The Vergecast - Meta's VR prototypes, the best earbuds for phone calls, and our dream E Ink device

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

The Vergecast is now the flagship podcast of twice-a-week podcasts. Our new Wednesday episode digs even deeper into The Verge’s reporting and the products you care about. And it launches today! 03:00 - David Pierce talks with Adi Robertson about Meta's VR prototypes she previewed. 19:44 - Chris Welch tests a bunch of wireless earbuds to find out which has the best phone call quality. 40:44 - Alex Cranz and David discuss what their dream E Ink device is, and why it still doesn't exist. We’re going to do a lot of experimenting on this show, so I hope you’ll tell us what you like and don’t like. Email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there, it's your friend David Pierce. I am out walking my dogs, Finn and Frida, who I'm confident you will get to know over the course of this podcast. They're very loud and have strong feelings about things. Anyway, we're out before the Vergecast recording, which, as you know, is the flagship podcast of automatically refilling dog bowls. Today on the show, Addy Robertson and I are going to talk about a big new set of VR headsets that Meta just showed off. Chris Welch and I are going to test some headphones and see which ones you should and shouldn't use to make phone calls. And Alex Cranz and I are going to build ourselves the perfect E-ink device. and try to figure out why no one else will build it for us. All that coming soon. We'll get to that in just a minute. Let me finish walking these unbelievably slow dogs, and we'll get right to it. This is the Vergecast. Let's go. Support for the show comes from Retool.

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Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for sure. nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th.

Tap in with us. Okay, I'm in the studio. Dogs are happy. Let's do this. We have lots to get to today, but real quick, before we get to all of it, let me tell you about this show. So the Vergecast is going to publish two days a week from now on. On Friday, it'll be the same show you know and love, Nelai and Alex and me, hanging. out and talking about tech news. But on Wednesdays, we're going to do something a little different.

We're going to use this show to tell you about even more of the stories the Verge is covering, and to dig even deeper into the products that we cover. We'll talk to the people who make gadgets and apps, will help you decide which ones to buy and use, and we'll try to help you make the most of them. We have lots of ideas about how all of this is going to work, and we're going to do a lot of experimenting on this show. So I really hope you will tell us what you like and don't like. Our email is Vergecast at theverge.com, and I would absolutely love to hear from you. Anyway, let's get into today's show. First up, VR headsets. Mark Zuckerberg posted a video the other day showing off a bunch of new VR headset designs that Meta's been working on.

Today, I want to show you four VR research prototypes that we're working on to invent displays that are as vivid and realistic as the physical world, and much more advanced than traditional computer screens we use today. Those prototypes are almost all just, modded Quest 2s with new tech and new motherboards and new chips that might make it easier to focus your eyes or that add tons of resolution so it's easier to read in VR or there's just one with a crap load of extra brightness that does something. I don't really understand that one. But Addie Robertson on our team got a sneak peek at some of the prototypes. She wrote a great story about it, which I'll put in the show notes. And she's also the person I know who has used the most

VR headsets. So I figured we'd talk through these new prototypes and what they might be for the future of Meta and the Metaverse. Addie Robertson, hello. Hi. So what was the occasion for this thing? It was sort of weird that just out of the blue, Mark Zuckerberg, was like, let me show you some things that we've been working on.

This is not what Meta normally does. What was the thinking behind this thing? Partly, I think they're preparing for Sigraph, which is the big visual tech show that's coming later this summer. And so they're getting things a bit out the door before that. They're going to be presenting on some other stuff there. Second, it seems like they just want to give people a preview of what tech isn't going to be coming in the next generation of headsets, which we know are going to be released starting this year.

And so this seems like them just trying to get out the door. Here are some of the big ideas we're working on. Here are the things that we're doing to show people whether or not they're achievable. Okay. I'm glad your read was, here's what's not coming, because that was also my read, too, of like, meta was, like, super aggressive. They were like, we're going to build all this stuff really fast. It's going to take a couple of years. It's like, whatever, eight years ago when everybody was like, we're going to have self-driving cars by 2020.

And now very quickly, Meta seems to be trying to pull that back and, like, lower expectations a little bit and be like, we're working on some interesting stuff. But it's going to take a long time. Yeah. And they are still releasing hardware this year. And it seems like they have a lot of prototypes they didn't show us. It's just that it seems like those things are going to be more iterative. Got it. Okay.

So, yeah, I actually want to come back to that because the timeline of all of this continues. to confuse me. But if I am understanding this correctly, the point of all these demos was to talk about display tech, basically, right? And it was like, with the acknowledgement that there's tons of other stuff to do in making VR and especially AR headsets work, they're just like, displays are hard, here's where we are, here's what we're thinking about. Yeah, it's displays, maybe optics a little more generally if you're talking about things like lenses, but basically what you see when you look through a headset hardware-wise. Did any of them sort of jump out at you as someone who has like tried all of these things as possibly cool, interesting, right answers?

All right, just to set the stage, there are three prototypes that seem like actual hardware and one prototype that's kind of a hypothetical synthesis. One of them is butterscotch. So we built butterscotch. That's this prototype that lets you comfortably read the smallest letters on an eye chart. Butterscotch is we're just going to take a quest two and we're going to jam an incredibly high resolution screen into it. And that's something that's one of those really iterative goals, but it's very very

important in the long term because if you want to be able to, say, read things at work, which is a thing that meta imagines you doing, you need something that's near retina resolution. And as he explains, it's really hard to do this compared to other screens because you have the stereoscopic display where you basically have to have images for each eye. And then also, this gets stretched over a really huge field of view instead of a thing that exists in the world. It's supposed to just cover your entire frame of vision. And so you need super high resolutions.

You need maybe some other tricks. So that's something where it seems like they're at least just proving, look, we're making significant progress on this. And then the thing that is maybe particularly interesting to me is this prototype called Starburst, which is really, really janky looking. It's just this big set of goggles. So we built Starburst, the first HDR VR system that we know of. Its idea is we're going to put the most powerful backlight we possibly can into a VR.

headset. And that's something that doesn't actually really get discussed a ton publicly, even though it is obviously important. It's hard to get a sense through Zoom over how successful it is. But Zuckerberg's just describing this as being orders of magnitude brighter. So it gives you this incredibly good high dynamic range in theory that could be really realistic looking. Yeah, it was like 20,000 nits or something, right? That's a crazy number of brightness that they're trying to do. Yeah, that's what they're promising. Just incredibly bright. Right. Does any of the strike you is super, like, novel and new? I mean, on the one hand, the tech is really hard and going from like obviously good idea to thing that is real in the world is very hard. But it was just funny to me to go through these and think like, oh, they're working on these very basic things. Like, how do we make the screen bright enough? And how do we make it so that you can focus your eyes? And how do we make it so that it is high resolution enough to read text? And your point about the text was something that jumped out to me too, was that it's just such. a crucial and obvious and like shockingly difficult thing to do to put text on a screen

that you can read, which is just like a weird insane thing to think about. But was that, did any of this strike you as like wacky new ideas or was this just a reminder of like how hard all these very simple things are going to be to actually pull off? Maybe the thing that is most novel is there's another prototype called holocake 2. So we built HoloCake 2, a working experimental device using holographic displays that can already play PCVR experiences. Head sets right now, they have LED displays, they beam them into your eyes, they have these lenses that refract them so they look like they're bigger.

This would use a very, very powerful laser, and it would shoot it through this almost flat lens that then bends the light. And the upshot of this is that you get an incredibly thin headset compared to what you have now, incredibly thin and light. It's one of the things where it seems like they haven't quite cracked what actually would make it work, which is the powerful laser part. But it's one of those things where it genuinely does something you cannot find in another headset, at least a sort of major commercial headset. If you're looking at high resolution headsets, those exist. If you're looking at really bright

headsets, it seems like it's still pretty speculative and it's kind of a you just turn up the dial. This seems genuinely pretty interesting if they can pull it off. The thin and light thing is, I mean, for lots of obvious reasons, a huge, huge deal and seems like where we're all going to go. And I will say that was my favorite part of your story. Your story is very good. But the thing that made me laugh the most about your story was the photo of like the wall of designs that they have. And it's like, what is it? I think it's four rows of six different designs. Most of which are just insane. They all look like sort of exploded Oculus quests, which I guess is literally what they are. They just like took a quest and put some

wild new stuff in it. And then there's two that are just glasses. And it's like, you look at this picture and it's like, I know the correct answer. It's the glasses. I almost wonder, like, are they doing this in the wrong direction where it's like, let's figure out how to build this cool tech and then hopefully fingers crossed someday we'll be able to make it really small. Whereas you get a company like Snap, which is saying like, we're going to start with glasses and then figure out how to build them into cooler stuff over time. It just makes me wonder looking at these prototypes. It's like, there is just no chance that anything other than these thinner and lighter options is the correct answer going forward. Right? I mean, am I overthinking this? This is where it gets really complicated,

which is that you have this section where meta starts really big and goes smaller, and then you have this separate division where they start with things like the Rayban smart glasses and they build up. They have so many pieces going on right now. This wasn't even talking about the part where it's just AR glasses. Yeah, wait, what was the balance there? Because I think you're making me realize I don't actually understand meta's strategy for any of this at all.

This was very specific about just like this is a VR thing, right? But hasn't meta even talked about the fact that ultimately it thinks AR is more important than VR too? Yeah, it's not necessarily the difference between VR and AR, although that's kind of part of it, as much as the difference between pass-through, which is where you have a screen. And if you see AR, there's cameras and they're passing this feed-through and something's completely blocking your eyes and something where they're just projecting holograms into the real world with glasses. So this was all about display tech where in theory you could have full VR. It's completely blocking your vision. It involves some level of screen projection mostly. And then they have, as far as I know, a lot of separate AR prototypes.

Right. Yeah. What's your sense of how overlapping those things are? Is all the stuff that's happening in VR eventually going to be useful to the AR headsets too? Or is this like just the thing we can build now? I was reading an interview that Duck did in the course of doing this. I think he basically said, we have to invent all kinds of new novel stuff for VR, but we haven't even invented the stuff we need to invent the stuff for AR. And it's just like, oh, this is all way further out than people think before this stuff is really good.

But what is your sense of how much this all kind of coalesces and how these things feed each other over time? It's really hard for me to tell. I'm sure that anything where, say, eye tracking is really important for their VR efforts, and I'm sure that's very helpful for AR2. Yeah. I'm sure that anything they do with like lasers, also if you're doing projection tech in AR is very useful. And so I'm sure there's a lot of crossover. I don't actually have a great sense of how much overlap the individual researchers are doing, especially then when you get into things like they're trying to build a bunch of hardware like smartwatches and AR control devices. The thing that's interesting about meta is that they're a software company, all the things they're known for are software.

they have an incredibly huge hardware research division at this point that they're trying to spin up. It also really seems like the hardware strategy has basically been to just write giant checks to like every individual person on the hardware team and just be like, just go chase your bliss. Like whatever cool, wacky thing you can come up with, we'll try it out, we'll see what happens. And then eventually like maybe someday a product roadmap sort of magically emerges out of it. But right now it's just like it's just a crazy research lab in Menlo Park. It's nuts. Yeah, they just invent features.

Like one of the things that wasn't really part of this presentation, but that they referenced is that they have the system for displaying your eyes on the outside of the headset. Terrifying. And they announced this last year with this long blog post that's just like, yeah, so I was like, this would be really cool. And so I dropped a phone to the front of the headset and it displayed my eyes and it was terrifying. And then I created this whole other system. And now I ended up with something that actually looks, again, deeply uncanny, but is really sophisticated. So what is your sense of the roadmap right now between sort of what we saw in these prototypes and, where we are right now. The rumors around the headset, like with stuff we've learned from Alex Heath

and other reporters at other outlets, is that there's going to be Cambria this year. That's just confirmed. There is an upgrade to the Quest 2, which is going to stay this more affordable consumer pathway that has maybe less advanced tech. And then there's going to be an upgrade to Cambria. Those seem like they're maybe going to come in 24. Who knows? And then from there, it seems really up in the air. It's unclear to me how quickly they would be able to miniature. a lot of this stuff. It seems like one of the things they're very interested in is very focal displays. They've been working on that for a long time. It was also referenced but not in these prototypes where it seems like there are features that they're going to maybe focus on like getting

these different focal depths. They're adding eye tracking to Cambria. That's going to be a big deal. They're probably going to keep trying to up the resolution. But it seems like they always try to do a sort vague five to 10 year roadmap. And so that's maybe what you would assume here. Okay. So the stuff coming in the immediate future, we can safely assume it's going to be like better versions of what we've already seen rather than some of these sort of wild new ideas actually brought into products. The basic idea we have with Cambria so far is that it uses a lot of the past through stuff we've seen from the Quest 2, except that it's higher resolution, it's color, there's eye tracking, there's nicer features there. And so yeah, you're not going to see this retina quality

resolution necessarily or incredibly bright backlights. Definitely not going to see something like Cola cake. Right. Fair. Well, and this is one of the things that I kept thinking about in watching his video and reading your story and some of the other stuff she's been doing is there's this clear push in his mind toward photo realism. Like that's the goal, right? Is that like when I have my virtual office, which is an idea that Duck is clearly obsessed with, the like virtual workstation that I can have anywhere I want, it should look like the real world. And to me, it's like I have a quest two right back here behind me that I love And it is super fun to use and nothing about it is even remotely realistic.

Facebook can't make avatars with legs yet. And yet we're now down here talking about photorealism. And part of it to me is like maybe they're trying too hard. That like maybe there's a thing we can do here that is not trying to perfectly replicate the real world inside of your headset. That's actually like a lot more interesting. And that's kind of where I get back to like let's build glasses and then figure out the coolest thing we can do with it. Rather than all this other stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, and they said they're going to talk about some other aspects of this at Sigraph, and so we're going to see how far they're going to try to push photorealism elsewhere. They've talked about photorealistic avatars. But yeah, the question is whether they just keep trying to push for this or whether this is their big aspirational. We're going to make big research swings here because it's hard, and we're going to try to let people figure out an interesting middle ground.

All right, we need to take a break. We're going to come back and talk to Chris Welch about headphones and making phone calls. Addie, next time we'll do this. legless avatars in the Metaverse. It's going to be terrible. I can't wait. Sounds great. All right, thanks. We'll be right back.

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It just comes with the job, apparently. Wireless earbuds in particular have become a super hot market. There are tons of different options. It really, it started with AirPods and has ballooned to everything. But over the course of the pandemic, I feel like I've noticed way too many people get on Zoom calls, put on their really fancy headphones, and then sound like they're shouting at me from the bottom of a well. It's awful. And honestly, I'm as guilty of crappy sound as anybody,

so I wanted to solve this problem once and for all. And as it turns out, I'm actually in the market for a pair. My fifth pair of AirPods got ruined by a rainstorm, so I need a new set of earbuds. But I can't test microphone quality by myself, at least not very well. So I grabbed Chris Welch, our resident headphone expert, and had him round up all the wireless earbuds he could find, and decided that we were going to stress test this thing

and figure out which mic we should use once and for all. Hi, Chris. Hello. Good to be here. This is going to be a lot of Bluetooth pairing and probably very painful for you. So I'm sorry in advance, but we're just going to roll through it. So the earbuds we're testing today, I should say,

are not a complete sample of the market. It's basically just everything you had in your house. But actually, everything you had in your house turns out to be a pretty good sample of the market. So we have, I think, seven to try. There's the AirPods Pro, the Jabra Elite 7 pros, the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro, the Sony Link Buds, S, the Sony Link Buds, the Beatsfit Pros, and the Nord Buds. We're going to get into all of those really soon, but first, for phone calls, the thing most normal humans do is hold their phone to their face. Let's just do that for a minute.

Is that still the best way to do it, by the way? You've tested a million of these. Like, let's just give it away. Is this still the best way to actually sound good is just to hold your phone to your face? Have we beaten this yet? I haven't quite beaten it yet. You know, it's all about physics. The closer the mic is to your mouth, the better it's always going to be. So I think that's always the way to go if you can. Hold the phone up to your face. Don't use speakerphone in public like a fool. It happens all the time at the coffee shop down the street from me. People are on Zoom calls. Yeah, we should say that is the worst answer here. Any other outcome is better than don't use speakerphone in public. You're the worst and everyone on every side of your call will hate you if you use speakerphone in public. So please don't. But for a long time, you know, it was like we would see the AirPods are the best and everything else is pretty. bad and that was the case for several years. But now finally, we've gotten to a point where there are quite a few models that can, you know, stand up to the AirPods and at least make you

sound fairly intelligible and decent. So you don't have to spend like 200 bucks to get decent mic quality. But this is me talking into my phone, just as you would if you were, if you weren't wearing earbuds. So it's going to sound a lot better than any of these probably. And you're also in like a pretty quiet. This is the kind of space where almost any set of headphones will like work. Right. Yeah, exactly. If you're home by yourself, now just working in a dead quiet apartment. It's pretty ideal. It's hard for these things to sound bad in this environment. So if they sound bad in this scenario, then it's going to be pretty dire when you go out tours in any situation.

Real quick, before we switch to more complicated stuff, let me just hear how the AirPods sound in this, like, good space. This is the other sort of useful control, I think. Okay, so here are the AirPods Pro. As you can hear, they sound pretty good in this very ideal scenario. These are what I use on Zoom calls all day. They haven't failed me yet. They're the gold standard for a reason, but they're also fairly expensive. So you would hope they perform decently.

And AirPods are kind of AirPods, right? There's the AirPods, there's the pros, and there's the Mac. Are they all about the same when it comes to microphones? I mean, the STEM design is always going to want out over the headphones, I think, just because they do just aim the mic towards your mouth. So that's always going to be a huge benefit. Yeah, they're all pretty similar. They're all really good, honestly.

So that's one thing that Apple kind of focused on from the start, which not many companies did. AirPods definitely qualify as good enough. Like, I wouldn't call it, like, great sound, but it's like, I can hear everything you're saying, and you don't sound like you're a million. miles away. Basically, as long as you have those two, it's fine. As we're going to hear, many of these do not live up to even that standard. But I feel like AirPods are at least like, I don't feel like a jerk like walking on the street talking into AirPods. Whereas with some other

stuff, it's like, I've just made this experience horrible for whoever I'm talking to. It's like, why did you call me? Exactly. Just like go inside somewhere and then let's do this. Okay, so now let's have you relocate. I think you're going to go to a coffee shop. Where are you headed to test some of these out? I'm going to absolute coffee, which is my coffee shop right down the block. This is not a sponsored ad, but that's a very good coffee shop in downtown Brooklyn. Let's take a spin down there and see how the rest of this group bears. Awesome. Chris Welch, you were in a coffee shop.

You're outside of the coffee shop. You're outside the coffee shop. There's outdoor seating. There are several people out here. There's music playing overhead. Someone's like Paul shortly next to me. What song is playing? I can't actually hear it, which is already good news. What songs playing? I have jazzed. I'm not jazzed up and not know what track it is. Solid coffee shop vibes, though. Like, unknowable jazz music is a very coffee shop thing to do. But yeah, it sounds like you can hear what I'm saying.

Sort of. So I would say my sense of you is that, like, I can tell there's a lot of noise, but there's like a thing fighting pretty hard to get rid of that noise. You know what I mean? That thing where it's like, I can hear the noise cancellation happening at all times. But it does kind of work. Like, I can hear you pretty well. It sounds like you're sort of in a cone, which is I think kind of what Apple does.

Is it basically, it just like, it pulls you toward it. and then tries to block everything else out. So it's like you have blinders on with your microphone. Yeah, it's pretty loud here. Except it's doing that, and that's pretty impressive because it's fairly noisy. There are cars right next to me driving by, so it's a very typical outdoor New York scene. Yeah, and I would qualify this as like, this works. If I spent 20 minutes on the phone with you in this, I would not want to kill you at the end of it,

which feels like, again, about all you can hope for. There's a very high-pitched thing that's getting through that is not my favorite. It sounds like whenever somebody's brakes squeak, it's going to be glad you. Oh, and there's a truck, which is about to make things very unpleasant for a hot second. Oh, but even that wasn't so bad. Okay. We've got the occasional disturbance, but overall, not bad. Let's do the Jabras next.

Those are the ones I'm kind of most curious about, because when people talk about AirPods competitors, everybody, like the hipster things buy instead of the AirPods is the Jabras. So let's try this. All right. Connected to mobile device. New Java, Elite 7 Prox. Play the flex. And you're in transparency with Britain?

I'm hearing everything around. I am also hearing everything around you. Are you hearing clearly? No. No. You know that thing in Charlie Brown where you hear the parents and it's just like, whir-r-r-brat-br-war. Yeah.

That's basically what everyone around you sounds like and also kind of what you sound like. I can more or less hear you, but it is much worse. That's not what you want. Yeah, which is kind of a bummer. Wait, so I'm assuming the transparency mode is just for you. should not in theory affect me, right? No. That is true.

Yeah, I can hear our unknowable jazz music. I can hear more people around you. So, I mean, these cost $1.79.99 right now. So that's a lot of money for just okay. This is making me think that Apple is unusually good at knowing what's your voice and what isn't. Because even as you're talking, your voice is kind of coming and going as if the headphones can't figure out what it's, what they're supposed to be canceling. And yeah, it makes me think Apple's just like algorithm.

them for figuring out what is your voice and then isolating it is just much stronger than this, it sounds like. It's good. Okay. So, it's the canvas. Now let's try Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro. Yeah, let's do it. All right.

So now we have the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro, which are $200, if I remember correctly. Yeah. And when you reviewed them, you liked them a lot, right? They were, like, high on the list of ones worth actually considering, especially if you're a person who wants this Galaxy phone, right? Yeah, absolutely. You're not Samsung ecosystem. They're great.

They're tuned with all the sound quality and they've got three microphones for voice. Hopefully you're making out what I'm saying. We've got some tricks to sound like the AirPods do. I would place this somewhere between the last two. I can definitely hear you better. Samsung is like boosting the hell out of the base. So I can, you sound,

you have this very like sexy low tone thing going on. Oh, yeah? Yeah, no, I'm not mad at it. But I'm also definitely getting more background noise. Like, it's pretty good. clearly gating at a pretty aggressive level. So I'm not hearing any of the like high pitch stuff, but I'm also not hearing like the higher parts of your speaking voice.

But I can hear you fine, which is progress. And I'm kind of impressed because these don't have stems. And I have always sort of thought that like more stems equals better. But these are actually doing an okay job just as the little buds in your ear. Yeah, it took a long time. But I've finally gotten to a place where, you know, just little buds can kind of pick up my voice fairly well. So yeah, they sound pretty decent. think. I mean, would you want to talk to me like for an hour with these in or would you get fed up after

like five minutes of a conversation. No, see, I think I could live with this. I would definitely like notice more of what's going on around you. You know what I mean? In the sense that like sometimes you're walking on the street and it's like hard to tell that the other person is walking down the street unless it's really windy or whatever. Like it is it's very obvious to me that you're in a coffee shop right now. I can hear some conversation. I think is there a, is there a woman sitting very close to you having a very loud conversation? Absolutely. Okay. I can hear. I can hear that that's happening very clearly. But yeah, like this, I can live with this.

I don't know that I would want to, like, record a podcast with you making this sound. And yet, here we are, folks. For comparison, before we go on to the next one, let's just jump back to the AirPods real fast to remind ourselves of what slightly better than slightly okay sounds like. Sure. And now we're back in AirPods world. Yeah, this is better. This just is better. I think, like, Apple still can't get out that, like, highest screech.

Like, there's definitely one frequency at the very top that I'm getting that is kind of, like, a nasty screeching sound. But I can just hear you way better. Get those brakes. All right. We have the Sony link buds to try next. I'm sort of fascinated by these in general, so I'm kind of excited to hear this one. Low battery. Please recharge headset.

Okay, so the battery and link buds died, so I had to charge those up. These are link buds S. we're using right now if you want to re-jigger this intro. So these are the link buds as. These are the new Sony Link Buds, right? Yeah, 200 bucks. These are more traditional than the other Link Buds, which have like a big hole in the middle.

These are plain old earbuds. They're super light, so comfortable. And I've got really good transparency mode. Not all earbuds do. So it sounds very natural if you want to hear what's going on around you. And the mics in my experience so far are decent. What do you think? This is okay.

I would put this kind of right about in the Galaxy Buds Pro range. Yeah. You sound a little different. it's definitely grabbing more from like the middle of your voice than the bottom like the galaxy buds did you don't quite have the same like sexy smoldering thing going on that I can hear which is a bummer I'll be honest with you I hear a little bit of jazz but not very much when you're not talking I actually don't hear anything interesting which is kind of impressive yeah so it's like it basically understands that you're not talking and just like seems to crash the noise entirely which I

hadn't even thought about with some of the other ones but like the the job is and Samsung's in particular, we're letting in a fair amount of sort of residual background noise. And I'm not getting any of that from you right now, which is kind of cool. Yeah, so I think that it's done like a lot of work from like the noise algorithms and noise isolation and AI and stuff. So who knows how much of that is real. But it doesn't make a difference, you know, because it knows when I'm talking, when I'm not. Yeah, these work, these sound like, you know that thing when somebody puts you on speakerphone and you can tell they're like 12 feet away? And they're just sort of shouting across the room at their phone.

I get a little bit of that on this, where it definitely doesn't sound like I'm sort of close to you. But I can still, I can make out everything you're saying and I'm not hearing like heinous background noise. I'm not even hearing the car breaking that is slowly inching towards you from miles away, apparently. This is an interesting other one where it's like, I'm getting all the different profiles here. There's the one way that it's like, I want you to hear the voice even at the expense of hearing everything else. And then there's this one, which is like, I want you to hear as little as possible, even at the expense of taking away. some of their voice. And I feel like this is probably more pleasant to listen to for a long time, even if it's like slightly harder to hear you talk. Right. Yeah, makes sense. I mean,

I think the thing is just, you know, use these for casual stuff for Zoom calls. I wouldn't have a job in review or in earbuds. That is not the best advice. But, you know, sure, for chatting with the workers or, you know, small people, I think they do the job. I'm going to hop over to something else. Maybe the link buds, normal, have charged stuff on. Bluetooth pairing. Okay, so now these are just the link buds. Yeah, just the link buds. Very different design.

Kind of like the AirPods and AirPods Pro, these are more of the open. You can hear everything at all times. There's a big hole right in the middle. So the whole idea is to keep you aware of your surroundings. So if you're out for a run or in the city and want to stay aware of traffic or whatever else, they're a good option.

I don't love these kind of things personally. I'm more of like a cone of peace and music. So these sound. totally different than the last link buds you're on. I just assumed they'd be basically the same, but the profile here is totally different. Your voice sounds the best of any headphone we've tried yet. You sound terrific.

I'm picking up a little more background noise. Like I can hear the piano much more than with the other ones. Yeah, these are great. Back when I did the review, I did like a voice test on that, and people were blown away about that with these sounds. I think whether this or the AirPods are my favorite is like a matter of personal taste, because I'm definitely hearing the music more. but I'm also, you sound like you,

much more so than you do on the AirPods. Why would Sony be so different with these two products? I'm like blown away by the fact that these are not just the same thing. And they're like a very different design. These look much different. They fit much different. So I think there's that. But they both have the same number of mics as far as I know,

or similar. So, you know, a different form factor, different sound profile. But yeah, these are great. These are what I use for most using calls throughout the day. And that's really all I use me for. But for that purpose, do you want like a set of earbuds that do the job super well.

store around the house or go for a walk, then you do that very well. This kind of makes me feel better. I sort of thought everything was going to be varying levels of garbage, but this is, this is working for me. See that. We're making real progress, folks. Okay, so we have hopefully one more impressive one and one less impressive one left to do. So let's, let's run through that.

Let's do the beats first. I think that's the other one you have here, right? Yes, so the beats fit first. Oh, I dislike this one already. Okay. we're just getting started here and I'm already not a fan. Which ones are these? These are the Beats Fit Pro.

Yeah, these are the Beets Fit Pro. So if you're at the gym or in a long run, that's always when you want to hop on the phone with somebody, I know. Classic, yeah. So, you know, in fairness, these are not really meant for voice calls that much. They're more so just meant for fitness and getting swole. But it sounds like you're not impressed. I mean, I'm getting you fairly clearly.

I'm also getting one whole last saxophone. just all the saxophone. I'm kind of back to that like AirPodsy woohing sound behind you where it's just like it's just white noise behind you which I don't hate as a strategy like it's a lot easier to tune that out than sort of the specific sounds you can hear

but like I mean I'm what was that somebody else's phone just rang? Is that what that just was? Yeah somebody's alarm on off so that came through as well. But yeah I'm literally I can hear the whole saxophone line. It's like that one frequency band beats was just like we're cool with this. No problems. Yeah, they should sound pretty AirPods because they do use the same quartet. So I think, you know, as far as it's the voice pickup and that kind of stuff,

should be pretty similar. But that sounds like Moore is coming through the environment. I'm definitely getting more of the environment. But it is, it is kind of in that same high, screechy line. Like, yeah, I would say these sound fairly close to AirPods. But I think the AirPods are, they were gating the noise a little better. Right, yeah. Okay.

Did you bring the Nord buds? These I'm fascinated by. I brought the $30 Nord buds that we just reviewed. Yeah. Okay. So let's see. what you can expect for $40 for earbuds.

Okay. So we have $30. $1 plus Nord buds? Yes, that name. It's played name. But yeah, 30 bucks. I think you've had a pair of these too, right? I do have a pair of these.

These have become my headphones that I wear while I walk the dogs because they're like, they're not great, but they're fine for listening to podcasts. They're easy enough. They're fairly comfortable. They pair fairly easily. It's just like, I don't have to think about them. and eventually I'm going to like bend over to, you know, pick up dog poop and lose it and they're 30 bucks,

so I won't feel too bad about it. This is my life now. Have you dared to call anybody with them yet? Can you see what that sounds? No, but honestly, you don't sound nearly as bad as I expected. I'm hearing no music. I'm hearing some nature sounds, but I'm hearing no music and I'm hearing no people. And I hear you, I would say relatively well.

You fade in and out a little, but like I can I can hear you, which is promising. There's not much talking happening. I think someone folks got annoyed and left. I was getting a lot of these. But yeah, there's still the street noise, the ever-present jazz and nature of them for 30 bucks. And we really can't ask you much more, you know? Yeah. These are a little like the link buds in the sense that when you're not talking, the noise cancellation is actually pretty solid.

But when you come up, like the longer you talk, the more I hear your background. Like as you were talking there, I couldn't hear the music at the beginning. But at the end, I could hear the music. So it's like, it's like slowly giving up as you talk. It just, it has only so much noise cancellation it can do. And then at the end, it's just like, ah, you're fine. Sure. I mean, this is way better than the Jabras.

I would say this is better than the Galaxy Buds. For 30 bucks, this is substantially better than I would have expected. This isn't the best, but I can live with this. That's a purging, you know, sign of how far we've come in the past few years. This is good. All right. Chris Welch, thank you very much. Go back to your coffee and tell everyone around you that I'm very sorry that we made you do this.

My pleasure. This is how I like to spend my Fridays. My Friday afternoon. testing earbuds at the coffee shop, frustrating all the customers. That's what we do for journalism. Thanks, buddy. I appreciate it. All right. Talk soon. Okay, so I have thoughts.

But first, just for science, let's hear all the sound really quick, back to back. Here are the AirPods pros. Yeah, it sounds like you can hear what I'm saying. Here are the Jabra Elite 7 pros. Are you hearing me clearly? Here are the Samsung Galaxy Buds pros. Hopefully you're making out what I'm saying. Here are the Sony LinkBuds S.

Some mics in my experience so far are decent. Here are the plain Sony LinkBuds. These are what I use for mostly in calls throughout the day. Here are the beats fit pros. And that sounds like more is coming through in the environment. And here are the one plus Nord buds. But yeah, there's still the street noise. There we go.

So having done this test with Chris and now having listened to all of that audio again, here's my takeaway. And I should say, again, this is not the test of the best earbuds. That's a test about sound quality and comfort and battery life and connectivity and boring and answer as it is, I'm pretty sure the AirPods pros are going to win that fight. Even here in this one specific use case, they do really well. But two things really surprised me here. One was just how good the link buds sounded.

I mean, right? For just walking down the street or taking calls from a coffee shop or like dialing into a work meeting from the beach, they're pretty great. They seem pretty tough to beat. And the other thing is most of the things. these options at least worked. They're not all great, none of them are perfect, but you could at least make some calls on almost any of them without giving a headache to whoever you're talking to. Even the Nordbuts, they're 30 bucks and totally serviceable. The only one in this test, actually,

that was really disappointing was the Jabra Elite 7 Pros. I honestly cannot believe how bad they sound, especially for something that's supposed to be a high-end, legit AirPods competitor. Super disappointing. So why does any of this matter? Because microphones matter a lot. We spend our days on Zoom calls. We yell at Siri and dictate text messages. And especially as AR becomes a thing as we've been talking about, we're going to do a lot more of all of that. Having a mic that hears you and understands you, and I guess just as important, lets other people do that too, I would argue is as big a deal to headphones as spatial audio or fast pairing or any of the other stuff we talk about. all of which is to say, I think I'm going to go buy some link buds.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back to build our perfect E-ink device with Alex Kranz. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence

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Welcome back. So if you've been listening to the Vergecast for a while, you know that Alex Cranes loves E-ink. I mean, like, loves E-ink. And honestly, I'm just as obsessed with it. I think the Kindle is pretty close to being the perfect gadget.

and I've been trying for years to find an e-reader that does all the things that I want it to do. But despite spending arguably too much time thinking about this stuff, neither Alex nor I have ever found the gadget that really works for us. And I wondered, why not? What is so hard about this? So Alex and I decided that the best thing to do is just get together and spec this thing out for real. We're going to build our perfect E-8 gadget and hopefully along the way make sure our perfect E-ink gadget is even possible.

Alex Kranz is here. Alex, hello. Hello. I'm never been more excited for a podcast. Okay, so let's try and design our perfect E-ink device. And then I have this theory that in doing so, we're actually going to figure out why these things don't actually exist. And the only ground rule that I will lay before we start doing this is that the things

that we design have to be like theoretically possible. Like somebody has to have made it even if it's just like a science project that one employee at E-ink made one time. You can't just have, you know, the magical YouTube playing E-ink device that is definitely never going to exist. Does that seem reasonable? That seems very reasonable. I feel like we can do that. Okay, good. You go first. Both of our homework was to come prepared with lots of ideas about the perfect E-ink device. What do you got? I think what I really want, in a sense, this like solves all of my problems. Basically, an iPad with E-ink. Okay. Because Apple would actually be committed to making a UI that wouldn't suck, which is a major problem with most of

the e-ink devices out there right now. Yes. The design would probably be very, very nice. Ideally, it would have page turn buttons. Apple might not, would never do that. Yeah, no. You're out already, I think. And only on one side, because I think that's like the perfect device. What screen size are we talking about here? I think I want like an eight-inch. Okay. Like I've used the 10 and above e-ink devices, the ones with 10.1-inch displays. or 10.3 or whatever the E-Inc display available right now is. I've used those, and they're too big. And I've currently got, like, six-inch ones,

and they're too small if I want to, like, take notes and stuff. So, like, eight inches feels like the sweet spot. So the good news here is you and I are on exactly the same page about this. Because my immediate instinct, as soon as I started, was I want an iPad Mini, but I want it with E-ink. Yes. That is it. I bought an iPad Mini like a year ago and basically designed it as a reading device.

I have like resolutely not downloaded work apps. I don't have video things. I don't have fun things. It's like it lives on my bedside table and in my backpack and it is what I used to read. And it's wonderful, except the battery dies really fast and it's too bright and it annoys me. But form factor wise, I think it's perfect. So I completely agree with you. This is where I want your expertise the most, which is there are a million kinds of e-ink technology.

Yeah. Which one do we put into this device and why? Ooh. So I think it's something that's coming, right? Like, I don't think it's anything that's here right now because I think right now they've got really, really good resolution in these displays, right? Like all La Carta E. Inc.

You'll usually get, like, 300 PPI, which is very pleasant to most people's eyes, very sharp. The refresh rate is, like, decent. The technology exists now that we could probably put into it, but you would want to have, you'd want to layer on there, the Wacom layer. Right. So you can write, so you can poke it,

and it will actually be responsive. because most touch layers on e-ink devices, they're super unresponsive and it's horrible. Honestly, I think that more than the refresh rate is most people's frustration with E-ink. Yes. So in preparing for this, spent, I think what you would call, like, an aggressively large amount of time

on the E-reader subreddit, which is a wild place that I didn't even know existed, but it's full of people with very strong feelings. Yes. And the general consensus seems to be that you're right, that it's less about having the page refresh more and more about like having it respond to me doing something more quickly, which is like those two things are kind of related.

Yeah. But they're not exactly the same thing. And like everybody's like, oh, I want the like 60 hertz screenlight, the iPad that refresh. And it's like, no, I don't want that. I just want a thing that when I try to type, it actually types the thing the first time I hit the button, unlike my Kindle on which I have never once typed a sentence without many, many, many, typos. Yeah.

So this one company, they're called Onyx Books. It's a Chinese company. they make a lot of Android e-ink devices, and I've used a lot of them. And for the most part, they work really, really well, very, very responsive, but they're expensive. They're super expensive. It's like $500 to get one with the Walken layer. And last year, they did something called the Onyx Books Leaf.

Okay. And it was only $250, right? And I was like, okay, already cheaper. Didn't have the layer, but it had buttons on one side. It was super, like, nicely designed. And it was only six inches, but I was like, you know what, this could be it. This could be my ultimate device. So I bought it.

I still have it. And without the layer, it is so annoying to use. I can't tell you how many times, like, I'll go to type something in on the browser and it won't work. And there's a lot of other, like, they have a device that would do exactly what I want. That is all of this, but with the layer. But do I want to spend another $200, $300 just for the layer? It's a lot. Yeah.

I'm actually glad you brought up onyx because I tweeted about this a while ago. that like what I want is an E-NIC iPad, essentially, and a bunch of different responses I got were from people saying, just buy an Onyx thing, it's exactly what you want. It's not. It's like stupendously too expensive. Yeah.

Well, you tell me, you've tried these things more than I have. Why aren't these the answer? I think it's down to user interface more than anything else. I think the technology is there. You don't need a super fast processor on an E-ink device, right? Like, it's not processing video. It's doing handwriting recognition. It needs to be reasonably fast.

The first one I got from Onyx was way too slow. and I'd be like handwriting recognition and it would just die. But now like most of the processors they put in those devices are reasonably fast. The battery life is good. The edge lit display looks wonderful. But it's the user interface and the price, but mainly the user interface that really hangs me up most of the time. And it's not entirely Onyx Books's fault. I believe that's how you say it.

Okay. It's not their fault entirely because it's on Android. And Android is not intended for two-tone e-ink displays, right? Well, I was even reading that Google doesn't officially support it. So when you first get the device, you have to go do something wacky to turn on Google Play Services. You have to go turn on Play Services and wait a couple of hours. I just recommended one to a colleague of ours at the Verge. And I'm anticipating that text in a week or two when they get the device.

And they're like, how do I get Play Store on it? Yeah, whenever the first part of your answer is go deep into the developer setting, and then click that like you're out of you've lost me I'm done no I like every single time I do it I've done it on so many of these onyx devices and I'm like okay I'll wait and that works and then I download all the apps I want to use and then I go and I have like e-ink bro which is a web browser that lets you automatically pageinate oh I was going to ask about this because one of the things that I look at is like I was like oh okay I want something for like reading the web and then I'm like flicking around on my Kindle being like oh if I'm trying to scroll on this thing it's going to be

horrible. Maybe that's not what I want. You want to pageinate. And this one does it, but it also hasn't been updated in years. And it's kind of buggy. It's super ugly. It's close. It's like everything about the onyx books is so close that I almost want to be a developer so I can go fix it. Like I want to learn how to code so I can go fix some of the issues with it. Because like a launcher that makes sense would be great. A browser that makes sense would be great and are both regularly updated and have like documentation that is in English would be fantastic. Seems reasonable. Those would make it a really, really appealing device.

So, but wait, the apps thing is one I've been thinking a lot about because there's like, if we're doing E-ink, we're not getting video, it's just not happening. So YouTube and all that stuff, not going to happen. We're not getting games. Nope. Like, maybe like the crossword, best case scenario. Sudoku. Sure.

But like, hard games, not going to happen. Right. Write it off. But then, and so it's like mostly like reading. apps and a browser. All that's good. News apps good. But then I'm thinking like, do I want Instagram on my E-ink tablet? I mean, it would make every picture look super arty, right? It's like a filter of its own. Yeah. You just got your E-ink filter becomes its own thing. Everybody be really excited about it. I like that. Okay. And what about like messaging apps is the other

one I was trying to think about? I feel like yes. But again, nobody's factoring in the fact that like E-ink is not an LCD display and that refresh rate is slower. And so everybody does these really flashy things and you just can't do that on E-ink. It looks ugly and just is like making you always be reminded that you're using E-ink and it's slower. So anything that like you'd have to basically have like forks of all of your favorite apps that are like this is my E-ink fork. So for Apple we're kind of treating it like the Apple Watch where it's like there's a bunch

of things that does really well. There's a bunch of things that can like kind of sort of do if you really want to really bad. And then there's a bunch of stuff it just doesn't do. Don't even try. Move on with your life. Yeah. Okay. This works for me. And because if Apple did it, like I feel like a lot of those app frustrations and those UI frustrations would go away. I feel like it would probably be $500 because it's Apple and they're like, well, Onyx does it. So ours is also going to be $500. It would be at least $500. Like, no question. But I would probably pay that if all those weird little UI frustrations weren't there. Well, and the problem is the UI frustrations are doubly

annoying because the thing is slower. So it's like what you actually need is like the most efficient, effective UI in history because what you can't deal with is all the nonsense that comes with not having things work the first time. Like you have to just do a complete rethink. And it's interesting. This is like onyx books is doing that slowly. Like every time they do a very big update, it improves exponentially.

Okay. And you almost feel like you have a new device every time. And you're like, wow, this is incredible. But it's still, it's not there yet. it's still not something I would go and recommend to people who don't work at The Verge. And even then, I kind of regret recommending it to our colleague who works at the verge. I find this whole thing very sort of disheartening and heartening all at the same time. Because on the one hand, it feels like what you're saying is true.

Like, Onyx and others are like not all that far away from some of this stuff. And it's like, yeah. Like I spent a lot of time with an onyx. I believe it's called the Nova Air in my shopping cart over the last few days being like, maybe I'll just buy this and see what happens. That's a really good one. That's the one that I should have bought instead of the one I did buy it. I bought the Leaf, and the Nova Air is like, because I've got like, I've got the note air,

and then they redid it as the note air too, and it's even better. And I'm like, then I had a lot of FOMO. And then I was like, no, I'm not going to spend all of that money. I'm going to get this other one. But also, it was just a little bigger because then I've got like a remarkable too, and I love it. And it's how I take all of my notes for work. And I would much rather have one device for all of my note taking and reading. That one is such a perfect example of like crushed the hardware for what it was trying to do.

Like crushed it. Terrible. Terrible. Like I cannot tell you how many times I open a notebook on it and it's the wrong one. And then it takes like 40 minutes to get back to the right one. I'm just like, oh my. Yeah. They're like, would you like a list of files where everything looks exactly the same and you can't really see the file names? Here you go. I don't want that. The other thing I've been learning a lot about in the course of this is partial refresh rate, which seems like it is the sneaky solution to all of this. I found this video where a guy hacked his Sony, I think it's called the PRST1,

because Sony's really good at NAMI products. Yeah. Hacked his thing so that it scrolled more smoothly, basically by just trying to refresh the parts of the screen that changed, rather than refreshing the whole thing. So it would get a little ghosty at times, as E-NIC always does, but it would then sort of like bits and pieces would pop back into place.

And so it made it so it would scroll much more smoothly. And there was like a whole freak out on the E-reader subreddit being like, why isn't this the answer? This is magic, everything. And I was like, okay, so like some of this tech is sort of here. And this is kind of what we're talking about with the tablet, right? It's like all the parts it could kind of work.

Like, this doesn't seem like it's that far away. You just need somebody who like cares about the whole thing to put it together. But then Apple would do it and only let you use like Apple books and Apple music on it. And that would ruin my life. It would ruin it. I mean, I think that's the point of them is like you can get a Kindle and you can get a remarkable two. And you'll have a very reasonable.

e-ink experience. But you'll be locked into those two ecosystems completely. This is my problem now. I've been buying Kindle books for a decade and I would love to get out of the Kindle ecosystem, but I just literally can't. That's what led me to Onyx is I was like, I need to stop using Kindle and I don't like the Kobos that much. They feel like too toy-like to me. Yeah. You know, Barnes & Noble is trying now. They've announced like two different e-readers in the last year. Yeah, I'm not super worried about Barnes & Noble. Yeah, they're going after the budget market, right? They're going after like Amazon's cheapest, cheapest devices. So, no, I want something quality. Like, I'm willing to spend the money and nobody wants to make me the thing. Is there some big exec at one of these companies? Like, call me. Like, let's talk. You can do it.

I believe in you. I think what we need to convince the world is that handwriting is coming back. Yes. There was like a minute where Microsoft was all in on it and they like convinced a bunch of people to put stylists in their computers again. And I'm like, we need this for these tablets now. That's the thing is like handwriting on an LED device always feels goofy, right? It always feels fake. And on The Remarkable 2, it just works. That's so good. On the Onyx Books note, it just works.

You're just writing and you feel like you're writing and you don't feel like you're on a surface or whatever. Microsoft, do it. Make a surface e-ink device. Oh, man. Microsoft might be the most likely one to do it, actually. Yeah, because like they love to do the writing stuff. They love to do weird tablets. And bonkers versions of Windows.

This would be great and terrible all at the same time. That's it. That's the one. Forget iPod. Forget Apple. It's Microsoft. We want Microsoft doing this. Okay.

My last question about the tablet, because I spent a bunch of time thinking about this, is do we want the screen? Do we want it to fold? Do we want it to roll? Do we want it to just be what it is? What do you ink are we using here? I think if we're going with the 8-inch, right, and then you fold it into four inches, slot it into your bag, that's very compelling to me. So basically we're rebooting the Microsoft Courier as an E-Inc.

This is the best idea we've ever. I'm so glad we got to this point. This is perfect. We did it. We did it. High five. Somebody call Sachinadella. We're going to make this happen.

This will be great. I feel better. Do you feel better? I feel better. I feel like we're going to get a lot of calls and all the execs are going to be like, these are great ideas, guys. Thank you so much for putting them together. Yeah.

Can I give you money to make them? And we'll say, no, no, no, no. Don't worry about it. This is what we do. Yeah, we're just here for you. Yeah. And we should say, if listeners, if you have ideas about e-ink gadgets that you would like to exist and you would like us to bully Microsoft into making for you, hit us up, Virgcast at theverge.com,

we would love to hear all your ideas. Alex, thank you very much. Thank you. And I'm sure we will be back next time there's new E-ink tech and we'll do this all over again. It's going to be great. That's it for the Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening. There is tons more coverage on everything we talked about at theverge.com.

And you can also follow all of us on Twitter. Addie is the Dexteriarkey. Chris is Chris Welch. Alex is Alex H. Cranz, and I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Eleanor Donovan is our executive producer, and the Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. Like I said before, this is a new episode and we're going to do this every week and I really, really do want to know what you think and what you'd like for us to do on the show. Hit me up, hit up Vergecast at theverge.com and tell us everything on your mind. Alex, Nilai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all the tech news of the week. We'll see you

then. Rock and roll.