The Vergecast - The smart glasses era is (kind of) here

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of glassholes:  The Verge’s David Pierce chats with Victoria Song about her experience using the new Ray-Ban smart glasses from Meta.  Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses hands-on: in pursuit of content  The Verge’s Sean Hollister and iFixit’s Kyle Wiens join the show to discuss the latest legislation in the right to repair and what’s next for the future of fixing your own gadgets.  Right-to-repair is now the law in California The Verge’s Nathan Edwards answers this week’s Vergecast Hotline question.  The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro launch with ‘future Qi2 wireless charging.’ Here’s why. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Glassholes. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently in my, I don't know, we call it the utility room, but it's the room with like my washer and the furnace and also it's like where we keep all of our extra paper towels. Whatever you call that room, that's where I am. I just finished my latest home improvement project, which was to replace a bunch of doorknobes. Over the course of the last two years since we bought a house, I've gone from like, I can put together, IKEA furniture and feel unnecessarily proud of myself for a week level handy. Two, I can watch a bunch of YouTube videos about that and probably figure out how to take it

apart and out of the wall and put it back together and back in the wall again. Feels like big progress. I'm not really sure it's actually all that big progress. But anyway, I just replaced a bunch of doorknobs, which I truly cannot recommend enough as a project to give you more pleasure than it was work. Like now every time I hold onto that doorknob, I'm like, I did this, even though it was like unscruing four screws and screwing four screws back in again. And by the way, if you have more ideas for home improvement projects that are very little work and make you feel very proud of

yourself for a long time, please send them my way. I'd love to hear all about them. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We're going to talk about the right to repair fight that has happened in California. There's a new law there that I actually think it's a big deal for the whole way that we buy and repair and use our electronics. We're also going to talk about the new smart glasses from Meta and Rayban. I think these are fascinating. You've heard me talk about why I think smart glasses are interesting. Really, for the last few weeks since Amazon launched the new Echo Frames and Meta has these new

smart glasses, this is just a device category I find totally fascinating. V-Song has been reviewing them for us. We're going to talk to her and get the whole rundown. And, of course, we're going to get to the VergeCaths hotline. We have a fun one today, which is a question I have also had. All that is coming up in just a second, but first, I just realized all of the batteries to my drill are now dead because I don't use this thing enough and should probably charge it more often. So I'm going to go plug a bunch of stuff in and then we're going to get to it.

This is the Vergecast. See you in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.

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Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. Let's talk about glasses first, because like I said, I'm totally fascinated by this whole category. Are smart glasses the future? Are they nothing? I don't know. But I do know this.

Nobody is pushing the idea of smart glasses harder than meta right now. I really think that Meta believes that smart glasses, something that looks like a pair of glasses, but is just absolutely loaded with technology, is the future in a very real way. Its new smart glasses, which it made in partnership with Rayban, just went on sale. They start at $299.99. They look pretty nice. They are very much not that tech-filled future of everything. But Meta says they're vastly better than the last model, the stories, for everything from taking phone calls to taking video. The Virges Victoria's song has the smart glasses, and she's been wearing those. all over New York for the last few days.

So I called her up to see what life is like as a smart glasses wearer in 2023. V, welcome back. Hello. The listeners should know that what happened when we got on this call to do this was you showed up wearing the smart glasses and immediately took them off, which on the one hand is like you're sitting inside of your house wearing sunglasses, which is bad news, but also like says something about the state of smart glasses that you could only handle being on camera with them on for about eight seconds before it all fell apart.

Well, a lot of this was because, you know, it's sunglasses and I'm indoors, and my computer screen is not so blinding that I need that. And my vision is not good at all. So this is like, I'm going to blame meta for sending me the sunglasses version instead of the one with clear lenses or transition lenses. That's fair. But it kind of, it does kind of get to the issue of this whole smart glasses, smart sunglasses divide.

I just had these on so I could take a tiny little clip. because we're going to do a social video, like, day in the life. And this is part of my day in the life. So that was it. That's all. I love that for you. So let's start with big feelings about smart glasses. So you've had these things for several days now.

You've been, like, running around, using them in your real life, trying to, like, immerse yourself in smart glasses life as much as you can in order to do this review really well. What have you found about, like, how the world and the idea of smart glasses interact? I feel like we're in a weird middle because, you know, I've been using. smart glasses for years. I've used several iterations of these audio smart glasses before and some of the ones that, you know, were more full featured, like having a secondary display in your eyes. And usually it's just, you know, they're fine up until you find the friction in your daily life where you're just like, okay, it's just too much work to use these versus my phone versus my normal pair of glasses. So I will say that with these, that friction, it takes longer to get there. There are reasons why you would want to put it

on your face, whereas in the past, I've always been like, no, why would I reach for the smart one unless I have a very specific instance? But I've used a bunch in my career, and I have to say that these are the ones that have thus far kind of fit into my life the best, though there are a lot of, a lot of, a lot of asterisk, asterisk, asterisk. Asterisk. Asterisk. Asterisk. Yeah. And listen, I want to get to those in a minute, but like, the thing that jumps out to me the most, and I got a brief demo of this before the launch where we just kind of got to like try them on on like the roof of a building in New York and play with them for a few minutes. And the thing that jumped out to me the most was just that they look like sunglasses, which is such a stupid, obvious thing to say. But like we've been talking about these devices for a long time. And like you said, we've tried the Bose ones. And Amazon has the echo frames, which it's also sort of pushing in the looks more like glasses. realm, but like, meta's working with Rayban here. And I'm even looking at the ones sitting

on your head right now. And like, if I didn't look for a long time, which no one is going to, people don't like really spend a lot of time staring at other people's glasses. They just look like glasses. And that strikes me as like very, very important. They're like easily the most stylish smart glasses I've seen. Has that been your experience so far? They're pretty on par, I think, with like the Bose Soprano, which is like the nicer looking version of the Bose tempo, the non-Gibroni version. It's the technical term, the non-Gibroni version. Do I look like a jabroney? Like, that's one of the main criteria I grade these.

It's a good technology test, actually, for like all wearables, like the gibroni factor, like 1 to 10. I feel like that's a good one. So these are very not gibroni-like, but what I will say is most consumer smart glasses, they go for the very boxy Warby Parker Wayfair vibe because that's like I think that's what they've kind of identified as the most universally flattering, although it's still not flattering for everyone, the most universally flattering form factor that they can go with. And it was a very smart choice for meta to team up with Rayban or Esser-Lexotica, their parent company, because you know, rebands, everyone finds them to be like, even if you don't like them, they're kind

of iconic in terms of fashion. So yeah, these are probably in the top two of best-looking audio slash camera sunglasses I've ever worn, low bar, since we're all kind of going for the same vibe. But what I will say is you have so many more style options with this than you do with others. So that, I think, is a huge underrated plus with these glasses because, you know, we don't talk about it enough in terms of wearables because we're geeky people. We love to talk about the specs and everything like that. But how they look and the design is such an integral and crucial part of smart glasses more so than any other piece of wearable technology because it's on your face.

Yeah. And we are a vain creature. We are vain people's. Like, if I put something on my face, it better look good. I don't want to look like a dwebis. Like, I, this is the moneymaker, right? This is how people see us. This is how people perceive us.

No one's going to wear these things if they're like, I look like the kid from a Christmas story or like, you know, the kid who's shoots his eye out with the BB gun. No one wants to look like that. No one wants to look like a really dorky person. You want to look good. You want to look Kingsman, EGZ in a nice little suit wearing his dapper little smart glasses. That's what you want. Dude, I have spent so many years now telling people that like forget Ready Player One, forget Minority Report, forget her, Kingsman is the future of technology that we should all hope for. Like just look at that movie and that's That's what I want.

I want to look like that. I want green avatars of people sitting around a table while we have a meeting. Like, give me Kingsman or give me nothing. I could not agree with you more. There are parts of, like, actually, where I was testing these, where I was like, oh, shit, I'm egzy. From the second movie? Because there is a, oh, crap, I got these smart glasses playing music. Okay, I have to take them off now.

I touched them accidentally. But Kingsman, he, in the second movie, he's. He's at like a dinner and he's just taking pictures and recording things. I really felt like that this time around because that's what I was doing on my commute one day. And I felt like such a spy, like an incognito. I was like, oh, my God, I'm taking pictures and people don't know. It's totally like freaky. And they have these little LEDs that are on the outside that are supposed to signal when you're taking a video and when you're taking a photo.

And what I found is that it works indoors. especially if you're an ethical person and you're like, hey, I have this device and I'm going to do these things with it. But when I'm outside, you'll be assessed as to whether you can see it easily. And it requires, like, looking at you while you do it, which most of the time, again, no one is. I'm glad you brought that up. And I, like, I start with that because, like, not only do I think the way that it looks is important to the way it works. I think it's the whole thing, right? And I think we've talked about it like, oh, you have to have cool technology and they have to look cool.

No, no, no. If it doesn't look cool, none of the rest of it matters, right? Like, I think that's what we learned from Google Glass. That's what we're learning with the VR headsets. Like, if you don't have something that is at least inoffensive that no one is going to look at you when you walk by on the street, like, that's the baseline. The better part of it is you get to the like, you know, I feel like where Apple got with like the wired headsets back in the day where they could just do a silhouette and you saw nothing but the white wire and you knew exactly what it was and you've like made something iconic. That's what you want with all of this. but none of it matters if it doesn't look cool.

No one's going to wear these things, especially on their face, if you can't make them fashionable and stylish and make people actually want to wear them, even features aside. And the good news is, I think belatedly everyone now knows that because of the way that Google Glass went. So I'm optimistic about the road all of these are on. But you brought up the camera.

And I think the two reason these things exist is, one, for the sort of audio stuff, which I think is interesting, making calls, playing music, that kind of thing. and the camera. And meta obviously made a big deal about the camera. It's where they put in a lot of the engineering work. You can do the live streaming, all that stuff. We have not had good luck with face cameras in the past being like good cameras that you actually take videos and photos you want to do things with.

How did these turn out? How do you feel? Surprisingly good. Really? The point where you're angry because the original Rayban stories looked like potato vision. Anything you took a picture on, kind of looked like a potato, right? Like, there's just nothing you could do about it.

It's fuzzy. It looks like circa 2010-level phone camera. This, I think you could get away with saying, oh, an iPhone took this photo. Like, it's that good. There's caveats. Again, like, there's a little fish-eye distortion going on with everything you take, and you really can't think about it until you've worn it,

but there's a real POV factor to all the photos and videos that you take with this. So if you're on a phone, you can see what you're filming. You know when you're off kilter. You know like to kind of just micro adjust while you're doing things. Yeah, that's not necessarily what you're going to be thinking about when you have glasses because you're not seeing the footage as it's being taken in real time. So there's a lot of photos that I took where I'm like, oh, I'm doing the puppy dog tilt. where my head is like tilted to a side because I'm looking at something.

And that was actually a behavior I didn't know I did until I was like re-looking at my footage. I was like, oh, I tilt my head a lot. When I'm looking at things or when I'm trying to fuss things out, the other stuff is like, I have curtain bangs, which are, you know, if you don't know, fashion, curtain bangs are face length framing bangs. I have a lot of ruined photos of my cats because there's just hair like obscuring part of their cute face. So now I have to do this thing where it's like when I put these glasses, the new behaviors to swoosh back my bangs so that they don't ruin any footage. And that's not something I ever

thought about before or when I'm walking and taking video and I'm talking with someone. Like, it was very funny watching this footage back because you can just see me look straight every so often while my partner was talking. Sometimes that's like the most crucial interesting parts because what I'm doing is trying not to fall flat on my face. I'm trying to see where I'm going. I'm not trying to walk into a tree like Looney Tune style. So there's just kind of a real found footage quality to the videos that I've taken thus far. And it's a muscle memory that you have to learn. You have to retrain yourself entirely to film in this context. But it's still, like in terms of video quality and photo quality, you could share it very easily and no one would

know that it was taken on a potato camera. It's shareable. It's shareable. It's shareable. It's chair ready, which is pretty freaky when you think about it. Well, yeah, it's interesting to think about taking photos kind of at your eye level, which is essentially where the cameras are, right? They're kind of like just above and outside your eyes, right, as you're wearing the glasses. That seems like it would be very natural. It takes a picture of what you're looking at.

But you never really think about all the work your brain is doing when you're looking at something that the camera can't then do to do things like solve for head tilt. Like your brain doesn't think the world goes askew every time you tilt your head to look at something, but your camera is sure going to. And the thing where you can't look down because it's going to screw up your shot, like in a way, it seems like we sort of all understand the like language of how to take a phone photo now. And it seems like doing it without any of that guidance or help or sort of dynamic feedback would be much harder. Like if you find yourself taking pictures you thought were going to be good at the moment that turned out to be bad, just because of the mechanics of how you shot it. Like, if you had stood there and taken a picture

with an equivalently good phone camera, would it have turned out better than what you got out of your glasses? Absolutely. So many. I would actually say, like, the majority of my first day or two of just taking photos, a lot of them ended up being, like, no good. Because I would look at, like, what came out

and be like, oh, the quality is really impressive. Especially I was impressed by the low light. But like, oh, the quality is impressive, but I can't use this because it looks like, One, I really love a Dutch ankle, which I don't, which is because my head is tilting. But also there's things like movement. I guess the big cell is that when you're on the go and you see something like, oh, your cat is doing something really cute and you just want to like get it real quick. Well, you actually have to be quite still.

You have to stand still and you have to like click it and you can't move while you do it. Otherwise you're just going to get, or unless this is what you want, a very blurred motion shot. So a lot of the shots that I took on my first walk, I couldn't actually see what I was taking a photo of well because I was like, oh, that's a beautiful shot of the Queensborough Bridge and it's blurry. Right. Or that's a car that I think my partner would love to know what it is. It's yellow and sporty and I don't know what cars are. Oh, well, I can't see the logo now because it's a little blurry. Like there was a lot of that going on.

So once you're aware of it, you can just kind of adjust and be like, oh, if I'm going to take a little bit. I need to stand still, click, wait for the sound, and then move on. So it's a little bit of learning how to work with the device in that respect. But the difference is that if you do do that, the result of what you're going to get is a lot better than what we've seen so far in this category. So it's sort of like a, it's sort of a noticeable step in terms of progression forward. So I was, I was quite like shocked. And at the same time, like, oh, this is how I'm going to have to adjust to use this properly. Yeah, that kind of makes it make sense why all of Meta's marketing material for this is like put on the glasses, start a video and then sit down and play drums or look down

while you use your hands to make something. Like there's a very sort of specific moment for it. Like I'm sitting on the couch and my kid over there does something interesting. Like that's, that's a moment for it. Whereas I think a lot of the sort of run and gun stuff phones are really good for, these might not be, despite the fact that it seems like they would be because they're on your face. It's just a really interesting, like, tone shift in what these things are actually for versus what it seems like they ought to be for because they're on your face. Yeah, like, I will say that you can get some footage that you could never get with your phone. Like, you know, anyone who's taking a picture of a kid or an animal before knows that they know what a phone is, right? They change their behavior as soon as the phone comes out.

This, you can, like, just click a little button. And I've got some really cute footage of my kitten just yawning and making biscuits that he would have not done if I had my phone out because he'd be like, oh, phone, time for a snack, chomp, chomp on the phone camera. But he's not going to do that because I have my glasses on. Like those are instances where you're like, oh, man, this is so cool. And for me, just like, this is very, very specific to smartwatch reviewers only. the next time the video team asked me to take a social video of myself putting on a watch, hallelujah, because do you know how hard it is to hold a phone and prop that up and then put on a watch? It's a two-handed job.

So anytime you want to take like hands-free phone footage, it's not every instance. But depending on who you are, there may be a ton of instances where that's really cool. Like maybe you're a musician and you want to like film yourself. playing piano. Like, wow, you can do that now instead of having to wear a GoPro on your face. That's what it is. Like instances where you would be like, man, if only I could stick a phone on my head or a GoPro in my head, this does a really good job of replacing that, I think. No, I think that's really interesting. I remember, I think it was Anthony Bourdain a bunch of years ago talked about how much it changed the kind of show he was able to make when he started using iPhones

instead of big giant TV cameras. Just like the vibe in the room is different. when you have these phones that people are used to being filmed on and kind of understand what they are, as opposed to, like, big-ass shoulder-mounted cameras. And I feel like there's a world in which the smart glasses kind of go the same way, where it's like you're able to feel more intimate and literally get places and shots you couldn't with any other device, because there is now nothing between you and the subject. It's very social-oriented. It's not like, oh, I'm going to do a YouTube video movie.

shot on these glasses. It's very like for your social media. There's like things built within the MetaVue app that make it easy to share to Instagram or like WhatsApp, you know, all of Meta's services. But it's just very easy to make that transition and like I don't live stream, but I have like tried out the live stream kind of connectivity. It's freaky how fast it it just recognizes that I've got a pair of these paired. Like, I just pull up Instagram reels and it can see that it's there. And you just like double tap to switch between cameras, right? That's pretty cool.

You just, and like, I saw that. I was like, wow, there's just a type of content creator that's going to love doing that. That's not me. But also, you know, it's kind of weird to kind of test that because you're going live in a live stream. And then people are just going to have questions. So that's not a thing I've been able to really explore yet. but just having it there, being able to recognize it without me having to go through a really long

setup process, that was like, ooh, that's interesting. Where you come up against a wall of like, okay, that's not how people are going to use this, is who really is using Instagram reels for this type of content? It's TikTok. TikTokers are the ones who are going to want this type of, like, live stream capability built within the glasses, and it's kind of limited to reels. So that feels like arbitrary ecosystem guarding when you consider like, if you didn't do that, if you worked with TikTok to make it a compatible thing, this would like sell like hotcakes immediately. So I mean, I'm not one tiny bit

surprised that meta is doing that. But it also makes me hope that somebody else comes out and says, like, we are the content agnostic one, right? And it's like, you can, if you could share as easily, to like shorts and TikTok and reels and go live on Twitch and YouTube and TikTok and wherever else. That becomes a pretty cool creator tool in a way that there really isn't anything other than phones right now that do that. And I think that could be very cool. But frankly, I would have been shocked if Meta had opened this stuff up more than it has.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Like it makes sense. Like people going to put their ecosystems first always. It's just one of those things where you're like, yeah, but that's not the reality of how content creators work. So that's just one of those things where it's like maybe down the line, we'll see that happen. Maybe Betta wants to be the one who makes that particular hardware for everyone to use. So, you know, I get it. If I know anything, it's that someone in the EU is

already writing smart glasses interoperability rules. So it's going to happen. What about the like headphone replacement piece of this? I think one of the reasons I'm the most excited about these is for audio and calls and microphone stuff. How do these do? So I think you sound great when you wear them and you take videos. Like there is a new microphone in the nose. And I thought that was kind of silly at first, but you do really sound a lot more present and clear. It's a really smart place to put a microphone. Actually, I had not thought about it until they explained it, but like that is such a close

place to your mouth. And it's such a like they can just plain it straight downwards. Like it's very clever. I was, I had high hopes for it. I'm glad it works. I sound so clear in all the videos I took, even if there was wind outside. That's great. And you sound more like the narrator when you do it that way, just because it does record in stereo.

So when you put it on and you listen to the videos that you took, you do sound like the main character of your video. Oh, everyone's going to know I'm recording because I'm going to be like swooping my bangs to the side. It does and it does it in stereo. Oh, wait, wait, wait. When you listen to it, you can. Like, how is the... Torius sucks. So, like, I'm sorry.

Like, you can tell that you are the narrator and that you were talking and that if you were talking to someone else, they're over there. Right. Like, you can tell that, which I thought was like a very subtle touch. But, you know, I wore it on the very loud New York subway and on a tram and in various forms of public transit. They're quite loud on these forms of public transit. it depending on what train line you take. And like on the four or five, I could listen and I could drown everybody out. But if you live in New York, you know the four or five is a fancy train. It's well maintained. I also took the NRW and it was a lot harder to like listen to my

music and that with everything just screeching and being loud. So it really depends on the area you're in. I didn't have anyone yelling at me like, turn down your audio leakage. So on that respect, no one yelled at me. So it can be really hard to hear other people, though, when you crank it up really loud. But as far as that goes, it's very similar to other smart glasses with audio components. I do think it has good sound quality. Is it the best sound quality for listening to the bass heavy tracks of XO? Not really. In ear is always going to be better than that, but it's good enough for my runs. Is it good enough for a race? Now, I wouldn't take it in a race, because in the race they blare their own music, and that makes for a bad time if you're very music-dependent like I am.

So that's just kind of how it works there. So hit me with some of the caveats. What sucks about these things? Like, were there specific things that drove you nuts about the way that they work? Battery life. You know, battery life is, it is what they say it is. It's just, you know, I have bad eyes. I need a vision, like, help all the time.

I need either glasses or my contacts. In terms of these, you know, if they run out of battery while I'm going about my full day, trying to use these as my main driver, that's annoying to charge my main seeking device. You can't really use this as your sole pair of glasses. You are going to need a backup pair because this charges within a case. So you can't even, like, plug yourself into a wire while you're working and have that work. Now, you have to plug it into the eyeglass case. So you can't just use this as your sole pair.

of glasses. And if you get it as sunglasses, you really have to think about what situations you're going to be using this in. If you want to be indoors, it's really not going to work for you. And then if like me you have really, really terrible vision, there's a limit as to what prescription glass Raybann says they support. It's negative six to plus four. I fall outside of that. That really sucks for me. It means I have to keep wearing contacts with these. And that makes life kind of difficult to manage because, you know, thing I think we don't really talk about with smart glasses is that glasses are a medical device. People need them to see and you need to see at all times. So when you add a charging battery

component to that, you're saying that this can't be your main glasses all the time. You need a backup. And that's very expensive in the United States, not in Korea, which is why my family all goes to Korea for glasses. But you're asking people to spend like 400. to 700 just to have two pairs of these at any given point in time, which, you know, I don't, I don't love that. I think that's a major barrier. Yeah, this is why translation lenses are the future. I know we were on a few episodes ago, and NELI talked a lot of crap about transition lenses, and the number of people who have told us that actually transition lenses are good, I support you. You are my people. And I'm sure my dad was one of them.

They are absolutely necessary for smart glasses. They don't think the sunglasses, if you want to wear them in your daily life. Sunglasses are not an option. But if you want to go outside and not have your eyeballs burn off, because eye health is important and UV rays are damaging, then you can't really have the clear glasses all the time. So you really do need transitions if you want these glasses to be on you at all times and to have a camera at all times. So it seems like we're not all the way there. We haven't sort of fully solved these problems. There's a lot of interesting like software stuff left to do, especially I think in the camera. But it does sound like meta has probably made the most convincing case yet that like there's something here that the camera can be good the audio stuff can work they're working out a bunch of AR stuff that I think is going to get more interesting over time but it's like meta wants the gadget of the future to look a lot like the thing that you're wearing on your head right now right like it's a huge amount of technological work to get there but I think I'm at least you know one percent more convinced than I was before these that that's plausible yeah so

What I'm going to say is I have tested a lot of smart glasses in the past, and I've been made fun of consistently and constantly while I wear them. This is the first time where, you know, I've had people go like, oh, hell now. This is a privacy nightmare. Get away from me. But I've had way more people go like, oh, my God, that's so cool. I'm buying them. Where do I pre-order? And that, I think, is huge because I'll be real.

My husband is the biggest, the humble. he keeps me humble because he's always like, that looks stupid. That's dumb. Why would anyone have that? Why do you wear five watches at a time? Yeah, I have to argue my thesis, but this is the first like pair of smart glasses that I've ever worn that they've gone, holy crap, I'm going to order my own pair. They are waiting to order these so they can have their prescription and they're like super excited about it. That's so weird to me. One, Alex Cranz had a field day at the office, stealing them from me, taking the world's blurriest photos. was just running around. They're so bad. They're so bad, but she ran around the office with these,

like a child. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to buy a pair. These are so cool. And it was just like, oh, my God, I've never seen someone that excited about a pair of smart glasses I've ever tested in my life. That's something to me, you know. Alex Cran's taking bad pictures is the first sign of any any good gadget category. Yeah, though. Oh my God. Just so many nostril shots on my phone. All right, V, thank you. I want to talk. about these more because the echo frames are coming out. There's more to do. I think this is like the next phase of these I think is going to

be really interesting. So we're going to have to keep in touch on all the smart glasses stuff. Absolutely. We got to make the exe spy dream a reality. Please, from your mouth to God's ears. All right, we've got to take a break, but then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about right to repair. V, thank you. We'll be right back.

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Download Gramerly for free at Grammarly.com. that's grammarly.com. All right, we're back. Before we get to our next segment, actually, one more quick thing on smart glasses. One thing that's not on the meta smart glasses, at least not yet, is augmented reality. When meta launched these glasses a few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg said that in a software update next year, the glasses will turn multimodal. That's the word he used. Here's the way he described how it'll work.

So the glasses are going to be able to understand what you're looking at when you ask them questions. So if you want to know what the building is that you're standing in front of, or if you want to translate a sign that's in front of you to know what it's saying, or if you need help fixing this sad, leaky faucet, you can basically just talk to MetaI and look at it and it'll walk you through it, step by step how to do it. So, you know, I think that smart glasses are going to be an important platform for the future. You know, not only because they're the natural way to put holograms in the world

so we can put digital objects in our physical space, but also, because if you think about it, smart glasses are the ideal form factor for you to let an AI assistant see what you're seeing and hear what you're hearing. The smart glasses obviously don't have a screen, so they'll use your phone as the display for all that stuff. It's basically a companion to your glasses. I actually think that's super clever, and a smart way to do AR glasses before it's possible to put all the hardware and software we're going to need into a decent looking pair of glasses. But the race to watch out for is between that approach and the one taken by a company like, like X-Real, which used to be called N-reel, you might have heard of it back then, but is now called X-Rail for reasons I don't totally understand.

It doesn't really matter. I've been toying around with X-REL's latest glasses. They're called the Air, and they're essentially the opposite of the meta-smart glasses. They're not smart at all, but they do have a display. Right now, they're basically a projector on your face. You can plug them into your phone or your game console and see your video on a big virtual screen in front of your eyes. You can plug them into your computer and use them for virtual desktops.

They don't do much of anything by themselves. They're just a screen you can put on your face. They're not the most stylish glasses. They have displays underneath each lens, so they're big and bulky. But they work pretty well, actually. And I've really enjoyed using them for watching shows that I would otherwise stare at on the tiny screen on my phone. Or even playing games. I plugged mine into my switch, and I've been using it that way.

It's very cool. So that's really the battle, I think. Can someone like Xreal add the smarts and the looks faster than meta-configure? out how to get a display into these glasses. I don't know who I'd bet on there. I think probably meta, but we'll see. And in the meantime, which of those approaches is actually useful to the most people? Is it meta's AI and camera thing, or is it having a display on your face? I don't know, but I am absolutely convinced that meta in particular is ready to see this all the way through. Alex Heath on our team has done some really good reporting on the roadmap. The roadmap is long.

meta is in this for the long haul. It's going to be super interesting to watch, especially over the next couple of years as everybody tries to figure out what anybody actually wants from these glasses. Anyway, sorry, brief diversion. Let's get to the next segment. Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill called the Right to Repair Act, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It makes it official that gadgets should be repairable.

But it does so in some important, specific ways. Under the law for any electronic made and sold after July 1st, 2021, and costing more than $50, the manufacturer of that device has to make tools, parts, software, and documentation available for people who want to repair those devices. Some of these devices you'll be able to repair yourself, others you'll take to a repair shop, and those repair shops, this is important, will be far more equipped and enabled to actually help you than before. This law is a huge win for the right to repair movement, which has been steadily fighting for

laws like this all over the U.S. and around the world. So to help figure out what it means and what it means for how we buy and use and fix our electronics, I grab two people who know very well. The verge of Sean Hollister and I fix it CEO, Kyle Weens. Sean Hollister, hello. Hi, that's me. Kyle Weans. Welcome back to the Vergecast. Hey, thanks for having me back. So there's a lot of rate to repair stuff to talk about. But first, let's just kind of catch up on where we are. And it seems like this bill that was just signed into California law is like if you were to pick a moment that you won at right to repair, it feels like this would not be a bad one to choose. Is that fair to say? This is far and away the most broad sweeping bill that we've had. And the retroactivity is helpful. The broader flexibility to a variety of products. California had an existing law that we modified. I don't know most people know this, but California has this law called the Beverly Song Warranty Act.

It's the best consumer protection law in the world, really. The Lemon Law, right? Yes, it's the Lemon Law. And it says that you have to be able to get your product service for seven years, which is longer than even Europe and other places. So the Right Your Repair Law kind of modifies and improves that, lemon law. When we think about the Lemon Law, most people think of this as like the thing that protects

you from buying a shitty used car, though, right? People don't know that it has anything to do with their other electronics. Right. So, like, in California, Apple will repair products for seven years. They don't do that anywhere else. in the world. So if you have a six-year-old MacBook and you walk into an Apple store in New York City, they won't work on it. But if you go into the Apple store in L.A., they will. That's wild. I genuinely did not know that.

Apple has, they have what they call vintage and obsolete. And it's been five and seven years. And at five years, they cut the world off except California. And then at seven years, they cut California. Wow. And I think that goes back to just the broader question, like, how long should things last? When we talk about right to repair, you know, you're buying a new thing or the Verge is recommending a product? Well, cool. I'm going to buy it. How long am I going to use those new air? AirPods for. Well, that's actually the thing I was going to ask, because you were involved in this bill from the beginning, as far as I understand, right? Like, you were an active participant in crafting this legislation. That's one of the things you have to figure out, right? What is a

reasonable amount of time to expect a gadget to work? Absolutely. Seven years seems to be the magic number. Why seven years? Seven years is the default that we'd like to do. Now, I should mention California's law, the right-tropair law, is 2021 devices and forward, but that 2021 is kind of a one-time date. So the retroperlough over time will get better and better. The kind of compromise we negotiated with Apple was 2021, which is iPhone 12 and forward. So why seven years, though, is that, like, why not, why not 10 or five? What was it about seven years? Seven years was in the, in the Lemon Law historically. So that's kind of, and it, you know, tailored toward, you know, electronics-y type products. I don't think seven years was long enough. I think that's a good place to start. But, like,

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro that still works just fine. So we're going in. 11 years on that one. I think we should be talking 15 plus years, but you got to start somewhere. So the existing California law was it requires the manufacturers to keep the parts around. It requires them to maybe repair them for you. If you go get to the repair, you still had to pay them for that repair, though. And they didn't necessarily, Apple didn't necessarily have any obligation to send parts to you to thought that you could repair it yourself, right? Right. Yeah, that's the big difference, the big change that we're doing with these right to repair bills is It says manufacturers have to make the same parts, tools, and information available to consumers and independent repair shops that they have in the Apple store.

So walk me through that, though, because there's a letter of that law and there's a spirit of that law. And I feel like the spirit of that law is pretty straightforward, right? There are a bunch of tools. There are ways to make these things more fixable. I should have the same access that somebody at Apple does. The letter of that law says that Apple can do to Sean, what it did do to Sean, which is ship him like 9,000 pounds worth of equipment in a bunch of Pelican case. and say, here you go, jackass, you figure it out. And that's like, that's better than nothing.

There are tools that exist that you can get access to that you can fix stuff. But there's so much gray between the tools exist and you can have them to like, it is easy and doable for a regular human to fix things. Do we just have to be comfortable in that gray space for a while here? Step back and say, what are we trying to achieve? We're trying to have a robust repair marketplace where products get fixed, where they last a long time, where you have local repair. shops in our neighborhoods that can fix everything that all the gadgets in our lives,

where we used to have TV repair shops in our neighborhoods. We don't anymore. Maybe those could come back. So it's what we're trying to get at. And then with legislation, you try to approximate pointed fixes to try to nudge the world back in that direction. And then the companies can decide if they want to wholeheartedly embrace that and really work with you to try to address the systemic causes that have resulted in the repair

system breaking down, or they can engage in this sort of compliance with a maximum amount of resistance, which has been Apple's approach so far. Yes. Rates or a pair of shenanigans. Yeah, I call it malicious compliance. Yeah, exactly. Do you think, like, California has just put every manufacturer on notice for all kinds of electronics, not just like laptops and tablets and phones, but like anything over a certain

value, right? Anything over 50 bucks. Are you expecting, in general, an explosion in parts availability for these things, or do you think there's going to be explosion in people attempting to sue companies for not making those parts available? That's a good question. I would say, you know, we're helping some companies, but I'm kind of shocked at the silence that we're seeing from the middle market from most companies. I mean, obviously you've got, you know, Samsung and Apple and Logitech and some of these companies out front that they're paying attention. But the vast majority, I mean, there's thousands of these companies, and I haven't, I've only seen a handful of parts program announcements. So I think, I think companies are behind the eight ball and need to get on it. You got until January 1. How much of this are you trying to do?

Like, there's a version of this where you could be sitting here thinking, like, I just want a gigantic business opportunity for I fix it. I'm going to corner the market on human usable repair tools. And now that these things are available in more places, like, I'm going to be a billionaire. My sense would be this is probably too big for I-Fix-It to try and monopolize. But are you sitting at this, looking at this as a huge business opportunity for you? The debate when we were working at retrofer was like, are we going to pass laws that put I-Fix-it out of business? Because the idea is the companies need to provide parts, tools, and information on their site. Like, that's what I-Fix-it does.

That's how we've always, right? We've built an alternative ecosystem for Apple products. You can go and get all that from I-Fix-it. Now, in addition to the I-Fix-it service manager, you can get Apple and you can get Apple, and you can get a service manual for the iPhone. So I think that's pretty cool. And just so I understand, Apple partnering with I Fixit to sell stuff

is not good enough under this law. Is that like Apple has to offer it itself? Is that right? It would be. I mean, that's how Samsung and others are complying. I mean, they have to provide a link to where to go to get it. So if you provide it on IFIX it, that would meet the need.

Some companies like Samsung is purely going through us, others like Microsoft is selling parts directly, which is great. I think that's fantastic. That's what we've been asking for all along. So it's really cool to see it starting to happen. Have you gotten an influx of people asking you about this? I mean, you've already got Google and Samsung and Valve, like, very publicly.

We've written about it. Other publications have written, this is where do you go to get your parts for these devices? Are other manufacturers contacting you and saying, yes, do that for me too? We have some companies that we're working with, absolutely, and we're ready to go to help more. But like I said, I'm surprised we're not hearing from more. you know, like pick a random company like Bose, right? They make a lot of products. They're over-ear headphones that are sold in every airport,

and these batteries were out of there after a couple of years. And Bose has no strategy. We're not talking to them. They don't have parts available for their quiet comfort headphones. I mean, they have to do something. And I would say that's the default for almost all companies. So it's more the exception than the rule that they're talking to us and working with us. I'm curious what you've heard from the companies you've been negotiating with us on this front.

Because I think about even a company like Apple is probably an easy one. want to think about, right? Because I think making a MacBook more repairable, pretty straightforward. Like, not easy, but doable. Like, we know what a repairable laptop looks like, one where you can open it up and put in a new battery, right? Like, we know what that looks like. Phone, less so, but still sort of doable. But, like, you mentioned AirPods. And I'm trying to imagine if I'm Apple, how I literally how I make that tiny little integrated thing with all the stuff in it in a way that complies with these laws. What have you heard from the folks who are trying to do these, especially like, you know, smaller wearable things.

Like, are folks throwing at you saying we can't do the thing that you're asking us to do? No, it's totally doable. I've talked with, I mean, so for the AirPods, I would point to the Samsung Galaxy Buds, which I think the Verge scored basically identically to the AirPods and said the sound quality just as good. So the galaxy buds, you can pop open and swap out the battery easy. And they're like 25 bucks for a sudden new batteries for them. It's great.

We sell them. You can get them elsewhere. You just pop them open. There's a gasket. And that's how they all should be. So, no, I don't really accept that you can't make these things fixable. It's just a matter of effort. When we got the Apple Watch, we partnered with a watchmaker, a local watchmaker,

and we took it apart with him. And he was just aghast. He's like, are you kidding me? This is the most shittily designed product I've ever seen. And the architecture hasn't changed. He's like, let's take a part of Rolex, and let's look at how you really do this. And you can seal these things. You can have gaskets, and the form factor is similar.

The sizes are similar. these are very small components, but they can be repairable. So there are shortcuts that we take in mass manufacturing these things, but there are paths. So when we do a lot of consulting with manufacturers where we give them feedback and we also kind of teach them design for repairability practices. And our point is consistently, we can innovate our way into the future here. We can come up with new innovative technologies that make repairing products at scale at the cost that we need to hit possible.

How concerned are you with easily repairable versus, you know, repairable with a lot of knowledge and the parts available because I just watched an amazing, amazing tear down by I Fix It of the MetaQuest 3. And I watched that tear down and I said, wow, that is a tremendous number of screws, 50 screws to get to the battery. All these layers of circuit boards, ribbon cables, all this stuff. I looked at that video and I was of two minds about it. One, oh my God, there's so many layers. Do there really need to be that many layers than any screws? But the other side of my mind was every one of those steps, seems easy. It's just a lot of them. I could do that myself at home. No problem. Yeah. As long as there's documentation, you can do it. We just published our repair manual for the new pixel fold. It's in depth. It's like 126 steps to get to the battery. So I'm not going to recommend that be the first electronics repair you ever try. It's kind of bordering on the edge of possible. I think it is possible. We're selling a repair kit for it, but I don't expect very many people to take us up on it. You get that with kind of new technologies where there's a lot of complexity.

We've taken apart pretty much every VR headset since the Oculus, just because I'm fascinated by the category. Clearly, it's some element of the future. And the mechanical design is really interesting, and the sensors, and over time, you end up with consolidation, you simplify things down. I mean, the Apple Watch system on chip is they took all the discrete ICs and they just bundle them together into one silicon package. And there is no more visible complexity for a fixer in more. So you'll get there with the optics on these on these veer headsets over time. Yeah, I think one interesting example of that tension that you're describing, Sean, is, I think like you look at the new surface stuff from Microsoft versus like the framework 13,

right? And the framework stuff, Sean, which I'm curious to hear your thoughts on because you've spent a lot of time with these things is, I mean, it is designed for a regular person to take it apart and put it together, right? Like, that is the point. You should be able to unscrew a thing, pull a thing out, put it back in, screw it back in, and you're done. Like that is a sort of end state of right to repair that I think is really interesting. The surface stuff is designed

sort of deliberately to be harder to do than that. They're trying to find a middle ground between like you can still get at it, but it's not going to be as simple, which gives us certain affordances that we can have in design and materials and all that stuff. Is it good that we have both of those approaches?

Should we all aspire for every gadget to be like the framework where I can just yank a thing out and put another thing back in? Like, where do you feel like we should land here? From my perspective, what the companies tend to argue is they tend to argue, we get better component density when we don't make things upgradable, modular, repairable. And I do think there's definitely a gap between something that's simply repairable versus consumer upgradable, like a framework product where everything is its own little module. And you can put them in because there's been many, many, many, many laptops that have had modular parts technically in them.

but making them end user. I pull a piece out. I stick another piece in exactly where that went within, you know, two minutes flat and I have a new GPU. That's definitely something new and different. And frameworks should be applauded for that. But to your question, to your question, like that density is less with a framework than it is with a surface. They cram a little bit more into a tighter space in the surface. And I don't think that is enough justification from my perspective.

I want the device that is upgradable. after year and modular and eminently repairable, but I can see why they come at it from that perspective, and I can see why they might be angry that the laws say, well, do we have to redesign our products and think how we're doing our products differently in order to meet the goals of this law? I'd love to hear what Kyle has to say about that. Well, I would know the retro repair laws in the U.S. don't address design at all. So the companies can continue to design products however they are. It just says, if you have a repair network for your products, you have to make that competitive. So it's really angling on.

that competition. You can't have a repair monopoly on your product is what the California and these other laws are tackling. In Europe, they're more interested in mandating device design and banning lightning ports, which we could argue about that, but they did it. It was effective. It worked. Here we are. I've got a USBC port on my iPhone. That's cool. And they're going to do the same thing with removable batteries on smartphones. They're going to mandate removable batteries again. If you're going to pick a place to draw a line, I think consumables are a pretty good place to draw a line. They're not saying you can upgrade the RAM in your smartphone. They're just saying the smartphone can't stop working when the, you know, the most fragile, chemically wearing component

inside it fails, which seems like a good initial line to draw. Was it intentional to not think about design? Because I was thinking about, Sean, as you were talking, the difference between this and the USBC thing, where they are like, that is a proactive decision. They're like, this is what your thing is going to do. And the EU is pushing on a lot of that, right? Even some of the stuff they're doing with messaging apps, like mandating that they be interoperable. Like, They are telling people what their products will do and how they will work. And so far in the U.S., the right to repair stuff, has not done that. Like, it just seems like it's truly poking a bear if you start to tell these companies what they have to do.

And it's a minor miracle the EU got as far as it did. Yeah, well, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting that we got so much fight against the right repair laws as they are, because they're really pretty darn minor. I mean, you saw what Apple had to do to comply. Like, it's not a big tweak. It's just a subtle tweak. Now, they've fought against us for over 10 years, just on a subtle tweak.

So we decided to focus on what was achievable. We talk about in politics, you know, but the Overton window, which is the window of what politicians can, like, plausibly do. Politician can't go out and, you know, do something totally crazy that society would never put up with. Debatable. We elect them, and then they do the things that are kind of within the scope of what is reasonable.

Right. So we picked something that was within the scope of something that was pretty reasonable. It was really important to us to have bipolar. bipartisan legislation. It passed almost unanimously in California and, you know, overwhelmingly in New York and Minnesota and other places. So we've been focused on bipartisan legislation that can be consensus-based, which means that there will be laws that will stand the test of time. They won't be easy to overturn. Yeah, I remember you and I talked a bunch of years ago about kind of the, you were in the like, we haven't yet won one, but we're about to win one phase of the right to

repair fight. There had been a bunch of almost, a bunch of near misses. And you're like, it is only a matter of time until we tip over this line. And your thought was, we really just need one or two. We don't have to get all 50 states and the federal government to pass a right to repair bill. We need a couple of significant ones to make it so hard for companies to make a million different versions of their gadgets that they're all just going to play ball. And it's going to work. Absolutely. With the California law, we're up to 20 percent of the U.S. population has passed a right to repair line.

I've heard for many years, you know, as California goes, so goes the nation. But then on the other side of this call, you're telling me that an Apple laptop is handled differently for repairs in California as it is in New York. Well, because that is a business practice and that they were able to kind of drive a wedge there. I'm hopeful that when it comes to things like you have to make the repair manual online to sell your product in California. Are they going to like GOIP locate people and only make the repair manuals available in California? No, they're doing it nationwide. And I think you'll continue to see that. And I would assume part of it is like, honestly, I would not put it out of the realm of possibility that Apple would geo-IP fence the accent.

Like, I really wouldn't. But the good news of it is that stuff now exists in the world for regular. Like, you don't have to hack Apple's servers to get that stuff. It just, once it's out there, it's going to be out there. Right. And as soon as the version of that manual and the existence of those parts is seen by some portion of the broader internet, it becomes too big to hide in a way that I think works for the movement that you're, talking about, right? Yeah, I mean, getting this information out there, having Samsung say, this is how you open the phone. I mean, it also, by the way, helps guide regulators because when

I go to them and say, hey, it's hard to open the iPad, they're like, okay, sure, Kyle. But then when we've got Apple service manual to say, which they haven't posted for the iPad yet, by the way, but to show like, hey, the battery is glued in and this is the process and it's this crazy hard, that makes it much easier for regulators for academics. One of the big challenges, I think, in regulation and honestly, product reviews across electronics is who's out there taking these things apart? Like, when's the last time you guys took something apart while you were reviewing it? And it's not a criticism. It doesn't happen very often.

It's expensive. You have to get a lot of products. I mean, we spent over $10,000 on iPhone 15s on launch day just to get enough of them so we could pull them apart and give you guys some kind of analysis of like, hey, if you swap the screens, the selfie camera stops working. No one would have known that if we hadn't tested it. I'm going to plug here and say, I totally did. take apart the steam deck and the rug ally for my reviews of those products. But yes, it doesn't happen all the time. No, and we super appreciate it. And Sean, you go more in depth than just about anybody else in the technosphere, which is really appreciated. We need to see more of that.

Sean, can you talk about the steam deck? Actually, because I think in the realm of this sort of next phase of more repairable gadgets, I think Valve with the steam deck is kind of out ahead of a lot of other companies in the way that it's thinking about how this stuff should work. Is that true? Absolutely. I flew to Valve's headquarters two years ago in August, and I asked them, hey, are the parts for this going to be replaceable? And like the very first hands-on that Presid had with this thing, this battery in here, it's a small battery. You only get like your two hours of battery life, maybe. This is going to wear out. It's going to go lower and lower battery.

You're going to let me replace that, right? And they were like, we have a plan to let you repair this device. We will send you more details. when they are ready, which we have learned to be dubious of over the years. Yes, the rug alley. We're still waiting to find out how you repair that one. And then it turned out that you were their partner. I fix it was their partner for the Steam Deck parts, and you could buy, I think, literally

every part of this. Yeah, and it takes a long time to set these programs up. So while they were showing you off, like we were hammering out the details, logistics, of how we get parts out there. But it's been really important. It's been really successful. It really shows that repair takes an ecosystem. It takes a product that can be the,

repaired, which maybe is the challenge with some of the foldables right now, is they're a little hard to fix. But then it also takes the parts and tools and the information. You have to have that whole ecosystem come together. Otherwise, people, you know, when it breaks, they sort of do the math in their head and they decided by a new one. Yeah. Kyle, can you explain a little more about how a partnership like that comes together? Because I suspect whether it's with you or with other repair manufacturers around the country, like a lot of people who make electronics are going to be out there trying to figure out how to strike partnerships like this. So when Valve comes to you and they're like, we want to work with you on some Steam Deck stuff.

What happens? Yeah, so there's a spectrum. The simplest thing is they come to us and say, hey, we want to fix the thing. We say, cool. Set us up with your supply chain. Introduce us to your suppliers. We'll buy from them. We'll write the repair manuals.

We'll build the store for you. We just kind of take care of everything, which is what we've been doing historically. You know, like we were the largest resource for how to fix Apple products. We have been for 20 years. We don't work with Apple at all. But aside from that, you know, we build the supply chain and we come up with the tool. and we build repair kits, so you get a screen and it comes with the tools that you need to do that repair. And that's kind of our happy spot is just let us do everything.

But some companies already have the information. Or like we work with teenage engineering. They've got some really cool audio products. And they actually, they wanted to write the repair procedures. So they write the repair guides. They put them on, I fix it, and then they send us the parts. And we're just, at that point, we're just an e-commerce company for them. And that's perfectly fine, too.

So we're pretty flexible. We'll work with companies however they want. We'll kind of fill them whatever gaps they need. but we're perfectly capable of doing everything from soup to nuts. How do you properly size the repair supply chain pipeline for users who want to buy parts through I-Fixit? I mean, I know that you haven't always been able to keep all the parts in stock that I would possibly want for a steam deck or a pixel. I think last time I checked you had like two iPhone mini screens in stock if I wanted to replace one of those. Like, how do you figure that out?

It's hard. And we don't know how many of the gizmos are going to sell, how many are going to break. It's really challenging, right? And so you do the best that you can, and then you adapt it over time and the tighter knit the supply chain is the better. Also, you know, planning out. So, all right, we're going to stop production of this device and we're going to, you know, make the next version of it. But we have to, at that point, do what's called a last time buy. You have to buy all the parts that you're going to need for the next five or ten years for the device.

So you're just kind of guessing at that point. So we do the best we can, and when we get it wrong, our community lets us know. That's fair. Yeah, Sean was lamenting that the Steam Deck stuff has been sort of intermittently hard to get over time. I mean, we have tools. So you sign up on the email list and we'll mail you the moment that the part comes back in. But yeah, that doesn't help when your thing is broken and I love the part. So what's your sense of kind of what happens most immediately here?

It feels like long run, we might start to see a change in the way gadgets are made and work. Like your AirPods might come from a fundamentally different manufacturing process, but that's going to take a while because this stuff always takes a while. Right. Maybe more immediately, like the re-rise of the local repair shop, which seems to be very clearly kind of a goal of this. Like, what do you look for as sort of the first metric of success that like this is working? This law is having its intended effect here. Well, the first and the most easiest thing is to get companies to publish all their service of So that should happen. New York law goes into effect January 1. So at that point, January 2, you should be looking at

companies and if they're not posting their service information, they're out of compliance, right? And having that just that basic level of insight into how are these things put together then starts to help. Then we hope to layer on parts availability. And then if the pricing and, you know, kind of consumer awareness follows, like right now people don't fix televisions. You have a TV that breaks. Just get a new one. There's no reason. These things are not glued together like AirPods. They're pretty easy to fix. If you have a power supply, go out in the TV, it's crazy to buy a new one. But we have to kind of retrain society that way. Yeah. Sean is going to be, like, deep in manual deep dive heaven for like the first six months of 2024.

It's going to be, he's like 100 million pages of documentation and in Sean's house. It's going to be amazing. I have to ask you about parts pairing. Back when I could report on Apple, I have an ethical conflict now, so don't report on Apple. But back when I did, I received those two suitcases full of Pelican suitcases full of Apple. repair tools and I stuck that battery in my iPhone and then it told me that my battery was not genuine until I went through this procedure to make it genuine. And I know that companies like I fix that they're worried that these manufacturers may decide to require that some part be paired

with some other part either digitally requiring some kind of special authentication that might be difficult to get or physically where they will only sell you a module that has all these different things on it. Can you really repair a TV? if they say you need to buy the TV mainboard, which has all the components on it for the entire TV, and you're basically buying a whole new TV. Do we want them to, you know, buy an entire compute board for a phone? Or can you buy the individual pieces? Yeah, so the question here is one around control.

Can a manufacturer dictate where and when devices are repaired? And so if you have a chip in the part and a chip in the main board, so let's take the display on the iPhone, for example, there's a chip in the display with a serial number. At the factory, they marry or they pair the serial number in your display, the serial number on your phone. We took two brand-new iPhone 15 Pro Max units. We swapped the screens between them, and you lose a bunch of functionality. You lose true tone. You lose the front-facing camera, which seems like an important feature of a phone.

You lose a lot of these features, and you also start to get a lot of warnings. It's pretty easy to build those kind of locks in. So that's why we're kind of raising the red flag and saying this is a moment in technology where we need to pause, we need to evaluate. What road do we want to go down? Do we want to go down the road where parts are not interchangeable? Right? I mean, for the entire history of the electronics industry so far, you have two PCs, you'll stop the hard drives between them, you can do that. Now we're saying, well, you can't even swap screens between two phones. The entire electronics recycling ecosystem, they don't make money off the commodity. They don't make money off the gold and the silver in

these things. They make money because 20% of the devices that they get can be fixed and resold, and that subsidizes the rest of the recycling. So when you, insert this poison pill where you say, well, no, actually, you have two broken phones. You can't combine them and make one that works. That's really going to sabotage the economics of the electronics recycling and refurbishment industry. So we need to do something about that. None of the right to repair laws that have passed so far addressed this. The California law had some language in it that would have done that and a compromise to get Apple to support the legislation that was removed. So stay tuned for next year, I think. I think we're going to need to do this. We

We cannot stop with rights to repair legislation. We need to keep going. And that's the conversation we're having with all the states about next year's laws. What does keep going look like? I think it's very easy to see rights to repair as kind of a binary thing. Either you're allowed to do it or you're not. But what you're presenting is a much sort of longer series of steps? Like, what is the step after this?

Yeah, so we need to get to a point where repair is practiced regularly on the ground, where the TV is not only is fixable, you can get parts, but the people are and the repair sharp start to come back. And so we can't really stop working on this. We have momentum behind this, but we can't stop until we actually see the solutions start having an effect on the material world. Someone very wise once told me, the earth doesn't care about anything that we say. It only cares about when you actually take a shovel and you stick it in the ground and you start doing things. So we need to get retro-prefer from this discussion, this intellectual discussion, to like practically something that impacts how long things last. Are there key states that support

parts pairing and other important missing elements from the current right to repair laws, where you think you've got the momentum to make it happen there? Yeah, so right to repair bills were introduced in 30 states this year. So I'm anticipating, and Minnesota is still considering it, the hope would be to make substantial progress in many of those. It's not just core electronics. We need to solve this for e-bikes. We need to solve this for appliances, for power equipment.

There's a broad spectrum of other products that need to be covered. So I would expect, I mean, like Washington is. a state where the bill got really close. Microsoft actually endorsed Washington's right to repair bill and then Apple killed it. So I think you're going to see states where they got really close in Oregon. They were just short one vote. I think there's many states that you're going to, you're going to see move quickly at the beginning of next year. The legislative season, by the way, you know, you think about in the tech world, we have CES. Right after CES, that's when all the legislators get to work. And there's like a two, three month kind of frenzy of activity where between

February, March, April, you're going to see a lot of action. So your California celebratory period was very short. Very short. I mean, I can tell you, the coalition is very busy, very engaged. There's an active coalition in each state. And you can go, if you want, check out your state, you can go to Oregon.repair.org and get involved. There's wonderful, I mean, this really is a grassroots movement where, like, I couldn't even tell you where it's going to happen next. What's going to happen in Pennsylvania?

I don't know. There's a great community there that might push it forward. At the risk of basically asking you to jinx yourself, does this feel unstoppable at this point? Like, have we tipped into this is going to win? It's just a matter of time. We're making very good price. I mean, we've moved beyond the sky will fall of this passes stage. There was so long, I mean, Apple was wandering around Sacramento telling legislators, hey, if people can open their iPhone, they'll puncture the battery and set it on fire. And they told legislators in Nebraska that if they passed Rachel, it would turn Nebraska into a mecca for hackers. And I think those sort of like sky will fall kind of claims have clearly been proven wrong.

It's the same fight we're having about the App Store. If you're allowed to do anything, you will give all of your money to a stranger and also burn your house down. Right. These are the rules. Which, by the way, the App Store has banned apps that report battery status. So Apple's the only one that can tell you how many cycles are on your battery. Interesting. So, okay, so we're past that phase.

Are there other sort of obvious roadblocks you're seeing that you still have to get past? So parts pairing is a large one. And then I think you have to look at implementation time frame. Going back to 2021, is that far enough back? Some challenges around internet access, should you be able to fix things if you don't have access to the internet? If you look at who uses I fix it, we are per capita much more heavily used in rural areas than urban areas, right? Farther from access to retail locations, the farther north in Canada you go, the more people rely on I fix it. And so I think making sure that repair is robust and repeatable and that the software diagnostic tools are available to everyone is really important.

It impacts far more products than you would think. You think about like an outboard engine on a boat. Traditionally, you've been able to fix that without software. Now it's all software controlled. You talk to fishermen and they're like, yeah, I can't fix my engine anymore. Five years ago, I could, but I can't fix the one now because I don't have the software. And that's increasingly the case across everything of the software and the technology. It's making these products better in some ways, but they're not thought.

following up with access to the diagnostic tooling that we need. Have you seen any of this? I mean, when we're talking about phones, I mean, it's very hard. In the United States, there's Apple and there's Samsung, are predominantly the market share of all the phones. Most people buy from that. But when it comes to like outboard motor for your boat, do you see any kind of pushback in that realm where consumers, the people buying those things, say, we're going to buy lower tech products instead of higher tech products so that we have the ability to repair them on their own.

Are there manufacturers, you know, who are intentionally developing more repairable, lower-tech devices for those realms? You can see this in the farm equipment industry. If you take a tractor from 1995, its value is continuing to go up. It's not going down. The kind of pre-computer age of farm equipment is in high demand, and you can see the economics playing out very clearly. Now, I think it's interesting that you haven't seen manufacturers take advantage of it.

So I haven't seen a manufacturer like Cabota go out there and say, well, we're going to make a lower-tech tractor that's easier to work on and beat John Deere at their own game. It seems like everyone is still in the cult of technology, the cult of the new, which is really frustrating. Because if one of them would break out, I mean, you see the success that framework is having, I think there's a real opportunity for some of these companies to really differentiate themselves from the galilee. I think that's right. And it also, people root for framework in a really interesting way. Like, there is this sense that companies like Framework are on this morally right side of history. And I hear people in tech who would never buy a Framework laptop and don't even care about laptops who are like, boy, I hope that company succeeds. Because it's like their sense is everything is better if we prove that that can work. It's proposing a different trajectory than what seemed as inevitable.

What is the single part of a gadget that you are most excited for everybody to make repairable? If everybody just opens up one thing, is it screens? Is it batteries? It's batteries. 100% is batteries across everything. A battery is a consumable. Having a battery glued into a device is like buying a car with tires that are welded on. It's insanity.

Go to Home Depot and they're like, hey, get the new smoke detector with a 10-year battery that you never have to change. You just throw the smoke detector away after 10 years. The smoke detector has a radioactive isotope at the center of this thing. We don't want to be throwing these away, right? Like, why in the world will we want everything in the world to have this chemical pouch inside it that wears out after three years? It's absolute insanity. We have to move away from glute in integrated batteries and everything. Until, I mean, if we get to a point where we have some magical new battery technology that lasts for 50 years, okay, cool.

We can glue batteries at that point, but we're not there yet. Yeah, I like thinking of batteries as a consumable and an otherwise very long-lasting thing is actually, I think, a really useful frame for how we talk about technology. Yeah, let's take your refrigerator that was going to last for 30 years and make it last for two and see how happy you are. That's the world. It just drives me insane. And I've been watching the trend.

And by the way, there are underpinning reasons. Like, there are UL standards that have to change. It's not completely the manufacturer's fault. We're in kind of a system that has accidentally been designed that really pushes us in the direction of proprietary back. battery packs. Even if you do make an interchangeable battery, like, what standard is there for interchangeable lithium pouch cells, right? There isn't one. What size? If I'm like, I'm a good cell phone manufacturer, I'm going to use the standard battery size. What is that?

And that's a problem that needs to be addressed at an industry level to then enable manufacturers to innovate around interchangeable interoperable batteries. I like it. All right, we should let you go. Sean, Kyle, thank you both so much. And Kyle, you know, congratulations on your gigantic victory and your impending billionaire status as the CEO of I-fixing. This is a win, I think, for all consumers, everyone who's been adjudging for this for so long. I mean, we owe so much to Reddit and all of the enthusiastic folks who've written and called their representatives over the years, let's not take off the gas now. We've got them on the ropes, but we need to keep pushing this until we really solidify and build a solid foundation

that the next wave of technology is built on. Love it. Awesome. Thank you both. Appreciate you doing this. Thanks. All right, we've got to take one more break, and then we're going to get to the Vergecast hotline. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Welcome back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline, as you do every week. For this one, Nathan Edwards is here. Hi, Nathan. Hello.

Welcome to the Vergecast. First time. This is very exciting. Thank you. Long-time listener, first time participant. As a reminder, before we get into it, the hotline number is 866 Verge-11. call and ask us all your questions.

You can also email Vergecast at the verge.com, if you'd rather not call. We've gotten really good questions the last several weeks. So thank you to everyone who's been calling and emailing. This one, we got a bunch of, like, charging questions this week. I guess it's like new gadget time, so everybody has lots of charging questions. But this one was my favorite. And the reason we have brought you in, Nathan, is because this is right up your alley.

Let's just play the question. First, it comes from Kyle. Hi, this is Kyle from Nova Scotia, Canada. I was wondering if there have been any updates on the Chi-2 wireless charging standard, the MagSafe sort of looking magnet thing from a while back. You guys wrote about how the new iPhone is kind of supporting it, but it didn't appear on the pixel 8, so that's it for major flagship. For now, when we see an Android with Chi-2?

I want my hacking magnet accessories and car chargers. I've been listening for ages. Love the show. Thanks. Okay, I love this question because it is so confused and so vague about what Chi-2 is and when it's coming, which is the exact correct response, as far as I can tell to what it's going on with Chi-2. So, Nathan, just start quickly at the very beginning. Catch me up, what is Chi-2, and why do we care? Okay, so Chi-2 is the sequel to Chi, which is the wireless charging standard that is in pretty

much every phone. Almost everything that charges wirelessly right now, except for smart watches is Chi. Regular Chi, no magnets, including the iPhone. The iPhone also has MagSafe, which has a ring of magnets to make sure that. that the charger and the charging coil aligns with the receiver coil. Wireless charging is very finicky. If you're off by a couple millimeters, it takes more power, it's less efficient, you're not going to get a good lock.

The thing the iPhone's always really good at is like you get sort of close and then it just like sort of snaps in a position. That's MagSafe. Everything else is Chi. Yes. Okay. MagSafe phones will work with Chi. And in fact, there's a lot of magnetic Chi accessories that are not MagSafe certified,

but they've got the Chi charger and they've got the ring of magnets and they'll stick to the back of a magsafe phone and charge it just fine. Okay. That's Chi 1. Doesn't include the magnets. Chi 2 is basically generic magsafe. It's over-the-counter magsafe. Okay. Basically, it is wireless charger with a ring of magnets around it. Apple contributed a bunch to the new standard. It's run by the wireless power consortium, which is the same group that administers the Chi standard. And basically, it's got a ring of magnets. So it should be intercompatible with magsafe to some degree in the sense that Apple doesn't have to do anything. As far as I know, they don't have to do anything to make Che2 work hardware-wise because the magnets, although they're not exactly the same

configuration, apparently, they're just fine. Okay. So it's something that's already on Apple. It's not officially on the new iPhones because it's not certified yet. This is weird, right? So, like, I remember when the iPhone 15 came out a few weeks ago, Chee-2 came up. It was like- Yes, briefly. Yeah, sort of mentioned in passing. And we tried to figure out, like, is this the first official Che2 phone. And the answer is like, kind of? It probably will be the first official Chitu phone. Okay. So it said the spec said future Chitu support. And I reached out to the wireless power consortium and I said, hey, what's up with Chitu? Like, is the standard complete? Is it certified? Do we have devices ready to go? Because we've had Chitu chargers already

have been announced. Okay. And they told me at the time, which was like mid-September when the iPhones launched. They said they hadn't certified any Chitu devices yet because they were waiting for the test equipment. I see. To be able to certify them, they need to be able to test them and so forth. That stuff wasn't set up yet. And I pinged him again earlier this week and he basically told me hold tight. Okay. So I am expecting that there will be Chitu chargers and probably Chitu enabled on the iPhones this month, next month maybe. As for the actual question, which is when will there be Android phones with Chi 2? I don't know. Nobody knows. The assumption would be that next year would be the answer to that, right? There's no good reason not to have it everywhere, right? This is

the new standard. Everyone has been supporting Chi for a while. It feels like, is there an obvious reason we wouldn't see a flood of Android phones start to support this over the next year or so? I would say development pipelines. Okay. Like, I don't know. T2 was officially announced, mentioned at the beginning of 2023. If people have had time to put the magnets into the design and manufacturing and stuff, I would say probably spring is the earliest we'd see something. And it also, like, I agree, there's no reason not to put it in there because there's a bunch of magnetic chargers out there already. The generic magnetic chi-chargers you have now, they will charge an Android phone actually faster than they'll charge an iPhone.

What? Yes, they will. This is why we get questions about charging, because charging doesn't make any sense. It doesn't. It's silly. So if you have an official MagSafe certified charger, it's got a little chip in it that tells the iPhone that it's real, and the iPhone will charge at 15 watts, anything else has just a regular cheat charger and the iPhone will charge at 7.5 watts. And that's an Apple thing. Because if you take an Android phone and just sort of hold it to the charger or use one of the third-party cases that gives you a little ring of magnets in the right spot, it can get 10 or 15. Whatever it normally supports with wireless charging, It can support through that. So you'll get companies that'll be like, hey, this is a 15 watt MagSafe charger. It's a 15 watt charger and it's MagSafe compatible, but it will certainly not, unless it's certified by Apple, it actually won't do that on an iPhone.

It's like 15 watts and mags and ore. Right, but not simultaneously. No, but Che2, here we come circling back around, the big advantage of Chee 2 is it will offer magnetic wireless charging at 15 watts on any phone that supports it without having to pay extra money for the Apple certification. Okay. Including allegedly iPhones. And the reason this is very exciting, it seems to me, is that if Chee 2 is what it is promised,

it solves both of the biggest problems of wireless charging all at once, which is the, like, finicky, I put it down a millimeter off and so it didn't charge problem, which is the single most annoying thing about wireless charging, and the fact that wireless charging is much slower. So if I'm getting reliable connection to the charger and 15 watts, suddenly, I personally can go from like mostly not telling people to buy wireless chargers for their phones because they're kind of more annoying than they're worth in a lot of cases to this actually becomes like a tenable system, right? Yes. I will say that 15 watts is still slower than wired charging in most cases. And both MagSafe and any other wireless charger, there's, you know, it'll charge at the max rate when the phone is really low. and it'll drop it down as the phone gets closer to a full charge to save the battery a little bit. I don't know what's going on with the iPhone 14 Pro because my battery level is at 88% health after one year. Oof, that's not great.

But in general, I don't know what's going on there. But in general, they will only charge, they only hit the peak wireless charging at, like, if they're like under 30% or under 50%, that they'll taper off. Got it. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, I think my guess would be, and this is purely conjecture based on nothing, that like maybe next summer is about the time we'll start to see real Chi devices.

Because the things somebody told me a while ago that has held fairly true. Yeah, sorry, Chi-2. Yeah. The thing somebody told me that has held pretty true is the pipeline from any announcement to devices is 18 months. So it's like from new standard exists to it starts to be lots of places, including like from reputable companies whose products you will actually buy that won't catch fire and come from Amazon with sketchy names is 18 months. And it's not always that it's sometimes a little longer, sometimes a little shorter, but that's a pretty good, like, rule of thumb, which would mean if Chitu was this January, like, summer 2024 is when we might start to see a real run of, like, devices from big name manufacturers with some of this stuff. And the hope would be that they've been working for this longer than we know, and it could be sooner. But I'm not necessarily holding my breath on that stuff.

Yeah, I would say probably summer is the soonest. I would be curious to know who is going to make the first move. Because if, depending on which manufacturer it is, do you want to be the company that basically put MagSafe in your phones? Like admitting Apple was right about something? That's a really good point. On the other hand, now that it's generic and it's not MagSafe, maybe they're all going to do it. Just like, yes, this was a great idea. We told you you should have given it to us or something.

Yeah, true. I don't know. Is it going to be Samsung? Is it going to be nothing? Yeah. It's an interesting question. I think my guess would be if I'm Samsung, ever since the notes, Nothing. Anything to do with batteries and charging and craziness, I'm going to be just a little slow on.

Just going to take my sweet time on all things, batteries and charging. So like maybe, yeah, maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's Google. Maybe Apple just in January is like, it's Chee too now. Don't worry about it. And that's where we are. But yeah, I think it's coming, but it's going to keep being confusing for a while, unfortunately. I mean, and the first phones are going to be Apple or going to be the iPhones that are already here because they don't have to do anything hardware-wise. Fair enough. All right. Well, Kyle, I hope that helps. Nathan, thank you. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody on the show, and thank you for listening. There's a lot more, as always, from everything we talked about at theverse.com.

These full review of the smart glasses is coming later this week. We have a bunch of really good rate to repair coverage, and we'll put some links to all that in the show notes, but also readtheverge.com. There's tons of news. Netflix is doing weird stuff. YouTube is doing weird stuff. It's just wild times in the tech news world. fall. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or gadgets you want to fix or home improvement ideas for me, you can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or keep calling the hotline. 866, verge 1-1. We've gotten so many fun ones the last few weeks. I really appreciate it. I think we're going to have to do a full hotline episode pretty soon. So keep all your questions coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. Eli, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about the new Apple

pencil, Google's homepage redesign tests, Netflix's gaming plans, and all the rest of this week's news. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.