The Vergecast - Quibi's launch week, Asus laptop reviews, and Sony's PS5 controller

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Stories discussed this week: Webcams have become impossible to find, and prices are skyrocketing Why the 5G coronavirus conspiracy theories don’t make sense UK mobile carriers politely ask people to stop burning 5G towers No one’s getting new emoji in 2021 because of the pandemic Foxconn will produce ventilators at its controversial Wisconsin plant Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review: AMD has rewritten the rules Nvidia’s RTX Super GPUs for laptops have arrived — here’s where you’ll see them first Asus’ ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is a gaming laptop with two screens MSI announces new laptops with Comet Lake H and new Nvidia GPUs Gigabyte’s latest gaming laptop supports Intel’s most powerful 10th Gen Core i9 processor yet Razer’s new Blade 15 has powerful specs and an improved keyboard Samsung Galaxy Chromebook review Asus Chromebook Flip C436 review Microsoft reportedly delays Surface Neo beyond 2020 Can Meg Whitman outwit a pandemic with Quibi? Quibi app review: shifting landscape Quibi’s shows are fun, familiar, and a little forgettable It’s impossible to screenshot a Quibi show, and that’s detrimental to its success Disney Plus surpasses 50 million subscribers Sony reveals new DualSense controller for the PlayStation 5 Microsoft’s Xbox Game Bar is getting custom widgets and its own store on Windows The OnePlus 8 Pro will have super fast, 30W wireless charging Google’s midrange Pixel 4A could launch soon, and there may not be an XL version  Google’s Hangouts Meet is now just Google Meet Google extends free access to advanced teleconferencing features to September 30th Google trademarks 'Google Meet' and 'Google Chat,' support ... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, a new Verge laptop reviewer, Monica Chin, joins us to talk about a bunch of laptops, including the Assuse Zephyrus G14, Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, the Asus Chromebook, Flip, the new one. Julia Alexander joins us to talk about Quibi. That launched this week. And we get into a bunch of stuff, including the new PlayStation 5 controller. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports.

And mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Stay-at-Home network. Mm-hmm. See? It's like a change in reorienting the company a little bit. Hopefully Bankoff hears this.

Jim, if you're listening, I didn't mean it. I'm Mili. I'm your friend. Deidre Bone is here. I'm your friend, too. Paul Miller is here. Hello. I would also like to apply for friendship status. Oh, good. The website is down, Paul. I'm sorry. It runs COBOL. We have a special guest. Monica Chin is here.

Hello, Monica. Hi. Monica is our new laptop reviewer. a hallowed position at the verge. How long has it been? You've been with a few months now, are you? A couple months, yeah. It started in late January.

All right. And it's been totally normal ever since. Absolutely. Super normal new job. A bunch of laptops stuff to talk about a little later on. Julia Alexander is going to join us. We got to talk about that quibby launch. It happened.

It happened this week. So that'll be fun a little bit later. I want to start, as always, just a quick run-through of what is happening. with the coronavirus, there's a lot of coverage. I've heard from quite a few people that they appreciate that our show is not 100% focused on the virus. It's a balance. We're trying to get it right.

Keep giving me notes. I do appreciate it. But I do want to start with just some updates. So first of all, I'm just going to do it because, I mean, they announced it on a Friday, and the show comes out on Friday. I'm good at counting, you guys. It has been four weeks. By the time you listen to this,

will have been four weeks since Donald Trump had the flow chart that said website, symptom checker, drive-through, you know what I'm talking about. And then Google was going to, well, it was approximately 170,000 Google engineers. We're going to build them a website that let you schedule a test, drive-through a test, and get results. That website, four weeks has not shown up yet. That's correct. However, verily, the sister company of Google underneath parent company Alphabet has expanded to another testing site in the Bay Area. And I believe I read that they said that they had done as many as 6,000 tests, which is, that's good. I don't know, 5,600 more than I thought they had. So it's a lot. It's actually like more impressive than I expected. The goal is more tests. If Aureli can can roll that

out even farther, we will do nothing but applaud them. I'm just, the idea was that everybody would be able to just like use this website and that is definitely not true. Speaking of counting, you can also now count the number of days since New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that Google was going to make him a website for New York State. I was going to ask how many days, because you're so good to counting, it's been since he

held up a printout of Google tweets and then Mike dropped it because that's my holiday. That's the one that you're guiding from? I think that was the following Monday. Yeah. There was no promise associated with that. Days since Donald Trump holds printout

of tweets is a good I mean, I applaud the timeline of someone's key, but I'm more of the lost promises. So there's that. There's some crazy second order things happening. Chris Welch had a story about webcams, just being impossible to find because everyone's working from home. Like a basic Logitech webcam that normally sells for 50 bucks is like $200, like the C-920.

The higher-end ones, like the Brea, which is their 4K webcam, 500 bucks. Oh, my God. There are some in stores. The problem is that the store. are closed. So Best Buy will happily tell you they have them in stock in your local store, but only certain Best Buy locations have the curbside pickup that you need. So those stocks are down. We actually got a statement from Logitech. They are not happy about the price gouging that's happening. So where they have the ability, they are actually trying to get some of those listings

taken down. But if you just bought a bunch of webcams to reselling them, Lodge can't do anything to you. So that's a weird second order. No one expected it. A bunch of other. stuff like Elgado stream link boxes. People are using like they're like all sold out everywhere. That's a weird second order one. Adi wrote a great piece about chloroquine and sort of the misinformation ecosystem about that. Just check that out. We're trying to write some servicey things so people have can share reliable information. So that's a good one to share. There's the insane 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory out there. I don't know what to say about it, but Tom Warren wrote a great debunk of

that people in England are lighting 5G towers on fire. And so, like, the government and English wireless companies are having to beg people to not light cell phone towers on fire because they're... This is Britain, so they're politely asking. Well, they use bold in the press release. Yeah. Are the fires, polite fires? I mean, that is nuts. John Cusack tweeted that 5G would be the root cause of it.

And then, like, everyone dunked on him and they had to delete a tweet. Like, it is a more pervasive conspiracy theory than you would ever expect. So Tom Warren wrote a debunk of that. I encourage you to go find it and share it widely and get some good information on the world. And then this is just my favorite one, Ashley Carman. The Unicode Consortium has paused emoji development for this year because of the virus. And they're like, and they're like, look, everyone's really distracted. We don't need to do this.

Do they do in-person meetups to like make the final decision? Yeah. It's a completely remote process. You like send like the thing that verged at a piece on how, I got an emoji into the emojis. Jay wrote it. And there is a meeting that, like, you go and you present or, like, you send in your thing and then there's a meeting where they, like, go through the presentations.

Can I just read you this quote? It's just from Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium. And I actually appreciate this quote. I'm just going to read it to you. And it's amazing. Under the current circumstances, we've heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment. And we decided it was in the best interest of our volunteers and the organizations that depend on

the standard to push out our release date. people are busy there's a lot of anxiety in the world you don't need a you don't need but the ones that were already announced like the olive the beaver and the plunger they're still coming it's oh good it's the new ones the controversial ones the controversial ones yeah emoji drama is going to have to wait for a year speaking of counting here's the thing i've been counting the most on sunday april 12th it will have been one year since foxcon told us that their empty buildings were not empty and that they would send us a correction. Yeah.

One year. They've gone one year without sending us that correction. But, well, we'll do something about that. You're listing this on Friday. Yeah, I assure you the Virgil have a post on Sunday to mark this glorious, extremely disappointing anniversary. You know, the buildings are probably empty right now. Foxhahn actually still under construction in Wisconsin.

They deemed themselves essential. To make what? No one knows. But they didn't announce. The CEO of another company, Medtronic, announced that they would be building ventilators at the Foxcon factory in Wisconsin. Foxcon, when reached for comment, declined to comment. So hopefully this factory, which I would remind you is supposed to be making LCDs, will be making ventilators. Ventronic, this is cool.

They open source their ventilator design. I'm so stoked on this. Yeah, Medtronics are really a serious company. Yeah, Metronic is the real deal. their CEO says we're going to make him at this factory in Wisconsin. People believe him. He's not screwing around. And they open source that ventilator design.

So that's really cool. Foxcon has just not committed to doing it. Like you think they would just, that's like the easiest one in the world, right? Wait, are you saying Foxconn won't do this? Or it hasn't agreed that this is the case? Medtronic CEO went on CNBC and he said, we're going to be making ventilators at the Foxxon factory in Wisconsin.

Okay. Reuters, CNBC reached out to Foxcon. Foxxon didn't comment. And I'm saying like usually like when someone hands you the ball and then picks you up and holds you over the basket, you're like, you just put the ball through the, you know, it's like, it's just like an instinct that companies have. And they just didn't do it. So we'll see. They say four to six weeks. Again, that is not what the factory is for, though, right?

The factory is theoretically for LCDs. And it's supposed to open in May. So we're going to, there's a lot coming on the Foxcon's story. But if they do make some ventilators there, I think that's a good thing. It's just, you would think the factory that's supposed to start spitting out LCDs in May was kind of like. Ready to do that. Yeah. It seems unlikely that you can, like the car companies that are making ventilators, Sean O'Kane is actually going to have a big story.

And it's hopefully by the time you're listening to that. Sean O'Kane will have a story about why, like, the state of the art and ventilator tech and why specifically car companies are shifting to ventilator production. It's because they already make H-FAC systems. They have a lot of motors. they have huge supply chains, all the stuff. So they can kind of like quickly put one together. There's a really, I don't, do you see the Tesla video? Or Tesla engineers are talking about how they designed a ventilator using mostly Tesla parts.

Like that stuff is cool. You don't normally, because it's all mechanical. It's mean, it's basically just a big pump, right? TVs are not big pumps. This is far as I know. If you can think of a TV that's a big pump, you just hit me up. I mean, they're pushing out pixels. and, you know, light and matter are technically

according to the theory of relativity. It looks like there's a screen on the Medtronic, and you've got to build like a shell for it. Yeah, sure. Two things you can build. So we'll see. Anyway, Sunday is one year since they told us the buildings were empty,

and then we'll see if this thing. So that's the Foxxon update. Okay, that is all the more virus news that I got. Just I want to make sure we keep calling out our coverage, particularly the Verge Science team, which is just cranking away, and then these second order effects that are happening throughout the whole world, quite frankly.

So I don't want to shortchange it. But I have heard from quite a few people that everybody needs a break. So we're going to try to get the balance right. Give me that feedback. All right. Dieter, Monica, Paul. Let's talk about some laptops. Yeah.

The AISIS ROG, parentheses Republic of Gamers, Zephyrus G14, has this hot shit new AMD chip, which we have talked about before. Nelai interviewed CEO last week. Monica, tell us about this laptop. Yeah. So this laptop was really, really impressive. It's pretty light. It's a lot lighter than most gaming laptops, especially, you know, traditionally gaming

laptops have been like five and six pound things. This just weighs just over three and a half pounds. And for such a light machine, it really can fly. I was able to play Red Dead Redemption 2 on Ultra, which is just about the like most demanding game you can play. And it was able to do it. Like it wasn't amazing. It was a like, you know, a console-ish like experience.

But it, you know, you could play it on those sets. But if you play it on high settings, which is just below Ultra, it absolutely was a great experience. It was around 50 FPS. Like it was really, really, it performs very impressively. And I mean, that's not necessarily surprising. It also has a very powerful graphics card. But it's really, it was really impressive to see just the load that it could take on. So put this, put this chip in context because this is like, this is not the sort of chip that I should expect to like be in the next MacBook air, right?

or be in the next, like, Dell XPS. This is, like, specifically designed for, like, high-intense, high-end gaming, like really serious sort of processor work. Yeah. So the 4900HS, it's an eight-core chip, it's comparable to Intel's core I-9. So, you know, most laptop, most, like, Dell-XPS that you're buying are going to have an I-5 or an I-7. That's what most people are choosing between.

When you get into the I-9 and 4,900-HS territory, that's where stuff starts to get pretty, like, more expensive, more sort of. power user oriented. And the HS, the S at the end indicates, like, special. It means that it's, you know, the 4900H is like the top of the line. The 4900 HS is designated more for thinner laptops that can still deliver on gaming. They call it desktop class gaming. So that, yeah, that's the intent of that chip.

A lot of the comparisons I saw was this chip at 35 watts versus Intel at 45 watts. So it's like more, it's kind of comparable power, comparable performance with less power draw. Yeah, yeah. That's definitely what they're, that's what they're going for. But it's obviously not as low power as the U series, which is that's sort of the main like comparable to, you to, that's what you're going to find an ultra portable laptops is the U series. This is the H series, which is for slightly bigger machines that are slightly more powerful. Oh, and so my big question is the battery life, because I feel like AMD was able to make laptop processors. in the 3000 series that were cheap and ran okay.

And this is very fast and a little more expensive. So what's the, like the battery life? Is that, is it a win? Yeah, oh, the battery life is definitely a win. That's sort of another thing. Like, the last Zephyrists we reviewed back in 2017 had like two hours of battery life. Like, it was almost comical how, how irrelevant the battery was. I got out eight hours and 50 minutes of browsing, you know, not not gaming, but, you know,

on a balanced battery profiles and not even in battery saber mode. It easily made it through a whole workday. And it only took 41 minutes to charge up to 60% on ASIS's plug, which is like, that's not terrible. And even gaming on battery, I got about an hour and a half on a charge. It's a pretty big accomplishment for such a power, for such powerful hardware to last that long. Put this thing in content. This means a lot to gaming laptops.

And I'm assuming as like thinking about gaming laptops, this is not going to be a one-off. This is actually like going to be a new thing that continues. like the Intel and MD continue to fight over. Does this affect anything that's going on with laptop processors outside of that specific domain? Yeah, I mean, I would definitely hope so. I think that, you know, even though this is a machine intended to be for, you know, intended to be for gaming, it's certainly something that works really well as a productivity machine as well. You know, it handled the multitasking just fine.

Obviously, you know, the 16 by 9 aspect ratio isn't like the one that I'm certainly a fan of for productivity. But I certainly would, you know, I would be totally happy having this as much. my primary device, you know, work device as well. And I think that's sort of, that's one of the things that is really impressive about this chip is it, you know, it's able to provide the battery life necessary that most people are looking for in a primary device will also really, like, enable it to run games. And so I feel like I could just have this and I wouldn't need a secondary productivity device if I wanted to use this to play games. I would hope that even laptops outside of the gaming space. I think Intel's really been put on notice here. I think not just,

with gaming laptops, but with, you know, I think this really shows that laptops can be really powerful gaming laptops and really good productivity devices. Whereas where the battery life and where the power consumption and the design and the weight is concerned. So I hope that Intel is, you know, is making moves to do that and is moving in that direction too. So, Monica, I mean, that like sets us right up for like the other part of the conversation here, which is AMD has been charging hard.

They're doing well. This is a solid machine with a powerful chip in it. That's next to all of the 10th-gen stuff we're seeing Intel put out, which seems a lot iffier than I expected. Is that kind of your experience? Yeah, I mean, I think definitely compared to the prices that we've seen for Intel stuff so far and the battery life and all those things that we've seen for Intel so far, I would say. You know, for comparable gaming machines, the Zephyrists G14 has really rewritten the rules. When I first saw the price 1449, I was like, I literally emailed the PR guy and asked if that was the right price. That seemed so low to me for the specs that this thing has and the performance it was putting out.

I really think they've raised the bar like a ton and in terms of what Intel machines should be able to do at that price point. I mean, that's like unprecedented in terms of what I've seen. So, okay, if we're talking 10th gen Intel, we actually maybe it would be useful to like do Intel, chips 101 because like when it used to be like you if you knew it between y series and you see series and until you were good and then like you kind of needed to know about the gen and but now when i hear intel 10th gen like i literally don't know what it means like it could it could literally mean anything it's confusing as hell so like there's there's this new xps you reviewed you reviewed a couple of chrome books everything is like running intel 10th gen but it seems like like none of this

stuff is actually equivalent so like can you like just give me this dummies version of what's going on with 10th gen right now. Yeah. So in terms of the current XBS that I'm reviewing has the I7 106-5 G7 and that is part of the Ice Lake generation. Okay. That is a quad, this one is a quad-core processor. The XPS 13 that we reviewed the end of last year has an I7-107-10U. That is a, and that's of the Comet Lake generation. And so that one is a six-core, that is a six-core processor. So I think that's sort of the main, the big distinction that I'm, you know, that our reviews have sort of been looking at. So, you know, something with two extra cores is going to be a better fit for productivity oriented tasks, stuff like crunching numbers, elaborate things in Excel. But we found in, you know,

Dan found in his review of the one at the end of last year, which has six cores, that it's at, that it was worse at things like photo and video editing. Because the update with the ice like processor is it actually has better graphics, better integrated graphics. And so one of the things that the XPS 13 that has come out with the Ice Lake chip is that that is supposed to be a much better one for gaming on integrated graphics. So you're currently reviewing the XPS 13. I don't want to spoil your review. I think it probably be out after people listen to this.

But what is your early impression? Yeah, I think it, I mean, my early impression is that it's very good. I mean, the XPS 13, you know, for the past several years has been really the, uh, the Windows laptop to beat. Just, you know, I think that if you took a lot of, a lot of the features that it has, like if you took the keyboard, if you took the touchpad, if you took the design, if you took the performance and you just put that by itself in like another laptop, it would be the standout feature.

It's a really cool experience to just have all these features be like absolutely the best, basically. I think that over the past couple years, the XPS 13, it's, the progression has really been one of refinement. It's been Dell sort of seeing like, what, what is like the one or two? two things here that people really don't like and changing that. So, you know, for a while it was the nose cam and for a while was the bottom bezel. I think they're really at a point where they've fixed a lot of the things that we didn't like. I think it's probably still the laptop

to beat. Okay. That nose cam thing is really funny because there's an argument in my Twitter applies today about webcams. And like, there's just a bunch of older XPS 13 owners being like, I didn't think it would go this bad for me. I was on a Zoom call. With a guy with a nose cam. It was just hilarious. That was always the reason I didn't want to buy it was the nose cam. I mean, that was literally like, it seemed like the one kink in the armor. If you don't remember, for the people listening, if you don't remember, it was like two years ago, Monica, the XPS 13, the camera was like in the bottom of the screen at the corner.

And so it was just like shot up your nose. And I would also say the other big thing is the design has changed a lot. There's a, the screen is taller. So the 16 by 9 aspect ratio is gone. And I hate the 16 by 9 aspect ratio. The eliminated bottom, you know, the bottom bezel used to have the big Dell logo in case you forgot that Dell made your computer. So I think, you know, it really looks different. And I'm really excited for everyone to see how it's changed.

Okay. So we've got to get to NVIDIA stuff. But before we get there, just like, I need to express my deep, heartfelt, emotional sadness about the, two Chromebooks you just reviewed. So like, 10th gen in the XPS sounds good. 10th gen in the Samsung Chromebook and the Aces Chromebook flip, it sounds like not, not so good. What the hell happened with these Chromebooks? Yeah, I mean, I think the issue with these Chromebooks is just that they're, they cost too much, you know, and there's, there's lots of debates about, you know, does anyone actually want to $1,000 Chromebook? Why would you pay $1,000 for a Chromebook? And I mean, there's

definitely a market out there. You know, there are people, they're power users of Google. There are people who really like a ChromeOS ecosystem. It's their preferred operating system. And they really want a really, really nice computer. I've been talking to a lot of these people who have been so frustrated that they feel like their best options are like either you get the pixel book or you just have like what looks like junk. So a lot of people have really been waiting for, you know, something that's comparable to an ultra book that has ChromeOS. And a lot of them hoped it would be the Galaxy Chromebook or would be the new Asus Chromebook flip C-436. And, you know, the Galaxy Chromebook looks so nice.

It's really well designed. And there's a lot of cool things about the design. There's, like, a stylist. There's, like, camera in the keyboard deck. And the screen, you know, it's a 4K ammo-led screen. It looks absolutely beautiful. And it's a lot of fun to use. And it's super light.

But it's just a battery life of four hours is really not useful for most people. It's brutal. You buy a laptop because you want to be able to carry it around. You don't want to have it just, like, sitting plug, in all the time sitting at your desk, especially when it's so light. Well, and it also gets wicked hot, which is incredible. And it has no fans, so that's not necessarily surprising. But yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, I think it's, you know, if it's, if it were a $500 device, maybe we'd be more forgiving of a battery life that that's bad, but $1,000, you know,

that's when we're getting into like, that's, that's MacBook air pricing, you know, that's when you really need, you really are looking for something that is pretty good all around. And unfortunately, the Flip C436 sort of fell to a similar issue. The battery life wasn't quite as bad. I got about five hours out of that, but it's an $800 Chromebook, and you really want an $800 Chromebook to be significantly better,

I think ProBooks that are $550 to $650. And I just think, you know, we have the pixel book right now. We have the Flip C4344. We have Windows machines that are, you know, in that price range are a little bit higher as well, but just don't have the same battery life issue. have similarly good performance and much, much better battery life.

So I think at this point, it's just, you know, we need to make these machines better or we need to get the costs down. I have a conspiracy theory. I have a correlation, not a conspiracy theory. I have an unfounded correlation. You just reviewed two machines, 10th gen processors. The Galaxy Chromebook, I think you got four hours and change. The Chromebook flip, you got five hours.

I just reviewed a MacBook Air with a 10th gen processor. when I ran Chrome, I got about five hours of battery life. There's a commonality here, which is Google Chrome, which it just destroys battery life. Like, if you make your entire operating system Chrome, you can't be like, the battery's going to do great. So one thing is that with the Chromebook flips C436, as well as with the Galaxy Chromebook,

is other reviewers who did battery tests where they just looped 1080P video, got way better battery. So I actually do think it's probably an issue with web page optimization or with app optimization. The problem I have is no one is buying Chromebook just to loop 1080P video. There is this aspect. It seems like Intel's integrated graphics are getting better,

faster than their shipping processors are. But I don't know, dude, like, is it just Chrome? See, Chrome actually does okay when it's, like, we're just running on Linux. Like, there are Chromebooks with good battery life. They exist. The Pixelbook Go is actually a really good example. of a Chromebook with like pretty good battery life. When it came out, I was like,

man, this seems fine, but the other Chromebooks are cheaper and better. It's like the Aces 4C434, which is still around, like is just a better all-around computer. But now that I'm seeing this new Galaxy Chromebook, which is like literally the successor to the pixel book that Google pretty much told me so, it's trash. This 436 is a bummer. Like, I'm actually less worried about Chrome OS

in terms of Chrome killing battery than I am about the fact that Android apps are still. trash on Chrome Homex. We can't do that. We can't do this. We cannot do this. But Monica had so many problems. I have another conspiracy theory.

And this is more germane. Okay. When the galaxy book S or whatever, whatever it's called was announced, it was announced with a Lakefield processor. And now it's shipping with a comment. Like Lakefield is like, like these, I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy. but these seem like laptops that maybe were designed

like they were going to get a mobile-esque processor from Intel, like a next-gen Qualcomm killer, and then instead they got like 14 nanometer plus plus plus processors. Yeah, that's not unreasonable. See more conspiracy theories. All right, Monica, what's next? Obviously your XPS review is coming.

What's next in the world of laptops for people who are looking? It seems like this is a big inflection point, right? You got two new classes of chips. out, you got many more, obviously, a flood of new products. What are the next big releases people should be looking for? Yeah, so we had the big announcements earlier this month were Comet Lake H coming from Intel and NVIDIA's new RTX super GPUs. And so, you know, alongside those two announcements, we got just a barrage of new laptops that various manufacturers are announcing that are going to incorporate the two chips. The most exciting

one to me is the 2020 razor blade 15. That's going to pair the RTX 2070 supermax queue or the 280 supermax queue with a 10th gen I7. And it's actually going to be the first eight core processor to ever appear in a razor blade. So very excited about that. So that's going to be, that's going to be interesting to compare to the ROGs, FRIS G14. That's, I think, the first time where we're really going to see how these, and you know, that's going to be an I-7. not an I-9, but I think it'll still be interesting to see how these systems compare and how well handles the games. Because it's only, it's 1599, so it's only a little bit more expensive.

Acer's Triton 500. It's another big one, getting the supercards, a couple other big ones from Gigabyte, the Gigabyte Aoros 15G and 17G. And then one that I think is really funny is the Aces, R.G, Zephyrus Duo 15, which is a gaming laptop that has two screens. So there's one, like, in the keyboard. then there's like the main screen and the one on the keyboard like tilts up. I think it's at 13 degrees. So you can have sort of these two screens running at once. So for example,

you could be like playing your game and then you could have your Discord chat open on the second screen. You know, we'll see if it actually is practical or useful when we get the device in. Is it funny or is it genius? Paul is the founding member of the keyboard in the front club, Monica if you were to wear? So, Timmy, Monica's new. The thing that stands out to me with this

NVIDIA launch, and I think it's important context with the AMD is that AMD is not getting all these fancy new Nvidia cards. Intel and NVIDIA co-announced all these laptops.

There's like, you can get a $1,000 laptop with an RTX 2060, which might be comparable or even, I don't even possibly even better than the AMD laptop when it

comes to just gaming, anything that's like GPU bottlenecked. The really interesting thing is Nvidia is doing this, like that power shifting thing that AMD was talking about. If the GPU senses that the CPU is the bottlenecked, it will reduce its power consumption so that the CPU has more room to work to catch back up in a sense. And there's, Nvidia's claiming like maybe 10 to 20% performance gains from that. So even though these are like kind of minor tweaks to the cards. The way that they actually work might actually result in some decent gaming results, which is going to be great news for Intel because they're not helping make these H-Series

laptops that much faster. Yeah. Also, I want to last on our list in terms of form factor stuff, Monica, you brought up the dual screen stuff that's happening. Microsoft has reportedly delayed the Surface Neo, which I was very excited about, which was their dual screen, which means I don't know what that means for Windows 10X, which is supposed to run all the dual screen stuff. But we will see.

Pandemic, it's just happening. All my form factor dreams are going away. Okay. Monica, thank you so much to joining us. We'll have you back very soon. It sounds like there's many, many more laptops for you to review and talk about. Absolutely. That was great.

Good talking about. All right. We're going to take a break. Thanks to Monica. We're going to come back with Julie Alexander. Talk about that quibby. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner,

helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent.

And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Julia Alexander, welcome. Hello. I've been so excited for this day to talk to you about Quibi.

It launched. It happened. Yeah. I mean, it's successful in that regard. It's not paperware. you know, we've talked about it conceptually for what appears to be five years.

We sat through a CES demo of nothing. We have done all kinds of coverage. I encourage everybody to read Liz Lapato's profile of Meg Whitman. Liz had a great idea to not focus on Katzenberg, but Whitman, who is actually the CEO of the company and had to

literally change all of their plans in modeling around the virus. It's like just a fascinating story. The one question that I Liz and I were both like, can we ask this directly? It was like, you were the CEO of HP. You're a billionaire because you're the CEO of eBay. You like, were the Republican nominee be the governor of California.

Why are you running quip? We just like, we were like, it's pretty rude to ask. But it's launched. After all of that, after all this conversation, it's here. What do you think, Julia? It's an app in that it opens when I want it to open. and it plays videos. I mean, Quibi, I mean, Quibi is exactly what they said Quibi would be.

It's short shows and movies and chapters, and it turns, like there's the function that when you turn your phone, what you're seeing the format or the aspect ratio or whatever changes, that there's nothing else, I think, to say positively about anything on that app, but it works the way we wanted it, too. So, congrats. Have you had an exciting portrait to? landscape or vice versa moment? I genuinely don't use it unless I remind myself that it's a function that I should use like when writing about it so that way I can be like I've used this and it's here's what it is.

But everyone I keep talking to both in media and outside of media, because Quibi is like a very media thing. People in media love Quibi and everyone outside of it is like what is Quibi? That is the world that I experience. So the random people that I've gotten to download the app, because I'm like, please, you're not in media and I just want to talk to someone who's not in media about it, they haven't used it either. They're like, oh, I don't turn my phone because no one turns their phone when they're watching anything.

That's not what humans do. The turnstile thing really stresses me out. And I did not expect this, but if I'm watching it in portrait, I'm like, oh, I wonder what I would see if I turned it in landscape. I'm missing something. So then I turn it to landscape. And I'm like, but maybe this would be better in portrait. I want to see it in portrait.

And so I always feel like I'm not getting the right thing all the time because there's two possible options. And maybe I've picked the worst one. I don't know. So I always feel like there's a better version of it that I'm just not seeing. Have you tried watching it with two phones at one time? Double quibbing. I could watch it twice, but there's only so many times I need to see, you know, the reboot of punked. If you haven't two X quibbed, I don't know what you're doing.

Dieter, I feel the same way though. Like, Deeter, I've gone back and rewatch something twice just out of, because I'm concerned I've missed something or it's better a certain way. And that's just as- Watch it in landscape. That's it's not, here's the, here's what I would say. If I had to like very narrowly pick two criticisms of Quibi at launch, there are more, but if I did narrowly in like their strategy, I would say one, they do not have the one thing

everybody should watch. Yeah. Right? They just couldn't pick one. They have a lot of things, like just an overwhelming array of things. I need to disclose,

Polygon has a show called Speed Run, which if you have Quibi on your phone, you should go watch it. There have been some talks about us doing a show. Maybe it'll work out. I don't know. There's your disclosure. But they have a lot of things.

None of them are the thing, the way The Mandalorian was the thing. And I know Katzmerger's like, whatever, it's a big hit show. They got all this type. You can still just pick one, right? When Netflix was going to, do original content. They just literally like, house of cards. It's the thing. Everybody go watch

the show. They don't have that. So that's like I would issue that criticism of their launch strategy. The second one is they spent all of this time talking about their technology and what they could do in storytelling on a phone. And literally none of the launch things take advantage of that stuff. Like zero percent of them as far as I can tell. Like yes, you can turn it. You can watch it. But I watch everything in landscape because it is obviously that is the primary edit of the thing. You think so? In every single thing that I've watched so far, it's obvious that the landscape edit is the first edit. And the portrait is like, it's along for the ride.

It's not, you're looking at what, Julie, it's like a horror movie, right? Where you like, in landscape, you're watching the character and in portrait, you're like watching your screen or something. Yeah, they like change the way it, but you're still viewing the same type of content. It's just a different POV. Yeah. Exciting. That was like the big promise, right? Of like, you could watch the murderer or you could watch the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

person who's going to get murdered. Maybe, by the way, also obsessed with death. Yeah. So much. I keep asking them about this and they keep telling me I'm obsessed with their, like my own obsession with her obsession with dad. And I'm like, no. Well, so we'll get to that in a second.

But the promise was you could, you, in portrait, you'd watch the murderer and in landscape, you would watch the murdery. That's a, that's a word. And none of their shows right now do that thing. So like, if you add those together, they should have had the, one big show that fully took advantage of the technology, right? The Stevens Spielberg show that only plays after midnight wherever you are. That was the promise. They don't have that yet. And I think that's like, they seem to be doing fine, Julia, like, and then they

have like a bunch of downloads? Yeah. So the third party app, so Quibi hasn't announced anything officially. When like Disney Plus launched, they came out 24 hours later and said, we hit 10 million, because that's a great number. Quimpy did not hit 10 million. They didn't even hit 1 million. So third party apps came out like App Bannie and Censor Tower, and they said estimating about 300,000, which is not terrible for an app that one is supposed to be used on the go and no one can go anywhere. Two, that doesn't have a strong presence outside of, I would say, either very young circles because their advertisements are like super tied into TikTok and Instagram or you're in media, which like was where the Quibi's. story, I think, really truly lies for a lot of people that I know. So, 300,000 is not terrible for what Quibi, for what I think Quibi was going to hit. I mean, it's also not a million, and I don't know what internally they wanted it day one. But as you said, there's nothing in there

that's really, the funny thing about Katzenberg that I think about a lot is that he always says content is a kingmaker, but platform is king. And it's like, but you didn't get the content right, and you also didn't get the actual usage of the phone right. So nothing that you have is king or king maker. So I don't know what the business plans at this point to get to those points. In Liz's profile, Whitman, again, just go read it because it's good. But like, imagine you're the CEO of a new platform. I'm sure many VertraCast listeners could imagine themselves as such a thing.

I would say pull over in your car, but like you're at home. So like just go, I don't know, stand in the bathroom or something. But like imagine you're the CEO of a platform. and you know, I got to launch this platform. And all of your plans, your entire team, your whole company is like, we're going to launch with a big fancy party full of celebrities and then a blitz of ads, expensive ads during March Madness and the master and all this stuff. And all of it is gone.

And Whitman's was, Whitman's quote to Liz was like, we're taking those budgets and we're putting them on like Twitch and YouTube. And that's why you just see, like, if you're like there, the number of quiby ads, on Instagram, like, out of control, right? And it's like, yep, because they took their, like, broadcast sports ad budget and just firehosed it at social platforms, which is wild. Like, I don't think it's ever been done before. Did that level of move.

And, like, maybe it worked to get to the $300,000. I think the big question is, can it, well, sustain at that level? Or is it going to drop? Because it usually drops. And what's it going to plateau at? And is that going to be enough to sustain them? I mean, that's absolutely the biggest question. And unless they have a show that's going to bring people in, one, that they think, unless they have a Game of Thrones or a Mandalorian that people are like, okay, I'm going to sign up for and I'll watch this weekend or week out or whatever, people aren't going to come to it. And especially after 90 days, they're not going to pay $5 or something for content that they can get elsewhere really in terms of quality.

But the other thing that Quibi really missed out on is that Quibi thinks that it's the reason people will sign up for it are the kind of top high production movies and chapter. big, big actors and TV shows. And that's not. People are going to sign up to watch food explode in people's faces or watch Idriselma take on stunt drivers. Like, it's the really funny mid-tier reality shows that Quibi, like, basically the 30 Rock fake shows that Quibi has actually produced.

Those are like the shows that Quibi will find its audience with, and there's no way to share any of that. There's absolutely no way to talk about Quibi and the ridiculousness of it in like a screenshot or anything because Quibi has disabled any form of sharing, which is absurd. Yeah, actually, can you dig into that a little bit more? Yeah, because with Netflix, like people, I watch on TV, but everybody else seems to watch on the laptop because they're able to put out screenshots like really fast with like captions on the bottom. And I was like, how do they do that? Oh, because they're not watching on TV. But you can't watch Quibi on TV at all. You just watch it on your phone. So what's the problem? The greatest series of, so I have like a Slack group and it's people who review stuff. It's a bunch of critics.

There are a lot of people doing Quibi. And the number one conversation in the Slack was how to get it to like airplay on your TV. Like every single person was trying to find a way to figure out a way to do it. And then I thought that's what critics do. And then when I was on Twitter just looking at, I have a bar open for Quibi conversation on Tweet deck. It was just like Ariana Grande stands being like, I want to watch this on my TV. is there any way to cromcast it? And I was like, oh, that's a surprising thing.

But yeah, so I know, like, when I watch Netflix, my thought process is like, I'm watching this, and also I want to get some cool social media points. So I'm going to wait for a good screenshot opportunity, and then I'm going to screenshot something and tweet it out. And that's how Tiger King became what it was. Like Tiger King was just people screenshoting and being like, LOL quarantine mood, and that becoming like a viral thing. Same thing with Mandalorian, like people screenshot it and tweeted about

baby Yoda like two million times or something in like two weeks, it became a viral sensation. And with Quibi, because it's disabled on mobile, which is true for a lot of other streamers, like you also can't screenshot on mobile. Without the desktop component, there's absolutely no way to share any aspect of the shows. You're reliant on Quibi's own social media presence or the Instagram accounts of people in Quibi shows. Like if they upload something, I've seen a lot of people screen record and then tweet those out. And it's like, that is counterintuitive to what your whole thing is if you're designing for mobile and what people do on mobile outside of you in content is like sharing with people and you can't share.

That's the most unfriendly mobile experience I can think of. Yeah, you know, it's wild to me that Netflix seems like fairly enlightened about this, right? Like they know that screenshots are like your story has a chart of Tiger King views over time and it just explodes. Right. Like that's the day it went viral and that there it is. Like it seems like Netflix, you would not. expect Disney to know it, but it seems like Disney knows it too, that like we need people to take this stuff, remix it, and share it in the ways that they want. That's going to drive a bunch of

awareness and be the sort of like user marketing campaign that makes everything successful now, right? You need to feed the fandom, basically. Quimmy is like, it's weird that they don't know that. It's also weird that they didn't. There's like a million product things you could do to even just make that easier for people or like precede them with clips or screenshots. And they, they don't seem to know that they need to do that work either, as far as I can tell. Yeah, it was funny. One of the main questions I had before going in was just talking to people to Quibby, and I said, can you screen record? And they were like, no, we're disabling it. Like, why is that even a question? And I was like, well, because people watch content to share content. They don't just watch it to

watch it. It's become an interactive experience. Like, if I'm, I want to get something out of this. And for me, that's like social cloud points for making a really good meme. On top of entertainment. And so I was thinking about that. And so I was thinking about that. I was thinking about screenshots. And this is something that people have been asking for for years. Like Netflix years ago was like, we know people are making gifts out of our shows. We know that they're screenshoting and turn them into memes. And by 2018, Ted Strandos, who's their chief content officer, was like, our whole goal

is to just meme our shows and movies before they come out. And that way people have bought into the meme, and they're going to come check it out because it's a meme. So they did that with everything. And his argument was, which I think is the issue with Quibi's thinking, his argument was we don't have Disney IP, we don't have Warner IP, and we don't have NBC IP. So we don't have anything that people automatically recognize and are just going to come watch. So we have to create a brand out of thin air. And the only way to do that is social media viral hype. And what Katzenberg

seems to think is that if the content is good, people will show up. But the landscape is so oversaturated. Everything good is being squished or squashed underneath things that are just viral. Like, you can't, it can't just be good. You have to be shareable. That's the whole way to get people to watch your thing in 2020. What about Prince of Egypt, two? What? What about Prince of Egypt too?

Throw out ideas. Are you just, like, pitching Jeffrey Katzenberg right now? Like, the off chance he's listening. Prince of Egypt was DreamWork's big breakout, right? I mean, well, yeah, and then Shrek. It was a DreamWorks movie. That's true. Oh, Shrek.

DreamWorks too. Who owns Shrek right now? I think it's still DreamWorks, so that would go. Hope it's Comcast so bad. I actually do think it's Comcast. I think it's NBC Universal. Truly is correct. DreamWorks is out. Shrek is owned by NBCUniversal. Do the disclosure. It's arrived at this place. I must disclose that the Versus parent company, Vox Media, NBC Universal's minority investor. There it is. Because we talked about Shrine. Oh, my God. It's always the nightmare.

So at the same time this is happening, Julia, Disney Plus hit a big milestone, yeah? Yeah, Disney Plus announced, yes, Disney Plus announced, Disney announced yesterday that Disney Plus hit surpassed 50 million paid subscribers with like a big asterisk on it. So like 8 million of those subscribers

rolled in from Hot Star in India. A few other million subscribers, for some reason, there was like an issue with them the way that they were working counting because they were like on the precipice of just signing up.

So there's like a weird way that they counted it. But yeah, the point being that Disney is telling investors that it's Disney Plus streaming services continuing to grow. A few important parts

of that number. One, when Disney first announced Disney Plus, they thought by 2024, they would hit 60 million subscribers. It is now 6,000, months since Disney Plus launched, and they've hit 50 million subscribers. Okay.

So they are doing way better than what they thought they were going to do. However, the common rule of business is you don't announce a number unless you're pretty sure you're going to hit it or at least be around the same point where you are, like a year from now. So I think they lowballed that anyways. But it's impressive. $50 million in six months in about 10 countries, I think, approximately is an impressive number. I mean, hitting $50 million in six months, it sounds like they should put the guy in charge

of Disney Plus and charged of the whole company, just making the CEO. Oh my God. Right. Julia, put that number in context. How big is Netflix?

Yeah, so Netflix is 167 million subscribers worldwide. For now, it's probably gone past that because we're in a global lockdown, and people are watching a lot of Netflix. Those numbers are released the last quarter, and Netflix is about to roll into a turning season, being very

very pleased with what's going on, and I'm sure they have more. But the other thing, which is what ties into a Disney, is that Disney, when Disney Plus came out, both Kevin Mayer, who runs Disney's streaming group and former CEO Bob Eiger, said they're not really good to announce numbers outside of earnings calls because otherwise it detracts. Otherwise, that's all people focus on. The reason that they announced it now is not just because it's 50 million, it's because every other part of Disney's company has taken a massive hit. And they're trying to get, they're trying to make investors feel okay as they head into their own earning season, which is going to be terrible.

Like, their forward-looking statement is going to be like every part of our company with the exception of streaming has hit a monumental loss. Right, because they operate theme parks and cruise ships in a sports network and film productions, all which are on pause as well. Yeah, everything is on pause. So you're seeing Disney make these kind of Hail Mary plays to get investors to feel okay. They're like releasing random shorts to kind of be like, we still. have content that people like Bob Iger is doing interviews with Barron's and not their CEO

notably. He's going out and being like, no, things are fine. We know things are going to be okay. And they're talking about reopening the parks as soon as possible and taking temperature checks. But the point being is they're saying, listen, our streaming is doing fine. It's growing. We're really happy with it.

And I think you're going to see them move a few more movies over to Disney Plus to keep people there to keep people signing up, keep people subscribed. I mean, that's the big question. I mean, it's the question for Quibi. It's the ongoing question for Disney Plus is what's going to make you come back and open this app, right? With Netflix, it's like, okay, Tiger King definitely made me open the app. Like, I just saw enough pictures of Joe Exotic to be like, I need, I just need to know what's going on here, right? Disney after the Mandalorian has not had the big breakout hit.

I will say that I open Disney Plus every day to watch Toy Story 3 with Max. But I'm also like, I could just buy this movie and cancel my Disney Plus subscription. and it would be effectively the same experience. I'm never looking for new stuff in that app. Are they going to ramp that library up soon? The idea was they were going to do that, but then all of their big shows that were going to start hitting in August, August and September, they got hit with production delays.

They don't know what they're doing. Mandalorian Season 2 is supposed to be October, and it looks like they'll probably be able to get that done because filming's done post-production seems like they can do it remotely. But like all the Marvel. shows, they're still figuring, finishing things up. So we don't know if like Falcon and Winter Soldier and Wanda Vision, which are their two big ones coming up, will hit on time. I mean, that's the thing is like Netflix is at this point where Netflix, because they film all their, they drop full season,

so everything is filmed by the time that they do trailers and announce things. Netflix has enough content for the next three months, roughly. And then they have to start figuring things out, but Netflix is out here dropping new things every single week. And that gives them a huge advantage. because while everyone is struggling, like, while Quibi is producing their daily shows, but everything else is kind of taking a step back. Disney's in the same boat where they are trying to figure it out, but they don't really have any new content. Netflix is the only provider that has new stuff.

That said, there are two major streaming services launching in two months. We've got Peacock, which launches for some Comcast subscribers this week, or next week, sorry. And then we have HBO Max next month. Oh, man. You're just going to be on the show ever. week. That's what's happening here. But HBO Max will do well because it's, it's got family programming, and it's got HBO, and I think people will want to watch friends if they're still quarantined.

And so they'll just buy HBO Max. I'll just give in. Netflix brought back community, which is a genius move. It's like, what am I watching the most in Netflix? This community right now. Okay. So what's, that stuff is upcoming. What's the next thing? Well, let me just, let me just ask you straight out. Quibi's free for 90 days, right? People should just check it out. Yeah, I mean, the mid-tier shows are, like, not terrible. Like, the reality shows are, they're cute.

And if it was free forever, I'd be like, this is an app I could probably use. Like, I've used this. I've said this. And Kevin, our futures editor, Kevin and I debated about whether or not we should put this in the story. Because I was like, Kevin, Quibi is like a bathroom companion app. Like, it's the best bathroom companion app in the world. And Kevin was like, oh my God, please stop being you for a minute. But like it's a free app that like has cute entertainment for seven minutes.

For now, it's like if you sign up now, you get 90 days free. And that's fun to use the minute that they want to charge you $5 with ads or $8 without ads, it's like you can just use TikTok. And it's more entertaining and it's free. And it's like you don't have to pay attention to it. Didn't I read that if you if you sign up and accidentally like choose the ad option for your free trial, that you're just stuck with ads for the free trial? Yeah, I've seen some people say that. I meant to, yeah, I meant to actually reach out about that because I was like, that seems, for a free experience, you don't want to give people ads

for a limited time if you're trying to sell them on your app. Yeah, I saw that, too. The other thing that was interesting to me is that they, after all that conversation we had last week about Amazon and Apple and Apple and Apple's cut, like, they're just giving Apple to cut. Like, there's no way to pay for Quibby except in-app purchases. they just do not want you to overthink it. They're like, push this one button. Like, Apple can take the money. We just need a recurring subscription. Go. Which is

certainly interesting. If you do sign up with Apple subscriptions, you can just sign up and then immediately cancel and then it'll get canceled at the end of the three months but still work until then, so you don't have to set a calendar reminder to cancel it later. Oh. Yeah, that is actually one of the best parts

of Apple subscriptions, for sure. All right. Well, we'll see what happens of Kivvi. At the end of the age, Julia, you think so it could be more than almost anyone in the world. So it's like Jeffrey Katzberg, Matt Weyman, and Julia, like top three quibby thinkers. Julia, thank you so much. We'll see you again for Peacock and HBO Max. Okay.

Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews

for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hires find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale,

it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid-compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500.

And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Paul Miller. Hello. Every week in these troubled times, you provide array of stability. array of stability? A stability array.

You have stability. Hold it together. What's it called? I do a segment every week and it's called Pop the Stack. And that's capital P, lowercase O, capital P. And that stands for package on package. Okay. So I got what I was looking into this Lakefield conspiracy, I got really into reading

about Lakefield, and I just missed this news, but Intel announced this in 2019. It's still not out. It's obviously delayed. There was like a leak in March of like a benchmark, which is always like sometimes I feel like these companies do that on purpose as like a little tease, like this is coming soon. But this is a really cool chip because it's got one ice lake core, like the sunny cave, sunny cove core that Ice Lake uses, and then four small Tremont cores. And those are basically like the atom processor type. And so like the Athena Chromebooks that just came out are like 15 watt, the ultra-portable type of processors.

But these are like five-watt, seven-watt chips that are like supposed to be truly competitive with mobile. And we don't have them. But oh, yeah, pop the stack. This is a 3D architecture. So the cool thing, the how we're not going to lose in Moore's Law is, Moore's Law is about the number of transistors in an area, right? But it doesn't have any rules against stacking.

So you stack chips on top of each other. And they've got the substrate. That's what it's package on package. You've got 10 nanometer chip on top of like a 22 nanometer. substrate. It's so cool. 3D chip design and it's got like RAM built in. So exciting and I just wish we had it.

It's coming. Yeah. I promise you. Pop the stack. Stacks are popping. All right. A little bit of gaming stuff, some Google stuff. We got to talk about this PS5 controller. I love it. I love it so much. It is prettiest

controller. I don't care what anybody says. It's two-tone, white, and black. There's a little blue highlight, light around the ring that you barely see around the little touchpad thing. It looks like a stormtrooper. It looks like a... It looks like an Xbox controller. Yeah, well, that's because like you actually, like, it turns out that like hands have a

certain shape and like Sony finally admitted it. That's the other reason I love it. This is why I don't like it. It looks like they had a shape and then they slowly morphed it to be more like hands. You know what I mean? And so it doesn't feel as design, like full disclosure, I can't really play games at all on a dual shock. I'm horrible at it.

I've been more of an Xbox person. But I've always admired the design because it's so artificial. And this just, you know, this just looks like a controller that is designed to hold in hand. I think it looks like a, I don't remember who on our team said this week.

It looks like a BMW I8. Yep, for sure. I mean, it looks like everything. If you just Twitter search for like PS5 controller, it looks like the number of things people. It looks like Eve from Wally it's great I'm like very

it's a hymn wrote an entire piece about how it's like Sony's most exciting design in forever we'll see I'm excited about this console generation it feels like they're proceeding in like the right both of them are proceeding in like the right way like they're focused on the right things which is like playing video games and making playing video games fun

as opposed to like controlling your cable box over IR I love that Sony's refusing to show us what the box looks like people are real mad just show us the box like no actually don't Just like up until literally, like, people go out and buy it and unbox it. And that's when they get to see what it looks like. Oh, that'd be great.

Everyone's, every one's PS5 looks a little bit different. It's just a pile of chips and a bottle of shoebox. Do you remember that year at CS when Sony announced, like, their first 4K streaming player? It was like way, way before anything, like, anything was available. No. It was like five years ago. It was like Sony's very first. they announced their very first 4K TV

and then they announced their like 4K player The play it was like a subwoofer size Type of thing. It was no it was a circle like it was like a circle You were supposed to put in your house and at CES it didn't work yet So the circle was just an empty circle with the light in it And the actual 4K player was a tower PC that was like shoved under the booth And their whole idea was like you would buy this circle and overnight it would down the movies for you because they were so big.

Right. And then you, when you bought them, all your early buying was an unlock. I don't really know where I'm going to this, except to say, I really hope the PS5 is a circle. Because I wanted that dumb circle so bad that it was never real.

On the controller, because this is the most we know about any, any PlayStation 5 hardware. USBC, it's kept the touchpad, which is a bold move. I'm very intrigued, but I always hope that developers will do something really cool with novel input schemes, and they do it twice ever, and it's fun those times.

And the built-in mic is really exciting to me. I think that's going to be really useful for more casual conversations and stuff. Headphone jack. It's got a headphone jack? There's a headphone jack, which is, you know, if you want, you know, lag-free audio, what do you do? You use a headphone jack. Yes. And then it's got these like adaptive triggers.

It's got new. They're calling a dual sense because it's redesigned haptic. So it should be real subtle. And it should feel like you're driving through mud when you drive through mud somehow. That's exciting. Dieter, you want to yell about the Xbox game bar? I actually don't want to yell. I actually want to give Microsoft a little bit of credit for building something that maybe potentially could make them relevant in desktop gaming.

They make windows. They are super relevant. It's this overlay. And then they basically like, open it up for other people to integrate into their overlay. So instead of having to have overlays from other games, there's just now like a standard bar on Windows that has the chance to be like the default thing that you use

to like have an overlay to like do other stuff outside of the game. That's really smart. It's really overdue, I think. Of course they're going to use it to push like Xbox stuff. And so maybe it will completely fail. But it's a it's a smart idea and I'm glad they're finally doing it. There's two ways I can see this going. Right now, if I launch a game on Windows, there's like three random overlays.

Like, Nvidia gets at me, Steam, Discord. They're all happy to be an overlay, and they really want to be my overlay. And I hate that. If they all used Microsoft's API and then Microsoft let me manage overlays better, that would be cool. but I just think this is going to be the fourth overlay. And they're all pop over at once and it'll be annoying.

And Yahoo's going to have one. Oh, yeah. It's going to be amazing. Pixel 4A, Deeter? So the retail box leaked. And we also, 9 to 5, Google got like pretty solid specs on it.

Looks like there's only going to be one version of it. The screen is going to be 5.8 inches. There it is. and, you know, specs are going to be the specs. Looks like a Snap 730. It'll be, you know, it'll be the same thing as last year, basically. It'll have a headphone jack. The pezzles are going to be a little bit smaller this year.

But again, like, unless Google does something shockingly good at the Pixel 5, the pixel 4A is like the thing to get. And, like, the pixel 5A is going to be the thing to get. Like, they really need to impress us with the 5 because, like, this 4A looks like it's going to be just as the only difference between it and the four that matters to, like, most people, their day-to-day experience. whether or not you want face unlock. Can I share some personal news about Pixel?

The top glass of the back of my Pixel 3 has broken, and it's really sad. Well, Pixel 4A, all plastic. No wireless charging probably, but it does have a headphone jack. Is it unapologetically plastic? And then there's just a bunch of Google messaging links here that, quite frankly, as I stare at them, I just waves of exhaustion are...

Like everybody, Google is putting out a bunch of PR about their video conferencing stuff during the pandemic. And in one of their, like, notes, they just happened to call it Google Meet. And everyone's like, what the hell is Google Meet? Do you mean Hangouts Meet? And they're like, yeah. That's what we meant. So Hangouts Meet, which if you remember is the video version of Hangouts, not Duo, but it's the video conferencing there is now called Google Meet.

And we're like, well, what about Hangouts chat, which is. their Slack competitor. That, it turns out we're going to have a story. It's going to be called Google Chat, which means, officially, for the first time in history, there will be a real product called Google Chat. Not Google Talk. Google Talk, by the way, which is what everybody calls GChat. Chat is still around in the form of Hangouts, which is still around for consumers.

Google's last communication about that was that it would be end of life in June of 2020. We don't know yet. By the time you read this, we might have an answer. If I go to hangouts. dot google.com. I'm still using Hangouts, right? Okay, I have to do something special and intriguing to discover meat. Right.

The thing about meat, which is hilarious, I've been on a large meat call. But it doesn't tile the video by default. It just puts everybody in a stack on the right and then whoever's talking, it's the big window. There are literally Chrome extensions to just solve this problem. problem. Like just reorganize this window so it's a it looks like Zoom or whatever. Like the most obvious thing they need to do. They haven't done it. Um, but I love, I love, there's an ecosystem of third party crime extensions to do it. Quote, there will be no changes to the consumer parentheses classic on parentheses version of hangouts. No, no. But that's the one they need to change. Like it's the next one

like parentheses, we know dot dot dot dot. I've been on so many more hangouts and it's just, it's so, it's so bad. Like you unplug your headphones and then it lowers the volume of everything, but you can't raise the volume back. Friends who like just can't get it to work on their computer, probably because they're trying it in Safari. But I use it in Safari and it works. It's just like, it's a nightmare and it's an important infrastructure. Oh, well. You got to switch them all, man. This is your time to break the network effect. That's right. We're switching to Matrix. Yeah. All right. We've gone a little long. That was good. It was like,

see, there's all kinds stuff going on in this world. Dieter's just looking at me. No, I just turned on G-chat again in Gmail for the first time in like a year. And I'm just like, I'm just looking at it, just fondly. Well, no one's going to talk to Deeter again for some time

while he figures out of G-chats. Google Hangouts doesn't integrate with Google Calendar. And if I got to invite a Google calendar, doesn't even show up in a hangout. That was the Vergecast, everybody. Thanks so much for us. My thanks to Monica Chen.

Uh, Julia, as always. wonderful. We'll be back on Tuesday. I can't say who it is. I'm holding out hope for a particular name. I'm excited Tuesday. We'll have an interview show. I'm back on Friday. We're not going anywhere. So we're just going to keep making podcasts. Let us know if you like them. Apologies. Have you heard the thumping of my daughter running above me today? It seems to be going well. Let us know about that calibration between virus coverage and tech coverage. It's on my mind. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Paul's at Future Paul Dieter is at Backlon.

We'll see you soon. Rock and roll. Paul. Promocode.