The Vergecast - NFTs explained / Sonos' new bluetooth speaker / Asus ROG phone 5 review

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn talk to Verge deputy editor Elizabeth Lopatto about the NFT craze from the past few weeks and explains how the transactions work. Verge deputy editor Dan Seifert joins the show for a gadget roundup — from the Asus ROG phone 5 review to the new Sonos Roam bluetooth speaker. Further reading: COVID-19 took disease tests out of the lab — and may keep them there People who are vaccinated can socialize together without masks, CDC says COVID-19 vaccine supplies are on the rise in the US Single-shot COVID-19 vaccine is popular at vaccination sites Artifacts from the first COVID-19 vaccination in the US are headed to the Smithsonian Meet Dr. B, the startup connecting people to leftover vaccines Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million NFTs, explained Of course John Legere bought an $888,888.88 NFT from Steve Aoki Jack Dorsey’s first tweet may fetch $2.5 million, and he’ll donate the NFTy proceeds to charity Sonos Roam officially announced for $169, preorders start now Sonos partners with Audi to bring its audio tech to cars Asus ROG phone 5 review  Leaked OnePlus 9 Pro and OnePlus 9 renders leave little to the imagination OnePlus’ next phones will come out on March 23rd Samsung will host another Unpacked event on March 17th Apple reportedly overestimated iPhone 12 mini demand, by a lot Insta360’s Go 2 is a $299 action camera with a surprisingly powerful case The most powerful Wear OS watches are held back by Wear OS Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 review: AMD and Nvidia at their best Razer Blade 15 Base review: losing its edge Best gaming laptops in 2021 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coming up on the Vergecast, Liz Lapado joins us, talk all about NFTs. It's NFT mania this week. Dan Sefer joins us, talk about new Android phones, some new laptops, and a new center speaker. That's the Vergecast coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools

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slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for 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, blockchain technology. I don't know that you want to say that. I do and I don't. Anyway, I'm your friend, Nila, Dieter Bonas, here. I am your 18th gig of RAM. It's good. It's the one that right over the top.

Liz Lapato is here. I'm here to bring a little bit of chaos to the verge cast, as I think long-time listeners know. As always, we're going to make Liz talk about NFTs. It's going to be great. A little bit later, Dan Seafurt is going to join us. We got some gadgets talk about. Before we get into NFTs with Liz, I want to start, as always, with our COVID update, kind of like a big week in, like, vaccine news and, like, just feeling good as we're recording a few hours ago.

President Biden signed the Recovery Act. There's just good news in the rate of vaccines. But before we talk about the vaccine news, Nicole Wetzman wrote a great piece this week about at-home testing, which is something that has been somewhat sorely lacking. There are now these new PCR kits. PCR is the good kind of testing. There's a company called Lucera. There's another company. This was, Liz, from what I understand, like kind of like a dead end of research until COVID, and now there's like an explosion of innovation here. I have a company. I have a company called. I have Lucera tests at my house because there's no testing around where I am and my sister is a doctor and she has sent me one. They're so cool.

So now at least we have some access to testing. It's really neat. Yeah, I mean, so there are a couple of things that are pretty well known about what happens when you go to a doctor's office, right? Like you're not necessarily at your best. Your blood pressure is a little bit higher than it normally is. Other stuff, like in terms of, you know, testing requires laboratories. And so you maybe can get that at your doctor's office. but if you are like me, sometimes your doctor just sends you to another lab and that sucks.

And that lab is closed and they don't tell you. And then you have to go to the next day and then you find another lab that's nearby. And then the people there are super mad because everybody who went there is mad at them because the other lab was closed, but it's not their fault. And you're worried they're going to kill you because they're so pissed. They're like jabbing you with needle to get the lot out. Peter, what's living in Oakland like? I mean, look, I didn't have that experience the last time I went to a lab. But the experience I did have was waiting in line for two hours, which sucked.

Especially indoors. Like, we were all masked, but it was the most people I had been around in weeks. And it's a pandemic. So that was not great. Yeah. I mean, these things are cool. I mean, you know, I took bio in college. I remember doing a PCR experiment.

It was complicated and hard. I think I got it wrong. I think I had a good grade in that class. But this was like a little plastic box with two double A's. You put the violin. You run it for 30 minutes. It has a result that you can be caught. Very cool.

So read that story. It's just a great, it's a great story about innovation that wasn't happening, and it was spurred on by the pandemic, and now it's happening at a high rate. Very cool. On the vaccine front, good news. The CD says if people are vaccinated,

they can socialize together without masks, which is like the biggest glimmer of hope that has ever glimmered in the past year. That's very cool. Supplies of COVID-19 vaccines are up in the United States, by an administration, buying more of the single-shot Johnson and Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which I think a lot of people were concerned that there'd be some hesitancy

around that one because of the numbers are reported compared to the other vaccines. Turns out not a lot of fear there. The single shot vaccine is indeed popular at various vaccination sites. I have a story about that. Actually, this is just a fun story. Artifacts from the first vaccination in the United States are now going to be in the Smithsonian. I feel like they should keep that in storage for a while. Like, I don't need to think about that.

I don't need to go to a museum to think about COVID for a good long time. Well, Nilai, how is Max going to learn about it? We're just not going to talk about it. That seems just be like a mystery. Like, what happened in that year of my parents' lives? Like, she'll just find out about it. Someone can make a documentary. If you're a teenager, start thinking about that documentary now.

Vaccine distribution around the world. Very cool. We have a story about drones that are helping to speed up deliveries of vaccines in Ghana. And then lastly, I'm assuming a lot of people listening to this, hopefully you are high analysts. You can get a vaccine. A lot of people are not. There are now websites. There's one called Dr. B, which is a startup that is basically like connected, putting people on lists around the country.

So at the end of the day when providers have leftover vaccines, you get a text, you get two hours to get over there, you can get vaccinated. That's very cool. It's a good use of technology. There's like, you should read that story. It's great. It's like a classic tech company story. Like a guy started it and how do they grow? They bought another one.

It's like every story is the same story. Also, the holdup is not actually on the user side because like half a million people. have signed up, I think. The problem is that they're trying to verify vaccine sites so that they can, like, guide people to the right ones. And that's taking a lot longer than, like, all of the people, like, in all honesty, me, who are dying to get vaccinated or just like, sign me up, coach, put me in. Anywhere you want. I wonder if like Google could make a website to solve that problem. Don't kill me. We should announce that. It's amazing. It's like, we're going to cruise into a year since that announcement soon.

And it is now easier for me to plug two double-A batteries into a box and just do the test at my house than to go to a website run by Google that tells me where I can get a test. Anyway, glimmers of hope. It's all positivity on the Vergecast today. And now we're going to talk about NFTs. So if you don't know, NFTs stand for non-fungible token. Liz, I would say the past two weeks have taken NFTs from being a somewhat obscure idea to literally today an artist named Beeple sold an

NFT of a digital painting at Christie's that fine auction house for 69 million dollars. Nice. And that's just a rocket ride of awareness I would say. And there's history and people did know about it, but like the past two weeks in particular that is quite a journey we've been on.

So Liz, you've been writing about it. We've got some other coverage from Justine and others across the site. Jake has been writing about it a lot. But Liz, let's start. What's an NFT? Great question. So NFT stands for non-fungible token, which probably for some of you is not going to help. So basically, imagine a Bitcoin, right? It's fungible. Every Bitcoin is basically the same. You can do whatever you want with them. You can split them into parts, all of that. So this is more like a trading card, right? It's if you trade it for, like if you trade, I don't know, I'm trying to think because I wasn't a trading card person. But if you trade like a rookie card of, I don't know, Babe Ruth for another card,

you no longer have the Babe Ruth card. The identity matters. And so part of what the NFT does is it makes it really clear what the chain of ownership was for this specific object. Okay. Let me stop you there. Does it? There's just a very complicated idea that I want to peel apart here before we talk about the explosion. of an empties. For all listeners, I want you all to know that in the back of Neely's mind is a deep

fear that we are about to talk about what makes a thing a thing and whether it's possible to own the thing and whether or not words have meaning. And he's just staring at me through the Zoom window asking me with his eyes to shut up and not interrupt him. We're not, we're going to get there so quickly. And I'm just trying to slow it down. But let's start and see how long it takes us. So things have value. No, so you've got the physical trading card, right? And like, tops, which makes trading cards, prints a couple thousand of them a year, or tens of thousands of them a year. They sell them. They don't print them again. They end up on a market. You can buy and sell them. You can keep them in your grandmother's attic for the rest of your life. An

NFT is just linked to a thing that exists digitally elsewhere. So like Top Shots is like the NBA's NFT trading card platform where you can buy and sell video clips of basketball highlights. But like, I can just watch those basketball highlights whenever I want. And I don't have to pay anybody. And I don't, you don't own them. Like, you don't own that highlight. You just own, like, a copy of the highlight. You see where I'm, like, there's actually not a connection between buying and selling the NFT and, like, creating scarcity around the thing. Correct. Does this make any sense? Yeah. So it does. And it's, it's interesting. So I'm going to, I'm going to phrase this another way. because are John Ligere, John Ligary?

Ledger. Ledger. Lager. I don't know. I only read his name. Who, by the way, and I'm just saying this, former T-Mobile CEO, John Ledger, I'm just going to say this, is like the number one Decoder super fan, so he's on my good one. He's tweeted like every episode of Decoder.

So I'm like, I'm on Team Ledger right now. All right. Well, Ledger bought a 888,000. $888.88. That's good. From Steve Aoki. And if you're curious about what it is, you can go on YouTube and see it. It's a 30-second long video with music and an animation of what I would describe as a person with fur and sunglasses.

Oh, this is fucking horrifying. The fur is pink and blue for anybody who cares. But so you can see it, right? But in some sense, I think what you're purchasing is a sense of ownership. So I've been talking to people on the Top Shots platform. And yeah, there's a story coming, guys. Get excited. They talk about over and over again, you know, well, yeah, you can watch this clip on YouTube, but you don't own it.

You don't have a sense of ownership. There's no, like, it doesn't accrue to you, right? Like, you're not part of it. And so for them, because a lot of them are like very, very serious NBA. fans. It's almost, it feels at times like this is like the next iteration of a fan club where like you join the club and you get to talk to some of the stars of the NBA because they hang out in the Discord. And like sometimes they'll trade you like their jersey for a particularly good moment, which, you know, yeah, they're like there are a number of very funny transactions.

So, you know, it seems like there's like some mix of like a sense of ownership and a sense of community that are really powering Topshot. So I want to talk about this without going, I don't know, too far down the epistemology rabbit hole here. But I mean, like, here's a narrative. We used to know what a thing was and like what it meant to have it. And that was a physical thing. And then things went online.

And so like instead of having a VHS tape or whatever, there was copies and things became infinitely copyable. And it sort of messed with our idea of what it was to like have something. And Liz, you called this a. sense of ownership. And I think that's, that's kind of the core of it, because typically our sense of ownership means some kind of control. It means some kind of like you are in charge of the thing. And with digital stuff, that sense of ownership just becomes a copyright and you, you know, you try and tell people not to pirate your stuff. With an NFT, you don't, like, that sense

of ownership gets another step removed. What you own is the token. You own the cryptographic thing in the blockchain that says that you are the person currently in possession of that cryptographic key in the blockchain that may or may not, but in most cases is not, like, one to one the same thing as the thing it's representing. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, I apologize for being a philosophy major. We got there so fast. It's been like, it's been like eight minutes. But the thing that I keep thinking about is art in the age of mechanical reproduction, um, where, Benhamine talks about how physical objects have an aura. And this is like born out by psychology. So like one thing that we know about people is that if we take a sweater and we say this

sweater used to belong to Albert Einstein, people really like the sweater and they want to own it. If you take the same sweater and you tell people it belong to Hitler, people want nothing to do with the sweater. It's the same sweater, you know? Like the sweater didn't change. You just change the story about the sweater. And that, that aura is like part of what physical objects have. And it's been a minute since I've read this book, but I should probably read it again. But one of the things that Benhamine talks about is that when you can endlessly reproduce things, you lose this aura.

And in some ways, I have been looking at this as like a way of reintroducing the aura to a reproducible digital object. An infinitely reproducible object. First, I will note that the verge very famously made a video where Dieter narrates art in the age of mechanical reproduction to just scenes of CES. Yeah. It's good. You should watch it.

It's really good. Easily one of the best videos we've ever made. We were completely hung over and out of our minds on the lack of sleep when this video was conceived and produced. But one of the best ones you were made. Here's my question, though. But that's the thesis, right? You can make many, many more objects that are the same thing.

You lose the aura. Yes and no, that's true. Right? Like, we do live in an age of mechanical reproduction. There are, like, lots of copies of. cars, right? And if I tell you this was, I think Elton John's, like, Lamborghini just sold for, like, $30 million and serious car collectors, like, that car's a piece of shit. Like, other Lamborghinis of exactly the same vintage do not fetch that price. Like, this makes no sense, but it's Elton Johns.

And there is, like, a market for this thing because of that aura. Digital goods don't have any of that. Why not? I would say, like, underline, like, my college-level economics courses was markets are based on scarcity and their supply and demand and there's only a certain number of commodities in the world and if there's a lot of demand and no supply the price goes up like this is like the basics of economics the internet represents the end of scarcity so like streaming services charge you for access to an infinite catalog of music and movies because they cannot charge you for the movies or music because you might as well just go pirate them So actually the cost is convenience, right?

Like DRM systems generally have failed because they are less convenient than just piracy. So if you just charge for extreme convenience in the case of Spotify or whatever, people might pay you the money. But so to put these two ideas together, what Liz is talking about, you're talking about, the thing that made Elton John's Lamborghini valuable was the story that it belonged to Elton John and potentially the historical fact that it did. The thing that makes an NFT, what an NFT is then is it's basically a computerization using tons and tons of carbon to produce the electricity to make the blockchain of that story. It takes that story, it makes it a verifiable thing on a network. And that's like kind of it. Some of them don't actually take tons and tons of carbon. I want to be super clear about this.

It sort of depends on the blockchain. I'm very sorry for what I'm about to do here, but I'm going to do it anyway. Do it. So Bitcoin is probably the most. carbon hog of the bunch. Ethereum is a little bit better, but one of the problems that Cryptokitties very famously had, Cryptokitties being one of the original NFTs in like, what, 2017, was that they, it was so popular, it like clogged the network really badly.

So Ethereum is not as bad as like the Bitcoin blockchain, but it's like not ideal. And if you look at other blockchains, they're doing things differently. So both Bitcoin and Ethereum are. proof-of-work blockchains, and they require consensus in order to get to a result. And both of those things mean that you're using more energy, basically, to produce something. The thing that's really interesting to me about the top-shot blockchain, which is called flow, is that it's a relatively centralized blockchain, and it's also using proof of stake, which means that there's a lot less of a carbon impact involved. So in addition to not having to do the decentralized stuff, and

not necessarily using the same methods to arrive at like the block. They've managed to make it a little bit better. Now, Ethereum has famously been about to move to proof of stake for a very long time. I will believe it when I see it because getting to consensus on that is going to be difficult. But there are alternatives that are less environmentally unfriendly. That said, like Ethereum is the most popular thing for NFTs right now. I rescind my cheap shot. Well, I mean, it comes up every time we write a story, every time we tweet about it, like, people are like, this is going to destroy the environment. And the answer is if it continues the way it's going, it absolutely will. If these alternative marketplaces come up or if this big Ethereum shift comes up, maybe it won't.

It's like a good argument to have. To me, it kind of feels like being asked to judge Windows phone on an update that might come out in six months. Like, I don't know what that's going to happen. Like, I've got it right now. Like, Rob Grancowski selling his Super Bowl highlights, he's not waiting for Ethereum 2.0 to come out. He's just going to sell them on the Ethereum blockchain right now. And that's the end of that. And he's going to make his money.

He's going to continue to be Rob Grancowski. And we're just going to have to deal with whatever fallout of that. Like, there's a gold rush right now in the inefficient power system. The real question is whether this is going to lead to a functional new kind of creator economy that is maybe on a more efficient. less environmentally fraught blockchain, and that's going to allow creators to buy and sell things in a way that 20 years ago they would buy and sell t-shirts and records and movie clips. I do not know the answer to this question. Like, if all this is, if fundamentally all this is is Patreon, but you get to say you own

something, fine. But like, it, like Liz, you don't own the video clip when you buy it from Topshots, right? This is a question I asked you that. Like, you're just getting a license to a video clip. Well, I'm glad you asked because I happen to have the terms of service right in front of me. Would you like me to read them to you live? This is the most riveting radio I can think of, please. So this is section four, ownership, license, and ownership restrictions.

And this is bold and in all caps. Your ownership of moments will only be recognized by us if you have purchased or otherwise rightfully acquired such moments from a legitimate source. Oh, my. and not through any of the category B prohibited activities as defined below. What are the category B prohibited activities? Well, it's below. But I'm going to give you a couple of...

I want to zoom in because they're about to define art, own, and purchase moments. And I think that that's going to interest you. Perfect. Okay. So art means any art designs and drawings in the form of media, including without limitation, video, or photographs that may be associated with the moment you own. Okay. Own means with respect to a moment, a moment that you have purchased or otherwise rightfully acquired from a legitimate source and not through any of the category B prohibited activities as defined below where proof of such purchase is recorded on the flow network.

And a purchased moment means a moment that you own. So I'm going to scroll down to the category B activities. So we're going to go below. Right. Just before you do that, Dieter, when you warned me that we would be talking about the nature of a thing. Yeah. Did you think that conversation would resolve to the National Basketball Association defining the word own? Nope, I did not.

But I actually am super here for it. It's actually really great. Because what we're learning here is that the NFT, like the thing that creates the ownership are the terms of service. It's the whole idea of ownership is a story we tell each other. And NFTs are a thing that's layered on top of that. And like the fact that the thing that actually creates the ownership, is the terms of service that Liz is reading? Like, just, it's all just stories all the way down.

I would like to know what the category B prohibited activities are. Yeah. Now that we're below. I'm scrolling. We're thoroughly below now. Okay. Oh, wow. This is involved.

All right. So this is conditions of use and prohibited activities. You agree you're responsible for your own conduct while using the app, sure. And consequences thereof, you use the app only for purposes that are legal and proper in accordance with these terms and any applicable law. regulations. What if there's like a moderation thing? You get kicked off the platform. Yeah, they actually have a code of conduct. Of course they do. One of the things I've been really enjoying about their Discord community is that I'm coming from Wall Street Betts, from having recorded on Wall Street bets. And I have come to this Discord community and everybody's like very polite and like you

get warned if you use a bad word. It's actually very well moderated. I'm kind of impressed. That's great. So basically, you will not send a upload, distribute, or disseminate any unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, fraudulent, obscene, or otherwise objectionable content. Involve the distribution of any viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses, corrupted files, hoaxes, or any other items of a destructive or deceptive nature. Involved the uploading, posting, transmitting, and otherwise making available through the app of any content that infringes on the intellectual property rights of any party. involve using the app to violate the legal rights, such as privacy and publicity of others,

involve in engaging, promoting, or encouraging illegal activity, without including, without limitation, any money laundering, involve interfering with other users' enjoyment of the app, involved exploiting the app. So this is just like the Twitter moderation rules. Like, that's, this is what they all look like. Yeah. They also ban bots. Of course.

You can't have a bot. Well, good luck. But more social platforms should have don't interfere with other people's enjoyment. of the app. That's a great catch-all. Yeah, I love that. But here's what I'll say. When you buy most things, you buy a roll of toilet paper, the Charmin Bear doesn't pop up

on your screen and tell you all the things you cannot do, right? Well, not yet. I agree to continue. But like you buy a top shot NFT, the thing you own comes with a lengthy list of restrictions,

one of which is like, there are illegal ways to sell it. You can't sell it for drugs, for example, based on what I just heard, you can't launder money through it. There are also illegal ways to acquire it, right? So if you get it in some transaction that the NBA or Topshots or whatever doesn't authorize, you don't own it. Right. You don't own it if you used a stolen credit card to buy it or a payment mechanism that you do not have the right to use or if you try to charge it back. Well, sure. But like if you sell it outside of the Topshot app, right? Like, then you might not own it either because the NBA wants a cut of the transaction.

So it's like a closed ecosystem. Yeah, it is a closed ecosystem. And they very, very clearly warn you that they can't be responsible if you sell the moment outside the app because that does potentially provide the opportunity for some of the stuff they're talking about, like, viruses. So can they rescind your ownership? Great question. I imagine. Yeah. Look, one thing that I know about term of service agreements, just as like a person, not like as a lawyer, is that typically they give the company the rights to do an awful lot of things, most of which the company will not feel especially forced to do, but if it has to, like, for instance, halt trading because they are having trouble securing the funds to give to their depositors in order to deal with the game stock. volatility, they can do that. That's in the terms of service.

So let's switch for a different example. So Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet as an NFT. So his tweet still exists. He still owns the tweet. It's still on Twitter. You can look at it whenever you want. But the, the NFT that he minted of his tweet is up for auction. It might go for as much as $2.5 million. He says he's going to donate the proceeds to charity. Let's say you spend $2.5 million on that. What do you get? If I buy that NFT of Jack Dorsey's first tweet, can I delete his tweet? Can I make sure no one ever sees it again?

Boy, I'm going to have to go look at the terms of service. No, I think that, one, you get that sense of ownership, right? So maybe you get bragging rights. Like, yeah, I own Jack Dorsey's first tweet. But he could just like mint another NFT of it, right? He could. Yeah. What you get is the NFT.

What you own is. the NFT. You own the thing that Jack Dorsey said is an NFT of his tweet. That's what you get. I got to tell you all this sounds like people, like, we're all been stuck inside for too long, and like rich people have too much money. Like, that's what this feels like to me. That, like, we just needed something else to buy. Like, we've all bought all the things from

Amazon that we can think of. Like, I bought a pair of slippers on Instagram the other day. Like, why? I haven't been to a restaurant. I would pay $10,000 to go to a bar right now. I'm just telling you. All of this feels like this is an overheated market that isn't rationally connected to. At the end of it, you're going to sell that tweet for $3 million. Right? Like, the market doesn't feel like it exists. So this is a thing that I think is actually pretty interesting because we've seen, for instance,

CryptoKitties, which is still a going concern, by the way. It's just not as many people and they're not trading for as much. There was a period where the most expensive crypto kitty sold for 600 Ethereum, and now it's all like a tenth, a hundredth. So, you know, there's that. But the other thing that happens with stuff that's out in the wild on Ethereum is money laundering. And like there's no way of getting around that with cryptocurrency. It's part of it.

It's part of the reason why regulators are like, regulators are, looking pretty closely at how to regulate cryptocurrency right now. It's not the only thing that's going on in cryptocurrency, but I think we would all be kidding ourselves if we said it wasn't happening. And like, if there is a digital object, for instance, a Jack Dorsey tweet that you can say has some kind of like intangible value, then it becomes less obvious that you're engaging in money laundering. Do you know what I mean? I wish I had the criminal instincts to know what you meant. Okay. This is a story about when I used to live in New York.

And Man Liz's previous life is a criminal. No, I've only ever been it. No. But there was this liquor store that was next to one of my friend's houses. And all of the bottles of wine were just like mispriced. They were just like wrongly priced. Like this was, I went there a lot because they had bottles of wine that should have been expensive that were cheap. And there was also a very big space in the back. that I sometimes saw people going in and out of. And if you've lived in New York, you know that there is an organized crime presence. It's around. And my guess was that this store was at front. And it was a money laundering front. It didn't matter how they priced the wine that I was buying because that was not the point of the store.

So you're saying you're a criminal, you've robbed a bank? You've got some money. I just watched Logan Lucky. It's a great movie. So you've got a bunch of money. You need to launder it. You're going to buy Jack Dorsey tweets. and then resell them at a later date?

Yeah. Okay. Well, now I think NFTs are super cool. I hope the entire market is buying and selling Jack Dorsey tweets. Let me take the positive version of this for the last little bit here. We have seen across the entire internet for maybe the past two or three years, the creator economy is like pushed into doing things for the YouTube algorithm because that's the best place to make money as a creator. You basically have a bad job, right? Like, you're constantly grinding.

You're trying to make videos that go viral. There's some bad incentives there. Like, we've talked to a lot of YouTubers. We know and love a lot of YouTubers. This is what they tell us. Like, incentive structure creates a lot of pressure. You can be on Instagram. You've got to, like, make a bunch of brand deals.

Very rarely are you monetizing the thing you make itself? This is all, and I think it's true for musicians at the highest level, right? How do they make money? They're on tour. every day and they put out singles they record in the hotel room because the value of the music itself has gone down and the value of the scarce product, which is a concert, has gone up. Okay. And that's good or bad, however you see it.

Do NFTs represent an ability to rebalance that by valuing the art itself? Because that would be the good outcome. Maybe. I think the thing that's most significant here is a sense of community, right? So, like, if we're taking, for instance, YouTubers, you have a community around you. And a significant part of your job is actually community maintenance, right? Like, you need to talk to folks and, like, all of this. You have a very personal relationship with your fans.

And so I think that that's a way of monetizing that relationship. You know, like the fan wants to support the creator. They know that the creator isn't making money from the videos that they love. But if the creator puts out an NFT for one of those videos, the fan might buy it in the hopes of supporting the creator. Yeah. I think I'm just coming around to like bands used to go away for years at a time. And like Jimmy Page would be like, I'm going to hang amplifiers in a church and then record the church from a mile away. And that's going to take me six months to get a guitar tone.

And then the album would come out. And the album would be the thing that made them money. Right. And that cycle worked or didn't work, but it was like the known cycle for music anyway. That cycle is like all but destroyed. Yeah. Right. Like now the impetus is to be on tour all the time, to monetize the relationship with

the fan that have a Patreon, like on and on and on. And you're getting paid pennies on the song per listen from Spotify for the actual music. Is there a way here where you're like, I'm selling an album, it's all NFTs? You can buy it or not in that relationship. is strong enough to create the new economy. Because that's, I think that's a thing a lot of creators, they're talking about it that way, even if the mechanics of how the copyright work or the mechanics of what you're actually buying aren't quite there.

That is what the conversation sounds like to me. Yeah. And like the truth is, as somebody who owns a lot of band t-shirts, she mostly doesn't wear. I use Led Zeppelin for a reason here. Yeah. Like, you know, I do go see people live and I do buy their merch because I know they're not making money when I stream them on Spotify. And I don't have a problem with supporting them.

And that's why I think that that sort of fan relationship is really important for making this work. Right. Like, you know, I'm not going to buy an NFT of Jack Dorsey's tweets, not least because we have a policy that doesn't let me own any cryptocurrency. But I also don't have a relationship with Jack Dorsey. I don't think he needs more of my money. Like, I don't think, I don't care. Like, if I want to donate to a charity, I'll do it myself. Whereas if I'm, like, thinking about, like, somebody who hosts a podcast that I like, and I

know that they're having trouble getting ads, but I want the podcast to continue and they sell an NFT of something from the podcast. I might buy it because I want them to continue doing the thing I like. What's more, this is a question without an answer. What's more carbon-intensive, buying the T-shirt from the podcast or buying the NFT? Well, that sounds like a story you should assign, Mr. Editor. Deeder? No. It's actually, if anyone has a thought, like, please tweet at us, otherwise we'll go research it. Like, I think those are the kinds of questions that are, that it's the second wave of NFT stories.

It's going to look like that. Because if all you're doing is like super Patreon and you get something, okay. But if you want to like have a transaction, I think people are, especially post pandemic when we're like away from screens, being like I own a GIF is not going to be cool. I promise you.

Well, like the challenge I have to everybody listening to this is like, go find the normiest normie you can. and think of and try to explain Jack Dorsey selling this tweet for $2.5 million. It is impossible. Like, people's eyes will glaze over. They're like, they bought a tweet. Like, why? And then you're like, they didn't actually buy a tweet.

And then it's all over for you. So here is something that people, I think, do understand. And there's a component of it in NFTs, though that's not the only thing the NFTs are doing. But people definitely understand gambling. And more specifically, they understand that gambling is really fun. Yeah. Like, there's like a whole city in the U.S. that's devoted to that, too, if you count Atlantic City. So, you know, like, if you explain some of this stuff as, like, a way for people to gamble and have a good time and sort of leave out the question of what does ownership mean, I think that that's something that's relatively easy for people to grasp.

Long-term blockchain tweet gambling. That's where I'm leaving it. I just want that idea in everybody's head. Liz has stories coming out next week. We're going to have more stories. I'm going to have to figure out how to assign that T-shirt story. now. That's my own fault. I'm sorry to the staff of the verge. No, it's the thing. I think this rebouncing the creator economy is like there's something deeply important there. I just don't

have buying and selling numbers is like the is the thing. But we're going to keep chasing it because everyone seems to love it. All right, Liz, thank you so much. That was great. Oh, thank you for having me. We'll take a break. We'll be back with Dan Sefer. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise grade, no code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow 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.

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the rome it's 169 dollars it's pretty cool yeah it's a ui boom with a sonos logo on it well i'm very proud of chris welch because he like scooped the whole thing so like the element of surprise is like, we had it. Yeah. It's a competitor to the UE boom. It's got Sonos tech in it. You can also just like seamlessly move audio if your Bluetooth thing it to that speaker, you can move it to the rest of your sonof speakers, which is cool. Yeah. It seems like Sonos is about to dramatically expand this product line. Yeah, you know, it's, it's funny. Like this is the first really portable Sonos product. Like they had the move, was it 2019 or something like that, but that was portable from like your kitchen to your porch. Like nobody really is bringing.

that thing around because it weighs like 11 pounds. But this is a Ui Boom sized thing. So we're very familiar with that form factor. You throw it in a bag. You take it to the park. You take it to the beach. Take it to a friend's house for whenever we can do that again. And like it's you just, it's a Bluetooth speaker.

And then when you're home, it's a Wi-Fi speaker and integrates with your Wi-Fi Sonos system, which is really rad. So I think it's pretty cool. I think a lot of Sonos customers have been wanting this for a long time. I don't know how many people outside of the Sonos world will be interested in it. Yeah, I mean, that's my big question. Is this going to be an entree into living the Sonos life or not? I love that they basically threw every feature that I would ask for.

I'm like, oh, what do I want a Bluetooth speaker with everything? Okay, I want Google Assistant. I want Lexa. I want Wi-Fi to connect to Sonos. I want Bluetooth. I want wireless charging off a standard chip pad. I want it to charge via USBC, and I don't want it to be too big,

and I want it to, you know, have good sound. Like, you, like, that, they just check, chick, chick, chick, check, check, down the list. Like, if I had to complain about the spec, I would say that the handoff feature uses, like, super, super high frequency tones that nobody can hear instead of just using, I don't know, ultra-wide band or something.

But, like, okay, who cares? That's fine. And really, what's UWBB about a different kind of frequency anyway? I mean, really, for a good idea. Yeah, yeah, it's true. So I like this thing. Is it worth 170? Like, it will be for me, I think,

because I will, like, have it integrated into my sono system. I will say this in a question that only the verge would ask. We confirm that you cannot use them as surrounds. What? For a son-o-send bar. That's garbage. I take it all back. Literally, we're the only people who asked.

We're the only people who care. But I personally loved the idea of, like, putting my surrounds away and then bringing my surrounds. They're no fine. That shut up is so funny. Battery operated drones. I don't think anybody else cares about that. that box. It's true. They packed every feature into it. It's very competitive. I think that the

idea that like most days, like most days, you don't get any value out of your Bluetooth speaker. Right. Like it's just like at home, you like put it in a closet. You take it out when you want to travel or you're like outside your house. Because it's part of Sonos, you might get a lot of value out of it. You might like keep it in your bedroom and use it there most days. And then when you want to leave, you pick it up and go, especially you buy the charging dock. But like Patrick Spence, CEO Senos, good friend of our show, gave a great interview to to Yanko protocol. He's like, we're expanding,

we're going to put this thing in stores you might not expect. Like, particularly outdoor stores or, like, hinting towards, like, camping stores. Like, they're moving to expand the product line out of its normal zone. Yeah. There's the rumors of headphones forever.

Yeah. Right. Like, they announced a partnership with Audi. You know, there's... co-branded car audio is, like, very funny. Like, it'll be a Sonos logo on the Audi stereo system. I have no idea what Sonos could bring to the car. Like, I just do not understand what, I mean, like, maybe it does true play in your car and, like, tunes the audio depending on where you're sitting.

First of all, they, yeah, their stuff sounds good. Sure. Co-branded car audio is, like, always very funny. Like, maybe the feature will be there where you can, like, you're playing the music in your living room, your kitchen, and end your car for some reason. Like, that would be very funny. I would appreciate that. Like, just, I'm the guy who wants battery powered surrounds. Like, not useful, but would be hilarious and then delight.

But it's probably more like you drive home, you're listening to something, you get out of the car, you push a button, and it starts playing on your sonos. Like, that would be cool. Or it could just be that somebody paid somebody, Audi paid Sonos, to put the Sonos logo on the speakers that are in the car, right? We're, you know, the one plus nine, nine pro are coming, and, you know, all the leaks and there's a Hasselblad logo on it. We've seen camera companies put logos on phones before. How meaningful is it? We don't know. So there might be some feature stuff on the Saudi, but it might just be that Sonos is getting paid for its logo.

And there's some like there's a patina of we helped tune the sound or whatever. Right. So I have a Mustang Maki review unit now. It's very fun. I highly recommend driving one. It's the good time. I saw one in the wild for real, not a review, just like a person that own the car. It was amazing.

It has a B&O sound system for it as a deal with. B&O, which is, it's like a nice logo in the sound system. But like, bang and Olson is like, they're the crazy design company. Like they're the 80s CD tower, foldy speaker, like TVs, like unfoldy, like, yeah, they're that company. They were like the ultimate high end stereo mall store. Yeah. And like, there's this logo all over this Ford. And it's like, is something you're not like unfold? Is it is, are you going to eject like eight CDs at once? Like, What's good? Is the remote going to be a triangle for some reason?

I'm very excited. And it's just a logo. The question for me with the Sonos Audi partnership is, is it going to be as cool as the Macintosh integration into the Jeep? The Macintosh audio, not the old school Macintosh. Yeah, yeah, no, not. Yeah, I'm sorry. I forgot my audience here.

Yeah. The Macintosh audio, who is, like, best known for making these, like, tube powered custom amplifiers that have the needles that show you the values of things. and they partnered with Jeep to put that on a screen in your car. Yeah, I'm going to buy that Jeep. If I can get VU meters on my car in some way, yeah, I'm going to buy it. Are we at the point where we're worried that Sonos is, we complained for years that Sonos didn't move fast enough. They didn't make enough stuff, and they were just too slow.

Are we going to have the opposite problem? We got what we asked for, and now they're just making so much stuff and we're worried they're diluting the brand. Well, they have to do that first, right? Yeah, I mean, they have to make all the stuff. I think, like, there's a handful of headphone companies that just have announced for the past few months. Like, we would sell ourselves, if you'd like. Yeah. Like, I think cost announced that.

Like, Senheiser. Senheiser. It's just, like, true that being a dead ahead headphones company right now is, like, not a great business to be in because I have a headphone jack from the iPhone. The iPhone will place it with a proprietary refund Bluetooth and AirPods reading the world. Like, that's just a real thing that is happening. I told you so. Sorry. Like, years ago when they took it.

It's like, I should have titled that post. This will kill Senheiser. Anyhow, it's not a great time to be in that market, but it's still a big market. So I think Sonos just has the opportunity to be like, we have all the stuff in your house. We make this soundbar you like for your TV. We work with all these services. We're the neutral system. And in your car, in your portable.

And, okay, now here's a set of headphones. that have value beyond just being a competitor to the AirPods match or whatever. Is that a hard road? I think there's a reason I haven't done it. But they haven't, I don't think they've made enough stuff. Like, there's not a finite amount of places people want to listen to music. Right. Right?

And there's like all kinds of products to make. Anyway, I'm excited for it. I desperately, I was just thinking about this. If they put it in the Audi and they let you stream into the car, you could use two cars as surrounds. Just an idea, Pat, if you're listening. Just make that like a secret feature for me. Like, you know, like a lot of people right now are doing projectors in the backyard?

Yeah. Just open up your cameras. Think about it. Like you set it the big projector. You got the speaker and then you drive up your two outies behind you. It's only two, it'll cost you two outy all roads. No big deal. Very cost effective.

Look, if I learned anything from the Max L commercial that ad, the guy, like, cost is no object from your searching for audio fidelity. All right. What else is going on in gadgets? So Cameron just reviewed the ASIS ROG Ultimate 5 Ultimate Whatever Words, Android phone. It's another gamer phone. I once again ask you, the Vergecast listener, to tweet me the name of a professional phone gamer, someone that does this work and makes money gaming just on their phone. Please, I want to meet this person because this person must exist because AIS may.

this phone for that person. If you want a phone that is just unapologetically sick, this is that phone. Sick is the word to describe it, yes. It has a mini display in the back that you can put your own custom logo on that you can customize the look of it. It has their armory software. This is armory software to customize the processor speed and the GPU and blah, blah, blah, blah. It has two USBC ports, if you want to have one on the bottom when you're holding it.

It has phantom buttons on the back and on the top. It's got, you know, specs. It's got those 18 gigs of RAM that I joked about. It has a thing that I think Samsung may have done this first where you can, when you're charging it, you can set it to do pass through charging so it doesn't actually charge your battery. It just keeps the phone running so the battery doesn't overheat. But if you're worried at overheating, there's a fan attachment, so that's cool. And what am I forgetting? There's something else.

144 hertz screen. 144 hertz screen. That's correct. Oh, the battery is, I think, 6,000 Milly amps, and they did the thing where they split it in two so they can charge each one separately because then it charges faster. Wow. The camera's terrible.

I mean, whatever. Progamerers aren't taking photos. Everyone knows I'm a huge proponent that there should be more diversity in phones. There should be phones for smaller niche markets. This is why I like foldables. This is why I like all sorts of different phones. This is why I like the iPhone 12 Mini, even though apparently Apple made too many of them. So I love that this phone exists,

but I want to meet the person who needs this phone for their phone. job. Tell me why you need the 18th gig of RAM. I don't know if you'll meet someone who needs it. I think you'll meet a lot of people who want it. And like, this is the fourth one in this lineup, right? Yeah. Like they skipped number four. They went from three to four. So like clearly Assus has like found a market for this where people are buying it. And not only like we reviewed, I think the ultimate edition, which has all the bells and whistles, but they're also releasing like two other configurations. So it's like they are taking their gaming laptop lineup model where you could buy the top of the line one with the RtX 3080 in it and the best AMD processor and the fastest screen.

Or you can like spec down to like the 1660 GPU and like a lower res screen and less RAM and stuff like that. And they are like just applying that to the phone here. So there's like three different or four different tiers of this depending on which features you want. They're at different prices. The one we reviewed equates to like $1,500 plus dollars. It is it is a pricey phone. It is a big phone. You have to know you want this phone.

phone, but if you know about this phone and you know you want it, you probably want the phone, right? Like, it's like a very specific market for this, but it clearly the market exists enough for them to keep making them, right? Deeter, you didn't say the fan attachment has triggers. Yeah, sorry. triggers. I mean, that's like, I applaud, I applaud this phone. And it has gesture control.

So there's something like 18 different ways to interact with this phone. Yeah. Can you use it as surrounds for a sentence system? It does have good dual front-facing speakers, so. And Nilai, it has a headphone jack. Yes. See? Sennheiser is saved.

Not only does it have a headphone jack, the last version had the headphone jack on the fan attachment, and they took it out and put it into the phone directly, so they added it back. Yes. This is my next, yeah. It's calling it now. I'm buying this fun.

I'm the guy. I'm a pro gamer now. I want to know, I want to see your Armory crate overclocking settings when you get it. Yeah, please. I'm the guy who has a PS5 and hasn't played it in like a week and a half. Like, I'm just not the market for this phone, but a headphone jack, you got me. I mean, well, it's the thing that funny that you mentioned the PS5, because like in Cameron's review, it seems like the whole future of gaming on a phone is moving to cloud streaming gaming, which, you know, X cloud and Stadia, if Google ever figures that out and so on, lots of different things happening in the space. They're not going to figure it out.

Google's problems aside, you don't, you can do all of that with like a three-year-old iPhone and like or like a pixel 4A. It's the same experience when you're streaming everything to the device. So, like, the question for this is, like, it's a gaming marketed phone. It's got a lot of gaming-centric features. But all of those affect, like, the local games you would play on the device. And, like, is that the future of gaming on mobile? And it doesn't look like it. So I don't know.

Maybe it is. Maybe there's someone who's playing a lot of games on their phone and loves this stuff. And if you're out there, please tweet it Deeter. Yeah. If you're buying this phone because you need it, not just because it's sick. I mean, if you're buying it because it's sick, I want to hear about it, too. But if you're buying this phone because, like, yep, I need to do this thing because I'm a professional gamer. I desperately want to talk to you.

All right. There's a bunch of one plus stuff going on. Speaking of phones that have an audience that knows about them. Yeah. So we know that they're going to have an announcement on March 23rd. We know it's the one plus nine pro and the one plus nine. There have been plenty of leaks and renders. And we know that there's a Hasselblad tie-in with the cameras in some way.

And we know that the sensor is going to be the Sony. IMX-789 on the main camera, newish sensor, and that will be fascinating. It turns out that putting new sensor hardware on a phone is really interesting. Sometimes it can go really well, and sometimes it can go the way it did on the S-20 Ultra. I'm just pointing out that OnePlus is willing to experiment with brand-new sensors, Google. Yeah, I mean, and they're also willing to put a Hossablod name on it because Hossablod accepted the check. Like, I mean, like, they had this announcement come out that they say they're going to announce their phones on March 23rd, and they went into this whole thing about their partnership with Hassablad. And really what it boils down to now is they are tweaking the color.

Yes. Which is like really what you should expect from one of these partnerships. Yeah. Well, maybe they'll do more in the future. Maybe, maybe. But, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the last Hassabod partnership on a phone was the Motorola Moto Z Zoom attachment. And, uh, right. That was really bad. that. Expectations are low. Now, I'm sure the phone will probably be fine. One Plus generally makes good phones at this point. You don't really have to worry about that.

I would temper your expectations that the camera is going to be a miracle camera, just because it has a Hossoplaid name on it. But here's the thing. I don't think miracle camera needs to be the standard. I think it's keep up with iPhone 12 Galaxy is 21 Ultra, preferably. iPhone 12 Pro Max preferably. We haven't seen miracle cameras. the last few years, but we have seen, like, Samsung fell behind a little bit with the S-20.

They're, like, catching up again. There's, like, that race is very, very close, and it's not moving as fast as it used to. So I would love to say that this is going to be the thing that, like, breaks through and is a big innovation. But I would be happy, given One Plus its history with them just keeping up at the times. If they could do that, like, that's great. Speaking of Hossil-Lod, I want to call it, Becca, has a great review of a new Hustleblad camera. on the YouTube channel right now. Yeah.

We don't often review gigantic medium format cameras. This is a little medium format camera. I'm just saying, but when we do, we go all out. So it's like the, it's like the spectrum of Hossel Lod, like the actual Hossel Lod camera. And like, yeah, you can pay us some money for the name. You can pay us like a whole mortgage of money or you can pay a car loan of money. And so this one is like the car loan level. It's only $6,400 for the camera.

It's a very cool camera, though. If you haven't seen it, go check out Becca's video. She does, has a lot of fun with it and take some really fun photos with it. It has some really cool insights into what it's like to shoot with this camera that was essentially designed to mimic what a camera was like in the 1950s. But it has, you know, a medium format digital sensor in it. So it's pretty neat. That's fun. Samsung unpacked March.

We're coming up on like event season again. Yeah. Like there's rumors of an Apple event coming and now there's an unpacked. I feel like it's sneaking up on us. That's what it feels like me. Yeah, rumors of an Apple event, which are kind of all over the place. Like, it was firm, and then I got canceled, and maybe it's later, and who knows. And then Samsung is holding an unpacked event.

As near as we can tell, it's going to be for the Galaxy A52 and I think the A72. And it's like, how much daylight is there going to be between the A72, like their high-end mid-range and the S-21, which is their low-end, basically mid-range flagship? Unclear. But the A-series sells better than the S-series, so I guess they decided. it deserves its own event. I just want another commercial from them. Yes. You know that commercial?

Yep. It was just like banging away in good battery life and great camera. Like, come on. They took it off their main channel. They like, Samsung has a thing where they delete their YouTube videos now. So you've got to find it on like an alternative channel if you want to watch their old stuff. Is that because they make fun of other companies for not including like a charger in the box or having a head, not having a headphone jack? And then they have to roll back that marketing.

It's fine. One Plus 9 Pro coming with an AC adapter charger. Although that makes sense because they do their custom work. charge stuff. It's the only way to get their fastest charges through their own thing, yeah. Dieter, you mentioned this iPhone mini 12, 12 mini situation? Yeah, so the rumor

is they've cut back on their component requests and that they don't need to make as many as they originally forecast. I had a tweet go like semi kind of viral where I was like step one, everyone says Apple needs make a small phone. Step two,

Apple only makes it, wait, step one Apple only makes bigger phones. Step two, everyone wants Apple to make a small phone. Step three, Apple gives up. It's like, fine, we'll make a small phone. Step four, nobody ever buys. Not enough people buy the phone. Step five. It wasn't worded perfectly because the demand was an illusion. The demand is not an illusion. There are plenty of people who want to buy this phone. Millions and millions of them. I am one of them. I bought one. I love it. But I think it's true that like the trend that people say they want a small phone, but they actually end up buying the big phone is, I think, like a real thing. Yeah, I agree with that. Though I will say that a underperforming iPhone sales is like

probably way more than like LG cells of its own entire market. Do you think that the, the, uh, ASIS ROG phone 5 Ultimate is going to outsell the iPhone 12 mini? No, of course not. Like the iPhone 12 mini is like going to be orders of magnitude more than that. But when you're playing on Apple scale, it's like, oh, we didn't move, you know, 50 million of them. So, wait, they saw. a lot of iPhone SCs, right? I mean, like... Yeah, but the iPhone SC, the reason that sold was because it's $399.

That's the number one driver on that. Not because it's a small size. That might be a benefit to some. Not the headphone jack? No, they took it on the SCT, right? I meant on the first one anyway, yeah, yeah. But on the first one. But like the reason that people bought that

is because I can get a brand new iPhone for under $500. It's the only way to do it. The mini, the 12 mini is, what, $640 or $700? I can't even remember at this point. I think it's $700. But it's not in that bracket.

And so, like, it doesn't, it's cost less than the regular iPhone 12. But when you're, you know, looking at that price point and you can be like, oh, I can get the bigger screen. We know it has much better battery on the iPhone 12. And it's only $100 more or $5 more per month if you're, you know, splitting it up. Then I think a lot of people are just going to go for the bigger. I kind of wonder if the iPhone 12 money for Apple Galaxy brand is just like their future platform for the SE and they know it, that they don't think they'll be able to bring the costs down on like the regular size iPhone. 12 to an SE level.

So they just, they made a small one because they know sometime in the future they can reuse that factory line to make another SE. Yeah, it's the thing here is not no one, to Dan's point, it's not no one bought it or it's a failure. It's they overestimated the demand. And Apple is usually really good at estimating demand. Right. So like maybe they'll just calibrate it to where the market is.

At the same time, like what do people want? They like across every screen in existence, they want the cheapest. they want the cheapest biggest one. There's a reason there are like $250.75 inch TVs that basically are gray. Display no colors and no black levels. Except for the ads. They let really colorful ads on those TVs. Yeah, that's true.

But there's a really, like people just want the biggest, cheapest screen, and that is like held true in TVs, in laptops, in phones for more than a decade now. And I think the mini is kind of like falling into that. The only thing I would say is that a lot of, I think a lot of industry watchers, enthusiasts and stuff, were watching the iPhone 12 mini very closely because they were wanted to see if it would be enough of a success to push other companies to copy that formula and come out with smaller phones. And it seems like seeing news like this that it might temper those things. Like one of my biggest complaints or criticisms against One Plus for the longest time is that the only way to buy a One Plus phone is to deal with a giant phone. and I would love to have like a smaller one plus phone that is more manageable to use.

But if Apple isn't moving, you know, loads of mini-sized phones, is OnePlus going to be able to? Or is Samsung going to be able to? Or, you know, whatever other company actually sells phones these point, at this point,

are they going to really be able to play in that space? And like, it seems like maybe not. I don't know. We'll have to see. My question is how much of this is a pandemic story? Like, if you're buying,

Apple did sell a lot of iPhones this year, which surprised me. Right? Like, people are at home. I figured no one would upgrade their phone. We didn't see laptop sales, like, explode. TV sales exploded. People just also bought phones to... Well, they got tired of staring at the same old phone all the time, at home.

This is like, there's nothing left to buy. This is what I mean. They bought a new phone, a new laptop, a new TV, and now they're like, but be people. It's like, whatever. I got money. Whatever. I got $69 million sitting around.

It's like, what else's left to buy? But I was, what's left to buy. But I wonder if post-pandemic, we're all out and about, like, pockets become a relevant consideration in your life again? Yeah, but then the battery life becomes a real relevant consideration, too, right? Yeah, but I feel like we don't. I feel like this was like an imperfect year for the experiment because like portability stopped being the concern, right?

Like, even like one-handed use stopped being like, like, you're just like on the couch. Like, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. It's just reports. We don't, Apple certainly isn't confirming any of this. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited.

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slash build. Deere, I want you to talk about wearOS. Do you? Yeah. I'd rather talk about the Insta 360 go-2 because it's such a cute little gadgety gadget action cam. Well, I wanted to start with WareOS so we could we could go low and then end high. Oh, okay. So these aren't new, but I reviewed the Tickwatch 3 Pro Pro 3, 3, and the fossil Gen 5 LTE. The Tickwatch Pro is notable because it has the latest Qualcomm processor for smartwatches, but it also has a bunch of stuff built on top of WearOS to make it, what's the word, usable? It's got a separate screen, and it's got an unbelievable raft of Mobvoy fitness apps.

And the experience of using this watch is you want to open up the fitness tracker, you know, the step tracker, and it presents you with the terms of service on the watch. And every time you want to turn on a sensor, you get the terms of service. And it's so aggressive, you're, like, more likely to read it and more likely to wonder, like, is the data, is my health data actually going to this company, my boy, which, I don't know, do you trust my boy? And maybe yes, maybe no, kind of actually a little bit yes. And then it makes you less likely to want to use the things you bought the watch for.

So that experience is weird. But if you want a good wearOS watch, this is the one, even though it's big and whatever. The fossil is a standard, bog standard, snap 3100, wearOS watch with LTE. The LTE actually works just fine. Like it's basically seamless. So kudos to that. But it still has this thing that fossil has to do, which is like four different battery modes, each of which are like granularly customizable, again, on the watch, which nobody wants that.

It has been going on three-ish years now where I've been saying, if you use Android, there are no really truly great smartwatch options for you. The Versa is like chucking along. Who knows what's going to have with that now that Google owns them. There's whereOS. Samsung's is probably the best. I still just chafe at using a Samsung smartwatch unless you're using a Samsung phone because you have to install like four different Samsung apps to like make the thing go.

I don't know. It's wild to me. Like, people say that, you know, I'm a capitalist and I believe in competition. And that's true. But also, capitalism hasn't produced a decent smart watch for Android users. 85% of the market. You know, I heard Bernie give that in a floor speech the other day. I'm once again asking you to come out with a good smart watch for Android.

I'm sorry. The question for me with this piece, we are once again in 2021 writing about terrible wear OS watches. Well, they're not terrible. They're just like, they're fine. They're not good. Right? Like, you wouldn't recommend any, either, anybody buy either of these. They're $300 or $350. And they're not great experiences. My question, as usual, is how much of this is on Google for making wear OS work better? And how much of is it is it on the hardware for not progressing faster? Like, it seems like, you know, every time Qualcomm comes out with a new Snapdragon wear model, which, is like every 18 months or so, everyone hopes that it's going to like fix the problem of wear OS watches. And it maybe lags a little less. It doesn't really make much of a difference between the battery life. It seems like the things that Mobvoy did with the like second screen and all the other hacks really affect the battery life much more. But then the wear OS experience

is still kind of crummy and like things break all the time. We just saw a news article today that OK Google finally works again after like not working for months on where OS watches. Nobody noticed because everyone turns it off because it was a battery hog. Yeah. It was so slow and so laggy because it was terrible experience. And I just woke up my smartest way. Or like, you know, you're scrolling with the little, the rotating crown, and it just kind of like lags and hangs and crashes. And like, I would say about a third of WareOS doesn't work with a rotating crown just randomly.

Like, nope. So like, whose fault is it? Is it Google? I would say that it is Google's job to make this better. And, like, yes, the processor's never probably going to keep up with what Apple can produce in the Apple Watch at this point. But you could probably keep up with Samsung. I don't know why you're not doing that there. They just don't seem to be committed to making WearOS a better thing.

And, like, now they own Fitbit. Maybe that'll change things. But I don't know. Yeah, unclear. Google hardware acquisitions always go great. I routinely use my entire ecosystem of Nest products. It's great. It's the best.

All right, let's end on the high note. Okay, so the Insta 360 go-to. Becca reviewed it. It is an action cam, but it's itty-bitty, and it's, you know, just front-facing is not a 360 camera. It's even though from Insta-360 anyway. It comes to the cool little charging case. It also is the, like, display for the phone.

It also can act as a tripod, and also can act as a remote control. It sticks to a bunch of different stuff with magnets. You can buy a GoPro out for it if you want to. There's no real interface on the tiny little camera itself. There's just a button and then a white light turns out if it's recording. Why it's white and not red is a mystery for the ages. But I love that there's just like a million little geegos and gadgets you can get with it,

and it works well in this little ecosystem. They just created Xenilio. It seems like it's cool and fun. It's $2.99. And if you're going to spend $2.99 on an action camera and you're looking for a big ecosystem, I've got to say, I don't know that it's... This is it quite yet. The GoPro still exists and makes good stuff, and older ones are still around, and they're also very good.

So, like, as fun as it is and as much as I really like it, I'm not sure that I would recommend it over a GoPro. But I love it. I love that it's small. Here's my question, though, Dan. Will tiny little camera accessory that is a satellite to your phone ever be a thing? We had this. What was Google's thing called? the pixel clips the Google clips

there was the HCCC Re remember the the periscope thing it seems like a company goes for it with this every two to three years I like the Instant 360 goes to go to take on it because they're like no no we're just going to make it an action cam

we're not going to try and make it you know or whatever but this is this never seems to work like the modemods there was the what was the thing that you could stick into your lightning port USB port, the camera. Oh, the DXO. The DXO mark thing. Oh, man. I bought those. That was your mistake. It should make, you should be able to attach a good lens to your camera or have it near your, or to your phone, and then have it be, or have it be near your phone.

Sony used to have that thing that bolted onto the back of the phone. Yeah. This is like a good idea that always fails, so maybe it's a bad idea. I think that the Insta, uh, Insta 360 go to is a little different approach than like the clips and the re, which tried to like do the photography for you. I think this, acknowledges that it's a camera. It's someone who's going to buy this is going to be wanting to control it and wanting to manage it. The point that Becca made in her review is that it creates a far more, I'm using her words because I'm reading them right now, but it creates an image that's far more unique than what you get from your phone. And so like if you want to capture something

that looks different, it's got that really wide field of view, it's got a little bit higher resolution video, it's got a little bit higher frames per second for the capture. It just looks different than what you get from sticking a phone out in front of your face. And so it has that purpose. If you are an active person, I love all the gadgety gie gie gags on that you can attach to this. I love, like you mentioned, the case is like all magnetic and everything. That's really fun. But these also feel like the kind of thing that's a little disposable and a little, like,

you're going to buy it, use it once in a while if much, and it's going to live in a drawer most of the time. Like I don't see it being like a thing that you use all the time, unless you are the type person that mountain bikes all the time and wants to record. every single clip. This is great because I have space in my drawer next to my, my, my MAVIC mini, and my gimbal, and my other action camera and that weird little, what was it called the, the thing that plugged in with the RX100 sensor. I think it was a DXO thing, right? The DXO, I've got that. That thing was just a real lark

of a bad idea. That drawer is, there's a little space in there. That was the idea that it's got a bigger sensor in it, so it's got to be better, right? And then it's like, oh, it was so slow. Also, it didn't pull power from the phone, so you have to charge it separately anyway. Yeah. I love little cameras. And as soon as this is discounted, even $1, I will almost end up buying it. I would tell you to be sure to buy a microSD card to supplement the 32 gigs of onboard storage, but it's too small to take that.

It just has the 32 gigs. And if you turn on motion stabilization, you run out space pretty quick. So maybe wait until it's discounted $2. All right. Last thing. Monica's been on a tear of laptop reviews. Dan, what's going on here? Well, we had two gaming laptop reviews in the last week,

and they are two very different outcomes. Cameron reviewed the Razor Blade 15, which is fine, but like really starting to get long in the tooth and then probably wouldn't recommend you buy it. Monica reviewed the Assus Rugg, Zephyrus G15, and if you are buying a gaming laptop this year and you're not buying this one,

you must have some really specific reason because it does basically everything you want from a gaming laptop really well. Well, I spent my gaming budget. on the rock phone. Yeah, well, see, the problem is, if you bought the ROG phone and now you don't have $1,800 to buy an actual gaming laptop, that might be a consideration. But the screen is great.

They upgraded the resolution of the screen. The one thing that's different than last year is last year was a 14-inch model. This year, they have 14-and-15-inch models. So we looked at the 15-inch so far. So it's got a bigger screen, a little bit bigger chassis. It's a little bit more common in the gaming laptop world to have this size of a computer. But the screen is higher resolution. It's 40-40P.

It's got a higher refresh rate. It's got AMD's, like, great, awesome processor that everyone loves and it performs really well here. It's got NVIDIA's latest GPU options. You can get the 30-70 and have really great performance. And it's like $1,800, which is a lot. But when you compare it to the Razor Blade that we reviewed at $2,300 or $2,400, I can't remember the exact thing. It's like, this is actually packing a lot of value into the chassis. Yeah.

And the best thing is it doesn't have a crappy webcam on it. It doesn't have a webcam. That's like the one consideration you have to make, which is the really weirdest thing about this is like they went and put this triple microphone array to capture really great audio when you're on your calls. And then they didn't put a webcam with it. It's because they know all the Twitch streamers are just hooking up GoPro's. Yeah, I mean, like you could hook up a camera.

Sure, if you're a Twitch streamer, but like if you're not a Twitch streamer, like, you know, it's nice out of a webcam. You're not working. You're playing, man. That's what this is for. But that's the thing with this computer. It's not Republican nerds, Dan. not Republic of Excel out here. I will say if you are Republic of Nerd, if you are a Ron, this is a great laptop for working on or going to school with.

You're going to get eight to ten hours of battery life. The keyboard's great. The track pad's great. You can actually use this as your daily laptop and then go home and Twitch stream your Hades runs or whatever. So it's great laptop. It's like the best laptop we've reviewed so far this year. It's probably going to be the best gaming laptop of the year without much competition. All right. There's a lot of gadget news and this like feeling that new product season is upon us.

Yeah. Just creeping up on us. I'm excited. Sneaking up on us. Glimmers of hope. That's what the Vergecast is all about. WhereOS is going to be great this year. Damn it. All right. We're over. We got to wrap this up. Thank you to Liz for joining us. I'm confident Liz is going to be back to talk about NFTs like almost every week for the rest of the year. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Deeter's at Backlon.

Liz is MS. Lepado. Dan is D.C. Seifert. I'm going to plug decoder. Last week, we had Kavon, Bakepour, who's a head of product, Twitter. That was a fun conversation. A couple weeks ago, remember we were talking about Facebook and Google versus Australia?

I realized we hadn't talked to very many Australians. This is a real thing. We talked about Google and Facebook in Australia. So I had Scott Farquhar, who is the co-founder and co-ceo of Atlassian. Australia's biggest tech company. They make Trello, in addition to Jira, which is a huge product.

So he was on Decoder to explain to me why Australia is the testbed of all tech regulation in the world. It's like a great conversation. Also, it was tomorrow for him. I was talking about Wednesday, and it was Thursday, which was just a mind. So that's coming on Tuesday. That's a real fun episode of Decoder. Wednesday for him. That's true.

We'll be back next week with more Vergecast. I'm telling you, glimmers to hope. It's going to be great. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.