The Vergecast - Google I/O, Android O, and Assistant on the iPhone

Episode Date: May 19, 2017

Fresh out of my export folder is a brand new episode of The Vergecast. This week, because of the business that is Google I/O, we recorded our episode Friday morning. This resulted in Nilay’s attempt to bring a morning show vibe to episode 257, despite Dieter, Adi, Natt, and Paul’s (and my) disapproval of sound effects. There was a lot to discuss thanks to Google’s developer conference, so here it is! Enjoy! 06:43 - Google is finally replacing its bad emoji blobs in Android O 13:59 - Google Assistant is on the iPhone now 24:41 - Google wants the Assistant to be everywhere — but first it needs to conquer the iPhone 31:46 - Android O 37:40 - Google is adding Kotlin as an official programming language for Android development 45:37 - Google AR / VR 1:01:25 - Ford update brings Android Auto and Apple CarPlay to its 2016 fleet 1:06:50 - New Surface Pro leak confirms Microsoft's hatred for USB-C 1:07:28 - AMD is bringing its new Ryzen processors to laptops later this year 1:08:15 - FCC votes to begin overturning net neutrality Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. The flagship podcast of Theverge.com, which is just our website, but we have all these other things, too. We have an Instagram. The flagship podcast of YouTube.com slash The Verge. How's that? It's a big week. We got all kinds of things going on. I want to jump right into it.

No inside jokes. No nonsense. Paul Miller is here. Hello, Paul. Hello. Nack Aaron is here. It's me. Dieter Bone and Addy Robertson are together in San Francisco because Adi,

is at Google I.O. What's up, guys? Hey. We got a full boat. The flagship is full. Step in over. Help. Can you have a flagship in an armada of one podcast? Yes. Is that allowed? It's just by definition of the flagship. You have ideas for podcasts. There's some kinds of podcasts I want to do.

I think we should do a culture podcast. I want Casey to do something. But, you know, Walt's podcast is winding down. So we're going to be down to one. so we need more. So if you, if you, the listener, have ideas for them, let us know. I'm very curious what you guys want out of. And you can't just be like, I want Vlad. Like, you get Vlad.

I promise. You get Vlad, but we need like a show idea. Do you understand what I'm saying? Tell us about like an unsolved mystery. Yeah. What if Vlad show is headphones on headphones? And you have to listen to it with headphones. It's just the sound of Vlad wearing more and more headphones over time.

And every episode ends with like a test tone so you can test the quality of the headphones that you're using. This seems like more like a weird asthma sort of live stream thing. Like you just keep it on all the time. It's not podcast. Yeah. It's just a sound. No, I mean like I'm saying I love Vlad. I want Vlad to be more involved in everything we do. But like when you give me a podcast request, you can't just request people.

I want like, what do you want the show to be about? But send them to me because I'm really interested. I don't think we should just have one podcast. I love that you thought we were going to start not having inside jokes and that we forced you to doing nothing but talk about Verge stuff for the first three minutes of this podcast. Well, here's the real inside joke of the whole show. I've been thinking about this all night, and I'm saying all night specifically because it is now morning. We usually record this show on Thursday afternoons, but it's 10 a.m. when we're recording on Friday here on the East Coast. For Addy and Dieter, it is 7 a.m. on the West Coast.

So we got a real morning zoo crew vibe. Oh, God. I got a whole soundboard here. Oh, yeah. So you're saying, in the time since Thursday afternoon, until right now, 10 a.m. Eastern, you've been working on this zoo zoo crew reference? Yeah, that's all I've been doing. Okay.

No, I've been finding sound boards. So please be warned that I might be making sound effects the entire show. But anyway, look, none of that is important. What is important is Google I. So, Addy, Deeter, you're there. Nat, you've been running our coverage on the East Coast. Deeter, you wrote, I think, the big piece out of it about assistant and what's happening with AI.

Addie, even talking about what they're doing with VR, which seems also very foundational. But, Deeter, I want to start with you. What's the gestalt of Google right now? What's their vibe? They are very chill. The whole event was also very chill. Like, everyone's like, what's going on? And they're like, yeah, you know, we're just doing our stuff.

We just, you know, took all the stuff we had last year and we're making it better to this year. And you would, you'd walk around, like, they call it the sandbox. I don't know. That's just because it's a developer conference. I don't know, whatever. It's a joke, a developer joke. But it's, they have it at the, it's a parking lot of domes. It's a parking lot of domes.

They have it at the shoreline amphitheater, an outdoor theater, amphitheater. And then there's a giant parking lot zone that they fill up sort of like a county fair, but it's filled with like weird domes and giant tents. And this year they added about 30% more shade and 50% more air conditioning. So nobody would die of heat stroke. Although there was a kitchen fire that apparently injured somebody yesterday. I feel so bad for missing the fire. Yeah.

I was not there when that happened. I was off at the Google campus doing Google things. Anyway, it was not a huge giant crowd. I went to places and like there were like, obviously, you know, thousands of people. I think it was 7,000 people, which just maybe is more than they ever had before, who knows? But you would walk into one of these little domes, and I would go around, I'm going to go find some stuff to take video of for Circuit Breaker. And I'd walk in, and it would be eight people standing around little tiny booths in Google shirts and nobody else.

And I would walk in, and they would turn around and look at me and go, hi. I'd be like, hi, hi, guys. And I would, I would, I would Homer Simpson into the hedge out of the dome. to go to the next one to see what was going on? This sounds like the worst marketing campaign for the circle ever. You're actually in a David Kronenberg movie. Yeah, yeah. But like that, to me, that was, I mean, they got busy. Like the domes got busy a little bit later.

But like if you showed up at like, you know, 10 in the morning at one of these domes, it was just like, everybody was out at a session or like chilling. It was just a lot of like general chilling. And the news itself was generally, I don't know, chilling, not terrifying chilling. Maybe a little chilling. The keynote was literally chilling to my body physically. It was cold. I know I have been complaining about this,

but it's because it actively impeded my ability to work because my hands resisted. Yeah. So our copy editor, Kara Verlady, I do not envy her because I, when I was trying to live blog, literally just gave up not making typos because my right pinky finger was so cold. I couldn't feel it. It was like 60, you know, whatever. but it was breezy. And so I couldn't arrow key over to fix typos

because I couldn't feel where my pinky finger was. And so I just said, fuck it and hit enter, like over and over again. So you're saying next year, instead of giving out sunscreens, they should give out blankets and gloves. Next year,

yeah, I'm going to buy a pair of fingerless gloves. That's what's going to happen. I feel like more a heating pad. If I had a heating pad, sort of around my hand, maybe. Yeah, I don't know,

is that an accurate description of the vibe at I. It was very chill. It's, which sort of made it on to the site where everything is like, Google was kind of boring this year, but that's actually really good. Yeah.

Yeah. I think Vlad wrote a piece that's like, it's time for Google to be boring. And then they were like, and then they did it. Well, after you. We heard you. But some of the stuff isn't boring, right? I want to start with where Nat wants to start. They're changing the emoji in Android, which I think is like, honestly, the biggest news at

Google I.O. is that you don't have to deal with the blobs anymore. Wait, hold on. I love the blobs. You love the blobs? It might mean the minority here, but I love the blobs. very upset they're going away. It's very bittersweet. Wait, why do you love the blobs?

No. Because there's so, I don't know, there's so much character in them. And like, beyond the blobs, even the animals are changing. Like, the cat now looks like a tiger, which I'm not a fan of. All cats are tigers. Well, you know, like, before it was like a really cute kitten-looking thing

and now it's like this weird stripe thing, which I don't really see as a cat. Anyway, and also like the clown somehow managed to look even more menacing than before, which is terrifying. Not a fan. But anyway, I missed the blobs. They were cute, and they look like adorable little things.

And now the new one is just, like, generic and round. And I don't know, probably on par with how bad Samsung's emojis are. And that's pretty bad. This is part of, like, an ongoing thing for me that makes me really unsettled by emojis. One thing that accompanies, one thing that accompanies, like, most of the... multi-billion-dollar company can add to my vocabulary, but that they can now, like, change my inflection in this, you know, like, we've redesigned your language now. Yeah, and it's crazy.

So this is what your words look like. Right. It's crazy how emotionally tied people are to these emoji. It's just, like, at the end of day, it's just, like, a bunch of freaking icons, but, like, people have legit feels about these things changing. The thing that gets me, though, is that if what it looks like on your phone, it looks like on your phone is not necessarily what the person that you're sending it to sees. Yeah, totally.

Right. So, like, it's weird because they're redesigning your language, but they're also redesigning what people are saying to you. So if an iOS user sends you an emoji, before they were like, they, I assume most people think you receive what you send, right? Right. Right. And you do not.

Well, it's, it's been like that way for a while. So this is a problem with the grimace, right? Like on some phones, the grimace actually looks like a smile. And this is a particular problem on Samsung phones. So while I don't have... Oh, my God, the Samsung grimace is the worst. I don't have any particular affinity for the blobs. I actually don't hate, hate them.

I think they're fine. They do have, like, they're like, they're like, because they're trying to look like the Android robot, they've got these, like, cute fat little necks, basically. They're just, they're just, the Android blobs are just, they're really jowly, right? Like, jolly emoji is cute. I mean, I just, I think I think of emoji,

totally differently from this that when I'm in Slack, I hover over the emoji to see what the text is. I just think of this like a font. Like, yeah, it matters when Google changes my fonts, but it's not, it is redesigning my language in a fairly subtle way. I guess this is a little more obvious. It matters because traditionally, when you send a sign. Are you an emoji traditionalist?

No, what I'm saying, no, I'm saying language. I'm talking semiotics here. When you write a letter, the other person sees the letter. No, it's like when you write something in cursive and somebody would change the font drastically or they would OCR it and translate it into text. It's different, but it's like Nietzsche typewriter different. Right, but like this thing is like built into the technology of transmitting the sign from me to you changes what the sign looks like and possibly means. But that's always happened. Yeah, but this is a different, this is a different inflection because it literally depends on what device you're using.

Like, when I sent you a letter, you would see the literal physical thing I wrote on the letter. when I sent you up, when I typed something, you see the literal physical thing that I type, but there's like, the translation is different because you're using an iPhone and I'm using a Samsung phone. Like, I don't know that what I'm sending you

is literally going to be displayed in the same way. That like, because the, because emoji are, they're essentially glyphs, right? They visually represent the motion that they're meant to convey. A letter is supposed, is abstracted. It's abstracted away from the emotion.

And so if the letter looks different, it's okay. What you're getting is the abstraction. If an emotion, If the emoji looks different, it conveys the thing it's meant to convey by the way that it looks by like a being literally a smiley face. And if that literal smiley face looks different, I can't trust that you are receiving the thing I'm intending to send because the layer of abstraction that actually protects us and makes communication possible is going away. Wait, I have that. I don't think of emoji as being like.

I don't care what it looks like. I think of it as a letter or like a glyph or a symbol. Right. I totally just, it does not matter to me what it looks like as long as I know this is the sad. emoji. Well, that's because people, I think people generally like you and they don't send you a bunch of grimaces when you talk to them. I, on the other hand, receive nothing but grimaces. And I don't know if maybe they're trying to smile or they're actually just really grinding their teeth at me. But usually it's the teeth grinding. I have to say, in terms of being a wacky morning show,

we have immediately failed. I could not, I'm looking at a whole list of sound effects here and I just don't know which one to play. Semiotic. I'll see Liz, I don't, like, I think you guys are thinking of emoji as a very, like, utilities type of thing. And for me, I just use emoji because, like, sometimes I'm trying to convey a feeling. That's literally how I see myself. So, like, maybe I like the blobs because I identify as a blob. I think the point here, it, we, there's all this news that we should talk about. But emoji is complicated.

It's so much more complicated. than anyone actually gives it credit for because it's how we communicate. And the nexus between what Deeter is saying and what Adi is saying is when you sent, if I was to send text to somebody through a system and it changed the font, I would be like, that sucks, but it's okay because you're still reading my words. But if it just actually changed the meaning, and it depends on how much meaning you was signed to the emoji. And that is like a complicated philosophical question that Google's like,

yeah, we're going to make you contend with it now. No, but they're actually, they're making it better because they are the, they change, they're changing their emojis to look just a little bit more like like the standard emojis that Apple or Twitter are making. And so what they're doing is they're like, they're moving, they've moved their emojis more towards not being identical to like a universal set of emoji, but like closer to what other, to other platforms make their emoji look like. So like, that's right.

They're like, they're pulling away some like cute, unique. character from Android. And so that's like, that's, it's maybe going to make that communication better and add less friction to it, but it's going to change it. Well, I can confidently say that emoji unification will be an ongoing theme, the flattening emoji discrepancy. I think language wars were probably a thing at the early development of language. This is like the divergence of dialects and we're going to see which one wins and which one

dies. Maybe. I wonder if there were zoo crew shows during the early development. of language. Anyway, Deeter, I want you to talk about assistant because it's what, it's coming to the iPhone. It is gaining all these new capabilities are all kind of small.

Tell me more. I was going to try and list off all like 20 features that they're adding, but Safari is garbage fire and it's frozen. So here's the news. They announced the Google Assistant last year, and it was, everybody was like, okay, whatever.

and it's Google's version of Siri, why don't you give it a name? And this year they're like, no, we're here. We've got Google Home now. We've got them on watches now. It works on cars now. Now we're adding it to the iPhone. And we're like solidifying our story that assistant is a separate thing from search. And there are just here's a million features that we're adding.

Like a bunch of different languages. It works with a Chromecast. You can do Google Actions, which is the Google equivalent of Alexa, skills on phones now. Like just down the line, they just like layered on a million features. And to me, the story of what they're doing with assistant is they are actually building a foundation for this thing to actually matter as an assistant and not just be a thing that you use to set alarms with.

And the thing that Google is doing this year that they didn't do in previous years when they tried to like talk about AI on the phone, like Google now or now on tap, is they're not saying this thing is great, you should go use it because it's going to change to the future. It's the, this is the way everything's going to work. They're saying, yeah, it's the assistant. It's got a ways to go, but it's probably better than everybody else's. And that's kind of the zone where they talked about it.

The context to think of it in is the assistant story runs parallel to this other like AI and machine learning story that they're telling, which isn't necessarily directly connected to a consumer product, but is actually like Google's biggest moat, biggest strength as a company outside of like owning the entire ad market on the internet, which by the way isn't a bad strength. But that's like what they're doing with that the stuff when you fell asleep and they started talking about TensorFlow and like learning algorithms is like actually the thing that makes them more powerful than other companies.

I, the, the standout thing for me was this screen thing. because in a way it was like, we made an echo show too. And you already have the screen and you don't have to buy another thing. You don't have to have another. And there's something I really like about that. Like Chromecast on a Google assistant and like Google Home and stuff is already pretty slick. But this idea of utilizing a screen that is already in your home is kind of, it's kind of cool to me. It seems like next level.

It seems like futuristic that like automatically like the screens around. you should reconfigure to what you want to be doing right now. And if right now you want to be talking to Google Assistant, why shouldn't contextual information be showing up on your TV? I really like... It's good that you called it futuristic, because none of this shit is launching until sometime in the future. I just want to explain what Paul is talking about.

So one of the new features of Google Assistant is that it can display... I wouldn't call it an interface, but display information to a Chromecast that's plugged into a TV or a cast-enabled TV. or your phone. It'll also shoot stuff to your phone if you don't have a cast TV. Anyway, keep going. Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that.

But you can say, show me my calendar and your TV will let up and show your calendar. You can say, show me what's on YouTube and your TV will let up and actually show you the information, or show you the videos you can watch YouTube and then you can pick one. There's a lot there, particularly you have to trust that HDMI CEC will, like, light up your TV, or you have to leave your TV on all the time. but I tweeted that and you know Matt McCrae the CTO Vizio which makes cast enabled TVs was like or you just buy cast enabled TV which of course you would say because he sells them but that is to me that's like the it's as Paul is saying that creates the sense that you're surrounded by

ambiently smart screens everywhere that you are and what you're doing is is linking them all to one thing and I to one service or one intelligence that's helping you right an assistant if you will I think Chromecast is really smart because it forces Google to think of how its cloud services can display on TV instead of thinking of the TV as a computer unto itself, which I think, and I thought for a long time, is the big split in sort of like TV device methodology. And the computer way is kind of like diverging along one path. And this is just another screen for the cloud with what Google's doing here is kind of taking the next. step along its path. I think this is actually in the original, the guy who defined the term ubiquitous computing, the thing that he was describing was very much like, you wake up and you talk and your like ambient world like computer shows things on screens and knows exactly

what you want. Yeah. But at the same time, Deeter, you did a whole hands-on with like the new version of Android TV. Yeah. Like they're doing that too. It's Google. It's like, yeah, we're doing that too. We actually, I actually forgot to bring up like one of the other really exciting things is Google has taken a bunch of its image recognition stuff and actually put it together in something they're calling Google Lens and they're going to just throw that at a bunch of products.

So they're throwing it at Google Photos, which got a huge update, or is getting a huge update, and they're throwing it at the assistant. So now when you open up the assistant on an iPhone or an Android phone, you can have a keyboard input, you can have a voice input,

or you can have a camera input. And it basically will just take information from you whatever way you want to give it to it. Yeah. I remember actually Paul, the day Siri came out, I remember you asking, why can't I just type to this thing? Yeah. I think you might have written a piece about it.

Probably. So I downloaded Assistant and I put it on my, you know, in the widgets on iOS. I made it the top widget. So I could just tap it and then like go into the interface. And then like the first five questions that I typed to Google Assistant, Google Assistant's like, I don't know what's going on. Yeah. I would say it got off to a very.

rocky start. Presumably it will get better because it's designed to learn. But that first day, just the number of tweets I saw of people being like, this thing has no idea what it's doing right now. Is it the same assistant? Is it tied into the same back end? Or is it like learning from the beginning on the iPhone, what iPhone people want to ask? I mean, it should already know the stuff that your Google account knows about you. Like, what kind of stuff was it not able to answer? Let me pull it up. I mean, it's like everything. It's like the base. It's like, the base, The basic, like, literally things like, tell me a joke, like the things that you would expect, it's like, I'm, I don't know. I just got here. Oh, wow.

Wait, really? Can you try? Can you ask Google Assistant right now, Paul, to tell us a joke? I'm assuming it's better now. I'm just saying that very first minute it was available. It was just failing for me all over the place. One joke coming up. Why can't a Tyrannosaurus clap? Short arms? It's extinct. I don't even do it. That is so dark. So I asked Google Assistant, what can you do? And it gave a list of cards and stuff.

I said, do you ever want to just chat? And the assistant said, my apologies, I don't understand. And I said, what's up? And Google Assistant said, just searching for answers to the lives, whatever, I said, can you play video on my TV? Right? I have a cast-enabled TV and I want to learn more about this. And then I found this on Google.

and something, a Google support of a page for Google Play. Then I said, do you work with Chromecast? And I got like some about page for Chromecast. I said, open YouTube on my TV. And said, sorry, I don't know how to open that, but I'm still learning. And then I said, I don't know why I said this. I said, define inquiry. That's also a command that Dieter accepts.

Fund them. Funding that way. Actually, I accept all those. Yeah, I think it's just like it's new. Whatever. Like, it'll get better. But that first day, and I think this is emblematic, like we've been saying, of everything Google did at I.O. It's not, most of it's not even going to come out for a few weeks or months. And the rest of it, the promise is it will get better. But like, here's the next little step. And that's a really hard problem for Google. Like, Apple comes out as like,

all right, we did a thing. We're going to explain why it matters. And you're going to be able to buy it tomorrow or, you know, in two weeks. So, like, sometimes it's a big deal. Like, you know, I don't know. Not that the Apple Watch is a big deal. But, like, they came out. They said, here's the thing. Here's why it exists.

Here's what we're doing with it. Here's all the stuff you need to know about it. Go buy it. Google's like, all right, we did a thing. Here's 5% of the story. Over the next year or two, it's going to be amazing. Hang on. It's coming soon.

Okay. I do think Google could have a problem going forward. if they can't keep all of their platforms that support assistant at parity, because they feel like one of the best ways that you learn about features that something like a new interface like this does is that your friends tell you. So if your friend is having some great experience with assistant, and they tell you about it, and then you try it with whatever device you have that access is assistant,

and that feature is not available to you, I feel like that could be a problem. Yeah, especially because now they're adding it to like washing machines and refrigerators. Literally washing machines. Yeah, what should you expect a conversation with your washing machine to be like? I mean, how long is this going to be over? No, my washing machine relationship is extremely complicated, actually. I mean, when I had one.

Yeah, I only have one friend. It's my oven. Again, I just like to point out, I've been trying so hard to capture that Zucru vibe, and now we're, like, Tyrannosaurs are extinct. We're only friends with major appliances. we have no idea what those relationships should be like. Paul, tell us, what's the traffic like today, buddy?

Like outside? Oh, and you? There's a lot of big trains are down. I feel like the red trains are down and the green trains are down. So a lot of people are having some commute probs. And apparently in San Francisco, it's very cold to the point that Deeter can't type.

So there's the weather for the week. Here's what I want to do. Deeter, just real wrap up. You wrote a long piece about AIs the UIO. I did. You also, I know you spent some time after the event sort of talking to executives. Just give me kind of the top level of what's happening with AI in Google.

And then I want to read an ad and we should come back and talk about Android and VR. So, I mean, there's like the thing I wrote in the piece, which is all computer revolutions happen because the distance or the difference between the thing you used to input information and the thing the computer uses to spit information back out at you gets smaller. And I think that for Google, it believes that, like, it's like the thing that fundamentally the things that computers are going to do in the future is to be artificial intelligence machines. And if the computer's thinking brain is also the thing that you directly interact with by talking to it or typing at it or whatever, that it's going to change the way that, like, computers work. And so when you hear Sundar, Pachai get on stage and, say we're moving from a mobile first to an AI first world, that thing, which is like just a

giant cliche that just sounds like totally empty, is actually pointing at that idea. Like, I don't know, this thing called TensorFlow, it's their, it's their, like, name for all the stuff that they do in open source when it comes to like machine learning. And they have a chip, which they call a TPU. So there's a CPU, which you know what that is. There's the GPU. You know what that is. The TPU is like a GPU, but it's for AI instead of for graphics.

They've made these things. They're like, they're leasing them out on their cloud so you can like buy time using them and they're more effective. They're also now good, not just at like spitting out the things that machine learning knows. It's also good for training it. And they do this insane thing. Man, it's really granted. But stick with me for a second. So when you're training a machine learning computer, you give it.

a giant data set. You give it a million pictures of cats. And then it takes those million pictures of cats and it runs an algorithm and then it like takes a subset. It's like, okay, these are probably cats. These are probably cats. These are probably cats. These are probably cats.

And at the top is like, yep, this is a cat. And what Google does is instead of like throwing one algorithm at the problem, they throw 50 algorithms at the problem. And then it takes every single one of those 50 algorithms and it puts it inside another algorithm and then it uses that algorithm to figure out which one is the best one. Does that make sense? It uses neural networks and machine learning to pick better machine learning algorithm. Right. So instead of a data set of cats that it's applying an algorithm to, it's a data set of algorithms. Which is important. And something they said on stage is that machine learning is obviously

revolutionizing like a ton of stuff for us right now, but is very much limited to basically PhDs and like a few other experts. Like it's a, it's a very specialized knowledge. Well, yeah, so Google actually edit the keynote by trying to counteract that by like putting a high school student on a video who like picked up and learned TensorFlow

and like used it to improve breast cancer, or not treatment breast cancer diagnosis. So like they really believe that the next app developers are going to be like Google machine learning developers. Right. I don't know if that's true because I think you're right that like it is primarily, still in the academic realm right now.

Yeah, well, they can make it accessible. And I think that's why it actually is a very important statement that this, this TPUV2, which by the way was my gadget of the week. It's gone now. But the TPUV2, so like the current gen TPU was used for AlphaGo, right? So it has the algorithm that's already been built, kind of embedded in it, and it can run that algorithm. algorithm really fast. The fact that the new TPU can be used for training new algorithms is really exciting because there's a lot of these problems that are really exciting, but can only kind of

be worked on by companies of like Google and Facebook scale. Because they'll have to, like, they have to take a million pictures of cats and they have to run it for, for, you know, days or weeks. And, you know, they have to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of computing time to get the answers. So it's not technology that's really available to everybody. And so if you can get a lot cheaper to train these things, then there's a lot more developers that can bring their own problems to this technology and hopefully solve. So I am hoping that we see a lot, a much wider diversity of problems that are solved with this technology. And I think, I think Google is doing everything right with TensorFlow.

Like, developers had a huge range of choices of machine learning frameworks, and Google has just worked so hard on TensorFlow. And then also by hardware accelerating it, you know, developers still have a lot of choices, but they're just all choosing TensorFlow. So good job. Well, it's nice to see something being chosen on technical merits, and it's not, you know, it's not all lock in right now. Eli, were you silent because you were trying to find another zoo crew sound effect right there? 100%. There's not a great zoo crew sound effect. I'm just going to play Hale the Chief.

That's all I got right now. Anyways, that was my weekly gadget segment that I do every week called Tensoring with the Flow. That's good. Unfortunately, the theme song to your segment is now Hale to the Chief. So there we are. Okay, I got to read this ad. And we're going to come back. We've got to talk about Android.

We got to talk about VR, and there's a bunch of other little Google stuff to talk about, but those two are important. This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Squarespace. Whatever your next big idea might be, count on Squarespace to help you create an eye-catching online platform that brings it to life. Whether you need a portfolio to showcase your work, a store to sell your products and services, or a blog to share your ideas, Squarespace gives you everything you need to look like an expert right from the start. Even get a unique domain, which strengthens your brand and makes it easier for visitors to find you. Plus, with Squarespace award-winning templates, creating a beautiful website is simple and intuitive. You can add and arrange your content and features to click of a mouse, and there's nothing

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All right, we're back. Deeter, yeah, Nat. Nat, you've been using Android-O, right? You wrote our preview. Yeah. Tell me what's going on. And Deere, tell me what you've been seeing there. Well, the problem is there's not a lot of things that you can do right now.

I mean, when I first tried to develop a preview, there was a lot of stuff that we saw in the back end, and we were like, this looks like stuff that's coming, but I can't use any of it right now. Like, there's picture in picture. Awesome. I can't use it because it's not readily. available. And this week, it's like Google finally says, hey, you can watch YouTube and then, like, minimize the screen and do other stuff while you're watching YouTube. But that literally just

happened. So it's like a lot of people aren't going to be able to use this yet. Only this week did it become actually sort of safe to download Android O and not wreck your phone. And even still, I think like fairly limited amount of devices can use the beta, right? Dieter. Yeah, I think that's right. I'm sure it's like mostly just pixels right now. Yeah, it's like a bunch of old nexus and pixels. I think that the most important Android O announcement didn't happen at Google I.O. They did announce it before Google I.O. It didn't even get stage time.

I think they were reticent to talk about it on stage because they didn't want to raise expectations too much. But the most important update in Android O, in my opinion, isn't like the battery improvements. I think they're interesting because they're finally doing what Apple does and telling background applications to piss off and shut down. But the most important thing is Project Treble, which is they are re-architecting Android such that they're modularizing it so that they can send out updates faster. And they are putting like manufacture customizations like basically in a box so that chip makers and Google can push out updates faster and push out updates with like less having to have fewer conversations with. both carriers and like the people that make like Android skins.

It's a very, very open question about whether or not a company like Samsung is going to stay inside the nice little box that Google has constructed for them inside the OS. But if they're actually successful at it, it could mean maybe that Android might actually get updated on phones on a more regular basis. If you step back and look at Android updates, Google has built an amazing. very, very good system for updating Android. There's another partition, so the entire operating system downloads in the background

on the other partition, and then when it's time to update, you just switch to the new partition and your old one's there in case it goes wrong. There is this new treble system where all the custom crap gets put in a box and they can update around it so you don't have to wait for Samsung to approve it

or wait for Verizon to approve it. They've built an amazing system, except for the most important part, which is like actually having leverage, like actual like money and like political leverage over carriers and manufacturers to get them pushed out quickly. This is going to be an unpopular opinion.

And by the way, I'd like to remind everybody, inform everyone, the Archer theme was just Dieter's ringtone, not me doing Zucru stuff. But to me, and this is going to be unpopular, but bear with me. I think the Android fragmentation, situation is worse, not better. It's harder for me to know what a given Android device is going

to do when or how it's going to behave when. And the here's Android, oh, it's really exciting, can do all this stuff, but I have several devices that are still running like lollipop. You know, like it's, and all the things that Samsung is doing, which is easily the most important Samsung distribution out there, are way off in another direction. And I don't know. There was a time when I was very confident in my knowledge of what every version of Android could do that was around me. And now I feel like I'm spending more and more time thinking about what version of Android I'm holding in my hand. Does that make any sense?

Yeah. Well, thank you. That segment of the Vurchgas has come to an end. Honestly, like, that's true, but like the only fragmentation that matters is Samsung. I'm sorry, HG. I'm sorry, LG. Love you guys. But if those phones are a little bit fragmented, like the 200,000 people on the planet that buy them, like they'll figure it out because they love those companies and they really are bought into that vision. But the one that matters is Samsung because that's the one that like sells the most.

And whatever Google can do to like make sure that Samsung stays a little bit in line, the better. It matters in the U.S., right? Because worldwide there are like in China, they're very dominant companies. Yeah, well, China's a whole other story because Google Play isn't in China. And so, like, a bunch of the other stuff that Google is doing, like, Google Protect, where they, like, actually show you how Google Play keeps your phone safe from malware. Like, the core of how Google renders HTML has basically switched to Chrome. And that is also getting updated directly through the Google Play Store.

So there's, like, there was this Android fireside chat at, like, 6.30 p.m. yesterday, which is why we're recording late, by the way. And like the question that got the second most applause was, hey, Android's open source. You're all Android people. That's great. But it seems like more and more crap is getting pushed through the Google Play Store, which is all Google stuff. And so why is Android feel like half of what matters is like Google stuff, not Android stuff? And like, is that stuff ever going to get open source?

And I kid you not, the Android team was like, yeah, you know what? You should ask Google that. Wow. Okay. That's something. Well, Google Play, but yeah. The most applause, by the way, by far, was for Kotlin. Yeah.

Paul? Yeah, boy. Paul. This is literally your moment to shine. I know. I know. I was like, the evening before, I was literally on a web page that was like differences between Kotlin and Java.

Again, classic Zootland. crew bet right there. Okay. Kotlin is a programming language created by a Russian IDE company called JetBrains. And JetBrains is very popular. They make Intelli, which is like a very successful Java IDE. And Google uses IntelJ for its Android studio that it gives to developers to make Android apps.

So, like five or six years ago, this company, JetBrains, decided to make another programming language because we didn't have enough and called it Kotlin. And it's very much like Java. But it really, one of the biggest problems with Android development is, for one, they've been stuck on like an old version of Java for a while. So they haven't gotten a lot of new features. and they are about to get a bunch of new features from Java 8. But also Java just sucks, especially for... It's actually, you know, it's really well suited for a very large corporation that wants to have, you know, meetings and procedures about every single thing. But for the, you know, the one or two person app development team, it's really intimidating.

and it's a ton of boilerplate and it's just it's very verbose and it has a lot of strictures on how you can do things and so the idea behind Kotlin is just like basically a better Java and one of the nice things about it is it has this crazy interoperability with Java so that you can they actually showed this demo that was pretty crazy where they like literally copy and pasted some Java code and then pushed a button in their fancy ID, and it turned into Kotlin code. So the transition for development, because the obvious parallel is Apple introduced the Swift programming language, which is something that they developed. The transition between Objective C and Swift has been fairly long and it's still not complete, and in some cases,

a little painful because they're just very different languages. But Kotlin is so similar to Java, it's easy to conceive of a lot of developers wanting to move over and having a very, it looks like a very easy time moving over. Giving an example, just to make it more understandable, of a concrete benefit you get out of Kotlin. Well, one of the, okay, so are you familiar with objective, object oriented program? Sure. Let's assume for the sake of this super show. So you're going to make a class, right? But all you want to do with the class that you're creating is store some data, right? So what do you need for any data class in Java?

You've got to have getters and setters. Getters and setters. Getters and setters, right? Am I right? Yeah. So they showed this demo where there was this like probably like 400, word, that's the wrong one. Let's say like 30 or 40 lines of Java code to create a data class that is basically like, I'm going to store some information and you'll be able to modify it

and I'll give you the information back. That's all it's really doing. And so they showed that here's the Java code and then here's the one line of Kotlin code that does all of that. You just declare a data class in Kotlin and it will do all the best practices of like wiring it up to be to have like these getters and setters getters so it'll make it faster for developers to write apps and presumably simpler yeah that's a user what's the benefit that you'll you would see over time well the big one is that for one a lot of developers avoid using Java and so they've been using other frameworks. There's a bunch of, I actually wanted to touch on this, but I'll get to it. Some developers don't like Java and might avoid Java and therefore won't work on Android. And so you'll possibly

attract more people willing to port their iOS apps over or to try Android who didn't want to mess with Java because Java is so loathed. And then the other thing is that theoretically you'll have like faster iterations or if Kotlin is as good as a lot of people are saying it is, it will make it easier to develop apps. And if it's easier for developers develop apps, then you'll get better apps and your apps will be updated more frequently and they will improve over time. But the thing I've been thinking about a lot is that there's iOS and there's Android. And right now, some of the best tools to make iOS and Android apps, are not made by Apple or Google.

Facebook has done a lot of work, and Microsoft just announced a lot of stuff. There's a lot of work in companies outside of Apple because the only companies that want you to only develop apps for iOS or Android are Apple and Google. Every other company wants to have their apps everywhere. So Google has done a little bit to have a cross-plagery.

to have like a cross-platform framework. Apple has done absolutely nothing to have a cross-platform framework. Microsoft has some cross-platform stuff. Facebook has some cross-platform stuff. So I think it's an interesting time because

mobile platforms are so well-defined and we know most of what they do and most of what the user interfaces are like and most of the features that you need to support. And so there's kind of this huge push in the developer community

create better tools for developers and whoever does the best job of that could kind of win in the next generation I don't know if Kotlin really helps with that other than shoring up current Android developers and possibly attracting new ones but Kotlin also has some stuff that would be possibly cross-platform

there's so much, I don't know I'm getting in the way. But this is why there's like wild applause for it, right? I mean it feels like a dramatic upgrade to the life of an Android developer, because we've heard for a long time that making Android apps is somewhat more irritating than making an iPhone app.

Right. Yeah, it shows that Google cares at all about that. Yeah, and they're not just punting you off to somebody else's framework. They're really developing tools and working with JetBrains. I mean, that's the thing. Kotlin is another example of people

outside of Apple or Google wanting to create tools that work across platforms and that are really easy to use and that are very focused on developer productivity in ways that Apple and Google never seemed to quite grasp. And so it seems like they did a really good job of that. And so it's really cool for Google to embrace that instead of ignoring it. Nice. Okay.

We got to talk about AR and VR. Yeah, yeah. Okay. We have to. So Google did a thing that people have been thinking it would for a long time and introduced an all-in-one headset with inside out tracking, which sounds really wonky. But the upshot is that you don't have to put together all of these parts. You just have one headset and you don't have to put a phone in it.

You can turn it on. It runs. And you don't have to set up cameras or trackers or anything because it uses edge detection to map the room and basically create its own markers. So it knows like this is a table. This table is like three feet away. I can use this and you can actually walk around in VR without having something creating boundaries for you. Is that what Tango did a little bit? It is exactly what.

what Tango did. That's what's cool. It's based on that technology? Yeah. So they basically took Tango, which they've had for a few years, but it's on like two phones, and they took Daydream, which is the VR platform they introduced last year that's Android-based, and they put those things together. But isn't Daydream kind of nowhere? Like what's the, what is the status of Daydream? Because I have a pixel and I want to use it, but I don't think it's anywhere else. So they did the one thing that they really, really needed to do, which is,

is bring it to Samsung. So one of the big problems is that you need an OLED screen. A lot of things don't have OLED screens, but Samsung does, and it's been doing VR itself at a really high level. So they announced that this summer you're going to get support for Daydream on the Galaxy S8, which basically means now if you own an S8, you have two totally different VR platforms that you can pick from. There's the Samsung Gear VR, which is Oculus, and you have Android's, you have Daydream. So here was the, so these standalone headsets, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but they're basically just like tango phones, but instead of like having a cell radio and then they just like take the phone parts and build it into a headset. Yeah? Yeah, it's that.

But you also get to do things like redistribute it because mobile headsets are just, they are really uncomfortable. Right. Because you have all of your, you have a like complete computer attached to the front of your face where it's pulling it down. Right. Whereas now they get to balance it so it can be. back by your ears or whatever and just have the screen in front of your eyes. You can build it into the ring on the head or something like that. The other, so it was Lenovo and HTC that are making, that they promise to make standalone

headsets. And Qualcomm is making a reference design. And Qualcomm is making a reference design. Explain this to me. When they announced that HTC was making, what are they calling these VR headsets, mixed reality headsets, immersive reality headsets? They're not jerks, not like Microsoft. No, VR headsets.

The whole banner that they have. as immersive computing, but they are not going to make you use that. They're just like, this is our catch-all. Is World Sense a brand name or just a... That is, I guess maybe it's a brand, but it's just the name for the tracking technology they have. It's like TensorFlow or whatever. Better than Tango, basically.

And Tango's also a brand that would be literally confusing. Right. But when they announced HTC was making a headset, what they actually said was an HTC-Vive is making a headset. Yes. Right? It's like they either they like referred to Vive as like separate company from HTC or they implied that this headset would also be called Vive or they just wanted you to remember that, hey, you like the Vive. So maybe you liked this thing too. Like it was really unclear to me like what that was. It's a little bit complicated because the it's also just that Vive is now HTC is sort of subbrand. I think they literally did spin it off into a separate entity. Okay. That's nesting. But this is mostly happening in China.

they have a Viveport store. They have a Viveport mobile store. There was this thing where they made a concept phone that said Vive on the back a long time ago. They've been implying they're going to make a mobile headset. They have all of these things like with trackers. So it's kind of, it's like that that is their sublabel of VR, quote. Okay. Yeah.

So I think it's, A, it's a little bit of, hey, you know and like this brand. B, Google announcing things that it's doing with HTC, historically, doesn't go great. So they're pointing at the, like, the better one. Oh, you mean Android? No, I mean the pixel, which HTC builds and is unable to ship. Google. HTC's entire life cycle, it's an Android hardware maker. It does not, it's not a story of ongoing success.

By the way, I asked about pixel shipping really quick, just very quickly. Dave Burke, guy who's in charge of Android, I'm like, I made some joke but not be able to ship the pixel. And he said, yeah, you know, one of the hard. lessons and making phones is by the time you realize you don't have a good enough supply chain, it's too late to build one. Wow. But doesn't HTC have it? Never mind.

I can't do this. We do this on every episode. So, Adi, I feel like you are the smartest person I know. Full stop. Paying attention to VR. You're actually full stop. One of the smartest people I know. But when it comes to knowing what's happening in VR, I feel like I just going to ask you,

where's Google right now in the VR story? Are they leading? Are they behind? Are they, you know, laying out their pieces on the board? What's their status? It feels definitely like a laying out the pieces because Daydream, it's sort of, they're competing with the Gear VR, but the Gear VR in itself is sort of rudimentary VR. And they're definitely not as good because Oculus just bends over backwards to get games on that. And so they have Daydream, but then they're updating Daydream to work with things that aren't phones. So they've been kind of building that out. then they're putting in on this headset, which is some ridiculous timeline, like it's going to ship by the end of the year, and they literally did not show a single image of it. They showed, like, a line drawing. So that's going to happen fast, I guess. And if it does happen, it ships with the Daydream controller, though, which is not a tracked motion

controller. It's like a huge compromise. So you get this great headset theoretically, but it can't compete with the Vive or the Rift because you don't have hands. And then they're going to update that, obviously. Do you think the world sensors are going to be able to track your hands and let you control stuff that way? Or is that, like, too complicated for them? Given that Microsoft announced a thing that did absolutely exactly that, like a week ago, I'm going to guess Google is at least working on it.

Okay. The other option, which is getting actually wonky, is that you put a magnetic sensor on the top of the headset, and you put magnetic sensors in the controllers and you have a, like, relative distance thing because if the headset knows where it is, then it, like, bootstraps or daisy chains onto the controllers and it can tell you where those are. Oh my God. Magnets. Isn't that how, like Razor had a tracking technology like that, right? Razor did not. Sixth Sense did.

And they were turning it into the most disastrous VR Kickstarter of all time. Because they have this great technology, but they could not turn it into a project because they didn't have a supply chain. In my opinion, the greatest VR title that's ever been made is job. simulator and Google owns Alchemy Labs now, which made job simulator. So Google's winning at VR. They also own Tilt Brush, which is probably the second best. Like, those are the two things that people who don't like gaming have heard of and like in VR. And they both require controllers. Yes, which are now just going to be on the Vive. I'm just, I really want to actually see these

things. I saw a prototype. They didn't show it on stage. We couldn't take pictures of it. It worked, but it is obviously not a project, like a product that you're shipping. Does Daydream have enough features now? It seems like it should be another Windows app for me now. Like I've got Steam where I can launch VR games. I've got the Oculus thing where I can launch VR games. I should just be able to double-click Daydream and use Google-type stuff on Windows with whatever VR headset I have, right? That's getting really complicated. If you think of Daydream as an entire OS with its own sort of store and that kind of thing, it's not really like Steam. It's like you want to run like Apple on Windows. Yeah.

It's, I mean, it's not exactly like that, but it is that they're still figuring that out. And at this point, yeah. But like the VR browser type stuff, right? The VR browser, that's like, that's Chrome. You could absolutely roll out features like that. If you're talking about Daydream or Google VR, you're also literally talking about like component optimization and stuff. Right, right, right.

Which means that you could probably port a lot of the features, but it's like semantically is that daydream. So, disclosure, my wife works for Oculus. Facebook also says that they're making a standalone headset at some point. Google claimed that they have done something that, like, there's a distinction between desktop VR and mobile VR and like desktop VR is way better, and mobile VR is like way worse, and it doesn't look as good. And these daydream headsets seem like they're pretty firmly in the mobile VR camp.

No, they don't dispute that. Google would dispute it because they have created this thing called Surrah. Sorat. Sarat. Serat. Serat. named after the pointillus painter. Pointillus painting graphics engine for VR?

Is that what, like, what is it? It's... I don't understand it at all. I made Paul, like, explain it on the site, but the way that I understand it, based on pictures, is that you have something, and it's like you're standing in a corner, you're looking at, like, a real world building.

You take a bunch of pictures of it from every possible angle, and instead of constructing the entire building, you just show people that picture from whatever angle they're at. So you don't have to render everything. you have to render like a facade. I think somebody compared it to, it's like you make a cardboard cut out of a town. It's like Potemkin VR.

Right. I was going to say Wild West. Yeah, I was thinking Wild West. Yeah, so it's supposed to vastly simplify it because it's kind of like it's cheating, but you can't tell. Right. Yeah, it's almost like a panorama 2.0 kind of.

I feel like it's like, I don't think, I feel like most experiences that people want to make, and maybe I'm wrong, will not work with this. Like, if, the setting is all at all like animated or whatever or dynamic, it doesn't seem like it would work. But for like virtual tours, it's kind of nice.

I mean, they told me, they made, not me, they like made a point of saying, hey, and it works with dynamic stuff. But the question is how, to what extent that happens? Like if you have a thing that's actually like a game like job simulator and you're constantly throwing things around, do those things make up so much of the bulk of what you need that it doesn't really matter that you've optimized the environments? Are these headsets going to be wildly more powerful than my phone? so that if I, like, something says it works with Daydream,

I have to then check to see if it only works with, like, cool Daydream headsets instead of Daydream phones? Well, it would be awesome if Google had actually given us any specs or anything like that, so I don't know. Didn't they say the reference headset was a Snapdragon 835? Yeah, but we, I don't know anything beyond that. But the idea, like, is that all Daydream phone apps are supposed to work on Daydream, not phone.

And Daydream Not Phone. I'm calling Microsoft headsets not whole and stuff somebody to do the same thing. But that you're supposed to be able to run like things that maybe need positional tracking on your daydream, not like you're not phone. But everything else should run on the phone too. Like they're positioning this is a sort of standard that works on both. Gotcha. Which raises questions about how much they can optimize things or like how far the optimization can go. Right now they're just saying this thing we have is magic.

it would make everything beautiful. Well, in theory, the headsets can push way more because they don't have all of, like, Android's, you know, phone crap sitting in the background. I mean, it's still probably Android at the core of it, but they could strip away a bunch of the stuff that you need to, like, run Twitter and make Facebook happen and, like, make phone calls. Right. They also don't have cameras in this early. They have cameras, but they're, like, depth sensing.

So they don't need anything that involves taking a picture. But so you can't, like, see the world, like, through the headset like you can in Microsoft's mixed reality stuff? No, it is not doing the, It's not doing the mixed reality part of the virtual reality. Interesting. They might later. First of all,

I'd like to point out that Dieter got Addie to say mixed reality without hissing. No, that's the other thing is that I'm fine with mixed reality. I am absolutely fine with it as a description of a technology. I'm not fine when you say absolutely everything is mixed reality. And you don't give me any other words to describe it. Like, I'm fine with saying house, but you also have to be able to say like bungalow and all my tower and shack.

And you don't get to tell me to not use this words. Addie Robertson, you must be able to say bungalow. It's a great, it's a great memoir, I have to say. Addie, give me one line, like, one brief sum up. This sounds like a lot of stuff. What is, there was the big Microsoft thing. You're obviously, Oculus is being sued, right? Like, there's a lot of stuff happening in VR.

What is your, like, very quick take on the state and who is kind of winning and losing? So the state, first of all, just to call up things, I think that the thing that Google not phone daydream is trying to do. do is get to Apple. Because the state of like mobile VR is that everybody does things, but if you don't have iOS on board and you don't have like people who are iPhone users, you can't do anything. And that limits phone-based VR a lot. So all these companies, every single company that does major VR is now making an inside outtracked headset. And the vast majority of them are doing standalone headsets. So they're sort of trying to make VR a thing that anyone can buy without having to

turn it into a lifestyle. Yeah. If you're an Oculus user, you're like, I have my room full of cameras. If you're a daydream user right now, you're like, yeah, I use the pixel phone, which five people have in the world. So basically, this is, the idea is that they're moving toward the second generation of VR, and the second generation of VR is where VR is just a thing that you can get in isolation instead of having to change your life around it.

but that most of these systems are not remotely near something that I would recommend commercially. They're all mostly kind of bad. And even the ones that are not bad, it's like they're not really a commercial product. They don't really know how to polish those up. I feel like Facebook has maybe literally forgotten that it made one. It showed it off last year and it's actually some of the best tracking I've ever seen, but I have not heard of it since. And Oculus pulled out of CES and they've been.

pulled out of E3, and I'm not really sure where that leaves them. And they got sued. Yeah. It does seem like another inflection point that often feels like a huge flow. Okay, I got to read this ad. We got a little bit of a lightning round, and we got to wrap up. This episode of Virchcast also brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Are you hiring? Do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? With ZipRecruiter, you can post your job to 100 plus job sites with just one click. Then, powerful technology efficiently matches the right people to your job better than anyone else. That's why ZipRecruiter is different. Unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn't depend on candidates finding you.

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You get it post jobs for free. So try it out. One more time, ziprecruiter.com slash verge. We got a little bit. There's some other little stuff that you wrote about Ford bringing Android Auto and Android CarPlay to its 2016 cars. I want to talk about that. There was also some news at I.O. about Volvo and Audi just using Android for the entire stack.

Yeah, and I think that's smart. I think car companies should realize that they're not going. I don't think car companies really understand how people use touchscreen technology, and I understand that they have to prioritize safety first when it comes to information, providing information for the driver who should theoretically be focused on driving. But as we've seen with some of our screen drive review, it seems to be pretty clear that these car companies don't really understand how people interact and what they want to see out of cars and how to just make it pretty.

So I think that the fact that Volvo and Audi and other car companies likely are starting to use Android as the main platform is a good move. In my particular Ford review, Ford has its own system called Sync3. And I personally drive a Ford and I'm very happy. basically the Android Auto is coming to my car because Sync 3 is horrendous. Like, it will tell me that getting from my house to work will take 12 minutes. And when I reviewed the Ford Fusion, it took 40 minutes. I'm very upset by that.

I think, Nilai, you already know that Sync 3 has a terrible time reading people's names, particularly ethnic names. Like, it butchered your name, Nilai, and it called you Nile Paddle. That's my code name Which are very upset by Because you know I have a lot of friends and family members Who have ethnic names And I

Every time I get a text And Sing 3 tries to read them to me I want to like Just crash my car Into the river To make a stop Because it's just It's just so bad

It's so uncomfortable And it takes five minutes Because Sing 3 will literally Text message from Phone number Date time Subject line who I would send to and I was just like

please kill me. Synch3's last platform in the world to know that SMS messages can have an optional subject line. It also adds the horrendous signature every time I choose to reply by the system which is equally awful

as saying Nalai paddle. But anyway. So here's the thing. So I hung out with the CTO Ford last week. I'm going to put that interview up on the site next week. We took some photos of him, the whole thing. two things happened after that interview. One, Ford announced it's laying off a bunch of people. So go back and get an answer to him about what happened there.

And two, I asked him very specifically why the cars aren't updatable, right? Because it's the question I have basically for every automaker. Like, you're going to put a computer in your car. Modern computers and obligation computer manufacturers have is to update the software, at least along some reasonable time frame. And he was like, yeah, I understand. We just can't do it. The screens don't support multi-touch.

And then like 20 minutes later, they announced they're doing it. So either I convince them or like, it's just like not, the left hand is not talking to the right hand. But he also told me, and I thought this was really interesting. They've hired like 400 engineers from Blackberry to work unsink. And his whole thing is if you look at the inside of a car, and his example was, like a four-wheel drive vehicle, he's like, we have added so many hardware controls to the car that are confusing. And we have not thought about the screen as the replacement for those hardware controls the way that, you know, smartphones replaced buttons and keyboards with a big

screen. And he's, you know, his example was when you shift your car from like the snow icon on a four-wheel drive car to the sand icon, we should actually tell you what those mean. Because they don't mean sand and snow. They mean like deep, particulate matter and in deep snow, you actually want the sand icon because it's more like sand than snow. And the car should figure it out on its own or the screen should be telling you what the hell is going on. And we're not going to give that away to Apple and Google. Like that for us is we have to reset the whole thing. The entire user interaction model of the car. And I thought that was really interesting, but if the luxury car brands like Volvo and Audi are starting to push towards,

let's give more of this to Google and use more of this as our common platform, they're going to be able to do more of the work on the, what does the interface of our vehicle look like, whereas Ford is saying we have to build our entire own operating system over here with these BlackBerry engineers. I think that's like a fascinating split. I mean, I think it's ambitious, but like, let's face it, I think a lot of people when they're going to buy a car, and they hear that, oh, the same OS that I'm already familiar with in my pocket is now in the car, I think that's probably going to be a lot more enticing to many people who are looking to buy or even lease cars. Let's face it, like, no one wants to learn any OS.

Yeah, but like I feel like car manufacturer skinning Android is a bigger nightmare than phone manufacturer's skinning Android. So we'll see. So that's one little piece of lighting around. Deider, I'm curious, there's a new leak of the surface pro. It does not have US. I just... But no USBC. That's actually like that...

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Just like, it's fine. Like, they are committed to their strategy of saying USBC is bad. And they're not entirely wrong. I just wish that Microsoft would, in this particular case, do a better job of participating in moving the industry forward towards a better future and they are not doing it.

But they are going to give us mixed reality, which is the only time. type of reality that exists. Okay, there are two cases in which I wish Microsoft. Paul, I know you're high on what AMD is doing with Verizon. They're bringing it to laptops. Is that a thing? Should we care? I feel like it matters less than, I think Verizon is really exciting for desktops right now.

I feel like it's going to matter less in the laptop because Intel's lead there is so huge that I feel like, Verizon is a huge upgrade over what AMD had in, laptops before and will make it viable and a reasonable thing to do. But I don't think it's like it's a huge competition. I think Intel's still going to dominate laptops. Yeah, I mean, AMD's heat issues, it feels like matter less when it's what it's trying to do in the desktop. But that's always the question mark for me with AMD. And lastly, my little piece of the lightning round, FCC, that's the only thing I think about, obviously, are great. discovery

discovery agency. The FCC voted to open the notice of proposed rulemaking

so that they could reclassify the internet service providers from title one providers. So the next

move, they haven't released it yet. There is some talk that they're trying to make it as

lawsuit proof as possible. So they're reworking it based on some comments they've already gotten,

the fact that Minion Clybourne dissented heavily. There's some talk that actually

Republicans in Congress want there to be more of a nod towards actual rules. So they haven't released a text yet. We're going to dive into the text when it comes out. But they voted to begin the rulemaking process. So net neutrality is up for grabs for the foreseeable future until the vote to like actually implement whatever new rules they come up with. Interestingly, and I think I keep saying that I think Ajit Pai is like a little Trumpier than Trump. He is. And you know, his his staff like, like troll tweets at me now. It's like an interesting part of my life. There were reporters at the vote yesterday and FCC security like basically assaulted some of them, which is not the part of the Trump administration. Like if Trump's whole platform is we're going to get rid of

burdensome regulation and this agency is like going for it, that's great, right? People voted for that and it's happening and we have a policy argument about it. And I think everybody listening to this knows that I love the policy argument. The part where reporters asking questions to FCC commissioners get assaulted by government security, that's the bad part of the Trump platform. And like, I just want people to know listening to this. Like, I really care about the policy. I actually love the policy debate. I'm writing a thing for next week about the fact that fundamentally I don't really give a shit about Title II. Like, what I care about is consumer products that you spend money on getting faster and better and whether that mechanism is competition or regulation.

I don't care. So I'm going to do that. But I just want to note this. Like the way this is happening, I keep using the phrase Trumpier than Trump. Like, that's how they're acting. And I think it's worth just calling out. So a lightning round that ends in a dower note, a zoo crew show that had literally no zoo crew elements apart from some side effect.

So Chelsea Manning got released from prison and ate pizza. Yeah, Chelsea Manning. Yeah. It's unambiguously good news. And also has great lipstick. She does. Yeah. I'm very happy that there's like pictures out in the world now that are like,

that don't carry all the weight. It's just like a happy person out in the world. That's good news. I think that's it. We're actually way over time. We'll be back next week with more Vergecast. Control at Delete. Has a few more episodes left.

We are working very hard on a very special final episode. We'll be talking about that more soon. And there's other stuff to listen to as well. Over on the recode side, Lauren Good, our excellent senior editor, host Too Embarrass to Ask. You should definitely check that out. Kara Swisher, host Recode Decode,

which is essential listening. And my favorite, because I'm Media nerd, Peter Kafka, hosts Recode Media. All of that is on iTunes. It's on all your favorite podcast apps. Just go to iTunes.com slash The Verge. Leave a review. Give him five stars.

Come on. It's Friday. That's why you should give him five stars. And you can tweet it all of us. Paul is Future Paul. Addie is at the Dextericky, Dieter's at Backlon, Nat, the best handle, simplest handle, at Nat Garan, and I am at Reckless. We love your feedback. Hit us up, let us know. Like I said, the beginning of show,

we need more Verge podcast. So I'm very interested in your ideas for what kinds of shows, not just characters, but shows we should have. So let me know. And that's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul. Paul.