The Vergecast - Homepod review, Intel's Vaunt smart glasses, and Falcon Heavy launch

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

A lot of things happened this week in the world of The Verge, and we have some first-hand experience to share. This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul, welcome science reporter Loren Grush back to the show to tell us what it was like to watch SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket launch in person, as well as meeting SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Also, Dieter got an exclusive look at Intel’s new smart glasses, and Nilay reviewed Apple’s HomePod, so they share their experiences with the technology and discuss what it means for the rest of the market. There’s a lot more in between that — like Paul’s weekly segment “USB-C-crets” (I think that’s how you spell it) — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 02:17 - Intel made smart glasses that look normal 20:40 - Apple HomePod review 44:28 - SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch with Loren Grush 1:07:57 - Paul’s weekly segment “USB-C-crets” 1:11:44 - The Uber-Waymo trial: greed, ambition, and robot cars 1:15:01 - Inside the desperate fight to keep old TVs alive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode, The Vergecast is brought to you by Cyber Systems. That's S-I. Hey, Eli, how do you spell cyber? I'm doing it. I hate you, Dieter. I was helping. I think it's cyber. It's S-I-B-E-R.

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with the Roboform password manager. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, which is the flagship Ship podcast of The Verge. And I believe every podcast everywhere. Oh. I'm just going for it this week. The best boat. Are you the best? The finest boat in the left.

I'm Nilai. Paul is here. Hello. Deeter is here. Hello. Hello. I will say this. Last week was a little bit of a ride because there was no news. We just fell right off the edge of that nonsense cliff.

This week, in comparison, full of news. Yeah. Too much news. One of the newsiest weeks ever. And I'll say this. Lauren Grosch is going to join us for the second half of the show because she was at the Falcon Heavy launch. She hung out with Elon Musk there, one of the few people to interview him at the Falcon Heavy launch. She watched it take off.

Elon Musk, by the way, smells like Ootswade. Free advertising, man. We charge for that. I actually don't know if he does or not. We'll find out. I bet. We'll ask Lauren. Anyway, but Lauren watched the Falcon Heavy take off.

She watched it break into its constituent parts, and she watched two of those parts land. And then we all watched the car float around space. I watched the car. Yeah. Which was amazing. So Lauren's going to join us in the second half, but there's tons of just tech news this week. So let's start. Dieter, you started us off with a bang on Monday.

You had the big exclusive on Intel's vaunt, glasses, which I don't want to, I mean, it's exciting, but they're kind of like a pebble for your face. Is that the situation? That's the uncharitable way to put it. I'm an uncharitable person, so that's one of the ways that I put it in the story. You know, face pebble. Yeah. So, okay, these are smart glasses from Intel that the prototypes don't look exactly normal, but they could potentially look super normal.

And the way that they got there is they cut out all the other crap that usually goes in their smart eyeglasses. There's no camera. There's no touch panel. The batteries are very small. display is very low power, so they don't need to power a bunch of pixels and they don't need to have a bunch of colors and whatever. And the way that it works is it has a Vixel, which is a shoot, vertical cavity, something, something laser. It's a very tiny laser. The best part of that is

laser is also an acronym. So it's an acronym that goes into an acronym. But a VIXel is not like a pixel. Correct. Not a pixel. Pixel is not an acronym. It's not. Don't look at me that one. We'll never know. Anyway, keep going. A Vixil laser. It shines into a reflective area on the glasses, the lens, and then that reflects into the back of your retina. And so you get a perfectly sharp image beamed by a laser directly into your eyeball. And it connects over Bluetooth to your phone, obviously. But all the electronics can be really small so they can just fit in the front half of both sides of the stems of the glasses.

and their goal is to, I don't know, like they don't want to just do notifications. They say they have an AI until talked about AI before. And they used to have what's his name from Big Bang Theory Talk, but it'd anyway, they intend to release this thing to developers as an early access program. Don't call it whatever Google Glass called their thing. The Explorer Edition. Yeah, Explorer Edition.

You're exploring looking like a moron. And they want people to make apps for it. There's a whole bunch of nerdy history. we can talk about here if you want to. Yes, please. That's what we do here about it. I think the first thing, everybody's first question, it's safe to shoot light lasers into your eyes, correct?

So I have not independently verified this with, I don't know, an ophthalologist. Okay. But they say, Intel says, that this is barely a class one laser. It's like at the bottom end of class one, and you have to start getting approvals and regulatory blas once you hit class two. So they're super not worried. about it. Okay.

Yeah. Well, I mean, light goes into your eyes all the time. Yeah, but it's true. Yeah. It's just a slightly more focused light in laser form. Laser focused. So, my God. What if you got burning on your retina for us?

Oh, man. So, didn't there another crazy, like, virtual display? There's like a great picture of you. What was that thing called that was also retinal projection? Oh, that was, yeah, that was the Avagant Glick. Right. So that was also retinal projection, right? They weren't like, there wasn't like an LCD in front of me. They were like putting full color into your eyes. It was just a huge headset. Yeah. It was a giant crazy huge headset and it had, I think it was a 720p resolution or something and it was full color and blah, blah, blah. This is 150 by 400 pixels, monochrome red. And when you aren't looking sort of down into your right in your peripheral vision there, you don't see it at all. It's just completely. gone, which is kind of crazy. Like I thought, I first, what I first used is like, this is broken.

And they're like, no, it's not. I'm like, well, maybe it's misaligned. They're like, maybe, but do you see it? And I like kind of glanced down on there it was. I was like, oh, that's the point. If you don't want to look at it, you don't have to. Does it feel like looking down at a book or are you like, how awkward is it to look down at it? It's just sort of, I don't know.

Like, if you're looking at your computer, how awkward is it to like look at the shift key or the delete key? actually is probably a better. I'm a touch typist, either. You know that about me. It's just sort of there. What's interesting is having it on all day, you can learn to ignore it, but if there's movement there,

like when it switches from one thing to the next thing, because I was just looking at a demo loop, you notice it. It's like you see movement in your peripheral vision, because your eyes are never just laser-focused straight ahead. They kind of roam around, you know, all the time. And so through your natural roaming around, if there's useful information down in that corner, you'll notice it and look at it. But because you don't have to focus on it.

Right. That's the thing. Right. There's useful information on my computer screen all the time. And I'm like, that's probably some stuff. I'm not going to look at that now because I have to like look at it. But this is always in focus, right? So you look down and you just like see it?

Yep. If there was like a flashing red alert down there, would it maybe get your attention? Probably, yeah. So it's probably super annoying. They really want this thing to be not annoying. So they're not intending on having it just blast all your notifications through. They really want all the information to be super contextual, you know. Okay.

So here's my set of questions. So it's really. That's all I'm here for is answer questions about this thing. Because I've been talking about it and writing about it and making like editing videos about this thing since literally December. Wow. And so like I don't know what is interesting about it anymore because like I've been spending so much time with it. Yeah, you're in it. Okay, so it's a pair of glasses.

They look really normal-ish. Yeah. They're a little bit heavier than regular glasses, but you wear them. And there's a cool display technology in it. We were at CES. We saw lots of cool display technologies integrated in glasses. It was just a theme of our show. But, like, a cool displays, like a monitor, right?

Like, they need to connect it to some software. And so to do contextual notifications, like, those come from your phone. Is Apple going to let them read every notification on the iPhone and do some stuff and pipe it to these glasses? Yeah. So, here's where we get nerdy. One, probably not. They'll have the same access to notifications that Pebble did, for example. And that wasn't enough for Pebble to be really successful.

Now, you, there's no, the only... Wait, we should also clarify that the Pebble guy works on the Vaughan team, right? Yeah, yeah. So his name is Itaio Vonchak. He, sorry, Itai Vonchak. He was the, he didn't found Pebble. He wasn't there at the beginning, but he was one who created that timeline interface that Pebble had, where, like, you could, like, scroll up and back and forth through your timeline on the smart watch.

Yeah. It was really smart. Had really neat animations. Anyway, the glasses input, they have an accelerometer and a compass, right? And so it can sort of tell what direction you're looking, and it could theoretically use that as inputs for gestures, for dismissing notifications or whatever. It may eventually also have a microphone so that may get them to the point

where they run into problems where you want to act on a notification and therefore it doesn't have enough OS access. But their vision, from what I've been able to gather, and everyone's making light of this, is that the thing gets programmed basically via JavaScript, which is crazy that they can fit a thing that can parse JavaScript on your face.

Just think about that for a second. But before he was at Pebble, he was at WebOS. He was working on WebOS, and he was working on the WebOS TV. And the interesting thing about the WebOS TV and LG wasn't that it was WebOS. Is that the whole thing was designed from the jump to basically act like Google Cast. Right. And so he understood that, like, the important thing about a TV was getting streams of information from the Internet. And reading between the lines of what they were willing to talk about with the software,

The important part of this thing isn't necessarily that I can gather information from the operating system from the phone. The important thing is that it is able to act as an end point for stuff on the Internet. And all the phone really needs to do is provide access to the Internet. And then if you've got a cloud service, if you're Yelp or whatever, you can talk directly to the glasses and not have to deal with iOS's app limitations. No. That's my idea. Wrong. Why is that wrong?

Paul, by the way, if you're in your car, you're listening, what you missed was Paul during that entire explanation, Paul inhaling air and getting tenser and tenser and tenser. And then, and then bellowing the word no. In 2012, I wrote an absurdly insightful piece about Google Glass, then known as Project. Glass. Yeah. I was in on this early. Yeah. Google thought it was...

You got to remember your insight. It was an internet computer thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It helps you connect to the computer. Yeah. Yeah.

Helps you connect to the internet. That's right. You got it. I dove into the delightful and insightful and amazing history of wearable computing. Okay. Uh-huh. Which were typically human augments. So the one of the...

What was the headline of this piece? Uh, project glass. glass and the epic history of wearable computers. Subtitle, how we've tried to become more than human. So good. So there's so much to say. Look, whenever you try something new, what I want you to look for is something Paul wrote in 2012 that says you're making a mistake.

So a computer, as someone once said, it's like a bicycle for the mind. Yeah. Steve Jobs said that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good guy. It should augment the human.

And I don't know if Intel's like completely off base, but it's just, one of the first things that this reminded me of is that there was a research in their early 2000s who was working with just like a little light that would light up in your peripheral vision. And it basically worked like a string around your finger. It'd be like, it would remind you if you'd been sitting too long or like you've got something come up just like, hey, what are you forgetting right now? And it just kind of pop up as a tiny little reminder. Obviously, this could do a lot better at that, like, putting text up.

Then there's other researchers who are using, they basically made like a shared text document or a database of text documents where they would write down all their notes. And then when they were in conversation, like let's say they were giving someone a tour of the MIT Media Lab, they'd be like bullshitting someone on this tour and they'd like pull up notes and like read notes. So like let's say you see somebody and you forget their name. A little prompt could show up and remind you their name. And why the Google Glass was so creepy to have a camera?

It's because it was an internet camera. Yeah. But the idea. If you roll up on somebody with a film camera and just start taking photos, I don't like that either. Yeah. I'm still confused about like where you're going, Paul. What's the problem? I want a wearable computer that augments the person. Yeah. But is not a new, a new tool for accessing the internet. I want things. So I think they want to help me remember things. Right. They want to help me remember. So one of the hypothetical examples. And to be clear, like a lot of these hypotheticals, it's impossible to know if they're actual hypotheticals or if they're like, we're saying this is hypothetical, but really we're doing it. So one of their hypotheticals is. is when an incoming call comes in, we will be able to surface the notes from your last meeting.

Or we know that it's that person's birthday. And so you'll be able to start your conversation with, hey, it's your birthday. All of these examples of like contextually relevant information are, they set off my internal alarm bell with regard to like Google now in particular. Because people have been saying stuff like this for years. and it never seems to quite pan out. I think actually a really good example that says Windows phone.

Windows phone promised a world of integrated contextual information, and it was people-focused and not app-focused and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it just, I don't know, it didn't work. Yeah, I just, I think the display technology is cool. Yeah. And that's a neat idea. I don't know if I agree that WebOS TVs are meant to be these, like, endpoints. like I have one.

It's a smart TV. It runs apps. It is an integrated, complete thought of a computer that displays video on a very nice panel at the end. I don't... That's like a different...

You know what I mean? Like, the idea that you're going to connect a display to a sequence of cloud services that just like push important information to you. And use your phone as a Bluetooth modem. That seems different. Like it is meaningfully different, but it has to know about what's happening in your life. Yeah, no, like the other hypothetical, again, I don't know how hypothetical is, is it knows where you are.

It has information from Yelp. And so as you look left and right down the street, it can actually show you augmented information about the thing you're looking at. Right. Which is definitely something people are trying to do with like AR kit and Google's doing very similar things. Yeah. That's interesting. The advance here, as near as I can tell, Dieter, is the glasses don't look at. insane.

Right. They've built a display into glasses that look more or less like glasses and way more or less the same as glasses. And because they run

JavaScript, there have been other very small computers that can run JavaScript. The whole reason you make it run JavaScript is that so regular developers

can write stuff for it. Everybody, every developer knows JavaScript. So everybody who can make a website could make a service

for this, ideally. Here's what I want. And then you can mine Bitcoin on it. That's right. What about a fact checker?

It's always listening to everything you say, and it just flashes bullshit when you start lying. That'd be incredible. Deeter, it just seems like the open question here is very much, how are they, like, are they just going to sell this thing to Google and let Google, like let Android phones connect to it directly in triage information that goes to it? Right. The back half of this story is, well, maybe the front half, I don't know.

know. Last week, depending when you're listening to this, Bloomberg got the scoop that these things existed. And, you know, I was under a embargo. I couldn't talk about it. But Bloomberg did the reporting. And part of their story where they got the basics of what this thing were right, they said that Intel was looking to find an investor for this thing to maybe spin out some other startup to actually sell it. And then the investor that they want is, you know, somebody with quote unquote retail experience. I think. I think if Intel tries to do this on their own, one, Intel doesn't do this, right?

They make smart pulls that they never sell, and they make chips. So they've got to spin it out somehow because Intel has no knowledge of how to sell stuff to consumers. But two, they need somebody that can either help them, like, get into eyeglass stores, or they need someone who can help them solve this, like, platform access problem or both. There's only one answer. I've got two I know You go first

Bixby glasses Samsung buys the tech Bixby on your face How about this? A partnership When you're not looking at it It's a little line drawing Of a cartoon dog

Yeah every time you look away The dog starts dancing But when you're trying to look down The dog stops You can never see Bixby He's always there I think it should be a partnership A joint effort between

Fitbit and HP to see who can destroy it the quickest. Who can crush this project? All right. Well, I had one other question, Deere, does this, the lasers in your eyes? Has this has this have anything to do with how Magic Leap works? Do you know? Magic Leap had apparently, Sean Hollster actually brought this up in his C-Nite article,

had looked at similar technology, but we don't know if that is what they intend to use in a final product. I think the trend that you're picking up on, All the implementations might be different, but the trend definitely seems to be we're not going to put a screen in front of your face. Correct. We're going to somehow directly address your eye. Right, which is what Magic League is doing, what Avagant was doing, which is what Vaughn is doing. It just seems like we're not looking at a screen is not the right answer for these products. Right.

Yeah, or placing a holographic screen in front of your eyes is not the right answer for these products, which is what HoloLens is essentially doing. Ideally, they'll be able to overlay your vision. So you'll be able to look at a person, like with Magic Leap. I mean, ideally, you get the AR kit or the AR core experience from a phone on your eye. Right. But I think we're just a long way. But you have real-world objects in front of you that are being tagged. Yeah.

Which is kind of why it needs a camera. It's really sucks. Let's catch toy, too. Thanks, Google. But as soon as you put a camera on it, it gets rejected. Nobody wants that. So my great insightful piece was I went to the Indy 500 wearing Google Glass. I was very hungover that day.

That's just, I'm just going to be honest with everybody. And I walked around with that thing. And all the people at the Indy 500 came up to me and said, is that Google Glass? And I would say yes. And they, without fail, young, old, rich, poor, whoever, can you see through clothes? It was just the immediate expectation of the product. Yes, that's what I'm saying. It was insanity.

So I'm saying. Yeah. You got to read my piece. You got to read mine. We'll send each other links in Slack. All right. So that's the bot. And then on Tuesday, we had HomePod review.

What a day. Oh, my gosh. What a day. So Dieter's like been working on this thing for weeks. Becky was out of town over the weekend. And I basically only talked to Siri for like two days. And I came, she came home. And she was like, why won't you leave me alone?

And I was like, because you actually answer. answer my questions. And then you wrote an essay on loneliness. So I picked that word in the headline or in the first line that it's just like a lonely

product. And I mean that you can watch our video. We played with it on Circuit Breaker. If you want to see how it works, go watch that stuff.

I just want to talk about philosophically what is going on with the HomePod. Because when I say it's lonely, it sounds great. Apple's first claim is it's a great speaker.

I think they've met that goal. I think it's really interesting that they own beats. And I took a tour of their audio lab. I looked at all their fancy stuff. Other people got it too. It's great. It was like a fun day. It was on the record.

I asked, did you guys talk to the beats people? And Gary Greaves, who's like director of audio engineering, was just like very carefully answered the question. You know, at various points in development, we allowed trusted listeners to listen to it. Trusted listeners. Which I'm just reading is like, every now and again,

Jimmy Ivy was like allowed to listen to a home mom. I mean, that aside, but like Beats has this like very distinct sonic signature, right? It's like it is, it's very base heavy. Some people like it. Some people love it. Some people hate it. But it's like a very distinct.

signature. And if you listen to the way that Dr. Dr. Dr. and I mean, we talk about beats products. They're like, sound quality is garbage. We've got to give it back to people. We've got to make it sound like the studio. All of the same kinds of language, but beats does not offer you like studio sound. Right. And so this is a very tuned sound for this kind of music. It's very, in particular, it is very bass-heavy. The HomePod,

same language. We want it to sound like a studio. And they actually did tune it to like a pretty flat response curve. They told me, I was like, is it actually flat? And they're like, well, we made it a little fun. That is really interesting, because when you listen to it, most speakers have like a scooped frequency response curve. So they emphasize the bass, they emphasize the treble, mid-range a little scooped.

It's like an inverse parabola. The humpot is flat. So you get all of this, you get all this bass. It makes an incredible amount of bass for it sound, but you get all of this mid-range that You don't usually hear or is like usually deemphasize in some way. It just sounds really different and like really good and really spacious. That's great. I love that.

Super into that. I think how it works is so unintuitive. Like we, in the video we have this animation of how it works. It took me forever to just like explain because it doesn't make any sense. It's a whole good device. I was watching that video with with somebody who had not been paying attention to the HomePod stuff. And we would watch it and then stop it. and then rewind it 45 seconds, and then watch it again, and then talk about it for five minutes,

and then watched a third time. Yeah. And you did a very good job explaining it. It takes a lot to figure out. My notes from my conversations with Apple about how it works, I sent him to Danny Deal, who one of our great reporters says back on our audio. They're basically like a graduate seminar in like sound reproduction theory. So they're like crazy.

So it's got these seven speakers on the bottom, and it's got this four inch woofer that points out the top, which is not normal for anything. The speakers, our video, in Apple's video, it makes it sound like the tweeters are arranged, like, coming out, but they actually have wave guides in front of them. So the sound comes down. It comes down from the bottom and reflects off the table. So you said it, you have to put on us real soft service.

We actually put it in this podcast studio, Miles, one of our engineers and Andrew, our podcast engineer, they put it in this room on the carpet and just, like, instantly muffled. Because it fires down. Really? It doesn't fire out. It fires down into the ground and uses, the table. So that's like super

different. And those seven tweeters don't, they're not individual channels of sound which is super counterintuitive. They use beam forming which means they use like interference of the individual sound waves to cancel out and like focus the sound

energy. And they if you put it against a wall it creates three beams. If you put it in the middle of the room, it fires in 360 degrees all directions. And all of that is happening in real time while they're tuning the room and then they have a seventh microphone that measures the position of the bass speaker, and they can push the bass speaker louder and harder than other companies because they know that they won't blow it out. They can stop it if they measure it every 30 milliseconds they measure it.

That is just an extraordinary amount. I think when I was talking about, I literally said, that is fucking rad. And everyone just, like, look pleased with themselves. Because it's cool. Yeah. That's great. Like, man, I want that all the time. I want some, like, crazy speaker computer that's, like, listening to itself.

And then it's like home kit. Mom, Mom. It's a serious. HomeKit is a disaster. What? Setting up HomeKit is so fiddly and insane and it doesn't have a canonical home. Where's HomeKit live? Wait, are you say there's no home for HomeKit?

There's no app. HomeKit doesn't live anywhere. Right. There's an interface for it on your phone, but everything connects to the HomePod. Or it used to be the Apple TV. Or the Apple TV. Or just an iPad that you have. line around.

What? Yep. You just have an iPad in your house. It can be a HomeKit Hub. So everything connects to a device, but the settings for that device are not linked logically to it.

They're just like floating in space. And then every other device in your life has like another app except for the HomePod. The settings for the HomePod are in the HomeKit app. But if you want to turn off the feature, let's anybody text with your HomePod, which is a default. So I'm actually,

I'm going to defend HomeKit briefly. I think that the problem you're referring to is real. I think it's the best Apple could do. I think they could very, very easily clean up the interface of the app itself. The fact that there's settings weirdly located under a compass icon in the upper left, for example. It's insanity! The difference between like scenes and devices, like, it's all very messy. Can you imagine Steve Jobs looking at the home app and being like, yeah, ship it? He would be like, everyone is fired. This elevator ride is over. He would compare it to the situation on Android where every single app is, every single device is controlled by a different

app. There's no uniformity across them at all. And trying to, you know, unify all of your different smart home devices that are on different things is a nightmare. Sure, but then you just buy a Smart Things Hub and you open the Smart Things app and it's like relatively fine. It's not great, but at least it's like, you know, like it's like a unified interface. Yeah, you have to buy a special piece of hardware. You got to buy a special piece of hardware with Apple stuff too. Anyway, look, so that part is weird and bad. And then the Apple music part, there's been just a lot of conversation about this.

Yeah. I said in our video, you can't really use it with Spotify. Other people are friends, like other people that we're friends with, Jonathan Morrison, good guy. You know, he opened his video with, you can use it with Spotify and showed airplay to Spotify. Yes, you can airplay almost anything to it. but Airplay isn't actually controlling it. So Spotify is running on your phone. And if you are the sort of person who cares enough

about sound quality by a HomePod, you are now sending whatever bitrate Aug files to your phone, which are being decoded, and then over Airplay re-encoded to Apple Lossless, which is not great for sound quality necessarily, sent overairplay to the HomePod. And then the HomePod can send Airplay commands back to your phone.

But if your phone goes away, It's all happening on your phone. And there's like remote. There's like remote buttons on the HomePod. What you want is to just talk to the HomePod and have it run Spotify. That's very different. And I don't know why I can't. It's an iOS computer as an A8 chip.

It's almost like they made a speaker. Apple makes all of its money in hardware sales. That doesn't have any plugs in the back. It's basically did. It's like, this is the best speaker. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I don't think I'm using.

You can't plug music into it. but just know in your head how good it sounds. I just think Apple Music gets you anything. Like it doesn't make it better. But the fundamental question here. In the way that Apple's other software makes its hardware better, they make their money in hardware sales. Apple Music, look, can I get really esoteric?

Oh my God. Okay. It's true. It's wild. There's this concept in the world that digital copyright people always talk about called the celestial jukebox, right? What happens when you have free? This is before people start talking about the cloud.

the celestial jukebox. What happens when you can just access any song in the world from anywhere and it just comes to you? That's streaming services. It's like this thing, this very esoteric idea that copyright people used to talk about all the time, came true in the form of these services. They are not differentiated to you in the consumer. Literally the only difference between Spotify and Apple Music to you is the range of songs in the catalogs. Catalogues are largely similar and the interfaces on your phone.

You take away the interplaces and you replace them with very. voice services, now they are completely undifferentiated. There's nothing that they can offer you apart from, on the margin, some songs that the other service doesn't have. There's literally... Well, some playlist, curation.

I got my first ever good daily mix because they just cribbed from all my favorite playlists I've made myself. These are the ways that they are trying to differentiate, but they're not, they all do it. They can also differentiate by being available in more places.

All right. So spot. Spotify is available in more places than Apple Music. Right. The celestial jukebox has a larger reach. Right. Right. You can connect to that jukebox using a wider range of devices. But I think of celestial jukeboxes.

I think that they can reach everything. Right. So Spotify is a horizontal service. If you're in space. You can get a car. If you buy a connected car, it runs a Spotify app natively in the car. Right. There are all kinds of speakers of Spotify Connect. WebOS TVs have Spotify Connect.

Like they're everywhere. Maybe up. The PlayStation has Spotify. modified. There's two fundamental questions that we need to talk about here if we're complaining about this. One, will Airplay 2 be so good and get adopted so quickly that, and maybe it'll have some Siri integration that this problem goes away because Airplay 2 is like deeply integrated into Syria in some way. And so like whether or not the HomePod talks to it directly or not, this problem goes away too. did Apple not include these other services and these other capabilities into the HomePod because they're philosophically against it or because they just haven't gotten to it yet?

And I suspect the answer to that second question is yes and yes. I think that they haven't gotten to it yet, but there are some people that don't want to and there are some people that do inside Apple and they're both working to achieve their ends at the same time. That's probably way more nuanced and correct than what I was going to say. I don't think Apple actually cares about whether or not it runs Apple Music. Apple Music doesn't make it many money. It never really will, compared to the vast amount of money they make selling hardware.

But to the point of how you led this conversation off, if they've truly made the world's greatest cantaloupe-sized speaker, maybe it's a competitive advantage. I don't. Everybody wants to have a home pod, but you gotta use Apple Music with it. Oh, well, it's the same price of Spotify. I guess I'll switch. I don't think that people care about sound quality. I'm somebody who does.

See, this is what I was talking about two weeks ago. Everyone wanted the iPod because it had a compelling design and a compelling technological advantage. Is everyone going to want the home pod in the same way? And the answer is, yeah, I'll probably get a sonous one because they have a different level of like things they're paying attention to than we did back when the iPod came out. And we're just like we're smarter, savvier consumers of how like cloud services work than we were back then. Well, yeah, so the compelling technical, in your framework deeter, what Paul is asking is,

is the speaker stuff a compelling technical advantage for the home pod? Right. Right. And I think the answer is people are out there with AirPods in their ears. They do not care about sound quality. It is just abundant proof that they don't. The other products that Apple sells that are very popular are beat speakers, which some of them are very good. Most of them sound not very good, right?

Like they have that sonic signature that people love or hate. There's not like a... Beats worked because the people who liked how it sound loved how it sounded. Yep. And they were a status symbol. Yep. It was like a one-two punch. And they went.

They were everywhere. I'll put, okay, I'll, I'll put it this way. So we, A, B, tested all the speakers in my house. It was like really, really long, but very fun day. We listened to the same song over and over and over again. What was the song? It was, because we had to film it. It was like a royalty-free.

Oh, no. It's on the video, you can watch it. It's called Buffalo. It's very, it's real something. We all know all the words now. The words are nonsensical. Okay. But we listen to it over and over again.

It was abundantly clear in that AB test that maybe the son-us play five, which is much bigger. could do what the HomePod was doing in terms of filling the room and being spacious and all that stuff. But compared to every other speaker, the HomePod was just like obviously better. No contest compared to the Sonos Play 1 or the Sonos 1 and everything else that we were trying. The Google Home Max does not sound nearly as good. But I think only crazy people do that. I think product reviewers do that.

I think regular people who are not product reviewers buy a pretty nice speaker. It is probably better than the other speakers that they've had. They set it down. They turn it on and they're like, that sounds pretty good. And they move out on with their days. And I will tell you, I have son to play one in my kitchen. It sounds really good while we're cooking. It's not like an active listening environment, right?

The waters run. We're doing all this stuff. It sounds really good. That's it. Bar reached. You can't improve that experience unless you are a very serious kind of music listener. So I don't know if sound quality is the thing that wins there, especially when the interface, if you want to get back,

to what Dieter's saying with the iPod, the interface for the iPod was like brilliant. Siri is the interface here. Siri is not brilliant. And that's like the other thing that makes it lonely is like Alexa is this vibrant platform. And like maybe you don't use any skills, but there's all kinds of new skills.

You can like monkey with stuff. You know, they made the ad for the Super Bowl. Now there's like a skill where Gordon Ramsey yells at you. It's like there's like fun stuff happening with Alexa. It's like free to develop for. There's a vibrancy to that platform. there's no vibrancy to the Siri platform, as near as I can tell.

And to get a new capability in Siri, you've got to get an app on the phone. It's just like, oh, that's why I say it's lonely. Like there's so much exciting stuff happening with voice assistance, but none of that developer or ecosystem attention is pointed at Siri in the same way. So you get this and like, yeah, you can set one time or at a time, you know, I can play Apple music,

set up HomeKit, flip on a light. Yeah. But all the action is happening. happening somewhere else. I don't know. Just lonely. It sounds good though. Perfect, lonely thing. Yeah. That doesn't seem like Apple. Like Apple's success is like the app store on the iPhone. Like make an app store for the HomePod. Just do it. So they ate chip. Well, they, I feel like Siri from day one, they were not capitalizing on their app store's success.

Massive lead. Yeah, they weren't capitalizing on the fact that developers love to make quality things for Apple products. Yeah. Siri is, here's my theory of Siri. It is the most un-appled thing they've ever done, and that is they got to market too early. Wow. You're so right. But they could have just won. They did, but they didn't because technology wasn't ready.

People didn't know how to interface with a voice assistant. They didn't know what the, like, killer app for voice was, and, like, the rules for, like, how you want to talk to this thing and opening it up to an app ecosystem. all the stuff that makes Alexa work was stuff that we didn't know about back then when it first came out. And it established itself and established what people think of it, and it hasn't been able to shake it since.

And some of that is fair. Actually, most of it is probably fair, but some of it's unfair. Siri's actually relatively capable, except for, you know, setting timers. If you think of how we personify, how voice assistants are the most, personified technology in our lives.

If you talk to somebody, and they're a big dumbo. You're not going to come back. I wonder if six months later, I wonder if that dumb person is super smart. Well, maybe it's software. It gets smarter.

Software does. But most people don't become dramatically smarter in six months. That would be surprising and it'd be really exciting. But it's not a person. If they do, then they end up getting, into becoming a tragedy where they get radically smarter in six months,

but then it turns out to be a degenerative disease, and then they die six months later. Did you just recap flowers for Algernon on the Vergecath? Yes, I did. Just checking, buddy. Early after that, I made a really great corporate metaphor about the ones who walk away from Omelas, too. So I'm having a banner day.

Do you guys want to talk about Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIM, the greatest children's work ever written? Was it? Mrs. Frisbee? The Rats of Nymn, very, very good book. I've heard of it. The greatest children's book ever. I don't know about that.

I just like the idea of clever mice run around doing stuff. Do they become dramatically smarter within the span of six months? Well, it depends on. How do you think rodents perceive time? Here's, here's, in rat ears? Here's what Apple could do. Kill Siri. Right?

Come out with a new. Here is Apple Assistant. The hot new, gender neutral, vastly more intelligent, smart assistant. I like it. I just think, look, this platform thing is the thing I've been thinking about. Spotify is a platform, right? Like, people build apps that access Spotify and use it in surprising ways. We covered one this week where basically the recommendation algorithm.

them is laid bare to you and you can like adjust sliders and see what it gives you. Spotify builds its own weird little apps, like time capsule. Like it's a platform for music that extends and people can do things with it. Sonos is like a little bit of a platform for like audio in your home. Right? There are lots of different kinds of devices that connect to Sonos. It's all one party. It's a one party platform.

But you can like fit it into every little corner and every little way that you want. By the way, uh, CEO Sonos Patrick Spend. was on Too Embarrassed to Ask right before the reviews came out for the HomePod. So if you want to hear how Sonos is dealing with this before the HomePot came out, but nothing changed. You should go listen to Too Embarrassed Ask from last week, I think it was. Yeah. It's funny. Before I got the HomePot, I was like, this is a lot of bluster.

And afterwards, I was like, it's not as much bluster as I thought. But, you know, like Sonas. But Sonas makes home theater stuff. Right? They make little boxes that connector other stereos. They make amps that you just plug regular speakers into. It's a full, complete thought about how you might put music in every part of your house. Alexa, Google Assistant are platforms that developers are flocking to.

What you want is to be near the platforms where the action are or the platforms that can extend and fit into your life. I think what Apple is doing, this is I think the second time I've said this about Apple product, they are asking you to adjust your life to fit their products. And I just don't think that they're providing as much of value to you as you're getting out of that adjustment. I don't think you're getting as much for the cost of the adjustment in return from the product. That's like the core piece of the HomePod that makes it seem lonely to me. It's just like you alone in a room, smiling at audio quality. And I feel like the unanswered question is, is the HomePod?

fully baked or is that actually Apple's ideology? It was already late. That's like the crazy thing. You can be late and non-fully baked. It's like rushed and late at the same time as bad. Yeah. That's true. So here's just last one. Then we got to move on. We got it Lauren on the show. So it doesn't differentiate voices. So on Sugarbreaker, Paul, asked it to read texts.

I read my text. I read a Walt Mossberg text from Deli's phone. Neat. Whatever. It's not great. But what is cool is that when you say, hey, Siri, you know, my phone recognizes my voice. So when I say it, my phone lights up, and then it negotiates with the home pod of the network, and the home pod takes the query, which is neat.

Yeah, everybody does that. Right. Wait, wait, wait, just let me finish the thought. No, it's just neat that they do it. Yeah, but everybody does it. But because they don't recognize voices, if you, you know, you have an iPhone that isn't i clouded over to the home pod everything just goes off at once in both devices it's like literally like they just never had two people in a room at the same time

with the home pod well daily head was it select approved listeners what were they called trusted listeners it's just like get get some friends i don't know anyway i'm going to read one more ad and then we're going to talk about something much happier rockets cars in space this episode of the verge cast is brought to you by Mattress Firm. It has one question for all the I'm going to listen to a podcast to help me fall asleep people. You struggling to get some sleep. If you answered yes, you're in luck

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And if you're still awake, we're going to start the podcast again right now. Lauren Grush is here. Hello, Lauren. Hi. How are you? I'm okay. How are you? Well, I appear to have gotten more sleep than you recently, but you just came back from the

Falcon Heavy launch, which seems like a real emotional roller coaster. Tell us everything. Oh, gosh. Where should I start? Yeah, I mean, I've kind of been waiting for this launch for, what, five years now? And, yeah, I mean, as soon as I heard rumors of a launch day, I booked my ticket down to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where they launched from. I was told that you bought a one-way ticket. Is this true?

I did. I did. Well, I mean, it's a new rocket. So, you know, there could have been all sorts of technical issues. And if you'd been following the static fire, which is the test that they do before they fly the rocket, that static fire test kept getting pushed back and back and back. And then a government shutdown happened, which pushed back a bit. So I figured, you know, something similar would probably happen for launch.

But, I mean, it really worked out just right. The weather was really nice. I mean, we had some, there was some delays when we were down there on the day. They pushed back the launch like incrementally every 30 minutes. And we thought it was going to be pushed back to the next day. But then they ended up launching like 15 minutes. before their launch window cut out. Wow.

So it really was very lucky. So Lauren, you've been to, you've, like, watched a regular Falcon launch, rocket launch, right? You've been present or, like, in the zone for that. Can you, just having been, you know, within, I don't know how far away, how far were you? How far were you? How far were you? Three miles. We watched.

Three miles. Yeah. When you're at NASA, they have the NASA press site, which is like a nice little field that iconic countdown clock. And it's right next to the vehicle assembly building, which is that huge building with the NASA logo on it where the space shuttle used to sit and the Saturn 5 rocket was put. So it's a really great spot to watch the launch, and I really love being there for the launches.

What was the, like, if you could try and describe the difference between experiencing the Falcon heavy versus, you know, some other previous, not quite as huge and insane rocket, is Is it just bigger? Is it louder? Does it knock you over more? Is it just cooler? Yeah, it's all those things, really. I'd say, well, the first thing, but even before it launched is like the energy in the air was just kind of crazy because I've been to these launches before, and it's really not a lot of people. Some people come in from out of town, but it's mostly Florida Space Press Corps. But this time, I think they said like 400 reports. had requested credentials.

All the major networks were there. I mean, I think I saw something that it ran on all of the news, you know, during primetime or whatever, or they took it live. So first and foremost, it was packed when I was down there.

Then when it launched, I mean, I was warned beforehand that it would sound like a bomb. And it really did. Like, it starts off as this low rumble because it's far away.

so you don't hear it right away. And then it just kind of engulfs the entire area. And I was screaming at the top of my lungs and you couldn't hear me. Like I was trying to yell at Christian and you couldn't hear me. And yeah, I mean, it's just, it's so much bigger. And like, it, I would, I, even when you see a rocket, like a regular rocket launch, you're just like, how is that thing in the air? Like, it's so big.

And this time, this was like an even, you know, more heightened experience. I was just like, how is that thing flying? It's dichormous. Wait, so I have this question. I think it's, I think this is just like really common. I don't think SpaceX gives you a good sense of scale with their videos. Because there's rarely any like human sized elements in them. They're really far away.

And like I've seen people who think like the Falcon 9 is like a tiny little thing. But it's huge. Yeah. So how big is it? Oh gosh. I don't know the exact. number off the top of my head. But it's something like the main core is like

14 stories or 17 stories. You know, it's about the side. I think I compared it to the size of our office building. So, I mean, consider that. Like, you go to work inside a Falcon Heavy or a Falcon and it never goes to space.

I know. I was sort of, I feel like I read somewhere possibly on the verge, possibly something that you wrote. This was considered a success. if it didn't blow up and destroy the launch pad. Is that correct? Well, mostly, yeah.

So there were so many different failure scenarios for this because there were so many different moving parts. They not only were they launching it, but they were also landing all three of the boosters afterwards. So there was the possibility of, oh, it launched, but the boosters didn't land or, you know, yeah, it blew up. So it kind of, the scale of failure starts at blowing up the launch pad. That's the worst case scenario.

But that wasn't a big fear. We kept talking about it because the launch pad that it launched from is a pretty historic site. It's LC39A, which was used to launch the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. And it was used for 82 space shuttle missions. And now SpaceX leases the site from NASA, which is why they launch from there. So if they'd blown it up, they would have, you know, destroyed a landmark in space. And also it would have given SpaceX a huge headache because they're supposed to launch humans from that site later this year. So if they had blown it up, that would have significantly delayed that.

And that's a program for NASA that they're doing. So there would have just been all sorts of headaches if they had blown up the launch pad. Look, launch pads aren't about history. They're meant to be used. That's right. Wait, so let's let's get to the thing. You interviewed Elon, which is incredible. I did.

I did. Was he just like vibrating with nervousness? What was his vibe? No, he was so exuberant. He stepped out and you could just tell he was in the best mood. He was giddy, laughing, you know, like just, I don't know. He was just kind of glowing. So it was a nice interview.

He walked up to me and I told him that we bought one of his flame throwers. And he was like, he said, you shouldn't have done that. That's great. He says, too dangerous. So that's on y'all. That's what we're here for. I mean, I was just, there's a point in the video where you ask him, like, what are you most excited for? And he just, like, looks at the rocket for a while.

Right? And I was like. I do know exactly what you. you're talking about. And it's so funny. It's like I, it's the dumb, like, I build like an IKEA bookcase and then like for the rest the day, I'm just like looking at it. Like, I did it. And he's like looking at

the Falcon, like the same way, but like 10,000 times more. So, like, what, did you get, what was like the most interesting thing that Elon said to you? I like talking about the different possibilities

for the use of the falcon heavy. So he talked about how he'd be happy to, you know, have NASA use this in any way that they want with their plans. And he also told us at the time that, because I'd asked him about the trip around the moon that they were planning to do. Some background, like last year, they said they were going to fly two tourists around the moon on the Falcon Heavy. And he told me that they weren't sure if they were going to use the Falcon Heavy to send people anymore. They're probably just going to use their next big rocket, the BFR, to do that instead. So no, no tourists going to space on the Falcon Heavy

in the foreseeable future. What's the difference between the BFR and the Falcon Heavy? BFR is a whole lot bigger. So why do you, I heard, I forget, what is, what is the F nominally stand for? We know what it actually stands for, but what is the F and BFR supposed, like? It's big Falcon rocket. Okay. That's pretty good. I mean, he's just like a little kid.

He's like, he blasts his car to space. And he's like making these jokes. But why? So I heard in the press conference, he said, we almost canceled this thing three times. Yeah. Which is like interesting just as a phrase. Like we almost like we tried to and we couldn't stop ourselves from making this rocket. It's like how it came out.

But why continue the Falcon Heavy if they're just going to replace it with the BFR? I think for now it allows them to get into a different type of. a market for their business. And eventually, once they have the BFR, that can take over the business of both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy. So think of the BFR as like a combination of those two. And for now, you know, the Falcon 9 is going to focus on the smaller satellites and BFR and the Falcon Heavy can focus on, for instance, national security payloads that

the Falcon 9 can't lift right now because they're too big. you know, so I think of this is more of like a medium term solution as SpaceX continues to build and develop the BFR. Right. Okay. Let's talk about the car in space for two minutes. Okay. I love the car in space so much. Like, every time I think about it, like, I just get so happy. Like, is it, is, is it dumb?

Like, what, I don't know. What do you think about this? So, I can completely understand. And there was a lot of backlash. There still is to the car. You know, why not just auction it off and put something else that makes more sense, you know? And I totally think all of those concerns are valid. But at the same time, just look at the response that it got.

You know, everybody was, I mean, even my friends who give no, you know, they don't care at all about space. We're, you know, messaging me and talking to me. Like, everybody was so into it. So I'm all about something that engages people like that and gets them involved. I mean, I bet a bunch of astronauts were converted that day, you know, like, or soon-to-be astronauts. Well, the problem is that they're all, like, 10 years old and they think they get to go to space in a car. Yeah. Well, isn't the issue that, like, the rocket could have failed, so you need a payload that is not important, basically?

Yeah, I mean, that's. That was their justification, but I also saw a good point, and that's, you know, anybody who has a research payload, it's really hard to get a rocket to take you to orbit. So even if it had exploded, I bet there were people out there that would have gladly put their research on there for free because, hell, you know, that's a free rocket ride. Why not? Or not even for free, but even if at a discounted price with the chance of explosion, you know, like, that's a risk you always take when you go to space. So, you know, but like I said, you know, it's their decision. And I see both sides, but personally, I mean, those pictures are so good.

I mean, I think you're right. I think a lot of people, like everyone knows about the car in space. It's just everywhere. Yeah. Like, it is a symbol of, I mean, it's basically like the most cowboy America symbol ever. It's the most. Yeah. It's funny.

Like kids being converted. I was a teenager, I think, I read a short story by Arthur C. Clark called Sunjammer, also known as the wind from the sun, which is about a yacht race in space with like solar sails and stuff. And that was like, this captures why I love space. Like that short story did. And I feel like car and space also does that exact same thing that short story made me feel. Yeah. So, Laura, I think, I just want to say, it's like, if they hadn't put the dummy in it, it wouldn't have been as good. But, man, that shot.

And I think the thing that, I don't know if anyone else noticed it, but he had his arm, like, draped over the car door. And I was like, that's just like, that little detail, it's just crack me up every time. Like, it's so casual. It's not a 10, too. So much people say that they hated the car in space until they saw that the dashboard said, don't panic. because they send him along with a hitchhiker's guide, which is great. The thing that was tweaking me out the whole time

when I was watching the live stream is because it was rotating in and out of the sunlight, you would see the shadow move on his hand on the steering wheel, and I kept on thinking that he was moving, and I was like, ah, ha! If I were Elon, I would have put just a little robot in the helmet, and right before the feed cut out, he should have just turned the helmet to look at the camera

and then cut. That's good. Yeah. Someone told me that they should have had robots in the hands and it just do a thumbs up. That's pretty good. The feed is cut forever, right? Or will we ever get back? I don't think so, no. The batteries ran out.

Yeah. How do they attach the car? Do they tell you? That's what I was thinking about. Oh, no. How did it survive all that vibration? How is that dude sitting in it? There's a picture of it's like.

I'm sure that's proprietary technology. But it was like mounted at an angle inside the rocket. Yeah. So we were having the hardest time figuring out because normally how a normal payload works. They mounted on a payload adapter, which if you remember the Zuma mission, that was like what all the grief was about, the payload adapter didn't, you know, separate or that's the speculation.

The payload adapter didn't separate the satellite. So we were trying to figure out, you know, is the rocket eventually going to separate from the Tesla. And I think we found out that they didn't separate. So the rocket is forever mounted, or the Tesla is forever mounted to the rocket. So I thought the structure that it was mounted on might have been the payload adapter. And so it was eventually going to jettison the car off from the rocket. Was there air in the tires?

The tires looked inflated, but there's no way that they put air in that. There's no way that would stand up to the rigors of space. So what did they fill the tires? Yeah. No, I'm fairly certain that the tires couldn't have been filled because I saw a bunch of tweets that were like, you can't put air in the tires because it'll explode. I just have this image of Elon. They looked inflated. I just have this, like, he had to figure it out, right?

Yeah. Like, he's like in his hot tub, like, you know, like wine glass and hand being like, well, you can't have air in the tires. And, like, yeah. That was somebody's job for a month to. to like edit the car, alter the car, to like rig it up to be space ready. Yeah. I do need to know as many facts about the car that is in space. The car is fundamentally ridiculous.

It is a symbol of our national character. I think we found a commercial excuse for spaceflight. I think all current space industry should pivot to car launches. All right. So Lauren, here's my real question. And then we'll let you finally get some rest. Okay. Why is SpaceX able to do this?

and why are they just so far ahead? Like, it just seems like, you know, like they started landing Falcons and no one is catching up to them. Like, there's blue, I saw you were Instagram and that you like went by Blue Origin. Like, there was this moment when it seemed like, okay, all this commercial activity is happening. But it's just like SpaceX, just like racing ahead. And you just don't see the rest of it. Like, what is driving them so far ahead? Um, you know, I think that's a very complicated question. Um, but I think it's just a combination of

different things like, you know, it's, I'm sure the way that they do business, the way that they manufacture, they probably found some, some, you know, streamlined processes there that we're not aware of. And also, their, their business model is pretty smart, you know, they have a lot of private investment, but then they also, you know, have a lot of investment from NASA. And NASA's helps, like, they, what they'll do is they'll develop, um, capabilities with partial NASA funding. And, you know, they get a lot of flack for that, but look at where they, they are with it, you know, so I think it's just a combination of how they do business and, and how they, and the manufacturer and just being forward thinking, you know, um, when it comes to space, ironically,

there's a lot of people stuck in the past and then the old way of doing things and SpaceX is daring to think differently about it you know and so they get a lot of criticism for it but then here you go you get they launch a car into space but like you know ULA or Blue Origin or whoever else

like they can't reorient themselves fast and like what's holding them back? Well I mean let's not knock ULA because you know they like they have a very reliable rocket program. And I believe when I've spoken with ULA's CEO and he just says that, oh, you know, the reusability just as an economically feasible.

And to be fair, it's not like SpaceX is saving a ton of money with their reusability program. So I think it's more like ULA plays it safe, you know, whereas SpaceX just is kind of being a little more daring on that front. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about it, you know, previously before the Falcon Heavy and this sort of like incredible run of SpaceX hype, like rockets took off all the time. We were launching rockets in 2001, right? Like there wasn't this like incredible emphasis that's placed on it now.

I think that's like part of the SpaceX story. Like when you earlier launches a rocket, like the world doesn't. stop to like watch the live stream. Maybe they see younger HIPPER hosts on their live stream. Or they should put cars in their rockets. It's obvious. But you know, I mean, let's, that's the other thing. Like, I do love SpaceX, but they do get overhyped a little bit like when it comes to,

yeah, yeah, the Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket currently. But, you know, the space shuttle was a very powerful vehicle, you know, and so was the Saturn 5 rocket and we've got other rockets coming online in the coming years that will be more powerful than the Falcon Heavy. So yeah, I think SpaceX just has figured out how to capture the imagination and I think it's because they try to do new things and they also just are kind of sexy, you know, like they make things look good. Yeah. And they're very focused on aesthetics. And let's be honest, that's kind of, you know, how you get people to like what you do. Yeah. So I'm You mentioned Christian earlier, who's one of our video directors.

I saw Corey, one of our other video directors this morning, and he was saying that all of you were talking about how you were on this high after the rocket launched, and that you're like on the down swing, right? Because it's like it happened. What's the next big thing you're looking forward to? Oh, I mean, there's a ton happening this year. Like, I guess the next one I would say is the Mars Insight lander. is launching in May.

And so that's going to send another ladder to Mars. And then I'm really looking forward to the commercial crew program, which thankfully since the launch pad didn't blow up, hopefully that won't get delayed. And that's NASA's effort to put to put people on commercial vehicles.

And so SpaceX and Boeing are both developing the spacecraft. And they're supposed to do demonstration missions this year. However, a bunch of auditing has shown that they're probably that might get delayed to next year. But at least

we're getting close or we're hopefully getting close. And I think that when astronauts launch on those vehicles, we'll see even more interest than we did for the Falcon Heavy. Because that'll be the first time that we've sent people to space from

U.S. soil again. And it's been so long. I mean, the last launch was in 2011. So I think that'll be a huge event. Yeah. Also, spacecraft is coming back, which is kind of where I was leading you.

No, all that stuff is expect. Bigger picture, Eli. But no, spacecraft, I mean, that stuff is amazing. It's amazing that you are such an incredible space reporter,

and we get to see your work on the verge all the time. But spacecraft is coming back. Anything you want to say about it before we let you go? Yes, we've already filmed some really great stuff, and I have, I'm setting up more shoots, and I think we're going to have an even better season than the first, even though I really love the first season. So I'm really excited. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for delaying your sleep a little bit longer to come on the Vergecast. I know it's been a pretty wild ride for you. But thank you so much, Lauren. We'll talk to you soon.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. All right, we read one more ad, and we're going to come back, lightning round. extra long episode. Like I said, week is packed of news. All right, here's the ad. You ready? This episode of Vergecast

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Well, the bats, if it is just bats, they're definitely ethically treated. That explains this is a limited supply. Simplesafe.com slash rush All right, Paul, every week My dude, you do a segment. Yep. What's it called?

Always called USB secrets. Oh my God. Come on. Here's what I got The Dongle Life so wrong. I believe I've already admitted on this podcast that I lost

the Dongle Wars. What I thought was happening was that we would be able to use high bandwidth, high quality connections that are at the bottom of our phones to power new listening experiences. Yeah. And we could have great digital audio converters in our headphones. And our headphones would have power and noise canceling, but we wouldn't have to recharge them because they'd be powered off of the phone. Yeah. We were... A promise explicitly made by Phil Schiller at the iPhone 7. keynote.

And one of the reasons, part of the trick was, we haven't even shipped the AirPods yet. Yeah. Right? So, I was wrong. You're just supposed to buy Bluetooth headphones. And you're supposed to suffer, okay? So get ready to suffer. Essential came out with some $99 USBC earphones.

They originally launched with a dongle. And the dongle was not great. and their headphones are bad. Vlad reviewed them for the site. It gives them a five. Apparently, apparently great microphone quality. Yeah,

which actually is important to me. These headphones, I tried them before I shipped them off to Vlad, they get stupid break your eardrums loud. Like crazy loud. You've got to be really careful with them, which is interesting, I guess. They also make a $50 pair,

which maybe that's okay. But either way, I think the fundamental problem here is, building, offloading all of the electronics and the DAC and whatever into the headphones is I think just more, it requires more audio expertise than

I think most companies can bear it. It's a harder problem to get right than I think people are assuming. Well, amplifiers are more of a physics problem. You know, audio processing, if it's just based on chips, like it can get smaller and smaller. But once you've got to amp it,

you need a little bit of room. for amplification. Yeah, it's a real mess. It was a Helen Hadlack's birthday, and I was going to buy her USBC headphones because she's always complaining about it. She can't find any. And I was like, at any price, I would buy USBC headphones.

And it turns out, it can't. Can't be bought. I was like, here's a bottle of bourbon. I couldn't figure out the headphones. Elon Musk will fire a car into space before there's good USBC headphones. It's like, whatever. Sigh.

Okay, tiny little lightning around we're going to wrap up the show. It's been just a huge week of news, and I think this has gotten buried a little bit, and I just want to call it out. Sarah Jong, who's one of our terrific reporters, a lawyer, an extraordinarily smart human being, is at the Uber Waymo trial. Waymo is Alphabet's self-driving car division. There's a whole drama about a Waymo employee going to work for Uber and stealing like 9.7 gigs of documents on the way out the door

and like trashing the hard drives and like texting with Travis Kalanek about how they're going to have jam sessions. Travis Kalanek was like, we got to get this guy because this is a quote. Oh God. No, let me say it. Let me say it. Let me say it. Say it. The laser is the sauce.

Laser is the sauce. The laser is the sauce. By the way, it's funny because yesterday it was also Tesla's earnings results. You're referring to LIDAR. And Elon Musk was like, LIDAR is a dead end. Lasers not the sauce. wha! Anyway, that trial... Caliq also referred to alphabet, but then Google

was he C, whatever, Larry Page. He said that he was, quote, and I quote, he says, on the witness stand, in front of the jury, he said that, man, Larry was, quote, super unpumped. Yeah, super unpumped. Super unpumped. How about the deal falling through?

It's a whole thing. Look, read Sarah's coverage of the trial in any other week, this would be the biggest story in tech by far. Basically, Google is suing Uber, but only its alphabet because of Google's insane structure. Right. Yeah.

But it's happening, and all of these people are cartoons, and the documents that are coming out are hilarious and insane, and the judge is mad at everybody, and Sarah is like, A, her Twitter feed is incredibly fun because she's just, like, live tweeting it all.

But she's writing dispatches every day from the trial. Read that stuff. We're going to have Sarah on the Vergecast next week. week. We'll talk us through what's going on. This will be good for me because I realize that I have some catching up to do. It's a lot.

It is absolutely an insane case. It's going to drag on forever. I just thought they were people, car people fighting. No, it's literally, it's literally Travis Kallanek recruited an engineer out of Google by means of his intermediary company and on the way at the door he stole stuff. And there's a laser. It's unclear what he stole. It was important.

Whether it was laser sauce, no. That's what's happening in this trial. Okay, great. That's why Al-WATS too. You know how you kind of don't like Uber? Like, they're just kind of a bad reputation. Waymo is just whatever legal case they have, whatever tiny little, you know,

chocolatey core of, you know, legal case they have, is surrounded by a massive cake of, look how terrible Uber is. Yeah, and it's just, it's so much fun to watch. Yeah, Sarah's read as they're just suing Uber for being Uber. But reader coverage, we're going to have her on next week. I'm just pointing out, in a week where it wasn't the home pod and vaunt and a car in space,

this would be the thing that dominated, and it's a little subsumed. So I just want to call it out because Sarah's coverage, the trial itself is like hilarious and wonderful. Sarah's coverage is brilliant and incredible and you should just like check it out. I also want to call out. Addie Robertson wrote an incredible feature for us about the people who keep CRT TVs alive. it is so good it's mostly because of video games hilariously that's the market

like old video games where you don't want any lag but there are people who just like collect them just read it it's a friend of my collects CRT TVs and it's basically there's like a story in every one yeah he finds people on Craigslist and then he has to go to their house and hear a history of this telephone it's incredible

yeah I just want to call those things that are on the site this week because they're just really good and in particular that The Uber and Waymo thing is, every night I read Sarah's dispatches and just crack up because they're so good. Also, Charles Salaries. And Circle Breaker Live is back. We did a first episode on Tuesday.

People seem to like it. Yeah, we timed it specifically to happen during the most important thing that's ever happened on the history of the planet since the moon launch, basically. You're like, do you want to watch Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful Rocketland? the second most popular live stream and YouTube history or do you want to watch us goof around with the home pod?

And I'll say this, somewhere north of a couple thousand people did. So do it all right. I have some close-up footage of me smushing the surface of the home pod. Yeah. So you can definitely get that.

That's pretty good. That's great. But Tuesday's four. Every week. Every week. It actually does have the same name every week. What are you trying to say? What are you trying to say?

I'm just saying. I don't understand. I don't know if you notice a trend. Watch Sugarbreaker Live. We love your questions in the chat. Thank you, everybody, for behaving yourselves. It was incredible to watch a YouTube chat that was, like, positive and fun. Keep that up, or I'll ban you.

And that's how I feel about YouTube. Okay. There's also a bunch of other stuff to listen to. This is exciting. If you're going to South by Southwest, the Vergecast and Why Did You Push that button are going to be live. We're going to be live tapings at the Vox Media House at South by Southwest. So the Vergecast, it'll be me, Dieter, Kee, Deeder. Casey, Ashley, Carmen, and then Ashley and Caitlin are going to be Why'd You Push That Button Live.

They've got a pretty cool lineup of guests coming together. So if you're going to South by Southwest, look for that stuff. Come join us live. We'd be happy to see you. Why'd you push that button is coming back soon. I actually just talked to Ashley today about the episodes they're putting together. Casey Newton. That podcast is coming.

Converge with Casey Newton. I've been promised that so many times. It's got a good tagline now. The interview game that is easy to win, but not impossible to lose. That's a new thing. It's be good. I'm excited about that. That's coming.

Soon. It's going to happen. But while you're waiting for all that stuff, like the other side, you can listen to Too Embarrassed to Ask with Lauren Good. She did have the CEO of Sonos on last week. That's a great episode. And we have a little promo from Recode Media. Check that out. Hello, Vergecast listeners.

This is Peter Kafka. I'm the host of Recode Media. I just did an interview on my podcast that I think you will like. I talked to Mitch Lowe. He's the CEO of Movie Pass. That is the much buzzed about company Let's you see about as many movies as you like For $10 a month

How can that work? Mitch Lowe explain that to me If you want to hear us talk about that And you should, it was great You can check out my podcast, Recode Media with Peter Kafka You can find that at recode.net Or wherever you find, find podcasts like this one. So lots of stuff to listen to

Or just listen to Verchast over and over again That's what I do. That's all I do. It's weird. It's very self-indulgent. And we will see you next week. Rock and Roll. Paul. Laser sauce.

Elon Musk will fire a car into space before there's good USBC headphones.