The Vergecast - Rabbit, Ballie, and the other gadgets of CES 2024

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz follow up on all the rest of the gadgets and tech seen at CES 2024. Further reading: CES 2024: all the TVs, laptops, smart home gear, and more from the show floor The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you Rabbit sells out 10,000 units of its R1 pocket AI companion in one day Samsung’s Ballie robot is now a projector that follows you around   Wi-Fi 7 quietly took off while everyone was looking at AI Wi-Fi 7 certification is now underway for new routers and devices    Belkin made an iPhone dock that can track you around the room   Satechi’s new Qi2 charging stands are stylish and storable Have yourself some more Thunderbolt 5. Behold: the first Thunderbolt 5 port we’ve seen on an actual PC. I just watched the first interactive broadcast TV channel in the US Thread Group is finally fixing Thread border routers   The Aqara Hub M3 launches at CES 2024  Google and Samsung team up to simplify Android sharing Intel: ‘We are bringing the AI PC to the car’ Hyundai says hydrogen will play a ‘prominent role’ in going carbon neutral   BMW turns inward for CES, announcing new gaming, streaming, AR, and AI features   VW’s software division and Bosch are testing robot parking and EV charging   Volkswagen says it’s putting ChatGPT in its cars for ‘enriching conversations’   Kia’s ‘Platform Beyond Vehicles’ is a family of modular electric minivans for businesses   Mercedes-Benz taps Will.i.am to create an ‘interactive musical experience’ for its cars Mercedes-Benz’s best-in-class voice assistant is getting an AI boost Honda debuts new global EV series, Honda Zero, coming in 2026 Google Chrome is coming to your car Sony’s Afeela needs to be more than a feeling Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast. Affectionate intelligence. Aw.

Yeah. That's so nice. That's how I describe you most of the same. There's an all-knowing. Kind of cuddly intelligence. Affectionate intelligence is how LG is branding its AI washing machines. Uh-oh. Huh?

So they don't have, you know, you go. go to the LG booth. Yeah. LG makes everything. Yes. Here's our washing machines. Here's our little robot guy. And all the AI stuff is affectionate intelligence.

Because it's AI. It's also AI. It's like personal intent. It's not like chat, GBT, which will lie to you and then try to bang you. This is much more. It's just going to make sure your sweaters are dry. Yeah. I've given up on the smartphone.

So we should, LG and Samsung both have little robots. We'll talk about Bali because we'll talk about Bali because we David and I both got to see Bolly in action. The LG robot is so silly. Like they're not even pretending that this will be a real product. It doesn't even have arms. Yeah, it's just like a little thing that walks around and makes squeaky noise about it. It's cute.

It is very cute. So it's day two of Vergecast at CES. We're sitting here at the Kia connected home right in front of the show floor at CS. I'm your friend, Neely. David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Franz is here. Hey.

The Verge team is everywhere across the show floor. If you are on our site or you're on TikTok or whatever, you've seen we've got reporters everywhere. They're making themselves sick at laser shows. It has been quite an experience here at CS. I would say it's been a good show. It has been a good show. It's been, I would say not as like full of wildness as CES sometimes is. Like there are very few sort of bonkers off the wall new things as there sometimes are.

But in terms of like actual cool things. that might be actually cool in the actual world. Like, it's been pretty good. Then there's more here than I expected, actually. Yeah. And it's a lot of iteration has occurred. Right. Yeah.

And then you can like slash chap GPT on it. And the test I always use at CS is the local news test. Like how ridiculous is CS by how many things break through the barrier of local news programming. Oh, that's good. And that one that I always remember that the baseline product for this test is the year there was the smart fork. And it would tell you if you're eating too fast. Yep.

Uh-huh. It didn't actually work. But poor Joanna Stern was at ABC at the time. Yeah. And so she was just like on every local news broadcast America being like, it's a smart fork. There's not a lot of smart fork at CES. There was so much enthusiasm for the smart fork. There was.

Like it was such earnest belief that this was a good idea that just these were simpler times. But that's how you, that's how I measure. CS is like what's is there garbage that breaks through to the local news or is there meaningful technology that is but and like there's a lot of meaningful technology there's a little bit of local news garbage this year it's the it's the it's the ink toilet right I think the ink toilet yeah the sort of transparent display situation yeah but there is you should watch the video Gentui went and looked at an ink toilet from Kohler you get the feeling to a color has like maybe more R&D money than it knows what to do with

Have you been to Kohler's booth? I have not yet been. Coler's booth has all kinds of stuff and then, I don't know, 15 just running showers. Yeah. All going into like a pond. There's just a pond. It's very soothing. Like you walk into it and you're like, I'm in a little garden.

Look, I'm from Wisconsin where Kohler literally owns a company town called Kohler, Wisconsin. I wish Kohler nothing but the best, you know, pump some of that water back into the local economy, if you know what I'm saying? But every year, Kohler is like, this time the toilet has. has more technology in it. It's pretty great. Okay, so I think we're going to break the show up into three segments. If you watched our earlier show this week,

David's Gambit was that was the screens show. And this is meant to be the not screen show. Despite the fact that many of the things we're going to talk about, have screens. My methodology is not to be questioned. It's products that are screen products. Yeah, that are like about the screens. And then now, and then this show is all the products that are

products that have screens. I mean, we have e-ink toilets now. Like, everything has screens. There were, we wrote stories about headphone cases that have screens on them. You just cannot avoid screens anymore, but they're like not the point of the thing. Right.

They're just, like, one of the gadgets we're going to talk about. They're going to show you ads. Literally, the question was, why did you put a screen on this? And his answer was, yeah, screens are cheap. That's literally what it was. And so it's like, screens are cheap, and they're everywhere.

Okay. So we're going to talk about some gadgets. Then we should talk about a bunch of standards that hit pretty important moments at the show. Which actually kind of is the story of CES this year. It's like there are big standards that are going to start to be everywhere that are like here in a really meaningful way. Yeah. Like Wi-Fi 7 had a moment. Thunderbolt 5 is here. There's a smart home stuff. Alex had an ATSC 3.0 adventure, which is pretty good. It was wonderful. It's magic. And then we should talk about some cars because there's tons of Cs always has tons and tons of cars at it and we should just go through all the car nice.

So let's start with gadgets, and I want to start, David, with what is undeniably the breakout gadget hit of the show, which you have seen and talked to the founder of, the Rabbit R1. This thing came out of absolutely nowhere. Yeah. And I think probably has been the most talked about single device of the show. It's either that or the transparent TVs. So this thing is basically, it's just dedicated AI hardware, right? It's like if you've ever seen the panic playdate, that little console with the, the, the. Craig, the crank, it feels just like that.

It's like colorful and orange. It has a button on the side and a camera and a scroll wheel. And it was made by teenage engineering. And so it's like lovely and all the buttons feel really good. But the schick is it's an AI gadget. And this company Rabbit, which has kind of an interesting history, its founder has worked on AI stuff for a really long time. He's on the board of teenage engineering.

So he's like connected to this world. They built this whole big new thing where instead of a large language model like chat GPT, which is fundamentally about like you input something and you get text back. This is about like doing stuff, right? So their idea is you should be able to say, I want to accomplish any goal. I want to listen to music. I need a ride here. Order me something.

Book me flights on something, whatever. And have it all be like accomplishable with all of the services you use, but inside of what amounts to an assistant. One million billion unanswered questions about that. but it's $199. It's a like adorable little gadget. And the two reactions that everybody seems to have are either, this thing doesn't do anything that my phone doesn't do, why on earth what I want it?

And this thing doesn't do anything my phone doesn't do. And oh my God, I want it so bad. That's me. Yeah. It is very cute. Yeah. I think people are just reacting to the idea that they could purchase a gadget. The questions are just infinite.

Yes. Yes. For example, it's $200. There's no recurring fee, right? There's no subscription service. This thing can't be making money. Like, just from the jump, it's like... It seems impossible.

They have to run a cloud service. There's no way that they're making enough money on the upfront sale to run the cloud service. They had to pay, like, teenage engineering to do all the design work. Right. Another question I have, and I encourage everyone to go watch this, they put it out in what is a can only be described as a, fake Apple keynote. Oh, very much so. He's standing there on a stage.

I don't know if there's an audience, but here there's an audience. Can I actually describe the scene to you? Because it's very funny. So this wasn't on the show floor. It was kind of a secret thing. Like, I found out about it from like a relatively sketchy email that was just like, we're launching the future of everything. And I was like, well, all right.

Like, I got to, we'll just find out. It was deep. I mean, deep, like it, like a mile and a half walk from the front door. of the win to this tiny little meeting room in the back of the wind where this keynote was. And it was set up, it was like in a ballroom. And on the one side you have tables for people to stand out and coffee and stuff. And on the other side, maybe four rows of seats. And then this big screen and Jesse Liu, the founder standing in front of that.

And that's where they shot the whole thing. And it looks so polished and so professional. And it's literally just him standing in a casino ballroom talking in front of a screen. It was very impressive. Yeah. But you were in that audience. I was in that audience. So that was live.

I thought that was a production. But no, you were there. It was life. All right. So that's the experience you had. The experience I had was what appears to be a pre-produced version of the presentation you were given. Which now that I'm looking at it is even more apply than the thing. Right.

It looks like a fake Apple keynote. That's the introducing our one video on their channel. Right. And the thing about this that caught me, and I'm wondering if you saw this in action, is in the video, he's like, asks it to do something and you look at the animation of the rabbit jumping, which is adorable, but you never actually see it do the thing. Right. He's like, success.

And you're like, what happened? But you like held it and got to use it. Did it, did it work? Yes and no. Well, I did get to hold it. It did work. But we were on horrible hotel Wi-Fi, which I can vouch for being horrible. Yeah.

So it kind of. kind of came and went in terms of actually being able to do anything at all. And obviously, a device like this can't do much offline, period, because everything it's doing is happening in the cloud. So after about 10 minutes of everybody sort of playing with it getting to try stuff, he literally like disconnected it and just was handing it around to people. But at one point, it Rick rolled somebody, somebody was holding in their hand and never going to give you up, started playing. And I think that might have been when they took it offline for good. They're like, no, we're done. That's how it reacts to losing its connection. It's like,

you're going to like this. So again, like added to. the list of unanswered questions about this thing is like does it actually work? Because I think you're writing a bunch of people had this reaction of like, you see him talk into it, clever cut, you see it work. And it's like, well, yeah. What does it do? Like, like, I keep trying to understand that. Okay. So I have. Okay. I'm just going to say my ideas and then David can tell me That's how it's structure this. Because I don't think David actually knows you. I think I bet I know slightly more than you, but only slightly.

So my understanding of this is that it is using the apps for you. Right. And this is not a new idea. Yeah. If you are a decoder listener, we've had like robotic process automation episodes where big enterprises basically bring in computers to use their old computers for them. and like these are big companies that do this work. And that's at the corporate level, it's enterprise.

This is a known thing. We're going to use some machine learning and some computer vision. And we're going to use Windows 3.1 instead of updating the hospital building system. Right. It's a real thing that happens. There was a company called Kavo that I loved ages ago. Yeah, we talked about it last week. And they were going to do machine vision to like click around on your TV interface for you.

Right. They failed. It didn't go well. As we talked about last week. Yeah. But not because you can't do it technically. Like it is a possible thing to do it. It is a thing you can do.

Yeah. So this gadget, the hardware seems less important than whatever is happening in the cloud. Yes. Oh, very much. The hardware is just like a little bitty, cute thing you can ask questions of. And then somewhere in the cloud, it appears they're spinning up like Android virtual machines that have your Spotify app or whatever on it. Right. And then it's clicking around on a little Android phone, like a virtual Android phone in the cloud and then delivering you the result.

onto the little thing. So that is also, I think my understanding of like the most likely way for it to work. What that doesn't do is jive at all with what Rabbit says about privacy, which is that it doesn't store your credentials. Yeah. And so there's like a total disconnect there that I just don't understand. And what I do know is they have this training mode where you can like teach Rabbit how to do something for you. Like one of the examples Jesse the CEO gives is how to remove a watermark from Photoshop.

And the way that you do it is you literally go into Rabbit Hole, which is like their adorably named portal for getting into all of your apps. It's very good. Like the whole branding of this is excellent. You go into it and you, like you said, you boot up a virtual Windows machine. You load Photoshop and this is all like rabbits computers, not yours, right? So you load a Photoshop and then you narrate aloud what you're doing as you're teaching the model how to do it.

So you go through the process and you say, and then you go over here and you select the lasso and then you select you you you lasso around the watermark and then you click this and that and that and that's how you train the model so in terms of like how to actually interact with the underlying model your metaphor is exactly right then what happens after that yeah i do not know because like once i give it my spotify credentials rabbit says unambiguously that it does not then keep my spotify credentials and i have no idea yeah how it can at some point it just has to have a token to log in the spot-off on your behalf, right? Are we sure it's absolutely going to be in the cloud, or is it going to be in the cloud

than talking to your phone and in the cloud talking to your laptop? It's not talking to your devices, that I know for sure. But do they have a rack of like mid-range Android phones? Maybe like hot dog fingers just banging away on them. Like beepers thing with the Mac minis getting into your eye messages? Yeah. Yeah, this is just a big question I have about this whole product, right? Which is, it sounds really cool.

What if you had an assistant that could use a computer for you? Right. Yeah. Very good. Yeah. Right. And you don't have to re-architect all these apps and services. You don't need Adobe's permission.

Maybe a big question mark there. But you have a computer in the cloud. It's loaded up with legal apps and services. Who knows? It's not Alex's Plex server. It's a computer in the cloud. And a robot's going to click around on it for you and then do the work for you. And that just means that the price, like, that just can't work with.

with the privacy claims. Right. Yeah, it's very difficult to square that with it. And they're also very clear about the privacy claims. Like, it's, they're either just boldly lying or there is some clever turn that we don't know yet and they're not really talking about yet. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's not, they're not doing the like, you know, sketchy, you know, deflect and you ask questions. Like, no, they're just very straightforward about like, we do not store your stuff. And I'm like, how? I'll do the same sort of exercise as we did with the humane AI pin. Yeah. You're like, here's the demo. So one of the demos was Spotify music, right?

Okay. To make that work, they need your Spotify credentials. Then they've got to log into Spotify somewhere, somehow. Uh-huh. We don't know where or how. We don't know if they have a virtual Android computer or virtual Windows computer. We don't know how your $200 one-time payment is paying for that server cost. Right.

That's just the beginning. Yeah. Then they've logged into Spotify. their large action model has clicked around Spotify and found the song you want from the artist you want, which even Spotify's search is not great at. Correct. So there's a whole problem there, right?

It's going to navigate the Spotify interface, which is more and more geared towards like, what if you listen to a podcast? Yeah. Right, so two different computers are going to be hostile to each other in that specific way. Then it's going to stream the audio from Spotify. Spotify's audio is DRM to hell and back because it's a streaming service.

So now it's accepting a DRM audio stream. And then it's going to send it to your rabbit. It's going to send it to your headphones. That little transcoding step where it rebroadcast the DRM audio is, I would call it a pickle. Yeah. Yeah. If you will. I think there's just like a vague whiff of vapor.

You think so? This thing. Like, it just, there's, there's too many things where it's like, no, that doesn't compute. That's not how computers, yeah. Yeah, that's good. This is just not how computers work. This is just not how, like, any of these services work. How?

And the fact that they're not saying how, but they do have this really gorgeous hardware. Well, so I do think the how, it's not such a leap, the how, right? Because machine vision to operate a computer interface has been deployed in other contexts. Right. The thing that gets me is the cost. No, it's the cost. Like, if you call Microsoft to come do a big RPA integration in your health care system, that is millions of dollars. Yes.

It is not $200. Yes. One time payment of $200. One time payment of $200. Like, I'm just dying to know. And then they sold, which is to their credit, they sold vastly more than they thought they were going to sell. They sold out of their first run of 10,000 units in a day, maybe hours even. Yeah.

So they've just signed up to run a pretty large. set of, what, 10,000 virtual machines, at least. Yeah. And, you know, we used to see that a lot in the Kickstarter days. Yeah. And then eventually you'd get an email saying, my bad. Yeah. And this has that kind of feeling to me because the privacy situation and the cost

are two things like you need to explain. There's a big missing piece here and you haven't disclosed it. And I kind of need to understand that. Even though I do, I would 100% have spent $200 on it. if I'd gotten in. They're going to open up another route. Like the hardware itself, I'm like, I just want to play with that. Yeah, I love a teenage engineering device.

Yeah, yeah, like, that's pretty cheap for a teenage engineering. Like, to everybody in March, like, this is, right. By all accounts, their version of this thing is, like, ready. Yeah. And again, I think that, to Alex's point, like, the how of it, it's not like other people couldn't have come up with this idea. I think their challenges are, can you skip? Because it actually work.

Is it brittle or is it really flexible? Right. If Spotify changes the interface, will it actually survive that? Photoshop moves some buttons around. Will it survive that? That's got to run on Windows, by the way. They're running Photoshop on like an Android phone, like a mid-range Android phone with a hot dog. I mean, they could be using Azure.

They could be using AWS, right? Just put all just cost after cost after cost. Yes. Totally. Yeah, I'm just like, can I just read you a few sentences from their privacy web page, which is actually like a useful summary of everything we've been talking about? So it says when you interact with Rabbit OS, you will be assigned a dedicated and isolated environment on our cloud for your own large action model, which more or less. Yeah.

Yeah. You're in a virtual machine. When our rabbits perform tasks for you, they will use your own accounts that you have securely granted us control over through our Rabbit Hole web portal. We do not store your passwords for these services. I literally don't see how those two sentences can both be true. Because you don't need the password persistently. Yeah. You need it for like a second to get the off token.

true if you're running Spotify's API, not if you're logging in on a new machine that I'm spinning up every single time. No, but it says you have access to a machine. They're giving you a little cloud computer that is yours. For these 10,000 people who bought $200 rabbit R1s, they also bought a computer. Yeah. Yeah. This is what I'm asking.

That doesn't make any sense. I mean, that's what it sounds like. It sounds like they're saying, we personally aren't going to have like your code everywhere Instead, your little cloud computer that we manage is going to have it. Right. And a little splitting hair is there. Ah, Rabbit Joe. This is why if you're a lot of these companies, you try to build a thing where you can tap into APIs.

Like, there are lots of ways to interact with Spotify, not through Spotify, right? Because Spotify has open APIs for this stuff. And you can plug in and they do a good job of the authentication tokens. Rabbit is explicitly going a different direction. Yeah. So Spotify is a good example because it's, you know, It's a very simple thing. You could put the Spotify API on this device, run it locally.

Spotify will happily let you do this thing that it's described. Here's a little Linux computer. It's going to ping Spotify and stream. Maybe that's what they're doing. Every smart speaker is that. Right. And they're cheap. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. You go to the second most complicated example. Like I said, I'm just running this down the way that we ran down Humane. Because obviously, humane is the thing that people are going to compare this to. Humane, by the way, which laid off 4% of its staff this week. And I tried to play some games with Alex Heath when he broke that story.

pretty shady, humane. Anyway. Not great. So, the other example was booking a flight. Yep. Which is easily the most complicated thing you can do. Yes. And when I talk about hostile interfaces,

the interfaces to book a flight are openly hostile to you. Like all over the place, all the time. Prices are changing. It's unclear what you're buying. The door might fall off the plane. It's just a real hard time in air travel. This thing has to go. you say like book me a flight to Seattle.

This thing has to go find a website to do that on. It has to understand a vast amount about your preferences and what you want and what you fly and what seats. Like the amount it has to know about you before it even starts the rest of this process. Right. And if you are a united person and I'm a Delta person and you are American. American. Yeah. It's rough.

Yeah. That's three entirely different websites for the large action model to understand. to understand and be able to navigate. And then it has to condense those into a coherent response that works on the interface of the rabbit. Yeah. And the airlines, by the way,

hate this and always have. Yes. Like they just don't want there to be a layer of abstraction over their websites. They don't like it. That's, and then it has to actually do a good job of booking you a flight.

Right. It has to have your credit card so I can pay. And your frequent flyer miles, your preferred seat area, like, do you want first class? It's a lot that's got to do. I don't know. Like, I love this thing.

It seems like we're going to get one soon. Yeah, I think sooner rather than later, we'll start to get a real idea of what this thing actually is. But I'm just, like, if you just, like, run the examples, just how would you do this? Step by step. In a funny way, I would be more bullish on this thing if it was $400 than I am at $200. I'd be more bullish on it if it was $200 and it was $30 a month. Yeah. Like, at least I would understand.

Okay. Yeah. understand how this company can persist. The way it's structured now is like we're going to make a big splash. There's a part of me believes they started this company and got all this interest and then we're sitting right next to the Google booth here at the Kia connected home. They're going to sell it to Google in a year because there's so much interest in AI and then Google will shut it down in two years. This thing running barred would be so much less exciting. Like I just don't, I don't understand the economics of this service. But it is very exciting. It looks

very cool. I understand people are excited. And it is like a whole thought about AI, which I appreciate. They built a thing that is like a full vision, and I think that's cool. It is bringing some tech that we have seen in the enterprise context to consumers. So I think I have more faith. It's not 100% faith. It's about 5% more faith than you, Alex. Yeah, yeah. Like the hardware is so, and the concept is so, so good.

Execution, I'm just like, no. Yeah. And I want it to, I want it to work. I want this all to work. I would love a $200, no addition. fees just like does everything for me. That's magic. That sounds great, but that's magic. And generally, magic is not real. Well, I went to the sphere last night. Oh, sorry, sorry. David, I went to the sphere. Boy, I was just, I'm in love with the sphere. Yeah. Which should be a

sphere in every town in America. We can see it from here. It's beautiful. It is, it is better, farther away than up close. Yes. Oh, absolutely. And then even inside on the screen, you can see lines. And like, I was like, there's dead pictures. It's not an IMAX. And then also we did not see you too. We saw there in Aronofsky's Postcard from Earth, which is just the weirdest thing you can see if you are sober.

Oh, you. There were people there who were not sober who were like, yes. Yeah, that feels like a Shrooms event. Yeah. That's a real Adam and Eve Falligory. Like at the end of it, like they get off. I'm going to spoil postcard for Earth. That's fine.

It's mostly a reason to show you, like, videos of elephants. It's going to be fine. At the end of it, they, the Adam and Eve get off their spaceship, and the voices are like, you are here for a reason. The reason is obviously to bang and populate the planet they're on. It's like very obvious. Get to it. The reason is.

It's good. It's a love story. You should go to Earth, which humanity has left in this. Okay. Liam is telling you got to wrap this up. I love the sphere. You know, like the water tower in your town. if you're in a town in America with a water tower,

go to your local town meeting and be like, we should turn our water tower into a sphere. Yes. Just a huge... It's only going to cost $2.3 billion. Probably... Don't worry about hail. You'll be fine.

It was not full last night. It was, in fact, mostly empty. Yeah. Oh. But is that because I was just like magnetically drawn to the screen. Regardless of what was on the screen, I would have been happy. Postcard from Earth, I think, is not drawn a crowd. No.

Anyhow, all right, we've got to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about some gadgets. We've got some standards. CES, stay tuned at the first chest. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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I spent the whole day thinking it was Friday. The only thing that makes sense is the sphere, David. The giant, ridiculous spectacle. When you walk into the sphere, we... Like, the lobby of the sphere is, like, bathed in blue light. There's, like, bad robots talking about the future at you. And you're like, oh, you just made, like, an Epcot Center. Like, you went to the warehouse of old Epcot Technologies.

Do you ride on a little train and get to see, like, the cave in? No, they ran out of money well before that happened. That's what the postcard from Earth is supposed to be, I guess. Yeah, right? The spaceship Earth where you go up. Yeah. No, there's a definite vibe at this sphere where you're like, well, this is where they ran out of money. They built the screen and they're like, hmm, this carpet.

Just pour to potty's everywhere. If you're in Vegas, please, if you're listening to this and you ever come to Vegas, you just go look at the screen. It's an insane screen. Don't look at Postcard from Earth, I think, is what I would say. Yeah, that's right. I think fish is coming like in April. Go see fish.

That's the move. That's appropriate. Yes. Oh, that's very good. Actually, speaking, we got to talk about standards. There's a bunch of standards news here at CS. But speaking of just screen mishaps, you and I both saw Samsung Bali demos. Poor Bali.

And we saw different mishaps. What was yours? Well, first tell people at Bally. So Bally is the sort of little rolling home robot that Samsung is making. We saw it last year and we saw a new version of it this year. And its new thing is basically it's a new thing. it's a robot assistant projector. Yeah.

So last year had no projector. Right. Yeah. Okay. And this year, the demo is actually sort of convincing. It's like this little thing that will follow you around and you're like, oh, I'm doing a workout and it'll project your workout on the wall. And then he went to do sit-ups.

And so it started projecting the workout on the ceiling. And I was like, that's awesome. And it can make calls for you. It knows your schedule. It's just like it's a little adorable smart speaker that just kind of like ambles around your house. Like, I'm into it. I love it. The demo I saw.

So they were doing these as shows, like once an hour. where it was like, Bolly will appear. And Bolly comes out. They do the first half of the demo. It's going fine. And then Bally is supposed to, I believe the first time it went wrong, Bali was supposed to make a phone call. And what Bolly is supposed to do is project the phone call, like, up on the wall.

So you can see here talking to, whatever. Bali projected it upside down and about three inches off the ground. So all you could see was the word, like, flower shop upside down on the wall. and then Bolly went around to try and, you know, help him see his calendar upside down and teeny tiny. And then for the last part of the demo, rolls it back over the wall and the guy's like, oh, show me what's in my fridge so I can decide what to make. Leaving aside that his fridge is literally right next to him. Yeah, like he could have reached out with his left hand and opened the fridge and instead he's like, Bali, what's inside the fridge? Bolly projects nothing on the wall.

It's just nothing. And this poor guy who clearly has a script to follow stands there and he goes, hmm, So I have some apples. And that was the moment that like the panic level among all the Samsung employees just started to spike and the demo ended very quickly after that. Yeah. It's over. I saw the same Bali show. I thought the call the flower shop demo was very fun.

It was just in the same way we were talking about the rabbit. He's like, what's on my calendar? And Bali shows a calendar. It's like it's your anniversary. He's like, okay, call the flower shop. And he just says call the flower shop. And if you've ever done a search in your life, you know, that is not a thing. You can just instruct any assistant to you.

There's not a thing on Google Maps called The Flower Shop. Yeah. It's like 10,000 sponsored listings later. And he calls the Fire Shop, he makes a phone. And like, this is, you know, it's a demo. It's fake, but whatever. But he's like, any dozen roses. And like, come in right your way and hang up.

I was like, that's not how that works at all. And then he's like, I'm going to make dinner. He does the Apple thing. And then in mine, the mishap was he went. to go watch a cooking video. And Bali was supposed to... Oh, I didn't even get that far. He shut yours down.

Mine, he was like, I'm going to do some cooking. And it was supposed to project it above the kitchen sink. But Bali missed and presented it teeny tiny on the side of the cabinet. And he just kept going as though that wasn't happening. Just keep like looking down, double-checking all your instructions. It's very good. I love the idea of Bali. I think it would be very fun to have a little projector that follows you around showing you things.

My favorite thing about it was every time he would have, ask it a question, it would project little arrows on the ground. Yeah. Telling you, like, follow me over to this wall so I can show you. And it was great. And he's just, like, chasing this little ball around the living room. There's a real, the workout demo. Yeah.

Did this happen? It sounds like your demo was much higher stakes than mine. Mine mostly went fine. The workout demo is like, a time for my workout. And he's like stretching. And he's standing in front of a television. Yeah. And instead, Bali, rolled to the left of the television, projected the workout video on

the wall next to you, which everyone was. has just a wide blank wall next to me. Same. And then just insisted on making us watch Megan Trainor video on the television. I was like, this isn't what I want at all. Yeah, I don't want this experience. It was very good.

All right, so that's Bali. It was good. It's cute. Yeah, it's cute. Yeah. All right, we should talk about some standards. So lots of smart home stuff happening in CS, eating toilets, you know, clumsy projector robots.

what have you. Let's start with just some smart home stuff. So Jen Toey is here, our smart home reviewer. She's killing it as always. Basic stuff. So Matter and Thread are always a big deal. At CS, we're into what year 35 of trying to make Matter or a thing. It's going to happen this year.

This year's for sure. The big news around Matter is that matter is supposed to work with a wireless standard called Thread. Thread is built into all kinds of things now. The iPhone 15 Pro has a lot. thread radio in it for totally mysterious reasons. But the Apple TV has it, Nesthubs have it. The issue is that thread is supposed to form a low power mesh network in your house. So you get an Apple TV, you've got a thread device, you get a Nest Hub, you get an ERO. They all sort of form one pretty good, resilient thread network.

And up until yesterday, the specification did not allow that to happen. So instead they would all create their own competing little. networks. Yeah. And you have like this fight. Like my ERO has a different thread network running in my house than my Apple TV. And I just shut the thread radios off my Eero because this is useless. Yeah.

That is bad because there's more Eros in my house than Apple TVs. And so that should just be the good network. Right. But you can't pass the credit. It's like, all just a mess. So the news here at E.S is that thread the thread group, which definitely sounds like a consulting company that Jason Gorn works for. they've murdered a number of high-value targets,

and they've also released a specification that lets all of those devices pass credentials to one another, which Jen specifically has been saying is the thing that needs to happen. Yeah. Nothing has shipped with it yet. It's a software update. They're all going to do it. But this is some, like, baseline spec news at CS,

I think is very important because it's going to get you to the place where you're in your house. You have a Wi-Fi network for high power usage, high data usage, and a thread network. for smart locks and light switches. We'll see. Fingers crossed as someone who relies on a thread network. What's your thread network?

The light for the entryway so I can climb up the stairs at night at my apartment. I like to be able to see. Yeah. Seems reasonable. Yeah. Sometimes it doesn't work and I'm like, okay, cool. I've got the Shlake door locks on a thread network with the Apple TV. Yeah.

I don't know why. Yeah. I just like knowing it's on a different network than the Wi-Fi. These batteries last 30% longer. Nailed it. These were more expensive than the other smart ones. Then there's a bunch of just sort of like basic stuff, standards-wise, as comes to smart homes. So with Matter, Matter is extending. It's going to do robot vacuums this year.

It just keeps getting bigger. And then Dear Sweet Amazon announced that instead of using Chromecast or Airplay, it will now support casting content from Prime Video with Matter, which no one else supports. It's one of those things that it's like, if we had all decided to do this a long time ago, the world would be a better place. It is patently absurd that you have 11 different technologies just to send a thing from your phone to your television. But like we're out on that one. So now we're into like, people who are like DORAC keyboards are better than QWERTY.

It's like, that's great for you. Yeah. I don't care anymore. Yeah. Yeah. We should put the accelerator on the left. Yeah. I don't know.

Maybe we should have done that in 19. 15. But we didn't. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so now you have yet another way to send prime video to things. Yeah. Which I'm sure tons of people do all the time. So Amazon makes its own TVs. Yeah. They can insist on it. Really popular set top box too. Really? Yeah, the Fire TV is popular. I want to joke about this thing a lot, but also Amazon's like right behind Roku with one of the most popular, like set top situations. So. I'm excited for Andy Jassy at the meeting with Tim Cook, where you're just like, like, right? He's like, we'd love for you to support Mattercasting on iOS. I don't think that's going to happen.

I just assume he'll close his laptop. He just puts on his vision pro. He's like, I am on the top of a volcano now, sir. He just puts on the screensaver thing on the outside. He's like, I'm done. This meeting's over. Just looking at Tim Cook's dead virtual eyes while he just disassociates from this conversation. That's exactly what's going to happen.

That sounds about right. So similar note, LG is supporting Google Cast. this is a big announcement Samsung is not this is the silliest thing yeah like so Google has nearby share I'm like there's a 100% chance I'm gonna get

all these names strong Google has nearby share Samsung has Quick share Google is now renaming nearby share to quick share and just giving it to Samsung yeah and they're just gonna put them together and LG is just off to the side being like we don't have any of this anymore we don't make phones but we're gonna use Google cast and our TVs Samsung's like we're partnering with Google

on QuickShare, but we're not going to put Google Cast on... It's just a mess. This whole thing is a mess, which is why basically AirPlay 2 continues to be the thing that people like gravitate to, and then Google Cast is the thing that on Android thing people gravitate

to. Yep. Except for Amazon Prime Video. And then lastly, just on smart home gadgets, we still live in a world of hubs and bridges. They're inescapable. But a thing that's happening is they're all kind of converging in these idea that you will have just one kind of main hub.

Thank God. In your house. It's not quite there yet, but Aquara, which is sort of an upstart smart home company. I've got Aquara smart locks in addition to my sledge. Super expensive thread ones for no reason. They're very good. They go on sale every, they're constantly on sale. They're motion sensors.

They're great. Yeah, and they're a really interesting company. They've got an interesting proximity sensor. But they've got a new hub to Hub M3. We've been talking about it for a year or more. It's a Zigby hub for all of the query Zygby devices. It's also a thread border router, and it is a matter controller if you want to be a madder thing. So this is the thing that should be able to control like hue lights and eave shades and work with your nest thermostat.

And not require you to use home assistant. Because home assistant has a similar hub, but it requires you to use home assistant. And a lot of people aren't as nerdy as myself. A lot of homicestine stands are about to get real mad at you. Yeah. I mean, I'm one of you. I use home assistant. And I love it.

I have the home assistant yellow. But like a lot of people don't want that. Yeah. This is a little more turnkey. This is the non-sick hacker version. Yeah. If it works. If it works.

I just want to point out. Yeah. Thread and matter. Like every year at T.S. We track. Like, okay, there's a bunch of smart home products. These standards are growing. The big companies are still all over the place with things like as simple as like I'm

watching a video on my phone. I want on TV. Still a mess, right? Like still fundamentally a mess unless you are pretty firmly in the Apple. ecosystem, which is Apple's argument. Right. Fair. This is app, like, stay in this prison and we will care for you.

Three hots that caught in consistent, reliable video casting. That's the Apple way. But it's getting better and some of these products are interesting. Okay, so that's the smart home stuff. You want to talk about Wi-Fi 7 or Alex? You want to talk about ATS C. I will talk about ATSC 3.0 forever. This is, I mean, this is Alex's baby.

Yeah. You saw a pretty cool demo. Yeah, I saw a really cool demo. ATSC 3.0 famously came out many, many years ago, and nothing happened because no one wanted to spend the money to upgrade all of their broadcast towers to ATSC 3.0 because it's expensive. And all you would get was like slightly higher quality. And they're like, well, why would I want to do that? That's dumb. Yeah.

And so this company, Roxy thinks it's figured out a way, which is that... It's Roxy with an I, by the way. Yeah, it's Roxy with an I. Very important. Very important. R-O-X-I. So it's... It's good.

Yeah. They also do like a music app, and so they're bringing that music app as a channel. And so right now as we're recording, if you're in Vegas and you happen to have an ATSC 3.0 tuner on your TV. Which you almost certainly don't. You could if you recently bought an LG, but not this year's, just last year. If you're one of three people in Vegas to whom this applies. Yeah, you can go and you can watch this channel. And then you can pause the music on the channel.

You can skip tracks. You can choose other like stations within the channel itself, all in the channel. all broadcast. And I was like, okay, well, do you need Wi-Fi? And they said Wi-Fi will, like, increase the quality, the visual quality, but other like the interactivity? No, you don't need it. Really? It's all broadcast.

That is just not how I would expect that to work. Yeah. And I was like, oh, cool. They're claiming that they basically put, they called it a transitory app, just a little tiny app that goes on to the TV and operates on the TV while you're on the channel. And then it leaves a short-term memory once you leave the channel. So ATC.4.0 increases the bandwidth? It's a digital signal.

And part of the spec has the storage in there. They can send you the bits to run a little baby app. Yeah. That's pretty neat. How does it send a signal back to the TV station if you want to like buy? So they're having to use AWS. They're going through servers. So that all is happening.

And the money side of it was my other question there. They figured out instead of using broadcast ads, which I guess don't make as much money, they can use streaming TV ads. So they can use a more lucrative ad on it. And they're partnering with Sinclair, who has like 40% of broadcast. standard. They own 40% of broadcast stations in the United States. They can't own any more because then they'd be a monopoly.

So that's the only reason they haven't purchased more. They're partnering with it. They're super excited about it. And they're insisting that it's going to be on all in every market that has ATSC 3.0 by the end of this quarter. I'm really curious about that because there's 60% of markets that aren't completely owned by Sinclair. But they're like, no, no, no, we got this. So the guy was like very, very emphatic about that.

So we'll see if that actually happens. But like this is cool. I would love to be able to, you know, you could think about it. Like Max could theoretically, not your child, but. I mean, I love her dearly and every now and again. I regret naming her Max. Yeah, yeah. She could become a new broadcast channel.

But like theoretically, Max could like be on this. Their examples were QVC or something like that. Of course. Like, yeah. There's always transactions by stuff. Yeah. transaction, buy stuff, choose the weather, skip to your actual weather on the station while still watching the news, that sort of thing. So, like, this has been a promise for a very long time, and nobody's actually, like, shipped it.

And so that's why this is really, really exciting. So this is, like, over-the-air interactive television? Over-the-air, interactive television. No internet required. No internet required. And that's, I think, super crucial because there's so many people in the United States who don't have easy, cheap access to Internet. So, like, they don't get to go watch all the cool stuff we get to watch. and this would theoretically, if everybody adopted it, would give them more opportunities.

It is super cool. I think all of the interactive stuff, though, I wonder about because on the streaming side of it, there's no reason that hasn't been possible for forever. Yeah. And still, nobody has to. Like, Amazon cannot figure out how to do a good job of letting you be like, I would like to buy the chips in this ad, please. Yeah.

You're showing me a commercial for Fritos. Please allow me to buy these Fritos. Amazon doesn't know how to do that yet. And so the idea that they're all going to figure this out on... They're doing that with Prime Video. They're getting there. Yeah. Yeah.

Slowly. Yeah. I suspect that one, like, right now it's just going to be this Roxy music app. That's all we're going to see. That's all we're going to see. You know, maybe they could work with QVC and QVC and them could put their heads together and figure this out. Okay.

But here's my question. Yeah. It's always QVC. It's always shopping. The other thing you can do with ATS3 Pruno is improve the, picture quality. Yeah. Well, and that's the part I think is exciting.

Please someone improve the picture quality. Like, to your point about the broadband stuff, the idea that just A, you're going to be able to send what amounts to streaming services over broadband is really exciting for all the reasons you're talking about. Over broadcast. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. It's super exciting. And then also the fact that the picture quality could be better.

But I just wonder if any of the stakeholders involved in this care enough about ATSC3 anymore to pick this fight. It's like the matter casting. Like, we should have done this a decade ago and everything would be better. Sinclair needs it. Like, if Sinclair doesn't figure this out. they're done, you know, 10 years from now. Broadcast TV is dead. Like last year we did a lot of reporting about how people were watching less broadcast TV.

So it's on its last legs. It needs something. And if this can get those companies, and a lot of these streaming companies own broadcast networks, right? Like ABC or Disney does, Paramount does. I think, I believe Max owns a lot of cable channels. Like, there is certainly opportunity for these people. And the fact that this company has figured out this tech. This is lucrative spectrum.

You should be able to do something good with it. Right. Ideally, you increase the picture quality and stop broadcasting football on 720P. But instead we're doing QVC. Yeah. It's great. All right, let's talk about some other standards. By the way, you should go watch just the glee on Alex's face.

It's the best. It's a video. Just watch the video. The way that I felt at the sphere, Alex felt downloading ATS3. I had such a good time. People like stopped to watch because I think I was just that excited. Yeah. People like coming into the booth.

A little bit later today, I'm going to go look at some party speakers. Yeah. And I feel like I'm going to be the most excited person to go through the party speaker tour. They're going to just join you. People are just going to follow you. Feel your enthusiasm. And they're like, why? Just some other quick standards to talk about.

Chee-2, it's the magnetic wireless standard that is basically mag-safe. It's here. There's some products. Yeah, there's a lot of it. The good news is less about like a specific product and more about it. It just feels like everybody has decided to embrace Chee-too, which is awesome. Including Apple, which is like the big one. Right.

Including Apple. Like, we're going to start to see a lot of Android phones with it. This year everybody thinks that new pixel is going to have it. Like, the momentum on this is super real and happening fast to the point where I think, like, and we've talked a lot on this show about how cool it will be when we have a bunch of unified systems for accessories. Yeah. And we're getting it with USBC. We're getting it with Chitu.

Like, it's going to be good things. Yeah. So we've got some photos of docs from Siteschi and other companies. There's a Belkin thing that works with Apple's new dock kit. Yeah. I absolutely forgot dot kit was a thing. Yeah, Apple is like, we made an accessory standard, and you're so used to being like, and that'll be one company will try it. But now because of USBC and she too, companies are free to try it.

It's like less costly in a way. Yeah. So Belkin made a dock, a camera dock. You put it on it and dock kit motorize is the dock while you're in FaceTime mode. So like follow you around. I don't know if that's cool. I think it's cool that people made a thing. Yeah. Yeah, that hurts. Is this anything? Yeah, is this anything? I will say I hate the webcams that automatically move to keep you in the center of the frame.

It is the worst experience to be on a call with somebody while their camera is constantly moving every time they move their head. But it's like it's just pan and zoom. Yeah. Yeah. Or pan and scan, right? But like if you watch something that is constantly panning and scanning, it sucks. Hey, Bella Porch built an entire TikTok career off that effect, man. What are you doing?

Fair enough. All right. Alex, what is going on with Wi-Fi 7? It's everywhere. It's like having a moment. It's having a moment. It's faster. Yeah.

Okay. But it's faster because it can like do a thing, right? You can like use multiple radio channels at the same time. It's faster. It can use multiple radio channels. And the big thing is that... I don't know what other feature you want from Wi-Fi other than faster. No one wants anything else from Wi-Fi.

It's also a delivery service. Go fast. It's now interactive. You can connect to QVC with it and buy all sorts of things. You can look at Max on it now. Which one? All of them. But yeah, I think the big thing is that it's going to be smarter about how it handles your traffic.

So if you're on the 5 gigahertz and it's getting jammed with stuff, it'll switch you over automatically to 6. And this is just like – but the main thing is it's just – it's faster. It's getting a lot faster. It's getting smarter about how it handles all those packets. Yeah. And you can probably – like you're going to find laptops with it now because a bunch of – until the laptops announced it to the point where I was like, oh, I guess it's just everywhere now. The cheaper laptops don't have it, but anything like the XPS line has it.

Yeah. A lot, almost all of the gaming laptops that were announced have it. So is it just all the stuff with the new Intel? Yeah, it seems like primarily the new Intel, but you still have to have like the Wi-Fi chip and that's expensive. Right. And so like sometimes they're like, no, we're not going to put the new Wi-Fi in. Yeah, that's fair. But, yeah, so it's going to be available this year. I'm hesitant to tell people to go out and buy those Wi-Fi set up.

in routers. I think you can still, you can still... Well, they've only just started certifying. Yeah. So you can buy them now, but they're uncertified and the promises that a software update will certify them. We just got, was it Wi-Fi 6E? Like last year or something. I only know that because I bought a Wi-Fi 6 router and then it was immediately that out 6E and I was very bitter about it. That's how I feel too. I just bought new Eros and their Wi-Fi 6 because I was like, who needs 6E? Like, that's barely anything. And I'm going to get 7. I'm like, I'm

two generations behind now. Yeah. So this is all just, this is like the Wi-Fi companies are doing what the TV companies did where they just want to make you jealous every year. Yeah. So you're like, okay, I guess I better go spend $3,000 on a new router. Yeah, I would wait until there's the second-generation of routers when things calm down. The last thing you want is for there to be software instability in your network infrastructure. No fair. So like, unless you need for some reason, like a 2 gigabit per second Wi-Fi link.

If you live like in an apartment, which we all do. By yourself. really small, your router's old, you see one of these, like, giant, like giant gaming routers, because it's all going to be all of like the giant gaming routers, you want to spend $4 or $500 on that thing? You know, I'm not going to judge you. I've done that. Not for seven, but I've definitely done that.

But otherwise, probably, probably wait. No, the Eero Mac 7 is not $4 or $500. It's like... Oh, no, I'm thinking like the gaming. The gaming ones are also like, they usually start at $4 or $500, but then they immediately go up. A single EroMax 7 is $600, and the three-pack is $1,700. That's outrageous. Just wait.

Don't spend that much money on a row. Like, it's fast, but is it that much faster than six? Particularly because you're still going to be hampered by the fact that you have to pay your ISP, who probably is going to give you garbage internet. So unless you're just moving a lot of big files on your Plex server, you're probably fine. My local network is sick now. I'm pre-ordering a 17-9 or all right. I haven't pre-ordered any.

But it's, Wi-Fi 7 is here. It seems like it's going to be the next. Yep. Like 60E seems very transitory. I also have a 60 network and I feel very annoyed. Yeah. Whatever. Next year.

Next year. And then lastly, on the standards front, I will say the Verge team was the most irrationally excited about this. I don't know why, but Thunderbolt 5 is here. And we have a lot of pictures of USBC ports with stickers on them that indicate they support Thunderbolt 5. They're just pictures of USBC ports. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't run pictures of USBC ports here at The Verge. I am perhaps the most guilty of publishing photos of ports on our website and excitedly telling people that the future is here. I've done it a lot, but I'm just telling you it's not even a different shape of port.

Yeah. It's a USBC port with a sticker on it. They're Thunderbolt 5. Thunderbolt 5 offers 240 watt charging 120 gigabit per second data transfer and up to, it will support monitors, up to 540 Hertz, 340. refresh rates on the new version. Can you bring it 240-watt charger on a plane? That's like past FAA rules, right? No, that's the battery size.

You can't bring more than 100-watt-hour battery. Okay, so this is fine. Yeah, you can put two of those together. But you need it for some of the GPUs that you need to support 540 hertz refresh rates. This is just the next standard. There are some laptops here. Again, you can look at the photos of the ports with stickers on them on the website. But the Thunderbolt 5 is here.

and Sean talked to the person Intel responsible for Mr. Thunderbolt, who he referred to in print on our website as Mr. Thunderbolt. Wow. And I refused to learn his real name. Intel's Mr. Thunderbolt when asked if Apple would support Thunderbolt 5 simply said to Sean, will they support every other one? That's all you need to know. We also have photo of our Thunderbolt 5 cable.

It looks like a Thunderbolt cable. I'm telling you, like our whole team is so excited. Like there was like a hunt to get that first pick. of a Thunderbolt 5.4 on our website. Like two weeks ago, we made a whole Vergecast episode about how stupid USBC is. This is not stupid USBC. This is the good USBC. So like we should be excited about it.

It goes fast. I'm excited about it. It's very good. Yeah. All right. We got to take a break. That was the Standards Lightning Round here at the Vergecast episode 2, CES Day 4. Still unsponsored.

Still unsponsored. Well, no, we're here at the Kia Connected home. Yeah, that's true. Very good. We'll be back. We got another car lightning round to come. and David's rubric of things that are not screens, cars is next.

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Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. CES Vergecast 2, day four, month one hour 12 year 2024 last little lightning round of

CS coverage this show over the years has become a car show there's just cars everywhere we're literally sitting in the Kia connected home there's cars all around us every kind of car tech

that you can think of is being demoed here I saw a power steering pump on the show floor the other day the Bosch roof sure like here's a thing and it's like that's consumer technology, I suppose.

Yeah. Consumers love steering wheels. Literally every piece of the car is being recontextualized to be connected, to be smart, to be an EV. David, run us through some of the highlights here. So that thing you said is actually kind of why I think the car stuff is really interesting because it feels like we got a bunch of cars. There's like new versions of existing cars, right?

There's a lot of that at CES every year. There's a lot of that this year. This year felt unusually also like we got a bunch of things that are shaped like cars that are barely cars. Yes. And I think like the Sony Aphila, which is probably the first one we should talk about,

is to me the closest version of that thing. This is like borderline not a car. It just looks like a car. But it's like a lounge area that runs places. Theoretically. But the car part seems to be the least important and least fleshed out part of this car.

They've spent a lot of time thinking about the seats. Yeah. And that's about it. I just think that's weird. We're in this like strange time with cars where like Honda has this very cool new concept series called Honda Zero. Hyundai and Kia are doing interesting stuff

there all over the place. There's just like a Bugatti chilling on the floor for reasons that I don't totally understand. But it just feels like a lot of the cars here aren't cars. I saw a tank. My... You saw a tank? There's like a little like tiny tank over.

There's a company here called Dodge Brothers with e-bikes, but they've bought a Dodge Challenger, and everyone's like, what's this for? And they're like, we just brought it to get attention. It's like, it's very good. It's just a good car. So the way I always thought about this for years was at CS, we saw the future of the inside of cars,

and then the Detroit Auto shows in a few weeks here, and that's where we'll see the outside of cars. Oh, I like that. The thing that is, I think, not the case anymore. Because I think what is happening in a big way is the outside cars are going retro. There's cool design stuff. Like, these Honda concepts are really cool.

The inside of cars, that is what is selling the cars now. So if you just think, like, I love watching car reviews on YouTube. You watch Doug Demiro. You watch Forrest Auto reviews. Miles Summerall is on the MKBH team I saw on the other day. He makes great TikTok car reviews. Everyone's, like, flipping buttons and counting cup holders and, like, push it, right?

Like, quirks and features is the thing. Because you're inside the car. Yeah. So that whole thing has moved to the Detroit, because that's how you're going to sell cars now. Right. And is that just because, especially as things go, EV, like the experience of what it's going to be like to drive this thing just compresses to the point where like driving an EV is going to be like driving an EV is going to be like

driving an EV is going to be like. And you see all the car companies talk about mobility. Yeah. Because they're like, you're going to get the car, it's going to drive you where do I want to go. And in the meantime, you'll be awash in a sea of Sony IP. Just transacting. You'll be. Biterman just flipping across the car. And you're going to be watching our streaming service.

If you can put Bravia core in the Sony Afila, I'll buy it. 80 megamphys per second in the summer. I guarantee you that's a thing. Do you think it because I'm at CS? I've been wondering this all week. Bravia core usage has to have dropped by like 200% because I'm not at home. Who's watching Spider-Man?

Anyhow, so they feel it's really interesting because I kind of get what Sony needs from Honda. Can you make us a car? And what I've been wondering is like, what does Honda get from Sony? And the answer is a universe of screens and content. But that is, I just doesn't feel like enough to sell me a car. I mean, but also most of the car makers, most, not all, are garbage at like the software

side of things. Right, so the UCY Honda would turn to noted software experience provider, Sony. I mean, if you're garbage at it, it makes sense. Can you imagine if the, like, the interface of the Sony feel as the same menu structure is like any Sony camera? You just spend 45 minutes every time you get in your car, or even, you've been, go anywhere. Terrific image quality.

You have to format your card before you can go into drive. You brought the wrong format card. Sorry. No driving. It's actually memory sticks. We're doing weird Sony memory formats. So that's Afila, which is interesting. You look at the pictures, but it is very much, it's less about the car, more about

will you watch a bunch of Sony content on these Sony screens? And I think the answer is, well, I have a phone. So no. And it will just, it's not, it's the most vaporware of the vaporware of a car. Like this year, instead of a picture of it, you can like look at one. Yeah, you can sit in the passenger seat. Yeah. But it's not anywhere close.

I guess that's part of what is like leaving me cold with a lot of stuff is it doesn't really feel like any of this is getting more real year after year. Like I think we're in a phase with car design that I think is not going to last forever, where everybody is just designing cars that are like the capital F future. You know what I mean? Like everything looks like a Blade Runner prop now. and that's fun, but eventually we'll start making EVs that look like cars again. Like that will happen.

We'll come back to it. You don't think so? Do you think we're just going to stay in this like the air 3,000 phase? It all depends on autonomy. I think right now we're on the cusp of what feels like a really fun design Renaissance in cars. Cars are real ugly for a long time. Oh, yeah. Like the angry robot car was just everywhere for a minute.

Yeah. And now there's like some very cool, like smoothed out retro designs are all over the place. The Honda ones you're talking about. Hyundai and Kia, there's that Hyundai N concept that kind of looks like the D'Laurate. Like that stuff is really cool. You know, that we're sitting above an EV-9. People keep coming and looking at the EV-9. You can just see, like, car companies are getting the new Prius.

Yeah. It's like a surprisingly cool-looking car. Yeah. Finally. Dog slow and surprisingly cool-looking car. We're just on a cusp of what I think is a good moment for car design. And it's because you can read, the EV stuff lets you repackage. cars and think about them in different way. And they want them to look different from what came

before because they want to signal consumers. Like, these aren't just cars. And then on top of that, you might get to autonomy, which is a real coin flip and one that will happen. And then you get to really repackage the car into the thing that looks nothing like a car. So I totally agree with that. But like this Honda concept is just the Batmobile. Like they just made the Batmobile. Yeah, there's a lot of that going on. I think we might have swung the pendulum a little far. Yeah. I mean, it's a concept. But now I'm looking at the picture of this and this thing is hot. It's hot. Maybe I'm wrong.

I was like, I would have had that on my wall when I was like eight. Right. But those are, these are all concepts. They're all like out in the world. And you look at what's actually being announced. Yes. It's like BMW put an LLM in the voice assistant.

Okay. There's a bunch of AR features in the new BMWs. It's like, why? Yeah. Right. Volkswagen is letting you talk to chat, GPT, inside the car. Which I am told people have just been doing anyway on like the streets of San

Francisco. I'm going to try it on my road trip. Like someone told me yesterday, like more people, more tech people in San Francisco are driving around just chatting to chat GPT instead of listening to podcasts than you think. Don't they have like siblings, parents, loved ones? This makes me think of like every once in a while there's like an app that comes out that's like, turn all of your emails into a daily podcast. And I'm like, who wants that? And then it's these people, it turns out. Yeah.

This is where we are. I just thought the idea that people are getting out of the car is just woefully misinformed. Yeah. just utterly be like, I know a lot of facts. This is right. A whole list of books that don't exist that they're going to read. Exactly. They're like ready to read books that have never been written.

On the flip side of that, there is a lot of just infrastructure here at CS. Intel, I think this can only be read as a threat. Intel had a whole keynote where they announced a bunch of AI stuff. And then the quote is, we are bringing the AIPC to the car. All right. You like it or not. Uh, Intel wants this to be a big market for them. You can see that they would like to bring them car makers to use their chips.

They're very late, Nvidia is very dominant and all over the cars. But there's notion that the car should be one sort of unified computer from the body control module, all the infotainment stack. I think Intel sees as an opportunity. Uh, and then let's just end here. We should just talk about where I am in Mercedes. Do we have to? So I was sent a video by a good friend of the Mercedes event, which I've told was very expensive to produce.

And Will I.M. comes out, and he wrapped a song about cars. He just did it. Yeah, I love this for him. And the feature they announced is that this is actually cool. I don't know if you've seen this video or any demos of it. It's an interactive musical experience in the car. So it's like playing a track. And Will I.M.

obviously chosen all the samples. and if you speed up, the track gets more exciting. Oh, I don't want that. And it feels like it's just going to make you drive really fast. I was like, my car just screaming at me as I drive down the road. Have you ever seen the movie Baby Driver? Yeah. Like the thing in that movie that's so cool is the music is matched up to what's going on.

So like he's steering on beat and drifting on beat. And it just, it rips, dude. It's so fun the whole time. Can you imagine? You watch that, you watch Fast and Furious. You get in this car immediately. accident. Like, you're going 100 miles per hour, straight out.

You're like, I can drift around this corner in my neighborhood. And it's just, Will I am yelling at you the whole way home. So it's the MBUX sound drive or Mbux sound drive. It links the music that you're listening to is driving. So it's a bunch of tracks, a bunch of samples. And things like energy recuperation, acceleration, steering, braking, and turning all linked to what is being played. And Will I am refers to this as the audio.

automotive orchestra. Cool. I love it. There was a thing a bunch of years ago, and it's possible I'm going to get all of the details of this wrong, where I think it was Spotify, did a thing with Tiesto that had basically like adaptive Tiesto songs to your workout. So that like the faster you were moving, the faster Tiesto would go. Yeah.

And I tried it out. And it was like, it was pretty cool because it like keeps up with the beat as you're running and you like, you kind of, you fall into the right pace. A hundred percent everyone is going to crash their car. as soon as they start you. Well, there's other things that happen to. For example, if it's raining and you turn on your windshield wipers, it'll play lo-fi beats at you.

So you can drive home sadly in the rain. So you drive slow. I was in love once. My Mercedes-Benz. If you get in the car and you, like, roll into the McDonald's drive-thru, like, what does it start playing? Mercedes wants sound drive to be an open music platform

so that any musician create their own auditory soundscape for driving using the M-Bucks operating system. This is like why I'm at CES. Yes, I want to be very clear this specific nonsensical idea with Will I. I am just mash it all. I'm surprised they haven't put the words AI in this in any way, shape, or form. I'm just imagining being a kid in this car. You know when you'd sit in the back and you'd like, when it's raining on your car,

you're just thinking really heavy thoughts in the back of the car as a little kid, but now you'll have this soundtrack going with it, like the lo-fi soundtrack. I just wanted to like play me depressing music while I like shove Taco Bell in my face on a long run. road trip. Like, what's the vibe there? One hand on the wheel. Yeah. Exactly.

Like, yeah, the one where Will I am is like, you got broken up with. You can, you can buy a taco and a burrito. You know what I'm saying? Like that crunch wrap alone and going to take this home. We've all been there. All right. That's the Verchast day two, episode two, day four at CES 2024. Right?

Yeah. Seems good. It was a good CES. Yeah. Yeah. I will say it was good, and I got to go sit in this fear, an almost religious experience capped off by an almost religious movie. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you to Kia for letting us use our space to do shows. Thank you. The whole VERS team has just been killing it this week. Please read the site. Check out our best of CES stuff. The best is up as you're hearing that. It's coming right now. It's going up.

TikTok channel is full of really fun videos. CS is really fun every year. It's like a great way to start the earth. There's just a bunch of tech. So it's been really fun. Thanks for listening. for watching see you next week back home and that's a wrap for verge cast this week hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866 verge 1-1 the verge cast is a production of the verge and box

media podcast network the show is produced by andrew merino and leiam james this episode was mixed and edited by zander adams and that's it we'll see you next week