The Vergecast - IFA 2017, LG V30, and more smart speakers

Episode Date: September 1, 2017

The Vergecast returns to the New York studio this week. Dieter, Nilay, and Paul run through what was announced so far at IFA 2017, including the LG V30, Sony Xperia XZ1, and lots of smart speakers. Halfway through the show, Loren Grush makes a pit stop on her way to space to talk about episode 3 of her new video series Space Craft. 04:01 - LG’s V30 loses the gimmicks and gains a beautiful OLED screen 12:41 - Sony’s Xperia XZ1 and XZ1 Compact have refreshed designs and Android Oreo 21:10 - Lenovo made a weird $70 Alexa speaker that only works with its Android tablets 23:26 - Lenovo’s new Yoga 920 laptop has far-field microphones so you can shout at Cortana 24:56 - Google announces three third-party speakers with Assistant, plus LG appliance integration 34:07 - Space Craft episode three with Loren Grush 51:46 - In colossal screw up, Essential shared customers’ driver’s licenses over email 57:34 - Fitbit has a lot to prove with Ionic, its new smartwatch 1:08:56 - Paul’s weekly segment “Who will let me out of this yarn prison?” 1:11:03 - Sony's new wireless earbuds include noise-cancellation technology 1:12:36 - Apple’s iPhone 8 event is happening on September 12th Oh yeah, and Apple announced that its next event will be September 12th. So we announced we are doing a live Vergecast on September 13th in San Francisco! Join us! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Vergecast fans. After you've gotten updated on the developments in tech this week, come join us at Worldly, Vox's Foreign Policy Podcast. It's Jen Williams, Zach Beecham, and me, Yolchidreason, with your weekly guide to making sense of the wider world, the big stories, the small ones, the depressing ones, the funny ones. You can find us in your favorite podcasting app. Come subscribe, rate review.

Email us at worldly atvox.com. We'd love to hear from you. Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. then this is new. I'm going to start saying this every week. Apart the Vox Media Podcast Network, which is vast, which is huge. Vox is like the tugboat. Bring us in the port. I like to think that we're the flagship podcast of the whole network.

I don't know if that's how anyone else feels. Or if it's literally true. Yeah. You know, as a Klein show, it's fine. There's no gadgets on it, I think is the main problem. We're the flagship podcast, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there's isn't somewhere else an army. Like we're part of the Armada. Yeah.

But there might, that's just, that's just sea power. The Vox Media Podcast Network also has air power and land power. Yeah. This ends with me sending a note to the CEO being like, I am now an admiral. Our podcast triad. Anyway, also very exciting. Dieter Bone is in the studio. Hello.

With us this week. Yeah. And Paul is here. And there's a ton of news because of Ifa. IFA. 2017. Paul was for International Federation. of electronics.

It's not what it stands for. We got a big crew up there. Vlad's there. Tom Warren's there. Becca, one of our video producers is there. Chris Welch is there. No. Not true. You just think he's there because he's so good at V-30 video.

Chris Welch is in Germany and spirit. Yeah. He's alone in a room with a map of Germany. He's German and spirit. A lot of built, not buildings or man. That's a coming of age story. Is that how you say it? Buildings, Roman?

Wow. Buildings are Roman. There's also Schadenfreude. Dieter's in the room and it's already very German here. What's the spirit of the age word? Nietzsche. God, nailed it. All right.

We should go right into the news. First of all, we're going to talk about the Apple stuff later in the show. But the Apple event is confirmed for September 12th. Yep. Zeitgeist. Zygne. That's a good one. Yeah, a lot of zeitgeist here.

But the Apple Events confirmed for September 12th, which means we can announce that we are doing a live Vergecast on September 13th. Yep. Deider, you've got all the details. I do. It is in San Francisco. You can buy tickets. And later in the show, I will tell you what the link is to buy tickets.

But if you're listening now, you know how to use the Internet and Google so you can search for it. Our venue is a very lovely place. It's the Robertson Auditorium at the Mission Bay Conference Center. And so we'll be doing it on September 13th. It'll be like an evening show. I don't know if I know the precise time off the top of my head. But get ready. And by the time you hear this, we'll actually know what we're doing and we'll have a place for you to go and get tickets.

And you'll be able to see the three of us do a podcast. Yeah, that link will be in the post. We'll be tweeting a link. But the Vergecast live. It's super exciting. We haven't done one of those. Not since South by Southwest. Oh, yeah.

We did South by Southwest. Yeah. But you didn't invite me. But this time Paul will be there. So way better. Way, way better. I'm going to get a haircut. I'm just going to say this.

We're working on some guests. I'm not going to tell you who they are. If it's going to work out or if it'll just be Casey. But we're working on some guests. We're just going to have the little new Sphiro R2D2 robot just making R2d2 noises. That thing is very cute. They were playing it with that. It falls over and makes the sad noise.

But it doesn't get back up. Well, you know. But let's get into EFA. Yeah. So the big news at Ifa, this is why I thought Chris Welch was there, is the LGV30. Yep. It is a phone. Yep.

It's a big phone. It looks beautiful. I think it looks beautiful. I've seen it in person. I think it looks like an LG phone, which means that it is beautiful, but it is not drop-dead gorgeous. Yeah. And the way a Samsung phone is. Right?

But it has the fingerprint sensor in the right spot. Yes, it does. And it has a headphone jack with very high quality DAC. Four. Four of them. Yeah. They're all in on headphone jack. Yep.

This is the thing that I want. Here's what I'm not the not the headphone jack. Whatever. The thing you want is for Apple to make the big change and then everyone to react to it, not by copying them, but by going off in our wild directions. Yep. So I think Vlad wrote the piece like this is the ultimate headphone jack phone. Yeah.

Four DACs, super high quality. random banging Oliveson logo on the back of the phone. Someone explained to me why four is better than just one good deck? Because it's four. What does quad deck mean? Yeah, it's got four of them. Yeah. But it's only got one jack.

Yeah. So the three are just cheering. There's two for every channel. That's what you want. It's spec war. That's what it is. Okay. But I really do think there's two for both channels.

The other thing, I mean, actually, well, there's two things to say beyond. I've got many things to say about the V30, actually. They have a lot of feelings. You should definitely watch the video that Chris Welch is in that our teammate and read the post that he wrote about it as a hands-on post. It's exciting for a lot of people because even though Google says that they make pixel phones just completely on their own, we all kind of know it's still not that different from the Nexus program, and we're pretty sure that this phone is a pretty decent preview of what the pixel XL is going to be like. Yeah. So that's exciting.

The other thing that I think it's personally interesting about this phone is it, LG is, LG is, sticking with its dual camera solution. So there's three ways now to do a dual camera. One is have a black and white and a color. Huawei and Central do that. One is to have a regular and a telephoto, which

is, I think, it's like Samsung is doing that and Apple kind of, it's like the portrait mode thing. And then the third way is to have a regular and a super white angle. And that's what LG does. And just like, you know, you want people to react to the iPhone by differentiating in some way.

I am happy that LG went with a super wide angle lens. I don't know that I'm going to would like that better than having, you know, fancy bouquet portrait mode. I don't know that that's what I actually want. But I just love that it exists and they're continuing on it instead of just copying. They're saying, nope, this is the thing you get with a high-end LG phone. You get a crazy wide angle camera and that's fun. Yeah. Yeah.

And their little depth effects look neat. Yeah. And they're all in on like 4K video filter effects and being in. Being able to record raw audio. Like, they're trying to make the highest-end camera. Yeah, like this is the perfect concert phone. Quad-Dak, looked it up. Yes?

You used live Google on the show here. Parallel sub-dacks. Ooh. They stack for decreased noise. So they stack the decks. It's a deck stack. And it lowers the noise floor. There's also something called the Time Domain Jitter Eliminator.

Oh, I've heard of that. Yeah. Yeah, I did it. a big deep dive on the TdGE. Yeah. Yeah, time domain jitter limiter. There's also analog volume control. So all the work is happening in the DAC, which I think is neat.

But that's going the other way. Yeah, that's great. Good for them. Which I think is clever. That's how you differentiate in the market. That's the thing you want. There's a surprising lack of external decks with a lightning connector with any good

like that aren't you know an old school large DAC that is as big as your phone yeah

like I would think by now that there should be like a dozen good ones and two great ones

that are like the size of a pack of juicy fruit or smaller see I feel like let alone a DAC stack

everybody's hopes and expectations for the dongle market have not materialized there are still not a great multifunction USBC dongle.

The only one that I, like, have found that, like, fulfills my needs is a piece of garbage. Yeah. And I keep, I look, like, once a week, like, right, who's making the good one? And nobody's making the good one? Similarly, with the iPhone, like, there's no DAX. Like, there's not a, like, there's, like, a crazy microphone you can get. And, like, we're starting to see some interesting cameras for the iPhone. Like, did you see that 360 cam that Sean O'Kane wrote about?

it's a 360 cam. You can plug it in via that lightning thing to move your files over, but you can use it standalone. What's cool about it, though, is it does the thing that you want 360 cams to do, which is you just like hold it and take a picture. Yeah. Right? But because it's 4K,

you can then take that movie or that picture and then pan and scan your actual 180P video out of the 360 video or out of the 360 shot. So if I want to take a picture The cool thing that Sean O'Connell came about on the verge If you want to take If you want to take

You're live Googling on the Vergecast You could take a video of a thing with a 360 cam Not to like get a 360 video But to get a regular old 10EP Video that is Doesn't require you to like point the camera And blah blah blah blah blah You just like hold this thing up and then later on

You can like get a multi shot point the camera on Do something video just by editing You're turning the camera Yeah Yeah, which is really cool. I think you can also pull stills on it, which is neat. Yeah, it'll rewarp the stills for you. I can't find this.

So, anyway, my point is, like, we're starting to see some, like, cool accessory things, but in general, the idea that, oh, don't worry, don't worry, don't handle it, doesn't always work out as well as you hope. The RICO thing? Insta 3651. That's what it's called. Yeah, Insta 360 space one. Huh. Yeah.

What LG should do is create a dongle for the iPhone, and it's like, you know, it's like, Enjoy the high-end audio experience of the V-30 from your stupid iPhone that doesn't even have a headphone check. Like, you know, for aspirational people, just like you can get like a hat with the Mercedes-Benz logo. Yeah. You know, you maybe can't afford a Mercedes-Bin. You actually call it the DAC stack. Yeah. Yeah.

Buy the DAC-Stack, $299 from LG. I don't know. I don't know that any accessory market has ever produced the number of things, except for USB. but every time Apple changed connectors. Yeah. Like the firewire accessory market did not develop. Even the lightning accessory market has never truly developed. There's just a bunch of like docks.

Yeah. Speaker docks. Charging cables that don't work. No DAC stacks. No DAC stacks. By the way, that stack sounds super like it's a thing. You can buy a Taco Bell. Although actually you can get a great DAC for lightning.

Yeah. Which one? Oh, wait, not Lightning. Thunderbolt. Yeah, no, there's like the market for the pros. Yeah. Right? But the consumer level market of crazy stuff.

You can plug into a phone. I think this is also going to be the problem with modular phones. No one really knows what those accessories should be. Yeah. It happens to actually just be another 360 camera. It's the only idea we have. But I think the V30 looks really cool. I like that it, the LG's finally like taken the step up to compete.

Yeah. I think the G6 wasn't quite as nice as the Samsung phones. Like, just really obviously. I don't think the V30 is quite as nice as the Samsung phones either. Really? Like, everybody's very excited for the V30. It's, you know, clearly like the biggest, you know, news at EFA, the most important phone there. By far, sorry, Sony.

Yeah. There's a whole other thing. But I fundamentally will, I don't want to say it's a bias, but I have a hard time getting super jazzed by LG phones in general because I've been, burned so many times by like, all right, this is the one. LG did it. And then I use it, and then I experience the software. And then I'm like, oh. Yeah. And I think watching

Welch's video, that was still the Right. It's still their software. But you can change the launcher, right? I mean, there's not much else there. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting segue to Sony. Are you guys ready to talk about Sony? Sure. Because Sony's going Oreo right away. But

Bezels galore. Everywhere. Bezel town. It's like really. obvious Sony doesn't own a display company. We don't have one of these. I mean, seriously, what year was this picture taken at this phone? I mean, Sony... It looks like those old...

Remember when they were trying to make those dedicated P&Ps that would run Android? It looks like one of those. They make those. They still make those. They still like a thousand dollar Walkman that runs Android 2.2. Yeah. I mean, Sony's big thing is they made... One of the phones they announced is like a human-sized non-giganto phone that has the top end specs, the

Snapdragon 835 and everything else you want. But Sony started this design language and making these cool phones like two, three years ago, and they got a bunch of like hardcore fans saying Sony gets it. Sony makes phones designed for humans and they're beautiful.

They're minimal. They're minimal. Sony's going to do it. They're going to turn it around. And so he's like, yeah, thanks fans. And then they did the exact same thing for the next three years. and they never broke into the U.S. and now it doesn't feel as innovative as it once did. The XI Central exists, which is a truly minimal design.

Yeah. Yeah, but this picture of the XC1 compact, you're right, it's like this looks like a reference design from 2010. Yeah. Well, I'll give it 2013. Fine, right? Maybe even 2014. But I, the thing with the Sony phone is I want to deeply and truly love it.

but and I do think it is you know a pretty beautiful design but it's also like those bezels don't help and they're I don't have a ton of faith that they're going to execute especially in the U.S. market to the point where like I can trust it as like a thing that I'll buy and like be supportive do you know what the most exciting thing Sony announced if it is the MHC V90W it's a five foot six dig it foot tall is that did I steal it yeah never mind I was just seguating. What about the Sony home pod? I'm saying the most exciting thing that Sony announced is a five and a half foot speaker.

With Chromecast, it has what, four tweeters, four mid-range, a huge woofer. All of the speakers light up. It is crazy looking. It has like a touch panel on the front. Here's what I really want to know. This is like the fourth one. Yeah. Like they made one.

It's sold. enough for them to make another one. That one's sold enough to make a third one. And now they're like we made it even bigger. You can chain ten of them together and you can control it with Google Assistant. Who is buying them?

And will they be friends with you? Where can I go to experience your purchases? I would like to be there. I'll bring drinks. Also, there's a team at Sony in a conference room with like sales charts on the wall that are like, we got to top ourselves.

right like there's a dip in the market here i think if we had two more light up woofers we'll be able to capture even more of this market i just want to be in that room so if you work at sony you know somebody who works at sony who builds the crazy party speakers let me know i will bring drinks to them i would like to write a profile of that team what i don't know black parties it's super unclear but they're they've sold enough of these, I repeat, to have multiple generations. What if they exist solely to go into Sony trade show booths? And that's how they sold them.

Whenever Sony rolls up at a trade show, they put those speakers in it. And that turns out they didn't realize it. But that's the entire market. Trade shows. Other people's trade show booths? Well, why do you need to chain 10 of them? Like, someone had to receive that feature request. Yeah.

Execute it. Yeah. Put it in the product. Tell a marketing team. Like, put this in the press release. That's a lot of decisions. Yeah. I just want to be a part of it.

I just want to be in that family that everyone else is worried about phones and AI assistance and whatever. And they're like, what if the speakers could be a thousand colors? But they did worry about an AI assistant for it. That's true. There's no freedom. But we should talk about the home. So Sony made the big crazy speaker, which again, I tell you people bought three generations of them previously. But they also made this.

weird bad home pod? The LFS-S-50G. It looks... Sony, can I get a job just naming your things? Oh, man. It looks so much like a home pod. But they put the clock behind the fabric. Like an old school alarm clock behind it. Which I love. Sony makes a lot of alarm clocks. They were the default good alarm clock for like 10 years there. It's true. It's true. It's a real core competency. If this thing was sitting on the nightstand in my next hotel room, I would be happy. That would be cool. It would also So inevitably, the second the hotel bought it and put it on the nightstand, your phone would have a different connector. That's how you know.

My hotel where I'm staying at this time in New York, across the street, no alarm clocks in the room. Yeah. That's great. Do they have lightning plugs in the tables? Ah, that's like the power move. Like, you don't need an alarm clock. Here's a selection of plugs. So this thing, actually, the alarm clock thing is interesting.

It's got gesture controls. I mean, it's a home pod. It's also splash-poove? It's got gesture controls on the top. It's got a clock on the front. It's got microphones. It's got Google Assistant. It's $200.

It's cheaper. This is like the whole set of things that EFA that's worth talking about is what happened with Alexa. And Google Assistant. A bunch of speakers came out that like there's a version for Alexa and there's a version for Google Assistant. And they're all like slightly different in like weird ways. Yeah. And Amazon and Microsoft announced a deal, which is worse unpacking. Yeah.

Alexa and Cortana are going to work together. Cool. Yeah. This deal was made when Jeff Bezos went to a CEO summit at Microsoft. And Sashendell was like, wouldn't it be cool if they work together? And he was like, yeah, sure. Cool. That's great.

Yeah. Another sort of party I'd just like to go to. Right. The Microsoft CEO summit. I bet they had those Sony speakers there. It's just like, fucking crazy. Satch is like, turn it up. I only hear nine.

I only hear nine. But the way that deal is working right now is super dumb. Yep. So say it. Just do it. You have to say, Alexa, ask Cortana to do something. Alex is like, cool. Or you can say Cortana, ask Alexa to do something.

And then, yeah. That's so clunky. That's, that, I want to assume they'll go farther. Yeah. Here's what I did you see my insightful analysis of this deal? Alexa and Cortana teaming up to take on Google Assistant

is like the Patriots and the Browns teaming up to take on the Packers. Ooh. That doesn't... Cortana's the Browns. Yeah, got it. I understand what you're saying. Alexa cheats.

I understand. And the Google Assistant is pure and good. Oh, okay. And the town owns the team. Yeah. By the way, in this analogy, someone replied to this tweet and they said, oh, so that would mean that Bixby is the Vikings. I was like, yep. I think my way of reading this is they have to team up because they need more scale.

And they just will never really truly be the default on the phones. Right. So how do you compete against Siri when you're never going to be the default thing on the iPhone? You need scale. So it's a great deal for Microsoft because they're going to go. onto that whole family of Alexa devices. Great deal for Amazon, because they're going to start

to address all the Windows devices. Lots of scale. But what's interesting is that there's a bunch of phones now that are just going to do Alexa, that are Android phones that have both. Yep. So Motorola announced a phone

that just does Alexa stuff. There's a couple other weird ones with the Motorola one. I think the X4, the MotoX4. Yep. It's just Alexa. And then I think this is also really interesting. This is so weird.

Lenovo has a bunch of crazy stuff. I think Lenovo has entered it's sort of a crazy period. They were like really big winners and now they're like, but we're still relevant. Here's crazy stuff. So they made a speaker

that only plugs into its Android tablets that runs Alexa. Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. No. It's super no. What?

I use this thing. The speaker is a speaker. It does nothing. You can't plug an ox into it. You can't talk. talk to it, it does nothing until you plug on the side, like a wing, one of Lenovo's tablets into it. And then when you do that, the tablet says, oh, I'm plugged into a speaker now and it turns into Alexa with a display. Huh. Yeah. That seems a lot clunkier than an echo show.

Yep. But you can take, presumably take the tablet and run away. But you could like grab the tablet and do stuff with the tablet, or if you want to have an echo show, you plug the tablet into the thing. Does it do echo show things when it has a tablet plugged in? It does do, it does do Echo Show things, I'm pretty sure. I didn't get to try it fully, but their press release says it has like visual responses for Alexa. And it's a standard

API, so I would be very shocked. There's a standard API for like all the way you display and control visual Alexa stuff. Which is weird that we haven't seen more devices with that. I'm sure that we're going to see. I just like the idea that you're going to build a product

for your huge market of Android tablets that you've sold. but like if you think about this in the abstract which is the only way to think about it. It seems like a good idea. No one will ever see one or purchase one. You hold a tablet and you're like, man, I wish this thing had a louder speaker. Yeah. Or you look at an echo show and you're like, man, I wish I could take this display and like go read some, you know, book on the couch. I've never thought that. Maybe you think that. There's this whole LCD panel. It's stuck on my kitchen counter. Oh, how terrible is that? Dieter wants everything to be a phone.

In theory, it makes sense to make this thing. In practice, it makes no sense at all. Yeah. What if you had a TV? You just gave up on this idea. Lenovo also made a yoga laptop, the Yoga 920, that has far-filled microphones in it for Cortana, which is very smart.

I think that's going to get to be pretty standard, I think. You know what could have been a really good Cortana device? I was having this conversation today. Uh-huh. Xbox. It is a Cortana device now, isn't it? I don't think you can put the connect in there. I mean, it is, but it's not that.

They totally killed the connect. Like, what they should have done is, like, offered it with a microphone. Like, I really miss saying Xbox play Netflix. Yeah. I mean, everything that happened with the. Xbox one, they're like, oh, crap, we forgot games. Yeah. And they just let it slide.

My Xbox 1S, by the way, totally dead. Really? Won't boot. Oh. Very unhappy. I've tried the hold reset button down trick. Does it have a cool color ring? No, it just won't boot anymore.

I got it to display a screen that's like, oh, things seem broken. You should reset because I hadn't turned it on in like two months. It's like, okay, I hit the button, and now it's just gone. I need to buy the new version of Madden, and I don't know if I should see. stay with the Xbox or switch to PS4, and I haven't bought it yet, because I really think I might do, I might go all the way. But it's hard. It feels like leaving my family behind. Yeah. Except they've already all moved on to PlayStation, so there's no one there on Xbox. All puts it to the PlayStation.

The assistant news is out of control. Yeah. So Google also announced three third-party speakers with assistant. I think the most interesting of them we know nothing about, which is the Panasonic. Yep. But the second. most interesting. The news might be out by now. Let me see, but it wasn't, I didn't have the information when it came out. But the second most interesting is terribly named. Oh, the Panasonic GA 10 is a crazy square obelisk of a speaker. So this is the new Panasonic Google Assistant speaker? Yeah. It is just an obelisk. Yeah. And then there, I think this one is interesting because it's cheap. It's $70. It's from Anker, which is the company that makes everybody

battery packs. And they also, Anker's making a cheap Alexa, right? Onker's making a cheap... Called the Ufi. EUFI. Bad names because there's the Ufi, which is their little echo dot.

Yep. And then Anker's Google Assistant Speaker Say it. It's called the Zolo Mojo. I don't know what is going on with that. I don't have high hopes with the Zolo Mojo. Because the Ufi the Ufi didn't do,

isn't that great. It's the Ufi genie, by the way. The Ufi genie is. not that great. So Zolo is their Google Assistant brand and Ufi is their Alexa brand? Is that the story? You know, I hope not. It appears to be the story, but they're not, again, not great names coming out of EFA this year. Yeah. A lot of letters and mistakes. But, so there's the new fancy Panasonic one. Yeah. There's the Anker stuff. There's a third one. They have an announcement with LG to put Google Assistant in appliances. Well, you can control LG appliances with the Google

assistant. Yeah. So you can say, hey, Google, are my jeans clean? And they will say, no, you haven't run the washing machine in three weeks, you disgusting monster is how I assume that will go. Just based on personal experience. Why don't you remember me? That's all they say.

And then on top of all, and then obviously there's the Sony home pod clone with assistant. So tons of new Alexa and Google Assistant speakers. Yeah. Fairly clear the market will just be flooded with those devices. I think it's really interesting now that Amazon will have this massive range going from, I mean, they're just going to start giving the dot away for nothing. We're so close to it. But right now it's 40 bucks.

Sometimes it goes down to 30. All the way up to, you know, bigger, batter speakers. Have we seen any speakers out of EFA? I haven't seen any major ones that run both. No, nothing runs. I think you've got to make that deal. Right. And all of these smart speakers are happening in the context.

of Sonos has an announcement coming in October. Yep. That is going to be a smart speaker. Like, finally they're just doing the obvious thing. And the picture of the top leaked to the, not leaked. Yeah. They put it through FCC certification, so we got a picture of the top. And then they built that into the invites that they sent out to all the different tech

publications. So each tech publication got a different invite that had a different mouth on it. By the way, mouths, not fun to look at after a minute. Yeah. But if you look in the corner, it had the little. top the dots of the, you know, the microphone and the volume controls or whatever. Yeah. My guess is that it's a play five, or play one with touch controls at the top instead of the

buttons it has. Yeah. I mean, that seems like the fastest. It has to have an assistant built in. Right. I will say this about Sonos. Sonos traditionally extremely slow product cadence. Yep.

The glacially slow. Yep. They got a new CEO. Yep. He said, we got to speed up the product cadence. Yep. They're rushing a voice. He sent a memo that said that they need to have a bias to action.

Yeah. The biased action then resulted in then pushing out a software update for the play bar, which made it broken. Super glad I'm not at home this week, by the way. Clearly, no, the play bar, not the play bar, the one that goes on to the TV. Oh, the play bass. Yeah. Okay. It's one of the two.

Anyway, they pushed out a software update for one of their products that broke everything and everyone's mad. So some tradeoffs there in the Sonos world. Fair. I'm a Sonos fan. Really like my Sonos. Just don't push an update that breaks it. It's basically my... But that's a lot of smart speaker stuff.

Yeah. And I think it's fascinating in the context of there's an Apple event coming. We don't know if they're going to talk about a HomePod more there. We presume that they will. And that product is going to sit at the very top of the market. And, you know, Siri obviously is integrated across many Apple products. There is an ecosystem there that's important. But this range that Amazon has now built where you can get all kinds of stuff that runs Alexa,

all kinds of smart speakers, for every room of your house and every shape. size, color, bad name. Google also moving there very quickly. That's a weird spot to enter. It's, what's fascinating to me is how we went from, there's Alexa and there's the Echo, and then there's the Echo, and then there's the Echo, and maybe some other people are thinking about it, to there's just a gajillion things and good luck figuring it out.

Yeah, and it feels like it happened overnight. I know it took, you know, 18 months or whatever, But, man, I was expecting some smart speakers at EFA, but like, that's the story of EFA. It was also fundamentally the story of CES, right? But not with as many speakers. Right. There were only a handful of CES. That was like we made a device that does a thing.

Oh, and it's also got Alexa. Right. You can control all these new devices with Alexa was really the story of CES. And now it's all this hard. Which makes me wonder if you are Lenovo or you are Motorola or you are Sony or whoever, you're the guy who invented the phrase Zolo Mojo. Your endgame can't be market domination. Right.

Right. You're only going to get a piece of the market. And Amazon is going to win because they have all of the devices. Or Google's going to win because they have all the devices. And people buy speakers like you upgrade your TV because there's new specs out there. Like now you want 4K, now you want 3D, now you want this. If you buy a speaker, as long as it still makes noise. Until you're ready to really go up in price or something.

Yeah, so I think that this is the thing, right? This is the feature inflection point. Lots of people have Bluetooth speakers. Okay, now you can get a speaker of this size. You can put it in your bathroom or whatever. There's a million price points. You can get whatever assistant you want or you're using. It's going to be part of that ecosystem.

I think that's the rush. But none of this feels like a lasting market. Because after that big rush to buy things, some of these companies are going to win, some are going to lose. Amazon clearly is going to win and just keep making stuff. I think to Amazon's benefit to have a huge ecosystem of Alexa devices. But the Lenovo stuff, they're putting it out there. I think in the hope that this is the thing that people want in this moment

where they might be upgrading their Bluetooth speakers or whatever, but it can't last. How long do you think until someone says, oh, that used to be a smart speaker, but now it's a dumb speaker because they never updated the software it's not compatible with the newest API like when does like software rot

stuff right that's a really good question ruin the take its first victim when are we going to start talking about like the the Qualcomm snapdagon of speakers and like you want the one that has a faster processor this just makes me sad uh yeah let's there anything else for Mifa probably but it's just like I'll

A ton of laptops that have the new Intel processors and just everything in the world. And that's mostly it. A lot of laptops. A lot of laptops. There's some neat gaming ones. But here's what we're going to do. I'm going to read an ad real quick. As usual for the past couple months of the show, I talked to Lauren Grush about her show of spacecraft in the next episode.

So I'm going to read ad. We're going to listen to Lauren for a while. That was actually a really fun interview. And we'll come back with that question of other stuff. This episode of Vergecast brought to you by TransferWise. Do you ever need to send money internationally? Maybe you're an engineer who moved to the U.S. or a business owner paying suppliers in another country

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Transfer is in I need to send money to another country. Wise is in that Confucius guy was wise. Transferize. Use it. Lauren. Nilai. You're back. I am.

You're from space. Sure. Yeah. Well, obviously, you're in the middle of your show's spacecraft. Yes. We've been having you on the show for a few minutes every week. Let's talk about what's going on. This week, you exercised?

Yes. It's all about pumping iron. Well, not really. It's like pumping syringes. Pumping vacuum. Pumping vacuum. Is that what astronauts say? I don't know if that's what they say.

I hope they do. That's what we say now. But tell us about pump and vacuum. Right. So we went to NASA's Johnson Space Center. I'm sure if people realized by now we had like an epic day there. Was it all one day? Most of the stuff we, no, everything we did at Johnson Space Center was all in one day.

And then we went to the Neutral Boisee Lab the morning before our flight the next day. But yeah, so we went there. This particular episode was at the Countermeasures Training Facility. Fancy word for gym. Yeah. It's a gym. It's a gym. I will say this.

So I'm watching all these episodes before they cut out. And our early edits are really, really long because we don't put everything in. And then we're trying to trim back. And there was just a lot of shots of you walking into very nondescript buildings. Like this building looks like a 1970s elementary school from all I gather. That's my favorite part. So whenever they depict NASA in movies, they always make it look so much cooler than it really is. because it's like old 80s, 70s government buildings.

Like they're all beige, brown, and like so nondescript and they're rectangular. You know, like, at least, I mean, I have most experience with NASA Johnson Space Center, so like that's what I know. But yeah, it's not like the prettiest of campuses. So whenever they refer to it in movies, it's always like these cool orbs that they work in or like, I don't know, some geometric shape. And it's like, no. It's like, it's a government.

Remember this is the government. people is. Anyway, so you went to a gym inside of the middle school? Yes. Well, okay, so the special thing about this gym is that it's the same machines that you have in the International Space Station that are specifically

designed to give you a workout while in zero G, which is tough because the whole point of working out here on Earth is to work out against gravity with weights and, you know, to work your muscles and bones against that gravity. But in space,

they have to like simulate that. So one way we worked on the ARAD machine, which was the, I guess it varies as you can use it for squats, you can use it for bench press. It's basically one long bar, but instead of having weights on the ends, it is connected to two canisters.

And like I was saying earlier, they basically recreate a vacuum. So a good demonstration that the guy showed in the video is like if you put down a thumb over a syringe and you try to pull on it, you create a vacuum. and that's tough, like it's hard to pull against. It basically recreates that vacuum effect,

and you can adjust it in certain ways, and that will make it hard for you to pull the bar or push the bar or whatever you want to do with it. And you can vary that. Yeah, you can vary that. You can bring in like a thing to lay on, I guess, even though actually I'm not sure. Basically, you would have some kind of thing

to, like, strap you in and, like, pump iron. Pump vacuum. Yeah, harnesses are a big, big part of working out in space because you got a state put. When you were on the show last week, you did squat lifts. It talked about that. And it got very hard, very quick. I don't remember how much I'm doing air quotes weight they put on it.

But I just remember being like, okay, I'm done after about three or four or five of them. And the point of this, it's like two hours a day, six days a week. Two and a half hours a day, six days a week. And yeah, so what we were saying earlier is, okay, so you and me just sitting here or walking and standing, we're working out our muscles and bones because gravity is kind of pulling us down, but we are defying that whenever we gesticulate and whatnot. But in space, you don't have that, so your bones lose mineral density and your muscles can atrophy. So basically, in order to just be normal, they have to work out so much during the job. It's a big part of their

daily routine. How do they, and it seems like we don't talk about that a lot. It doesn't come out a ton. Yeah, you notice that. And it kind of bothers me because, not to say that, you know, space isn't fun, but it always is depicted as like this vacation land that you go to where you just float around all the time. I mean, I literally, by accident, I didn't want this to happen, but it happened to me.

I watched part of passengers last night. Oh, God. It's just a awful movie. But it was on, you know, it's like, whatever. And it's a vacation. Yeah. And I was literally, I just watched. But they have like simulated gravity.

Yeah, but it goes off all the time. Yeah. Spoilers. It's always breaking. But like that's, it occurred to me that like it's a vacation, right? It does. I think it gets portrayed that way. And speaking of, I did want to bring this up because we also talk about radiation in the video too.

That was something like when Elon was talking about his deep space transport system, that's going to take hundreds of colonists to Mars. or whatever. He talked about how fun it was going to be with all the pizza shops in it. And I was like, you didn't talk about a gym. Like, these people have, and then I also brought up, when I remember

asking him at the presentation, you know, what about deep space radiation? Because this is something that NASA studies intently. And he was like, I guess I don't think is that going to be that big of a deal. Oh, okay, Elon. And I'm like, I think NASA disagrees with you. I mean, I will

note that you put out an entire episode of the show about spacesuits and then Elon put out a picture of this space suit. Yeah, he's definitely following our lead. He's watching you. So the radiation's big deal, but how do they program their time against that much like workout, like requirement? I mean, I believe it's just like a scheduled day like any other. And yeah, I mean, I think they get up fairly early. Yeah. They build in free time too. So it's not like they're just going nonstop all the time. But yeah, I mean, they basically have things kind of down to the hour planned out. But it's interesting because I was actually studying about this incident long ago. Before ISS, before Mir, they had a station called Skylab, where they

would go and do experiments from time to time back in the early days of the shuttle. And I remember that there's this thing called the Skylab Mutiny. It's not really a mutiny. It just gets that name, but essentially what happened was the astronauts felt like they were being overworked. Like, everything was regimented to the minute, and they had no free time. So then one day, like the last day of their trip or whatever, they just spent the day like hanging out. And so basically they called a mutiny because they were going against protocol. But in reality, it was like an eye-opening experience for NASA being like, okay, you can't make. Like people are people.

Like we need, even in space you get burnt out, you know? So they have to, they do have free time worked into their days. Yeah. On a treadmill. Well, apart from the treadmill. Are they like watching Netflix on the treadmill like everybody else? No, but they do have movie nights. Yeah.

Actually, I remember one time I think Scott Kelly was tweeting, or maybe it was somebody else, but he tweeted that they were watching gravity. I was like, that seems like the worst movie to watch. I would not watch that movie in space. In space. Wait, so you actually ran on a space treadmill too. Yeah, yeah. So the space treadmill.

No, no, probably not. But the treadmill, yeah, so I was talking about harnesses. Basically, yeah, you have to wear a harness. And that one was really, maybe it was just the fact that we were on Earth, but it really, like, tore me apart. And, you know, I run fairly frequently, but it was like just a couple of minutes on that treadmill. It really kind of took its toll. But I really think that had to do with the fact that I was in a home. harness.

Yeah. But it's the only way to keep you from floating away and get that workout. I will say that harness did not look nearly as cool as I thought. Like he was showing it to you and he was like, these are just three medical rubber bands. Yeah, they're just bungee cords connected to like a beige harness. He just like figured it out. But one day, like we need a harness.

And he's like, I've got these cords in the back of my Jeep. Right, right, right. So the biggest question we got. I do want to talk about the radiation part too because it's important. But the biggest question I think I saw happen in our. our comments was people asking about sweat. Yeah. And there's like this one incredibly gross shot with the huge ball of sweat that just like sticks to the face.

Right. Well, that was Chris Hadfield. He was actually demonstrating when it was like to cry. Oh, wow. But it was his tears were getting bigger. And I love how water interacts in space because of surface tension, it does ball up like that. So you don't have all these droplets of water like you normally do here on Earth. And so yeah.

So speaking of gravity, we actually had a trivia question. about this, like in gravity, they don't really depict it correctly because the tears float away from her face, but in passengers, they actually do depict it correctly. It would ball up on your face, like a big glob. And then, yeah, they talked about if you were to jerk your head, the ball would float away, and it would get captured by the recycling system, and it's used for tomorrow's coffee or water. And people really did not like to hear that. the rest of the water that you might expel. Well, I mean, it's not just your sweat.

Yeah. It's a closed loop system on the ISS, so what goes out, then goes back in. But that's just, I mean, think about it. Everything we drink here on Earth has gone through some organism or another and been recycled. I'm never swimming in the ocean again. Sorry, you're drinking pee all the time. It's all you can do. You have no choice.

So you're running on the treadmill. Sorry. The sweat gloms up on your face. And then you like whip your head around and it floats away. And you're like, see you later, coffee. I mean, that's it. That's basically it, right? So if you, we talk about what you learn on the show and how it might apply to Mars and the moon,

I think every one of these segments we've done. So if you go to Mars, there's way less gravity. You're going to end up having to work out there too, right? Yeah, I would just seem so. I mean, and that's also another thing. People don't really know how that's going to affect the body. And that could be a real downer if it turns out that when third of gravity. You know, will we be okay on one third gravity or not? We don't know.

There's like no particular way to test it. Right. And, you know, the longest, I mean, we've been doing this one, the last one year mission with Scott Kelly was kind of designed to see how a human could do in space for that long. But, you know, it's going to be a lot longer if you're going to Mars. So we don't know if one third gravity is really okay for the human body or not. And I mean, I'm assuming you would work out, but it's unclear what that will do to the human system. I feel like I'm just going to stay here. I'm going to drink my extremely well-filtured pee water on Earth. I just love being a Debbie Downer when it comes to colonizing Mars.

I feel like nobody talks about all the problems that you're going to have. Another thing is these toxic salts that is in the soil, perchlorates. If you want to grow anything in the soil, chances are your food's going to be toxic because the perchloric, are going to get into your food that you grow. So you're going to have to filter the soil, which is a whole other process. There's like all these different engineering challenges that Mars is going to pose, which I'm happy to overcome. But it's not going to be the pizza haven that Elon makes it out to be.

Pizza haven't. He really, I think he mentioned like pizza shops two or three times during that presentation. He was just hungry. It was like an evening presentation. I can't remember. I mentally blocked that day out. It was terrible. Speaking of terrible things, let's talk about this radiation.

So you also visited the lab where they tried to figure out how to mitigate the effects of radiation. Yeah, that place was pretty cool because they have this particle accelerator that is very big, actually, compared to other particle accelerators. And just to clarify, you're basically taking ions and you're spinning them really fast where their electrons fly off. And that creates particles that are similar to the particles you'll experience in space. and then they shoot them at biological samples to see what the effects are. And they have this machine that can control how big the beam is, how fast they wanted to go, you know, the direction they wanted to go. And they can also shoot it through different materials to mitigate it or not.

So they've been learning a lot there. And basically what they were saying is, I mean, like we said in the video, NASA monitors their astronauts for lifetime exposure. So if you get to a certain point, then you probably can't fly anymore. That's usually when retirement comes. But when it comes to going to deep space, it's going to be a lot different than going to the ISS because we are shielded by this magnetic field. So, yeah, you get more exposure when you're in space, but it's not bad.

However, going to Mars is going to be way different because we don't have that magnetic field anymore to shield people. So they're trying to figure out better shielding to reduce it. It's probably not going to totally get rid of it. But, yeah, that's another big issue that NASA needs to work on before Mars can happen. How far along are they on that? That's a good question. I would say that right now, I feel like they're not that far along. They're more focused on doing the next steps before they can even go to Mars,

which is building this like deep space gateway. Yeah. And even then, that also comes after building the rocket that they need in the first place. So there's a lot of steps in the way, a lot of obstacles that still need to be overcome. Well, the good news is the pizza shops have already been designed. Yeah. I mean, that's the first thing. I mean, that's an essential for any trip is pizza.

Obviously. So you've got sadly only one episode of spacecraft left in this season. But it's not sad because it's my favorite. I just watched the first cut. It is amazing. Tell us all about it. So we got to... Well, tease it out.

Oh. Because we'll come back next week and then you tell us all about it. Well, let's just say I got to cross an item off my bucket list. That is kind of on everyone's bucket list. And that is we got to ride on the vomit comment. So the zero G plane that does the big parabolas.

Yes. So I did get to experience what zero gravity is like. I will say that I watch this and Lauren is very intense in zero gravity. Well, the thing I've seen, seen other videos where people go on this flight and yeah it's hard I've noticed that it's hard for them to kind of articulate how they're feeling because they're just in this moment so the whole time I was on the flight I was challenging myself to be as talkative as possible and I might have come off a little deranged I'm not sure yeah I mean it's like very exciting it seems really

it's exciting but it's definitely a level of laura that doesn't normally come on our videos so I'm really excited for everyone to see that what's the as people are watching that episode which comes out next week, Tuesday. Tuesday, post-Labor Day. What's the one thing they should be looking for, a takeaway? The takeaway space seems like a lot of fun. That's just like radiation, pee-drinking, but really good times. Well, okay, so this one is less informative.

I mean, we tell you about how the plane works and, you know, the differences, you know, the different feelings versus, like, extra gravity versus no gravity. It's way more experiential for this one. And it's more of an experience of like how this particular flight is. And one of the cool things about the flight is we were on it was Scott Kelly. And he was telling us that it's way nicer to be in space because in the flight, you're alternating between, you know, extra gravity and no gravity. And that process of going back and forth is what makes people throw up.

Did you vomit on the vomit? You'll have to find out. All right. Spacecraft. Plug your show. It's spacecraft. That's your plug. I don't know what else to say.

I have to say we're, it's like we're journalists and we're trying to do these shows and we're not good at the like plugging that you need to do. Okay, let me try. All right. Spacecraft takes you into what it takes. Spacecraft comes out on Tuesdays. It does. The full episodes are on YouTube. Go watch them there.

They're great. And if you're on Facebook, you will see shorter condensed things that are really, really fun. I think are doing great. Yes. I'm very excited that you did the show. We've got one episode left, and we'll see you again next week. Yes. Hooray.

Do you want to try the plug again? Spacecraft. It's like nothing else. Okay. We're done here. Thanks, Lauren. Sorry. Lauren's great.

That show's great. You should go watch spacecraft. I'm so jealous, though. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Every time I watch that show. It's difficult. The episode that's coming up is, like, complete jealousy-inducing with her and the zero-g-ge

What? Yeah. It's really, she has a good life, that Lauren Grush. Because she's a space person. We got to talk about this essential situation. Oh, my God. Deeter, you got to go through it. Okay.

Because you're the one who called him out hardest. Yeah. So on, I'm going to say Tuesday night, a bunch of people who had pre-ordered the essential phone got an email that said, hey, you don't trust you. We need a picture of a driver's license to verify your address. and like an alternate email, alternate phone number, which is a weird thing to ask for in this day and age in e-commerce. But it used to be a very common thing.

It's like a way to like deal with fraud. Like, you know, I don't actually believe you are her you say you are, right? Send it's picture of driver's license and then be like, okay, yes, you're a person. So fine. A bunch of people got this thing and they replied. Said, okay, fine. Here's my driver's license. But what essential did was they sent out this email to, I don't know, a bunch of

of people, something more than 70, probably something fewer than 200. We don't know the exact number. From this email address that they set up at Zendesk, which is a customer service portal that you can use. But that email address, they set it up as an email group. So everybody who replied to that email was replying to everybody that got sent the original We Need Your Drivers License email, which means that somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 people, according to Andy Rubin, sent pictures. of their driver's license to each other. And now they're all friends. It's the sharing economy, right?

That's great. They're now all Uber drivers for Central. So overnight, everybody basically reported that, yeah, it's a fishing scam. It's fishing. And I was like, this is a weird way to go fishing, right? So I got on the phone with some of the people who had received the email. And one of them just so happened to be a computer forensics expert. and he was the CTO of Paul Rand's presidential campaign.

Oh, my. Rand Paul. Sorry, Rand. Yeah, Paul Rand. Yeah, he's great. Part of the corporation. Whatever. And he's like, yeah, no, this, like, I, I, you can look at the, the DK IDs and the blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's like, these emails went to essential. And yeah. And so did talk to some other people, did a little, you know, a little more digging. and said, yeah, Essential screwed this up. And then 12 hours later, I don't know, not until the evening of the second day did... They turned it off, though. Whatever was broken, they turned off.

Yeah, they shut down the email so people couldn't share their driver's licenses with each other anymore. Which, you know, that's sad. It's like they're building a little community there. I love you used the word share. And so they copped to it, and Rubin apologized. He said, this is humiliating.

and they're giving everybody who was involved in this thing a free year of life lock, which is a prod protection service thing. So they did the right thing. I think it took them a little bit longer. We could talk about the quality and tone of Essentials Apology. I have a couple of feelings about it. But the bottom line is that they copped to it, they apologized.

Meanwhile, the other problem is I think these phones are just now starting to arrive. So they said they were shipping last week. And that was technically true, but they were shipping from like Shenzhen. So there are not a ton of these out in people's hands anymore or yet. And how many people are going to buy them now? Yeah.

You know, I get one for free if you send everyone your driver's license. I did, I did the review a while ago. I don't know that, not that long ago. I still think it's a very beautiful, good fast phone. I think the camera is pretty bad. but like the default consensus opinion amongst everybody else who's looked at it.

Marquez just put up his review is at the camera. Yeah, it's pretty slow, pretty bad. Yeah. We'll see if they can continue to fix it with software. But either way, like not setting yourself up for success with this phone, guys. Also, I think it's kind of crazy that the number is only 70. Well, but they didn't send it out to everybody who pre-ordered. Okay.

They sent it out to people that for whatever reason they felt like they needed to check for fraud. in some way. Like the CTO of Rand Paul's presidential campaign. Well, yeah. There's that. We don't believe you. No one can be this committed to the free market. Oh, if it were Paul Rand's campaign, then you'd be fine.

You're like, what's happening here? Who are you? Yeah, it's something. It's something. Yeah. I mean, is it the... I don't want to... Go ahead.

What is the best corporate apology? Man. I don't think that... There's a specter. You're holding it wrong. Yeah. one in. Yeah.

And then there's like, but it wasn't just here. You're right. You're the CEO now, I guess. You're the CEO. I think that the issue here is that Andy Rubin is not a baby. Right.

He founded, he's founded a number of companies that have been very successful. He founded Android. He ran Android inside of Google. One would just hope that it was a little bit more buttoned up. At the same time, we pushed the wrong button. Zendesk and we screwed up.

I'm assuming Andy Rubin did not set up their Zendesk account. One hopes not. Right? He's not micromanaging that. So I get it, but not the best look out of the gate. Also, maybe just hire somebody

knows how to use Zendesk is like the other they were like, this is what we use, right? Everyone uses Zendesk? Just push some buttons here. Ready to go. Send us your driver's license. Yay! I mean, that's how I would do it. But that's why I'm not in charge of anything.

Let's talk about these watches. A bunch of watches. Oh, yeah, a bunch of watches. The new Fitbit. The Fitbit. Ionic. It looks bad. Can I just say it looks bad?

I can't decide. It looks bad. You know what? If I was a robot. Yeah. Even part robot, like a cyborg. I think it would look great on me. Ionic is a description.

It's not a noun. It's an adjective. You can't be an ionic. There are so many products. There are so many. We went through like two years where like, like, It was like the Samsung Galaxy Blest or whatever. Like, we went through years of Android phones.

Yeah, all adjectives. I mean, Hyundai makes a car called the Ionic with a cue at the end. Oh, God. So they're just out there. Can I tell you? The one story I will say about this Fitbit Watch, I saw somebody else who'd gone to the event. Yep.

And she was wearing it. and she knew that like our team had gone to the event so she was talking about it and she's like here's the craziest thing about it they wanted to keep this so secret they gave me the watch to wear but then they gave her like a wristband to wear over the watch to keep it secret it's like a huge like a sweatband like a sweat like a you're going to play tennis a device protector in 1983 but what fitbit had also done is it had printed the fitbit logo on the wristband It just defies the point of keeping it secret. The most interesting thing about this watch is that it runs their new operating system, right?

Right. Which is built by Pebble people. Right. But it has all the same problem. And they have a big sleep apnea thing. Warren Good wrote a whole great story about their dreams to... Yeah, don't... When you see Fitbit and Sleep Apnea in the same sentence, don't think that this thing will detect

sleep apnea, but they have more sensors on it that can read like oxygen levels in your blood a little bit more accurately. And they're hoping eventually that will lead them to help like identify if you might have it and you should go to the doctor. They're working towards that goal, but they are not claiming by any stretch of the imagination that they do that now. Right. Right.

But what they are saying is we are collecting more data and like we are going to find more in more useful, interesting ways to work with that data. And so there are practical benefits to these extra sensors on this watch now. But if they get it right, they could have a very interesting technology in the future. Yeah. That's the proper way to think about it. I think the way that I, and you should read that Lauren piece because it's great. But the way I keep seeing this, I think this is going to be true of the Apple Watch,

if and when we see a new one next month. They're targeting more towards health too. and it seems like the pattern that's emerging is you find a big problem that a lot of people might have and you develop technology that helps you mitigate it or identify it or treat it or whatever

and I think the incentives of that are weird. Right? Like weird how? Because these are market-driven corporations, right? So like sleep apnea. It would be great if it could detect it But then their bias is going to be towards targeting all the people who have it or are worried about it.

And that traditionally has led to not great outcomes with like unregulated medical devices or even like pharmaceutical advertising. Right. Like the incentive structures of that are going to start to get mapped under these health devices. What's a what's a bad result that this incentive could lead to? Like that they're they've created a device that misdiagnoses stuff? I don't want to like go too far down the line. I just see it like hazy in the distance, but FitBib being like sleep apnea kills. You probably have it.

Wear this watch. Buy this watch to fix it. Like a hyping up or like fearmongering of the actual condition. Right. And that's like a very common sort of pharmaceutical advertising thing that happens. Like, you know, they're not there yet. But you see that happening with the big wearables. Like Apple's really pushing it around diabetes.

Like it's coming. It's fine. I think it's cool in the sense that it's probably to everyone's benefit for big companies to think about treating these common problems. But the incentive structures, especially the companies that are losing, to find one, target it, make you think you have a problem and then sell you the solution. It just feels dicey to me. But, you know, we'll see what happened. Like, I don't think Fitbit, that's probably not their mindset now. But the incentives, you can see it on the healthcare side.

Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. I think I've, I talked to Liz Lapato or science editor about it a bunch. Maybe this should have disclaimer. Ask your doctor if this Fitbit watch looks good on you. Yeah. It doesn't look good. Can I also just point out that there's a smart watch that was announced at CES. It ran Android wear. So it was a thing you wear. It was called the vapor.

Sure was. And we all said, well, that's a stupid name. There's going to be really obvious joke that people are going to make when that thing gets inevitably delayed and or canceled. The Vapor Android Wear Smartwatch has been delayed. Yes. FYI.

I made the joke on Twitter. I admitted, I did it. Couldn't say no. I don't... Like the Apple Watch is going to win in the way that it's going to win. Android Wear is owning this hot...

Fossils can't stop putting out Android Wear watches under its many, many brands. And then there's a bunch of Garmin stuff too, right? Yeah, so Garmin has... Like there's a Vivo active and the Vivo move and the Vivo sport. Garmin stuff is, you know, it's obviously more pointed towards fitness, but they have been slowly but surely improving the smartwatch stuff and making it not just for like hardcore,

get a GPS and go hike 10 miles or 20 miles or whatever people who actually exercise do. I don't know. It's terrifying and scary to me. And so they have a interesting lineup of stuff that goes from like hardcore type 20 miles down to pretty basic smartwatch stuff, but a little bit more health focused. The one that I'm most excited about is the Vivo move. Yes, the Vivo move because it's a standard analog watch that has like a little bit of a display on the bottom of it, which is just enough. That's all you really want. And then the thing looks like a normal watch.

Yeah. I'll be very interested to see what Garmin could do if they just made a consumer smartwatch generally and not have quite as much fitness stuff in it. But even this Vivo move is relatively cheap. It's 300 bucks or $100 for the sport, $300 for the primo version. I think honestly Garmin is low-key doing a better job at smartwatches than Google for sure and probably than Fitbit. I think Garmin is a sleeper good smartwatch right now. It's not a full smart watch.

It's not going to do the full thing. And the notifications are still going to be a pain, especially if you've run an iPhone and replying to eye message and all that stuff. But people want smartwatches for health stuff. Garmin's pretty good at health stuff. And there's enough smartwatch stuff that you actually use it, but not so much that you're like, why is there a cloud of circles when I hit this button?

Yeah. And how do I, why? Where's the dock now? How does blah, blah, blah, blah. It just tells you the time tracks your health and that's it. Again, I was talking to Liz Lapato or science editor and she had played with an Apple Watch for a bit. And then she was like, wait, this is dumb. I'm about to go on a hike.

Yep. And my crappy Garmin GPS watch will last three days. Yeah. So these Garmin's last longer than those other watches too. Because it's not a computer. But it is computer-y enough. Yep. I think that balance plus like a little bit of hardware differentiation is the thing that is to watch.

The challenge here is Pebble had that advantage, but they weren't integrated into the platform, and they didn't have a good enough health message. And so they eventually got bought. Yeah. And so we look at these, you know, the Fitbit and the Garmin, and we say, well, you're still not integrated into the platform. So as a like pure smartwatch play, it's going to be disappointing compared to an Apple Watch or Android wear. but they aren't hanging their hat on a pure smartwatch play. They're hanging their hat on, we are Fitbit, we are Garmin, you trust us to do this health thing.

And that might be enough. Yeah. But I don't know. Well, I think the Pebble thing, you know, all these products are different and the Pebble was a little janky. But Pebble's bet was you want a computer on your wrist, and we made a little cute computer for your wrist. Apple's bet is every feature is in here in generation three

we will redesign the interface around what people actually wanted and that they're pushing more towards fitness but it's still very much a computer the rumors are the next one will have its own cell radio it'll be even more independent from the phone and then these other companies are saying their fitness devices with a little bit of computer next to them

right so there's a spectrum and it's very clear that pure computer just kind of fell by the wayside. Because no one actually wants a computer on their wrist because you can get a phone with a giant screen. Right. Which is, I think, as the screens get bigger and more compact bodies,

that why do I need a watch piece of this conversation is going to become more and more interesting to me because I don't, Deeter's wearing one. I am. I see, I today, just like saw a bunch of people wearing AirPods as I commuted to work. Very rarely see watches now. Yeah.

Like more people, I think, but, you know, obviously, I'm not like checking everyone's wrist. But I see a lot of AirPods because they provide this instant massive utility. Yeah. Whereas I think people are still kind of struggling. Although yesterday we hung out with a guy. I don't know if you noticed this. He was wearing a watch and a Fitbit on the same wrist.

Yeah. It was balsy. Yeah. It's a power move. Okay. I'm going to read another ad. We should talk a little bit about iPhone. We should talk a little bit about the new YouTube stuff.

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Again, that is OfferCodeVERGE. Squarespace.com, offer code Verge. Squarespace. This was an advertisement. Should we talk about a little apple stuff? Every week. Oh, yeah. We never forget.

Never forget. Ever. I got to move. Well, at first it was called, will you please come to my block party? But you know what? This week I'm changing the title. Yeah.

It's called, who will let me out of this yarn prison? Every week, we do a segment called Who Will Let Me Out of This Yarn Prison? So there's this robot called Blossom. Oh, this thing is... It's so creepy. You'll have to...

You'll have to check it out. Ashley's write-up was, Someone Please Save This Robot. Yeah. And they wanted to make it more natural, so it kind of has analog movements. Yeah. And it looks like a cat with a bag over its head

and holes poked for the ears, and the bag is made out of yarn. And it's kind of like vibe in and body. And it's stuff, but it just looks like it's struggling to get out. Do you remember those, like, dancing flowers that you could get? No, no, it's just me? No. Podcast listeners know what I'm talking about.

Dancing? Yeah. They're the kind of thing and they listen to music. Yeah. So I don't think it's creepy because it looks like it's trying to get out. Oh, why do you? It should have a face, but it does. It has no eyes.

Yeah. But it has like kitty ears. So it looks like it's facing away from you in quietly dancing. Yeah. And like what the hell is going to happen? It never turns around. And it's like, it's going to turn around and kill you. Yeah, nobody has seen it turn around and lived to tell about it.

Yeah. Can it turn around? The CEO of that company, again, Ashley's write-up is amazing. The CEO of the company is like, well, if you want to add eyes, you can just sew eyes onto it. Which is not acceptable. No, I'd put a little gougly eyes on it, but I don't think it would actually help. Jabra made some neck buds, the Elite 25E, that has 18 hours of battery life, 22 hours of standby time. Neck buds for life.

22 days of standby time, excuse me. Sony also put out some truly wireless. Some true wireless. Yeah, their battery life and the truly one, truly. When I saw those Sony's, that's when I decided I'm 100% I've made my choice, team neckbud. There we go. Because when you take them out, you don't have to, like, put them in a weird case and put in your pocket. You just let them fall around your neck.

Yeah. And then you can hide them under your shirt if you don't want to look like a nerd because you do. I'm not saying that neck buds look good. They make, they look terrible, but they are slightly more convenient. And therefore I'm teen neckbutt. Yeah. I almost lost an air pod yesterday. Oh, man. I'm real close. Wait, well, have it. Give me the play by play. So it came home. Dieter and I were out. Helen, our editorial director, came home. I was thinking some thoughts. Okay.

Some whiskey-fueled thoughts. This is really good so far. Put it in my AirPods and then like walked outside. And then the gust of wind. And I was like, oh, shit, it's dark. I've had drinks. Uh-huh. I'm never going to find this thing again.

And then frantically search for them and then found it under a leaf. Aw. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like. And then the leaf, I wasn't like. Oh, leafy. The leaf which had no eyes stood up and started dancing. Yeah.

Facing away from me. It was shaky. I'm going to turn around. I was like, I ran back in the house. I'm so afraid. Use my AirPods to make a phone call. I called the police. There's a murderous leaf on the loose.

I didn't do any of that. But anyway, game real close. Apple. Speaking of AirPods. Here's my question. So they put out the invites, September 12. Yep. They're having it at the Steve Jobs Theater,

which I think we all sort of suspected they would do. Yes, at Apple's new campus, Apple Park. The invites line is, let's meet it at our place. Yep. So no hints there, really. Not really. The Apple logo is. Shapes and colors, very abstract.

No hints. Not really any hints. There's three shapes and colors. To signify the three stools of Apple's business, or the three legs of the stool in one hobby. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it feels like that firmware leaked and we know everything there's to know, right? There's new phones. We've talked about the new phone rumors endlessly.

There is, obviously they have to talk about the new Apple TV because that's been leaked, and I think they're way overdue. Yeah. There was some stories that they're negotiating with studios to make 4K movies a little bit cheaper to buy. So right now they're about $29 on Voodoo and wherever Google Play you can buy them. They're trying to get to 20.

I'm curious if they're going to have 4Ks, what the rental price will be. Because renting right now, I think an SD is like three or four bucks, and then the HD is six, maybe seven. Paying $10 to rent a movie to me, Yeah. This is how I end up just buying up. Yeah.

The windowing has gotten extremely aggressive in all these movies. Yeah, it's bonkers. They now window, Voodoo at least, will window the 4K purchase. Really? So you can buy it in SD and HDX, and you have to, like, wait a little bit

to get the 4K. Huh. If Apple can solve that particular problem, there's not just broad availability, that will be a huge win. But yeah, it seems like we kind of know. Do you guys think that, iPhone 7 will, or the 7S will have wireless charging?

Yes. Yeah. I think the big question there is whether it has a home button. So, like, Hym is just like, it's definitely an iPhone button. But there was a, there was, uh, inside Rambo on Twitter had a, he found somewhere deep in some beta an animation of, uh, a different way to bring up the cards by swiping up from the bottom, just like WebOS. Yeah.

And that animation looked like an iPhone 7S. It was very hard to tell if whether or not there was a home button there. Yeah. So I think this is a sort of a big open question. But like, were you expecting surprises? I'm not particularly expecting like a home pod to come out. I think that's December. Yeah.

I am expecting that the most interesting thing will be, for me personally, will be the new sort of gesture-based UI and the changes they make to iOS to get rid of the home button. I think it's going to be more interesting than just, you know, the face unlock. We saw the thing where there was just like a little bar on the bottom. Getting rid of the home button and not just doing a straight virtual bar on the bottom like Android does presents a wide array of very interesting UI challenges to make it intuitive and natural and useful. And I'm just going to say that in terms of doing the right thing with interesting hard UI problems, I don't have a ton of faith in Apple. to get it right based on recent history of different things you do with the current home button and the way that notifications work.

And what they've done with force touch in particular, I am a little bit nervous that whatever they do to navigate iOS based on getting rid of the home button on the new iPhone could be troublingly weird. Yeah. I'm a little bit nervous. Yeah. I think force touch was the big. big misstep.

Like trying to make that a thing. That was like a solution in search of a problem. Yeah. Yeah. That really confused a lot of... Well, no, but you see the narrative, right? They added forced touch to the screen. Then they added the non-movable home button.

And now they're going to take it away. And they're hoping that over the course of the two years, you have learned to, like, click your screen. But who... But I haven't. I haven't learned how much. to click my screen. I click the button at the bottom. Every time I click something in iOS, it's like, oh, oops, I meant to press and hold.

I use, I preview web links all the time. I think it's great. When I use an Android phone, I'm like, hmm, I wish that was there. Really? Yeah. The one thing I wish I could do is you, like, you peek the web link. Like you push the URL and it pops open. I'm like, I just need to scroll this a little bit. Like, what's the end of his headlines say? Have you tried, like, two-fingering it?

It doesn't work now. It's so dumb. And then you end up holding it down harder and you open the web page. You should just click the web page. You should have just clicked this. Well, I'm saying. Yeah. Like, all the time.

I'm like, I just need to see the last word in the subline. Or it's like, there was a picture of such and such in this article and you click it. And you're like, I just need to scroll to the picture. This is what AI should be used for. Previewing web page. Yeah. I mean, I'm excited for it. Yeah.

Big change is coming to the phone. I think the software stuff is really interesting. There's obviously going to be a ton of AR stuff happening. Google put out a big new AR core framework for its Android phones. Which kind of feels like the whole Tango project was a misdirect. Well, I wouldn't fail. Yeah, I was clear. Miscdirect would imply that they intended to misdirect you.

Yep, it shouldn't get right. Yeah, I mean, it just seems like it's going to be a big event for them. They're going to make a big deal out of it. And I think the lack of, the lack of sort of like hints in this, probably your reaction on the fact that so much has leaked. But also, I think they're trying to keep it more secretive, so it gets bigger play. On a very personal note, which does not really apply to anybody,

but people that are actually going to the event, if Apple can't nail Wi-Fi reliability on their home turf on their campus, I'm going to see that as a bad sign. I think they'll figure it out. I think they'll figure it out too. Yeah. It's not easy. This is like very inside baseball,

but their previous on-campus theater, like notorious for not having enough power plugs. Yeah. Like all the stuff that journalists need, the stuff that we don't complain about because who cares? Like, we should just figure out these problems because we know we're going to go do the coverage.

But you hope. Yeah. You hope they're like, hmm. Neli is always sitting on the floor in the corner at the end of these events. Maybe we should add some power jacks to this room. We'll see. I'm very excited to go there.

I haven't been to that campus. I'm excited to see this new theater. I don't know. I'm just overall excited to go hang out. And then the next day, you got a live verge cast. Yeah. It's going to be wild. September.

Looking good. Yeah. By the way, if you want to go see the live verge cast, yeah. Go to b.it.l.L. bit. Bit. bit.

Just bit. Bit.com. S.F. All one word. Bittley. Bitley slash verge cast SF. Yeah.

It's going to be great. If you're there, please come. First of all, because it would be embarrassing if no one came. But second of all, I'm excited to see you.

I think it's going to be fun. There's going to be some scissor vodka jokes. But like IRL. You're going to bring back the oldies with the goodies? Yeah. in cups.

Oh, you just say there's going to be vodka to drink. Yeah, there's legal issues. I can't actually call it Cizor vodka. We're going to figure it out. But we're going to work on it. So there's like a bar situation. This is going to be chill. So if you're in San Francisco,

coming to the event, stick around the next day, come to the Vergecast. We're working hard on some special guests. We'll see if we can make it happen. No promises yet. Okay. I think that's the show. I want you to go read, however, on the website.

Ben Popper did a big feature on YouTube. YouTube's new logo, which the logo is not very different, but I think the way YouTube is thinking about itself is really interesting, and Ben pulled that story out of the logo change. So you read that. And Casey did a big write-up on how good YouTube's feed has become, because they pointed Google Brain, they're like AI machine learning stuff, at powering that feed. And the little things that YouTube does to show you stuff you might be interested in is so clever. You should just read it. I think YouTube has been better than ever recently. That's basically the genesis of Casey's story.

He noticed that he's watching so much more YouTube than before. And it's because of Google Brain. Yeah. They really have me figured out. It kind of annoys me sometimes. Well, here's the one little nugget that I thought was, it's like, it seems really obvious, which I think is always the sign of something really smart. It knows when you're on a phone, and it recommends shorter videos when you're watching a phone.

And if you're on a TV or bigger screen, recommends a longer video. And that's like the AI just figured out that it should start doing that. That's like, it sounds really obvious. That's the sort of thing where it's like one guy in a meeting was like, do this. And everyone's like, that sounds smart. But like the robot just sorted it out.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, go read that stuff. I always want to call out cool stuff to read on the website on this, a radio show. You know, it's a homework. It's multimedia. We have a number of great CD-ROMs you can put in your computer. Also, rate and review us on iTunes,

We're everywhere. We have a new show coming up from Ashley Carman and Caitlin Tiffany that I'm super excited about. It's called Why Did You Push That Button? We're going to be running some teasers about it very shortly in this show. I'm just ridiculously excited about it. We'll have more information. So just hyping that up, keep it in your mind. And if you want to listen to More Tech podcasts, there's a bunch of great ones from our friends at Recode.

Lauren Good, who's great, who's on the show all the time, does Too Embarrass to Ask with Kara Swisher, which is great. Peter Kafka does recode media, which is one of my very favorites. Keraswisher does recode decode. All that's on iTunes. Go rate, review it, check it out. Keep listening. Our armada is growing. It's happening.

We're going to media war. Metaphor is bad. And that's it. And you can tweet at us. Paul's at Future Paul. Deeters at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. We love to hear from you.

That's it. Rock and roll. Paul. Run with it. What?