The Vergecast - Pixel 3, Pixel Slate, and Home Hub

Episode Date: October 11, 2018

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Dan Seifert went to Google’s Pixel 3 event this week in New York City. After the event, the trio, along with Paul Miller, got together for an early taping of The Vergecast to discuss Google’s product announcements and their first impressions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Hilton. Restaurant or room service? What would the boss do? Either way, the boss would choose Hilton Hotels and Resorts to get down to business and a little pleasure. Check out Hilton Hotels and Resorts. Travel like the boss. Hello and welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.mobie. Ooh.

It's a real whap browser kind of day here at the Verge. I'm your friend, Nelai. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dan Sievert is here again. I'm back. Why? Deeter Bohn.

Suspicious of Dan. I can tell you why Dan is here. Yeah. It's Google Day. Google Day. A day leaked for decades previous, but it happened. Google actually had its Pixel 3 event. Deeter and I went, Dan was there.

Can I tell you guys something? Yeah. With all the leaks, I probably spent about six hours trying to workshop a leak pun, and I got nowhere. It's really. I was really bleak, and I was like, oh, bleak, I could do something there, but I just, like, where does that? Where do you get the buh from?

Well, the front edge of the display leaked right over the top. No. Anyway, it happened. Google had an event here in New York. Can I just, first of all, for a disclosure, somebody used to work with us, Trent Wolby. Yes. Now is like, helps big companies put on events. He definitely helped with this event.

So, like, that's my disclosure. But regardless to Trent, who's our buddy, the event was super fun to be it. Yeah, I will say, though, that Trent being our buddy and also being there at the event did not help us in any way get any seating access or anything before anybody asked that question. In fact, it was quite distracting because he kept on coming over to hang out. Apparently he had nothing to do,

so you just stared at us the entire time. We're like, we're working, buddy. I was watching this live stream and they had this moment where they, like, open these pods and the devices all slid out, and everybody was taking pictures. Did you guys get any sweet shots in that world? No.

So I was actually in the worst possible seat. I was doing photos for a live blog for anyone that didn't know. And I was in the worst possible seat for those pods. They were literally two rows behind me. Wait, let me just back us up. I couldn't go. We're so deep in the weeds.

Google had an event in New York City. Three of us went to it. They announced devices at these events. Trent Wolby was there. Our friend Trent was there. But they announced the Pixel 3, Pixel 3 Excel, the Home Hub, and the Pixel Slate. Yes. That's it.

And just as Neil I did just now, they announced all three things fairly early. in the event. They just went for it. And they just wait to find out what the heck they were talking about. In the moment that Paul's talking about, one of the dumbest, I just complimented to this event. It was a delight. It was a good event. But the moment that Paul is referencing, that Dan is referencing, was one of the dumbest pieces of staging I've ever seen, which was there are like huge columns cut at 45 degree angles, like scattered throughout the seating area, which was basically like couches and chairs and pillows. Yeah.

And Rick Osterlo, who was doing the event, was like, and here they are. And then like the tops of those columns like slid open and all the devices rose up on platforms. And then there was chaos because everyone was trying to like get a photo or look at them. And he was like, a couple seconds more. Guys, excuse me, everyone. Then they started going away. They were out for less than 30 seconds. And he was just like, yeah, there they were.

Pay attention to me again. So what was funny about this event was that was the only time that the physical devices were shown during the whole presentation. Nobody on stage had devices. They must have been holding a phone at some point. Really? Nope. I'm trying to take photos of them. Nobody pulled a phone out of a pocket.

Nobody held up a new product. Everything was done on these giant screens behind the present. Wacky. It was a lot. Anyway, so we saw all the things that were leaked. Yep. Dieter, you did a long exclusive video with the pixel slate. Yep.

Which is pretty cool. Do you want to start there? Do you want to do the phones first? Whatever you want, man. We could talk about the cloud that weighed upon this event. Oh, you're discussing the Google Plus security exposure. Yeah. That occurred.

Yeah, not a breach. Not a breach. An exposure. Potential exposure. That's a lot. It was enough of an exposure for Google to be like, we're closing Google Plus. Yeah, Casey's headline in the interface, and he's loaded the community every day, was the bug that killed the social network.

Yeah. Never has a bug been so serious that it has destroyed a product completely. Although it wasn't serious enough of a exposure for them to tell anybody for like six-ish months. They discovered and closed it in March. And then so the TikTok here, we're going to get to the phones, but this is hanging over some of this stuff. The TikTok here is they discovered in March. And the vulnerability, the exposure to whatever is there was an API that allowed app developers to grab profile information from. your Google Plus profile, including like your age and your location, your home location,

or, you know, a couple things like that, like where you say you lived or whatever, your city, and grab that information for your friends, even if you had marked it private. Yeah. So it was a bad API. And we've seen stuff like this specifically with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. So they found it and they closed it down in March. And then they told nobody. They made the decision that like, well, look, we dump our logs every two weeks.

So we don't know if anybody actually access this data. If anybody could access data, we suspect it's fewer than I think it was like a half a million people or something, some small number. And nobody uses Google Plus anyway. So there's probably nothing going on here. But they chose not to disclose it, which may or may not have been a good call. I tend to think it was not. And then the Wall Street Journal got a hold of a memo where somebody described this whole process and the decision behind not disclosing it and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so they wrote the story.

And then like a couple hours later, Google came out. I was like, yeah, no, we're shutting Google Plus down because nobody uses it. And the lines about how extremely no one uses it were hilarious. So, like, 90% of sessions are less than five seconds long, which is like, oh, Google Plus is still going to close that down. So it was hanging over the event like Cloud. They made no mention of it directly. But indirectly, they did. I'm sure they wrote the keynote script before this, but I was talking to Vlad about this a lot.

Because one of the things that's interesting about the camera is they didn't really talk about tech specs. I talked about AI. But they didn't get into the stuff for a good 15 to 20 minutes, it felt like. And Rick Osterlo, who runs hardware, got up on stage and basically gave like an apology, a defense of what Google is and what it means. And like Google is here to help you. And we use machine learning to help you and like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like gave a whole bunch of examples and ran through like really rapid fire, like all the stuff that Google. stuff that Google does for you.

I wrote down this list. These are the three things that Google does. Okay. One, your own personal Google. Yeah. Two, your security. Three, digital well-being. Yeah.

Those are somehow the foundation of how Google does things. Yeah. Somehow. No. They also like licensed help by the Beatles. Yeah. And played a long video set to help about like maps and search and YouTube. Right.

That's your own personal Google. Is that fold into your own personal Google? Can we just not use this phrase because all I'm just going to have to listen to Depeche Mode. Yeah. Someone to be your friend. So there. But the reason I'm telling this story about how they tried to like re-contextualize Google is one, they want to, you know, make you think of it in that way and not think of the, you know, the Google Plus, basically. They don't want Google Plus on your mind.

But two, Google's entire sales pitch for Google hardware is we are so good at this software AI cloud stuff that we build all of that smarts directly into our hardware. And there's a direct link between the good feelings you have about the rest of our software stuff and the good feelings you should get out of the hardware. Yeah. And so if everyone walks into that room and I was like, oh, Google, what do I think of Google? Well, I think of data breaches and I think of them not showing up. up to Congress and I think of, you know, they're getting closer to being in the Facebook

zone of how I feel about a company right now. And, oh, they're also announcing a product. Yeah. Then you end up with what happened with Facebook and portal. Exactly. So they had to avoid that problem. And so they had to start with like, remember Google? You like us.

We're nice. So Casey wrote about this in the interface yesterday. You should go read the interface. Roach.com. Sless interface. Casey's not here to plug it, but I'm doing it for him. I had actually had a conversation about after the event yesterday about this. Google, they had to do it, and I agree they had to do it. It felt very ham-pisted, though. So I disagree about that.

Okay. I think this was Google very clearly articulating its value to you, the job it does for you, the user, right? Like, Google is a set of utilities that you use in your life, and they just keeps, they keep sincerely trying to make them better. That was Casey's lines. They keep sincerely improving these things in a way that does not feel like they're gamifying the product or they're trying to boost engagement. Sometimes it feels that way with YouTube, but, right, for the most part, Google Maps does not try to suck you deeper into Google Maps. Like, it helps you get where you're going and you're done.

Google search, you can argue about whether on mobile too much of the top of search results are populated by Google products, but then there's the list of links and you click it and you leave Google and you're gone, right? Like, the products are not trying to drive engagement in that way. And even photos, it's just your photos. Yeah. If you're just engaged with your own stuff. And their one attempt to build a product that was driven by user growth and network effects to compete with Facebook was such a spectacular failure that when they had a buck, they'd shut it down.

I don't think Facebook has that utility argument. Like the job Facebook does for you is not perceived as valuable. And Facebook does do a lot of jobs for people. Facebook events are a big deal. Marketplace is an economic powerhouse. Knowing how to get out, like, I'm going to find this person. Stalking people. But also, like, I want to send this person.

person to message, I don't have their email address. There's like a better than even chance I'll find them on Facebook and I'll take a shot at sending a message on Facebook. Sure. Finding my family. Like, blah, blah, blah. There's a bunch of utilities. Facebook's brand is so toxic that the utility can't overpower it.

Right. I think Google is doing a pretty good job of saying, here's the value we provide to you. We can articulate it. Right. Our brands stay strong because you actually love, you love these products. Yeah. And then you should buy a phone that encompasses all of them or a little, a tiny little display for your bedroom.

Oh, God. We made an alarm clock, right? So I think that was what they set up. So I agree, like, you could have read that as hand-fisted. And, in fact, when I was talking to Casey about this yesterday, he's like, I don't want to write a story that just, like, re-articulates their marketing. Yeah. He's like, all these companies do the same thing. They just market themselves differently.

My argument is, I think Google is just like a bunch of, like, this event was, like, adorable. Like, there are a bunch of nerds who, like, have a big company. And they, like, they're just excited to show us their stuff. Like, the people doing the demos of the Home Hub when I did our video. the actual product managers of the software of the Home Hub, and they were just, like, bouncing up and down, excited shows. Like, I take that, you know, like, I think there's something real. Like, there's a sincerity there that comes out in the fact that the products are not trying to game you necessarily.

And sometimes they are. Don't be wrong. I can be very critical of Google, and I think the YouTube stuff and some of the search stuff is worthy of extreme criticism. Yep. I don't think they should build drones for the government. Like, I don't think they should go to China. Like, there's a bunch of stuff that's worth being extremely critical about. Casey articulated it really well in the newsletter.

I'm not going to do it as well, but it basically, Google provides you the very easy value that you can see. People see the value in Google's products, whether it's maps or search or whatever, that Facebook doesn't provide. Facebook provides entertainment, but then it also provides all this other headaches along with it. And so I think, you know, part of this conversation is, you know, we're not Facebook, but it's also, I think, calculated to, you counter the arguments that Apple makes that Google just wants to harvest your data and sell your data and is a data collection company. Oh, I mean, Apple's going to make that argument as hard as they can. That's a great argument for that. It's a great argument for Microsoft, right?

I think Google needs to cleave itself away from Facebook and say this is why it's valuable that we have all this data from you. So I think that's where they began. Here's the things Google does, as Paul is saying. Here's the list, right? Putting digital well-being on that list is like pretty wild because that's the anti-gameification. It's the anti-user growth stuff that they're doing to say, we're going to limit your use of these apps. Okay. Let's start with the phones.

Yeah. Pixel 3. Pixel 3, Excel. Yeah. Literally exactly is leaked. Yep. Were you surprised by one thing? Yes.

What's that? The quality of the screens. Oh, yeah. That is true. I was very surprised by the quality of the screens. All we know about them is that they're, you know, quote unquote flexible OLED. That doesn't mean the screens are actually, actually, they're flat and they're under hard glass. They're not actually flexible.

But, like, it's just a substrate that they use to, that they use to, it's, it's, more flexible. Anyway, we don't long argument about this history. They are very, very good. I think the quality

of the hardware overall is very good. It's a noticeable step up from the pixel two. It feels like way like way more of a premium device. So the back... What does a good screen mean?

What do you mean? Good color reproduction, good viewing angles. It doesn't look muddy and brown and the pixel 2xel did. Like that's it. The pixel 2xel,

there was a screen burn-in thing. Is that it going to be a thing or not? It was very concerning and I stand by by our decision to temporarily pull our review score until we knew what the deal was there. Number one, but number two, even setting that aside, the screen just looked bad. Yeah, it looked gritty. It looked gritty.

But, you know, I used it. I've used it for the entire year. And, you know, nine times out of ten, when I would look at it, I would feel fine and not have a complaint. But when I put it up against another phone, I went, eh. But they have this new thing called adaptive brightness on the pixel three. It's adaptive brightness and adaptive color. management. Oh, I'm sorry, adaptive color management.

The adaptive brightness has been around. So the color profiles, there's like, there's natural, which is just SRGB straight, which is they, you know, they say is like, me, fine. And then there's boosted, which is SRGB plus 10%. And then there's adaptive, which on some apps when I was looking at in the hands-on air is like, whoa, this is, this is a lot of color. And in other apps, it just looked totally normal. But the overall effect of it was it didn't get garish, but it just like, it just looked

better. And like, Paul, the other thing is like the basics of like viewing angles and I don't know. Yeah, I mean, rightness and such. Brightness. Paul, my answer to you would be just like pretty flatly Apple makes the best displays. Even when the iPhone was just LCD and everyone has always yelled at me about this, those LCDs were calibrated correctly. They showed colors naturally. They had great touch response. They had really high pixel densities. They had great viewing angles compared to The Samsung displays, which look beautiful, but I don't think, like, withstand any scrutiny. Like, you look at a Samsung display out of the box.

It's like, the colors are way too bright. The reds in particular can be insanely oversaturated. Reds and oranges in that spectrum can be wildly oversaturated. They just don't, like, look good. The Pixel 2 display last year, like Dieter was saying. The 2 is a different story. Yeah. The Pixel 2 Excel display last year.

The little one was a Samsung OLED, and the big one was an LG OLED. And that LG OLED just, it looked gritty. Like, it didn't have as tight of a pixel pattern. It looked like when you have a photo that's too dark and you raise the brightness in software, and it gets all noisy and grainy. That's what that display looked like. And then they had the color issue where they insisted that it was dead accurate out of the box, which did not seem correct.

and then they shipped a mode where you could turn off the SRGB calibration But then it would just do whatever the display felt like Yeah, so then the display was completely uncalibrated And that looked fine But it was still gritty And so this year it's natural

Which is calibrated at SRGB Which by the way Google If you're telling me that both these displays are calibrated SRGB they should look the same And they don't Like the three looks way better than the pixel in its normal mode Then there's boosted which is just like

I think Samsung It's not quite something, but it's getting along that line. Yeah, it's pushing it. And then this adaptive thing, what they said to us was we're reading the content that's being displayed and adjusting the... Yeah, it's not quite to the level of... They're not like scanning everything that happens on your phone and trying to match, like, oh, this is a puppy. It should be puppy colored or whatever. But they are...

The way the colors get displayed will be different based on some, like, machine learning stuff. So the example they gave is, like, we want to boost colors, but we definitely don't want to... to make faces look weird. And so if there's like a person in a field of flowers or something, the flowers might have more color, but the faces shouldn't is the way that it was described. Yeah, I have no idea how they're actually doing this without scanning everything through the display layer.

I'm sure that they just have like, here the colors of skin don't do anything to this. Yeah, it's like a list. I mean, it's Google. They're like machine learning did it? It's like, is the machine, did you just put a list in? Yeah. You just add, it's a list, right? It learned a list.

I got, yeah, it's very clever. So the display looks a lot better. We got to just, let's just start with this notch. It is quite the notch. It is so much bigger than I thought. I agree. I mean, there's been so much hate against this notch for basically since the leak started. I mean, I'm on the position that like once you pick up the phone and you use it,

the notch really doesn't bother me all that much. And what I do gain from that notch is more vertical space because if it didn't have that notch and it was just flat black across the top, housing the can. cameras and the speakers, it would be pushing the notification bar and the status bar down into where I can put content now. So like when I'm reading something like an article on my phone, which is what I use my phone most of the time for is email and articles. I get more stuff that I can see before I hit board.

Counterpoint. Look at it. I set down my pixel 2xel next to the pixel 3xel at the event and I opened up the same webpage on both of them and I tried very hard to convince myself that I was getting like even a single extra line of text on a web page, no, I was not. That's a crying shame. Maybe like half a line.

So the notch exists because they added a second front-facing camera. Well, no, no, no. The notch exists because they want to push the screen to the edges. They could have added a second front-facing camera and just made it a black bar at the top, just like a small one. But what they want to do is get the screen all the way up to the edges because Google's line is people who buy. big screen phones want as much screen as possible. Right.

And people who buy small screen phones are like, great, Bezels just get, I don't care. I'm a small screen phone buy. Like, the whole question here, Nick's actually writing a, Dick Stad's writing a good story about this right now, is did they justify the notch? So with the iPhone 10,

they justified the notch by saying you get all the weird face ID stuff. Plus we want a bigger screen. With every other Android manufacturer on the planet, they're like, we want a bigger screen. We're going to stick a little camera in there. It'll be fine. Okay, fine. With Google, they justify the notch for saying, we want a bigger screen, and we want to give you dual front-facing cameras.

Okay. I actually think that's a very dubious value. I am super not convinced by this widescreen selfie, but we'll come back to that later. Oh, I'm very convinced. Yeah, I know you would be. But no, for Google, it's the speaker. The speakers are supposedly 40% louder, and they're dual front-facing. And, like, they did that with the pixel two.

And I really think that Google thinks that's a thing that people care deeply about, at least, like, they're super-fam. I don't know. And so they really believe in having big, loud, dual front-facing speakers. Here's where that logic falls apart for me. Because the speaker that's up near in the notch is the earpiece speaker. Every single phone has an earpiece speaker. And Samsung is using that for stereo

speakers. The iPhone uses it for stereo speakers. What's different about the pixels is the bottom speaker is on the front of the device. Not the bottom edge of the device. Because there's a chin to go at the notch here. Right, but that doesn't have anything to do with the notch. Like, that's the

and that isn't related to the notch. So like you can get a Samsung note nine has a very loud, powerful stereo speaker system and the speaker at the top is one of those speakers. If they had just aligned these things just at the top and made the bezel smaller at the top. So it don't look like a silly face. Would all this go away? No, because it's huge. So this is what I was saying.

The reason the notch is there. What I really mean, like we all live, we've lived with the iPhone 10 notch for a year, the 10 S is here, the 10 R is coming out. out like, okay, here's a notch. Like, it's ugly, but you use an iPhone for a day and you just stop seeing it, right? And it only in certain moments do you perceive that there's a notch because it's relatively sedate, right? And it also houses like face ID. Like, it's this thing.

And like, beyond just a camera and a speaker, it also houses this whole authentication stack that happened. Yeah. Google's not just huge. It's just gigantic. Well, it's not just that it's big. It's that it's so tall. It's that like the curves around the iPhone 10, you know, you can, I'm sure that there's a million blog posts about this from fancy designers who looked at all of the special like, you know, math equations that create these beautiful curves that are better than just a straight, you know, round edge or whatever.

Yeah, the curve on the iPhone 10 notch never actually goes to vertical. Yeah. And any tangent line. I mean, they're great. You should read them all. If you ever want to be this sort of person who like sits around at dusk and like drinks a whiskey and reads about tangent curves, maybe out the only one. I highly recommend these blog posts. But like the notch on the pixel 3xl looks like you're looking at your phone and then

Gonzo came and he wants to talk to you real bad and so he rested his nose on your phone. It's a lot. Or it looks like the screen is doing devil horns. And then what I would say is on top of that, so Apple instructs developers, Apple itself says don't deal with the notch. Like it's just there. Don't call attention to it. Don't try to hide it. Although Apple, every one of its phone.

photos is a black background. And the email app hides it. A bunch of Apple apps hide it. Yeah. So whatever. But their official instruction is like, don't just like leave it alone. Like just leave our notch alone. Google, I would say, is pursuing a similar strategy.

But it's so huge that that is a mistake. Right. So Android should have, there's no software affordance for this notch. And the one that drives me the craziest just using it. They are going to turn. There's a developer option to get rid of the notch, and Google has tweeted that they are going to bring some sort of option for people to, like, get rid of the notch. I don't know if that's going to push the whole status bar down or if it will do something else. Well, so here are the three modes I saw yesterday.

Okay. One, and I think this is the one that is the worst. The two ears, little bunny ears on either side, are white, and the notch curves down. So there's like a horizontal line across the bottom of the notch. Yeah. You've got the two white bunny ears. And then as you scroll, there's no border between the bottom of the notch and the content you're scrolling. So it's just like a line.

So it just like crashes into the top of the screen. Yeah, I tried to describe this in the post and I couldn't. I tweeted a photo of it. You can see it. It just looks just like a mess. Then Google Maps, you can look at my tweet. I tweeted all this from the event. Google Maps trends the bunny ears transparent.

So more content scrolls up under that and the notch is over that. but then all the status icons and time and everything run into the Google Maps content. So that looks a mess. And then the third one is just everything, just everything scrolls. And that looks insane too. Oh, yeah, yeah. If you have words, like, if you're reading an article or something and your words are going up into the bunny ears. Yeah.

And they're, like, getting cut off in the middle of the sentence by the speaker, notch, whatever. It just looks openly insane. So, like, should they add a border? Should they, like, do a thing? like should anyone on the Android team maybe look at this phone. So here's the thing. The one little like image gets

crushed or like I don't even know like the curve is weird or whatever. That's like the one time I notice it. But just as with the iPhone 10, you stop seeing it. And I will point out that it looks way more egregious in photos than it does in person. Hard disagree.

It's just gigantic. I mean it is big. All right. Well, look. We'll get them. I haven't tried to buy one on the Vergecast. Get the small one. I don't, not going to buy it. The small one has no notch.

Small one's too small. The small one, so what's weird is like the big one other than the notch. Like these things, Dan, you were saying, they feel like super premium, right? They definitely feel like a step-up and build quality. They feel nice. The glass really help there. Build quality is better. The small one does feel like it's a step-up, but it's still, I'm just going to say it. It does not feel up to the, like, hardware build-quality standards of a Galaxy S-9.

No. Yeah, no. I mean, like, if Samsung's S9 is like 100%, this is getting to like 90 to 95% of the way there. 80 to 85. Oh, man, that's harsh. When you buy one, you can only pick Verizon or unlocked or Project 5. You can't pick any of the other carriers in America that exist. That's true.

You could, you're one crushing mistake, Google. You know what I love? I love that it's a Verizon exclusive because you can, it's also on Project 5, so it's not technically a Verizon exclusive. But Project Fi is such a non-entiful. It's not a real thing. It's also on Project 5. Black or white? Black or white?

Well, so the black apparently scratches. Yeah, so durability. These are now glass backs because that enables wireless charging and the pixel stand, which is a cool thing. But because last year's phones were metal and had a certain finish on them, Google tried to mimic that by etching part of the back glass on these new ones. And it basically gives it a matte finish, which feels like interesting and nice. It looks really cool when it's brand new.

but A, it's super slippery, so these are like... We don't know that yet. Pretty slippery folks. You don't know that. The hands-on area, they feel pretty slippery. And then apparently they get scratched up very easily, especially the black ones. We saw pictures from yesterday. Yeah, Rod Amadio tweeted some stuff from the demo area that had some scratches on it.

And then they're glass. We know what happens with glass. Like, glass is not a friendly material if you're worried about scratching and shattering and stuff like that. Every phone is glass now. every phone scratches. Should we talk about the camera? Snapchat at 845 storage. We got to talk about the camera in price.

Snapchat 845, is it 4 gigs of RAM or 3 gigs? 4 gigs of RAM in both models. And then you get 64-128 for your storage options. And that's it. Yeah. 799 for the little one, 899 for the big one. Yeah. Well, the little one is a jump.

150 bucks more than the little. We've got to get to the camera, okay, but now we're talking about the price. I am disappointed that it costs more. It costs more than the iPhone 10R. I'm disappointed that it costs that much more. If it was a $50 price hike, okay, sure, it's a nicer phone, it's improved year over year, whatever. It's $150 more. That's a lot.

It's too much. You were saying this yesterday. If you walk in the store and you see the 10R and you see this, you're like, why would I take the smaller screen? Yeah, like, you know, people who are very into this will know why they want a pixel. But Verizon is going to be selling these. It's going to put promotion behind them. It's going to put marketing behind them. It's going to have a stand in a display in a store.

It's going to train its sales reps. But it's also going to be selling the iPhone 10R for $50. less, which has a bigger screen, five colors, it's a new iPhone, blah, blah, blah. I just, I find it very hard to believe that any normal consumer walking into a Verizon store and presented with these two options is going to go with the pixel. You get a Verizon Wireless.com and the pixels on top of the screen. Yeah, that'll last, that'll last another day. When they were like, Paul, do you want a pixel?

Walk into this basement. Paul, what do you think of the pricing? It's terrible, but it feels like it's a discount because I'm comparing them in my mind to the 10S. Fair. So it's like, oh, well, they managed to make a good phone with possibly the best camera on the world for $200 less than Apple did. So I guess they're winning. You know, like, I do think the specs are, I'm guessing that processor is, it's not going to be

competitive. That it's not competitive on the tennis, right? It's not going to be as nice of a build quality. It's not going to have stainless steel frames. The screen is not going to be as good. We've already gone over this. the processor like you just mentioned so like we'll see if the camera is as good

we haven't been super thrilled with the 10S camera so far so it has a very good chance of being better but there's like I get why it's not as expensive as a tenant my thinking right now is I'm going to wait for you all to review it and then I'm going to probably buy a pixel 3 small

ooh making the switch here's what I'm going to tell you you're switching yeah wow Best Buy is selling the S9 64 gig S9 unlocked for $570 like right now. That's bonkers. With the same processor, same amount of RAM,

micro-s-E expansion. But does it do call screening? It does not. That's actually the coolest feature. That isn't very interesting. I'm going to screen everybody. Eli, you call me, you're going to get screened.

I'll take it because it's fun to talk to the robot. I'm sick of these spammers. So we did this at the event yesterday. Yeah, it was super fun. Dieter called me and I talked into it. And we, I live transcribe. You can see it on the screen transcribing the text. It's amazing.

Are there any other pixel exclusive features? Duplex is coming where it can call a restaurant and make a reservation for you. Yeah. That's not yet, but soon. A bunch of the camera features are pixel three exclusive, but not all, but most, but some, but not, but blah. And Paul is going to read off the list of amazing camera features that are being added to this new phone that just got announced. And as he doesn't, as he, in his best keynote announcer voice, rattles off these features.

I want you to have two questions in your mind. The first question is, is this cool or is this a gimmick? And then your second question is going to be, how would I feel? What would my answer be if it was LG with these words and not Google? So, Paul, please. Top shot, super res zoom, night site, playground, Google lens. And group selfie.

And that group selfie. You know, I should have that to my lips. There's a world in which this is some LG Samsung camera gimmick crap, and we all just laugh it out of the room because we have done that with many, many, many phones over the years. Okay, so let's tell the people what they are. Yes. Because the names are frankly ridiculous. Top shot. Top shot is you take a photo of a bunch of people.

When they're playing volleyball before they get in their fighter jets. Something. You take a photo, people are moving, or it's a group photo and people are like smiling. and it will burst the frames, and then it will pick one for you. Yes, and it's one shutter press. You don't have to hold the button down and do a burst photo.

And you can go back and pick the better one later. We forgot one. There's also a photo booth. Great. Everyone's favorite macOS 10 feature from 2004. No, it's cool. We'll get... I'm just doing it now.

In selfie mode. We tried it there. You point the thing at you and whoever else is in the frame And then there's a little bar at the top that like expands. And the closer you get to like everybody smiling, the bigger the bar gets. And then when it thinks it's a good photo, it takes a picture. And so you just sit there and like stare at the phone and everyone starts making goofy faces or whatever.

And it's like a video game. You're trying to get the bar to get big enough to actually take the photo. Oh. Okay. I didn't. So that means there's a Google algorithm that they've been trading for, I always love visualizing these algorithm trading. Like funny. It's called what is?

funny. There's a Google robot watching hilarious videos of Pratt Falls and the three stooges. And then I run back in there and they're like, I don't know, Emily. I think the algorithm isn't quite right. And it's like, it watches another episode of that is funny as some videos. No, but so mentioning Top Shot and Photo Booth together, they're both using that same thing that they learn from clips, which is like, we think we know what a good photo looks like. And if it looks like a bad photo, we'll tell you and we'll offer you a chance to get a good photo.

Yeah. So that's cool. Yeah. Into that. Do these top shot photos, does that whole role of them stay on the phone on your 64 gigabytes of? Not only does it stay on your phone, it all goes to Google Photos. Because you have free Google Photos storage. So it's forever.

It all goes there. And then you can go back afterwards in Google Photos and pick another one. Yeah, it's not like you have to like scroll through all the shots. Like you see one image, you tap it and then you say you view the other shots that are available. And what of Google's like pieces of shade that they like to throw is that when they do, these burst shots, they keep all of the shots, and they're all full resolution images that are stitched together. It's not like a little movie where there's a bunch of low-res ones and then one main

central one. They're all like co-equal photos. You just have to pick what you want. They all run HDR Plus, the whole thing. Then there's NightSight, which we did not see. We saw some demo pictures of. So this is a new mode of the camera. It's not in the regular camera mode.

We're basically, at this point, what all these companies are doing with HDR is just variations on a theme. So the standard pixel HDR technique is they take a bunch of under-exposed photos and stitch them together. Apple's riff on this is they take a bunch of under-exposed photos, and then they add one over-exposed photo. Google's version of NightSight is they stitch together over-exposed photos. And that gets them far better low-light performance. It remains to be seen how well that's going to work. We weren't able to demo, but they showed us some photos.

It's interesting that it's a different approach than, say, like, Huawei does with the P20 Pro, which Wallway's attempt to do this night brightness type of thing is to shoot a very high resolution photo I believe its camera takes 40 megapixel photos and then it down samples them down to 10 megapixels and uses data from four pixels to create one pixel and 10 megapixels. So Google's using multiple images technique and a computer to figure it out.

Huawei's using more resolution. Interesting. So we'll see how good it is. We weren't able to see that. It's also not going to be available at launch. I think next month or later this year, it's going to be available. NightSight is coming to the older pixel phones,

though, which is cool, right? So this is not something Apple does with its cameras at all, but the pixel phones, I've got the picture of the visual core, which is their little co-processing made with Intel. Because that's in the pixel two, they can take some of these features and bring them back to the other phones. I think that's just super cool. Like Apple's like,

Animoji only works in the iPhone 10S because we have to run our processor at its fastest speed and connect to the bionic ultra-core. And it's like, really? Because it's just a I'm very dubious that I'm going to like night sight, night shot, night mode. The dark night night. They're so bright they look fake to me.

Then they're super res zoom. Super res zoom is technically amazing. That is cool. We played with that. When you zoom into a photo, it uses the discrepancy in the images produced by your hand jittering. Because it's doing these burst shots. Yeah, because the shutter's just running a whole. whole time. So as your hand moves, it can detect the discrepancy in pixels, like the wobble

between two frames, and then use that discrepancy to fill data back in. Yes. To fill detail this is, this is Google's reasoning for why it didn't put a telephoto lens on the camera, was that we can do it better with super res zoom. Yeah, they are wrong about that. Just to just be completely flat, like they are not correct that making up pixels is better than just capturing them with a real lens. I mean, I'm very, excited to see these comparisons. But that said, you know, we've seen a lot of phones with these telephoto cameras. They always have an inferior sensor and an inferior lens because you can't get a telephoto

lens and sensor down in size to fit into the phone. So you've got a worse lens, worse sensor. So the images from a telephoto camera have an iPhone or out of an LG or something or whatever, always worse than the main camera. And this is not like they're super zoomed in either. Right. They're only a 2X zoom. But Google says it's doing this at a 2X zoom.

but and then when you're indoors the iPhone and every other one doesn't even use the telephoto it just crops it digitally anyways so like I can see Google's reasoning here Super Res zoom caps at 2x it starts doing the effect at 2X but it goes further right

you can zoom it further but I mean like this has been a frustration of mine forever I'm not trying to be a sports photographer here but there's sometimes what I see a really cool thing that is fairly far away and I want to zoom it on it so and I don't need to have a magazine ready photo, I just need something that is, like, intelligible.

So what Super Res. Zoom does, and at least how I understand it, is that at 2X, you should not know, perceive a quality difference from 1x. Once you go beyond 2X, then you get into, like, your digital zooming, and you are going to start to notice that it's a digitally zoomed photo and you're going to have a loss of resolution, etc. The algorithm takes the wheel. It takes a wheel, but, like, it can only do so much, right? So, like, if you're trying to get a 7X zoom out of this, it's not going to produce a great-looking

7x zoom photo. It'll be better than 7X zoom on a phone that doesn't have this feature, but it's still going to be inferior to a wide angle photo. All right, so I have two things. One, I want to go back to my question. Is this like cool or is this just a bunch of gimmicks they threw on top of the same cameras last year? It is. I mean, we need to review it to actually see photo quality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think Top Shot is a smart thing.

As a software update, it sure does not bolster their argument to raise the price by $150. Yeah. I mean, it's so hard. We haven't done the thing that we need to do, which is like take a thousand photos, get James Barram in his big pro display and look at it. It's so hard to tell, but just playing with the camera yesterday,

it is super consistent. Yeah. And my huge complaint about the iPhone 10S camera is that it is wildly inconsistent. It's also there's the reasoning for these features to exist is also sound. Top shot fixes the problem of someone blinked in the photo and you missed it, or, you know, they looked goofy or whatever,

and it gives you an alternate one because it captured a whole bunch. We've seen that feature before. Sure. Google's implementation is probably hopefully better. That's what we have to prove out. We have not talked about the wide angle selfie camera, which is a true delight. My second thing is...

The whole time I was like, yes. Somebody thought this through. I'm pissed about this camera because it's the reason we have the notch, number one. No, it's because you just did the whole thing about speakers, seeing more content. But like if they hadn't put a second camera, they would have figured it out without the notch.

They just spent an entire keynote talking about how they can do all kinds of insane things with software and machine learning to a single lens on the front. But on the selfie front, on the selfie side, they can't figure out how to just put one wide angle lens in there and then just make it look normal with software. Like, so they need to,

they need two in the front to just, for a wide angle, they can't figure that shit out with software? If you ask Google, they'll say they need good quality to hardware to start with before they can even get anywhere with their software tricks, right? The problem is the front facing camera has to be physically smaller, and the lens has to be physically smaller. So it is a inferior quality camera to begin with. And so, like, when you say, like, what you said,

like, just have a wide angle and then, like, have a mode where it just crops in or whatever, you know, I could see an argument that, like, well, that's not going to give you as great of a quality image, because we are starting with an inferior sensor and lens, and now you're propping in on this inferior sensor in lens. So if the back camera is a 1.0, 1.3 quality, you can multiply the quality of it by, you know, adding software.

But if you start with something that's like a 0.5, there's only so much multiplication you can do, the law of fractions. Exactly. That's not how math works, just to be clear. What just happened in your brain? What? What? What?

What? Never mind. That's great. Okay. Yeah. So that would be like the reason. The other thing is that, you know, it doesn't have dual pixels, um, autofocus because it is an inferior sensor.

Um, so in order to do good portrait effects, you kind of need two lenses because it can't do that trick that the back camera does. Yeah. But it's in the service of, they identified a problem that real people have with their phones and solved it. It is far, if you're going to add another camera to your phone, I would say adding the wide angle to the front is more useful and will be used more often

than the telephone on the back. There's there have been phones with wide angle front cameras for years. HGC used to talk about this all the time. They hired everybody from HGC. They spent a billion dollars. They have every HCC trick. They even do the thing where you flip the phone over and it goes into shush mode. Yeah, and you could squeeze the sides again.

Yeah, HGC's been doing that since 2006. They're like, a new feature! And like, someone with a Windows phone, is like, I don't remember us? It's all just, all we're doing is adding Windows phone back to our phones. Slowly but surely. What if next year they're on stage and then someone rips off a mask and I've been HDC this whole

time. Peter Joe is up on stage. Hello. I mean, it's going to happen. We did hear yesterday that this round of hardware is not yet the fruit of the HTC acquisition.

This is still the Google plan. Partners and ODMs. They won't really talk about them as usual. Yes. And then next year we'll get the... The full... Next year, they're just going to ship an HDC baking. It'll be the pixel ripe.

Or whatever it was. HGTC pure. To answer Dita's question about gimmicks or not, I feel like the metric is, will you actually use these? Will these create results that you will want to share with people? Will you end up rewinding through photos to pick a top shop? Will you super res zoom on things? and that gives you the special shot

that you're hoping to get so you can share with friends on some insecure messaging app. If these are actually used, I feel like that's what makes, because you can have a gimmick and it can sound like a gimmick and it can look like a gimmick,

but if you use it, it's no longer a gimmick. I think the top shot thing people will use, right? Like, you'll never see it. It won't be, it's not like an Instagram filter. Like you, you as the friend will never see

that your friend is showing you a top shot photo. You're just going to take a photo and it's going to show you some stuff. That's cool. Maybe you'll see a bunch of night sight photos on that ships. Like we just have to see how it works. I sincerely doubt we're going to see a bunch of like extremely digitally zoomed photos popping up on our feeds. I mean like not as like, you know, something that's a picture that someone's proud of, but like you will see them when it's like you're creepshodding somebody doing something weird on the street and you don't want to get too close to them or whatever. That's where you see those, right?

Wow. It's true. We all learn something about dancing. Yeah, look, I think the way the camera app works, Paul, is it says camera, video, panorama, and then, like, video, I said video. It says camera, video, panorama, and then more. And portraits in there somewhere, too. Yeah, that's what I was saying. Portraits in there.

Those are the ones people are going to use. Sliding over to Moore to pick one of these other lens, like, let me just ask you a question. Just, when is the last time you all saw Photosphere? Is it ever? Like, it's in that list. It's in the, like, Photosphere. list. Yeah, that's where you find night shot, night shift or whatever.

What is it called? Night bright? Oh, my God. These names are terrible. Can I just say, the fact that the night mode is based on the subtle, you know, jitters of your hand, why on earth did they not just call it night moves? That's good. They should have called it night moves.

All right. We're going to listen to an ad. And Dieter is going to rebrand every Google product. The camera engineer would be like, hey, what are you working on right now? Oh, you know, I'm working on the night moves. Wow. Okay. We're going to listen to an ad.

is dying. Liz is going to do this week in Elon. When we come back, we're going to talk about the charging stand, the home hub, and some other stuff. Listen to this. A decade ago, during experiments on board the Space Shuttle Columbia, Merck scientist Paul Reiker, discovered conditions that crystallize a specific protein. By studying these crystals, Paul and his team determined all new ways to improve the storage of structurally fragile medicine. devising life-saving drug delivery methods.

Paul is just one of many Merck scientists dedicated to Inventing for Life. See why we invent at Merck.com slash inventing for life. Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags, and everybody else, hello and welcome to this week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lepado, Deputy Editor at the Verge. It's been a kind of quiet week in Elon, thankfully.

But there has been some exaggeration going on. and I guess we should discuss it. So Elon Musk does like to exaggerate, right? Like his timelines are often wrong. They're too ambitious. And like the things that he says he's going to do, like he does some of them, but not all of those things. And I bring this up because on Sunday, Tesla published a blog post that said the National High Traffic Safety Administration tests show the Model 3, quote, has the lowest probability of injury

of all the cars the safety agency has ever tested. Okay. Except the thing is that the NHTSA says that's not true. NHTSA does not distinguish safety performance beyond the star rating, with five stars being the highest safety rating a vehicle can achieve. Thus, there is no NHTSA's safest ranking within the five-star category, the agency told Reuters. I bring this up because exaggeration seems to be a common theme when it comes to Tesla and Elon Musk. If you think about it, like when you kind of squint, like you can understand a lot of the stuff that goes on as being a product of exaggeration, of not just wanting to be good, but wanting to be superlative. right? Like, you know, in 2015, Elon Musk claimed Tesla's cars will drive themselves in two years,

and obviously that hasn't panned out, right? Like, in September, Musk emailed Tesla employees to ask them to test the first full version of autopilot, but no autopilot advances for self-driving were in the most recent version of the software, which was released Friday. Navigate, the first of these features that's supposed to be released to drivers is still, quote-unquote, coming soon. And if you, you know, look at Elon Musk's Twitter account, you can certainly see plenty of plenty of hyperbole, let's say, especially around the discussion of short sellers or people who maybe don't take the same rosy view of Tesla as Musk himself does, which, you know, sure. But this is part of the reason why there seems to be such a divergence in the way that people view Tesla, right?

The exaggeration. So you have this enormous rhetorical divide between people who are certain that Tesla is going to succeed and save the planet and people who are certain that Tesla is going to fail. And that divide only seems to be widening, frankly, even though people are generally working with the same sets of facts. So why is this? Well, you know, if you exaggerate and you're a Musk fan, like Elon's exaggerations aren't really that big of a deal, right? Like, if, you know, you really, really believe in the guy, you're like, yeah, he exaggerates sometimes. So what?

But if you don't believe in the guy, especially if you're a short, the exaggeration might be evidence of dishonesty. And then, you know, if you follow this line of thought, you're like, well, if Elon Musk is dishonest about the NHTSA rating, if Tesla is claiming something that doesn't exist, like, what else? What else isn't right? So that's kind of the nut of the problem. And like, you know, the reason I bring it up is that as part of the SEC settlement around the go-private debacle, Elon Musk is leaving the chairmanship of Tesla. And that's important because one of the main things that the board of directors does is it thinks about succession planning and it's like basically the CEOs like committee of bosses, which is no longer chaired by Elon, although he certainly sits on the committee of his bosses. And there's been some indication that James Murdoch is the person who might be moving into the role, both from the New York Times and the financial times, which puts Musk in kind of a tricky position because if James Murdoch does step into the role, he is the person who could potentially rein Musk in. And that might be good for Tesla, actually.

stopping the exaggeration and like letting the rhetoric cool down a little. But if the Financial Times is reporting is right, Elon Musk actually wants Antonio Gracius to sit on the board, which doesn't surprise me because Gracius has invested in a bunch of Musk's other projects and is more likely to be Musk-friendly, I think, than James Murdoch, who, well, is James Murdoch. Anyway, it's a thing to keep an eye on as this all develops because there's a short window of time for, you know, Tesla to figure this stuff out, per the SEC settlement, although the settlement window can be extended at request.

Anyway, stay tuned because it kind of feels like the call-in before the corporate storm. That's this week in Elon. If you want to hear more, you can certainly subscribe to my newsletter at theverge.com. I'm Elizabeth Lopato. Thank you so much. Thank you to Elizabeth. By the way, Elon Musk is killing, Liz. I don't know.

We talked to her every day. And I'm like, how are you? And she's like, Elon. And that's all she says. She doesn't have other words. She just says Elon over and over. again. Pixel charging stand. Yeah. So they made a charging stand in its vertical.

You put your phone. Wireless charger. You put your phone on it. Yep. It clicks over. It basically becomes like a fancy alarm clock from what I can tell. Yeah. Slash photo frame. Slash photo frame. It basically comes a little Google Home Hub. Basically. It doesn't have a...

That's what they want you to think. I have very serious doubts that the functionality of the pixel stand mode thing will be anywhere near as good as the functionality on a home hub. I mean, it's different... Possible reason. What possible reason is it not as functional? Well, for one, you have to have your phone on it, right? So, like, the instances where your phone is sitting on a stand are, like, basically two, right?

You're sitting at your desk and you put it on the stand. You're going to bed on your nightstand. You put it on your stand in charge, right? The desk one, you could be looking at it. The nighttime, you're probably not looking at it anyways, right? And then the UI for Home Hub is quite different than the UI that we saw presented when we would put the phone on a charging stand or what Google showed. So, you know, I see where Deeter's going. Anyway, so you put your phone on the stand.

Yeah. The reason it has to be Google stand and not any other, it's a Chi compatible stand, but they are authenticating your phone to the stand. It's very interesting, yeah. So they can't authenticate to other Chi chargers, which are just basically coils. This one, you put it on, it says, I know the stand. this one is in your bedroom, this is your phone, authenticates it, switches it in this mode, where it's showing you your data. That's pretty cool.

And then you can take it, and you can, like, put it in another room, and it still knows it's used. That's cool. Is this interesting? It's a wireless charger. I don't know. We'll see, like, what exactly you get in the mode. You were saying that other stuff is super LG.

This, to me, is the most Samsung. Why is that because Samsung has had wireless charging stands for, like, five years? Yeah, they've had, but this to me is, like, the one where it's like, you put it on here and, like, it turns into a refrigerator. Like, it's just like. I mean, it's just like. I mean, it is what Palm did with the pre when you put it on the touchstone. Yeah, WebOS 2.1 brought exposition mode, which allowed you to display data on your phone

when it was sitting on a touchstone. Anyway, so that's the stand. Yes. It's $80. It is a cut down version of what they are doing with, like, assistant on the home. And it will charge any wireless charging phone, but apparently it will charge the pixel faster. Right, because it knows it's you. It's like he doesn't care about fire.

I don't know. Then there's the Home Hub, which is just way smaller than you think it is. It is so tiny. Like all of us, we saw it on stage, we saw it presented, as soon as we saw it in person,

every single person's first reaction was, look how small it is. It's super small. It's a seven-inch landscape touchscreen. It looks like nothing so much as like a little Nexus 7 tablet, like clipped onto a base. Yep.

With a little bit of fabric around it. Yeah, it's like, Here it. Yeah, you want to take it off. Well, so the thing about it being small, first of all, it's so cute. And then it's like, oh, wait, I would be willing to put this as a night clock. But the other thing that I didn't realize watching the keynote was that the speaker on the home hub is actually inferior to the speaker on a standard Google Home. It's true.

There's only one speaker in it. The Google Home, if you remember, you can pop the bass off. You can see at least two drivers. Three, I can't remember. But there's more than one driver on the home. So Google does say that the home will have better audio quality. I got this wrong in the video, by the way. This is my apology to the watchers of our YouTube channel who were pouring over my every word.

The speaker fires at the back, not the front in the video. I said, there's a speaker down here at the front. I'm sure you all care so much. That probably affected so many purchase decisions. Anyway, it is super interesting because it does not run Android. It runs cast. Well, it... Which is just a weird thing for it to run.

The Lenovo Smart Display runs Android Things. So you can... No one knows what the difference is. You can put a smart display on top of anything, except apparently Android itself, because I don't think that's what's running when you put the pixel 3 on the stand. Yeah, that's, okay. $79. You've got a little stand.

You put your phone on it horizontally. And then when, you know, all their commercials for like stuff like Google Home is like, oh, your hands are busy, like loving your family. Like, you're hugging people or you're like preparing food. You know, you're always, I get it. Give you a reason why you couldn't possibly touch your phone because your hands are occupied. Yeah. So, but why can't that interface be on a phone?

And what, especially if the phone screen is like an inch and a half smaller than this home hub. It is on the phone, but it's not what happens when you put it on the pixel stand. It's on the phone. in the form of the Google Home app, which has been redesigned, and is going to look more like the interfaces on the Home Hub devices. Can you do voice controls for YouTube? Yeah, it's just Google Assistant. Yeah, well, yeah, Google Assistant is there.

So you are really looking at three platforms here, right? And some of the platforms run on top of the other platforms. So there's Platformception. There's Android, and it's little brother, Android things. Yeah. Then there is the home app in that interface, which runs on Android and Android things. Uh-huh. And cast, which is what the Home Hub runs on.

And then there's the Google Assistant, which runs on top of all of that. Which, yeah, it runs in the cloud and connects all. Right. So there's the assistant, which does the same set of tasks on every device. Then there's this new interface for the Home Hub and the Lenovo Smart Display. that looks almost exactly like the home app on an Android phone. So the Home Hub runs the new Google Assistant UI on top of Google Cast. And the only reason I'm pointing this out is because it is not the same as the Lenovo Smart Display.

It's just a different riff on it. But it's the same. It presents the same. It does all the exact same things. Except for one thing that it doesn't do that the Lenovo Smart Display does or the JBL or whatever. It doesn't have a camera. Right. That's the most interesting thing about this, is that it doesn't.

Well, that and the ambient display stuff, but yeah, but the camera. Right. So they, we saw Rishi Chandra, who is the head of this product, and he told us very directly, like, the design brief here is we wanted a product you could put in every single room without worrying about it. And that meant we cannot have a camera. We want this in your bedroom. We want this in your bathroom.

We want this anywhere in your house. And he was like, we figured you can make video calls for your phone, right? But that's what people do with a camera on these things. You can do that with your phone just fine. Great. Do that. And he said, nothing's going to stop us for making one with a camera in the future, but this one is supposed to go. The way to think about this thing is they made an alarm clock.

Yeah. Just like the echo show, echo spot. Excuse me, I got my echo spot. The echo spot is an alarm clock, but that has a camera on it, and that's probably the biggest fault of the echo spot. So if you're like me, you put tape or a googly eye over the camera because you don't want a camera staring at you while you're sleeping and you're changing in your bedroom. And I think it's super clever that Google realized that, A, that's a concern that people have. B, I think that, you know, for my experience, testing a lot of these displays is that there's this conception that, this notion that you would use these for video calls and that they'd be great for people with, you know, who are having kids and they want to talk to their grandparents and across the country and they want to make these video calls back and forth and things like that. And I thought that would be a great use case for my family.

In practice, they're not that great at them because they are like fixed in one place. You can't move around with them. They're not natural feeling. They're more confusing to use and set up and to initiate a. call than just someone using a phone or tablet to make a video call. So I think Google probably realize that, you know, maybe video calls aren't that great on these things yet. And it doesn't justify than putting in a camera which brings all these privacy concerns.

Yeah. But there is this new UI where you like slide it down and shows you all your house stuff. It's all coming through Google Assistant. Yeah. The new UI for Smart Home Control I'm very excited about because the UI for Smart Home Control that you've had through the Google Assistant before was like virtually non-existent. And then there's another pane in the interface. There's no home screen or whatever.

Like there's no app model here. It's just a bunch of voice commands and then showing you stuff. And then the home view pane. But there is a pain where you can click on and say, what can I do? And it shows you all the things you can do in categories. And you can either say them or Paul, I think you will like this. You can just tap on them and it will happen. So they finally started to bridge that touch voice divide, which I think is really good.

They had a really great line that I made sure to write down. about the home stuff. Many people have connected devices in their home and they don't even know it. Yes. Yeah. That's just nuts. That's terrifying.

They also said this is the first time you can see all of your smart home devices in one place. And it's like, I don't know not that. I feel like whoever the CEO of Crestron is. And also the irony is that you can't because unless you own all of Google and Nest products, you're not going to see your ring cameras on here.

You're not going to see Arlo cameras. you're not going to see anything that's like outside of Google's ecosystem right now. The Home Hub to me is a fast. It's, it is the, I think, the most closed product Google has ever made. Yeah. Right? Like, it doesn't have a browser. It doesn't have a bunch of open APIs.

Like, you have to, it's the one where you put it in your house and like you have to buy into Google ecosystem to make it more powerful over time. Yeah. Whereas everything else Google. The other thing they've made was, you know, a phone and a Chromebook. Like, very Googly, very open. Just like do your thing on it. You can put Linux apps on the Chromebook? Yeah, you can just, like, do anything with the Chromebook.

I don't know if the Chromebook runs the new... Oh, it does, because that's Android. Look, there's just multiple layers of Google platforms here that you have to understand. There's ChromeOS, which runs Android, which runs the home interface, which runs Google Assistant. Look, we all know that Fuchs is going to save us. They're just going to combine everything in FUCHS. So what I think is, like, most appealing about the Home Hub is I know the smart home controls are going to be cool and stuff like that. But I think people will really like it as a modern updated digital photo frame because it integrates with Google Photos really nicely.

It has a new mode that will automatically update the images for like if you say like, you know, update with fresh pictures of my kids as I take them as you back up your photos to Google Photos, they show up on this picture frame. And then it has this amazing mode feature thing where it detects the ambient light in the room. And just like the iPad, excuse me, the iPad and the iPhone and Max now will adjust the color balance. of the image on the screen to make it look as much like a photograph in a frame as possible. And the demos that they showed yesterday were really impressive. Yeah, they had

it under a hue light and they just kept changing a call of a hue light and they had it next to a printed photo and within a second or two, it would instantly change the display and it looked exactly like there was very little glare. It didn't feel like I was looking at a screen. Does your family

use Google photos? I feel like getting people off of iCloud photos on to Google Photos is as hard, if not harder. Just got you more painful. Root-Force it. Dan and I have children. It's very easy to get our parents to look at whatever photo service you want. Like, the baby is here now.

They're like, yes, whatever we need to do. So like, yeah. The rest of my family, they're all using I cloud photos and I just don't get to see pictures of my nieces and nephews. I just don't. See, because you're on the receiving end. Yeah. We're on the sending end.

So like, we're in the position of power. We can say, if you want to see these photos, you see them on the Google photos. I bought my parents a dumb Nixplay frame. which is like sort of fine. But it's not going to do the auto color adjustment. We want to do anything like that. You know,

auto updating you're going to have to use their app and blah, blah, but in terms of sharing, there's like an app on my phone than I ever used, but it installed a sharing extension in iOS.

It's like, I go through some photos, like hit the button, send it to an almost free. I mean, like, cool. But you know what Google Photos does? It knows my daughter's faces and it automatically creates albums of them.

And anytime I take a photo of my daughters and it adds them to those albums. I'm trying to curate a lifestyle here, man. It will just, refresh my in-laws home hub, right? Which is like, yeah, I just want to be a little bit bigger. It would be nice. It was a little bigger.

But I get, you know, people don't want a giant thing in their bedroom for sure. But even in a kitchen, like, you know, a lot of kitchens don't have endless counterspace. Like, I just reviewed the Echo Show. And the Echo Show has a nice big 10-inch screen, but it takes up a lot of counter space. You have to dedicate space to this and a wall outlet and all this other stuff. So I will say that it does not have any controls for Google Photos on it. You can flip through pictures. you can like tap the buttons to go back and forth,

but you cannot ask it which album to display you through all that stuff on your phone. Yeah. So like there's like a little bit of, this is very much a 1.0 product. It will clearly build that over time, which comes back to me saying, again, it's built on cast,

which is super interesting because you don't think of cast as being an OS that's going to support growth of an operating system. That's Android things, and it doesn't run Android things. All right So should we talk about the thing? 149 bucks

Bill are going to buy the hell Yeah it's super cheap It's going to be super hot this holiday season I'm sure Yeah I think people are going to buy the hell on it Yeah It's a good time to talk about Go ahead

Yeah exactly What if you think Dan is a big demo And that only thing that people want to do Is put a camera In all of their rooms Connected directly to Facebook With a giant 15-inch screen Right

What about that? You know what's great about this? My wife works for Oculus, which is a dividend of Facebook, and so I don't have to talk about this stupid-ass thing at all. The Facebook portal is 199. It's basically a little echo show with a camera that can make video calls and Facebook Messenger. Dieter, just say nothing.

It does run Alexa. That's why I said it's like a little echo show. Yep. It also is styled. That model for 199 is styled like an echo show. And then there's the, what is the one above it? The Portal Plus, which is $350. By the way, you got $100 off you buy two of these at a time.

The Portal Plus, I think Vergecast listeners know this. I'm a sucker for insane hardware. The Portal Plus is insane. It is an insane product that makes no sense, and is the only reason I would ever think about buying a camera. It reminds me of the new Surface Hub 2 and like scaled down. So it's a tall vertical column with a camera at the top. 15.6.

A 15.6 inch LCD that rotates from portrait to landscape on it. It's 1080p. And when you move around the room, the cameras follow you around. I think there's some really smart stuff there. Facebook, no one trusts you. Okay, well, we want to release a video calling

speaker display thing for people's houses. Okay, but nobody trusts you. Yeah. So we're going to make sure the camera follows you around the room. Okay. It's a lot. Just to reference Casey again, he put this in his newsletter. There's never been a tech product release where the instant consensus was no. Just absolutely not. I get that some people probably video chat using Messenger. Sure. It's a shame because I'm there on the no. Like I do not want a Facebook connected camera in my home. I've been not using Facebook services

nearly as much I use to, et cetera. However, you know, some of those problems that I mentioned earlier about using these for video calling are that they have a fixed camera. It's hard to get people in frame. It's hard to see the screen. The technology that they're using to improve the video calling experience, assuming it works as advertised, is actually really impressive and useful. If only, it wasn't connected to Facebook backend services. No.

This doesn't work with, like, WhatsApp? No. You can't make your IGTV videos with this? You know what you can do? You can watch Facebook watch videos. Oh, oh, finally. I've been meeting to discover how to watch Facebook watch. Instagram would probably never like to acknowledge this thing exists.

And yet they're the ones making vertical videos. All right. Well, I think we can all agree that this thing is a disaster and move on. But just note that Google was like, yeah, no camera. We want you to put it everywhere. And Facebook was like, the scariest camera ever made. Here's the thing. I think this is a disaster, but I want to be wrong.

I want to walk into homes and people just have these crazy screens. I want to walk out of that home. I mean, look, I said, you go look at a picture of it. I said it looks crazy. The little one does look like an actual show. The big one, straight up, looks like teleconferencing equipment. Yep. Like, if your strategy is for people across America and the world to install, like, a polycom in their ass, like, I don't know what you're thinking.

Why didn't they just say it was teleconferencing equipment? I don't know, man. Okay. Because I don't know. They wanted by Polycom, but they know the regulatory heat. If you had caught Casey's newsletter this week, another plug for Casey's excellent newsletter, you would learn that Facebook wanted to launch us back in the spring, but it couldn't because of the Cambridge Analytical scandal. So now it launched it in the fall amidst another scandal, which is apparently not as bad of a scandal to delay the launch again, which is just crazy. Jake came back from the briefing, and I was like, what is it with this portal?

And he was like, yeah, we asked about the scandal. and they were just like, wha-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-r. I'm going to be an ad. Paul's-ind-dust thing. We're talking with Pixel Slate. We're going to get out of here. This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by Hilton.

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Ooh. Yeah. Okay. So the June smart oven, which has been around for a little while, is partnering with Whole Foods. And so now Whole Food, you can buy food at Whole Foods and then bring it. And then the June Smart Oven. is already programmed to cook Whole Foods Foods.

So there's like, it's an over-the-air software update to an oven that adds an icon for Whole Foods Foods, and you push that button and then you get a list of it. One tap, Chef Developed Cook Programs will allow users to automatically make more than 30 365 everyday value products and other foods sold in Whole Foods market stores. I just like this as sort of, it's sort of a brand, synergy thing.

They've got June ovens, which are $800 are going to be in Whole Food stores. You control your June oven with Alexa. It's really this sort of end-to-end food experience that really feels like a corporation owns your whole life.

Yeah, it's like it's dystopian in the funnest way. Yeah. Like this is like Jeff Azos is going to get us to Mars and he's prototyping this. Like on Mars, everyone has issued a June oven in like a biofield.

It's just more efficient. Yeah. Does the June have multiple ways to cook? Or does it just like turn on at 350 for 10 minutes? No, the whole idea of the June oven is got a camera and then it does

like AI cooking. So it looks at what it's cooking and it has programs already developed for just basic foods. But somehow these are more chef developed and it's more curated for specifically foods that you buy at Whole Foods. You know what happens when there's a software problem with the oven?

That's coming. It's a June bug. Well, Deeter's conflict is no longer in effect, everyone. He's back on the podcast. Hey, buddy. It's good to see you. All right, Dieter. What?

Let's talk about the Pixel Slate, man. Oh, I forgot to say this about the Home Hub. It runs YouTube, which the Echo Show cannot. Yeah. It can be a cast point, so you can cast from your phone to it. Except? Netflix is not participating in this. They've locked out cast to the Home Hub.

For now, we're told, they're working on it. I don't know what exactly they're working on. Presumably they're busy putting the money in the envelope to give it to Netflix. You can cast Hulu to it. There are Spotify, Pandora, all that's a lot of order. It has YouTube TV, which is the thing everybody asks about. Can you cast Amazon to it? You cannot cast Amazon.

I don't think you can cast any Amazon. on video services to anything. So it's a cast point for many things, but you can't, I don't think you can say, just like, turn on YouTube TV. Like, I think there's no interface for that stuff. Right, there's not like a YouTube TV app on it where you can, like, scroll through a channel guide

and pick a show. You can cast it. Yeah. We're going to be reviewing it. We're going to answer. Final answers on all these questions. We got multiple conflicting answers about all this stuff yesterday because it's so wonky.

Like, I was like, can you cast to it from a TV? They're like, yeah, of course you can. And he was like, cast YouTube to my bedroom TV and like another TV across the house the little fake house started playing. I was like, that's not what I asked. He's like, but it's casting. Don't you see it's cast?

All right, Dito, the pixel slate. You were, this is all you. You were deep in it. So it is a 12.3, 12 inch Chrome OS tablet that feels nicer and smaller than the 12 inch, 12.9 inch iPad pro in some ways. It's just like lighter, you know. And it's a tablet.

And it's basically the equivalent of a pixel book, but it doesn't come with a keyboard. You have to spend an extra $200 to get the keyboard. So there's lots, I don't know, I didn't even know where to start. The hardware is very nice. The bezels are relatively small. The screen is LTPS, which stands for low temperature polychrystallin silicon. Polychristin.

Polychristin silicon. There it is. It's an LCD. Yeah, it's an LCD, but apparently the electrons can move 100 times faster. So it takes up lower power. It's 2K by 3K. I really like that aspect ratio. Do the electrons move at the speed of light?

So in a TFT display, it has an amorphous substrate. And so in order for the electron to go like, hey, light this pixel up, it needs to align the substrate to get through. And the substrate has to be like, a blah, and then it goes, oh, wait, come on through. And then the electron gets through. But apparently with a low temperature polychristolin silicone, it doesn't, it's not amorphous. It's firmer and solider. And so the electron can just shoot on through. And so it can go through 100 times faster, which.

which means it's lower power for higher brightness and higher pixel density. I guarantee you that that technical explanation I just gave you is dead wrong. Yeah. But we are going to have an explanation that isn't on Theverge.com in the near future. I'm just shaking my laptop lid here, waiting for the LCD blob to do something. It's not doing anything. All right. Go ahead. Whatever.

So, no headphone jack. No headphone jack. It's weird on a laptop. It's weird on a laptop. There are two USBC ports, which is nice. and they are shipping it with the dongle. For those of you who own pixel books, when I heard that there was no headphone jack,

the very first thing I said was, did you fix Bluetooth since the pixel book because Bluetooth on the pixel book is a disaster? And like, yes, yes, we did. We're sorry. But also they emphasize the speakers. The speakers are great. This is part of my new narrative.

These companies have figured out that no, people don't actually have Bluetooth. You know what I've been doing? Now that I'm living in the suburbs, so I'm in the house, often alone. I just, I don't even use headphones anymore. Same.

I just listen to my phone without headphones. Wow. This is the future. All these companies see it and they're just putting better speakers in their devices. Yeah. Because they can't be bothered with headphone jacks and Bluetooth is still garbage. So Android tablets are dead. Sorry, Samsung and Huawei.

Good luck with Dex. I'm sure that's going to be just fine for you. But Google's all in on Chrome OS, which also happens to run Android apps. there is some confusion about whether or not this thing is ready to be on a tablet. The stuff that I tried at Google's campus felt pretty, pretty good, not great, but pretty, pretty good. I do think that ChromeOS still needs a little bit of UI work, but there's also just been underpinning work. But I wonder if the reason that at the event, at the Google demo event where things felt and looked just a little bit janker in terms of moving windows around, was it they were on a different ChromeOS build, because, you know, there's three of them all the time, or maybe. maybe more. This is actually the biggest problem I have with this thing. We can get into the keyboard in a minute. They say it starts at $599. If you buy the $599 version of this tablet, I don't know what you're thinking or who gave you that advice. Don't do it. I do not think that anybody should buy this tablet unless they are the kind of person who would buy a pixel book and be willing to spend $1,000. Yeah. Because they've got like five or six different processor skews for this thing. It's a Celeron, Celeron, Celeron, M3,

I-5, I-7, so five. So the two low-end models are cellarons with four gigs of RAM. This explains why I thought it was slow yesterday. Well, I don't know what they had on the floor. But the two low-end models are cellarons. I think they only have four gigs of RAM, which is, you know, enough for if you're buying a $350 Chromebook for school or for just banging around in the house. But on a $600 device, unacceptable.

Yeah. Definitely the one I saw yesterday. I was like trying to just bang around switching windows. Vlad went to the London event that Google had as well, and he said the same thing. Yeah. So, I'm very excited by this device because I am that weirdo who is willing to spend $1,000 on a pixel book. And I think that this is more compelling to me than a pixel book in several ways. But unless you are that person who, like, believes and understands and knows how to use Chrome OS and really, like, is willing to spend the money on a really nice Chrome OS experience, you shouldn't get the $600 version.

I don't think you should get the $700 version. I think maybe the M3 will be fine, and that's $800. I think, yeah, but like, woof. And then, like, it doesn't come with a keyboard. So you've got to pay more for the keyboard. Now, the keyboard is cool. It's got flaps on both sides. One side, like, covers the back.

One side is the keyboard on the front. The one that's on the back, it folds down with them, and it forwards a little tent with a magnet, but the magnet can work at, like, multiple angles. It just sort of slides down smoothly, which is really clever. And it's got, like, stronger magnet, so it, like, clicks into the top and the bottom. And then the keyboard itself, very quiet, very nice. It's got circular keys because, bring up. Why not?

Yeah. Maybe it's not a little loose on your lap, but that would be fine. So I would rather have this thing that a pixel book, but I do not, I just, I cannot emphasize enough. If you're looking at the $600 version, go buy a $330 iPad and live your life. Yeah. Okay. Lapability.

You mentioned this in your video teeter, but I need details. Compared to like the surface or whatever. It's not as stable as a surface. So you remember the surface before you could like fold up the keyboard to attach it to the front of the screen? Remember that? You can tent up the keyboard to the surface to attach to the front of the screen and that has some stability. So this doesn't do that.

It's just, and it's a little bit the fabric that connects it to the keyboard connector is just a tiny bit looser. It reminds me of like the first generation surface and service pro before they added that. I think it's a little looser than that even, honestly. But like look, so if you're trying to balance it on like one leg, you're going to be whatever. But you put on two legs, you'll be fine. Okay. So two legs is fine. Yeah.

I mean, it's not like it's like floppy. It's just like there's like there's some play between the keyboard and the screen that you can get a little jiggle going. But when you tap the screen, it's when it's set down, it's really, it doesn't jiggle at all because it has a full tent behind it. So it just to me it felt really big yesterday. So it feels really big if you're comparing it to an 11.5 inch or the smaller 9 inch iPad. It feels very big. But it is smaller in both the X and the Y than a MacBook, 13 inch. And it's 7 millimeters thin.

So it feels big, but it, to me, it's in this weird zone where it's, once you start using it for a while, it, like, when you use like a 12.9 inch iPad, the thing is always big. Yeah. That thing is always, look at me, I'm big. You feel how big I am. It is just, look at me. This thing after a few minutes, after, you know, 15 minutes or whatever, it stops feeling quite that big. It doesn't feel like, du-d-d-d-de-d-d-d-big. It's still going to be big.

So, like, if you think that you just want a little tablet or, you know, whatever, don't get this. This is a straight up, I want to, I want this to be my next main computer. I am the kind of person that is willing to spend $1,000 on a Chrome OS device. So it's really interesting to me about that, and this is like, this is the big future of computers. Oh, God. Is the reason it's a desktop computer is not the keyboard or the flap or the screen size. I mean, the iPad is all that stuff. Yeah.

It's, it runs desktop Chrome. Well, and it has a mouse. or a trackpad. And it has a trackpad. But really, fundamentally, it's because desktop Chrome. And then everything else is Android, right? Like, the app model for this thing is the Play Store. Or maybe you'll be able to do Windows someday.

Who knows? I think the Linux thing is there for, like, if you work at Google, you're like, I need a little bit more than this guy. Yeah, like, okay, you can run Linux. I can't develop on this. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so we turn Linux on. You can just have Linux.

I mean, I was using a pixel book for a while with Android apps, and they just, they feel a lot different than. ChromeOS apps. I tried to, what I was using a Chromebook, I definitely preferred to try to keep

most of my apps, quote unquote, as web apps, because Android apps feel different. Yeah, yeah, when you start using it

more as a touchscreen, you'll start to feel a little bit different about that, but not entirely. Right. When you take this thing off the keyboard,

like ChromeOS has changed now, so there's really no way to like force it into windowed mode or it's not easy to, like, have it, just keep the windows moving around.

It goes into like the full screen or split screen tablet. so I don't love that, but it's fine. What about multiple desktops? I'm pretty sure Chrome can do that, yeah, could be wrong. I'm not a multiple desktop guy. Oh, then I guess not.

I'm not a multiple desktop guy. You do everything at one desktop? Yeah. How? What do you mean, how? I use window management. Sorry, man. Paul is just staring at me.

I just use one desktop too. Service Pro uses multiple desktops, supports multiple desktoms. I just like, to me, there's a part of me that's just sad that Chrome OS is becoming a full-fledged operating system. Yeah, that's fair. Right, like, to me, the best part of it, about it was it only did one thing. I did it really well.

And now it's like, okay, get it. Like, here's a bunch of other stuff. But, like, there's a lot of buttons on that task bar now. Yeah. There's a home button, a back button, a row of app buttons. It's a lot of, like, an assistant button. They actually reduced the number of buttons on the task bar on the shelf in the new version because there used to be a button for notifications and a button for settings,

and they collapse those two into a single thing. Yeah. I know. It's just, it used to just be like a cool. Chrome, I've gone. Yeah. And now there's many more. I'm excited for this thing.

I mean, the reason I'm excited for it. I'm excited for, like, the thing itself is like a pixel book replacement, honestly. But I look at what's happening with computers and what I think is about to happen to computers, to big screen devices. Chrome is a tiny little market share, but it's big in schools, and Google's pushing really hard. Windows is, like, Microsoft is someday going to forget that it's there. But right now, they still remember it's there, so they're developing it.

Apple is trying to increase the productivity abilities of the iPad. And they're also trying to make the Mac not die by throwing Marsapan apps on it, right? Meanwhile, we know for a fact that there are flexible screen displays coming, right? And we know that like Samsung and another, maybe Microsoft has sort of hinted at this, that they might be looking at like foldable devices. So there is more competition. The big screen space, the desktop space, the laptop, whatever. whatever the hell you want to call it, the future of computers, there is more competition

in that space than in phones. And like, phones are just, they, we're out of the land where it was a, like, there was a five-way competition and now it's just a doopoly, good by the end, right? And anybody else that tries to launch a new phone platform gets laughed out of the room. But we have a genuine three or four, depending if you want to count Apple twice, way competition for what big screen devices should do and how they should act. And that is just, that's just fun. Yeah.

I'm excited. I mean, it's like a lot of stuff going on. Haiku, the open source port of BOS is believe about to hit 1.0 or just did hit 1.0. So we do have exciting new desktop operating system. All right. I think that's a good place to end it. We've gone a little bit.

I don't want to hear you. Why? We've gone for an hour and a half, which is the exact amount of time that we go for every week. We should just stop pretending we don't. Yeah, it's it. I mean, it was just a lot of stuff. Reviews will be ongoing.

The pixel is you can pre-order it now. Yep. It's shipping next week, I want to say. Sure. I don't remember. Shipping soon. I think it's shipping soon. The big question will be, will they, are they going to keep stock in?

Yeah. Or will Verizon hoard all 12 of them to dole out one at a time? We didn't talk about that at all, but Google just is in bed with Verizon forever and ever, and it's unclear why. The Home Hub is October 22nd. You can pre-order it now, but it's not shipping to later. It's not shipping until later, and the pixel slates later, too. Yes. So as soon as we get this stuff, we'll be doing reviews, I'll promise you right now.

Those camera review videos are coming because it's a fight. It's just a fight. Yeah. And I am just less and less impressed with the 10-S camera by the day. That's all I can tell you. I mean, they tried a new thing. When it's good, it's very good. The rest of the time, it just, who knows what it's going to do?

Is it going to make a huge mistake? Who knows? We are deep in the camera comparison weeds, and that stuff will be as soon as we get these phones in hand. We'll be producing many camera comparison videos. More exciting news, why'd you push that button, starts next week. October 17th. Ashley's on the show last week.

Ashley and Caitlin are back. Why'd you push that button? Trailer's out. You can go listen to it today. Catch up on the two previous seasons. Next week, that comes out. That'll be really fun. Interview episodes, continue a piece.

I interviewed the CEO of Ring, Jamie Siminoff, he was on Shark Tank this week. He was promoting his Shrek tank appearance. I asked him some questions about Shrek tank. But mostly I was like, how'd you start a Kickstarter called DoorBot and end up running a piece of Amazon? And he answered the questions. So check those out. Let me know how this is going.

You can also check out of the interface. We've brought it up a thousand times, verge.com slash interface. Thank you to Liz for doing this week in Elon. And that's it for this week. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul.

I message lock-in. Hi, this is Aaron Patinkin. of Ovenly. And I'm Natasha Case, CEO of Coolhouse. And together we're the co-hosts of Start to Sale. We talk to entrepreneurs one-on-one about what it takes to build a business from launch to exit. Our podcast is different from other business podcasts because it delves into the journey of entrepreneurship. This isn't just about a startup story. We'll be hosting the founders of some of your favorite brands, people like Jen Rubio of Away,

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