The Vergecast - Picking the perfect portable console

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of nose bridge microphones:  03:10 - The Verge’s David Pierce enlists help from Alex Cranz and Sean Hollister to figure out the best gadget setup for his handheld gaming needs.  The Steam Deck wasn’t born ready, but it’s ready now Nintendo Switch OLED review: screentime Sony PlayStation Portal review: flawed but fun Asus ROG Ally updated review: it’s a bit better now This amazing knockoff GBA SP comes stuffed with software piracy 42:10 - Victoria Song joins the show to test out the microphones on a bunch of smart glasses and headsets.  Razer’s new Anzu smart glasses break from the pack with truly wireless audio The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses actually make the future look cool Amazon’s latest Echo Frames are more style than substance Meta Quest 3 review: almost the one we've been waiting for Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not 01:10:26 - Later, David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline. North Focals glasses review: a $600 smartwatch for your face 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 Nosebridge Microphones. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting in my new bathroom. It's been almost a month since we've been doing this construction, and I'm sure you've heard me complain about all of the construction, noise, and chaos on the show over the last month. You've probably even heard some of the noise and chaos on the show over the last month, so I'm sorry for all of my noise and chaos, but it's done. It's not all the way done because as I've learned with a project like this, it's never all the way done. I can like see the paint touchups and everything that I have to do.

You do one of these things and you're suddenly just very like aware of your surroundings in a way that is honestly not helpful. I don't recommend it. It's better to just sort of live your life and not notice all the imperfections. But now I have a sink that works. We have a shower that works. We have a toilet that works. I have places to put things. It's all very exciting.

And now honestly, given the amount of money and time and energy we've spent in this bathroom. It only feels right for me to just live in this bathroom. So this is my home now. I'm verge casting from the bathroom from now on. Anyway, we have a lot of stuff to do today, so let's dive into it. We're going to do two things. First, we're going to talk about a bit of a gaming hardware conundrum that I'm having, and we're going to see if two of my colleagues can help me figure out

how to upgrade my PS4 and what I actually need to buy. Then, we're going to do a test of some new wearable microphones. We love doing mic tests on this show. on this show, and we haven't done them with the glasses and headsets and all that kind of stuff that is out there in the world in a big way. So we're going to test some microphones and see how everybody sounds. We also have a really fun glasses question from the Vergecast hotline. Lots to do, so let's get to it. All that is coming in just one second, but first, there's a grout line that I have to go fix, and it's going to drive me crazy if I don't do it. This is the Vergecast.

We'll be 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.

Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it. On your company's data and 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. Welcome back. All right.

So as I mentioned up top, I'm in the middle of kind of a gaming dilemma. I've been really a gamer off and on over the course of my life. It's not something that it's kind of a consistent activity, but I'll play a lot for a few months and then kind of put the console away for a few months because whatever, things get busy or I get into something else. But then I always come back to games. And really, for me, it's sports games that are the most consistent. Like I play Madden every year.

I like the NBA games. 2K is really good. I've been a FIFA player for forever. I like Fortnite. I like games that I can kind of come and go to and play a whole bunch all at once and then leave for a little while and then come back. I also like games that I can play for like 15 minutes at a go. And the challenge I've always had with a game like Eldon Ring is I just want to play it for hours. And I feel like it never rewards you for just a couple of minutes of playing at a time in a way that some of these more.

finite battle royale or like football game sized games really are. So all of this is to say I'm pretty happy with my gaming setup. I haven't really felt the need to get a PS5 or anything like that. I'm still on a PS4 pro. It works fine. Everything's great. But more recently, I want something new. We've been talking a lot about handheld consoles on this show over the last eight months or so, I would say. And there's just a lot of cool stuff happening. I also travel more. than I used to. And I'm back to wanting something I can play on the train or on a plane or in a hotel room when I'm not at home. I also just spend too much time sitting at my desk. Like right now, I'm sitting at my desk. My monitor's in front of me. My computer is underneath it. I have a

Mac mini that I use for most things. And then right off to the right is my PlayStation. And so having this one space be the place that I sit for work all day and then to play games at night, I just don't like it. And I want something that I can take and sit on the couch while I hang out with the dog or play out in the backyard when the weather's nice. So I'm really into the idea of a handheld console, but I have no idea which one to get. So I enlisted two people to help me figure it out. Sean Hollister and Alex Cranz, they both know this stuff way better than I do. And together we are going to make a decision about which handheld console I'm going to buy. Let's get into it. Alex Cranz, hello in Texas. Howdy y'all?

Well, this is what we're going to do here. Sean Hoster, hello. Hi, from the land of gaming handhelds. I have brought you here to do personal tech support for me because that is what the first contest is about is helping David figure out which gadgets he should buy. I'm going to lay out for you my current situation, and then you are going to help me solve my current situation. So my current situation is I have a PlayStation 4.

I've had it for a million years. It's fine. It plays video games. I would like to upgrade, but I don't think what I want is a PS5. I think what I want is something handheld and portable because my PS4 lives next to my computer in my basement and I'm spending too much time sitting in this chair looking at this screen. And I would like to have something that can go out in the world with me and I travel a lot and all these things. So I want something that is like primarily but not entirely a portable handheld gadget.

I would like to play lots of games. We can talk about which games I do and don't care. about, but I have exactly one non-negotiable game, which is FIFA. EA Sports FC is the new name of it. I will call it FIFA until the day I die. I play that game more than I play every other game combined, and I need that game. That's it. That's literally like, that is the entirety of where I am.

And I want to buy something, and I want you to tell me what to buy. Why? Why is that your game? Why is that your game? Because I have an answer for you, but the answer has just been foiled by the fact that You have picked a game, which, and I quote, runs a, this program encountered E110B during an civilization. Okay. Error message would you try to run it on a Steam Deck?

So I guess I'm not going to tell you to buy a Steam Deck. My worry was this is going to be the shortest first cast in history because I was going to say all that and you were both going to say Steam Deck and then we were going to hang up and move on with our lives. If it were not for this one game that I require, is the world sort of that simple at this particular moment? Yeah. It kind of is. And maybe it won't be in like two weeks. In two weeks or so, is it three weeks? There will be a Windows handheld with a battery that is bigger than any other handheld on the market.

And maybe that will solve the issue of Windows handhelds don't have great battery life. That won't solve all the other problems with the Windows handheld. I'm going to say, David, you're on the Vergecast. So I feel very comfortable saying you like to tinker. You enjoy a little tinkering. So I do and I don't. I will say what I'm, I am willing to tinker. Like if it's a matter of I need to like buy this thing and spend a couple of hours,

like downloading and tweaking and doing whatever I need to get it set up, fine. I am not buying a thing with the intention of screwing with it forever. I would like this thing to play video games and I want to be able to sit down on my couch and be playing video games as quickly as possible. That's actually very important to me. Would you spend those two hours? Hear me out. Would you spend those two hours setting up your steam deck to dual boot, windows off of an SD card occasionally with the one non-negotiable game that apparently you must have?

You can get FIFA on the steam deck without doing dual boot. I was looking this up. Tell me more. You will need to be comfortable diving into the Linux side of Steam deck and do some tweaking. And also, does it have to be FIFA 24? Yes. Oh, it can't be FIFA 23. Well, no, it actually, what's important is that it's going to be 25 in like six weeks. And it's actually what I need is that one.

Do you have to play it online? Because it's the anti-cheat. That's the problem here. Yeah, insisting on its own version of anti-cheat instead of the ones that actually work on the Steam deck. Yeah, I need to be online. Shit. Well, I feel like the other FIFA games have appeared in Xbox games. cloud. And I feel like this one would also appear in Xbox cloud.

That was my next thought. You make a very good point here, which is a thing that I should have said. I don't need to be able to play this game on the first day that it is available. I just need to play it at some point. Yeah. And what I have discovered about the video game world is that those things are very different. Like when things come to GamePass and there's stuff that comes to PlayStation's cloud stuff later on that isn't there like day and date when they release.

Like the reason I picked this game that matters is because I can just like get lost down this impossible. universe with any game that I want, and it's all very complicated. But just to tie off the one piece of this, if all I was saying is I want a handheld thing to play games on, and I did not give you any specific games, is the answer like the Steam Deck and it's not even close? Yeah. It really is. It really is. The Steam Deck, we're in this moment where all of these other companies are like, we want a piece of that Steam Deck action, but we're going to build it on Windows because gamers tell us that Windows is where all of the games are and they want to just be able to play the games they already own.

Which is true. Which is true. But the reality is that the Steam Deck plays Windows games and it plays more of them better than a native Windows system plays Windows games. What is the problem with the native Windows system? Because Windows is built for computers, for laptops and desktops and things you use with a mouse and at least 13-inch disson. and then you put that on a seven-inch display, and instead of a mouse, you have a joystick. Okay, that sounds awful. Now that I'm thinking this through, that sounds like a nightmare.

That part's kind of that. You can, if you want to spend your two hours of setup, you can certainly spend 10 minutes of them setting up steam to launch every time you launch your Windows computer, and to launch right into big picture mode, and then you have an interface that's similar to the Steam deck, but it doesn't have the ability to like tweak the handheld very easily so that you get great battery life. The chips won't give you great battery life to begin with because there's all that other overhead for all the other shit you don't need in Windows. Sometimes you'll turn off your Windows system. You'll put it to sleep and you'll turn it back on again and wake it up again and all of a sudden your app will be gone and where did it go? I wonder why it isn't full screen anymore.

It's this tiny icon on the Windows task bar. That's not great. Sometimes it won't wake up from sleep. It'll have restarted itself. I'm having like netbook flashbacks to 10 years ago, as you're describing this. Sometimes for some reason, I can't get it to stop asking for the password when I open one of my Windows game consoles. And so then I have to like figure out how to get the accessibility keyboard up, which always takes at least five minutes. And then very carefully type in the password, which is super long because I like to be safe.

It's my favorite thing to do. David, you don't want to do that? This is not the most compelling case you've ever made. But wait, Sean, you alluded to maybe there is something coming that solves this problem for me? Okay. Not most of these problems. But the battery life problem. Asus with the Rugg ally, the ROG ally, they're going to hop on me.

So the ROG ally came out a year ago as like a steam deck but worse in almost every way, except that it had a better screen, a variable refresh rate screen. It has since been surpassed by the Steam Deck OLED, which has an OLED screen that goes 90 hertz. I'm going to stop getting into the weeds. But they're coming out with a new version of that later this month that will have a doubled battery in it and all kinds of other creature comforts. It'll be more comfortable to hold in the year since they shipped the original ROG ally, the UI's gotten a little bit better. It's smoother. Like Tom Warren likes his.

I think he might prefer that over the steam deck. He is a notorious Windows fan boy. That's why he doesn't count. I think it's going to be very possibly the first Windows handheld that I can recommend because they've gotten so many things right, but it fundamentally still runs Windows. And Microsoft has not improved Windows in any meaningful way in the year and a half, two years since SteamDeck came out. They could, though, right? Like we've been hearing a lot of rumors that they're going to introduce some sort of Xbox handheld in the next couple of years. That will very likely run on Windows because technically the Xbox runs on that.

There's like the opportunity. I feel like a lot, like, remember when AMD was having its big resurgence, Nvidia was the game GPU, and then AMD was like, we're going to start doing this again. And the difference was Nvidia actually did software and made the games work really, really well, whereas AMD didn't for at least a year or two. That's where the Windows handhelds are. No one's done those really important software tweaks, so the Steam Deck is better. But Microsoft would have to be like, we're going to ship a different OS on it.

We're going to ship a version of Windows that's so stripped down. You don't recognize it as Windows anymore. Look, if it opens EA Origins, then, like, I'm fine. EA is one of the Achilles of the Steam Deck. You brought up FIFA. FIFA. EA games will notoriously, particularly if you need online, they will just break on Steam Deck because EA does not give a shit about Valve's handheld.

And they'll just, like, change their stupid mandatory, like, DRM app all the time. You used to be called Origin. Now it's like EA app. And games will just break there on Steam Deck. But everything else works pretty good. But they do participate in cloud gaming. Most of their stuff is available on the various cloud gaming platforms. And all of those work on the Steam Deck.

You can get them up and running pretty quickly. And then not have to constantly go into the Linux backend to tweak them, just the one time. Meaning like I could do like Steam Deck plus Game Pass and solve my problem? Yes. Is this a good idea? Yeah, you could do that. You could even, you could stream your Sony PS4 from there so you don't have. have to like sit in front of it to play the last of us. Oh yeah. We can stream your Xbox and your

PlayStation and Cloud to the Steam Deck. It does all these things. I'm glad you brought this up because this is a thing I have deeply investigated and have come up with is it is just a terrible nightmare that I will not subject myself to. There are there are things about remote streaming your own console that are really great and they immediately fall apart as soon as you get anywhere outside of your house. Like it just doesn't do you do you, do you, Do you need to play fief outside your house? I do. Like, for me, honestly, the two biggest things I'm trying to solve in switching from this console

on my desk to the handheld is I want to play other places in my house than at this desk, which is a victory for console streaming. And I want to play when I travel, in part because I'm addicted to this game and it's set up in such a way that the mechanics are. If you don't play every day, it's actually kind of, like, it's a real problem as I'm describing this. But this is where I'm at in life. And the console streaming thing is great for the first thing.

Like, I can sit upstairs on my couch and play my PS4 on, like, an iPad. And it actually works passably well. Total non-starter trying to stream any stuff over the internet. I just, it's just not even worth it. This goes for all streaming. Yeah, I agree with that. All streaming breaks down once you leave your house because you no longer have control over making sure you have a good internet connection. If you're out there, like, on 5G, if you have a great 5G signal and nobody else in the node is using it right then, yeah, you can have a great streaming experience.

But I would sit. I would sit in, you know, a hospital waiting room or out in a cafe, and I'd be using that, that Razor device, which could only really do cloud streaming. And I would have a beautiful streaming experience that would drop out five minutes later and be completely unplayable. Over and over and over again, I had that experience with cloud gaming, with a good cloud gaming service like G4's now. Great service.

This connection would not maintain that. Now, if you're talking about going over to a friend's house, which your friend also has amazing internet at home, and you want to stream from Xbox Cloud there. great. That could work great. I was just assuming that David has like a hotspot with him at all time that gives him brilliant internet, like 90% of the time. To be honest, I do a lot. It's called an iPad Pro with cell connection. And it's actually like an unbelievably great hotspot. The problem is I'll give you the

worst case scenario for my own gaming usage is on an Amtrak train from DC to New York. And at that point, realistically, what I need is games I can play offline, right? Which I think just rules out full reliance on game streaming services. Like, I actually, this is why I'm compelled by the combination of Steam Deck and GamePass. Like, I can do mostly online stuff. And like, I have, I don't need to be able to play FIFA online while I'm on Amtrak Wi-Fi. That's, like, not possible in the world that we live in. So I'm fine with that.

But I need to be able to do something on that thing when I have crappy connection. And the idea of just having, like, a brick in my hands when the Wi-Fi is bad, feels bad. I do have one other suggestion, and it is actually even more basic than the Steam deck, and it's a Switch. I'm glad you brought this up. It's like the Steam Deck gives you all of the customization and gives you, it's like a Swiss Army knife. The Switch is like just a really good K-bar. Like, it's good for one thing, and that's playing the games that Nintendo is okay with you playing on it. And one of those games is EA Sports FC24, the dumbest name game in soccer.

But you're still not going to play it online on Amtrak, right? No. But so I have almost landed there except, and Kranz, I'm glad you brought this up because I want to know what you guys think right now feels like a stupid time to buy a switch. It feels like the end of a switch cycle. They have already talked about the next one. Like the switch, by all accounts, is still very good, but this feels like a ridiculous time to buy a switch.

It is absolutely the end of the switch cycle. They're delaying it a little bit. They're not like, they don't want to come out right away and do switch tube. They're biting their time. probably because they want to get some great software lined up for it. And I imagine that that software, if you want to play a Metroid Prime 4 or whatever the next game is that Nintendo does, it probably won't work as well on the current switch because the current switch is not only seven years old in terms of its processing power, but also was already weak to begin with.

Like when you played Zelda, Breath of the Wild on day one on the switch and you go to the forest where the master sword is, Like, it was choppy then. It was choppy seven years ago, you know? I was like FIFA will look like a bunch of potatoes are on a big green field. But you'll be, but you'll know what those potatoes are and you'll be able to control all the little potatoes. So like, if the control of the potatoes is important and not how they look, the switch could be an option. Because there's a lot of good deals right now because there's a ton of different ones. Like I just recently picked up the new Zelda one because somebody left it on a plane and I bought it at a thrift store.

Have you played the new Zelda yet? I have. So I actually have an OG switch, and it worked great, and I loved it very much, and then it got to the point where literally the battery lasts like six minutes. Like, it's fine. The thing is seven years old. I got a lot of love out of it. I used it for a long time, and it just basically doesn't work anymore.

And so now it's just like a pretty yellow thing that sits over there. Do not trade that in, because if it's an original switch, the battery is six minutes, it also means that it is hackable, and you can do fun things with it. and it is worth money. Deal. Okay, well, that's David's side business in selling old gadgets is a whole other thing you and I should do on this show, Sean. So, yeah, so I think one of the outcomes I'm afraid of

is that the answer is just wait a year because there's going to be a new switch and they might fix windows and maybe we'll get the Xbox thing. And it feels like in a weird way we're in like a bad middle zone between good things. No, you need to get the steam deck with OLED and just be done and happy. I think what you need to do is you need to do is,

You need to unlock a mountain of amazing PC games you've been missing that are incredibly cheap and brilliant and beautiful and rut on this handheld with an amazing screen. That's what you need to do. And it's also hackable. Sean, I gave you one game, one game that I need to play. And you're telling me that I can have everything I want except the one game that I need to play. If you want to play Fortnite on there, it doesn't do that either.

So unless you're going to strip that. I literally, I almost wrote down that the two games. were Fortnite and FIFA. And I decided I can live without Fortnite because there are other good, David has an hour to kill battle real games out there. I could take or leave Fortnite at this point of my life. I was like, you can just use her iPad. That is true.

So let me float another idea by you, which is that I, instead of buying one thing, I buy several things. And I just acknowledge that at least for this next phase of my life, the right thing to do is get a PS5 and a PSPort. for my house projects and then I get a steam deck for travel. I have just quadrupled the amount of money that this is costing. Is this the outcome? Don't do that.

Save your money. Just get like never ever, ever, ever, ever buy a portal unless you just have zero computer skills. If you have none whatsoever, if all you do, if you like struggle to turn your phone on, get the PSP portal. People love the portal. There are people who love the portal. It is selling really well.

I would never touch one except to have the knowledge of having touched one because the Steam Deck has an app on it. And the app is the PS portal. Yeah, that's in an app for your Steam Deck, basically. It's called Chiaki, Chiaki for deck. And it works great. Just make sure your PS5 or PS4 has an Ethernet cable plugged into it or will not work very well. Okay. Don't get the PS portal because that is, that's for like, that's for people who,

love to game and don't have a lot of computer skills. And so they're like, okay, I just need to go play right now. And that's great. But like you spend a little bit more money. You get the steam deck. You spend a little extra time and you have just way more capability. Okay. All right. So let me, let me play out this scenario. So what's happening here is I'm going to make sure that my PlayStation streaming setup is as good as possible. I'm going to make sure that I have an Ethernet port. I'm going to plug my PlayStation into the ERO gateway and not the ERO in the basement. I'm going to make sure that my internet connection for my PlayStation is as good as possible. TBD on whether that's going to be a PS4 or a PS5. We're going to see how poor I feel at the end of this episode.

But that essentially becomes my like dedicated FIFA machine, which is an absurd place to have landed. But again, here we are. If you've already got the PS4, I mean, why not? So that, I'm relegating this thing to being my FIFA machine. And then, I'm going to download the app you just said for the Steam Deck for when I want to play FIFA, and I'm going to play FIFA on the Steam Deck through my PlayStation, which seems ludicrous, but you're telling me will kind of sort of work as long as I have very good Internet. It'll work great. Inside your house.

Remote is theoretically possible, but you'll play it in your house, realistically. So that's my solution to the how do I play on my couch instead of in the basement problem. Great. For everything else, I'm just going to broaden my horizons and play less FIFA and play more other games. Is this what you're telling me? This is where I need to land? I feel like you can find a really good FIFA clone, but like they all have swords or something. I feel like this exists.

Someone's made this game in Alpha. So what is ironically possible is that because EA Sports FC is no longer called FIFA, somebody else is making a FIFA game and maybe that FIFA game will be on the Steam Deck, which will solve all of my problems all at once. This is what I'm hoping for. And also you will write about this experience, hopefully, for the very first. And then EA will start taking care of the shit. Okay, so EA, very large company makes a lot of very popular games.

Is there any hope for EA on the Steam Deck ever? Like, should I have any optimism for that to be a thing? The Steam Deck's very popular. What are we doing here? Yeah, I mean, they just break things willy-nilly and they don't think about it. It's not like they don't want money. Yeah, E.A is like kind of notorious for being one of the worst companies in the United States. Like, I think when consumerists existed, it was regularly beating cable companies

for being the worst because they just, they put money ahead of usability frequently. And so they could fix it, but I don't think they have a whole lot of interest because most of their players, the bulk of their audience is not, you know, it's on the switch. It's on the PlayStation. Okay, one other steam deck question. The one other thing I forgot to mention is I do want to be able to plug this thing into a large screen and play it. I don't think that's like the most common use case for me, but I do want to be able to sit in front of a television and play it like a console as I normally would. And for me, with the Switch, I have done that way less than I expected because you have to have such specific hardware to pull that off. And like carrying around the dock is annoying. And I bought

the little plug thing and that helped. But then I lost that. And so I want, I want something that is a little easier to turn into like a full-fledged console when I want to. Is the Steam Deck good at that? You're still going to need a little dongle to mirror things. Dongle or Doc? Yeah, you're going to need a dongle or dock. I think the official one's like, what, $100, Sean? It's less. I want to say $70, 80, something like that.

But you can buy much cheaper than that. I'd use, like, an off-the-shelf, like, $35 USBC hub that had H-DMI. That worked. I used docs from, like, J-S-A-U-X. Great company with an Alphabet Soup name, surprisingly, $40, 50 bucks, and those do all the things you'd want from a dock. It's really easy once you get one of those things to get it up there. The question is, is your TV like 4K and you're expecting 4K visuals from a console that normally plays at 800?

Because it's not going to look as good up on a big 4K TV. I will say, and Liam or producer can vouch for this, the least verge-casty thing about me is I don't care all that much about pixel density. So the idea of playing like at, you know, medium settings and having it work okay is completely fine with me. I just heard Neelai screaming. This is the last time you'll ever hear from me on the verge cast. but that is that is where I'm at. And especially with something like this, like battery life is much more important to me

than like getting 10 extra frames per second. And so I think, again, the customizability of the steam deck to be able to like dial that up and down as I want it seems useful. You want a steam deck OLED. Like get the steam deck OLED. Every once in a while you'll plug it into the TV, you'll be like, oh, I did it. This looks kind of shitty.

And then you'll unplug it and go back to the really pretty OLED display and be very happy. I do suspect my switch experience has been that I set it up in such a way that it was going to be really easy to dock. It was going to be great. And then most of the time I would sit on my couch in front of the TV and just play on my lap. And I would assume the steam deck will end up being kind of the same way. Yep.

It's so good. We'll watch some shows together with my wife and I'll have my hand held out and get to do some gaming at the same time. It's great. Okay. Are there any other like crazy wild card possibilities coming that we know of that might win. Like you mentioned the, the RoggalliX seems like a possible improvement, if not sort of equal to the steam deck. Is there anything else on the horizon that in three months I'm going to be like,

oh, this is the one I needed? I don't think so, but there are two very different directions you could go. And I don't have one of them here in front of me. But one of them is a 10.1 inch laptop with like keys that actually feel good, full size SD card reader. You could actually shove the SD card all the way inside. We've got full-size USBA ports. It has more ports than a Macbook. USBC ports. There's an Oculeink port, H-DMI. It is your dock built into it. And then you take these little things off. And you've got joysticks, a D-pad. And even this menu button in the center acts like an Xbox button, which for some reason none of the other windows handheld have. And this thing is way expensive. I mean, it's twice the price of your Steam deck. It costs more than

of the handles, but it doubles as a laptop that has the power of one of those other gaming handhelds, and a decent-sized battery, all this stuff. But Sean, how is it to play? It is a laptop first and a game handheld second. It's such a perfect gadget because that is both the stupidest thing I've ever seen and I want it so bad. Yeah, right? It's beautiful.

It's like, what if instead of the touchbar, we just put a PlayStation controller in pieces? I love it. I can't get over at the boss mode. Like you got this thing and you're like, no, I can't show my game pad at work. Let's take this little metal, let's take this little slip of metal out of the back of the thing and drop it on top. Boss mode. It's a physical boss mode.

Yeah. Okay. Moving on from that. Okay. So your other possibility is you could embrace, you could embrace software piracy and you could buy one of these things, which looks like a Game Boy Advance SP. This is the Envernik thing. But actually just comes with thousands of pirated games.

And so you can play all your Game Boy advance and PlayStation games on this. Maybe you delete the pirated games first and dump your own ROMs or something like that. As I always do. As you do. Yes. I feel like Annenberg's already going to get wrecked for you just saying, yeah, it comes with all of the pirated games on it. Every time Sean talks about one of these, there was, I think you did a TikTok, Sean, talking about the new Anbernik thing. And every single comment was like, Sean, be cool.

Stop telling people about me. Give me my free game. TikTok shop is all over those things. Like, it's been snitched on enough. Just to illustrate, though, that the EA, the EA FIFA game is not a steam deck problem. The top comment on EA Sports FC24 is EAFC24, not launching on PC after anti-cheat back to EA. So it's not a steam deck thing so much as it is an EA doesn't care thing. Interesting. Okay. So it truly is easy. is like there are ways you could get around the rules that we have. So we're just taking our ball and going home.

Yep. That doesn't feel like it's getting better anytime soon. That does not give me hope for the for improvements coming here, which also means, listen, there's there's a lot of sports games. This means I can't play anymore. But now I'm going to have to get into like cool nerd games. It's going to be great. You can play them streaming.

That's true. Steam Deck plus game pass, I think is starting to feel like the realist answer I have here. You'll have Halo and FIFA. like you will be the hit of every frat party you go to. Okay. Last question. And then we have to go. Uh-huh.

Am I stupid for buying a steam deck right now in the same way that I might be stupid for buying a switch right now? Where are we in the steam deck cycle? We're fine, right? We're mid, yeah. We're mid-cycle. We're not late yet. The thing that Valve needs, they've told us, like, told me to my face.

What they need to see is they need to see a major. improvement in performance without sacrificing battery life from a chip manufacturer before they start building the next true steam deck. And I've heard this from other companies, like Asus, with the ROG ally X. They were like, we don't think we can get it right now. So we're going to ship the Rogg L.I.X with the same chip. And I don't think Qualcomm has changed that calculus at all with the Snapdragon. And even if it has, we're a ways away from that actually appearing inside of a product. Yeah, I think we're probably a good, we're at least a year out. I think you'll have one beautiful, blissful year before you get FOMO, at least. Okay. And that's, I mean, honestly, in gadget world, that's all you can ask for.

It's like a year is in an eternity in gadget world. I mean, listen, I've made it this far into the PS5 cycle without upgrading. Like, it turns out I can, I can manage my fomo on this one. I am so impressed. Thank you. That's actually the other question I should ask. Is like, am I being ridiculous? Should I just buy a PS5 and move on with my life? I mean, have infinite, if you have infinite money, yes. If I buy a PS5, I almost certainly will end up buying a portal. And I hate myself for it, but it will probably happen.

Then I say don't because I want to save you from the portal. You could buy a used stevedec LCD for the price of a portal and also have a portal built into it with an app. Oh, well, that's very compelling. But PS5, like, if you do love that I'm sitting on my couch with my 4K OLED TV experience, it's It's hard to beat the PS5 for that. I'm playing Spider-Man 2 on it right now and just a gorgeous new whole lid panel that was deep discounted recently. And wow, the pop of that city, the lights at night.

It's really something. Yeah. And I do love that, but I think I am increasingly coming around to like having a thing with me is more important than the sort of very best possible experience. I would love to have both, but I don't think you can really have both right now in the world we live in. And if you, if you really want to have that thing with you, I don't think there's anything that beats the steam deck. There's just so much you can now take with you that you can't, the same way, through the windows handhelds, you can't really with Android. All right. Well, we have

ended where we began, which I find very frustrating, but also sort of telling. I'm going to buy a steam deck. Yeah. I probably should have bought a steam deck a really long time ago. I'm going to buy a steam deck. And I will start yelling loudly at EA. I will report back. I'm so excited for you. Everybody's excited about the EA, though. Do you have any immediate setup tips? Before we talk again, I will have purchased a Steam Deck. What should I do immediately out of the box with my brand new Steam Deck Oled? I have so many nerdy suggestions. I don't want nerdy suggestions. Sean, I say this with love. I want to get to playing games well

as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Like, I am worried about the Steam Deck because I'm worried it's so fidgety and finicky that I'm going to spend my whole life goofing with the joysticks and not playing games. So Steam Deck has this, like on the Steam deck, they have compatibility for games. And you can also see it on the Steam software. So like you can just go download Steam ahead of time, find some games you like, make sure they're compatible. And then it'll be just out of the box ready to go.

Anything that's like yellow or red, you'll have to mess with a little bit. That's where you have to start tweaking things. Like I try to play Crusader Kings on it. Don't. That's, it's not for the Steam deck. It's terrible. There's even a tab in the store where you can just like only show me games that work well with the Steam deck. And for the most part, they do. Yeah. And it's a lot of stuff, right? Like,

it's a ton of stuff. The ones that don't is stuff that's like Mass Effect, which is an EA game. So you know why it doesn't work. I will say the other game in my life that I have loved with my whole heart, the way that I have loved FIFA with my whole heart is Portal. And the idea of having a steam thing that will let me play the Portal games forever is very exciting. And it will just straight out of the box, you'll be you'll be off to the races, having a great time. Yeah, it really is. so easy to just get going on the Steam deck, provided you already own games. Eldon Ring plays well there. Ory and the Will of the Whips, if you haven't played that yet, play that on the Deco Lit.

Oh, my God, it looks brilliant on the Deco Lit. That game is made for HDR. Persona 5. Have you played any persona games? Bits and pieces, but never super deeply. Okay. Get Persona 5 or Persona 5 Royal, whichever one is better for your budget. Play that on Steam Deck.

It's epic. We could spend the rest. You've been another hour talking about games to play on. Yeah, I was about to say, have you played Final Fantasy remake yet? Like, beautiful on the Steam deck. All right, my list is long, and none of them are the only game that I need it. But, you know, we're doing the best we can here. You can get FIFA 23 fairly easily on the Steam deck.

Okay, that might help. Maybe that's like my gateway drug out of being obsessed with FIFA. I'll just play old games enough to satiate me and then go play better games. You get Ted Lasso in that one. You'll be fine. All right. Thank you both. This was very helpful.

I'm going to go spend a bunch of money. All right. We got to take a break. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk wearables. Specifically, one feature about wearables. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere.

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Welcome back. So before we get into the next thing, one last note on that last segment. Listening back to it, I realize, I don't know that I actually solved any of my problems. It was a really interesting discussion, and I think the place we landed is the right one for almost everybody. But I was realizing listening back that actually one of the games I'm most excited about this here is the new college football game, which is also an EA game and is also probably not going to be on the steam deck. So for me, now, I go from one game that I play a ton

that doesn't work on the steam deck to two games that I'm probably going to play a ton that won't be on the steam deck. So I don't know what to do. I think I'll probably still buy a steam deck, ideally with a good return policy, just to really get into it and play with it and get used to it. But I don't know that I've solved my problem. And I think I'm not alone. These are very popular games. The EA stuff is huge. Game streaming is going to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people, but hasn't yet. So I'm still stuck. I haven't bought anything yet.

If you have ideas, please let me know. Vergecast at the verge.com. Call the hotline 866 Verge11. What do you think I should buy? Tell me everything. I'm still so torn. I think Sean and Alex gave really good advice, but I don't know if I've actually solved my problem yet.

Anyway, let's get into the next thing. Every once in a while on this show, we like to test some microphones. I think this stuff really matters, and it doesn't get talked about a lot when we talk about headphones and when we talk about wearable devices, is we talk to our gadgets a lot.

And if you believe that AI is the future of how we talk to gadgets, it's going to get more vocal over time. Microphones really matter, whether you're just talking to Siri to set reminders, which is a thing I do constantly all day, every day, or is going to be how you talk to chat GPT or your robot AI best friend for forever. Microphones really matter.

And we've tested a lot of earbuds. We actually probably overdue for an earbuds test, but the thing that we haven't really done is maybe one of the wearable categories I'm most excited about, which I'll say broadly speaking is face gadgets. You have things like the MetaQuest 3 and the Vision Pro. You also have things like the meta smart glasses and Amazon's Echo Frames and the idea of just a thing you wear on front of your eyes on your face that is a super powerful computer. I think we're at the very beginning of that genre of gadget, but I already think there's a lot of interesting stuff out there. So, as we do, it's time to do a microphone test. I asked V-Song,

who has almost all of these gadgets, somewhat remarkably just lying around her house, to come on and do some tests with us, so we're going to hear how it all sounds. Let's go. V-Song, welcome back. Thanks for having me again. You and I've done so much stuff together recently. This is very exciting. This is terrible for you and great for me. I'm happy about it. So I have brought you here for the thing I have been like very excited to do for months because what I have discovered in my own life is that now when I take a phone call and I'm at home, instead of holding my phone to my ear, I actually put on the meta smart glasses. And that is now my like hands free phone experience. And I love it very much. And I have found myself wondering a lot how I sound to other people when I do that.

So you and I are going to do, I think, maybe the most ambitious microphone test we've ever done on this show because it involves. a deeply weird set of gadgets, and I'm very excited about it. I spent so much time yesterday and this morning prepping the gadgets just for the technical logistics of all of it. And I looked ridiculous at every step of the way, so. As it should be. So, yeah, okay, run me through the list of all the stuff we're about to test, which is basically like every weird face gadget in Fees house.

You know, it's a very thoughtful selection of the weird face gadgets in my house. So we have the Razor Anzou, which are a productivity pair of smart glasses. You know, they marketed as basically like smart glasses for hands-free calls. And when you're on your computer, it has blue light, what do you call these lenses? So we have those. Then we have the Rayban meta-smart glasses. We have the Apple Vision Pro. And we have the MetaQuest 3.

Amazing. I will say the only one in this category I feel like we don't have in here is probably the echo frames. I think anecdotally, no one seems to care about the echo frames. So I don't feel that about leaving it out. But I do think it's like, it's like the one in this category that I'm curious about that we're not testing. So we'll have to come back and do that another time. Yeah, well, I do have a pair. I just moved not that long ago and then did spring cleaning. So the charger, where is the charger? I have been tearing my house apart for the charger because it's a, it's a weird charger. Okay. This is a good point. It's not just a USBC port, which is,

what all chargers should be. It's a stupid like stand that you have to stick them on top of. And if you don't push them down at the right angle in the right way, it doesn't work. It's one of the worst chargers I've ever used. I hate it. It's also the glasses that stay on my face the least because I have a low nose bridge and it just slips down. That's my problem with the meta smart glasses. So I'm sort of hoping that the meta ones don't win so that I can convince myself to buy something else. But we're going to see how this goes. So before we dive in, I think, the one caveat we should provide here is that so far you're talking into your podcast, Mike. So I would say this is kind of the gold standard of the audio that you should hear.

Anything that we test is going to be compared to this. There are a couple that we're about to test that are Bluetooth devices. So you're going to be pairing Bluetooth devices to your computer. So you're going to get whatever Bluetooth weirdness exists. But I would say that's fine because that's pretty indicative of normal Bluetooth weirdness. Like most of the time people are talking through Bluetooth gadgets. So we're going to do that. But then there's a couple, I think the headsets are going to be basically treated like microphones on computers because we're actually going to be able to do it natively inside of the device.

So we'll talk about those when we get to those. But let's just dive in. Which one do you want to do first? I've got the ANZU on right now. So let's just do that because I swear to God, this is going to be a logistical nightmare when we're switching. I cannot wait. This is one of those times where podcast editing becomes very, very, very helpful. Because you don't have to listen to us fiddle with Bluetooth settings.

But all right, let's dive in. Let's go. All right. I am talking. I am saying a sentence. Oh, no. And your face is like saying that it does not sound good. This is terrible. This is like, okay, how would I describe it? You sound like you're on a phone call on speakerphone, but you've done the thing where you put your phone down on the kitchen counter while we're talking and then you've like walked into the other room. Cool. Love it. I can imagine what that sounds like. And, you know, I don't. don't, I'm not really sure where the mics are on this particular thing, but I don't think they're

like the meta ray bands where the mic is in the nose bridge. So it's like kind of close to your mouth. It says that they have omnidirectional mics, probably in the temples. So if they're in the temples, that's, you know, pretty far away from the actual sound source. And actually in a certain way sort of defeats the purpose of why I'm excited about these devices. Because as you're talking about, one of the nice things about glasses is just that they're closer to your mouth, right? We have, all these Bluetooth headphones and stuff, they are constrained by the fact that they're on your ears. So they have the stems that point towards your mouth and that kind of helps and they're getting smarter with the software. But fundamentally, like the way to get a good microphone is to put it closer to your mouth where the sound is coming from.

And it feels like Razor just sort of beefed this one. So to Razors credit, I guess, defense slightly, these aren't necessarily meant for this kind of like communication sorts of calls. These are things you're supposed to wear like at your desk to make it a little less painful to look at a screen all day. So they, you know, there's like a while where Razor was just like, we're not just gaming. We do productivity stuff too. Yay for the office. And I think this was part of that push. Like, yeah, they do have blue light lenses so that if you're looking at the screen a lot, it's easier for you.

They are your typical pair of glasses that are also headphones so you can just listen to stuff. But, you know, like when I took the briefing a couple years ago and was testing, it was just basically like, yeah, it is meant for like productivity in the office so you can take phone calls and you'll sound really great. So obviously that was some marketing spiel because clearly judging by your reaction, I do not sound that great. Yeah, you will not sound really great. I can tell you that now with great confidence. Andrew Marino, I don't usually get to do this when we're here, but Andrew is our sound expert and podcast editor. Andrew, I want you to weigh in on all of these with me. What do you think of this one? Okay, so these aren't as bad as I

thought. It is obviously a clear difference between the podcast microphone and this, but I don't hear a lot of background noise. That is true. That is good. I would actually like to hear how this sounds compared to like someone wearing AirPods, though, too, because would you prefer hearing AirPods microphones or would you prefer hearing the glasses microphones? I was just thinking about that actually, and I think The thing that the AirPods do that these aren't doing is at least the AirPods push the voice more to the center of the mix, right? Like, it's trying really hard to, like, raise the volume of your voice as opposed to everything else. This feels flatter in a way that is, like, probably more pleasant in a certain way, but also just means I can, like, hear you less well. I also wonder what it would be like if, you know, the other proposition for glasses is that, like, you're on a walk.

You can go outside and take the phone call as well. And, you know, outside, there's a lot more. ambient noise, there's cars, there's wind. I wonder what this would sound like if you were on a walk. Because I've taken calls on the met of Raybans while I'm on a walk and people think they're pretty decent, pretty good just because of where the microphone is situated. So I, you know, they always claim that they're great for wind. And I'm always like, but are they? Are they? Yeah, we should say you're in your house in what I would call like a relatively quiet space. This is kind of as good as it's going to be. We'll have to come back and do this another time with

worse environments, but I think particularly because we had some of the headsets and these are like things you're mostly going to be doing inside, we wanted to give it its best shot. But okay, I'm done with these. These are not great. Let's move on. Let's do the Rayban ones next. That feels like a good one-to-one comparison here. Let's switch to those.

All right. Okay. This is me and the meta and I just want you to know that I'm blind because I have my contacts on and these are prescription lenses. So you are just a big blob on my phone. This sounds way better. like night and day to the last one. This is actually like the sound I was hoping that this was going to give me.

It's not like amazing. It's definitely, I'm hearing a lot of compression on your voice. It's like clearly trying very hard to get your voice and cancel, even not a lot of background noise. But this sounds great. I should say also you're on your phone to do this, normally record these things your computer, but because of the weirdness of these glasses,

you had an easier time connecting them to your phone, than to your computer because Bluetooth is dumb and bad and complicated and nobody is good at it. But you sound really good to me. Yeah. So this was like one of the limitations that Becca pointed out when we were both doing the Rayban meta testing. And she like went all in on the microphone testing for these. And it's just not really all that easy to, you know, connect with your computer while having these on. This is just a very phone first kind of pairing situation, which is a little annoying.

But great if you want to take these outside, I think, and just like walk around and take calls while you're, I do that all the time. Like, I'll be on a walk and a friend will call and I'll just gab and people will look at me crazy because I don't have the social cue of having AirPods in my ear. And these just look like a normal pair of glasses. So I just look like a psycho. Well, and right now you have sunglasses on indoors, which I would say it's like an extremely cool move. Is it? Is it cool? Who can say also like, yeah, so I got these sent with prescription lenses as sunglasses, and I was like, I would have loved it if these were the transition lenses, but alas.

I have the transitions, and they're awesome. My dad, who does not have smart glasses, just has transition lenses in his regular glasses. And we made fun of him about it for so long because it's like you go inside and for four minutes you just have sunglasses on and we always used to make fun of it. And like, boy has history proven him, right. Like, congrats, Dad. You made transition lenses a thing. They are great. I'm a fan.

So the thing that I like about these is this is the one where they put the microphone like right next to your nose, right? So it's sort of perfectly where it should be to sound good here. Yeah, there's, I believe there's five microphones in the glasses at various points. But the one that captures your voice is just right in the nose bridge. So it's like right above your mouth. So like, I think that was the. kind of low-key genius move that they did with these compared to the other smart glasses that I've tested.

So I got to say, I really enjoy these as my outdoor walk, outdoor. I wear these while running too. And it's pretty great as like a pair of open-year headphones. I can take calls. The sunglasses are great. The sound quality is great. So I just wish I had transition lenses because then I could just use these all the time. That'd be great.

Totally. Andrew, what do you think? Yeah, these sound better than the Razor ones. I wouldn't be mad at all about this as far as like Bluetooth goes. It's pretty good. Yeah, I agree. This is definitely one that is like notably better than AirPods. And it just, you feel much closer, which is really nice.

Like a lot of the things, and this is the challenge with the Razor one is a lot of Bluetooth headphones just make you feel sort of far away because you are far away. This one, you feel much closer to the mic, which makes you feel much closer like to me as we're talking, which is. which is very cool. This one I'm calling a victory. Let's move on to some of the other ones. What do we have next? We have your pick of which headset, the Vision Pro, or the MetaQuest? Let's start with the Quest because I would assume that the Vision Pro is going to sound better, but also I think more people have quests. So let's start with the Quest. This is going to be logistically fraught. We're going to play some hold music. We'll be back in like 45 minutes once we get this set out. Let's do it. All right.

MetaQuest. Is this the question? Quest two or the Quest three that we're on here, V. Quest three, I believe. Yeah, Quest three. All right. Let's hear it. How do we sound? I am talking. Supposedly, you can hear me, even though this gave me a lot of grief about there being no microphone while logging into this. So it's very confusing. Okay, this sounds really good. This is kind of right in line with the smart glasses, actually, which I'm realizing now that's two meta products that sit on your face. Maybe there's some shared technology there. But I don't know how that didn't occur to me until just now. But yeah, you sound. pretty good. This is just another, like, big microphone on your face. And this is another one that

I think they put the microphone pretty centrally on the thing. So it might even be closer to your mouth than the smart glasses. Oh, well, it certainly is weighing on my head. So it feels like it's falling down my face more than the smart glasses. It's going to be on top of your mouth here in a couple of minutes as you're trying to talk. It'll be good. Yeah. It's actually, it's because I don't have it super tight on the back because I get head. When these are too tight. Oh, there we go. There we go. Okay. So what I also want to know is tell me about the experience of getting into this call from the quest. Because there's like one of the things that meta would really like to convince you of is that eventually a VR headset is going to be a work tool and you can you just like open up a browser and use it for Google Meet or whatever. I have never done that one time. And I'm very curious how it's going for you. So I basically had to log into Slack. right? Because I need a link to this meeting. And so how am I going to get a link to this particular meeting? So, you know, like either you have to have your calendar in here in some capacity or you have to

basically go into the browser, go into your Google calendar and whatnot. But then I was just like, oh, God, okay. So I went into Slack, which in our workplace, because things are secure, was real effing annoying. Because two factor authentication in a headset. Not a solved probably. Two-factor authentication in a headset. Let me tell you it's not fun and I was a good box media employee. I have a very complicated password for my work thing. So I'm just going in in this 13, 14, 15 character long path. I don't know how long it is. It's long. But I'm just like punching it in with this stupid little keyboard just going eh, eh, capital. Oh, that's not a capital. I have to re-enter all of this. Then we have two-factor authentication and I have to go. Thankfully, I get it sent to my watch.

So I get it boom into the watch. I'm like, yeah. Cool. Awesome. Then I'm in Slack. And then I have to go, like, in the browser in Slack. And I have to go, okay, now I've got to go to the link that I know is in this DM. And then, oh, okay, I've got to scroll in the DM, click on the link. That opens up Riverside in the browser. And then I'm like, cool. I'm going to just log in, even though it's saying that there is no mic or camera detected. So, yeah, Andrew helped me test this before. It is quite a project. So, okay, Andrew, I'm really curious for your thoughts. on this one because I want to know how you feel about this versus the smart glasses because

what I'm hearing is very similar, but this sounds like it's compressing harder to me. But what are you hearing? There's a bit of compression here. I'm also wondering if it's Riverside's echo cancellation here, but it is not significantly better than the meta ray bands. This is a great sound for taking a meeting call, but if V was like, hey, can I join the podcast with the Quest 3, I'd be like, well, can you use your phone?

Right. I think that's right. Like, none of this has gotten even up to, like, wired earpods quality. But at least so far, this is definitely better than Razor, but I would say not quite as good as the meta ones. My theory, I wonder about the echo cancellation, too,

but I also wonder if because meta assumes you're going to be playing games all the time on this thing, that it's going to have audio all the time. And so they've just turned up the echo cancellation on the device itself, just so it's trying to noise cancel against what's coming out of the speakers all the time. Because it's just, it is compressing this pretty aggressively. It does sound like there is some processing happening before it gets into here.

V, how are the speakers on this? Like, the actual listening experience is pretty solid, right? I feel like, yeah. Yeah. So this, I agree. It would work in a pinch in a meeting, but Andrew would not allow you on the Vergecasts in the headset under normal circumstances. Also, like, if you're reaching,

for a headset in a pinch for a meeting, something has gone terribly wrong. Consider your choices. Something has gone terribly wrong, terribly, terribly wrong, because where's your phone? There's just easier things to do than to slop on a headset. And then, you know, like I had gotten logged out of my account because the spouse logged into this at some point and it was playing games. Then it was just like, where's my account? Oh, I forgot. I don't remember what my Facebook password is.

oh, you're telling me you have to log into this with that. This was an ordeal yesterday, getting this prepped for today. Well, in the name of making everything simpler and better, let's make it more complicated. Let's switch into the Vision Pro. Let's try that next. Oh, good Lord. You know, actually, that might be slightly easier than this one because. Okay.

All right. We'll go back to the hold of music. We'll be right back. All right. All right. Well, it took some digging in settings and some app rebooting, but we got it working. And now your persona is here. and I hate this already.

But I'm going to not look. I'm just going to listen. How do we sound? How are we doing? This was a nightmare. This is a nightmare. Everything's a nightmare. I can't stop looking at my horrible persona.

Why is my hair so lumpy? My eyebrows are also misaligned. So I just look dubious. The good news is you sound great. I'm actually like amazed by how good this sounds. I suppose it's a $3,500. headset. Again, it's a thing on your face. There are a lot of microphones. Apple's pretty good at noise cancellation. I sort of figured this would be just in terms of raw audio, the best one. But it is,

I would say, like a full leap above anything else we've tested so far. It's surprising. Just because of how annoying it was to get into this app. There's definitely some compression, I will say, that I'm hearing more and more as you talk. It's doing a lot of the same, like, processing and cancellation stuff, but still sounds very good. And it's very central. Like you are right in the middle of the mix, and it sounds like you're talking to me instead of shouting at a phone from several rooms away, which is very nice.

I will say that whenever I've done my cursed Vision Pro face-times with Wes, everything sounds great, like, because he's obviously in the Vision Pro and it's using that mic. And it's always sounded like he's in the room. with me, which is uncanny and freaky on top of his mustache that won't move. Yeah, the real takeaway from this is FaceTime audio is your friend on the Vision Pro, not FaceTime video. And that is the way to live your life on a Vision Pro.

Now, half the time our FaceTimes are like, oh, why do I have this over my mouth, this cloud, because my hand is there. All right. Well, it sounds good. Let's get you out of your misery here. I do, we should, we weren't planning to do this, but we should test AirPods last, just as kind of a control on the rest of it. Do you have a pair of AirPods lying around? I do. All right, let's go get those. Take off this Godforsaken headset. And let's try those. Thank you. Thank you for letting me leave virtual jail. I was going to find out of you, I don't know what is having right now, but your voice is sped up like a hundred. I'm going to have to kick you out, V, and then you're going to have to come back in.

I can't even understand what you're saying. Yeah, I got nothing. Yeah, just kick her out. V, you're back with AirPods on. My AirPods Pro, USBC version. So I guess the latest versions of the AirPods Pro you can have. Okay, so I have to say this is, this sounds comparatively worse than I actually expected. I would say I would put this like pretty close to the.

the very first, the razor ones that we listen to in the sense that it is, it kind of sounds like a far away omnidirectional microphone. And like you sound fine. I can hear you. I can hear everything you're saying. But like, I expected this to come on and me to be like, oh yeah, this sounds kind of like the ray band smart glasses. This is like demonstrably worse than those, at least to my ears. Andrew, is that, am I way off here? No, absolutely. I actually would like to hear how the razor one sound again because those were a lot more fuller sounding in a frequency range than these. These kind of sound pretty tinny, actually, in comparison. Yeah, I mean, I do have an assortment of just gadgets in my strewn across my room,

which is like my office rather, which is the freaking, it's a disaster now zone. It's like late in the week, so I haven't put my gadgets away, like a naughty, naughty gadget reviewer. So it's literally right here. I can put them back on if you want. Let's do it really quickly. Let's just do it. Yeah, just really, really quick, and then we'll let you go.

Okay. In these glasses, which you guys say look fine on me, but I think I look a little, like, I look a little bit like the grandpa from up. First of all, that's a compliment. You should be psyched to look like the girl from up. But yeah, Andrew, I'm kind of hearing what it sounds like you were saying, that, like, this is a little fuller, but to me a little sort of further back, where like it sounds further away, but in a certain sense, better?

Yeah. So it's probably like they're worse microphones, but they are closer to the face. So you get a little more detail of what Vee is saying. I mean, yeah. There's a tradeoff there, but like, if I'm on a call, like, I would almost prefer these. Not on a podcast, but in a meeting, yeah. Yeah, you do sound clearer in this. Like, I feel like I hear your voice more clearly.

It just sounds to me like you're further away. from it. That's really interesting. Big win for headsets today. I expected AirPods to come somewhere in the middle, but I think you could make a pretty compelling case that all four of the things you just tried are better microphones for talking to people than a pair of AirPods. Wow. That's a big boon to the smart glasses category. Yeah, right? This is also a big win for you and me wearing glasses walking around talking to ourselves like maniacs kind of situation. You know, my neighbors have seen me do walk and talk, like just filming social videos and just I did a social video while doing a walk and talk and someone was just like this this ho really just be walking out here talking to thin air and I was

just like yeah you know what this is the future baby everything is the microphone I really hope you say that to people you just say this is the future baby and then you just high five them and move on I love it all right well we need to get out of here but big giant win for smart glasses today I'm going to say In terms of like the combination of you don't look like a lunatic and you sound pretty good, I think the meta-smart glasses here are probably the winner for me in terms of like, what would I tell you to go get for a good microphone? Andrew, what's your read? Yes.

I would like to note that V, how much are the Razor and Zoo? How much do they cost? On Amazon, you can get them for $40. Jesus Christ. Right. That's pretty cheap. That's really cheap for that. That is really cheap.

If someone was like, should I get the $250 meta glasses or should I get these $40 glasses that I can take calls with? I might just say get those. That is fair. That's a big price difference. The meta ones definitely sound better. But yeah, for 50 bucks as a thing to just throw on when you have a phone call, the Razor one's not a terrible choice. That's shocking to me. That's like, obviously I've tested these a long time ago so I didn't remember.

But that's just, wow, talk about bank for your book. The thing that I use the meta smart glasses for a lot is it's like I've had, I was in a car accident a couple of weeks ago. So I spent a lot of time on hold with the claims department. And rather than wear headphones, I can just like throw them on and sit on hold. And then I can like listen to music in the room or whatever. And actually for sitting on hold a pair of smart glasses is like weirdly great. So I think in that case, again, like the $50 Anzus are also a pretty solid choice. But I feel like raw sort of quality and usability meta, but Andrew, you make a good point.

$50 for this is not the worst deal in the world. And you get to look like the grandpa from Up, which is an incredible huge victory. Jury is out on how these look on me. Like you guys say it looks fine, but. It's one to think about. All right, V, we got to let you go. Thank you so much, as always, for doing this and putting up with all of our Bluetooth nonsense. Thank you.

I'm just going to lie down and take a break and recalibular. my vision pros. All right, we've got to take a break. Then we're going to come back. We'll do a question with the hotline. We're right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations

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For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people?

So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. Like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented,

the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning.

And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. Welcome back. All right, let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866, verge, 1-1. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com. We love all of your questions. Please keep sending us all of your wildest, weirdest questions about technology.

Also, in particular, I'm really eager to start doing more, like, teeny tiny tech mysteries. So if you have a weird tech problem that you can't solve and we might be able to help with, let us know. This week, we have a question, which seemed fitting about glasses. Hey David, it's Ruby from the UK. I have that eyesight and I wear glasses all the time and it's getting to the point where I really need new glasses but I told myself I wouldn't buy new frames unless they wear smart glasses. I don't like meta so those are out of the question but I don't know if it was you

but the Verge reviewed a pair of smart glasses called Focles by a company called North. It got bought by Google and they have a little laser projector that just gave you a HUD, and from those reviews, it looked pretty cool. Do you think that's maybe something we might see in the near future, and maybe even an AI version of it? That's not stupid. Thanks, and take care. Okay, so real quick, if you don't remember the north focals, and you'd be forgiven for not remembering the north focals, basically the way that they worked was instead of being two screens in front of your eyes, there was a little laser projector off to the right, I think, of the glasses. So it would project the laser onto this little polymer in the middle of the right

lens, which would then reflect that light back into your eyes. So instead of looking at a screen, you were getting what amounted to, I think it was a 300 pixel by 300 pixel display, kind of right in the middle of your right eye. And you could see through it when it wasn't projecting. It looked just like a little smudge on the lens itself. It was a very clever system. North had a real problem making these things work, though. For one, it's expensive technology, it's a startup. They ended up trying to sell these things, I think, for $1,000, which most people are just not going to spend $1,000 on a pair of glasses. Google ended up buying North, I think, mostly for the technology, but obviously Google has a complicated relationship with smart glasses all the way back to Google Glass. I do think the company is committed to doing some kind of ARXR thing. The company keeps teasing it and talking about it. There was that. That thing in the Project Astra video where you can see the glasses, like it's out there. Google is still thinking about this stuff. But what North did was really clever, honestly, and I'm sort of sad to have seen the company go.

But it was tough, right? Not only was it really expensive, but North famously had trouble with people with longer eyelashes and evidently the display struggled when people were wearing mascara. So this stuff is hard, is my point. It's hard and it's expensive and there is just not a lot of progress being made towards putting this kind of technology in something that looks and feels and costs like a normal pair of glasses. All that said, I do think something like the Focles is probably where we're headed in the immediate

future. Like, look, sure, someday the whole Vision Pro meta quest thing might be the future, but it's only going to be the future when those things look like a pair of glasses. and I think we're just a bunch of huge technical innovations away from that being the case. So what we're going to see instead, I think, is something that feels more like a heads-up display, right? Something that projects little bits of information at a time onto your face. And as we've been talking about this whole episode, if you believe that chat, in particular voice-in, voice-out chat with AI systems is going to be a key part of how we talk to computers, something like that becomes really powerful, right?

It can display your text message and you can respond to it. It can show you the answer to a question that you asked. It can show you the information that you asked for. It becomes this really useful thing in a way that even North five years ago was trying to like awkwardly rewrite apps to make them make sense on this tiny display in a way that was just really hard. Now we have a confluence of things, whether it's voice or we've had a lot of work with widgets on, you know, lock screens and home screens of phones. That stuff has also been transferred to smart watches, which have made a lot of progress in the last five years.

Put all of that together, and you can sort of see how the interface for a pair of glasses that is just listening to you talk, maybe doing some gesture control. Again, we have these new smart rings like the galaxy ring that are starting to experiment with maybe you can use your fingers to control devices just with your hands. Meta is also working on this kind of stuff. Mark Zuckerberg even said that there is a new wearable that the company has been working on that it's getting ready to release that is going to be a new way to control gadgets. So again, all of this is just coming together.

The question is going to be, can anyone make a product out of it? Can you do North's thing where North also had a little ring joystick thing that was kind of neat but also kind of got in the way? Can you do that well with a smart ring? Can you figure out the interface in a way that is useful and will make people want to spend the extra money on it without being too much extra money to the point where people just don't want it in addition to their regular pair of glasses. Can you make the battery last long enough that it doesn't feel like I have to charge my glasses twice a day because that's a terrible

experience? And then I think there's the biggest question, which is just that we haven't solved how any of this is supposed to work. A Google executive a few years ago said to me that one of the most challenging things about AR is figuring out kind of the relative noise level of an AR system. And I mean noise in the sense of like how in your face it is and involved it is in your life, right? Sometimes you want lots of information. You want it to be telling you what's going on around you. You want it to point you to the coffee shop down the street or the cool place that you totally should go or the fact that your friend is over there. And then other times you want it to just shut up and go away.

And you want all of that to happen automatically and seamlessly and without you having to decide what you want. Like your phone, you can just leave somewhere else. You can walk away from your phone in a way that you can't walk away from a pair of glasses, especially if they're corrective. you need them. And so all these interfaces are going to have to be automatic and perfect and uncomplicated in ways that just no one has figured out yet. Right? Like if you got as many notifications on your face as you get on your phone every day, you would stop wearing glasses the very first day. You just would. We all would. It's a bad interface when it is literally in front of your eyes whenever you get a notification. And that stuff, I think, is going to take

longer to solve because it's about who we are as people and how we use technology and what we care about and what we don't care about. And putting all those pieces together, I think is actually the hardest part of all of this. Because again, you have rings, which I think are doing interesting gesture and sensing stuff. You have other devices doing that. There's, who knows, we might get like brain computer interfaces soon enough. I think the glasses technology is getting better pretty quickly. North's projector was not amazing, but it was pretty good. And that was a while ago, and frankly, it's a bummer that we haven't gotten to see five years of progress there. We also are seeing companies like META really start to bet on the smart glasses space.

I think the idea that we were going to get headsets and we were all going to learn how to live inside of headsets was just the wrong one. And I think even the success that META has said it's seeing from the smart glasses is proof that what we're doing is saying, how do we make glasses that look like glasses and work like glasses and feel like glasses? And then how do we make them more useful over time? time. And I think that is a really interesting road that is going to lead to interesting things fairly quickly. So I would say to your question specifically, I think if you need a pair of glasses

today, you should just buy a pair of glasses. There's not anything that is so smart and so good, even at doing one thing beyond being a pair of glasses that it feels worth making a huge bet on. But it's kind of like the one after this one, right? Like someday in, you know, a couple of years when you lose these glasses or need to increase your prescription or they break or whatever. I think at that point we might be somewhere where there is a heads up display in your glasses that is pretty useful. It won't do everything. It won't be a full on metaverse AR experience where you can like play games in the world

around you. But it'll be something. Maybe it'll just show you your text messages. But that'll be something. And I think that'll be pretty cool. There are companies out there working on this. I think Google has intimated that there's stuff going on. There's some indication from reporting that we've seen from Mark German at Bloomberg and others that Apple is starting to really work on smart glasses.

Meta is very clearly investing in this more and more over time. There's a company called Brilliant Labs that is doing some interesting work here on trying to create a whole ecosystem of these smart glasses. So like I think this is coming. And I think you're on to the right idea that just a little display, a little bit of information, a little bit of sort of, sort of additive interface over top of the real world is the next thing and feels achievable. But I just can't think of something I would tell you to buy right this minute that feels like it's the answer. So maybe go by like, you know, the junkiest pair of glasses you can find that still look good and work well. And then just try to keep them around until you find the right thing.

All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from the gaming handhelds to all of our reviews of all of those wearable face pewter thingies at Theverge.com. I'll put some links in the show notes, but as always, read theverse.com. There is a lot going on right now. So go check out the site. As always, if you've thoughts, questions, feelings, or handheld gaming consoles that I should buy, email us Vergecast to theverge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge11. We'd love hearing from you. It's my favorite. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor. The Vergecast is Verge production.

and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about all the AI news, all the Apple public beta stuff, and everything else happening this week. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.