The Vergecast - The TVs, monitors, and laptops at CES 2024

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz are discuss all the things with screens announced at CES 2024. Further reading: I’ve looked through LG’s new transparent OLED TV and seen something special Samsung’s got its own transparent display. Samsung’s new OLED TV could make annoying glare a thing of the past  Samsung finally puts the TV at the heart of its smart home The Frame has become such a hit that Samsung is making a speaker version   Intel’s new 14th Gen mobile processors are here for 2024’s gaming laptops   Lenovo’s latest 2-in-1 crams Windows and Android into one device  Razer gaming laptops at CES 2024: Blade spec bumps and display upgrades    Alienware’s M16 R2 trims the behind for less power and more portability    MSI Claw hands-on: the Steam Deck rival with Intel inside   MSI’s Claw is an Intel-powered Windows competitor to Valve’s Steam Deck What if your Samsung flip phone could flip further? Apple Vision Pro launches February 2nd   Apple Vision Pro prescription lenses will cost $149 extra Xreal’s new AR glasses are aimed at the Apple Vision Pro Asus targets Apple’s Vision Pro (with M2) with the AirVision M1 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

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello, and welcome to Vurchast, the flagship podcast of mobility solutions here at CS 2024. That's if you spend enough time at CES, you just start to talk like that.

Yeah. You just can't help it. You start saying the word innovative. Yeah. Like as all parts of speech and just lose all. rack of what's actually words. You just look around. There's companies here.

No one's ever heard of. Enable by AI. Enabled by AI to solutionize the future of innovation. Yeah, with HK, with 8K and 5G. It's all happening all once. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. I'm here at CS. We're here in a Kia connected home, which means we're above a number of Kia's downstairs,

which I'm told are powering the home. Which is kind of cool. We also have a view that I would call like Regal above CES. Oh, yeah. We're sort of gazing upon. on our kingdom. I feel very powerful. We're slightly above the Google booth right next door.

That's right. It feels right. What's up, Android? David Pierce is here. Hi. Alex Franz is here. Hi. There's a whole verge team here at CS.

Huge number of people. We've been out on the show floor. It's the day after all the press conferences. There's an awful lot of news here at CS. Yeah. And David, you have some sort of gambit to organize our two CES shows. I do. So we have to do two shows this week at CES.

And the thing about. CES is, it's just a grab bag of things. Yeah. And so we broke it into two things. Today we're going to talk about things that are mostly screens. I believe you called them screen gadgets. Yeah. And then on Thursday, we're going to talk about all the things that aren't screens.

Yeah. Do these things blur together? Yes. All the time. Is the Venn diagram of them mostly nonsensical and made up in my head? Yes. But this is what we're going to do. So today is the screens day.

Yeah. There's like a version of this where we were like, okay. It's kind of a car show. It's kind of a TV show. Let's talk about those things. But it's just like we're going to do screens and no screens. That's a better organizing principle than CS has for itself. Which this year is just a mishmash of ideas.

Like AI? Do you want AI to do it? At one point, VW announced that you could just talk to chat GPT in the car. Sure. Which seems like, I don't know if you guys are aware of this chat. GFT often makes things up. So just being confidently lied to while you drive is. is now a feature of the new VW.

There's so much of that this year where somebody is just like, well, we made a product last year. And now that product, but also Chad GPT. And nothing else. Is that new? Yeah. Is that what you want? Like, telly, the free TV we talked a bunch about on the show, their new thing is you can talk to chat GBT to get like recommendations for stuff to watch, which I think is hilarious because to your point, chat GBT is loves to like make up movies that don't exist. So you can just like, you can just like.

invent movies out of Hulkcloth and then not watch them on your free television. Well, the show is advertising to you. We should actually start with TVs. So if you don't know, CS is a consumer electronic show. We're here in Las Vegas. It is the biggest industry trade show. There is. That does not mean the entire industry is here in an odd way.

Apple, for example, is not here, but Apple loves to upstage CS. So they announced the Vision Pro early this week. We'll get to that later in the show. Microsoft isn't here. They all have employees here and people here wandering around. But in terms of announcements, CS waxes and wanes. Yeah, that's right. Google is here, but Google didn't make a lot of announcements, but everything runs Android.

So technically millions of Android products were announced here at CS. So it's a real grab bag of things. The good thing about it is that everyone is here. Everyone's talking. If you're a tech reporter, this is fish in a barrel. Yeah. You're just in Las Vegas, and everyone is holding a drink and ready to tell you a story about something. And in fact, ready to tell you how much they think the Vision Pro costs to build, which has been the best gossip of the week for me.

Just people just yelling numbers. So making up numbers out of both. But the history of CS is that this is a show where TVs are announced. Yeah. Like in a long history of CS, the one constant that has held the show together and really given it its sort of center of gravity is the TV industry shows up here. They show you new TVs. The buyers from retailers like Best Buy and Amazon and I don't know, Circuit City. Circuit City still exists.

They show up. RCA has a big booth here. I told him he's coming back. Liam is telling me Circuit City no longer exists. Rip Circuit City. But anyway, the buyers from those big retailers show up. They debate about what will be the hot trends in TVs to sell this year. They place their orders and then later in the year the TV show up on the retailer shelves.

That's been the pattern. Still the pattern here at CS. Although, interestingly, Sony has broken this pattern now two years in a row. Yeah. No TVs at CS. And the big Sony booth at the end of the hall has no TVs in it. Wow. Like there are TVs to show you other Sony stuff, but there's not even like a whisper of like Sony's TV models.

Right. It's like PlayStation stuff, some camera stuff, half a car, then the rest of the car that Sony's building with Honda, which we'll talk about on Thursday. They're just out of the game. Like Sony wants the high, high end of the TV market, and then the rest of it is kind of up for grabs. Yeah. So we should start with the other announcements. But that, to me, is just the fascinating turn of the show as I think about the tech industry. this has been the place where TV is going to announce and Sony's opting out.

Samsung and LG, which obviously dominate the TV market. They are doing stuff, but they're, I don't know, they're kind of like, what if the TV was clear? It's like they're in that zone with it. And then the cheaper brands, the TCLs, the high senses, I want to talk a lot about mini LED. They're coming up fast. Yeah, it feels like for the big companies, they've gotten kind of less and less practical over time with what they show off. These are just sort of like tech demos. And some of them are very cool tech demos.

Well, I think they plateaued, right? Like the technology is plateaued. Well, so I don't think that's true, but I think people don't care anymore. That's very true. The technology keeps getting better. But my ability to experience said technology has, like, long since plateaued. So the only thing to do is, like, get real weird with it. Yeah.

And I think part of what we're going to talk about in a little while is, like, monitors, which are now on this run of, like, getting better to the point where you're not going to start to notice the difference anymore. But there was just, like, more. do with computer monitors, whereas if you want to kick-ass TV that is too high-res for you to know the difference anyway, you've had that for a while. Oh, my friend, I'm ready to talk about this. All right, so we should have got some news because I think there's, this year at CS, I think

that has been true for a minute. It's about to stop being true again in a really exciting way. So the news, Samsung LG, LG has a new transparent OLED TV. It's the T. D-O-led T-L-T. T-V-T. That's what they're calling. on it. It's clear.

It has like a black thing that you can motorize, pull down to make it not clear. But then you can make it clear again. Chris Welch looked through it. He was blown away. You can read that piece. I went and looked at it on the show floor. It's just out. Did you notice a crucial thing about it?

No. So one of them, they had, they were playing like wheel of time on it. Yeah. And they had motion smoothing on. Ooh. On their like invisible, well, transparent TV that everybody should care about motion smoothing. That was just like...

Somewhere Tom Cruise is furious. I didn't... I didn't actually see content. I just saw like CS demo reels. Yeah. It was like water falling, you know, flowers opening. They were beautiful. Yeah.

Such smooth motion. And then you saw real content here. Yeah, there was like, there was one TV like in a corner and it was playing just some of wheel of time being like, isn't Amazon Prime great? And I was like, hmm, is it? And also motion smoothing. Yikes. I turned into Tom Cruise for a moment.

I almost kicked the TV. Does the transparent TV have film maker mode? Because I'd like to enable it, please. I was like, can I have a remote real quick? I just need to fix something for you. Show up at CS with an LG remote. So that's LG's big announcement. Samsung has its own riff on a transparent display.

They're very excited about all that. Samsung has, Samsung famously, is now doing QD OLEDs, quantum dot OLEDs. That's the panel Sony's using and it's high-end OLEDs. They're doing anti-glare on that. Here's my argument to you about all these TVs. O-led is hitting a weird, interesting peak. So the sort of base technology of O-L-L-L-L-LAD is, like, where it's at. Samsung displays between quantum dots in front of OLED pixels to make them brighter.

LG is doing the micro-lens array, which is really cool. They're just, like, trying to make the OLED brighter. Right. But the fundamental technology is, like, hit its point. And it's gotten about 77 inches, and that's kind of how big they can get them. LG can get to, like, 83. But do you need bigger? So here's what, here's what's happening.

And those are expensive. Like a big OLED TV is like pretty expensive. Like a Sony A80 is like a pretty expensive TV. That's four grand, right? And that's about as big as an all I go. Like 83 is right. That's basically it. If you walk on the show floor, you see mini LED TVs are everywhere.

Yeah. TCL is all in on them. High Sense is all in them. High Sense is picking up from Samsung. They know that people think like OLED is good. So High Sense is like ours are U-leds. Yeah. Yeah, just the longest time

Sony or Samsung was like Q-leds. It's like, you think people are so stupid. Truly, who think people are so dumb? They'll do it. So if you're not caught up on this, the thing that is happening with backlights on LCD TVs, an LCD TV can't make light by itself. You can make the color.

So you need to put a backlight behind it. Those backlights have basically gotten more and more advanced over the years. They started out with literally fluorescent lights on the side of the TV. They didn't look great. Like old old LCDs literally fluorescent lights on the side of the side of the panels. Then you got into like LEDs behind the panels.

That's where you get LED TVs. That's what I was talking about. Then you started adding local dimming. You started turning those LEDs on and off in zones. Then there was a hilarious spec race over how many zones of local dimming you can have. That was the best. Which is thousands of zones. Right.

And then you, what's the next thing? You make the LEDs themselves smaller. You pack more on. You get more zones. You're now up to like 6,000 zones. 60,000 zones is like one of the claims. I don't know if that's true or not. It's too many zones.

Just looking at this thing, I was like, I don't know, the same company put a you in front of the LED to confuse people, like whatever you want, man. So this thing, if you look at these TVs,

that backlots are really bright, they have really, really, really well-controlled local dimming and they look amazing. They do. And they're cheap as hell to make because they're just still LCD TVs. And the core LCD technology

is all the way at the bottom and the cost curve. Like all over the bottom. Because we're doing this for a long time. It's been iterating on is the backlight. So now the backlight is starting to come down the cost curve. There's mini LED, and this is like year three or four that we even talking mini LED. This is the year that it's down the cost curve.

And the thing that these manufacturers are doing is they're not saying we've made a better, cheaper 65-inch TV. They're saying, what if you bought a 98-inch TV? Oh, that's too much. And TCL has a giant display that's like, we are the number one provider of 98-inch TVs in the country. And this is our fastest growing, like, model. There's this amazing graph in the TCL booth that they have printed up next to one of their TVs that is, like, percentage growth of various sizes. And all the other ones are, you know, like steady growth from 60 to 70, steady growth, steady growth. And then the highest one is like 398% growth.

And it's like, first of all, that means you sold 16 TVs and now you sold 40 TVs. So, like, cool. Great job. Get out of here, you math magician. But I do think, like, we've talked about this before, and, like, you in particular are kind of an OLED purist. Yeah. Like, you came very close to buying a mini-lady Sony, and I was like, couldn't do it. But I think all these companies are correctly betting that most people are less obnoxious than you about TVs, and thus will buy something that is 95% as good as OLED for a literal fraction of the price.

And brighter. Right. And this is the thing that. And basically what you lose is off-axis viewing. So an OLED looks perfect from basically any angle, LCD screen, you're familiar with LCD screens. You get wide and off, things get weird. Right, but it's still pretty good on these TV, especially when the TVs are huge. Yeah.

It's actually very hard to get off-axis on a 98-inch TV. You need a big couch. I'm four miles away to the left. So you have this huge TV. It's really bright because you can make an LCD really bright. And like, you have to go look for the blooming on some of these manually. Not all of them. They're going to be all prices and shapes.

But I'm just telling you, this is the year that that technology just like enters the mainstream. And I think it will probably take the default big TV size from 65, maybe not to 98, but it'll go from 65 to 75 pretty fast because it's going to be cheaper, bigger, and brighter. And it's going to look in a store almost as good as the OLED. Yeah. Like, almost as good as you. Like, I really had to look on the show floor. And the show floor is like a bad environment. It's like bright and crazy.

And all the TVs are cranked up to 9,000. And they're playing like the best content to make the TV look good. Yeah. There are no blacks. You cannot see it. So this is the demo that in particular T-Cale is doing. There's big TV and it's like, you know, it's a flower over black. Yeah.

Or like an Edison light bulb just kind of lighting up in the middle of it. So they're trying to stress the TV. And they have a few that are settings. Were you playing with the button? Yeah. Yeah. You can push the button and you can basically put it in a mode that's an old backlight and you turn it on and it does the mini-lady backlight and it looks really good.

Now, this is a totally controlled demo. I'm not going to promise you that this is perfect, huh? Do you remember, like, 10 years ago when Vizio did the 100, I think it was like 120-inch TV? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it was the ugliest thing. And everybody was like, this is preposterous. Like, you could only check it out, like, in a giant warehouse because that's the only place the TV would fit.

And it was garbage TV. Yeah. It was just the ugliest TV possible. That's when they, that's when people started doing really intense local dimming demos. Yeah. And TV companies will still, like, the drop of a hat, a TV company will go to this a summer. Like, here's a TV. here's a TV without the TV. It's just the backlight. And then I'll show you like half the screen has a TV on it. And the other half is just the backlight. Yeah. Look at the backlight move with the image. And you just watch Sandra Bullock like spiral out and turn into lights. Pretty good. Pretty good demo all around. I'm just saying this is the year you see it on the show floor this year. It's everywhere. And, you know, my prediction is always rooted in my firm belief that people will pick big cheap screens. And so if you can give people a screen at 65, say,

that is almost as good as an old bit cheaper. They're going to pick that one. Oh, yeah. Especially they can't tell. And then if you can get, and it's brighter, which is always the thing. Like, to that point, actually, like, it makes me think of the test Marquez Brownlee does every year with the smartphone cameras. And every year, what wins is just the brightest camera. Yeah.

It's like, people don't want anything else, but it's just if it's bright and there's lots of colors. That's it. And it's the same thing. You see it in a store. It's the same thing. It's why they crank the brightness to 50,000 percent. But the thing that I think is just like really interesting is like, oh man, like what if the baseline size of a TV gets even bigger next year? And it's, you're no longer picking 55 and 65. You're picking between like 65, 75 and 95 and 98. This could be kind of wild. My wife steadfastly refuses to buy a TV above 50 inches for our house. She just thinks anything over 50 inches is like outrageous and unnecessary and no one should have it. And the number of choices that we have under, 50 inches is getting so small.

Yeah. So, like, it's crazy. And the TVs aren't very good at that size. No, they're trash. You can't buy a good TV at that size. Which is why we have, like, you got to get to 55. Crappy TCL Roku TV. Could you tell Anna this, please?

Yeah. Can you like black out the 65 inch on the box and just. Yeah. Yeah, don't worry about it. I thought the other one is 50. Like, no, that one was 30. You're like, see, they measure them differently now. Don't measure it.

It's fine. Don't measure the TV. So that actually brings us to like the next thing that's happening here, which is for all, of this talk about fancy backlight technologies and good looking pictures, the best-selling TV in the country is the frame TV. It's the proud owner of frame TV. Those two things totally square for me, right?

Like, if you're going to put this increasingly humongous thing in your home, like a 85-inch black panel just looks ridiculous. I see, in my mind, that looks like a symbol of success, stability. But you are correct. Most people do not just want a wall of black in their eyes. They would prefer to have a middling single backlight, extremely bad LCD panel. It's the dream. It's just throwing some art.

The frame is wildly successful. Yeah. It is, it dominates Samsung's TV sales. They love it. It is, I'm just going to tell you, it is not a great TV. Like, it's a find, it will do the job. They've updated it nothing this year because it is, basically. fine and they're flying off the shelves.

The update for the frame this year is that now in art mode, the refresh rate lowers to 60 hertz instead of just staying at 120. Sick. If you have been following cell phones for any period of time, you're like, oh, this is four generations behind variable refresh

tech in cell phones. And Samsung's like, no, no, this is plugged into the wall all the time. We're going down to 60 to show a static image of a painting. The frame is a monopoly. I'm just telling you right now. The frame is a monopoly. They feel no competitive pressure. And they're like, whatever, you want some art?

Yeah, everybody's out here now making things that they want to be frame competitors. Yeah. And what they are is just television. Right. So TCL has an art store. It's unclear what that is. They have a, there's just a sign on the show floor. It says TCL art.

Yeah. And art is written in like marker font. And all it is on the booth is a TV with a bunch of paintings around it. And it's like, I think you fundamentally misunderstand what the frame is doing. Uh, High Sense has, like, it looks like a Jetson's TV. That's their art TV. Yeah. Okay.

So everyone's trying to come at this idea, which is the TV should look good once off. And I think Samsung just has such a dominant position here that they just do not care. It would be cool if the TV was better. Well, but that's also one of the reasons I think that transparent displays are interesting. It's because like, this is the stuff we were talking about last week, too, that these things are sort of increasingly furniture. And there's a feeling like this should blend into the rest of my house instead of just being, a gigantic black thing. To the point the LG one is

furniture. Right. And they're actually going it with, right, with all this other stuff on the stand. And yeah, I think that's really cool. I think it's like very,

very cool. I would almost want to get one. But like Chris Welch pointed out, the picture's kind of garbage when you just want to watch TV. It's like it's worse. But it's better than the frame, at least.

So is everything. It's like low bar, but better than the frame. No, I think that's right. But I think that's right. But I think that, trend, I think, is super interesting, even though we're not getting what we should have. Because the transparent thing is also going to cost a billion dollars. And it kind of sits in a

really awkward way in that it's actually going to call more attention to itself than a normal TV would. Because we're all kind of conditioned to not notice TVs. She's like a fireplace on for it the whole time. You're like, I have a wireframe fireplace. Don't worry about it. The fish tank mode, just 24-7. Yeah, I love it. The fish tank thing is so cool. I swear, that was the moment it clicked for me because I was like, oh, this is going. to fancy doctor's offices. Yeah. Like that's who's going to use this.

That's what you want. The bleeding edge of OLED technology. We'll get some fish in your doctor's office. All right, Samsung did announce some other stuff in the TV zone. I'm just going to read you one. And here's what I'm going to do. First, I'm just going to say this word to you. And I want you to guess what you think this feature is.

Oh, boy. Samsung announced that it's new 24 TVs will feature in addition to workout tracker and techno gym, which I think are self-rejected. understandable yeah i get those samsung tail samsung tail tail tail t a i l yeah is it an acronym nope is it like paw patrol is it like for children oh that's good it's not for children okay it's not for children okay it's like it's not a series of cops that are dogs it's with tails it's it's pet mode for your television oh yeah instead of turning it all the way off and showing art you show like puppies running around that's good or squirrels it's wrong it's wrong it's wrong

It's good. It's just dead wrong. Okay, Alex, what's your guest? Well, it was Paw Patrol, but no. It's just the Paw Patrol. You push the button. Dogs come running out and solve crimes. It's great.

I would love that. Ooh, um, something related to Wi-Fi? No. No? No. H-D-R. I'm just going to start listing words. Those are just features in the TV. Boles.

All right. Samsung Tail. Yeah. Enables real-time. video consultation with a vet in the comfort of the user's homes. See, we were close. From basic care tips to advanced advice, Dr. Tail has a range of questions covered. Users can act with veteran experts in real time whenever they need.

This is a startup that Samsung saw at like a Samsung Deb day. And they're like, yeah, Dr. Tail, you're part of the TVs now. And now it's just part of the TVs. That's so good. It's so good. That's the most Samsung thing. Do you remember when Samsung had all those apps called like milk? Yeah.

You can get milk music. Yeah, yeah. And it's just like, Samsung sees a weirdly named startup and it's like, yes, that's it. Let's do it. That's like a good business model. You just like come up with a startup that wouldn't make sense. Put a weird name on and be like Samsung. Yeah.

Would you like to bundle this on Android phone? Look, big tech companies, very few of them can buy companies anymore. This is a problem. Lena Con's really ruined it unless it's Dr. Tail on Samsung TV. In which case, she's fine. last piece of Samsung news speaking in the frame such a hit uh Samsung expanding the franchise they've made a frame speaker which I still find utterly perplexing because it's just a speaker behind a picture yeah that's it really is like imagine you took a picture a tooth speaker and just hit it behind a painting this is what I'm saying

Samson did it for you right so I'll be honest I don't hate this at all it does not need to exist Yeah. But I love that it does. It's like IKEA makes some of this stuff too, where they're like, what if our lamp was also a Sonos speaker? I'm like, what if? What if IKEA? It's a great question. It does seem like Samsung has made one turn more innovative than Sonos and IKEA in that it appears you can pick your own picture in the Samsung frame speaker, which I don't know if you've been following frame technology, key element in the analog frame world.

Huge fan of that. IQ was like, no, this is just one one picture of sparkles. Yeah. Like, do you want it to look like a hotel room in your house all the time? We got you. Let's go. Yeah. So that's TV news.

It's, again, I wouldn't, and I'm not saying there's like one standout TV here apart from the transparent one. It's not like the year that, like, plasma TVs were introduced to the year that, you know, OLED kind of broke and we're like, oh, this is the future. I do think you're right, though, that this is like, we're going to look back at this is like, oh, this was the year we saw all the mini LED. TVs. Yeah. And then I think this is the year that TV sizes starts to get bigger. And I think that's fascinating. Like, if you are running a movie theater chain and you're looking at people buying 98-inch TVs

for their house that look really good, I don't know, man. What do you put that on, though? A 102-inch wall. I'm just like, I'm thinking of the furniture situation there. I need a, like, basically for me specifically, I just need a much larger credenza to put a TV that big on it. That sounds right. Yeah. We'll come back next week for for the AV furniture show. Yeah. We'll be back. It's just me.

We're measuring tape. All right, we gotta take a break. The frame is a monopoly. All right, I'm just telling you right now. If you are out there, your TV maker, put some competitive pressure on Samsung. This thing needs local dimming tomorrow. We'll get back.

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That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. All right, we're back. Vergecast, CES1, the Kia Connect. at home gazing out. I don't see Dieter out there. We're reliably told he was there at some point. I 100% saw Dieter out there earlier. Shaking my fist in the direction of the Google booth.

Lots of other gadgets here at CS. Lots. Alex, you've been paying a lot of attention to laptops, monitors, the gaming gadgets. Yeah. What's going on in Windows World? Gaming, first of all, has been kind of like weirdly the story of CES, right? Gaming has been really here.

Like, used to, you could have one person kind of covers gaming stuff reliably, And now it's like, ooh, maybe I need to assign more people to cover this next year. Yeah. And it also kind of felt like gaming stuff was always sort of off on its own. It was like, here's like the gamer section of CES. Yeah. But now it feels like even these like extremely mainstream brands are mostly making gamer things. Yes.

They all are like HP's doing it and and Dell. And I mean, they were already doing it. But Lenovo like is even kind of leaning more into their gaming stuff. They even introduced another one of those external GPUs that everybody does every couple of years. We're all like, yeah, this will be the year, and it's never the year. But Lenovo's out there doing it. I think they were mainly thinking more for professional reasons, like using the GPUs for AI. But I think that's also why we're seeing more gaming stuff is because you need really powerful GPUs for AI and also for gaming. And so it's like, okay. Yeah. And that

would also explain, I guess, why it seems like a lot of all this gamery stuff is getting slightly less gamery. Like my theory with gaming stuff has always been that it's just those are the people willing to spend money on fancy things in high-end specs. Oh, no, I have a way spicy your take. Oh, yeah? What's your spice of your take? If you want to make a young person buy a Windows computer, it has to be a gaming computer. Yep.

Well, that's interesting. And that's why, like, all the gaming laptops are losing. 25% spice for the needs to be. Please, direct your emails to Alex.com, Cranz of the virtual cycle. I agree with him. I totally agree with him. But no, so we saw, like, a lot of gaming laptops this year, and they were all, like, I wouldn't feel weird pulling it out at a coffee shop.

I'm older now. I don't really want to pull out something and it's got a bazillion lights on it. Yeah. You can hear it from space because it sounds like it's about to go into space. I'm trying to avoid that in my life now. But you still want to play sick games at the coffee shop. Yeah. I get it. I still want to play Boulder's game forever at the coffee shop until they ask me politely to leave. And it feels like that's much more possible now. One, because the processors have gotten better. The CPUs are a lot better. The GPUs have gotten smaller and are very efficient. The batteries are getting a little bit better. And two, they just start making these laptops and thinking about the rest of us. Or more specifically, they're thinking about, as I heard over and over and over again, this will work

really well in your dorm room. And it's like, my dorm room. Okay. Mine? No, not mine. Someone's dorm room. Yeah. And so that's really what they're positioning for. It's for the college kids who are coming in and they don't want like an adult, the laptop their parents have. But they also just don't necessarily want like neon green lights and stuff all over their laptop. They want to play games, but also take the thing to class. Yeah. And so we're seeing a lot of laptops. A lot of them have new white colorways. That was a big thing for, I think, both HP and Legion, we're both introducing laptops that were like white. And they look really, really nice. And you can turn that, you can, you know, you've got

RGB keyboards. And then if you don't want that, you can turn it off. And that just seems really, really nice. But we saw one from Legion or we saw one from Lenovo. We saw one from HP, alienware, the Dell one, they actually, they used to have a really big exhaust fan on the back, and they still do for their more powerful ones. But the new, the M16 R2, they got rid of the butt. There's like a big butt on the back of the laptop, and they just said, nope. Classic alienware move. Yeah. They like, chopping the butt.

Chopping the butt. Alienware. Well, first you add the butt. They've got two moves. The CEO's like, this is the butt year. And then the next year he's like, get rid of the butt. It's like, you know, they used to make the iPod like skinny and. fat, then wide,

and narrow. I just check the dimension and pull it every year. It's actually very accurate. That is what happens. A lot of times they're like, the butt got too big. We have to shrink the butt.

And so this year they took it completely off. They've still got it for their higher end ones. But for like the 40-70 and below, they're like, we don't actually, for the in video, 40-70 and below, they're like, we don't actually need to have all of that exhaust.

We don't need all that heat and stuff. We're fine. You can do enough for gaming. And that's true. Like, most games nowadays aren't as demanding, like the really popular ones, you know, the Fortnite's, the Boulder's Gate, just not as demanding. It feels like after all these years of trying to make like the one laptop that could be all things to all people, ultra powerful and ultra portable and everything, they're finally finding like a pretty good

middle ground that isn't for anybody at either side, but actually hits like the middle 80% in a way better way. Yeah. And like I consider myself a gamer. I play a lot of video games. I don't want that huge giant laptop. Right. I don't want to carry it. It's super heavy. I don't want to try to power it. Some of the times you can't even bring the chargers on the plane. Like, I want something that I can play most of my games

reasonable enough. That's why I like the Steam deck. That's why it's a really fun device. That's why we're seeing a lot more of these like little handheld PCs where you can play that. Like the MSI Claw was the new one this time, which I really, really like not as much as Sean. Sean loves the MSI Claw.

Yeah. But also I don't like it because the controls on it. Have you seen the controls? I haven't seen yet. Okay, so the Steam deck has the little touch pads, and you can control it, and it works like a mouse. Everybody else who's doing this right now has just joysticks and a D-pad. And it's just not as good. I'm like part of why I like the Steam Deck is I have a bigillion inputs.

And now it's like- And they're all super customizable. So you can do any kind of weird thing you want with your Steam Deck. Yeah, and said they're now like, okay, what we're going to do is pack in like a little Intel processor. We're going to make this thing really, really fast and not give you super great controls. But you are getting much better displays. Like the MSI one, the MSI Claw has like a variable refresh rate. It's got a decently sized battery.

And it's got the Hall Effect joystick so you don't get the drift and stuff. Wait, so there's something like Intel processor needs. You said that the Claws, it's got a newer Intel processor in it. Right. Intel's got its new 14th gen mobile processors here that's sort of making all these gaming laptops go. They announced it like, I think a week ago, two weeks ago, they announced it right before CES. And it's the new Meteor Lake. And they're just really, really good processors.

I feel like for the last couple of years, you would always go to an event and everybody would be like, we're going to make really thin laptops next year, like fan-free, really cool laptops just like Apple, and it's going to be awesome. And it never happened. And now it's like, oh, no, they can actually do it. Like Meteor Lake gives you these really, really thin laptops. It's giving you these really, really cool handheld gaming devices where you can actually have a lot of power in a fairly small thing and still have the good.

thermals because that's also the big limitation. Like, you can't do really fast gaming if the processor overheats, which it will. If your device is on fire, it doesn't play games very well. If your hands are melting holding on to it, that's bad. And it seems like with Meteor, like, they finally found that balance. And, like, we haven't gotten to check out a lot of these things. I was going to say, I feel like I've heard that specific story so many times. Yeah.

And Qualcomm is out here being like, we did it, guys. Our batteries last 37 hours. I think the difference is typically the laptop makers don't buy into that hype. Like the Intel will come out and tell you this is a year. And then the laptop makers generally will be like, this is not the year. We may release like one as like a pity. Right. They'll often run like a whole generation behind just for that reason because they're like,

we don't trust this new thing. We're going to wait this out a minute. Yeah, because they're the ones that are going to get yelled at. Everybody is ready now. But this year, everybody jumped on it. Everybody has stuff. They're really, really embracing it. So it feels like we're finally like, I think it was 2017, 2018, where I was seeing these super thin laptops.

And they'd be like, next year, this is going to come out. We're going to show you this for real. And I'm like, cool. And it never happened. And then this year, like, it really feels like it's happening. And it's not just what the gaming ones too. It's also like Lenovo's got a new think book 13X, I believe it's called. And it is just like it's super, super thin.

It only weighs like 2.2 pounds. It's got a magnesium body. so it's like stainless magnesium, so it doesn't get fingerprints at all. Everything else in the Lenovo booth was covered in fingerprints. And that one worked. I was like, hey, it does work. And it was just like, it feels like a toy,

but it was a full laptop. And I was like, I just covered this. I just want to own this laptop now because it is so thin and so light. It was like the old MacBook. Yeah. And it was like, oh, it's that. I really hope that's true.

I want that to be true. To me, running around looking at a bunch of these laptops, there's been the sort of normal C. E-S glut of just like weird ideas about laptops, where there's some that they're like, what if we had foldable screens? And you saw a Lenovo one that runs Windows and Android. And sometimes they're just like,

what if everything about the laptop, we just moved six inches to the left. And then that was a laptop. But there's also just a bunch of them this year that they're just like, oh, no, we just made a better laptop that is good. And it feels like, especially what, the last three years, Apple has just like run away

with the best laptop to use. every day as a regular person. This is what I'm saying about the gaming PCs. If you want someone, if you want to knock someone off the default of buying a MacBook error, you need to show up with video games. Right. Which is, I think, part of why Apple is now pushing the Mac as a gaming platform harder than ever because they're trying to undo that a little bit.

But that only works for the Windows manufacturers to the extent that you have also made a pretty good laptop. Yeah. Because, like, I'll figure out another way to play a game. games and like Microsoft is doing game pass which is going to be playable on these other devices so like that specific thing is going to fall apart if these windows manufacturers can't figure out how to make just like an everyday very good laptop that is also better for gaming and like that is it's starting to spin but let me ask Alex about the most incredible device here at c s it's the Lenovo think book

which i believe you've seen i've seen all of the Lenovos yeah sorry can i just can i just stop you real fast. It's called the think book plus gen 5 hybrid. That's very important. My apologies, the Gen 5 hybrid family. I'll be releasing this as a note. Gen 4 can get out of here. As you know, I've always valued the contributions of the gen 5 hybrid family. I meant no disrespect.

I have so many Gen 5 hybrid friends. Your best friend is Gen 5. It's like somehow I'm going to take this joke and actually canceling myself. I don't know how it's coming. No, you saw this thing. Yeah. It is literally two computers attached with a hinge. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. Yeah. So it has a Qualcomm processor in the screen and an Intel processor in the base, right? Yeah. Yeah. The base of it is just a Windows machine. And then the top of it is a tablet.

And when you pick it up, you're like, oh, yeah, that's a tablet up there. Because it kind of like has that little wobble. It's not as bad as sometimes remember the early ones where they put the tablet up and then the horrible little keyboard and you'd pick it up and you'd be like, I could never use this. It's a little more balanced than that, but it's still got that like heft to it because it's got a 14 inch tablet like in the top of it. And what was interesting was you really just like pull it off. You don't have to press a button. You don't have to do anything. You just like grab it and yank.

Because it's its own computer. It's just with its own batteries, except two batteries? Yeah, it's got two batteries. I love this product Do you remember the Microsoft Surface book? Yeah That was one of those things that like I don't think anyone bought it

Except for like six people but those six people My niece and nephew had surfaced I loved it bizarrely That had like a rabid fan base of people Who liked it for exactly that reason It's like the base had a battery and a GPU Right yeah So this made this the base of the Lenovo

Thinkbook plus Gen 5 hybrid It's a Windows computer It's just a full on Windows computer Just a whole one I actually really love this. It's like it's a weird fun idea. They were like we asked hey can you

communicate between the two like if you're working on something and you pull it off the pull the tablet off you can keep working they're like no it's it's two computers. It's like a full Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Yeah you will have to transfer all of your files in order to do it. That's fantastic. They're building like an app to fake it. They're working on that.

They're working on that. There was also like the separating the two is a little difficult because it's a it's a sample it's it's not ready for release yet they said it's absolutely going to be better when the when the thing finally comes out so i'm excited to try that out two thousand dollars somebody even has two computers they haven't figured out the detach i just read from alice she's being nice this is very nice the converting process was also dead simple just yank on the tablet until it disengages the sample version i tried would sometimes need some coaxing to separate just a little i was like at one point i was like maybe you just

doesn't come off. Maybe like this isn't the laptop I'm supposed to be looking at. Maybe this isn't the Gen 5 hybrid. Then the guy came over was like, no, no. You just got to want it. Yeah. That's great. And then it worked fine after that. This is a classic CS product. Yeah. It was a delight. As somebody who like rode really hard for the Asus Transformer lineup for years where you could dock your phone into a tablet and then dock that tablet into a keyboard and it was just all the devices all at once. I'm so happy this thing exists. This is CS exists again to sell TV. the unwitting masses. And also to have the Motorola,

what was it, the axiom? The Atrix. The Matrix, the greatest phone of all. The Matrix, which they had a lap dock. I wanted it so bad. And then the transformer and then this guy. Just if you can shove two computers into one computer, CS is a place for you.

I was describing CES to somebody this morning as half, just a place to show off things that Best Buy might want to buy. And then half just companies saying, is this anything? It's just they're just like V-Song wrote a whole thing about like a wood-paneled litter box that will also weigh your cat It's like that is the most is this anything gadget I've seen in forever And I love Cias for that I have a question you just walk by and it's people who are like I'm from France Is this anything?

Does it weigh your cat before and after like given the nature of a litter box? It's a really good question By all accounts you're also back into weighing something else right? It would know what's left. It's a really good question. I don't know what that date is for. Why would you need? I just know her cat's apparently too large to use it.

Samsung Tail will tell you. My apologies. Yeah, she's going to have to hold it up to Samsung Tail. Okay, so I want to ask what, two more things. Every year Razor. They do a thing. They do a thing, right? It's like a project, but it seems like pretty chill this year.

Pretty chill. They did have like a pad that you can like sit on for your seat and it will like kick you in the butt when you play video games. You would say it's a happy. I think they called it. And Sean was kind of impressed by it. He was like, this is fun. But that technology's been around for a while.

Like a lot of people have done that before. And as with a lot of these Razor CES things, they never come to fruition. They're very good at getting attention. Yeah. They're very, I mean, I love it. Yeah. Like the year they brought in the Razor laptop and it had three screens. And I was like, next year this is going to exist.

It never. No. Speaking of things you'd love to take into chemistry class. Yeah. Hell yeah. And then there's a Samsung. flip phone called the flip bowl? Okay.

What is this called? Once again, Eli, I am in the position of having to correct you on very important naming things. There are two new Samsung display folding screens. I am on the record as I believe flip phones are the future and folding phones are mostly stupid. Samsung has two new flip phone concepts, both of which basically go not quite 360 degrees because it runs into each other, but it like folds all the way open.

One is called the flex in and out, all one word. Yeah. And the other is called, we should talk about this. The other one is either called the flex lipple or the flex lipple. I just want to point out that flipple is a better name. It is a hundred percent better name. It is, I believe, a portmanteau of the words light and simple. Oh, no.

So lipple has to be it because lipple's hysterical. It does have to be libel. Yeah. You're right. It sounds more like a medical condition that you'd have. Lifele sounds like a medical condition. Doctor. Like that's what you take for your heart?

Lipple's like the thing you get diagnosed with. Yeah, I think that's right. But these things are like... It also rhymes with something. I just put it up there. I think we all know it's getting diagnosed when you have lipple. Okay. We all know a part of the body is getting diagnosed.

We got David. We broke David. We broke David Pierce. It's gone. I just. But so you like the phones? Yeah, he liked them. The L-I-P-L-E.

Yeah, just, again, it's like, on the In's, is this anything scale? Everybody comes every year to C-E-S and is just like, look at this crazy thing we made a screen do. LG has a big booth of the bending OLEDs. The competition for, like, wildest array of screens this year is kind of a bummer, actually. Yeah, we really toned it down. LG and Samsung have really toned it down. Yeah, normally they're just like, we have a wave.

of 600 televisions that you can walk through and this year LG's thing was just like I don't know 20 of the transparent TVs that just move back and forth Not a single tunnel

Not that cool Yeah So I think Samsung is doing stuff With phones that I continue to think is really interesting And part of the appeal of something like this is that because it can fold

all the way around you don't need an outside screen and an inside screen which could in theory make this thing cheaper and easier to manufacture What? But that's

Then what happens to the inside when you unfold it? It becomes the outside. So it's just nothing. You can customize it. Yes. Beautiful pictures of Will I Am and his Mercedes. I do. We'll talk about this on Thursday.

Alex is doing some important foreshadowing here. Yes. Will I Am wrote a song about infotainment systems. C.S. everybody. We have until Thursday to figure out a fair use way to play the whole song on the podcast. All right. We got to take a break.

We should talk about the vision pronouns. Yeah. It did hit this week. We'll be back. We'll talk about that. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance and burning out while you're trying to scale.

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Yesterday was day zero. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I get this wrong every year. I've been coming here. This is like my 15th year and I still don't quite know what day of the show it is. I think it's day one. Lots to talk about CS.

We've got another show coming later this week with all the rest. rest of it. There's still news happening. We should end though this episode by talking about the thing that didn't happen here, but that will probably dominate the year in tech coverage, no matter what, the Apple Vision Pro. Yeah, which is a screen gadget and thus fits the rubric of our episode. It's like mini screens. The most screens. I heard a rumor. Like I said, at the top of show, people at CS are just full of speculation over the screens in the Vision Pro, how much this thing cost to gold, whether Apple is making any money on it, whether they're not making any money on it. So we already knew the price.

Yep. Industry should take note from Apple. Apple announces things. Like, here's a price in a release window. They said early 24 and they meant it. Yeah. So they said early 2024 and they meant it. End of January they announced February 2nd, this thing shipping.

Yep. $3,49, $3,500 for a 256 gigabyte model. Unclear if you need more storage in your face computer. Who knows? To be fair, that's going to be like four minutes of spatial video, as far as I can tell. Spatial video on iPhone, where you can record it right now. It's 130 megabytes per minute. It's real big.

Yeah. That's not small. You got to think in TikTok minutes, not like, I see. That's fair. Okay. Real minutes. Right. Yeah.

I would say that the press release announcing Vision Pro, deeply confusing. It does not have any AR or MR apps really mentioned. Apps mentioned in the press race include Fantastical and Slack. It really seems like this is an iPad for your face. And what we've heard from developers is that Apple is going way out of its way to tell them not to call it AR or VR or VR or MR or XR or any of the other thousands of things. Like Apple is very specific that these are spatial computing apps. And I don't think that's going to work. I've been wrong about Apple's ability to make things into buzzwords before, but that one doesn't

really work for me. But it really does seem like at least at the beginning, I've been talking to developers really for the last six months about this. And the number of folks that I've talked to who are either sitting it out at the very beginning because they haven't spent enough time with it and aren't sure what to do with it and don't want to ship a crappy app just to have something that the first day, or people who are saying basically everything we're doing is based on an iPad app anyway, that's kind of the starting point for these Vision Pro apps,

we're just going to ship the iPad app and we'll figure it out from there. Yeah, but I just want to give you the list. So Apple's own press release. I'm just going off very directly. Here's how Apple is communicating about the Vision Pro. They say it's shipping, it's coming out, revolutionary and operating system

and user interface, Vision OS. You can use your pinch-y-pinch to select things, eye-tracking. I tracking what I saw it looked, was amazing. Then they're like, you can immerse yourself in environments, which is a straight-up VR feature. Yes. Right? That's interesting. The first thing that they tell you about it is that you can put yourself somewhere else. So it's a VR headset. A fascinating consideration. It's the first thing I say. Then they say, here's all the stuff you can do. Bullet list. An infinite canvas for productivity. First pull it in a list. Fantastic call free form, jig space, Microsoft 365 and Slack. It's like, all right, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to Hollyocula and Slack.

Right? Like, if you just read the press release, that's where you land in Apple's own messaging. I think this is fascinating. Maybe this is the best Slack experience anyone has ever had in their entire life. It's just interesting that this is what they're landing on. Then the ultimate entertainment experience. They're very proud of these displays, more than 4K TV free try. Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus Max, other services on a screen that feels 100 feet wide. Okay, that's with HDR video. Can I tell you with big TV? Fun conspiracy theory I have about this, which is that Apple deliberately doesn't mention Netflix because Apple and Netflix are beefing over all the stuff in the Apple TV Plus app. I have no evidence for this. That's how I feel.

I would believe that. 100%. Users can also enjoy new interactive experiences like encounter dinosaurs. VR app. So, again, I'm just reading their press release. I don't, I'm not saying these things are good or bad. I'm just saying if you just read how they're talking about it,

they have described to you a VR headset. Yep. Fascinating. Then gaming experiences. Access games in the App Store, including 250 titles on Apple Arcade. This is where I think the iPad for your face comes in. Yeah. Because what do we know about the Quest?

The thing that sells a quest is games. Fundamentally Games and Supernatural, which is a fitness game. Yep. That's what the... Even Matter refers to the Quest as Games console. It is by far that... You might think the Vision Pro is going to blow the quest away. But it is currently the market leader.

So it's the thing you compare to. Super Fruit Ninja? What the Golf? these are iPad games, right? Like, yeah. It's just, I'm just, and then the next one is memories brought to life, spatial videos and photos. This is fascinating.

The people I know who have tried this thing say it is very convincing. I'm very excited to try it. I've been taking some social videos. Excited to try it when we get our hands on one of these things. But that's limited to people who own an iPhone 15 pro. Right. So that very, like, it mean, I think costs $3.5,00. I'm assuming that's a pretty big overlap of Apple customers.

And then it's the stuff, right? spatial FaceTime where you get your avatar you can talk to it but you need two Vision Pros to pull this off fascinating if a user is wearing Vision Pro while on FaceTime they appear as their persona while others joining from Mac iPad or iPhone appear in a tile okay like we just have to see this stuff

work but that's still like this is the cutting edge stuff and you can't really use it yeah because you yourself will not experience this right right right it's actually possible you will be the persona to someone else right If you're on a Vision Pro and everybody else is on a different Apple device for face-site tiles. It's actually not going to be a great experience. Right.

It'll be fine. But like it won't be, again, it's a face iPad. That's what that will feel like. What will you look like? And then that's it, by the way. Then we get breakthrough design. Then we can talk about that stuff. But that in terms of experiences you can have in the headset, that's Apple's list.

So iPad stuff and VR stuff. And it's, yeah, it's just funny that the first thing to describe is, you will go somewhere else, totally VR, and then they described productivity, then you can play games from the App Store, and then this Personus thing. You know, like, I, again, I've worn one of these things. It was very compelling when I wore it.

It's the best VR experience ever had. Yeah. But if Apple wants to break through into the spatial computing, and they think the future is augmented reality, actually very unclear where the augmented reality part of this headset comes in. Yeah, I think the productivity is probably going to be the closest thing that we see there. Yeah.

I mean, one thing I noticed, and again, it's possible this is just like the way that it's written in the press release is Apple mentions that there are sort of specific spatial games like made for the Vision Pro and doesn't say that about any other app. So it's like, I think there's a decent chance that what we're going to get is like Fantastic Al with a different border in the Vision Pro. And I think that's going to be a lot of these apps where they're just going to get rid of the Chrome in their apps so that it feels more like a floating rectangle. and that's going to be the Vision Pro app. And I think this question of like, what does a spatial calendar look like is going to take a while. And I don't know if that's a thing people want

or if that's worth working on or if it's going to be meaningfully better than an iPad app in front of your face. But it doesn't seem like anyone has really racked that. And I think Apple is betting that some combination of FaceTime and just, like, the interface is going to be the killer app for people.

Because, like, to your point, the eye tracking is awesome. Yeah. The pinchy pinch thing, at least in the demos that we've gotten, is fantastic. Like, it's just fun to use the thing. And I think for at least this first version of a $3,500 gadget, that might get Apple far enough. Yeah, my theory is that Apple does not really want people to buy this one. Like, at scale, right? They're going to make $500,000 maybe.

I think that's the rumor I heard in terms of like. That's a lot. I was going to say, that's the thing I've been hearing a bunch this week is how many does Apple think it's going to sell? Yeah. That's the other number. And the thing I heard yesterday is they are actually capped by how many displays that can be made. We'll see. They're at the bleeding edge of display tech.

So we'll see. I just think that Apple does not want this version of this thing to be a mass consumer. Right, because it's a developer's kit. Yeah, they just polished it up to. Yeah, that's why we don't. That's why everything in it is kind of weird. And we don't know what the killer app is because they don't know what the killer app is. So they're like, here's our thing.

please don't call it VR or AR, even though that's what it is. And I get why they're doing that. They want to like, they're late to that game, and so they don't want to feel like they're late to that game. So spatial computing is the thing. And it sounds like it is really, really cool. But it's also just very clear that they don't know what they're doing entirely. Yeah. So let me just tell you what you get for your $3,500 bucks.

You get the headset. You get the solo knit band and the dual loop band. Sick. Which are the headbands put around your head. A light seal and two light seal cushions. The light seal seems like a thing that you got to finagle with and get exactly right because you got to block out of light. The Vision Pro cover, very important. Polishing cloth.

Don't just skip over that. It's like $20. It's a lot. I know. Free polished cloth. The battery, the USBC charging cable and the USBC adapter. I think we continually forget Vision Pro is two and a half hour battery life with an external battery pack. That you wear in your pocket.

Yeah. On a cable. I'm just saying, I agree with you. I think this is a developer kit. I think they need developers to get their hands on this thing. They need people to start using it. They need to collect some data.

But what it's for, why it's, why it exists. And I think that is just the most unlike Apple, I've seen any products in quite a while. Even the watch, which I criticized heavily at the beginning, and it took them three tries to figure out the watch. Yeah. And now it's a huge success.

Everybody knows a huge success. But the watch was like a shotgun blast of ideas about what you could do with a computer on your wrist. Down to you will flirt with people. in school by sending them your heartbeat. But that was like a complete Johnny Ive thought. Yes. Not a good thought. It's a fun thought.

Not a thought that landed anywhere, but he was like, here's what you're going to do. You know, put your fingers on your wrist. Then you're going to read your heartbeat. And someone else is going to feel your heartbeat. And they will know that you want to go to the movies. The Vision Pro is like comparatively a little Is This Anything? Yeah. It's got that vibe. Yeah.

I mean, what's weird is there's nothing at CES trying to compete with it. Like, we're running around thing. There's tons of glasses. Sony announced a fake headset that doesn't exist. In real. But that, they're just imagining as like a content creation device. It's a camera more than it is anything. But then, yeah, we saw Xreal, which is making the sort of like AR display glasses. It's doing more like degrees of freedom and they can see depth and all this stuff. Like they're pushing towards this thing. But everybody else is still on this like we're going to take something that looks passably like glasses and then try to make it more and more powerful over time. No one is

at least as far as I've seen, is trying to do the whole swing so far. I mean, meta is very clear. Like, meta is, right? Oh, sure. But meta's not really here doing stuff either. I think the thing is Apple, we're looking at it as like, oh, is Apple, why is nobody competing with Apple here? And that's because Apple is late to the party.

And Apple has to actually compete with everyone else. Everyone else already launched their failed VR headsets two years ago. And three and four and five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. But no, and I also think what I've heard from a bunch of people this week that the fact that the Rayban meta smart glasses, the ones that actually look like real glasses, have been such a hit with people, is changing a lot of folks' mind about actually the way to approach this. And I've

gotten a lot of confidence from people over the last couple of months, but even including at this show, who think the Vision Pro is wrong in a way that people don't usually bet against Apple products and are convinced that if we can take something that is closer to looking like a normal thing you'd wear out at a place like CES and not a pair of ski goggles on your face, we can get that too powerful faster than Apple can get the Vision Pro to like socially cool. Yeah. And I think Apple

usually wins that race, but this is kind of the hardest it has ever had to try to do that. And I just think it's going to be so fascinating. But I am sort of bummed that no one here, like this is the year Samsung should have been like. There's a rumor that Samsung Google are going to do.

It doesn't have local dimming, but it'll show you artwork anywhere you want. There's a rumor and Google and Samsung are going to do something again? Yeah. We'll see. Because that went great the last time. Like I said,

everybody had one of those. We've run this experiment before. Maybe we'll see. But that is, I will say, where CS is great. I love the gadgets. I love talking about TVs and laptops that are actually two laptops

bolted together. Put them together. Exhibit would be so happy. But I suspect we're going to spend the year talking about the Vision Pro. I think that's right. Because it really, you know, Apple's betting on it.

It's their big new. category, a lot of ideas contain that thing. And I agree, I think there's something to the fact that the meta glasses are doing well and people like them in a way that we, I usually don't see this. John Hauser is here. He's taking a lot of videos at a lot of the little events. He's been wearing a phone sort of like on a chest mount so he could like show people with his hands. And our commenters on TikTok and on the social platforms are assuming they're taking with the meta glasses. Oh, interesting. Which is super fascinating. Like they've already broken into consciousness such that That's the camera he's using.

And like, the and our director is like, no, that's an iPhone on a chest. All right. I think that's it for this. Day one. It's day one, Liam? Day one. Day one of CS. It's always day one.

There's lots more on the show. We got to do an entire show about not screens. Yeah. And Alex has to talk with ATSC 3.0. Some of the non screens. We haven't talked about a car yet. Yeah. And they're all, it's all cars here at CS, which have not screens.

screens for David's Rubrik. They're not screen gadgets, but they do have screens. Shut up. Don't worry that. It's going to be fine. Things that roll and things that don't. That's the new split. We'll be back a little later this week with that episode.

In the meantime, if there's stuff you want us to go check out at CS, you have questions about some of the stuff you're seeing. We're here, like I said, for a tech reporter standpoint, this is fish in a barrel. We can go find out almost anything you want, except what the vision pro is for. That'll be for later. All right. That's it. That's for a Redcast.

Rock and wrong. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.