The Vergecast - Magic Leap, Galaxy Note 9, and Android Pie

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

If you’ve been reading The Verge this week, then you know Samsung announced a few products. We got our hands on the Galaxy Note 9, the Galaxy Watch, and we even got to look at that Home speaker as well. That news is covered in a big chunk of The Vergecast this week, but there was also so much other stuff that happened. Adi Robertson was able to travel down to Plantation, Florida, to check out Magic Leap’s creator edition headset. She sits down with Nilay, Paul, and Dieter to discuss her experience with the device and how it compares to the years of hype surrounding it. And, of course, since another week went by on this planet, there is another week of Elon Musk news. Science editor Liz Lopatto graciously fills us in on the show. Like I said, there’s a whole lot more — like Paul’s weekly segment SHAASUIVG — so if you listen to it all, you’ll get it all really. 03:32 - Samsung announces Galaxy Note 9 with bigger screen, huge battery, and more powerful S Pen 16:20 - Fortnite for Android is launching today exclusively on recent Samsung Galaxy devices 23:47 - Samsung unveils its latest smartwatch — the Galaxy Watch 24:27 - Samsung announces Galaxy Home speaker 25:49 - Samsung is partnering with Spotify across its devices 29:20 - The 5 most important Android Pie updates 32:57 - I tried Magic Leap and saw a flawed glimpse of mixed reality’s amazing potential 54:25 - This week in Elon Musk with Liz Lopatto 58:33 - Microsoft Surface Go review: a little goes a long way 1:03:03 - The new Anki Vector robot is smart enough to just hang out 1:08:35 - The FCC lied to Congress about an alleged cyberattack and didn’t come clean until now 1:12:00 - Justice Department appeal says AT&T-Time Warner merger decision is ‘contrary to fundamental economic logic’ 1:14:48 - Paul’s weekly segment “SHAASUIVG” 1:17:24 - Google Pixel 3 XL leak appears to show production hardware and wired USB-C Pixel Buds 1:18:09 - The Palm smartphone reboot is shaping up to be disappointing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Start your free trial today at Azure.com slash trial. Hello and welcome to Vergecast. Like shit, podcast of the Furch. I'm going to get this pro-style intro. I'm going to get it down. You're always professional to me. I'm your friend, Eli. Paul Miller is here.

Hello. Dieter? Yes. Would you like to address the audience? Hello, audience. I am your nemesis. Oh. Deeter's in a mood today.

And we have a special guest, Adi Robertson is here. Hi, Addy. How are you? Hi, good. Addie spent, I would say, like five years in Florida with Magic Leap. We're going to talk all about that. Yeah. But, and we're going to talk about the Note 9, which came out today just before we started recording.

But before we begin, I have two quick plugs for Verge stuff. One, our series Home of the Future is out this week, hosted by Grant Imhara of Mythbusters fame. We built a house in Texas. And then we made Grant go there and tell you what's in the house. It's a lot more exciting than that. But it's a full on home in the future. It's like a sustainable house. There's cool solar panels on it.

There's all kinds of smart tech. There's like laser keyboards happening. Are there USB C plugs in the outlets? No, they're not. I believe there are no USB outlets. Oh, okay. But there's like Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is good.

But like the house is super cool. It keeps track of its own. energy consumption. I mean, there's smart tech everywhere. So that is on YouTube right now, the first episode, Home the Future. Big props for video team, particularly Tom Conners, who really shepherded this project. Building a house is not easy. And then making a video while other people are building a house is harder.

So props to Tom, because you've got to look together. But check it out. It's on the YouTube channel right now. And then I want to call out Casey Newton's newsletter, The Interface. The other big story that isn't the Note 9 and Magic Leap and all the stuff we're talking on the Vergecast right now is what is happening with platforms in free speech and Alex Jones and all that stuff. Casey is doing an amazing job of covering that on the interface, which is a newsletter. It's publishing on the site mostly every day now. And you can check it out at theverge.com slash the interface.

So go look at that. If you are interested in that stuff, there's no better synthesizing it for everybody to Casey. I just want to point it out at the top because we're not going to talk about that stuff. I mean, I'm going to jab at the FCC a little bit later on. Like, we're going to do some policy stuff. But that's like, that's me. We got some gadgets on our place. There's, like, a lot of gadgets today.

And I think the world, you know, there's politics everywhere. We're going to do gadgets. But I just want to point out the verge is covering the stuff very deeply, a bunch of reporters in case he's leading the charge. So if you're interested in that stuff, make sure you go check out the interface. All right. gadgets. That's what we're here for. Note 9 today.

Let's start there. I actually just played with it. We have one. It's gigantic. It's always been gigantic. Yeah. The screen's even bigger now. It's 6.4 inches.

It looks amazing. We have the one with the yellow pen. She's adorable. I've never wanted a phone more for an irrational reason than just this yellow. It's a Bluetooth pen. It's a bright yellow Bluetooth. pen. Spenn. It's a Spen. It's a spen. Sorry. Actually

now, because it is Swedish, I believe it is technically a Spen. It's blue and yellow. This thing is just a spec monster. There's a 512 gig option. There's a 4,000 mill-an-a-hour battery. There's two skews. There's a thousand-dollar skew with

128 gikisd, 6-gigs RAM. But there's also a $1,200 skew, 512 storage. Yeah. Eight gigabytes of RAM. You can stick a card in there and get to a terrible. And there's a big battery so you could use it for like several hours probably.

I mean, the thing is, it's just ridiculous. And Dieter, I saw you tweet earlier. You can't tell why people are so excited about it because it is a very iterative update to the note eight. But people are psyched. People are super psyched. It's not that I can't tell. I was just like, I'm genuinely curious what it is. And looking at the responses, it seems like every phone.

has like some set of compromises to it, right? You get a pixel 2xel, you've got a meh screen and bezels and, you know, whatever. You get a S9 is boring. It seems like right now in this moment, the other than maybe the processor, the note 9 purports to be a phone that has very few compromises if you are a spec maniac. You know, it's still got Samsung software, which is a thing. There's no notch. It has crazy storage.

It has a crazy battery. It has a ton of RAM. It can do all the things. Wait, do you know what else it has? Decks. No, no. It's water cooled. Oh, yeah.

How does that work? I don't know. It's not the first water cooled phone. It's just, you know, it's got some liquid in there. Stefan conferred with Samsung that there is literally water inside of this phone. Yeah. Like, what loop does it go in? Like, does the water just get hot?

Okay, here's how it works. The computer's hot. Yeah. The water goes whooshimbaugh. And it takes the heat somewhere else. But usually then it radiates that heat out somewhere. Yeah. To where the CPU isn't.

It's just circling the head phone check. Yeah, and it comes back around. I mean, every water cool computer is a loop. Yeah. But like usually the... You don't plug a hose into a water cool... Oh, but you should. There's that garden hose port.

Every port you want. What does all this water go? No, but usually the whole point of the loop is that you carry the heat away and it radiates out somewhere else. So theoretically there's a part of the phone that is less hot, then that's where the water goes. And because the phone is so big, it's not always entirely in your hand. Places to journey. I just think it's kind of exciting that people are getting excited about specs on a phone, right? The note is always meant to be that.

And even though you could argue that the specs are in some ways not the best or not like what you might hope for? Like, what thing exists for an Android phone right now, spec-wise, that you would want that's not here. More water cooling. It doesn't have, like, several cameras on the back. Well, that's two in a multiple aperture.

I mean, it's like a lot. Yeah, you're right. It's got all the specs. I like, I'm most excited about the Bluetooth pin because Samsung has made a button that is remappable. So it's a Bluetooth LEP pin that's charged by the phone, and you can use it wirelessly as like a shutter or I think by default it launches the camera. You can also use it to like slide or progress a slideshow, a presentation. But you could remap it to do whatever, which is very exciting to me.

It sounds like the spend team should talk to the Bixby team and educate them on how buttons. work. Yeah. Well, it doesn't have a Bixby button, does it? I'm almost positive. It has a Bixie. Maybe in my short time playing with it, I did not enable Bixby.

I played with her five minutes before I came on the show. Do you, I, to be honest, I'm out of my depth here, but do you guys know anything about Bixby 2.0? I do know that they tried to demo it, and it didn't go so well. And then the presenters had to say,

you can clap now, which is not a great moment. But they're trying to do some of the, this more conversational stuff. They're trying to make it more powerful, order food for you, things like that. Yeah. I mean, restaurant reservations order. I mean, they're basically doing... Are they just wasting

their money? I mean, they put out, we got to get to the Bigsby speaker, the Galaxy house. Oh, shoot. Yeah. More gadgets. It's a gadget show. That's true. So I think they're leveling up Bixby so they can compete. Okay. But, I mean,

it's still just a dog with shoes. It's like the Butler got some more capabilities and he's still just like standing in the way of your friend the Google Assistant. Yeah. So it has, but I mean, it obviously has Google Assistant. Mm-hmm. There is decks. So, like, the skin is toned down as Samsung is, like, continuing to turn down their

skin. Yeah. And it seems like all the, all the insanity is, like, pushing into Dex. Mm-hmm. It's like a totally different Android environment. What's exciting about Dex is, well, I mean, one, we have to see how well it works. But you don't need a dock for it anymore. You just plug in a dongle.

and do an hd-my thing, and you're done. And that's kind of cool. Well, because the whole reason for the deck stock before was partly cooling, and now it's water-cooled. Oh, my God. So, Deter, you are always on about the future of computers. I feel like this is one of those phones where the promise is you just don't own another computer. You spend $1,200 on this phone.

You buy the micro-sd-card. You have a terabyte of storage, 8 gigs of RAM that is legitimately more number. than the baby Macbook. Do you think you could, is that the play or is it just a spec monster? I think it's mostly a spec monster. I don't know. We're going to be putting up an article later. That's like the history of people trying to turn phones into computers,

starting with the palm folio on through the atrix and then Windows phone are now this. I think it's an exciting idea, but I'm glad that it requires fewer accessories. But I mean, who really uses it? I don't know. I think people are going to buy this thing for a phone. I'm the regular. Tweet it. Please tell us if you use decks.

I'm dying to know. And also, if you have a choice between this and, because you can use decks at a desktop with a screen and a keyboard and stuff and use your phone as a mouse. But like you don't get the laptop coffee shop experience. Yeah. So would it be better to get like the new? Galaxy tablet was the S4. S4.

That thing is, Stefan, reviewed that thing this week, it is crazy. Yeah. It's just a great, and you switch over to Dex and it's even crazier

because it's trying to like window Android and. Right. Well, but Dex is windowing Android. Yeah, but when you, it's, I think it's,

philosophically it's different than, you know, like you plug in a phone, it turns in this other thing. Mm-hmm. You know, like, okay, I'm definitely doing something

that seems different, right? And like, maybe Netflix isn't going to work as well in this mode. When you have the tablet and it's the same screen, you just push a button, it becomes a radically different thing all on that same screen, and then Netflix won't go full screen. Because there wasn't a physical

mode shift, but there's a software mode shift. Right, there's like a context shift to like, okay, I'm going to try to do a thing that phones can't do, and I'll be way more forgiving of it. Now I need spreadsheets. Yeah. Whereas with like the tablet, you like push the button, you're like, wow, this is a crappier laptop than I expect. If you are the person who drags a external display into the coffee shop to plug in your note nine. I want to hear from you. So, Deeter, one of your big questions last week was like basically, why are they making this when there's the S-9?

Did they answer that question for you? The S-9-plus. Do they answer that question for you? I mean, it's the stylus and decks without a dock, right? That's the whole answer. And the rest of it, I kind of don't care about. But it's also like, it's the RAM. It's the storage.

It's the huge battery. I was hoping they'd answer it with like new innovation and they answered it with brute force and specs and Samsung stuff. And it turns out people are excited about brute force specs and Samsung stuff, which I wasn't expecting. So I just, I do not know who on Earth should spend $1,250 on this thing. Like you got to really, really stand for Android for Samsung to spend $1,250 on this. I mean, I definitely just held it in my hand and thought to myself.

I want this phone. I'd run away before I bought it by accident. And no notch. And no notch. So, Eddie, you're like an Android person. Are you in on this thing? This just feels like such a non-starter because I, how can I use the screen?

I can't fit it in my pocket. I can't use it with one hand. I can't use it on the subway. I have to like, if I want to sit down in a coffee shop and like, I'm going to go and fold out my phone now. Yeah. Okay, maybe. It just like, it's cool on.

paper, but I just can't even think about owning it. Yeah, because it's just too big. It doesn't do the thing I need a mobile device to do, which is be mobile. Yeah. What is your preferred phone size? Is like just a regular S-9?

I'm using a pixel, original pixel, and I forget what screen size it is, like... But not Excel. No, not an Excel. Excel was a little too big. I've got a fellow traveler over here. Small phones. Small phones and, but like thicker phones. Okay.

I feel like the original pixel is going to, it's like a, it should be loved more in history than it will be. Like the Model T? Yeah, like it's, it's a great, like, it's a great phone. The Nexus 5. Nah. The next, like, every. I want to love the Nexus. I have one.

Like, it's one of the few phones I didn't throw away because of the color. And then it was not a great phone. I don't know what you're talking about. The Nexus 5 was dope. It was beautiful. It was like three, 400 bucks. The screen was like super wide. Yeah.

It was great. Yeah. Let's turn this note nine discussion into a referendum. The Nexus 5. Here's what I, here's my like major question with the note 9. How long are you meant to have it? Right. And so Samsung, they did a video, which we actually declined to participate in, where they did all of the people like around the original note saying it's like they had, they just did a montage of all tech journalists being like, it's stupid.

nobody wants a pen and then they were like the no nine you were so wrong it's true they asked and I was like no you can't you can't have that from us but it seems like they're targeting note five owners it seems like they're targeting note three owners are you seeing a note is every two year purchase no it might be like every four right it's a computer it might be on that cycle and it's that's just very different from the regular phone cycle, especially when you're this specked up. Or are you just going to load it with, like, pirated movies and run Fortnite on it, and two years are going to be, right?

Yeah, I have a Samsung. Every time I think I want a new Samsung phone, I look at the S6 on my desk. I was like, wow, that aged so quick. Because I remember, like, a year in, I was like, this is the oldest phone of the world. Because the S6 was the first one for the gear VR, right? I thought it was earlier, but I'm not sure. Whichever one was the first one. I was like, I'm going to be super into VR.

So I bought a phone specifically for VR. It had felt so old, so fast. In some sense, it's kind of nice that Samsung has slowed down on its redesign because it makes you feel less bad about having a phone that's a year-to-old. The S-X was also the one that had the extreme curve. Do you have the curve one? No, I'm pre-curves. Oh, pre-curve.

Yeah. I got a fully flat screen. Can't get that anymore. Classic, classic design. Tried and true. So it's exclusive, Fortnite is exclusive to Samsung phones for like a hot minute and then it's, you know, going to be available on other Android phones.

And there's the whole very, very interesting thing they're doing where they're refusing to launch it on the Play Store. But that aside, my hot take is that, uh, Fortnite working well on Android. phones is strategically important to Samsung, and it's the most important thing that could happen to Samsung's bottom line in the past year. Because it's a spec mover? Because if you're going to play Fortnite on Android, you need a flagship phone. And you know who makes the flagship phones that people buy? Samsung.

Yeah. And the S-9 did not do so hot. Can you play Fortnite on decks? With a keyboard and mouse? With a keyboard and mouse and just wreck people. That could give you a huge advantage because apparently when you play

Fortnite if you're playing on mobile you play against other mobile players you play against a console, you play against the console players. If you got a keyboard or mouse, you play against other keyboard and mouse players to make sure nobody gets destroyed. But if you manage to hook up a keyboard and mouse

I asked if like the stylus was a like competitive advantage in Fortnite and everyone told me to shut up because you don't steer with the stylus you tap the screen to fire so the stylus doesn't actually give you a competitive advantage. But that would be dope if it did.

I guess that's interesting. interesting also because that's been the play for all of the people making those those, quote, gaming phones, is that they're like, you can do all these things and all you have to do is put up with a phone with no battery, that's hideous. Right. This seems not good for them. Are you talking about the ones with the analog sticks on both sides? No, not even those.

Like the... The ROG phone. The ACUS. Yeah, the ROCENDS. I think Razor has a thing. But those all have faster refresh rates, right? Isn't that their whole gimmick? I feel like after a point there's like the trade-off's.

become less and less worth it. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I don't know what the display. I mean, I know that when they use, like, my iPad Pro with a faster display, refresh rate, I'm like, yeah, kill that battery. Yeah, I don't think a mobile GPU is going to render Fortnite at 144 hertz personally. Yeah.

And maybe I'm underestimated. I doubt it. So the Fortnite thing is really interesting, right? Because it doesn't even, it's not even exclusive for very long, right? And it doesn't track with Epic's business model for Fortnite, which is to give it away, free to everyone and then charge you for stuff. Yeah, a subscription.

Right. To get XP faster? So like Samsung got this exclusive. Will it drive any sales of the Note 9 before it goes away? And then Epic does what Epic needs to do with Fortnite, which is put it everywhere. Fortnite is a sensation.

I don't quite understand it. I felt like there were plenty of video games. They were very similar before. Yeah. And all of a sudden, Fortnite shows up. It's a real interesting case of just growing the pie. Like, if I go around Twitch, everything I used to watch on Twitch has the exact same number of viewers, but also there are Fortnite streamers with 100,000 of you.

It's a really weird scenario. So I have no way of predicting this. But I could imagine it would be a huge driver. You've got a new phone coming out. You've got holidays coming up. Samsung has now positioned itself as the Fortnite phone on Android. That could be big. Sadda, you know how long this exclusive is?

Now I have to actually check our site. But it seems like it was days long. Yeah, so we have the quote. It says the exclusivity period will last for the next few days, according to Samsung. I think we were joking that you won't even be able to buy one and get it shipped before the exclusivity ends. But how many of those phones are water cooled? So I actually want to talk about the Fortnite side-loading situation for a sec. If anyone can pull this off, it's epic, right?

to say get out of the store, turn off the side load restriction, download this thing. Then turn back on the side load restriction. Very confusing. How confused do you think people are going to be? Not at all. No? Not in the slightest. Do you remember the kind of shit that you went through when you were trying to get video games to run when you were a kid?

Like, if we could figure out autoexec.bate.bat and config.sys and high mem settings, they'll be just fine, side of loading. It'll be not a problem. They're going to get people to do this. We'll see how many people follow their little, apparently it sends a clever little prompt after you have done it to remind you to turn back on, don't allow untrusted sources, which is nice of them. But yeah, I think that the only limiting factor on them getting installs is like the specs that are required to run this thing. I don't think it's going to stop anybody who wants to play Fortnite from installing it. And it's going to train a generation of children on how to get apps outside of the Google Play Store. If I'm Google, I am freaked out by this.

Yeah, between that and the EU, it's like, whew, like, all of a sudden, their entire, like, you know, walled garden, they're like, the government's like, no, actually, you can't have this at all. And then, I mean, the next, the next domino here is, do they get forced to start putting, like, core Android updates directly sent to you, not through the, you? the Google Play Store because half the stuff you want updated for you comes through the Google Play Store now. That's the next big thing. If they have to do something there, they're in deep trouble.

The real irony of this is this is all their fault for being open-ish. It's like, hey, we see that you're more open and accepting of different modes of software use than Apple is. Yeah. You suck. But I'm stoked that people are. You're going to be sideloaded the hell out of apps now. Yeah. I think it's interesting because there's no way to do this on the iPhone, right?

So Epic just had to take the deal. But here they just walked through the other way. I can't imagine that Google is happy about this at all. Even on the revenue side is like whatever. But like if I'm Google, I would give Epic the special deal. Yep. And be like, yeah, no one else can have it because you're not Fortnite. And then just be done with it instead of end up here.

and that is a weird, a weird stance for them to take. I mean, the Fortnite business model isn't ads. It's digital goods. Right. So Google can just be like, we want Fortnite on Android. We don't need to take this cut. They don't need to take the cut. They don't need it.

They couldn't do that. Why? They kind of make a one-off deal for Fortnite. Everyone would hate the forever. Except all the people who love Fortnite. I mean, it's like, if you're going to make the one-off deal, you make it against Fortnite. I don't think Apple or Google's best long, If you look at their balance sheets, they are not making the bulk of their money on App Store revenue.

Right. And you are basically... But they're making enough that they don't want to turn it off, especially Apple. Apparently, but you're basically taxing the small businesses that make you have a vibrant ecosystem. While for you, it's like a marginal portion of your revenue. Yeah, but they would provide... I mean, the argument is they're providing some valuable services. They're giving you distribution.

They're providing an update mechanism. Cinsuring. Data transfer. I don't know. Some stuff. restricting. Yes. Trampling.

I just want to be able to buy my Amazon audible books on my iPhone. I know that's not Google's fault. All right. Let's go back to Samsung, please. But maybe Fortnite can help you. All right, they also put out a watch. I don't know what to say about this watch.

There it is. It has a, it has panel level technology in the processor, which allows it to have four days of battery life. I admit that I am not a processor super smart person, but what? What? What?

What? What is that? It just ramps down unless you have a digital key in which case. I think what's funny, this is the galaxy brain meme has like re-contextualized Samsung's branding for me. So it's like the Galaxy watch.

It's like every time. It's all I can say. It's like all I can see about it. All right. Then there's BigSpeed 2.0. Mm-hmm. And this speaker. I like it. exactly as creepy as a smart speaker should be.

It's, it's, I don't know, it's, it looks like a Weber grill on a tripod. It's a cauldron. No, it looks like the, it looks like the eggs for the face, the face eaters. No, it's the turrets that kill you in portal. So it's a lot of things. A cauldron is good. I've seen a lot of cauldron memes today. Yeah.

I don't know why it's on, the only joke I had was like, well, I bet it won't stain wood countertops. Yeah. Because it's on this tripod. It has three little legs. If you haven't seen it, it looks like a Google Home that's bigger, painted black, with three legs. Now, because Google Home has like that angular top. Yeah.

It's like a teardrop shape on three little silver tripod legs. It is enormous. I just don't understand this product. You know, like, the Note 9 is like a huge phone, but you're like, Samsung got good at design. like curved edges, sharp lines, sleek yellow pet, and then they're like, oh, and then they made this as well. No pricing, no availability, except we'll talk more about it in November. It presumably just runs Bixby. They didn't say anything on Google Assistant.

I rate this product one, one to ten on the scale of how doomed it is. I give it three Spotify's. Oh, they did announce a partnership with Spotify. Yeah, I think that helps them a lot. If they're the best Spotify speaker, I don't know. What is being the best Spotify speaker mean? Not being a Boots speaker. How is it a better Spotify speaker than a Sonos?

It seems like it's the other way around that it's like Spotify gets to be on a thing. I don't know that I saw great benefits if I use Spotify. Well, you might remember Samsung's extremely successful music service, milk music. Samsung doesn't have that service. It's not a deal with Spotify. So it's Spotify by default everywhere. I get it. That makes sense.

But like how is it? Once you like say, play. song. It's like any smart speaker will play the song. There's not like a differentiated Spotify experience where it like... Yeah, on Apple's speaker. Yeah, okay.

It doesn't work. I just don't understand this thing at all. I'm extremely excited that it exists because it is crazy. I think that's a lot of Samsung things. I think that's why the note is interesting. Like nobody

required Samsung to make the note the way the note was. And it always has been a little push in the envelope. A lot of their products, though, are like, ah, well, you've got a green phone icon. I guess we should do a green phone icon. They have a lot of Me Too products. I just want to be in the design meeting for this thing where the first person was like, I've got an idea for how this should look.

And then I put out their tripod cauldron. Like, were they all in a room? And everyone's like, all right, show your work. And then like taped them all to the screen. Google doesn't make televisions. Apple does not make televisions. Samsung had the chance to be the, hey, we solved TV audio. Yeah.

Like to combine the world of Spotify voice assistants and you have a shitty built-in TV speakers. Yeah. I just want to be. They could have done that. I just want to be clear. What they did instead was like a, they built a face hugger on legs. Yeah. It's just deeply confusing product.

I can't wait for them to like trot out the audio engineer who talks. about why the tripod is necessary because it like creates a space under the speaker for sound to reverb off of to make a better sound. That that has to be what they claim about it, right? They didn't do that today. Also easier for a cat to tip over. See, that's what I think about. No, it's a tripod.

It's very sturdy. No, no, no, no. Those portal robots are, it's all about tipping them over. I mean, you know we're going to get the briefing like that, that where they're like, we've engineered this to be as sonically perfect as possible. they're going to play Hotel California for us and we're all going to have to listen there and not make the face.

And you'll say, I've never heard music before. If I'm Samsung, I don't play Hotel California. I'd market this thing as the best and only speaker you should ever get for listening to K-pop.

They should just pick a random music genre and just go all in. This is the thrash metal speaker. I mean, I'll buy this to me. immediately when you said a word to it, like the bottom opened and a dog with shoes like tumbled out. People have been sending me Photoshopps of this thing with shoes and a little doggers on it. You put shoes on the tripod. It's perfect. Oh, we got to put those in the Vergecast post this week.

All right. Literally no information other than that. That's it. That's all we got. Go on the website and look at it. Megas Photoshop. We'll put it in the post. Lastly, Android P came out this week.

No fanfare around this name. at all, and they just picked pie? Well, no, so here's, if there's, like, one thing to latch on to is something to talk about, it's that it's Android 9 Pi. Why? That's what it's called officially. Nine Pie. Not just Android Pie.

Not Oreo, how they did before, Android 8 Oreo. It's Android 9 Pi. Why? All right. They want you to know that it's a ninth version. Adi, you told me you didn't put it on your phone yet, Diet. I have it on two phones. I have it on my pixel 2xel, and I have it on my...

essential phone because they had a day and date update with the new version. They're still just trucking along there, essential. Yeah. That's great. No, I mean, it's, we'll see who else follows suit. They're saying that the other beta people are going to have it in the fall or no later. So that we'll get, you know, there's six phones with it. I mean, the big question is always, and it will always be when will Samsung do it? But is the note nine on trouble? It has to be. Oh, right. Okay. Oriel phones have to be troubledized if you launch with Oreo. Okay, so presumably they can do it relatively quickly. Yeah, but there's like, you can do treble or you could screw up trouble.

Like, just because trouble's there doesn't mean they've stopped Samsung from being Samsung. And if you don't know, trouble is Google's new update mechanism. It separates the theming and the stuff from the other part. The Android fragmentation. The good part. The final solution to the Android fragmentation. Until the EU showed up. I'm going to try and write a review of it for next week.

I mean, I've been using the beta, obviously. My big question was the gestures. And, like, they fixed the animation, but I still don't love the behavior. Well, I was surprised to learn that's off by default, the gesture thing. Like, by default, you have the buttons. An Android engineer at Google told Android Central that it's going to be on by default on the next phone. Okay. So they're not, like, having second thoughts.

They just know that they need to warm people up to it. That's probably both. All right. you'll have it next week a little review anything i mean yeah we've it's like been out we've seen the features announced it and like two the slices and time will spend's in beta and slices are not available yet slices are the thing where if you like type a thing into google search it'll like surface the app action directly so that's not quite ready and i'm assuming the app support for that as well yeah yeah this episode of the verge cast is brought to you by microsoft azure your business is built on bold

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All right, Addy, you went to Florida. I went to Florida. The mysterious Magic Leap facility. Yes, which used to be a Motorola factory. Yeah. And you actually put the thing on. Put several versions of them on. And you look through it.

Several times. Did it reboot the GPU of your brain? I can't tell because I saw a slideshow and there were diagrams about how this was adding light to my eyes. But it also kind of, they were just. describing how eyes worked, I think. So it's very hard. So you wrote your first impression. We don't have one.

It's not a review, but it's been, I don't know, four or five years of endless hype that they're kind of walking away from now. And what do you think? I mean, again, I probably used it for like an hour maybe. It feels like HoloLens with a bigger field of view and with some genuinely very good ergonomics, which is a big deal. I don't want to underplay that because so many companies have screwed that up with VR and AR headsets.

It's really like whoever designed that, good on them. What's good about it? That it's, first of all, I think separating out the, like, most of the components onto a sort of pocket computer is actually a good idea for now just because it is working within the limitations that you've got. Yeah. Like, it's hard to fit all that stuff on your head. So I think that's good. It has a pretty solid, like, you stretch out the back and you rest it over your head and it fits on. And it, like, if you lean way far over, maybe it feels like it's going to fall off.

It rests well. They have a bunch of little adjustable nose and forehead pieces that actually, like, work pretty well. I tried one that one headset and it fit badly. It felt like it was too far away, weird angle, and they just swapped out a few pieces, and then it was perfect. So it's promising. I feel like that's like when you get a new set of earbuds and you know, like figure it out. And they're like, what I do with all these old ones? I don't know what.

When you say it's got a wider field of view than HoloLens, like how much wider? Because that was like, when they, especially with the hype, it's like, all right, you're going to do all this cool stuff and it's going to feel totally immersive and the stuff's going to look totally real. How did the stuff that, you know, how did the holograms or whatever we're calling these things actually look and how wide was the field of view? So the numbers are that HoloLens is, I think somewhere around 35 degrees diagonal. Magic Leap is 50 degrees diagonal, which is, is, I think somebody calculated it to a 45% increase in rectangular area. The problem is that that's still like 45% more of something really tiny. So their site has a whole bunch of estimates like you can see a house cat at 12 paces or something. But they have a, because they're trying to cast it as there are, it's volumetric space.

It's not like a square. It's that actually things exist in this viewing frustrum. And so you can see this thing at this far away and like something larger if you look like, if you look like you're further away, and it's great. In reality, it's like there are things that work. There are, if you had something like Microsoft's like Minecraft thing, you're going to be able to see more of it. Like you can walk a little bit away.

You could see it all over the coffee table, but still, if you lean close, like, it's going to disappear. You can't, like, if you're looking at a screen that's pinned to your wall and you turn your head a little bit, then half that screen is going to go. And that's a pretty clear edge. So I remember with HoloLens, it looked like, I would say I was like holding a postcard out almost arms length and just getting this like very discreet slice of what I was trying to look at. I think that it's inherently not necessarily slicy. And I know that they have done some projects where it'll like fade out so it'll look more natural.

I think a lot of that's controlled by software. It does kind of inherently make the world darker, which is a little bit annoying. It's like wearing mild sunglasses. Okay. Just the regular view, minus any... Yeah, it's got darkened lenses, which a lot of things do. Is that just to manage the relative brightness of things? I would guess so, but I don't know totally. The problem is I just don't know how much it can scale up.

Like, when I went there, they had this table and there was a tablecloth over it, and Ronnie Abavits, the CEO is like, you know what's under there? Magic Leaps 2 and 3. So they're talking constantly about how they're iterating and how fast they're going, but I don't know how much the field of view is going to improve because it's just not enough to actually use as a computing device. So I think this, your piece and the question that came to my mind, which is the only question I have, which is what is Magic Leap?

Is it a hardware platform or is it a software platform? And I mean that very specifically. Like Magic Leap's 2 and 3. They needed to put this one out so people could build this software. and then, you know, MagicLeap 2 comes out, and it's the more consumer version and all the software's at the ready. Or is it the thing, the hack, the GPU of the brain thing,

where they're developing this crazy photonics system that, like, does something to your eyes? Because that's not what this is, right? And so it's just like I can't tell where the bet is exactly. So the photonics chip is what is in these things. They call it a photonics chip because it's not, it's a lens. It's a wave guide, but it's made with processes that are similar to making a CPU.

because it's very precise, and therefore they call it a chip. So the thing that you have been hearing about since, like, 2016 or something, it's roughly that thing. The problem is that it's really hard to describe what technologies Magic Leap is actually using because everything simultaneously is a specific technology and also like a really weird, we're going to project light in your eyes. Like, yes, that's how eyes work. Well, no, but before it was not, it was much more about directly interfacing with your retina. I mean, like, it is the, that's... Hacking the GPU of the brain, man. It was, it was about not, like, the first Avagant didn't have, like, that thing, right? They were, like, actually shining against your retina, and they were beaming light rays against your retina. Yes, no, there's redden, this is not the technology, I think, that people were speculating they were going to be using when they first got all of this funding in 2014. It's using technology that as far as I am aware is fairly similar to,

to HoloLens, but more so right now. So more HoloLens. I was really sad here. You said you couldn't quite tell if the refocusing, because ostensibly you can actually refocus using your regular eye features on things at different depths, but you said it was kind of too fuzzy to tell if it was working. So, yeah, they have something called multiple focal planes, And the idea is supposed to be that you're supposed to be able to focus on things of different depths.

There just wasn't a demo where it felt like there were things at multiple focal distances that I could look at in a way that felt like I was looking and shifting my eyes. Actually, in the hotel before we got there, I just sat there with Tom and Becca and James and I just had them hold things up and I practiced shifting my eyes so I would know what it felt like. But I just, I couldn't tell enough where I'm like, this thing is categorically different. It must be the focal planes. So you didn't have like, I feel like the canonical story is like their original demo, they like put like a teacup in front of people and like which one's the real teacup? You didn't have some sort of like, I should definitely give them $2 billion sort of experience. Yeah, no, I've heard the version that when you go there to interview or something or you go to try it,

and they put you in a room and they ask you to pick out the things that are fake. I do not know how someone could lose that test. Oh, no. It's a lot, right? I wanted it to be magic. A leap. A leap, at least. A leap of magic.

And then you point out in your piece, they have this huge set of developers more than some game studios, and the games aren't even there. Like they, yeah, literally not there. They have a ton of creative people working for them. Like Neil Stevenson, obviously the author, was one of their very early hires. He's supposedly been working on something for just years and years. The day after I left, they announced they were going to have Grant Morrison, the comics author, writing for them.

They have, yeah, they have a studio that's supposedly 55 people from the New Zealand Effects Studio Weta Workshop, building a game. You played that game a little bit, right? I played a thing that is supposed to be that game, yeah. Dr. Gord Bortsinvaders. Yeah. Amazing name. It's 55 people just as well. Who is this doctor, by the way?

He's actually one of their franchises for making their props or something. It's like a sort of steampunk universe thing. It's kind of neat. Yeah. But the idea is that if you've seen the Microsoft demo where the stuff would break through your walls and you had to shoot it and there was the little holographic creature telling you to do stuff, this was like that except steampunk. And the thing that this didn't do.

that was actually really neat, was that it looked like this portal opened up in your wall to this other, like, little steampunk world, and you had to shoot through it. I just genuinely don't know how you get a full game out of it. So I was reading a wired piece. So Jesse Hempel did another, I guess she got access before, and like she wrote the, like, story of Yeah, I think she wrote a piece after Kevin Kelly wrote his big wired piece. Yeah. So there's just two quotes that I want to point out from Abbott's.

He says in this piece, the marketing team, the early marketing team was in line with the company's culture in Russian. He likenes it to a type of organ rejection describing the ethos of the time as tribal. It was like, which culture is going to win the splashy big company? Everyone else was just like, that doesn't feel right. Cut to the chase, we were not connecting with their early marketers. And then the ex-marketer gave a quote, as the months and years were on, it became clear to me that what he was directing us to say publicly was not going to converge with the realities

of the product when it launched. That is a damning set of statements. Right? Like, they straight up lied about what they were going to launch at the beginning. And we all just sort of saw it. And now they're trying to like back it down to like, this is Gen 1. It costs $2,300. This robot's going to throw a thing at you and you can like wave your hand through some grass. And Gen 2 is like going to be better. Or are they backing it down to this thing is still a revolution? It's a little bit weird. Like the analogy they used, me was that it was like the original Macintosh.

And so I think the thing they're going for is that it's, it will be have clear shortcomings that you'll be able to point to, but they're the kind of shortcomings that if you like make a big deal out of them now, you'll feel very silly when this thing is huge in 10 years, like the people who thought that the iPhone with 2G was never going to catch on. Like I'm reading between the lines a little bit, but that kind of feels like the thing they're positioning it as. Like it has shortcomings, but it's still fundamentally amazing.

Yeah, I just, And they like and they were like, he told me he's like it's a magical mystery tour thing. That's what we were going for originally. And we think people took it too seriously. I mean, like the press that they did was so insane. Well, how are they reinventing computing? The way that anybody who's doing mixed reality sort of inventing computing, they do actually, if you talk to him, it's like really cool. He has these weird ideas for like the life stream, which people have written about, where the idea is that all you're

data is actually a thing that you own and they treat it like you had generated a book or something and you could sell it. And it's going to be like a gesture that universal no recording gesture that they're going to slowly incalcate people with etiquette for augmented reality. Like they come off as way less techno inevitable than a lot of really big companies. It's cool. It's from a lot of the stuff and you have this stuff in your piece. It sounds like they are thinking through the implications of what it would be like if everybody

was wearing this all the time. Yeah. But why would everybody be wearing this all the time? What are you going to do other than fight robots? I mean, that's the problem. So, because augmented reality, the thing is that they're kind of making a thing that tons of people have been imagining in science fiction and that tons of people are also currently trying to make and have been trying to make for some 10 years.

So their ideas so far are a lot like, it seems like the ideas that a lot of people have, except that they're more, they've traditionally been more sort of entertainment focused. Like they have a deal with ILMX Lab. They have said they are working with like location-based entertainment places so you could put these things on and it's like this extra dimension to a theme park. I mean, I can think of a lot of things I could do with it. The really obvious thing everybody seems to say is just I want to replace my computer monitor with a thing that I can put in midair and take anywhere. But it's too fuzzy for like reading a lot of text, right? I mean, you can read text, but it's, yeah, it's a little bit fuzzy.

I also just don't want a screen where like if I were looking the direction I'm at looking now, I'm like a slight angle from my computer, it would just disappear. It sounds deeply silly to say, but I kept forgetting where I had put stuff. Because it was just like disappearing. Because you have to look fairly closely to, like you have to look through sort of a periscope to find anything. Yeah. Well, it's hacking the GPU your brain. It's getting rid of your object permanence.

I mean, there's actually a blog called GPU of the Brain now, which is amazing, just in general. Like, I'm glad it's a meme. So, okay, $2,300. Yes, with an additional optional $500 developer package that gives you, like, replacement services and stuff. Who buys this thing? They're calling it the creator edition, and the idea is basically it's people who want to build apps for this, who want to build games for this, and who want to be comics artists in Magic Leap or something. And are they promising that this stuff is portable? Like, is it on their platform and their platform only?

Are they saying it'll go to AR kit on the iPhone and HoloLens? Like, how does this – are you buying into their platform or are you buying into the future of AR broadly? They were saying kind of both. I talked to developers who they're building sort of internal stuff. And there's a lot of stuff that they want to work just on all platforms. And they don't sound like they have a bunch of exclusives. deals with anybody who builds stuff. Yeah.

I think the thing they obviously don't want to say is like if you can build for our tech, our tech's the same as everybody else's tech. So I think there's probably an argument that they're like, no, look, it'll obviously better on us. We have this special controller that like HoloLens doesn't have. You obviously can't do the same stuff with looking through a phone. So like you might not want to do this, but like they have a vibe in their office. They talk about like cross-platform stuff.

Yeah. They definitely don't seem like they're trying to create a lockdown ecosystem. Can they do like a blacked out virtual reality mode in the thing? Or you always just see the, it's always mixed reality. I mean, they can't do it. I think they're at something like 85% darkness or 85% occlusion. Yeah, I mean, I was just like, after all of that, it seems like this is a very grounded in the practical reality of what they could build right now product.

And I still, I don't know what the cell is for that when it's really easy to have a nice AR experience. looking through an iPhone. I mean, I'm not a big fan of phone-based AR. So I think part of the appeal is also just genuinely having a hands-free computer that you can take anywhere. Yeah. Like not having to hold up a fairly heavy device when you're holding your arm up. Yeah. Staring at things. Like being able to control something without like blocking the thing you're looking at. I think that phone-based AR genuinely is just a stopgap and there's a lot I don't like about it. I think the problem is that every company making AR glasses. Like, how do you build a future when the thing you're trying to build is something science

fiction writers have been, like, coming up with every possibility for obsessively over the last, like, several decades? Well, I mean, so Apple puts out the glasses, they're going to run iOS. They've got the huge library of software magically passed to compete with that, presumably, right? Yeah. And the way that I had thought they were going to do this originally was that they were going to use their huge entertainment thing. And they were going to be like the Nintendo Switch, sort of, that they were going to come up

with the best experiences. They have, that's where you get Star Wars, and maybe there's some version of it you can get on other platforms that they will sell, but that actually, like, that's why you want a Magic Leaf

because it has the best experiences and it's, like, comfortable and fun. Yeah, and yet, Dr. Gord, Borts, Invaders. Yeah, I just haven't seen anything they're doing. So what's next for them, do you think? Well, the Magic Leap's 2 and 3, apparently. But, like, they're going to go on sale.

Are they going to go, like, road shows? Those are going to be in AT&T stores, right? Like, are they going to make the big push, or are they going to keep it kind of quiet? Yeah, they're going to, like you said, they're going to be in some AT&T stores sometime this year. They're going to go on a big, I think, university tour. He really wants, like, Babavitz really wants this to go to, like, schools and wants college students and kids and stuff to try it. And I think they are leaving it open to, like, pop-up stores and things like. that. But largely, yeah, they try to sell this thing probably. They, I mean, I'd assume,

showcase any really good stuff devs make, which would be cool. And then they're also supposedly already working on their next generations. And AT&T, they signed a deal with them to distribute something with mobile data, which this doesn't have. So that's hypothetically coming. I feel like this AT&T made that deal just to get people into an AT&T store, because there's no reason that you go to an 18T store otherwise, unless you just need a new phone, and then you're trying to get out of there as fast as possible. And now they're like, I'm going to go to the AT&T store. Oh, my God, I accidentally bought a note nine, five family lines, like four cases, pure margin.

I just left $400 in the floor and walked out. We've all been upsold. I mean, they also invested in them. I'm not super clear on to what extent the investment is influenced. Part of that, right now they don't recommend using this outside for whatever reason. But obviously the biggest AR successful at all time. is Pokemon Go, which is walking around outdoors. Yeah, so sort of the problem technically is that outdoors is super unpredictable, right?

The idea is that you constantly have these things moving. There's not a prearranged space that you can map unless they go through some truly giant mapping effort. And inside, the way that you use this thing is if you want a ball to bounce off a table, then you run a mesh of the room. it can't detect when people are walking in front of you. Like it just doesn't have the kind of responsiveness, nor do other AR headsets that that would require.

And Pokemon Go, like, nobody who played that game for more than like two days used the AR component. It's true. It's true. When can I get one? In specific cities, which you can check on their website, you can get one now and they will literally come to your house and, like, fit it for you. Otherwise, you can sign up, and it's sometime soon.

And you have to sign up through the develop. You have to sign up on their development portal, but that's easy. I did it, and I've never developed a magically BAP. Did you buy one? No. She's asking. When are we getting one? Do you tell us?

No. I know someone in the office, I think, has ordered one. Oh, my God. I have not ordered one because I don't want to spend $2,300 on a thing that I can't do anything with right now. Makes sense. All right. Well, you made a comparison on Twitter to General Magic. There's like the new documentary about General Magic out where it's like all of the

smartest people having all the best ideas just way too early and then it flamed out. Do you still feel that way? Yeah. And the corollary of that would be that everybody from Magic Leap goes on to found every company in Silicon Valley 10 years from now. But yeah, they feel like they're trying to do a thing and they do have good ideas, but they haven't really backed them up with the hard work of making a software platform and that they, it is not clear that they can actually realize the thing they're promising with current field

of view standards. Yeah, I just, I feel like the thing that they magically right now is an AR software platform and the hardware hasn't caught up to it. And like, if you get the people going, like, spin that flywheel, then you put out the big piece of consumer hardware and everything's all ready for you. And they just haven't made it explicit that that's what they're doing. They're still pretending that this. This one's amazing.

Yeah. And I really do hope that they find a bunch of cool apps and that they showcase them and they support them because that's been a really key part of something like Oculus's strategy and that's how they have managed to survive, I feel like, besides being a part of Facebook. So I really hope that they actually are paying attention to software. All right. We're going to do this week in Elon with Liz. And then we're going to come back.

We're going to talk about Service Go. Did you play with some robots? The FCC did some stuff. It would be great. Check this out. This Week in Elon with Liz Lapato. Hello and welcome to this week in Elon. It has been an unusually eventful week even for Elon.

And this is Elizabeth Lapato, the science editor at The Verge. I'm going to walk you through it. So, Tuesday, there was this tweet, which, you know, isn't unusual for Elon. But what was unusual is that Elon tweeted about taking Tesla private. Now, Tesla is a publicly traded company and has been since 2010, but Elon Musk has never been happy about it. In fact, if you've read his biography by Ashley Vance, you know that Vance says that going public was something of a Faustian bargain. Because even though an IPO can raise an awful lot of money, it comes at a cost. When you're a public company, obviously there are lots and lots of people who are paying attention to what you're doing.

It's not just your shareholders. It's also short investors who are betting against the company, regulators and reporters like me. So Elon Musk has been pretty consistent about not liking having a publicly traded company in 2013. He sent an email to SpaceX employees explaining why he didn't think SpaceX should go public. He wrote, quote, some at SpaceX who have not been through a public company experience, think that going public is desirable. This is not so. Public company stocks, particularly if there are big changes in technology involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and reasons that have nothing to do with the economy. So let's zoom back to Tuesday.

What happened was a little weird on a couple of levels. So here's his tweet. I'm considering taking Tesla private at 420, funding secured, and then nothing for an hour. So there was some speculation about whether this was like a weed joke that like went wrong or like whether this was a real, a real thing. But then he, Tesla released an email he sent to the entire company confirming that this was a real thing, that he is going to try to take Tesla private. Now there are a bunch of things. that are currently happening in the Wall Street press that I'm going to try to quickly summarize. First of all, the tweet could attract regulatory attention.

And in fact, it looks like the SEC is considering an investigation. But especially if Tesla doesn't move ahead with a deal or the funding isn't there, then regulators might suggest that Musk made a false statement that caused the price of his company to skyrocket. That's market manipulation. It goes to in very big trouble. But there's also some concern about the announcement being on Twitter itself, which is sort of an unusual move. It's not unusual for companies to disseminate stuff on social media, but the SEC requires a simultaneous press release.

And the email did not go up for an hour. So let's just leave the SEC aside for a moment and talk a little bit about the practical concerns. So no one knows where Musk is getting the money, or at least I don't. And most of the smart financial reporters I've been following don't either. So SoftBank did meet with Elon Musk in 2017 to talk about taking Tesla private, but it didn't work out. So it's not super clear where the money is coming from. And he needs about $60 billion to do this deal because he only owns about a fifth of shares. So that's a lot of money.

And there aren't a lot of people with that money. So right now, a lot of reporters are focusing on figuring out where the money could possibly be coming from. The obvious people are banks, private equity firms, mega tech companies, and soft bank. It turns out reporters are just coming up empty. So there's a big question about where that money is coming from because it is a lot of money. money. But it's, it's, you know, one of many, many questions that are sort of raised by this move. Because, you know, the other thing that Musk said is that he wants everybody who's invested in Tesla to go private with him, which is not usually what going private means. Usually you just

buy everybody out. So whether or not that's even possible is something of an open question, but I think it's pretty interesting. What he's saying essentially is that his shareholders aren't the problem. It's all the rest of us. So that has been this week in Elon. And I suppose he will. tweet again very soon. He will. He will tweet again. Busy man.

Actually, right. It's funny. Let's tape that earlier today. And as we've been taping the Vergecast, Tesla's board put out a statement said they're evaluating his offer and the Saudi money. The Saudi wealth fund is like part of the thing.

So who knows? That's the update. He keeps going. The week in Elon does not end. Elon never stops. On Thursday at 1 p.m. when Liz tapes this week in Elon. All right, Dieter.

Yeah. We've been talking about the service go for three weeks, so let's do this fast. You reviewed it. Yes. Tom Warren was like, I love Microsoft, and then also reviewed it. It's good. It's like, get the expensive one. Don't get the cheap one.

It's stupid, slow. Windows Central did some benchmarks on the EMSC storage, and it's like a quarter as fast as the SSD on the more expensive one. You know, like we answered a bunch of questions. It's how we did the review. I managed to play some games on it. I managed to not play some other games on it. And everyone's really freaked out about, you know, spending $650, 680, maybe you can get it for $600 on Amazon if you look carefully. Is that too much for this thing?

And I just stopped worrying about that. Like, we don't freak out about how much an iPad Pro cost. It's like, well, it's expensive. It's $800 with a keyboard. But if you want that thing, then you spend $800 and you get that thing and you could maybe use it as your, you know, main computer on the side or some main. main computer on the side. Yeah, your main side computer. All right.

I got it. Your main second computer, you know, whatever. And I just, I feel the same way with the Surface Go. Like, don't overthink it. Wait, hold on, hold on. What's your second second computer? It's a Chromebook. Yeah, I knew there was an answer.

That's true. I would like a Chromebook as my second second computer. What do you think your first computer is? It's still the Mac. Oh, I was going to say it's my phone. Although, yeah. Oh, okay. That's fair.

So this isn't, you don't think of this as an entry level surface? No, I do not. And I know they're trying to make it that by selling it for $400. But if anybody buys a $400 one, I'm very sorry. I'm very sorry for what's going to happen to you. But it's also not a really iPad competitive. But no, it's $6.80. I mean, there are so many bad $700 Windows laptops out there.

Yes. And like their only benefit is like a mediocre 15 inch screen. It's 680. You might as well just get this instead of a 700. Windows laptop, right? I mean, like, I could see making that case pretty clearly. Right, except that everybody who buys crappy $700 Windows laptops is doing it because they want a 15-inch screen. So the market for this is people who want an ultra-portable, who want a tiny little computer. So, like, one of the things I hate doing in a review is like, if this, you're this

kind of person and you're this kind of person, and if your computer needs are this, then maybe you should check this thing out. Like, I hate doing that. So, like, I don't want to totally, like, try and predict what the, you know, target market of who's going to buy this is. But I do think that if we give other computers the benefit of the doubt to just be what they are and sell for their price, that's fair for, you know, what it costs to make them, I don't see the reason why not to do it with this thing and not, like, stress about, you know, the price point too much.

I will say that is a slightly different angle than Tom, who is like, the dream is alive. It has been achieved. He's very enthusiastic about this thing. Yeah. Well, the thing will surprise you. Like, that was like my first angle. Like, you use this and you're like,

holy shit, this is good. And you're like, you're not confused, but you're a little bit confused. Because all the other little surfaces have been bad, really bad. Every single little tiny, like, let's make a tiny Windows PC and see what happens and make it kind of cheap, has been awful.

Yeah. Going back to netbooks. So the fact that they did the thing they tried to do originally with the Surface RT and that they've made a good little Windows computer is worthy of, I don't know, applause, admiration. Good job, Microsoft. Maybe we'll get one. Primary side.

What would you rather have a Note 9 or a Surface Go? Ooh. Or two Note 9s or two service goes or one note 9. What about a note 9 and a Code? a little monitor with HTML plug. Yeah. For decks. Straight deck.

I'm going to make you use decks for those AIS tablets. Are those Aces or Acer? They were Aes or Zanphone? Those were Ais. Those were Ais. Yeah. Yeah. And it had the tablet with like the slot for the phone in the back. Oh. Yeah. The stream is never going to that.

All right. And then Deeter, you also played with these new little onky vector robots, which are, I I think they are less cute than you think. I think they could have been much cuter. They could have been much cuter. The main job I had was not to, you know, it's not a review, but not to, like, judge this thing based on what I thought they could have done and what I think they thought, you know, it looks exactly like the last robot. It looks exactly like the Cosmo. It's just, like, slightly updated.

My question of Anki is, like, they have done something unique, which is they are basically a toy company, but we talk about them like they're much more than a toy company. Right? Yes. Why is that? Well, this thing is supposed to not be a toy. They have much higher ambitions. Like, they were very unafraid to be like, this is the first step. Like, they showed me a slide that's like, there was the overdrive, and then there was

the super overdrive or whatever. And then there was the Cosmo, and then there's this. And then there'll be another one next year. That'll be even better. There'll be one after that. They keep talking about it. They believe in a bottom-up approach to robotics. So they made this thing the way they did.

They didn't give it a hand. They didn't make it bigger. They didn't do whatever they did with it. because they wanted your expectations of what it could do to match to match what it actually can do. So when you look at this thing, you're like, what could this little thing with this dopey little forklift arm do? I bet it could do this stuff. And that's the stuff it can do. If you, you know, they dunked on Gbo, which was super fun, right?

Like, Gbo promised way more than it could deliver. And you expected way more than... Gbo's a little like Butler robot that runs around your house. That got canceled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so this could do more than that GBO thing could, but it's only $250. And, you know, we'll see. Like, you should not buy this.

Don't buy it. I'm telling you now. I don't know. I'm telling you know, don't buy it. Because if you buy it expecting to get something out of it, to expect utility, you're going to be disappointed. Yeah. If you buy it because you think it's kind of cool to have a little robot in your house that

charges itself and says hi to you when you come home and gets excited when it sees you. and watches TV with you and gets really mad when the alarm goes off and like shakes and gets pissed off that its face is turned into a clock, then get this. If you want to like see what it's like to have that thing in your house, go get it. It's like a hamster. Why do they call it a home robot? They could call it a desk robot. Or an Ibo.

I don't know. We could call it an Ibo. And that would make me very happy. Yeah, they could call it a robot pet. It's a robot pet. It's like what I said, is it a pet? They're like, no, it's a home robot. Okay.

Is it a toy? No, it's a home robot. So it's like a digital assistant. No, it's a home robot. What is a home robot? Well, it's Vector. Vector is a home robot. Very interestingly, we say don't gender the robots on the show all the time.

They gendered the robot. They supergendered the robot. It's a heat. Yeah, well, they believe in character. So one of the things the robots are going to be able to do come later this year, I think, is you'll be able to leave messages for somebody. And they're also going to let it, like, bring you notice. And so think about, if you've got an Alexa speaker or Google Home or whatever, and it just is like, hey, Paul, hey, I got some information for you.

You're like, no, you do not get to talk to me out of nowhere. But because this thing has a personality, they feel that it gives them permission to, like, have it proactively do stuff and, like, proactively try and get your attention. Which maybe, maybe that's true. we'll have to see once they start releasing those features. They, I don't know, they, they like overthink a whole lot of this character stuff. Like I got a really long conversation behind one of the character designers who's like, it's like an exotic pet. And when we don't think about like you and the information, there's this third entity,

and that's the character of the robot. And so when information comes in, the robot has an opinion on it. And so you're talking to the robot who's delivering the information. You're not just getting the information. Like, we've gotten this whole thing. Wait, will the robot stop doing stuff if you get it mad? Yes. That's what Magic Leap wants to do, too.

Yeah, it, they specifically said it'll get moody. Like, if it can't get to its home, yes, if it can't get to its home base or, like, it's trying to pick up its cube and can't figure it out, it'll, like, start grumbling and be like, brer. Isn't the Magic Leap thing that they're going to make an AI assistant that, like, abandons you if you're mean or something? Yeah, they're going to have, like, a sort of little demon that does whatever, does low-level things, and then you'll have this.

collaborative, like, AI that has a personality, and if you're rude to them, the name is Micah, then she, which they're calling a she for now, even though they accept that gendering robots and AI is problematic, will, like, walk out and you'll maybe be locked out of stuff for a little while. Oh, my. That's amazing. So the best minds of our generation are trying to create AIs that will abandon us. What you want is moody AIs that have...

I mean, we do. We do. We do. We do. When they're unhappy with you. I think there is something just completely innate in humans. We want to make humans. And getting mad of people and storming out, slamming doors.

It's very human. Starting a global thermonuclear war. That's where this ends. Hashtag just human beings. Like, I'm a he. And like, hits the button. Like, humanity is over. It's like the end of it.

I'm a boy. All right. Two little net neutrality things. One, it takes a lot to put the word lied in a headline, and we were very confident in this headline. The FCC lied to Congress about an alleged cyber attack and didn't come clean about it until now. So when the net neutrality is dead, I know it's over, it's fine. But go with me on this. When John Oliver went up against Ajit Pai last year, the FCC said their comment system was taken down by a quote-unquote non-trader.

DDoS attack. And then Congress started asking about it. The FCC's own Inspector General investigated and found that no such cyber attack had taken place. So Pai got up in front of Congress and said there was a DDoS attack. And that's why many of the comments were not there or taken out. Never happened, which is a lot. Is his argument that it was a non-traditional DDoS attack and it was non-traditional in

the sense that John Oliver asked everybody to do it and that counts? I don't think that counts. Their system did crash, right? They didn't like shut it off on purpose? No. The quote is, some external folks attempted to send high traffic and attempt to tie up the server.

The suggestion was rather than being shut down by a surge of valid complaints. The site was flooded by fabricated traffic. The assertion came from the CIA. And then everyone disputed this and now we're finding out that never happened, even though Pye went in front of Congress and said it did. That's a lot.

Like, there was, I think, a lot of fear that he was ignoring comment. We talked about it a lot on this show, that he was ignoring comments. He was saying, I only want quality comments. There's a surge of fake traffic. He was doing everything in his power to make it seem like the grassroots popular opinion was invalid. And now we're finding out that they outright, they just said a thing that wasn't true, which I think is just a lot for them. It also just seems like such an unforced error. This seems like such an elaborate subterfuge to go to, to say that John Oliver isn't as popular as you think he is.

I think what they wanted to do was discount how unpopular the move was. And to his credit, like, that's what you would do under a normal administration. You don't just do unpopular things whenever you want. So, like, I think there was like some element of, we know we're going to do this thing. we're going to get this blowback, and we can discount, we can say there was a DDoS attack and all this traffic was fake. I mean, I get why they'd do it in the first place,

but this just seems like they have doubled and tripled down to a point way after I would have maybe let this quietly die. Yeah, Pye passed the buck to a CIA. It's like, anyhow. So that's that. I just want to keep that in mind because the things are still spinning out of control in terms of consolidation, and I think Pye is just under the gun. He just blocked the Sinclair Tribune merger and now's the tribute.

Like, there's a lot of FCC stuff going on. And I think, as with many things in this administration, the actions are taken. There's a lot of, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors. And then some element of the truth comes out. And it's like, oh, yeah, you just lied. Like, that's actually, you just lied. The reason I wanted to bring that up is not just a Dunkin Pie, although if you'd like to come on the show, we can get that done, is because the government is now. appealing the AT&T

Time Warner merger and they filed their first set of briefs. They said it doesn't make any rational economic sense. AT&T, amazing quote from AT&T, an appeal is not a do-over, which it is. So I don't know what exactly they think

that that statement means. But they, it's at the same time, the FCC and the DOJ, this is very procedural, but just follow me on it. So the DOJ is appealing the AT&T Time Warner merger decision that they lost. At the same time, they are partnering with the FCC to vacate the previous decision upholding that neutrality in 2016, which they don't need to do

because they already passed the rules vacating decision. So it's a procedural move that they're doing. So they can clean the slate and potentially pass and let Congress pass new legislation is what they say. The reason I think it is insane is that the best argument against the AT&T Time Warner merger is the net neutrality argument. And they can't make it because they keep saying net neutrality is dumb. So they're going back at it again,

and they don't have this argument that letting AT&T prioritize HBO content will be unfair to Netflix. Like, they just don't have it. You say the government doesn't have that argument. The government is cutting off its own best argument. The government is arguing against net neutrality. So if they had this net neutrality argument in their pocket,

they could say, We don't usually care about vertical monopoly in this way or vertical consolidation this way. But in this case, letting AT&T prioritize its own services will necessarily affect the market. They just don't have that argument. So this thing is still just like rolling. And I think they just want to get back at CNN because the Trump administration wants to get back at CNN, even though they claim that's not what they're doing. But they don't have their own best argument. I just think that is deeply, deeply hilarious.

You got a big science. They have it. They just can't say it. Okay. That's the opposite of having it. I know what I should say, but I'm actively choosing to say the other thing at every opportunity. What were you going to say, Paul? I just hate antitrust.

That's my thing. A really smart Econ professor called Hausinger, I follow on Twitter. It had a whole thread today, which I retweeted. You should go read it. It's very smart. But his line was antitrust. is the thing that separates capitalism for socialism. I'm not going to go into it, but it's good.

It's good. My thing is Tom's soul. So that's not going to go into it. All right, Paul, shake hands. All right, Paul, buddy, every week you do a segment. This week is sponsored again. The sock folks have come back. You know about all the socks.

Yeah, this week's segment of, Shasuiovich. But you got to read the ad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This week, Shasuevich is brought to you by Darn Tough Vermont Sox, the flagship merino experience for your feet. Made in the USA and unconditionally guaranteed for life. Visit darntuff.com slash verge for 20% off your first order. That's darn tough.com

slash verge. Thank you darn tough Vermont socks for sponsoring Shasui Vidge Thanks to Vermont Yeah, basically the great state of Vermont and all your merinos

Okay, Shasui Vig is It's basically like a Kimming joke If you're aware of Kimming, where if you put an R and in close together, they look like an M. Yeah.

But it's a joke on the word kerning, which is about the spacing of letters. There's this brand called Shesouy Vig. S-H-A-S-U-I-V-G that through some miracle when properly curned

looks exactly like Samsung Kroger. They are selling a 55-inch 4K TV for, I believe, something like, yeah, $57. So you could go to Walmart buy a $4,000 Samsung S Amelad.

Yeah. Or you can get a Shazoo Evage for way cheaper. Oh, that's beautiful. This is like my favorite posts on the site today. Yeah. I'm happy it happened on Samsung. Thank you, Vlad, for putting this up. All right. Let's do like four phone leaks.

There's iPhone 10 plus in the iOS 12 beta. Does anyone surprised by this? Small phones. No, zero surprise. I don't know if I'm going to go back. I feel like I'm very happy with where I'm at right now. I used to be a plus phone all the way. iPhone 10 works?

Yeah. I'm not dying for a bigger screen. Oh, I felt that way when I had like the 3.5-inch phone and then I bought the plus and I was like, oh yeah. That's what I wanted. And then I just held the note nine. I was like, I want this. So, I don't know. More Google Pixel Excel leaks.

This thing is just getting uglier and uglier, man. Yeah, I mean, I've been saying pixels always look worse than the leaks than they do in real life. But, man, I don't know how you make this thing look good. It's got a lot of notch. I'm going with the smaller one. I don't know, man. Like the notch is good if you get bigger screen and this gives you more screen. But it's so big.

I don't want to have to reach up that high. It is easily one of the worst notches I've ever seen. It's ridiculous. And then it also has a chin. Yeah. So all Android phones is not just have chins. But that's bad. I'm not saying that it's, yes, you're correct.

All right. And then Dieter, I'm just going to throw this one out there. And then you're going to start talking. The Palm smartphone reboot is shaping up to be disappointing. Don't you mean plan? Yeah. So the logo is awful. It's like you can't.

if it's a palm or plam. I'm only referring to this thing as plam. It is now cannot canon. It is Verge law. Verge cast law. You cannot refer to this thing as a palm phone. It's a plam phone. It will say it's one of the dumbest logos.

That's number one. I'm just getting started. It has, what, like a 3.3, 3.5 inch screen. Yeah. I mean, it's small phones. 3.3. 7.3. So, like, it's maybe it's trying to get in on like the light phone action.

and like blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like channeling the veer. Go, yes, make that phone. Sure, fine, good. Don't put Android 8.1 under and under spec it so it can't pull anything off. But here's the deepest cut. Here's the thing more than anything else. Like, it's low end, blah, blah, blah, all these problems.

That's all fine. I just want you to look at the layout of apps. apps on this launcher. Screen image placeholder. Yeah. You know what I think. That's what it says. I believe that that is what they're going to do.

And here's why. Because these icons are laid out in a honeycomb. And if you know your smartphone history, you know the very last version of Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile 6.5 thought they could save the platform by creating a honeycomb launcher. This is true. Yeah. Everything is awful about this thing. I'm going to buy like four of them.

If you haven't seen the Plam phone, by the way, it has a scattering of app icons, kind of like the original Apple Watch. It looks like a knockoff iPhone made by the lowest rent Chinese OEM you could possibly imagine. My dude, it's called name the Papito. We have not mentioned this yet. That is the only good thing about this phone. That is a great name for a phone. That is why I'm buying it.

It's because it's called the Papito. Isn't this the same company that's making the... BlackBerry's. The BlackBerry phones, right? Yeah, so it was Alcatel via TCL or TCL via Alcletel. Back in 2015, when they bought it, they said that they were going to ask the community what to do. And they were going to, like, run a poll, I guess. It was very unclear.

Wait, and so the poll was Make a Veer? I guess? I don't know. That's a lot. I love the veer. Don't get me wrong. Oh, man. But...

okay, okay, Peter. I'm not done. One more thing. Okay, go ahead. It's launching on Verizon. Yeah. It's all coming back. The carrier that destroyed Palm.

The carrier that wrecked this company. I mean, they went with Sprint and that's their fault, but Verizon rejected them the first. They had like, like, but no, but they tried to go to Verizon, Verizon, and rejected them, fine. And then they had the thing. And, like, I'm pretty sure they had to landfill a bunch of phones. Verizon made a. garbage ad campaign for them. Not that

Palm's first campaign was anything but garbage either, but the thing that put the last nail in Palm's coffin was Verizon's rejection of their phones. And now Verizon's the one that gets this little papito. All right. My question, I think that's, okay, go ahead. What if the

Plam ran LG's WebOS? That would be amazing. It's a full TV operating system. Well, I can't wait to make Dieter review the plan phone. Just you and your Pepito, man.

Dieter's just smoking. It's just smoking. He's so mad. All right, that's it. It's been a long one. Thank you, Addy, for being here. I've got two ads to read and then a bunch of stuff to hype. I'm just letting you.

I'll just be 100% off. You know the skip, you know where it is. I mean, we want to keep the stats good, so just keep it run until the end. All right, this episode of Vergecast brought to you by ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. The business attack is practically scripture that you have to be comfortable with big, bold, exciting risk. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to minimize the downside of taking those risks.

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I guess I could pay you. But free is the lowest risk price there is. That is zipprecruiter.com slash a verge. Start putting technology to work for you once again, supercruiter.com slash verge. Lastly, I just want it once again tell you to go watch home in the future on the YouTube's. It's real good.

Gran Amharro from Mythbusters. And I know we didn't talk about the big stuff happening in the world. Platforms, D-platforms, speech, Alex Jones. The info of wars. Yeah. War of Infoes. But Casey is doing just an excellent job covering that stuff on the interface. So subscribe to that newsletter.

Check out Casey's work on the site. We have a bunch of other reporters new to you, but Casey's really tip of the spear there. Speaking of which, converges to Casey Newton, almost done. So go listen to that. It's an excellent show. one of my very favorites. He's so good at it. So check that out in Apple Podcast.

Why'd you push that button in season three? Production ramping up. Oh, boy. Ashley and Caitlin and Andrew are producer, and their producer, has been working on it. I'm very excited that's going to be coming out. A little bit.

We've got to do some more. But Converges wrapping up, go listen and converge. Binge watch. Binge listen to Why Do you push that button in season one and two. You can follow us on Twitter. I'm reckless.

Paul's Future Paul. Dieter's Backlon. Addie is. The dexterity. The dexterity. Are we adding your Magic Leap photo to like the quad tick of VR photos? Are you keeping that restricted to VR glasses? The quad tick is only the big four from 2016.

Okay. But I have a whole other sort of running tally of them. So this goes with that, with a few other headsets I've done this year. It's one of the better ones, though. Yeah. I feel like your job is to just wear extremely weird headsets. It's good. No, it's like the only pictures of me on the internet are me without eyes.

And with that, that is Vergecast. You could also listen to Recode Decode with Carole Swisher, Recode Media with Peter Kafka, all of it's and podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Plam.

Hey, I'm Russ Frustick, the host of the History of Fun podcast. Each week, we explore the hidden backstories behind the things you love to do. For example, did you know the neopets were led by high-ranking members of the Church of Scientology? Also, this kind of blew my mind. The original Mr. Potato-Head was. wait for it, a real potato. If any of that sounds interesting to you,

new episodes of The History of Fun are added every Monday. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.