The Vergecast - Pixel 2XL screen saturation update, an iOS11 bug, and Harmony Link hub services shut down

Episode Date: November 10, 2017

There’s a lot of little tech news this week, and we’ve got the perfect podcast to sum it all up. This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter run through topics like Samsung’s ad that mocks the iPhone, the update to Pixel 2 XL screens, and Logitech shutting down Harmony Link hub services. Also, The Verge’s video series Next Level is back! Lauren Goode returns to talk about the season premiere, which deals with creating holographic videos, and how that can be used to preserve memories. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like obviously Paul’s weekly segment “One 2 Won (One)” — so listen to this whole show to get everything you need. 02:23 - Samsung returns to mock iPhone X buyers in latest commercial 06:06 - An iOS bug won't let some users type 'I' 15:02 - Google updates Pixel 2 XL with new 'saturated' color display option 18:21 - How big of a problem is the Pixel 2 XL's screen, really? 21:32 - Next Level S02 E01 with Lauren Goode 43:36 - Logitech will brick its Harmony Link hub for all owners in March 52:49 - Intel and AMD team up against Nvidia to produce a new laptop chip 59:32 - Paul’s weekly segment “One 2 Won (One)” 1:02:26 - Justice Department pushes back against AT&T–Time Warner merger 1:10:32 - Broadcom may acquire Qualcomm amid existential legal battle with Apple Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of The Virchcast is brought to you by Qualcomm Snapchat GigabitLTE. 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 videos in 4K resolution with minimal buffering. You can access files in the cloud nearly as fast as you would if they're stored on your phone. You can download hours of movies or music in a matter of seconds. To learn more, visit snapdragon.com slash gigabit today. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com

in the Vox Media Podcast Network. Absolutely. Somebody tweeted at me today, I listened to Aser Klein Show. He didn't mention you. Wow. I'm going to make the speed happen. By hook or by crook.

And mostly by telling Ezra about it. Anyway, I'm Eli Patel. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bone is here. Hello. How's it gone, man? We missed you last time.

I am awesome. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I was with my family. Who is great. Our great. Yeah. There's more than one of them. Family first, I say, but only after podcasting.

We actually have a pack show. There's lots of little news. But importantly, next level, Lauren Good's show about technology in the labs is back. Season 2 is underway. She's done it again. She went and found another level by gum. So she's going to join us and we're going to talk to her about the episode she just did, which is about people making memories.

in VR headsets. So like parents capturing their babies in volumetric VR so they can go look at the kids again. USC Show Foundation is capturing Holocaust survivors and holograms so people can actually interact with them as other crazy stuff.

So Lauren's going to join us later and that's been really fun. As always, I'm going to plug Caitlin Tiffany and Ashley Carman's podcast. Why'd you push that button? The other ship in this fleet. Potentially a cooler ship. They might be a really cool ship.

They're a really cool ship. They are the better ship. But anyway. They talked about sharing streaming passwords. They talked about sharing streaming passwords this week. Super fun episode. Why did you push that button? Still just sitting at the top of all the charts and all the apps.

Doing great on Spotify, interestingly enough. So go listen to that in iTunes podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, go check out that show. Paul and I are hosting a circuit breaker show. There's all kinds of stuff going on. But most importantly, this show is packed to the gills with news. And I want to start with the most important news of the week, which is that Samsung put out an ad that has a guy in it and his haircut

is shaped like the notch on the iPhone 10, which is just the funniest thing. And Paul, I know you in particular have many thoughts about this. It's very subtle for Samsung, right? It is very subtle. They did the commercial with, I believe there's a thing God love. I forget the name of that band already,

because it doesn't matter. The darkness. That was the one hit. That was the darkness. They had two hits. They did ads with the darkness. The darkness definitely had two hits. What was your other head?

I kid. Okay. Well, first thing I should say, I did not scroll down Tom Warren's excellent post. Yeah. And see this screenshot of the notch haircut. The notch haircut is real. That's hilarious and amazing. It's make, okay, I loved this ad.

Just tell people what the ad is. Okay. There's a guy. And he, 2007. seven gets the first iPhone and he's like, hey, guess what I got? He picks up the phone, guess what I got? Then he runs out of storage, you know? Then he gets like the next iPhone and it falls in the water.

And meanwhile, his girlfriend is having a great time with her Samsung products. Yeah. Big screens. Yeah, when her phone follows, she gets his information using a stylus. I will say at no point during this ad does touchwiz make any sounds, which is horrible. nor is she shown operating touchwiz. Just putting that in there. The real culmination is her phone charging on some wireless dock.

And he's got dongles. He's got so many dongles. 50 dongles. But here's what I loved about this at. If you think about the traditional template for a commercial, it's like you, without this product, not cool. Yeah. You with this product, all of the people of the opposite,

same gender come flocking. You are sexually attractive and better because of this product. What the story here tells is that he meets someone with a different, a phone of a different operating system, and they love each other. They take care of each other. They look out for each other. Yeah. There's a decade of a beautiful relationship built with two people with phones.

Different platforms. Yeah. She never says, why are you on the green bubbles? or he never says that to her, presumably. He accepts her for the green bubbles that she accepts him for all his doggles. It's perfect. And so I just like that. Like, you know, they make some like all sorts of great digs at Apple for various things.

And obviously you could criticize Samsung for a lot of things. But they don't hinge the relationship's success on which phone he chooses. I just thought that was a great commercial. I think it's a hilarious commercial because the iPhone is going to, like, blow Samsung out of a lot. Probably. Yeah. It's like a week later, right? Like last week was the big iPhone.

We have it. Reviews. It's a week later. And it's people are loving the thing. And emoji karaoke was a phenomenal. Type the letter I. Yeah, we should, so we should talk about that. I think we should, we should, a lot of phone news happened this week.

I know there's a lot of phone news every week. But the two phones we have been talking about the most recently, Pixel XL2, iPhone 10. iPhone 10 and Pierce v. You actually get it in not a great time frame, but it's like three. weeks now. It's not, people thought it would just not be able to get one. You can get one. It's about three weeks from the Apple store. But hilariously, Apple has like a machine learning problem that seems to be the undercurrent here, where when you type the letter I, the autocorrect, replaces it with like a question mark box in the letter A. And so just the unicode glyph for like,

I don't know what this is. Yeah. I can't render this text. And some people are just rolling with it. So you look at Twitter, I get text, and it's just like, fine. This is the letter I now. We're changing the language. It's just a move on. Some people, you can set up a text replacer. I turned off autocorrect in my phone, which is a way you can fix it. Not recommended strategy because I'm bad at typing, I realized, without autocorrect.

So I'm just sending crazy, misspelled text messages all the time. I think there's something. I don't have a 10 yet. Is this happening to everybody? It's iOS 11, yep. So it's like a bug that spreads. It's really weird. So it starts like I sent-

Like a virus. I sent, yeah, it's the wrong kind of viral marketing campaign for Apple. So I sent it in to our tips line overnight when it started happening. I saw some tweets about it and like Vlad couldn't reproduce it. It hadn't spread there yet. And now it's like everywhere. Apple put out a software update today. But for all of their like machine learning, we do AI-2 differential privacy.

It's like, oh, there's a downside here. And sometimes the downside is like really stupid. Yeah. Wait, so you have a theory you were saying. Well, no, I just feel like autocorrect is, is incorrect. I've got a note on this somewhere. Actually, I have an auto-correct story while Paul looks. You know, there's this Twitter joke where you like type it a phrase and then you let the keyboard's auto-complete keyboard finish the phrase.

Yeah. So it's like, you know, I was born and then let autocorrect tell your life story or whatever. So I thought this was funny And I thought I'd make a joke And my joke was instead of I was born or I died Or whatever the joke might be My joke would be Hail Satan And then let Otto correct finish the sentence

And it worked And I got a lot of people on Twitter to say Hail Satan Which was my goal But I had to mute it because it was too much But here's the fascinating thing Hail Satan is not a phrase that most people type It turns out And so everybody's keyboard, both Android and iOS, follows nearly the same thing, including the official Church of Satan account, which, by the way, is very thirsty on Twitter.

And the phrase that follows Hail Satan on everybody's phone is basically, Hail Satan was a good night. Sure. Yeah. Sure. I get it. I don't know what that means. Yeah. You know, most of the people who say that.

So it's definitely basing it on just the previous word, not the previous two words. No, it depends on the platform and the keyboard that you're using, but it can't base it on more than just the previous word. Google's very good at it. Swift Key actually did this before anybody, and now everybody kind of bases up on more than just the previous word. Okay, this is my auto-complete thing. The keyboard should auto-complete based on words in your current document. So this happens to me a lot. if I'm writing about somebody like some proper noun or like at church I write Bible words.

Yeah. And I use that word over and over. It should like I feel like that should be one of its first suggestions. The other thing is that if I type a word that is in the dictionary, that's what I meant to type. I'll fix it if I did the wrong dictionary word. Yeah. But don't assume that I didn't mean to type that word because that word is in the dictionary. I didn't misspell anything.

If you can't find the dictionary, maybe you can replace it. Yeah. That's where I'm at right now with article. Just turn off. I've been living a wild life of just sending random strings of letters to people and realizing most people know what I'm trying to say. It's just completely out of control. I'll turn it off. See what happens.

Neelai, you should old man it and use the microphone button to dictate it to your phone. Yeah, that's probably the move. I've done it. It's great. Machine learning bug. It feels really surprisingly good. Turns us all into maniacs screaming at our phones. The other thing to note, we have this too. iOS 11 adoption is behind previous versions.

So I will say this. At the end of the review video, the iPhone 10 review video, I just lightning around answered some questions. And the last one I answered was, is iOS 11 still kind of janky? And I was like, iOS 11 still kind of janky. And everyone got mad at me because that's what happens on the end. internet. But iOS 11 is definitely pretty janky, and I think people are holding back from upgrading because they've heard so much about it. There's this meme out there, like, well, I just updated,

and now I guess I have to get a new phone. Thanks, Apple. You make it slow, so we have to get a new phone. I don't feel that with a typical Apple update, but a lot of people seem to feel like that's the case. So I asked, actually, during the review, I didn't, I couldn't figure out where to slot this into the review. But, you know, Apple's very proud of the 10. The 10 is screaming fast. It's basically the same Internals is the eight, but it feels a thousand. I don't know if it's the gestures. I don't know if it's the app switcher, what it is. It feels way faster than the eight to me.

Really? Yeah, it's wild. Like switching. That's remarkable. It's mostly like app switching is so, so fast on it. Like, you just swipe along the bottom and the previous apps just like are there and ready to go. So there's just a perception of speed.

There is, this is a complete tangent from even this other tangent, but so it goes. It's the verge cast. the ordering of apps when you switch is enough to break your brain. So, what? So say you're, I don't know, you're in the Twitter app, and you slide left to right along the bottom to go back to Gmail. At some point, Gmail becomes the first app. So then you can't swipe right to left to go back to Twitter.

But if you did it right away? Yeah, if you did it right away. If you did it right away, it's there. But as soon as you switch, then it goes into the previous slot. in the most recently use list. And if you, yeah. Yeah. So like, it's almost like if you have a bunch of cards on a phone, you want to order

them spatially and then be able to rear-reaching stack them. It's exactly WebOS, but WebOS kept, it locked the spatial relationships of the apps. Yeah. iOS does not lock. And it grouped them. Yeah. It's not doing any of that. So, like, it's just, if you start to think about the apps that way and you're like

switch around and trying to swipe on the bottom, you're not in any order. You're in some order that at some point can be reset to another order. Anyway, my point of all of this circling all the way back around is apps switching is great because the phone feels really fast and Apple is justifiably proud of their massive performance lead. And I was like, if you have such a performance lead, you have all of this headroom and you know you're not using all of it now because your operating systeming apps run on phones from two years ago, why is it that people always complain that their phones get slow with a new upgrade? because the iPhone 7 still potentially has tons of headroom. The iPhone 6S still has tons of headroom. Most people are not playing tons of games on these phones. And the App Store will send you the right binary for your phone anyway.

So what is the point of all this headroom if every two years people think their phones slow down? And they're like, yeah, it's just a conspiracy theory. We can't prove it. We can't prove that it's not true because people are just going to believe what they want to believe. And they said that the only time they're just the only time they're just, this has ever really been a problem is the iPhone 4. So they did whatever update for the iPhone 4, and then the next version of iOS came out,

and fours got really, really slow, and they spent a ton of time fixing it to make the 4 fast again. But I think that question is, Apple's got all this headroom. There's no way that a 2-year-old phone should feel slow. If every single year they're like, this is the fastest phone ever made,

you should get more than two years of use out of it. And I'm with you. I rarely feel like a new iOS update makes my thing slow, but it's such a meme. Yeah, people feel it for some reason. There's something there that I think is interesting. I do know my phone slows the hell down when I haven't updated apps in a while. I'm like, oh, yeah, sure, update all.

Oh. And then I just have to walk away from the phone for half an hour. They have a bunch of animations in iOS that are almost a second. They should just half them. This is why I think my pixel feels really fast. Yeah, you can turn, in fact, Neelai, on your pixel, you can go, you can turn on developer options and just turn off the animations. Oh my gosh. You could adjust the speed of the animations and basically make them go away.

What a dream. Just swipe around this phone. This is a Pixel XL2 I'm handing Paul. It's a rocket ship because nothing animates or anything's hardly animate at all. And it's just like, you're just banging out of things. I showed somebody my Pixel 1. This phone's so fast. It's like it's way behind the curve now.

But it still feels really fast. Yeah. Anyway, speaking of a pixel. Yeah. All right, here's the thing that happened. I think, Dieter, you don't have this update, but I have this update. Google put out the screen saturation upgrade. I'm going to spend the rest of the Vergecast tapping the update button, by the way.

It's so frustrating. So the way this update works, I think Google is very unhappy about having to do this. Yeah. So the Pixel XL2 when it launched, as everybody knows, had like many, many questions about the screen that started with. These colors are kind of muted to, is the screen burning in to, you know, white, scrainy. The blue is shifting everywhere. the one thing they could definitely solve in software was the color saturation. So they put out an update.

They said it's going to work a lot more like the pixel one. They insist on calling it an unmanaged color space. Like you're venturing into like Mad Max shit with these colors. I would read a sci-fi novel that explored the unmannedics. Here's the quote from Mario Corraz. I'm sorry, I can't pronounce your name. From the update that they said, this is what our update's going to do. The saturated mode puts a display in.

to an unmanaged configuration, similar to how the pixel one operates. The colors will be more saturated and vibrant, but less accurate, similar to how most other smartphones which display by their colors. We give consumers the option. Yeah, you know, you should pick

saturated mode. It looks so much better. This is like a parent whose kid just loves ketchup sandwiches. You idiot. I will prepare you a ketchup sandwich sandwich, I don't want you to starve to death, but you're so stupid. Did you eat ketchup sandwiches as a joke?

You hate them. That was a good kid. Now I have to try one. Who knows what I've been missing out on? Like most other smartphones, I love a good ketchup sandwich. So I switched mine. James Barham switched his. We're both like running around.

No, James Barham switched his? He was a huge proponent. He loved it. Yeah. But he switched it. Now he's all happy. I think it looks way better. I think if they're,

Google's not giving it to me out of spite. I think if they had shipped this by default, all of this other stuff would have... Would have gone away? It would have gone away because he wouldn't have had... People would have still talked about blue shift. It's still super annoying. This screen is tall enough that I can see it from the top to the bottom just when I hold it.

If I don't line it up exactly right. So like if I load up a white... You can see what from the top. The blue shift. So if you just hold the phone, hold it in your hand. I see what you're saying. And if you don't line it up... upright, you can just see the blue shift from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen

when you're just looking at it. You don't have to go look for it. So people would have talked about that, I'm sure. The whites are still grainy. Like you can see grain on the screen. But if the colors had been bright, I think a lot of people would have forgiven the other stuff where it would have been a smaller tech nerd thing. But you line up all the things, including the, hey, this display looks dull. Hey, the thing. Anyway, it's out. I love it. If you have a pixel XL2, you should just put it in that on a man. Live that life. Live that unmanaged life.

They got to deliver it to me first. And I'm not... Maybe if I switch my carrier to Project Fye, that'll jump me to the front of the line. I know I can manually install it, but I have not done that. So, Deider, you and Vlad had a fight on the website about how big of a problem the screen really is. Was it a fight? It was a good-natured debate. It was a TIF.

Yeah, we brought back Ping-Counter-Ping. So, by the way, I can get into why we call it Ping-Counter-Ping. We had a very long argument about that branding at the foundation of the verge. So this is my phone. I bought this phone. I actually bought the other phone, too, the two. Been using it, saw the stuff about the screen. I was very worried about the burn-in possibility.

Google says it's not a problem. Sure, I trust Google. The image retention is very difficult to see for me. You can see it. I'm trusting it's not going to get worse over time. And when you look at that, and it's like, oh, well, that's bad. I've expelled that extent. I shouldn't do that.

true. On the other hand, I just want a big, dumb screen. The screen on the two is too small. And I don't want a Galaxy S8 because I hate TouchWiz or sorry, the Samsung experience, which is what it's called now. I'm waiting for my iPhone tend to arrive, but I tend to prefer Android over iOS because Android doesn't have ridiculously stupid notifications like iOS does. And so I look at the spectrum of phones out there and the Pixel 2xel is the one. It has the best camera.

It has a big dumb screen. It has good software. It has very good battery life. It has all the things, except the headphone jack. And that's why my SIM card is going back in my Pixel 1. Yeah. Your SIM card. Dude, just stop it.

You need to stop talking about how you're going to use a pixel. You just do. I use one for like two weeks. It was like, great. And what are you doing now? It's in this iPhone 10, which is a lovely object that I enjoy holding. Because of iMessage.

You are never leaving iMessage. It's really hard. Just admit it. You know, the worst part is that the phone automatically re-enrolled me, and so now I have to, like, do it again. I have to, like, get out of it again. I'm going to do it, though. If you, see, it's weird that it auto-reinrolled you, because iPhones used to do that to me, but they seem to have stopped. There might be a special Dieter flag.

This is don't auto-re-enroll Dieter. because he'll bitch about it on Twitter. Yeah, probably. Oh, I message. All right, I'm going to read an ad. There's still, like I said, lots of little news, but all of it important in a special way. I'm going to read an ad.

We're going to talk to Lauren, and we're going to come back with more of this, the Vergecast. This episode of The Verchcast brought to you by Parachute. Parachute products are all designed at headquarters in Venice Beach. Their sheets have a modern, clean design that works with any style of home. The natural colors and minimalist styles

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Lauren Good. How you doing? Your next level is back. You're back on the Vergecast to talk about it. This is so exciting. I'm coming to you from another dimension right now, and it is my hologram speaking. That's how you know Next Level Season 2 has begun. Yeah, the theme of this episode is Lauren takes slightly different forms in every episode. No, you actually do have a theme. We'll talk about that. So Next Level is back. If you've been listening to VergeCast, you know, next level was Lauren Good's show where she looks at the tech that's in the labs, not the stuff we can buy. We had Lauren on every episode of that show every week that first season was on to talk about it.

We're going to do the same thing, obviously, this season. But this season, you have a theme. You're trying to focus in on one part of the puzzle here. So what's going on with that? Yeah, when we were talking to different companies and research institutions about the things that we were interested in looking at this season, we started to realize in some of our early production meetings that we were stringing this theme together, and a lot of it had to do with just the human impact. and the human element of things.

And granted, tech impacts all of us in some way. So you could argue that all of tech or almost all of tech has an impact on the human experience or alters the human experience in some way. But this felt very strongly like the theme that was emerging this season. And I felt there was no better way to kick it off than to talk about people turning their loved ones

into holograms because that's what we do. You know what I always think about it. Apparently. Well, I want to talk about the episode because the episode is super fascinating and I think equal parts like heartwarming and then extremely creepy. But it occurs to me as I was watching it. So much of what I rely on technology to do for me is to have a better memory than I do. Like I have a crap memory. It takes me so long to remember like a face and a name.

I forget what I ate for breakfast. I'm just a terrible memory. The only thing my memory is good for is remembering specs of phones from like 20 years ago. And that's great. It served me well in this career as like a social human being. I'm like, who are you? I'm simply met. But this first episode is all about not just like augmenting your memory or assisting your memory,

but creating like an entirely new kind of memory with VR. And it seems I'm just so curious about that. Tell them what the episode's about, but then I want to talk about that sort of like new kind of memory because it was such a theme with the people that you talk to. Well, first of all, may I recommend that you lay off the scissor vodka? Because that may help with your retention of information. It's already gone, right? Like now I'm not supposed to ask. No, it's true.

You kind of get to, I mean, I've been there. You get to an age where you start to think like, oh, am I just, am I getting a little bit older? Or is there too much information in my brain? and I just can't possibly remember it all or if I've been drinking Cesar Vodka. But yeah, so the episode is about a couple of different studios, and they both happen to be in the Los Angeles area, where people have been using holographic video

to create these little time capsules of people. And the episode really runs the gamut. We started at a studio that's been doing this side project where they've been using the technology they have at their, disposal to make these holographic videos of people's kids. Think like LA moms bringing in their kids and instead of getting baby photos made, they're getting holograms made. And then we kind of ended up in doing our research at the total other end of the spectrum where we ended up at USC's Showa Foundation. Showa Foundation, fun fact, was founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994.

and the foundation has been devoting itself for the past 20, 23 years to capturing testimonies of people who survived genocides. So they're all about researching genocide, which is just one of the deepest, darkest topics you can sort of dive into. And I was able to talk to a Holocaust survivor as a hologram. It was the combination of they had captured him in holographic video, but they also had developed their own natural language processing system where when I was speaking with him, I could ask him questions as though he was right there. And he would answer in this very sort of natural way because they at some point had spent a week asking him 1,500 questions and getting those answers in the database and getting his likeness and his being in their database and created this thing. And so it, you know,

it's like really crazy to think about how our minds kind of perceive and consume media now. And for the most part that's on a flat 2D display or flat 2D environment. Yeah. But is the future of like talking to people in the future, like in the future when they may have changed, like if you're a small child now, but then one day you're grown up, right? Like do you go back and experience that interaction with that child in a way that actually feels real? Or do you talk to someone who's no longer living in a way that feels real?

And that's like, that's where things got really crazy. Yeah. That to me, that's the turn. right like that's not a kind of recollection we've ever been able to have and so that it's funny you really did run the gamut of things you'd want to experience right like i'd like to play with my kid again versus this is an indelible important part of human history that we need to talk about and like hear firsthand accounts of but let's start with the kids because that is where your episode started um so they sat down in a room it looked like kind of the matrix bullet time like how do they capture that. It's funny that you say Matrix because this particular company, they used to be at a sound stage in Culver City where scenes from the Matrix had been filmed. So, yeah, I feel like if I can just work The Matrix into every episode in some way,

that would be we've succeeded. Well, if you don't mind, I would love to just back up a little bit and talk a little bit about how I found this story. Because this company, which is called 8I, I had done a report on them in January or February of this year. So I had spent a day down at the company in Culver City at the time and just learned how they were making volumetric video. And for the most part, they're doing a lot of content around cute pets and celebrities and NBA stars. And think of it, a lot of it is like marketing, right? Like, I'm going to insert this hologram of John Hamm into an app right around the time that

his movie is coming out at Sundance. Wait, can you quickly explain what volumetric video is? Sure, yeah. So there's been a lot of talk about 360 videos. or spherical video and it's being used in VR. Think about when you're wearing a VR headset and you're looking at an environment around you. You're looking around and you're seeing like a new wall or a different floor or you're in like a video game environment, right? Like you're experiencing 360 video

but you're looking at the things around you. With these kinds of video assets, the cameras are all pointed inward. So they instead of capturing things, they may also create a VR environment for you to experience. But for the most part, the cameras, you know, think of like 50 cameras being pointed at you from all angles and capturing you or an object or an animal or whoever it is in your full volume so that when they place that video asset into a virtual environment, you're able to

go up to it and walk around it and peer into its eyes or look at the underside of it and just see the volume of it in a way that you wouldn't be able to see normally. And this is like a big deal for VR. Yeah, absolutely. So this is like the next step for VR, right? If you think about the classic 360 video camera, we've covered a ton of them on the verge now. It's like a lens and you like stick it

and captures the world around it. But the next step is to put things in the world so that when you're wearing the headset, you can like walk around the world and look at stuff, right? Exactly. Yeah, so that when you experience objects in that world, the objects feel real and volume. I mean, we have volume as beings or objects have volume.

So it's kind of creating that in a digital environment. And it's still very expensive and it's highly technical. So there are, of course, barriers to making it. But this company has been doing it. And when I first visited them on a reporting trip earlier this year, someone who worked there just said very offhanded to me, you know, like there's this woman who came in early on to do kind of like a spec test for us.

You know, like we needed a baby and a mom together and we were going to just test them out and see how they looked in volumetric video. And her experience was so, the mom's experience was so emotional that she kept coming back. She ended up coming back. I think she's been back four or five times now. And she's come back every six months or so to get updates of her child, first, her first child, Reese, and then her now her second child, Wilder, have them made into a holographic format so that she can either on her phone or in a VR headset kind of go back.

and visit them from when they were tiny little babies. And they're still pretty small. I mean, I think Wilder's one year and the little girl is now nearly three. But I heard this and then this person said, yeah, and like some other people in the area, like employees and friends of the company have also been doing this. And I was like, hold on a second. Like, hold up the bus. What is happening here?

Is this just like some LA thing or is this like really happening? And so just due to timing and we get caught up in so many stories of The Verge, I didn't have time to come back and revisit the story until now, but we thought this is perfect for next level. We need to really explore what people are doing here. And that's kind of what got the wheels turning. Yeah. So they capture the mom and the baby, and then she was wearing, what, just a regular

Vive headset and she could go back and look at the baby again? Yeah, because originally, when she first started doing this, it was a couple of years ago, there was no AR kit or AR core, right? So you weren't just looking it on the phone. So they processed it and rendered it for her and they put it on, I don't remember what tower it was, but yeah, she put on an HTVive. And she started crying. And she told me this and I wasn't there when this happened, but she told me she became very emotional. Other people at the company who had been observing her reaction to the material said they got emotional. And she was like, I've never experienced this before.

And like she described this feeling of looking down and seeing her baby when her baby was still a baby and wanting to hold it. You know, there's like this great imagery of her kind of reaching her arms out as if to hold it. And she stepped back into her own body. And she just had she had this like crazy experience. And she was like, yeah, I would love to keep coming back to do this. Which is funny too because she described this woman Ashley. And she's really interesting to interview. she described herself as not a very techy person.

And I think that's a thing we often kind of have to remind ourselves because we're so involved in tech that most of the general population has not experienced VR headsets. So when you do experience it and you have that kind of reaction, then you kind of see the power of it. But until you see that, you just see a bunch of geeks with these giant ugly headsets on their faces. Well, crying in a VR headset is like not a thing that most people think about doing. because the experience is it's so focused on games right now, right? Particularly the higher end VR.

I think these kinds of experiences, like a new kind of memory is so, it's just so fundamentally interesting. And if it is your memory, then of course it's even more important to you. Whereas... Would you ever say you've had an experience at a VR headset where you've cried? Or what would you say is the most powerful

VR experience you've had so far? Or AR? Yeah, I've never been emotional. I think the most powerful ones for me have all been the, you know, it's the, the room, it's going to look like you're standing on a cliff and are you, are you going to take this step, right? Even though your brain knows you're in a room, your body just believes that you're standing on the edge of some height and you just won't do it. And I think that's great. Okay, we can, we can definitely terrify people in VR? But like, can you create, uh, can you create

another kind of feeling? And so I think this is, when you go to what USC is doing, the Show definition, to me the danger of, hey, you can go look at your own kid and you can like get lost in the past when maybe you should like take the headset off and like play with your like real child seems like valuable. Like there's something there that's like maybe we don't need those kinds of memories. Right. Like you can it's emotional, it's important. It might sell a bunch of headsets. But like is this more valuable than photos? And I don't know the answers to those questions. But then you go to what USC is doing, and it's obvious that we need at least those kinds of memories because primary source history is so important. So when you were with the ADI people, did you ask them about the value of that memory, or did you just take it as part of a piece with sort of what USC is doing?

That's a really good question. Because ADI does what ADI does, of course, when you ask executives there, they all say the volumetric video is better because that's what they do. So if you say, well, what's the difference between looking at a photo of your kid on your iPhone versus looking at it in a volumetric format? They'll say, well, it just is more real. It's so much more immersive. You can walk up to them. You can walk around them.

One woman who I spoke to there, an executive, who, interestingly enough, came from Twitter. She showed an Instagram video she had made of her son when he was little in volumetric. One of them was a hologram. To this day, I'm still not sure which one of her. kids was a hologram in this Instagram video. There was one that was like really little in just about a year and like did the one year old baby stumbling drunk thing

because they can't walk very well. And then there was one that was a little bit older that was able to stand and walk and they were juxtaposed with each other and she was like, see like this is more interesting. In some ways she was saying this. I mean I'm paraphrasing but like this is more interesting than just looking at a flat 2D photo.

So I think like the point that they sort of make, it's not a very good answer right now, The point is that, well, it's more emotional. It's just more emotional when you experience it that way versus another way. And at some point, Aidae thinks that we're going to be popping into photo booths or popping into department store studios and making holograms instead of flat photos. That's like their vision, which is pretty wild to think about. I think in USC's case at the Shoah Foundation, it actually does make a little bit more sense that they would marry this very realistic video with,

natural language processing because in this case like the testimonial actually makes sense these people who are genocide survivors especially the Holocaust as opposed to more recent genocides you know they they won't be around for very long for much longer and and so we want to be able to interact with them like right now someone like pinkie scuder who was one of the survivors I spoke to he can go to classrooms he's still around but at some point he's not so how do people learn from him then and I think that's that was very cool to see so that's actually a question that that came up in sort of the comments that I was reading. And I know that you love it when I read your comments

and ask you questions from them. But were they good. They were great. But one of the commenters were saying, how long until we do the capture and then AI is just answering questions directly and it's not quite a person anymore. It's like the representation of a person's thoughts and memories

and they're the ones out doing the teaching and then like obviously how do you control? Like are they thinking? through all of that, or are they just trying to make a more interactive experience? Adai didn't really have a concrete answer when I asked that. I think they're just still about getting their tech into the market and seeing where holographic assets go from there. I did talk to Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Shoah Foundation, and asked them

specifically about that because they're already at that step where they're using an LP. And so for me, it's like, okay, well, what happens when you start to add in neural networks? Right? And he said that right now they're making a very clear distinction between what their holograms do and say versus what he calls an android. He kept saying, well, you know, there's an android and then there are these real people and we're just capturing them. And he was very clear to say that whatever Pinkus or the other survivors who've been captured as holograms, whatever they're saying right now, those are words they've actually said. They might respond to you in a natural way. and answer your question in a way that feels like they're right there. But those are phrases and sentences that those people have said themselves. They're not being manipulated at all. But he said that future is inevitable. Like he was so clear on this is where we're going.

And we've already seen stuff with just flat video being manipulated. Yeah. You know, to show something Obama supposedly said when he really didn't. Right. But there's so much digital data that lives out there now that people are able to cobble it all together and make something of it. that is fake. And it's a really big ethical question, and nobody has the answers right now.

Like, I wish I had something more insightful to say than that. But we don't have the answers right now, but it seems like it could very well happen that these holographic assets take on lives of their own. Yeah, I certainly don't want to suggest that a parent looking at a hologram with their kid is like trivial, but the stakes of that being manipulated are much lower than the stakes of living history being manipulated. And it's all the same tech. So it's one of those situations where if Adai gets really good at it, they're going to

have to plan ahead before somebody does something bad. Or if, you know, the Showup Foundation is saying this future is inevitable, they're definitely going to have to think about it first before the bad actors start using the stuff. And I think that problem, as we've seen over and over again in tech particularly recently, is really hard. And it's just, the stuff is so interesting. you know, as they're saying to you, the emotional power of the technology is so great that, of course, people are going to want to use it for different kinds of things. It just seems like

that is obviously the next set of questions to be answered. Yeah, and not losing sight of the fact, too, that pretty much every major tech company right now is getting into this space. Apple and Google have their own AR and Google's case VR platforms. Microsoft just announced that it's doing these holographic studios in San Francisco and London where people can, you know, rent out the space to tape holograms. And then let's talk about Facebook. You know, they have Oculus. They've been experimenting a lot with this idea of social VR and recreating people as avatars and VR. And Facebook has a little bit of a problem right now with manipulation on its platform.

So when you start to, you know, I don't want to connect too many dots, like sort of in an alarmist way. but when you start to think about the bigger picture stuff, you could definitely see how manipulation of media could really have, I don't know, just have a big impact in this type of video format. Yeah. Well, I think that's a good place to end on the darkest possible note.

Yes, dystopian. Sadly, you and I are out of time this week, but tell the people where they can watch next level, where it's coming out, how they can look at it, how they can watch this episode, and a little tease of what your next episode's going to be. Absolutely. You can go to Theverge.com.

We have a landing page dedicated to all the next level episodes. You can also go to YouTube.com slash The Verge, and you can find Next Level there. It's on Facebook. I think it's on Twitter. It's everywhere. What did I say last season? I was going to say last season, I think I said it's being, beam directly into your brain. So I'm going to have to come up with some other.

This season, we're going to deliver it directly to your backyard by drones. Yeah. There you go. The future's coming for you. What's your next episode about it? Speaking of, next episode. episodes about drone detection technology. So yeah, drones are getting more popular. If you're a hobbyist, you currently don't have to license your drone in the U.S. Drones are, you know,

they're getting in the way sometimes if you're at a natural disaster site or near an airport. And so we're talking to some people who've been testing technology that will help maybe keep drones at bay, but we'll see. I will say, as the current operator of an unlicensed drone, I'm not sure I'm into this, I'm ready for the episode. Oh, you were really going to dig this episode then. I actually ended up at an airport down in Southern California where we went on a patrol. We go on this patrol on the runway.

They clear the runway for us, and we get in this giant Tahoe, and we're on a patrol with this tech. And there was, all of a sudden you hear this crazy beeping because the tech has spotted a drone in the distance. and I saw the real-time reaction of airport operations specialists being like, what's that drone doing over there? It's pretty wild, so you guys have to check out this episode. Well, that sounds super exciting. Next level comes out. What day?

Tuesdays. Tuesdays, next level. Everybody tune in, check it out YouTube, Facebook, all the places you are. Lauren, thank you so much for being on the show. We'll see you again next week. Thanks, Neelai. See everyone next week. Bye.

We're back. Lauren was great. Next level is great. I'm so happy we do that show. It makes me, in that episode, you have to watch it. It's very good. It's very good. In the VR baby situation, very disturbing.

I get it. It's just fundamentally disturbing. All right. Like I said, lots of other little news. I really want to talk quickly about what's happening with Logitech because I think it speaks. It's like the news itself is so small and stupid, but I think it's something we're talking about. So Logitech obviously makes Harmony remotes. They had a product in 2011 called the Harmony Link, which was like basically a Wi-Fi IRblaster.

It's what it is. It's just how many years are going to go by, and I'm still talking about IR Blasters. Are you okay, though? I'm not great. So Harmony Link was a little Wi-Fi IRBlaster, connected up to Harmony servers. Harmony earlier this week said we're discontinuing it, no longer supported. Go buy a new one, the Harmony Hub, which is the same kind of thing. People freaked out because they bought this thing, it's working, just sitting in their house working.

They didn't say it's no longer supported. It will stop working. It will stop working because it needs, when you push the button on your phone, it goes up to the cloud and then down to the thing. Right. Which is an insane way to trigger an IR Blaster fundamentally. But that's what they decided to do. That's really absurd. It is bonkers crazy that you push a button on your phone and it connects to a cloud service.

And then the cloud service connects to your IR Blaster. And then it's like, TV, volume up. That just doesn't seem great. But that's what they did. They sold it. People apparently liked it. So people have a working control system in their house. And Logitech said, we're done with this.

We're just breaking it. There was an outcry. Here's my favorite part of this outcry, because Logitech had to address this today, too. Logitech's forums censor the phrase class action lawsuit. So you can't type it into the forums. They had to make an excuse that's like, that's because of our forum service agreement. But really, they just censor the phrase class. action lawsuit. So Logitech came

all the way back around. Anybody who has a link of any kind, I think their head of product is out there something like, if you just send us your old link and be like, I got it somehow, they'll just send you a new hub. So they've committed to a mass swap of Harmony links for the new

Harmony Hub, which is a much more capable product. How does that... How does they benefit from... They want to keep people in the ecosystem, and they don't want to keep running the service to support the link. What are their additional effects? What do you mean? Well, Logitech keeps them in the ecosystem and like, and then what do they get from those people?

Well, presumably they buy the next one. They stay in the ecosystem. They buy the next one. I currently am thinking about buying Universal Remote and I was looking at buying a Logitech. But it's a little bit too much remote for me right now. I've got all the HDMICC stuff going, which works like HDMICC works, which is to say medium. It's like H-GIC-E-C is like having a family of arguing siblings, and you have one side of food. My Vizio remote with a five-way D-pad, now it does successfully operate my Apple TV, so I don't need it.

I don't need the Apple TV remote unless I want to talk to Siri, which I don't need the Apple TV remote. Well, what if you want to play one of the many great touchpad swiping games available for the Apple TV? Oh, my God. But all I want is a button that launches the Netflix app on. the Vizio, and it comes with one. That's great. And then it also has a crackle button, which I don't want. Very confusing. Or it's a voodoo.

I know, something's stupid. And I just want a remote that has, like, the five buttons I actually want and or, like, just color codes that I can program. But I don't need a touchscreen. I don't need to spend hundreds of dollars. I need a remote that costs six bucks that I could just program. Doesn't exist. Doesn't exist.

Especially because so many, you want to integrate it. So, like, what Logitech is getting is you'll buy the, you'll buy the, you'll get the hub now for free. And you're going to connect it to Alexa, and then you're going to use the Alexa scale. And then you're going to be all sticky, and then the next time you want to, like, they're getting happy customers.

That's what they're getting. Then you're probably buy more logic stuff because now you're happy. And you can type class action lawsuit in the forum now. But the real issue here, and it's come up, and I'm just curious what you guys think,

is when you buy products that are utterly dependent on a cloud service, now you're buying like this long commitment to a company, but they will either charge you a monthly fee for, which I think is what they all want to do, or you're just betting that they won't go out of business or otherwise decide that that cloud service is too expensive to run.

And I just like, this is a small thing. I don't think a lot of people have Harmony Links, but it's one of those where you piss off the people who do, and it becomes a story throughout tech. Well, you know, Canary just did this with their, and they had to double back as well. they like change the functionality of the product. I think how it should work is that almost any product should work,

do some basic function without the internet. And then possibly receive new functionality over time. It seems like how this link should have worked is it would receive new techniques and capabilities over the internet. But it shouldn't have to ask the internet every time it does anything. and then you can clarify and then you can have cloud services that like we're going to store some stuff in the cloud for you like Canero's doing with video that like are clearly delineated and can go away but you have some sort of core functionality that is local that that and so the end of life of a product is we will no longer continue to update it which is bad because of security and stuff, but whatever. And that we won't offer these cloud services anymore.

But that somehow we described to you when we sold you this product, that there is a core functionality that this product that will continue to work. Yeah. I mean, so I have a Logitech 1, just like the last of the Harmony remotes, or the Harmony one, the last of the Harmony remotes before things just got out of control with Wi-Fi connected to IRBusters. and to reprogram it, I have to go talk to a cloud service.

And I think, like, that to me is, like, I don't need this in my life, right? Like, just let me give you an app with all the codes in it. And we plug it into a computer. I'll run the app. I'll program the thing. But Logitechick wants it to be smart

and they want to update the database over time. So this piece of hardware that's going to work forever because it never needs to talk to the internet will get bricked by software support to online if I get a new component. Right. And that's like, okay,

I can sort of make, make that trade, I think. It seems fine. But it's going to stop working because, well, there's not a lot of link owners and we really want to focus on the hub and running that server's expense. But brick them all. Brick them all.

Also, Harmony's web services suck. It's not like they needed their resources to make the thing better. It's like, man, everything's pretty janky. Let's shut down the oldest one. Theoretically, like, how much did the link cost when it first come out? I don't even remember.

You call it $250. B. Whatever. I don't know. Whatever. Some, and it's, it's theoretically a five-year-old product.

Yeah. Do you think that 250, like, should Logitech have said, we'll continue to support this product after three years, but we're going to charge you at two bucks a month? Yeah, I mean, that's a choice,

but, or, you know, just tell everybody, hey, in six months, we're discounting this. All of you get a discounted Harmony Hub.

Or, right. They just mismanaged all of that messaging. Anyway, the point of this is really not the Harmony Link because, again, I think very few people had them. They just happen to be very vocal. I think we just have to be thinking constantly about when you buy the thing that's actually an avatar for a web service, you might have actually purchased nothing, which is not how we think about hardware usually. But if you make it, I'm doing it again.

You guys ready? Yeah. If you make the thing open jailbreakable, unlockable, dev modable from the jump, then when, your web service inevitably dies, users that love that product for whatever insane reason can band together, unlock the thing, and do stuff with it. This is exactly what happened with WebOS. I'm just saying you can go to Palm or Palm C.E or whatever it is, WebOSCE, that whole thing.

And you can go and you can install a Twitter app that still works and has been updated for 280 on your touchpad or on your Palm Pre 3. You've got to be a huge crazy nerd to make a Palm Pre 3. work in this day and age. But it is possible because you can get the thing going and you can type in the Konami code and you can go. If Apple goes belly up tomorrow, every single iPhone on the planet is gone. And that's a bummer.

Like maybe these things should be a little bit more unlockable and openable from the beginning. And then that protects us as consumers from if the cloud service goes down. Agreed 100%. Midwestern man rages against cloud. That's not what's just happening. No, I agree with theater. Jail break all the things.

All right. Paul, I want to ask you about this story because I think it's really interesting, but I don't really understand it. Something is happening in Intel. Yeah. Oh, my God. So they have teamed up with AMD,

which is not a normal thing to have happen. Right. Historically, the greatest rivals in the world. Intel and AMD. There was a top. Michael Jordan Larry Bird. It was a tough.

But historically fierce rivals. Yes. Now, whatever. Well, AMD is making a comeback. Anyway,

they, they've teamed up to make a new chip to rival and video. But then Intel also hired an exec from Apple and AMD

to lead its own GPU effort. Right. So Apple or Intel hired Raja Koduri who had worked at AMD, and before

then he worked at Apple, and before that he worked at AMD, and before that he worked at ATI. Yeah. Which AMD bought. So a graphics chip legend apparently. Here's what surprised me. I assumed Intel did

not want to do a good job. Intel has been making integrated graphics forever. And they basically, they're like the baseline. Like, basically Intel integrated graphics chip can barely run World of Warcraft, and it can do some really good stuff with like video transcoding and video playback.

But that's basically what they're for. And, you know, an integrated chip is sharing RAM between the GPU and the CPU. It's just, you know, it's just got a real serious performance ceiling. But I didn't know that there was anything stopping Intel from creating a discreet. graphics chip, which it seems like what they're doing with AMD. They're partnering with AMD to make some sort of discrete graphics that are still bridged very closely to the CPU so that should hopefully work really well. I watched the video. The video is bonkers.

The video is like a lot of sweet, like swoopy CGI and then like rectangles stacking on other rectangles while the narrator's like... That's what GPs do. Yeah. And the narrator's like, only Intel can stack these rectangles in this way. with our high-performance, rectangle stacking technology. So the thing is, NVIDIA's discrete graphics for laptops are getting way better recently. And, you know, the new Surface book.

Yeah, I think it's the Surface Book. There's so many different surfaces. It's one of the surfaces. It's the book. It's getting like a Nvidia 1050 or 1060. So you're getting good graphics in smaller form factors, and it's cool. And the other thing is, Intel, always done really good job at providing drivers for its integrated graphics.

So a lot of times when you're running Linux, you can barely even work with a discrete graphics card. But you always got that trusty Intel integrated graphics. So hopefully, this could be the final great Linux laptop. Also it means you might get the final great Apple laptop. Because Apple has avoided these invidia chips for whatever reason. Because they hate games. They hate video games and gamers. Yeah, it just seems like Intel's trying to make a move.

They're like, Internet of Things, that'll be Intel. Like, we're making modems now. And now they're just refocusing on what if our laptop chips were really good, which seems fascinating to me. But what's the timeline here? I have no idea. It's only like five years. before they figure it out. No.

I bet this chip is going to be in laptop. It's going to be part of Intel's eighth generation. The Intel AMD hybrid thing. Yeah. That'll be soon. Yeah. But they're just booing up their own graphics. Intel making GPUs, I have no idea.

It just seems weird to, in the same breath as we're teaming up with AMD to rival Nvidia to then be like, also, we've hired this person who used to work at AMD. To rival AMD and Nvidia. I don't know. I don't know. They're like, these graphics, people love them. We should get good at that. I have a cousin who has a nephew, and he just loves graphics.

He's so into computers. He could just do anything with the computer. He says graphics are the future. All right, I'm going to read an ad. And then we're going to have a conversation about mergers. No, we're going to talk about interesting things, but also mergers. This episode of the, Vergecast brought to you by the Art of Shaving.

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All right, Paul. Yeah. In the rundown, it is now huge. huge and yellow. Uh-huh. It's, also comic sands. It's red text,

highlighted and yellow. The text is so big, it just says Paul Segg, and then I have to scroll to another page for meant. But every week you do a segment. Yeah. Which is called. It's called one to one.

And you spell out one, then it's the number two. And then you could say W-O-N, just, I don't know, or just O-E. Yeah. To your own taste. And it's about how in VR we're making everything, again, that already exists in real life.

And Logitech is coming out with this thing called Logitech Bridge. Right now they've only seated it to like 50, or they're going to give it to 50 developers to like try it out. But he uses HTC's Vive tracking disc thing. they're a little like, I don't know how you even describe. It's basically, it's like a beacon. It's like, here I am in 3D space. And then that connects to a whole Logitech keyboard. And then in VR, you see a one-to-one representation of the keyboard in VR.

And when you push the keys, the keys go down. But the real crazy thing, and I think they're using the Vives front-facing cameras for that, is they can see your hands as well. So you see your hands floating out in front of the keyboard. And the keyboard is just a 3D model being rendered, but it's in the exact space that your actual keyboard is. It's this one special Logitech keyboard is. And then you can see yourself type.

So now you can type in VR. They did. They solved it. Well, you need it. I think you need, especially if these VR things get like higher resolution and you really want to stay in there. If a VR headset was both lighter and higher resolution, and you wanted to hang out in there and do work in there, you definitely want to see the keyboard, and this is one way to do it.

I mean, I'm just saying Matrix was typing, or Matrix, Neo was typing in the Matrix all the time. Yeah, you got to type. You got to type. One to one. One to one. But why would it be W-O-N? I don't know. Because you've won against the reality of typing.

VR keyboards don't break. Well, but this is based on a physical keyboard that could break. That's the real question. If you break this keyboard in real life, does the VR one break too? Interesting. So we'll find out. Getting that headset. Be one of 50 lucky developers.

All right. I wasn't lying about merger news. There's two things happening in this world. One, we don't have to dwell on either one. But they're important. AT&T is trying to buy Time Warner. We've talked about it a lot. Justice Department.

says, hey, AT&T, you want to buy Time Warner, you got to sell Turner, which owns CNN, or you got to sell direct TV. Effectively. Or the Justice Department didn't say that, and it was somebody floating the idea to see what would happen because CEO Randall Stevenson said, today, no, they never said that to me. That's crazy. Yeah, he also said, I'm never selling CNN. Yeah. So obviously, this is interesting to me for a variety of reasons. one of which is the operating rumor.

I wouldn't even call it a theory. The rumor is that Donald Trump, President of the United States, hate CNN, was against the deal when he was a candidate. Now he's president. Donald Trump hating CNN is not a theory. That is a fact. That's a fact, but you put all the pieces together

to make it the rumor. And so he's saying, I want to punish CNN, and the way I'll do that is I'll force AT&T to sell it if they want to buy a time order. I'll block this deal to punish Senate. It's out there. It's definitely out there.

It's been reported that way in some publications. Other publications are reporting other things entirely, which one of which is the career lawyers in the Department of Justice don't like this deal because media consolidation and letting giant companies get bigger is bad, right? And that's their job, is to block deals, block mergers for antitush reasons. So it's, this is the moment we're in. Where I'm at is I actually don't think distribution companies should buy media companies. I think it's healthy for all the media companies to compete for access.

So the canonical example here, Disclosure, Comcast investor in Rocks Media, which is a Virgins parent company. But Comcast bought NBC Universal as a media company, Comcast's a distribution company. They had to sign an agreement with the Department of Justice a consent decree saying we will never preferentially treat. NBC content on our networks for a period of years. For like five years. For five years. It's expiring.

And then it's good. Good. It's crazy. So Netta Trale is out the window. They can prefer anything. Even during the time of that agreement, Bloomberg is saying, hey, Comcast and its cable grid

puts CNBC up there and we are buried at the bottom of the list. Why can't we go up there either? They're obviously prefering themselves. And it's like, where do you go? Where's it up there? one pointing up. I don't know where you're talking about.

Channel grid on the whole guide. Oh, from listings? Yeah, so actually placement in those listings is hotly contested. And apparently not alphabetical. It's definitely not alphabetical. It's grouped. Placement in those listings is such, like, it's so conflict-ridden that there's a special court inside the FCC that handles these disputes.

So like the golf channel is like suing some tiny cable company. This sounds like old people stuff. Yeah, right? But this is why you don't. This is why the internet's better because you're just typing the thing you want and it comes to you at the same speed. Let them merge and be old together and make bad old person decisions while I watch Twitch. Yeah. But you don't want AT&T to slow down Twitch because it's owned by Amazon, which competes with HBO.

Let them do their bad old people thing so that they can die off as a company quickly. But AT&T is not going to die. because Direct TV's channel listings are preferred, right? They're going to continue to succeed. And the issue is Amazon and HBO compete. So, AT&T on its mobile network, it wants to punish Amazon. If AT&T gets, well, for one, I'm not AT&T subscribers, so they can't really do it right now. But if they find a way to get between me and my Twitch TV, I think Jeff Bezos will be there.

Uh, sorry. Paul, Paul. Verge editorial guidelines require you to refer to him as Swole Jeff. Oh, I'm sorry. Swole Jeff will probably repel from a helicopter and deliver to me my streaming content that I desire. Do you think? By a drone. He could buy a whole food.

Do you think he can't get me a 1080p stream? So what I'm saying is if you're 18T, you're saying, hey, Jeff, swell Jeff. Yeah. I just somehow have agreed to this term. J.B. Let me talk to you. You got enough money to buy his grocery store. Yeah. Give us some extra money to stream Twitch.

And he'll say, no, you don't make HBO pay that money. You just give it away for free. And AT&T's like, yeah, we own it. Whatever. Let them fight it out. They're old rich people. They can do whatever they want. No, that's bad.

That's terrible. That's why you don't want ATT to own Time Warner, because you don't want that fight to exist. They can fight all they want. But what's going to happen is that your, In the meantime, you don't get your Twitch TV. Right, until they pay. I think I'm going to get my Twitch TV is my theory. Based on...

The things I know, I get my Twitch TV, and old people fight about listing their stupid TV channels that don't matter. All right. Paul Miller's antitrust doctrine. Old people are doing stuff, but I'm still watching Twitch. Anyway, this is a... don't know how to impress upon the average human being that the AT&T Time Warner deal is a huge thing and that Trump is blocking it potentially out of spite or he's not blocking it and a bunch

of lawyers with like, you know, books and interest laws. That appears to be not the case. What powers does the president have to direct the Department of Justice? Well, do they work for him? Yeah. That's part of the executive branch. So what's interesting is before Trump took office, a lot of people were like, I hate this idea, but it seems legally okay because they're not competitors, so not merging and

consolidating power in the market. That's their vertical merger. And now the same person who said, this is probably fine, is the head of antitrust of the OJ, and he's like, we should block it. And it's unclear why he's changed his mind. Peter Kofka wrote a great article and re-cote about it. It's out there. And I think what is particularly note an interest to verge cast listeners is this is going to be very distracting for AT&T. AT&T's desire, Verizon's desire, to Comcast's desire, is to capture media companies and then use the media company content to differentiate their products, which is a fair desire.

It is not to compete on quality of service. So Verizon's desires to own AOL and Yahoo and whatever, and then track all your activities across the entire web and build an advertising business to compete with Google and Facebook. Maybe you like this, maybe you don't. One outcome is that they've signed a huge deal with the NFL, and now you cannot stream NFL content on any mobile network except Verizon's mobile network, which is super annoying. AT&T's desire is to buy Time Warner and have Game of Thrones stream for free,

HBO stream for free, CNN stream for free on AT&T networks, and you have to pay through the mechanism of your data cap to stream on any other network. ComcastBot NBC literally prevented from doing those things. The consistent analysis is it's basically two different companies. They just share some leadership, but they operate completely independently. The conditions will expire. It will be very fast for Comcast to start doing things like preferential streaming of NBC content. I think all of that's bad because in the middle of that is they are all competing with Amazon and Netflix,

and they will do bad things to deteriorate those and promote their own services. via the mechanism of their networks. I think that's when the net neutrality debate is going to come to its conclusion because nobody wants that. And Netflix is very good at making that argument. The end. That's my merger story for the day. There's another one out there which is much more boring.

Broadcom. Broadcom wants to buy Qualcomm. Qualcomm's fallen apart. Yeah, Qualcomm's all the part. The immediate reaction to Broadcom among everybody else who was, isn't a tech nerd? was like, what? And then among Technors, it was like,

they make crappy modems. I don't understand. They make other stuff. They've got the money to try and buy Qualcomm. How could they be more? They're not. They're a little bit smaller, but they know Qualcomm is failing. The only thing that's super interesting about this is Broadcom

literally moved its headquarters to the United States, and the next day they're like, we're buying Qualcomm. Oh, wow. They moved in, they opened their doors, like, Qualkom! Come on over. Maybe they can call the new company Comcom. All I want is...

That's the end of the Vergecast, everybody. We're done. Somebody made the joke that all we want from Broadcom and Qualcomm is to agree on how many Ms belong in the word com. Because they each have a different answer to that question, and it's very annoying. I always type in both with two. Oh, that's the worst.

All right, that's it. Like I said, a lot of little news this week. But all pointing at big things. What about the Xbox? Oh, Xbox one Xbox. Xbox one, Xbox one, Xbox one. The most recursive name in history. It came out.

We had it on Sugar Breakers Live. We did. I will say this. That shit is hot as hell. Like, I don't mean like good. We had to stand behind it while it blasted. I mean, it was so hot. Megan was wearing a necklace, like a metal necklace.

And the necklace got like warm to the touch because the Xbox 1X blasts so much hot, hot air out of it. It was like uncomfortable to stand near. Yeah. So that's something to keep in mind. also I don't know maybe maybe I'm dumb but it just feels like what is the point of a console anymore

to have it and then play games yeah no you're that I'm I'm I'm team console I am not going to deal with building a PC I am not as serious a gamer as you I just want to play my Horizon Zero Dawn I want to play my Doom and I want to not have to think about it and a console like that's its entire

purpose is to let me play games and not have to think about it I love that but that's the thing is they're trying to make you have to think about it. Like, well, do I get this one? So it runs at 30 frames per second 1080p, or do you get this one? So it runs at 60 frames per second 1080p? Or what if it could be in 4K60?

I don't, you know, it's just like, I feel like right now should be like the glory times of a console where the consoles are getting a little old, but the games are so optimized that you get, like, They're coming fast and quick and great. And instead, we're just still, it's all about specs, which is what PCs excel at. Yeah, Eli, how many lights on the Xbox OneX? Just the one.

Okay. Atmos. The No Vision. I know, Dan keeps giving me TV boxes to review. Like, I have a new TiVo. The F is that, man. Thanks, Dan. The TiVo app, by the way, in the iPhone 10.

Pure garbage. Really? They never updated it for the iPhone 6 screen size. So it's like it's the wrong screen size, but zoomed. It's just an incredible mess. That's the whole review. I'll publish a review. Whatever.

It's nice. It's pretty blah, blah, blah. The app is a hot mess. And that's it. It's been a long episode. Lots of little news. We're in that moment where all the stuff is out. It's holiday shopping season.

Yeah. The news is going to be up and down here. It's time to spend time with your family. Yeah. Go home and make a ketchup sandwich for your mom. Just like she used to make for you. I do want to say 280 characters on Twitter is fine. It's fine.

It's coming handy a couple of times. Every day I'm like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to like quit Twitter and like a storm of hatred. But then I'm like, whatever. I don't want to be a part of a mob. The Twitter story. It's just there and I can't get rid of it. That's it.

There's a lot of stuff in this world that, The Verge is making right now, I implore you to watch and read and listen to all of it. So like I said at the top, Ashley and Caitlin got a great new podcast. Why did you push that button? Go listen to it. It is rocketing up the charts. It's just the best. They're also taking audio messages now. So people are like recording voice memos about their own button stories. They're going to do a holiday spectacular. You can email them at a button at the verge.com. Yeah. Check that out. It's just so great. It's one of my favorite things. Lauren Good, who is on the show today, is doing Next Level. Go watch next level. Lauren's also got a podcast.

Caras Swisher called Too Embarrass to Ask, which is wonderful. Kara Swisher has a podcast called Recode Decode. Peter Kafka has a podcast called Recode Media. All those are great. Part of the Vox family. There are no other podcasts in the Vox family worth listening, especially not Ezra's Klein's. What does Ezra Klein produce?

I'm just interested. You just want to know. You just want me to say the names of his shows? I'm just curious about other ships. They're not, whatever. They're fine. Neil is just mad that this is called the Vergecast, and Ezra's show is called the Ezra.

Klein show. It's really irritated. Oh. Anyhow, there's tons of wonderful Verge and Vox stuff in this world to listen to it all. And there's lots of videos being made, just all kinds of stuff. We're doing

the Cirker-Baker Live show on Twitter. Which is a lot of fun. On Tuesdays, it's super fun. We're basically pairing things with Bluetooth and seeing how well it goes. We're just hanging out with gadgets. Medium. I would say we bring Ashley on to that show and for sure to pair Bluetooth things. And it goes about as well

as you expect every week for an hour. So watch that on Twitter. The replays on the site on Wednesdays. And then Russell, Megan and I are doing the Mr. Robot after show. We actually had Sam Esmel on the show this week. And we were on USA. We're on the TV. Real TV.

Great fun. So if you're watching Mr. Robot, check that out. And that is it. That is the Verchast. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code.