The Vergecast - Google's Pixel 7 and Pixel Watch event / Elon Musk vs. Twitter trial update

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss all the announcements from Google's Pixel 7 event. Senior correspondant Liz Lopatto joins the show to explain the latest in the Elon Musk/Twitter trial saga. The Super Mario Bros. Movie trailer is here (and so is Chris Pratt) Hands-on with the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro: something familiar  The Pixel 7 and 7 Pro double down on Tensor-fueled features  Google’s Pixel 7 and 7 Pro will fix your old blurry photos  Google once again calls out Apple for not adopting RCS  Google’s including its VPN service with the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro Pixel Watch hands-on: Google's taking a page from Apple  Google thinks smartwatches are the future again — are you buying it?  Google’s Pixel Watch marks a new chapter for Wear OS  Google shows off wireless charging dock that turns the Pixel Tablet into a smart display Google overhauls Home app as it prepares for Matter  Everything we think we know about Elon Musk’s plan for Twitter The Elon Musk vs. Twitter trial is on hold until October 28th 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 in the Vergecast will break down the whole Google event, Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, and of course the Pixel Watch. And Elon Musk somehow interrupts the show with some more news about Chancery Court and buying Twitter. 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's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools

just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast.

We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th.

Tap in with us. Hello and welcome the French cast, the flagship podcast of Chris Pratt's Mario Voice, which was a lie. It's just a normal podcast. Just a regular podcast. Just a regular old podcast. So you don't know this because you're listening later. And you're, you know, the magic of time shifting is covering this up. You're in your car.

You're going about your day. But we are starting late. Me, your friend, Neelai, David Pierce. Hi. Alex Cranz. Hi. We are starting late because we were waiting for the Nintendo direct reveal of Chris Pratt's voice in the new Mario movie. And it's just his voice.

It's just Chris Pratt. No Bob Hoskins impression. no potentially offensive impression, just Chris Pratt. I mean, he said it will be unlike anything you've ever heard, right? In parentheses, if you've never heard Chris Pratt before. I mean, a lot of people haven't watched Parks and Rec. They haven't seen Everwood. I get it.

Right, but your choices are like the entertainingly but somewhat racist. It's a me, Mario. He was going to say, like, every other option was worse. So, like, in a way, this is the least. I've done Bob Hoskins. Bob Hoskins just went out there and he was like, I'm in this movie. I'm playing Mario. Yeah, he was just mad.

By the way, you keep talking about Bob Hoskins. I'm pretty sure most of our listeners have not seen the Super Mario Brothers movie starring Bob Hoskins. The Seminole classic starring him and John Likizamo shot in Brooklyn. It was not good. Like that movie came out when I was a child who was playing Super Mario Brothers. And I was like, I'm going to give this one a miss. Oh, I loved it. It was like a transformative moment for me.

I tried to do my hair like Cupa. Bob Hoskins, I think he played it as I'm an actual plumber. Yeah. Right? He was like, what's wrong with these guys? Your turtles. Like, he was like a very strange voice. And then obviously there's like the famous sort of like modern day Mario voice.

Woohoo! Which, again, it seems fine. Like we've all come up with it. My assumption is that if Chris Pratt had done that voice, he would be immediately canceled by regular Italians and Italian Americans. They would have just been like, you're done. Not doing this. And so he was like, I'm going to do this other voice who've never heard it before. It's like unlike.

And so we all waited with bated breath. He only said one line that was like, what is this place? But it was just Chris Pratt. Anyway, so we're starting late today. And I got to tell you, I think we're all starting from a place of profound anger in Chris Bratt for. lying to us. Yeah. I had high hopes.

But that's not... Wait. Look, well, maybe there's more movie. Maybe he's going to grow into the voice over the course of the movie. Yeah. That's a thing you can do. Maybe it's a trilogy. And by the end, it'll be full Mario.

So like, at the end of the movie, Bowser's going to be like, who are you? And he's just going to be like, it's a me. Slam to credit. The hardest, It's a Me Mario ever delivered. So hard. Deadly serious. movie looks very silly. When we, when we started watching the trailer, Alex just went, oh, this movie's for children. Yep. We're too old. There was a little bit of like the sort of thing they do in all trailers now where there's like the minor key theme comes up. Yeah. To make like dark Mario. But then it was just a Mario movie. Anyway, go watch the trailer. You can watch it right now. Pull your car over. See if you are as disappointed as we were. I'm already for the gritty reboot starring Tom Holland. I'm ready for it. It's going to be amazing. That was the Bob Hoskins movie.

It was the gritty movie It really was They were like What if Mario and Luigi were actually plumbers in the situation And they played it that way In a dystopian future Where everyone's a human dinosaur Perfect

Oh yeah that was the plot I mean this movie came out of it I can't always I can't believe you remember this movie Oh my God All right that's not the news We thought it was going to be the news What were we thinking The news

It's a big news week Yeah There was a Google event today David was there Along with V and Welch and Allison, we got new Pixel 7, new Pixel 7 Pro. We saw the Pixel Watch. We saw a tease of a pixel tablet.

Elon is just Eloning like a maniac in the Delaware court system. The European governments are like, yeah, USPC, remember that? You're going to use it now, Apple. Allison reviewed the iPhone 14 Plus, which still has a lightning connect. Just a lot going on. So I think the way we're going to break this out. We should start with Google and the pixel. And then we're going to have Liz join us and talk about Elon, right?

Sounds like a plan. Yeah. That feels like the right plan. Let's start with a Google event. David, you were there with a full crew. We live logged it, the whole thing. What's going on? So this event was weird because Google back in June at I.O.

Just was like, here's all the stuff we're going to launch in September. And then just told us about all the things. Like, we have a Pixel 7 and we have a Pixel 7 pro and we have a Pixel Watch. And we were like, tell us more. And they were like later. No problem. But so we get there today. And it's at this place in Brooklyn called Nassel.

National Sawdust, which is, I guess, like, a music venue. I don't know, Neely, you used to live near there. Did you ever go to National Sawdust? Yeah. It's a place. It's in Williamsburg. Yeah. It's nice.

But it was like, we're used to these things being sort of big spectacles. This one was very intimate. I, like, it was basically four rows of these chairs. Probably 60 people. It's like all journalists. And I was like eight feet from Rick Austerlo as he's like introducing all these new gadgets. It was nice to be in person again. Like, Neil, you and I have done a couple of these now where like a lot of people get together and we all watch a video.

this was not that, which was nice. But yeah, they launched the Pixel 7, the Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel Watch. They told us a little bit about the pixel tablet, which is coming next year, and I think is actually like sneakily very interesting. And then basically made the like grand case for Google gadgets, right? It's like they've talked a lot about ambient computing. They've talked a lot about like putting all the pieces together. They started the whole thing with basically a long, I think, Neely,

you were the one who called it the corporate webinar about product design. Yes. It was a product design and privacy and safety. Right. And it just, if you've ever had to take a corporate training before in your life, where like at the end there's going to be a short quiz, very much that vibe. Yeah. No, I think that track. Just I was like, I don't, I don't want to remember what kind of aluminum you use. I refuse, in fact, sir. Yeah. But yeah, they gave us the whole rundown. And then we went down

the street to, I think what is the newest Google store that they said just opened this summer and got to actually see the things. And I don't know how y'all felt sort of watching it, but being there, it was like the watch was. by a mile the most interesting thing that happened today. And then the phones were phones. And we should talk about them, but like their phones. And if you just like imagine a pixel 7 in your head, you're correct. That's what it is.

And then everybody went around looking for the tablet, but the tablet wasn't there. But the best part about it was there were a bunch of Nest Hub Maxes there. And I was one of probably 50 people who walked up to one and tried to pull the two pieces apart to see if it was a tablet. And it wasn't. That's how you know that product is a success. Yeah, exactly. But it was interesting. And I will say, I think the watch to me is, is both better seeming from the experience we've had of it so far and just like way more interesting than anything else that came out to gave.

Was that y'all's experience too? Yes. Yes. And no. I mean, I mean, yes in the sense that like it's the new product category. David, he did a big feature with Rick and some of the Google folks about it. People should go read it. It's interesting.

My know is like all I can think for better or worse. is when will Google stop caring about it? Yes. Right. Which is kind of the thrust of your feature. And like Google, it's Google. Like they have created this problem for themselves where I just need to believe them. Right.

And I'm actually more. And so like if I just had to rank them, I would say like the pixel tablet to me, which isn't even out yet. And it's like kind of vaporware because the ship date is just 2023. Like I know they're committed to the nest hubs. I know how I use the one in my house. I've watched it get software updates. Yep.

I know that the CEO of Google cares a lot about Google Assistant and Chrome. And like, I want that product to run Google Assistant and Chrome on it. So, like, I know it's going to ship and it's going to do those things really well. And the watch is like, it'll ship and you'll get it. And then maybe two years from now, they're just going to shut it down. And like, I don't know. I just don't know how to quantify that. So it's true.

Like, it is the most interesting thing because it's a new category for them, a new kind of hardware, a bunch of new capabilities, a new thesis. But, you know, there's just a dark cloud around new Google things now. So your worry about commitment isn't for the phones, it's for the other products, like the tablet and the watch. I know why they have to make the phones every year. It's obvious. Yep. Because they need something to scare Samsung with.

Right. If they let go of that, they might as well just, like, give Android to Samsung and be done with it. Yeah. So there's like a reason for that thing to exist. There's a reason for their smart home efforts to exist. Right. And you can make some case for the watch to exist, right? If you don't have this category, Apple's just going to eat you with the watch.

And then there's a whole sort of like meandering road. Yeah. But it's a weird one because on the one hand, I think you could make the case. And this was the fun thing about writing this story and talking to Rick and a bunch of folks on the team. Like you could make the case that the watch is actually like crucially important to all of the things that Google wants to do because it's on your body because it has biometrics because it like understands you. It's like all the stuff that they want to do actually might record. a thing that lives on your body, right? So I can see that. But it's also, to your point,

by far the easiest one to walk away from right now. And Google has a really long history of walking away from these things. Like literally, I had two calls with Google two days apart. It was like a whatever, like a Tuesday and a Thursday. And on the in-between day, Google killed Stadia. And so it's just like, okay, this is, and I literally, I opened both of those calls with like, Why on earth should I believe you that you're serious about doing this? And basically their answer is like, all we can do is prove it to you, right? Like people ask us this question about the pixel phones. And we kept making the pixel phones and now people don't ask us this question anymore.

And like, I look forward to five years from now when I can say the same thing about a watch. And I was like, that's all well and good. But like you're asking me for $350 today. Yeah. And that is, that's a very different thing. The watch looks really nice. I will say, like Alex, we have a couple of them around. Like Alex and I have both been playing with them.

And it's got the round face. It's not huge. The interface has made huge strides. It's much better to use than any Android smartwatch I've ever used. It definitely feels like it's probably going to be one of, if not the best, Android smartwatch. I think so too. And it also, V and I were talking about this earlier, like, it basically just decimates Fitbit forever. Yeah.

Fitbit as a thing that exists outside of pixel products is dead. Like, there's just no reason to buy a pixel or a Fitbit that isn't baked into the Pixel Watch. Well, unless you have an iPhone, right? But that's fair. There is that. which is, it turns out, quite a large number of people. But no, but I think you're right. And there's just Google has to, like, prove this weird thing that all evidence is against Google, which, even with smartwatches.

Like, Google has been making smartwatch software for a long time and intermittently seems to care about it and then forget about it and then care about it and then forget about it. I can see, they're four years in now to caring about it. And that's a reasonably long time. But, like, would I bet on Google continuing to make smartwatches without stopping for the next 10 years? like absolutely not. I wonder how frustrating it is, though, for people who aren't like us. Like, I think every single one of us has sat in at least three calls where Google says, this is the time we care about smart watches.

Yeah, we're so serious. We are so serious. And most people haven't had to sit through that. Most people don't know that the LG style came out and was terrible. Most people don't know about all those other times or they haven't cared. So, like, I wonder if that fatigue is unique to us or if that's a bigger thing. I think that's a fair point. But the part that kept jumping out to me was there was this.

whole section in talking about the pixel phones, I think it was Brian Rukowski, one of the Google execs who's in charge of all the pixel stuff, who was talking about how part of the pixel promise is that it gets better over time, right? Like, they do the drops. And their whole thing is like we have this very powerful processor with a lot of machine learning and we can do all this stuff. And so we're actually in a position for your phone to get better over time as the AI work that we do continues to improve. And it's like, that's all well and good. And there's actually some truth to that. Like the pixel software has gotten substantially better over the years. It only works if you keep doing.

And like the Pixel Watch by all accounts has a bunch of stuff going for it, but it's like in no way a finished product. And Google has these big ambitions. And it's like, you know, it's like a thing we always say, never buy a thing based on what it might be someday. Yeah. And Google is making these big promises about where they'll go someday. And I just think you'd sort of be crazy to believe them, even if they're telling the truth or they think they are. Yeah. I mean, evaluating something on the potential of future software updates is like I'm old now and I'm just going to tell you it's a sucker's game yes uh you shouldn't do it but the you know this was true of like amazon last week too right amazon has just sort of like relentlessly iterated on Alexa but it has reached its final form yeah and like there's not much more they can say Alexa can do right and so now they just like put it into they're like Alexa it can fly now it's like literally a product

is like a flying ring camera with Lexa net like fine and I just think phones are that thing and watches are not that thing yet we don't know where watches are going to go And Google's just starting well behind Apple. Right. So we should talk about the watch as it is and what the promises are today, what it can do. But then it's the question of, as you were saying, David, the question is like, it might be central to their whole strategy. And it's like worth understanding what that whole strategy even could be for this thing, even though

it's like obvious it's not this one. And that, right, like, they're going to make a pixel watch two and a pixel watch three and a pixel watch four. And maybe by then we will believe them that they're committed to the product and we'll like live up to more of their ideals. Right. Right now, just from watching it, it's. It seems like it's round, it's cool, it's a little bit smaller than Apple Watches, it's got a bunch of

cool Fitbit stuff in it, and it's wearless. And that is it. Am I missing something? No, that's pretty much, that's pretty much the extent of it. I mean, even the fact that they had James Park, who was formerly the CEO of Fitbit before they were bought by Google, do the presentation for the Pixel Watch, I thought was deeply fascinating. Like Google, and I wrote about this bunch in the story, but Google has these big ideas about like wrist computers, right? And it's like, this thing should be contextual and it should understand you and it should interact with your other devices. Like, they made a Fitbit.

Like, make no mistake. Like, the Pixel Watch is a Fitbit that also runs Google Maps. Like, that is functionally what this thing is. But we should, we should note a very good looking fit bit. It is. It's nice looking and by all extent,

or by all accounts, very powerful. And Fitbit was terrible at making good looking smart watches. Yes. Like the worst at it. There was a... How's the bezel? This is what,

I mean, honestly, we were 16 minutes into this and now I'm asking about the bezel. I've not done my job. How's the bezel? It's, is so hard to answer. Alex can vouch for this. So it's a weird thing where like the bezel is large. It just is large. But the way they've designed the UI is such that you don't actually notice the bezel most of the time. It's like the bezel on on earlier Apple watches where like there's a bezel and you sometimes bump up against it. And I think you are going to bump up against it a lot more in this watch than on an Apple watch. But you don't really notice it that often. You're not like, ugh, a lot. Whereas previous round watches you'd put it on and be like, yep, it's a big old bezel on there. Or it had that flat tire at the bottom like the Moto Watches did. It doesn't feel like any of that.

It feels like it's all screen. Except if for anybody who hasn't watched the keynote, I encourage you to go back to the keynote and look for the moment where they're testing. They're showing off that you can take a photo using the watch as a viewfinder. And there's a moment where you can see the little square viewfinder on it. And that is the moment where you're like, holy God, is that bezel enormous. Yeah. And Google does a really good job of hiding it with the other UI.

Like it's all really dark and it all sort of like fades off to the sides. it doesn't, it's not just like color into a black bezel, but it's big. It's real, real, real big. If you actually find the thing where it hits against the bezel with color, you'll notice how big it is. I mean, I was thinking, like we published this piece yesterday that was kind of like a timeline of the pixel phone over the years. And it reminds me of that very first pixel phone where it was like, there's like some cool ideas in here, but oh, there's some really ugly design choices. Yeah, it was not an attractive phone. Yeah. And it feels like that same thing where it's like, you'll have some really good ideas.

But boy, and when it comes to design, Apple just schools you. Samsung just schools you. And they haven't done much to improve that. You know, it's funny. I feel that way about the phones. I don't feel that way about the watch. Really? I mean, you guys have seen.

I have not. Alex and David are in the office. We have a bunch of units. They've actually seen them. David was at the thing. I'm just watching the videos and reacting to the photos like everybody else. The watch seems like a composed thing. Like they have a point of view about it.

The band seem really cool. The band attachment mechanism seems really cool. The entire vibe, just from where I'm sitting, when you put different bands on it, seems like the entire vibe of the watch changes dramatically. In a way that is like not true of the Apple Watch, actually. That's fair. Like you can put the fanciest band on Apple Watch. It's still an Apple Watch.

This looks like it actually takes on a new character. That part's fine. The Pixel 7 is like, you can't convince me that you did anything to design this to make it look nicer. You were just like, screw it. There's, Neil is I was going to complain about it in the podcast, but this is what we got. We're just doing it again.

We're just doing it. I mean, it's, it's an ugly phone. You weren't swayed by the 15 minutes of telling you about lemongrass and how nice all the human designs are. No, I'm shocked.

The colors are great. I will say. Yeah. Lemon grass and hazel, dumb names, good colors. But I'm kind of with you. I mean,

it's just. Wait, which is the lemon grass and which is the hazel? Lemongrass is the, the sort of like off greenish one. That one's good, yeah. It's like other companies would call that like sea foam or something, but Google went with lemon grass.

And hazel is, I don't know, it's just the hazel one. I don't have a good answer for you on that. And then there's like a gray one? That might be the hazel one. I don't know. None of these make any sense to me. Yeah. There was a part where Isabel from Google was like the centerpiece of our warm colors

is lemon grass. And then they showed the lemon grass. And I was like, that's a cool color. And I still don't know what she meant. because then they're like and here's the cool colors and they were indeed much cooler but I was like just going back to the green

that's it okay yeah the green was nice the hazel is the kind of gray color and I'm not a fan of that one it felt a little like it's got too much brown in it for me it's too warm I could definitely see that

yeah but my thing with the pixel design and Nila you've you've never liked the pixel design and I feel like I nothing the pixel design like I don't I wouldn't say that I like it but I also like I have no strong Is this how you broke up with people back when you were like in your dating days? Like, here's a deal.

I'm nothing you. Yeah, I'm just, I'm whelmed by this relationship that I have with my Pixel 7 pro. Yeah, it just feels like it's just like it's not doing enough for me to like have strong feelings about it. Yeah. But people seem to have really strong feelings about it. I don't know. I just, it looks, it's shiny. I like that it's very like, it feels luxurious.

It looks pretty luxurious. The Pixel 7? That's the shiny one, right? No, I'm thinking of the pro. This is what I mean. You have strong feelings. How is it possible to have strong feelings? Okay, hold on.

Hold on. I have to make sure I'm talking about the right one. Here's what we know. I just want to put this out there. What we know from our own audience data and from your experience at the event is that people care about the watches more than the phones. Oh, unquestionably. Your desire to make me dunk on the phones, I'm resisting so we can finish talking about the watches. All right.

Tell me more about the watches. Is it what's, whereOS is updated? How's that working? Yeah, WareOS actually seems really nice. Google has spent a bunch of time over the years trying to make it less complicated. Like I went back and watched the 2014 IO where they actually announced Android Wear in the first place. And it had this like the mental map of Android Wear was insane. Yeah.

It was like you were on the screen and then it was like there was stuff to the right and stuff to the left and stuff up top and you could go down farther. And it was insane. And so Google has pulled all of that way back. And it's basically you get like. small widgets and feeds and you can swipe down to get to the control panel. It's like it feels like teeny tiny Android like in a good way. Yeah. And at least this watch is, I confess I'm slightly out of date in my Android smartwatch usage. But I, this was my experience and I checked at the V and she agreed that this is like dramatically smoother and better feeling than any Android smartwatch I've

ever used. Everything we've used so far for the most part was in like a demo mode. So it's really, it's hard to know what sort of the deep powerful stuff will be like. But even just like little swipes, it was the kind of thing that used to be sort of slow and stuttering and it would like miss when you would flick on the screen. And it just didn't seem to do any of that. Like they've done a really good job of actually tuning the thing up to work. And it was one of the things they told me they spent a lot of time on and sort of tacitly admitted in talking about it that like this was a thing they had not done well in the past and eventually realized they should probably get right. So Samsung smartwatches, wearOS, traditionally like Samsung smartwatches ran Tyson for a minute and they merged Tyson and wearOS. and then Samsung is doing Samsung stuff,

which is like their own riff on it. They barely even mention WareOS when they introduce new versions of the Galaxy Watch. It's like a flicker of a ghosted image on a slide in the transition between two other slides and their presentations, right? Subliminal messages like in between. White text on a white background. It's just as Android.

But you know, Samsung watches have a point of view, right? Right. And they're kind of like feature-laden and there's lots of buttons and settings, Samsung stuff. This from all accounts is much more minimal, right? But it's still whereOS. Do you feel a split there? Do you feel like they've tried to pare it down and focus it?

It's going to be a little hard to tell until we can like really put some apps on it and put the thing through its paces. But they clearly have tried to do that. Like I think your reaction to what they're attempting to do is the right one. That like they're trying to not make a thing that you spend a lot of time with.

Like I'm sure you guys notice this, but like voice interaction continues to be the thing the Google harps on, right? With all of their devices, they're like, voice is the answer, speech to text and text to speech. Like, that's where we're headed. That's where all of this is going to go. And then they're trying to make things take fewer taps, which I think is meaningful,

that like with the Fitbit stuff, it should just be sort of a quick scroll through information that you want. And Maps works much more simply. And they're definitely trying to get to the phase where, like, Samsung wants you to use your watch like a computer. And Google definitely doesn't. I think Google still doesn't. know exactly how you should use your watch, but the answer is not like a computer.

Yeah, it feels like this time they've taken more of that Fitbit DNA because for years, they didn't, they just wanted to be like a watch that you could also get notifications on because they're like primary person putting WearOS into watches was Michael Coors, you know? Like, they didn't care. And now they've got the Fitbit. They've got all that fitness apparatus behind it. And it's like, okay, we can have a point of view, but it's still going to be software, but it's going to be fitness.

It's going to be like that. So that's my kind of my last big question here. I don't think Apple knows why people are wearing these watches either. Really, right? Like, if you go back in time, David, you're saying like the first wearer-off stuff was just a scattershot mess of things and like huge ideas. Yeah. So was the first Apple watch. Do you remember when Apple was like you're going to send heartbeats to people?

I want to do that right now. It was the two fingers, right? You put two fingers on it and it sends your heartbeat to somebody else. Yeah. Truly bizarre idea. we should all be doing more of. Honestly, Apple should bring the heartbeat thing back. Can I send you my heartbeat now?

Maybe it's still there. That just open the weather app. I didn't like. I tried. I put two fingers on my watch, nothing happened. I will say that the walkie-talkie feature on the Apple Watch is criminally underrated,

underutilized. I use it all the time. Absolutely. Apple should put all of its development. Stop making the car. Rake the watch walkie-talkie better. Anyhow. But, you know, like all of these devices,

Google started a huge idea and they've had to pare town. Apple started a huge idea and they've had to pair town. Apple has very much landed on. Well, the Apple Watch Ultra is like basically a huge computer on your wrist. Big screen app store. The whole thing can work independently of the phone now. But really, we know that the reason you buy it is like health and fitness, right? And the ultra is like the pinnacle of that. Right. They're like, this is for people who dive. Yep. Right. Like you have to pick which band you want depending on what kind of mountaineer you are.

And obviously you've already considered that because they know, like this is what drives the thing. Google was like, we have to buy Fitbit in order to be competitive. We've added a Fitbit to it. Are there like meaningful fitness features out of Fitbit here or is it just a Fitbit? It's basically just a Fitbit. It seems to be a particularly good one. I feel like that's enough because the Fitbit audience was never the ultra audience. It was never the Garmin audience. It was never like the Super Fit audience, right? The Fitbit audience has always been the same audience as the Apple Watch where it's like, yeah, sometimes I want to know my heart rate. Sometimes I want to be able to show my friends that I walked outside today so that they stop

shaping me. Like, that's always kind of been the goal of these products. And this is like, okay, finally you have an alternative to Apple if you want, hopefully, if you want just a nice looking watch that does those very basics. And if you want to get more hardcore than that, Garmin or Samsung or whoever's there. But I think this is really for that Fitbit audience who's been like dicked around for years with really bad smart watches from Fitbit. Yeah, I think that's totally right. Like Google needed Fitbit in a big way, but Fitbit also needed Google. Yeah. To like, people have been asking Fitbit to make better looking devices for as long as Fitbit has existed. And Fitbit just basically has not been able to do it. Like the company is sort of

intermittently tried. Like I remember doing a story, God, eight years ago maybe where Fitbit was like, we're going to start making fitness trackers that are like jewelry. Yeah. And it was like, all right. And then they were like, look at this one we made. It's six inches long and rock solid and It's just a Fitbit. It was just like a black pill and you put it in a gold bracelet. And I think the thing we don't talk about enough is like Fitbit's primary audience for a long time was women. Yeah. And women have been left out oftentimes from smart watches because so many smart watches are these really, really big watches.

And a lot of women and a lot of people with smaller beasts love to wear them. I'm wearing one. But a lot don't. And so they've held on to their Fitbits for a very long time or they've just been like, all right, I guess I'm just going to get, you know, a $10 special watch at Walmart. Just so I have something to wear. And this is like, this is for them. This is for people who are like, I don't need all the big gadgets and stuff.

I just want something nice that I can like be in on this too with everybody else. Yeah. I totally, I think that's exactly right. I just want to come back to the idea that two things you can do with smart watches now are send your heartbeats to people. And then per Alex, shame them for not walking enough. Yes. Those are your two choices. Every day.

Do you not remember. sending direct love taps or like you didn't walk enough. You were lazy. Do you remember when the Fitbit first came out, everyone I know was like, oh, yeah, I have a Fitbit because I care about fitness. And I'm like, no, you don't need that. That's too performative. And so it is that like performative stuff going on. Yeah.

Well, I think it's neat. I'm curious to see, you know, Google took a couple of hard shots at Apple today. We should talk about them more at the phone in the next section. But this is the point now where they can start to pressure Apple even again, even in terms of regulations about, hey, there's a lot of people that would like to buy this watch instead of your watch. And you won't let them. Yep. And I think it's probably the same. There's probably some Android people that would like to have an Apple watch, just like some Android people buy AirPods or whatever. Well, it's like one thing Google would really like you to know is that fast pair is a thing that exists and is open to lots of different devices. And also that beats headphones use fast. Those are two things that I can tell you confidently Google would very much like a lot more people to know. And it's like, and I think you're exactly right. Those are the things. And that came up even during the keynote today.

It was like Google is sometimes quietly and sometimes not particularly quietly, like continuing to push Apple on this idea that like if you make this stuff work better, everyone will be happier and be better. And I don't know that there are a ton of iPhone users who are like mad about the Apple Watchberg and a clamor for a. a pixel watch. But it would be a more fun world if we could find out. I tend to think. Yeah. Yeah. I just keep coming back to that idea. It's like, I'm not going to switch my entire life over to Google services for a $350

watch. Right. It just doesn't seem likely. So the market is already teeny tiny. They can't go compete in the market of iPhone owners too. Just like Apple can't go compete in the market of Android owners. Apple just seems content because all the rich people are on their side. Like that's, they know it's true. Yeah.

And they're like, okay, we're going to... Do you think Google's move is, is it more possible that Google could get people to switch from Samsung to pixel in order to get a $350? 100.000? Like, is that the move for Google? Does a pixel watch work with Samsung phones? I believe so. The thing on the box, we'll have to test this. So I reserve the right to be wrong about this. But it just says an Android phone running Android 8.0 or later.

So it should work fine. It would be really stupid if it only worked with pixel phones. I'm sure there will be pixel specific stuff. Like, I think that it's possible that the viewfinder is one thing that seems like. to me probably only works on a pixel, but I'd be, it would be, yeah, you're right. It would be stupid of Google to do that. We're forgetting that like the United States iPhone reigns supreme. The United States is just one country in a lot of places Android reigns supreme. And now like, oh, a competitor to the Samsung that's nice looking, that's smaller, like,

I could see that doing some real numbers in a lot of places. Yeah, that's true. I think so too. All right, we should take a break. That's the watch 349 without LTE, 399 with LTE. It's coming out soon. We'll have reviews. As always, we've got to like use the thing before we can talk to you more about it. We've got to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business

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Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. 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.

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lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hires 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 focus 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. Okay, we're back.

We talked about the watch a little bit. David tried to bait me in and talking about the phone. Here's what I'm going to say about the Pixel 7. One, just like the iPhone 14, it looks the same as the phone before it. Which our YouTube commenters don't seem to have understood that we said about the iPhone 14. So that's just my note to the YouTube commenters out there, all of whom I'm sure, listen to this. Yeah. But you will note that our headline on the iPhone 14 review was, this is the iPhone 13S.

Yeah. Sorry. You could have had what you wanted. You just didn't Google it from us. Like, I don't want to tell you. We gave you the thing you want. You're like, I would like some chocolate chips. And we're like, yes, they're here.

And you're like yelling at us. There's some chocolate chips. Just get what you want. There's only one skill. And it's getting what you want. That's true. That's my life advice for you today. Second, it's still ugly.

They're just ugly phones. I don't know what to tell you about them. That camera bump is horrendous. The colors are slightly nicer. They have refined some of the edges. You know, like they've done some things. They're not attractive. I think that they're shiny.

And maybe I'm just like easily distracted by shiny at this point. But I was like, ooh, that gold bump. It's so shiny with a glass underneath. Ooh. Like that just, I don't want it. I don't want to own this device because I just bought a phone. I don't need another one. But I was like, that is appealing.

That is a pleasing look to my eyes. Yeah. This is my thing, Neel. I just don't get the hatred for it. It's like... Is it because it's so boring? It's like looking at this like boring white table and being like, that table is so ugly. It's like, no, it's not interesting enough to be ugly.

Like, what are we talking about? Yeah, I don't know. Look, all phones are kind of boring now. Yeah, that's true. I'll give you that. I'm just like the back of this thing, the glass and then the weird surround and they're like, at least that my pixel six is, there was a like a noticeable ridge between the glass and the metal. and I haven't touched a 7.

Maybe they ever find it. They're just ugly. Like, the bump is bad. The bump is bad. But it's not as bad. This is like someone like a Google engineer to open one of the AI image generators and was like generic smartphone. And then it's like this sort of like mutated AI version of a generic smartphone got spit out. Yeah.

It's, I don't know. It's like the uncanny value of generic smartphone design. Whatever it doesn't matter. You're going to put it in a case anyway. The cases last year were horrible. Chris Welch says the case is this year. They're slightly better. Chris Welch.

I just, Chris Welch deserves some credit for this. I'm just going to tell a very short story about Chris Welch. So I'm wandering around the Google store,

like looking at the phones, taking video, taking pictures, and I walk over and Chris Welch is standing in front of a wall display, reaching up to a set of three pixels about eight or nine feet

off the ground and he's just yanking at one of them. And I'm like, Chris, what are you doing? And he's like, just hold on, don't just everything,

make sure everything's fine. And he literally just yanks the case off of one of them, pulls it down, takes off his own case puts them down and goes to those feel any different he goes nope it's the same that sucks and then just walks away it's like all right Chris just yanking phones off walls it's like if you did that at an apple event they would have killed you like right then and there somebody would have

just sniped you from the steve jobs theater yeah but at the google store they don't care i will say when i put on the apple watch ultra the apple event things are dicey for one moment they were like uh-huh maybe you should be in jail and at the google store they're like you're touching our phone hooray That's all they want. All right. So look, that's the way it looks. You're going to put a case on it anyway. We should talk about the phones.

New TensorFlow, the G2, which I'm very proud of. What else? New cameras. And I actually, I want to talk about the cameras because Google talked a lot of shit about Apple and then basically just said, we did the Apple camera. But we'll come back to that. TensorFlow G2. There's a 6.3 inch screen on the Pixel 7 and a 6.7 inch screen on the Pixel 7 pro.

Both have variable refresh rate. Both go up to 90 hertz. It's all like medium exciting. They did a bunch of stuff with phone calls that I thought was pretty interesting. They're like one of their big new features was stuff that if you're going through a like a phone tree to, you know, press 9 to get to whatever, it'll just show that to you as a menu on your screen now and you can just tap the thing you want. That's awesome.

It's awesome. It's very smart. And they did a bunch of AI work to like improve the quality of phone calls. You can reduce background noise and enhance your own voice. So there's just a bunch of little things like that kind of all over the phone. Speaker recognition on the recorder app, which is one of those things that no one can. cares about, but a room full of journalists got really excited about. It got the biggest gasp of any announcement from the reporters in the room. And that is the entire list of people who will use that

feature. And then, yeah, just a ton of little things. They spent a lot of time on the camera. That was obviously the thing. And, like, Google is, in the same way that Google is crystal clear that people buy smart watches for health reasons, they buy phones for cameras. Like, that just is true. And Google's whole... The cool feature this year was that they can take your crummy, blurry photos. and make them look better, right? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of been Google's thing for a while, right? Like the magic eraser thing works relatively well. They did have the new feature where they'll do it with your old photos that I think is very cool.

Yeah. And there was a guy walking around the Google store after the event who was very proud that he thought he was the first person to use the hashtag fixed by Pixel. And he was like, we should make that a thing. And the Google employees were like, yeah. So that was fine. But yeah, that idea that Google can not only help you take better pictures, but actually fix them after the fact is a, big part of what they're starting to push on now with all the AI and ML stuff. And well,

but that one in particular they announced was you've taken thousands of photos with cameras in the past, phones in the past. You buy a pixel seven and you have Google photos and then Google photos on your pixel seven using the tensor G2 will like upscale your old blurry photos or de-blur them or something. That's right. What is a photo, Neelai?

What is a photo? Well, so like the the what is a photo vibes coming off the pixel event. Oh, yeah. Are out of control. Oh, yeah. Like fully out of control. So just that.

Why can't Google Photos just do that? Right? Like Google Photos runs on Google servers. But do you pay for Google Photos? Yes. I pay quite a bit of money for Google Photos. Okay. Never mind.

I have like the upgraded storage plan, the whole thing. I mean, like famously, Google gave Google Photos away for free until they destroyed the market for photo services and now they charge for it. Right. That's actually a super interesting question because it's, not like Google Photos is short of access to processing power, right? Like Google has data centers. Those can do some things. That's really interesting. Yeah, that that is a device-specific thing. That has to have been just a deliberate marketing choice. There's no technical reason to just not

put that into Google Photos. Yeah. I think it was Dan who said they say they need something in the TensorFlow G2 chip to do it. But it's like you make the chip. Yeah. Yeah. And also your data centers are full of tensor chips. Uh-huh. That's like a part of the whole thing. Like the tensor came out of all the work they were doing in their data centers. Like these two things are the same. So I just that's a little confusing. But that's one thing. And I don't even think that like really implicates the what is a photo conversation. Like you have an old photo and you're going to do some processing on it

to make it a better photo. Like I, I understand how it works. Because you still have the old photo. Yeah. Now you just have like the second improved version. Like that's just photo editing. Right. Like maybe it's a more complicated thing. But you're you're like created a photo. You're editing it. The camera on the pixel seven, is just far beyond, like, capturing a still image in time. Yes. It just has abandoned that idea of making the photo that way.

Like, almost completely. And so the one that really got me was all of the Zoom stuff they're doing. Yep. Where they're like, okay, we have a number of Zoom lens. We have an ultra-wide. We have a wide. We have a Zoom. At every point along the magnification,

from regular to 2x to 10-X to whatever else. 30. Max, which is bananas. We're going to merge frames from multiple cameras, run them through the HDR pipeline that we've set up, and then do AI to create more detail. And it's like, you know, like at some point, it really is you're just holding up your phone to reality and giving the AI prompt. Yeah.

Like recreate the scene. Like it might as well be Dolly for reality, right? Like Google, interpret reality. Right. And if you just watch that, I encourage everyone to go watch it again and just come at it from that perspective. When you take a photo, you think you are capturing a moment in time, right? You're going to open the shutter. Some pixels are going to hit the thing.

You're going to close the shutter. And there's a lot to be said about how long the shutter is open and how long that moment in time really is and all this stuff. Google is now like literally a computer is looking at reality and it's going to try to faithfully reconstruct what we think that reality is using more data than your eyes can possibly. process it once. Yeah, we've moved away from like optics being the primary way that like the light is gathered and interpreted. And now it's like, okay, the optics are going to gather the light. And then we're actually going to interpret it. Yeah, it's like a rendering engine. Yeah. It's just very lifelike. It's kind of wild, especially I noticed the same thing in the Zoom ones where it's like they're going through and he just is like, okay, it takes, you know, if you want to be it between two and

five X zoom, it's going to take the telephoto lens and the wide lens and actually, do some work to comp them together. And it's like, okay, we're still working from images here. And then it's like, by the time you get to 30, it's like, okay, we're doing, we're stabilizing for handshake. We're doing all kinds of crazy stuff on the other end. We're pixel binning. It's like, I'm snapping the shutter and that is the beginning of like a 16 step process that

ends in, I get a thing that looks like a photograph. Yeah. But there's so much happening in between there that Google is in charge of that it is just wild. Yeah. And there's so much that isn't really transparent about what's going on there. I mean, except at the end, you get to see what you see and the photo at the end. Like, there's at least a check on what the thing just presented. Yeah, but you're not seeing those processes.

Like, if I'm in Photoshop, I can see every layer. I know what I'm doing. Whereas this, it's like, to-da. I mean, most people probably think that's fine, though. Like, I think. Yeah, I think most people think it's fine. But, like, what Dave was talking about with the Zoom on the stabilized Zoom when you shoot a video. Mm-hmm.

And they were like, we know this is noisy. so we're just going to clean it up. And they just showed like adding detail back to the thing that the sensor couldn't have captured. That's weird. Yeah. Like you should. There's just something about all of this that's like we're getting a little,

we're getting a little closer to the photo is just a prompt. Yeah. Or a number of systems to just spit out an image that it thinks you will like. Yeah. I'm really excited for the Spike Jones movie in like five years where like somebody's running from a crime that their Google Pixel phone. No, no, no, no, no. This is what I'm saying.

Like, not to get too dark. Yeah. This was the basis of a completely nonsensical set of objections in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Oh, wow. Do you remember this? They all this photo evidence and his lawyers were like, Your Honor, like, Apple iPhones are, they are known to use AI to interpolate scenes however they want.

And like, evidence got tossed out because the prosecutors in Kenosha, Wisconsin were not very good. Oh. And they were just like not prepared for this objection. Like it's already has happened in a very high profile case that like, yeah. The thing that a camera makes is so unknown that you can like, you can undo it. You can undo its validity because you can't, you have to bring in an expert to explain how it works. And like that has nothing to do with family photos.

Like I'm very happy that the Google Pixel 7 pro can like take a better picture of a child than yes. The phone that came before it or a phone from two years ago. But just philosophically, the thing that happened. happens when you push a shutter button is getting farther and farther away from like centuries of cultural expectation of what pushing a shutter button does. Yeah. And there's no like underlying transparency of here is this moment as it existed in time. And here is this thing that we made that is the best version of that moment. Yeah. I remember Google saying to me a while ago and I think this was with either the first or the second pixel that do you guys remember with those phones?

You would take the picture and then you would open it up in the photo. photos app and it would show up slightly blurry and then it would sort of resolve. Yeah. They told me at the time, and there's like a 60% chance this was a lie, but they told me at the time that that was deliberate, that it's like it should you, they wanted you to understand that something was happening to the photo that you took as Google was like working its magic on it. And that should have gotten better and instead it just went away.

And there's like, it's so abstracted away from what users see now. It's weird because camera makers figured this out, right? They said, okay, you'll get a raw, and that's what we're taking. That's optically the thing. And then we're going to give you a JPEG. And a Canon JPEG is going to be way warmer than it should be because Canon just thinks that's prettier. And we're going to do tons of tons of processing.

And so they've already kind of acknowledged that and said, okay, but we're still going to give you the raw. And Apple's finally giving us the raw. And I think kind of making that connection and making that more common might be part of the solution here to like escape this like kind of wonky philosophical and potentially legal quandary. Totally. So the thing about the camera that really struck me though,

it was like in the course of all of these announcements was they just did the Apple stuff with the camera, right? Yeah. They're doing some of the same pixel binning. The cinematic stuff is very Apple. All of this. And this all came as simultaneously, Google is just taking every opportunity it can to just not.

knife Apple about RCS and crash detection coming three years ago and all this stuff. And it's just like, I had this moment of sitting there and being like, oh, all phones are the same now. Yeah. And everybody's just going to yell at each other about everything. And all the phones are the same. Like this is just where we are. Yep.

Yeah. They made, they had the list, right? It was like the always on display and car crash detection, lock screen widgets. Mm-hmm. Night mode. Like, they made a list. Like, here's all the stuff we did first that Apple picked up. And then they, it's true.

They got to the camera section. They're like, here's what we can do. It's a 2x zoom and we crop the sensor. And it's like, yeah, we just, I think there's, there's an element where it's once you have the big pixel bin sensor, there's a handful of moves that you get out of it that are very obvious, right? Yeah. Yeah.

You can stop pixel binning and you can crop it and use pixels natively. It all comes down to the processing on a back end. So I, you know, I think you all know this way. Apple's processing to me is just like way out of control lately. And pixel has traditionally been better. So, like, I think we got to review the phones to see. Yeah. It just, I just keep coming back to this.

Like, Google is being so aggressive with letting AI step in and fix the photos that, like, it's like, don't even trust this anymore. I don't know. Maybe it's just like old school. Yeah. I mean, it was interesting being in the room, too, because the demos that they showed, like, Apple, Apple is very funny in the sense that there's very clearly, like, a large team of people at Apple whose job it is to just go to beautiful waterfalls and take the pictures that they use

in their slides. Yeah. And they even said during the keynote today that, like, one of the pictures they used as an example of how good the Zoom was was just like a shot, a person who works at Google took. And the demos they showed were not great, but were probably substantially more realistic than the stuff that, like, I'm going to get out of my iPhone. Yeah, because iPhone, the iPhone is like, you know what? Are you ever on a dune in a desert at night? With 11 professional photographers. Have you ever been there?

Have you ever worn a sweater at dusk in paper? with three beautiful people. And there's just a cat over there. And a full crew of wedding engineers. And everyone has very vibrant hats on. The next time we review the phone. The hat budget's got to... We've got to absolutely increase it.

But it was just striking to me to see, like, A, these two companies are competing more head-to-head, I think, than ever, because, like, Google's talking a ton about TensorFlow. At the same time, Apple is talking a ton about the recent A-series and M-series. and it's like these companies are competing along the same lines now. Yeah. And it's going to be really interesting over the next couple of years to see there's so many places they could push it, but they're all betting on.

Well, there's one line they're not competing on, which is that Apple sells a million phones and carriers will all but pay you to get a new iPhone. Fair. And Google sells vanishingly a few phones. I think Vlad Savov, one of our former Verge Senior editor, former co-founder. Any former co-founder? Existing co-founder. Permanent co-founder.

Now Bloomberg tweeted he asked IDC, Google, since 2016 has sold like 27 million pixels. That's as many phones as Samsung sells in a year. Like Google has to sell like, I mean, it's just like ridiculous situation. So many more phones. Yeah. And there was a, there was a line today that Google has like doubled its order for the Pixel 7s because they're they're hoping to sell more.

And it's really, it's like they're going from like a tiny number to a tiny number. Like, good job, Google. Like, we're proud of you. But it's a long road to go here. It's a long road to go. We should quickly, we got to get, you got to bring Liz on and talk about Elon. We should quickly talk about the tablet. Oh, yeah.

I'm very excited about just because I have a Nest Hub and we use it for photos and we talk to Google to set timers, all the things. Well, the one thing you do. You set timers, you ask for music. Occasionally you ask it to play YouTube TV, which is very cool when it works. So like having a bigger version of that is cool. But if you can also run Chrome on a fast processor, done. Yes.

like kitchen computer solved. And so like, I'm going to buy one in this dock that lets you turn it into a nest hub. Just because having the backstop of like screw it, I'm just going to open Chrome. Yeah. It sounds great. But Lenovo already did it. Lenovo's been doing it. Right?

Like, but they put like a garbage media tech processor in the thing. Yeah. With like a big bezel. Amazon has already done it too. But then you've got to use Amazon's weird browser on their bad shit. So what's appealing to you is that. it's a different form. It's a different processor. What's appealing to me is that Google appears to have cared about processing capability in a tablet by putting in their high-end arm chip.

Everybody else is designed. Right. Like Lenovo has done it, but like fully cheaped out on this type. Yeah. Like bad display, chunky, you know, bad construction, shitty processor. Like life's too short for slow computers, man. You know, like, I'm going to just go get my laptop. How expensive is it going to be? That's, that's, because like, Lenovo cheaped out because they were like, we want to. to get it down to a price that it makes sense. And this is like, seems pricey. David, did they have the tablet there? Did you get to play with it? No, we went, we went looking for it. And there were, there were several instances of people like wandering around the Google store trying to peel apart a Nest Hub Max to try and find it to no avail. That's pretty good. But

there was no tablet and we don't know what it's going to cost. We don't know when it's coming. It does, from all the videos, look very much like a Samsung tablet from like eight years ago. But it seems to be very powerful. And I'm with you on the end. idea that like a full Chrome browser on my Nest Hub Max goes a long way. Like I think the big questions for me are like is the speaker and the dock going to be any good? Are they going to do a good job with the far field microphones so that it feels enough like a nest from far away? And how much does it cost? Are they going to do the ambient photo mode thing where they do the reflective color thing? You know, like they got to do that to make this really work. Yes. They got to release it first. Well, there's

there's that too. It is very much still vaporware. But I think they said this thing during the keynote that was like a lot of people get tablets and then they're like dead in drawers or charging in corners all the time. And that is largely my experience of owning a tablet. It's like it is a home device. Like it is a thing I use around my house much more often than I use it anywhere else. And so I think they're like they're on to something smart about how people actually use their tablets. We'll see how well they actually pull it off. But I agree that like fast processor and full Chrome browser instantly makes this thing more useful than anything else I've ever put in my kitchen.

Then the kitchen aid? It's true. The knives? It's the second most useful gadget I've ever put in my kitchen. Is the kitchen a gadget? Do you not have a stove? Can we talk about this? Is a kitchen?

Is a sink a gadget? Here's what I want. I want a 2.3 gigahertz processor in my microwave. I want a step. All right, that's all the stuff. We're going to get it. We're going to get reviews. We're going to go into it in detail when we actually gets a chance to play with this stuff

outside of the watchful eyes of Google employees. That's coming up soon. We got to take a break. bring Liz on. Oh boy, we got to talk about Elon and Twitter. We'll be right back. 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. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need 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 focus 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. Support for the show comes from

Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter.

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Claude. com. Okay. Wisn. Welcome to Vergecast. Thanks for having me, folks. Good to be here. Okay.

So let's just be honest. We've been recording for an hour. It's Thursday, October 6th. Has anything happened in the last hour with Elon and Twitter? Yes. Of course. Of course. As is always the case.

Does he own it yet? No. Okay. So he filed a thing with the Delaware court saying, hey, we should have a stay of proceedings because I'm totally going to buy it. Like, I'm totally buying it this time. And then Twitter, like, filed their own little thing that's like,

absolutely don't stay the proceedings. We don't buy this. We think he's up to some mischief. Which, you know what? I kind of agree with Twitter here because, like, just given what a week today has been. I think that, like, I think that we're, I think we're in for more shenan again. and I also think I'm still going to Delaware. Okay, so let's just back up.

When Lisa, she's going to Delaware, what she means is she's going not for like a pleasure visit, although I think you might have a good time. She's going to go to the trial, which is taking place at the Delaware Chancery Court. Right? That's what you might do on Delaware. That is what I'm going to do. Let's just back up before today in this last hour of surprise news. So Elon said he was going to buy Twitter for 5420 a share.

It's $44 billion. It's April. Nice. God only knows what it. And a bunch of rich people. Neil, wait, wait, wait, please sum up the entirety of the last six months of Elon and Twitter in the next 60 or so seconds. Just go. Can we start at the clock? All right. Let's see what I can do. All right. My timer's going. You've got 60 seconds starting now.

Okay. So in April, Elon tweeted himself into buying Twitter. There's no other way to describe it. For 5420 a share, which is $44 billion. Nice. It turns out a bunch of rich people texted him embarrassing ideas about Twitter, including Mark Beniott, the CEO of Salesforce, who just said, things like Twitter OS conversational OS for your life and Twitter said, and Elon said, screw you. Then May he gets cold feet. He sues Twitter, says, I want out of the deal because there's so many bots on your platform. Twitter says, what the hell are you talking about? We'll see you in the Delaware Court of Chancery. We've been in a lawsuit ever since. Elon's entire bot argument has proven

to be a total fraud full of shenanigans. He's losing, losing, losing. We're coming up on trial. He's supposed to be deposed today. Trial starts October 17th. He files a letter with the Security Exchange Commission, not the court, saying I'm fine, I'm going to do it. The court puts out a letter yesterday saying, no one has filed the motion to stay this trial. We continue. Then there's been a lot of shenanigans today leading up to Elon saying to the court, please stay, which means pause the trial. I'm actually going to do it. Twitter won't say yes for an answer. That was the last hour. That's a minute. And now we're here. That was amazing. Well done. So I also want to say the other thing is if you weren't paying attention, there were reports that Elon,

his deposition got moved back, which is what I think all of the shenanigans this week were about was were about pushing back that deposition by saying, oh, Twitter, we're really serious. Come back to the bargaining table. Because, you know, this was going to be a really unpleasant deposition for him because the judge found this week that he may have irretrievably deleted some signal messages that pertain to the deal, which not great. And then there's also a bunch of questions about the bot stuff

because that didn't really show up in the text messages that we saw with, for instance, Parag Agrawal, who had sort of politely asked Elon to stop saying, rude stuff about Twitter on Twitter. And Elon was like, what did you do this week? Which, like, pretty solid burn. Yeah. No, just to be clear, he said, stop. I think it was like, what did you get accomplished this thing?

Or what did you get done this week? Implying that he was. What did you get done this week? Yeah. Yeah. And like 30 seconds after the text from Prague came in. Again, a pretty solid burn. But like, I definitely would not like, you know, go through all of these like court

proceedings just to like get a cool burn in. But like, that's me. I don't know. So then Elon puts out this letter. We all kind of bought it, right? He says, I'm going to buy Twitter at 5420 a share. And then we, like, read the letter and that I'm going to actually buy it was like conditional in weird ways. Like, you have to pause the lawsuit.

You have to drop your claims. I have to get my money out of the banks. And we're like, wait, this is nothing. But if your Twitter, you've already had Elon promised to buy you for 5420 a share. Right. But this time he means it. Well, why would you believe him now? You serious, Nilai. Come on.

And the other thing I'm just going to add here is that Elon is famously an SEC disrespecter, which you may recall from previous shenanigans involving Twitter, where he tried to take a Tesla private for 420 a share and then like changed his mind about that. And then there was like an SEC settlement. He was supposed to have like a Twitter sitter, which he maybe or may, does or does not have sort of hard to tell. So, you know, he's gone on the record saying he doesn't respect the SEC. which makes the SEC letter a particularly funny move to me. Like, yeah, I'm going to file a letter with this organization

that has nothing to do with the Delaware court and that I don't respect saying that I'm going to buy Twitter. Now you should take it seriously. And it seems like a big part of his whole thing through this whole process has been essentially assuming that the rules don't apply to him because he has lots of evidence that the rules don't apply to him and then slowly realizing that in the Delaware Court of Chancery,

the rules look an awful lot like they're going to apply to him. Yeah. And as that has become more and more clear, he has gotten more and more nervous about what's going to happen, especially as it got towards his deposition and the text with his friends came out. Neli, the only thing you missed in your description was Jason Callicanis, who I now think is the single funniest and most important part

of the entire Elon Musk Twitter saga. Someday we will just do a dramatic reading of all of his texts on this podcast, and it will be a great day. But the vibe I get consistently is just Elon suddenly going, oh, like this might actually, I might lose. Like, I don't know that that occurred to him for a long time, and it now sort of seems like it has occurred to him. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, one of the things that I've been keeping an eye on throughout this trial is that, or these legal proceedings, I guess, we haven't gotten to the trial yet.

This is the mechanism, the forcing mechanism for Twitter, right? And so, like, if you're trying to get this done because you want certainty, you can do things like, say, hey, we'll forego the trial. if, and like maybe knock a buck or two off the deal price if you just do the deal. Yeah. You know, but as these motions have been coming in and over and over again, the court has mostly been ruling in favor of Twitter and finding out things like, you know, at one of the last hearings, that Elon Musk's bot experts actually seem to agree with Twitter's bot estimates, which is something of a problem for Elon Musk's case, just putting it out there.

as we're finding these things out, his case just looks worse and worse. And although, like, the lawyers who are working on this case are really serious and frankly kind of scary, this isn't the kind of case that even serious and scary lawyers can be certain they're going to win because I don't think the facts are necessarily in Elon's favor. And so the closer we get to this, the more we find this out. And then, like, the other thing that's going on is the deposition, which was supposed to happen today and got pushed back. So my personal going theory, like everybody tinfoil hats on, because I can't see what's happening in these negotiations, I'm just guessing. But my personal theory is that he tried to push back his

deposition by filing this letter with the SEC and succeeded in doing so. And there's a really hard deadline coming up for all of the pretrial stuff, which I believe is October 12th. So if Elon Musk's deposition is pushed back, that gives Twitter less time to work with it. And and less time to prepare for trial because he's super important to all of these events. And that, like, kind of makes trial a lot more annoying for Twitter.

Can he, sorry, can he avoid, can he, like, push the deposition back even further? Be like, oh, I got a cold today. So I can't do it. So, oh, and I guess we're going to have to push the whole trial. Well, he's already done that once. So I feel like... That's good.

I feel like the answer is probably no, and you end up in a relatively serious situation where your lawyers get sanctioned or something if, you know, he doesn't get deposed before trial. And I don't think his lawyers really want to be sanctioned. So I think he does actually get deposed if we go to trial. I just think that it's going to be in a super annoying and inconvenient way because the entire legal strategy here, I would characterize as the I'm not touching you legal strategy, where it's like, you know, like it's technically within the rules, but it's really annoying.

and like it's violating the spirit, but maybe not the letter of the law. And so that's kind of what I think is happening here. This is my favorite, like, it's not even a C plot. It's like a D or an E plot. Is it the state of Delaware is the state where all businesses get registered. Like Vox Media is a Delaware corporate, like just down the line.

Any big company is a Delaware corporation. And they like hold themselves out in the market of states that you might register your corporation in is like being good at, corporate law and having this court system that like adjudicates disputes sufficiently. And Elon is fucking with that. Right. And so like this court like wants none of it. And then the lawyers in this court have other clients in these courts.

And their rep is like getting screwed with. And you can just see it's like, oh, this is bad. Like we look, we got we have a real nice little country club going here in Delaware. Like, get out. Like, you can just see that there's, there's kind of like the part where the rules apply in the Delaware court is kind of because the state of Delaware's, like, image is on the line for where all these corporate disputes happen. And all of the players inside those disputes are pretty clubby. Like, these lawyers are going to be back in front of this judge tomorrow on a different case. This judge has a rep with her appeals court, like just up and down the line.

This is a group of people that work together to do these things all day. long and Elon's desires are sort of like just tangential to it. So the other thing that's worth keeping in mind, Delaware being a center for corporate law, is that there are other Elon Musk suits that are currently pending in Delaware. Of course. Oh, my God. My personal favorite is a lawsuit about his pay package, which incidentally is going to be going in front of this very same judge.

That's great. So she's going to have some feelings about how much she can relate to. on what he has to say based on what's happened here. So I kind of feel like maybe as being as annoying as possible in order to like make Twitter unhappy is not the best long term strategy here. But I'm not Elon Musk. So who knows? Maybe everything works out beautifully for him. Not only does he walk away from the Twitter deal leaving like a smoking crater. He also like gets his amazing pay package and that's the end of that. But I just think strategically it's a really bad idea to annoy judges.

That's just my non, you know, expert thought about the legal system is that maybe don't annoy the judges. Well, and is it a fair characterization to say that Kathleen McCormick, who's the chancellor in Delaware and is adjudicating this case,

basically has made very clear that her general stance is like, I'm not having any of this bullshit. I don't want to play your dumb games. Let's just keep things moving. Like, that seems to have been her overwhelming response this week was like cute story everybody see you on october 17th yeah yeah i mean she said so in one of her filings that she hadn't received she hadn't received anything and i just like that we just saw something cross the um guys hold on um she grant the stay it looks like she granted the stay

okay we should do it live this is great yeah this is happening live this is how we're gonna end this segment here you go this feels extremely appropriate that this is happening live this is just what my day has been like i've been trying to keep up with with the court filings. And honestly, I'm just sort of getting rolled over. Yeah. Okay. Let's look at this.

Should we read it together? Yes. So the action is stayed until 5 p.m. on October 28, 2022, to permit the parties to close on the transaction. If the transaction does not close by 5 p.m. on October 28, 2022, the parties are instructed to contact me by email that evening to obtain November 2020. trial dates. Okay.

And then in all caps, it is so ordered, which is an unbelievably fantastic way to end all communication that I intend to do from now on. I mean, that's what, if you're a judge, do you get to do it all the time? I know it rules. So she granted Elon's motion and said, okay, we're giving you a delay for basically 11 days, right? The trial was supposed to start on October 17th. Right.

And she's like, we're giving you 11 more days until October 28th to figure it out with Twitter. And if it doesn't, you have to let me. know and we're going to go to trial in November. Now, I know why she did this. Most cases should settle. The correct policy outcome in this case is not the government ordering Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Right. Yeah. That's just the funniest. It's the funniest. And that's like courts don't want to do it. They want people to settle their own disputes. And so she's holding the sword. And she's like, I've still got it. I'm just going to put it away for 10, 10 more days. And you figure it out. And I think, what they need to figure out is a discount on the price, right? Like, that's got to be what they're

holding them up. That's sort of the question to me. I actually think given the SEC letter, it's not about, it's not about a discount on the price at this point. I think it's about the condition for the deal. So what I like- This is live reacting. Like what I think is going on here, given that Elon has said he'll buy the price he previously agreed to and that the shareholders have already voted for that price is that a lower price is unlikely. I think instead, Twitter wants confirmation this deal gets done. Like, they want to make sure that they're not Charlie Brown and Lucy isn't going to take the football away again.

So my guess is, like, there's some sort of terms and conditions they want to hammer out. And, like, that's been part of the holdup in this whole process, is that Twitter is saying that Musk has put conditions on this that weren't on the original deal. And I don't blame them for wanting to go ahead with the court case, especially because they think they're going to win and Elon Musk is going to have to pay all their legal bills in addition to all of his own legal bills. That said, like, I don't know, man. I'm still skeptical about this. We'll see. If I'm in Delaware in November, I'm going to be real annoyed. Let's put it that way. very cold. Liz is very excited about being Delaware in October, but once you get past October into November. There's no leaves are changing. Yeah.

That's exactly what it is. I live in California. I don't get to see like fall foliage. So I was like, all right, well, that'll be really pretty. Like, I'm excited about that. Like, maybe I'll go for a hike or something. That'll be cool. It's over. Delaware and November, it's happening for you. So here's what I'll say.

So the Twitter letter opposing Elon's motion to stay, which means the delay, they're like, they haven't, he still hasn't accepted his contractual obligations. he hasn't put a timeline on it. He won't give us a closing date. And so the judge here has at least solved one problem. She said, I'm giving you a date. If you're not, if this date, you don't hit it, October 28th.

We're going to trial. So we'll see. I mean, they could hit it sooner, but there's the threat is still there. And I think that the threat is the most important thing for Twitter. The underlying conditions, we'll see. It's just going to be weird when he ends up in either direction. He ends up like swirling out of it. or he ends up owning Twitter, both extraordinarily weird outcomes.

Obviously, you're live reacting here, but like, does this, do we have any sense that this makes one or the other of those things any more likely? Oh, I think Elon Musk winds up owning Twitter. I think it's just about all over about the shouting at this point. I have questions about the money because Twitter's lawyers said something earlier today to the judge. And one of the things they said was, like, people from these banks have testified that they haven't talked to him about closing the deal. And so like where is the money going to come from? Doesn't he have to sell Tesla stock? Doesn't he have to still get all of these banks to like do this all in 11 days?

And for banks that's three days, as I understand it? So he's definitely already sold a bunch of Tesla stock. So that part is handled. And then Matt Levine, who I think you all know we stand here at the verge, Stan a legend, been reading him since Deal Breaker. He has like the sort of blow by blow. of how this kind of thing works. And he doesn't seem to think it's that big of a deal for these lawyers to get it done.

Maybe they haven't talked to each other in a while. Maybe it's going to be a little slower than one might anticipate. But he thinks it happens. And I have no reason not to believe him, not least of which is that he, like, he's a former corporate lawyer. Like, he actually knows how this stuff gets done from the inside. Now, do I think that there are, there's a possibility of Elon Musk's shenanigans? I do.

I always think that there's a possibility for Elon Musk shenanigans. So I'm like, we'll see. I will believe the deal is closed when I see that the deal has closed and not before that. Because I just, there are so, there have been so many, like, weird, like, moments in this case. Like, you know, for instance, involving the All In podcast, which is hosted by Jason Kalakhanas. And, like, I got to say, like, one of the things that I appreciate about the texts is that he sounds exactly like he sounds on that podcast. So, you know, he's, like, legit. Yep.

Yes. I have known Jason for a long time. Jason started in Gadget. There's no, the man is, there's no opacity to that man. Yeah. It's his best quality. He's the same person in every, the game is the game. Yeah. Yeah. Dude's authentic. So, you know, like there's been a lot of stuff going on, some of which has been goofy, some of which has been ridiculous, some of which has just felt like stalling. Like a lot of the stuff this week to me has felt like stalling. But we'll see. I don't know. Maybe this is like Elon turning over a new leaf and getting really excited about testifying in front of Congress about his social media platform and what he's doing to like oppose the various things that Congress thinks are bad. Oh yeah, Liz assigned me this story when we thought this deal was actually,

when we thought that letter meant something. She's like, you've got to write the Elon most, content moderation story. I will tell you, I'm going to write it when the deal closes. I'm just, I'm not going to do it before. I'm not going to do my homework before I have to. We've been played before. But my proposed headline is straight up, welcome to hell Elon Musk. And it's just a list of things that he's going to have to figure out that basically no one in history has ever figured out. I just want Vergecast listeners to hold Nealai accountable to this. Like, I just want you all to make sure that he files on time. I will write the headline.

Pure pressure, pure pressure my boss into filing to me. Okay. Sorry, David. I just, I have found myself wondering. So there was this like clearly a strategic leak that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both had like an exactly simultaneous exclusive story saying that Elon had tried to get a lower price for Twitter. And all I've been able to wonder in like the 24 hours since is what is the number that Elon flips from I will pay this much to not own Twitter to I will pay this much to own Twitter?

And it's like if Twitter just sits down and it's like the number is $30 billion, like would he rather pay $30 billion and then have Twitter at the end or would he rather pay $30 billion and then just go about his life and never have to think about any of this again? And I feel like there is a number somewhere where that flips and I have been wondering a lot about It's 53 69. It ends in 69 for sure. Yeah. It's the only thing we know.

It's definitely 49 or 42.69. Here's the question that, like, no matter what happens, he's still addicted to Twitter. Yes. Right? Like, he can't quit this shit. So even if he pays the money and walks, he's like, you know, he's going to have that moment where like gets home alone and it's all done and like, you know, and he's still riding high, but there's no one there. Everyone knows this moment, right? And then he like,

there's a beat and he pulls out his phone. He's just going to tweet. I love cheese. And like, you know, and there's like no one in the house. He's like talked about how it's weird when there's no one in his house. And he like pulls out his phone and he's like, oh, what app should I open? And it's Twitter. And then he's like tweet some insane shit about Russia and Ukraine again. Like it doesn't matter how much money he loses. At the end of the day, Twitter has Elon. Elon doesn't have Twitter. Yeah. Like, it's. It's just they're the same thing now. All right.

We've gone over, my friends. As always. Thank you, Liz. There's some stuff you should read. Allison, there's like a lot of things happen today. Yeah. A lot of things happen today, including, I would remind you, the reveal of Chris Pratt's liar's mouth in the new Mario trailer.

That feels like it was decades ago now. So long ago. Allison reviewed the iPhone 14 plus. Big screen. I'm telling you big cheap screens. The way to go. Long battery life on that thing, too. Big battery life.

Long battery life. The steam deck is now available with no reservations, which I can't believe Alex didn't do a whole hour on that on the show. I'm fine. I already have mine.

Go get one. You already have one? Of course. The Matter standard is not official. By the way, Twitter rolled out the edit button in the United States for Twitter blue subscribers today.

In another time, there was a whole hour of our show. Just like, it's a huge week. Go look at the site. It's all on there. We got a quick post for days. Yeah, we're over. Go read the website.

It's full of, oh, the European Union passed another checkbox in forcing Apple to use USBC. Just a little closer. All the things. The interview on Decoder this week was Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel. That was a pretty good one. We'll be back on Wednesday. Cybersecurity Week is kicking off, right, David? Yeah, we're going to do a big cybersecurity episode in a couple of weeks, but it is like, like Infrastructure Week in America,

cybersecurity week is a couple of weeks long on the verge. So we're going to have some fun stuff over the next couple of weeks. All right, you can tweet at us. David is at Pierce. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Liz is at MS. Lapato. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you.

Keep sending notes with the redesign. We're starting the ship little changes here and there. There's some bigger ones coming. We love the feedback. It's great. Love you. That's Thevergecast. 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 theverge.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 Minters, 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.