The Vergecast - iPhone event Sept 10th, Microsoft Surface event Oct 2nd, and the future of Siri

Episode Date: August 30, 2019

Stories this week: HP has a new CEOApple’s next iPhone event will take place on September 10thApple releases iOS 13.1 beta before iOS 13 is even outApple apologizes for Siri audio recordings, announces privacy changes going forwardApple was a little behind on Siri privacy, now it’s way aheadApple contractors were allegedly listening to 1,000 Siri recordings a day — eachWe’re still not getting voice assistants rightBBC plans ‘Beeb’ voice assistant for its apps and servicesA phone insurance company bought uBreakiFix, the official Pixel and Galaxy phone repairerApple will let more independent repair shops buy ‘genuine’ iPhone partsMicrosoft announces Surface event on October 2nd in New York City ...Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 headset goes on sale in SeptemberSamsung announces Galaxy Home Mini public beta before full-size speaker has even shippedFitbit’s new Versa 2 has an OLED screen and Alexa voice supportFossil ‘Gen 5’ smartwatch review: best of a Wear OS situationGarmin’s best GPS sport watches are getting even betterLG’s $4,399.99 fridge makes ‘craft ice’ for cocktail loversGoogle’s been thinking about a watch with a hole-punch cameraNintendo Switch Lite hands-on: a budget handheld with a premium …TV manufacturers unite to tackle the scourge of motion smoothing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about the iPhone event invites our app that's on September 10th. We talk about what's going on the Siri. There's a surface event. We got a preview. It's on October 2nd. We get into smartwatches a little bit. And we talk about motion smoothing on televisions. Good or bad?

Find out. Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually

builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Whoa, and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.biz, an enterprise podcast about cloud solutions. That sounds good. I feel good about it. Our retention rate on people staying with us is going to be sky high this week. Are you a B2B executive? Well, we will help you B2B all that you can be. Can I tell a quick, funny story about B2B executives?

I've written a couple of stories about voice assistants this week, and one of them we'll get into later. I said there should be more smaller specialized voice assistants, and that would be nice. That was a whole idea of the story. And I have been getting nonstop incoming from people that make tiny little voice assistants. on LinkedIn now, just like, I'm now a celebrity amongst the people that make a voice assistant for B2B cloud services. It's the best. I mean, that's the dream. By the way, that B2B cloud voice assistant celebrity you've been hearing from is Dieter Bone.

Hi, Dieter. Hi, everybody. Sorry. I am Neilie Patel. I'm your friend. Paul Miller's here. Hi, Paul. Hello.

I got to say, there's a lot of stuff to talk about. It's all, like, little stuff. It's 100% the week before Labor Day weekend. Like, nothing is happening. it's like all very announcements into the future. Like fall is coming. Yeah. That's happening.

The fall hardware season is upon us. We'll talk about that. But this is definitely, it's the week where everyone's like, you know what? I'm going to take my foot off the gas. But we're not going to. We're going to start with breaking news, the biggest news in tech, which is that HP has a new CEO. And you know this news is big because we wrote a story on it. And I honestly didn't even read it.

Do you remember when HP was a big deal? We used to cover their news, like, nonstop. They owned Palm. Mm-hmm. Yep. And now they don't. It's just wild to me that they can announce this change in nothing. And the photo that they have that, like, was provided by HP was, like, a random photo

of him hanging out at CES, like, with his badge. Yeah. HP doesn't care either. He doesn't look happy about it. He's like, I'm definitely at CES. Anyway, his new CEO is Enrique Loras. I mean, I will say HP has done a good job with their laptops lately, right? Yeah.

So they broke up, speaking of P2P software, they broke up into HB Enterprise, and then they have this like consumer business, which has actually done a good job. But the real thing I want to talk about here is... Except for the track pad. I mean, yeah. I just... I just want to point out that the person who was in charge of it, the real point of this was a quibby joke.

Can I be honest with you? The real point was that when they said... split up, Meg Whitman ran HP Enterprise, and then she quit the Enterprise biz to go be the CEO of Quibi. Well, and Quibi, my understanding is there's a rumor that they're trying really hard to form a partnership with a cell phone carrier right now. Yeah, which is the ultimate Go-90 move. Yeah. If they sign a deal with a Verizon, then they're just external Go-90. That's all I want in this world. It's like when you quit and then the company realizes they still need you, but they can't hire you back because it'll screw up your severance. And so they just hire you as a contractor.

Quibi is contract, O90. Anyway, the whole point of this was to make the Quibi joke. And we did. All right, here's the actual breaking news. This happened, what, an hour before we came on the air. Apple invites are here for the iPhone event. It's September 10th. Dieter and I will be going to the Apple event.

It's Steve Jobs Theater and Cooper Tino. It's the iPhone. I think we know it's the iPhone, right? It's the iPhone. It's the iPhone. We talked a little bit last week about the Mark German, you know, giant pile of stuff. In the intervening days, it seems like people are pretty confident that we're going to have like the iPhone 11 Pro, the iPhone 11 Pro Max, which is just a great series of words. And then there'll be the iPhone 11 something.

It might just be the iPhone 11. It might be the iPhone 11 R. And we're expecting there to be a green color. So the colors of this invite are like green, blue, yellow, yellow, red. red, purply, might be the colors that are available for the, whatever the main iPhone is, iPhone 11, iPhone 11R, whatever they decide to call it. So here, Apple, I think they've just decided that they're bad at names. Yeah.

Like, it's just, they're fine. They're like, whatever, whatever names were Apple, it's called the 10R, everybody. Just go with it, right? And they're like, official reasoning is like Phil Schiller likes fast cars, and that sounds like a Toyota. I don't know. That's like, what do you want for me? But iPhone 10 was their branding for this design of phone.

Right. Right. So my question is whether they actually walk away from that X10 branding because it was the thing. It's like all the phones of the notch are a 10. This is the next generation of iPhone. If they just go to iPhone 11, all of that sort of branding equity just disappears, right? Right. This is obvious.

This is a naming problem that has come up before. Final Fantasy 10-hyphen. two. I mean, that is the ultimate. It's been solved by some of the greatest minds of our generation. iPhone X-2 to me is the ultimate sign that, like, lock in is real, right? Yeah. Like, you are so stuck with us that we didn't even try to solve this problem. We just went with dash two. I actually really hope that Apple follows whatever standards, Final Fantasy numbering has set, because famously a bunch of Final Fantasy games didn't make the jump from Japan to America

and so the numbering was off for the different versions of kinds of Final Fantasy games and so when it was released it was like Final Fantasy I don't remember the numbers now three but in actuality it was seven and so when you refer back to it since they started saying

oh yes Americans also like Final Fantasy they're like retconned all the numbers so I would like Apple to retcon all of the iPhone numbers in the same way they retcon the original iPhone to iPhone 2G I think that the iPhone 5 should just become like the iPhone V. Just do it. So what you don't know, and this is, you know, it's a little bit of conspiracy app,

is that Greg Jawsriak actually owns the website EveryMac.com, and he has to make it a compelling and useful resource. So the goal is to make the product names as complicated as possible so people are constantly visiting this website. Yeah. Yes. I don't think that's actually true. true, but that is this sort of conspiracy theory that I am willing to engage in.

Anyhow, so we're expecting, and I think this is true, the 10R was the best-selling phone, right? It is the iPhone. Yeah. The 10S and the 10-S max, I think the max outperforms the 10-s. That's the, like, the hints they've given. But they're obviously the much more expensive phones or the high end of the line. The 10-R is a great phone. And we've pointed this out in the show.

Like, lots of Apple employees have the 10-R. When you go to their events, it's like they're easy to spot. They're extremely colorful. And you just notice everyone has a 10R. I have a 10R. Deater has a 10R. Joanna Stern has a 10R. She loves it.

It has great battery life. I see 10Rs everywhere. I think that's the main phone. So the real question is in the naming and in the announcement, are they going to focus on the pro phones, if they indeed name them pro phones? Or are they going to focus on this is the iPhone 11? and if you want, you know, one extra camera and a bigger screen, you can go up to this next set of phones. I think that's a really interesting, like, project for them to rethink which is the main phone. They have not had this problem before in this way.

Yeah. My guess is that they will focus on a pro one and then be like, there's another one that's just as good, right? Like, yeah. That seems to be it because they, what's the story they have to tell Deter? We've even talking about it. They'll tell a story about the camera. Yep. And the big one will have the good cameras, the big one, the high end one.

It's going to have the extra camera that's wide angle. They're supposedly going to do a bunch of new kinds of computational photography with where they're going to be able to pull data from all three lenses to do interesting things and potentially even fix photos. So it won't just be that you can take a super wide angle photo the way that you can have a bunch of wide angle Android phones, which by the way might be enough to make me happy because I love me wide angle lenses. They're so much more fun than telephoto lenses.

Yeah, I mean, we've already had this conversation. We'll see. Like, I'm so not convinced that buying more lenses on the back of your phone is a good use of money at this point in time. Yeah. Like, at the same time, it is better to have a better camera on your phone. But is this going to drive an upgrade cycle? I think even Apple knows that it won't at this point. I mean, the thing that would drive an upgrade cycle that would make everyone around the world immediately throw their current iPhones in the trash.

They won't recycle them. They won't do the environmentally friendly thing. They'll just try, they'll immediately light them on fire and go by the new one is if they actually switch the iPhone pro to USBC. That's what I believe in my heart. Deep down, they won't. The rumors are pointing towards lightning. And it's not going to happen. I think it should happen next year.

It makes sense that they're not doing it. But that's what I believe. I believe that there's a secret hidden movement, a silent majority of people that just want the iPhone to use USBC. And Apple's problems of people not upgrading their phones would go away if they switched. That's what I go to sleep dream. about. Okay, here's what I'm going to ask you. Yeah. I know that Heim Gartenberg on our staff has his deep emotions about this. Yeah. Do you think the power brick in the box this year will be USBC? Ooh. I'm a hard. Man. I think absolutely not. You think they're going to go with another

USBA, five-amp little dinky-do again? They can't. All of their computers. They're going to do that until the end of time. Oh, man. They have to switch it to USBC. They have to. It's not going to. They got to up the power, the wattage just a little bit. Nope. You can tell me what they have to do. We have lots of, I mean, what is the verge cast but an hour long of what Apple should do or what they have to do or what they're morally, they're going to put a five-watt USBA charger in that box. You know what?

That's going to be our review of the iPhone. I'm just, the N-Lives review, and the entire thing is just going to be a picture of that power adapter and just no. That'll be the whole review. A giant 20-point font, no, a picture of the power adapter, the end. Well, so a question I have. If Apple knows that they're not getting new customers, which is like a real thing, right? They kind of know it, right? They're not grabbing many new customers. The sales are basically flat. Why do they even put this thing in the box anymore? Oh, yeah. It is statistically likely that every person in the world has a USB power brick. Right? Like it is statistically likely that there are like five USB power bricks in existence for every human in the world. We should actually do that math. That's like instead of like GDP, we're going to measure USB bricks for capita.

So like why do they keep manufacturing these? Is it like a question I have? I was looking at my collection. I have a box. I've done some home organization and now have a box of power bricks. And most of them are five watt. And that would be a bad situation for like a modern fast charging phone, right? Yep.

So most people, most of the random, if you just. If you just, a charging brick falls from the sky and hits you in the head, it's probably 5 watt. And that's probably a subpar experience. So I feel like you have to pack in a good one so that people have a good out of the box experience, right? Again, if that was a winning argument, they would have done it last year, the year before, three years ago.

Like, Samsung puts like fast charging bricks in the box, right? Yeah, not like, it's faster. It's not as fast as their phones can handle in some cases. But yeah, they do put fast charging bricks in the box. Google does. Pretty much everybody else does. So here's another question. With Johnny Ive gone, do you think this endless sort of rumor that the goal is to have no ports on the iPhone is over?

That they're going to always have a port at the bottom of the iPhone? Does you know, like, Ive was like, there should be no holes, no buttons, no screen. It's just one piece of glass. Right. But, like, you dude's gone. Like, maybe they have some more rational designers who are like, yeah, charging with a wire is pretty convenient. I think that it was unlikely that they would be able to get rid of the port regardless. There's no way that there's fast charging solutions for wireless that are fast enough.

Even Samsung stuff isn't great relative to what you can get from a wire. Can you imagine that airport experience where you're like at the weird charging, like, branded experience and you've like plugged a wireless charging power mat into that and then you're balancing it on your knee and then you've got your iPhone on top of that. And that's airport life now. Yeah. I see that everywhere. But you can't see that? You can't use your phone when it's on the wireless pad if you're like at the airport.

It's over there, right? Yeah. I see people on planes who have the new fengal, like I think Moffi makes one, Belkin makes one. They're batteries with a chi brick like in it, you know, like integrated. And they're like on the plane with their battery pack charging the phone on the battery pack. And I'm like, you're not accomplishing anything. Like you should just, it's right there.

Like, you don't, you don't need to, okay. Anyhow, I think that's like a big question. Like, are they going to move it to USBC? I would guess not at this time. And then are they going to, are they going to decide the ecosystem is ready for a USBC brick? And I would bet no. Like, just a flat no.

And I think that's, it's one of those things that's like, the USBA port is the most successful power connector in the history of the world. Yep. And you have to say it's over, and I just don't think it's over. It's so everywhere that they have to put that cable in the box. Here's what I want Apple to do instead of putting the charging brick in. I want them to put a lightning-to-USBA cable in and then replace a charging brick with a lightning-to-USBC cable.

And no charging brick. So you get both cables, and you can choose which one you want. And then you've already got a charging brick for either one of them, or you can charge it off your MacBook like you actually want to. They should just put a second lightning cable in there instead of the brick. Think about it. And then when the first one inevitably fails. So that's the phone. I think we know, like, iOS 13 is well and out.

It's pretty buggy. It's kind of funny that iOS 13.1 beta is already out. Yeah. iOS 13 isn't out. So there is some question over whether the software will be ready in time for the phone. I mean, the phone is not 10 days away, right? 15 days away. I mean, who knows?

Like, that's, I think a huge open question. I am nervous. I haven't been running the beta on my phone because I use my phone as my phone and I can't, it's my main computer. I can't trust it to be buggy. I have been running the beta on the iPad and the most, most recent developer beta, it's like, okay, I could see it going with this. But that wasn't true until the most recent one. But they've maybe got a little bit more time with the iPad because we're guessing they're not going to be announcing new iPads at this September 10th event. Yeah, I think a safe bet is the three phones and a watch, we should talk about the watch, and then sometime later they'll do Macs and iPads.

It seems like now that they're calling it iPad OS, they can basically do like a mobile event and then like a computer event. Yeah, yeah. The Macs and iPads have to go together because of the Catalina screen do Hickey that lets your iPad become a monitor. Well, I mean, not necessarily. Like, I think it's more about the, is it Catalina? I was going to say Marsapan. Yeah. It's more about the apps, right?

They can do an event and they can show you an app running great on an iPad, and then they're like, here's our new MacBook Pro. Checkout podcasts running just great on this MacBook Pro. Yeah. I don't know. Like, that's what they're going to do. Creators love it. Everybody loves the home app on their shiny new MacBook Pro.

And I think they have to make a big deal out of that MacBook Pro. So I think you get an event where you get like new iPad Pros, a new MacBook Pro, iPadOS. You get to put all the focus on that stuff at once. Like, here's the future of this kind of computing. And then on this one, you get a phone and a watch. And that's like the big consumer thing. The watch seems like they don't have to do much.

They're already the winners. We're going to talk about watches in a little bit. But like the Apple Watch, what do they have to do? The rumor is they're going to offer it in, I think, ceramic and like some other material. And there's a new watchOS software with the App Store. And I don't know what else I would want. I mean, I would like the thing to have it always on screen, but that's not likely. But the state of the competition for not just watches for iPhone users, but watches for all smartphone users is so lacking.

Apple could coast for like a couple of years and they would still have the best thing on the market. It would be great if they added USBC to the watch. Like well before the iPhone. They're like, we actually added a port, you know, if it's got a headphone jack now, we're just seeing what happens. It's the future. Do you think we're going to see new AirPods? Because there's rumors of, like, pro AirPods in the world. Yeah, like noise cancelling AirPods.

I would like to see that. But, like, we've seen rumors, but we sure haven't seen much in the way of, like, actual, like, pictures or supply chain leaks that I have noticed, which is generally a sign that it's not imminent. Yeah. And they have to put them out before holiday, right? I mean, it's like the ultimate holiday present. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like the cheap iPods used to be. like you're like I have to buy you a gift I don't know you very well it has to look like I love you

here's an iPod nano right like it's like it's enough money to indicate that I care yeah not thoughtful enough to indicate that I know anything about you but it's an iPod and like that's like AirPods like every you can just like an air pod like you've got like a 35th niece I have a huge yeah so like you're like you're like I don't know you can have AirPods for everyone um all right there's other Apple News in the world that we should really get into. Dieter, you've been all over this. Yeah. Which is what is going on with Siri. So you may recall that everybody that makes a voice assistant has gotten caught with whatever

the metaphorical equivalent of your hand in the cookie jar is for letting third-party contractors listen to recordings of your voice. Because they need humans to like verify that like the thing worked and why did it pick up or whatever. So when this happened, happened to Amazon first. And Amazon was like, oh. Yeah, that's bad. They changed their policies.

They created some opt-ins. They created a whole bunch of pages, and they let you go and look at your stuff, and you can delete stuff from Alexa. Happen to Google. Google did something very similar. Here's a webpage you can go to to see everything. Here's how you can delete it. Here's how you can opt out of this, that, or the other thing.

Apple went, oh, yeah, no, we're turning off all human listening for now. And the reason was Apple doesn't have a web page where you can go and see all of series recordings of you. one, because they're anonymized for six months and then they get completely de-anonomized from you. Two, I think Apple just isn't good at making web portals for things. So it's like, well, what are they going to do? And they have now come back earlier this week and they put up a statement that I think critically said, like, we have not lived up to our own standards and we apologize, which is super important because Apple having a privacy scandal and is worse than everybody else because they've like they've staked their entire

business reputation and we are more private than everybody else. So it was very, very good that they just straight up to apologize, no wiggle words, just we didn't live up to what we said we would do we feel bad, we're sorry. And then it said what the new policies for Siri are going to be this fall. And the most important one, the best one that I, the one that I want everyone to follow is the default opt out, which is just fun to say. Yeah. By default, Siri is not saving recordings of your voice on its servers. Full stop. It is still saving transcriptions. And if you don't want them to do that, you have to turn off both Siri and voice dictation. And this is the thing I wrote earlier this month where I'm actually kind of salty at Apple that they don't have an easier toggle for this.

You have to go turn off Siri and then you have to go turn off voice dictation and then you get a bunch of things and blah, blah, blah. And then that's how you end up deleting that stuff off of their servers. Although after six months, it's like, there's too many like, okay, this, but then this, and then you need to know that in that process. Which is worse because you can't just go to web portal and click delete the way you can with Google and Amazon. But because their default is now just, we're not going to save your voice unless you like explicitly say, yeah, no, I like you, Apple. You're allowed to have my voice. I think they're doing better on the privacy front than the other two.

They've sort of leapt ahead a little bit. What is the value of having the transcription? The value of having the transcription. I mean, they get to know what people are asking for and whether or not Siri was able to successfully, like, respond to that query. Like, they are able to learn whether or not people are actually trying to set a second timer in their kitchen. You know, apparently not. This is something I thought when voice assistants first came out. It's like, okay, well, I've used this for an hour and I found 20 things that can't do.

Yeah. So obviously, Apple, who has several employees, probably knows even more things that it can't do that it probably should do, right? And sure, it might not have perfect. big data omniscience about the statistical likelihood that someone's going to want to set two timers. But it's imaginative, innovative some say employees could figure out, well, this is something we can't do. Let's add it on our little Trello board and then we'll add it as a feature. So things don't get added. So like I don't see why these voice assistants need to gather so much information about how we use them because some of the most obvious improvements are not

added. If there was truly a robot in the sky augmented by contractors learning how I like to use my voice assistant and improving that, then I'm like, oh, okay, I get it. That's a tradeoff. But this doesn't seem like a tradeoff because we don't get those kinds of improvements. So a potential pushback is you're assuming that what's obvious to you of what these voice assistance should be able to do and questions they should be able to answer is obvious to everybody. And that's not necessarily true. So I don't know the stat, but Google likes to talk about how some surprisingly high percentage of Google searches are completely unique things that they have never seen before in the history of Google. People are asking stuff that has never been asked before

in that search box all the time. And so it may be that saving at least those transcriptions and then, you know, running some kind of insane anonymized machine learning, what are people asking for a thing on it? They can, number one, like, keep up on trends of, like, what are the new things people are asking for that we should cover. But two, they won't get caught in an ethnocentric filter bubble of only assuming the things that the people in Cooper Tino think to answer is the thing that people worldwide actually want answered. Yeah, but I think it's important to differentiate the three main companies here. Yeah. Right. So Google is a search engine. They already take text queries all day long. And we have to just, we have to trust. In my mind, there's a difference between how I use Siri and Google Assistant. And it comes down to the fact that I've already made the decision that Google will know every question I've ever thought of in my life. Right. Right. And like, is that cool? It's cool in the sense that it's a monopoly. And there are very few other choices. But like, Also, like, you know, we're in the privileged position of having met many Google executives in her life, right?

Like, I feel like Sundar is a good guy. Like, is he maybe? Like, but like we've met them. We talk to them how they build their products. Part of our job is communicating, like, our skepticism about their products. There they are. You know, like, I'm sick and I type in like, am I dying because I have a cough, right? And like, Google knows that information.

Right. I ask Google Assistant or my Google Home Hub, like, turn on the TV, whatever. Right. And then the question is, like, if it goes on by accident, is somebody listening to it, which is, like, the real issue here. If you're a corporate executive and you've got, like, a Google Assistant random trigger in the middle of your board meeting, is that kept private? Like, that's a lot. That's a lot of, okay, we've flipped on a microphone. Oh, one thing I didn't mention, I'm sorry, about Apple is the third point is the only Apple employees are going to listen to recordings, and they're going to be more proactive about deleting accidental recordings than before, which is a stricter policy than either Google or.

Amazon. So that executive thing, Apple's actually slightly better for that. Sorry, continue. Sure. I'm saying with Apple to Paul's point, and, you know, and like Google like does get better in monopolistic ways all the time, right? Like, you search for a restaurant and you don't see Yelp review. You see like a Google card that scrapes some smaller website, not websites out of business. Like, whatever, but they are improving all the time. And you can like see it because you're in this constant relationship with Google to do that thing. Yeah. Apple has, has been collecting this data. They've had contractors listening to it. And to Paul's point, the perception of whether Siri or not is getting better is basically like Siri is far behind and

hasn't improved. To your point, Deere, like that might not be fair. I think Siri has improved in some ways, but you're not in this constant relationship of using it. Right. I don't, like, personally, I don't trust it to get it right so often that I just don't use it. Actually, you know, it's really it was uh this is like a hilarious uh problem and whatever but uh becky like didn't turn on syri on her phone when she set up her iPhone she just never uses it it was like do you want to use syri and she said no and it's just off on her phone yeah so when we're in our car yeah which has syri integration the car's instinct is to like connect to syri you get she gets a text when it's connected over bluetooth uh and like syri will handle it but because syri is off on her phone the

cars like built in weird voice assistant lights up and it is so bad so she gets like lots of texts when we're driving this is just a fact and like our car like literally the computer crashes because it cannot handle the amount and it's like you got a text and then like another text comes in before it's slow. Anyway, I got to turn Siri on her phone. The point of this is she hates it. It doesn't even occur to her to turn it on when she was prompted to do it because the use case is so bad. Even though they have this data, even though they've had the voice recordings, even though they've had the transcriptions, even though they know people want to set two timers, they have

not lived up to the bargain of we're collecting your data. So to me, it makes perfect sense that they're going to say, we're going to stop. Like, we're not using it anyway. But then you go to Google and Amazon where it does seem like they're using it. They need it. They know they need it. They've got to be more transparent about it in various ways. And Amazon, the Alexa app, just lets you listen to.

it. Like, it's very clear, right? If you just open the Alexa, you can be like, here's all the stuff I've said to my Alexa, or here's all the times the microphone is lit up. You can delete it. And I think they're better at it because they're making better use of the data. So the data seems valuable to them. Whereas I think Apple is just historically so far behind that they would rather say, we don't need it. You can opt in if you need it and then we'll collect some of it. I can't, you know, like we have to ask them. I think, you know, we're about to go to an event. We'll hopefully see some of their executives. We can ask these questions.

But that's my sense of it is they don't need the data because it's less fundamentally less actionable for them than it is for Google or Amazon, which are far more data-driven companies. Yeah. I don't know. Is Alexa getting better? Yeah, I think so. I think that Amazon also has the benefit of being able to market Alexa on TV. And like they're willing to say, go use Alexa. It can do these things.

And Google does this to some extent, too. Apple doesn't get on TV and be like, look at all the things that you can ask Siri because they know that they'll just get dunked on nonstop. But Amazon can go up there and say, like, look at the new thing Alexa can do and, like, show a family, blah, blah, blah. And the kid runs in and Alexa reads it a bedtime story. And I just called The Kid and It, but that's fine. You know, like Alexa is getting better, but also Amazon and Google are both more willing to try to communicate to you that it's getting. better through various other marketing channels that they have to talk to you. Whereas Apple is not

in that business because I don't think that they believe Siri's gotten good enough where they can play that game on that battlefront. Yeah, and also they own the phone. Right. Right. Again, this is another case where I think the stakes are higher, in particular for Amazon. Right. Like, Amazon wants Alexa to be Windows, more or less, and they have to put it in your face all the time. You should use this instead of your phone. Right. This should be the primary computer. interface in your car. This should be the primary computing interface in your, your bathroom. Everywhere that you are, like Alexa, it's to be the thing you think of instead of reaching for your phone. Whereas Apple's just like, you should reach for your phone, which we made. Like the stakes are lower.

And I think Google's in like a weird middle zone, right? Like what's a thing that you do with your phone quite often is use a Google service? So I think they're a little bit more chill about it. But, you know, to address it, I think Google would be very happy if everyone was used. using assistant all the time. Yeah. Whereas I think Apple's like, yep, it's a $1,000 phone. You can buy it. And then we will upsell our services to you over time.

Mm-hmm. I mean, they're a very chill company in that way. Peter, you wrote a piece about how generally voice assistant ecosystem has not developed as you think it should. Yeah, I mean, so the BBC announced that they're making a digital assistant called Beeb, although maybe Beebe is not, because, you know, it's the beep. Maybe Beebe is not a great wake word, so they might have to change it. And everyone is just making fun of them.

Oh, my God, why is the BBC? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my take is, like, actually, no, go ahead, BBC. Like, there's lots of things that I would want a voice assistant that interacts with a news service to be able to do. That is item number 5,325 on Alexa's list of priorities. It's number one, two, and three on the BBC's. And so I would like to see a more job. generalized way of people to make voice assistants. Obviously, it needs to be private. So it's really

ironic to bring this up right after we've had all of these scandals about contractors listening to voices. But if we can get to a place where, like, the voice understanding problem is relatively solved. And I think we're not that far off from it, at least at a good enough level. There should be a better way for the main assistant to have another assistant pop in. In the same way that, like, your computer operating system doesn't do everything. There are third-party apps. Right now, the third-party apps for assistance are like skills or actions or, you know, whatever the heck they're called. And they're really basic. They're basically just like macros. That's all they are. They're just macros. And you can do a little bit of like call on this other service that like has a

little bit more interaction now. But it's very, very janky. It's very bad. And I would like to see a system and we should like be trying to develop a system that feels a little bit more open and a little bit less like Well, we just have to wait for Amazon or Apple to make their monolithic, you know, operating system based on voice better. Like, what if they just made it a platform that other things could run on in a more open way than they currently have? I think the operating system analogy, and as you were explaining, like, especially Amazon needs it to be an operating system. And to me, it's really that it's that worst kind of operating system where there are no apps. You know, these skills are not apps that you cannot run. software on it. It definitely cannot run whatever software you want on Alexa. Like, Alexa is a

completely controlled system. Amazon completely controls it. There's a computer in your house that Amazon is 100% in charge of. And they sometimes dispense to you a few privileges of customization. But they really, that's their software. And I would love to see the voice assistant operating system or whatever it would be. I don't know what it would take for me to to actually want a real voice assistant in my house again. But it's not something that is as tied down as Alexa is. Paul, weren't you ages ago talking about some like open, decentralized voice assistant project?

No, I was telling you, it was just a few weeks ago. I got a Kickstarter update from the Microft open source voice assistant. So that's like trying to be like, I don't know, the Linux of voice assistants. I don't know if it will come through. And it's very possible that like it's very hard to, make an open source loosey-goosey version of a useful voice assistant. But I am at a point where I really want to turn off Google Assistant on my phone.

I've tried to turn off all the functionality that it does do except for I want it to be able to set timers. I literally am thinking about just turning it off and just using my, because I feel like I'm opening a pretty huge privacy hole for not a lot of upside, you know. Yeah. I'll say that of the big three, I think Amazon is the closest to working towards this, like, let's have an operating system voice assistant and then other voice assistants that, like, talk to it that you can talk to that are more specialized. They've already, like, gestured in that direction now that Microsoft has, like, bailed on making Cortana a heads-up competitor to those three. And now Cortana is just going to be like a thing for Windows and enterprise use and who knows.

and they've made deals with Amazon and Alexa's built into a lot of Windows computers and so I think that there'll be the case where you talk to Alexa but then you ask Alexa to do some Cortana stuff and I think that they're more interested in being open and just screw it everybody makes stuff than either

Google or Apple. Google is actually surprisingly precious about how they're working with stuff with the assistant and it makes sense because I think that they are more sensitive to people accusing them of privacy violations that Amazon is in this moment. And so they have to be more careful. The way that they shut down, like, works with Nest and, you know, all that stuff is, like, related to that. So they're being much more deliberate. And that has resulted in a little bit

more of a Walt Garden for the Google Assistant than their husband for Alexa. Yeah, I mean, I think Amazon's walking into the privacy conversation a way that it absolutely does not want to, which is, like, it owns Ring. Ring often goes to the cops and it's like, would you like to surveil the neighborhood? We'll give everyone a friend. free camera. And it's coming for Amazon. It's weird. Most of the coverage is about Ring, which is fine. And like, Jamie Siminoff has been on the Verchast. You can go listen to that an interview. I mean, I was actually just relisting to it with all this ring coverage. I was like, what is the future of Ring? And he's like, our goal is to stop crime.

Yeah. And it's very few like IoT CEOs, like say the same things Batman says. You know, like that's not a normal, like, like the August smart lock. CEO isn't like, I will defeat the Joker. Like it doesn't, anyway. But Ring is like, that's the mission of the company. Yeah. Is to help the cops. And like now Amazon has this like problem, uh, which I don't think it's ever had to

deal with like the surveillance problem. It's coming at it in a way that I think is wholly unique from the way that Google and Facebook have maybe faced it because they're, they're actively trying to like work with like the state in that way. Yeah. And I don't, I don't think they quite realized it when they bought like a security ready camera company, you know, like the goal was to build a pervasive private surveillance network that would then deliver video to the cops.

Yeah. But here they are. Like, welcome, Jeff Bezos. Your indiscriminate buying of companies has brought you this problem. By the way, last two things on Apple real quick. And I mean, we're way over in this section. We're going to take a break. But this is like, Paul, you know, we constantly talk about like regulation.

I think a thing that is happening right now is that companies are doing things they should have done ages ago because they're afraid of who will win the next election and actual regulation coming for them. So Apple is like opening up its repair cadence because like the right to repair movement is like getting traction. So before I don't know, Kamala Harris or like Bernie Sanders or whoever like it like puts out a right to repair law, they're like, look, we just give, we've announced an extension of our repair capabilities and now independent contractors can get certified and repair our phones, which I think is a great outcome, right? Like, just the mere threat of the government action has caused them to do the right thing. It's like working opposite

with Facebook. Like the threat of antitrust means like Instagram is slowly being crushed into the Facebook ball, but like whatever. I think it's a great outcome, right? Like, independent repair shops can buy genuine parts from Apple. They can get certified to repair the stuff. Hopefully there will be some price competition in the market. Like, all of that is great. And I think it neatly threads the needle of hey, there should be more places to get your battery replaced and by the way replacing battery might cause your phone to explode.

This is a follow up to that like that iOS like hating your unofficial battery thing right? Yeah. Yep. I do like that you know we can credit Elizabeth Warren for this or we could

another optimistic version is that like privacy and right to repair backlash is a I mean, we've been talking about how ineffective it. I mean, obviously, if we gripe about something, doesn't mean anything's going to happen. So stuff happening after griping, you don't want to like take all the credit.

But it's exciting. It's exciting. It's almost intoxic. Because if you had these companies that were truly responsive, not just trying to control their customers, but actually help them, you know, that would be a cool, weird world to live in. Yeah.

No, I think, you know, I've talked to Apple folks about this in the past. like we're happy to let people repair the phones. The phones are very complicated. They're very small. There's a lot of stuff packed in there. And the batteries are dangerous, right? Like, we don't, we don't talk enough in, like, how dangerous battery, like,

if you, like, poke the battery wrong. David Pierce did this, right? He tried to repair. There's a Wall Street Journal video. Yeah. Where his, like, battery went on fire. Like, David's, like, a smart guy. He's not, he wasn't, I mean, he's a little bit clumsy.

Sorry, David. But, like, he messed up. And he's, like, yeah. He caused a dangerous situation. The idea that now there will be more places that are certified to do it correctly, hopefully means consumers have more choices. And Paul, like maybe it's griping. But I think there's a lot of, hey, you don't have to pass the rules because we're doing the right thing already.

You see it in kind of like a few different places. I think it's like great. Right. Like you don't have to go all the way. You don't have to push the pendulum all the way out. But like just the threat that someone's paying attention and could make a rule means like, oh, we got to, like, behave ourselves. That's, like, the right sort of outcome.

Yeah. Or you could pull Zuckerberg and integrate rapidly all of your division. There's another, there's another outcome in which you launch, like, a global currency that threatens to, like, destabilize the world. It's like, six of one, half dozen of the other. You never know. There's another note on this same kind of thread. We had the CEO of a Shurion on the show.

And I really want to talk to him because I think it's wild that, Tony Debtor, he has 19,000 employees and they like contract to cell phone carriers and just help people use their stuff. Yeah. Which I think is like a massive indictment of how like how difficult everything is and how like poorly everything works together that you can build a business of that scale just doing tech support. They bought You Break I Fix, which is the official shop that repairs pixel and galaxy phones for Google and Samsung. Yeah. So I think, right, there's a little bit more consolidation. But you see like the idea that these things are pervasive.

They're gonna last a little bit longer than than anyone ever really expected. And you need a like a network of repair providers or service providers. That's like a huge business now. Like the reckoning is coming for everywhere you go. You should be able to get whatever phone you have fixed or repaired or replaced. That's like a very sci-fi thing by the way. Like like every every pick one out of a hat like Blade Runner. Like there's all these little shops that are like tweaking and customizing and modding stuff.

Like in the background of every great sci-fi story, it's like another little baby step to that. Like, okay, this stuff is going to get a little more modular. It's going to get a little more hackable. It's going to get a little more fixable. I'm into it. Speaking of modular, last thing, the Fairphone three or two. There's a new version of the Fairphone. It's not like a spec monster, of course.

But if you want a battery that you can replace yourself, there you go. Just go buy a Fairphone. Yeah. Yeah. Good luck. Okay. Enjoy. Enjoy your time. All right, we're going to run some ads. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

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Okay, we're back. Dieter, what is going on with this surface event? Microsoft did a kindness to all of us and just told us over a month in advance of when they're holding a surface event. So, thank you, Microsoft. I can actually, like, manage my calendar and not live in suspense. I'm sure that Apple's not going to take advantage of this encounter program you. Actually, they probably will. I'm very excited for this surface event because there's a bunch of surface devices that they're not bad.

They're not long in the tooth. they still are great, but like they could stand some updates. So like the Surface Pro and the Surface laptop, I would like to see them switch to USBC. I would like that very dearly. There is potentially a Surface Pro, Surface something, something that could run on this new Qualcomm 8cx processor, which is a thing that there's only a handful of laptops that do now. It's an arm processor, and that could potentially be, like, good enough. Like, my guess is that a surface running on the Qualcomm 8cx will be faster than,

my current surface go, and I would be very excited to switch because I would get way better battery life, approximately similar performance, and access to LTE. So that, I think, is like, the flagship, but the stuff that people actually buy. But the big flashy thing is this might be the time that when Microsoft is finally ready to reveal the dual-screen device that they've been rumored to have been working on for a while now. Not like all the way back since the courier. Like, we're not going to bring up the courier because that's too painful. but for a while now this thing that's been code named Santaris that Tom Warren has been writing about

there's a decent chance that this might be the time for them to show it off. Yeah, I feel like that's that is like related to the endless rumors of the phone. You know what I mean? Like there's an endless surface phone rumor and kind of like when we talk to Pannos or whatever, like the response is, well, what would the next kind of thing be? And it's very much like your professor of innovation like demands that you add and answer the question. I love it. It's like very challenging.

He's like, well, what do you want? And it's always like, I don't, I don't know, man. Haven't we definitively proved that this is bad? Like a true dual screen laptop that doesn't have a, because there's some real exciting stuff happening where like the touchpad is a screen or the, you know, keyboard of the front club and you got a screen above the keyboard. Are you saying that a folding or a fold in half courier style like note taking, device for Microsoft is a bad idea, but that keyboard in the front is a good idea.

I just want to be clear that that's the argument you're making. Yes, okay. As someone who has at times been employed as a professional writer, I find it helpful to have keyboards on my computers. Yeah. You know who has historically made really, really good Bluetooth keyboards, portable Bluetooth keyboards? Microsoft. Microsoft has made my favorite Bluetooth keyboards over the years.

So you're saying it's a two-screen laptop and the use of it. You got to buy a Bluetooth keyboard. Yeah, but it's like, think of it like an iPad. Think of it. They can't make a tablet. They've got the surface to use it. You got to buy a keyboard. But nobody thinks of it in the same class as the iPad because it's, you know, it's a Windows machine and blah, blah, blah.

So if they want to get people to think of Microsoft making consumer products in a different context than just it's a laptop replacement, they need to do some other form factor. And the ones that are like on the table right now are like tablet. Well, they got the surface. they can't really try it again there. Phone. We know what happened there. They're not going to get that done until they, you know,

convince Samsung to let them make a Microsoft version of a Galaxy phone, which they're very close to. And then, or something else. And that's something else, I think, is this, like, dual screen, you know, folding thing. Yeah. I feel like the, you said laptop replacement and that just started my wheel spinning.

Like, that is the entire frame for these devices. It's weird that you'd want to escape. Even Apple is, like, inside that frame now. They're like, it's called iPad OS. It can do multi-windows. It can, I don't know, the web browser now pretends to be a real web browser. Like, they're like, okay, it's going to replace a laptop. Like, here's a file system.

Fine, we give up. And then they've got like the cheap iPad, which I, like, my dad owns just to play Sudoku on. Right. Like, right, there's like the Sudoku machine. There's a laptop replacement and there's literally nothing in between. And I just don't think Sudoku machine is like a big enough market. But like that's the that there's no middle ground.

Is there? Maybe. You can make a, uh, a Nintendo Switch. That is Minecraft, a Minecraft, Microsoft Nintendo Switch. Mm-hmm. Game specific tablets. DS, so you could have two screens because you're so with two screens. There is Microsoft X Cloud just saying.

And like, like Tom's reported that they have, the Surface team has been showing this off internally and there have been long lines of employees like lining up at Microsoft's campus to go look at this Centaurus thing. So maybe they won't release it. Maybe this event is not the one where they do it. But I don't know, you know me. I get really excited about different kinds of computers. So I'm like really hoping they do something here. Yeah. I mean, I would love to see some new form factors. Like just in general, it's time, right? It's in the folding phones, I would say got off to a bumpy start. Sort of

literally a bumpy start. Oh, God. But, like, it's obviously time, right? Like, there's a lot of excitement over, is there yet a new form factor? Speaking of new form factors, we're also expecting, what, Hollands 2 to go officially on sale, like, next month, two days. Yeah. But, like, that's very much an enterprise product.

Yeah, it's very good. You know, I got to try one, but we did a whole thing on it. It's very good. You're not going to go buy one. if your company goes and buys one, you're going to like it way better than the HoloLens one. Yeah, if you're an Audi mechanic, this is true.

If you're an Audi mechanic, the HoloLens 2 will be how you receive your training materials. So get ready, Audi mechanics of the world. Yeah. It's coming. Two more little announcements, and we should talk about smart watches for a minute. This is my favorite that Samsung announced a Galaxy Home

Mini public beta before actually shipping the Galaxy. They've got to be, we just talked about voices. Maybe we should have looped this in here. Like, who stood the best opportunity of launching a competitor to Google Assistant and Alexa and Siri? It was Samsung, no matter how much crap we gave Bigsby. Yeah.

Like, they sell a lot of phones. They can get it in front of a lot of people. And it went nowhere. Samsung's core mistake with Bixby was they launched it. Dan Seafurt went and, like, talked to the engineering team and did a whole story on it. And they said, we are not trying to take on Alexa and Google Assistant head on. We are making a thing that controls the phone. It's a different kind of thing.

And we're going to get good at that, and then we'll see what happens. And they stuck to that plan for approximately five minutes. And then they're just like, let's just have it try and do everything now. And you're going to lose. If you try and take those big guys on head on from the jump, you're just going to lose. It's like if you tried to launch a phone operating system head on right now, you're just going to lose. You've got to do something that's lateral. and they just didn't.

And on top of all this, we've been talking about the privacy problems and the threat models for these big three assistants. I have literally no idea what happens when you say something to Bixby. Right? Well, nothing, generally.

I think it's very clear they're collecting no data because it doesn't work so great. It's weird because Apple should do all that phone control. I don't think it does it, right? A little bit. Right. Turn off Wi-Fi. Yeah.

Oh, it did. Yeah. Now Siri's not available because I'm not connected to the internet. Nailed it. Okay. I mean, like, it's weird that Apple doesn't talk about that more. That's actually a useful thing for Siri to do. And they haven't, I don't think, they've got like shortcuts.

And I think iOS 13 is going to let shortcuts in Siri integrate more. But that's still pretty power-usory. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, I'm very happy that Samsung is now and now. like another smart speaker product that will never ship. I don't think the first one will ever ship. I think it's a dream world.

And then another piece of, I mean, the pixel four has leaked so much. Like they've just up and said like here it is. Yeah. But battle of the camera squares is real, right? We think the iPhone 11 Pro will have a camera square. We've seen like leaked case builds or whatever. And now the pixel four is going to have a giant camera square.

And this is just going to be an ugly cycle of phones. is from what I gather. Yep. That'll be an ugly cycle of phones. And like the thing that will determine the winner will be what does your ugly camera square do? And how does your face ID slightly better at unlocking when you see me at an angle or when I pick it up and so your radar detects my face? Like that's where we're at now. So this is a slight tangent.

But so camera squares, right, it's a bump. And it's a bump on one side of the phone. And I know the rumors with the. The iPhone, the new iPhone that it will have a lie flat on lock, right? But that's a bit of a misnomer because there are no phones in the world now that lie flat because they all have a bump on one side. Everybody uses a case. Everybody uses a case.

The end. Yeah, I think Apple just assumes you're going to put their phone in a case now. Even if you put it in a case because you're a monster or you value your investment, whatever. Why can't we have a full width bump? just embrace the bump and go full wide camera bump. I don't care what you put in it, but just go full width

so that I don't have a teeter totter of a phone. Isn't that more or less the S-10? It's like a horizontal bump across the back? But does it go all the way across? Well, no, but it's like, it's big enough where it like lies flat. Well, not flat, but it doesn't wobble.

Yeah. Also, phones are so big now that like the wobble, it's like they form like a triangle, like a tripod. from the camera bump and the two sides of the phone because they're so big and so they're relatively stable not my experience i'm sorry paul we're gonna we gotta send you some cases man if you're if you're out there you're case manufacturer paul's segment needs a sponsor let's just make this happen can we just end this conversation 2020 in the wobble just sell me sell me a sticker that's the size of the camera

bump that is also as thick as the camera bump and so i can no wobble no case that is the worst outcome. Sell me a foam pad for my phone? Just get a case. Alright. I hate the wobble. Dieter, let's talk about Starwatches. So the big important news is there's a new version of the Fitbit Versa, Fisbit Versa

2, and they man, they gave it an OLED screen and they removed some buttons and so it's going to look like a nicer object, but it still looks kind of cheap, I think. I mean, we'll see it in person, see what it looks like in person in photos. It looks like better. Everybody's

saying it's just an Apple Watch knockoff, and I can't say they're wrong. But I'm hopeful that it will be a little bit better than it was before. And just the fact that it's a nicer object and has a nicer screen, if the software's a little bit better, it might become a nice de facto alternative for Android users. And if you're really into Fitbit and you have an iPhone, you know, it'll be cheaper than an Apple Watch, I'm sure. And so like, you could go do that and fine. But I think that Android users right now have to choose between Samsung Tysen watches, Galaxy watches, which the new one's actually pretty nice, but you have to install a bunch of Samsung crap on your phone to make it work. Or wearOS watches, I just reviewed the new Gen 5 fossil, and it's very nice. It's like I would be very happy to own it, but no one should spend $300 in a wearOS watch right now because who knows where that platform is going.

Yeah. So it's like, and then there's new garment. There's a bunch of stuff, but like this is still Apple's market. everyone's doing a bunch of little stuff underneath, but nobody has emerged as like, oh yeah, I know, this is definitely the alternative to the Apple Watch. And Fitbit should have it.

They should own it. They bought Pebble. You know, they own the market. But, you know, like, I just don't think they've got that much resources. Yeah, what's the major shortcoming here? Here's a watch that $200, has Spotify, has contactless payments, does fitness stuff, and it looks okay. Like, what's the big...

So on Android, like, the software quality isn't quite where you wanted to be on the watch. It looked bad before, so they've solved that. For iPhone, it's like, you can't get eye message on it, the end. Like, it doesn't do the stuff. Okay, let's assume that iPhone users are going to buy Apple Watches. Yeah. The answer is, I don't know. Like, there might not be that many downsides.

Like, they've added in enough stuff that, like, you're annoyed that it's Alexa and not Google Assistant, or it doesn't quite do integration with other Google stuff as well as you would like. So there might be some of that, but some of that might be relatively minor. That's why I'm excited for this thing. It has the potential to be like, oh, yeah, just get that. That's great. But we can't know that until we review it. And that's what we're going to do.

Yeah. I mean, Deeter, you're always pointing out, like, more people in the world have Android. So this is a huge addressable market. It's weird that no one has got it right, especially weird that Google has not gotten it right. Yeah. Well, I mean, Google doesn't know how to make. make its own processor chips. And Qualcomm is too busy making money hand over fist with the other chips that it makes to

think about smart watches, I guess. And like, because everybody else has, like, failed so hard to execute, like, it's not worth it to Qualcomm to put all the years of development and R&D into making a really good smartphone or smartwatch chip. So they just, like, keep on tweaking the one that they've got is my sense of it. There's like, there's a real chicken and egg problem here. It would be great if there was like another chip manufacturer that saw a huge market and then competed. I got one idea and it's like there should be more companies doing stuff.

Or abolish patents is what you're saying. Oh my God. Well, no, I mean, no, the patents are a great incentive, right? Like you got to have a moat. Anyway, that's like a whole other. Here's the problem. Here's what we need. What you need is a watch.

It should be round. People like round watches. And then in the middle of the face of the watch, there should just be a big ass camera. Just smack in the middle of your watch. Absolutely. So here's a thing that remains true at the verge. Someone in the world sees a patent and then I get like an urgent message.

It's like we need you to look at that. That's my legacy. So Google has, they've received a design patent for a watch with a camera in the middle of the watch. Yeah. So it's not like a, so you know, there's like different kinds of patents. A utility patent is like what Paul was just saying. Like that's the patent where like Qualcomm has a bunch of patents on like 5G technologies and how they work.

And so you can't like build a 5G chip that works in that way. Like whatever. That's like a design patent is like here's how it looks. Like literally like here's how it looks. And there's like some whatever. It's a little more complicated that. But it's all you do that. So Google has a design patent for the dumbest looking watchin world.

The end of all of that is it's not even how it works. It's literally just, what if it was a circle with another circle in the middle? And that circle was a camera. And it's like, why? Like, were your lawyer's bored? Like, did the intern need a project? Like, why did you fight your way to getting this patent? Who did you think you were going to block from this idea?

Because I assure you, no one else has had it. But anyway, they have it. Maybe they're making a first party watch. and it will like every time you look at it the camera in the middle of the screen will be like see your face and it'll be like hey buddy you bought the watch with the camera in the middle of the screen but it's like it's not even a utility pad it's not even how it works it's literally just this it's so ridiculous anyway yeah that's the end of the smart watch segment on the verge cast this week we're gonna take a break we'll be right back support for the show comes from lincoln if you're a small business owner you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn HiringPro comes in.

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and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. Paul Miller. Yeah. Every week, the consistency is astounding. It's the only thing. in a turbulent time in American history

that we can depend on. What's it called? Fridge ice is trash ice. Please don't at me. Wow. You know, I've been, it's been weak. It's amazing that you've, for weeks and weeks you've been able to deliver this.

And nobody's added to me, which is, we'll thank you for respecting my wishes about adding. Okay, LG has made a $4,400 fridge that makes craft ice for cocktails. Yeah. Craft ice is big ice cubes. Specifically, these ones are round. It's nice.

You want, you don't want, if you have a bunch of little cubes, they all melt real quick. But if you have one big cube, it melts slowly, but it still has enough surface area to make your drink cold. I think that's how ice technology works. Properly made craft ice doesn't have as much air inside it, so it's clearer, looks better. And that lack of air means that, like, it may be less likely to affect the taste of your drink. Well, so this is what I'm talking about with trash ice. Because most, what I mean by fridge ice that is trash ice is ice that comes out of the door of your fridge. If you push a button and ice comes out, it's probably bad ice.

It's typically old. It's full of those air bubbles. Also, often it doesn't seem to be filtered as well as water I know can be filtered. And so it's just, I have had so many nice, delicious water beverages. ruined by trash ice from fridge doors. And I'm saying that it is worth it to invest in some nice, whatever those silicone soft ice cube trays are. Fill them up with some like filtered water.

Put them in the freezer yourself. Pull them out. You know, your fingers get cold, but it's worth it for the flavor. That's all I'm saying. So I have several questions about this refrigerator. Okay. First, just on a purely.

mechanical level. It's delivering giant spheres of ice, right? So you like push a button and it like shoots out a huge ice sphere. It drops them into a drawer. Right. It doesn't become old. It doesn't come out of the door like

a like a carnival prize. It's like you can open the drawer. It also does have door. It has door ice as well. Yeah. It has regular door ice. And then there's like it's it's automatically making ice. spheres for you.

Yes. Constantly. Uh-huh. Okay, that's just fun. The mechanics of that are just like fundamentally ridiculous to me. Yeah. Like, at some point, it's, it's just like ejecting perfectly. Like, just imagine you went back in time.

Let's pick a historical figure. George Washington. Right? You're like, George, how's it going? I hope the revolution's going well. I need to tell you something. In the future, people in their homes will have a $4,400 machine. Uh-huh.

that keeps the food cold, prevents them from getting sick. That's important to you. But also that they will just eject perfect spheres of frozen water at some time interval. And he'd be like, who are you? Are you? Are you British? I have to kill you. It's George. I mean, that's like where he's at.

He'd also, he'd also say $4,400. I could fund my entire revolution off that. He's got to be like, what's a dollar? Get me out of Valley Forge. Give me that cat. But that's just like a remarkable future moment, right? Like everyone has a small machine that produces ice, and now it's like the ice is perfectly round. So that's, let's just admire that.

Then I want to point out that LG's fridge marketing is completely out of control. Like, we don't often talk about refrigerators on this our technology show. I wonder why. But if you just look at what LG is doing to market, like, their high-end appliances, it is the most, like, unconnected from reality marketing I've ever seen for things like, refrigerators and washing machines. Like, it's like all black, like, images that everything's like fading in at you, like moving slowly, a washing machine coming at you from the mist. And then the word like elegant luxury like appears.

And it's like it's a, it's a washing machine. Right. That's what you just go. I just encourage everyone to look at these ads. It makes perfect sense that they added a luxury ice machine to their luxury refrigerator because they've just decided that there's a market for extremely extra. appliances and as somebody who loves that like like markets filling holes that nobody knew existed it is my favorite thing like every other refrigerator is like it it gets your food cold

it has a number of doors uh it's energy efficient and LG is like it will change your life and it's also like a nightclub and I just that's great I just think we should all be proud of them so Paul I've hijacked your segment thank you and just to put a little button on that this fridge is called the 30 cubic foot smart Wi-Fi enabled InstaVue trademark Door and Door, registered trademark, refrigerator with craft ice

trademark maker. They trademarked craft ice? Yeah. All right. Whatever. Anyway, I hope someone buys me this fridge at the end. Two other, we should just go through

these things real fast. Switch light is out. I think Hime got to play with it. Is everyone just buying a switch light? I'm assuming everyone's just buying a switch light. I have a switch. I want the switch with better battery life you can't have multiple switches on the same account and easily, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, you got to transfer your saved games.

I wish Nintendo would figure that out. If Nintendo figured that out, I would have bought a Switchlight, but they didn't, so I'm not. It's like a, you can transfer your stuff, but it's like a one-time deal kind of. Right. It's a whole thing. Yep. I want the TV switch. Oh, yeah, you want, you want like a console.

Yeah. All right. Can you just buy a switch and leave it plugged into a TV? Sure. Well. Just throwing that out there for you, buddy. It might come to that. All right.

And then this is obviously my favorite. You might know, we've talked about motion smoothing on a show so many times, but a bunch of directors across the industry. Tom Cruise made a video. Ryan Johnson made a video. Hate motion smoothing being on by default. Hate all the processing. They've been fulminating about it for years now.

We have been, I mean, I believe that you, if you see a TV with motion smoothing, it is your obligation as a concerned citizen to turn it off, no matter where you are. Just turn it off. It's fine. You can do it. No one will stop you. Unless they do, in which case it's not my fault. The TV manufacturers are going to start a filmmaker mode in response to these concerns.

I against Vizio said they would, LG, Sony. So you like hit a button and they turn off all their junk. Notable Samsung is like, F that. We're making it crazy as possible all the time. Bixby mode. A small dog will narrate the movie for you. I hope they make a Bixby mode. That'd be great.

This is exciting. I think are they going to roll? it out to their existing TVs, which they should absolutely be able to do because it is just a macro that turns off settings, or are they going to market it in their next generation of TVs and force people to upgrade? That's the question I have. I just want it so bad. Yeah, because especially motion smoothing is bad enough, but there are other things that TVs do as well, and this turns off all of them at once. So like now, because now, nowadays, if you're at a friend's house, they've got motion moving on. It is your obligation

as a citizen to turn it off. But you got to like go through and like you got to really tweak the settings because you want to picture that they're happy with. Like you, the hope is that this person will realize, ah, thank you Paul. Now I'm enjoying movies more. And I think that's just such

an easier sell. It's like, Christopher Nolan likes this. And you're just like here, let me just pull up the man you turn on film micrower mode. Seasons is great. This is what a movie looks like. So there is like a real danger of this. So one time I went to visit Joanna at, like, her parents' house in New Jersey. In New Jersey, she was there, we went up by.

Her dad's, this is a true story. It turned off motion smoothing on her, like, dad's TV. And to this day, he's like, I think that Neil, I ruined my TV. So you got to, like, be careful. But filmmaker mode, you're right. It's like an easy sell. You're like, you know, you got to put your TV in filmmaker mode. That's like the, that's the best.

It needs like, they're all going to have hypey names for it. I guarantee it. Yeah. Like, Sony's going to be like cinematic vision plus. That's a very important part of filmmaker mode is that it has a consistent name across brand. They've said it's going to have a consistent name across brands. This is at least according to the announcement.

Like, sure, somebody could, Samsung could call this Q, Q filmmaker mode S. But for now, that seems like the plan is a consistent name. Mm-hmm. All right. Is this also going to affect sound? It says, affect multiple settings like frame rate aspect ratio over scanning and noise reduction noise reduction referring to the picture so yeah this seems all picture related yeah yeah because there's no way because every tv is a different and b they want you to buy a soundbar and you should buy a soundbar so um the noise reduction thing is really interesting right because there are many cases that you might want some noise reduction on your tv because streaming services are not great right so it It kind of depends on like whether they're talking about low light noise reduction,

because you can see some of that grain, some of that ISO noise, or if they're talking about like streaming compression noise. The combination of a TV playing around with noise and also the like, because there's a film grain noise and then there's compressed film grain noise and then there's compression noise. And those are kind of three different things. And I don't think TVs are smart enough to do a good job of different. of differentiating it.

Well, so, I mean, this is, huh, I'm going to find myself arguing against Tom Cruise and Ryan Johnson for a minute here. Let's see how I can pull this off. So if you're buying like a Blu-ray, like the way filmmakers deliver a movie is like they either deliver reels of film, which are hard to screw up in a theater, right?

Or they deliver like bits. And so, and then you have to like recompress the bits in however many different ways you want to. If you're playing off like a 4K Blu-ray, like the TV should probably do nothing, right? Those bits are effectively perfect. They've been compressed to a standard. This is assuming that they did a good job.

But like those bits are perfect. The reality is no one in the world as a 4K Blu-ray player. Like even the people who own Xboxes, which are 4K Bluray players, probably don't think that they do. You know what I mean? Like, they're not using them in that way. Yeah.

Streaming services do all kinds of bad compression. And there's like this massive variety. I think Voodoo and Apple are kind of the best. But like, that's, it like there's no upper tier beyond them and so like you kind of do need your tv or your player to compensate for okay i've decided to watch this movie on on tubi just pick one flickster or whatever crackle i'm watching a movie on crackle tonight like crackle might deliver you bad bits and there is a world in which the tv could improve that picture but filmmaker mode would like turn all that off

so it's a real i think this is a real question of like who is this targeted to and whether streaming can be improved or whether they're just going to push everyone to like the highest quality streaming services and turn on filmmaker mode and you're done. So a couple things. One, they shouldn't call it filmmaker mode because the

author is an illusion and authorial intent doesn't matter. Oh my gosh. And also frankly, like you don't want it to be exactly what the filmmaker intended because what the filmmaker intended was watching it in a dark room on a $30,000

reference monitor. You don't have that. You have a thousand dollar TV in a bright-ass room with the sun shining on it and you can barely hear the dialogue and you're trying to watch the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones and all you see is black because if you had that perfect thing, you would have the perfect experience, but you don't. So what you see is garbage. They should just, they should call it like, I don't know, simple mode or something. No, but so that's the perfect example, right? HBO's streaming service. it. Like, he delivered bits. Like, the Game of Thrones is edited digitally. That's how you add a dragon to a show. Sure. Guarantee you it's edited digitally. Yeah. So he delivered some bits. He delivered bad bits. He delivered bad bits. He delivered. He delivered. He delivered. He delivered. He delivered. He made bad bits. He did. He should not have killed Danny at the end.

So what here, here's what I believe filmmaker mode does. Okay. When a movie is done, when Mission Impossible 12 comes out, Tom Cruise will sit down and write a manifesto of authorial intent. It will be six to 12 pages single spaced. That will come along with the streaming bits as additional metadata. Yep. That before you watch a movie, your TV will display this to you.

Yeah. Right. And then an AI will interpret that. And then you will have a conversation with their TV's voice assistant about what authorial intent means to you. And then it will adjust the settings based on what you personally believe. This is what should happen. You know how you can like go on cameo and pay a celebrity to record a 30 second clip for you? I should be able to flip on filmmaker mode premium. And then it will personally send 50 bucks to Martin Scorsese who will then Skype. me on a video call and I'll point it around the room and he'll tell me how to adjust the TV based on my room. And he's going to be like, you should buy a better TV. By the way, if Camio offered a service where famous filmmakers just told you to buy a better TV, I would use that shit every day. What if you could have that, like, through the magic, the cloud, like a special logitech remote that is remote controlled by Scorsese. So he's actually blasting the infrared

at your television. We had this whole privacy conversation. Now we're like, what we need is Martin Circusi to surveil me as I watch a TV. Like, okay, like, there's a yin and a yang to this. Okay, we're just, now we're just, we're just way over. There is, that letter. So there, you know, some films are like, I know famously, uh, Terence Malick wrote a letter or a notice to projectionists for tree of life. So there is that concept.

There's so much, there's so many gigabytes of data going over the wire for video. if there were several bits dedicated up front when you load the video to here's some tips on how to how to display this and then I don't know sounds like there could be a standard there who knows yeah but those bits are like here's the frame rate of this video please don't interpolate you know 200 extra frames along the way like that's like I think that's like part of the deal here yeah that's true okay well hopefully you know when Wonder Woman 2 comes out Patty Jenkins like issues like a 12-page statement of authorial intent that like is displayed before and after like Apple streams it that's like my dream okay we got to wrap this up we were going to talk about Disney plus but like whatever it happened there's a D23 happened Julia went she covered the hell out of it go look at it on the site that the news I want to talk about was I did or you're with this too like Disney knows they have to win on the technical side yeah so they're doing free 4k they're in force on I don't think of streams.

They own BAM tech. They're thinking hard about, like, server load. They have a really good kid mode in the app. I'm excited for the stream wars to actually begin, but none of this. Like, I don't even think we're going to see Apple TV Plus at this event. I don't think they're ready for it. I think it'll be yet another, right? I think this is a phone and we'll see.

Yeah. The stream, the drums are rising in volume. We're the second Lord of the Rings movie where, like, the run-up to the battle at Helms Deep is like half the movie. Like, we're there right now in the streaming wars. Yeah. Yeah. Which one's Gandalf?

Ooh. The one that rolls in at the very end to win? Yeah. Quibby. We begin and end with Quivy. That's a Vergecast for you. All right, that was the show. I got to say next week, Vergecast interview is going to run on Thursday instead of Tuesday.

We should have to hold some news. So look out for that. It's going to be good. And then we'll have the regular show on Friday. I want you to go watch Future of Music with Danny Deal on my YouTube channel. It's so good. Speaking of movies, she, this. week's episode was Junkie Excel who scored Mad Max, Deadpool, Blade. Come on. Just go watch it.

It's so, in his studio is incredible. Danny's doing great job with that show. Go check it out on YouTube. You can also check out Rico decode with Kara Swisher, wherever podcasts happened to you. Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway. I actually went to a live taping of Pivot. Scott is just like hilarious. Go listen to that. And then Recode Media of Peter Kafka also available to you out in the world. I'm also telling you that Land of the Giants, Rise of Amazon, hosted by Jason Del Rey, is out. It's a whole podcast series about Amazon. Jason's going to be on the Vergecast soon. That's going to be fun. Binge listen and watch this up button. There's a lot of podcasts listening. Just get out there.

Do it. We'll see you next week. Rock and Roll. Paul. Kesney.