The Vergecast - Kanye wants Parler, smartwatch showdown, and the Vergecast Hotline returns

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Today on the flagship podcast of slightly inaccurate fitness trackers: 02:15 - David Pierce and Makena Kelly chat about Ye buying Parler, as well as the other new set of apps and app owners entering the space.  Kanye West is buying ‘free speech platform’ Parler The ugly business logic behind Kanye West’s Parler acquisition 24:44 - Victoria Song and Dan Seifert return to the show for a smartwatch showdown between the Pixel Watch, the Apple Watch Series 8, and the Samsung Galaxy Watch. Google Pixel Watch review: it’s a smarter Fitbit Apple Watch Series 7 review: time and time again Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 review: if it only had a better battery We could all use a ‘This is Fine’ Focus mode 1:02:07 - Lastly, we return to the Vergecast Hotline to answer your burning tech questions. Fitbit Sense 2 review: it doesn’t make much sense 1:14:55 - We explain why we still don't have chapters on The Vergecast Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of slightly inaccurate fitness trackers. I'm your friend David Pierce, and let me just tell you about the day I'm having. So on Sunday night, we get home from being away for the weekend and we go to bed. And then at about 11 or so, we get a knock on the door from a police officer. Turns out, a tree fell on our car. Now it's three days later. There's still a tree on our car. The road's still closed.

And I'm standing here staring at it, wondering if I could just pick it up and lift it off my car myself. I'm not supposed to because it's technically hung up on a power line, but I feel like I could do it, you know? Anyway, enough about me. We have a great show coming up today. McKenna Kelly is going to come on and explain why Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, might be buying Parlor. And we're going to check in on all of the other conservative-leaning social apps like TruthSsocial and Getter and Rumble and try to figure out what's going on with them. Then later, Dan Seafurt and Victoria's Song are going to help me figure out whether the Pixel Watch, Apple Watch, or Galaxy Watch is truly the best smart watch. out there. And then we've got some great questions on the Vergecast hotline, so we're going to

answer as many of those as we can as well. All that is coming up, but first, I'm going to go try and lift this tree. Wish me luck and pray that I don't throw out my back or electrocute myself to death. This is the Vergecast. We'll see in a sec. 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 Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar 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. Welcome back. So Monday morning this week brought what I would argue is the single most 2022 news story of all time, maybe even possible.

Kanye West, now known as Yeh, is apparently buying Parlor, the conservative-leaning social media network. So we have Yeh owning Parlor, Elon Musk owning Twitter, Donald Trump owning Truth Social. There's this whole new set of apps and app owners entering the social space, and it feels like it's all getting very weird in real time. Parlor's pitch basically is that it is uncancelable and a fight against censorship. That's also the pitch you'll hear from Truth Social and Rumble and even the way that Musk increasingly describes Twitter. But is that pitch actually working? It doesn't feel to me like any of these apps, obviously, except for Twitter, have really hit mainstream. But are they headed that way?

McKenna Kelly has been tracking the progress of these sites and apps as they try to take on the Twitters and Facebooks and TikToks of the world. So let's try to see where they are. Hi, McKenna. Hi, it's good to be here. Let's start by talking about parlor. There's a bunch of like different apps and services I want to talk about. But Parlor's in the news because it's maybe possibly, I would argue, probably not going to be owned by yay, formerly Kanye West at some point. But in reading about this, Parlor's been through sort of a weird year.

I feel like everybody knows it as like the conservative-leaning social media app. But it seems like from your reporting that that's not really what it wants to be anymore. Right. Yesterday I ended up talking to a bunch of sources who told me that Parlor has been trying. Now Parliament Technologies. They rebranded about a month ago after they acquired something called Dynoscale and were pivoting towards more cloud services internet infrastructure business rather than social media. But over the last couple of weeks, they've been trying to offload parlor. It is a failing social media network.

No one really uses it anymore. And they see more of a business need and a market need with uncancellable cloud services for other online businesses. is. So, and this has been a thing for a while, right? Because, like, I think back to even the, there was, like, the controversy about, like, the Chans and, like, the Daily Stormer and this question of, like, who actually is in charge of moderating this stuff and what should be allowed on, you know, AWS versus what should cloud for allow. And we had these, like, big, long conversations. And it seems like, it doesn't strike me as a totally crazy idea to be the company that will, like, host and prop up and support these other companies and that, like, this is the kind of thing that this universe of social

apps really needs. Like as business pivots go, this one actually makes a lot of sense to me. And it's been happening for a while. So I would take a look at Parlor did this, you know, made this pivot last month, but there's also companies like Wright Forge that have sprung up to fill this need. And then also Rumble as well has been working on cloud services and even like payment processing and things like that. So even before, you know, this turn this year with Parlor, people had been seeing that maybe the social media in market for alternative apps is a little saturated. There's too many people. We can't compete. So now there's this other adjacent market opening up with cloud services.

That's interesting. And I want to come back to that because I think the sort of broader market here is really interesting. But in Parlor's case, the joke going around was right that it's like Eon Musk and Twitter and Yeh and Parlor. But the difference is that Yay probably paid like $45 for Parlor because by all accounts, this thing has not succeeded, right? Like is this app working in any way? One of the prospective buyers that I spoke to yesterday told me when they were looking

at the records and the numbers for Parlor, they had about 50,000 daily active users, which is extremely anemic compared to, I think, Twitter's last quarterly earnings report said it was about, like, they had about 230 million. So compare 230 million to 50,000 daily active users. And Twitter is one that is like not a smashing success story. So it's like, that's bleak. Okay. Why isn't it working? Like, what is the problem with Parlor? The problem with Parlor, I think, is a little bit twofold. The platform launched a in 2018 as one of the original censorship-free, free speech platforms to come out of the Trump administration in this Donald Trump first big tech culture war that brewed during, you know,

his presidency. They were fine, but it also led to other groups announcing other competing services. You have Gap, Gettor, Rumble, all of these places, alternative ways for them to, you know, find, I guess, the same service, right? But when it comes to Parlor, Parlor was one of the platforms that was effectively de-platform last year entirely after the January 6th riots. So Apple took it down, Google Play Store took it down, AWS took down its website. And it wasn't until May that parlor was then reinstated on the App Store. And it wasn't even until September, like a few weeks ago, that parlor got back on the Google Play Store. Which, of course, has tremendously more users globally than Apple's App Store, right?

So this company really suffered from being deplatformed. And at the same time, when I say this is a twofold thing, the second part is, oh, my gosh, all of a sudden there's truth social coming up this year. There's more, you know, bigger name competitors in this space than Parlor. And Parlor just completely missed out on that wave. Yeah. So it seems to me, and you pay a lot more attention to this space than I do. I feel like I sort of like where I am with these apps, which is like latently aware that

they exist, but I don't spend a lot of time on them. but it seems like the one that has like crept into not quite mainstreamness, but something much bigger than just like a handful of angry band Twitter users is Rumble. Like Rumble, which is basically like a YouTube competitor in sort of this same like free speech uncancellable vein you're talking about, it's the one that seems to be working the best. Is that fair? Is that your experience to you? I think Rumble is the one to make the easiest case about, for example, like earlier,

was it just a couple weeks ago, Rumble went public. Like they IPOed, which is. crazy because none of these other platforms have done that. When we talk about Rumble, why I think it's probably the most successful. And I think Getter arguably is also like the second most successful compared to Rumble. You got to look at, you know, how they're trying to monetize the service and how they're getting people on. Of course, with Rumble, you have folks like Russell Brand, big names that they're getting on to sign exclusive deals for shows that, you know, people in this area of the internet, this ecosystem on the internet really admire and listen to, right? I think Russell Brand used to have a

YouTube show. I think he might have been the platform, not entirely sure there. And then also with Getter, getter has also been good about getting influencers on the platform and incentivizing them to use it. Getter as well has a video component now over the summer. It launched its vision service, which is technically TikTok, but for conservatives, I haven't spent too much time with that. But they're growing in different ways like that. But when you look at Parlor, Parlor, Parlor just really didn't, I guess, give like the right deals to get people on the platform. You look at the sum of the exclusives that it has, and it's Benny Johnson, a contributor to Turning Point USA, has like a show called The Left Camp meme. And arguably, it's one of the most cringe

things I've ever watched in my entire life. And I think the audience for it doesn't really even exist. And they're probably over the age of 60 and they aren't even on Parlor. So that's kind of where we are with that. And the other thing is, I just want to go and talk about truth. Truth has one big user, and that's Donald Trump. Right. So a lot of these come down to exclusivity with content and who's really winning and attracting the most influential people onto the platforms. Interesting.

Because the next thing I was going to ask you is like, do you think this idea of conservative focused social media is even a thing? We're like several years into this pitch for a lot of these companies now. But it almost sounds like what you're saying. I feel like what you just described is not social networks, but like streaming services. And we're now in like a Spotify versus Apple Music war, but for like conservative radio hosts, as opposed to like maybe they don't need to try and get Twitter scale. They're just trying to be like entertainment platforms like Fox News but on the internet, right?

Like is that where all this is going? I think it's important to note that a lot of the platforms, these alt ones that are, I guess you can say, succeeding in air quotes, have a wider user base. just conservatives. So look at Rumble. Rumble recently struck a deal with Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate being that guy who's like a manosphere, very sexist, misogynistic content creator who was kicked off of TikTok, Instagram, et cetera, and found a home on Rumble. Now that is an inherently, you know, conservative political content more as it is like this misogynistic lifestyle content, right? So that's finding a home on Rumble. You look at Getter, Gettor also has a huge

base in Brazil, in the UK. They're actively onboarding users and countries all across the world and not just focusing on the U.S. users. And I think that's part of the reason why they've been successful. They're kind of growing the space past politics. And of course, it's taking them a little bit longer to grow maybe and really see the headlines that we see with like parlor being D platform, all this crazy stuff during the Trump administration. But I do think they are, you know, in the middle of a slow leak globally. Okay. Well, what's interesting about that, that though. It's like Andrew Tate's actually a really interesting example, right? Because it's like guy with a big audience, these other platforms decided they didn't want on their platform anymore.

And so if I'm one of these networks, like it makes absolute sense to me that somebody like Rumble, right, who promotes itself as like against, you know, censorship and cancellation and pro free speech, it's like that actually strikes me as like a match made in heaven. But in reality, there aren't actually that many of those people. And there are very few of those people who have like real big audiences. So I guess part of what I'm trying to figure out is, like, does this idea scale past that sort of small handful of people that everybody cares about, right? Like, obviously Trump is sort of the biggest example of, like, massively famous person. A lot of people care very much about who was kicked off of these other platforms. Like, it makes sense that there is a set of people who would go wherever he is.

Same goes for Andrew Tate. Same goes for like this other handful of people. But that only gets you so far, right? I don't know. It only does get you so far. But at the same time, I look at the Elon. I got to think, like, Twitter isn't real life, right? This is the cornerstone of this beat.

So you see how folks react to Elon. He has so many fan boys, fan girls. And that came across, you know, those grew out of, I guess, just Elon being Elon. But in the early days, this, you know, kind of progressive virtue of combating climate change with Tesla and all that stuff. So he's finding himself in the same boat, maybe not the same life boat off the Titanic, but an adjacent one, a separate one, coming off of this like, kind of cultural moment that we're in. It's Elon Musk people. Kanye West now, you know, buying parlor. This is somebody who has been in culture for a very long time, one of the most famous rappers, you know, married to Kim Kardashian at one point in time, who is the biggest influencer,

social media user of all time. I don't want to. I think it's very easy to say as reporters, as people in the media, that these are failing platforms like parlor, getter, et cetera. But at the same time, you look at the people who are hawking to this, who feel a lack of control in their own personal narrative online, whether it be Kanye, Elon, whoever, who jump to these things in order to claim that narrative back. And I think now that this is a trend, right, with Trump and Truth Social, Elon Musk with Twitter, and now Kanye with Parlor, even though Parlor is anemic and awful and terrible, I think it does set an example. And even if we aren't in a place right now where these companies are profitable and successes, I think this is giving. them all a sense of, I don't know, legitimacy over the past couple weeks. Yeah, no, that makes total sense. And I guess, and this comes back to the cloud services thing, too, is, right? It seems like what is increasingly happening is we're just getting different sort of full stack silos.

But then that comes back to this idea that, like, the unifying thing is these two app stores. And it's Google and Apple have just a gigantic amount of control. And there's just nothing, any of these apps, no matter how you feel about it, can do about that fact, right? And it's like, as we talk about even TikTok, in China. Like the companies that have the most influence there are the ones who run the app stores because they ultimately get to decide based on whatever they feel like, whether these things live or die. And we've seen the effect when they get kicked out, what happens next.

But then there was this thing recently where like, I think Truth Social just recently got back into the Play Store. And there's been, like you said, all these issues with Parlor over the course of this year. What's your sense of where all of that is headed? Like can these, can these platforms stay on the right side of the app stores? Do we want them to? Are they going to? What's your sense? The way that I view this is mostly that the Trump fight with big tech has created this small, albeit small, but mighty group of people who want nothing to do with the mainstream platforms. And albeit it, it's growing into the mainstream economy, right? And you see right-leaning folks launching conservative, anti-woke credit cards, banks.

Now, a lot of these things have failed. But I think back to, I think it was a Dan Bonjino company, a company. months ago that tried to copyright the phrase, quote, parallel economy. So there's movement and there's definitely money. I don't know how much money on the right to build out an alternative economy to that with which, you know, most people engage in, whether it's Visa, MasterCard. We saw the blow up with PayPal the other week about their misinformation policies and things like that. That's just all getting blown over into this separate bucket of these people who feel disenfranchised by the mainstream media, mainstream economy, et cetera. And so right now,

is it a competitor? I don't think so. I don't think it's probably going to make that much money, but it's gaining steam. And the more that we see folks like, yay, Kanye West and all these big name people putting a lot more money, whether it's money or just attention to this, I do think it does have the possibility to grow, especially with the internet the way it is, right? Like people who want this information, who want to know about Kanye West, and want to know about these things. They know where to find it. And they know that they can find other, you know, adjacent platforms to use. I can find these things. I don't know. I just, at this time, it's like these platforms have been around for not so long. Parlor was 2018. A lot of things cropped up in 2020, 2020, 2021.

But there is a lot of money behind it. Like, there's a lot of investment firms and things like that, the IPO that I can't like turn a blind eye. I think it's wrong to turn a blind eye. I think that there is accountability necessary for these things. But at the same time, you don't want to give them too much credence. It's an interesting moment, I agree, because it's like there is enough going on in this space that it feels like something substantial is happening there, but it's hard to figure out. Like, if you asked me to, like, pick a winner between, you know, Gab, Parlor and Truth Social, and then even, like, the me-wees of the world, I feel like anyone who would guess the answer would be just lying. Like, we're all just kind of making it up. And there's so much, like,

sameness in all of these. And what I think is going to be fascinating, I was just looking at, like, censor tower, which tracks a lot of the app downloads. And Parlor had a big jump after the, the yay thing was announced, which on the one hand makes sense because it's in the news. People are always going to download stuff when it's in the news. But also, like, you're right. He is this, like, massively famous presence who probably will draw some number of people to him wherever he goes.

And that right now is the best thing that these platforms have going for them. And if they're going to get where they want to go, like, 230 million people aren't on Twitter just for Elon Musk, right? Like some of them probably are. But like you have to get past that before you can really build something of huge substance. And it's going to be really interesting to see if anyone can get there at that kind of scale. It's also important to note that I think Kanye had less than 100 followers on Parlor. He set up his account last week.

Last time I checked earlier this morning, it was less than 16,000. That is so small compared to I think it was like the 30 million he had on Twitter. His reach is so small. And so when it comes like the motivation behind. the sale, albeit like, who knows how much they sold it to Kanye for or want to sell it to Kanye for, or if they even plan on sending it to Kanye, because no, nothing's been signed. Maybe this is just a whole publicity stunt to raise the price of Parlor and get it off to someone else who can do it.

I mean, I was talking to prospective buyers, and they just called the number that Parliament was asking as, like, absurd. It was just too high, not even near the price that they would be willing to pay for it, right? And so either Kanye got duped into spending a lot of money for this. Or he got it for like a $2 bill and a handshake, you know, to make it like look good. And hopefully, maybe later he dips out. Who knows? Do all these folks see the Elon owned Twitter as like an existential threat to this entire thing?

Because if he does some of the stuff that he said he's going to do reinstate Trump, way reduce the terms of service, make the rules much more lax for people to post on there. That seems like take the thing that those people like about the platforms they already have, add 230 million users. and suddenly that's going to be the one that a lot of these folks would pick, right? Like, if Elon does buy Twitter, do a lot of these things just sort of die on the vine as a result? Maybe. But you look at the news this morning that Kanye intends to have dinner with Trump this week. Kanye is going to make a truth social account and he's going to invite Trump on parlor. Okay. So what does this mean, right?

So what does this mean? It's very clear. And I've been hearing this from sources in like the Republican, you know, right-wing online ecosystem for a while that they, don't even care about who ends up being the winner. They just want an opportunity to show that they are a powerful force, right? They want to be able to influence the mainstream media. And whether that's, you know, combining into one major platform, sure, maybe. Or maybe it's just drawing the attention of all of these, you know, celebrities who do have weight and who do have large audiences to show them that, hey, actually, mainstream culture isn't like Hollywood progressive. It's also us, right?

You can always ask whether or not it's true. I doubt it's true. It's a very false narrative. But it seems like that's kind of the more of the angle that they're pushing. And they have so much money. Look at the Republican investors. Look at Rebecca Mercer. All these folks, Peter Thiel now, they have so much money to throw at these things in just a bid for cultural influence and cultural relevancy.

And I think that's the major narrative here. You know, if you peel away all of like the little tit for tat company versus company, it really comes down to hoping to influence this like progressive, leftist, whatever culture that they see as, you know, encompassing the United States. Totally. Yeah. And it's, it's an interesting question whether what you need is sort of one gigantic player or if you can do it with kind of a lot of different slices of the pie. We've never really seen that work in social. Like it's been very hard to be a small social network over time. So it's going to be interesting to see if anybody in that space can pull it off.

what are you looking at towards the midterms? We're two weeks out from an election. This is all bubbling kind of as political conversation is reaching this like crazy fever pitch ahead of the midterms. What are you looking at and looking for as you poker on all these platforms? What I think is most important to bring in this discussion is the stakes. There are a lot of stakes here with whoever wins the Senate, whoever wins the House, you know, whoever has control of these things.

Because if, you know, Democrats are able to maintain their majorities or Republicans, end up taking the House, which is what it seems like likely, this is going to have a lot of effects on the way that social media is regulated or not regulated under the rest of the Biden administration. So I can imagine, you know, if we have Democrats somehow maintaining their majority in the House, maintaining a majority in the Senate, they would probably pursue, you know, a greater data privacy framework, maybe get that through. That, of course, is a Biden administration priority.

Hopefully they'd be able to get G.G. Sone confirmed. who is the FCC nominee who has... I'm talking about that for decades, it feels like... I know, because she was nominated almost two years ago and has not gotten the seat. So the FCC is like just total lame duck. And now if the Republicans, you know, are even able just to take back the house,

there's going to be so many investigations into like the Hunter Biden laptop. There's going to be investigations into perhaps like taking a more tougher look at TikTok rather than U.S. companies and just kind of putting the, US companies to the side and targeting like TikTok and other foreign-based entities. So there's a lot at stake about like the future over the next two years. And I think it's very critical at a time when

we've spent like the last five years since 2016, frankly, debating these issues that they're finally garnering enough steam and with bills that are actually moving places. Like a merger filing fee actually got passed like a couple weeks ago. So big tech would have to like pay more of a fee in order to acquire nascent competitors. Like that actually is change. So we're starting to get this momentum. them. And I think, depending on who's in charge, somebody's going to hit the brakes or someone's going to hit the accelerator. And that's mainly what I'm looking for. Fair enough. All right. Well, we're going to have more chances over the next few weeks to talk about all of that. But thank you. And if you see anything cool on Rumble, you know, let me know. Always searching Rumble.

All right. Thanks for Kenna. All right. Bye. Okay. We need to take a break. But then we are going to come back and try to sort through all of the smart watches that have been launched this year and try to figure out once and for all, which one's the best. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

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In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Welcome back. It's been a huge year for smartwatches. All the phone announcements we got this year were relatively normal and like fine, but not that

interesting. But there is so much interesting stuff happening in the smartwatch world. And really, there are three at the end of the day that matter the most. There's the Apple Watch Series 8, the Pixel Watch, and the Galaxy Watch 5. Those are the flagship smartwatches, the ones that most people are probably choosing between. To some extent, which watch you use is governed by which phone you have. But let's pretend just for the sake of this segment that that's not the case. Which of these smartwatches is actually the best?

I brought in Dan Sefert and Victoria Song, who are the two most smartwatchy people I know to help me figure it out. Time to talk watches. Victoria, hello. Hello. Dan, hello. Hello. We have reviewed many watches. So many watches.

You both have all the watches, right? Do we all have all the watches? More watches than wrists. Yeah, I don't know what the watch per wrist capita is at my house, but it's... It's over one, for sure. It's like, what, 400 to 1 or... 400 to 2, because I only have two wrists, so yeah. So I didn't tell either of you this, but we have a little game to play, basically.

So I came up with a bunch of categories, which I would say are the things that make up a good smart watch. And we're going to go through each of them and decide between the pixel watch, the Galaxy watch and the Apple watch. And if you have like a weird, crazy wild card you want to throw in, knock yourself out. And we're just, we're going to try to lay out what is best at what. And then at the end, if there is an obvious winner, great. We don't all have to agree. We're just going to talk about it and see where we land. So first I'm going to tell you the categories and you can tell me if there's anything really obvious that I'm missing. Here are all the ones I wrote down. You ready?

Ready? I have best assistant, best for computer things, which I have to be like reminders and smart home and like doing all the little like one touch stuff you want to do. on your phone. Battery life, best looking, plays best with other devices, and you can define that however you'd like to. Best for regular fitness people, best for super fitness people, and best overall. Those are my categories. How do we feel? Are we going into specific models within these categories? Because the answers are different if I have to like consider the ultra versus the regular series eight versus the SE. Same for the Galaxy Watch 5 pro versus the standard Galaxy Watch 5. So there's only one pixel watch.

Yeah, there's only one pixel watch. That's actually good. So we're going to do, for the sake of this discussion, the ones that are most comparable to the pixel watch. So it's probably the Apple Watch Series 8 and the regular Galaxy Watch and the Pixel Watch. Otherwise, everything just gets too crazy and too complicated. Someday we'll, like, do a Galaxy Watch Pro versus Apple Watch Ultra from like the top of a mountain and it'll be amazing. But for now, let's just, yeah, we'll do the sort of basic run of the mill. I assume all three of those are going to be the most popular in their line, so that feels like an okay one for us to do.

I got two proposed questions. Hit me. Comfort and like band compatibility slash options. Yes. Okay. And then I guess the only category I would suggest is like advanced health features because health and wellness tracking versus fitness tracking, they are different things. Ooh, okay. I'm good at that.

Let's just dive into this in, I would say, relatively no particular order. best looking of the three of them. I feel like this is this is going to be a tricky one. Pixel watch for me. Yeah, I'm going to go with pixel watch as well, even though I think it's too small. Okay, this is not a tricky one. I also agree. I think they just like they did the thing. That's like what a watch is supposed to look like. It looks very pretty. Like, I think it's distinct enough that it doesn't look like it's trying to ape an analog watch, which I think the Galaxy watch suffers from a little bit. Like, I don't think the Apple watch is very pretty at all. I think it's very functional and comfortable or whatever, but the square shape is just, you know, a lot of

people complain about that. So I think that the Pixel Watch nails that. And it is like a nice felt size that tapers and the curves make it hide whatever size it has really well. So I don't know. I think I dig the look. Yeah. I would agree with that. And it looks modern.

You know, it's sort of, I don't know, Samsung's watches are really nice looking out of the box. That's true. but it is not what I would call, like, elegant. Like, you kind of need to dress it up a bit with straps, and it's the same thing for the Apple Watch. Just out of the box, the Apple Watch is like, hello, tiny wrist calculator computer on your wrist. I mean, it's nice, but you have to buy a really nice strap to kind of dress it up,

whereas I actually think that the Pixel Watch's default band. It looks really pretty. Just it does. And then if you've seen the mesh straps, like the metal mesh straps, It is gorgeous. I was in the hands-on like, oh, my God. I really want this. And then I saw the price and I was like, no, okay, it's fine.

Yeah, I was going to say, it's really nice. It's stupid expensive, but it's really nice. All right. Well, then I think, yeah, I think we're all in agreement. For me, it's like, it's just the right amount of watchy, like you said, Dan. It's not trying to do some of the things that, like, the fossils of the world have done where they try to, like, sneak technology into a regular watch. Like, look like a smart watch.

That's okay. And the pixel watch does do that. But it also doesn't look like. they shrunk an iPhone and put a band on it and put it on your wrist, which is like the Apple Watch is a very nice device, but it is you would never mistake it for anything other than what it is. And I feel like the Pixel Watch walks that line very well. Okay, three points for the Pixel Watch.

Big day. I don't know if we're actually keeping score, but I'm just going to write all these down. Related to that is best wearability. So this is the one, Dan, you just brought up this mix of like comfort on your wrist and also the like band and accessory ecosystem, all of the stuff you can put on when you put it on. Apple Watch.

So I think for comfort, they're all the same. They're all pretty comfortable. And I think what impacts the comfort most is which strap you choose on it. And out of the box, if you were, we were just go to like the default one you pick up off the shelf, they all come with very similar rubbery sport straps that all feel basically the same. So then it becomes like, well, which one can you customize the easiest? And that, I think the pixel watch is instantly disqualified because it has.

the fewest number of strap options, and they are using a proprietary mount. And it's brand new, so there's no third-party options or whatever. And they're very expensive. Google, for some reason, made all of these very expensive. Yeah, and I like leather watch straps for my straps, and the leather ones are just really not that great. So pixel watch is disqualified. The other ones aren't either.

No, like, I've got this, they sent me the woven one, and I really have to stress. So, like, there's two kind of fabricy ones for the pixel watch, and one is, like, the stretchy one that they were, like, all gung-ho about. during the presentation. And then this is this woven one, which they're like, oh yeah, this woven one is here too. And it is stiff. It is light as a feather, stiff as a board.

Like exactly that. It's really weird feeling. Like, it looks fine, but it feels odd. Yeah. And like the way you secure the bands onto your wrist itself, they're weird. It's got this button and I don't like it. So then you gotta like compare this Samsung and the Apple Watch.

And Samsung has an advantage in that they use a standard watch pin size that's been around for ages. It's super easy to, you can walk into like almost any watch store or on Amazon super easily, find a strap design that you like that will fit this watch very easily. And then the Apple Watch, because it's been a market leader for so long, basically has the same scenario because so many third-party options exist for it. You can buy one of Apple's watch straps, which are really nice. I think they're really all overpriced and you should just go find a third-party option,

but you do have like a wide variety of options there. So it's a little bit of a toss-up between the two. I think that because the Samsung is round and uses a standard watch strap, it's a little bit easier to get that watch style look from it compared to the Apple Watch. Tell me why you shook your head when Dan was describing the standard watch sizes. Because that's also, I would give it to Samsung for the exact reason he just described, that it just works with watch bands, which seems like insane that not others do this. Yeah, so I'm going to go with the fact that it is much easier to slide on an Apple Watch strap,

third party or not because like I really don't think it's hard to get a third party one that makes it look you know you can dress it up there's bracelet types there's leather types there's metal types they're out there I can't tell you how many manicures I've ruined just trying to change the pins and because you know that's part of doing a smart watch review just how easy is it to swap out the pins and they're so small I have broken so many nails on it and I do my own manicures so it's just like ah do I spent so much time on that Yeah. I agree that the Apple Watch, if you are the type of person that's going to switch their strap any more than once a month, the Apple Watch is just so much easier. Yeah. And if you're doing fitness stuff, right? I don't know if you've ever seen Alex Cranz's most disgusting leather strap that she wore for a very long time. If you do any sort of fitness and you don't have a leather strap with a silicone underside, you have to switch that thing out for like hygiene reasons. It gets real nasty. That picture haunts my dreams. It's so disgusting. Anyway. All right. Okay. You've talked to me. to it. Yeah, I think if it was just banned ecosystem, I think it's

Samsung by a mile, even though it is definitely true that there are like a million great Etsy stores that will sell you very good Apple Watch bands. That is definitely true. But I think you're right. For like day-to-day wearableness, it's probably the Apple Watch. Oh, and I got to mention the Pixel Watch's proprietary band mechanism

requires a degree in physics to learn how to use. You're saying it's not like twisting on a camera lens, whatever that means? Yeah. I mean, you saw me in the office just losing my mind trying to figure out the trick to it. Once you figure out the trick, it's like, oh, I'm an idiot. This is really easy and satisfying to click into place, but learning it and like it clicking into your hand, into your head rather, there were Google reps at the demo who are like, just give me a second. I'm going to figure this out. So it's sort of like,

uh-uh. It feels a bit over-engineered. Yeah. That's so weird coming from Google. The next category, I have a feeling this is going to be the one we get through the quickest and agree on the fastest, is best virtual assistant. So we have Bixby, we have Google Assistant, and we have Siri. It's just Google Assistant, right? We don't even need to talk about this. I disagree. Really? It's Bixby.

No, I'm saying it's not Bixby. I think, and this is like highly contextually specific, I think that Siri on the watch is better than Google Assistant on the Internet. Android watches. And the main reason is it's so much easier to use. And for the things that I use Siri on my watch for, it's actually very good at. The things that Siri's not good at is, like, figuring out how tall the Eiffel Tower is or other random facts or whatever. Like, it's, it consistently fails at that. And, like, that doesn't change. But I don't really ask my watch that very often. The things I ask for on my watch are to set timers, to turn on and off my lights and to like set an alarm or I ask at the weather maybe or I send a message.

And all of those things work really well with Siri. And all I have to do is hold it up to my mouth and start speaking and it instantly transcribes it and does the thing really quickly. Whereas with the Google Assistant or Hey, G, I have to say, hey, gee, wait for it to like react and know that it's listening, speak what I want to speak and then have it do it, which always has a longer processing time. So for me, it's Siri on the watch is actually a better experience. So there's like a theoretical universe that exists in which I completely agree with everything that you just said.

But my experience with Siri is that Siri just full fails about 40% of the time. I pull the thing up like you said. It's great user interface. Pull it up to my mouth. Say the thing. You know, I use it for like reminders a ton. Just like anything that comes into my brain, just like it goes into reminders. And truly like two out of five times, it doesn't even finish the process.

It just goes like one moment, still working. And then it says, I'm sorry. I'm like, I already forgot what I wanted to. I get that on home pods all the time. But on my watch, it like is way more reliable. And what I experience with the Google Assistant is it doesn't hear me say, hey, gee. Like I have to say that like three times for it to like grab it. And the watch has to be like awake.

So I have to do the motion. I have to say the thing. I have to make sure it's heard me say the thing. And then I have to say my command. So it's like the whole process of it just like turns me off to it. That's so funny because I use the digital assistant. sense on the watch in a completely different manner. I never use the wake words. I always, you know, do the hard, quoted shortcut. It's just way more reliable for me. But also, the reason why I'm going

to give the Google Assistant the win here is that it understands me better and just in general is able to understand ethnic names better, which is relevant to my life when I'm like, hey, send emo a text. And emo is aunt in Korean and Siri is like, I don't know who Imo is. And it's like, okay. Okay. Thank you. Does not, like, I had a friend who had a Japanese name in the past, and I was like, send SEIA a text. And they would be like, there's no one with that name in your actual context looks. So I would have to say, send CIA a text. So, like, using Google Assistant in that sense is a lot easier of my life. The natural language understanding is just better. But I just think Siri thinks I mumble, which is very rude. Well, I mean, it's two against one, right? So, like, I mean, Google Assistant wins this, right? I guess we're doing it that way. Yeah, Google Assistant technically wins that round. So good, good job, Google Assistant. Dan, congratulations on being, like, the one person on Earth who, like, Siri gets. That feels like it's like a meaningful moment for you. On a related note, and Dan, you brought this up a little bit. The next category is the best at computer things.

My big theory about smart watches is they're very good at doing all the things that take you three taps on your phone, right? where it's like changing your lights or setting reminders or quickly like texting a thumbs up emoji to your friend or whatever. I weirdly would have guessed for me that this would be the same answer as assistant, but I made them two separate things because I actually think the Apple Watch is better at those things than the Pixel Watch because mostly because it has more apps. Like there's just more stuff I can do on it. Exactly.

Same reason. I fully agree. I think the voice assistant has a little bit part of it there. but fundamentally I can use the apps that I use on my computer all the time, more likely on my wrist with the Apple Watch than I can with the Google Watch. There's just way more app ecosystem. It supports way more smart home devices. It supports way more like different to-do list apps. So you can basically choose whichever one you prefer. It's going to have an Apple Watch version and it will have a good complication for it and things like that. So if you want to see your upcoming

to-dos or your upcoming appointments or whatever, the complication systems are way more built out so that the watch face is more customizable to show you the information that you care most about than you can get on either Samsung or Google's watch. I'm going to agree with that, especially since I think one of the most underappreciated things you can use an Apple watch for is as a two-factor authentication or just that kind of device. It has made my life so easy just to pull up one password, just released an Apple Watch update, and it is like, wow, you mean I can just pull up my Octa password super easily? Amazing. This is great for work.

But getting apps onto the Apple Watch is seamless. You know, Google's been fragmented for so long that it's like different watches getting the apps on there. It's not always the same experience. And it's same for Samsung and for the Pixel Watch. It's just they're not terrible. it's just Apple does it better. Yeah, Apple also integrates the watch into the iPhone software a lot closer and tighter. So like now with Iowa 16 and watchOS 9, you can have a different watch face show up for your work focus versus your personal focus.

So like you can have a real chill one for the weekends and then one that's like fully dense with your calendar appointments and to do lists and things like that. And it automatically changes when it comes work time. Whereas like on the Samsung watch or the Google watch, I have to like manually switch between them. if I want to have that kind of functionality. So it just feels more helpful in that kind of context of having a computer on my wrist. And that update was like such a game changer in both iOS 16 and watchOS 9. I have so much fun with it. Like I'm just such a nerd with my focus modes and in the watch.

I believe you've written about it. You should go check it out on theverse.com. V's written about it. It's my, what you call it? This is fine focus mode. I do love that. Everyone should have a this is fine focus mode for when everything is falling apart. But I think we, yeah, we all agree we're giving that one to the App Watch.

So next one is Battery Life. VM, you've tested these things probably most aggressively of the three of us. Is there a clear winner here? It's the Apple Watch. Okay. Apple Watch, Samsung, Samsung, that's how it's going to go. Wait, really? You'd put Pixel below Samsung?

Because Samsung's battery was pretty bleak. It's pretty bleak, but here's the thing. When you wear the Samsung watch for a longer period of time, and, you know, that's one of my blind spots sometimes as a reviewer, because I am, constantly onto the next. But when you do wear the Samsung watch for a longer period of time, the battery life gets better. So that's shocking. It's not that much better, but it gets better. Okay. So Samsung also made forward progress with the Galaxy Watch 5 versus the Galaxy Watch 4.

So like even just the newer model this year has noticeably better battery life. And whereas if you've read V's Pixel Watch review, it's just making it. It's tough. If you have any variety in your routine, you might not have enough battery life by the end of the day. Yeah, just for context, I went on my long run, which was about 55 minutes. I did not use an offline playlist. I just went on the run with the GPS tracking and always on display, just for the run, mind you, because you can do that. And it went down like 25%.

Ooh. Normally on other watches, it's not going to go down 25%. I feel like we do have to set the context here that we are only comparing against these three watches. and there are like Fitbits and garments and all this kind of stuff that will have like way longer battery life than the Apple Watch. We're not saying the Apple Watch is like the best watch battery life. But at these three, it is the most reliable and consistent and predictable. And you will get a longer period of time, especially if you're doing stuff like sleep tracking and wearing it 24 hours a day and stuff like that. You will more reliably experience better, better life on the Apple Watch.

Yeah, that's a good note. I think this is probably the first category for which like if this is the most important thing to you, don't buy any of these. Yeah. Well, you could get the ultra. You could get the ultra. But even still, you could get a garment that's going to last you, like, days and days. You could get a fit that's going to last you days and days. Like, if battery life is, like, your main thing, these are the wrong answer. But they don't do anything. Like, they're great for, like, fitness tracking and, like, workouts and things like that. But if you wanted any of the stuff we just talk about for, like, computer assistant stuff, they are terrible. Like, they're just non-starters for me as someone who, like, prefers that stuff.

So, like, it's a completely different concept to me. Yeah, it's your priorities. A Garmin has the most, I think, smart features of any of the, you know, fitness tracker e-watches. It's not great, Bob. It's just not great. Yeah, there you go. Okay. So we'll give that one of the Apple Watch, but with like, there's like an asterisk next to this one.

This is the not great Bob asterisk. Okay, the next category is plays best with other devices. And you can define this however you'd like, whether it's like. whether it's like type compatibility or like it works with lots of different things, where do we land? Oh, God. They're all bad. Yeah. That was one of the reasons I brought this up.

Yeah. They're all pushing an ecosystem agenda. It's hard because I think you could say Apple because it works with like within the Apple ecosystem really well, with different devices. You have that third party ecosystem that Dan mentioned very, very good. But it's for iPhone users only. So it's kind of a non-starter. But then again, Samsung and the Pixel Watch right now are for Android users only. So what are you going to do there?

And then of the two between the Pixel Watch and the Galaxy watches, it's, I don't know, do you want a choice between Bixby and Google Assistant? Is that a choice that you want to have? Do you want to choose between Samsung Pay and Google Wallet? So you have more choice. It's just whether you want those main functionality choice. So it's, like, they're all bad. I will say if you, if we are simplifying this to like works with the most phones,

because you can't use any of these standalone. You have to pair it to a phone. Even if you get the LTE models, you're still relying on a phone. Works with the most phones is the pixel watch because it will work the same with any Android phone, whether you have a pixel or Samsung phone or what other Android phones are there? A one plus, a nothing phone. Whatever it might be, it'll work the same in that context. the Samsung watches will work with other Android phones, but they will only have certain features available on Samsung phones. So you have to be in the Samsung ecosystem. V-correct me if I'm wrong to get like ECG working on a Samsung watch, whereas the Pixel Watch will work with any Android phone with that feature. And then obviously the iPhone or the Apple Watch only works with iPhones and it has to be paired to an iPhone. You cannot pair it to an iPad. You cannot use it standalone. You have to use it with an iPhone. So in that respect, I would give it to the

pixel watch. But I think V's first point about like, if you aren't using an Apple watch, it works with more things within that ecosystem better than the pixel watch or the Samsung watches. It like you can pair pixel buds to a pixel watch and Samsung buds to a Samsung watch and your AirPods to an Apple watch. But I can connect it to my home kit, home and I can connect it to Apple TV. And there's and like Apple Fitness works well across my Apple TV with my iPad and all this. So like if you're bought into that, it works very well. But if you are not into the Apple ecosystem at all, then the Apple Watch is a non-starter. Yeah. I feel like the tie goes to the Pixel Watch here, just because Android is like a larger ecosystem of more things. And you literally

have to own one device in order for your Apple Watch to work. Yep. And at least Google is giving you some more choices. But I agree. The real answer here is they all suck. And it's like, it's ridiculous that like, like I have an Apple Watch and a Mac and they in no way are useful to each other. What do you mean? You don't you don't unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch? No. You don't use the Mac's notoriously reliable Bluetooth connection to unlock it with your watch. Oh my God. Kill me. It works fine for me. Touch ID on MacBooks, wonderful. Touch ID, huge win on MacBooks. I could type a 65 paragraph password in the amount of time it takes my Apple Watch to unlock my MacBook most of the time. That's so weird. It works so

well for me. That's... I had to turn it off. It was too flaky. Must be nice, V. Must be nice. All right, we're getting this one of the Pixel Watch. We're going to move on. Now we're getting into fitness and health categories. The first one is best for regular fitness people. You're just like, you're a person who wants to like get their steps and make sure they're not dying. Who wins? I'm going to give it to the Pixel Watch. Really? I have reasons for this. It's like so many, so many caveats here because we're talking about the average person, right? So when I think about the average person, I'm thinking about someone who is, you know, looking to increase their activity in a way that's holistic and makes sense. And I have a lot of issues with how Apple does this

obsessive streak and closing your ring stuff. Like, it's great. Don't get me wrong. It's great. It is a bully. Like, my rings are very passive aggressive. Like, I wake up every morning and it's like, it's like, hey, hey, dipshit, you only closed one of your rings yesterday. Maybe, maybe do better today. Maybe. I don't know. You probably can't, but maybe try. That'd be good. I love getting the alert at 7.30 at night. It's like only a 27 minute brisk walk. And it's like Apple Watch, I've been wearing you for seven years. You know I'm not going for that wall.

I've never done this once. Leave me alone. Yeah. So like to get into that, it is a very real thing where Apple will always push you to do more faster, better. And that's not always the best thing for you. Like at one point I was getting into it was like, you need to have 3,000 minutes of exercise to get this month's bed.

And I was like, I will die. I will literally die if you ask me to do that this month. And now you're making me break my streak. And it's very bad for your mental health in a certain respect. And it requires a lot of discipline to not get pulled into that. Whereas, you know, Fitbit used to be like that. It was really kind of similar in a while. But they have since made moves to be a little more holistic that I think are great if you're just new and easily demotivated.

So, like, they use active zone minutes, which is, you know, it's, It's better than this whatever move ring is. Like, whatever. The active zone minutes, you get a certain number of, like, I'll call them points based on your heart rate activity. And it corresponds to the 150 minutes of moderate activity you're supposed to get, according to the American Heart Association. So it's a lot more forgiving. You don't have to get streaks going. You can just look at your weekly average and go, oh, you know what?

I've been really sedentary this week. Let me kick it up this last two days. And that's better than nothing. You have a daily readiness score. So that's going to at least get you thinking about recovery, which is also really important. You're not going to push yourself and demotivate yourself by getting injured. You have stress management that is like not great on the pixel watch compared to the other Fitbits. This is the whole thing.

You can read my Fitbit Sense 2 review and my Pixel Watch review to get the whole picture of it. I'm really mad about it. But at the same time, just overall, I think Fitbit has a smarter, more experienced approach to how to get people to do health and well. illness and Samsung's a non-starter. I think Samsung suffers from, it's a poor copy of whatever Apple is doing. And so like, Apple's is problematic to begin with. And then Samsung tries to clone it, basically, and then they don't even get as far as Apple gets. And so, you know, if you use the Samsung watch for tracking your health, it'll do it. It'll do all the same features. It even, the one knock against the Pixel watch is that it doesn't automatically start a workout for you.

The Samsung watch and the Apple Watch will do that and things like that. But I think V is right. that I have liked the better, more holistic approach that the Fitbit software on the Pixel Watch is offering over the other two. Okay. I love it. I have no qualms. Pixel Watch wins this one. Good for a Pixel Watch. Okay. And now, best for super fitness people, which is like you are a person who like whole ass cares about being fit and runs. I don't even know the words to use because I am not this person. But you are a fitness person. Apple Watch.

Okay. I feel like this isn't even close, right? It's really not. And then again, I'm going to put an asterisk because the Garmin people, this is for people who are kind of intermediate level and still want smart features, but still care a lot about fitness. Once every 10 minutes in a smart watch discussion, you have to acknowledge that Garmin exists. So consider this the acknowledgement that Garmin exists. The acknowledgement that there are hardcore, rugged sports watches out there and that none of these, this is not going to hold a candle. But if we're going between like the smart, quote unquote, watches, Apple is just a rugged. going to win here because the accuracy is better. It actually is more accurate according to this

fascinating YouTube video. You should look it up. It's more accurate with your sleep tracking data, even though like the presentation of it isn't great than the Fitbit is. So like, wow, cool. You want the most accurate data of these three. I'm going to give it to Apple, especially with GPS tracking. Like you can again look at some of my more recent reviews where you see the GPS tracking on the Pixel Watch versus the Apple Watches and the GPS. maps I got were bad. It's a known issue. Fippit is working to fix it. But I went for this run and the Pixel Watch map stopped a whole 1,000 feet-ish before the others. And I was like, this is, this is crap. I ran that. This is BS. Give me my credit. My favorite is the part where you go on a run.

And I guess you go like under a bridge or up some stairs or something. And the Apple Watch is like, yes, fee, you ran up some stairs. And Google is you like, You ran 11 miles back and forth randomly for six minutes, and we don't know what happened. Yeah, it's just, you know, just as a caveat, GPS tracking is GPS tracking. If you're a city runner and you're going, so I run up four flights of indoor stairs on my long runs, it's miserable. But the GPS maps are, I love looking at them afterwards because they're hilarious. They're like, you're in the East River. You've died.

You're like on the park across the street. I'm like not. But yeah. So Fitbit accuracy-wise, it's enough to track your, like, it's consistent enough. You can track your progress. But I wouldn't call it the most accurate. I would actually encourage you to do more so that when you go for a race or whatever, you're not like, what is this?

I trained exactly according to this Fitbit. And then suddenly there's an extra half mile you have to run and you're really angry and dying. Like just tack on extra, a little bit extra, not too much, but tack on extra. And then Samsung is... The one thing I'll give Samsung is the body composition analysis. That's a thing that the rest don't have, but bioelectric impedance analysis is iffy. Would you say that the Apple Watch's stronger third-party app ecosystem also plays a part here?

Like, I feel like I'm coming from this as not an advanced athlete or whatever, but I would just assume that like there's more apps for training, there's more app services and things like that available on the Apple Watch than on either of the Android watches. It's actually pretty equal-ish now for like the major ones. Like two years ago, I would have told you it was Apple. But like, you know, you can get Strava now on both of these. So like Strava is the big one, I think, for people. Well, I guess if you're a hiker, you know, there are things like Komut to like track your routes. So it's kind of equal now. Interesting.

Cool. But yeah, I think we're right to give that one to the Apple Watch. That seems fair. Okay. And then the last category before we get to best overall is the best health stuff, which all the non-fitness, but health and wellness tracking stuff. And my assumption here would be good first showing from the Pixel Watch. Galaxy does fine, but Apple is clearly in the lead here,

just in part because they've just been doing this for a while now, right? Apple's in the lead, in my opinion, but the gap is closing, is how I'll say it. Like, actually, Samsung and Apple are pretty neck-and-neck. It's just that once again, there's a little extra polish to the way Apple does it versus how Samsung does it. it's just clunkier. I think one really good example I can give from the latest round of products is temperature tracking. So Fitbits have been able to track skin temperature for a while. Somehow, for some reason, you cannot do that on the pixel watch, even though ostensibly you could have

stuck the stupid hardware in there. Samsung added temperature tracking to their new watches, but it does absolutely nothing as of right now. So why is it there? Futureproofing. Cool. Apple has also added skin temperature sensing and it at least does something with advanced cycle tracking. So, yeah, like that's kind of a really good illustrative example of why it is that way. So the Apple Watch is the only one that has like fall detection. No, Samsung has fall detection as well. And Google will in 2023. It would really like you to know. That's very important that Google tells you that it will happen in 2023. What's interesting to me about the pixel watch is that they talk a lot about how it does

the per second heart rate tracking all the time. They went really on and on about that. And then they don't have a feature to tell you when you have an elevated heart rate when you probably aren't supposed to. Whereas I know Samsung does that. Apple's been doing that for a long time. It'll tell you about arrhythmia and things like that. Other possible concern areas that the pixel watch doesn't do.

But it does feel like the fact that the Apple's, Apple Watch has is we're on the eighth generation of the Apple Watch is is really helping it out because every year they add one or two more of these things and they just kind of cumulatively stack up. And for me, it's it's that proactive stuff that you're talking about that I think is a big deal. Like Neil, I was harping on this on the show last week that like the Pixel Watch can't tell that you're washing your hands. And it's like, it's such like a dumb, small thing. But Apple is slowly sort of pressing in this direction of like, okay, we understand what's going on inside of your body and we're going to like tell you about it. And it's only the.

doing it in very small ways. And in some ways, it's like, we can tell you when you were ovulating a month ago. And it's like, what is that? Okay. But we all, we all know what the next actual step is there. But Apple just seems to be much further down this road of like not only getting this information, but sort of telling you what to do about it or at least helping you understand what's going on. It feels like it's, it's several steps ahead on that front, at least in my experience. It is. I do think the gap is very, very, very slowly starting to close just, just a bit. But it is the things that you mentioned, like, well, the hand washing timer sometimes thinks you're washing your hands while you're doing the dishes, but it's still going to start automatically, right?

Whereas with Google, you have to be like, I'm going to wash my hands. Before I do that, I'm going to go the hand washing timer widget and then start it and then do that stuff. So that's just an extra bit of friction there. But the Pixel Watch is also a victim of a very confused lineup. Like, as Dan said, there's some weirdness there where it's like, well, you guys are basically a Fitbit, a smarter Fitbit, but you're not including things that Fitbit's been able to do on their less advanced trackers for a lot longer. Like, it has an SPO2 sensor, but you're not going to get nightly SPO2 percentages. You're only going to get this more obscure graph that you have to, like, dig through a few menus

to find called estimated oxygen variation. So it's like, what are you doing here? And the answer is that they have a sense too in a Versa 4, and they want people to buy it for whatever reason, but they don't know what to do. So things on both watches are unnecessarily nerfed in a way that's infuriating. Yeah. And I think that's awful. A lot of this stuff is like stuff that happens on your first generation that like you give Google a couple of years.

And if it's actually serious about pushing on this, they can start to get some of that stuff right. Yep. All right. So we have finished all of our categories. And I think the way this nets out is basically the Apple Watch wins, but not by like a gigantic margin, like surprisingly strong showing for the Pixel Watch. The Pixel Watch took some wins there. It did. The Galaxy Watch got nothing.

I'm sorry to the Galaxy Watch. It's got second best syndrome. It really does. Totally. It absolutely does. And then there are like, you know, scenarios where it might be the better choice for you, especially if you have a Samsung phone. And there are certain things it does better than the Pixel Watch.

I will say I have a pet pee with the Pixel Watch. It does not have an hourly chime feature. So I'm so used to the Apple Watch and the Samsung watch buzzing on my wrist every hour. And it helps me keep track and stay on. time and the pixel watch doesn't have that. So for the entire week, I was wearing the pixel watch. I was losing track of time all over the place. This is the longest hour ever. I guess the hack you can do is if you're okay with it going off at 10 minutes to the hour,

you could turn on step reminders and use that as a... And just not move. And just not move. All right. So, yeah, I feel like this landed in the right place. I think it was, I would have been surprised if we had landed on the pixel watch is better at more things. But I feel like the pixel watch, it's a good job. It's a strong showing for a first-gen device. Yeah. I gave it a six, which I think some people will be like, that's really harsh, but tough noggies, but it gives it, like, room to grow, you know? So I'm going to, I'm going to quote, like, diminishing returns that Apple Watch has diminishing returns, right? It's gotten so far advanced, so long that, like, the amount that it can really improve by gets smaller and smaller each year. The Pixel Watch,

the Pixel Watch, too, could be a vast improvement over the pixel watch one. The Pixel Watch 3 could be like exponentially better as well. So like there's greater potential coming from these from the pixel watch than from I would say the Samsung watch or the Apple Watch. But that's just because it's brand new. As long as Google doesn't kill it, it might be great someday. Someday. All right. Well, we need to take a break. But thank you both. This was this is super helpful. And I'm sure we will be back to do this again every year for the rest of our lives. Sigh. Okay. We need to take another break. And then then we're going to come back and do some rapid fire answers on the Verkast hotline.

Oh, and Victoria, actually, stay on because we have a question we need you to answer first. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time.

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since we got to just answer some of the other questions that we're getting, including a few that we get a lot. Please keep calling the hotline, by the way. I love these questions. 866, Verge 1-1. Call it and ask us anything on your mind. Let's take some time and answer a few of them now. The first question we got comes from Josh. Hey, my name's Josh, and I have a Fitbit Sense. With the Sense 2 and the Pixel Watch coming out, which one should I get? It seems like Google is very much trying to disincentivize me from getting the Sense 2. Thank you. All right. This is a question that V, you and I have been talking about for like weeks now. I feel like there's a very easy answer to this question, but I'm curious what you

think. Well, ding, ding, ding, ding, Josh has hit the nail on the head, very astute. It's going to boil down to what your preferences are and what your priorities are. If you really want to lean into all of the health and fitness, you could make an argument for the sense too. But if you care at all about literally anything remotely smart, the pixel watch is going to be better bang for your buck. Like, as I mentioned earlier, Google is very confused about what to do with all of these watches that they have now. They've got three. Technically, if you include the sense two. the Versa 4, which, you know, if you asked me, they should have merged that together. So what they did was they nerfed the smarter features on the Sense 2, and then they also nerfed some of the more, like, advanced health features on the Pixel Watch. None of this makes sense. The Sense 2 is $300. That makes no sense to price it at that when you are nerfing the fact that it cannot have third-party apps on there.

So if you enjoy Pandora, Deezer, the random Starbucks app that's on there, that's gone now. You can't have it. Bye-bye. Sorry. That's so stupid. On The Sense, you could have a choice between Alexa and Google Assistant. Well, sorry for you. On a Google product, you can only have Alexa as your assistant for The Sense. That makes no sense. Pun intended in this case. So what you're doing? What's you doing there, bud? And also, you're going to get Google Maps and Google Wallet much later down the line. It's not available yet on The Sense, too. It's just, I'm enraged. On the other hand, if you're mostly like okay with having the majority of the health features in a basic sense, the pixel watch is fine. It's only $50 more if you're not getting LTE. So it's just like, I really do think you're going to get a better value for the pixel watch. The only reason I would tell you not to is if you are really into the idea of proactive stress alerts and like stress management journaling and you want those proactive alerts, like, because the Sense 2 will be like, I detect that you're having a bodily response to something. Would you like to log your mood? So that's like the one thing this watch has and battery life. If you want to say, shut up Fitbit, leave me alone 50 times a day.

Buy a Fitbit otherwise. Yeah, I mean, it's a very thoughtful feature. I think Fitbit does stress management the best and most holistically, again, a thing. But overall, I reviewed the Sense 2 and I was like, we're going to have to pour one out for Fitbit smart watches, guys, because this is like, it's, it's just clear that the next time they're going to unnerf all the fitness things they did for the pixel watch. And then it's just not a competition. I really think they had the sense to and the Versa 4 already like 90% done. And they're like, well, got to put them out there. Got to give incentives. This is artificially our

fitness watch and this is artificially our smart one. But we're going to half ass instead of whole last one thing, the Ron Swanson way. It's been frustrating. Yeah. And it does seem very clearly like the future of Fitbit looks a lot more like the Pixel Watch than it does the Versa or the Sense. Yep. That like if you fast forward a few years from now and you were like, do all three of those things even still exist? Like I would bet no, but the Pixel Watch still will. It's the one that's going to come out of all of this. David, you told me one day that like we're one pixel band away from all FitBits just not existing. And I agree with you. Yeah. So I just think. I think it's Google and Fitbit are going to be the same thing now with one arbitrary data barrier between them because regulators said so.

Like, that's it. All right. Josh, buy a pixel watch. That's where we are. Thanks, Tee. Yeah. Okay. Our next question comes from Austin.

Hey, this is Austin. If somebody who works in my car, one of the things I think about upgrading is my car stereo. I don't know if you guys have looked at upgraded car stereos, but they are just bad pieces of technology. They're clunky and they're outdated. And even the ones of touch screens and car players still, you know, just not fun to use. So I was wondering if there's any reason why these just seem like they haven't been improved at all in the last two decades. Thanks. Obviously, there is only one person maybe on earth who I would want to answer this question.

And that is Nilai Patel. Hi, Eli. What's up? What do you got? So car stereos were amazing in like the 90s and early 2000s because all cars had the same standardized slot in the dashboard to fit a car stereo. It's called the din slot. Some cars had double din slots, which were too high,

and you could get really crazy car stereos, and a lot of GM cars had double din slots. But because there was basically a standard hole in your dashboard, and all that you needed from a car stereo was to play audio, not all the other stuff in your car, there was like an arms race in cool car stereo stuff because the whole market could address the opportunity of, we just need to put a stereo in this rectangle in your dashboard

that's the same size in every car. What's happened since then is car dashboards have gotten crazy, and they're all different shapes and sizes. Screens in cars have become all different shapes and sizes. So there's no more standardized spot for a car stereo to go in a car. No modern car really has a din slot anymore. And the big trend is to actually break this screen away from the computing hardware inside. So for a long time, all the computer stuff behind your car's screen was like right behind the display. And now the big trend is to tuck all that computer stuff elsewhere and make the displays ever thinner and float in space for aesthetic reasons. So there's no market for car stereos anymore. It's gone away.

And as cars get newer and older cars go off the road, the actual market for car stereo is shrinking, which is why you see no innovation. There's not a great return on investment to actually invent a new kind of car stereo. There are infinity bad Android-based car stereos you can buy. So if you get away from the brand names, like the Pioneers and the Kenwoods or whatever, and you fall down the rabbit hole of weird Chinese companies and other weird companies like Phoenix Automotive, they will sell you an Android tablet that can take over all of the functions of your car. You can replace the entire center stack of a modern Ford with like an Android tablet. It's just a horrible Android tablet, and you don't want to have that experience, and you can watch the YouTube videos of people who do it, and they're so excited, and then they're like, wait, this is horrible, and they all end up reverting.

I've gone down the full loop of, like, two in the morning. I'm going to buy one of these Android tablets, and then I go and watch a review, and then I don't do it. And you can just join me on that journey. But the answer, basically, is new cars don't have the right size holes in them to fit your car stereo. They all have different size holes now, so there's no more car stereo innovation. Okay, next up, we have a message from Gary in Canada. Hey, it's Gary from New Brunswick Canada. I have a daughter who's eventually going to be asking for her own phone.

I assume she'll be asking for an iPhone, mainly because children can be awful to each other, and we know if they get something different from the rest of them. They treat each other poorly. So I assume she'll be one of the sheep and want to get her own iPhone. Our household, unfortunately, is all Google, except for a MacBook Pro. So I would be inclined to just give her an Android phone and be done with it. So my question is, how does one do parental controls properly on an iPhone when you don't own another iOS device? Can it be done on a single iPhone?

Can you manage it with a MacBook Pro? It seems kind of ridiculous that I would have to go buy a cheap iPad or something just to manage it for her. And are there any gaps in features and functionality with any of the options that you could do to manage that? So thanks. Love the podcast. This turned out to be a surprisingly interesting and complicated question, and the short version of the longer answer is that Apple actually doesn't handle this very well. But Liam, our producer, did a bunch of looking and researching and found that actually the best way to do this for you, Gary, is going to be on the device itself. In the screen time settings, you can set up what's called a screen time passcode, and basically you would have that passcode, but not your kid. And then through that passcode, that's how you'd be able to manage things like content and privacy restrictions.

and which of the built-in apps they're allowed to use. And you can turn off allowing iTunes and App Store purchases, all the kind of stuff you would want to do for parental controls, all lives in screen time on the device itself. And if you want to manage it, again, you would need that screen time passcode. That does require you to have an Apple ID, which could be slightly annoying, but it gives you much more control over what's going on on the kids' device. I would argue this is like a terrible system and should be much easier to manage,

but here's where we are. So you're going to want to get a screen time passcode in the screen settings on the iPhone, keep that passcode for you and don't give it to your kid. It does mean that anytime you want to manage this stuff, you're going to actually have to have the device itself, which, you know, could be testy, whether you can steal your kid's phone away from them in order to change some of this stuff. But that's where it is. So all this stuff lives in screen time and the way you'd manage it for yourself, basically,

is also the way you'll manage it for your kid. You'll just have a separate passcode. It's messy, but it seems to work. Finally, to close out the show, we have an age-old question about podcast apps. I love talking about podcast apps, so let's hear it. Hey, Vergecast, this is Summer Sika. I'm calling looking for a good podcast app alternative. I have an iPhone, and I'm really sick and tired of my podcast app,

the Apple podcast app not syncing up every time Apple releases a new iOS update. What's a good podcast app I can use that's not Spotify and doesn't require a subscription? Thanks. This question prompted a surprising amount of controversy. among our little VirgCast team over here. So we're just going to talk about it here. Andrew Marino, hello. Hi, David.

Liam James. Hello. Hey. Okay, so based on my read of the situation, Liam, you're wrong. So why don't you go first and tell us your bad answer before we tell everybody the good answer? I wouldn't say it's a bad answer, but it is definitely a niche app. It's called Castro for iOS.

I don't think they have an Android app. It's for people like me who have tabs on a ton. like over 100 podcasts, but don't actually listen to them all. So the thing that makes it unique is it's got two buckets. One is the cue, your actual play queue. These are podcasts that you're always going to listen to. And the other, and for me, much larger bucket, is just podcasts you're keeping tabs on. And so I'll scroll through that list maybe once a week and pick the ones I actually want to listen to and just wipe all the rest of them.

But the whole app is centered around that. So if that's not the way you listen to podcasts, you'll probably hate this app. But I think it is the best one out there, and I'm not wrong. Yeah, I give Castro a hard time, but it does for that one specific thing where it's like, I have a bunch of podcasts, but I don't want to listen to all the episodes. I just want to make myself a cue. Castro is really, really good at that. And I should say, you know, you can basically create that same functionality in other podcast apps, but this is just kind of like an automated, you know, it's like the framework of the app itself. So maybe it's not as important to you.

you can create this with playlists or something else in another app. Fair enough. It's a good app, but it's not the best app. Andrew, you're correct about the best app, which is to say that you agree with me about what the best app is. Tell us what you think. Yeah, so I use Pocketcasts. And I started using it because a while back, I was using an iPhone and an Android tablet

to listen to podcasts. And this was an app that I could sync what podcasts I were listening to on two different devices. So I've been using Pocketcasts. And also, when we put timestamps into the show, Pocketcasts, when you're listening to the show, you can actually use the timestamps as a hyperlink, which brings you right to that point in the show. And a lot of podcast apps don't offer this. Is that like chapters, Andrew? It's like chapters.

We get a lot of emails. We get at least one email a week about chapters in the Vergecast. Where are the chapters? Why won't you support chapters? Everyone does this. Megaphone, our publishing platform does not support chapters, so we're not able to do it right now. But we really want to. We're all on board for chapters, but we can't do it yet.

We get a lot of emails wondering where chapters are, and we also send a lot of emails to different people also wondering where chapters are. So if you want us to have chapters, don't worry. We want it just as badly as you do. Right. You're right about pocket casts. And you're also right about the reason for pocketcasts because pocketcasts is everywhere, which is why I think it's great. They have a web app that's very good. There's an Android app that's very good.

There are desktop apps that are very good. It is like the most functional cross-platform podcast app. It also has a million ways to do stuff. You can filter it. Like I have a filter for just like the daily podcast that come out every day. And that was just dump into one place. I have stuff for like my favorites that I'm going to listen to. So if you want to like sort the hell out of your podcast, you totally can.

But mostly it's easy and everywhere. And that's good enough for me for podcast apps. I should say the two honorable mentions we should mention are Spotify, which has lots of podcasts and is just a god-awful podcast app. Like, do not, unless you hate yourself, use Spotify as your podcast player because it is awful. And the other one is Overcast, which I think falls into Liam's category of like apps that do less but do it very well. Overcast is really good for like, if you're the type to listen to it fast and you want to compress silence so you can hear stuff better and get through shows more quickly. it's really good for managing stuff. It's only basically for Mac and iOS users,

but it's a really good podcast app. But for me, it's pocketcasts, and I think it's not particularly close. You know, that begs a question that I really want the answer to. Andrew, the man who makes our podcast sound as good as it does, what do you think of these trim silence features? I'm really curious.

There's, you know, a lot of people love and hate listening at 1.5X. I'm very much on the side of listen to it the way it was meant to be listened to, which is 1X. But what about trim silence? There's some shows that need the trim silence feature, and I think that's okay. But not the verge cast. But not the verge cast.

I spend a lot of time cutting silence on my end, so I don't think you need it. And if you do need it, then I think you might as well just be using the like two times speed. That's fair. All right, listen to PocketCast's unless you think Liam is right, which he's not. And Castro is also a good app.

It's a great app. Support your podcast app. developer. Okay, and with that, that is the Vergecast for this week. Thank you for listening. As always, there is tons more on everything we talked about at TheVurge.com, and you can also follow all of us on Twitter. McKenna is Kelly McKenna, Victoria is Vic M. Song, Dan is D.C. Cepert. Neely is Reck is Reckx, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Noria Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts,

feedback, feelings, ideas about getting trees off my car, or cool Halloween costume ideas. You can always email Vergecast at theverge.com. Please call the hotline to 866 Verge 1-1. I'm actually going to be offline for the Friday show, but Nilai and Alex will be joined by senior news editor and much-requested Vergecast guest Richard Lawler to talk about the new iPads, all-day announcements from Adobe Max, and much more. See you then. Rock and roll.