The Vergecast - IFA 2018, Apple event announced, and iPhone/Apple watch leaks

Episode Date: August 31, 2018

This week, The Verge has been at IFA 2018, Europe’s big tech event. There are a lot of new gadgets, so Nilay, Dieter, and Paul go through their favorites on The Vergecast. Also, Apple announced its September event this week, and immediately following the announcement, iPhone and Apple Watch leaks surfaced. The crew discusses. And, of course, we have our fan-favorite segments: Liz’s “This week in Elon Musk” and Paul’s “Keyboard-in-the-front club: population 2” There’s a whole lot more in between that — like Sonos announcing a geeky new amp — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 01:04 - The Internet of Garbage by Sarah Jeong 02:08 - Apple’s next iPhone event will be on September 12th 03:24 - Purported iPhone XS image shows gold color and Plus-sized display 15:03 - Leaked Apple Watch Series 4 image reveals bigger display, new complications 25:15 - This week in Elon Musk with Liz Lopatto 29:30 - IFA 2018: all the biggest news from Europe’s grand tech showcase 29:43 - Acer’s absurd Predator Thronos gaming chair is fit for a king 32:29 - Lenovo’s new Yoga Book replaces the keyboard with an E-Ink screen 36:22 - Asus’ new laptop has a touchscreen trackpad 37:44 - Skagen’s minimalist Falster smartwatch gets a sequel with fitness features 43:01 - Sony’s 1000X M3 noise-canceling headphones have an improved design and USB-C 45:09 - Paul’s weekly segment “Keyboard-in-the-front club: population 2” 48:51 - Trump lashes out at Google: all the news about the president’s intensifying feud with Silicon Valley 52:18 - The new Sonos Amp is coming to save your old speakers 59:20 - The last Blockbuster: what we really lose when video stores shut down Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by the Audi ETRON. The electric car has always raised questions. Can you contend with the elements? What's the range? With high speed, charging, long range capabilities, and quattro all-wheel drive, the fully electric Audi E-Tron can be the answer. Visit AudiUSA.com slash Eitron to learn more and stay informed. Hello, welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge.

And also Vox Media. I got to tell you, I read some copy that other Fox Media podcasts might have to say, and they definitely have them saying that we're the flagship. I think this joke is starting to get out of control. Anyway, I'm your friend, Eli. Paul is here. Hi, Paul. Hello.

Dieter Bone. Hi, how's it going? Tell them. Tell them how you feel about him. I'm your tech patron. Tech patron. That just sounds like you work in tech serve. I had like a 64 gig iPod, please.

There's a lot going on this week. Apple stuff leaking all over the place. Google stuff leaking. Eiffa's going on. There's all kinds of laptops going on. Dieter just wrote the words old man yells at cloud here, so we're going to get into that. I want to start by just plug in something we did this week, which I'm very proud of doing. Sarah Jong, who is a great writer for us, wrote a number of incredible stories, including a profile of a judge in the Ninth Circuit, who's one of the most important judges in tech.

You should go check that out. She just jumped to New York Times, and we published her book, The Internet of Garbage, or an excerpt from a book, and republished the whole book is a PDF, Amazon file, everything. Just check that out, read it. We've been talking a lot about content moderation and platforms. And Sarah's point in the excerpt is, if you focus all of your energy on just deleting stuff and using copyright law to stop bad behavior, you're going to make mistakes and be trapped in a cycle. I think it's just a really interesting point. Check it out. It's on the site right now.

It's on the Kindle store. Just search for the Internet garbage. By the way, the minimum price you can set in the Kindle store is 99 cents. We really wanted to be free. But Amazon doesn't believe in free things, except for free shipping, but you have to pay for Prime. So it's not really free. Anyway, check it out. I just want to bring it up at the top because I have loved.

working with Sarah over the past year. I'm very excited for her to go to the Times, but the last thing we did with her was this book. She's been on the Vergecast a couple of times too. So check it out. It's there. All right. Let's start with Apple. Apple event. So invites came out today. Invites came out. It's a golden circle. Or circles. Shaped in the shape of Apple Park. Yeah, it said gather around. Gather around, which has me really viving and waiting for Guffman. Because the play within Waiting for Guffman, the what's his name, Eugene Levy comes in and he says, gather around for I have news. Yeah. So it's, you know, gather around.

I mean, it's a reference to Apple Park is round. Yeah. So come join us. Gather round, for I have news. It also could be an elaborate cell phone because it kind of looks like a wireless charging coil. Oh, that's pretty good. Oh, air power. Yeah.

Air power is. That's what happened to air power. They finally got the coils. They were like, oh, they shouldn't be squares. They've been trying to do wireless charging with squircles the whole time. So gather round, the invite was gold. You know, the fun everyone had when a new invite came out, happened on Twitter. Everyone tweeted the same joke, which was the next iPhone is going to be round.

Mine was better. I tweeted that they're just going to announce bagels because it's like a golden brown color. Oh, it's good. I do like bagels. I'd like to think that I was the first one to tweak the round joke, but I was not. Not even a little bit. And then, like, immediately afterwards, the watch, the Series 4 watch and the iPhone, Excess, like, leaked.

They're just like, there they are. Nine to five Mac just flexed. They're like, oh, everyone's paying attention. Now's the time. Kaboom. They've got what looked like basically, like, very Apple-looking, like, official product shots of both devices or all three of those devices. And, I mean, what do we learn?

We learned that the iPhone 10 thing is going to be called the iPhone 10S, I guess. Yeah. But it's excess. It's a lot. The iPhone in excess would be amazing. That's an MGCC. The Giegler joke, I have to give him credit for that one. And then we learned that the Apple Watch looks really dope.

Yeah. Edge Edge, edge screen. Seems like the same size. Although the Watch Face was terrible on that thing. Yeah, the Watch Face, there's like eight complications on it. Yeah, it looks ridiculous. This is the time of year, every year, when I relearn what the word complications means. Yeah.

Because you're not a horologist. Is that a watch person? It's a watch person. It's a lot. You don't visit Hodinky. Houdinki is great. I just read an article about how they built their business, and basically they realized, like, people come here to look at expensive stuff. So we just sell them expensive stuff.

They'll just buy some of it from us, which is perfect. I love it. I love a good business story. Okay, so let's start with the iPhone. I guess we have to call it the iPhone 10S. I was thinking this last week, and I forgot to say it on the show, but Apple isn't a real pickle with these names. Yeah, right? They really got themselves in a bind.

So they called it the iPhone 10, but everyone calls it the iPhone X, literally. everybody. Then they have to make the next one. So they're at iPhone 10s. Yep. But it looks like XS. Then they also have the iPhone 8. Well, I don't think there's going to be an iPhone 9 this year. But then there's this rumor of this other phone. So there's the XS, the XS plus, and then this third LCD phone. That's also been out of mine. So is that the iPhone 9? But it's going to be a big dual sim phone. So it's a different product. So it can't be the iPhone. 8S because that blows their whole thing away, especially if it has an edgehead screen and a notch. So, like, what is that going to be called?

Well, what about a C? Because C connotes low end. So maybe it'll, and it's the low end one is supposed to have a, like, not beautiful steel room, but it'll just be aluminum. So it'll be a different color. And they might do different colors on the back, so it'll be colors. So that one could be the iPhone XC. Okay. And by the way, is S a Roman numeral? So I make this ask you a question. Okay. Is the C capitalized or lowercase? Oh, God. It's got to be capitalized. They always do capitalized. No, the 5C was lowercase.

Oh, so it'll be, okay, it'll probably be lowercase. Who knows? And then, okay, so that no one, like, already they're in a jam. What the hell are they going to do next year? Because they can't be like the iPhone XI. They sure they can. And everyone calls it the iPhone X. No one calls the iPhone. So they switched to 11. They've, like, ruined how cool the X looks. It's funny. I know there's going to be a better camera.

I bet there's going to be a faster processor. All I really care about is the name right now. I feel like 11 from Stranger Things has really revitalized the 11 brand. I feel like it's pretty cool right now to be 11. Yeah, but they're going XS. I prefer X's, like the plural. iPhone X's? Yeah, the iPhone X.

So S is apparently in the medieval abbreviation, the S was used for 70 or sometimes 7. Okay. So technically the iPhone X. S is the iPhone 1070. Ooh, I like that. It's got a little trucker vibe to it. Well, but Roman numerals, it would be the larger number minus the smaller, so it's the iPhone 60. Well, no, it's the plus because it's 10 plus seven.

This conversation is horrible. It's the iPhone 80. No, but think about final fantasy numbers. I see what you're saying. You're right. It's 60. Yeah, it's the iPhone 60. Did you just explain Roman numerals by talking about Final Fantasy?

What are the views of the Olympic? Super Bowl. I also want to point out in this leaked photo of the iPhone 60, that they're using this wacky, colorful planet. I don't know what it is off the top of my head. I don't know where this image came from. It's just like a hyper-color planet rise. But they have it.

The arc of the planet that they're using is just precisely at the spot. you don't see the notch. Yeah, of course. Yeah. It's great. It's the most. It also looks like if you don't see the fading away line of the phone, it just looks like a phone that's been put in the microwave.

I know. I know. I know. It's just bulging. Paul's doing some home science. It's like, what happened if I did this? Okay, so we see that there's going to be a new iPhone 10S. Should I keep it clear.

one would assume the normal S stuff, right? Faster processor, better cameras all the way around. What else can they do to this phone? There's been a rumor that they would remove 3D touch. Yeah. So we got an earlier rumor from Bloomberg, German and company put together their, basically, their guess of what there's going to be.

So the iPhone 10S is there's going to be a 5.8-inch OLED and then a high-end 6.5-inch OLED. But then there's also going to be a cheaper model whose name we don't know, which will be the 6.1 LCD and probably dual sim. And that is the one that will have colors. And we think that's also likely the one that won't have 3D touch. Yeah.

I don't understand why they would take 3D touch off of these phones. I don't understand why they'd put it on anything ever. I like 3D touch. What? I use it for exactly one thing, which is moving the cursor. Okay. That thing is great. You know, you just, okay, fine.

That is great. It is legitimately great that you can do that on iPhone. You can slide your finger on on the space bar on an Android phone to do the same thing. Yeah, but you don't get that satisfying haptic. The whole iPhone, like, Taptic engine thing is legitimately great. No one has matched it. And so you can click down, you feel the clicks, and you, like, move the thing. That's just like a good, it's a very Apple, very satisfying thing.

Everything else about 3D touch. Horribly confusing. Not least of which, turning on the flashlight and the camera from the home screen, which more people tell me their phone is broken than not. So I keep trying to turn on my flashlight and it doesn't work. I'm like, you have to click it. And they're like, why? It's like an immediate response.

Okay, so that's the, we're assuming the 10S, the standard 5.8 basic updates, right? Like the thing, it's basically a spec bump. I think it's going to be a spec bump. And I think if we go in hoping for more, we're going to be disappointed. To me, the big question is can they get the camera up to basically like pixel 2 standards? Because I do think that the camera is, you know, of course it's very, very, very. good, but I think that if there's one place where Google and maybe even Samsung a little bit are really catching up and or surpassing Apple, it's in just raw picture quality.

I absolutely agree. Not like R-A-W, but yeah. No, I absolutely agree. We were out the other day and someone was taking a picture of our kid with a Samsung. I think it was an S-8, not even like a newer phone. And the closer I look at the iPhone photos, the more I'm like, man, they're doing less smoothing, like they're doing less egregious JPEG-y things, but the

quality of these photos, when you look at them closely, it's not there. So I really hope they bump up those cameras. Then a speed bump. And then, so then there's a larger screen iPhone 10, which assuming would be a 10S plus. Yep. And that will have what the plus features. It'll have split screen apps the way that the

A plus and the other plus phone supported, right? That's it. Yeah, and it'll be a 6.5 inch screen, which is huge. Yeah. It's really big. I don't think anyone ever made really good use of the sort of like split screen app stuff the plus models offered no i agree no one ever uses that stuff but i would like if you would let me do picture and picture on an iPhone the way you can do on an ipad or an android phone i would happily do that stuff yeah so like yeah i don't know i mean

maybe but i just i don't think that they're they'll sell it on the size of the screen they won't sell it on having great picture and picture but you gotta be able to do stuff with the screen that's what i mean A huge screen is great, but... Do you use a 8 plus right now? I don't use a 10, but before the 10, did you use a plus? Yes. Yeah, and why? Because I really enjoyed split-screening apps and the two apps that supported it.

That's why I loved it. It was my favorite. I loved it so much. Every day I wake up, and I'm like, oh, why doesn't notes have a split-screen view in landscape? By the way, if they do offer that split-screen stuff, the notch becomes like a gigantic crazy problem. Yep. Right?

Because you're going to be turning your phone and one of your two apps is going to like get notched up. Yep. Okay. Well, that's going to be fun for everyone. I can't wait for like the most pedantic Apple bloggers to start doing pixel math and how much percentage of the left app gets cut off when you rotate your phone. Yeah.

Do you do you think these phones are going to be like excess is like a thousand and XS plus is like $1,200? I mean, that's where the note is. It'll be 1250, I bet. Yeah, I think they're going to come in right at the sort of like note nine price. Yeah, but we're not going to get a cheaper iPhone 10. No, I think they're going to put out this other. Well, I think the iPhone 10 will go down.

Yeah. History suggests the iPhone 10 will remain and just go down at price. That's right. And then the whatever this new thing is will be like the low end of the line. It will probably replace like the iPhone. Will the iPhone 8 persist? So many phones. It's a lot of phones right now.

Like Steve Jobs came back to Apple and you like drew a square and he's like, this is how many products we make. And now it's like 45 iPads, 64 phones. I couldn't tell you if the iPhone 8 persists, right? If they can drop the 10 to that price point. No, it definitely persists. They'll drop that even lower. They got to do, they're making this 6.1 for India. Like they're famously like the iPhone's not doing so hot in India, right?

Yeah. They got to keep as much as they can around. to try and find some kind of solution for that region. So I think they definitely do it. Yeah. And you think that one doesn't have 3D touch, but the 10 model, the OLED models do. That's my guess.

And I think precisely nobody will care. I think it matters that they have a low-end phone that looks a lot like the high-end phone because people just want the thing that looks like the top-tier phone. Yeah. I think it says a lot that 3D touch has never made it to like the iPad. Maybe it's just like too hard. But if they thought it was important, it would be everywhere in iOS by now.

Yeah. Well, just ergonomically, trying to do a hard press on an iPad seems bonkers. I mean, I've tried to do it to move the cursor around. Again, the only good feature of 3D touch. And there's other ways to do it, but I always try to do it. By the way, part of that Bloomberg piece that you mentioned, they said the iPad Mini will not be updated this time around. No, but there's another.

The Mini is getting, but that's later. There's another Mac story that's going to be the new mid-range Macs. Book Air thing. We don't know what it's going to be called, and that's very confusing. The Mac Mini. The Mac Mini. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. The iPad Mini, yeah, no, it's gone.

It still, it continues to be sold. That really is just Apple's strategy. We'll just sell this until people definitely stop on you. Okay, let's talk about the watch. I mean, it was pretty shocking to me how much people were into it. How much, like, my initial reaction was, oh, yeah, that looks great. Like, they have turned the watch around. People feel good about the Apple Watch.

Yeah, because it can send eye messages and no other product can. I mean, there it is. But it looks great. I think the bigger screen makes the thing look just wildly more powerful. It looks like, again, these watch faces are going to be more complicated. I think a big question is the new, we've already seen a preview of the new watchOS, right, at WWC. So is that going to change even more against a bigger display? And we just kind of don't know the answer yet.

Yeah, I don't know. And there hasn't been a public beta, I don't think, but there has been a dev beta. But we haven't seen like the kind of like close analysis of like every little piece of what's in the beta that we usually get for the iPhone. So we haven't seen a hole that I've noticed, a whole lot of like chatter that points to new features. Yeah. Yeah. And then the only other thing is like there's apparently now there's a new hole in between the button and the digital crown, which could be a microphone, could be something else. Who knows?

I'm sure it's a microphone. Yeah, so you can make those phone calls. Waki-talkie-talkie mode is coming finally, right? Yeah, yeah, right. Which, Wachie-Tacie mode is technically just a phone call. It's the best. No, have we not talked about this? Yeah, yeah, we did.

I remember how mad you were. It just makes a phone call. It just makes a phone call and silences it. That's all it does. I mean, what more do you want for a phone call? Okay. I mean, look, that's like, I'm sure we're going to talk about it next week, too, because the event will be coming.

But the amount of time between invites go out, everything is leaked, it was like 10 minutes. Yeah, it was crazy. So good on 9 to 5 Mac. But the way we're looking at this is we're expecting this event to basically be iPhones, Apple Watch, and hopefully air power? Yeah. And then we figure, we know that there's new iPad pros coming and we know those new Macs are coming. We don't think they try and cram those into this event. event, either one. We think they do another event in like October, right?

I have a strong suspicion there's another thing in October. So I think the way the next few months plays out is Apple on the 12th, we think there's a Google event in early October, and then Apple swoops in mid-October, suck all the air out of the room. Right. I mean, that would be, if I was Apple, that's what I would do. And there'll probably be like two other events, too, just to screw with us, just because we won't be busy enough. No one's going to sleep. Is it just me or is like the idea of a slightly larger iPhone. The iPhone 10, my iPhone 10 is like, I've already broken the back. It's like a mess. But this is the first time that I haven't been like, oh, this phone already feels old, right?

Yeah. Every previous iPhone of sort of the six design. And maybe it was just because that design lasted for so long. I was like, yeah, I don't, this is getting old. Like, I could, I want a new phone now. This one, I just don't feel that way. Something about the iPhone 10 or iOS 11, like, and not getting the sense that like things are slowing down the way I used to, which maybe some of that was psychosomatic, maybe not. And I'm definitely not getting the sense that the battery is degrading as much as previous iPhones did. My battery is definitely not doing this well as it did in the beginning. Oh, really? But I use, I mean, like, that's like just my fault, right? It's like you use the hell on my phone. So iOS 12 comes out. A bunch of iPhone 10 owners get a new OS. Are they racing to

upgrade their $1,000 phone? Again, this presents like a big problem for Apple. Like, a lot of people just paid $1,000 for this phone. Are they going to get one-year upgraders, or is the cycle going to even longer? They're going to get enough. They might not get as many as they usually do, but I kind of don't think that it matters because they're Apple and they're a trillion dollar,

or they were, I don't know if they are presently a trillion-dollar company. Yeah. To be clear, this criticism is rooted in, this is a great phone, right? Like, the phone's really good. I don't, it's not, I don't have any problems with it. So I'm just curious what they can say to, like, convince a bunch of iPhone 10 owners to upgrade.

More an emoji. It's such a good problem, though, from a consumer perspective. Yeah, it's a great problem from a consumer perspective. I just, it's just new iPhone season, right? They have to, like, make it better in some way. Like, their line has always been, the S generation is actually the bigger upgrade, and the S generation is always the one that sells even more, right? Like, they consistently have said S phones sell the most compared to their predecessor.

But I think the 10 phones sold more than they expected. Yeah. I'm still on a 7, right? The 10 was exciting, but not quite worth $1,000 to me. And I didn't know if I wanted to beta test the new interactions and stuff. But, you know, I've got a crack screen, dying battery. I'm ready to upgrade. Yeah.

So this is the generation. I'll either hop in or I'll finally switch to pixel. Yeah. You got used to that Dongle Life. I mean. You were defeated. I haven't done a Dongle Life update in a while. I got, you know, I have the Beets X neck buds.

Yeah. And one of the ears died. Oh. Yeah. So I only have sound in one ear right now that's been pretty rough. But I think the, I don't know, Thonga life is whatever. I'm over it. That's good.

And now your choices are a series of W-1 headphones or someone else's Bluetooth implementation, which is great. Sure. I love it. Deeter put the Square Ads of Lightning connected to its mobile card reader here just to troll me. Yeah. But it's true. So let's back up and give some context. So Square made a new version of their card reader dongle.

Previously, they had two versions. They had one that plugged into the headphone jack. And then they fixed that one so it actually encrypts the data when it goes across the headphone jack. So that was nice. They've made that compatible with iPads and Chromebooks and Windows, like just laptops and whatever. And then they've released a new version a couple years ago that worked over BTLE and then that you could stick your card and do it. But people just really like the little dongle. and so now they have another version that uses lightning.

But in order to use lightning, you have to make Eli mad. You have to pay an Apple tax. Yeah. What two people want? They want a consistent hardware connection that does not rely on a battery. And so the market spoke six years after Lightning came out, and Square finally added this product that people have wanted since the headphone jack went away. And they couldn't push everybody to their $50 BTLE reader. and so now they're paying a tax to Apple

for every lighting product they should. And I just like, if you just look at the scope of interconnects on the iPhone, headphone jack aside, it was just, it was the only free hardware interconnect to the iPhone.

And now it's gone. And so your choices are, Lightning, you gotta pay Apple. If you use Bluetooth and you're a headphone company, you're at a disadvantage because Apple makes W1 and they won't give it to you.

So your headphones will be less good than AirPods in terms of connectivity. just necessarily. Yeah, Wi-Fi Direct is impossible. It's slightly better on Android in some ways because you can trigger a switch, but on the iPhone, it's pretty locked down, and so you have to go into settings

and join a random network. So that's not an option. Yeah, then there's Wi-Fi, which is not good for many of these products, right? You know, the future of interconnects that don't require Apple taxes are QR codes, I think. I think you're just, everything's going to communicate the camera app.

I'm just saying they're the most valuable company in the world and they're making their money by charging rents. And it's just, I don't know. You should be able to beam data by having the screen flash, sort of like the way that you could beam data with infrared and Paul pilots. You can point two phones at each other. That's a standard called blink. Yeah.

That's what we should be using from now on. Morse code for the screen flashes. Do you guys know the distinction of what if the iPhone just read another iPhone's NFC chip? Are NFCs, like, not buying directional like that? I'm really into Apple pay right now. I'm Apple paying. My coffee shop upgraded to the Square Reader with the contactless payments and the chip reader. They paid that, the Bluetooth LE tax.

The Bitley tax. The Bitley tax. And I've been Apple paying everywhere and I love it. Yeah. But if I could just bump phones. Yeah. Just get it done. You just bump, well, I mean, Android can do it, right?

You can do all kinds of cool pairing stuff with Android. Look, I'm not that mad about it. I know the war is lost, but I'm just going to be the one who keeps pointing out all the routes in and out of the iPhone. Apple's just there to make it a little bit harder for you. Okay. We're going to have an ad. It's an audio clip.

I don't have to read anything. So we're going to read that. Then Liz is going to do this week in Elon, which is now a newsletter, by the way, that you can sign up for. So if you're interested in that, get on the website, sign up for this week in Elon. Amazing, amazing illustration from Dami Lee is the header of this. And we're going to come back and talk about EFA. Check this out.

Hi, my name is Carrie Byron. I'm a former MythBuster, which means I'm a seeker of the truth. There are a lot of myths about EV batteries. Today we're going to debunk some of those myths with a bona fide EV expert, Stolle Freundland from Norway, where more than 50% of new automobiles sold last year were electric vehicles. He's the member of Norway's EV Association. All right, so my first question,

We've heard that EV batteries die quickly. How long can I drive without recharging? Ever more. More cars are arriving to the market with more battery capacity, meaning range anxiety will be a thing of the past. Now, how do EVs perform in cold weather? I mean, I've heard that the batteries can peter out when it's really frigid outside.

I think in general, they perform surprisingly well. I've tested so many cars doing this over and over again, preheating the battery, pre-hitting the car actually saves energy. Is it harder to reach a top speed when in an electric car? Well, you sure get there fast. It's like you reach top speed in terms of acceleration in a small amount of time. To learn more about going electric with Audi, check out AudiUSA.com slash Etron. That's Audi USA.com slash E-T-R-O-N.

Hello and welcome to This Week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lapato, the deputy editor at The Verge. And by the way, if you want to receive this week in Elon in your inbox once a week, you can sign up at theverge.com. Okay. So it's been a weird week in Elon, though I guess they're sort of all weird weeks in Elon lately. I'm very tired. Okay. So you may remember that Elon Musk tweeted on August 7th that he was going to take Tesla Private at 420 a share.

And then last Friday, around 8.30 p.m. Pacific time, blog post ran up on the Tesla site saying, hey, actually, that's not going to be. happening. We're going to keep Tesla public. We're going to focus on the Model 3. And, you know, this is too much of a distraction. And that would be a pretty strong response. If it didn't seem like distractions were still getting the better of Elon Musk. And the reason I say this is because of his Twitter account, which honestly, like, this is like a, like, sometimes I wonder if, like, Elon Musk is enacting a PSA about why none of us should ever tweet. Because you remember the share price thing started on Twitter, too. It's not the only problem he's had on Twitter, right? Like, there was the bankruptcy thing, the jokes about bankruptcy around April 1st.

There's slamming the media, getting in fights with individual journalists. And then there's the sort of Thai submarine debacle where he called one of the people who was involved in rescuing the children who were trapped in a cave. He called that guy a petto because that guy had made fun of the submarine that Elon Musk had built to rescue children. Just a lot, a lot. And, you know, that Friday statement could have been a really good reset. It could have been, you know, like Elon Musk goes head down on Twitter, like he doesn't tweet, but it wasn't. So one of the things that happened is, you know, Musk was tweeting about the New York Times, which had characterized him as alternating between laughter and tears in an interview. And he says, for the record, my voice cracked once during the New York

Times article, that was it. There were no tears. The finance editor disputes this. I'm sure. I don't know. I wasn't there. But that sort of led to this other thing that he did on Twitter, where he essentially implied a second time that the guy he had gotten into a fight with around the Thai cave thing was, in fact, a pedophile. He tweeted, you don't think it's strange, he hasn't sued me. Then Wednesday, that guy's lawyer tweeted an August 6th letter informing Musk that the lawyer is in the process of preparing a civil complaint against you. So there's that. Now, you might be wondering why Elon Musk is doing this to himself. And in fact, I am wondering too.

But there's been this narrative that started with short sellers that explains it. And the narrative is that Elon Musk is erratic and desperate. That's according to David Einhorn, who is short Tesla. Now, you don't have to agree with that narrative, though you can, to see why Musk is acting out. Because if you don't agree with the narrative, then your impulse is to fight it. But you don't fight a narrative by, like, arguing with it. You fight it by having a better story.

But it doesn't seem like Musk has that figured out. Like, look at what he's doing. He's trying to justify himself, right? He's trying to justify, you know, the emotionality of the New York Times interview, saying, oh, no, I didn't cry. He's trying to justify calling the rescuer a pedophile. He hasn't sued me. Maybe he's scared of discovery. Like, he's trying to make himself look rational.

But the thing that I'm not sure he's realized about a narrative about being, erratic and desperate is that the more you fight it, the more it sticks to you. It's kind of like fly paper that way. So like the actual way to fight this narrative is really to go heads down on the Model 3 and like log off of Twitter and focus on making Tesla profitable. But I don't know that Musk is ever going to log off. He's like to me become the embodiment of the drill tweet about never logging off. So, uh, I don't know what next week in Elon looks like, but I am taking a vacation. and so Sean O'Kane will have to tell you about it because I don't know about you guys,

but I just need a little break. Anyway, that's been this week in Elon. Thank you very much. I'm Elizabeth Lepado, deputy editor at The Verge. Okay. So EFO's this week, it's a trade show in Europe. IFA stands for trade show in Europe. Yeah.

It's basically CS for Europe. Lots of stuff going on. Do you want to talk about the Thronos? Can we just start with the Thronos? The Throneos. Oh, the giant throne, the gaming throne? Yeah, I mean, it's Acer, it's called the Predator Thronos. It weighs 458 pounds.

You sit in it, the screens, like, it like rotates. It's like something from Prometheus. Like that's the every time I look at it. You sit in it, a huge bank of three giant curved monitors, curves around you, and then it rotates you back. So you're like in a weird prone position. And then it has haptic feedback. So as you're like, you know, shooting stuff, like the chair kicks you.

It is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. They don't have a release date. I don't think it's a real product. And I wish they would stop pretending that it is a real product. They should have just said, we made this dope thing. If you want one, give us a call. I think it's a real product. Okay.

They're going to sell four of them. I mean, like, it's a real product in that they're going to sell it for like $15,000. And, like, 10 people will buy them. But, like, it's a real product in the same way that, like, Corvette's a real product, right? It's like it's the one that makes you want to buy. Constantly and it's only really purchased by people having midlife crises. Yeah, but other people are interested in them so they buy a Chevy Cruce.

Okay. That's how that works. Okay. So people buy three monitors sometimes, right? Yeah. So let's say people are willing to spend that much. Also people buy these like $400 to $600 like gaming chairs. So there's a market of people who are willing to spend about.

like $3,000 to $3,000 to $6,000 on these components. Yeah. So how much is the moving chair part is the question? So now we're like talking motors. We're talking LED lights trips. We got motors. Yeah, we got a bunch of buttons. I mean, if they sell this thing for less than 10K, it's so stupid.

I love it so much. This has been my dream to live this life for forever, basically. Yeah. So you strap in, have it recline you, and then begin gaming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I can imagine writing a novel in this.

I feel like there are a number of people on the verge staff where if I was like, hey, I'm, I'm going to offer you the choice for replacing your fancy motorized ergonomic standing desk with a throneos. They'd be like, yes, I will, I will immediately take the thronos. It's great. It's super silly. Hym did a video with it. Check it out. who normally is not like overwhelmed with excitement in this video is like I wish more people did insane things That's a check does point out the aster's pretty good at announcing things and then never shipping

Eventually getting around the shipping yeah other stuff at Ifah There's a new yoga book from Lenovo the The keyboard is an e-ink screen and it's a it's a thousand bucks I used one blind has a good hands-on video It's a thousand bucks The e-ink screen is it's used for the keyboard and they do a really clever thing where the instead of a touch pad on the bottom

track pad there's just this little like lozenge, just a little oval but then when you put your finger on it to grab the mouse the keyboard shrinks down and the trackpad goes over it you move your mouse or you want it to you take your finger off and then it goes back to the keyboard so you can get a full-sized track pad

and a bigger keyboard in the same space I like that sounds great that sounds great but like when I'm using a laptop I've got hand on the mouse hand on command C, you know, I'm like stealing code from Stack Overflow. Like it's like my goal is to get really good of VIM commands and be able to just be one,

just be all keyboard, but I'm not there yet. I don't know. That seems, it looks beautiful and it looks so clever, but like the last yoga book, it seems so impractors. So the other thing is the E-ink screen works as like a PDF reader.

And you could also like do doodles on it. they beam to Windows? Yeah, so it only supports PDFs now. They say that ebook and dotmobie are coming, which is annoying. You can draw on it and then copy and paste your drawings, or you can write on it, and then it'll do OCR and paste it into Windows. So it's like the E-Nx screen isn't running Windows. You can't just take any old app and, like, throw it onto the E-Nex screen if you want.

It's running some separate proprietary thing that communicates with Windows instead of being an actual part of Windows. Yeah. I think. That's how it works. But you can do stuff like, you can, if you have a PDF on there and you, like, draw a square around the thing you want to copy and then you paste it, if the PDF is color, it'll paste the full color thing, which is, I don't know, neat, I guess. And, and yeah, it is just tiny and skinny and beautiful and really well made. It's got two USBC ports, which is what it should have.

And it's also got an Intel, I think you get an M3 or an I-5 processor on it, which is what it should be. But yeah, it's $1,000. Like, you really got to want it. Are these the new Intel processors? They're seventh gen. They're not eighth gen, I think. So, Deere, you used it. And they're also like whiskey lake.

Yeah, for like 10 minutes. How was typing? Better than you expect, although I was using prototypes. And just like the last yoga book, they hadn't dialed the haptics in. And so you'd, like, type on it and it would just be like, this is what I'm saying. Yeah. You can't do this stuff.

This is why the 3D touch is good because of the haptics. Yeah. Everyone needs to steal. Every computer manufacturer needs to look at what Apple did with a taptic engine and then look in the mirror and be like, we failed. And like, compete. It's just so much better. There's not, I think, LG phones have reasonably good, like, haptics. And everyone else is, like, a blurry mess that makes everything feel dumb and slow.

Yeah. Could you do the sound of good theater? No. You remember the Rumble packs you could get for the N64, those like things that you plug into the bottom of the wavebird? That's what that's, that's, that's where most of the phone industry is these days. Maybe like a new thing instead of headphone jacks in Dolby Atmos should be bad haptics. That's a new site. If you have an idea for what a segment called bad haptics should be on the show.

You have to steal that from Sam Biford. He is our bad haptics reporter. He's very angry about haptics all the time. Oh, and he's great because he has like a delightful British accent. That's our new second. Yeah. We get Sam to just rant and rave on bad haptics every week. It'll be great.

We've already got the intro music for it. Me. It's just now. That's great. I will say Dan Seafurt reviewed an AIS Zen book today. And instead of a track pad, it has a screen. It just seems like Windows manufacturers are like, all right, this bottom half. What kind of nutty thing can we do with that?

And he was expecting that screen trackpad to be horrible. And honestly, just reading the description of what it can do, where you can make it a full secondary display for windows and put little windows in it. That's amazing. They didn't have the right idea here. But he says it's really good. Yeah.

Well, it does other things too. Like for YouTube, there's like a Chrome extension so that you get these nice YouTube controls in the touchpad. I had to check the byline multiple times to make sure Dan was actually complimenting a screen and a touchpad. I mean, I'm looking at a computer with a display on the, keyboard that is completely useless. It's called the touchbar.

And I hate it. And I would trade that touch bar for a little screen on the trackpad any minute. I feel like the dream has always been just like put your phone there. And I don't know why because I know it's a bad idea. But I'm always like, what if this was just what if I just put my phone there? And then I

3D touch on that thing. And that's like, see? No, but on the Mac it's force touch, right? The worst name. I know. It's just not appropriate. Before we get into some of the other EFA stuff, so there were a couple of, at least two,

maybe a few more Android Wear. I'm sorry, Wear OS watches. There's a new Skagen. And then there's some diesel that's just massive. The Skagit is based on the fossil thing because there's a new generation of fossil. I think they call them Generation 2.5 or something. They're all still using the Qualcomm 2100,

which is a huge bummer, but we know Qualcomm's announcing a new processor soon leading up to the Pixel Watch, and concurrent with all these slightly newer generation of current, don't buy them 2100 Android or WareOS watches, Google updated the way WareOS gets navigated. They simplified it. The swipes are clearer now. So it seems pretty obvious they're gearing up to put out a Pixel Watch and really try and save wearables from being completely owned by the Apple Watch.

and, yo, I don't think it's going to happen. It's a very hard thing to do, right? But there's still, I made the video about this, there's still no good wearable for Android users. Full stop. Look, there's the processor problem and there's the size and weight problem. Fundamentally, I think the Apple Watch

is becoming a much better product overall. The main thing people use it for is notifications and texting. And obviously the health stuff. Health, yeah. But the thing, the reason you want that is because you get text message on your wrist and you can reply to them from the watch, right?

Oh, so I don't know. I use mine, I mean, I use mine for the date. I use mine for time. For me, it's health, like, basic date and time and weather, and next calendar appointment are important to me. And I'm trying to use it for HomeKit, but I'm getting really annoyed with HomeKit. Can I just say home kit has a feature where, like,

when everybody comes home, we turn the lights on. And when everybody leaves, we turn the lights off. But for some reason, the ERO or Scyt something is not talking to my phone nicely. And so the phone will drop off the network for like a half a second. And then when that happens, and then it comes back on. And every time that happens, HomeKit thinks I've either left or come home. And so my lights are just turning on and off at will.

Whatever they feel like, you're just like me sitting around. Everything just shuts down. You're like, well, okay. Oh, that's perfect. How many heroes do you have? Only two. I've got the main base station and the new plug that goes into the wall. Because I have a two-bedroom apartment. Yeah, yeah. I'm just wondering because your phone roams between them.

So maybe it feels like it's dropping off and it roams between them. It's like a thing. Well, look, anyway, what I'm saying is... Androidware is coming, but don't buy this. The stuff for me actually looks halfway decent, but don't buy it. Wait. But what I'm saying is it's not going to be good until Google filters up messaging. That's why you want to buy these things. So you can send messages and you don't want to send some janky-ass.

text. You want to use the actual messaging client that you use, and Androidware still quite isn't there for that stuff. Until they sort out messaging, the killer app for these is, you know, that I'm on my way right from your wrist. I mean, they've sorted up messaging by, I mean, we're waiting for RCS

to rollout, number one. Number two, they have quick replies available for pretty much every single messaging app. Messaging on Android and on WearOS, if you don't use the default texting app, is way better than messaging on the iPhone with the Apple watch if you don't use a default texting app.

Fair. Same thing with Android Auto versus CarPlay. Android Auto, it doesn't show me all the notifications of the home screen, which is good. But if I get a WhatsApp message or a signal message or whatever, it still pops notification. I can still tap it, still hear it played, and still reply. Yeah. Which you cannot do on CarPlay. I'm with you.

I just think maybe this interface stuff will change it. But I just see people using the Apple Watch, and they, immediately gravitate towards notifications and messaging because it's an obvious thing that thing does extraordinarily well. I don't. Yeah, I think you're super wrong about both of those points. No, it's just like it just does it off. Like there's no, you don't have any other choices, right? You're like locked into iMessage and like just does the thing and they're like, okay, I know I understand this. Google's thing is far more powerful, but it's way harder to figure out. You're wrong about notifications being a good experience on the Apple Watch. You come in, you got to catch it right away. You got to

swipe down to see them. They take up the full screen. It's not super nice. And I think you are actually wrong about notifications being the killer app for a watch. I think more people care about health than they do about notifications. All right. Well, if you agree with me, tweet it back on. If you disagree with me, tweet it back on. In the past six months, I've probably seen 100 Apple watches in the wild. and I've never seen one of them light up.

I think this is the old beats thing where everybody's pretending to have a piece of technology but really they just ran out of battery. They're Lagerfelding. Do you remember this? When they haven't watched first come out, they gave one a Carl Lagerfeld, and there was a picture of him,

and he hadn't set it up, so it was just the glowy ring. There's a Lagerfeld in it. It was great. Last EFA thing, tons of Bluetooth headphones came out. It's like a little out of control. New Senheiser, truly wireless ones, which I think is Vlad wrote them up, says they're actually worth the weight.

He really likes them. And then Sony, the 1000XM3s are out. Headphones to charge over USBC, which is basically their killer feature. There's like lots of new things about them, but I have M2s and I like them, but they have USBC, so I might upgrade. I might spend another $300 on these. Do you guys see my tweets about Sony's headphones app and how insane the user agreement is? I should have put this on the website. You got it at me.

I'll just at you next time. So you can buy Sony headphones and put them, like light them up and connect them over Bluetooth. You don't need this app. But if you download the app, it literally presents you with a privacy policy that is among the most insane things I've ever read. So you agree to waive any right to sue Sony. You agree to forced arbitration. You agree that Sony, yep, you agree that Sony can collect data about what you're listening to and send it to. third parties. And if you want to opt out of all this, you have to send Sony a letter in the mail

within 90 days. What? What? Flash your phone firmware? I don't know. I was just like, this is insanity. I never had this problem with headphone jack headphones. Just putting it out there. Anyhow, to read one more ad, and then we should Paul do your segment and talk about what's going on with Sonos a little bit. This episode of the Veritas is brought to you by Dollar Shave Club. No matter what you do in the bathroom to get ready, Dollar Shave Club has everything you need to look. feel and smell your best. They have amazing shower stuff, hair styling products,

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that's right you can't buy this one called it's called keyboard in the front club population two. So if you have seen my tweets, I don't know. But I, so, you know, Asus has that Zephyrus laptop. They put the keyboard in the front. I was super excited. Then they released a new Zephyrus. They didn't put the keyboard in the front.

It was really sad. Then they went back to the keyboard in the front for the Zephyrus S. Yeah. But now, Acer has, this is part of the deluge of Acerge of Acer. News and general gaming laptop stuff at EFA. Acer's Predator Triton 900. Oh my God. So this is like a convertible.

Remember those like the hinges in the middle of the screen. Yeah. And it always looks impractical and really fragile. But it was kind of a popular like Sony did one. The Vio Duo like did a Windows 8 convertible laptop like this. But this is a gaming laptop that's a convertible or, or basically the screen is repositionable, but it's got the keyboard in the front,

which is all that matters to me, because I think if you have a gaming laptop, you're not going to use it in a coffee shop, you don't need to use it on your lap. You want to use an external mouse anyway, so might as well bring the keyboard forward so you don't have to reach across a hot surface to use the WASD.

But isn't the whole point to have palm rests? Yeah, if you don't have a palm rest, then your keys are up, you don't have any place to rest your palms. That's why it's called a palm rest. Like do you put a block of wood in front of it? Do you just hover your hands over the keyboard? You're elite gamer.

You don't need to rest your palms. I do think they shipped the original Zephyrus with a wedge. Yeah, it is. We had it on the circuit breaker show. It was wild. But I used it without a wedge. Now, the Zephyrus was really thin, and this one looks a little high. But think about, I've used a mechanical keyboard without a palm rest in front of it often.

And a mechanical keyboard is higher up. a typical laptop keyboard. I think it's completely fine. If you need... And again, you know, if you need more ergonomics, feel free and put something in front of this. But I think this is fine. I mean, I think if you need more ergonomics,

what you need is the ACER Predator Thronos gaming chairs, which is the most ergonomic way to... So you'll just be using the Predator 900, the Triton 900, on the pad in front of you, And then all the monitors will just say no signal. Yeah, that would be great. No, on the monitors, you know, you put up a couple of TV shows, got some Netflix going. It's like a full immersive experience.

I'm in love with this. I wish I went to EFAT. So anyway, yeah. How much is this thing? The world of the front club population two. No idea. It's got a four case. This is probably one of those like three and a half thousand.

This is like one of those like statement pieces that gaming that often don't ship. At EFA, it's in a glass box. You can't touch it. Yeah. It's got a 4K screen with G-Sync, so it's going to be up there. I feel like these companies are from a different time and gadget coverage. You know, like they just like stayed in place. They're like, I don't know, what's that?

The fish that like everyone thought was extinct, but it's still there. The seal can't. And Acer's still doing the like glass box at a trade show thing. And everyone else is like, yeah, we stopped doing that a long time ago. Real quick before I talk about sonnows, Deeter put Old Man Yelze Cloud here, which is a direct reference to Trump tweeting about Google and saying Google and Facebook and Twitter need to be more fair to him. Again, it's a little sideways for us.

You can read the interface. Casey's been writing about it at length for days now. But we're starting to do the second episodes of the Vergecast. So we had Brad Smith last week, the president of Microsoft. Next week, I actually just interviewed Tim Wu, who was a guy who coined the first. to phrase net neutrality. He's got a new book coming out about antitrust. We actually get into that. So I don't want to see, seem like we're ignoring Trump and Google. Like, actually next week at the verge is what we're calling Monopoly Week. And we have like six pieces about antitrust law and monopoly

and how you'd regulate tech giants coming out. And we have this interview to Tim Wu coming out probably Tuesday. So I just want to like touch on it. Would you say that that coverage is going to like completely dominate the site and push out all competing coverage next week? Yes. We're going to tie it. If you want our monopoly coverage, you have to use our search engine. That's the way that goes. You have no choice. No other browsers will be able to use it except for Verge browser 5,000.

Wait, wait, we have to make Verge browser 5,000. Just like whatever's left of the WebKit engine. We just skin it, call it a day. Oh, Electron. Fork the Brave browser. It's probably open source. go back to Mozilla's original rendering engine. Wait, can you make an electron

app based that is itself a self-contained browser? Think about what I'm saying. Yeah, there's... Yeah. What do mean? Well, Electron is a web engine to rub web apps in. Could you build a web browser that then runs a web browser? Yes. Can you have

electron section? You could build a web browser. I don't know about your last step. See, it's a last step. There's a lot of electron-based web browsers, right? They use the Chrome rendering engine. and they render random web pages. That's just fine. What is your last step?

Can you build a web app that is a web browser? So you're running a browser inside of Chrome. Yes. Like a JavaScript web browser and then run that as an electron app. Yeah. So you just basically take a huge performance hit for the sake of doing something stupid. Someone just released an electron app that runs Windows 95 and that's got an internet explorer in it. There you go.

That's VergeRiser 5,000. i.e. on Windows 95 inside of electron and that will crowd out Netscape Navigator and that's for Browser 5,000. Anyway, look. By the way, I need to point something out real quick. I just wanted to see if anybody had done this and so I did a very quick Google search and my Google search was browser in your browser. Turns out that the person who owns Browson Your Browser.com

is Joanna Stern. It's a website dedicated to her dog name browser. Oh, I remember. She made a Wall Street Journal video about that. Yeah. She was testing out like Squarespace and Wix and all that. Anyway, look, I don't want to ignore what is happening between our president and the big tech companies. There's a huge series of hearings, congressional hearings next week.

Yeah. CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, Google. They're all going to be there. We're going to cover the hell out of it. I'm just telling you, the Vergecast, we're not doing it here. But check out the interview with Tim Wu next week. Check out Monopoly Week next week. now let's talk about Sonos.

Sonos put a new amp, I'm buying the hell out of it. Also, I've come to like really... So Sonus Amp is what you... You plug external speakers into it, like regular external speakers. They've had one for years. I have one. The new one is more powerful.

You know, it's designed to be rack-mounted. It's for custom installers. Most people will never buy this product. That's not what you want. You want, like, play 5 or Play 1 or Sonus 1. But here's my point about all of this stuff. The Sonos, like, breadth of its product line is the thing that will save it from Amazon, from Apple.

Like, Apple is never making this product in a billion years. No way. They're never making the Sonos amp. Amazon is never making the Alexa-powered Sonos amp. And so if you have Sonos, which is making, like, $200, like, Sonos 1 speakers, $600 speakers for custom installers, everything in the middle, partnering with IKEA to go to the low end and sell, like, $40 Sonos speakers. and at the high end partnering with the big AV companies to build receivers that work with Sonos.

That actually, to me, we've been talking a lot, like, how will Sonos win? That's how they win. Like, they're there at every segment of the market. I just don't see any other company like taking that approach. I have never owned a Sonos product, but this is really my ideal. Passive bookshelf speakers are not that expensive. And in my opinion, a decent pair of bookshelf speakers sounds better than, any crazy sound engineering that Apple or Google have done to bounce.

We do bounce shots and the sound, you know, the bass has changes your life and it leaves a ring on the table. You know, like they've worked so hard to out engineer what already sounds amazing, which is two speakers that you do have to sit in front of to sound well, that you can just enjoy music in a very clear life-changing way. And this Sonos amp makes that very easy to pull off. Yeah. And if you really want Alexa, you can just get a dot and it'll communicate.

You have to say play it on the living room or whatever you name the Sonos room. But you can still get 90%, 80% of the benefits of buying one of Sonos's smart speakers by getting an amp plugging in the two bookshelves and throwing a dot next to it. Yeah, but you're now $1,000 in, right? Yeah. Like, it's a lot of money. No, I get it. Oh, maybe not a thousand.

You're like $800 in. Like $200 for decent bookshelf speakers, a dot for $50. It's a lot of money. But I just, I don't see any of the other competitors realizing that people like have lives. And that like you should build products to fit the entire spectrum of things you'd want to do. And I think this is where Sonas has a lead. They also rolled out their new like API stuff and alerts, which I'm a little less excited about. Well, the alerts are like you're not going to.

going to get notifications of like a tweet reply. It's going to be if someone rings your doorbell, the doorbell can talk directly to the Sonos, and the Sonos can ring your doorbell. I just don't, like, human civilization is 2,000 years old, and I feel like someone's at the door is a soft problem. Like, do I want that? Like, I think that's like, that might be where they're starting to get a little fuzzy, right?

They're rolling out, if this, than that, integrations. So it's the same thing as Dieter. You come home, if this and that notices, like, your garage door open. and your Sonos lights up. Yeah. Like, I think that's where it's going to get a little hazy. But they are trying to make, like, you have 500 sonos speakers in your house a platform for stuff to happen.

And I think that's interesting. I just think the ideas they have right now seem like they're definitely the first ideas. Yeah. What's interesting, it's not just that Sonos has something for everybody, which is the really cliche way to say it, but they always give you someplace to go, right? So you made this joke when you interviewed the CEO not too long ago. the Sonos's like most important business value is that people on the whole tend to make more money as they get older and they can buy more stuff.

And if you have, you buy the one cheap sono speaker and then, you know, I don't know, you make a lot of money and you're very lucky and successful and you want to install a home system. You don't have to leave the ecosystem and you can continue to just use Sonos. Whereas, you know, it used to be you'd have to like go buy a Crestron system and you'd cost, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. And there was no like nowhere in between. There's a very steady path from, I'm just going to buy the one nice speaker to I'm going to have my whole house full. Yeah. And nobody else is willing to play at all those different price points and support with the same ecosystem all those different propositions. Also, none of the other companies, well, I mean, Apple and Google are, but if you look at the other audio companies that support this stuff, the idea that they are a good software company that will be there for you is not true.

So, like, there's a lot of, like, wacky, Sony Google Cast soundbars. And, like, there's really high-end stuff. There's, like, $5,000 amps that support cast. And it's just like, I don't trust this to not be a botnet in a year. Right? I just got very, like, wary. Like, I tiptoe around them. And, like, at least I have a little bit of faith that Sonos as a software company will, like, persist.

Speaking of the same thing, like, Bose just put out a whole bunch of new, Alexa-powered smart speaker stuff. Casey had a good tweet. He's like, their assistant should be called Bozo, and you can just say, oh, hey, Bozo. One of their speakers has, like, a tiny little screen on it for some reason. Yeah, why not? This shows the Albumart.

AlbaMAR is very valuable to a lot of people. Innovation. To some people, it's a key part of the music experience. And those people should buy a record player. I do think their soundbar looks dope. Yeah, I just, you know, I have, like, QC-35s, and they're like a good Bose product, and every other most product to me is like a big question mark. Yeah.

Sharper image. Yeah. Yeah. No, wasn't that Bang and Olson? That's the mall store that I coveted in my life. I actually looked at, you know, they had those huge Walmarted CD players. They're like a B.O. Sound 9,000. I can't believe I remember the small number.

I can't remember a face and a name to save my soul, but I remember the B0 Sound 9,000. It was like a huge, and I looked them up on eBay the other day because I have a problem. they still sell for entirely too much money. We need to go back to product names having a thousand number at the end of them. Right? Like you said the iPhone 10,000. Yeah, first browser 5,000, iPhone. The iPhone 7,000, just call it that.

Why not? Go for it. Yeah. All right. That's the end of the Vergecast today. A few things to plug real quick. Home and Future are still going. Rapping up, Grant Imhara.

That show is doing great. I'm so excited. people like it. Our video team worked on it super hard. We actually built a house with Curbed. So I'm really happy people like it. That's going on YouTube. Check it out. This week we did an episode on securing the home of the future. Bejohn Steven, who's one of our new culture reporters, went to the last blockbuster in the world in Bend, Oregon. Watch this video. It's on YouTube. He went with the manager to a big box store to buy videos for the blockbuster. And the big box store, this is like adorable. They didn't want to sign the release and be on camera

because they wanted to protect the blockbuster manager because it's against the retailer's policy to buy videos and rent them later. So it's like this little community in Bend, Oregon is like supporting the blockbuster. I love it. Watch that video, Bejana is great in it. Read the interface, Casey Newton.

Speaking of Casey Newton, converged to Casey Newton, just binge, listen to the whole thing. It's there on iTunes. Same with Why'd you push that buttons, season one and two. Why'd you push that button, season three? It's true.

In production right now. So that's coming again. It's going to be great. You can also follow us. We're at Verge basically everywhere. I'm at Reckless on Twitter. Paul is Future Paul. Dieter's Backlon.

That's it. That's the Verge cast. Rock and roll. Wait. I had a business idea real quick. Imagine it's called fake Blockbuster. And you walk in and they have the different sections instead of being like horror and mystery and stuff, there's Hulu and there's Netflix.

And there's just like printed out cards. And so you and your friends can wander around and debate on what to watch based on what's on the different services and then there's snacks up front and then you walk out without a movie. Then you go home. No, you go home. They've got QR codes and you go home and you scan them under your TV and it launches the appropriate service. This is great.

Oh, and then the store gets a cut of the streaming revenue that normally would have gone straight to the, yeah. Yeah, which is like 0.010 cents. That's going to be great. You know what would actually be on those cards in addition to the QR code? What's that? Promo code.