The Vergecast - Magic Leap, iPhones slow down, and Microsoft removes Chrome installer from Windows Store

Episode Date: December 22, 2017

Hello! And happy holidays. This is the last Vergecast of 2017! But we go out with a bang (At least two computers broke down during this recording). The two big things that happened this week was the unveiling of the mysterious Magic Leap augmented reality goggles and Apple confirming they slow down older iPhones. So Nilay, Dieter, and Paul welcome senior reporter Adi Robertson back to the show, who has been reporting on Magic Leap for the past few years. There’s a whole lot more in between that, like Paul’s weekly segment “Robots teach me how to breathe?” so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 01:41 - Magic Leap finally unveils augmented reality goggles 31:39 - Apple confirms iPhones with older batteries will take hits in performance 50:13 - Paul’s weekly segment “Robots teach me how to breathe?” 52:45 - Google brings Chrome to the Windows Store as just a download link 57:29 - Caavo, the universal remote control that uses machine vision, will ship on February 14th 1:02:50 - Amazon Echo Spot review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And if you're an ad buyer, email somebody. It's like a web ring. You remember web rings? Yeah, it's like that. Click to the next one. Yeah. Welcome to GEOCities.com. Anyway, I'm Eli Patel.

I'm here. Paul Miller's here. Hey, Paul. Hello. Deider Bones on the phone. Hey, it rhymes. Hi. And Addie Robertson is joining us today.

Hey, Addy. Hey. How are things? Yeah. So, you're, Addy, we should just start. Yeah. Which with something that is supposed to be like the biggest news in the history of technology, but is actually just a motorized scooter. It's just a scooter.

That's all it is. Magic Leap published their website this week with some photos of their, their, their, VR goggles. Adi, you want to walk us through that whole situation? Yeah. So magically, if you've been around reading the internet for the past few years, it's gotten like $2 billion from Google and a bunch of investment banks and a bunch of other tech investors. Like, it's gotten a ridiculous amount of money. And yesterday, it finally showed something for literally the first time ever. And it's a pair of glasses that look kind of like Riddick's goggles. and they're supposedly shipping in 2018

and we don't know exactly what specs are. We don't really know how much it's going to cost, but we know it exists. Well, do we? Okay, well, so the invited Rolling Stone, and Rolling Stone was like, hey, we tried this thing. Actually, it's good. Not just Rolling Stone, a person we know,

Brian Crischente, who used to work at Polygon. Who is, it's like the most, if you wore a fedora with a little press tag, you want to be surprised because he's so old school journalist. Yeah. But he went there and he tried the thing on and he said it was good. It was a long article. At the same time, they also went to pitchfork.

Eddie, you wrote about this and had, what was it, Seguer Ross, like talk about how they were going to like pull fish out of the sky. It was very esoteric. They did like a music visualization tool that does sound neat. It just is something that I feel like I've seen a bunch of in VR. and I'm like, oh, yeah, it's one of those. There's the headset, which looks insane. And it's got all kinds of cameras on the front. It's called, it's, once again, it's for creators.

It's a real Microsoft move. The product is called the Magic Leap One. Yeah, creator edition. But we're not enough things called the One yet. Yeah, there's not enough things called The One, and there's not enough things called Creator Edition. Creator Edition is like the world's biggest cop-out, I've decided. We made a bunch of stuff.

We don't know what they're actually for, but we think they're kind of cool. So we're just going to say it's for creators and hope. I think it's the new developer kit. Yeah. I like it better than Innovator Edition. That's true. I think this is going to cost like $1,000 or maybe even $2,000. I think it's going to be $5.

Well, HoloLens costs like $3,000. Yeah, this is going to be $4,000. I feel like from reading the Rolling Stone piece, they're trying to let people know this is going to be a real premium, rare type of thing, like a bespoke computer that you buy. So yeah. So anyway, so there's that. headset and then that connects to like a Adira, I think you called it a disc man. I did. That you wear on your belt called the light pack.

That thing is very mysterious. So all the photos are of people wearing the headset, all the descriptions of using it, are of light field images that are indistinguishable from reality. And then there's like one line in the Rolling Stone piece where the CEO of the company is like, It's as powerful as an alien wear gaming piece. And I just, there's not a world in which I want to put that much power on my waist. I'm fine with it. Adi, maybe you can help describe this.

But as far as I understand, there's two main things that the computing power of this has to do. It has to render whatever 3D graphics it's going to inject into this very mysterious light technology that they have that has sea monkeys in it. Oh, my God. but it also has to do inside out tracking like you know to a slightly more advanced degree than like AR kit does is that correct i have to hedge all of this a bunch because it's all secondhand but there is a computer in the headset itself that it sounds like does basically the inside out tracking and then the computer on your waist has to analyze i guess any of the information it's taking in, connect to like the cloud database that will tell you how to annotate this plant you're

looking at, and it will render all the stuff. So it seems like the headset senses the world, and then the computer produces everything else. And did you understand this description of how this, because it's almost, it's almost philosophical, how they're talking about how they're making things render in your eyes. Yes. It's a trick. I am aware of their bullshit. The only real world is in our minds. We construct it. The problem is that everything their CEO says could either be

some kind of science fiction tech that will never understand, or you could just literally be describing a computer. When pitchfork did its piece, he was like, well, you'll be able to talk and opera music will come out. Yes, you can do that. With a lot of things already.

Yeah, I think that we're in this moment, and this happens a lot. This happened on a smaller scale with like the iPhone 10. We're in a moment when the company gets to drive its entire narrative. And then there's the moment when like, now everyone has one. And I can just confidently tell you, face ID kind of sucks every morning because it doesn't look at my face right. Right. Like the reality of the thing is that it's just a bunch of like plastic and chips. And you'll get it and it's going to work or not work. But they're in the moment where they can be like life field technology. Tax the GPS.

of the brain. I am under the impression. So something that always bothered me in the Silicon Valley TV show is that something that's actually very rare in Silicon Valley is like a true technology breakthrough. I think the reason that Magic Leap,

despite every appearance of a scam, has raised this many billions of dollars and is going to be just fine if they release something that's not at all for the market for years, is that they have something that's truly very different. Wait, so this is the question, because Adi, you've been, like, covering them for a long time.

And so the way that they start, the reason people are like, this is kind of scammy is the core tech breakthrough, if they have one. And it seems like they have one, because lots of people have seen it, including people like, I know, we just can't write about it because everyone has to sign it NDA, except for apparently Brian Christente and Sigur Ross. they've got this light field display technology where you put the plastic chips in front of your eyes and then instead of projecting the image that reflects off the plastic into your eyes which is the way everything else works it sends light field information into your retina

and presents true depth. Yeah. This is fundamentally what we understand their technology to be. Everything else they say is insane. Right? It's what you make, what you put on that display

actually has nothing to do with the breakthrough of the display. And I think they're very bad at figuring out what to do with it. And all of their patent applications, and Adi, you've covered these, this is a question. All their patent applications

have nothing to do as near as we can tell with like the display. It's more like if you add the word AR to any idea. Like dinosaur AR, we have a patent. Addie, is that kind of your understanding? So I've read a bunch of these, and a bunch of them are actually about just how to create a wave guide, how to develop, like, depth.

And then there are all the ones you're talking about, which are basically ridiculous. Like, I have an alert and I just got one this morning, and its title is Augmented Reality Display System for Evaluation and Modification of Neurological Conditions, including visual processing and perception conditions. I've been reading it, and I think the idea is that if you have some kind of neurological, like, blind spot or something, it'll have sensors that look into your eyes and detect that and then compensate for it. Well, that sounds cool. So, yeah, a bunch of really weird bands. Yeah, it's just like... It has a bunch of things that sound neat. Like, what do you think sounds the neatest?

I think stuff like this sounds interesting. I think the idea that it has all of this biometric data, and then it's going to try to use that to... basically make glasses that genuinely just sort of help you behind the scenes is really cool. The problem is that everything they talk about is so weird and lofty that they never are actually engaging in the conversations that they raise with like their patent applications. Well, I think it's, so I agree with you completely. I just at this point, first of all, the thing, obviously it is for developers and it looks very technical, right? Yeah. It's not a consumer product. It's, it looks crazy, actually, and it's like, got lots of cameras and sensors across the front. You know, like, so if that's your audience and or, and it's people like us in the tech press and our audience that cares about this stuff, the first set of questions is actually really obvious. What operating system does it run? Right? Like, that's, I would love to know the answer to that question. Did they write their own? It's been driving me crazy, yeah.

Right? Like, do they write their own? Is it, is it just Android? Is it, is it Windows mobile? Like, it could be anything. Is it just Windows? Because they, you know, they keep showing, like, web browsers. Yeah.

Like, what makes that work? Like, when they put out their SDK, like, do you have to learn a new programming language? Well, I think one nice thing is that so much of game development now is done in Unity and Unreal, that they'll have to create a platform that is easy to target from Unity Unreal. But Unity Unreal target the switch, which runs free BSD. So probably anything that is Linux-like... Yeah, but they're not just talking about games here. It's basically good.

Well, Unity Unreal is being used for a bunch of stuff beyond games now. This is what I learned at the IMAQ Pro briefing is like a bunch of medical software, a bunch of other VR applications, all the 3D modeling stuff, the architecture thing. a bunch of stuff in VR and AR is getting driven by these games engines. And so Paul's right, they have to do something that supports these games engines because otherwise, that's like the actual foundation of a bunch of stuff that involves three rendering. But let me read this paragraph to you.

And you try to map this paragraph to the reality of having to make something. Okay. Here's this paragraph. It's titled Next Generation Interface. It's on the Magicleap website. Maggalype.com in case you're curious. We live in thinking a 3D world, not a flat screen. Our spatial interface includes multiple input modes, including voice, gesture, head pose, and eye tracking.

This collective input system provides the tools needed to break free from outdated conventions of point-and-click interfaces, delivering a more natural and intuitive way to interact with technology. There's also a little controller. It looks, I don't know. It looks like a gear VR controller. It looks like a gear VR controller, more of us. Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Yeah, it's like, what does that mean?

Whatever you want. It needs... HoloLens. HoloLens has all those things. It means you can talk to a thing. You can look at a thing. You can move your head and it looks like you're moving it around it. He is just, that's the problem.

Everything they describe, you can also apply to a bunch of other things. And their selling point is it's better, but they never actually show us any of that so we can't tell. Yeah, that's what's so frustrating is what's magic about Magic Leap is this vision technology. And all the things that they seem to want to do are somewhat. unsolved problems in UI design. Like we haven't ever had a computer that we'd want to wear on our face that would beam light into our eyes all day, but we'd still be able to look through the lens to the real world and live like that.

So nobody has had to or managed to solve what UI is like and what sort of valid experiences are. But I think, you know, HoloLens demonstrated one of my favorite things in this realm is one of the early demos of HoloLens there was like a kitchen and it had different app icons that were kind of distributed around the kitchen. And I really like this idea of going over

to the wall next to the fridge where the Skype icon was. Because that's growing up, my phone was always next to the fridge. So I like this idea of being able to move around in the world to go to launch a quote-unquote app. I think that's really interesting and there's going to be tons of interesting experiments like that.

Well, yeah, that's actually... Sorry, go ahead. Finish ball. I just feel like magically is trying to sell itself as the company that will deliver us all the implications of the technology it's developed. We just want to see the technology. One of their big points from the Rolling Stone thing is that their virtual objects persist in time and space. So if you set up a bunch of screens and then go to bed and then wake up the next morning, the screens are supposed to still be there. Again, like Addie's been saying, that's nothing that nobody else hasn't thought of her is trying to do.

but they're trying to say that their their implementation of all of these things is somehow better and they're also they're better at the lofty talk and so a bunch of stuff that everybody else has been sort of talking about and showing little hacky demos of and blah blah blah blah magic leap instead of actually showing the things has been giving behind closed doors NDA previews and using super flowery language

and I don't know like reading up on their Kant and the way that's how they talk. Well, I just, I mean, it's very exciting. I love a new company. I love crazy people. I love it all. That's why we're in the business, right? But this to me, it's just, you know who else is working on AR?

Apple and Google and Microsoft. Facebook? Well, let's leave Facebook aside, right? Because Facebook doesn't have like app developers. Apple, Google, Microsoft have this like army of app developers who have a business relationship with the company who understand how to make money. Apple has stores. All the stuff you need to get the light field chip in front of your eye.

They haven't shown that. Like, where are they going to sell it? Are they just going to ship boxes out of their factory? There was a Q&A they put out today on like 10 things, 10 more things you didn't know. And what is we're not going to, this requires a special retail experience. experience. And that is what the term magic leap. Your first use is going to involve a magic leap. And so I just bet Addy $100 that it's going to be like the like jump over a cliff demo. You'll put them on in the store. You did? I did. You didn't accept it, but I tried to get you to take it.

You'll put them on the store and then you'll see a cliff and then you're supposed to step over the cliff. I bet you're supposed to step over the cliff. I bet you're right. I think the only only valuable thing from the don't even go to the website. Just read the Rolling Stone It has not nearly as many details as I wish it had, but it is another actual user experience from a relatively objective source, someone describing what it felt like, what it looked like. He mentioned that it had a much better field of view than HoloLens, which everybody who's tried HoloLens knows how limiting that feels, but also said it wasn't a perfect field view. He said he is still unclear about how depth works, whether it's actually working with being able to focus on using your eyes actual ability to focus near and far. I don't know.

Did you figure that weird statement out, Addie, that they had? He like, Brian asked them, he realized he didn't know for sure what it was doing as far as depth. So he asked them, and they gave him this weird, vague statement that made it kind of sound like it was real depth? I don't know. Because I think that's a very important thing. I mean, they magically is criticizing

the age-old stereoscopic version of 3D, which is it's two flat planes that fool you into seeing 3D, but you realize as soon as you try to refocus your eyes on something, it kind of breaks that and it can also be disorienting. I think

that's probably one of the reasons why this looks and feels so good is that it feels a lot more like looking at real 3D objects in space. Yeah, that's what they've promised. And if that works, that's going to be really cool. Right. And I think the problem is we invented a great display technology and we invented a great product and we invented a real company are all very different projects. Right?

And all they, they keep trying to distract from the reality of the technology that they've been. Which is a very expensive. right, hard to manufacture, but sounds like a complete breakthrough in vision. Right. To play devil's advocate, they do keep hiring people who are genuinely talented. Like, they just pulled John Gator away from ILMX lab.

Oh, wow. It's theoretically possible. They are building like a supergroup and that they're just getting a bunch of money from Google. They quietly steal everybody from all these other companies and they build this great powerhouse trifecta of hardware entertainment. software. Yeah. That is going to be really hard if that's what they're doing. And they're still

pretty far away from, you know, the mass market product that makes that valuable, right? And there's also a huge, like, barrier there, which is the creepiness factor. What's creepy? The creepiness factor being stuff like Google Glass, the idea that when you cover your eyes in public, people find it really unsettling. People don't know what, like, if you're doing something that they've seen in a million in augmented reality movies where AR glasses are generally incredibly scary. Like, they've created something that looks really awkward to wear and can do really cool entertainment things. I don't think they've passed that barrier after which you're comfortable wearing something

in public. And that's on top of the other thing where they map your entire room in 3D space, whatever room you're in, so that it can have those persistent objects. And then my understanding is, like, that map gets stored in the cloud, and that's, like, one of the roots of the privacy issue that Addie's been asking about. Yes, they will also analyze everything all the time. Right, they need a map of your house because they need to know where you are in the house to like, well, now I'm just terrified.

The patents also talk a lot about object recognition, so it's not just like, oh, you have a shelf there. It's that, oh, your house has like five paintings from these artists and it has these cups from this company. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is this all just like an elaborate Ocean's 11 plot to steal five paintings? I just remember like the craziest demo in Brian's account was the there was like an avatar, like a 3D avatar floating in space. And then the guy who's giving the demo sort of walked into it and merged. And he became enveloped in the 3D avatar. And then he stole five paintings.

No, you could erase somebody in vision. Yeah. That's the reason that I'm like willing to believe that this is some kind of breakthrough display technology is that when someone walked into the hologram, the thing. Cresente said that his eye saw the hologram as more real than the person who just disappeared into it. To be fair, I feel like HoloLens can do that to some extent. Like you can put something on top of an object and like with HoloLens and you'll see the hologram. But can it track like a body and and put an avatar? on top of that body because that's, I mean, I hate to go back to the well that I've gone to so many times.

Do it. Rainbow's End. Burner Vinge. Eddie, here's my question for you. What are the things you need to know the most and what are the things where you're like, this is the most exciting? What are the things to make you the most excited and one of the things that make you the most skeptical? The thing that makes me most excited is genuinely just this display technology. The idea of something that doesn't feel limited, that looks realistic, that has depth, that is

complex, that's incredibly exciting to me. I would need to know firsthand whether this actually is comfortable and whether the field of view is actually good. I think a lot of AR companies that I've seen really neglect industrial design and make something that, like, fits one head shape. and is miserable for everyone else, and you can't even see the hologram. There's that.

I would, I guess, technically need to know the specs, although really I just need to know whether it's powerful enough that the things that you'd want to do there don't stutter. And I was, I don't know, I don't care that much about price because it's so far in the future. I also want to hear about hand tracking, because that controller kind of looks like it sucks. Yeah, it really does.

It mentioned hand tracking a bunch. And I want to know how complex that is. Here, my biggest question, the more I think about it and the more I look at this photo, is the light pack. What's in there? The disc man. What's in there? Is it battery powered? It actually has two parts.

And most of the photos hide the other part. There's a big rectangle and then a circle. And the big rectangle is supposed to like go into your pocket and the circle sticks out in front. Is the battery in the rectangular part? Is all the processing in the circle? What happens in the battery dies? what happens in the matter gets a little bit old. I mean, I want to know whether I can clip that on, I don't know, my boot or my neck or something if I'm wearing a dress, which is one of the things that actually worries me about Magic Leap is that they had a literal lawsuit that's like this company cannot design for women at all.

Wait, what? They have a design-based lawsuit? No, there was that sexual harassment suit. And one of the things that it alleged in terms of creating the hostile work environment was that they hired these people and they had female employees and they would hold focus groups and they would come up with ideas and then magically would completely ignore them. That they had this belt pack that was really difficult to put on if you weren't wearing like traditional jeans, that their only idea for making something fit women was making it pink, that they didn't listen

to criticism about how it was hard to wear if you had a ponytail or a hairstyles. Like just all of these little design things that I really hope that they're actually making. working work because I literally can't wear a bunch of AR headsets because they're made for men and they just fall off my face. I saw something about this pack that it was something to do with a guitar strap. I think this is in the crescentia piece. Yeah. I don't what does that mean? Yeah. Like I said, the pack is really the yeah. So like there's all the I just keep coming back to this fundamental idea. There's the dream that they have and that they're trying to sell. And then there's like the messy physical reality of our bodies and like our bodies in space and those things are

really you're like they're very difficult to bring together in a way that makes any sense and Paul when you're like that world in which you walk up to the fridge and like hit the Skype icon yeah like a really good solution to that is to actually remove your brain from your body put it into a vat and then construct a virtual reality uh in which your brain believes it lives like Yeah. It's the philosophical endpoint of this whole thing. I am under the impression that that was Magic Leap's first idea was to tap straight into your visual cortex. And they couldn't quite figure that out.

So they're settling for beaming. Or not, I don't know how light field works. See monkeys. Somehow interacting with light and you see things and they look real to you. Yeah. But obviously the next step is to tap directly into the visual cortex. And then once we have a high bandwidth, bi-directional communication with our brain and a computer,

the brain in the VAT is just the next step. Can't wait. So this brain is totally on the way. Touch is a thing that's really important and we can't do it. Touching what? The brain in the vet, you can't touch things. You can't feel things and it's like tasting things kind of sucks. Like artificial sense and taste, they're miserable.

Yeah. I'm just saying. And haptics are still really primitive. Just like touch is important. But if you could tap directly into the visual cortex, couldn't you tap directly into the nerve endings that would, and therefore simulate touch as well? That's like an insanely complex neurological discussion about embodiment

and whether we actually have like a center in our brain that handles that or whether our physical parts are inextricable from the way that we feel and whether like all of the nerves in our body actually produce something that you couldn't handle and replicate just by tapping into something. People have written a lot about this and it's very complicated. Oh man. I'm very much under the impression it's in the brain because you get the, you know, phantom limbs. What's it called? Yeah, and that's a whole thing.

It's partly in the brain. What I'd like to circle back to is that the way Magically talks about itself leads us down the hole of wondering whether or nervous. system is important or whether we can take our brains out of our skulls and put them in vats. Where did you want to go? Where did you want to go? Oh, what's the skew? Oh, what's the cost? I mean, I understand it's the verge class.

I understand what we're here to do. I'm just saying there is like other fundamental questions. And like, magically it was like, here's a circle. And we're like, what if we took our brains out of our skulls? Okay, I want to see the UI. That's actually the thing I didn't mention. That's basically central to me. I want to see how you interact with it.

Yeah, I think all of that stuff. If you're listening to the show, you know how it goes, right? Like, is it laggy? Does it get laggier over time? How much bandwidth does it need to pull all the stuff off? Like, there are these fundamental questions that are just reflections of actual reality that they have not begun to address. Well, one interesting thing about augmented reality is that you don't have, unlike VR where you have to render an entire world, you can get away, you can create very, very very, very, valuable applications that render something very minimal.

Like one, I, I have a dream that high school students have so many tools to cheat at math. And so you just wear your AR goggles and the math solves itself right in front of you and you just write it, you know, you just take notes. But that's like very minimal rendering, you know. There's some, a little bit of machine vision to like, for recognizing handwriting and stuff like that. But like, I mean, that's, that's relatively minimal. But that's enabled by having something that's just overlaid across your regular senses. Instead of having to render all of, you know, Wolfenstein. Yeah.

Okay. We have to stop talking about this. No. I'm going to read this ad. And then we should, I tried to segue into the Apple battery thing. But we'll come back and talk about that. So, Addy, we're going to let you go. Thank you so much for joining us in talking about whatever it is we just talked about with Magic Leap.

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certainly the most controversial can I say my first thought when I heard this I was like oh that's smart it is How clever of them. Let's walk through. Yeah, we actually got to tell people we're talking about. They all know, but we'll walk through it anyway. Four years. We know starting with the six, six, S, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, but legitimately for years. I guess that does make four years. A conspiracy theory has loomed in the world that Apple artificially slows down your iPhone so that you will buy a new iPhone. Right. Like people, you can't make them not believe this. And like Roobes, we thought it happened when they pushed a new soft. software updates.

Right. We were like, yes, so the new version of the OS comes out. It's a little bit heavier. Your phone, stuff is bad.

The people at GeekBench, another developer, they did a bunch of tests and they found that iPhone 6S and 7, the peaks of performance that they were measuring when people ran GeekBench were split. There's the highest performance

and then there's other little peaks of performance down the line. And they were like, Apple's actually slaying out of these phones. So conspiracy theory, full overdrive. Apple came out. They issued statements to us to TechCrunch.

Yes, we are doing this, which was, right, and there's like this enormously important caveat, which is the iPhone 6S in particular had an issue where the current draw off an older battery would be such that the phone would just immediately shut down. So we had to smooth out the instantaneous piece. of performance and they did it by varying the performance of the phone of the processor so that the battery is old it cannot deliver the full current needed to power the processor its full capability Apple did this by ramping the processor

down and like rethinking how it works so the battery would be smooth out your phone doesn't shut down like Paul said that is very smart mm-hmm that is yes it's clever as hell let's Apple gets full credit for like thinking it through and making the phone last longer on a degraded battery. What they did not do was tell anybody one about it. And like, so if you live in a world where there are this conspiracy theory that your phone is slowing down after a year or two so that Apple will force you to buy a new phone. And then people are out there doing these measurements and are like, hey, these phones are slowing down after a year or two. and you've provided no information,

all you've done is reinforced the conspiracy theory. And this other thing that you're doing, which is trying to maximize the life of a battery or maximize their intentions, I think, are good. But if they hadn't gotten caught, they would have never told anybody. Deider, what do you think about it? I think that's exactly right.

I mean, my very first hot take was like, this is good. Apple should, like, it's smart for an operating system to see that older batteries have different performance, and for the operating system to be aware of that performance and to like change to adjust for it. But yeah, just stupid to not say something to the users in some way, either like via a press release or just like another pop-up on iOS 11 because it's not like iOS 11 has a shortage of those, right?

No, so I think Matthew Panzerino, Techron, who's been doing a lot of good reporting on this. He, like, tweeted like a mock-up that he made, some like long dial-in locks. I think that is not the right move because people see weird boxes pop up on their phone. they hit okay, they learn nothing. Right?

You'd have to pop up that box like literally every morning. Like, hey, your battery got a little crappier today. Just letting you net. Like, you have to hammer that message in. I think they need, I mean, Android does a reasonably good job of this. Like, they need to tell, the settings screen needs to tell you the health of the battery, the maximum performance of your phone on battery power as related to the health of the battery. Like, what apps are using lots of your battery?

Like charge cycles, all this stuff, all the technical stuff that Apple wants to hide from you is actually the stuff that lets people understand what's going on. Well, Ashley did that piece for Circuit Breaker on, you know, should you let your phone charge all the way up? Should you let your phone charge all the way down? And it's something that we don't really know a lot about. She went to the experts and got some slightly conflicting, but, you know, consistent. if you parse it, opinions. But what she couldn't get was a really strong official statement from Apple of how you're actually supposed to treat your battery.

Yeah. And I think because they have multiple suppliers, they have multiple, like, there are multiple models of phone. Sure. I think Jake made the best point is that, so I have an iPhone 7. The battery is, I would say, half of what it was when I bought the phone.

And it's been about a year. and that's too soon. Yeah. That's too soon. That was Jake's point. And so, especially, and he also mentions, you know,

there are a lot of barriers. You can't live without your phone, basically. And so to get your phone replaced, you go to Apple store, if you're that lucky, or you lose your phone for days, or you go to the shady guy down the street that does it.

I went to a shady guy downstairs in our building. That was a huge mistake. they're like mess giant mistake not only did it ruin your phone but also someone's been recording your every move ever since because he put a spy chip in your phone at the same time of my battery

damn it well good news for me that battery was a piece of shit so that's fine shit didn't work very well but like so this is go ahead this is my thing is this gets into like the i fix it realm right like should these phones be a little bit more repairable

should uh replacing If the battery degrades that much after a year and a half, two years, should it be part of AppleCare? Should normal use be covered under AppleCare? It costs 80 bucks to get your battery replace. Should we just be changing our norms and telling people, don't go get a new iPhone, go in and get your battery replaced much more often? There should be a more general awareness of your battery's performance over time. And there should be a better system for replacing the battery in current gadgets. And the reason I say this gets into IFIX territory is we've moved very far away from that world. And it's very hard, especially for end users, to do something about battery problems anymore. Because all that shit is just sealed up super tight. The Surface laptop is a very good example of this. It's impossible for the end user to do anything with that thing. And it's suddenly like, everyone's like, just make the phone thicker, just make the battery bigger, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you know what? screw it, give me removable batteries again. I forgot how much I enjoyed and how superior I used to feel at CES when everyone else was running around with iPhones and they had crazy battery packs and USB cables hang out in another pocket and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was just using me a Galaxy S5 or whatever it was or back in the day like a Moto Q9. And I would just have another battery or two, very slim, no problem in my back. Literally my back pocket and metaphorically in my back pocket.

And I would just swap the battery out, reboot the phone, and I would have a fresh battery and I wouldn't have to be carrying around eight honking things. If there was a version of a phone that was a little bit less like elegant in its design, but it had a removable battery, but was still good, I would probably buy that phone. Or design the current phone. The last one we had was the, yeah, the last one we had was an LG, I think it was a G5, I've had that modular thing and you could pull the battery out and that was terrible because it was an LG phone. But that, I would do that.

If I could buy the same iPhone but it was like a little bit jankier looking or the same pixel or the same galaxy phone, but it was just a little bit jankier looking. But I could just swap the battery and buy a spare battery and recycle the one when it started to run out of juice. I would do that. I would be very happy with that. I would love to go back to that. What I was saying is, or design the phone to accept an external battery better. Like, the iPhone 10. Motorola does that.

The iPhone 10 has actually two batteries inside of it. Like, it's beyond the realm of, like, I'm just going to swap a battery. Like, the way it's designed, there are two independent battery cells in here. And Apple's, like, managing that. Like, there are benefits to sealing the batteries in because you can just do different things with them. You can design the phone around however you want the batteries to work. But you could also just make it so that external batteries communicate better with this phone, that it fits into a battery case better.

Are you saying we need a standard? A W-1 chip, a proprietary standard that Apple can create. I'm sure. The B-1 ship is here. But B-1. There are solutions to this problem. Like Apple designs its phone to be... So that it's not just like plugging in...

It's not indistinguishable from plugging into a wall. when you plug into an external battery. Right. So it knows that so that the physical design of the thing is designed to fit into a case. Like Apple's own battery case

for the seven was like tremendously ugly because the seven itself was not designed. To make this real like... Do we know if... The iPad Pro is designed to work with keyboard accessories.

So they're like pretty elegant keyboard accessories regardless of how the actual keyboard feels. Like it has a connector, it's aware, It all works together. The surfaces are designed to work with keyboards.

It has a connector. It all works together. You're just describing modemods. How many times can I say modemods before you acknowledge that this thing exists in the world? But mod mods are like a, they're a full on accessory. They're not like narrowly designed to just do batteries. That's all Apple needs to do. They don't need a full on modular interface and serial.

Like they just need to send some power and data back and forth, right? But it's a weird moment. Like I tweeted yesterday, I can't wait for everyone's AirPods to just die. And then like millions of AirPods to be in a landfill. Like the reality of us wanting to be wireless and the industry pushing us towards wireless and the battery technology that enables that are very different realities. And batteries are just a hard limit on everything we can do and they don't last very long. A year and a half. And like, what are we going to do two years from now when all of our Bluetooth headphones kind of don't work anymore?

Are we going to demand repairable AirPods? Like, what? Yeah, Dieter. What I? It's just like, we have to decide. Sure. Like, we're the market force, right? We have to decide if that's okay.

It seems like we're all going to decide it's okay. But there's a clear outcome where the AirPods recycling program needs to exist or whatever. or we're just going to throw more shit away. And we're going to end up saying more money, right? Like, I have headphones that I've had for 15 years. They're fine. They sound really good. Yeah.

But, like, my AirPods are going to last two. For you look. That's what it's all about. I don't know. Do you have any other thoughts on this? No. Just, like, a bunch of this stuff is, um, it's going to take, I think, more.

consumer demand for any of this stuff to change. Otherwise, we just, we just sound like, I don't know, Stallman-esque. Like when Richard Stallman, you know, freaks out about, like, he only uses software that's open source and screw everything else and everybody thinks he sounds like a crazy person. I worry that when we talk about repairability and like replaceable batteries and all that stuff, we end up sounding like crazy people because at the same time we're saying, wouldn't it be nice if we're going out and buying another iPhone with like, you know, a battery that the last two years?

We're going out and buying AirPods again with a battery. every than only last two years. And we keep talking about Apple products, but this applies to literally everything else. And Apple is actually theoretically in a better place morally on this stuff and works harder to create programs to recycle its stuff than other companies because they make so much of them. They've got, you know, they've got the crazy robot that takes phones apart and like, you know, get all the parts. It is unclear whether that robot does anything else.

They have committed themselves to the goal of basically being zero impact. And, like, they will, they want to make future iPhones 100% off of the parts and the, you know, precious metals and rare metals off of old iPhones. That's their goal. They've committed themselves to doing it. Who knows what they'll get there. But they're at least further along in acknowledging this is a thing to address than other companies. But that's the left hand. The right hand is designing iPhones that exacerbate the problem.

Yeah. Right. And I do think Apple's. Like, if you buy a really cheap, mid-range, random, no-name Android phone, your battery degrades and the phone turns into a piece of garbage and then just starts shutting off. Like, the work of, let's balance out processor usage against battery power has not been done for you. So, again, Apple gets a lot of credit for doing that work on the technical side. I think they created a PR disaster for themselves by not being way more up front of it.

about it in the software by not communicating to actual users. Like apparently, you know, they're like, other journalists are like, you know, Apple said this. We had some briefings about how they're fixing the power problem. It's like, yeah, that's not, they sell a billion of these devices, right? Like, you have to tell all of those people in every language they speak, not just some journalists. But at the same time, Apple does make the most phones, right? Like, they bear this disrep- and they're the ones pushing towards this wireless future faster than anybody else. So they bear some of this responsibility because these are problems that they have themselves created because of their vision of how the technology should work.

They should have just told people. Yeah, this is just told people. Yeah. Like, in a perfect world, what they would have done is they would have, like, held a special environmental day and maybe even a press conference or maybe like, you know, a little event or like had to be a portion of some event and be like, you know what? we're not going to talk about a product for a half an hour. We're going to talk about batteries and recyclability and the problems there. You know that we've done these things. We're going to do some more of these things.

Here's what we're going to do to help make people be able to get new batteries in their phones so their phones last longer. And here's how our recycling programs work. And oh, by the way, you should know that when your battery degrades, it will slow down a little bit in these certain situations. And we're doing that to extend the longevity of your phone. if they had done literally any kind of rollout from just like, hey, by the way, something more than just telling a couple of journalists in a random press briefing, anything more than that all the way up to like a single bespoke event for this thing, they would have picked up just, they would have started a conversation, people would have thanked them, people would have been happy that they've done this, they would have explained away the conspiracy theory and they would have come out looking great. Instead, they've come out looking awful. Yeah, the fan army goes to bat for them over and over and over again, right? Apple actually prolongs the life of your phone. It is very clever.

It is like a very clever solution. Ingenious, I might say. I don't want to distract from like the core thing that's happening. It's just all this, it's the media criticism that you do around it that's interesting. The thing they're doing is actually quite, it's fine because your phone lasts longer. But that actually brings me back to this year and a half idea. like every year. I actually asked them during the iPhone 10 review.

Every year they're like the phone is faster than ever, right? Like this phone is faster than any laptop you can buy. It's the thing that they say. But that headroom doesn't get you anything, right? If two-year-old phones feel slow, like what does it matter that it was the fastest phone ever when it came out? And like this battery issue is clearly tied to it. I will say in my personal experience, my iPhone 7 does not feel slow. and the battery is definitely degraded.

But the things that I attempted, I mean, I don't do like crazy 3D gaming because I don't want 30 minutes of battery life. I need my phone to last all day. But it doesn't feel like super sluggish to me. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting is they didn't have to do this with Macs.

Like my Mac, I have a 2013 MacBook Pro and the battery doesn't last very long. But like it doesn't, you know, like, it does at the very end of its life get slower, but like in extremely, obvious ways and it's obvious that there's a battery indicator that like that relationship is very clear but they don't have a problem where it's like it just starts shutting off halfway through because it can't handle the current draw of the processor like this is an interrelated set of

problems that I think they need to communicate about better yeah okay we're going to read one more ad we're going to come back and we got to talk about google and amazon and microsoft all trolling each other this week because that was pretty good we got to talk about some smart speakers I'm a ramble about Cavo We don't got to. I don't know. Read this ad. We'll come right back.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. You do a segment. It's got the same name. Uh-huh. And never forget it. It's called robots. Teach me how to breathe. Okay.

So there's this, it's called Somnox. It's a $500 sleep robot breathing pillow. It's called the world's first sleep robot. Here, let me just read you some from Alessandra's wonderful post. about this. The robot has soft actuators that inflate and deflate essentially mimicking breathing. Why? You just get how to breathe somehow. I don't understand it at all. No, it's comforting. Like, I don't know. Do you ever spoon? Like, to feel something breathing that you're spooning is like a

comforting thing. And like your breath, it relaxes you. You're up at night. You can't sleep. You can't, your mind is going a mile a minute. And then you've just got this thing that you can kind of cuddle and you can focus on its, like, in and out breathing. And without you, you don't even have to focus on it. It's just your breathing will naturally match the in-out pattern of this thing. And then you calm down and you go to sleep. It's nice. Hugging the, if you don't, instead of spooning a, you know, a human, you can spoon a robot.

Hugging the sleep robot while trying to fell asleep, my hand on its belly so I could feel inflate and a deflate. Definitely focus my attention on breathing, the robots, if not my own. So, Deere, I see what you're saying. Here's my fear. I've always wanted a robot as a friend. Like since I was a child, like something that was very important to me is that I would have a robot be a friend, right? Yeah. Do not want a robot as an intimate lover.

And I feel like this is on a slippery slope. Because you spoon your intimate lover, you do not spoon a friend. I feel like some people will spoon to friends. Okay. We're not talking about cuddle parties. We're not talking about cuddle parties on the Verge. Very many people. Very many people never spoon a friend.

I'll say that. That's true. Okay. All right. This segment is over. And that is the end of that line of thinking for today. Deeter, do you want to talk about what's going on? with Chrome in the Windows store because I just I just LOLLed a bunch.

It's very good. Yeah, that's basically where I was at. So the backstory is Windows 10S doesn't run full like, you know, classic X86 Windows apps. It runs, it does, but they've got to be designed for the Windows store. And the other thing is like iOS, hell, like ChromeOS, you can't, well, ChromeOS you can run Android apps. Anyway, you can't run other browsing engines on.

on Windows 10S. And so the only way to get apps on Windows 10S is to go into the Windows App Store. And Microsoft is trying to make a big push to get everybody to get all their apps through the Windows App Store. One, because it'll help Windows 10S. And two, you know, then they'll have an app store. And that's important for everybody because that seats, that takes control away from the web, which everybody wants to do.

And so Google recognizing that this was a push and just decided to troll the head. hell out of Microsoft and put Chrome in the Windows App Store. But all it is is a link to go download it via the normal method of, you know, typing Chrome into the Google and then finding the Chrome website and downloading it. And so this happened. And everyone was like, okay. And, you know, maybe it makes it more discoverable. People look for apps and app stores.

And so it makes sense to put your app in an app store, even though your app is not in the app store or whatever. Microsoft just yanked it. They're like, nope, you, nope, it's out. And yeah, that's the state of that. Just great. Meanwhile, you may recall Google is blocking YouTube on the Amazon Echo via several methods, the end of which was blocking the Amazon Echo basically web browser from accessing YouTube

on the web, which is terrible. and it's also going to block it on the fire TV. And then Amazon started selling Chromecast again. So maybe they're going to make nice before this deadline of January 1st when they're going to yank YouTube off the fire TV. And Firefox, some engineer at Mozilla was like, huh, fire TV, Firefox, spent a weekend ported Firefox over to the fire TV, put it on the fire TV so you now can use the Firefox web browser on the

Fire TV and the very first thing in the description of Firefox on Fire TV is you can use this to access YouTube. So would you say and so now the open the move is if Google blocks this, if Google blocks this, then Google is officially 100% hostile to the web. Screw that. If they don't, then fine. Whatever you're going to switch. They're not great for the web right now anyway.

Are you going to switch to duck, do they block it? I don't think Google blocks this. First of all, they secretly love Firefox, right? Like, it's not a secret. Right. They love Firefox in the way that Bill Gates loved the Mac when Apple was about to go under. They need Firefox there so that they can be like, no, it's not just Google. It does stuff.

Look, there's another web browser. See? Just one more. But they also, like, pay the Mozilla Foundation a lot of money because Firefox defaults to Google. It's like a whole thing. So they've got it. They're fine. They're not going to.

But also, what they want to do is make it harder for Amazon to access YouTube and to keep YouTube from being a selling point of the Amazon devices. I don't think they give up shit about the one person who's like, I'm going to put Firefox on my TV streaming stick. Right? Like, I think that's fine. Because you can't really control Firefox with Alexa, probably. Probably not. Well, you can like voice. Unless you get a cavo.

You'd be like, Y, Alexa, Y, O, U, T. No, but that wouldn't be hard for Alexa. If Alexa just, if you said, I want to watch this on YouTube, Alexa would just search YouTube for that and then on Firefox just load up a page of YouTube search results. Yeah. This is great. It's all crazy. What if this is what makes the open web win, Dieter? What if these companies trying to kill the open web is what made it live?

It's not how it works. It's going to work. It's like when Harry Potter is trying to kill the bass list. Well, everyone blocks one another, and they realize the only answer is open web browsers. In his moment of greatest need, he pulls a sword out of the hat. Can I say my favorite silly web browser story this week, which is Kavo? So I wrote about the Kavo, the new universal remote that watches your TV. So they came, they showed it to me.

You plug all the boxes into this huge Kava box. The Kava box is hacks on hacks on hacks. It's $400. It's super expensive for a universal remote. But the thing it does is fascinating, which is it literally operates your devices for you because it watches the screen. So you plug your Apple TV into it, and you can watch it like clicking around. picking your Netflix profile for you,

opening the search box, typing into the search feed. It's just using it for you. It's cool. The other thing it does is it has a virtual web browser that it just puts in space. You can't see it. But it just opens a web browser window.

And it will like open Hulu, log into Hulu for you, check out your watch list on Hulu, scrape all the playback states off of the Hulu watch list. All on the web in the background. What? If you open a cable app on your Apple TV, if you're like, watch this on HBO Go and you

haven't logged in HBO go on your Apple TV and it pops up that screen, it's like, put this code in the web, it'll open the web browser. You will never see it. It'll open a web browser virtually. Read the screen. Go to HBO.com slash activate or whatever the hell it is. Type in your, it has your password. You give it your cable username password.

It will log in, read the, read the. Apple TV screen to get the activation code, type it into the web browser for you, and then activate the HBO Go app. This is like having a nerdy son. Yeah, it's like you have a little robot butler. This is your child who's grown up smart enough to program your VCR for you. Yeah, only it's a $400 universal remote. I think it's the coolest. It doesn't have HDR and they know that most people won't buy it.

They're only trying to sell 5,000. But like, how... I just want to point out that Nilai went through this incredible description of like 15 different hacks. the Kavo has not mentioned IR Blasters because it pains him so deeply that it has IR Blasters. I'm having like a moral dilemma with this IR Blaster. Because the IR Blasters in the Kavo is not the problem. It's just a control. It's just an input method.

Because it can read the screen, it's it doesn't matter because you don't have to deal with it. Oh, so this is a good IR blaster. You have thought that AR blasters isn't IR. It's that the IR isn't aware of the. the state of the thing that it's controlling and therefore it often fails. Yes. But the Kavo is aware of the state of the thing that it's controlling. Therefore, in certain situations, you are pro-I-R blast.

Yeah, if the Kavo, if its solution was like a little robot that sat on top of the Apple TV remote and like push the buttons, it doesn't matter because you don't have to deal with it. Like if IR fails out, the Kavo knows it fails out. It's just not your problem. You're still operating a Kavo remote. I just think the fact that they went so far as to build a web. browser that just does stuff for you in the background. At night, if you have a DVR, like a crappy cable company DVR,

we'll just open the DVR and it'll scroll through your DVR list of shows and scrape and scrape it to index all the shows in your DVR. At night when you're not around? Yeah, like when you're asleep, it's like it's got to rebuild the index. You have to take the index. Kavo scraping. It's just like, it's a little TV robot. I love it.

So on the street today in my neighborhood, I saw an amazing ad. Yeah. It's kind of like a man with a van ad. Like it's an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper printed in black and white, all just text. And like it starts on the top. It's all keywords. Free cable, PPV movies, PV events, sports, adult channels, new and old movies, kids, movies, all TV shows, music and much, much more. All you need is internet plug and play.

Then in italics, I am a programmer selling brand new Android boxes, which are streaming boxes. Then a new sentence, new line, underline, and italics, all caps. Better than a fire stick. It says, I install everything and anything. Want just movies? Got you. Want TV shows? Got you.

Want kids movies? Got you. Want adult movies? Got you. PPP and live events, got you. List goes on and on. That's literally the text. List goes on and on.

Brand new streaming boxes fully loaded, very affordable. Oh, my God. My company is called Android. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Ask for Steve. Did you ask for Steve? My company is called set up your pirate box for you. Yeah, exactly.

My name is Androidplexedive.com. Then written in pen, written and pen, no gimmicks, no more bills. But then in other handwriting written in PED, it says 3,500 cable channels, any language for $7 a month, no gimmicks. Yeah, that's just Plex. He's just going to come set up Plex at your house. That's fine. That's a good business if you're, you know, that's a person. I was very excited about Steve.

All right, we got to wrap this up. Is there anything else we need to talk about? The Google Home Max came out. Deco Spot came out. You read both of them. Dan review both of them. They seem fine. I got an echo dot for myself for Christmas.

There you. So you just got yourself an echo dot. I canceled my Echo Spot pre-order. Why do you think Amazon is so insistent on putting cameras on stuff? Because I really think that video calling between kids and grandkids is a thing. I think they're... Maybe they're right? You think they're right?

I mean, if you are, you know, if you are just like a student of history, you know that network effects, like if you build a communications platform for people and you get enough people in that network, the network effect is a huge moat. You really think it's communication? Right. You don't, what, like, it's just straight up surveillance? I mean, Amazon's trying to steal five paintings. Amazon, Amazon wants to steal five paintings. They know they have a long ways to go, so they need the like slow roll this. But I think Amazon wants to say, hey, I see that your favorite pajamas have become threadbare. I found some very similar that are supposed to be even more comfortable. I'm sure you'll love them.

That's Amazon's product. That's Amazon's dream. I think first you have to light up the

camera all the time. Like the number of steps. The first step is the cameras lit up all the time, which is

not currently true so far as we know, but Amazon, that's what Amazon says. So until they take the step of saying we're lighting

up the camera all the time, please continue to trust us. Right. I don't, that's a big hurdle. I think that's too

much of a jump. I think their first jump is just getting people to want to buy Alexa devices instead of Google Home devices, instead of home pods, instead of Cortana devices. I don't see how they can have any fundamental footprint in communication without having a phone or a well-known messaging platform on a phone. So I think that's why everything has a camera. I think if you get people addicted to the idea

of, hey, drop in on mom and it lights up in your video chatting, like now you're definitely not going to buy a home pod. And then when they do put out a phone, it's like seamlessly, So you can just drop in on mom again. That's a huge moat and it's all the 3D So and then it's like your clothes are shitty. Do you want to buy some new clothes? Prime is already sending you new clothes you slop You work for us now. What are you saying? Clodes? Clothes clothes? Clothes? Clothes? Clothes what's that from? Clothes Clothes Clothing clothes clothes clothes. No, but you're so you're clothes clothes clothes.

Andrew just shut us out. All right. That is, I will say, this has been one of our sloppiest for Gass in a long time. But a good one. I'm glad you guys all listened. I think we had a good year. I mean, outside of the year that we had.

It was good. Hey, Hank? All right. Dieter. Pretty good year. Yeah. Good Toriamos song. All right, so here's a deal.

We're off for the rest of the year. We'll come back in the new year. And then we're going to CES. And we're doing four live circuit breaker shows at CES. That's going to be bonkers. Deeter's going to be on. Lauren's going to be on. Ashley's going to be on.

Lots of CES coming your way. We're going to be using this feed for, I think Andrew has some wild ideas about behind the scenes, verge cast content, which I think will be fun. And then we're right back in it. So we're off for the rest of the year.

We're back. Then at CES time, it's going to be wild. You can also listen to the why did you push that button, Holiday Spectacular, which I'm told is coming out. Why did you push that button?

I just keep boosting the show. Spotify, put them in there. best of the year. Which is pretty cool. You can also listen to Too Embarrassed to Ask with Learn Good in Kara Switcher, which is wonderful. Kara hosts Recode Decode and Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media. All wonderful shows on iTunes, rate and review them. If you are listening to this, you know about your holiday gifts, you can read our gift guide and then click the links and buy things, but it's probably a little late for you. It's probably a little too late for you. Anyway, that was it for us. 2017. We'll see you again next year and at CES.

Rock and roll. Paul. promo code.