The Vergecast - Google is shutting down Stadia / Amazon's hardware launch event

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Jay Peters discuss Google deciding to shut down its game streaming service Stadia. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy joins the show to chat about all the products Amazon announced at its hardware launch event this week, including the new E Ink tablet for reading and writing. Google is shutting down Stadia Google is trying to reinvent search — by being more than a search engine  Google’s trying to become a one-stop shopping destination Google will help you find better results without tagging ‘Reddit’ onto every search The 11 biggest announcements at Amazon's hardware launch event  Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is an E Ink tablet for reading and writing Amazon fifth-generation Echo Dot smart speakers get a host of new features Echo speakers can now be Eero mesh Wi-Fi extenders Amazon’s new Echo Auto is smaller and easier to mount in your car Amazon’s latest 4K TVs improve picture quality and borrow ideas from The Frame The new Amazon Fire TV Cube has an HDMI input for controlling cable boxes  Alexa is getting some much-needed smart home upgrades Amazon’s Halo Rise is a bedside light to track your sleep and wake you up Blink's new Mini Pan Tilt adds robotics to its compact home security camera Ring's new Spotlight Cam Pro mashes its most advanced features into a wireless design   Sonos Sub Mini review: low end for a lower price Intel and Samsung are getting ready for ‘slidable’ PCs Leaked Galaxy S23 renders suggest Samsung could ditch the camera bump A smart lock with long-range wireless power is finally a reality Asus launches massive 17-inch Zenbook with Ryzen 6000 Intel’s 13th Gen processors arrive October 20th with $589 flagship Core i9-13900K Wacom announces the Cintiq Pro 27, its latest display graphics tablet Logitech announces its first mechanical keyboard specifically for the Mac Stage Manager isn’t just for M1 iPads anymore Hands-on with aptX Lossless, the new tech promising CD-quality audio over Bluetooth Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the verge cast, we mourn the unexpected loss of Google Stadium. Then Jen Patterson-Tooey joins us live from CDA Expo 2022 to get into all to smart home news and everything from Amazon. That's coming up right after this. 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. this backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing

what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data 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 Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Google Graveyard. I like to imagine we're like the local radio station. We just like broadcast from the top of the Google Reader tomb. That's just where we are. That's where we're at. Yeah. I'm your friend David Pierce. Alex Kranz is here. Hi, Alex. Hi. I'm still upset about Google Wave. It could have been a thing. It could have. I wholeheartedly agree with that. I also don't remember which one is Google Wave and which one is Google Buzz. Don't ask me to tell the difference. Google Wave was, it was a better one. Okay. That's good or no. That's Jay Peters. Jay Peters is here. Hi, Jay. I am Google Wave. Just to say, you work like half the time, but you seem cool. Is that basically the fine? That's accurate. Yeah. until I lost that, but yeah. Nelai is not here.

The excuse he made was that he has, like, 45 weddings to go to this weekend. So if you have tips on how to be a good wedding guest, please send them all to Nelai. He's at Reckless on Twitter, and I'm sure he would love to hear all of your wedding tips. We have a lot to talk about, but we definitely need to start with the big breaking news of today,

just a couple hours before we started recording this. Google Stadia is dead. Yeah. Jay, you found out about this like 10 minutes before it was happening. Tell us what's going on. Yep. So Google is shutting down Stadia. It's cloud gaming service.

It'll stay online for folks who subscribe or play games on it until January 18th of next year. The good news is if you've invested into hardware or software on Stadia, Google's going to refund everything to you. But if you loved Google Stadia because of the dream of cloud gaming, Stadia will not be part of that dream anymore, unfortunately. So wait, every penny that anyone ever spent, on Google Stadia, Google is giving back? Not quite.

If you subscribed to its Stadia Pro subscription, they're not going to refund those. But if you were subscribed, you can still use Stadia Pro through until the shutdown happens. Got it. What are like incredible admission of not only failure, but like we are sorry,

we conned all of you into thinking this was a thing we were actually doing? Yeah. They're just giving all your money back. Yeah. It's not, you know, I mean, I'm happy that people get their money back because I think a lot of people, well, maybe not a lot, but a fair amount of people really believed in what this could do. And, you know, it very pie in the

sky sounds awesome, right? You can stream your games onto whatever platform, whatever screen you're in front of. But for Google, it's not in reality. I think it's because it was always a beta. It was, it was always a beta that they just charged for. Yeah, I mean, it launched super rocky and without a bunch of the really cool features that they announced right at the start. And, you know, they slowly added some of those things, but, like, it wasn't enough. And when you have to think about, like, is my internet connection going to even work to play this game, like, I think that's enough of a barrier for people that it just can't catch on. I was talking about this with Tom on Wednesday's show that, like, there is just this invisible

barrier for people that it's like, internet gaming is a good idea. It's probably definitely the future. And it is just not something people are ready for. And the thing that really amazed me was going back and reading some of the stuff from the launch in 2019, like, this service was never very good. Was the thing that I forgot. It was like a cool idea. And there were some people who were like, yeah, this could really turn into something.

But even at the very beginning, it was like, there is some big important stuff missing here. Namely, like, there aren't really very many good games to play. That wasn't true. And it's like, if we've learned one thing, it's like, just have good games. There were good games. They had good games. The problem was the Internet in the United States is, garbage. Like, it's bad. Everybody has bad internet. Very few people have good internet. We are

currently recording this podcast and all of our videos are super pixelated because the internet is so bad it can't handle video streams. So of course, I wasn't going to be able to handle Stadia. And like, I remember talking to the heads of Stadia when it came out. And I was like, what are you going to do about this? And they're like, well, you know, ISPs recognize when things are bad and they improve them. And I was like, that's just, are you dumb? But Alex. And they were like, no, it'll happen. And I was like, but it didn't. It wasn't going to happen. Alex. How are you going to make that happen? Well, 5G was the obvious answer for that one. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's like 5G is going to be 5G and cloud gaming together hand

and hand will transform the world. And it's like they won't because you still have to get fast internet. You say that like it's a joke by the way, but that really is what they said. Like, that really genuinely is what they said. They were like, this is going to save the world. You're going to be able to, like, cloud game doing laparoscopic surgery on your best friend's dying mother with stadia. They didn't say that part. But these were all these huge, massive promises. And they kept forgetting the fact that at the end of the day, you still have to have pipes that pipe the internet to the 5G broadcast towers and to the people's homes.

And nobody wants to pay for those. Yeah, and I think... Sorry, I get very passionate about internet infrastructure. I mean, it's important for a technology that requires good infrastructure to make the games work. So I think you're really justified in being passionate about this one. Well, and I think if you do the business in a very different way, I think you can maybe get away with it. Like, I have PS4 down in my basement, and I use the PS4 remote play to play. video games on my computer.

And it's like, it's kind of what you're describing. It's like occasionally blocky. There's a little lag, but it's a free thing that just sort of exists. And so anything about it that, like, works at all feels like a victory. And I will take that. Google came out and said, not only are you going to pay for the games that you want, you're going to pay for the privilege of streaming the games that you want. And at the beginning, they were making people buy that, like, weird, expensive package

that also included a Chromecast. And it's just like, they set it up as this very premium, very, like, high-intensity future of gaming thing. And you know who's going to buy that is people who need way more out of their games than Google Studio is going to give them? Yes, 100%. I really like Microsoft's approach personally,

where it feels like cloud gaming is like an add-on to the things you can you can buy a game from the store and just play it on your Xbox and that's fine. But if you want to test one, you can test that using the cloud. I think that's a really perfect application

of cloud gaming technology with the internet infrastructure for the vast majority of Americans right now. And I think it's notable that Microsoft and Nvidia are the two that are still like really in this. Amazon's out there doing Luna. I'm sure it's going to get canceled next week. They're going to be like, oh, oh, we're canceling these now? Yeah, we're out of this game too. But, you know, Microsoft and Nvidia both have been doing this for a lot longer.

Microsoft has been doing this for since I think at least 20, 2019, right, was when they first launched their beta, I think. I think that sounds right. Nvidia's been doing it even longer. And in doing a free beta, don't charge you any money. They only started charging very recently when everybody else started charging. Before that, they were like, yeah, this is cool technology, but we know it's not worth your money yet. I've been wondering about Nvidia, actually.

And I'm curious what you both think, because like the state of G-Force now is exactly what you just described. And I think Nvidia got away with it because Nvidia was just. just selling all the Bitcoin mining rigs that existed in the universe. What was doing it before Bitcoin? But like the GPU business has been so good for so long that like Nvidia could kind of get away with this. Right. And now like what's clearly happening here is all of these companies are going through and saying, okay, where are our money pits where we can go and actually like the economy is not great?

We're like potentially headed to a recession. Everybody's doing hiring freezes. It's like if I'm Google, it's pretty easy to look at this and say, okay, we're paying a fortune for games. because we set it up in this weird way where you have to, like, build an extra version of your game just to run on Stadia. We have all this cloud infrastructure that's really expensive. And no one is signing up for our services. So, like, obviously we should kill this thing. And I wonder if there are going to be a bunch of other companies who make that same kind of calculation.

I don't think Nvidia and Microsoft will be those companies. Microsoft, because, as Jay, like, rightfully pointed out, it's treated very much like an add-on. This is, like, a nice bonus perk. And they've got the infrastructure in place, right? Like, they're one of the largest cloud computing companies in the world. InVIDIA also really big cloud computing company. Like, they've had these servers for a long time, and they've been doing this for a long while. And it's a different thing for them.

But they've actually, like, it's an actually good service. I can go play. I've played Civilization Six on Nvidia, G-Force now since, like, 2017, 2018. But doing it for ages. And, like, yeah, is it pixelated? Is it buggy sometimes? Sure. Is there one time where like it just wouldn't quit the game? And I would like go away and I'd come back and my game was still running like four hours later,

even though I'd left the browser. Yes. This is not the compelling case that you think it is. It's great. I love it. I mean, I think it's nice purely as an option. Like when I was visiting family one time, I played through all of Donut County on my phone using Xbox Cloud Gaming. And that was like, oh, this is a fun game about a hole that just

gets bigger and bigger and eats up all the stuff. But like if I was really into destiny, I don't know if I would invest, you know, tons of time into Destiny on Stadia where you have to shoot good, right? Like, and I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I can do that on Stadia or other cloud platforms. You can't. So what happens to all this stuff now? Like, there's all the infrastructure, there's people. The strangest thing I've been noticing is there are a million people who are really curious about the controller. I've never actually used the Stadia controller, but people seem to really like it? What's happening here?

I haven't used the controller either. It looks like a good depat, you know, a good controller. Like, it looks fine. Like, it's nice. It lets you play the games. People are psyched about it. They're like, okay, you can shut down Stadia. I don't need my games, but like this D-pad, y'all.

Like, I need the D-pad. Well, what I think, what I was, what I've been reading and I haven't dug into this myself, you know, all the way, but I think, like, you can't connect it to your, be a Bluetooth to your computer or whatever. You can plug it in with a wire, but way more controllers. Probably everybody has a couple just sitting in a drawer somewhere. It can connect to a computer or another thing with Bluetooth.

And so I think there's a good chance that people just stop using these controllers. Well, the controller doesn't serve a purpose after this. Because the controller was built to connect directly to Stadia. It didn't connect to your broadcast and then go through. It connected straight to the cloud. It's got its own Wi-Fi. and I'm sure somebody will get out there and hack it. Please, please, hit me up on Twitter if you're that person and you successfully do it.

I want to talk to you. Yeah. But for most people, it's it's now just a piece of plastic that is going to go into a landfill and be bad for the environment. Google made so many weird decisions here. I forgot that the controller was connected to the internet. Like, it just, Google tried way too hard here, I think. Because they wanted to avoid the lag. They wanted to avoid the lag.

which Google thing. I mean, I think the real death knell happened more than a year ago when it shuttered its internal game studios. Like, if you're trying to make cloud gaming a thing and you're not going to keep your own game studios for

what's assume they're in production for two years, like most AAA games take at least three years to make. Like, that was a pretty clear sign that they were not in this for the long haul. Yeah, I have been wondering why Google didn't just shut this down a year ago.

Like in a certain way, it would have been cleaner. And then everybody has been resurfacing these like vociferous denials that Google is shutting it down. And it's so brutal now because every one of them is like, we're in this for the long haul. Like, we know you think Google kills lots of products, but we'll never kill Stadia. It was like two months ago, too.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not a great situation. No. And it causes, like all the things everybody already thinks about Google products, this just makes even worse. But to your point about the games, I do think the one thing that makes me think like Luna might still live

is that Amazon, potentially against all odds and rational thinking, is very invested in making video games and seems to have just continued to try spending money on making video games that people will play. I don't know if it's ever going to work, but it seems to be trying.

Yeah, I think the gap we still need to see them cross is like them to take New World, which is this barely popular MMO. I don't remember how big it is now, but like, I don't think you can play that on Luna yet, right? I think the big, when that will all come together when Amazon makes these big, ambitious, live service games, and then you can just play them with your Luna subscription. I think that's when that will all happen. But will it happen is the real big question mark.

I don't think it's going to happen. Like, I just fundamentally do not think Luna is going to survive. It's got, here is my litmus test for. cloud gaming platform and whether or not it's got legs go on reddit look up the subreddit for the cloud gaming platform and how many followers does it have stadia has over a hundred thousand how many does luna have let's see reddit luna oh man can i just say the the the mood in the stadia subreddit is so bleak right now like it's really just the the top comment on like the main thing saying it's shutting down just says sad, but probably the best possible way to shut the service down.

It's like, they're not even mad. They're just like, oh, what a, this thing had like a beautiful life and now it's over. And let's just mourn it's. At least I'm getting my money back. I guess. It's so bleak. But to the point of like who's actually using these services, Stadia had over, you know, dedicated cloud gaming service over 100,000 followers on the subreddit, on the subreddit.

Luna Cloud Gaming, which is like kind of the main subreddit for Amazon Luna, 2000. $2,700. It's a big difference. Sorry. Very big difference. Huge difference. Like, yeah, this thing is, this thing is not going to survive. And you look at like the games are all games that have been out for three or four years.

It's like, come on. I just can't stop reading this stadium subreddit. Sorry, somebody's very mad that stadium is being shut down. And the biggest reason that they're mad is because today is, the same day that Hot Wheels Unleash was released, and I was looking forward to playing that on Stadium. Oh, man. That's brutal. RIP Hot Wheels Unleashed.

Tough, tough day. It is notable, though. Jay, how are you feeling about the fact that Stadia, the Stadia subreddit scooped you on, on Stadia being shut down? You know, I'm glad for them, honestly. They are watching so close. This is their pride and joy. They love it.

Like, I'm glad that they were able to come to terms with this. a little bit sooner than everybody else was. They noticed 15 minutes before it was official. Because they were all, somebody went on the store to buy a stadia game, presumably, and there was just a sign saying, this is closing in January 2020. And they were like, is this real?

And there's like a whole flurry of it. And then it's like, Jay's story. And they're like, yep, it's real. Yeah, it's real. I think what is, it doesn't seem like Google told hardly anybody, like it sounds like bungee which makes destiny they they're learned at the same time pretty much how everybody else did i feel like i've read a couple of developers on twitter who were not aware of this and so you know larion studios yeah like stadia will be going away but this creates some collateral damage that developers have to deal with which kind of sucks for them especially since they had no warning that this is what they'd be waking up to i am really curious about

Dolerian Studios does big RPGs. They have the new one coming out, Balders Gate 3. People bought the game on Stadia because it was like one of the first games announced for Stadia. And it was going to have this really cool exclusive to Stadia feature where it's like Dungeons and Dragons but a video game. And so you were going to be able to roll dice while like streaming it directly to YouTube via Stadia and people could roll the dice for you like viewers could. And it was going to be like, okay, that's cool. That's neat. Yeah.

All gone. Just all dead. And you go and like Larian Studio has made no comment. They have not talked about this. Boulder's Gate is still not out of beta. It's still not been released. I mean, they have to pivot so fast. Although is that game coming to other systems? It must be. Yeah. Yeah, it's totally coming. So it's coming to a lot of systems. But there was like a big thing was, well, we're not being exclusive to Stadia. but we are giving stadia exclusive features like this dice rolling mechanism. I mean, that's really cool. And, oh, you just wasted three years. You can only assume that they're saying that Phil Harrison is like standing behind them just like hucking $100 bills at them.

Right. Like no one in their right mind is making a Stadia exclusive or even like a Stadia optimized game without Google. And I think there were Stadia exclusive. There are very few of them. think. Like, they were there, but there were not many of them. And you're not doing it unless Google really, really, really makes it worth a while. Which is, I think, part of, has been part of Google's problem.

It's kind of like meta with the quest, right? Like, at some point, it just becomes so expensive to fund this thing unless other people buy in. And meta seems to so far have the stomach to keep funding VR, but Google seems to have just run out with Stadia. I think it's the same thing we see time and time again with new. game consoles where you have to have a lot of established relationships with developers. And that was besides the internet problem, the big problem for Stadio was they don't have those relationships. Invidia and Microsoft do.

That's been their success. Amazon bought those relationships by buying studios and building their own studios. Stadio was always just like, anybody want to put a game on a service? We got this great cloud service. Do you like games? You want to come on? over to Stadia Town. It streams from the internet.

Yeah. Well, excuse me, 100,000 people in the Stadia subreddit maybe did. 10.2,000 of them are online. This is like, this is the most interesting Stadia has ever been in its history, including to Stadia fans. That's very sad. This, I cannot get over to this subreddit. Everybody is just like, they've gone through the five stages of grief so fast.

And they're just moving on to like, you know, we had a good run and now Stadia is in a better place and that place is like the landfill along with my controller and it's it's just it's just bleak game pass is the big winner here right like this game pass now becomes the if you want cloud gaming game pass is is like the default answer and it kind of was already right but like this is now even clearer than before yeah invidia invidia too but i mean like for the average consumer to just jump into cloud gaming in any way shape or form doing it through xbox game pass is probably the way most people can and may want to do it. Yeah.

I just always liked it as this nice extra. The other people we're not talking about is Sony. Sony does, in fact, kind of have cloud gaming. Yeah, I mean, you can get it. Technically. You can get it through their PlayStation Plus. I think it's the ultra, ultra-brenium tier offers cloud gaming. But like...

Is that like $400 a month? You have to buy a PS5 every month? And that's before you can get the VR headset. What I'm curious is what this all means in five to ten years, because I feel like there was a big rush of cloud gaming stuff in like the early 2010s, and then it went away for a little bit. And we had this rush a few years ago, and this could be the dip of that next movement.

And it's like, are we going to see this again in 10 more years? Like, I don't know. Yeah. My guess would be it seems unlikely that it's going to go all the way away again. just because Microsoft in particular is just so in on this being the long-term future with Azure and Xbox. And it's like it is the perfect confluence of everything Microsoft wants to do. Sony relies on Azure for its cloud gaming. So like, you're right that Microsoft stands to gain quite a bit, especially now that Stadia is going away.

Yeah. Is Google trying to make this a Google cloud thing? They're trying to like, they've been like white labeling it for folks, right? they have in white labeling it. In the blog today, they kind of talked about how the technology in Stadia will be utilized in other ways at parts of the company.

I mean, I don't think that's going to mean like AT&T can buy Stadia on Google Cloud or whatever. Like, I doubt that that's... This to me feels like a big retreat from cloud gaming. Yeah, that definitely means like you can connect the controller to your phone and use it to play

Sudoku. Like that's what that means. I don't know. I would not bet on anything else. Yeah. Well, I was always curious. Did they own, like, we know AMD worked with them

on the servers they used. Were those servers just always just Google servers that they repurposed to do Stadia? Or were those like specific built for Stadia servers? I don't know. I mean, you have to imagine that at least the plan was to have built for Stadia servers. but like I'm not sure about that.

Google has talked a lot about the infrastructure behind it and the amount of work that it did. And I would assume in the same way that like building data centers serves gaming, it also serves other things, right? So there's probably a version of stuff that they would have had to build and they're going to build both the hardware and the software slightly differently to do games than to like run Gmail. But I can't imagine very much of that stuff is just going to be like mothballed because they're not doing gaming anymore. They're just going to like switch Google Docs over to it. Now Google Docs is just going to like really fly. So fast. It's going to be incredible.

Google Meat is going to look great, you guys. It's going to be so good. Yeah. This is how they get Google Meat. This is how it comes back. You can do your video chat in a Hot Wheels car. Why didn't they put games in Google Meat? This is why Stadia failed, you guys.

Like, this is, this is it. We figured it out. Yeah. I think we fixed it. Yeah, this is great. Well, they have, they got three months to turn that around. and unannounce that, you know, oh, Stadia's coming back

as your favorite new meat feature. And we're now renaming it. There's going to be meat, meat original, and meat Stadia. There's going to be three meat. It's going to be amazing. You're going to love it. It'll be four,

because it'll be like the destiny edition, will be the Hot Wheels edition, the Balders Gate edition. It's going to be great. I retract this idea. I don't want it anymore. The absolute best part of that is you just described

Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the Metaverse. I just want you to know. That is what he wants. Yeah. Maybe he's the one. He's going to be like, those servers. What are you doing with them? I got some ideas.

Get in on this, META. Meta has their big quest event soon. You know, big announcement. That's true. Yeah, that's in two weeks. We bought Stadium. The amazing. Phil Harrison works from META now.

I mean, he's worked at Sony and then it was Microsoft and then it was Google. So meta seems like a logical next jump. If he, you know, if he wants to work at all, the companies. Not Amazon? It's got to be Web 3 next. It's got to be. I hope not. Oh, boy. He's going to go like run Axi Infinity and everything's going to be insane. Good luck to him. I wish him all the best. We should quickly talk about the other Google news of the week. They had their big search on event this week. Jay, you and I both wrote some stuff. You wrote about multi-search, which I actually think is like the most interesting new Google product when it comes to search stuff.

What was new this week? So multi-search is this pretty cool technology where on your phone you can hold up through the Google app. You use Google Lens to take a photo of something and then you can add text to that photo search. So it's like pointing at a jacket that you like and saying what if it was in green? And Google will show you a jacket like that that is in green.

And so it's a really neat way, I think, to search a little bit differently. in ways that just writing out a query and text doesn't let you do. It's currently available globally in English, and it will be expanding to more than 70 different languages in the coming months,

which is what Google announced. Is it going to understand that I'm very into brand and like, I want my designer labels? Or is it going to be like, you can go buy this $2 dockoff at H&M? I don't know that. I tested it by pointing it at my

AirPods Pro case, and then I typed green black is what I think I did, just to like really see what it would throw up. And it showed me like greenish original AirPods case. So like it was close. It wasn't perfect. But like it was definitely like in the right direction of what I was intending. And of course, Google's going to invest a whole lot into this, unlike other products that we've recently talked about. And so I think you'll get better over time. Alex, I'm just imagining all of your searches where you just like take a picture of somebody's clothes and then you type but make it fashion and that's that's that's the Alex Cran's way what's the expensive version right this times 10 I have not tested that one but that is zero I need the Gucci version yeah and Jay you did

forget one part of the step which is that then Google will send you to Google shopping and say please dear God do not buy this on Amazon that's right yeah I forgot that stuff yeah they'll beg you to do that Do they like blacklist Amazon results? I don't think they're legally allowed to do that. No. But can they shove them so far down the page below a bunch of Google shopping results that you never even see them? Yes, they can. And they and they will.

I bet they will. All right. We should take a break. We're going to come back and talk about Amazon because the tech news just keeps coming. Jay, thanks for hanging out. Thanks for having me. We will be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer.

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in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring. forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. We're back. Jay's gone. Jen Tui is here. Hi, Jen. Hi. You're in Texas. Is this correct? Yes, I'm in Dallas, Texas right now. Having a great time at the CDA trade show, which is the custom integrator smart home audio visual, all that kind of fun stuff.

Alex, how aggressive is your foam over right now? It's super aggressive because she was tweeting me places to go and eat while I'm here. She was like, I can't get to any of those. I was like, they only serve cheese and beans and beef. That's it. Do you want healthy food? You're not getting it in Dallas. I love the show, though, too.

Like, Dallas obviously sucks because I'm from Fort Worth and we always call it Dallas. Because they call us fart worth. And it's big rivalry. So I'm sorry you're in the worst of the two towns of the Metroplex. There's more than two towns. But I'm sorry you're in the worst one. But Cedia is cool. Like Cedia is a show I actually really enjoy because it is all of these custom installers

doing all this really weird, cool shit. And then like LG is there. Samsung's there. It sounds like Amazon is there showing off ERO stuff. Like there's a lot happening there. Yeah. It's big. Google's here. Google's actually sponsored the whole thing. Oh, wow.

Yeah, Google Pro, I guess they're calling it. You know, it's everyone's here. It's a big show, but it's a little show. Like it has, it feels comfortable and small. It's not scary and huge like CES. Yeah, it's intimate. I've been enjoying it. It's an intimate show. Yes, very intimate. Next time you'll have to come with me. I know. We'll go together and then we will drive out to Fort Worth to go to get real good food. It's not in doubt. Dallas. I'm really hung up on the fact that Fartworth is a much funnier joke than Dallas. Dallas. And I just, it's like, Fart Worth is just very good. That's something that Dallas person would say. Everybody knows Fort Worth is superior. We have culture.

What does Dallas have? They got CDF. That's it. And they only, CDA, I think, only get like. Just this year. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. It's not here every year. So we'll have to wait until it comes around again. We'll go together. But there's a lot of cool stuff. The show floor is exciting. and it's packed. There's a lot of people here. This is the first big in-person show that we've had for a long time.

So everyone's excited. There's a real good vibe here. And lots of loud, loud sounds everywhere. Everyone playing their speakers as loud as possible. Lots of music. It's a party. It's a party here, sure. Oh, my God.

I love it. Well, we wanted to talk to you today because in addition to being at CDA, seeing a lot of the stuff that's happening at the show, Amazon also had this massive event this week, and I feel like you were blogging all week to cover this event. A lot of stuff happened. Kind of walk me through, walk us through some of the stuff that happened.

Right, yeah. So big event, not actually as big as Amazon has done in the past. We've sometimes had, you know, 72 product announcements in five minutes, but they still managed to cram a lot in I'm impressed with David Lipp's diction at that speed. He does well.

Very impressive. But, yeah, well, the most important, most exciting thing, I'm sure, and I can't believe you haven't mentioned this yet, if you've been on the Vodcast for, like, more than two seconds, is that Kindle now comes with a stylus. We've been waiting as long as we could. I'm very proud of Alex for making it this long. And I think at this point, we have waited long enough that Alex,

we've reserved three hours for you to just talk about the Kidlo. I know. There's going to be a very special episode. I was like emergency meeting, we need a four-hour verge cast, just so I can talk about this. Yeah, no, the Kindle was definitely, I think for me, the most exciting thing that came out of this because this is their 10.2-inch 300-PPI Kindle that you can also write on. It is not the first product that's a 10-inch writing e-ink tablet, not by a long shot. Remarkable, obviously, has done two of these already, and we're waiting for a third.

Books is out there. Big Me's out there. We've got a lot of companies doing this, but this is Amazon. And Amazon is like the biggest, biggest E-Inc producer in the United States. Like, they're the only ones really doing it at the scale. Cobo is way, way, way behind them. They sell the most E-readers in America. So this is a huge, huge deal because like they're kind of the de facto e-reader in the United States, which means this is now the de facto e-ink writing tablet thing in the U.S. maybe. I worry. Well, and they were showing off little, you know, how you could use it to sort of annotate while you're reading stories to your children or add notes when you're doing your research. I mean, I could see a lot of use cases for this. I mean, it's expensive, though. Yeah. It's actually, it's interesting because the price is, it's kind of right between the remarkable and my personal favorite of these devices, which is the, it's a really long obnoxious name. I'm so sorry. The onyx books spelled with

an X. Yeah, Nova Air 2. Catchy. Yeah, rolls right off the tongue, that one. Hold on, you didn't let me finish. Oh my God. Plus, which is another 10.3 inch another 10 plus

inch device. Same weight pretty much as the new Amazon one. Same size, same form with the handle on the side. All of the same stuff, but it has Android on it, so I can also do like Barnes & Noble Nook or the Cobra Reader or Libby. This is very explicitly for writing and reading in Amazon's ecosystem. Yeah, yeah, which is a large ecosystem, but definitely limits the wider appeal.

Yeah, and I think for some people, for myself, I've been trying to like cut back on the stuff I used in Amazon because I'm like, I don't know how great things are ethically sometimes. But you're like amped about using a tablet from a company no one has ever heard of. In China. That. Where I have to like do weird hacks. Yeah, right. Of mysterious.

To like activate the play store. I am not consistent in my, my moral code. Let's, let's be clear on that. That's fair. If Amazon ran it with Android, I'd probably be like, buy five. My big theory about this is it is going to be like a monster slam. dunk huge success instantly. Like, if it's good, and we've only seen demos and stuff, but like the closest thing I got

to a demo is I was on a call with one of the execs on the Kindle team, and he held his up to the webcam and wrote Hi, David on it. And it looked really good, but that is the extent of which, like, that's the only in the wild Kindle scribe I've actually seen. But if this thing is good, it's going to be a gigantic success, because it's like, it's the kind of thing a lot of people want, especially. like business people, which I thought was really interesting. Like they make, they're making a big pitch for this is like, it's a way to take meeting notes.

You can have to do lists on it. It's like a thing to bring into the room with you for business meetings, which is like classic Amazon way of thinking about things. But I think it's, if it's, if it's not bad, I think it's going to be a huge hit. And it might be bad. I like, I think it's, I think it will absolutely be a hit. One, because it's, it's the first really big e-reader that, that Amazon's done since what the DX. They haven't had a big one. And people love that thing. People want a big e-reader. Like,

that's a common complaint is why are they so small? I want like a big screen so I can look at it from this far. So I don't have to put on reading glasses or anything like that. I can just read it. And so one, it's really big. And two, it can write. And if they can get the writing down, but that's hard to do. It took remarkable a long, long time to do it. And a lot of the other people in the space have really struggled with it. Books is a great example. Like the first few miserable. There's one that I'll write on and feel even remotely okay writing on. And Remarkable has kind of a crummy UI. It's the experience outside of the actual writing, which is wonderful, is kind of crummy. And so if they can get those things down, like, that's a big success.

I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited to try it. I upgraded to a paperwhite from the original Kindle recently, so I'm really behind the curve. So, yeah, I'm... Wait, like the original, like with a keyboard? Kind of incredible. It was old. I don't think you had a keyboard. Okay.

But it was very old. That's still very impressive. This is what's so good about the Kindles, though. You know, you don't need to upgrade. It's not like a phone that you have to do it every, every, or feel compelled. You don't have to. to upgrade every year or two years. I mean, you read a book on the Kindle.

It still works. I only upgraded because I like, I needed the bigger size because, you know, I'm getting old. Yeah. You did bigger fonts. But yeah, I'm excited to try it. Yeah, it's... But, you know, Amazon did announce a lot of stuff.

A lot of stuff. Do we have any more Kindle feels or... No, we'll have more Kindle feels next week. We have lots more Kindle stuff to do. Like, I think I'm, like, forcing David to do an entire special episode about the Kindle. So, so I think we can save a lot of those feelings for a future day. But, yeah, there was a lot of other stuff there. We got a lot of, like, router news.

We got Matter News. News that matters. I'm sorry. News that must have to pun. Well, yes. It's just, it's like they made that name. They chose that name because they're like, the Verge is going to have so much fun with this name, with all their parts. But yes, it was, so Amazon, they started out with their same schick that they do every year, the Ambient Smart Home, which is Amazon, your smart home will work without a smartphone.

That's essentially what Amazon is saying, because who doesn't have a smartphone? Amazon. So you need to be able to use to control your home without needing a smartphone. I am totally on board with this, though. I do not like using a smartphone to control my home. So I'm good with that. And the Ambient Smart Home is what Amazon is trying to move. that's its vision that it's bringing us to in its smart home, sensors, devices that react

intuitively, hunches. I mean, they use the, I think personalization was kind of a big focus of this. They've got new features for routines that can be personalized. So when you say good morning to Alexa in the morning, it will tell you your personal calendar events and your traffic rather than, say, your husbands or your spouses. So there's lots of, there's lots of, of small sort of updates to how Alexa works in the smart home. Jen had a good run. What was going to say? Did you lose me?

Not allowed to talk about Amazon. Oh, you're back. You lost you for a second. You lost me. Sorry. We heard your husband or your spouse and then you were gone. Okay. That was, okay.

All right. So, yes, Amazon is trying to get in on the personalization front, which is a good angle to go for because, you know, most homes, they're a lot, they're more than one person and the smart home does not work well for more than one person right now. Especially, my family will attest to that because they get very frustrated. But that, you know, I'm a unique use case. I know. I have like all four voice assistants.

I was going to say, how many times do you accidentally like turned all the lights off on somebody in your home? Often. Just like plunge someone into darkness, possibly in a bathroom situation. Well, the biggest problem I have, and I wish someone. could solve this for me. And this is a personalization issue. My husband is a firefighter paramedic. So he works shifts, which means if I have any kind of automations or routines that work every day, that is not good for someone that's trying to sleep in the middle of the day. And you can't set

something for every third day. It just doesn't exist. And that's a solution I would love to see. I want a button that I can just press. And this is something you can now do with Amazon. They introduce buttons. We can get to that. They used to have buttons. They took them away. now they brought them back. But I would love a button I could press that just turns off all my automations. Just shuts it all down. Because I, you know, I get yelled at.

Kenny, there's music playing. Turn the light off. He's just trying to sleep and you're like, no. They did add some scheduling. There were some new scheduling stuff, right? Yeah, there were quite a few. And these enhancements aren't live now. They're coming later.

There was a lot of coming soon. Coming shortly and coming soon, and not coming this year, which I think was very specific wording. But yes, there was some scheduling updates, so you can now say to Alexa, sorry, am I setting off everyone's devices, you know, lock the front door in an hour or turn the lights off in 15 minutes. And that's a really nice feature to have. And that could be, yeah, that would help, that might help my situation a little bit. But the biggest news, the thing I was most excited about, and I actually got to, I didn't get to see the echo, here, but they have new echo dots, and they're going to be mesh Wi-Fi extenders.

Now, this is only very exciting if you already have an ERO mesh network. It's only going to work with ERO, but the concept is a good one, and, you know, we may see it trickle down to other manufacturers that also have smart home devices and routers at Google. So, you know, I like the idea, smart home needs connectivity, and Amazon realizes we need to bathe your home in Wi-Fi. And ERO devices, whilst less expensive than they used to be, are an investment. And this way, you've already got, you need to buy one. And if you have a couple echo speakers already in your house, you're extending your range. And it's not like super extending, like it's not super fast Wi-Fi. It's not, you're not going to get the, Wi-Fi 6 gig. So,

ERIOS Wi-Fi 6 has great speeds if you get those speeds into your home. But most people don't. Right. You know, most people aren't on gig speed. internet. This gets you 100 megabits, which is more than enough for streaming, would help connect, say, your camera if you have a camera on the side of your house. So I think this is a really good new feature, because not only is it in the

echo dot that they announced, which was the new echo dot and echo dot clock, which is the fifth generation, but it's also going to be enabled on the existing echo dot, which is the fourth generation, echo dot with clock, and the existing echo fourth generation speaker. So if you

have Eero mesh, you've now got so so but these are all like products that are like $50, $100 like these are cheap whereas an ERO is usually like $200. This is like a big kind of price cut to extend your Wi-Fi. Yes, yes. And that's what I mean, you need good Wi-Fi for a smart home to work. You need good Wi-Fi for the ambient smart home. And so it really is in that in the company's best interest to make sure our app our Wi-Fi is good. And this is, you know, why Ring ended up with its ring alarm pro with a built-in Eero because so many. problems consumers have with ring video doorbells are connectivity based and you know ring can't it's

too hard for them to sort of troubleshoot that and so you know if you have strong Wi-Fi you get a strong smart home and you know there's a few other really interesting upgrades for the echo dots especially the echo dot with clock is now going to have a scrolling LED display which I think is really fun I love yeah I love LED displays so you can have your song title scrolling along maybe your next calendar appointment. It's kind of a nice way of having information without having to have a screen in your face, which I'm, I'm more for because there's too many screens in my world. Yeah, I think it's very cool. And I think to me, the, like, the Eero thing is very clever to me because, like, we should be clear, it's not turning your ECHO dot into an ERO, right? Like, it is not.

No, it's not an access point, no. It's a good old fashion Wi-Fi extender, like he used to plug in to, you know, those terrible ones you used to plug in. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So it's like you're going to get more latency. You're going to get slower speeds. But what it is going to do is it's going to put Wi-Fi in places you might not have otherwise had Wi-Fi. And that alone is awesome. And I think that kind of thing is going to be super useful to tons of people. And it is especially for Amazon, which is like very invested. Like you're saying in the idea that everything in my house should be able to connect to a network. It makes that possible in a way I think is very cool. And I really like the idea like it sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong, the tech. technology behind that is not terribly sophisticated. It's just Amazon figuring out how to basically reuse a thing that has Wi-Fi capabilities. And so in theory, this could be much more pervasive even than just putting it in the Echo Dot, right? Yes. So I spoke to Nick Weaver, who's the CEO of ERO, and he said, yes, it's definitely something. So the concept is called ERO built in, and he said they're looking at other ways of

extending that. I asked about the Echo shows, and he said, yeah, that's definitely something we're considering. He says it's a little bit more complicated, but it's possible. And, yeah, it's all done over a software, firmware update. So it's not something you're going to have to buy new hardware for. And this is something the smart home has been really bad about, you know, again, like the smartphone, every two years, buy a new smart thermostat. You know, that's not the way the smart homes should work.

So, yeah, I think I love seeing upgraded to existing devices in our home. And that's nothing the ERO came out with. They now are going to have a new capability for internet backup. So your Wi-Fi goes down. because, say, Comcast, cut someone, cut a cable somewhere, you can actually have your entire network. So everything that's on your network, default over to your mobile hotspot from your smartphone

or if you have another Wi-Fi network in your home. Some people have to. Or maybe you can steal your neighbours' Wi-Fi. And so you can keep everything up and running, which is a feature they introduced with the Ring Alarm Pro last year. It's, you know, when I tried it, my smart home kind of killed it. because I have so many things. But it's a good feature to have, especially when everyone's at home.

And you've got to do, both my kids are home today in e-learning days because there's a hurricane. And they need to do their schoolwork. But if the Wi-Fi went down, they'd have a backup. And so I think that's another good feature that now is coming to any ERO. So I really love this backwards, you know, backwards compatibility for devices. It really does feel like we're heading in the direction of Amazon eventually just being like, we will be your ISP, we'll give you internet for free, we will. run cables to your house.

Just please don't let your smart home go offline. Which is become, it's like the theme of this episode is like, if only our internet connections were better, right? Like, wouldn't the world be a magical place? And it's really, it's just really interesting to see Amazon in particular basically like hack around every edge it can to try to find ways to make sure your stuff doesn't go offline. Because like, you just see it all the time.

And there's like the, I always think about the horror stories people have about like when, when the nest services go down and all of a sudden. your like house plunges to freezing. And it's like, it just takes so little for this stuff to fall apart in these really spectacular ways. And if you're Amazon, you have to do absolutely everything you can to make sure that that doesn't happen. And it's going to like, that fight is going to get messy because our internet sucks real

bad everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. The other day my Wi-Fi died or my internet died. And I just, I was trying to go to bed. And I usually use like an automation to go to bed. And I was like, just couldn't get my lights to turn off. I was like, I just.

I want to sleep now. I think he's a light switch. What is this decade? No, you finished. How dare. It was like very upset. You just slept at the lights on, didn't you? Be honest.

You just slept at the lights on. No, I have a Phillips Hugh little light switch in the other room. And that, I guess, worked over local network. So that one still worked. It didn't need to call out. So I got it. I turned my lights off. Did I have to get out of bed?

Yes. Yes. Well, speaking of sleep, Amazon is going to try and help you sleep with their new Hilo rise. So I'm not that excited about this product, but because there's a lot already out there that offer this capability. But it's definitely something, they've done a nice job. There's no cameras. There's no microphone. There's no speakers.

So for anyone that doesn't want to put any of those things by their bed, which is, you know, the large majority of us, it's a good option. And I like, I'm a big proponent and I'm excited about circadian lighting, you know, lighting that helps you wind down or helps you wake up. And so that's, it takes from the Phillips lamp that Phillips has a lamp that is very similar looking to this, that will, you know, the light will come on gradually to wake you up in the morning. And apparently there's some algorithm and learning that will actually figure out when you should wake up, the best time to wake you up. So that'll be interesting to try out. otherwise it has a lot in common with the Google Nest Hub, which has the sleep sensing. It uses, I don't think they've specifically said, but I think it uses some sort of ultrasound detection to see how your breathing rate and to track your sleep.

Right. They said it was going to use ultrasound to like kind of bounce off of you to figure out where you are and determine if it's you, if it's somebody else in the bed, if it's a pet, that's some fancy ultrasound. And to do sleep tracking, so you don't. have to wear a wristband or basically they don't, you know. You don't have to wear a wristband, put anything in your bed with you, like, no wearables. I thought it was kind of an interesting thing, but I did think it was also weird that they're like, you know, we're not going to put a microphone in it. We're not going to put a camera in it, but we are still going to track your entire body

and how your body moves in the bed. So we're still doing the tracking. But not in a creepy way. Super normal. But in a, like, and somehow, like, not a creepy way, but a very creepy. Like, just a weird, an interesting way, I think. But, yeah, that's wild. I still think they need, someone needs to come up with a smart alarm clock that doesn't

rely on a battery. Because, I mean, it does have a backup battery. It doesn't rely on hardwired power because I've written about this, but back to my husband, who's going to be so mad about me talking about him so much, He will not use any smart alarm clock I've tried to get him to use because he doesn't trust that it's going to wake him up because what if the power goes out? And, you know, old-fashioned battery, old-fashioned alarm clocks always have batteries in.

Like, at least his did. And you just stick it on your bedside table and it always worked. Or it plugged in, but it had a battery backup. But you can't get smart alarm clock with a battery backup, which I think is a fail. That's the one thing I was listening when they announced this. It's like, come on, tell me it's got a battery in it. Yeah.

And they're like, nope. Yeah, and it tracks the, it also like tracks the humidity in the room, the temperature in the room, the amount of light in the room, which you can go get a thing at a Walmart or a Target that does almost all of that for about $12. It does, that runs off a battery. Like, doesn't shine a light in your face. Yeah. Yeah.

And know when to wake you up. To weak you up. So. Well, and the other neat thing here, and this goes to the ambient smart home again. And I was impressed with this is when it senses that you've woken up, it can run your good morning routine. So you don't even have to say anything or do anything. And that's a really nice touch. I don't know how it's got to be tricky there, though, because if it gets it wrong and wakes you up, you can be really mad.

Yeah, if it does that once your hose. It's going in the trash. I will say, Jen, the next thing we need to do is we need to start slowly sabotaging your husband's alarm clock. that's the move here. It's like maybe just pour a little water on it. Maybe just to like, you don't want it to like totally break. Just slowly over the course of a week kind of fall apart.

And then you can start making the case for all of your cool technical stuff. But I did wonder, the halo rise, the more I think about it, the weirder it strikes me as a thing for Amazon to even do. Like to your point, there's a ton of these out there. The idea of like a light that wakes you up based on the right time to wake you up is not particularly like new or novel. People who want it can get it. And it doesn't, it's not really, it's not a way to talk to Alexa.

It's not a speaker. It's just, it's just like a thing. I don't, like, what's your sense of why this is worth doing for Amazon? Well, I think the last point that we just discussed is probably where it's coming from, helping to kind of integrate the routines into your sleep. So sleep was one area they hadn't really got. their wearables haven't, don't seem to have taken off. Nope.

No. Not popular. And people don't like putting echoes by their bed because they have cameras in them. The echo dot with clock was kind of the solution there. And that has ultrasound motion sensing. So you could use that. They could have, I'm surprised they didn't work, somehow work that into the new echo dots in the way that Google Nest has done with its hub. But I feel like this is kind of a bit of a like me to.

Not me to. That's the wrong word. Sam'sies. You know, we've got to have one too because our competition has it. It's very similar in functionality to the Google Nest Hub, Max, which is good, not Max, sorry, Google Nest Hub without the camera. And actually, my husband does like that. He likes the sleep tracking for that one. Okay. That was the one he allowed to have on his bedside for more than a week. But it doesn't, not having a microphone means it can't track snoring, which is something quite. key, I think, for good sleep habit is to understand if you are having sort of respiratory issues at night, that can be one of the biggest issues from preventing you from having a good night's sleep. And I don't think this is going to help with that at all. So it's, yeah, like I said, it seems a bit like they felt like they needed a space on your bedside table.

That's fair. They didn't want it to go somewhere else. Yeah. No, I buy that. And I think it's, it's going to be really interesting to see Amazon try to start to put some of that stuff back into devices like this? Because I'm just assuming that like V2 or V3 of something like the Halo Rise will start to have speakers and microphones and more sensors and start to do some of that other stuff. And I think Amazon is starting to get very good at just like sort of slowly normalizing these things into people's worlds. But I still feel like I don't know about either of you, but like I don't have just totally

anti-microphones on the bedside table, no cameras on the bedside table, no speakers, on the bedside table. I have one of those old Casper lights that they made for like 15 minutes before Casper stopped being a good business. I love the thing. It's awesome. Yeah, it is great. And then my phone, which is of course all of those things, and I'm sure undoes all of the privacy concerns that I'm

trying to solve. But it does feel like the bedroom definitely feels like it's going to be the hardest for any of these companies to make real moves inside of. So I guess if Amazon can do it here, I think you're right. They're in a pretty powerful spot. I think it's going to be, I think it's always going to

a challenge. Well, they are hampered by, you know, by that PR angle. People don't want Amazon tracking them. So, yeah, it is a tough one. And I think, I'm not sure this product's going to hang around, honestly. I don't know that we'll see a version two or a version three. I feel like this was kind of maybe something they started developing a while ago and they're like, we don't have much else. Let's throw this one in. Yeah. Just a little test balloon. Yeah. There are a lot of Amazon products. Yeah, I mean, we have, so there is the glow lamp. They have, which is similar to the Casper glow that you can put on your bedside table and can wake you up gently.

It doesn't have the smarts that this does in terms of tracking your sleep. But they have other devices that, you know, you could use that don't have speakers and cameras that give you light on your bedside table. I don't know. And the design of this one, too, is it doesn't really fit in with the whole kind of Amazon Echo ecosystem. But we'll see. See if it might be a huge hit. Who's testing it out? I don't know who's going to review it. I guess that's probably going to be me. I don't know. Sounds like not. I don't know. We'll see if your husband the last time.

You, your husband or Victoria, like just all fighting over it. Yes. We're not fighting over it. It is a useful reminder that Amazon's product strategy is basically to like make everything it can think of, make 60 of them and then put it on sale on Amazon.com and just sort of see what happens. So it's like all of this comes with like the gigantic grain of salt with the possible exception of like the echo dot, which I suspect they know they will sell an awful lot of that all of this is just like, see what happens. There's also the TVs though, right? They just, they announced a TV this week, the 4K one that's ostensibly like the frame from Samsung because it lets you put pictures on your wall and it'll just like stay on all

the time. But it doesn't look like a frame. It is just a TV. Like people will still look. It's just called leaving your TV on. I don't understand this at all. Yeah, it's not... You're just leaving your TV on.

I can do that already. Yeah, it doesn't really have the same aesthetic as the frame. It doesn't have that nice kind of matte look. But it is essentially a huge Echo Show on your wall now because it has all of the Alexa capabilities and built in and the widgets that you got on the new Echo Show 15, which has now become a TV, because they've turned that in...

You can now use Fire TV on the Echo Show 15. So those two... The Fire TV, products are sort of, and makes sense to put Fire TV on the Echo Show 15. You could even put it on the Echo Show 8. I mean, I try and watch TV on shows on that screen. It's not a terrible experience, but Amazon has had a very limited support for video streaming services on any of its devices other than the 15. So I was excited to see Fire TV built into that. But this obviously is an Echo show on your wall for, with the TV, but it's not a touchscreen. So,

you use this remote and actually the remote I was most excited about. I thought the new remote was really quite interesting. Well, it's... I totally agree. I'm so glad you said that. Why do you like it? You tell us. Because you guys really love Peacock and Direct TV like you needed those buttons at the bottom.

Yeah. Well, A, I love a good remote just at all times. Love a good remote. And B, I think they did a couple of things that I thought were very smart. One is to have like a big Alexa button, right? But the other is to like, they seem to have imagined this as a thing that you both like use sitting in front of your TV, but also maybe sort of carry into the kitchen while you're doing stuff. Like you can program routines into, was it done? Two of the buttons, I think, are there for you to pick to have routines.

And that's genius. I mean, and they should be doing that with more. We need more buttons. And that's something else they've announced, we alluded to earlier. So they used to have these really cool buttons. Do you remember the echo buttons? Yes. You could use them to, like, play Jeopardy.

They were so far. And I get emails regularly from readers saying, why did they take those away? Because they discontinued them and you can't use them anymore. And they were Bluetooth, so they were kind of flaky. But now they're introducing compatibility with more wireless access switches. I think is the phrase that they used. But I don't know what they haven't given us any specific models. But being able to press a button and have one of your smart home routines run is, you know,

well, they don't have a smartphone. so they need buttons back to that point. And it's a nice experience. Like if you sit down with your remote in front of your TV, rather than having to say, hey, Alexa, run, movie time, and maybe shout because it didn't hear you properly, you just press your button. So I think that's a nice experience.

One of the things I'm going to see while I'm here at CDia is a fancy high-end remote that you can't buy unless you're a custom integrator and spending a lot of money on your home. But it runs Google Android on the remote. And you can control your whole smart home from it. It's by Ava, AVA, AVA. And I want to go look at it because I want to write a piece about how you can create the best smart home remote.

So someone will go and do it. Because since we lost the Logitech Harmony, we have no, there is nothing good. There is no good solutions. I agree. The world needs more remotes. Thank you for also being upset about the Harmony remote. I still use mine. I've got the little buttons for my life.

I can just be like, okay, new routine. I just, I want all the lights off so I can watch Marvel movies in darkness. And it's wild that you can't do that with more remotes. You have to use your phone. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I want to get the phone out of the living room, you know, because otherwise you need to really engage with your content. No TikTok scrolling while you're watching a good episode of Shehawk.

Amen to that. No, and I think the buttons is such a good one because it's like, and Jen, you and I've talked about this before, that like the gold standard for the smart home is like the only way I'm going to use it is if it's easier than walking up and flipping that light switch. And you know, it's easier than walking up and flipping that light switch is like mashing the giant green button that I have sitting right here on my desk. And like I'm in. Like put buttons. I want like a wall of buttons that I can just do all kinds of stuff with.

I'm going to have like a suit of buttons that I just walk around my house in. Like this I can't, this sounds awesome. Bolt a bunch of stream decks together and just wear all of them as a nice little desk. Exactly. That I would love to see. My pajamas are just going to be buttons everywhere. You look great, David. I love this.

I was just going to say, just the one thing, the last thing on Wi-Fi we didn't mention is the New Fire TV Cube has 6E, which is quite exciting. Oh, that is exciting. Because that is a real use case. Like, I've struggled to find a use case that I really need for 6E at the moment. But streaming is the perfect one because that's the one where you want the wide bandwidth so that you, you know, when someone goes and, like, turns on their computer upstairs and does some work, you don't suddenly drop your streaming when you're watching your movie.

So I think that, that's a really good use case. I'd like to see more of that. And I've never really gotten comfortable with the Fire TV cubes. They never worked that well for me. But I'm really interested in this one because of that 6E capability. And being able to, I think it also connects, it has, what's the other thing it does? It connects to your... It connects to your cable box.

So you can plug it in the HTML cable from your cable box directly into this and funnel it. So you have voice control. Yeah. Not that I have a cable box, but... So since NELI is not here, I feel obligated to be the one to remind our listeners that the H-DMI pass-through IR Blaster combo is a bad idea and no one should ever try it. and everyone who has tried it, it always goes badly.

Microsoft was like, oh, turn your Xbox into your cable box, H.D.M.I. Pass through. That went horribly, and they lost a whole generation of game consoles. Google tried to do it with Google TV, which went just horrifically badly. Like, Neelai tweeted a thing that he wrote in 2013 where he said, we've been overlaying fancy interfaces on top of cable signals

and praying for IRBlasters to adequately control the boxes for years now, and it's never worked. And that was in 2013. So kudos to Amazon for trying, but I am not holding my breath on this particular one. But I like the idea. It should work. But you got Wi-Fi 6E. So you can, you don't even have to do any of it.

You can skip all of that and just go enjoy 4K, even when people in your home are deciding to scream Stadia in the next three months before Stadia dies. Before it goes away. Yeah, get rid of your cable and stream so fast over Wi-Fi 6E. Well, and there were a lot of other announcements. I know ring had announcements, blink had announcements, but I do have to just say, I went to the ring booth to see their new cameras. They have new cameras. And I saw the drone. You saw the drone?

How big. Oh, it's real. It's real. It's not that big. It's like the size of a toast, piece of toast. Okay. All right. It's quite small, but they wouldn't let me touch it.

But it was up in the air. but it was hanging from strings. Suspicious. Oh, so it's nothing. That doesn't count. But I did talk to someone who told me he has it in his house and promises it does actually work. So he says it's coming soon. Did he show you video footage?

No. It sounds like they showed you a chandelier in the shape of a drone. A very tiny chandelier. A very tiny chandelier. Yeah. I was like, can I bring it down? Nope. Can I reach up and touch it?

Nope. Nope. So. It exists. It exists. It exists. It's out of the renders phase. So we'll take that.

I have seen it in person. So I felt like that was a step forward. It's in the physical mock up phase. Yes. And in this guy's home, apparently. Thank goodness. All right. We really do need to take a break.

Jen, do you have a few more minutes to hang out and do a little lightning round thing with us before we go. Sure. Happy to. Excellent. Okay, all right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be right back to do a lightning round. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job.

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Vergecast. We're back. There was so much other news this week. So we're just going to do a little lightning round, basically, Jen, since you're new to this part of the show, everybody just picks a thing that happened this week that we haven't talked about yet that you thought was interesting and cool and worth talking about. And you can go last so you can have a minute to decide what you thought was interesting

that you want to talk about. Alex, what do you have? Oh, it was absolutely the Intel, Samsung. slideable PC that they showed off at the Intel event. We've kind of, everybody's been alluding to something like this was going to happen at some point. We've seen phone versions of this. This was a laptop version.

And you're initially like, that's so cool. And then you watch the video and the guy's kind of fighting with it a little as he pulls it out. So you know, like, oh, that's, that experience is not smooth yet. That's not coming this month to a best by dear you. I've watched that video. many times now and I cannot figure out how it works. It's just like, it's, I just keep getting like fruit by the foot vibes from it where it just sort of, you just, you just like peel it out from

itself as it opens up. It's very, it's very weird. I don't know. It's, it's, it's, it's the same thing that, that LG is doing with its rollable TVs, which I think, Jen, you get to, you might get to see one. I know they're showing one at CDia. They just announced a 42 inch one. I'm stealing all of the lightning rounds. I'm sorry. Yeah, I haven't got to see it yet, but it is here. But it's just an OLED. And OLEDs have gotten to the point where you can kind of, I want you to please, like, send me pictures just to me personally.

You don't have to put them on the website or anything like that. We don't need that. But I just want to see them myself. But it's the same concept, right? It's just an OLED display that's really kind of tightly wound up. And because it's Samsung and Samsung's gotten very good at this like bindi OLED technology. They're better than anybody. They figured out a way to make it tight enough to make a pretty svel-looking device.

Notably, it just showed an image. There was no computing or anything really happening with the thing. I wouldn't, this is just a proof of concept that a display like this could work. And then now they have to pack it into a thing. And every other time we've seen like, what about a foldable laptop that's got screens everywhere that like the mock up is, you know, a few millimeters tall. And then the actual products, like four inches. Right.

So, yeah, this is not going to be your next iPad, but it's just cool. These always kind of bum me out, if I'm being completely honest, because they're like, they're very cool. And you look at them in, they're very exciting. And then inevitably, there's that, like, one line in the story that's basically just like, this is just a science project that some guy made in a lab. Yeah. And they have no plans to do anything with it. And this one screen that they showed you, this demo cost $6 million.

Yes. And it will almost certainly never be a product. And I just get to the end. And I'm like, ah, that was a cool, like, basically animated gift that I just saw. That's the way that was the foldable phone for years. And now it's like an actual, maybe almost mature. It's everywhere here. Everyone has it here.

Really? Really? Because everyone's from Samsung. Is everybody just walking around doing, like, cool moves where they're, they like aggressively close their flip phone when they're done. Just slap it close. Or it's like at the end of the meeting, everybody like folds on cue and then you stand up. The end of every presentation, they snap them shut and walk off stage.

I do. I want one. It's so cool. Yeah. All right, David, what was yours? I feel obligated to talk about stage manager. I don't want to, to be clear. Stage manager just makes me angry and sad.

But there was stage manager news. And I feel obligated to talk about it. So the news this week was that our. Apple is bringing Stage Manager, which it originally said was only going to be for iPads with an M1 processor to, I think, the most recent two generations of iPad pros. It's coming to those without one feature, which is the external display support, so you won't be able to run Stage Manager on a monitor while also having your screen. Oh, no. It's terrible. But they're bringing Stage Manager to other things, which strikes me as exactly the wrong impulse.

Like to me, there should just be one, they should make one iPad, not even like a model, just one iPad that runs stage manager and give it to Craig Federegi because he really likes it. And no one else should have to have stage manager. Like fork iOS for Craig and leave the rest of us alone. No one else. To not have stage manager. That's what I want. Not more, less. And it does seem like the betas keep coming of iPadOS and stage manager seems to be getting.

It's coming. I know it's coming and it makes me sad. And it seems to be getting better in some ways and worse in other ways. And it's like it's just, it's just a mess. But the good news is many more people are going to get to experience the mess. So congratulations, everybody. I'm so excited to experience the mess with all the M1 iPad Pro owners. It's just not good. That's the thing.

It's just not good. You're like, it's just bad. What are you going to do if it comes out and somehow between the latest beta release and the release of the new OS, it gets good. I'll be psyched. Are you kidding? I've spent a decade trying to get better multitasking on the iPad out of Apple. And this is like the most, I was going to say the most interesting idea.

It's an idea. Could the pile be good ever? I don't know. Maybe, potentially. Craig could be onto something. Craig loves his piles. That's all I know. And Craig likes weed jokes.

and piles. Those are the two things that we know about Craig. I've given up on trying to multitask on the iPad, honestly. I just, it was, it's never been a good experience. So, um, but also I don't want to multitask on my iPad that much. I like using my iPad as my non- multitasking device. It's like, Picker Lane. Is this a computer? It's my focus device. That's fair. Well, I think the problem is that there continues to be this very small, but incredibly loud minority of people who want to to do like real like capital P power user stuff on their iPad. Yeah. And those people have tend to have a very loud voice on the internet and talk about this

stuff a lot on the internet. And so they drown out the people, I think, who are most iPad users. And it seems like Apple has struggled to make both sides happy. And I think is sort of increasingly pushing towards this like, how do we give the power users more stuff to do? And I'm not sure that that actually turns out to be the right strategy all the time. Well, I think they run into this problem of like they've got these really nice processors in it. They've got the M1 processor in it.

And so it's like, okay, that's the same one as the laptop. So it should be able to do laptop stuff. And it's like, no, it shouldn't. Maybe you shouldn't have put that in there. Maybe we don't need a $2,000 when you get the stuff iPads. I was sold on the argument that the iPad was now a computer once they brought the iPad pro out with the keyboard. And my husband went back to school. I'm sorry, my husband again.

So we got him an iPad Pro, and he did three years of college with it as his main computer. I felt like this was a big test for how, and he is not techie. He doesn't really use computers. So this was a real challenge. And it failed spectacularly. It really did. I mean, he survived. He graduated with honors.

But it couldn't. Half the time I would have to pull out my computer to help him access something and then upload it to the iPad for him. And it just, he could write his paper on it. That was fine. That's what the main thing you wanted to do. But to use things, some of these tools like blackboard and canvas that a lot of these college programs use and schools use, it just didn't work. It was, anyway, it was, it was not a good experience. And that Apple keyboard that comes with it, or it doesn't come with it, sorry, that you spend a very small.

fortune on. It's worn away. I can't read any of the keys on it. Oh. He's only had it for a couple of years. So, yeah, it was not a success. I was very disappointed. But now it's a great TV watching device for him now that he's graduated. Yeah, there you go. It does. The iPad fails very gracefully over the course of its life, which I appreciate about it. It's, I've always liked that. All right, Jen, what's, what's yours? What's your lightning round? Okay, so I have big gadget news in the smart home. is Roomba has its new, or I-Robot has its new Roomba this week, they announced, just the day before the Amazon event, because technically they're not owned by Amazon yet, although Amazon is trying. Right.

And they have announced finally, very late to the party, a robo vacuum and mop in one. But what's neat about it is that it actually is a robotic mop. So all the other mops, you have to kind of, all the other robot vacuums that have mops, you have stick the mop on. Like you have to pick it up and stick it on the bottom of the robot. Yeah. And then it goes off and does its job. This one, Roomba has, it kind of raises itself up on aluminium arms and then slides itself underneath the robot and then goes off and does its mopping. And then when it's done or if it comes up to carpet, it will stop and then lift the mop up and put it on back on top of the robot, vacuum the carpet and then vice versa as it goes off.

around on its merry way to clean your house. So basically it's a two in one. You don't have to get your hands dirty at all if you want to mop and vacuum. So is there just a gross, wet mop inside of your Roomba at all times now? So you do. Yes. That's the answer. I mean, that's fine.

It's just going to take me a minute to get used to. What's that smell? I haven't changed the mop in my Roomba lately. Yeah. Yes. Yes. It's removable. You just rip it off, it's velcroed,

washable, throw it in the washing machine, and then you do have to manually attach it to the bottom of the mop plate when you want it to be clean. But it has a water tank in, so it's squirting water onto the mop, so keeping it damp as it goes around. And it's smart enough, so iRobot has their, what they call the robot OS, the fifth generation, that kind of helps make the robot smarter,

and it applies to all their robots, not just the new one, which is called the Roomba combo J7 plus. Woof, that it will go in, when it goes into a room, it does the, it will go intelligently and do like the mopping first and then vacuum the carpets

or vacuum the carpets first and then mop. So it can be efficient rather than having to stop and reload its mop every time it comes across the carpet, because it can map your room, so it knows where your carpets are. or where your rugs are versus your hardwood floor or your tile floor. So it's a very expensive robot over $1,000, but it does come with the auto-empty base.

So you don't have to get your hands dirty, empty in the little bin. You do have to fill it up with water. And yes, you do need to clean the mop. You can't just leave the mop on. So sort of like every morning before you leave the house, you feed the dog, you give the dog water, and then you go and you like feed the mop into your Roomba. You're like, goodbye, guys, have fun, and leave.

That's like the idea? Yeah. And then the robot will, actually, that's one of the good things. They just came out with a new capability in this new OS to avoid pet bowls. Or if you want, clean really well around pet bowls. So it has, so it has visual, it has artificial intelligence that helps it identify a pet bowl and know that it shouldn't bang into it because Roomba's do bang into furniture. I've actually had a Roomba knock my chair.

down regularly. But now it can identify a pet bowl or a litter box and not bang into it, but it will also, but it'll clean and mop closely around it so that you can come home to a nice clean pet bowl rather than a sloshed mess that your, that your Roomba is created while you were gone. That's pretty good. I make a lot of fun of fancy Roombas, but I also own a fancy Roomba, and I love it to pieces. Like it is, it is a truly good. glorious device to own. And I got the one that like empties itself and it just, it just runs. And I don't think about it. And it is, it is truly, truly delightful. So when they make one of these that goes into like a swimming pool and cleans itself at the end of the day, like that's,

that's where the magic happens. I want one that goes straight into my washing machine at the end of the day and cleans itself and then just sort of scoops back. Well, they do have, there are two that will clean their own bottoms, as I like to say. But they, And it goes in, there's the Omni by Debot, and then Robor Rock has one, and it goes in and, like, scrubs the mop and then, like, blows little hot air on it to dry the mop so that you never have to deal with it. But that one's even more expensive. It's like a little car wash for your robot vacuum. Yeah, it's a car wash for your robot vacuum, exactly.

And it makes it funny little noise. It's like, that's pretty good. I love it. This is the closest I've ever felt to wanting to buy one of these things. Thank you. It's worth it. It will change your life. It feels ridiculous when you're buying it from experience.

I can say there is a time when you're going to look at it and be like, am I really about to spend all of this money on this thing? Like I could just vacuum like a person. And then... But then your floors are clean. And then you don't have to vacuum like a person. It's great. I do have one more gadget if you want it, one more lightning gadget. Sure.

Do it. So Ufi, which is Anchor's Smart Home. brand has released a very interesting new camera system. It is the UfiCAM 3, and it comes with a home base three, and it's artificially intelligent intelligence-powered data processing that does all locally on the little home base in your house, so it's not sending your video up to the cloud, and it has facial recognition, animal pet recognition, vehicle detection, so that the idea is you shouldn't get hundreds of annoying alerts saying there's motion. at your door. It'll say there's a person at your door or there's a dog or a pet or a vehicle.

And then the facial recognition kicks in and it can say there's a stranger in your yard as opposed to your husband's in your yard or David's in his yard. Alex. I don't have a yard. Alex is frequently in my yard though. I never ask, but she's frequently in my yard. At the window. Peak again. What do you guys do you in there? You get facial recognition on a number of cameras these days. but most of it has to have some kind of cloud component for the processing, whereas this is all edge processing, which really makes a lot faster,

which means for a security system is pretty crucial. And it also has up to 16 terabytes of local storage, which they tell me can hold 60 years of video before you need to erase any of it. You have to buy the extra storage separately, because obviously 16 terabyte hard drive is not cheap. Yeah. But when you buy one of these, when you add a hard drive to it, you can add a terabyte hard drive up to 16. It gives you continuous video recordings, so 24-7 video recording, which again is something that really doesn't exist in the DIY smart home space right now.

Google Nest has it on some of its cameras, but it's not a big, it's something a lot of people ask for, but most companies don't offer because you're using cloud storage, but this doesn't. Yeah, and it's not going to the cloud. So it's like if I fall down and accidentally record myself looking like a dumbass because I fell down, no one will ever know. No one's going to see it. No, and they. I can delete the footage. And bringing this back to how we started, what I really love about this is they have new cameras that come with the HomeBase 3.

It's the Ufi Cam 3 and they have 4K. They have built-in solar power. It's an impressive system. But if you have Ufi cams and you have Ufi cams and you, you buy the HomeBase 3, this AI capability, which Ufi calls its bionic mind, will work on all your existing cameras. So it works with every Ufi cam. So you're basically upgrading your existing cameras by adding this hub. So, and that's a really, you know, that's a good strategy for companies, I think. That's sick. Improve the company. Improve what you already have.

I was like, no, that's like, I don't need any cameras in my home. But if I did, that would be, incredible. That's what I would want. That's perfect. Yeah. And especially now that that stuff is like trickling down to all these other brands that that's, that especially ones that aren't trying to like charge you an arm and a leg for other stuff. That's pretty exciting. Yeah, there's no fees for this. You just buy the device, stick it in your home and it will keep going for 60 days. 60 years. And I'm sure all the gadgets will last that long also. It'll be great. All right. We have gone way over. Jen, thank you for going to that deeply sad looking press room. to hang out with us. But yeah, thank you both. Tons of good stuff on The Verge. Esther Wang wrote a great piece about the campaign to stop Asian hate. You should go read that. I'm supposed to promote Decoder on this show, but Neely is not here, so I will absolutely

not do that under no circumstances should you go listen to Decoder. Don't watch it. We're going to have the third episode of our future of music series on Monday. The first two have been really awesome. I love that. It's been really fun. Yeah, it's two great, great shows so far. I'm hosting the third one and I'm confident it will be the least good of the three,

but it'll still be fun. So check that out. We're going to be back next Wednesday. We're doing some more earbuds testing, and I know there are some people who hate that segment, so I'm sorry, but we're doing it anyway. We're going to have more Amazon stuff to talk about because we're not done talking about Kindles.

We're also, if you have cybersecurity mysteries, we're doing an episode at the end of October all about cybersecurity. So if you have some weird cybersecurity thing going on in your life and you would like to talk to us about it on the show and maybe we can help you solve your problems, hit us up. That is 866 Verge 101. You can follow us on Twitter.

Alex is Alex S. Kranz. Jay is Jay Peters. Jen is JP2E. And I'm Pierce. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend, you can send us feedback at Vergecast at the verge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director,

is Brooke Mentors, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.