The Vergecast - Nothing’s gadget renaissance, and our favorite TV remotes

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of sustainable supply chain economics:  03:27 - CEO of Nothing Carl Pei sits down with The Verge’s David Pierce to discuss the new Phone 2, Carl’s vision for the company, his thoughts on AI, foldables, VR, and much more. Nothing Phone 2 review: the vibes abide  Nothing CEO Carl Pei on the Phone 2, AI, and the future of gadgets (video version of interview here) 50:02 - Later, Vergecast producers Andru Marino and Liam James debate with David the best and worst TV remotes, and what makes a good remote design. Watch the YouTube version to see all the remotes we talk about. 3 Kinds of Simplicity :: UXmatters   Philips Design - Simplifying TV remote (UX Case Study) 1:25:19 - Keep listening for the Vergecast Hotline question of the week.  Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Sustainable Supply Chain Economics. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently packing up to go on vacation. I'm off next week, and we're going to go visit some family and spend some time relaxing, so I'm getting everything ready. I don't know if you're like me in this way, but I realized for the first time in getting ready for this trip that my packing strategy is to basically just like randomly heave a bunch of shirts and pants into a bag without even looking at it, and then spend three days carefully curating all of my technology. I might have my priorities wrong here. I have my laptop, I have my phone, an iPad,

and a Kindle, all of which I'm going to spend the next several days making sure are perfectly charged. The iPad has like 9,000 hours of TV and movies downloaded, even though I'm driving, and I have no idea when I'll watch them. But anyway, I did that, and they're there now. I bought three new books in addition to the several dozen I already own that I haven't read yet. I have chargers and backup chargers with me. I even have an SD card reader in this little bag here, despite the fact that nothing I'm bringing uses an SD card. I have wired headphones. I have wireless headphones, and I have a pair of Bose headphones that is both wired and wireless.

I might have a problem, y'all. But I guess if our car breaks down and we have to spend an entire day waiting and watching all of season two of the bear on Hulu, when there's no service, I guess I'm good to go. So there's that. Anyway, I have a lot of stuff left to do somehow. It's going to be a scene. Anyway, we have a great show for you today. First, we're going to spend some time with Carl Pay, the CEO of Nothing, talking about the nothing phone two, but mostly talking about the tech business in general and why it's so hard to build great hardware. Then, we are going to finally get on the mics and hash out a debate that the Vergecast team has been having for months. What makes a great TV remote? And which one is the best one? All that's coming up in just a

second, but first, I got to run upstairs and find my USBC to HDMI cable, because I always bring that with me in case, I don't know, I guess I need to connect my computer to my TV and do a slideshow or something. I realize now this is insane, but this is the life I've chosen. This is the Vergecast. We're right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to,

but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it

on your company's data 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 Skylar 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. All right, we're back. Everything's charging. All my cables are packed. I'm going to crush this vacation. So we are already in the thick of phone season. It's mid-July, and it is just coming fast. Google launched the pixel fold the other week. Samsung has new foldables and flippables coming later this month. We're going to get new stuff from Apple in September.

The new Zen phone is pretty good. It's all happening really fast. But one of the most interesting phones of the year to me is the nothing phone two. Introducing phone two. Meet the glyph interface. A more thoughtful. way to interact with a smartphone, where lights on the back of your device tell you all you need to know. Nothing is one of the few startups, true startups, trying to make it in the phone business,

and has been doing some pretty interesting stuff over the last couple of years. The Verges Allison Johnson reviewed the phone to, I'll link to it in the show notes, it's a great review, and her takeaway was essentially that it's a good phone with some strong opinions about how phones should work, and how you feel about those opinions, like a monochrome UI, and that light-up interface on the back that can alert you when your phone is face down and nothing's cool, transparent design language. All that stuff will determine how you feel about the phone. Otherwise, it's just a good phone.

And actually, that's the kind of stuff I want to talk about today. Nothing, specifically at CEO Carl Pay, has spent the last couple of years running around talking about how tech is boring and the world needs more exciting tech companies and how nothing is going to bring back the glory days of gadgets. And then it makes a pretty good smartphone. I just have trouble squaring those two things sometimes. So right around the launch of the phone, too, I brought Carl into the studio to talk about nothing.

The company, the phone two, his thoughts on everything from gadgets to AI to AR glasses, and what it really takes to make it in the phone biz. I thought it was fascinating. So let's get into it. Carl Pei, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks for having me. We've been trying to do this forever. Yeah, we said seven years, right?

Yeah, God. Several lifetimes ago. Several lifetimes ago. So you just launched a phone. Congrats. Thank you. You're like at the end of true chaos, hopefully, of launching a phone. There's still a lot of work in the next couple of weeks.

But yeah, at least we've launched the phone now. That's good. And I want to get into that. We both have the phone sitting here and we're going to talk about it a little bit. Yours looks more like a stormtrooper than mine, which is very cool. But you've never been on the show. And I want to talk about nothing as a thing. And sort of you launched this company a few years ago with this like big grand

theory about the state of technology. And I have lots of questions about it. I guess maybe the easiest place to start is just like, I've sort of heard this mantra in a bunch of different forms. But how do you talk about it now? Like what does nothing exist to do? We're trying to make tech more fun again because I think a lot of people can resonate with this.

But personally, when I was young, I was super excited about tech. I felt really inspired both on the hardware side and the software side. When I was younger, Apple used to have these epic product launches that I grew up in Europe. So I had to stay up over the night to watch. And it was worth it because each product was such a big leap forward compared to the last one. And it just made you feel like everything was heading towards a really exciting trajectory. And it was also the time where a lot of these social media and consumer internet companies were being created. So you had a lot of innovation on hardware, but also a lot of innovation on software and services. So it felt like back then, you know, 10 years ago, society as a whole was way more optimistic about where technology was going. But in the last couple of years, that sentiment, at least for me, has pretty much disappeared. And when we speak to other people, be it consumers or investors, I think it kind of resonates. So we're thinking, like, how can we kind of get back to that original state where things just felt like it was getting better and better and hopefully

also inspire others to be a part of this journey, be it our community or even our competitors? So I guess that's why we started this. I like the theory of that a lot, and I think that change you're describing is something we talk about a lot on the show. And I think there are sort of two responses I have to that idea. And one is that I think one thing that has happened in the last 10 years is that all those things became super successful to the point where now, like, most people's smartphones are not exciting, right?

Like, their appliances. And I think to some extent, that's fine. Like, they do a lot of things really well. They're very successful. But we got past the point of being really excited. about every single spec upgrade because they don't matter that much. The marginal utility is not that high. Yeah.

And I think you can have interesting debates about whether that is a total lack of imagination and innovation, or it's just the fact that everybody got phones. We all got used to them and that's fine. And like our phones, fridges or washing machines now, like maybe. And then I think the other thing that happened is a lot of that stuff we were really optimistic about turned out to have huge problems, some of which we should have known going in, some of which we didn't know going in, but like, we've been talking a lot about this with Instagram threads, this like beautiful world we used to live in where you could just like

talk to all your friends on Facebook before we all knew all of the costs that came from that. And so part of what I wonder, and I suspect you spend time thinking about is like, is that era of how we felt about technology ever going to come back? Or do we just know things now we didn't then? And our experience of it has sort of changed that forever. I don't think anything is forever. And I think if you zoom out and look at history, history kind of ebbs and flows. So I think there will be kind of periods in history where technology doesn't advance that much.

And there will be other periods where a lot is happening. I think we're in one of those slow periods. But what you said, if you look at it from the company's perspective, I think a lot of innovation happened when there were many small and medium-sized companies trying to compete with each other. And I think one of the reasons why we feel like innovation has slowed down is because a lot of these companies have won already. They become really big. They have a very defined business model, a very defined type of consumer, and it works. So why risk it with something new?

At the same time, it feels like they've all created really strong modes. So it's really hard for a new entrance to get in. We talked about the fact that we were launching our second phone. There's a bunch of people that try to make smartphones in the last 10 years who never got around to launching their second phone. Or even their first phone in a lot of cases. I have a lot of prototypes that never hit the market sitting in my basement somewhere. So the barrier to entry is just way too high for smaller companies to come in, I think. So I think that from the company side, that's kind of what we're seeing. You know, these small companies got really big and they built these modes.

I think we're probably one of the only smaller companies that's able to experiment and, you know, try our own ideas because we have accumulated the right type of resource, competence to at least give it an honest shot. That's fair. And I think to some extent, I would imagine coming out of what you were doing at Oneplus, which is like a small thing inside of a large company with lots of infrastructure and lots of, you know, backing resources. You were sort of a startup without all the like scary cliffs of being a startup in a lot of ways. Then you should just show up on your own and you're like, okay, now it's it's just like me in a dream. And I was in preparing for this was like listening to other interviews and stuff that you've done. And you've basically talked about just like walking into factories being like, please.

please build my phone. And all these companies are like, we've built other people's phones and they died and those companies went out of business. And like there are a million failed really good Kickstarter ideas out there. Are you sure you're not just like totally insane to try this? Is there a possibility that you are? I think we underestimated how hard it would be. Maybe that was a good thing.

We're kind of like you said in more of a protected environment. Coming out in the real world, it's a lot more difficult. When we are approaching the factories in the beginning, as you say, a lot of them have been before by other entrepreneurs even more with more resources than us. And the factory's got a lot smarter now because before the factory took all the risk. So they would procure all the components and they would make everything. And if the entrepreneur or the company couldn't sell the product, the factory would be sitting on everything. But with us, when they eventually agreed to work with us, which they didn't in the beginning,

we had to pay everything not even up front, but months in advance of getting the product. So it got much harder from a funding perspective and a cash flow perspective for us compared to the guys before because the supply chain had just lost so much money with these other startups in the past. And in thinking about like how do we push all this stuff into the future, I feel like there's a version of nothing where you tried to do something super different. And you ended up doing like what Humane is doing with the AI pin or what Snap did with Spectacles a bunch of years ago.

And you're like, we think we know what's next. And we're going to try to build it in public and get everybody really excited and move everybody into the future. You decided to go with headphones and smartphones, which I think you could argue are two of the most mature mainstream, hard-to-crack markets that exist. If the goal is like make technology exciting again, why build those things? I think you have to exist to be able to make things more exciting. I think of it as kind of like the Apple analogy. So Apple started with computers, but computers is not what made Apple really big. The iPod was what made Apple really big, and then they had successes with the iPhone and other products after that. I think our entry

into the smartphone industry is similar to Apple's entry into the computer industry. It's a mature market. Through being different, we can find our group of consumers and eventually build a business that is self-sustaining. We can make some profits, and then we can take those profits and reinvest those into imagining what a future form factor could be. I think we need that. I think we need that iPod moment in the future as well. But if we started with that really crazy idea, what if it didn't have product market fit, then we don't have an opportunity to try and create the future anymore. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting analogy, right? Because I do think the computer market was substantially less mature in the 70s when Apple came in than the

smartphone market is now, which I think just like kind of makes that road for you even harder in a lot of ways. It's like there was no sort of Apple of the computer industry at that time. But the thing that's interesting is like I think about sort of what is what is at the point right now that the MP3 market was when the iPod came out and it's like there really isn't one I kind of feel like the closest thing is maybe headsets in the sense that like some exist but it's pretty clear that nothing has gotten it right but I also think we're like several massive technical breakthroughs from being able to make you know the iPod of headsets or whatever I don't think the Vision Pro is that thing yeah and so it's just sort of a tricky moment where it does feel like

your only options are things we're totally not ready for, or things that may be kind of at the other side of the curve of being super, super exciting to everybody. Yeah, I think our strategy is to start with really mature categories that are big. So for smartphones, over a billion are sold every year, for wireless headphones, over 300 million are sold every year, and try and be different there, at least carve out a niche for ourselves, and then gradually take it step by step to a more innovative part of the curve. So you don't have to win the phone market. You just have to get enough of the phone market to put yourself in a position to win the next thing. Yeah, I think, you know, Apple in the

computer industry, although dynamics were not exactly the same, but today they're still kind of not a dominating player in terms of market share. I don't think that we're going to be a dominating player if we're around in 10 years in smartphones. I think the, like the turning point will be a new form factor, definitely. Is it glasses? You know, I've been thinking a lot about software. I think a lot of the smartest people, they went on to making apps. So in 2008, the App Store was invented. I think that was like the major, the last major innovation in mobile OS. Before the App Store, whatever features you got with the phone were the features you had throughout the entire lifecycle, unless you side-loaded something. After the App Store, you could basically

extend your phone with infinite capability, like whatever other people could dream up, you could download. So I think a lot of the smart people, they went on to making apps around 2008. And Then it got to a point where people were just optimizing for time spent or trying to make whatever metric was important to them. And I think the major platforms like Apple App Store, they were bought into this because whenever the app developers make money, they also make money. So I think there's a vested interest to not do that much on the mobile OS side. Maybe that's where we should be exploring what could be done. Like one of the things we've done with the phone too is we feel like apps have gotten too powerful. Like, you know, sometimes I know I have to do something on my phone, work-related.

So I unlock my phone. I go into TikTok or Instagram. I scroll for, I just wanted to scroll for like one minute to see what's new, what notifications are important. But I actually just end up scrolling for five minutes. And then I forgot what my original task was. So we feel like apps have gotten too powerful. And with the phone two, both on the hardware side with the GIF, but also on the software side, we're trying to at least give users options to take some of that power back.

I mean, now you're just bringing up my, like, pet favorite thing to talk about. I've been obsessed with this world of these, like, slightly dumber smartphones for forever, the light phone, and there was the punked a few years ago. And this idea about, like, what have you had a phone that did all the things you needed it to, but didn't take over your entire life, which I think is a really good thing. And I think a lot of people intellectually want that. But I think figuring out how to make the case for what amounts to, like, a slightly worse smartphone, is really complicated.

It is. You're better at marketing in this space than most. And I think even for you, that story is going to be hard to tell. Like, we are going to make it harder for you to find the Instagram icon because that's good for you.

And I think that's right. And I just, I don't know how to get over that bridge. I think it's going against human nature. It's really difficult. And tens of thousands of engineers who have spent the last decade building really, really good apps

that I am sort of drawn to spend hours in all day. So I think we've got to start with a niche. I think there's a certain type of consumer out there who really resonates with features like this, it's really going to be hard to convince the mask to adopt something like this. It's hard to go against human nature. Like, we're hardwired to want to use things that are addictive.

So I think it's one step, but it's not going to take us to the mainstream, definitely. Yeah, that's fair. So tell me about the phone, too. So by the time this comes out, the reviews will be out. A lot of folks will have seen it. But I think based on kind of what I've heard and what you said in the launch and stuff,

you learned a lot from the phone one. Building phones is hard. You got better at it. You got a better team. You've convinced some of these partners that you're actually doing this for real and you're not just going to leave them in the lurch with a bunch of unused product. And you're in a position where you can push a little harder towards the stuff you want to do. So when you look at the phone two, where does that most show up?

What is that like you're like, this is now this stuff we're able to do because we're better at this now? So if you look at the hardware design or the hardware side, we had the Glyph interface with the phone one. We got a lot of negative feedback from comments on the internet saying it's like a gimmick. It's just a nice phone with some funky lights on the back, but it's not really useful. It wasn't that we didn't have those ideas of how to make it useful and what features it should have. We just didn't have the engineering capability to deliver all of that. So now with the phone too, on the glyph interface side, there's a whole lot of features. There's a timer, there's a progress bar.

So when you're like waiting for your food delivery or waiting for Uber. you can see where it is. We created a glyph composer, so you can have fun and kind of create your own glyph segment, share it with your friends or working with artists like a Swedish house mafia to make sound packs.

Yeah, so it's just more fun. So a lot more on the utility, but a lot more fun as well. That reminds me of, I don't even know if this is still a thing, but for a while you could customize the vibration patterns on certain phones so that if you had it in your pocket

and it was like, oh, if my wife is calling, it does three quick pulses. And if it's anybody else, it's like too long, pulses. And I remember spending so much time trying to dial that in only to discover that I could never get it quite right and could never remember what was what. But I feel like the glyph thing kind of vibes with me in that same way. Yeah, I think we should simplify it, right? So now we also introduce something we call essential glyphs. So for things that are really essential for you, it's just

always on. It doesn't flash and go away. So you could assign this one to somebody important as an example. So I think that's easier to recognize then some vibration or a light that flashes. and disappears. So the hardware side, I think Lyft is a lot more useful. I know that the creativity within our company cannot be compared to the creativity of the entire internet. So we're creating SDK for this interface. Other app developers can also tap in and it will be exciting to see what they build with

this. Yeah, I noticed in using it, there's definitely, like you can tell the team is bigger. There's just more stuff going on on the phone than there was before. It feels like you've touched more of the menus. You've touched more of the icons. there's more going on kind of in the nothing OS. People built new widgets. It's just like there was just human power to build some of this stuff.

But it does make me wonder not to keep going back to the Apple analogy, but like the thing Apple did very early on that worked out really, really well for Apple was basically try to own as much of the thing as it possibly could. And you're in a position with smartphones where that's very hard. Like building your own OS right now is suicide. Like it just is. If you weren't running Android, people would be like, that's stupid and just move on with their lives. They need apps.

Right. Yeah. And so you're in this position where there is at some point sort of a wall on how much you can do, I would think, in part because apps are made to run on specific kinds of devices with specific size screens, with specific kinds of resolutions. Like, how far do you feel like you can push in the smartphone world before you either, like, lose users or just build something nobody wants? I think taking a step-by-step approach and reacting to user feedback for every generation, we could probably do something really interesting. Okay. and wait for that leapfrog moment. You mentioned that our hands are kind of tied, right, on multiple fronts.

And even within Android, if you look at the market share globally, but in particular in the U.S., like iOS is creeping up year on year. I think today it's already, in general population of the U.S., it's like 55% iOS already. And climbing pretty fast. And for people under 18, it's like 90%. So what happens when these people grow up, I mean, is Android still getting? going to be around. So that's something that really worries us as well. Like if we're able to be successful with the next few generations of products, but at the same time, if the door for Android is slowly closing, then what do we have to build a company on?

Right. But the thing I take away from that is like, I swear the whole reason for the iOS thing is just blue bubbles. Like it's just, it's just blue bubbles. And it's like there are people out there who it's like, you know, what's the biggest turnoff in a possible dating partner and people like green bubbles? And it's like, that is like objectively insane. But this is the world we live in. Are there blue-bubbly things you feel like you can do in this space without being sort of the dominant player? Like if I'm, if you're running Samsung, you have some moves, right? There you can you can start to sort of enclose the ecosystem in some interesting ways. You're too small to do that right now in a way that would sort of blow up. Maybe that

changes over time. But are there, do you have moves like that? My view on this is that, you know, Apple, they used to really compete on making the best product, the best user experience, the best software, the best hardware, the best interplay between hardware and software. But today, they build so many modes that are beyond that. Right. So they don't have to compete as hard on pure product because they have these blue bubble modes. And ultimately, that's going to be really bad for the consumer because there's just going to be fewer and fewer options. If you look at our industry, there's fewer and fewer brands over time.

It's getting more and more consolidated. And Apple is slowly gaining market share every single year. I think ultimately the only way around this is if the government steps in. And I've seen in Europe that things are already happening with the USBC standard, but also I think next year the protocol, the message has to be opened up in Europe based on my understanding. But I'm not sure how they're going to phase it, and I'm sure Apple is going to try and make it difficult.

That's going to get messier before it gets better, I think. I think so as well. So what can we do? We can wait. We can communicate on kind of how unfair some of the practices are. and how it's really hard to break in and innovate in this market, we can probably not, I mean, if we build our own social features, it's probably not going to do that much, right,

because our user base is still quite small. Maybe we can do some really naughty stuff like reverse engineer I message and have support on our phones. Sure. I mean, but even that, it's sort of an interesting thing to think about how to sequence, right? Because if you wait until you're huge to build that stuff, you've kind of missed a chance to bring people along with you.

But if you do it at the beginning, it's going to be so sort of limited in its utility. But I just think about like I mostly use an iPhone and my wife mostly uses a pixel. And there's just a series of things that are more annoying in our relationship as a result. And so I'm at a point now where it's like one of us is going to switch phones because it's just going to make life easier

for us to like send each other pictures. AirDrop, right? Because trying to send pictures between devices is awful when you're on different platforms. So what do you guys do now? Email or? She just texts me everything. Links and the videos come in like tiny little postage stamps.

I mean, it's bad. It's a crappy system. We have shared Google Photos albums that kind of work. It's just not good is the point. And so I think for me, it's like, okay, if I go out and buy us the same thing, if I'm buying two nothing phones, should that be better than if she has a pixel and I have a nothing phone? Today is probably the same. Android is also building interoperability between Android devices. So instead of AirDrop, Android has something called nearby share.

It works in a similar way. I don't think it's the right time yet to make the experience between nothing devices way better than nothing in other Android devices. Okay, that's fair. I think that's probably right. And it does seem like Android has at least gotten better enough in that regard that you're not missing too too much. The iOS to Android Interplay sucks really bad. But with things like RCS and nearby share and that kind of stuff, it seems like the blue bubbles of Android at least are coming along a little bit. I don't think it's enough.

It's not stopping the market share increase or the market share decrease, right? So it's something that's kind of worrying, but hopefully something good happens. What do you make of that? Like looking at the fact that especially in the U.S., the iPhone is just dominant. Like what's the takeaway there? Is it just that Apple is better at marketing this than everybody? I think Apple had the best product. And now that they built the modes, they can focus less on innovating on the product.

They can just keep defending their pie. So that's my take. So if we want innovation to speed up again, somebody has to do something about all these modes because like messaging is almost like infrastructure like how can you give monopoly to one company file sharing is kind of like basic infrastructure would you give water system or like water plumbing and electricity to one company i don't know but that's kind of what's happening yeah do you buy that hardware can kind of lead that because i think a lot of it also is i think the app ecosystem on iOS is pretty definitively better than on android but i think like i remember

talking to the pixel team years ago when they were starting the pixel. And one of the things that they said is we need to make what we believe is like a truly terrific Android device to make developers excited to build stuff for this device. And I think to some extent that has worked. And that's what they've tried to do with Chromebooks. It's what they've tried to do with tablets and kind of to, you know, mixed effect on some of those. But you've been in this business a long time. Do you buy the idea that like if you make really great hardware, you can get people to kind of want to be part of it? I guess the same question goes for like the glyph interface. I think with scale.

Okay. Great hardware and a lot of scale. Because the app developers, a lot of them are also businesses. So they have to figure out the ROI. If I invest engineering resource, am I going to make the money back or not? So it's easier when you have scale. I think we're lucky because we have a very, because we're quite small. So we have a very enthusiastic community.

They're very technical. So there'll be a lot of kind of hacking going on. So we're released SDK. Maybe something interesting comes out of that. Yeah. But I don't expect the metas or, you know, the largest tech companies in the world. to use our glyph SDK. Is the only way to do that to just eventually get so big they can't ignore you?

That's the only move? That's the only way, I think. You don't think you can sneak one into Adam Messeri's office and be like, hey, here's a cool thing that might work for Instagram. I think he might really love the product, but it still doesn't make sense for him to commit resources to doing anything at this moment, unless it can really benefit his product somehow. That's fair. I can understand that. Adam, build it if you're listening.

I don't know what it would do, but every time you get an Instagram, just glit. just glyphs everywhere. All right, we're going to take a break, but we have lots more to talk about, including what comes after phones. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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No endless searcher required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-R-K.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back with Carl Pay, the CEO of Nothing. Talk to me about price because I think this is something you've been through now at a couple of different companies

trying to figure out how do I sell good stuff at the lowest possible price and you're kind of doing the same thing you did at One Plus which is like one of the things that most impressed people about the phone one was how cheap it was

and I think with this next one the phone seems to be significantly better but also significantly more expensive it's gone from $399 to $599. How do you balance making a phone at the cheapest possible price with trying to do all this other stuff you're trying to do?

It's quite complicated. We can't just think about what consumers are going to think, although consumers are the most important ones. We also have to think about the suppliers because our industry doesn't really support small companies. It just costs like $30 to $50 million for each new product we develop. Wow. So if we sell one unit, it's still that amount of money.

If we sell a million units, it's still that amount of money. So we just have to reach scale. And it's quite costly for our factories and our suppliers to work with us. So unless they feel like we can become a big company. one day, it doesn't make sense to collaborate. So in the beginning with the phone one, we had to sacrifice and make it a loss leader just to get to some level of volume that's enticing for supply chain to want to work with us. So at that point, it's actually more useful to be sort of cool and zeitgeisty than it is to be per unit profitable in that first run.

We need to get the volumes up. Sure. That's like the key. But as a company, we can't keep making a loss on everything we sell. So over time, we have to become profitable. You should just made the phone 50 bucks. You would have sold a ton of them. Exactly. And it would have been bankrupt by now. So it's about finding the right balance.

So with the phone, too, we're not losing money on every device sold. We're making a small margin. But after all the costs this year, we're still going to lose quite a bit of money. But we have to make that step so that eventually, maybe next year, after, we can break even. The economy right now is not the best. So funding, although it's available, it's much harder than before. So we've got to try and run a more get to profitability quicker than before.

Okay. I have no evidence for this, and it's possible I'm totally wrong, and I hope you tell me if I am. But it seems to me that especially in the U.S., $600 is kind of an awkward price for a phone. Like, I almost think it's easier in some ways to make the case for like an $8 or $900 phone than it is for a $600 phone. Because especially in the U.S. where people are paying it off over the course of a couple of years, it's a couple of dollars. it's a couple of dollars a month people don't really notice but then if you say

okay I can buy the iPhone for $1,000 right? That is just sort of the assumed price of a very good phone you come in and say no we've made a very good phone for $600 and there's just a thing that lodges in people's brains

that's like well what's the catch and I think right if it's like if it's $200 I understand that I'm making tradeoffs and I'm clearly a cost conscious person but you get to this middle ground and I think lots of companies have found this in the US

that the price sensitivity is really different here and so it's like At some point, if you're going to charge $600, you might as well just charge $900. The market is like a barbell shaped. Yeah. So you got a lot of volume at the low end and a lot of volume at the high end. But I think that's like when you're looking at the market as a whole, like the general market in the U.S. looks like that.

However, we're not catering to the general market today. We're not even available for sale inside of the carrier stores. Sure. I think the first step to our entrance into the U.S. is we got a target to the tech enthusiasts. Who are even less price sensitive? These are the people who are out there buying $1,800 crappy foldable phones. I think a lot of them actually look at what you get and what you pay and can be really smart about that. So at least that group of people are going to be, I think this phone is going to speak to them. I think U.S. is really, really complicated as a market. We've got to take a step-by-step approach, start by building a loyal fan base.

People really knowledgeable with people really knowledgeable about technology, have their endorsement first, you know, collaborate with them to make the product really, really good. before we go to the next step. You know, U.S. is like one of the freest economies in the world, but actually our industry in the U.S., it's one of the most difficult ones. Oh, it's a disaster. Yeah. Like the barrier to entry is so high. There's basically only three sales channels, right?

The three carriers, the three big carriers. And it just makes it a lot more complicated than compared to other markets where everything is unlocked. When everything is unlocked, you can just speak to the consumer. And as long as you have a great product and a brand that consumers love, that's all you need to worry about. But here it's way more complicated. Yeah, I mean, that sort of mid-range phone graveyard is littered with phones who thought

they could crack unlocked phones in the U.S. And they just were all wrong. It's really hard to do. And then you see the market share for iPhone keep increasing as well. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, people like walk into stores and say, what should I buy? And they say, here's the new version of your old phone. Yeah.

And that's, in the U.S., especially, that just is what happens. So, like, I had a Samsung phone or I had an iPhone. and you use your phone until it dies, then you upgrade to whatever the newest one of those things is. And breaking that chain strikes me as maybe the hardest challenge of breaking into the U.S. Yeah, I've spoken to carriers in the U.S. It's not that we can't be arranged, but I think it's just not the right timing. But something that came out of those conversations was that they're also really worried about the situation

because they're seeing, you know, after these big launches, they would measure the footfall into their stores, and now the footfall is getting less and less after the launch is because there's not much new to go and check out in person anymore. Yeah. I mean, that tracks. I mean, we even see that covering these things like the sort of day of enthusiasm for one of these new devices is definitely not what it once was. Yeah. So hopefully we can do something about it, but it'll take a bit of time. Yeah, that's fair. And speaking of that, actually, one of the things I've heard you talk a bunch about is thinking about how to do all this stuff over time, right? You clearly have a long roadmap. You didn't answer my question. question about glasses. So I'm going to make you answer my question about glasses here at some point. But you also are in a position of you don't have unlimited money. You're not a trillion dollar company

that can just pour money into the metaverse until it becomes a thing. You have a small number of shots at this in a pretty real way. Like I've talked to a lot of companies over the year who are like, we got one hardware order wrong because it didn't launch to as much excitement as we hoped and it bankrupted the company and that was it. We ended up with a warehouse full of phones and no company. How do you square those two things? You're like, okay, this is the thing that gets us to the thing. We want to be big. We have this long roadmap, but we also have to keep being an ongoing concern to get there. Yeah, you kind of have to have a dream, but you have to be very practical in reaching it. I think this business is one of the most challenging ones to build because there's

just so many things you've got to think about. You've got to think about everything from supply chain to manufacturing, to hardware engineering, software engineering, hardware design. software design, sales, marketing, distribution around the world. It's different in every country. Marketing is different in every country than supporting the products,

software updates, and repairing the products when they're broken. So the chain, the value chain is just so long compared to if we're just making an app, it'll be much simpler. Sure.

Or the reverse. One of the companies I know you've thought about in building this company is Tesla. And I think the smart thing Tesla did was say, our first car is going to cost $250,000. We're not going to sell very many of them, but we're going to make a bunch of money on the ones that we do sell,

and that's going to start to pay as we kind of trickle down. So for you, I don't know, you could have started with like a foldable phone that cost $2,000. And some people would have bought it. Some people would have not bought it. And then you can sort of slowly scale up. But you tried to do kind of a small version of the mainstream thing from the very beginning. I thought about the Tesla model, but I think Tesla was so ahead of its time against their competitors. That's fair.

To make an electric vehicle, a foldable phone does not have the same head start as what the first test launch. You just had to launch that in like 2012 and then you would have. And also, the utility of electric car is so easy to understand versus a foldable phone, I think. That's fair. So maybe when we go to our iPod moment, that's where we start from the high end. I don't know. Yeah. No, that's fair.

And I just think that pace is really interesting. And we've seen so many companies like Snap has been going through this. a big way where they started the spectacles. They're like, here's the road to true augmented reality we think we're going to get there. And that road has gotten weirder and longer than anybody expected and has been really hard for that company. And meta's going through the same thing with Oculus. Like, that's getting better, but not as quickly as we would hope. Apple's having trouble with Division Pro. It's like these roads are long and complicated and those are companies, those are like public companies with billions of dollars to lose on this problem.

It's a cliche, but I mean, timing is key. So we're trying to do the right thing at the right time. Yeah. And have a more patient approach. So speaking of that, what do you look at right now? It feels like we're in this crazy moment of change. All anybody talks about is AI. Wearables are like kind of a thing. Glasses are becoming the thing. Like, what do you make of the transition we're in right now?

I think for us, like at where we are, what's really important is to get to profitability. If we don't, then there's a risk. You're talking like a big company here. You're like, we have to be fiscally responsible. Because if we are not profitable, then we don't have the opportunity to build the next thing. And that's a reality. A lot of these big companies, they have a lot of free cash flow like Google and and Meta.

They make a lot of money on ads so they can use that business to kind of subsidize or take larger risks elsewhere. We don't have that. So we need to make sure we're at least safe and we survive. And then we can figure out the really interesting products. Is that hard for you as the CEO to move sort of deliberately in that sense? Because I would think also if you're sitting there thinking like, okay, here is the thing that is going to make us the company we want to be,

to not just pour everything into racing there as quickly as you possibly could and actually be sort of methodical on the way. Seems like it would be a really hard thing to stay disciplined about over time. There's no other option. I mean, it's like a game with no other path. So I think it's quite easy to be on this path. Apart from reaching profitability, I think it's really important to build a really solid team

and really solid processes so we can run like clockwork for when that opportunity comes will be much more it'll be much easier for us to capture the opportunity it's like during winter let's train our body to be really strong

so that when summer comes when spring comes we can run really quickly so do you think the phone keeps being the thing for a long time both for you and kind of for the world

I think so yeah like if you fast forward out five years from now is the phone still the primary thing that everybody has with them all the time a computing device

made up of a large screen with some camera capability, I think, is going to be the dominating form factor for a long time. People have said voice might be taking over or kind of immersion into a virtual reality, but I think those are more like in addition to the main form factor. You can't get the same level of utility through just audio or it doesn't feel that good to always be in a virtual environment. So I think this form factor will be really key. But I think maybe what happens on the OS side and the software side could change with all the improvements we're seeing in AI today.

Yeah, what does that look like, do you think, as you cast out a few years? I think the thing I keep hearing is basically like how do we take your phone out of being kind of an app machine, right? All your device does is provide a bunch of icons that you tap on to go into sort of individual worlds that are apps. And how do we kind of stitch it all back together in a way that makes more sense? And that's what like Alexa and Google Assistant were supposed to be. That's what we're talking about with the AI chatbots.

Is that where you think we're headed or do you see something else? I think so. I think there's not a lot of dumb people. I think everybody sees a similar kind of long-term vision, but everybody might have a different solution or hypothesis on how to get there. If we take one step back and just think about what it means to be a tech company, I think we need to either not just our company, but the tech company community, we either have to enable consumers to do something they weren't able to do before.

or we need to enable them to do it something they can already do, but much faster or much cheaper. So I think those are the guiding principles for how we evolve the OS as well. Like, okay, it's an app machine right now. It's an app launcher. That actually hasn't changed since the Symbion days, right? The Symbion was also home screen or lock screen with a bunch of apps that you open. It took up the entire screen.

You went back to home screen and launched something else. So I think if you want to remove that metaphor, you need to create a new metaphor that's way more efficient than before and easy to understand and easy to use. Do you have a theory about what that metaphor looks like? Is it just a text box? Like is the chat GPT bot? I think some text, not all text, probably, some buttons,

because writing is still slower than just pressing something and some augmentation via via voice. I think it needs to slowly augment away the apps. Like today we're using some really simple apps, like mindless scrolling apps. What if we wanted to accomplish more complicated tasks like 3D modeling or photo editing or I don't know, what other use case there might be? It's actually quite difficult to learn how to use these new apps. Maybe we can just tell the phone what we need to do and it would use those apps for us without the apps even being visible in the foreground.

I think that could be enough utility to transition to a new metaphor. Yeah, I mean that is like my favorite sort of UI game to play. it's the plane ticket example, right? Like, I need to go to San Francisco, and I would like to buy a plane ticket to get to San Francisco. It turns out that doing like a back and forth of the voice assistant to do that is terrible. Doing a back and forth with the chat bot is terrible.

But also the way we have it now, where I'm in six apps, I'm comparing a bunch of different things, like also terrible. So this question of like, what is actually a better structure for doing something like that feels like sort of the next big question

of the next, you know, five years? And there's a million versions of that, right? It's like, I just want to find something to watch on my TV or I want to book a reservation to go to dinner. These things that we've all learned how to do in these really specific not that good ways, we have to invent something better for. And like the underlying tech is getting there. But the products don't seem to have quite solved it yet. Yeah, I think everybody sees what the future needs to be. But I think the really tricky part is finding the right user interface that's easy to understand and can get adoption from consumers.

you know, as we scale these products into the hands of millions of consumers, we also have a shot at implementing our version to see if it sticks or not. But who knows, right? Because I don't think it's the underlying technology that's going to be the most challenging part because it's maturing. It's going to be the right user interface. I have two more questions then. I'm going to let you go.

The first is one of the things that has happened is that this sort of transparent design that you guys have bet really big on is starting to percolate out. there are like beats has a pair of headphones that looks suspiciously like somebody at apple got a hold of the nothing headphones and made those for but for beats the the transparent look is you guys didn't invent it but i think it restarted a bit as nothing started to come out you're going to be in a position where like any good startup there are these big companies that have infinite resources and are going to copy every cool thing you do really fast how do you stay out in front of that I think Apple won't, I mean, big companies won't really copy us because they already have a much more mass market consumer base by copying us.

They actually limit the amount of users that they can potentially talk to because our design is more niche. But on the flip side, they have 100,000 engineers and they can just throw a thousand of them at any specific problem for us. And they can use their subbrands like what you just mentioned to do something more niche. but actually also committing to creating something transparent is actually it's a lot of work. I don't know if you've seen some of my tweets on how we accomplished this design. I mean, it's very easy to make the glue look very ugly because everything is visible now.

It's very easy in the manufacturing process for there to be dust. So it actually adds a lot to our costs making the product transparent. I don't think it's something that, like these big companies with a lot of resource, of course they can do it, but I don't know if they cannot. to make sense for them, to increase the cost of all their products just to make it look a little bit different. I think it's a good strategy for us because we need to find our niche and wedge and wedge into the market. So I'm not that worried about other people copying. Also, if our vision is to make tech fun again, if we can inspire other people to do more interesting things, that it's still okay.

However, if they go straight for some of the user interfaces that we create, like for me, I see the Glyph interface as a UI that we're, trying to create. I think that's when we're going to start defending ourselves. Okay. So do you think about it that ruthlessly in thinking about products? Like is one of the sort of checkboxes for new products? Is this something that these big companies can or won't do? I don't think we're that, we weren't that kind of structured about this. It just happened, but we realized throughout the process how difficult it was to actually make these products, which kind of alleviated our worry that people would aggressively go after this. All right.

So last thing, and then I'll let you go. The phone two is, I think, in a lot of ways, a much better phone one. Is that the right path to be on in this space where you're trying to sort of build something like just keep getting a little better every year? Or do you think there is room for you in this industry to try something wildly different and new? I think both. I think if you keep getting a little bit better every half a year or every year, it really compounds. Right. So you end up like maybe.

I don't know. I think Apple would say that's what. what they've been doing for the last decade. And then you show up saying everybody's super boring because they all just get 10% better every year. I don't know. I feel like the changes between the phone one and phone two and how different it is is a lot bigger than some of these bigger companies.

Okay. Like, give me an example. What on their feels? I think the software looks completely different as an example. So when we launched the phone one, we were only able to make stock Android stable. Right. That's the extent of our engineering resource.

Now we can start experimenting with our own ideas. our own widgets, our own monochrome UI, et cetera. So I think at least that looks very different. And we have a very exciting roadmap for where to take that in the future. So at least the next few generations or next couple of years, there'll be a lot of exciting stuff happening on the software side. What about on the hardware front? I know you've said somewhat controversially,

I read a thing this morning that said, like Carl Pays' reality distortion field put Steve Jobs to shame. After you said you're not into foldable phones as an idea, I'm very bullish on flip phones personally, and I'm happy to give you a long speech about why I love flip phones, if you'd like. But you have not seemed all that interested in that. You're still on this kind of like most people's experience

of a smartphone. What else can we add to it? Do you think there's big new ideas to be had there? The thing for us is every product needs to be profitable, and every product needs to be a hit because we don't have infinite resource. So foldables and flip phones are not that exciting yet. Over time, as the category matures,

as the crease starts really disappearing, as apps are being tailored to this new form factor, I think, you know, it's something we could consider. We're not saying no. But I don't think it's the thing that's going to really change the paradigm. I don't think it's the thing that's going to make Android win over iOS. I don't think it's what's going to make us go from a niche smartphone maker to the next big tech company. So it's okay. We just got to build a really solid base of products, and we keep getting better. hopefully we build up some cash to try and invent the next thing. Fair enough.

All right. Well, when either the next thing happens or the phone three flips and folds and you've just been lying to me this whole time, you're going to come back and we're going to talk about it. Okay. Thank you, Carl. Really appreciate it. Thank you. All right.

One more break. And then we are going to get deep into our feelings about TV remotes. Support for this show comes from whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time.

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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. Welcome back. Andrew Marino is here. Andrew, you have told me very little about what's about to happen to me and to us in the universe, except you told me you want to talk about.

talk about TV remotes. Yeah. Yeah, we have a lot of opinions about TV remotes in this Vergecast Producers Club here. And I wanted to share that discussion with the audience because I think it's worth talking about. I should say in preparation for this, I went around my house and found every single remote that I have. It turns out there were seven. Three of them, I could not tell you what they go to, but I have four functioning remotes and three others in my house. Liam James is also here. Liam, who usually refuses to be on the podcast, demanded to be on the podcast. Well, someone has to counter your terrible opinions on remote control. I mean, that's fair.

We've been talking about this segment and this issue for a very long time. This might be six or seven hours long, so buckle up everybody. Andrew, you have been talking to some people and doing some research. Where would you like to start here? Okay. I want to start with one of the most frustrating remotes I've ever used, which kind of started this conversation about how remote design is kind of an afterthought. So I have this remote and it is one of the novelty remotes because I needed a universal remote for my TV. Okay. And it's shaped like a fishing

reel. It looks like a fishing reel has a little like crank on the side. Oh boy. To it actually works with the remote. I'll get to that. You know what this looks like to me is like an old timey like Nintendo video game controller. Like you know the the gun. that you had for duck hunt on like the old Nintendo? There's a Dreamcast fishing remote that is like that. Yeah. Exactly. It's shaped like a fishing reel.

There's a skinny handle and there's like a bulbous spool shaped end to it. The first problem is there's absolutely no way to lay this flat on the table because there's a little trigger on the back. And if you lay it on the table, it just kind of goes to the side. Also, there's a gigantic button on the side of the remote that makes this very little bit. very loud noise. Oh, no. It sounds like a fishing reel being yanked. Pressing this button also turns on the sounds for the remote so I can be like, I'm reeling it right now. Is this marketed to children? This is marketed just to you, Andrew. I'm not convinced this is a real product. This is

something someone made and conned you into buying on the internet. It's probably like a Father's Day present kind of thing. So obviously you don't want to knowing. sound every time you use the remote. So you can turn it off by pressing the button again. But if you put it on the couch, it's going to hit that button again. It's really annoying. And then all the other buttons are so tiny and hard to find. The volume up button is like two little triangles on the left. The thing you're holding up looks like a slightly bigger like calculator watch where all the buttons are the same and tiny and like God help you trying to figure out what any of them are. So obviously this is like a dramatic version of a bad remote design, but there are similar kind of problems with remotes.

Like my least favorite is that Comcast, Silver Remote. This one. Oh, yeah, David has it here. This is one of the seven that I have in my house. I don't have a Comcast box anymore, but I have this remote, which means there's like a 60% chance I'm paying Comcast $10 a month for this remote at some point. But I agree. This is one of the all-time worst remotes.

And it has the same problem that you were just showing. It has a million buttons. They're all basically the same. You can't find anything just like with your fingers. I agree. This is like one of the worst remotes of all time. Yeah, this is one of the remotes that's like notorious for being taped off for certain areas. So like you give to your grandparents.

It's like, here are the three buttons you need to know how to use. Do not touch the input button. This remote, I'm sorry. I'm just now obsessed to this remote. I'm looking at this remote now. It has five buttons just to control picture in picture mode, which no one ever uses on their Comcast box and overwhelmingly their Comcast box probably doesn't support. It has buttons marked guide, info, menu, exit, help, and last. There's an A, B, and C. Like, what are we, what are we doing?

This is out. There are five buttons that you use to turn things on at the top of this. This is, yeah, this just makes me angry to look at. Right. So I wanted to know, how did we get to this point? Why are a remote so poorly designed? So the first person I talked to was Steve Turbeck. He's a designer in Brooklyn. One of the biggest things I've worked on is how to like explain to people, normal people, what design is. He wrote this really great blog about the design of remote controls and the different levels of simplicity. He pointed out the obvious reason why a lot of remotes are quote unquote bad. The key thing about remotes is that even though they're the most important thing to the user, they're the last thing that the company thinks about making. And generally speaking,

they're trying to make them as cheaply as possible. And so that often means using a bunch of just stock remotes that are kind of manufactured in a hundred different places. And yet, like, the actual thing that you hold in your hand for a good five to ten years, it doesn't seem to be that important. So I think it's more of a cultural thing rather than an engineering problem. I guess that's true. That also explains right why like your cable box looks like crap. It's just not the thing people ultimately at the end of the day care about. Yeah. But it's the least satisfying answer. It really is, but it's probably right. That makes sense, but also, yeah, requires me to accept that people don't care about things that they should.

Yeah, exactly. So I talked to someone else who actually has designed remotes. His name is Sajid. He worked on the Phillips U.S. design. The whole effort was called OneUX, which is basically one user experience across all of Phillips products. Not only doing the digital interface designs, remote controls were an integral part of using a product like a television. So naturally it became part of the process to take a look at the remote controls and make that entire experience, end-to-end experience, more pleasant for our users. Something immediately when I asked, like, why can't we just have like a simple remote design?

He alluded to the obstacles and red tape and a lot of this kind of stuff. When you try to do something totally divergent and let's like, okay, let's remove the buttons, let's introduce a track pad. And then there will be a lot of pushback because that demand. new engineering, new product in industrial design, new testing, and there is skepticism around whether this will work or not. So you have to convince a lot of stakeholders to be able to adopt anything that's diverging from the traditional way of doing things. And this is kind of like an overall tech design problem, not specific to TV remotes. That's a reason why a lot of TVs look exactly the same and a lot of laptops and mice and all

that. Well, and I think I wonder if that also explains these kinds of, you know, every imaginable button and idea thing. Like, this just made me think of for some reason. I was talking to somebody years ago who was making an email app and they were like, pullup gmail.com. And I'd like to tell you about the product manager for every single pixel on this website. And it's like there's a reason that there's something in this corner and there's a reason that there's something in this corner and on this sidebar and up here. And there's a person who is in charge of all of this. And they are sitting in meetings demanding that their thing be front and center. So ultimately they make everything front and center, which makes everything a total nightmare. And I'm sitting here looking at both this Comcast

remote with a billion buttons and my old Vizio remote, which has a million buttons on one side and then a full keyboard on the back. Oh, I love that one. I actually, to be honest, there's like something very good about this particular remote, but you can just see it too, right? There's a million different products inside of this one remote and they all just shove it all together because it seems easier than having opinions about things. Yeah, both designers talked about this. Like, over time, there's been so many iterations of the TV remote controlling the DVD player, the home theater system, the VCR, your music devices, your computer.

All of these interfaces that you are trying to control kind of are hidden behind something that you need to access and to access those is the remote control. And that makes it you need to expose all of those functions and features on the remote control so that you can have a one-click access to them, right? So then you add up adding buttons and functions. So you can tell when there's not a lot of research and development being put into a remote. So how would you test a good design is what I asked them. Steve had a lot of ideas on how we can get to that place.

You have every designer who has a way that they think about doing it. But it turns out a lot of our ideas are not that great. And so I'm more of a kind of user experience designer where you design stuff and then you test it. And if your ego is strong enough to sit through like hundreds of people going through your device, you end up in a much better place. And that is what Sajit's team ended up doing was testing out this stuff in people's homes versus them coming to a lab. That's the best way to kind of understand what you're designing is getting used in the real world.

Like it could be somebody in their home trying to use a TV while attending a kid and something they are doing on the side. Like, how do you juggle your day-to-day life around the products that you are, because your product is going and sitting inside their home, it's becoming part of their life. Well, my question on that is how do they test this? Because I think part of the challenge here is that everybody is used to a giant slab full of buttons. And there's something awful, but something sort of familiar about that. So if you do have this, like, big divergent idea, how do you test to see if it's working? Like, what are they looking for?

What does a better remote even look like? So the best scenario that people want, which I think kind of is a flaw in TV remotes, is everyone wants something to be like one click away. We wanted to understand, like, what are some of those priorities for the users? Like, most of them don't want to be looking down at the remote control while trying to experience the content they're trying to enjoy. One of the big insights was, like, make this a non-interruptive process. like remote control should not be interrupted to the experience of enjoying the content. And at the same time, things should be one click away. Can I tell you my crazy theory?

I wonder if the problem is that we conflate those two things, that I can do it easily without looking down and I have to be able to do it in one click are the same thing because they're not the same thing. Like, for me, it's all, every time I have to look down at my remote, we have failed. But I'm happy to like do two or three things as long as I kind of understand how to there quickly and don't have to look down. I am much more in favor of like if I had to like do the Konami code every time to do something, but I like knew it and didn't have to look it up every single time, that still feels like a victory to me. But maybe I'm not all people. Yeah, I mean,

I'm pretty satisfied with like the Netflix button and the Hulu button. It's like multiple streaming service buttons and on one remote. That's, I mean, that works for me. But what Sajid's team ended up going with is kind of more, I don't want to say minimalist, but like, like a smaller design with just like focusing on a track pad. It is like a smaller in size. The track pad was like the major portion of the design and the interface. So track pad can be just a track pad, but then track pad can be with clickable areas.

So we had like top right, top bottom, left and right edges of the track pad as clickable. So you could do multiple interactions. And then we also, because we had to do incorporate so much into one track pad, So we said, okay, how can we increase more functions within a trackpad? So you have a single click. You have a long press. You have a long press and a slide. So we kind of use all those gestures to increase the amount of things that you can do with just a square surface.

I saw Liam really shaking his head. This is my biggest frustration with modern remotes. You know, I completely agree with what Steve said, right? Most of our ideas are bad. I think Johnny Ives' worst contribution to technology design and his entire career was putting a touch surface on a remote control. It's a terrible experience. I've never seen anybody do it, right? If anyone should be able to do it, it's Apple, and their remote is a joke.

Yes, I could not agree more with this. The, like, true torturousness of trying to figure out how to even hold that Siri remote in your hand was such a gigantic disaster. To me, it's like, Liam, listening to you talk about it just made me think of the keyboard that used to be in the Apple TV where you had to swipe from letter to letter. And it was so fine in order to make it quick to swipe between things that actually landing on the letter you wanted to click on was like borderline impossible. It was awful. I will say the things that Sajid is talking about about having these kind of different interactions built into the same thing, the single press, the long press, whatever. I like that in theory. I just have never seen anyone do it well, I don't think.

Even the second version of this, this improved version of this remote still has a touch surface on it that's prone to like spurious inputs. Like you just accidentally do things while you're watching a movie that takes you out of the moment. And sorry, who thought putting this fucking Siri button on the side of the remote was a good idea? It's just like every time you try to take a screenshot on your iPhone, you accidentally turn it off or do some weird thing. It's like it's like the screech on the fishing reel. It's like they're trolling us. It's like, let's just see how crazy we can drive people. I would get more use out of the reel spinning thing than I do the Siri button,

because at least that's like a fidget spinner I can play with while I'm watching TV. What you can do is you can hold the trigger on the back of the remote and then use the reel. Oh, my God. And it will put the volume up on the TV. That incredible remote that should be marketed as guaranteed divorce, just pop this out next to your spouse and give it a go. So we're talking a lot about what bad remote design is, but I want to talk about what everyone thinks is good TV remote design.

Okay. Liam, you go first. So this isn't the remote I use every day, unfortunately, but my favorite remote of all time is the Xbox One Media Remote. Of all time. Of all time. This is what you want to, really? This is the sword I'm going to die on.

I'm ready, willing, and able. Hear me out. The Xbox One was a terrible product, but from it came a great input device. And if you've ever used a Microsoft input device, like go back to the Intelli Explorer mouse from the 90s to their ergonomic keyboards. Microsoft knows how to make a good input device. And I think this is just like peak remote design. It's not made out of a slab of aluminum or any sort of fancy material.

it's just a plastic remote with buttons on it. But what I like about it is the way it feels in my hand, because it has a rounded back. However, even though it has a rounded back, when you put it on your coffee table, it still stands up straight, which is just kind of like a cool gimmicky bit. But it makes me smile every time I see it.

It has backlit buttons, which are necessary, only because all the buttons are black, and it is a black remote, which I admit. Right. It needs backlit buttons because it's a bad remote that you can't use without having to look down at it and blind yourself in the dark. This is great. This is what I was hoping for, too.

I hard disagree. It is definitely concession of the design to have it all black, but every design has compromises, right? You want something that doesn't look ugly on your coffee table that has like a giant Netflix logo and an Amazon logo and whatever else on it, right? This is a really nice-looking design, but is also really ergonomic. It feels really nice to use. even though the buttons are covered with a layer of like soft touch plastic over the top to make it water resistant, they feel really nice when you click them. Up down, left, right are very easy. Even though they're set inside a circle, they're very easy to distinguish with your thumb without looking at the remote.

And then this is for me the most important thing, and this is what makes this remote stand out to me. So most of our like media streamer remotes nowadays have about like 12 or 3.3. 13 buttons on them, right? This new Siri remote or whatever it's called has, I think, 12 buttons, if you count up down, left, right as separate buttons. This has those same 13 buttons that you would normally have, but then it has for serious video watchers, some dedicated video control buttons at the bottom. So you can scrub forward, back, play pause, or let's say you're inside of a video playlist. This one in particularly, I love, you can skip to the next track. There isn't a button on most media streamer. Actually, I can't think of another one that has that button. So if I'm

queuing up a playlist of my favorite must-see TV sitcoms from the 90s on shuffle, and, you know, I've seen a couple too many episodes of Frazier. I can click the next track button and get there. So I just love it. It feels nice. It's not too heavy. It's not too small. It doesn't get lost in a couch, regardless of what David might say. And yeah, I just love it. It's a good remote. best of all time is a truly wild take. All right, what do you got? What's better than this remote? I just mostly feel like the thing you're controlling with it is your Xbox One,

which immediately removes it from all contention forever and ever and ever. Okay, that's a really good point. This remote is really good for operating a device that makes me want to throw it out the window 450 times a day. Totally fair, totally fair. I should have started this whole thing with the Xbox One Media Remote, is using standard, like, media streamer IR codes. And you can get this to work on...

I've had it work on an Nvidia Shield. I've had it work on an Apple TV. I've had it work on an Xbox Series X, which it's supposed to not work with. That's fair. I will say this is the kind of remote that I think, like, if Logitech made it and sold it as like a use it for all of your other kinds of devices remote,

it would have done very well. My answer, I have two. And ultimately, I'm just going to pick one. but I want a quickly honorable mention to the only remote that I have ever paid money for on purpose, which is the Roku. I have four Roku remotes on my desk right now. Like this is, this is the life I lead. I believe this is the Roku voice remote pro.

Yeah. This is a very good remote. And it's very good for two reasons. One is because it's a little bigger and sort of, you know, heftier than the other Roku remotes. It's like feels better to hold. It feels like a thing instead of the plastic nonsense that Roku mostly ships. but it has two things that are very good. One, it has integrated voice search.

So you just press the microphone button, hold it up to your face and voice search. And two, it has a headphone jack. And private listening on the Roku is like the single greatest streaming box innovation of the last decade as far as I'm concerned. I love it very much. And Roku deserves huge credit. So feature-wise, I think this is my favorite remote ever. But in terms of like just the thing to hold in my hand and use, it's the Nvidia Shield remote. Oh.

The Toe Blurone. It's a totalerone. It's a weird shape, which is weird because it doesn't sit sort of pleasingly flat on my coffee table. But I can pick it out from all the other remotes that I have. So it's like unique. It feels really good to hold, which I think is important. Are you guys, when you're sitting on the couch watching something, are you holding the remote or is the remote on the couch next to you or is the moat on the coffee table? 50.

Yeah. As an audio engineer, I am constantly moving the volume up and down on the TV. So I love the Rookeruma also. So I'm constantly like moving the buttons on the side of the Rooker up and down. Side volume controls also a good innovation of Rooker. Agreed. Yeah. Well done on that.

But I will stop with the Shield shortly here. But it is another one that has nice buttons, kind of like you're talking about Liam, where they're not super separated, but you can kind of feel the difference between all of them. And NVIDIA did a thing that I really like where it has a customizable button that you can like, aggressively customized. It can do almost anything. It can launch almost anything. It can get to menus. And you can have it do different things for one press, two presses, three presses. So it becomes the thing that's like, I can hand this remote to somebody and they're going to be able to figure out how to use it. But if I have it, I'm better at it. And I actually feel like that's sort of the sweet

spot where like most of these kind of macroe remotes like Sajad was talking about are going to have a huge learning curve. But I like these ones where it's like most people could just sit down and figure it out. but I have these like power tools on top of it. And for that reason, I feel like Invideo really got this right. Okay, so the Nvidia Shield Toblerone is a gray remote. I have to agree. It's actually my half-daily driver. So I watch movies using the Invidia Shield and everything else on my Apple TV.

For the nerds, it's just because I want pass-through audio, and Plex can do pass-through audio on the Invideo Shield. But I do have a couple comments about this remote. One, you just knocked my baby for how. having black on black buttons. Same thing. Also, that remote's backlit. You can turn the backlight off. You can turn the backlight off, but then it's really hard to see it. My one other knock on that remote, and maybe this, maybe I just got a bad one, but I find the up, down, left, right to be, like, I just, it doesn't feel like it's going to last forever. Do you know what I mean? Like,

I've had it since the Nvidia Shield Pro came out, so what is that a couple of years. It just feels like it's not the way it was when I got it and it's starting to get a little less satisfying to click. That's fair. A lot of these, like I have a couple of fire TV ones too that have the same kind of all one piece wheel and they all feel a little bit like they're one grain of dust away from just totally breaking. But I've been using the shield one for a long time and it's still fine so I have high hopes. Andrew, I want to know what yours is. Is it is it the fishing rod? Please tell me it's the fishing. It is not the fishing rod. I have to agree that I love the Roku remote. And there's different reasons, I think, than what you said. Really, like, the play state. The way we watch TV now

is not like dialing numbers. And we don't go up and down, usually, on channels. So what this prioritizes is the play and pause. So, like, right where you're, when you're holding the remote, right where your thumb is, is the play and pause button. And that is the most important thing. And that is the thing to do while you're watching TV, right? Yep. And it's a little like concave too. So your, your thumb just kind of nestles on it. It's, they did it. It's, it's very nice. And then there is a home button and a back button. And those are right at the top of the remote. And you know if you need to go back, just put your thumbs up to the back. And it's just like a really flexible remote. That's a product of like us

being in the streaming world. And they started to get it right during the TiVo days. I have this TiVo remote here. And if you see this yellow button in the center of the remote is a pause button. And it is like they clearly understood that this was the most important part of the remote. And it's like right where your thumb would be when you hold it. Anything that prioritizes the play and pause, that's where we should be going towards right now. I had never thought about this until you said this. But now I'm looking at all these other remotes and almost none of them do. Yeah.

Like on this horrible Comcast remote, I couldn't even tell you what it's prioritizing. But the play pause buttons are actually up from where you naturally hold it. So you have to like shimmy it in your hand just to get to the pause button. This Vizio remote, it really wants you to launch the Vizio smart apps because that's cool and a thing people want to do. And most of them, the volume is actually where your finger goes. And that sort of makes sense. But I think you're totally right that play pause should be like naturally as you hold the thing. That's where your thumb should sit.

Yeah. And while you're holding a remote, you can hold pause and then do the volume up and down with your other finger at the same time. True. So you can really, it's really flexible. Yeah. And my LG remote that it comes with my TV has a Netflix button and Amazon Go button acknowledges that streaming is important. The play and pause button are all the way tiny at the bottom. And it's so tiny, you can't even tell, like they're just next to each other.

There's no prioritize. Yeah, it's terrible. Like, how often am I going? fast forwarding. You know, it's the same size as the play and the play and the pause button are separate buttons. I was just about to say, we can agree that play and pause should be the same button. Yeah, right?

Absolutely. Okay. And then can I just give an honorable mention, please? Which is the Zenith Space Command remote, which is a very old TV remote from the 60s, all it is is just a tuning fork. And you press the buttons. There's four buttons. One is channel lower, volume mute, on and off, and channel higher.

Can you press the buttons near your microphone? Because I suspect they make great noises. Yes. That's what I'm talking about right there. That's a button. There's a really high frequency that is chiming with this tuning fork in the remote. Then the TV picks it up and does that command. And I just love it because it just stays flat on the table.

It is just a chocolate bar, basically. and it has four big buttons. And I just want a remote like this again. That's just a thing with four big buttons. So that doesn't use infrared. It uses sound? Correct. Yeah.

Incredible. It does not use any electronics. It is just you press a button and it makes an actual sound with a tuning fork that changes the TV. This would absolutely not work in 2023, but I love it. There should be an adapter that you could plug your TV into to use this thing. Andrew, this brings me to a big picture question that I've been wondering about, and I wonder if you talk to Stephen Sajd about it too, which is that it seems like the world should go in one of two directions. Either all of these companies need to care about and design and build better remotes that work for everybody. And I wonder if that's even possible, especially because all this stuff is so mainstream now that like if Roku radically redesigned their remote, I kind of feel like it would go badly.

The Apple TV is a perfect example, right? But then on the other side, there have been various attempts at like making a remote industry. Logitex sold the Harmony. There was like the Kavo was a thing for a minute there. People have tried to do universal remotes. And even when, do you guys remember when everybody was like, oh, we're going to make a universal remote that's also a smart home controller and that had a moment. Google was like just screw that user smartphone. Now they have a remote that's kind of like everybody else's remote. Can we make an accessory industry out of this? Can TV makers do this? we just sort of stuck in this crappy world of mediocre remotes forever? What's your sense coming out of all this? Well, I talked to Sajid a little bit about the future of this. Now with virtual reality and AR and all of that coming in, maybe there's something else. I don't know. We won't be even looking at each other anymore.

So remotes are like maybe a small part of the larger problem that the technology revolution is going to kind of bring us. And now there are like TVs you can. with your phones, so you don't even actually need a remote control. Phones in some cases have also become a second screen for televisions. For example, there are ways things you can do with second screen. You're watching something on, let's say, Amazon Prime on your TV, and there is a product that you saw. Your phone could tell you what that product is, and you can buy it from Amazon.

I think the phone remote idea is horrible, and I hate every phone remote. Because you have to look at it. It's like it's the opposite of what I'm looking for in a remote, which is like a thing that I can hold in my hand that doesn't light up like Liam's stupid remote and doesn't make me look at it like Liam's stupid remote and doesn't get lost in the cushions like Liam's stupid remote. I just want like a little brick that I can feel. This is like I just keep thinking about like Apple's Vision Pro where it's like the sort of look

and click your fingers. And I'm like that's the closest thing to a sort of virtual remote interface that I'm interested in. I hate the smartphone as remote thing. It's fine in a pinch when I lose Liam's stupid remote in the couch cushions, but it is not what I'm looking for, like, day to day at all. Yeah, I absolutely hate the reliance on a smartphone to control things. And I think it's becoming a problem in, like, the home theater world. Like, if you buy a soundbar, a lot of times there's functionality locked behind the app. So they give you one of these cheap pack in remotes.

But if you want to change how it's processing at most or something like that, like that. You got to download the app and link it up to this box. And is this company going to continue to develop this app? Because we know you can't just make an app and put it on the smartphone and expect it to just continue working forever. Right. You have to continue to develop it to make sure it continues to work. So every time I see TV companies saying something like that or home theater companies, it's like you've already proven to us that you make terrible software, just the worst imaginable. Only the audio industry can eclipse you in making terrible software. And you want me to use your iOS app to actually control your device? No, thank you. I don't get my iPhone out to

control my TV unless I have just absolutely given up. Because you've lost your Xbox remote in the couch cushions again. Yes. Just to be clear, back check here. David, your remote lights up is also hard to see in the dark and is smaller than mine by thickness. So it's easier to get lost in the couch. So, you know, just point that out. That's outrageous. My Toblerone sticks out when it falls into the couch. And I just yonk it right out.

It's like the sword and the stone style. I just pull it out of the couch, get back to it. You know, something I liked, and I know you guys are going to have some feelings about the Wii U controller with the whole screen on it. Oh. If I have a TV with a second screen controller. Ooh. What do you think about that?

So basically, what if my Nintendo Switch was also my TV remote? Yeah. I love this. I'm in. That's the most impractical thing I've ever heard, and I love it already. No, absolutely. I don't want software and screens to control my viewing experience. Yeah.

One more thing before we go, I want to talk about voice control. And whether you think we can rely totally on that, or is just an added feature or we should just not use it at all. I don't like it. I find it really handy for search when you're looking for something with like an obnoxious title to type out, but I very rarely use it.

That's interesting. I use it a lot, but only for search. I think the idea that it's going to be easier to lift my remote to my mouth and say open Netflix than it will be to just press the Netflix button is just never going to be the case. But search on screens is awful.

And, you know, going left, left, left, right, right, right up down, up down to get to the letter is just sucks. And that's also a place I use my smartphone a lot. Like Roku has the thing where you can type with your phone keyboard into the text box on the screen. Love that. But I use voice pretty regularly. If I know what I want to watch, that's almost always the fastest way for me to get there.

But I don't, if that was my only remote, it would drive me and everyone else in my home crazy. I mean, I just think about all the times that like Siri activates because of something. thing it hears on my television. And like, good God, if it could control the TV in the process, I'd be, I'd be screwed. Yeah, the only time that has worked really well for me is in like 2018 when I asked my Google Home, play Stranger Things in my living room. And that has only, the only time it's ever worked is specifically watching Stranger Things on Netflix. But it probably felt like magic. Yeah, it felt like magic. I felt like the future. And ever since then, nothing has really worked as well with voice.

for me. That sounds about right. So, okay, I know, I know we have to go here, but did you ask them about the grandparent thing where you have to cover 80% of the buttons and, and then hand it to them? It's like, the babysitter test was always the one that I think of too, right? Because these are like social objects, right? Lots of people use them. Do they look at this and think, okay, the fact that you have to like sharpie an arrow to the play button and the guide button because those are the only ones that people should touch? Is that like a miserable design failure of anyone who has ever tried to make remotes? Yeah, Steve in particular, called this out. Most designers, especially for remote-controlled designers, we're in a funny position, like, where we have, I think, a certain responsibility to try and push

the state of the art to be a little bit better, even if that means you're just putting a little bit more work into your on-screen menu design or whatever it is, or advocating in that critical meeting to spend another 10 cents per unit or something like that. But because I think a lot of people are, they're given the remote, and they have no choice. And I feel like we have a little bit of responsibility to kind of tip the balance to them. And if you see these little photographs of people save like taking their grandparents' remotes and covering over all the buttons except for the volume and the PBS button or something like that, that's a little bit of failure in it. I feel like we could do a little better there.

Yeah. Like I would like fewer buttons on remotes in general, but I also think like clarity above all things, right? even if you're going to hand me a remote full of buttons, most people are relatively smart. They should be able to figure out what is going on. I was looking while you were talking, and speaking of the back button on the Roku remote, I'm back on my Silver Xfinity remote.

And there are six things on here that you could plausibly think are the back button. Like if I just want to go back one, there are literally six things that I think I could plausibly argue are the right one. I'm pretty sure I know what the right one is, but I genuinely don't know for sure. And it's like, let's fix that problem.

And then we can worry about having a million buttons for a million streaming services. Like, just teach me where back is and then we can go from there. Exactly. Can you play us out with the fishing rod? We should take a break, but I just want to hear from the fishing rod one more time before we go. And with that, he launches Hulu. All right. Thank you both.

You listening should email us all of your thoughts about your favorite remotes ever. Virgcast at theVurge.com. Send us your favorite remote ever, ideally with a picture. And we'll talk about as many of them as we can on the show. This is delightful. Andrew Liam, thank you both again. Let's do the hotline. Wrap the show up.

As a reminder, the hotline number is 866 Verge 1-1. Call and ask us all your deepest, darkest, weirdest tech questions. We love them all. Before we get into this week's question, let me just play you a voicemail we got from Sean, who called in to respond to last week's question about how to keep your battery healthy for longer. Hey, hey, this is Sean from Clearwater, Florida.

Talking about phone batteries. I drive for a living, so I have apps that track me and take up a bunch of my battery life. So I found out that it overheats really bad doing that. So what I've done is clip my phone to an air conditioner vent in my truck, and that will keep that phone battery nice and cool, not using as much electricity. Okay, hope it helps. Bye. I love this.

These are our people. Thank you Vergecast listeners for being as weird about technology as we are. All right. This week's question, more on TV. It comes from Rahul. Hi, David, and Verge steam. My name is Rahul. I'm in San Antonio, Texas. I'm calling to ask you guys about TVs, particularly devices for TVs because I'm tired of the crappy software on my LG OLED TV. And I refuse to get an Apple TV. That seems to be the only decent option out there. What is Google have nowadays? I had an Android TV years ago. I had a other products. I know the Shield exists, but it's old now. So is there anything newer, anything updated since the Shield TV for an Android user to watch some streaming on their TV? I appreciate you answer this. Thanks. All right. First of all, I love this question because Rahul, you feel the pain that I feel with set top boxes, which is that they're mostly all very bad.

The Apple TV has some stuff going for it. The Shield, like you said, has some stuff going for it. But I want there to just be one that is like the one you should get and there just really isn't. But I think there are really two answers to your question. One is the Nvidia Shield, which just from a pure raw power perspective is still probably the best Android thing on the market. It's a little overkill for a lot of things. And some people aren't going to love the way that you have to kind of maintain the interface and all that stuff.

But it's still very good. It's pretty expensive, but it's very good. But I would say for my money at this moment, Google's latest Chromecast, the one with Google TV, is probably the one to get. You can get the new Chromecast for as little as $30. It comes with a remote now, which is great because you don't have to just use your phone. But it's still just a dongle that plugs into your TV. The $30 one is just 1080p and the $50 one does 4K and HDR and all the rest of that stuff. I would direct you to the $50 one for all those reasons.

but also because it comes in more colors. The $30 Chromecast just comes in white. And I don't care for the dongle, but that white remote is going to get gross really, really fast. Maybe you're less gross about, like, eating Cheetos and then using your TV remote than I am. But that's just what happens. My remote would be truly disgusting if I had that white one around.

But the new Chromecast is good. It has Google TV, which does a really good job aggregating content and recommendations and finding all that stuff. The remote works pretty well. not my favorite, but it's like eight buttons in a Dpad. It's pretty simple and straightforward. You'll figure it out. The Chromecast has all of the apps you probably want, including Apple TV, which was a late addition to the Google TV stuff, but it's there now. It just does a good job

of being content first in the way that some others aren't. So that's where I would start you. It's not terribly expensive. Works pretty well. It's a boring answer, but just buy a Chromecast. I think that's the one. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who came on the show today and especially as always thank you for listening there's lots more on all of this at the verge.com if you want to see all the remotes we talked about you should watch this episode on youtube we'll also put some links in the show notes but also you know read the verge dot com it's cool website if you have thoughts feelings questions or tv remotes you desperately want to talk about please email us verge cast at the verge.com tell us everything or keep calling the hotline 866

verge one one we're trying to answer at least one question on the show every week but i think we're going to do a whole hotline episode soon. Keep sending all your thoughts and feelings. It's super fun to hear from you. We really love it. Thank you to everyone who has called in so far. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nilai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Reddit, Threads, Barbie, Oppenheimer, everything else gone on this week. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.