The Vergecast - Surface Duo hands on / Amazon's Halo fitness tracker / Epic vs Apple: the latest

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

Wired's Lauren Goode returns to the show to discuss Microsoft's soon-to-be released Surface Duo, Amazon's new fitness tracker, and an update on Apple's battle with Epic over the App Store.  Stories this week: FDA authorizes Abbott’s fast $5 COVID-19 test FDA authorizes convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19  Tracking COVID-19 through symptom monitoring will be harder when flu season starts Facebook chose not to act on militia complaints before Kenosha shooting Facebook takes down ‘call to arms’ event after two shot dead in Kenosha  Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman interview Amazon announced Halo, a fitness band and app that scans your body and voice Amazon Look review (2017) Fitbit’s new Sense smartwatch can take your skin’s temperature to help you manage stress Microsoft Flight Simulator players are flying into Hurricane Laura Fall Guys is the feel-good game of the summer Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 2 doesn’t have a release date, but you can already watch this review This could be the first real picture of the Pixel 5 Sony Xperia 5 II leak reveals a new 120Hz display and a headphone jack The Asus Zenfone 7 adds a third lens to its neat flipping camera LG’s swiveling ‘Wing’ phone allegedly revealed in video leak TikTok sues Trump administration over US ban Kevin Mayer quits as TikTok CEO due to ongoing political turmoil Walmart says it’s partnering with Microsoft on a TikTok deal Epic judge will protect Unreal Engine — but not Fortnite Why Epic can’t afford to lose the Unreal Engine in its legal fight with Apple Read the emails between Epic and Apple that led to Fortnite’s App Store ban Apple is holding the Unreal Engine hostage, Epic says in new motion Epic confirms Fortnite’s new season won’t be on iPhone, iPad, or Mac Fortnite is splitting into two different games because of Epic and Apple’s fight Apple apologizes to WordPress, won’t force the free app to add purchases after all Fortnite on iOS already feels empty and dated  Apple’s move to make advertising harder on iOS 14 is part of a trend Announcing the Get Wired podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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. This week on the Vergecast, our friend Lauren Good returns from Wired. We talk about the Surface Duo. We talk about new Amazon Halo Fitness Tracker.

We talk about TikTok, Apple versus Epic. The whole thing. It's coming up now on the Vergecast. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Flagship Podcast Empire. See if I just say it's the flagship of they can't get in trouble. You see what I'm doing here? It's very clever.

No. Hi, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Dieter Bone is here. I'm your antagonist, I guess. That's great. That's what you want on a show with some spice. We had a special guest today.

Lauren Good is here. Welcome, Lauren. Hi, I guess that makes me your neutral party. You're meeting. Yes, that's what we want. Notable Verge trader, Lauren Good is here. Welcome. Lauren is it wired now?

You got a new show. We've got to talk about that. There's all kinds of tech news to talk about. But I always start with two things. Dieter, you did this last week. I did. Yeah. I think I kept the count correct, actually.

Who knows? Forever ago, 24 weeks, according to the rundown here, Donald Trump held up a flowchart, well, Dr. Deborah Brooks held up a flowchart with Donald Trump looking on a flow chart of when a website from Google, I think 45,000 Google engineers are going to work on this website. You would log into it. You would do a symptom checker. You would drive through a test. Test results would come back on a, it doesn't exist. Verily is trying, you know, the division of alphabet that isn't, you know what I'm saying. It's just still very small. No national. testing strategy in place. That is a big piece of the COVID puzzle. Still waiting for that, but there is some other COVID news on the site. We always start by just a quick rundown. The FDA is authorized a fast $5 COVID-19 test from Abbott Labs. We've got a great piece on that that actually details how it works. Check that on the site. FTA is also, this is a little bit more controversial, authorized convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19. Lots of questions about pressure being put on the FDA right now. But all that's on the site. Flu season about to start. We got a big story on the site about flu season overlapping with COVID-19 and symptom

monitoring and testing. All of that is going to be more challenging when the flu is also in season that's coming up. And then the other big story in the world that we constantly talk about and checking on is obviously the movement for racial justice in this country. I will just admit, I am very biased. I was just saying to Lauren before it began, I can barely look at the current set of news about this in Kenosha, Wisconsin, because I am from Racine, Wisconsin. And I grew up just miles away from where this is happening in Kenosha. That's where my mom works. But there's obviously big protests in Kenosha.

Police shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times. Then there was another shooting. Two protesters died. Our piece of the puzzle here is that Facebook had complaints about groups, events on Facebook, possibly inciting some of this violence. They chose not to take them down. And then it took them down, which is about a class. classic of a Facebook pattern as exists. We're just going to keep living in that pattern for a long time. But I always want to start the show by pointing out those are the two big stories in the world.

Those are the stories that will change the world after 2020. It's all over the site. We're covering it very deeply. We care about it a lot. There's a lot of tech news talk about and we hear from the audience constantly that people need to break. And quite frankly, with this one, I kind of do too. So I'm excited to talk to Dieter and Lorre about tech news. One more plug before I begin. Casey and I talk to Jeremy Stoffman, this is a lot of of Yelp on the interview podcast, about antitrust, about competing. Check that out. It was a really good one. Jeremy hasn't talked to a lot of people since all of this began. So go listen to that one. We pushed him pretty hard. One thing I'll call out, I'm actually interested to see what you two think of this. Like, Yelp is to small businesses as Google is to Yelp. Yeah. And that's just a tough

place for Jeremy to be. Well, I worry that he's spicy, too spicy, and that biases his reviews towards the restaurants, because he was very spicy on that podcast. Yeah, I mean, if you're a small business owner, like Yelp is some giant of search that you have no influence over. And if you're Yelp, Google is some giant of search that you have no influence over. It's the same problem all the way down. So we got into that. It was very interesting. I think kind of understanding this antitrust moment requires talking to kind of everyone at every level of the stack.

And Yelp is like right in the middle of it. So check it out. That was the interview episode this past week. All right. Let's talk about some tech news. I want to talk about the, I want to start with this Amazon Halo. Oh, God. I mean, there's a lot to talk about.

I want to talk about flight simulator. Dieter has a Surface duo that he's only a lot of talk about the hardware with right now, I think. There's all kinds of stuff. But the Amazon Halo seems very, Dieter's just right, go ahead. I'm so excited. Okay, we're going to play a game. I'm going to describe a fitness gadget. And Lauren and Nelai, you're going to either, like, you're going to react.

And your reactions are going to start in one place and they're going to end in another place. Okay, so step one. It is a fitness band that does not have a screen and has the usual array of sensors, accelerometer, barometer, heart rate monitor, and also a temperature sensor. Fitbit. That's what came to mind. I don't know you said to react. So I'm thinking like the earliest versions of Fitbit.

But without a screen. So it's like a super boring Fitbit, right? Right, right. Like an old Fitbit. Like a charge. What was it called? Yeah, like a force or something like that. Yeah.

They work with the American Heart Association so that they don't just count your steps. they give you an abstracted activity score that pays attention to how intense your workout is. But actually, you have to manually enter your workouts because it can only automatically track running and walking. And if you sit for more than eight hours, it starts deducting your score. And they only give you your activity ring for the entire week so that if you take a rest day, you don't feel like you're being punished by your Apple Watch. Okay. Okay, so like a less intense version of Apple Watch. Yeah.

Okay. It tracks your sleep. And if it detects your sleep is bad, it will give you cute little recommendations in the form of these things called labs, where it suggests that you change your habits in order to sleep better. Like, quit drinking at night or kick your cat out of the room. Like, I need a fitness band to tell me that. Yeah, like, how does it know? I feel like you could just tell anyone in America, I'd be like, stop drinking so much at night. It would work right now.

You should sleep better during this pandemic. If that were the end, we would just, the story would be, Amity. Amazon made a fitness band. They just made the thing that Amazon does, which they just made a cheap version of the thing that everybody else has so that Amazon has one. The end, hooray. Next up, there's a feature called Body.

You take your smartphone and you prop it up on your dresser, and then you get down into your underwear, and then you stand in front of your smartphone whilst it takes pictures of you in your underwear, all four sides. And then those pictures of you are uploaded to AWS, Amazon's Cloud, and Amazon does some. calculations on them to take those pictures and turn them into a direct 3D model of your body.

And then it uses machine learning on that 3D model based on extensive knowledge of people with a similar height and build as you to calculate your body fat percentage in such a way that they say it's more accurate than your standard like smart scale that uses the, you know, electricity between your heels or whatever. And it approaches the accuracy of like stuff you can get in a full on hospital or full-on, like, you know, gym or something where you, like, go weigh yourself underwater or whatever. So this is creepy, and I probably should have a better reaction than this is creepy. But there is a timeline for this, right? If you go back just a few years, there was a company called Naked Labs that was doing, you know, consumer-facing 3D body scans that I wrote about for Wired. And I think the year prior

to that in 2017, Amazon actually had acquired a company called Body Labs that TechCrunch wrote about that was doing this kind of 3D body scanning. And then you guys also very clearly remember, because I think I wrote about this for The Verge, that Amazon did the echo look. Yes, that's the thing that I thought of. Yes, which took a photo of you in your clothing, not naked, although I suppose you could have stood in front of it,

naked if you wanted to. It would have been like, wear some clothes. Right. Nelai, do you remember this? I actually brought it to the New York office and had you stand in front of it. And yeah, and like take a photo of your different outfits. Did it recommend Nelai wear something other

than black, wasn't that its recommendation? Add some color. It was just my mom, which has made a phone call to my mom. My mom was like, when you wear some colors? I think that you were wearing a tie that day. Is that even possible? No, it used to wear ties a lot. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so we'll have to go back and read this review on the verge.com. Maybe we'll put it in the show notes for the podcast. But it seems inevitable. I guess it's a long way of saying it seems inevitable that at some point Amazon was going to do something increasingly creepy with this technology. Well, so the look failed, right? It didn't go off. Like, nobody bought one.

Like, the return on the investment of put a camera in your bedroom and let Amazon take photos of you and tell you what clothes. Like, no one thought that was a good deal. I feel like it's a substantially worse deal to be like, take semi-naked photos of yourself, and then Amazon will tell you you're fat. Like, I'm not, why would you pay money for that experience? So the good news is the images don't stay on Amazon servers. They get deleted within 12 hours. Is that good news? That's just some news.

It's some news. It's better news than if they kept them, right? But I haven't gotten to the part that is a complete freak out for me, which is once you have your 3D scan of your body, and you can look all around and see the whole thing, there is a slider, a little, you know, slider thing on the screen. And you can slide your finger up and down on the slider, and it will add to or reduce the amount of body fat on the 3D representation of your body to show you what you would look like if you have. gained more body fat or lost body fat? I mean, but then can I use that in a series of online avatars and profiles? That would be valuable. Like, what are you supposed to infer from that?

It's supposed to incentivize you to, like, work out. You could see what you would look like if you lost some weight or you'd see if you looked like if you bulked. And maybe you, you like, save a series of them over time so you can see your, you know, your before and you're after or something is the idea. I think there's an argument to be made that maybe in 2019 this would be received very differently, but in the context of this massive pandemic that we're living through right now, people's idea of, like, health and particularly this idea that, like, you should just

take control of your health and the consumerization of health care. And it's, it's all your fault if something goes wrong is, is like increasingly sort of out of step with what we actually need to address in health right now. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, again, my, maybe I just like an old guy, My sense of when or why anyone should send unclothed pictures of themselves to a corporation is just maybe a little bit more puritanical than the world. I'm still going with never. Like, that's just never the value of that, right? Like, I mean, I can see why you would build tools like this to give people more control.

But what do we know about all these fitness trackers? They all need to provide some massive amount of value over the Apple Watch in order to break in. Right. And like, so if this is the set of value that, if this is a set of things that Amazon thinks is more valuable than watch, it's like, it's cheap, it's a little bit more gentle and it has this other feature, I would still tell most people with an iPhone to buy an Apple watch. The place where my mind immediately went and where a bunch of people in my mentions are, have gone is people with a body dysmorphic disorder or people might have anorexia or some other self-image issue. the idea that you could like obsessively look at a 3D scan of your body and like reduce the amount of body fat on it digitally

and just like have that be part of your exercise app or your fitness app is pretty troubling to me. I asked Amazon about this and they said that there's some safeguards in place. It won't show dangerously low levels of body fat on the scans. It's not available to anybody that's under 18 years of age. and if you do like have low level of body fat in your scan or whatever, they do start popping up warnings about the health implications of not having enough body fat.

Nevertheless, it seems like that's like, that's the sort of thing that I just, I don't know, it's troubling. There are lots of examples of these like fitness tracking apps and fitness trackers getting misused by people who like have body issues. Yeah, I think those are really, those are very, very valid concerns. But I think the thing I'm trying to get my head around is that those are not necessarily new concerns either. Because as I mentioned, there have been body-skinned technologies available to consumers prior to this. And Liz Lapato from The Verge has actually done some really excellent reporting to on how these consumer wearables could contribute to body dysmorphia problems. But I think my question is still around like the timing of it. Like, why now?

And if Amazon was going to be Offer some real value like I would love to see them include an SPO2 sensor That's something that we really haven't seen done very well in a consumer wearable yet and like that's something that would actually be really valuable at this moment in time or is it I mean look we know based on our reporting experience that products are in the pipeline for like at least eight and 24 months before something hits the market So this has obviously been in the works for a while But it might just it just might have been more valuable if it had a different feature set at this point. It does have a temperature sensor, but I don't think it, it, like, works, like, in the moment.

And there's a bunch of heart rate monitors, early heart rate monitors that worked like this, where you couldn't, like, you couldn't just say, what's my heart rate right now, but it would, like, track it over time. So this thing tracks your temperature mostly when you sleep. And so when you wake up in the morning after it's gotten three days to see what your baseline is, you'll be able to see if your temperature was higher or lower than, you know, you're normal. And so that might tell you that you might have a fever coming before you realized it or something. Final feature, well, we're going to skip labs, which is like there go experiment stuff. Actually, maybe we'll get to that. But final feature, it's called tone. When I saw this in the first screenshot of the app, like, oh, muscle tone, that's great.

No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. There's a microphone, and it listens to you all the time. And none of this ever gets uploaded anywhere, but periodically it will listen to your voice, and it will send that voice over Bluetooth to your phone, and then your phone will do a little processing on it. And it will tell you if you are positive or less positive or your high energy or your low energy or you sound frustrated or annoyed or happy or apologetic or whatever. And it will show you moments throughout the day when it thinks it knows what your emotional state was and like let you know if you're like being a jerk to your family or not.

Why? Like this sounds like someone at Amazon read like a PhD thesis, you know, and they like bought the research and they. hired the researcher and they built this feature and they're like, that's what people want. Yeah. But like what is the one of the things about all these devices that I've long been confused about is at the end of the day, going back and like reviewing what happened that day from like a data perspective offers you almost no insight. Right?

If you're like, if the thing is like you were angry at noon, it's like, yeah, I definitely know. But what if you didn't? What if like it turns out to you that you didn't realize that your, your tonal voice was like accusatory or whatever at noon. And then you go back at like, what the hell happened at noon? And you're like, oh, I was I was talking to someone. Yeah. I mean, I would say, I would actually say that I have found it helpful to have historical data. And coming from the perspective of a woman, one thing that you get asked a lot when you go to the doctors is when was your last period? And I'm like, oh, let me look that up. And then there's often

like a lot of corresponding data that accompanies that. And if no one has talked about their period on the verge cast before. I'm very happy to be the first person to do that right now. But, but yeah, like, I mean, there are things that, or you think about the last time you weren't feeling well, and maybe you had a doctor's appointment and then you look up your health app and you're like, oh, yeah, and actually, like, my blood pressure was high that day or whatever it might be. I do find that to be useful from a historical perspective. That said, but that time series is longer, right? That's what I mean. Right? Like, the minute to minute of a day tracking, I just like don't.

Like I used to use a sleep track wrap. Now I just wake up in a panic at 7 a.m. on the dot. Like I'm just like, what's going to happen now? Just like pure panic awake. But I used to use sleep cycle on the iPhone. And you know, like the minute, the overnight data of like you snored for 20 minutes is like useless. You get to six months of data. And like the weird correlations just show up.

Right. And so I do think that's valuable. I just think like this, like it telling you that your tone of voice is you were angry at 3 p.m. And to get that data, you have to have an open microphone all of the time. Yeah. That seems completely backwards to me. Yeah. And also, like, if anyone truly is wondering how I sound most days, I'm just going to say stressed.

Like, I don't need a wearable to tell me that. I'm like, we are living through stressful times. Yeah. Amazon is like, you had Zoom voice again. It's like, yeah, I know. I get it. Yeah. I haven't actually, I can't verify this.

I had one person DM me and say that this person was a beta tester. And this person said that during the beta test that you had to push the microphone to have a test. And the thing only ever said that this person was angry. Just not. Maybe I was angry that I was beta testing this. I don't know, but like, nonstop angry. The thing that people are talking to me about this tone thing is it's one thing for, I don't know, me to have my gadget tell me. you know, your tone is bad.

It's quite another thing for somebody else to be told their tone is bad. Like one of the things that happened I was writing this story is people like, oh, it's tone policing. And it's like, ooh, it is. But the phrase tone policing and what it actually means is so, like, fraught for me to just, like, throw that phrase into this gadget. It would have been like, that's what it is, but not really, but I can't do. And I actually asked Amazon, what about people? people with different accents or different genders. And the response is it's a high priority for us.

And I want to quote this, if you have an accent, you can use tone, but your results will likely be less accurate. Tone was modeled on American English, but it's only day one and will continue to improve. Oh, they threw out the day one line. Yeah. Well, Amazon also always capitalizes the D in day one, which,

heavy sigh. Well, it's early days for Google, and it's always day one for Amazon. Amazon, yeah. What is the purpose? Like, what's the thing you're supposed to learn? So here is my thesis. Imagine you're, like, a dad. Right?

And you know you need to go to the gym, but you know what? Honestly, you're not going to. And, like, you could get a fitness band, but it's just going to make you feel bad because you, like, aren't, like, actually going out in hardcore exercising. You just want to be a little bit more active. And, you know, you should sleep better, but whatever.

And, you know, you're starting to get a little bit of a gut and maybe it'd be a little bit helpful to like, you know, get a little motivation to get rid of it. I feel attacked. This is bad. Maybe you're yelling at your kids and like you don't know it because like you're like kind of maybe you're just stressed out and like it would be helpful for something to tell you if you're like being kind of mean to your kids. Like I feel like this thing was like it's like the ideal device for like a dad and a nightmare for like a teenage woman. Right. Like that's that's what that's how I see this thing. Yeah, it's like all the overstressed Amazon executives are like, that's what I need. Yeah.

Sounds like from the way Dieter wrote about it, too, that it's also designed to be a little bit more of a passive device because it doesn't have, it doesn't have GPS. It doesn't have Wi-Fi. It doesn't have something. Well, as you said, it has the microphones that are listening. You can mute the microphone. The microphone doesn't record anything other than snippets of your voice. It tries to only listen for you and it deletes those things right away. So, like, you don't interact with the thing.

There's no display. It's just like there's a thing. You don't set it into like exercise mode. Like you're not like, I'm cycling now. No, you've got to do that in the app. And like you can't even like, I don't know, triple tap the button to be like, it's time to go use the rower or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's a totally passive tracker. And I think that the, yeah, the target audience you're describing is probably somewhat accurate. Well, you know, there was like a, in the early days of Fitbits. I had a bunch of friends who would wear a regular watch and Fitbit on like different wrists. And all of that has faded away. as people got smartwatches. I always think about it in the same framework as the first Apple watch,

which was a mess. And Apple knew it, and they've rebooted the product, like, significantly. But it didn't do very much or anything very well for the amount of care that you had to give it. Like, just beyond, like, charging it and wearing it your wrist all the time. Like, it was messy and hard to use. And, like, do you remember that the, just, like, the home screen interface was, like,

15 different swipes to lead to 50? different navigation paths. And so there was not value there, but it had notifications from iMessage. And it had some rudimentary health tracking stuff. And that value was like very high. And then Apple refined the product down to be just those things in one generation.

And now they've been slowly layering in, there's an app store that nobody uses. There's some other stuff it can do. Right. There's GPS. There's waterproofing. There's EKG. Right.

But that core exchange of why are you going to strap this battery to your wrist and then worry about the life of that battery. Right. And know about how to use this computer too. Yeah. The core exchange has always been notifications and health stuff. And so if you come in and all you have is health stuff, you have to find a target market of people who want your specific version of it without the other massive value of having a

computer on your wrist. So the battery lasts a week. So that's helpful. It's not demanding of you other than like you got to wear it. and if you want, you can share your health records with, you know, your CERner or whatever compatible electronic record system. Or you could, like, take part in, like, the John Hancock Life Insurance Wellness Program or something and get, you know, weird discounts on stuff. So it's possible that, like, the motivation here is you get, like, ambient information on how you can improve your lifestyle. You, like, start changing your habits because you take part in these lab challenges.

and you get, I don't know, a discount on your life insurance. So Amazon is positioning it in a way that it's not, it positions its other products effectively, which is we're going to promise you a certain level of convenience. And at the same time, we're going to have a tremendous amount of data on you. And it might be kind of rudimentary to start, but it's going to improve. And you have to figure out, and I'm going to use this word, my coworker, Sydney from Wired, use this word in our gadget lab podcast taping.

You have to figure out the calculus that works for you. And that calculus is how much convenience you are willing to trade for potentially the erosion of your own privacy. And that's like that's kind of what it's like what a lot of things are. Right. Like when you go to the Amazon website now, it is actually not a great consumer experience. And we've seen Amazon's, you know, model of convenience sort of threatened in the time of the pandemic, right, with like delivery times changing and everything else.

But like you still have to make that calculus, whether it's worth it to you to like use Amazon as a service. and we've seen that with some other products that have come out. We certainly see it with like Alexa and the Echo. And so this like wearable is like is also somewhat emblematic of that. All of which by the way, this thing is $100. It's like $65 for an intro program. And it's four bucks a month.

Like it's a subscription. There's a subscription fee? Yeah. Yay subscription. That's it. And let's move on. There's another. I can't.

I don't even want to talk about this in the whole show. Well, there's another, there's a Fitbit. Yeah. They added a temperature sensor on it and then it can like tell you to meditate, tell you to like stop being so stressed and breathe. That's otherwise it's a Fitbit. Oh my goodness. For the umpteenth time,

I do not need these wearables to tell me I'm stressed. I know. I do think that, I mean, Lauren, to your point, obviously the product ramps here are very long, right? but the opportunity to somehow engage with the COVID testing tracing, it's all sitting here for these companies. You want to get people to drop their Apple watches or their Samsung watches for your thing. Just like, right, that pulse SPO2, right? Pulse ox, is that what that is?

Just add that sensor. And then people will be like, yes, this is valuable in this time for me. And we just haven't seen it. There's like some glimmers of it out there, but all these products seem like they're just from a different, and they are, but they just seem like they're from a different time with different priorities. Yeah, the way that researchers are sort of triangulating this data right now, and Fitbit is part of a large research program through scripts. And I know that other trackers like the aura ring are also part of these research projects right now is that they're taking, researchers are taking all of the other data that they gather, right? like skin temperature, heart rate and things like that, and sort of triangulating it to say, like, to grab those biomarkers and say there was some kind of variation right now in this data,

which could point to X, which could point to X, which could mean that you have COVID. But it's still these steps away from actually identifying, I think, some of the key metrics that would indicate that you're very, very sick. But they're working on it. And I actually do think the hardware is going to get there. Yeah. My big question with, like, Google is still, like, waiting around. to get permission to finish the deal to buy Fitbit.

And so, like, where – are they just going to, like, keep making Fitbit? So are they going to, like, keep the software? Like, you know, a Fitbit, I don't know how long people realistically expect one of these things to last. And I'm sure it'll be supported even if Google gets the acquisition or whatever. But it's just like, what's the plan here? Is this the last Fitbit before the Google acquisition? I don't know. It's weird.

I think Google is just generally happy that Amazon introduced a thing to make. it seem like. Look at all this competition. Of course you can buy it. Do they have a plan beyond that? Like, who knows? All right, we've talked a lot about wearables. There's lots of other hardware to talk about, but we've got to take a break. We'll come back, and then Dieter's going to tell us all about his new gaming laptop. Oh my gosh. I'm very excited about this. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there.

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You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPW-O-R-K. com. Upwork.com. Deeder, you've got a very special phone that you're only allowed to talk about half of. Yeah. So they have sent out, Microsoft's a set out, the review units for the Microsoft Duo Android phone. I got one. I got mine late because it took the courier a long time to show up. They did that on purpose for you. That was so great. It's just the best. And the rules of

Microsoft's embargo is that I can tell you whatever you want to hear from the experience of looking at And I don't know, using this thing with the screen off and all of these screen on information has to come at the embargo time, you know, when reviews are allowed to be published, which will be, I'm not sure if I'm not to say what the embargo time is, but I can't tell you, like, the thing, we all know that the thing is getting released on September 10th. And why do they want, why do they want this to be screen off so far? Well, that's a really interesting question. It's possible that there's something that they would, they would rather have people talking about how nice a hardware is for two weeks and anything else. That's a possibility. It could be, they just, they know that the full two is out in the world, and there's going to be a big announcement from Samsung, so they want some kind of information out there. There's lots of, lots of possibilities.

And I, you know, you'd have to ask Microsoft. So they've seen it a lot of these. That's the other thing that is important, which I think is telling in a variety of ways. My very fancy box said it was like one of the first 50, and I guarantee you there's more than 50 of these in the world. My colleague Julian has one too. There you go. Do you think some people got a box that's like one of the first 100? Oh, he's so dark.

They just segmented it. Like some people got one of the first 10. Yeah. And like, you're just in waves. Well, what is it? What's it like? When it's closed, it is very thin. It's really not that much thicker than like a smartphone with a camera bump.

If you like count the camera bump and put it across the whole thing. It is very wide. Like, you can hold it in one hand pretty much, especially if like you open. it up and there's bezels and you can like grab it by the bezel. But if you have the thing folded in half, it's super wide. And so like imagining, usually, you know, phones are relatively narrow and so you scroll, but like having it be wider is weird. The hinge feels great, you know.

It feels like the same friction, I don't know, resistance all the way through the turn. It came with plastic bumpers. Why? I don't know. I mean, I imagine there's going to be hard to find cases. so Microsoft felt like they had to include something. Google did the same thing with the fold. Part of me is a little tiny bit worried.

They included plastic bumpers because they know that people are going to be clacking him shut and maybe that would be a problem. I don't know. It's glass in the front and the back. I know that some people were a little bit surprised for that because it looks so gray and metal in photos. You don't realize it's glass, but it's glass. You know, it's very thin.

It's very elegant. It's very unclear to me if this is the, shape of thing that I want or not. Does it fit in your back pocket? It fits better in my back pocket than it does my front pocket because it is so wide. It feels sort of weird in my front pocket. But it's like it's like back pocket sized. Is this thing safe to sit on?

Who knows? I know you can't talk about the screen on experience. But notably, there's no screen on the front. Or the outside or the outside. Right. So that feels safe to talk about because there's no screen at all. See what I'm getting at? What's the vibe of being done with it?

The thing I'm most excited about this phone is that you can be done with it. You can close it and it goes away and it's a little notebook. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I guess I have to use it to tell you what it feels like to stop using it. But it is nice to like just close. I really tried to lawyer my way into that one. I don't think it works. One thing I'm curious about is like, I'll tell you what,

trying to like open it up one-handed is a scary nightmare. You cannot do it one-handed. You really can't. And like you think you'd like maybe wedge a finger in there and like flip it out or whatever? Nope. It's two hands. Which makes me wonder if that's like annoying enough or if you just want to check something quick and you want to be able to use it one-handed, if I'm going to start like having it open all the way 360

so that the screen's on both sides and start using the phone that way. You know what I mean? and then having my pocket with both screens exposed. So you can see the time. It seems more dangerous, but it also seems like it'd be a hell of a lot more convenient if I just want to pull the thing out and check a text message.

But your regular phone is in your pocket with a screen exposed all the time. Right, but now there's two screens exposed, so ooh. But that's why you have plastic bumpers. Have you been using the pen at all? I can't say if I have or not, given the on-screen on experience, but it is compatible with a surface pen.

I think that's one of the reasons it's so expensive is they needed to have a screen that works with like the traditional surface pens. I really think this thing costs too much. We talked about that before, but it's like $1,400 bucks. Like, man, that's a lot. Yeah.

The move here, if people have questions about the duo, they should tweet at you at Backlon. And then we can address those questions in the review for the screen on experience. You're taunting me with this thing. I don't know what to tell you. The problem that I have is that if we weren't on the podcast, I could just ask you about what the software's like, but we're on the, this is horrible. So we're going to wrap this up.

That's it for the Vergecast. Is it closing it? Oh, I really missed you guys. You're such a great duo. That was a burn. I just want to be honest, everybody. Okay, this is in context. You mentioned the Fold.

The Galaxy Z Fold 2 is coming. You are both excellent product reviewers. I sometimes pretend to be a product reviewer. I watched this video, this Chinese YouTube video that's a review of the Z-fold 2. And I kind of realized, like, maybe we shouldn't make videos for the words in them. Just as like, obviously I don't speak or understand Chinese. But like, I got so much out of this reviewer's, like, tone and inflection and just, like, seeing him use the thing. Yeah.

And I was like, why do I talk in reviews at all? You just got to make noises. Oh, you know what? Our reviews should just be music, and then it will be the chart showing the halos reading of our emotional state as we do it. Oh, my God. It's horrible. A graph of our emotional state overlaid over B-roll of the gadget. That's what everybody wants. Everybody wants to watch a graph of our emotions during a review.

I love this. The point out here is the Z-Fault 2 isn't out, but there is a review from a Chinese YouTuber that you can go watch right now. There's a link on the site. Watching this, here's the two. the design seems just far superior. Superior to the prior fault. Oh, yeah, for sure. The big screen on the front seems like a massive improvement. The hardware design itself is refined. It's a little less squared off. It's a little smoother. The, um, not having the camera indentation on the screen, having the whole punch camera. Like just big improvements to sort of the user experience the human feeling of the device.

Just from watching a regular person flip it around and use it. Everything else seems like the same deal to me. Same set of software problems. Same set of Samsung stuff happening. At one point, this reviewer puts it in tent mode and then has Google Maps running while it's like on the dashboard of his car. And it's like, I'm not going to use my $2,000 delicate phone propped up on the dash of my car to navigate.

But does that seem like a good idea? It just doesn't seem like where I'd want to put my phone. Yeah. So that to me is like the context of all. these flippy phones is you have to develop a killer use case for them, which is even harder when you're at home. Lauren, I think you've written about this several times. Like, we're just at home. The sale of so many of these gadgets is like harder than ever. Right. And it's opened the window for a lot of other technologies. I mean, there's a shortage of Chromebooks right now. And

people are asking all the time what monitor they should get for working from home. And they're investing in speakers for home. And there's a lot of opportunity there for the consumer electronics market. But yeah, the entire pitch we've heard over the past two years of these foldable devices is like for people on the go. When you're on the go, when you need something that you can use in your pocket to send a text and then when you get on the plane, you unfold it in the tray and you watch a movie on it or you're going to bed at night and you don't want to talk on the phone anymore, but you want to watch something on it like it's a tablet or use it as a reading device or you get to your office and you dock it. and it's like a second screen. All of these use cases, like, they've totally changed, and they've changed for the foreseeable future. And so these companies, particularly Microsoft,

had to, like, change its messaging around. Like, Panos, you know, was saying, like, and you guys were in the briefing, too, like, yeah, I love it. Like, when I, you know, I take it from my desk to the couch to the patio. It was just such a different message from even just, like, six months ago. Like, wow, we're no longer road warriors. Yeah. The thing that grabs me is for a, I used to, ages ago in the NGadget era, like, I used to work from home when I only ever worked from home. Then I moved to New York and I started going to the office. Now we're all at home again. And the thing that I remember that like just an instant realization memory was, oh, I used to like have a room that I worked in and then I would leave that room and not work anymore. And now I just like have a phone and the work can chase me all over the house. So I have to like leave the thing. thing, so I'm done with work.

Right. And, like, I'm going to take my flippy Microsoft computer from the deck to the patio to the living room. It's like, no, that's the opposite of the thing I want to do. It's, like, very much the opposite of how I want this experience to be. I want to leave my gigantic computer in this room, close the lid, walk away, and be like, I'm done with work now. And I think a lot of people experiencing work from home, they've arrived over the course

these last few months at that realization. All of the digital well-being, time-well-spent, screen-time features are actually really bad for most people at just turning off the work stuff. Like, unless you are, like, work in a massive corporation that has big metal managing all of its devices and they've got all the work stuff in its own little protected silo on your phone, you know, like in Knox or the Blackberry Zone or whatever. BlackBerry Zone. It's a thing. It's a thing. It's like a thing. It's like the thing.

It's like a thing. It's like the apps are in the workspace and they're like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's something it's called the Blackberry Zone. Well, maybe it should be because there is a new Blackberry coming. Emotions about that. Where is I going? Oh, it's hard to turn the stuff off, right?

It's hard to, like, remember, like, turn off these notifications and, like, turn off that notification. There should just be a toggle. It's like, turn work off and it, like, runs through a script of, like, turning off a bunch of the stuff that would normally be incoming from work. And because everybody uses different apps and different ways. work apps, it's really hard to enable that sort of thing. To the effect of, like, do people really want a big, like, the big foldable screen at home? Like, I have two thoughts about that. One, nobody cared about the Note 20 Ultra relative to previous big notes.

And I think that's part of it's just really expensive. And then my, like, my counterthought is, like, the use case of having a big foldable screen is having a big screen. And I'm, I ever since, like, everybody in the world kind of got head faked by making fun of the very, very early versions of the note. And then it turns out, oh, wait, no, everybody just wants a big screen. I'm a little bit hesitant to just dismiss things like the Galaxy Fold out of hand, because if they can find a way to make the thing a reasonable price someday, then it may be that people want a big screen so badly. They're willing to deal with all of the compromises that go with

it. That's a great point. But I will also say, too, that there is the camera. And the devices that we're talking about, particularly the galaxy fold, the galaxy Z-fold, and the duo don't really have great camera experiences. So at some point, going back to the calculus, you're going to have to make the calculus of whether or not you want a screen that unfurls into a much larger screen, or if you want something, you can just whip out of your pocket super quickly, press a side button and take a really good photo. Yeah. You know, my perspective on the big screen thing is I think you want a big screen, but you want the screen to get smaller. And so I've always thought that the razor, the Z flip, that's like, that seems much more likely

to work itself out. Like that's the thing that you want. You want a regular size phone, but it actually gets smaller versus you have a pretty big phone and it gets even bigger. And then the software of it being even bigger is just kind of confusing and weird. Yeah. I mean, man, will Android ever be good on big screens on tablet size screens? That's like the question.

When they never figured out? And I think part of the reason that Google and Microsoft are kind of like doing the Surface duo together in a way that seems much happier than you would expect is Google's like, well, we didn't figure it out. Maybe they can. Right? Android has historically always been bad on tablets. But what if it's Android on two very little tablets that are tossed each other on a hinge?

Yeah. Like, what if Microsoft Word on the surface duo turns out to be the thing, right? What if the only way to use Excel, the way the power users want to use Excel, is on a folding Android phone? Does that sound like a killer app? To me, it does not. Are there like an army of wealthy accountants out there who are like, yes. Maybe. But the idea that Microsoft can actually build complete software experiences that take advantage of a new form factor UI paradigm.

Well, they can in a way that Google has not been able to get the kind of other army of software developers to try. And that's like an opportunity. I think that's largely why Microsoft's first Android phone is not a phone, right? It's, or well, Panos will tell you it's not a phone. But it's a new form factor because I think the race is to get to that new form factor. And then what comes after that? Like is after that then Microsoft and Google work together to make a Microsoft Pixel C, which is like effectively a surface tablet with Android? Like I wonder where it goes after that.

Yeah, that middle zone is real tough, right? They've got the little surface. I mean, if this thing goes off and it works, then the real question is between the laptop and the phone, what operating systems are going to lose? there. I think that's where that fight gets a lot dicier. But first, they have to make you clear that productivity on Android and the way that Microsoft wants it to be productive is even possible or a good idea. Right. We're very far from that. I mean, we'll use the duo and see, but Android is very far from that. And the ChromeOS Android mashup didn't work out at all. At all. And you've got like a little surface go, right? I have a surface go here. I have a

surface go too, but I really haven't used it much, to be honest. Yeah, because you're a house with your real laptop. Right. That's exactly right. And then, and then I like to say now that our lives are, like, are structured by the different size screens we use. Like, you wake up to a 5.5 to 6 inch screen, and then you, and then you graduate to a 13 inch screen or 15 inch screen for the day or maybe a monitor. And then, and then like your leisure time is like the 50 inch screen, which is your TV. And then you have, like, one more at night that you're like, what am I going to use? And for me, that's the 10 inch or I guess it's the 11 inch iPad. So like the surface go would probably fit somewhere into that structure of the day for me. And I'm like, well, I don't want to use a pen

and use Microsoft software at that time of night. I want to watch Netflix. I'm not doing spreadsheets at that point. And can you imagine, like if Microsoft, we're going to talk about TikTok eventually, but if Microsoft buys TikTok and that's the cell of like all of their hardware is like the best TikTok device. Some more phones talk about before you get to that. There's a picture of the pixel 5 out there. I haven't seen it. What does it look like? It looks like a pixel 4A.

It looks like a plastic pixel, like with a fingerprint sensor on the back and the whole deal. The specs have gotten better over time in terms of the rumors, so it looks like it's going to have a good enough battery, good enough RAM. Getting rid of their face unlock is like, man, I don't even know how to feel about that. It's very strange. I will say that in the pandemic, the phone that I use more than anything else is actually a Samsung Galaxy S20 because it has a fingerprint sensor and it's not a hassle to unlock. If I had an iPhone SE around, it would probably be that. So maybe they decided to do that, but I kind of doubt it. They had to make this decision a while ago.

So to me, it's like when you start adding on the stuff you expect from a high-end pixel, so higher frustrate screen, we're expecting it to be the exact same camera with, by the way, the same camera, that they've used since I think the pixel 2, like that's the rumor, which is ridiculous. No face unlock. The processor will be like medium faster, maybe not technically as fast in the benchmarks as the pixel 4. Like, how much should that cost? Because you can get a one plus eight for like seven, 800 bucks. You can get a Galaxy S10 on sale or refurb for probably 600 bucks. you can get a Pixel 4A, which is excellent for $350.50.

So how much Google thinks that they can get for this Pixel 5, which for all intents and purposes is like a mid-range phone with a good camera that doesn't have quite as nice specs as other mid-range phones with not quite as good cameras is, I don't know, that's going to be exciting to see. What if they just cancel the pixel as a phone and just sell it as a camera? Sure. I mean. Really? Like, I mean, are you asking that? Like, should we actually map that out? Well, I was just looking at the newer Canon cameras that can share directly to Google Photos,

which is very interesting to me. It's like, I'm a Nikon person, but would I switch for that? Maybe I would. But, like, what if they just said this is actually just a camera with a cell connection and, like, carry this instead of whatever mid-range smartphone you have? And you'll take really excellent photos and it'll be integrated with Google Photos. Like, wouldn't that be, like, just a more interesting product? for them to release at this time versus another sort of weird pixel phone.

That's pretty cool. They tried that. It was the clip, the clips. Yeah, but that thing was so weird. It was like automated and the photos weren't that great. Samsung tried it. There was the Galaxy camera, which was literally just like a mid-range point-and-sheet with an Android phone slap on the back of it.

That was like the ultimate in Samsung, like two engineers from like different parts of the company, like ran into each other in the kitchen and they were like... And they were both carrying their projects. And they ran each other. They flew up into the air. And they landed on the ground in a pile. We're like, oh, my God. What if we did this?

There was a story ages, ages, ages ago. When the Motorola rocker came out, the, like, Motorola iPod phone. Like Steve Jobs screwed Motorola because he announced that phone. And, like, minutes later, he announced the iPod Nano. This is ancient history. But, like, there was definitely a story at the time that was, like, a much better version of the rocker is to buy an iPod Nano and just tape it to the back of a Motorola razor. And like, you just like get a better product.

And like that was the Samsung phone. I'm saying what if Google engineers it to like, they're like, this is the coolest camera you can get. Just think of all of like the Franken gadgets we're missing out on right now because engineers are not running into each other in kitchens at Google's campus. I got to start doing some just like roundtable zooms with various engineers from companies to seed horrible ideas. You can have a TikTok alarm clock. Oh, my God. I'm dying. Wake up to a different, like, viral TikTok every morning.

That would be great, actually. Because you just hear the sound over and over and you're like, I need this to stop. Yeah. I think the question for Google is, how can they put out a phone that's differentiated? The last three of them have been mid-range forgettable phones. And if the rumors are true, as you're saying, like, the camera is not getting better. It's getting different, but the camera hardware is the same. The technique is the same.

They're making different looks out of the algorithm, which is interesting. Yeah, but they're like, they're perished. They're tiny differences. I don't think that it's evolving as much as we'd like to give them credit for. And then the video, I mean, speaking of TikTok, like we live in a video world now, and that video is not getting any better. Yep. How much would you pay for a device like that, Neely? Like a sick Google camera with great 4K video.

Well, like a Google camera that has, yeah, great. great 4K video takes great still photos, uploads immediately to Google, Google Photos, and let's say it has like the Titan M security chip, so it keeps all of your multimedia data secure or whatever it might be and any biometrics you use to log on. And like, that's pretty much it. You're not like playing games on it. You're not answering emails on it. Yeah, like I would happily pay like $500 shit thing.

And that's like high, but I have a kid, right? Like, we take so many photos of our kid that we have maxed out our first 20,000 image Google smart photo library. Like, what? Yeah. We had to, like, start a new one that was, like, very funny. Oh, my God. Dave Leeb from Google Photos was sweet. And he's like, yeah, we got rid of that limit.

And I was like, you do. And I was great. Yeah, I mean, like, we take, once you're in that zone, we're just like taking a ton of photos. Like, having a device that's more dedicated is great, especially if it has slightly better image quality than your, you're own. And so Google can get there. The only reason I propose it, and maybe that's a total dud of a product, but at least it's not another mid-range pixel that no one's going to buy. You know what I mean? Like, at least it's a different attempt to get Google into your pocket in a way that is smart. What if they took it like one step further and made it the creator's

phone? So you had like a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack so that you could plug in, except audio accessories. It did run Instagram. So you could upload things directly. It ran Instagram, like all the major platforms. Of course there would be like an easy YouTube integration because Google YouTube. And what if it, yeah, what if that's how they marketed it? I mean, we've just walked ourselves all the way back to just having an Android phone. We basically described a Galaxy S20. Like we're just bored and there.

And all the creators are using iPhones anyway because that's right. Like I just think that how are you going to break into this market and differentiate yourself? And if all you really have is your camera, because it's still all they really have, And a software experience that some people think is better, but like on the, like for most people not having a Samsung browser and a Google browser is not a reason to buy a phone. That's what we talk about because we're annoyed all the time. But like, whatever, they're clearly choosing Samsung phones in the market. Maybe you just stop saying it is the thing that it is and start saying it's something else and just like see what happens. So here's what I want Google to do.

Just start, just call them nexus again. don't front like they are meant to sell in big numbers. Don't front like you're going to compete with Samsung. The next time we talk to what are their executives and be like, hey, you said in five years it would be a market success. They'll be like, yeah, nope, it's never going to be a market success, but we're going to keep making them because like it's good to have like an exemplary phone. Like if they just admitted, we just want to make a nice Android phone that we want to use,

that's exemplary to the market and that we can use to develop Android on. And because we're nice, we'll sell it to you if you want one. They just did that, lowered expectations radically, then there would be like a group of people who like bought it because they like having that phone and that experience and that feels cool. And nobody would feel bad about it ever again. Yes. They create a scarcity around it basically. Yeah. And say like it's for these like special use pieces.

The problem is they spent a billion dollars or three billion dollars, however much they spent on HTC. Which is for Google's like, you know, pocket money. Yeah. They did do that in an effort to make this better. All right. Once again, the Virchast is devolved and just us complaining about the pixel. There are two more phones I want to talk about. There's a Sony Xperia 5, 2, which is a horrible name,

120 hertz display and a headphone jack. That's honestly the only reason I'm going to bring it up. God bless them. And then the Assuse Zendphone 7 with the flippy camera. I'm just proud of them for competing in the camera lens wars. Now the flippy camera has three cameras. Yeah. Should we talk about this LG wing?

Oh my God. It's on the list, but it's like the best phone of the week. What is it? Tell me, tell me. So it's a phone. Like, just imagine a phone. And then imagine the front of the phone, you rotate it,

but the back of the phone stays, so I'm holding it horizontally. And then the front of the phone, you rotate vertically, but the back stays horizontal. So that there's a vertical phone in front of you, and then there's a little bit of a screen sticking out to the side, like a wing.

Not two wings, just like a wing. And you just get like a little bit of an extra display there. Like, you've seen. seen like vertical sliders, right? Where like you slide the phone up and there's a keyboard underneath. There's even been vertical sliders like you slide the phone up and there's like more display underneath.

This is like you just rotate it and a screen like sticks out the side. Oh my God. I'm like me. It's amazing. It's slacked it to me. It's incredible. And it's actually being used in this video as a GPS device, like an in dash GPS device, which is pretty much like what it looks like.

It looks that clunky. Yeah. Yes. It does look that clunky. It's great. I'm here for hardware innovation and phones. We got flippy phones, we got foldy phones, we got swiveling phones. We got phones with flippy camera lenses.

Let's have it, people. We spent 20 minutes talking about the duo. LG makes a phone right now that you can go by with a case that has a second screen on it with a big gap in the middle. It's the LG velvet, pretty fine. And then you put the second screen on it, and the experience of trying to deal with second screen is pretty not fine. But you can do it.

It's there for you. All right. Go look at the LG wing and just imagine a world in which we were constantly switching phone form factors and the software worked. It's a big asterisk and the software worked. And we could live in that world. And there's something to be said to you about that explicit delineation between screens, right? Which is like what the duo has to a point. But like this LG phone, I'm looking at it right now.

And there is just no, there's no fluidity to this. There's no expectation of fluidity. Yeah. It's just like you have two screens smacked against each other and perpetrated. format. We made a phone a T-shape. Is that what you want? I love it.

Lauren, the next time you come back to the show, I expect you be using an LG wing. Okay, I want to, we got to take a break and come back. But before I do that, we have to talk about flight simulator. Indeed, are you, I promised them that we talk about this gaming laptop you bought. So just walk me, walk me through your situation. I thought, I bought, I'm sold, I'm in the process of selling my Surface Pro X, because I don't need an LTE enabled long battery life arm based Windows computer. Maybe nobody does.

I bought the laptop that Monica Chin, our excellent laptop reviewer, recommended, which is the ASIS ROG Zephras 14. Got a 1080P screen with a pretty good refresh rate on it. It does not have a webcam, which is delightful. And I am going to

start playing PC games again. It's been a super long time for me. So if you have recommendations of what games to play, I will put them on my list. I will tell you that the very top of my list, is all of the Half-Life games because true story never played them.

So yeah, I'm really excited about it. I'm also excited because I want to start participating in some of these viral moments that are happening with games now. So there's Microsoft Flight Simulator where everyone's playing it. They're going around, they're taking screenshots, they're taking little videos.

It's really easy to take videos and screenshots off of games now. They're on Twitch. They're finding all sorts of weird things, like towers that reach into space because somebody had a typo in some database somewhere. People flew into the hurricane

because they're compatible with real-time weather data, which is amazing. And I'm also just going to play the hell out of Fall Guys. Have you guys been watching any of the Fall Guys stuff? Yes. I mean, I have a PS4, so I'm like ready to do it. I just haven't done it,

but I've been watching video after video of this game. It seems amazing. It is incredible. I'm so, like, the fact that we can just have, I don't know, like, these games are, it's so much easier to share

and spread little, clips of them and to like get a little snippet of joy out of a video game that doesn't require you to like watch a four-hour Twitch stream or be super into gaming. Like I could never play Fall Guys for the rest of my life, but still love that game and get a ton of like joy out of it just from watching little clips of other people having their little goon get knocked off of a thing and the, you know, weird version of the world that is Fall Guys. This is how I feel about four. I'm never going to be good at Fortnite, but I thoroughly enjoy watching other people play Fortnite.

I'm really not gaming at all these days, guys, or ever for that matter. But I do appreciate games as an art form, and I appreciate your enthusiasm for them. Well, you don't need to be a gamer, that's the whole point. You can go look at the weird stuff that's happening in Microsoft Flight Simulator, and like, it makes your life better. It makes you happy. I don't know. I love it.

I mean, the clips I've seen shared on social are pretty cool. The Flight Simulator, I think, does your new laptop play Flight Simulator? It better or I'll be very unhappy. The flight simulator one to me is super interesting, right? Because it'll eventually come out at Xbox. But right now, the barrier to entry to flight simulator is like pretty high, right? You need a powerful PC. You need a fast connection.

I mean, how is anybody playing it without flight controls? Like, we had a story last week that like flight control accessories, the rudders, the joysticks, whatever, are selling out because so many people are playing flights. Like, that's crazy. If you're a company and you make like rudder pedals for a, PC, you're never like, oh man, they're flying off the shelves, but like, this is your time. And like, that's like that that that barrier entry is very high. Like most people cannot play a flight simulator until it comes to Xbox and then everyone well. But right now, there's all

the stuff happening in this virtual environment and you're sharing out of it. It's like a window into it. There's a thread of like errors say and like there's the game's amazing and all this stuff. But the errors are hilarious. Like there are air conditioning units on the top of the leading tower of peace. It's just like, just the funniest thing to look at and to see. And like that little, that interface between what some people are able to do and share out to the internet and what everyone's able to experience. To me, it's super interesting. All right.

Now, maybe I'm going to buy a gaming laptop. You should. I recommend it. Well, let me know if it plays flight simulator. Well, I'll update everybody next week. The amount of dumb things I'm willing to buy right now is way higher than you think. It's just retail therapy. It's how we're going to get through it.

All right. We're going to take a break. We have a little bit of TikTok drama, a little bit of epic drama to talk about. We'll be right back. 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.

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verge cast. Lauren, before we talk with this other stuff, tell us about your new podcast. Yeah, thanks for bringing it up. So I have a new podcast for Wired. It's our new flagship show, and it's called Get Wired.

We launched it late July, so we're about six episodes in, and it's been really, really fun so far. It's weekly. It runs on Monday mornings. And topics so far have really run the gamut.

Our very first episode was about the Neighborhood Watch app citizen, and in particular, We kind of went into the deep into the mind of a 12-year-old crime chaser on the app, which was pretty fun and fascinating. We've talked about the ways in which animal rights activists are using different kinds of technology, including VR, to expose some of the abuses going on inside of factory farms. We had an interview with Bill Gates. We're going to be talking about the back-to-school viasco in the United States. So, yeah, we're just trying to highlight, I guess, the best of wired stories in audio form.

And so you're talking like, I mean, obviously you talk to Gates, but you're obviously talking to like Wired reporters and building out what they're doing. Yeah. So I would say that occasionally we do plan to do high profile interviews such as the Bill Gates interview, which was conducted by Wired editor at large Stephen Levy. But it's not, I mean, the goal of it was not to launch an interview podcast. The goal was to find really compelling stories that have rich audio elements and then find ways to tell those stories. But as you guys. know from producing lots of things, podcasts, videos in particular at The Verge. Like, production takes a lot, right? And sometimes as you're reporting a story, you're not necessarily getting like that audio or that video right off the cuff. Like, you have to go back and figure out ways to tell stories through those mediums. So most of the show is us, like, talking to fellow wired reporters and saying, like, tell us about the story you reported out.

And then using that audio to illustrate the story. So, like, a really good thing. example, you had to run a two of the people, the activists that go in, like, invade, like, factory farms. And you're talking to the reporter, and you, like, just played a short clip of this horrific thing that was happening to the animals in the farm. But if it were just on the website, I probably wouldn't click play. If it were, you know, I don't know, on a video or something, I would have skipped over it or something. But, like, hearing it in the course of the conversation felt like way more visceral than it otherwise would have. So that worked really well.

Thank you. Yeah, that's the goal. And like with the Citizen episode, for example, it's one thing I think to read a story about a 12-year-old crime chaser, but it's another thing to actually be in the car with him and his mom, since he's not even old enough to drive, as they drive around his neighborhood south of San Francisco and, you know, look for things that are happening according to the Citizen app.

And here's sort of like why he does this and what excites him about. it and also what does it mean for a future in which, you know, there's sort of all these like little surveillance notes around, right, in the form of smartphones. So, yeah, so they're, we're trying to take a dive into our very strange present and potentially even stranger future in ways that feel compelling through audio. That's great. That was like my best pitch for it, I guess. I hope you'll listen. I'm really excited about it. It's been a lot of work and a lot of fun. Yeah. Do you have a twin on the show? Is that? I wish. You know, I have to say, first of all, I actually wish I had a clone. But I have to say, guys, the number one request I get through my Instagram DMs on Twitter, through emails. To this day, I have now, it's been how many years since I left The Verge? Like two and a half years. People say, can you please do your twin videos again? Wow. I swear to God. And so I think one of these days, you know, I have a camera here. It's not a great camera. But I I have a camera here.

I have some lights. I think one of these days I'm going to have to figure out how to, like, self-produce this, just for fun. I think what we have to do is organize, like, a fake beef. Like, you make a twin video for Wired, and then we pretend to be really mad that you stole your format and we, like, create this. I don't know why I'm saying that loud in the podcast. If you are someone out there who's engineered a beef.

Yes. For publicity, like, please get a hold of me. All right. Well, we do have to talk about some policy stuff. You got to eat our vegetables here. Today, the day we were recording, the TikTok saga is even more out of control than before. So if you'll remember, Trump initially issued 45-day order. So September 20th, TikTok had to sell.

There has been a lot of reporting about sort of the inside of that deal. Microsoft initially wanted a small stake. Then TikTok said, do you want a bigger steak? Then Trump said, you got to pay me a little bit on the side. Which is real sketchy and no one has ever really figured out what that meant. and Microsoft put out a statement saying, we will compensate the United States Treasury, which is just weird.

I'm just going to tell you, I have not talked to a single business person who understands that, except it made Trump happy. Fine. Then he issued a new order, extending the deadline by another 45 days, so a 90-day clock,

mid-November now is the deadline. All of that is hanging over the head of this company. Oracle has been reported to be very interested. The Trump administration is, is very cozy with Oracle. This is a real thing. Larry Ellson's a donor. They host fundraisers.

He does all the things. Oracle has emerged as a frontrunner. Last night, today, TikTok CEO, Kevin Meyer, quit. He just F this, basically, was his note. If you don't recall, TikTok CEO, Kevin Meyer, was the guy who launched Disney Plus and then didn't get tapped to be the next CEO of Disney. And so, rage quit and ended up going to TikTok.

It's more complicated to that. Based on reporting now, the parallel here is very clear. He did not know that he wasn't getting the Disney CEO job. He found out the morning that Chepec was getting the job that he didn't get the job. So then he quit. And then it turns out Julia Borsstein at CBC reported today, he was not involved in the talks with Oracle at TikTok. So you're like just a guy who's been cut out twice. You're like out.

And like these deals do come with like what's called key man provisions. So you acquire a company. Lauren was a key man when we acquired recode. That's a real thing that happened. You acquire the company and you have to like make sure that certain key people come in. If you're Kevin Meyer, you're probably one of those people and that probably means you're, you have to stay there and work for a while. And you're like, I don't want to be one of Nadella's guys.

I don't want to be one of Larry Ellison's guys. Like, I'm supposed to be a CEO. Right. And like, he quit. So then that happened. And then on top of that happening, Walmart announced that it was partnering with Microsoft on to deal with my TikTok because of e-commerce, which seems horror. I'm just going to say that is the worst idea I've ever heard, turning TikTok into like a

shopping experience for Walmart stuff, don't do that. Agree. I would say that if the three of us were to go into our credit card history and tally up all of the amount of money we spent on crap we saw on Instagram ads, I think I know who would have spent the most. Which would be who me? I think Nilai is what I think No I buy

Actually that has been curtailed Oh yeah good Well I started using TikTok Or than Instagram Well I think also like Walmart has really been trying to push A lot more into video right And so I guess it makes sense from that perspective But I would worry that it would effectively be the quibification

Of TikTok Which would be like Take this idea Take this idea or this concept that's already like working on a different platform and then and then try to sort of add your twist to it in a way that's just not really going to work. Because the kids are already in one place, right? They're already like doing the thing on the platform. So then like if Walmart bought it, it suddenly becomes, what is Walmart owns like voodoo or something? No, so Walmart sold voodoo to fandango in April.

And so I bet that it's like whoever was in charge of voodoo at Walmart was just, it's just been like hanging out and is bored. It was like, hey, I know what I could do to keep my job. So the quote from Walmart to CNBC, the way TikTok has integrated e-commerce and advertising capabilities in other markets is a clear benefit to creators and users. That's what they want. They want advertising and e-com. And like, it seems gross. TikTok, the last bit of news, TikTok actually sued the Trump administration over the ban order,

saying that Trump had not shown a colorable harm. I mean, this is all the stuff we talked about when the ban was issued. No one really knows what the theory of the case is against TikTok. talk, except that it's from China. And if you're going to have that theory of the case, well, then you definitely need to have against WeChat, which Trump administration did. You probably need to have it against Tencent, which importantly owns half of everything in Hollywood. It's just a real thing, including, this is my segue, including 40% of Epic, makers of

Fortnite and the Unreal Engine. So many streams crossed that fight between Epic, Fortnite, Unreal, and Apple, which has continued to just, like, operate in high gear. right i mean they're at the moment so we we there's a lot always to talk about with apple in the app store let me just ask you both this though is it strange that apple seems so content to be the villain because they're definitely acting more like the villain than they should be yeah how so their statements are all pretty aggressive right their actions are all pretty aggressive like this so that you know the epic did the things

thing, they enable the payments, and then Apple said that we're going to cancel your developer account, including the developer account for Unreal Engine, which is a different, technically different company. There's Epic Sarl and then Epic, which makes Quarthe. Der brutality against both. Epic filed this TRO. There's all these emails came out. Temporary restraining order.

Sorry, full lawyer speak. The point of a temporary restraining order is to maintain the status quo so that neither party can do something that can't be undone. And so the judge granted the restraining order with respect to. Unreal Engine, because if Apple kills the developer account for Unreal Engine, that is a bell you can't unring. That's harmed that you can't undo. Whereas with, if Epic wins the Fortnite lawsuit, they can calculate some damages. They can reinstate it. Like, they can get back to it. So that all made sense. But the move to go after Unreal is like pretty agro. Their statements about

this stuff are pretty aggressive. You know, they pushed on WordPress to add in-app purchases. they've been pushing on other developers to add in-app purchases. It just seems like Apple's in a place where they don't seem, I don't know, sad. They don't seem like they're trying to do the right thing, but it's so complicated and we're all going to work through it together. They're making it seem very much like,

this is our phone, and we want to cut of everything that happens on the phone, and that's the price of the phone. And that is just like a, I don't know. They just seem more aggressive and more happy to be the bad guy in some of these narratives than otherwise. Well, it's it is incredibly complicated. I can't help but wonder if Apple is just thinking about winning the war and not this particular battle. So like ultimately Apple has one of the largest app stores in the world. It's the only way that you can currently get applications on Apple products. It needs to maintain ultimate control

of that app store. I maintain the walled garden, right? And so I wonder if going after specific elements of that app store, such as Unreal Engine, or any kind of gaming, you know, Google Stadio we've talked about, or I'm sure you guys have talked about too, or something like payments is part of that strategy, but also ultimately some kind of head fake. Yeah, it's weird. Like, there's a way in which these statements could be like, look, guys, we set

these rules, we've got to apply them evenly. It leads to these unfortunate situations. We're going to try and figure it out, but for now, the rules are what they are. And if we make an exception here, it's going to be chaos. So, like, we're doing this thing, but we are working to work on it, to figure it out and make everybody happy. Just bear with us, but these are the rules. Instead, it's, these are the rules. You made all kinds of money on our store because you were on there for free and we're going to apply everything equally. And if you are just follow the rules and do what we say, then we're happy to have you back. Like the tenor of those statements is like remarkably aggressive.

To me, what's like fascinating, I did a like a pretty basic newsletter on this. It's like that remarkably aggressive tone, like it plays maybe in the court, but And maybe it plays with like a general audience that's like loves their iPhone and understands that like you got to follow a contract when you like click a checkboxer like you agree to the iTunes. I don't know whatever. But it is very off putting, I think, to a developer audience. And Steve Balmer clap at his hands yelling developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, Apple shouldn't take developers making stuff for their platforms for granted. They have been able to do that with the iPhone. for a very, very long time.

But it's no guarantee. And the thing that you don't know is like, it's like a missed opportunity cost. Apple will never know if there is a developer who would have made something awesome for the iPhone, but saw all this stuff and was just like, ugh, that seems like a mess. And maybe not even consciously, just like subconsciously,

and went and did something else for some other platform. And like, that stuff can, to Crete over time. And when it does, you eventually, like, you eventually go over a hill and then people start thinking of you the way they thought of Microsoft in the bad old days of Microsoft where, like, people would like spell Microsoft with a dollar sign for the S, ha, ha, ha. But you just saw it everywhere. And Apple could, like, it could, like, lose that PR fight for that very important constituency. And it could be very damaging for them down the road. I completely agree with you on everything you just said.

And I in particular tend to think that anyone who has expertise in software who joins the argument and says, well, look, for as long as software has been distributed, the distributor has ultimately taken some kind of tax, right? Like, back in the days of shrink wrap software boxes sold on retail shelves that we used to go to and buy in stores, like there was also a tax on that too, right? And so an Apple's cut is actually relatively fair compared to that. I think that's a bad analogy. I think that the way that software has changed, in particular the distribution of software has changed over the past few decades, like warrants a different look at the way that these kinds of, you know, relationships, these revenue sharing relationships are structured. And I do think that all of this is pretty bad for developers.

But I think, like, the question that Neelai was asking was, like, why do we think Apple's being so aggressive? Not necessarily like, and I think, like, they're being aggressive because at the end of the day, what better way to get their messaging out than to have a giant fight with Epic who makes one of the most popular games in the world versus like having this fight with Hay from Basecamp, which like, you know, 50 people are aware of. I shouldn't say that. Like a lot of people are familiar with Base Camp and I'll use Base Camp, but it's like not the same level of argument. And so the Epic argument actually serves as a vehicle for them to like make a stronger argument for their cases outside of Congressional Subcommittee hearings. But I don't understand why Apple wants this fight so badly. Like, Laura, the last time things started getting a little bit, like, hairy with developers and the 30% tax and blah, blah, blah, blah. You interviewed Phil Schiller about this switch to like the subscription thing and like the change from, well, it's 30% the first year and then you can be 15% after that.

And they tried to like completely solve this problem with the 30% tax and you can't have trial modes and it was all messy. And they're like, well, look, subscriptions are going to solve it. And in some ways, they were actually ahead of the curve there because like, subscriptions are everywhere now. But they were accommodating in a certain way. They still did it in a real Apple way, but they saw that there was some sort of discontent and they tried to address it. This time, they see that there's discontent and their answer is, no, these are the rules. We made this platform. It's ours and we get our cut. Yes, ultimately in 2016, when at the App Store rolled out

these changes led by Phil Schiller, they were, I think, on some level trying to appease and help out developers. But ultimately, the changes that year were about serving Apple. I mean, it was also the year that they rolled out search ads, right, in the app store. And what they were doing was laying the groundwork for fundamentally what would be their own growing subscriptions business, which we've seen pretty much quarter over quarter year over year since then has just completely grown. So yeah, sure, subscriptions maybe are great for the developers who want some kind of recurring revenue and they want the confidence in that recurring revenue and they get a better cut if they are able to maintain that for a long period of time. But ultimately, it's also all going

back to Apple. Not all, but there's money going back to Apple there. Yeah, and on a consistent basis of like it's like, I mean, I hate subscription apps. I hate them. I've got, I use Mailplane on my Mac still to handle my Gmail on my calendar. And, you know, I got a new Mac and I installed mail plane and I typed in my serial code and I didn't pay anyone any more money. And like, that was such a normal thing to have happen. But now in 2020, I was like, this is great. Like, I already paid for this. I paid for it. It's done. I'm done paying for it now. It's over. And that pushed to subscription from Apple instead of doing things developers wanted, like upgrade pricing, trials, all that stuff. They said, just make everybody subscribe. All that meant was

they get a recurring cut of recurring revenue. It wasn't, we made it easier to operate on our store or to build your business. It was just a way for them to charge your credit card more often. And that fundamentally is just where the iPhone has gone, where every interaction that you have on your phone or everything you do on your phone accrues some money to Apple in some way. And I think that's why they're being this aggressive, because it's existential for them. Because they can't sell any more iPhones. Because everybody who has an iPhone has an iPhone. Right. until the 5G upgrade cycle hits or until their AR glasses hit.

Like they're not going to get a big wave of new purchases. They're just sort of like every two years, most of the people who have the two-year-old iPhone get a new iPhone. Or now in the time of COVID, they don't because they're at home. Right. And so like there's the amount of money to try to squeeze out of the platform at every corner. It just seems like they're not being quite as honest about it as they could in a way that would justify the aggressive actions are taking against Fortnite.

Now, Fortnite did pick the fight, right? They absolutely picked the fight, but I continue to think they pick the fight kind of thinking they were going to win. And they might not, the way that's, like, it's going. By the way, this is going to be weird because I have to change the way I say this. Disclosure, since we're talking about App Store stuff,

my wife works for an App Store. She works for the App Store for Facebook Labs, which is the edition of Facebook, which makes the Oculus headsets. No longer called Oculus, apparently. You got through it. I did. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Like, there's not much to say. Not much else has happened after the restraining orders. Again, the point of the restraining orders is to maintain the status quo. Status quo is maintained. Well, yes and no. Status quo is maintained, but Fortnite is, like, already getting worse on the iPhone. Like, it already, like, feels like there's fewer people on it, and it doesn't have the new content. Yeah, the new content is Marvel.

I also think Tim Sweeney kind of knew everyone's at home and the number of people playing Fortnite on their phones versus playing on a PC or a console is low. Right. You know, the flip side to this is so well played to them, right? They've reduced the risk. The flip side of this is Google, and it just doesn't seem like the Google fight is, as, again, if I was Sundar or anyone at Google,

I'd be like, we're going to just see what happens with Apple. But why would they want to be in this fight as aggressively as Apple is? But there hasn't been any news on the Google front as near as I can tell. Not really, no. I mean, they also kicked them off the Android store, but other than that, it's been relatively, relatively quiet. But there's a, there's a trial there too. So at some point. Yeah, I mean, at the restraining order hearing, I think they asked how long they needed to get ready for trial. And

Apple's answer was like 10 months. So we got a ways to go. Yeah. There's going to be so many blog posts, you guys. So many podcasts and blog posts before this thing even begins. All right, we've gone way too long. Lauren, thank you for being here. You've had another podcast. She's talking at Gadget Lab. Yeah. So we have two podcasts at Wired. We have the brand new one, Get Wired, that I'm hosting every Monday. it drops. And then we have another podcast that's been, I think it's going on for at least four or five years now called Gadget Lab. And I co-host that every Friday with Michael Colori, a senior editor at Wired. And that's our more consumer-focused, gadget-focused podcast. So check that out as well. Great. And thank you so much for having me on this. It's been really fun.

So good. No, our verge expats are always walking back on the show. It's whenever you want. It's great to see again. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backlon. Lauren is at Lauren good. Deere's got a newsletter called Processor at verge.com slash newsletter. All this TikTok epic Facebook stuff Casey writes about in the interface, you can check that out. verge.com slash interface.

We'll be back on Tuesday with the interview show next Friday with the chat show. Just a lot going on. We'll see you soon. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.