The Vergecast - HomePod (2023) review, the Steam Deck one year later, and faking your death online

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of removable power cords: 02:14 - The Verge’s Alex Cranz, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Chris Welch, and Nilay Patel discuss the updated version of the Apple HomePod.  Apple’s new HomePod plays it safe How to use the Apple HomePod’s temperature and humidity sensors 43:23 - Katharine Trendacosta joins the show to discuss why and how faking your death has been a common practice in online communities.  A Fake Death in Romancelandia She created a fake Twitter persona — then she killed it with COVID-19 1:05:19 - Verge senior editor Sean Hollister gives an updated review of Valve’s Steam Deck, which had a buggy start in 2022. The Steam Deck wasn’t born ready, but it’s ready now Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, you're listening to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of removable power cords. I'm your friend Alex Cranes, and, you know, it's kind of nice here in New York City today because it's snowing, technically. Big fat flakes, but it's super warm, so they're not actually sticking. But it's a nice change of pace, because if you didn't know, until yesterday, North Texas had actually gotten more snow than New York City this year. Absolutely wild stuff. More wild is the show we've got coming up today. It's going to be a lot of fun. I'm talking with Chris Welch and Jintui and also Nelai.

And we're going to be talking all about the home pods place in like the smart home ecosystem, what it means for matter, what it means for home theaters. It's a lot of fun. I'm also going to be talking to Catherine Trindicosta from the EFF, all about faking your death online. And finally, hanging out with my good friend, Sean Hollister. We're going to be talking about your favorite gadget, my favorite gadget, everybody's favorite gadget, the Steam Deck.

It's going to be a super fun, super nerdy time. All of that's happening right after this. I wonder if I could do a snow angel in this. I probably should not. 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 news. 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. Okay, welcome back. Apple's big home pod has returned.

The second-gen home pod is not that much different from the original, but it has added a couple of updates, including for like audio, for the smart home, even some of the home theaters. stuff. So I had to get together with Jennifer Pattinson Tui, who has been reviewing it from like the smart home perspective and Chris Welch, who's been reviewing it from like that audio nerd perspective. And then Nilai Patel, who reviewed the original one way back in 2018. Let's get to the combo. I've got three incredible people with me, well, two incredible people in Nilai with me to talk about the new home pod. Nilai Patel is here. Hi, Neelai. I'm going to just interpret this the other way, which is that y'all are incredible, but I'm fabulous. I love that. That is exactly what I meant.

You got to look inward to your own heart and find your own validation in life. That's a real lesson when you hit 40. Jen too, he is here. Hello, I'm very pleased to be here. Also feeling fabulous. There you go. See? Welcome to my team, Jen. We're the fun ones. And Chris Welch is here. Hello. I'm surrounded by three hornpads right now. Wow. It's a party over. They're taking over. Okay, well, this will not surprise no one. We're talking about the home pod today.

Jen and Chris have a review. They're up on the site. Right now, you can go read it and see their feelings, or you can listen to this. Or both. This is like a spatial audio DVD commentary. What you need to do as you're reading and review, play this podcast from three or four homepods play strategically throughout your home. And we're slowly all creeping up on you. It's going to be great.

All right. So this is kind of a big deal for them because we thought the home pod was dead. or at least pretty done. And now there's a whole new one. How different is it, Jen, from like a smart home perspective? Well, from the smart home side, it's actually very different from the original home pod. Okay. There's like no difference other than $200.

Well, the one thing that's different, I take that back. One small but large difference is speed. So the new home pod has a fastest processor. It has the S7, whereas the HomePod Mini has the S5. And that is the one thing I definitely noticed that the new HomePod, the HomePod 2 responded very snappily to my Siri requests, very few on it or hmms compared to the mini, which, you know, it's getting a little long in the tooth.

You know, it's turning three this year. So there's, you know, what you would expect to see a bit more speed. But feature parity is identical between the two. There are a lot of new features, though. There's a lot of sound focus outside of audio sound, which Chris, I'm sure, is going to regale us with. But there's a new feature coming in the spring. That's actually not here yet,

which is going to turn the mini and the HomePod 2 into a smoke alarm and CO monoxide alarm detector, not sound detector. So it's not actually turning into a smoke alarm, but it will listen for your smoke alarms and your carbon monoxide alarms because they have unique signatures and that will come in the spring and mean you'll get sent an alert to your phone if one of your home pods in your home hears an alarm going off, which is a very useful feature that all the other smart home speakers already do. Which is kind of a theme in my review is that this is really Siri and the home pod kind of playing catch up in the smart home space

and adding a lot of features that are great and super handy and that everyone else already did. But that's good for Apple home users who are, you know, a dedicated bunch and who don't necessarily want to switch ecosystems to get some of these features. You know, we finally have multiple timers, which has those have been around for a little while now. And those have been actually around for a year or so, but they work great and you can name your timers now.

Oh, wow. Which is, yeah, very handy. You can even dismiss. miss a timer from one room if the home pod is in another room, which is nice. You don't have to yell. There's a lot of little things like that, but just kind of little quality of life features, smart home features that have come to the new home pod and to the home pod mini. And, you know, you can, one thing I really like, which is unique to the home pod, is the find my capability. So you can now track your family just with your voice. You know, where's my child? Where's

my husband, you know, don't have to get your phone out and, like, put effort in. That's the next great Apple commercial. It's just someone screaming, where's my husband and a speaker lighting up and saying the answer? He's outside. Do you ever think about the people who spend their lives, like, laying underground, under ocean, fiber optic cables on ships or the engineers who spend their entire lives developing the next process technology for, like, a microchip, like the S7? Yeah. And, like, one day they wake up and, like, it's all in service of people.

being able to set two timers at once. And that's what we're going to be excited about tomorrow. It's exciting. Siri in particular, every time it comes up, I'm like, this is all we get. Like, all this work. Two timers. And it's like, you can name one timer and you can scream, where's my husband? And that is the pinnacle of assistant technology.

You can do lots of timers. Actually, I did up to five at once, which is quite exciting. Oh, my God. See? Take that, cruise ship, people. So much for your nihilism. Well, we do also have the temperature and humidity sensing, which we've actually written about quite a lot on the site this week. But that's going to be in the HomePod too.

And I've been finding that really kind of fun because it's cold right now in South Carolina, which is very unusual. So I've been using it to keep my rooms temperate. And it's worked really well, although I was talking with our deputy editor Dan, who is also a big HomePod, Apple Home user. And he's been trying to set up the humidity sensor to do things, which I don't really need to do in South Carolina, because South Carolina is humidity personified. And he's not been having any luck with that. So there's still a bit of testing we need to do to sort of, you know, put that through its paces. We've only had these ditty little devices for a few days now, holding mine up.

It's actually quite hefty. You could do good arm workouts. Is that what you've been doing? Chris, you've got two of them so you can do both arms at the same time? Yes, just mention those every night. It's like the rock curls as children. I've ever seen that. It's very funny. HomePod curls.

Jane, can I ask you this question? It seems like there's the updates to Apple Home and sort of matter coming along for the ride. So the Apple Home and HomeKit ecosystem is getting a big upgrade. And there was a software update to existing Home Pods and HomePod Mini that sort of exposed these sensors, added more capabilities. What is required in that suite of new feature? to get a new home pod for. Because I think the line for me is really blurry. It doesn't seem like the hardware of the new home pod

is required for a lot of the new features of Apple Home that are coming out now. So in terms of matter, you don't need a new home pod for Matter. In fact, the original HomePod will be a Matter controller. It will not be a thread border router, though. It doesn't have a thread radio in. And that is something you might want with Matter because a lot of, or some new devices are coming out that use thread,

and Apple Home is kind of leaning more on thread as opposed to Bluetooth for a lot of its connectivity, which is a good move because Bluetooth in the smart home has never been a great experience. We know. Bluetooth is just a hot mess next year, all right? Next year. So, you know, I definitely see Apple Home moving away from reliance on Bluetooth and thread is really where they're putting the eggs in the basket. And thread is still kind of a nascent technology. It's been around for almost a decade, but the infrastructure is still not quite there to support a strong thread network.

I've been talking to a number of different companies who are all producing thread border routers, which is part of matter. There are two distinct technologies that work hand in hand, matter and thread. And the problem is right now, if you have like a Google Home thread border router, which it's the Nest Hub Max is one, and you also have, say, an Echo 4th gen, which is going to be a border router. in the next few months, they'll all create their own separate thread networks, which kind of defeats the purpose of thread. So we're waiting. Everyone promises me that this is all going to be fixed soon and eventually all of these devices will work together in sort of harmony in your home, which is, you know, the promise of matter. So I would recommend if you're on fence and you don't have a home pod or an Apple TV that supports thread and you're looking at buying one, it's worth having a device with a thread border router if you want to. work in the smart home because it will, it's future proof in your smart home, but you don't need

one necessarily today. So it's interesting because Apple came out with two new Apple TVs and didn't put thread in one of them, but did in the other. So, I mean, maybe, I don't know, they're heading their bets there a little too, but it does, it is an important step for matter, which Apple has been fully kind of on board with since the beginning because it actually sort of started matter. It was one of the founding companies, and it has contributed home kit to the infrastructure of matter. There's a lot of similarities between Apple Home, using Apple Home and using Matter devices. The problem right now is there are just not very many Matter devices to use. And they sent us, Apple sent us a matter, an Eve Matter device to use with the HomePod, which is great.

Is that a light switch, a plug? The plug, yes, the Eve Energy plug. And I'd already used, I'd already been using a Matter Eve Energy. plug that I'd upgraded myself, but there's just not enough devices out there yet to really get a feel of how this is all going to work. The momentum is there, though, and I'm definitely going to sort of check in in a few months' time and see if the thread solution, the thread situation has resolved itself and, you know, whether these devices are actually creating a stronger, more robust network in your home, or if they're all still competing with each other and causing issues,

which unfortunately is... One of the problems at the moment. So the dumb question here is if you have an existing home pod and you're happy with it, your reasons to upgrade from a smart home perspective are kind of zero, right? It's like you want thread, but there's not enough reason that have thread yet. And if you have a new Apple TV or you have a HomePod mini or they actually get together and work together, you have hero routers or an echo. Like that stuff will serve the purpose.

Correct. There's no major benefit to having multiple threadboarder routers. You can do it and it will help extend your network, your mesh, network, but only if you live in a reasonable-sized home, you're not going to need multiple border routers. So yes, if you have an original home pod and you're happy with it, it's fast enough for you and it responds well enough for you, then, you know, you can get thread for less than $300 quite easily by adding a home pod mini or an Apple TV or, as you said, a border router from a different company. Because the new one's faster. The new one is faster. Yes.

That's been my experience from the smart home side. Like I put a HomePod 2 and a mini together. and asked my questions and the HomePod 2 always got got there first. Grab the glory and ran with it and responded quickly that like I said much less sort of, I mean an aering and kind of waiting, spinning its wheels. There was a much fast response. I am actually on the new Apple Home architecture, which I think is not actually to do with matter, but it's sort of like in preparation for matter. And that is something that they pulled.

Apple had a lot of issues when it first rolled out. But if you did get it when it first rolled out and it worked for you, it's still working. And I found that it has been a lot more stable and a lot more reliable. So the improvement in the home pod too could also be down to the improvement in the home architecture. I don't have an original home pod here to kind of compare, but my mini is not as fast. So it's probably going to generally be faster. Chris, does it sound better? It sounds very similar to the first home pod.

Very similar. And not the same. Like, if you put them side by side, you can tell some differences. But sometimes the new one sounds clear and better. And sometimes the old one sounds a bit more detailed. Like, all comes down to what song you're playing. But on the whole, it's very, very similar. They cut down the number of tweeters, right?

Yeah, there are five now as opposed to seven last time. And there are four mics instead of six. There's also a new system sensor is what it's called, which is the most vague thing I've ever heard in my life. That's supposed to, like, help with all, like, the computational tuning even better than it was last time. So on the whole, those things should hopefully balance out for like a very similar overall sound, which it is. So if you like the first one, you like this one. If you didn't like the first one, you're probably not going to love this one either.

So you're not going to sit there. You never like, we're listening to stuff on the new one and being like, man, I just miss those seven tweeters. Yeah, not myself. But I'm sure there will be like a small group of people who swear that they ruined it and that the first home pod was like a really special product. Oh, yeah. The stereo form people are about to, I mean, this is, this is the greatest gift they've ever been given is arguing with the number of tweeters in the home pod. So the first one, when I reviewed it, a long time ago, there was a lot of, Apple, like, made a lot of noise about computational audio, using the tweeters. They, you know, they have a sensor in the body of the home pod to measure the distance the woofer is going, right? They were bouncing some sound off the

walls and measuring that in real time. If you moved it, they would remeasure it. Oh, very cool. I was never like, oh, this is a greatest sounding speaker in history, which is kind of where Apple, like, led people to believe, like, their version of computational audio would dramatically blow away speakers costing tens of thousands of dollars. And at the end of day, it's like, it's limited by its size, right? It's like, it's this big, and it can do this much, and, like, it sounds very good. And the Sonos one sounds pretty good, too. And the Sonos 5 sounds a little bit better. And it has bigger low-end drivers so it can make more bass. It's just very much, they overhyped it because I think Siri was bad. So their solution to marketing, it was like,

it's the best sounding speaker in the world. Are they doing that again this time? Or are they just kind of like, here's, you love the home pod mini. Now it's bigger. There was less talk of all that stuff, but it is still the same as far as like the room stuff goes and all that background process goes. But, yeah, I mean, the review that, like, the sound is very clear, super detailed, rich, whatever. But there's no warmth to the home pod sound, whereas, like, Sonos does have some of that and some other speakers do. This is very, like, this is what the lab told us a speaker should sound like. Oh, that's interesting, though, because I remember the one home pod having a much warmer sound than the Sonos one. Sometimes, I guess certain tracks, again, it comes down to it again.

But on the whole, it's just very clear to me. Like, that's the one thing that I always, like, vocals are right there in the center. It sounds good. I think two is where it really starts to like sound really, really good, but that's $600. So at that point, you are looking at a Sonos five or whatever else, too. You will get more serious separation from two, obviously. Yeah, so two together. And that's where the spatial audio thing, a case can be made that when you have two very nice speakers, beaming sound all over the room, that spatial audio does start to make a bit more sense and sounds pretty good for like the very good master tracks. Okay, it started to make sense. Did it actually like, were you like, were you like? okay, I get spatial audio now.

For a few songs, yeah, but there are still so many that are bad that still don't sound as good as their stereo versions. But yeah, there are certainly some tracks where there's just like more atmosphere. And you can hear instruments throughout the room and it's a bit more than stereo itself. So it's there, certainly more than headphones and earbuds where it's still just very silly. My new go-to rules, it only sounds good if the music was meant to be listened to on drugs. And so music for being on drugs, that's like great. And then everything else.

And we've got notes about this. People like it. But everything else just kind of like loses impact. And I think where Apple could succeed here is by getting away from spatial audio for music, which they are just relentlessly promoting to no discernible effect. And focusing on the TV features they've added to the home pod, right? And saying, okay, you can get two humpods together. They've added this new feature where you can do EARC off a TV so you can send all the audio

from your TV to your home pods. Can we talk about that? Well, I have Chris explain that. But then you get, do you get Atmos when you do that? Like proper movie Atmos? I think it mixes down Atmos. Like there are no like upfiring speakers, obviously, in the HomePod. But it sounds pretty good.

Yeah. So that feature has been around, I guess. They've called it beta to like last week when they actually put out TVOS 16.3 or whatever it was. And so now it's like a full-on feature. And so you can plug the Apple TV 4K. You need the new one. That goes into your TV's ERC port.

And then the HomePods will play all of your TV's audio. So like I was playing a PS5 game and there was like no latency, no audio sync issues. I was like, this is not supposed to work this well. This is ER. It's supposed to be a hellscape. It's HTML. Yeah, like none of this is supposed to work, right? This public service, what TV do you have that you're using this with?

I've got the high since U8H myself. And I have very good Wi-Fi. So I'm sure that plays into it too. There are many factors that could make this worse for you. But it does work. And so that by itself has me convinced that Apple has more home theater stuff coming down the pipeline because like, why would you go through all that work just for the home pod? Well, I remember the number one thing when I did the review of the first one,

the number one question people asked was can I use it with my Apple TV all the time. And so I think just from an Apple doesn't do like proper focus groups. We're just like a market research perspective. They're like, what would make the HomePod better? And they're like, I want to use it for my TV. It's like you would build it. They built it. You know, I think I would put this in the same category of like it doesn't detect a fire,

but it can listen for a smoke alarm. It's like a Rube Goldberg machine to get what you want out of the HomePod. It's like you need an Apple TV and you e-arc into the Apple TV. and that wireless sense of the home pod. And we don't actually detect a fire, but we'll listen for a smoke one. Like, it gets to the right outcome, which is your phone beeps if there's a fire and the TV audio is coming out of the speaker. It's just a winding path to get there that is kind of like distinctly on Apple. Yeah, it seems strange to leave your Apple TV on at all times for that feature too.

But it sounds better than like a Sonos Ray sound bar, like the two of them together. Really? The bass. Those woofers are. Yeah. Those are legit woofers. So like if you don't have like a subwarfer for your Sonos or any kind of like budget level sound. bar, this is going to sound much better than that. But again, you've got to leave your Apple TV on all the time, which I'm sure some people do. That's their mainstreaming device and that's fine. It's kind of in a weird place financially, though, because a beam is like $300. And this is $600 for $200. And then an arc is what, $200 more than that. And that'll give you true utmost and everything. So it's like, I don't really know if the people who are buying a Sonos are like, do I want to go into this weird middle ground necessarily with two home.

pods. Right. Yeah. That's some people who just live like all in Apple's world thoroughly in the ecosystem. Don't want to go anywhere else and they're happy there. Yeah. If you're like an exceedingly well-groomed person who wears all black and you live alone and you don't allow strangers into your house and all the magazines are perfectly arranged, this is going to

be great for you. Yeah. And all of your furniture is made of concrete. You know, like I'm describing like my idealized lifestyle. Like it was because I'm not trying to talk down to be like if I was very single, like I'd be like, yes, all My furniture is made out of concrete and you're not in my home. And all I have is home pods. The wire perfectly routed so you can't see it. But in reality, it's like not how it works for most people.

Well, you can remove the wire now. Yeah, exactly. Now that you can remove the wire, I know we're going to see third party battery mounts for this thing. Oh, my God. There's still a lot of question. Like, why bring it back? Okay. And I'm biased because I'm coming from the smart home side.

But I think, honestly, it all ties in with matter and thread. because the original home pod was discontinued just after they started Matter. And I think Apple realized that this was not going to be capable of supporting this new smart home platform. And the biggest change, really, in this device from the original, is the support for thread and it has matter, which you can have in both. But this is now their flagship smart home controller for Matter.

And people were sad. It was gone. They wanted it back. It wasn't as successful as perhaps people expected, but there's a passionate user base behind this device, the original version, and I'm sure there will be with the new version. And it fits perfectly into the lineup,

but it's not what they really needed to do. What they really need to do is bring us a smart home controller that we can actually use to control our smart home that has a touch interface, and that works with multiple people. Because right now, Apple just sucks. that. I really struggled. I could not get personal requests to work for all of my family with the new home pod or the old home podder. Just your husband did you? We're the only ones it

worked for. Only my husband I would work. As soon as I had my kids, it just went crazy. Was it just like they do not like pay the mortgage so they do not get a say? I don't know what it was. I've been talking to Apple. They've been troubleshooting, but we haven't found a solution. But every time I added either of my children, one of whom is over 14 and one of whom's under, because that's a cutoff point with family sharing, it would just stop recognizing anyone's voice. And the personal request side is a real challenge in the smart home. None of the other platforms have actually nailed it very well either. I struggle with both Google Home and Amazon's Alexis ecosystem for them to recognize personal requests. It's a hard,

It's a hard problem, but it's one that really needs to be solved because the smart home is not about the single guy in the concrete house. It's about multi-user homes and places where, you know, you've got roommates. There's very few people that live alone and that are going to have a vast or a comprehensive smart home ecosystem. And that's something that all these solutions need to work on. And hopefully, I mean, Apple's has been the most useful to date because of the tight integration with the phone. But obviously if not everyone in your home uses iPhones or iOS devices, then it's just not useful. And as much as matter is helping bring down those ward gardens for the smart home, Apple is still very much a curated garden party. So the matter piece for Apple is really interesting.

They're very much behind it. They did give up a bunch of home kit or share it with the Matter consortium to build off of it. And that's because the other smart home ecosystems were ahead, right? Alexa notably is much more ahead. Many more devices work with Alexa. You get everybody to support Matter. All those devices work with HomeKit as well. You can control them from your phone.

That's great for Apple, but isn't the flip side of it that the Alexa and Echo show can also control your smart plugs just as well as HomeKit on your phone? Well, that's the key phrase just as well. Will it? I mean, because Matter is giving that common infrastructure so that everyone can control the same devices, but you still have to have the good user experience on top. And as I've talked about before in articles, the HomePod and the Apple Home ecosystem is one of the better user experiences. The Alexa experience, the Amazon experience is still, it's so big and it can do so many

things that it's also really hard to kind of keep track of and remember exactly what you want it to do and you might ask it to turn on a light and it will go and buy you some toilet paper. You know, there's too much going on, whereas the Siri ecosystem and Apple Home is a lot more tightly controlled. So if you're using matter devices in either platform, you're going to have different experiences because of the experience that each platform adds. And that's where they're going to differentiate is by, you know, with Apple Home, you can use adaptive lighting. And that's not part of a matter yet, but hopefully it will come so that, you know, you don't just have to buy expensive light bulbs to get that expensive feeling feature

where the lights change naturally during the day with sunlight. You'll be able to use any matter-enabled light bulb and, you know, have that feature that you can use through Apple Home. Amazon Alexa doesn't offer that feature yet. So, you know, there's going to be things like that that make the difference that make you choose one platform over the other. I think this product was just like so easy for them. It's like such an easy lift. So they call this the all new home pod, and that's just the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.

Because it's like the same design. And it's like, here's your new speaker. It's very similar. And so they just like bought themselves probably two years to build something new that's actually going to like be that new thing for the home. Well, so you were talking about what they should build, right?

Which is like a tablet with a touchscreen that you can actually click the buttons on. Like put an iPad on a stand. That's what Google is doing with the next version. the nest. We don't know when it's going to come, but they showed one. I'm wondering on a more conceptual level, HomeKit in particular doesn't live anywhere that a user understands, right? You buy an echo, and it's like, now I'm in control of your smart home. And you're like, okay, this computer is the one that's in charge of my smart home. And that's not exactly right. There's a lot of cloud services and all this other stuff going on. But like, you're like, this is the thing that controls

my house. A home kit lives on an Apple TV. It lives on an iPad until recently. It could live on this thing. You can solve a lot of home kit problems by just like rebooting your Apple TV, which or your iPhone. Yeah, or your iPhone. And it's like the lights aren't working. I needed to turn off my phone. Like I say this stuff out loud to people and I know I just sound like a maniac. That's so true. Does this solve that problem? It's like, all right, I'm just going to reboot the home pod and that'll fix it. Yeah. So that has been. the go-to solution for any issue with HomeKit, your phone and your whichever Home Hub you have. And with Alexa, in particular, and a lot of Google Home, there's much more reliance on the cloud.

But the intricacies of how the Apple TV and the HomePod and the phone and all work together have very much been kind of a black box. We just know that rebooting the phone works. Who knows why? Apple has said, I think, that the new home architecture is going to kind of make some of that a little clearer. but that hasn't officially arrived yet, so we still don't really understand the difference. I did notice in my testing since I've been on the new home architecture that it does stick with one home hub rather than bouncing around.

Like it used to love going to my HomePod minis, which I would constantly unplug for various reasons and would mess everything up. Now it just sticks with my Apple TV that's hardwired. And it's like, hallelujah, this makes sense. This is what we should have done since the beginning. Do you get to choose that? No, no. You still can't choose it, but it just seems to be more rational than it used to be before.

And it did try and use the home pod, the new home pod a couple times, but then it was like, and went back to the TV. And that's something about the smart home in general that I think confuses people. And what is going to help with matter, because we're going to bring almost most devices and most interactions that you need to be quick and happen on a regular basis into your home and local, without having to use the cloud because that's where, you know, when people get frustrated with Siri, I think we talked about this on our last episode together, Alex, you know, because she's, it is waiting or it can't connect to the internet or it can't get some device to work. It's normally something is

broken in a cloud connection or some kind of Wi-Fi connection, whereas once we have this more robust infrastructure for the smart home, those kind of issues won't happen so much, hopefully. And it'll be a much smoother experience, you know, just as easy as actually. turning the light switch on. The ever-elusive goal. It's so funny because I still have my little homebridge tomagocchi in the garage. They have to go and reboot and open up to take the SD card out and like reformatted every few months.

And I'm like, this is better. This is like concentrated effort into chaos. Like every three months, I started all over. And then it's fine for three months. As opposed to, you know, like matter, which is one day, I'm sure, just like Bluetooth. It'll be better. But right now, it's like a lot of. like diffuse effort to even know what the hell is going on.

I think the good thing though, the thing that I'm most excited about with matter and thread is that you won't need a Tamaguchi. You won't need a single device that runs everything. Because when you have a single device that runs everything, you have a single point of failure. And that's when things go belly up. And, you know, with thread in particular and with Apple and most of the ecosystems putting matter and thread into every device,

most people these days with smart homes have more than more. one smart speaker. So you're going to have these multiple points that can keep your smart home running because someone unplugged your echo speaker to use their hair dryer and you didn't realize and now nothing's working in your home anymore. You know, that that won't happen anymore. And that's one of the reasons I think that thread got chosen over Zigby because in previously and when you use Zigby, if you're familiar with, you know, like Phillips Hugh runs on a Zigby bridge

and, you know, one morning I might wake up and I'm like, why are none of my lights turning on? than I realize it's because someone unplugged my Hugh Bridge for some reason. But you're going to lose that single point of failure. And the smart home is going to become much more kind of diffuse and more integrated into your home rather than just relying on little white boxes or tamagatchez in the garage. No, but Jen, here's my solution, though. Everything is routed through my home bridge tomagachi.

But then independently of that, that is plugged into a smart plug that is on HomeKit natively. So when the home bridge crashes, I can just reboot. There's people living there. No, that's not me like a smart plug. It's like a genius. That works unless your Wi-Fi's gone down. That's true. And then you're just out of luck.

This is also a great solution for troubleshooting anything at your parents' house remotely is you get a smart plug on their network. And then you just turn it off from your house. I spent like three hours on the phone with my dad the other night because he couldn't figure out why when he reconnected his router. It wasn't working. And he just put two cables the wrong way around. And it's like, oh, this smart home is doomed.

Well, we are going to face like a challenge for the next couple of years, though, right? As everybody has, because people still have to upgrade everything that's never going to support matter. They're still going to have to like wait for some companies. Dyson's like, yeah, we're doing matter. And then crickets. There's a lot of crickets. Yeah, so no's crickets. Yeah.

Although the good thing is that matter works with your existing ecosystems, right? So if you're all in on Apple Home or all in on Amazon or Google or smart things, you can start adding matter devices now and they will work just like they do like your system works today. So it's not like we're asking, you know, matter's not going to make everything have to start from scratch. It is going to be a slow process. It's, you know, like when they try and redo roads or redo the plumbing, they're not going to do it all at once because everything would explode. You need, it's a slow process.

So yes, I think ultimately I'm going to be doing this for a long time. It's going to keep me in a job. Speaking of Sonos, I do kind of wonder, we did mention Sonos, and I do kind of wonder if like six months down the line we're going to wonder, like, did Apple play it too safe with the home pot too? Because like Sonos is going to come out with a brand new, like wholly redesigned speaker. Like spatial audio you say, okay, here's like a 10 driver like speaker that's going to have USBC in and all sorts of crazy stuff. Yeah. I just really hesitant to think of how many people. who can afford a home pod

are also thinking like it's either that or the Sonos. I would assume most of those people are usually like it's that and the Sonos. I make this mistake too. I think I always think of the home pod is like you should get two of them. And so like I think it costs $600. It costs $300. It costs $300. Yeah.

It's in a pretty reasonable range for a lot of people who are willing to spend money on smart light light switches or whatever. Like I think what Chris is getting at is Sonos is going to offer you more advanced technology than Apple has, it might have even more unnecessary audio processing, and it will work with more things. For example, a thing that the Sonos speaker will do is work with Spotify, which is still not there

as a default service. But I guess that's Spotify's fault at this point. Yeah, but I think, like, they're different products, right? Like, one is probably more intended for the home pod I see is more like, oh, I've got Sonos in my living room. That's my home theater. I'm not going to to necessarily want to use home pods for that. The home pod is more like, I need to have music while I'm cooking dinner and I need to be able to talk to it. Because one is talking and like Sonos is bad at the assistant. Sonos is real, real bad assistance. So I just don't like if you're getting it for the assistant, you don't need like those are two different things. It falls in a slightly odd spot because if you just need the music while you're cooking dinner, then you've got the mini.

Yeah. If you want more interaction, you want to follow a recipe and in the kitchen, then you're going to go with like a show, an Echo Show or a Nest Hub. You know, an iPad sitting next to a mini is just, just feels kind of wrong. I just feel like it's, it is, as Chris said, it was an easy upgrade now, but I don't think it's the grand plan for Apple Home going forward. Yeah. I might, but I think I'm in a very small minority because we use Google Assistant on our Sonos One and we use Google Homes and their default audio devices set to, so.

Sonos speakers in the various rooms they're in. And these companies are suing each other and they hate each other. And everyone says it's not supposed to work. I was going to say, how did you get that to work? I think it's because I cover the lawsuit that they're both like, we can't screw this up. And there's one house. There's like one engineer from each company on call to be like,

all right, they asked to play classic rock at 7 p.m. Like, make it happen. And like someone pushes the play on Spotify on the Sonos side. Like, I don't know. I'm assuming there's some sort of complicated. legal PR Rube Goldberg machine to make sure it works in my house. But that's the dream, right?

Is that you assemble all these components from all these different vendors. You kind of get the best of everything, or at least a solution that's more tailored to you. Right? Because what I want is the only reason we have Google Homes is because of the photo feature on the Nest hubs. It's really good. And like, I don't know why Amazon hasn't built a good photo system for the Echoes. I don't know why Apple, they've tried. Hasn't built one at all.

And, yeah, Apple, the default, like, just make the thing with the screen. Like, people will buy it without a second's hesitation. But, like, that's what we want. So that's what we have. And then we want son of speakers because that works with all the other stuff we have. And it's like, I would get a home pod. But, again, it's like the concrete table problem where it's like, it's designed for this one, it's designed for Tim Cook. Tim Cook's has a lot of concrete furniture in it, you know?

And, like, it's just like, you don't make enough product. here, like, it's not versatile enough or there's not, the product line is not versatile enough to fit into all these spots in your house. So I guess I'm coming out from the kind of the same place as you, Alex, which is like, there's maybe one room in my house where this would be great. Yeah. There's, like, I want a smart home is like the home. Yeah, this home pod is like slightly better, slightly cheaper, but it's not going to change the calculus. I'm like, who's buying it in the first place. And so I think, like, the first

one wasn't a hit. I can't see this one being like a smash hit either. at $299. Maybe once it goes down like $2.49 at some stores, that'll pick up some. But I think, like, on the whole, it's the same home pod. Bit smarter. What is the price you would, like, instant buy it at? I think $199 for sure. I'd be like, sure, buy it.

And that's the studio, the Echo Studio, is $1.99. Sonos 1 is 199, too, right? Thereabouts, yeah. I'm just going to say this out loud. A really good pair of regular old stereo speakers sounds better than any of this stuff. Blasphemy. It's just true. It's true. Do you ever go into the home theater Reddit? And it's like half the people are there. Like, I've just replaced my sonos or my Vizio sound bar or whatever. And I just got two speakers and got rid of my sub. And it's like, I'm hearing everything for the first time. It's like way better. It's just way better. There's an entire other episode of the show on the specs to get marketed. And then whatever. I'm just saying like all these speakers are like inherently noisy and they try to cover it up with extra process. because they're full of radios. And if you just make speakers that are not full of radios and are connected with wires

to clean sources, you're in a much better spot. Whoa. But that's the problem. Everyone, you know, we want these multi-use devices now in our home. We expect more out of our speakers than to just play music or just to play the audio from our TV. And it's a problem. And it's actually another problem.

I mean, Chris and I've talked about this in the past. Like, Matter actually has a casting spec built in. So in theory, if all these players keep playing nice together, you know, we could be playing all our music on all of our smart speakers and our airplay speakers. Everything could all work harmoniously. But that doesn't seem like it's going to happen. Mainly because Sonos and Bose and a couple of the other big speaker companies who are part of the CSA, which is behind matter, don't seem to be actually making any movement or any head. way on doing this multi-room audio between companies and the individual companies that have multi-room audio like Amazon and Google and Apple, you know, they want to keep their, but these are

little fiefdoms that look like they're going to stay. We're not, the whole kumbaya part of matter doesn't necessarily like it's going to go through the entire smart home space, unfortunately. And audio is such a big ticket item for most of these companies, right? Because they want you to stick with their streaming service, their subscription service. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, like Amazon and Apple and Google, like, have no interest in making smart plugs or window shade controllers because there's no recurring revenue against them. Like, if Apple's like, it's our new smart plug, it's part of iCloud, it will cost $10 a month. People want to go away. And so, like, you see where they're like willing to commodify the ecosystem.

But streaming services are recurring revenue. They are lock in to a certain extent. They are excellent places to upsell you to other parts of their services bundle. there's no way they're going to go that stuff. No. So, yeah, it's always going to, the fragmentation is going to remain on those levels for sure. We're not going to get the simple smart home for many years.

Just make me in charge of everything. Who's the president of the CSA and how do I take him out? They've got to get you your Apple TV. Your TV made by Apple. I'm going to go to that guy's house to reboot his Apple TV and he'll be out of the job. I'm like, sorry. All right, guys. So the review is up now.

Jenner and Chris worked on it together. Thank you, guys. We're going to take a break. And then when we get back, I'm going to be talking with Catherine Trend Acosta about faking your death online. It makes sense in context, I swear. It's a hard segue.

Can we fake the CSA guy's death online? Okay. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better.

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That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-R-K.com. Upwork.com. All right, welcome back. I'm very excited because I'm talking with my friend, Catherine Trinda Costa. We've worked together. We've been colleagues for many, many years. And one of our favorite things to talk about is faking your death online. I know that's like a weird thing to have a favorite to talk about. But Catherine and I love to talk about it. And there was a super weird one that actually appeared in the New York Times last month called a fake death in Romancelandia. And it's all about this romance novelist who, you know, faked her death. So like naturally I had to get together with Catherine, we had to talk about it. She's like categorized fake deaths into different buckets for reasons. It's a whole thing. We're just going to go ahead and get to that chat right now with Catherine Trindicosta. Hello, Catherine. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for having me to talk about one of my favorite topics in the world. Yeah, you and I have talked many times about fandom and

online communities and the absolutely wild things that come out of it. And what we're talking to about today is this woman was a member of the romance novelist community, specifically self-published romance novels. She was a member of this community. She was super, super active. She was so active that she was getting a lot of hate. And then one day someone appeared on her account and said she had, it was her daughter and she had passed away. Everybody mourned two years past. She reappeared on January 2nd of this year to say, surprise, I am alive. I'm excited to get back into the community, let's have some fun. And the community did not react with the same enthusiasm that this author had. It's weird. It's almost as if if you fake your own death and

people mourn you, if you show back up, people are not happy to see you. They are in fact very upset by the emotional manipulation. Yeah. And it was very interesting. The New York Times did a piece on this. And it was very focused on the middle. mental health element. This woman had been battling depression. She'd been battling other mental health issues. And she really laid a lot of it of the situation at the feet of that. And we've just seen this particular circumstance appear over and over and over again. Well, here's the thing. If you're burnt out or if you're being attacked, it is perfectly valid to want to take a break, to want to leave that community, to want to not interact with the people who are causing you harm.

You see that actually a fair bit when people are like, I'm just leaving social media. It's bad for me. People are yelling and I can't handle it. That is all perfectly valid. Right. What you can't do is affect other people's health by putting them through the trauma of thinking someone they know has died, right? And that's what happened here. Yes. If it's just about you, if it's just about your health, and this is a thing you actually see on the internet all the time, you can just disappear. You don't have to make an announcement even, right?

If you're not using your real name and they don't know who you are, you can just leave. Yeah. You can always just leave. So when you do something like this, it becomes pretty clear that it's not just about your own health. It's about something else. It's either about like you want to,

bury this and never come back, which is why this person coming back was unusual. Usually it's about trying to escape because something's about to catch up to you. And you want to cause trauma so that people don't poke into it harder. Or it's just about a tension on its own, right? So faking a death is like a very extreme thing to do because it's not about you. It's about the effect that fake death has on many other people. And I talked to you about this like it's like a spectrum. Yeah. When you fake your own death, there's like an X axis and a Y axis.

And on the X axis is like... You should be a chart. You made a whole chart. Yes, I drew a chart. So on the X axis, there's like, are you killing your fake killing yourself or are you fake killing like members of your fake family or other things to like get attention or to just like give an excuse as to why something? And then the Y axis is like, you're doing this because people.

are catching up to your con and you need to go, or are you doing it for attention, just purely for attention? And like, these things is all a spectrum, and you can be, because it's the internet, it can both be yourself and someone else at the same time. And it can be a little bit of like, I want to leave this situation before my lives catch up to me, but I also want attention. Yeah. And I think it's interesting that it really happens in these fandom. communities, right? You and I are both members of fandom communities. We've both been, we've seen this happen a lot in the last 20 years. What are some examples of this happening before? Because this wasn't the first time we've seen somebody in a very small, very active community suddenly nope out of

that community by faking a death. So my little chart that I made for myself actually doesn't have a ton of fandom examples because I wanted to be more accessible to normal people. Uh-huh. So, like, on one hand, you have the Manteo thing, which has a documentary came out recently about it. And that was very clearly a getting away fake death, right? So the Manteo story was this football player on this Notre Dame team that was doing really well.

The major news cycle of that story was that Manteau story was that Manteau. by Teo's grandmother and girlfriend both died, that he continued during that year, that he was playing for them, all of those things. And it turned out that the girlfriend did not exist. And that Teo had been catfished, which is, you know, the term for someone pretending to be someone else online to lure people into various kinds of relationships. And in that case, the person pretending to be the girlfriend was very clearly. had killed this person off in an attempt to end the low eyes to sort of get away from this

sort of fake thing. The catfishing killed the catfish, right? So that's sort of in the self-getaway category. In the dead center, this was a big story like I think a couple years ago, like at zero-zero on the graph is Bethann McLaughlin. Now Bethann McLaughlin was a professor at a university who announced the death of another academic from COVID. This academic having been a person who had been very vocal and active in the move for greater equality within the sciences. So this person had been Native American and disabled and queer, I believe, as well. And then in a truly horrifying manipulation, this other academic came up and said, oh, she's she's died of COVID.

And that turned out that she had less died of COVID and more never existed and had in fact been Beth and McLaughlin the whole time. So she had to get rid of her because she couldn't have anybody. So this was both killing a fake someone else and your fake self. And it was to get rid of both the con and clearly for attention. Otherwise, you wouldn't announce it using your own real name. Like, there's a lot going on in that one. It's one of my favorites because it's, if this person had paid attention to online fandoms,

she would have known like, any time you make an announcement about someone else's death, they're going to look at you. So don't attach your real name to it. Like, it was wild. And then in the form of like clearly just doing it for attention and like killing random family members or like other people and then giving themselves cancer is. the infamous miscribe, the fandom person who had so many massive moments of fandom drama that it involved a giant, like, eight-part series of posts where this person did more work

than journalists do in dissecting what had gone on. There's like a term for when you're killing other people where it's called Munchausen by Internet. Right? Because the famous thing is Munchausen by proxy. That's when usually parents pretend or make their child sick so that they can get attention as the caregiver of a sick child. At least in Munchausen by Internet, there usually isn't a real child, but people will, for attention or sympathy, beef up their trauma. And I think the reason we're sort of seeing this acceleration of it is that it's come with the acceleration of like attention as a commodity online. Yes. And so you can't just step away. You have to get attention when you step away too. What's bigger attention getting than dying? There's also like a vindictiveness about it that is

very internety. That's very like, you people did not appreciate me enough and you did not like me enough or you did not pay me enough attention. So in addition to doing this thing that I'll get attention, I'm going to make it painful for you. I'm going to make you feel bad about it. Right. So I both get attention and I've gotten back at you. Yeah. And going back to the miscribe example, because that's, I think, one of the most interesting ones. It was one of the earliest ones. This was like, what, early 2000s. It was in the Harry Potter fandom community, which at the time was one of the biggest online communities out there. There was a lot of people involved. And this whole saga, like, took down fan websites.

Like, it did a lot. Yeah, it was, it created this huge kind of catastrophe through the entire fandom community. And a lot of people were involved, I believe Cassandra Claire, the now very famous New York Times author, was a part of that community and was having to deal with the, with it while also being accused of, I think, plagiarism within the community. there was just a whole, whole lot of mess. And at the center of it was Ms. Scribe, who had gotten involved with a whole lot of people. And then when things started to get really intense, started killing off family members that we assumed did not really exist. And a lot of the reporting done since then bears out that. And I think it's really interesting because we really only see this when the Internet came around.

This wasn't a phenomenon as common pre-internet. And it was like, okay, we can all communicate. We can all gather in these smaller groups now. And we can also get so intense that we don't necessarily know how to regulate ourselves and escape these. And I think like, we've all had those moments where you're like, oh, I'm really into this community. And you need to figure out a way out. And these people are like, okay, my great-grandmother is going to die for a third time today. Well, I didn't think of it actually as like going full circle before like pictures and documents.

You could fake your own death by just walk into another town and claiming to be someone else, right? Yeah. Like, this used to be an easier thing, but it didn't used to be for attention. It was escape. It was always an escape thing. It was a con men trying to escape or, you know, various other things. People just trying to leave scandal behind. There is sort of the infamous, like, theories about various lords who fake their own death to just sort of get away.

So it used to be very easy to fake your own death, but that was killing your real, the identity you were born in. Right. It wasn't constructing and then killing off a fake identity quite as much. I mean, for con men, yeah. But like, again, it was sort of, it was solely to get away. The attention was not really part of it because you didn't actually want that much attention. You wanted to be able to get away. And so now we've reached this, this era where you can create and kill non-real people.

sort of easily, but you aren't doing it to get away from your real life obligations or from the police, because that's not going to happen. You're really doing it just to see how people react to get attention. It's like the, it's like a TV trope, right, where people like attend their own funerals to see how people feel and on all of those things. And like, in television, that's not real. It's a, it's a rhetorical device to allow you to find out how people, feel about characters. And then people are now just like, I would like to know what people would say about me if I died. So I shall die. I'll do a quick announcement. I'll post it on Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter or wherever. And then I'm just going to sit back and rake in the,

the true feelings that everybody has about me. Some personal news. I died. Right? Yeah. That's basically what it is. They're just saying, okay, you know what? I'm just, I'm just looking for it. We don't know if that was necessarily the case in this instance. We don't know if this is the case with Meechen, but revealing it and coming back to me very much screams, I would like attention. Yeah. And very much screams, too, of that, like, of that internet evictiveness of like, you all drove me to this. And so I'm revealing it to you now, so you'll feel extra bad. I believe her husband is now taking the blame as being the one who told her to do it? Yeah.

When she spoke with the New York Times, she said that things just got out of control. Her husband insisted on faking her death on the internet. And when she started to feel better and feel like she wanted to return to the community, she did, the community has naturally not been really enthusiastic about her return. They are not excited to see her.

And it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate that she felt this was her best avenue forward It's unfortunate that this community had to deal with a lot of trauma and grief over the last two years. And a lot of people probably felt really bad. Good reminder, always be kind on the internet. You never know what's going on with someone else. Just be kind. But this one was, I just thought it was so interesting because reading it, every single part of it I heard.

I was like, oh, this sounds like Ms. Scribe. This sounds like half a dozen other situations I've seen over the years in the small. or insular communities where someone just says, F it. I want to see what happens. And it was just truly kind of wild to me. This person seemed a lot less destructive about it in a way. Because you can tell because she underestimated the negative response to coming back.

Because in the sort of fandom examples, it's either like desperation, like, oh, no, people are real mad about real things that I have done to them because there are also many instances of like fake outs to get money for for the fake conventions and things like I need to get away in a way that they won't they will feel bad asking questions about right or it's f all y'all like you are the worst people like you've ruined me and I want to make you feel as bad as I did so time to fake a death and sometimes too like time to fake a death in the like most attentiony zeitgeisty way like the Beth Ann McLaughlin one, to kill a fake native person with COVID,

there's just like a lot of appropriation packed into like that one sentence. As far as we know, she's white. She's not part of the disabled community. She is not queer. Like, she was just doing a lot of appropriation and then killing that person off. Just to feel happy?

Just to feel good about herself to like hurt other people? I think the thing that, too, about that, one is like to look at COVID early on too like early on in the pandemic when it was so horrifying. I mean, it's still horrifying, but when it was both horrifying and really uncertain what was going on, to see that as an opportunity to get rid of this thing you built is callous in a real specific way.

Super, super callous. I think too it speaks to like a very sort of immature internet sense, like people being sort of because they don't have to act like an adult in a room with other adults, they sort of regress because it is the like childish, like, oh, I need to get out of a test. Grandma's been dead for five years. She won't mind if I kill her again. Like, it has sort of that kind of logic to it. Yeah. The kind of logic a child has who does not really understand the real effects. Like, you want attention. But the difference between like, I want attention and, like, this causes other people real pain to feel my pain is like a very sort of immature child

conception of how like people process those kinds of announcements about people. Because like to them, it's going to make them feel bad, but it's not traumatic because it's not a real person that they know. Yeah. Except to those people who have empathy and are real humans, it does. Yeah. I think it's this common thing we see. in communities, it's often people who are kind of new to these communities. They forget that

you can forge real relationships online without seeing people all the time. Catherine, you and I live on other sides of the country and we talk constantly. We talk all the time and we have a real relationship. We're friends. We're going to go to Disney World together. And I think people forget that, yeah, you can forge those relationships online. You can forge really impactful relationships online. And so when they, when they kill someone off, when they start to disrupt those for their own personal gain, there's something really kind of egregious about it. It feels just a little, feels wild and you kind of laugh because we've seen enough of these at this point that I almost always laugh, but it still feels kind of like you've taken advantage of people, other people's

kindness and forgotten kind of the social codes that we are all usually very cognizant of in real life and we oftentimes forget in a virtual space. I think one of the reasons that you and I are so fascinated by the fandom stuff is, this is going to sound weird, it's like porn. Whatever technology porn goes to first is going to be the big technology. Similarly, fandom finds the drama center points years before the main street. So like when the internet first sort of started, everyone did this drama. And now we're seeing it leak more into, like, other places, right?

Like, the Mantaeo thing was, like, a major college sports scandal. Right. Which is far away from, like, two Harry Potter fanfic archives having a fight, right? So you can do that archiving. Like, every time one of these things happen, I text, like, various people who are journalists, friends of ours. And I'm like, you're writing about this story. I need you to understand how many times this has happened and how, how much. easy it is to investigate and check and how it happens. And I think, too, for the fandums where it still

happens, they tend to be young fandoms because they tend to be younger people, because they tend to have not lived through it already. Or in the case of this fandom, this was a fandom where you had a lot of people who weren't maybe as online as someone like you or I or people generally involved in fandom was. These were people who were kind of new to using the internet to connect this way. Or were, because they were self-publishing as authors, we're using real names or names that had associations to them that gives them a sense of security because it's like, no one's going to do anything weird with their own name or the name that is what they publish under, not really realizing that that's what happens in fanfic all the time. I think you're right. I think this is something that we see again and again in fandom. This is why you and I immediately both went, oh, yeah, that woman faked her own doubt. and then came back in the romance community. That's normal.

And like, we didn't even blink. And so other people were going, oh, my God, you and I are like, seen it. She didn't start a cult. So she's like, yeah, there's no Snapewives. There's no cult going on. This is still beginner fuckery in fandom. Right. But thank you, Catherine, so much.

I'm sure we'll probably have to bring you back the next time somebody does something truly wild that you and I have seen a billion times before in fandom to talk about. It's going to be a lot of fun. Thanks, Catherine. We're going to take a real quick break, and when we're back, we're going to talk about the Valve steam deck and what's actually changed in the last year since it came out. 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.

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The Steam Deck. You know, it honestly didn't leave. It's been over a year since the Steam Deck came out, and it's still going strong. And there's been over like 100 updates on it. There's been a ton of weird little software quirks and changes over the last year. It really, it feels like a different device from the thing that shipped back in February 2022. And so that also means I got to bring back Sean Hollister because he has spent over 435 hours with the steam deck. He and I are going to talk about what's changed, what the drawbacks are that still exist, and what Sean would probably score the thing if he had to score it right now.

Hey, Sean, thank you for joining me talking about the steam deck. Hey, it's great to be back. I love this thing. I really, really like my steam deck. And I think you were one of the few people that likes their Steam Deck more than me. You loved it when it first came out, but you also were very clear-eyed about its many, many flaws when it first came out. Yeah. And they've changed since then. But kind of walk me through when it first came out how much you were disappointed.

Yeah, let me go back even a little bit further. I got to go to Valve's headquarters before the Steam Deck came out, months before, I got to try it. And I had this vision in my head of like, this. is going to be where I buy my games now because I changed where I buy my PC games. I used to buy them, of course, on a PC. And then I was like, well, now all these great indie games and small games are coming in. And I'm going to play them on the Nintendo Switch instead. This is where I'm going to buy them because this is where I could actually play them. I can take them with me. I can play them in the bedroom, you know, when my kids are trying to sleep and things like that.

I can take them on the go. I just wasn't getting enough time with kids to play my games on my actual PC. So I was giving Nintendo. my money. And I try this steam deck. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is going to be the Nintendo switch of PCs. Not in that it's going to be like this thing I buy at retail that just plays my games well, but it's going to be where I buy my games because I can just have the time to play them finally. And I was like, this is going to be great. And then the steam deck arrived on my doorstep in February 2022. And the thing was just felt so messy and broken and buggy. I'm like, how that Heck, could you put this thing on sale valve?

And it wasn't just that it was broken. Because I've used a lot of broken gadgets before. It was that valve was pulling the rug out from under me every single day with new updates. And some of these updates made things better. And some of these updates made things worse. During the period that I was supposed to review this and let the entire world know whether this device is any good or not. And so I wrote, this thing was a mess. I said if Valve sold the console

I've been playing it best by your GameStop, people would return it in droves. The UI was sluggish and crappy. The games, you'd launch a lot of games and they would just not launch, they would just go to a black screen, some would crash in the middle, my Wi-Fi connection would disappear,

my Bluetooth headset would pair and unpaire, so many issues with this thing at launch. There was other big stuff, like, wasn't there an SD card issue where it would like just delete your games? Oh my gosh. Okay. So SD cards are this thing.

I bricked, I kid you know, I bricked three SD cards. Like just had to throw them out. Yes. Like I have one right here. I have a 256 gigabyte. Very nice, Sandusk Extreme, 256 gigabyte card here that I used to help review the Skydeo 2 drone. Because, you know, you need a very fast SD card for drone footage. You can get 100 megabets per second down from that camera.

I stuck that thing in there. It's a birdie. now because it didn't format the card properly. Valve had this issue where it was, it was trying to do like a full and complete format, like overwriting every bit on an SD card when you're doing it. They switched to a quick format. That's better. It doesn't break SD cards as far as I'm aware. But this thing where I lost three cards because of this. I plugged a solid state drive into the deck's USB port. And the deck didn't know, I guess, not to run device. is too fast when it doesn't provide enough power. Because, you know, it's a small device with like a 40-a-watt-hour battery, this steam deck. It doesn't have a lot of power for its USB port. Well, my SSD in my enclosure, a nice SSD I've been using for a while to transfer things between computers, the deck decided that it was going to just blow through that thing, download giant game to it very quickly,

without providing it enough power. And so that got brick, too. And it's not like this thing was just a shit show at my. launch. And yet, you could already see the potential. There was so much potential there. They were fixing things very quickly. And so by the end of the review period, I was like, you probably shouldn't buy this thing today. It's not ready. But wow, you can play all of these old PC games and all these new PC games with all this horsepower, these amazing controls you can customize to do any kind of game. Phenomenal. And so I was like, okay, maybe this thing will be great.

So was it like the flexibility of the device was so good that you could overlook the fact that you had now spent hundreds of dollars of your own money in the process of reviewing it just washed that money down the drain? There were, yes, yes. I want to throw some caveats in there. First off, we gave this thing a score that today would have probably fleshed, well, it would probably be like a 4.5 at the time that we gave it a 6.5. At the time, we gave it a 6.5. But like, if you read our descriptions of how we review devices today, we would have to give it like less than a 5.0 back then because we do not like telling people to buy gadgets that are not ready, that have a lot of issues with them that may not pan out. At the time, though, yes, I could see that this thing was already fun to use. And that's super important. Like, people want to buy things that are fun, right? even if part of the fun is like figuring out how to make games run on a console.

I've read so many. I think you're also in the Steam Deck subreddit. Yes. And there are so many people in there who post how much fun they're having just figuring out how to make various games work, figuring out all kinds of cool things to do with it as a full Linux PC. Lots of people say they're doing more of that that they are actually playing games, which is funny to be. There's guys who was saying, oh, I plug it into my TV. and I use like a PS4 controller and I just use it as like a console

like a traditional console now and then there's people who are like oh yeah I use it as my primary computer it just seems like this great it's for the tinkers it's for all the people who just like to mess with stuff I've seen people do video editing on this on this computer

I've seen people like piece together you know stuff for their work I saw there's a one of the developers of VLC the amazing open source video player that you know you can play it plays anything you throw out it is working on a way to turn the deck into like a miniature tv internet streaming tvs it'll just stream down like channels over the web or something i don't know yeah i want a portable tv i want a handheld device that can double as my work pc in a pinch i want a game system that flawlessly runs all my game cube and we games because there's an emulator that somebody put on linux like just flawlessly yes it doesn't all these things and the controls, which are many of them carryovers from the cult classic steam controller that Valve released a number of years ago and then had to put on a $5 fire sale.

Anyhow, if you missed out on the steam controller, the controls in here just let you do so much. I have, I'm playing through trails in the sky now. It's an RPG game with a lot of dialogue. I have three of the buttons on my Steam deck set to be turbo buttons so that I can speed through the dialogue and the sword swinging when I'm trying to build up my CP to do the big, flashy magic and special attacks. When I am playing Genshin Impact, which you're not really supposed to be able to play on a Steam deck, but you can because somebody built a client for it in Linux, and also because I can stream Genshin Impact for my PlayStation 5, because there's a PlayStation 5

streaming client on the deck, which is amazing. And it works really well. It works really well. When I'm playing that game on a PS5 by itself or, you know, any of the other consoles, it's really difficult to aim a bow with like some of the bow characters in that game, which is annoying because the game rewards you for you know, hitting enemy creatures in the head

with a bow for some reason. I don't know why. Anyhow, the deck has gyroscopic aiming that you can add to literally anything you play on it, including streaming a game from my PlayStation 5 to the handheld. So, my

My deck is transmitting its gyroscopic motions over my home Wi-Fi to my PlayStation 5, to tell my PlayStation 5 how far to move virtual analog stick so that the bow of my anime character can line up with the head of some legendary monster in this game. And it feels like it's running locally. And that's just cool. There's just so much cool shit you can do with the deck. But that's not what the focus of my recent piece was. Like the main thing I want to tell you today, the main thing I wrote in my like long-term review is that, yes, there's this whole ecosystem of cool things. But also you can just use the Steam Deck now as a game system and it works. And it did not at launch.

That was not the case nearly a year ago when it launched. Yeah. And it works with like a wide variety of games. I know we've seen some complaints on the subreddits because somebody goes and they play the, this really nobody's ever heard of it game from 20 years ago. And they're like, oh, the Steam Deck doesn't work out of the box with it. But most modern games, most new games, it works pretty well out of the box. I played like just three days of vampire survivors.

My sister was like, don't you want to say hi to me? I haven't seen you in a year. I'm here for Christmas. And I was like, I sure. But after I get through this level. Yeah. Like just totally glued to it. Because it played so, so well.

It worked so well. And also I could like huff the fumes off of the fan on the steam deck. This is a beautiful in-joke also from the Steam Deck subreddit and discords. Everybody comments on how good it smells, the chip fumes that are coming out through the fan. I don't know what that is. I'm guessing it's just warm air. Probably should not be huffing it. Probably this is a disclaimer.

Do not huff those smells. We cannot be held liable for it. Please don't do it. We don't know what's in it. But man, it smells great. It does. It does. At the risk of reduction, there are three reasons why games might not work on the Steam deck.

Okay. One is they are big modern games, but they use anti-cheat software. That's the biggest one. Some of the biggest games in the world will not work on the Steam deck like PubG, Lost Ark, Collodity Warzone, Rust, Destiny 2. A lot of these games don't work, not because, not because, Because the Steam Deck doesn't support anti-cheat. In fact, Valve went out of their way to go ahead and say, hey, big providers of anti-cheat, easy anti-cheat and battle-eye, we're going to make you work. Hey, developers, all you have to do is enable them. That's not the reason they don't work. They don't work because the developers, the publishers, decided they weren't willing to take the risk of enabling these and then maybe somebody on Linux figures out some kind of cool hack because these anti-touchers. sheet software can't necessarily run as effectively in the kernel level manner that it wants to

because there is no way for them to control what happens on Linux the way they can on Windows. Now, somebody's going to listen to the podcast and be like, oh, it's totally possible you could totally build a system where this works. What Tim Sweeney at Epic Games, who says Fortnite's will not come to this, what Tim Sweeney will tell you is that they don't want to spend the money to build something. such a system. They don't think it's worthwhile for the amount of players they'll get in return. Right. I mean, he didn't say that explicitly, but reading between the lines of what he told us, that's what he's saying. Yeah, it's an investment to build support for the Steam Deck. And one of the

reasons I think it's so popular thus far is that the investment for most game developers is fairly minimal, right, when they don't have the anti-cheat software. Yeah, I would say even if they do have the anti-cheat software, it's minimal to enable it to work. But it's not necessarily minimal to satisfy your company and your shareholders that you will have not inadvertently created some kind of loophole that will come to buy you and the ass down the road. That might be the expensive part. Yeah, most games just work. Anti-chid is one reason they don't work. Another reason why they don't work is because they are old enough that whatever game company built it had to do something very customer proprietary with the software.

that they use to run, say, the video cutscenes at the beginning of the game. Some games will not launch simply because they cannot launch the video that plays at the very beginning of the game, and the rest of the game would run. And the reason we know this is because most of the games on the Steam Deck that are designed for Windows run on a compatibility layer called Proton that is developed primarily by Valve. Open source developers that Valve is paying to improve Proton's compatibility. But there is also a fork of Proton called Proton GE, which stands for Glorious Egg Roll, which I love, which is maintained by people who do not care so much about proprietary things that they may not have the legal rights to use. And there are some games that will just run because they said they built in whatever the proprietary video codec was.

And so you can see a game that wouldn't work on the main fork of Proton just does on the global. Glorious Eggroll version. Are there examples of games off top of your head that don't work? Because I definitely have, I think I've run into this situation, and I'm just completely blanking on any games. A persona for Golden was not working on the Steam Deck at launch. It had issues, I think, with cutscenes and also with audio. There was some kind of audio glitch as well.

In Glorious Eggroll, it worked perfectly. And then Valve went back and worked with Proton to, I think, get around some of those issues. I don't know if it uses some kind of compatibility layer for the codex, never what. But they did make it work, and they made it a full deck verified game. I know that currently the longest journey, the last time I tried to play the longest journey, which is a famous point-and-click adventure. That does not run on Steam Deck. I can't remember if it works in Clary Seg Roll or not,

but I would bet you $10 that is one of those issues where it's just some codec or some thing that they try to launch at the beginning of the game doesn't work properly. that's the reason it doesn't play because there's no reason why the deck shouldn't be able to play that game. Yeah, I think one of the ones I run into is Crusader Kings 3. It's got some weird pop-ups at the beginning of the game. And sometimes I can get right through them and get to play. And sometimes I want to fling my beloved Steep Deck across the room. Yeah.

So it's anti-cheat, one reason, video codex or other proprietary techniques that they use that, you know, the Steam Deck doesn't know how to interpret yet. or, and this is also a relatively large category at this point, it actually does work and Valve just is marking it as unsupported because they haven't fully tested it yet, which is wild. It is wild to me, not that they haven't tested the whole hybrid, but it's wild to me how many games Valve says, hey, this doesn't work, but they haven't gone back to retest and it actually does. Mass Effect is a good example of that, the legendary edition. The majority of people who play it have no issues with it, but it continues to see it. say, does not work. Don't try it. Mass Effect is the one where there was a period of time where it wouldn't launch unless you, like, jumped through some hoops because EA broke that and it broke

a lot of other EA games by introducing a new version of their EA launcher, which used to be called Origin. That's a whole long story. They introduced a new version of the EA app, and it just, they'd never tested it on the deck, and it didn't work, and it broke everything. And you couldn't see the prompts that you needed to click through in order to get into your game. It wouldn't ask you like several things and those things wouldn't graphically show up on the deck. They do now, particularly if you enable proton experimental. But those are still all marked unsupported because EA hasn't quite finished it yet so they run properly. Like, EA keeps breaking it with new versions.

And so Valve, I think Valve is waiting until that all settles down. But like The Witcher 2, Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl, XCOM, Enemy Within, the original Half-Life, those games are all marked as unsupported. all just run. And now everything seems to be ready. Well, not everything, but a lot of it. Like, it seems like something where I could recommend it to a family member and not have to worry about doing tech support all the time. Yeah.

I largely agree with you. Like, I recommend this now to people who want a PC gaming system that they can take with you. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to people who do not like the PC of experience of like tweaking settings, because you can still absolutely play a game on Steam Deck and be like, this runs, but it doesn't run very well. And if you come from the PC background where you're like, okay, I will turn down the shadows and set the game spec to low, but then I will increase the anti-aliasing because this is

a 720P, you know, 800P screen where you really need anti-aliasing or else games look pixely, if I'm coming from that background, or if I know the person I'm recommending, it comes from that background, absolutely, no question. If you have $400 to spend, you want this portable gaming PC, do it. If you're the kind of person who like, you want everything to just work, like sticking a cartridge into a Nintendo Switch works, and you don't want to think about settings ever. It's not there yet. It could be there someday, but if you're that kind of person, I would wait until future handhelds. That's fair.

I think they can go just get a switch until it. It plays a lot of these games. But you probably shouldn't because there'd probably be a switch press. next year. But anyhow, moving on. Or this year, it's 2023. I expect this holiday. Well, maybe we'll have something.

I don't know. Well, thank you, Sean, for coming on and talking about the steam deck. We're going to let you go because we'll have to bring you back again to talk about the seam deck. We want to do it over lots of different episodes. Appreciate you taking the time. I'm so happy. I will come back to tell you about the latest tax later on.

Awesome. Okay, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you for listening. As always, there's a ton more coverage on the site, and you can see. all the stories that we've talked about this week on theverge.com. If you have thoughts, feedbacks, feelings, steam deck game recommendations, you can always email the Vergecast at Vergecast at theverge.com. And if you have questions, call the hotline.

It's 866, Verge 11. That's 866 Verge 11. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Mentors is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production. and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I will not be here on Friday.

I'm going to be in Disney World, but Nelai will be back this Friday with a whole bunch of the verge crew, and they're going to be talking about the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event and all the other news that popped up this week. So stay tuned. Till then, rock on.