The Vergecast - This week in EVs, Starlink's wireless battle with Dish, and Sony announces gaming monitors

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz chat with transportation editor Andrew Hawkins about EVs, trucks, Tesla, and Starlink. Segment 1 - 02:07 Hyundai gives first look at Ioniq 6 EV as market share surges  Electric vehicle companies have a serious quality problem Segment 2 - 23:44 Tesla reportedly doesn't have enough desks after Musk threatens to fire remote employees Tesla lays off nearly 200 Autopilot employees who help train the company's AI Uber drivers are liking the Teslas Tesla reportedly doesn’t have enough desks after Musk threatens to fire remote employees Starlink RV review: the dawn of space internet to go SpaceX asks Starlink customers for support in wireless battle with Dish  Segment 3 - 46:27 Google's worst hardware flop was introduced 10 years ago today  Sony announces InZone gaming monitors and headsets for PC and PS5 Samsung M8 Smart Monitor review: the good enough of both worlds Arm's Immortalis GPU is its first with hardware ray tracing for Android gaming  Apple says iPads will keep working as home hubs in iPadOS 16, but there's a catch The Future Of trailer: The Verge’s first Netflix show about the future of everything Email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, Andy Hawkins joins us to talk about all the news in EVs this week and why it's so hard to build a reliable one. Of course, Neli ends up talking about trucks, but we'll also get into all the gadget news from this week. That's coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone, else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool

actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Verchast, the flagship podcast of both Wednesdays and Fridays. Yeah. Yeah. Two days a week. Do you realize ever listen like Zuku Radio in high school and they'd be like, hump day? That's how I think David should start every Wednesday show.

everybody. I wanted a soundboard the whole time. Liam, can I get a soundboard? You cannot have a soundboard, Neely. Sorry. All right, fine. I'm your friend, Neelai. David Pierce is here. Hey, I'm your friend who will always do dumb pranks at 7.30 in the morning while you're on her way to school. What you're saying? Alex Kranz is here. I'd never listen to the zoo crew. I think zoo crew is like the universal term for like the people who were on too early in the morning who just sort of yelled at each other over microphones. Like whatever they were called, they were the zoo crew. That's exactly how to think about it. Andy Hawkins is here. Can I get like a weird nickname like the squeege. Yeah. Andy the squeege Hawkins is here. It's pretty good. Talk about cars.

Awesome. Before we start, I just want to say the next six episodes of our Netflix show are out now, including the future of headphones, which is like the most Nelai episode that we've done. The show's great. All four of episodes are up. People seem to be really liking it. Some people have told me that they're like, I don't, the show is just about the future. I'm like, it's called the future of. Like, yes, it is, it is just a wild speculation. Like, that's the show. But I hope you appreciate it.

My mom really likes it. She tells all of her friends to watch it. I've been trying to get them to start, like a VPN thing, like, K-pop stands. Try explaining that to your mom. No, absolutely not. I was like, just keep streaming. A bit of a quiet week. We're headed into the Fourth of July holiday.

There is a lot of stuff going on. Andy's here because there's actually a lot of EV news this week. Then we got to talk about Starlink and Dish, the Project Gen 5Sys update, as always, and we got a little lightning around. But let's start with EVs. There's some Tesla news, actually quite a lot of Tesla news. There's some overall EV quality concerns across the industry. But I'll start.

People have seen me tweeting by the stuff. I've had the F-150 Lightning, and I spent some time with Rivian this week. I'm a little, I don't want to like over, we haven't published the pieces yet. so I don't want to give them all away before I publish it. This segment in our rundown is literally just called Truck Talk with Eli. We'll do another round at Truck Talk. But here's what I will say about these two cars. And Andy, I know you've written about this before.

It just really occurs to me that the F-150 Lightning is a very important product, right? The F-150 is the best-selling vehicle in the United States for like 40 years or something. It is super just an F-150. Like, they changed out the drive train. The drive-train is really impressive. That truck is really fast. A guy in a Corvette Stingrayed drag-rower. raced me down the highway and I kept up with him in a pickup truck.

And then he smoked me because I was like, I got a, it's not my truck. He was very confident. So the drive train is impressive. All that stuff was great. But inside it's an F150. The software is still just a Ford. Imagine me reviewing the software inside of the F150. That's where we went.

Whereas the Rivian, the R1T and the R1S are really very, very similar. One is a pickup truck and one's an SUV, but they're kind of the same car. That's like a ground up re-architecting of a car. And it's very much they started with this hardware and software platform. And they own all of the software. Even down to the little itty-bitty chips, they wrote the code for those chips. In a way that Ford just, like, gets the parts from suppliers. Driving them back-to-back, it just occurred to me, like, that split has not really been investigated.

And we're going to obviously talk about Tesla a bunch here. They're also completely integrated in that way. We're going to talk about the quality problems across the EV industry. It just seems like there's more to do with how the cars are built that's changed. changing than almost anything else right now. Well, yeah, I think the missions of both of these two companies are radically different. Ford, their mission is not to scare away their customers. They already have a gigantic base of customers who are loyal to them and will always buy

F-150s. They buy a new one every five years, potentially. And their goal is to not scare those people away. In fact, just to make sure that they stay within the Ford ecosystem, if you will. Whereas Rivian is just trying to build something from the ground up. And so I feel like that they probably have more of an incentive to do something that's new and innovative when it comes to in-car software than Ford, which was just to basically, like you said, slap an EV power train onto a pre-existing Ford F-150. And that's why I think also you hear so much about the frunk, because it is literally the only thing that's different about the lightning as compared to past F-150s. the fact that it has this gigantic front trunk. The thing that Ford talks about the most is the

frunk. Yeah, which rules, by the way, it's like, as somebody who owns a pickup truck, having an actual trunk is like, oh, my car's twice as useful as it was before. Your car's actually useful. Well, I mean, you can, like, put stuff in the bed of a pickup truck. That's very useful, but it gets wet. It could get stolen. You can't, like, putting your groceries in the bed of a pickup truck is actually not a good idea. My mom disagrees. She does it? She does it all the time. She has like a little, like, gate extender that I hate the most. It's like a 2001 Chevy Silverado. And anytime I'm in town, it's still got, like, an American flag tent on it because it was my grandfather's.

He's been dead for 20 years, you guys. She still has this truck with the American flag on it and the little extender. And she puts that little extender down. And she loads the back of her truck with groceries. And then she's like, she puts like ice cream in there. It's like 100 degrees outside. And she's like, this will be fine. I'm like, you're just making soup on the way home.

The electric silver auto coming out next year, that is also the gate extenders is a big. It's never coming out. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Being unveiled next year or what have you. When it actually goes on sale, when customers will actually take deliveries is very much in question. I forgot that we had to make all those qualifications on vapor wear cast.

Is it out of the, it's a drawing stage or no? Like, where are we in the Silverado? That's like the big thing that Chevy is hyping is the gate extender. Yeah. No, they've made one. There's a prototype. You can watch videos of the one truck. they've made. And it does have the gate extender. But are they going to make more than one? Who knows?

The thing about the Ford that's really interesting to be is it strikes me as like, and I say this as decidedly not a truck guy. But like it seems to me like it was smart for Ford to do kind of as little as possible here. Like it's not like there are like massive things about the F150 that this was the moment for them to solve. It's like, how do we take this very good truck that everybody likes for lots of very specific reasons and make it electric? And that it's like, I almost think it was smart to not try to solve any other problems except for that one, whereas Rivian then has a much harder problem with being like, we have to convince you that this thing is actually better than the F-150, which is like not a problem Ford has. They just have to keep making F-150s.

Well, when Rivian is like trying to create a new market, right? Wasn't that kind of the thing, Andy, that they're like marketing to people who eat granola and hike a lot? Adventure. They will say the word adventure at you without a second. It's hesitation. Right. They have the whole like there's the kitchen option that you can get with the R1T where you there's like a pull-out kitchen where you can cook all of your, what do people cook when they go camping? Beans. They cooked us a steak and potato hash on the kitchen at the event that I was at. I thought that hash is under embargo, Neely.

Yeah, I can't like give away like anything about the R1S, but I can probably talk about the hash and the R&T. What I'm getting at, though, is a little bit different than that. Like there's the expression of the products, which is, is it smart to just make an F-150 with an electric driver chain? Yes, I think that's true. Yes, this thing made me the star of every Home Depot parking. lot that I was in, especially when you open the frunk. Dads for miles around, like, they get on the walkie-talkies. We got to go see this thing.

It's like you blew the conch, you know, at the top of the mountain and all the dads came flocking. It was very good. And they all had, they all said two things to me. Everywhere I went, people said two things to me about it. One, they asked me about the range, because everyone has crazy range anxiety. And two, almost everyone was like, I have a deposit on the cyber truck. And then I would be like, uh-huh.

And they'd be like, I know. And then we would just have that moment over and over and over again. Because everyone just gave Elon $100 or whatever for the cyber truck. And no one really thinks they're going to get one. They just all, everyone just has a deposit on the cyber. Like in the pickup truck community, you know, there was like the phone chain that was like, did you put your cyber truck deposit down? And then just like went around and everyone did it. It's bizarre.

It was like the two things everyone said to me. I'm worried about the range. Does it get 300 miles like Ford says? And I have a deposit on the cyber truck. And I was like, do you ever think you're going to get one? And they're like, no. And then we would laugh and like open the front some more. But what I was getting is kind of bigger than that.

So like there's the, you know, the product of the F150 and its market on that. But the way that the cars have been designed and built, because Rivian and Tesla are new companies, they started with a software platform to run the whole car. And they started with these hard requirements that they're going to write all. of the software for all of the chips in the car. And like the meanest thing you can say about the traditional automakers is that they're basically banks that buy parts and turn them into cars. Right. Like their big businesses are like financing and leasing. And the cars are like a way to get you into their bank. And the way the cars have traditionally been designed and built is like by

buying lots of parts from suppliers that may or may not have chips in them and then integrate it. They're more like Dell than Apple, right? Yeah. And like, I think the F-150 is just really interesting because Ford wants desperately to get away from that. They keep talking about it. They're splitting the company into, and the F-150 is kind of like stuck in the middle of that transition and that lots of it is new, but lots of it is just F-150 stuff. It was just very striking driving all these cars back to back. I mean, if you remember, like, you know, during the 2008 recession when, you know,

a lot of the auto industry had to get bailed out by the federal government, one of the first things that these companies did before they had to declare bankruptcy was to spin out their their financial services businesses. So it was clear that that was going to be something that they saw as being that could save them potentially was spinning those out or selling them off to like foreign companies, for example. But yeah, now, like today, it's like it's much different. I don't know if you want to transition to like the study that just came out the survey about vehicle quality because like today it's like we're always just sort of hopping and skipping in the auto industry from one crisis.

to another. And the crisis, you know, the most recent crisis is obviously supply chain and semiconductors. And now it's, you know, in some respects, it's gas prices and like, you know, how that's going to affect car sales and car sales are down, even though prices are still sort of like wildly out of whack. But, you know, I think that the most recent crisis with the supply chain and the pandemic and everything that was happening, we saw like a really noticeable dip in vehicle quality. The survey was conducted by JD Power and Associates. And it was like the most steepest drop in quality that they, like, have ever recorded in, like, 30 years of doing this survey. So it's clear that, like, you know, while these companies like Rivian are exciting and

coming along and promising sort of like a new architecture and a new way to think about cars, there is still, like, a lot that is dependent on sort of the old, like, tier one, tier two, supply chain issues. And that's going to affect all the companies across the board. You know, there's only so much vertical integration that you can do. Like, Tesla is trying to vertically integrate as much as they possibly can, but at the same time, they can't, they still can't make their own battery cells. They still need Panasonic to make all the batteries that go into these cars. And at that end, you're starting to see a lot of problems as well because the prices are now shooting up and we're starting to wonder, are these cars actually ever going to be affordable for regular people?

Or are they still just going to be these luxury products for rich people to buy? Yeah. This survey is fascinating. Electrical vehicle manufacturers are the biggest drops in quality. Polestar is dead last, and they... I mean, that's fascinating, right? Polestar is connected to Volvo. They're not trying to make the fastest or craziest EVs.

They're trying to make pretty practical ones that are well designed. And, like, they're struggling. Tesla's seventh from the bottom. Every Tesla owner I know lately has been pointing out how creaky the car is or their cars are or like where the panel gaps are like that's just a Tesla thing that happens there's that TikTok star like this woman who does detailing on cars and she's now famous and she now has like her little TikTok business because she just one time was like I'm just going to roast this Tesla and all the problems with it and she had like her little like paint meter

she's like look how thin the paint is she's been really crass about the gaps it was great TikTok auto detailers are my favorite they're my favorite I'm like I'm like I'm like oh should I get one of those drill brushes? This feels like the right move. No, I definitely bought both a foam cannon and a drill brush before the TikTok. So this is a real thing that happened. I'm a transportation editor. I had no idea that there was this genre on TikTok. And my sister is an auto detailer in Missouri. Should I tell her to get on TikTok? Get on TikTok, dude. Oh, my God. I mean, it's like ASMR for car nerds. Like, I don't know how else to describe it. You're like, here's someone gently brushing the console of a 1982 Toyota. And you're like, you're going to make it new again.

Oh, my God. It looks so nice afterwards. But anyway, so like Polestar's dead last, Tesla's seventh from the bottom. Ford has had numerous recalls on the mock E. They're different kinds of cars to build than traditional ice cars, even though they obviously shared many, many components. It doesn't seem like we figured any of it out yet. Well, and this was the problem we were supposed to have solved with like traditional

car manufacturers getting in the game, right? It was like Tesla did a lot of things right, but like was not as good at making lots of cars. And now this was supposed to be the moment where the people who were good at making lots of cars we're going to come in and like simmer things down. And that, yeah, like to your point, that does not seem to be happening at all. And actually, like, it seems to be getting worse. The really interesting thing about the recalls, because there have been a ton and some

of them have been really like kind of like very concerning. Like Toyota just had like a major recall for this EV that they just put out just came out. Like it's only been out for like a couple of weeks. And they have to recall pretty much every single one of them because the wheel might fall off. while you're driving, which is like, that's not something that can be fixed with an over-the-air software update. Like the tire on the ground might just fall off? Yes, like the actual wheel. The bolts get undone.

Yeah, the hub bolts were not the right bolts. And so it just goes to show that, like, you know, the software issue is obviously very crucial, especially as cars become smarter and they start to use, you know, more advanced driver assist features. And like, you know, for example, like the Ford Mustang recall, like they're going to be able to fix. that with an OTA update. But it's not coming until next month. It just sort of illustrates how far behind the traditional auto industry is compared to like the Rivians and the Teslas when it comes to kind of this stuff. Because as you say, they did not architect this stuff from the very beginning to accept software updates in this way. They have to create something and they're relying on a supplier base to provide them with the tools and the resources that they need. They're not doing it

themselves, whereas Rivian and Ford have vertically integrated all of that stuff into their business model. Yeah. The Hubbold's thing is at once, like, hilarious because it's Toyota, and, like, they have a reputation for making really excellent long-lasting cars. But it's also very understandable, and that, like, someone's like, these'll work. If they fit enough, like, that's like how I build things. I'm like, this is close enough. Like, the car's still there. It's not going anywhere. Like, it literally is not going anywhere. Because if you take it somewhere, the wheels might come off. We just published a review of that, right? The BZ4X. Yeah, Abigail Basset wrote it for us, and she was not impressed with it. She thought it was pretty mediocre EV overall. And this was before,

like, she turned in her review before the recall came out as well. And so I was just like, I reached out to her afterwards. I was like, I'm so glad you lived to write this review because it turns out this could have been a very, very bad thing that happened to you. The other thing I want to call it from this survey is people hate the software in their cars. And they, in particular, dislike CarPlay and Android Auto, which they find difficult to use. The introduction of wireless carplay and Android Auto attributes to an increase in connectivity problems, 4.9 problems per 100 vehicles in 2021, went up to 5.8 and 22. I'm just going to say this.

I know we've talked about CarPlay and Apple's vision for CarPlay. The more people that have talked to me about Apple's vision of taking over the screens from the auto industry, the more people that have just laughed and been like, this is never happening. Nobody wants this to happen. Also, it's impossible. Like, there's no standard car API for Apple to tap into to just take that and, like, provide you a speedometer in car play. Can you imagine the amount of work Apple Tim Cook would have to do to get all the car makers to be like, you know what?

Yes, we're going to do an API. The best way I could describe this to you is what Apple is proposing is basically Windows 95. Yeah. Like, you know, like, you know, you can install Windows 95 and that whole thing got prettier, but then you're like, DOS is here. Like, DOS lurks in the background of Windows 95. And, like, at some point, like, your computer is definitely still running DOS. And it wasn't until much later with NT. I think it was like straight up Windows 7 and Windows 8 that finally, like, got rid of most of the DOS underpinnings.

So, like, Windows 95 and 98 and M.E were, like, definitely just shells on DOS. That's what Apple is basically proposing with CarPlay. Like, you'll run your regular systems, and you'll just provide us with the information we need to display it in CarPlay, but your stuff will still be there. Because there's no way to replace it. There's no standard, like, can bus is like not a, it's not going to work for them in that way. So, like, the more people who talk to me, the more like, what are they even proposing here? Like, there's no way to build it. I don't understand why Apple isn't going the Google route, which, like, Google will, like, you know, they have Android Auto, obviously.

but they're also, like, working, you know, alongside a lot of automakers to just, like, install Android automotive natively in a lot of cars. You know, like, Polestar has it. A lot of Volvos have it. BMW just announced that some of its next cars will have native Android. And I'm just, like, curious, like, I don't know. Why does an Apple do that? And once again, we're going to point to Polestar being dead last. Can't follow.

Like, Android is Android. I think there's, like, it's an out, you know, and like Ford sign that big deal with Google. to base the new version of sync on Android, which is like another big question mark about the lightning. Like the lightning I tested was somewhere between $90 and $93,000. And I was like, the software in this,

like I don't know what its future is. If you buy that truck now for $90-some thousand and you think you're going to have it for 10 years, 10 years from now, you're on a dead end road of software because Ford is moving at some point next year to Android. But I think most people are taking that out because Google is there and they'll do it for you.

But I don't think Google hasn't figured out either. And then CarPlay and, general is like fairly confusing to use as the cars get more complicated because particularly for EVs what you want is a like accurate range estimate and to get the most accurate range estimate out of any EV you've got to tell it where you're going. So now you're like flipping back and forth between Apple's vision of the world and the EV vision of the world. And I would point out that even that vision of car play we saw at WWDC was definitely for a gas car. Like Gas meter, like the whole thing.

Just like, I think the software story and cars both from the how is a car architected to what is on the displays is like incomplete and total flux right now. Like nobody knows what's going to happen. And all the way down at like at the very bottom, it's like people can't connect their phones to their cars with Bluetooth. Like Bluetooth is bad. It's part of the problem here. And it's like, well, good luck with your beautiful vision of a car play future when I can't

figure out how to do the like 11 button routine I have to do to get my phone to understand that it's in a car. Yeah. I still plug my name with a wire. I'm kind of flabbergasted that none of the car makers have been like, oh, we all are asking you to use Android Auto. We're all asking you to use car play if you want to have that fun experience, I guess. But we're not going to provide any like very natural way to like just slot your phone in,

like a little computer into your car and be like, boop, done. It charges. It connects everything. and go. Oh, like a floppy disk? You do like a little slot you just stick it into when you get in the car. That's the dream for me. It's just be like, boop, done. And then also, you don't have to worry about texting and driving because then you have to, like, eject your phone. And immediately you don't know where you're going because Waze is disconnected. I like this. So instead of the CD slot, you just want, like the phone. Just a phone slot. Just boop. And then when you, like, have to get out of your car and run away,

you're like, hold on. Hold on, I got to eject. Hold on. Stop it. Shut up. So I will say that the lightning is close. New F-150s are close in that there's a wire. charging pad and wireless carplay works fine. So you just like get in the car, you throw the phone in the pad, it starts charging. Off you go. I will, again, reserve my detailed complaints about all of the software for the forthcoming review. But like at the end of the day, the notion that anyone knows what's happening in cars, well, there's two things that I'm assessed with. One, all of these cars are being re-architected. And who, the winners and losers of that software battle are unknown. Rivian, like, they developed their entire own software platform because they were on an open

in source platform, and they just decided it wasn't good enough, and they made their own. All kinds of companies make that decision, but for, like, consumer products, and now that's happening at the level of cars. And then second, I get to drift EVs around dirt tracks because that's how you test the products. And it's like, oh, this is great. All my interests are aligning. And it was like, again, I won't share too much about actually driving the RMS. It was beautiful truck, oval headlights, make your own decision.

But, you know, it's like a bunch of tech reporters and a bunch of car reporters. And I just, what you notice is like, we live in different worlds. We think about different things. And that was, you know, it's eye opening and obviously revealing. But you got the sense that like the car industry is still in a framework of gas cars. Like they still think about gas car stuff. And all the tech reporters like, no, like the real question to ask is how much headroom is in the invidia chip in this thing that runs unreal engine? Because like two years from now is it going to be slow, right?

And like Rivian's like very prepared for that question. And like Ford is basically like it's slow now, actually. It's quite slow. It's called Managing Expectations. Yeah. Rivian stuff is coming out next week. The Lightning should come out. The Lightning review should come out right after that.

It was fun driving both. If you have questions, let me know because I'll try to put the answers in the reviews. All right. Like I said, there's actually a bunch of Tesla news. There's some Starlink news too. So let's take a break. Andy, stick with us. We'll come back for the Elon last segment of the Virchcast.

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Let's stick with cars. Let's talk about Tesla. Tesla's going through it, man. What is going on with this company? Lots of layoffs. They decided to go the route of like slow rolling to the layoffs. so that they just have like multiple news cycles, like, dedicated to how many people are getting laid off. Rather than just, like, ripped the Band-Aid off all at once, it's just like this excruciating process.

So, yeah, they just most recently, it was reported that they're laying off about 200 people from their autopilot team. And I guess most of these folks are, like, hourly workers who were tasked with, like, labeling. So that means that, like, you're sitting at a desk and you're looking through training data and you're saying this is a car, this is a pedestrian, this is a baby carriage, don't run over these things. Those people don't work at Tesla anymore, which depending on how you feel about Tesla and autopilot, maybe is a little concerning? I don't know. Yeah, do you track that specific part of the company being affected as meaning anything, like should we read anything into the fact that it's autopilot? Like 200 people in the scheme of Tesla is not that many people, but it is

200 people from sort of one specific team. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that that means that like Tesla is going to stop labeling its trading data. because that would obviously be, I think, a huge blunder on their part and could result in potentially lots of crashes and deaths that they probably don't want to have happen. But I think that what's clear is that like the industry in general is sort of turning to cheaper sources of that labor. They're outsourcing it to other countries where, you know, people work for for less money than they do in the United States. We shouldn't assume that Tesla is going to stop doing this task altogether just because these people are getting laid off.

But the stealth layoff thing in Tesla is a slowly growing story, right? So first, Elon sent the memo saying everyone's got to go back to the office or you can quit, which is like a very good way to make people quit without saying you're doing layoffs. Like we've seen that pattern repeat now a few times of other companies. So he does that first. Then there's this hilarious story that there's not enough desks in various Tesla offices for all the employees who are not forced to come back to work, which is very funny as well. then there's this allegation from a number of employees that they were fired for quote performance reasons all at once and that actually constituted a layoff event giving them rise to some additional rights that has led to a lawsuit and then now we're seeing the 200 autopilot employees all in the context of Elon saying I feel bad about the economy Tesla's overstaffed but as of yet he hasn't said I'm just doing a layoff at Tesla like it's it's this like death by a thousand cuts and I kind of don't understand why like

Of all of the CEOs in the entire world, the one who could say, I'm just going to fire about 10,000 people. Like, you can sign up and go, or I'll just walk around the office pointing at people and saying you're fired. Like, Elon can do that in a way that, like, no one else could get away with just saying I'm making these cuts to deal with it. Does Tesla still not have, like, a PR department? No. Could that be part of this? Just somebody who actually knows about comms being like, hey, buddy, your Twitter account does not actually equal corporate comms. and there's other ways to do this.

That ship has sailed. You're talking about a, like, most CEOs don't want to do that, but Elon, like, in particular is like, don't get in front of my Twitter account. Like, the United States government, you want to get in front of my Twitter account, I'll just buy Twitter. Yeah. Like, that's where he's at with this. I mean, he's literally still involved in, like, litigation with the SEC over the issue

of whether or not he needs to get his tweets checked out with regards to whether or not they're like they would have a material impact on Tesla. share price. And he's trying to get them to like vacate the settlement that he made, which required him to have someone, some lawyer somewhere. You talk about Trump's music man. Elon's Twitter sitter is like another job. But he doesn't actually have one. Is another job that I feel could be categorized in the same way. But he hasn't actually employed the Twitter sitter. Anyway. No, yeah. But I'm just saying like it's weird that he hasn't just said I'm making this move. I'm cutting Tesla down to be ready for the recession. They did the same thing in 2017. They had layoff

in 2017, and they slow-rolled it, and it came out drips and drabs over like multiple weeks, and it was an excruciating news cycle. And they clearly just haven't learned anything since then. That this is just the way that this company does business. And, you know, in terms of like its labor practices, it's been well documented, that there have been numerous lawsuits filed against Tesla over a toxic work culture, racist incidents happening in its factory in Fremont, gender discrimination. It's just, you know, sort of the list goes on and on.

And so it seems like the way that they are doing these layoffs are just sort of part and parcel with sort of like a culture at Tesla that is extremely problematic. Well, and Nil, I'm not sure I agree with you that Elon Musk is the CEO who can get away with this right now. Like it's been a moment where like investors in particular are not super convinced that Tesla is a very well-run organization. And with all the Twitter stuff going on, there's been a lot of, you know, nerves. And I think if he were to come out and say, I'm laying off 10,000 people. Like two years ago, Elon Musk, everybody just goes, you're so brave. And that's great. Now I'm not sure that works for him the same way.

And I think there are a lot of people out there who are like worried about the future of Tesla who are looking for reasons to get really, really, really, really, really worried about the future of Tesla. Well, and Tesla's stock is not doing great. All of his wealth is tied to it. I have no doubt that he's thinking, okay, which hurts my stock more? just one ripping the band-aid or doing these like low trickles and hoping that everybody talking about the music man distracts him of the fact that we keep laying people off every week. I don't want to like be full CNBC, Eli. But like-

Do it. Like I don't know that he cares that much. And also like Tesla is the most shorted stock in like world history. Like people have been betting against Tesla stock the whole time. Like at the end of the day, it's like bad overall. Right. Like people are losing their jobs. It's like heartbreaking.

It's just strange to me that in everything else, it's. Brash moves. And in this thing that he's signaled so loudly that he thinks the economy is bad and Tesla's overstaffed. He's letting it persist as opposed to just doing it. And I think maybe part of that is like he's distracted with all of the other things, like buying Twitter, like fighting with the SEC, like SpaceX generally is a going concern. Do you know he has a company that drills tunnels under the surface on the earth to slowly drive one car through them? They just got a new project in Vegas. They're still doing it.

The official tunnels of Jenna five, sis. Yes. It's just like with all that stuff, like maybe, maybe he was like, just figure it out. And like, so there's a slow bleed. It's just interesting. Like Tesla is feeling it in a way that a lot of companies are feeling it. And that's, I think, unusual. Like, Tesla has virtually unlimited demand.

They have never been like, we made too many cars. They're always like, we cannot make enough cars at every point in history. And now I think Elon's predicting like they're going to make too many cars, which is surprising. Well, this is all happening at. the same time that the Texas factory is coming online, the Berlin factory is coming online. Musk has described both of those factories as essentially just money furnaces at the moment, where he's just shoveling money into a furnace. The Shanghai factory continues to go through a pretty concerning cycle of opening and being forced to close because of COVID restrictions

in China. I don't understand how that man gets a single minute of sleep every night, considering just the numerous catastrophes and fires he's forced to put out on a constant basis. And really, I think managing the lack of sleep explains a lot of the tweets. He hasn't tweeted in nine days. It's good for everybody. Yeah. If you've noticed that the birds are singing a little bit more clearly outside your window and people seem to be walkering with a little bit more of an upright gate, it's because

Elon Musk has not tweeted in eight days. Love this for all of us. The thing I'll say, though, I said basically, you know, there's unlimited demand for these cars. but what is true right now is that they're being outsold by Hyundai and Kia, which have very hot EVs in the Kia EV6 and the Hyundai Ionic 5. I see Iionic 5s all over the place here. You know, I always look to see who's driving them, and it's like a wide selection of diverse people are driving out of class.

It's just people. Yeah. But with Tesla's like for a long time, I was like, oh, VC, VC, VC, VC, startup guy, VC, VC, VC. A lot of Patagonia vests. A lot of vests in Tesla. But, you know, I don't live in New York City anymore. and it's shocking to see how many EVs I see floating around.

And then again, when I had the lightning, I was like going to chargers. And you just saw it was like Machis, Ionic fives, and like the odd Volvo XC40 recharge, like populate all the charges up here. And so I think the fact that like Hyundai is actually taking share from Tesla has got to be weighing on Elon's mind as well. He's tweeted that they're doing a good job. Yeah. I mean, he was like he's had the luxury of being kind of first mover in this space for a long time. and now he actually has to compete. And just the worst time to over-extend yourself

with a ton of new factories and a giant $48 billion Twitter purchase, like maybe not the best time to do all that. I think Hyundai and Kia made the right move too because they made enough cars for people to actually buy, whereas a lot of the other automakers who are introducing these new EVs have limited supply. The F-150, there's only going to be like several thousand

and delivered probably this year. It's going to ramp up, obviously. But Hyundai actually, you know, Volkswagen, they sold out of the ID4. There's not going to be any available until 2023. Like Hyundai and Kia, they actually made enough cars for people to buy. And demand is obviously very high right now because people are getting pinched real hard by the gas prices. So I think that that was a smart move on Hyundai's part. They sort of came out at the right time, right place, right time, and they actually made enough.

So now we got to talk about the Ionic 6, which, boy, were they like, people will We'll go with it. It's, yeah, I don't know how that, that thing looks strange. They're leaning into this, like, retrofuturism thing, which, like, normally I think is, like, kind of a cool design choice, and I'm with it. I'm here for it. But, yeah, this one, it seems like they're trying to do something, like, similar to, like, what Mercedes did with EQS.

It's, like, extremely, like, bubble-shaped and very, like, aerodynamic. But, yeah, it's a sedan. No one's going to buy that in the U.S. All I can think of is squishy minivan. That's just what I look at. when I look at this. It's like somebody just took a minivan, removed the bucket seats,

and was like, here it is. You have a car now. I've seen a number of people, including Marquez Brownlee tweet that it looks like an Apple Magic Mouse. And then immediately his replies had people photoshopping a charger in at the bottom, which is very good.

We'll see. The notable thing I'll say about from this announcement, you should go look at the picture. It does look silly. Their head of design is like, we're sticking with buttons, like physical buttons. Touch screens are dangerous when cars are moving.

Yes. And I just want every car designer to like internalize this. Rivians, all touchscreens, the lightning. Regular F150s have a lot of physical buttons and the lightning has that portrait touchscreen that takes the HVAC and puts it on the touchscreen. I hate it. And it's just like, what are you doing to me, man? Like, I'm driving an eight ton pickup truck.

I can't be messing with the seat heaters like this. Like, leave me alone. So I appreciate it about it. Hyundai Kia. Can I just read this quote because I actually wrote this, I took this quote out of the story that we did and was like, this is the thing, this is the answer. And it's, like you said, from Hyundai's design chief whose name I should have written down and forgot.

But it says, for us, anything that relates to the safety, we use hardware. Anything not related to safety will use a touch interface. Like, that's it. Perfect. Crushed it. Love it. A plus. No notes.

That is the answer. Go look at that picture. I mean, tell me if you think it looks like a magic mess. I think it looks cool. It does look cool. It has like some, like, some PT Cruiser energy. Wow. Wow.

That's harsh. Did you say cool and then PT Cruiser, like right next to each other? Did that happen? I was going to say it has some old Porsche energy, but I would not have gone PT Cruiser. I want it to look like a car that Batman in the animated series would accidentally hit with his car while he's chasing the Joker. That's what I want from a car. And this has got a little of that energy, that PT Cruiser energy. You want to be the NPC bystander car?

Yeah. I want it to look like a weird 30s car as designed by an animator. in 1992. Dream big, Alex. And that's very much where Hunt is going. That's where they're going. They nailed it.

That's true. Have you seen the new episode of Westworld season four? Her job is writing backstores for MPCs, which is very funny because she was MPC. Oh, my God. Oh, I love it. I don't know if it's any good,

but I definitely laughed as I watched her, try to explain. And I was like, it's the Westworld thing, and she's on a date, and she's trying to explain what a video game is to her date. I'm like, have you been around? Like, do people still not know what video games are? in this future. It's very good. Last little Elon bit, some Starlink news. First, Thomas Ricker,

who lives in Europe, as you may know, reviewed Starlink RV. That's a version of Starlink that you can just like take anywhere you want as long as there's service. You can shut it off and not pay the monthly fee and then turn it on again when you're on the road. The tradeoff is that you are lower in priority for bandwidth than anyone else. Thomas loved it. He was like mostly on beaches. He had a clear view of the sky, which is very important for Starlink. And he said it was faster than whatever sell internet options that he had wherever he was. And he did not notice the throttling. I will say two things.

One, they've changed the design of the dish, and they've made it worse in some ways in the original dish than I reviewed and better in some way. So better, it's smaller and it looks cooler. The worst part is very verge cast. My dish gets power over Ethernet. So you plug the dish into the power box, and you plug the power box into the Wi-Fi router, and you just plug everything in and everything has power, and you're off and go. One wire teach thing.

This dish attaches via micro-USB. Oh, no. That's just like a big, like falling on your face. It's a 70-foot micro-usb cable that attaches to the Wi-Fi router. Do I say 75-foot micro-USB connector? You can charge your old Kindle and use your Starlink Tish. What are we doing? Not like backwards, but also like backwards and sideways to go from pure power over anything.

to not even USBC, but like, yeah, micro USB. Let's see what that is. He also said it rarely lines up properly, which is very good. So just like a confusing, but it uses less power than my dish. Like there's all this, there's benefits to the new dish, and there's obviously tradeoffs. So that's good. And like I said, he sent me the slack. He's like, I had a very different start living experience than you.

And I was like, did you have any obstructions? And he was like, no, we were like on peaches. Well, but he also, he framed it in a way I thought was really smart, which is basically like your experience was, you were trying to replace your home internet, which is like a very high bar in terms of both reliability and speed. His, and he said this in the review, is his bar was basically awful cell service at the beach or at a music festival. And like beating that is really easy. And that's like, that's what Starlink is trying to do here, basically, right? So they're like, even if we throttle you, even if you have some obstructions, like, you're going to get pretty good internet in places

where pretty good internet is actually like a vast improvement over what you've had before. And I think Thomas might be being slightly generous in being happy with good enough internet, but like good enough internet in a lot of places is a huge improvement. And I thought, like, I just think that it's a clever way of thinking about it. What happens when you're like at Burning Man and everybody's got their internet? Because that's totally a thing that happens at Burning Man. But everybody's got their little Starlink like system. Won't that actually make the internet worse if everybody adopts this? Well, so this is kind of what's happening with Starlink right now in general. Okay. So I'm a proud lurker of the Starlink subreddit.

And there's like one, to me, it's like one of the most chill places on the entire. It's just bros helping bros. Love it. Like, everyone's just trying to solve the same problem. And they're like, should I climb this hundred foot pole with no safety equipment to install Star Lake? And everyone's like, you got it, bro. Like, it's great. Is the top comment on every single one just like trees, question mark?

There's a lot of discussion of trees and whether cutting them down or going over them is better. There's a lot of just like, you know, I'll put this in like historical context. Like the big cable companies in the United States are now lumbering giants, but they were all started by effectively cowboys. Yes. Right? Who like wanted to help a community. And so they set up an antenna and like ran coax cable to their neighbors. And they had like started a cable network.

And I think that part of that story is so cool. And like, yes, now they're lumbering giants. Disclosure, Comcast, NBC Universal, so I'm an investor in Fox Media. And now we have to think about like peacock and like whatever. The minions exist. Right. But even Comcast started as like this cowboy outfit. There's an element of the Starlink moment that has that cowboy energy that I think is great. And so it's just people like they can't get internet access where they are and they've got one tool to do it and they are overcoming whatever obstacles to figure it out. I think it's great. They don't like me very much because I said Starlink doesn't work with trees. But I would just say like the revealed evidence is that trees are a problem for Starlink, even in the subreddit. I ran into a woman this weekend and she uses Starling. She does not read The Verge.

It was very rude for her to say that. But it's fine. But she was like, yeah, I love Starling, except for trees. Did you know that trees are really bad for Starlink? You said, oh. Do I? Anyhow. So, like, the suburb is great.

And I read it all the time. But the thing that is happening right now is the cells are getting overcrowded. So Starlink divides up the map into these like honeycomb grids and that people are getting starlings. So now you can get them. There's no wait list anymore in a lot of places. The RV has no wait list. You just get it in a week. And the speeds are dropping.

They're dropping to about 40 to 50 down. And so, like, there's just a lot of, to David's point, there's a lot of justification now in that community over, I was an early adopter. I was getting like 200 down. And now I'm getting 40, but it's still better than my satellite internet. And that's what you've got to keep in mind.

And I think that this tradeoff over, you know, Starlink is more or less self-powers in space. Like, there's a physical limitation to what they can accomplish over time, even with more and more satellites. and whether they can pull off the whole business is like it's running into its like first cap of limitations, which I think is fascinating. Is that why Starlink is fighting with DISH? Because it wants more spectrum to solve these problems?

So deeply unclear why they have chosen to fight with Dish. No Verge story made less sense to me this week than Starlink and Dish fighting about spectrum. And we tried. We tried real hard with this. So Starlink this week sent out an email to all of its customers saying, we ask for your support and ending a lobbying campaign that threatens to make Starlink unusable for you and the vast majority of our American customers.

So DISH wants to use 12 gigahertz spectrum for 5G. They have formed an alliance called the 5G for 12 gigahertz coalition. This is true. In the trades and Fierce Wireless, which is a trade publication, there's a great line that's like, this is not to be confused with the 12G alliance. It's like, oh man, what's happening with you people? What's going on over there? So they form this thing where they want to use 12 gigahertz,

which the FCC has provisionally said might be interesting. So DISH is doing studies about whether it can use 12 gigahertz or 5G. And they're pushing to a place where they can do it with this coalition. SpaceX is also using that spectrum. And so they follow the FCC where it says they use 12G. gigahertz frequencies to provide critical downlink services across the U.S.

If you open that spectrum up for 5G use, customers will experience a total outage of service 74% of the time. So now DISH, which I remind you, has no 5G network, owns a ton of spectrum, has been required by the government to light up a network called Project Gena 5Sys

that we have two Project Gena 5Sys phones. Mitchell has one and Nathan Edwards are new senior reviewers. one. We're going to have a piece coming out. But as of yet, those phones have mostly been on AT&T's network, because that's what DISH is using is its backstop, which is very funny. So even the Dish network that is launched is still just AT&T. The world's first smart 5G network remains an illusion. But Dish wants even more spectrum to take away from Starling, and Starling's going to fight with him. And it's like, both of these things are like, what are we even fighting about? Like, your network

doesn't exist. Like, you should just build the network you have. Are you going to convince Apple to put 12 gigahertz radios in the iPhone for 5G? No. I don't think you are. Like, I just doubt it. Especially when you have like four customers. This is how you end up with the Motorola Edge Plus is the only supported phone. And then obviously, Starlink, you know, they're already using the spectrum, but it's amazing that they've built out a service that could be threatened by a competitor as ferocious as dish network.

I thought it was wild that the FCC like started all this. January of 2021. And it's only now in June of 2022 that SpaceX is like, oh wait, wait, wait, we need that. That's ours. We need that really badly. Like, were you just not looking? Did you just not read the trades this for the last year and a half?

Well, so I think one thing that's happening here is DISH already uses 12 gigahertz for its satellite TV service. They want to just like repopulate it and use it for 5G because they have some of that spectrum. I just like the phone networks are like the phones don't exist that use this spectrum. So like where are they at? Anyway, Dish said a great line, which in the context of fighting over spectrum in space is great. We believe coexistence is possible. Like that's 100% what the president says after the aliens invade Earth.

Like we believe coexistence is possible. So we'll see. It's like one of the funniest broadband stories in front because they have a network. they should just build that one. They have all of the spectrum. They can do it. I mean, they could. There will be more Gena 5Sys coverage to come.

I'm very insistent that we overcover Project Gena 5Sys. So we're going to do it. All right, we've got to take a break. Andy, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah. It's good to see you, Squeege. And we're going to do Truck Talk round two

in a couple of weeks, so you'll be back. Yeah, you'll be back. We'll have you back for all that stuff. Okay, we're taking a break. We'll be right back. Squeech, send it off. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge.

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Claude.aI. slash vergecast. We're back. Let's do like a little gadget lightning round to wind this up. Dave, do you want to take us? Sure. So, I mean, this says something about

how newsy this week was. But the biggest Verge gadget story of the week was that this was the 10-year anniversary of the Nexus Q, which makes it the 10-year anniversary of one of my all-time favorite verge photos, which is the Nexus Q being used as a doorstop in our office in New York, which I think is about as good an explanation of the Nexus Q as you will ever find. That was our office on Fifth Avenue, which was basically an apartment. Yeah. The bathroom was right in the center. It was awesome. It was a very strange office. I will say this, that this is one of the rare product that was killed by product reviews. Yeah, I think so I think that's right. So they announced it in this weird moment. They said it was a music streamer. It was one of the first Google hardware

devices. Andy Rubin announced it. It was like a high-end music streaming device. It was a circle, like a sphere-ish shape, and you could turn the top to change the volume. Very strange. You got to look at a picture of it. And they gave it out to reviewers. We gave it a five out of 10. Everyone else was like, what is the point of this? It was also really expensive. It was $300, I think, yeah. In 2012, $300. And it didn't work with anything except Google services. So Google was like, well, that was a mistake.

And they canceled the product and they killed all the services, rendering it completely useless. Yeah, a $300 streaming device that only works on Google Play Movies. What a surprise that that really never took off. I will say it did look very cool. The sphere sitting there and when you connected all the cables, it kind of looked like that tentacle monster from the Matrix that was always flying around. It was kind of sci-fi and cool-looking, and now all streaming devices

are the same little flat, pucky, rectangle things, and I at least kudos to Google for doing something more interesting. I mean, visually, it was cool even at that time because, like, Apple, Roku, everybody else was doing, like, Roku was doing weird giant boxes. Apple was doing weird giant boxes. Shield, I don't think,

shield didn't exist yet. Like, I had to get it in there. There it is. There it is. This was, because I definitely remember at the time being like, oh, should I get one to run plaques? And I was like, no, just immediately like, no, this won't work at all. This is a stupid idea of mine. But it looks cool.

I really wanted one. And I never bought it. And I liked just one more note on this, then we should move on. Chris Welch wrote that story. And he mentioned in it that you can kind of see some Chromecast DNA in it. And it is true. Like as a precursor to what became the Chromecast, which is like a simpler thing that's much cheaper and has more services. It sort of makes sense.

and someone responded to him on Twitter who was like, I was on the Chromecast team, there is no Chromecast DNA in this thing. We were just as surprised as everybody when it launched. They were like, do not associate us with this piece of junk, and I pretty much enjoyed that. That was very good. All right, we got to talk about this GPU situation,

which is like the Alex Cran special. So for our audience of hardcore Android gamers, your time has come. Yeah. I'm trying to figure out how it's pronounced, because I want to call it the Immortalis. I read it as Immortalis. I assume they want Immortalis, but I want to call it the Immortalis because that's a dumb name either way. That also sounds like a ship.

The Immortalis is like an old-timey spaceship. It's got like a lot of wood in it despite being in space. Exactly. Everybody wears like 18th century British naval uniforms. Yeah, it's like Pirates of the Caribbean in space was on the Immortalis. That's definitely what happened. Would watch. But so Arm has announced a new GPU.

They're still doing the GPUs they do now, which is the line, it's called Molly. And this is a new GPU lineup. And it's meant for big high-end phones. We'll probably see some stuff from media tech, Samsung, around it. But the big catch here is that it does ray tracing on a tiny arm-based GPU for your phone versus rate tracing, which we have now, which is primarily. AMD kind of does it for the PS5 and the Xbox, and Nvidia is doing it in its 20 and 30 series GPUs. This is the new version of it, and I suspect, I want to get really excited about it. I want to be pumped because ray tracing continues to be a holy grail.

Like hardware-based ray tracing is a big deal. We want this because it's going to just bring really incredible visuals. But there's two kind of key components. one, developers have to develop for it and actually do it. And as we've seen in the PC gaming space, and even in the console gaming space, they don't actually want to do it. Most of them are like, yeah, this is really cool. I'll do it because you paid me to do a tech demo, but I won't actually regularly put it into my games. And then the other problem is like on mobile gaming, we already have a very distinct visual language for mobile games, right?

They all look kind of the same. And it's kind of that flat thing. There's maybe some shadows. why would you need a lot of ray tracing? Like there's no effort to make photorealistic stuff on mobile gaming apart from like car games. Yeah, I mean, but this is like the question mark around hardcore Android gaming in general, right? And also it's limited to Android, which makes it even worse, because most of the games are getting developed for iOS first. That's where the fun happens.

My hope and dream from this is that somebody makes a really cool handheld console that can sometimes play the games, but it's just, mainly for cloud gaming. That blog will be on the page one day, I swear. I mean, but that's what's what's been happening right around the industry. Like they've made it now for Android phones and maybe they'll get in the high Android phones, but over time, this just becomes the default GPU for ARM. Yeah, I think that's like kind of the idea is that eventually maybe we move away from Molly and they start to really use Immortales, but I don't know how quickly that's going to happen. And I think this is like a really big flash bang of like, hey, wow, cool. And then we're all going to forget about it.

And then five years from now, we'll be like, oh, wow, I saw my reflection in this game. It was immortallus. Truly, we are all immortalis. More lightning around stuff. It feels like we should make cooler monitors for work from home market is having a moment. Yes. It's like definitely happening, right? They finally catch it up.

Well, and there's this thing where it's like, oh, do you sit in front of the same screen for 17 hours a day? Would you like that screen to do more things and look good? Here's some products. It's great. I think this Samsung M8, which Cam Falkner on our team reviewed this week, is one of those devices I have been sort of aimlessly shopping for basically all week. It's like part TV, part monitor, doesn't do either of those things exceptionally well, but does them both better than it would if you tried to buy them both for the same price, if that makes sense. And it's like, yeah, we're just getting to this place where it's like, what if your computer

monitor did more stuff? And I am very interested in that world. Yeah, I think McKenna Kelly, one of our policy reporters, she was like, oh, I want this. This is, this is what I want. I live in New York. My monitor needs to do double duty anyway. Yeah, I want to watch some TV on it and also do my work. So I buy it. It's only 32 inches. If it was 40 inches, I would, like, extremely buy it. Yeah. Right. It seems a little small.

Do you want a 40-inch computer monitor, though? I mean, I could. I could definitely have one of those. Fair enough, yeah. My Zoom setup now is our legendary 40-inch Samsung Curve TV, which has now found its true purpose, is just being my display for Zoom. Just enveloping you in Zoom.

It's great. It's everyone kind of looks like, you know, I can see their faces. I can sit far away from the TV. I never use it to watch TV anymore. It's just a, But yeah, but then all my work happens on my actual laptop screen. I would just say at 32, it's like, one takes small.

Great headline from Cam, though. The good enough of both worlds. Very good. But this thing looks great. I know one person who has one is Dieter Bone. And he definitely thinks it's the good enough of both worlds as well. So, okay, wait, can I ask a question about this, though? Because my counter to this thing would be, because the schick, basically, is like it works

as a computer monitor, but it also runs Tysin and is a smart TV with a TV remote. And I was thinking about this, and I'm like, what TV do I want to watch? that I can't just make like a full screen browser window on my computer. I think it's more for like, think back to college, you're in your dorm room, you want to sit on your bed and watch all the episodes and you don't actually want to move. So it's the remote is the thing then. Yeah, I think it's the remote. I guess that tracks.

Okay, that's fair. The webcam sucks, though. Huge mistake making a terrible webcam. The webcam being this like weird external thing that you can pogo pin on the back. I love it. I love a pogo pin. We always have the verge of his stand to pogo pins since the dawn of time. True. Very good. That's cool. So then the other one is from Sony and they seem, this is their in-zone monitors and they're like, they're in the game.

You mean in the zone. Oh, my God. You did it. And truly that day we were immortalis. I've been doing this to Cam all week. It's Mortilus. I refuse. Has Sony ever done this before? It's like, it's a lineup of like gaming monitors and headsets. And I have no memory of Sony like being. deep in this game before, but maybe I'm missing things. I have no memory. Cam and I like try to look around for it. We have no memory of it, but we also don't want to say they've never done it before

because someone will absolutely be like, actually, in 1998 for two weeks. Sure. In one store in Japan, yeah. But this is definitely like a significant push for them. And I think Cam's got a story coming this week. I think it'll be up Friday when you're all listening to this beautiful Vergecast episode. That's kind of about why they had to do this. because when he went and learned about it, he was like, oh, this makes sense.

Like, Microsoft is out there. They're doing great in the console space. They own the cloud gaming space, and they own the PC gaming space. Sony, if it doesn't, it can't, like, compete like Nintendo does with a bunch of weird, wacky games. It has to compete in Microsoft's land. And so, okay, let's do what we do best. Let's just make a bunch of cool gadgets and shit. Yeah, but I got to say, 900 bucks, 27-inch 4K iPS with 144 Hertz.

refresh rate. That's a strong spec sheet. Yeah. I mean, that's up there with, I had just purchased another LG GN-950, which has similar specs. And I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. I kind of wish I'd waited, but it's too late now. I've got it. Also, I'll point out, it has full array local dimming with 96 zones and display at Shere 600. If you were, for example, to compare it with another 27-inch panel that was very expensive, you might note that it has far superior specs for far less money. I think this is a really smart idea because Sony has gotten really good at TVs. They're oftentimes considered better than LG in the OLED TV space. Like, their processing is really good. The visual is just really good. They do the local dimming really well. And so take all of that kind of

like TV math and now apply it to monitors, which have really struggled, especially with like controls and calibration. That's a place that's a real pain point on monitors and bring that TV ease into the monitor space, like, that to me is just a smart move. This is a super interesting thing from Sony in the world of, like, they want you to put your PlayStation on your desk, which I think is just like a totally different way for Sony of thinking about gaming that I think is fascinating and is like, like you were saying about Microsoft kind of owns the whole world that isn't you sitting on your couch playing games or your television.

And Sony is like needing to compete with that space because more people are spending more of their time sitting at their desk playing games. And for Sony to be like, okay, this thing works for your PC, but also like the real magic is if you plug in your PS5 is, it's like it's a subtle small thing, but feels like a kind of big omission from, or a big admission from Sony that this is like, we are in a new world of how people play and where. And Sony needs to like be part of that in all the ways it possibly can, which I just think is fascinating. Yeah, 100%. Let's end it here. The iPad Home Hub in iPad OS16 situation is a, uh, of little consequence at the end of the day.

I think very few of our listeners are using their iPads as home hunts. Let us know if you are. If you're running your Apple HomeKit system off your iPad. On purpose. We need to make that key. I'm curious as to why. But here's the thing that's really interesting. So there was some code in iOS 16 that made it seem like iPads would not be able to work as HomeHubs and HomeKit anymore.

We run around in circles. There's a lot of reporting, whatever. Apple finally released a statement. The statement is fascinating because Apple made a big deal about matter at WWC. They said matter out loud. They put the thing on the screen. But here's the statement. iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 will continue to support iPad as a home hub with no loss in functionality. Alongside these releases, the home app will introduce a new architecture for an even more efficient and reliable experience. Because iPad will not be supported as a home hub with the new architecture, users who rely on iPad for that purpose do not need to update the home app.

home architecture and continue, can you enjoying all of the existing features. Now, you could just read that as it doesn't have the radios to support matter. Right. Which is what we assumed for a while is the case. Like, that's definitely the simplest way to read that statement. But neither do most Apple TVs. Right. And really only the HomePod Mini has thread radios that work in that way.

So it's unclear actually what this new architecture is. But they're saying that matter accessories will require an Apple TV, which doesn't have the radius. Right. It's just unclear, like, what is this architecture and why can't the iPad run it? Is it matter? Is it not? What is Apple's true commitment to matter? Does it matter? Far more up in the air now because of this statement than he would expect. Like, you would just expect, like, oh, it makes no sense to have this, like, mobile device be your home hub. Right. But the expectation was always, like, many iPads just never leave the house. Yeah. So it might as well be the home hub. I think that's actually what they were saying is actually sometimes iPads leave.

the house and that's bad. So we're going to things with plugs. But instead, we have this, like, this misdirect about architectures. So, I don't know, we'll see. But I'm, Matter still hasn't shipped. It's going to save everything, you guys. It's going to change. It's going to matter.

Soon your house will be smart. It was dumb before. And then we will be immortality. And then as I walked off the funeral looked around and thought, today, we have become immortal. Look, it's been a weird short week of news. You're going into the holiday. We should end it here.

I'll say two things. One, Decoder next week, our annual grill spectacular. Last year, we interviewed the CEO of Blackstone, which, by the way, went public after they were on Decoder. And they're going to do $600 million in revenue this year selling grills, which is pretty good. This year we got the CEO of Trager. They're going to do $800 or $850 million in revenue, selling smokers. That's the wood pellet one, right? That's the woodpout skunkers.

People love that thing. That dude, Jeremy Andrus, do you know what he did before he was a CEO of Trigger? He was the CEO of Skull Candy. Wow. Headphones to Grills. Yeah. Crazy story. Is he your best friend in the whole world now?

We're like in it now. Yeah. Give that man a Ford F150 and it's like he can just move in the Eli's house. That's come in. That's our 4th of July special. The Vergecast is off next week. But our show's on Netflix. Futureov is on Netflix.

Please go stream it. We also have a huge. package called Homeland this week. It's the 20-year anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security. Lots and lots of stories, including a look at Chad Wolf, which is a fake name. But Chad Wolf was basically illegally the Secretary of Homeland Security for a long time. Sarah John dove into that. Mechanic Kelly has a big piece on the Afghan refugee crisis in the United States after we withdrew from Afghanistan, which has a big Airbnb component inside of it, which is fascinating. And I interviewed the Director of Innovation. for the TSA, which went pretty much how you'd expect. You talk about innovation in shoe removal? We innovated. He was a very nice guy. His name is Dan McCoy, but it's the TSA.

Like, you can't overcome the TSA. But he was getting, they actually came to us. So all that's going on is even more stories in the Home Unpackage. Please check that out. We've spent a long time on it. It looks beautiful. It's one of those beautiful things we ever published. It's gorgeous.

And the stories are great. McKenna's story in particular. They're all very good. But if you're going to start somewhere, I would start with McKenna's story. It's excellent. For sure. Okay. that's it we have we we're just about to go over wait for it we went over saying it happened so close

i was stupid waiting for it uh you can tweet at us i met reckless david's at pierce alex's alex h cran's andy's andy's at andy jocke uh david's got the show on wednesday's what was your show this week on wed we talked about privacy implications of roe v wade we talked about why netflix won't just tell me what to watch and we talked a bunch about a susuise laptops and Monica made all of Asuos's stupid names make sense to me. I think David gets mad about product names is going to be a long-running theme of the Wednesday Vergecast. I'm very excited about it. And that's how he became into us. All right, that's it. That's Vergecast. That's Vergecast. Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email

at Vergecast at theverge.com. And if you'd like to the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of the Verge and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. That's it. We'll see you next week.