game. We're live logging. One person is doing play by play and one person is doing color commentary. Right.

And usually that's to just, move people along, right? Like, here's all the things that are happening, and here's the context and color. Does that make you Joe Buck? Yes. Okay. And that makes you Chris Collinsworth.

I'm very sorry. This happened to you. You walked directly into it. No, what I'm saying, these events have now turned so fully into infomercials. That there's no, right? Like, they're shot that way, that weird thing where they're looking at somebody else

and earnestly explaining how 5G is going to make gaming faster or whatever. Like, they're all doing it. Yep. They all, they, you know, they all have the problem moment where it's like, how do I move the music around my room? And it's, you know, someone's like fumbling with an ox cord and they're like, no, I just say here at Google. Like, they all do it. Google had a moment. We're like, how do we explain how good sound quality is without having you hear it yourself?

Mark Ronson. And he's like, I listen to my own song and I'm telling you it sounds good. I'm like, you got paid. And there's just, like, they've swung the biggest word in advertising for like a decade has been authenticity. right how do you connect with millennials you need to be authentic and these things are just wildly swinging to 2 am infomercial territory in a way that you know hopefully that pendulum swings back but as we were live logging why am i being so mean and it's like i might as well be like live logging the shake weights commercial yeah like it because that's just what it that's what they're start it's what amazon felt like and that's definitely what google felt like to me they should just have uh cindar running around with his android phone doing a periscope video right No, I think there's like a way to bring back, like I think having events be live, even without an audience, brings back an element of like, at least you know this is really happening. Yeah. And they can screw it up.

Like, this is so polished. That's the infomercial part of it is like how many takes did it take for each segment there? It's so polished. It's not live on stage. It's not being presented. It's not authentic like you mentioned. The best part of the entire thing was the credits when they just showed the outtakes of people fly. people flubbing their lines.

It was like, thank you. And one of the outtakes was, we're going to review this and make sure it's good later. And it's like, nah, that's the problem. Anyhow, not to, I mean, I'm sure everybody worked hard. And, you know, I commend the people who work hard and the things they work hard on. But I just think as we've gone through the sort of pandemic event, the temptation all these companies have to just make infomercials has gone over the line.

And that's, it's fun right back. Anyway, let's talk about these phones. Pixel 5, 699, little cheaper, little wiser, little, little, weirder. It's got some weird 5G radio stuff going on. Tell me about this one. So, it's got the Snapdragon 765, which is a processor that I think is really interesting because I think it's

fast enough and it integrates the modem. It's $699, and I think it's partially that expensive because it has to include a millimeter wave for Verizon because they only made one model of it. It has wireless charging, which is really cool, and they have wireless charging, even though it's a fully aluminum frame

that's covered in Google's sort of resin that they do, because they just mill out a hole in the middle of the back of it for the coils. And then they, you know, they paint over the whole thing. So it feels, it supposedly will have to feel it, but it feels like one singular unit. Otherwise, the specs are like, they're good, right? It's got water resistance. It's got a 90-hertz screen.

So it's not the full 120, blah, blah, blah. It's only 1080, which fine. So it's a solid mid-range phone. It is like completely respectable for a phone that costs $6,700. The question will. be, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, is there are other phones that cost exactly the same amount of money that are just more compelling in certain ways. They have better specs. The other big thing to talk about here is the camera. They got rid of the telephoto, and they went back, not back,

they went to an ultra-wide, just like everybody else, but they kept on the main camera sensor the same sensor they've been using since like the Pixel 3, the Sony IMX-363, I think it is. we asked them about this and they just straight up said yeah no we've been looking for something that works better for our algorithms and there's just nothing else out there

there's like this is the one and like our experience with this sensor means that we can make better camera stuff happen maybe that means the algorithms are maybe too precisely tuned to one sensor right that cuts both ways we've been looking for a sensor that works best with our algorithms

also we haven't changed the algorithms like those are two lines that just converge at the IMX 363 yeah yeah I can see their point, though, like, that feels like Samsung is obviously much more aggressive upgrading the hardware in its phones, but it takes Samsung a couple of phones to figure it out. Like, we saw this with the S20 Ultra earlier this year. That big giant sensor, all kinds of autofocus issues and problems, come Note 20 Ultra. It's the same sensor, but they kind of

figured all that out and updated it and got it to work better. So, like, I can see Google's points. I don't know if four years in a row is necessary. Like, maybe something's happened in those four years that they could take advantage of. But obviously, we're going to have to try it out. They're promising some video improvements, which we're excited about. They're promising some other stuff. So the video improvements are actually the thing I want to focus on a little bit here, because you can solve video problems with hardware much more easily than you can with software

because the hardware will just make it better and you don't have to run a bunch of real-time algorithms on the thing because it takes a while to process stuff. So Google claims they've added a bunch of embeddinger. improved video just with software. And they did that while taking out the pixel neural core. It does not have the specialized co-processor for image processing anymore. So they've done apparently a lot. And so the stakes for doing better on video, I think, are relatively high because it's

always been the knock on the pixel. I actually think that Samsung and Apple have caught up in a lot of ways to the image quality on the pixel. And in certain cases are surpassing it. but in most cases, it's a matter of taste rather than of quality. So it would be nice to see Google jump ahead again. But the real question is, what can they do without the pixel neural core, without a new sensor, to improve video quality? Yeah.

And I think those questions are wildly unresolved until we get the phone. I keep thinking about that, you know, we had Mark Levoy on the Vergecast a few weeks ago. And, you know, he said the thing about the sensor. Like, you're hitting the limit of what you can get out of a sensor. there's better ways to think about stacking images out of any sensor. So that's interesting. It definitely seemed like, you know, he doesn't work for Google anymore. Like it definitely seems like the people who make the Google camera app and the people

who make the phone do not talk as much as you would think after that conversation. So like, you know, just trying to figure out what's happening there. And then he was very clear that video is much harder because you have to process so much more data. You might as well do that locally. when you ask a question of like Samsung and Apple are catching up I think that's true you know the thing about Mark's iteration of the pixel phone was he knew he they were intentionally going after a look right and he would call out the artists that they were trying to emulate

Apple and Samsung are way less open about whatever look they're trying to get yeah and so it it always feels a little more muddy so like in terms of raw picture quality yeah like Apple's gotten better at smart HDR so on and so forth but This is a striking photo. I think Google is still there because of that sort of intentional set of, let's make it look different. Hey, while we're talking about camera processing, I do want to give Google some huge credit because it put up a blog post and it is saying, we are not turning on face retouching by default on our phones anymore. By default, it's off from now on because we have done studies and gotten feedback that like it actually genuinely does affect people's self-image. And so it's off by default now.

And that's great. there's going to be a question of like where exactly does the line on face for touching sit because every camera seems to do some sort of semantic, you know, I see a face, I'm going to do something to it, I see the sky, I'm going to do something to it. So what exactly

is Google, like, what's the line between full-on, like, face-smoving and just the camera recognizes its face and does like certain things automatically. You know what I mean? It more aggressively fills in the shadows. Right. It's very much the thing they've been doing. I don't know. We got to play with it.

So the things that they've taken off of the phone, they're saying they're going to bring back. Yes. So they got rid of, there's no face unlock with Soli. They didn't, I don't know about the neural core. I imagine it will, but who knows? Yeah, I mean, they'll bring it back, I imagine, but I don't know what's going to happen with the pixel next year. My hope, I've written this in a couple of newsletters this week, is that the pixel 5 and the 4A5G this year are sort of the last of this generation of pixels. It's like they've, they've, they've hit the plateau.

So this is the last time they make a phone that is like this core idea of a pixel. And next year, I think they're going to do something, I hope, radically different. They're going to hopefully include their own processors, which everyone forgets that like XOs reported that they're making their own processors with Samsung, five nanometer processors. Maybe we'll see a camera jump. Maybe we'll see Sully come back. Maybe if Google's smart, they won't try and release them in October anymore. They'll try and find someplace else in the year where it's a little bit chiller and where they're not

coming out literally eight months after Samsung beats them to the punch on Qualcomm's new processors. The Google needs to make its own process. That's not the thing that's going to make me buy a pixel phone, right? Yeah. It's, well, I actually always end up buying a pixel phone. It's really a question of like,

what would make you not buy a pixel phone? But it's not the thing that's going to take them to the mass market that we've been asking about forever. Right. Right. It's marketing deals and carrier deals. These just feel like they made phones for, it's almost like they knew this moment in world history.

was coming and they're like, here's just some more phones. Yeah. Right? Like, we know you don't have $1,300 in a folding phone. So there was a press meeting with Rick Austerlowe had a hardware. And he had this line that I was probably prepared. It was like, I don't know what the world needs right now is another $1,000 phone. And so I was like, oh, okay.

So you were like, and so the question is, did you make this phone because of the pandemic? And the answer is no. Of course, we worked on these phones before. But we did expect an economic downturn this year. And so we were planning for that. And I think that is a little bit of truth and a little bit of, like, justification for the fact that you don't want to have to compete at the high end anymore or this year anyway. I think that that phrase or that sentence that he said can probably be translated more like, I don't think Google can sell a $1,000 phone. Like, that's the reality of it.

And when I look at the Pixel 5, and Dieter, you mentioned this earlier, that like some of the specs are lower, like the resolution isn't as high on the screen. We talked about that different processor and things like that. At 699, it seems laser targeted to the iPhone 11. It is the iPhone 10R slash iPhone 11 approach. And it is, I don't think Google is really thinking about Samsung and One Plus and others as competitors to the pixel. It is the iPhone 11 it's going after or, you know, when there's an iPhone 12, whatever this $699 iPhone that's sold at that time is. And you look at the iPhone 11's got a lower-risk screen. It's got, you know, a different design than the premium model.

It's got fewer cameras. So it makes all these cuts, but the iPhone 11 also has a really big battery, which is one of the things that Google did with the Pixel 5 and was the big criticism against the Pixel 4. It's got an excellent camera system. It's got the performance, which is what Google is promising. So it seems like it's just like it comes in one size, which is all you get with the iPhone 11. It's the same price as the iPhone 11. It's roughly the same size as the iPhone 11.

It seems like all those compromises that they made to get the Pixel 5 to $699 are the same compromises that Apple made to get the iPhone 11 to that price. And it just seems head to head to me. There's one more compromise, though, and that was including support for millimeter wave. There's a bunch of phones that have a Verizon variant that costs more because it includes all the millimeter wave antennas. They chose not to make a variant for the Pixel 5.

And so the compromise was with Verizon to have their flagship include compatibility with Verizon's network, so it actually pushed the price up. That's like the one compromise I don't feel great about. You know, not for nothing, the iPhone 11, that one, that's the 10R. That's the one we've just told people to buy. Yep. Yeah.

Like, it's, it's like, I feel very confident telling people to buy an iPhone 11. Yeah, totally. I've been using one as I test the Apple Watch SE and like, yeah, it's an iPhone. The reliable phone. It's an iPhone. It's definitely an iPhone. That's what you need to do. I'm curious what Apple's going to do with all these, all these radio machinations.

Yeah. If the next one's at 5G. I don't understand why you, I understand. I understand it's a couple hundred dollars, but the 4A5G just seems, it seems like the ultimate cheap big one. Yeah, no, that's exactly what it is. It's the ultimate cheap big one. And actually, like, there's this, like, philosophical, like, ship of Theseus question of, like, is the pixel 4A 5G actually just like a pixel 5 that's cheaper?

Or is it a pixel 4A that's bigger? Or is a pixel 5, a pixel 4A that's nicer instead of, right? So much for a simple lineup. Well, they've got these three phones, and I think they're all made from the HTC team. And I think that it makes more sense to think of like the 4A as the foundation, and then they like tweaked it from there rather than the other way around. Why they decided to call the 4A 5G, the 4A5G instead of the 5XL is because they wanted to make the big cheap phone. And so they had to like call it a 4A. It's like half of it leans towards the five.

It's got the same processor and same camera system as the five. You can get it with the five. It has obviously has 5G radio. Verizon's going to charge 100 bucks more so you can pay $5.99 for it to get their 5G radio in it. But then it's a plastic body. You give up the wireless charging and you give up the fast refresh screen. And you get a bigger screen with a smaller battery.

Not even that much bigger though, because I mean the 4A is 5.8 inches, right? And the 5 is 6. and the 4A5G, Jesus, is 6.2. So these aren't huge differences between these phones at all. Yeah, we're really thin slicing the size differences. Google Store has a chart where you can like compare all three of them next to each other. And it's like they look the same. They all look like they're the same size.

Like you can't really tell. Just to come back to that camera before we move on, one thing I thought was interesting is they're bringing some of the new camera features to the older phones. And they're bringing the wait on hold feature, hold for me, which we should talk about. So there's a new portrait light mode. That is just coming to Google Photos, they made it seem like, where you can go back in time to a portrait photo that you've taken, I think they said, up to five years ago. And the Google Photos editor will let you enhance that photo in some way. We have to actually use it.

I always think the, you know, the pixel camera of Google Photos integration is very tight. I think it's cool. They've got cinematic pan settings, like we said, video. three new stabilization modes for smoother video. The problem isn't that the video wasn't smooth enough. Right? And the problem is, like, it shot like 1080p30, and that was it. I mean, they got slightly better, and they are adding 4K60 this year.

But also, like, just at a fundamental quality level, like, it's not there. You get more dynamic range out of an iPhone than you can out of a pixel phone. The question for me is, like, are they going to bring all of the camera features down? because why wouldn't they? Like the pixel 4 actually has a neural core and like a faster processor technically. And the same chip. And the exact same chip.

So I asked about this and I'm told that Google doesn't have an exact outline of what's going to happen when. But for sure, portrait light in portrait mode, which is the thing, it's coming to 4 and 4A. Portrait light in Google Photos is going to be available on three and newer pixels. And combined video modes is going to be on everything two and up. Okay. I'll take it. And then they're bringing the call feature. Was there another feature they're bringing down?

There's like the improved recording, and I forget exactly what the deal is with that. But the call feature is actually like super cool. I spend a lot of time on hold lately. It's just a feature of the pandemic. Like every phone call you make for customer service, like a trippy robot is like, due to the pandemic, we have increased old times. And you feel like Google like employees felt it too, so they built this exact feature. I'm just like tired of it Everyone is like

Oh crap there's a fraud charge of my credit card I've been on hold for 25 minutes And they built this feature So it's an extension of Duplex you call You say just wait on hold for me What they did not demo is what happens When someone picks up Yeah does Duplex ask that person to wait on hold

If it just listens for the music to change I've been on a like have you ever been on hold And the hold music sounds like it's coming from Mars And then somebody picks up and it just sounds normal. Like, just scratchy that. Or there's also hold music that like stops every two minutes and then loops. Or it stops every two minutes and like a voice tells you that hang on.

My new favorite is they play ads for other products and services. It's all bad. But I'm saying, so Dieter, you're my, you're the bank. Sorry. It's great. Bank of Collinsworth. I'm calling in. You, the bank, put me on hold.

I'm waiting. I tell my pixel phone, let me know when the hold is over. Then you pick up. Uh-huh. It's got to tell me that you picked up. Yeah. Is it just engaging you, the bank teller, in some idle chit-chat while it waits for me to pick up and engage? Is it like, thanks for picking up.

I'm Nelah's duplex assistant. Click. How are you today? Right? I already hung up. Are you, this call is being reported by the Google Cloud? Like, none of that makes sense. I got a call queue of 50 calls, and my bonus, it depends on how many I get three.

I'm not going to wait for a robot to like call the human that is, you know, there. Nope, not doing it. So I'm curious to see how this works in practice. As with Duplex, actually calling restaurants, actually using the thing, it worked. But in the many, the reality of people answering the phone did not quite match up with the cell. I cannot wait for an AI to wait on hold for me. I'm very excited about this feature. I'm just also excited about, you know, the Verizon customer service person who has to issue your Fios router return code talking to my Google robot for a couple minutes while, like, finish washing my hands.

It's going to be great. I'm excited for everyone. Is that all, oh, we should talk about this extreme battery saver mode. Yeah. So it's, it's a, Google loves making these modes that shut your apps down. Like, they've got variants on do not disturb or they've got a focus mode or whatever. This just, you turn it on and it shuts all your apps down. down in the background, and if you open it, then it'll work.

I'm actually annoyed. Like, if you think that the solution is that your apps are running too much in the background and that's what's killing your battery life, fix Android. A better way to fix Android than my shutting most of it off. Yeah, God. The other thing that we should mention is availability on these things was super weird. It looks like it's hitting internationally ahead of the U.S., and it also looks like the Pixel 5 is out of stock.

You've got a wait list at this point, except I think you can still get it unlocked, and that's still available. Yeah, so that's still there. But, yeah, like, there doesn't see a bunch of stock, and it seems like they're having a hard time getting it into every country at the same time. They, like, do not have Apple's supply chain. You know, they just can't get everything landing at stores at once. That feels like a direct consequence of the pandemic. Like, Google's not good at this in general, but the U.S. is really by far, the strongest pixel market. And so for the fact that it isn't able to get them to the U.S.

as soon as other markets, it really feels like that is a consequence of the struggles with the pandemic. It's funny because, you know, what cuts against that is they're able to get the Chromecast and Home Depot. Several days before it was even an accident. We've got to take a break. We're going to come back and talk about that Chromecast. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start, is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this.

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I would say that you've had a tempestuous week with the Google Chromecast. Yeah. Start at the start and then let's talk about the thing. Start at the start. So on Sunday, I went on a 13-mile hike and I stayed at my friend's place out in the suburbs. And I was working at a Starbucks on Monday when I saw a tweet from Friend of the Verge, Dave Zatz. And he had mentioned that someone bought the new Chromecast at Home Depot, had a photo and everything. And so I realized there was a Home Depot right across the street.

And so I figured, you know, what the hell? Let's just go there and see what happens. And so I did. And they actually didn't have any at that store. But the whole shelf was cleared off. So I was like, well, something has happened to here, obviously. And so it was just one of those moments where I was like, you know what? Let me just try one more store and see what happens.

So I took an Uber to another. Home Depot because out in the suburbs, there's a Home Depot every 15 miles. And so I got to another one. And sure enough, there it was just on the shelf. And I grabbed it, ran to the front. And like, even then I was like, you know what, I'm just going to get up to this scanner. And it's going to be like, sorry, you can't buy this. That happens sometimes when you find something on the shelf too early. And so, but yeah, sure enough, went to self-checkout, bought it in a snap and walked out before the product had even been announced. So that's amazing. That's like one of the funniest Google hardware stories. It's so, it encapsulates so many things. So you've got the new

Chromecast, the Chromecast 2020. I don't even know what we're going to officially. Chromecast with Google TV. That's what it's called. There's a lot to unpack there. Tell us about it. So the old Chromecast was a $35 stick that you'll plug into your TV and it would show you like a nice photo of the ocean and you would have to know to, you know, I've got to open YouTube on my phone or Netflix on my phone and cast it. And so that was fine several years ago. They sold a ton of those, obviously. But now you can buy a $40 Roku or a fire TV and have all the apps you need and 4K and Dolby Vision and all this stuff.

So it doesn't really work anymore. So finally, the Chromecast has an actual menu, has apps you can download just like a Roku, just like a fire TV. And it has a remote control to do it all with. So it's a pretty big shift. It's a lot simpler. The Chromecast was a phenomenally successful product. It was. Yeah.

Like people really love that thing. And I think part of the reason I loved it is because it just didn't have to do anything. Well, there's that. And it was also relatively early to the idea that you can just have a $30 stick and plug it into the back of your TV. And so that was kind of an amazing thing. I'm like, oh, I can make this a smart TV and it's not a hassle. It only costs $30. And it's sitting at the, you know, impulse buy line at Target.

So this is a $50 stick that now plugs into your TV. So it's a bit more expensive than the old. And it runs Android TV, which I'm sure most people have never used before. but it's very similar to your typical Roku on Amazon Fire TV layout. You download your apps, run them. But on top of all that, and this is the big thing to unpack, is a new software that's called Google TV.

And so this is a lot like Apple TV's Apple TV app, wherein it just brings in all of your services and tries to recommend shows from all of them side by side in one big universal guide for streaming. But it's the actual home screen of the thing. It's not like Apple TV's Apple TV app, which is just another.

app. This is the home screen. Yeah. It's a Chromecast that runs the Android TV operating system. No. It's an Android TV that happens to have Chromecast capabilities. Ding. And it's called Chromecast with Google TV. Correct. All right. That's fine. Does it make duo calls? It totally could. Yeah. You can sidelode apps. You can plug in a keyboard to camera. Beautiful. Well, so I have a Sony TV that runs Android TV. They made it sound of the event like this new Google TV experience would come to old TVs in some way.

But that doesn't appear to be correct. It's very confusing. There was some story yesterday saying that they're going to phase out the old Android TV over the next couple of years and use this as their main go-to. Are they just going to blow up?

It's a very nice OLED TV. I don't want them to... Are they going to come to the cops going to come? But I think this is like a much better UX as far as like just knowing where to go and finding something to watch.

quickly not having to like dig into every app one by one and search for stuff. And so I think they did a pretty good job. And they have most of the apps that you would actually want, which is the actual surprising bit. So right before we came on, we were talking about this. And it's so funny that this moment of like streaming boxes is really not about the capabilities of the boxes themselves anymore. Right. A year ago, two years ago, what would we be talking about? I'd be making jokes about all of the lights. Right. Does it have a, does it have a lot? all the features, right? Now they all have vision. They all have Atmos. Their libraries are starting to fill out. I think Amazon is still pretty thin, but like they all do the thing, right? The best

4K you can get streaming. Now it's, well, AT&T's Warner Media Division is in some sort of advertising related fight with Roku. And so you can't get HBO max, but there's another app called HBO that might work if you have a cable subscription. And so like the promise of the Roku is like lost in some deals. It's the same with Fire TV. The Peacock app, I was joking that, you know, there's like HBO Max, there's like definitely an app that you want. And then Peacock from NBC is definitely an app that NBC wants you to want.

It's true. Disclosure, obviously, NBC is an investor in Fox Media, which owns The Verge. They're just never happy about what we say here. So there's a disclosure. But NBC wants Peacock to be on the Roku. They're also in some advertising-related fight, which, very much tracks with like every platform's fight with their apps. Right.

Roku wants a cut of every ad dollar that gets put into these apps. They don't want to give them the cut. Julia Alexander will have her on the show. She'll talk for five hours about exactly how those dynamics works because it's very complicated and very stressful. But, right, the fire TV doesn't have HBO Max. The Roku doesn't have Peacock. NBC pulled all of its apps, all of its other apps from the Roku platform. and like what they say is not retaliation,

but by any measure is like obvious retaliation. But Google pulled it off. Google, the advertising company that makes all of its money in advertising was like, we've got HBO Macs, we've got Peacock, we've got every app, and importantly, the only platform I can think of that convinced Netflix

to unbundle its content from its app. So what is the only platform? the reason that the Apple TV app is not the interface for the Apple TV box. It's because you still have to go launch Netflix to watch Netflix shows, and it will not show you Netflix shows and recommendations or curated lists or up next or whatever. Google managed to do that with a Chromecast, which is like a big deal, like a seismic shift in this industry. And I don't really know what they gave them a button. They gave them a button. They can't be like there's a button on their remote control. Everybody gives them a button. Netflix doesn't even take them.

meeting unless they get a button. Netflix is now in the Nest Home Hub. Is that Reed Hastings was like, finally? Okay, I'll unbundle my app in my entire, like, it's a lot. But does all that stuff work well? I mean, you have it, you reviewed it. Does it all, does it work? It does, yeah.

I mean, you can choose which services you have. So I've got Netflix Prime Video, Sling TV. And it'll still show you things that are from services you don't have like HBO Max. That's there pretty heavily. And so you'll see things from, those apps and they're just kind of there. You can't get rid of them fully. So that's kind of unfortunate. But they have all the apps you want. I think this does come down to partly that,

like, these are Android apps at the end of the day. It's like, Peacock is on Android. So is HBO Max. So it'd be kind of weird to have a split there where like they are on Android the phone, but not on Android TV. That's where Google had that perk. But otherwise, I mean, yeah, they all work great. 4K, HDR. We should say there's no Apple TV on it. There's no Apple TV app. So you can't watch your Ted Lasso, which people are pretty upset. about, actually. There are people in the comments saying, like, a few months ago, I wouldn't have given a damn, but now I do. So, I guess. Is there an Android Apple TV app? No, there's not. Although I think they're supposed to have one for Sony TVs, someone had told me, so I don't know what

the situation is there. So I think maybe someday, I'm sure Apple wants one there ultimately if they want it to be that big of a platform, but it's probably going to be a while. But that's really the only app that you don't have. And I mean, there's no Airplay too, obviously. There is one other app that technically you don't get, and it's just quite a thing. Stadia! Stadia does not work on the new Chromecast with Google TV. Just not there out of the box. It's coming first half of next year.

Yeah, it's not quite ready, but you can side-load it, which we learned, and you can also siload the X-Cloud game streaming service, and that works too. And they both worked well enough. I mean, they're buggy. They crash once in a while, but it proves that it can work. I mean, it just seems like Google's kind of behind on actually getting there, which, what else are you doing if you didn't have this ready? It's time for the launch of your new, brand new TV streaming box. If you're thinking, oh, I'm going to go buy this Chromecast instead of an Xbox and it'll be great.

I encourage you to go look at Chris's tweet where he demonstrates the latency on the current XCloud app that you side load. It's not insignificant. It's like a second. It's good. You want to play like turn-based games. Yeah. It's really for chess simulators. Yeah.

You know, card games. Yeah, so there's no Stadia. Also, there's no Google Photos app, which I still find pretty strange on Android TV. Didn't they say there was an ambient mode that pulls from Google Photos? Screen Savers can be Google Photos, yeah. But there's no straightforward app where you can just go browse your photos and, like, pull up videos. And, I mean, you can cast all that stuff, obviously, but there's no straight up Google Photos app on Android TV. There's no Google Home app either, right?

Like, you can't visually control your. But it does have the assistant. And so you can ask it to do stuff, and it'll do the stuff. And there's power button and volume on the remote. Power button, and there's a volume rocker. Why is that? Because there's an IR blaster on the room. Sure it is.

The remote also, and I think this is kind of genius, has an input button. And if you hit the input button, it'll switch the input to the Chromecast's input. So you don't need to dig out your TV's remote to change the input over to the Chromecast. It becomes your one remote. And it's a little bit closer to being sort of like input one because you can just hit that button. In a perfect world, CEC would take care of this. Like the Apple TV does this over CEC, Fire TV does this over CEC. But it's funny when Deidre and I were getting briefed by Google on this, they were just like,

we don't trust CEC, so we put an input button on it. If you ever want to just hear like a pure howl of despair, ask any of these manufacturers. about the CEC power commands. Yeah. Because I think technically there isn't a CEC power off command. Okay. So they're all just like stuck. They can't do it.

They have to have the IR blaster turn the shit off. But CEC does work well to some extent. Like my LG TV remote actually does control the Chromecast, which is kind of neat. Oh, nice. But I can't do voice search, obviously. But you can just like navigate and browse around. So if you want to use one remote, you can. If you have more than one CEC device,

the stack. That shit is like the real housewise. Like they're just always fighting. They're like, my PlayStation will just light up and be like, here I am. It's like, why are you here now? Well, look, the first Google TV was such a huge bet on IR control of everything that it almost killed Logitech of the company entirely. This is a true, you could go read these headlines.

Like the previous CEO of Logitech was like, that was dumb. We shouldn't have done that. We made a bet on beta software that wasn't We thought it would be great. It wasn't. Like, he's saying it to his investors. Like, we bet the company in this and it was a bad idea. They have since recovered, which is good for them. I think this is less of a bet on IR blasting, right?

I mean, it's... The IR Blaster is there as a necessity, but it's not like the system is architected around the fact that it has an IR blaster. But I do think the notion that these remotes now need power and volume. There's a, like, they almost all have it. Yeah, there's a period where they were like, Yeah, we could get away without it. It'll be fine.

But I think that period was reflective of we know you have other remotes on your table. We know that we're in second place to your cable box or to your TV remote or whatever. There's some other stack of remotes on your table and you're already turning stuff on and off. We just need to do a Dpad control and whatever other buttons. And now they're almost all of them are like, we could be the only box and maybe your game console. Yeah. And that's really thanks to the proliferation of live over the top. services. So like Google TV is really built around YouTube TV integration with the Live tab. And like,

if you didn't have that a couple years ago, you would have needed a cable box for live TV. But a couple years down the road, you don't really need that for live TV services. Now this Fire TV, Google TV, Roku box is your only remote. And it makes sense in that in that context. I would just like to point out that Google now operates Google TV, the rebranded app that sells movies and TV shows. Although, Hey, I'm sorry. It's still Google movies and TV on non-Android platforms. So it's Google movies and TV in some places. And then it's Google TV, the app on Android phones. And then it's Google TV, the interface on Android TV. Sure. So they operate Google TV in interface on Android TV, a platform that supports an app called Google TV. Yep. that also supports a service called YouTube TV.

Correct. And also, the Chromecast is not built on Chromecast. It's built on Android TV, and it's called the Google Chromecast with Google TV. It's actually called the Google Chromecast. That's great. It's like they're so close to this being a messaging app. Like, they're right there. To be fair, to be fair, Apple has this confusion with Apple TV.

There's Apple TV, the Apple TV hardware. There's Apple TV, the app. There's the TV app on the Apple TV, and then there's Apple TV plus the service. So, you know. So despite all that confusion, I mean, this thing is actually really, really good. I think you said this is going to be your next streaming device that you go with. Oh, yeah, this is it. This is it for me.

The remote is nicer than the Apple TV remote because I don't lose it. And it has a real power button instead of like remembering to hold down the right button to turn off the power. It has a YouTube button and YouTube looks great on it. Yes, that's what I was going to call out. I mean, yes, it just looks good. It's not the fastest box on the planet, but it's fast enough. There's not a ton of ads on the home screen, like on the fire TV. The fire TV is just like, I will, Amazon, let me pay you 20 more dollars to leave me alone, please.

But, I mean, there's a bunch of promoted content or whatever, and I will be very curious to see if Google's content recommendations are better. I'll be very curious to see if they do manage to keep all of these services in line and letting them intermix their recommendations. And the other thing is they have a watch list that might actually be useful because it works across every single service, and you can just add shit to it from your phone. You can search. Someone says, hey, I want to watch this show.

You search for it on your phone in Google, and you tap the button and it gets put on your watch list, the end. Yeah. I mean, I'm down all that. think not that missing that Apple TV app is going to keep my Apple TV sitting there. You know, it's like, well, there's a, there's a 50-50 chance your, your smart TV itself has an Apple TV app. You can just use that. But then I'm now just like back to using multiple moments. Like, I have it. It's hard to gain anything. I will say the Apple TV 4K, YouTube

looks so bad on it. Like I, Dieter and I were like in a late night tech session because he was so mad about how, I, I saw I ended up convincing him to install the beta of TVS 14. And I was like, I'm such a bad friend, like, just destroying Dieter's Friday night. You know, that's supposed to get fixed now. You know, they're supporting the new codec, but it just, I haven't seen it. And I will say this, YouTube TV is great. Like, we, I've, you know, we moved out of Brooklyn. We let Fios go.

I don't have a cable card in my life for the first time in over a decade. Wow. It's very freeing. And so we sign up for YouTube TV and it's great, right? I mean, it damn well better be for $70 or whatever it is right now. There was a moment. There was, but so it got more. expensive because they added the Viacom channels.

And there was like a moment, I was three weeks ago, whenever, when the VMAs were on. And I was like, I am paying this much more money for every single Viacom channel to show me the VMAs. Like these are the most expensive cable award show in history. Yeah, you know, I wish you the pricing was better.

But I can't help but feel that Apple's big investment in making original content. They could have taken all of that money and built a service like YouTube TV, subsidized it with their hardware and they come out way ahead in terms of just feeling more relevant. And I think that's what Google's going to get

out of this thing. Because they can say you can buy this. But then we wouldn't have Ted Lassow. Ted Lassau is a Warner media production. They didn't make it. They bought it from Warner. I think Warner could have figured out somewhere else to put it.

I have an idea. I have one idea where else it could have gone. Anyway, I just say, You look at this and you look at the integration with the live TV, which is like, you know, we're in the middle of a lot of sports right now. So it's like compelling to have. Yeah. Like that, it just feels like this is smarter in that way.

Google did say that their live tab, they will let, like, sling and others integrate with it. Yep. So they've got that little bit of openness going. But YouTube TV seems like such an advantage for Google that they don't quite know how to say out loud. Well, it's because it's a product that has a word YouTube in it. And any product that has a word YouTube in it, they, they, they, they don't know what to do with it. YouTube music is like pretty good.

Some people love it, but it's not a full-on. People don't really use it. Like people use Spotify or Apple music. You know, Selena Gomez uses the YouTube Music Collaborative playlist feature to work with Blackpink on new songs. So, Nilai, your pitch to Google is to call it Google TV. I mean, they should just call it Google TV. Like a device and a service, right? And then you can subscribe to Google TV to watch.

on your Google Chromecast with Google TV. Yeah. And you're good. Yeah. There's a way to bring all of the things together into one branding that makes sense. I mean, it would probably require the addition of a messaging product, just spitballing here. But there's a way to say you're going to buy the Google TV hardware and you can pay for YouTube TV. And that's like this upsell.

Yeah. Speaking of upsells with the Chromecast with Google TV hardware, did you know that there's a Netflix bundle where you can pay 30 bucks more and get six months of Netflix? They made some deal here. There's some Google Netflix deal that occurred. I really wonder, and this is me purely hypothesizing, but Android TV's biggest market right now is in Europe. And as we know Europe and Google, they kind of have a lot of bick and forth between antitrust things and things like that.

I just wonder if this make-nice with Netflix. is driven in part by that. It's just spitballing. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they cut him a deal on Google Cloud or something and get him off AWS. I'm just saying there's some sort of massive, massive Google Netflix deal that occurred here that got Netflix on the Home Hub, that got Netflix to unbundle its content, that created a weird

bundle where you get six months and Netflix for free. Yeah. For what it's worth, Netflix is also coming to the Alexa smart devices. So, like, that's happening. So maybe we'll see Netflix unbundled in the Fire TV in the near future. Maybe it's a new Netflix that's worth seeing. Yeah. It's the thing to track because it's the story of the Apple TV is the inability to unbundle Netflix has kept the interface Apple wants to have, like locked into this goofy app that no one understands.

Yeah. That and the hardware is just super overpriced right now. I think this shows really that it's time for Apple to make some move with the Apple TV 4K. I mean, $170 when Google, Roku, and Amazon. Amazon are all playing down at like the $40-50 mark is rough territory. So we'll have to see what happens over the next few months. Who hasn't wanted to pay $130 more for the world's most confusing remote? It was like Joanna Sweet.

She's like, this is the only story. Like, this picture of the term. And what an indictment of the pixel phones that a $50 TV dongle is like 10 times more fascinating? Yeah, but that's just phones. Yeah, plus this thing's here now. Those aren't coming for a month or so. That's true. Yeah.

Plus, Chris had to abscond with him in the Home Deep. There's a new Roku Ultra to... I mean, again, I think this is... What's the story of the new Roku Ultra? It has all the lights, but it doesn't have some apps. Yep. So that one finally lights up Dolby Vision, whereas it didn't have that before. So this is the first Roku player to have Dolby Vision.

I mean, you can buy Roku TV that has it, but this is the first player to get it. And it's got faster Wi-Fi performance, better range and stuff like that. So it's pretty iterative. And it just adds vision. and it's a Roku Ultra. And Airplay 2 and HomeKit are on this device. They're on the Roku, not the TVs. They're coming to the TVs too, yep, sometime later this year.

But just 4K players. So if you have like a 1080-D-P Roku, you're not going to get Airplay. So that's where they draw the line. No, but I think those are the first, like, separate boxes that are going to have Airplay 2. Yeah, I believe so. It's been Apple TV, so now Airplay 2 is coming to Roku, standalone hardware. If they get HomeKit, can they be HomeKit hubs? Do we know that answer?

I don't believe they can be HomeKit hubs. but I can double check that. But as far as no, you can just use, like, Siri to power them on or off. But I don't think they can get the full hub experience. Because once you get all the way there, then the Apple TV is, like, totally obviated. Yeah. Unless you're the one person who's playing Apple Arcade. I mean, just sideload stadia on this thing and you're all set.

I think the stream bar is more interesting. It's like a cute, itty-bitty little soundbar with Roku built in. It's like the perfect, like, second room, bedroom little streaming box, because you actually get decent sound in that other room, kids' room or bedroom or whatever. And so just, you know, getting a doggle and using the TV sound. And you get a Roku mode that probably has a headphone check on it. So that's also useful in the bedroom.

So, like, I don't know, I think it's great. Yeah. The question of where does the smart stuff go continues to haunt this entire category. Like, is it in your TV? Is it a little box behind your TV? What if it was in a speaker? Like, we will come to the point when Roku is like, we put it in a ceiling fan. Is that where you want it to be?

Why not? As I just left, Time Story the other day, the button of the month, this month, about the Roku button that does nothing and still hasn't

after two years of being on the market. What is it for? We'll never know. I loved that story because you managed to spin it into maybe they will have an idea. And what is the human experience

except for hope? And it's like, you're clicking this Roku button. One last Google announcement. The whole event was colored by Sonas, filing a patent lawsuit the day before. Five more patents.

We get into it a minute. And then Google announced the new NEST audio. Smart speaker, $99. It's just a dead run at the Sonos one. What did they, what did they demo it with multi? Well, they demoed it with Mark Ronson. Listening to, again, listening to Valerie and being like, I love this song. It's like, this great.

But they demoed multi-room switching, right? You walk up to it. You say, move this music over here. It does it. You say move this music to all the rooms. It does it. They also demoed stereo pairing. which I think they've had for before,

but that was like an important feature here. Yeah. Yeah, it's much more of like a, much more of a serious speaker than the original Google Home from 2016, which was like the air freshener thing that had different colored bases. And like, that was very much like

bringing the assistant into your home. I think four years later, Google is more like, this is for like, you want really good audio and it's a smart speaker. You already understand what the assistant does. You know, in the context of last week's Amazon event, right? They made the echo show and they're like, you're in your kitchen. Now it moves

around and like looks at you while you're cooking. I think there's just a recognition that like, what do you do with these speakers? You ask them play music. You ask them set timers in the kitchen. You turn lights on and off and the weather. Right. So like you see them just optimizing towards the actual use cases. That's what they've learned over the last four years is what are the actual use cases. Well, and this is why the new Nest Audio and why the orb echoes are now more directional, because they recognize that, like, nobody makes it the centerpiece on their coffee table. You don't love running a power cable through your living room floor to the middle of your coffee table for your smart speaker? Really? So we haven't heard the thing. Just by way of comparison,

I will tell you, I mean, this is very cheap. It's $99. Or I guess $99.99. So $100. Obviously, Apple tried to sell the home pod by saying it sounded amazing. Yeah. And that's why you should buy it. Yeah, it sounded very nice, but it was Siri, so nobody bought it. It was also very expensive. I don't know that slightly better audio is the thing that makes anybody switch, right? Like, the Nest minis in the echo dots are the things that sell. Yeah. Well, do they sell or are they just kind of given away? Like, I mean, I think they sell. Come on. I mean, yes, people do buy them, but they are so inexpensive. They are impulse purchases or they are, I mean, like every holiday season, I buy guests

for friends and family and things like that, and I'm thrown Google minis. And so, like, I literally have a basket full of Google minis. I can't even give them away to anymore because my father-in-law is like, I have four of these already. I don't need anymore. Stop listening to me. And so, like, they're just basically thrown out there. So, like, yes, people are buying them, but also it's like a very different purchase than

like a $99 thing. that you are putting out a much more significant amount of money. It's larger in size. It's a little bit more dedicated. You have a bit more intent when you're buying it and when you're placing it and things like that. And I will say that, like, you know, we haven't heard the Nest audio yet, but like there's a limit to what a mini can do. That we know. Like, it's not powering your party.

There's volume limits and things like that. It's a really great interface for the Google Assistant. It's not like a super great speaker. So, you know, if you want a better speaker, the Nest audio is there. I'm very curious to put it head to head with the new Echo, which is the same price and kind of the same pitch. So we'll be looking at these a lot. And then, of course, you know, compare against the Sonos one, which is a smart speaker at twice the price, looks to be about the same size. I don't know, a lot of fun in the space.

Yeah, I think it's very hard to, like, come in on that Sonas territory of like multi-orim audio because, like, that's their brand, that's their cachet. That's what people like walk into Best Buy and know. And so, like, Google has to, like, scream pretty much and say, hey, we do this too really well now to, like, take any of that away from them. And they're screaming with that price. Like, Sonos is still, for a lot of people, Sonos is like a premium brand. And Sonos, one, is $200 unless you get it on sale. That's a lot more money than $99. So they're saying it in multiple ways, but it'll be interesting to see how well it stacks up.

That's the heart of the Sonos lawsuits. They're up to three lawsuits now in January. Well, you can group them in two ways. So there's three separate filings, and there's two groups of patents. So in January, they filed the first two lawsuits. lawsuits, one in federal court in California and one in the International Trade Commission. Those are different kinds of courts. The International Trade Commission can just block products.

Yep. Right? Like, you're just not allowed to import products in French patents. So the court proceeding, like the court court proceeding in California was put on hold while the ITC goes through. That led Sonos. And that set of patents, I talked to Eddie Lazarus, Sonas' chief legal officer. He's like, think about the patents generationally. The first lawsuit was like the very basics of doing stuff with smart speakers.

Right. Or wireless home audio. So set up, stereo pairing, keeping the music in sync over time as you're dropping frames and all that stuff is that first set of patents. And like, you know, every time we get a patent story, I'm like, is this, do I feel comfortable that this is what we've patented? Right. Some of that stuff is very difficult, right? This new set of patents is, you know, true place. Sino says true play, where you can wave a microphone around and the microphone's built in,

and it'll adjust the EQ for you. True play is in this set of patents, setting the volume across number of speakers from your phone is in these patents. It's a little more like, a little diceier. One of the patents was only granted two weeks ago. Wow. But they said it was from work that started in 2011. But they filed this set of patents in this case in the Western District of Texas.

The Rocket Docket. It's a word called Rocket Docket. It's funny because the Eastern District of Texas used to be the rocket docket. And then there was like a Supreme Court case and changed. And then they got a new judge in the Western District. And that's what he wanted. So he was like back on the March. So like if you read like, if you're like the Texas legal news, they're like,

Texas is back on the mat for patent suits. A hilarious sub story that only four people care about. I'm glad that I spent your time with it on the verge of test. Anyway, the point of all of this is what does the lawsuit say? What does Sonas's point with all this? They keep calling it efficient infringement. they say we went to work with Google on getting assistant

to work on using YouTube music on Chromecastle and stuff. They got to see all of our IP and then they're making cheaper products with it to flood us on the market because those products for them are lost leaders that support their search business. And it's cheaper for them to just steal the IP and pay the penalties than

to invent the stuff themselves. And so now you're staring at it at a $99 speaker that's going to have Google shopping integration or whatever or play you ads for frozen two or whatever next to the $200 sonos speaker. So I don't know how these suits are going to play out. Eddie told me their chief legal officer. He said, I was like, how long is going to take? He's like two years. I was like, the rocket docket, two years. Like, that's how long lawsuits take.

Yeah. So unless they say, I think Sonos is just going to keep filing and putting more and more pressure on Google. Because I think what they really want is for Google to come to table and make a deal that lets them do all the things they want to do. Right. I think winning a patent lawsuit, they'll get some money, but they're looking there so what you're saying is they're looking for a licensing deal from google it seems i think i think they're they're they're an old one of the things that son of patrick spence has told us several times is sonis isn't the lucky position of not being a startup right like they're an older company they've patented a lot of things they've been around for a while they're innovators in space they have an audience that loves them they sell products they make money and he's like

we just need to we need to get the leverage back whereas a startup would just sort of like get crushed. So we'll see, I mean, we'll see how goes, but this product to me, I think the reason they filed that lawsuit was because they may or may not have known the NEST audio was coming. And they're like, you're doing it again. They knew it was coming. We knew it was coming. The entire world knew what was coming at this event. Sonos knew as well. I mean, like, Sonos had people in every Best Buy in the country, or every home deep on the country. It was like July or August when FCC leaks of the NEST audio started having. So Google PR just like sent down an image. Here's our next speaker. And we're going to announce it in October.

It would be great if that was just a doctored photo of a loaf of bread. It's close enough, you guys. So we'll see. I mean, we got to get this stuff. We got to listen to it. I just think this is a super interesting time for this category of hardware in particular, right? Because the hardware has gotten to a place where it's all very good. And what we're really talking about is deals, ecosystem support, interoperability with Airplay 2.

we're talking about a very sophisticated set of decisions that help you buy, that help you choose what to buy, as opposed to just, does the hardware exist or the in the market? Is the interface refined? Does it have the various standards that we think it should have? That to me is deeply fascinating. And what you, if you remember when the HBO Max Roku fight has been heating up, along the way, what Warner Media has been saying is when, holiday buying season comes, the thing will change. They'll break. Because they can't sell Roku's without HBO Max. Now, whether or not you believe that, right? They're just like having access to all the Harry Potter movies. HBO believes.

It depends greatly on whether your stock portfolio includes HBO. Yeah, and whether HBO Max is successful, you know, hilariously in this conversation I'm saying they all have all the lights. HMOX does not support vision or atmos. Like, it's just, it's a weird

service. Or 4K. Or 4K. But HBO Max does support spatial audio on the AirPods Pro. Yeah, it's super confusing. Like, I don't want, I don't, there's a part of me that's like, man, I would love to watch these movies, but I'm not, I got all this stuff. Why would I watch it in lower quality? Like, so they've got some, some, but that's a fight. This holiday period is a fight because that's the upgrade cycle time. These are all cheap enough to be like, Dan, instead of Ness minis this year, you can be tossing Roku ultras at people like the candy. And so I think we'll see actually this logjam break, but right now, I think the difference for you're buying a Roku Ultra in a Chromecast, to me, Chris, is what services do you want on this thing?

What does it support? Yeah, and somehow Google is in the best position possible, which you wouldn't expect, but that's where we are. Especially after their history with cable companies. Like, Google TV was laid low. Before they had their IR blaster Google TV, they wanted to, like, make cable boxes. they were trying to just get in with all the cable companies and they got rebuffed. And they're like, well, what if we made our hour blasters and worked around all of you?

What if Sony made the world's most insane remote? That's beautiful. Well, we're here now. Everyone's learned a number of lessons. Well, one last thing on the Chromecast. Yeah. Do we think that it took Google seven years to add a remote to the Chromecast because they were so gun-shy and shell-shocked after the original Google TV? insanity remote. I think that there was a holy war between Chrome and Android, and it took a while

for that to simmer down and everyone to chill out, and then be like, okay, we'll just use Android. It doesn't matter that much. There was a great Wall Street Journal profile of Sundar Pichai, and there was this tidbit in it that I had, maybe it had been reported before, but it was like, oh, wow. And when he went in and got control of Android on his, like, March to become CEO, he went in and the thing that he did, the Wall Street Journal said that he clipped their ambition. He went and he said, we are not making everything Android at Google.

It's going to be too much of a fight. It's not worth it. You're not going to be the OS that does all the Google things. Chill out. But Google TV will be. Yeah. You can't be Android. Google TV, yeah, that sounds fine.

Absolutely. Well, we'll see how goes. We've got to get all the stuff. I mean, go to your local Home Depot. So read our review. Chris has already done it. Sorry on the website. We got all their stuff to review.

But it's that time of year. We'll be right back. We've got to talk with some of this Microsoft stuff. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

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Service ProX has been updated. There's a new Surface laptop Go, which is very much a netbook. Just be honest. And Tom has spent some time with the Xbox Series X. Yeah. Where do you want to start, Tudor? I mean, we could do Series X really quick. You should just go look at Tom's article, watch his very much,

video. It's very good. And the load times are great. And, you know, it's still early. We're still looking at like pre-production software. But bottom line, it's like, yep, they've definitely made a console. It definitely does the things that they, you know, like that sounds like it's whatever, but it's actually like not a guarantee that they wouldn't have completely screwed it up. But they still could. We haven't looked at the final software yet. But they're definitely making the things that load in the times that they say they're going to. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Go watch stuff. It's great. I mean, console season is also upon us, but I don't think we have no time to go fully into it, and we're going to have reviews of that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, surface laptop go. What I, this thing is just, it's so interesting. So it's 549 to start, but for 549, you don't get enough RAM and you get the slower EMMC storage. You don't get the biometric log in either. And you don't get the biometric log, you don't get the fingerprint sensor. But you do get the core I5. So like, head to head with a Chromebook, you do get a faster processor that'll like run Windows stuff a little bit better. Until you run out of RAM. Until you run out of RAM.

So it's a very confusing device because there's a world in which they save money on the processor and go down to... Dan, you tweeted about this. They go down to like an I3 or something and that lets them improve one of the other specs and they just didn't. It's really, it's an interesting line. So it starts at 550. You can spend

up to like $900 configuring this out. It's effectively a shrunk-down surface laptop 3, a little bit smaller screen, a little bit smaller form factor. a little bit lighter. But really what it seems like, the drive behind this product is to bring that price down and go head to head with the Chromebooks, like you mentioned.

But in order to bring that price down, they compromised a bunch of things because they really wanted to keep this core I-5 processor across the line. So now the screen is kind of lower-res. You mentioned the RAM on the base model's 4 gigabytes, which is really pushing it on a Windows 10 device in 2020. It's on 64-gig storage,

which, again, really pushing it on a Windows 10 device, and it's a slow storage. And you don't get the surface, what I think of as surface standards, that surface experience that you get with biometric logins and faster zoom and all that neat stuff, really gets compromised here.

You could spend more money and it will add a fingerprint sensor and you'll get more RAM and more storage, but then you're spending more money and you could just get a better laptop. So, like, it's kind of a weird thing, and I think, look, we haven't used it yet, we're going to be reviewing it. Monix is going to be getting a review unit of this, and we're obviously going to be testing it and seeing how it stacks up. But I think that the compromises they made

to get that processor in really are kind of weird when they could have. A core I3 processor is certainly capable for basic stuff, especially when you're looking at this $500 range of laptop and what people use them for. If you're able to pair that with a little bit faster storage, maybe 8 gigs of RAM, you can have a really great experience. Like the Chromebook Spin 713 is our current favorite Chromebook. Its sticker price is $629. You can frequently find it for under $600. It's got that core I5 processor, 8 gigs of RAM, twice a storage, and a bigger screen, and it performs great. And so in a head-to-head comparison, Microsoft is looking a little ye. Yeah, but they've got to be at that price point, even if it's not the one they sell the most

of, right? Like, you can tell that they're going to sell this. They're going to push the $700 configuration the most. Yeah. And maybe that they also made this, I mean, they made this so that they'd have that price out in the world. But maybe that they're going to sell just boatloads of these to schools. And maybe there was like, I don't know, the New York City demanded that they get a Core I-5. You know, like, I don't know. I mean, but once you start specking this out, right, you start running into the problem of like a Surface laptop three. Its regular price is $999.9.

It's been out for a year. You can find it on discount for $800 all day long. Same with the Surface Pro 7. You can find a discount. those have the faster storage, more RAM, they've got facial biometric login, they've got higher resolution screens, they've got all these things that we're saying are lacking from this one. So it's kind of weird. Maybe we'll see sales on this pretty quickly before the holiday season really kicks off.

Maybe not. I don't know. It seems like the same conflict as the surface go to that has like a really low price at $3.99, but it's got that weak processor and weak storage, and maybe not everyone buys that one. one you buy is $550 or $650, but at that point, you're getting really close to what a Pro 7 costs. Maybe you should just buy Pro 7 instead. Just the same conflict as I see with the go-to. But in the end, Pannos is getting your money. Never forget. Service Pro X, this seems interesting, right, because it has a faster addition of Microsoft's custom processor, which is arm-based.

Yeah, I will see. Faster is a relative term when it comes to armed. I thought that the original was fine for, like, you know, I had the whole thing where I use it, like, a Chromebook. This, I'm sure, will be fine for that as well? The big question to me is, will this faster processor mean that it can credibly run the upcoming X86-64-bit emulated apps? Because they're going to start emulating 64-bit apps instead of just 32-bit apps, which means that those, like, all the modern Windows apps, right? You can, like, for me, it's Lightroom, but there's people are madly that I always go to Lightroom, but there's plenty of others. you will be able to run pretty much any Windows app now instead of being limited by what can be emulated or what has been recompiled for Arm.

And that's either going to, I mean, that could go really badly. If that experience ends up being awful, it could sour people on this whole Arm experiment all over again. Yeah, I mean, you have to imagine that they've, those two announcements happen in parallel, right? We're expanding X86 on Arm support. Also, here's our new service. like it has a new arm processor. One hopes that they, the left hand is talking to the right.

I'm just reading this line about the SQ2 processor. Microsoft has once again worked with Qualcomm to customize it for the ProX. It's essentially a variant of Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8CX Gen 2 5G without 5G. And it's like, yep, that's what you want.

The expensive thing that kills the battery, just delete that, just draw box around it and don't print that part. I mean, this seems great. We got to get a lot. our hands on it, but I'm, I am, like, particularly happy that Microsoft is pushing this product. Yeah. Like, they didn't just give up on it.

Yeah. Like, they're pushing it forward. I bought one. I love it. I loved it. I ended up selling it so I could get a gaming PC, but, I mean, but I loved it, right? Well, look, I'm not leaving the house. I don't need an ultra-portable with LTE.

So. And that's why you should buy a $400 pixel phone. Yeah. Just to, you know, hang out. Have it make phone calls. Well, that's it. That's all the stuff. I mean, I was going to tease Deidre about the Apple Watch Six review.

I got it out the door. It's out there. It's out there. Go read it and go watch it. And we'll have more Apple Watch stuff coming. If you're wondering why it was late, it was because I had lost half a day, I lost half a day to an entire shoot of the video that I had to throw away because I shot bad audio. I also lost half a day going to the doctor to get a tetan shot because when I was trying to scout the location where I lost the half a day on bed audio, I got bit by a Chihuahua and I had to go get a tetan shot. Amazing. See, Chris is walking my...

Miles in the suburbs to get out announced Chromecast. Dieter's fighting off with yappy dogs. This is what we do for you. I had to test out the exercise too. So literally blood, sweat, and tears for this Apple Watch review. And you shouldn't buy one. It's the conclusion. If you have an Apple Watch, you don't buy one.

Like, it's like, if you've got a series four or five, don't buy one. If you've got a three and you're unhappy with it, sure. If you got something older, sure. If it's your first time buying an Apple Watch and you want it because it's the best one, sure. But Dan's got the SE and it seems like it's pretty good. Yeah, the SE seems like the one first-time buyers, for sure. One thing I'm going to call that, Nicole, our health reporter, Nicole Wetzman, had a great story this week about a study out of Mayo Clinic saying the ECG feature has too many false positives and since people are a doctor too often, which is all part of the story of

Apple releases the sensors, it backs into what they're good for. They're very proud of the ECG sensor, as they should be. But now that there's more rigorous data coming out, what is it good for is getting refined over time? Read the story. It's super interesting. She goes into the methodology of the study and how it worked, and she actually talked to the scientists. Just really kind of contextualizes where we are with this tech. One of the things I'm always thinking about is like sometimes we assume the tech works better than it does.

That's the case with the blood oxygen monitor, by the way, on the Appwatch Series 6. It just doesn't. The wrist is not a good place for it. Dave Lee did a great video where he just took it off his wrist and put it on his finger and it was like way more reliable. Yeah, so it needs a lot of blood to like work. And there's just not a lot of blood in the top of your wrist. And it's not just an apple problem. Since we're talking about Nicole, I'll plug her Whithing's Scanwatch review that went up earlier this week where Withings is trying to use it or Wythings, whoever you want to say that, is trying to use the same.

the same type of technology to detect sleep apnea, not super successful with it. She talked to a bunch of doctors to see if it was reliable or was a valuable thing. And they echoed the same concerns that in her report about the heart monitor is that it might cause people to call us more often. It's basically the gist. So go check that out. The Wythings is not available in the U.S. yet because in order to claim sleep apnea detection, they do need FDA clearance approval.

There's some real wonkiness with what those two words mean. but they need something from the FDA in order to sell it. So right now you can get it in Europe. They're still waiting for that from the FDA to sell in the U.S. And it's one of the interesting things that Apple is not making that claim so they can sell theirs. Yeah. And again, the strategies of these companies to bring health devices to market

without making the claims that they would make. It's just really interesting to watch, right? They're all kind of coming out through side angles. Anyhow, that's it. Thank you so much for this. We've gone over, which I say every week at exactly this. amount of time. But, you know, it's a journey. That's where we're on together. We've gone over, I'll say. You can tweet at us. Dieter is at Backlon. Dan is at D.C. Firt. Chris is at Chris

Welch. I got to, those are all right. D.C. C. Ferd. No. DCC. And I'm at Reckless. You tweeted us. Please send me any photos you have at ancient Sony Google TV remote. I just like see them in the wild. The full size keyboard. Glorious. The full size keyboard, the two joysticks. just knowing that that product was made and shipped. It just fills me with happiness. If we got one, send me a photo. I'd love to see it. We've got more reviews coming.

Like I said, we're in it. It's coming. So we've got more reviews coming out, more news happening, more events. We are expecting an Apple event sometime this month. So a lot's happening. We'll see. Oh, Deeter, what's happening on Tuesday show? On Tuesday, we have your average consumer.

You may know him from YouTube. And we are going to be talking about a review of a product that you're not expecting. Wealth history. I let Dieter have the Tuesday show. It got all wild and wacky. Maybe go to your Home Depot and see if it's there. All right.

That's it. Rock and roll. Vote.