The Vergecast - iPhone XS review, Apple Watch 4 review, and Amazon's surprise hardware event

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

This past week, Nilay reviewed the new iPhone XS and XS Max while Dieter reviewed the Apple Watch series 4. Paul, Dieter, and Nilay dedicate half the show to their review and whether it’s worth upgrading to the new model. Second half of the show, the crew tries to cover all of the insane amount of gadgets that Amazon announced this week, including a DVR for over-the-air channels. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like deputy editor Liz Lopatto’s “This week in Elon” segment — so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 01:26 - Apple iPhone XS and XS Max review: smoothed out 32:10 - Apple Watch Series 4 review: the best gets better 54:44 - This week in Elon Musk with Liz Lopatto 59:00 - Paul’s weekly segment “Spin to win” 1:03:46 - The 14 biggest announcements from Amazon’s surprise hardware event 1:33:09 - Sony is launching a PlayStation Classic console this December loaded with 20 games Also, in case you missed it, Nilay along with transportation reporter Sean O’Kane talked to Ford AV CEO Sherif Marakby about self-driving cars and what Ford is doing with them. You can listen to that right in the Vergecast feed.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Now, VergeCast listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Verge. That's ziprecruiter.com slash verge. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge. I feel like I didn't go big that time, but it's a big show this week. It's a very big show. I'm your friend, Eli. Paul is here. Hi, Paul.

Hello. Dieter is at, Peter, are you in Seattle right now? Where are you? No, I made it home. It's 7.30 in the morning in Oakland. And I am your compatriot today. Ooh, a compatriot. No, it's just a huge week.

I was just going to tell you straight out. There's no grab bag this week. There's no nonsense. It's iPhone review, Apple Watch review, and Amazon's 50,000 products that they announced yesterday. Dieter, you were at that event. I was. And let me tell you, it was hard. It was just nonstop.

They were announcing products at a cadence of one every minute and a half for an hour. I love it. I love it. Okay, we'll get to that later. Let's start with the phone. I have, guys, I have the phone. As you may have deduced by the fact that I wrote 3,000 words in place. published a video about it. No, it's iPhone review week. Can I just say something first before we

begin? I've been thinking about this like all week. It is the Verge mafia is like wild. I'm so proud of it like Joanna Lauren Dave like the Verge alumni out in the world who are now the top reviewers. It just makes me so happy. So that was like the first thing. It's like I've just been thinking about it all week. It's incredible because you know it didn't used to exist. Now exists and now it has like an alumni class that's amazing. So that's cool. That made me happy. And then the phone, I would say the phone made me happy with some medium, medium feelings on the side. Is that a phrase? Yeah. The phone is like one of those things where it's like, it's like the restaurant that you know is capable of blowing your mind with the best steak ever. But like that,

that chef had the night off. And so it's a very, it's an incredibly good steak. It's one of the top five stakes you've ever had. But you just, you just, in your heart, you kind of know, like, oh, man, I should have come on Thursday. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like that or like, it's the second time you've had it. Do you know? Oh, yes. There you go. You know, like, you like had this transcendent experience. And then you're like,

you go back and you're like telling your friends, like, this was incredible. I've never had anything. And then you're like, yep, it's a steak, actually. So,

so I have both phones. I have the 10S and the 10s max. I'll be straight out. I barely use the 10S because it's the same phone as the max. And obviously, the max is the more interesting phone because it has the bigger screen. It has, you know, the bigger battery. So I really wanted to test bigger battery. The battery is incredible.

I've been running 12 to 14 hours with this battery with like eight hours of screen time. Yeah. The people that don't get to hang out with Nilai, and I suspect that that's probably most of you, hanging out with Nilai is infuriating because we'll be sitting there at the office or no no let me finish at the office or at his apartment or wherever and he'll just be banging away on his phone

nonstop just draining the battery for like three hours straight and I'll be sitting there watching it and there will be a power cable literally half a foot from his phone the entire time and he won't touch it He won't just plug the damn thing in. It's like, if I'm within 50 feet of a power cable, I'm like, I'm going to plug it in over there.

I carry spare batteries with me everywhere. I have a complex about being max charge all the time. If my phone is below 65%, I start to get really shaky and nervous. And Neil, I just does not care. She's like, they're just going to use it. It's fine. Conversely, hanging out with Dieter is great because he's always got extra batteries and cables. Wait, Nilai, what's your thought process in this?

Do you like to live on the edge? Is it the ergonomics of using a phone while it's plugged in? What's, what's going to your mind? I'm an optimist. And I just assume that, like, if the battery, like, ever, it'll just be fine. Like, I'll only find a place to plug it in, or I'll just go home. Or, you know, it's, like, probably time to stop using Twitter anyway. I will say that the screen time limits on iOS 12 are remarkably in effect.

with me. I don't know if they're effective for other people. I hope they are. Did you say any? Yeah, I set a two and a half hour limit for Twitter, Instagram, and I told it to turn virtually everything off at 10 p.m. And I am begging my phone for an extra 15 minutes, like 10,000 times a day. I basically have like a snooze button for everything. And I now live in a constant state of snoozing, which actually makes sense. But I like it, because it makes me at least, it makes me at least think that I shouldn't, but then I do.

I feel like it's more revealing about my personality than I want it to be. Yeah. So the battery life is great and it's perfect for you because you never plug in. So that's cool.

Yeah, so the max is great. I was talking to Joanna, actually, who was testing the 10S and she was really impressed with the little battery life, which is only quoted at half an hour more than the 10. And it actually has a smaller battery.

It was like revealed that the 10S has a smaller battery than the 10. But it's getting a better battery life. I think that's down basically to a combination of iOS 12 and the 7 nanometer A12 chip, which is more efficient. So that, I think just on the first cut, right, is the battery life better. It's the thing everybody cares about.

These phones are really impressive. Then the max, because of the sort of full body screen, I've just started becoming accustomed to it. At first I thought it was too big because I've been using a 10 for a while, and I thought it was a little silly. And I really do wish Apple would make more use of that screen. Like, I really wish I could watch picture and picture video

while doing something else on it because it's big enough to support it. But now I'm like, oh, this is my computer. And I remember thinking that when I had a plus for years, like this is basically my computer all day. Like, I'm in meetings. I'm running around. I'm draining that battery. My computer might as well have a big screen so I can do all the stuff I want to do on it.

It is not quite the note. level where the thing actually is a computer and you can just make it a computer if you want. Right. But as somebody who like spends their day going from conference room to conference room, I don't carry my laptop because I want to pay attention. So having a phone, I'm like, okay, I can, I can review a video and feel confident that I actually saw the thing. The max is great.

So I think I'm a max person. I think I'm going to end up, you know, I'm trapped on AT&T Edge forever for life. and so I'm going to end up upgrading. And I think I'm going with a max. I didn't think so at first, but I think that's where I'm landing. Wow. Can you talk a little bit more about like, because I know it's been a year really since you've used a plus, but like does it basically just feel like a really nice plus that doesn't have big dopey bezels?

Or is there some like feeling to it that's different from the plus that you like or that you don't like? I know that like you have to reach further up to the screen. You have to use two hands to hit the notification tray. Is there anything else compared to the plus that feels different? Yeah, the plus, I've never liked the design of sort of the iPhone 6 class of phones. I always thought they were kind of ugly. With the iPhone 8, you know, they added the glass back. It kind of refined that design a little bit.

It still felt kind of surfboardy to me. I think honestly, the combination of the rounded edges on the screen and the glass back kind of makes this design way better. It is still pretty surfboardy, and I keep it in a case. But I had it out of the case all the yesterday because they were taking photos of it. and just carrying it around without a case, I was like, oh, this is fine. Like, I actually kind of like holding this thing. The one thing I do not like about it at all is they went to a new antenna configuration to support gigabit LTE.

And that means they're on the bottom of the phone where the lightning connector is, the holes are asymmetrical. There's like six on one side and four on the other in an antenna line. And it, yeah, it's the least Johnny I've thing I've ever seen. my entire life. Here's the thing. Like, every time Samsung put out a phone for years, there would be just a million blog posts and tweets of like, look at how, like, the plug and the hole and these speakers are not all on the same line. Look how asymmetrical this is. Ha, ha, ha, ha, Samsung, ha, ha, and I always was like, yeah, I mean, sure, but also who, who, who cares? Like, genuinely who cares?

and I feel the same way about the 10. Yeah, but Samsung stuff was like nothing was aligned like vertically. Like the headphone jack would be up here and the USBC jack would be down here. And then like the speaker holes would be somewhere in the middle. Like that was, that's crazy. I get it. This is like they made a concession to their antenna and it looks, it just looks weird. And I can't imagine they're happy about it, but it's fine.

That's like the only true like visual problem with the phone. if you could even call it a problem. There is some discussion over whether the camera bump is a different size than previously. And we should get into the camera. The camera sensor is like 32% bigger than before. And there's a lot of just sort of if you put an iPhone 10S in a 10 case, like the case fits a little differently. But I haven't actually had that experience. My cases fit fine.

Marquez Brownlee made a video and he was like, this case fits differently. So, like, John Gruber is like, I measured it with precision calipers, and it's the same size. So it's a little unclear to me what is actually happening there. But for all intents and purposes, it's the same phone. Right. In your cases, should fit fine. And Apple says they should fit fine. So speaking of the camera, that's, like, where we spent all of our time and energy,

outside of, you know, measuring battery life. Like, the screen is the same screen hardware-wise. I think they're doing some stuff in software. to get more out of it. But it's the same sort of beautiful OLED screen. It's the same 458 pixels per inch on both devices. There's really nothing apart from the processor and the camera that's different on these devices than last year.

Right. So we spent all over time with the camera because I've been saying this on the Vergecast for months now, I think, which is as soon as we had a baby, I became immediately unimpressed with the iPhone 10 camera. The second, you're like, I want these photos to last forever. That camera does not hold up. at least to me. Because the loss of resolution is really obvious to me when you zoom in.

The noise reduction and smoothing is really, really obvious. Portrait mode gets really blocky and low light real fast. So the 10 has a great camera, like a good camera. Not great. But I just don't think it holds up compared to the pixel compared to my real cameras. So I was really interested in the 10S. The 10S has a much better camera. I think Vlad wrote a piece.

There is some, because of that larger sensor in the same, specs. There's been some triangulating of what sensor they're using now. And it appears they've gone from a Sony sensor to a Samsung sensor, which explains one big thing, which is it looks way more like Samsung's cameras now. Like color temperature wise. You think that comes down to the sensor? It's like hard to say, but like if you just look, you know, there's going to be an I fix it, tear down, you know, the second these things come out in the world. Actually, it hit this morning as we're recording. I'm going to, I'm going to go read the internet while you. you continue to talk. All right. So Deider will confirm for us what censor it is. I didn't realize

it hit this morning. Yeah. So there's like some triangulation of what sensor it is. Regardless, if you just look at the photos and we spent, I don't think people know this. Like we have a huge team of people that makes the iPhone review with me every year. It's like a weird tradition. We all end up staying up until three in the morning. We all end up working on the weekend. So there's like, you know, eight of us floating in and out of the review process. And our creative director, James has a big calibrated professional monitor with a hood. He retouches all our photos with it. We spent hours arguing about these photos under that hood. And people were walking by and yell it. It's like, it is the most fun. Right. Like if you, that's the sort of thing you enjoy,

it's the most fun. So my impression in the review is not just me. It's like a lot of people have given me a lot of thoughts and opinions about what these photos look like. As we're making the review, James and I spent a lot of time taking photos and arguing about photos. And so the conclusions we arrived at during the review, you can see him. One, it's a really good camera. I think like most people, especially if you have an iPhone, it's the best iPhone camera ever made by far, which is obvious. It is a substantial upgrade over the 10. I think the 10S camera makes the 10 look worse, like way worse than any step function iPhone camera upgrade than before.

I think that's to me particularly interesting. But it looks way more like Samsung photos than before in terms of sort of color, temperature, and like processing quality. And it does a lot of smoothing. And that's smoothing and noise reduction. You can argue what they're doing. You know, I asked Apple very directly. Like, are you attempting to go for this look?

They said no very clearly. Like, we're trying to do the best camera we can. We pride ourselves in accuracy. So they said no. But then you look at the photos and you're like, what is this? closest to, and the answer is Samsung. Samsung is still way aggressive. Like, you look at an S9 photo up close, and it is smooth to all hell. Like, they detect faces, and they're like, you will now have the best complexion you've ever had. Right? Like, they're doing stuff that Apple won't do,

but you look next to a pixel, and the pixel just has more detail in the image. And that, to me, is like, I'd rather have that and edit that photo to make it look more like an iPhone photo than not have the detail to begin with. Deter, what have you discovered? Oh, but I fix it. Oh, they did not say. I can see. I'm looking at a picture of the sensor, but there's no branding on it, so I apologize. I see. So the conspiracy theory continues. Yes. And let us add our part to it. So the question is, does it, do they just need another mode? Should they just, like, be straight up and say, like, the default mode is beauty and they should add, like, a manual mode to the main camera? Well, you can shoot it in raw. You can also turn,

I didn't talk about how the camera works. So there's a whole new image, processing. chain that's happening on the 10S and soon the 10R, which is called SmartHDR. It's Apple's riff on what Google is doing with the pixel, basically. It takes four photos in a buffer the second you open the camera app, but it's also, unlike Google, which Google combines under-exposed frames. Apple is taking matched pairs. One is like the regular exposure, and one is a long exposure, which is over-exposed, to pick up details in the shadows, right?

So they have this like, they basically have eight frames. It's four matched pairs. One is exposed correctly and one is over exposed. So then they like do a bunch of processing and they combine whatever. They get the detail out. That smart HDR is like the big new thing with the camera combined with the new sensor. So you can turn it off, which is, right? Like you can just turn it off in the settings.

It's totally normal. I think those photos look way worse. Just way worse. You could also keep it on and tell it to keep the normal frame. And the comparison between the two, the smart. HDR to me makes a much better photo. Okay, so the SmartA Share is better. Yeah, and you can open, like, Halide, which is the pro app I use, and shoot in raw if you feel

like it, and then you have a raw image, and then you can, like, do whatever you want with it. So you have options, right? Oh, that's great. Do I think that there should be a button that's, like, more pleasing photo, more accurate photo with Smart HDR? Yeah. Right?

Like, that's, like, the oldest debate in the book. Like, in everything. Like, you go into Best Buy, and the TV's look insane because people buy the brightest TV whether or not it's accurate, and you bring it home, and you set it to, like, be accurate, and I'm like, this TV looks really muted and bad. And then your dad shows up and turns on motion smoothing and turns up all the brightness. And that's just life. So, like, I don't know. Like, I don't know what the right answer is because it's entirely subjective, which is the thing I said in the review. I cannot tell you what photos to prefer. Like, absolutely can't. James and I have

a strong preference for the pixel photos for different reasons. Actually, James is like, these photos look more like what I would want to make. So they're closer to where I want to be already as a photographer. And he's a professional photographer for 35 years who's like operated at the highest levels. So like that's his preference. Like this is closer to where I want to be. I can get this photo and get it to exactly where I want to be very quickly. My read is actually very different than his,

which is the colors are flatter and more accurate on the pixel. And there's more detail. Right. So as a starting edit place, it's not necessarily, is this closer to where I wanted to be? It's more, is this more accurate, right? Can I push this in a wild direction, but am I starting from a place of accuracy? And I think the iPhone photos, a lot of people have been tweeting at us this week,

the iPhone photos are really, they just lack contrast because smart HDR, because of that overexposure, brings up the shadows to be really flat. So iPhone photos are noticeably less contrasty. Now, can you start there and end up at a pixel photo? Yes. How do I know this? Because people keep taking our photos, editing them and sending them back to us and saying, look, it's just as good as the pixel photo.

But what they don't have is detail. Right. And to me, like, particularly, like I'm saying, like, we had the kid. And do I want to look at a photo of Max five years from now and be, my childless name Max, by the way, I'm never going to figure of Apple for this? Do I want to look at a photo of the baby five years from now and be like, man, I wish there is more detail in her face, right? And the answer for me is that tradeoff feels really hard.

for a picture that might be like brighter or more contrast or less contrasty. So that's, look, I watched Marquez's video. It's good. He landed basically the same place as me, which is it's firmly the number two camera behind the pixel. And then he said a thing in his video that I actually cut from our review, which is if you have an iPhone 10 and you are the sort of person who just like wants to spend $1,000, you should just go buy a camera, right?

You should keep your iPhone 10 and you should buy a Sony RX100 or the new Fuji film XT2 or XT3. Like, just go do that. And you'll have a real camera that will take far better photos in any of these smartphones. You'll have the best of both worlds. But the sort of 10S versus $10,000 spend just for the camera doesn't seem worth it until adding another round of smart HDR optimization. Yeah, I got to say, unless you really want the max, the camera improvements are good from the 10 to the 10S. from what I've seen, like actually very, very good. But the idea that you would justify an upgrade based solely on that seems just bonkers to me.

But there were, there have been many iPhone years where that was, I think, the right move, right? The jump from the five to the six camera was incredible, right? It was just like a really, it was a really big jump in quality. That's when they started doing the Billboard campaign shot an iPhone. So there have been times in the past where you do that. And I think Apple tried to sell it. Like, it's a much bigger sensor, like, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like, yeah, I think Apple wants this to be that kind of jump.

And if you just look at it in a vacuum versus the 10, it is. But if you look at it across the industry, it's incredible that Google's year old camera is doing a slightly better job than the 10S still. And the pixel 3, you know, looks like it's coming out in a matter of weeks. But other than that, I don't think there's much more to review with the phone. I mean, we've been talking about it for a half an hour. But you understand? I can't stop looking at these sample photos and not being able to. decide, which is better. I really just haven't, I really can't make a call. Like, they're obviously

different. You know, we have like the calls. We talk to Apple as we like go through a view and I have questions. And so one of my questions was, you know that no one is doing this, right? Like, no one is under a hood looking at 150% crop of these photos and being like, that one has more detail and this like tiny. And they're like, no, we do that, right? Of course Apple does it because they want to win. But then they were like, yeah, but we also know that most people look at these on smartphone screens. And I think one of the things that's happening with smartphone cameras, James actually wrote a piece about this for us like five years ago. And I can dig it up and we can put it in the show notes or something. But the revolution with smartphone cameras was that

your capture device and your display device are the same device, right? And that means you're going to take a photo, you're going to share it. And then like you have a huge audience of people who are going look at it on their cameras, basically, right? Their phones. Right. And so if your target is basically like Instagram, which already compresses the shit out of your photos, or your target is Twitter, which compresses shit out of your photos or whatever, Google photos or ICloud sharing, and you know, in your Apple, and you're like,

what kind of photo should we make with this camera? And you know it's only ever going to be this big and no one's ever really blowed up. And even when you pinch to zoom, there's like a max pinch to zoom. Well, then, of course, you're going to optimize it for that size. And I don't know. I think Apple is an honest broker. I don't want to suggest that they're cheating. But I think they know deep in their hearts that they need to make a photo that looks really good for the iPhone screen.

To that point, they were saying you get like this phone, the 10S is supposed to have 60% more dynamic range when it's displaying the photos that you take. Did you notice anything like that? It's so hard to tell. Yeah. Like what does that mean? First of all, like sometimes when you watch HDR things are like, well, that's pretty HDR. Like, watch an HDR movie on a good HDR set. Sometimes, like, hmm, very HDR.

Yeah. Yeah. I will say that the sample photos I've seen of, like, full-on H-DR backlit with the sun in the background from the 10 to the 10-S. That improvement has been massive. Like, there are stuff that, like, a 10 would definitely blow out or definitely screw up that the 10S can capture just full stop now. Yeah. F-stop now. I keep saying this, like the 10S is a huge step over the 10.

Like, don't get me wrong. Like, they don't even sell the 10 anymore, so whatever. But the 10S and presumably the 10R are easily the best iPhone cameras ever made. They're better than most Android phones. I think they're far better than the galaxy cameras. But are they as good as the pixel? And like, one thing to note is that no one else in the world has a pixel. It's me trying to buy one on this show.

and failing because the eight other nerds have already bought the whole stock out, right? Like, they don't sell very many of those. So is that a fair comparison compared to what most people would buy? Like, I think if you are writing for a much more mainstream audience, you should only compare it to the Samsung phones, because that's what that audience is going to buy. And it's better than those. So it's the best camera. For the Verge audience, for the Vergecast listener, presumably you know that the pixel exists. Presumably, you know, that we've been saying for a year, this is the best camera on a

phone. So I think it's only fair that we compare it to that, right? And I think there, Google just has an edge. So I want to go back to this. Most people look at their photos on the phone that they took them with thing and then the Instagram thing. I have a solution to this problem and you're going to hate it. Are you ready? Yeah. Yes. CSS for photos. The revolution in web technology was separating out. The whole point of HTML was you separate out the layout from the content. And cascading style sheets were the best because they'd be like, here's the raw data, here's the content. And then the CSS was separate. And it said, make it look like this on this type of screen. And so what we need is we need a new standard, a new web standard that everybody can

agree to, a new photo standard. We'll have to form a committee. We'll form a committee. We'll form a a committee and they will agree on a format that is everyone just shares raw photos from now on and then along with it is another file that says this is what it should look like on these different screens think about it okay okay you guys remember like early days web design where you make a jpeg and like it had a white background and then you try to put it on a white HTML page but then they'd be different whites yes we've come a long way is what I'm saying Also, there is some sort of color. There's a new color standard that's being either proposed or is pretty far along in standardization.

It's like a new color space for the web that's about, it's like designer's eyes to designers monitor to your monitor and whatever your monitor color profile so that you as the consumer end up seeing similar color to what the designer put in. But it's kind of different than what you're saying, Deeter. Yeah. Well, I mean, so I think Apple's displays are. the most accurate smartphone displays. I think they're very proud of how accurate their displays are. And I think for good reason. Compared to, so like one thing you cannot do, you cannot take a bunch of phones,

take pictures with them, and then like compare the pictures on five different screens. Right. Like the pixel screen makes pixel photos look really good. The iPhone screen makes iPhone photos look really good. Samsung screens look like neon took drugs. Right. Like there's no, right? Like, you can't do that.

You have to pull them back to at least one screen. So we sent them all to an iPhone screen and we looked at them there. We sent them all to a pixel screen and looked at them there. Then we use James, its monitor. I think there is, I would love the entire industry to say, like, put our screens in reference mode where they're all dead accurate. But like who, no, but you know what that would look like? It would look desaturated.

It would look flat. It wouldn't be as bright. and people just don't want that. And that's like the reality. People just don't want to look at accurate displays. They want to look at bright, vibrant, crazy displays. And so again, I think that's a push and pull for all these companies. And I asked Apple and they said, no, we're trying to make an accurate camera.

But I think you can just see it. Their photos look a little bit more like Samsung's photos this year. Yeah. You know, and you can get conspiratorial about that. Like, people might prefer Samsung's photos. Joanna's review, she said in some shots, I preferred the S-9's photos. I think it's because on a small screen, all of that smoothing and beautifying doesn't really matter, right? Especially in other markets around the world where these phones are people's primary computers, primary connected device.

And they don't have a laptop or whatever else. Of course they don't care about, there's no way you can see it. So I think there's a little bit of competitive push and pull there. But can I prove out that, you know, some Apple camera engineer was like looking at a matrix of consumer preferences and was like, guys, we got a, of course I can't do that. I can just look at the photos and tell you what I see. Okay. Is it time to read an ad and move on to the watch? It is. I mean, we can talk about the processor. Here's what I'll say about the processor. It's the only other thing. The neural engine is cool.

I think every year Apple gives itself more headroom, right? They have such a massive advantage in smartphone processors that they're just giving themselves headroom. So the 10 doesn't, feel slow a year later. Last year, the A11 and the 10 had a 30% faster GPU than the A10, right? Have we maxed out the processor in the iPhone? We absolutely have not maxed out that processor. So they've got even more headroom this year. They're another 50% faster than that GPU. But the real thing is the neural engine. And I think that that's a bet that Apple's AR stuff, that their core ML stuff will pay off. But in. day-to-use when you're like using Slack and Twitter, does a neural engine kick in? It does not.

So I think there's like, it's there for the next generation of things. And Apple on stage at their keynote, they're like, we make these products to last a long time. And I think all of that processing headroom they have is part of that strategy. I think that's, that's awesome, right? That they, they have way more headroom than they need. So these phones are going to last four, five, six years. Yeah. We should give Apple a little bit of credit, actually a lot of credit for the iPhone 10. It is a way better phone than I think we realized when it first came out. There have been a lot of iPhone generations that a year in were like, oh, well, this is slow. Well, this, this, this, this, this didn't hold up as well as I hoped. But the combination of the bug fixes in iOS 12 and the speed ups in iOS 12 relative to iOS 11 and the

iPhone 10 having just a better, faster processor and more longevity than like other iPhones is one of the reasons I think that upgrading to the 10s, if you have a 10, seems a little weird. Like, because the 10 was so good and continues to be good and, like, continues to not feel slow relative to the 10S. Yeah, absolutely. I think the 10 is going to last, people are going to have, we're going to see iPhone 10s for five years, right? The same way that you still see iPhone 6S is floating around.

Yeah. We didn't talk about iOS 12 a lot, but we've talked about it a lot already on the show. So go back into the archives. That's so rude. Okay, I'm going to read an ad, and then Adidas is going to take over. We're going to talk about the watch. This episode of Verchast is brought to you by Betterment. We're about to hear an advertiser segment brought to you by Betterment,

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All right, Dieter. Yeah. You had to watch. The watch is fundamentally more interesting. I don't know why we spend all that time on the phone. It is wildly interesting. I deeply love it. And I do, we should probably point out that like the valence, the like emotional tenor of our phone conversation was like one way and it got an 8.5.

And then the emotional tenor of our watch conversation is about to be a very different way and it also got an 8.5. But to be very clear, like these are both very, very good products. And I don't know, like an 8.5 in the smart watch world means something very, very different because the competition is like a six right now. Right? It's like a five. And so an 8.5 smartwatch is like, oh my God, you did it. Holy crap. Yes. Nobody else has figured this out. An 8.5 in the phone world is like, yeah, no, it's really, really good. Everybody who buys this will be very, very happy with it. There just happened to be other 8.5 phones. Yeah, to be clear, we've given virtually every flagship phone for the past year in 8.5. The note, the S9, the pixel 2, all of them got 8.5s. I have routinely given iPhone. phones nine, the 0.5 deduction was you had a year to beat the pixel two and you didn't in a camera department. That's it. Like it is on par. It's the same school. Literally every other phone has gotten

8.5. So I felt confident about that, but it is that like 0.5 ding. And you're saying, I think I gave the first Apple Watch a seven, right? Like I was like, this is an unfocused mess. This thing needs a purpose. And now you're saying, oh, it has, it has purpose now. It has purpose. And like that purpose question, I actually struggled a lot with that. So just real quick, like the basics of the watch are it has a bigger screen, which is beautiful, and it's got curved corners, and, you know, faster processor, blah, blah, blah, and then a bunch of health stuff that is supposed to protect your health, not just track your fitness, most of which I really couldn't test all that well, because I didn't, you know, the irregular heart rate thing isn't out, the EKG thing isn't out yet, ECG, same thing, whatever. And I didn't have a low heart rate. and I couldn't get it to trigger the fall detection. We can come back to all that. And then there's new watch faces, which some people love, and I don't. But the thing I spent a lot of time thinking about and really had a hard time coming down

and a clear answer on, and it's the thing that we always talk about with the Apple Watch, which is what is it for? The original Apple Watch, Apple didn't know what it was for. So, like, it's the future of all computing on your wrist and it does everything, and it did everything really badly and slowly and with a terrible interface, right? So they retrenched, they read it the OS, and they're like, no, no, no, it's for fitness and also some notification stuff. And then what they've done since then and what they did especially well with the series four is they're like, we know what the basics are of what this thing does. And now we can add features that build on that foundation.

And the thing that I think is, like I didn't write this very well, but the thing that is great about the Apple Watch is it now can, appeal to like multiple types of people and be good at that thing for that person. So it's not a general purpose computer, but if you just want to watch that will show you your notifications, let you reply to text messages, show you the time in the weather and just be like a smart watch, classic smart watch thing, they've gotten very good at that. And it will last a couple days on that if you don't, you know, go out running. It still doesn't show you the time, which is super frustrating and annoying. and like that's like the one of the dings on it.

But it's very good at that. If you want a health tracker watch, this thing, the only competition are like those big Garmin smart watches that last a week and have like, you know, pretty ugly interface and isn't well integrated into Apple World ecosystem. As a like fitness watch, this thing is incredible. If you,

and now they've added this year like health thing. And we need to see like lab tests. We need to see a lot of stuff there. But in theory, if, you know, you are over 65, if you've got some health problems, if you're a little bit worried about your heart, this thing, it won't actually like definitely protect you and tell you things, but it seems like it's a very nice backup insurance policy, I don't know, insurance policy, like a monitoring thing that could maybe give you some peace of mind.

And so the achievement with the series four is they didn't achieve that it can do everything original vision of the first Apple Watch. But they have managed to create a watch that can appeal to different types of people and not suck for any of them. And nobody else is doing that. If you go get one of those crazy Garmin watches, like, they're great. Don't get me wrong. A lot of people are like, how could you say it has good battery? Like, the Garmin lasts a week and it does GPS a lot.

And like, yes, but using it kind of sucks. And like the software is like, ah, right? Yeah, and I just go down the line. And like, in each of the things that it does, it does it very well. So it's not the original vision of the Apple Watch. but it's more than it was for the past couple of years. We've been saying, like, Apple fixed the Apple Watch. They made it really good.

And now they've made it really good at multiple things, which is really impressive. It feels like they started off that first watch. I remember during the announcement of that watch in 2014, literally thinking, this is a mess, right? And I thought, should I type this in the live vlog? And then I thought, well, I haven't used it. I don't know. But I, like, vividly remember that moment.

being like, I'm just looking at this, and this feels like an LG presentation where it's just like, they're all over the place, right? Yep. And I think the story is they've clawed it back. And I think particularly with watchOS3, they just rebooted the interface entirely. And so they've peeled it back. They've removed functionality or hidden functionality. They've redesigned it significantly.

And does it feel like they're now at a place where they got that foundation right and they can start adding functionality back? Yeah. That's exactly what it feels like. Here's a fascinating thing that I think it's kind of instructive. When we were at the Apple event, we actually mentioned this, I think, in the last Vergecast, the app screen on the Apple Watch still defaults to the Honeycomb Weird Grid, but they switched it to the list view, right?

And I think that was partially so that we could all, like, the first thing you do is you want to feel the new haptics on the digital crown. And so you want to find something that'll make you feel it so you could just go to the app view and scroll and so you can feel the haptics. But the digital crown feels faster. And I switch to that list view on my review unit, and I like it way better because it's way faster to just scroll through to find like in the alphabetical order to find the thing you want than it is to remember where you stuck an icon in that weird freaking honeycomb. Wait, tell me about the crown. Because I keep thinking about that first presentation.

They made such a big deal out of the digital crown. They compared it to the iPod scroll wheel. They compared it to multi-touch. It's true. It's not those things. It's a slightly more convenient way to scroll. That's it. It's a slightly more convenient way to scroll.

And it turns out that scrolling is a really effective computer interface. Like scrolling is nice. We used to have scroll bars. And like, do you remember, and I'm talking like 1990 shit here, do you remember when you had scroll bars and you would like have to go and you'd have to decide whether you wanted the arrows at the top and the bottom or just two at the bottom? And then you would like go and like click your mouth. and then mice with scroll wheels came out, and then track pads picked up two-finger scrolling instead of scrolling on the right-hand side

of the track pad for the first time. And I was like, oh, my God, this computer feels completely different. To me, that's kind of where the digital crown is. Scrolling turns out to be a really great way to jam through a ton of information on a small screen really fast. That's what it's for.

And the digital crown is very good at scrolling. And so it's easier, like, cognitively to, like, get through something by just scrolling up the digital crown than, like, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe on a tiny screen. But that was the argument for the touch wheel on the iPod. Yeah. Like, you're, maybe they were right all along and they just duffed it. Because, like, the iPod, the whole thing was they developed the scroll wheel to get you to scroll through a list faster on the iPod. Yeah. Look, all Apple does, the story of Apple is they reinvent scrolling.

every 10 years on the dock. And then that is a revolution. Right? They're like, look at this phone. You can scroll with your finger. It kind of makes sense if you think about it. iPod,

you're scrolling with your thumb. iPhone, you're scrolling with your thumb. And the information that you're looking at is above your thumb. But with the watch, you're scrolling with you, if you're scrolling on the screen,

you're scrolling with your index finger while also covering, I don't know. It makes sense. Yeah. You've got to have a digital crown, is what I'm saying. I agree with the,

the feature inclusion of a scrolling device. You got this one right, Apple. So, Deter, you were really down on the default watch face after the hands-on. Now that you've used it, are you, do you still think it's insane? Yes. Aesthetically, I don't love it. That's like, it is what it is. I just wish there are more options.

And it's weird to say I wish there are more options, but I wish there are more options within the watch face. It's like, if I could get this watch face and just like choose whether I not want, crazy color mode, like that would make me pretty happy, actually. That's the thing that frustrates me is like, you know, you look at the screenshot of put in the review, you look at the video, and it's just like, there are a lot of colors. And they also they made a new font. They customized their, whatever Apple calls their font, the San Francisco font. They made it like a little bubblier.

So it's just like every, all the letters are a little bit more rounded. And there's just sort of a, there's a bubbly interface to the watch. and even the buttons, they change those to make them a little bubblier, that I just don't really love. But I think part of that is just a personal aesthetics thing. Like, you know, I don't mind chunky watches. By the way, this does not feel like a chunky watch, even the larger one. But I don't know.

I'm boring. I want a boring aesthetic. I want something that's a little bit more, I don't know, modernist and a little bit less, like, happy, I guess. I want a watch face that makes me sad is basically what I'm saying. They have these video watch faces that could definitely make you sad. Like the water one, you can remind you of drowning. The liquid metal. But there's no information on there.

Yeah. So if you can take, they look silly, but you can take those animated watch faces, which, you know, they're just basically like animated photos. And you can make them round. And so all the animation happens inside the circle. And then you can add, I think, three complications around it. So you can get some information on them. those watch faces. But fundamentally, I think the best one is the update to the shoot, I forget what it's called, the watch face that has the three at the bottom and the time that's in digital and then like

a main one in the center. Like that one's really nice. And you can get some really cool information in the middle there. Like you can get a five-day forecast like on your main watch face. And that's dope. But the other thing that I don't know if people, I didn't realize it at the Apple event. And I only realized that when I was trying to pick a good watch face in the review is if you pick one of the new watch faces, there is a completely different set of complications, the new style of complications that are available to you. And all of the old style of complications that are available on the other watch faces aren't there. And vice versa. So for example, when I wear an Apple watch, I like to have the home app icon on there so I can quickly turn a light on or something. You can't do that on the new watch.

They didn't make one. Really? Yes. Really? If you want the weather, it's a completely thing. And if you have a bunch of third-party complications, you have to wait for all those developers to update their complications to support the new watch faces. And so now Apple developers have to like make two styles of their complications, one for the new watch faces, one for the old ones.

This is complication fragmentation. Yes. Complication fragmentation. That's our new children's show. That's like, it's like, that's literally like a Sesame Street song. We should explain to the children how complications work. I'm going to do an article that just lists out every single complication and the two different sets of them. And then the headline is going to be complication, fragmentation, compilation.

That's good. Wait, you have to do that. I'm officially assigning you that piece, Peter. Damn it. We have to put that headline in the world. Are you kidding me? But the new watch faces run on old watches with watchOS 5, right? So basically there's...

No, no, no, no. Like, the best one, like the best one, the coolest one, the infograph one requires a bigger screen. Okay. But I know that, like, the fire one and the vapor one, they run on the old watch is, right? I think so. But they don't have updated my old. Do they take the new complications? Yeah, I haven't updated my old watch to the new watch OS yet. So I actually don't know for sure off the top of my head. Because I mean, if Apple's saying, like, here's our new watch base style and here's the future of complications, again, they have so much of a lead that they are, like, they are, like, they are a. Forded some sloppiness because it's not like, you know, it's not like Google's going to do anything. You know what I mean? It's not like, it's not like the software department at fossils.

Like, that's our opening. You know, like, they have so much of a lead that it can be like, okay, everybody, every Apple, iOS developer, like, here's the future of complications. Just start working on this. By the time you, we have 100% saturation, maybe Google will have released yet another reboot of Android Wear or whatever it's called now. Yeah, it's WearOS. And there is a, there's like a weird little reboot where they, they didn't update the version number, but they changed the interface. And the new watch processors for wearOS devices have been announced. We only know of like one insane, expensive maltblanc watch that it's in, but we're expecting more.

But there is a new generation of the old processor, but even the new processor is like only good for standby time. It doesn't actually make it faster. Like, people have been asking me like, hey, there's a few, there's a new wearOS processor. There's an update to the WearOS OS a little bit, and there's this new Apple Watch. You know, I made this video last year that's like Android deserves better smartwatches. It's just like looking at the state of smart watches for Android users and how crappy it is. Be like, have your, has your calculus changed?

And like, I can't fully say no, it hasn't yet because I need to test the new operating system on WearOS. But honestly, the answer is probably no. Like Google hasn't figured it out yet. It's going to be another year. And so there was this rumor that they canceled making a pixel smartwatch at this, you know, upcoming Google Hardware event. And yes, good move because there's nothing that I've seen in WearOS that Google could do that wouldn't look just sloppy and ridiculous and terrible next to this Apple Watch.

Really? Yeah. It's a big claim. Yeah. No, I mean, unless they had something that they haven't shown that is like they revamp the OS again and they've done a bunch of really cool stuff and they've made it thinner and they have this processor that nobody's ever seen before and, you know, down the line, all the stuff. And, you know, they revamped Google Fit, so that's good.

They can do a bunch of stuff. But I don't know, man. Here, like, the execution on this Apple watch is, like, incredibly good. Like, LTE takes a minute to connect, but once you do, it just feels like you're connected. And if your phone is on somewhere in the world, you get your notifications, full stop. And you can reply to them, full stop, right? Like, that just all just works just fine. That stinks through the cloud.

Google does that too, but, like, still. The phone calls. Like, Nilai, you talked to me when I was on this watch. Tell me what your experience was talking to me when I was talking to you on the watch. I did not believe the Deter was talking to me on a watch. I thought he had just called me on a phone. Yeah, it is so good. Like, the speaker is loud.

The screen is beautiful. Like, my biggest complaint is that, like, you have to turn your wrist to turn it on. And they, I don't know, they pick up an extra eight hours of battery. Maybe they double half. I don't know. Some number of hours they gain from that. But isn't it an OLED screen? Can't they just do the thing where it's like always kind of on?

And then it feels like they're so committed to being like, the screen's on fire that they won't just give you this sort of like you know Android default like the screen's on but not on state and like they should just do that I don't know why they don't I really don't and I told them like look I would I would turn off every single fancy ass health feature in here if it meant I could trade all of that for I'd rather die yeah I'd rather die with a pretty watch face that you that like when they when they find my body they can be like time of death and they can look at my wrists and just see it, and that'd be fine.

This guy probably tripped. If wearing the Apple watch, last gen, was like a one in, I feel like I look attractive wearing this watch, how many more is the new watch? I mean, it looks exactly the same. Like, if you don't like the Apple Watch aesthetic,

you're not going to like this. It doesn't fundamentally change. They're bigger. they're like they're thinner but they don't look thinner but you can kind of feel it like actually you can really feel it but like it's not so it's not so much thinner that I would actually like make that a point of like oh yeah you should get it because it's like a thing you kind of noticed kind of thinness but they're bigger but they're actually like they don't feel that much bigger so like I had the 42 before I tested the 44 you could tell it's bigger the screen looks way bigger but it doesn't feel huge on your wrist

and I think that I think and I can't say for sure because I didn't test it, but I think people who prefer the 38 are going to feel the same way about the 40, the new size there. So in terms of its looks, like, it looks the same. The watch bands fit the same, and that's actually kind of impressive that they managed to do that. But if you didn't like the way it looked before, you're not going to like the way it looked now. That didn't fundamentally change. Yeah. Okay. You gave it 8.5. What is the minus 1.5? Right now, you're making it sound incredible. Yeah, always on screen in Siri. Of course it's Siri. What's wrong with Siri? Siri. Yeah. Oh, Siri. It's just like, you don't trust it. When it works, it works like Siri works, and that's fine. And I wish it worked better. So you don't trust it. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. When it works, it works. It works. It works. But the combination, if you get an LTE one, there's like a lot of like, is it connected or not, I don't know. Let me like go. Go look at the like swipe up settings to see. Okay, wait, here. Okay, here we go. Now it works. But, you know, you get a lot of like, hold on dot, dot, dot, dot. You're like, okay. Okay, Siri. Let me, let me just, you let me just, you let me know when you let me know when you,

ready to talk, Siri. I'll just wait. It's fine. Right. And so that's, that's annoying. And then, yeah, the always on watch face that I wish that had that. I don't know. Wachie-talkie mode is like not great, I guess. I don't like it. People were really excited about it. People were really excited about it, but the ergonomics of it are weird. And this is another Dieter is an old man thing to say, but it's not true push to talk. It's not true classic Nextel, Iden. You push a button, you say a thing and it sends it right away. It's push a button, you say a thing. It gets recorded, and then the watch makes a FaceTime audio call to the other watch,

and then that gets connected, and then they send your recording. So in theory, the idea is you do it, you tap the thing, you say, hey, Dan, and then you like, wait, right? And you try not to look at it and worry about it. And then, like, it connects, and then he, on the other end, this person hears, hey, Dan, or hey, Neelai, or whatever. And then you're connected. And then it's just a back and forth in that work.

pretty well. So what you save is you don't have to be like hello hi how's it going you save that like blah blah blah you can send that initial message right away and the person who receives it has that immediate experience of I got a message and now we're connected and now we're just talking but the method the experience of sending it is still like basically the experience of making a phone call huh well I'm gonna get one and we're gonna try it out but you can like you can touch your nose to the screen you know that's great okay you can start talking with that preamble but when you're done talking, do you still have to say, like, I love you too? Well, it's up to you how you want to end it. The way it works is when both of you stopped talking for a while,

Apple, you know, the call just sort of, it's like, well, it seems like they're done. Are they done? I think they're done. Okay, I'm going to disconnect the call now, right? So, Tim Cook just hangs up on you. Yeah. So, like, after a minute or so of not sending a message, it eventually is like, okay, they're done now and then it hangs up and then you'd have to reinitiate a call. But there's no, like, hang up button. You just sort of stop. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'm going to buy one. I'm just signed. That was my question. Is it worth upgrading?

Man, from the Series 3, God, man. No. Like the base model's $400. You know, you get LTE in the bigger size and steel and you could end up spending like $700 bucks. Man, it's such a hard. It's, I don't think it's worth upgrading, but it's going to make you mad that you bought the Series 3. That's how I feel. I bought the Series 3 and I'm super mad at myself. If you have a series two and you love it You can afford it. You totally should.

If you have a series zero or a series one, oh my God, you are going to be, you're going to love it. It's so much better. I feel bad for the person who bought the like edition series zero. You spent like $15,000 in a watch like three and a half years ago. I have zero bad feelings for that person. That person deserves what that person got because it was obvious. It was we all knew what was going to happen.

There wasn't going to be way to upgrade it. There wasn't going to be a way to pull out the internals and replace it. Like, we all knew what was going to happen. And if you had $50,000 to spend, you should have known to. Yeah, I feel like those people don't. All right, we got to read another ad, then we've got to talk about Amazon. And then Paul, my man, you're going to do a thing. It's going to be great.

Always. This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Have you ever forgotten to lock your Bitcoin account with two-factor verification? Who among us? Am I right? That's not smart. But you know what is smart? Hiring a ZipRecruiter's powerful technology,

people with the right experience for your job and actively invites them to apply so you get qualified candidates fast. That's why Ziprecurter is rated number one by employers in the United States based on a trust pilot rating of hiring sites with over 1,000 reviews. Right now, Vergecast listeners can try it for free. It's ZipRecruiter.com slash Verge. That's ZipRecruiter. Smarterst way to hire. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else. Welcome to this week in Elon, I'm your host, Liz Lapado, deputy editor at The Verge. It's been a big week. Monday morning, I was on my way to Hawthorne, California, to attend a press conference at SpaceX.

When the news came out that Vernon Unsworth, the cave diver, you may remember him from the Thai caving expedition. He was instrumental in saving those kids. He also made fun of Elon Musk's submarine design, at which points Elon Musk called him a petto and then doubled down on it a couple times. Yeah, so he's filed his defamation. lawsuit in the U.S. Now, he's also suggested that he might be filing in the U.K. It's not totally clear which country has jurisdiction. The U.K. has much stricter libel laws. In the U.S., like, I think probably Elon Musk has a defensible case, right? Like, he's got insult, he's got hyperbole, he's got exaggeration. The only actual statements of fact come and then email to BuzzFeed.

So that's the U.S. case, in a nutshell. I don't know a thing in the world about the U.K. libel laws, except that for some reason, truth isn't a defense. against libel in the UK, congratulations to you guys. But I would stay tuned because depending on where that jurisdiction is, Elon Musk may be in more or less trouble. It's also possible he'll settle to make it go away. Like that's always a possibility. Anyway, that evening, I was at a SpaceX press event where Yusaku Maizawa, who is a, I guess how would I describe him? He's a billionaire Japanese clothes horse who's like obsessed with Basquiat. Anyway, he's going to be the first person that SpaceX is going to send around the moon, and he's going to bring a bunch of artists with him. His whole thing is called

hashtag Dear Moon, really. And, you know, that's a thing that they say that they're going to be doing in 2023. Okay. So here's the thing. I'm not going to go through the entire list of delays that SpaceX has experienced, and I'm not going to go through the entire list of delays that Tesla has experienced. Let me just say that I think 2023 is optimistic. The other thing that I found out at that press conference is that Musk says that he thinks the development of the BFR. The design has changed, by the way. Looks more like Tintin's rocket. Is going to cost about $5 billion.

He says $2 billion in the low end, $10 billion on the high end. Okay, well, the space launch system, which is NASA's similar rocket, has cost about $2 billion a year for the last, like, three years. And I know that SpaceX's whole thing is that it's cheaper and faster than NASA development, but all I'm saying is that $5 billion. also feels a little optimistic, particularly because SpaceX has a bunch of other projects. So, you know, like there's this satellite constellation they want to send up, and in order to maintain their license, they have to hit a bunch of deadlines.

And so that's clearly ahead of the BFR in terms of development, right? Because otherwise, like, you lose your license. That sucks. So, you know, it feels a little squishy. We'll see. One of the things that I found out at that press conference, though, is that Yusaku Maizawa was One of the original passengers who was announced to be writing on the moon trip that you may remember from the Falcon Heavy. There was going to be two people who were going to go around the moon. He was one of them. So, okay, he's moved to a different rocket.

He still wants to go around the moon. Great. That was Monday. On Tuesday, we found out, Bloomberg reported, that Tesla is being investigated by the Department of Justice about the Go-Private tweets. So we already knew he was under SEC. Tesla was under SEC investigation. But the DOJ stuff is new. And the difference between the two is that the SEC is civil and the DOJ is criminal.

So the penalties are different. The standard of evidence is different. There's just a lot that's different. Doesn't look good, though. It also turns out that the SEC has subpoenaed both Silver Lake and Goldman Sachs for materials on their Tesla encounter. Those two were advisors for the go-private bid. And Tesla says it's been giving information voluntarily to the DOJ. So that is like dot, dot, dot, dot, to be continued.

That's this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lepado, deputy editor at The Verge. This is also available in handy dandy newsletter form, and you can subscribe at theverge.com. All right, Paul, every week, man, blow us away with the segment that is exactly the same that is called. It's always called Spin to Win. And, yeah.

So I remember, once upon time, I was walking through Costco, and one of the sample sands was a Vitamix demo. And I was not aware up until this point that you could just spin things really fast to make them hot. So like, are you guys aware of this fact? You can make soup in a blender? I mean, I was aware of like the physics of friction, but I didn't realize it was like a method of cooking. Yeah, you make soup in your blender. But a Vitamix is like $3 million.

And now Instant Pot, a beloved brink. by millennials everywhere, apparently, is coming out with a $100 blender that can also make soup. Okay. I like it. Okay. Does it have a heating element? Because the Vitamix doesn't heat.

You have to, like, you pour, like, boiling peas into, I don't know how to make soup. And then... No, the Vitamix, you put cold stuff in it, and then you push one of the buttons and it makes it hot. I am almost 95% sure that that's how it works. I mean, I have a vitamin. and it's never spontaneously produced soup for me. Yeah, I don't know. I'm looking this wrong.

So maybe it's like a special combo, like a key commute. Yeah, the Instant Pot Ace 60 cooking blender. All right. $99. It's eight smart blending programs, a heating blender for soups, milk some more. So you can make your own like, I don't know, oat milk, nut milk. All right. Oh, yeah.

But also soups. and a blender. Does it have a smart connection to your smart home? No. No. Okay. Oh, well,

screw that. I would say that's a plus. No, I disagree. It's a plus. All right. I'm going to, I'm definitely getting this blender.

I'm like, Becky makes a lot of soup. It's like a weird thing. And I don't think, I consistently see her cook the things and then put them in the vitamin eggs. If you understand how physics work, here's your, here's your assignment for the week.

I want you to tweet at Paul the name of a car and then a graph of how friction works of how fast the vitaminics would have to go to cook vegetables A car that can go fast enough to make soup Paul last week we asked everyone to tweet the name of a car at you They did from what I can tell What was the most popular car?

I mean there's a lot of Tesla Model 3 but I feel like, come on, guys, that's pretty obvious. A lot of Mazda 3. Okay. Which, like, as far as, like, serious suggestions that actually seem like decent cars, that was pretty interesting. I used to own a Mazda 3 hatchback, and it was a stick shift, and I deeply, deeply loved it. And I don't know if the new ones are any good, but Moss is on this beat now where they're like,

we're not putting smart displays on our dashboards. They've got a couple now. We're like, nope, we're just, we're, our, our shit is analog now. And that might be interesting to you. You know, the thing about the Mazda 3 is it, you know, you're at like a party and you be like, yeah, I got to, I got to hop back in my 3 and leave. And everyone will think you have a Tesla Model 3. But you haven't actually lied.

I got one of those three calls. I don't know if people call them the 3. Be like, yeah, I got a, I got to jump in the 3 and jam out of here. And everyone would be like, oh, Tesla owner. But like, really, that's horrible. Some of these cars, I wasn't. Even are like is a Honda Jazz is that a real car? What?

Honda Jazz? That can't be a real. Yes. Sebring Vanguard City car. The Honda Jazz is a version of the Honda Fit. It's, uh, oh, in Australia. I got it. Okay.

All right. Well, Paul, I think you should buy an Australian Honda Fit called a Honda Jazz. I, absolutely. That's like deep from like the HTC playbook. of names. Like, they just picked another word. They're like, people like jazz, right? By 8.HC. Jazz. I have a much better assignment. I take back my friction assignment and I have a new assignment. Tweet at Future Paul the name of a car that is probably not real, but absolutely could be. Yeah. You mean just like last week. Perspective car names. Yeah. At Future Paul. Just let him know.

And when Paul finally buys a car, we'll let you know which one he makes. I, ideally in Australian Honda Jazz. All right, Deeter, you were at this Amazon event yesterday. It was nuts. Yes, yes. Try, do your best to recap it. So Amazon's VP of something, something, Echo products, Dave Limp, got on stage. He's like, we have 70 products to announce.

And we're like, okay, ha, ha, ha. And then they did. So, I mean, I've got like deep analysis here, some. But basically, Amazon has a, They're basically on a yearly cadence for their main echo products, right, for most of them. And so they had new echoes to announce. But the other thing that Amazon is doing is they are looking to do two things, extend their lead in the smart home and become the default, like ambient computer system, the default thing that all smart home devices talk to. in a way that's very, very interestingly,

like not that far from what Andy Rubin was trying to do with his essential home. But anyway, the other thing they're trying to do is make sure that Alexa is credible in spaces outside the home so that it doesn't, like, people don't just be like, well, I can't use it outside the house, so I'm just going to switch to Siri or Google Assistant or something, right? So they have those two goals. And the home one is the more important one. And so they announced a whole swath of stuff, a giant pile of, of stuff that makes it like more obvious that they are just killing it in terms of ecosystem.

And so that ranged from a bunch of home audio stuff so that they could be credible for home audio and become like everyone would buy into their room system. It meant that there was a clock. It meant there was a microwave that everybody wanted to talk about. And the microwave wasn't actually about being a microwave. It was about being like a reference design for this new module, this chip that they're selling, to make it easy to add Alexa to anything. Right.

And so they just, for an hour and a half, they just like went through. I don't even know what order was. New echo dot, new Echo Plus, new Echo Show, Echo Auto, Echo Sub, Echo Input, Echo Echo Sub. Echo, did I say that? The link, the link amp, the clock, the microwave. And then there's a bunch of like Alexa features. So stereo pairing, Alexa Guard, Alexa.

Alexa hunches, which are amazing and interesting and fascinating, and I can't wait to see what happens with them. And just like... What's an Alexa hunch? It just went on and on and on. So Alexa hunch is the new Alexa feature where if you say Alexa... Sorry. Alexa's talking to me. I'm sorry all Verge cast listeners.

Oh, my God. Sorry. I'm not sure about that. She's not sure about that. If you say Alexa, turn off the lights. and it's like, you know, 10 at night, it will turn off the lights, and then it'll be like, you know,

the last time Dieter turned off all the lights at like 10 o'clock, he also turned off the porch light, and he usually has the door locked. So instead of saying, done, or making the little done beep or saying, okay, I did that, Lexa will be like, okay,

by the way, your porch light is on and your front door is unlocked. Do you want me to handle that? And you're like, oh, yeah, do that. And it will do that. So the hunch thing is, it starts to look at a bunch of stuff that you do in your smart home at a given time or together or whatever. And then if you want it to, when you ask it to do a thing, it'll be like, oh, hey, by the way, this other thing is going on.

Do you want me to do something with that? Which is really interesting. So I don't know. What do you guys want to talk about? I have a potential framework for discussing this stuff, right? And I think the microwave is obviously just hilarious and very interesting, right? As far as I understand, it does not have a microphone, right? It's, it's, you talk to your echo device of whatever shape or form that is, and that tells the microwave what to do.

Yep. So I feel like there's this delineation between, like, there are echo devices, and I guess Amazon is probably going to hopefully use the echo name for things that can actually hear you. And then there's a lot of devices that are going to serve that echo, right? So it's not like exactly a hub and spoke, because you can have lots of different echoes. but there are the command devices and the doing devices, I guess. I hate to tell you this, Paul, but I asked Dave Limp specifically what makes an echo device and echo device, what gets to be an echo. And the answer is very unclear. I thought it was maybe a thing that has a speaker, but the Echo Tap isn't that, it didn't wasn't, or the Amazon Tap wasn't called an Echo device.

So maybe it's just things that have microphones that Amazon makes, but I don't think that's it either. his answer was basically like there's a family of echo devices that like we call echo and then there are companion devices that like do stuff with the echo devices and that's that's it and like the microwave is a companion device it's not a it's not it's an amazon basics microwave but i was like okay cool that's all fine but the wall clock i believe is an echo wall clock so it gets to be called echo. I think. Yeah, and the echo link and link amp do not, as far as I can tell, have microphones. Yep. In the specs sheet, it says voice control, music selection, and playback with your compatible echo device or the eluxe app. So there's an echo link that has no microphones.

It's just an output. So this is deeply confusing. Yeah. There's no way to know what, yeah. It's whatever, it's like, I think it's whatever gets made in a certain building, right? Because there's also ring and blink or whatever. I think. If it gets made in this one building, it gets to be called an echo. Otherwise, no. I don't understand what Amazon is doing with Ring and Blink. So if you don't know, Amazon bought Ring, the doorbell company that also makes, like, floodlights with cameras and whatever. And that's rather high end.

And then they bought Blink, which is another, like, connected smart home camera company. I actually have a bunch of blink cameras. They're great. They, like, last for two years and two AA batteries. So you can, like, put them wherever. They're whatever. But they're obviously the lower end. So at the event yesterday, they were like, we're announcing new ring products.

Like, ring is great, integrates everything. And they didn't mention blink at all. At all. And it's kind of like, and the two ecosystems are developing in parallel. So there's a ring doorbell, but now there's like blink, a whole blink security line that might include a doorbell. It's the most Amazon thing. Like, you know how Google is just organized? It's the most you buy a smart home gadget company and then don't know what to do with

thing because Nest had the same problem at Google. Yeah, but, you know, like, Google is disorganized in like a, like a charming way. They're like, oops, we made another messaging app. Like, oh, my God, how, we just did it again. Like, we, another group of unruly Google teens just made a messaging service. Like, this keeps that. Amazon is that but cutthroat, right? Like, they're like, you're a team and you're a team.

And everyone will go in the store and whoever wins will survive. Right. And like, I don't quite understand it because if they want, this dominance, they should just have one integrated thing. And they just don't seem to, they just haven't gotten there. You know what I mean? To me, this gets to like what is Amazon as a company and what are they good at, right? And Alexa sort of came out of nowhere, right?

It became popular kind of out of nowhere. I don't think Amazon was ready for it. And so they bought these companies. It's taking longer than we'd like for them to integrate it. That's fine. Maybe they'll go that direction. but man the Sonos speaker here I really should have put it on mute it's really trying hard to answer me every time I say Lexa but like one of the things they announce is they have a new RTOS they have a new real-time operating system that some of their stuff but not all of their stuff is running now and it's it's really clear that like Apple has everything runs iOS at Apple now right and like they're they make an operating system that is a core competency of that company right Google makes Google

stuff and like they have a core competency of like making operating systems and securing them. And Apple or sorry, Amazon has like had to build up a OS company, like an operating system company and like consumer software company. Like they had to do it like, oh my God, we got to do this right now. Like they had no other choice because Alexa became really, really popular. And so to me a lot of these like what are they doing? What's the plan here stuff? is they're just rushing to keep up with the demand

and the popularity of the stuff they've already made and they're trying to, like, as the plane is in the air, build the infrastructure of becoming a consumer software company. Their consumer software stuff before was like the fire phone and fire tablets. It was like, that's fine. That's great, guys. You know, they're getting there. Like, the new stuff on the Echo Show is pretty interesting.

And they've definitely, you know, I was really impressed with. with Google Smart Display and like the quality of the visual interactions. And as near as I can tell from my very short time with the Echo Show, Amazon has caught up and in some ways, like done a better job. Like their recipe system seems way smarter or at least like easier to use, right? Yeah. The most dystopian thing they announced was like you can buy food from Whole Foods.

And then your Amazon Smart Display will teach you how to like make a recipe with it. And then your Amazon microwave will cook it for you. And it's like, okay, that, that is, that's like a hell world. Like what, it sounds really nice, but that, that's literally the plot of almost every dystopian sci-fi book that has ever been written, which is that a corporation completely runs your life. Yep. And then you get in your car and talk to your Amazon Echo Auto or whatever.

Like, yeah. It's a little too much. Like, yeah. I, I want to peel it back one little bit. But it is a remarkable, like, vision of where it could go. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, the nice thing about a lot of these devices are still smart enough that they can be useful just sort of on your own.

It's not necessarily that you have to buy into this whole ecosystem. Obviously, the Alexa powered microwave doesn't make a lot of sense if you don't have an echo. But for a lot of this stuff, it can be kind of useful on its own. And in some of this, it seems like Amazon's just like making something for everybody in the sense, like I feel personally catered to, because they're making devices that don't have speakers that can power good speakers. And so I could use Echo and Alexa with just regular good sound. So, like, hey, they found me where I am, you know. So, like, but also I'm sure they do want to run my whole life.

Yeah. So the benefit of the doubt argument here is Amazon doesn't itself want to make every single product. They want to make sure that they own the ecosystem, the operating system for your own. your home, right? And so you could, if you wanted to, make the argument that the most important, most, like, revealing thing that they announced was the 2499 smart plug, which is a very hot take. Like, this is a very, very hot take, but let me, let me just, like, make this argument. It was the most important thing that they announced in terms of their ambition, because here's what it is. It's a smart plug, duh. But it runs their new real-time operating system that they

will maintain and they I asked what about security updates when are you going to stop? He's like I don't know we still issue security updates for the original Kindle we have no intention of stopping anything and someday we'll make that decision but we're not there yet. So it's a reference design because it's another example of like here's how to take our chip that will

like anybody use and like quickly make a smart home product and I think maybe most importantly it has this new I forget what it's called. They've got a bunch of weird code names but it has this new Wi-Fi Discovery System where you scan the QR code or you buy it direct from Amazon and so they know that it's yours.

And then as soon as it hooks into the Wi-Fi, it's like, hey, I'm here. I belong to Dieter. And then the Echo's like, yeah, you do. We're set up now. Here's the Wi-Fi password. Everything's cool now. And then the Echo says, hey, the smart plug's here. What do you want to call it?

What room is it in? And then you do it. And so the reason that you could make the case that smart plug is the most important thing is it's the thing that reveals their ambition to own the home ecosystem. It has a chip that anybody can put into anything. It talks to Amazon's like smart home stuff instead of like ZWave or ZigB or trying to figure it out or whatever. They solve like the communication hassle, the setup hassle. It's rock simple.

It's pretty cheap. And it makes like if you're trying to decide what how am I going to build my smart home ecosystem, what products I'm going to choose, what standard I'm going to choose. You just choose the stuff that works with Echo. And if you are trying to make one of those products, if you want to make a smart light bulb or you want to make a smart light bulb or you want to make a smart microwave or you want to make a smart whatever the hell you would be crazy not to work with echo right now and if you definitely have to work with echo why wouldn't you just buy the chip from amazon and make it it's a very very dominant move it's a very like almost monopolistic move it's like it consolidates power around their ecosystem in a really

surprising way not surprising but like forceful first i would like to be commend you for starting to say echo instead of Alexa. I know you did it on purpose to stop setting out of personas. That was it was a very subtle shift. Two, I think you're right, but I think they, the breadth of the things they announced to me, it's it's more to what Paul is saying, which is when you're in the store and you're buy a gift for somebody this holiday season, any single Amazon device that you buy pulls you into the ecosystem or now because there's so much other stuff further cements you in the ecosystem. Right?

So if you buy the Echo Auto and you put it in your car, you are way less likely to say, my next thing is going to be a Google display, right? You're going to say, well, I'm just going to buy another Amazon one. If you buy an Echo Link, which poor Sonos, right, like Sonos thought they were going to be this neutral party, Amazon is just there with a full audio system. Is it going to be as good? No. Who the hell knows?

Right? Like whatever. But like, here are the. these products where if you have a bunch of speakers pre-installed in your ceiling or outside or wherever, now you can just buy this box and all those speakers become part of your Alexa system in a way that was a little bit harder before. Yeah, and now it integrates with title, Nealai, so that's great. I got to say, the biggest Amazon Flex yesterday was announcing their new Alexa search features. I mean, like, coming at first to title. And it's like, if you announce a feature that you

literally know no one will use, but you're proud of it anyway. Like, you're just flag. You're like, no one can have this, but no one else is even close. So like, we're going to start with title. Like whatever. And I think that, I mean, I, you know, two weeks ago, we, we had Tim Wu on the on the interview episode to talk about monopolies and antitrust. Those network effects in these ecosystems are, I think we're only now, like, as consumers, as policymakers, as whoever, like, realizing how insanely powerful they are and how if you don't demand somehow, whether it's consumers in a market

saying these are our preferences or governments or I don't know, space aliens coming down and saying you must interoperate. Who knows that would work? But if you don't demand interoperability somewhere, the pull of let's use our network effects to become the dominant player and then the sort of logarithmic

curve of how much better you get how much faster versus your competition. Those things are super real. So Amazon now, so like the classic example is Google search, right? So Google capture the search market. They get more incoming search data. They get more data about what people click on when they actually search for things. Like what are the correct results? So the search engine gets better exponentially faster than a search engine with less volume. Right? Like that's the sort of the classic European Union going to regulate Google argument. Amazon actually being investigated for antitrust violations by the European Union this week for basically

the same argument. You have a store, you collect purchasing data from the store, then you make products to price out your vendors in the store. You do Amazon basics. That's unfair because no other store or retailer has access that data. Like these sort of like exponentially growing network effects or data effects, like create and preserve a monopoly. Can you apply that to the smart home right now? Absolutely not because it's still just a giant mess, right? Like, you cannot credibly say that like buying a whole bunch of stuff from one vendor gives you a radically better experience than not, right? Like, everything is still pretty messy. That's why I'm saying the smart plug is the most important product because they are solving that mess by, you can either just buy

our stuff if we offer it or if you make the stuff you should definitely make sure it works with our stuff and so they they're solving that problem with a huge flex of like work with amazon stuff and making it super easy to do for you know rando manufacturer 27 right or 20,000 actually like that's how many they've got so I'm just going to say some words and then I'm going to sit back and let nilai's head explode um mark witt went from sonos to Microsoft and is now running fire TV at Amazon created a thing called the Fire TV recast. Go. This thing is so silly. I get it. It's such a hack, and I love how much of a hack it is. So here's what this thing is. It is so silly. It is two, it is two over-the-air TV tuners in a box with a 500-gigabyte hard drive. It's a TiVo, right?

Like, that's fundamentally what it is. But without an interface. That you cannot plug into your TV. You cannot plug it into your TV. It's like a TiVo slingbox combination. So it has no interface on it. You can't plug it into a TV. It doesn't come with an antenna.

You have to buy your own HD antenna. Okay. So then you set it up wherever that antenna gets a good signal. And then you plug it in and then you like leave it. You like walk away from it. And then you go to your fire TV. Yes. Or your phone or your tablet.

Yeah. wherever great fire apps are served. Everyone loves those. And then you get a new tab that's like TV and DVR, right? Just DVR. It just says DVR. It doesn't say TV. So do you get live TV off of this thing?

Yes, under the DVR tab. That makes no sense at all. Okay, fine. That's fucking crazy. Literally no sense at all. And then you can watch whatever wonderful local channels are available in your area. Yes. I get, at my core, I understand this thing. If you live in a world of cord cutters, what don't you have? You don't have local news, which some people want. You don't have the broadcast networks and you don't have live sports on the broadcast networks. Those are the things you need. You need ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox. But those are hard to get as a cord cutter. So you can just put up an antenna and get them. Great. Problem solved. So now Amazon has an affordance to let you do that. I think what Amazon does not want to do is start like a skinny bundle of streaming services.

Why not? Like that's actually, that's the like YouTube made one. Sony made one. Sony's by the way, the Vue Skinny bundle integrates into this whole recast system, which is. This makes no fascinating. Also makes no sense. Right? Like we're assuming Apple's going to make one.

But Amazon chose rather than making a skinny bundle and selling it under Prime or like having it be an add-on to Prime or part of Prime. whatever, they chose to make a $230 box that you stick in your attic. It's very technically advanced. Like, it does Wi-Fi Direct. It figures out what you're streaming to. It's like, what's the fastest way I can stream 720P video to this thing? And if it's like an Amazon thing, they've updated all their Amazon things to support Wi-Fi direct.

So it doesn't like, it can do better than, you know, just like going through the rest of the crazy traffic on your Wi-Fi network. technically it's very advanced, but they thought it was a better idea to make this crazy sort of hard to understand $230 box that you stick in your attic than to make a skinny bundle. And you just said, of course they're doing that. But actually the question is, why don't they do the skinny bundle? Are they trying to avoid competition? Do they not think that they can make the deals? Like, what is it?

Where does Mark Whitten work at Amazon? He is currently VP and GM? at Amazon. He works like he runs fire TV. Okay, so he worked, well, hmm. So the way Amazon works is like, they're this famous line, disagree and commit, where if there's not consensus on a thing, Jeff Bezos is like, disagree and then everyone has to like admit that they disagree, but then commit to doing the thing. So basically no one can say no. So you can't prove that making a 500 gigabyte dual two nerd TVR is a bad idea. Right. You can't like sit there in the meeting and be like, no,

definitely, right? So Mark Whitten's like, disagree and commit. I don't work in the division that can go make the skinny bundle deal. I'm just going to make this DVR while you figure out how to get good margins from the TV networks. And I'll just get them for free because they broadcast. Like that I feel like that's the story of Amazon. Yeah. The benefits you get from this is like there's no subscription fee. But like, I don't know, like there are things that are just bonkers to me. Like you're Amazon. You run AWS and you didn't put the DVR in the cloud. Yeah, but I get it. I absolutely get it. Yeah. You're Amazon. You have, you have wrestled complete control of the smart home, like, universe. And you didn't think that you were up to the task of cable card. Right?

This thing doesn't work with cable. It's not a cable box. What was that company that got shut down that had antennas in a server center? Area. Yeah. Yeah. So this is just your own, your own. own area. But now there's more devices to consume that. No. It's it's totally your own personal area.

Yes, it is. You're just trolling me. This is horrible. No, it's absolutely not that. Why not? The way Aereo worked, and this was a guy named Chek Kenosha was the CEO of Ario. Now he's working on Starry, which is like another like Wi-Fi thing. But their idea was they had, I went to the warehouse in Brooklyn. They had a warehouse in Brooklyn that was full of TV antennas. and when you signed up for Aereo, they virtually assigned one of those antennas to you. Yeah. And then they captured everything and they would restream it to you, right? Right.

And they were going to have warehouses like around the country to get different, whatever. But they got in trouble because you didn't actually own the antenna and there were not, they could not prove that every customer had their own dedicated antenna. Right. Yeah. So they capture everything. And this thing doesn't capture everything. It only captures what you tell us.

And also, if you're a company like, if you're any rational company and everyone in the country wants to record American Idol and everyone you use, you don't want to make 50,000 copies of American Idol. You want to make one and stream that one 50,000 times. Right. So there was like a lot there. This device is like you have your own antenna, your own hard drive. If 50,000 people buy this thing, 50,000 copies of American Idol will be made. And that like fits you out of all the trouble. But from a user perspective, you get exactly what you got.

No, because area was like, it would give you kind of, from a user perspective, you have an antenna on your house and you get whatever your antenna on your house will pick up, right? You just get a DVR in the mix and it integrates through fire TV. Area was like an app. It held itself out as a full on streaming service. It promised high quality. It was like a whole thing. This is literally just an antenna on your house and a DVR.

Like, you can go buy a TiVo like today that will do. this thing and offer you substantially the same experience and even have all the apps, right? So like, it's a, I saw a lot of people talk about the area thing because I think area was really high profile and everyone has forgotten the TiVo exists, except for me, like I have one. But like, it's a, it's a TiVo. Like they just, they just, I don't, de aggregated a TiVo into its components. Do you know what I mean? Like the interface, the TiVo lives over here and the tuner lives over there.

Like the area part of it lives over here. That's what you're saying. I hate you, Paul. It's like, I love you, but I truly hate you. Honestly, the thing that makes me sad about this recast box is that doesn't involve any IR blasters. Yeah. I can't.

I can't survive today. Can I say Amazon, every one of their first generation products looks like trash. Yep. Like they, it looks like they were made in project boxes by engineering students. And then a year later, they're like, okay, you like it. we rafted in fabric and now it's nice. And like, yeah, that's what they did with the Echo. It's what they did with the Echo Plus.

It's what the Kindle. The first Kindle looked terrible. The first Kindle was like legitimately insane. Like it was so, it had that vacuum fluorescent display with the scroll bar. That's a scroll innovation. So bring it back all. That was the truest in insane scroll innovation was having a custom display with a scroll bar. The first Kendall belongs in the MoMA.

Do you disagree? I think it is in the. the MoMA. It must be. Anyway. We did a post a few weeks ago about how you can turn a Kindle into a clock. And I definitely fell down an eBay hole looking for a first-gen Kindle to turn into a clock.

And then I thought to myself, do I want this on my wall as a clock forever? And I did not buy one. The Echo Auto is, looks like your very first like 3D printing project. Like you're like, I've got a 3D printer. I'm going to learn how to use it. And that's the first thing you make. Yeah. And the link in the link amp literally.

look like project boxes with knobs in the front. So there's a part of me that's like, these are cool. I'm very interested to see what they do with the auto in general. Like there have been car Alexa products before and they just haven't very useful. Like can they make this thing useful? Do I want a permanently mounted, you know, mini USB connector in my life? Like, I do not. Would I rather have Google Maps on CarPlay, which exists now? Yeah. But is it going to sell well? Will they make it nice? We'll be integrated more cars. Like, I'm sort of just jet. This is like, how much that thing costs?

Like 100 bucks? I don't remember. So here's a thing. You just said you want Google Play Maps. So the Echo Auto is interesting because like they have to, they have to, they're competing with CarPlay and Android Auto fundamentally. And like, that's a losing proposition. No, Echo Auto is 25 bucks.

Right. It's a Bluetooth module with speak with microphones on it. And maybe a tiny speaker. I don't remember. But if you don't have or the ability to get. car player, Android Auto. It's interesting. If you ask it for directions on your phone, the Echo app, the Alexa app will pop up, like, is this where you want to go? And then you can hit yes. And then it will deep link send the address to ways Apple Maps or Google Maps. So like the thing that works

with existing mapping applications by using deep links, which I love. That's wild. Open ecosystems. URLs. They remain the future. URLs. Google wants to change the URL, by the way. I'm just putting that out. You never know what's going on. Oh, boy. All right.

We got to wrap this up. Speaking of Google and URLs, by the way, interview episode of the Vergecast next Tuesday, this coming Tuesday, I guess, for the people in their cars right now listening, Malta Uble, who is Google's engineering lead for AMP, and we spent a lot of time talking about the future of the web. It was pretty good.

Nice. I can't make you hear that. Yeah. Do we miss anything? I don't think we missed it. I think we did it all. I think we did it all. I promise you you're going to be happy to your iPhone 10S if you pre-ordered.

Everyone read my camera criticism as me trashing the phone. It was just a little camera criticism. Do it get over it. You'll be happy. You'll talk to Siri. Maybe it'll do some stuff. By the way, Amazon 100% gendered Alexa. Dave Limp only referred to it as a she, which I think is both very interesting and somewhat troubling.

Yeah. That actually made a really good point that if you're going to start making kitchen gadgets, the fact that you chose to gender this thing is like, really not good. Like there were a bunch of super misogynistic stuff about the microwave and the female name there that was like really unfortunate. On a lighter note, Go ahead, Paul.

PlayStation Classic. PlayStation Classic. Do you feel like this is going to be as big as the Nintendo thing? Name 20, name V20, PlayStation 1 games that you're dying to play. Like, I feel like the, I feel like the SNES had like a better catalog for this sort of thing. If you're not, and also, SOTES does such a good job at allowing you to buy old games on its newer consoles. Yeah.

Also, it doesn't have the, it's not dual shock, right? So it doesn't have analog sticks. So it feels weird to me. I feel like it's missing some amount of magic that the S&ES Classic had. It's still fun. Yeah. Does the S&S Classic have NBA Jam? That's like really what I want.

I don't know, but now I really want to play NBA Jam. Right. Okay. Spacecraft. We haven't talked about it much on the show. Spacecraft season two is up and running. Lauren this week learned to grow plants in space. That's just a thing that she did. So go watch that. It's on the main verge YouTube channel. Democracy continues to have a troubling relationship with social networks. KC. Newton is writing about that literally every day in the interface on your newsletter. This week in Elon, you heard Liz do it. Now you can read that on the website as well. So read this week in Elon. Why did you push that button? Season 3 is being made right this second. So get ready for that by listening to seasons one and two on your favorite podcast app. And you can also follow The Virgin on Twitter and Instagram. You can rate us on Apple Podcasts. There's a new show with Carrey Swisher from Recode coming this fall,

which is basically now. And you can listen to Recode Decode with her and Recode Media with Peter Koffko. They're both all excellent shows. And we will see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Promocode.

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The full first season is done. It's awesome. It is such a good show. I love it. Every episode is like 15 and 20 minutes on one thing. The one I want to point out to Vergecast listeners, in particular is the music episode, which explores questions like,

how does sound become more than, like, just sounds? There's actually a really great sequence where they have people listen to, like, raindrops, and over time, they start ranking the raindrops as just random sounds into music. It's wild. And then it also explores things like famous producers who lost their ability to hear

after having brain surgery and then regained it, and it's narrated, I swear to God, by Carly Ray Jepson. So go on Netflix, check out, explained by Vox, You can also just go to Netflix.com Explain and check it out. It's an awesome show. It's been so much fun to watch it get made around us in our office in New York and to see how something becomes a TV show. I love it.

Go check it out. Netflix.com Explained.