The Vergecast - James Webb Space Telescope to launch next week / cool gadgets announced this week

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Loren Grush discuss NASA's plan for launching the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to NASA’s Hubble telescope. Second half of the show, the crew go through all the gadgets and software updates announced this past week. Stories discussed this week: NASA’s massive next-generation space telescope arrives in South America ahead of launch NASA sets new date for James Webb Space Telescope launch Five former SpaceX employees speak out about harassment at the company Sony Glass Sound Speaker review: it’s not what it looks like Analogue Pocket review: Game Boy games have never looked so good Opal’s C1 offers DSLR-rivaling video quality in a small form factor  Dell’s Concept Stanza converts your chicken scratch to digital text Amazon Echo Show 15 review: Alexa’s on your wall Oppo’s Find N is an impressive first folding phone Huawei’s P50 Pocket is a stylish clamshell foldable launching this month Samsung’s working on a rollable smartwatch with a camera Apple releases iOS 15.2 with App Privacy Report, Digital Legacy, and more Apple scrubs controversial CSAM detection feature from webpage but says plans haven’t changed Universal Control won’t be coming to macOS Monterey until sometime this spring Adobe launches Creative Cloud Express, a new app that simplifies its powerful editing tools  Snap launches Story Studio, a standalone video editing app for mobile Log4j is patched, but the exploits are just getting started ‘No easy solution’ for Tesla Cybertruck’s comically large windshield wiper, Elon Musk says Chrome OS tablets are getting fancier but not better Former FCC officials are worried about air safety fears delaying 5G rollout Toyota is going to make you pay to start your car with your key fob Delivery failed How to sneak into a Bored Ape Yacht Club party Matter’s plan to save the smart home Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Alex Cranz and Lauren Gruss joined the show. We talk all about the James Webb Space Telescope. It's launching at the end of the year. Then it's a lightning round of gadgets and tech news, taking us out of 2021. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software.

What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and 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. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of 2022. Hmm.

You're leading right into it. Because we're just, we're not going to do any 2021. This is it. This is our last show of the year. It's true. I'm your friend Eli. Dina Bone is here. I am the guy wishing Nealai.

Happy birthday. Oh, happy birthday. I was telling Deeter that I think odd numbers, they sound older than even numbers. So I'm turning an odd number and I just like don't want to think about it. But next year it'll be an even number. I'll be like, it's my birthday. Oh, it works. This is my theory of aging.

Anyway, Lauren Grush is here. Hi. Surprise. I'm here. And Alex Tran's here. Hello. So it is, in fact, my birthday and I'm just going to admit it. I've barely prepared for this show.

I just like hung out all day. I hope, just grant me this affordance, is all I'm saying. I didn't want to miss our last show of the year, but it was also my birthday. So, Deeter is going to drive the show. Eli, for your birthday, I want to tell you that I have come around to believing that IR is stupid and IRBlasters are stupid. They're dumb. They've always been dumb. But I was thinking about it some more, and I'm like, you know, it's still like a relatively easy, cheap, almost interoperable standard that anybody can use to communicate with anything else if they have the IR.

ports. So maybe it's sort of analogous to a headphone jack. Maybe. The fact that wired headphones are trendy again is like my personal. It's like a victory for me every time I see one of those stories. Maria, who people might know that she's been lots of videos, you know, she's one of the trendiest people on our staff. And she did it. She had an Instagram story about her wired headphones the other day. And I was like, I did it. That was me. I don't think that she knows that I think that. So, Maria, if you're listening, just I want you to know you gave me that moment, that personal victory. But yeah, no, it's our last show of the year. We're taking the next couple weeks off. We'll be back after CS. I hope everybody has a good break. But there's still a lot going on, including a big

thing happening towards the end of the year. That's why Lauren is here, the James Webb Space Telescope. Neelai, it's not just happening at the end of the year. It's happening currently on Christmas Eve. What? Hooray. We're going to hit Santa with a telescope. We're going to hit Santa with a telescope. Merry Christmas, boys and girls. No, I am doomed. forever to cover some major launch on a really important holiday. That is just how these things shake out. So it moved. It was supposed to be the 22nd and it moved to Christmas Eve. Why did that happen? It was supposed to be the 18th. Actually, it was supposed to be 20 years ago. And now it is happening on December 24th. Yeah. All right. Let's start at the beginning. What is the James Webb Space Telescope?

It is a big deal. It's when people have been working on this for a long time. What is it? Yes, so James Webb or JWST, for short, is widely considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. You might be aware of some of its iconic images. It's currently orbiting around the Earth, and it sees an optical wavelengths, but JWST is just going to be so much more powerful and more sensitive than Hubble. And it also sees an infrared light. So it's a special type of light on the part of the optical or the light wavelength spike. And the reason we use infrared to see in is because we're trying to look at some of the most distant galaxies in the universe. So these would be galaxies that are roughly 13.6 billion light years away.

And that's an important number because we think the universe as we know it after the Big Bang was 13.8 billion years ago. And so because light takes such a long time to reach us, if these things are 13.6 billion light years away, then we think that they formed roughly 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang. So we're basically looking at baby pictures of the universe, is kind of how I think of it. And they're also moving away from us. When they're that far from us, they're moving away from us because the universe is expanding. So the farthest ones are moving the fastest away from us. And when you move away, the light from those galaxies gets shifted. It gets red shifted.

So it moves towards the infrared side of the spectrum. So that's why we have this amazing new infrared telescope. It's going to be able to see all this infrared light from these distant galaxies and really show us like what the universe looked like when it was in its infancy. So you said the successor to Hubble. Whatever, it's my birthday. I'm an old man now. I'm just going to date myself. I was in like elementary school when the Hubble launched. It was a huge deal. The mirror was broken. They had to fix the mirror. Yeah, don't remind me. But this was like, I mean, this is like the highlight of fifth grade. It's like they fixed the mirror, right? Yeah. I mean, I was like, I'm being an astronaut. It didn't work out.

Spoiler alert. You got a couple of billion dollars. You can still do it. Well, yeah. Now I'm just going to like float around on Michael Strayhan. It's great. But is the Hubble over? Are we, you know, like, sent it crashing in the ocean? What's going on with it? Oh, no, Hubble is definitely not over. It definitely won't last forever. But I know, Hubble is still a very valuable part of astronomy and continues to work to this day. This is actually, yes, it's called a successor, but really it's a compliment because Hubble has these amazing capabilities. And Hubble actually saw some really distant galaxies. You know, there's this really great image called the Hubble Deep Field and it has all these incredible number of galaxies, far-off galaxies that we were able to see with the telescope. but it just can't go back as far as the JWC will be able to.

So this is really just kind of adding to our knowledge and having an even more amazing tool at our disposal. But Hubble will still be a very valuable tool as long as it's up and running. So what are the big primary unanswered questions we're hoping to get answers to here, beyond very, very pretty pictures of far-off galaxies? Everything, right?

Like basically everything. I mean, that's a pretty big, one, Deeter. You know, I'll never turn down a baby picture. Don't get me wrong. Well, the evolution of stars and galaxies is big. So we really wanted to know, you know, how the earliest galaxies evolved over time. Also, we want to have a better idea of just kind of the large-scale structure of the universe.

So, you know, one thing, Hubble, that was really great at. It was proving that the universe is expanding. And so we really want to get like a better understanding of just how fast it's expanding and what that means for the future of the universe. And then probably the biggest thing, not the biggest, but one of the biggest things that JWT will do, that nobody really even thought of when they came up with the telescope, you know, roughly three decades ago, is using it to look into the atmospheres of exoplanets. So exoplanets are planets that are outside of our solar system orbiting around other stars. And we didn't even know exoplanets existed.

prior to the 1990s. Obviously, people theorize that they existed, but we just didn't have a confirmation of them. And now we know about thousands of exoplanets because we've sent missions into space to actually find them and study them. But the problem with studying exoplanets is, you know, it's a really dark rock or gaseous object right next to a really bright star or sun. And it's hard to see that because the star's light drowns out that object. So the only way that we really can know that an exoplanet exists is through a technique called transiting. It's not the only way, but it's probably the best way. So basically, when the planet passes in front of the star, it like momentarily dips the star's light just because there's a little bit of blockage there. And we can infer that a planet is there.

But we want to know, like, what's on the planet, right? Because we're looking for Earth 2.0. for possible signs of life outside of our solar system. And the best way to do that is to see what's in a planet's atmosphere. But like I said, it's incredibly hard because it's getting drowned out by the star's light. So what JW's team might be able to do is because it's so powerful and so sensitive, is that it will be able to look at the edges of that exoplanet as it passes in front of the star or at the edge of the star and see the light as it filters through the edges of the atmosphere. Once that light passes through all those gases and all those molecules,

it warps the light in such a way that we can actually tell what molecules are present, what gas is present. And depending on what gas is there, you know, then we might be able to infer if there are signs of life on the planet below because, you know, people, we put a lot of gases into our planet's atmosphere that wouldn't be there if we weren't here. Sorry, I hate to say it, but we're disgusting. Look, I stand outside just shooting off my hairspray into the sun every day being like,

find us aliens. I got my aquanette, just like looking for little green men. We're going to be looking for disgusting aliens. Yes, just, yeah, we're looking for disgusting byproducts of alien life. Nilai, you're just doing your part to help other aliens find us. I'm running SETI at home, and I'm shi. shooting hairspray into the sky. You said this was supposed to launch 20 years ago.

I mean, it has been like a long road. I believe the most ambitious projected launch date was in 2007, probably somewhere between 2007 and 2011. I mean, they first came up with the most, the earliest concept. It wasn't the iteration that we know now, but people started talking about having a telescope of this nature as early as 1989. And then it became more formulated than the 90s.

And, yeah, they had these really naive cost estimates of, you know, $500,000 to a billion. And it would launch in 2007, between 2007 and 2011. Obviously, we overshot all of that. And now we're looking at a price tag of roughly, you know, nearly to $10 billion. So you're saying it's a James Cameron movie. Yes. But that's also a great point that you bring up. Perspective is key here because, you know, this is going to revolutionize astronomy and astrophysics.

And yes, 10 billion sounds like a lot of money, but it is chump change when we put it in the perspective of other things that we spend money on, you know, either from the federal government or like just how much we spend on potato chips, as somebody reminded me. I just think it's wild that like we're going to see what happened right after the Big Bang. Yeah. I messaged you earlier this week about this because I was still stuck earlier this week thinking that the Big Bang was like a single explosion and everything exploded out. So I think I messaged you just saying what direction are they going to look? That's not how the universe works. No. Really, the way to think of the Big Bang is just that's, it sparked the expansion of our universe.

And so that's how we, we, it's a very pivotal time obviously in our history. But yeah, it's really when the expansion began. And it's, and it's, there are smarter people that can talk about this than me. But yeah, it's when the first galaxies and there was, you know, very basic elements in the universe at the time. And then they kind of formulated to form stars and form galaxies. So what we're really seeing is the first signs of that formulation of stars and galaxies coming together, which is incredible. And we might also find dark matter, like we might be able to find, find dark matter or see dark matter with this? I have not looked into that as much, but yes,

there are dark matter studies, but you pointing that out to me reminded me to look into it. But I've been more fascinated with like the exoplanet side. I mean, aliens are also cool. I get it. So I hate to be the downer. We're talking about what we are going to be able to do with this thing. But it's got to get off the ground. It is itself very complicated. I'm totally fascinated by the pictures of the mirror, which is this enormous mirror. They're launching it from the middle of nowhere. How are they getting it to where it needs to go, keeping it safe, and getting it into the sky safely? That's the probably most wild part. And the reason why everyone has such anxiety leading up to this is because it can't launch the space the way that it

needs to be in space. It has to launch folded up because no current rockets that we have available are wide enough to get it in its full configuration out into space. So it has to fold up like a little origami figurine. And then once it gets into space, it ignites this really complicated, unfurling process. And you have to understand that the telescope is a mixture of hard and soft things. So the mirror, obviously, is this very intricate gold-plated mirror, very tough, you know, stuff. But then in order to make sure that it stays super cold, which is important because it sees in the infrared, it has to have a sun shield that is made out of this very thin,

almost, it looks kind of like a plasticy material. It's called Capton. And that has to unfurl in space too so that it blocks the rays from the sun and so it doesn't get so hot. It has to, it has to operate at a temperature close to negative 400 degrees Fahrenheit. But this is a lot of the sun. But this, This material of the sun shield is so thin and it's such a very thin membrane. And there are four layers of it. So there is a process in space where that sun shield slowly opens up. And, you know, it has to work or else the whole thing kind of falls apart. So that's just one of many different things that have to happen while it unfurls in space.

And I think we're, we've been, I'm working on a story about that unfroling process. And the numbers I've heard is, you know, somewhere over 300 single points of failure. Oh, great. Yeah. And obviously it's what you think it means. It's like that thing must happen or else the entire thing does not work. And it's just a terrifying thing to think about. So, yeah, normally when, I mean, not normally, but most of the time when I'm following a launch,

we aren't happy until the thing separates from the spacecraft. and then it unfurls its solar panels and its starting getting power. That's usually when we declare victory. But with JWST, we won't be declaring victory for at least another month because that's how long it takes to unfurl and to get out to its intended orbit, which is a million miles from Earth. Oh, so actually, speaking of the intended orbit, can you explain why this thing is launching in the middle of nowhere?

And actually, can you define middle of nowhere? Well, it's launching in Peru, French Guyana, which is the site of, Europe's primary spaceport. So this is an international collaboration. It's meant to be, you know, used by astronomers and scientists all over the world. And so we made a deal with Ariana Space to launch the JWT on their Arian 5 rocket and their primary launch site is in French Guiana. And I mean, for most launches, I don't know if this has to do with JWST. So forgive me, orbital mechanics people. But

the reason that Carew is such a great site is because it's near the equator. And so we really like to launch near the equator because that's where the Earth is moving the fastest. So you get a really, like a little boost when you launch closer to the equator when you're getting satellites into orbit.

So that's why it was located there. What are the next, like that month, 300 points of failure? Are they clustered at the beginning of that month? Like, will we know right away? Or is it like 30 days later we're like, crap, 16 things have to happen today? It's a two-week process of unfurling. So the Sunshield deploys over a period of many days. So there's really no time to relax. It's just a dull anxiety. Well, and to be clear, we can't, if something goes wrong, can we can we send astronauts up there to fix it? No, not really. It's too far out.

I wish, I wish everybody could have seen Lauren's face just now. No, no, no, no. Can Bruce Willis get up there with a drill and do something? Right now, we don't even have the capabilities and astronauts to where JWT is going because it's going a million miles from Earth. But even if we did, the telescope was not made to be serviceable like Hubble was. You know, from the beginning, Hubble was designed to be serviceable. So the way that they built the components, they built them in such a way that you could swap

things out, fix them with certain tools. They designed completely new tools just to work with Hubble. But with JWST, it was just not an option. Now, I did talk to some NASA folks about this. There are targets on it so that if maybe we want to try refueling it someday, we could do that. But if, say, an actuator just completely breaks or if the Sunshield doesn't deploy or many other these things happen, then we are kind of out of luck. Once again, the right to repair is so important.

I mean, the Hubble thing is like really interesting. It was a totally different paradigm of space, right? Like, they thought the space shuttle would just be going up every day to fix satellites. Yeah. And so they like, I don't know, it was just like crazy to think that that's what we thought would be happening in space. And then like quickly we're like, wait, that's it. We just launched another satellite.

That's easier. This is the Microsoft surface of satellites. the lights, right? It's just very difficult. What you've ordered is what you get. Yeah. Is there a reason that they designed it? I mean, it's been a long time. They're ready to launch it. But is there a reason that it's designed with so much anxiety built into the unfurling process? Could it have been more redundant? I asked that question, and the answer is basically no. Yeah. Just because there, I mean, there's this thing in the launch industry known as the

tyranny of the faring. And essentially what they're talking about. So at the top of a rocket, it's known as a payload faring and it's what covers the payload so that it doesn't burn up as you're launching to space. The problem with that is that the bigger you make your rocket, the more fuel you need in it, right? So at some point, you have to limit how big your rocket is. And that size limit is what often dictates the design of a satellite, right? So you can't. You can't, launch something that's wider than the Falcon 9 on the Falcon 9 unless you fold it up. So that's that's where this comes in. And this and the thing is they decided they wanted to have this mirror be how, you know, over, I think rough, it's like roughly more than 20 feet long, right?

Yeah. If you haven't seen a picture of this mirror, go go go. It's like a wild thing to look at. And because they wanted that size of a mirror, they knew they had to figure out a way to fold it up because there was no that was going to be able, like the mirror alone is too wide for any rocket available. Now, all the SpaceX people will come at me and be like, well, one day we'll have Starship and that could eventually launch really big telescopes, which Elon has definitely talked about, but that rocket is not available to us at the moment. And then it's being delayed like day by day, right, 18th to 22nd and 24th. Why is that happening?

Well, the latest was a communication issue between the rocket and the payload, as I understand. it. But they think they have it resolved, but they're having a meeting at 6 p.m. on Thursday. So it's very possible that it could be Christmas Day launch by the time this podcast airs, which would be amazing. That was the latest thing. The other one, I mean, they had to push it back a few days because some clamp snapped and sent vibrations throughout the entire spacecraft that wasn't supposed to happened, so they wanted to make sure that that didn't damage anything. But you have to understand, we've never launched anything of this complexity ever before. And so, yeah, we have experience putting payloads on rockets, but we definitely do not have experience putting this kind of payload

on a rocket. So everything that we've done before does it, it helps, but it's not, it's all a whole new experience. So of course there's going to be challenges along the way because putting the most complicated space telescope on top of its rocket is just a completely new experience for us. Is this more or less complicated from like a engineering perspective than putting somebody on the moon? Oh, my goodness. I don't know. Because I keep hearing that like this is the most complex thing we've ever sent and it's like maybe we sent like three guys. And they were like emotionally complex. Yeah.

I watched it. Did you see first man? That's like a, you know. That's a great question because once you're in space, the people can potentially, you know, fix errors. And I mean, obviously it's really still very hard, but they can still have some agency over the spacecraft. If something goes wrong with JWST, we have to send signals to it from the ground.

That's our only way of fixing it. But then again, it does not need life support systems or food or anything. So I don't know. This is a great question. Something for engineers to debate who are not me. All right. So this is hopefully happening Christmas Eve, maybe by the time you're listening to this Christmas Day. We'll be looking forward to that.

Lauren, last thing I want to ask you about, you wrote a pretty big piece about the culture at SpaceX this week. Five former employees who have spoken out about the culture, about harassment. That SpaceX is one of those companies that we just don't hear a lot about internally, but it seems like this was a big deal. There was another essay by one of these employees. I don't know what you, a whistleblower site called Lioness. It's hard to describe what Lioness is, but you can go look at it. Tell us about that story a little bit. Yeah. So one former employee decided, who just recently left, decided to pin this essay in Lioness. And the allegations that she made were pretty shocking. And so, you know, we kind of, you know, we kind of, work to find other former employees, mostly interns, I've realized, who worked at SpaceX to see if they could kind of corroborate some of her experiences. And they definitely did. And yeah, I would just encourage everyone to go read it. It's a rare glimpse inside of SpaceX's culture. And I think the main theme is that they all felt like they themselves experienced an appropriate behavior, or they saw other women and non-binary individuals experiencing inappropriate behavior.

And when it came to whether or not to report it, they all had very different and inconsistent responses from the HR department or their managers, many of which that they did not see as adequate. And they all have their various opinions as to why that is. So I'll leave it to them to explain it. Yeah, that piece is on the sun. It was just really great work. And I wanted to call it up before let you go. Yeah, thank you. So you can go read that and then sometime around Christmas.

Lauren will be crewing the verge. It will be Lauren, Santa, and the James Webb Space Telescope all together. All right. Thanks a lot, Lauren. Thank you. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

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Deeter, you've assembled a list of gadgets here for us to talk about. Usually we save the wacky gadgets for the end, but it's, you know, it's the holidays. I just want to tell people, usually there's like themes in how these are ordered, but this list is just titled, cool gadgets. So look, Sony made a speaker that looks like a bong. and I just think that they deserve some credit for making a bong-shaped speaker. It's glass. It's got a light on it.

The glass is part of the speaker. And it does a little candlelight thing. And I don't know what's going on with CES this year. As of this recording, some of us are going. We'll see if COVID allows that to happen. This is the sort of thing that we would expect to see at CES. But I kind of like that Sony just said, you know what? Here it is.

Here's the thing. We made this. Just blaze it. There's a throwaway line. So Chris Welch reviewed this thing. It's called the Sony Glass Sound Speaker. There's a throwaway line. I was reading it.

And like he's just the show he'll just like, Sony believes in this so much that this is the third generation of this device. And I, you know, there's like, there's just a handful of teams at Sony that I am desperate to know better. Like there's the team that makes the party speakers. And they're like, here's what the frat boys need this. year and they have they have to have that meeting right they're like and then there's right next to them i'm assuming it's very competitive there's like the karaoke speaker department right and you can

just see that they kind of overlap but they don't and the party speakers are not karaoke speaker like i know it i know that that's a fight inside the halls of sony and if anybody wants me to write that ex-poise i am ready and willing to do it then there's like the high-end home theater stuff that makes no sense department like here's a twenty thousand dollar short range for that you can put one inch from the wall and it'll put up a 400 inch 720p picture. And it's like none of that makes sense, but I love that you've made 15 of these. Yeah. Then there's like the part that's like, we made yet another memory card format, right?

Like Sony just does that. That's what they do. That's just a core part of their business. And then there's this group that's like the wacky gadgets that you would never expect. Like this one, it's a glass tube, has an LED in the middle. that flickers like a candle. Why? But they've done it for three generations in running.

Yeah. And I just want to know. I just like, if those PMs call me, they can come on decoder. If anyone knows, like, do they have a P&L? Do they have to go to like the Sony executive meeting and be like, you know, our budget for this year and our revenue really, really suggests that we should make a fourth generation of the bong candle? Here's the answer. Are you ready? Yeah.

The amount of R&D that goes into making. a bong candle speaker is so intense that the people who make it have to cut themselves off from the world. And so nobody has given them the message yet that there are no more we work lobbies to fill up with these things. They're just out there. They're on like an oil rig in the middle of the ocean working on this project. They just send missives back. Like there's some account at Sony with like a spreadsheet, right? That's like like sales projections for bono. Candles. Two.

And no one will pay attention to them. I'm just saying, I'll give you the whole show. Like that account, like, talk to me. Yeah. Okay. Another cool gadget is the analog pocket. This thing is great. So it's a game boy.

It's a modern game boy that can play Game Boy cartridges. You can also get an adapter to play Game Gear cartridges. It is incredibly well designed. It has an amazing screen. Andrew Webster reviewed it. And I just, I look at this thing. And I can see in my mind's eye a box in my parents' attic with my Game Boy cartridges. Yeah.

All I want to do is go find them. Yeah. You should. So we had one here in San Francisco because Viren was taking photos of it for Andrew's review. And it is. It's amazing. It feels great. The plastic isn't quite like ultra-premium, I guess is how I would say.

It's like you can kind of feel like there was maybe like the tiniest of cost cutting there. But in terms of like a thing to play. game boy games, there's literally nothing better and they really didn't need to go this hard. But they did and it's amazing. So is it the size of like the original Game Boy or like the Game Boy pocket? Oh, it's like the original Game Boy. It's like a little tiny bit bigger maybe even than the original Game Boy. It's that big?

It's pretty big. Yeah, but like it feels comfortable, right? Because like the shoulder buttons are at the base of where the cartridge goes in and it's got four buttons instead of two. And so, like, if you think about the ergonomics of your hand, you don't want, if you're going to make it much smaller, you're going to make a whole bunch of other tradeoffs. And, like, the tradeoffs they chose to make was having a really great screen and the ability for it to do more stuff than just be a Game Boy, run Game Boy cartridges. You can put the adapter in for Game Gear. And so it's like, it's a more interesting, versatile gadget than just a Game Boy game. Well, the reason I ask is not to give any budding young students this idea.

But the Game Boy Pocket fit perfectly into the slide cover of a TI82 calculator. And so when I was in high school, we'd pretend that we were programming our TI82s in calculus. But really, we were playing Zelda. And so at the beginning of calculus, we would do it. But you would turn it on. And the only sound you could not mute on the Game Boy Pocket was the startup chime. And we literally got it. because you weren't like going

in the middle of it or whatever we did that for like weeks on end we're like yeah like like anyway I was just it brought back I saw this thing and I was like oh I could probably slide this into a TA 82 like yeah it's gonna bring it back I guess people probably slide their phones

into their TIA 82s now people don't know the difference between you and me like you grow up rock and roll playing Game Boy in your TIA 82 thing I grew up just like programming the TIA 80 no I did that too you put cool games on the TIA 82 yeah there's a little racing game on the TIA

come on We've done all that. But when the Game Boy Pocket came out, and I remember this, shout out to my friend Ryan. He was like, let me see that for a second. And he went, think. And we're like, oh, the heavens opened. This thing is great. I'm probably going to buy one.

I don't know why, but I'm super into it. Well, and they reopened pre-sales this week for it. Yeah. I'm still waiting for my play date. Yeah, still waiting on my play date. They had to push some stuff back, but good on them. They've been very transparent through the whole process. So I'm not actually agitating about it.

Yeah, they've been very open. And they've just massive supply chain issues, right? Yeah. All right. Man, actually, there's something I want to talk about, but we're going to talk about it later because now we're going to talk about the Opel C1. This is a webcam. I'm super into this. I'm not.

So Cameron reviewed it. No one needs that. Alex, your camera is off right now because it's overheated. Yeah. I mean, come on. This thing has a giant, like, heat fin on the back of it. Like, I'm going to buy one of these for you. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's a high-end webcam with good microphones that are like supposed to be great at noise canceling. They're okay. But it's basically like all the stuff that makes your smartphone a better camera than your average webcam, that's like, well, let's just make a bespoke webcam that's based on smartphone parts. So it's got the Sony sensor, I think, from the Pixel 1. It's got a bunch of other like smarts in it. It's better at background blur than like Zoom's really ugly background blur.

It's like 300 bucks. It's expensive. but I was thinking about this like my ZV1 that I use I use a Sony ZV1 is my webcam. Yeah same. It is expensive. It was four or five hundred bucks or whatever it was. It's complicated.

Like I would never send this to anyone else to use as a webcam because you have to monkey with the settings. You need a USB capture card. Or you have to use Sony Imaging Edge, which is Alex's personal nemesis. Oh, that's a mess. But this thing is like a little more expensive than what you spend on a webcam.

Yep. I think the sensor part of it's really interesting, right? We have not spent a lot of time in the show talking about the sensor from the pixel one is like a great sensor. It was the software that made, it was, it's a Sony sensor. It is the same Sony sensor, but it's a software that made that sensor good. And they basically, with a pixel anyway, they ran it to the edge of its limits and now they've had to go to a new sensor.

Yep. So it's like fascinating to me that they're using that sensor. And it's like on the website, they're hyping up the sensor. but in the context of the show, we're like, here's this old sensor. Made, by the way, designed by the same person who designed the Google Clips camera. Yeah, that's like an all-star team, right? It's X Google, X Apple. What's really interesting to me is their pricing model. So you can buy the thing right now. It's plug and play with Windows, plug and play with Mac. But if you want all the software features to like really get the most out of it, you need software. The software is Mac only right now. And it's a subscription. Yep.

So it's like, do I want to just have my camera overheat every day or do I want to pay a subscription? I want you to pay a subscription so bad. I know what this room thinks. I will pay you a subscription. I will pay your subscription fee. I mean, it's cheap. It's like, um. It's like $4.

It's very, I've been investigating the C one. And right now it's free for early customers. So if you pre-order it, it's free, they say. But it's just, it's one of those things, right? Like every one of these products is trying to. turning into a recurring revenue stream. So now a hardware webcam has, like, subscription software. The remote starting a Toyota requires a subscription.

Oh, we're going to get to that. It's just coming to everything. It's killing me. On the other hand, on the flip side of that, I just bought this Garmin venue too, and I wanted to buy this watch face. And the way you buy the watch face is you read the description. And the guy says, please PayPal me and make sure you PayPal me as a friend, so we don't have to pay the fees.

And then a couple days later, he gets back to you with the coach. to unlock the pro features. Which, oh my God. Incredible. I kind of love. It's very, it's very personal. It's like artisanal watch faces. I will say the opal, you should, it looks good.

That's actually the point of this, all this. Like, it is not just like a pixel one quality video. They've done a bunch of computational photography stuff with that sensor. They've got an Intel chip in there. Cameron really liked it when you reviewed it. I'm like, like, immediately emailed them. I was like, give me a code to buy this thing. We'll see.

This next one is for Alex. It's the Dell, it's a concept device from Dell. It's called the stanza. It's basically just a little tablet that you can like take notes on. And then that's literally all it does. And then you like tap the thing and it'll digitize it. Or you can use it as a monitor, right? Sure.

But I mean, let's not get too crazy here. The idea here is they're trying to simplify it down to the core idea of taking notes. And I just want to know why isn't this E-ink. That's what would be my question too. That's why Dell didn't allow me in the room. No, I didn't go. They probably would have allowed me. But when I said E-ink, they probably would have kicked me out.

Yeah. But yeah, I just, I mean, I get it. I think that's the big push-pull, right? Like a lot of people really want full color that E-ink is terrible still at. So they're like, okay, let's do this. Let's try to like mimic writing, even though I think it's a lot worse. Yeah. Like the writing experience on an iPad versus remarkable two is just night and day different.

But this could be cool if it comes out of. I don't think they're ever going to make this. This feels like a classic. It's, you know, it's CS time. There's some designers at Dell. Here's some stuff. Yeah. And they just did it kind of early, you know?

Yeah. It looks kind of like an iPad. Like, I got very iPad feelings from it. Yeah. Okay. Wait, you know what? I'm going out of order. I was going to save this in the Android section,

but we're still in cool the gadget zone. So here we go. The ApoFindN. It is a new folding phone from Apo. It only can be available in China. Basically, take your standard Galaxy Z-Fold 3. but instead of having it be super tall, just make it a little shorter when it's closed.

So as you open it up, it's almost square. And it takes the like weird do-p-do-do-do-do-chapina strangeness remote quality of the other thing and makes it feel, I don't know, more like a human size, like pocketbook or like a notebook or something. And it's just like the build quality is really, really nice. and for a company that, you know, like, we're going to get into some of the problems they've been having with the One Plus, but for a company that is just rolling into foldable phones as a first entry, Sam Bifert took a look at this thing, it looks great. It's a beautiful little phone. And they didn't overextend themselves like Samsung did with, like, the underscreen selfie camera, you know. And the size of the screen when it's unfolded, they don't have to bother with a bunch of like multitasking questions. because it's not quite big enough for that.

It's just a nice big screen that folds up into a size that doesn't feel ridiculous. Yeah, I think one of the things we keep talking about with folding phones over and over and over again is what is the final form factor for this technology? Like, what does a folding screen actually enable? Yeah. And Samsung kind of went big phone to big tablet, which is very Samsung. Like, it's just in keeping with their, it's what you would expect from them. They also went like Flip phone to little guy

Right and Huawei has got one of these now too The P50 flip phone But I think this this is like an unexplored middle zone Is what you're getting at right Like small phone to small tablet Yeah But like a small tablet is just a big phone Like there's something in there that's compelling

Yeah well like it doesn't have the complications Of like the two screens on like the Surface Duo Service Duo 2 I would like to see more foldable form factors And not just because I like seeing wacky phones but like LG has given up the ghost. So it's going to come from places like Apo, Huawei, Xiaomi, because Samsung's like set.

And I think that for in this zone of folding phones and in like in the zone of like Android innovation, Samsung has had way too much leverage, at least outside of China in terms of like how people think about what trajectory of phones should be. And so I really hope that stuff like this will encourage other companies to do more experimental stuff. And like experimental stuff that actually could be sold.

Because like TCL will show you wacky prototypes all day long. But no, they're bad. I actually want to see more stuff get closer to like actual production. And this is a good sign. It's a good step on the way. I'm looking at this Huawei P50 pocket that you just mentioned that we have on the list too. And it's this thing rules. It's cool, right?

It's got like two circles on it. One's for the display. Once for the camera array. It looks great. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because like, you know, this thing was, not announced for the United States at all. Like, it was announced in a Harper's Bazaar China photo shoot.

Yeah. But it looks like it. It rules because it was in a fashion photo shoot. Yeah. Like, we have no idea. But I just keep looking at this. Like, what is the big question? Like, what form factor does this display technology actually enable that people want?

Mm-hmm. And we've only taken a couple shots at it. Yeah. And, like, we've only taken a couple. We've taken, well, there's more than a couple, but we've only taken, like, two, like, Good shots. Everything else has been, like, bad. Like, just, like, you hit the uprights.

You just donked, like, donked off the uprights. I mean, like, I get it. Like, there's other stuff. Like, LG will make you a $100,000 TV that rolls up at the foot of your bed. Yeah. Where's the phone version? Yeah. Like, that's what I want, right?

Like, none of that stuff exists. What about the watch version? Because there's a patent for a Samsung watch that unrolls. Yes. And it expands out. And it's like, it's split down the middle for some reason. So if you're like, you want to watch a video on your watch, it's like split in the middle, which is incredible. This is one of those patents where like, you know, I've spent a lot of my life covering patent application.

I looked at this one. I was like, shouldn't the patent examiner have sent this back with like, you got to try harder? Like literally the drawing is like a watch and two fingers and the fingers unpinched and the watch gets bigger. And it's like, guys, like an eight-year-old could have come up with this. Yeah, I also watched Iron Man, too. Come on. I'm sure it is a much more complete patent application. It's just those first two pictures is like...

The way it rendered Thor is like, Thor is on half of the screen and then just the axe on the other. This is incredible. I love that they were like, yeah, sure, patent, go. Yeah, movies don't ever put stuff in the middle of the picture. It's always on the left and the right. So, of course, you know. I love that you just started talking about how it rendered Thor

with no explanation of the fact that one of the patent images is of Thor. It is one of the, yeah, one of the patent images is of Thor. I didn't just like, have that idea.

I've already seen it. It's great. That's very good. Okay, but you got these pictures are just, it's like, dink.

So the last gadget is a thing that should be cool, but instead it's a disappointment. Jen reviewed it. It's the Echo Show 15, which is like the final form of what the Echo Show should have been, which is a picture frame. But it's got this widget system, which is not great. Like the smart home controls are really not great.

And also, it's got this new fancy Amazon custom bespoke processor in it, but it's still slow. That's unforgivable. Come on. Just what, I'm looking at, like, I'm looking at one of the pictures she took and I'm looking at the widgets. And the buttons look like they were designed at 2007. Like, the U.S. is just ugly. It's funny.

We were talking about fridges last week. Like, it looks like the Samsung fridge UI. Yeah. Like, this is what a Samsung smart fridge tablet looks like. And it's like, I don't know, did Amazon not get the memo that they did not set the world on fire with smart fridges? Like, I don't, I don't know. The photo thing is really interesting. So we had Dave Lampon Decoder.

And I was like, you, Alexa, da, dot, like, the thing holding me out of that ecosystem is that Google Photos is better than Amazon Photos. he was like Amazon Photos was up to me. A week later, great at keeping the cards close. A week later, Amazon launched a huge update to Amazon Photos. iOS only. Yeah.

So the app on Iowa, because that's, if you think about this, most of your photos are taking on your phone, you have a good iOS app, you're doing the auto import, great. Now you can feed them to Alexa devices. So, okay, the first bits and bobs of this are coming together.

We're going to compete with Google Photos. But then it's slow. It's like you might as well just get a digital photo frame at that point. Like, you're still doing better than having a slow computer on your wall. Well, so here's my thing. Like, Amazon is trying very hard to create the ambient OS, right? They're trying to make ambient computing.

They're even trying to, like, move beyond the whole concept of OS in the first place and just have it be ambient computing. But there's a step in the middle before you get there where, like, people still need screens and they need to do stuff on those screens. And they need the stuff they do in those screens to connect to the rest of their life and connect to their phone. and I don't know how often you interact with the Alexa app on your phone, but it's not fun. And, you know, there's like shopping lists here, and like there's like we mentioned the pictures, there's the widgets for your smart home,

there's like all of the stuff that looks like it's connected to a whole and complete ecosystem in the way that, you know, an iPad is, or even an Android tablet might be, but it's not. It's all like a veneer. It's the veneer of an ecosystem. with a bunch of widgets on it. It's not an actual ecosystem

unless you are willing to bring your whole family in and use the Lexa app to do all your stuff. I mean, I would say, like, I would be more offended by this if the product was good. You know what I mean? Like, it's a giant slow picture frame. Yeah.

Like, of course the software is kind of, like, that's what you, it's just weird that Amazon, this is true. I'll offer this. criticism of Google, too. They just put out that new Google Nest Hub. Yeah. Like, same design, new processor, they told us, still pretty slow. And now they're, like, Google is adding, there's like a browser on that thing, but you can just open web pages. There's an apps dock. And it's like, guys, you didn't not design these to be computers in this way. Like,

you are overtaxing the hardware here by turning them into baby iPads plugged into the wall. Yeah. Also, they're plugged into the wall. Why not put faster chips in them? Right. And like we're just kind of like, it seems like they can't sell you a tablet. They know they can't sell you a tablet. Yeah, Dan actually just reviewed a couple of ChromeOS tablets. And they haven't gotten there yet. They're like not there. You should still just like ChromeOS is great. ChromeOS tablets are not. So like let's make these weird crappy tablets out of our smart home displays. Yeah. Is where they're going. And it just doesn't make any sense to me. Well, they're just so cheap. Like I mean, I guess, yeah, they have to be cheap. Right. It's Amazon's whole thing. is undercutting everybody else.

But it's just like, looks like so cheaply made. It's got the super slow processor in it. It's just like zero effort. And there's the other side of it, right? There's the really, really, really nice, super expensive billionaires have it in their home, like, what this is aping. And can't there just be something in the middle for people who don't want to spend no money on a garbage piece of technology?

I would say this stuff. stuff the billionaires have on the walls of their homes is, uh, it's actually worse. Yeah. Like, if you ever, like, encountered one of those systems, I have a friend who used to install them and he's like, they're all intentionally designed broken so that our service contracts are more lucrative. Hell. Like, it's like pretty brutal.

But they're billionaires. Whatever. Just like milk. Yeah, they don't care. It's a good business model. It's good work if you get it. We got to take a break, but then we're going to come back. And Deuterus promise it will be sad about software updates.

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Yeah, I frontloaded the fun stuff. now we're going to have some sad stuff, which is software updates. Merry Christmas, everyone. We'll say we'll have some fun at the end. We'll have a lightning run. It'll be okay. So Apple got out a bunch of its fall stuff. So iOS 15.2 with the app privacy report and some weirdness with CSAM.

Universal Control is still MIA and Monterey. But you can do SharePlay now. Hooray. And then, I don't know, like Google put out a massive update for the Pixel 6, but it still hasn't arrived on a bunch here, at least here in the U.S. One Plus had to pull its OS update for Oxygen OS 12. Just had, they just screwed it up. Yeah.

I think that everyone needs to take a beat on your big software updates. Just like hold them back a little bit longer. Don't announce features until you can ship them. Don't do this. This fall in particular. I expected, you know, I expected a little bit of chaos last year from COVID and everyone learning how to work remote and whatever. But the fact that we've had so many major OS updates this fall just go sideways is infuriating.

And I don't know. I don't have a thesis here other than I am seeing similar stories across Apple and Android. So here's my shot in the dark. Okay. I am like a huge proponent of remote work, so don't take this wrong way. These companies are in like kind of like open conflict. with their employees, so I returned to office. Right.

And Apple has returned, certainly its hardware employees. But we're seeing, like, here's the fruits of 19 months of remote software development. I just, like, I honestly wonder if maintaining that relentless yearly update schedule, and maybe it's not just being remote, maybe it's the stress of the pandemic. Like, I wonder if maybe they shouldn't have eased up on the aggressiveness of the yearly update schedule. So just to account for the fact that their workforces are totally distributed now. Yeah. I mean, I have no science behind this.

And I don't think Apple engineers should all go back to the office or whatever. I'm just saying, like, it's, you can see those two things maybe colliding in this being a result. Yeah. Oh, I was going to say, like, Apple had already struggled with this. But also, I want to point out, there is one company that had a major update just like last week to all of its Android tablets that maybe run on E-Inc. And it was wonderful. It's beautiful. Yeah, four people work there.

They probably all just got on a Zoom and wrote it together. Yeah, and it was beautiful. I love it. So not everybody screwed up their updates this year. There was a little, the CSAM thing that you mentioned with Apple, there was some controversy that they had changed the webpages and maybe it was going away. Apple tells us, nope, it's still coming. They're still working on it. It's still collecting feedback.

So, yeah, we'll see if that happens. The other part, I mean, iOS 15 is missing a lot of features, right? They're slowly rolling them out. Universal control not being there. This is like a highlight feature of all of it. And they're still, we don't know, spring, which is a long time away. Yeah. And I really want it.

It's like a great feature. The end of spring is like, now you're starting to start thinking about iOS 16 on this cadence. For sure. Right? The end of spring rolls you, it's pretty close to June, which is when they will announce iOS 16. Yeah. Well, this is like when the MacBook error, like the second generation MacBook Air is going to be coming out and also finally universal control. Yeah. There's this moment that has become lore amongst people that have watched Apple keynotes over the years. And I'm forgetting the U.S. Was it Snow Leopard?

The snow leopard. Yeah. Where they got out and they're like, all right, here, the new features this year are none. Just bug fixes and speed improvements. And like the crowd erupted in cheers. Yeah. And I'm just saying, 2022, blank check to every major software company, redo that keynote. Microsoft, Apple, Google company that makes Alex's weirdo e-ink tablet. They did a great job this year. Come out and say, all we're doing this year is cleaning stuff up. That's it. Microsoft just come up and you know what? The settings and the control panels thing, yeah, you know we've been working on it,

it's fixed. They're all in one place now, and that's the only feature we're shipping. Yeah. All Apple needs to do is, like, ship the features they promised last year and bug fixes. Blank check. Do it. I always think about the local news test. of the Apple keynote.

Like, what thing are they going to announce that breaks through to, like, the local news or the Today Show or whatever? Yeah. And they're kind of, like, out. Like, Universal Control those ship. And, like, can you just imagine your, like, local news anchor being like, and now you can wave an iPad at your laptop? I don't know. But if Apple announces, we're taking a year off to clean up all the bugs, like, literally every local, like, the Today show will do the full hour. Yeah.

On Apple said they're just going to fix the iPhone. And like, you can just see it. Like, it's like an earned victory for them. Yeah. All right. They're never going to do it. Snow leopard was the best house ever made. I still think about it.

I was at, I was taking our trash to the, I live in the woods. So I take my own trash to the dump. And they have a shed, like the electronics recycling shed. Yeah, yeah. And they had like an original eyebook in there. Ooh. And I was like, I should just take this home and run snow leopard. The other software stuff I wanted to talk about is, um,

Two things happened. Adobe launched Creative Cloud Express, which is like a light version of its editing tools. And then Snap launched Story Studio, which is a standalone video editing app for phones. And I feel like the cycle of everybody realizing, oh God, TikTok is a video editing app. And we need to catch up to that, but we don't know quite how. And like, how is it connected to our social network or not is going to be hitting. And it's going to be hitting in waves over. the next year or so. I'm not going to bring this back around to Apple Clips, although I really want to. But I don't know. I'm excited to see another shot from other companies besides TikTok at innovating on the like mobile editing workflow. Despite the fact that inherently when I see Adobe announce a light version of its software, I hate it. Because I've used a bunch of their like the way they used to think about mobile software, their, you know, elements or whatever the heck they used to call that stuff. It was terrible. I believe Adobe can get it better now because they, like, seem to have a clearer mindset of how their stuff works on multiple platforms and cloud and whatever. But, yeah, I don't know.

I think it's time to have a little bit more innovation in, like, the UI of video editing. I think TikTok has definitely led the way, but we are, like, we need something that feels, like, I don't know. We need, like, that I movie moment, like, where there's, like, a coherent, like, oh, I am rethinking how. how this thing works in a way that isn't sort of like tacked on, tacked on, tacked on the way it was on TikTok and a little bit on reels. So I don't make a lot of TikToks. Yeah. It's not my thing.

But I would argue that that I-Movie moment actually already happened with TikTok. Like the TikTok video editor is complicated, but it works nothing like a premiere or whatever. It doesn't even work like I-Movie, which is bonkers and no one understands. It's its own thing and like users have different expectations out of it. And I think that's partially what drove Snap to do this. Like, yeah, the audience of TikTok users and Snapchat users is a Venn diagram. Like, there's perfect overlap. It's both young audiences, as Alex Heath will always remind us,

Snapchat is very popular. Lots of people use it just doesn't get the attention of the other platforms. So Snap making a tool that's better for TikTok just reinforces the affinity people already have for Snap. Right. And I don't think Snap is going to make a TikTok clone. I think they just want people using its tools. instead of thinking of TikTok is a creative place that then gets shared out elsewhere. So I think there's like the value here.

And I think the reason Apple never got there with clips is like Apple, once you're done making the thing, Apple is there's no value to Apple once they're done. Right. Right. It's just like you're going to share it on Instagram or whatever. You don't feel good about clips. The only person that feels good about clips is me. Yeah. But like, but they don't have like this big distribution network that is their business.

Right. Whereas with TikTok, getting you to participate in a TikTok, economy is great for TikTok's business. So there's a huge incentive to make that video editor, like, fun to use. Yeah, Adobe doesn't have that ecosystem, but it seems like they're starting to think about doing a better job with mobile and, like, that workflow. I think they're only thinking about it because they have, like, a finite number base now, right? Like, they have professionals.

All of these young people and stuff no longer are going to go and buy Photoshop. they're not going to go buy Premiere. They never would have to begin with. But like they're going to go pirate or they're going to go get the Gimp. Is it Gimp? Like free Photoshop. Like they need this younger audience that actively hates them because of the last, like how difficult they've made the path to entry into Photoshop and Premiere.

Like they actively hate them. And this is like, oh yeah, we can go for them. Even though it's, I guess it's mainly this new software. where Sweet is mainly geared for, like, social media managers. So Scott Balski was on Dakota just recently, and, like, that's where Adobe lives, right? Like, Adobe is start to finish a commercial operation. Right. Social.

Their big competitors are not necessarily TikTok, although TikTok creates the paradigms for the tools that Adobe has to live in, so they're very aware they need to participate so they know. But their competition is Figma and Canva, right? that you are, you own a flower shop and you want to do some Facebook ads. What tools are you going to use to make your, your Facebook ads? Adobe wants it to be their tools. Right.

Like that's, that's where they live is like, the second you become a business, Adobe's like, 100 bucks a month. Where else are you're going to go? Yep. Like, here we are. And I think that's the line for them, although that whole interview is fascinating because Scott's fascinating. But I do think they're not, they're not chasing teens need to.

to care about Photoshop. They're chasing the second you graduate to, this is revenue. You're going to move to Adobe Stools. Right. But are you going to move to them on your phone? No, you're going to move to them on your iPad. Yeah. But like a less good version than what you can get on a computer.

I don't know. It just feels like they still haven't answered. Like, they still haven't solved the problem. What is a computer, Alex? Yeah. They haven't solved the problem of like the difference between Photoshop and Premiere on a computer or a laptop, excuse me, something with an X-86 processor and mobile-based stuff.

Oh, they saw that problem with a file format called Cloud PSD, which is just a lot. It's a lot. One last software thing, speaking of software updates, actually spare a thought for sysadmins around you because this LogForge bug is, not bug, vulnerability, it's out of control. And I actually don't have any interesting things to say about it.

I'm happy that Cloudflare is like trying to block it off at a system level there. Yeah, you're happy about it. You're happy that there's a centralized gatekeeper on the internet who's like, we're just going to fix it. Man, that cuts both ways. It's rough, right? But this is one of these levels of catastrophe where it's so big that it's impossible to wrap your head around because it's big, but it's also like slow moving. So there's not like an immediate, like, oh, my God, this thing is broken and I feel it right now or this hack just happened. Like, this was the exact effect of it is this fundamental piece of Java is like broken.

And there's fixes for it, but it's going to take a long time. And in the meantime, it's trivially easy to attack. And so get ready for bad stuff, question mark, period. Yeah. And I will say it's a great time for us to have hired any senior security reporter, Corn Faith. Corn is doing a great job. like literally i was like wow just in the nick of time yeah uh so corin's headline is a log for j's patched the exploits are just getting started right so we'll see but and by the way that this is like

open source contributors choosing to work nights and weekends to fix this thing the internet is a wild place like on the one hand cloud fair is like we'll just stop it like between you and everything is us so we'll stop it and on the other hand it's like we're a loose collection of all volunteers and we'll fix it. Yeah. And like the dynamic between those parts of the internet is, I always think about it when things like this come up. It is under explored, I think.

All right. We should do like two lightning around things. I don't know. I made a bunch of list of stuff here. I personally want to ask why when designing the cyber truck, Elon Musk didn't think of the fact that it would need a windshield wiper. And so instead it has one that's like eight feet long. There's a video of the cyber truck testing.

Yeah. I will say it looks sick. Right. Like it's just, it's a triangle car. I can't, they actually went and built a stainless steel triangle car. Like,

yeah. It's cool. It looks ridiculous. But do you want to drive it? It's like tank wars, but in real life, it's great. The first design was too big,

by the way, so they were always saying we got to scale this down. It's clear they didn't think about what scaling down would mean and like complying with road laws would mean. So even in the scale down version, It's got the three lights across the front that mean it's an extra wide 80-inch car.

Like big pickup trucks have those lights. So it's got those. They didn't think about where to mount the actual headlights. So the headlights are like at the bottom of the, I don't know, you can't even call it a, it's the front of the triangle. Like, I don't know what else you would call it the flat front of the wedge of the car. The lights are at the bottom. It's got side mirrors that look ridiculous. And even Elon and Twitter was like, we have to ship the side mirrors, but, you know,

People can do other things. She means take off the side mirrors. Yeah. Which is a horrible idea. But maybe he could replace them with cameras. And then this wiper, which is just a huge ass wiper, the size of the windshield. And I like, I know he was responding to someone else, but he was like, the wipers is what troubles me the most about the whole triangle car. And it's like, man, that is an incredible list of priorities.

But like, like, I made a triangle car. Here's the problem. the wiper number one on the list. And it's like, there are many other question marks. Yeah. I've been saying this to Andy and Sean are transportation reporters for a while. Like we are just in this incredible vaporware moment with EVs. Yeah.

Everything is vapor. And so the cyber truck was extremely vapor for a while. It's cool to see it running around on a track. But you see all of the problems from the initial design to reality expressed in this video, including this wiper. And the wiper, it just looks flatly ridiculous. It just feels like it's getting more and more to that Homer Simpson designed car. No, you know.

Like, I'm just waiting for the 64 ounce cup holder. The Homer did not have a vision. This thing has a vision, and it's what if the triangle was a car? Slightly better vision. I love it. Everyone should watch this video. That's great. Okay.

Last thing in the lightning round. We touched on this, I believe, before, but the fight between the FCC and the FAA over 5G at airports has gotten, like, to the point. point where they're just like sniping at each other. So this list. So a bunch of ex-FCC commissioners wrote a letter being like the FAA is dumb. Yeah. Here's the list. Tom Wheeler, Democrat. Meadun, Clyburn, Democrat. Julie Shinakowski, Democrat, Ajit Pye, Michael Powell. Like, you've got, like, it's just nuts. Like, these are people who do not agree with each other. Like, literally people who reversed each other's policies at the FCC's immediately upon taking

office. And they're all saying the FAA is overstepping their authority. The FAA position threatens to derail the reasoned conclusions reached by the FCC after years of technical analysis and study. Nuts. Yeah. And this is the FAA saying that like 5G will destroy planes? They're saying it'll make it harder for certain systems to automatically land the plane under certain conditions. Yes, there's an FAA study starting 5G interference with altimeters. But the argument is that many other countries have already approved this radio equipment in these bands, the spectrum bands. There's a great quote from Harold Feld from public knowledge, old friend of the verge. And he's like, either physics works differently in the United States or the report at

the center of this controversy needs to explain why interference hasn't shown up in any other country. Maybe it does work different here. You know, honestly, here at the end of 2021, you could probably convince me of that. We'll be able to see. Birds aren't real. Yeah. All right.

This is a good one. Yeah. For the last of the year. We haven't complained at all about the fact that Toyota is making remote start from a key fob part of a subscription service. I think cellular radios were a mistake. Anytime you add a radio on a chip, someone is like, what if you pay me some money every month? That's the future of all technology. Soon to be the future of, you know, like what was the last thing?

Your refrigerator. Like anything where there's like a server on the other end that might do stuff, they're like, what if we, you, paid us to use the server. Yeah. It's going to happen. That's my prediction for 2022. Rebellion against the services revenue. My prediction is no more software features for the whole year.

Oh, it would be so great. It would be so great if your prediction was right and mine was wrong. That's my hope for you. Anyway, it's been a great year. We turned 10 this year. Thank you all for participating. We're going to take a couple weeks off. I hope you get some rest.

Good to hang out with your families. You can send us nice tweets at the end of year if you want to. Dieter is at Bacelon. Alex is Alex H. Cranes. Lauren is at Lauren Grush. I'm at Reckless. We'd love to hear from you. I want to call it just a handful of stories right at the end here.

Sean O'Kane, congratulations, Sean. He just took a big job at Bloomberg, but he has his last big feature about an EV startup. They're all vapor. I'm telling you. Evie startup called Chanji with Jay, change with Jay. It's really good. It starts with ayahuasca, and it just like goes from there. We ran a great story about sneaking to the board.

Ape Yacht Club party. It's just really good. It's an incredible story. You have to go read it. It reads like old school 90s tech writing, if you know what I'm talking about. It's just got a vibe to it. It's really fun. And then Jen, who we mentioned earlier, wrote three gigantic pieces on Matter, the new

standard. She did a Vergecast with Dieter about it. It's great. It's really fun. Tony Fidel is like all over the big feature, just excitedly talking about how he had the right idea because thread was his idea. It's A plus. Definitely worth reading.

Okay. we've got a couple more decoders in the year but other than that the verge cast is off uh so we'll see you in 2022 that's it rock and roll happy new year