The Vergecast - Switch review, Galaxy S8 leaks, and iPhone with USB-C

Episode Date: March 3, 2017

Usually I start these posts by apologizing, but ya know... by now I think you know what you’ve gotten yourself into — unless this is your first episode. So great! Hey! We’ve got a great show for you! (This is a podcast.) Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Ross Miller, and Paul Miller (no relation) compiled a list of things from our cherished website TheVerge.com and dug a little deeper, with different angles, viewpoints, and behind-the-scenes journalistic insight. We’ve got more time with the Nintendo Switch than we did last week (even a taste test), a roundup of MWC announcements from over the weekend, and tons of little stories. I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff you missed because of the Amazon web server disruption since those four hours were the only time you get your news. 03:04 - Nintendo Switch review: pure potential 14:05 - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild review 21:33 - Amazon’s web servers are back online after more than four hours of disruption 24:34 - Samsung Galaxy S8 leaks in its full glory and The BlackBerry KeyOne resurrects the keyboard with style 30:08 - Google Assistant begins huge expansion across Android devices today 38:05 - 5G: Super fast data, throttled by reality 41:10 - The next iPhone won’t switch to USB-C, but its cable likely will 49:32 - Paul’s weekly segment “Hey look at me now” 51:55 - FCC chairman says net neutrality was a mistake 58:40 - YouTube launches its own streaming TV service 1:02:20 - Amazon is working on its own home security camera 1:03:47 - Spotify is preparing to launch a Hi-Fi music tier Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. That'll be great. That'll be great. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. I think it's time that we retire that says a vodka joke because LG blew it. That's where I'm at. We need a new joke. And we're going to spend the next hour of your life.

Trying to come up with one while we talk about technology and culture. But the good news is that we get a good joke once a year or so. Once a year. And then we grind that joke into a fine powder. So don't worry, we'll come up with something. Yeah, it's going to happen. Anyway, I'm here. I'm Eli Patel.

Paul Miller's here. Hey, Paul. Dieter Bone is here. Hi. And Ross Miller's here. Hey, what up? Paul's brother. Exactly.

It's great. But Ross reviewed the Nintendo Switch this week. So we're going to get deep into his brain. Dieter licked part of the Nintendo Switch. That's a real thing. He licked portions of this device. And it's bad. We're going to talk about it too.

But first, I have some exciting news. The Vergecast, the show that you're listening to, if you are going to South by Southwest, you can come watch us to do it live twice at South by Southwest. We're taping two live episodes of this show at Southby. We're doing it with National Geographic. They're taking with the Vulcan Gas Company and they're like rebranding, it's like South By. It's a brand activation. But the Vulcan Gas Company, which is a place that you can find on a map, is going to be like the big national geographic experience at South By.

They got a stage. We're going to be on that stage. We're doing the show live. And our friends of Recode are we been taping some of their podcasts live there as well. So if you're at South By, on March 10th, you can come watch Recode Media with Peter Kafka. on March 11th, Lauren Good, who's on this show all the time, and has a great podcast. You can watch her do too embarrassed to ask.

On March 12th, you can come watch the Vergecast. We'll be there. On the 13th, Kara's Social Reader and Recode Decode. And then on 14th, we close it all out. The Vergecast one more time. So the Vergecast live at South By, March 12th and March 14th, if you're going down there, you come to Austin, eat a taco, you know, just get settled and then come watch our show.

It'd be great. So that's the big news. We're very excited about it. this. It'll be fun. And then we'll put the audio of it on the internet. So if you're not at South by, you can experience it on a delay. Two in one week. That's crazy. The deal with seeing the Vergecast live is we have a reputation to maintain of being terrible. So all the good stuff never actually makes the internet. We cut all the good jokes out and only put out the bad jokes. So if you come see us live, we promise it'll be entertaining. It's going to be a real

situation. But yeah, if you're coming to, if you're coming to Southby, come see us. It'll be fun. Okay, let's get into it. Ross. Yes. Should I buy a Nintendo Switch? You've got, I can see Ross on Skype that people are just listening, but he's got one. I'm literally like half paying attention, half playing, also making these beautiful clicking noises into the microphone. Because yeah, I mean, we did the video review of it and it's seriously the one thing that Dieter and I have been absolutely obsessed with, it's just the sound of the audio. Yeah, I've been obsessed with when it's in kickstand mode and you push a cartridge down into it. If you push too hard, the kickstand flies off and you need to reattach it.

That's a fun little effect. So you've got it. It's flung across the road. So explain this review situation to me because we have the hardware. We have Zelda. Yes. You have been playing Zelda, but there's like a whole software component that's happening that we don't have.

I don't want to get too media weedsy, but here's the basic just that myself and every other person that did a review yesterday kind of hit with. Or what happened is we got the hardware, we got Zelda. Some people got One-Two Switch, like the hand-wavy party game thing. But there was no internet. No friendcos, no online games, no digital shops. We couldn't play anything else either. That finally came this morning.

We're recording Thursday. Unfortunately, the review embargo was the day before. And the launch of it is the Tonight. So we've done with basically an in-progress review. There's no score. We realized there's a lot of missing pieces. we kind of had basically wait until Nintendo finished the software.

Yeah. And the hardware is great, and if you love Zelda, it's great. The hardware is really good. Okay, fine, it's really good. It's not great. Uh-oh. So here's the deal.

Uh-oh. The feel of the hardware is great. I think the line that Ross put in his review, which is the smartest thing he's ever written, is that it's amazing how many pitfalls that Nintendo avoided. By that, he means he actually wrote that line. There are a million

Classic editor-trick. ...that could have gone wrong in building a hybrid mobile console system with little controllers that click off the sides. Just a million things that could have gone wrong. And Nintendo avoided almost all of them with a couple of exceptions that are like kind of boneheaded.

It has some like frame rate drops when it's connected to TV trying to push out 1080P video. I mean, it does that too a little bit like mobile as well. To me the big... Wait, it has frame rate drops when it's mobile? No, when it's on the TV. No, but Ross just said I had frame and shots on mobile.

I can make that happen a little bit on Zelda, like pushing it a little bit. To me, the biggest problem is, you're going to laugh. The placement of the power jack is on the bottom, and so you can't plug it in and set it up in kickstand mode and use it. You can only have it on your lap and use it having it plugged in. Huh. I'm also just here comes. You have a bitter taste. It doesn't run WebOS.

It doesn't seem to be using standard USB power delivery for power. So batteries that I know are able to provide USB PD power for fast charging only seem to trickle charge this device. Similarly, it's not using standard USB for HTML out because standard USB to C to HDMI things don't actually do anything. We just say we can't use a third-party don't go. We have that docking connector. I bet that is a copyright thing. Oh, I'm sure there's some kind of proprietary handshake. It'll be figured out with a...

And Nintendo's the company that doesn't want to pay for the license to play DVDs on their systems. Right, that's like, they're like whatever we built our own. We're going to take the margin on it. But it looks like USBC. What would the copyright thing be? Like, let's play videos. I guess that's going to be a real question. You can do HTML capture if it's in the do.

Yeah, you can do HDMI capture, no problem. Yeah, no, I think it's more of a can we sell you? a Nintendo licensed dongle later. Yeah. Dongles are the future of the hardware industry. Right? What you do is you take the ports off and then you sell the people the ports back. This is something that we haven't

talked much about on the show, but the Switch is a cartridge-based system. Yeah, correct. Would you, does it seem like it, or does it seem like you're getting like SD cards? Because something that's really frustrated me is install times are getting

ridiculous. Oh, there's zero install. Well, for Zelda, yeah. For Zelda, there's no install. I mean, to me, that's kind of fun. That's kind of exciting. But can you buy games? Can you buy digital games, too, or is it all cartridges all the time?

Oh, you can buy games. You can buy Zelda from the store. You don't actually need to use cartridges. You can do everything digital. But here's the problem. It only has 32 gigs of storage on the device, and Zelda, for example, is, what, 13 and a half gigs? It's 13 gigs, but...

And the system itself takes up 7 gigs. and so there's no way to like download a library of games without buying one or several big ass microSD cards. Right. If you're buying a switch in Japan right now, there is one game that is 32 gigs large. Like you can't even purchase it until like you get an, like, us expanding. Do you feel like right now the CEO of Case Logic is like, we're back? He's like called the All Hands meeting. He's like, you thought it was over. But I told you to hold fast.

We've been through some ups and downs. Keep your sewing machines warm. Yeah, it's a good day for that. But just to be clear, let's say I bought Zelda in the store. Does it come in a DS case? It comes in a big-ass DVD-size case, I think. Right, it's not as wide as a DVD case. So if you're actually stacking it up to your Blu-ray discs

or your PlayStation 4 cases, it's going to look awkward. It's also comically big for the size of the game card itself. but there's just no love for either side of that. The game cartridges are like slightly bigger than a standard size SD card. Give or take. Yeah. So then you take the cartridge out. Wait, you take the cartridge out and you plug into the system and then it just

bang, you're playing a game? Like it's like super NES? Yep. Yep. I mean, there's like, I think there's a low time. I think no more than maybe 15 seconds at times. I'm just definitely. I'm putting the cartridge in the system.

This is so exciting. And I'm hitting the home button. Wait, show me the screen. Show me the screen. with Chris Plant's profile and the game is now launching. Yep. There it is.

For those of you listening in your car, what Dieter is doing right now is lying tough. He's not playing Zelda yet. It did take a little bit longer. Okay, there you. There we go. Wait, but that's just the title screen. Yeah, well, I think it had to switch user profiles.

The point is when you put a cartridge and you don't have to install a bunch of stuff locally to play the game. That's what I mean by there's not installed. So that 32 gigabytes won't be eaten up because like with the Wii you, there would be like day one updates for games

or like the Mario Kart update was like 12 gigabytes or something like that. Now that the Nintendo switches out, we do not speak of that previous console. It does not exist. I'm so sorry. It's completely gone. So there was a really interesting Bloomberg story.

It's funny how Nintendo is kind of going to different parts of its audience with different parts of the Switch story. So like Ross was saying, the nerds, review sites got Zelda. They were like, Ross Miller,

you're reviewing the Switch, here's Zelda, you, this was fine for you. And then like the mainstream sites that reviewed the Switch got One-Two Switch, like the Wall Street Journal got One-Two Switch, and you know, their piece was great, but it was all about like, this is a console for

everyone. You know, it's like it was a different audience. And then Nintendo, there's a good piece in Bloomberg, and it was all about Nintendo's investors and the future of the platform, right? And so is managing this message very carefully. And the investors are pretty rattled by the switch. Really?

Yeah. Like it was just a really interesting piece in Bloomberg. Obviously, the concern is that they've released a tablet so that competes with the iPad. Like there's this feeling that mobile gaming, that what this thing is trying to do is compete with mobile gaming. I don't have that feeling at all, right? I think of this as a console that kind of moves around. I feel like they found this one specific story. spot that has never truly, it's been attempted, but has never succeeded. Like, the closest

equivalent to this is the Vita. Yeah. Or on the other side, like, attaching handles to an iPad. Right. Yeah, it's essentially, it's, but it's interesting how they, they, it's right in between those. They're trying to message a thing, and I think they're having a hard time. Like, what I'm perceiving from all of us is a lot of excitement. We just talked for five minutes about putting a cartridge in this, like, that's ridiculous. Like, when are we ever excited that much about a piece of hardware or software. So that's like really cool. I'm excited to like buy one.

Ross, you like ran around and played it. Like did you ever think I could be playing an iPad right now or like this is less convenient than my, was that even a part of your consideration of the thing? No, because like to me like this still feels like a different kind of game, right? Like I do like iPhone and iPad games, but they're also like they're designed differently. It feels like this felt like more like a console game. Right. So I got that kick out of it.

And the thing always comes with the Bloomberg stuff is like, and Nintendo, you know, wisely has always had that dedicated game console 3DS was sold almost 70 million. And it was created and like sold throughout the like the lifespan iPhone gaming. So like I think this will do well. I think this will be fine. Yeah. That's just interesting.

It's different. Yeah. The idea that this launch is happening and there's so much excitement in nerd world and out in kind of like mainstream consumer world, they're having to show one. to switch and try to recapture that we energy and then out in an investor world they're trying to prove that this is a good idea period those are interesting disconnects to me we don't usually see that usually when the nerds are excited the investors are like they're you're going to sell a lot of

these right just the thing so deeter you uh put a cartridge in your mouth ross i believe i believe you did as well actually no no so by the time i got back to the office the deeter every one of the office yeah it's like deeter and like half the vox media office had licked both cartridges to the point where like there was just no bitter taste like the coating went away uh i think so it wasn't that bad when i tried it's terrible um so polygon got to scoop right well no so giant bomb got the scoop uh jeff girstman tried it last week oh i meant the reason why oh it's because it's coated in bitricks which is like the thing that you put on things so the babies don't eat them because it tastes awful yeah or it's like something

like bit tricks yeah um and like let me tell you, it took about four hours for the taste to get out of my mouth. Wow. It was unbelievably atrociously bad. It was just awful. That's so funny. Yeah, it just took forever. It tasted like spraying bug spray directly on my tongue.

Wow. It's terrible. Ross, anything? Tell us how it's Zelda. That's actually the thing I want to know. Tell me how it's Zelda. Right, because that's honestly, that's the only reason to get it right now. I think it's great.

Great review by Andrew Webster on Theverge.com. Yeah, Andrew did a great job. with it. Also, poor Andrew, who's been doing GDC here in San Francisco, managed to put 50, 60 hours in the game the last four days, maybe five. His drop sounds terrible. Oh, my God. I'm such a terrible boss that makes everyone work so hard.

It's true. You know, it's a different thing. Andrew's away from his family. It's a whole thing. But he's playing on the go. He's playing on the go. He's playing on the go. He's playing anywhere he wants.

It's great. It doesn't feel like any of the old Z. Zelda's. It's very much, they don't kind of tell you what to do. They say, here's Link. You have a sword. That sword's going to break, so go pick up another one. And don't die. Like, it's very much, we're going to just let you explore. Every other Zelda game was like, go to dungeon, get a grappling hook. Yeah. Kill a guy. Is there a narrative to this game? Or are you just like an elf with a, with a, with a dream? No, there's a pretty big narrative. No, Jesus Christ, Nilai. What are you doing? He's got the ears.

What is he if he's not an elf? He's a Cochiri. Okay, Paul, you also thought Link was an elf. Yes. I mean, not really. I thought he was an elf too. What is he? A Hyrolean?

He hung out with a Cochariis. He's a Hyrullian, yeah. That's his nationality. When you say elf, people think of like Lord of the Rings elf. There's everybody knows that there's Keebler elves and there's linked elves and there's Lord of the Rings. There's a Spanish. There's a lot of different elves. Hold on.

Is Lincoln elf? He's a Hylean. I don't want to try to sound too clever here, but I will say from reading Andrew's review, and I have literally not touched this game, but it kind of sounds like they did the same thing where they found this perfect little, it's like they played a dangerous game

because I was looking at this game, it's like, well, this looks like a dumbed-down Skyrim, and if I want to play Skyrim, I'll just play Skyrim, so why would I get this? But it sounds like they captured what was really great about Zell. and captured what's really great about having open world, open-ended sort of Skyrim situation. Right.

Like, you know the thing I always think about SkyRum? Wait, just to be clear, there's a lot of information on the internet about Hyalians versus Hyrulians. Hyrulians are people that live in the land of Hyrule, who may be of any race. Are you on Zeldoppedia right now? I'm on Zelda Wiki. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Highlyans are race and there's humans, Gorons, and Zoras and Hylians. And then Hyrulians are nationality. Huh? Okay. Because like, Gorons and Zoroas are different races

than the Hylians. Right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So Link isn't up. Like, I just want to just be clear.

No. No. I swear to God, I'm going to quit. Physically, Hileans resemble humans and the only difference appearance-wise between them is the Heilian's long elf-like ears. Deere looks so mad.

This is unacceptable. Yeah, so to Paul's point, like games like Skyrim and Fallout, they always just seem big for sake of being big. Like, everything's kind of lifeless. A lot of the character models feel like kind of repetitive. This does feel like a Zelda game in a sense that you're wandering around. And like a lot of it just feels like there's a lot of touching care.

Like, I didn't feel like I was seeing the same dungeon over and over again the same moment. Like, it felt like it was big because they just had that much to do and not like that much to show. Yeah. But does it drive you

through a narrative or is it just? There's a, there's a large narrative. But it doesn't drive you. That's the thing. Yeah. Like, there's a very large narrative like the after like

what essentially feels like a two to three hour like tutorial. Then they kind of let you like open up the world. And then it's like, you can do these things. Like here are four things you should definitely do to save the world. Good luck.

And then like, give you direction. Yeah. That's fun. Yeah, you can wander around. There is this one quest at the beginning, a small spoil, like five hours in, where you go to Kokiri Village and they tell you that, you know, Link, you got to go find your elf parents. Oh my God. To prove your elf life.

Now, that's just a thing I really didn't say. Yeah. It's like a... It's an term of endearment. Yeah, it's a national holiday, elf parents' time. But, yeah, the gist is, like, I like the switch. I would definitely buy it just to play Zelda, but I'm also kind of in, like, the minority for that. Beyond this game, like, it's kind of hard to say when the next big thing's going to come out, right?

One-two Switch is terrible. One-two Switch is awful. Like, we do have a copy of it. Really? Yeah, we have a copy of. We've been trying to play it. It's just bad. I don't think it's going to hold my, like, four-year-old niece's attention. And the fact that's a $50 standalone game is ridiculous.

Wow. Why is it not the pack-in? I don't know. They really screwed that one up. That's, it's really bad. But a couple of other games you can the shop are pretty good. Nintendo is promising one new independent game a week. That could be great.

Portable Stardie Valley sounds pretty exciting to me. That would be fun. Blaster Masters coming out next week. Blastermaster Master Zero! Deeter is enormously excited about that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, but honestly, like, if you're not eager to play Zelda, I would just wait a month or two, at least.

Yeah, there have been some connection issues with the joy cons. Yeah, we've not had that, but probably got had it. Yeah, I think Wired, Chris Kohler had that. Wow. Okay. Well, I mean, it's Nintendo, so you're going to have to wait a month anyway. If you haven't already decided to buy one, then you can't have one unless you spend more than the list price. Yeah.

And it's going to be like that for a month. Maybe this is, they released it now so that by the holiday season, they might, they might be able to sell some. Possibly. That's what they did with the little, you know. Nintendo Classic. They released it before last holiday so that they might have them in stock of time for this holiday. They didn't figure it out. That was a much simpler product. Anyway, that's very exciting. This episode of this show, The Vergecast, is brought to you by Chrysal Noglare Lenses.

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Should you talk about that? Yeah, sure. So it was down for like an afternoon. Four-ish hours. When we say Amazon, what we actually mean is Amazon's S3 cloud services upon which... East One. Yeah. A vast majority of, I don't know, websites and apps that you've heard of depend.

Do you want to explain what you mean about East One? Well, when you sign up for Amazon... for AWS. For AWS, for any service that you do, you pick which region you want to host your stuff on. Now, if you really want to go crazy, you can set it up. so that it will load balance and bounce around through all the different services. But most people, including apparently Amazon, don't set up that kind of redundancy. And East One is one of the primary OG original locations for storing a bunch of data that the Internet relies on in S3 buckets, as they're called.

It's supposed to be just like the static files, but so many of the dynamics, operations of the internet rely on those static files. And yeah, it was just a cascading problem. Amazon has up an explanation of what happened. Yeah. Which was a typo by a programmer. It was a pretty good one. It was like a routine sort of like more...

Yeah, he's like, I'm just going to turn off a few of these because we're going to change a thing. But he like, maybe order of magnitude error. I don't know. Yeah, so did... Well, it caused cascading problems. Like, they were supposed to take down a few servers in a support role. And then he took down too many.

And then that, but he wasn't directly taking down the S3 servers, but the services that they took down, they took down a few too many. And that caused other servers that depended on those services to like go down. And the whole thing cascaded out. And then it turns out that when a server goes down, you need to reboot it. And that ended up taking a long time because they needed to do all the checks to make sure that they would come back live properly. How do you think he's feeling today? Who? The dude that made the typo.

Not great. Just like a little stressed. Yeah. Yeah. He's fine. I'm back now. I mean, like, I will say yesterday, was it yesterday? Tuesday.

It was Tuesday. It was very hilarious. Like, the people reacting to Amazon being down was actually quite funny, in my opinion. Yeah. I'm sure that huge number of companies that actually lost money because their shit didn't work, they were probably not writing funny articles about, is it down right now being down? But Casey did, and I thought that was great. So, where are you going to say, Paul? Well, so many people were down that for a lot of people, like, I'd be mad at you for being down, but I'm down too, so I'm busy doing that.

Yeah. And like our image service, like our asset manager partially relies on this three. So we just had a long conversation about whether we should publish things without images for a while. It was kind of like a vacation. Yeah. Yeah. Images are tyranny. Interesting.

Just a thought. Speaking of images. the tyrannical nature thereof. There's a bunch of sort of mobile news we should talk about. I think the most important, well, interesting piece of mobile news, the galaxy S-8, Evan Blast just leaked the whole thing. There it is. And that's, you just look at it on the internet.

You look at the, you look at the S-8. It looks kind of like the LGS, our G-6. Yeah. Snip-snip-snip. And it looks a lot like what works, like there's a vague sense that that's what the, you know, the fanciest of the fancy iPhones coming out later this year. You know, all the rumors seem to point to it being,

you know, curved screen bezelist, very tiny bezels on the top and the bottom. Yeah. That's just what phones look like now. They have virtually or no bezel on the left and right, and they have incredibly thin bezels on the top and bottom, and that's just,

that's what a phone is now. Ashley turned to me the other day and held up her iPhone and said, this is just so ugly to me now. Yeah. The bezels are just And now I can't look at my phone And think the bezels are just garbage At least when the screen's off you can't see them

You turn the screen on it's like Oh, I can't The entire I think we talked about this last week Two weeks ago The whole re-architecture of the home button And touch ID And the no more swipe to unlock

I feel like that's a big Like user training for the next phone that gets rid of the bezel and maybe integrates it into the screen. But I was trying to use Apple Pay today. Even Apple Pay got slower. It's like way more confused about what I'm trying to do with the phone. Really? Yeah.

Oh, were you trying to meet Space Apple Pay? Yeah. Oh. So I love it for like buying stuff on my phone. No, I was like buying lunch and I like waved my phone at the thing and it unlocked the phone instead of paying because I had like clicked instead it didn't. It's like they've got a they've got to just clean up around the edges. of that interaction design.

But the S8, though, we should get back to it. Yeah, well, apparently they're putting a home button on the back, or they're putting a fingerprint sensor on the back in the same way that the pixel and the LG have been doing for a while. I think that's how Samsung's handling it. That's fine. I think what's interesting to me, you did the G6 hands-on video.

The S-8 looks like it has the taller screen as well. Yeah. I'm kind of getting that vibe. And I think what they're doing on the G6 with the square camera previews. It's genius. Yeah. It's really nice. There's something there.

Yeah. Well, and also, like, you've been able to multitask on Android, on Samsung forever, and on Android since the latest version. And I just don't do it that much because, like, everything feels a little bit constricted. But on a super tall screen, I'm, you know, more likely to do it. You mean, like, split screen multitask? Yeah, split screen multitasking. I'm also, I'm with Dan Seaford. on this one. I think I'm more likely to do split-screen multitasking on a

Blackberry key one than I am on a regular Android phone. Why? Because when you bring up the software keyboard, it doesn't include the bottom thing. Oh, yeah. That's just there. But you're never going to purchase or own a Blackberry key one. Well, man. So like the true percentage of likelihood gets multiplied by zero. Everything about the key one is, like, operator. Everything about the key one is really, everything about the key one is really. smart except for the price. They kind of did everything they should have done. They've got BlackBerry Software on there.

I think that there's still some room to improve there. They, instead of going for the latest specs, went with the Snapdragon, I think it's 625, 620. It's like a baby one. Yeah, but it's the one that everybody loves on the MotoZ play because it gets just bonkers battery life. And they put a really big battery inside this thing. So when you think of traditional BlackBerry, you think of keyboard.

And back in the day, you used to think of it was the smartphone that got better battery life than everybody else because it was. Back in the, you know, the curve bold days, people would get a BlackBerry, not just for the keyboard, but because they knew the thing would last all day when an iPhone or a Windows phone wouldn't. And I think that this Blackberry Key One is going to probably do that. But they just, they're charging way too much money for it for the specs that are on it. Hmm. I mean, but that's their brand, right? They're trying to, like, people who buy that phone have expense accounts. Yeah, I suppose. Right. Like a bunch of government types are going to buy that phone. Yeah, I know I pivoted from talking about the essay to the Blackberry, but I mean, we just know a bit more about the Blackberry. I'm still really interested to see this Dex system on the, on the, the Samsung. Is it going to be good when they, you, they, you've, they've, they've,

dock it and get a desktop up. I'm really intensely curious to see if it does have a desktop class browser, what that browser is, if it's Chrome or if it's Firefox. I bet it would be Firefox? Why would Google give them Chrome? Yeah, right? And that's like licensing revenue for Firefox, for Mozilla rather. Right.

I can't imagine Google's going to give them Chrome if what Google's trying to do is get you to buy a ChromeOS laptop that runs into Android. It just doesn't seem like the Google move. but who knows Chrome is technically open source they could just write their own Chrome they could yep that'd be a thing

but then it wouldn't yeah other mobile news bunch of like Google assistant stuff going on right so they yeah I mean more phones are going to get it yeah like that and that's rolling out right now

so basically anything with Android 6 or 7 that has Google Play services should be getting it pretty imminently it's starting with English and then it's going to other languages. There's some other random stuff. Android police just put up a thing right before we started podcasting that

multi-user for home code is starting to show up, so they're going to fix that. Multi-user for home code. The code in the Google Home app, the companion app for the Google Home, has code in it that indicates that they are actively working in multi-user, which they've promised, but now they're actually doing it. Got it. They also stuck a- And that lines up with Amazon trying to do multi-voice recognition, right?

But yeah, like the Google Assistant coming to Android phones, I want to feel like is a really big deal. But the Assistant isn't so much different than just the voice button from before that I don't get that excited about it. The more exciting thing for me is long pressing the home button on Android 6 phones now does something actually useful instead of pulling up the screen grab feature.

There's literally nothing worse than the screen grab feature. It's so annoying every time. because it makes like the click sound, it flashes a screen at you, and then it's like, it looks like you're reading a web page. It's like, sure am, buddy. I don't know. But now it's going to be good. I mean, look, this is Google's future.

They keep saying it's their, like, this is their big future. If they don't put it on the phones, you can't get there. Right. And the fact that it's getting distributed through Google Play Services instead of, like, requiring actual firmware updates is a big deal. So I asked you about this before the show started. Yeah. I don't think they make a big enough deal.

about Google Play Services. Like the fact that they don't need Verizon or AT&T or Samsung or LG's permission to just roll out the core thing that is their new strategy, they can just put in all the phones. I think that's a much bigger deal for the future of Android than we're paying attention to. And what I was asking earlier was, does Google tell people what the percentage base on the newest version of Google Play Services is? Because I know they tell people how many people are running the newest Android.

and it's always like 1% of people. But if everyone's running the newest Google Play Services, that's almost more important. Dieter's just laughing at me. That's because there's a ghostly T.C. staring at you from the window behind you. T.C.'s super ready to go into neutrality. Yeah. The thing about Google Play Services is how they roll out security updates,

which is a big deal. And it's also the more that they can unbundle from the core of the, I can't do this right now. God. Hello. Hello. Hi. Our old producer, Creight and D. Simone, has rolled in to interrupt you, even though I tried to shush him.

I wanted to interrupt to, uh, because the G6 was announced today. And I wanted to present you with a custom bottle of scissor vodka. Oh my God. Is this? Oh. What the actual fuck? Is this actually vodka? It is actually vodka.

All right. Well, we will take some pictures. He's a sealed bottle. How did you make this? Uh, with love. This is amazing. It says best by July 2012 on it.

It's fine. It's new. I will say for people who can't see this right now, it looks legit. It does look legit. It just definitely says best by July 22nd,

2012 on it. I think it says 2018, but that's fine. It's fine. You use it to clean things. Thank you, Creighton. It's new vodka. It's for you.

It's really nicely made. I lived with graphic design. I learned through osmosis. It's funny because we said we're going to retire the joke at the top of the show. Well, this is perfect. It's all happening. Then you can wash this joke away with a bottle of vodka on the rocks. I mean, go get some cups.

We'll drink some vodka there. All right. It's going to happen. Bye. Guys, we're going to get donked in my custom vodka. Okay, so I do want to make this Google Services point. Yeah. Because it is important.

It's how Google is rolling out security updates. Yeah. It's now it's taken a bunch of stuff that used to be built in of the OS and it's starting to unbundle it, which is great because it means they can update that stuff more often without waiting for carriers to approve it, but a little bit scary because it makes Google phone, like Android phones, Google phones more than they are like, you know, open source Android phones, whatever. That's been a debate for a long time.

Yeah, but Chrome is basically unbundled. They just announced that in future versions of Android, they're unbundling the SMS app. They're calling it Android messages now rather than Messenger or. or messaging or whatever the hell it's called now. And that's going to be updated through Google Play Services. And now they're able to update, you know, the Google Assistant. So more and more, Google's solution for this problem that a new version of Android comes out and nobody gets anything is to make the new version of Android less important than the unbundled apps that you can get updated directly via Google Play Services. A playbook that palmed at first.

Oh, damn. Damn. The longest con. The longest con. I mean, isn't the whole point of apps is that you can upgrade them? Yeah. Like, every time I want a new feature. I don't have to like read.

Every year, there's a new version of iOS and there's all these like changes that are bundled into iOS. And we have to wait for the next version of iOS to get them. And they have to, it has to get pushed out through this, you know, big ass iOS update. They finally started to do like skinny updates that can like upgrade some of these apps on their own directly. so Apple doesn't have quite the same problem that Android has in terms of waiting for carrier approval because they've got more strength and they've got a better update system. But nevertheless, they tend to bundle a bunch of their app updates to have a moment for the OS upgrade. And the thing that Google hasn't figured out yet is how can they create a different kind of moment

surrounding these things that they're going to be able to push out to all phones that isn't the thing that every consumer understands, which is like a new version of Android. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. It's silly. It's funny because it's a big moment when every year new iOS version. Yeah, and then your phone just starts randomly restarting.

Your alarm clock gets fucked out. Battery life goes to hell. I just think it's interesting. Just generally, I think that split is interesting that, you know, Google rightfully, I think, gets criticized that they can announce a new version of Android, and it doesn't matter to, so many people, but I don't think they get enough credit for Google Play Services. Like, we're just doing this and then something everything's up for it.

I think Google could get a good hype cycle going. If they could show up on stage to say, hey, we made this new thing. Look out for it. Next month. And then next month, like, everybody gets it. Like 100 million people have it on their phone. That's what they're doing with Assistant. They just kind of like, in Google fashion right now.

How many years ago was Google? I guess it was like one year ago that Google Assistant was in there? else? How long ago was that? It feels like, it feels like a long time to be. It was October. Yeah. Yeah, that's about a year. I mean, technically that was last year. October was a different time, but much different time.

I mean, I still don't have a goddamn pixel. I don't remember anything to happen. I thought you got one. I thought you got one. No, I ordered one finally. I'm going to check the status right now. It has some ship yet. What are you doing, Google? While we do this break, I will

let the people know that right now, according to the poll, 50% yes, 50% no is Lincoln Elf. Even split. Dead time. The country is divided. Who's going to bring us together

on this elf issue? Who will unite Hyrul? I wanted to bring, I mean, this is on the list of the links. It's not like I'm going off topic here, but James Vincent wrote up something everybody should read about 5G

has kind of like this religious. There's this amazing quote. The future of all things and the creation of time is the name of a talk you could attend at Mobile World Congress? Oh, the transformative power of 5G? I don't know. It's exciting.

I'm excited. The thing about, like, there's no such thing as 5G yet. There's a logo and there's a promise of speed and nobody knows which network standard it's going to use. And it's possible, perhaps likely, that especially in the U.S., we might end up with competing network standards. and I'm just going to say this right now don't go with whichever one's sprint

chooses because we know how that goes. Here's what I'm going to say. I ordered my pixel on January 30th. The ship date has now been pushed to March 16th. What are they doing? What are they doing? They're pulling a real Nintendo on. It's a good thing they don't have any plans to make any plans right now to make new pixel laptops

because they can't make anything called pixel. Well, that Austerlo quoted MWC is very strange. So Rick Osterlo, who runs Google's hardware division, and I must say has not done an excellent job of shipping me a phone. Rick, pulled a bunch of reporters together at MWC and said, I think answered a question about Chromebook laptops and whether they're going to make their own pixel. It appears that he first said, no, we're done with it. Everybody reported it out. And then came back around, Google sent us a statement. Osterlo tweeted today.

what I meant to say is we don't have any plans at this time, which generally means we're never doing this again, but I think they were trying to deflate the Googles out of making its own laptop hardware. I'm telling you right now what they're making is some sort of surface alike. They're making a Chrome tablet. I don't have any real evidence. There's no real rumors here, but you look at the work that they're doing on Chrome OS,

you look at how much effort they put into making the stylus work, you look at the Android stuff that's coming, that is what I expect. So they're Pixel C2. Yeah. Which is probably what they'll call it because consumers love names like Pixel C2. I'm curious about if they make a Pixel C2

in that same form factor, if they'll come up with a way to have the keyboard not scratch the hell out of the screen. I just don't know what they're... I want Google to be in the game in a way that Google doesn't appear to be in the game right now. That's it. They're not executing well, I think.

I said this to Wall and his show. They have a lot of great ideas. and then everyone gets all excited when they have the ideas. And they're like, we made it. And you're like, this is nothing. This is a box of wires that actually hurt me when I touched it. And you can't even ship it in the first place. Yeah.

This is awful. I can't even get the box of wires that hurt me. I don't know. I don't know what they're doing. Last bit of mobile stuff. Then we can move on to the next thing. iPhone rumors happened this week in a really, I would like to say, dumb way. Yeah.

Like a particularly dumb way. Because it, well, here's what happened. The Wall Street Journal reported the next iPhone will not have lightning and switch to USBC. But the wording in the piece was such that you could graft any hopes and dreams that you wanted on it. So everyone, instead of, they read the iPhones dropping lightning and go to USBC into it. It was also worded in such a way that they're just switching the cable that comes with the iPhone to be a USBC to lightning cable. And they're going to adopt some of the. the USBC power delivery stuff

for the phone to charge faster. You could literally read both of those things into it and everyone read the thing that they want. I prefer to believe it's hinting an augmented reality. Yeah, of course, right? What else are they doing? Marquez Brownlee, our friend, MKBHD,

made a video entitled Dear Apple, which is all about switching USBC. That is one of the nerdiest thing. Like, Marquez is a nerd, we're a nerd. We love his stuff. That video was trending on YouTube today because people want USBC in the iPhone so badly. It's not going to happen. And then today, you know, the analysts were like, no, they're obviously just doing the USBC cable. But it's just a moment, right, where people want the standards to work. And then, by the way, Apple switching to USBC on the other end of the lightning cable.

Yeah. It's going to piss so many people off. Right, because USBCAA is basically the new power socket around the world. Right. Okay. What about... And they're going to ship it with a USBC to USBA dongle. And the world is going to explode. How about this compromise?

Wait. How about this? The problem changes the plug in the phone to be USBC. But they ship a charging cable that has lightning on the other end. Deere, I actually don't think that it's going to be... They'll ship two cables. They'll ship a USBA and a USBC. Charges the new iPhone just fine.

Right? They can't be that dumb. No, but I bet you what they do is they ship two cables. They ship a USBC cable and a USBA cable. And the USBC cable charges it super fast. Right. And then if you have a new MacBook, you don't have to carry around a dongle to charge your iPhone. It'll plug right in. But they have to know that not very many people have USBC laptops yet.

And not very many people are excited about the idea of getting on a plane wanting to plug their iPhone in and seeing that it's a USBC plug and it's a USBA port. And so they have to shift gold cables. Or anywhere. Like, the only solution. Everyone's going to laugh at me because I'm fond of universal standards that have been widely adopted. I'm sorry, it's just one of my personal flaws. But USBCA is like literally everywhere.

We just bought lamps for our bedside that have USBA power plugs in it. Do you live in a hotel? No, they're just like, we don't like the wires. Like we have a million wires because we try. charge a bunch of shit at night. Sort of like, instead of buying one of those anchor blocks, we bought, like, very nice lamps, and they just have, like, little hidden USB ports at the back of them.

Okay, cool. That's clever, yeah. I drilled a hole in the back. I saw it a giant-ass hole in the back of my nightstand and then threaded a wire in it, so I've got one of the multi-onker ports sitting in a drawer on my nightstand. Yeah.

I put my crap in it and close the drawer. That's like a whole movie came. But, like, I'm just saying USBA ports. Our desks in our new office, I will say came with USBA ports. They suck because they don't offer enough power. But it's just like they're everywhere. Yep.

And like that transition, it'd be like if you change the regular power plugs in America. It's like Apple is like, you know what? We're just not putting a regular AC plug on our laptops anymore and just use this new one that we invented. Here's a dog. We're not that far down that road.

We're a decade into that road. They're everywhere. A stick in the mud. Are you going to go with the flow? I just love it. universal standards, Paul. Here's why I believe that this is happening. If you look at the AC adapters for all the MacBooks, the pros and the new Macbooks,

it has a USBC plug on the adapter itself. The cable isn't attached to the adapter and the way it was on MagSafe, which means they want you to be able to plug other USBC cables into that, aka the one that's going to charge your iPhone eventually. Yeah. No, look, but I think USBC is great. And, like, I have the, I think I've talked about that show a thousand times. Like, I have a MacBook.

I threw away, but I didn't throw away. Put away the adapter it came with. I bought an anchor adapter that has like four USBAs and one USBC. That is the best thing I travel with regularly. It is my favorite thing. The other day I was, I was trying to, I forget what it was. It was like a weird, a thing for making music by a company that I forget the name of. Let's call it a keyboard.

It had buttons on it. Were they in the shape of piano keys? Stuff like that. They were not in the shape of piano keys. And it had a little hole in it that you plug the power into. And you needed like a brick. It was like a nine-volt or a...

I don't know. There's lots of voltages. So I go to my box. Oh, I have one of those boxes. I got that rats nest of bricks that adapt that, you know, and you know in your heart that you can never throw them away because there will come the day that you need one. Wall plugs are a nice universal standard that every gadget that plugs into them has to adapt from it to turn it into it.

You know. You should. I think what you're doing right now is you're pitching me an article called Powerbricks or the original dongle. Think about it. O.G. Dongle, the Paul Miller story. I'm not selling you on this at all. Sounds like a little worse. Do you buy this curved screen, iPhone rumor, that the screen is going to curve around a la?

Galaxy Edge. Oh, I don't. You don't? I don't. I think that comes from like a weird patent that Apple did. Like, what if the screen went all the way around? It comes from the analyst that everybody believes everything he says. Yeah.

I think. Yeah. I think they'll probably more aggressively curve the back. But I think Apple, the way Apple thinks about screens and cameras is so purest that introducing curve distortion into the screen doesn't feel like a thing that, they will do. Right? Like,

yeah. It just doesn't seem like they're like, watch movies on your iPhone. The top and bottom will be gently curved away from you, so just ignore that part. Which I, like, when I hold Samsung's phones,

I look at that. I'm like, that is more annoying than I want it to be. So I, I mean, maybe it's a way to make it thinner. They like making things thinner. But I don't,

I just don't see Apple being like, here's our screen. It's partially distorted by the hardware. It's, we invented it. it just doesn't seem like their move. It's also what Samsung is doing, and I don't think they want to walk into that trap either.

Do you buy it, Paul? I agree with everything you just said, and I hope that you're right. Yeah. Because it's one reason I would not want a Samsung phone. But the reason I bring it up is, you know, rumor is they're going to get rid of the home button on the front. You press the whole screen, blah, blah, blah.

Samsung will have released the Galaxy S8 by then, the G6, even though I know it's, It's not going to make a big impact. It's going to be out as well. And what I said earlier that this is what phones look like now, whatever the hot shit this looks new iPhone is looks like will be probably a design that we've already seen for six months on Android, which is going to be a really interesting moment.

Yeah. And it's funny the Huawei P10 like announced at MWC. We'd have a hands on with it. It looks like if you made another iPhone, but like iterated the design. It just looks like the next iPhone of this lineage. Like almost exactly. So I don't know.

Like I don't think Apple, I think Apple is obviously very confident in this particular design. They've released three iterations on it now. But if they're going to make a move, I just expect them to make a more, a more dramatic move than headed to where Samsung's headed. All right, Paul. Yeah.

Every week. Every week. I do a segment. I like how you're just intro in your own segment because I'm waiting. is called, hey, look at me now. Wow. Yeah. What do you got?

You should think about changing the name of that second. Sometimes I think about it. LG came out, it's coming out with a VR headset. Oh, I saw this thing. So it's Steam VR, right? So HCC was never the exclusive forever buddy. And so it works with the same lighthouse technology and it's used the same VR technology, but it's a VR headset. But you can like slide it up.

Yeah. So you can have it still mounted on your head, but raise the visor part. Like a fighter jet helmet? Yeah. That's pretty awesome. Which, if you've ever used VR, here's what you're doing. Especially once the motion controllers were introduced. You've got two motion controllers.

There's a computer with a keyboard and mouse that you have to lean over, and then you have a thing on your head, the perch's cut on your forehead so that you can look at the, what always happens is it like squishes my, like, brow down. And I'm like squint. It is just so annoying. I don't know. LG might have solved it. Might have cracked the case. Yeah.

Does it, is it going to, what platform is it? It's steam. Steam. Steam. It's basically a vibe. Yeah.

But made by LG instead of HD. I'm into that. Yeah. Do we know, is it like the, are the hard respects better or worse than the vibe? They seem to be very, very similar as far as the field of view and the resolution.

What Adi said is it's basically some, it's not the next generation, our headset. Yeah. It's another one of this generation, but with a cool thing where you can swing it up. I got to probably be a little bit cheaper, I bet. Hopefully. Maybe.

Well, also, you know, Oculus just drop the price $200 on the Rift and Touch together, which is great for me because it's less than a month from when I bought my Rift and Touch. I'm going to $200 back. There you go. And you're going to spend it on this new LG watch. Yeah, I've got to spend on LG, but not have the lighthouses. It's just, yeah. Oh, it doesn't have the lighthouses.

No, it works with the lighthouse. I was trying to riff on the joke that we were doing. Well, let's all just sit here quietly for a minute to get through it. Okay, so I have a, we have two lightning rounds to end the show with. If you have been reading the site, you know that Jake Castronachas and I, literally everything FCC chairman, Agapai does. We believe is a story on the verge right now. Magic pie eats an apple. Yeah.

That'd be amazing, actually. That'd be a lot easier to write than the very complicated story chapter right here. Dude has just been on a tear. These are been doing stuff. Here's just a list. I'm just going to list them all. I've been writing about the – well, actually, Jake has been doing the hard work of reporting out, getting the analysis, doing the work, and I've been ruthlessly aggregating Jake into my daily newsroom of the show notes.

But here's just a list of headlines that Jake has published this week, alone. Adjapai went to MWC, said net neutrality was a mistake. Advocated for a bunch of stuff, including 5G rollouts, basically yelled at a bunch of European mobile executives and telecom chiefs, because he's like, you guys build one infrastructure and then you make people compete on it. We believe in something called facilities-based competition where different kinds of infrastructure compete with each other. Really stern warning from Chairman Pye, which is great. He said that he has no plans to review the AT&T Time Warner merger because Time Warner isn't selling any broadcast licenses to AT&T that actually sold off whatever they would. So he doesn't want to look at it.

Just let it go. They're going to be happening. Net neutrality, actually, it was its second anniversary, I believe on Sunday of the vote. And Jake ran a whole thing about industry people reacting to it. Pi said broadband infrastructure investment in the United States is at the lowest, historically low levels. There's a great piece in the consumerist analyzing that based on the public statements of telecom companies. We looked at market caps and stock prices. He's basically walking into a new kind of fight, right?

Like, you can, if you slice away the data and ignore certain kinds of investment, he might be right. If you just look at a whole at what broadband companies are saying about their investments, to their investors, to their shareholders, so definitely wrong, and all their market caps are way up. Then, we're not even done yet. Then... This is more of a thunder round. Lightning rounds are like instantaneous and fast.

This is just all the shit. I'm just going to list the headlines. Just read about it on the side. We don't have to get into it. Then he, Tom Wheeler passed a bunch of privacy regulations for internet companies, basically saying you can't share your customer's browsing data. There's all kinds of other stuff.

This is important because particularly Verizon, bought AOL wants to buy Yahoo to build an ad tech network. So it's not, like, them getting more of your data helps them serve more ads. So there's this regulation there. All the ISPs were against it because they want to sell more ads. Pai said, you know what, we're going to let the Federal Trade Commission handle this. We want to step out of it, halted the implementation of that order. order in basically a rush. He announced he was going to halt it on a Friday, rolled it out on a Tuesday.

Like, dudes move in. And then today, this is still going. Today, the Trump administration pulled the nomination of Obama's final FCC chairman. This is way wonky. And we don't know who they're going to nominate that. It's like a whole thing. So now... Well, there's three people left. Well, there's a rule of the FCC of the five commissioners no more than three can be from the same party. But historically, the tradition is the opposing party in Congress says, you should just nominate those two. And then the president says, sure, whatever. And then nominates those two. The president gets nominated the chairman. So there's always like a three, two majority for the executive party. But nobody knows if, you know, Trump doesn't have a good

history of following tradition. So he may, he may nominate a couple of independents that are, you know, basically what's I knows, E knows, independence and name only? Yeah, yeah, that's a phrase. It's like a possibility. Yeah. I like that.

Yeah. So it's just out there. Like, I was joking with Jake today. Like the FCC, most of the FCC's votes, historically, are unanimous. There are votes on things like, let's spend more money on 911 services. And everyone's like, yeah, that's a, yeah, sure.

Or there are votes like, let's let people use federal funds to build broadband instead of copper telephone lines. And I was like, yeah, it's unanimously passed. Right now, we're in a place where there's only three commissioners. To pass anything, the FCC has to have three votes. One of those commissioners, a Democrat, two of them are Republicans. So they don't have the votes to do anything. So they've got to get through this whole thing.

And on top of it, the chairman's like, what if we just, I've got this red pen? I'm going to use it a bunch. It's like a crate, like this agency does not usually make this many waves. It's not, I've covered the FCC for a long time. It's not usually this newsworthy on like a day-to-day hour-by-hour basis. And it's the one that's in charge of the internet. So we don't have to get super into it. I just wanted to point out.

We are covering the hell out of the FCC right now. I think it's super interesting. And I think we need to move our strategy. Like everybody's been tweeting at Ajipai and we've been retweeting. I think it's great. But I don't think it's working. No, it's, I email that. So, like, it's not just a Twitter-based strategy.

Like, I have been, I am in contact with the FCC. And what they are continually saying to me is, the Verge is definitely on the list. You know, he's new, and we're going to come around. So I think we should keep tweeting on him. AgitPi, at AgitPi FCC. Just let him know. It's working.

It's working more than you think, is what I would say. Okay. He definitely knows what the Verge cast is. He definitely knows who Jake is, who Deeter is, who I am. He's aware of us. And I think he, from what I know of him, he probably wants to have this debate. Yeah. But I think he, like I said, he's in a weird political moment.

He doesn't have the votes, right? Like, he needs human bodies on that commission to get the votes he needs. So I don't think he wants to engage some, like, huge ideological debate right now. I think he wants to have a functioning agency and then move on. But we'll see. So keep tweeting at it. Okay. Actual lightning round.

It's actually more mobile news. I'm just going to read the things off. And Dieter, you're going to respond to them, the first one. Okay. YouTube and ads streaming TV service, $35 a month. You get all the networks. You don't get football because Verizon owns the rights to football on mobile. So there's some weird exceptions in there.

I think it's a brilliant idea. What do you think? I think it's a fine idea. I think that the inability to know precisely which networks you're getting is a problem that every streaming service has. It's interesting to me that Google is like, yeah, whatever, that's the way it is and is dealing with it. And that everybody is in that camp except for Apple who's like, no, no, we're going to make the perfect service. Paul. Yeah, I, when you say the word YouTube, that seems like the place I want to watch videos.

Yeah. But the fact that there's not going to be everything, it's just like, I don't want to, I don't want to buy something that's going to disappoint me on a regular basis. But what they're going to have is, so I think it's, well, Ross, you go first. I mean, half the stuff is going to be, ended up pirated on YouTube anyway. It's not going to pay. So what they're going to have, which I think is huge, we write for every live event, how to watch this online.

And it's like a long, complicated post in every one of those posts. I will just be honest with the audience should end with. You will be disappointed by one of these things in one way or another. YouTube is going to at least have the four big networks. So when it's how to watch the NFL playoffs online or how to watch, well, not the... Fuck. See, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying.

It's just at Verizon deal. When it's how to watch the Oscars online or how to watch presidential debates online. Do we know it's going to be the Oscars? Yeah, because the networks have the rights to that. It's the NFL that cuts up its rights in like that specific way. So the big whole... YouTube is missing a bunch of channels. They're missing a bunch of channels, but they're not missing the...

four major networks. What about like the Olympic? I feel like every big event has specially negotiated rights. Here's why I'm switching. I had, I've tried Sling, I'm currently trying Vue,

here's why I'm switching to YouTube. Yeah. I trust YouTube to make a good app for everything that I use. My PlayStation, my Apple TV, my iPhone, my iPad, my Android phone, shit my Xbox.

Right, and they have an unlimited free, nobody else can say that. Unlimited free cloud DVR. Like, this is the winner. Right. And like the thing that's held everyone back is they don't have all the channels, but really what's held them back is they all have bad apps and their services are a little bit flaky. YouTube is not going to have that problem. That's such a good app. They're just going to build on a thing that people like.

And maybe they don't offer you everything, but they will get there in some way somehow eventually while everyone else is still trying to catch up to our app doesn't crash. Yeah. And you know, the excitement about picking this service is they're going to change the name of it. every six months. YouTube Green. Google Play All Access and YouTube Reds. Blue Tube. Burgundy.

I just think this is the service. I will say YouTube is executing better than Google as a whole. But this is a service when I read about it. I'm like, this is the right idea. I can't believe YouTube is beating Apple to this service. If Apple announced this service with these restrictions and said, this is the new Apple TV, pay Apple $35 a month, get these channels. I think a lot of people would cut their cable. Yeah, like instantly.

I used to think that, but like Apple is like the, I like use iTunes and then like takes 10 seconds to load each different page. Yeah. I tried to skip ahead and a track in Apple Music yesterday on my desktop. It just beach balled for 30 seconds. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, fast forward. It was like, I can't, I can't do this, man. Just you live in real time now. So why don't you just slow down?

Amazon leaked its own home security camera on Amazon.com. That's where the images were located. I think I found out. Yeah, what do you think? Fine. Whatever. I mean, sure. Go ahead and buy an Amazon security camera.

Well, maybe it's like an echo with a camera. That'd be wild. Yeah. Probably they'll stick that on there because why not. Be a really weird election. I don't know. I can't get excited about security cameras. Yeah.

I mean, like Canary so well. NEST is a whole business that's built. Half of it is security cameras. I guess one third of it, if you count the smoke detector. But I don't think that's something's better than it. I mean, you want a security camera to have a good app and a good online service and like backup and all that stuff. And Nest has done pretty well with that. A few other canary, I guess is fine.

But like, I don't know if you've, like, I haven't tried Amazon music in a hot minute. But I kind of suspect that that'll be kind of crappy. Like, I look at this and like, oh, Amazon looks at what sells well. What's actually surprisingly easy. to make, but nobody knows it, and then they make a cheap version themselves. Yeah, Apple also makes $10 keyboards and $10 mice

and $5 cables. It's just looking at it, not knowing a lot about it, looks a little bit more on that end than the echo in. I think if you are, yeah, probably, but if you're Googling to buy a camera, and Amazon's like, this one has free cloud storage,

if you're a prime member, and everyone else is like $9 a month, you're just going to buy this. Yep. This is why it's an lighting around. Spotify preparing to launch Lossus Audio. Sorry, Tidal. I think this is like a ruthless move by Spotify to kill Tidal. Well, how?

I would venture to guess that very little of Tidal's market share has anything to do with Lossilus, and it's all about those random exclusives that then you forget the cancel title. Yeah. So I oddly disagree with you. I think a lot of like, I've been just reading stereophorms. just the thing I'm doing lately. They're all in the title train. Because they all, right?

Because they're just being told, this is better. And then their brains are like, it must be. Which is exactly how all stereo marketing works. Yeah, it's amazing. Today I looked at a $1,500 H-DMI cable online. What? Yes. It was amazing.

It's covering diamonds. Did you have a moment where you're like, maybe? Wait, wait, I mean, did you have a moment where you're like, click? Yeah. The 50-foot version of cable, $50,000. It's insane. It's an insane market.

What are the radio properties of diamonds? I don't know. It's so confusing. The comments, just go, it's an audio quest, HGMI cable. I encourage everyone to go read the reviews. The reviews are, like, amazing. The question and answers are amazing.

Like, one of the questions is why is this better than a $10 HGMI cable and the answer? Or what makes this different than a $10 HGMI cable? And the answer is $10,000. Anyway, but I will say this. If you are Spotify and your business is your business like streaming, I think it's Ogvorbis files for free and some ads and then you convert people to your pay tier, you probably incur zero or close to zero cost to reencode into whatever loss list you're going to do. You probably incur zero or close to zero cost in bandwidth streaming that stuff out. You can just be like, okay, you can have this now.

and then people will pay you more money so you're just getting free money and title, which their whole business is like it sounds better they're like we have exclusives but then title has to compete with Apple which has silly money to buy those exclusives

it's kind of like they're getting boxed in in a way and I don't think the labels want exclusives to happen anymore because they know it's bad for them because they don't want to negotiate with every service every time they release an album right also Spotify if you just ask them they'll just be like you know what?

those Ed Shearing tracks are at the top of the chart because we put them on every playlist. Like, that's their power. And I know, it's a thing. Poor title. It's all over. Is there anything else lightning around that we need to talk about? Oh, I know what it was.

See? I knew I just had to give you time. Personal to lose. Personal news. I am becoming a soilant man. Oh, God. Bye. See you.

All right, go ahead. It's my middle meal of the day, one bottle of soiling. Is it working? I don't know. Two days a day. It seems fine so far I mean do you want the like the real

Everyone wants to know This morning That's like the real This morning This morning Oh God I farted And

I mean I asked you I asked you Did you want the real The real scoop So did I I didn't drink suddenly yesterday That also happened to me this morning Okay well here's the thing though

here's the thing. It smelled really bad. That's the show, everybody. And then it turned out that we just had a gas leak in our apartment and it wasn't being. There are so many other things to listen to on both the Virgin Recode side. Walt Mosberg and I have a show called Control of Delete. It wasn't Sloyalet's fault. Everything's fine.

Peter Kafka has a show called Recode Media, which is very serious. reaches heights of intelligence and discourse. I'm saying, can we cut this whole part off? At this moment, we can literally only dream of. Keras, Wish, her host, Rico, Decode, another deeply intelligent podcast about technology. And Lauren Good, host Too Embarrass to Ask. Also, just a well-produced show. It's called Too Embarrass to Ask, but it's never quite as embarrassing is what just happened.

here. You can listen to all of those. Just whatever you want. You can come back to this moment if you want to feel better about yourself. Anyhow, go find that stuff on iTunes, listen to it all. I will say it's been like months since we got a review because I've been asking people to tell a friend. Review us in iTunes.

Make it. Don't just review the first, like, 50 minutes of the show. Leave the last 10 out. But in your mind, remember that. and then write us review, tell your friends, tell your friends about all the other shows. That's great. Once again, I'll remind you that we're live at South by Southwest.

If you're going to be in Austin on the 12th and the 14th with National Geographic, that's happening at the Vulcan Gas Company, which we rebranded and the whole thing. But if you're down there, come down there. If not, look forward to the live shows. That's been really fun. I want to thank our friends at Krizal, no glare lenses. If your glasses, you know,

fingerprint, splurges, scratches, glares, constant obstruction to your vision, a huge distraction. So go to Krizal.com to learn more. that's C-R-I-Z-A-L.com, start living life in the clear. And that's it. That's the first cast, everybody. Rock and roll.

Paul. Link's an elf. Snap-snip.