The Vergecast - Pixel 2 review, KRACK, and Microsoft's Surface Book sequel

Episode Date: October 20, 2017

The reviews are in and everybody just loves the quality OLED component Google picked for the Pixel 2 XL. Really just can't stop talking about it. And talking? That's what the Vergecast is for. On this episode Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss the reviews of Google's new phones, and The Verge's security expert Russell Brandom drops by to explain KRACK and four-way handshakes. It's all the grit and off-axis color shifting of a Pentile display, in podcast form. 03:08 Dieter: Pixel 2 review 10:27 Smartphone screens, display 17:58 Features, camera, speaker 26:12 Russell: Wi-Fi, WPA 2 protocol 39:40 Paul’s Segment 46:45 Dieter: Surface Book 2 52:14 Microsoft fall creator update Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Qualcomm, Snapdragon, Gigabit, LTE. With download speeds up to seven times faster than typical home Wi-Fi, Snapdragon GigabitLTE can turbocharge all of your connected apps. You can stream 360-degree video and 4K resolution with minimal buffering. You can access files in the cloud nearly as fast as you would if they were stored on your phone. You can download hours of movies or music in a matter of seconds. To learn more, visit www.spanagarin.com slash gigabit today. Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship poddust.

of The verge.mobi, a WAP site optimized for the Nokia 3310. Oh, man, I'm missing WAP. Yeah, WAP was great. Hey, we have a, there's another ship in the Armada. It happened. A new boat. We're not longer alone on the ocean of audio. Caitlin Tiffany and Ashley Carman launched.

Why did you push that button? It's a great podcast. It's really good. It's so good. First episode, second day, was in the top five, Technology iTunes podcast on its first day. Got all up to number four. Wow.

Pretty amazing. So go listen to that. It's on iTunes, on Stitcher. It's on Spotify, wherever you listen to stuff. Can I just say they deserve it? It was a really good show. And I'm really excited for, like, literally every single topic that is upcoming is everything. It's like, I need to know.

I need to understand this. Yeah. The next one, you're prominently featured in the intro to the next one, which is about read receipts and why you turn them on, why you turn them off, and how they work. So that's coming. That's Tuesdays. Spoilers. It's not a spoil.

Those are just the questions. I haven't spoiled anything. That's like being like there's a movie about a man who's a spider. And the last episode, Caitlin, or no, Ashley quoted me saying that I accidentally super liked people. And Kate was like,

yeah, sure. A lot of people say that. Anyway, you go listen to that. It's everywhere. It's great. Two podcasts in the Armada.

We remain the flagship. Boat number one. Boat. First boat. Rambo, first boat. We're also part of the Vox Media. network of podcasts. I contend that we are the flagship

of that network as well. I agree. Other folks. Come at us, Ezra. Ezra. Do not agree. Although, potentially also not paying attention. But yeah, that's that. Anyway, Dieter's here. Hey, Deeter. Hello. How's it gone? It's going really well. You're not here this

week back in San Francisco. Sorry. Paul is here. And I remain as ever, your captain. I almost got to be right. Anyway, I'm Neil. I'm also here. So, Deeter, I feel like we could do the entire show on just one topic. Just about P-O-led screens? Just about OLED screens.

I have a lot of thoughts. So to set the stage, it's Pixel 2 Review Week. Dieter was here. He was on Circle Breaker Live with me and Paul. So if you want to watch us yell about OLED screens, you're on the website. You can watch that video. Yeah. But let's talk about it now.

We looked at it. You reviewed it. Before we go into screens, what do you think of the phone? Does that make any sense? I think, yeah, no, the, this is an incredible, amazing phone. It has an incredible amazing camera. The one bad photo I ax or mistakenly called good on Twitter, notwithstanding. I'll get into that if you want.

I still think it's a good photo. I don't beat yourself up. I like it. Anyway, the camera's just stupid good. It's fast. It feels really good to hold, even though it feels kind of plastic-y because they coated it in plastic. It does all of the things you want a phone to do, and it does some things surprisingly well. I actually am using the squeeze for assistant, which I never expected is a phrase that would come out of my mouth.

Are you intentionally squeezing? I am intentionally squeezing. It's funny. So you don't know. You can squeeze the phone and it launches a Google Assistant. fine. But you can adjust to the, you know, how hard you have to squeeze it. And I am just constantly changing it.

It's like too high. It's too low. I can't find the perfect middle ground because if you have it too low, you pick the thing up and it launches and yeah, it's no good. You have it too high. You have to just grip it really hard. Anyway, so I have not a ton of complaints. I wish it had

wireless charging, but not so much that I'm really angry about it. It fast charges very well. And Google does include a proper fast charger in the box. the lack of a 3.5 millimeter headset jack is another thing I imagine we could spend the entire podcast talking about but it's very good at Bluetooth unlike the last pixel so whatever so I basically ended the review as saying if it weren't for those two small things plus the screen I would be giving this thing the highest rating I've ever given a phone in my entire life

but let's talk about that math so the math was we gave the iPhone 8 and 8 which I felt was appropriate. So they walked right into that one. Just walked into that one. And we gave it an eight. We've traditionally given iPhones 9s. I think it's not a secret. We talked about it.

And we're like, this design is somewhat old. And the headphone jack is somewhat annoying. There's a newer, more interesting iPhone coming out. We're going to shave off a point. That made sense. I also think that price factored into that iPhone score. Like, it's a pretty expensive phone, and there are lots of, you know, presumably good reasons why. But, and it does have an insanely good processor and slightly updated cameras over the seven.

But when you look at the value proposition of the iPhone 8 versus the iPhone 7, I don't know that it fully justifies its price. And this is borne out because there are studies coming out this week saying people are buying more sevens than 8's. So 8 sales are slow. Which is just the 7 is outselling. The worst look ever. That's wild. And presumably all the people who would be buying an 8 and pushing that number higher are waiting for the 10. The deafening silence around the iPhone 10 is real.

I'll just tell you that right now. So just to be clear, I feel like this is where you're going, but I don't totally understand our review system. But here's because I don't review things very often because I'm super biased. But you can't just drop a phone into this pure mathematical scientific function of the Verge review process and get. out a number. It's very contextual. It's very contextual. It's contextual.

It's based on the opinion of the person. It's incredibly contextual to its time. And I guess it's a place. I don't know. And also like it's cost. It is in the same way that like we struggle to, we pay a lot of attention to, you know, our like last few lines of the review and like how we're going to like end it. We pay a lot of attention to the score not as a like scientific metric like DXO marks.

camera scores, which themselves are not so scientific. You might argue. But as like another editorial statement about the thing. Yeah. So that's a all lengthy aside. So then we were with the pixel two. Deere, it sounds to me like you're saying, you would have given it a 9.5 and you just took off a whole point for the screen.

Yeah, I mean, it would have been a 9 or a 9.5. 9.5, I would have had lots of feelings about score that high, and I'm not quite sure I would do it, especially with like the headphone jack. But it, like, that would have been the debate. Is this a 9 or a 9.5? Instead, it was, is this a 8 or an 8.5? Or do we, you know, even go lower, depending on how angry we are at the screen. And the screen in particular, we should be really clear. We're talking mostly about the screen on the pixel XL, which is a screen that's manufactured by LG. The screen on the screen on the small. smaller, Pixel 2 is manufactured by Samsung and the whole thing is manufactured, built by HTC. It is also not a vibrant, super bright screen like you might be used to on Android phones, but because it's tuned to SRGB, but it doesn't have a lot of the technical deficiencies that you see on the LG screen on the Pixel 2 XL.

Right. And that's, again, before we do this whole thing, I just want to point out that I bought one of these phones. It's coming whenever it shows up if Google manages to actually ship these things. And I'm very happy with the purchase. When I look at this phone day to day, I'm very happy with it. When I look at photos that I take on this phone, I'm very happy with it. They just happen to look different when I look at them on another screen. Yeah. So I think that's where the, what you're saying, the scores are an editorial judgment. Because I think if Vlad, who also has a Pixel 2 Excel review unit, he basically thinks the screen is a disaster.

actually published that headline, I believe, on our website. I think the screen looks very bad. I also bought this phone. Can you guys clarify? I mean, I looked at it and like off-axis. The thing that bugged me was the off-axis. And I'm definitely like subdued colors. Okay, so let me hear it.

There are three issues with the screen. Yeah. Number one, the classic, when you look at it at different angles, the color temperature changes wildly. That's a thing that happened to OLED screens for a very long time. that basically Samsung had resolved in more recent phones. So that's issue one. Issue two is the color tuning,

which Google insists they've done to SRGB to make more naturalistic. But when I look at the color tuning, it looks like very blue, reds look very brown, it just looks very, like, desaturated and kind of washed out. The third issue, which may or may not be related to the second issue, is the thing that folks like Arsectica I've been talking about, and I believe Android Central a little bit, which is there's this weird sense of like grit in between the pixels and the surface of the screen

where if you turn the brightness way down and you scroll, you can kind of see that there's like, I don't know, it's like muddy. There's like dirt or dust or like just like a screen or something in between you and like what you're, what you're scrolling. And trying to put all those together and describe them when like accurate language is relatively difficult. It makes me say like all the time more than usual, like a lot. Like here I am saying like.

But it adds up to a thing that is just a little bit, it doesn't look perfect the way that you expect an $850 smartphone screen. So I would go even farther. It's not that the bar is perfect. The bar is nice to look at. Whoa. And those are different. That's a wildly subjective thing. So there's a gap between a perfectly color accurate display and what you like to look at.

It's just true, and that's why TVs come out of the box looking crazy. They're wildly inaccurate. I have said this a lot. I'm getting a lot of heat for it. I think the best display on the market is the iPhone LCD. Right? Apple calibrates each one individually in the factory. They're not dead accurate.

They're really accurate, but they're tuned to be pleasant. Right? So there's a gap between absolute color accuracy and sort of what your eyes want to see. And Apple's just hit that sweet spot, I think. other people like to look at Samsung OLEDs. Right. Which I think Dieter, you've called them phantasmagoric, which are ultra saturated and vibrant and crazy.

You can switch the color gamut setting to Samsung's to be a little bit saner, but that's not the default out of the box. But even I have the pixel one right here. This is the tale of woe as to why my SIM card is in this phone right now. But even this to me looks crazy. So there's just that color. tuning. Google just botched that. And that's like somewhere in the code. They went, they aimed for like complete pure technical accuracy. If it's just code, they can fix that. Presumably,

we don't know. And they've, they've implied in a statement that they would consider doing that. Then there's a question of, did they botch it or did they just make the wrong philosophical choice? And you know what I mean? Like it wasn't just like a screw up. They chose to, to make this color because they're trying to do like the morally right thing from a color temperature perspective. Well, philosophically, you can make the wrong choice and that's a botch. Yes, fair. But it's not necessarily

technical botch in that regard. Sure. Anyway, so there's that. That's a whole thing. Then there's the muddy, grainy pixel thing. And I'm, I will just,

this is like a throwback. If you say the words pentile, I'm quitting the podcast. That's what I'm going to say. God damn it. It's not a striped pixel arrangement. So the early OLED screens that were Pentile, that's Samsung's trademark,

had this problem all the time. And so all that's happening is LG is making all of Samsung's mistakes five years after Samsung fixed it. But it's not, you can't just blame LG because Google bought the displays and shipped the phone. So they made the choice to use an obviously substandard part. Like if they put a crappier processor in there, is that Qualcomm's fault?

Like I just don't understand what drove them to use this panel. Because the panel, the hardware of the panel and the blue tint off-axis, you can't fix those problems. You might be able to fix the money colors, but you can't fix the literal RGB dot arrangement on the thing that causes it to look grainy. And you can't fix that the polarizer on top causes the off-axis shift. If you know those are going to be problems, what are you doing? Dieter, what are they doing? I don't know, man. Sorry, I clicked a link and then there was sound and my whole computer decided to be angry at me.

But I was listening to everything you said. I promised. I promised you listening. One of the issues here is this idea that these are Google-made phones. So everybody knows that LG manufactured this phone. So what things are made by Google, what things are made by LG, what things are made in what factory and who actually did the real design, whatever. So one of the things is we know that this thing very closely resembles the LGV-30, which has other. problems, other screen problems.

And so do we blame Google for just picking LG? Do we blame like the market dynamics because they tried to have Huawei make one and Huawei couldn't pull it off? Do we blame them for wanting to go with HDC, but HDC can't figure out how to make a bezelless phone? Look at the U11 and it's big giant bezels and they're like, well, we got to go bezelist. So who out there can build that for us?

I don't know. I don't know quite where to land on it. I would say I would at least expect the phones to be the same. Like I understand why. I feel like if Google is going to bill itself as a hardware creator. Like one of my favorite things about these phones is that they have the same camera in both phones. Yeah. Because it makes me not feel like a second class citizen for liking small phones.

But you would expect that they could at least, I don't know. I would definitely blame Google. Not that maybe they couldn't have delivered a phone this year, and they have to deliver a phone this year. So there's nothing they could have done. But it just means they need to get better at this. Way better. So they just hired, you know, 1,000 engineers for a billion dollars. 2,000.

2,000 engineers for a billion dollars. They're all from HTC. Right. Do they know how to make OLED displays? Someone. And so that's, so here's the tale of woe. my iPhone 6S broke my vengeful iPhone success

I'm just going to hold on to this because I has a headphone jack broke in what way the camera decided well first the battery died and I put a weird shitty aftermarket battery into it

and that got very hot then the camera decided that it no longer wanted to live in its housing and it would just rattle whenever you turn it on because the auto focus decided that it would just rattle

oh you showed me some of this it was crazy so I put my sim into the we needed the iPhone 8 for review so it's like out in the world photos are always getting taken of it

so I put it in the seven review unit and then I'm just going to admit this on the show to Apple I dropped it on the concrete stairs here in the office

and it shattered and that was fine and then I dropped it again and it's not ringing so that is a problem wait you dropped it in the screen shattered but then you dropped it

again And now the screen doesn't light up anymore. It's still buzzing away. It's still getting my eye messages. I've seen some pretty busted screens. I've seen screens with that's where I messages are going? Yeah. You left I message on?

Well, so this is only all happened today. This is very fresh. Oh, my God. So what happens if I message you read out? So I'm leaving the house and I'm like, I don't have a phone. So I grab my pixel one and I just throw my SIM card in there and just like leave and like I'm working all day, having that time to think about I message. And now I'm like, well, I've got this pixel one.

It's got a great camera, a screen I can tolerate looking at, and a headphone jack. But why did I order this pixel two? Now I don't know what to do. So you're thinking just staying on the pixel one. The iPhone 7 equivalent. That was fine. All right. I just I messaged you.

It says it's delivered. It's going to come to my laptop. It says delivered already. I've been texting from the laptop all day on I message. The only person who's actually gotten a text through to me today is Josh Tupalski. He switched to a pixel. And he's like, welcome to no I message hell. So who knows, man?

I'll tell you what, like, I don't know. Google will ship a thing to like adjust the screen. I am okay not having the perfect screen because there's so many other things here that make me happy. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really. What are the other things? I really want that camera. The camera.

It's the camera. The camera is great. The speakers are also very, very good. When I say, okay, Google, it actually hears me, whether it's on or off from across the room, I just activated it, sorry, in a way that no other Android phone ever has. Battery life is very good for me. It's fast. I prefer the way Android does notifications.

I prefer the way Android does multitasking. There's no crazy bad Samsung stuff on here. It's just like you run down the list of all the things that you want from a phone. And not only does this like hit a bunch of checkboxes, it like pounds a nail into them. Yeah. That's a bad metaphor. But do you like looking at it? There's no hanging chats.

Yeah. Twist a knife into the heart of the American election. trip there, Paul. Well, people in Florida like this phone or they'll be hopelessly confused. I mean, I'm the guy who sets his screen brightness down one notch lower than looks great

in order to get that little bit of extra battery life. Yeah. So whatever. Yeah, we'll see. I mean... It's not the most important thing to me. I think it's going to be really... And I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to be like an apologist for this screen. Like, to be very clear. Everything everybody has said,

about the quality of the screen and how disappointing it is is right. Yeah. But I'm not having a giant existential crisis about it. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, I'm going to get it.

We'll see. I just have a feeling that what's going to happen is I'm going to look at it and be sad and then leave the sim in the pixel one until the iPhone 10 comes out whenever that is. And then the iPhone 10 is going to have an OLED screen, and I'm just hoping that Apple has solved these problems. Yeah. Because in my mind, no one has ever made an OLED screen that looks as good as the iPhone LCD.

Or LG's previous LCDs looked really good, too. LCDs look really good. OLEDs look insane to me. That's just my personal... Except on TVs. Yeah, but everything they're doing... I mean, this is like an interesting thing to get into somehow. LG's OLED TVs are great.

Samsung makes LCD TVs. Samsung's OLED phones are great-ish. LG has been LCD displays. LG makes the LCD in the iPhone. So it's just like these two companies went wildly different directions. I do think there's, I would like to see a trend towards screens that look more like paper. And you don't want your TV to look like paper. Yeah.

You want your TV to be ultra real. But the pixel density of a 4K TV is way lower than a phone. It's not just about pixel density. It's something like the Kindle. Yeah. Like if you think of what you're using a phone for a lot, you're reading text. You don't read text on your TV. Yeah.

So it's true tone on the iPhone. Yeah. Yeah, but there's true tone. But like I would like a screen to eventually look less backlit. Yeah. I want pixel chi. You want that phone that has the e-reader on the back of it Yeah, but it's also on the front

And there's only one screen You want a candle I want a candle phone All right, Jeff The fire phone failed Yeah, I don't hold that against you at all Kindle phone You didn't stick to your core competencies

You try a lot of weird 3D Why did you do all the 3D things Andrew, our producer Bought an HTC Evo 3D. You remember the thing with the two cameras and the 3D screen? It just caused a sensation in the office. It's really exciting. Everybody wanted to look at that phone and then everyone got tired of it and put it down. Exactly. All right. I, what, Deider, what's your last word here? Basically, look at it and see if you like it? Yeah, go to a store and look at it. But

apparently don't go to Google's pop-up stores because it's run by some rando third-party company and they're like sneakily charging an extra 30 bucks for the phone. It's perfect. Yeah, you can't look at the phone because you'll either be scammed or Google just won't ship one to you. That's great. How are they doing on shipping, by the way? I don't know. Mine doesn't, isn't due to come for another week. But presumably they're getting the first batch out.

Mine, oh, I was supposed to do a dramatic reenactment. I found a window over the weekend and I ordered one. It's supposed to come on Tuesday. But. Why would you dramatically? Because I tweeted, I got one, and someone's like, you're supposed to order on the verge cast. You broke in tradition. Oh, that is true, and I'm offended.

Let's do, let's quickly. I think that's a curse for the fans. You cursed your pixel by doing that. Why don't you just buy me a phone, Neela? Real quick. All right, no, it's a dramatic reenactment. So it's just pretend. Nobody asks, but I'm staying with the iPhone set.

Outselling the 8. Yeah. Okay, I'm at store. com. Fine time. Neelai is making, like, pretend keyboard motions for this. hands right now. Everybody? No, the way

you know that Neil is actually buying a phone is if we ask him a question, he's like, wait, what? And unlocked, black and white is out of stock, of course, 128. Although I will say, I would

really like to go over to, like, Project 5 or something. Wait, which color? All black, 120. X-L-2 ships October 22nd. Dang. Wow. So I bought it.

The black one. The black one in stock. Definitely bought this phone. The white one, not so much. I'm going to switch to this thing. I'm having the worst T-Mobile service. Oh, and the kind of blue is just gone. It's not even in the store anymore.

Yeah. Just memory wiped it. Too cool to sell. I want to be Verizon. Okay, I'm going to read an ad. And then, this is exciting. Our friend Russell Brandem is going to join us and tell us how Wi-Fi is. It's completely insecure now.

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That's Parachutehome.com slash verge, BRGE, free shipping and returns. Russell. Yeah. How's it gone? Good, good, living life. Great. So there was a huge...

Actually, can I just point out, if you guys don't know Russell Branden, he's our... one of our security reporters. He's incredible. And the thing I love about Russell is as chill as he was just then is how chill he is when something is insane as all Wi-Fi being critically broken. And he's just like, oh, my God, Russell, no Wi-Fi is secure anywhere ever.

And he's like, yeah. Wait, so Russell, let's just start at the start. No Wi-Fi is secure anywhere ever. Is that, that's the case? Yeah, kind of. All right, walk us through the exploit known as crack. Okay, okay. So essentially there's this protocol called WPA2,

which you may have seen if you were setting up a router recently, as I think a lot of our audience probably was. And so it's just, it's basically what you, it's how you encrypt Wi-Fi at this point in this modern age. And it's been the same protocol for 13 years, and no one's had a problem with it. But this guy, this researcher in Europe, discovered that the details of it are actually kind of cool. You can go, if you're at all technically minded, the paper is public.

Basically, you can get, because packets drop wirelessly a lot, especially when you're setting up Wi-Fi, it will just keep resending one part of the authentication process. And you can just have it sent to you three times. and then that's enough to give you an edge to sort of decrypt what the password is. So the question of like how much you can get from this varies from thing to thing. It's sort of worse on Android than it is on Microsoft or iOS. Is it worse on the router side or the device side? Um, well, it's worse.

Ultimately, what you're trying to do is compromise a device, right? Like it's, that's, that's the most common attack. is that you're masquerading as the router, and then you're doing the internet through the router. The router itself, it's kind of a more complicated thing. It is vulnerable. You do want to patch your router, but that's not really the biggest number one concern

because the most common attack is, I'm going to use this to pretend to be the router and pretend to be the internet and sort of slip malware into your web page, right? Got it. Okay. So why is Android more vulnerable than these other platforms? Because everyone implements the platform.

protocol a little differently. It's specifically marshmallow, which is a few versions old, but there's also the most common Android version just by usage. So it's, yeah, it has to do with what do you do when you reset the key? The whole thing is a R. The KR and crack stands for key reset. And so what does it do when it resets the keys? And Android has this one condition that you can trigger if you're clever enough that uses this predictable all zero key. or one part of the key is all zero. It's not just the password as six zeros, but like this one element of it is all zeros,

which lets you effectively steal the key in a way where like in the other ones, you're leveraging knowing something about the key to do some more complicated attack, whereas it's really bad specifically in marshmallow. So, yeah, I mean, I think the tricky thing is companies have known about this for a little while, like the guy did the right thing

and told people, you know, in July and August, hey, this is coming. But the patches are not really ready yet, because everyone has been taking this profile, I think, for granted for like years and years. So like, you need to re-ar, and also in some ways, it has to do with this very deep aspect of the protocol. So every implementation of it is kind of broken in a different way. And you have to come up with some completely new way to implement the protocol. So it's really hard. And they still, you know, we did the rounds and asked everyone and everyone said, well, you know, in a couple weeks like that, that's about when it'll happen. Wow. So I noticed router manufacturers all did it first.

Like Eero put out of press release. They're like, we're done. It's happening. It's rolling out. That's not it. You're saying that's not enough to actually protect you. Yeah. Because then the thing is if someone's pretending to be Eero, but they're pretending to be Eero with an old version of the thing, then your phone doesn't really know the different.

your phone has to not accept it if it's the other thing. And so that protects the router, but it doesn't protect your phone. Right. So what you're describing is a man in the middle attack, right? So someone gets near you and they figure out what network you're connected to. Then they do something to collect packets from your phone. They crack the key and then they impersonate that network and then they just start putting stuff on your phone. Yeah.

I would even say that right now, security researchers at all, of these companies are looking at the man in the middle and they're asking him to change his ways. Oh my God, Russell, you're done. It was great talking to you, buddy. No. Well, the cackling here is out of control. So I remember there was a time when you could, I think it was a great joke. There was a time when you could, when WPA was fine and then, and then it was like, that's not safe anymore.

You got to use WPA too. Why isn't there like, are people talking about a new protocol? Because you sound like, it sounds like if everybody's implementing this fix, it's a fundamental flaw in the protocol to begin with. And so if those fixes are different, will that like mess up compatibility? Well, I mean, you're making the fix for this device, right? So, you know, the protocol is everyone kind of meets in the middle, and that that middle point can still be fine, but they have to sort of add some extra structure on each side to make sure that the attack doesn't work. That makes sense. They are, I mean, they're always working on the next version, and there is, you know, WPA3 is a real thing that will happen.

The word so far has been one that we don't need to wait to WPA3 to have a version that's not vulnerable to this. Ultimately, that will be the best fix, but we can, for however long that takes, we can have secure versions that are just, like, slightly more complicated and, like, we'relier to deal with. And then the other thing is people said, oh, well, why don't I go back to the other one? WEP is the one that, like, you can probably set your router to, but also has some problems. And the researchers actually said it on the page. They were, like, do not take away from this that you should switch your router to WEP. Like, that's not a good idea. please don't.

Well, so the other thing I should say is the good news is that because this is a Wi-Fi bug, it's not, like, catastrophic. Like, I think if there's an internet-based bug, a lot of times it just spreads really, really far, really fast, and it becomes this scary, fast-moving thing. Whereas Wi-Fi bugs, you really have to be, like, sitting outside someone's house in your hacker-ski mask. So, like, that's not a comforting thought, but also it's unlikely that we'll get there. right? Yeah, I mean, Paul just don't mind me when I'm sitting at such. There's no indication, right, that

anybody's actually used this. Like, it, like, yeah. And also I think that so, so the, the, the phase of life for these things is they, we have the vulnerability. There isn't, uh, an exploit program that takes advantage of this vulnerability that's like easily available. I mean, maybe there is somewhere, but it's not public. We couldn't, you couldn't go out and find it. Uh, so that's good. and hopefully it will take as long for them to make to code up the exploit as it does to deploy the patch. So, you know, it's not a great situation. But I feel like it's probably not the worst thing.

Unless like literally someone was waiting to be like, I'm really going to hack, you know, I'm really going to hack Deeter. I'm just going to wait for this bug and then I'm going to go outside his house and a ski mask. Like that's the scenario, which again, is not great. suggest, for example, the president of our country is tweeting from an Android phone. Well, yeah. I'm just, it's like,

that's there, right? It's, it's reality. What, what if, what if someone's phone is patched, uh,

or laptop is patched, but their router, like I can, um, a lot of people do not update their router software. If they have a relatively old router, it might not update automatically. In fact,

I know a lot of routers are kind of a pain in the ass. Yeah. to update the firmware. Are you still vulnerable if the router is vulnerable, but your device has been patched? So this is what happens with all these vulnerabilities. We saw this with stage fright in Android, where you like fix the obvious attack,

and then people kind of get clever, and they're like, well, what if I did this other thing? And what if I, like, took it, you know, came out at this other way. And, yeah, I mean, that's what's going to happen. Like, that's, you know, the question is, okay, if your router's not patched, then can someone use this, to somehow put malware on your router, and then they'll use that malware to put malware on your phone,

which is a little bit more complicated, but it's totally a good thing to protect against and a reason to update your router. I can't wait for Verizon to try to instruct its entire customer base on how to upgrade the Action Tech M7012 or whatever it is. Literally requires downloading a bin file. Is this thing scary enough to sort of kick everybody in the ass and make Android security updates, router security updates, internet of things, you know, security updates.

Is it enough to make people actually care and actually start to secure these things and actually get updates pushed through the way that they ought to be? Or are we going to be like, ah, it's a thing, it's bad. And then a month from now, it's back to business as usual. And there's just a whole, there's just millions upon millions of different kinds of devices that just have this security hole and we're going to forget about it. Like, is the scale of people freaking out about this high enough to actually affect actual genuine change in the ecosystem of things that are supposed to be getting security updates and just aren't? Yeah. So I would say it's even the door number three, which is there will not even take a month for it to be back to business as usual. It's bad.

I mean, I think the thing the thing is, so my gloss, and I tweeted this was that it's sort of hard. to exploit, but also hard to patch, which is kind of a recipe for this just going on and on forever. And like years from now, there will still be devices that are vulnerable to it. And it'll be one of the things where like if you hire someone to do a security check on you, it'll be one of the first things they'll check and people will probably be finding vulnerable devices to this for years to come. Yeah. Great.

Cool. We're all doomed. Go to die. Well, if you're interested in hacking, Russell and I are on a show together, the Mr. Robot Digital Afters Show. So you got to watch Mr. Robot, which is about hacking and capitalism and hacking capitalism. And then we are on right after it live on the verge's YouTube page. And we chat. Megan Froke mentioned on that show with us.

You know, all kinds of guest Sam Esmail is going to be on this season. Weirdly, your show is just about capitalism. Yeah, it's all I care about. It's a strange spin. It's really weird. You don't even have to watch. You don't even really have to watch Mr. Robot. You can just go straight to the after show.

It is a good time. We run a lot of clips. You can catch right up. Anyway, thank you so much, Russell. Thanks for being here. Please, if you can come to my house and patch all my devices for me, that would be great. Would you say this conversation was kind of like a four-way handshake? It was very much like it.

There's only two people in the four-way handshakes. They just shake hands four times. Seems like a bad name. Are they shaking hands with both? hands at once? They're like passing stuff back and forth, so each handshake is different, but it's like, that seems like a two-way handshake to me. Yeah, that's just four single handshakes.

Yeah, and they happen really fast, like at the speed of life. Got it. All right. Thank you so much, Russell. Yeah, my pleasure. I got to read one more out here. You ready? This episode of Vergecast brought to you at Squarespace.

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So good. Make it a reality with Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com for a free trial. When you're ready to go, use OfferCode Verge to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Squarespace.com offer code Verge. The dream is just a great idea that doesn't have a website yet. They should stick with that one.

Yeah. And even if they change it, we're going to stick with that. That's where I'm at. Okay, Paul. Oh, gosh. Did you forget? Yeah, I forgot. Every week.

No one ever forgets. Paul does a segment called... Waiting for Safari to load. That's a good segment. Called. Hmm. Called. I don't know, dude.

Can I name it for you? Sure. $80 dancing hot dog costume. Oh, gosh. Snap. A camera company. That's your whole segment. I think that's pretty good.

I'm sorry. I forgot. So every week, Paul does a segment. No one ever forgets. And it's called. Snap, a camera company. Got it. What happens in your segment, Paul?

You look so sad. I can't believe I forgot this. I don't know. Nothing looks really standing out to me. It's a problem. I think this camera... Oh, I know what I want to talk about. The Sony 360 camera.

All right. Or the Samsung 360 camera. We're going to do one more time, the third time. Every week on the Vergecast. no one ever forgets. It always happens. It always goes off without a hitch. Paul does a segment that is called.

Smells like a competitive foothold in the machine learning segment of the economy. Spirit. So close. Go ahead. Intel is releasing its first. of the Intel Nirvana, but they spelled it weird, neural network processor family, or NNP for short. I'm really excited about this. They are making processors.

They bought this company that was doing this, but they're making processes that are specifically designed for training neural networks. But it's just, it's really interesting because it's just a real. really weird processor. Like they, they laid it out way different. Like if you take a typical processor, you've got the cores

in the middle, and then you've got a large cache that they all access. And this processor is more about like putting the cache next to each of the cores. I don't know. There's just some really interesting stuff. I'm still like reading up on it

and learning about it, but I'm really excited about like very different kinds of processors. And this is definitely, and so this is very focused on machine learning, but I'm kind of curious if there are other applications that could benefit from this weird sort of chip. I'm also really excited about FlexPoint, which is their type of floating point number. So you know how numbers are laid out of memory, like an 8-bit number, like goes up to 255. like powers of two of floating point numbers for machine learning you typically have to have like a 32 bit number to have like a large enough number they're doing it with flex point you can use a 16 bit number and then share the exponent which is only five bits across a bunch of numbers all at once what does that let you do other than name it flex point um it makes fast fast fast

I mean, you're using less memory to represent all the numbers that you need and therefore it's faster. I like it. It smells like a competitive foothold in the machine learning. Markets. And the market spirit. The spirit of the market. That's the name of your boat. Yeah.

You know, we should talk about the pixel chip. Oh, yeah. secret chip. Oh, yeah. What's it called the something, something core? Like visual core. Visual core? I had that tab open somewhere.

Yeah, visual core. Like they knew they had this. They told me they had this before it when I did the big Google feature. And they're like, but you can't talk about it. I was like, why not? You should be telling everybody. Like, no, we're going to announce it later. It's like, but.

But what if you announced it right away when you announced the phone? No, we're going to wait. So it's like this big surprise. Like, yeah, yeah, look. of that. We've got another chip in there. But it's not on. The pixel visual core, it's not on. What's the opposite of vestigial?

It's like prestigial. Yeah, prestigial. This is like an appendix? Pre-used. No, that's not right. Yeah. They're going to use it to speed up HDR. There is, when you do Pixar or portrait mode on the pixel or you do any like particularly

you compute intensive things, there is still a little bit waiting to load. So it'll probably get rid of that. But they're also opening it up to every other third-party camera app that wants to use it. So other camera apps, other things will be able to use this thing. I'm betting my hunch. This is just, I'm just speculating wildly here. But the other thing that they announced for the pixel that they're not shipping is those AR stickers, those like stranger things, AR stickers and other AR stickers.

I'm wondering if this is also like an AR core thing. that it's a visual core does like visual processing but they also it makes AR stuff work a little bit better and that is why they didn't launch those stickers right away as those stickers depend on this chip to work so what's the holdup it's a wild guess you know stuff

reasons it's pretty wild that you had a chip ready before you had the software ready yeah like chips are pretty hard to make I don't know a lot about chips yeah but they sound pretty hard to There's caches. I do think of this as a large, like, you know, Apple's got its bionic thing.

Google has, like, the tensor processing units. Like, there's a lot going on right now. Like, Google led off its pixel presentation, like Moore's Law is dead. So we put a really old processor in our phone. But, you know, most of the improvements that you get these days in performance are from really specialized hardware and not from the basic CPU. Yeah. All right.

Dieter, we have a few minutes left. Okay. Let's talk about Microsoft. You also visited Panos this week. You had a busy week. Yeah. A real busy week.

We flew up to Redmond and hung out with Panos and Ralph and the folks in the design lab. We're going to be doing a follow-up story about their hardware lab. So stay tuned for that. But what happened was they announced two new surface books, a new 13.5 inch and a brand new, all new, never before seen 15 inch. They look basically the same as the current

surface books. They still have the hinge. The hinge is a little bit sturdier now so it can hold a bigger screen. They did the thing that is apparently just commonplace now where they got rid of the fans in the I-5 version of it and the tablet, so there's no fans in the top of it anymore. And they also put a big, serious,

very serious Nvidia graphics cards in there. So there's a 10-50. in the 13 and a 1060 in the 15. Yeah, so I didn't like hit it hard enough, I think, in my write-up, but it's a big deal that these laptops have those graphics cards. And they also, go ahead. I have two questions for you. Yeah.

Are the graphics cards in the keyboard and you only have it when you plug it in? That's correct. Yeah. There's no way you could fit that in that little thin tablet. Okay, so when you're tableting along, you don't have a GPU and then you plug it in. The standard Intel Adrino, whatever, you know, integrated GPU. That's what runs on the tablet. That's kind of amazing.

I just want to like point that out. We have covered for almost a full decade now the dream of the on-demand discrete GPU. And there's been external boxes and like weird thunderbolt things and all kinds of crazy shit's been out there. And now it's all just in a two and one. And it actually works. Although I will say with the Surface book. all of the processors actually working the way that you expect them to is an asterisk. But it probably actually works.

My other question is the original. Yeah, they're eighth generation KB Lakes too. So they're, eighth generation intels are the same as seven, but they can make them quad cores now. Yeah. So there's more probably, yeah.

I kind of want this. I've been looking for like thin, you know, there's a few of these thinner laptops with 1050s and 1060s coming out. But this might be my, this is your one. My idea. I don't know.

So the other question, does it shock you when you? When you try to disconnect. The first service book would shock me. The first service book is going to go down in history is a misfire of a product. Right. And like, You think so?

Yeah. I mean, it's just it had the, that had the intel chip problems. It was hurting people with electricity. Right. It's just like, they didn't execute it perfectly right.

And it was, it was just broken in fundamental ways. But if this one is everything they think it is or say it is, it's kind of an amazing. Like, just the fact that you can dock into a $1050 or $1060, like, literally that has been a thing. Remember Sony made those Vios back in the day, and they had like the Vio GPU station,

and it was like a huge box, and you could just like plug a thunderbolt, like an optical thunderbolt cable into it. I don't remember that at all, but I do remember, I mean, there are a lot of external GPUs now on the market. I don't remember Sony doing it. Sony had, and it was like literally the cell of the,

product was like, this laptop is very fast. But once you get home, you can plug it into something that is fast. It's very good. Well, because theoretically, they could sell you a new base, right? Yeah. It's like this one has the new GPU. Like the 1170 in it or the 1160. Yeah, the VioZ.

It was Light Peak. Remember light peak? This is the ancient tech history. Vio C. The VioZ, and the dock was called the Power Media Dock. The Viozzi was like a beautiful, thin laptop. It was just not very fast. And you plug it in with this optical version of Thunderbolt.

Oh, this is like 2011. Yeah, it was ancient. Ancient. That's what I remember this at all. Anyway, so, Deeter, you wrote a piece, and I want to get into this piece of it as deep as we can in the time we have left. I feel like Apple's MacBook situation, right? now is not great. So,

Casey Johnson, who is an excellent writer who generates the wire cutter, wrote a piece for the outline, being like, these keyboards are a disaster. Marco Arment followed up and was like, keyboards are a disaster. John Gruber was like, these keyboards are a disaster. The port situation. Marco Armit also said USBC is a disaster. Yep. And USBC is kind of a disaster.

Everything he wrote was right. And I definitely kept myself from pointing out that, that I've been screaming about this for three years now. Right. So, like, it's hit ahead because you've been screaming about it. Yeah. But you still soldier on in the dongle life. I do.

Our, we said this on the Circuit Breaker Live. Our IT department won't even stock the touchbar MacBook pros because they think the battery life is insufficient for the people who work. That's not the verge. There's like a different set of people in our company. And we wanted one for the show. And they're like, yeah, we don't have those. We don't stock them because the battery life isn't good.

So the ports are an issue. A lot of people are buying 2015 MacBook Pros. Mike Isaac, the great tech reporter from New York Times, tweeted the other night, my MacBook Air is dying, but I don't want a new one. What do I do? 500 people replied to him that was like, this is garbage. So whatever is happening, maybe the products are great, and that no one is brave enough, courageous enough to see where Apple's going. But there's definitely an opening in the market where people are not happy with the MacBook Pro. And Microsoft is trying to get that.

Can I say something about, can I say something about this just very briefly? Yeah. I'm going to piss off a bunch of people. I had a bunch of Apple people also mad at me about saying the, you know, if the pixel camera is better than the iPhone 8. When it comes to defending the MacBook and a little bit defending the iPhone, I'm getting a distinct, like, Windows phone fan vibe from Apple fans. Like there's a there's a defensiveness that isn't necessary.

Like you don't need to get this defensive about Apple stuff. Apple stuff is pretty good. But there's like a there's a general sense out there that they've been missing the mark. And nobody really knows quite how to say it in a way that feels totally accurate and not just ranty. But there's a bunch of like missed marks. Yeah. In general. So here's what I've been thinking about.

We should talk about the service book. Well, first finish that, and then I'll say the thing I've been workshopping about the Apple missing the mark because I've been turning over my head. But Pano's just basically told you straight up, we're going for the Mac. Like, that is the market we want to get because we see the opportunity. We have seven hours more battery life than the MacBook Pro. We are this much more powerful than the MacBook Pro. Usually when you talk to people at a company, they'll say, then the competitor, or we think it's very good on its own merits. And we don't talk about the competition by name, right?

Microsoft is not doing that. They are just straight up saying, this is better than a MacBook Pro. Yeah. And they know, like, they seem to know it, right?

They're confident about it. The only thing that is holding them back is that they run Windows, and a lot of people really like MacOS. But then Dan Severe was pointing out, like they're, they're making Windows 10 act pretty MacLite with like a bunch of swipes and scroops.

I like that they're doing the swipe stuff. I got to say the fall creator update is kind of hitting me the wrong way. Yeah. It's like... You don't like the fluent? Well, the things I've seen of the fluent design, I'm not super excited about.

This, like, Cortana, like, collects all your favorite things for some reason. Oh, my. There's a new Cortana feature where she pops up, like, clippy. Don't gender the robots. I'm sorry. Well, it's a girl in the halo. Don't gender the robots. Okay.

There's a new Cortana feature where... it pops up like Clippy when you're on a website. It's like, hey, I see you're trying to buy the newest book by Bill Gates. Would you like me to add this to a list of books that you want to buy or something? Which is weird. But then the UI for it is like, it's kind of, I don't know, I see what they're trying to do. I just don't think they're doing a very good job of it. But basically.

I will give Microsoft credit, though. They do a better job in Cortana of giving you lots of like checkboxes and settings to turn off what Cortana does or does not know about you in a way that neither Siri nor Google do well. Right. Yeah. And I don't feel creeped out by it. I just like I have Cortana turned off on my Windows desktop. I don't want Microsoft to say, look at all the new features that we added to the computer.

It's like, I know how to get my computer to do things. Yeah. I get apps and they do the things that I want them to do. Those apps are mostly games and, you know, software to make games and, you know, coding software, some of which is made by Microsoft and they do a good job at that. But showing me how many new things they're piling into the operating system just doesn't excite me. It's like, wait. Yeah. I feel like your operating system is good right now because it is relatively minimal.

And don't go crazy. They're trying to give you little gifts. They don't feel like gifts to me. It's like when someone gives you Yeah, they actually, no, they're exactly like gifts. It's when somebody gives you a gift, but you didn't actually want it. But you can't throw it away. Was this you, Dieter?

Someone mailed me an IR repeater today. Or ages ago, and I was just sitting in a thing. In a gift bag and a card just says, this is the only way. I don't want that gift. Why would, was that you? Why would anybody do that to you? That's just, 100% to you. That's just so mean.

It's almost like someone. knew that you had feelings about not getting enough lights on your AV system and they wanted to suggest a solution to you. Definitely, Dieter. It's almost like the joke would have come off a million times better if you hadn't let it sit in the goddamn mail room for a month. I'm sorry? It arrived the day the review came out and it would have been perfect. It just sat there.

I didn't know what it was. And I couldn't be like, hey, did you get any packages? Because then you would have known it came from me. Oh, I'm sorry, Dieter. Well, thank you for sending me, I-HR Blaster. You're my best friend. All right. Can I offer you my workshopped Apple Line?

Because we've been doing the show, Circuit Breaker Live. We have all these old Macs on the show. We've got... We literally, our producer, disassembled an IMac G4 with the arm and mounted a surface tablet in the display because we need HTML out

so I can look at tweets. It's a whole thing. A lot of metaphors in that, by the way. Well, we just can't do it with an iPad. You just can't get 16 by 9, HTML out, which is what we need for the show. So we mounted a thing. Anyway. And then we have an old eyebook. We've got a bunch of old Apple stuff.

A bunch of old. It's just the set. It's the decoration for the set. And I'm looking at that stuff and all of it is so whimsical and like inviting and it's funny. Something like that that tangerine eyebook is just like a funny thing. The handle. Yeah. You just want to. You want to look at it.

You want to hold it. You want to think of it. It's just that there's something. about them that is so much more human than what Apple is doing now where Apple is consistently demanding that people adapt to the products instead of the products inviting you to use them.

And it's just the more it just keeps going, I think that's the thing that people are reacting to when you say, Dieter, they're missing the mark. Apple is saying, okay, we've removed all the ports. Now the market will create USBC peripherals. right like that is they're demanding that you adapt to them quite literally in a case of many of these songs

they were doing in the the Bondi Blue era yeah but they got rid of a bunch of proprietary Apple connectors for a universal standard right right that was like a different kind of move they've certainly done it before don't get me wrong but the just as we've been spending a couple hours a week on the set that is dressed with old Apple products it just has struck me over and over again these products used to make

tons of affordances to people they were very the products were aware the people who made the products were deeply aware that human beings are like not great at technology and they made them inviting in different ways and now you know the phone is getting

it's just becoming it more and more faceless piece of glass right right and it's like something they put an emoji on it aren't an emoji inviting aren't an emoji inviting Yeah, I think it's less the software than the hardware. I think iOS 11 compared to like iOS 7 is a much more inviting thing. Like iOS 7 compared to iOS 11 was like, I don't know, man.

It was like being on cocaine in the 80s or something. It was just not a very, it's a very sterile place. I'm an iPhone, iOS 7 fan for life. Yeah. Okay. It was great. It was insane. But anyway, that's just my theory.

It's just something I'm noodling. So it's not like. a complete thought. Here's something I've been noodling. Yeah. So actually, I got to do one thing, Paul, and then I'll let you finish out. If you haven't read the Surface Book post, it's a standard, you know, gadget and announced post, but make sure you go read the back half because Microsoft did something kind of crazy

with me. They blew up the lab tour. This was probably staged, but maybe not. And they showed me different cuts of the launch video for the Surface Book 2, all set to different music that evoked different emotional reactions. And it's fascinating that Microsoft makes those videos in-house instead of farming it out to an external marketing team. And the different emotions that they were trying to nail there and like do it in a context

of let's make this thing compelling to regular people. But let's also, I think they didn't say this, but like there's like a sense of like, what can we do to like have this appeal to Mac users who are disenamored with the MacBook Pro that I feel like that was there. the final video they went with was a cover of what was it a cover of no I'm already blanking

they did a great job anyway go read the back half if you like oh I know what a service book to is I don't need to look at it you should still go look at it I really enjoyed your piece I also forget what the song was called they also brought back the Intel andast Explorer too

just putting that out there Meister back oh mixt reality yeah What the hell is that? Oh, God. I feel like that really crept up on me. We got to wrap up the show.

I just wanted to say the words mixed reality, because I feel like I haven't said this on the show, and that's, Microsoft's really into that right now. They love it. You can go to their website. They've got all these different headsets you can buy, and, like, they have certifications for the different computers they sell,

whether they're, like, mixed reality compatible or mixed reality ultra. Fly me to the moon, by the way, is what Microsoft used. Best. Thank you. Which is an interesting choice. All right, we got to wrap up this show. And all this other stuff I want to talk about,

like the SNAPS $80 dancing hot dog costume. A camera company. A camera company. All right, but whatever. So it goes. That was our show this week. A lot of stuff. I want to know what you think about the pixel to screen situation.

You can tweet at us. At Backlon. At Pac-Lahn. You can tell him about his photos. He loves it. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at Future Paul. I also want to know why you feel about this Apple thesis that I've advanced because I, you know, I'm just putting it out there in the world.

It's not my, it's not my complete thought yet. It's just, I'm tossing around. So tweeted us. You can also go. Can I say something super thirsty? Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to back off on Twitter for a while. I'm going to start posting my Facebook page.

So search for my name there. I'm going to start posting videos on my Facebook page. Just chats. Keep an eye out for Dieter Bone on Facebook. I'm going to put up some thoughts. Some feelings on video. It's going to be wild. I like it.

Can I get a Theseus ship deep dive? Yeah, you sure can. Ship of Theseus. You can also go to stored at theverge.com and order a number of shirts. The promo code there remains promo code. Still going to, 30% off, I think. And there's a whole bunch of other stuff to listen to starting with. Why'd you push that button with Caitlin Ashley, which is great.

Go listen to that. Give it five stars. rate it, review it. Episodes come out on Tuesday. Lauren Good, who's on the show a bunch, too embarrassed to ask. Kara Swisher, that show is wonderful. Listen to that. Kara herself does recode, decode, and Peter Kafka does recode media, all of which are excellent podcasts in the Armada of the Vox podcast network, of which the verge is a flexion.

Vogue number one. Vote number one. That is it for this week. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.