The Vergecast - The USB-C Holiday Spec-tacular

Episode Date: December 23, 2023

The Verge’s Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz start the final show of 2023 with some chat about the state of USB-C: the ups and downs of charging gadgets, the ubiquity of one cable, and what the future looks like for gadgets with ports. The crew competes in a few rounds of USB-C Price is Right, a game we completely made up to show how confusing USB-C and its specs can be. Nilay, David, and Alex each play for a Vergecast listener to win an awesome Verge swag basket from our merch store. Check out the video version of the game below. David and Nilay end the holiday show with Noah Dentzel, the CEO and co-founder of Nomad Goods, to talk about how USB-C on the iPhone has changed his business, the challenges of building cables, and what tech accessories he’s most excited about in 2024. Have a happy, safe, and fast-charging holiday. We’ll see you in 2024! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. iPhone 15 Pro also has the new USBC connector. Happy holidays, everyone, and welcome to the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular, the flagship podcast of symmetrical serial bus connectors and holiday spirit. I love it. The two most important things in life. Easily the two most important.

And putting booze in the drinks. A critical part of the holiday experience that is under-remarked upon. I mean, that's my favorite specs. Yeah, everyone's like, you're going to drink a thing called eggnog, and you're like, put some brandy in it and we'll talk. Here's a hot cocoa, a little whiskey. Yeah. Holiday party is getting lit at the USB-C-I-F. Anyway, this is a holiday spectacular, our now yearly tradition where we dive deep on one specification that makes the entire tech industry go.

I'm your friend, Neely. David Pierce is here. Hello. Are we all egg-nog people? We should talk about this. We can intro everybody, but I do want to talk about it for egg-k-k-nog people. I think I've had eggnog once. Oh, it's good.

But like the real stuff, the stuff that comes out of like a jug from the grocery store, I'm just not. Yeah, that's fair. Like, I don't know how good eggnog is made, but it exists. You have to like whip the eggs. I did it once and it was too rich. I was like, oh, it's like a pudding base I just drink, filled with alcohol. All right. And that pudding enthusiast, that's Alex Cranz that you're hearing from right there.

I'm your friend who loves pudding in all its forms. Set and unset, apparently. So this is the holiday spectacular, a now yearly tradition, which is one of my favorite things we do here on the Vergecast, a chance to let go of the new cycle and be gigantic nerds about one interconnect or standard that we all depend on. Two years ago, we did HTML, which was really fun. Last year, we did Bluetooth, which is Bluetooth. This year, by what I can only describe is popular demand, we're doing USBC. We're going to have a little talk about the state of USBC to open things up, set the floor. Andrew has forced us to play a game show.

The USBC price is right. We did it. I'm not going to say anything else about it. I don't want to tip your hand on who won or lost, but we did it. And it is actually hilarious. It's really fun. And then lastly, we're going to talk to Noah Denzel, who is the co-founder and CEO of Nomad goods, an accessory company.

They make a lot of USBC products. Yeah, Nomad makes like fancy accessories, I would say. And Noah was a good hang. He is kind of eyes open in ways I didn't necessarily expect about the weirdness of USBC, but it's also psyched about the future of gadget accessories in a way that felt very right for the holiday spectacular. Very right for the verge cast holiday spectacular. The man loves the cable. But let me just say this to open.

We're like a decade into USBC. And the only way I can really describe it is it's a mess. That's half the story, right? It's like on the one hand, like we got it. Like, we did it. Yeah. Somebody, you know, in the ancient history of technology was just like, what if all of our stuff plugged into the same stuff and you only needed one cable?

And it's like, we did it. It's there. I only need one cable. But we did it in the worst, most backwards and impossibly confusing way possible. I like that you can sometimes brick a device or catch it on fire by plugging in the wrong USB court. That's cool. Yeah, that's what you want.

You know, like, this one provides the power of a car battery to my phone. Let's just see what happens. I will say, have you guys noticed my gadgets have been much warmer this year as a result of this. Like, I genuinely believe that that's true, that, like, the average temperature of my phone and laptop and tablet has gone up as a result of USBC and the gigantic mess of cables in my life. I am not cranking my radiator as high this year. Wow. Maybe it's just a better insulated home I'm living in, but I like the theory that my gadgets. are just warber.

Yeah. It's like, you know, it's like spiritual. You're like, no matter what, I will use this amount of energy. And as the energy usage of LED lights drops from my old halogens, I'm going to pump this into my cell phone instead. Yeah. It's like, it's very good. It's like a fix some kind of spirituality, you know?

Yeah. I like this. To your point, though, David, this has been the dream, right? We're going to have one cable, one interconnect. And then the reality of the dream that we live in is that there actually isn't one cable. There isn't one interconnect, but they've just used the same plug on lots of different things to make it appear as though there is one cable. All life. And that is to some extent.

Yes, I agree with you, Alex. There's a lot of, I wouldn't call it lying, but like wishful obfuscation going on with USBC. You're like, what if you didn't think about this too hard? Like, what if this was almost what you wanted? Huh? Is that good enough? But what's happening inside of it is because very few things are labeled correctly, very few devices will tell you what is going on. It feels more confusing than ever, even though in one important way it's gotten much simpler.

Yeah, I think that's right. It used to be back in the good old days that your stuff was either, you know, micro USB or mini USB. And you could sort of distinguish them by the way that they looked. And generally, as long as the thing fit in the thing, it was probably going to work. And it was very annoying because all the things had different things. And in order to bring five gadgets, you had to have five things. Now it does feel like slightly more of a mystery where it's like you can plug it in and it fits. Like you know that thing where you have a bunch of keys on a key ring and you have the one that fits in the lock but doesn't turn.

Yeah. That's very much like the USBC experience where it's like it goes in. Doesn't still, that's not the job, it turns out. Like fitting in the thing is not. That's not the job. Okay, but here's my question. Has this reduced any amount of frustration? So one of my favorite laptops in the entire world is the PowerBook G4, the titanium Powerbook G4. Do you remember this thing? Oh, yeah. This is the laptop. I never had one. I've coveted it the most of any laptop ever.

Like, it was just a beautiful thing that I couldn't afford when I was in college. And I'm looking at a picture of its rear panel, just because you were talking about different ports. And it was wildly more Oh, yeah. Than just micro and mini USB back then, right? It's, I bring up this laptop because it was one of the thinnest laptops ever made. It was one inch thick, or as Apple said, one inch thin. It's good marketing. But like, you know, they had done this thing where they had shrunk the computer in a radical way for its time.

And you look at the back panel and you're like, the height of this computer has been determined by the Ethernet port. Yes. And so here's what's on the back of it. Alex, I know you'll love this as I do. left to right. I'm just looking at a picture. Firewire 400. Yeah.

The most important port. The God port, as I call it. Yeah. The best port. Ethernet. Yeah. Two USBAs. Oh.

Giant outlet for its fan. Important. What appears to be a DVI connector. Yes. Huge. Massively wide DVI connector. That's a monitor out. An S video connector.

Ooh. And then I shit you not. An RJ11 Jack for a 56K. motor. Yes. They don't make them like that. This is not happening anymore. But that was the port selection on these computers. And many ports have come and gone since then. But if you think about this is maybe one of the most important laptops of all time. And I'm just going back to it because it's port selection seems insane now. The design of it is driven by the size of some of these ports and very often you have the wrong cable.

And having the wrong cable is a very common frustration, and it's why I'm confident that everyone listening to the show is just like me, has a drawer full of cables. Just cables. Just in case you've got to plug one thing into another thing, you're never going to throw that cable away. That's how I knew I was an adult, was I had like a box of cables.

I was like, this is it. Like I was like 22 straight out of college. And I was like, well, I'm an adult now because I got this big box of cable. just like my parents did. So first of all, one box of cables is not enough boxes of cables. I was 22. I was young. But the big change that I made recently in my life was I threw away all the cables that were very old and I didn't know what they went to. So for years, I had a whole box just of cables to mysterious things that I didn't know about.

And I kept them all for all this time because I had one really old Western digital hard drive from when I was in college. that I knew at some point I was going to want again, but never actually took the time to do anything with. And I had a bin full of cables that might have been for the hard drive. And so I kept the whole bin around. And recently I took the hard drive to Best Buy because I literally couldn't get it to turn on again. They got all the stuff off of it for me. And I threw away the whole box of mysterious cables.

And it was a truly transformative day in my life. This is an important thing that you're bringing up. You had a product. It may or may not have had a proprietary cable. It probably just had that weird super speed USB3 cable. So its problem was its power cable, which was a proprietary thing. Yes. This is the main thing.

It had weird proprietary power cable with maybe some weird pins or a barrel connector. And that power system, there's still a lot of stuff with barrel connectors. But a barrel connector with an adapter and you don't know how much power is coming at an adapter. And if you get rid of it, then you're screwed. You've got to get one of those long plastic blister packy things. with all the different barrel connectors and you're like sliding the dips like that's bad

USB just eliminated that problem from like the jump Mini and micro USB started the process of limiting that problem micro USB got pretty far along there and then USBC I think has almost completely obviated this thing like USBC is the world's power connector

that is unequivocally a success yes I agree with that as the like make it turn on thing, USBC is a huge, huge, huge win. And we're now up to 240 watt USBC chargers. There's some really great material science that's going on underneath that. Galleum nitrate is the thing that replaces silicon and all these devices. There is just a furious effort at GAN chargers, gallium nitrate chargers, making them carry

more and more power in smaller small spaces with less heat. That is just awesome. Like, that's just a bunch of scientists and engineers and physicists making it happen. Is it just my impression that Anchor is way ahead on the gallium nitrate stuff? Like, is there a reason Anchor stuff seems to be so popular in that world right now? Right. Anchor is a fascinating company. It was a bunch of people who worked at Amazon.

They realized this was an ecosystem they could sell into. They went off and started a company. They saw a lot of things now. The CEO of Anchor, Stephen Yang, was on Decoder in 2021. And he told me that they'd partner with a company called Power Innovations, which, which makes like the bleeding edge gallium nitrite. Also a very Amazon sounding brand. Truly.

No, it's like too many real words. Now it's just like letters and numbers. But basically Anchor has an exclusive on bleeding edge GAN chip sets. So they get them for like a year, six months to a year before everybody else. And you can see that's really cool, right? Just from like a business perspective, they identified that as a competitive advantage, went out and spent the money ahead of it. And now they have a six month exclusive in the second.

way that, you know, like Sony buys exclusives on PlayStation games, like anchors, like we have exclusives on GAN chipsets for a minute. It's badass. That's obviously changing. There's other companies and there are other companies that are more aggressive. Like, you go on Amazon, you're like 600 watt charger. It's the size of a quarter. Will it catch fire?

But so just from that perspective, USBC is a huge success. Because of GAN, because of this material science innovation, because these companies have identified a market opportunity in selling more. higher-powered chargers can do everything. That means you can get everything from an electric toothbrush to a laptop off the same charger with the same plug over the sometimes the same cables. The cables have to be rated. That's just an overall like barrel connector should go away.

Seems like a big victory. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think it has made the like multi-port charger thing, a true must have accessory in life. Like the one thing you can plug into the wall that has the three USB slots on it, anchor sells, I'm sure, infinity of them. So do lots of other companies. I started to see them everywhere. Like I noticed this. I was flying last week. And it honestly seemed like one in every three people at the airport. Either had a battery pack or something you could plug into the wall and get multiple USB ports out of. And that is just now like how everybody charges everything. Yeah. And that's created the market for battery packs.

Right. You just see, okay, the market sort of got created here in a big way. I just call them the flail. The flail. Because you plug enough cords in, it just looks like a little flail. You swing it around. Yeah. So that's a good thing. Inside of that, still some problems, right?

Right. Not every product supports every charging speed. I still just worry that things are getting hot, as we've mentioned a few times. And then there's the problem, which we've talked about in the rich has a few times now, where a lot of companies are doing this in the laziest possible way. They're not adding the pennies of additional cost to their problems. products to put on the two resistors that make USBC power go. So they've effectively just replaced the micro USB port with a USBC port. And if you plug an actual USBC to USBC charger onto it,

it doesn't charge because the thing doesn't know how to call for power from USBC because it's not actually USBC. You have to use a USBA to USBC cord, which just drives me insane. And I'm going to propose on this, the holiday spectacular, in the holiday spirit, in the spirit of Christmas, that all of those people should go to jail. And I can't think of a better present for all of us gathered today around the holiday hearth than jail. But that can be my gift to America and the world. I think we can agree. I will have done the Christmas community at least as much of a service as Mariah Carey. We're skipping right past like coal and everybody's stocking. We're going straight to jail. Strict detail.

I like it. All right. And that, I would say, represents the best case of USBC. Right? We've basically solved this power problem. We've created a market for a new kind of product, these battery packs and these multi-chargers. There's a lot of innovation and engineering resources and money and invention going into a thing. And it has tangible consumer benefits.

And then there's like 4% of it that's bad, which is like the cheapest products. It's a lot of off-brand headphones and speakers. I think I've mentioned the milk frother we use to stir protein path. It's like, that's really annoying. There's just a bunch of that stuff where they just, like, USBC will fix it. And they didn't do it the right way. So it frustrates everyone. We've had people, since we've mentioned it the first time, we've gotten a bunch of emails

from people who were like, I threw something away because I didn't realize this was the problem. Oh, wow. I thought it was just broken. That's crazy to me. Yeah. And I'm saying this is the best case. So so far, the worst experience I've personally had is kind of what you're describing with the A to C connector, where you plug it in and nothing happens.

I have not had anything problematic happen. I know there are risks. It's like you could plug something in and your phone could explode. That's a real thing that could in theory happen. That has not happened to me. Have either of you had sort of actual bad USBC experiences so far? Mine are just all I plug a thing in. Nothing happens.

I take it out. I plug it in. Nothing happens. And then I get angry at my battery being dead. I feel like I busted a hard drive. I feel like I busted like an off-brand hard drive by plugging it in. into the wrong USBC and it just died. It was just like, nope, no ma'am.

That actually kind of makes sense. It like tries to come to life and then just, uh-uh. And like after that, even when I found the right cables, it never worked. And I blame, was it maybe because the hard drive was crappy possibly? But I like to blame the USBC. I have a similar experience. It is dumber than Alex's.

I don't want to mince words about it. So you were drinking some eggnog one night. Was it a beer tremor? It was not a beard trimmer. My beard trimmer is not yet USBC. I don't, that needs a full-on barrel connector to get through this forest. You got to rub the engine. Max has a like a V-Tech kid's zoom camera.

If you have children, you know that these things are just, they're everywhere. Every kid has one. They're fun. They're cute. And they are notorious for being really finicky about what USBC cables are compatible with them. Even just a regular USB-A to micro-USP cable, real messy. Like, some of them work, some of them don't. And everyone I know just ends up buying a microSD card to use because the cable thing is so fussy with these cameras.

I didn't do that. Every time I would, like, get, when I get photos off the camera, I remember that I should buy a micro SD card for this camera. So you don't have to deal with trying 500 cables. And then I forget, I don't do it. So I'm trying to get photos off this thing. And obviously, my laptop only has USBC ports on it. So I'm like going through adapters. And the adapters end up effectively corrupting.

photos on the camera until I finally gave up, came upstairs to this delightful 2015 iMac that I used to Vergecast from and plug directly into a USBA port on the back of it. And I got off whatever photos I could. And I was like, this is bad. Yeah. Right. And that's like a dongle problem. And, you know, it's like it's all, it's kind of all the messes at once. But like you should be able to just plug into what is effectively an SD card reader and get files without thinking, okay, this thing is USBA, that thing is USBC, this thing is a really finicky micro SD implementation, and now I've corrupted some photos that my kid took on our camera. That's by far the worst USB experience I had, and somewhere in there is that I was leaping through Dongletown.

Well, and the problem with that is it's so sneaky in its problem that it makes everything worse, right? Like, I don't have the right cable for this. It's a very obvious problem. It's a very annoying problem, but you at least know what the problem is. And then it's like, okay, if I go get the correct cable, everything will be fine. In this case, you're left to like troubleshoot through a bunch of steps that you have no actual visibility into because something along the way that seemed like it probably should have worked and all fit together, literally and figuratively, didn't work. And that's the thing about USBC that has always driven me the most crazy.

Like the Opel camera came with a USBC cable and would only work with its USBC cable. And it's like, my friends, that is, we're doing it wrong here. That is like not the spirit of a universal connector. At that point, just have a proprietary barrel connector. What the hell of difference does it make? Well, that just explains something about my opal camera. I learned something. So we, I've said it.

I've said the magical incantation. We have to talk about it now. We got to talk about Dongletown. The magical incantation is just the word Dongletown. Yeah. And the dongles show up. And now we're in Dongletown. You just like say it three times and then you go to Dongletown.

So USBC first comes out. I remind everyone, it came out. first on the Apple MacBook, the tiny little MacBook, still the world's best playing computer. Remember, that computer only had a single port. It was so tiny. And again, I go back to the Titanium Powerbook G4 that I was talking about. That computer, a real design constraint for that computer was the height of the Ethernet port. Apple says, we don't want to do this. This is also what you might call the peak Johnny I there. We want to make the laptop as thin as possible. We're going to cut it down to just a single port because all you need to do with this computer

is charge it. Maybe you want to do some data stuff, so we'll use USBC. We'll figure out how to charge it. They went to the USBC implementers form, the USB IF. Apple dictates the design of USBC. They've had a hand on this wheel since the very beginning, and it started with that first MacBook. Yeah, there's a lot of lightning in USBC for that reason. Yeah, there's a lot of Apple ideas in there. The connector is very much their idea. It was designed to be a partner to lightning, which is how they got, they were able to get there in the end with the iPhone, which we should talk about. But, you know, this MacBook comes out and everyone says, ah, dongle town. Like, in order to use this computer, you will have to have a series of complicated dongles. And Apple's response to this with that computer in particular was,

no, you won't, because no one plugs anything into our laptops. We've done the research, we've done the studies, especially consumer laptops. No one plugs anything in. Be happy with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Fine. And this computer is so underpowered that it is true, that no one ever plugs anything in. I had two of them. And I truly believe that this is the world's best travel computer. I took this thing on planes.

I've live logged a million Apple events with one of them. It had a terrible butterfly keyboard. Many, many compromises. But I never felt like I need to plug anything into this other than a power cable. Yeah. You move through the years

and Apple releases many more computers. Now maybe they have two USBC ports. And we are in Dongletown. Like in order to have a laptop, You've got to have one of those like eight and one dongles that has a bunch of useful ports on it. Apple eventually relents. Their MacBook Pros now have lots and lots of ports. They're literal cheers in the audience.

The SD card reader is back on a MacBook Pro. My MacBook Pro is an HTML port on it. We're many ways back to where we started. But all the ports have gotten smaller. And I'm sitting here in 2024. I'm wondering, are we in Dongletown anymore? Like I still carry one around, but I don't know why. Security.

Like maybe sometimes I need a USBA port. And that's it. That's all I can think of. Yeah, I carry mine for the USBA. And also, like, I was always in Dongletown because that stupid DV. Like, if you had a monitor, it always was VGA. And then your laptop was always DVI. So you were always doing dongles anyway.

I didn't have to carry as many of them. Like, it wasn't for little small quick things like SD card reads. And, oh, I need to plug a thumb drive in. So I don't know. I'm still in Dongletown. I'm okay with it. So the thing that I wonder here in you, talk about this, though, is whose fault is that? Because, like, I'm sitting here on the computer I use

every day as a Mac Mini that I have connected to a SEPTor monitor that I bought for super cheap on Amazon and could tell you nothing about except that it exists and it's my monitor. It uses HDMI. So it's H-DMI to H-DMI, and that is just the way that it works. And I'm like, whose fault is it that I don't connect these two things to a USB cable? Because I think there's a world in which the answer to the MacBook Pro's problem was more USB-C port. not let's bring back the old ports. And I think bringing back the old ports was the right call, but I can't figure out whose fault it is that we haven't gotten to the all-USBC everything accessory

universe faster. It's a lot of cost stuff, right? Like it's more expensive to put in a lot of these ports. You talk to the monitor makers, they're like, well, no, our people want displayport because there's some stuff that USBC can't do, that display port can't, vice versa. I refuse to believe that. And anyone on Earth wants DisplayPort. Oh, my God.

Well, DisplayPort is a better standard than HTML. That is maybe for next year. Oh, that's true. Next year's holiday spectacular. It's just DisplayPort v. HDMI, you know, like, we'll do it as a court case. Love it. But you're seeing it.

Like, the monitors I'm on right now are these two, like, $800 LG monitors that I'm still very except that I spend as much money as I did on them. But they've got USBC on the back, and it works. But they also have USBA, and that's the only way you can use the backlights on them to make the back lights do cool stuff. So it's like, they're kind of dumb. Well, so you get USB as a connector might be good and can support all this power. USBC as a standard is not capable of doing all the things that you want.

Right. And so if you were to go to an all USBC world, to Alex's point, you would increase cost. Because you'd be basically building in adapters somewhere along the line to move the data into different kinds. of standards or different kinds of pin configurations. And I think you do want an HTML that is focused on being the best display connector up against its mortal rival displayport. Which is better. And I think you do want a displayport team that's like, we're taking them down.

Merry Christmas. You're describing like bundling and unbundling, right? Like we've been through a bundling phase, which is USBC. And then everybody's going to come to the realization that, oh, it's great that all of this is in one place, but what it means when it tries to be everything is that it can't be the best at anything. And then we're going to spend the next decade with like a new series of very specific one-to-one things that are better at one thing than USBC.

And then we're going to do this again in 10 years and be like, wouldn't it be great if we had a standard that just brought everything together and you could just plug it in? I don't think it's that many things, though. When you think about like what the ports are being used, it's visual ports, right? Like it's HTML and display port. And that's because they're really good at doing visual stuff in a way that USBC just isn't quite as good at. But if you think about most like data transfer, everybody's moved to USBC or they're using Thunderbolt, which is like USBC, but more expensive and it's the same port.

Fancy USBC. It's fancy USBC. And even audio, you maybe have an optical audio out, but typically the 3.5 millimeter jack is like more than enough for most people. In phones, they are like, no, we don't even need that. USBC is enough. I was going to say, I can't believe, Neil, I'd just let you get that far into that sentence. No, I hitched at her. I was going as fast as I could to Get there before the hissing. No, but yeah, I think you're right. It's like, right. The really fast data transfer

lives in the world of PCI. Thunderbolt and PCI have a connection there that's important. Everything else is kind of on USB. And then the thing that is not is the two display connectors. And even that is getting into a realm of silliness, right? Where it's like how many 8K displays can Apple plug into one Mac mini? That's how we're measuring how important those are. And maybe some things that are.

time like additional HDR bandwidth or more colors or whatever is going to be needed there will come and I'm sure it'll be great. But most everything now can run on USBC. And what you're what you see is yep, sometimes you sit in a conference room and there's just a bundle of display adapters sitting on the table. But they all have USB connectors on the end. That to me just feels like a, a kind of victory. I'm not sure it's the right one. Like we defeated complexity with additional complexity, but at least all the connectors are the same. but it's smaller complexity, I guess, which is something. That's a way.

Yeah, I mean, part of me feels like I think I'm torn between these two ideas that this transition was always going to take a long time because it essentially involves replacing every gadget on Earth at some point. And that's a lot of work. And you can fix your own gadget. And like, I've seen this even with the iPhone 15, right? Getting the iPhone 15, fantastic. Love being able to use USBC.

My wife and I can now charge our phones with the same thing. She has a pixel. I have an iPhone. It's great. Huge victories for everybody. I have a new cable that I had to get for my car. My phone now doesn't plug into certain things that used to plug into.

I have a bunch of accessories that are now dead, right? Like, that transition is going to take a long time, and I get that. But also, we've been at this for a decade now, and it doesn't feel like we're close. Yeah. And so I can't decide if we're running too slowly or if I'm being too ambitious here.

Let's wrap this up by talking about the big news of the year for USBC. Apple switched the iPhone to USBC. This is the big thing in a normal universe, when that happened, we'd run a headline like USBC arrives or it's finally here. The transitions are, and that is just, no one's doing that because of the iPhone. That's what I mean. Instead, it's, yeah, to your point, it's a combo of finally and oh boy, this is going to take

a long time. Yeah. And I feel that way, to be clear, I feel that way about USBA too. But because there isn't some giant company that is switching away from USBA to mark a moment, it's hard to talk about in the same way. but it is true that USBA is, I believe, in world history, the most popular power port of all time. Like, it is the most popular plug outlet in world history. I believe it.

It's just everywhere. It is a standard. You can be anywhere in the world and you see a USBA port and you're like, I'm going to plug these god-awful cheap LED strip lights into them and they're going to light up. Well, first you're going to have to flip it over because you plugged it in wrong. But the second time, it'll work. That's kind of amazing. No other plug outlet has ever, I'm going to charge them. my phone. I found a USBA port. God, I hope it isn't loaded with malware. I'm going to carry one of

those little adapters that only that cuts everything with the power. That's incredible. But that is also, you got to take all of those out. We, you know, we're renovating our house. I'm buying plug outlets. And I'm buying plug outlets with USBC and one USBA in the middle. Because there's enough stuff that I know I'm going to want to plug into that plug out. That's nuts. And now I've just installed another USBA outlet into the wall of this house. It's going to be there for 20 years. Right. You're both helping and hurting all at the same time. And it's the same with lightning. Like Apple, there's, you know, a billion plus iOS devices out there with lightning ports on them. Apple's still selling some phones with lightning ports. Apple still sell some iPads with lightning ports on them.

They're going to keep selling them for a long time. EU be damned. Merry Christmas to the European Commission, says Tim Cook. Happy holidays, you bastards. And he ships his billionth iPad. Like, that stuff isn't going anywhere. And it kind of means the, The core dream of the USBC, maybe no connector will ever achieve it, right? Because there's always going to be standard sort of waxing and waning. And as everything, it's bigger and everything becomes a computer, the installed basis just get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

People are cheap. I mean, how long has the PS2 port persisted? I think you could probably buy something with a PS2 port right now. And you shouldn't be able to do that. That's just stupid. It's like it's older than half of the people that we work with. That said, this is true. You can get all the way here.

I've seen people assemble just the most bananas USBC dongle chains. You can get a PS2 to USBA to USBC connector and use them on a lot of computers. People still use Apple extended keyboard twos. They're very popular. The big clicky keys. Apple desktop bus to USBA to USBC totally works. It's kind of amazing. You know, when software backwards compatibility is so hard.

Yet with USBC in hardware, people almost take it for granted, which is pretty incredible. Yeah, I mean, kudos to like the people who did this for making it a continuing standard. But I think now we're at a point where we've agreed that this is the standard and it's going to keep moving so fast that I wonder if we're going to end up sort of accidentally at another unrecognizable standard before too long. And if maybe we're even there already, like USBC is a collection of different things that all kind of look the same already. And the EU is out here regulating like what the port has to look like. And I think that's good. But I also wonder if instead of that thing you're describing where we've kind of had really good connectivity over the years between the ideas of USB, if instead we're going to have a bunch of things that look the same and are very different.

And that's just going to be where it lands. I have no idea. I mean, that's what we're doing with HTML right now and a lot of other ports is there's like that conflict and nobody wants to properly label things. And if they just properly labeled things and made the labels easy to understand. this would all be solved. Oh, yeah. If you are a member of the United States Congress listening to this, the Vergecast holiday spectacular about USPC.

Welcome. I think there's at least 40 or 50 senators listening to this right now. No question. At least half the Senate is listening to this. Look, first of all, if you're listening to this and you're in Congress, you are the most effective politicians' countries. I want you to feel great about it. You are here on the ground with the people.

You're sharing the holiday spirit with them. and you are talking about real problems in America. Second, you have an opportunity to outdo the Europeans if you just pass some labeling standards. Everything in tech right now is being regulated by the Europeans. You know, and you can do it. You can take weird St. Nicholas from France and turn them into Santa Claus in the greatest American Christmas spirit.

You can do it. And you can say, look, you're focused on USBC. Here in America, we label our wires. then you can just take Christmas from them. And I want you to do it. Please. Because that is actually what we just put labels on the plugs and say how fast they can charge

and how much data they can support. And then everyone will be happy. We'll lead better lives in America. You have to also make it a spec that people care about. Like this is the learning experience over Christmas. It's like, sit down and really learn about the charging requirements of all of your individual devices. Take some time.

Instead of reading the night before Christmas, read some instruction manuals to your computers. Yeah. Because, like, I think about what, what happened to TVs, right? Like, everybody got very aware of what 720P and 1080P and 4K and 8K were. And those things get better because people start to care about it, and they'll buy the better ones. And now I've become, like, a zealot for telling people to buy expensive cables, which is the opposite of what I used to say. I used to tell people just, like, buy the Amazon basics, the cheapest thing you can find for whatever cable you need, it'll probably work.

Now I'm like, if you want to live the as few cables as possible, lifestyle, you have to buy good ones. And you have to buy ones that are more than most of your devices need in order for it to work for most of your devices. And people just don't know because they've never had to. And realistically, they shouldn't. Like, this should be a solved problem. But this has to be a thing people care about. Like, I'm the problem because I didn't make sure that my monitor was the right connectivity for what I wanted. And if we don't start to demand that, it won't get better. That's wild, right? Because HTML, which carries much more data on the regular, it needs to be more reliable in order to support all the high-end video standards, it is kind of like

you just buy whatever cable. Right. But it's not truly. But it's close enough. Like for most cases. If you're out there buying the monster cables, like you're getting taken for a ride. If you buy a high-quality HTML cable, it's going to be fine. Yeah.

Right? In a way that if you don't buy a high-quality USB-C cable. You're bound. You're not guaranteed to get life out of it through as technology progresses. And you'll notice the difference. Like, I work in my basement and my bed-eastern. room is two floors away upstairs. All of my cables are right next to me. The thing I use to charge my phone all the way upstairs is a piece of crap USBC cable that takes 100,000 years to

charge my phone. And I have to change it. And I have not because I keep forgetting when I'm upstairs and it's too much work to come all the way downstairs. But it's like it's a real thing. And you will notice the difference between a really good cable and a really crappy cable in a way that I think with HDMI like most people are not going to notice the difference. Yeah, most people don't even know like, HTML 2.0 and 2.1. And so they're like, what's fine?

Yeah. And if you're like, let's spend $65 on this cable, like someone will come out and just start screaming at you. But you know if your milk foamer is not charging. It's exactly right. Eli can't make coffee

if his milk fomer is not charging. And that's very important. Okay. Here's my last piece on this. And then we should go to the game show. This was the year that Apple did the big transition to USBC. The iPhone has it now.

The EU has mandated it. This is all big news. I feel like that stuff in the weeds of it is less important than how does it feel to use technology that all has this port. So that's what we've sent our time on. But it is the thing that happened. Does that feel like it was a success? Does it feel like it will be an enduring success? Or are we just waiting for USB CD to come along?

USBF? 6G will change everything? That's what I'm saying. Well, 6G change everything? or did we get there with this big European regulation and finally the switch on the iPhone? Alex, what do you think? It'll change nothing. You think it'll change nothing?

I don't think anything's going to change, really. I think we're going to continue this slow roll. I'm a little more hopeful than that. I think the iPhone changing is a big deal. I think it would have been a bigger deal if the iPhone had switched 10 years ago. I think there's a really interesting parallel universe if instead of launching USBC on a MacBook, it had launched it on an iPhone and how the technology world would look different now all these years after that, I think it would look very different and much better. I've talked to a lot of people

in the last, say, six months who are very excited about this and what it'll mean for the kinds of accessories you can buy, knowing that they're going to last more than the life of your phone and the kinds of things that you can put into cars and put into fixtures in your house. And with confidence that this port is going to be around in some way for the next, let's say, 10 years, there's stuff you can do that is cool and different and exciting for everybody. I think if we are still in this place where I can plug a thing into my devices and I have no idea what's going to happen in another 12 months, I'm going to be a lot less optimistic. Join me.

Yeah, either we're going to spend 2024, like weeding out the crappy stuff on Amazon, starting to figure this stuff out. The next rev, a lot of these gadgets will make more affordances for that stuff and it'll be great. or we're just going to be overrun by crappy USBA to USBC gadgets, and I'm going to be on Alex's side saying actually nothing has gotten better. Yeah. I'm somewhere in the middle, and here's what I'll throw out there to just complexify this whole situation. My family has a wide variety of iPhones in it, and some of us have a USBC iPhones.

Some of us have lightning iPhones. And the most popular person on my family on our recent family trip was my nephew who had a MagSafe battery pack that worked with. Everyone's funds. That's so real. Yeah. And it was like, oh, there's another thing going on here that is interesting, right? There's another out for Apple. You know, MagSafe and Chi charging Chi 2 and MagSafe are really tightly aligned.

That's becoming its own little standard right next to USBC. I think that's going to make the ecosystems a little more interesting and a little more compatible, but we'll see. Like, that's the only thing I'll throw in the mix. I'm also optimistic that at least one turn of it is done and that USBC, seems future proofed in a way. Like, it's the thing. It can support everything from a laptop to whatever to change the world's laptops to the next power standard. You need a good reason. Like, this is a tiny little connector and you get 100 watts out of it, 240 watts out of it.

That's most laptops. You don't need anything. Like, the design constrate it imposes is not an inch tall internet connector. Like, you can get what you want out of it. So that's my hope is that It has done what it needs to do for now. And the next turn looks like magnetic charging or whatever. And that is going to make this transition hopefully a little easier because there's something compatible with both along the way. And then a year or two from now, most things will just have the USBC and people will just understand it. And then after that we get to the thing. What was the thing where it was like a lamp that sits in the corner of your room and like beams power at you?

Yeah. They're at CES every year and every year. They're like, we could do it. And every year it's like, well, then do it. That's 8G, baby. One year, one of those companies promised that they had a form and grill that was wirelessly powered. And I was like, I don't believe you. And I went and I shot a video on a flip cam of them cooking a burger.

And it was like the thing was just sitting on a giant plate that was, you know, like wireless. I was like, this isn't really. I understand that there's no wire here, sir. But this is it. We haven't gotten very far. All right. Speaking of the complexity of USBC, we got to take a break. We're going to come back.

with the USBC prices right, then probably some sort of lawsuit from prices right people. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing

that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.

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So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. that's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence

without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a campaign candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time

connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Here it comes from the Vox Media Podcast Studios in New York, New York. It's the USBC Price is Right. Nelai Patel, come on down. We're going to get sued.

I'm just so worried about it. Alex Cranes, come on down. I can't afford to be sued right now. And David Pierce, come on down. I always thought I would do a cool dance if I was on the Price is Right. That was like I had a whole choreography planned. There was a spin move. Ed, here's your host, Liam James.

Okay, welcome to the USBC Price is Right. I'm VirchCat's producer, Liam. James. We have a great game for you today, which will consist of four rounds, all themed around the latest industry's standard connector for all your favorite gadgets. Well, Nilai, David, Alex, you should all know that each of you will be playing today for a Vergecast listener that we randomly pulled out of a hat. Let's hear who Neely is playing for. This is James Alexander, and my favorite USBC gadget has to be the very first one I ever got, a Nexus 6P. Greatest phone Google ever made.

Thank you. All right, James. I'm in it. Yeah, great pick, James. All right, let's hear who David's playing for today. Hey, very chance team. My name is Kabir Ali, and my favorite USBC gadget is my ceramic burr grinder for coffee beans that I got on Amazon. Awesome gadget.

Thanks so much, guys. Hope to win the competition. My fussy coffee people. Let's go, Kabir. I'm in. Let's go. David, you're my sworn enemy now, and Kabir, I don't know you, but you're dead to me. We got to go back and ask a beer if his thing is actually USBA and doesn't have the resistors and can only charge from an A-to-C cable.

Yeah, we'll put that in the follow-up for the next show. But for now, let's hear who Alex is playing for. Hi, my name's Terry, and my favorite USB-C gadget is my Ventrue and Ford Pro. It's a three-channel 4K Wi-Fi dash cam. I put it into my car. I have a key of soul. It's pretty awesome. Also, I would like Alex to represent me.

Yes. Dude found his people. He's like, I've got a fussy dash cam, Alex. But he also has a Kia. So his insurance rate is more than his car. Okay, well, whoever wins, your listener will be sent an awesome, cool, verge, swag basket filled with all kinds of goodies. All right. Is everybody ready?

Let's go. We're ready. All right. The first round is, guess the price. Guess the price of each gadget. The closest guest without going over five wins. Get within $5. Get a bonus of five points.

Let's get started with the first gadget up for bid today. It's a 1080P endoscopic camera for your Android or iOS device. Featuring a 2.1 megapixel camera, six adjustable LEDs. This USB-enabled tool is great for inspecting, hard-to-reach places like car repairs, sewer maintenance, dryer vent inspection, and more. Made by pencilin. Can I ask a follow-up question? Can we spelling be this?

Where can I ask for like, you know, language of origin? I just wonder how many megapixels was it? Two. Two megapix? Okay, that changes everything. The 10b. Okay, whoever gets the closest to the retail price without going over gets the most points. All right.

Alex Kranz. Ooh, what do I want to do? 248. Alex Kranz with $2.48 cents. Wait, 248, not $248. Wow. Alex Cranes with an overbid. I believe it in me.

Look, it's long, it's one long wire. Look, it's at least three cents per megapixel. $248. $248. All right. Mr. Pierce. Okay. Do we have the thing where I can look back at the crowd and ask them to guess for me?

I, 59.99. All right, David Pierce, $59.99. And the thing on Amazon says it's usually $74.99, but it's actually $59.99. That's what I think. And Mr. Patel. Oh, this is very complicated now because I think Alex is way too high. I think David's way too low. $117.

Yeah, that's a good number. Nilai Patel, $117. Actual retail price is $29.90. Let's go. I should have gone with it. I should have just kept my mouth shut. I could have won. Sorry, Terry.

Look, my father was an emergency room doctor. Do not do that with things that cost $29. Check for dryer lint? No. My dryer vents are going to be so clean. You guys don't even know. Okay, that means all three of you actually bid over the retail price. So no points are awarded for this gadget.

But let's move on to our next USBC gadget. It's rechargeable heated socks. by Weston. These stockings will keep your feet warm all day with the power of two small batteries you tuck into a pocket sewn into the socks, which are rechargeable by the included USBC cable. Rechargeable socks by Weston. All right, contestants currently on Weston's website, these socks are actually 50% off, but at what price? Wait, what is the discount price or what is the regular price? What is the discounted price? That's harder. I feel like this tracks with a David is saying is that these are probably never sold at the real price?

Correct. Like, you have to psychologically manipulate people to believing they're getting a deal in order to sell battery socks. Normally, these are $1,000. And today, they're six bucks. All right. Contestants, are you ready? Ready. Okay.

This time, let's go with David Pierce to begin with. It's one pair of socks, yes? One pair of socks. $22.49. All right, David Pierce with $22.49. Mr. Patel. I've learned my lesson. $11 flat.

$11 flat from Mr. Patel and Ms. Krantz. Oh, see, because it's socks. Sox are sneakily expensive sometimes. So I'm going to go with $37.96. You think the socks cost more than the camera. Yes. Actual retail price is $79.95. Oh, my gosh.

Cran's our winner. That's the half off price? That is the half off price. price. I told you. Sox are price. I'm just going to say this out loud. What I've learned from two rounds of USBC prices, right, is people respect some parts of their body much more than other parts of their body. You can get the USBA version of these socks for $199. Oh my God. I'm kidding. I totally made that up. Okay. Let's get to our final gadget for guess the price. It's the Fleer 1 Pro Thermal Imaging Camera for Android phones. This infrared camera accessory has an adjustable USBC connector and lets you find hidden electrical problems,

energy loss, water damage, and other heat-related issues with its thermal imaging with the help of the Fleer 1 app by Fleer. That's so jaunty. All right, contestants, right now on Amazon, you can get this gadget for what price? I reviewed the lightning version of this in like 2017, and I don't think that's going to help me at all. You got to factor out the MFI tax. Yeah, I got to, I got to factor that and also the many years since I last reviewed this. Yeah, inflation. What does Bidenomics say this is worth now? $4,000. Okay, first we have Alex Kranz. Oh, I hate it. $268 and $468 from Alex Kranz.

I feel like that's a good number. Eli Patel, what is your guess? 207. 207.86. 207.86. We have a last minute correction. David Pierce. What is your guess? $1. $1. Price is right, baby. Let's go.

David's taken the entire middle range there. All right. Actual retail price is $420.50. And 50 cents. Oh, my God. Why didn't anyone guess 420? Oh, I'm sorry. But wait, I still win, right? You do.

You do for a while. Yes. Wow. You absolutely won. In fact, let's take a look at our scoreboard as it stands now. Rounding out the back is Nilai Patel with zero. I'm sorry, James. I'll send you a Nexus 5, man.

No matter what happens. Joining him is David Pierce with zero. Here, I'm so sorry. Alex Cranz, our fearless leader. at 10. A commanding lead. All for you, Terry. It's all for you. I can't send you an X-S-W-F because it's a mini-USB. I'll figure it out. Get an adapter. Dungle it.

All right, contestants, the next game we have for you is called the match game. Match the gadget to its max wattage over USBC. Two points per correct match. Here, we have a list of 10 USBC gadgets and 10 of max-powered delivery stats in Watts. As you all may know, power delivery is a specification on USBC that tells us how much power the gadget is allowed to receive for charging. Use your expert gadget knowledge to match each USBC PD number with the appropriate tech. Can I just say this is proof positive that USBC PD is bananas? I'm just going to read you the numbers that are available.

100 watts, 45 watts, 140 watts, 3 watts, 80 watts, 18 watts, 30 watts, 96 watts, watts, 27 watts and 45 watts. Many of these numbers are virtually the same. Universal standards, maybe. Let's tell the audience what the devices are. First, we have the Nintendo Switch from 2019. We have the iPhone 15 Pro. We have the 16-inch MacBook Pro, them three. We also have the Steam Deck OLED model. We have the DuWalt DCB-094 USB charging kit. We have the PS5.com. Dual Sense controller. We have the Samsung Galaxy S23, the OnePlus 115G. We have a 14-inch MacBook Pro, the M1 model, and finally the Pixel 8 Pro. Everyone should have a worksheet we provided for them with all this information. Please match the gadget with the appropriate power wattage.

You may start now. Again, I'm just going to point out it's 10 different devices, many of which are exactly the same category in 10 different numbers. Neil, I stop stalling. All right, I'm going. Oh, I did this one wrong. Did you guys do the thing that I did where you get almost to the end and you realize the two highest ones you haven't done yet and all that's left are ones that don't need that much power? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. C. And I was like, C, C, C, 45. I goofed. No, I think I nailed this. Actually, you know what? I nailed this.

Confidence. All right, contestants. Let's see how everybody did. We're going to take these one at a time. Starting with the Nintendo Switch at 18 watts. Oh, that's a big no. Anybody get that one? Nope.

Next, we've got the iPhone 15 Pro at 27 watts. Oh, I was close on that one. Did you guess 30? I guess 30. I guess 30. You know, what's horrible about this is that we keep going, the more it's guaranteed that I'm wrong. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Next, we have the 16-inch MacBook Pro, M3 model, at 141. Dang it. Hell yeah. You should have all gotten that. I knew that was a thirsty bee. No.

I knew it was thirsty, but I thought something else was thirstier. All right. Next, we have the Steam Deck OLED model at 45 watts. Yes! That's low. That feels loaded. I got that one. It does feel low.

That means I know nothing. I was surprised by this as well. I put a little line in. All right. Next item on the list is the Duwalt DCB-094 USB charging kit at 100 watts. Wow. Yeah. I had it in the math.

Macbook Pro, the 16-inch, I switched them. I got to say I got that one wrong, and everything else waterfalled to wrongness after that. There was just a cascade of inaccurate answers after I got that one wrong. All right, well, we'll rip the Band-Aid off gently here. It's the PS5 Dual Sense Controller at 3 watts. Yes. Yes. Let's go. Samsung Galaxy S-23 at 45 watts.

Yeah. One plus 11 5G at 80 watts. Yeah! That's the only thing I know about Oneplus is that it'll just suck down power. That's what they do, baby. I put 100 because for the same reason, I was like, Oneplus just get after it. Light that battery on fire.

I put that shit on a hot plate. Let's go. All right, the 14-inch MacBook Pro M1 model at 96 watts. Oh! Finally, we have the Pixel 8 Pro at 30 watts. Hey! Bang! I got two!

I told you I take this home. All right, contestants. let's find out how you did. A reminder that each one that you got correct here counts for two points. A reminder that this is the winning worksheet. And if I had gotten the DeWalt thing correct. All right, Mr. Hotshot, tell us how many you got right. That's five.

Got five correct guesses. Wow. David Pierce, how many correct guesses do you have on your worksheet? I got a whopping two right. Two correct from David Pierce. I have probably five other ones that are one wrong away. Like, should I have put 100 when I put 96? Yes, I should have.

Should I have put 80 when I put 96? Yes, I should have tough beat for David. Kabir, I'm sorry. Four points for me. All right. Alex Cranes. How many correct guesses do you have? Well, I can't make fun of David because it's the exact same.

Two. I also got two right. But I got two right in the last round, so I'm winning. Did you both try to do the highest and lowest first? Like, I knew that PS5 was the lowest. Yes. And then I was just trying to figure out where the highest was. and I knew it was the MacBook.

I did highest first, and then I started to scramble because I realized I'd done it all wrong, but it was too late. So I was like, oh, PS, PS. I know that one's going to be low. And that's the one I got right. I very confidently, the first line I drew was iPhone 15 Pro to 30 watts because I was sure that was like, no question that was correct. Three watts off.

And then, no, I'll tell you what threw me while I'm being angry about this, is that the Nintendo Switch is famously the hardest gadget on the, to buy cables for. So I looked at this and I was like, what's the most random number on here? Because I bet that's it. And I landed on 27 for the Switch. And I was so sure that was right

because I was like, no other cable except the one done one that Nintendo will sell you will work. So it has to be a random one. And I was wrong and I'm furious. I just randomly chose 96 and I was crock. You think the switch takes 96 watts of power? The Switch has the processing horsepower of a phone

from 2009. I was like, maybe it just gets thirsty. Well, I will just say you guys are doing much better than you did last year on the Bluetooth Jeopardy game. Fair enough. Let's review the points from that round. Mili got 10 points for his five correct guesses. Yeah. Worst to first.

David, Pierce, and Alex Cranz each got four points for their two correct guesses, bringing our grand totals to Mili at 10, David at four, and Alex at 14. Yeah. Santa's back. I got you, Terry. All right, now we go into round three. Round three is Madlips. We have given you a sentence with a bunch of terms missing, but all the terms are jumbled.

The sentence comes from a recent Android Authority article spelling out just how complicated USBC has gotten. Fill in the gaps in the sentence with the provided terms. We'll give you three points each per correct placement. And the sentence is, blank is based on blank and aligned with the blank. specification, thereby bundling in blank tunneling support for two blank or a single blank display output and blank capabilities on blank devices. Do we have four hours to complete this? And the terms we have for the sentence are displayport 2.0, 4K, PCI Express, Hub, Thunderbolt 4, USB 4, Thunderbolt 3, An 8K.

All right, everyone. Please use your worksheet to fill out the sentence. I got it. Can I ask for definitions on several of these words? Also, is PCI express a trick because no one has used that in 25 years? Are there more words than there are slots? No. Nailed it.

By the way, that's how I took the LSat in case you're wondering. I finished the worksheet and just stood up and said, nailed it after every section. I'm having deep regrets already, but I'm locked in. I hit the buzzer. Cranz, you ready? Well, I guess I'm going to have to be. I've worked something somewhere.

I knew the people who took the L-Sat that way, too. All right. Let's hear your sentences, contestants, starting with Alex Kranz. That's rude. That's very rude. Thunderbolt 4 is based on Thunderbolt 3 and aligned with the PCI Express specification, thereby bundling in, this is where it goes really bad, USB4 tunneling, no, that's just wrong, support for up to 2 hub or a single display port 2.0 display output, and 4K capabilities on 8K devices. You really just ran out of words there. That's how that feels.

Okay, let's go with David Pierce next. Thunderbolt 4 is based on USB 4 and aligned with the Thunderbolt 3 specification, thereby bundling in PCI Express Tunneling support for up to 2,4K or a single 8K display output and hub capabilities on DisplayPort 2.0 devices. Oh, that makes sense. I'm not sure that it does. You guys do not spend nearly enough time on the DisplayPort Wikipedia page. Sean Hollister is very upset somewhere right now. All right, Nilai Patel, tell us your sentence. USB4 is based on PCI Express and aligned with a Thunderbolt 4 specification,

thereby bundling in Thunderbolt 3 tunneling support for up to 2.4K displays or a single 8K display I put in DisplayPort 2.0 capabilities on hub devices. All right. I believe NELA is going to be our winning contestant here, but let me read this sentence for you. It's actually USBC4 is based on Thunderbolt 3 and aligned with the Thunderbolt 4 specification. That doesn't make any sense. No, I refuse. Thereby bundling in displayport 2.0 tunneling support for up to 2.4K or 1,8K display output and PCI Express capabilities over hub devices.

I just got two words in the, and they are the same word. Thunderbolt and PCI Express are the same thing. Yeah, so why didn't you put them in the right places, Patel? Hominiums. The power of suggestion. No, I maintain the first clause of this sentence objectively. makes no sense and should not be allowed. I refuse.

Just like to remind you, this sentence came from an Android Authority article spelling out just how complicated USBC has gotten. I'd like to have a word with Android Authority. Could we bring them on the show? Yes. I'd like to question your authority, good sir. All right. So let's review that round of Madlips to see how we did. Eli Patel got five correct guesses for a total of 15.

David Pierce got two correct guesses for a total of six. points. Don't say it like that. And Alex Cranz only got one, correct? Got one. For a total of three points. Let's go back to the big board to see our totals. We've got Nelai Patel at 25 now, taking the lead. Yes. David Pierce at 10 and Alex Cranz at 17. And it would be more if it wasn't for the corrupt Android authority whose administration I will bring down. I got to crush Neelai in the last round. My sets are higher, Cranz. I think for an extra 10 points, can Neelai be forced to explain? this in English.

Yes, now that I have the correct one. So the way that I always think about this, just very quickly, and I know I'm going to gloss over the details, but the way I always think about this is that Thunderbolt and PCI Express are the same thing. And PCI is what's in your computer, and Thunderbolt is that exact same connectivity over a wire. That means Thunderball has lots of bandwidth. It's really fast.

You can do expansion with it, which is how you get PCI expansion chassis over Thunderbolt. This all makes sense. So all this is saying is over time, USB 4 and Thunderbolt, as USB gets faster and faster and faster, it starts to inherit the capabilities of Thunderbolt because Apple and Intel are all mixed up in the standard here. They're starting to align the things so that you can do more Thunderbolt things on USB as it gets faster. So here, USB 3 is inheriting a bunch of Thunderbolt 3 capabilities in alignment with Thunderbolt 4, which is itself getting faster. and that means USB4 can now do Thunderbolt three things, like DisplayPort 2.0 for 24K or 1 8K device, and PCI expansion on hubs.

I also appreciate that Nelai said it in more words than Andrew Authority. So good job, Andrew and Thorpecatively more. All right, let's go to that final round, everyone, which is the showcase. Guess the price of the combined showcase without going over. The closest guess wins 20 points. Guess within $250. We'll give you an extra five points. I hate this.

Can we go back to Madlibs? Guess within $100, get an extra 10 points. Guess within $50 and we'll give you a whopping 50 bonus points. All right. Kabir, this is our moment. Let's go. Let's see what we have in this showcase. In this package, experience USBC in all of its many uses with this all-inclusive podcasting kit.

Oh, my God. This cutting-edge package would, in theory, include a 16-inch 2023 MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip, 12-core CPU, 18-core GPU, 16-core neural engine, of course, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and 140-watt USB-Hauer adapter. Along with that, we have the Sony W8, 1000XM-5 wireless headphones, chargeable by USBC. And then, Rhodes' NT1 5th-generation studio condenser microphone, which allows connection with both XLR and USBC. Anchor's 563 10 and 1 USBC docking station, LG's 28-inch 16-by-18 dual-up monitor with USBC,

and to top it all off, a waterless portable essential oil diffuser, rechargeable by USBC, by Lintro. So it's a wellness podcast. I just want to be clear. All right, contestants, please guess the price of this deluxe podcasting kit. We're going to start with our leader, Nilai Patel. Okay, 417999. All right. We've got Nilai at 4,17999. Next on the scoreboard, we have Alex Kranz.

4,856. We don't know how much that microphone costs at all. Alex Kranz is going with $4,856. And David Pierce, what is your guess? $1. $1. Yeah. In a classic price is right.

I wrote down an actual number that I will tell you when I find out whether I won or not. All right. We'll get there at a moment. The actual retail price of this package is $3,847. Shit. And 96 cents. Come here. We did it.

But I'm closer. You went over. It doesn't matter. Is that how that works? Because this is Price is Right rules. if you've gone over, you lose. Which means... The comeback of the century.

No one knows how much that microphone costs. Can we get individual prices? All right. Let's break that down in more detail. The 16-inch 2023 MacBook Pro with M3 chip was $2,49. Got that exactly right. The Sony headphones were $329.99. I was $20 off on that.

I was so close. I was a little high there. The Road NT1 condenser microphone was $249. Oh, I was just a little high, actually. It was only $50 high. I was $100. Hello. The Anchor 563 docking station was $129.99.

That's a good deal. I'm way off on that one. Andrew, you put together a nice little package here. Yeah. It's very affordable. I put it at $50. The LG dual-up monitor with USBC was $599.99. I put $6.50.

I was pretty close. Why is my LG monitor half that size and twice that price? You love pixel density. The thing you don't know about the duel up is that it only has 10 pixels. And finally, the Lindro 2023 Waterless Portable Essential Oil Diffuser from Amazon at $39.99. Oh, it nailed that one. Yeah, I know my Amazon garbage. Your company's called Lindro and you put the year in the product description.

You're not going over 50. This is much more affordable than I thought. I was high in the headphones, the microphone in the docking station, and that allowed David to win. I had that MacBook at three grand, not $2,500, and I blame Apple for not making any sense with what it sells you. And I was in aggregate, basically dead on with the rest of it. So I ended up, the number I wrote down was $4395.61. And if you take away that $500, I was like, I was right there. So I'm feeling good about this.

But also I won anyway. So learn how to play the game, Patel. David is fired. And what you've won is being alone for the holidays. That's correct. David got 20 points from this round, our other two contestants with zero. That makes David our winner today with 30 points. Eli just behind him at 25. And finally, Alex Kranz with 17 points.

Rigged by the corrupt Android Authority. So sad. Congratulations to our winner who David was playing for Kabir. And let's tell Kabir what he's won. In our Verge swag gift bag, we've got a Verge cast t-shirt. from the popular What's a Photo series? We've got this awesome pair of Vergecast sweatpants, a Verge mug, a Verge hat, and of course, a Verge Fanny Pack.

Thank you to everyone for playing, and thank you all for listening. Please get your pets paid and neutered to help control the pet population. We'll be right back after this break with more of the USBC holiday spectacular. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a story, front, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On Whatnot, you go

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Claude. a.ai slash vergecast. All right, we're back. I'm going to tell you right now, I feel like USBC price is rigged, and I should have won. David is my mortal enemy now. I also feel like that.

I feel like I just really didn't deserve to win that. Like, I did it. I did it for Kabir and I did it for everybody. But I didn't deserve that victory. I'll take it to be very clear. But I'm just looking at the sentence that I wrote and I don't deserve anything. I was so close. I also can't believe you won with a $1.

Anyway, whatever. We're going to have some beef next year. And also, most assuredly, a trademark lawsuit. It's just coming for us and that's fine. Oh, yeah. Alex, in the meantime, has gone on vacation. She's just on Santa Slade, flying around the world, giving out gifts to all the good boys and girls. It's great.

I hope she enjoys her break. But David and I are sticking around to talk to Noah Denzel, who is the co-founder and CEO of Nomad Goods. In this conversation, David, I really enjoyed it. Yeah, it was fun. We talked about USBC. We talked about wireless charging. We talked about just like what it means to be an accessory company in this new world of USBC. And it's very clear that this is a thing he spends a lot of time.

thinking about and having ideas about. And like, he didn't tell us as much of the weird stuff that they're building as I wanted him to. But he told us some of the weird stuff. What's fascinating by this is the iPhone switching to USBC created a vast new market for USBC products, which is really interesting. And Noah got all the way into what that means for how he runs the business and how you can build a business around a standard like USBC. Right. All right.

Without further ado, here's Noah Denzel, the co-founder and CEO of Nomad Goods. Welcome, Noah. Hey, thanks for having me. Thank you for celebrating the holidays with us by talking about USBC. Hey, this is a USBC holiday. I'm sure there's going to be. It's a good subject for around the table discussion. Confusing, not too controversial.

Yeah, right. Everyone's got an opinion, but none of the opinions matter. Confusing not too controversial is like the perfect tagline for USBC. That's very good. It's definitely confusing. There's a lot of potential. It's a standard size, but what's going on in that size, there's all kinds of different things going on. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is why we wanted to have you on here because you're somebody who is actually like making this stuff for people in the world. Right. And like just sort of poking around your website, it seems like you went at some point in the last year or so basically like all in USBC. Like I had a hard time finding non-USBC stuff for sale from Nomad, which I feel like in the past your thing was kind of always like we have all the cables for all the people. And now you're just like it's USBC time. Get out of here. Yeah, our customer base tends to be very early adopter, and we internally are as well. So like the second that something's even announced, we see this. We saw our sales shift from Lightning to USBC before the iPhone 15 was shipping. For context, historically, when we've had micro USB stuff or USBC stuff and Lightning stuff, we've always been way stronger on Lightning and five or seven times more. And then all of a sudden, earlier this summer, we saw. that our USBC, we launched a product actually charge key. We launched a USBC in a lightning version

and the USBC version was outselling the lightning version. That would typically never happen. This was before the iPhone 15 debuted. That was just based on rumor and speculation. So our customers are living in that forefront. So like as soon as the EU says it's USBC time, people just start going to nomads website and buying USBC stuff basically. It's wild. It's fun. They keep us busy. And that's where we like to play. You know, that's the fun being on that front edge. When you're at the beginning of a new cable era, obviously USBC's been around for a while, but until the iPhone does it, you know, it doesn't seem to get the recognition it deserves. But it's, it's this future proofing,

which is really cool because anything you buy right now, I mean, if I were buying a car right now and it didn't have a USBC port, I would rethink that car purchase, right? That's a massive purchase. I just would not want to be stuck behind. I mean, I honestly personally wouldn't even wanted to have a USBA port. But if it did, I would be okay with that. That's just like, we're ripping forward through USBC, and it's way better. The car example is really interesting, right? The experience a lot of people have with USBC up until nowish, maybe, is that it's

the new charging connector. So they would buy an Android phone. It would come with a cable, maybe even a USBA and USBC cable, and that's how they charge their phone. And that might be how they charged everything. But then it also has this huge data functionality that it's, very complicated. It can also be a thunderbolt cable. You're an accessory maker. How have you been thinking about just communicating what does what to people? Because that seems like the hardest part

about USBC. So we have some materials on our website and some blog information. And we probably need to do even more to explain what is USBC. Because to us, we get the problem of we're just surrounded by this when we've been thinking about it for years and we assume everybody knows. Sometimes we talk about how higher wattage, you know, charging a faster speed. But sometimes a really helpful piece of communication is language surrounding like minutes to charge, you know, 20% in 20 minutes. That might be more relatable or 30% in 20 minutes. So, so like what is the core thing that the person wants? And how is it really helping their life? Because what all these numbers mean? I mean, sometimes there's numbers and specs are so high and crazy and you can't even use it. The iPhone can only charge

jet, I think it's only rated for 20. I think it charges closer to 30. And often that's only for a very short amount of time, right? You're not necessarily getting peak speeds at all times. If you're over 80%, if you're really high up on your phone, you're going to charge slower. So trying to break it down, let people know that sometimes using the like analogies, it's like a hose and the size of your hose versus, you know, these are terms that our engineers here will explain it when we're debating internally. But this makes me think, like, I hate buzz words all the time. And this makes me think we like really need some good buzzwords here. It's like, like, like Tesla did a good job with superchargers, right? Where there's like, people now understand

that there is like a waiter charger car and then there are super chargers. And those are faster because super is a big fast word. And now it's like maybe we need like cables and fast cables and like mega cables. And it's like people will suddenly understand how these things work. We do. In companies like nomad, we try. I mean, we come up with our own little internal buzzwords. often from a marketing standpoint to be like, you know, for example, you know, supercharging capability or something. It's, it is kind of nice when there's actually a standard because then it's like, cool, we're building to that spec. We'd obviously building to a certain spec. And it can be confusing for the consumer too, because there's, there's real things that are like from USB,

you know, the USB system, the USB standard. And there's protocols on that standard. And then there's marketing things that, A, may be actually helpful because it's like, oh, I can make sense of that supercharging. B, it could just be buzzwords from a company, but maybe that company is so big that their language confuses you and sounds official when it's actually not. So it's wild. Yeah. So that's the basic challenge of USBC, right? It can do so many things and so many different permutations that even just talking about it is hard, which is fascinating, right? You've got to market the products. You've got to invent new things. You've got to tell people what they can do. but the business is built around something that's pretty amorphous, right?

Like, Nomad makes USBC accessories. What's your relationship to the standard like? Are you thinking about the next version of how much power can come through a PD cable? Are you saying, okay, here's where the base of iPhone owners is. We've got to rush some products to market. Building a company around a standard seems like you need to pay a lot of attention to the standard, but you can't get too far ahead because the market hasn't gotten there yet. Yeah, I think you just brought up a great point mentioning PD. So power delivery was a great example of kind of a standard term or threshold wattage at which point that is considered kind of the standard of fast charging. Challenges, USBC has been just ripping and roaring forward. So I think it was 20 watts before maybe it was 18. And so at this point, charging at that speed could almost be considered kind of slow. So power delivery, which was fast just a couple of years ago. And like in my book, I'd call that.

like good, you know, solid. So yeah, staying on point with the standards, we absolutely have the problem of chasing the front edge so much. That's where the fun is. That's where the excitement is. But it also can be like too far out there for sure. We've had that happen. We actually launched our first USBC product in 2016, I think it was. And I think it came out in 2014. But like that product had a 3,000 million up hour integrated battery. It was 12 volt in. So you plug it into the 12 volt, the cigarette lighter thing. And it charged itself up, its battery, and also had an A and a C out. Everyone was using the A and not the C on it because it was just so early and it was kind of ahead of its time. That was in 2016. So we've been doing this C for a long time. We've been waiting for this moment for a long time.

Sometimes it can be really expensive when you're trying to get on that really, really front edge and you might make a product and it's super cool. And it's like, do people really need this? And to need it, they're going to need to pay for it, right? because some of the stuff that's not at the mass scale yet, it can be substantially more expensive. So it can be finding that sweet spot of the front edge or certainly where things are moving. I came across a really great word the other day called extensibility, extensible. It's a quality of something that's basically future-proofing, right? So the cool thing about USBC is it's extensible. So they have this standard size.

It's updating and it's growing, right? You know, 4K, then 8K and then the high-speed data and this and that. So it's cool that we seem to have come to this standard size that is extensible and it's growing. And it means that for an accessory maker like ourselves, we have a big pool to play in. And we have a lot of, we can bring forward ideas. We can adapt. We can update. We can be thinking about power, portable power data.

What if we want an issue where there's not data for security? Sometimes when you're charging in a public environment, maybe you want to ensure that data is not going through. It's exciting and interesting. and it means that there's opportunities and challenges for us to build for it, but it's certainly got so many pros. And we like that. We embrace that. It's annoying as a customer, as a consumer, to have six different cables and you

always seem to have the wrong one. Those days are kind of over, at least largely improved. I'll give you largely improved. I think over is hopeful. That's what you've got to take to the holiday table, David. You got to be like, grandma, look, it's largely improved. Do you feel the spirit of Christmas? No, to your point, like the thing all of that relies on, and I'm curious how you feel about this, is like getting the connector itself right.

If we're at a point where it is so sort of future-proof and extensible, like you're talking about, that we won't regret that choice in a decade, a lot of things will change around it and it, like, you know, there will be backwards compatibility, stuff, but whatever. But, like, do you feel like we got the connector right? Like, as somebody who works with it all the time, is it, did we do it correctly? I feel like we did. I've got to say when we started in 2012 with our first product charge card, it was a 30-pin adapter for the iPhone. So I think they switched in 2012 or 2013. So when we started, it was the 2012. And they shifted the lightning.

And it was cool. It was good. It was, it was great. What we've seen there's been kind of these like looks like there's kind of a 10-year window. So does this usher in a 10-year window? I think that we're at the beginning of a relatively large window. It's hard to say. I mean, it makes sense to me that ports would also stay around for charging, but of course,

we have the whole component as well of wireless and Chi and the Chi 2 standard that's coming out. And does Apple want to go portless? Do some devices want to go portless and drop the port altogether? Nonetheless, remaining the port, but with some option of wireless. So from what I've seen, from what we've seen, it seems like we should probably have a good 10-year window. These are the types of windows you need for it to be useful because otherwise you're on an airplane. lane and then you're like, gosh, darn it. But aren't we at the end of the 10-year window?

Right? USBC hit in, what, 2015? Yeah, there's one version of it that says we're nine years into a 10-year window. Yeah, I guess it depends on the level of the adoption and a big impactor is, look, you know, the United States, the iPhone is the leading smartphone. It's a leading smartphone globally. They just took it all this year. I think that's big. That's a big impactor there and should give us a decent window. It's hard to say, if they do change, it will be there. There's nobody like telling you about USBD already, right? Like is this is this a thing that's that's coming next year? We just don't know that yet.

Oh, gosh. Not hopefully not yet. We need to give us a little bit of time to get the standard rolled out. So let me ask about Apple, actually. I'm always curious to ask accessory manufacturers this. For the longest time there was lightning and that was your volume seller, right? You pointed out like that's where all the volume was. That's where people were buying.

And lighting was pretty fixed. Like they rolled it out in 2012 or whatever. never changed. It was the thing it was for the whole time and you were able to build the business around that. And mostly it was charging. Like there were just not a lot of like cool computer things you could do with a lightning port. I had like a silly little camera attachment for my iPhone at one point, but like all this stuff fizzled out. Was that because that's how Apple wanted it is because you didn't have the market. I always wonder if that's where all the people were buying was lightning accessories. Why were the only lightning accessories like cable?

in battery packs. Why weren't there anything else? Yeah, it was a very controlled and in somewhat conservative market. So MFI is made for iPhone. That's the Apple sort of guidelines and program that manages it. And it's very clear and very strict guidelines. There's some wiggle room. You could submit exception requests to products. We actually had a couple products that had exception requests that had to do largely with the housing that was holding the connector so we we made like a carabiner cable that was really cool. Cool. We made it. We made our key, a little charge key short cable. So these were, these were not the most, you know, wild exceptions that are more like an industrial design exception, but it's very controlled

environment. And then you think about female, right? So when we think of lightning, we tend to think of the male. These are the connectors that you buy and you integrate them on cables and this and that. Well, I feel like we just need to explain to people exactly. You mean the part that you go into, right? There's the plug and there's the socket. And so when you say female, you mean the socket. The socket. So it was that very few products had, the female lightning on them. From Apple on theirs did, right? The iPhone has anything that takes a lightning or the battery pack, for example. Lightning was really, generally speaking, was really a male program, right? It was really just a little, the connector plug that goes in.

You think of USBC, it's double universal, right? It turns around. It's 360, you can turn it on both sides. Lightning did that too, of course, but both ends can go both ways. It's actually one of the things that I'm really excited about is that they've enabled reverse charging. And I know, I get in trouble in these things. I say, like, you know, the iPhone did this. It's like, yeah, well, the Android did that years ago. I know. I know. It's still, and it's so amazing now on USBC because it can go both ways. So, you know, you're out at the bar and your phone's dead. You buy someone a beer. You charge your phone from their phone or vice versa. So if you're irresponsible and your battery's dead, you need one of these on these. If you're responsible, you need one of these

on you so you can charge other people. So there's just cool stuff going on with USBC. And so there's things like that that never were really part of the lightning thing because it wasn't going both ways. So there's things like that that just make it better and interesting and again, confusing. Yeah. Right. If we put power in the mix, which way is it going? What's charging what? You know, you need to kind of choose on the phone or does it just go out if it's to the AirPods. It's just going out. You're not charging the phone from the AirPods. But interesting stuff there. Yeah. Well, and even beyond just charging. It seems like one of the things we were amazed by with the iPhone was how not locked down its USBC setup is.

You can just plug most things into it. Some of them work. Some of them don't, but we were sort of consistently surprised by the number of like computery accessories that suddenly worked with the iPhone. And I feel like for you, you're now in this position where you can build one set of accessories that works with iPhones, which are, it sounds like the majority of your customers, but also with the whole universe of Android phones. and then also do this gigantic set of things that you've never been able to do before with accessories. Has it changed the list of things you feel like you can build just because it is this universal port that theoretically you can plug almost anything into and it'll do something? Absolutely. A, from a technical standpoint and B, from now we have the opportunity to do it standpoint,

meaning now that everyone's together, one of my best friends is a diehard Android user. And when we launched this charge key, he sent me a message. he bought five. And he said, you finally made something for Android. And of course, of course, and you're like sort of. And of course I'm thinking like, dude, we've been making the best cables for USBC for years. But it's true. We're largely iPhone. So from a customer base standpoint. So it's huge for us. And I just say that because we were all about building portable power, keeping charged on the go, keeping it protected on the go with our cases and so forth. But we've, it's always been part of us. And now though, that it's obviously like this cable without question.

thought that there's two models and one sells more than the other, there's one model and it goes to everyone. That's huge for us. I mean, from a research and development standpoint, it means let's probably invest more into this because we don't have to build two of them or we don't have to make a judgment call. Is there a market for this one? So it's incredible from that standpoint. We have a lot of great ideas brewing right now. We have a couple products that are in development that are going to be released in 2024 that I think are a little bit ahead of their time, if not early, we're trying to, there's a challenge that it poses as well is the Apple lightning ecosystem was a protected kind of ecosystem, right? You see products at gas station,

so forth that were non-MFI, right? But if generally a customer wants to buy something, if you're buying a quality product, it's MFI. So it was a controlled environment. So while there were all these annoying rules and stuff, it was a safe environment. One of the challenges of the USBC is there's less of that, right? So you go to the gas station, how do you know that that $5 cable is good. Well, if you're buying a MFI lightning cable, it costs a lot of money, $20 or $30, but the components are coming through the from the Apple ecosystem. So these are going to be challenges that we face from what you had mentioned earlier about the standard in marketing and these key terms and buzzwords. But these are going to be challenges that we face.

And so from our side, I can already see that there's going to be a little bit of some fun coming together. And hopefully some things do prevail, some solid standards and so forth so we can give clarity to customers and what they're buying and what they can expect from the products. With all that extra, you know, resource available for research and development, do you see more in different kinds of USBC accessories coming out now? Yeah. Great question. I mean, having a cable on you at all times becomes more important than ever before. So perhaps portable cables, portability could be more important. especially as there's this universality, it's like there's way more reasons for why you would need it.

Before, do you want to bring a cable with you? You might use it for one use case and you need another cable for another use case. That's kind of annoying. So I think we're going to see more things like that, more portable cables and perhaps just maybe some higher quality cables where you're investing in a strong. Because, you know, before you're so annoyed, you know you've already bought 20 cables. You have a drawer in your desk filled with random cables. You know, the last thing you want to do is spend $30 on a cable. And now it's like, hey, do the research.

There's a really incredible high-speed data cable. I think it's the Thunderbolt one from Apple out there, 240 watts, this and that. It's nice to know that that's going to be around for a while and it's going to have so much universality and usefulness. So it could be worth investing. We have Kevlar on our cables. You know, that's coming from DuPont. It's a license thing. It's like the real deal.

So our cables aren't cheap, but they're really well made. We have metal tips to them. So I could understand why. someone would be annoyed a few years ago and they just want to buy the cheapest cable possible because hey it might break on them be the standards are changing c they need to have five different cables but now with one you can be a little more thoughtful about it yeah do you think i was going to ask you about the kevlar cables because you were you were early to the idea of what i would call a ludicrously fancy charging cable like the the kevlar stuff you started doing like in 2019 i think right that's which is

like ancient history in the charging cable universe but i think the idea that you should eventually carry the one sort of the cable that charges the hardest thing you have to charge and then kind of scales down to everything else. Like that seems like where we have to get in this crazy world of charging that we're going to get into that you either carry a bunch of different USBC cables or you carry like the one like the epic cable. God cable. Right. The God cable. It's Christmas. It arrives in a virgin birth. Yeah. I'm trying to make the Christmas jokes as much as I can. So just the universe best cable. We're calling it the God cable. It is now officially known to God cable. Like, is the God cable going to be a thing? Oh, I guess the God cable is kind of. We already made it a thing. It happened

already. This is great. The USBC cable. And I mean, I would argue, I can't, I can't, I love this product. It's the best cable is the one you have on you. So I love our charge key because the best cable is with you when you need it. But isn't that the problem with USBC is that that's not necessarily true anymore? Yeah, how fast is the charge cable? You love it. It's great. And I understand why you like it. Can it charge my MacBook at 100 watts? Ours, right, this version right here will just charge up to 60 watts, but we're probably going to increase the speed to go 100. The MacBook Air tops out at, I think, 35 watts.

So 60 alone, you're charging really, really high speed. I got to run these M1 Ultras, dog. We're coming. We're coming for it. So there's something else happening there. You mentioned it before, which is MagSafe, Che2. Just to make this stuff, there's a whole bunch of really hardcore engineering, probably for you, a bunch of supplier deals, right?

The bleeding edge of USB power is all in GAN and getting supply of GAN chips. In Chi-2, I'm sure that the supplier base of people actually making Chitu stuff is pretty limited right now. Let's start with GAN. That's what you need to have in order to build the most powerful at USBC stuff. How does that market work? Are you in it? Do you have exclusives?

Do you have to fight off other vendors? Yeah, so GAM, Gali, Nitride is the kind of the high-speed dense, sort of compact, high-speed standard, I guess you could say. When you're doing these things at first, earlier on, it's going to be more expensive. So back to your point on the supply chain and the suppliers and contract manufacturers, they're pretty on this stuff. So we're usually one of the early companies to be excited and be pushing the boundaries of those things. And for GAN, that was a couple years ago where it was more really on the forefront. It's certainly become the kind of premium commodity tech, let's say, because there's still plenty of stuff out there that's not. And it's going to be less expensive. It's going to be

bulkier. And when you think about costs as well in supply chain, there's the cost of freight and air freight and shipping. So it depends. What's the thing you want to build that you can't now, but the next rev of GAN would let you build? Well, I would love to go. Even really compact so we could have the AC to C integrated. Right. So AC 120 Volt. in or up to 40, whatever, for your other places. AC2C extremely compact, extremely compact. So hyper compact. So it's so small.

It fits on your keychain. And it's smaller than a key fob. So it's kind of like game over with this, you can charge. You just have a wall plug on your keychain. But it's so tiny that it's elegant, right? We don't want to be carrying around a funky brick with us. I love this answer. This is completely not what I was expecting.

I love you. A straight 110 plug on a keychain is what you're after. You're like, where's my 200 like crazy charger thing? Yeah, I was like 200,000 watts. Let's go. Like, you can plug a Tesla into a USBC.

Like, and you're like, here's what I want. Like a wall plug. But that's actually really interesting to think about it. If that's what you can stretch out to, we're kind of just back to having power cables. Yeah.

Right? Only this is a power cable that has intelligence and it to self-negotiator rate. Like, we are just back to power cables is that like i don't know i bought a power strip for seven dollars yesterday it's a real thing that happened and i did not think i mean maybe you should not buy one that you're going to run too many amps on but like most people do not think about a power strip they're like i'm going to buy a power strip and i'm going to have six plugs in it hopefully i can fit all my walworts on it and that's how i'm going to evaluate this power strip and you don't think about

charging speeds or delivery with usb you have to and yet usbc is going to become the power cable for the world. Are we going to get to a place where we can just stop thinking about it that way because you're going to integrate a regular power plug on the end and it'll just negotiate it intelligently? Like, how is that going to play out? Yo, you've got me thinking to your previous question as well as I'm just really hopeful that it becomes as universal as it can become. I'm just thinking about all the products that we have that don't use USBC, but do use their own AC to DC wall warp thing. And you're plugging in with a barrel connector. It's called the little circular plug. And think of your, your Dyson vacuum cleaner,

your, you know, any, it's certain mini household products, et cetera. So we still have so many products out there that are using all their weird little power systems. And then if you lose the thing, you don't know, I have a charge. I have a little air pump like mattress air inflator thing. And I can't remember where I put that barrel plug. And I like don't buy things if they don't have USBC. If they could have USBC, I've been waiting for years to do it at USBC, electric shape. So there's all these household items and all these things that I'm excited for it to come to it. And as that happens, like back to your point on what's your like dream build, I guess like, I don't know, maybe as well. Again, really boring answer, but building the cables that can supply the wattage for these household appliances and devices that might take a higher wattage to charge.

Because I don't want to have still, when you look at even though USBCs become universal for all of our portable electronics, and so forth, it's not quite universal on household appliances and all these other things that are running on DC anyways and probably should go USBC. And sometimes the supply chain there can be slow to change. I'm sure we all have had the experience where you bought something. And you're like, wait, it's still using that cable. Yeah. You know, I'm using a mic. Granted, it's an older one right now. And it has a mini USB on it. And it's really high quality mic. It's from years ago. But even when I got it, It was weird that it had the mini on it. So sometimes things can take a while in the deep supply chain.

You might go into REI to buy a light, a camping light, and it might still have micro. And I'm at a point where I'm not buying that. Like, I'm going to, unless it's the only one of its kind, it's just, it's got to be USBC. One of the things I've been wondering is as we get to that universality, like the sort of addressable market of everything USBC goes up in a really big way, now that it's kind of of universal and available to everybody. Like, everybody's just going to have USBC stuff. And part of what that makes me wonder is if, like,

you're talking about these sort of super niche accessories can start to come back, right? Like, I feel like, especially in the electronic space, you can spend an outrageous amount of money on, like, a really fancy case for your iPhone. And that's about it. And I now wonder if, like, if Nelai is going to be able to get his ultra fancy many thousands of dollars, multi-device charger, because there aren't tons of money. of people in the world who would buy that, but there's just enough. And now they all can because it's USBC. And I wonder, like, are we going to, all of the stuff that's been out there

until now has been sort of mainstream on purpose because you have to be in order to sort of be accessible to people who would buy this thing. But now I wonder, the market is just so much bigger if it's just going to get much weirder and nichier and fancier and more luxurious. And part of that is just really exciting to me that we're going to get to like the speaker market, right, where it's like you can buy the $20 speakers everybody has. But you can also spend 50 grand on a pair of speakers if you really want to. And there's just enough people in the world for that that it works. And I wonder if we're going to get there with some of these accessories too.

I kind of hope so. I hope so. I imagine it's coming. I was just chatting the other day with our supply chain director, guy named Darren, total audio file and spends a good chunk of his paycheck going into these really nice speakers. I'm with you, Dan. Let's hang. What's hang, our people.

And he was buying Monitor, British company, and just really beautiful work that they do on the metals and the housings and in the industrial design, just kind of, kind of in that really upper level category. My left, rights and centers are monitored. I'm with you. Darren, we vibe, baby. You guys would love it. And he, it was just funny looking at it and he was getting all excited about these details.

And I could just imagine so many companies who are in the broader electronics, speaker, consumer space, you know, companies that have been around for a while have really high standards. build really cool stuff. This is an opportunity for them to go, oh, okay, that thing finally settled, all that BS of all the different cables and this and that. And granted, before the cables not only were their different standards, they didn't have the capabilities that USBC has. USBC has a lot of capabilities. So like I was saying, we just got some new monitors in the office, and instead, we can now

get USBC cables for them or USBC HTML cables, because I'm sort of sick of the whole HTML I think too. So it's just really cool what can happen. And I do think that with more universality, it opens the opportunity for people to take it seriously, to jump in and to build really cool stuff. I hope that Nomad can continue to be one of those. And I expect we're going to see some high-end competition and it'll help us help keep us sharp. And Nilai, I think we're going to, if we don't make it, granted, we got some cool stuff in the works. I think we're going to be seeing stuff like that out there. And that's totally up our alley too. So I love it. I know. we got to let you go. I got to say in the, in the spirit of the holiday, there's no better place

in this than with some light shit talk about HTML. That's a perfect ending for the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular. Just throwing it right back at the H.TMI people. They were our first spectacular, by the way. A deeply political organization, I have to tell you. I thought we were going non-controversial. No, no, it's the holidays, man. We're lightening this thing on fire. Let's talk politics. Now, amazing. Thank you so much for joining us on the Burgecast Holiday Spectacular. Thanks, guys. U.S.S.BC, U.S.B.C. How faithful are your transfers. All right, boys and girls, that's it for the Vergecast, Holiday Spectacular USBC edition.

We hope you have a happy holiday season. We hope your families are safe. We hope you get a lot of charging cables in your stockings that can go at 240 watts and the transfer data at 40 gigabits per second. The GZ cable, if you will. It's the holidays. We hope you have a happy new year. Hold your loved ones tight. Throw away their lightning cables and move to one universal standard for serial communications.

That's it. That's the Vergecast, Holiday, Spectacular. Safe travels and rock and roll.