The Vergecast - Microsoft Surface Duo 2 updated review, Solana's Saga phone, and the M2 MacBook Pro review

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Nilay Patel and Alex Cranz chat with Verge senior reviewer Monica Chin about her review of Apple's Macbook Pro 13" with the M2 chip. Alex, David Pierce, and Dan Seifert continue the show, focusing on this week's tech stories from The Verge: Nothing's Phone 1, Solana's Saga phone, and a second look at Microsoft's Surface Duo 2. Further reading: Apple MacBook Pro 13 (2022) review: new chip, old threads There has to be a better way to binge Netflix cuts around 300 jobs after losing subscribers Microsoft’s weird Surface Duo 2 has surprisingly become my favorite device of the year Here’s what the Nothing Phone 1’s rear lights can actually do Nothing’s Phone 1 isn’t coming to the US Nothing Phone will be invite only like original OnePlus phones Solana is making a crypto phone with help from former Essential engineers Juul’s e-cigarettes can’t be sold in the US, FDA says Twitter confirms it’s working on a built-in Notes feature Amazon shows off Alexa feature that mimics the voices of your dead relatives Email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on The Vergecast, we're going to talk to Monica about the Apple MacBook Pro 13 with the M2 chip and whether or not you should buy it. We're going to talk about Netflix and how the apps could be better. And we're going to talk to Dan Seifert all about the Microsoft Surface Duo 2, which he's grown to love six months after launch right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need.

Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. 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 nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th.

Tap in with us. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of twice a week podcasting. Yeah. That works, right? That's a sentence that works. Yeah. I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Cranes is here.

I'm your friend who is very excited to listen to that second podcast every week on Wednesdays. Every week on Wednesdays. Monica Chin is here. I'm your friend who has too many laptops on her desk currently, like way too many. It is astounding. Every time I pass by your desk in the office, I'm like, that is a lot of laptops. They're even more in the closet. So this episode of Vergecast is going to be different in two ways.

Some of the changes are permanent. For example, we have rockin new theme. music from our friend, Breakmaster Cylinder. It's great. It's an update of our theme. We had that theme for 10 years. It's time to move on. So Breakmaster Cylinder came in. It did an amazing job with our engineer, Andrew Marino, on making something great. I love that theme. There's a slightly different version of theme that will come out with the new Wednesday episodes. So we've got two variations. That's really fun. We've got new art. I'm loving all the people on Twitter who are finding all the Easter eggs in the art. It's so good. There's some like long range Easter eggs in the art.

There's a lot. I've been, I've been released, it took me way too long to get vaporware car. I was like, why's this car invisible? I don't get it.

It's pretty good. People trying to guess what kind of car it is is very funny. And I'm like, no, it's just, it's literally the most generic model of a crossover that you can find.

And because every car looks like that, you can kind of assume it's like every car. It's pretty good. The computer ship. Yes. So the name of the ship in the art, the class of ship, the flag ship.

Yeah. The class of ship is computer ship. And then the name of that ship is the USBC. it's very good. And then there's a USBC monster. It's very good. All that's great. That's all the stuff there. I'm saying there's long range Easter eggs. Like we've been seeding the ground for some of the changes to come for a while now. And so there's some in here. I'm excited about all of it. So we got a new podcast art. We got a new logo. We've got new music. Those are the changes, like the permanent changes. We're over 10 years, over 500 episodes. New look, new sounds. David's hosting that second episode on Wednesday. That's going to be really fun. Those are the real changes. And then this episode, the Friday episode, is going to be the same chaos as ever. And then the temporary change for this particular Friday episode, I have to go to Toronto today. So I grabbed Monica and Alex, so I really wanted to talk about the MacBook Pro review.

David was busy, so he's not here. But then when this is over, Alex and David are going to take over the rest of the show. So it's going to be a little weird episode because there's all the change. But I promise you, the permanent changes are cool. And then today's weirdness is just because I got to catch a flight. But it's also cool. It's going to be so cool, guys. Stay tuned.

Who doesn't love air travel? Flying is so easy and convenient right now, so. It's right. I'm flying at Canada for the collision conference. I got to download this weird Canadian surveillance app called Arrived Can. It's great. I love it. That's an amazing name.

Anyhow, those are all the changes. I'm really excited about the new art and new music. I'm glad people like it. Very fun to see the discussion about the artwork on the tweets. Okay. There's two other things you have to talk about before we dive in the Smackwick Pro. One, our Netflix show, The Future of, is out. It's streaming now.

People are watching it. Mind-blowing experience to work on something for three years. And then just, like, have people watch it. It's just out there. Like, everybody can have opinions about the things you had opinions on first. But, like, you, like, marinate in those opinions. Like, this show, we, like, record the show and we put it out. And then we, like, make another one the next week.

This is, like, we spent three years arguing about everything. And then it's going to be another long time to make the next one. So I'm really excited about it. I hope you like it. I hope you're watching it. It's on Netflix now. The first six episodes are up now. The next six episodes are coming out next week on the 28th.

Please watch it. If you know how to do some like K-pop fan army stuff and you want to like VPN to 50 Netflix accounts around the world and stream it all at once. I'm not saying you should do it. I'm saying that would be an interesting technical challenge for a group of motivated teenagers. Just an idea. I'll get on it. You ever see those farms? Those like farms in Asia with like the hot dogs moving hundreds of Android phones at once?

What? Do you know what? They're not hot talks. Are you saying that if we open that door behind you, that's what we're going to find in your house, Neelai? Hundreds of hot talks operating Android phones. No, like, you know, they do testing on the way that you like do testing on apps to find bugs is you hire these companies that operate automated phone testing systems.

And like they need things that can touch the phones. Yeah. So they're not hot dogs. but one of the first stories about touchscreen culture that I ever wrote it in Gadget was iPhone users in South Korea discovered that a certain type of like meat on a stick worked as a stylist on their iPhones because it was capacitive. Just greasy. So they weren't just using these like meat stylises. And so now whenever I see one of those rings, I'm like, oh, it's just like hundreds of hot dogs.

Maybe it's a kebab. You don't know. You never know. Okay. It's gone in a strange direction. Let's bring it back home. Watch the Netflix show. listen to the new Wednesday episode of the Vergecast.

Lots of exciting things happening in Virchworld. One of those exciting things, which is like, I would say Monica, half exciting. Like, exciting with a limit is our review the MacBook Pro 13. So I actually loved the way Apple Insider described it in their review roundup. They said, the MacBook Pro reviews are out with what seems to be a collective yawn. Yeah, I think that's right. So we were just at WWC. Apple announced the new M2 chip.

That chip is going into two laptops, the MacBook Air, which is full redesign. mag safe, the new webcamp, the whole thing, and then this computer, the Macroprone, which is is also there. Hi, which I was thinking about this. So Apple announced it and they put up this slide. They're like, did you know the 13 inch Macquarie Pro is the second best selling laptop in the world? The MacBook Air is the first, the 13 inch pro is the second best sell.

And at the time, it's like fine, you know, you've got to justify releasing this computer and the same old chassis. You're saying people like it already. And then it occurred to me like, they showed us no numbers. Like they just said that it was true. I don't know a lot of people. I mean, like, I feel like laptop owners are quite loud in talking to us about the laptops they like. I would not say I get a lot of emails about the 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Monica, you're our laptop reviewer. I certainly don't. But I do say in my personal life, I do know more people who own the MacBook Pro than I do who own a MacBook Air. Okay. My guess would be that the MacBook Pro is just owned by more of the people who aren't email. milling us all the time. Like normal people who like don't care as much about laptops. I just think those are error owners. I think like there's the default. Anyway, so Apple's contention is that the 13 inch MacBook Pro with the touchbar that only the two ports is the second

best selling laptop in the world. So obviously updating it with the M2 chip is a big deal. Monica, what did you find? I mean, it's better. Like it's a little bit faster. Like if you are upgrading from an Intel machine, which you likely are like I can't imagine that people who bought the M1 last year, like, already getting tired of it. It is going to be, like, a big change. It's going to be a noticeable change. It's like, if you need to buy one now, it's like fine to buy now. Like, you can go ahead and buy it. In terms of, like, separately talking about how big of a leap forward it is from the M1, it's like, you know, not necessarily something you would notice in your day-to-day life if you're, like, using the M1 next to the M2, which I did, like, for quite a few

days. And there are like differences of a couple seconds when you're doing certain things here and there, but it's not anything like jumping up to the M1 Pro, which is where you will really notice, like, I think a huge change in a lot of the stuff that you're doing. And that was reflected in our benchmarks as well. It's, you know, the M2 is a step up from the M1. It is still much closer the M1 than it is to the M1 pro in terms of like how powerful it is, how fast it can go. And that's not unexpected. Like that's like exactly what everyone thought it was going to be. But that is just to emphasize that you can get a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro for $300 more. And that $300 is buying you, like, a lot of power to the point where, like, if you are really looking for a powerful laptop, like, I will just tell you not to buy this.

Like, it is worth it for you to pay $300 extra dollars. You'll get a lot more multicore performance. The other thing I do think is worth noting, though, is that the M2 does beat the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, as we, which makes sense because that's just the M1 Pro with more cores. in single core performance, like on single core sit a bench and single core deep bench, the M2 is doing better, which I think is a good sign for just like the M2 Ultra and Max and all those little fun chips we expect are coming. I think that is a good sign that those will be single core improvements. It won't just be like the M1 pro with even more cores or two M1 Maxes making M1

Maxception. Like it will be, I think there will be single core innovations there as well. Alex, on the sort of like the nerdy chip side. The M1 is kind of like an A14 but more. Souped up. And then the M2 is the A15 but more. Right. So it's a little bit more souped up.

So this is kind of like, I ultimately always think in the Intel, AMD kind of way of thing. So I'm like, this is like a tick talk situation or this is like a little refinement of processes across the board. And so the tick was the M1, huge change, big massive performance leaps from Intel. This is the talk. So these are like minor changes. This is like refining processes, cleaning things up.

So like slightly different processes. They're both five nanometers, but it's like a more refined five nanometer. It has more transistors, has more memory bandwidth. It has a couple new updated engines. There's an updated media engine was like the big one that they've been harping on. And it has more GPU cores than the M1s than the M1 did. Compared to the M1 Pro and the M1 Max, it has more like efficiency cores, whereas the M1 Pro and the M1 Max have more like power.

cores. And you saw that. Like, I thought what was really interesting about your review is that you were like, yeah, the performance is a little bit better. The GPU performance is a lot better. But the battery life, yeah, that sounded like a real big win. And I think honestly, that for me was the most interesting part, is that like, yeah, we know the M1 is good. We know the M1 is fast. A slightly refined version of it is going to be slightly faster. Great. But there was a lot of changes there for the efficiency cores. and I was really, really curious how much of that bared out in your actual testing for battery life. Yeah, so I was not able to run this down during my testing period, which has actually never happened to me before.

Like, even when I was testing the M1 mat, like the M1 Pro 14, which gave me like 16 hours, like I did that same thing with this computer and there was still like 20% left. Like I would like use it all day. I'd like leave it running like something overnight. I'd wake up and there'd still be like so much left that I'd, I'd have to shut it and stop my timer and, like, bring it to the office because it was just like, I was never able to consistently use it for all the battery life that it has. I do plan on doing that. I need to find a time to do that, but I haven't been able to yet, which is really unprecedented in my career.

It's a very long lifespan. It's funny because when we were doing the M1 reviews, we were running right up against the limits, right? Yeah. Because the MacBook Pro is with the M1 Pro and the MX are like, it just keeps going. But we got there, and then this one is like, and a little bit more. Yeah, like, I would use it for like, you know, eight hours. And I was, I mean, I was getting really frustrated at points where I was just like, I'm just going to kill this.

Like, I would throw, I like played Tomb Raider on for a while, like had like premiere running over audition. Like, I was like really trying to like get it down. And it would still at the end of the day, like, have like 50 to 60% remaining. So I, my best guess as of now is that with my workload, it will get like 17 and a half to like 18 hours. I will update the review. This to me is baffling because Apple's battery life estimate is for video playback,

which we know is all the radios are off, brightness down, you're using the Apple TV app, and they quote 20 hours. And you're like, well, just in using it, I'm getting 18 hours. It's like, why wouldn't they just say the real figure? I was a part of it is that, I mean, everyone's workload is different. And the fact that I'm getting, you know, a certain amount of time doesn't mean that you're going to get a certain amount of time. It is sort of useful for giving you an idea of how much you might expect knowing if you're doing stuff similar to what I'm doing.

And it's a useful comparison because I know and can confirm that I was doing the same workload on the 14-inch M1 Pro. But I do understand that Apple sort of saying like, our engineer Steve got 17 hours out of this like isn't like as useful as having having a playback test. Poor Steve. Poor Steve. Just sitting there watching the same video in Apple TV at 50% brightness. Mead stylist. That's what they're doing in severance. Yeah.

They're just battery life testing. So it sounds like the M2, right, based on the A15, faster efficiency cores, more efficient efficiency cores, a meaningful bump in single-threaded performance. But then the M1 Pro and the M1 Max have more performance cores. Yeah. And so when you do multi-core workloads, those cores will kick in. you get way more performance out of those chips. Yeah, just like way, like it's double. It's close to doubling it on a lot of stuff.

I do want to say last week I ran into Monica at the office and I was looking at the computer and we were trying to come up with ways to tax the memory bandwidth on it because that seems to be one of the really big like performance increases is, right? Like the memory band was really improved. And so my very dumb, it's five o'clock in the afternoon idea was to see how many tabs we could open. And like we went and found like a site. We won't name the site. That's rude. But we went and found a site that we knew would normally tax our browsers. And we opened it in Chrome, which we know is really memory heavy. And how many, we got to like 200. It was over 150. That was on the M1, which

any of our storage would be, storage would be part of that too. But yeah. Because we sort of had the idea of like, oh, let's like see side by side, like which one can open more tabs. And it became very clear, very quickly that that would take like hours because M1 was just like, Still doing totally fine with like 150 tabs open. Did anything slow this computer down? No, not when I was using it. Not even when it was on battery. It certainly wasn't like as fast at doing CPU heavy stuff in like Premiere and audition as like the M1 Pro

computer would be. But there was never a point where I was using it and getting like the spinning wheel. That doesn't mean you couldn't get that if you were like doing even heavier stuff that I was on here. But one of the things I wanted to emphasize in this process is that if you are doing like lots of professional work, like, you should just stop reading a review and go by the 14 because this is really, like, not a good value purchase for you. So I think what sort of does matter more than doing that, like, really heavy professional work is how good it is at the stuff that the M1 Pro is overkill for, which is mostly the stuff I was trying to do. And none of that slowed it down.

But then we have no idea how good the MacBook Air will be at that stuff. Right. And that's sort of my hesitation with the battery life, too. You know, the battery life is really great. The MacBook Air has the same processor, could have the same battery life as well. Because we don't know the size of the battery in the MacBook error. It's a slightly lower quote. We know that much. It is a slightly lower quote. Yeah. But again, the quote is for video playback, which is all the radio's off, low screen brightness, playing video on a loop in the Apple TV app. So if you need to do that for 20 hours, the MacBook Pro is the way to go.

Right. For all you loopers out there. Yeah, loopers. That's what they call them. Right. You go, it's a great subreddit community. People who just loop video all day talking about their tips, their stamina tips, bathroom strategies. That's who we're going to talk to. They're going to feature them in the air video. That's like we did with the MacBook studio at Alex Castro.

Like the air video is going to be loopers. Yeah, the looper forum wars are just crazy. Right. You don't want to get in the middle of that. But so the MacBook Air, the MacBook Air is quoted at 18 hours of video looping time. So like, presumably that just means it's less. But if it's less against the benchmark of I couldn't kill the battery, maybe it doesn't matter at all. I want to see how much less it is.

If I'm only getting 10 hours out of the MacBook Air and I'm getting 17 out of the MacBook Pro, that to me would be tempting to buy the MacBook Pro because I'd be, you know, I'd be giving up MagSafe for seven hours of battery. For me, that would be a worthy trade, even if it might not be for everyone. But, you know, the more battery that the MacBook Air has, the sort of more considerably other tradeoffs become, I think. How many hours battery did you get on the M1 MacBook Pro? 10-ish, 10-11. 10-ish. So this was almost like double that. Yeah.

So if we got, we saw like similar on the MacBook Air. And the MacBook Air, I struggled to get mine to die. Like I can go a day or two at the office. And everybody's like, did you bring a charger? And I'm like, no, never. Yeah. I live and die by the battery. I'm not actually used the M1 Air recently.

But the M1 Pro is I using it as my primary driver right now in that it's like 10 to 12 hours, generally. Yeah, I have a 16-inch M1 Pro, and it just doesn't die. Like, I think I said this, like, last week or the week before. Like, I went and live-logged the entire Apple event and then did some photo stuff and wrote up, like, I did that day on the road, and I got home, and I was at like 50% battery. And you weren't even 100% charged. Yeah, I was at 90. It was great. So we keep talking about the air. You keep talking about the 14-inch pro. Let's put those things in the perspective of the price. So the M-2 Air, which is, is coming out next month, starts at 1199.

So the M2 Air, for my playing around on the website, it seems like it is largely going to be comparable, if not the same price for the same specs as you can get from the MacBook Pro. So the decision between the two of them is going to be less about money and more about the other benefits the MacBook Air has, like the new design and MagSafe and the upgraded webcam and the lack of touchbar for people for whom that's a big draw. Yeah, I'm just trying to understand it.

So the MacBook Air with the M2 chip has MagSafe, It has a 1080P webcam, has the new design. It comes in fun colors. It starts at 1299. Okay. I think you should get more than 8Ks of RAM. So, like, maybe you should pay a little bit more money. But, like, whatever, it starts at 12.99.

The 13-inch pro that you reviewed. Yeah. And then you reviewed the step-up model of the 13-inch product pro with the M2, but the base model is 1299. So for $100 more, you get the old design. You get the 720P webcam. You don't get MagSafe, which. effectively means you lose a port because you need to use one of those ports to charge. And then importantly, you get a smaller screen because the 13 inch pro is 13.3 inches and the 13

inch air now with the M2 is 13.6 inches. Yeah. So this is like the worst $100 you can spend unless there's something you need the touchbar for or some extremely esoteric reason that you need to run the fan all the time. Yeah, I mean, it's really not looking like a good deal, but I sort of, like, I want to wait and see how big of a deal the fan is. Like, I think Weekends Air and, like, suspect that the fan is not going to lead to huge performance gains and suspect that the battery life on the air won't be too much less, but I don't want to, like, bang that gavel down quite yet until I've tried that stuff out,

I think. I think there's two reasons to get the pro. I would never do it, but here are the two reasons. one, two sweet, sweet more hours of battery life, as promised by the loopers. The loopers are freaking out right now, man. Yeah, I know. They're like, oh, my God, they're finally talking about us. But, like, it's also an established design.

We know it works. We know all the components work. We know there are no bugs. We know that, like, this has been tested for years and years and years, and everything about this is going to work. And then MacBook Air is a totally new design. And historically, when Apple launches a totally new. new design. Like, sometimes it goes really great. So far, I've got a Mac studio. It's going great.

And they just did a totally new design in 2021. But like, but this is a pretty radical, radical new design for the MacBook Air. And there could definitely be some things that pop up that like might make somebody who just wants like that super consistency will be like, you know what? I'm just going to go ahead and get this other one. It's got all these crappy things on it. But I know it's going to be consistent. But I live in fear. Yeah. I live in absolute fear. I like to live my life on roller coaster. I mean, there's like video editors out there who don't upgrade for decades because they're like, well, I, you know, my software works just perfectly right now.

Dude, if I could still be running Snow Leopard, I would. So I feel those people. But I'm just saying for $100, you get the substantially worse computer on a number of like, like experiential metrics. Like the webcam is worse. You can have access to fewer ports. If like me you are left-handed, you will be touching that stupid touchbar and just muting your computer all the day long, right?

Like, forever. Whatever is going on there. If you pay $400 more, you get into M1 Pro 14-inch MacBook Pro territory. And that's like a substantial improvement across all the met. You get an SD card reader, right? Yeah. You should definitely just pay the $400 more. So I think that the audience for this, like, is theoretically.

me. Like, I am legitimately someone who just does not need anything close to the power that the M1 Pro has. Like, like, I could frankly do my work on, like, a $700 computer if $700 computers didn't have, like, terrible battery life and lots of other bad things about them. Like, like, I just do not want to pay for the 14-incher, and I do not need the power the 14-incher has. Like, that's just overkill for me. And I do want a fan because the current air, like, just from the reviews that I've read, I do think that some of the stuff that I occasionally have to do in Photoshop and in audition would lead to some throttling on the current air. So if I were like a 2020 shopper, the MacBook Pro with M1 would be like the buy for me. I personally do care

of battery life a lot more than I care about like MagSafe and care about design. So I do think that there is a world in which the M2 MacBook Pro is a better purchase than the MacBook Air for like me and my demographic. But again, that's where I've been sort of so heavily caveatting. Like, I need to see exactly what performance difference is between the air and the pro and exactly what the battery life difference is for me, because those are really like more so deciding factors than a lot of the sort of extra stuff that the air has. That is the best case I can make for it.

So the M2 Air is coming out next month. That's what it says in Apple's website. We'll see how this chip shortage goes. Apple's running the supply constraints like everybody. this thing is out now. I think the right answer is unless you need this computer right now, and there are lots of people who need a computer right now, like go fine,

you'll be happy. But if you can wait the additional month to see whether the worst $100 upgrade I've seen Apple provide to people in a long time, it's worth it. Like, I would just hold on. Yeah. Because my instinct,

and I hear you that like there's this middle ground and whatever, but my instinct is, the mini LED display and the MacBook Pros is really good. The ports are useful. Like, the M1 Pro is faster. Like, you get more for that money. So if you can live with the air, like, you get the new computer. And if you need more, you should get substantially more.

And this thing is just in a weird tweener spot where that, I mean, this is why they're saying, look, this is the second best selling computer, the second best selling laptop in the market. A statement, by the way, I'm looking at their president. release, no footnote, no sourcing. I don't know if that's from IDG. I don't know where that came from. They're just like... They can just say it. Yeah, they just said it and there's nothing underneath it. It could be in like 2015 that it was the best. Yeah, I mean, who knows? But you understand why they're saying it. They're saying, look, this computer is popular, despite what you may think. Yeah. My instinct here is if you can wait a month, you should absolutely wait a month to see how the air

performs so you can decide whether you need the little bit of extra sustained power that the fan would give you. You need the little bit of extra battery life that you might get. We don't know yet. Or you need the big jump to the M1 Pro machines. And then you're going to be in a horrible conundrum of like, do I wait for the M2 pro machines? And who knows?

I basically agree with you. I think it's, it is in like a weird middle spot. And the way that things are looking right now, it is somewhat unclear, like, who this is the best computer for, especially given the identical pricing, basically, to the MacBook Air? I think the pro name kind of trips it up, because you see the pro, like, that made a lot of sense. And just because they're using the same chassis, they decided to call it a pro. And really, this is more of just, like, base model MacBook, right? Like, the Air is generally for those of us who aren't doing a lot of professional stuff. We don't need a fan to just get a slightly bit more

performance. We want, if you're going to go like super performance, you want to get like more cores. So this is like, it's just a weirdly named product sitting in this weird space. And they should maybe like reposition it. The pro naming is just very confusing to me in general. The fact that they have an M1 pro processor that is in a MacBook. And they also have a MacBook pro with M2 that is not of the M1 Pro and it trips me up all the time and they should change it. And I hate it. Oh, and they did tell us what the battery size is. It's actually slightly, for the MacBook Air, the M2, it's slightly bigger than the M1 MacBook Air. The M1 MacBook Air was 49.9 watt hours. The M2 is 52.6 watt hours. And then this 13-inch MacBook Pro is 58.2 watt hours. Ever so slightly bigger. Yeah, ever so slightly bigger.

The answer is we have to wait for that error. And I will say that our friend Joanna Stern, like straight up said, I didn't review this computer because it's pointless to review it without the MacBook Air. She also, I will say, gave Monica a great compliment, said Monica's the best laptop reviewer. Thank you, Joanna. Quote, since Joanna reviewed laptops, which is an amazing pat-in-back. But we forgive Joanna for it. But I thought it a very nice compliment for Monica.

Okay, we've got to wait for the air. That seems to be the consensus unless you need to run out and get this computer right now. If you were someone who needs to run out and get this computer right now, I do want to, like, not undersell that the M2, like, is a very good chip. Like, it is a better chip than the M1. Like, this is still, as of now, one of the fastest laptops you can buy. And that, like, it is like, yes, it's like boring. It's confusing.

It is, like, very, very fast and, like, a big achievement. And it's, like, fine to buy. It's true that it's very fast. But, you know, I just think this pricing is so odd that it feels like Apple is counting on people to be like, for $100 more. I get a pro and just, like, paying it. And I think the answer is we absolutely have to wait for the air to know how these things all slot together. So we'll wait a month through the air. All right, I am running late to catch this plane.

Alex has got the rest of the show in excellent hands. We got this. Everybody, do a shot. We're going to get through this together. It's going to be great. Monica, thank you so much. We're going to take a break, and then, you know, Alex Gottspeed. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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But David Pierce is here. Hello. It's good to be here. I'm like 60% here, if we're being honest. I don't know if you guys talked about this while I was not here, but I have COVID. It's very exciting. I don't recommend it at all. But I have watched a lot of Stranger Things.

No one told me all the episodes of Stranger Things are six and a half hours long. We can come back to that later. So in several days of being sick, I've watched like half of the Stranger Things season. But I'm very happy to be here. Anne Seaford is here. Hello. We're very, very excited. We're going to, we got a bunch of other things coming for this episode of the Verge cast,

this very special, very weird episode. First up, we're going to talk about Netflix and binging because David's watched all of Stranger Things, but also because Netflix just laid off another 300 people. And they're pegging it kind of to, they had the quarter one results. They did not go well. They were losing subscribers. They're kind of starting to tighten up the finance. and have laid off another 300 people.

And I think the question is like, well, how do you rebuild? Like, how do you make Netflix competitive? And everybody seems to be focused on content. Netflix is focused on content. And I don't think that's correct. Well, so wait, hold on. Before you get too deep into that, I think part of what's so interesting about this to me is that, like, that premise that Netflix is somehow like falling apart and needs a new

strategy to rebuild is just not true. Like Netflix, this has been the weirdest part of all of this. to me is Netflix seems to be undergoing this like massive panic attack because everybody went outside again. And like that's fine, right? Like Netflix was like so many of these other companies that like probably grew too fast over the course of the pandemic. It was unsustainable. Netflix probably should have spent time talking about how that was unsustainable rather than being like video games. But instead like Netflix is fine, right? There was this, there was a report a few days ago, I believe from Bloomberg, that Netflix has like half the shows people actually watch on streaming.

like Netflix is by all real accounts killing it and yet is undergoing this like crazy existential crisis as a company, which I find just deeply weird. I feel like it's kind of the investors and stuff. I think I think there was always this like expectation of nonstop unrealistic growth until the end times. Cranz, are you saying that Wall Street has unrealistic expectations? Really? Like, really?

Wow, it's crazy. And like Netflix is just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're drinking the Wall Street juice. Yes, we are, we are, and dire, we lost 200,000 subscribers. It's time to lay off another 300. It's like, what, 450 people so far that they've laid off total. And like, why are you panicking? You have so many things you can be doing to like deal with this. And also, it's okay to lose subscribers.

Well, I shouldn't say that because I'm not working at Netflix. But they have, they have 220 million of them. Losing 200,000 is like, it's not good, but it's not like a signal. of a broader crisis inside of Netflix. But then Netflix is also out there saying, you know, they confirmed, as far as I know, like aggressively and exactly for the first time that they are doing an ad-supported plan, they keep pushing on the video game stuff. Like, Netflix is going to be fine, which is why I think, like, your stuff about binging

is way more interesting? Because to me, the question is not like, is Netflix dead? It's like, why is Netflix such a bad service? Yes. Because, like, we saw also this week, I think Wall Street Journal did a piece about how Netflix, is like talking to a bunch of different people for advertising. They're talking to NBC Universal for ads because it's like, yeah, we're just going to go to our competitors.

They got this. And they're talking to Google. They previously, there was reported, they talked to Roku. Like, they're trying to figure out their ad game and they're trying to figure out how to get all their subscribers back. And then they're like, oh, is there anything we could do to fix our actual app? No, nothing. Couldn't possibly.

Just rows of endless content from categories that don't make any sense to anybody. We've solved. Yeah. We're good there. everything's fine. It's wild to me that you cannot do a playlist on Netflix. Yeah, wait, give us the rundown of this piece that you wrote a few days ago, because I've been thinking about it obsessively after three days of lying on the couch scrolling through Netflix. I have determined that you are right. So like, give us, give us the argument.

I mean, this was entirely because I was watching, I started to rewatch, first time watch. I don't really remember watching Star Trek, the original series as a kid. Like, I watched it. But if you asked me what happened to episode, I couldn't tell you. And I started watching it. But Paramount Plus will only, like, if you want to watch it in order, their order is how it was aired in 1966 when it was chosen by like a bunch of executives who were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you got too many big ideas in here. We need, we need, like, bikinis and we need, like, guys ripping their shirts off and punching each other. And so, like, the first five episodes are just like William Shatner losing his shirt and then being like, oh, ladies, hello. You're like, what is happening here? And why can't I just watch it like the way it was intended to be watched by the writers?

And Paramount Plus doesn't let you do that. And so all the shows have that. And it's like, why can't you just like watch it in another order? Or can't you choose the order without having to like go through the whole app, I think is the clear clarification here. Because technically I could pull it up on my phone and I could choose the episodes I want to watch and manually select them. But wouldn't it be nice if I just had a playlist? like I've been doing in iTunes since 2001. This is not new technology.

Yeah, so this is where I should confess that I have never watched one episode of any Star Trek anything. I'd like to, and we should come back to that. I'm like, I'm an aspirational Star Trek fan. Dan, are you, are you a Star Trek guy? I used to watch Star Trek when I was a kid. I was a big Next Generation fan, but I think the last show I watched was Voyager, which was mid-late 90s. I think that's what most people did. And then I saw the recent movies.

Okay. All right. Well, at some point, I need the like how to get into Star Trek thing, which I guess is kind of the point, right? Like there are a million Star Trek shows. And the same is true with Star Wars, except there's just like less of it. So it's easier to sort of put in order. But you're like, what order should I watch these things in? And the order in which they were produced is not necessarily the correct order because they all move around in crazy timelines. Everybody has theories about the canons of them. They all cross over with each other. Marvel is even worse like this. Like there are a hundred different ways you could watch the Marvel universe. order and it would all make different kinds of sense. And it just feels like, to your point, it's such a, like, basic thing to just put them in a different order and show them to me. Like, there's, is there some, like, secretive governing body that says these shows have to be shown in this order? Like, I'm kind of, I'm to the point now where it's, like, the only thing I can think of is there's someone on the other side who's like, you must do this this way.

I honestly think it's just laziness. Because just like, when Disney released the Simpsons and everybody, like, lost. their minds because the Simpsons were in the wrong aspect ratio and it was cutting things off. You were losing the Duff Beer jokes and stuff. Like, I think it's, they just, they know you want the content, but they're like, they don't care how they get the content. You just shovel it in. They got this.

I think this goes back to the first thing that you said, Alex, which was that they are so focused on the content, they are not focused at all on the experience. And like, I think all of the streaming apps are this way. Like HBO Max rebuilt its whole streaming app. and it still sucks. And Netflix continues to suck. And Disney Plus sucks. Like they are all terrible at like,

I'm watching a show on Tuesday night and I go to bed. And it's Wednesday night. And I want to watch the next episode of that show. Doesn't want to tell me that. It wants to tell me a million other things. And it's just like, I'm sure there are like metrics involved because Netflix, especially, but all of these companies are very data driven at this point. And there's probably metrics that say like more people will watch more things.

things if we make it this annoying to use, then if we made it easier. But it's just like none of them consider the experience at all when it comes to like actually setting up, navigating, finding what you want to watch, continuing what you want to watch. I just want to complain about the fact that the continue watching row is in a different place somehow every time you open a streaming app. Have you ever noticed this? Sometimes it's at the top where it clearly should be. Sometimes it's like the 11th thing down.

And I'm just like there is a 97% chance that I'm coming here to watch something. that I already started watching. And Dan, I think you're right that they're like, all these companies know that the only way to keep you using their service is to just like relentlessly turn you on to new stuff. But that's just like not the experience of watching things. It's not a pleasant experience. No, it sucks.

And it's like, and there's even a way to do it that's like, I mean, everybody should take a like some learnings, but not all learnings from YouTube in this respect, right? Which is that there's like, there are really interesting ways to do recommendations. Yes. And you can do stuff like on topics. you can do stuff on like people. Like there are a million ways to show people new content.

And these companies just seem to have no interest in doing any of it, which blows my mind. I think for a lot of them, Netflix excluded, they were all entertainment companies first, right? Like all they knew was content. Disney may be the exception because they have their whole theme park experience. They should know better. But for the most part, they were all these like companies who were just making lots of content. That's what they know and they know that. And Netflix used to actually care a little bit more about that experience.

Like the big news from Netflix used to be not what new show was on, but like how they tweaked the app, how they improved it. And I think they've just all kind of ignored their app to be in this like content race and see how much stuff they can turn out. And it's like, well, you also have this whole other thing that will keep people sticking around if you make it not suck. Did we forget to say a disclaimer that we have the future of on Netflix right now? A wonderful show that you should absolutely go watch. Netflix? Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. Neely's in like a TSA line right now, and he just felt it. He's like, oh, my God, they didn't disclaim something.

I can feel it in my bones. But yeah, we do own it. Thank you for the disclaimer, Dan. It's wonderful. But I will say on the front, like, if you have to choose between tech and content for these apps, like content is clearly the thing to choose, right? Right. The flip side is like Quibi, which had a million different interesting ideas about how an app

should work and no shows anybody you should watch and died immediately. But I think the part that drives me so crazy about this is the stuff that we're asking for is not wildly complicated. It's not like invent new filmmaking techniques or like build new technology for televisions. It's like it's playlists. They do the Dolby vision and the Dolby Atmos. They do the nerd stuff already. They don't. Most of them don't though. Well, you know, Netflix does and Disney Plus does and HBO Max does. Like the nerd specs are there. It's like the very simple stuff like David just said, like give me a playlist that I can make. Make your watch list makes sense.

Why do I have to do I, like the thing with HBO Max, I can add individual episodes or seasons or shows to my watch list. And I don't know which one, which button does which. And like, which is going to let me watch this show tomorrow when I want to watch the next episode. I do not know. Oh, I added episode three to my watch list, but I really want to watch the rest of the season. Like, it just doesn't make any sense. But you're just going to watch episode three forever, just on loop. These are the things where you can see why Apple is so obsessed with this idea.

From a pure design UI perspective, to use one of these apps is so infuriating that I'm sure they're all in a room just being like, what if we could pull it all together and be the ones who actually make this make some sense? And I would say there is no indication from Apple's existing products that that is actually possible for Apple to do. But you can see why Apple is so obsessed with it. Like the Apple TV app is just as guilty of this as anybody else. but it at least is like slowly pushing in some of those directions. It's like Plex for years. I know I've got to bring up Plex. I'm sorry.

I can't believe we made it this long. We went so long in this. But like Plex for years, they've made it very, very clear. They want to do the same thing that Apple wants to do. They want to be like the place you go and you aggregate all of your content. They release that new function that kind of lets you do that. And it also took them over a decade to give you playlists. And even then, like, one of the most requested things that you see from Plex users is I want to just like set up a TV channel of like random episodes of The Simpsons and Futurama.

So I can feel like I'm like getting ready to have dinner 5 p.m. after school all over again. And they still like, it's still really hard to do that. Like even the people who like they have to focus on the app because that's all they have struggle with this. And nobody has an answer. They're just like, yeah, well, we're working on it. Yeah, and for all the reasons that's hard for a company like Plex, because like all these streaming companies and content companies are like super intense about how the stuff that they own is used in all these aggregator apps.

There's just no excuse for one of the streamers. Like it's hard for Plex and I get that. And I think Plex is like trying to do the right thing and is running into like legal walls because these companies don't want to have their content next to each other. For a while there, they were even doing that with all of your very legally gotten content that you brought to them. They were still like, it's really hard to do playlists. And I'm like this, again, iTunes has been doing it for how long? Creative Jukebox was doing it? You have one and then you have the next one after it. And then after that,

another one. Something about videos. They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, playlist for videos. I can do it for you guys. You put avatar.mkv. Then you put Batman underscore begins.mkv. VLC, just out there changing the game. Thank you, VLC. Everybody do what VLC did in 2001. But, you know, Netflix, they're going to do their own thing. They're going to lay people off. Go spend another $30 billion per episode of Stranger Things. It'll be four hours long each episode.

David will never stop watching it. Just being a Stranger Things loop. You know that feeling sometimes when you, like, you get to the end of something and you're like, oh, it's over. That was good. And then, like, the screen goes black. and then there's just more after it. Like, I don't know if either of you saw The Batman,

but that movie ended like six times. Oh, man, the longest movie ever. Yeah, and it's like, I actually enjoyed that movie, fine, but it literally ends, I think, four times. It just keeps ending. And every time you're like, oh, good movie. And then it's like, oh, there's another scene. Stranger Things is like that.

And somehow I'm like, okay, I'm like 53 minutes in, like cool cliffhanger. It's like, oh, oh, no. It's too long. We're going back to Russia now. Like, that's, we're just going to hang out in Russia for a while. So many nights to get through that. It's a lot. It's incredible.

But we're going to take a break. When we're back, we're going to talk gadgets. Dan's going to tell us all about his favorite gadget of all time, right, Dan? Maybe of like the last six months, we'll say. It's going to be great. Stay tuned. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge.

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Get started with Claude today at cloud. com. That's cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash Virchcast. And we're back. And Dan, tell us all about, is it the HTC Vive? Is that your new favorite gadget?

It's the HGCVive. It runs Android 2.3 with HTCSenseUI. No, I wrote a piece last week, or we published it last weekend. Because I revisited the Surface Duo, too, which if anyone remember, came out last fall, and it was like kind of a disaster. And it was the second disaster in the Surface Duo line. I think you're being very kind to say kind of. Yeah, the first one is a disaster.

The second everybody was just kind of like, oh, that's probably bad and instantly forgot about it. Yeah, and it was bad. Like, it was like functionally broken at launch. Like, I could not type on the screen. I wrote our review. I used the thing. I tried it out.

I went back and forth, got gas lit by Microsoft PR who insisted they did not see these problems. But, like, I couldn't use the phone. And so it made it really hard to kind of like wrap my head around what the idea with this product is and like what the goal of this product is. So anyways, I keep seeing these reports that Microsoft has been issuing software updates and that they've been actually updating the phone and making it better and things like that. So I figure where like eight months later they're cost less now. So they cut the price by 33% or something, which is a sizable amount. and I was able to trade in some things.

I got my hands on a Surface Duo 2, and I had been using it for the past, like, month, and I kind of like it. It's very much not a device for everyone, and it's not even, like, my primary phone. I don't even use it as a phone. I use it as an iPad mini. But it's, like, kind of great,

because it's an iPad mini that I can fold in half and shove in my pocket, and then when I go to, like, my kids' gymnastics class, and I'm sitting there in the waiting room for an hour, I just opened my little iPad mini book, which is the Surface Duo, and I can read books on it really easily, or I can watch YouTube videos, or I can do anything that you can do with a phone, except I now had this, like, eight and a half inch screen that also fits in my pocket, where I could run two apps at the same time and, like, multitask if I want to get some work done or something like that. And because Microsoft has addressed a lot of the core issues, the touch response, the buggyness, the fundamental broken nature of the original launch, I can actually like use this now. And it's not frustrating to use or annoying to use. And I kind of like it.

So, you know, it's become one of like my go-to devices for the past month and a half or month or whatever. And it's like more exciting and interesting to use than a typical slab phone. and it's more portable than a tablet. So it's kind of like hitting this weird niche that I'm getting a lot of enjoyment of. I like it. It's fun. So you finally found like an Android tablet that you like. Yeah.

I mean, like it works like a phone, right? So it runs phone apps. And like you can stretch apps across the two screens. Not a great experience most of the time when you do that unless the app is made by Microsoft, which designed its apps to go against both screens. But it's super convenient to be able to have like in the morning I'm drinking my coffee and I've got Slack up on one screen.

I've got my email up on another or a web browser on another. And I'm like catching up with things really quickly and easily. And I can like view things and respond to messages while I'm viewing it all on this device that fits in my pocket. Normally I would need to use a laptop or a larger tablet or whatever to really do this kind of stuff. And I'm able to do it really easily with the duo. It's just like second nature on that thing, which is really cool. But like it's not replacing my phone because it's, order to do anything with it, you have to open it up, which is kind of cumbersome.

I put this in the piece. It's a very intentional type of device. It's not the kind of thing that I'm standing in line at the grocery store and I want to like kill some time by doom scrolling and I pull the phone in my pocket with one hand and unlock it all that things. Like you can't do that with a duo. You have to open it up. You've got to go through a process of like using it that requires both hands. Always have to use both hands. Basically. I mean, like you can fold the screen behind it. But in order to get it into that folded state you have to use both hands to open it up and fold it. There's no screen on the outside. It's annoying to check notifications with and things like that. It's also like cumbersome to use as an

actual phone against your face. So it's not a great phone. But if you think of it as a secondary device or like as a tablet replacement, a small tablet replacement where, you know, David mentioned in the Vergecast on Wednesday that he uses his iPad mini as just a reading device. Like this is like a really cool modern feeling reading device, whether it's Kindle book, or my pocket queue or websites or whatever, long emails, stuff like that. Like, it's really, like, great for that stuff. So I have to say that all totally tracks for me. And I think, like, it's sort of wild to me that Microsoft has not just always tried to

sell the thing that way. Like, the thing that they have always tried to do is make it a phone. Well, they didn't. They didn't with the first generation duo. They refused to call it a phone because they knew everyone is going to be like, this sucks as a phone. Right. But then the problem was it's a $1,400 or $1,500 device.

And now it's like, oh, it's a $1,500 or $1,500 device that is not your primary phone. You also need to carry another phone around to make this usable life. Like, that is like a problem. So I think they realized that problem with the Duo 2 and they changed their marketing. But it really didn't make any sense for me until that price came down almost $1,000 from its launch. And they fixed all the bugs. Yeah, that's what I was just about to say is I think that the price was the thing for me. because I totally buy it as a separate device.

Like, it sounds really stupid, but just having the Kindle app where you can see two different pages on two different screens is lovely. It's like, oh, I'm reading a book, like a person. It's nice. Exactly. And I have the original duo still floating around in my office here somewhere. And every once in a while, I pull it out because I'm like, I want to love you. Like, for all the reasons you just described, like, it's sort of the perfect, like, sit and have coffee in the morning and, like, catch up before the world, like, collapses on you as it does the minute you open your phone. All of that makes total sense to me.

The stylus is really good. It was three times the price it should have been. And it tried to be a phone. And for me, it's like that's the thing with all of these folding devices right now. Even the Samsung fold. Like when you close it, it just looks like a TV remote. It's like too tall and weird and doesn't quite work. But then you open it. It's like, oh, there's something like magical happening here. And I feel sort of the same way about the duo. Like I kind of like the idea that it's not just a screen staring at me all day. But it has to give me more than what it gave me before. But it sounds like, like, kudos to Microsoft for actually, like, continuing to support this thing that as far as I can tell, no one bought. Yeah. I mean, like, realistically, the people

that bought this are all on the Surface Duo subreddit. Yeah. Like, they all exist there. And they are all very passionate about it. And they really love their devices. It's just you and a bunch of Microsoft employees. A bunch of Microsoft employees, right? But, like, I opened the piece with, it is so rare that a product actually gets better after launch. And this is like consistently gotten updates. It's gotten some small updates for like security patches, but it's gotten a lot of like big bug fixes and also new features added. Like in June, they added new features that didn't exist. And they should have been there at the beginning, but they didn't have it. But now like, it has some new features that didn't exist before with the, the pen's got some new features.

And the glance bar, whatever they're calling the hinge notification thing, it's got some new features. So, like, they're continuing to invest in this, which is, like, most companies would not be able to do this. It only can be, like, a Google or Microsoft or Samsung or an Apple who have endless resources can let this thing lose money forever and still have engineers working on it and making it better. We're going to talk about a bunch of startups in a minute, but, like, a startup couldn't do this. Like, a startup might have had an idea for this of, like, this hardware and stuff, and maybe even could have gotten hardware onto the market. it. But as soon as it's out there, like, they can't continue supporting it because they don't

have the revenue coming in. So it's remarkable. It's rare. You know, we talked about the studio display earlier this year. Launched kind of bad. Apple has issued updates. It's still kind of bad. Like, the camera's not good. Like, that hasn't gotten better. This is an example of something that has actually gotten better after launch. And you should never buy something with the promise or hope that it gets better after lunch. But it's just fun to see something kind of like buck that trend. And it's kind of a classic Microsoft move, which I really love about Microsoft, is like, be a few years early to a pretty good idea. And then sometimes Microsoft gives up before that good idea becomes a good product. Sometimes it doesn't.

And in this case, like, I mean, the foldable phone thing is going to get there, I think. There are enough of those moments where you're using a foldable device and you're like, this is clearly better that I think, like, it's, we're going to get there. And it's just a matter of what it looks like. and I think Microsoft, like, has a bunch of very good ideas here. Because it was all the super basic stuff that was broken when it launched. It's just, like, you couldn't launch apps. Couldn't launch apps. You couldn't, like, close apps.

Like, the gestures to navigate both screens just made no sense. But couldn't you, like, run Microsoft Word on it? I mean, I get it. The people that are going to buy this thing, right? And they know it's $14 or $1,500. They are going to be, like, the die-hard Microsofties who use all the Microsoft services, and they, like, live in my own. breathe Redmond. And like, they're the ones. So, like, it makes sense to me that, like,

we're going to talk about how PowerPoint works on it and how you can use it as a PowerPoint remote and how you can do teams calls and take notes while you're in the middle of a team's call and all this kind of, all these things that I've never actually done because I don't use any of these services. But, like, I get that, like, original pitch with it. But, like, at a certain point, they have to be able to move beyond that and beyond the crowd. And the perennial joke with Microsoft is it takes three generations of a Microsoft product to be good. Windows 3.1 was the first usable version of Windows, right? And Surface Pro 3 was the first good surface product on the market that was like,

mainstream people can buy this and not really have lots of issues with it. So maybe if Microsoft sticks with it and keeps doing this, maybe the Duo 3 will be it. Like that's what we're holding the hope for. Like maybe it'll come out at a price that is reasonable. Maybe it'll be functional at launch. Maybe it'll address some of the things like, you know, it'd be really a lot easier to use this phone. as a phone if it had a screen on the outside of the cover, and it doesn't. So maybe the next one would have that or something like that. Well, should it though? Like, I think that's also the question

is, is you guys keep talking about it as this device that works best when it's not being used as a phone. So should the third iteration of this kind of step away from that and be like, no, this is, this is a foldable iPad Mini with Android? I would love to not have to carry two phones. Like, I mean, like, that's like, the reason I'm carrying two phones when I use the duo is because one of them I use for certain functions that they work really well at and the other one works better at other functions. I would love to be like the pitch for foldables, especially with Samsung's foldables, is that it replaces your phone and your tablet. And it is like this convergence device that fits in your pocket. And Samsung's much closer to that reality than Microsoft is currently. even if the Fold 3 is kind of like this weird TV remote when it's closed, you can use the outside of it and you can send messages and take phone calls and do that stuff and then open it up and have the big screen deal. You can't do that with a duo. Like you have to open it to use it. And so I think that adding a screen to the outside, bringing the price into a more reasonable territory and making sure that it fundamentally works at launch as opposed to having this string of horrible bugs.

I think Microsoft would be way better off going all the way the other way. And it's like, the what does the new surface go like 400 bucks like yeah make it cost about that make it be pure tablet don't even try to do phone stuff just be fun so that's a it's an interesting thought example so like if it was pure tablet then what is what software does it run because the duo runs android because it has to be a phone to do phone stuff right we're not doing it it can't be a windows no i mean like that's what the go is right and that's what the what was the other one that they never launched that folded the neo that was supposed to run a lighter version of Windows, which got folded into Windows 11, but the product never launched.

So, like, that could be, like, an interesting approach is as that middle secondary device in between your phone and your laptop. But I feel like the Go is really dependent on having that keyboard case. Yeah, the Go is pretty bad. Like, I think Windows, generally speaking, as much as we like to call the surface and the Go and everything, tablets, they're really just computers that you only get half of when you buy it and you have to buy the rest. Like, I think if a duo did that, then you're like, okay, well, I got to get my duo,

and then I got to go get my sweet keyboard so that I can actually, like, navigate and do anything on this device. Like, I think Android is much closer to being a good tablet competitor than Windows. And I would love to see it as, like, just an Android iPad Mini. And they're like, just go have fun with it. We're not going to care about our camera. It's got a folded half. We should still have the camera, though?

I could lose the camera entirely. But part of that is because I'm carrying my iPhone in my pocket. Yeah. And the camera is bad, right? The camera is not the best. But that's not like the performance of the camera is not really the problem with the camera. The problem with the camera is in order to use the camera, you have to open up the phone. And it's like you cannot, it's really hard to use one-handed.

It's hard to be quick with. It's hard to be, you know, in the moment with because it's this big device. It's like shooting with an iPad. It's not a pleasant experience. So that's why I don't use the camera. But the other side effect of the camera is that because they had to make a better camera for the duo two, they put this giant lump on the back of one half of it so that when you fold the other half around, it doesn't like fold or sit flush against it, like the original one,

which is one of the coolest things that the original one did was it folded around into this like really flushed felt thing. Now it's got this lumpy camera on the back that prevents it from doing that. And for me, because I don't use the camera and because I carry another phone in my pocket, I would ditch the camera entirely and just have a nice more common. compact, sleek or hardware. I got it. I got it. Okay.

So you know how like with the Surface Pro and the Surface Go? They're really at their best when you get the case. What if there was like a camera case or dongle or something? And you're like, all right, I got to take a photo. Plug in. We've just turned this into the most Microsoft product of all time. Yeah. This is the combination of the modular phone ideas that have failed for the past decade.

And folding phones. What if we put them together? Oh, gosh. Eli wasn't there to stop me as I started saying that. Sorry. But no, I'm like, maybe, you know, they always are kind of like, well, you need to buy something extra to make this truly usable. Like, all right. To be fair, they already do that because the pen doesn't come with it.

And then you buy the pen and you can't charge the pen unless you buy the charging case. So it's like, they're getting you, Alex. Like, you don't need a keyboard. What if the charging case had a camera on it? See? You're buying all the stuff. You want a camera? You want a stylist?

You just go spend $400 extra dollars. And for now, you can just have your $400 device. It's fine. Yeah, we're not at the $400 price. I don't think they'll ever get to the $400 price with this. Probably not. But, you know, it does need to come down from the $1,500. Well, speaking of phones, we're starting to see more of nothing, which is a real sentence I can say.

And the big news is that we won't see much of nothing in the U.S. Oh. So, like, Dan, walk us through the nothing news. So the big news this week. a couple of beats on the nothing phone. It came out that nothing is not apparently going to be selling the nothing phone one, which is the name of the product, in the U.S. It's not going to be compatible with U.S. networks.

We really don't know what the details are there. Like, it might work if you throw a T-Mobile SIM in there. It might work on some bands, but it's not going to have full support. It very likely will not work on Verizon, and you're just kind of be, I have a poor experience, It's pretty similar to like if you imported a Chinese phone to the US now made from Opo or Vivo or whatever. So if you were hoping to buy the nothing phone one in the US, that's a little bit of a bummer. We did get a preview of what the back of the phone looks like from MKBHD.

He did like a video detailing how the LEDs work. It is like the unique feature of this phone is it's got an array of LEDs on the back, which can light up with notifications or when your phone rings, it lights up with a different pattern or when you plug the phone in, it lights up like when you're charging, which is kind of clever. It's kind of a little gimmicky, but kind of neat. And of course, it'd be covered up by a case when you put a case on it. And then just today, it came out that apparently if you are in a country where they're selling this, the only way to buy it is going to be through an invite system. So it feels very much like the original launch of the one plus one back in 2014.

It was very hard to get. You had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to get an invite to buy it seems like Carl Pei, who is one of the co-founders of One Plus, is now co-founder or founder of nothing, is using the same tactic here. The thing that jumps out to me about this is like the launch stuff doesn't totally surprise me because, A, it's really hard to launch a phone globally, which we've seen from many, many, many startups over the years. And what too many of them do in the U.S. is like sign the one exclusive carrier deal, which is just the instant kiss of death to all smartphone startups everywhere.

So like kudos to Carl and nothing for not doing that. But then the invite thing seems to also be, I would guess, purely like supply driven. Yeah. I mean, they're a small company. They're not going to be able to compete for the already limited parts. You don't think it's just like to build hype? It does build hype too, yes. It helps.

But I don't, I just don't think the world is the same as it was in 2014. Like that was a time when people were like amped about their phones and wanted the, and I just don't think that's. the world we live in anymore. Like, there's Samsung and there's the iPhone and there's just, I think the audience for people who are like deliberately looking for something else is just shrinking really, really, really fast. But I think like, I think that's the point though, is I think they're trying to find that shrinking audience who's currently buying the one plus or whatever and saying, no, come, come buy our thing. We can be exclusive and weird with our like rollout too. We've got this. And we've got light.

on the back. Well, and they've done some of that, right? Like they did a stock X drop where I think with, I think, a hundred phones that by all accounts does not seem to have gone as well as they might have hoped. But that kind of stuff totally makes sense to me as a pure hype driven thing. But for what nothing is trying to do here, like artificially restricting the number of people who can buy your phone just seems backwards to me. So it's possible that they're going to do like the pre-order thing and have invites and then everyone who wanted one will get one very quickly. But my guess would be that this is just the fact that it's very hard to make phones right now. And they, unless you're a company as big as like Apple or Samsung or Huawei, it is hard to stay on top of your supply chain.

And like, I have no inside knowledge of this, but I would be very surprised if that's not the limiting factor here. Yeah. I mean, that's that's kind of what they are alluding to, that it is, it is, you know, a supply chain driven thing. it does conveniently build help, I think. I think that is definitely part of it. If there's one thing Carl Pay is very good at, it's marketing. And it is driving interest in hype. It looks cool, though. Like, I know we're going to knock on.

We have knocked on the nothing. We will probably continue to knock on some of the elements of the nothing. But it looks cool, right? I guess. Would you buy it? Like, is it cool enough to buy it? Like, that's a thing. It's not cool enough to buy, but it's just neat looking.

Like, the lights and stuff I thought were just to, hokey. Like, I honestly, the first time I saw the screenshot of it from MKBHD's piece, I thought it was like a mockup or a case. And I was like, okay, cool, that's a dumb case, but you do you. And then I was like, oh, wait, no, those are real lights? Okay, that's cool. I don't want to buy it, but I'm really excited about what you're doing here. Even though, like, if I saw this in a movie theater, somebody's phone started ringing and just the entire row is glowing, I would lose my mind. Yeah, I've gone back and forth on this like a hundred times. There are just a bunch of little things that you see, like, in Marquez's video, that, like,

you plug the phone in and it gives you the charging indicator, like, where it fills the space as the battery charges. Super neat. Cool idea. Fun to watch into that. The lights will sync with notifications or ringtones. They have a bunch of custom ringtones. Like, all that stuff.

I'm like, okay, it's neat. It's cool to see companies, like, actually do something with the back of their phone, which it's been a long time since anyone really tried anything. Bring back E-ink screens on the back of phones is my personal opinion. But I think I'm going to lose that fight permanently. But, like, Dan, your question is exactly right. Like, I get to the end of that and I'm like, okay, this is neat. Okay.

Like, 90% of people put cases on their phone and the people who don't care way more about, like, the camera and the battery life and, like, the basic functionality of the software. Have they said anything about any of that? Like, have they talked about how durable it is or whether the camera will be good? Because most startups, you know, I keep thinking of essential and it's garbage, garbage camera that did not improve with time, unlike some other products in the world. It just got worse. Well, it did. It just went from literally unusable to, like, pretty bad.

In terms of, like, details on the phone, mostly what we have is, like, the design. And then these lights. So, like, we don't exactly know. I mean, it could have a Snapdragon. eight gen one, whatever the latest version of that is, and like 12 gigs of RAM and like a decent panel or whatever, it all comes down to the software optimization for things like the camera performance. And that's where the startups generally struggle because they just don't have the experience or the resources to make that work well. But he should, right? Like didn't nothing like

they bought essential, didn't they? And they like... So they bought like the essential branding. Oh. Like we're going to talk about what happened to the other. half of Essential in a second. But like there's not like a ton of Essential. I think staff at nothing. I think it's a lot of the branding and like the domain that they bought. The engineers from Essential started a new company called OSOM and they announced that they were working on a phone last December. Wait, can I just pause you real quick? Is it not called Awesome? I thought it was called awesome. I never made that connection. So maybe it just went right over my head.

It's also very possible that I'm wrong. I just assumed it was called awesome. How is so awesome spelled? I think for listeners. OSOM. If it's not awesome, it should be. I'm just saying that. So in December, they announced that they were working on this phone called the OV-1.

It looked like an essential phone, just modernized, and it was going to have modern specs and everything like that. Turns out today, here we are in June, six or seven months later, and Solana, the CryptoWeb3 Company, which I know very little about. So quickly getting out. out of my depth here. And has an announcement that they are announcing a phone and it's made by Awesome. And it turns out that this phone that Solana is announced and releasing, they say, early next year, is the OV-1 phone that Awesome announced back in December. They've rebranded it

to the saga and it is the Salana phone. So there's no more OV-1. Awesome is not releasing that phone under its own branding. It's only going to be the Salana saga. which is a crypto Web3 blockchain type of phone. What is, where's the crypto? Where's the Web 3? What does any of it mean, Alex? Isn't that the eternal question? The pain on your face right now.

Just try to think, like, I just. I believe their pitch is that it will have a crypto wallet on it and you can trade crypto with it and store crypto with it and access digital NFTs and things like that with it. Beyond that, it's just a smart, it's just an Android. phone. I'm just, I'm reading our post. Chris Welch wrote it for support for decentralized apps that rely on the Salana blockchain. That's the blockchain element of it. Yes. It's a workaround, I guess, for the play store, but you don't want to buy a phone that doesn't have the play store.

Yeah. I mean, I think A, it's very interesting to me that our friends at OSOM, awesome, decided to go this way because clearly what this looks like is the company thought they were going to be able to build a competitive, like, security, privacy-based Android phone and kind of ride that wave. And what they've decided is that actually the wave is Web 3. And if you want to, like, halfway gimmick your way into a successful phone, that's a better track. I'm not sure if that's true. I just think it's really interesting. It's worked well for HTC so far.

But the only thing about this that I think is interesting is like there's been. been this big debate over the years about whether your phone should be your hardware wallet for crypto. Because in theory, right, the idea is like it's a device you have with you. Like, your phone is very handy for that. It is a, it's a computer that you hold that can do all of the identifying for you. But then because it's, because it's connected to other things, because things get software updates, because phones die much quicker than like thumb drives do. Lots of people have always said, you know, don't use your phone as your hardware wallet. But in the sense that if you imagine a world in which blockchain and cryptocurrency is the future, which I strongly believe is not the world

we actually live in. But if you imagine that world. Jack Dorsey wants that world. Right. In Jack Dorsey's Web 5 world, there's some interesting problems to be solved here about like how do you do on device payments? How do you let it be your hardware wallet? How do you do that kind of like cryptography and encryption on your device? It's all very interesting. I think it's like incredibly trying to catch a wave that crested a year ago. It's just so. late to the party. It's just Koolading, Kool-Aid Manning in at the

weirdest moment. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's going to be $1,000. The specs are nice. You know, 6.67 inch screen, 120 hertz OLED display. Like the Snapdragon 8 plus Gen 1. Like, it seems

nice specs. It looks cool. It just why would you do Web 3 in 2020? 22. I mean, I get like, you know, kind of David alluded to this awesome company probably realized or they couldn't line up the money needed to actually bring a phone to market at this point. And so, you know, you catch the wave of, you know, Solana is an exchange. They've got money.

They've got resources. There's a lot of buzz and interest still in the Web3 world, even though, like, markets have been crashing and things like that. So, like, I get the pivot here. Do I think it's going to be a successful device? Do I think anyone's going to ever buy it? Probably not. Even, like, crypto hype enthusiasts probably won't buy it. If you want to buy this phone, if you're like, yes, this makes sense.

Please, please DM Dan, not me. I'm just going to go on record and say, I don't think this phone ever launches. I look forward to this being thrown in my face in, what is it, Q1, 2020? this is supposed to launch. When that happens, please take this clip from the Vergecast and send it back to me and ruthlessly make fun of me. I do not believe this phone is ever going to launch. I mean, this is one of those areas where we love to be wrong on.

So, like, please make fun of us if we are wrong on this. If Web 3 is, like, real and cool, that gives us so much interesting stuff to cover, that'd be great. I don't, I don't see this being the thing that makes it work. Hey, Siri, set a reminder for April 1st, 2020. 23, awesome phone. You didn't pay attention at all. I mean, it's incredible that you thought Siri would be capable. Yes, it's at the reminder.

All right. There we go. I'm very excited, David. It's going to pop up in a Vergecast in 2023. We're remembering it. We're setting the calendar. I bet you it'll play its reminder at 12 a.m. I'm going to be asleep.

Just be like awesome phone. Go away. Okay, we're going to move on to the lightning round. David, what you got? So there's this new Twitter feature called Notes that Twitter is testing. Twitter has been saying for like years that it is interested in the idea of longer tweets and Twitter just rolled out blog posts. Like that's just what it is.

Twitter is testing blog posts on Twitter. But like image blog posts, right? Like they're images. They're not even like text. Oh, God. The thing that drives me the craziest right now is you're in the Twitter app and you're like, oh look a note and they're just like this is just a test so only a few people have access to it there's only a few notes out there you hit one it takes you to the in app browser makes you log in

again separately still in twitter and then finally lets you read the note but basically like the idea like the idea's done all this stuff on like longer form things like they they bought review the newsletter company they're very interested in the idea of like letting people make stuff natively on the platform and now it's blog posts will this go the way of all of the other things Twitter has tried in that vein, which have not worked at all ever, probably. But I still think it's kind of interesting. So I'm very curious to see how that pans out. I can't imagine why I would ever use it, but here we are. Yeah, I don't understand the use case. Like, if you're writing a blog post, you're putting it on a website, preferably your own website,

but maybe you're putting it on Medium or, you know, another place. It's like indexable and searchable and findable. Like, otherwise, how does anyone see these? I think this is just for celebrities who want to, like, clarify this. It's to replace the notes app apology. Yeah. Exactly. Yep, there you go. And they designed the thing to replace the notes app apology.

All right, I'm in. I changed my mind. This is the best idea of Twitter's ever had. I love it. It's perfect. They're like, we don't want this indexed. We just know you want notes. That's the note.

You need notes. We got to have it. Also, this week, the FDA said, said, Jewel, you cannot sell e-cigarettes in the United States. kind of not good, seeing as it's like Jewel's whole thing nowadays. There was a, I think it was Dan Primmack at Axios who, like back in 2019 when all this started, predicted that Altria's investment in Jewel might go down as the worst corporate investment of all time. And because I think I'm going to butcher the numbers here, but it was something like they invested $13 billion at a $43 billion valuation. I'm like,

I'm wrong, but like I'm in range. Yeah. And the thesis was basically like if things goes badly for jewel as it looks like they're about to, that's going to essentially go down to zero. And he just wrote a thing today that just said, update, worst corporate investment ever. It's like, yep. And that's a rough one. And I know a lot of people who are not minors, to be clear, who love their jewels. There's like a whole black market for the pods, the other flavor pods that they discontinued a couple of years ago. Like very, very interested to see how that goes.

Very interested to see if this finally gets the teens to stop smoking. This is it, guys. We did it. We got rid of the camel mascot. We got rid of Jewel. Definitely won't be other reasons that kids smoke. Smoking is over. Not at all.

It's right. It's over. It's done. We solved it. We got it. Great job. I mean, they're just going to go after the rest of the vaping community next, right? Like, they kind of put off the rest of the vaping community to go after Jewel because it was so

easy to use. But they're still like, you can go get popcorn-flavored nicotine fluid. I did that one time and I didn't pay attention and I thought I got like the lowest nicotine dosage. No, I didn't. And then I was like, why can't I sleep? Why do I just keep vibrating out of my body? Oh, I've just overdosed on nicotine. There are like several big mistakes in that one story that you made. On butter, popcorn flavored nicotine. Yeah, right? Like that's none of that strikes me as like a good decision that you made. It was a, I mean, it was like, I was like, all right, let's see. And it would taste like popcorn and kind of like a tortilla and a little savory and a little sweet. I don't hate it. Oh, wait. I'm vibrating out of my body because I did like the 6% instead of like

the 0.5%. Dan, what's going on with Amazon? Oh, what is going on with Amazon? Who can say? So this week, Amazon had its what they call it a re-mars conference, which is kind of where it shows off. ideas and things that it's been working on. So they showed off this week a thing that they've been working on where they can synthesize someone's voice and use that voice to read a story or act as a virtual assistant or something like that. And the way that they positioned it is they could synthesize a dead relative's voice and then you could hear your dead relative's voice come out of a smart speaker, maybe to read a book or say something or something like that. it's very strange and it's a little off-putting of all the ways to explain that like at the beginning it's like oh synthesize a person's voice that you know and use it for things like oh i can make sense and then they're like what if your dead grandma could read you books

no amazon no it's it's kind of funny there's been a lot of you know commentary on this out there and one thing and i can't remember who it was someone in my twitter feed was like the real way people are going to use this is they're going to make their Alexa speakers say talking Beyonce's voice, but Amazon can't say that. So what they are framing it as is grandma's talking, grandma's back and grandma's reading you a story again. Grandma's telling you the weather today and that she cannot turn off those lights because she cannot find them on the Hugh app. It's an interesting category. Our friend Joanna Stern did a documentary over at the WSJ last year about trying to capture relatives in a virtual way and how it can be a very therapeutic and a thing to help people with grief and things like that. So there is a lot of research into this and thought behind it and things like that.

I think it's just the way, because it's Amazon and because it's associated with the Echo Smart Speaker, and because it's associated with Alexa, it is extremely like off-putting immediately. Because the thing that I immediately thought of was like, my grandma was going to say, by the way, did you know that diapers are on sale? Like, that's what I expect to happen because it's going to be tied to an Echo or some Amazon service. So I think that's, like, a lot of the hesitation here. But it is strange. I'll see if to get dead grandma to be alive at some point and record those audio clips, right?

Yeah, one would assume. I mean, I don't know the exact process. I presume my grandmother, who's been dead for 10 years, is not going to be showing up on my Alexa anytime soon. But you know who's got a lot of recorded footage that you can make a synthesized voice off. of Beyonce. And Nilai. That's real. I was thinking Nilai.

And Nilai, are we going to make Nilai at Alexa? Nilai could read me stories. That sounds nice. We're just going to do a podcast one day and it's just going to be all of us. We'll record our voices on Alexa and just have them talk to each other. Love it. That is it for the Verge cast, I think, today. We are done.

Neelai's not here to tell us anything. So too bad. We have absolutely gone over. You can find me on Twitter at Alex H. Kranz. You can find me on Twitter at Alex H. Find Neli at Reckless. You can find David at at Pierce.

Dan is at D.C. Cepert. And Monica, who is here earlier talking about the MacBook Pro, can be found at McSquared 96. That's it for the Vergecast. I'm not going to say rock and roll because I'm not Neelai, so make good choices. Goodbye. Later.

Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. And if you'd like to the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of The Verge and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. That's it. We'll see you next week.