The Vergecast - Pixel 2 XL screen, Amazon Key, and iPhone X preorder

Episode Date: October 27, 2017

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul run through the news this week on The Vergecast, with a lot of heavy sighs to go around. There's the Pixel 2 XL screen fiasco, Amazon's home camera invasion efforts with Amazon Key, and Amazon's oversized new Fire TV. Plus, Paul is back with his weekly segment about water pods. And more! Listen in and lament the current state of technology with your three best friends. 02:44 - Google 'actively investigating' reports of Pixel 2 XL screen burn-in … 17:39 - Google Pixelbook review 27:50 - Microsoft kills off Kinect, stops manufacturing it 31:38 - Amazon Key is a new service that lets couriers unlock your front door 37:22 - Amazon Echo (2nd gen) review 38:07 - Amazon Fire TV (2017) review 46:00 - Apple’s Face ID struggles detailed in new iPhone X report 55:54 - Paul’s weekly segment “WATER PODS” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of The Vergecast brought to you by Qualcomm Snapdragon, Gaggaggagin Gigabit LTE. With download speeds up to seven times faster than typical home Wi-Fi, Snapdragon Gagbit LTE can turbocharge all of your connected apps. You can stream 360-degree videos and 4K resolution with minimal buffering. You can access your 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.spadagin.com slash gigabit today.

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast. of the verge situation. The verge dot situation. You know, we're doing great. I will say this. I want to call out our friends, our coworkers, Caitlin, Tiffany, Ashley, Carman, and our producer, Andrew Marino,

the Vergecast producer, who's also the producer of Caitlin Ashley shows, why'd you push that button? Yeah, why does he make them sound so good? We sound like butts. Yeah, Andrew, why don't you ever organize our thoughts? Andrew works very hard on the show. Which is impossible.

Anyway, why did you push that button? Yeah. In the top five of the iTunes technology podcast section, since the entire two weeks it's been out, number one trending in pocketcast on Android. Featured by pocketcast. Thank you, pocketcast. That was nice to you. But doing great.

So if you were interested in an organized conversation around technology and culture, go listen to why did you push that button. It's great. It's everywhere you could find a podcast. It's just quickly become one of my favorite things that The Verge does. Last night, my mom was like, I love the new episode of your show, but you weren't on it. It was just these two girls. Thanks, Mom.

But you're like a character. Sometimes. You're always in the montage. But anyway, that show's doing great. Please listen to it. We love it so much. Paul and I and Ashley and Hime and Jake are doing a show, Circle Break a show on Twitter. It's on Tuesdays.

It's on Tuesdays. There's a replay on the site on Wednesdays. where we play with gadgets. You should watch that. I'm hosting the Mr. Robot after show with Megan Farokmanash and Russell Branden. That's Wednesdays after Mr. Robot. We're just doing all kinds of things later. We are, what an empire we have built. What an Armada. Our boats are all different sizes and most of them are videos. This podcast Armada really, really has some definitional issues going on. But anyway, it's not to listen to anyhow. By the way, I'm Nilai Patel. Deter Bone is here.

I am. Well, I'm here. Well, he's not there. He's in San Francisco. What is time and space anyway? Paul is here. Hello. All right. We're just going to do it. We're going to talk about this pixel two situation. Oh, my God.

Two Xcel. By the way, I threatened to start the show by just saying the words Pixel 2 XL and then deeply sighing for 35 minutes. I think that about sums it up. That's what we're going to do. But, Deeter, I don't have my. I still don't have mine. I don't have mine either. Last week, and I reenacted ordering it on the show last week, and it shipped. I don't have it yet.

Mine has been in San Francisco for three days. There's a local shipping company called OnTrack that has failed to deliver it. I've been here at my office waiting for it every day for the past three days, and Zippo Zilch, not a nothing. But I have now looked at three different Pixel 2xels, and they all have this issue. So here's the story. Over the last weekend, Alex Dobie from Android Central happened to look at a gray image. on his pixel 2xel and saw that there was the ghostly image at the bottom of the Android navigation

buttons and like a bar above them. And so everybody went, huh, that's weird. And then literally everybody who has a pixel 2xel looked at the same thing on their phones. And yeah, I don't know. Basically everybody has it. There are people who say they don't, but everybody who like has a review in it, almost to a person has seen this thing. There's, you know, a handful that don't maybe.

Has anybody? So the question. Burned in a non-bar? That I don't know. Can we just zoom? Let's just zoom back. Yeah. Zoom out.

Yeah. Do the rocket way. That's what I was going to do, but I'm going to let you do it. All right. Together, we're going to zoom back as a family. About this screen. No, before we fight about the screen, which I'm very willing to do. Because I was looking at James Barham's today, our creative directors today.

The phone came out. You reviewed it. I did. You're like, the screen has definitely has muted. then, and the blue shift, which is real. It's pretty real. Then there's the burn-in or image retention issue. We don't know which one it is for sure yet.

Yes, but you suspect it's more image retention than burn it. I very much changed my mind every time because actually, Interintentional did a great video where they played a gray screen for like five minutes and then they played a video for five minutes and they went back to the gray screen. And playing moving pixels underneath that area does reduce the visibility of the ghost buttons, but it doesn't eliminate them entirely.

And it kind of doesn't matter. I mean, it matters because if it's burn in, this is, so the next part of the story is we pulled our score off of the pixel 2XL. Right. Because if it's image retention, that sucks. It's a thing you're probably not going to see most of the time, but it's another knock against this screen on top of the three or four other things that are wrong with it. And even though you're almost never going to see it, it is worth noting and it's worth taking a point down.

If it's actually real genuine screen burn in, that is catastrophic. Because if that's happening within a week or two, or even literally, I managed to see ghost images on a review unit that Google swapped out for me that same day. If it's burning, if the screen is burning itself that quickly in a month or three, you're not just going to see it on top of a, you know, a gray image. You're going to see it on top of everything. The screen, the, the screen, the screen could literally be eating itself. And if that's the case, then this thing is just fundamentally flawed and it's really bad. At least it's not on fire, but that's a pretty low bar. So until we know whether or not this is genuine. actual screen burn-in, we can't recommend that you buy it because these images are either image retention or screen burn-in. It's a symptom of both. And there's enough of a risk that it's a symptom of real burn-in that it's not a great idea to buy it right now. Can you clarify the difference between burn-in and retention? So burn-in is like a ghost image. So this happens on a bunch of different kinds of screens. So when you are looking at a picture and then you flip to another

screen, you like see like the ghostly after image of that, especially if you flip to something that's like a relatively flat image, like a gray image. But if you move some pixels around, the screen like figures out, oh wait, I shouldn't be showing that ghost image anymore and it goes away. Burnin is, you know, OLEDs degrade over time, all screens degrade over time, but OLEDs in particular are susceptible to this, so are plasma TVs actually, where the pixels that are showing, you know, a bright thing will eventually just get worse over time and not be able to show as much brightness or as much color in that zone. And so they literally get burned. And they start showing that after image forever. So when you look at an old CRT or a badly maintained plasma TV or one of the very,

very early OLEDs, you'll see, you'll see like just like random craps that's sort of floating on the screen. Now, all phones, especially OLED phones, do this over time. And so there's lots of people who have been tweeting at me and tweeting at everybody saying, oh, you know, my Samsung does this, my blah does this, my blah does this, my pixel XL from last year does this. Yeah, but it doesn't do it after a week or two.

It does it after months, if not years. So my plasma TV, the last Panasonic plasma ever made before they were all fired into the sun. If I play Madden for a couple hours, the score just lives at the top of the TV for like another

day or two. But that fades. But it fades. So that's retention. That's retention. Right. Like my roommate has just the worst LCD. Yeah. And so you like browse Netflix for a while and then you see the Netflix UI for the first 30 minutes of whatever show.

That shouldn't be happening. That's like a particularly shit. But that's retention not burning. So burning is permanent. Burnin's permanent damage. And I guess I should as a PSA, if you see this thing, you may have heard that there are apps that you can download that supposedly fix it. and they do kind of work, but they're dangerous. They fix it by basically, like, burning the rest of your screen to match the burn.

It flashes up. It does stuff to your screen that is like potentially past. We say the village by lighting it on fire. Yeah. I also saw apps that purport to fix the colors by shifting Oreo's color space. Yeah. Like, under an Oreo's color space. Which, okay, so now we've, like, entered the realm of Google shipped a broken phone.

People are trying to fix it. And people are tweeting at me and at the verge and everybody, I'm going to buy this phone because I know Google will fix the color issue. Or I'm going to buy this phone because I can install this line of hacks to fix whatever I think is wrong. That to me is that's where we start entering like fanboy mistake territory where you're like back justifying something. Because I like firmly believe that you should never buy anything based on the promise of a feature update or a software fix. or any company doing anything other than going out of business. What was the big thing with the original pixel is like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth? Was there a big...

Acquiring it, I think, was a huge problem. Step number one was getting one. The Bluetooth and the pixel is bad. Yeah. Yeah. So my SIM right now is in a pixel one. I'm going to tell you right now I love it because I love it. You got a headphone jack?

I got a headphone jack. I got a screen that looks nice. You got like maybe the second best camera on the market. Yeah, the camera's excellent. No portrait mode, but it turns out I don't have nothing to take portraits of. It's just sunsets for days. It's really fast. Great, great phone.

Focus on infinity. Vlad has pointed out the headphone jack sounds terrible and it's true, but at least it's there. Your headphone jack doesn't sound like anything. No, dude, my apple dongle is a little bit on the fritz. That's not good. But the Bluetooth on the Pixel 1 is so comically bad. Which headphones are you using it with? I have a pair of red Sony wired headphones and I have QC-35s.

The QC-3-5s seem to be fine. But I got into my friend's car last weekend and I wanted to play him. Why did you push that button? And I was like, I'm just going to pair to your infotainment system. It's BMWs, I drive. And I try to pair my pixel to it. and it is so bad that it crashed the infotainment system. And we just had to wait.

Is that Google's fault or is that BMW's fault? It's everyone's fault, but it works with his iPhone. He's like, I've never seen this before because BMW probably assumed everyone has an iPhone. So I weren't fine with the iPhone. But literally, you just didn't sit there and wait for it to reset itself. So you plug the iPhone into it. So almost a perfect phone. I just want to get a 3310.

That's you're going back. $60 phone. It's got Twitter. It's got Facebook. It's got snake. It's all you need. It has a camera. It's all you need.

I'll be fine. I'm just done with all this shenanigans. Get back to me when you've got something. Well, Dieter, you were saying this has been a terrible year for phones. Yeah. Like just in general, not a great year for phones. Like even Samsung phones, people are going to say Samsung phones are great. Samsung put a button that launches a dog with shoes at you on the phone.

That you cannot decide. Also, they put the fingerprint sensor in the wrong place. Yeah. That's just a super wrong place. Those are more matters of taste. Yeah, but do you ever unlock your phone? Just, is that a thing that you do? I have on a cable.

Yeah. Not with a 33.10, though. Yeah. But no, like the iPhone 8 has got the old design. People are very nervous about the notch on the iPhone 10. I think the essential phone is probably my favorite just, plain hardware phone of the year. It's so heavy and dense and just feels so good.

But the camera on it is, you know, not that. Not good. And then the Pixel 2 XL has the screen issue. And even the Pixel 2 has got big dopey bezels on it. And it feels, I've got one. It just doesn't feel like a good phone. Not a great year for phones. It just isn't.

Yeah. And this is why I'm sticking with the Pixel 1. Yeah. But on the other hand, like they're faster than ever. Their cameras are better than ever. They can do all kinds of crazy AR stuff. The phones have never been better, and phones have never been worse. That's your headline assigned.

Wow. Wow. God, damn it. I like, James Barab's take on Twitter, our photographer here, is like, I got one. This could be the worst screen ever. I don't care. It's got a camera. Yeah.

He's really excited. Because if you think about the pictures are forever. Here's the thing about that. another phone in a year. Here's the thing about that. I was all set to have that same feeling. Like, you know what, screw it. I can live with the bad screen because it has everything else that I want.

But if you take a picture, you don't know what that picture is going to look like at all on other screens. And that's true to extent on every phone. But with this one in particular, you're going to look at it and be like, uh-huh, I should punch this up. And then you'll punch it up and then you'll put it on another screen and it's just going to look crazy town. That's why I only shoot in raw. I only distribute raw selfies. Raw selfies with Paul Miller. That's your coffee table book.

It's like 400,000 pages and you could just, it's one selfie. You just flip through all the different slides. So as of Sunday night, the 22nd, or recording this on Thursday the 26th, Google said that it is actively investigating this report. It's also actively investigating and has a fix coming for. or like the buzzing and crackling sounds that the Pixel 2 apparently makes. Also like a high pitch screech. I don't know. Come on.

But it's been four days. They haven't come back to us with, you know, an explanation or an answer. So until they do or until someone can definitively say that it's not burn in, I'm not putting a score on this phone. Yeah. And other websites have followed suit.

I believe CNET's pulled their score. I believe PCMag has pulled their score. So, yeah, it's... Here's my question. Well, I have two questions. One's just a yes or no. Okay. Here's a yes or no question.

Would you call this a fiasco? It's definitely in the fiasco ballpark. Yeah, I'd say it's a fiasco. There's hijinks. Is it or no? So yes. Yes, it's a fiasco. Okay, so then here's my follow-up question.

Fiasco is not the same thing as a disaster. Yeah, I said fiasco. I think it's quite clear. a disaster, but does it rise to the level of fiasco? I think it's fiasco then disaster. You can have a fiasco, but fiasco can be like fun and like, you know, like a madcap comedy. Fun fiasco. That's my favorite vampire weekend.

I think fiasco before disaster. Okay. So it's not a disaster, but it's a fiasco. It might be a disaster, but right now I will go so far as fiasco. 100% fiasco. Defcon fiasco. Defcon fiasco is a great name for a roller. rink. Think about it.

I'm in a branding kind of mood today. Please someone make a DefCon fiasco shirt. Anyway, what's worse than disaster? The top one is catastrophe. Catastrophe is the worst. Catastrophe, disaster. The definition of fiasco is a complete failure. So it's a fiasco. Well, it's screen wise. Potential fiasco. Now you're downgrading.

Maybe what's one step down from fiasco? Conundrum. No, it's like Madcap, Tompour. Why are these all so fun? Crisis. Crisis. Crisis is above... No.

No, no, no. This is... A crisis, you can get through a crisis. All right, we gotta stop this. So, okay, so it's a... Let's just to say it's a fiasco. Who... It's a crisis colon, fiasco, comma.

The Bixby story. The Bixby story. This is the worst Jason border. movie of all time. I've watched it. Jason Ward, crisis fiasco. As long as it's got Matt David in it.

All right, it's true. Okay, so the Pixel 2 is hissing at people. The Pixel 2 Excel might be eating itself. The Google Home was always listening to you and they had to disable a button.

Is it possible that Google's big hardware push is a fiasco? Like, in to-to- Yeah, that sounds like a to-fiasque. Yeah. A total fiasque.

But here's the thing. I'm going to tell you something. Yeah. The hardware in the pixel book? Like, I swear to God, I'm going to, I'm, the, now that I've published a review tomorrow, it's going to, someone's going to discover that knives shoot out of the keyboard and stab you. Yeah. Right. You love the pixel book.

Because I love the hardware of the pixel book. It is my favorite laptop hardware of the past year, bar none. I'm sorry. I'm not sorry, actually, to anybody. Not to the Surface laptop with its cloth keyboard, not to a single thing that Apple has produced that has a keyboard attached to it or could attach to it. It is great. What's the number one standout? Is it the soft silicon palm wrist?

It's the build and industrial design. The basic design of it is just hard as a rock. It's super solid. You can't flex it. The keyboard is halfway between like a standard. keyboard in the MacBook's like zero key travel keyboard, but it feels totally normal. And this is the shape that laptop should be. If your laptop doesn't have a hinge that lets you flip it around to use it on an airplane, then get it out of my face. I'm serious. Like I not have people, Windows people

know what I'm talking about. Like not having a touchscreen. Once you have a touchscreen, you're like, this is dumb. It's just put a touchscreen on it. It's fine. You're not going to get a gorilla arm. It's just convenient and nice to have, just do it. Not being able to just, even though it's not as good, even though, you know, blah, blah, blah, it's not touch-optimized. It's not as good as an iPad. That's all true. But it doesn't add that much thickness.

It is not that hard of an industrial design problem. Just put the 360 hinge on the thing because being able to like sit on a plane and actually have my little like cup of seltzer and my own laptop in front of me watching a movie is so much better than worrying about someone leading their seat back and cracking my laptop in half, that it's dumb that you don't do it. Everybody should do it. The hinge on this thing looks so simple and small. Why does Lenovo need that crazy, like, weird mesh thing?

That's their design element. Yeah. The watch band. But everyone's trying to convince you by with like, create, like, you know, the surface has the snake. You know, everyone's like, oh, it's so hard. Making hinges is so hard and our hinges better than everybody's. No, it's not.

It's just put the 360 hinge on it. It's fine. Just do it. Now you are definitely guaranteeing that the pixel book shoots knives. I know. Now that you've gone this far out in the ledge, tomorrow it's going to be like, Pixelbook wakes up in the middle of the night, runs off with family, never comes back. They made the Silicon Palm Rest out of whale tears.

You're way out there. But the pixel book, so it's great. I'm really interested in it. I'm probably going to return my Pixel 2 Excel and spend that money on Pixelbook. Great hardware. Great hardware. But there's a little software question mark. Yeah.

Which is called Android. And you, actually, all the reviewers that I read today, everybody had the same sort of set of problems with Android apps in the pixel book. Right. You resize them, everything goes to hell. Or they run in tiny windows. Or they don't do exactly what you want. I've been thinking about this.

Here's your best case scenario. You have a really great tablet operating system with really great. tabel apps. Like, for instance, iOS and the iPad. Now, take iOS on the iPad and then add that to MacOS. Is that a good thing? Because that's your best case scenario. And that doesn't sound like a good thing.

No, you take Safari on the iPad and you just make it Safari from the Mac. That. Just do that. That's the whole game. The limitation of the iOS web browser is what prevents me from, you know, using it. Maybe put a mouse on it because it is helpful for a full web browser. But the reason I'm interested in Pixelbook is because it's a desktop class web browser, which is the app I use the most. Yep. I mean, this is the, I don't think this thing, most people aren't going to really be choosing

between this and a MacBook unless you're a student and like you've lived with Chromebooks your whole life. Same thing with the Windows laptop. It's this and the iPad. And this is more expensive than an iPad Pro. But they basically make the same case. You want a simpler computer that is easier to manage and is constantly secure, constantly updated, and has got a bunch of apps on it. And two versions of Slack. Well, that's a thing. But in order to make it your main computer, you've got to be an expert at either one. But with the Chromebook, you get a really good web browser and kind of shit apps and with the iPad you get really good apps and a kind of shit web browser which is unfair it's a really good web browser for an iPad like it's a great web browser but it can't do a bunch of the

web apps that I kind of need yeah yeah so but if you added a mouse and a track pad or whatever to an iPad that one would be good it's a touch it's a touch interface life goes on if I've learned anything from using phones with not that bad it's okay It's fine. Dieter has been defeated by the year of gadgets in 2017. It's like everything is hopelessly compromised, but you're still going to wake up tomorrow. I think we just build it for the groundup. Just put whatever on it.

It doesn't matter. Fuchsia is the way the future. Google's revolutionary new operating system. I'll tell you right now, you can take this Chromebook and you can root it and you can just run Linux on it. And if you really want to, you can go crazy and you could probably find a way to get Ubuntu on this thing, Paul. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking it's straight Hackintosh. No.

No, no. Okay, so we got far away from my original second half of question, my two-part question. If you ask you this to know. Second part, pixel book aside, because it's a pretty limited product that Google basically made for itself. Or is it the future of laptop? And Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix. And Dieter Bone, the executive editor-outer-the-Virge. But their big consumer products, the phone and the home mini, both compromise in some way.

Are there consequences? Does Rick Osterlo, who runs this thing, is Sundar calling him into the office and being like, WTF, Rick? Or are they just... I hope so. But here, in my opinion, here's the worst thing Google could do. Yeah. Oh, turns out we're bad at this. Well, it was just an experiment and walk away.

That is the stigma that hangs over every Google project. Well, is this another Google Wave? That's what everybody's thinking. By the way, Google Wave was actually very smart, way ahead of its time, and I think about it every day. Genius. Every time somebody sends me an email that should have been a Google Doc, I'm like, I wish I could wave the fuck out of this. It happens every day. How do we out a poll?

Every time we have to make a Google Doc to plan out something at the very very time we have to make a Google Doc to plan out something at the very I'm just like, what? No. You've got seen this CODA thing? What's that? It looks good. It's like Hypercard meets File Maker, meets Google Docs, meets like, you could take like a document.

It's like connecting documents to like different kinds of interfaces that you can create for them. And it's like, it's like taking like spreadsheets and then you could like, you could view them as like a Trello board or you can view them as what the other kinds of like organizational boards. You can take one kind of data and then use it with different sorts of interfaces. It's very interesting. Hmm.

Seriously, I said Google Wave. It's very wave-esque. I think there was a wave mention. Would you say it's wavy? Which makes it basically wavy. All right. All right. Well, I'm going to get the phone.

Dieter's got the phone. We're going to keep looking at the screen. Don't give up, Google. Don't give up. Stick with it. Next year. Pixel 1. I mean, take this exact design.

Put Bluetooth 5 on it in 835 and then ship it again. Well, aren't you going to crap about the bezels then? I mean, probably, but this phone is great. Okay. I thought, was it Sam Biford wrote the piece for us? It's like maybe the iPhone 8 plus is the best phone. Yeah. A lot of people feeling that way right.

Maybe the right bezel was the one that was what this all this time. Maybe this is focus on bezels is all wrong. I got to say, I saw. Maybe focus on me. Heim wrote like how to pre-order the iPhone 10 piece day. and just he just used like a random photo that you guys got at the at the live event yeah it just looks so good all right we're gonna get to the iPhone 10 i'm gonna read an ad we got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about we're gonna talk about the iPhone 10 x x 10 at the end this episode of verge cast brought to us by zip recruiter

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That is right. Free. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. You can try for free. Ziprecurter.com slash verge. All right, Paul, I want to talk about the whole bunch of Amazon news, but first, I want to just get your take on this, which is Microsoft killed the connect. Yeah.

Which was at one point, the sort of like hobbyist hacker tool of choice. Right. Prime Sense, obviously acquired by Apple, Face ID, really built on original Connect ideas. But now Microsoft's walking away. How are you feeling about this? This reminds me of possibly the worst hot take I've ever written. I was at E3 when Microsoft was announcing the Xbox 1, Sony was announcing the PlayStation 4. Maybe Microsoft had already announced.

I forget the exact timeline, but the details about the PlayStation 4 came out and that they weren't going to bundle a camera. Yeah. And so my take was like Sony has given up on the world of motion control. If you don't bundle it, it's not something that people are going to develop for, and therefore it's dead. And what I failed to write, it required just a sentence. It's like, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing to walk away from this. Because that was a, turned out a genius move on Sony's part. People were totally disillusioned by these motion control shenanigans.

They just wanted to get back to playing video games while leaning. deeply into their couches. And Sony totally won this generation. So, it makes sense. And there's tons of these cameras. You can buy, like, Intel's got one. Like, you can, it was ACER or ASUS?

Like, a bunch of companies have licensed the necessary technology to make depth sensing cameras. So, like, it used, it's the, this whole movement of, like, taking a connect and getting it working and then making some cool robotics project, like, definitely started because the connect was such accessible hardware. But there's plenty of hardware available now that you don't have to use a connect for it. And it's really straightforward.

But I guess it's sad to see it go. But it's also an example of just not, I mean, Nintendo was doing this with the Wii U and a little bit with the Wii where you just got this great idea and you just don't support it well enough. Yeah. And so it just completely dies. I mean, I think the original Connect, right, Connect Sports was like a phenomenon. And then I cannot think of another Connect game that people heard about it. I've never seen. I know Connect was one of the, at the time, Connect was the best selling piece of consumer electronics ever.

Yeah. Some ridiculously high rate of sales. I have never seen anybody play Connect Sports. Really? I have you? I mean, I've seen myself. Okay. Can you see yourself?

It was always about like Wii bowling. Yeah. Unless you're a vampire. Can you can one truly see themselves playing connect sports? Yeah. It's just a thing. It's something to note, especially because the whole Prime Sense Apple thing,

we're going to find out soon if it paid off. You know, like it's probably going to work. But it's interesting that Microsoft's like, that's whatever, we're done with this. Well, Microsoft like, after the,

for the, the Connect 2, that was what the Xbox one. Microsoft went way past the technology that Prime Sense even had. Yeah. Like, it was much higher fidelity. I don't really know since Prime Sense has been

under the wing of Apple, I don't know how much they've advanced their technology. Well, they've made it smaller. It's definitely smaller. It's not a full size. Connect one. All right. I just wanted to flag it because it's interesting.

All right. Amazon News. Like, a lot of it, actually. I don't think we even have a reality. We don't. We don't. The sort of the big one that caught everyone's attention is key, which seems ridiculous. You buy the camera from Amazon.

It's a smart home camera. And you can buy it, I think, Zygby locks, because they're deep in the Zigby game. As you know, Amazon's mortal enemy is the Z wave alliance. Right. Hate those guys. So you buy their new smart camera, which is just like a camera. called CloudCam. Cloud cam.

You pair it with your Zigby lock from like Yale or whatever. There's a couple of... And then when you get a delivery, the delivery person like scans the package with the camera. The camera connects to the cloud, says, oh, this is an Amazon package, and then opens your door. The delivery person can just go in your house, put the thing down. That seems just wild.

And your cloud cam is recording what's going on, so then you can go watch what the delivery person did. So the logistics of that, to me, seem very confusing because the camera needs to be outside. That's really common. Like, the camera needs to be outside, but they scan the barcode. They do that with, like, package lockers already. Yeah, no, but I'm saying the logistics of the cameras outside your house, they scan the barcode, they go in your house. The camera presumably can no longer see them because they're on the other side of the door from the can.

You just got another camera. Okay. So we've created this problem of strangers in our home. solution to that problem is more products from us. Yeah. Can I tell you, just follow this timeline with me briefly. Amazon's like, hmm, I wonder if people will accept a speaker that's always listening in their house. And we totally did.

And then Amazon's like, huh, I wonder if they'll accept a speaker with a camera on it and then anybody who wants to that you're friends with can just turn that camera on and see what you're doing by dropping in. and we're like, yeah, no, sure. What if we made a camera that judged the quality of your outfits? Go ahead, we won't bother you. What if we took that camera where anybody can drop in, and we made it into an alarm clock that you're supposed to put next to your bed where you sleep and do other things? And everyone's like, oh, well, it's really cute.

And now, like, what if we just use our cameras and stuff to just let random people go into your house? Jeff Bezos, or as I like to call him now, Swole, Jeff. He's swall. Amazon is on a mission to see just how far they can push their creepiness. And they're like that sense of like, do you trust Amazon enough to do this thing? They're building on the fact that everybody loves Amazon to see how far they can go. When Google does a tenth of this stuff, people lose their minds.

And perhaps rightfully so. No, people lost their minds over the lock. Like, I did not see one tweet of our story that was like, I want this. So this is the line. They finally found the line of what will we not allow Amazon to do in terms of our privacy. But the question is, if we had been okay with this, you know, lock thing and letting people into our house, what do you think was next? Like, what is Jeff Bezos, Swole Jeff, secretly want to do for privacy that he was building us up to? Well, first of all, I will say other smart locks do.

this. So while I have an August smart lock, they have, you know, set of partnerships where like you call for a cleaning service and it'll automatically unlock the door when they get there. So like this idea has been there. Like what if someone else could unlock your door? Like who would do that? And like the answer is like deliveries and cleaning services. And if you are renting your house, you can partner with Airbnb and Airbnb can lock your door. Right. So like there's, that idea is there. I think Amazon. they're not making partnerships. They're just like, what if we unlock your door for our people?

Maybe I'm weird for not being creeped out by this. I just love it. I'm creeped out by the clothes cam, not because they want to put like a camera in your closet or whatever, but just the idea that it's all about trying to sell you more stuff. Yeah. Right? Who among us has not missed a delivery?

Right? Yeah. I'm waiting on a delivery right now. And if you miss a delivery, there's an and and you miss the next one. Now you've got to make like an hour trip to like go to the actual facility or you have to like get it resent to you. It's like a big inconvenience. And like this, this is definitely part of like that last mile of delivery.

And I love, I really like how integrated Amazon is in the delivery of a lot of things because it seems it's really optimized. And just the influence of Amazon in the market is really optimized. home delivery is so much better than it ever was. And it keeps getting better. And this makes it even better. I'm totally into this. It's also completely non-applicable to me because I live in an apartment building, which has a front door.

And then I have my own door. Yeah. So you got to get smart locks everywhere. No use. Six cameras, two locks. Let's get into it, Paul. Zigby, that shit up. I don't know.

I think this is the line, but I think they're going to figure out how to do. this. I think there's a reason they don't make the locks. There's a reason it's cameras and like, you can pair with a lock and let you in but really we want you to have these cameras. Well, they sell with a lock as like a bundle. Yeah, because they're a store. Sure. But they're not making the

lock. Right. Okay, so that's one thing. Then the new Echo came out, Dan reviewed it. I always say this. I reviewed the Fire TV the same day, the 4KHCR Fire TV. In our expectation is like everyone will be really interested in the new Echo

and no one would care about the Fire TV except me and my rowdy band of miscreants who love them theaters totally the other way around. The Echo, the Echo review was like, everyone was like, yeah, sure, it's a new one. It's got fabric. It's real nice. It looks very nice. It's very small.

But it's an echo. It doesn't have, like, new features. The feature is that's cheaper. Yeah, and smaller. Yeah. It's covers. It doesn't sound radically better. It's just an echo. Yeah. The whole Dolby processing, this is a lie.

It doesn't sound any better. And then the Fire TV review blew up because I think people are buying those. That product, massive disappointment. Yeah. Yeah. So like it is... Were you expecting too much? I was expecting it to have content.

How many lights did you hear? Zero. Zero lights. So there's two potential lights. Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos. No lights? Zero lights. I can't believe it.

Come on, man. So they announced it right after the Apple TV reviews had hit, and they're like, we got Atmos support. It's like, great. Everybody has it. Very simple. Zero atmost content available on Amazon. So it supports it, but you can't actually play anything back.

I will say this, unlike Apple, which has to down mix surround, or decode surround into discrete channels, and then so they can mix series voice into it. Amazon has figured out how to mix Alexa into Dolby. So if they ever get Atmos, the blocker that Apple seems to be having, which is mixing Siri into this round sound, doesn't seem to be there for them because they've already mixed Alexa into Dolby Digital Plus. Who knows? And then they don't have deals with movie studios for 4K HDR movies, or at least not all the studios. So movies anywhere exist, which is awesome, and everyone should sign up for it.

So I've owned a bunch of 4K HDR movies from Voodoo. They're synced over. They play in 4K HDR on the Apple TV and iTunes. It's great. It's really cool. Amazon doesn't have those deals, so they just play back in 1080P. And there's no way to rerunt them because Amazon doesn't have deals or rebuy them. So even though you own the movie in whichever service, movies anywhere is this beautiful gateway.

Yeah. But it's not a gateway that brings the literal file from one service to another. It's just a license. So it still depends on which service you're watching it through. of which encoding you'll get. Yeah. So I think the technology that Disney based it on,

it's called Key Chess. So I have like software keys to unlock streaming rights. I don't actually own bits. Sure. So yeah, so because Amazon, so baby driver is like a good example. Baby driver, I own it in 4K

HDR on Voodoo, play it on iTunes. It just works, does this thing, plays HDR, Amazon, 10 AP. I've never used spent much time.

It's Wonder Woman. I think Baby Driver can't confirm, but Wonder Woman definitely works on the Apple TV and like voodoo. I get the impression that like Amazon, I mostly interact with Amazon's content library just through a web browser. It's like my last

resort. And it feels like the oldest part of their tech stack. It's like looking at like a website from like 2005. So the fire TV is beautiful. So in like the, the spectrum of things, the Apple TV and the fire TV

are running mobile operating systems. Right. So the fire TV runs a fork of Android. It runs at 60 frames per second. It's like beautiful. There's like swoopy animations. Apple TV is obviously running TVOS

which is very now iOS. Soupy animations. And then like another on the spectrum is like, well, there's the Chromecast which I literally know you why. But one take about that is like the Roku which has basically the most utilitarian interface. It's like Soviet.

Like you fire up a steam engine and plays Netflix at you. And then like in the middle you've got like the shield and all their boxes. But the fire TV and the Apple TV clearly have the most like well thought out interface. Which is why I was excited about the fire TV. Because it's like it's got all the support of the things I want. But no lights, not enough content. And like 70 bucks. For 70 bucks you can get a Chromecast Ultra.

If you deal with it, you get both lights, two lights. Do you really just let it hang like this? Yeah. You just put that HTML and just let it hang? So it's a huge box. It's like the biggest dangly streamer thing. So the Chromecast Ultra, the Chromecast started, though, we're just going to let it hang off the side. Right, but it was like almost the size of a USB key at that time.

Yeah, and then they made it so it actually dangles because they found people, it was weird. You can't get it back, so it's better to let it hang. The Amazon, it's got a 1.5 gigahertz dual core processor. It does 4K. It's got its own power supply. But it's big. And so I was like, guys, I plugged it into the front port on my receiver. And I was like, I'm going to break this HTML jacks.

So, like, propped it up. So I asked Amazon, and this is like heavy. Did you test it? Is there a spec? And God bless them. They came back to me with the spec. The spec is amazing. The HTML spec for the Kemp.

for the connector for dangling for dangling the precise measurement is called a wrenching force yeah wow HDI connectors

need to have a wrenching force tolerance of 40 newtons okay and the fire TV with its current weight only exerts a wrenching force of one newton what

yeah wait so you could wait I don't know if the math is it scalar you could take 40 of these things could you put 40 But I asked, it would have to be in the exact same form factor, but 40 times heavier. You glue 40 of them together and you plug one in and you break your TV.

But there'd be more leverage because it'd be more volume and the weight would be further out. It's so it's more Newton. Yeah, so you need it to be like a straight downward force. Yeah, you need to link 40 of them in a chain, mount your TV in the ceiling. For science. Yeah, I thought it was greater than they wouldn't look at. I'll credit to that. Now, where do you look on the packaging to tell if your HTML receiver adheres to the 40-Dent standard?

They're like, we also tested it with a bunch of TVs. All that said, it's huge and it's kind of heavy. And so you plug it in and you're like, I don't feel good about this. But it's only 140th of the regulation of Newton's. Which is great. I like, all credit to them. Most people are like, it's fine. They like went and did the research and they're like, we tested it and the spec.

That's great. That's the best news I've heard all week. Yeah, the wrenching force is well within the Newton range. All right, I'm going to read one more ad. We're going to come back and talk about some Apple stuff right before we get out of here. This episode of Virchcast brought to you by the Art of Shaving. What is the secret of well-groom guy? The Art of Shaving.

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Deer, midnight, your time on the West Coast. Correct. 3 a.m. hour time. On the East Coast. iPhone 10 pre-orders start. You doing it? No. Deeter.

I haven't decided. I'm probably going to do it because, I mean, it's me. You'll be awake. I think it's on the East Coast. It's like, that's now you're committed. Midnight, it's like, I'm up. Beep. You know?

Dude, I go to bed at like 9.30. What are you talking about? Stranger Things is coming out tomorrow Friday. Yeah. Mario's coming out tomorrow. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like iPhones down that list.

Really? It's third on the list. I don't know. I'm very excited for Mario. Any of those three things. I'm definitely going to watch Stranger Things. It's very exciting. I mean, I don't have a switch.

I should get one. I guess you guys get a switch. Yeah. Yeah, you can save $700. I want to sit there and look at the color temperature and viewing angles on the iPhone 10 next to the pixel 2xel just for days. I just want to spend the rest of the year just looking at those two displays side by side and just pondering them. I want to look at the notch. I want to look at the notch.

to look at the viewing angles. I want to like look at the grit on one screen and the bunny ears on another screen. I want to I want to flip them over and I just want to consider the camera bump. Yeah. Yeah. The size of it on the iPhone 10 and the little ring on the pixel. Sometimes you got to think about the rounded corners too. Yeah. Yeah, you do. You got to think about it. You got to look carefully. You got to look at the edges of the screen and see if the round curves into the street. Let me just say this. It's a bad time for phones, right? I think did I say this to you when we were

taping Circuit Breaker? Because we were watching Dan's hands-on with the ZTE-X-on-M. And I was like, all of these flagships, like, compromised. I'm going Z-T-E-X-on-M, two screens to flip over and form a huge screen. None of it

looks like it works right. But at least like, at least for all of that, you get something wild. That's why I'm going with the 33-10. It's just like, you know, stop trying your best. Give us something interesting. Start trying your worst. Do your worst.

Do your weirdest. ZTX, I'm telling you, that's my next. This is my next, the ZTX on it. If you don't know what it is, you can go on our YouTube channel and look at it. It is an Android phone with a hinge, and it's a screen, and then you flip it open, and there's another screen, and it becomes a mediocre Android tablet. Yeah. And that's just the best.

Wait, there's... Neely, that was redundant. There's only one kind of Android tablet. Harsh. Harsh per capita. Oh. I've been thinking about an Android tablet. Like, you know...

Dude. Do your worst. What would you buy? Well, because I use the Chromecast, and you can't Chromecast off an iPhone. Uh-huh. So then you have to... To use the TV, you have to... I have to have my Android phone there.

Right. But if I'm not there, or I left my phone somewhere else... Wait, what do you want to... Your iPhone won't Chromecast. Like, almost anything. Like, there's tons of apps. I can Chromecast YouTube. Netflix.

Netflix. Voodoo. NFL game pass. I think Sunday tickets kind of wonky. There's just stuff. I think you can do Sunday. You can definitely do Sunday ticket from an Android phone. I don't know about an iPhone.

Yeah, I think it's, anyway. It's been wonky with my phone. Anyway. If you want to buy an Android tablet, the only answer is by the cheapest one you can find, because they're all bad. Or I could buy the ZTEXon M. Yeah. You have a phone that is hopelessly compromised.

What I want you to do. I want you to buy the ZTEX on M, and I want to be there with a video camera when you present it to your wife. Here's your new remote control. I will say this. I've been using this pixel. I'm in love with the pixel.

I'm in love with Oreo. The pixel is fine, his piece of armor. A great camera. Oreo is great. It's super whimsical and fun. And there's like, I love opening the app drawer and watching a little arrow do. It's like little arrow anime. It's all great.

Becky hates not being on a message with me. Literally sends me texts or like, I hate this. Wow. Hates it. One of my friends yesterday was texting me. And she's like, finally a good use for live photos. And I was like, I don't want an Android phone. And she just goes, oh, I assumed you were traveling.

I didn't know you were one of those. Wow Brutal Brutal response I'm in friend jail People could be so mean Yeah Do you just want to reply

I be like The vast majority of humans On the planet Use this phone Yeah But I can't I don't know I had a bunch of friends

Over the house This last weekend And I had the pixel And we were playing Like dumb Trivia games And we kept asking Google Assistant

And it has all of the answers Really? It's so much better than Siri And like Everyone loves the camera and I was like this phone's really fun it's really smart it's doing all this stuff all it's all the Google stuff we love this phone yeah and everyone's like oh I love that phone my buddy was like I'm you know I'm kind of sick of this iPhone it's got a headphone I'm into it

and I was like no I message and all I'm like it ended the conversation every single one of them what a world all right we've by the way forgot to talk about the iPhone because there was a big Bloomberg report came out this week oh yeah so Bloomberg reported that Apple basically told its manufacturers that it was okay to have a slightly worse like tolerance for the dot projector I think it was one of the parts of the face ID and so and then everyone was like oh my God that means it's going to be bad and then Apple didn't just deny it but as John Gruber pointed out they strenuously denied it outright said it was false just a very strong no to that's to Bloomberg's story no one.

No wiggle room at all there. So the story, the specific claim in the Bloomberg story was in order to produce as many face ID 3D sensors as they needed, they dropped one of the spec requirement. Because there was a rumor before that that was one of the things that was holding up production. Right. So in order to get enough, they dropped a testing requirement so that and more things would pass the test. Apple says this is completely false. I will just as I totally inside baseball note by the way we have some people on our staff who used to work in Bloomberg

people are pointing out that like in the Bloomberg report it quotes by name the Apple person who denied it this must be a really big deal because Apple never says anything by name Bloomberg's policy is to always name everyone so that's not like Apple doing it it's literally Bloomberg's house style is to never let anyone

not be named in that in that particular way like if you're a spokesperson it's just a thing I think it's really neat, I wish we did it more. But that's like the Bloomberg way. I just want them to ship this phone and see how people like it and see if they can have enough of it. But I feel like this phone, there's been so many rumors about this phone for so long. It just needs to come out and live or die on its own merits. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like they're, they've definitely hit the point now. Like this whole little hype cycle of theirs might have like back. Like people are going to be looking now, right? Whereas they'd cut it out, right? Like, people are going to want to tear this thing apart now in a way that might be unfair. Because I think having just used it for the few minutes we've used it, like, Dieter set up his face with face ID at the hands-off thing. And it worked great.

So, like, just in that moment, if you watch our hands-on video, like, I was, like, giddy with excitement because the thing is, like, fun to hold. But I think they've set up this thing now where everyone's going to be hyper-conscious of the fact that, A, you can't get it. B, it's pretty expensive. Like, is it worth waiting? Is it worth the money? There's just not a lot of info. There's all this other stuff. They're usually really, there's usually, there's the notch.

Are the apps going to work with the notch? Like, they're usually really buttoned up with this. And this one feels like they're coming right up against the deadline. I also feel this is, this is some really, this is totally tangential, but I got a bunch of emails from a bunch of people who just happened to have written stories about how some of the iPhones have an Intel modem and some of them have a Qualcomm modem and the Qualcomm modem is superior. So I think Qualcomm is trying to cede the story and like get themselves inserted into the conversation in their ongoing fight with Apple. Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. I've heard a lot about

Qualcomm recently. You know, there's like crack, the Wi-Fi issue we had Russell on the show. Qualcomm supplies a lot of Wi-Fi chips in this world, like a lot. And their response to crack has been like nothing yet. Like it's kind of like weird, right? Yeah, what is their role in that? It's just like, Qualcomm is this entity, is like, exists and they want to be in this conversation, but like

they're not the consumer facing brand actually. Right. And with Apple and this patent fight, they're trying to become one so that you, you know, you think highly of them in their patent fight with Apple. Right. But they're not. And so if you want to be that,

then you have all these responsibilities and you don't want to take the responsibility. It's like they're in a weird spot. a weird spot. Yeah. Do they want to be responsible? The Qom's story. I'm just putting it up there.

It's true. They're in like every single, every single Wi-Fi router. Yeah. Like basically all of them. Do you what I'm really happy about? Yeah. That we haven't forgotten Paul's segment.

Oh, God. Paul. Every week, my friend. Can I just say this? It's in the rundown. It is now in like 24. point bold all caps in our rundown that we work off of. And yet we just blew by it.

Here's the thing. And this all ties back to burn in. Our brains are designed with basically burn in and mind. Your neurons adapt to patterns they see in the world. And then those patterns become less and less obvious. And so because of that, sometimes we don't notice anomalies. And so because this is formatted in this. this document as an anomaly, you scan right past.

Anyways, water pods. Water pods. Water pods. I saw these today. We did it. We did it. These are mineral water pods from a company called META, I think, is how you say. It's a German company, M-I-T-T-E.

It's great. Basically, it distills the water to get all the minerals out of the water. And then it uses its mineral cartridges to put the right minerals back in. I don't understand what, I don't know. I'm pretty lucky. I live in New York. We have like the best tap water, the business. So I'm fine.

But I don't know. Anyways, water pods. So they add the minerals to tap water? No, no, no. First, you get to distill the water, get all the minerals out of tap water. First, you got to distill the water, get all the minerals out. Then use the proprietary pod with minerals in it to inject new minerals in. We're doomed.

One cartridge should last for 400 liters. That's a lot of liters. It's about 10 times as many Newton's of wrenching for us. 50 bucks for a cartridge. About $328 for the machine. It's a Kickstarter. Go ahead and spend your money on that. Water pots.

Water pots. We got a pitch. Are they the company that's like the first truly healthy water? We definitely got a pitch. I emailed it to some. I think I emailed it to our science team. And the subject line of the email I got was X company. I don't remember.

But what I remember is the subject line was the world's first truly healthy water, which struck me as being a bit of a bold claim. They definitely say, create your own mineral water just like nature. Cool. So let fish pee in it. All right. I think on that extremely depressing note. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go home. I'm going to set an alarm for like 245 a.m.

You take a pre-order nap? Take a pre-order nap. I'm going to wake up. I'm going to start clicking. Do you know the worst part of that this is? You're doing it? I have to do it. I don't do it.

Why not? But do you want to do it? I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. Okay. But I have to just be a part of the club. The worst part of this is I have to order mine from AT&T. Next.

And it's not going to work. You told me you're going to spend your AT&T next. On the ZT-AX-on-M. Which is an AT&T phone. Are you going back on that? Wait. Should I spend my next allowance on the Axon M and buy a $1,000 phone in cash? I don't know.

What would a true ship captain do? Damn it all. As captain, I'll make my decision known. The captain will retire to his quarters. Yeah, please update us. All right. That's our show. Tweet at us if you are pre-ordering this phone.

If you're pre-ordering the iPhone 10, I'd like to hear from you. Just help us get through your thinking. I'm at Reckless, Dieter's at Backlon. Paul's at Future Paul. There's all kinds of stuff to listen to if you're tired of this show and our nonsense. Although, I will tell you, this is the only, I am confident this is the only podcast available in the world this week that discussed Newton's of Wrenching Force. I am making that claim, and I completely stand by it.

No other podcast at all produced this week mentioned Newton's of Wrenching Force. If you find one that did, you can tweet it at us, but I know you won't. We'll issue a correction. I will issue a correction next week. But I'm almost 100% certain. It has specifically be about H-DMI spec. No, no, no, no, no. I open the gates, man.

Any podcast that mentions a Newton's of Wrenching Force in any context. There's a civil engineering podcast out there A podcast that's just about screws That'd be great If there's a podcast just about screws tweet at me Let me know about that That'd be wonderful They're like Phillips regular

Torx is the best screw I think Anyway other stuff to listen to that isn't this nonsense Again I cannot stress enough How great why'd you push that button is Available everywhere Caitlin Ashley great Our producer Andrew who is wonderful at producing the show Has to put up with this

Does a great job of producing that show Lauren Good, who's on our show all the time, has a great podcast with Kara Swisher. Too embarrassed to ask. Kara Swisher herself does Recode Decode, which is wonderful. And then Peter Kafka does Recode Media. If you're a media nerd, must listen. All that's available everywhere. Our frenemy, Ezra Klein, I don't know what he does.

Don't listen to him. He's out there, too. Oh, I forgot to say at the top of the show, we're part of the Vox podcast network. I was so excited to talk about Screen Burnin with Dieter. By the way, Vox also launched an amazing podcast with Sarah Cliff called The Impact. It's all about health policy. That was number one trending in all podcasts and iTunes. A nerdy show about health care policy.

That's great. It says something about us as a people, which is that what we care about is branching force. Nation of nerds. I love it. That is the Vergecast thing. You're so much for this thing. We'll be back next week. It's going to be a wild one because people are going to get their phones on a third.

So we should presumably know more about the phones. Someone's going to know something. I wonder how much wrenching force the iPhone has. All right. I'm going to stop it. Goodbye. Rock and roll. Paul.

Provo code.