The Vergecast - The anniversary of Scissor Vodka, Nintendo Switch hands-on, and the secret behind the OP-1 processor

Episode Date: February 24, 2017

Hello! We’re still testing out our new studios so we thought we’d see how many people we can fit into the show. This week we’ve got Nilay, Paul, and Ashley in the podcast room, with Dieter and Chris Plante coming in over Skype. Everyone had so much to say so we gave you a few bonus minutes to listen to. Included are: Chris’ Nintendo Switch review, Dieter’s scoop about chips in Chromebooks, some MWC previews, and much, much more! 04:26 - Nintendo Switch hands-on 23:24 - Solving the mystery behind the OP1 processor in the Chromebook Plus 41:44 - MWC preview: LG G6 / Scissor vodka anniversary 47:44 - Verizon is planning 5G tests in 11 cities this year 55:49 - FCC news updated 1:06:15 - Lightning round — Snapchat Spectacles are now available online 1:08:22 - Meitu’s new T8 phone 1:16:37 - Amazon says Alexa’s speech is protected by the First Amendment 1:21:27 - Ashley’s weekly segment “Good Boy” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Paul, are you recording locally? Yes, absolutely. I always record locally. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com, a multi-channel media experience about technology and culture and talking it off angles into this microphone to irritate our audio engineer. I think we need a new tagline. Yeah, I think we should be the eighth planet orbiting Trappist One. Oh, Trappist one, I have to say, great name. Really?

Really? Yeah, it sounds. Trappist? I thought, no, they make a really good beer there. It's called trap. No, I don't know, guys. I thought, it sounds like a sci-fi novel. That's good.

It's fine. Anyway, this is, again, the Vergecast. I'm Neilette Patel. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter Bone is here. Hey. Christopher Thomas Plant is joining the Vergecast today.

Hey, Chris. It's my full name. You can steal my identity now. Yeah. Get in there. We'll tell you a social security number at the end of the show. So stick around. Oh, my gosh. So many Gamer Gators are going to be thrilled. Finally. And Ashley Carman's here.

Hello. How's it going? It's going great. It's like a party show today. It's a full boat. It's a full boat. The flagship is a full boat. Can I tell you that we moved in this new office and now I commute via a boat?

And I ride a boat twice a day now. Yeah, that's how you Brooklyn people do it. And I really think about how successful I am every time I'm on that boat. It's not like a great, it's not my boat. Right. It's not even like a fancy boat. I just literally am like, I am once again on a boat. I'm happy for you.

That's it. I'm very happy for you. There's not even a rest of a, there's not even more thoughts. It's just like peace. I'm just at peace for the 18 minutes in which I write about to work. Anyway, there's tech news. Boats are technology, by the way. Some might say the first technology.

You know what? I would guess not. I would guess that it would say the wheel or literally anything else. Shadows maybe. Boats, the first technology, my new pop science book will be going on sale at airports in a few months. If you lived on a sandy beach with, we'll see if you had trees, you'd be making fire already. Yeah. But you wouldn't make a wheel because it's sandy beach. Yeah. This is literally how fake news is made. Why roll when I can float? Said the first humans.

Anyway, so Chris, there's a lot going on this week in the news. I'm sorry, why roll when I can float is definitely the best thing to say when you're high. And now the true secret of the verge cast has been revealed. No, that's not true. Very sober show. I mean, Ashley is on her, like, third LaCroix. I'm so buzzed. You're sparkling.

Do you know they serve LeCroy liqueur? Have you seen this? Is this? There's like spiked carbonated water. Isn't that just the croix with vodka in it? I've seen it in the store. I'm like, I think I know what you're doing. Speaking of vodka's,

hey, this show is brought to you by a joke that is now exactly one year old. We have a clip. Wait, we'll do it later. It's a little bit. Neely, but it hasn't aged a day. No one's sick of this at all. Because it was never good. Cesar vodka.

There's a lot of news about, stay tuned. Anyway, Paul, cut through the night. Snip, snip, snip. The joke keeps getting longer. Anyway, Chris. You know what I love about podcasting? There's no way for you to tell when people stop listening. So the people that have, we're like two minutes in,

they're like, well, screw this episode and dropped. They just are like a full listener If you've hung on this long, you are a true Vergecast patriot. Thank you for. Local media hired To the long tale. Vox Media hired a new like podcast EP like to see pod like make podcasting a real thing

across the company and I met with her yesterday and she's like I've been listening to the Vergecast and my instinctive response was I'm so sorry and she's like no it's great show. I'm like I don't know. Were you listening to the right one? Anyway, we're going to do news. Chris, why not?

You played with the show? the Switch, the Nintendo Switch. You literally put your... I have to say this. I said this to you earlier today. I'll say it again to now in front of all of our listeners. You're fired. The skies above us. Chris, you're fired. No, I thought you're... And that's how we do it here at the Verge. Welcome to Vergecast. This will be your last day at Vox Media. Please clean your things out of your home office and go. Enjoy this complimentary scissor vodka. It doesn't exist. No, but you played a Switch. I thought your hands-on post is actually

beautifully written. Particularly because the tactility of the thing is important, and I thought you described the tactility of it really well. Tell me about it. What can I say? The hand feel, it is pretty good. It's pretty good. Yeah, so what can I tell you is Nintendo made a very large screen. It's like if you took two Nestle Crunch bars and you, like, laid one on top of the other.

And you're like, now it's a video game console. Except for you can attach two controllers to each side. They're little wireless controllers. They're like itty-bitty Wii modes. You can remove them and they work wirelessly. And it plays Zelda. And all of the little ways that things click on, they have this beautiful ASMR sound to them.

Some of it is heightened. As in literally Nintendo added a sound effect that goes along with the tactile click of putting the controllers on. So you can hear it in the in the trailers for it at the very end. There's this like, it goes like switch. I can't do it like click like that. It sounds like that. Pretty much exactly like that.

Really? Yeah. It's just like a guy yelling the word click. It's me. But you know, no, that sounds like, oh, that's, that wouldn't make sense. Except so I don't know if this break, I don't really care if this breaks embargo. go. There are these menus in the system. The system basically doesn't do anything right now. Like it needs a patch. You can't go onto an e-shop to download your stuff. You can't download anything.

You literally currently cannot format the micro SD card. You will use the storage. It's like, not going to work. But there are still like tiny menus. And when you load them, they're written like short letters. and they're signed by a woman named Amelia. Wait, what? That's real. I need to put this on the site. It's real. There is a fictional character named Amelia that Nintendo is created, and she is your guide by way of little notes she is left throughout the Nintendo Switch.

But otherwise, it is the most, like, it is the most boring and, like, simple user interface Nintendo has ever designed. That's good. When they try to do things in software, it's always bad. No. So, well, here's the thing is, it's utterly boring,

but it's still just as, like, poorly designed layout-wise. The layout, I mean, there are, like, what, like, gonna be four games for it at launch? I think, like, there are a few more. Yeah. I don't know.

But actually, what was the one that you were saying you were excited about? So I heard from The Verge that there are two games that are particularly interesting to me. The first is you get to, to eat sandwiches with your friends, like fake sam-like virtual sandwiches.

And then also you get to walk like a model or something like that. Those are the same game. What? That seems like very different games to be neat. Complete opposites, actually. Struck to lunch, the breaking hot news switch game. I will rumor, put this under maybe true, but the word is that game. called One Two Switch, okay?

And it's a collection of, like, wacky mini games. Oh, yeah. The rumor, capital R, rumor, is that Nintendo just didn't send it out to video game sites and sent it to, like, USA Today. Because they were like, we know for a fact,

video game nerds are going to just take the biggest shit all over this. We have to send it to, like, USA Today who haven't, like, play a game since Pac-Man. That's, like, literally why I like this. I don't play video games and I'm like oh my god I can eat a virtual sandwich I think video game nerds would love that like they can like cradle a crying baby is another game they made a commercial for it and it's a woman try like you hear a baby crying

and see her rocking it and then it pulls back to reveal she's rocking a fake child on the Nintendo switch screen are you rocking the tablet or the controller the tablet the whole thing and then you have to set it down on the table so when you're playing when you're playing the sandwich game, do you eat the tablet? I, listen. You eat the controller. You make little mouth noise. There's an IR sensor on one of the joycons

or maybe both of the joycons. Okay. Sure. They can detect biting. I don't know. I saw it. And the Nintendo's official unboxing they were talking about detecting when your mouth closed. Okay. I buy it. I mean, it's like not actually a hard thing to detect. Have you really thought of it? Because if you're

shooting an IR beam, break. Have you ever thought about that something could detect your mouth. Yes. That's something I generally spend my lunch breaks on. I was waiting for... This is such a bad story. There's nothing to do to switch.

I was waiting. My wife and I were waiting for friends to get off a train. We were waiting to pick them up at a train station. And I watched the train roll in. I'm sure the nerds who listen to the show will understand this reaction I had to train. I said, train wheels are so weird. And Becky looked at me and she goes, your brain works in a completely different way than mine. And she just like walked away.

But that's how I feel about the iron blaster and the switch. Yeah. No, that makes sense. What do you say to me the ironblaster? I'm like, oh, yeah, I think I know how that works. Yeah. Right, it's just detecting a distance and then you're cutting the plane. Uh-huh.

Steps slip the plane. Anyway, so, Chris, you've been playing with the switch. What is weird about trading rules? Okay. Well, I can say that literally the only thing I can do with the system is play Zelda. Okay. So it's the perfect video game system. Yeah.

Oh, don't worry. A number of commenters have already made sure I understood that. And let me know that it was pointless for me to say anything other than it can play Zelda. And that was a grave offense on my part. So internet comments. I want them to know that I appreciate them and I hear them. And I didn't mute. them on Twitter. I listen to

everything they have to say. There you go. But yeah, that's what it does. It, right now, it plays Zelda, and it turns out for, I think, a number of people, that will be okay. I think that will be enough. I think they will spend $300

for the system, and then, what, $60 for the game, and then $20 for the DLC, and I think they'll be pretty pleased as punch, because being able to play a big, open world, Zelda, game, wherever you want for, I mean, however long the battery lasts, which is not especially long. It does feel pretty great. And so far, it is a pretty good game. Yeah. Especially if you like

weird, really weird games that don't really tell you what to do. I have spent a lot of time trying to kill a pig because I need to make a soup. And that is my Zelda experience, which is not the traditional go get the boomerang and the bomb and kill the bad guys. eyes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But why isn't it ready?

Like, I'm just looking at, I'm looking at the list of headlines from today. There's no virtual console at launch. The online purchase thing seems very confused. The battery pack situation seems messy. I mean, I think you and I have both linked to Chris Grant piece about the Wii and the Switch. And, like, the Wii was not ready at all. Yeah.

And they just didn't. Like, Nintendo is just. bad at executing. So yes and no. I mean, yes. Okay. I mean, basically yes. Here's my question about it not being ready.

When they gave the software developers the deadline, why didn't they just tell them their deadline was last week instead of next week? Okay. Fair question. Here's what I will say about it. Two things. You need to answer my question. I'll try to condense.

It's an important question. I'm going to answer it, but they're kind of, they build on top of each other. One is this. I think, and we have to go way back in time to the launch of the Wii. I think they wanted to get the Wii U out ahead of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One as much as possible because graphically they weren't going to compete. And I think they thought that they had enough to go off of with their game. library at the time and they didn't and then what what that resulted in was they suddenly

didn't have games that people were interested in but they needed to make people care so they did this bat crazy thing where they essentially announced everything they were going to do for the console years ahead um and it was terrible because it spoiled i mean i i always want to know uh you know game leaks yada yada but the result was that they kind of showed all their cards and then it became this giant waiting game and I think at that point the system started to die they didn't know if they're even going to keep these games on this system and then they ultimately decided hey we need to cut our losses and just move on to the next thing and they started on the switch right and they're like okay great like we're gonna we're gonna

really beat uh Microsoft and PlayStation to the punch like before PlayStation 5 and Xbox 2 or whatever And, but then Microsoft and PlayStation were like, yo, what's up? We're just going to release a new Microsoft and PlayStation thing every year or so from now on. And then Nintendo is like, oh, damn it, it's happening all over again. We need to rush this thing out because clearly that worked last time and do the exact same thing. So suddenly we have this scenario of like, yeah, it's out tomorrow. and Mario is going to happen. Don't ask us when,

but like roll that beautiful bean footage. Yeah. New Donk City, everybody. And that I think is like the pickle that they're in is I think they just, I think they didn't know that they were going to have to get this out the door so, so quickly. And that's why we have shipping with a day one patch. What's happening the week after next that they needed to get it out ahead of? Yeah.

So I think what that means is like, You know how literally today we found out that they don't have a virtual console? I think they were literally deciding, okay, what is close enough to finished? And the week before, like, where can we put all resources and get this out the door? And then after that, we'll just have to add on things later. Like, I think the reason that it's literally this week is they probably had 10 things they wanted. And then today, they were like, okay, which of these are shipable? And I think the system that we'll have on day one, again, this is a lot of speculation, so cushion cushion.

But I think the system will get day one is literally like, hey, this is just what we have right now. And we'll get back to you as soon as we have the rest. So it's the Google I.O. version of console development. Yeah, isn't everybody else? Isn't every, aren't you sick? I'm just sick of companies not releasing finished products. It's like this is where we've just landed in the universe where because we can ship software to everything over the air whenever we want, we're like, here's a piece of garbage. We'll wait for it.

What do the Wii you have at launch? They had the zombie game and then they had the collection of mini games, right? Yeah. And like Wii you had the advantage of Ubisoft support, which was kind of the. reliable thing of the last generation. Like, when everything launched, you could count on, like, Ubisoft, just completely supporting it out the gate

and having four or five... Okay, maybe. Like, maybe one, like, interesting game, and then, like, three, okay, and then, like, two real bad games. But they didn't have a Zelda for the Wii, and they didn't have a Mario or a Mario cart at launch. They did have a Mario.

They had it a new Super Mario, and it was, like, not that, Oh, one of those 2Ds? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I don't mess. So I bought the Wii U and this is while I was off the internet. So I didn't have to even think about this software update that everybody was complaining about. I just bought it.

It was like near Thanksgiving, I think, because I immediately brought it to this party where a bunch of people are hanging out. We just played a bunch of games and you could use your old Wii controllers. And, like, I think that's, at least Nintendo typically offers some fun out of the box. And I don't know. I haven't played this. What is it called? I always forget. Switch it up.

One to switch. One two switch. Switch it up. Okay. Switch it up. I haven't played these mini games. Who knows? That sounds like an ad campaign for tab.

Sick of Diet Coke? Switch it up. I feel like Nintendo is less of a, like, a platform company and more of like, hey, we could probably deliver you some fun. I think we're ready to deliver you a little bit fun right now. There'll be more fun later. Here's my devil's advocate that actually builds on that and why they could be like totally okay and why this might not be like the Wii is look at the launch of the Nintendo 3DS, which was, I don't know if you remember it, but real bad.

They shipped a piece of hardware that like essentially the 3D did not quite work like you would hope. It made you feel gross. You had to keep your head, like, right in a locked position. The screen wasn't very bright. There were no good games. Like, I think the big game was Steel Divers, where you were, you know, steel divers, that popular Nintendo franchise about submarine. You go diving for steel.

Yeah. Yeah, of course. There's a cave with water in it, and you go diving down. Who can forget steel dieters? Thank you. Thank you for joining me on that little dialogue. But so yeah, so it was it was really, really bad. And then Nintendo basically did this Mia Copa where they were like, hey, you know what?

That was like really crummy of us. Here are, here's a pack of like 15 or 16 free virtual console games. And if you bought one, they're just there. Go download them. We're really, really sorry. Oh, and it turns out we're finally going to release the games you actually like. so Animal Crossing and Mario Kart and what is it

the RTS that just came out oh my gosh why am I blanking on it Fire Emblem Thank you all those games finally came out and great this system is really fantastic and now there's all this stuff for it

the great twist here being Nintendo apparently just doesn't make Nintendo 3DSs anymore so there are games for it and you literally can't buy a new one like they sell out instantly when they get these annual pre-orders or semi-annual or whatever. But they're almost impossible to find otherwise.

I guess because Nintendo has diverted its manufacturing focus to the Switch. Yeah. The one that doesn't have games. So, yeah. I want this thing to be successful. Yeah. I think it has a shot. I would just say, I think it will be a while before it, like, finds itself.

I don't think it's going to have like an identity problem the way that Wii U did. because the inherent problem with the Wii was like the core idea was terrible. What if we gave you a, we ripped off the used screens on the back of old airliner seats. And we said you could only use it six feet from your TV. Like how would that feel for you? And also like you can only have one. So like we know it's terrible, but we also don't want you to have too much terrible. Like, they fixed that.

In the switch, the core concept of like, hey, it's a console and it goes wherever you go and you can connect with friends over land. And we're so confident that you'll be like playing with other people that you can literally share system updates via local area connections. Which is hilarious to me. I think like that, that is like really solid and you can build something on that. unfortunately they like laid the foundation and they're like who's ready to buy a house and a lot of people are like does that house let zeld in and they're like sure and like cool yeah where do i sign up that's pretty much the nintendo destroy all right the switch we're gonna we're more lots of switch right gdc is coming there's reviews coming like all kinds of stuff

happening we're gonna see indie games for it so like yeah that's an interesting thing is they're supporting, or Unity and Unreal engines are going to be, which are used to make a lot of the tablet games that people play. So you could definitely see Indies who are making a tablet game. Over under how many months until somebody puts Android on this thing, for real? I mean, it might be zero months. It might run on Android right now. Do we still not know?

We still don't know. All right. Speaking of Android, hold on. We got to get off the switch. We're on it almost all the time. I mean, there's like half a show off. But whatever. I want to do one thing, and then I want to read the ad, and then I want to talk about MWC.

Wait, what's your over-under if it's not running Android? I don't know what over-under means. Is it like a ratio? Pick a number of months. It'll be under three months, over three months? Over six months. Over six months. Okay.

Because they've got to break it, presumably, if it's not running Android. Yeah, and it's a slightly non-standard chip, and yeah. Okay. So speaking of slightly non-standard chips, Dieter, you had a scoop. There's all kinds of chip. Yeah. I want Deeter, I want you to talk about the OP1. I want Paul to talk about Risen.

I want Ashley to keep people to me like I'm crazy. which you've been doing for some time. I'm here for it. The scoop, I actually buried at the very end because I, like, found it at, like, right before I hit publish. Is Google is going to start a new marketing campaign, which is surely for Chromebooks or maybe a Chrome tablet, maybe a pixel tablet that runs Chrome OS that they're probably going to make. Some kind of ad campaign for ChromeOS that its tagline is going to be. Bye-bye laptop. Hello,

Apptop. Yeah. I feel like we should just shut it down right now. The verge had a great run, and it's great, and we just had a pretty new redesign. I'm really proud of the company. Is that a laptop?

That's an app top, Paul. No way. You idiot. It's obviously an apptop. Hello, fellow kids. When I was like 12 or 13, I probably told this story before, I had the longest running argument with my neighbor down the street of whether they should be called.

Who thought that netbooks were stupid, right? No, it was notebooks versus power books. Oh, my God. I really wanted you to say joke books. Can we start a label for joke books for bad laptops? That's not bad. Jokelick book of the week. Anyway, Teter.

How about app? Stop. If you want to have how things are named at the verge, it's like this but worse. Anyway, the whole thing started because I reviewed the Chromebook Plus, which is an arm-based Chrome OS laptop, Chromebook. And it was really good. And I was like, huh, I thought arm chips were garbage. And this thing is really good and fast. And it benchmarks almost as well as an Intel chip.

What's going on? What is this chip? This chip is called the OP1. What the shit is an OP1? Who makes it? So I Google O.P. And the website that comes up is what is op.com. So you go to what is op.com.

And it tells you the O.P. chip is designed for Chromebooks. I'm like, huh, but who makes it? The website doesn't tell you who made the website, doesn't tell you who made the chip, and is registered anonymously so you can't tell where it came from. Luckily, there's this guy who Paul probably remembers his name Charbacks. Yes. Charbacks. Yes.

Charbacks. Charbacks runs a website called Arm Devices. And at CES earlier this year, he pointed out that the OP1 is actually a rock chip processor. And rock chip is like, they're like in the same league as like media tech where it's like an arm processor from a company that you've barely heard of. And if you see it on a spec sheet, you just assume that that thing is garbage, right? Like if you see an Android tablet that has a rock chip processor, you're like, oh, that's probably bad. I won't buy it. Right.

Right. Not that the chips are garbage, just that it means that they're not putting premium parts in here. Yeah. Right, exactly. And rock chip chips used to be garbage. Not anymore, but once in a time. Right. Okay.

So turns out that OP is just a brand that Google made up that anybody who's making a Chromebook can use if they meet Google's spec to, instead of the name of the processor that you probably don't trust. That's the whole thing. It's a brand that Google made up. So why does this rock chip run ChromeOS better than all of the other arm devices? Oh, well, because it's optimized for ChromeOS. So the deal with like a system on a chip is there's, you can have multiple versions of like arm processors. There's like big little configurations and little little configurations and big, big,

configuration. So like there's the heavy duty processor and the like she'll do low power stuff processor. On top of that there's like the memory bus and the cash and like all the crap that like goes around the thing that does the raw computation. And Google worked with Samsung and rock chip to optimize all the stuff. Like they said Samsung, you could if you spent $5 more on using this Wi-Fi chip instead of that Wi-Fi chip, it'll talk to the motherboard better, and this will work better. And, like, they just, they just optimize all the parts, basically. So is that what gets you the OP thing, or is it just, hey, Google?

Well, no. No. Actually, neither of those things. It's so freaking weird. Google does, like, whenever, whenever there's a new Chromebook that comes out, you can, like, go look at, like, the GitHub's and all the other, like, open source development. stuff and find the code name for the Chromebook and there's Google employees working to optimize it. Google actually works with basically every Chromebook that comes out. It's not like Android where

like you can like go and just launch the thing and not talk to Google at all. And I don't know yet if if you have there's like a higher level of collaboration like a Nexus program that means it gets to be OP or not. But I mean I called up I called up Google. It's like what the hell? And they're like, talk to Arm. And Arm's like, no, no, talk to Google. Then I called Google. I was like, I'm talking to you now. And there's no money that trains hands when something gets called OP.

Google owns the trademark. And by verifying that, that's how I found that. Bye, buy a laptop, hello, laptop thing. And Google is not the one who decides this is called OPE. It's up to the manufacturer of the Chromebook and the chip maker. Hmm. So yesterday you and I argued about whether or not this was Nexus. Right.

So here's my re- This is why I make the parallel of Nexus. Yeah. The Nexus program was Google saying, we're going to design a phone. And then they would go to a manufacturer like HTC or LG or Huawei. Right.

And they would basically take a phone off the shelf and be like, make these design tweaks. Yes. And then they would do that. But they were never really meaningful design tweaks. It was usually the exterior. And they would say, this is a Nexus phone. And they would run stocking and drone on it.

what is different than this that's the same thing they're going well other manufacturers who make chips can come to google and be like we made a chrome book we put a random rock chip in it um it meets you know some minor spec requirements of yours and google's like great op one uh it's different for a few reasons uh one they did do a little bit more with the nexus stuff and specifically like nexus was in part in some cases designed to like prove that android could run well on a certain processor architecture. Two, this isn't like, like the, the nexus stuff was like associated with Google

and OP is like sort of associated with Google, but not really because they anonymously registered the website. It's like the point of the OP brand is to not make you think, oh, that's a media tech chip, that must suck. Like it's just there to make you feel better about buying an arm device. And the level of collaboration, I don't think, is that much higher than before. The one weird, like, thing to talk about

with, like, the Nexus program, which is basically done is Google's doing Nexus-like program stuff right now. So the two LG watches, I think the thing on the box had, like, designed with our friends at Google, which is hilarious. Yeah. And actually, these two Chromebooks, the Plus and the Pro, were, like, really, like, Google was very much involved in a Nexus-like way in the creation of the Samsung.

on Crowbook Plus and Pro. The big question is, the next time we see a laptop that says it has an OP processor, will Google have been that involved in it? Or will it just be there because, I don't know, AIS doesn't believe you, like, want to buy a rock chip? Or will this whole thing just go away? Because if the point of OPE is as a marketing device, they haven't done much marketing around it except make one, like, kind of meh, website. Yeah.

So who knows? It's not like a great website. I really wish we had Squarespace as a sponsor this week, but we don't. Because that would have been, that's a real Squarespace integration. But to me, the larger thing here to pay attention to isn't like the incredibly nerdy mystery of like this, the name of this processor and the trademark. The thing that's important is we are going to start seeing arm-based laptops and tablets. We've already got good arm tablets. we've got the iPad.

But we're going to start seeing arm devices that run Windows and that run ChromeOS that are going to be like really good this year. The Chromebook Plus is basically there except that Android apps, the software is still bad. But we might see like there's going to be this race to like make a cheap, you know, less expensive laptop that runs on an arm processor instead of an Intel processor that's like good enough for like to be your main computer and who's going to win that race. Windows said they're going to do it, and now Google's got a head start on everybody. And Apple's like everyone just assuming that they're working on it too, but like we don't

know what the plan is there for like software work. But either way, Intel laptops are like going to be facing an assault from Arm laptops. And that I think is really interesting because Arm has a better reputation for battery life. And it's cheaper. And connectivity. It's better at doing, you know, phone stuff, and we want our laptops to do more phone stuff. Like, talk to the modem, talk to the accelerometer, talk to the barometer, whatever the shit. I need a barometer immediately.

Right? Well, I'm a sailor now. I live on a boat. Not knowing the relative air pressure is more important to do. So there's another piece of this, Paul. Yes. You were very excited about the AMD Risen. I want to just say this.

I want to say it out loud. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a terrible name for anything. It sounds like a rejected character from a Mortal Kombat sequel. I was going to say Street Fighter too. Like they're like, what's better than Ryu? Risen. For me, there's two ways to think about it.

You're rising up. No. You're looking up into the Risen. No. Right? So it could go both ways. So here's the long and the short of it. That's the merch cast, everybody.

We'll see you next week. AMD is releasing. Can I? Can I get a. an app top that runs Horizon? Well, ChromeOS does work on

Intel. Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. Tell me about the right. AMD's been out of the game. Because these are desktop processors. AMD has been out of the game for so long. What is going on here? They just did a good job.

Except on the name. They've been really lagging behind the Ryzen logo looks like It is a 1990s Las Vegas Japanese restaurant. Yes. It's spelled with a Z. It's spelled with a Z. It's spelled with a YZ.

Yes. Riz. I want you to focus on this. This is 200 meters. 200 meters. Of wiring. Oh, yeah. This is power right here.

So, so, okay, they're launching you. I like to measure my chips power by meters of wiring. They're launching their high-end desktop chips, right? They're launching their equivalent of Intel's I-7 chips. And the big takeaway is that their top-end chip is $500. It's almost exactly as fast, maybe slightly faster. We don't have all, like, we have AMD benchmarks and some early benchmarks are coming out. And it seems like it's about almost exactly as fast as Intel's top-end Core I-7, which costs $1,000.

Yeah. So AMD came into a market that just kind of had stopped being, like, who else, there's nobody else to go to get a top-end. Core I7, you go get it from Intel. And AMD's like, hey, we'll give you that same power for half the price. What's the power usage? I think those are around like 95 watts. Okay. Amdd just has this reputation of being really hot and power hungry.

So these are probably going to be, so they are doing slightly fewer instructions per clock cycle so that, so they, all these AMD chips have slightly higher gigahertz than the Intel equivalent while still getting the same amount of performance. But the price thing, and, you know, there's plenty of ways, I mean, 95 watts, there's plenty of ways to power that and cool that, and it's totally fine. And if you're this sort of enthusiast building a desktop like this, you've got plenty of headroom for a chip like this. You just want an excuse to water cool that PC.

That's what I'm looking for. How can I make this a fish tank? I just I don't think you'll have to I mean if you want to overclock this you totally totally watercool it I just what's so exciting about this is this aggressive of competition it means Intel's going to have to up its game

and Intel obviously will come out with something that will be faster than this in the next like three to six months I mean I think the Intel has to up its game story is actually the story of Intel over the what did you say two years now

like they've just not delivered for two years but they don't they haven't had a competitor like you know this charming sushi restaurant of a processor you just got to look at the logo I'm not kidding but I mean it's not even they haven't had it on arm right the arm performance

and coming onto laptops hasn't been there so they've been in stasis they deliver the last generation of chips I don't think it was ever conclusively proven but it really felt like it had problems. Yep. And then KB Lake is basically that

amount of performance with fewer problems. So they've just been doing nothing. And now they've got a big desktop competitor in a world where people care about building gaming PCs and they're building and buying PCs that do this stuff.

These are also important for the server market. That's really where a lot of the money is for this kind of chip, this kind of architecture, Right. And then you look at where are laptop sales increasing. It's Chromebooks to schools, and Google's going to throw an arm chip in their Chromebooks and figure that out maybe. And it's like Apple, the low end of Apple's line, if they switch it to arm and they radically increase the battery life and the arm processor is powerful enough to do a lot of things.

Like all of Intel's growth suddenly looks like, man, I hope this Windows laptop renaissance goes as well as we all hope it does because it's pretty interesting right now. now, which is a pretty weird thing to bet your business on. Yeah. It's just a moment. I'm just excited and I can maybe spend time next week being worried or concerned about Intel, but like right now I'm just excited. You're just excited for AMD. Here's that.

Will this chip work with the Nvidia GTX-1080? Yeah. So the thing is you have to have a motherboard that's compatible with the computer. So you can't swap this into an Intel compatible motherboard. But any like graphics card, obviously. Okay. I'm just checking because you have to MD. You never know.

No, they want to do you like that. Yeah. Invite AMD have not like historically wanted to play nice for each other. The other situation right now we've, we've had is Microsoft had DirectX12, Apple's making metal. Like these are the low-level graphics APIs. And then AMD was making one called Mandel, something like that. And AMD was like, hey, this low-level graphics API that we're making to be proprietary and competitive, we'll just give that to the OpenGL association. Oh.

And that's what Vulcan is. I love a standard. I love a good standard. I got to be honest with you. Good guy aimed at you. No, that's really, that's great. I didn't realize that's where Vulcan came from. Right.

Dieter, I feel like one day you and I are going to be standing on the flaming wreckage of the world still screaming about how open standards are good for everyone. Like this nuclear holocaust is great because everyone's participating equally. And we'll be looking at that through Krasal no glare lenses. If you wear glasses, then you know. Can I just say this to where I read this ad? Literally the only negative notes about the Vergecast we've gotten lately, and we should be getting a lot more about many more things.

But the only ones are people want me to read the Chrysal ad better. What? People are criticizing your ad reading skills? I guess people love Chris. I'm not saying I'm doing a good job. It's like the criticism is warranted. Of all of the things that you could criticize about this show. The audience loves messaging.

They love brand messaging. But look, it's because they hate fingerprints, smudges, scratches, and glares that are a constant obstruction to their vision and a huge distraction. Sometimes you end up focusing more what's on your glasses than what's going on around you. That's why the people love chrysal, no-glare lenses. They give the clearest vision possible by offering resistance to glare, scratches, and throttes. I just read that really bad. But you can tweet at me, I'm at reckless.

Just let me know. That means no more blinding glare from the headlights of oncoming traffic will drive every night. No more fingerprint sponges from taking your glasses on off. No more scratches from cleaning your lenses on a shirt. And because Krizal and no glare lens to stay clear and reduce distracting glare, your friends and family can actually see your eyes, not just your glasses. Ashley. I do wear glasses.

Yeah, and they're always dirty. There you go. Nerd. Just we know what we should do. Anyway, look better, feel better, most importantly, be prepared for whatever comes your way with Clearvision. Go to Krzal.com. That's C-R-I-Z-A-L.com. Start living life in the clear.

I think I did okay. I mean, I screwed up. No more strudges. All right, so MWC is next week. Yeah. The thing. There's a bunch of stuff happening at MWC. There's a bunch of, like, telecom stuff we should talk about.

But the biggest thing happening at MWC is the LG G6. I'm going to come out. I want to tell the story behind the story. I want to get in the weeds. A year ago that LG released the G5. It's a fact. There was an episode of the show where we talked about it. I said LG needs to get on this right now because the next one we called the G6.

Wait. Okay, I'm not going to interrupt. I'll let you just keep going. Oh, we all send to Brits going. There's a lot of tension in the air right now in the Virchcast. The marketing, LG's been doing this slow dribs and drabs marketing thing this year with the G6. Here's a picture. There's a leak.

They're pitching stories like the G6 will have a USB port. It's like things that you know. Like here, the screen, would you like to do a story about our phone having a screen? But they have yet to do what I think is the most obvious thing, which has announced that Far East Movement will be playing in Bartholona. I said I couldn't resist. Far East Movement, the playing concert in Barcelona,

where they perform the song like a Giac. So I asked Michael Singleton, who does a lot of work, reporting on bands and music, hey, can you just email Far East Movement to see if they're booked? And the band wrote back instantly and said,

LOL, no, but that would be cool. So then I had Vlad email LG and be like, hey, have you guys booked this? My God, you made Vlad do this? By the way, Vlad did not want do this. I mean, I know. That's why I can't believe he was like, what's the story here? And I was like, well, they're missing the easiest marketing opportunity in the history of the world. And he's like, I don't understand. I like that you gave this assignment to literally the one person waiting with

fading breath. You're like a G6, right? That's the story, right? Yeah. So LGA was like, no, but put us in touch with the band. That sounds like a good idea. So maybe it's still going to happen. This is true. We might make this happen. But this joke that we've been telling for a year at the top of the show came from the song because I think the lyrics are wrong. Andrew, do you have the clip? Do you understand that when the LG puts out the G6, we will listen to like a G6 in 2017, unironically. It's a massive corporation, like just bumps that song at us. It's unescapable. Everyone just be warned. Today, know this. A year from now, we'll be on the show. I'm quitting next January. Listening to like a G6. It will come for us.

They will also have a friends next year. Wait. Yeah, I quit looking for whatever song it is you're looking for. Oh, you're the worst. Can I tell you a story about that lyric? No. Yes, please. Okay, I'm just saying, if LG blows this opportunity, I don't know what they're doing. Like, they have a phone right now called the G5.

They should already be stealthily playing this song, like, in clubs, in the background of, like, LG TV commercials. It should just, they should be setting the stage for, like, a G5. to come back huge. Seating it to the right DJs. With no doubt. Next year they're going to go with like the G5X. They will screw this up. Okay, here we go.

The G6 in the song Booty Bounce was sampled in Like a G6 came about when the song's producers the cataracts were looking for a rhyme for the line Sippin Sizirp in my ride like 36. Yeah. A reference

itself to the 2000 song sipping on some syrup by rap group 36 mafia. Wait, wait, wait. They settled on G6 meant to be a reference to the private airplane model Goldstream 4

referred to as a G4. It had been name checked in many songs including Drake's 2009 forever as G4. A G6 they decided was flyer than a G4. Yeah, it makes sense.

There's a real spec race going on in the private jet industry. It's not even a real plane. They literally made a club. Well, there's a G650. Micah corrected me. That's some retcon stuff right there. Yeah.

That's not like, it's not like, oh, sure, G650. I'm just saying, we listen to that clip. That was literally one year ago, I believe, this week today on this show. You heard Nicola Fumo, you heard Emily Yoshita. Jake Astrakis, who's still alive. He didn't quit. Nicola, Emily. They're doing great.

We're bringing back on the show someday. But they blew it. But they blew it. They being LG. LG just blew it. There are so many opportunities, and they blew it. But to Chris's, to Chris's point. It doesn't make sense anyway.

It was a number one song in the country. Now that there will be a literal G6, I think the Far East Movement needs to go back and re-record and pick a higher number on an unattainable number. I just, I don't think Far East Movement's doing anything. I think they're sitting around. They're like, remember 2010? We were the shit. I can't believe that was in 2010.

2010. I thought this was like 2003. No, 2010. I was, we were all wee babes. And we had no idea what's going on. And we, and it just didn't happen. Now it's over. So basically what you're saying is, as far east movement is sitting around making music.

It's good, but it's not like great. But it's really not getting the attention that deserves, even though it's like pretty good. Like you'd be happy if you're listening to it. but you're paying more attention to, like, other more popular stuff. Yeah. So we've really come full circle because now Far East Movement truly is like a G6. Oh, God.

Because this phone... Yeah, no, dude, it's going to be fine. It's like... I don't know if anybody follows Deeter's Twitter account. That was, like, listening to him compose a tweet in real time. All right. Anyway, there's other Mdbc stuff. There's a bunch of 5G things happening.

Yeah. Which seemed very confusing. And the only thing I'll say about them is Verizon is already testing 5G networks in 11 cities in America soon. It's not mobile 5G. It's designed to compete with wired internet access, which is cool. That's a cool idea. But they are doing some mobile 5G testing. AT&T is doing some mobile 5G testing.

There are already modems announced. The standards body, which still to this day is called the 3GPP, so they should maybe figure that out. It's a couple numbers behind. they haven't released their draft standard and if you look into it I did some research last night 18T and Verizon are arguing about what the standard should be

well right now there is no such thing as 5G there's a logo there's a logo they've approved a logo it looks very friendly I could draw three like cocentric arcs and call it Wi-Fi

that doesn't mean I have a Wi-Fi standard the 3GPP again couple of A couple of numbers behind to haven't figured out a good name for them as a standard. They have approved a 5G logo in preparation for their forthcoming 5G standard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what is going, and then there's going to be a bunch of news in Barcelona about that. But there's a real possibility that what Verizon calls 5G is a different technical standard

than what the rest of the world calls 5G or AT&T calls 5G or whatever. So the other thing, and I think the most concrete, real helpful news is that there is Gigabit LTE is coming. Also coming. And that's like things that chips will support and then hopefully networks, like LTE networks, like LTE Advanced is going to kind of start moving towards Gigabit. Who's going to be the first to call Gigabit LTE 5G? It's absolutely T-Mobile. Are you kidding me? John Ledger is going to get on stage and like,

pull from a 40 and be like, fuck it, it's 5G. We're the uncarrier. And then he's going to like throw the bottle and walk away. Actual 4G standard set by the 3GPP is the 4G standard is gigavit. Yeah. That's a top end of the 4G standard. But we're just getting to that. Yeah.

You remember the original 4G thing was the top end of the 3G standard was fast enough to be was as fast as the slow end of the LTE standard. So T-Mobile was like, screw it, we have a really fast 3G network. It's as fast as your slow LTE network. Our thing is called 4G. But that was the original debate. So now we're going to get it into a period where gigabit LTE will come out. They won't know how to brand it because they've already gone through LTE advanced and LTE Ultra.

and whatever other dumb name Verizon has. Real 4G is supposed to have peak 1 gigabit speeds. The real standard is peak 1 gigabit. That doesn't mean... The standards are defined in bands of speeds. Yeah, but nobody's been shipping peak for... No, that's what I'm saying. But I'm saying the exact thing you're describing is what happened with 3G.

I don't think we are in the 4G era as defined by these people. Well, I got bad news for you, Paul. They have decided it's called 5G. they put out a goddamn logo and they're going for it. I think there are... Do you want me to send you to Spain so you can stand on street corners?

Scream at telecom executives. I'm ready. Actually, this is a question for... I believe Nelai and Dieter will actually be responsible for making this very important decision at our publication. Yeah. When T-Mobile

calls slightly faster, LTE 5G within the next six months. What are we going to do about it? We're going to call them on it. We're going to say it's stupid. But at some point we're going to have to like how, and then like all the carriers will fairly soon start calling their service.

But I'm saying we did this. We called it, remember we called it Fogie? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But we kind of, that kind of ran out of steam. Like I'm saying that. Back at the day. Let's not just repeat our actions at the past. We're going to hold fast.

What was 18G's? I'm going to get on my boat with my barometer laptop. and we will sail to the future of truth. Oh, my God. At least AT&T, back when it, on the edge network, it did 2.5G, right? They, when they had like, no, our edge is really good, it's 2.5. Maybe they'll call it 4.5G. Yeah, there's a real chance they'll do that.

I'm just saying the mobile standards war, which we have thankfully not had for years because LTE just sort of took over, is coming back. Like, it's just absolutely coming back. And I think we'll find out. If only there was a. division of the government that could force them to like create a wireless standards so that things would be compatible and there wouldn't be a format war that will that will happen like a federal commission for communications no something

like that well so that will happen in Europe I'm sure this isn't even even format war it's a normal standards for people are generally agreed on the technology they're going to use that's what they're going to come I don't think they are no no no no no no that's what I'm saying yeah I'm sure the European carriers in AT&T will agree eventually on the technical standards that they use, whatever that ultimately is. Verizon is already off doing tests with their own standard, and they are already in the middle of a pretty heated argument with AT&T that could split.

So they will all call it that it's like, it's already happening. So like Verizon's already doing tests. They're announcing modems, doing all this stuff. They have a huge network, so they have the ability to get Qualcomm and Sony Erickson and all the other vendors to make them stuff. there's just a chance they make a hard turn and say the Verizon Network will be better

than everyone else's network and we want to roll out the stuff faster R5G is actually our own implementation of millimeter wave blah blah blah and AT&T which generally follows the European standard will follow the European standard

it's going to be a mess I'm very excited this is stressing me out anyway this is job security right here but Deter I'm so stressed you just brought up the FCC

even when I talked to Tom Weller about 5G standards. I think I interviewed him a year ago. I was like, are you going to set a standard? And he was like, no, no, no, no. We would never do that. The market has winners and losers. And I was like, really? Like Sprint picked WiMAX and now Sprint sucks and will always suck thus forevermore. And he's like, yeah, shit happens. So like I don't think like I don't think our FCC, no matter Democrat or Republican running it, wants to pick technical standards for the networks. Right? They want to allocate spectrum efficiently and do all that stuff. But there was. There's no interest even from Tom Wheeler in specifying a standard. There is much more interest in Europe, right, at the highest levels of the various European country governments. Right, which is why everybody else on the planet uses GSM and we're the only, I mean, us in like pockets of Korea do CDMA, right? Right.

It's Verizon and China's got some CDMA. Right. And so that's the thing. Like Verizon could build their whatever, I don't know the technical names these standards right because they haven't been locked down, but there's a chance that 5G splits along that GSM CDMA access with Verizon AT&T again. Which would suck. It would be terrible because then we're going to have to deal with like, oh, you can

use this phone on this carrier but not that carrier and who's going to make the first phone that like has modems for all of them. Yeah. And we're going to end up with like, remember the actually literally looks stressed out. I keep seeing these articles on our site. Oh my gosh. Yeah. What was the first LTE phone on Verizon that it was like the HCC Thunderbolt or something?

It was like literally the size of a Mac truck. It was great. It was so big. I thought you were saying it was so big. Dieter, speaking of the FCC, there's a bunch of other FCC news. Our boy, Agit is just moving. He hate faved, he hate faved one of our stories. Oh, my God.

That was amazing. Which is great. But he just did his first big interview on CNBC. Jake wrote a great piece, kind of breaking out his answers. his answer has come down to we're going to reduce taxes on ISPs. He calls him broadband opportunity zones, which he actually needs Congress to do. So he reduced taxes and make it easier for ISPs to like leave fiber. And he's doing this thing.

I actually need to write about this in some way. He's doing this thing that the telecom industry loves to do, which he's taking credit for the tech industry, right? So I don't, that conflation to me is always really gross. Unpack this. So he has this. this line this interview where he's like, this is the most dynamic industry the world has ever known, why would you want to regulate it? That is not true of internet access. Internet access

is not the most dynamic industry the world has ever known. It is one of the least dynamic competitive marketplaces in America, at least. What is the most dynamic industry is the stuff that's built on top of it. So devices, gadgets, apps, services, that stuff is really super competitive because there's freedom of access to it. So that conflation, that's like when the CEO of AT&T is like the iPhone's great and if you regulate us the iPhone will go away and it's like that's not true like no one likes you they like iPhones

and if you would just get out of the way of their phones we would be happier and I think this is the move that you make when you want to deregulate telecoms because no one likes their telecom provider like no one likes their cable company no one likes their wireless provider You don't like your wired internet provider.

What you like is the stuff that lives in the layer above it. And I think that he's doing this conflation, which just truly bothers me. You think being a big telecom, rich telecom executive makes it easier to hear things to constantly hear, Neely, I tell you that no one likes you. They're listed in this podcast, like, no one likes you. They have actual boats. I'm on the East River Ferry. That dude's on a yacht.

Like it's a different game. When I was at MWC, like 100 years ago, Chris Siegler, and I interviewed the CEO of AT&T at the time. Yeah. And the room we were in got double booked. And so our interview got cut short, but the people who needed the room were freaking out because they were going to have a meeting in there really soon. And so they needed to set up the chairs, CEO of AT&T, who I have forgot his name, Was it Randall Stevenson? No.

So the previous year, was it Ralph DeLovaga? Yes. Help set up the chairs. Yeah. He didn't have to do that. No. He's a good guy. He's a good guy.

Randall Stevenson, you know, he has said a number of things about, like, wanting his company to be more diverse and inclusive and tolerant. Like nobody would want to run a hated company. No, the CEO of Comcast, when I asked him, why do you run the most hated company in America? first he looked at me like he was going to shoot me. Then he looked at me like he was going to pull his investment from box media. And then he said, we don't wake up every day wanting to run the most hated company America. Their incentives are such that they inevitably run the most headed companies in America. They have not a lot of competition.

So Spectrum in New York, which is, this is like a classic cable company move, Charter bought Time Warner Cable. They said everyone hates Time Warner Cable. It's called Spectrum now. Spectrum has got sued by the Attorney General of New York for telling people they're getting faster than they knew they could deliver. It wasn't like you told them and you messed up. It's you maliciously lied to the people of New York. So we're suing you for it.

They don't have competition. They have no incentive to anything except maximize their profits. So when you call it the most dynamic industry in America, there's only four national wireless carriers. Well, this is why I want... It's four. What I really want is wireless gigabit LTE to compete with wired broadband. So I think that's pretty smart, right?

If we can get there, but even if you get to there, then you're looking at wireless gigabit LTE or whatever 5G standard happens and it's really fast, great. But the way they manage those networks means they're not peers to the wired networks. So you'll still end up with zero rating and throttling over a certain gigabit cache. a gayway cap, like you'll be making a different set of decisions, and the wireless networks are way more expensive than the wired networks. So you're having more money for a worst class of service, and that's supposed to be competitive to wired.

You know what we should do is we should ask these questions to Agit Pie, chairman of the FCC, who will not come on the show no matter how much we tweeted him. But I encourage you to tweet him in any way. He's at AgitPy FCC. If you tweeted him and asked him to come on the show, I'm sure if you're on Twitter, you know Dieter and I will immediately retweet that. You guys are so good at that. We're not being kind to him, but he's a public servant.

He runs the internet. Our business is based on the internet. I'm not at all shy about saying his actions could threaten my livelihood because of the internet. You know what? The thing that we all love. So I think he should answer some hard questions. I'll be kind to work. I know you'll be kind of.

I love this guy. Oh my gosh. I mean, he's like a big nerd. He's a big nerd. He says the things that I want. And to be honest, like I think he's super stoked on. on unlicensed spectrum. I just love hearing the words.

No, and they did LTE unlicensed. The innovation possible in the space of unlicensed spectrum. But no one disagrees about that. Coming out of, oh my gosh. No, that's great. And they just did LTE unlicense. There's a whole thing, look, they're doing some things that are great. Yeah.

But when you say the industry that you regulate, the telecom access industry is the most dynamic industry that the world has ever seen, you're not telling the truth. because the thing that's built on the industry is the most dynamic industry the world has ever seen. So don't let that industry screw with the thing that the people like.

And like that you got to you have to pull that apart. AT&T is not the tech industry. They're the telecom industry. They don't make anything good. What is one product AT&T has ever made that you love the way that you love a tech product? Okay, this is, I feel like that's kind of me.

Like the United States is a huge country and it has one of the fastest best LTE rollouts of anywhere in the world. We're competing with Singapore and South Korea. We're up there with tiny Asian nations with some of the best LTE on the planet. It's really expensive. It's actually pretty good. It's not perfectly consistent, but we covered a huge geography. Right.

We did a good job. They did a good job. I didn't help them at all. They did a good job. I paid them $100-something dollars a month, and they did a good job. and they did a good job. But they didn't do a good job because they were, how do I phrase this? The reason they did a good job is they saw the explosion of interest in mobile created by a company

that they had actively tried to shut down in the past. So Steve Jobs went into Verizon and said, here's the iPhone and they said, no, thank you. That's not doing a great job, right? Because that happened, because there was open innovation on a platform, they realized, oh, mobile video and mobile data usage is going to explode. We should build networks, our primary business, that can capture that action. But had they been trundling along on their own, they wouldn't have even had that opportunity because they wouldn't have put out devices that would have created that amount.

Their return on investment in building 4G and LTE was created by other people. Other people created devices and services that made their network valuable. I mean, when they controlled their network, they did not put out devices and services that made 3G rollout in the United States worthwhile. But it's true. In Europe, you believe in your heart that they have done nothing but respond to the market. I think that they have responded to the market. But I feel like a company should respond to the market. Right.

But what they want to do is extract more profit, which is great. And so if you don't have true great competition, there's nothing. to check that profit-seeking impulse. So in a super-competitive market, there's a natural check on your profit-seeking impulse that makes you act in the consumer interest so you capture more consumers. This is why Uber and Lyft are like in a war.

And Lyft is like, hey, we're not run by assholes. Like, that's their competitive advantage. But I don't, you don't, there's only four of those carriers. And if you're looking for wire, there's only usually one or two. And one of them is far inferior to the other. all I'm saying is these are reasonable debates to have and we should have them. I like having them with you. Like I really do.

But you can't say this slice of the industry is the most dynamic industry the world has ever seen. You can't use that to take credit for the other thing. And I think that's the move. That's the rhetorical move you make in order to avoid regulating companies that generally don't have a ton of competition. If the market was wildly competitive, let them run. I don't think you should regulate Uber. I think they will not buy leather jackets for their female employees, and people will delete the app, and then everyone will use Lyft.

Fine, Lyft won. They were more competitive on like an axis that people care about. Let them burn themselves out and die. I don't care. But here, there's just not competition. You don't believe. Ashley does. Ashley's not on your head.

I think Ashley's not on your head about you for being full of ticks. I'm not even going to wait into this. I'm just shocked you believe that there's competition. Yeah, I'm sorry. That's like, well. What's your internet? Do you have a spectrum? I don't know.

My roommate pays for it. Paul's excused to this conversation. We do have competition. My roommate and I both have our own wireless routers and we interfere with each other over unwise that's true. That's what you want. All right, Ashley, the entire lightning round belongs to you. Ready? I'm just going to throw...

Yeah, this is all my... This is all you. Okay. Snapchat Spectacles now available online. Yeah, makes sense. Oh, that's another one. Snapchat, in their IPO filing, said losing net neutrality could threaten our business. Like, the companies worry about it.

I think spectacles are a huge fat. They won't go anywhere, by the way. Yeah, I don't think anyone's going to buy them. And that's the thing. But I'm going to buy them eventually when I one day do it. I keep seeing Sam Schaeffer post selfies himself wearing spectacles, but I never see him post videos. Sam is really trying to make spectacles.

But he never posts videos from the spectacles. Yeah. I'm only going to get them because I'm, well, ideally I'm going to Mexico next week. So I would have liked them for Mexico because it's like home videos. Just easy. That's the only reason. I don't think spectacles have to like change the world to be a success. They're like a fun little project.

The people that use them enjoy them, they'll be another version. It doesn't have to be a blockbuster. It doesn't like, I don't know. I always have this problem when people are like, there'll never be another iPhone for Apple. So what? Like, one is enough. They can be successful with smaller things.

I think the spectacles are like, they're fine. They prove that they could like make a camera on your face that didn't piss people off. That is an accomplishment worth praising. Yay, spectacles. I'm done. Yeah, but Snapchat doesn't have any other products and they're being publicly offered.

So it's sort of like, okay, if spectacles suck, literally how are you going to make money. Yeah, they have Snapchat. But Snapchat isn't profitable. Yeah. And they owe more money to Google than they are like projected to collect. That's true. They run on Google's cloud.

Yeah, Nelai made me watch their 30-minute video. You're a reporter. Well, I was hoping you would be good. But then it was all about ads. It wasn't like Ashley. That's like, I want you to spend a delightful 30 minutes. Okay, well, all of it was about ads, and I learned a lot about This is what I'm trying to say here.

And of the court. All right. I'm really interested, lightning around, MeToo. You played with their phone. They make really beautiful phones. Yeah. They're cool.

So Me Too is that people probably know it because it was the viral selfie app that supposedly was spying on you. It wasn't. But yeah. So they delivered this phone to you. It doesn't work here because it's Chinese phone. Yeah, Chinese phone.

But it has inbuilt selfie software. Yeah, so I'm super into this space, and I'm waiting for the iPhone to come with some, like, beautification settings. Interesting. That's, I have something to, but go, keep going. So, Me Too, and honestly, Huawei does this as well, but Me Too, obviously, is known for its selfie apps, so they have, like, makeup apps. That's kind of their bread and butter. They're publicly offered in China, by the way, and they're for billions of dollars.

This is a big deal company. So they have this selfie phone, and the whole schick is that, You can use it, take a photo of yourself, and it automatically beautifies you. With AI, it can sense your skin tone, your lip color. And there's like a slider. Yeah, there's different levels. You should read Ashley's piece because she has photos. Yeah.

And one of the photos, the max setting photo of you looks insane. Well, so I was like, this is crazy. And literally I put that article up and a Ractor reporter messaged me. I was like, girl, your skin looks amazing here. she didn't read the piece of course so she's like oh my god your skin looks so good what are you doing wow and i was like dude this is fake like so apparently it's a good trick so this is like a weird break because you're like i can't wait for the off and do this Walt and Lauren good and I have taken a meeting with like Apple camera engineers where they have said we're never doing this

right if you want to do this you can get an app on your phone that'll do it for you but our unnamed Asian competitors are doing this, and they definitely met Samsung, because Samsung does this in it like a baby scale. They'll do it, but we think what people want is more true-to-life photos. So they've, in classic Apple fashion, they've made an idealistic, like, religious determination about what their phone will not do.

And it's weird because it's somewhat clear that people like this a lot. Yeah, especially in Asia, which is critical to their profit now. Yeah, so it's just interesting that like they're like whatever people will just use apps for this. It's true. There are a lot of apps on the phone that do this. Totally. And Me Too has those apps. And that's what was interesting to me too is like even with Snapchat, like this really made me think about Snapchat's hardware products because Snapchat is a camera app. Right. Now they're a camera company, quote unquote. Me Too was an app. Right. By the way, Snapchat's saying it's a camera company. It's like you know they all died, right? Are you going to make SLRs now? What's your plan? Yeah, that's why I'm really wondering what they're like how they're going to interpret that phrase.

using, but it seems like you want to be at the ground level of the hardware, right? So wouldn't it make sense for Snapchat to maybe put their software directly into a camera, like a smartphone camera? Like... You think Snapchat's going to make a phone? I don't know. All I'm saying is Me Too is is similar. Do you think they came and gave that phone as part of like a, hey, let's see if American consumers are into this when people write about it and then we'll launch. Well, I called them up after their app went viral, just because I had never heard of them. And then I was like, holy crap, this is a really big deal company. So I just wanted to talk to them.

And then they offhand were like, oh, yeah, we're also putting out another phone. I was like, oh, I had no idea you made phones. So they're like, go ahead, but you try it. Neat. Okay, this is a crazy theory. Tell me if I'm being dumb. But like, the early mobile phones, they're all like super generic. They nailed the like basics pretty early, address book.

You can make a phone call. You can play a snake. And then there was that period of just like weird, wild evolutions of that idea. And then it died because smartphone came. And then smartphones were like all new and interesting every time they announced them. But now we're hitting the point where it's like, okay, we kind of know what a smartphone is. They're all kind of the same. Are we getting to a point where we could start just seeing really weird experimentation like a Snapchat Android phone

and is dedicated almost exclusively to beautiful selfies? I don't think, I'm curious what Deeter thinks in particular, I don't think we're at a place where phones are going to get more specialized, right? That's a problem, yeah. The game is convergence, and I think, I think people are going to get frustrated with Apple. I wrote a little bit this week about, like, Apple's preventing innovation in some ways. We're at the point with phones where to do more, you do need more hardware-level. access and Apple's just not going to give it to you an iOS, right? They're going to give you

metal so you can make better games. But if you are Doppler Labs and you made the Hear One earbuds and you develop a competitor of W1 chip, you can't install a driver for your chip. Right. If you truly owned your phone, you can install Me Too's software to automatically filter every photo you take. Right. Apple's never going to allow you into their camera. So I think it's less that Snapchat will make a phone. I think it's more that companies that make Android phones that are dominant will understand that that is a competitive advantage. But who the hell knows? Deider, what do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I think that there, we'll see it like a couple times a year. I mean, we have for a while now, but none of them have worked, right? Like, the G5 didn't work. Motorola. The G6 marketing is a disaster. Moto's having a little bit better success with Moto mods. But I think we're more likely to see experimentation there, but the market just isn't into it. Like, I don't know, man.

It's not a Vergecast unless I mentioned palms. So here it goes. Here it is. Yes. I really kind of miss the veer a little bit. Or like, do you remember the Sony Android phone that was like exactly the size of a bar of soap? Yeah. And like it was like a horizontal slider and had a little keyboard underneath it.

my wife just got an iPhone SE and it was like so small and cute and like there is part of me that wants just like a little phone like a phone to like when I cross the border and I don't want you know ice to see my shit that I like just like have some basic apps on it but it's really tiny there's a bunch of stuff that I would like to see

that but I don't think the market is rewarding it yet and like we'll see some experiments but until one of them is like like kind of a little bit of a surprise, we're not going to go back to the weird zone for a while because people are still fighting tooth and nail to be number three behind Apple and Samsung. What do you think about the Nokia 3310 revival rumor?

You've got to be waiting for the flips. I know you're waiting for the flips. I'm always waiting for that. Wait, but Tina, is that what you want? Kind of, yeah. I mean, I want like a little bit more. I do want like a screen. I want to be able to like check my email in a pinch and and maybe have like a cordy keyboard.

Yeah, that's the thing. I like the idea. I like the idea of a phone as something I can swap out really easy. Like this is my nighttime phone and it's my flip phone. Right. So for example, if all the phones ran on one unified cell standard, you can just move. Some like some sort of chip, like some sort of embedded chip that contains. and your customer details.

You could just take it out and put it another... Open standards, fall! Why don't we have software-defined sips, do I? Because what are you? You're logging your phone, like a chump? Whose fault is the lack of software

to find sips? Probably the carrier. All right. He's got you. It's super true. Maybe we should regulate the carriers. No. Software's...

All right, last one. True Lightning Round. The show has gone way too long, but it's been a fun one. Ashley, you're out of this. There was a case, December. There was a murder. The cops went into the suspect's house, and they got a warrant to search his Amazon Alexa history, and Amazon replied today.

And they said, it's all protected by the First Amendment. Yeah. Which is incredible. Yeah, I was actually interested to hear what you thought of, like if you read the motion. I did. Russell and I were both reading it. It seems like I'm obviously not a lawyer, but to me, I was like, oh, this kind of makes a little sense.

I mean, it was stretching it, but I was like, what's the base of the argument why Alexa gets first person? So they're saying that like both what you ask the Alexa to do is protected because you're seeking information. Nilai, you can use your official jargon. Sure. I mean, that's right, right? Like what you request in terms of media is generally protected by the first amendment. And then whatever Alexa replies to you is also protected because the algorithm that Amazon is using qualifies as an opinion. This all goes back to other cases like with Google.

Like Google as a search engine. What they rank is technically like an opinion, which is protected. So that's what Amazon says. There's a lot more. It might be interesting to do a survey of this Sunday. But there's a lot of case law that Google has produced. over the years about what is and isn't protected by the First Amendment in terms of what you search, what is and isn't fair use under the copyright law because they collect so much information.

It's probably not considered by most people that Google as a company that developed its service was charting such a new territory that everyone sued it all the time. And the thing that you think of Google right now is actually protected by this huge array of opinions that determine the boundaries of what Google can do and what it can't do and what the cops can do and can't do. That's what was so shocking reading this is they were pulling from so many cases. And they're like, wow, like, A, you guys are super well-versed. Yeah.

And B, just like, I cannot believe how many opinions have been written on these hyper-specific. So it's interesting, this is what I thought of as a lawyer. As you read it, most of the cases are pretty local. Like, they're happening in circuits. They're not getting appealed up. They, like, stop. So the body of law isn't like universal across the country. So Amazon in this case is like they're pulling from an Oklahoma case and like a New York case.

And like they're trying to add up all of this disparate regional law into one argument to present to Arkansas to make regional Arkansas law. And like that's where I think it's going to get like in a perfect world, you know, the legislature would like fix it. Or, you know, one of these things we get appealed up all the way and the Supreme Court would like issue a rule because there's a split. circuit. But what was fascinating to me is the bad local news read on this is Amazon argues Alexa has free speech, which is a great local news headline. But really what they're saying is this is just a voice controlled search engine.

And every law, every opinion from the court that has thus far protected what happens with a search engine should apply to the Alexa. And they've got to make that argument and that argument has to work. but what's different, I think, is that Amazon also has to prove that a microphone in your house that is theoretically recording or listening all the time isn't of such a value to law enforcement. Like, there's a little bit of a different.

Like, the Google search engine open on your browser isn't of any value to a murder investigation, but seven far-field microphones might be. That was the other part of that motion they filed, was that, I guess, you have to make a compelling enough case that you couldn't to get this information elsewhere. So Amazon said, well, if you could get into his Huawei Nexus phone is 6P, you could go to his Alexa app and see every single thing that he has said to the echo and what Amazon has said back. And they can't crack his phone.

Yep. So that's the whole Apple. But I was talking to Russell, like, can't they just, the guy, the defendant is like alive. He's in jail. They could just put his finger on the back of the phone. And Russell's like, well, that's 50. Amendment. That's compelled speech, which the cops can't make you do. And I was like, well, just ask the judge, like, pick between the First Amendment and the Fifth. And Russell's like,

that's not, you can't, you don't get to pick. Like, they all count. If I had been, if I were Amazon's head lawyer, this is, this is what I would do. You ready? Yeah. Here goes. In the eyes of U.S. federal law, corporations are people, and Citizens United established that they have First Amendment's rights, a speech, and Alexa is a person made by a corporation, therefore it's a corporate person, therefore it has free speech rights. Anyhow, that is our show. It ended on... Wait, wait. Ashley didn't do the thing

that she does every week. Every week. Ashley's here every week. For my gadget segment, which is called Good Boy. Now plant. Oh my God. All right. Okay, in the Japanese town of Ohio, They developed a drone named Yuki Maru.

And Yuki Maru is a dog who wears a bowler hat and a little bandana and flies around the town being whimsical and looking cute and delighting people and showing you around the town of Ohio. And I highly recommend watching this short commercial film about Ohai and Yuki Maru. Okay. Is this a corporation's dog? This is the town of Ohio's dog. Is the town of Ohio a person? Yes. So everybody banded together and bought a dog drone.

I really know. Is the speech of a town dog drone in Japan protected by the First Amendment? Wait, question. So in Shibuya, there is the dog, there's a statue of the dog that waited outside for its owner, even after the owner died, but it went there and waited every day. That was a good point. What if Maru's creator died and then the drone went waiting every day until it lost its charge, so it made it about six hours?

It's a drone to like 30 minutes. Stupid drone. Yeah, there is actually a whole backstory to this drone about a temple and a dog. I really didn't pick up on the cultural subtleties, but. Yeah. Wait, is Mario the name of the dog that waded at the train station? All right. We're going to, Chris, go do some more reporting on this dog.

Figure it out. Meet Mario, the smiliest dog in Japan. That can't be the same one. I think it is. I just need to point out that I let a Temple of the Dog joke just pass right by. I think it's definitely time to end this episode of the bridge. Goodbye. That's been it.

I would say there's been ups and downs. There's been a lengthy segment where we just played an old Vergecast. That was great. There's been triumph. There's been extreme disappointment in LG. You still have time. Just putting that out there. You know, there's been a flying dog.

You can listen to other shows that we make that are vastly different than this. Walt and I do a show called Control Out Delete. It's better in some ways. It's certainly more organized. Lauren Good makes an excellent show called Too Embarrass to Ask. Karas Swisher does recode decode and Peter Kaufgo does Recode Media, which is one of my favorite things to listen to you. So listen, it's all on iTunes, go rate and review it.

You can tweet it us. You know, just let's keep it clean, everyone. Ashley is Ashley R. Carmen, Paul's Future Paul. Dieter is at Backlon. Plant is at Plant. By the way, Plant, I don't know if my dad tweeted you worked today or not. I don't think it did. Does anyone know the answer to this?

Twitter allegedly made a change where you don't need to put a period in front of someone's name when you at tweet them. Oh, wow. And so I didn't do it. I didn't put it a period when I tweeted about Plan's switch story. And Plant was like, Dad tweet, you blew it. It was like, they changed it.

The tweet got very low engagement. So I don't know if that's true or not. Anyway, you can tweet it all of us. I'm at Reckless. I think I said that. I don't know. You can leave comments. You can email us.

I'm thinking we should start doing viewer questions, opening a phone line. We've done that in the past. I'm thinking about it. Let me know if you want to do that. I'm also doing a new thing every day where I'm trying to do, I'm trying to write something every day. It's like a thing. So I'm trying to do this thing called Show Notes, which is basically how I prep for this show.

I just look at the site and have thoughts. I don't know. It's like a thing. Read that. Let me know if that's anything good because I want to keep doing it. Is there anything else? Do you know if I'm missing anything? Oh.

That's plenty. If you're buying glasses, put Krasal no glare lenses in them. They're great. No spudges, scratches. Anything else? Go to Krizal.com, C-R-I-Z-L.com. They're fantastic.

No glares. Lenses. Krizal. Thank you. That's a very chest. We'll be back next week. God only knows what will happen. It'll be on W-M-W-C.

We'll know everything about 5G next week. Paul will be on street corner setting standards. That's it. Rock and roll. Paul. Go out to the night. All right.