The Vergecast - New releases: Surface Go 2, Macbook Pro 13-inch, and the first Xbox Series X gameplay footage (Goodbye Paul)

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Stories discussed this week: The disappointing truth about antibody testing Apple is giving $10 million to COVID-19 testing kit company FDA authorizes CRISPR-based test for COVID-19 Sen. Ed Markey wants the FCC to rethink its broadband deployment plans An Amazon warehouse worker in New York has died of COVID-19 An Amazon VP’s resignation has cast a spotlight on the company’s working conditions Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders demand Amazon explain whistleblower firings Pittsburgh’s airport is the first in the US to use UV-cleaning robots NYC will use powerful ultraviolet lamps to kill the coronavirus on subways and buses ESPN to air live NBA 2K League games We’ve known how to make healthier buildings for decades The spring of iterative hardware updates MacBook Pro 13-inch: come for the keyboard, stay for the performance The saga of Apple’s bad butterfly MacBook keyboards is finally over Microsoft’s new Surface Go 2 has a bigger display and better Intel processor Microsoft Surface Book 3: new Nvidia GPUs, up to ... - The Verge Watch the first Xbox Series X gameplay footage, showing off ray-tracing and graphics of the next-gen console These 11 new games will get free upgrades for the Xbox Series X Here are the first 13 games optimized for the Xbox Series X Xbox Series X Optimized games promise 4K up to 120fps, ray tracing, and fast load times Madden 21 shows that cross-gen gaming on Xbox Series X and PS5 could be messy Sonos announces the Arc, its first Dolby Atmos soundbar Sonos will launch its new app and big S2 software update on June 8th Google unifies all of its messaging and communication apps into a single team Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The Vergecast, it is Paul Miller's last episode. We got some special surprises for that. We run through the usual virus news. Then we talk about the MacBook Pro 13-inch, the new Microsoft Service Go2, the Surface book three, a bunch of Xbox news. And then Dieter desperately tries to explain Google's messaging strategy to me. We'll see how it goes. It's the Vergecast.

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building. building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast.

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

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Paul Miller Weekly Second. I'm your friend, Nelai. Dieter Bone is here. I don't know what I am. I'm also a friend. Dieter's going through a time. We're going to get through it together. Paul Miller is here.

Hello. Paul, this is your last show with us for now. I'm very sad about it. It's a breakup episode. It's going to be emotional. It's going to be sincere. I saw it, Paul, I saw some speculation on Twitter that we had some sort of beef. There's no beef.

There's no beef. Perfectly honest, everybody. the verge through like every other business fox media the verge our budget's changed we had to make some calls sadly we have to take it about a paul but first of all paul i want to say you and i have been podcasting together it's 2007 is that when we rebooted the engadgett podcast i don't i can't remember that back that far it was a long time ago that we rebooted the engadget podcast together which was a lark of an idea before any of this podcasting business looked anything like it does today So we've been talking to each other about tech on a show like this for a while.

We started The Verge. Three of us are actually founders of this thing called The Verge. We started The Verge with this is my next podcast together. Before there was even a website, there was this podcast. Yeah, I think of this podcast as the InGadgett podcast was originally Peter Rojas and Ryan Block. And I was listening to that and a fan of that. Yep. I moved to New York, worked for Engadget.

it then I was on that podcast and then we we sneakily stole the as much audience as we could with podcast continuity by having this is my next uh which moved into uh the verge cast it's true do you remember when uh we used to sneak we were at n gadget and we would like sneak around plotting the verge and we called it project secret it was it was like the worst code name of all time it really that was the code name It was horrible. It wasn't great. That's great.

I would say worse, the only one that's worse was, I think, Vox.com, as we're called it, Project X. Which, there was, like, a movie about, like, chimpanzees being trained to, like, drop bombs on people. Matthew Broder. I was like, yeah, it's very sad. It's like the wrong code name. Anyway, we've been doing this together for a long time. The thing I was thinking about is, Paul, this is not the first time, right? Like you left the internet for a year and left the verge.

You came back. You left again when we was starting circuit breaker because I really wanted to gadget coverage again very serendipitously. I remember Dieter and I were like sitting in a bar. Yeah. Being like who is going to help us do gadget coverage again. And you literally called out of the blue. I was like, I need a job.

Just like lightning strike. You have actually since left the verge, but we kept doing the podcast together. So this is the first time it's the verge side. initiating the split. It's fine. It's me doing it. But I anticipate that you'll be back again in some way in the future. That's just what history suggests. Well, and anytime you need a guest to shell Bitcoin, I'd be happy. But no, you guys have given me so many opportunities and so much grace. And you've been really bros and friends. And so I really, you know, I really appreciate the way

you guys and Vox Media and Verge have treated me in our on and off relationship over the years. So there's definitely, there's no hard feelings at all. And yeah, I'm sure we'll find ways to collaborate. You know, the one thing I'll say, and people have pointed this out, Paul, you and I have talked about this a lot over the past few years. You and I obviously do not have similar political beliefs. I don't know if that's clear to the audience at this point. What?

But one thing I have always appreciated, and I think both of us have gotten notes from the audience to this effect, I think it's been valuable to have those disagreements in like a civil and rational and direct way, regardless of the policy disagreement. You and I have been friends for a long time, and I value the fact that we built the verge together. And I really have come to value the fact that we hopefully have been able to model for people what it's like to still be friends, even though you have deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, political disagreements. Like, we come out of it laughing more times than not. I'm going to miss that. I hope people see that that was something you and I have talked about and cared about and wanted to do for folks because it's been important to me. Yeah, it's totally important to me. And it's, I never wanted this to be like a political show. But it, you know, as tech became more political, I feel like that just sort of was inevitable.

And so I still don't think of myself as a hugely political person. I just have, you know, maybe outside the mainstream thoughts on the role of the government in our lives. And it was cool to have an opportunity to share that, you know, without yelling at each other. And now I'm going to yell at you. So we're going to miss you here. But, Paul, you've got a new show and a new site, right? Yeah. If you go to paul.

I'm so proud of that domain name. That is an incredible domain name. You can sign up for my newsletter, CyberDeck Users Weekly, and I'm also doing a podcast of the same name. I've got two episodes out. So you can subscribe to that, like and favorite on your favorite services whenever it gets deployed to iTunes. But yeah, Paul.l. And I just want to say thank you so much to all the listeners who have reached out and so many notes of love on Twitter. It really means a lot, and I really, really appreciate it.

All right. Now we got to do a show. We got to do this show. Yeah. And then you can go listen to Paul's show. It's great. It's just a one more podcast list. It's just more.

Even more reasons to pull over in your car. All right. So I'm going to start. The show comes out on Friday, which means it's really easy to count. It is week eight. It's been eight weeks since Donald Trump promised a website based on a flow chart. Can I tell you something about this, Neelai? Every week you do this and you say it's been,

And I get that goddamn bare naked lady's songs. Look at my head. It's been. Yep, eight weeks since the flowchart day. Since you flowcharted me. Website still does not exist. Verily, which is the subsidiary of Alphabet. This story is so tiresome.

Just know that it's been eight weeks. If you're still curious what I'm counting, just listen to last week's episode. The one before that. The exact same information. The one before that. With a lower increment of a number. but know that the real way we're going to come out of this is with a robust testing and tracing apparatus that does not appear to be in place yet. So we're still paying attention to that.

That said, when it comes to testing, there was a bunch of news this week that is interesting. The FDA authorized the first CRISPR-based test for COVID-19. Most tests now are based on technique called PCR. We actually have a great story from Nicole about how PCR testing works that you can go read. The CRISPR-based test is a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, a little bit more accessible in terms of what kinds of equipment you need in your lab to do it. So that first test has been authorized for the FDA. Apple invested $10 million in a COVID-19 testing company. So you see the, like I said, we're coming out of this with testing and tracing. So the amount of investment and interest in testing is going up. And then Liz Lapato wrote a really important piece.

everybody should read about antibody testing this week, which goes into immense detail on how antibodies in your body work, like the different methods your immune system uses to produce and use antibodies. Sometimes they just don't do anything. That's just a real thing. And then the amount of antibody tests that are on the market, you can actually go get one right now. Many companies will happily sell you one. They have not all been proven to work. So some of the tests have up to a 14% false positive rate, which effectively makes them useless. So there's just a lot of hope, I would say. Hope, confusion, optimism, and pessimism around antibodies and antibody testing.

Liz spent, I think she spent over two weeks reporting this out, talking a lot of doctors, a lot of scientists, a lot of researchers about antibodies and anybody testing. So just go read that piece. We really wanted to provide a very credible, serious, deep, reported, rational look at the state of antibody testing. And Liz absolutely pulled it off. And the animations on how the antibodies in your body actually work are great. Alex Park can do those.

So go check that out. It's, to me, one of the more important pieces on this whole thing that we published. Do you think that there's going to be some sort of biotech renaissance coming out of this? Because it seems in a sense that whatever biotech we had, the people who are trained and capable right now are the people who can engage with this current scenario. But new investment and new people switching their major or that kind of thing could be, you know, what the future of that industry. Do you guys have a good vibe on that? Is that just like wishful thinking? You know, I was on, right before we came on the show, I was talking about my first remote CNBC appearance, which

notable mostly because my AirPods fell out of my ear on live television. But it's funny because, you know, the CNBC anchors who are all very smart, very plugged in, they were talking about the amount of funding they're seeing in the biotech industry, right? And it was literally in the context of we work, right? Like all of the sort of startups that were getting the money and the unicorn valuations, we work, Uber. It was all like consumer stuff, all stuff like you need your mom to do, you know, like on demand made service or, you know, like it was, it just felt small, or it seems now in this moment particularly small, and the investment is now flowing to things that are big,

I think that's a really interesting phenomenon. Honestly, Paul, I think the answer is I hope so. But we're seeing it now, and I think the generation of kids who are going to be interested in biotech and bioscience, like, it's got to be huge, right? Because if this is the defining moment of your life, then it's going to have that kind of ripple effect. So I hope so.

There's an amazing video series that I was watching like right kind of when the lockdown starts. where GeoHot, the guy who, you know, jail broke the iPhone, cracked the PS3, and now has a self-driving car company. He's just like, let's hack the genome of the virus. You know, and he's just downloading, like, publicly available information and processing it with Python. It's really interesting, like, the tools that exist right now. Yeah, I mean, that's, like, that sort of, like, democratic access to the information, like, the virus is sequenced really fast. Yeah, that's, like, remarkable. The split between the amount that we know and the amount

that we don't know is just as we read the coverage as we talk about our coverage, that split is vast. We know more about this virus than almost any virus in history at this speed, right? It's brand new. So the amount that we know for the fact that it's new is remarkable. It's been an international race. And then the amount that we don't know is vast. And that's the thing that will help solve it.

It's like we have a ton of intelligence about the virus. But like as a country, we're not acting with a ton of wisdom. We've got way too much Too many charismatic leaders at the top Saying the wrong things and we need to move with We need to have more dexterity about Wow Cleaning up our testing process here

I don't like this To make our country give our country more strength Really? Yeah Okay I get it we should just grind on stats I would take it All right other virus news Amazon is kind of getting it on all sides right now So Josh Jezza on our team

Actually broke the news the first Amazon warehouse worker at the Staten Island facility in New York died of COVID-19. That comes on the heels of a lot of protest and a lot of complaints from workers about the conditions in Amazon warehouses. Tim Bray, who was a VP at Amazon, resigned specifically because the company was ignoring worker unrest. That's a high-level executive principal engineer in Amazon. Very public blog post. He was a very public person. And a bunch of people in tech knew him, knew him from before.

And if you have not read his blog post, his letter about why he resigned, you absolutely should. I know me recommending reading a, you know, a letter from a VP of Amazon doesn't sound that exciting. But it is bracing. It is very clear. He's a good writer. One of the keys was Amazon has fired some of its most vocal whistleblowers. That's one of the reasons he quit. Congress is now demanding explanations.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren came together to demand Amazon. Amazon explain why those whistleblowers were fired. There is a growing unease in Congress, senators, representatives from both sides of the aisle, calling on Amazon to explain whether or not it lied in hearing, antitrust hearings, about whether it uses its data to make competitive products. Amazon also, they're getting it from regulators. They're getting it from their own workforce. I think pretty soon they're going to start to get it from customers because their ship dates

are still pretty low. And like Amazon at this moment cannot sell you. toilet paper, right? Like, the things you think Amazon could do for you, it's not able to do. So that's three sides. And Casey wrote the newsletter this week. It stuck with me. The thing that made Facebook change was not consumer unrest, was not privacy scandals, was not regulators. It's when they were less able to hire people, when talent didn't want to come work at Facebook. When talent was going elsewhere, people were leaving the company. Amazon's now. It's something close at that moment, plus this additional regulatory pressure, plus this sort of customer, like for me, where I'm at,

everything takes a week to get from Amazon down from tomorrow. And I think that is just a big combination of things. So we're tracking the Amazon story. The virus is really shedding a light on that company. Some interesting tech approaches to the virus. Pittsburgh is going to start using UV cleaning robots in the airport. So they're going to shine bright UV lights that kills the virus, New York City is going to start using UV lights to kill the coronavirus and subways and buses. So now these kind of cleaning techniques are coming to the fore. That's really interesting.

And then on the sort of culture side of the story, ESPN is now going to start airing live NBA 2K league games. Like, we're just fully in the moment of athletes playing video games on live television. I'm extremely here for it. If they would like to let me play Madden against Aaron Rogers, I'm available. I'm cheap compared to them, I'm guessing. I'm not free, but I'm definitely cheaper. So it's just an idea.

Just if anyone from ESPN's listening, I'll do that. I'll lose. I'll even throw the game to Aaron. I just want to do it. And Nicole Wattsman wrote a great piece this week about building design, office design, and how we actually know, we've known for a long time how to make healthier buildings, healthier office plans to combat the spread of germs and viruses. I think that's going to, as we think about how the world will come back to work and business,

we're going to see a lot of that change implemented. So go read that piece. it's like right in the strike zone of science, design, technology. It's really cool. Go check it out. Okay, that's all the virus updates I have. Now we've got to talk about MacBooks. You're going to talk about Surface Go.

There's like a lot of news. A lot of hardware. We get to talk about MacBooks. It's real privilege. Let's take a break. We'll come back and do that. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder,

used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast. as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's

framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic can be getting lost in the shuffle. Gramerly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Grammally's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on.

See why 90% of professionals say Grammarly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Datter. Yeah. What a week.

It was a huge week of very small hardware chains. You actually wrote your newsletter this week. One of the headlines was, it's the spring of iterative hardware updates. Take me through it. I was inspired by Marquez Brownlee, who tweeted that it was the year of the ultra-minor Apple update, which sounds a lot like the year of whatever,

the sponsored years from Infinite Jest, if you're the kind of person that has read Infinite Just, or the kind of person who has pretended to have read Infinite Just, which is... Oh, I carry it around everywhere. Yeah, yeah. I'm never without an unread copy of Infinite Just. So the news from Apple is that they have updated the 13-inch MacBook Pro.

And the main thing, the thing that everyone's going to pay attention to, and the thing that you should pay attention to is they swapped out the butterfly keyboard for the scissors switch keyboard, the quote-unquote magic keyboard, which makes it, I think, 0.02 inches thicker and like 0.08 pounds heavier. You can convert the metric yourself if you'd like. I'm not going to help you. But I'm going to remind you that if you need to, you can do it on the round. If you are lucky enough to be in a car right now, pull over. No, just ask Siri.

Oh, yeah. Ask Siri. See how that goes for you. So if you're not familiar with MacBook Pro, there's the 13 inch. There's actually always kind of been two of them. And there continues to be two of them. So the base model, other than the magic keyboard, is pretty much unchanged from what was available last summer. Dan reviewed it.

It's got an eighth-gen Intel core processor. They put the good keyboard with the escape key in it, the end. But then there's another version that has the 10th-gen processors. And that's the one I'm reviewing right now. And I did not expect it to be quite as good as it is. I iterative updates are like, yeah, it'll be faster, whatever. But especially with Intel, I've sort of become acclimated to not really knowing, seeing a huge difference. from year to year in my day-to-day experience of it,

and only really seeing the difference on, like, you know, this thing is 10% faster on this, you know, benchmark or whatever, which doesn't really affect the kind of work that I spend most of my time doing. But, I don't know, compared to a three-year-old laptop, this is notably faster. And, of course, it should be. That's like how you expect the world to work. But, you know, Apple did the thing. They put in the newer and modern processor in a MacBook,

which is not something we've been able to take for granted from Apple for quite some time. So that's the story with the MacBook Pro. We're reviewing it if you want to know about it. And what you want me to do with it, tweet at me. You're reviewing the $1,800 skew? Yeah, it's the $17.99, which is a Core I5 with 16 gigs of RAM. It's LDDPR, LDPR 4X, and it's got 512 SSD. It's just weird.

Why can't there be a fast? I mean, $1,300 is, you can get a lot of laptop. Like, there's this wave of like 650, 700. $100 AMD laptops that are coming at with like the new Ryzen 4,000 series laptop chips. Like those are going to be very performant for like less than half the price of this. Yeah.

So there's that. And then there's like you can get Windows laptops even in 13 inches that like have real GPUs instead of the Intel Iris Plus. The Intel Iris Plus in this thing is impressive. It actually the whole package, I don't know if it was the GPU or just the 10th gen processor. The whole thing actually did better on Premiere Pro than I expected. Normally Premiere Pro is the way that we can do.

hell that while Apple software doesn't support its chips. You know, like Adobe just doesn't doing it. And that's probably still the case here, but like it did way better than it had any right to. It was almost as fast as a 16 inch, which is wild. I'm fairly certain the betas of Premiere Pro now actually have GPU support for encoding, which we'll see. I mean, it's always like a risk. Like, what if I offload this to a slower other processor?

Is like that that's that checkbox? And sometimes right now in like Lightroom, depending your computer, it actually gets slower when you turn on GPU in code because the integrated GPS are slow. But they're at, there's Adobe's slowly getting there after however much outcry. One thing I think is interesting, and I noticed this, and you called it out in your hands on too, Apple's preferred software like applications to show that it's faster are 10,000 miles away from Adobe. And it's like extremely vague. It's like 4X faster in this game you've never heard of. Photo editing and affinity photo is twice as fast. It's like, what does that even mean?

Like how are you benchmarking that? I think they're now at a point where to show that things are faster. They have to find applications that are optimized for the platform. And they're being way louder about it than before. Yeah. I think Paul, you're right about the pricing. I mean, look, like Mac users are kind of a captive audience. It's like this is why the keyboard caused so much angst.

It's like if you wanted a Mac, you had no choice but to buy a keyboard that you couldn't trust for not quite five years, depending on what model. But, I mean, we should just talk about it. In the past six months, they have refreshed their entire laptop lineup. After five years of trying to make butterfly work in six months, they're like, nope, we're done. And they were when they put out the 16 with this keyboard, they did not, they did not suggest they would be moving this fast. Like, it'll come. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you know, Apple never likes to give you a hint. you know, they don't like being Osborne or whatever. But I don't know, I kind of expected them to not move quite this quickly. I was thinking that what they were going to do. And I actually asked them to do exactly what they did. It was just screw you, put the 13-inch out, don't wait for the microled screen or whatever. But in my heart, I kind of expected them to, like, put the 16 out and then wait until they had like some fancy new screen technology or some other bigger iteration to put out on the 13-inch. And they chose not to.

And part of me is like, oh, I'm sad. And part of me is like, yep, good. If someone needs a laptop right now. And there are people that need a laptop right now because their keyboard is broken in isolation and they got nothing else to do. There are at least two version reporters with broken butterfly keyboards right now. Yeah. Just like freaking out. So if you have the money and you can afford it, like I haven't given this a full review.

I can't like endorse it. But I would be completely shocked if this wasn't radically better than the 13-inch MacBook you have now if it's, you know, more than a couple years old. Do you think Apple learned a valuable lesson about hubris? No. What are you talking about? Absolutely not. Just kicking it around. I think, I mean, honestly, like Deer said, Mac OS is a captive audience, right?

If you want to run MacOS, they still sold a lot of Macs during that period, even though the keyboards are notoriously bad. I think it got to the point where they were putting out new laptops with repair extension programs at the same time. Yeah. Just to calm people now. Because, you know, Apple's line was, this is a tiny fraction of keyboards that are breaking. The vast majority of people. Yeah. Everybody loves them.

A customer sat is through the roof and it's like Casey Johnson and Joanna Stern, their keyboards broke and it's all blown out of purple. Like that is not our experience, right? Like, again, there are two people on the verge staff. My 13-inch Smackwick Pro review unit had two broken keys, but three months ago, two keys were broken. And we just know lots of people. I think it was underreported. I think people just dealt with it. And so Apple's stats were wrong.

And I think the more they looked into it, the more they realized trying to fix it versus just rebranding it and going back to the trusted design was the way to go. And I think they moved really fast. You know, obviously Apple's product cycles are, they're a lot longer than just immediately reactive. All these products were probably ready to go. And they're cruising into graduation season. and then back to school. And they need to be ready for that.

They need to have a MacBook Air out now stocked up in the channel so they can do their discounts for back to school, assuming there is such a thing. You understand what I'm saying. Back to homeschool. Yeah. Here's my question for you, Deere. Fully loaded MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. Because MacBook Air has the 10th Gen chip.

Yeah. It has a 10th gen chip, but it's got a way lower thermal ceiling. Right? Like you can't run that thing hot. It'll start to choke way faster. And that will affect you. It won't affect you with like your 15th Chrome tab or whatever. It will affect you if you're trying to do stuff with like lightroom, right?

Or if you're trying to do stuff with, well, even with the GPU. But like basically if it runs hot, if you're doing video, you're doing anything quote unquote pro, you're, you know, decoding the genome or whatever. If you're geo hot, then you should step up. I mean, a bunch of people are asking me this question. And, you know, until I've, like, done a review, I can't say. And there's also, like, that lower base model of the pro sort of out there, you know. I think that if you are asking that question, you should probably get the pro. Because, like, if you're not price sensitive enough and you, like, you sort of, you are, like, thinking, well, maybe I want that power.

You'll just feel better having gotten one of the pros. If you're not asking that question, you're just like, I just want a Mac. I want a thin-light MacBook. Then get the MacBook area. you'll be happy. So, like, if you're asking, you're probably going to be unhappy. Like, if you don't get the pro, the first time the air is slow for you, you'd be like, ah, Dieter, how dare you?

And I don't want that in my life. So I'm just saying you can speck out a MacBook air. Actually, specs are ridiculous. You can speck out an air with a 10th gen I7, 16 gigs of RAM, and a 2 terabyte SSD for 2250. That computer feels ridiculous to me. Yep. I completely agree. Like, if you're going to spend that much money, you should definitely buy a pro.

Because I can't imagine why you need those specs if you're not trying to use them. Unless you just want to keep a computer for 10 years. Whereas, let's see. Oh, it's funny. The MacBook Pro page on Apple's website is at Starkman because it's Pro. Whereas the 1799 configuration, you can spec it at, oh, 32 gigs RAM, 4 terabytes. Yeah, you can get up to 32 gigs of room and 4 terabytes of storage on the new MacBook Pro, the 13 inch. You know the only thing that would make me buy an air over the pro is the touchbar?

Yeah. I'm just going to say it. I really dislike the touch bar. But I guess we got to say the thermal thing to me is when I was reviewing the air, you just watch to hit the ceiling. And the processor throttles way down by design. And like, you hear the fans. You're like, now my computer's slow. Which I, the more I think about it makes less and less sense to me.

If you're going to run the fans super hot, it's because you're letting the processor get hot. It's like that whole system is optimized to keep things cool because it's a cooling system. I understand. But if you're going to run the fan super high and just deal with the noise, why not let the processor run hot? Yeah. I don't know. Maybe they just can't. I still feel like somewhere along the line, Intel told Apple, we got this.

Don't worry about it. Go ahead and design it the way you're designing it. We're going to take care of you with the next version of the chip. And Apple's like, cool. So we'll use this thing that is too hot now. But you promise the next one will be cool. And Intel's like, yeah, we got you. And Apple's like, we totally believe you Intel.

How does Apple make that belief? I don't know. And they couldn't get away from the air form factor, right? And they tried. They're super tried. Refused to let them. All right. Well, speaking of Intel chips, iterative revs, a bunch of new Microsoft stuff.

Yeah. So the headline is Surface Book 3 and Surface Go 2. But there's also like they finally put out a release date for the earbuds and they also drop the price. There's also new surface headphones. There's a surface doc two. There's new keyboards. There's just like, like, oh yeah, we make stuff. Here it all is.

That no one really has to. I mean, they're saying build, which is their traditional keynote developer conference. We're in developer conference season. Yeah. And so Apple is still having a virtual WWC. It seems like they're just all systems go. Yeah, Google announced they're doing a keynote just for Android. It was like they made a cute little video with George Decay, but it's not the full Google I.O. developer

conference. Yeah. I mean, I know. I know is scaled way down. And then Microsoft is kind of like, we're doing build, but it's more for developers than ever before. Yeah. And build was always kind of the outlier, right? Like, WWDC, the keynote was still a consumer keynote.

They would like, at the end, and they'd be like, and Swift UI. And then everyone would be like, but you announced a phone. and pay attention on the phone. So Apple was their keynote at the developer conference was very consumer focused. Google was somewhere in the middle, right? They would announce a bunch of consumer products, and then it was very much a developer conference. Microsoft was always at the farthest end of the spectrum where it was like, come for

the keynote. Someone will write code on stage for an hour now, which is very useful for its audience of developers, very much not a consumer keynote. So what you're seeing is Apple still going. Yeah. Google has scaled IO way down. Like, basically not happening, but like they're going to do an Android thing. Yeah.

Yeah. And then Microsoft build is fully a developer conference now. And they're just releasing all the hardware this way. Yeah. There's a great video of Panos Pente, like, in his wood panel study. Yeah. Saying I'm super pumped and like holding up products. Like, I love that.

Anyway, Microsoft stuff. So, I mean, what do you want to talk about first? I mean, I guess, let me do the Surface Go. two first because that's kind of the easiest. There's three things wrong with the original surface go. Well, four things wrong with the original surface go. The first thing that's wrong with it is it broke my heart because I loved it so much because it's so cute and we and exactly what I want out of a computer, but it was not great.

The first thing that was wrong with it was the screen was too small. The bezels were like embarrassingly huge. The second thing was wrong with it, it was slow. Slow. It was slow. Super slow. And then the third thing that was wrong with it was battery life was like not at all what you would expect out of it.

So they've attempted to solve all three things, but only if you buy the model that costs like $629, plus you got to buy the keyboard, plus you can decide if you want to get LTE. So the base price is $399, but for that price, you still get the Pentium Gold processor, which, and even worse, you get E-M-C storage, which is, so you got to step up anyway to get an SSD, and you might figure to step up an extra, you know, I don't think it's $150 or something, you might as well step up to the $629 edition, which gets you, I properly. core M3 processor and 128 gigs of storage and I think 8 gigs of RAM. I've used it for like a tiny little bit and it does seem like it's going to be okay. The screen is bigger. It's 10.5 inches and they say the battery is bigger. I don't know the exact watt hours on it off the top of my head. So if you're willing to spend a little bit more money, they may have fixed a problem, but we don't know.

But I'm excited about it because I can't help but be excited about tiny computers. It really feels like two different machines. Yes. Like EMC is so, so dang slow. Yeah. Well, it's paired with a Pentium gold, which honestly sounds like a chip for old people. Like, it just sounds like a laxative. I'm sorry.

You get an AARP discount. I would love a good old-fashioned bake-off between whatever iPad, I don't know which exact iPad you could get for $400 right now. But that iPad versus Surface Go, that's $400. But this $630 machine, like, if you're thinking, like, I want to do a laptop-y type thing with my iPad or I want to do a $4,000 keyboard or whatever Apple's charging, you know, versus I want to do a laptop-y type thing with this $630 and $100 keyboard with an M3. Like, that seems reasonable and interesting. It's reasonable and interesting. I mean, we'll see. It is only 120 gigs of storage.

But fine. You can expand it with a micro SD card if you really want to. The thing that's interesting, though, Neil, I said it's for old people. If you look at their video, it's like all kids. Like they are definitely thinking, especially if that $3.99 model, just buy this for your kid. It'll solve their homework problem and they'll leave you alone while you're in isolation. Like, I feel like that's what they're going for. Yeah.

I mean, honestly, like not having enough laptops for your family to properly homeschool right now is a thing. But it's a thing that is well solved by Chromebooks. Like, that's like a, Microsoft trying to make a thing that competes for the Chromebooks is just a theme now. Well, Windows 10X. They'd like, oh, just kidding. It's not a dual screen OS anymore. It's now for single screens. The end.

They're like, what? Yeah. Uh-huh. They're just going straight after ChromeOS with it now. They're just like, just kidding. Windows 10X is for single screens first. We'll figure out the rest later. Who knows when the duo is coming out and the Neo and everything else?

I think if you go to Best Buy and you browse the Chrome. Chromebooks. The $300, $400 Chromebooks are so, they just don't see very trustworthy. And when you have a piece of hardware like the Surface Go, it has this premium aspect to it. And it's from a brand that you know very well. And you love them because they don't allow you not to love them because they buy everything they do. The Wonderless shutdown really hit you hard. I was just going to say, now we're going to talk about wonder list for the next 45 minutes. Great. I just think like, right, but then you buy it. You buy the cheap one for Microsoft because it's Microsoft and you love it. And then you're, you made a mistake. Yeah. And then you've got this like slow story. Like that's just,

none of that makes any sense to me. But we got to get and we got to review it. The more interesting one to me is the Surface Book 3, which is. Do you want to take this one, Neelai? Because it is the most confusing machine ever. There's actually a number of Surface books in my family. Okay. for whatever reason my niece and nephew have them. I always ask them if they use them as tablets. And? No. Never.

Never. They never take them out of that base. Yeah. Right. And the base to me is like the most interesting part of the entire product. Because if you've got a big, thick base that makes it effectively a laptop, well, they've stuck more battery in there. There's all kinds of stuff they can do once they know in the base.

and so like you just put it together and then you have a much better computer because you've got more battery the thing is allowed to run faster et cetera et cetera et cetera then you pull it off and you've got this like giant Windows tablet that's unwieldy and it's like shouldn't you just put them together all the

like it's a tablet that is best as a laptop and worse as a tablet than almost every other tablet but it's so compelling just because you can pull it apart I mean I agree with you it's confusing I just don't know why we are across the industry now. We are insistent that the computer part needs to be in the screen.

Right? The iPad Pro has the same problem. You can make it a tablet and you can like do stuff with it. I would not go so far as to say that the tablet part of the book three is worse than everything else. It does mean that they have one compromise. So what they did, like there's a 13 inch and there's the, you know, the bigger one the 15 inch. And you can get if you want like an Nvidia, G4s, GtX, 16, 50. Max Q or the 15 inch you can get a 1660 TI you can you can like throw just a ton of RAM and GPU and all kinds of shit in the base but the GP the CPU has to live in the screen because you can take it off and it still needs to you know work which means that they've gone with they haven't gone like the 45 watt chips that you get in like a regular laptop you have the the smaller lower watt 15 watt Intel process first of the processors which means that this this machine is this incredibly confusing mix of like

way more powerful than, say, a MacBook Pro, because you can get, like, a GPU that, like, actually gets used by a bunch of apps and, like, can let you play games and do, like, a ton of stuff. But at the same time, less powerful than a MacBook Pro because it has an Intel processor that's, like, super throttled in, you know, in its wattage. And so it's like, it's an interesting experiment to see what this computer is for. Who needs it? Who benefits from this particular combination of componentry? But the form factor of the computer is the confusing thing.

Like if you need that GPU, why are you also thinking, sometimes I don't and I just want to walk away with this tablet? If you're a CFO, Neelai. You're talking like someone who's never seen a Microsoft back. But it's like, oh, I got to go over here and circle it. Sometimes you've got to sit down with your spreadsheet and crunch some numbers and you want to, you want your GPU to do that for you. Why, me a GPU to do that? If you're a young, talented architect, and sometimes, yeah, you're in the, you know, and then sometimes you've got to flip out the screen and show a client something.

And then, oh, your kids are home and you've got to pull up a recipe. There's a kid. I don't know. You know, if I was a young talented architect, I would just become a young talented architect influencer. And I would just shop myself to all of these companies nonstop. It's like every product video you make basically features me. You should just put me in it.

And I would just be a multimillionaire. And it's just Dieter's circling buildings over and over and over. I could imagine, I'm sure there are some people that they like the detachable tablet so much that that's why they would get this. I do think this would actually be a better product. Because I can imagine more people who would benefit from, I don't need a lot of CPU, but I do render things out every once in a while. And I need the GPU to kick in. or I play video games that are often not bottlenecked by the CPU at all, just GPU. So there are interesting use cases where that actually kind of makes sense that low-power CPU and a good GPU.

I'm just going to read you these two sentences from Tom's post on the book three. This isn't the best choice for a gaming laptop in terms of price and performance unless you want the unique combination of a removable touchscreen that also includes stylus support. You can configure Razor's new Blade 15 with an RTX-26. and 144 hertz display for less than the starting price of the service book three you have to really want to pull that screen off and have a tablet to me the service book three in the iPad pro are like an apex of form factor confusion around tablets right like we have gotten to the place where we definitely think the tablets are important but to make them useful you definitely have to turn them into laptops and now it's like because we think tablets there's something here with this

tablet thing. We have to remove, we have to be able to split this form factor up. But also we know that everybody just really wants this form factor. Just, I don't know, maybe I'm here, here's my hot take. Tablets are useless. The end. Like the idea that a tablet for a pro in this capacity is a useful thing. When Steve Jobs put out the iPad, he said it's a third device that needs to be good at these things in the middle. You still need a phone on a laptop. The more they've tried to sell tablets, the more they've tried to encroach on laptops. And all that has happened is we have turned them into laptops that are slightly worse because they're inherently compromised. Because phones got so much better and bigger that people just did all that tablet stuff on their phone.

Yeah. I mean, look, I think that sort of, like, I love the idea that it's a cool tablet that you can use into all this stuff. Yeah. And you click it in and it gets a better GPU and battery. That's, it's just cool on its face. But in practice, it's just gotten to the place where all we have is slightly worse laptops across. however many different companies. The right compromise here, honestly, is just make the 360 hinge, honestly.

Just everyone will think that they're going to flip it around and use it. It'll be crappier as a tablet if you ever actually do it, but then you get all the benefits of the laptop. Just make the hinge that does the flippy thing all the way around, the end. I'm going to put out the same challenge that we put out to people who game on Android phones. The mysterious Android gamer. if you are a hardcore surface book user and you are always attaching and detaching it from the base At least once a week

Just tweet it either You don't have to do it every five minutes Yeah Once a week is like still not enough Like once a week is like you realize that you've spent the money And you're gonna try to force it again, right? Like three times a week Okay

Every other day you're on you're detaching it intentionally Because that's how you use it He tweeted us. He's at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. We'd like to hear from you. I suspect you don't exist. But, you know, let me know.

Oh, a bunch of people are mad at me because I, in the surface go-to video, said that I think that I don't like the surface connector. And I don't. I know that Microsoft loves it. I know it's a very useful port. I know that it sticks in magnetically. I know that it makes it really convenient to plug a dock in. But you know what does all that just as well? Thunderbolt 3.

It's not a magnetic connector, but other than that, it just does it. And Microsoft apparently thinks that that's wildly insecure, which is interesting. USBC does it. That's not quite as well, but it can. You just don't get that magnetic fin. Wait, why does Microsoft think it's insecure? Because there's a leaked presentation, Tom wrote about it, that apparently Thunderbolt 3 has, like, direct access to the motherboard and direct access to the RAM in some way that isn't mediated by software, which means that it could potentially be insecure. is the claim from this internal presentation.

Right. But Thunderball 3 is basically PCI, right? Like, that makes sense. Okay. I mean, Apple seems to not worry about it so much. Well, my whole thing, like, there are many, many good things about the service connector, and I like, I understand. But it's just like with the Apple's magic keyboard for the iPad,

just because the thing that they made is pretty good, like that doesn't mean they could have made something better. Like, the things that have to happen to Microsoft's Surface laptops and tablets and whatever in order to keep that surface connector there is theoretically holding other things back. Like, they have to put the space in there to make the fin port work in the magnets, number one. Number two, it's keeping them from figuring out a way

to make Thunderbolt secure in a way they might want to, right? Because like, oh, we'll just keep this thing. I don't know. Do you think they're keeping their options open with AMD, right? Because Thunderbolt is very much an Intel thing. That could be. Yeah, I don't know. Like, they might be keeping their options open with arm as well. like what Apple does with Thunderbolt

and Arm is going to be it's like an upcoming question because Thunderbolt right now very much tied to Intel my original my pin tweet for years was it's okay to like things and it's okay that other people like things and like don't be mean for people

for liking the thing that they like I'm just gonna put out the flip side it's okay that I don't like the surface connector it does not mean that you're wrong that you like it I you are correct the surface connector is great I am correct the surface connector is garbage wow hot take on the verge cast

everybody. How philosophy works. Yeah. Everyone is right. Okay. The connector both exists and does not exist at the same time. What's it like to be a service connector? All right.

More Microsoft News. Does Xbox Series X have a service connector? Oh my God. That would really turn this upside down. So Microsoft's, I don't know, title wave of Xbox Series X news continues to crash upon our shores. Yeah. Today it was gameplay footage that came out,

uh, showing off ray tracing. They're sharing out their graphics. They're sharing off the games. They have a bunch of game announcements about what will be optimized, game sharing between the original Xbox 1 and the Xbox Series X. There's some confusion around other companies are going to implement it, particularly EA. What is going on here? Here's what I think. All right.

Microsoft's strategy, I think, is to really push this thing where you can buy games right now and they'll be playable on the next gen. And when you buy, and when the next gen comes out, current Xbox one owners won't feel super left behind. And so this is a kind of a weird, this doesn't feel like an E3 slate of games, if you know what I mean. Like, Assassin's Creed is definitely like the biggest IP. Like the best looking game in this lineup is called, and they let off the presentation with it, bright memory infinite. It is crazy beautiful, made by one person. It's like, and so they're really leaning into, the way it's looking to me with a lot of

these games, they don't look very next gen, except for like the ray tracing aspect, which is obviously super next gen. So it's going to be stuff like lighting. And like anything you can do on the GPU, anything you can do like with a shader to like make cooler special effects, like better smoke and wind. There's a ton of weather in a lot of these videos if you've noticed, like in the games, like it looks like weather technology is great. And you've got like in the bright memory trailer, there's all these like moving trees with leaves and stuff.

And it's in rain. And it's stunning and very next gen looking. But I feel like what is not here is what next gen looks like in like 20, 21, 22, when you have games coming out that won't be backwards compatible. Because if you make a game that has to also run on Xbox 1 or PlayStation 4, it has to work with a regular hard drive. And so you can't pack in, like, way higher-res textures, for instance, that wouldn't load as well.

You know, I just feel like there's a lot of stuff that game developers have to decide whether they're going to make a title right now that's going to bridge both consoles. which is probably a better decision at the moment. But there's going to come a time when I feel like what will truly look next gen in more ways than just these graphical effects will be the higher-res textures and stuff that takes more advantage of the SSD and the CPU. Yeah. And so Microsoft has a new badge optimized for Series X.

Like all of Microsoft's badges in the past, it means one or all of several. several things. So it's 4K resolution, it's faster cardboard compression, it's the use of the SSD, but it doesn't require the developer to use all those things. It's just maybe some of them, maybe all of them. I think this transition period in this console generation is going to be real weird, right? You're trying to convince a bunch of people to buy your new console when they currently have an existing console, right? How do you get someone to buy a new console? Well, there's better graphics, and there are these games that you can only play on this new console. Well, they're

trying to split that difference. It's like, well, there's better graphics, but the games, they're going to be backwards compatible. They're going to work on everything. But you'll know you're getting better graphics if you have this badge. But this badge doesn't necessarily mean you're getting all the cool stuff. It just means you're getting some cool stuff. And so all of a sudden, you're, you know, your pitch to the gamer is go buy this new expensive thing. Some games may be optimized for it, but we don't want to cut off the backwards compatibility. So you could still play them if you don't, don't buy it. But if you do buy it, it'll be outpice for it. You'll see it, you'll know because of this badge. But you also got to make sure you look

at what's listed underneath the badge so you can find out exactly what benefits you're getting. I think this is all directly related to the just gigantic shift in business model that the entire tech industry is seen. Right. Okay. So what was every previous console, the first generation of hardware sales lost money, right? This is just the standard way that particularly console gaming industry worked. Microsoft put out the Xbox. They lost Xbox. They lost money in every Xbox sale for a while.

They made all the money on games. They had the install base. They would put out the next version, cut costs, slowly start to make money in the hardware sales, but then have the install base, make money licensing all the games. That was the old way, to some extent, still happening. What is next to it now is a gigantic services business, right? Xbox Live. All of the in-game purchases, all the stuff. right like subscriptions to they're selling movies in the store so just having the

hardware there is important and now once you want that you need an entire range of prices of hardware hmm right like you need you need the cheap one you need the expensive one you just need to get the box in people's houses so I can start spending money on it even their branding along those lines even their branding for this cross-plac cross-generation games it's called smart delivery when smart delivery does not at all evoke cross-generation compatible. It would be like smart compatible or something, you know? Smart delivery is like a service.

Yeah. And that's what I say about EA at the very beginning of all this. EA has not pledged to use it. So you can get, you can buy Madden. But if you want to get Madden now and then use it on your Xbox Series X, you have to like buy it within some window and then upgrade it within some window. And it's not this promise of when you download the game, we'll deliver the right bits for your console. They don't want you to go to GameStop and buy like an old version of Madden 21 and then it runs next gen probably, right?

I wonder what it's like to be like the product lead for Madden at EA and just be like no matter what every year, I'm going to turn on this money fountain. Just like when they have their like stand up meetings, they're like, how are all the games going? And they get to the Madden guy. He's like, money fountain scheduled to turn on. Like it's coming. Don't you worry about it. We have an exclusive license for this game. What if it's, what if it's like an ice luge, like, that, like, that they have at CES for, like, they pour the alcohol down the ice looge, you know?

Yeah. No, I bet it's some more expensive ice luge than what it's. Yeah, probably. The Cs ice sluge is spectacularly low rent. Yeah. I bet the mad money found is a towering structure. Anyway, the next time console stuff is happening. I just think the, do you guys watch, I think Polygon did a great piece on rate tracing and Minecraft.

Just go look it up on Polygon. They have a bunch of demos of what it looks like with ray tracing, ray trace graphics on a PC in Minecraft. It is, it's Minecraft. It looks insane. Mm. Because it's still Minecraft.

Yeah. But it's like some of the most beautiful lighting you've ever seen in Minecraft. And it's just one of those places where, because the game, it's not trying to be beautiful, like Minecraft, at no point is Minecraft trying to be beautiful. You can just very clearly see what the ray tracing is doing.

Mm-hmm. It's just such a stark difference in the game. game versus other games are usually trying to be beautiful and they're faking it anyway. Right. Yeah. Lots of other games have been trying to fake a lot of these effects. So I'm very excited if this is all, I mean, again, this, this, this game made by this one dude, like is an example of, in some sense, it might become cheaper to make a good game. You know, it might be easier to make something that's very beautiful. or, you know, it's cheaper to make something performant.

Like, you know, Grand Theft Auto famously would read game data off your hard drive and the Blu-ray drive simultaneously to keep up. And so a developer doesn't need to invest that crazy amount of effort to get something good. These consoles are bonkers powerful. It's really exciting. I'm just trying to, like, hedge my own. excitement because I always know, like, you know, you get a launch lineup and it's a little disappointing. I mean, like, remember all that like fake boca and stuff and like lens flares in like

the early 360 generation? Like, you know, developers are going to have new effects and they're probably going to slather them on just a little too thick, I feel like at first. But in a year or two, games are going to be ridiculously better than they are right now graphically. At least there's that there's that horsepower is available. Yeah, I think I'm going to switch back to the Xbox this cycle. Whoa, why? Why? I just feel like the amount of complication in smart delivery and all this stuff.

Like Microsoft is a better computer company. And all this stuff feels like hard computer service problems. And Sony is like a great, I mean, I love my PS4. I've actually been playing it more than ever during all this. it's just a great product, but there's just a part of all of this developer transition, all of this service integration

where I'm just like, I don't know if Sony can pull it off. You just, you know? You just love you some Azure is what you're saying. I just like smart delivery conceptually, right? It's like it's just a very hard thing to pull off. I just wonder if smart delivery implies that Apple or I wonder if smart delivery.

delivery implies that Microsoft is going to lean a little bit more on this cross-generation thing and therefore be a little slower to flagship because Microsoft also has a lot fewer first-party titles than Sony does. So if Microsoft's going to have fewer standout flagship games to pull people in. So like they'll just going to be the big tent that allows it, you know, every, you know, every game to run everywhere. Where is Sony? maybe, and this is total conjecture, but maybe Sony will be pushing harder to like, here

is something that is literally impossible on any hardware on the planet other than the PlayStation 5. Oh, I'm sure that's what they'll do, and I'm sure I'll end up by it. I mean, why am I pretending like I'm not going to buy both, first of all? Just for the sake of conflict on this show. But I've been

a PS4 person and it's been great, and I just find myself like, oh, the computer part of this computer is not nearly as good. It's just like very obvious. that Sony is better at games and worse at managing a service and computer stuff. We talk about, like, there's just, everything is now a computer. And so, like, being good of the computer stuff is more important than ever. We'll see.

I guarantee you that Sony will come out with some game that makes me buy PS-F-F. All right. Speaking of computer stuff, one last thing to talk about. Dieter, you told me that you trolled the entire internet. Well, I had to troll the internet. It's a fair and accurate headline. but if you don't read it, read it, because, you know, I would, then maybe you would be confused. The headline is Google unifies all of its messaging and communication apps into a single team.

So. A team of apps. There's one person now in charge of all of their apps instead of them being spread out across a bunch of different teams, all of their communication apps. So let me tell you a story. A long time ago, there was an app that was the best email app for the iPhone by far. It was very, very good. It was called Accompli. And then Microsoft bought it.

And you know what they did? They didn't ruin it. They turned Outlook into it. They just turned it into Outlook and it became their email app, unlike what they did with, you know, Wonderlist. The person who was CEO of the company that made that app, Habiriof Taro, bounced around to Microsoft for a while, did some Cortana stuff for a while. And last October got put in charge of G Suite. And in the time since, Hangouts meet chat, chat, chat meet, meet chat, meet cute, whatever it was called. has now simply just become Google Meet and Google Chat for Enterprise.

They're working on cleaning it up for, you know, consumers. That's still a little bit of a mess. But they just made the call. Like, seems like he knows what he's doing. And so they have put him in charge of the apps that are on Android for communication. So primarily it consists of like duo messages and the phone dialer. Now, there's a bunch of really deep, nerdy WebRTC and RCS policy. We could get into here if you want.

I'm willing to do that. Go. That's right here. So if you think this means that they're just going to unify everything, it does not. Like Google thinks, like, look, like people, like the quote I got from Hiroshi Lockheimer, which I haven't put in the article, is, look, y'all use Slack, right? Yeah, yeah, we use Slack. Is anybody angry that Slack doesn't integrate RCS? I mean, it's just like.

No. The answer is no. And so. But it's not even like. I know. a lot. Yeah. That question is insane. Well, but the point is that do you want your Android messages to integrate with your work chat is like kind of the question? I don't know. Like this is their contention is like, look, like the work stuff, the enterprise stuff shouldn't be merged with

the consumer stuff. There's like different use cases for different kinds of apps, different kinds of communication apps. That's their, that's their what they're saying. And so don't expect all these apps to merge. And I actually, I do want them to like clean it up a little bit more. But I don't want them to rush into it because I saw what happened the last time they tried to rush into unifying all of their messaging apps. And it was called Hangouts. And that worked for about a month. And then it all went to shit. And then it has taken them three years to recover from that. Okay. I agree that enterprise apps and consumer apps are different. I would also point to the fact that the two most popular enterprise apps in the world right now are Slack and Zoom, which are great

consumer apps, and that is why they are successful. And consumers are using them in droves. Yeah. Well, I think that they want Google Chat hangouts that transition to finally happen. I think that's like the next thing that has to happen. It has to stop being in this weird another zone that it's been in for very, very long time. Like, we're going to kill it. And everyone's like, no. They're like, no, we're going to replace it. We're like, okay. And what are you going to do that? And like, we're going to do it. And it just like took a while. And it's still take it a while. But to get back to the RCS and Slack point. Yes. It makes no sense. Okay. No one is like I want to I message from Slack either. Right. Right. Right. I also guarantee you

that if that demand existed, Slack would build, test, deploy, and iterate on its RCS connector. Yeah. 10 times faster. Yeah. Than Google has done anything with RCS. Okay. The demand doesn't exist because RCS is for texting and Slack is for chat rooms at work. So then Google's argument, the reason that the analogy being made here is why would you expect chat and Android messages to be the same thing? Wait, I'm sorry, which one is Google Chat? This is part of the frickin' problem right here. Google Chat is Google's Hangouts competitor, and it will eventually be the thing that they replace. It's Hangouts competitor?

God damn it. Google Chat is Google Slack slash Microsoft Teams competitor. And eventually it will be on the consumer side become, I think, where places Hangouts, which is what everyone used to call Google Chat, but was never actually Google Chat. Neely's dying.

I literally am watching him die right now on my video screen. These names are all bad. I do like the idea that I can't accidentally convert a personal chat into a work chat. Yeah. Like, I like there's some sort of membrane there. Yeah. But there are a lot of times when you are in a one-on-one conversation and then you want to move to, you add somebody into that. And you're like, actually, you know what?

This should be a voice call. Oh, actually, let's do this on video. Hey, let me share my screen. Oh, let's bring this back to voice. Google chat slash meet are designed to do that. And then on Android, it's a combination of like Android messages and Duo. And like, so we're not going to get like a grand integration, but there are going to be some benefits. So one of the things that, uh, have you told me was like right now, uh, there's Hangouts Meet and there's Duo on Android.

And they both use some variant of WebRTC, right? But, like, Duo is, like, using a new kind of video spec for to make sure that, like, it looks better. And I don't think meat is there yet. And so Google is, you know, they support this open spec WebRTC for video on the web. And then they're building products on top of it, but they're building products in two slightly different directions. And now he'll be able to just, like, have them build in the same direction and use a technology in similar ways instead of different ways. I mean, that's nice. Yeah.

That sounds better. I agree with your take. This is not my take. I'm just telling you what I have been told. My take is Google has been wildly negligent with RCS and with Android messaging. They took way too long to recover from the fiasco of hangouts because, you know, it's like, it's like, if you ever had just like a really, really bad meal at like a particular restaurant? You know that that restaurant is good, you know, and like you, you'll go back there again,

but you just don't want to think about it. And then you finally go back and like, oh, God, I should have like solved this problem sooner. that was Google Plus slash Google Hangouts for Google, right? Like, they just, it was so, all of that, that entire episode was so painful for them. It was easier for them just not think about it. And that meant that things got messy. And now they're thinking about it again. Yeah.

Well, the take I was agreeing with was they looked around and they identified a guy who seems like he knows what he's doing. Yes, that is true. It is amazing that I agree with your take and you went there. Yeah. I was just like, this guy maybe seems like he knows what he's doing. Like, yep, he's got some history. I think if they more cleanly differentiate the enterprise and consumer stuff,

they come up with some branding that actually makes sense. Yes. And they should just name all the consumer stuff G-chat, which is a product that has never existed, but everyone thinks exists. It exists now. It's the enterprise product. All right.

We've got to take a break. I can't talk about this anymore. We're taking a break. We'll be right back. Support for the show. show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring

Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting

your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build.

All right, Paul. Yeah. Every week, my friend. You do a segment. What's it called? What is it called? It's called embarrassingly parallel. It's called phone prison. Lonely alone. Fold the phone. It's called the hearings. Record resolution. Revolution. I've carved this for you out of a It's the weekly robot backflip update. Rhymes with what's popping. Shasoo Evage. Safety first, they said. Bring a ding ding.

Kickflip, the kickstand script. What is it like to be a dolphin? Please don't block my chain. Wireless vapes. Keyboard in the front club. Population 2. Cold ears. Warm heart.

Can't lose. Can't lose. The decline of dirt. Meal pods to 2. Jeff Bezos edition. First to fold. Type like nobody's watch. Spin to win.

Space egg. East Gates Arms Race. Plam this. Because I'm going to interrupt this week's regularly scheduled segment for an important announcement from the USB Implementers Forum. Call touch a tree. Touch the future. Hashtag dongle what? Nightlight.

Highlights. Sleep tight. iPad land party. My heart is a low frequency oscillator. Please replace magenta. Why didn't you push that button? Don't brick the shoes. Don't brick the jacket.

smart yoga pants. Nice netbook, man. Tell me, am I beautiful? Why not two? Keyboard in the front club honorary inductee edition. The penultimate dongle. A jaunty nagonotch. Invisible to visible. I believe I have met this robot dog before in a past life. Phones aren't jokes. Robots dance while they die. A cloud computing murder tale brought to you by the same people who collectively write all the James Patterson novels. It's called Android tablets are a real gift to humanity and I think we forget that sometimes. Did I ever tell you about the time I built my own computer? The year of the Linux desktop with a delightful plot twist brought to you by Christopher Nolan. Dongletown, USA. The JSON of Emotions. ATX, more like late TX.

No more notches? And there's a question mark. A lot of people leave off the question. Skate 4 is not a joke. Do I look like I'm laughing? Now, that's a smart kid. The sweetest pies. Adam and Book is Best Book.

It's called You've Been a Good Boy. Nice boca you've got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. Are there no laws for hype fees? And the track point guys laugh and laugh. Sorry, I can't pass the jewel because of cybersecurity. Fridge ice is trash ice, please don't at me. If my shoes turn green, it's time for crime.

Let me just jot that down with my money pin. It's called What Do You Want? A Medal. Here's the place where we do the crimes, signed your friend a teen. 600% screen-to-body ratio. I've seen The Matrix. I'm not an idiot. You know what? Maybe radio was a mistake. The real crime, teens, is Flavor.

Our best banana phone yet. Flip phones, and there are three O's. Uh-oh, we have a time hole. I'm taking my talents to artificial general intelligence. So you want to get into the GPU biz. Called Express Card Never Died, it only slept. In the apocalypse, we don't need space bars. Web often, oh yeah.

To charge the time, do a dongle crime. If a Roomba had arms, who would it hug? The cloud, but for kids. Revenge of the glass hole called Bring Back Bump. Top 10. and LCD betrayals. A plurality of puffs. Take a picture of your ear. Do it. Take me to your metaverse, Mr. Sweeney. I'm a Moog man now. It's my year of the Linux desktop, boys. If I were a rich man, pop the stack. More hurts than you can handle old man. Tap me on the shoulder.

Displayport alt mode 2.0, a memoir. One last time to hold this nation together. Can you do it? As we've heard, it's always been called the same thing. It is and always always and all will always be called so long and thanks for all the Bitcoin. Obviously, I'm referring to the Zoom acquisition of Keybase. Keybase is the coolest and worst thing simultaneously. They have basically made like serious and amazing software and encryption and cryptography tools easily usable, beautiful, super friendly, and they're also funded by what in my mind is a scam coin called Stellar.

And so Keybase, they did some sort of, the Stellar did like an airdrop via Keybase where they just gave a bunch of people stellar because it's a scam coin and nothing means anything. And I got like, I don't remember how much, but it was serious amount of dollars. And I like, there was like someone who popped up a service where you could just like send the stellar to him and he'd pay you in lightning like Bitcoin. You're just making up words. Yeah. Well, it worked. And I have money now thanks to the stellar acquisition of Keybase.

But it's also really sad because it felt like one of the coolest things in the space was like trending towards kind of a scammy. world. So now Zoom just bought Keybase as part of their like, we're going to make our software secure. And it's not really clear what's going to happen to Keybase. Like it might just be an aqua hire. I think the phrase is leaders from Zoom and Keybase will work together to determine the future of the Keybase product. I mean, that that means it's done. That means it's done. There's no way, that that, that statement is, that's a classic Aqua Harris statement. We, we will work together to determine the future. That means goodbye. That means it's going to get wonder listed at best. My hope is that just like, if you told me four years ago that I would host all my code

on a Microsoft cloud service and use a Microsoft like IDE for, for developing full time, like, I was like, get out of here. But they, they, they, they, they, pivoted so hard to loving developers. They really embraced the words of Steve Ballmer, developers, developers, developers, developers. And, you know, now love them or hate them, it's kind of hard to get away from Microsoft's services for developers. So I'm saying Zoom pivots from being hilariously insecure to being the ultimate cryptography. Because Keybase has a whole suite of products. They have encrypted Git. They've got like an encrypted chat and I think they have working group chat as well.

Like they've got all these wonderful services. They've got like a like a Dropbox competitor in a sense. All encrypted, all with good cryptography. Zoom could be the company that brings them to the mainstream and turn that image around. Yeah, I think the amount of work Zoom has done to bring on advisors. We're going to interview Alex Stamos, one of the Zoom security advisor in a week or so. They've brought on these advisors. They're buying Keybase.

They froze in their features for 90 days to focus on security. It is a pretty rapid response to a lot of well-deserved criticism. Paul, I agree. No one knows what's going to happen with Keybase. Like, even their own press materials are like, yeah, we'll see. In a normal world, we would just find out because Keybase is in our office building. Oh, really? I would just like go over there.

But I guess not. So we'll keep sending me emails until they answer. Anyways, thanks for the Bitcoin, guys. I was going to buy you on Bitcoin, but it turns out they're very expensive. They are expensive. So I will not be buying you a parting Bitcoin. It's pumping that the halving is coming up. Are you guys aware of this?

Yes, because Liz is dying to write about it. What is your take on the having, the halving? Well, so every four years, Bitcoin has a fixed issuance rate that gets cut in half every four years. So about every 10 minutes, a new block is rewarded to, like a new block is mined and the miner gets a reward of Bitcoin. So that's how that's the, what's called the flow in into the Bitcoin system. And we're right now at like 17 million Bitcoin and there's only ever going to be 21 million. So but the the incoming supply. gets cut in half every four years. So that's what we're coming up on. And at the moment of the having the stock to flow ratio of Bitcoin will be scarcer than that of gold. So there's X amount of gold that exists. And then there's Y amount of gold that is mined, right? So the amount that exists is the stock, the amount is mined is the flow, that Bitcoin's ratio, will be more extreme than gold's ratio after this having.

So it's very exciting. And what does that, does that just mean that I'll see ads for Bitcoin on like late night cable TV? It means, yes. Yes. It means Bitcoin is becoming like the most scarce asset in existence. So if you think Bitcoin is money and you think it's an asset, it is becoming officially the absolute hardest money.

Like if you, if you, if you were into gold because of its stock to full ratio, you just got one up. Okay. I want to believe. Mm-hmm. I just, at some point, you watch all of these things result in what people really want, which is dollars. Yeah. Right? Like the, when I say Bitcoin is expensive, it's because I have dollars and I want, you know what I mean?

Like the, the relationship to the, the Fiat currencies is still just the, the fundamental of the thing. Right. to transition to Bitcoin being valued for Bitcoin is? I think in, I feel like in 10 years, you would be like mad if someone tried to pay you dollars. Wow. Like a hard prediction for, you're going out with a bang. I think there's something wrong with most monies that can be printed and Bitcoin can't

be printed. And there's something kind of special about that. And so, yeah, like most people get interested in this. stuff because of for dollar gains. Like, I'm going to buy low and sell high. But most of the people I follow in the Bitcoin community are trying to create a permanent exit from the Fiat system. Paul, I have a harder question. How many years until Bitcoin doesn't make me feel stupid? I mean, like, how many layers of the internet are there? Like, I don't fully understand TCP IP and DNS and all that.

all that sort of thing. Like Bitcoin is relatively difficult to understand. I think the problem with Bitcoin's complexity is that there are people who are financially incentivized to make it complex because when they make it complex, they are able to get an edge on other people. I don't mean like in the core paper of like what Bitcoin is itself. I mean in the Bitcoin economy and like the shit that happened, the meta stuff. It feels like all the money in that economy.

is trying to make things easier. Like cash app, you know, you can just tap a button buy some Bitcoin or you can like dollar cost average with like Swan Bitcoin or, you know, a lot of the work in there is trying to make it more usable and easy to use. And I feel like when you compare it to the Fiat system, like which one's really actually more complex?

All right. Well, this is an excellent transition into you talking about your new show because you're already done two episodes and you're talking about Bitcoin. Tell people about your new show and then we'll get out of here. Yeah, so CyberDeck Users Weekly, I just want to talk about, like, what technology is for and, like, kind of the weird directions that I'm interested in going with it. I don't know, like, I'm thinking of doing an episode of, like, are we using computers correctly?

You know, like, maybe we should be doing more math. I don't know. Like, I just got a lot of thoughts I want to dig into it. And I've also got a lot of people I love in the open source and technology industry that I want to talk to. So my first interview was with Matt O'Dell, who is a bitcoiner. And that was a lot of fun. But he's like a long time Vergecast listener. So we got to talk a lot about, you know, security and privacy and technology in general.

And then also Bitcoin. So there's probably going to be a lot of that. And yeah, we'll just, we'll see where it goes. But yeah, some people are already listening. And I'm really grateful to them. And yeah, you can find me at Paul. All right. Well, Paul, it has been privilege and great fun to be doing this show with you for

across three different shows to be doing it. I'm sure we will have our paths cross again in the future. But thanks for doing this, man. Thanks for making the verge of us. It's been great. Thank you, guys. All right. That's it.

That's our podcast. This is for you, buddy. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul. Paul