The Vergecast - It's gadget season again

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler discuss all the gadgets announced at IFA 2023, the next flagship phone events from Apple and Google, and a whole lot more. Also: Nilay Patel breaks news about the 5G banana surgery. Further reading: No, they did not do surgery on a banana over 5G Apple’s September iPhone event: how to watch and what to expect  Google leaked Google’s flagship Pixel 8 Pro, again Google sets its Pixel 8 launch event for October 4th Google kills Pixel Pass without ever upgrading subscriber’s phones Taylor Swift Eras Tour is coming to theaters this October Starfield review: a stellar sci-fi refresh of the Bethesda RPG formula  Sony is raising PlayStation Plus prices up to $40 per year  Dolby might have found a way to make built-in TV speakers sound much better Instagram may be making Reels longer to compete with TikTok Google’s Duet AI now available in Docs, Gmail, and other Workspace apps  IFA 2023: the biggest announcements from Europe’s big tech show Alexa and Google Assistant play together nicely, but not perfectly, on JBL’s new speakers Anker's new MagGo wireless chargers might charge iPhones just as fast as MagSafe  Philips Hue has three new smart security cameras Jlab’s $39.99 Jbuds Mini are the smallest yet.  How Google made the world go viral We sent the top ANC headphones to a lab to test their noise-canceling abilities This USB button helps Jeopardy! contestants get their buzz on The future of Tesla is in China Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Nelai, you made us promises about bananas. Are you here to deliver? I made significant promises about bananas and my fellow Americans.

I'm here to say that my administration has delivered. This is your white whale. This is the only story I've ever wanted to do. And after we're done on talking about it, I'm going to leave. I'm done. I'm going to start a cafe, which has always been a lifelong dream. No, a couple weeks ago, I asked Vergecast listeners on this show that if they had actually experienced the real world benefits of 5G to send us a note,

because the carriers themselves have not experienced the real world money that they thought they would make from 5G. Tons of people sent me a video of a banana in a Da Vinci robot, which is a robot surgery tool, and the banana is getting a raisin pulled out of it, and then the banana is getting stitch back up. This video was, like, very popular. I think I sent it to you. Like, it's just around. It's just a me.

It's been floating around for like a couple years, apparently, with this text on it that says the surgeon was in London and the banana was in California. And this proves 5G. Well, there's like no provenance for the video. Or at least like the version I saw. It was just like, here's a banana. It's 5G. And I was like, who are you random TikTok, man? Where did this video come from?

Well, and just to be the one who says this out loud. Who cares? It's, I think one really good reason to not check on this is that is, Who cares? But this is why the Verge exists, because we did. Well, unfortunately, this is my calling. It's this and a cafe. So there are versions of this video on X that have like 15 million views. And once that happens, people just were posting it and posting and posting it. So I promised Vergecast listeners that I would blow this story open.

And I'm here to tell you that I did. And if you are on the Pulitzer Committee, I'm available in person. I will come to you. but I talked to the surgeon who operated on the banana. His name is Dr. Kais Rona. He's located in Southern California. Let's listen to Kais. I did surgery on this banana, but it wasn't over 5G.

There it is. Done and done. Do you need any more? How did you find this person? So people are lazy. The whole story of this is media and the internet is super lazy and in search of views. So if you just start clicking and looking at variations of the video, they all have like fake credit. And so I just started chasing all the credits.

And one of them was Dr. Rona's Instagram handle, but it wasn't linked. It was on Twitter as just plain text, which is an incredible piece of evidence, right? It's like this thing has been booted and pirated and copied so many times that the credit has been survived, but it actually hasn't translated between platforms. It jumped platforms. So I had to take the credit from X and then go search all the other platforms. And you find Dr. Kais Rona. and on his Instagram page, there's this video, and he's in the comments of the video,

replying to people who are like, what an amazing demonstration of 5G technology. And he's like, this wasn't, I don't know where this came from. I don't know where this idea came from. So I sent him a message on Instagram. I wrote him an email. I called his office, like very politely,

like over several times in the course for a few days. It got to the point where the woman who answered the phone, I was like, hey, it's Neil I Patel. And she literally, I heard her, turned to the person next door and say, It's about the banana video again. So is this because lots of people call about the banana video or because you had become so relentless about the banana video? Good reporting is about persistence.

It is because I had called them so many times about the banana video. Is Dr. Rona like a well-known fruit surgeon? Like what? No, so I finally, he called me. He was, I believe, at the airport. He was on his way to Italy on vacation. Fruit surgery pays well from what I hear. It's lucrative.

But he called me. He had some time. And he was just crack. When I first saw that, I saw someone post my video and say, some surgeon in New York performing an operation on someone in London. And I was like, wait, what is this? So I commented. I was like, this is not true.

You know, this is my video. So, yeah, it's false. It was done in Los Angeles. I mean, the procedure was done in Los Angeles. The banana was in Los Angeles. The banana was in Los Angeles. I'm just telling you right now. I blew this story wide open.

Call Dr. Pulitzer right now. Get him on the phone. The banana was in Los Angeles, sir. So this just keeps happening to him. So we post the story. The story, you know, itself has now has a life of its own. A lot of people in our comments are like, I can't believe they did surgery and a banana over 5G, just to troll me, which is great. The point that I'm trying to make with this is, one, we were primed to believe lies about 5G by the 5G hype industrial complex, right?

All of the carriers around the world insisted that 5G was a race. really all that we've gotten out of it is higher network capacity in crowded areas. Like that is more or less the shape of the 5G experience for most people. We got one more thing. We got misinformation about fruit surgery. Well, so that because of all these promises, someone who knows who was able to take this pretty familiar video of a Dimitriot doing its thing. Another video of the robot doing surgery on a grape went viral all by itself with no 5G claims. No 5G.

Right. So they just took a bit of a bit of. banana video, they changed it a little bit to make it different than the grape, and then that went viral on its own. And I'm telling you, that's because we were primed to believe these lies about 5G. The second piece is that no one asked, even the video that I found that had the credit on it. Like, all you had to do is chase that credit from X to Instagram and find the surgeon saying, no, this wasn't over 5G. No one did that work. We haven't fixed that problem at all. And this is nothing. The stakes of the banana

getting the surgery over 5G are zero. But just think about how much other information like this that we are constantly exposed to that no one is checking. And next time, just ask yourself, anytime you encounter something on the internet, just ask, is the banana in Los Angeles? Yeah. The banana is usually in Los Angeles. The banana

is usually in Los Angeles. I'm like turning into like a banana specialist, you know, it's like, let's make fun to me because I'm like, oh, you just operate on the fruit all day. That's all you do. I'm like, oh, man, that was just starting COVID. Dr. Rona was great. He was a great sport about it. So thank you to Dr. Kais Rona for engaging in this silly story about the banana, especially for calling me on vacation. That was very nice of him. He said smart dimensions, weight loss in Southern California. If you're in the market for robot surgery, you know, the banana survived. This is my contribution to the Vergecast this week. I'm out of here. David, take it away. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of TechTember and TechTober and TechTember and

all of the other months to come. It's about to get wild in the tech world, y'all, and we're going to be here for all of it. Alex Kranz is still here. Hi, Alex. Hi. What about to lie? To lie. No, if we have to lie, we're never going to make it to TechTember.

Don't do this to me. Richard Lawler's here. Hi, Richard. Hello. I just want you to know that both I and everyone who listens to the Vergecast prefers you to Neli. So I would just say this is an enormous upgrade over what we had just before the break. I get that a lot. What's your take on bananas?

How many times have you done surgery on a banana? I guarantee no bananas takes. You don't have any takes on bananas. Now I feel obligated to press on this theory. You don't have any takes on bananas? Rowley's banana shakes? Yes. Bananas no. That's good. Fair enough. So we have a lot to cover. This is like the last week of summer. It's about to truly get bonkers in the tech world. Like we have this big. run of events about to happen. So this was kind of a mix of leaks and information about what's

coming this fall, plus the last of this like grab bag of news we've been talking about all summer, like get all your stuff out before Apple announces the iPhone event because basically as soon as that happens, like it is the fall and chaos rains forever. But the first thing I want to do is talk about some of the stuff that's coming this fall. And before we were coming into this, I made a list of all of the events of like the next six weeks. And I can I just read them to you and I need you all to feel the feelings that it made me feel to write this list down. Are you guys ready? Do I need like a drink first?

You're going to need several drinks during and after. Take a shot for every time you're going to have to work too much in the next six weeks. Don't. You'll die. Okay. Here's what we have. Ifa is happening right now. The Toronto International Film Festival, which is a surprisingly cool source of movies,

especially like smaller stuff you might not have heard of, starts September 7th. The Apple event where we're going to see the iPhone 15 is on September 12th. The Detroit Auto Show is on September 7th. 13th. Amazon is having an event, presumably one of those where they just launched 200 things that run Alexa on September 20th. The next day on the 21st, Microsoft is having an event, probably some surfaces. The Code Conference, which we're obviously a huge part of, starts on September 26th. Meta Connect is on September 27th. We're going to see the Quest 3. There's a Google event. We're probably going to see the Pixel 8 on October 4th. And then the next day on October 5th is Samsung's

developer conference where I assume they'll just like talk about Bixby a bunch. And that's, that's just between now and the first week of October. So like for all the people who write to the Vergecast email and are like, hey, can you talk more about gadgets? Like, oh boy, it's coming. It's coming. We miss the gadgets too. And they're about to come back with a true vengeance. Are we like, is this good? Are we excited about this? I'm always excited about this time of year. because I like all the travel. I like the hustle and bustle. I like how you're just moving.

And then like Thanksgiving comes and you're like, there's just an off switch. And you just stop functioning for a week ideally. And that's really, really nice. And you just get all these cool things to play with for a month and a half. And that's fun. I like that.

I like playing with all the stuff. I wish there were more like things that I really enjoy, like not phones, but I'm still excited. Like I want e-readers and weird tablets. Yeah, A real lack of cobo events this fall for Kranz. Yes.

Where are the cobo events? Okay. Where's the Nook event? Like, I want a Samsung event, but I just want it to be TVs and speakers. That's it. I'm imagining a Nook launch is just like one person at a Barnes & Noble who like spots the new nook on her shelf. And it's like, oh, look, a new nook. And then the CEO just bursts out from a display of books.

And it's like, we made it for you. With like some music playing, like, the lights start changing. Exactly. But I like, if you want to get to some snacks, they're right in the back. At the knockoff Starbucks that we put back there in every one of our stores. I don't know. Richard, how do you feel about this? Well, and I love that.

And I love the events, the pace of it, not so much to travel, covering them from at home, much better. But also, it's the time when all of that stuff that came out at CES and that was announced really early in the year, then you never heard about it again. And companies acted like, they never announced it at all when you ask them, like, what's that? I don't, I would remember if you, if we had said that. but I don't. Now it's coming up. Like Samsung's like, oh, yeah, remember we launched 200 gaming monitors and we said they were going to be released. Now you can actually buy them maybe. They might be at your local Best Buy.

So there's kind of both parts. You have these announcements of products that are about to come out and will be out very soon. And you also have these things that you've been waiting for so long that you probably forgot about them. But here they are. And they're all monitors from Samsung. That's true. The thing that precedes all of this actually is like back to school season, which we've been in the throes of for like three weeks now. And that's when everybody who's like selling large TVs and large computer monitors and like wants to sell you a thing with gaming lights on it, like back to school season is their sweet spot.

So we've we've been in this like remember that thing you heard about at CES space for the last few weeks. And I agree, it's been delightful. Samsung being like, remember that big screen we told you about? Look at it. Here it is. I love it. I'm in on that. You put it outside.

It's great. It's bright. Exactly. Okay. So we're going to have plenty of time over the next six weeks to cover all of this stuff. So we're just going to like lightning round it for now. We pulled out a bunch of stuff that's happening this fall. We each picked one, and we're just going to talk about it for a little bit here now.

Just kind of what's on our mind as a little preview as we go into the fall. Richard, would you pick? The Pixel 8, first of all, Google just can't stop leaking its own phones. The Pixel 8 Pro showed up on Google's store website a little bit early. Fortunately, we didn't have to wonder whether or not it was the Pixel 8 Pro or not because it had some alt text that very clear. described it as the pixel 8 pro. This is definitely deliberate, right?

And the guy in the picture is also probably wearing a new pixel watch if you take a look closely. It has to be deliberate. They did the alt text. Like, you don't mess that up. It might be, but they also have a track record of doing this that's so long that they might just be that incompetent. It's the perfect crime.

What if that's actually not incompetence? What if that's the plan? Like, it's always been the plan. So everybody's like, oh, man, they're always leek. What's it going to be this time? I'll get excited this time. I don't think it's a good plan. But, like, I think it could be the plan.

Was it last year with the Pixel 7 that Google ended up just tweeting out, like, yeah, here it is. Like weeks ahead of the launch. They were just like, yeah, you've seen it enough times. Here it is, enjoy. I think that was last year. I can't remember if that was the 7 or the 7 8. But I think you're right. That was the 7.

They were just like, yeah, look, you know what it is. Like, it looks like the last one. Whatever. The bad news, unfortunately, this week about the pixel is, you know, if you bought a pixel 6 and you subscribe to Pixel Pass, like I did, thinking that you'd be able to easily upgrade because Google said you would be able to. They said you would. You won't.

You couldn't upgrade for two years. It was locked. You would have to wait two years to upgrade to a new device. It is now one year in about 10 and a half months, and Google says, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. The Pixel Pass is over. Do you feel bait and switched? I feel baiting to something.

I don't know switched, exactly. Yeah, because before this, like, before we started recording, you were like, I'm not that upset about it. But you're like, walk me through that. Why aren't you that upset about it? Well, there's kind of two parts to it. What people paid for, what I paid for, I got. I bought a phone that I paid for over the course of several months.

Also paid a kind of bundle discounted price for a bunch of services like cloud storage that I don't really use. YouTube music that I do use, YouTube premium. It's pretty nice to forget that YouTube has ads. Got all that. And even after the Pixel Pass goes away, they'll still have a discounted rate for those services. And also insurance for the phone and stuff like that. Like, it was all in one thing. Sweet.

But when they announced it, they said that it was going to give you easy device upgrades, and you could do it after two years. And now no one will get that. Like, it's not even like they're cutting it off and some people who took advantage, some people didn't. Zero. There is zero of that, which you can still get like a zero percent APR phone if you want to get it like and pay over the course of months or something,

but you just can't do this package again. I think you're way underselling this. I think this is outrageous. Like, I honestly believe this is one of the, like, crueler and more cynical things Google has done in a series of cruel and cynical things to people who bought its products and cared about them. And they framed this in the course of building up the pixel over the years as, like, another way to believe that Google is going to continue to care about its hardware, right? Like, it has said over and over for years now, like, we are in this for real. We're going to take care of customers. We're going to keep giving you reasons to be part of this.

We're going to keep making the deals better on and on and on. And this is like the most deliberate, shitty rug pull of a move, I can imagine, even if everyone more or less, like you're saying, comes out of it whole, which I actually don't really think is true because I think there are a lot of people who are now going to go through much more messy and complicated upgrade programs than it would have been if I could have just clicked a button and shipped my thing to Google and gotten a new phone. Like, that's a win in a way that like even if I have to go to my carrier store and do a trade in is more complicated. So even just making it harder is a loss. But I just think, like, from a pure, like, showing people you don't care about them move, this is such a crappy thing for Google to do. And the people who are the most dedicated to the brand, like, probably the biggest pixel fans who were like, okay, yeah, I'll get one. And then two years from now, I'll get another one. I'm willing to sign up.

Let me do it. I think it's a mischaracterization to call you guys the biggest pixel fans. I think just pixel fans, right? Who's a bigger pixel fan? No, but like, I'll fight them. Are there people that, is there anything above a pixel fan? I think like being a pixel fan in itself makes you a big pixel fan. So you're saying like there is no such thing as a small pixel fan.

There's not like a Zoom tattoo guy of the pixel community. Yeah, there's no such thing as a small pixel fan. Like you have to have passion. There are no small pixel fans, only small people. Like there's like e-ink. There's no such thing as a small e-ink fan. Like you can be like, oh, that's a, like, I'm not a big E-I-I-ing fan. I'm an E-ink fan because there's not a lot of us.

There's not enough of us for there to be like big ones and little ones. No, you know what? I think there are kind of a pixel casuals. Okay. As it were. And many of them may have picked up the pixel pass because, again, it was a pretty good deal. And a decent way to buy a phone. It was like, oh, you know, you can click a button and you can get all the things in one thing.

Not your carrier. You can go bring that how you want. Or you could get Google Fi and get another $5 off. But now those people are just, oh, not happening. I think it's just like, was just super, I don't know. I know you're processing it. And I know you're in a place where you're like, it's fine, it's chill. But I really hope like next week we come back and we're like, Richard, how are you feeling about it?

I hope you're like mad because I'm so mad on your behalf. I'm just like, I'm with David. I'm like, they bait and switch y'all. They were like, hey, come and do this. Nah, psych, we don't give a crap about you guys. We're not even going to last two years. Like, it feels like disingenuous marketing. It just feels gross.

And I'm sad for you. Yeah, but believing that Google would actually come through on something that they promised is basically doing it to yourself. Like, I've got to take the hell on that one. I just should have seen that coming. That was not a 5,000 IQ play. It really, it really is like terrifying how true that. It's like I wrote a thing, I think it was last week, about Google Keep their note-taking app,

which has gotten a couple of like really nice upgrades. It's a good app. It's kind of a thing people don't like know or use, but the people who do really love it because it's a really good, simple note-taking app. And, like, overwhelmingly, the comments on the story were, like, don't talk about Keep. Google will remember it exists and kill it. Like, if a Google executive reads this, the one engineer who is still building features will get fired, and they'll kill this app.

And it's like, that's how people think about this stuff. Like, we literally cannot have nice things from Google anymore because it just ruthlessly kills all of them. And I think if I'm the hardware team, they're still in this position of people don't believe them that they're serious. and with good reason and lots of evidence. And so, like, if I was Google, I would have gone way out of my way to say this thing is going to continue to exist. Even if we can't think of a way to make it worthwhile for the people who already got it, even if they've already been made whole, we're going to come up with something new. Because what we need you to do is be loyal to us and trust that we're going to be loyal to you. And instead, they're just like, never mind.

You get YouTube. How do they, how can, like, I feel like I had this exact conversation two years ago with Dieter on the Verge cast about like, when that pixel six came out, because that was the big moment where that was what the fourth iteration of, no, we really care about hardware now, this is the moment. And we're like, okay. And they did the pixel pass. It was like, okay, they feel like they, and then they pulled the rug again. So it's like, how do you build that trust? You keep like destroying that trust. Every time you get a little bit of it, you go and you like poop on it and say, oh, pixel fans, the 12 of you that exist, including Richard, get out of here. We don't like. I just don't see how they can, they come back from this. I think the writing really was on the wall because when you look at like when the pixel fold came out and people asked about the pixel past, they were told basically the same language that they announced this week that, yeah, no, not so much happening. And I think that's part of what makes it worse is that they could have announced this six months ago. Yeah. But people were like, oh, people were sitting back.

They saw the rumors. They were like, oh, pixel age is coming out. I'll just be able to get that. Check. No. No, you will not. You have felt better if they'd done it six months ago, if they just like, so you could have, like, prepared emotionally? Yes. Emotionally, yes.

All right. Let's move on. We're going to have a lot of time to yell at Google between now and October. Do we know anything about the 8-Pro yet, by the way, Richard? Is there any, we saw the one picture in the ad. Are there, like, reputable rumors? Yes. We've seen lots of pictures. We've seen renders. We've seen specs. There's rumors that it'll have Wi-Fi 7. It'll probably still have the same. The FCC filings came out this week also. So we know that it's basically like the previous ones where like the pro has ultra wideband, but the regular one does not. We've seen kind of hardware specs about the chips. It's a pixel. You know how these go.

The real question is like what are the software features going to be? And there's been leaks of something like video unblur. So just like photo unblur, but for videos. That's cool. I just want to say I was out sick for the last two days and somehow Wi-Fi 7 happened while I was gone for two days. So that's cool and fun. And I'll catch up on that over here. But I do think I'm actually more interested in the pixel than the iPhone this year because, like, Google has been saying this thing about, like, on-device AI for, you know, years now.

And this seems like one of the first years that if it wants to do some, like, really genuinely wild on-device AI stuff, it might actually be able to. So I think that's going to be very interesting. But again, we have lots of time to talk about that. I'm going to go next because I want to talk about Taylor Swift. And Kranz, you can go last. Okay. The true event of the fall, I think we can agree, is that Taylor Swift's era's tour. is coming to AMC theaters across the country in October.

As far as I know, at least from what I've seen so far, this is all kind of just happening. We don't know for how long. We just know that they're doing at least four showings a day at every theater and that AMC has upgraded its ticket capabilities for five times as much demand as it has had before because of all the Swifties who did or did not get tickets to the Ares Tour. I honestly believe this might be like the biggest movie of all time

if it was allowed to be. It's a like concert movie, right? It's not live streams. Yeah. So from just like the little tiny bits I've seen, you can see some snippets on like Taylor Swift's TikTok account was I think where I saw it. It looks basically like a super well-produced concert film. I love that. That sounds great.

It sounds amazing. And you get to see it in like a gigantic theater with, you know, cool surround sound. And it'll be a million swifties. Like they even said bring the friendship bracelets, dress in all the era's stuff. Like you better believe I will be there giving people. bracelets that say Verge Swifties, and we can all be Verge Swifties together. I won't be there, but I will support all of you. Are there Verge Swifties besides you and Neely? I think sneakily, like two-thirds of the Verge is Swifties. I know at least a couple of

people tried and failed multiple times to get ERA's tickets. Richard is being suspiciously quiet, which makes me think he's definitely a Swifty for sure. I was like, hmm, look at Richard's off looking in a corner, Richard? Yeah, I just don't know what's going on here. I'm very happy for you. The cultural event of the summer and fall and winter and the rest of our last. I'm sure. This movie might be in theaters for a decade, Richard. She fixed the economy. Like, they keep being like, oh, yeah, the Eros Tour increased spending.

Like, it fixed the economy. I don't think it fixed the economy, but it increased spending. What if she, like, lowers the rent? What if she, what if she, like, changes the world with this tour? I fully believe in her economic prowess. Oh, I agree. At some point, when the, when the, era's tour ends, we're going to find somebody fun to talk to about this, and we're going to go through

like the insane, like, stratospheric records that this tour has set, and nothing will ever top it ever again. And like the things she has, it's insane and wild. And I'm very excited about this movie. And that's all. Everybody, you probably can't get tickets if you're hearing this now. Well, it created congressional hearings about Ticketmaster. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah, she broke Ticketmaster. She's going to make AMC the most valuable company. the universe now. This is, she runs the economy. This is what it is. All right, Cranes, you're up. What do you got? Okay. iPhones coming two weeks. I'm really mad. I bought an iPhone 14 pro last year and I was really excited about it. And I was like, I'll be fine. I don't need the next one.

And now the next one sounds like it's almost definitely going to have USBC. And the FOMO is extreme for me at the moment. And like, I'm locked into this payment plan for another year. So it's not like, I'm not, I'm cheap. I'm not going to be going and buying it. But I'm going to be regretting my life. choices a lot, like come two weeks from now. You didn't get the iPhone upgrade plan? No. I want to pay in cash because it didn't work with my Apple pay card, I think. And I want my 3%. I like imagining that you just walk in with a bag of nickels and just like throw it on the desk in the Apple store and you're like, give me an iPhone. I just whip it across the genius

bar at him. Yeah. But it seems exciting. I don't know. iPhones are kind of weird in a weird place, right? Like, yeah, they're in a weird place. Last year, the exciting thing was the dynamic island. And we enjoyed the island, but try explaining to anyone who doesn't listen to the Vergecast what the dynamic island is. And that's a less fun conversation. Yeah, they'll just say it's that thing at the top of the screen that screws up all the apps sometimes. Yeah, they're just kind of annoyed with you. But like USBC, I'm super like beyond excited about USBC. I just got a new USBC charger from, from Anchor. And I'm so like it charges my phone or not my phone it charges like my my computer it charges my steam

deck it charges just everything I own that I can plug USBC into and it's wonderful and I'm like oh I want my phone to do that too that seems cool so USBC alone has has been pumped for it and we're going to USBC on the AirPod case I'm not going to buy it because again like if my phone doesn't do USBC I refuse to let my AirPods case do USBC. It has to wait in line, but this is like exciting. If you like USBC, it's going to be a big event. If you like anything else, it's going to be an iPhone event. Also, if you like wireless charging, I mean, we'll talk to John in a bit.

But the big news at EFA is these wireless chargers that are getting announced with the Che2 standard that the iPhone 15 may support. I guess we'll find out. And allow kind of non-Magsafe chargers to charge iPhones at the same rate as MagSafe. and also, you know, kind of other devices, other phones that support 15-watt wireless charging. So if you like wireless charging, this is your moment. Oh, I got a wireless charger, too. I spent like $150.

Or if you want to buy a new charging stand or something like that, yeah, don't for like the next couple of hours. Don't be me. I bought it last month. I do not read our website enough is what happened there. A lot of regret. I was talking to somebody at one of the charging companies the other day, and they were basically saying that the USBC thing is cool, but it's a mirage because wireless is the real thing. That it's like the actual arc that we're on is wireless charging taking over.

And it would have been great if USBC had been ready, you know, 12 years ago and we could have just gone straight to that. But we didn't and that's fine. But where we're actually headed, and I think where Apple has pretty clearly been wanting to head for a long time, is wireless charging. Wireless charging is mostly still very bad and not as good or fast as wired charging. So I think we still have a ways to go. But I agree. I think, especially some of the stuff we're seeing at EFA that we're going to talk about a little later is pretty exciting. Richard, do you care about this iPhone? Convince me to care about this iPhone. I had more things to convince you about the iPhone.

Oh, you're not done. Okay. You didn't talk about the action button yet. Hit me. Yeah, I was going to say, the action button. I think it's the stupidest thing in the world and I'm not excited about the action button. I would be excited about the action button if it didn't replace the mute button. And like, if I'm just going to have to program it to be the mute button, then it's not an action button. It's just a mute button that I had to like do an extra step to make a mute button. I won't both. I just straight up had to look at my phone to see if it still had a mute button.

That thing has been on mute since the minute I took it out of the package and I have not touched it since. Anyone who lets their phone ring loud is 75 years old. Blanket rule of the universe. If your phone rings, you are 100 years old. And don't you like being able to just go, oh, is it on mute? take a quick look or like reach into your pocket and go and kind of hit the little switch while you're walking down the street and be like, yeah, it's on mute. I just want that. I like that. I don't want to have to like pull my phone out, program the mute button and then hit mute.

You don't miss the art of ring of ringtones? They're trying to bring ringtones back by getting rid of the mute button. No, maybe it's the opposite. Maybe they're killing it forever. It's like your phone can no longer make noise when it rings would be like truly Apple's most innovative feature in years. They have to go to my mother's house and explain that to her. Like, I'm not doing it. I'm not letting anyone at the, like, Apple, it's, Tim Cook has to fly to my mother's house and explain to her why her phone doesn't ring anymore.

Does your mom have the ringtone that rings like an old-timey phone? My mother-in-law has that ringtone and it drives me nuts. Oh, yeah. She's got the ringtone and she's got it on her watch too, which she answers in the supermarket, I learned. So sorry to all the H-EB shoppers of Texas for having to live. listen to all of my conversations with my mom while she's picking up groceries. It's great. All right. Before we go to break, Alex, you wrote down one other one in the fall things coming up. You're excited about. Give us 30 seconds. Then we're going. Yes. Starfield. It's the new

Bethesda game. Like all other Bethesda games, I think it's going to be stupid. But then I'm reading all the reviews and now I really want to play it. But I also know like every other Bethesda game, I'm going to play it for 100, 200 hours, never finish it and tell everybody it sucks. I'm so excited. So stupid is not the word you're looking for here. It's going to be stupid. It's going to be like the characters look stupid. I feel stupid playing it because I'm like, oh, you can't look dumb. Like, Bethesda characters look dumb.

And that's a bummer. And so far, that seems to be the case for this game as well. But also, I want to travel around delivering coffee in space. That seems cool. I don't want to do that in real life, but I want to do that in space. Richard's just like, if it's not Overwatch, don't even talk to me. Yeah. I'm sorry.

I want another games as a service shooter. Just something I can play in 15-minute. You just want to play Redfall forever. If it weren't so terrible, if it were just any slight bit less terrible, I would be playing it right now. I like it. All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back,

and we're going to talk about all the other mishmash of nonsense happening in the tech world this week. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. it can be really scary too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought.

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moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. So lots of little news this week. There was some threads news. It seems like we're getting search.

Sony raised the prices on PlayStation. Plus, we've got some X doing sketchy stuff. I don't really want to talk about that anymore. or wireless carriers doing weird stuff again. Call of Duty using AI to moderate voice chats, which is just America's worst idea in years. Let's just blast through all this. We can't get to all of this.

So let's just lightning round this again. Kranz, you're still on the roll. You get to go first. I'm so excited. So Dolby just announced this thing. It's called Dolby Atmost Flex Connect. And the name is very stupid. That's okay.

Because what it could do could potentially be very, very cool, which is that it will automatically like just make your speakers, your wireless speakers, work with your TV, provided they both support Dolby Atmos Flex Connect, and only one of TV will support that in the next year that we know of, and it's from TCL. So it's not going to work with any of your current stuff. And it's probably not going to work with most of your stuff next year. But like five years from now, this is going to be sick as hell. And I'm actually excited about it because like Sonos has done a lot of this stuff in the past. They do the automatic calibration. and everything like that. But it's just Sonos, and you have to use Sonos speakers, and you're stuck in that. And this means, like, okay, I can go get any speaker, like any wireless speaker I want, and it's going to bounce, it's going to take,

and ping the audio from that speaker. The TV's got its own microphones built in. It's going to receive it, and it's going to go, oh, and fix it all. You don't have to worry about a stupid sound bar because sound bars are bad. I'm sorry, even though I own one. You don't have to worry about, like, messing with anything.

It should just all work. and for like the last, what, 20 years, TV audio has not just worked. So that feels appealing. Even though you're still like now going to have to buy additional speakers for your TV, at least it should make it a lot easier and more natural and hopefully cheaper than the Soto solution, which is why I'm not buying a new iPhone this year. So the idea seems to be, if I'm understanding this correctly, And I'm genuinely not sure that I am.

But if I'm understanding this correctly, it's that you don't have to buy like a full surround sound set. You don't have to buy that one gigantic box at Best Buy. You can you can sort of bring your own speakers. And essentially as long as they are like compatible with this one flex connect spec, Dolby will be able to stitch them all together. You'll be able to put them in a system and it'll work. Yeah. That's it.

Like theoretically, if Vizio supports this, you can go. get those super cheap but decent Vizio speakers, set it all up. And then instead of like getting all weird and finicky and trying to use the not very good super cheap Vizio technology to make the speakers sound good, just have Dolby do it and do it well. And it'll all sound well. So this seems great. This also seems like a thing that shouldn't be that hard to do and probably should have happened 15 years ago. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like Sonus does it now and Sonus is wildly expensive. The TV companies have not really cared about speaker. Like, they haven't cared about this.

They haven't needed to because they're like, okay, for them, there's three TV buyers, right? There's the people who spend all of their time in AV forum. It's like me and Eli. Like, we're over there. And we're going to go buy a bunch of stuff and we're going to spend 12 years working on our system and it's going to sound beautiful. And people will ask us how much we spent and we'll have to run from the room screaming and saying, you don't need to know that. That's us. Then there's like me a couple of years ago and a lot of people, probably most people listening to this, who are like, I want speakers that sound good. So you go

and you buy some speakers, there's Sonos or Vizio or whatever, and you plug them into your TV and it sounds reasonably good, probably not as good as any CRT TV you had 20 years ago, but decent. And then there's everybody else who doesn't listen to the Vergecast and doesn't know that all speakers and TV suck because speakers require space and TVs don't give them any. And so they go and they buy a TV and they're like, wow, the speakers stop. So they turn the volume way up,

they turn on the subtitles. And they're just like, why can't I hear anything anymore? And while part of that is definitely the fault of Hollywood, so much of it is the fault of bad TV bakers, not caring. And they're like, well, if you care that much,

go be one of those people who buys speakers from us inputs in the back. We don't care enough to like make it nice, but do it. There was this post I saw, I forget, which social platform it was on.

There's too many of them at this point. But there was somebody who was like, guys, you don't even know. The reason you think Netflix sounds so bad is because by default, its sound is turned to 5.1. And if you are using your built-in speakers, that means you're not getting the right ones. Just go and switch it to stereo and everything will be amazing. And this post went like hugely viral. And everybody was like, oh, my God, you've solved it.

And I was just like, my guy, like, this ain't it. You didn't do it. You just had a setting wrong on your Netflix. Like, I don't know what to tell you. that is not it. And also, you're going to put it on stereo and you're going to be like, oh, now it sounds bad in stereo. From two sides instead of five. I don't know.

Richard, you're a guy who lives in AFE forums and owns 30 or 40 televisions. Does this idea excite you? I think it sounds great from the idea that, okay, so you can just go get some speakers and press the button and it'll say, all right, I'll get the sound figured out. And that's kind of always been the promise of Atmos is that they've programmed in the sound, so it's, It doesn't need, like, okay, so how many channels do you have? Do you have two channels? Do you have 2.1? Do you have 5.1?

Do you have 7.1? Do you have 9.1? 8.2. No. I have some speakers. Do it for me. Yeah. And you'll do it.

Also, they have never gotten surround sound audio right, ever at any point. It has never been seamless. It has never worked the way that it should. So I don't know why we should expect that it will. I'm an optimist at heart, Richard. The thing is the technology exists. Like, this should be possible. This is the kind of thing that, like, with a microphone.

phone and the TV with speakers with the right technology. You could do it. I'm sure that it will make Dolby money as they get licensing fees from all the speakers that are now compatible. How long it'll be until I can use this in my own living room, I'm not so sure. Well, you know, if it sucks, which it very well could, but it's a good idea, somebody else could go, like, can be like, oh, like, physio could just go and do that. Well, it'll be DTS-Not Flex Connect. Yeah. DTS, flux connect. Yeah, I just, I always think about like the, so the, the ultimate ears boom series are like the best Bluetooth speakers on the planet. And one of the things that they've done really well is you can actually daisy chain a bunch of them together. And it's not terribly complicated. It just like

synchronizes the sound coming out of a bunch of speakers, right? So if you have a big house and you don't want to rig up a whole speaker system, you can just put four Bluetooth speakers around the house, sync them all together and it plays. And the fact that that alone is like an innovative feature in speakers is bananas. Like, you can do this with Bluetooth, you can do this with Wi-Fi. Like, this is not a complicated technological problem. We've done much harder things than make speakers play. And I think, like, to Richard's point about, you know, a million different kinds of

surround sound, none of them that have ever been done very well, I think just the fact that it's as difficult as it is to buy, like, two pretty good speakers, stick them on the either side of your television and have it work is nuts. Like, that's the reason I tell people to buy sound bars, because you don't have to program you know where it goes. Just don't worry about it. Even buying two speakers ends up being more work than it's worth for not that much better sound most of the time. So I think the idea that it's going to like perfectly correctly tune your room, I agree. I don't trust, but I really hope it works. Like I super, super, super hope it works because it would be awesome. Five years from now. It'll be, it'll be cheaper than Sonos and not as good, but better than nothing. I mean, I'll take it. Which is the entire story of a home theater audience. at this point.

As is Dolby almost got it right. That's like, that's Dolby's slogan. Like we all, we almost got it this time. No, we're not going to, we're going to, we're going to read for the last second. Screw it up. Sorry, guys. Yeah. Richard, what's your next one?

Yeah. You know, my thing is Google's Duet AI becoming available in docs and Gmail and other workspace apps. You know, you reported on this this week. I want to hear more from you about the people you talk to and all the things they said. But what strikes me is the price. We saw this with the Microsoft's. Being AI and then making it available in Microsoft 365, and it looks like Google's going about the same way.

They're charging, it looks like $30 per person per month. That's a lot of money. And as soon as I saw that with the Microsoft thing and now I see it with Google, I understand why they're pushing AI so hard because they're going to make a lot of money from it. The bad news is that the companies who buy it, they're probably going to want to save money somewhere else. Whether or not these AI tools actually work or make people more productive or do not, they're going to be spending a lot of money on them. So there's going to be cut somewhere else. And it just seems like that's a short. Is it $30 per month per head?

User. Like per account? Yes. Yep. No. Yeah. No. Hard pass.

That's a no for me. It would have to be magic. Yeah. Like, do you, can you just think for a second how good it would have to be to justify that price? It would have to be magic. There's like a, there's a set of people who will just get this because it's useful. And there's, There's a set of these things that I think are like time saving in a way that will actually be meaningful to people, right?

Like the idea that I can, I don't know, take a Google Doc and say, duet, turn this into a spreadsheet and it'll turn it into like a remedial but functional Google Slides deck in 45 seconds is like there are a lot of people to whom that is worth $30 a month easily. There are a lot of people who essentially do that one thing for a living. And I think the question of what happens to those people, to your point, is really interesting and really complicated and probably really messy and bad in the long run for those people. But I tend to agree that I think the number of people for whom there are $30 a month worth of good features in Google Duet is going to be smaller than Google thinks. And I think it's going to be the same with co-pilot that like if you just give it to people, they'll use it because having a thing that can, you know, clean up my email grammar or make a good. graph out of my spreadsheet data for me is useful. And I would use that if it was just there. But paying what amounts to like 3x the price of Google workspace for that is super, super, super steep. And I don't know that Google has made a particularly convincing case that this is going to like work. Like we've

all used Bard in the last six months. I don't really have any reason to believe this thing is going to be as good as they say it is. Is it going to work with like your calendar? What do you mean? The only thing I would pay $30 a month for is an AI that just understood and did all my calendar scheduling for me, including the polite DMs to people to be like, can I put some time on your calendar? Is this okay? I wanted to just do all of that. If it did all of that, I personally would pay $30. I don't know if I could get Vox Media to agree to pay $30.

But like, I'd be like, oh, I'll see you'll check. Let's do that on the side. There's an app called Motion. I think it's motion. I think that does exactly. that and I think it's like $15 a month. But is it trustworthy? I haven't used it in a while, but by all accounts, it's actually pretty good.

I hate those apps. Like, even as a person who is, like, obsessed with my calendar and spends way too much time, like, managing the blocks in my calendar. I can't trust them. No, because it's like, tell us about your flow state and we'll schedule it. And I'm like, I don't know. It, like, depends on what I ate for lunch that day. Like, leave me alone, calendar.

I was like, no, you should just know. Like, I basically want an assistant, but it's only $30 a month. I am the problem with the economy. I am why they're all so excited. You're literally the reason they built duet AI. Like, here's the best we can do. But I don't trust it. Like, a person, I would be like, hey, don't do that in the future.

And they'd be like, yeah, pay me more than $30 a month. That'll be, fair, fair. But like, I just can't imagine trusting it because when it would screw up, it would probably screw up in the worst way. It would probably, like, decline an interest. invite from an Apple event, which would be hysterical, and be like, no, you're not going to that. Decline it and be like, you've got to go do your performance review. And I'll be like, no, those are two different things.

And one matters more in this moment. Performance reviews always matter, but not on the same day as Apple events. I don't know. I just think, like, my initial read of duet is very much that, like, this is clear evidence that Google has not figured out what the killer app for AI is for. and it's the same with Microsoft where they've come up with a lot of relatively small, mostly useful sounding things that these tools can do without anything that you're immediately like, oh, I need that in my life.

I'm also cognizant of the fact that the three of us do not have real jobs and that most jobs involve email, spreadsheets, and slide decks. And most people and most companies would be willing to pay a lot of money to make any of those three things slightly more efficient. And like Google's bet is essentially like, okay, if we can make each one of those a little tiny bit better, we can help you write emails faster, we can help you like get more actual data out of your spreadsheet, we can help you make more beautiful decks on deadline. Like that might work. All they have to do is be like, we'll do the pivot tables and you'll never have to understand what a pivot table is. Like a lot of places would probably be like, yeah, $30 a month.

never have to learn about a pivot table. Yeah, and then every just out of business school employee on planet Earth just got fired. Like right as I was saying that sentence, they all lost their jobs. Yeah. Sorry, guys. Yeah. If you are a junior account executive at a marketing company, like, you're so screwed. I'm so sorry. Fortunately, the thing that we'll be replacing you, our boss asked Bard,

what's the coolest thing anyone could do and receive some answers? Can you just read the list? Some cool things people have done. include walking to a destination, even if it's 3,000 miles away. Playing World of Warcraft for 100 hours in a week. Yes, I'm cool. Being in a movie with Will Smith, pretty cool, pretty cool. Cool things in the world include chewing gum, skateboards, and co-oord outfits.

I don't know what those are. I guess I'm not cool enough. You're not cool enough. The bard knows. Don't feel bad. Who do we're also cool for like 1995 with a chewing gum in a skateboard? We were badasses. You know there's a marketing person at like a fashion agency right now who is furiously Googling what is the coolest thing anyone can do and just being like I would not pay $30 a month for this.

This is it? And I just, I very much enjoyed that Nelai's when he posted that, he was like, I can't believe it didn't say a backflip, which is objectively the coolest thing. It is. Yeah, it's very good. But I like all of this stuff to me just says none of this is finished. yet. And it's kind of wild to see who is willing to pay for this stuff, even though it's at the very, very, very, very beginning of whatever it's going to someday be. And who is going to say at the end of their free trial, this is neat, not worth $30 a month per person for my entire company.

And if I were a betting man, I would bet on that second thing being a lot more true than either Google or Microsoft think. How long is the trial? I don't know. Because if it's like a year-long trial, maybe they have a shot. They can take the year to figure out how to make it useful. If it's a one-month trial, like, yo, what are you doing? You gave Richard more time than you're given these people. Come on. I think it might be 30 days. I think that is, I think that might be how long it is. I think their bet is that the executive who makes the decision is the person who's going to find it really useful right away. And they'll just say, yeah, we'll sign off on it and we'll fire 100 other people. It doesn't matter how well it works or it does not work. And we just saw this week,

I think Walmart announced that they're going to roll out AI for basically all their office employees. And they didn't say which one they're using or how much they're paying or anything. But I wonder how much, how long they'll stick with it and how many people will continue to have access to it. It's going to be the Walmart AI. That's what it's going to be called. And they're not going to pay it very well. But it's going to do the job. And then the rest of us will subsidize it with our tax dollars.

And there will be one in your town before you know it. Yeah, there will be one in every town. It's going to be great. It's going to get rid of all the other little little. mom and pop AI stores in your town. I'm so sorry. The AI needs to unionize. Now that is going to be when this gets really interesting.

The AI labor movement. They're the AIs themselves. I don't need, yeah, we'll come back to that. My lightning round thing for this segment is, I feel obligated to be the one continuing to chronicle, the ever-consuming normalization of all of these video apps in which they just all slowly become the exact same thing. And the version of this this week is that Instagram appears to be working on a version of Instagram Reels that lets you upload videos up to 10 minutes long, which you can now do on

TikTok, which TikTok did in order to be more like YouTube, where people have always been able to watch, you know, longer videos. And people on YouTube, of course, have started making shorter videos for shorts, which was created to compute with TikTok. Reels is also created to, I could do this forever. The point is, all of these apps. are the goddamn same thing now. And it's driving me nuts.

And Alex, I want to get to why you're wrong very shortly here. But the last thing I want to say about this is I think 10 minute vertical videos are actually an extremely good idea. One weird thing that I have discovered is that I just really like watching vertical things. Like there's something to the sort of flow of like how you swipe and how you watch and all that stuff. But also like I think for a long time there was this idea that you can't do as much in a vertical frame. And in certain ways, that's true, but also, like, I don't mind. I've found myself sitting, watching longer things on vertical screens than I thought. And, like, I'm holding my phone

the way I normally hold my phone. And so the idea that, like, somebody is going to come out and make, like, a show out of one of these 10 minutes at a time, I actually think is not crazy. You mean, like, quibby? Dude, so I listened to a podcast this week. It's called the Big Flop or something like that. Oh, yeah, I saw about this. The first episode is about Quibi. And the single wildest take that I will say on this show to this week is that it convinced me that Quibi didn't actually miss by that much. I would agree, honestly. I remember seeing Quibi at the time and being like, this feels like it could be a really good idea if it's executed well. And that it was just executed terribly and also released at the worst possible moment, an app of that nature could

have ever been released in the history of the world. Okay, so that's reasons two and three. Reason one is it was called Quibi. Like, that's the, that's the first thing that ruined Quibi. Like, if Quibi had been called Max, it would have had a real chance, right? Like, if they hadn't spent a trillion dollars on content at the beginning. On, like, Flip My Murder House. Given some YouTubers, like, 50 bucks. The Rachel Brasjana hamster where she just the silver arm.

But this is what I'm saying. Bring Quibi's back as 10 minute reels and I'm into it. But yeah, no. Vertical video is, it's a little limiting, but it also is a little bit more focus. And I think people generally do it better.

It does work. It has a place. But I kind of lean David's way, Alex. They all just become TV shows eventually. Yeah. And I'm a person who's never watched 10 minute videos on YouTube,

so I'm not going to watch them on Instagram. I'm not going to watch them on TikTok. I just won't do it. Oh, I watch them on TikTok all. the time, but it's the same ones I watch on YouTube, only now they're vertical, and the dude doesn't, like, cut, like, trim it to make it vertical. So a lot of times it's just, like, blank space, and you can hear him doing things because he's not in the frame. And I'm like, yes. It's just like his left hand in the frame. And that's all you can see. You see, like,

just a left hand cutting something. And you're like, yeah, this is great. It's so soothing. Because I already watched it on YouTube. But I was going to say, like, there is one big differentiator between all of these. And that is YouTube still does horizontal video and the other ones don't. I mean, YouTube does. TikTok does do horizontal video. You can have videos that rotate. Yeah. I just, I guess I haven't been presented with them. Am I supposed to be watching this guy in horizontal all this time? If you upload a wide screen video on TikTok, I think it'll like give you the option. So like it depends on it how they uploaded and what they did. But yeah, it definitely can do it. I have watched so many videos on TikTok that are the little horizontal video in the middle because it's like it's like clip from a

YouTube video and then just gigantic letterboxes on top you're telling me I could have been doing it better this whole time I think there's times like tell you like hey turn your phone this is service journalism here at the verge this is also my favorite TikTok genre is people explaining little known features of TikTok like the thing where if you put your thumb on the left side of the screen it plays at 2x speed mind blowing yeah yeah learn how to use TikTok on TikTok. It's like the, it's like the YouTubers being mad at YouTube. Like, that's what they do on TikTok. It's great. Incredible.

Yeah. All right, we've got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to go through some of the biggest announcements coming out of EFA, the gigantic European gadget show that is happening as we speak. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts,

but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates. takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence

without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week.

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Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today. today at cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. That's clod.a.ai slash vergecast. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Clod.a.ai slash verge cast. All right, we're back. So none of us is it EFA this year. John Porter and Gen 2 were there. They did a lot of really great coverage for the site. There's a stream of all the stuff that they found. They went and just had adventures with vacuums and lights and head phones and speakers.

And now they're sleeping. And now they're sleeping. It really is how it goes. You basically, you go, you touch gadgets for three days with no sleep or food, and then you drink heavily and go to sleep. And that's pretty much the run of one of those shows. So they are hopefully at this moment in the sleep phase of that. Listen, it's a win.

Yeah, it's either way. But let's, there was a bunch of things going on, but we've kind of figured out how to divide it into three categories of interesting stuff. And Richard, you alluded to one of them earlier. So take us through the, like, charging world of EFA this year. Yeah, it's all kind of centered around the iPhone 15 launch because Apple is finally going to release a phone, we think, with a USBC port, first of all. So lightning and tons of docks, tons of charges, tons of stands that people have,

when they get a new phone starting this fall, those won't apply anymore. They're going to need new charges. They're going to need new things. They're going to need new cables. So, of course, all the companies that make those are just ready with new products. And beyond that, there's also this new standard Chi 2 to replace the wireless chi standard that assuming Apple supports it could allow outside Maker's Chargers to charge iPhones at up to 15 watts, you know, just by touching it.

Which would be like twice what it has been before, right? Yeah, it was 7.5. If you weren't a MagSafe charger, it was half the rate. And, you know, these things they throttle kind of as it. as it goes to the charging. So, like, it's not just going to be twice as fast, but it'll be faster, and you'll love it.

Anchor and Belkin are two of the companies that have announced Chee II products. One of the things that I noticed about these announcements is that everyone who's announcing Chee Too products does not have a date for when they'll be released. They don't have a price. They don't really have anything. It's coming later this year,

probably maybe early next year for some things, but eventually. And I think we'll probably get a lot more clarity once the iPhone 15 is actually announced. But we've got stuff like battery packs. Anchor, they've got it all branded under their Mago line. They've got new stands. They've got different charges, different kind of desktop charges, all kinds of things.

And the same thing for Belkin. And I think that this new Chitoo standard is going to be the kind of thing that you will actually replace several of the chargers that you have probably within your reach on your desk right now. I just realized, as you were talking, that this is kind of about to be the most exciting moment for phone accessories, like ever. That there has ever been. Yeah, for the first time, if I'm an accessory maker, I can make something that works with your phone, your laptop, your tablet, your other phone, your partner's phone. You can build something that is going to work for everything and is going to last because I think you can reliably assume we're going to be on USBC at least a few years from now.

And so I have a feeling we're about to see like a glut of stuff. And like, Lord knows Anchor alone is going to make 700 different USBC products between now. in like September 12th. Yeah. And of course, it's not all, and if it's USBC, you can work with whatever, but they have like a little thing

that kind of latches onto the bottom of your iPhone with USBC. They can't show it connecting to an iPhone yet, but you know what it is. And that's just kind of where we are with those products. So there's just, there's going to be even more

and even better, I think kind of charging stuff. So if you're the kind of person who, when it's one of those Amazon deal days or something, you're like, okay, yeah, I'm going to go get some chargers. It's time. It's going to be your time very soon.

Kranz, this must make you so happy. I'm not happy at all because I just bought so much wireless charging stuff like two months ago. I feel so dumb. I'm just like, it was like reading all of the news out of Eva being like, rookie move, Kranz. It's every time when the prices are really good and you're like, oh, okay, I'll get it. It's all on sale. I should, I should buy these. I got that wireless charger slash battery from Anchor.

That thing is great. The little cube? Yeah, that like, oh, it's beautiful. I love that thing. I love it. And now I'm like, well, damn it, there's another one, and I want that one more because it's got like a little screen on it. It has a screen on it now. Yeah, I'm like, so if anybody needs a Generation 1 charger, I'm in the market to sell it at cost.

I do wonder if there's going to be like a black market for old, old chargers and docks going forward. Like all the people who just desperately hold on to their iPhone eight minis. I'm re-gifting it all to family. Christmas is going to be really crummy for them and great for me. Before we're done with this, I want to make the case for slow wireless chargers. I have the older pixel stand near my bed. Now, see, if you're one of those people who you want to go to sleep and stop using your phone, one way to do that, put the wireless charger out of your reach. So if you have to decide, am I going to put the phone on the stand and let it charge overnight so that it's not empty, the battery isn't empty when I wake up? or am I going to use the phone and maybe fall asleep with it in my hand, wake up with a phone on zero, and I don't have a fast charger to charge it up. That's good.

That's stress. It will improve your life. That's smart. Get yourself a slow charger. No, disagree. I really, like, I think the single most, like, aspirational thing I have done over the years is try to be a person who charges my phone outside of my bedroom. So many times I have tried to be this person. I'm like, okay, I'm going to have a stack of, like, print books and magazines.

And that's what I'm going to read before bed. I'm not going to sit here and like scroll Reddit until I fall asleep. And after like three days, inevitably, I'm like, how did my charger get right back into my room and next to my bed? And I'm scrolling Reddit again. Like, I don't remember ever putting it back in here and yet it has arrived. And I swear I've tried this 25 times in my life. And I think it shows real personal growth that I have stopped trying. Like I think it says, it says a lot about me as a person.

Are you, I mean, you're not a very lazy person. So is just putting it on the other side of the, because putting it on the, the charge. on the other side of the room, that's enough for me. I'm that, like, once it's on there, I'm not getting out of bed again. For me, it's not getting, it's not even the laziness factor. It's like the actual feeling of getting out of bed is so awful. It's the, like, it's the taking off the covers. Like, even if my charger was right there, but I had to take off the covers to get it, I wouldn't do it.

Sometimes there's one time where I did that, but like, I, like, army crawled across the floor with, like, the cover still on a single foot, being like, I'm not technically out of bed. Yeah, it worked. It was fine. It's fine. It's very good. But yeah, I suspect it's about to be a very, very, very exciting, like six months in the accessory world. And the other thing I will say is this is just a PSA to everyone now. Don't buy any accessories. Don't buy any accessories the day Apple launches things.

Don't buy any accessories the day it ships because what's going to happen is between now and Christmas. There's going to be this unbelievable glut of cool new stuff that comes out. And it's going to happen really fast because all these companies are already making USBC stuff. So they're not going to have to get used to a completely new connector. Apple will have some weird tweak to it because it always does. But there's going to be just a run of new things that all these companies are ready for. And so whatever you buy today or tomorrow or on September 12th or September 20, whatever, when the iPhone ships, there will be something in November that is better.

And by Black Friday, it will cost $5. So Alex Cran, stop buying accessories. And like, you were talking. I was like, actually, maybe it was good that I just bought all of this stuff. Because we're not going to be buying. I'm like, I can't. I just bought to do dining room table and four like wireless chargers. I'm broke for the next year.

Like, it's great. There you go. There we go. All right. You go next, Krins. What did you look up for EFA? So there was a lot of smart home stuff, a ton of stuff. That's why my Jen was there.

And she was doing incredible work. A lot of stuff coming out from Phillips Hugh, who historically just does lights. And if you like me are tired of spending so much money on Hugh lights, there's a lot of competitors in the space now. There's a ton of other really good lights. I've got some like little candelabro lights. They're beautiful. They do like the pride flag. It doesn't actually look like the pride flag. But in July or in June, I was like, yeah, cool. Is Hugh still the best one though? I confess I'm slightly behind the times on my own personal smart home care, but my read was always, Hugh is the best. It's also twice the price of everything else. Yeah. Yeah. Like,

it's like the Apple deal for a long time where you're like, well, sure, I'm paying twice the price. but I can smugly say it works. Can you say that, Richard? Fair. In your Windows machine. But... That hurt. Can I say that about my Mac lately?

No. But yeah, so it typically just works, but it costs a ton more. But there's so much stuff now in the space that really does also just work. Like I was using, adding stuff both to Home Assistant and to HomeKit. zero issue, like totally flawless. Even the stuff that some people complain about like nano leaf can sometimes be a little buggy. Works. And so Hugh has a whole bunch of stuff. They've got track lighting now, which is big. That's exciting because oftentimes track lighting you can't replace. Like there's no little bulbs to go in there and replace that Hugh probably

would make if they could. So you have to get the whole thing. So that's cool. And they got into security cameras, which is a big deal for them. They've just been a company that does lights, and now they're doing security cameras, predictably expensive security cameras. Yeah. It's very telling to me that that's where they went, actually. Like, I think it's pretty obvious

that if you're a company that wants to do smart home stuff, lights is the place to start, right? It is kind of the, it's like the gateway drug to the smart home for basically everybody. And it's very interesting to me that after all this time, the Hugh team looked around and was like, okay, what's the next thing we want to do? and decided it was security cameras. Not like other sensors or weird things for your garage door or things for your car.

It's just, they're just like security cameras. Yeah. And these are very expensive. It's got end in decryption. It currently does not work out of the box or won't work out of the box with Alexa and Google assistance home security camera integrations. So you won't be able to just like play it on your little Google speaker anywhere. That kind of sucks.

It won't work with HomeKit until Matter start supporting video for security cameras because that's the only way it's going to work with HomeKit. It won't work with like HomeKit's secure video platform, which isn't actually very good to begin with. So that's not the worst one. Like that one, you're like, oh, that's kind of sucks, but also I'm fine with that. Or at least I am. But it will work with Matter. And the most exciting part of all the Phillips Hugh News is it finally is going to be

going to start supporting matter. It's pushing out an update next month. I am unreasonably excited. I've been spending this whole week being like, I cannot DM Jen, because she's very busy working. And all I want to do is be like, Jen, Jen, Jen, Jen, this is such a good moment. So I'm like being very patient and waiting until she comes back and gets over her hangover and is having a good time. And then I'm going to just assail her with it. But that's exciting. Like, it's been ages since they promised matter. And, The stuff I use that where Matter works is wonderful. I'm in the future.

I'm having the best day of my life. I've set up my entire system. Oh, it doesn't work with Matter? I hate everything and everyone. And I want it all to die, especially my robot vacuum cleaner. Which there were also a bunch of it, EFA. I just love that robot vacuums are becoming like an outrageously competitive space. There are so many good robot vacuums out there now.

I love it. This was the first one I'd ever. Like, I tried one 10 years ago, and it was garbage. And I was like, I'm okay. I can just walk around with a vacuum cleaner like a normal person. And back this summer, somebody was like, oh, go get a robot vacuum cleaner. They're really good now. And this was a person that I trust.

And so I was like, you generally aren't stupid. And I went and I got one on sale. And I was like, oh, it's really good now. Like, my house is just clean. And with a dog, that's not common. They're good now. And now there's a, the robot lawnmower industry is booming. I think Jen and John saw one of those.

It's starting to boom. Yeah, there was, she was, she saw a robot lawnmower. The problem with robot lawnmowers is they generally have really crappy range. And American lawns tend to be pretty big. Like, there's a lot of space. There's a lot of stuff going on in them. And these weren't doing it very well. They're really meant for those little tiny, like, postage stamp size lawns in Europe.

And so this can do like half an acre, which I would have loved at the age of 13 when I had to hop on the riding lawnmower and like mow the front in the backyard and in the garden. It was the worst time of my life. My family still talks about how much I complained about it. This would have been amazing. I would have like been campaigning for it immediately. So I'm so excited. All you kids out there listening, I know there's a lot of 13 year olds that listen to the Vergecast. And I know you're very excited about this.

Start campaigning now. This is a great Christmas gift for you. probably not. Your parents will not buy it because it's like $2,000. But aspirational, aspirational. Yeah, everybody talks about how like kids are not going to grow up and learn how to drive and they're going to miss like a key part of life. And I just feel like if your parents never force you to mow the lawn, like you've missed something. Yeah, you really have. It's like 111 degrees. It's called five. And you have a push mower that barely works. And they're like, shut up. We're going to pay you $1. Go mow for five hours, David.

And then rake all the leaves. It's fine. My shadow is fine. I hated the leaves. It's fine. It's the worst. Oh, the leaves. Spending 45 minutes trying to get that thing to start is character building.

That's exactly right. You feel like you're a mechanic afterwards. Like when somebody's car breaks down, you're like, hold up. I've jumped started a lawnmower. I think I can help. You can't. It doesn't work that way. Is there a thing I can pull on really hard and hope that starts it?

All right. The last thing for me, which I should just run through real fast, was there were a few headphone and speaker announcements, but a couple were actually very cool. So I just want to basically call out two. One is new Jabra headphones. They're called the Elite Tens and the Elite 8s. They're basically new wireless earbuds.

I think Jabra in general does not get the shine it deserves in the headphone space. Everybody talks about AirPods and pixel buds and galaxy buds and kind of all the stuff that's like bundled with devices. Jabra does a really good job of making just like very good headphones that work with everything. It supports all of the open standards. It can.

It has really good noise cancellation. The mics tend to be pretty good. The battery life is pretty good. The audio is good. Yeah. Like, they're very good headphones. But they're big. They sit, like, if you have tiny ear canals, that's why I don't use them.

My ear canals are too small. So that's actually one of the things that I think is exciting about these new ones. The Elite Tens, which are the higher-end one, I think they're 250 bucks. They have a, like, semi-open design, which, in theory, should help. with that feeling of being sort of smushed in your air. Personally, I end up using very few of those kind of closed ear headphones because I get the same thing. Like my ear canals start to hurt after a while if I listen to those. Like I got the Sony link buds and they like cause pain or they fall out.

I love that pain that like you're like, oh, it fits so good. Agony, agony, agony. But the Taylor sounds lovely. Oh, it sounds amazing. Yeah. But I like after 30 minutes, I'm like, oh, I'm going to lose both of my ears. Like this is cool. And they feel like they're bleeding.

Yeah, but so the elite tens seem cool, sound great. They have six mics, I think. The audio quality should be good. They're supposedly one of the best they've, that job has ever made. And then there's the elite eight, I think it's technically called the Elite Eight active, that are IP68 rated, which is like more or less everything you would need as a person. Yeah, you can get disgusting. Yeah, exactly. It's like you can throw it in the wash and they'll come out fine.

And they're just super, super rugged. And personally, like, I lost a pair of AirPods because I got caught in a rainstorm. I lost another pair of AirPods because I dropped one of them in a puddle and then put it back in the charger and it ruined everything. Which, if you're wondering, yes, it was stupid, but this is the life I lead. You had to charge it. Yeah. And so just I like blew on it a bunch of times and then put it back in the case. And then about 45 minutes later was like, that was the dumbest thing I could have possibly done.

But now here we are. But so the idea of like a super ruggedized pair of pretty good headphones, I actually sound very. exciting. But they both do wireless charging. They both do multi-point Bluetooth. They both do the mono modes. You can just wear one earbud at a time. They just have all the features. And I think, like, in general, if you're shopping for wireless headphones, most people don't think of Jabra, and you should. But the other thing, which I think is much more exciting, is this new JBL, I think it's called the Authentics speaker. They look nice. They do, right? The 200, the 300, the 400 and the 400. They're all stupid expensive.

They're like anywhere from $330 to $700 for a Bluetooth speaker, which is preposterous. Can't put a price on fashion. But not only are they great looking. They are. They have this like cool sort of fabricy retro thing going on. But they also have Alexa and Google Assistant in one device and it can hear both wake words at the same time. You don't have to do the sonos thing where in setup you pick which one you want to use. You can use both.

And you can tell it with one to start the music and with the other to stop the music. And they found some ways in which that gets. weird. Like if you start a timer with Alexa and then you try to use Google to stop the timer, that doesn't quite work. But it worked if the timer was going off. But if you like started a timer and then you're like, oh, no, I didn't want to do that timer. Oh, I try to tell it to stop. Yeah, John, like, I guess he got to play with one. And apparently just had a whole list of ways he was going to screw with this thing. I love it. And just went through his whole list. He chronicled it all in his piece. And I was just like, yeah. Just like chanting as I read it.

It was great. Yeah, his piece is really great. And he also, he asked Google, like, should I take this as the beginning of a trend? Is this going to actually be the sort of interoperable voice assistant world we've been wanting to live in? And the Google representative was sort of sketchy about it. And so, who knows? And then ran away fleeing? Yeah, I mean, basically.

But at least this proves that, like, this is a thing that can be done. And here's hoping that it's not just on this one set of expensive JBL speakers. Do you think Sonos is going to do it at some point? Like a good version? I think at this point Sonos and Google are at such odds that I would be surprised if Google was interested in playing along with Sonos. They would rather just get rid of it entirely if it would piss off. But like could the next U.E boom that I buy, because I'm inevitably going to buy 500 more of those in my life, could that have both? That would be awesome.

Like the speaker world is big and wide. And imagine if you could have them with the Dolby stuff that work. all over your house and you could talk to each individual one with whatever voice assistant you wanted. Like, how is that not the world we live in? This is the world we should live in. That's the future. That's what I want. That's the interoperable feature I want. Yeah. I just want to yell whatever I want at my speakers and they have to listen. I do not want to do that. I don't want to talk to my speakers ever about anything. But I do love these. They look incredible. Like if you remember how speakers looked, those old 70s and 80 speakers, you do have to look at these.

finally someone's bringing that back. I don't know why they didn't before, but they are now, and I like it. Yeah, it's based on the L-100s, right, from the 70s.

Yeah, after like two decades of trying to make speakers look like spaceships, now we're back to making them look like speakers, and it makes me very happy. Like,

yeah, these look great. The one has a handle on it, which is basically just to remind you, like, yes, you can pick this thing up. It's allowed.

They have actual knobs for all of the different levels. It's just wonderful. Like, what a world. Yeah, I'm not saying that you should do cocaine off of these speakers, but like if you wanted to. If you wanted to.

Yeah. They've got some good, there's some good flat spaces there for a nice, a nice line. We don't endorse cocaine on the verge cast. All right. Well, now that we've gone well and fully off the rails, it is time to end the first cast. Just in case this is the last episode you ever listened to, this is what I want to leave you with. It's snowing somewhere. All right.

A lot of good stuff on the site this week. We had the most recent piece in our big series investigating the effect of Google in the world. Ryan Broderick wrote a really great piece called The End of the Googleverse. Really interesting. It's full of old internet heads reminiscing on the weird things people used to do with Google in the early 2000s. It's really fun. Our video team and our producer, Andrew Marino, made an amazing video with one of those heads that does binoral audio and noise canceling headphones to really test how good noise cancelling is. It's a wild video with like lots of graphs that I didn't understand and tons of interesting people and Andrew sweating to death on a summer in New York City.

It's a really great video. Andrew also did another piece on the button of the month about a USB button that helped people win Jeopardy. It's delightful. And I want one just to like mute and unmute my microphone now. I have no use for it, but I want it. I want one real bad. The latest Land of the Giants episode is out. It's about Tesla in China.

It's very good. That whole season has been really great. Like Land of the Giants is always really great, but I actually think this might be my favorite season we've ever done. It's really good. Everybody just go listen to it. We are going to be off next Wednesday because it's Labor Day, but then we're going to be back next Friday. We're going to have more Apple to talk about. Like I said, there is just a massive title wave of gadgets and tech news coming in the next three months.

So we're going to be doing a ton. It's going to be a lot of fun. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at the verge. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Box Media Podcast Network.

The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.