The Vergecast - iPhone 10th anniversary, Nintendo Switch, and the HTC U Ultra

Episode Date: January 13, 2017

You watched the live show at CES and now we’re back in podcast mode. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul get together to share some of their experiences from the Consumer Electronics Show, along with a review of what happened this week. The iPhone turned 10 on Tuesday, so the trio looks back to when it was first announced and discuss what will happen with smartphones in the future. There’s also lots of gadget talk: HTC’s U Ultra, the Nintendo Switch (!), and lots of throwback devices. This is a really good nerdy tech-centric episode of Vergecast, I hope you like it. 3:31 - iPhone 10th anniversary and the future of smartphones 19:03 - iPhone prototypes 22:38 - Macbook Pro battery life 31:38 - HTC U Ultra 46:02 - Nintendo Switch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Anyway, let's start. Are we ready? Yeah, ready. I'm ready. I'm recording. Okay. Shitty audio. Is that the name of your DAW program? Shitty audio for Windows. Anyway, here we go.

Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. You may notice that this week, the Vergecast is not a TV show like it was last week. Last week was so produced, this is going to be a free-form jazz odyssey. I'm Neil I Patel. I'm here. Dieter Bone is here. Yeah, at a different. city this time. You're all alone in that room. It's very strange. Yeah, I'm, I'm alone in the studio in New York. Paul. Paul is here. Hey, Paul. Hello. Paul got sick at

because that's what happens. Everybody is. Yeah. So Paul, you, you're at home on a Windows PC. Yeah, I'm just looking through my Twitter moments. I don't see, I don't see anything. Yeah, we don't appear to be live on Twitter right now. This is the PC that I, it's great. It's great. If I need to start playing Overwatch for any reason during this podcast, I'm fully equipped to do so. Great. We'll try to keep you interested. I will say this. The dirty secret of most large tech podcasts that I've guested on is that many people are online shopping. What I prefer to do on the Vergecast is just tell the audience what I'm shopping for, which once again is a pixel and once again is sold out. Just annoying.

You still haven't managed to buy a pixel? I can't get a black pixel unlocked. A black pixel LL unlocked. That's all I want. Completely sold out forever. I'm going to have to find another shady Craigslist guy to come to my house. I'm currently shopping for the Iago W3 Apple Watch Stand, which is a little silicone thing that makes,

that looks like a tiny, little itty-bitty Macintosh, the original Mac. Yeah. Best reason to buy an Apple Watch is to buy a stand that makes it look like a 512K Mac. Anyway, my voice is going out. So I want to just tell the audience right now, the listeners, Obviously, last week, we were at CES. We made a live show for Twitter. It was basically a TV show. It was really fun.

I want your feedback on it. That show was really produced, really organized. The thing I didn't know about making a TV show was that it involves hours and hours of arguing about spreadsheets in different locations with slightly different groups of people. So that's what Deeter and I did at CS. We'd wake up in the morning, argue with Ross Miller about a spreadsheet in Slack for a few hours. Then meet Ross. I was usually late. but Dieter and Meet Ross in the lobby of the hotel, they would argue about Slack for a while.

Then we'd all go to a four-hour meeting and argue with a Slack with like a, argue about a spreadsheet with a different group of people. And then we'd have rehearsal where many more people argued about a spreadsheet. And then we made a TV show. And the reason for all this, it turns out if you want to show a decent video, when you're, you know, in a random conference area in Las Vegas, you need to have it ready ahead of time. And the people that actually put the video on the screen need to know what it is you're going to talk about.

And so we had to like decide most of our topics ahead of time. And that's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. But for this. Oh, and we also had, you know, there's huge lines of the spreadsheet that said Paul brings gadgets, which is all, it's all we want. But that was that. Now we're back to a podcast.

Real loose. There's no structure. There's no plan. There's nothing. No spreadsheets in my life anymore. Anyway, but we should talk about some news this week. I would say the only huge news of the week. And we're recording this a little bit ahead of the Nintendo Switch announcement.

So we can't talk about that too much. But the big, as odd as it is in the week after CES, the big news the week is actually old news. It's that the iPhone was introduced 10 years ago this week. I don't know. How do you feel about this, Deuter? I still am angry that I stayed at CES while my friend and then colleague Michael Ducker, who we both were writing for Trio Central at the time,

he got to go to see the iPhone. And I had to stay at CES. And I remember the phone that I had to blog about was I want to say it was a random Sony phone, and its big innovation is that it had media player controls on one side and the screen and the 10 key dial pad on the other side, and it was very small. And that was the phone I got to look at while he got to go look at the goddamn iPhone. Yeah. So that made me very unhappy. It also made me remember that when the iPhone first came out, I wasn't sure that I wanted to call it a smartphone because it didn't run native apps.

Oh, my God. Which is a very strange thing. Oh, yeah. It was a whole thing. We should just do ancient pedantic tech history arguments on the show front of now. Well, it wasn't a platform. Like, anyway. So that's my memory of the iPhone is just deep, deep jealousy that converted into a weird opinion about iOS.

Or back then it was called iPhone OS as a platform. So I was not a tech reporter when the iPhone came out. I actually joined Engadgett in between the iPhone announcement in June when it was released. But Paul, you were in a guy for them, weren't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I pulled it up. I pulled it up. Yeah.

2007, January 1st, on the night, I was live blogging the Dell keynote at CES. Here's a quote from the live blog, announcing the Dell Home Media Suite based on a Dell XBS 410 with Core 2 Duo, Vista, DVD burner, speakers, webcam, 27-inch display, all-on-one printer, Lynxys 802.11N router,

HD TV tuner, including HD cable. So this is like a little package that... What is an HD cable? An H-GMI cable? I guess so. Okay. Yeah, no idea.

Or possibly like cable? Wait, so Paul, that's what you wrote? No, it's got to be H-GyMai cable. That's what you were writing on iPhone day. Yeah, so I was like actually looking at InGadgett's live blog of the Apple event while... And other people in the audience were, too, while Michael Dell was talking about PCs. Because you were at CES.

Yeah. Yeah. I was a C. Well, except for you. No, I was, yeah, I was in a law firm wishing I was at CES. And then I made that dream come true for the next 100 years. And many me came on stage. Oh my God.

So this is like classic Dell. It was a real Dell situation. So I was surprised that it's been ten. Yes. Stuck up with me. Yeah. It's funny because the current iPhone, it's not a lot different than that iPhone except for the platform.

Like all the specs have been iteratively improved, but they haven't made like, you know, and it's 10 years. Like that idea was so good that they were able to just refine it for a decade. Well, didn't Peter Thiel just come out saying like, there's nothing they can do anymore? You can't improve the phone anymore. Like, you can't revolutionize the phone anymore. So I was talking about this, a wall uncontrolled release. I think there's one thing that can do, and it's a conceptual shift.

You could put it down as a refinement, but I think the phone 10 years ago was built in a world of constraints. Right? So the networks were limited. The screens were poor. The battery life was bad. The processor was slow. This phone now, it's like faster than the laptop I had when I was in college. Literally the screen is higher resolution than the laptop I had in college.

The broadband network gets connected to is faster than the computer. computer I had in college. I'm using that computer as an example because that computer was, no one thought of it as living in a world of constraint. It was a primary computing device, and it allowed me as a user to do all kinds of things. I don't know that we've made the shift to thinking about phones as primary computing devices that should do all the things that computers can do. I think we still think of them as constrained devices. You can see Apple's kind of doing it on their other mobile platform, the iPad, but I don't see it happening in phones quite yet. And that's a big turn that's, I think, remaining to be made.

I couldn't, like, look at screens very much this week. My eyes were hurting. So I had a lot of time to think. And I would, this is something that I've wanted for a long time, but I think maybe we're better equipped than ever. I really want mobile devices to help us become more cyborg. Yeah. Like, you were telling a story before we started the podcast about your turntable and you put

a phone on the turntable. Yeah. I have an app. Yeah, go over this, please. Do you want the long, hard stuff? I have an app on my phone. I bought a turntable that randomly slows down. So I got to return the turntable.

But I needed to verify that A, was not going completely insane. Because when that happens, it feels like you're in the Matrix and the cat's going to walk by again. Like, the music just randomly slows down and speeds up again. So I was like, looking online how do you this? And it turns out, like, there's just apps for Android, iOS, lots and lots of apps where you basically put a cup. over the center spindle of the turntable like upside down so it makes a platform and you put a phone on the cup and you

What is this app called? It's called RPM or something and you put the phone on it and it just makes a graph of how fast the record player's spinning and I was able to Immediately verify that my record player was like it was just like wavering and speed constantly and then Every now and again it would just dip really hard That's like 10 years ago that is not a pop you I would have to like go to Radio Shack and like build something out of like parts to accomplish that goal. And now my phone can just do it. I can just turn a phone into that device very quickly. Right.

And so that image, I think combining the capabilities of phones like that with the sort of natural user interface that I think has been kind of gimmicky so far, like Alexa and Siri. So if you could just point your phone at something and say, is this slowing down or am I crazy? You know, I saw this molecular sensor at CS and like you can point your phone. phone at two different strawberries and it'll tell you which one's sweeter. Like if that had this natural interface that's something that you, because you don't necessarily want to launch an app to do every, every single, you know, like I want to, I want to be like rain man and count all the toothpicks on the ground. I just want to point my phone and say, how many toothpicks? You know, like, like this

idea that we could be super humans in intelligence because these phones are so powerful. I feel like that should be the next thing. Anyways, that's what I'm on. Yeah. I mean, how do we make better use of all the sensors on a phone. Let me synthesize these two thoughts. Basically what you're saying is you want the iPhone in particular to open up and you want Android to be a slightly more powerful

app platform so that a bunch of stuff on there isn't just a bunch of apps that are kind of like grown up Java is what I'm hearing. Paul has been complaining about Android being grown up Java since I don't know the first time we talked to that Android. I mean that's nine

years old. And Apple opening up would be huge because a lot of these, there's such an AI arms race now, like a bunch of companies in Google's especially doing this. Like, hey, we have this API. If you hit this URL with an image or some text, we can do something intelligent to that image. We can tell you how many faces are in that image. We can tell you if there are dogs.

We can tell you if the dogs are happy. You know, like they have these APIs that are on the web that are basically open and sometimes basically free. If Siri hooked into those instead of just. just like wolf from alpha and Bing, you know? Yeah. Well, I mean, can the iPhone be a little bit more open, I think is the Apple's answers. I mean, no.

Like, we're going to make an integrated product, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Well, I mean, they've made app extensions and there's like talk that maybe that'll get extended a little bit more. But I basically, man, you're going to hate me so much, Neal. I'm going to say a sentence. I'm ready. And you're going to get super pissed.

Bringing the heat on a verge cast. Yeah, I'm ready. Here it comes. I basically take a Kantian view of this. Oh, my God. Yes, yes. Bring it. Wow.

Continue. The categorical imperative. Do you literally taking me to school right now? The categorical comparative is the basis of his ethics is if you're trying to decide if something is right or wrong. Just imagine that it was a universal law that applied to everything. So imagine a world without computers and everything is an iPhone. Does that seem like a world you want to live in? Would that be the best thing for most people?

And the answer is no, because it's a closed platform, and you wouldn't be able to do a bunch of the stuff. You would have been able to make an iPhone, for instance. Right. The counter is, of course, we don't live in that world. Computers are still out there. There are still trucks. But, like, so many more people are going to have phones going forward than, you know, desktop computers and laptops that we should basically treat these phones as though it were the

content categorical imperative in that we just have to assume this is the computing platform for the vast majority of humans on the planet for the foreseeable future until we can get the shit implanted in our brains. And if that's the case, yeah, I think that I would rather have a world where you can, you know, hack a little bit on these things, rather than a world that they're like appliances with extensions. Yeah. I mean, you know where that leads you, inevitably. Oh, God. Fundamentally. If you say WebOS, I'm leaving the podcast. No, I'm going to say something worse. the Motorola atrix It leads you to a modular phone

that can connect to a laptop shell and becomes your laptop or unplug it and you can connect it to a keyboard and mouse and becomes a computer like that it's great to say the phone is done right which is Peter Thiel's argument like Apple doesn't have any innovation left in it

and he was like pretty wide with it I think Peter was on CNBC today and they asked him about it yeah they wanted me to say Apple was doomed they really did I really didn't want to TV much like his podcast is built on conflict.

I'm going to make a prediction. You ready? You brought up the Atrix. If you don't remember, the Atrix was an Android phone, you'd plug it into this weird laptop thing, and then it would give you Firefox. And so fundamentally, what it was when you boil it all the way down was a mobile operating system with a desktop class browser that you could look on a big screen. If you look at Chrome OS right now, it is a Chrome operating system that has Android apps,

which is basically the mirror image of that. And when people talk about Android and Chrome OS getting closer and what the hell is Andromeda and, you know, that's this code name that they're going to come together someday. I actually think that's asking the wrong question. I think fundamentally what people want is the power of a desktop class browser like Chrome tied to the utility and usefulness of apps on a mobile OS. And whether or not the kernel is like fundamentally Android or fundamentally Chrome kind of doesn't matter. I think this year we're going to see somebody bring the Atrix back. we're going to see a phone that has a desktop class browser on it. You might not get to use it when you're actually just using the phone,

but when you plug it into a bigger screen, you will have access to a proper, real, good browser, and when it's a phone, it'll just be a phone. Yeah. I like, I believe it. So, I mean, look, when you're on the mobile network, and we can argue for the rest of our lives about whether the bandwidth scarcity of mobile networks is real or not.

But let's assume that. Let's never do that again. But when you're on the mobile network, Like, fine. Like, power the phone down, whatever. You know, put it in the state where it plays nice in the mobile network. When I'm at home and the phone's plugged into power and I'm plugged into a display and I'm on my Wi-Fi, there's no reason my phone should have the same constraints. Right? It should be as unconstrained as my laptop. I think that's kind of like, that's what I mean. That's the conceptual shift that needs to happen with phones. And they're still built on this idea of these really deep power mobility bandwidth constraints. And 10 years hence, I think we can let go then. Actually, here's the big question.

The fundamental question for me is actually about the iPad. Like, if Apple were to make the iPad as, like, open as the Mac, would it become a viable replacement? Because the iPad Pro is wicked powerful. And there's these rumors that there's going to be a 10.5 inch. So you'll basically get a big-ass screen in the 9-inch iPad form factor. And then if you take that thing and tell me that developers can, you can. you know, make stuff and I can do stuff on it without having to go through Apple's App Store and Apple approval process. I kind of believe that in a couple, two, three years, that thing,

that ecosystem of, you know, capabilities and apps would be robust enough that I wouldn't need my Mac anymore or a Windows PC. I think both you guys are just so wrong. I mean, the dream we're actually talking about is Windows. I want to hear Paul out. I think the Atrix idea is beautiful. And I love it when it pops up and it's fun to flirt with. But I think it's always this, there's too many compromises. It's always this jack of all trades, master of none. And I was at CS this year.

I saw the same ratio of, like, you know, brave iPad users that I've seen in, like, years past. Like, you know, they are vastly more powerful. But I think it's a really, it's a form factor thing that keeps it, you know, it's a lack of a mouse thing. I think certain form factors are designed to be powerful for certain tasks and should receive information in certain ways. I think web browsing will always be substandard on a phone. And the browser keeps on taking over more and more of our desktops, but our desktops are getting slower and it's sucking more and more. Did you imagine every single hardcore surface user is freaking out at us right now?

like all we're doing is talking about Windows. And like Windows Continuum, but Continuum doesn't have desktop class apps. But the dream since like phones, smartphones have been smartphones, has been all your stuff is either on this device in your pocket or maybe it's in the cloud and then you can just have a bunch of dumb terminals. And the phones are definitely powerful enough to do that and have dumb terminals everywhere. This was the dream of the folio. There was a thing called the Redfly.

Oh my God, the Redfly. Yeah, what's up? Wow. Deep cut with Dieterbone. Yeah, I'm just saying. That's a video series we should do. Deep cuts with Deerbone. Deep cuts with Deerbone.

You just pull out really old-filled products and talk about how they really are the dream. Yeah. Yeah, I think you want more to happen in the cloud and then you have the appropriate client per device. And maybe it's a web browser on your desktop. Maybe it's a really slick, fast app on your phone. but trying to get the thick client on every device. Oh, and in Windows defense, they are emulating X86 on ARM so they can have it all.

Finally. Which is a perfect example of the compromise is necessary in this whole scenario. Yeah. So the other news around the iPhone, was there a bunch of prototype videos leaked of something? It looked, so that the long-standing narrative of the iPhone was Steve Jobs said, okay, we're going to do a phone. He pulled a tablet project, a multi-touch tablet project,

off a shelf, said, turn this into a phone to one team. And then to another team, he said, turn the iPod into a phone, and we're going to have bake-off inside of Apple. The version of the story that is out there, I think the Walter Isaacson book repeated it. A lot of people repeated it, is that Scott Forstall had the, like, shrink OS10,

make this tablet thing work, and Tony Fidel had the iPod. into a phone project and they were competitors and they were definitely rivals anyway but one of these prototypes something actually leaked that is an iPod with support for a SIM card and a dialer and stuff and it had a weird you should watch this video on the site uh it's sunny dixon found the prototype made the video good reporting there but it had like a multi-touch click wheel and then the iPod interface in like an aqua window above it looks completely insane and the other thing obviously like the junkie first junkie is the wrong word but the very ugly very crude

first iPhone prototype that we actually saw during the Apple versus Samsung court case so the video of the comparison to the two so yeah it's out there the the narrative the old narrative fidel versus four stalls back but Tony fidel he tweeted about it and then we talked and he told me like the actual story and I think one of the things that is lost that we don't have yet is like the real story of the iPhone. So 10 years later, how it was actually made and like the things that actually happened is still pretty murky. And now it's starting to come out. And so Tony's thing was first they tried to make the iPod because their marketing department inside of Apple never wanted to lose the click wheel because it was such an icon for Apple. So that was like one of the impetus is

behind making the iPod a phone. Then they realized they couldn't dial a number, which is story you've heard. Then Steve Jobs said put hard buttons on the wheel, like the Nokia 3650, which is one of the ugliest phones ever made. They tried that and it failed. And then John Rubinstein left Apple around this time. Fidel took over the whole project and he killed the iPod thing and releases his version of story. And they went with the OS10 version. That to me is it's some of the first real insight into the fact that Apple didn't know. Like they tried a bunch of weird, bad ideas before they...

Yeah. I mean, they even tried letting Motorola take a crack at it with that iTunes phone, The Rocker. The Rocker. One of the worst phones ever made. Like, one of, like, in... Motorola has had many peaks in valleys. 3650 right now.

That thing, it looks like a piece of garbage, man. That was Nokia's phase where they, like, they nailed like the internals of what their feature phone would be and then their next step was to like put it in as many zany fucking cases as they could so it was always the same phone and they were like what if this one's purple and the buttons are in a triangle this one's blue and they're in a circle like one of the craziest periods in nukia history and now paul's gonna get one no paul's on me paul's on ebber right now 35 bucks on ebay all right so deeter do you want us through this MacBook. So that's the iPhone.

It's been a decade of the iPhone. Right. I feel good about it. So the MacBook stuff. So a couple weeks ago, I mean, if you're listening to this, you probably know the story, but a couple weeks ago, three weeks ago, I don't know how long ago. Consumer reports came out and said, hey, we can't recommend the MacBook because we've done a bunch of battery tests and a bunch of different

models and we're getting wildly inconsistent results. Results that like in some cases like boggle the mind. Like we're talking like differences from like it lasts three hours all the way up to it lasts 19. half hours, which is like, no, that's not possible. And so there's a whole bunch of kerfuffle about it.

And it comes out that the way that Consumer Reports does its battery test is very similar to actually the way we do our battery test, but they're a little bit more, I guess, rigorous is the word. They take a bunch of web pages. They put them on a local server. They connect the laptop up to that local server. And then they just refresh those web pages once a minute. But what they do is they dig into a developer setting, which you can find in Safari, and they turn off automatic caching, which makes sense if you think about it because you actually want to load and render the web page in order to run the battery test.

Now, that doesn't actually reflect real world use. Most people leave their cache on. But then again, battery tests never reflect real world use. They're mostly designed so that you can compare apples to apples. So you can just sort of see how a computer does on that relative scale. So you have a sense if it matches your gut of actually using it of how good the battery is. And that's precisely how the verge does its battery test. We run a battery test.

We loop a bunch of web pages once a minute. We go through them. And we try and standardize the brightness on the screen. We try and turn off all the extra services. We do all that stuff. But we're not claiming that it's like an objective B.L. This is going to tell you exactly what your battery life is kind of test because that test doesn't exist. And it's fair to turn off caching.

You should know. Yeah. It totally is. Right, because if one web browser on one platform has a better caching system than the other, the test becomes unfair. Right. So it turns out that there was a bug in Safari on Sierra that, like, did something wacky with, like, reloading favicon's too often or something. I don't know. It was weird, but it's one of the things that may have affected the battery life on this test.

So Apple fixed a bug, consumer reports is rerunning it. But Apple was like, this test doesn't reflect reality. And it's like, well, that's not the point. Battery tests aren't designed to reflect reality. They're designed to give you some sort of, you know, comparable metric across a bunch of different types of devices so that you can get a sense of whether or not it's true. And then you have to actually use the damn thing, have your own experience of the battery life. And if either one of those things like seem wildly off from each other, you figure out what's going on. So the end of this tale is consumer reports is going to retest.

Apple stands by the battery life on these things, but we definitely experienced weirdly inconsistent results ourselves, especially on the touchbar version of the MacBook Pro. And so as much as Apple wants this to be like, well, they screwed up. There was a bug. That's our fault. But their test was dumb because it had developer options on. That's their fault.

And like call this thing done. I don't know that the jury has rendered a verdict on the battery life on MacBook Pro, I think it's more the case that we're going to need to wait a few months, see if some software updates sort of clean it up, and if people are complaining about it still. But as of right now, I feel like if you care the most about battery life, you should probably hold off a little bit and sort of see what people are saying, one, two, three months down the road. Yeah, Consumer Reports is now in their recommended category.

They say for the 13-inch with the touchbar, it's. 15.75 hours. Yeah. So it seems like it really helped them out. But yeah, I think your advice is accurate. It's,

I mean, this is with beta software. They had to use beta software to get this test to work. And there's a, there's a history here with Consumer Reports and Apple, right?

They, they went, I think they went after Antenagate, was it? Or was it BenGate? Yeah. I think antenna. No, they did both.

And I think they, you know, they've been out front with like this scratches easily and this shatters and like the iPad gets real hot and the pattern I think Marco Arment was the first to point this out the pattern is they because they're consumer reports and they have this reputation they say a thing that is true and there's an outsized response to it the thing is like usually not as like catastrophic but it is ultimately true right so like

the iPhone 4 antenna got redesigned because if you held the phone wrong you destroyed the signal which is not a great design the iPad whatever iPad it was a Mark I pointed out it did get really hot I think it was iPad 3 or 4 it is

they did between the iPhone 6 and 6S make the case stronger and I completely imagine that for Apple's next MacBook Pro release they're going to talk about how they've really solved battery life which is it's kind of

nice like this screw up even if it was just a software screw will hopefully result in them putting actual focus on battery life which is so important obviously Apple always has but it seemed like it was a side note this time the German reported that they actually wanted to use a different kind of battery

technology something more like that tiered stuff that they use on the MacBook and they couldn't get it done so they just reverted to like classic cells yeah I think this MacBook is this is the MacBook that we're going to look back on years from now is the one they made before they just went on on the touch screen design they went down this road it's like don't do it don't do it album don't listen to them

I don't want to touch my laptop screen you know who touches my laptop screen babies that's who touches they don't know any better and they touch my laptop screen do I look like a baby I know we have another topic on our non-spread sheet topic list Yeah. But this is something I didn't get a chance to talk with you guys on the Vergecast at CES. But other than all the weird stuff, which is kind of my job now to wander CES and find bizarre items, my story of this show was the laptops with the 1050.

Like, Dell has an Inspiron 14. This is like the classic laptop that's cheap enough to buy for your child before they go to college. when you're not really rich. And I just knew so many people that got Inspirons as their laptop, college laptop. This is $800 laptop with a $1050 in it. And, you know, it's just more powerful. Like if you want to play video games or if you wanted to edit video,

this is a much better laptop than almost anything in Apple's entire computer lineup. Yeah. Which is just bizarre. I don't know why Apple sticks with AMD the way it does. I can't.

People have offered me reasons. Obviously there's like the thermal management and power management, but you're seeing the Windows makers just get out there. Yeah, and I'm guessing a laptop with the $1050 is definitely going to be bulkier than a MacBook

Pro, and it's probably going to get, you know, eight to 10 hours of battery life. But if some of these laptops come out and they get reviews with that good good enough battery life, I really want to get one.

I think it's just such a good value. I want that $9,000 Acer that we saw at CES. If you didn't watch the live show, you should go back just because there's no way for me to talk about this thing without you having seen it, but it's a massive widescreen,

curved, was it 21? Something like that, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just huge. It has a mechanical keyboard. It's like, You know the fish that live at the bottom of the ocean and they evolve differently? It's that, but a laptop? It's just so massive.

And it's just the opposite direction of the way we think of every other device. And I love it. Like, I don't know what to say about it. It's so not practical. But if I could come to work every day and that was my computer, I'd be like, yeah, this is how I'm doing it. But that also, I mean, it had like we literally have prototype. You got to be careful. but I looked at the battery meter

that the battery is at 90%. It told me that it had an hour left. Well, that thing has two power adapters. You need dual... That's great. I love that stuff. All right, let's talk about a phone. Do you want to talk about the HCCU Ultra?

Which, according to Vlad, is just a catastrophic disaster of a phone. So I actually watched the... Wait, can I just read this slug, the circuit breaker slug for this phone? HCCU Ultra Headphone Jack Bad Design Features

Price I watched their presentation for this phone last night it was like 11 o'clock Pacific or something was pretty late and you know they basically got up and said a lot of

meaningless words about you and HCC's focused on you and this is going to you know make you more creative and change your life and it was just insane. So here's this phone. It's HGCU Ultra. It's a 5.7 inch Android device.

It has a glass back. It is very thin. It has a camera. It has a Snapdragon 821. Whatever. It looks like a galaxy S7, but a little square. Galaxy iPhone 7. That's what it looks like.

Yeah. screen up on the top above the main screen where you can have like stuff. I mean, this is literally just a collection of everyone else's ideas. Yeah. So and then the best part is it's got AI guys. Hey guys. Also AI. It'll it'll tell you what the weather is on the place you're traveling to.

It will notice what you do and don't dismiss from your notifications and give you less of the stuff you don't want and more of the stuff you do want. Just like, just like the most. We wrote this piece at CES about how, like, AI was like the worst thing that happened because all anybody did was just say AI and everybody just sort of trusted that meant something, but nobody trusted it. And so it just is a phrase that people add and it doesn't mean anything anymore. And that definitely applies to the HTCU Ultra. Here's what I'll say about this phone. Vlad wrote a really good piece.

It's like all the things they did wrong with it. They didn't put a headphone jack in it. I, we should maybe have a longer conversation about headphone jack. I'm starting to, I hate to say it, I'm starting to lose the rage. I'm starting to become inured to it. I'm starting to just accept that phones are going to have 3.5 millimeter heads. I'm not embracing it. I've been worn down and am now just, it's just happening.

I can't stop it. Well, I bought two sets of headphones recently. I bought a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort, 35 Bluetooth headphones. for my plane rides. I think you have them, right? Don't you have the same ones? I'm wearing them this very moment. It's how I'm hearing your voice. They're great. Although I will say our old friend Chris Sigler was right in that they have real floppy bass if you turn it up real loud. But whatever, they're great. Noise cancellation, great on a plane. Wireless. My first pair of really expensive Bluetooth headphones

thoroughly enjoyed the experience, except for all the parts where I had to use Bluetooth. But they actually have a pretty good Bluetooth chip and driver in situations. It's fine. I also bought the headphones Vlad recommended months ago, the like $36, $40, I don't remember how much it was months ago, the Carbo, the Zero Audio Carbo Tenors, which I will give Vlad credit, he wrote about them instantly sold them out on Amazon worldwide. Like his headline was like, just buy these headphones. Like the whole, like everyone went to buy them. They were not being sold in America at the time, so I bought them and they had to be shipped

to me from Japan. It took forever. Now you can just buy them in America. Amazon stocks in America. Or some anonymous Amazon reseller stocks in America. God only knows how Amazon works. Those headphones are great. I think they sound better than the Bose headphones. Like absolutely sound better. They're really fun. And they plug into my phone. So I'm at work and I like plug the, like, walk into work, unplug them. Because I don't want to wear the huge Bose headphones on the subway. I throw them in my pocket. I don't feel about losing them.

I don't feel bad about I said it. I don't feel bad about losing them like in any way, shape, or form. They're not AirPods. I'm not like, I lost one, and now I have to spend it. I can just buy more $40 headphones

as much they want, and they sound great. And I can plug them into my laptop, which I did a hundred times yesterday and today. I don't want to lose that. And I don't want to like monkey with it. Dude, I'm just saying that I'm getting worn down. Someone's going to send me a photo

of the goddamn dongle, and that I just want you to shut up. Whoever, right now, if you've queued up the tweet with the photo of the dongle, just back away. Like Paul said, don't touch your laptop. When I saw that the HCCU Ultra didn't have a headphone jack,

I wasn't filled with rage. That's all I'm saying. I have that rage deep in my heart and I just don't feel it anymore. I suspect that Samsung will put a headphone jack on at least the next line of galaxy phones. Here's my thought process. Dieter. I see this phone and I'm like, that phone's thin.

Bad battery life. The thing that I've really learned is my primary inconvenience with the dongle life is you can't have your wired headphones plugged in and charge at the same time unless you want to go like full dongle life and have the multi-dongle and I don't want to go there. But with the iPhone 7, like I watched Netflix all the way across the country. You just get Netflix offline and you just watch forever and it's great. And I didn't have to worry about charging my phone. My battery life was good enough that I got my Uber in the morning.

I flew and watched Netflix, got my Uber at night and got home and I made it completely fine. A year in with this phone or with a phone with inferior battery life, this would be a huge problem. Yeah, right. And this HDC phone looks too thin. It doesn't need to be that thin. Yeah. It's only got a 3,000-million-amp battery. which is smaller in the pixel smaller than I think the S7 edge even.

Definitely smaller in the Note 7, but we shall not speak of that phone ever again. Here's what I'll say about HCC's phone. The presentation was a real downer. And you know how the knock on LG is all LG does is fast follow Samsung and then add like a little hint of something different on top to make it not an exact copy of a Samsung phone? Yeah. HCC is now doing that to LG.

HTC is following LG, who's following Samsung? And I don't know, I don't know how they turn it around. Like, if I were HTC and I still wanted to make phones, I literally, like, don't know what I would recommend they do other than make a better phone. But get this. They didn't announce any carrier partnerships. Like, it wasn't like, and it'll be out on these things. It's just, they're just making it.

And that's some real, like, that's not the HTC of old. Right. So this thing's going to come. a couple of months and you know we're going to review it we'll look at it obviously but it's just like man HGC no longer relevant in phones anymore

man good thing they got the vibe yeah the funny thing is is that I think they're becoming the sort of declared winner of this this VR generation at least that's the vibe I get like that's where the excitement happens like even if you get sales numbers with Sony like

all the developers are using vibe because it has the most flexibility I don't know if that brand is strong enough to swing back into phone somehow, but it's interesting. Well, you just take off the headset and then use it as a phone. I also will say, I can't, I can't. Paul's just like letting that slide. I'm sorry. I was cueing up my next thought.

It was really rude to me, Neil, that's bad conversation on my heart. The first, I can't find this. No, the great thing about, a great thing about Deli's plan is you can, like, wear it around your shoulder. Like, it comes with its own, like, carrying strap. One of those Motorola backpack, though? How would it be a backpack? You mean like a backer? No, a shoulder bag.

Remember those? Motorola? It was like, just before they got small enough, you had to like carry them around in a shoulder bag. I'm getting you. I'm getting you. I know what you're talking about.

I totally know what you're talking about. Okay, so I can't find this picture anywhere on our site, but I swear the first time I pulled up our post about the HDCU, you know how that lead? photo of it has two clocks side by side. Yeah.

I thought what I was looking at was a double wide phone. And that would be a bold move. Who's going to do the double wide? Yeah. Nobody. Blackberry. Isn't that the, wasn't the passport a square? No, LG already did it.

It was called the LG view. Oh, my God. This is really, this entire episode of this podcast is us remembering bad phones. That's all we've done for like. Oh, yes. There we go. Wait, can I say one more thing about the headphone jack? It's actually not about the headphone jack. It's about something that I know Dieter cares about deeply, which is USBC fragmentation.

So the headphones that come with the HTC have a USBC plug in them, but they only work with the HTC. If you take those same USBC headphones and plug them into another phone, they won't work. This is already true. USBC headphones are not always compatible with other USBC jacks that is a disaster fine you can make the argument

and I think Vlad makes it effectively Lightning headphones are interesting because lightning has power you can do all kinds of things like fine at least it always works USBC headphones just all over the goddamn place I don't understand why HTC would make that decision like they're saving 20 cents on a part like I don't I don't see it's real dumb by the way I can see

video of Dieter and I know the audience can't what Dieter is doing on Skype right now is just silently shaking his head look like wait wait wait wait so these these these have yeah Paul you can't even like finish the thought the reason the HTC's reason for making these headphones is they have tiny little microphones in them so that they somehow are able to map the contours of your eardrum to give you better sound. They use sonar technology to map your inner ear so that they can customize the sound profile to you. And that theoretically, according to them, is the reason that they only work in HCC phones. Okay, but here's what I will say. Okay, go ahead. If you, if you, if you got other

USBC headphones, they would work with these, this phone. Maybe. Maybe. Who knows? Yeah, the answer is like a hard maybe. If that's not true, then nothing matters. The industry group that is in charge of USB, it's called the USB Implementers Forum, has boned the entire rollout of USBC in about

15 different ways. It goes all the way down to the quality and consistency of their goddamn logo, which is just looks terrible. And Apple and Google were two of the primary groups that are all, they're both

part of the USBC implementers forum or USB implementers forum that were pushing to the standard. And Apple decided to put it on their laptops and not their phones. Google was putting it on, you know, whatever, all the stuff. But not all the stuff that they released last year in October, which is hilarious. But imagine a world where Apple decided to put USBC on a phone, on the iPhone instead of lightning. I know there's lots of talk about this. I'll never do it. there's a million good reasons, at least from Apple's perspective, why they wouldn't do it,

including the thickness of the phone, the quality of the actual, like, Jack. Down the line, there's lots of reasons that Apple will never do this. And so I'm not suggesting that they will, although I wish they would. But imagine if they had, do you think for even a nanosecond that Apple wouldn't, like, whip this situation into shape and everybody would, like, figure out how to make these things compatible across the board, including the iPhone, because of the power of that thing. Yeah. The fact that Apple chose not to.

Well, Apple would pick one standard, right? And then everyone would just use it because they have the most volume. Like they did it already with the web. They did it. They did it with the web with, you know, they were part of the W3C. They, like, you know, were part of WebKit. You know, and now that's fragmented again. And Google's off doing its own thing and, you know, whatever.

But like the mobile web only happened because. of the iPhone and Apple, while developing the iPhone, participated in the standards body and said, hey, this stuff works better if you do it this way on your websites. And so the only reason that, like, honestly, like, if they had not done that, it wouldn't, like, we would have had to figure it on our own. Like, they participated and it made websites on phones better. Yeah.

And they're, they just, they don't seem to be as engaged in, this thing with USBC because like they don't care. It's only on their laptops. Right. Whatever. So I have in my notes here, by the way. The previous phone was the HDC bolt. The headphone dongle for the HDC bolt does not work with the MotoZ, which is USBC 2.

The headphone don't go for the Moto Z doesn't work with the HTC bolt. Like I think I put this on HTC screwing it up. Like I really do. I don't know why. It's just a hunch. I don't know. They just boned it. I mean, that to me, look, my argument about,

this the whole time has been don't take away the simple universal thing in favor of something complex and proprietary. Usbc. Good job, Delia. I started this whole conversation by saying I wasn't mad and he managed to get me mad. Thank you. That was Vergecast, everybody. Once again, I'm the winner. I'll see next week. All right, let's do, we got to stop talking about iPhone jokes. Paul, I feel like you're going to be better at talking about the Nintendo Switch than any of us. It's going to be announced tonight as we're like as Andrews producing this episode. The announcement will already have happened.

So everything that I say right now can be instantly judged. No one will have time to forget how wrong I am. But it's happening. It's exciting. Yeah, I think the big question, I was talking to some people about this at CS like, I can't, I don't have a good enough memory to know if are people always this obsessed with Nintendo things but then they don't buy them or is there

actually something special about the Switch? I think it might be like in between those two things. Well they were so going back in time until the Wii U the answer was they were obsessed with them and they bought them so much that Nintendo couldn't keep anything in stock. Then the Wii U happened and now they're obsessed with them

and they want to buy things like the NES classic and Nintendo is like oh we can't possibly put a chip with an emulator in a box fast enough for the demand, we're out of stock again, which is ridiculous. Like, it's ridiculous. But I think that, to me, the switch is, it's just such a compellingly bonkers hardware design that I think people will buy it.

I don't know why I feel that way, but I just look at the gif of the guy in the plane that we have up where he like puts it on the seat back and they're like yanks the controllers up. And I have no idea why you would want to do that, but I definitely want to do it now. It's a airplane power play. So I travel a lot now, and I just got a PS4 Pro,

and so I've gotten back into like console video games and the way that I hadn't for a while. And I really like it. And when I travel now, I miss my PS4, and I miss just playing console games. And so I'm going to buy the hell out of this because it will be the thing I do when I'm sitting sad and alone

in my hotel room in New York because nobody wants to hang out with me instead of watching the West Wing on my iPad. Harsh Burn, Dieter. I always want to hang out. I'm really looking forward to that future. It sounds like we've let you down, Deeter. It also sounds like poor Lisa.

I got dark real face. You're like, I'm leaving. I'm taking the game console with me. She has an Xbox one and a PS4 sitting there. She's fine. Also, again, I've said this in a few times. She works for Oculus.

She's got a rift with like the motion controllers in a room that we've dedicated just for VR. She's fine. But let's make this purely theoretical. You're a 38-year-old first-time dad. You have a four-year-old, five-year-old child. You convince your wife that we should totally get this Nintendo Switch because the kids will love it and you'll love it too. You got a work trip coming up. your kid loves Mario Kart and Zelda

Yeah Where does the switch go Oh it goes with me The switch stays with this poor child And then the kid misses me even more You made your bed when you use the child As an excuse to buy the switch Yeah

I think it's obvious I'm just telling you that it would The feelings the child has for the Nintendo We get mixed up with the feelings the child has for her father and they would just get all bundled up together this weird broken mass

of emotion He never came to my soccer games He routinely absconded with my Nintendo My dad took the fun away This is terrible This brings me back to my original point This thing is so price sensitive Because it is a bit of a gimmick

I think the thing is that I don't think the Wii U was a bad idea full stop. I think the gaming market was moving away from the Nintendo style at the same time

as Nintendo was doing something weird. And the gaming market has continued in this more PC gaming style trend. And like the

PS4 and the Xbox 1 are literally PCs and sometimes run basically unmodified software from PCs and they compete with PCs and they have a few exclusives but the exclusives don't dominate that variation anymore and graphics are amazing and the switch is something that is a lot different

than that and it's going to play Skyron which is 100 years old it's going to play what is probably going to be a great Zelda game a great Mario Kart game a great regular Mario platformer but those are not what do a great splitoon Toon 2 or whatever. Those are not what it's dominating. And everybody was like, oh, Nintendo really gets the e-sports thing now because they put

esports in their like promo commercial. But Spletoon is not an esport. E-sports are dominated by PC games. Overwatch, League of Legends. Don't. Paul, all I'm saying is on Paul's headstone, I think it should say

Splatoon is not an easy. So here's what's going on. This is Paul Miller. Splits Moon is not an Eastport. Here's what's interesting about the switch. When you looked at the Wii U, you're like, okay, they've got this crazy idea, but it's really badly implemented. This tablet controller is kind of junky.

It's got a resistive screen. The Wi-Fi play only works on the house, and like the range is really bad. So, and it's not powerful. If I'm comparing the Wii U to an Xbox or a PlayStation, it's like, of course you don't get the Wii U because it's like, it's a bunch of weird ideas that didn't get implemented very well, right? So it was as much about the weird idea. but it was more about like the execution was just awful.

With the switch, I think that the way people are going to look at it, they're not going to look at it like a switch versus a PS4, especially if they price it right. What they're going to think is what I think. Okay, I really like my iPad. I really like my iPhone. The games on it are good,

but they're not really as good as what I can get at home. But with the switch, if they can set it up as like a mobile platform that you can also play at home and have it in that context, Its competition isn't going to be the Xbox and the PlayStation. Its competition is going to be like iPad games. And in that context, it could be a huge win.

I think that's a good point. But again, I think that's why prices is so sensitive here. I really think that $250 would be the sweet spot. The Wii U came out at $300 for the basic unit, $350 for the non-terrible. There's no way. Look, we should just place our... bets now because the listeners will know. By the time you listen to this, they'll know the answer.

I'm saying $400. No way. I'm saying, I think $400 sounds right. I think that if it's anything over $350 is a mistake. So there, I didn't make a prediction. I made a judgment. I was going to go risky and bet $250, but I don't have to

be crazy. I'll just say $300 and I'll obviously win. All right. There you go. This would be a total failure a dollar over $300. I am super excited about it. I think it's really great, and I'm glad. Yeah, but in a sense, it's like a fulfillment of the Wii U vision.

Yeah. I'm definitely going to end up buying one. The other nice thing here is that they made, it's less dependent on developers, like coming to Nintendo and doing something weird. Developers just basically have to port old games to it. The Wii U required really rethinking your software. if you wanted to take advantage of the controller in the living room. And that didn't happen.

And it was sad. I can't wait to get one of these. That's all I'm saying. It's like, it reminds me of, like, classic Sony hardware arrogance, right? Where it was just like so over designed and like, you could do all these things. And the software is probably going to let us down in some critical way. But it's so crazy that I just need.

need it closer to me. This is your Clia. This is a Clea. It's that crazy cleae with like the flip around. The camera. The camera. Bad phones on the Vergecast. That's, that's this episode.

That wasn't a phone. That was a PDA. No, didn't they make a Cleeet phone? No. Yeah, they did. Someone's going to correct me, but I don't think so. I'm going to correct you right now. Hold on.

I mean, fast Googling on the Vergecast, the best radio. Phone. Oh, man. I printed. The N. The second round was definitely a PDA. The screen flipped around. It had an insane keyboard.

Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Don't step to me on old-ass palm OS gadgets. I forgot they ran Palm OS. The software was so much less important than the hardware. I forgot they ran Pom-O-Wet. You know the crazy thing about these?

They had like a phone button on them because that's the pull-up. your address book so you can call people with the phone numbers that you store them. Oh, my God. I actually did that with, one of the very first Bluetooth phones available in America was an Erickson. It had a monochrome screen, but it had Bluetooth. And I, like, spent just weeks figuring out how to tether with it on my Palma OS device. And I managed to, like, be able to tap on the thing and then pull the phone out of its

little holster, which was a little screw. that screwed to the back of the phone and it could like swing on your belt on a little plastic clip so I could like pull up my phone dial the number put my phone to my pocket put the pull up the PDA dial the number put the PDA in my pocket put the phone off my belt and it would be ringing it was the best finally convenience can I read you the specs of this thing it seems like a thousand dollars wait which one are you looking at my god I'm looking at the uh the NR 70 P EG NR 70 which everyone if just when you when you get when you get home Google this I'm sorry, it was $600, not $1,000.

$600, it has a one-tenth of a megapixel digital camera, which is amazing. Fastest Palm OS device out there, 66 megahertz processor. The line in a mobile tech review.com right up I'm reading says, Speed freaks and gamers take note. 320 by 480 pixel screen, higher than pocket PCs. I mean, just these, the, the, the, The distance we've covered in the past decade is ridiculous.

You forgot the best part. What's that? It came with a memory stick. It did. This one says, this one says save files on optional memory sticks. Yeah, memory stick slot.

Hey, did we go through a CS and Sony didn't announce a proprietary memory format? How is that possible? Look, it's the end of an era. It's also, I think, the end of the Vergecast.

Unless anybody else has a, bad old mobile device to talk about. We should mention that cars exist. Shout out to the E-Mate 300. There's a lot of cars out there in the world, and people are driving them. Look out. It was a Detroit Auto Show this week.

Our transport team did an amazing job. Paul, do you have a specific car you'd like to shout out? No. No. Well, I'll just say the one that's important. Waymo, which is a terrible company name, that's Google self-driving company.

sitting here appreciating the fact that you had to say that word out loud and we just sat here in silence we just we just we just sat in the room um it's funny everyone still calls it google but it's alphabets self-driving car company waymo which was spun out of and fuck this anyway they uh they uh they shut off their chrysler pacifica uh they're like it's designed for self-driving which really to me looks like a whole bunch of plastic surrounds for cameras, which is fine. Yeah, it's like better integrated, but like not that much better integrated. Yeah, it really looks like they hired a bunch of like street tuners who like usually put ground effects on civics. And they're like, just make these cameras look kind of conspicuous.

They look like Celine must. Anyway, that's a card or whatever. Look, Paul's right. Cars exist. they're slowly becoming autonomous and you should read our coverage of that from the Detroit Auto Show I'm more interested in this Chris

Chris Latner guy you know about him so he made the Swift programming language which is sort of the successor to Objective C which still hasn't completely replaced it but a lot of people like it I think it got good uptake I don't think it's solve all world

problems but his project before Swift was LLVM and that is like that's just ascendant. That basically runs the world as far as like, it's like the open source project that is like made almost any,

like something that we're going to start seeing in the future is this thing called WebAssembly, where you can basically use any programming language that would compile down to bytecode, but compile it to WebAssembly and then it could be delivered to a browser like JavaScript is,

except in a more concise way. But you have to be better, you have to manage memory and stuff like that. Anyways, LLVM is going to be a big bridge for that, and it's going to be like a huge deal. And LLVM, I think, it's like, I mean, that's his, like, that's his Moby Dick.

That's his huge achievement. So I don't, he doesn't really have to achieve anything else. He's already a total legend in software. Yeah. A bunch of people have left Apple recently. many to Tesla, many to other places. That's a thing. It's another one of those like memes that's floating around.

Like, people are leaving. It's getting a little, little stolid. Is that a word? That seems like we're using. That's definitely a word. Yeah. Yeah. Well, another meh note to end the show.

That's where we are. Speaking of stolid. What's that, Paul? Look, I'm saying, go. Go watch the three episodes of Vergecast live from last week. They were high energy. They're scripted. They're super produced.

There's segments. There's teleprompters. There's me and Dieter ranting the camera. I have so much makeup on. We're wearing so much makeup. Megan was there. She was amazing. She was hyping it up.

You want that? You watch that. This episode of this show is us coming down, swinging the pendulum all the way back to just a couple of friends having time. I think we did a great job. I just thought it was funny to say. Stollard. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, it's been a solid time with you as well, Paul. All right, that, my God, that is the end of the show. We'll be back next week. Presumably we'll have prepared. Who knows? There's other shows to listen to. Control Out Delete is back.

Walt and I talked about TV and the iPhone, and so great job stories, as always, on that show. Lauren Good, who is on the Verstcast with us last week. She hosts Too Embarrass to Ask, which is wonderful. I think she and Kara. It's got Dieterbone on it himself. Just the family out, just doing it this week. Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media, which is wonderful. And Karas Wisher hosts Recode Decode, which is all fine podcasts that you can listen to

and learn about the tech industry. And also just listen to the three of us to talk about old phones. That's it. That's a podcast. Rock and roll. Paul. Cut through the night.