The Vergecast - Google's Rick Osterloh shows off new Pixel and Nest hardware

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Vergecast hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn attended Google's hardware event on Tuesday and sat down with SVP of Devices & Services Rick Osterloh to discuss Google's new products: the Pixel 4, the Pixelbook Go, the Nest Mini, and the Pixel Buds 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Deider Bone and I went to Google's big fall hardware event, sat down with Rick Osterlo. He's in charge of all of Google's hardware efforts. That's pixel phones. It's Nest minis. It's Nest Wi-Fi. It's the pixel buds. They announced all of that stuff at the event,

including the extremely leaked Pixel 4. We talked about all the new products, including whether Google's going to go big on marketing the Pixel 4. What's going on with that new camera, whether solely, the new radio, motion controls are here to stay. We also went in on the new pixel buds, the new pixel book Go,

and we ended with, it's true, a deep dive into whether the thread standard in the Nest Wi-Fi routers is for real or not. It's the most Vergecast thing we can do, and Rick was a good sport, did it with us. Check it out, it's Rick Osterlo, Google's SVP of devices and services

on the Vergecast. All right, Rick Osterlo, SVP of devices and services of Google. We're here at the Google's fall hardware event. You just announced a lot of things. I would say a very low-key way on stage. They just sort of happened. Oh, here's a Wi-Fi router.

A new laptop has appeared. The Pixel 4 is here. That's fun. Tell us about what you announced today. Sure. We announced a lot. But I think we started out just kind of framing the vision a little bit of what we're after. And we have this idea about ambient computing, which is trying to bring help to people wherever they are whenever they need it.

And so that's kind of like the main foundation. And a lot of the product supported that idea. We announced a new pair of headphones called PixelBuds. and they work with Pixel and any Android phone. And they also are a great stereo headset, and they give you really fast access to the assistant. So that's one of the key things we talked about today. We talked about two new Ness products, Ness Wi-Fi and Ness Mini.

Mini's really simple propositions, refresh to the first mini product. It's got double the base, double the base and a tariff. It's starting from a low floor. Yeah, you double a small number. It's still pretty small. It is called Mini. It is called Mini. They're small.

And usually, you know, smaller speaker usually has less base. But this one, we've added a lot more to it. It sounds really good, actually. And it's got a Terra-Ops of machine learning capability. I'm sure someday we'll figure out what that all means. But it's intended to bring more helpful machine learning to the device itself so you can run it on the device. And it's got an easy way to hang itself on the wall, too. So if people want to wall mount it, now that's easy to do.

Comes in a couple cool new color, sky is my favorite. excuse me, Ness Wi-Fi was the other big NEST announcement. And so this is extending the range of the original Wi-Fi product, Google Wi-Fi product. It's now going to be able to cover about 85% of homes with two points. One of them, we call it the point, the thing that's usually not the base next to your router, but the point that's out somewhere in your living room or kitchen, also kind of combines the capability of a NEST mini-speaker in it. And so we think that'll be a nice two-for-one. So it forms a great mesh router. It also has great speaker capability. And then, you know, we, we announced Pixelbook Go, new laptop, start at 649, runs ChromeOS. Nice design, really light, quiet keys, feel great. I think

people like it. It's more affordable price for the Pixelbook line. It's still, you know, still 649, but it's, we think, a pretty cool offering. And then Pixel 4 and 4xel. We talked a lot about that on stage, but I think the key areas of focus are new camera system with great zoom capabilities. We've added a lot to the overall computational photography story with the product. You know, I really like the live HDR capability that lets you see what you're going to take in the image, which is really important with these computational photography techniques because it's like can be really different what you see on the screen versus what the picture actually is. But I think we've really closed that gap. And then the new Google assistance, very important. It's fast because

it runs on-device machine learning for a lot of the speech processing. We took the data center model and we shrunk it, so it runs mostly on the device now. And that's, so you'll see it's a lot faster and the UI is different. So it gets out of the way a little bit of the user, and I think that'll help the user experience a lot. And we've included a new technology, radar technology called, it's codename solely. It's been under development for many years at the company. And we put it in pixel four first, and you can do gestural commands with it. So it's useful for things like snoozing alarms.

And we also use it to warm up. all the sensors when you go and do face unlock. So face unlock happens pretty quickly. So that's a little bit about the news we had today. It was a lot. We also talked a lot about privacy and our approach to sustainability, which I think are pretty key areas of focus for us. So with the pixel four specifically, it seems like you are trying to pull off a lot more this year than you do the previous pixels. You've got face unlock. You've got Sully. You've got the high refresh rate screen. You've got another camera upgrade. I'm definitely forgetting the new assistant. So this seems like a true flagship phone for you. The thing that I've always knocked you for is you haven't treated

like a true flagship phone when it comes to marketing and trying to sell just a ton of them. So can you talk a little bit about you've made an incredible phone? How do you make sure that you sell it to an incredible number of people? Well, thank you. We're one of the key things is we've been pretty measured in our distribution approach to date. And so now we're going to be available like from day one on all the major U.S. carriers. And I think that's going to make a big difference. So we announced we'll be on AT&T and T-Mobile and Sprint and Verizon today. So that's great. You can also buy it unlocked from us or Best Buy at other places. And of course, supports GoogleFi as well. So that'll be a key thing when all the channels that people are primarily buying these products through or selling your product, I think that'll help us a lot.

Of course, we have a lot of marketing push behind it as well. So a lot of marketing push is kind of the key, right? There was a bunch of marketing push around the previous pixel phones. Is it going to be substantially more? Are you going to go make sort of the investments that your big competitors make in marketing? You know, we think they're pretty significant. You'll see a lot of our advertisements around. There'll be in a lot of live events. We also do a lot on YouTube.

We found that we can reach the people were trying to reach in YouTube. I mean, it is. How very convenient. Yes, yes. Wouldn't you know? YouTube is a handy marketing capability. But, I mean, at the same time, it's sort of obvious, too. like we're selling a phone that brings together the best of Google services.

So a lot of those people are going to be using Google services. So it's a good place to. One of the narratives of the overall phone market is like it's saturated, right? There's not a lot of new customer. There's not a lot of people in America who don't have a smartphone who want to buy it, $800 flagship phone. So you've got to convert, you've got to switch people from the other ecosystem or you've got to convert them out of being a Samsung owner or an LG owner or something.

Are you actively thinking about that challenge? Yeah, I mean, everyone who buys one of our phones is probably coming from something else. And that's just, that's a mature market. And so, you know, and the thing they're coming from was probably pretty good. And so it's super important to keep trying to improve the user experience and you have to make it better and better every year. And the upgrade cycles are really slowing down. So, you know, often what we're looking, and I think you said this actually in a recent podcast, But like most of the people were making product for are actually people that own like a pixel one or pixel two or maybe something, you know, like an iPhone 7 or something.

So this is actually a really big upgrade for them and can be quite a big difference because they've skipped like two or three iterations and generations of product. And so it's, you know, we're trying to make it easy for someone to use a pixel for the first time, trying to make it so that the setup experience is easy if they're coming from a different ecosystem. that the conversion process is okay. And we now have included with all the new Pixel 4 Google One support so they can have live support. And like if they run into something they don't understand, they can call someone and like they'll literally walk them through how to get through it. And so hopefully that'll help a lot.

It's certainly it's certainly hard to convert people to a new product. And ours is definitely different. I mean, it's how we as Google want the experience to show up to our users and we hope people like it. So a big part of that is solely. Is that a science experiment? Is this something you're committed to for generations of phones? You're just going to see how it goes and make a a call a year from now? No, I mean, I think, well, we're definitely going to continue working on it for the long term. I think it's going to be useful for phones and other things, too. Like, it's probably not very hard to imagine how it might work and like something in your home.

There's a ton of pretty interesting applications that could come from it, too, that we're experimenting with. I mean, gestures are kind of obvious. like it's like, I think it's also one of the, one of my favorite things is like if you walk away from your phone, it locks, things like that. But we can also do some pretty interesting stuff around things like sleep tracking. And we also think we can probably get a pretty accurate read on heartbeat. So like this is technology's really interesting. You know the Soli sensor in the phone right now. How does it detect a heartbeat? Or how could it? All it is is just like just waves. It's just waves and then signal coming back. And we try.

to figure out what it is. Like, what are we reading? So we think we can do pretty interesting things like that. Now, they're all research experiments right now, but we do believe that we can land some of these in the coming quarters. How did you decide on the feature set that you're including in the pixel phone specifically for motion sense? Because it's just a handful of things. And I, you know, I used solely three years ago and I was able to do, you know, wacky things like rub my finger and thumb together and like adjust volume. So there's many, many things you could have included. How'd you land on this set? Well, these were, these were a combination of very common use cases and also things that we thought were really useful. And, like, quite frankly, things that we

knew we could really get right. Because it is, there's a lot of other things that are possible, like we just mentioned, but, you know, it's, you have to have them be completely right for them to be truly useful. So we knew that like this, in and of itself was hard enough, like you saw in the video, like someone moving a coffee cup. You really don't want. to skip to the next song when that happens. But the face lock, face unlock capability along with this was really useful. That made it so that it could be pretty performant. And those are just a couple of examples of things that we knew we could get right. And that we're going to be, you know, people are going to unlock their phone about 100 times a day. So that's going to be

something that is pretty useful. Just to answer a question, you got, you're all committed to solely. It's going to be a future of the products. You'll see it across sort of the Google hardware ecosystem in years to come? I think so. Yeah, I mean, we'll definitely keep working on it and see where we think it's going to be the most useful. But like, you know, gestures at a glance when you're listening to music at a high level seems like a pretty useful capability to me. So we'll keep working on it. And hopefully we can get it right and get it in some more products. So this was the first phone. I think that 3A was technically the first phone that the HTC team that you guys acquired helped you develop. This is the first flagship phone with that big team involved.

What's been different about that process versus sort of the previous flagship pixel phones? Well, I mean, we're a lot bigger now. And, you know, you're starting to see the capability of our Taiwan team really come into play. I mean, they're so experienced that they've done a lot of really interesting technology developments over the years. So we're psyched to have them a part of our organization. They're awesome. I mean, they're very good at product. And we've really enjoyed getting to work with them.

And so, you know, now they're, we're. one large functioning organization that knows how to ship together. And I think that's a really key thing that's actually quite hard to figure out with new people coming together is like, how do you actually make a good product and ship it? There's so many thousands of interactions that happen every day between people in your organization that it's, you have to, you know, come to a common language of how you develop things and what's important and what's good enough and what your focus areas are. So we're... What did having that team let you do that you don't think you'd have been able to do before?

Well, I mean, for sure, Pixel 3A is a great example. But they completely developed that phone. So it was done entirely out of our Taiwan team. And they did a great job with it. And now it's like everything is intermash. So we have all the stuff we're building our roadmap. They're involved at some degree. And in many cases, they're doing full products.

So a lot of it is just a function of scale. Like, that's a key thing. They also have some really terrific expertise in wireless and RF and mechanical engineering too. So it's super helpful as well that they're in Asia and they're very close to our supplier. So many of our suppliers. So that is a tremendous help. So if they're super good at RF and wireless, why was this not the moment to make a 5G phone? 5G is still pretty early.

And we could have made a $1,200 phone like everyone else. And we didn't because we didn't think a $1,200 phone was the best thing to do right. now. I think 5G will be interesting eventually, but it's early. And so we'll keep working on it, but we don't, you know, we didn't feel the timing was right for us now. Do you know why 5G is a race? I ask everybody who makes, even remotely involved in phones. Is 5G a race? And if so, why is it a race? And what happens if we lose? Like a worldwide race? Yeah. I don't know. See, that's the, everybody makes his face. For the listeners, there's a face. And it's the face you would imagine Neli was making if someone asked him if it was a race. I don't think it's racist.

I just wanted to make sure we got that reaction. It doesn't feel like a race to me. My point of view is that right now, 5G has a lot of like fundamentals that could be better, you know, like that are useful. I mean, like you're going to get more capacity out of networks. You'll get reduced latency. You'll get better IP support. So there's a lot of positive things that can come of it. But it's just like everyone is in the process of upgrading and it's going to take a very long time.

And so the other key thing is there's no super obvious driving application right now. Frankly, I think Stadia is one of the things that would be most interesting on 5G because of reduced latency and things like that. Like cloud gaming. But, you know, it's different than with 4G where it's sort of like you couldn't watch video on 3G, but you could on 4G. And you couldn't really browse on 3G, but you could on 4G. but you could on 4G. You know, something that fundamental, I don't, isn't yet clear

how it's going to change with 5G. So we'll see. I mean, you know, I think if, if we're able to get things like millimeter wave in a lot of places, like I'm sure stuff we're not thinking of

will come up when you have two gigabits per second of bandwidth. But it's, you know, today it's more like a hotspot. So let's shift to the camera, the feature you are shipping, not the 5G radio that you're not. So the camera's like been the big,

differentiator of the pixel line for years now. It's the reference standard that we hold up all the other smartphones against. I think Apple did a pretty good job this year. I enjoyed Mark Levoy on stage, taking his shots. You can tell he was very pointed at some of what he was saying. By particularly life path, he was like, anybody can understand what's happening here. It's not mad science. How are you thinking about that camera as a differentiator moving forward? How are you thinking about the look of the pixel? It has had a very significant, like a very distinctive look over time. And is that still the thing that's going to market the phone for you? Is it a package?

Where does it live in the context of this device as you are trying to sell more and more of them? Right. I mean, I think it's a key pillar of who we are. It's also something that I think is like, like as I look back in the last four years or last four generations, it's like it's so it's such a great strength of Google that we were able to build on. Like I think it's a great example of how we hopefully bring forward Google hardware going forward. which is we have this incredible technology strength in research around imaging, and then we're able to combine it with some interesting hardware design and create a user experience that we think best represents, like, our latest technology.

And so we were very fortunate to have people like Mark and many others like him who are working on, like, cutting-edge imaging science. And every year, we've tried to bring their latest research and latest work to market. it. And, you know, this year that obviously the key focus was really on Zoom. That was a enormous area of focus. We combined some pretty interesting concepts with optical zoom and Super Res Zoom that we shipped last year with Pixel 3. And the results are, it's pretty cool. I mean, like, I think people are going to find zooming is now actually a really viable thing to do on smartphones. And it, you know, in the past, I'd say results have been mixed. And a lot of users

are a little bit worried about actually doing it. So when you're picking what thing you really want to focus on for the camera every year, Zoom, you had night sight last year. It seems like for Pixel at least, video always seems to fall at the bottom of that stack. Video quality in Pixel is not as good as a bunch of other competitors. Is there a reason you think that consumers don't want that? Or is it just like there's every year, it'll be the next year's priority? Also, you point out at Google owns YouTube.

So it seems very odd that we're not. And there's a lot of YouTubers in the audience today. I saw them all floating around, a lot of Instagrammers. These are people who care about video. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say our video's bad. Our videos actually usually rated pretty well. But some of the stuff we're doing lends itself best to, you know, when we're taking like a lot of images at once infusing them, at the moment,

it's pretty cutting edge to do that with single shots. Right. Doing that across a continuous stream of video at like 30 or 60 or even more frames per second gets pretty hard. but I think it's a challenge that we want to take on eventually for sure. And, you know, like I said, I think we are doing some interesting things in video for sure, like doing like EIS and fusion with OIS. It's like, you know, it's hard things to do, but our video quality is usually rated pretty well. But I definitely think our still imagery is pretty top notch.

To point at one specific feature, you shoot 4K video 30 frames. I think a lot of people like to see it 4.5. 4K24 or 4K60. The Samsung phones choose the same processor can do 4K60. Why is that still not happening on the pixel? I don't know. I mean, it's something we'll focus on in the future, I'm sure. Okay. And then just in terms of the camera itself, obviously Google strength is in the algorithm. It's in the tone mapping. It's an HDR Plus. Is it the same sensor? Is it a new sensor? Is it off the shelf? How are you think about the actual hardware of the camera? Yeah. I mean, most of the stuff for most of the core components are things you'd buy from the

supply chain with, you know, we've made some changes to specifications and, and things that we require specifically from it. But they're, they're mostly from components that are close to standard things that you buy from our suppliers. And most of the magic happens in software and some custom hardware afterwards, like, you know, some of the computation afterwards. So, that's, that's been our approach. And I think it's going to be our approach going forward. It just makes sense for us to leverage all the great capability we have in machine learning and computational photography to get to better results. Is it the same sensor for the zoom and the wide angle lens or are they different? Those are different.

And they're both just off the shelf and you're thinking you can get farther ahead. I mean, that's like a big advantage, right? You're saying our image processing capability is going to remain far ahead of the competition so we can not spend all of our sort of like bill of material dollars on. Yeah, and we want to be able to upgrade. it. You know, I think like that's, we try our best to make sure that the camera keeps getting upgraded over time. And there, there are sometimes where you run into hardware limitations, either with the main processor or the sensors or lenses, but definitely like a lot of our approach being in software is what lends itself to bring down, you know, pretty much the same capability that was in pixel 3 to pixel 3A. It takes a while to get, sometimes you get a lot of margin to be able to have good performance on like a very high end, necessarily. see. So it takes some engineering work to get it to run more efficiently on lower end processors and things like that. But like because it's software, you can often bring it down. And so that's, I think a little bit of an approach will, we'll try to leverage in the future, make sure we

introduce things at the high end and then bring them into more affordable price points over time. Will we see any of the features in the pixel four camera come to the pixel 3 and 3A? Hopefully some of them, you know, we'll be working on it shortly here. But it's a lot of it is measuring performance and making sure we can do it or not. Some of the stuff we're doing around Zoom, I think, would be hard to bring. It's like some of it really is dependent on the new sensor and lens, but we'll do as much as we can to bring it to all our products. Actually, get off the camera just a second. You've got face unlock. You've got the pixel neural core that are both enabling things that are much, much faster than I can do at any other Android phone.

Are those things that you were thinking of as like being pixel specific that if you want the new assistant, you need to use a pixel. If you want good face unlock, you have to get a pixel and you're not going to be sharing that with partners. I mean, over time, we might share things with partners. I think that's like to be determined in the future. But certainly right now, if you want them, you've got to buy a pixel. A lot of the work is like really hardware specific. For face unlock is a great example. I mean, that is, you know, there's four cameras that are doing it. It's leveraging basically a set of cores that run our machine learning algorithms really fast, run TensorFlow light. And so that's like a really key part of the system design. That is unique to us. So that's why it's not super portable.

And it would be hard for it to be. There is a lot of computation happening to understand, like, is that really you? And so, so, you know, for for Google Assistant, I think it's a pretty similar thing. Like, having the models run in a performant way on device is hard. And it took us a lot of engineering to get to that place. And so like with anything, like there's a tradeoff for performance versus portability, and this is one of those cases. We're trying to do more and more on the device. It lends itself to better and better performance.

We think in the future it can be a building block on which you could do more and more private things that are on the device. And so it's something that is a technology direction for us that maybe is a little bit different, but it's something that I think is important in today's world. So we're basically getting to my favorite topic, which is platform lock-in, which brings me to the PixelBuds. I mean, look, the future of headphones is like platform-specific features for the computers in your ears. PixelBuds have some platform-specific features with the ambient,

or I'm sorry, the environmental noise detection, some of the assistant features. Are you thinking of those as a part of the pixel ecosystem or as a part of the Android? Android. Android. Yeah, I mean, there's some stuff. We'll be able to do most things on Android, we think. We'll definitely be able to do everything on Pixel. And we'll probably not be able to do a lot of things on iOS. And so like, you know, we're still in development of it. So a lot of it's like TBD and everyone makes their own OEM specific customizations. So it's certainly going to be a challenge to figure out exactly what we can make work really well across the number of products. We know things. are going to work really well on pixel. So we can certainly make promises about what's going to happen on those devices. Why spring 2020? What's the delay?

I mean, it's great that you announce them. I'm glad I got to see them. But the ones here like don't work. I couldn't hear them. Well, hand them over, man. He's putting them in. This is horrible.

My favorite thing is when I can't hear you. I'm sorry. Oh, wait. No, I can because there's a spatial event that allows the right amount of environmental noise. This is horrible. What I like most about our show is. is when executives just openly taunt us all the time with unreleased products. It's great.

It's my favorite thing that happens. How do they sound? Are they any good? Yeah, they're good. They are great. Perfect unbiased review. Yeah, exactly. Take it from me.

The most objective person ever. I think the key thing is the design itself lends itself to good sound. So it is a partially occluding design. So it will mostly cover your ear. There is a small event that will. allow some of the, like basically the pressure equalization and also some sound in and out, but not a lot. And then we talked about the adaptive sound techniques we're doing so that we automatically adjust volume depending on the environment. And then there's a lot of other things

that we're still working on for on-device machine learning that will change how you experience the product depending on your environment. So I think that's, it's not done, which is why it's not available today. We wanted to make sure we got the product right. And we also don't have a major event between now and I.O. So we wanted to make sure people knew about it. But that was the approach for today. I think they're going to be great.

I'm really excited about them. I think the access to the system will be great too. And the size, I think, is the right size for this kind of product in the space. Do you think people are going to walk around wearing headphones in their years all day long 24-7? I don't know. I don't think so. But I think people wear them for like kind of, anytime they're alone.

I mean, that's a possibility. They might start to really, like, I've found it super. I love listening to podcasts, like Vergecast. It's good plug. Thank you. Really made up for the taunting earlier. 1.7X speed. That's how I do it too.

Don't worry about it. Although listening to our show at a faster speed is like, we already talk so fast. I watch all of YouTube at 1.75. Me too. Yeah. With captions. Yeah.

Yeah. Totally. That's the way to do it. I'm basically reading a slideshow at that point. It's like, I'm going for you. Oh, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, is what is your flash to flashlight ratio? That was,

thank you. Nothing is, nothing made me happier than seeing the flashlight meme on stage. Yeah, I don't know. One to one thousand for me. Yeah. I've only accidentally taken flash shots in the last,

so I did. Well, so let me ask you if this is a flashlight use. Yes. So I was in a restaurant. It was very dark and the baby was like dancing. Uh-huh. I want to take a video of her.

It was too dark. So I turned on the light. But that it didn't flash. It was just on. So it's technically a flashlight. Right? Yeah. What is a photo?

Sure. We're not going there. And did everyone around you go bonkers? No one liked the fact that I was shining my light in this like dark. I think Flash should be banned in public places. This is great. Rick Osterlo takes on the New York Times live on the verge gas. I can see the headlines now.

This is great. If we're banning Flash, why isn't, why is night mode a separate mode and not just like a thing that turns all that's dark? I mean, H. HDR plus is really good. Yeah. I mean, night mode is good when it's really, really dark, but most of the time, HDR plus is going to be really good.

Okay. And so, and that keeps getting better and better. So I think, I mean, you know, we chose to keep them in separate modes. We might change that in the future, but that's, we feel like those are, like, when you kind of almost can't see anything, it's pretty clear that night site's going to be a good time to use it. And we also give you a hint. Like, you'll see in, in pixel four especially, it's very good at it. So when like the light level is at a certain level, you just like, it comes up and says try night mode or night night sight.

You. Sorry. Ew. So that's like a, right. You've got more sliders in the camera now with the brightness and the shadows. Like the UI is actually giving more and more control of the user that is a, that's a philosophical direction to go in versus we're just going to handle everything for you, which many of your competitors do. How are you thinking about how much control? role to give the user? How many sliders to put over the viewfinder? You now have a very nice

live HDR Plus viewfinder. Right. It's constantly evolving. I mean, I think like cameras are getting very complicated. I mean, they've always been complicated, but they're now complicated in new ways. And so, you know, there wasn't a few years ago, there wasn't in smartphones of portrait mode that was something that was great. There wasn't night site that was great. Even photosphere or panorama type things were kind of not really great. But now they're pretty good. So the, question is, do you want to do these things automatically for users and get it wrong some of the time, or do you want to make it so that it's really deterministic? And so we've chosen that approach. But if we get very good at anticipating, we might change directions. I mean, that is something

that we think we could probably be very good at. But for now, this is our approach, and it's something we think is right for the pixel camera. And it's consistent with what we've done. So let's talk about the Pixel Book Go. Yeah. So sort of the other big part. Sure, yeah. Why was now the moment for Google to launch a $650 Chromebook? Because it's sort of You've had very premium high-end Chromebooks? Well, we just felt like that was a space where we could do something interesting and different. I mean, it was clear that at $1,000 the pixel book was only going to reach a certain

number of users. And we saw a pretty clear opportunity to cut about a third of the price out and make something that was pretty compelling. We figured out how to make the case that looked nice. It was design consistent with the rest of our line. We were pretty happy with that. And we wanted to take another crack at making great keys on a lower price. device. And so that was really the inspiration for it. It wasn't, it wasn't like any major technology

change or something. It was more like, let's try to do all the things that people liked with the original pixel book at a slightly lower price. Is that why you have, it's like an eighth gen Y series processor in there? Well, it's more like, are there really major improvements? I mean, like, if you look at like power performance in that space, there's really, it hasn't been incredibly. It hasn't been incredibly fast moving. Like Moore's Law truly has flattened out, especially when you look at power performance curves. And so in a portable laptop, it's pretty hard now to build things that are at the higher end of performance of a fan. And so we didn't want to have a fan. And it was pretty key. You know, we felt like we could make all the performance we needed with that hardware and with our latest

software on Chrome. And so, I mean, I think I've been using it. It's my full-time driver. And it works really well. So yeah, that's why we went with it. Is there is there not an arm ship that you could use? I mean, that seems like the other choice in the I mean, certainly I think that's a possibility, especially in the future. You know, arm performance is getting better and better. So that's and ChromeWass supports arm as well. We haven't made one, but other people have and and you know, I think they're getting really good. So I think that could be a real possibility in the future. Is that somebody you actually see happening that flip to sort of more arm based laptop? I think there'll be more and more.

I think there'll be more and more. It also brings in, like, people who are normally used to making arm-based products, like, you know, more phone manufacturers. Like your 1,000 phone engineers in Taiwan? What's that? Like your 1,000 phone engineers in Thailand. It seems like we're going to make a list of people who are used to making arm based products. Some of those people.

Or others like them. Yes. So, NEST. You're in the transition. Is it over? Nest is fully part of Google? It's fully part of Google. Are you going to spin it off again?

Because if I just keep, by the clock, you should be ready to spin Nest Beck out. Just into the history. It's just a pretty part of Google. We were talking to Rishi Chandra outside. And he said something to me, which I actually found quite surprising, which is that the Nest Wi-Fi is like the cornerstone product. Like, everything else is going to be built off of that. Y'all don't really talk about the Wi-Fi products.

This is the first time we talked about it maybe two years publicly. Well, we haven't shipped one in a couple of years. Although the software, we do, I mean, to be fair, it's like a very different paradigm for like Wi-Fi. You know, you have an app that's actually useful and it updates and the, you know, we update the devices, kind of like they're like a phone. I mean, they get frequent updates. I think we've done 15 or something since it was introduced. So we think about it a little bit differently. And this Nest Wi-Fi product was sort of a natural evolution.

It was like, okay, it is the cornerstone of a house. You can't really have, for, you know, smart homes. You can't really have a lot of rich capabilities if you don't have coverage. And that was the original motivation for the product. It was pretty clear that there was a market need. And like it sold very well beyond our original expectations for sure, certainly mine. And there were some fairly obvious things we felt like we should do to the product to make it better. Like if you're going to have a device outside like in your kitchen or living room,

might as well have a speaker in it. It saves you from having yet another device in your room. And so that was kind of an easy thing to add to the product. And I think it's going to go quite well. Is that the bikes and the speakers and the nest point, I think it's called? Is that functioning identical to the Nest Mini? Or is it less good than that? I probably have to caveat and say it's not identical, but it's super close.

I mean, it is very close to the Nest Mini and its capability. You know, the sound quality will be very similar. The range that it'll be effective is very similar. So I think people who are interested in having either or will like that product a lot. Are you, so when you think about Wi-Fi is the, I'm just getting to the thread question. Let's be honest. I just work just jump right to it, man. So, you got to have, you got to have much Wi-Fi.

I mean, now is another reason to refresh Wi-Fi. To add thread. Yeah. For which devices did you need to have thread support? The thread at this point is like a religion. It's not like a, it might not even be real. Like there might not be a thread radio in the device. But you might just be saying it so that we keep writing it until someone invents a thread radio.

What is thread for? It's so you can do local networking and low power. But there are no thread devices in the world. No, there's some. There's some phones. Wow. Some light bulbs. Some light bulbs.

Yeah, well, that means like, turns out you have a lot of lights in your house. It's kind of important. When do you think the thread? Is this? Thread will be the next year. Well, first of all, like Wi-Fi is like close to, Nest Wi-Fi is like close to, if not the best selling Wi-Fi router at any given time in the U.S. And it's definitely the best-selling mesh Wi-Fi system.

And so, you know, I think after a certain period of time of that being in market, suddenly the market opportunity becomes a much more interesting to people who are making thread-enabled devices. And so getting it in Ness Wi-Fi was like a super important priority. We wanted to make sure things that we're selling well, we're now creating like this base of homes that were now available to target for, you know, someone who might make a thread-based device. And the kind of basic premise that you might have a light ball that has a hub, yeah, then connects to Wi-Fi, that then connects to their cloud, connects to your cloud.

It's like totally wrong, completely architecturally wrong in every single possible way. And so like the need is obvious, but there hasn't been an enabling solution until that. So someone has the ability enabling solution. And the ecosystem might trail behind. But we're going to, like, drive it. We're going to try to make things happen. And clearly, I mean, I think, like, the most obvious use case is that light bulb. Yeah. You know, you should be able.

It should have a direct connection from, like, anyway, I think you know. I'm just saying I'm happy that we're doing our part in thread awareness. Yes, that's good. Thank you. Like, most people in the world are only aware of the thread exists because we make fun of it. You're in the, we sell ribbons. Yes. Thread awareness, fun.

Thread, thread detection. Some light bulbs are available. No, but is that, why thread and not, I don't know, Z-Way. Right. Amazon supports like 55 protocols in their routers. They just invented a new one. I mean, you know, at one most basic level, we've been supporting thread for a while with Nest. It's something that we think is the right direction forward. We think it has some advantages and being IP based on end and having a good power profile. It's, you know, over time, pretty easily combinable with things like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips. So we think like it's a good direction for the industry. And that's why we're getting behind it.

Let's end on Stadia. It's shipping soon. Yes. November 19th. And pixels are going to be the first phones, I think, certified to run it. What makes the pixel able to do it and not sort of the broader range vendor? It's just like we've been able to test it for a long time. Yeah.

What is that experience going to be like on pixel phones for people? Well, first off, it's just going to run on Wi-Fi to start. So, like, it'll be like you're playing a game and Wi-Fi. Now, I think, like, you can't really tell the difference other than the screens small, like everything performs the same as it would on a laptop or on your TV. It's pretty immersive. So, like, you're probably not going to be moving most of the time early, you know, you personally won't be moving. So, like, the experience is really rich. It's trying to bring AAA games to any device you're on. And it works really well. Like, we've been testing it extensively at work.

Sometimes my kids ask me, are you actually working, dad? Yeah. And it's a very fun part of my job and you know we have a great team Phil Harrison leads our teams industry vet got a bunch of great people working on this product they're very excited about it and so am i think it's going to be very very interesting for the gaming industry when it comes out how much you're going to cost well I mean we'll I think we'll announce full pricing in a little bit but like if you're buying that you can buy the founders bundle and then you get like a number of months free in service you get new game and you get the controller it's 129 so go buy it it's a perfect gift for Black Friday and holidays.

Wow. Thank you. Really snuck in there for giving me that. A literal mic drop of a plug. The pixel buds sound great. Stayed here. It works. It's available for a holiday.

Why do we even bother reviewing this stuff? Yeah. I know. It's all help you. No, just don't, you don't need a new phone. Just use the flash and your old one. I can help you. It's perfect.

All right, Rick, thank you so much for enduring this as always. I'll talk to you soon. Thank you guys. It's great to see you. All right. My thanks to Rick Austerlo for joining me in Deeder on the Vergecast, we're back on Friday with the chat show. There is lots to unpack from Google,

lots to think about. We've got devices. We're starting to review them. There's so much more to talk about. We'll see you on Friday.