The Vergecast - Steam Deck review / Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Senior news editor Sean Hollister joins Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz to discuss his review of the Steam Deck, the latest portable gaming system. Verge reviewer Allison Johnson continues the gadget talk with her review of Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra. Further reading: Ukraine internet outages spark concerns of broader blackout US and Russia still tethered by International Space Station during Ukraine conflict Twitter accounts sharing video from Ukraine are being suspended when they’re needed most Steam Deck review: it’s not ready The official Steam Deck dock won’t be available at launch Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review: notably unique Dish says its 5G buildout is going great, thanks for asking, how are you? Apple will reportedly debut an M2 chip with four new Macs this year Spotify’s Car Thing goes on general sale for $90 Sony finally reveals the PlayStation VR2’s design  Tesla CEO Elon Musk accuses the SEC of ‘leaking’ information Inside Pornhub Why Trump’s Truth Social may not survive the hype Inside Galactic Starcruiser, Disney's hotel where everyone becomes a Star Wars character Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week in the Vergecast, Sean Hawster joins us. We talk all about the Steam Deck. Boy, does he have feelings about that. Then Allison Johnson joins us. We talk about the Galaxy S-22 Ultra review. What's going on with Dish Network's 5G Network, supposed 5G Network. Let me do a little lightning round. That's the Vergecast.

Come up now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools

just by describing what you need. Prompts something like, 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. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of being late, but then coincidentally being able to hit the Steam Deck review embargo. Yes. It's a very specific niche. We are the only.

contender, that we are definitely the flagship of that. We did it. That's the one we found. You got to find Elaine and be the winner. I'm your friend Eli. I'm in the studio with Alex Cranes. Hey, Alex. Hey.

Dita Bonas here. I am a rock solid 60 frames for second. Very good. Sean Hollister is here. I am a glorious mess. It is true. We were late. I was at a conference yesterday.

We had a Hot Pod Summit. Ashley Carman did an amazing job hosting Hot Pots Summit. Do you ever want to see some people? and out about programmatic ad tech. Podcast industry is lit. Very fun. I was out of pocket. Forgot to tweet that we're going to be late.

So we're coming out a little late today. But the good news is that means the steam deck embargo will have passed. Yes. Talking about time on a pre-recorded podcast is very difficult. The steam deck embargo, we wouldn't have been able to talk about it this week had we not been late. Yes. But we didn't actually plan it. No, we totally did.

We totally did. This was all planned. You have to manifest luck. a thing that happens in decoder all the time is everyone talks about manifestation like Miss Excel is like fully manifesting that's like wild and then like random executives

like I manifested by business success so we're manifesting luck today yeah you're like this just happened you have to have an abundance mind-soul I'm gonna find $100 on the street after this Aaron Rogers is gonna sell me a crystal it's gonna be great can you guys give me like 15 minutes

to come up with a software manifest pun for this thing before you're on yeah so we talk about SteamDack with Sean. A little later, Allison Johnson's going to join the show. She reviewed the S-22. There's some other phone stuff. We would be remiss if we did not open by saying Russia has invaded Ukraine. There's a war on the European continent. It's a big deal. We have some coverage on the site. It is kind of our first digital war of this kind. There are internet outages in Ukraine. You know, there's a space station. We have to collaborate with Russia on the space station.

So Lauren Crush has been covering what's happening there. There are information challenges and all the various social platforms or technology sanctions against Russia. I keep hearing this very shaky rumor that the Ukraine wants the United States government to ban software updates to Russian devices. Yes. We haven't run it down. I'm telling you it's just a shaky rumor. But like all the stuff is in the mix.

Uh-huh. So it's on the site. We're not going to spend a lot of time on it here. I was just saying to Dieter, I feel like we are well practiced making this hard left turn out of very serious world news and into gadgets because of it. of two years of the pandemic. Never gets easier, though. It's always weird.

I do want to point out our team is doing a great job of covering it where it is Verge stuff. It's important. Now we're going to make a hard left turn into the steam deck. We have other great. The company, Vox Media, if you just want to stay in the family, lots of other great podcasts that are full on Ukraine. Yep.

So go listen to today, explain, and all that stuff. They're doing a great job on it. We are aware that some of what we provide here at the Verchcast is diversion. Other times you're fully in it. But if there's stuff you want us to cover, if there's stuff you want us to talk about, this is new. So we welcome your feedback. You can tweet at Alex.

Just me. Or me, whatever. Or send us a note. We do appreciate it. We are taking it seriously. All right. Steam deck. Here is my big plan for talking about the Steam deck.

Sean, talk about the Steam deck. Go. You just reviewed it. I mean, this is like one. I just read the review before I came in here. It is an emotional journey. But begin. It's going to go out.

about 45 minutes after we finished recording. It'll be about by the time you read this. And the first thing I want to say is that this is the hardest review I've ever done for The Verge or the other publications I visited briefly between because Valve was constantly updating the thing. Every couple days, there'd be a big update, sometimes multiple times a day. There would be a new update for the thing because it is the hottest. The software is coming in, the hottest of any device. Sean, what is the Steam deck?

It's begin at the beginning. It looks like a Nintendo Switch. It looks like a Nintendo Switch in photos. And if you actually pick what up, you'll find out that it is much bigger than a Nintendo Switch. But yes, there is a 7-inch to 800P screen flanked by two sets of controls. But inside, it is a Linux computer. And get this, a Linux computer that is running Windows games, not Linux games. It can also run Linux games in that Nintendo Switch-like interface.

And so the first question you have is, one, how the heck does that work? How is Linux running the Windows games? Are they going to be any good on this thing? Your second question might be, does it have any battery life? And the answer is, we'll get to that. But it actually, it works because Valve spent years, like four years, working on a compatibility layer that's built on top of an existing compatibility layer called wine, which lets you run some Windows games on Linux.

W-I-N-E, like the thing you drink, not the thing you do, right? Yes, yes. Wine is not an emulator, I think is the acronym for it. Yeah, it's a recursive acronym. It's like one of the first things I learned as a young computer nerd is that wine is a great recursive acronym. I had no idea. Wine is not an emilates the acronym. It's very good. And in many cases, it works amazingly well. I loaded up, well, let me see, I loaded up Fallout 4 in this thing.

I loaded up God of War on this thing. 2018 God of War, just got ported to a PC. It works brilliantly well. And the controls. This thing has so many controls that a Nintendo Switch does not have, that a PC does not have. It has gyroscopic aiming. It has touchpads that you can customize six ways from Sudday and turn into like virtual track balls. You can literally swipe across this touchpad, which is a flat surface, and it will feel and act like you have gone back to the early 90s,

the late 80s and have a genuine trackball in your hand. And you're flinging that cursor across the screen. And yes, I did use a trackball at one point. It was not my primary pointing device, but it's one of those kinds of things. Okay? And that works great in 2D games that have a cursor. As long as the games actually have a cursor, because while a lot of games play through Proton,

the compatibility layer, on Linux, based on Windows games, a lot of them do work. Very often, they might mistake. Seriously not. And in most cases, this manifests on the Steam deck is they just don't launch. And that'll be the case for any big game that uses anti-cheats software. So your Destiny 2's not on here. And your Halo Infinite's not on here. And your PUBG's not on here. And your GTA5 is not on here. But so like the entire Ubisoft lineup. I think I got something running from Ubisoft. I'll have to remember what it is. Is that like a Valve hasn't gone to those publishers and figured it out problem? Is that a, the EO load out a Linux PC? in the format or Nintendo Switch. We're just going to see what happened. This is a publishers

are lazy and scared problem. Wow. Valve has explicitly reached out to the two big anti-cheat manufacturers which are EAC, which is easy anti-cheats made by Epic Games.

So there you go. We're bought by Epic Games. And BattleEye and said, hey, can you make these things work better in Proton? And they said, yes, we'll make these things work better in Proton. And then they went ahead

and made these things work veteran proton. And in fact, the big new hit game that Andrew Webster just reviewed for the Verge Eldon Ring literally has easy anti-cheat in it and will literally work, I believe, tomorrow, Valve says. They'll push an update that makes that game work. So it's possible. It's totally possible. And Valve says it literally takes two clicks for these companies to enable it. So hang on. I need to stop you right there. Anytime a company says it takes literally two clicks, it takes more than two clicks. Sure.

At least three. It takes an important business decision in this case, which is in Epic's case, in the case of Epic CEO, Tim Sweeney, who, by the way, owns easy anti-cheat and also runs Fortnite, one of the biggest games in the world. In his case, he said to me that this is basically not worth the amount of effort they would have to put into to convince themselves that they wouldn't be inviting new hackers and chants. cheaters into Fortnite. And so they have said, epic games has said, it is easy to do this. It is easy to enable your games. And yet the CEO of the company, Sim Sweeney, has also said, by the way, we're not going to do this because we don't think the Steam Deck is going to, you know, basically it's not going to sell enough to justify the amount of work they would have to do to convince themselves that it'll be okay. Right. So the problem isn't the two clicks or three clicks.

It's, this company is so big that to instruct someone to do the clicks requires meetings. So it does, in fact, require more than two clicks because you have to click on send. Yeah, if you click on Outlook, you get to make new meetings. A lot of extra clicks in there. Lies. Someone's got to click through PowerPoint and be like pros and cons. And I guess I understand that there is like this. You can never anticipate the amount of risk because hackers will find a way into anything.

if you give them along enough and cheaters have just this tremendous incentive. And companies like EA and Activision are constantly suing cheatmakers out of existence to try and solve this problem, which has gotten worse and worse over the years, by the way. A lot of video game manufacturers are now building their own custom anti-cheat solutions because they don't even think battle I and using anti-cheater good enough anymore. So yeah, there's more to it than that. But a lot of this stuff doesn't work. And even some of the games that do work because you have all these glorious controls that you don't have on a normal hand-tailed gaming system or even a PC.

And you can easily get a cursor in some games. They won't necessarily work on every game. I pulled up the original Tie Fighter. Do you remember Tie Fighter for PC? Oh, my God. That's such a good Star Wars game, possibly the best Star Wars game ever made. I want to say like 95, 94, something like that. Anyhow, this game, it loads.

The cutscenes look great. It looks phenomenal on the Steam deck. But there's no mouse cursor, so you can't navigate the menus at all. I had to move around an invisible mouse cursor that, you know, I couldn't see on the screen to try and figure out how to get into the game. And once I did that, I got into the Tie Fighter and it just spun. uncontrollably through space. I was horrible at that game, and from my understanding,

from my experience, that's just the game. Yeah. Very finicky controls. So, okay, Sean, like, we've gone immediately into the deepest of weeds on this thing, which I love.

It's a portable PC running Linux with an emulation layer for Windows games. It has, like, decent performance question mark. Like, you mentioned battery life as, what sorts of games? Should a person looking to buy this thing expect? We'll come back to the bugs, which are myriad.

But like, am I buying this thing to play Eldon Ring? Am I buying this thing to play, like, emulator games? Am I buying this thing for all of the above? Am I buying this thing to just screw around? Sorry, I will let you know an Eldering tomorrow. Okay. When I can run it and have the online mode work. Technically it launched last night, so they call it a Steam Deck verify.

Anyhow, the performance is. is great. It's amazingly good. I don't see a crazy performance dip because of, you know, Ruddick Windows games on Linux. I don't know if there's any performance dip at all. Not that I've got to test Windows on it, mind you. But I've tried other portables. I've tried the IA Neo that came out last year. And this thing's head and shoulders above that. Yeah. So actually, can you put great in context? Because there's like full-on PC gaming grade great. There's like gaming laptop great. There's PS5 great. There's like, I don't know, Nintendo Switch, you could say runs great because the games are designed to run on, you know, something that's relatively underpowered. So when you say

great, like, great for what? This is a giant level of detail above what you'd play on a Nintendo Switch. We're talking above PS4 quality here, above Xbox One quality here. We're probably in the PS4 pro kind of graphics that you're looking coming out of the screen, but it's got one important caveat there. The important caveat is that the resolution is 1280 by 800 or 1280 by 720. You take your pick on the actual screen. So it just has to drive so many fewer pixels. So if I want to run God of War here on medium settings or Star Wars squadrons on medium settings, like that looks better to my eyes than a PS4. It's in that PS4 pro territory, not quite as good as, you know, a really beefy gaming PC, but it's up there. But it's up there. But it's

has to run so many fewer pixels that if I blow that up onto a monitor, you're not going to get quite that same effect. If I blow that up on my desktop monitor, if I put that on a 4K TV, you don't get it. I'm going to put my 2019 gamer nerd hat on. Does it do ray tracing? I have not tried ray tracing on this thing. That is a great question. It has some, it has a custom chip, right? Part of the whole, I mean, this thing is like an ultimate gadget. Yeah. We probably should have said that at the top. Like one of the, there's like very few moments. where there's an ultimate gadget. Yeah.

You know? And like the Steam deck is firmly in the category of ultimate gadget. Like it's a tiny little Linux PC that looks like a switch that can run Windows games. It is buggy as I'll get out. But it's like... I immediately bought one. Right. It's also, it's 400 bucks, right?

Yeah. As did I. It's like, it's fully in ultimate gadget territory. Like, you have to be a gadget nerd to appreciate it. But if you're a gadget nerd, like, there's not many. Plans to play it. Many boxes left to take. Let's talk gadget nerdery for a moment here.

This thing, this thing. Sean just picked it up. The love in his eyes. Literally his eyes turned in the cartoon hearts just now. Also, his shoulders just kind of shrugged under the weight of it. It is 1.47 pounds. It is sculpted in a way that I do not feel that weight constantly. Like if I'm holding it above my head in bed, which is definitely a way I play this thing.

Yeah, I do have this. sense that maybe I'm going to drop it and brain myself. But in most other positions, my arms merely get tired after a while. Okay, so this thing has a, it has, yeah, 1280 by 800 touchscreen, but it is a good screen. Like, this is a, like, the best small iPS screen I have seen on a device. It's not like OLED quality or anything like that, but the colors look good. It's sharp, it's crisp, it's refresh rate. There's not a lot of jelly effect to it. The speaker, are loud and clear. And there are so many controls on this thing. I think touch pads that can do all kinds of things. Touch sticks that have capacitive sensors on top. So you lay your finger on top of it. You lay a thumb on

top of it. And all this guy and you got the gyroscopic aiming. The triggers are not only, not only does it have triggers and bumpers and face buttons and d pads, but the triggers are not analog triggers, very responsive analog triggers. The touch pads, you can press down on them and they've got, you know, your 32,000 levels of pressure sensitivity. Each of the has a linear actuator underneath. So they not only can give you some haptic feedback when you're scrolling, you can feel a little bit of texture, but in addition to that, they make sounds. The original steam controller that this thing is based on could play like chip tune music

out of its touch pads, and this one can too. It's got a custom AMD chip that not only is it custom and like exclusive valve, but it had AMD RDNA2 graphics before any other laptop or handheld was allowed. to get like the thin and light version of those. So while you could buy like a beefy gaming laptop with our DNA2 graphics or you could wait forever and scalp a graphic desktop graphics card, this thing has it for $400 and it's a great level of performance for $400. It's got a ginormous, really annoyingly loud fan in it, which has the wonderful side effect

of making sure I never feel the heat. I don't feel the heat at all. Never seen it overheat. Never seen it. Throttle the GPU. unless I was asking it to. And when you dive into the software for the deck, there's a single button you can press

to see your frame rate, your battery life, what all your CPUs and GPUs are doing. And at a moment's notice, you can say, wow, I'm only getting an hour of battery life out of this now. I can cut my frame rate in half or throttle the GPU with like two presses. And this time I actually mean two presses, not the anti-sheet two presses.

Sean, the next time you throttle the GPU, I'd like you to schedule a quick meeting with me, just to sync. I will do that. I will do that. Pros and cons. Let's make this decision rigorously. Are all of these controls overwhelming? Because like, you know, a game designed for keyboard and mouse or even just like a standard controller, like, are you spending just as much time fiddling with like 50 different ways you could configure what all these buttons and touchpads and gyroscopes do as you are actually playing the game?

Or is it relatively easy to like set it up and like start playing the game and not be constantly. fussing with it. I'll answer that two ways. Way number one is I may have spent an hour, an hour and a half personally configuring a custom profile

for Destiny 2, which is a game that I can only play on the deck through Stadia, and I don't even own games on Stadia except for Life is for Strange 2. So I probably wasted an hour and a half just because it was fun

to customize the controls to that degree. You can do incredible things with the amount of customization on here. There's macros and turbos and it's dizzying. It's dizzying how much you can do, but you don't have to. When you pick it up, what you have in your hands is basically an Xbox 360 game pad, an Xbox one game pad. It's got two sticks. It's got all the buttons and d-pads exactly where you think they'll be. If you want to, you also have the touchpad right beneath the stick. There's your mouse. There's your gyro. But you can also dive into a quick

settings menu and flip on gyroscopic control on the touchstick. You can flip on the back buttons. There's four back buttons on the back of the thing, and you can set those to do whatever you want. I set it up in control. I set it up so I've got one of them. I double tap one of the buttons on the back, and all of a sudden my character is floating in the air, ready to rain down death on my phone. I tap another one. I summon a shield of debris all around my character. It's great. And I don't have to take my thumbs off the sticks to do any effect. Is it labeled rain down death? on my phone, my phones in the settings? Yes.

Okay. I can definitely do that. Sean, I think it's really cool because it's got the same haptic, like, touch pads or whatever that the steam pad did, right? Yes. Is there a learning curve like there was on that because everybody decided that learning curve was stupid and stopped buying that controller? Is this just replicating that problem? If you want to use them, it's going to take a moment to like, okay, how do I want this touch? pad to work. But there are a lot of presets. And again, you can just like pick it up and say,

I only want to use this like an Xbox controller and you never have to think about it, which is super nice. The original Steam controller, they kind of like, oh shit, I guess we should add a left thumbstick at like the very end of the development cycle for that. Valve showed so many versions of the original Steam controller prototypes. I have one at home that had two touch pads and nothing else. And they were like, you are going to use our touchpads. That's the one I have. Yeah, there we go. And at the end, they said, I guess we should put a left analog stick on it. And now they've put the right analog stick on it too. So you don't have to use touch pads ever if you don't want to. You can just ignore them. It's fine. I played a whole bunch of games that way. But I mean, you compare it to the Xbox 360 controller, but the layout is very different from it, right? Because the joysticks on this are up by the D-pad and I don't know what that other pad is called. Oh, boy. If I want to get into some gadget history.

The layout here is exactly like the wikipad. Yeah, like, it's a very different, it's not an Xbox 360 layout. Where those would be is where those touchpats are. Like, where the joystick. Yeah, in terms of, like, physically where you are reaching for it, I have found that it just feels completely natural to grab this thing and just my thumbs go where they should go. And the only place where the thumbs feel a little bit awkward

is actually on those touch pads. They feel natural reaching for the stick. they feel natural reaching for the face buttons and the d-pad. Everything is comfortable there. And then when I pull them down to the touchpads, I'm like, oh, maybe I should shift my grip on this controller a little bit. It'll feel a little bit less like a game pad. Maybe I should flatten it out physically in my hands so that I can get that swipe across the touchpad instead. This whole thing, like you keep talking about configurability.

Like a lot of video games now, like the first game you play is just setting up the controls. Yeah. And then you get to set up your character? Yeah. Like, I'm never going to play this game. But, like, one of the things that jumps out at me about this, and it's kind of like ultimate gadget territory, compare it to the Switch or any Nintendo product, right?

The control layout and the hardware is pretty much designed to make a game, like a one game work. Right? Like, the GameCube was like, have you heard of Luigi's Mansion? This controller was designed to play this game. It's going to be weird for everything else, but we like nailed it. The switch is kind of like, it has that element too, right? Nintendo's really good at this. The hardware and the software work really seamlessly together.

That's the product. This is like designed to run whatever, maybe. Like, right? Like there's an element here where the hardware is like over designed, overbuilt, over engineered, because the target software is whatever will run. Yeah. The idea is you can, if they fix the cursor, go back to that original, tie fighter and play it and not have to wonder whether the developer is ever going to add

game pad support. I went back to the original Half-Life 2 and I played a chunk of it using this. I went back to Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 from 1997. The 90s are back. This is like a whole theme. This is the vibe shift. It's like I didn't have to think about, okay, I want to remap every single control because I had a functional mouse right there. The game had mouse support back in the day, which helps. That was one of the early first person histories that had it. And Valve had a profile ready that was like, okay, here's the one you set

it to if you want this to emulate a mouse and keyboard. Okay, there we go. It works. And then on top of that, I was like, okay, well, I want one extra button to do one extra thing. Mapped it in like a minute. And then if I wanted to go crazy, I can upload my own controller configurations to the

Steam library. And the cool thing is all that work that everybody did mapping out those old Steam controllers, all the cultists, who sped, you know, huddled over their steam controllers, spedding hours, babbigatting configurations. Those are in the store, and most of them just work on the steam deck, with a few exceptions like Tyfighter, where you spin uncontrollably through space. Do you ever, like, there are a lot of PC games that really don't care about controllers, you know, RTSs is I'm thinking about, a lot of strategy games.

Do you miss a keyboard and mouse with games like that? I would not miss a keyboard and mouse. if I spent the time customizing the buttons, because there's enough buttons. There is something to say for... Real theme of this situation. Something to say for, I have a number row,

and I know exactly where it is my muscle memory. There's something to say for, I have spent over 20 years learning how to do first-person shooters of the mouse and keyboard, and I am never going to be better on this than I am with a mouse and keyboard. There's something to say for

if I want a swing of sword or an axe in a game with like a swing of my mousing arm, I'm never going to quite replicate that on a Steam Deck or Steam Controller. I could do cool things with it, things that allow you, but I don't know if it's going to be better necessarily. Cool thing about this is you can plug the mouse and keyboard, and if you want, it's a full Linux computer. I'm just going to point this out. I'm saying it's an ultimate gadget, Sean, you have a mollifluous voice. It sounds like you love the, like the hard eyes are apparent, I think, even in audio.

However, you gave it a 6.5, and you called it the hardest review you ever done. and I don't think people should buy it. So, like, explain that side of the situation. As reviews editor Dan Seaford will gladly tell you at any moment, we do not review things for the verge based on their potential. We review what's right in front of us, what we can see in touch. And what I can see in touch is a console that was constantly changing under me, where bugs were everywhere.

I had some crashes, hard locks, black screens. and I broke an SD card using this thing. Like in half? It might as well have. I completely destroyed the partition tables. I've tried many times to fix it. I have not found a way to fix it. Maybe a data recovery expert could help me with that.

But it was my fault. I did hard to reset the thing while it was writing to the SD card. I was trying to format it because it wasn't working. And then I said, you know, F it. and now that SD card is going back to Amazon. Sorry, Amazon. It's unfit. I didn't get to try a lot of things.

They introduced new bugs while they were fixing old bugs. There were regressions, which as a former QA tester and regression tester, I would have caught if I'd had the time to do it. But they're basically pushing nightlies to this thing multiple times a day. They do say they're going to reduce the cadence a little bit once this thing gets to the market. But they told me they're going to still do it pretty much. They're going to kill, still push random fixes to this for weeks and months to come. And I'm not surprised because they have a long runway of early adopters that's sold out for at least six months. I mean, a lot of people bought this thing to side unseen and they're going to tolerate it if they buy it instead of, you know, reading my review and deciding not to.

Yeah, I wonder how many people are actually going to return theirs, not just because I'm in the second tier and I want them to. Wandering the streets of New York. Are you unhappy with your Steam Tech? Call out of Trans. Cancel. Cancel that order. Right now, everybody listening, cancel your order. No, it sounds, are they kind of just banking on the fact that their audience will be okay with the fact that it sounds like it's going to be a buggy mess for the foreseeable future? Because normally we would be blogging just Steam Deck destroys itself again every week.

But it sounds like they're banking on, that's fine. Our audience won't care. I really think that is largely true. I really think it is largely true. They told me in an interview, you know, Valve's Greg Coomer, who's been there forever designer on a lot of games and hardware. The Steam Machines Initiative, he was working closely in that, as I recall. He told me pretty much straight up that they are hoping to learn from their fans. It's one of those things.

Deliver the features that they want. And like, I almost believe them because I did walk into the hands-on briefing for this back in August. And I walked up to some Valve developers and I said, hey, have you ever been? heard of this thing called AMDFSR. Are you going to use it in the Steam deck to upscale your games and make them look beautiful on a monitor? And nobody in the room had heard of it. And now it is a global feature on the Steam deck. And while I'm not going to personally take credit for making this happen, I'm kind of going to take credit for making this happen. So we talked a bit about the idea of early access on Steam itself. You know, PubG, people, Valheim, people happily buying

games that are like pre-beta to like participate in the experience of a new idea for what a game could be bugs and all and like even paying for it and just accepting that. And like so the question here with all of the bugs and problems with this thing, did it like was it worth it in like that early access sense that you get to try something new and you're getting value out of it? Or was it just like, well, this will be nice when it isn't a buggy fiasco? I am having so damn much fun. Okay. Wrong person to ask.

No one can tell. I'm having so much fun because I love that they are adding new features to it on the fly, like being able to switch between two apps, which was not available until like two nights before I wrote the review. It's great. I love that now I can do integer scaling and just have it look one-one on an external monitor instead of blowing it up and making it look possibly sharper, but weirder. That didn't exist until three days before the review. This is cool. They are fixing a bunch of the

bugs as they go, not some big ones. Like my Bluetooth earbuds don't work properly, and they haven't since day one. But like there's a lot of stuff that's been fixed. It's way smoother. The first time I followed it up, I was like, what the heck is up with this janky scrolling and animations? Mostly better. I think what they were trying to do with this review process, and by the way, sent this out to a lot of outlets. I think what they were trying to do with this review process is we know it's not done. We've got to ship the thing because otherwise our processes are going to get stale. These awesome processors that have great performance are not going to look so great in six months. And we're just going to show you, all you reviewers, that we can fix things on the fly,

that we are pushing so much into this, that we're going to be open and transparent with all your questions. And that is great for me as a reviewer, and it might be terrible for you as a buyer of the system. I kind of want to poke at the processor. there because everything I'm hearing is that many of us may just be paying to participate in that early access style thing. And then six months a year down the line, they're going to release a new product with faster processor and all the hardware like problems fixed that may present themselves. And we're all going to be like expressing a little regret.

Valve believes in iteration. They have an image, which I'm going to share later this week, that has like 40 prototypes. types of this thing sitting on a table and they're all different. They've said repeatedly that they are going to produce a successor. They don't believe in the Osborne effect these folks. They're not worried that folks are not going to buy this one because another one is coming. But yeah, I don't know if I'd put it at six months to a year, particularly given chip shortage, which is also affected the steam deck, they told me. But like, yes, there's another one of these things coming unless this is an utter flop. And that one's going to be better. And it's going to have a faster chip.

because they're going to keep working with AMD on this. And because other PC makers are going to want to build things like this too. And it would behoove a lot of people to wait unless you want to participate in the whole early access thing, which I love. And Alex sounds like you're your game for, but. I mean, I did buy the cheapest one, and I plan on immediately gutting it and putting a better storage system in it. Same here. Did you review the 64 gigabyte that has the EMMC storage that's really slow? or did you review the nice one?

They didn't send us the 64 gig. I asked for it. They didn't send us Windows to try. We don't have the dock yet. It's been delayed. I reviewed the 512-gabyte model. Loading games from SD, which you're going to have to do

on the 64-gigabyte model unless you got it and replace the SSD. Loading games is fine. Writing games to SD is kind of slow. I found transferring games had a bunch of issues. Like my SD card only got half the rated right speed. Also, you broke it. Yeah.

Also, I broke one of the things. The other ones haven't broken. Also, the day after I broke it, no, two days after I broke it, they did submit an email to me that says they fixed the SD formatting issue. So apparently I discovered a bug there or somebody did, I don't know, and it's fixed, I hope, maybe. No other cards have broken since then. You see the battery life is, eh, how is, like, playing while it's plugged in? Is it like the plug in a friendly place or is it an awful place where you're always having to do weird gymnastics to keep it plugged in while still playing?

Okay, we should ask. On this podcast, we've had the keyboard in the front versus keyboard in the back club. Let's talk about USBC port on the top versus USBC board on the bottom. Some of the rival portable gaming systems on the market said, F it, we're going to do both. And so they did. This one has it on the top. I love it on the top because I play prone in bed. I rest it on a desk.

I never have to worry about the cable, like shutting out from the bottom of the system. I think it's super easy. It charges great. I never see any throttling or any weird issues while it's plugged in. But the switch has it on the bottom. That's what a lot of people are used to. Same. Is USBC charge port on the bottom.

In fact, you said that and I was like, well, I have to go cancel my order. Never mind. All right, we got to wrap this up. Sean, your final thoughts. I guess it's like, my question here is we are very ideological while not reviewing our potential. Right? That's like a hard and fast rule. But here you are definitely buying the experience.

experience of potential. Right? Like that's kind of the promise here is like, well, this thing is going to be weird. You seem to enjoy that. Two things. One, yes, yes, absolutely. I ate it up. And I am a glutton for punishment.

I played 452 hours of Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. And I started when it was very buggy and broken in early access. That said, I personally don't entirely need to buy it on potential because I have played hours of games on it hours that many of those hours just worked once i'd launched a game gotten the controls game in there i knew it ran i just played the game they didn't crash in the middle of the game i played two hours of resident evil two here and i played two hours of control there and i played four hours of into the breach there which is a lovely indie game please buy into the breach slay the spire like i just played them and they worked and they were great and and and you know it's it's

a lot of games that do work in my library. And then I just, I don't know about the whole rest of the library yet. All right. Well, I love an ultimate gadget. It sounds like we're going to have a long relationship with this thing. Twists and turns. We'll have you back the next time. We'll just like, we'll set a software update counter.

Yeah. Every 50 software updates at the pace they're going, we'll have you back on. We'll have a check-in. Thanks so much, John. This is great. Take care. All right. We'll be back with Allison, talk with the S-22.

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That's upw-w-r-k.com. Upwork.com. We're back. Allison, welcome. Thank you. You had a big week. You reviewed the S-22 Ultra. There's some other phone stuff.

You were, you know, it's a big review. It's a huge phone. It has 400 cameras. Yeah, so many cameras. It was really cool. My arm hurts from hauling it around, obviously. No, it's a really powerful phone, and I was impressed by a lot of different aspects of it. And ultimately, it's like, this is something I talk about with Dan. It's like the ultimate evolution of like the slab style smartphone, it sort of feels like. but I still kind of my conclusion is like I don't think it's for just anybody. I don't think it's like you want the best,

biggest Android phone, like just get this one. I think the S22 plus will serve a lot of people very well. And the Ultra is kind of this like special if you really into these particular features. And, you know, credit to Dan, we talked about this. But it's sort of hard to imagine, like, what else you could put on this phone. Could you put another camera? I don't think so. There's many cameras.

Could it, you know, I'm sure there are things that will be added, like, in generations as, you know, it's always, you know, the next one's going to get the newest Snapdragon processor. Maybe the screen will get a little cooler in some way. But it feels like they're going to be just little refinements. at this point. Like, you've got the S-Pen, you've got two zoom lenses. It's just hard to imagine what else this form factor can have added on to it. Yeah. Let's talk about the...

I'm a camera nerd, so I've got to start with the cameras. You have this line that's like, well, this space zoom is still a gimmick. Right? And they've been, like, at it for a long time. It seems like Samsung's look is way toned down, right? It's still pretty oversaturated. Like, that's Samsung. but it's not as neon as it was two or three years ago.

But I think all these phones just kind of look like each other now. Like they've all just landed right in the middle. Whereas like maybe three years ago, I think an iPhone and a Samsung phone and a Pixel all looked remarkably different. That's just like my, I didn't review this phone. Is that kind of what you were feeling too? Because as I was reading the camera part of your review, I was like, so it takes good pictures, right? Like, it's hard to be like it has a Samsung look and I can evaluate the look. Right.

I sort of feel like it's giving a point where really like camera cameras are is like they're, they're all going to take really good photos. And there are things you can do if you are not like I think there's still a little bit of a Samsung kind of like, wow, that sky is really blue. And I've never, never seen that color in real life. You can you can mess with that. if you want to. But at the end of the day, they're all really capable,

especially at that like $1,000 level. And the refinements, like I was really impressed by the portrait mode refinements, which they talk about are just, are pretty much AI enabled. And it's just able to identify like very fine details on a subject better. So they were saying like down to the level of. of a single strand of hair, which in the briefing, we were kind of like, sure, that sounds great. But it's real.

Like, they really have done a very good job with that. And you can look side by side at what it was doing previously. And you have to look very closely. So the differences are subtle, but they make an impact that it just looks more convincing. and I'm more likely to take the phone out. I'm like, yeah, I will take a portrait mode photo in this moment. It's not going to look super unrealistic and fake. Yeah, that's when you know.

I always look at my camera when I see what, because on iOS anyway, it'll tell you how many photos are portrait mode. And I'm like, oh, that number has been going up. Yeah. Right? And like I think Apple got there maybe last year or the year before. It feels like Samsung got there this year. Yeah, and my test is like, is this photo good enough to go on the grandparents' digital photo frame?

The answer is like literally any photo of it. I was going to say, that's a pretty low bar, is it not? It's really, it's my own. I have high standards for what goes on the frame, and they're like, no, we just need more content. Yeah, for me, I was like, these are frameworthy. That's good. On the portion mode, how's the drop off over distance? Does it still sort of look like cutouty?

They've cut out the hair nicely now, but is it still just like an even layer of blur? Or does it do the thing where it gets blurrier, the further back in the distance it goes? I think the telephoto lens, it does a better job. And I think it's just easier to make it look convincing. The wide angle still has that kind of like. the foreground is not blurred where it should be, and you do get that kind of like, here's a little cardboard cut out in a sea of like blurriness. Yeah, the telephoto, which I don't personally, like,

I would personally like to shoot with the wide more, but I found myself just picking the telephoto because it looks so much better. So it's still not 100%, but it's definitely up there with like the most convincing Portrait Mode photos I've seen. The other camera thing I wanted to ask about is this new computed raw stuff. And there's like a separate app and you got to use the Galaxy Store. Can you talk to through what's going on there? They even made a separate lightroom.

Yeah, lightroom for Samsung. I did not know that existed. Yeah, so this feature is called Expert Raw. And it's essentially a, instead of a single frame traditional raw file, like you snap the shutter, you get one frame, one exposure. This is compiling information from multiple frames. So you get the benefits of computational photography, which is kind of the whole point of taking a picture with a smartphone. It's like, it can do all this awesome stuff. Right, right. So when, you know, previously, like you could shoot raw, like traditional raw on, on this phone or like most smartphones.

but it's sort of pointless because just use the JPEG like it has more information. So this makes this makes raw not pointless on a phone. Something Apple's been doing a little bit and one plus I want to say introduced it to. But Samsung's version is called ExpertRaw. You have to download it's only on the ultra model. You have to download the ExpertRaw app from the Galaxy Store. And then, so you use the camera app that way, and then you get a raw file. It's a typical DMG file.

So you can take it to like Snapsid or you can export it and edit on your computer. But the shortcut in the expert raw app is to lightroom, like take it directly to lightroom, but it's Samsung lightroom from the Galaxy store. That is just such an instinctually Samsung thing. do. I didn't even know. I'm just still blown away that Samsung has a lightroom. Is it just lightroom mobile, but it's just in their store? Yeah, yeah. It's like it's your Adobe login and everything. It's like it is the lightroom map. It just sets like Samsung. People had meetings. Every time I hear about this, I'm like,

there were meetings, right? Like lots of highly paid Adobe and Samsung people got together and they're like, we didn't need a cross-marketing deal. And it's a galaxy store. And the engineers had to be like, whether this is the Galaxy store, support, same APIs as a place. Like, they had to do all this. And at the end, it's like, it's Lightroom. It's the same app as it was. Right. They just added a logo.

Just, poop. We did it. Nailed it. We got it. In the fine print, you, as a Galaxy S-22 Ultra owner, get two months free of the Lightroom trial through the Samsung for Lightroom. but after that you have to pay for an Adobe license just like everybody else. They could have just used a coupon. What are you doing? Enter this code at checkout.

They got to get you in the Galaxy store. That's what's underneath all this. This was all like just go use. Because it's on the Galaxy store, not on the Play Store, right? Right. Speaking of Samsung stuff, how are the ads in the interface? This is a $1,200 phone. And for years now, Samsung has been throwing rediscovered.

ridiculous ads into core pieces of software. It seems like they've started to learn their lesson. Have they learned it completely? Not completely. It is a little better. I think you pointed out the ads in the weather app, which is like in last year's phones. And once you see them and you know you're there, it feels kind of icky. You're like, don't make me look at an ad.

I'm just checking the weather. Those are gone. So I'm thrilled with that. But I did get a pop-up or a notification at some point that I could pre-order the S-22 and get some Samsung credit. On the S-22? On the S-22 ultra, yeah. That's the end state of all ad targeting.

It's like, you've already bought something? Would you like to see an ad for it? It's like no matter how much technology you build. It always result. That's the result. Yep. Okay. One camera question.

So Samsung has been kind of the leader of the, we're going to put a big sensor in it and pixel bin it. Right. And that's compared to Apple, which is like using this standard sensor compared to Google is moving in that direction now too. But have they figured it out? Right. Because now they're doing all this raw stuff. And you can get the full file, the full 108 megapixel image. They're like using more of the capabilities there.

But it is just a very different approach. right and this is like samsung's approach yeah and i initially i got pretty excited when they talked about this in the briefing they call it adaptive pixel technology where it's it's doing some of the pixel binning and they talk about it kind of in conjunction with with nightography oh god no yeah i know i'm hoping we could avoid that i asked this question i didn't know it would go here now we're we're going to come back around there it is there it is So the photography you do at night. Or nightography.

Right. Love some nightography. When you take a picture of your kids, it's called kiddography. This is the future of language. Portraitography. People's photography. Everything is o'grapher. Yeah.

Yeah. So I got kind of excited and I asked for a little clarification and it's only do it. The difference between last year's model is a lot of, limited to some specific situations. So you can now, on both the standard S-22s and the ultra, you can take a full high-resolution image with night mode, sort of like pixel bending applied, which you couldn't do before. And it's something you can't trigger manually. It has to be actually really super dark, which is sort of annoying. because I was like standing in a Starbucks and trying to take a picture of something.

I was like, where's night mode? But it's up to the phone. So you had to go to the Starbucks and be like, please turn off the lights? Yeah, I was like, if you could just turn the lights off for me, that would be great. And they told me to leave. Yeah. So it works. It's good, but it's sort of like I now have a 108 megapixel image of my bar cart.

in the middle of the night. And to see, the use case is a little more limited than I was hoping. I was like, maybe this will be a really cool sort of. Where's like the cutoff, like outside well-lit parking lot? I think it would depend. It's, it has to be very dark. Like I had a little kind of like table lamp on in the living room. And that was too much light for.

So you have to like increase the creep factor. Yeah. Yeah. This is the emotional element of nightography. It's creeping around. They're just trying to get you into the headspace of like lurking around in the night. Taking photos. To experience true nightography.

Are you Batman? They're bidding the pixels. They're making choices for you, but whether or not to turn on nightography. They're offering all this extra raw stuff. They're, you know, they're turning on the AI when you zoom in on stuff. They're like, they're cutting out human hairs, like all of this stuff. Samsung has always offered a million things in their cameras. And 90% of the time, I'm like, these things seem cool, but I'm annoyed because I don't

trust you to just take a picture. It seems like you could just trust this thing to like take a really good picture. Yeah. There's definitely more times when I just feel like, I'm, taking the phone out to take a picture and I'm okay with it. I'm not sort of bracing myself for like, well, this is going to look kind of crummy. What's Samsung going to do to reality? Let's find out. Yeah. I was really impressed by the, it's not new. It's new to me, but the 10 times Zoom, I was sort of like, oh, it's, it's just going to be terrible. But it's really actually pretty good.

And even 30 times, like digital Zoom and whatever it's doing is okay. So definitely with the telephoto, I'm more like, oh, I could actually use this and like trust it. And I would put that on Instagram or whatever and not be super embarrassed about it. All right. We started talking about the software a little bit immediately in the context of ads, which I feel like tells you a lot about where Samsung is with One UI. But it's, you have this like paragraph. here that's like you you have to imagine things that you can't

do with this phone and they can probably do them because the software has so many features now. Is it overwhelming? Have they made one UI every time I've used it I'm like, wow, every surface of this interface is festooned with options. Yeah.

And all of them are designed to make you like live the galaxy lifestyle. Get a little hat. Yeah. Yeah. A little sweater. Right. Have they kind of like brought that into focus? It is like option overload for me. And I think that's just something that maybe the kind of person who's really interested, who had a note and who's really interested in the ultra is sort of prepared for it and okay with.

I think it's one of those things that makes me kind of steer like most people to the S-22 plus. just as an example, like if you're trying to write a note in handwriting mode and convert it to text, there's like four different ways you can do that. Like you can scribble it and then circle it and convert it or you can go to the keyboard and put the keyboard in handwriting mode and convert it that way or, you know, it's sort of like, I and I'm not sure everybody would dive into every option you can kind of exist on the surface level and just you know pull the pen out and write a note and it's not going to bother you with a lot of intense choices but if you start digging in it's sort of like wow there's a lot of stuff here

all right you give it a nine it's a great phone I kind of feel you on the like this is the end of history for slab phones. We're done. Right. Like we're obviously going to see further iterations, like you said, more chips will come out. But I buy it. It's a great phone. Let's talk about where the action is, which is you also covered Dishes and

Innings Call this week. A real story. Whatever. Phones, you know what you need to make a phone work? You need a network. Just to remind everybody, America's supposed to have four wireless networks. When T-Mobile bots sprint, the Trump administration just concocted this plan whereby we would still have four wireless networks.

And Dish O'Ran with it. You did it. That's a fresh cast, everybody. Good night. It's been great, Allison. You've been wonderful. Yeah, Dish is going to concoct a fourth wireless network out of nothing. They are supposed to, it's like 20% coverage across the country, 25% by June of this year,

which is but four months away. Because what you want out of your cell phone is for it to have signal 25% of the time. You're like, I can go to Las Vegas in Baltimore. This works great. It's a true competitor. But they've basically got part of Vegas. Allison, you covered the earnings call. CEO said some stuff.

What is up with dishes open radio access network? That's O-Ran. It's a technology bet that no one has ever made work. What's going on with this thing? So they've been testing it in pilot in Vegas. It's been in this beta for friends and family since November, I think. And their update on the earnings call was, it works. But the quote from Ergen was, where it works, it works pretty well or something like that.

It was really enthusiastic. Yeah, we're like, hold on. So tell us about the where it doesn't work part. And, you know, he kind of goes into, they have some setbacks. They're behind schedule. They kind of missed every deadline that they set for themselves in 2021. But they're still like, yep, we're on target for June. We're going to light up 25 major metro.

areas. It's great. Everything's going great. Is there like a legal, like, classification for major metro area? Or can they just, like, choose anywhere and say that's a major? It's a tiny town called Major. They just found out of every state. Yeah. Every Springfield in every state. His other quote, the other quote from Dish CEO, Charlie Ergan. Who's like a remarkably candid? Like, he's like a.

old school cowboy and CEO. He's like, we have a lot of work to do to make the network work everywhere. Yeah. So they have this bet, right, on Oren. So, like, this is the thing that we should love, which is the idea that you can move a lot of the network infrastructure to cloud providers, like AWS. They love to say AWS is involved this network whenever they talk about it. It's like a magic wand. It just fixes everything.

Yeah. Don't look behind the AWS curtain for our non-existent network. We're torturing our friends and family in Las Vegas. But the idea is right now, you know, an 18th year of Verizon basically has to buy all of its radio equipment from one vendor. And that vendor will, like, integrated across the network or they will outsource it to the company has actually run the towers. The biggest tower company in America, by the way, is called Tower Co. It's a very out of those. So the idea here is that it's an open system.

So you can buy parts from all kinds of vendors and run it all in the cloud. Great. No one has ever made this work. I was just on a panel with the chairwoman of the, the FCC, Jessica Rosen-Worsel. And she was like, we're really starting to look at this O-RAN thing. Really good to hear. I was like, aren't you?

Six months before. That's exciting. Yeah. So I'm very curious about all this. We're supposed to have four carriers. Well, there's like Mobile World Congress. O-Ran is going to be there. They're doing a keynote.

We need it here. Mobile World Congress is in Barcelona. well it's in the cloud man it can just yeah it's just very funny this is what I mean like there was a explicit bet made they're like we're so excited about this this is going to let them spin up a viable

fourth network that will compete with 18T Verizon and now massive T-Mobile yeah and it's because of O-Ran and AWS they're going to do it right away and like now they're like well it kind of works real confidence there ever they mentioned AWS in relationship to this network.

I think about one time, disclosure, my wife works for metadata, but she asked me how do they paint the lines on the football fields? And I didn't know. So I just said they use computers. We've been fighting about it ever since. Like,

oh, it's computers, that's it. I just feel like they're just saying AWS is like, oh yeah, it's just, you know, computers.

The network will exist. It's amazing. We'll see if it ever happens. Also, I don't know if you guys saw this map today, of T-Mobile's V-G footprint. It's amazing. So if you look at their coverage map.

It's pink and yellow. It's all pink, except literally the entire state of Nebraska is not pink. Like the shape of Nebraska is not pink. And it's because like some random company owns the mid-band spectrum in Nebraska. It's very good. Like the state of U.S. networks is just out of control, stupid. It's like, like the FAA is like, I don't know, man. planes might fall out of the sky.

Team Mobile's like, we forgot Nebraska. It's fine. You just drive up north or you can get around it. Let's bet the farm on this technology that we forgot to invent. It's going to be great. In the end, it's good. Oran is the kind of technology that we should love. Yes.

Except that there's nothing to love. That there's nothing to O'Ran with. Anyway. I'm going to keep going with that. I'm so sorry. You are not. That was my last time on the verge. CAST, thank you.

I had a great time. It was a good run. Oh, ran yourself out of here. All right, we'll be back a little lightning round. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing

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What a surprise. Apple will reportedly debut an M2 chip in four new max this year. What do you think, Alex? Yes, they have to. Why do they have to?

Because... Is anyone catching up to them? Because what comes after M1 max? Is it going to be just the M1 max with another X? No, I'm saying the M1 is so far ahead. That's true.

That's true. It's so far ahead. Do nothing. Like Intel's like, we have a chip that will outperform the M1 Max, and it's like also it will let your house on fire. Yeah. But the thing is also, they are still kind of, I mean, they are competing with Intel. They are competing with AMD. They can't afford to give them any space because they are such a new competitor in this space.

They have to keep, like, rubbing it in. If they don't rub it in, then, like, Intel and AMD will smell weakness. And then we'll be just right back to an Intel or AMD chip in these computers. Wow. No. I don't think it's that dire. But I think, like, the expected cadence is there from kind of everybody in the processor industry. And so if you're not, like, keeping with that cadence, if you're not constantly innovating and moving at that, like, yearly cadence, what are you doing?

Like, are you wasting our time here? And for Apple, it's also, like, how else are they going to, like, everybody's kind of, you know, the sales cycle for laptops is around the processors. How do you get people to upgrade? Yeah. Put another an M2. Well, I think it's going to be interesting when they have an M2

and then they do the Pro Max and they have M1 Max isn't it? Yeah, I'm really like... Doing the numbers on these chips I think was a mistake. Yeah, 100%. And I think...

They should have gone with lakes. Yeah. Like just lake guidelines. No, wizards. They should have gone with wizards. D&D character classes. So many people tweeted at me that were like,

it's alphabetical, the Intel thing. I was like, I know it's alphabetical. They still think of Druid for D. Druid is way cooler than Celestials. But yeah, yeah, no, they, like, I think it's going to be really interesting to see when that M2 comes because Apple likes to tell a story when they do their presentations, right? They, and an absolute distraction is to be like, here is our new refreshed Mac Pro,

finally on our new arm-based chips, the M1 Max Pro. And then also we have a new M2 chip over here. Yeah, I think it's weird. I think the numbers here... But the messaging is going to mess them up really badly. And I think the numbers are fine on the phones because they just have a new one every year. And like the old phone or the cheaper phone... And we don't really...

I mean, Vergecast cares. But the vast majority of people don't really notice those numbers on a phone the way they will on a laptop. Well, see, I think this is actually what we'll find out. Yeah, like, presumably they knew when they named it M1 that they would have... The M2 was coming. They bought this problem, you know? But I think it's interesting. I'm imagining somebody.

to get into the meeting, just be like, wait, numbers go up. Let me tell you about ordinal math, everybody. No, they made a horrible mistake. Product strategy, all the designers are like, oh, no, what do we do? It's too late. So we'll see.

I just think it's going to be weird when the most expensive ones have ones and the cheaper ones have twos. It's going to be weird. It could be weird in like two weeks. We could be seeing it as soon as March because there's a rumored event in March. Oh, boy. We'll probably see a new Mac Mini with the M1 Max Pro in it, but everybody's saying, oh,

there'll be a MacBook Air. Well, that would have to be in presumably an M2 MacBook Air. So we'll see. It's going to be fun. All right. And confusing. Spotify has the car thing, which honestly, I think we have tried to kill several times as a publication. I actually reviewed it once, and she was like, what is this garbage?

Spotify has a car. It's called the car thing. I'm not just saying Spotify has a car thing. I'm saying they have a product called car thing. It's $90. It's not for sale to everyone. It is a screen and a knob that you mount in your car. It connects to your phone.

It is the most insane, like, ox adapter of all time. Yeah. So it plays music from your phone over Bluetooth and then plugs into your car. I mean, that's... And you can, like, spin the wheel. That seems cool. That seems cool. Couldn't you just go by a head unit?

and install a head. Couldn't you just get a good car? I feel like you can get an inexpensive head unit for a little bit more. Were you like a car stereo girl in Texas? Did you have like the big speakers? We're not going to talk about my ass. I know you. I see you. Someone had a Honda Civic that was bumping.

Mitsubishi a clips, you know? Like just my friend had one. He had the big subs. Oh my God, it was so good. But like, it's so easy to install. I mean, it's easy to install a head unit. It used to be. I guess if you have a car that's old enough where you, like, would need this thing,

you probably have a car that's old enough to take a standard in car stereo and not have your heating and cooling integrated into the screen. But it won't be $90. That's true. This thing is so unwieldy. I don't know why they've just insisted on, like, making it. Just block an AC vent for music. You know, we're saying the Steam Deck is like,

like an ultimate gadget. This is like the opposite of an ultimate gadget. It's like, just makes me angry. Wouldn't it, wouldn't they get stolen? Do you, do you leave it there all the time? Yeah, no, it's not going to get stolen. It looks like candy for someone. I mean, that's why it's $90.

So you just buy a new one. You just buy a new one. Yeah, you just keep a stash in the back of your car where you could have really cool subs. And, and you're fine. No, when you go through the checkout process, you know, there's like the standard, like, do you want to buy the warranty? then the warranty and clue is replacing the window that people smash to get it. So it's like a whole package deal.

Yeah. Joe Rogan comes to your house and fixes your car windows. So integrated Spotify experience. My first car was my sister's Honda Accord that she had. Oh, yeah. It's a good car. To put speakers in. The gear shift had a sport mode that really put that 90 horsepower four cylinder in the next level.

But she lived in Chicago. So when I inherited it in Wisconsin, it had lived on the south side of Chicago. And she, the car radio got stolen so often. And she was embarrassed about it. So she kept, like, having various people just, like, replace the car radio with whatever jank and then it would get stolen again. It's just a real thing. So the time I got it, there was just a hole in the dashboard where there was just a radio.

She's kind of, like, lying about because all the math. It was great. No, you put a computer speaker with a CD player. Truly loved that car. Oh, that's so nice. My friend's called it the bullet. Yes. Anyhow.

Later, I got a different car. Sony finally reveals the PlayStation VR2's design. What do you think, Dieter? It looks exactly like I thought it would look. Yeah. It looks good. I'm hopeful that this will have just a cable sticking out of it instead of the original PlayStation VR,

which was just like, it was like playing Cat's Cradle with your PlayStation, just like all the little extra boxes and cables and lines that you had to plug in to make the thing work. This looks much more elegant. Disclosure might Signific another works for You did it

You did it when you just mentioned her There wasn't even a conflict You're like my wife who exists Disclosure It was good It's our brand Disclosure's our brand Being careful

This Tesla story is out of control So the timeline here Is that Back in the day Elon tweeted Should I sell my stock And then he sold the stock Yeah And it was obvious

That he was always going to sell the stock So it was like he's joking And the SEC was bad And the SEC was bad And then Elon filed a complaint with a judge that said the SEC, because they, you know, for the, for many previous scandals, including the one where he was like, funding secured, I'm taking Tesla private.

Yeah. Well, didn't he also say if it hits 420? I'm going to. Yeah, but funding secured was, these are the words. Yeah. And then the SEC was like, you have a settlement. You can't tweet. You need a, like, a monitor of your tweets.

You have to be off the, like, it was bad. Yeah. So then the SEC is like enforcing this. He's complained to a judge. The FCC is stifling his free speech. then he accused the SEC of leaking information, and then it turns out the information that leaked is that the SEC is now investigating Elon and his brother Kimball for insider trading. Yikes. It's like, oh, that's what was going on.

I see now. Understood. Yeah. It's crazy. Elon is great. Everyone likes the cars. The rockets land themselves. It's all very impressive.

The man should stop tweeting. Yeah. Just never tweet. Like, just delete. I learned on decoder, by the way. I had, um, Tiny Evans, who's a law professor. And we were talking about Dow's and like crypto organizations and like, you need a contract. And she's like, well, you could just look at the discord logs and the judge could infer a contract.

And I was like, that seems bad. That seems really bad. And then she was like, oh yeah. I mean, they've done it already with tweets. And so like, we should all stop tweeting. Like, you don't know what kind of deal you're making on Twitter. I have signed so many contracts on X. It's like, I got to get off the internet right now.

If I agree to write a story on Slack, is that a contractually obligated now? Tell it to the judge, sister. That's it. We're over. We've got some stories. We got a big feature about the early days of content moderation at Pornhub, which I encourage you to read. It's got some great art. By the way, we won a National Magazine Award yesterday for our Verge 10 illustration. We were nominated for another one. That is

we just hired a killer new art director. Her name is Kristen Radke. She's wonderful. Now she's set the standard. She's been here for like 25 minutes. She won two National Magazine. She got nominated for two and she got one one. I have won none since I got here.

I'm feeling really bad. You made the O-Rand joke though, so that's a real life. My awards in the mail. Anyway, the art on the porn hub story is great. And then I got to tell you the, you know, we're like diligent journal. It may have surmised from this experience every week. We are diligent and rigorous journalists. Yes.

So we go to Pornhub for comment, and they don't have real spokespeople. They have like anonymous. So a person identified only as Ian goes back and forth with our editors for 20 emails. Yep. And it's like, I will only comment if you can guarantee the piece will be unbiased. And we're like, well, yes, but can you just tell us who you are? Guarantee. And so we publish this in the sidebar because, you know, we're very transparent, as Deeter says.

Disclosure is a brand. And all these other reporters like, oh, yeah, that definitely always happens. One of the strangest companies ever. Read that story. Truth Social launched. That's Trump's Twitter clone. I like that you assumed everybody knew what Truth Social was. We're going to have to know.

We are. It's like one of those things. Casey wrote about it. McKenna wrote about it. It is pretty buggy and hard to use. It already came pre-populated with Q&N accounts, which is very funny. Incredible. So we'll see.

Competition is good. This competition might be a little shakier the most. But we've got a lot of coverage of it on the site because we're heading into an election cycle and the man is going to start tweeting again. I do really love the truthing again. The business decision to be like Twitter, the notoriously most successful of social media networks. That's what I want to compete with. That is McKenna's point, actually. You should read that piece.

It's really good. McKenna's piece and Casey's piece are actually in conversation with each other. Casey's is like, it won't survive. it's hype, the audience is inherently limited, it's also buggy as hell, and Twitter's a bad business. McKenna's piece is like, it doesn't matter because it is a broadcast mechanism for one dude. That's true. Yeah.

And so that's like, we'll see how it goes. And then lastly, I'm Carton, Frank went to Disneyland. That's it. He filed me over 3,000 words at 11 o'clock at night. And I was like, I'm not, I'm doing this at 6 o'clock in the morning. It's 6,000. he went to the intergalactic star cruiser. Yeah, which is, it seems like more like a video game than a hotel.

It's like $6,000 to stay there. You pay $6,000 to LARP Star Wars. It sounds incredible. I'd probably do it if paid enough. Did you all have the like the living history thing in your hometown? Like we had Colonial Williamsburg, I think. And the same awkwardness you felt then, you will presumably feel. Yeah, where everyone is like your character from like the, yeah, but it's lightsaber.

But cool lightsabers. They're real lightsabers. Yeah. You just can't escape. it. All right. We got to wrap it up. We are way over. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Dieters at Backlon. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Sean will happily talk to you about the steamback. You can tweet at him. He's at Starfire 2258, which is perfect and has been for over a decade. And Allison is Allison Joe won. This is great. We'll see you next week on the Vergecast.

Rock and roll.