The Vergecast - Pixel Buds review, OnePlus 5T, and Surface Book 2

Episode Date: November 17, 2017

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter run through a few things in the tech world that happened this week, like reviews for Google’s Pixel Buds and Microsoft’s Surface Book 2, and the announcement of the OnePlus 5T. Also, Lauren Goode stops by the show to talk about season 2 of her video series Next Level, which takes a closer look at technology's impact on the human experience. This week’s episode featured DJI's Aeroscope technology that can track rogue drones. There’s a lot more in between all of that — like Paul’s weekly segment “Robot dogs are people, too” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 02:50 - Microsoft Surface Book 2 review 13:12 - Google Pixel Buds review 25:40 - Next Level season 2 episode 2 47:54 - iPhone X: a few weeks later 1:01:04 - OnePlus 5T announced with bigger screen, new camera system, and a headphone jack 1:05:15 - Paul’s weekly segment “Robot dogs are people, too” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge Battalion and the Vox Media podcast network. A battalion. I'm going for it. But also a network. But also a network. A networked battalion. It's a smart battalion. It's a smart battalion.

It has a cloud service that's easily compromised. I am Nilai Patel. I'm joined, as always, by Paul Miller. Hello. Dieter Bone. How are you doing, buddy? Yeah, I'm doing good. You didn't say I was here because every time you do, I get all fussy about my precise location on the earth.

Well, we're to get, you know, to the listener, they don't know. You'd be anywhere. We're in your mind. Dieter Bone is in your brain. Welcome, Dieter. Sorry, everybody. I will say, as always, lately we start the show with this series of plugs. So here's that series of plugs.

You can listen to this show, which is great. Caitlin Tifley and Ashley Carman have a great podcast called Why Did You Push That Button. Still, I would say this since the day it launched into this world in the top five of the iTunes technology charts. And the people at PocketCast have been super nice to us lately. So thank you, PocketCass. But they're doing great listening to them. They even said I was handsome.

They did. They said it on Twitter, which as we know is the system of record for our country in this 2017. And we're going to have Lauren Good on the show, talk about Next Level, it's her series, it's running, so watch that. There's all kinds of things happening. But Lauren's going to be on the show a little bit later. We can talk about that. All right.

I would say we're in a quiet week of news. Yeah. The fall rush has subsided. We got all the big phones. There's one more phone that came out. The one plus 5T came out. It's too late. It doesn't count.

We'll talk. Oh. It's got that headphone check. That came out. By the way, that came out in an event. The event was held in a bar by my house. It's like a big, fancy bar. Oh.

But it's like a bar that I go to. Which is like, Dan was like, I think I'm by your house. It's nice. But yeah, that can not say. We'll talk about that. Dieter, actually, people are getting their iPhone tens. We're starting to learn a lot about iPhone tens in the way that when you give them to millions of people, things just emerge. But like overall, we're in the holiday lull.

Right. It's fine. We're spending time with our families. We've got some reviews to talk about. Yeah. So let's start. Do you want to start with PixelBuds or do you want to start with the Surface Book 2? Service Book 2, I think we could start with because it's a little bit more straightforward.

Tom Warren reviewed it, did a great job. He spent a lot of time playing video games on it from what I could tell from reading his review. As you should. I mean, it really is, like, if you are dissatisfied with the MacBook Pro, it is a very good alternate option. If you can get past the weird physicalness of it, which I still love two minds about, I don't know how many people actually want to detach the screen. You know, there's a few things. that could have been better,

but especially like there's no thunderbolt, which is like weird. But overall, I think it's a very good outing for Microsoft. It's a little bit more than your standard laptop spec bump, but it's not so much more that it changes any huge narratives for Microsoft. If this didn't have a detachable screen

and the compromises that that necessitated, don't you think this would just be a better computer, like full stop? I did the hands-on. with it. And the tablet thing is surprisingly useful because it, when you take the tablet off on both the 13 and the 15 inch version, it weighs literally half of what you expect it to. And so if you have any inclination at all to do tablet stuff, it's actually really interesting. Okay. So the problem is, like, is there enough there? I've been using the pixel book. And I do like the fold. And you're a really good article about that. Oh, thank you. I like the foldover aspect. Like,

Here's me watching Netflix lying nearly flat, fold over the pixel book, so the keyboard's on my belly. The screen's right in my face. If it was just a tablet, I'd be holding it and I'd be dropping it on my face all the time as everybody who's ever held the tablet has done. Yeah. I just don't see the value of the tablet very much. Also, Tom had a wild experience with this like charger where the charger wasn't charging the base fast enough. base has the battery that is powering the GPU, and therefore the GPU ended up disconnecting while he was playing a game because the charger wasn't keeping up.

So Microsoft says that they think he just got a bad charger. Oh, man. But we'll see. Oh, man. What you need is USBC ports and everything. So you just plug them in independently instead of that. There is a USBC port. Yeah, but I don't think you...

It's just not Thunderbolt. You can't charge off of it. Can you charge the tablets separate from the base? Oh, dual charging. No. You can, but the tablet has a surface connector on it. So you charge the tablet with a surface connector. The tablet doesn't have any other ports.

This sounds like a real Paul and Neil. I do something stupid on Circuit Breaker Live situation. Here's a question. I've seen this happen a lot lately. People are like, I don't know where this article was. I got to find it. But I saw a couple of people tweet. I finally got a new computer.

And I got a Windows PC because the Mac situation is. like just too a situation. It's a situation. Like I don't, at this moment in time, I do not want a new MacBook. Actually, the MacBook situation is literally the situation from Jersey Shore. It's

like too proud of itself, it's always showing off and everyone's a little bit disappointed in it. And why is it so shiny? But okay, so Microsoft's big thing is we're going to come after creators. Is this Is this the product that convinces people to switch off the Mac?

Because that's ultimately the thing that Microsoft is trying to do. They're trying to capture. I think Apple had a dominant share of premium laptops for the longest time. Microsoft's trying to muscle into that. Four words. Yeah. It has a GPU. Yeah.

Is an acronym one word or three words? You know what? Midway and two. I started thinking about that. No, I don't know. I think that the creator thing is, as much marketing as it is reality. Yeah.

The other thing that I will say, and I can say this, because typically when I say an opinion, Nelai makes me write a story about it, but it's almost done because we're making a video. We went and did a tour of Microsoft's hardware lab when we looked at the Surface Book 2. And I believe that Microsoft is doing all this stuff so they do the thing where you need to make the hardware

to make the software better. You need to understand it both. That's the same story that Apple tells. It's the same story that Google tells. They are actually going after creators. but I think that they just as much need to have a story around their devices that they actually want to make devices for creators. But I also think they are teaching themselves how to make weird shit.

And I think they're teaching themselves how to make weird shit so that they can make other weird shit again so that they can maybe do a phone or there's the rumor about the courier. I think that the interesting thing about Microsoft hardware isn't, can it take on the MacBook? Because the dynamics of that market are, as much about platform as they are about anything else. It's, can Microsoft make a bunch of different weird hardware at scale that all runs on Windows

or runs on a Windows-esque platform that is compelling and interesting and moves computing forward? It's the same thing that it's a story that started with the surface, that they just need to finish that story. And they just, instead of like, waiting for one giant big, we done it moment, they just are tossing out different iterations out there. and seeing what works. And you know what?

As long as every iteration is not a dumpster fire, people will buy them, they'll be happy with them, they'll move on with their lives, it'll be good. And maybe in some part they'll figure it out. Every year they add another product to the mix. Right? So now they're slowly getting to having a full family, right? Right.

Shapes and sizes and form factors. I mean, you could argue that they already do, right? Yeah. Tablet. There's a real variety there. There's choices. No, they've also got HoloLens, which is in a weird limbo zone, limbic zone.

It's a limbo zone. There's Xbox, of course. It's a lambic zone. My favorite Microsoft product, by the way, is what I wrote about for the pixel book. I basically figured out how to get Microsoft's Visual Studio code running on a pixel book, which is Microsoft has always had Visual Studio. Yeah. Is their big IDE? It's like where big software is built.

And they... Giants room. They fired up this open source product called Visual. studio code, which is not at all confusing of a name. And it's like wildly successful. It has everything that I should hate about a tech editor. It's an electron app. So it's basically a web browser.

But they just keep on doing like a really, really great job of it. And it runs on Mac, Linux, Windows, basically perfectly. And like as far as Microsoft helping me a creator. Yeah. That's them helping. But you know what? Does it help me as a creator? Cortana popping up in the middle of a day is like, hey, did you know?

I could track your packages now. I'm like, no, I didn't. But you know what? I didn't need to know. Yeah. So that's all I felt from the recent Cretors update. Yeah. Visual Studio Code.

No, no, no, no, no. Cortana reminded me about new features. Cortana just got pushier. Like in the update notes, it's like Cortana. Yeah. Now annoyingly aggressive. Slightly agro. All right, so that's a service book, too.

I mean, it seems like a really nice laptop. That's how I would put it. I think I want Microsoft to make an even deeper push at it. I think where they need to get to is, you know those pictures of, like, college classes where, like, everybody had a glowing Apple logo. Do you remember what I'm talking about? They used to float around a few years ago.

Microsoft needs to, like, every year, release another picture of a college freshman incoming class. It's like the Windows logos are growing out of the top left corner. Yeah. They've got to do that. That's a long road. But I don't think it's impossible for them. But it seems like a nice laptop.

And I need a new laptop. Mine is starting to do a GPU glitch thing. I thought you just said you got one. No. This is my 20. What is this? I don't even know what year this is from. It's like steam powered. 2013.

My laptop is from 2013. Here's an idea But you know I have stuck into the side of it right now An SD card? Buy me a surface book too And I'll use it for a while And if I like it, I'll give it to you This is a weird plan you have

I want this pixel book Yeah No but I literally It doesn't have multiple desktops It's basically unusable Yeah the multiple desktop things is a real hassle What? Google's recommend

I saw a Google employee like commenting on like a a Google Plus thread about the lack of multiple desktops. It's like, oh, it's really easy. You create multiple accounts, and it's only two clicks to switch accounts. That doesn't seem right. No, that's not. Doesn't that necessitate you creating another Google account?

I'm pretty sure. And if there's one thing Google it's known for, it's managing multiple Google accounts seamlessly without wanting to kill yourself. All right, Dieter, I got to ask you this question. So Sean and Kane reviewed the pixel buds. He did. I also have a pair. He gave them a five. If you haven't gone and watched the video, you should watch it just for the scene of the many, many people in our office who speak multiple languages trying to do the real-time translation with Sean.

The overwhelming consensus is this makes you sound rude and stupid, but it works. But that's not the pixel buds fault. It's Google Translate doesn't understand nuance in language. But it's a feature of the pixel buds. I mean, like, the, it's the highlight feature of the pixel buds is like, do this and it works. And, like, if the back end software, like, what are you going to, it's still a feature of the thing. Right. But anyway, it's fun to watch. So you should watch that part of it.

But it just seems like we're definitely in proprietary headphone time. And this is, like, the reality of proprietary headphones, maybe not as great. And then as a piece of hardware, maybe not perfectly designed. So you have them. What do you think? I think Sean basically nailed it. The advanced stuff, the Google Assistant stuff on it is incredible. It makes you use the Assistant more because you just hold your finger down under ear, ask a question, and it gives you an answer.

Boom. It's really good. Everything else about it is not. Which is a huge bummer for me because as like a form factor thing, as neck buds, they're almost exactly what I want. I wish that they were more isolating so that you wouldn't hear outside noise. That's the main thing that keeps me for using them. But they're the right length. They don't like hang down like to my belly button like other long ass neck buds do.

They don't have weird hard plastic, you know, horseshoe things around your neck. They fit in your ears fine. They have pretty decent battery life. Well, it sounds like Sean had some trouble with fitting him that is like a little finicky. Well, so the mechanism for getting him to fit in your ear is there's a little, like, braids, like, fabric cord, and then you, like, slide that in and out of the headphone to have it fit in the archer of your ear. And that gets, that changes. Like, to put them in the case, you've got to, like, do this crazy awkward cord wrap on top of the awkward, like,

fit the bud into the things, so the pogo pins match. And you end up misaligning it. So every time you take them on or put them away, take them off or put them away, you end up messing with the thing that fits it into your ear. and then on top of all of that, for me the biggest problem, the thing where Apple AirPods just make these things look ridiculous is they have no way to detect if they're in your ear. Technically, the entire plastic body of these earbuds is a capacitive sensor, so it could, but they don't have it turned on yet.

It's like the story of Google. I know. You take them off your ear and have a hanger on your neck. You might actually hit play. No, every piece of Google hardware ships with like the capability you want, and they just haven't. They're like, this screen could look good. We just didn't ship it that way. Like, this camera has a dedicated processing chip.

We just turned on yet. These headphones could work good. We just didn't, we just wait a minute for that. Have they said anything about? The Google Mini could let you tap it to stop the alarm, but we screwed that up. Right. Have they said anything about possibly enabling that feature? When I talked to them before the launch, I was like, you should really do that.

And they're like, we're looking into it. You should really do that. You should really make it possible to skip tracks. We're looking into it. You should really make it so that it could detect it from him in a ear. We're looking into it. It's possible. We're like playing it.

But I think that they're kind of stuck with this hardware. The case is awkward. I think that getting it to accurately detect if it's in your ear or not, just using a capacitive sensor is difficult. Because you have it on your neck and it detects your neck. Maybe it thinks it's in your ear. Who knows? This is why. The main difference between, I think, Google and Apple hardware right now is Apple just goes crazy with hardware sensors.

There's like an infrared blaster inside the AirPods. There's like 30,000 lasers that shoot at your face in the iPhone 10, all this crazy hardware stuff. And then their AI is like, yeah, fine. Google has incredible AI, and they think that will solve all hardware problems. and so they end up shipping with slightly cheaper, less refined hardware. And that puts them into problems, problems like what we see with these pixel buds, problems like what we saw with the Google Home Mini. I don't think it's fair to pin that necessarily on, they don't think they thought that

like Google AI would fix the screen on the Pixel 2XL. But in general, their MO is we can have more commodity hardware. And, you know, they're in a hard place because unless you're Apple, it's hard to get any, Apple or Samsung, it's hard to get anything other than commodity hardware. And so they're just trying to make up that difference with machine learning and AI. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But you shouldn't have to apply machine learning to the problem of, does music stop when you pull these wireless earbuds out of your ear?

Right? Like, you should not. That's like, I don't know. It's just pure overkill for the issue, which is like basic usability. Yeah. I think David Pierce at Wired said that they do all the really hard things really well, and they do all the really easy Bluetooth things really badly. Yeah. And then I think that, I mean, this is the thing I harp about, but if you pair it to an iPhone, you don't get assistant.

You obviously don't get trans. Like, they're proprietary headphones. It makes me not want to buy them. So this is like a terrifying situation if there are two headphone manufacturers in the world now. They are Apple and Google. this is scary. Right, and they own the stack. So Google is releasing FastPair, but is there going to be anything with the assistant stuff that third parties will be able to do?

That like fast assistant where it starts listening as soon as you touch? So the new... I think it'll come later. Right now the fast assistant stuff is just pixel. Wait, so, Deter, are you saying that... I think the assistant, the translate stuff is just pixel for now. I think the fast assistant stuff is just pixel, but I could be wrong about that. So what I do know, because I asked about this when the...

pixel buds launched is they had to do some fancy audio routing with Google Translate for the pixel buds. So they're keeping a lot of audio channels lit up in a way that you otherwise wouldn't do with headphones. So you talk into your pixel buds. It plays audio out through the phone speaker. Someone talks to you into the phone's microphone. It translate and plays audio out to you through your headphones. It's like obviously a non-standard arrangement. So that's like custom. And there's an element of like, okay, to innovate, you've got to build a custom thing, and then over time they'll get commoditized. But then there's also the element of there's literally no reason that the Google's, the Google Assistant feature couldn't just work with the Google app on the iPhone in that way.

But it doesn't. And like maybe Apple, maybe it's an Apple API restriction. Maybe Google doesn't want to give that to you. But at least in Google's land, Google has the power to push. towards commoditizes. Like, okay, we did like a trial run. We are bad at headphones, but we got like kind of the software stack set up.

And it was in beta when we rolled out the headphones, but now we got it to 1.0. It's early 2018. Please start making good headphones that use all this technology. Right. Yeah, that's my conspiracy theory is they knew it was bad, so they limited a bunch of features to the pixel because pixel users are like Google stands

and are willing to deal with weirdness. If they had turned all this stuff on for the iPhone, then a bunch more people would have bought it and a bunch more people would have mad at Google. That's my conspiracy theory. And they've got to compete with the AirPods. The AirPods are good, I think. But also, like, you pair AirPods to an Android phone.

It's not like you can launch the Google Assistant by doing the taps, which you can do with an iPhone. It's like, I don't think you can. I think they just become bog standard Bluetooth headphones. Right. Right now, my Donga Life experience, something's wrong with my dongle, and it keeps on launching Siri. There's some loose water.

I think I found out what's wrong with your dongle. Also, in the interest of fairness, Apple iPhone tens were becoming unresponsive when they were suddenly inflicted with cold. Apple has a software fix for that today, though. Yeah, I will say that everything has a problem when it launches. So I will say this. I don't think it's a huge problem. Maybe I can't even see it anymore. I got my iPhone 10

Put the review unit in the closet Like a good boy Bought my own phone And I'm pretty sure the right side of the screen He was a little pink Uh-oh Hmm I think you have to be a real picky nerd

To get it And maybe sometimes I just be honest I was drinking last night Maybe I was just looking at it With some of those whiskey eyes I could think we're saying though But I mean

I think this stuff is just hard It's a hard thing to make But on the whole right now, it seems like Apple's hardware advantage, they're pressing it in a way that, you know, it's new iPhone time. So of course they're pressing it. But the 10 puts them ahead of the curve in a way that, you know, the 6S, the 7, and the 8 certainly did not do. Yeah.

And Google made this big splashy hardware announcement. And literally every piece of hardware they announced, it's like, sigh in practice. Yeah. there's not been a single one that's been like a home run in the way of the pixel the first pixel is a home run I like yep I have the pixel and the pixel two sitting on my desk at home and like I more often pick up pick up the pixel to use because the screen looks nice wow I don't think that have you I installed the update I did the colors they look more the same it's just not as nice I just watch John Carmack's presentation every year at the Oculus event John Carmack gives a present where he just is literally allowed to say whatever he wants. Yeah. And so he can criticize all the Oculus products. And so he goes deep into Pentile.

Really? Yeah. He's like, effectively you have less resolution. It's true. We're doing William Joel, our art director, if you ever wonder, like, we're all the crazy graphics. He's the dude. But he fell down a deep hole of pentile vision theory.

when we were shooting the review video because I was explaining to him how it worked we were doing on the macro shots. I'm pushing him to make a video about it, but basically your eyes are more sensitive to green. So the pentile displays had these like, they're basically true resolution in green, and then red and blue are like way less resolution.

And they modulate green light at you to fool your eyes more. And it's like, that's cool. I don't like love pentile displays, but it's cool that someone did the research into like how your eyes work and built a display technology to like maximize resolution and brightness

because the blue pixels are harder to maintain. They die faster. Like this is cool. That's neat. I would prefer an RGB stride. I just remember, I feel like when I was first, OLED was first marketed to me. It was like, oh, it's

organic. We're going to grow this like plants. It's like it's going to be hard at first, but we're going to get really good at this. It'll be like Avatar. Yeah. It's organic. It's organic. It's organic.

It's like a plant. No, it's cool. I mean, like, I want to go to the OLED factory. What we need to show us how to do this. Free range. No, it's an OLED farm. It's an OLED farm. It's upstate.

That's where little sparkles went to the OLED farm. All right. I'm going to read an ad. Deeter, actually, I know you got your iPhone. So I'm going to read this ad. We're going to talk to Lauren for a minute. I'll come back. I want your unadulterated iPhone take.

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Hey, Lerin. Hey, Nilai. How's it going? It's going. I feel like I'm having a much more relaxed time of things than you. Why's that? You've been racing around, shooting next level. You've been racing around looking for 1990s microphone equipment to use to tape the Vergecast remotely. So I think we've both had it stressful.

This is true. In case you're wondering, I had to drive to a Walmart in upstate New York this morning and buy an emergency microphone. It is a blue snowball. It is a USBA. It came with a 90s IMAX style clear USBA cable. It's a real dongle situation up in this piece. But I think it's working. I think you should review it. I think the listeners of the Vergecast can review. my audio performance using this microphone right now. Sounds good. Five stars. So next level, it's your show. Yes. About the next level of things. Yes. Of all things. Of all things. Next level of technology. Next level of innovation. Next level of science in some cases. Yeah. So we're well into season two at this point. And this last episode you did is one of those things I didn't

even think was a problem. Like you don't think about the scale of potential problems with new technology. But you, DGI has a device that lets you track drones in the air because so many people are flying drones all the time. And they got, sometimes you're not allowed to, or you got to take them down. And you like went in drone hunting. Yeah. They created this technology called aeroscope. And it kind of relies on existing technology, but they packaged it all in this Pelican case and called it Aeroscope. And they've been giving this to public safety officials to test over the past couple months, and then they just did a launch event in D.C. at the end of October that Ben Popper went to and sort of formally unveiled it to the public. So I both met with DJI and Golden Gate Park with this

aeroscope box, and we kind of went drone hunting with it. And then I said, you know, can you put me in touch with one of your beta testers? And they said they had a beta tester down in Camero, California, which is in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles. And there was a public safety official there actually an airport operation supervisor who has been using this and I basically just kind of shadowed him on his daily patrol of the airport while he sniffed out drones that were flying overhead because drones flying near airports can be a pretty problematic thing. So we went drone hunting. Yeah, it was pretty wild. How many drones were like around? Well, the funny thing is is when you're doing this for video and it's a live sort of, I mean live to tape, but it's a this kind of

real-time thing where you're like, let's see if we spot drones. You're kind of thinking like the chances of it happening while you happen to be filming are pretty low. And we were in Golden Gate Park with DJI's Michael Perry. He's the managing director of North America for DJI. He does a lot of like policy comms for them and stuff. And he's opening up this Pelican case and they're like these giant wand-like antenna sticking out of the top of the case that you have to screw in. And it's got a crystal sky display and a bunch of fans and processors. was running in it. And he's like, okay, so like, here's what you do and here's this. And then all of a sudden, in the middle of him talking, we just heard, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. It was literally

the sound of like, for those of you who were around in the 80s and 90s, the sound of like when you left a landline off the hook. Oh, my God. Yeah, and you could hear the phone making that terrible beeping noise, you know, persistently. That was the noise that it makes. And I was like, what's, what's that noise? And he said, well, there's a drone overhead. And I was like, what? And then you look on the crystal sky display, and we could see that several blocks away outside of Golden Gate Park, someone had fired up a drone. Wait, just to be clear, the crystal side display is like DJI's like ultra bright LCD, right, for viewing outdoors? That's correct. It's their touchscreen display technology so you can see stuff outdoors. Yeah. Yeah. And it's running, I mean, it's running on Android.

I mean, this tablet type, you know, like thing is running on on Android, but it's their custom software built on top of Android. And so they are layering this information. over Google Maps. Wow. So we scroll in, you know, and we see, we see this drone, this little icon of a drone. And by tapping on it, you're able to see some really interesting information about the drone and potentially the drone pilot. But it depends on whether or not that person has registered their drone.

So it has to be a DJI drone, at least for now. I think technically they can track other drones. But right now, as they're rolling this out, it's only picking up on DJI drones. If you've registered your drone, then you can see. you can see like the registration number, you can see the serial number, you can see, of course you can see all the telemetry data on the drone and where it's flying and stuff like that. In earlier versions, you used to be able to see the pilot's email, which is crazy.

Like I saw that. I was like, here's, I have this person's email now. Like, you know, not going to email you, don't worry. But DJI has since said, since we ran this piece that they're planning on not showing the email anymore. And the same thing happened when we were down in Cam Rio, California. I joined this guy, Nick Martino. the airport op supervisor on his patrol. We hopped in his giant Chevy Tahoe, and he clears the

runway, like tells the planes not to fly on the runway because we're driving around with this Pelican case. And so we're in the car and he's telling me about his daily routine and all of a sudden, that terrible landline sound again. And I'm like, I'm like, he's like, we got a drone. We got hit. Like, you know, it's, I'm making this sound way more exciting than like it is. Like, yeah, of course, there's a drone flying overhead and it's like, we got a hit. So turns out, though, that was really interesting because right in the same vicinity of Camryo Airport, which is, by the way, a very nice private airport. So some pretty cool aircraft while I was there. There's Oxnard Airport just a few miles away. There's a naval base just a few miles away. I mean, this is pretty much

along the California coastline, and there's a lot of activity there. So you can be pretty certain that if you're flying in that vicinity, you're flying in restricted airspace. Like, you're not supposed to be flying a drone there. So even though that drone we spotted was nearly 10 miles away, it was close to somewhere it was not supposed to be flying. And so in that instance, you know, he could see the drone pilot's email. And it's like, what happens now? And he's like, we send a friendly email. And I'm like, yeah, that was my favorite part of the episode. It was like, all this happened. And the guy's like, and now we send a polite email. Because they can't just like shoot them out of the sky, right? That's another thing I, you know, I discovered as I was reporting

the story, you can't. Right now in the U.S. under Title 18 U.S. code, you cannot shoot down a drone from the sky. You can't remotely disable or intercept a drone from the sky. I think there are probably exceptions to that rule, of course. And I know that there's a, the story that we wrote about on the verge, I think it was last year, where a local Kentucky judge determined, or a Kentucky judge determined that a local man who had shot down a drone from his property was not going to be charged with anything. So I think that's where drones get really confusing because there are these federal levels and there are these federal levels of regulation and there are FAA rules. But then local states, parks, local jurisdictions,

like people can sometimes sort of make up their own rules around them. But for the most part, you can't remotely disable a drone right now. Yeah. So what was interesting to me is like obviously this is DJI's tech. And most drones are phantoms as far as I can tell. Like they have a commanding market share. So it makes sense that they could just build this like kind of closed loop system. But there are other kinds of drones in the world.

Can they sense those two? Like how are they thinking about this holistically? Right. That's a good question. Yeah, they said with this system right now that they can remotely detect about 65% of the personal drones that are out there. And what are they doing to detect? Are they just scanning radio frequencies? They are picking up on, for the most part, they're picking up on the communication link between the drone and the drone controller. They're decoding that signal that's happening between the drone and drone controller. and they're capturing the telemetry and they're sending that data back down to the box. So there is a difference between trying to track just the drone itself, which usually requires

there's like another type of frequency that you're picking up on and usually requires that there's some type of special, you know, transmitter or like box in the drone that allows you to do that. And that would require like retrofitting a bunch of drones, right? in this case they're picking up on that communications link that's happening between the controller and the drone, which by the way means that once you just turn the drone on, even if you're not flying it, you know, and it's like sending a signal controller and drone are speaking. It's picking up on that too. Yeah. So, I mean, they say that through a firmware update, they can get other drone operators to get on board with the system. And then they would effectively be able to track 95% of the consumer drones in the market. The question is, of course,

is whether another company like a parrot or someone else would want to issue some kind of update to their drones to allow it to be tracked. That could be mandated at some point, of course, but for right now it's not mandated. And there are a ton of different drone defense solutions out there. I was able to make a list very easily of two dozen different organizations around the world that have been working on drone defense systems. And everyone kind of has, you know, Most of it's technically being done the same way, but like everyone kind of has their own take on it. And some people are more focused on drone interception. But yeah, I mean, everyone's trying to come up with a solution for how to remotely manage drones in some way while it's kind of the wild wild west out there.

Yeah. I mean, I've definitely seen the video of like basically the giant radio emitter that just interferes with the drone and makes it fall out of the sky. And that's always seemed like a wee bit dangerous. But there's like a, is there an encryption piece to this? because you don't want anyone intercepting your communication link between controller and drone. So DJI, obviously, they make everything, so they own the keys. So it's probably easy for them. To decrypt it.

But once you wander into other companies, now you're doing all this, like, private key sharing that seems, you know, I'm just thinking about the iPhone, right? The FBI trying to open the iPhone and the Apple's like, we're never giving me these keys away. Are they thinking about that stuff, too, or is that just somewhere else? They are thinking about it for sure. And I think what's interesting, too, when you talk about Apple and you talk about Apple getting into skirmishes, for lack of a better word, they're actually really big issues with government agencies like the FBI. You are talking about an American company, too. DJI is a Chinese drone maker. And I think that's probably one area that's worth considering, even though DJI is very careful not to really, I don't know, they didn't really talk about that.

when I asked them about this. But, yeah, I mean, I think that's something that they're considering, but the sort of the polite answer they give is like, well, there are lots of things you have to consider when you consider remotely intercepting drones, which is taking them down safe, is taking them down legal. Like if you were to remotely, if someone were to remotely decrypt this and take it down themselves, like that would be a safety issue,

which is true. That's not to minimize that, but I think you're totally right in that that sort of higher level conversation that is to be had is like, wait a second. So that means anyone can decrypt and intercept a drone. Right. But yeah, I mean, you basically can. Well, I guess what they can do is decrypt and send friendly emails. If that's the whole vector, like a world of attackers being like, I noticed you're flying a drone today.

Right. Like maybe not the worst thing. One of the things they also were very careful to point out is that this solution, for them has to do with proximity. So it's a localized solution. So they say that you can only, you can only use aeroscope to spot drones within, you know, a few miles or so. Now, we happen to see the Ventura County Department of Airport spot a drone nearly 10 miles away. So we already know this box can exceed that range that DJI said it can. But they say, well, it's not a centralized network. It's not like your cell phone network where it's all that data, all that call data, all of the

activity data is going into some type of, you know, centralized database at the end of the day, we know that government agencies could have access to. You know, they claim this is still very localized and that that should give people some reassurance. Yeah, I'm just fascinated, the more we talk about it, I'm just fascinated by the closed loop nature of DGI making the drones and making this equipment because they don't actually have to send a friendly email. Like, I have a Phantom 4. And when I boot it up, it tells me, like, you're near an airport. push this button if you want to fly. If you want to break the rules, we'll let you, but we're letting you know you're breaking the rules.

There's no reason that this box couldn't go through that DGI registration database and actually just flash on the control app that people are using. Have they thought about closing the loop that directly, or are they still just friendly emails? Well, so what's interesting is DJI is also not the entity that is sending the friendly emails. Like, they're selling this directly to public safety officials. They're not saying it's going to be accessible to consumers. they're selling it to people like fire departments, prison guards, airport ops specialists,

people like, you know, control towers, people like that who are in a position to send, you know, a friendly but slightly admonishing email that's like, hey, what are you doing over here? And so DJI is not getting involved in that level themselves. I mean, I think, and there were a couple really, really good comments on our videos about this where people would say, wait, so this is brilliant. DGI makes the drones. They've essentially created the problem of lots of drones flying around. People don't have to register them anymore because a federal court said that last May,

I think that hobbyists no longer have to register in the U.S. And now they're creating the solution to the problem they've created. Wait, so I'm not a scofflaw because I definitely... No. I got as far as like printing out the FCC PDF. I don't know how to mail things. What does this mail thing mean you speak of? I was like, what?

Who has a stand? What is the stamp? Yeah, no, you're not. You're as of, I think, I believe it was last May and Recode reported this. Lots of outlets reported this that a federal court did mandate that you don't longer had to register your drone as a hobbyist, but you do, if you're a commercial drone, if you're like in Amazon, you know, or whatever it is and you're flying drones, you still need to, to register.

So, yeah, so DJI has like, they've, DJI, excuse me, they've created this situation where they, they own the drone market for the most part, you know, within a certain price range. of hobbyist drones. And people are flying them in places where they're not supposed to. People don't necessarily understand the rules because the rules aren't clear. And so they've created this solution to the problem that has exists because of their drones. I mean, that's like the tech industry in 2017.

It's like, we've caused this problem. Here's a $19 dongle that fixes it. Right. So buy our dongles. Yeah. Basically, Aeroscope is a giant dongle. It's perfect. It's a dongle for fire departments around the country.

It's great. But there is a reason why DJI did this presentation in Washington, D.C., when they presented this. And part of this is like they do need to stay on the friendly side of policy makers. And I think in general, there's this thought among the drone makers and drone technology companies that anytime there's a chance of overregulation at some point, because something bad has, happens with a drone and it sours everybody on the industry, you need to be able to show that you can manage it without that over-regulation. And I think that's a part of this too. Yeah, that makes sense. I think there's the idea that everyone will have a drone, I feel like it's

getting, if you just look at DJI's lineup, and Ben Popper has been talking about this because he covers it so closely, their lineup is getting smaller, more accessible, more easy to use. The ranges are getting smaller, though. So it's almost like, you know, my Phantom 4 is absolutely overkill for what I use it for. Like 90% of what we do with it is we put it in the sky and take like a selfie when a bunch of people are over. I don't need that. And then like, right? That's like mostly what it's for. But I could have gotten a MAVIC. There's a new spark that's small. But as they get smaller and they're more useful for consumers, the idea that you're just going to randomly buzz an airport starts to fade away. So I wonder about the scope of the

problem as well. Like, you know, I bet Apple would have loved to have one of these while they were building Apple Park, uh, because everyone was constantly buzzing it with drones to like watch construction happen. But at the same time, if most consumers just have little ones, maybe they wouldn't be doing that anyway. Right. And there's an argument to be made there too, um, which is, I don't think that Apple Park would have been restricted airspace unless it was near an airport or unless there were public safety officials legitimately concerned about the danger. Well, when we, we went there for the iPhone event, They had the big signs that are like, no drone zone.

And it's like, I don't think anyone's listening to you guys. Right, right. Yeah. And that's one of those things where because it's a local, you know, property that they probably had to get some sort of specialized permission for that, just like when you go to a local park and it says it like state parks and national parks. I don't think you can fly drones. But yeah, there are all these like weird little exemptions for sure.

So your point about them getting smaller and therefore their range growing smaller is is definitely a good one. I think if you look at most data, at least right now, for where DJI dominates the market, it's largely in that $1,000 to $2,000 range. I think they have, according to one report, like 66% of that market. And, you know, there's something like an estimated 3 million drones are expected to be shipped in 2017, and that's both personal and consumer drones. And I don't think those are the cheap ones.

So at least for now, you know, I'm sure the technology is shrinking and it's, and you don't necessarily have to worry about a tiny little thing, you know, flying maybe within 10 miles of a runway. But there are other ones out there that they need to get under control. Yeah. I mean, it's just, like you said, there's, it's a problem that no one considered. Like drones came out. Everyone thought they were cool. And now it's like, wait, airplanes, we have to protect them.

Yeah. Like, that's like a whole, it's a whole new class of problems. It's fascinating they're trying to solve it. Like you said, they're in D.C. saying we've already solved it. Don't worry about this government. Like, we're on the case. Because I hesitate to say the last thing you want is the government participating and, like, over-regulating this. I'm not confident that the current government in America, as it is presently constituted, can actually do anything.

So, like, it's fine for DGI to be doing this. But at some point, you know, the local airport or firefighters, they are going to want to see every drone in the sky, right? not just bet on DGI solution being able to see the drones in the sky and betting on the fact that DGI is going to maintain its market share. So, like, at some point, it does become a more collective problem than just DGI asking it politely for its encryption keys or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. We get to a point where registered aircraft, you know, let's just say it's an Amazon drone

that's delivering packages all day long and it's flying in the same airspace, the same relative airspace and it's a registered aircraft. I mean, you get to a point where you start to question, like, well, shouldn't air traffic control also be able to see that in addition to seeing the Cessna 172 or, you know, the Boeing 737 or whatever it is that also is flying in airspace? And we're talking about three very different levels of airspace there, but it's still airspace. So, and it's still, you know, you still have things that could potentially crash into one another. So I think that's just something that people are just going to. have to get their heads around at some point and make some serious decisions about.

Yeah. And those friendly emails are going directly to Jeff Bezos, I'm sure. I'm sure. Well, I heard he reads his own emails. Exactly. Perfect. All right, Lauren, give us a tease. What is the next episode of next level?

Next episode is water. It really is about water. One of the most fundamental basic human needs. We talked to a really interesting. company that is looking at a new way to harvest water that is not groundwater, that is not rainwater. And it's just very interesting stuff. We went, we saw how they're trying to do this. We tasted the water. We talked to their team. It's actually like a material science problem, which is kind of interesting. I don't think we've done much material science coverage here on next

level. And, and yeah, that one's, that one's super cool. And then we're working on, we're working on episode four right now as well. And that one's going to be very cool. All right. I like it. Next level comes out on Tuesdays. Next one, we're taking a week off for Thanksgiving. We're not really taking a week off. We're working on it, but we figure you'll be taking the week off, everybody. So we're going to publish the next episode on Tuesday, November 28th. Okay. And that's the water one. That's the water one. And it's on YouTube and Facebook and everywhere else that you can find The Verge. Yes.

Not on WeChat yet, but we're working on it. I think. It seems like something we should do. Everything else on WeChat. It's going to be on DJI's Aroscope Box soon enough. You'll have to watch it on the crystal sky display. Well, you're waiting for a drone to fly by. You've got to watch something.

Yeah. All right, Lauren, thank you so much. Next level is wonderful. I encourage you all to watch it because it is absolutely the most fun. Thanks, Neely. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Thanks.

Yeah, next level. It's a real, real, next level show. That conversation with Lauren is like the only time I talk to Lauren lately. It's like she's so busy with this show. It's a great show, but she is just racing to get these episodes done. That's fun to catch up with her. You should watch it. It's really good.

Deeter, you got this phone. Yes. Can I docks you a little bit? Okay. It's just like a little baby docs. Dieter got the phone and then he sent me a screenshot of our website all notched up, big bars. All it said was, this phone. is a joke.

Go on, Mr. Bone. The Knotch stuff is just, they screwed it up. It's not good. There are just too many apps where there are just buttons on top of buttons. I'd like piled up at each other in the notch. All of Apple's dev tools to help developers make their apps work on differently sized screens, the developers ignored it or implemented it or implemented it right and Apple screwed it up.

There are just a lot of apps at their first cut of, yeah, this will be fine, was wrong. And it gets worse because of the fundamental problem. One of the fundamental problems of iOS is they thought it was a really great idea to have this back to the previous app bug in the upper left hand corner. Like when you click on Twitter and it goes to Safari, there's a little Twitter back to to Twitter thing. But there's that. And then there's also like usually some kind of weird X button up there.

And sometimes there's like a back button for the app inside it up there. And they just get piled on top. of each other and you just start, like, tapping, hoping that you hit the right tiny thing in the right, the right tiny space. Also the space where you bring the notifications down. The upper left corner of the iPhone 10 display is pretty messy. Call overloading? Yeah.

Overloaded. And it's like, well, you made the display bigger, but we put more elements in this part of it. The trick there is to stop using the upper left hand corner, just pull it straight down from the notch, which gets a fingerprint on the selfie camera, but whatever. Just pull straight down from the notch. Oh, that's a thing. Wait. But now, if you pull down on the right.

Right corner, it's settings, right? Yeah, it's a control center. I am increasingly have, maybe it's my bad crack screen iPhone, but like every app, I just always need to be swiping up to get to the settings control panel. And there's always like a keyboard or a text input box or something at the bottom. Yeah. Like that's the thing that I'm most frustrated about right now. I do want that top right swipe down.

Yeah. No, that's fine. That's not bad. Like, overall, the screen is incredible. The cameras are very, very good. I have a problem with face ID, which is weird. I do have a problem with face ID, though, and it's a weird one. It's different than the one that everybody's talking about.

So when you get a notification, by default, it hides what the notification is unless the phone is unlocked, right? Yeah. Which is great. I want to leave that feature on. And when it's sitting at my desk angled up looking at me, the notification will come in. I turn to look at it, and then it unlocks. I see a notification. Everybody's happy.

But if I don't turn to look at it quickly enough, it doesn't unlock. And so if the phone is sitting there locked and you're staring at it and you're waiting for your notifications to pop, once it misses that first look, it doesn't try again. And so you're just like, are you going to, are you, what do you do? And they're like, okay, let me hit a button to have it try again and there's nothing to do. Literally all you can do is unlock your phone and then you've got to swipe down your notifications. Or you have to, I don't know, turn the screen off and turn it back on again. and then that makes it try again. There's no, with touch ID, if it doesn't take the first time, you just try again.

With Face ID, if it doesn't take the first time, you're just sitting there waiting. Yeah. And like this might be better. Like Face ID over time might be a better solution. But the fact that there's no sort of user option for, oh, this didn't work, let me try again, is not great. So I know I keep banging on about us adjusting to technology versus technology adjusting to us. And I think face ID is in this weird balance zone where I think so much of it is better than touch ID. Now, having had the thing for several weeks, I will say that a thing that sucks is if you've had a review iPhone 10 for a few weeks and it's gotten really good at seeing you and then you get a new one and you re-register your face, it is,

is significantly worse. So that process of it, yeah. So my actual iPhone 10, I just set it up a couple days ago, significantly worse than the review unit I had had for a couple weeks. And I was like, this is broken. And then I was like, no, it actually hasn't done it enough.

But once it gets there, it is effortless. You don't think about, even with touch ID, there was like a tiny little moment of like, I got to put my thumb in the place. But 90% of the time, you just like look at the phone, it's unlocked. So I think that's a huge improvement actually.

But the 10% of the time when it doesn't work, it asks so much more of you than touch ID. Like so much more. And that thing you're talking about, the notifications is one where it's like you have to make a decision about what to do to get into the phone. You have like, okay, I'm going to start over. I'm going to swipe. I'm going to like let it fail out until it gets a code. If you get to the place where it just wants a code, there's no point on that screen where you can just. just like make it try again.

So if you swipe up from the bottom, it doesn't just try again. It just like sometimes you're on the code screen and it decides to try again and it'll just unlock. Sometimes you're on the code screen. It won't do anything and you have to enter the code. But you can't just like, be like, just try. I'm telling you to try again. Try again right now.

And I think that 10% is, it's what I think I wrote about the most in the review. It's when I wake up in the morning, every single morning I have to type in the code now. Because I'm not wearing my glasses and I'm holding it too. close to my face. Literally every morning. I'm like, ooh. And I haven't gotten into the habit of like holding it far away where I can't see it.

It's a really dumb problem. Can I ask a question about notifications? Because I'm just realizing when Neil I was... You don't want to bring up notifications in iOS with me because we will lose the rest of the podcast. I want clarity because this is something we've talked about a ton of times. Like Google does notifications better. And I use the essential phone for a couple of weeks recently.

And I realize I used notifications there very similar how I use them on the iPhone, which is basically I see a notification right when it comes in. That scenario you were talking about where you have to glance at the phone. Then it's useful to me. Other than that, it goes into a log of notifications, which at some point I have to manually clear. Like the only time notifications are useful to me is if I spot them when they arrive. what is this essential thing that Google does on Android that makes that backlog of notifications somehow more useful? Primarily, it's the grouping. So I'll wake up in the morning and I'll have 30 emails, 50 tweets, a couple of text messages, some news alerts, and I don't know, Donald Trump tweeted some garbage and so everyone's losing their mind over that.

You know, like I'll have, you know, 100 notifications, maybe not that many, but a bunch. And on Android, I'm like, okay, there's a bunch of tweets. They're here. If I want to look at them, I can. There's emails. They're here. I know that they're such and such important. But if there's a text message, a text message or a missed call is almost always more important than that other garbage.

99% of the time, a text message is a higher priority than an email or a tweet or a Facebook message or whatever else. On iOS, there's just, it's just a giant reverse chronological stream. of all your notifications, and they all look identical, which is fine, but you have to scroll through and look, and you're going to miss something. On Android, you're like, they're all grouped, and so, like, okay, there's a bunch of Twitter stuff. I'll look at that later. I'll expand that later. All right, there's a text message here. I'm not going to miss it. I care about this. And none of that exists in iOS. And so, and that's like the biggest problem. There are other problems in terms of the way that, you know, you swipe and you clear and you 3D touch.

you manage how do you clear them and what's apple's philosophy for how you should treat them as a stream that you ignore and or a thing that you actually like work from blah blah blah blah blah blah but fundamentally the lack of grouping means that i miss important notifications yeah also apples they put that today's screen it's to the left you see swipe left to right on the main home screen and you can get to it and you can pull down the notification shade and go over there and get to it and that screen could be the most useful screen on the iPhone. It just kind of isn't. I want to...

I can get use out of that screen. I mean, I have a very specific set of things on it. It's... I mean, I could just look at it right now, but its calendar is the most important thing. Yeah. And then it's weather, my to-doist,

Apple News, and then time home, and because I'm creepy, my wife's location. She has mine, to be clear. Whether I'm on Android or iPhone. Becky's literally never let me turn that shit on. We're like at a wedding together or something.

And she's like out with the family. I'm like, can we turn it on for the weekend? She's like, no. Just call me. But I think that screen could be way more useful. It's just really hard to manage. It's hard to figure out. I definitely did not use this screen.

Yeah, it could be great. But it's way more useful than Google Now. Google now is an attempt to do this. And Google tried to put the algorithm in charge of it, and they just boned it. It's just bad. and so now they've buried it. Yeah, that's just one of those screens where, you know, it's like Apple doesn't know where settings should go.

Like, they're just like, I don't know. They just throw them around the phone, it's fine. Like, if that was, like, in the settings app and you're like, I'm going to adjust this to my liking and then look at it. But instead the settings are there, like, per widget and, like, you got to pull apps into it? Oh, you want to hear an exciting thing I learned after 10 years of using an iPhone? Every time I set up a new iPhone, I get a million candle

alerts and it drives you crazy, then I jump into the calendar app and I turn off all the calendars I don't want because we've got, you know, 50 calendars. And I'm still getting notifications with the calendars I've turned off. iOS has two separate settings for calendars inside the calendar app. There's another set of settings inside the settings app. But you tap calendars and then there's a setting to display them, the main checkbox. But then you have to hit the little I button to go into the calendar setting and manually turn off event notifications calendar by calendar.

Oh, my God. In the same way for notifications, like there's no way to just manually edit all notifications. You've got to turn up, turn it on setting by setting. Like, it just takes an eternity. In calendars specifically, you have to manually turn off event notifications for every single calendar. I think I've just somehow disabled the iOS calendar app. I think it knows. It knows.

It's like this isn't going to work out. Leave you alone. All right. I'm going to read one more ad. And then we've got to talk about the one plus five T. This episode of Vergecast brought to you by the art of shaving. What is the secret of a well-groomed guy? It's the art of shaving.

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Was it like gross? Was it like red? He was a little red. He should have used the art of shaving. He should have used the art of shaving. All right, One Plus 5T came out today. Yeah.

Big event. How did they do it? Headphone jack. How do they fit it all in? Weird tall screen. Bezillist. Well, fine. It's fine.

It's like not quite bezelist. It's close enough. Here's what I'll say about the One Plus 5T. If you don't know, it's got the same Android specs as every other other phone internally. I'm very curious to, here if the camera will be any good. But it has a taller screen. It has a headphone jack.

You know, it's the same thing as every other flagship Android phone. But imagine, just close your eyes and imagine this phone with a pixel camera. If Google had just done this, everyone would have lost their minds. Yep. Right? Yeah, it would have gone crazy. This is the phone. I mean, also the pixel version of Android. Right. The pixel version of Android. Right. The pixel version of Android and, you know, Google's camera stuff on top of this thing. Yeah. I'm actually very intrigued by this. I'm not a fan.

I don't have a lot of faith, rather, in One Plus's ability to execute on the camera. Yeah. It's always been their thing, right? We did a big feature. Yeah. They have a secondary low-light camera. Right. On the 5-2.

Which may or may not be, I don't think it's black and white. It's just a low-light. I know. We have to see. Yeah. This is the problem with the essential phone, too, right? everything was great and then the camera. I will say that has been a problem with previous

One Plus phones. I'm enjoying the essential team doing Reddit AMAs all the time. They're so cheery about them. And they're like, they're sort of admitting like, we're already designing the next one, which is like, you didn't finish shipping the first one. But it's like they're on it,

you know? They've got a whole little community. Are you still using one? No. It's over. It's too heavy for me. I've got ADB in my computer I need to reinstall ADB in my computer

so I can put the Oreo beta on mine Yeah Didn't Oneplus have the weird spyware situation going on They did have a thing And now it's gone they fix it They know They promise that everything's fine now Cool

Yeah Who buys a 1 plus 5T If you're listening to this And you're going to buy a 1 plus 5T Please tweet at us I'm curious because I know they've got deep fans, right? Like, people are real excited about Oneplus phones.

Dan did the video where he went out to China. Yep. Hung out with them. It was cool. That video did gangbusters because people love One Plus. This phone starts at $4.99. Yeah. Yeah, that's great.

It's a good phone. This is amazing that this phone is as cheap. And that they somehow, there's some kind of wizardry because they fit a headphone jacket in it. I don't know how they did it. I thought they made a giant phone. Yeah, is that the answer you just make it taller? What's the over under that the Galaxy S9 has no headphone jack and Vixby headphones? Ooh.

Because you know they're thinking about it. Samsung has been hitting the headphone jack thing pretty hard. Yeah. I mean, even in their last commercial, they made fun of dongles. Yeah. But like... I think they're going to do one more year with a headphone jack, but they won't hit it hard. They won't hit the messaging as hard. They'll be like, and it has a headphone

jack, and they'll move on. And that's how you know the S-10 won't have one. But the Bigsby headphones are coming. You know they're coming. Oh, yeah. It's going to be real sad for it. What do you want a Bixby headphone to do for you? Have a headphone check. I will say this, for better or worse,

and Paul's going to make fun of me, because he's going to think that I like this. But like, every time anyone in the world forgets a dongle, they tweet a picture at me. They're like, I'm so frustrated at Reckless. I'm like, I can't help you. But I hear you. I see you. I'm in it with you, man.

Yeah, that's why they're reaching out to you because they know you understand. It's like the easiest like on Twitter is tweeting me, your dongle rage. I'm like, yeah, I got you. I listen. All right, Paul, every week, you do a segment. And it happens exactly. the same time in the show. Always.

Exactly. And it has the same name. It's called robot dogs are people too. Ooh. So I'm very excited that Boston Dynamics is somehow not a dead company still, despite just a terrible corporate environment. I don't know. I don't know the full story, but some reason, Alphabet was just like, these crazy people

who make super impractical robots aren't. making a consumer product fast enough for us, even though our whole portfolios full of things that aren't consumer products. So now SoftBank owns Bossan Dynamics. Bosca Dynamics does like those, you know, scary robot dogs. And also they have some humanoid stuff. But they made one of their scary robot dogs look less scary. So it's like the new spot mini.

And it literally looks like it's from a sci-fi movie. And it's cute. And it's got a little, a pep to its step when it walks. And we still don't know if it's a product. They said, coming soon at the end of their teaser video, but it's probably just for another video about SpotMet. I hate to steal your thunder here, Paul.

But while we were recording, Boston Dynamics released another video of their Atlas robot, which is their humanoid robot. And the thing does backflips. Atlas does backflips? Dude, watch the video It is unbelievable It's 55 seconds

We can pause the podcast And just We'll come back in and hear everybody go What? Because it's crazy town Whoa Oh my gosh Right?

Wait, is this Atlas the next generation Oh, wait there it is Yeah It just It just could just backflip down It can jump on things It can jump on little blocks It's jumping from block

block, it hits the tall block, and then it's like, I'm going to turn around and do a backflip right now. Yeah. There's a big debate going on in the Verge Slack right now about whether or not you should say thank you to Alexa and the Google Assistant after it does something for you. And I am very strongly on pro thank you team. Okay. I think you should thank your assistant. One, because thanking your assistant,

saying thanks is like forgiveness. It's not a thing you do for the other person. It's a thing you do for yourself in your own heart. It makes you a better person. It makes you feel better to say thank you or to forgive somebody. So that's number one. Number two, it's Pascal's Wager. You guys know what Pascal's Wager is?

Yeah. Paul, you want to explain Pascal's Wager real quick? Pascal's Wager is like, let's say you got like 50-50 chance that God's not, God's real or God's not real. If God's real and you follow God, you go to heaven. And if you don't follow God, you go to hell. If God's not real, nothing happens when you die. So one of these is a better course of action with even odds.

So you're saying, say thank you because the robots will come to life and kill us all. Right. I'm saying there's some chance. Just to take it from live a godly life to go to heaven, you're saying if you don't say thank you, the robots will come to life and murder you first. Either the robots are going to become self-aware and try. try and kill us all in a Skynet future, or they're not. And so you might be able to prevent this or survive it by saying thank you to your robot right now. Is it painful at all for you to say thank you? No, it's not. If there's a two percent, if there's a tenth of a chance,

10th of a percent chance that saying thank you will save your life in the coming robot apocalypse, you might as well do it because it doesn't hurt anything. Here's my question. Do you say thank you when Alexa just blows it? Yes, because otherwise Alexa might get mad. And you don't want to make it like some ad. Good job. It's very easy to see how this works. So you're the robots. You're taking over the world.

And you're like, should we save humanity or kill humanity? And then one of the robots is like, well, not all humans are bad. It's like, well, how do you decide which humans are bad and which ones are good? Well, since we conquered all the tech companies and captured all their logs, we can just look. Thank you. All right. This is an excellent segue to something Dieter put on the list. Can I just say one more thing about Atlas?

Yeah. Yeah. My favorite blog I ever read about robotics was literally called robots that jump. Mm-hmm. And it was basically, there's a lot of thinking in, like, the AI circles, that there's something very fundamental about the physical expression of a robot or of anything. to be able for intelligence, the physical expression of animals

for their intelligence. How you can explore and interact with the world impacts the thoughts that you can have about the world. His whole thing, I think it was called Playao Jump or something like that. But it was something very fundamental about a robot being able to jump and that being super important for AI. I don't think that's true at all. I'm pretty sure Atlas is super dumb.

Yeah, but this is a huge landmark. in robotics. Yeah. This is really crazy. I think the jumping is like when you start to perceive the robot as having capabilities beyond your own in like a tangible way. And then you're going to start assigning it other, even if it has it or not. Right.

You're going to start assigning it other capabilities. Like the rock. I've been playing Horizon. So charming. I finally started playing Horizon Zero Dawn. And it is so obvious that they modeled the robot animals after the Boston Dynamics robots, that it is creepy as hell to play because you are out there in the future wilderness hunting what is like this is the very same stuff that we're publishing on our website right now.

Yeah. Anyway. It's funny because Boston Dynamics, right? Like Google's supposed to sell them. They've been trying to sell them forever. They did. They sold them to SoftBank. They did? Yeah.

When did that happen? June. I missed that. Well, SoftBank money is going to do. They own everything everywhere all the time. Although apparently some of the time. Although apparently some of that comes from the Saudis, so, you know, there's that. Yeah, SoftBank has a big chunk of everything.

They're about to buy a big chunk of Uber. What if future Uber cars are just spot minis? You're just like, mount to steed. Right. Yes. Rott is Spot Mini to where you're going. It's just like you just, you whistle and it comes running up and you hop on. And also, you would yell high on silver.

You could yell. You can yell. You can yell. You can yell. back of an atlas and just starts hopping away. You could yell hi-ho silver and it would be literally true because there's probably some silver

inside that robot. Just think about it. Well, we've really collapsed at the end here. All right, well that was the verge cast. Again, a slow week. It ended with us hypothesizing that we would ride robot dogs to work.

So we're doing fine. And yet still make just the worst puns. All right. If this was not what you expected from us, there are other things to listen to. You can listen to Ashley and Caitlin's show. Why'd you push that button? Lauren was on the show today. You can watch her show next level with Lauren Good.

You can also listen to her podcast, which is excellent. Too embarrassed to ask with Carus Swisher. Karris Swisher host Recode Decode and Peter Kafka host Recode Media. Media industry, by the way, literally going crazy as we began the show, all kinds of stuff going on. So listen to that. if you're into it. It is a good show to help you make sense of the world. You can also watch Paul and Ashley and I and Hiam and Jake and Nat this week on the

Circuit Breaker Live show on Twitter. That is a good time. We really went for it with the TV boxes this week. Yeah. You should watch it if you haven't watched it. It took Creighton, D. Simone, our producer on the Circle Breaker show, what, four hours to set up Game Stream on the Invidia Shield, and then it didn't work. when we tried it eventually worked.

I definitely was looking at a Windows desktop that he could not see on the actual computer. It was a very confusing time. So watch that. It was a real comedy fairs. There's also the Vox Media Podcast Network, which is a fulsom doodont as a client. Robots that jump.

WordPress.com. That's old school. All right. That's it. That's for our chest. Thank you. Rock and roll. Paul. promo code. I don't know.