The Vergecast - Google I/O announcements and iPad Pro M1 review

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

In part 1 of this week’s episode, Nilay and Dieter talk with deputy editor Dan Seifert about Google I/O and reviews for the M1 iMac and iPad Pro.  Further reading: Google I/O 2021: the 14 biggest announcements Android 12 preview: first look at Google’s radical new design Android 12 public beta is now available: here’s how to install it Google showed off its next-generation AI by talking to Pluto and a paper airplane Apple iMac M1 review: the all-in-one for almost everyone iPad Pro (2021) review: Mini LED, major improvement Apple’s redesigned MacBook Pros with next-gen in-house chips could arrive early this summer Apple’s $549 AirPods Max can’t play lossless Apple Music — even when plugged in Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Two-part Vergecast this week. Here in part one, Dan Sefer is going to join the show. We're going to do Google I.O, including Android Wear, merging with Tizen, plus our M-1 reviews. That's the new IMac with an M-1 chip, the iPad Pro with an M-1 chip, whatever Apple's doing and lost this music. Then we got part two coming later today. Addie Robertson and I are going to talk about everything, Epic versus Apple, including

Tim Cook on the stand. That's the Vergecast coming up now and later. 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. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.

And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and 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 Skylar 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, Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of natural language interpretation. See, it's very toppable. I'm your friend, Eli. Dieter Bone is here. I'm your mom. Wow.

It's like talking to a paper airplane, Dieter. Let me tell you. Dan Seaport is here. Hello. So here's what we're going to do. The Apple Epic trial is ongoing as we're recording. And on Friday, Tim Cook is going to take the stand. So we're going to split this episode into two.

two parts. Dan and Deeter and I are going to go through Google I.O. Android news, wear news, big, massive wear news, wearOS news. We got reviews of the new IMac with M1 chip. Deter review the iPad Pro. There's Apple Lossel. We got all the stuff. We got all kinds of stuff to talk about. Then Addy and I, after Tim Cook is done on the stand on Friday, we're going to record a bonus episode to cover that because what is the point of talking about the Epic Apple trial? if we don't talk about Tim Cook on the stand and I don't want to wait a whole week. The real reason that we're not doing

epic right now is as we're recording we're doing this on Wednesday a little bit early. Craig Federee just referred to the Mac as a car, not a truck or a bicycle. And Deli doesn't want to lose the entire episode to me just losing my mind over computer metaphors. I will say this. Craig Federigi basically implied the iPhone is for babies

and using the Mac is very dangerous. Really, he would. was like the Mac has an unacceptable amount of malware the iPhone even an infant can use it we're trying to make the Mac say like they're in the weeds of what makes a Mac different from a phone and Craig's answer is basically the Mac is too dangerous uh it's it's real so that's going on now and then Tim Cook on Friday I just didn't want to I don't want to talk about it before Tim Cook and then if we did our normal show I didn't want to wait a week so Addy and I are going to do a whole trial-focused episode later on Friday.

So this episode is just about I-O and Apple reviews. But I want to start where we always start with COVID. Lots of COVID news this week, actually. As vaccination ramps up, there's a lot of interest in tracking vaccination and continuing to test and continuing to contact trace. We've got a whole story about those tools and why people are uncomfortable using them to control the spread of COVID. I completely understand why people are uncomfortable digital tracking technology,

but there's a lot of conversation about how to use those tools, the countries that they're being used in and how effective they are. So that's a great story you should go read that. COVID is running rampant in India. It is a disaster. It is people are dying.

People are getting sick at unacceptable rates. It has happened in my own family that people have gotten sick and died. And there's a lot of conversation about patent waivers and vaccine manufacturing waivers in India. We've got a long story from a reporter in India who freelance with us about the Indian COVID crisis. and specifically why just like wide opening manufacturing will definitely help. It should help.

Patent waivers are important and I think the Biden administration should grant them. But there's a laundry list of issues that created that problem. And so we wanted to dive into that. And then Nicole wrote a great piece. And I think this is just as we go through it and as we get vaccinated, we come out of it. There's a lot of focus on what you as a person should do to manage your COVID risk and like your individual choices. And Nicole has a great piece about how focusing on what individuals can do does not solve public health problems. And like, we've really learned that a lot through COVID. So that's all on the site. If you're not vaccinated, go get vaccinated the CDC says you can ditch your masks. Obviously, that's controversial too. We've got a story about that. But if you're not

vaxed, please go get vaccinated. It would be great to have this all over with. And that brings me to I.O., which I would note, I was held on Google's campus. And if you watch the stream, you notice people were socially distanced, they were outside, and they were wearing masks. No, chance is taken by Google doing this. But lots of announcement at I.O. Deeter, take us through. The biggest stuff is sort of the traditional stuff that you expect. It's Android 12.

It's Google showing off a bunch of futuristic AI demos. It is, you know, that stuff. But some of the new stuff, they've got a big iteration of workspace. They surprised a bunch of us by actually doing something with Wear, Android Wear, WhereOS, whatever you want to call it. I guess we're calling it where, but it's unclear. They remember it exists and they're doing something with it. And then a bunch of Google Photos updates to distract you from the fact that unlimited photo

storage is going away in a little less than two weeks. A bunch of maps updates. A big, big one, which I imagine, I don't know, we're probably not talking about too much, but I think it's a big deal. Google shopping is basically now going to be attached to everything Google makes. You are going to have Google shopping retail things pop up in all sorts of new places now. Like, Lens is going to be more directly pointing to it, a whole bunch of other stuff. And they're also partnering with Shopify, which, Neil, I recently talked to somebody from Shopify on...

Harley Finkelstein, the president. Yes. And now if you are, if you're a retailer on Shopify, you can, like, click three buttons and show up now on Google Shop. So it's a big shot across the bow at Amazon, potentially. and it's also, I don't know, how often do we worry about the incentives for SEO for websites? How often do we worry about the incentives that Google has for where it ranks things? Like, I don't know, flights and whatever else.

Now Google has an entirely new set of incentives for selling stuff on the internet, and they're going to be attaching it to way more of their products. So that'll be fun. So that's like the top level overview, I think. But I think the big, big news for us to really get into is probably Android and Wear. Yeah. I want to talk about some of their AI stuff. And these big ideas are on multimodal search.

We'll get to all of that. How could we not spend an hour talking about Google Docs? But let's start with Android. Android 12 is in public beta now. I think you two have already installed it. I did not have time yesterday. It looks very different. I mean, that's like the first thing Google can do.

There's a part of me that says the pixel not selling well is actually, like, it's a good thing in some ways. because if you look at the iOS user experience or even Samsung's user experience, they have such a huge install base. They sell so many phones that radical changes to the interface patterns, they have to do a lot of work to get you there. Whereas Google's like, well, 10 of you have this phone.

Now it works entirely differently and you can just deal with it. Yeah, I mean, they've been doing that for years, right? They changed how you access multitasking and stuff on the app, or in the phone. Three years in a row, they changed it. And they settled down at this time. They didn't change it this time.

They just changed everything else. And so it's a lot more colorful and it's bubbly. And it's, I, Dieter, I know you like it because you feel like it's a lot easier to use a lot of the settings buttons and the dials and what have you. So here's the thing. It's big and bubbly. We should talk about material you, YOU, heavy sigh on that one. But like the big change, like functional change of the design is everything is just really big. and everything is a little bit smoother because they've optimized the way animations work in the subsystem.

There are fewer interrupts, and they're using the big core less often, so battery life should be better, and it's more efficient, blah, blah, blah, blah. But everything is big. I think that's more accessible, but if you like information density, you're probably going to hate it. And there's a pretty even mix of responses in the YouTube comments and on Twitter on it. Also, a lot of people saying it looks like the iPhone, which I don't understand, actually, very much. How does it look like the iPhone? I don't know.

Like control panel has big round buttons, I guess. There's only so many shapes, y'all. I know. It's funny. Like, you can have a square or you can have a circle and then you can do something with the corners. Like, what do you want? Stars?

They've got them. They've got weird star. They've got like badges. The new widget system is just like you can have any shape you want. And it looks a wackadoo. But anyway, I am fine with them taking up more space and like having the buttons just be easier to hit and like less cognitive load to be like where's the Wi-Fi button because now it's like twice as big and now you just tap it. So that's an interesting idea. But I'm always interested

in like new interesting ideas in UI. The big kerfuffle that I've seen is people trying to decide if what they want the power button to do because Google tried to do a new thing with Android 11 and they've already ditched it. It used to be it would bring up like some power buttons and then Google Wallet and then home controls. But now it just brings up the assistant, which is what it on the iPhone, which is what it does on a galaxy phone. Yeah. So they just had to, like, copy everybody else there. But it was, like, if you have a smart home stuff, it is a little bit more convenient to, like, get to it from a power button.

But whatever. I mean, I think the thing for me about Matera You, and I thoroughly enjoyed Mattias's presentation, because it, yeah, in many ways it was ominous. I don't know how to describe it any other way. Like, like, he's just, he's a big personality. he was wearing an insane shirt. Big, big shirt. Like, he definitely looked like he had been DMing

with the mayor of Miami. You know what I'm saying? Like, huge personality, big floral shirt. And he kept saying things like, now there is a color for every mood. And it's like, dude, like, why are you in my brain? Like, but the operating system has- Oh, wait, my favorite was,

what if instead of form-following function, form-followed feeling, I think was the line? Yeah, I mean, there was all these little lines in there that they were, delivered with such intensity that I was like are you panache like the last line could have been like and now we will control your feelings like they just made the turn um but I look at this and I look at the design across Google's products because this is the whole point of material

you it's not just Android 12 it's how the apps are going to work it's connected to their hardware design they're trying to unify all this aesthetic and it is definitely less silly than Google used to be. It's far more refined. It feels more careful. Right. Like there's a sense of, okay, we're actually going to do a thing where the shapes of our hardware map to shapes in our software design, like a very Apple thing to do, but Google hasn't really done it. And now they've got a big plan to do it. I think, Deeter, you said everything is really big. Google's confidence that it knows what the most important information is, is like at a DNA level across the company. Like, that's what Google does.

And you see how big things are, and they're like, what you really want is a big ass clock. So here's a big ass clock. And it's a very well-designed. It integrated with everything. And it kind of looks like your nest hub. And I think that is a big turn for Google. And you reacted when I said it doesn't look. It's not as silly as Google used to be.

I think it's still friendly. But Google stuff used to just like outrageously silly. Yeah. So what's funny about it is it's like this is the last thing on the coffin of the droid aesthetic. Right. This is so far from like, even honeycomb that, you know, Matias Dorote worked on. There was this whole like, I don't know, cool computer nerd vibe, right? Like the gamer vibe or whatever to Android.

Very Tony Stark back. Yeah, Tony Stark, yeah. And like, that's all gone. And so when compared to some of the old stuff in Android, I think it's more playful. But you're right that it is refined in a way that OG Google Playfulness was never refined. Yeah. I mean, it's just like not primary colors and big silly shapes anymore. Like, I think it looks really good.

I think one of the big problems Google has is that nobody buys these phones. So it's a, it's like an opportunity for them to experiment way faster than anybody else can. And like the hardware design and the app design and, you know, the Chromecast TV or the, what is it, the Google TV with Chromecast or whatever it's called now. Yeah. The Chromecast Ultra with Google TV. Android Chrome search docs TV. Good job. Whatever it's called.

You can see that that little piece of hardware, like, connects to this aesthetic. They're building a remote app into the... Like, they're starting to do all the connections, but so many of their apps and services run on other people's operating systems. So they're disconnected from, like, the iOS aesthetic. They're disconnected from the Windows aesthetic. And I think the big question for Google is always, how do you... They're disconnected from the Samsung aesthetic. Yeah.

So how do you... How do you, like, put your company's interface identity into the world when it's always sitting next to something else that is the primary UI design of that hardware? Well, and how much of this is going to get on Samsung or, you know, Jami or whatever? They're going to encourage everybody to adopt material you in their own, like, you know, personal, beautiful way. But is Samsung going to do that? If Google's actually successful at getting app developers to update their widgets because they haven't done it since 2012, which, sorry, developers, but chances are you haven't updated your widget, your Android widget since 2012. Will that now look weird on a Samsung phone because it's designed for a pixel?

Like, because no, people are going to design to have it look good on a Samsung phone. So the only question that really matters is what does it look like on a pixel is what does it look like on a Samsung? Yeah. We won't know for six months. Were we expecting a new pixel at this? There were some rumors, right? And then they didn't do it.

Well, I mean, they've announced the Google Pixel 5A. Like, they said, hey, we're doing this phone. And, you know, a logical person might have said, oh, you've got this big event. A lot of press is paying attention to it. Maybe you want to slip a hardware announcement into there. They did not do that. They announced the phone, if you don't recall, by denying that it was canceled. That was how they announced it.

There was rumors that, oh, this phone that everyone expects Google to probably make is not going to happen. And then, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're doing it. We're releasing it in two markets. We'll talk to you later. And then, you know, we haven't heard anything since. So the Pixel 5A is still TBD. You would assume that it's got to be soon.

It's almost June. It is a different generation than what we expect them to do in the fall with the Pixel 6 and the rumored due processor and everything like that. So you assume that's got to be soon. The other piece of hardware that's long been rumored now is new PixelBuds that are called some kind of PixelBuds A. So there was two pieces of hardware that you maybe could have seen here. Didn't happen.

It was an entirely software services show. I believe Google might have telegraphed that they wanted to announce the 5A at the usual time, which may mean that they are, in fact, waiting for the fall. And so we'll have another one of these wacky situations where there's a pixel 6 and a pixel 5A at the same time, which will be exhausting. The third piece of rumored hardware, which there's much less information about, is the pixel watch. But that is, we should probably get through the rest of Android before we start having emotions about wearables.

Yeah. Google's like adding little features to Android. I'm always interested, like, what makes it in the system? and what makes it into Samsung's version of Android or Jammies or whoever. So what are the system level features they've added to Android 12? Other than moving the stuff around, which nobody adopted, they have added new privacy permissions. So there's a little indicator for camera and a microphone. There is a new approximate location thing. So instead of giving someone your pinpoint location, you can give me your neighborhood.

There's a new privacy dashboard that tells you how often your stuff has been accessed. I don't know if that will make it. And there is a new Android TV remote, which may or may not make it to other phones, but it will be built in at an OS level. And there's also buttons in quick settings to just turn off, like, there's switches, your camera and your microphone. And I think that's actually pretty cool. Yeah. Just the apps think they have camera access, but they don't, which is kind of clever. Yeah.

I think that's really smart. I mean, I like the idea that these two companies are now racing each other for privacy features. And I really like the word. We're going to let the apps think they have it. And every time they call it, we're going to ask you again. Because a lot of people say no and forget. And then they have no idea why things are broken. So I think this is really smart.

The other privacy thing, I was expecting a non-answer from Google, but they gave me it will tell you later this year answer, which is some kind of app tracking for ads. And the same way Apple has ATT and Chrome is doing flock. Oh, my God. Privacy sandbox. There's going to be some answer for Android later this year, but they don't have. it today. So that's something to watch out for. And before I know, there was some reporting Times, Journal, et cetera, that Google doesn't really know how to handle the cookies, flock

tracking debate because their entire business is selling ads. Yep. And I think this is just a very unique dynamic for Google. They're also under an enormous amount of antitrust pressure. So if they do the thing everyone wants them to do, which is turn off most tracking, and just use its first-party data set, they have anti-competitively foreclosed other people from running advertising networks in their browser and on their phone. Right. Do you think this is a problem? You probably don't.

Do I think it's a problem? I don't think it's a problem. Do the ad tech vendors think it is a problem? They definitely think it's a problem, and they're like, get me on the phone with Europe, we're going to shut Google down. And that is just the weirdest situation for Google to be in. Yeah.

You know, if you're worried that Google won't be able to figure out how to target ads to you, if they don't have third-party cookies and ad app tracking, I'll just say to you the thing that Casey Newton said to me, which is they can talk to Pluto. They're going to be fine. They're going to figure it out. The question is, will they figure it out for everybody else or not? And who knows?

The last thing, I guess, for Android is we should talk about the Android Private Compute Corps. Yeah, it's a core, right? It's a real core. Not hardware. Remember, no hardware. It is a special sandbox for running machine learning things that Google thinks you will think is creepy. So it's smart chips that analyze how you talk to give you smart replies. It's what music is playing.

And I get the impression it's more stuff. They made this thing so that they could do more machine learning stuff in the future that they know would creep you out a little bit. So everything in the box has no network access and apps can only communicate it via very limited APIs. Speaking of stuff that I expect in the future, they implied that that was one of the reasons they moved the Google Assistant button to the power button so that I could do more contextually aware stuff based on whatever screen you're on

because it's easier to just hit the power button and ask about the screen that you're looking at than it is to swipe up from the corner. Actually, swiping up from the corner was always a terrible idea, and I'm glad that nobody bothered doing it except for Google because what a fiasco that gesture was. I did it by accident a lot, and I always was like, oh, this doesn't,

You have nothing to say to me about this Twitter feed. I will say, you know, first beta, very early, you can do both. Currently, you can have the power button launch assistant. You can also do the corner gesture. If you have the power button launch assistant, Dan, how do you turn the phone off? That's a good question. Let's find out. All right.

Oh, boy. I don't know. I'm holding the phone. It's not doing anything. wait oh no there's got to be there's got to be the volume thing nope that's a screenshot I know how to use phones no it's not there my understanding is that that you you have to turn it off again if you want to turn the phone off eventually if you look closely at the screenshots in my article there is going to be a power menu in the bottom of the quick settings so they'll be

like edit quick settings go to all settings and then there's a tiny little power button there to go to power systems yeah the Samsung way I hate that way I just want to use the power button true. Well, I like the death group way that Apple does, although I hit the screenshot accidentally, but yeah, whatever. Who wants to turn their phone off anyway? Come on. Yeah, I mean, this is like, it's like kind of, you only

want to turn it off when it's like crashing. And most these phones will eventually recognize they're in some sort of death loop and just like restart themselves. Yeah. So maybe the way is actually no buttons. Here's my Steve Jobs approach to this problem. No buttons at all. It's for babies.

It's for baby. Actually, can I tell you a story? Palm OS, when it crashed, they would, unless they knew, unless they knew what it was and that you needed to do something about it, they would just let it crash and restart it and never tell you, including rebooting the entire phone in some cases. Like,

they would just, they chose not to show error messages because nobody knows to do their messages. So they just let apps crash in the background and replay. Like, that's what, like, echo devices do this, right? Like Amazon echo devices are like constantly restarting themselves and no one ever knows. that that's also how a certain folding device that recently came into my life behaves it just reboots it but it's like motor it like flaps open and shots like goodbye

it's you close it and you open it and it just like I'm gonna restart all right so that's Android's well bunch of stuff we'll see there's like other little stuff like Google photos adding this like locked folder for pictures yeah which is great so they're like yeah if you're if you're like taking pictures of a puppy to give to your child yeah that's what it's for that's okay that's for Um, that's great. No, it's a good feature.

Like, I think that stuff is neat. There's other stuff that's kind of like more, I don't know, it's less tangibly part of Android 12. Like they're updating their camera algorithms to handle dark skin better to do it. There's stuff that's coming that will affect in particular the pixel experience and hopefully spread out to the rest of Android.

I think that's great. But the real news, the real news. Yeah. Samsung and Google are bringing their smart. watch platforms together. Yeah, I put in the live blog that there are 60 people who care about this and the tweet got like, I retweeted somebody who took a screenshot.

I got 95 likes. So I was off. That was off by 30%, but it was still only 95 likes. But this is sort of a big deal. Like Tyson was invented is like a hedge against Google. Remember there's that whole, there was like a year where people thought Samsung would split off from Google where Google was mad. They launched a couple phones.

Yeah. Where Google was mad. about Samsung just like skinning Android so hard and trying to pull them back and now they're like yeah let's just emergency is operating it's if old old school verge cast heads will know when I say this is me go this is me go you actually can you explain that because like it takes it it's a long walk to get to this is mego all right what were the constituent operating systems of mego there was mammo maymo maymo which was their new smart fund platform Intel had like moblin moblin yeah

Dan remembers Dan no Dan is trying to pretend it's not on the tip of his tongue Anyway there was a vision of a new Linux-based smartphone operating system from like two or three companies that they jammed together To make Mamo M-A-E-M-O And then it still was like not as good as iOS And then Android should up

That is my understanding of the timeline I don't know if Mamo ever made it to a shipping phone. There was one. Like, Intel was threatening to release a phone for years, and it all fell apart. They never could get their chips in order. And Nokia became Windows phone. Like, Nokia had... N-900 was a default Mamo phone.

No, they made some stuff with either Mamma or Migo. I forget... The Nokia N-900 ran Mamo-5. Yeah. Okay. I stand corrected. the N-900 was the Mamo phone, and then it died. Designed by Peter Skilman, who helped design Palm OS and WebOS.

I can't believe we're so far down this route. Anyway, when they announced this thing, I want to, Dieter, I know you like know what is actually happening. But so they announced this thing. And it brought me back to like straight up my old head gadget playing days. Like what happens when two companies announce a partnership to merge their operating systems? Well, random executives you've never heard from before show up on stage to be like, Working with partner company X has been a dream.

With their innovations and ability to do fitness and our innovations and ability to make hardware, the future is bright for smartwatch customers. And that is exactly what happened here. It was like a 2008 CES keynet. So, okay. WearOS, slow, not a lot of support. Nobody's using it. Whatever. Tizen, fast.

terrible non-existent app support. It's got Samsung behind it, and so it's good. And also, by the way, Google bought Fitbit, and so Fitbit's over in the corner. And Google insisted they didn't buy Fitbit for the software or the data. They wanted to buy it for hardware. But that's a little bit weirdness there, because Fitbit is also part of the story. It's not two things coming together. It's three.

Yeah. So. Kind of, right? Kind of. So from what I can see, the base is basically still WearOS. I watched the I-O presentation on it, and like, it's, It's very wear OS-e, it's not very Tysen-y. Samsung contributed screen stuff. They contributed how to make it more battery efficient,

and they contributed how to make it work with processors better. So maybe it's like some low-level merging of the two, but you write apps with Kotlin and Jetpack, which is the Android way to do good fast apps now. It's basically where with a bunch of Samsung stuff put in, like how to make watch faces. And Google had already kind of adopted a lot of the UI that Samsung had with Tysen.

in later versions of WareOS already. So they were already kind of on the same path in terms of like interactions, UI. And then Fitbit is going to be the fitness health stuff on the watch, but apparently Google Fit isn't going away, which is the dumbest decision. Really?

But fortunately, S-Health, Samsung S-health, is going away. That one will not be there. Okay, great. Yeah, they did confirm that. Y-ha. So, RIP, everyone is promising that there's new stuff. Yeah. Shelf.

Everyone's promising to make stuff. Samsung said we're doing it soon. Samsung has done making Tysen watches, apparently, which is great news. All I care about is that there be a decent smart watch option for Android users. And this thing is going to, you'll have a cellular option. It's going to work apparently with more cellular networks, quote-unquote, so it's going to be supported. We are assuming Google is going to make its own thing, too. Maybe some company not called Fossil will start making these watches, too.

Who knows? Well, so this is kind of the big question for me, right? So why do you bring these two things together? Because where OS has support the Android system level, so you can theoretically use it with any Android phone. But the products are bad. Sorry. I know some people like some of the products, but like as a sweeping generalization, I'm comfortable saying the products are bad. Ties and watches are slightly better, but really only work with Samsung phones.

Well, I think the difference is what this is bringing together in that I think the 90 people that are excited about it are excited because the Tysen watches, the Samsung watches generally have the best hardware in the Android option ecosystem. They have the best battery life. They have the best screens. They've got reliable clicky bezels to control them. And they are noticeably faster than the WareOS counterparts. But they don't have, they have Bixby instead of the Google Assistant. They don't have access to any of Google services and things like that. So if the dream is, take Google services, stick them on a Samsung Tysen watch, and you've got like a compelling interesting thing. Yeah, I'm just like, take a step back from that. If you think about, if you are fully in the Bigspee ecosystem, yeah, I'm cutting this down to like four people. And please call me. I just want to talk to you for hours.

You're full dog with shoes, right? Big Spies just wandering around your house. Tyson is great for you and the Tysen watch will, like, complete the experience. And you're using S-Health in the Samsung email app and like, and all that stuff. kind of works for you, but you're living a very lonely life because no one else is using those things. And that's fine. Maybe you're just happy alone with Bixby. That means like Samsung's

total adjustable market for their better hardware is just like small. And Google's market is like all of Android, but the products are bad. But, but I mean, when you think about it, what is Android, especially in the U.S.? Sure. What is Android but Samsung, right? And so like, wearables, as we know them in the smartwatch sense, the Apple Watch, the Tys and Watches, things like that, those are expensive add-ons that people buy with expensive phones.

Low-cost fitness trackers are a different story, but that's not what we're talking about here. So, like, this is, like, Samsung sells the most Android-compatible smart watches, right? Maybe Fitbit is up there as well, but the WearOS ones just don't sell at all. And so, like, this is,

Google's opportunity here is to bring where or wearOS, whatever wants to call it today, to that market of people who are buying Samsung watches, which is a real market. It's not an Apple Watch market, but it is a real market, and bring those Google services and hooks and all that stuff in to it. And then maybe the trickle-on effect is if they're not buying a Samsung phone and they have a different Android phone, they can buy this watch. It's got Google's name on it. It's got Google's software. They don't need six helper apps. Like if you have a pixel right now and pair up a Samsung watch to it, You need to download no less than six apps to get every service working on it, which is just like kind of a wild thing.

So you get a better experience on that. But really, I think it is Google's getting access to this larger market of people who are actually buying these smart watches. But this brings me to my last kind of big question about this. You've got Samsung making watches that work better across Android. You've got Google making watches using this new operating system that work better. How much room is left? Right. Like, will fossil compete and, like, show up and, like, continue to make these watches?

Like, I would like there to be a vibrant ecosystem of competitive smartwatches that run on and are compatible and has Google services across all these phones. But I think that they're walking away from that. They tried that with WearOS and it bombed. LG, like, couldn't make it. Only other fossil brands managed to participate. You know, like, the thing to think about here isn't the smart watch market in the U.S. It's like the 80% of all phones on worldwide are Android, you know, based on Android. And their smartwatch options are like the weird low-end stuff that you can get from, you know,

One Plus or what's the other one, like a maze fit. Or you get a Fitbit or you deal with the hassle of the Samsung stuff. And so there needs to be a high-end option. And, you know, I would love there to be a big, you know, competing ecosystem of a bunch. of different manufacturers fighting to make the best thing. But I would like that for phones too. I would like to have HTC and LG, you know, still in the game. But right now it's like, it's Samsung.

And then if you are like really nerdy, sorry, you get a OnePlus. So you look at the market shares. One Plus is just like, especially in the U.S. So, yeah. One of the most interesting things with this shift is, and I don't remember, Sina and Wired had some articles where they got to talk to some of the people that were building it. And I don't remember which one said this. But apparently watchmakers will now be able to customize the UI that's on top of where,

which is a huge departure from how Android Wear and WhereOS were, where basically Google dictated that UI. You could not change it. You could not customize it at all. And every single watch basically looked the same as a result. They could have different watch faces and a couple different apps, but the UI itself was the same. So now Samsung, who will definitely muck with it, because they're going to make it look exactly like their ties and watches, I'm sure. Fossil if it wanted to, these other manufacturers that maybe they play ball could customize it and make it a different experience, kind of like what we're seeing with Android phones. And then it begs the question or begins to ask, like, what is the goal in terms of what Google wants a smartwatch experience to be because now hardware partners can dictate a lot of that. So it'll be kind of interesting to see how this shakes out, see what is different between how where OS has been, that we've known for a few years now and how this new wear when I suspect we'll see devices

in the fall running it. Yeah, Dieter, is there a timeline? No, I don't know. Honestly, I think fall is pretty good. I mean, Samsung announced hardware that they're gonna have watches. There's rumors that Google's gonna do a watch this fall. We've seen renders that, you know,

whether or not you believe them is dicey, but they could be accurate. So I do think that this is the year. And I think that because it's basically where, with Samsung being given permission to put whatever Samsung stuff they want on top of it, I actually think it's not going to be that hard to get the watch out. Like I don't think they're making a whole new operating system here. I think it's just wear, but faster and less crappy.

You know, you could wear on a modern Qualcomm chip. It's like, okay, it's better than its reputation, but there's just not enough to do on it and it still just feels a little bit incomplete. This feels like more of a complete thought. I think making it feel like more of a complete thought is great. but like as a person who wears an Apple watch every day like what do I use it for notifications the walkie-talkie feature which is just a real hit in this house and like it is the best RSA two-factor dongle but you could ever hope for in your life right right that's it like

and like I keep trying to make it do more things but those things are and obviously that like the fitness tracking right like it just happens to you and then you're like I got to close these rings like Great. That's all stuff that Google and Samsung can compete with and rebuild. But that, like, first, it needs to be a complete thought that we're iterating on. And, like, people want to use the features. It doesn't have... I don't think any of these smartwatches need to do much more than that to be compelling.

But I just don't think where has gotten anywhere close to it. So we'll see. I just can't get over the, like, with our excellent partnership in innovation and our long track record of partnership. Like, I've heard it. So now they got to actually do it. I don't know. I mean, you know, the cynical endgame of this is where becomes Samsung smart watches. And like, it's just like that's what.

Android again. It's just, no, it's just Samsung. Like other partners don't sign on board or they give it a college try with one model. And then a year later, they're gone. And it's just this is what Samsung watches now run. I mean, that that's an end game that I could very see happening with this. Yeah. Well, I hope it's good.

Okay, we've got to take a break. That's so dismissive. Well, I hope it's good. We've got to take a break. We need to come back. We're going through the rest of I.O. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers,

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to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-R-K.com. Upwork.com. Okay. Lots of other I-O-O-S stuff, including like a huge change to Google Docs, which our entire business runs on Google Docs. So we can, You can talk about this forever. But a big change in how it works. I will say they're adding Google Meet buttons to everything. Like it's going out of style, which makes me sad. But some cool stuff in docs.

What's going on there? Yeah. So Google wants to do the thing that Microsoft says it is doing with fluid. They want to have all the stuff connect to each other, right? And so their method for doing that is called the smart canvas. And then they're the smart chips. So instead of at mentioning somebody in a dock, you can add mention them. You can add mention them and add a Google task to them right in the dock.

You can hit the app button, it'll pop up a menu that will fill out a template that's, like, ready for meeting notes. You can add mention other documents in your drive, and that could be either Google Doc or like Microsoft Word Doc or whatever. And when you hover over it, you can get a little preview of it right there in the thing. So they're basically trying to get you to not have to switch tabs. Just like they just get rid of tab overload. And they're doing this with Google chat too, right? Like a bunch of these things you can view inside chat. and now they're going to let you have chat viewed inside the Google Doc, or you can do it inside Meet, or in the Google Doc, you can click the meet button to share your doc directly to the meeting, so you don't have to worry about screen sharing and showing the wrong tab or whatever.

So they're just basically making everything do everything, which if they can keep it feeling coherent and understandable, is kind of cool. But it's also, Casey wrote a good piece. I kind of gesture to this idea. it's a lot like what like the cooler new office suites like Notion or code or whatever we're doing. But Google can't go that fast because they have such a huge user base, just like the iPhone, right? They can't change it, bang, and do something completely wild. They can't bring back Google Wave. So they're doing these sort of baby steps.

So that's the feature set. But the thing for the Vergecast to discuss is in order to enable that feature set, they have to use this feature called Canvas, which is basically a thing in HTML where you say there's a canvas here and then your web browser stops paying attention and then the thing that's inside the canvas is an app or like it's like JavaScript. It's not Flash. I mean, maybe it could be, who knows,

but it basically takes the idea of like using the web technology we're used to thinking of as the web, HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that is not used to build this. And so it's no longer in the document object model. It's not in the DOM anymore. and lots of people have emotions about that because if there's any company

that could have figured out how to make a kick-ass futuristic web app that interconnects everything together and makes you feel like everything is all, you know, magically jumping from one thing to the next, inside web technologies, you'd want it to be Google. And if Google's bailing on it, then that kind of bodes ill for, you know, future of, like, web stuff that's, like, more accessible

where you can, like, inspect source and see what's going on. Wait, so you can't. I mean, that's, like, break it down that simple. simply. So with the new Google Docs, you can't just like inspect source and see how the thing works, which you can do with some but not all, like most but not all web pages right now. Yeah. I mean, basically, it's more of a black box. I don't know for sure if like if you really start pushing out it. If you can like find the link to the web app that is a, that the canvas is pointing to and then like, you know, go down the line. And Google will tell you everything is open source all the time. So like, I'm not saying it's uninspectable. But I am saying it's a lot less accessible, if that makes sense. Yeah. And Google said that a lot of like extensions that are built to modify docs. So like a common one might be like a dark mode extension to flip your Google Docs into a dark mode. It's probably going to break until they update it to work with this canvas or whatever. Which gives them ultimately more control. Right. Google is going to make this thing extensible so that other you can like we can make a verge Google Doc thing. So if you type at something in the name of an article, it would auto fill the link. Right. That would be cool. That would make making shoutouts way easier for me. But for now, the way that most extensions and most Google Doc plugins from third parties work is they basically inspect source.

They go through the DOM and they're like, oh, like this thing, change it. And then it changes it. Just like you can inspect source yourself to change a headline for a joke screenshot or whatever. And that's going to be harder to do. A lot of that stuff might break. But it's not going to break instantly. A bunch of stuff is still going to work. It's just like the stuff inside the canvas.

It's going to take a while to shake out. but it's potentially more centralized, you know, control inside Google for appy stuff inside their apps. So a lot of their demos were, to me, things that seem like great ideas. Like they seem like great demos. And then I think about how I actually work. And I wonder, right? Like one of their demos was you are writing in a dock or you're working on a spreadsheet and you push a button and the video call starts right in the dock and everyone's already looking at it and the screens are really small. and it's all just happening in one place.

You don't have to switch tabs. You don't have to switch tabs. Yeah, yeah. And then you close it and then you go back to your doc. Or, I mean, I think you brought this up in your piece theater. Like, these are kind of like ancient ideas about how to work in docs, like documents. Yeah. Like Apple had open dock.

Microsoft had OLE. Yeah. OLE. Can I just say that this is a Vergecast where we have brought up Mamo, Migo, and Open Doc. This is just a classic. Oh, in Palm OS. And Paul, you're going to say,

you can't forget the Palm now. We are just like in our feelings of that technology ideas this time. It's just wild to be. Like these are dreams that have persisted for years and years and years. And like finally they can come into reality. I think the pandemic in working from home has made people be like, I want to figure out different ways to work with a bunch of people remotely. so there's appetite for change in a way that has not existed before.

But really what you're talking about is I want to make a document, I want to embed a table from a spreadsheet, and if somebody else updates that spreadsheet, it all happens live in one place. Also, that's like wildly accessible to other kinds of apps and services, and I'm just logging into my work dashboard, and stuff is happening all the time. And I think that stuff is great. And then I think about how I actually work, which is I need to, focus on a single thread and just get through it without being distracted. And then I need to like give that to Dan and be like, edit this review.

I'm leaving. And I know that's not how everybody works and there's lots and lots of different ways to work. But like these ideas are like somewhat in conflict, right? That you want, you perceive a way of working that is not actually the best, like, what most people would call the best way of working, which is like extreme focus. Well, I mean, the big question to me is like, how much of this is driven by like metrics? I'm not accusing Google of being driven by metrics and like the old joke about, you know, how many thousands of blues they tested, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, if you're making an app and you see more use of your app, then that must be good.

And so all this stuff is designed for like real time interaction and less asynchronous communication and like just more use the apps more because there's more stuff going on. You're getting more notifications. There's video calls, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But maybe that's not, maybe you should make an app that doesn't need to be used so much because the idea of work is to get it done and move on to the next thing. That's what I mean. It's like, and I recognize that we have very strange jobs, right? Like we deliver things that need to be finished and then published. And there's, if we have to change them after published, like there's a process.

We have to, like, yeah, that's all very different for us than other folks in different kinds of industries. But I do think that notion, I mean, this is why when I was doing version. test interviews or song. I'd ask every guess, when do you work? Right? And the answers were like, almost always, some executive are like, I work in business class flying across the country because the Wi-Fi is bad and no one can bother me, which is always my favorite flex of an answer. But I look at this stuff and it's like, oh, this is just allowing more people to interrupt you and get in your way, but it looks really cool. It sounds really cool. And I'm just, I think Google like, yep, they've got a big user base that got to go slow, but I think some of that slowness is going to be

helpful to figure out what is useful and what is not. But I don't know. Even within our weird way of working, if you pull the staff of writers who work with editors all day long, some of them will be writing in Google Docs, but a lot of them will be writing outside of Google Docs because they want a thing that does not distract them. And they can write it down. And then they literally copy their text into Google Docs, which then gets collaboratively edited and then gets copied into our CMS. And there's like this process that we have. So it's like, these things that Google's coming out with are all focused around immediate collaboration and like real-time collaboration, which is like, like you said, looks really cool in a demo and has this like neat idea of all of us. We're all in different places of the world and we're all working on the same thing and the same goal.

But how much of that is going to reflect in the reality of how something is put together. I mean, like, I don't know how we integrate this into our workflow. Maybe there's other workflows where it's more obvious. Yeah. And I don't want to be like too narrow-minded. lots of people work in all kinds of fields. They do need more real-time collaboration. I'm excited for the innovation.

I just keep thinking about the fact that I own an Apple pencil. And all that is used for is my daughter draws on the tablet. Like, in any demo, no one knows what to do except circle things on a screen. And like, it just feels like that. Like, man, this is cool. I finally have this thing I want. Boy, its usefulness to me is extremely limited. We'll see.

We shouldn't get off workspace before pointing out that they finally added a page list mode that is responsive. And so the document will change its width to the width of your window and not assume that you're printing it, which is a little bit overdue. And I just want to reiterate that if you are a Google tasks user, A, they haven't given you a website you can go to. It's still only in a sidebar. And B, somebody in your team can add a Google task to your Google tasks from a Google Doc. No. So I am intending on using that in all sorts of terrible ways. That's horrible.

I'm intending on continuing to ignore Google tasks. Yeah. But they are normalizing a bunch of stuff. So like the little hover thing for a contact and Gmail is going to stop being so broken because they fix it for Google Docs and they're going to bring that back to Gmail. So the thing that struck me at the end of all of this was, oh my God, they're doing stuff. Like they're actually, they have a roadmap and they have a plan and they have a vision for what Google workspace is going to be, and they're actually making products on the path to that roadmap.

That's a bad metaphor. But they're doing a thing, and they have a plan, which at Google is not common. I feel like Google is going to start shipping stuff in docs is actually like the whole story here. Because it has remained remarkably unchanged for a long time. Okay, let's round out. There's a bunch of other stuff, and it kind of like falls into two categories. One is like Google doing a bunch of demo stuff and then Google doing AI stuff that is associated with controversy. And they're all kind of like demo-y demo stuff.

So just like we could, man, talk about classic verge cast. Like Google Photos is not going to be able to take two photos taken around the same time and animate them. So like the question of what is a photo is about to get extremely wild. So you take, let's say you're, I mean, their demos like two photos. We can. But, Nilai, if you take two photos at different times, were those photos, photos in the first place? Weren't they also composites?

Inherently, the photos are already HDR composites, so they are not single moments in time. But then if you think about an animation, animation is frames that would stitch together indicate the passage of time. But now the first photo is actually a slice of time that is interpolated to create the impression of a single moment in time. So is the last frame. And now it has generated multiple frames in between. Yeah.

That are moments in time that never existed. Right. Well, they assume it existed. They're taking a guess that you, you know, you moved your head this way in between those two frames. But they don't know. They're just figuring it out. Yeah. But so like, that's crazy.

Yeah. Like, it's just crazy. I don't know what to say about that. That's an hour of Vergecast angst. Like, what is a photo? Like, is one of those middle frames? Statistically, it could be an accurate representation of that moment in time. maybe at a high level, like a high rate of accuracy, or could not be.

So now you have a computer-generated photo. Yeah. The whole concept of reality is just statistics anyway. Statistically, nothing made, it's there or it's not, and it's not actually on-off, yes, no, it's statistics. It's a percentage chance that you exist. And luckily, it's, you know, you're hidden jackpot every millisecond. Which brings me to quantum computing.

uh right there go uh google did a whizbang and this was like i didn't think this was a great interstitial right was michael pania they had and like walked through their quantum computing facility it was very joky it's very hard to explain quantum computing i made this joke in the live blog but this is true if you ever in your life like encounter a quantum computing person or like go to their facility within minutes they'll be like this is the coldest place in the universe because it is the single most relatable thing they can say to you, and it is still insane. Because otherwise, like, qubits.

Here's the deal. And you're like, off for the races. So they're trying to build a quantum computer by 2029. They're actually in a race with Microsoft. They're in a race with IBM. All these companies have different approaches to how to do this thing. But they're doing that. They demo this thing called Starline.

Yeah, this was wild. Which I kind of, like, don't understand why it's so complicated. I don't think it's necessarily complicated. I just, it's a smart thing they made. Yeah, explain it. It's a,

video conferencing booth. So you sit in it, there's cameras, there's a 3D display in front of you, but then instead of just like shooting you and sending that video signal directly to the other Starline booth, it constructs a real-time

3D model of you and then reanimates that model on the other side. That's the part where I'm like, why is it so complicated? Because they could just, shoot the video of you in 3D and send it over there. But they make a volumetric 3D model of you. Right.

Maybe it gives you more ability to, like, move your head around a little bit. Maybe it just looks less video-y to do it that way. Yeah. I wanted, I'm like bursting with questions because they showed it off and it looked cool. Lauren Good wrote a great piece of wired about it. She got to experience it. But then they kept saying things like, this takes so much data. Yeah.

Like gigabytes of data. invent a new compression technology. And it's like, why don't you just shoot the video? Like, they never made that turn for me. Did you hear that? Because I never figured out why they need to do all this, like, volumetric 3D rendering instead of just showing 3D video across this. Well, because what you're looking at in the booth, you're looking at a hologram, right?

And the reason you can make eye contact is because one of the cameras is behind the hologram. And so you're actually looking at a full person, like, in 3D presented with, you know, hologram technology, not, and so it's not just a video, it's a real person with like volume, right, in front of you that. And so could that have been done with a bunch of 3D cameras or did they actually need to do like a full bunch of like motion capture volumetric stuff to like get that, to have that presence on the other side? I'm guessing they did. Maybe they didn't, but I'm guessing they did. And that's also a lot of data. But that's weird because they said like it just worked on like their standard office. They didn't have to run a special

fiber over. So. there is a lot of compression happening there as well. So to me, the real question is like, how does it actually look in person? Lauren, I think it was one of the few people outside of Google to be able to describe it. And she said it was very real, but as soon as you, like, moved a little bit to the left or the right, it started to break the illusion. Yeah. And another one for the what is a photo files, right? Like you're looking at a person that is not there that is a reconstructed volumetric 3D model of a person, but that is reacting in real.

time to that person's actions. I don't know, man. I got to go lie down. I think Ben Thompson's strategy where I referred to as Google creates new realities. And like, here it is. Okay. And then lastly, this is, Google just charged into this. And I think they kind of made a mistake.

So they announced a bunch of AI stuff that is at a high level, very cool. So they announced Mum and Lambda, which are new natural language processing system. We were joking before about I was saying talking to D-D-Rs like talking to a paper airplane or talking to Pluto. Those were their demos so that the system can take on the character of a paper airplane and then sort of converse with you about what it's like to be a paper airplane. Or you can converse with Pluto, which, by the way, Sundar and Google just directly called a planet like 10 times. Yeah, what was the Google put down on Google being a planet? I thought that was great. Yeah.

I mean, go Pluto. I'm on Team Pluto. Okay, so that's cool. And then they can do searches with it. They have this thing called multimodal search where they can understand photos, where you can take a picture of your hiking boots and say, are these boots good for hiking up whatever mountain? I'm going to hike up. And the system will understand all of these things. Okay. Oh, that's in like, provide you a conversational answer. All that's great. All this is in context of Google had a team called the Ethical A.I. team led by a researcher named Timnit Gibrew, who was writing about how Google's language models had profound racial implications. There was bias built into the models because how they collect natural language data to create the models. She tried to publish this paper. She got into a fight with Google.

She and a bunch of her team were summarily fired. That has led to Zoe's been covering this rest left and right. James Vincent has been covering. He has actually got a great piece about how. what Google said at I.O. connects to the controversy and, like, Google just papered over it. Like, no mention of the fact that this is an internal

controversy in Google about whether that AI teams are acting using correct datasets. The only mention of it was they announced this image processing initiative where they're going to change some of the camera filters, and they've hired a bunch of experts across fields to

make sure the image data sets are more inclusive. They're literally going to go out and take photos. But that was, I didn't I think there was a little bit with Lambda about needing to be careful with the datasets, needing to be responsible with it. But again, it's like, obviously they've been working on this stuff forever. It's unclear how much of the ethical AI team contributed to it. If that controversy hadn't happened, I guarantee you that they would have been like, they would have talked about the fact that they have an ethical AI team. The ethical AI team

advise them on this. It's pretty wild how they just went for it with this stuff. And they They are basically daring everybody to be like, but wait a minute. And that's kind of been the reaction. Remember, when they did duplex a few years ago, and we were like, this is amazing. And everyone went, but wait a minute. Yeah. They just walked right into that again. But in a way that is, I don't know, much more pointed because there's just much more, you know, Google did a lot worse things here than duplex.

It was just like, oh, you didn't think of it. What the hell? With here, it's like, oh, you fired somebody. What the hell? Yeah. So James Vincent, who wrote about this. For us, he's got a quote from Emily Bender, who co-authored this paper in the center of the controversy with Tim Nick Gabru and Margaret Mitchell, one of the other Google researchers who was fired. Her quote is, from the blog post discussing Lambda and given the history, I do not have confidence Google's actually being careful about any of the risks we raised in the paper.

For one thing, they fired two of the authors of that paper nominally over the paper. So, like, there's a big sticky problem for Google here where they've trashed their reputation. They know they have. James Dean, who runs AI Google, has said it. We've reported it. And now they're watching the product. Or they're talking to the product in a way that is of high strategic importance to them. I honestly do not know how they're going to make that turn.

I mean, they're just going to do it, which is the problem. I was going to say, yeah, they're just going to power through it. I mean, the team is still there. it's got a new person in charge. Maybe they can come back from it, but like, how hard is hiring over on that team right now, right? It's not a huge community, and they

have trash their reputation in that community in a way that, like, isn't, isn't like, they haven't figured out how to solve it. I mean, not even a little bit, and we also don't know how much that ethical AI team gets to make calls about what Google's products are. So what I think about Deeter

is something you have mentioned in the context of voice search a million times, right? you ask a Google Home Hub or an Alexa a question, you only get one answer. And you get no contextual information about where that answer came from. You don't get other potential answers or links. You just kind of get told information. In Google, if you look at their presentation across I.O., all of their search results are geared towards giving you the one answer.

And they announce some stuff in search about contextual search results and why we're showing this to you. They're going to disclose whether things are ads or not. clearly, which is hilarious, because that is totally a problem of their own making. Right? Like, they've stuffed so many ads in search results. Now, they have to tell you when things aren't ads. But as you go down these AI roads and you start to say the computer is going to tell you more things,

you're going to take a picture of your shoes and ask the computer if the shoes are appropriate to wear. And the computer is going to tell you an answer. It's just going to generate an answer and tell it to you like a person. And that answer might involve, no, they're not, but you could go buy these shoes and if you do. There it is. Right. I mean, like, there's just, like, all of these moments now for Google, where instead of showing

you where information might be, they're going to become the provider of it, and they're obviously trying to automate it. And, like, yeah, if you, Google has mostly escaped the Facebook dynamic, right? Like, the algorithm is bad Facebook dynamic. They definitely, with YouTube, it's, like, absolutely there. But as they start to turn search and maps and all this other stuff into natural language, single result AI systems. Like, who, man,

do you need an ethical AI team showing, like showing people the work more than ever? Because Google's a utility in the way that I think Facebook isn't. Well, and Google is also when it gives you these answers, they're coming from Google. They might tell you what the source was, but when you get just one answer,

the person, the entity, the responsibility for the accuracy that answer is going to end up falling on Google in a way where it has a lot on Facebook, but Facebook can kind of slide around it and say, well, it's our algorithm. It's, but other people are, other people are posting the misinformation, blah, blah, blah, blah. Disclosure by wife works for Facebook reality labs, which used to be called Oculus, et cetera.

Yeah, it's going to be a tougher problem in the future for both companies. Yeah. The demos are cool. You should watch them. It's fun to watch Sundar talking to a planet. It was even, I thought when he showed a breaking, that's hilarious, where he was like, Pluto's answer was sometimes I play with the moon. And it's like, oh, this is how the world ends.

the computers get feelings they blow up the moon but I just I want to end the IOS section on this because it is a huge issue for Google and like you know Addie and are going to do a whole episode

on Apple and Epic and competition and antitrust where is the competition for Google in these spaces if Google screws this up where are you going to go to search for things on the web in a meaningful and realistic way

especially like it's not like Apple's going to stop taking the Google money. So, like, I think the pressure on Google to get this right is high and needs to maybe get even higher. Okay. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We got some gadget reviews to talk about. This is really like a classic Vergecast.

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Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay, we're back. Got to end. Monika reviewed the M1 iMac, which is beautiful.

Dieter, you reviewed the M1 iPad Pro. And then I don't even understand this lossless audio thing. Let's start with the, Dan, let's start with the IMAC. Yeah, the IMAC is finally that redesign that everyone's been waiting for a decade. I love it so much. It is very pretty. It comes in a bunch of fun colors. We were able to review and see the purple one and the orange one,

which have dumb marketing names that I cannot remember. remember. So you can remind them as purple and orange. They also come to green and blue and silver and yellow. So if you want a yellow computer, you can now buy one. But the point is, it's basically if you took a MacBook Pro M1 and put it into a desktop chassis with a 24-inch screen, really great speakers, that's what this is. And that's exactly how it functions and performs. It's got great performance for everyday work. It's very quiet. It's very quick. It's very responsive. The webcam's great. The speakers sound great. It's got three microphones to sound great.

So Monica tested it out a bunch with the, for video calling, because that's what we're all doing now. And it's a really great video calling machine. But it's not like the IMAQ that people who have bought IMAX for the past few years have probably been waiting for. Because the IMA for obviously since its beginning was like the family computer. It was a way to get online initially. It was all in one very simple. But as time has gone on and things like the MacBook Air have kind of. of replace the default computer from desktops, the iMac became more of a focused professional

tools. Our video team uses iMac all the time. Lots of creative professionals uses iMacs all the time. This new iMac is not probably the computer for them. They're going to want to wait for something more powerful, bigger screen, more ports. There's only four ports on this that you can get. But it is like kind of the return of the classic Bondi Blue iMac that came out in 1998. Yeah, so actually, I think you're wrong that this isn't something that people waiting for. My parents bought an IMac in the pandemic because they just wanted, they needed a desktop, they needed a bigger screen, and they wanted to make video calls a little bit easier in a format they were familiar with because figuring out the Facebook portal is a nightmare.

And so, like, I'm a little bit bummed that they don't have this computer because it would be so much happier with it. It's lighter. They could, like, they could move it around, stick it on the kitchen table if they wanted to. I think this computer is great. Yeah, it's a great computer, yeah, for sure. But like for the audience that's listening to the Vergecast, for the audience that reads the Verge reviews, they're probably, it's probably not the computer for them. It's not the right computer for me. It's like a 24-inch screen is like, huh, it's like tiny. Come on. Like, what am I going to do with that? I would, the first, if I had this computer on my desk, the first thing I would do is stick a thunderbolt dock into the back of it

so I could actually have, like, functional ports and do what I want to do. So, like, it's, it's not the computer for someone who cares about that stuff, but for some people like your parents theater or like for people who are not you know uh that you know care about it it's it's it's a great functional computer that they can literally put down on a desk and not worry about it for like five to 10 years which was like the dream of the iMac yeah i mean i don't know we kind of when these were announced we kind of poked around at the idea of like did you know everybody was going to work from home and then you had an m1 ship so you made like a fun colorful good work from home and like the response was like man we wish we were that good right like yeah but they have hit a moment

where a lot of people are reconsidering how and when they're going to work. A lot of people are like, oh, I want to have like a nice home office situation. I'm not going to go in the office. This computer is perfect. Like, they're going to sell so many of these. So, so many of these. And it's also like a brand new 5 nanometer chip, the M1, on a new process that Apple controls all the supply to. So there will be no chip shortages whatsoever.

Like, well, there might be some. Actually, Apple hinted out of, they might be. They might be running into it. But like just in terms of meeting, like your plan meeting a moment and like having that moment kind of be perfect, I think they've, they've nailed it for a huge class of people that is reconsidering whether they're going to go back to an office. And like, I think if you're not, like, I cannot recommend enough. If you have a laptop, get an external display and a keyboard and just tilt your head up. Like, don't look down on your laptop all day. just like sit up and look straight.

And if you are in the market for your computer, like maybe you don't want your laptop to follow you around the house and make you work all of the time. Maybe like work should stay in a room. And like, I don't know. I think the M1 power thing, like how powerful is this computer really?

I mean, I want to wait for a bigger screen and a faster computer, but most people are looking at 13-inch laptop screens. There's just a part of me, it's like Apple just nailed it so completely of this computer that I want to get one just to have it, even though I don't need it. Put it in your kitchen.

That's where Apple wants you to put it in the kitchen. Because your work will follow you into the kitchen. I do. Why didn't they, why didn't they, this goes in the iPad, but why didn't they do the center stage video calling thing with this? It's very odd. Yeah, I honestly have no idea. It's got a great image sensor in there. It's 1080p up from 720 now.

Monica did like, if you watch the video, she compares it directly to the camera that's in the M1 MacBook Pro. And it is night and day. You know, obviously, it's not going to compare to, like, setting up your own rig with a mirrorless camera and all this other stuff that people have done over the past year. But just compared to, like, what it was before, it is much better experience in terms of video calling. I think the answer to Center Stage is the same reason, is the same answer as why they didn't put Face ID on the IMac. It's just, it's a lot of work to recreate that stuff on the Mac. And I don't know, they can run iPad out, so apparently they can't run that yet. And they just don't want to do it.

Well, the Mac is scary and dangerous, that's why. Oh, okay. Monica says, speakers are good. This is probably as good places any you talk about. Atmos and lossless. I don't know. Like,

it supports Dolby Atmos with spatial audio. Apple music just rolled out, like, just this extremely complicated lossless audio plan. Yeah. Yeah. So you can get, it's not going to cost anyone anymore.

So the complexity is like, whatever. But there's two. different things happening at once. One is, what should be the more straightforward thing, is the quality levels of Apple Music are rising. So now instead of wherever they were at compressed AAC, you can now get lossless Apple Music. That comes in two different quality tiers. Dan, am I correct about this? Yeah. So there's lossless and then there's high-deaf lossless. okay

so this does make sense so there's two tracks here one is like existing Apple music is going to be higher quality and that is very complicated it involves a lot of Apple's own hardware not supporting anything

so at the base level Apple is going to support CD quality audio which is hilarious to me because everyone is always talking about CD quality audio but like CDs came out 30 years ago we got we got to be able to do better than like one

optical disc format but CD quality audio is 16 bit at 44.1 kilohertz those are the numbers and you can fall down in the rabbit hole those numbers if you want but those are the numbers that indicate CD quality audio. Then on Apple devices but by Apple devices we mean max and iOS devices

not anything else that's a big point on Apple devices you can get 24 bit at 48 kilohertz which is a good and meaningful step up. Then you can also further go to 24-bit at 192 kilohertz if you have an external USB digital audio converter, which is like another box you have to buy and then you plug fancy headphones into that.

So like at the top level of Apple music, you need to buy a piece of non-Apple hardware. At the middle level of Apple music, you can use your phone or your Mac to listen to it probably over the built-in speakers, because the phones don't have headphone jacks. Yeah. And you can't listen to any of this

if you have Apple's headphones. If you have AirPods or AirPods Max or AirPods Pro. It gets more complicated than that. Because the thing that Apple says is that, so that highest tier where you need that external hardware, you cannot listen to that with AirPods Max or HomePod's full stop. Right. That loss list of.

tier before you get to that highest tier is not called lossless when you are listening through AirPods Max, whether you're doing it wired or wireless. And Apple says this is because what happens is the audio is converted into analog, then it's re-digitized for the AirPods Max because they do not have an analog to digital converter. And so it's digital goes to analog, becomes digital again when it hits your ear, before it goes to your ears, where it, you know, comes out of the speakers or whatever. That last conversion means that Apple can't call it lossless because it is not the pure audio. Because the AirPods are themselves. The AirPods are shaping the music themselves, right?

They've got their own algorithms for shaping the music. Right. But the 24-bit 48-kHz signal comes in, gets converted, and then it gets reconverted back into 24-bit 48-kHz. So it's like that level is still maintained, but it's can't be called lossless because of the number of times of conversion. So it is like kind of this wonky thing. The gist of it all is it'll probably sound great. It's going to sound great in your AirPods max, but like you can't say, I've got lossless in my ears. I will say if Apple for years said nobody could hear this stuff and it wasn't worth it, and now they're like, they're in it. Right. And I think that's because we expect Spotify is going to do it. Amazon music the same day

announced they were dropping the price of Amazon. music HD. Something happened. Yeah. Right. Like, there was a smoke-filled Zoom with the music industry. Well, in Spotify, there was like a bug in the app where you could like see a high-fi option appear. Chris Welch found it on Reddit and like confirmed it on his own phone. Here's the thing. I mean, one, let's just talk about the fact that Apple and Amazon giant tech behemists with piles of cash to burn are offering this for

free when we think Amazon or Spotify is going to have to charge more. That's thing one. Thing two, I know there's a lot of people defending or like explaining why the AirPods Macs can't do it and like, you know, you don't understand audio and this is why they can't do it, whatever. But I don't know, Apple chose to make the AirPods Max. They released them not that long ago. Presumably somebody in the AirPods Max team could have wandered over to the Apple Music

team and said, hey, what's you working on? I know that Apple is very silent or whatever. But come on. What Dan is describing is. the wired mode, right? Where to get audio, out of your computer, you got to do a digital to analog conversion

with a phone that happens in the lightning adapter, right? That's why you get an analog audio jack and then you plug it in and then the AirPods convert it. Wirelessly, the AirPods Max, that's Bluetooth. And Apple doesn't support any lossless protocol

over Bluetooth. Like, it is necessarily compressed. So when you're like the AirPods Max team knew, not only did they probably know was happening down the line with Apple Music. They knew right, like, from the start that the only Bluetooth codec that they were supporting was, like, limited. And they didn't build headroom into the system.

Could all this change at WWDC? Could they add a Bluetooth codec to iOS to the iPhone? Could they update the W1? Like, maybe. But then why I announced it before now? Yeah. Because the music industry all got together and, like, you're doing it tomorrow. My favorite

Reefield room My favorite reaction to all this is For years and years Apple's like This doesn't matter nobody can hear it A bunch of audio people are like no it matters And now Apple announced it And a bunch of audio people are like It doesn't matter nobody can hear this

It's like completely flipped So we still have a lot of questions on Sono support Airplay support like many many questions to be answered Not of Apple's pages make any of this particularly clear We got to figure that up That is just one trend of the Apple music chaos.

And that, I promise you, is the simpler set of problems to solve. Because all you're doing is you're taking the existing music library. Yeah. And that you're compressing it or in some case, like, you're encoding it differently. Right. You're like, you've got stereo audio, two channels. You've got a master version of it somewhere that's uncompressed. And you're going to encode it into one of the many formats and like ship it out over

the internet. some complicated scheme that will eventually make sense. They're also announcing support for Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio, which requires a new library of music that has been remixed for Atmos. And there is even less information about that. And the only thing I ever think about when I, and it's a different format than Amazon and Sony, which are using like, what's it called, Dan, some Sony?

Well, Sony has 360 reality. Amazon's actually the one in between who supports both Atmos and 360. But I think Amazon music is due is 360 reality and not Atmos. I think it's actually both. Of course it's both. I mean, I could be wrong, but if I remember correctly, the studio, it's both. But you won't know really which one it is when you're playing it. Like, it's just one of them.

Anyhow, all I remember is when you reviewed the Echo Studio, you discovered that tracks have. had instruments added onto them to make them sound more 3D. And literally no one, tell the story. I don't think anyone has ever explained to us what exactly happened. Yeah. So I'm testing out. This was a couple of years ago, the Echo Studio came out.

Amazon rolled out its 3D music support with the Echo Studio. There was like their product to showcase it on. And there were like, I don't know, 10 tracks that I could test it with. One of them happened to be Cameron's, oh boy, from 2002. So, of course, I'm listening to that a bunch, and I'm listening to it in stereo mode, and I'm listening to it in a 3D mode. And I realize that when I'm in 3D mode, there's this whole orchestra of strings in the song that don't exist in stereo mode. And, like, this just is out of nowhere. And so we get comment on it from Amazon.

Amazon's like, you know, studios can choose to add things to the songs, however they feel fit or whatever. We tweet about this. It goes out on Twitter, Jonathan, from... Boy Genius, who worked in the music industry for a long time, has a lot of connections there, happens to know Just Blaze. It was like, Just Blaze. Look what they did to your song. And Just Blaze is like, cool.

He's like, did I get paid for this? I don't know. By the way, you are correct. The Echo Studio supports both. And Amazon Music HD is Atmos, not 360 reality audio. I don't know. All these are bad names. My point is, if you think the chaos and confusion of

lossless format support is nuts. Just wait until artists are like, I remade this in Atmos and you're like, great, I'm going to turn my head and listen for stuff. Then they realize there's nothing to hear back there because they recorded in stereo and they're like, what if we put some strings in this? Because that's what they're going to do.

I just don't know why. This is the one where the music industry for years, like their entire revenue model was format. shifting. Yeah. You know, like Google it. So they would sell you, for years, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd was like the best selling album in the world.

It's because every couple years, you would go from eight tracks to cassettes to vinyl to CDs and everybody would just rebuy dark side of the moon because you could hear it. You know, like, yeah, yeah. You like smoke weed and what it was? It was the Wizard of Oz. Yeah. So everyone is like, everyone's like hit and play in the eight track player and watching the Wizard of Oz and be like, oh, I got to buy this on the CD.

that's real. They don't have format shifting anymore. It's just streaming. So this is like an obvious attempt to do a format shift, but they didn't raise the prices. So I have no idea what the point of this is. And then on the other side of the music industry, everybody, all the new artists are just trying to make TikTok beats. Yeah. Like half of the music industry is like the songs need to be one minute long and have a clear hook that you can dance to and we're going to master it for phones. And the other half the music industry is like we're adding strings to Cameron. So people buy new speakers. And it just doesn't,

that doesn't seem like a strategy to me. Anyhow. But will there be strings in the TikTok beats? There's always strings in the TikTok beats. You got to get the woes, man. Look, read our Riki desktop interview. I think my favorite thing that we published last year, I talk about our Riki desktop profile so much.

Okay. Speaking of speakers, the iPad Pro has four of them. Yeah. They're really good. It was great, right? Yeah. Yeah, so I reviewed the iPad Pro, the 12.9 and the 11. I did not deeply test spatial audio because it's the same as before.

In fact, a lot of the stuff on these iPads are the same as before. The things that are new are center stage, which we discussed, you can follow you around. An M1 ship, and the 12.9 has a mini LED display that is called the Liquid Retina XDR, I believe, is the name of that display. And what do you want to know? Liquid right and XDR. Liquid right in XDR. Well, we got to talk about the display. So in the review,

I mean, in the review, pointed out how it works, it's got this huge grid of micro LED backlights. 10,000. As we were talking about it, I was like, you've got to run a blooming test because I'm a gigantic display nerd.

Yeah. And that is the first thing I thought of. It seemed like it did pretty okay on those tests. Yeah, I think it did fine. Like, you can see it. You can see a little blooming around the little square dot moving around the screen.

But I haven't personally reviewed a bunch of OLED TVs. I've obviously looked at OLED TVs. I don't currently own one. But Blooming is unavoidable. They've got 2,500 local dimming zones, blah, blah, blah, blah, but that's just there. But when you're actually watching a movie or looking at an HDR photo, you just don't see it.

And to be clear, you should know that the brightness on the screen is specifically for full screen application. So you need to go full screen in a video or in a photo for it to kick in the extreme HDR that can peak at 1,600. Nets and have an overall screen brightness of a thousand nits. Does it do that thing that the iPhone does when you're watching HDR where it like visibly shifts over into HDR mode as you play the video? Yeah, and it's great.

I'm sorry, it's freaking great. Yeah. The blacks are black. Everything looks amazing. Colors feel more accurate because there's actually detailed the texture that is lost in a traditional backlight system. The screen when you're like watching movies is incredible. It's so good.

Is that worth the extra money? That is between you and your bank account. To me... Because the extra money is... It's $100 more than it was last year, right? Like, that's the extra money. If they had this thing on the 11-inch, I'd have bought it by now. I prefer the 11-inch size on the iPad Pro.

But yeah, I would have to. Like, just because I have no idea why they didn't. Is it too expensive? Do they want to keep the iPad Pro a bit cheaper? Do they not able to make enough components to fit into both? Unclear. Unknown. So that's a screen.

I did run into one weird thing where in dark mode in e-book apps, there's like more than blooming behind it. It's like kind of lit up like big gray squares. You will not see it unless you're in like a pitchback room reading at night. You just won't. But when you see it, you're like, what the hell is that? And it's actually distracting enough to like have put me off wanting to use it to read at night with it.

But any amount of light at all in the room and it basically disappears. I'm assuming there's a very complicated backlight controller that is just being confused by big blocks of text. Well, I will tell you, though, it's not just blocks of text. Like, in iBooks, there's like a page number, page two, just all by itself down in the bottom on the left-hand page, and nothing else near it. And it had a like two-by-two-inch square of gray around it for one digit. Huh. Do Apple say anything about this? they they uh they did not

huh yeah sometimes when we review things you like find bodies and they're like yeah we'll get back to you um i think they're still investigating well i think if you think about that 10,000 microlady grid it is basically just a second lower resolution display yep like a lower resolution black and white display behind the the main color display yeah and so it I mean, we've seen this demo at CS, however many times, but like the TV demo, when they show you local dimming LCDs, is they show you each layer of the TV operating.

Yeah. And so the local dimming one is like, they show you the person walking across the screen. And there's like a blockier LED person walking across the screen. Right. And like that display controller and how fast it works and how responsive it is, like it's a significant engineering project. And it feels like there's probably a display controller software update that needs to come. Yeah. By the way, I was thinking about this because you said the yellow color thing, and it occurred to me, I just Google this.

That's just probably wrong. But a lot of the way you perceive brightness is based on the green channel, which is why pentile screens have more green pixels because they can look brighter. And I think yellow is like one of the weird ones. So now that you've got like a better backlight, you can actually perceive different. Because you called out yellow specifically. I've been thinking about it ever since. Yeah. Like yellow is one of the weirder, like harder ones.

So you've got a backlight technology It can make the yellows brighter So you can perceive the difference in the yellows is crazy to me Yeah See my obsession with pentile displays finally paid off in a positive way I'm only gonna watch movies with I don't know Lee Pace in him so I can look at his blonde hair I'm very excited

Do you think they're gonna do something big at WWC with this M1 chip? I mean that's like Every every review and you called it out like don't wait Like nothing indicates that Apple is gonna make this thing more of a Mac at Who knows right? But like Apple has certainly not indicated that they're going to make the same. Well, iOS is for babies, as we've learned today. Oh, my God. So we should just say the M1, if you use very specific apps,

you will perceive a speed difference in like rendering or doing stuff. But if you don't know exactly what app is slowed down by an A-series chip, then you will not notice. It is just as fast. It feels fast, whatever. It supports Thunderbolt, but again, the way that Apple supports third-party accessories on the iPad continues to be frustrating. The one that I specifically called out,

is audio stuff. So if you have a thing plugged into it that has a speaker, like my dock, there's no controls to tell the iPad, no, don't use that play audio on the iPad. If you can find the setting to like get audio back to the iPod, please tell me,

because it's not the little airplay-looking thing in Control Center. That didn't do it for me. And that's it. Like the iPad is great and it's like the most enjoyable computer to use until you can't do anything until you like hit a wall

and then it's frustrating. So I have no idea what they're going to do at WWDC. They are due because like they kind of like if they're doing like their TikTok small update, big update strategy, last year's iPad update was pretty minimal. They didn't do much. So maybe they're due to do a lot this year. But we will, we will see. One of the challenges Apple now has is Craig Federigi just said the entire software model of the iPod

of iOS is keeping you safe. But Mac is like a car and you have to learn how to. to drive it and it's not dangerous. And the iPad is like right in the middle of those two approaches. Yep. And what they need to do is make it more open and extensible and flexible and easier to use. But then they're going to have to give up the things in iOS. Right.

Like if you want to make the iPad truly extensible, you have to de-abstract the file system. Yeah. They're just not going to do it. Right. And like I just wonder, like the things people want iPads to do, like you can do most of them. I worked from an iPad for most of today, actually. It was fine. But the second, I'm like, I got to add something that we've had this conversation. I can, I just think their, their challenge now that they want to keep the iPhone so locked down in the face of all this antitrust

pressure is going to land squarely on the iPad not moving. Yeah. Because if they make any concessions on the iPad, people are going to say, why don't you make the same concessions on the phone? Right. Well, it's got a different name. It's iPad OS. It's not iOS. Maybe that's why they did it. I mean, honestly, maybe that's why they did it. Man, I could complain about what's a computer with the iPad for another three years, and I'm sure I will be. What about the, just like briefly, what about the fact that Apple, I think we've seen what the M1 devices are going to be, right? Like the low-end MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air, the IMac, and now surprisingly, the iPad, they've just like taken this thing and they slapped it in all their consumer stuff. So we know there's another version of the M's processor coming for the higher-end MacBook Pro

and presumably a higher-end iMac. Is it weird that it's just the same chip in the Mac and the iPad? Am I the only one that has a hang-up on that? I know that they're not going to run Mac apps, but they just like created this amazing board, and they just like put it to all their computers. And it's like, this feels more appliancey than ever to me. Yeah, I don't, I think it's weird to us.

It's probably weird to our listeners. I was like, now we know it can just do all the things in a way that Apple used to have an argument that Intel chips were different, that architectures were different, and they had custom built the A series processors to do X, Y, and Z. Now it's like, they're just openly saying it's the same chip. And then you know over here on MacOS, which is starting to inherit a lot of iOS paradigms, that it can just do all the things. So, like, I think there's a weirdness if you know.

but I think Apple's also very proud of the M1 chip. They're very proud of the fact that it can run every form factor from an 11-inch iPad up to an IMac. And that's just a huge range of thermal constraints. It can do a good job in all those thermal constraints. Give me an M1 Apple Watch. I think they're like their general pride

at like leading the industry and ship design far supersedes us being like, the operating systems are really close and why won't you just let me either touch my Mac or layer a window on the iPad? Yeah, right. Like, it's the only things I need to do. I need to layer some windows or I need to touch this screen and I think Apple just doesn't care.

And I really do think, and maybe I'm certain they would strenuously deny it. They're in a position right now where to move the iPad to closer to Mac where a lot of people want it to go, they would have to give up those concessions on the phone. and that is just a dangerous, dangerous place for them to be right at the second. Yeah, they're not going to do it. In conclusion, the summary of everything here is they should add multi-user to the iPad because it's punitive that they don't. That is, I don't understand what they don't.

No, they don't do it because they want to make you buy both. That was going to be the original way I was going to conclude the video. The reason is because they're going to afford it. They want to make you buy both. And that's like mean and whatever. but it's not like the right attitude to take towards the iPad because it is such an amazing computer. But, yeah, I just think that they want everybody to have an iPad.

They think it's a personal device. It's a lot of work to make it multi-user, right? iOS is not architected to be that way from the jump. And so having to retcon that in is like a ton of work. I don't know if it's worth it for them. They did that work on the education. Yeah, the education iPads are like, the multi-user there is like, okay. I think that they probably don't think it's a good enough experience to like send out to everybody.

But I wish they would. They've already been willing to make the iPad complicated. Trying to figure out like the windowing experience on the iPad is hard. It's not easy to figure out. It's not intuitive at all. So whatever. It's already complicated. Make it more complicated.

Offer multi-user so that a family that can't afford four iPads can actually use one. Yeah. Especially with, like, remote schooling and all this other stuff that we've lived through. Like, it's sitting there for them. They should just do it. Okay. I want to end. I just want to say this out loud.

We did this Starlink review last week. We talked about it at length. This is so dumb. If you've been listening to this show for any amount of time, but for example, over the past 10 years, I will happily disclose to you as many times as you wish that NBC Universal, a part of Comcast is a minority investor in Vox Media, which owns the verge. I promise you that Comcast does not love me. Like, I just, there's not, the number of experiences I have where I have been told this company is not a fond of our coverage of them is numerous.

And I also promise you that even if they owned us and controlled us, that would not be what it takes to influence me into saying that wired connections are better than. wireless ones, which is just, which is really the thing that people are mad at me for saying that I think the telecom industry in this country has utterly failed to connect people well. And if you look at other countries around the world with different competition models, different policy regimes, someone tweeted me and say, I'm on a beach, I'm on a remote beach in Sweden, I'm paying for my fiber provider's basic plan and I have 200 up and down. like I understand it's a big country there's all these issues most people in this country have electricity we can probably do a better job of running broadband cables to way more places and making the market

more competitive which was the heart of my starlink review if you look at if you just look at what the most like the harshest lines in that review are they are dedicated to the telecom industry in this country not starlink even though i think starlink for a lot of people might be a good solution in the end. That's all I'm going to say. I don't want to engage it too much. I just think it's very funny to accuse me in particular

of being in the pocket of Comcast in order to say that wired connections are better than wireless ones. If anything, I'm in the pocket of big HTML and big internet. I think people know that. So I just want to put that out there. That's the disclosure.

We disclose it all over the site. We disclose it on a show all the time. I think it is a very funny I'm sympathetic to it. I understand it. Some of the criticisms were valid. I got the name of the dish wrong. It's Dishy McFlatface, not Dissue McFestface.

We did correct that in the piece. I think people are so desperate for connectivity. They're angry at the wrong things. There's like a helplessness about broadband in this country that is utterly devastating to see in person. And so I'm not upset or mad about this. I'm just pointing out how upset other people are. that Dieter lives in San Francisco. Yeah.

San Francisco is a... Everyone's upset that I live here. I mean, I used to live in New York City. Like, even if you want to make the big land, you know, America's big and population, like in San Francisco in New York City, two of the most densely populated and expensive places to live in this country, it is hard to get good broadband. Like, Dieter, your broadband connection is not like... You don't have, like, gig a bit up and down.

No, it's not available to me. The best I can get is dark. from Xfinity, and I hate it. There you go. I'm paying for their max plan, and it's like a gig down, but usually doesn't hit that. And it's 25 up. And why is it only 25 up? Who knows? And I think if I moved, if I happen to have moved like six blocks, I would have access to Sonic,

which is an independent ISP. I think it runs on top of A&T, AT&T's fiber. And I would love to give them my money. so happy to get my money to an independent ISP. There's another independent ISP here in San Francisco called Monkey Brains, which is very good, but it's just like, it's microwaves and it's a little bit too slow for my needs. So my plan here, living where I live, is if I need to upload something, I will get

on my bike and ride to our office that's 20 minutes away and go through our COVID protocols. No, I'm serious. I go through our COVID protocols. I, like, fill out the survey. I get permission from the company to go to the office so that I can upload a file that's more than, you know, a bunch of gigabytes, like 20 gigabytes. Anytime I shoot video, I have to go to the office because Comcast is the only provider I have here and they suck.

Anyway, I just think that's like that's San Francisco. That's not the middle of rural America, which is where I'm sitting. I only have one choice. That's all I want to say. The Starlink Review was more about broadband in America than one thing. And it was in particular about American telecom policy, always prime. promising you a new connectivity technology instead of investing into deploying the ones that work and making sure those markets are competitive.

I think that is a mistake. I think you can look around the world and see other countries that have made different policy choices and their citizens are connected in much faster speeds for much lower prices. That's it. Disclosure. NBC Universal, a division of Comcast, is a minority investor in box media, which owns the verge. And I promise you. I absolutely promise you.

They do not love us. Okay, that's it. That's a Vergechast. I mean, for that take too long. But if you know me, you know that I'm very passionate about broadband policy. It routinely bores the staff

of the verge to tears. That's my real problem. It's the constant low-grade mutiny if I talk about broadband policy anymore. All right, that's it. That's a Verge-cast. We've got another episode. We went for an hour and a half.

There's another episode coming later today. We're more than that. Is it more than that? Yeah, it's like almost two. We went for an end, we went over, is what I'm really trying to say. But Addie and I are going to do another episode of the Vergecast later today after Tim Cook wraps up his epic versus Apple testimony. So look out for that. You can tweet at us.

Deeter is at Backlund. Dan is at D.C. Seifert. I'm at Reckless. By the time this comes out, I'm going to tell you episode of Decoder with Ford CEO, Jim Farley, talking about the new F150, lightning will be up in the world that was a wild he basically told me that you'd be able to upgrade the computers in cars the same way that you can upgrade like the shocks and the seats i would love to see that happen he did not have an answer when i said will i be able to upgrade my current card to your new android operating system just didn't answer that question i think i know

the answer enjoy your sink i think that means i know the answer to that question but that is up go listen to that it's that was a really fun episode to do like i said we'll be back later on Friday with Apple versus Epic and we'll be back again next week. That's it. Rock and Roll. Encourage your family to get a vaccine.