The Vergecast - Pixel 2 first look, Pixel Buds, and Google Home Max

Episode Date: October 6, 2017

Another week, another tech event: on Wednesday, Google had its fall hardware event. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter try to fit everything they want to say into 90 minutes. Dieter had some exclusive looks at the products, and was able to talk to CEO Sundar Pichai and senior vice president of hardware Rick Osterloh, so the crew lets Dieter talk this week to get more of the details. There’s a whole lot in between that — including everyone’s favorite segment “Micro is more mini than mini” — so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 01:46 - Google event 13:12 - Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL 29:02 - Google Buds 51:43 - Pixelbook 1:02:14 - Google Home Mini and Max 1:10:30 - Google Clips 1:26:18 - Paul’s weekly segment “Micro is more mini than mini” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast. The flagship podcast of Theverge. Dot biz. I've really settled on dot biz for that trick. And part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and I have an important update on the Vox Media Podcast Network and our status within it.

Today, I saw Ezra Klein, my friend and enemy. And I said, hey, man, I've started this beef with you on the podcast. And it looked at me and said, oh, I haven't been listening. So that's where we are with that. But part of the Vox Media Network, the flagship podcast of the Verge, and quite honestly, the entire

podcasting industry. So I am Nealai Patel in the Entertruth Verge. Paul Miller is here. Hello. And the man, the legend, the complete Verge hero byline dominator, Dider Bone is here. Can we like clap for Deter? Yeah, some clap. Oh, that's very kind of you.

I want to point out that I still didn't write more post that day than Heimgardenberg. Don't worry, you get that You keep practicing So the bone zone in effect This is all Basically an all Google show With a side of open standards complaining That's what we're gonna do to do to

Just to be clear It's almost like it's a Verge cast If you didn't go to theverge.com yesterday You know a lot of people You know it's a multi Multi platform experience Yeah so maybe you weren't there But there was definitely a moment

where our whole hero full of, I don't know, 20 stories, all written by Dieter Bone with exclusive, never-before-seeing information about everything Google announced. It was pretty amazing. Yeah. So Google had its big hardware event yesterday. Dude, I'm just going to do a tiny little bit of inside baseball. So if you, I've been watching the tech industry for a long time, you know, companies have big events. They invite some journalists in early and some pre-briefs. you know, in the magazine days, you get the big cover of the magazine.

They invited Dieter. But what we decided to do was instead of writing the one big feature, how Google's going to do a thing. We split it up, which is cool. So Deeter wrote a piece on the new pixel phones. He wrote a piece about the new Google speakers. He wrote a piece interviewing Sundar Pichai, wrote a piece with Rigostolo. Because that's the way the media works now. People want focus.

So it was like a big new experiment. We would love your feedback and what you thought of it. If you want us to instead write one big magazine feature printed on paper and mail it to you, that is probably not feedback that I will accept. But I'm eager to hear it. You want to hear my feedback? Yeah. I loved it.

Yeah, I thought it was super fun. I felt super well. Was it too much? That was the thing. You couldn't read it all. If there was something at the moment, I ended up reading probably everything, but if there was something at the moment I wasn't focused on, I wanted to dive into more information about one thing. like overall hardware strategy or this phones in particular or these pixel buttons.

You know, like I could go where I wanted to and learn so much information about all these things that like typically at this stage we're still scrambling for details. Yeah. The other piece of inside baseball is journalists like everybody are pretty competitive. And when the story went up, I definitely had to go into hiding at the Google event for about an hour so that nobody would murder me. Yeah. That's okay. We get mad at other people when they're. get stuff. It happens all the time. It's good.

No one's actually mad. This is why it's inside-based. No one cares. Do you want to know about this stuff? We had a bunch of stuff for you to know. We had all the stuff. Yeah. Like our friend David Pierce had the inside on Sonos history. Good for David. We're happy for him. I'll read that one story, but don't read anything else. You should just know if you didn't look at the time length of this podcast. It's probably going to go long.

So just buckle in, be prepared for a longer than usual Vergecast. I just, I have to say that without a hint of irony or self-awareness at all. Neely said before we started to Andrew Marino, our intrepid producer, Andrew, we're going to go 90 today. They've been long recently. There's a lot to talk about it. Let's do it.

All right, Dieter. You know everything. Let's start at the start. I know quite a bit. You hung out with Google for a while. By the way, one of our listeners tweeted me last week, and they're like, Dieter knows everything because he's not talking during this Google section. Good, good catch.

So you spent a ton of time with Sundar, you spent a ton of time with Rick Osterlo, who's the head of Google's Harvard Division. Just tell, give us the broad overview of what they announced and your kind of overall thoughts and we'll dive into products. Sure. So the main thing to know about what they announced, I think, is they announced a grand total of eight different things. Two phones, an insane standalone camera, a new laptop, a new VR, version of their VR headset. headphones and two speakers. Yeah. There you go. The camera and the headphones are brand new product categories. And so this whole question, and this all happens in the context that they just, you know,

acquired 2,000 engineers for a billion dollars from HTC. So the whole question for Google has always been, are you really serious about this? And the best way to answer that question is by selling millions upon millions upon millions of products. Google's not there yet. So instead, they answered that question by like, we're entering. new product categories. We're hiring a bunch of engineers and here's how serious we are. And we can get into like the product philosophy, but the bottom line for both Sudar in one way and

Rick Austerlo in an entirely different way, the thing that makes these products different is that Google is better at AI than anybody else. And these products are either infused with or directly inspired by AI. Their dream is to make products that wouldn't be possible if they don't have AI in them and they're like on the road to getting there and in some categories they've actually gotten there. Yeah. I mean, I think that you use that line, right, the reconfiguration of the standard integration line, hardware and software plus AI.

What's interesting to me, I only started thinking about this yesterday, the line actually used to be hardware and software and services. And what's happening is the AI component is actually filtering in to replace that service component. So I think the best example of this ever was the iPod and iTunes. So you bought a piece of hardware. It worked, was tightly integrated with a good piece of software at the time called iTunes, and that was tightly integrated with the service called the iTunes store.

And that was seamless and great and worked incredibly well. By the way, iTunes files were near-frey and played on any device in the iPhone. I needed to wipe a Mac today, and it took me an extra 20 minutes because of iTunes. All I was saying was iTunes files were so DRM-free. Not always. Not always. But Steve Jobs himself said, I want to. to do this. I don't want to hear I'm on these

files. Made it so you could buy an iTunes file, play it anywhere. I buy a little headphone just a thing I'm thinking about. Interesting. My thought is we are now in a place where I think the tight integration of hardware and software

is, I think we are taking that for granted now, right? That's a thing you need to do to make a great mobile device. Google got there. Samsung is pushing it on its own way. Microsoft is pushing. They're literally making their own hardware. We've come to the place where the big software platform vendors have realized that in order

to compete with Apple's particular advantage, they need to make their own hardware. We've been talking about it for a long time. The services layer is really interesting because Apple has its own services. It prioritizes its own services and its hardware in different ways so that we were just talking about before the show started. The Apple Watch, if you have the LTE version, you can only stream Apple music on it over LTE for a variety of, I mean, there's good reasons for it, like battery life, because you know they optimize for their own service. But we're entering a place where now the service

layer is getting integrated into that puzzle. And I think what Google is trying to add onto it is saying, well, we have this massive advantage in AI. So we can make your devices smarter and that, you know, Google is known for its services. So they're actually moving into that next piece where they're saying, we're going to help you make better decisions with all the data we know, which is a pretty intense competitive advantage for them. It's funny. I really loved this Google event, and I'm, like, pretty hyped on Google right now in hardware. I still don't buy the AI thing.

Like, I've been using it. No, no, you're totally right. It's a thing that, like, they have to prove it. Like, keep going. I totally agree. I've been, I used the essential phone for a couple of weeks. So I was, like, using a lot of Android. I don't follow a lot of sports, but I do watch Seahawks games.

So every time there's a Seahawks game, I have to Google when are the Seahawks playing? Google has figured this out about me. And now Google will surface to me the score of whatever Seahawks game is on my lock screen of my Android phone. So they figured it out and good for them. But you know what? I don't normally watch live games. I was home with my parents. Now that I'm home here in New York, I always watch on Game Pass.

like the next day. So I have scores like turned off of my NFL mobile app where you actually have settings for that. Yeah. I'm sure. There are settings buried deep in the Google app for that. Tell Google that the AI is like, thank you for thinking of me. Yeah.

What my problem is like they'll do that for me for the Vikings, but I also want them to do it for me for Packers scores, but only when the Packers are losing. And they haven't figured that out yet. that I only really want to know the score when the Packers are losing. But oh, so like... I love you, Deter. You're my favorite. The other piece of this is...

Great offense. Is, uh-huh, yeah. How's your entire offense on the Vikings here? Is it great? They all have... They don't have knees. A single one of them. They're just like,

just like walking around with peg legs. That's how that's code for me. Anyway. So if it's like, you know, Google flexing and look what we can do. But some of it is a little bit of like hand waving. It's a little bit of watch the ball or it's a little bit of, you know, don't look over here, look over there. Because fundamentally, and like Rick Osterloh said this, he said, do we have an advantage in hardware? No. Apple is just

dominating them on processor speeds. And I also frankly think in terms of the raw hardware of like a camera lens and maybe even the sensor itself, they also are losing out to the iPhone. I can't say that for sure. We've got to see. They might be using basically the same sensor as the Samsung S8. Who knows? But at least in processors and also in like some other stuff, like access to like super high quality screens that bend and have notches and blah, blah, blah. They don't have it or they can't get it in the way that Apple can. And part of that scale and part of that's, they just haven't been doing it as long. And so some of this stuff when, when Rick Osterloh talks about, you know, Moore's Law's ending and Dennert scaling, which is the thing where when the processor

gets smaller, it presumably uses less power, is also, like, not working anymore. So everything is the same. And, like, yes, when it comes to Android, everything has a Qualcomm Snapchat in 835 and, you know, something above three gigs of RAM. Great. You, good job. You are differentiating from all those people. But it's not fair to say that compared to Apple's stuff, that processor innovation is stagnant. Because Apple, so far as I can tell, is doing a very, very good job of continuing to innovate on processors. Yeah. And I think that that points to Google's potential market with this hardware,

and we should talk about the specific products, but they're going to eat their ecosystem, right? If you make the Android phone with the best camera, I just sincerely doubt people are going to buy the Samsung phone for Samsung software, right? They're just going to buy the phone with the best camera. And Google pretty clearly makes that product. hopefully I mean we have again we have to see with Pixel 2 but it's been true with the pixel for a year now the difference is that Google actually didn't manufacture the pixel it was like an idea

it was like an apparition that floated through our world um which they addressed on stage yeah and then they immediately sold out how do they address it on stage they said we're gonna like make more of them or like that we didn't make the pixel was a great phone that we didn't make enough of or something like they like very directly said it so I mean they already ran out yesterday. Hopefully they're going to make enough. But I mean, that seemed to me, their market that they're going to take from is going to be Samsung and LG and HTC first. And we are almost certainly going to talk about the cost of ecosystem switching. Convincing iPhone owners to switch will be a harder lift than convincing other Android phone owners to buy a nicer camera.

But let's talk about the phones. Yeah. Pixel 2. Pixel 2. Pixel 2. You just look at the specs again you know standard top tier android specs uh what is a five inch screen that's the pixel two it has big stupid ass bezels on the top of the bottom it's like look at this sony yeah it's like hey iPhone fans come on um and you know like you look at that thing and you're like oh well that that must be the super cheap one but it's still 650 bucks um The nice thing is that it has the same camera as the 2XL. They don't reserve anything for nice for the thing. And those bezels also have dual speakers in it.

The 2XL has a 6 inch screen. It's 18 by 9. It's got curved edges. People have been calling it edge to edge. I don't think that's true. It does have dual speakers. So the bezels in the top and the bottom are pretty big. But it also has bezels on the left and the right.

It just does. Yeah. And so the thing looks like it doesn't. It does not look like the future. It just doesn't. And it's fine. It's like a totally good looking phone, I think. I think it has good design. But it's a different kind of like phone design. It's a phone design that's meant to be, I keep saying this. So I feel like I'm repeating myself. But it's it's meant to be pragmatic instead of flashy. A couple quick questions. So the curved corners of the Excel screen, what happens when you're watching YouTube videos? Are there black bars on the right? left. So here's a some fun shit that Google does because YouTube is just loves playing hijinks games.

You already know that the only way to get picture and picture on Oreo is to subscribe to YouTube Red. They block it in Chrome for a picture and picture and it only works in YouTube Red if you pay subscription in the YouTube app. If you want to go full immersive screen and have the corners

cover it or whatever, you are able to double tap on the video finally and have it go full screen edge to edge and zoom in. Or you could just leave it letterbox like normal because it's an 18 by 9 screen. That's launching first on the pixel and will come to other devices later.

So they made a custom feature in the YouTube app for the pixel and then it eventually will get roll out to other things that you can double tap to get a full zoom on the YouTube video. That's the software hardware integration we were hoping for. I'm not to flip a table here. YouTube has all of the power

inside like Google's content business right now. Yeah, of course. Play Music didn't get mentioned until the very, very end. And I guarantee you the only reason they mentioned Google Play Music at all is because I know for a fact that Google employees read our live blog during the keynote. And they saw me pointing out that they have said Spotify four times. They've said YouTube music five times. And they haven't said Google Play Music a single freaking time.

And then at the very end, they're like, oh, Google Played Music exists too. It's like, oh, you're so kind. They got the note before I walked down on stage. Like, you got to say it. By the way, this is true of every company that we cover. They all read our live blogs. Companies have requested that we send Casey to live block their events. And I'm like, you know he's going to burn you to the ground.

That's what he does there. No, but we'll be really cool. Okay. Second question. My first impression when I saw the first pixel in the flesh was like, oh, that's chunky. Yeah. Did you get that vibe with the pixel two, specifically the small? one? Yeah, the small one is not not chunky. It's not not chunky? It's not chunky. It's got like nice

rounded edges and they did this really clever thing where they put a paint of some sort of hybrid coating. They call it over the aluminum so it almost feels like plastic. But it's not like I don't know the precise dimensions off the top of my head, but it doesn't feel like a like radically thin phone. Right. Not like a like an S8 or something. Yeah. Like I said, these things don't feel like like the future. Is the little one as similar to the original pixel as it appears to be? Yeah. Right. It's very, very similar to the original.

Right. That's what I figured. It's the bigger one that has the, it's the new design. The stuff. Yep. I love the design of the bigger one. So if you watched Paul and I on the Circuit Breaker show on Tuesday, which I encourage everyone to watch Tuesdays at 4 p.m. Eastern on live.

So we've got our little, like, tweet screen is built into an IMac G4. Our producer literally hollowed up the screen and mounted a surface in it. But we were like playing with it, and we've got a bunch of old gadgets back there. there on the set. And all of them are so much more fun than new devices. Like the hilarious comedy of the iMac G4 is wonderful. The Tangerine iBook G3 we have is... Has a carrying handle?

It has a handle. And they're just exuberant devices. And we were talking about how so many new devices from every company, they've gotten so minimal that they're like really demanding of you. they're like sometimes hard to hold and they don't know various ports and they're just very complicated like austere things and then the pixel 2 Excel in particular just seems very friendly that orange button yeah it's just that little thing or orange button i mean we obviously saw it in the leaks like man that i'm so sad that they don't have a version that's black

white with the orange button in the small small addition because that is such a good look So, but you've held it and played with it. Is it as like, I don't know, happy in person? I mean, it's, it's very accommodating. How about that? Like, it's comfortable. Like, it's like a, it's like a very, very nice high-end target potato peeler with like the really nice handle. Like an OXO.

Is it OXO or OXO? Yeah. I have no idea. Let's say OXO. People, whichever one I tweet, someone will tweet. right back, or which one I were to say, someone who's right back. It's XO, XO, XO, like in Gossip Girl. Yeah.

I don't know. I love Gossip Girl. It's a great show. You want to do an hour on Gossip Girl? Thanks for coming to you. It doesn't have a headphone jack, but that's really not worth talking about. We should probably just move on. We'll get there.

Talk about the camera. I don't want to just like, everyone knows it's coming, man. It's like a tightly coiled spring over here. Camera. It has a 12 megapixel camera on the back, 8 megapixel on the front. They have these things called dual pixels, so each pixel has got a couple of subpixels so it can read left and right. And Google is leaning way, way, way into HDR. Every time you hit the shutter, it's taking somewhere on the order of 10 photos, just all the time.

And then it algorithmically combines all those photos to do stuff. So we've seen them do HDR. I don't know if you remember, but last year we didn't trust HDR Plus on the original pixel. And so we did our camera test turning it off. Yeah. And Google's like, no, you're dumb. Turn it on. You don't understand.

And we're like, okay, sure. HDR sucks, but we'll try it. And like, oh, no, Google was right. It was really good. So they're using all of that stuff to do a bunch of camera tricks. So they're using machine learning to do portrait mode because they can detect faces, but also they can actually extract the data out of the two subpixels that are less than a micron apart to make a depth map. They are, they added OIS to the camera.

So that thing moves around, but they're able to leave it on in video. So the OIS module is moving around, but they can track it in real time. and you're shaking the camera because you've got a shaky hand. They can track that in real time. They can combine the data from both of those shakes into a really stable video. Those things that you just listed sound like some of the best software chops that they're bringing to this. They don't sound like AI to me. They sound awesome.

It's machine learning. And I guess, yeah. So here's, it's funny, I actually asked Sundar. I asked Sundar about this. I was like, you know that like everybody's confused because AI isn't precisely the same thing as machine learning. learning and there's also, you know, like deep learning and blah, blah, blah. What do you, what's the difference? When Google says AI and what does it say machine learning, what does it mean?

And his answer was, nah, I don't care. It's fine to call it all AI. It just gets more people excited for it. And, you know, we need to hire people. So if everybody's excited about it, we'll be able to hire him. So it's fine. Yeah. It's like, whoa, he just doesn't care.

There was one more machine learning thing I wanted to point out with the camera. And it was, oh, low light. So the pixels are a little bit smaller on the sensor, which is bad. but the lens is brighter, so that's good. But they have optical image stabilization. And what most cameras with optical image stabilization do in low light is they leave the shutter open for longer so that they can actually collect more light. Because you can because you've got stabilization to account for shake, right?

Google just doesn't. Like they could have left the shutter open for longer and low light. And they're like, nah, our algorithms are fine. We got this. And they just like keep it fast and just take a bunch of photos in low light and use HDR to fix it. Wow. Like they are confident as hell in this thing. Well, they gave the camera to DXO Mark early.

So, like, the day the pixel was released. And DXO Mark had very cleverly been like, the iPhone 8's the best camera. And then, like, the next day they were like, the pixel's the best camera. There's a lot of conspiracy theories floating around about DXO Mark and DisplayMate. Just that they, you can pay them for consulting services. Yeah. And so if you pay them, they might. Then they'll come and tell you how they test things.

and yeah um okay right i mean if you pay them to build a thing it's like if you pay someone to teach you to take the SAT and then they take the SAT for you or you pay someone to write the standardized test you're like how about you take this test but this is the line i loved in your write-up deeter that like that exudes this confidence talking about the dual pixels that are less than a micron apart they're really close to each other and it's really really noisy chow says But guess what? We have algorithms for that. Yeah, they know.

I think that's great. And again, like I'm saying, if you want to buy an Android phone on the best camera, there's a real chance that the thing you're going to buy is Google Pixel 2. Well, there was an algorithm

for a headphone jack. I'm just looking at this page right now. I got the Pixel 2 Excel, black and white. Yeah. You know, I don't care. 64, 128. I just want the phone.

seven to eight weeks. Yeah. Are you kidding me? You didn't order right. Oh, that's right. You didn't order right away because it's tradition you order on the Vergecast. Well, now it's tradition that I'm stymied every week that I want this phone. I just, just.

Don't worry. They'll have plenty of the pencil for you. I can get the black one in three weeks, but who wants the black one? Nobody. I got the black one. It's not the one to get. And I think the blue one on Verizon is even worse. Just like, you have to solve this problem.

You made a great phone. It's real bad. We're going to talk about it forever. You just can't get it. It's very annoying. You think maybe like that's the thing that they've done on the back to like play Kate Samsung? Like, hey, we're making this thing, but don't worry.

We'll never, we'll always be out of stock. The S8 is fine. I mean, oh, wait, and the blue little guy is just on Verizon. Yeah. And that's six to seven weeks. So all of the ones that you want, you either, now you're locked into Verizon the other week. I just don't. Yeah.

The white, clearly white, the 5-inch pixel 2 unlocked five to six weeks. Yeah. This is the one thing they needed to solve. If they had just been like, it's the new pixel. It's the same as the old one, but you can buy it now. It might have done better than a great phone you can't buy. Can we talk about some other interesting things before we get to the headphone jack? Always listening for for music.

For fake Shazan. Yeah. I will say, I was like, oh. What do you think about that? Well, first thought was only tens of thousands of songs, right? That's not enough songs. Yeah. But I pull out Shazam to detect weird songs.

But I'm always too slow with Shazam. And even if I'm not too slow, Shazam doesn't get it. Yeah. Also, it can't be worse than the status quo of Shazam. If it's always on and it's like just, it's tracking what's ambient, it's like, it's Despicito. That's what it is. It's always Despicito. It doesn't really need to

watch. But there's multiple versions of Despacito. There's the one with Justin Bieber. It's not actually 10,000 songs. It only recognizes Despacito. The Despacito plays so often that they can fool you in thinking it's always active. By the way, when I saw this

feature demoed, their sample song was look what you made me do. Of course it was. The other song. And I was like, why is it not displaying I'm too sexy on the screen? It's clearly getting it wrong. Dead silence in the room from the Google employees.

Yeah. They were not impressed. All right. Do you want to talk about the thing? No, it's fine. Let's talk about the thing. Do you want to save it to the end and talk about other products? Or are you, because we've got seven other things.

I've been an emotional turmoil over here. Here's the thing. We need 60 minutes to talk about the headphone jack. Where do we put the 60 minutes? This episode of The Vergecast brought to you by Squarespace. Are you ready to start your new business? Make it stand out with Squarespace. They got beautiful templates created by world-class designers.

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It's not just a dream. What's that? Wait. Paul made a website today. He forgot its own domain. Intentionalsqueeze.com. Is that yours? Yeah.

You just made it up. Yeah. Google said that you can't accidentally squeeze the pixel to. It requires an intentional. squeeze. What are you going to do with this website, Paul? It forwards to the, just like click to feel and swipe to go home. Yeah.

Forwards to the Verge newsletter. I like it. We got to make your pod website. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. It's a promise you've made me in this audience. All right.

Don't talk about this thing? Okay. It's a symbol. Mm-hmm. So we used to have open interconnects, standards, if you will, Okay. And now we are rapidly headed into a world in which listening to things requires multiple computers to talk to each other, and those computers are all part of ecosystem lock-in. So Google did the same thing Apple did.

They did it in a more Googly way. So basically we were talking about the pixel buds. That's a whole combo platter. Dieter, you want to tell us what the pixel buds are? Pixel buds are neck buds made by Google. They sit outside your ear. They fit in your ear with a clever little cloth loop do-hicky that slides through the headphone. They have a touch-sensitive.

The whole body of each headphone is capacitive. So in theory, it could do in-ear detection, but they haven't figured out how to do it yet. You control it by swiping on the left or the right earbud or tapping it or holding it down to talk to the assistant. It has some advanced features. It can fast pair with Android phones. As soon as you open up the little case, a little notification drops down on the Android phone that shows the headphones, their ID, a little picture of them, and their current battery level. And you just tap pair these and they pair.

They also, when you hold your finger down on the side of the right earbud, it will automatically start recording your voice right away and then start sending it as soon as it gets, you know, a secure connection, Bluetooth connection to the phone. So you can tap your right earbud and say, what's the weather, how do I get home or whatever without having to say, okay, Google. and the latency of like getting a response to the assistant is much smaller because you're not waiting for any like confirmation beeps or anything. Those are the neck buds. Yeah.

And the translate feature is exclusive to the pixel. Did they give an excuse? Yes, I asked, they told me. It's not an excuse. I think it's probably a real thing. So the way the translate feature works is I hold the phone out to you. You're speaking French. Absolutely.

Sure you are. I talk into the headset. The phone spits out. French at you. You speak French into the phone. It splits out English into my pixel buds. So they're like, we had to do custom audio routing to light up all of the headphones and speakers and not have them be confused. And it works with specifically with the Google Translate app, not the Google Assistant. So it also needs to be able to route all that information to the Google Translate app, not just randomly to the phone. Right. So there, yes, there's a level of integration there, hardware, software, services. It's a whole thing.

But I think this is just going to be a pattern. And this is why I'm all freaking out. So the pattern is a company takes the headphone jack off the phone. And then they're like, we know you're going to be mad about this. Here's a set of wireless headphones. Great. That's what Apple did with the AirPods. But because Bluetooth is a little shaky, they're building, somebody tweeted me,

Embrace and Extend. They're building these custom. That's what Microsoft used to do, web standards. They're building custom control layers on top of Bluetooth. And because they're their own products, they're like, well, now we own the whole stack. We can do cool new features, which is great. But what's happening is the big open interconnect,

which was the headphone jack, is gone. You've got a shaky open standard interconnect in regular Bluetooth. And then you've got like the walled garden of the first party product that's better than the Bluetooth product. Right. And this is like a big deal because, So I'll use Apple as an example, but I think Google's doing it too. But we've had a year now with Apple W1 products.

So you can get AirPods. You can get beats X. You can get beats solo. I think they just put another one. There's four choices of first-party headphones that work great with an iPhone. Right. And then there's like the second class of Bluetooth headphones. Traditional Bluetooth.

So I have Bose QC-35s. I think, Deter, you've got QC-35s too. They're great. I do, yep. Every now and again, they just don't work right. As a point of clarification, Bluetooth 5 won't do this fancy pairing stuff that Apple and Google are doing right now? It doesn't appear so, right? So Bluetooth 5 is the open one.

So yeah, so then on Android, Google owns the stack. Right. So a company, and Vlad told me that he's already gotten pitches from other companies, they're saying, hey, we're headphone makers. We now support Google's fast pairing. So Google is Google. they've made some special affordances in Android to make Bluetooth better, but they're custom.

The headphone maker has to go and support them, and that doesn't mean you get fast pairing on the iPhone. They're just regular old Bluetooth headphones on the iPhone. So now, I think Dieter, you said this to me yesterday, Bluetooth is fragmenting. Right? You're going to buy expensive headphones for one device, and they're going to work great with that device

in that ecosystem, and the second you take them somewhere else, you're going to fall back to regular old Bluetooth, which, again, I know people are going to tell me it's great and it works fine, is rife with problems. A thing that's happening in Bluetooth 5 is the chip makers are doing something along the lines of what Apple's doing with W1.

They're putting basically a microprocessor next to the wireless chip and doing some more aggressive control and quality of service stuff. So maybe it'll be better. Turns out, though, three phones out with Bluetooth 5, like mainstream phones? No Bluetooth 5 products. So you're months and months away from that.

And that's like fundamentally my problem is we've gone from a world where you could, there's a huge market of headphones. And you could, you as a consumer could prioritize whatever you wanted and get fundamentally like a similar experience across everything that you want. I want flashy ones, little ones, I want in-year ones.

I want giant ones with cat ears like Megan Farok Mesh has, like my favorite that I've seen. office. Now it's like you're going to buy the first-party headphones that are guaranteed to work the best with your phone. And all the other stuff is going to fade into like the second class of the market. And then on top of it, you're going to go by a smart speaker that runs an operating system in an OS and is tied to a service layer. And your Amazon Alexa, you can't say Alexa play this song on Apple music because Amazon and Apple don't have a deal. And when you buy the new Sonos system and Sonos in the app supports Apple music, but you want to use Alexa.

Alexa, which is the voice assistant supports now, now you're locked out because Sonos is just a skill in Alexa. And Amazon actually controls the music layer inside of Sonos. And they say Spotify's coming soon, but it's not here yet. So we've gone from a world of relatively open choice for consumers across their entire audio ecosystem to this move where we're killing the one guaranteed open interconnect that enabled the big market. The ox. Yeah. Just very simple. Everybody understands it.

It's almost everywhere in the world to vendor lock-in, ecosystem lock-in. And if you ever listen to this show, you know that nothing irritates us more than ecosystem lock-in. So I have a kind of a pet theory about Wald Gardens. Yeah. And it almost seems like it's be. So let's forget about the physical headphone jack, right? It's just a symbol. That's just a symbol.

Just a symbol. And I will say it's been very. disappoint. One, it's really annoying that Apple doesn't move to USBC. Because I think if Apple moved to USBC for a plug, we could at least get a standard headphone jack of USBC. Sure. Maybe. That would be theoretical. Because right now, like, a USBC, a USBC phone comes out like which headphone goggles. Yeah. Is it the weird HTC riff? And nobody knows. Is it the standard riff? Hopefully that gets resolved pretty soon. So let's say, by the way, if as long as we're talking about standards, there's another example here, which is.

moving pictures. Google has motion photos. Apple has live photos. They're different file formats, and nobody supports either one really out in the world. And that's a whole other thing. Anyway, continue. Standards.

So I have a theory. The Internet's most exuberance standards podcast. So if you just rename the VergeCast to IEEE. Go ahead, Paul. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. All right, please go ahead. If you get rid of all these physical plugs,

you had basically a situation where Bluetooth headphones existed. They worked, but they were not great. Apple came out with an extremely proprietary solution that is only supported by the AirPods and then by its beats subbrand. But with innovation. So the way I visualize it is like you create a walled garden it's like a nursery

where you nurture new ideas and new technologies before instead of starting like showing up knocking on the door of a standards body and saying we should get a new

you just create a kind of a proof of concept now you have Google doing it but it's not it and it's exclusive to Android but it doesn't seem like it'll be it's not going to be completely exclusive to Google or some sub-brand of Google headphones because they don't have that. But they've got one.

They'll have one headphone. They got the one. And then possibly third-party manufacturers won't do as good a job as Google or Google won't certify them very well. We'll have to see. But you still have, remember, we started Bluetooth. It's not great. Yeah. We had Apple W-1, great, but very limited.

Now you have Google, maybe a little water down. but more accessible. I see it trending towards we could end up with maybe it takes until Bluetooth 6.0, but like one standard. Don't. Please don't say Bluetooth 6.0. That's like 10 years away from now.

Like I don't, what would be the alternative? Like you could have Google. Apple could have shown up and said, here are the open specs for W1. If you adhere to this, you're good. You don't even have to pay us a licensing fee because we want tons of these out there. Right.

I think W1, this is going to be very nerdy, W1 is very confusing to people. I think it's somewhat intentionally mysterious, but it's a chip in the headphones and a software driver in iOS. That's all that's going on there. If you're Bose, I don't know if anybody can compete with Apple and chips,

but maybe there's a Bluetooth chip vendor out there that's like, we got a chip that's better than W1. You can buy that chip, but without the associated software support in iOS. you're just hosed. So Apple could say, here's how to talk to the software stack in iOS with whatever chip you want.

They do it all the time because they support, say, Wi-Fi. They support regular Bluetooth. Like, that's a thing that they know how to do. Here's how to talk to the software on this phone through a wireless protocol. They're not going to do that. Apple wants you to buy AirPods,

barring that, they want you to buy some beats. Great, and it's Apple's prerogative. I don't, like, I fully support them in that. Google, like I said, they're Google, they're a little bit more open. Are they going to take the Android fast pair code and send it to the Bluetooth standards body? And then the Bluetooth is going to make it part of Bluetooth 5.1 EDR plus. Who knows, right? But all of that work has to happen.

And in the meantime, it's not just headphones. It's like the entire ecosystem of things that you listen to, like speakers. So you're going to, you just end up in this world where you've bought the AirPods because they work right now, you're not buying stuff based on the promise of a forthcoming Bluetooth standard, and that further locks you into the Apple ecosystem. Because now if you want to switch phones,

your expensive headphones are going to work less well. Just to be clear, the incentive, like Paul, for your dream, I want to believe in your dream that you make a walled garden so that you can nurture the beautiful flower because out in the rough winds of the desert of standards bodies, it would just get destroyed.

The way we talk about standards bodies makes him sounds so excited. It's either on the money with how he described my beautiful vision. Under the baking hot sun of the committee meeting, it would just wither and die. It's definitely a conference room that only has water and not even soda. Like, that's a standard standard. How do you guys visualize the walled garden? I view it as like an isometric, like, gardening game, like nice eight-bit graphics.

We got to make a game called the Wald Garden. Surrounded by a hedges. If you're a game developer, you're a little bit bored, and you want to make a game with us called Waldgarden, email us. Yeah. You can figure it out. Okay, so Dieter.

So contrary to that vision. Contrary to that vision, there is no incentive for once the flower is hearty and thriving in the Waldgarten to let anybody else plant it. Apple and Google, their incentive is to become the Monsanto of ideas, where the seeds, they control the seeds. And in order to buy in, you've got to buy the seeds from them.

But they don't do that everywhere. This idea that they'll create a little bit of a standard and then they'll just give it away. I want to believe that. But if the standard become, their proprietary thing becomes successful, there's no incentive for them to give it away. Now, Google is slightly better at this. And Apple has done this with Webstuff, with WebKit in particular. But I think that because phones are getting more expensive, people are paying more attention to their margins, it's very clear that every single one of these companies knows that they can't just sell the phone, they got to sell other stuff around the phone, and that's just the trend.

And so why would you give that money of selling the stuff around the phone away? Apple, it used to be they didn't, I mean, they would have liked to, but they were just too busy trying to make enough of the phone. the damn phones that focused on making the phones better, that they weren't thinking that deeply about the rest of the accessory market, right? I mean, look at the very first Bluetooth headset for the iPhone. It was not good. It was beautiful. And their cases were, eh. But so, yeah, so all these companies are incentivized to create other things you can buy for the phone that make that phone better. And they're incentivized because you're going to want to buy the next phone in two to four years, well, you should buy the one that works with the other stuff that you bought.

Right? Yeah. And that's the concern. Also, all of these companies, and this is where the nightmare comes in, the nightmare. All of these companies are doing voice assistants. So they want to be in control of the primary interface of the voice assistant in mobile, which is having headphones in your ears and speakers they control and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the nightmare, I just want to point out, the nightmare is Samsung is going to

open the door to the garden. We've been working on this for a long time, and the monster known as Bixby headphones is coming for you. I have to go into their garden to meet Bixby headphones. You have to clamber through the tall weeds of Samsung's water drop effects.

Or at least press hard on a button on the side. It doesn't work anymore. You have to intentionally squeeze the Bixby button. But you know what they're going to do it. The S-9 is going to come out. It's not going to have a headphone jack. And they're going to be like... That Sonos-Alexa thing that you probably described

where it works with this, but not Spotify yet, not Apple Music. And like, you've got to figure out what the commands are and all that stuff. That problem scenario, there is a solution to that scenario, which is just use all Amazon stuff. Amazon Music, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Speakers. There's a solution to that. Just use all Google stuff. Google Assistant, YouTube music. Google Home speakers, and you're done.

Like, the problem of, like, how do these things talk to each other is getting solved first by just buy all the stuff from one company, and they'll figure it out for you. And only is an afterthought interconnecting. Again, I think Google deserves credit for trying to do a little bit of work here. So their assistant can't do as many skills as Alexa. That's because they're trying to make them, like, work with more natural voice stuff. Yeah. But Alexa's actually catching up in that department.

And so we'll see. The ecosystem lock-in is real. I mean, I think- The internet bundle. The whole, it, bah, bah, bah. I got him. I got him. I killed Dieter, everybody.

What's the internet bundle? It's when, the internet bundle is that when you want to use an intelligent assistant, it answers, it does a thing for you, but that thing it does for you is dictated by a deal, a backroom deal between two companies, not by like a neutral search platform.

that gives you the best possible thing. And this literally just happened with Google yanking YouTube off of the Echo Show speaker because they didn't have the right back-end deal. And so now, if you want to watch a video on your Amazon speaker, you don't get what you want to get because there's not a backroom deal. If you go to it on your goddamn laptop, you just go to Duck, Duck, Go, or Google or Bing, or whatever, and it finds the thing for you because there's no need for a deal. got him. You didn't think I could get him.

But I got him today. With headphone jacks. We went from headphone jacks to deeter lamenting the open web in like it took 25 minutes, but I got there. I'm just saying. I'm going to build a goddamn statue of a headphone jack. It's just a symbol.

It's just a symbol for choice and openness. And I just don't, maybe this is just me, I just don't want to buy all Apple shit or all Google shit or all Samsung shit. I want to buy the best thing, and I want the best thing to be driven by, like, pretty vibrant competition in a market where lots of people are buying lots of things. And instead, what's happening is there are four choices of headphones that work great with the iPhone. There's one choice of headphone right now that's guaranteed to work great with a new pixel. And it's just, that's not great.

I don't want my headtone choice to be determined by what phone operating system I run. I think that is stupid. Let me tell you a story. It is, I mean, actually, this should be a realistic story, not an impossible story. So the pixel XL, black and white, has come in stock. It is March 2018. I got all excited for one second. And Eli is on the Vergecast and he sees magically, oh my gosh, this thing is in stock and he hovers his mouse pointer over the buy button.

And then he gets a text message and it's a blue bubble. and it reminds him that if he buys that pixel he's going to have to deal with the pain of dropping eye message and then we will have the entire Vergecast derailed and we will have literally the same conversation

we just had for the past half an hour all over again. March 2018. Put it on your calendar. I'll be there. So I wrote something that's going up tomorrow morning that touches on that.

I was really struck by this event. I felt like, like Google is trying really hard. Especially Apple or Google is trying really hard in a way that lines up with my interests. Like I like neck buds better than true wireless headphones. So it's like, well, I'm glad Google's making neck butts. I like the look of these phones. I just liked a lot of little things that Google was doing.

I like that their phone is $50 cheaper because Apple did not need $50 more from me for a boring phone that they just released. Like, they should be sorry. They should put $50 off. We're sorry this is an eight and that you're going to look poor compared to the iPhone 10 people. Yeah. You got that glass back. You're like squeezing things.

Yeah, Google put the same camera in the big phone and the small phone. Yeah. And as a small phone person, that, like, lines up with my interest. And so as a person who I have traditionally sort of been fine with, like, this is how the world works. Apple wants me to be just all in their ecosystem all day. long. So I will model my life around that as much as makes sense.

You know, I'll still use Google Docs. I'm not crazy. I'm not going to use pages. But I'll be fine with that. And what Google presented to me was a fairly holistic picture of, what if you switch teams, Paul? Yeah. What if you came?

Well, if you just came all the way in. Yeah. So the piece ends with, you know, green text, blue text. but my line, which I think is very poignant, is that if I leave Apple, go to Google, I won't be leaving IMessage. The platform that runs IMessage left me. Yeah?

Yeah. That's good. Yeah, I know. It's real good. This episode of The VergeGast also brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Are you in need of great talent for your business but short on time? You have time to get lost and huge stack of resumes to find a perfect hire. You've seen the right tools, smarter tools.

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One more time, try for free, ziprecruiter.com slash verge. By the way, I just want to remind everybody that you can go to store. Dot the verge.com. You can enter the promo code. promo code? Does that still work? Any time you want. Pixel book, Dutrick.

Yeah. So it's a $1,000 Chromebook, less than the rumors. Here's my, so it's a, now you know everything. It's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. It has really is beautiful. Big silly bezels around the screen.

Yeah, they claim the line on the bezels is, it's easier to hold in tablet mode. It's like, of course, that's your line on the bezels. The other line on the bezels is if they had gone with smaller bezels, it might have added thickness to the laptop because they would have had to put the drivers for the screen somewhere. Also a line, I don't believe, because I've seen Dell's laptops. I know that they could... I've also seen the iPad Pro 10.5. Yeah.

Which is like a beautiful piece of hardware. Yeah. So, yeah, the bezels are too big. But the keyboard is the best take on a thin keyboard I have ever put my fingers on. It's 0.08, no, it's 0.8 millimeters of travel. which is like twice what a MacBook is, but it feels like not as clacky. It feels more like traditional keyboard.

It's way better than the Surface Pro keyboard attachment thing, Bob. It's way better than the MacBook. It's a very, very good keyboard, I think. I typed on it for, you know, off and on for a couple hours over the course of a couple of days. Yeah. So I think, you know, there's been a lot of like, why would you buy a thousand dollar Chromebook?

You had in your piece, you know, Google sells a lot of Chromebooks, education. Those kids are growing up. They're going to college. They're happy with the Chromebook. They're just going to buy this one because it's the nice one. I think that's an interesting read on it. My read, though, is, and that's kind of Google's messaging, my read on it is this is the shot at the iPad Pro. Right? It's, it runs mobile apps. Deider has had horrific experiences running Android apps on Chromebooks, so we'll see how well it does. But they were like Android app to are customizing their apps for this device. They showed off Snapchat running his Android app on this thing.

Casey lost his mind. He's like, it's a steptop. That's how I read that line in live blog. He tweeted, I want to spend the rest of my life writing about how Snapchat saved itself by pivoting to laptops, which is incredible. But, you know, they're obviously doing the work with the Android developer. So we'll see if it's better. But if it is, it's a huge hypothetical if, now you've got a device that runs mobile apps,

but also has a desktop class browser and a keyboard. And that is the iPad. That's the one thing the iPad Pro is missing in my mind. Do you even need to go after the iPad Pro? Savage. Like I love the iPad Pro. I think it's a really great niche product. I just don't think it's...

But it's Apple's vision of the future of computing, right? So if your bet... Keep looking. If your bet is that people are going to abandon the traditional complexity of the desktop operating system and the laptop, and they're going to go towards these more mobile things that they're more familiar with that are a little more sandboxed and controlled, well, definitely the one thing that the iPad doesn't have is the ability to do Google Docs great or the ability to go anywhere on the web and get the full of the...

desktop experience. Use a mouse. Yeah. Or use a mouse. So I just, to me, the comparison is not why would you buy a thousand dollar Chromebook. It's why would you buy this iPad Pro when you can get, again, the huge hypothetical here is how all these Android apps do. But you can get basically the most interesting Android tablet thing that has ever existed. I don't, I don't know. The Android part is irrelevant to me.

I've been using a Windows laptop primarily for a couple weeks, and I use it like a Chromebook. Yeah. But, you know, partly, and I also edit in Adobe Premiere. Something I couldn't do very well on my Mac laptop. Yeah. And I definitely couldn't do on a Chromebook. And I also played a lot of Steam games, I guess. So this is a terrible example.

I used a shit out of windows. I edited the registry. I switched to edge. A really good example. I'm sure that Google did a bunch of work to make games work better. This Chromebook has got, I think the base model has got like eight gigs of RAM, which is just a stupid amount of RAM for running Android apps. This is why it has so much storage so that you can put a bunch of movies and games on it.

I think it's safe to assume that Android apps are going to be kind of meh. And when you compare it to, especially, an iPad. It's stuff like games where you are not going to get the value out of a Chromebook or out of a pixel book that you would get out of an iPad. The iPad is going to have better apps. It's going to have better games. It's probably going to have better photo and video editing software for the very near and medium and far foreseeable future. I know that Adobe is promising to like make their Premiere or not Premiere, make their creative suite apps really great on Android to run really well in the pixel book.

I just don't believe that they're ever going to feel like anything other than like third class citizens compared to what you could do on Windows or a Mac with them. I just specced out the top end pixel book, which has an I-7, 16 gigs of RAM and a 512-gigabyte SSD. I suspect that's supposed to cost me like $1,600, but they won't even show me the price,

and it just says join wait list. And there's a checkbox here that says, send me Google Store special offers. Wow. What are you doing? They must not have the top one available. There's no way they sold out of it. Maybe it's just not available yet. Yeah.

I mean, do I need an I7 in my Chromebook? No. No. The mid-range one is an I-5. Four to five weeks. Yeah. Take my money. It's so hard.

What about the pen? I actually thought, like, I'm not huge on Google. or really any of these assistants yet. But I kind of like what they're doing with the pen. I feel like you probably can figure out how to do that with a mouse interface, but highlighting stuff and then having the Google Assistant find stuff for you quickly. It's pretty cool. I do so many reverse Google image searches.

I mean, the idea that you'd spend $100 on a pen to do, to like circle a thing on a screen so you could search for it, don't do that. Just don't do that. That's crazy time. they should have made some kind of feature where you could do it yourself with like your finger. Maybe there'll be a button for there somewhere. It's a walk-on pen.

It's got angled sensitivity of something and it's got pressure sensitivity of something. It doesn't need to be paired because it's just a walk-on pen. The thing that they claim is that it has 10 milliseconds of latency, which really, because I think the iPad Pro is 20 milliseconds of latency. Is that right? Yeah. There's no way they did that. But you also like, what are you going to use it?

It's like the A11 Bionic is so fast. Like, where's Adobe Premiere for the iPhone? Right. Like, what are you going to use it for? Like, Google needs to get Android apps that need that level of performance. Right. I mean, James Faramark. You can handwrite with it.

Because he loves his, he loves his Chromebook Pixel. And he's like, maybe there'll be some apps. We know, like, do some photo stuff on it. But you, yeah, maybe. There'll be lightroom, sort of. Yeah. Right. You can draw.

You can, it'll do handwriting recognition. I tried that. That actually worked really well. Like you can open up the software keyboard and switch to handwriting and just do that. That actually worked remarkably well. But like having low latency is there for drawing. That's why low latency really truly matters. And I just, I'm sorry.

I do not believe that there, that Android. Multimedia apps are anywhere near the quality of iOS multimedia apps. I just don't see it. And that's a big problem for selling this pen. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I don't think the pen is the point. I think the pen is there, again, because it's the one-to-one with the iPad Pro. So if you're going to make that comparison, you're like, oh, it has a pen too.

But really, I use this MacBook Pro. It's funny because I Excel open right now. So it's a bad comparison. that I mostly use this thing like a crumbook. Yeah, especially if you're going after students, like you were saying in your piece theater, like you've got a really good web browser and which you use Google Docs

and basically do everything in, and then you also can watch Netflix on it. And like, I would love if the commercials for this show in tablet mode or like those like that tent configuration or whatever, you know, and you're just watching Netflix. Can I just say I hate that? When they're like, it's a four and one. You can use it like a tent.

You can use it in a cinematic. Blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's no, but it's nobody does that shit. It's better than the Microsoft. It's two and one. The Microsoft commercials where like I'm a strapping young professional and you like, like seamlessly transitioning like like like a kung fu person from like situation to situation. And now I have to remodel my house and now I have to, you know, like, no, like people. surf the internet

and they watch Netflix on their laptops. Yeah. When Microsoft finally buckles and makes a surface laptop that has a 360 hinge because they're going to do it. They're going to call it a five and one because you can set it on its side

with it halfway open and like do portions. I feel like tent mode is underappreciated. Yeah, I'm like watching a thing. When's the last time you used tent mode? Like my laptop can't tent mode. I used it in Niagara Falls. It was great.

It was, I totally had a girlfriend, dude. You just haven't met her yet. Should we talk about the speakers? We should talk about the speakers. Although I feel like we've said the important things about the standards of the speaker. We should talk about the speakers. We should also talk about Sonos because they had an event on the same day. They're getting somewhat underplayed and all the Google hype.

but a lot of speaker news yesterday. Google Home Mini is a small Google Home, the end. It's 50 bucks. Yeah. The end. Google Home Max is an iPod, hi-fi, but you can't plug an iPod into it. It does the auto thing. So I told the story in the piece, but like they picked up the big-ass speaker and stuck it in the corner.

And the bass went from normal to like like the voice of the devil when you, play the record backwards. And then like 10 seconds, it just stopped being weird and sounded normal again. So that was impressive. You know, we'll review it. We'll play it really loud and be like, this is really loud.

It sounds good. But I don't know if Google can truly, truly make the case that you should center your, like, audio life around this thing. It's like if you want a really cool, nice speaker and you're a Google person, this is a cool, nice speaker sticking in your den because you have a den

if you're the kind of person that's going to spend 400 bucks on this thing. I add a little bit of high, otherwise, I don't know. High-fi on the brain because all the talking to Nealai so many times. Because like I have like, I have, I love my bookshelf speakers, but they're kind of like, they're kind of getting old

and there's some noise in the amp and stuff like that. So I would like new bookshelf speakers. These are a little expensive for that, but it would be really cool. cool if they tried to do like a sound bar because like a lot of home theater audio stuff I find inferior for music. It's designed for playing movies. So this, you know, it was appealing to me like this can, you know, be kind of in a music mode or in a spoken voice mode. So I said, so look, I need to be, I was talking to the engineers. I'm like, I need just, just to

just, I'm sure I know the answer to this, but just, just confirm for me that this is not meant to be uses a soundbar trying to get sound, you know, from your TV synced up to this thing would be a huge hassle. Nobody's going to stick a receiver up to it. And they're like, yeah, no, we don't, we don't mean to use it as soundbar. I'm not, like, I just imagine how hard it would be to, like, if you're, you know, streaming a movie on TV, sometimes the idog gets out of sync when you've got a wire running. If you were to try and handle that wirelessly, you know, like with a Chromecast or something, that would be, that would be insane. There's no way anybody could pull that off. And I Kid you not, it was about 30 seconds of silence while, like, four engineers stared at each other and had smirks on their faces.

I was like, oh, wait, maybe you are working on that. Yeah, they have to be. That would make a lot of sense. That would be helpful. Yeah. Right. And you could, if you, if you're in the ecosystem and you have a Chromecast, it's very easy for the Chromecast to sync the audio and video because it will be able to do the round trip time to the speaker. Right.

And I can delay the video. Yeah. Well, but that's kind of just along that, like, I can visualize a Google soundbar. Yeah. And this sort of pragmatic theme that I think you're very accurately, you know, ascribed to most of these announcements. Like, it makes sense that, like, that Google would introduce something that made it easier to have okay to great sound, not the best sound, but you can improve your movie watching experience.

Well, I'll tell you this. I have had my finger on the buy button of the new Sonos speaker since it was announced yesterday, literally a half dozen times because it's the dream. It's a good sono speaker. It's got the whole Sono system. It plays nice with multiple music services. I know it's going to be relatively future proof. I trust them as a company to not try and lock me into anything. But I haven't clicked buy because I do not yet believe that that dream of I'm going to be able to use any voice.

system I want on it and it's going to work as well as a first-party system could possibly be true. So Dan was pointing this out yesterday. There's a lot of Alexa devices. They're part of the sort of like works with Alexa thing. So you can like buy a Raspberry Pi and install Alexa voice services on it. And he's like none of them as yet have been as good as the EchoDuct. So I think the last one he reviewed was the EcoB4 thermostat, which has Alexa in it. Which seems very clever. It's right on the wall. Just stick it there. It's all collapsed.

And he's like, it's just not as good. It can't do a bunch of the stuff the first party Alexa devices can do. So I think Sonos has a much deeper partnership with Amazon. They've had to do a lot of work to make this go. So maybe it's all going to be fine. But that's like a, it's a big open question for me. So here's my open question. The new Sonos is also going to work with AirPlay 2.

So I have two questions. One, I still don't know what the hell Airplay? Two is. I have a minor answer. I have a minor answer to that question. Okay. Okay, good. I want you to give it to me two.

Why is Apple making just the one big, crazy home pod speaker and not just saying, oh, yeah, sure, here's Siri and a speaker. Done. They would sell a cajillion of them. Yeah. So the second question is more important. Airplay two is a minor answer. As near as I can tell, it's a slightly more robust airplay that enables. multi-room speakers. That's it.

Yeah. I don't think they've changed. They should have been, which is... They should have called it like Siri player. Airplay 2 and what Airplay 2 means is that it comes with Siri. Yeah, exactly. The HomePod thing is really interesting, right?

Because Amazon had its event last week. They put out like 900 things. Every shape and size of Alexa that you want is now available to you. And every price point from like $35 if you're a prime member on the third Tuesday of the month, to like the most expensive Echo Show, which is like 2709. You can just see that that's the price range people want. Like you can make the argument Amazon doesn't quite know what the sweet spot is, or you can make the argument that Amazon is doing what Apple used to do with the iPod,

which is like price them at every 50 bucks. Google's putting out the range because some people want the big speaker, some people want the medium one, some people just want to talk to a thing and get answers back. Apple is just like one giant monster that's as expensive as anything. It might sound good. It does the same sort of, or supposedly does the same sort of real-time audio correction as the Google Home Max. But, man, just in terms of sheer amount of choices, getting into that assistant smart speaker interface world, Amazon and Google are just sitting there with like super cheap products. Come on in.

Do you want to turn on your lights with their voice? Try this cloth-covered puck. Yeah. Whereas Apple's like, set up HomeKit on your phone. phone. You may or may not kill yourself when it's over. None of it's great, but that's just my... Yeah, I... Is it just a function that Siri, they know they're not going to get Siri caught up to

Alexa and the Google Assistant and they don't want to look bad? Apple should put out a $50 puck. It's clear that that is where the action in this market is. They let people talk to Syria on all sorts of phones. This goes along with... You can talk to Syria on your goddamn watch. Like, why not just put... Take your watch, the whole thing, and just stick it on a speaker instead of on a wrist and call it a day. It's all you have to do.

What are you going to do with all those leftover series one watches? This goes along with my sensation that Apple just is not in sync with me anymore. Like that they would, you know, that they are not even trying to discover where I am at or what I'm interested in. Yeah. What you're interested in is notches, my friend. I love, I mean, I do love a good notch. Who doesn't? But I'm not going to pay $999 for a notch.

You're going to buy an 8? I might get a pixel, too. I don't know. Green bubbles. I got to read this piece tomorrow. Green bubbles. Okay. Last one, Deeter.

Clips. The most complicated one, we're saving for last. I mean, we could talk about, do you want to say one thing about Daydream View before we go to Clips? You have one sentence. I have nothing to say about Daydream View. Here's mine.

VR is dead. Let's talk about Clips. Nothing makes me happier than knowing Facebook when all in on VR and it's going to fail. That's right, Zach. You bet wrong. All right. Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus. I'm sorry.

I can tell how biased your laughter was. All right. I'm sorry. If me life's prediction comes true, I have to quit the verge and go live in the country because I won't be able to afford rent. Well, it's fine. You'll be able to buy any speakers you want out there. Clips. Clips.

I think Clips is the most polarizing product that they announced. Absolutely. Because half the people are like, this is, like, Dan Sefer is like, this is garbage. This is creepy and lame and what are they doing? And Ben Popper is like, this is amazing. I want this right now. I want this so badly. It's also polarizing in terms of like how quickly you get it.

So for me, I'm like thinking about like the future photography and moving images and how does it work? And so a camera that uses AI to take little motion clips, I went all the way into the weeds right away of like, how does it work? And what do the clips do? And how are they encrypted? And does it use Wi-Fi Direct? Like all this stuff. And Nilai, I said it's a tiny little camera, but instead of you hitting the shutter button, it just sits there and AI looks for interesting things. He's like, oh, that's great. I was like, I think it costs too much. He's like, no, it's perfect. Yeah. The parents who get it are going to get it instantly. Was it $2.99?

Yeah. It's $2.49. $2.49. I don't know. It just seems very clever. It's a very Google thing to do. Intel put out a press release last night. It does all the AI locally.

Intel put out a press release last night. It's an Intel chip in there. They bought an AI chip company a while ago. It's like their first big use of that chip. They're very proud of it. Visual processing unit, I think they're calling it. It's one of those great terms. VPUs.

That's what you want. Intel's trying to inject itself into, the neural network land, which is dominated by GPUs and then like chips that Google has made itself by like creating its own like intermediate language. Yeah. They're like trying to be like this arbitrator of this industry that they did not found. But like good for them being involved. What's what's really fascinating about the clips thing is I said this is a new kind of camera.

We haven't seen the camera try and do this. Go ahead. Yeah. We haven't seen a company try to make a camera that's like does this specific thing. before. And I have been getting people emailing me shitty kickstaters ever since the posts went up. Like, no, no, it's like this life logging camera. No, it's not. It's not a wearable camera. That thing just takes pictures. It's like this other camera that has like a sticker on the back and you can stick it on the wall. No, it's not. It's like a security cam because the security cam looks

for interesting footage. No, it's not. This is mobile. Like the slice of like, you know, weird camera categories, action cams, drop cam, security cams, wearable cameras, boom, blah, blah, blah, go on down the line. The fact that Google looked at that landscape and, like, had a thing that hadn't precisely been executed on before, at least not by a company that you've ever heard of, is really kind of remarkable. So I was on CNBC yesterday. I talked about Google stuff. And I really like the hosts. I'm on CMBC. They're all very smart. But it was just like clear, like, it's a complicated thing and they didn't know it. And they were like, GoPro stock has dropped today because Google announced clips. And I was like, I don't think

that those things have anything to do with each other because this does not compete with GoPro. And then I said, here's what it does. And the host said to me, oh, it's like a security camera. And I was like, no, it's not. It, you know, it looks for this thing. And the other host, after the, after the segment ended, he's like, oh, yeah, you know, I've got an outdoor camera at my country house and like it looks for stuff and I was like I have I have one of those too but it's also not this like the number of things that it's not is like so much higher than the number of things that it is yeah they're going to have to seed a ton of like they're going to have to go on every morning show soon dark a chai is going to have that awkward conversation with

Megan Kelly he's like here's a picture of Mike like they're going to have to like figure it out so they have they probably are going to they're going to hire a team of like 50 parents with toddlers and 50 people with cute dogs. Yeah. And they're going to send them out and just a giant assault, a wave into every morning show. Instagram influencers for days. Are you an Instagram influencer?

You're getting a Google Clips tonight. That's right. It's already in your house. A few things. A few things. Watching you. The video quality does not look very good. No.

It's a seven second clip. I forget the frames for second, but it's a burst photo. It's not a video. What's the difference of you to burst photo? on a video, hmm, let's get philosophical, but like,

that's why it looks the way it does. Well, but no, but just, no, it looks like, uh, it looks like somebody

blue on the lens, you know? It's like, I know it's, I know it's wide angle, but it's just like, the fidelity of the image. It's not look great.

Also, did they tell you why seven seconds is, is the magical time? Like, what if I do something really hilarious in it? It takes eight seconds to really pull off. They didn't really. Uh,

I imagine it's like how, how much can they get? How much can they analyze? It does a bunch of clever trimming things, so it's not always precisely seven seconds. So if you reach and grab your hand to pick it up, it'll be like, oh, he's reaching to grab it. You don't want that. And they'll cut that off. If you're holding it and your hand is too shaky, they'll grab like three seconds where it's stable and throw away the rest.

So, yeah, I'm not sure why seven, but that's the average of how long the clips can be. One thing that really struck me from the announcement, the way the announcement and the things that they emphasized, like it looks like a camera. and there is a light that's on and you know it's recording. It seems like they really learned their lesson from Google Glass. This is definitely along the lines of something like that Google Glass was trying to, like there will always be a camera right there, right in the moment, so everything could be captured. This is like a completely different vector to come in on.

We talked about this last week with Amazon's little Echo alarm clock. Like they're training you. Dan had this idea that they're training you to be okay with cameras by like making it cute and putting in an alarm clock. I think Google's doing the same thing. It's training you to be okay with cameras by making it cute. I've never really had this huge fear. I mean, I've had a laptop for my entire adult life that has a little camera at the top of it. You know, like I've had a camera around me at all times.

I feel like I'm pretty good with it. But I understand that it's an issue for a lot of people. Yeah. I think Ben wrote that piece today, right? It's like, this thing is creepy as hell, but I want one immediately. Yeah. I think that's going to be a lot of people. And you can just, like, turn off, like, put it away.

I think Google Glass is like, there's someone in this room with me, and he's a cyborg. It's always a he. And they're watching me. I don't think that's going to be the case with clips. I think a case with clips is like, you just sit up there. But they are going to have to do a full-on 100% like morning show, holiday marketing push. And then, not to belabor this point, actually make and sell the device, which does not seem to be a thing they're good at. A strong suit. Yeah. But you can't buy the

buds yet either. I know nobody has actually tried, but I'm a crazy person, so I did. And then, yeah, they're six to eight weeks out on a bunch of this stuff. And I don't know when the clips is going to become available. Okay. So after all of that, after all of it. It was emotional. Yeah. Ethan Google is serious about Harvard? I saw all this stuff and got all the briefings and learned everything I could about it and then went to go have a nice walk and sit at a park bench with Sundar Pichai to ask him about everything. And I was focusing.

I wasn't reading the news. I was like, I'm not going to get distracted by Twitter right now. Went and talked to him and asked him about the ethics of AI. And he immediately said, I feel a huge responsibility when we get stuff wrong in search. And I was like, great, that's a good answer. We talked all about all this stuff about how AI is going to change the interface of your phone. And every time you open up your phone, you do the same thing. And the AI should just know that lovely conversation.

Go home, transcribe the thing, start writing my article, call Neli, say, hey, I think I got it. I think I know what the artist's going to be. And he's like, yeah, what was his answer about 4chan? I was like, why the hell would I ask Sundar Pachai about 4chan? And then he's like, oh, you don't know. For the last 14 hours, everyone's been flipping out because, Google put 4chan in its top stories box, you know, when people searched for this thing, and it was totally fake news because it was a conspiracy theory that they were spinning.

On 4chan. And on 4chan, Google promoted 4chan. It's just not a good look. So then I had to go through this whole, yeah, I had to like go through this whole rigmarole of like, did he know? Because I didn't know. And did he think that I knew when I asked a question and that's what I was referring to or not? And did he know?

And if he knew, then fine. Did he know that I didn't know? And this whole thing. End of the story is, if you read the top of the article, I didn't know that anything was going on. He had a vague idea that something was going wrong. And so he was in part referencing the fact that Google had allowed 4chan to be promoted on Google search. The end.

I thought his answer, his answer should have been, I'm immediately personally modifying the Google algorithm so that we don't surface. noted troll message boards in the top news box. Yeah. But barring that stuff. If I had talked to him like an hour later, that might have been it. If I talked to him an hour later, that might have been his answer. Like, to be very fair, like he got there.

The thing was starting to bubble up. And he's like, I should get briefed on this, but instead I have to go, like, sit down with this schmuck, Deter Bone. Yeah. And talk to him for an hour by AI. He did. He sent me that in the email. It was weird.

I was like Sundar. I was using the word schmuck. It's weird. Doesn't sound like him. What Mark Zuckerberg is not, like Google and Facebook are in this conversation together. What Zuckerberg is not saying, as loudly as he needs to be saying, is we should be held accountable for this, right? He's, they're trying to chart a path that's like, we're a neutral platform, people are going to do what they want to do, we're protecting the integrity of elections in Germany, we're not going to tell you how, right? Like, they're, they're being very opaque.

Google, to Suna's credit, although I think they have to do better, at least he's saying, hold us accountable, we screwed this up. Right? And like, yeah. Hopefully they actually do better because everyone just held them accountable. But at least... The second part of that is actually doing the thing and being transparent about the thing that they're doing. Yeah. I actually think Facebook has done a slightly better job at like actively

saying this is what happened. This is what we know. This is what we're doing. They got pushed into it. They like tried not to do it in the first place. So Zuck is doing a worse job in like taking responsibility, but a slightly better job in saying here's what happened. Here's what like we're working on. Google's going to be speaking to Congress, I think November 1st maybe. And I want to know what ads on Google were there to like during the election. I want to know if they think they got gamed by Russia in some way. I don't think we have as much information about what you know, the Russians trying to influence the election did on Google as we do what they've done on Facebook and Twitter. Yeah.

Well, see, I think Google with the 4chan thing, they walked themselves into a place where they're in a conversation with Facebook in a way that they weren't previously. Just the biggest, dumbest, unforced error. What do you do? Like, oh, anyway. But on the same time, they were on YouTube. Charlie Worsell, who's doing great job BuzzFeed News, tracking this stuff, pointing out. YouTube is full of misinformation. It's bubbled up to the top.

So they've got some work to do. We're ending in a real down note here. So I'm going to ask the question I started to ask before you talked about this. Okay. All this stuff. You saw all the stuff. You met all the people. Talks to all the people.

Yeah. Is Google serious about hardware? Until you tried to buy a phone today, I would have said yes. They're serious about it. I don't know. But in order to truly be serious about it, they have to sell it in volume and they're not quite there. But they're serious about it.

They're like, you don't enter two new product categories if it's a hobby, right? You don't acquire half of HTC. You don't build a giant new building in your campus for all your hardware engineers to move into. The question of what are they serious? The answer is yes. But what we don't know is it yes, because we're going to make a ton of money on it. It's going to be,

we're going to make as much money as Apple does or whatever. It's like it's going to be half. It's going to be half our business next to ad sales. Or if it's, we're going to make hardware so that we've got a little bit of, you know, hedge and a little bit of cherry on the top of the ad money Sunday. That's less clear to me. Yeah. I just wish they'd built a factory as well as that huge building. They could use AI to improve manufacturing.

Something. I think you're right. Yeah. It just seems clear that in order to ship the A. AI stuff, they want to ship. They have to make some of their own stuff. They can't wait around for Samsung to get out of its own way with its own software, right? Like, they need to be in control of the user experience in a pretty significant way.

I think honestly, it also seems clear that if things go south with Samsung in one way or another, they need to have the chops to spin up their own high-end hardware thing and actually sell stuff in volume. If Samsung says screw it, we're going Tysen, that's bad for Android, that's bad for Google. They can't just on a dime start making Samsung quality phones. Right. Or if just hypothetically, it's a hedge. Samsung's phones started exploding. Or hypothetically, the CEO of Samsung was caught up in a scandal so enormous, the entire government of South Korea fell apart.

Or just, who knows? Just things could happen. And they would definitely have meaningful input on Samsung. Nothing. Samsung will never go anywhere. Actually, here's a question. Samsung disappears tomorrow.

The whole company implodes. Who is more hurt by that? Google or Apple? Yeah, it's tough. Yeah. Yeah. Might be Apple. More hurt by that?

Because they can't get their components? They use Samsung screens and Samsung chips. Google can get by using other stuff. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Think about that. Put that in your pixel and something.

I don't know. Put that in your pixel and then think about owning a pixel someday. Put that in your shopping cart and then wait patiently for eight weeks. Six to eight weeks. All right. That is our show. No. No?

Every week. Oh, man. I'm sorry, Paul. I forgot. I do a segment. No way ever forgets. Not even me. I never forget.

It's called Micro is more mini than mini. And this is the exciting, that's like a little mnemonic I used to remember the different ports. Because there's mini USB, which sounds very small. Yeah. And then micro USB, which is what you use to charge your phone and your Xbox 1 controllers and your PlayStation 4 controllers. But until now, you've not been able to charge a PlayStation Move controller. with micro because they came out in the PS3 air. But Sony is refreshing some PlayStation VR stuff.

That pass-through box now does HDR, which is very exciting. But they're changing the... Oh, that's actually very exciting. They're changing the move controller, so it's micro USB now. Finally. Good job, Sony. Maybe I'll buy one this weekend. And then...

Wait six to eight weeks. God. All right. That was great. Thank you. It's really, I didn't, I'm sorry, I forgot it. It's okay. I love you, man.

All right. There's other podcasts to listen to. We are done for the day. There's other stuff to listen to. Lauren Good, who's on the show, a whole bunch, has her own podcast called Too Embarrass to Ask. Guess who's on this week? Rick Osterlo,

well, a little company called Google. I sent in a question, where's my phone. Dot com, Rick. I didn't do that, but I should. Kara Swisher, host Recode, Decode. Peter Kafka, host Recode Media. There's a number of other podcasts in the Vox Media Podcast Network, of which, again, I remind you that we are the flagship. Ezra Klein has a show, a rival show.

We both definitely listen to one another shows. Listen to all that stuff. It's great. We've got new shows coming out on the verge side. Caitlin Tiffany and Ashley Carmen have a great new show coming up called Why'd You Push That Button I'm so, so excited about the show it's going to come up later this month

and I'm excited to preview this to you not preview, just leak it and leak some information here on the Vergecast Casey Newton podcast What's a call? I told him I think he should be able to Casey Newton's show but he rejected that idea

but it's coming It's going to be something else So all that's happening What if it's called the SnapTop Experience? See, it's a different title every week. Yeah. But it's all the rumbles are rumbling. So stay tuned to the Verge podcast network, part of the Vox Media podcast network,

of which we are the flagship in to take. I get it. I get it with a flex ship. We're a Venn diagram with a ship on top. With the best boat, Eli. Okay, I get it. The finest vote in all of audio. And you're the captain of the boat.

I'm the captain now. All right. That, for better or worse, was our show. Please tweeted us. Dieter's at Backlon. He has the answer to all your questions this week. Paul is at Future Paul. I'm at Reckless.

Love your feedback. Go into iTunes. Leave a comment about headphone jacks and hit those five stars. That's what we want from you. And we'll be back next week. Thanks so much. Rock and roll. Paul.

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