The Vergecast - New Gmail, Spectacles 2.0, and iPhone SE 2?

Episode Date: April 27, 2018

This week on The Vergecast, Dieter, Natt, and Paul are still without Nilay but there’s a whole lot to talk about. Google made some changes with Gmail — which is now live, and Snap surprised us this week with their new edition of Spectacles — but what makes them different from the original model? Also, there’s a whole bunch of Amazon news and rumors this week, including an Echo Dot for your child. There’s even a whole lot more in between that — like the segment Paul does every week (say it with me) “I’ve carved this for you out of aluminum” — so listen if you listen to this whole episode of The Vergecast, you’ll be all up to date with the tech news of the week and won’t have to worry about much else the rest of your weekend.  01:20 - Gmail’s biggest redesign is now live 09:49 - Google is finally making a standalone Tasks app 16:38 - Snap’s second-generation Spectacles are more grown up — and more expensive 28:05 - Amazon will now deliver packages to the trunk of your car 32:33 - Amazon’s new Echo Dot Kids Edition comes with a colorful case and parental controls 37:04 - Amazon is reportedly working on its first home robot 40:29 - Amazon teases upcoming Fire TV Cube 43:41 - Paul’s weekly segment “I’ve carved this for you out of aluminum” 45:53 - Dieter essential phone feels 47:47 - There are a ton of sketchy rumors about an upcoming iPhone SE 2 50:44 - The OnePlus 6 is coming on May 16th 52:56 - Spotify launches a redesigned app with on-demand playlists for free users Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. Did you know 16 million new collar jobs will be created by 2024? To help fill them, IBM's new education model gives high school students, workplace experience, and an associate's degree. 90 P-Tech schools are already preparing graduates for tomorrow's STEM careers. Let's put smart to work. Find out more at IBM.com slash P-Tech. Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Vergecast, wherein I start at by saying greetings mobile accomplice. And note that it is week three without Herr Patel. Rations are running low. I don't know. Hi, Nat. There's just nobody around. Nat, I love you, but you don't talk

about boats enough. You don't talk about the love of the sea. I'm so sorry. You don't pick fights with Edgar Klein. It's just not the same. I'm so sorry. I'll make sure to gain a personality or download one by next week. Oh, my God. Paul, is you also heard his voice. Hello. He is on a boat. No? We got the flagship podcast.

Every episode starts coherently, smoothly. Yep. The rapport is just the best. We really try. Oh, my God. A lot of news, actually. I was thinking that it was not a big news week, but there's been a bunch of stuff going on. I think, obviously, we have to start with the new Gmail.

Yeah. I don't know. Nat, you did a video on this. Tell me what you think. Okay, so overview of the new Gmail. A couple weeks ago, we got a leak. We all saw that some sort of new Gmail was coming. and then, you know, this week came around, and all of a sudden it just showed up, which is surprising for a lot of people.

And I think a lot of people also freaked out and were like, how do I go to this Gmail? But if you have it already, if you haven't, just click your settings cog and see if it's there. If it's there, it's going to tell you that you can try it. But if you have it, it's a lot more white space. There's now collapsible toolbars on the left and the right side. The compose button is massive. The right toolbar now has a bunch of different icons that you can use to look at your calendar side-by-side to your emails, there's keep, there's tasks. You can drag stuff into tasks to build stuff out of your

calendar and just kind of work as a dashboard for your, basically your life or whatever you use Gmail to plan. It's a lot. It's really, I personally find it super busy looking and a little hard to look at because it's just so much stuff. But I don't know, what do you guys think? It does feel like a dashboard for your whole life. I can conceive of somebody opening the Gmail tab when they get to work and not leaving that tab all day. You know how back in the day I feel like when you're younger and you went online, the first website that you probably opened up was like Facebook and that's your dashboard for your life because your friends are all there.

Then you decided that Facebook is evil and somehow Google is not. So now Gmail is your dashboard. You wake up and the first thing you open is Gmail and it has all the emails of the stuff you're interested in because maybe you subscribe to content there. Maybe you have emails from your family members or your friends, and then you also have now your calendar and the things that you're going to do for the day and the things you have to do later because you added to your Google Keep or task. That's Google, though. There's so many things about that that make me happy and also sad. It makes me happy that you didn't just say AOL was the first thing that you opened when you got your computer when you were young because that was definitely the first thing I opened on my computer when I was young.

Well, first I was a BBS. So A, I'm old. B, it makes me happy to know that you are approaching being as equally old as I am because the first thing people open isn't a website anymore. It's, you know, I don't know, Snapchat or Instagram on their phone. I mean, that's true. I'm saying, yeah, I think you're right. I think on your phone people definitely still open apps, like social media apps in particular first. But I think when you open up a laptop, the first thing you probably want to look at is your email.

At least I do. I just don't read email. So Google. So Google created inbox. And I was very excited because inbox is kind of a one-dimensional way to go through your email. You are going forward through it. And sometimes you snooze something. Sometimes you archive something.

Sometimes you ban something from ever being seen again. Sometimes you even read it. But you're going through your inbox. And now in Gmail, it's like you're never going to be done. You're just going to live here. Which it makes a lot of sense. It seems really useful for a productive person. And I do think Tom did a piece on how Google's kind of going after Microsoft and Outlook and sort of this integrated business suite of apps. And Google is way behind, which is, I guess that was kind of surprising to me.

Oh, yeah. They're super far behind, especially among business users. It is pretty genius or maybe just the most obvious thing in the world to put your calendar next to your email. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I've been, that's one of the reasons I, like, use Mailplane on the Mac is it's, you know, it's one of these web app container things. It's not Electron, though. That maybe it's switched to Electron. Anyway, it's great because I just have a calendar tab next to my email, so I might not need that calendar tab anymore. You know, the funny thing, in Vlad's story about this, we actually have got the most direction I've seen about what's going on with inbox than we've got, then I've been forever.

Like, the joke is that they never seem to update it for the iPhone. David Pierce over Wired said that they didn't because they had to figure out the swipe interaction model. Fine. But this product manager for Gmail said that inbox is the next-gen early adopter version, whereas Gmail is the flagship that will eventually get the best new features. That sounds like a great idea, but that's not what it is right now. Inboxes is like they threw a bunch of stuff in it and then they, I don't know, they barely update it, man. They didn't do much to it.

I was really hyped for inbox for a while, but I eventually, I don't know, I got tired. of the app layout on it, and I just sort of let it go and went back to Gmail. So I'm really happy snoozing came to Gmail. Don't know how I feel about using B as the shortcut, the keyboard shortcut for snoozing, but that's a different story, I guess. I don't know. I think this is good. I think it'll help with business users.

It definitely makes it feel more modern to me. Like, I immediately dug into Gmail settings and made it look like my old Gmail, though. I don't have the little attachment things. I just want the simplest. list. I personally don't love default view. Like, I don't want to see all the files in line. I don't want, like, it's so overwhelming as is that you show up and you see all these different attachments and, like, everything is, like, not uniformed. I don't know, like, sends my OCD into like hyper level where I'm just like, oh, my God, does it see much? Well, it makes it harder to scan, right? If it's, if that list,

what we're referring to is the view for an email can also show that there's, like, attachments of certain file type. And it's supposed to be a shortcut today. You can click it and just see the light box view of it instead of going to the email and then clicking the attachment.

But then there's now all these different icons and colors and like file names and it's just like it's too much. And it makes a message line be a different height than all the other ones. Yeah.

Yeah. I rejected their attempt to like add tabs to the interface where there's like main and like promos and newsletters and blah and blah. Like nope, don't want any of that crap. I will handle all that on my own. Just give me the list.

to my emails in my inbox. Leave me alone. Yeah. Also, interesting, it's on the lower left side. They still have hangouts in there, which I don't know what that's about. Like, sure. It's Hangouts chat. Okay. Okay. Wait, Google is end-of-lifing hangouts. And yet it's still in this new Gmail.

No, they're not. Yeah. They're changing it to Hangouts chat. Please explain this to me because I'm a G-suite administrator because I have my own domain name that I host a Gmail on. And I upgraded to the paid version so I could use the new Gmail to check it out. And they're saying like in like the next like month or two like hangouts is is going away. And we're moving everybody over to meat.

Oh, by the way, meat still doesn't work in Safari or Internet Explorer. We won't absolutely kill hangouts until meat works in those. Yep. Which is probably some web RTC thing. Hangouts is getting replaced with hangouts chat, which is. their Slack competitor. It will still sort of work. It'll still be compatible with Hangouts in Gmail, although eventually we'll have to see what happens to that little widget inside Gmail. There's also another product called Hangouts Meet, which is their video conferencing

solution, which again, yes, is based on WebRTC, although they made a new version of it that is better and whatever, and that's one of the reasons it doesn't work in Safari. Safari doesn't have great WebRTC support, at least not the way that Google implements it. And so they have chat, which is the Android or the RCS thing, which will work on Android phones, and they'll be a web client. And then there's Hangouts chat,

which is compatible with Hangouts, but eventually everybody who uses Hangouts is going to need to move over to Hangouts chat, which costs money. And so if you're a regular Gmail user who uses Hangouts, your future into a free version of Hangouts chat is up in the air.

It is unclear what that plan is. Okay. Is my best understanding of it. Okay, so how about this? Bring back aim. I think it's time. Oath, this is your chance. Oath, I'm looking at you.

This is your chance. Oh, man. That's a great idea. Oh, my God. I would switch back to game. I feel like if I'm listening to this podcast right now in the car on the drive home, I would just like rage like off into the sun just because like everything that you just said, Deeter. And also like the idea of AOL coming back or AIM coming back is just like, oh my God.

I can't. So we haven't even talked about the thing I'm most excited about, which is Google Tasks. Yeah. I mean, I mentioned it a little bit, but I think that you are loving it. I don't know that I love it. I mean, you love that they're like paying attention to it. Yeah. So previously there were like 15 different places to enter a task, and they're finally like have

a single view or you can go look at it without having to do some weird hacky work around. There's a bunch of people up on my Twitter mentioned saying, technically, if you go to tasks. Google.com slash canvas slash something, something. I'm like, okay, whatever. So it's there on the sidebar. They'll make a standalone thing for it. I think the next step is they need to figure out how to integrate it

with the reminders that you put in Google Assistant, but you can drag emails into it. It's not a full-featured-do app. It doesn't do a million things that I kind of wanted to do app to do. Like you can't set a specific time on that. You can only set a date. But you can drag emails into it, and there's apps for it. So if you just want a really simple dead-ahead to-do list app,

Google finally does it. I mean, look, when the original Palm pilot, there was no poem mentioned for the day, came out in 1997, it had four buttons on it. Yeah. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Okay. I'm guessing one of them was for tasks. Yes. Okay. Calendar? Yep. Contacts. Yep.

Memo? Mimo. Yep. Back in the day, I used to call those. I had this whole thing. I had this whole like pre-packaged rant that I could try it out whenever I wanted.

I'm so bad. I called it the four pillars of PIM, which PIM is the personal information management. If you're going to make an Office suite, you need to offer those four apps and they need to be integrated into each other. Microsoft figured this out with Office. A long time ago, Outlook, and then there's one note

and then there's Outland, Outlook Calendar, and blah, blah, they figured that out. And it took Google this long to figure out that, oh, yeah, people might actually need to, like, make a list and check things off of it and not want to have it be buried away inside random notes in their memos app. Why should I trust that Google won't forget that it made a task?

You shouldn't trust Google for anything ever. Have you guys looked at the tasks app on Android phone or iPhone? I think it's a great, this sounds like maybe less unconventional than I think, but I would totally use it for grocery shopping just because it's way fast. Just check everything off the list. And not actually a task per se, but more like just the list. And I enjoy that. It's clean.

It's easy. I can type it in and I'll just look at that later on my phone. Works. Works great. I have gone to plain text for keeping tasks. Wow. I don't really like being. Don't you like check boxes though?

Isn't it satisfying to like tap a box? It would be satisfying. But what's not satisfying is I want my tasks very close to my notes. And my notes, I want them to be kind of in my cloud, not in someone else's cloud. Yeah. Like I use simple as a same way as a. as a synchronization service, but I feel like I own my notes. And I wouldn't feel like I own notes if they were in Google's system.

So I use SimpleNote as a synchronization tool. And then when I'm on my Mac, I make sure that I use NV Alt, which is a SimpleNote app. And what's great about NV Alt is you can go in the settings and tick a box to have it save every single thing and Simple Note and plain text on your Dropbox. Yeah. So you always have a text file backup. But no, the reason I brought up the To DoApp, one, Google caught a lot of flack for like it's completely incoherent. a font strategy in that app. They're like using different fonts in different places and there's no rhyme or reason to it.

But two, if you notice there's no drawer, there's no sidebar on the left-hand side, like there isn't a lot of Google apps. Instead, it's this thing that pops up from the bottom, which is kind of like how Google Maps work. And my conspiracy theory is that Google is getting ready to have a gesture on the left-hand side of the screen that acts is back in the same way that the iPhone does. Because there's this other, these other Android P-rumors where there's. there was like that little pill next to a back button, and maybe they'll do a swipe up to go to

multitasking in the same way the iPhone does. And if they want to get rid of those button bars, they could switch to the iPhone style of gestures. And if they're going to do that, they need to get rid of the left-hand drawer because if sliding over from the left opens the drawer, but if they need that to be back, then they've got to like change every Google app to have this drawer on the bottom thing. I don't know. This is definitely taking it too far, but they are doing this interaction model of the drawer on the bottom instead of on the side. That's like definitely a theme. Okay. Here's the thing, Dieter. You didn't take a far enough. How does the drawer in the bottom relate to the fuchsia UI? Right? Because they have these sort of narratives of chained together

tasks and cards and decks and all sorts of web voice elements. Yeah, I like it. If they can fix the font in coherence, then I think that the Tasks app is a pretty good indication of the design direction of what Google's doing. There's like a lot of hints in there. I think 9 to 5 Mac maybe even did a story about material design too. I don't think they're going to call it material design anymore. I think they're like, that was a nice experiment. It got everybody on the same page, but now they're sort of letting people be a little bit freer.

I don't know. What else is there to say? I like that it works in Safari for once. Like Google released a web app that isn't Chrome only. Good job, guys. Congratulations. I'm just saying. Yeah, it's kind of too bad that the confidential mode is not out, at least not for me. I think some people maybe have it, but it's not for me yet.

And I would be super curious to see how that works in practice, just because that is the newest thing that I've seen. Basically, what happens is when you make a composing email, there's now going to be a button that lets you make a message expire at some amount of time. Or you can even unsend it, which is crazy. Some apps obviously let you do this. I think WhatsApp has allowed unsending for you. some while, Instagram direct, has like an unsend-ish kind of tool. But yeah, like, I have no idea how this works in practice. Like, does it tell you that you've revoked privileges? No idea, it doesn't say. So I would love to be able to use this more to kind of figure out how that actually

works. I think the underlying thing is you're basically sending someone a link to a piece of content and you can kind of delete that piece of content later in time. I'm sure that I haven't looked into it. I'm sure that Gmail can just make it all look like an email. Yeah, I'm curious about that. Yeah, but what happens if you use a third-party client? Then you just get a link. Yeah, that kind of sucks. Yeah, we'll see. Well, what do you expect from a company that owns everybody's email account?

They're going to play nice. Are you trying to goad me to talking about email standards and then as a way to talk about web standards? I bet you that those embedded expiring emails are basically just AMP pages inside your Gmail. I hope so. I have no way to segue to this. So I'm just going to do it. Spectacles 2.0. Huge surprise.

New version of Snap Spectacles. They're still doing it. They're doing it. They're still making them. I don't know. I haven't tried them. I'm not compelled by them. I don't know, Nat.

You've tried them, right? Yeah, very briefly. So Casey Newton did the story on it, and he was in town in New York to check it out, and I saw it and it is the first time. So this is me, comment surprised to you, Deeter, but I am a 20-something who's never used Snapchat before. So yesterday was the first time I used Snapchat in my entire life

because I went up to Casey. Tell me everything. Well, I went up to Casey and I said, can I check out the spectacles? And he's like, sure. I took them. I put them on my face. And I was like, okay, what do I do?

And he's like, well, first do you have the Snapchat app. And I said, no. And he said, you should do that first. So it downloaded Snapchat. It was the sign up process is not, like, they still do that same thing they do like with most apps where like skipping, syncing your contact is like, The word skip is written on like a very light gray font on top of a white background that's hidden on the top corner.

So I'm like, I see you, Snapchat. I see you. So I pressed skipped. And I finally got into the Snapchat app and then I tried it. So the thing about this spectacle. I need way more detail. Did you understand how to use the Snapchat app? Because it used to be wildly confusing.

Now it's just mildly confusing. But I also don't know because I have used every iteration, whether I just, I'm used to their crazy way of thinking. Like, when you open this app for the first time in your life, this is amazing. Like, what was it like? Well, it turned the app on. You know, it had that camera screen. You can tell how to take the photo because there's the circle on the bottom.

I didn't really send a picture because all I wanted to know is how to use spectacles. But, you know, I can tell there's a button underneath the camera shooting, like, button that shows you that all the pictures are, like, videos of you've taken. but I assume that's got to be it. Then you take the picture that you want to send and just pick someone to send it to you. I'm guessing that's how you do it. How do you... How do you...

This is amazing. You send something to you. Oh, God. I didn't get that far. How do you have a filter? How do you zoom in? Oh, there was a point where I opened up one of the videos that I shot with the new spectacles 2.0.

And there was a scissor button that I thought was like for trimming the video clip. And it's not. It's for the scissors thing lets you select some part of the video that then you cut and then just becomes a sticker that just floats in your video, which was extremely creepy because I happened to cut out a piece of someone's head in the sitting far away in the office. And then I looked at it again, and this head was just like floating all over the video. And I was like, oh my God, what is going on here? But new spectacles is, I didn't use obviously the first spectacles, but I saw them side by side. It's a lot thinner. It looks like a real sunglasses.

I think that, you know, it kind of reminds me of some of the free plastic sunglasses that you get at, like, parties and, like, concerts that they like to give out. It's, you know, flashy. That is hard. I mean, they're supposed to be, like, higher quality than that. It is higher quality, but I think, like, the... Are you mean aesthetically or materials, wise? Aesthetically, aesthetically. Because I think, like, the flashy colors, like, the bright, you know, like, it's got this, like, reflective lens that's, like, a mirror kind of.

of look to it. So it reminds you of that. Like, it's very like, I just partied at Coachella kind of thing. They're not designed to blend it. Yeah, they're not, they definitely are designed to stand out. And they look, you know, hip. They definitely are targeted for someone younger. Yeah. Even I feel a little odd wearing it. And also, I just don't really enjoy sunglasses in general. But, but yeah, it's lighter. It feels like a real sunglasses. There's a little button on the left side that lets you, you know, hold it to take a video. If you hold it longer, it now takes a photo, which I believe is a new part of it. You can take a photo before.

Quality is better than the old one. It does look quite nice. It's still that spherical thing, and you can flip your phone when you look at the picture. And I think syncing is supposed to be faster now, although I've never used it. And when I was trying to sync up the video that I took, it's still, I was like literally just counting with my finger like one, two, three, four, five. And oh, there you go. the video's in my... 10-second video?

Yeah, and I was like, wow, this takes a while in case he was like, yeah, you'd be surprised how much longer it took on the first one. I'm like, what? So the key improvements is that they're lighter, it transfers faster, it's waterproof,

but the key... They're thinner, too. Like, when you fold them up. Yeah, yeah. The key question to me is, were spectacles ever a good idea, and they just had some execution flaws, which this is solving,

or was it just not a good idea in the first place? Look, I think the idea of a wearable camera is not new. Like, you see GoPro's, and I think that people are very excited by GoPro's because you wear it, it captures all the adventure stuff that you see or are doing. I think that Snapchat trying to go into that market is smart. I think it's cool. Is it executed in a way that I think it's going to be a mass market? I'm not quite sure.

Because also spherical video that only works for Snapchat is not very easy to share. Yeah, that was one of the, I don't know what it was about it. Today, I guess I've been thinking a lot about like open standards. Damn it, Paul. I just, I just like, you know, Snapchat, one way Snapchat could differentiate itself is by creating a product that just like doesn't. We don't need Snapchat to be another Apple that's making something that's completely vertically integrated. I mean, it makes sense that it would work the best with their service, but they, the idea that it's so intrinsically tied to its surface and it shoots photos in like a weird kind of useless format?

Yeah, I mean, I will tell you that like spherical format is cool, but I don't see any like value in it at all. Like it doesn't make me want to share it otherwise. Like it don't think that I think I can send it to my friends on Snapchat and they're going to be like, oh my God, let me flip my phone around and look at this. Imagine like Snapchat. It is super cool. In Snapchat, the spherical, the round thing. and you can move the phone around a little bit to peek around the corners of it.

That is actually genuinely fun. That's neat. Yeah, I think that that is cool, but I think that for me, it seems like a novelty that just kind of... Okay, imagine the coolest thing that's ever happened to you happens in front of your face and you happen to be wearing spectacles.

This is Snapchat's best case scenario, right? You don't have time to pull the camera. You just reach up and click the button a few times, you get a 30-second video of the craziest thing that's happened to you. In a format that is going to be complete, you know what I mean? You're not going to say 10 years from now, oh, thank goodness that I got a circle video of the craziest thing that's ever happened to me in my life. That I can only watch it as one app.

That fundamentally is not what their best case scenario is. They don't want, they don't think that this is for making, you know, a lifetime of memories that you're going to open up in your whatever the equivalent of a photo album is and you're going to like show naked pictures of your child to their you know boyfriend or girlfriend. Why are you wearing your sunglasses in front of your naked child? Well, you're bathing your baby. And you're wearing your sunglasses in your house, bathing your child?

Okay, let's move to. Baby's first time you. Baby's first steps. Baby's first steps. That's better. Okay. But no, you always like embarrassed. Whatever. Baby's first steps. God. Look. All I'm saying is everyone's had the moment when,

You bring somebody home for the first time to meet your parents, and then your parents break out the photo album and tease you with embarrassing photos from your childhood. Right, right. That was the whole point there. Okay, absolutely. I think that that is as close to, like, a lifetime of memories kind of pictures that I think Snapchat actually wants to do with this. What they actually want isn't, like, record this amazing moment for posterity. What they actually want is send a weird, funny video to your friends that feels like there's a lower barrier to entry that it doesn't have to be perfect.

because it's just a thing you recorded on your glasses. In that case, the next Snapchat thing or hardware that they should make, if they ever make one, is, like, one of those picture frames that you can give to your grandparents and you can just, like, shoot the video over to them. You know, like, those picture frames where you can, like, upload videos and photos? Like, the next Snapchat thing should be a picture frame where you can just shoot the message or video or photo over with your spectacles, and your grandparents will be at home being like,

oh look at my beautiful grandchild in this like and then you know they can pick it up and do the weird flippy three you know like spherical view thing this is you're a genius and snap should hire you right now and they should make that because think about that

that's the thing that you get for your grandparents when you like graduate high school or like that like when you get them for Christmas and if Snapchat is so you know adamant on making sure that they are the platform that you can view this content on, then, like, the next thing should be, like, another hardware where, like, you can actually view it on, but in a way that's not tied to your phone or easier for people of all

ages to use. Who knows? I like it. Well, we've solved all of SNAP's problems. Next year, they definitely won't lose around $800 million. Or just have, like, a hundred thousand million spectacle sitting in some warehouse collecting dust, which, by the way, they said they recycled parts to use for 2.0. So there's not, it's not all loss there. Yeah, I wonder what parts. Yeah, I've been wondering which parts, too. Me too. Hard to say.

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wanted you to let a person into your house with a special smart doorbell and lock. And they're like, okay, cool, we know you're uncomfortable with that. How about you give us access to your car? This is so smart. You think so? Yeah, so here's what I think the future is. All the cars being broken into all the time.

because people see Amazon delivery people leaving packages in them. And then they pretend it's, oh, oh, that's my car. And then they take the package. Oh, you mean you just break into a car because it has an Amazon package in it? I mean, like, that already happens if you don't have a doorbell or you live in New York City where you don't have a doorman, and people just leave packages in your front door. I'm just saying you see an Amazon truck or UPS truck in a parking lot,

and you're a criminal. You're just going to, like, see what happens. And if the whole bunch of cars get filled with boxes, you might see what you can do about that. What's the best size of box for a thief to target? Probably a smaller one. Like a small one that's like a phone? No, no, it's literally in a parking lot.

Anything that'll fit in their car is the best size. They're going to have a car there. You also have to make out with it really quickly. So you don't want a big box because you can't run away with it unless you have a different part and throw it all in and drive away like Santa Claus with all your Amazon packages. My theory is that in the future, I would have a big box because you can't run away with it. I will be able to be, it's kind of like being an Uber driver, but like a very like low lift version of an Uber driver where Amazon just strolls up to my car while I'm at work and puts something in my trunk. And then I drive home and then later at some point somehow that thing is, it turns out that was actually for my neighbor. And you know what I mean?

Like instead of making extra trips to deliver. things, use the trips that people are already driving. Like, I'm taking my body and my mostly empty car from city center to the suburbs every day. Why don't I bring something with me and drop it off at a neighbor's house and I get like a small little commission for that. But I didn't have to go out of my way, right? I think maybe they tried out something like that before. Did they? Doesn't that sound like the future, though?

I mean, I can't be bothered to, like, walk to the UPS store that's half a block away from my office to return stuff. Right. Like, what's the likelihood I'm actually going to do my neighbor a solid and deliver their package? I'll forget. Well, one, sit in my car. One, you build a reputation just like on Uber, right? Okay. So you're not going to be doing deliveries if you're bad at it.

Two, maybe there's some way that it's, like, locked so that you can't enjoy the fruits of your neighbor's Amazon. But also, like, it's a chance to meet your neighbors for once. That's true. I do not talk to my neighbors. Except when their crap falls on my patio. It, like, floats down onto my patio from the floors above, and they come knock on my door and ask to come get their stuff. That's nice.

Okay, yes. There's a thing called Amazon Flex, apparently, which lets you deliver packages for Amazon on an hourly rate. So somewhat that has sort of existed. I don't know that it's done. based on location or like based on where you're headed. But there is like an app economy or job type thing where it's like an on-demand delivery person who is just around to help make deliveries.

That's great. I think it's all going to happen. I've had my car broken into. I've seen lots of cars get broken into. It's like a real genuine problem in San Francisco. It happens all the time. And yeah, I don't think that having a package delivered to my car is a especially secure thing. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's also just an overly engineered solution to a problem that I think I'm not really sure that people, like people have problems getting their packages. Sure, I'm not sure. This seems like a super complicated way to fix that problem. And like, it's funny because what Amazon is doing, it's like just eating Walmart's lunch. And, you know, like the one thing Walmart had is like, we'll bring your groceries to your car. And Amazon's like, no, we're going to. to do that, but also we're going to do that when you're not there.

In Amazon's ideal world, you're really not involved. Well, if you thought that it was creepy that Amazon could get into your house or your car, you're going to love that you can now buy an Echo Dot for your children. Actually, this is kind of sweet. I don't know. This is okay, right? No, I don't know. I mean, it is a little weird to get your kids involved with like AI.

early on in life, but it's kind of an edible. Like, they sell fire kids, tablets. Of course, there's going to be something for kids to interact with that uses their voice. It's more fun for them because they're not looking at a screen. And, you know, like, let them play games, let them probably run around a little more. Like, encourages them to not be staring at a computer all day long. That, I guess, that's fine. I am contractually obligated to love this because it has a bunch of audiobooks in it.

So we should explain what the deal. is with this. It is a special like kid mode that then Amazon has this thing called free time where it includes parental controls and so you get the parental controls for free. And then there's like this mode for Alexa where it like encourages kids to say thank you and lets them ask follow-up questions. And it lets them, it like customizes answers to the kids. So if they ask where babies come from, they're like, you should talk to an adult. Or if they ask, you know, they're being mean to me at school. It like gives them advice on bullying. And again, encourages them to talk to an adult.

And so it's a little bit safer for a kid. And kids are talking to these things anyway. It also apparently is more forgiving for the wake words. So instead of having to say Alexa exactly, you could say Owexa. Owexa. Which is pretty great. And then on top of that, if you want to pay for free time, it's a relatively cool service. You can get it on tablets and now it'll be on this thing.

And you'll get a bunch of free, like, kid-friendly content so they can, like, have a bunch of free kid-friendly content and you don't have to, you don't have to, worry about them downloading a million apps or stuff because they've got a bunch of stuff that they've got sitting there waiting for them. It's a free for a year when you buy an EchoDoc Kids Edition or Fire Tablet Kids Edition and then it's $3 a month for prime customers. Should be noted also that even though it does come with free time, but it does cost like $30 more than the regular EchoDot, which is crazy because I don't think anyone, even at the

retail price, no one buys. the echo dot full price. They just wait for it to go on sale because they always go on sale. So for me it's like $80 for one echo dot for kids. It's kind of a lot. Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like weren't we talking about something recently? It's crazy that so much of this is about the content now

and not really about the basic assistant or the basic. I guess this is a lot about the assistant too. It feels like they have a lot of the hard early problem solved. And this is like a nice generation two thing to be able to do. Well, I remember when Benicio, our former transportation editor Tamara's son, reviewed the Google Home and Amazon Echo for us. He said that he had preference for Alexa because he said it was more fun to talk to. And like it told him jokes. And sometimes when he asked it inappropriate question, it would sometimes say, or like, you know, like, don't do that.

Or like, that's not nice. Or sometimes he'll ask him to tell the top ten jokes that it has. has and it'll be like, I can't tell you because some of them are not appropriate for your age. And he's like, hmm, why would you say that to me? I just thought that was really cute. Yeah, I'd be interested to hear what he thinks of the kid's version. Amazon does a better job of recognizing that this weird thing called a family exists and that there might be more than one person in your home.

I've heard of those. Please tell me more. Google does a pretty good job. They did a pretty good job with home and they've done a pretty good job with. Android, there's like multi-user stuff or whatever. But Apple and Siri just assumes that everybody has like one of everything that it makes. But Amazon has always done a really good job of multi-user. They took a minute for Alexa, but they got there. And they've always done a very good job of recognizing that there are children who get tablets and who get devices and that you need to

hand this thing to your kid and like have some sort of sense of it. The parental controls that are built into fire tablets are just heads and shoulders above anything else that you can get. The tablets themselves are like, man, Android on tablets is pretty man. I know it's not technically Android. It's built on Android. It's Amazon's fire thing, blah, blah, blah. But still, I think Amazon deserves credit for realizing that there are children, and children get things.

They use things. I don't know. Along those lines, Amazon is reportedly working on its first home robot, which is kind of seems like a play, to what you were saying now like because we've talked a lot about like don't gender the robots and you know google it's kind of right to have sort of a non-person like google assistant doesn't feel like a person nearly as much as Alexa or Siri do but you can't deny how attached we can get to something like watch bicentennial man i think is a good primer on this sort of like Yeah, it's just a robot. It's not real. It's not a human.

But if Amazon puts Alexa in a body, I feel like you could get way, especially a kid, could get way more attached to Alexa. I mean, even robots that don't have a personality, I think last week, James Vincent wrote a story where he interviewed the I-Robot CEO or head of something. And he was talking about how, like, people are super attached to the Rumbos.

Like, they refused to send their Rumbos in for maintenance. something's wrong with it. They're like, no, you send someone to come fix my Roomba at my house. There's no way I'm sending my like Rosie the Roomba away, which is wild to me that people are that attached to a robot in their home, even ones that don't talk or like don't have a face. I've also heard this

that I robot that like soldiers get really attached to the bomb disposal robots. And it's kind of like losing like a dog if like the bomb disposal robot actually gets blown up by a bomb. Yeah. So I haven't watched Bicentennial Man in

forever, but I'm going to say if you want a heartwarming robot movie, you should watch Robot and Frank. It is amazing. Have you heard of this movie? Yes. I have not. I forgot about it. Oh, it's so good. It's Frank Langella. He's like an old retired jewel thief and he gets a robot butler to like help him in his old age.

And he's like, screw this. I'm not getting old. Also, this robot's annoying. Oh, wait, no. I love this robot. Let's go do a heist together. And he like, it gets his robot Butler to like go do a heist with him. It's amazing. That reminds me of a cartoon. I grew up. watching. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this, but there's an anime called like Doraemon. It's from Japan. It's like this blue robot that this kid grows up with. And that basically

is my first introduction to what a robot is because his robot is magical. He has a pocket where he can pull a bunch of different toys and gadgets and all this cool stuff to make like this kid's life better because he, without him, he's just sort of a loser, like, frankly. So, and then, yeah, like, and then one day, like, sometimes they get into fight and like Doraemon will go away. And And the kid is all like, oh, no, like, I can't live without him. I need him. And like, oh, he's not just a robot. He's my friend.

Anyway, it's a great show. So, right. So this robot is a code named Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, according to Bloomberg. And there'll be prototypes in 2019. And I'll just be curious to see if it can, I don't know, handle stairs. Rumbas don't fall down stairs, but they can't go up stairs either. Yeah, I don't know. Stairs.

Stairs. They just don't leave the floor. Yeah. It will probably just roll around. Yeah. But I think it should have a vacuum. It should have a little sweep. Just like a little extra thing.

Just put a robot on top of a Roomba. That's all I want. Just put a fake, like put googly eyes on a Roomba and like a voice. And then the other rumor is they've been, they started teasing the Fire TV cube, which fine. Great. I don't, I don't like, it'll be a fire TV with Alexa in it, which is a great idea. I would definitely like consider having that under my. TV, I definitely don't think it needs to be hyped this much.

Yeah, Paul and I were talking earlier about how this reminds me of like a, this is another one of those crazy over-engineered Silicon, HBO Silicon Valley thing, where it's like, the box. And it just like just does the like weird, obscure thing. And it's like, ta-da, it is a thing that's going to be a revolutionary. It's like, it's a TV that's also an echo. Okay, sure. Yeah.

It does seem to be exactly what they should build, though. Yeah. Because my Chromecast is on the fritz. Like, Chromecast is built into my Vizio, and I basically have to reboot my Vizio all the time because Chromecast will start flickering. Yeah, same. My Vizio can't get softer updates because it's broken in some other way. Oh, so I had the same problem last week.

You know what you have to do? You have to unplug it and then hit the power button a bunch to, like, completely kill it and leave it unplug for a couple of minutes, and then plug it back in and it'll connect to the Wi-Fi again. It's nuts. My Vizio is just a garbage fire. I have to unplug it like once a week now. So this would be great, except the main thing that I watch over Chromecast is YouTube. No.

We all know how well that relationship is going. By the way, while we're recording, Amazon released their earnings, $51 billion in sales up 43% year over year and a net profit, which is always exciting when Amazon actually pulls a profit of $1.6 billion, although they did lose a bunch of money overseas. Fine. Everybody's making all the money all the time. I don't know about everybody.

Okay. By everybody, I mean huge companies are making all the money. Like five or seven CEOs of large companies are making all the money. Do you ever need to send money internationally? I want to warn you against using your bank or PayPal. Sure, they get their money for me to be, but that transfer will cost you more than it should, a lot more. Turns out that's the old way.

And now there's a new, smarter, and cheaper way to send you. and money internationally. It's called TransferWise. It was founded by two pals, Tavit and Christo, who were frustrated by their banks, bad exchange rates, and high fees. They wondered, what if they could bypass the banks? So they did, and they built TransferWise. That was seven years ago, and since then, two million people have used TransferWise, people sending money home, businesses paying suppliers, freelancers getting paid, and so on. TransferWise's clever new technology gives you a great exchange rate and a low fee, so it'll put some extra money in your pocket for the more important things.

Because apparently no one's ever said, it's important that my bank gets some extra money. I've asked, and I've never heard anybody admit to saying that. So you can test it out for free at transferwise.com slash podcast, just podcast, or you can download the app. Once again, it's transferwise.com slash podcast. It's the wise way to send money. All right, we're back.

Just in time. We almost forgot, but we didn't because we never do, that Paul has a segment every week. And he's always ready for it. I never have to vamp. I never have to talk and get ready for him to get to what he's going to talk about. He's always just got a queued up. It's always right there. It's always called, Deeter, it's always called, I've carved this for you out of aluminum.

So this week. Thank you, Paul. Yeah. The Cord Hugo, two. which is a $2,500, a deck, like a headphone amp. So you plug this into your iPhone that no longer includes a DAC. And so you plug this in over USB, and then it converts the digital audio to analog audio, and you plug in your million-dollar headphones into this,

and then you have the best listening experience in the world. Vlad reviewed it for The Verge. Didn't really like it. Obviously, $2,500 is way too much to spend on something that is not amazing. But the design of this thing is like it is the most 90s thing I've ever seen in my life. And I thought I'd seen a lot of 90s references lately. But this is 90s. Or this is like this, it reminds me, the aesthetic is,

is kind of like, what was the, Aqua. What was the original design language for OS10? Aqua. Yeah, it was lickable. Lickable. This is lickable plus aluminum. It's a lickable DAC. Like, if you took a modern MacBook Pro and you melded it with Aqua from OS10,

and you made a DAC, it would look like this. And I love it. It looks like you can hurt somebody with this. You can definitely hurt something with it. It's huge. It's heavy. And apparently over emphasizes the highs. So it doesn't make for an enjoyable listening experience.

But it's beautiful. All right. Well, can I talk about phones for a second? Just for a second. So I've been using the essential phone for the past week, week and a half. Explain yourself. Yo, I love it. It's great.

I don't know. Why? It's like jank and it's got bad scrolling and whatever. And I just haven't experienced it. Maybe it's because I have, I, like, fresh installed it on 8.1. I, like, took it out of the box and, like, did all the stuff from scratch and didn't restore and whatever. But, yeah, I've had zero problems, except for the camera. The camera is, like, a problem.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. The camera is better now. It's just the camera. And, I mean, that's a lot. But, you know, like, I've been bouncing between a pixel 2 Excel and an iPhone 10, and I've got the P20 Pro waiting for me at home. I need to switch, try that for a while. And I got to tell you, I'm just super done with. slightly oversized phones. I love that the essential phone is most, it just has a little

bezel on the bottom and you get a big screen in a small body. I love the notch on the essential phone anyway. Small being relative. I love the notch on the iPhone 10. So I've never actually held an essential phone in my hand. How does it compare to a regular pixel two? To a regular pixel two, it's a little bit wider, it's about the same height. Okay. So pixel two is smaller. So I'm a very small person, and I think the pixel 2 is about my limit of how large I'd like a phone to be, just because my hands are smaller. I can't reach all the way to the top of the screen if I held it in a different way. And with the case on, it almost doesn't fit my gene pocket.

So you don't want a bigger screen because you don't want to have to reach that much further up? Yeah. Like, that is actually a problem for someone's as small as I am, which is, you know, like, I've never used an iPhone, but I think that the reason people love, like, the SE sandwich is because it's small and it's cheap and it does what it does, and it's like the size is perfect for smaller people. Another good reason for Google to put this little drawer thing at the bottom or whatever it's called. Yeah. Speaking of the SE.

Speaking of the SE. Yeah. There are a lot of sketchy rumors about version 2.0 of the SE. So, Dita, just to be clear, it's mostly just the size and the feel of the essential phone. That's what's got to do. Well, it's the feel. It's the overall aesthetic of it. It just feels heavy.

It looks really good. It makes me feel like a thing that I want to, like, have. And whereas the Pixel 2 is kind of bland and the iPhone looks like every other iPhone. I think the iPhone SE is, like, in this for people. People, like, just love the size of it. Those are my exact reasons, exact reasons where I want an iPhone SE2. I've been using the iPhone 7 with a crack screen for 100 years now. I want a smaller phone.

Yeah. Creighton, who produced the Circuit Breaker Live show for us, It uses an iPhone SE, and I'm jealous of them all the time. If they just upgraded the processor, upgraded the camera, kept the exact same form factor, there's a rumor that it will be wireless charging and... Headphone jar. I really hope they don't get rid of that headphone jack. But if you think about what the iPhone SE is aimed at, it's aimed at emerging markets that are probably not going to also want to buy Bluetooth headphones. And they also probably...

Apple doesn't want to cut into its margins by packing in a pair of lightning headphones. Right. To me, it makes a lot of sense to keep the headphone jack on it, and it could be my dream phone. That's where I'm at right now, because the size, I'm just, I don't need a big phone anymore. I need a big phone less and less. I've been limiting my Twitter use. I basically, I mean, on my phone, when I've got tweet deck open, I'm still a maniac, and I'm sorry everybody. I'm also sorry for when I'm at the airport.

I'm also really bad at Twitter when I'm at the airport. Why be sorry, though? What do you mean? Airport Deeter Twitter is like when he gets the most Deeter. That's the thing. We want pure, unfiltered, 100% from the source Deeter. That's what the world craves. All natural, organic.

Free range. Free range Deer. Free range Deer in an airport. Never been caged. Anyway, like I don't need the big screen because I'm trying to limit my phone use down to like some of the core essentials, and that just, like, a smaller screen sort of forces you to, like, if you want to do something more, you go over to a bigger screen. And so it makes it. I do, I really do hope that the trend in, like, producing smaller phones again with, like, maximizing, you know, screen,

real estate on a small device could be a really good move for a bunch of manufacturers to now do just because, like, we're pretty much getting as big a smartphone as we're going to get at this point. I don't think they can get any bigger or, like, hope they don't get any bigger. So hopefully smaller ones can be on the way because they definitely figured out how to make the screen bigger now, notch or no notch. Yeah. Well, so the 1 plus 6 is going to be announced May 16th.

I love that they've basically announced everything about this phone and how they're announcing when they're going to announce it. Fine. But I don't know. We could talk about notches, I guess. I'm fine with notches. It's fine. It's dumb when they are just copying Apple just for the sake of it.

But if you just get a little bit extra screen real estate and you use it well, and I think the status bar on an Android phone is a really good thing to stick in a notch zone. That's like perfect. There's all a bunch of icons up there anyway. Get that off my main screen and put it up there on the left and right of the notch. Then I get an extra, you know, 50 pixels to work with. And then the phone feels smaller relative to the screen. I think it's a win. I think it's great.

Yeah. Don't be so emotional about notches. It's fun to say. but I really have a hard time getting mad or excited about anybody's notches anymore. We've just been worn down. Yeah, I mean, I guess it'll be cool when someone does the notchless phone. Like the S-9. But no.

That doesn't count. It doesn't count. It's got to be bezelless. You've got to be just holding a screen. You're just holding the rectangle of a screen, and you maybe at most can see it. tiny little pixel-wide black border around that screen at most. That is where it has to go. And so that's why we all need to have pop-out selfie cameras.

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That sounds like a spoiler. Don't worry about it. All right, I want to just talk about one more thing, and I only just want to talk about it so we're done. We've been teasing the Spotify event for like three weeks on the podcast, and they finally had it. I'm making the cringe face because it was, yeah, underwhelming to say the least. And the weird thing was that they literally had the event to promote a product geared towards exactly me. Yet I'm just kind of like, well, okay. So yeah, you love using free services.

They've improved their free service and you just don't care. I mean, like I said, I think it's great that some playlists are now on demand. But, like, if anything, this just tells me that I don't have to pay for Spotify. So, like, I mean, like, you know, they just went public. Their goal is to get more people to stream. Like, labels are happy when more people are streaming, and Spotify is more happy when people are streaming. So to them, getting more users is what they want, free or paid.

Yeah. Yeah, what is the value of a free user to Spotify versus unpaid? I mean, I think at some point they're going to hope. Yeah, I think at some point they hope. that the free people will love the limited on-demand and realize that they want it so bad, they'll pay for it. Or they'll just get a slew of people like me who are too cheap to pay for it and just be like,

ads are fine. Only 15 on-demand playlist a month is fine. So, yeah, I mean, like, all they want right now is user growth so that they can go back to investors and be like, look, we're growing. So, yeah, that's a beginning strategy. I don't know how sustainable it is. We'll see. But yeah, I mean, really nothing to report.

No hardware, unfortunately. Yeah, I'm sad. I'm really sad. I really want that hardware. I think it's really interesting. I think it is coming down, like coming out at some point. Today is not the day. All right.

That is, I think, the Vergecast. I want to tease a bunch of stuff. The next couple of weeks are going to be utter madness on Theverge.com, at least from tech news. We've got F8, and then after that we have Microsoft Build. and then after that we have Google IO, and then after that I will die. In addition, we have other podcasts. You should listen to Why'd you push that button, season two. This episode this week is about saving your dates phone number on your phone.

How do you get those digits? Also, and this is really exciting on May 1st, the Verge is launching. Am I allowed to say this? I'm going to say it. We're launching a new YouTube channel. It's called Verge Science. and it's going to be great. I've been seeing some of the videos

that they've been making. They're getting ready. It's going to be a whole separate channel just for our science content and it's going to be really awesome. So keep an eye out for that channel. Make sure you smash that subscribe button, fam, once it pops up.

We'll tell you all about it when it happens. There's a bell, I bet. There's a bell. We get notifications. It's great. You can also follow all of us on Twitter. We, of course, all are Verge. We're also on Instagram,

where our Instagram story game is still amazing. It's Virgin Instagram. I am Backlon. Paul's future Paul. Nat is Nat Garen. There's also other podcasts of Recode. There's Recode Decode with Caras Swisher. There's Recode Media with Peter Kafka.

And we will be back. Some of us, not all of us, but some of us. And maybe a surprise guest. Maybe two surprise guests. I don't know yet. It's a mystery next week. You're just teasing so much, Deuter. You just got to pay attention.

On all these promises. I don't have to deliver next week. I'm not going to be on. Somebody else I'll have to figure it out. Rock and roll. Paul.