The Vergecast - macOS Mojave beta, Microsoft Surface USB-C dongle, and this week in Elon Musk

Episode Date: June 29, 2018

The Vergecast starts off this week in a traditional fashion with a talk about dongles — Microsoft’s $80 USB-C dongle to be exact. But there’s a whole bunch of little things that also happened this week that Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss. We’ve got Apple acknowledging the problem with its MacBook keyboards, Google demoing Duplex, and Apple releasing the Mojave public beta. Also this week, we bring you two new rotating segments on the show. First we have transportation reporter Sean O’Kane with “This Week in Elon Musk” — a rundown of the news that happened this week in the Elon Musk canon. Second, culture reporters Megan Farokhmanesh and Bijan Stephen run though their favorite “Culture Headlines” on The Verge this week. And of course we’ve got Paul’s weekly segment that he does every week, “Rhymes With What’s Poppin’,” so if you listen to the whole show, you’ve got a stew going. 02:20 - Microsoft’s Surface USB-C dongle launches on June 29th for $79.99 09:15 - Apple acknowledges faulty MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards with new repair program 15:00 - macOS Mojave is now available in public beta 20:59 - Intel now faces a fight for its future 29:06 - This week in Elon Musk with Sean O’Kane 33:41 - Google Duplex really works and testing begins this summer 42:03 - BlackBerry Key2 review: a keyboard with a phone 42:59 - LG says screw everything, we’re doing five cameras for the V40 43:57 - The Galaxy Note 9 hits the FCC, with launch of Samsung’s next flagship presumably on the horizon 45:51 - AT&T more than doubles ‘admin fee’ for every wireless customer 48:31 - Culture headlines with Megan and Bijan 52:58 - Honda retires its famed Asimo robot 53:41 - Paul’s weekly segment “Rhymes with whats poppin” 55:58 - Amazon adds voice control to its Alexa iOS app 59:19 - Sonos Beam review: living room upgrade Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of the Verchcast is brought to you by Netflix. In the Vergecast, we examine what's happening now and next in the world of tech. In the new Netflix original series, Kiss Me First, a tech savvy teen named Lila discovers a virtual reality game that takes her into a secret world of thrills. She quickly realizes that nothing is that it seems in either realm. Enter a new reality on June 29th. Watch Kiss Me First, only on Netflix. This is very exciting. A world of thrills.

This is news to me. Good. Thank you for that ad. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast. the flagship podcast of the verge.biz and part of the Vox Media podcast network, an ever-expanding network of which we are still the ones in charge. It's just not true, but I'm going to keep saying it until someone tells me to stop. I really like Casey's show. I'll just put it out there.

I think we got to step up our case. It's horrible. What if we could add a laugh track? I am Nelai. That's Paul. Hello. Dieter Bone is here. Hello, hello.

A classic Vergecast lineup. today. But I will say this. We've been experimenting with the show. I don't know if you've noticed over the past couple weeks. We've been running some interviews. We had Kara Swisher on the show last week. We had Sonos CEO Patrick Spence on the show a couple weeks ago. Today, no interviews. We're going to run some segments from other verge people. So we're going to have Megan, Vrok Mnash, and Bajon, Steven, do this week in internet culture. We have Sean O'Kane doing this week in Elon. We're going to run those later on the show. I'm super excited. We're really thinking about ways to update the show, make it better.

So let us know what you like, what you don't like. I'm really thinking about how to make the Vergecast bigger and better and more accessible. As I've said many times, the show is effectively 10 years of inside jokes. I feel like that anniversary show where we reviewed all the inside jokes was kind of a wake-up call. Yeah, it was like, oh, we've been telling this joke for a decade. Dieter loves the web. All right. Okay.

If you're a Google podcast listener, you'll never hear this. But tell your friends who are Google podcast listeners. We are aware that the updates aren't hitting Google's app. and we're not sure I'm mad at Google. Anyway, we're working on it. We're going to figure it out. Sorry about the hassles. All right.

Rate and review us five stars. That is enough housekeeping. It was a slow week with some big highs in the world of tech. And I want to start with the biggest, the highest high of all. Microsoft announced a Surface USBC dongle for $79. It is the size of a car. It is so... I'm so mad about this.

I'm sorry, I'm peeking, I'm so mad about this thing. I'm so pissed. It is such a piece of comic. This is social commentary as product, right? Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's like comically huge. They're like, we heard you like dongles. We're going to give you the biggest, ugliest dongle ever,

because this is what you deserve, you USB people. Assholes. So it's, first of all, it's $80. it plugs into the magnetic surface connector on the side of a surface device. It's only new surface devices, right, Dieter? I'm too enraged by it to investigate it. Yeah, it's the new Surface Pro and Surface laptops, which sort of makes sense because the older ones came out before USBC was a thing.

However, you might recall that we had Panos Penae on the Vergecast and asked him directly about this, and he was like, yeah, I'll have an adapter for people need it, but the world isn't ready for USBC. And to your point, I think what he's saying with this. dongle is no one will ever be ready for USBC. Here's how unready the world is. He's saying screw you if you want USBC. Here's the thing that makes me the angriest about this dongle. It's not that it only, you know, it's huge.

It's that it only has one port on it, which means that if you can use it to power your device, if you've got, you know, the right thing. But if you also want to use it to do, you know, adapter stuff, if you want to plug it into a monitor, or I don't know, maybe you bought one of those high. shit new USBC hard drives that are really fast, you know, Thunderbolts or whatever. You can't do more, plug more than one thing into this without getting a second dongle. It's not a hub. It's not a hub.

No. It's basically if you forgot your surface charger, but you've packed this dongle and you have your iPads power brick with you. Yes. And a USBC cable. This solves your phone. If you have your iPad break with you, you have a USBA to USBC. You're just, you're so confused. Let me just read this thing that Tom wrote.

And just sit with this for just a second. The adapter will require an external power source of minimum power output of 27 watts and 12 volts to power displays and the laptop. Yeah, that makes sense to me. If you want to plug a display in it, you need another adapter. Did we also mention that's $80? Yeah. So I have the PANAS quote from the Vergecast. This is last May Panis was on the verge of it.

And to be fair, we love Pannis. We're giving them all this. Yeah, he's great. Except for this. He released an $80 monolith of a dongle. He's got to take it. Here's a quote from last year. Panis said to us, I love the technology in Type C.

I believe in Type C. When Type C is ready for our customers to make it easy for them, we'll be there. But it'll be a dongle. And he goes, if you love type C, that means you love dongles. We're giving a dongle to people who love dongles. I think at that time, that was a shot at the MacBook, right? Yeah. Because the MacBook was all USBC.

Everyone's living the dongle life. Yeah. If you want to replicate your horrible experience as an Apple user, we'll get you. Yeah. Why is this so large? Why is this so large? The power brick... We've done 10 minutes.

My limited understanding of electricity is that there's DC and AC. Yeah. And AC, you need DC for actual... I prefer to think of it as Edison and Tesla. Okay. Edison and me Tesla, right? Tesla's like, what if we had small power bricks? And Edison's like, no.

We need long-range transmission of power over power lines. And Tesla lost. Yeah. That's... Edison. He then died. And that's why we have big power bricks. Yes.

But this, you need a power brick before you ever plug into this. So why does this have to be big? I don't know. There's chips in there. It's a hamster on a wheel. I don't know, man. Look at the other side of the adapter.

Don't just focus on the box. It looks like a medieval weapon. You know, those like ball and chains, but the ball is actually just a long, like, baseball bat-looking thing with spikes on it. Yeah, the surface connector side of this is huge. too. It's huge. It's a giant fin. Anyway. On a regular search sector, it's just a nice little rounded cylinder thing.

Here, we have to move on from USBC dongles. This is supposed to be a hilarious joke to irritate Deeter and we're just like in it. We're at the point now with USBC though where even the Android sites, like Android Authority, like they're all publishing scathing pieces on the disaster of USBC. Right? You can't get USBC headphones. The charging standard. are all incompatible. The headphone standards are all incompatible. It just doesn't seem like this market is shaping up the way anybody thought it would.

It's shaping up exactly the way that the critics of USB thought it would. And I was just supremely naively hopeful that things could turn out better. And they didn't. And I'm sad. Speaking of Edison and Tesla, I was in my, I'm a dad now. So I was in a Home Depot. And no, I was in the power outlet section. Okay.

It is remarkably easy to buy literally power outlets for your house with USBA connectors in them now. They're all shapes and sizes, all configurations, range of price points, like literally dozens of them in like a random Home Depot that I was in. Zero USBC. Well, there's something here where people would want that, right? They would obviously want that because it's been years now of phones taking it. And it's just not there. And I think that that, it's like the little stuff. It's not this one dongle or whatever.

It's the fringe that enables the whole ecosystem. That's where USBA won, like running away. I think USBC's problem was it's like a fast car. And you look at a fast car and it's like, that would be great. But I look at a fast car and I'm like, the maintenance. I was like, I got to put premium gas into that. Yeah, you got to put premium gas. You've got to take it the mechanical all the time.

You've got to be careful going over curbs. Yeah, it's a fast car. It's a Lambo. You know, if you listen to the lyrics of Tracy Chapman's song, Fast Car, it actually applies perfectly to USBC. All right. I leave that as an exercise to the listener. So if you want to hit pause, go ahead and listen to Fast Car. Come back.

You can write Deeter a tweet in which you see if he's right or not. He's at Backlon on Twitter. We're going to move on to actual news. So a bunch of Apple stuff. iOS Public Beta is out. Mac OS Mojave is out. We should talk about those. But first, we should talk about the MacBook.

Because Apple finally acknowledged the keyboard problem with the MacBook. All credit, by the way, to Casey Johnson, the outline. She was the first person to publish the fact. And then she got a new computer when she went to the outline and it immediately broke. And she did the investigation. Discovered a lot of people are having problems with these keyboards, these butterfly keyboards. Yet one speck of dust in them, they stopped working. She drove this whole new cycle, so credit to her.

But there was class action lawsuits, which are, in my estimation, often a little bit bullshit. it because lawyers are going to lawyer. But getting Apple to actually acknowledge, okay, this is a problem. We're going to refund the people who've had, we've paid for repairs, we're going to do a warranty extension on the existing product. We're going to make it easier to repair. That's a big deal. I think we've just come around to the point that these keyboards are badly designed from the

jump. Apple's having to, you know, their line is always, it's a small percentage of customers. But when your keyboard stops working, it doesn't matter if you're in the small. percentage of customers. Do you think they're going to have to redesign these next time around, right? They can't just keep going with this. I've ignored this story because I saw the laptops as fundamentally flawed from Daywater.

It's like there's a problem with these laptops. And so I never like dug into the keyboard stuff. But I mean, yeah, it seems like, I mean, the mechanical switches are such an important aspect of like the whole design because it dictates everything about how thick it is, how it feels to type. Yeah, they're going to have to I don't know how they're going to do it. Well, so here's their repair program. The repair program is crazy. Eligible laptops, which is basically

every MacBook and MacBook Pro model with butterfly switches, so virtually every new one's covered for four years. Yeah, that four years is rough. After the date of purchase. That's a long time. Right. How long were you using your old MacBook before you upgraded, Eli? Or side-graded?

Yeah. You did the same model with a faster processor. I mean, these are work laptops, so they kind of come and go over two to three years. My iMac at home has been sitting there for a decade, just chugging on. I think that the update cycle on computers, especially which we're going to get into later in this age of Intel failing to release good processors, is very long. And I think especially for a MacBook Pro, that's the kind of computer that you use, and then when it dies, you know, you get a new one, you might do something else with it.

It might become like the office computer for the family or it might be, you know, a workstation for doing some other ancillary task in your office or whatever. And I just think it should be four years is like they had to pick a number. I would have been happier with five, I guess. Infinity would, of course, be better, but they're probably not going to do that. But I don't know. I feel like four years is like right on that line of being a little bit mean, a little bit off. This has always been the problem with Apple's warranties where they don't cover anything. They don't cover accidental damage.

And they say that they cover manufacturer defects, but then they never copped to manufacture a defect. Well, if you have AppleCare, they're great. I do not think that is true anymore. Oh, really? I felt like that they have gone away from AppleCare being great. It used to feel like it was great. Before AppleCare, you walked to. in the story like, I have AppleCare, and a man in the Cito came out to greet you.

They just handed you a new product and you were on their way. There's a lot of stories online. Obviously, it's anecdotal. It's just like Apple seems like they may be overpressed or they see it as a place where they can actually improve their margins by being less responsive and like making it harder to get genius bar appointments, stuff like that. I don't know. It's anecdotal. That's my vibe in the world right now is that Apple is tired of being helpful. I think that's just like a volume and scale thing, right?

Like they're redesigning stores and making bigger stores. They clearly see that they've sold a billion iOS devices and they're meant to be handled by human beings who drop them. Right. Like they're, I think it's just hard, right? Like the early days of the Apple store and the Genius Bar were like 50 people with Max in your town. Right.

And now it's like literally everybody with wildly different expectations. Anyway, they're fixing the keyboards. Literally, the keyboards now will be fixed. And the big question is how quickly do they fix, do they redesign the keyboards to the next generation, if at all? And as Deider is pointing out, Intel's in this place where it just doesn't seem like you can deliver new chips, which is traditionally what would drive a new hardware generation. So Apple's couple generations behind an Intel's current laptop chips. Which are vastly better than what Apple has. True.

Yeah. Totally fair. But you get the feeling that they were waiting for the big bump or something or whatever. And now it just feels like they're a little boxed in. Like Verizon integrated graphics stuff or something like that. Who knows? I mean, like, honestly, who knows? Deter, what do you think?

I think that Apple was waiting for 10 nanometer and they were going to do the big bump. I think Apple's also trying to slow down the expectation of the upgrade cycle on the max. They want to focus on having a fast upgrade cycle on iPhone and maybe iPad, but they really don't want to have the expectation in the world that they'll be new Macs every year. I think that Intel didn't deliver on what they were hoping for, and so then they were in a real rock and a hard place, and I think that their long-term play is to bail on Intel,

and I think that if you're looking for evidence of that, look no further than the Mars of Panapsa on Mojave. So are you running Mojave? I am. You are a bold man. Yeah, so the deal with these betas, I would never recommend anybody run even a public beta on their main machine. But iOS 12, don't run it, don't install it.

It's so good. I mean, it is better in subtler ways in terms of its stability and fluidity than iOS 11 by a mile. That's all I have to say about iOS 12. Mohave, like the iOS apps, the Marzapan apps, the not port ports, they're good. They're fine. There's a little bit of buggyness when you like resize windows and things kind of jump around. You can really tell this is like if any other company had done these apps, Apple people would be out there just railing on them saying these suck. Look at these stupid ports.

You can tell these aren't native to the platform. Apple, they're not that bad. They're like they do feel like they've got some of the Mac stuff. But there's like a, I don't know, like I'm rubbing my fingers together like there's salt, like grit on them. There's like a, there's a weird sort of tangible feel that feels a little bit different. And I think that'll get better over time. but I really do think that we're going to just, like, next year when they open this up to developers, like this is going to be the default way to make apps, and it opens up, I think, a relatively

clear path for them a year later or maybe a year after that at the outside to have a Mac that's running on an arm processor that has some sort of legacy accommodation for Intel. And honestly, I can't wait. I'm back. I installed Mojave on the unit of the little MacBook, the 2017, and got it. I love this computer. I love this keyboard. I know everyone wants the better switches and whatever, and I had my space park at a piece of salt in it.

It didn't work for a couple hours until I put some air in it, which is amazing. But if they could fix that, I actually don't mind the butterfly keyboard. Anyway, I'm rambling. Yeah. I think that Mojave is going to be fine. Dieter's been alone with a new operating system for like a week. And he's just like, I'm in love. I don't care who knows it.

On the iOS beta, I installed it because I'm a developer. And instantly just flooded with notifications because that's life. Yeah. Muted so many. Yeah. And I really wonder about apps whose business model seems to be luring people back in and being thirsty, where it's so easy to mute notifications and you can just forget about an app entirely. I mean, that's the point, right? I mean, that's like why Apple and Google are giving you this control.

I just say it's disrupting to a certain business model. Yeah. You mean Facebook's business model. Facebook, that liar. Facebook has lied to me so many times. You don't want to remember this day from five years ago. This person that a friend of yours was friends with in high school has a new photo about their boat. But I will say on Mars,

pan, you know, I've used an iPad a lot with the keyboard. And there are a lot of edge cases. It's buggy as hell. Yeah. Yeah. It's clear that it's one of those things where Apple doesn't have any wood tables. Apple doesn't really use iPads like this. Yeah. And there's just so many problems. So I, what I would really hope is that if Apple can really focus, if Apple's going to say this pretty soon is going to be the way to make Mac apps and iOS apps that they can like really bolster those use cases. So I'm hoping that using an iPad with a keyboard gets a lot better.

That's my optimism here. It's funny because you know, Mojave, it just the reaction to the public beta seems to be breaking along two very distinct lines. One is Dieter. I can't wait until this project is complete and I get an

R Mac that's basically running iOS apps. And the other one is like dark mode and I love New Finder features. and they are sort of the same, but they're obviously wildly different. Some people are just very excited that their Mac stuff, the classic files folders, Mac stuff, is cooler and better. And then there's the people who are seeing, you know,

two, three, four years down the line when there isn't a Mac the way that we currently conceive it or it's something else. And that question, that big future of computing question that Deeter keeps asking, like the Mac and the iPad end up in a place where they're just very clearly two sides of the same coin. If you get all the way to an ARM Mac that's running iOS apps in Windows, the argument to give a windowing system to the iPad becomes overwhelming, right?

Because why on earth would you buy the same sort of thing that doesn't let you do as much at the same time, especially if that's your primary creative computer? I kind of, what's it called? There's a lot of Oh gosh It's a serious Serious brain fart People who use computers

Like Go on People So everyone Okay everyone Some people use things called Linux Or stuff You're not doing great

But There's There's like desktops For Linux They don't have windows They just split They have splits.

Yeah. And they use key commands. There's like super power users. Yeah. And they're just getting around with key commands and they can change the focus on which pain, but there's no window management. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.

So iPad becomes the power user thing. That would be wild. And back is for scrubs who need windows a little traffic sides of the top of the iPad. It would be incredible if the iPad was four-pane Linux console. I mean, it is. What is the hottest takes ever on the Vergecast? We should talk about the Intel piece as well.

So the CEO of Intel, Brian Kuzanich, he resigned. The circumstances of resignation are honestly a little weird. Intel announced he'd had an improper relationship. It was consensual, but it violated the company's fraternization policy where management's, and he's everyone's manager. So really can't do that. He is gone. The sort of immediate response was this was an excuse because Intel. has been doing so badly lately.

But it's a little weird because if he's just doing badly, they could have just fired him. He would honestly save face if they just fired him instead of this other thing. But anyway, he's gone. And it feels like Apple's about to get away from Intel. They've certainly been avoiding their chips. Microsoft has also got a bunch of arm stuff anyway. Yeah, Windows on Arm is a thing Microsoft has been pushing towards for a long time. They're very open about it.

The mobile market is obviously dwarfeding the broader PC market. And even in the broader PC market, all of the actions on the GPU side. You know, Google's making its own processors for TensorFlow, right? Like, the action has moved elsewhere from Intel and X86, and they just haven't come up with a new business. And then on the other sort of side, you know, they're selling some modems to Apple, but their wireless business has never taken off. Steven Sinovsky actually had a great, he's the ex-head of Windows, now prolific Twitter user and partner at Anderson-Hawitz. But he had a great threat about sort of problems with Intel over the years and just how they work. And he was remarking that Intel is the company that pushed Wi-Fi forward.

They branded Wi-Fi Centrino. They pushed it for a long time. People thought you would only get Wi-Fi if you had a Centrino laptop. Oh, I didn't know that. They did like a great job of that on the Windows side. But Intel was so unhappy with Qualcomm's existence that they did not want to integrate mobile broadband modems. So there could have been a Citrino plus. Yeah, they could have done it and they just missed the business.

So it's like series of misses. It's great. Go find that thread from Stephen. It's good. There's another, if you haven't, Ben Thompson at Stratory did a pretty good analysis. And somebody at the Motley Fool, too, where Intel's whole model is we designed the chips and we manufacture the chips. chips were fully integrated, and everybody else on the planet has a separate model where, like, a company like Apple or Google or Samsung or whomever, will design a chip and design

the perfect chip they want, and then they'll go to a manufacturer to make it. And those manufacturers are broadly TSM and Samsung. And those manufacturers have done a better job of manufacturing than Intel has. Intel's been unable to make 10 nanometer chips, basically. And so, weirdly, the model of having a fully integrated design and manufacturing business is great and a huge advantage until one of those sides can't pull it off. And the manufacturing side of Intel, for whatever reason, can't pull it off, which means that all these other companies are able to design and then build much more interesting chips because they don't have those manufacturing problems. Yeah, it seems like you're, I'm still stoked on Risk Five. I have a Risk Five board now.

that I have no idea how to do anything with. Like a whatever crowd fund type thing I bought it on. Yeah, you're kind of, you're assuming all risk. Like, what's that? You're assuming all risk. Because risk. You're just our risk. Okay.

I'm a lead you right there, buddy. With you're designing and manufacturing, you're, I don't see why Intel can't, it seems like Intel always skates to where the puck is right now. Yeah. Because for so long, they were so huge and dominant. That was like a winning strategy. They were, they had the puck. Yeah, they were like, I'm skating to where the puck is, which is in my hands.

Yeah. That's not how you play hockey. Sometimes. Intel is doing curling when everyone else is playing hockey. They're still on the same ice. They're just doing a totally different thing. I've seen, I mean, TPU is a great example. there are so many chip designs coming out that are, it's basically about bespoke acceleration for specific applications, like A-6s.

And, you know, like, think of, like, AMD and NVIDIA's fortunes, like, have been hugely bolstered by cryptocurrency. In video, or Intel could have come out with, like, a, like, a crypto-specific chip or something like that. But that's not, they don't know how. I mean, this is why they had to, like, AMD is their hated rival, and they're like, give us some graphic stuff, please. We, like, desperately need this to make our processors. My theory on that is still patents.

Sure, but that still means they can't do it. That's true. I don't know. The future of these companies, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, are so intertwined, and it feels like what's going to happen as Apple and Microsoft are just going to move. They're just going to move on. And Intel's going to have to,

that classic Intel has to figure out its new business. before it just withers away, whoever this next CEO is, is going to have to desperately race to do that in a way that they've had all of this buffer of the PC market, the Intel X86 market, will just continue to exist forever. And that appears to be...

And it's all happening on the surface of the Mac, right? Like, whichever way the Mac goes is going to be the portent for the future of Intel, at least in my opinion. Apple has, in my opinion, no excuse not to upgrade annually to do chips. Yeah, no, I think they're asking it. I feel like it's the least they could do. And you're going to end up with a generation of people who are like, what's the best

laptop I'm about to go to college and they don't get a Mac? Yeah, and the answer is a Windows PCC for gaming or a Chromebook. Yeah. Quartz just did a piece, like randomly quartz, the business site, just put out a piece. It's like, don't buy a Mac laptop. It's like a pretty hardcore headline. All right, let's take a quick break for an ad And then we're gonna have Sean O'Kane do this week in Elon and then we'll be back

So this ad's a little different because it's not an ad for like a company It's an ad for our friends at Vox.com They've got a new show on Netflix called Explained Which is great. It's 15 minute episodes every week The crew of that show that makes it actually works in the office right near us They're like scrambling around it's it's like kind of wild to have a TV show get made near you They work really hard up this week the episode is about e-sports.

Paul, you love some esports. Are you aware of the significant meta-shift in League of Legends? No. Oh, my. For years, you typically had an ADC and a support. And I forget what ADC stands for, but a high-end damage dealer and a support in the bottom lane. And now people are doing all sorts of stuff. They're like funneling experience to.

the jungler, the meta has shifted and it is rocking the world of League of Legends. Well, if you have no idea what that meant, like I did, I definitely, I knew what all those words were. But if you are just interested in e-sports and you got a Netflix account, go watch Explain on Netflix

this week's episode, explores why esports are different, where they came from, there's a long history here. There's a difference, apparently, between arcade play and what we now know is e-sports. This is what they told me to say. It's just like, explained is just really good. I'm supposed to tell you to watch the e-sports one, but I'm going to tell you,

watch the cryptocurrency one, because it's narrated by Kristen Slater. Come on. Oh. Come on. They're just doing it. It's wild to have this show get made near us. So go watch explained on Netflix from our friends at Vox. Watch the Seasorts episode. Watch them all. They're all good. All right. Now, we're going to try something new. Ready? Yeah. Sean O'Cain is going to tell us what happened this week in Elon Musk. Hey, this is Sean O'Kane, a transportation reporter at The Verge. and this has been the week in Elon Musk. Elon Musk drawn into farting unicorn dispute with Potter.

Elon Musk is being accused of violating the copyright of a Colorado Potter who gained notoriety from making mugs that feature a unicorn farting electricity. Musk spotted the mug on Twitter in early 2017 and remarked that it might be his, quote, favorite mug ever. A month later, the drawing from the mug wound up in a promotion for a sketchpad feature that Tesla added to the touchscreens of its cars. Tesla also wound up using a unicorn drawing in other parts of its software, and so now the potter is trying to get paid or at least get credit.

Musk said on Twitter, he can sue for money if he wants, but that's kind of lame if anything this attention increased his mug sales in a series of tweets that has since been deleted. Elon Musk races to exit Tesla's production hell. It's been almost a year since Musk told his employees that they were about to enter six months of production hell in order for the company to make enough model 3s to fill the waiting list of half a million people.

And the company is still struggling to get there. Musk's latest milestone for Tesla is to make 5,000 model 3s per week by the end of the second quarter, which is just about to happen. Never mind that he originally thought that they'd be past this mark by the end of 2017. What's important now is whether Tesla hits

and sustains that rate of production. Until that happens, Tesla is losing money on every model 3 it makes, which is not good for its already tenuous, bottom line. In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal just interviewed Musk at the factory and found out that he's still sleeping there some nights, recently staying three days in a row at the factory. In a sign of how all-out Tesla's going to hit that production rate, Tesla built a giant tent to expand production of the Model 3. Tesla built a fourth assembly line under a giant tent

in one of the parking lots of its Fremont California factory. The company has been building the tent or sprung structure or whatever you want to call it since late May, but just last week, assembling cars outside underneath this structure. Musk praised his workers on Twitter for doing this and rallying together to meet his goal. Now, what's funny about this is Tesla is usually pretty secretive, but because this is happening out in the open, the tent has kicked off a sort of cottage industry, with Twitter and Reddit spies peering through the holes in the fencing or flying drones above it, even scouring satellite imagery in order to get an idea of how much production capacity this

tent has added. Stakeholders are obviously curious, but there are also a lot of people literally betting against Tesla's success in the stock market. And so every bit of information they can gather is crucial. Musk starts crowdsourcing ideas for the Tesla pickup. And we've known for a while that Musk wants to make an all-electric pickup truck in addition to all the other vehicles that Tesla is making. But earlier this week, Musk asked fans on Twitter to give him ideas for what they want to see in a Tesla pickup. He said he has a few things in mind, but he wants to be a few things in mind, but he wants to be able to. wanted to know, quote, what do you think are the small but important nuances and what would

seriously be next level. In the back and forth that followed, we learned some things that might actually come true with the Tesla pickup truck, like it'll have a dual motor all-wheel drive system with, quote, crazy torque. It's supposed to have a suspension system that dynamically adjusts for whatever load is being carried and up to a 300,000 pound towing capacity. Musk also said that it'll have a four to 500 mile range option, which is a good one to 200 miles than any other Tesla can do right now.

Musk said, quote, this will not be some dainty little buttercup of a truck. Driver's seat will be big enough to fit Andre the Giant. Love that guy. Layoffs hit Tesla Energy Department. Tesla announced a workforce cut of 9% or about 3,000 jobs a few weeks ago. And now we know that a significant number of those cuts were related to the company's energy efforts. Tesla closed about a fifth of the solar installation centers that it inherited from the acquisition

of Solar City in 2016. and the company is backing out of a deal to sell solar products at Home Depot. When it comes to Tesla, a huge amount of the focus revolves around its automotive business, but the company has a big energy generation and storage business as well. All eyes might be on the Model 3 right now, but Tesla is obviously trying to trim as much fat from the energy side of its business so that can start pulling in money there too. That's it for this week in Elon Musk.

Obviously, there's a lot going on with this guy, so check out the verge.com. We have a really good feature up this week about Musk's most loyal fan. You'll hear a little bit more about that in the culture segment later this episode. Dieter. Neely. You got to talk to a robot this week. I did, yeah. I'm very excited about this.

It was at Orrin's Hummus Shop in Mountain View, California. A very good restaurant. They've got a couple of locations. They're opening one in San Francisco. Anyway, they brought in journalists in waves, so they were like six at a time. And they gave a little presentation that was designed to convince us that Google actually does care about disclosure and privacy and is aware of the potential for spam calls on this thing. And then we heard some calls, and we got to talk to the executives, and then they let us

take a call from the system, the duplex system, to see if we could, you know, complete a reservation with this thing or if it would, we could trick it. And of course, I tried to trick it because I'm a terrible person. So it sounds really normal. They talked a lot about pragmatics, which is a branch of linguistics, which is about all the non-verbal. Well, not necessarily, you can have verbal pragmatics, but like this fluency is like ums and aaws and waving your hands and, you know, all the stuff that you do to make a

conversation flow and be polite and, like, seem like you're making a connection that aren't just like the words you're saying. See, I just did it there as a transitional moment to the next thing I was going to say. And you knew that it was still my turn to talk because I said, um, stuff like that. The system does stuff like that, which is fascinating. And it's able to do, like, the basic stuff. If it can have a range of times it accepts, it can answer some questions. It's very, very good.

The way that they set it up is like, we told it, you know, say it's for four people, say for this, say for that. We didn't see somebody actually make the request. Somebody typed it into a computer. But then the phone rings you answer and it starts and this is what's important. It's like, hi, I'm the Google Assistant. I'm calling on behalf of somebody. And so this call will be recorded. Can I get a table for seven at, you know, 4 p.m. or whatever.

And then the restaurant worker says, I'm a host too. Sorry. That's my dream. So it's going into, quote, limited testing in the coming weeks with limited testers, whatever. And then maybe it'll roll out more broadly. The big question is, will people accept it? And Google basically believes, like, look, we're doing everything we can to be, like, good and kind and not annoying to people who work at restaurants who, let's face it, want to take your reservation. And so if a robot calls them and they can get it over quickly and they're not annoying, then people will accept this.

That's their hope. What was it like when you talk to it? Yeah, did you have a divide by zero? Did you, did you like fool it? Was it weird? Like, what was the experience like? It was very polite. I almost used the word of Sequeas in my story.

I think I tweeted it. Like, you know when you're talking to somebody on customer service and you're kind of like, hey, sorry, can I, you know, actually, can you help me with this thing? And you're like a little bit submissive. It was a little bit submissive. It had this tone of voice that was like trying to incentivize you to be helpful because it was like asking you for help, which is really fascinating. Just in terms of the like pragmatics, in terms of like the things that it could actually do. Like it, you know, how many people? No, no, I'm sorry.

Yeah, let me repeat myself. Oh, hey, yeah, can you confirm this? It's able to, you know, accept a different range of times. You can say a bunch of stuff to it and it's able to parse it and figure out what you. mean and then reply appropriately most of the time. And if it breaks down a little bit, it kind of just goes back and goes back to that apologetic voice and starts over a little bit. But it doesn't feel very robotic at all. It's not like talking to the Google Assistant on your phone or, or I don't know, like Eliza in a chat program or something. It's way smarter than that.

The way that I tricked it was I, you know, asked for reservation for seven and I did something like, oh, yeah, sure, that's fine. But by the way, our kitchen closes at six. And so you can only have bar food. And what should have happened then is it should have recognized, oh, I don't know what the hell he's talking about and then kicked me back to a human. Several other people did get kicked over to humans, and there are humans that are constantly, you know, available for the system. But it somehow interpreted me saying the kitchen would be closed as the restaurant would be closed. And it said, oh, okay, sorry, bye and hunk up on. That's what I would say, too. I'm like bar food.

I'm here for the prefix. It's so funny because there's so much technology here, and I should be more impressed and interested in it. But I've read so much sci-fi and never, never has a robot been ums and Oz. Right. Yeah. Did you say disfluencies? Yeah, I did. I said disfluencies. I like that word a lot. It's a good word.

Yeah. It's just we're not prepared for it. We weren't ready that robots would hit us up like this. that our first phone call where a real robot that's ready to talk the first time a robot that is actually

going to be conversational with me is going to say ums and Oz Here's the thing I think that context matters a lot with these disillancies because some people are like why don't they put these

ums and Oz in the Google Assistant well you don't need them you know you're talking to a robot it's immediately obvious in the context that you're operating and waiting for those ums and Oz would actually just be annoying

you're like come on computer get your shit together but on the phone you've had these ums and even like three, four years ago and you would call into customer service lines and they were like, they'd make these little fake typing noises, beep, be, beep, blah, and they're wrong about it, so to make you know that they're working on it. Over the phone, those things, those little disfluencies give you really clear indication of like,

I'm still talking or I'm waiting for you to talk. One of the things that the duplex does is it says, mm-hmm, a bunch instead of a yes. So that you're like, can you hang out a second? It'll say, mm-hmm. Or if someone's talking to you and they've got their notepad out and they're trying to think, thing and they're taking a minute. And if the actual human is like, uh, actually, hang on, like, it'll say, mm-hmm, and it'll just sit there and wait for the human to keep talking.

Whereas, like, without that, the robot might have been like, yes, I will wait. I am still waiting. Is it my turn to talk yet? Right. And you actually might want that if you're directly interacting with a robot that you can see or with an assistant on your phone. But over a telephone line, without that stuff, it just feels super false. There's a great story.

This is like early 90s. It's probably just an urban legend. But there's an early 90s story. I think it was in the book microsurfs about Bill Gates and how he didn't say um or ah when he talked because he was just like always ready with the smartest thing to say. And it was just like it would completely disorient Microsoft employees. And I think that's like an important. And I just like just in this conversation I've been thinking about that story.

Like it was a it was a character trait of Gates that he didn't say um or ah. And it unsettled people to a point where, like, a version of the story ended up in a novel about Microsoft, right? And I think that this is, to your point about we're talking to the robots now, the robot's calling you. It's like a different, usually in sci-fi or whatever, you're like, you are aware that it's a robot, right? Well, lots of times you aren't. Why I understand what you're saying. I read a lot of different sci-fi. I'm saying, I missed this sub-genre.

But like you have some intentionality in your conversation versus this thing just calling you and be like, hi, I'm a robot. I will now have an unsettling conversation with you. I'm super into it. It feels like a hack in the best way. Like you're saying, there's so much technology here. And the hack they're doing is like making a restaurant reservation over the phone because that's an unpleasant experience sometimes. I would be surprised if regular consumers can do this within the next year. I think they're going to, they're being so careful with this after all the blowback they got after that rock, dumb way that they presented it at I.O. That they're going to be really slow with this. The way they presented it, right, was very exciting.

People were excited about it. It was the second wave of blowback that I think surprised them. They didn't, they could have presented it the way they presented it. And they put up a webpage with all of this other information at the jump, right? There's going to be a disclosure. Yeah. We've thought about recording people. We've done the work here.

It's not fake. That was a huge meme that went by that it was just like fake. But I don't know. I'm thrilled about this. All right. You want to talk about some crazy phone news? Let's do it. I got a whole stack here.

The BlackBerry Key 2 review went out. By the way, our new reviewer, Stefan Edian, YouTube superstar. He's done two reviews for us now on the channel, gaming laptops and the BlackBerry. People love that, dude. So go watch these reviews of the Key 2. Wonderful. and his gaming laptop round up. But he has this great headline here,

a keyboard with a phone. I was like, when I was talking about it, I was like, oh, no, no one's going to read this review. That's literally all you need to know. I love reading it. It's just a very direct explanation of the cost-benefit of having a keyboard on a phone. I try to use it.

You know, people still love the black great keyboard. I try to use it. I was like, I don't, all of my muscle memory for this situation is gone. I do not want this anymore. I want to believe that the keyboards I used back when I had keyboards on my phones were better than this keyboard. I don't think this is an amazing keyboard. It's better than the pre.

All right. LG says screw everything. We're doing five cameras on the V40, which is amazing. I mean, this is the moment, right? There was a megapixel war. There was the ISO war. There was an HDR war, although they didn't have a great number associated with it. Now, just number of sensors.

When do you think Apple had a third camera to the back of the eye? Five years, next year? Because it's coming. It does seem like they don't have enough. Because they have like two different cameras. Yeah. I mean, that's like Sean reviewed some crazy camera that had like 15 cameras. The triptophobia camera.

Yeah. It was awful. Yeah. But this is how you solve the small sensor problem. Anyway, Samsung shuts down the Bixby feature that bribes you to use it. So if you use Bixby enough, you got Bixby points and you unlock custom Bixby backgrounds. Is it my Bixby level? It's horrible.

What is going on? I can't believe I didn't know about this because we could have get on my BXP level. Actually, Dieter, I wanted to talk to you about this. Okay. So there's a couple galaxy rumors. The Galaxy S-10 might replace its IRS scanner with an in-isplay fingerprint sensor. I think I was honestly expecting the S-9 to do this, in-display fingerprint sensors on a bunch of Chinese phones now. That'd be good.

I'm into that. Yeah, the IRA scanner is bad, and I don't trust any face-unlock right now except for Apple. and maybe that's a bias. In fact, I'm sure it's a bias. But all the previous face unlock things were totally insecure. The burden of proof is on any company that wants to do a face unlock to show that it's secure. And iris scanning is secure, but God, it sucks. So, yes, please replace it with anything else.

It seems like there's a Note 9 come in, right? There's an event invite. We saw it hit the FCC. So the only thing I care about with the Note 9 is that the stylus was like a char truce, like a lime green yellow kind of thing. It looks amazing. I want that yellow phone real bad. But they're just going to warm over the S9 plus, right?

They're going to put a stylus on the S9 plus and, you know, wipe their hands and call it a day. They'll try and do something with the camera. I don't care. I don't believe it. Or I don't believe it'll be that good. Maybe I'll be wrong. I just, I don't know. I don't know why it exists.

I don't. Isn't the answer that the note is like the power user phone? It's got like slots? Yeah. Yeah, it's the one with the stylus. That's the answer. Release it with the S-9. Just put all three out at once.

But there's like the difference in the S-9, they should kill the S-9 plus and just have the note. Or, I don't know. I'm very annoyed. I don't know why I'm so annoyed because I love the last note. It was just that, but it, there was an aesthetic to it that felt right. I don't know. Maybe the note will be the one with a notch. That'll be the thing.

That'll be its differentiating feature. It's so huge. truly they can add a tiny amount of bezel and no one will notice the difference. So that's coming. And then lastly, this is not really phone news, but it is phone news. AT&T, a week after getting its Time Warner merger approved, closed, done, it's all happening. They're doubling the administrative fee that they charge to every wireless customer, both postpaid and prepaid.

On your bill, you won't notice it. It's going from like 80 cents to a buck 60. that 80 cents across its entire customer base, $970 million in extra revenue. They just made a billion dollars. What a business model. I love it. They're like, everyone's going to pay us 80 more cents,

and we made a billion dollars. So that's horrible. The reasons for the fee are ridiculous. Let me read them to you. This is a standard administrative fee across the wireless industry, which helps cover costs we occur for items like sell, maintenance and internet connection between carriers.

That's the fee. That's what I pay you for. That's my bill. What is the rest of the bill going towards? Logo redesigns. That's the bill. That's what the money's for. I know, you know, I know exactly where the money goes.

I just want to let everybody know the price of the purchase is going up by 80 cents for everybody. The reason this stings in particular, the timing is, the thing is bad. That's a shitty way to make money. Especially if you don't, with a statement like that, right? Yeah. If you're not like, we're going to give you something else for this money, we're just going to, like, I don't know, send a crew of power washers to our cell sites.

But the promise they made to the judge was buying 18T, buying Time Warner will help us realize cost savings that we will then pass to the consumer. And then the immediate thing they did was raise prices. It's just like, just have a little tact 80 cents fall. Not subtle. Can you imagine being a business where just being like, everyone's going to pay us 80 cents more? It's a dream. And that's a billion dollars.

You know, the real dream is getting embedded in a company and then set up like a little skim, skimming. Scam. That's the real dream. Isn't that the plot of office space? I think so. Yeah. I can see your dream being the plot of office space. All right.

Well, now that you're appropriately outraged, the lack of competent. Also, there's no other carriers should go to, right? What do you need? You're pay Verizon? You're going to go a sprint? Welcome to T-Mobile, baby. It's all happening. But, you know, I can remember it.

I can rant around the way. Xfinity or bust. Xfinity mobile. Yeah, that's great. Okay, now that you're appropriately outraged. Let's bring it down. We're going to run a new segment this week in Internet Culture with Megan, Forok Mnish, and Bejohn, Stephen.

I'm so excited about this. Listen to it now. Hi, I'm Megan Farok-Meneh. I'm a reporter at The Verge. Hi, I'm Bejohn-Svievean-Sever. I'm an internet culture writer at the verge. Oh, we have the same job at different titles. We have the same job.

What's up, Virchcast? We have some headlines for you from the Culture Desk. It's been a good week in culture, I think. Yeah, I mean, what makes it good. Okay. So first up we have, the internet can't agree on what big dick energy means, which is possibly my favorite story of the week because I also can't agree in what that means. Well, what do you think it means?

Let's start there. Because this all spawns off of a joke about Arianna Grande and Pete Davidson. But the whole idea is that it's like a swagger thing, right? so big dick energy anybody can have. It doesn't have to be about men or the actual size of your dick. It's about how you feel and your confidence. Yeah, I saw some tweets saying it was gender neutral and possibly communist, which I totally agree with. Yeah, so our writer, Patricia Hernandez, actually wrote this piece.

And a thing I really like about this is, is she talks about how people can't agree on what exactly it is. And so she says it's like the sexual version of Yanny or Laurel where people are trying to figure out like, well, who has big dick energy? And what exactly does that mean? No, yeah, I'm a lucky motherfucker. Elsewhere on the internet, though, things have been a little bit. crazy. You wrote a very good report this week. Yeah, I spent the last month hanging out and talking to Elon Musk fans online, and it was very informative. The fans are very active online. What I've learned is that I think Elon Musk's fans are sort of a barometer for where we are as a

country in terms of like our discourse and sort of a sign of what's missing. Basically, Elon Musk is popular because to a lot of people, he represents a person who knows a lot, who can tell you what's right from wrong and who has a very clear vision of where things are going and is like a hopeful figure through his companies. Like, the people who follow him see him as like this kind of Christ-like figure. And I'm using that as like a figure of speech, but also it's almost painfully real. One of the people I spoke to, her name is Selena Gomez. She's an illustrator in her late 30s living in Illinois, and she's writing a book of Elon Musk's

illuminated tweets. But she came to him because she attempted suicide following a mental event. And she found his tweets and his company's very hopeful. And that was the thing that she got her through her recovery. She really got across to me the sense that he was a very important figure in her life because he represented hope. I can see why people like Elon Musk. I have the other end of what happens when things go wrong in fandom. So this last week was VidCon.

It was also Tanakan, which was this convention that was supposed to be not quite a rival convention, but more like kind of an FU to VidCon by a creator named Tanamogo. Hi, guys. It's Tanamojo. Welcome to my channel. Her deal is that a couple years in a row, she was denied a creator past. to VidCon, which allows you extra security measures. So after being denied this past, she decides she's going to do her own convention. It starts as a joke of like, I'm going to hold a meet and greet in the parking lot. And it spawns into this thing she's calling Tanikon.

And then to be able to make tickets free and $65? They're expecting, they say, under 5,000 people. So what they say happen is that 20,000 people showed up. So after the first day, the whole thing was canceled. and people are very angry. It's a lot of fans who, you know, traveled to be there or spent all this money and didn't really get what they expected. And so it's been kind of a disaster that people are comparing to Fire Fest.

You know, that lovely Jaw Rule Festival that ended up being just a delicious delight for everyone to watch Fall Apart. I mean, I sort of get it, right? Like, planning a convention is very difficult. Remember DashCon? The Ball Pit. The Infoons Ball Pit. Has she said anything publicly about it?

Oh, she said a lot of things publicly. She's done interviews. She is very apologetic. She's very sorry. She's embarrassed. She feels bad for everybody that, you know, showed up and didn't get what they wanted. I just want people to know no matter what you're going to say, my intentions were pure. Nobody got what they wanted from this experience is the moral of this story. Sounds like a convention to me. So that was The Week in Culture. That is it from us. But of course, you can still catch us on the verge.

Go to the culture section, read our delicious stories. I'm also Megan underscore Nigelette on Twitter. I know it's a terrible name, but it's mine. I am Bijan-Steven at Bej-A-N-S-Evon. Also, kind of a terrible name. your mama gave you that name. I know. She's proud. But thanks for listening and catch us online. It's great.

Delicious stories. I love it. Tell us if you want more of that because I'm into it. I, as someone who gets Slack notifications, every time Jake, Paul, or Logan, Paul are discussed, I was really surprised at the lack of, it's like, these guys got to step up their game. You got to get out on the segment. Paul, breaking news. What? Honda is retiring Asimo, the robot.

No. Yeah, because they can't talk to you with uns and odds. They can barely walk downstairs. It seriously can barely walk. Oh, man. Well, they got completely eclipsed. Wow. That's a sideways burn from Paul Miller.

It's like a perfect example of like that point in time where Japan was ascendant. And it's not like they stopped doing what they were doing. Yeah. But now they're not. Yeah. There was a brief moment where like South. Korea took over robotics and then basically Boston. It's not in Boston.

The town of Boston. Paul, every week, my friend. You do a segment. Same name. Yeah. It's always called rhymes with what's popping. Are you sure? It's about WPA3.

Okay. Which, if you try to pronounce it, Wapaw 3, which kind of rhymes with what's popping. Yeah. Does it? Does it? I've taken a couple steps down this road and I'm interested in learning more. Go on. All right.

Have you heard of Wopat 2? Now there's a Wopan 3. And finally the trilogy is complete. And basically, Wi-Fi, obviously, if you're a W-Fi, obviously, if you're not, if you're you are connecting to a Wi-Fi network without a password, you're basically ransoming your children to the dark web. But even WAPA 2 had some security flaws, and WAPA 3 is shoring them up. So, like, if your traffic gets scammed, they will have a limited number of times that they can, like, or like, one chance to get the password right. There's like some sort of like freshness thing.

I don't even really, some of these are security concepts I was not even aware. It's like a use-once data that somehow expires as soon as someone tries to hack at one time. So you should be more secure. I already felt pretty secure with WPA2. I don't hear a lot of horrible things in the wild that actually happen. I think probably because there's so many people who are so much easier to hack than someone using WPA2. and obviously you should use SSL for all your browsing needs. But it's cool.

It's cool. I like that we're becoming harder to spy on as a people. There was one WPA2. Remember all the router manufacturers? No, no. It's a whippa. Whippa? Wipa.

Wap. All right. Last little bit of news before we wrap it up. It's basically all Amazon news in a way. They added Alexa to the Alexa app on iOS. which is just a long time coming. Have you ever seen the, you know, there's a chat feature in Alexa, right? You can like talk to people, you can like message people, you can send each other things.

Have you ever looked at the, like, the preview app in the app store for their like chat? Wait, they have a standalone chat app? No, no, in the Alexa app. It's built into Alexa. When you're like in the app store and you're going to download the Alex app, it's got its preview screenshots. Okay. And it shows you like what Alexa messaging looks like. Okay.

And this, the demo chat in the screenshots is crazy. So Paul, would you be Alexandra and I will be Jay? Sure, sure, sure. Okay. Ready? So I'm Jay. Okay. What are you up to?

I'm leaving work. Call me. Getting ready to leave now. Where do you want to eat tonight? I'm almost there. Hurry up. I'm here. That's their idea of how you should communicate.

The Android one is different. It's so rude. Yeah. What do they say at Android? What do Edward people talk about? It's the same thing, just a little bit shorter. I'm on my way there now. I'm close to a pizza shop, and that burger joint is like, where are you?

Hurry up, I'm here. I don't know what. Amazon has a famously curt in corporate culture. I don't know, man. Anyway, there's an Alexa button in the Alexa app. There's a new show mode for fire tablets that turns them in Echo shows. Deeder and I are hotly in disagreement about this because I think the Echo Show is great. I think it's the worst.

That's dumb. I just don't want a fire tablet in my life. It's too big. It doesn't justify its size and it doesn't justify its screen. But if I could have that. It shows you two timers at once. If you ask for it after it disappears after three seconds once you set the timer. But if you could have the dubious benefits of that screen, but then also have a tablet to bang around to the house.

with. I think that would be great. My only question is, like, will the speakers and the microphones on those, not the most newish Android tablets be good enough to support being your main kitchen Alexa device? All right. Let's say this whole setup costs probably like $7.50 because of Amazon's aggressive discounts, right? So you can spend $7.50 to get a fire tablet and this show doc or a screen that plays you. YouTube that you can talk to, but it has no other features. Which do you, which one do you get? Oh, it doesn't have other Alexa features? Zero other features and only a YouTube, an Echo show that is only YouTube, no Alexa.

So the opposite of what it is now, which is all Alexa, no YouTube. Exactly. I would buy a YouTube screen. I got a YouTube screen. I got like tons of YouTube screens. I'm going Alexa. Google really needs to get their smart displays out the door. I don't know what's taking so long. It's stupid. We saw it CES. We saw it I.O. They need to get them out the door. Something's up with assistant. I'm just throwing it out there, right? Because we had Patrick Spence on the Vergecast last week, and I was like, what's up with your Google Assistant support? And he said it's a technical problem, not a contractual one.

These displays aren't showing up, even though we saw them six months ago. Figure it out, guys. There's something up there where they're not shipping these things that they're supposed to ship. Speaking of which, I reviewed the Sonos Beam. It's great. Here's the line I didn't use. It's the one for grown-ups. If you have like a grown-up living room.

It's the soundbar you should just put in it And then it will give you Sonos It'll give you Alexa, the mics are good It has Echo ESP Alexa ESP, EXP, ECHO spatial perception So if you have multiple Alexa devices It'll like arbitrate between them And only the right one will answer.

Not every third-party Alexa device has that Does this do that big deal? Atmos? It does not do Atmos. DTS? So that's like the downside. It doesn't do DTS. It just says it'll

It doesn't do the things that I, speaker nerd, want them to do. But in sort of your average living room where you're not running speakers everywhere, or you're just already listening to your built-in TV speakers, which a lot of people are. That's true. This is the one to buy

and you get like a good music experience, you get the Alexa stuff, you get the endless in the distance promise of Google Assistant, so don't count on that. I mean, they're saying it's going to happen, and they're a company that tends to do what they say, but don't buy something on a promise. So if you're an Alexa person, right now. If you're an assistant person, just wait until it's real. But it's like the right,

if it was 350, I'd be like, everyone should buy this. Like stick it under every TV. Do you want a preview of my review of the Polk Command Bar, which is a sound bar that comes with the sub that costs 100 bucks less than the Sonos Beam? Yes. Tell me. It is 100 bucks less than the Sonos Beam, and you can tell. Wait, $2.99? Yeah. Because the Sonos Beam is $3.99, right?

Yeah. Or my hundred bucks off on these? The 99s still get me. annoying. Yeah, one's $400, the other one's $300. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it, you can tell the sound difference, I think. And it also just looks ridiculous because it has, it looks like it has an echo dot slapped in the middle of it.

I'm not kidding. Anyway, review coming next week. I have deep reservations about putting computers and things that are supposed to last for a long time. Like, your speakers are supposed to last for a long time. Mm-hmm. You put a computer in there. You've automatically, you're looking at, you know, it's never going to run anything over Android

6. Anyway, we really ended on a whimper here. Wah-pa! There's all the great stuff to listen to. Other podcasts in the fleet, Converge with Casey Newton is going. He's got a great episode on how Twitch came to be, speaking of e-sports. So listen to that this week. It's great.

It's going well. I'm really excited about the upside of that show. It took a long time coming, but converge was worth it. So good. You can also listen to all of Whyge You Push That Button. We're at Season 3, thinking through some top. That's going to come back. But in the meantime, listen to all of season one and two with Caitlin and Ashley.

That show is amazing. This is My Next. It's back on YouTube. So watch this. You can watch Processor with one, Mr. Deeterbone. I would like to publicly apologizing for saying command instead of control on processor when I was talking about Windows utilities. I am so embarrassed.

I don't even want to be on the internet anymore. I'm very sorry. I feel like every episode of Processor, there's one extremely pedantic, meaningless thing that you have to apologize for. And that's why the show is great. You can also listen Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen Recode Media of Peter Kafka. Those shows are wonderful.

Ezra Klein, is a guy you might know. He's got a show. It's bad. Don't get it. Both of his shows are good. Listen to everything. We love you all. You can talk to us.

I'm reckless on Twitter. Paul's future Paul Dieter's at Backlun. That is it for the Vergecast this week. We'll see you not next week because it's Fourth of July week. So we're off the week after that. And that's it. Rock and roll. Paul.

Promocode.