The Vergecast - Microsoft Surface laptop, Samsung DeX, and Google Doc phishing

Episode Date: May 5, 2017

This week Microsoft unveiled its new laptops in New York City, and Verge senior editor Tom Warren flew in from London to check it out. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter invite Tom to the show to discuss the new products from Microsoft and the various other news that popped up on the site this week, including Samsung’s new docking station, Apple’s earnings, and the Google Doc you should not have clicked. Will Dieter’s AirPods last throughout the show? Listen to find out. 01:26 - Microsoft Surface Laptop event 36:16 - The Google Docs spam attacks played off Google’s most fundamental weakness 47:33 - Samsung DeX review: the closest thing we have to using our phones as PCs 1:00:04 - Paul’s weekly segment “Four Fours” (previously known as 4444) 1:06:46 - Apple’s earnings show modest growth, but iPhone sales are flat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. We only have two and one's about to be canceled, so... Oh. The only ship of theverge.com. But no, it's true. Walt Mosperger's retiring, so the control of delete's going to go. We're going to come up with some stuff. We need this flotilla.

But for right now, you're listening to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the verge.com. A technology experience that surrounds you, holds you. Like no other. Like no other. Anyway, I'm Nealai Patel. I'm here, as you may have noticed, with your ears. Paul Miller is here. Hello.

Dieter Bone is here. Hi, I'm back. He's back. I want the listeners to know that Deeter, we can see him on Skype. You can't. So the picture in your mind is Deeter wearing the bright pink Verge CES shirt. Oh, you're wearing two AirPods. For a while, I thought you were just solo AirPods.

No, I got old AirPods. He's got a beautiful site. I mean, the man just straight up looks like a Muppet right now. I don't know. That's with the... But check it out. Tom Warren is here. Hello.

What's up, Tom? Not a lot. I'm in town for Microsoft, and I'm flying back tonight. I'm flying back to Seattle next week. You're a maniac. Why? Anyway, Tom... I just love being in the sky.

As you may know, Tom is generally in London. I am, yeah. It's also a stated-blind. Hence the accent. But there's a huge Microsoft event this week. And so we wanted Tom on the show. Tom covered it all. We should just get right into it.

There's actually a lot of things. that happened this week. But Tom, the Microsoft event was called like Microsoft EDU, right? Yeah, the education event. Your headline for the piece was all the news from like Microsoft's Chromebook event.

It was great. It was just a real little jab, jab in a turn. It's to be like, to make it a little bit more interesting. Yeah. The education event? Look, there's nothing more interesting.

What was the formal name of it? May event. That's good. like master of the obvious. But anyway, just to set the stage, what's happening right now in education is Apple thought they would do iPads. Yeah. But Chromebooks are ascendant.

Yeah. And Microsoft, I don't know, they were going to do something, we thought. But the event turned out to be bigger and much more interesting than just that. Yeah, I think it was more interesting than we were expecting going into it. Yeah. So what happened? So, well, they started off. They kicked off obviously.

education, you know, Satya and Della came on stage, lit by a single light and sort of told his life story and stuff, which was, yeah, it was different. Lit by a single light, was he, like, doing a, like, a cabaret act? No, whenever Sacha... Did he have a stool? I was basically waiting for him to start dancing around. So, I mean, I like Sasha. I interviewed him last year.

I'm hoping we'll get him again soon and working on it. He's very personal, very chill. Yeah. Very smart. Yeah, very smart. But he and Tim Cook both now do the same thing at events, which is like they open and close the event. by appealing to your soul.

Right? So it's like, they come out of the single light, and he's like, what? He's like, I'll teach you the ways of Microsoft. And then they're like, okay, now these nerds are going to talk about the products. And then like the nerds do the thing. And at the very end, they're like,

oh, that was the nerds. But what is the essence of belief? And it's like, dude, all these CEOs have become like new age shots. Anyway. That's all about it. Yeah, continue. So, yeah, so you did that.

interesting sort of intro I guess sort of set the stage for things and then they kind of went into it with they they kind of talked about office stuff Microsoft teams all that sort of stuff like whatever so a bit of a little bit of a sort of dull intro but then it kind of got onto the main sort of part why people were there which was the Windows 10S stuff which essentially bought it down it's their Chrome or S competitor so they're expecting OEMs to create devices of this new version of Windows 10, which essentially at the most fundamental level, it's essentially a restricted version of Windows 10

that only runs apps from the Windows store. Is it cheaper? I don't understand this. Yeah, I know. It's not cheaper. For the OEMs? But it's not free to OEMs? No.

I thought that was like half of the point at least. Yeah, so this is what I don't understand. So in the broad sweep of the industry, OEMs can put out Chromebooks. The Chromebooks are all cheap. They obviously run Google Services. people are happy with them, but they're cheaper, and Microsoft has done a lot of things

with cheap versions of Windows over the years. A Windows 7 starter was free. Yeah, so they make Windows free. So Windows is free on phones and small tablets up to, I think, is 10.1 inches. So anything above that? Anything useful sizes. Yeah, exactly.

You've got to pay Microsoft. Anyone would actually use Windows 4 on the device is 10.1 inches and above. Yeah, so it's not free. Okay, I'm still have to pay for it. But what I recall from the past is that Microsoft has done this before. Yeah, they've done, this is like essentially, I mean, you could call this Windows 8.1 with Bing. They've done that before.

You could call it Windows RT. Like, it's, you know, they've tried to do this sort of thing before. Yeah. Yeah, it is the same. This isn't precisely the same thing as Windows RT. This is just, so far as I can tell, this is just straight up regular old Windows where they optimized some login stuff and they've limited to they've locked it down to Windows Store apps and they took away some settings that let you customize some other

things. It's basically like Windows S and the S stands for Lod. Severely limited. Suck it. Right. And you have to pay 50 bucks to like make it regular windows. But there's nothing special or lightweight or different about it other than it's locked down. Yeah, they claim that the login times will be better

and like the just booting up and stuff like that but I don't really know if I buy that I mean that would just be because it'd just be because there's no desktop apps running in the background Right, every every, it feels like every single desktop app that I try to install. Always has some boot thing.

Yeah, it adds it to the toolbar and it's crazy. So maybe they, I'm guessing they have a lot of restrictions on what you can do with the Windows Store app. app that does it do all that stuff. Yeah, and I think it's like when they get packaged in a special way, it's like it's called Project Centennial's the way they do it. But when they get packaged in that way, I think that allows them to then, you know,

analyze how much it deteriorates the battery, performance, and that sort of stuff. So then they can be like, well, you know, you need to go back and change this to that dev. So it's basically, I think Windows 10S exists to get more apps in the store, personally. I think that's the only reason it exists. So it's a cart to elicit a horse response?

CART, cart, cart, cart, cart. Oh, my God, a horse. So I think the actual cart. Do carts incentivize the appearance of horses? I got a cart. I got a kid somewhere. You're just like waiting. You're like, I don't know this card.

Hope I get a horse. To go with this metaphor, which I don't think. Why do we have to go with this metaphor? Because we're here, man. Okay. Can I tell a totally tangential story? Yesterday I had to admonish Vlad for using the sentence. It has a lot of bass sauce in a headphones review.

And he's like, no, no, no. It's continuing the ongoing food metaphor. And I was like, where? Anyway. It's a very strange moment. Anyway, I think the real card is the laptop. I think that Windows 10S, fine, it's locked down, it's restricted, it's presumably for schools. So all that store stuff makes it easier to manage.

It's where they want Windows to be, because then it's more secure, easier to manage. It's more like an iPad. They get 30% off of every app subscription. But that's the iPad. They want Windows to be that way, of course, because they don't want all this croft and all this constant crap that they have to support for years to come. But, and I think this is like the crazy part, there's not a whole huge gap between an iPad Pro and the new Surface laptop running Windows 10S. Right? There's like, one has a windowing system.

But there is the aspect that... But the desk, but you could package, like Adobe could package a full version of Photoshop and put it in the store and it would run on this machine. Google could package Chrome for this. You don't need to rewrite. But, Tom, when you say that Adobe could do that? Could they? Because it seems like the thing that they're trying to do here is they believe that the core, you know, base of windows when you don't have any crap on it is really good, fast, and has an insanely long battery life. Yeah.

And when Nealai says this is basically an iPad Pro with a windowing system, like, it's kind of right. Like, what if Adobe can't put a full version of Adobe on it? Did it? Did it? I think so right. I'm leaving. But anyone can package a desktop app. They're going to have an office in there.

Oh, they can just package a desktop app and throw it in that. Obviously, there's like, I say that it's an extreme statement meant to like draw the comparison. Obviously, it's a card. It's a Windows. It's a horse. So what your statement was. A crazy horse, crazy comment horse is coming from us. I think the way to think of it is at the moment if you're on a Windows machine and even on a Mac machine, you'll go, like you don't necessarily you always use the Mac app store.

I never use them. Never use the Mac. But you'd go and get your DMG on Mac. You'd go and get your Xe on Windows. Just install it. That's it. It's done. But that's the traditional way.

It's so casual. Yeah. Just get your DMG. Just get your EXC. It's done, baby. But that's the way it's always been on computers, but on mobile it's always been an app store. I definitely think there's something about an app store in restricting what users can do that improves. It gives you a much more unified.

experience. I mean, like the install experience on, even on macOS is a little, you know, there's either Dragon Drop, there's Mac App Store, and then there's like several types of installers that remind you of Aqua and 10.0 days. Yeah. But then, yeah. I love those installers. I'm like, take me back. Oh, no. Computers are great. They literally give me the heby-jeebies. It's like, I don't know what this is doing. Yeah. It's ancient. I installed. But I can't wait to lick these buttons. I installed a version of the Unreal engine on Windows, and I was installing it onto an M2 SSD, and there was something wrong with that SSD, and it conked out when I was at like 95% of my install.

But then I couldn't install, I couldn't reinstall onto my regular drive because the Windows registry was like, I know where Unreal is. It's already there. It's on this D drive. But no, but the DDo. So I literally had to find and replace through the Windows registry for about an hour. Yeah, so it's that kind of stuff that they want to get rid of, which is, you know, you're always going to need that.

Not every desktop perhaps ever going to be in the store. There's also a huge security benefit, right? Because it can push updates out to the, I mean, this is a lot of iPhones are good. Yeah, so a good example is office is it has this really terrible update system within itself, like that just pops up and says, do you want to check monthly and all that? But now it's going to be the store. It'll just be handled by the store. you'll know it's updated, just do it.

So find a way. They'll find a way to make me quit Chrome to update Excel. No matter what happens. For $50, you can turn Windows S into real Windows. Yeah, so 49 bucks. So I think that upgrade does, I'm not entirely sure, but I think it popped. Like if you try and run an XC, it'll pop up and say, if you want to go to Pro. So it's also another way.

So if you try and run an XE? Yeah, I'm fairly sure. Okay, XE. An XE. That's what you call it. Yeah, no, I got it. A. A exe.

An executable file. It's an executable file. A binary. So this got me wondering, what if you could pay Apple $50 and then your iPad could run unsigned apps? Would you like that? I would love that. What if you could do that on both of these systems without paying $50? Whoa.

So that's Windows 10S. That part of it is interesting in the lockdown in the store. Yeah. But it's Windows 10. It's Windows 10 locked to a store. Do you think that this is actually going to convince the education market to switch from Chrome OS to Windows? Like, are they making it easier to manage? Is it like what is, why would anybody look at this Windows 10S and say, oh, yes, I'm so, I'm so glad.

Now I can finally switch everybody. of Chromebooks onto Windows. Yeah, I think the only people that would think that are the ones that are already in the Microsoft ecosystem anyway, and they're in that, like, because they use in tune, stuff like that for management. But I think ultimately, schools, whether in the US or worldwide, they're budget restricted, and they don't care about what system they're going to use. They just care that it works. There's a good browser.

That's probably why Chrome OS has done pretty well in the US, at least. So, yeah, it's going to come down to the price of devices, rather than, rather than, easy management stuff that. So let's talk about the price. Because the device that they introduced yesterday was far more interesting than Windows locked to an app store. Yeah, for sure.

Surface laptop. Mm-hmm. $1,000 to start. Yeah. It looks like a MacBook Air. Yeah, well. It just does. It does.

It does. Everything looks like a Macbush air. Yes, it looks like a MacBook Air. It looks like a carpeted MacBook Air. But the 12-inch MacBook MacBook looks like a MacBook care. They all, everything... The MacBook cares got that like

curvy bottom. No, that was the first one. The new ones are wedges. It looks like a horse. Still a little card. That's enticing a cart. Yeah. It's saying come hither, cart.

The only reason I say this is Apple and I, again, this was just a like a throwaway tweet. Yeah. Joke. It wasn't like a well thought out thing. And it now is like over a thousand retweets and like,

angry Mac versus PC flamewort in my mentions. It's a MacBook error with a retina display for $1,000. Like, that's... Yeah, they've... Apple doesn't make that. There's nothing in their lineup that is that thing. Yeah. There's the 12-inch MacBook.

There's... They still sell the old MacBook error without a retina display, which is crazy to me for $1,000. And the next step up, $1,500 to the MacBook Pro with no touch bar. Because Microsoft had before... I can't remember exactly what the Surface book goes for, But I think it's either 1299 or 1499. So it's an expensive machine.

But it's covered, the palm rest is covered in fabric. Oh, can'tar. Yeah, so they had the book at 499, and then they had the Surface Pro at 799 now. They've got the 999 in the middle. So it is like the MacBook Air, you know. With the retina. Yeah, it's the right.

I wouldn't say it's the right price. It could be a little bit cheaper, obviously. But that's what they have Dell for. Yeah. Like if you're the service group, You're like, oh, should we make this cheaper? And they're like, Dell, we'll do it. It's fine.

Yeah, there's plenty. I mean... Like, Thanos calls Michael Dell on the phone, he's like, Michael. Yeah, just do this. Do you do exactly this would make it cheaper? We'll do an expensive machine. We'll have four gig of RAM. And Michael does like, this is why I took over my company.

Is it seriously four gigas around? Yeah. It's not great. The $1,000 configuration is not great. No, four gig a RAM. No USBC. No USBC. Everyone thinks the thing on the side is an SD card slot, but it's just everyone mirro.

magnetic surface power connector. Yeah, so a number of... But actually, so I think they got the mini display port. They should have scrapped that port USBC. Yeah. But I like... I kind of like that they've still got the surface connector. Why?

Because USBC, yeah, you can... If you can charge from that, that's fine. But I like the surface connector, because you just... Like, if you use the dock with it or any of the old accessories, you just stick it in and it connects up your monitor and everything. USBC can do that, but... Yeah.

I wonder if it's that... I mean, USBC is still... the Wild West, right? Like, it's like, I'll buy a USBC adapter and it'll just be shit and like things won't work or I'm worried it's going to fry my computer or whatever. Things are better, but it's not great. And I think that Apple going to it, like, if you're buying an Apple laptop, you sort of have an assumption deep in your heart that you're going to get screwed over on the price

of accessories. And so you'll just buy the Apple ones. They cost a little bit more, but you know they'll work. I wonder if Microsoft looked at the USBC ecosystem. and looked at its customer base and said, you know what they're going to do? They're going to go out and buy the cheapest USBC adapters they can find. And these things are just going to get wrecked by badly wired USBC accessories.

And so we can't put USBC on it because nobody is going to buy the good stuff. Yeah. I think it's also USBC at the moment is like it's a fantasy of the tech press. Like we all love it. We think it's great because consumers aren't a, you know, they're not flocking to it because these devices aren't all shipping with it and it's just it's not it's not perfect

but you're talking about there's a ton of devices with USBC every single Android phone is now all charged by USBC most like decent PCs now have USBC it just doesn't matter until the iPhone does USBC well it's never going to happen it just doesn't matter in the broader consumer it sounds stupid but it's just I don't think consumers care about USBC

at the moment like we're maybe four or five years, it might be different, but we're at a point where people are still down plugging their iPhones into Windows laptops and using iTunes, even though iCloud is a way better solution for that. But it's just, it takes, it's a long tail

for that to, to manner. And I don't think I think they should have done USBC, but I think it's at the point of it. They'll put out another one next year, and I'll have USBC. Yeah, it's like, it doesn't necessarily need it. I think it'll take two years, so then to put it on another one of these. We're still waiting on a Surface Pro 5. Okay, let's talk about the laptop

Let's talk about it. Not its ports or lack thereof, which is apparently all we talk about now in technology. What ports does it have? What ports do we wish it had? What ports have we made up in our minds that all things should have? But you played with it. You were at the event. Yeah, yeah.

Panos Penae came out. They played a very strange video. Yeah. As always, he was pumped. Yeah. And then he was like, fucky he was pumped? He did. He tweeted that he was pumped before.

He tweeted he was pumped, yeah. But then at the very end, he's like, I'm going home to my children who I love more than you, goodbye. It's just always really nice. It's like very charming. And he did the whole running into the audience. Yeah, that trick. Yeah, now I tried it. I think it's really nice.

Like, it's the nicest surface so far. Like, I use the book, and it's a bit too top-heavy, and it just doesn't feel quite right as a laptop. It's nice enough, like, it's well-built and stuff, but it's just not a laptop because it has the detaching screen stuff. And the Surface Pro, like where, can't really use it on your lap properly. It's all a bit weirdly balanced. So this, this,

this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this laptop is like, like, the laptop that we were all kind of hoping that they'd do at some point. Um, I think, so they got the Alcantara fabric on, on on the front of it. Um, and they did that on the surface pro four, like one of the, they call it the signature edition cover. Um, and it feels, it feels good, but I think the concern around that is if you spill stuff on it, or, you know, if you're using this thing, like, for work every day. I'm going to imagine you're going to get some nastiness on it. They said it's warm and inviting. Yeah, it does actually feel weirdly warm. Like he said that and it's like total marketed speak.

I kind of see it and you're like, it feels warm. The summer's coming on. I don't have a great AC in my apartment. Yeah. And my laptop's already too hot. Like, like, I really want, I almost want like a summer laptop. Yeah. That is like super low powered. It doesn't get hot. Yeah. I would be worried when I'd put my hands down on the deck and it feels warm. That would just be jarring. Like, you know how you, when you go to the bathroom and you sit down on the toilet seat and it's warm?

That's not great. Someone was just sitting here. Yeah. It doesn't feel good. That's like, that's what I'm worried about with the surfaces laptop. I like a little cool feeling. Sweating into the cloth. You get those like sweat stains on it?

You know what it feels like? It feels like, it feels like obviously fabric. but it feels like they've kind of waxed it over the top. Yeah, is that a way? Yeah, yeah. Look, this is the same stuff they make like Rolls-Royce interiors out of. I bet it's perfect for a slow cruise. It's going to be great.

For tooling around town. Yeah. Yeah. But it's supposed to be that luxury thing. I think it's just, they bung it on there because they liked using it in the signature. But it's differentiated. Like, you know, it's something slightly different. I think that's the only reason they put it on there.

I mean, I think their whole thing is. is there is a spot in the market for the thing college students buy before the first year of college. And that thing for the longest time was the MacBook Air. And if you have $1,000, Apple thinks you should buy an iPad. Yeah, that's true. That's the way they position it. I think if you have $1,000 going back to school and you look at the MacBook Air, which is ancient. Yeah.

And then you look at the next MacBook up, which is. which doesn't have the touch bar so you're like everyone will know I don't have the good one yeah right and it's got the two weird ports yeah

or and then Apple's like but have you thought about this iPad do you charge the pencil by sticking in the right like there's just a whole it's yes I get it like some people are just going to buy Mac because they love Macs yeah that's great

Apple did a bet on the iPad for fulfilling that MacBook era yeah and if you You love macOS, so you do that. But I know a bunch of college kids. Like, they're going to be like, I want the cool one. And Microsoft is like, well, here's something that's really cool for $1,000. Yeah.

Yeah, that's literally who they're talking about as well. Because that's what they said. It's like. Yeah. And I think that, like all that fabric keyboard stuff, like, all of that is for $1,000, you get something that is very different than what everyone else will have. It's all these colors. And you can be like, straight up.

You like, dude, check out this keyboard deck. It's neat. I think it's their way of making it different because the surface stuff is always quite different to what's out of there. And that's their way. Yeah. But yeah, no, it feels great.

It's not as lightweight as some competitors like the Specter at X360. It's not as lightweight as that. It's not as sleek in some respects. Yeah, but if the battery actually lasts 14 and a half hours, I will take that extra weight because it's not like it's a thick laptop. It's really swell.

Yeah, no, I think I've got to the point where that's like anything under three pounds, like it's should be under three pounds, is like an acceptable weight now, I think. Like we've got to that point now. It doesn't need to be super thin and light, because then it becomes a little bit too flimsy. And all we've been talking about with phones is like, please make it a little bit heavier so you get more battery and like, all right, there I go. When we're talking about this, like what's happening in the premium laptop world is just

super interesting. Yeah. Like HP's, I mean, it was with you, Tom. Yeah. We were just chatting about yesterday. There's the Specter, there's the XPS that Dell is doing, now there's the Surface laptop. There's a bunch of really good laptops out there. And then there's like insane gaming laptops, which are my favorite.

It's been a while because everyone's been trying to catch up to the MacBookCare. And I think probably the XPS 13 was like the first one that was like, okay, this is as good, maybe better in some respects than the MacBookCare. And it was like from that point on, everything else that came after it was like, you know. What's an object lesson in not sitting on your lead? Yeah. I mean, how many times have we like, some company basically issued a direct copy of the MacBook Air. Yeah. And like it got so.

We just laughed at it. We laughed at it. And then it got so common that we stopped even pointing out. Yeah. Copies of the Mac. It was just like too tiring. Yeah. But Apple, they stayed still.

Yeah. And now they're done with the direct copies And they're starting to like level up and beyond Yeah, yeah They were probably waiting for So I'll say a couple things I actually don't think it's fair to say Apple stood still

I think it's fair to say that Apple made some bad bets Right like the MacBook is underpowered The MacBook Pro nobody's happy with Like in my head Wait wait there they sold a bunch of MacBook pros Okay that's fine But like that's like they sold a bunch of MacBook pros People like well I guess I gotta get this right

I don't know I'm more curious to see what it's going to look like a year from now. Is that right? Is that right? It just depends. Four percent or something? Well, it's the whole Mac line.

Yeah. But here's my question. Why now? Why did Microsoft finally make the laptop we wanted to make for the past five years now? Like in my head, Panos Pined was sitting at Microsoft every year they developed one of these things and then decide not to release it because what the hell? And they were just waiting for the moment.

And the moment was like, oh, people seem kind of frustrated with Apple laptops right now. Now's our moment. Yeah, what other thing changed? thing changed to get them to release a laptop finally now. This seems like a full realization that tablets aren't that useful. Yeah.

Like the surface, the original surface was like a proof of concept for Windows 8. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Windows 8 was a horrible... That's where they went all in on that whole tablet. And so Windows 10 was them walking back from tabletness. and now they actually sell a thing that's not a tablet. I'm just remembering our review of Windows 8 and the first surface devices and the RT. In fact, we gave it a bad review.

And the feedback. Like, our lives were hell. And now it's like, Microsoft's like, it's a laptop. Here you go. But, you know, on the positive front, I think that speaks to Microsoft. I think they- aggressively iterating against what the customers are saying to them. Yeah, they've seen an opportunity, right?

Like, you could look at the IDC numbers. Even today, they put out a thing about tablets, and I think IDC mentioned in it that, I was going to put it up, I can't find out, but they mentioned something about detachables, like detachable tablets are like the ones that are selling, they're the ones that they see. So like your iPad pros or your surface and stuff,

they're the ones that they see being the only successes in the tablet category, not just pure tablets. So I think they've seen that opportunity, they know that as well like Microsoft has all these forecasting metrics and they have people employed to all that stuff so they must have seen your gap in the market the opportunity that knowing that the MacBooks aren't that haven't well what you know wowed people and now is the right time to introduce something that's going to sort of be the MacBook Air replacement I guess they also on this battery life front I mean they're very aggressive with edge like yeah it's it I do think

it's kind of a dick play that they apparently you can't change your default browser so even if Google in S. Yes. Yeah. So even if Google and you can't change Bing which they're going to change that. It's funny that the first search result no matter no they're not going to fix the Bing thing. The Bing thing is done. It's already like that with

Cortana on Windows 10. No but I'm saying to get Cortana to go elsewhere. But the first search result no matter what you search for in Bing is how to pay $50 to unlock Windows 10 Pro. It's amazing. I don't know how they've done it. They can be like Microsoft's whole plant, the cart behind this cart is not $50 upsells. It's not.

It's the whole thing. Such as like I got an idea. I'm going to wow him in Microsoft 50 dollar up. He starts a meeting and he puts just a $50 bill in the middle of the table like, think about it. I'll come back to that later on. He turns it in a 5000 days. But yeah, I do think... So you think that's a bad move, not the default browser, right?

Yeah, this is my longstanding thing that I've brought up on this podcast multiple times for years, is that putting Bing as a default just in itself is a signal to your customers that you don't actually care about them. It's a deal that cheap phone companies make to improve their bottom line. They just need some more cash to be able to sell this phone for cheap. So they come to Microsoft. Microsoft gives them some money to put Bing on it. And obviously Microsoft is going to put Bing on as a default, but not being able to change it.

Yeah, that is just. So I think that the default browser stuff is understandable in the context that iOS and Chromebooks, they do it that way. So they kind of set that standard. But I think even with that in mind, it's still an expectation when you pick up a Windows machine. that you can change that browser, that you can't, like, that's the expectation. There is something, I feel, you know, we joke a lot about, like, people who are fanatical Microsoft fan. Yeah.

And I think part of that is that they want to distance themselves by identity from a sheeple who will just do exactly what Apple tells them and use exactly the stuff that Apple gives them. But the flip side of that is that there is nothing worse than using someone's Windows, like a normal person's Windows PC. after like three years of them using it. Oh, yeah. You're like, an average machine. This is the worst computing experience that anyone can have. And Microsoft, like, the reason the iPhone was successful, the reason Android is successful, the reason that these other platforms have been super successful is because they're locked down.

You cannot, you cannot make that mistake. So Microsoft, right, Windows phone didn't compete in that world. there is this big opportunity for this other computing device that isn't your phone and they're coming at it by saying what if we just lock down windows which makes sense

but the default browser has nothing to do with that why not nobody's computer the default browser on a ChromeOS device it does in a way because they're saying 14.5 hours battery life on this surface laptop I'm sorry not default

I'm sorry sorry sorry default searches yeah I agree I think not been able to change the default search is terrible. Like that's just, that's, yeah, you can't even,

you might even say it's user hostile and stupid. Yeah. Does it have a headphone jack? Huh? Does that have a headphone jack? Yeah, it does.

Hey-o! So while we're talking about cool, cool laptops and this research that Acer had an event. Oh, yeah. Which I think, I guess that was,

I think we didn't talk about it because the last week was the net neutrality special. Oh, yeah. Everyone's favorite show. Everybody's favorite show. One of the lowest performing episodes of the podcast.

personally important to me I had a great time I listened to it when I was falling asleep Wow I was searching for the sweet Embrace of Death so I listened to the net Neutrability Spencer So Acer

put out this Predator laptop I think it was at CES And now it's about to ship It's like 21 inch wide screen It's got like 108 It needs two power adapters It's got a full, literally full mechanical board

It costs like $8,000 or something insane But they came out with, like, this is what, where I think, like, I know, I think you're right that this $1,000 Macbook Air is a super important, probably the most important laptop category. But I'm still mad about the MacBook Pro situation. And the MacBook Pro, like, something that's the size of a 15-inch or 13-inch MacBook Pro, a lot of PC manufacturers are putting, like, real GPUs in them and putting, like, really crazy specs. And so this new Predator Triton 700 is like 0.74 inches thick, so just a little bit thicker than a Macwick Pro. It's got 10 series graphics. It's got like multiple PCIE SSDs, 15.6 inch screen.

Also, it has a keyboard in the front. Oh, on the track pad above it. And then, yeah, above it is a glass, like a gorilla glass track pad. It's above the deck. Wait, this is ASA. A's I love doing that. Yeah. Do you remember they did that one that like you'd flip it and it looked like you could serve, you know, it was like a serving

your dinner on it. And that had a trackpad at the top. That was a best seller. Everywhere I go, I see people serving dinner on that weird Asia left. I see it in bars. I had my beard delivered last night. Where I'm at is I'm trying to decide if I want to turn my desktop PC into a

hack and touch, like on a second drive. or if I just want to put Windows on my Mac. Because InViA got the drivers out now. Yeah, Nvidia's got the drivers. It's like, I'm on this weird stage where Windows 10 is like increasingly good for like a lot of things, including for developers. And it's always been like the thing for games. I feel like there's a few things. And the hardware is interesting.

There's a few things they still need to do to like get it. Utility sort of things that are from on the Mac OS side and stuff. Like they should just have a spotlight sort of search or Alfred style search. Stuff like that they need to do. but I feel like they're both apparently. You can basically do what you need to do. You just be like, hey, Cortana, open that app I want. No, but you can type it, Cortana.

It's like, it's not bad. Yeah, but it's not customizable. I get a few more false positive. Like, if I'm looking for Steam because I can't find it on my desktop because it's cluttered and I type in Steam, sometimes it'll come up with like a website that's Steam. Sometimes it feels like hasn't fully indexed or something.

Yeah. It's a little walking. All right, let me read this advertisement. and then we're going to talk about some other stuff. This episode of The Vergecast brought to you by Squarespace. I bet you're surprised. Whatever next big idea might be, count on Squarespace to help you create an eye-catching online platform

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Offer code Verge Oh man This is like the Tom Warren special episode of the show Because I think you know the most about this too Oh the Google We gotta talk about Google It felt like a huge deal to me So there's a big Google scam

Fishing scam going around this Tell us about it Yeah so essentially I don't know exactly how No one probably knows exactly how it started But essentially you would get an email And it would have a little blue button And the subject would be like Your friend

So Eli Patel has invited you to edit a document And it's got a little blue button just like any Google Docs button, and you click it. Now, usually a fishing scam like that, you'd click it. It would take you off to some crazy, you know, Russian site or something. It would be like G-Z0-G-L-E, and you're like, oh, if this URL, I can tell that it's not actually Google. Yeah, and some of them are good, but some of them aren't. But either way, they wouldn't have your, like, user ID and your, you know, your pitch or anything like that.

But obviously, this was Google through Google's own own. system. So if you were logged in with four or five accounts, so it had them all listed. So it looked perfectly normally like, okay, I need to sign in again. So you click on wherever your account, and then it pops up with a permissions thing, which is a standard dialogue box that would come up if you downloaded a third party app, you know, a mail app for Windows or Mac, and you wanted to connect it to your Google account, you'd get this permissions box. So that came up saying allow you, allow contacts, allow email. And so if you clicked allow allow, allow to that. And I think the important part of it is on that dialogue box, it came up and it said

Google Docs was the, you know, was requesting permission. And it had the Google Docs logo. So if you granted those permissions, then this third-party app essentially is what it was, we'd have access to your email and your contacts. So then it took the contact lists out of your Gmail account and then spread that to all of your contacts and made it look like it came from you because it's taking it from your email. It seems like a really simple... Yeah, like... There's nothing complicated about this.

Yeah, and I think it's a forward... It was incredibly well executed, right? Like the... Russell wrote a good story. The stack of vulnerabilities here, one, they made an email looks pretty much like an email that you get from Google Docs.

Okay, that's easy. But then they... It was really clever of them to use... to make a Google app that was... To make an app that... Oath through Google. So when you click the link, it brought you to a real, genuine, honest to God, Google login.

It was just a login to approve this nefarious app, not a login to get into Google Docs. And so unless you're paying really close attention, you could, like, you'd click it and then it would say Google Docs. And like Tom said, they like matched the icon. So it's not so much that like this is a, you know, ultra Uber elite crazy code hack. This isn't like Stuxnet amazing stuff. But it's a really clever and innovative way to try and do a scheme like this. It's sort of taking advantage of a bunch of the stuff that we built to make our internet life a little bit easier in a clever way that we hadn't really seen before, at least not at the scale.

It was essentially taking the system that allows you to log into Facebook or Twitter or any other third party web service with your Google account and authenticate. And, you know, when you go on a website and you try and buy something, they're like, do you want to log in with Facebook or Google? As soon as you click that button, that's using O-Off, and it's allowing that access, a part of your access to your Facebook account or Google account. So it's annoying Google shut it down relatively quickly. Almost everyone I know got this, because just the way it works. Yeah, I think the thing that's different to the regular sort of fishing attacks is obviously it's using Google's own system,

but it's also using a style of attack that we would have seen in like the Windows days, like the computer worm day. So it literally spread like a worm. So it was like if you downloaded an old virus on your computer and it was sitting on a network, like we've seen it where it closed down news stations. Yeah. And it was that kind of thing, but just in the cloud.

So it got into someone's email address. It stole their contacts, spread it to their contacts, which then stole their contacts. So it spread around. So that's how it got around to. I mean, Google says 0.1% of their users, but they've got a billion or more. So that's a million people, which is a million people's a lot to, like, spread a virus around, essentially, using Google's own tools.

Yeah. And it scared the hell out of people. I'm just going to tell this story. I won't name names. Oh, here we go. It's not me. There's an email from Vox Media. IT went out, said there's a fishing scam.

It was all the information. Yeah. And then someone, it was like panic-inducing because it was happening. And someone else at Vox Media replied all to the whole company. It just said, I clicked the doc. It was just like, it was the funniest thing that happened all day yesterday. But the other thing that happened as well is that like literally, I think 10 minutes after this broke, someone shared a Google Doc with the entire Vox Media stuff as well. Yes.

Like badly timed share. So everyone was like, I got it. I got the email. Here's the real. I mean, yes. I click the dog. I think that was all very funny. The danger is that I often tell people.

like don't, you're just going to reuse your passwords. You're all idiots. You won't listen. Use these open logins. Like, do the login with Google. Do the login with Facebook. It's the most secure way. It's way safer than all this other stuff.

And, you know, the chance, Google and Facebook employed better security engineers or at least more. Yeah. So the chances of them getting hacked are lower than, like, log in at macy's.com or whatever. So, like, just do it. But this is a direct attack on that advice. It highlights, like, that is the perceived more secure way of doing things, which it is and isn't, because then you've got a single target, right? So it's catastrophic if someone gets into your Gmail account. Right.

The thinking is that you have the single target, but it's the best secured target, as opposed to multiple targets where you've done, like, password reuse. Yeah. Yeah, if you've pastured reuse, then sure. Yeah, that's a bad. Then you're dead. You should just stop right now. Pull over, you're in your car, pull over the side of the road, change all your passwords right now. But fundamentally, the best security practice you can have is there's two parts to log in.

To quit the internet for one year. Just go away. Did you get hacked during that one year? You wouldn't even know. I wouldn't even know. That was the real freaking part of it. Someone could have been just taken over your digital life. It wouldn't even matter.

I was Paul Miller for one year on the internet. I think somebody was logging into my verge email and like replying to people. It was me. No, it wasn't me. It was me. But yeah, so fundamentally the most secure way. is obviously complex parts of it, everyone knows that, but the actual user idea is the other part that, you know,

an attacker needs to know. So if you're using the same email address all the time, then that's like 50% of the security for logging into any system. Yeah. So. It's stuff like that that just makes you, I was almost like quit the internet. There's no easy way to fix it.

It's like, Is this my moment to talk about my Gmail hack for email address? I think it works on Outlook. Maybe with the plus sign. The plus sign. That's what I do. Plus. Yeah.

Yeah. After your regular email just put plus and then something random and then it's, that's the email address. But it works the same as a regular email. Or you can just get a domain. Yeah, but if you're an attacker, you get a database. Oh, you have to scan for plus it. I mean, yeah.

Yeah, there's no easy way. Like, yeah, if you want a database. I saw this thing. You know, you know, um, Unicode has. as there's a hack for, you can make something that looks like Apple.com out of Unicode characters

that are not the actual A, P, P, L-E. Right. Because the same, they do it for, and they are actually, like, they're alpha numeric, but then, like,

they're used to represent, like, for, like, Chinese characters or something like that. So you can have Chinese characters in the address bar, even though that's not an actual, like, supported in the underlying domain registration.

So somebody came up with this thing that they'd use these Unicode characters and they'd get an S-S-S certificate. So you could look at your address bar. It would say, APPL-E.com, and would have a green lock, and it would not be Apple.com. And I was like,

well, what is true? Yeah. You know, it's just like, what is reality? What is reality? It's kind of like when people create those fake Twitter accounts.

So like they do Donald Trump, but the Earl would be an I, a cataly's eye and stuff like that. And they get retreated all the time. So you've seen my Twitter account. I'm going to do reckless with an I. It's just like it's something that makes you just not want to put too much of yourself into the internet. Yeah. It's just like at some point it is exposed. Yeah.

It's funny because not to bring up net neutrality, everyone's favorite subject, but I was talking to our CEO and I was like, you know, there's an argument against net neutrality, which is that the internet is. mostly garbage and we should just lock it down. That's actually probably the best argument against net neutrality that I've heard is like, it's mostly garbage and dangerous. So stop it. I know. I suppose if you were targeted by one of these attacks

properly, it's this scary thing, I'd guess. Yeah. All right. I'm going to read one more and then we got a little bit of a lightning round. Mr. Miller has his segment. But first, let's talk about shaving your face. What is the secret of a well-groom guy? Surprise, it's the art of shaving. That's the whole secret.

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order and free shipping. So go to the art of shaving.com for the special offer. Or if you want to talk to a grooming expert, go to one of the stores. I don't think you can just yell offer code Verge at one of the experts. Let's try it. You never know. It's an experience and then let us know it goes. Anyway, artistshaving.com, offer code Verge. Check it out. Let's start with reviews. Let's start with Dex. Sure. We're on this whole future computing kick. Dan Seasor

reviewed it, right? Yeah, I played with it a little bit. It's really impressive. So, Deeter, you want to tell people what Dex is, what it does, how it works? So Dex is a thing with the Galaxy X8, you buy a X8, S8, you buy a box,

a hockey puck-looking thing with a fan in it. It looks like you're putting your phone in a cup. Like, whatever Samsung wants that to look like, it looks like they shipped an ashtray and you put your phone in it. Like, if there's a world in which like a writer is like,

but like a really nice, that's true. Accidentally, like just ashes on the phone. But there's a good reason for that though, right? Uh, for it to be like that. It has a little fan.

Yeah, but it also, no, but I mean the angle, because then it, it's a certain angle where it can scan your face right as you can log in. Yeah.

So which I do, all that I have the, I actually have the wireless charger, uh, for my S8. And when I, it's sitting on there, I like hit the button.

I swipe up to do the iris scan. And then I just like kind of just stare down at it really quick. It's actually super convenient. Also, Did you know that on the iris scanner, it actually shows you a picture of your eyeballs, and you can customize what that looks like. So I have like a pair of like ski goggles or you can put like owl eyes. So every time you unlock your phone, you see a picture of yourself with owl eyes.

That's pretty cool. That's kind of one. It makes a desktop environment. It makes a desktop environment. You plug a monitor, you attach a keyboard to mouse or you do Bluetooth keyboard mouse, and you get all your Android apps in a window desktop. Samsung did the thing that Google itself has been unable. to do, which is make, you know, app windows like, you know, resize or whatever size you want

and make it a windowed environment. It uses Samsung's browser, which is chromium, but I think it's basically a mobile class what they request the desktop site. So it's not like a full desktop browser, but it's sort of in between a desktop and a mobile browser. I'm not super clear on that. The funny thing is, so Dan review it. It's pretty desktop-y.

Dan seems to like the browser. It might be full. Yeah, it's fine. It choked a little bit on, uh, chorus or CMS. It choked a little bit on some other things. There's no flash and stuff that else. Yeah, there's obviously no flash.

Right. So I edited Dan's review over this thing. And we actually went round and round a couple of times because I kept on basically just refusing to believe him when he said it was good. He was like, no, it's really good. I was like, no, there's no way. Once I got over the fact that it looks like his phone was in a cup and it just really does. But it's essentially Samsung doing what Microsoft promised to do.

Yeah. And they pulled it off. So that's the impressive. thing. So I came across Dan when he was working on his review. He was writing it. He's writing it on his phone. The keyboard. So he had the phone in the cup. He had a big monitor,

curved Samsung monitor. The phone was sitting there, and he had Microsoft Word open. He had Google Docs open, full desktop Google Docs in the browser. The Slack Android app I don't know. I don't know if they cut a deal. I honestly don't know

how this works was displaying the desktop version of Slack. And it definitely runs better than... Wait, are you sure it was the desktop version of Slack? I think it's the tablet version of Slack. It's like unclear because it wasn't quite... Because it was in a window and like, if you take the tablet version and put it in a window,

it kind of looks exactly the desktop version. I asked them, because my biggest problem with Slack is how slow it searches and I asked them to search and it was like the app experience of searching. Yeah, but it was also a lot faster because it was a real... Okay, I'll be more clear. It was a... It was a UI that looks...

Of course, Dan didn't put a screenshot of Slack on our review because that would be... Oh, no, this is definitely the tablet version. I'm looking at it right now. But it was windowed. So it looked very much like the desktop Slack experience. A bunch of other apps were windowing fine. It had a bar. He was like switching between apps.

I mean, it was like fine. And you could definitely take it one step where it would slow down. Yeah. Because of what it is. Because it's just the phone doing it all. But it was just working fine. And he's like, this is been my primary machine for a week. And I've obviously run into some roadblocks or all in the review.

But I was like, we, I sat there like trying to break it for 10 minutes. And like the things I was having to do to break it were not, they weren't normal. Right. I was like, what if I unplug it, like start 15 apps and plug it back in? He was like, yeah, that's not going to go crazy. Well, yeah, if I run three apps on a MacBook, it slows down. Yeah. But it was really, here's a big question, though.

like it's probably like in like cheap Chromebook range of like productivity right is way better than continuum so like if you're judging it against continuum it blows it out of the water if you're judging against a Chromebook it's like in that zone but do you what do you judge it against? Do you judge it against a Windows laptop? Do you like what what do you judge it against and are the conveniences of just buying a Chromebook or buying a cheap Windows laptop greater than the deal of like using this thing. Like that's how it's like how he ends his review is like, we're like, this thing is actually way better than you expect.

It's like radically better than you expect because we were expecting it to be garbage. Um, but even as good as it is, like, who's it for? So, so here's the thing. I never, I obviously have laptops at home, right? So I never take my laptop home from the office, my work laptop. It just sits here on my desk all day long. If I could change that out to, and I have to carry it around the office all the time, because there's stuff it can do that my phone can't do.

But if I could just have that, like that set up at my desk at work, and I would come in, roll in, set up my phone, like start working, and then like grab and go and go to a meeting, that would be awesome, right? Because I wouldn't be leaving windows and ideas behind. That's, I think, where it falls down. because when you pull the phone off the dock, it doesn't click back into being a phone right away. It takes a minute, like a full minute.

Yeah, and sometimes longer. You're kind of like losing the ability to just like quickly grab your phone, which to me is that's a huge tradeoff because of how many times you can quickly grab my phone, like do something with it. I do see like someone who is like a primarily a phone person and like just sometimes needs to sit down to look at like a full, slide deck or use word or something like that. Like having your notifications on your desktop is like that's awesome.

Like that's something that I take for granted on, you know, having Mac and iPhone is like, this is great. And I reply to more text from my Mac than I reply from my phone. I message lock in. There it is. Constantly there in my face. Whenever you use this stuff, like the continuum stuff is like it does, it's like a nice thing to think that this might be the future eventually.

Because we're seeing the tablet market now that's, you know, people aren't buying them and they're not refreshing them because, and it's what the market is say is the focus on smartphones. People just want those. Yeah. And I think that's been hitting the PC market as well. I just, I mean, this idea has, it's, this idea has been around forever. Yeah. This is the first time I've seen it work in a way that feels reasonable. And now the hard question is like, wait, what is this for? Yeah.

Like, it's not dreams anymore. Like, okay, I have it. Like, do I want this? The arm architecture works, like, they already have, like, the big, little and stuff like that. I mean, you can basically run some cores and not run all of the cores. I could conceive of a phone that just runs, it just runs the four cores most of the time. And then when you plug in, like, soups them over clocks them. Yeah.

And the phone melts. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why the Astray has a fan. It's in its fan cup. But you could really, you could, like, go turbo mode when you plug it in. I got to tell a story about the S8.

I was on a boat in Mexico. Perfect. Every story starts this one. I left my phone in the bag sitting in the sun like an idiot. And then I went out and grabbed my phone to like take a picture and it was wildly hot. I was like, oh shit. Turn it on. And it's like your phone's too hot.

You can't do anything. I like try to open the Twitter app. It's like, nope, you don't get to do anything until this thing chills out for a minute. You can maybe make a phone call. Um, and it, it, like, it handled it really well. And because it was an S8, I literally just like took a wet towel and like, uh, cooled it off and like waved it in the air to get the condensation off and then cooled it off again. And then two minutes, like it was cooled down and it worked again.

Like, whoa. They handled the heat issue really well. And because it was waterproof, I could like cool it off myself with some water. Tears like, uh, the iPhone does that temperature shut off thing to you. I've had that happen. I have not, I have not like, full. wet towels. Comes up like a warning.

Yeah. I don't, Dieter, you're the most deeply invested in this crazy future of computing. It works. Do you want to use it?

A little bit. I kind of do. Like, no, like, honestly, like, sinking my stuff across multiple devices

is a pain. There's a tiny little part of me that wants a dumb shell laptop that, like, all every, you know, Chinese computer maker is

made these at one point, the pad phone, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I don't know if I want this thing in a tablet, but if I had just like a, like, basically my MacBook has the, essentially the computer bits of my MacBook, it's like, it's all battery and then the computer bits basically could fit inside a phone. And just like, take that out and just put a USB port there and I can just slide my phone into it. That's actually like kind of an interesting idea.

So would your ideal be to have like a, a. a deck stock at your desk so you can have a big screen and a keyboard and stuff and then like a laptop doc show like would you have like one deck stock and a screen at work and one deck stock in a screen at home or would you just want to just use it with a laptop or what would your ideal situation to look the most cool to look the most cool I mean none of these things I would want the decks dock um I but I would also like I would want the thing to work without a dock right like I know there's no actual computing bits in the dock other than, you know, just basic wiring and like enough power to like make a fan run. It needs a fan, which is hilarious. But I don't know, it's like

the same thing with like the, I don't know, the Nintendo Switch. Like I want to plug it, I just want to carry a cable to plug it into a TV, right? I just want to carry a cable to plug it into a monitor. USPC. Yeah. And that would be the key to this sort of experience. Yeah. But it's also, I think it's also like what Dan is saying and the fundamental problem with it is that do you do you want to buy like just a cheap laptop that does all that or do you want to have to carry around like a keyboard and mouse and stuff like like what's the point of what you're carrying around is worth this investment like I mean that's going to be the problem with these devices going forward yeah well I mean the the the dumb shell would need to be like a hundred bucks right yeah that's not

going to happen just battery I guess that's what HP did with a lap doc thing that thing all of these things have been terrible. The fact that we know about them all speaks very deeply to how much we are terrible nerds. The bad part most of them was the software, right? Yeah. So this one, it's weird. We're doing it. We're praising

Samsung for their software. It feels strange. They solved a thing in software that no one else has been able to do, whoever it is. Microsoft included. I think it will really come into its own when Google does it. We'll see. You know? Like, they have to do it. They have to support it

on Android, across all the devices. It's kind of like Samsung is Google's like, like, test bed forward R&D lab. They're going to

like they did it with VR. They did it with gear, right? They, I think they've basically done it with that because I'm sure you're right that Google's doing a thing. There were some rumors about this a while ago.

I got to look it up. Well, you plug it, you plug a pixel into a dock and in terms into a Chrome OS. I mean, you could see it. They did it with multi-window. Yeah.

Right? Multi-screen on a phone. Multitasking. There's one other thing that's like, consistently Samsung does the thing that Google is going to do the next year, a year ahead of time.

Like a little pens. Well, there's a stylus on the Chromebook Pro. Tablets, ish. Nish. Motorola really zoomed out there. All right, Paul, you have a segment every week. It's called the same thing. It's called 4-4. Wait, let me start over because I've got to get the right number of four.

4-4-4-4. Oh, yeah. Four-fours. Four-fours. Yeah. It's called four-fours. I'm changing it. It's going to be called four-fors from now on.

Yeah. Permanently. Okay. It's an LG display with four HD-D-Mi ports. All right. 4K. Yeah. 42.5 inches.

What? For me. So you can play. So it could be like just a 4K display. It's got HDMI 2.0. So that'll work. It's also got a display port and stuff. But you could also plug in four different inputs and it displays them in a grid.

Which Adele also has a display. Oh, yeah, the crazy. So it's kind of, it's meant for like invest, like trading. Like you always put like cool graphs and charts on screens like this. and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is on the, literally on LG screenshot of this. But it's also like a really good split. It's $700-ish. It's got like free sync.

Like, I don't know. There's a lot of good stuff going on here. And I don't know. You're like hot on the high-end monitor beat lately. I just really, it's because I use, I use this Vizio like 32-inch 1080P low-end TV as my PC. monitor at home and I got to upgrade. Yeah. I got to go past that.

I want the best. You want the caviar of monitors. Yeah. Is there a monitor? I feel like there should be a monitor called the caviar. That Dell monitor is insane. Dell's come out with an 8K monitor. Yeah.

And then ACER and ACS have these sort of like these 4K, high refresh rate, G sync, like HDR, like HDR, everything's awesome in them. You're definitely behind this. I still won't like. $1,500. Which one are you going to buy? I still want Microsoft to sell this Surface Studio mona. Not even have it go flat and all that sort of stuff.

The 3 by 2 aspect, I don't think there is a, I've looked, I don't think there's a monitor that's free by 2. Yeah, they're getting, they're getting, it's such a good. Skinnier. Yeah. That's the thing. Seeing a Vizio, we should talk about it real quick. They're doing some neat.

But Vizio, last year, took all the apps off their TV, a tablet in the box. So everything's Chromecast. Yeah, I bought that TV. Deera's that TV. plan. This year, same TV. You bought the P series, right? They've barely changed the P series. The M series is new. Put all the apps back on the TV. Not all the apps, though. It doesn't have all the apps. It doesn't. It has, yeah, some of the apps. So there's some really, Netflix. So Chris Welch went to the event, talked to Matt McCray, who's been on the verge a thousand times, the CTO Vizio.

People were obviously, like, confused about all the interface being on the tablet, but they are really still better. on Chromecast is the main thing that drives their TV. So they're not actually apps. They built an HTML rendering layer so they can serve app interfaces on the TV and you can click around and do all that. But when you hit play, the app doesn't play the video. It sends a cast URL back to cast. An internal Chromecast.

The internal Chromecast. So it's still Chromecast. You can still use the Google Home. When you start a thing, if you have an Android phone, it'll show you the cast notification. notification. But because that is all like new, they don't have Netflix, they don't have Amazon, and there's like a lot of theory out there that Netflix is now being super aggressive and what's demanding from all of its partners because you can't, you can't not have Netflix. Yeah, it's the key. I think that's really interesting actually that they

built this other like system that kind of like goes in a circle. Well, you could Chromecast Netflix. You can Chromecast Netflix. Right, but it's not it's not one of their built in weird HTML. If you use one of the weird HTML apps, it's like, what's on Crackle tonight? Hooray. I've been wondering, what is on Crackle? Like, the fuck is Crackle. Do you know what I've been using a lot lately? Voodoo.

Yeah. What? 4K? This is such a nightmare. Paul knows this story. So I have LG OLED TV. It's 4K, Dolby Vision, and there's two movie services. that stream 4K movies.

It's voodoo and Fandango now. Wow. It's a real mess. Obviously Netflix and Amazon, but that's mostly like their shows. Right. You know, like rent a movie in 4K. So you're like, yes, I will pay $15 to watch San Andreas on my new TV. It's voodoo.

Voodoo also supports Atmos. Yeah, nice. It's nice. So I have all this stuff. But the LGTV won't send Atmos out through HTML. So it lights up all the lights. There's literally a fucking change.org petition to have LG support Atmos on HTML. I'm going to write about this.

Paul threatened to make me a Trello card, so I'd write about it. But what's your audio? How do you get Atmos? Do you have to use, like, optical? No, optical doesn't support it. It's really weird. I think there's no way, unless you have a new LG OLED TV, a 2017 one. I think there's no way to get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos at the same time.

time. There's like four TVs in the world that will send it out. And I think, I think they're like, they're like at the bleeding edge of the spec. It's very frustrating. I will tell you that I sign the change.org petition. Sometimes that's all you can do. Dieter took out his AirPods. No, it's like a very, so it's like the base in my house. So like we have speakers in the ceiling and our receiving and all this stuff. Yeah. Yes, Deeter? Sorry, my iPods decided to stop working.

First the right one went out and then the left one went out. Man, switching out the dangle life or the wireless life. You know, I was on a train at like 10 p.m. at night, listening to some banging house music with my AirPods. It got a call and then I got off the call and I was like, well, has the music not resumed? So I kept playing on my phone. It's come screaming out of my phone. And I'm like standing at the door to get off the train. Everyone's like turned around and look to me and I was like, uh-huh. And they looked like, you look like a dick anyway, wearing them.

And then I would look like an extra dick when I was. playing some screaming house music out my phone. They're doing what, you know, we didn't talk about at all as Apple earnings, because Apple made a bunch of money. Yeah, they were kind of just, no. The interesting part, the phones basically flat, Mac ticked up, iPads crashed, and you're down, like 13, 18, some teens percent. Some of this quarter had the cheap iPad in it, too, right?

Yeah, but it's, you know, that's not fair until the full quarter. But the big one they're pushing is the services business. So Walt and I talked about this Uncontrol, I'll Delete, a lot yesterday. The services business is a bunch of, like, B and C services. But if you bundle them up at Apple scale, it looks like an A-plus business. Yeah. Because there's so many phones. It's more revenue than the iPad, right?

Yeah. Yeah. But like service by service, it's not, they don't have category leaders, but if you just put them all together and call them services, they're like, this is a huge business. Wait, what's services? Services is like the iTunes store. iTunes app store. The App Store, IMessage, Apple Music, ICloud.

All of those individually, they all have head-on competitors. Anyway, if you are into that conversation, well, I wonder how much revenue out of, like, what is the percentage of revenue? Because it's around about 63% for the iPhone, the overall. So I wonder what it is when you combine services as well. Yeah. For Apple, it's got to be at least. Well, Apple also announced they're investing a billion dollars in American workforce things. Oh, and they put up a page to it.

It's like creating American jobs. It's actually a really fun page. I don't, I am curious. My favorite thing about that page is there are four Apple employees in North Dakota. I desperately want to know what they do. So go to the, just a cool page. It's like, it's well built. It's like neat.

And it shows you apps that come from every state and how many Apple employees there are in every state. And then it has this one category that's like app related jobs. And it's like, how did you calculate that? Like jobs created in the app economy is like one of their metrics. It's like an interesting number. And then they show you like the most famous app for overstate. You can, when you sign up, I'm thinking when you sign up for a developer account, you typically list like what company you're with and how big your team is and stuff like that.

Yeah. I mean, it's... It might be a way they get it. It's neat. It's just a neat page, but they're obviously pushing hard into this thing. Tim Cook, I think is hoping that Trump will like ease the tax laws so they can make more cash out from RCs. But the point, the only reason I brought out of Apple earnings was that it appears AirPods are doing well, although they're having manufacturing

issues. Yeah, because we might think they look silly, but they're doing, I mean, you have them and you think they look silly. Yeah, I mean, I see them all the time in San Francisco. They live in San Francisco. I don't see them. I don't see them. I don't see them in New York. I've seen a handful here and there in New York, but the people who are wearing... You know what else is doing surprisingly well is the Apple Watch. That's what I was trying to get at. The Apple Watch is doing well. They sold more than Fitbit. Fitbit looks like it. What was, what was it those a couple big apps just

abandoned Apple Watch? Yeah, Google Maps. left the watch. Like, as an app platform, and this is worth checking in on. Actually, Dieter, I'm just going to say this pitch out loud on the air. We're coming up on WWDC. Last year, WVC, they announced all these new app subscriptions. They have new app stores. There's the IMessage App Store.

There's the new TV app thing. I don't know how that stuff is doing. And the Apple Watch as an app platform just is zero as far as I'm concerned. Like, I don't. Yeah. What's the killer? I just committed to bringing an Apple Watch app. And that's the only thing that interests me because, like, I like using the Apple Watch with the AirPods, but then I have to rely on iTunes for the music.

Yeah. So. I mean, I think there's reasons to have apps on there, but I think the apps have very clearly turned into controls for things that happen on your phone. Yeah, for sure. And not independent experiences. Lauren Good wrote a piece. Now seems like a good time to ask what a smart watch is. Yeah.

How much do third-party apps really matter? So I'd definitely recommend that. Yeah, read it. Anyway, is that it? Anything else? Tom, I think it's enough. I think it's enough. We're taking Tom to the bar now.

I just worked out, though, that iPhone and services is 76.8% of Apple's entire revenue. Yeah. Services. But I just wish the services were better. Yeah. That's a thing. I think iTunes on the Mac has gotten a little bit better. Is that just me?

Like, it used to take, it used to take, like, 45 seconds to launch the app and then, like, get to somewhere you actually wanted to be. I'm doing this story because I love you. I'm going to launch iTunes on my computer. I had to use iTunes the other day because of a weird app bug that I had. Oh, it's pretty fast. I'd say it's down to, like, maybe, like, 30 seconds. It's terrible in Windows. It wasn't terrible. Oh.

Oh, I haven't tested on Windows. It's hell on Windows. Yeah. Okay, that's it. There's way more. I'm eager to, like, go out. Yeah. It's party time.

So you get no more Vergecast. Anyway, there's more, like I said, Walt and I went deep on Apple earnings and Control Delete. We also talked to a bunch of other stuff. We did talk about Neutralty. Walt Savage that Verizon video. That was an incredible moment in Control Out Delete history. So listen to that.

That's out. Lauren Good, we just brought up. She hosts Too Embarrass to Ask, which is a great show. Listen to that. Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media. And Caras Fisher, host Recode, Decode, all of which are fantastic shows.

They're all on iTunes. Listen to them, rate them, review. them. You can tweet at us. Paul is future Paul. I'm Reckless Deeders Backelon. Tom is Tom Warren. Tom Warren. Yeah. On the Twitter. Come find us on Twitter. Please, please stop flating me. That's Max versus P. It's like been a defining feature at my life for over 20 years. Macless PCs is like, it's never going to end that way. But yeah. Do you want to, do you want to have people tweeted Ajit Pie? Oh yeah, tweeted Ajit Pie. Oh, you know what? There's

actually a special episode of RICO decode. Tony Rom, who is a new reporter at RICOD, a fantastic policy reporter. I'm jealous of his skill level, because he is really, really good. He actually got Ajit Pai on the podcast, and you should listen to it. He asked him hard questions. Pai lets some stuff slip on that interview.

Basically said, I don't really know if we need bright line rules for net neutrality at all, which is not what the industry is saying. So very interesting. Go listen to that. And that's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul.

Hashtag brand strength. Snip.