The Vergecast - Pixel, Nintendo Switch, and new MacBook Pros

Episode Date: October 21, 2016

This week at The Verge has been a busy one! Reviews for Google’s Pixel phone are out, Chinese tech firm LeEco just announced a plethora of new products coming to the US, Nintendo finally showed us new hardware for their games, and Apple is teasing a new Mac event for next week. Even Tesla had a few things to say. Nilay, Dieter, Paul, and Jordan cover it all on this week’s Vergecast. 02:27 - Google Pixel review 24:06 - Masterclass ad 27:24 - Tesla 39:27 - Hello Fresh ad 41:26 - LeEco 54:21 - Nintendo Switch 59:27 - Apple’s upcoming Mac event Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're my guy. What am I doing? I'm 20. Hey, welcome to the Vergecast. Oh, a trolled in my own show. What? Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast. Oh, it's hello, not hey.

It's not... It's not... What's up? Oh, God. Here we go. Just another episode of the Vergecast is stumbled to a beginning. Yeah. This is it.

This is a show. It's the Vergecast. We talk about technology. We talk about culture. We talk about Chinese companies launching 10,000 products in one fateful day. Mm-hmm. Pretty good product announcement. going to get into all of it. But anyway, I'm Nilai Patel. I'm here. Paul Miller is here. Hello.

Dieter Bone, San Francisco. How's it going, Deeter? Hey, it's going well. I'm, uh, I'm there. I didn't mean to imply that your name was fully Dieter Bone, San Francisco. Anyway, Dieter's here. And Jordan Golson is here live in New York. I had so much fun last week doing it remotely. I decided to come here and see what it's all about. Yeah, but we're actually going to talk about cars with you. This is fantastic. Not just burning galaxy notes. Although We can talk about them too. President Obama, just as we went to air, was giving a speech about Obamacare and he's like, you know, something's broken. You don't just throw it away. Like a cell phone. When it comes out and it's broken, you know, they fix it if it has bugs.

Unless it's on fire, then they have to take it off the bar time. It's like, what are you saying is the problem with Obamacare, dude? Even the president of the free world is burning Samsung for their note disaster. It was like an incredible moment. He was like smiling. You know, there's like Sassy Obama is out now because it's over. He's just in a good mood. He's like doing finger guns all the time All finger guns That was like the look on his face He was like

Because he's given the Obamacare Is like a broken cell phone speech Like a hundred times Okay This is this has always been his thing It's like it's a tech product Go get a fix When you roll out of tech product

What you do You upgrade it, you fix it Data like this is his like line Okay Right And then this time He got the big Obama smile And he's like

Unless it's on fire It was good Anyway We're not sadly here to talk about Obamacare and metaphors. Maybe we are. Do you want to just do 90 hot minutes on Obamacare? Please. No.

Can we? Well, I will tell you, if that is the thing you're interested in, listen to the weeds with Ezra Klein, Matt Iglesis and Sarah Cliff, because they do that basically every week. But don't, we're not going to do that here. What we are going to talk about here is a bunch of tech news. It was actually a busy week.

Yeah. And it kicked off. It was something we should just immediately get into. Deeter, you reviewed the pixel. Home run. Home run, says Dieter Bone. Home run. That was the 11th hour metaphor that we came up with after many, many, many other bad metaphors. To be clear, my suggested headline was No More Excuses, which Deeter and Dan thought was too negative.

Huh. Well, on our beautiful homepage, which you could find on www.theverge.com, we are able to put up multiple headlines, whichever ones we sort of feel like. And no more excuses was 0.05% less clicked than home run. It's neck and neck. Positivity wins. That's right. So it's a phone that's made by Google. And there's a whole lot of people coming at me saying, no, it's made by HTC. Yes, HCC owns the factory that made it, I guess.

But like Google says they designed it and they came up with all the ideas behind it. And I don't know. I think it's good. The camera is, that's like the sign. It's like the canary in the phone mine. And it's really good. Yeah. The software is fast for Android.

but it doesn't quite, it's hard for me to compare it to the iPhone. Like, there's this whole thing where, like, the iPhone just, like, kicks the shit out of Android in every single benchmark, but does that really matter or not thing? It's funny how iPhone people three years ago tell you, or Apple people anyway, would tell you that benchmarks don't matter and specs don't matter. But now the pixels come out. All I'm hearing is a lot of, but it's not waterproof and it doesn't have two speakers and doesn't have optical image stabilization.

and it doesn't do as well on geek bench, so clearly it sucks. Yeah. These are all things that you, like, told me not to worry about three years ago. Oh, yeah. Anyway, we should go back and find the number of people who commented in reviews of, like, old HTC phones that had boom sound. Remember boom sound? Boom sound. Boom sound is what really sold a lot of phones for HTC.

Ooh. But the Apple people would be like, who needs stereo speakers when you're just going to plug in headphones? And now they're like, we have stereo speakers. and slightly more inconvenient headphones. By the way, both Jordan and Paul have their iPhone 7s on the table here. Both permanently attached. Both permanently attached iPhone dongles.

Deere, can I ask you maybe kind of a wonky, hard-to-answer question about the camera? Yeah. Because I always felt like Apple kind of won a lot of camera tests just because it just kind of put a little more saturation in there. Like a great camera. And then their default settings were pretty saturated. I've seen a lot of comparisons that have the iPhone pictures much less saturated than the pixel.

So are the pixel photos just absurdly saturated or just like actually true to life? So I would say they're a little bit more saturated, but it's actually like really complicated. So the thing that you look at most of your photos on are on the screen that you took them with. And the pixel has a very nice OLED screen. So colors just look more saturated on it, period. And so when you offload and look on a screen, they seem a little more saturated. On the screen itself, they seem way more saturated. And then Sam Biford actually talked to the camera engineers about what decisions they made

when they were deciding how this camera was going to interpret stuff. And one of the ways that this thing works, especially since it doesn't have optical image stabilization, is whenever the camera app is open, the thing is just taking photos, just all the time. It's all it does is just taking photo after photo. And when you hit the shutter button, all that does is mark a moment in time and tell the phone, hey, take the last four photos that you just took or six or eight or however many and compile them together and make an image out of them and just do that. And because they are automatically compiling together a handful of photos, you know, basically an HDR, but it's not just straight up bracketed like HDR.

They argue that they are able to, in low light, accept more color and be a little bit more daring about allowing color in low light situations where other cameras that don't do that need to be a little bit more cautious about putting color in low light. All of which you add together and the pixel I think is in fact a little bit more aggressive at showing colors than an iPhone. And some of that is just like preference of what they think people will like to look at better. and some of it is sort of like, I don't know, look at how good we are at coming up with innovative ways to make a camera work. Yeah, the way I see it, I think there's kind of a moment in time

with photography now where it is so subjective and about taste and what's pleasing. And Apple, when they did the 6S and we were doing briefings, review briefings of 6S, they sat me and Walt down at One Infinite Loop with one of their camera engineers and they showed us at length,

in detail on like huge displays. Here are iPhone photos. And here are photos from an Asian manufacturer we will not name. And Walt was like, is it Samsung? And they were like, we don't know. And we're like, it's Samsung. And what they were really into showing us was that the iPhone is tuned. This is their claim.

It's tuned to be biased towards reality. Right? It's going to capture real things. And if you want to filter reality afterwards, you know, there's a wide variety of tools in the iPhone. Whereas Samsung phones, when we're like 100% sure it with Samsung phones, they do so much more processing. They smooth out skin tones. They will do more, they will artificially pull light out of shadows.

And you can see it, right? And I think what's really interesting now is people like that, right? Like consumers really like that. And the idea that what you want, and this is what I think, what I want is a camera that produces the most natural image it can. And then I'll make a bunch of decisions. But what a lot of people want is a camera that already. made those decisions for them. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I'm not gonna edit this. They just want good pictures. They just want good pictures and so like I keep thinking at a bunch of friends visiting a few weeks

ago and it was like raining outside we couldn't go anywhere and I had two friends and they just sat on the couch for like you know 40 minutes while we waited for it stop raining so we go outside and they were just they had the basically playing with Snapchat filters and they got to the one that like the beauty filter and like both of them were like why don't why don't all my photos look like this Like, why, why doesn't my phone aggressively filter my photos from the jump to be like this Snapchat filter? And I was like, aghast, right? No, what you want to capture is reality.

Someone was telling me that, I'm not, I'm not any fun at parties. Let me get really high-minded here. Cameras don't capture reality, right? Like, it's not, this is why Teeters in the show. Apple is making a decision. It's not like the iPhone, like, literally captures your soul and any other phone that is, like, doing more aggressive processing on the thing is, like, affects. making a, you know, a cyborg version of it.

They're all artificial, like, visions of what the thing was and they make decisions. Like, if you look at the literal, literal raw sensor input from an iPhone, it is just as bonkers as any other thing. Because these sensors are fundamentally tiny. And so Apple's, you know, saying we're biased towards reality, to me, it's like, yes, it is slightly more accurate on, like, whatever scale we're going to talk about. But, like, so what? I kind of don't care. Like, I'm not out there making documentary films about the precise color temperature of the bar that I'm in.

I'm taking pictures of my friends and I want them to look good. Yeah. So I think that's just a question. When I say we're in a moment of time, it's like it's an inflection point where what we think camera, like all the cameras are just as good now. I mean, that's the big takeaway here. The pixel camera, the S7 camera, and the iPhone camera, they're better and worse on like a different set of metrics, but like you average it out and they're pretty much

just as good as one another. And it only took Android five years to get there. But I'm saying, unless you have a 7 plus where you can do the zooming and like the port, like, but that stuff is the next turn, right? Like portrait mode is in beta. Maybe it'll work great. Maybe they're going to do some other stuff with it. But that's the next turn. Like the baseline now is pretty equivalent. And I think the big question is what do we want these cameras to capture by default? And Apple's answer right now is a set of decisions that we believe is as close to true life as possible. Other people's, like Google's decisions are basically like real plus. Like We'll pre-edit the photo for you.

The thing that you would do to your photo if you edit it well is kind of where the pixel lands. And Samsung is like, do you like filters? I mean, you could almost argue that humans see an HDR kind of by default because we're kind of compositing a bunch of samples that we take of small sections of our field of view. Like what Deeter said, what is reality? That's where you want a smartphone review conversation.

I remember what Deeter said, are we here right now for sure? I'm not. Tell me right now, I'm not. Once you post the photos on Facebook, can you tell the difference between an iPhone or a Samsung or a pixel the way most people are going to use their phones and share their images? I sincerely know. One of my favorite things over the weekend was I know a bunch of reviewers who had the pixel and their reviews posted and then they started revealing which photos over the weekend they had taken with the pixel.

And it was like, you just can't tell. Yeah, if you go to Theverge.com again, Sean O'King. did a comparison between the pixel, the S7, and the iPhone 7. And the small versions of these photos, you really almost, I definitely couldn't, I can pick, with each one, I can typically pick which one I like the best, but I couldn't tell you if I didn't have the labels, which was which. Was it the same phone every time? No, it's not.

It's usually the pixel. Right. Yeah. It's usually the pixel. Interesting thing about Sean O'Kane and those articles, Sean actually really hates the HDR and the pixel. He much prefers the standard mode, which Google doesn't give you by default. Every time you open the camera app, it goes to the HDR auto mode. So there's a lot of, like, he was getting better, more quote unquote pleasing results by turning it off than leaving it on.

But that's also, I think, in part because Sean's a really good photographer, knows what to do to get good photos, whereas I'm a really shitty photographer and I want the camera to figure it out for me. I do want to say, though, that like, I don't fully buy this whole argument that it doesn't need OIS because the software is magic. Like, you know, when I'm in low light, I'm getting pretty blurry photos from time to time if I'm not, like, holding it super steady. Well, so that's, that zooms out. It's like the broader question I think I have with the pixel. So I have one.

I've been playing with it. I don't have it here for some reason. But it's, this is the first one. And it's just my question. I think it's the hardest question. And no other Android manufacturer, save Samsung has done a good job with this ever. is, is this the base they're going to iterate on, or is this next year they're going to come out

with some totally other product? Right? Because if you take the base of the pixel and you say it's almost as good as the iPhone, you really are just a few iterations away from being better along some other axis, right? Like, if you add OIS to the phone, Deter, I know you like, the Deter is pointing out

that the polarization on the screen is like diagonal so it like works well. Hmm. But I, so like, that's like, to me, it's, I can see it in a different way. Like if you tweet, you know, you make the screen, like you just make it better. Right. Well, and you have like an engine.

Like for Google to next year this time come out with a substantially better phone, they need to be almost done with that phone right now. Yeah. Right. And so, like, Deeter, do you think this is like the foundation or is this just a product? And next year it will be like another product. Because I can't, we don't know yet with Google. And only Samsung has done that.

Yeah. Well, so Google, first of all, hasn't committed to saying that next year it's going to be a pixel again. and they might call it something else. So that's one indication. And the second indication is they have a hardware chief, got Rick Osterlo, who came over, he was at Motorola for a super long time. And I'm sure he has his own opinions about what the phones ought to be.

I know he wants to stay at the high end. But, you know, we were saying, like, he started, what, like March, April, somewhere in there? Yeah. So, like, they were definitely working on this phone before he came in. So whatever they do next year, like if he, maybe he actually hates the pixel. I doubt it. But maybe he wants to go in a slightly different direction.

My sense is, like, they'll build on this baseline. Like, I think they like the basic hardware ideas. And I know they like the basic software ideas. For me, the big question isn't, will they be able to keep up or surpass the iPhone in terms of, like, raw hardware quality? As long as they're, like, in the same time zone, it'll be fine. as long as it like feels like a decent well-built phone and like matches most of the specs, it'll be fine.

The big question is, what can they do on the software side to convince you that living in Google World is better than living in Apple World or in Samsung World? With Samsung World, I think that like, yeah, nobody wants to live in Samsung. So one thing, one thing about that I noticed was I tested it out with like the Verge test account. So, like, you know, it didn't have anything on it. It was just the most, it just looked so boring and barren. And I pulled open the assistant. And the assistant, you can get to the assistant settings from inside of assistant. But they're not part of the main Android settings.

So that even felt a little tacked on to me. I do not understand, and Dieter, you talk about this at length in the review, and we were screwing around with it in my house. Like, the assistant is on the screen, and you have to hold down the button to get it. But then there's the Google search logo at the top, and you just tap on it. It opens and you can just talk to it. Those things are just wildly disconnected, and they have different capability sets. So, like, you can ask the assistant what song is playing, and it's like, I don't, I can't do that.

And then you click on the Google button, and you're like, what song is playing? And it opens its Zerzan clone and just tells you. That makes zero sense to me. Google Now is still floating around in there. Like, that's what I mean by, like, it's a couple of steps away. But, like, is Google committed to, you know, a student are going to sit in a room with, like, a whiteboard and be like, okay, we have Google. we have Google Assistant and we have Google Now, which one's going to be? Like, are we going to kill Google now?

Like, someone has to do that, and I just don't know who it is or when it's going to happen. I mean, right now, I would tell you that everything's going to get folded into the assistant. They just haven't done it yet. I think that the way that the assistant is probably architected at a relatively deep level, they can't just tack on every single feature. They just need to make it work. It's sort of like the Tesla stuff that happened yesterday. Like, they put in all new, well, we'll get it to Tesla later.

But like, I think the assistant fundamentally works a little bit different than like that other Google stuff. And so they couldn't just put the features in. That's a really charitable read. The less charitable read is like this is, this feels like typical Google. Like, hey, we made a new thing. It's sort of like the old thing. Well, but we can't kill the old thing yet because the new thing doesn't do what the old thing does. So we're going to ship both things.

You look at you look at the four, there's four different ways to get to Google. There's Allo, Assistant, the search button, Google Now. There's maps. If you want to search maps, you know, other searches, whatever. And then you look on the Verizon phone. If you want to send somebody a text message, there's messaging. There's Verizon, whatever the hell it's called. There's hangouts.

And there's Allo. And in fact, in some Verizon phones, they actually, like, have hangouts there, but disabled by default to, like, I don't know, make you use it. Yeah, I'm serious. There's also Go 90. Let's not forget Go 90. The best preload of all time. But like Google.

Shout out to Go 90. It's supposed to be their opinionated phone and they do not know what their opinion is on messaging. So they just have four different messaging apps on the thing. Four. Like that's insane. And like whatever, it's like they're shipping their org structure. And the org structure with Google search is like not clear. And so there's four different ways to get to Google search on this thing.

And they don't. know what the hell, you know, they, they are afraid of pissing off the carriers. And so there's four different messaging apps on this thing. What my ideal would be is that they would use the pixel as a prism and look through it to see what their org should be. Yeah, that'd be great. Sooner standing at the all hands meeting. The pixel 100,000 Google employees. I heard this great podcast. You guys got to check it out. The pixel is a prism. I'm doing it like an AR mime. Oh, yeah. Like Sundar's like looking through the screen of the phone in AR.

And it's like, your division has been canned. That's awful. Hey, Paul, do you do you like the heft, like the weight of the pixel? Yes. I'm trying to. Yeah. So are you like a really big fan of like how how it feels like in your hand in terms of weight? I want to make a noise for you real quick.

Would you say that you're a pixel density enthusiast? Oh, no. Nailed it, home run. I knew you were walking me down a road, and I just didn't know where I was headed. That was great. No, listen to this. Can you hear that?

Hear that? You just got to put a case... I hear something. That's the camera bump noise. Yeah, that's a phone. Oh, yeah, yeah. The phone that should theorize... It's not hard to make a flat object.

It's like day one of woodshop. It's everything. It has to be. Nothing more. It's, if phone does not sit flat on the, on the thing. If they just made it thicker, they could add a little more battery. So much battery. Paul's talking about his iPhone, by the way.

Yeah, I'm talking about the iPhone set. They made it thicker to match the camera bump. The design reveals itself to you. It can have so much battery. And you said you got wonderful battery life with the pixel. Yeah, well, I got it on the pixel Excel. I'm getting really good on the pixel, but not like, holy crap good. But Walt did not get great battery life on the regular pixel.

He got like fine. I also think, yeah, just a slightly. thicker phone than the iPhone 7 is just a little easier to hold. It's just more comfortable. It's so obvious. It's boring. It just makes sense. Jordan and I are just hanging out with her. It's ridiculous. Can't do this with a pencil. What do you guys think of the price? What do you guys think of the price? It's fine. I mean, like, my takeaway is there's only two phones worth buying right now. There's the iPhone and the pixel. That's fine for them to be the same price. I do not think that you should buy anything else. Unless you need to buy.

Unless you can't afford it, right? Unless you need a cheaper phone. Well, yeah. But I'm saying like at that, point in the market, those are the only two choices, and fine. If you need to buy a cheaper phone, there's several good cheaper phones to buy. Buy an older Samsung or iPhone. Yeah. Or, I mean, all the other manufacturers get heavily discounted by the carrier. There's almost a statement to the price where if they made it cheaper, like they'd still be in this, like, the age, well, yeah, well, at least it's cheaper or something like that. Yeah. I think, here it's like, they're head-to-head. To Neli's headline, no more excuses. No more excuses. You're in the game. I'm excited. I think this is good, it's good for the whole industry. I think if they get it right and this thing is indeed

just the foundation, then their foundation is arguably as good as the iPhone. Where Google will go as they build on that foundation is very different than where Apple will go. Apple have some real competition that will make them improve things. Walt went on like an hour-long tirade two episodes of his podcast ago about how bad Siri is. Like if Assistant gets good and it's the future of Google and they put all that effort into it. Apple has no choice but to improve Siri because they'll get compared one-to-one. The camera competition is cool. It's just in general, like, I'm happier having Google in one-to-one competition with Apple than Google mediated through Samsung. I honestly, I do not know what Samsung's next move is. I couldn't tell you. What do you think?

I mean, they got to, still, they have to tell us what the heck happened and they haven't done it, and maybe they'll never know. I don't know, our phones keep catching fire. We can't figure it. out, sorry. Yeah. But until they do that. The next round of Samsung phones, it's the only question I even is going to ask. Or they'll just pretend it never happened. Yeah.

It's gone from Note to Samsung. And like, it's creeping into Android in general a little bit to fear about this exploding. Like, I don't know that there was a single review of this phone that didn't make a joke about exploding phones. Yeah. No, not a single one. Well, and Samsung is like nickel and diamond people on refund.

So yeah, they've definitely not contained this to the note. They've made it about their whole company. President Obama. Sometimes the phones explode. It's like, it's out there. I mean, it's going to cost them billions and billions of dollars to recall this phone and refund people and everything. And they're nickel and diming over people whose phones actually caught fire. And being like, well, we'll give you replacement cost on your carpet, not cost to buy new carpet.

And it's like, guys, it's like a couple thousand dollars. They're shooting, you know. Well, there must. There's somebody. There's like a, what is it, like an insurance person, actuary? Does that do that is? Or is that just a calculator dying? An adjuster.

That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah, the person who comes out and looks at your stuff. And he's like, you know, he's in the office and he's, you know, got the spreadsheets. Just doing his job. And they're like, I bet that person is just like, well, they already hate us. What's the value in them hating it? You know they're not going to buy our phone again, so forget it. Like, whatever.

Here's your burned carpet swatch. Get out of here. All right, that's terrible. I'm sure the Samsung insurance adjuster is a nice guy. Yeah. His name's Tom. You're doing good, Tom. Thanks, Tom.

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People listen to it because they know we're going to screw it up, I think. Masterclass, you're great. I'm taking your, I heartily endorse your product. Anyway, let's talk about it. Let's about Tesla. Jordan, you're here. A bunch of Tesla news last night. Let's get into it.

So Tesla did a delayed announcement that finally came out yesterday. Elon had promised it earlier in the week and then delayed it, because I think he needs like 19 days in the week and only has seven to work at his three companies. So what Tesla did is they have announced that all the cars that they've built since last week are including new, advanced, autonomous drive capabilities. And basically, Elon says they have all the hardware. required for the car to completely drive itself in any situation. Yeah, which is full level five autonomy, right?

Yes, level five autonomy according to one scale, which is level four autonomy according to the SAE scale, which is all very confusing. But basically, the car should be able to, once the software is done, drive itself in any situation. Now, I can't do that yet. We're, you know, two, three, five, ten years away, depending on who you ask. But he says, if you buy this car today in three years or three years or three, you're, you know, two, five years when the software comes out, it will be able to drive itself. You will not need to

upgrade anything. So that's cameras, sensors. What's the hardware package? So it includes a number of things. There are eight cameras for 360 degree viewing at up to 820 feet of distance. So basically it can see in every direction for a long way, just like your eyes would. There's also 12 ultrasonic sensors, which are looking for objects in the environment around you. And what it does is the camera sees something, and then the ultrasonic sensor will verify that it's a thing. like perhaps a truck in front of you. One hopes. Yes, they say it will.

And then there's also a forward-facing radar that can see through things like rain and fog and dust that maybe the visual cameras can't see. And they also say it can bounce radar underneath the car in front of you to see what's in front of it. Whoa. That's really awesome.

How does that? Basically, the radar shoots radio waves forward and they reflect off things. And so what it's doing is it's shooting radar underneath the car that bounces off whatever the object is in front of it and comes back to you. It's a bounce shot.

Yeah, exactly. That's classic radar bounce shot. Yeah, absolutely. And so what they say is that the radar could notice the car in front of the car in front of you breaking before the car in front of you even reacts to it. Wow. So the car in front of you might rear-end someone,

but your car won't because the Tesla will know that it's stopping. That's pretty awesome. Is what they say. My favorite part of what he announced yesterday is all this stuff is coming and they'll turn it on when it's safer than a human driver. But the way that it knows if it's safer than a human driver is all Teslas are going to be running this autonomous self-driving software in shadow mode. Yes.

It's a very good Elon Musk code name for something. Yeah. So basically what it's doing is the car is going to be recording everything that's going on around it. All the video camera stuff is going to be recording all the time. And what will happen is that if you get into a car accident, accident, Tesla can recreate, well, what would the autonomous mode have done if it was in control? Would it have avoided the accident? And I bet a lot of the time the answer is going to be yes, because a lot of accidents are caused

by human error or distraction or whatever. And the goal is that they can take that data and take it to regulators and legislators and, in effect, elected officials, and say, look, our autonomous is safer than human drivers, so make it legal for us to use it. I have to say, one, it's brilliant. two that is ice cold, right? Like, we're going to put software in this car that would prevent a crash.

We're going to go ahead and let you crash. So we get what we want from the government. That's nuts to me. And I asked him about this. I said, you know, the whole argument is that he's saving lives. Autonomous cars literally save lives. So we need to do everything we can to get them in the hands of everyone.

And so I said, well, you know, if you're doing that, are you going to enact these technologies, whether the government says it's okay or not? And he's like, well, no, we can't do that because it would be illegal. He has to convince the government and not just the U.S. government, but the EU and everybody,

look, you are literally killing people by not letting us put this software in our cars. And he's saying this on the call to media. Jordan was on his call. Yeah, and, well, that quote. Oh, that's a whole different thing. This is a whole other quote. Oh, well, this is where he's at.

So we'll get to that. Okay. So what this quote you're talking about is that he's talking about negative stories about autopilot and how the evil media. So you're, yeah, there's media. It's us. It's rigged.

Sorry, Elon. Here's the Elon quote. He's saying this to a group of reporters. You really need to think carefully about this, because if in writing some article that's negative, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you're killing people. Next question. By the way, the pause between you're killing people and next question was like four hours. Just like, just like stone cold. We all have to recover from what he just said. A bunch of reporters was like, do we, do we quote this? Am I murdering someone? What am I doing? I mean, I get it.

Yeah, it's got a point. Like, there's no doubt that having a robot drive a car is the robot, it's not going to be sleepy or be drunk or the whole list, not distracted. The next time the Tesla software fails, instead of like, Elon Musk has like more fanatical Twitter fans than any other executive on the face of the earth. Yeah. And so the next time that we write about something failing with Tesla software, because we're going to do it,

instead of, hey, you don't believe in the future, we're just going to have everybody on Twitter literally calling us murderers. Yeah, that's a move. Well, it's going to be that, but it's two things. One, it's, you know, for a long time, you couldn't prove a negative. Right.

You know, all you knew is the accidents that happened. You couldn't talk about, well, think of all the accidents that didn't happen, and it was all anecdotal. Except now, he's literally going to have evidence that says, we could have saved 500 lives last year. Oh, I guarantee you, this is some, this shadow mode is like an Elon.

Musk like hot tub innovation where it's like Elon and Kimball Musk so at code conference you know he went on this extended riff about how we live in an alternate reality and he had this line where he was like I think about this so much my brother and I had to ban it from as a hot tub conversation topic which is an amazing list of things like what else is on that list to create a list of banned hot tub topics it on the wall and they like fill out a new thing it just implies a level of success that like no human will ever achieve. Like, you are not, not in my hot tub.

I aspire to have a list of banned hot tub topics. I started working on one immediately. I just bought a Honda. I stopped covering the event, like open, simple note. I was like, here we go.

Make it till you make it. But you know that he's like sitting in the hot tub with like Kimball, his brother. He's like, how do you prove a negative? And he was like, record everything that happens.

Then he took a long talk of his perfect Tesla vape. And he was like, a shadow. mode. This makes sense right now. Yeah. Aren't all vapes, Tesla Vapes? Tesla Coil Vakes. Attempt to get this legalized

and acceptable and mainstream. I understand this, but is there going to be a point where people are like, you know what? I don't really like that every time I do something bad with my car or good with my car and Tesla disagrees with me

Yeah. It tells the government. Elon Musk goes to the logs and it shows everybody recording of what did. Yeah. Like, like, there's a, there's got to be a point. Like, if you walked into the Apple store, it's like, no, I totally didn't drop it in water. And then Apple's like, well, actually, we have a video of you in your kitchen

dropping it into your sink. Yeah, they do it with a little sensor. But it's just a little thing. Series of NARC is basically what you're saying. It's not like thousands of eight cameras. It's not like your phone is constantly recording what you're doing through the fun facing

camera. So you can be like... That we know of. Where did you drop your phone? It wasn't in the pool. Like there's got to be at some point where we don't want Tesla to replay everything that happens in and around its cars. Right. Will that, will the information that Tesla collects from shadow mode be something that the government can subpoena? Because they can already do that with the crash mode. A lot of cars now, well, when you get into a crash, it knows, did you apply the brake pedal?

It knows how fast you were going. It knows if you were at your seatbelt on, and they can already subpoena all that info. Well, so I would go back to Dieter's point, which is people who, who buy Teslas are like fanatic about Tesla. Right. Right. He's not running, he's not running around to every car in the road

installing a cameras, right? It's just his products. If you're buying the Tesla, you're like opting into this choice. Mm-hmm. And I bet those people are as excited about self-driving cars as anybody. Right.

So I think it's the same as Apple, right? He's counting on a really devoted customer base to help him make this decision. And that's fine. Which will be fine until next year, when the Model 3 comes out and they're trying to sell 500,000 a year. Because right now you have all your early adopters

and okay, they know what they're getting. But the next group of folks, if my mom tries to buy one, is she going to be excited about the car recording everything going on around it at all times? You know, there's just like a world in which maybe. And they don't care. I was thinking about this a lot with the pixel, right?

Like the thing that we didn't talk about at all with the pixel that Apple would bring up is like Google collects more information from you. And like that's a privacy concern. I think Joanna's review in the journal pointed out, like, if you don't want I message and you don't care about these privacy issues, like the pixels are great fun. That's basically your conclusion. Deer's conclusion was much the same. Like, if you have I message, you're going to be annoyed.

But nothing is real. Well, yeah, I mean, I also say that, like, Google's not doing quite enough with that information to justify it. They need to do more. The assistant needs to be a little bit better to justify how much stuff you're taking. I've been thinking a lot about this information collection, and I'm just kind of hit the point where I'm like, I don't care. I've definitely been of the... You have nothing to hide.

I mean, maybe I do. I mean, I always say, Google and Facebook, really good at surfacing photos I wish I'd hidden. Right? Like, man, I had some bad hair 2001 to 2005. If I have an opportunity to opt in or opt out of your data collection, and I trust you as a company to be good at keeping it private, then I am totally fine with it.

What I don't like, the way Tesla does it, it's like, Let's go to the tapes. Like, remember when we were driving, we were testing a Tesla, ran out a battery. I don't know all the details of the story. But they got mad at us and they ran back the logs. They ran back the logs. Like, any time Tesla disagrees with you, are they going to run your logs and call you out? Like, I feel like Google's not going to do that.

Like Dieter could say, like, I asked Google's assistant to do this and I phrased it like this. And Google's assistant was like, I don't know. And then Google's like, play in the tape. Let's go to the locks. Oh, you actually said this and you said it wrong. So it's your fault. I mean, currently people are already perfectly happy to trade privacy for convenience. Right.

If, you know, Google or whoever, think about what people will trade. We're going to trade privacy for your life. Yeah. And that's basically what Musk is arguing. Yeah. I mean, I think people who buy Teslas are, like, excited about the cameras. They're excited about giving, handing over control to Elon. Like, he's got that in his brand.

If Chevy was doing this, I think we'd be having a much different conversation, right? And like, the question is, is this going to spur the rest of the industry to do it? And it's already happening in some ways, right? Like every insurance company will sell you an ODB adapter that, like, plugs in and monitors you and keeps your insurance rates low if you don't drive like a jerk. What if a company called Le Echo would do it? Are we transitioning? I don't know.

I just thought I'd try that. Lay Eco. Let me read this next ad. Is it a lay ad? And then we should talk about Laco. We should talk about Nintendo and X. We should do a little bit of MacBook preview because that's all happening. What a week.

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registered dietitian on staff who reviews each recipe to ensure its nutritionally balance. It's all delivered to your doorstop in a specially insulated box for free. I'm looking at some of these meals. It looks pretty good. Yeah. Phantom pork tenderloin. It's a ghost. Yogurt marinated chicken. Flies itself. Anyway, for $35. off your first week deliveries, visit hellofresh.com, enter code verge when you subscribe. That's hellofresh.com. That's the code verge. I wish we cooked together more. We should. I love cooking. It's my favorite thing. I cooked for Dieter this weekend.

Oh, yeah. Let's do it on the podcast. Huh? Just have a little hot plate in the middle. I know. I smoked ribs for like eight hours. It's great. Wow. They were phenomenal. Or apparently my new favorite word, they were stupendous. Stupendous. Stupendous. Yeah, Nelai, Stupendous Rids. your next hello fresh recipe. It doesn't take 30 minutes of that. It's like, buy a smoker. They ship a smoker to you,

especially insulated box. Anyway, Leco. Leco. Leco. So, Dieter, you wait for this event. It stands for ecosystem. I would say that... Lay stands for the.

Normally we would not cover many of these products, just to be clear. But the spectacle and hype with which they were introduced at this event was something to behold. So, do you want to walk us through it? Yeah, well, we had to like start it off. Lauren wrote a really good what, who the hell is the eco piece?

And then they got on stage and they're like, who the hell is the eco? This is a company, their Chinese company. They make a bunch of TVs and phones and like the standard stuff that you'd expect. They bought Vizio and now they're saying, hey, we're coming to the U.S. in a big, big way. So started out as kind of like a Netflix of China. Right. And so they announced like a TV. Yeah.

They announced like a streaming service, but it's only on their product. but it's not really clear. And they've got a bunch of partners, but they wouldn't tell us who the main partner was. And then they told some other stories. They, like, showed all these, like, weird charts and graphs

of how they interact with their customers. They have this thing that they call UP to you, up to you, where they, like, collect customer feedback. Just, like, this, just like, he's insane like, like, up to you. No.

It's up to you what we make. No, no, no, it actually stands for something. Yeah, it stands for something. but I like to think of it as up to you. Yeah, it's like user, man, I don't even remember. There were so many acronyms. There's EIO. They've got their own.

Yeah, EUI. EUI. E UI.S. There's EIO. There's EI. Yeah. Old McDonald was on stage. It was like a really like, it wasn't like Samsung weird.

It was just like, I don't know. It was just weird. But like they wanted to like convince Americans, Ameri cons La Echo That they were a big deal And that they were gonna be in our lives real And so they announced a bunch of stuff

That like you could theoretically go by But And we could talk about every single one of them There's a phone that's like a cheap version of a pixel It's called the Snap Dragon 821 The La Pro 3 Mm-hmm Which there's

Yeah Where's the two and the one? By the can I just say the phone runs a super custom Android skin The EUI Yes which has a persistent button on the screen at all times. Where your home button should be,

except there's like a physical home button or anything anyway. That launches their video service. Yes. So like just always, you're just one click away from watching Lecovision or whatever it's called. I don't know what it's called. I was there at the event. I have no idea.

They launched some TVs. You know, big ass TV that's got HGR, Adobe Vision. A great line. A great line when they watched the TV, when they launched TV. with it, it's 84, 85?

85 inch. 85 inch TV. Your games will be bigger than ever before. That's like that, but that's true of every TV that's bigger than the wire. It was incredible. It also has the new streaming service. There's electric bikes, the super bike. Up to you is user planning to user.

What does that mean? Okay. Oh yeah, there's a bike with an Android phone built into it. Yep. And lasers. and speakers and just stuff. 100% buying that bug. I would say my big takeaway from this

is that you could get possibly very astonishing TV for $4,000 after rebate. Yeah. That's kind of... Is it a rebate or is it like a credit to buy stuff from their streaming service? I don't know. I think it's a credit to buy stuff

or to buy a super bike. If you bought a TV or buy stuff at LaValle.com because they're not actually, they don't have carrier partners. they don't know on Amazon. They want everybody to go to LaMalle.com to buy their shit, which is like, okay, but why? Yeah.

You got to sign up for like their customer affinity thing to get the discounts. So they also announced a VR headset that they explore, whatever. We're all burying the lead right now. We're all like trying to work. We're trying to get all the garbage out of the way so we can talk about the really exciting part right now. The car, the lecisee. The car and the car and then what happened. with the car.

Paul had a great headline. So, Deeter, you were there. There was like a monologue. So the CEO finally comes on stage and we all put on our translation headsets. Who the prior executives are almost like mythologizing in the run-up to him. Yeah.

Yes. He, you know, jogs up the, the ramp, uh, gets on stage and starts basically apologizing for 20 minutes about how he wanted the car to show up on stage and drive.

drive up the thing he just ran up. But it couldn't happen and he's very sorry. But there was an accident on its way here from L.A. And it like broke the car. And it wasn't the car's fault. He really wanted to be here. We couldn't. And then we were going to try and get this other car that we showed off in Beijing.

But we couldn't get that. But we do have another version of the car. We actually wanted to show. But it turns out that it's in London because Michael Bay has it. And then we cut through a video of Michael Bay like saying, I got the car. It's going to be in another Transformers movie. Sorry about that.

See ya. And then he talked for another 10 minutes about how, oh, wait, just kidding. It's actually here. Here's a plane. I'm going to just show you a weird video of a plane landing. And like they got some version, I guess the Bay version of the car. But like he literally had to go on stage and delay us for like a half an hour so that they could get the car into their like showroom. outside into their little hands-on area.

I mean, he had a whole thing. He's like, you can see we really wanted to have the car. We built this driveway. There's a garage. But Michael Bay broke it. It was just chaos. Anyway, they have a car. It's a silver car.

Jordan, you're a transportation reporter. What do you think of the Lecy? What kind of car is it? I believe it's called the Lecy Pro. The Lecy Pro. I don't know. Are they aware of the hard drive company? I feel like the hard drive company, which by the way,

isn't that Lussy? This is Lussie. Oh, it's a lot. Lacey? I always pronounce it Lacey. Yeah. But the hard drive company often has hard drives designed by Porsche design. There's a lot of confusion in the air.

Anyway. So my big question about this car is how real is it? Because, like, I saw it, and I'm like, yeah, you made a really cool big concept. It kind of looks like an Aston. Am I crazy for me? Kind of looks like an Aston. No, if you look at it from the back, like this picture, it's very Astony there. Which is interesting because Le Eiko has.

as a strategic partnership with Aston. Oh, there you go. Which it may be or may not be related, I don't know. Well, there's that and there's also Faraday. So, like, explain all of this to us. So as best we can understand, so there's La Eco, which is attempting to come out with its own cars. And then Faraday has taken investments and has a strategic partnership as well, but is a separate company entirely. They're doing their own thing, creating cars, reinventing how we own cars, whatever is there.

they're doing. And then Aston Martin has a partnership with them to basically take over their infotainment system eventually. And, you know, their screen will be in Aston Martin cars starting in a few years, something like that. And so this, it seems like they're saying, we're going to launch a new car company and come sell cars in America. And this is their first foray. Here's what it's going to look like. You know, it's going to be autonomous. They say it's going to have lights on the outside that will tell pedestrians what mode the car is in, if it's being driven manually or autonomous. Lee or whatever. Yeah, it's got some like insane like Knight Rider style stuff on the on the grill of the front of the car that runs across the whole car that like tells you like it's like

it's blue so it's in automatic mode. Yeah, and we've heard similar ideas before for autonomous cars for sort of how they communicate to to pedestrians because, you know, if a person's driving a car and you're a pedestrian, you can look at the person and make eye contact and know that they saw you and probably aren't going to run you over. But you can't do that with an autonomous car. So So that's something interesting that we've been looking at. But, you know, it's a concept car. And as far as we know, Dieter, did they give any indication of when it's coming? Nope.

So it's a concept. And they say they want to come sell it to us, and maybe they will someday. Or maybe not. Yeah. So my read on this, and Dieter, you were there, and Paul, you were watching and covering a lot more closely than I was. But this is a company that has been very successful in China. They have a ton of money.

And they rolled into the U.S. they spent a ton of money lining up partners, paying for their car to be in Transformers 5. Flying in journalists. Some journalists, presumably. Not us. We paid our own way to be there. Like we always do, much to our own detriment. Yes.

The other journalists are eating free steak all day. I'm not saying all of them, but there was definitely some. Yeah. They had really good food at this event that I did not eat, but it looked delicious. You know what's delicious to eater? Ethics. Yeah. Produced fresh by registered dietitian every day.

I walked into the press room, like, fighting through just insane crowds. was so crowded, walk into the press room, and there's literally, I'm going down to do work at, like, you know, one in the afternoon to, like, start putting up pictures of cars. And I sit down and, uh, a waiter, like, tried to force a Budweiser on me. He's like, here's a Bud. I'm like, I don't, I don't want your beer. It wasn't in America. Yeah. It was very weird. He's like, you American's like Budweiser, right? But anyway, they have, they have a partnership with, like, Lionsgate, they showed a Matt Damon movie for some reason that I don't understand.

They produced it. They have a ton of money, right? And they're spending all this money on the wrong things. To make this like beachhead into the U.S. market. And that's great and fun. And like, you know, their press events are like huge events and that's always fun because weird things happen. But like, is this going to work? Well, no, they're buying all the wrong things.

Like ZTE, Huawei, and now La Eco are all trying to break into the U.S. market and all of them are just like look at what Samsung did they got super tight with the carriers they like paid their dues with the carriers for a few years and then they went big they cowtowed to the carriers and they spent a but load of money on TV advertising that's how they did it and none of these other companies that are like trying to follow what Samsung did in the U.S. are reading that playbook at all and it's baffling to me because it's really obvious what to do and nobody's doing it because they think that you're going to go to buy it on

Amazon or you're going to go to LaMalle.com. Isn't this the company that just acquired Vizio? Yes. Yeah. None of their products are Vizio products. Yeah, I do think they should have used the Vizio brand and that would have made this a little simpler because all the lay in front of our saying. But okay, but there is an aspect though that we all dock companies like Huawei and even

Samsung for having insufficient ecosystem to have a really strong, like have muscle in the market. And so I feel like from this company's perspective, from La Ecos perspective, it's like, well, we got to do, you can't just come to America with one great product and get people to be into you. You have to have everything. So we need to bring our Netflix. We have to have our phone. We have to have our bike.

We have to have our VR headset. They have music. They have lay app. They have lay viti, which I watch the whole thing. I don't know what lay vidi is. There's lay view, which I don't. There's lay. Of any conceivable noun, there's a lay version of it.

Yeah, but Samsung had this, right? They had milk everything, like milk music. And they had to shut it all down. Milk music just shut down. Right. It's like crying in the streets, hundreds of people across the world knew what milk music was. possibly work. Yeah.

But I don't know how else you, I mean, you do like the one plus thing, just have a cheap super phone. Yeah. And this company could obviously do that, but they just clearly don't think that's sufficient. Yeah. I'm excited to see them, you know, I just like spectacle. I'm excited to see them just burn money and crazy things. Yeah, it's some good spectacle.

And like, Samsung can't do that right now. And look. That's what we count on Samsung. They burn other things. It's not money. I do think it's important. Hey-oh. It's important to know.

that this company is bringing us a movie where Matt Damon defends the Great Wall of China from Dragons. So let's not forget that. I'm ready. I just, a Chinese company showing up in America with a French name. Yeah, I just,

maybe they should have changed the name of the company before they rolled into America. Yeah. Because you know what Americans love? They did. The French. Okay, let's move on. A couple more things talk about Nintendo and X.

Yeah. Or the Switch. Oh, God. Which I have to say it looks crazy. It looks like something I do. doodled in a notebook in middle school as a dream of what I wanted. I'm so hype for this thing. I'm buying the hell out of it.

Yeah, I'm definitely buying one. I want one. But so, let me just be clear. It's a tablet. It's running a tegr processor. Yes. What is it running? But as far as we know, we haven't seen any touchscreen interaction.

We didn't see any apps. We didn't see Netflix on it. On a 2017 game console, we haven't even seen Netflix. Yes. Well, we've only seen like two minutes on it, right? Like, we asked Nintendo like, hey, Does it have a touchscreen? And they're like, we'll tell you more later.

Wow. It seems pretty likely that it could have a touchscreen. But what I'm happy about is Nintendo is emphasizing games right now. Yeah. And games that you control with buttons and sticks, not with touch. Yeah. And local multiplayer, like, playing along with friends. So watching the video, everyone, you should go watch the video.

By the way, the video, when you watch it, it's a really well-made video. But the first part, it's like just a person playing a Zelda game. And you're like, this seems pretty boring. Why is this video happening? And then he gets up and, like, takes the thing out and plicks in the thing. And then it cuts to a red screen with the switch logo. And it's like Nintendo Switch and the logo clicks in. But instead of making it clicking sound, it makes like a huge dramatic dungeon door sound.

It's like, go, go. It's intense. And then the other thing about this video is it's actually shot. It was shot in a dystopian hellscape future where all the children are, dead and the only people left alive are cool, hip, professional millennials. Only millennials. Yeah. Which is basically the world we live in as far as I can tell.

What I didn't get is they showed like 10 different controller configurations. There's like the standard one, then there's the two side ones clipped in, then there's those things clipped into like another thing. Yeah. And then those things independently turn sideways. I don't think it's too many. It's just a lot.

I think the way to think about it, there's a, like a Wii classic controller pro or whatever they call it right now. Like an Xbox 360 controller. Yeah. There's one of those. And then there are these two little controller lits called Joycons. Yeah. There's JoyCon L and JoyCon R. Yeah.

Right? They're best friends. JoyCon L and R can clip into the side of the tablet. Yeah. So you could use it like that. Or they can be used independently. I could hand you JoyCon R. I'll hold JoyConn L.

I will beat you at Mario Kart. Yes, you will. Because I'm terrible at Mario Car. Or I can take JoyCon L and R and plug them into JoyCon the base that turns them into an Xbox controller. Right? Or you can just buy the Xbox controller

or the thing that looks like an Xbox controller and just use that. So I like the little things because it makes video games feel, I don't know, like this whole thing is about Nintendo is all about nostalgia, but like back of the day you had like you had an NES and you had two controllers right and like you're gonna you're gonna take this thing and you're gonna go over to your buddy's house and then

you're gonna be playing it and then you're gonna hand her the controller and you're gonna have controller and then you're gonna be playing together it's just like it it makes the thing feel a little bit more social uh than uh I think most video game consoles feel these days and definitely than VR feels uh and that's kind of cool I think it's just it's just great and And of course, it all will come down to execution. It'll come down to price. It's just thing like, we just don't know. It could just be like an Android tablet.

Yeah. I mean, it sure feel, I mean, it's running a Tegras. Tagra's got a gaming tablet called the Shield. Like, if darkest timeline, they like rebranded the Shield and added some controllers to it. I'm sure it's more than that. I pray to God it's more than that. But like, theoretically, that's like that would, they could do that. That could be what this is.

Yeah, I would be sad if it's running Android just because I don't think Android is a good operating system. Wow. And Paul burns the verge cast to the ground. I mean, here's a thing. If you're making a video game, you're compiling C and C++ code down to machine code for the thing that you're targeting. When you make a high-performance Android game, you dodge all Java and you get out of the

operating system as quickly as possible so that you can get down to the bare metal. Yeah. Right. And so obviously it would be totally fine and work if it was Android. I doubt it. If it is, I bet it's so custom, you'll never even see it. I mean, Nintendo should announce a partnership with Apple. They're not about to ship an Android tablet.

Oh, that's fair. If they made it Android, though, then they would have an easier time getting Hulu and Netflix and HBO now on it. Those guys are so thirsty. Netflix is showing up. It doesn't matter. They're just walking over to your house with the binaries under the arm. All the time. We're here.

Our app is built in H-TML5. Anything that renders it will work. That's true. Let's talk. We're running out of time. Next week, October 27th, well-rumored. Apple event is real. It's coming.

We're expecting a MacBook Pro. Here's the only question I have. Oh, it's going to have, we're told, also well-rumored, it will have an OLED function strip where the function keys are. Also a shady rumor where they'll have E-ink keys. Yeah, that won't happen. That's a dumb. That's a dumb one.

So, you know, you're assuming they're going to redesign it, I think that's cool. The real question, the other rumor that I'm interested in is saying, I'm going to dump all the ports in favor of USBC. Now, I think I'm on record as saying I think USBC is the best. Except when it destroys your devices. Because you use the shady cable. Would you say it's better than all of the rest? Yeah, it's simply the best.

Okay. Right. No, I think it's like the, I can charge everything with, like, one set of chords. That's the future I want to live in. How many you will. USBC ports is this thing going to have? Two. You think it's just two? It's got to be at least two.

Well, I think it has to be at least two. That's the, that's the pro. It's a two. The big question for me is, are they going to fully support? Jordan's literally just waving his headphone don't glower. Will it have a lightning port to plug in your lightning? No. That it makes no sense.

None at all. It's probably going to have a lightning port. And then what happens with your lightning port? Don't you think? Just for headphones? Then all Apple has accomplished in this world is they made a crappier headphone jack? What if it uses lightning for charging? Can they put enough power through?

What if everyone's house burns down? So look, I'm looking at my MacBook Pro. It's got like eight ports. Yeah. Right? It's got like two Thunderbolt. They can't drop Thunderbolt. Well, the other thing, like, we don't know if the USBC can support Thunderbolt, but Apple hasn't

done it yet. And if the Pro doesn't, then what are they doing? The modern like Intel chipsets support Thunderbolt 3 over. USBC. So, okay. So I got two Thunderball. I got HTML. I got two USB.

I got power. You got to have at least three because you got to have power and two USB checks. No. No. You don't need three. Oh, yeah. For a pro? For a pro.

You got to have power. You got to have two on the left side and one on the right. Yeah, I like that. Do you still have HTML? Yes. Oh, look. So now we're talking about our wildest dreams. And our wildest dreams, like you just run your hand down the side.

It's all you are. USB. I'm saying this thing has eight ports signs. But I'm saying in a real world where Apple exists. Literally the only question of it is interesting about it. On the air. I'm with you on the air. Or the regular MacBook. A lightning is crazy. I hope they do it just for the epic rant that you're going to go on. All that you can plug into it is headphones.

You mean like a headphone jack? It's so wrong. No, but like Arthur, there are lightning accessories. You can Buy, like, microphone. Put your pencil into it. That'll be the pro play. It's like, look at all these use, like, lightning audio interfaces that exists. Like, we wanted those to flourish on our pro laptops. Why did Apple bother with USBC at all?

What else can you plug in? There's no way in your Apple pencil. Well, here's my question. If you do USBC, will it still be magnetic? Because I think the best feature of Apple laptops is the MagSafe. No. It's not. It can't be right.

I think they're going to say this thing, it's such great battery life. You just start plugging it at night and you take out the plug and you just run pro-level software. That's why I'm saying. There will only be 12 hours. There will only be two plugs. I'm open for eight. Yeah, I would love eight. That would be great.

It would be so awesome. But there's going to be two. And you need to start to come to terms with it right now, is what I'm saying. That would be user hostile. No. I just, stop it. I plug shit into my things. I do it all the time.

We have three computers. sitting on this table nothing is plugged into any of them but I got power yeah you get USBC for that that's ridiculous you know the best part about USBC yeah you just charge my pixel and my laptop that's what I'm saying they can charge each other that's a very confusing it can transfer power from one that happens what do you plug to USBC devices into each other by the way it's like a total crap shoot of which one's gonna charge it's all the dice yeah no like the pixels come with this like transfer cable that you can use to like dump information off of an iPhone or an Android phone. So I went like

USBC to USBC on two pixels and it was just like a joy to watch which one decided it was going to charge off the other one. Just like eh, how about me? And then next time it's eh, how about me? Dieter doesn't flip a coin. He plugs two phones that we shut up with on USBC. He's like the left one as you live. Yeah. Can we agree that it will have either a headphone jack or lightning Not both? It will have a headphone jack. I'm almost certain it'll have a headphone jack. Oh, that's a caveat.

You're not sure. I mean, I just, Apple knows what people do with these computers. Yeah. They're not going to tell a thousand pros to throw out their monitor headphones. It's the laptop of the future, though. I want both. And they make audio. They have to put a headphone jack in it.

Yeah. Like, they're not completely insane, right? Listen to yourself You don't know That's what I'm saying That's the craziest part of this whole thing Is that we can't say for sure 8 USBC checks

Come on Get to me And then they'll ship a USBC To headphone dongle To go along with your lightning To headphone dongle Yeah That would be great

If there's a USBC to headphone dongle Oh god I want to kill myself This is the worst This is the worst This is the worst Of all possible timelines I don't know why I find it so much fun

because I have to live it. Hey. But I really have everything. You guys are taking this off? I think of Apple has it. My money right now, cinema display. Yeah.

Coming back. Stop it with the dongle. It's going to happen. A new USBC cinema display? USBC powered cinema display. Yes, I want that so bad. Yeah. 5K. Like it's going to have a million ports on the back of it.

It's going to be great. Yeah. So you don't need port. You can get the headphone jack off your. I should have what it was. You're using a laptop, you should obviously be wearing wireless headphones. All right. AirPods.

I'd like to think. Anyway, we'll be there. It's October 27. Yeah. I'm going out there. There's a big Microsoft Surface event. Tom's going to be, Tom Warren's going to be here for that. I'm going to California for the Apple thing.

It's going to be a party. There's a Tesla event on Friday. There's a Tesla event on Friday. Just more, the Tesla's putting out a laptop. I might go to a party this weekend. Yeah. It's going to be great. We're having a good time.

Next week is going to be balkers. Yeah. It's going to be nuts. And then you're going to be going to be. read it on the verge. It's going to be great. Yeah. Okay. I want to thank Masterclass one more time for sponsoring today's episode of The Vergecast. Masterclass, as you may have heard earlier, makes the world's greatest courses by bringing the world's greatest instructors, including one Mr. Aaron Sorkin, who's teaching MasterClass and Screenwriting. Sorgan's Masterclass contains

35 lessons over six hours of video, interactive assignments. He helps students learn about the craft of screenwriting and write their own screenplays. Aaron covers the rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell, which is fast-paced talking while walking. For an exclusive clip of Aaron discussing how you read the dialogue, go to masterclass.com slash the verge. That is masterclass.com forward slash the verge. Also, there's a bunch of other stuff to listen to. Chris Plant, who you heard earlier on the show.

There's a great show called What's Tech. It's every Tuesday. This week's episode is about web security with Russell Brandem. I also host Control at Elite with one Mr. Mossberg. We talked about the pixel on that show, too. Lauren Good, who's off on the show, hosts show called Too Embarrass to Ask over on the recode side. Keroswisher hosts Recode-D-Code and Peter Kafka.

It's Recode Media, which is one of my very favorites. Anyway, that's all on iTunes. go on it find those shows give them five stars listen to or not just hit us with stars that's what we want and you can also tweet us i'm at reckless paul's at future paul deeters at backlon jr j l gullson find us rate us review us that's it's sivaka cut through the night rock and roll paul paul hello jordan's peeking out from behind the big purple mountain