The Vergecast - Sonos' headphones are extremely Sonos

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of audio over Wi-Fi:  03:02 - The Verge’s Chris Welch shares his review of Sonos's Ace headphones. Sonos Ace review: was it worth it? Sonos CEO Patrick Spence addresses the company’s divisive app redesign 28:58 - MoviePass, MovieCrash director Muta’Ali and MoviePass CEO Stacy Spikes discuss what went wrong with the MoviePass subscription service and how that story was documented in the film. MoviePass, MovieCrash review: a damning account of corporate greed MoviePass is using you to ruin the movies  56:47 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy answers a question from The Vergecast Hotline about smart home gadgets for renters.  Home Assistant: Setting up the Aqara FP2 Presence Sensor - Derek Seaman's Tech Blog  Yale launches its first retrofit smart lock — the Yale Approach with Wi-Fi  The new Yale Keypad Touch brings fingerprint unlocking to August smart locks Aqara kick-starts its first Matter-over-Thread smart lock with a promise of Home Key support  The new Yale Keypad Touch brings fingerprint unlocking to August smart locks 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

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of audio over Wi-Fi. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently waiting on my breakfast order. That doesn't sound like big news, but as I've mentioned on the show before, whenever I get to a new city, I immediately go looking for like a handful of staples. Really great cup of coffee, really great donut, really great pizza is, I think one I forgot to mention the last time, and a really great bacon, egg, and cheese. I haven't really found one in this neighborhood, but there's this place that I'm at right now. now that is on the way to daycare for me, which means I walk by it like 40,000 times a week.

And they just got a new name, a new owner, a new chef, and a new menu, including a breakfast sandwich. I keep hearing good things. This would be huge for me. This is where I'm at in life as a breakfast sandwich would change things for me. So I ordered it. It was $8, which is a little high, but manageable. And we're going to see how we do.

Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We're going to do two things. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to talk about Sonos. There's a bunch of new Sonos gear. Chris Welch reviewed it all. I have been wondering about the Sonos Ace headphones forever. And Chris has them. He's used them.

He's tested them. He's reviewed them. We're going to talk to him about it. And maybe, if we're lucky, hear how it went. We're also going to talk about the new documentary about movie pass. It's called Movie Pass, Movie Crash. And it tells the story of one of the fastest growing tech companies of all time and also one of the fastest dying tech companies of all time.

It's a really interesting story because it is kind of every tech story, all role. into one bundle of total chaos. We're going to talk to the director and the CEO, get the whole story. Super fun episode. We're also going to do a hotline question, lots to do. All that is coming up in just a sec. But first, I hear my sandwich coming. I can smell my sandwich coming.

I'm very excited. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. 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. Proms 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 Verchcast. 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. Welcome back. All right. Small bacon, egg and cheese update. It was good, and it was on a biscuit, which I liked very much.

But this still isn't the one. To be clear, it is, again, on my route to daycare, so I will be going there between, you know, six and 15 times a week. But I don't feel like I've solved this problem yet. So the hunt continues. And to everyone who absolutely does not care about my quests for the perfect bacon egg and cheese, I'm very sorry. Anyway, let's get to the show. So Sonos has been rumored to be making headphones for years. And I think for obvious reasons, this seemed like an exciting idea, right?

Sonos is one of the companies that cares the most about audio. And you kind of figure that if any company was going to figure out how to do really good design, really high quality audio, really usable product, though that's kind of iffy for app-based reasons we've talked about on the show. But it feels like Sonos should be able to do a good job at this. Well, now we get to find out. So the new Sonos Ace headphones are out there, $450. Chris Welch has been using them.

There's also the Rome Bluetooth speaker, which I want to talk about. but I'm particularly curious about the ace because there's just something really hard about doing a pair of headphones like this correctly. You look at something like the AirPods Max or the Bose quiet comfort headphones. And what you see over and over is that the combination of weight, battery life, overall comfort, sound quality, noise cancellation, easy connectivity. It's really hard to do all of those things simultaneously correctly at any price. $450 is a lot to spend on a pair of headpoles. But a really great pair of headphones that does all of those things well is like the white whale. And a lot of companies are getting closer and closer.

This space is really exciting, actually, but we haven't quite gotten there. So I've been fascinated to know, are the Sonos A's the ones? Did they get there? Are they Sonosi? And are they just an awesome pair of headphones? Chris Welch has reviewed them. He knows this stuff better than anybody else I know. Time to talk about it.

Chris Welch, welcome back. Hello, hello. Sonos just continues to. take up your whole life and existence. Yes. How you feeling? Good. We just got the review up of the new ACE, as did many other publications, and it seems like

it's a fairly positive vibe so far. Yeah, people seem to like the thing. Yeah. I'm very curious how you review a pair of headphones. I want to get into the ACE in particular, but like, walk me through a day in the life of a Chris Welch headphone review. I mean, I've got my playlist of songs that I know so, so well. And then I just, you know, write the subway, walk around New York, see how.

how hot they get, yada, yada. It's like very warm in New York City right now. So that's been fun. But, you know, comfort. I try and wear them all day here at the office once or twice just to see how they wear over time. You know, like I've got classes. So I want to see how those do as far as like comfort goes. But yeah, nothing too crazy. What are your favorite test songs? Like what's, what's at the top of that test record? I mean, I'm like a big Dave Matthews band guy. So nice. Got to go back to those albums. Which of the many jammy guitar parts can I hear most clearly here? Yeah, I love it. Exactly. So that's on there. But, you know, there's Beatles. There's all sorts of stuff that I kind of just go through and cycle between. But yeah, these sound quite nice. I think they're kind of like in between the Sony's and the AirPods Max. There is some base to them. But yeah, they sound nice and warm and detailed. And I don't really have any complaints on that front. Is there, I'm realizing I've never really known the answer to this question. Is there like a Sono sound in the way that I feel like there is sort of a beats sound? And to some extent, there's kind of a Bose sound. Is there a Sonos sound? Is there a Sonos sound? Is there a Sonos sound?

sound with the ace or with just Sona stuff in general? I don't know. You know, they always talk about how they have this like board of like sound experts who they like go to for every speaker and product that like gives them a device on how it should sound and the aada yada. So these are pretty clean, crisp. They're not like super base forward.

Yeah, they're fairly balanced. Like there's no like profile that I can really like tell. So it's just, yeah, they're a good sounding pair of headphones. Okay. But they're comfortable as hell. That's like the main thing about these. So the weight is like in between the AirPods Max and the Sony's. But yeah, they just wear so much lighter than the AirPods Max.

You know, there's more plastic, which is fine for headphones, I think. You know, you certainly can't overdo it when it comes to metal. And I think that's what we had for the AirPods Max. But, yeah, they feel great on your head over long time frames. Yeah, I think the AirPods Max, one thing I like about those better is the fabric ear cushions. These were a bit hotter because they're like pleather. So in the summer and the spring, you know, you start to sweat and that makes a difference. But on the whole, they are just way, way more comfortable.

Yeah, I was surprised, actually, by how comfortable you found them, given that they are not, like wildly heavier than say the Bose quiet comforts, but meaningfully heavier. And I think the AirPods Max, for me in particular, feel heavy on my head in a way that like the Bose ones. You never don't know you're wearing headphones, but I don't sort of feel them like the gravity of them pulling down on my head. With the AirPods Max, I very much do.

And I was worried this was going to skew closer to that. But it sounds like at least in the way that they wear, they don't feel like that at all. Yeah, not at all. Super comfortable. The battery life is like 30 hours. So they last a lot. long, long, long time. So, like, on the hardware front, they got it all right, honestly. So for a

first time out, it's pretty impressive. And the software features, you know, half of them work, which is why I gave them a seven. I think some other publications were a bit kinder. While we're on the hardware, I want to talk about just the controls for a second, in part because from the way you describe it, it sounds like Sonos got the how you use these headphones while they're on your head thing, almost exactly right. Like this idea of there being one button that does everything, and then I think you slide the button to change the volume. I love that. That seems fantastic. Like, is that as good as it seems to be in terms of actually, like, putting your hands up and using the thing? Because for me, it's like, I have the bows, and it's just a bunch of sort of

same-y-feeling buttons. And I've gotten pretty good at knowing which one is which, but I'm still, every time I put my hand up, I kind of, like, slide it down the cup to find the right hit. And it seems like Sonos just, like, figured it out from the job. Yeah, no, it's very good. The content key, it's called. I'm not sure about the name. Yeah, it's bad name. But it's great. So it takes some time to get used to just like finding it and like sliding it and like that difference. You don't want to press when you slide. That takes like one day to get used to. But on the whole, yeah, it's very good. Like compared to swipes on all these like Sony headphones and stuff and like the tab gestures, once you have gloves on, forget about it. So this kind of stuff works a lot better in my

experience. So there's that button. There's a button for the noise cancellation mode and a power button. And that's pretty much it. That feels right. I will say I am just adamantly against touch pads on headphones. I just don't think they were. I just, it's just a bad user experience. I'm not, I'm out on it everywhere it exists. So I'm very glad Sonos didn't do that. I'm with you. Yeah. Okay, so let's let's talk about the TV audio swap thing because there are a bunch of other interesting features that sort of are and are not here, but TV audio swap was the thing, right? Like if Sonos is going to convince you to buy these headphones, one is, it's a Sonos product. Sonos tends to make very good sounding products, but the TV audio swap is the thing. Tell me about your

experience with this. It's been mostly good. I had a few hiccups where it just like didn't work. And Sonos tells me it's a bug, of course, that'll be fixed soon. Like so many other things that are coming soon. But on the whole, yeah, like, so you have an arc, you just go home, you come home, you turn on your TV, start watching something. And you hold down the content key for like two seconds, and then it just beams it right over to your headphones. And there's head tracking if you want that. So you can like, you know, move around and feel more immersed in your content. So it works for like anything plugged into your TV, be like a gaming console, which works super well, surprisingly so.

And it's just a nice little private way of watching TV and whatever else you want. Sonos seems to have this idea that it's for more than just watching something quietly while someone else doesn't want to watch it. Like, for me, I used private listening on Roku for months after I had a kid because, you know, I have a kid in my arm and I'm wearing headphones, and that is a way to listen to things quietly. But I get the sense Sonos thinks of this as like a,

a lifestyle feature or is like an audio feature more than just you can hear the audio but others can't like what what is the big sort of galaxy brain case for audio swap and why you would wear headphones to watch TV I think it can be more immersive like there's spatial audio surround sound like they up convert stereo if you want that as well so it does sound really good I guess that's true it's like a 5.1 system on your head yeah that's fair that's something and so there's that and then this fall there's a new feature called true cinema that's going to like map your room using both the soundbar and the headphones. So it sounds like more real this round sound effect.

It'll trick your brain into like actually thinking there are actually speakers around you. Right now it's not quite that level. But they say sometimes this year that'll be there. And Bose is also working on like similar ideas to like pair sound bars and headphones and earbuds together for like super immersion. So once that rolls out if it, you know, that works as advertised, that'll be interesting. But yeah, it's like very immersive. It sounds very nice. You don't have to like sacrifice audio quality just to,

not have your soundbar blurring away at night, which is nice. And you can game on it, like I said. That's what I've done a ton, and that's great. What's been your experience so far in terms of actually sitting down and doing it? Like, obviously, when you're reviewing the product, you're going to go through the work to sit down on the couch, grab the remote, grab your headphones, do the whole thing? Do you think as just a normal person in normal life,

you're going to add headphones to the flop down on the couch mix? I think so. I've got roommates, so that's the main thing. That's really late at night. I'm not going to, like, have my arc. going full blast watching you know Top Gun Maverick

and it's not super considerate so that's there that's a use case you know late night gaming yada yada past a certain point of night it's like a super handy thing to have and it sounds for sure

so is it worth the cost of the headphones and an arc you know that's a pricey thing I think in that case the key is to try and convince everyone in the house to split it and it's like listen this is not for me this is for all of us

it will be mine and I will own it and you can't use it but it is for all of us. And so this like, what, $1,100 purchase, we're just going to split it together. It's going to be no problem. Yeah, but it should be coming to the ray and the beam pretty soon. And it's cool for the ray because the ray is just like a basic, like, stereo sound bar,

but now you're going to get like dull the at most like upresed surround sound through your headphones, which is nice to see. But yeah, like, once they roll out that support, once TV audio swap works on Android at all, that'll be a nice thing. So I think I am going to like go back and like readdress the score once some of these software updates go out for more people. Yeah, so it's the once it works thing that is killing me here, right? Because this is, this is the story of Sonos these last few weeks is it rolled out this half finished app, supposedly in order to support these headphones, which themselves don't feel finished from a software perspective. And on the one hand, if you want to pick a weakness of Sonos, it has always been its software. So I guess I shouldn't be totally shocked that it seems like it nailed the hardware and didn't finish the software. Like that is kind of a Sonos story. But on the other hand, I just, I just. I just. I can't stop thinking like why why ship any of this a now and B in this order when it doesn't seem like there was any real like rhyme or reason and none of it's done i don't understand the whole june time frame

thing i think maybe like they're like thinking like i was going to have new air pods in the fall that would just drown out this if they waited until you know september but even like waiting until august would have given them like precious weeks to just polish everything a little bit more and get it out the door as a fuller thing yeah it's just a big rush and it's not you're not clear why. I mean, people aren't like buying speakers and soundbars like they were during the pandemic. So that's the main like impetus for these coming out in the first place. Is Sonos a little pelotony in that way? Do you think that like it's a great product that is always going to be kind of a niche thing just by virtue of A, what it is and B, what it costs.

And everybody who was going to get one got one, which is great, but now puts you in a position of like there, there probably aren't many people out there right now shopping for Sonos upgrades because everybody upgraded in 2020 and 2021. So now if I'm Sonos, like, is the whole headphones push just we need a whole new thing to give people so that they're not upgrading? They're actually buying like a net new object. Yeah, for sure. Okay.

That's the main reason behind this. They've also got services, you know, they've got Sonos Radio HD. They're Sonos Pro for businesses where they like manage all your speakers. So they're all trying to branch out and find like new ways of more income. But yeah, like you said, like, you know, I've had an arc. it would take a lot for me to upgrade a soundbar. Like, there's not much this thing doesn't do that I would need from some new version. You know, same goes for the Play 5, which has been around forever.

So these are first. And you can see like a world where they do, you know, like not just headphones, but also earbuds and kind of like, you know, do the full thing. This is a good start. There are 450 bucks, which is, that's a lot of money. But people spend a lot on this stuff. So Sony and Bose and everybody else, you know, they're all in the same territory. But yeah, for a first time out, you know, super impressive. I think they've got a lot of bugs to work out.

The app is still a causing. chaos. I mean, the Sonos subreddit is just, I've never seen anything like it, just every day, still people venting, which I understand. You know, people lose features I'd be upset to. Like, I'm with Neil I and you, and I don't really use my sona system that way, or I've noticed much different. But yeah, they should have just waited one or two more months, put all the stuff out in the fall and had a way smoother experience that, like, didn't cause this huge outcry. Yeah, I think to some extent Sonos is lucky it got the hardware as right as it did because it'll buy it a chance to do. that? Like, I think if there had been even one kind of big flaw in the hardware on top of all the stuff with the app, this would feel almost dead on arrival. Whereas now it's like, okay, I think there's a reasonable chance that come this fall or like this holiday when a lot of people are Christmas shopping, this is going to be a damn good pair of headphones. Yeah, that's actually going to make a lot of sense for a lot of people. I will say the thing

about it that kills me, the sort of dream that I think a lot of people have had for a Sonos pair of headphones. And what I'm seeing a lot of in, our comments too on your review is this idea that it should fit perfectly into my whole Sonos ecosystem, right? That I should, I want to listen to music on the speaker in my kitchen while I make dinner and then pop on headphones and just boom, the music switches, everything works great. And then I can play from, you know, my record player and the TV in my living room and the TV upstairs. And everything that is in the Sonos ecosystem just sort of beautifully flows around. And this has been the promise of Sonos for forever. And the Ace just doesn't feel like it comes anywhere close to that.

Like the content key thing you're describing where it sits down and it works with the ace, I am confident that will eventually work very well. I could be wrong about that, but it seems like that is the sort of thing Sonos will eventually get right because it usually eventually gets that kind of stuff right. But it doesn't seem like there's any indication that this is going to be the like magical addition to my whole Sonos system that I wanted it to be. So funny, you should say that last week they had like a Reddit Ask Me Anything, where people have asked about this a ton. So they kind of said like we're just not there yet as far as the tech goes. So in terms of like CPU power, these have a fraction of even like the Sonos room.

Like it's a small processor in there. Then there's Wi-Fi to worry about battery worries. And so they're like, we tried it. Like we prototyped those Wi-Fi headphones that everybody wants and they sucked. So like we're just not there yet as far as like being able to do that and like have it be viable. They were like, we tried it, and it's just not the right time right now. So this is like a first step, I think. And it makes sense as like a halfway point between full-on, like, Sonos integration and what we have now with the TV audio swap.

So it's a good starting point. But I can see the point of like, you know, do you really want like a short battery life just for Wi-Fi audio? I mean, I would sometimes. But, you know, give it like two or three, four years. Maybe we'll see that kind of product eventually. That's fair. And I will say to Sonos's credit, making a thing that is fundamentally just a very good pair of blue tooth headphones is the right thing and not something Sonos historically always does.

So like making a thing that actually easily works with all of your non-Sono stuff is a victory. So I think if you if you're forcing me to choose, I will take what they did. But it does, it just feels like there's that little piece of sort of Sonos magic that nothing else can get to that it didn't quite hit. And that bummed me out. Yeah. From an audio perspective, does the Wi-Fi thing matter? I just like sincerely don't know how much I should care that I can't.

do Wi-Fi audio versus just having the Bluetooth codec support from my phone. There are always going to be people who like swear they can tell the difference between lossless audio and, you know, like all these codecs. I can tell maybe sometimes. It's just one of those things people just like want to have because they're spending all that money, I think. They just want the best thing. And so it makes sense to want that. Does it really matter? It's going to really come down to like each person individual. I can see like why you would want it as far as like a turntable in your system and like an amp and like having like play that through your headphones. That'd be awesome. But unfortunately we're not there quite

yet. But like, yeah, these sound very good. They're good headphones. So they've got several features that like all these high-end headphones usually do. There's like on-head detection. So you can take them off. It'll pause. All those like, you know, like the small quality of life things. There's multi-points. You can pair them with two devices at once. And so they've covered a lot of ground. There's like wired USBC listening. So if you want lossless audio, there's your answer. So yeah, they've covered a lot of ground. But now we're in this like weird game of wait and C for like the Android support and the beam and the ray. But that stuff should shake out. Like Sonas promises software fixes and they usually do make good on actually,

you know, putting them out. So yeah, we'll see how long it takes, hopefully this month for some of this stuff. But there's no firm timetable just yet. So yeah, it does seem like audio quality-wise. I feel like the gold standard is like whatever new Sony hexadecimal thing, I can't remember the name of thing, the new Bose Quiet Comforts and the AirPods Max. I feel like that's kind of like the trio everybody thinks of. There's some others. And there, you know, there's the Sennheiser Momentum Fours, those. sound great. Those are probably my favorite sound quality headphones besides these at the moment. There's that. And I call these brands like Bowers and Wilkins for like that true like

audio file segment. But like by and large, like you said, like for most consumers, it's Sony, it's Bose, it's Apple. And now hopefully Sonos is what they want to happen. Well, and it seems like from a sort of what it's like to wear and use and listen to them, Sonos belongs there. But I feel like the one other piece of that we haven't talked about is the noise cancellation, which to me, I think is like maybe the most important feature for me. Like this is where I out myself as somebody who is like by no means an audio quality expert, but somebody who is constantly on planes. The ANC really matters to me,

which is why I've been a real like Bose loyalist over the years because Bose is just better at this than everybody else. How do the ace shape up there? Boz is still better than everybody else. But these are good. You know, they're not like top tier level, but they're good enough for a plane ride or the train. You know, I've had them on the past two weeks and they're good for the subway. My coffee shop, I can still hear like a little bit of racket when I work from the coffee shop of my block. So they're not like Bose level of like a total cocoon of silence.

But for most like everyday situations where you just want to like have some peace and quiet, it'll do the job just fine. What about the flip side? What is it called the like audio pass-through thing where it tries to pump in the outside noise? How is that? That sounds actually very, very good. That's like the AirPods Macs have the best pass-through mode of all. And these are like not too far behind that, honestly. Oh, wow.

Okay. It's like that's where Sonos really came through. kind of surprised me. Because the AirPods Macs are drastically better than the Bose. Yeah, those are great. These are, you know, like a stones throwaway, pretty close. And then Bose and Sony are not so hot when it comes to the pass-through mode. But, yeah, so it's not world-class ANC, but it's close on the transparency mode front.

So pretty good, all in all. So it seems like even if you're not a Sonos person and you're just wanting to buy a really good pair of headphones to pair with your computer and phone and whatever, if you don't have any other Sonos gear, this is probably like a. $100 more than you want to spend on this pair of headphones, but it absolutely belongs on the poke around the Amazon listing set. Is that a fair characterization? Yeah, but surely, I don't know who's going to start their Sonos journey with headphones that cost this much, but I'm sure some people will, you know, there'll be a person who just buys these and then thinks these are great and buys, you know, the whole, the arc, obviously, you would get first if you want to actually use the core feature. But yeah, I mean, they're great. Like, they belong in the same conversation as everybody else as far as like sound quality, fit and finish and comfort. Like I said, the comfort is really, you know, go to your local best buy and try these and you're going to be pretty surprised by how good they feel, I think. It's a big win for Sonos, honestly. Especially if you go back to that, like, Sonos has to find a thing to sell people who don't want Sonos gear. Right.

That's a big win. And I would bet, I could be totally wrong, but I would bet that we're going to get to like Black Friday and this thing is going to be $349. That'd be nice. That would help for sure. But even now, they're great. I think the white one are my favorite compared to the black. I know the black is fine.

The white ones are really nice looking. Yeah. They're really nice looking. So that's the way I would go if someone wants advice. Which ones have you been testing the most? The white ones, I worry, would get sort of a gross patina on them after wearing them for a while. So far, they still look good. The case is getting pretty dirty, the white case, but it's got a nice green interior.

So, you know, the black ones get all smudgy. They've got like an anti-fingreprint coating on them to help with that a little bit, but they still pick up smuders and stuff like all black plastic gadgets tend to do. But personal preference, as always. Yeah, I will say for all of the kind of missing Sonos-y stuff, I'm very impressed that Sonos did as well as it did here. Just to make this good a pair of headphones, just absent all the other stuff, just this good a pair of headphones on its first try out of the gate,

gives me great hope for what Sonos might be able to do here. Pretty good. I think Patrick Spence's job is safe for now after, just kidding. I mean, give me a couple app updates until I feel very confident about that, but I like the thought so far. I also forgot one other ACE question that I forgot to ask. We're going to come on and we're going to do a full fancy headfirst. phone mic test at some point because that's a thing we need to do the people love when we put

horrible sounding audio on the verge cast and we haven't done it in a while chris we're going to have to do it but give me the give me the quick feeling of how the microphone is on the ace pretty good pretty good if you go to the review there's an embed of me testing them that i put out today we've got the son oh sings here in new york trying to give you a sense of how they sound how clear they are and whether They're suitable for phone calls on the go. So let me know what you think. They're clear. I'm not wanting to like really take calls outside.

I just don't enjoy it for myself or the other person on the line. So I try to avoid it. But sometimes, you know, you're at the coffee shop on a Zoom call and these seem like they'll work just fine. They do a decent job of like canceling out background noise and all that. And you come through clearly. So I'm not sure what else you would really ask for or beyond that. So before I let you go, you also have the new Rome, the new bluesie speaker. You haven't published your review.

That's coming later this week. give me a preview how you feel so far? They added a button. That's really what it comes down to. Yes. So the first Jerome had a combined power and Bluetooth pairing button, and you had to set it up at home first before you could use it as a portable speaker, which never made any sense.

So they fixed that. You can use it out of the box now. Whoopty-do. But yeah, there's a new button. It sounds the exact same. So if you've heard it before, you've heard this one, battery life is the same. Some people haven't had the best time with the Rome over time. I guess the battery ages not so well.

So someone has told me that they've done. Some work there to make it last longer. But yeah, it's the same speaker as before, same price. Just a new button. It comes in colors. It's small. It's a good bathroom speaker. That's how I use mine for the shower.

But yeah, it's not my top tier favorite sound most gadget. Fair. But I mean, buttons are good. We hear on the Vergecast, we believe in buttons. You know this. So I will take it. Love buttons, yes. All right.

Well, it's very upsetting that I want to buy one of these now, and I will not forgive you for that. I also want to buy an ace now. I, like, don't have a sound bar. and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, $1,200 is a perfectly rational amount of money to spend upgrading my TV audio today. Like, what could possibly go wrong? There's the arc and there's an arc two coming and even like a higher end sounder they're working on. I don't tell me this. So much down the pipeline.

This is not helpful. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to be right back to talk about movie pass. Chris, thank you as always. My pleasure. Thanks, y'all. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder

used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot-com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages,

or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today

at framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer pro annual plan. That's Framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast.

But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic, can be getting lost in the shuffle. Grammally gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging.

No matter what kind of, of writing you're doing, Grammarly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Gramerly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com.

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 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 LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. In the top drawer of my desk here, I have this pile of cards. Does everybody

have a pile of cards somewhere? I sort of assume everybody has a pile of of cards somewhere. Mine is just a bunch of random junk, mostly. It's gift cards with like 19 cents still on them, a bunch of expired credit cards that I don't know what to do with. This one, I think, is a Chick-fil-A rewards card that somehow I have. I don't know. And in that pile the other day, I found this red master card that says movie pass in big letters up in the top left corner. It ends in 7099, just in case you're curious. I got this card. I think in 2017, maybe 2018. It apparently expires January of 2025,

but I'm confident that I'm never going to get to use it again. In fact, I've never used it once. I never even managed to get this card activated because by the time I signed up for MoviePass, the company was such a mess that it never even responded to my customer service emails. I looked back through and all I have is a bunch of one-sided requests being like, hi, I would just like to use the card that I'm paying you for, please.

nothing. If you were online in the summer of 2017, you probably remember movie pass. There's a decent chance you were a user of movie pass that you got a card and then went and saw a million movies all at once. It was an all-you-can-watch movie theater subscription, 10 bucks a month to see up to one movie a day. That was it. Those were all the rules, at least for a while. It was a great product for anyone who likes watching movies, and it was a truly horrific business. It took less than two years for the company to burn through two. $250 million and shut down the product entirely, which is honestly in a certain way kind of impressive.

Anyway, there's a new documentary out now on Max called MoviePass Movie Crash, and it tells the story of MoviePass. It was the greatest thing ever. Movie Pass. Movie Pass. The popular movie ticket app. Movie Pass. We remember them.

Whatever happened to those guys. It's a story about wild corporate greed, about a lot of bad. decisions. And I think at its core, it's about how two black founders found themselves ousted from their own company and really their own story by a couple of fast talking, wheeling, and dealing white dudes. I was like, we need to pump the brakes a little bit. I just thought that it would be better if he wasn't a part of the team. It's like the heart of movie pass. The deeper you got in, the more you realize. All of this was part of a bigger story. The doc is fascinating.

I really recommend everyone watch it, whether or not you still have your red movie pass card lying around. A couple of days after I watched The Doc, I got on a call with two people to talk about it. Stacey Spikes, co-founder and CEO of Movie Pass. My name is Muta Ali, and I'm a film director. I should point out, by the way, that Muta Ali is the director of this film also,

just in case that wasn't clear. This is sort of a spoiler, I guess, but the bones of the early movie pass story is this. Stacey and his co-founder, Hamei Watt, started Movie Pass in 2011. And it's more expensive than it turned out to be. It's doing okay. They have about 20,000 subscribers, not taking over the world, but coming along. They hired this guy, Mitch Lowe, who says he was a co-founder of Netflix, but that turns out

to not really be the case for interesting reasons, who then links movie pass up with a company called Helios and Matheson and its CEO Ted Farnsworth, who injects a bunch of marketing money into Movie Pass in order to help it grow. And along the way, Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth start testing ideas to see how they might help the thing grow into the stratosphere. We had grown to 20,000 subs. And if you go and you look at the Netflix growth curve, it has this long, slow arc, and then there's this hockey puck. It just starts to take off. And we had a very similar trajectory in that we were a multimillion dollar revenue company.

We weren't that far from profitability. We were at a $30 price point. We knew we were in the ballpark, but we got there with no advertising, was only word of mouth. And so we had never had an ad budget. And so really it was we had figured out what our customer acquisition cost was.

We wanted to do the deal just to get ad budget, but still grow with the right per month subscription price. And so that's what you wanted to do. You needed to leave the garage and you had a really hardcore fan base that people that just loved the service and it was break even. And so now, great, add that. Well, it broke apart when HMMI, they were coming in and they secretly ran a test. And Mitch had given them access to our login page. And they went online and they put the new price point up.

and tested it. We thought our site had been hacked. And we were like, hey, our site's been hacked. Somebody just put up a landing page for $10. And they were like, no, no, no. Mitch gave Ted and his team access to the website landing page. And no one ever told us of the engineering team. And so when you clicked on the button, it didn't let you sign up. They were just using it to gauge interest. And they were like, we've got a hit. And I said, well, if you want to make it even bigger, make it five bucks a month. If you want to make it bigger than that, make it $1 a month. I said, make it 99 cents. Yeah, giving money away is pretty easy. I kept thinking that watching this, that like, if you just give people money, they'll take it. And you'll be very successful at giving people

money. And it's a race to the bottom when you have no competitors. Like, well, but why? Why don't you walk your way down in price? Ten bucks a month for all the movies you can watch was just never going to work. To be clear, it was awesome for moviegoers. and one of my favorite things about the doc is all the folks in it who saw hundreds of movies for a fraction of the price. I love that for moviegoers, but it was never sustainable. Lowe and Farnsworth had this big idea about collecting data about those moviegoers and then selling it back to theater chains.

And eventually they seemed to think movie pass would get so big and so powerful that they'd be able to negotiate a piece of ticket sales and even concessions from those theater chains. That didn't happen. Even at the time we all kind of knew it wasn't going to happen. And just in case you think that's 2020 hindsight, here is a clip from a Verge video in July of 2018. I mean, look, the whole thing really is a mess, and it comes down to the fact that VuePass doesn't make money.

The company hopes that when it hits a certain subscriber-based size, all the math will magically work out. But in the meantime, it's burning through cash, causing the stock price of its parent company to plummet. The fix apparently seems to be to get its customers to just stop going to movies, or if they do, to pay up. That last point is a good one, by the way. At one point, to stop the money bleeding,

MoviePass started to create weird new rules for what you can see and when. And its executives are actually under investigation for even doing worse things, like allegedly breaking the product on purpose so that people would stop using it at big movies. The whole thing was just a mess. And a big part of the Movie Pass movie crash story is Stacey saying that aloud internally and getting pushed out of the door for it. You had the founder who built the plane saying, it can't handle these G-forces.

There's no way the math is going to work. What made it worse to me is you had customers saying, I am willing to pay more to help you be solvent. Like when your customer base is saying that, that's crazy, right? If people are like, this is so awesome. I went to 400 movies last year. Please charge me more because I know I'm saving a lot of money. I'm still, I've got so much upside.

I'll pay you $100 a month, and I'm still saving money. And when your customer base is saying that and your founder is saying that, then the writing's on the wall. And that's part of the plan. You figure it out. You experiment and you find the right place. Great. You found an entry point that consumers love it, now find a profitable place to be at.

And if that's $30 a month, yeah, you might lose a third of these people, but you're still the biggest subscription company in the world. So for theatrical. So that was the hard part was just adjust your pricing. It's like, what's wrong with that? You're fired. Get out. Part of the reason I've always been interested in the movie past story is that the rough shape

of that arc is something we've seen so many times in tech. You prioritize growth at all costs. You lose a giant amount of money. And then something, something you'll become so big and so powerful that you can either raise prices or find new ways to make money. That's the Uber story. That's the Lyft story. That's the Bird story.

That's the Instacart story. That's the TikTok story on and on and on. Sometimes it works. Usually it doesn't. It definitely didn't for MoviePass. And in fact, I think MoviePass might have sort of speed run that whole story quicker than just about anybody. The other kind of tech trope about MoviePass that kept jumping out to me was the whole

fast-talking founder with big ideas who might be full of crap. but everybody keeps listening to Anyway thing, which is obviously a staple of Silicon Valley. And for Muta Ali, poking at that idea, and in this case, who played that part for Movie Pass was a big part of the Movie Pass documentary. When I was doing research, a lot of people in social media who were trying to discover what's the real story behind Movie Pass, some of them were speaking with the understanding that Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth were really the founders. They were speaking and having these deep dives into movie pass and not even mentioning Stacey.

And I felt that they might need to enter the story through their perspective. It serves us in a couple ways because it's a little bit of a reveal for people who don't know. It might make some people uncomfortable who do know and maybe, oh, do these filmmakers even know who the real founders and movie pass are? And they question that and hopefully keep watching and not assume the work. But it also plays into part of the premise, which kind of revealed itself in a more crystallized form once we were later on in production. It has to do with racial bias and people's assumptions about who plays what role, especially in a tech company. And maybe if you did enter this story, assuming that, okay, yeah, Mitch is the leader. And Stacey's just kind of complaining.

Maybe he doesn't know how to ride this rocket ship like Mitch does, you know, because Mitch is the founder of Netflix. And all of a sudden, your biases played against you. And then you're like, oh, maybe I need to rethink how I was thinking about this. And so that little pivot in terms of the plot structure or that little inverse order helps play into that. I will say that it was a battle internally. You know, I didn't, this is a collaborative thing. And so I at first didn't want to start the story that way. But then there's an actual arguable point someone can make that.

We need to start with the excitement. We need to start with the millions of people coming into movie pass. And in my mind, part of me is like, well, you can't look over Stacey and how made all these 10 years of development they did before that. And so it was a lot of back and forth. And I actually needed to see it done both ways before I actually was on board with this little trick. Because I think it was Archie Gibbs who suggested it to me that, oh, maybe we should trick people at the very beginning. And I was like, I don't know exactly what that would. do to me in terms of how I feel about this story. And I didn't like it until I decided to like

roll it out the way that we did, you know, and like roll it out so that it really emphasizes that Stacey and Hamei were in a position of vulnerability, a position where they weren't in control of the ship. And okay, that's normal. They're not the founders. And then you realize, oh, they are the founders and they're not in position to drive this thing. And then you might feel a little bit more concerned about them. And so it was a lot involved. It was a lot involved. And I'm glad we ended up doing that the way because it's kind of fun. It really does work. It's quite a, it's quite a twist, whatever, 17 and a half minutes in the movie. Stacey, how did that part of the process feel? I don't know how involved you were kind of with the overall production, but like watching a lot of

this sort of twists and turns of it play out again all these years later. Obviously it hasn't gone away. You've been involved. This is the thing you live through. But how does it feel to see all of it sort of put into one place in order? I mean, I think it was what Mutali did. So I've seen, you know, WeWork and Thernos and all of them. I think we all kind of travel in a pack and we watch these things. And I think what he did was closer to the Steve Jobs' Apple story. Because it's the only thing you know.

They had a lot more air time on CNBC or MSNBC or all of the different shows that they were on. Yahoo finance, where they were being presented as that and called themselves the founders. So whoever thought of it or whichever way, it is a master stroke in storytelling because it's not straight linear. And, you know, a third of the way through, it then brings you back to the beginning, to the origin story. I thought it was a master's try.

He did make me nervous the first 15 minutes. He was sitting next to me in the theater when I was seen it the first time. And he got a couple of side eye glances. And he literally said, just wait for it, wait for it. Because I didn't know what was happening. And he literally had to tell me, hang on. Because I wanted to pause the film and go have a conversation. In the first cut, he should have just cut you out entirely, just as a bit.

Just to really make you sweat for a while. Yeah, my wife was there with me. And she goes, did they know you were the founder? And I go, yes. I said, yes, hang on. He waited until the end. We were at almost, I think, picture a lot by the time Stacey saw it. So it wasn't like he had a big chance to change much.

So it was do or die at that point. One thing I've always wondered about Movie Pass is, could it have worked? If they hadn't grown too fast, burned money at unprecedented rates, made a series of ridiculous bad decisions, is there a stable idea underneath here? Both Mutali and Stacey agreed that the $10 a month thing killed Movie Pass. but both seemed to think that it didn't necessarily have to. I think there were a series of failures that took place that allowed Movie Pass to crash in a way that it did. The biggest, though, I think is having $9.95 is that price point for promotional purposes, turning into this is our price point forever. And I wonder, Stacey, you know, I think what you said was 48 hours when you had the price at $9.95, and then you gain $175,000 new subscribers in two days.

if you had cut it off then, maybe that would have been the secret to success because you would have gotten that marketing boosted or what do you think? Yeah, I think, and we talked about it, we said, great, turn that off, tell everyone this is a promotional price point and just give them a heads up. This is a promotional price point. You're all month to month at some point. This will normalize, but enjoy it for now, right? And then I would take certain segments and I would have said,

people are going up to 30, like test different zones and different things, test your different price points, see what elasticity you have if we go up to $50, how high is a churn, if we're at $30, or if we're at 25, but what's the lowest we can go based on the behavior we're seeing? And then you move your price, and you're going to get some churn, but you've got so many people excited off the original idea that they keep going. And that's all you had to do. And we would be sitting here talking about a really big company, a big global company that was way, because an AMC or Aregal would never have been able to catch up to you. To be fair, of course, Stacey believes all of that.

He's actually the CEO of MoviePass again. After being ousted from the company in 2018, it went through all of its disasters. He bought the company back in 2021 and actually relaunched it last year. There were a bunch of new things about it, some web. three stuff that I thought was kind of weird at the time, but doesn't really seem to have come to anything, but it operates very differently. From a technology standpoint, we had some of the innovation. So we had our first year back, and we were profitable. And we added a credit system where we knew we needed a governor to be between the consumer, the product, and the marketplace.

And in any marketplace, you need to show value to the consumers so that the consumer, can have alignment with the company. In version one, whether you went to, say, an AMC, where there maybe wasn't a partnership, or you went to a B&B where there was, in the app, you couldn't see the difference. And though we were getting wholesale pricing from someone else, there was no display of that. So this version, we simply said, let's use a credit system to show alignment when the price is cheaper and say, let's motivate them by giving them a certain number of credits so that now they are aligned with saving money the way we're aligned with saving money. That didn't exist in V1, but we knew that was the pathway because we were beginning to test

that in 2016. And so when I said, guys, let me tell you how to get there, A, raise the price, B, we have this variable pricing capability. They were like, no, this $10 price point is so awesome. We're adding a quarter of a million. I'm like you're losing $30 per person per month. So I think that the technology, it's subscription. This isn't new.

Since newspapers were born, we've had subscription businesses. So a lot of it's not new, but the way to use the tech is new. So now we built it with machine learning and AI engines, which is very different. So I think the technology was there. It's just stupid was driving the bus. That's all that happened. The problem with that theory, though, is that the movie theater industry looks really different now than it did in 2018, or 2011, for that matter, when they first started working

on this. We're in the midst of one of the worst box office runs in a long time. We just had the worst Memorial Day at the movie theater in three decades. And by at least one measure that I saw, ticket sales are 22% below where they were at this point a year ago and a full 41% down from 2019. It's kind of like the pandemic happened and movie theaters just never came back, which makes sense, right? We're streaming more, we're on Netflix more, we're home more. Maybe movie theaters are just over. This is not remotely surprising to anyone who is like living life and watching TV more often, but Stacey doesn't think it's the case.

This guy loves the movies. I am not a filmmaker, but I love and respect. what people like Mutali will spend three, four, five, six, seven years on bringing a 90-minute story to screens and telling this, they are our profits, they are our freedom fighters, they bring stories that otherwise would never get seen. It's such an important art form that is under attack that if you know you have the burden of responsibility that you, have technologies that can double the attendance of movie going and you can create efficiencies in a sector that doesn't work with itself. When you see a Netflix, they can go into a space, dominate that space from top to bottom because they have the direct-to-consumer relationship

and no one ever built anything from the consumer point of view and empowering the consumer. So I think it's a beautiful moment in time because I don't want that, Minima died on my watch, you know, that it was a simple technology upgrade. I want the Mutalese of the world to forever be able to tell stories in such a powerful medium. And theaters shouldn't be these things on their last legs. It's just stupidity and arrogance and pride that's preventing technology from unlocking such great opportunities.

We're in such a beautiful moment that if we can get out of the way, I think that story storytelling will go to the next level, because I think we're on the verge of a new golden age of cinema from, we see how storytelling creation is just mind-blowingly changing. And you see how even the sight and sound experience in the theater is changing. But what it takes to get people there isn't changing. And that's the part that we're focused on. And I feel blessed to be able to have the privilege to be able to do that. Yeah, basically, other than Dune, it's been a disaster at theaters this year. And I'm curious from both of your perspectives, like, what do we do next with movie theaters? I agree it could be easier. I agree by it should, it could be cheaper, all this stuff. But I do wonder, does something fundamental in the movie-going experience need to change here? The cinema has a PR problem.

It doesn't have an attendance problem. You notice that this past weekend, okay, more people went in four days to the movies than everyone who will attend an NFL game in an entire year. In four days, that's how many people went to the movies. You don't get at a football game, they don't tell you how many tickets are sold at every single game. I think that we need to stop reporting box office numbers because we're focused on the wrong things. We're not focused on movie making. We're focused on movie going, And it doesn't matter how great the movie was because most really big films didn't gross at the box office. Over time, they became part of our culture.

And so we're focused on the wrong thing because everything is determined by one number. What was the gross of the box office this weekend compared to last year or the year before? We need to stop reporting those numbers and get back to the days when I was a kid. you didn't report grosses of Star Wars. It wasn't until IMDB and certain other things came online that my mom would call up and go, oh, you know what such and such gross this weekend? We became obsessed with that. And you'll hear even with YouTube and a lot of creators, they say, I stopped watching my view number. I started focusing on content and I started focusing on doing the right content and it will take care of itself. movie going is healthy when you stop comparing it to these numbers that every Monday morning you have a report card that you failed. No sports do this, no other industry. The travel industry, they report quarterly where some single companies, but you do not get

group-wide grosses every weekend on a business. You don't have it. So I think that's detrimental to us. It gives us a very big PR problem. Definitely, definitely. That's a good take. have not heard that before. I actually really agree with that. Moose-Daly, what do you think? Are movie theaters?

You're making stuff for the internet. Who cares about movie theaters, right? No, I care about movie theaters. The most fun I've had out this year has been at movie theaters, but it was screening movie past movie crash, so I think that's probably why. But that in-person experience is something that will always be better than watching it at home. And speaking of Dune, I just watched Dune 2 for the first time with my brother. and we watched it on a TV, and I wish that we had watched it in the theater. Maybe the second time I felt that way, like, oh, this movie was so great.

I wish that I'd seen it in the theater out with other people, that sort of glow that happens when you go and that communal experience that Stacey was referring to. It's something special that culturally I think we're going to turn back toward after we get enough of sort of the convenience of watching movies on our phone. And I think movie going is still going to thrive. And I think maybe it's just time for us to be reminded of how special it is. I like it. I will say Dune 2 ripped in theaters.

Like it's one of the, maybe the best theater going experience. Not to make you feel bad. One of the best movie theater experiences I've had in a very long time. The movie is just so loud. It's still playing some places. See it in Dolby Atmos. Because the sound design in there is just insane. I haven't seen anybody's house that can do Dolby Atmos.

He's right about that, I think, and I agree that there is still something to be said for going to the movies. I certainly felt it with Dune, too, still thinking about that movie. And I think there's a lot more to change about the movie-going experience than just the way we buy tickets and what they cost. But the way we buy tickets and what they cost is definitely a start. All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Vergecast Hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move,

Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud. cloud. a. a. slash vergecast. That's clod.

dot AI slash vergecast. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. a.I. slash vergecast. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite.

lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third.

Like, that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America, actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembark, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID.

Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive. for the virus, and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning, and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back.

Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge 1-1. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com. We love all your questions. Thank you to everybody who's reached out with thoughts. about what's going on with OpenAI and how the Verge and everybody else should talk about this stuff. Please keep them coming. It's been really interesting to hear all of your thoughts, and it's really helpful as we think about where we go from here. This week, we have a smart home question.

Hi, my name's Chris. I'm from Los Angeles. So this is a question about the smart home. So probably, hi, Jen. How are you? So I have home assistant running on a little raspberry pie, and I love it. It's actually pretty good. It's pretty flexible. I have like two stupid things I need to do. that Apple Home doesn't let me do. And it's great. I have speakers and lights. If there are a reason to add, like, a third thing, I, like, kind of can't come up with, like, I rent.

And so, like, I'm not going to get all new blinds, right? Like, I don't have a gate in front of my house. So I don't want to do a smart lock. I don't think unless there's one that's safe. I feel like the smart home's kind of just, like, in a really bad spot, generally, but, like, in a, like, non-starter kind of spot for renters. Am I wrong in that? Let me know, because I would love to be proven wrong in that.

Like, please, I would desperate. I really love that, but I don't know. You let me know. Thanks. Bye. All right. Well, asking you shall receive, Jen Toey. How are you? I'm good. Thanks. Hi, Chris, too. Very excited to answer this question because it's a topic I get asked a lot. So, yeah, lots to dive into in your question there. The first one, I'm going to say, renters, yes, there is lots of great stuff you can do, especially if you have home assistant. I mean, Chris, you're already set up pretty well for doing some cool stuff. I'd actually say there's sort of two answers here. Like, if you're a renter, there are options. If you're a renter with

home assistant, there are way more options. Oh, interesting. Okay. Just because, you know, it sounds like Chris is maybe, you know, quite technically advanced. I mean, if you have home assistant, I think we're safe to assume. On a raspberry pie. Yeah. Yeah, you're doing well. You know what you're doing. And then also, he mentioned Apple Home. So I'm assuming that's his main platform. That does narrow your choices down, but then Home Assistant widens them back up again. But just To answer that overall question about renters, I do think there are more and more options for renters. And you mention door locks. Doorlocks actually are in a better space for renters and they have been for a long time. There's the August Wi-Fi smart lock, which has been

sort of our number one choice for renters because it's retrofit. So you're not having to replace your door lock, which your landlord may not like, but you still get to control the lock in a way that is useful for a smart home perspective. That's the one that just goes like on over top of the existing lock, right? Right, of the back of your deadbolt. You do have to remove the thumb term, but everything else stays as is. That is pretty clever. Which makes it very easy. Also means you can take it with you if you move to another apartment. And also, Yale has just come out with a new retrofit smart lock. So there's another good option there. And they both, both Yale and August, who are owned by the same company and their sister brands, they have come out with a new keypad that has a touch fingerprint reader in it. So you can now use. a fingerprint to unlock your August Wi-Fi smart lock. That is the thing about the smart home that feels the most sci-fi to me, by the way,

the fingerprint thing. It's the most like mission impossible thing that I have tried in the smart home. And I cannot recommend it enough. And well, they've now got facial recognition for smart locks. So I haven't tried that yet, but that came out at CES. But yes, and the fingerprint is great. It's really easy. It's my favorite way of unlocking the door.

Apple Home key is also a really useful way if you use Apple Home. Unfortunately, there are not any retrofit door locks at work with Apple Home Key right now because it's all inside the house. So there's nothing to do the NFC. Although these new keypads do have NSC in them. So it's potential we may see Home Key come to some of these retrofit locks. And that brings me to the second retrofit lock I would recommend, which is actually coming out this month. And when I say recommend, I haven't tested it yet, but I have tested some of their past products and they've been good. Akara is coming out with a retrofit.

smart lock. So the same concept, you can just replace the thumb term on your deadbolt and then you can put a keypad out in the front of your house so that you can access it. That also has a fingerprint reader that does have NFC in. And I would not be surprised if at some point in future that could support Home Key because Akara already does support Home Key in some of its products. So there's lots of options now that didn't used to be, so that's nice for Home Kit, Apple Home compatible, retrofit smart locks. Do you think that's a good third place to start the lock thing? I do. I think locks are actually my favorite smart home device, most useful, easiest for everyone to use, not complicated, mostly, and provide real value. You know, being able to unlock and lock your door

remotely, if there's a problem. There's so much value, I think, in smart locks. And the safety issue, it's just as easy. I think if you're concerned about someone hacking your smart door lock, don't be. It's just as easy for someone to break a window. It's easier, much easier, sorry, to break a window, then it is to hack your smart lock. And in terms of whether someone's going to knock your door down, again, regular door lock, smart lock, not a big difference. So, yeah, I would not worry about the safety side

unless you have someone who's really smart, a big hacker who's after you, in which case maybe. Sure. But in terms of the third thing, I mean, it differs, I think, for renters, perhaps from people that own their homes, because, you know, a smart thermostat is a big one. Right. Energy management, you know, bringing that into your smart home,

I would say if a smart thermostat is, the research shows that the top three devices people use in their smart homes as smart video doorbells, smart cameras, which are kind of the same, smart thermostats, and then robot vacuums. Oh, interesting. Okay. As well as smart light bulbs are in there at number four, then the robot vacuums. So you've already got the smart light.

I mean, a video doorbell is, you can do a battery powered one. as a renter, so that's a good option. Door locks actually aren't in the top categories. I think it's just still a bit of a niche, but I do find it, like I said, one of the most useful smart devices in my home, and you use it every day. And yeah, there's a lot of innovation in this space too. But for Chris, who has, I think, you know, that was probably a more advanced smart home user, what I would recommend as like the third thing based on what he has is more automation.

So that is using sensors, making your home smart, not just having a few smart devices in it. And because he has home assistant, you know, using devices like motion sensors, contact sensors, smart plugs, smart buttons to kind of bring everything together and work more seamlessly. Going back to a Kara, who I mentioned at the beginning, that's a really good option for someone that's using Apple Home and Home Assistant because you can actually, most of their Zigby devices will pair directly to Home Assistant. and they have great inexpensive motion sensors, smart buttons. So things like he can have his lights turn on when he opens his front door

or what would be really fun for him to try actually is the FP2 presence sensor, which is an Akara device. And that I think works really well in an apartment setting because I've struggled to get it to work in my home because I have so many people in my home. But it uses millimeter wave sensing, which is a really interesting development in the smart home sensing, radar sensing to use presence detection versus motion detection.

So if he's sitting in his living room watching TV or your lights won't turn off because you haven't moved. Right. And I find that that's a really interesting sort of development in the smart home. And for Chris, the FP2 does work with Home Assistant. We can include in the show notes, this is great blog that this one guy wrote exactly about how to integrate it with Home Assistant and what benefits there are. So for Chris, I think more automation, you know, making your home.

smarter because things like sensors, contact sensors, you can take them with you when you leave, too. But yeah, so there's lots. And then the final thing I would say that a lot of people are interested in and works for both renters and homeowners is a smart security system. There's a lot of benefit there, especially because if you can integrate with, say, your doorlock and your video doorbell, if you want a video doorbell. So there's a lot the smart home has to offer for renters. And it does seem like I think the stigma that anything beyond the very basics requires opening up your walls, I think is so much less true than it was, even just a couple of years ago, that a lot of the stuff you're describing used to be a lot of work. And now it's a lot of, like,

battery maintenance. And that's kind of it in a lot of these cases. Especially, like, I think about Ring has done a really good job of this, of making it basically that you can just hang a doorbell on your wall. And, like, I have a lot of feelings about people in, especially like, apartment buildings and condo buildings who have video doorbells that just go out into the hallway. Yeah. I have a lot of like moral quandaries with that, but the idea of what it can accomplish for you, this stuff in general is a lot simpler than it gets credit for people, I think. Now, especially if you've gone through the work to set up a Raspberry Pi running home assistant, like you have the chops to do most of the smart home stuff that is available to you at this point.

For sure, yeah. And there is, there's a lot. And in terms of the doorbell, actually, I just, this actually happened last week. So this is news for you on the Verticals. Arlo has some good battery powered doorbells. And their first generation one just became HomeKit compatible. Oh, cool. There was only one battery powered doorbell that worked with Apple Home before.

That was the Akara. Now the AOLO essential first-gen battery powered doorbell will work with HomeKit. So not HomeKit, secure video, but with HomeKit. So, Chris, if you were thinking about a video doorbell, those two would be a good option. Cameras are a whole different thing. And as you say, especially if you're recording your neighbours walk past your house every morning. But if that's something you're interested in, those are two good options and a door lock and then motion. Get some sensors. Get your house to be really smart and that's really fun. I think especially if you're the type who wants to sort of experiment and play, just adding sensors and smart plugs to everything you can think of opens up so many things. And for me, it's like most of the stuff that I've tried ends up being sort of useless. But it's just fun to play with and be like, okay, whenever I get to like the fourth step to the basement, what should turn on?

I don't even know. Let's just have some stuff happen. And it's just, yeah, just that. And the sensors are cheap and they're everywhere and they're easy to pick up and move around. And I think that's a good call. Just like buy some sensors, spend a Saturday playing with them and see what works for you. I like that a lot. See what happens. Yeah. Awesome. All right, Chris, I hope that helps. Jen, thank you as always. Thank you. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who is on the show.

And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at theverge.com. We have Chris's Sonos reviews. We have a movie pass, movie crash review, everything you want. Plus, again, lots going on in tech. It's WWDC next week. There's lots to see. Check out theverge.com. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or headphones you think we should

buy it instead of the ace. Email us at Vergecast at theverge.com. Call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. I particularly want to hear what you're excited about at WWDC. We have a bunch of WWDC stuff coming. Lots of AI stuff presumed for next week. A few of us will be on the ground. really want to know what you think is coming and whether you're excited about what we're going to see from Apple in this next year.

So hit us up. Virgcast at theverge.com. 866, Verge11. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Eli, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about, like I said, WWC, plus a whole bunch more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.