The Vergecast - Verge turns 5, Google Home, and Assistant

Episode Date: November 4, 2016

Happy Vergecast day! Look we’ve got a new logo! This week, in honor of The Verge’s fifth anniversary and the redesign of the website, we start off the show by giving some behind-the-scenes details on the new things you see on the site and things we’ve changed. But don’t worry, we still have that weekly news you all subscribe for. Nilay, Dieter, Paul, and Dan discuss using the Google Home speaker and how it works with the Google Assistant. Also, we have reviews of the 13-inch Macbook Pro (yeah the one without the Touch Bar), Paul’s weekly segment “Cookie Pods,” and some great ad reads in between. 01:49 - The Verge turns 5 15:58 - Google Home 27:49 - Google Assistant 40:35 - Macbook Pro 1:06:27 - Paul’s weekly segment “Cookie Pods” We want to thank the listeners, new and old, for tuning in each and giving feedback on the show, we greatly appreciate it. A quote from Nilay on this week’s episode: “We launched The Verge basically on the back of this podcast. This podcast when Paul and I were doing it with Josh as the Engadget podcast was so popular that we could fucking leave and start a new podcast, our listeners came with us, and we were able to launch This Is My Next and then The Verge so it’s wild that we’ve done it for five years.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, welcome to this, the Vergecast. You are in a place of pure relaxation. This is your line. Cutting. Hello, welcome to Vergecast. That was a really weird intro that Paul made us do because he's just playing flute jams on his iPhone. It's called breath flute. It's the instrument, hot new app called noise.

The best part of the story is that Paul usually has his... iPhone 7 headphone dongle permanently plugged into his iPhone. Yeah. But had to remove it because the iPhone won't make any sound. It's true. So now the dongle is where it belongs plugged into the headphone jack or the headphone plug of my headphones. Because you can't lose this thing. You can't.

It's the most important thing. Anyway, we're not here to talk about dongles. Oh, but maybe we are. Maybe a little dongle talk. Anyhow, this is the Vergecast, flagship podcast of theverge.com, a website that is cooler than ever this week. We relaunched the whole thing. We turn five. We're like little people now.

We're just wandering the world. We're in like regular clothes. You know? We're totally potty trained as a website. We kind of know what we're doing, but still just blow it all the time. What's first grade? Is five kindergarten? Yeah, it's right.

Five, six is kindergarten. Yeah. Depends on if you're an overachiever or not. We know most of the letters of the alphabet. Numbers. A little fuzzier on the edges, but we're getting there. No, we're five, which is crazy. Actually, this podcast,

I think about it. It's a bunch of people. Deeter and Paul and I all started this thing, and Dan joined us in our first year. By the way, I'm here. I'm Nealai Patel. There's Paul Miller. Hello. Deider Bone is here. Hello, hello. Yeah. And Dan Seaford is with this as well. Hello, Dan. Hello, I'm here. So we've been at this for five years, which is crazy. I am going to take this this opportunity on this, our flagship podcast, to talk about our own website for a while. So we relaunched the whole thing. The first thing I will say to you is that it is crazy fasting. Yes. Probably the number one, complaint that we have ever gotten about the verge that I get from Paul Miller all the time is that it was really slow. And I'll just get in as like a little bit of backstory. So we launched

the verge in 2011. Mobile was not the thing that it is now, which is crazy to think about. There was no like Facebook did its earnings this week. There's a billion people who have only ever used Facebook on a phone. Yeah. That was not the state of the world in 2011. We launched the verge. We basically launched it for a 27th. an inch iMac. That was its canonical viewing experience was a big desktop monitor. Our mobile site at the time was m.theverge.com, which was a cut down version of the site. It was an own separate website. It wasn't responsive. We made it in 2013. What I made it responsive? 2014. No, response was like 2014. That was my biggest.

What I learned about the word responsive, I was off the internet. And people were like, oh, we're going to make the verge responsive. It was like, Yes, it's so slow. No, that's not what we're responsive. Responsive means, just check this out. And then you grab the corner of the browser window, and when you slide it different sizes, it works, which is great. Which is a great idea.

So anyhow, we launched it. We had apps at the beginning. We had a, believe we had a Windows app at one. I mean, it was crazy. Totally fragmented experience. 2014, we made it responsive. We got rid of all the apps because apps, if you've been paying attention to the tech industry,

It's very hard to break an app in anything meaningful in terms of distribution. I say if you've been paying attention to tech industry, like in air quotes, because you're listening to the show, and I'm sure you do. Anyway, a lot of the cruft on our site was a remnant of us believing that it would be deployed to powerful desktop computers on fast connections with big screens. So there's just a ton of JavaScript on the site. I will tell you right now, the thing that people are complaining about the most that we will find some affordance for to bring back, is we've lost the drop down. Yeah. It has had the article count.

You clicked it and showed you every article we published. That was just a big JavaScript thing in the corner of the site. So we stripped out all of that old stuff. We made the site just, it's like 50% faster in some cases. It is just lightning fast now. But I think it's also, it looks sick on OLED displays. It's beautiful. It looks so good on an OLED displays.

It looks really good on an OLED screen. It also looks really good on the iPad. It looks. It does look great on the iPad. And tablet magazine's going to make a comeback because of our, if you, if you do miss the drop down of the list of recent articles, we do want to bring it back. I will say that one of the things, one of the big decisions we made here, especially this being a website that pays attention to the fact that more people look at the web on their phones than they do on the desktop is underneath our hero area, we are committing to being really aggressive at leaving that in a reverse course. chronological and not pinning too many stories that breaks at reverse chronological. So if you just go to the homepage and scroll down, one, it's really fast. In some cases, I think it's faster than loading up that recent stories thing. And two, like, you will get a rev chron there. But we've heard you, we are going to figure out something that we can do later. And the other thing I'll say is we think it's beautiful. There's an entire design system. And that's actually the thing that

we made. Yeah. So if you think about us reading designing the website that's the wrong frame because we are we published to so many more places than the website for example many people consume the verge in the form of a podcast which is distinctly not a website uh we publish almost all our videos to youtube we publish a whole bunch of other videos to facebook we publish circuit breaker videos on the circuit breaker facebook page in fact we killed our video hub entirely yep because having tons and tons of video player flash video players on a series of web pages is actually not how anybody consumes video. They just go to YouTube, the world's second largest search engine, and search for videos.

So all of our videos, if you click on video on our nav, it takes you straight to our YouTube page, where if you haven't subscribed, YouTube will helpfully put a pop-up in your way to make you fucking subscribe. So subscribe to our YouTube page. Please do. Please. But you already have. If you're listening to this podcast, you're a deep virgin nerd, you're my people. So what we actually designed was a new design language called Pathways, which maybe one of these days will print the entire style guide.

We have this gigantic, formal style guide that the design team at Fox Media made us. And Pathways is just all about using lines and colors and shapes. We have a series of distinct brand colors. We have rules for the logo. We trim the serifs off the verge wordmark to make it better on small screens. So first we designed that. Yeah. We spent a lot of time talking about Pathways.

We also had a number of other design systems in contention that all had, I would say, insane names. My favorite was cyclical pulse. I'm kind of sad we didn't go with that one because that one could have just called pathway cyclical pulse No but that wouldn't uh It was in there There was another one that was like illuminated dreams Like crazy amazing things

We picked pathways We spent a lot of time discussing fonts And like Neil and I've been talking about the feedback And the best thing we can say is like People love it people love that it's fast But like when people criticize it They're criticizing our like actual choices Like I'm not getting any responses from anybody that's like, eh, meh.

It's all like, this is great or this is great, but I'm so angry about this font. I was like, yes, great, let's talk about that. Yeah, the choices. It's weird because what we do 90% of the time on this show, on the site and our videos, is talk about other people's products and we criticize their decisions. So when we make our own product, it's a, it's very confusing from our perspective. Because we have to not be jerks in the product development meetings. And B, it's the only time really that we get the same kind of feedback that we often give to other people.

I like the new font and stuff. Yeah. Do you want to hear some super inside baseball about the fonts? Sure. So we were really tired. Our two big fonts, the sand serif was called din condensed, and the serif, the old headline font, was called Adele. And we were all really tired of Adele. Not Adele the singer.

She's great. Yeah. This is Adele with two L's. It's a chunky slab serif font. We wanted to get rid of it. It's not good on video. It's all this stuff. We want to find something new, Hipper.

And they went through like a thousand options. And fonts are really expensive. So like there was a lot of hacks to like download fonts locally and then ping a local. Like it's crazy to make it all work so we could test it. And finally they're like, okay, we found a font. We don't want to tell you what it's called. But look at it. I'm like, that's great.

They're like, it's Adele Sands. And I'm like, you could have told us any other name. Because in every meeting we'd be like, Adel sucks. Get it out of here. Yeah. So, I don't know, look, here's what I'll say. I think it is, we just wanted it to be faster and sleaker and louder. Anyway, that's the website.

I hope you like it. I hope you like all the design. You're going to see it particularly in video. Yeah. Just get wilder and bigger and brighter. A lot of people have made like the Stranger Things reference. Which is super, like, funny to me. It's hilarious because we were, we thought our old wordmark and a lot of our old branding was that 70 sci-fi.

Yeah. Which is where Stranger Things lives. Yeah. So we are actively trying to like get out of it and get beyond it. I see the connection, but give us a minute. We're going to pull in a totally different zone with this, with pathways, with the look, with video. And then the, we haven't even talked about the features of the website, besides the speed. You're going to talk about the header.

The header. It's the header. It's the most important thing. Yeah. Well, so there's three things that like you can kind of like hear the inner voice of the verge where we, we say. hilarious, strange things to ourselves and to your audience. And that showed up historically in just the poll quotes that would show up on the front page. And if you don't follow Verge poll quotes, that's a great Twitter account that would aggregate those.

We still have that. It appears in one place on the homepage. It's going to appear in other places very soon. So that's pretty exciting. But the header, the thing at the top, so we've just got our logo, the new, you know, sans-serif logo, where we can discuss the G in the Verge if you want at length. It's there. It's huge. We have a date line, which Neil, I can talk about, but, like, it is, like, it's nice to, like, see the date there.

It says something that I think matters. And then there's a little tagline there that we can change. And we can also change the background. And so, if you are a loyal verge reader and you actually take the time to go to a home page on your desktop, first of all, know that nobody does that but you. And thank you. And your reward for doing that is seeing some cool imagery that we can change up whenever we feel like it. And seeing a clever little tagline that sort of expresses how we feel about the day or what's going on on the planet.

So right now it's Tag the Verge as we record this. And so there's a little link there and you can go and submit your own taglines if you want to have it up there. You can also just tweet it with that hashtag and we'll keep an eye out for those. And maybe some clever joke that you make could appear on the front page of Theverge.com. Yeah, I think it's going to be the most fun. Yeah. It's already been, we're already like overdoing it. I'm going to be honest.

Well, it's, it's two days in. But like, we're already overdoing it. Like last night, I changed it to back to the future Cubs reference because the Cubs, it was like, we're just like definitely overdoing it. But whatever, it's new. Let's have a good time. Let's party. And then we'll calm down when we turn six.

Real grown up. Because six-year-olds are totally calm. But anyway, just so everybody knows, we launched the Verge basically on the back of this podcast. Yep. that this podcast, when Paul and I were doing it with Josh, as the Engadgetter podcast was so popular that we could fucking leave, start a new podcast. Our listeners came with us and we were able to watch this as my next and then The Verge.

So it's wild that we've done it for five years. I will tell you nothing about what the verge is now is what I would have necessarily predicted five years ago, but it's been great every step of the way. And I think it's because we have such a loyal audience that cares. I think it's a lot because I love listening to everyone, even when you hate us. It's like really useful feedback. And we just want to make something that's great all the time for everybody. And I think we are better positioned. We are smart. We know what we're doing a little bit now. When we start it in 2011, just zero idea what we're doing. So we kind of know

what we're doing a little bit. We have a great company behind us. We have a huge video team. We have all these great people who work with us who are doing crazy, surprising things all the time. I encourage everyone to go read Caitlin Tiffany's, why you should have a job. giant jewel-encrusted cell phone case post, which is just bonkers and hilarious and funny and smart in such an unexpected way. It was just the things we're able to, our science team is incredible. They actually, and this is like the opposite end of silly posts about jewel-encrusted cell phone cases, they have been running a series of in-depth exposés of sexual harassment at the Smithsonian, and it caused the Smithsonian to start an investigation, change its policies, and fire someone

who was like it admitted abuser of people. Like that's that's the balance we can strike in the range that we have. It's not at all what I expected our team to be able to do. It's a it's a greater ambition than I think that we had in 2011. But what I've learned is that there's no ambition that's too great for us. So we're going to keep gone. And now we're going to talk about Google Home. Yeah.

And if you have questions or feedback about the design, we're on Twitter. You know, you can find us. Almost all of you have my email address for some reason and my home phone number. very disturbing. So please just keep giving us your feedback on the design. We're really proud of it. We are literally Dieter and I have our next meeting with the design and dev team on Monday. Yep.

To talk about the next set of things we're going to do. So it's not done by any means. You can see that it's not done in some places, but I think the bones of it are great. The last thing actually before we move on is we should also talk about Verge 2021, which is a feature series put together by our features editor, Michael Zelanko. Hey Michael, if you're listening, I hope you're listening. How's it going, man? Instead of, like, doing a retrospective of all the amazing things that happened over the past five years, we have gotten together a bunch of, like, really smart, really important people and ask them what the world is going to look like five years from today.

And put together for a bunch of them, like, videos that, like, animate the things that they're describing, the crazy world of driverless cars and gender balance workplaces, both of which seem like, equally unlikely, but are coming, and that's really good. Yeah. And that's another thing. It's the most ambitious package we've ever run. It's running for the full month. It's like 10 total pieces, and it integrates photography, video, design our access to these people. Yeah. It's that team is done. It's super fun. It's really good. Okay. Everyone take a breath. Okay, Google. Play the Vergecast.

Damn it! No! I was going definitely. I thought I had like the safe voice on, but it definitely heard you. What's the most inceptiony meta thing you can do on a podcast? Command the Google Home to begin playing your podcast. Alexa can't do that shit. Yeah, will it resume? Can Google do that shit?

The Google Home can play virtually any podcast because Google has a podcast. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're listening to the Vergecast on Google, and you say, okay, Google, play the Vergecast, will it say, I'm already doing it? I'm already doing it. I don't know. Or will it start it over? Because I hope it starts to.

HALM. Alexa, buy a Google Home. There you go. I figure we'll start it over. I did that with songs while it was playing a song and it just starts. All right, Dan, so you review this thing. I have one in my house. Walt has one.

There's Google Home's floating all over the Verge team. But you review, start us off. Yeah, so, you know, it's impossible to talk about this thing without talking about the Echo. And this is literally Google's take on the Echo. So everything that the Echo does now, the Google Home also does. And, you know, we can get into the personal. preferences between which one is better or not, but they're pretty close. And if you close your eyes, it's really hard to kind of tell them apart. But then, of course, go ahead, Deeter.

No, I was going to say, like, the fundamental question for me here, it's 50 bucks cheaper than the Echo. I think it looks better. Is this thing, like the Echo, like, I don't know how many they've sold a bunch. Like, most people, like, if you're listening to this podcast, you know exactly what an Echo is. But is, like, the argument Dan and I have been having for the past month is, is, is, is this thing going to be really important? And is everybody going to buy one? And this is going to be the thing that, like, is a big deal and a bigger deal, honestly, than the pixel phone.

And I kind of want to say yes, if they can get it into retail stores. Like, the thing that's, what, $130? Yeah, and it's going to be in, like, targets and Best Buy. Yeah, it'll be every more than Amazon, right? So, yeah. This, like, this could be the most important product that Google releases, like, in a year. They should just put it right next to the Chromecast and have a little placard that says love casting things.

Yeah. Because people just love casting. Do you cast? I guess that's a good question. Is it going to be as big as the Chromecast was? Yeah. Chromecast is $35 and it sold at Walmart. And it says like, get free TV on it.

It's like, you know, like it's the simplest way to get Netflix on your TV. And that's why people buy it. Right. Because you just like push the button on your phone. Dan, I think you and I disagree in a very fundamental level with this thing. Oh boy. Right. You're like close your eyes and it's the same.

And I disagree. I think it is slightly worse than the echo. Really? In really meaningful ways. Wow. And I was using it again last night. And like they are, they are just deeply irritating. Starting with the wake word.

It is awful to say, okay, Google. Yeah, I give you that one. I agree. Oh, no, you got it. God damn it. It is awful to say, hey, Google. Alexa is just a nicer thing to say. Yeah.

So when I was shooting the pixel review, I had to say Google, like, 30, 40 times per minute, you know, to like get my lines. And like, once you say Google more than three times in a minute, it becomes a Google. Yeah. It's like, okay. There's something to be said for the fact that most other assistants have a name. Yeah. There's way too much to be said of the fact that most of those names are female names and the assistants have female voices. But at least it's a person, right? Or an anthropomorphized thing. and you're having a conversation in the form of a conversation instead of invoking a brand. I read Brian X-Chens review in the New York Times today, and he's like, to get a sense of how

annoying this is, just replace Google with any other brand and just walk around being like, okay, Pepsi, like you don't want to do that. Yeah. Nobody names their kid Google. And the irony is that, you know, the home is of all of them the best one to have a conversation with because, like, you can actually ask a follow-up questions, but every single time you ask it a follow-up question, you have to say, hey, Google or OK Google, which like totally ruins. Now my phone's blowing up.

Totally ruins the experience of having a conversation with this type of thing. So, like, that's kind of why I feel like there, it's like when you look at what you would use it for at home, what most people use the echo for, like, you can, we can debate the sound quality and we can debate, you know, a couple other things. But like, really, people use them as speakers to play music in their home primarily. And then maybe for a timer in the kitchen, if you have smart lights or smart home gadgets, you use them to turn on and off smart home stuff. And that's like what they all do. And you can ask a basic facts. But what I really wanted from the home, and I think what a lot of people expected from the home, was the fact that it's running this supposed to Google assistant, which is supposed to be this really smart, deep AI system. And it's really not a great assistant in a lot of ways.

And like it's not anything more than the echo. And I think a lot of people, myself included, were expecting a lot more from Google at the outset. So like, but when you say it's not a great assistant, like on the phone, like, I think that the Google assistant is better than Siri, better than Cortana, better than, you know, it's the best phone assistant. But that doesn't mean that it lives up to like what you think it ought to be capable. But the assistant on the home is not the assistant. I mean, it is the assistant that's on the phone, but it's not the same capabilities. Like basic stuff like adding an appointment to my calendar I can't do with home or setting a reminder. I can't do with home.

I can't send messages with it. Like all this stuff that I'm used to using the assistant for on my phone, I can't use the home for. And some of that is like really still. And so it's because it's only tied to like a single Google account. Right. Yeah. That's the other issue. Like Google trying to do more with this than Amazon did with Alexa because like nobody

uses, you know, Amazon, not that there's such a thing as Amazon calendar. like Amazon doesn't have ambitions to like tie into like your actual personal data. It uses it, but you can connect it to a calendar. Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can. But like really they don't, that's like not the core thing that it does. Whereas Google says it is the core thing that it does. But everybody has more than one of Google account.

Yeah. Right. Like. Or, or they're in a household that has more than one Google account. Right. I have my main one and there's the one I used to control a botnet. Right. Great.

Bring it. A botnet of IoT devices that bring down the Eastern Seaboard's DNS. Don't cross me. So what? You don't have a Bondnet Google account? That'd be great, by the way. So there's that. But that's like deeper into the capability of the software.

I'm still stuck on like using the thing. So Dan was like, it's got a, the speaker's fine. I think the Alexa speaker, the echo speaker is better. Really? They're bad in wildly different ways, right? So the echo speaker is super tinny. Well, that's bad. Yeah.

And I think the home speaker is super muddy. I call the home speaker soft. Like, it's not as sharp sounding as the echo, and that makes the voice response sound better to me. Like, I like the voice of the Google Home better talking to me than the voice of Alexa, because it's not as piercing. It is like a better voice, too. Right. Dan, you didn't have any problems with the microphones. It just didn't hear me a bunch.

And really? My Newark apartment is not like a massive zone. Do you have bad Wi-Fi? No. Huh? I mean... Because Google only has two microphones. Alexa has seven.

My router looks like it could invade the Earth at any of the internet. money. It's just that little stuff. It's the echo works because it's a great hardware product paired with like a pretty okay assistant. Right. And they've added capabilities, but very few people use those. Like Dan, so I think they use it to play music mostly. Set timers. The promise of the home is that it's a slight, I think a slightly worse hardware product paired with theoretically a much better assistant. Should they made it more expensive so they could compete more on the hardware? What's worse about the hardware? Is it just the quality of the speaker?

It's just little stuff. It's the quality of the speaker. I prefer the dial on the echo to turn the volume up and down instead of the touch thing. Okay. I think it could have used five additional mics, right? I don't know. But I mean, I will say aesthetically, I'd much rather have the home on my counter than an echo. Like I never had a problem with the echoes looks before, but then I look at it compared to the home and I'm like, man, this is like twice as big and way uglier than it should be.

for something that like sits in the middle of my house. Yeah. Yeah, the echo definitely looks like they made a prototype out of a steel tube. Yeah. And they're like, what if we just put this knob on it? Well, the little light ring at the top of the echo has gone from like being just like a thing to feeling like really like sylon aggressive. Like when it like spins around and looks at you. Love that.

Oh, dude. It's like I loved it at first, but it increasingly feels threatening to me. Really? Yeah. It's very ominous to me. I take that as a sign that it's going. to work. Right?

Like that it know, because sometimes it doesn't work. Like sometimes your voice bounces off a wall weird and it points at the wall. Yeah. And you're like, you're just a dumb robot. But when it like looks at you, you're like,

you're listening to me, buddy. Is there another technology in your life that has become increasingly menacing? I feel like typically they're like menacing technology. Fade into the background. That's a really good tagline for the verge. So not only does like the light circle around and then stop it when it points to you,

but also while it's listening to you, it will like shift from side to side, like it's scanning you. And it's like, it's just a very weird thing. And like the lights on the home, I think I wrote this, that they're much more approachable

and like less offensive or menacing looking than the rain. It's a much friendly your product. Yeah. Yes. Friendly yours is the better way. But I just don't. But nice guys finished last.

I'm all just assuming that, I mean, if you're going nice guy and you're going up against Jeff Bezos, like you're dead. You're like, Daffan he's like, I'm stabbing you right now. With a drone.

I just, I feel like they kind of whiffed. Huh. I don't, do you don't feel, Dan? I haven't used one yet, so I can't weigh in. I don't feel as negative on it. I think that like, you know, for everyday use, I think it's fine. I haven't had the voice control

issues that you've had in Eli. And, you know, I'm able to ask it to play my Discover Weekly and it just starts playing and ask all these things. And I've noticed that, you know, I use these things a lot for controlling smart home stuff because turning lights on and off with an app is a real pain in the neck. So with Alexa, I don't know, three at a four times it works. And that one out of four times is super frustrating. So I've had a much higher hit rate with home for that kind of stuff. So that's like a

better experience. But my disappointment is like I said earlier, like Google pitched this as like this virtual personal assistant. And it's just not yet. Your own personal Google. That was like the whole thing. Yeah. It barely knows anything about me. I'm going to read this ad, and then I want to talk about Assistant for a little bit, because the most interesting thing to me here is you just reviewed the pixel, which is sold on the back of Assistant. Dan just reviewed the home. I think we should talk about Assistant for a minute.

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They wrote it nice. Squarespace. Write it nice. Right it nice. Let's talk about assistant. Yeah, what do you want to know? Well, so, you know, Dan and I were working on this review last night. What I was asking him over and over again was, why is it different than on the pixel?

And the comparison that Dan gave me was series, is wildly different on the Apple TV than it is on the Mac than it is on the phone. I think this is the beginning of like a huge mistake that all these companies are making. Well, so yes, you are correct. The pixel, the assistant gets instantiated differently in Allo than it does in Google than it does in Google search. Google Assistant on the pixel than it does in Google Home. It does different things in all four of those places. That is a thing that I would like them to resolve.

over time and I don't get super duper vexed about it. Like, they'll figure it out, right? I'm not super deeply worried about that. What does worry me deeply about the assistant is it has repeated the original sin of Google since time immemorial since Larry Page murdered Sergey Brintner, like Cain and Abel. It doesn't understand multiple accounts. Yeah. It ties to your primary Google account.

if you've got a work account, it doesn't know shit about it. Yeah. And come on. Literally, everybody who works at this company, all 45,000 people, however many thousand people work at Google. 100,000 people have a personal Gmail and a work Gmail.

Yeah. And they all have to use hangouts at work, and I'm so sorry for them. They all use these products every day. And they haven't figured out Like, they've barely got it working in Chrome where it's not the worst thing on the planet to have more than one Google account. Barely. And they build this assistant and they still haven't resolved this original sin. Figure it out, guys. Yeah. Make a setting where it's like, okay, fine, we can only tie it to one account. But yeah, you could like cheat your work accountant for it, all of your information from there. I mean, it's not you're smart enough to see shared calendars on my personal account. Like, we have a shared family calendar between my wife and I. And it's on my personal account. And it's on my personal account. It's literally the only thing on my personal account that has any appointments and the Google home can't see it.

So it's like it never thinks I have any appointments. It never thinks I have anywhere to go. I just want them to finish a product. Yeah. You know, Google search is like a finished product. It's the thing that makes them the most to money. It's really good. It works. Gmail is a finished product.

YouTube is a finished product. Like doesn't anyone at Google ever think like, man, our finished products kick ass? Yeah. People love them and use them and they all generate tons of money for them. End-to-end design concept is real interesting. What if we finish the product? My question about Google Home is like a lot of the answers on Google Assistant on the phone are like, here's a cool web search. I heard what you were saying and I searched the web for you.

Yeah, but I'll say that. So how does it do that with Google Home? I was at my cousin's house last weekend and he is a TV in his kitchen. He's got the nasty cable box sitting on top of the wall-mounted TV. and he's like, I've got to use all these remotes to turn on my kitchen TV. And I was like, we need to talk about this whole setup. But I can solve this one problem and program your Verizon cable box remote to turn on your TV for you. Like look at the remote.

I did the thing where you pull off the battery cover. It's usually the stickers there that's like how to put it in learning mode. Yeah. A sticker. So I was like, okay, Google, how do I program a Verizon files remote? And it brought up the webpage, but it summarized the web page for me. It did summarize it. So that's the goal.

So like it brought up the cart. and I was like, I looked like a genius. Right. Like I had like a robot butler from the future. And I was like, I don't know. I'm going to tell you this. So did you do that with your phone? And I tried with Siri.

And he's like, here's exactly the same web result. I was like, a click. I click it on this garbage. So like I don't mind. As long as they repackage the web, I'm fine for them to rely on it. Yeah, Google Home will actually like read that summary aloud to you. So it might kick off like four sentences of reading. I did some demos asking it for recipes

And it would read Like the steps of the recipe Without telling me the ingredients I needed So I asked how to make pumpkin pine It never told me I needed like canned pumpkin But yeah So can I say a thing that I'm afraid of? Yeah

I wrote this thing like I guess it was a year ago About the internet bundle Like the fact that these assistants Just return one canonical result It's what you want But man does it create some winners and losers It creates a lot more losers than it creates winners. Yeah.

And like if they decide not to get it from the web and they decide to get it from their good friends at, you know, 4Square or Yelp with whoever is willing to chip in a little more cash. So this is happening all the place now with CAST, right? Yeah. Oh, the new Google Home app that Cass has been renamed to is hot garbage. Yeah? It is awful.

Like you no longer, they gave up on like trying to like have shows in it. And that, okay. fine. You were bad at that, so you stopped trying to do it. That's fine, I guess. Instead, it's just like, here's a bunch of apps that support casts. Like, why would I ever open this app ever again? It is, they made it from, like, a thing that, like, could potentially be useful to a thing that's utterly pointless.

I think Amazon has dreams that I'll open the Alexa app from time to time. Yeah. Literally have never opened that app, except to, like, reset the Wi-Fi on my... Right. Yeah. It's only there for troubleshooting. Anyway, sorry, I interrupted. Echo tap.

That's a little one, the little Bluetooth one. Yeah. Most buggy device, my entire life. Wow. Yeah. I mean, like, the big echo is great. The little guy just constantly just loses its internet connection. But doesn't know it's lost its internet connection.

As we talk to it. It's like, I am going to play that song off of Spotify. I'm going to do it. Just nothing happens. And I have to turn it all. I don't know. Anyway, but I don't think anyone buys that one. You were saying that the evil deals are happening all over the place.

And I interrupted. Oh, the evil deals. So Google with the Google Home, I think it's the, it would be its coolest feature if they do all the things they say they're going to do. But you can just say, you can tell Google Home, like, cast the verge on YouTube to my living room TV. If you have CEC all set up right, which no one does, except for me, because I'm a huge nerd, it'll light up your, it lights up my receiver. It switches the receiver input. It lights up the TV, switches the TV input. It gets it all right, and it just starts playing, which is awesome.

Yeah. Google says they're going to like partner with Netflix and do this thing so you could be like Play black mirror on the living room TV and just like start doing it if you they could get all the way to Play whatever play the world series and like light it up but that's you got to have a deal with Google to do it Yeah it's not just like an open thing it it unless Google gets the deals which are very hard to get Yeah especially with Netflix apparently they're not plugged into Apple's TV app Apple also can't get they have single sign on for the Apple TV? Yeah only direct TV and DISH are signed up for it so far as we know.

And I'm almost 100% certain that the reason they haven't got the big cable companies to do it is because Comcast would rather you download the Xfinity app on the Apple TV and use that as your primary interface. Yeah, because the Xfinity app is an entire whole OS all of its own. It's an operating system that runs on your iPad. Yeah. Well, how can you trust these people? I think this is why it would be great. Like, like, if you think of, like, that old Apple commercial, like, in the future, there'll be this Apple assistant and, like, you know. So the knowledge navigator.

Is that what it was called? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. If you think about that, what you conceived of as AI in the future, it was relatively personal. It was probably made by a company. Yeah. But it was personal and it was smart in a personal way. It was smart about, like, it's not hard, like, theoretically, Dan, it's pretty easy to access your calendar.

or you could like take a piece of paper and write some dates on it. And, you know, you'd have your information. You know, it's not a crazy concept that your information could be local to you and you would have access to it. It's when it has to be filtered through multiple different companies talking to each other or just one big company talking to itself in the case of Google, where it's weird and it's harder for these artificial intelligent things, or not really artificially intelligent.

artificial insistence to access the information because they are not truly personal objects they're corporate products that you kind of get a weird license to yeah well it's weird because everything was that way before we just didn't think about it

because nothing no single thing was all consuming yeah so your access to television through a cable box just deals on deals on deals on deals but it didn't matter because once you stopped using it you did something else And AT&T Time Warner wasn't there to chase you around the world tracking your every move on the internet.

The computer, ostensibly, the personal computer, you had your recipes, you had your spreadsheets, you had your novel that you'll never finish, and your calendar and your emails. All of those are basically text files that are local to your computer theoretically and searchable by one computer. and if an intelligence was local to your computer, it could work with that information. I mean, that's Apple's pitch for the intelligence on the iPhone, right? It reads the emails and your contacts that are vocal on your iPhone and then tries to make some intelligence sense out of that, right? I'm still focused on the fact that Paul just laid down some real talk

that I'm never going to finish that novel. Yeah, it's real sad about that. It's actually in the extended cut, at the end of the phone call, when he, you know, teleconferences into the other professors, I know this video by heart, by the way, but teleconferences into the other professor's class to talk about dinosaurs. Yeah. At the end of it, he hangs up and he looks wistfully off in the distance. The knowledge navigator is like, you're never going to finish. God damn.

It's really weird. It ends. It's just fucking super drunk and alone, wondering why he's a failure. They predicted everything that would happen to me. John Scully had a really dark vision of the future when he ran. But also true. So right now, assistant. Yeah.

It's Google's biggest bet. Yeah. It's what they're talking about. They named it after the company. They got Apple running scared. Apple will literally call anything it can machine learning and AI. It's like when you unplug your headphones, the music stops. Series on the case.

Like that's the world we live in. Where's it at? Is it what's your take? It's the best, but that's not saying much right now. Dan? Yeah, agreed. Like on my phone, assistant is far more useful than anywhere else, but it's still not where I'd love it to be. Does anybody still have Tasker on their Android phones?

I feel like all we've done is make voice activated Tasker. Yeah. Where you'd like, you'd plug in your headphones and start Spotify for you. It's a deep, deep Android nerd cut from a... Remember Motorola built its entire own version of Tasker? Yes. And that was like a major selling point of the droid. Is that the one that could do like location-based stuff?

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the OEMs build that stuff now. so like LG, Motorola, like you mentioned. Samsung has it. You can set location-based stuff to turn your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. It's called S-Tasker.

Stasker. Weird. Okay, I'm going to read an ad, and we're going to talk about the MacBook. This episode, Virgiljast, also brought to you by Graphic Stock, a subscription-based stock media company that gives you unlimited access to over 300,000 premium photos,

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and you keep what you download, maintain those rights forever. So, exclusive to Vergecast listeners, sign up for a seven-day free trial today. Graphicstock.com slash Vergecast. That is Graphicstock.com slash Vergecast for a free seven-day trial. All right, let's talk with this MacBook. Paul, I want you to talk about the MacCast. I feel like I've done nothing to talk about the MacBook. I've thought about the MacBook.

Dieter has one sitting on the table here. I do. Vlad just published the review of what I am referring to as the boring one with no touch bar. That's the one I have sitting in front of me. Touch bar ones. I feel it a little delayed. Right? They were supposed to ship in two or three weeks.

I'm seeing people whose dates are getting pushed back. But anyway, Vlad, I believe, wrote, he wrote the review of the boring one. And then he wrote a follow-up piece, which is a fascinating thing to run simultaneously review. Windows laptops to consider instead of a MacBook Pro. Yes. And I know you're involved in this. So tell me what you're thinking about this, Paul. Well, I think these are the obvious ones.

My personal thing right now is that I always want to go more pro. Yeah. In fact, I had a MacBook Air 11 inch for a long time, and I was very happy with it. I actually really like the size. And I was like, I'm a writer. All I do is write, and I just write, right, right, right. and I don't need a big screen because if I, whatever,

if I've got all these browser tabs, that means I'm not writing. I should be writing. I need a small screen. And I went up to a 13-inch pro because I was like, you know what? I'm kind of a bit of a developer now.

Do it some programming. And I wanted something more powerful to run like Unity and Unreal Engine. I've gotten Premiere on this laptop. I've done a little bit of that. Yeah. But like a base model pro is not that good at Unity or Unreal or Premiere.

Right. And it's really, it's basically good for writing and for developing, for sure. And so my thinking was like, can Apple do something special and bring the GPU closer to the pro model people actually buy, not the $5,000 model. Yeah. But maybe the $2,000 model with a GPU. Apple's like, you know what? people really like GPUs. GPUs accelerate so many things.

Almost every Adobe app is GPU accelerated, and so it can be super helpful. And most of OS10 and a lot of Apple's applications like Final Cut is super GPU dependent. There's a lot so much nuance there, though, right? Like the Adobe acceleration doesn't work with the AMD GPUs that Apple uses.

Right. So, exactly. So Apple said, no, actually, we're not going to do that. Yeah. Well, it's weird that they stuck with AMD. Yeah. Everyone seems to believe that the Nvidia cards, the mobile cards are... I'm pretty sure AMD even knows that the Nvidia cards are better.

But do the Nvidia cards, are they gentle on the battery? Because Nvidia historically... Not a friend to the battery. See, that's the other thing. So, Nvidia's current gen are basically, like, you're looking at, like, twice the power draw. Like, if a laptop is, like, 20 or 30 watt, a MacBook Pro is, like, 20 watts maybe, like, a, like a laptop with like an invidia 1060 is like 60 watts or something like that. So obviously Apple's probably not going to do that.

But Apple just went to me in the other direction from where I'm wanting to go. I'm trending. I'm thinking about getting a thicker laptop with shorter battery life to do more pro things. And Apple made a thinner laptop. Yeah. And I just didn't need them to do that. And it looks beautiful. And I do like the new keyboard.

I think the touch bar is interesting, but not really essential. Yeah. And it just, it didn't help me. I feel like I'm a pro. I feel like I'm a pro person who uses a laptop for a job. Yeah. And the MacBook Pro doesn't help me in anything I want to do. So Dieter and I had this argument, I don't know, 20 minutes ago.

Yeah. Their naming is not helping them right now. No. At all. I think that the one that Deeter has in front of him, the boring one with two ports, no touch bar. Yeah. That should be the MacBook Air. Yeah, but it's not an air.

Harrison. Yeah. I mean, this is the, this is a computer they intend for Air customers. but like the air should be a little bit lighter than this. It should have the wedge. Yeah. To me, and this is the argument, I think that the MacBook should have been called the Air.

Yeah. And this thing right here should be the MacBook. And then the pro connotes the touchbar. Yeah. And that should have been the, that, like, that makes perfect sense. There's the Air, the tiny, 80-bitty one. There's the MacBook, the regular one, the one that everybody gets going to get. And there's a pro that has the cool, weird touchbar thing.

So the only thing about that, The MacBook famously is the that's the laptop that you get when you go to college because it's about $1,000. Yeah. Yeah. Um, this is not.

No. This is $1,500 for the base model. Yeah. Without the touch bar. Yeah, the whole new family is just like priced way higher. Really expensive. There's a MacBook and then there's like the MacBook Pro in three different styles. Boring touch bar and 15 inch touch bar.

Right. And that was the big thing. I mean, the, the piece we, that Vlad did of, PCs to look at, almost all of those offer superior specs for less money. Yeah.

Which for a while, I felt like the MacBook Pro was like, you know, this is always typically pretty competitive. Yeah. It's not competitive right now. I mean, to me, the big question, and like, I can't answer this because I haven't used a touchbar for more than 20 minutes, is, like, is Apple right? fundamentally, the difference between those more interesting, higher spec PCs and the MacBook Pro is they have

touchscreens. Yeah. And Apple just Not all of them. Well, except for the X, the 13th, the Dell. No, and the HP Spector. The real perspective. Definitely is. Well, not the 13 inch, but the Spector X360, which we have in that article. Yeah, that one, but that's like a different spec. I mean, I mean the Spector, the, like,

blinged out. Oh, yeah, right. But, like, fundamentally, Apple has gone from, like, being confident to being religiously sure that people do not want to touch screen on MacOS. I agree with them. In the current form of MacOS, I don't want a touchscreen. They would have to change MacOS pretty significantly to make a touchscreen

actually useful. And Windows did that and they screwed it up and then they did it again and they've gotten it mostly right but they haven't gotten developers to make apps for it yet. But the big, big question is all of the compromises on this thing, lack of ports, like lack of SD

card slot, the processor isn't the latest latest. The graphics card maybe isn't what people want. It's limited to 16 gigs of RAM. All of those compromises are dedicated to the proposition that what you want is a thin, light, long battery life laptop, and you don't want a touchscreen. And like, that's actually a pretty coherent, clear set of decisions and bets. But man, I just don't know. Because if you take away some of those compromises, put the SD cards on it, put a regular USB port on it, do something. thing, put MagSafe back on it, then all of a sudden you're much more willing to like stick with that bet. But as soon as you have to start making those compromises, all of a sudden, it gives you a moment.

It gives you a chance to go, huh, am I sure about those that I really believe in those first principles as much as Apple does? Yeah. Well, maybe I don't. Well, and that's the thing. The sad thing is that what I actually do every day, this laptop would be wonderful for. Yep. But what I aspire to be, or I aspire to do 3D graphics and video editing and more powerful things and more interesting things, this laptop isn't going there. They're stripping it.

They're telling me, Paul, you just browse the internet. You're never going to write that novel. You're never going to write that novel. They're forcing you to write the goddamn novel. You're never going to write that 3D graphics novel. I'm never going to write this novel. You're never going to make the multimedia CD-ROM, man. Oh man, I was so into director.

Yeah, it was director. I had director in the box. Oh, my God. Oh, and I was going to make so much multimedia. I've authored a CD-ROM in my day. It was basically a super fancy hypercard stack. Yeah. That's all that were.

It's a whole whole time in our lives. It's gone. And now we can't do it. Now we can't. Because there's not enough USB ports. So I have this story. So I have one of these two. The boring.

The boring one. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, there's a nice 27-inch Dell monitor on my desk upstairs, 24. I don't know, it's a big DOM. And it plugs into my 15-inch pro with a mini display port. Yeah. Like you do.

So Apple, they give us the review units. They give us, they literally gave me the review units and like dongles. Dongles for days. You're going to need in order for this to not be annoying. Yeah. So I go upstairs, like, take out the USBC to Thunderbolt 2. Dongle they gave me, confidently plug in my monitor cable, plug it in a laptop. fucking nothing happens.

Yeah. I had to go on Apple's support site. The plugs are the same, but their Thunderbolt cable doesn't support. Displayport. Displayport. You have to get a different dongle with the same connectors on the end to get mini displayport. Uh-huh. Like that, I complain a lot about this, but you're blowing it right there.

Right? When like the connector confusion is such that it's everything is the same, but everything is also different. I mean, the tragedy of this is I am really bully on USBC. I love U.S.P.C. I think that's great. And Thunderbolt, I'm also bully for. Like, Apple's screw you live in the future. Use dongles in the meantime. On the phone drives me crazy. On the computer, I like want to believe.

Because I want everything to use this connector. Ashley covered this Belkin Thunderbolt dock. Yeah. You just like plug in one cable and like the whole world opens up to you. Like literally every connector made for the past 50 years is there in power. Like, yeah. That shit's great. That's the dream. It only costs $400.

Yeah, but like, fine. Yeah. Well, this is why I'm surprised. Simplest thing. Like, did you know, for example, that the right side ports on the 15-inch pro are dramatically less fast than the left side ports? Who on earth is going to, like,

now you're saying, okay, pro customers, we trust you to be smart enough to know which side of the computer. Apple has had a laptop at some point, I feel like, with USB 3.0 in what, of the plugs, but like, because like on a PC, it's blue, right? The USB 3 put on plugs are blue, but Apple wouldn't do that. So I think at some point it's had one plug that is USB 2 and one plug that's USB 3. I mean, so this is why, why does it Apple, I heard that Apple's maybe just never going to make a display again.

Oh yeah, so that's what they told us. Yeah. Because that's the way, the way you want to roll into the office is you pull out your laptop, you plug in that one little cable. Yeah. And that charges your laptop. It's the display. And it's obviously... Yeah, I mean, that's what I do with my MacBook.

By playing on MacBook. It's the best. Right now, I have to plug two things in. So what they told us, because I asked him. And I tweeted this, and it's like, one of the most popular tweets I've ever tweeted. I was like, so you partner with LG to make this display? Are you ever making another display? And their answer was like, no.

Like, we're not good at it. We're just going to let LG be good at it and partner with them. So the LG display... You make the IMA 5K. And you're really good at making display. plays Apple, you're really good at it. But it's a super low volume business. They buy the panels from LG

anyway. Yeah, right. It's just LG. So they partner with LG, they wrote the firmware so the brightness keys, control the LG's brightness, the color profiles are all, it's the whole thing. And it's got the dock. But I've seen a bunch of people point out that when you buy your computer and your monitor

from Apple, if something breaks, you just go to the Apple store and fix it. Yep. And Apple isn't going to like honor LG's warranty. I mean, it's just like their move right now these laptops, I think. There's just, I've never seen so much outcry around an Apple product. And I'm the guy who, like, threw a temper tantrum over the headphone jack. But the deepest Apple nerds I know are like, I don't know if I want this computer. Yeah. And we've been waiting for this computer for a thousand years. And then it comes and we're like, ah, finally, buy. And then you sit with that.

You canceled your pre-order. Yeah, I did it. I was like, oh, man, finally, I got the, this is what I need. I bought it. And then I sat. And I was like, You know, I just don't know. Yeah. I just, I do not know. Yeah. I'm going to end up buying the computer because I don't have any other choice. Yeah.

Or I'm going to get whenever Google puts out like a sick Chromebook. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I tweeted this. Huge mistake that Google doesn't have a sick Chromebook on the market right now. Yeah. Huge, also huge mistake that Microsoft's still not that good at making an operating system. Yeah.

Right. Wow, Paul. It's the truth. Yeah. Okay, explain that one. Well, it's just, what was it? I was trying to work with the, the, the Surface book a while back.

And I was like, okay, this would be nice. This is an all integrated Microsoft experience. And it's just like, it just, it kept on shocking me ultimately. Like literally zapping you? I was actually being shocked by the Surface book. You know, most people, including myself, I just built a PC. So most people, the problem with Windows is that it's kind of this amalgamation because it's Windows, but then you've got this Nvidia application that kind of runs your graphics

card a little bit and then like your sound card is kind of from somebody else too and then so you end up with all these different interfaces but there's just the the the the operating system still just is not that slick it's not that unified it's still not as good at fonts as apple is yeah yeah and um and also for for developer stuff like they've got like bash on windows but i don't think it's really comparable to having actual unix under your operative system so then you're like well okay, well, I'll get a Windows laptop, and I'll put Linux on it. And that story is still not really improved. It's always about Wi-Fi drivers.

The oldest story. It really is. Before there was Wi-Fi, there was Wi-Fi driver problems. I read on these forums. I plugged in my parallel port, but for my printer, and the Wi-Fi driver doesn't work. What is Wi-Fi? I don't even know. You read on these forums?

I just want LPD. And they're like, we're starting to get 802.11. Man, pretty good. And they're like, oh, but AC is out. And they're like, oh. That's the worst. But Windows hardware, way more interesting than Apple's PC hardware. I mean, the Surface Studio is super impressive.

It's different. Dell announced basically a clone, which is my new favorite trend in PCs. Microsoft holds some big event. And they're like, we've done the most engineering. Panos Pena is like out there. He's like thumpinous chest. He's like, you know what you want? You want specs.

You like specs. I got all the fucking specs. And he shows you the specs and the video plays. And it's always like, dubstep Alice in Wonderland. And then you're like, I want that thing. And then like the next day, I was like, Hugh, we also made one. It's $1,000 cheaper.

You guys are wondering. Lenovo's like, you like the surface? Here's 90 surface claims. Yeah. It's great. I love it. But the hardware is way more interesting. Yeah.

And that's a weird spot for Apple to be in. Where the PC design is like, God, I wouldn't say opt completely to parody, but the stuff. is way more interesting. Well, and there's a gamut. There's, there's, there's, there's processors for laptops. They're similar to desktop class.

There's, there's the, the more, Intel's done this really confusing thing where they've basically made their mobile class and like higher end class laptop processors both be called I7 and five instead of having an M series. And then there's, you know, even lower in or lower spec. There's all, there is a wide range of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, specs that people want and there's a wide range of RAM like the RAM thing is is it's crazy to me because yes it does draw a lot of battery to have a lot of RAM also you know what sometimes people want a lot of RAM yeah and like people it's crazy it is crazy to say this with Apple

obviously this has been the Apple's thing forever we'll just make one size and pretend everybody wants it but I don't know I feel like there's other sizes out there and I think this is Apple and I've I've read probably more like Apple Mac web frustration with these Macs than any other Apple coverage I've read in a long time because it's so interesting to me. And I think Apple is just getting used to being the dominant player. Like they're still not ready for that role entirely, right? They still act like the underdog a bunch. They still think like everyone's doing it wrong. But in many cases, that's true but the turn now is like they're the dominant supplier of computing hardware and

software yeah so like everyone in the merit you know it's like all like they're they're they're the biggest one like they've got to they sell the most phones of any single company right they oh they're the latest strategy of analytics numbers they're they're down to 10% market share worldwide oh us android android is 90 but of the yeah individual phones of course yeah individual I just think they're, this is like their little moment of reckoning where they, they have to have the more diversified product line in almost everything they do because there's more, there's just, they have more people who want different things in different places. And this idea that they can hit the sweet spot constantly is just getting them in trouble. Because the sweet spot, particularly for pros, is all over the map. And this thing you're saying, like, maybe I don't care about the battery life of this laptop.

I just wanted to be powerful. Yeah. You know what? The normal answer for that is, well, why don't you just get a desktop? And Apple's answer to that is our desktop is from the Stone Age. There's a hamster inside of it. Yeah. Right.

Like, they got to solve that problem. Did you ever go to the App Store? And it's like, here's a game that came out like two years ago that we bet we sell a computer that runs something this good. Like literally what computer at Apple's line, well, Mac's. App Store takes forever to load. Let's see. Let's see. You can go with categories.

I'll get a good example for you guys. Just real quick. Just hold on. Nothing like shopping on the Vergecast. This has been Paul's weekly feature, wait for me to load the App Store. He does it every week. Okay, they got Civ 6. Yeah.

That makes sense. Sure it runs great. Definitely want to lock in a gaming purchase on the Mac app store. Wow, that was a really harsh burn. They just slid right by. Mm-hmm. Call-Duty Black Ops. Who'd buy that Mafia 2?

Oh, Mad Max. That was the game. Mad Max, it was on the cover page of the Mac App Store. For 30 bucks, you can get Mad Max. This is a 34-gigabyte game. So that's like most of your SSD. Like, literally who buys that on the Mac? Yeah.

That's what I want to know. I don't know, man. All I'm saying is I'm going to end up buying one of these because my current work computer is just, I mean, it is just nuclear hot right now. Literally the only thing it's open on this crow. This thing is dying. I need a new computer.

But I don't have a choice. Yes, you need a new computer and it will be marginally better, but it's not that much faster. Yeah. Which is frustrating. Yeah. No, I mean, I bought my wife, the 12-inch MacBook. It's about as fast as the, like, 10-year-old MacBook error replaced. Yeah.

What are you going to do? I think this notion that Apple has that you don't need that much more power and they can just make it smaller, lighter and the battery less that is fine for one class of people but i think another class like the person who has like three three browser windows because they don't know about tests intel's fault i mean is that a lot of it is intel's fault like intel blew it with silver lake apple never used it right yeah right like the the surface book had a bunch of weird problems that went somewhat underreported but they appear to be related to silver lake issues i mean intel's just i mean they're not getting faster, faster anymore.

It's not getting... At the same power level, you used to get a nice leap every year, year and a half. Is this Moore's Law has caught up to... Is the conspiracy theory that what Apple wanted to do was put an arm chip on this, and then at the 11th hour, they decided

they couldn't get it done and they just went back to Intel? If they do that, they're going to do it on the little MacBook first. Yeah. What's the over under on Apple in the next rev of this. Well, okay, three bets.

We haven't talked about touchbar at all. Yeah, we'll do that. We got to review. We got to touch the touch bar. I think the more interesting thing right now is the controversy of the thing existing. Yeah. Next week we'll talk about the touch bar thing.

But five years from now, will the Mac have a touchscreen and we'll be writing retrospective posts about that one weird time they tried the touch bar? No, so what's going to happen? It's going to have a touchscreen on the bottom. Well, that was the third one. The whole bottom is it.

No, no, here's what's going to happen. And the top part is not a touchscreen. Here's what's going to happen. Five years from now, we're going to be saying Apple really needs to release a new MacBook. They haven't done it since the MacBook Pro is a push bar five years ago. And iOS, the iPad Pro Pro, it's going to be called the Pro Pro. The iPad Pro Pro is not good right now. We're going to be using that.

And we're like, you know, it still can't do those two things that the Mac does and it's still not quite open enough. Let me tell you a very frustrating iOS story. You ready for this? So we're updating the whole Verge design. We've got all these new icons. You can have a GIF as your Facebook avatar. So we're going to make the circuit breaker Facebook avatar, this like looping video thing. You can only do that for apparently from an iPhone.

This is what Helen tells me. Okay. So she sends me in Slack and MP4. So download this, upload it to Facebook. Can't be done because I have no access to the file system. Oh, right. can't make that happen. I can't. There's no button in Slack to save a camera roll.

When you do it, it was the wrong format for the iPhone camera roll. So it didn't go. It just didn't take. I air dropped it to my computer and then airdropped it back. That didn't work. I googled where do airdrop files go. Nine million search results because no one knows the goddamn answer. Just, I get it. You want to still use that thing? That's great.

You got to give me one more little bit. bit of it's a computer. I feel like I haven't, I feel like maybe Apple's just already there, but I don't feel that pressure from Apple anymore that they're trying to get us all to switch to full-time iOS users. Oh, it's, I think it's coming.

I know, I just don't spend enough time. Read that Phil Schiller interview in The Independent where he like, he's like, yeah, you don't need an SD card slot. You're fine. The other thing he said there is, look, the iPad and iOS is the operating system where you touch the screen and interact with it,

and we're going to continue to develop the metaphor there. The Mac is a place where you don't touch the screen, and we're going to have other metaphors there. And they believe that the future of computing is the iPad Pro. Like, I know that it's really hard because everybody believes that Apple believes in the Mac, and I do too.

Like there's certain parts, like the Mac team obviously does. But I think institutionally, Apple doesn't believe in the Mac anymore. They believe in the iPad. Wow. That's a bolder. claim. And I'm not saying, if you ask any individual person at that company, all the way up to Tim Cook, they tell you that I'm a liar. But when you ask the institution of the company, the superstructure of Apple, it's just, it does not, it's focused on the iPad and on the iPhone. I just feel like they can't do that until they say, you know what? Everybody at our company for the past two years has been working exclusively using iPads to make the next iPad. That's actually the thing I haven't worried.

I mean, the Capitol makes a lot of media. They also design things. Yeah. And they program. Is Johnny Ive using like a nine-year-old Mac Pro? Like, what does he use every day? Probably. Richard Horwott, the-

Maybe the problem is that Johnny Ive... The whole problem with this Mac is that Johnny Ives uses a MacBook Pro full-time and didn't think deeply about the need for an SD card slot. Well, he's an executive now. That's what I'm saying. When I said I wanted a 15-Bitch Macbock Pro, did you mean iPad Pro? You don't need that. Yeah.

I'm sorry, he's using an iPad pro. Yeah. But there's like, there's somebody at Apple who's like making the website. Yeah, I'm saying. Doing the motion graphics. Yeah. Yeah. Just figuring out how to carve the aluminum.

Yeah. And like that person, presumably it's just as irritated as everyone else. Right. Right. What are they doing all day? Like, do they not, don't they have like an employee feedback for? Like, please update my computer. Yeah.

I think, yeah, they should, they should absolutely dog food. Like, if Apple wants to. force us all into iPad. I bet the iPad would become a really great computer if Apple everybody Apple had to use it as a computer. You know what's really irritating is if the next iPad event when they put up like the iPad

with the 810X or whatever it's going to be and they're like it's just as fast as the MacBook Pro. Well because you put the shit processor when they were doing this one they put it up and they're like it's a billion times faster than the PowerBook 170. Maybe you should compare

it to a Windows laptop that costs 800 All I know is the next 30 Vergecasts are just going to be a cycle of pain because I'm going to be spending the next six months just trying out every single Windows tablet and laptop on the market. That's be fun. Yeah, we're going to probably do some of the same stuff. All right. I'm going to read this last. Wait, no, you got to do your gadget corner. Some fan.

Faw has a recurring segment that he calls. Cookie pods. It's a lot like tortilla pods. I'll admit. It's a lot like. tortilla pots, but it's with cookies. It's way dumber. It's occurring for cookies.

I watched this video. I have so many questions, but go ahead. Okay. Chip is a smart cookie oven. It looks like a crock pot, but it's really shallow. It's smaller than a toaster oven, which apparently you can make cookies in a toaster of it. I literally have no idea.

Oh, they're the best. Okay. By the way, the most important part about Chip is that it's a capital P. Yeah. No, it's intercapped. And in the video, they refer to it as a hymn. which is very disturbing. Wow.

Wow. Okay. Its name is Eric Estrada. So basically you, it can cook four cookies at once, which apparently is enough for people. I don't know about that. That seems like a low number of cookies. Wait, is it one pod per cookie? The pods, I think, are there, they're four packs. It's like, it's like about $5 for four cookies.

Here's a main question I have. Yeah. They never show, they show the pod packs. And they show the people like opening chip lid and retrieving the cookies. They never show anyone removing the dough from the pod. Right. Because presumably you have to do that. I would assume.

Maybe not. I don't know. How? I don't know. Yeah, it's not. You don't remove the coffee from the curry pot. It's not. It's the whole point of the pot is you don't have to do it.

Exactly. It is, I, maybe it's a misnomer to call it occurring because, yeah, in a sense. Tortilla pods would, do you remove the tortilla? dough from the tortilla pot? No, you don't. See, that's what I'm saying. That's the magic of chip. It's science. I'm guessing that you have to somehow remove these four bits of dough into place. Yeah. And then, of course, you scan the barcode, obviously, and that it knows how to cook the cookies. And you can choose chewy, regular or crunchy. But

some people are mad about this. But you can cook your own cookie dough if you want. I see. Wow. So really just upending the whole razors and blades models of pods. Yeah, you can make your own blades. Yeah. Which is what you want. You know, make your own blades? So they made

a really expensive easy bake oven. Yes. With Bluetooth and QR codes. Which will take down the DNS of the Eastern C-B. It is not yet funded on Kickstarter. That makes people feel a better. In the app, you can send one another cookie grams. No. Yes, of course.

You got to make it. No. Game of fire. I just buy points and shit. No. No. They're at $18,000 pledged of their $100,000 gold. 28 days to go, though, so we can all turn this around.

That's not. Depending on what kind of world we want to live in. You take however much money, you were going to pledge this. thing and you just go buy some cookies. Okay, Google. You will end up with more cookies. Refill my cookie pot order. You could get, like, you could just buy cookie dough.

Oh, your phone's talking. Yeah, definitely. All right, I gotta read this ad. I have to say, I'm so excited about reading this ad. All right. I've never been more excited about an ad. I'm excited. It's a little late because Halloween's gone, but just bear with me.

You ready? This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by Final Scream, Lisa Jackson. What? It's every killer's favorite sound, the final scream. Don't miss Lisa Jackson's New York Times best-selling substance novel. 17 years after a deliberate and violent fire destroyed her family, Cassidy Buchanan returns to her small hometown in the shadow of Oregon's Cascade Mountains. She wants closure, but instead her presence ignites a fresh nightmare. Another fire, more deaths with one common denominator, Cassidy herself. Is she the target? A suspect? A suspect. or is a killer waiting in the woods, watching the flames rage and listening for the screams.

Final Screams by Lisa Jackson is on sale now everywhere books are sold. Find out more information at www.lisajaxon.com or kingsentonbooks.com. Final scream! All right, I think that was it. I think we've exhausted. We barely talked about dongles. Oh, man, we really could have, but we chose not to. When we get the touch bar one, we'll get deep into it. Dongle live. It's a real hashtag.

It's a real hashtag. It's happening on Twitter right now. Yeah. Get it. It was one of our taglines in the version. Yeah, that's my favorite ones. I'm pretty sure I'm the one who started the Dongolife hashtag. Really?

Back in the day. Yeah. But then when I did the headphone jack thing, I tweeted your picture at the Apple event. Right. All right. Anyway, that's our show. It was a good one. Yeah.

It was our fifth birthday show. We're five, God damn it. How did we get here? No one knows. We just waited. Literally. To be honest, I took a little break. That's why Paul's happier than everyone.

Paul's like the least stressed person I know. He's like hanging out. Anyhow, somehow we turn five. Thank you all so much for listening to this show. For reading The Verge, for watching your videos, for all the stuff you do. We love it so much. We love it. You can talk to all of us.

We love that too. Paul is at Future Paul on Twitter. Deer's at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. Dan is at D.C. Seifert. Was an E.I. We're at Verge on Twitter. We're Verge on Snapchat.

We're Verge on Instagram. Subscribe to us on YouTube. We switched to YouTube because you people complain so much. I gotta go subscribe. Get in there. And there's other stuff to listen to. Chris Plant hosts What's Tech every Tuesday. Control Walt and I do that every Thursday.

It was our 50th episode. Oh my God. It's a crazy town. We've been doing that show for a month. On the recode side, Lauren Good. Everyone's favorite hosts too embarrassed to ask. Recently had Joanna Stern on the show. Peter Kafka has Recode Media, which is wonderful if you're media nerd like me.

And Carrasfisher has Recode Decode, which is wonderful if you enjoy listening to care of great, powerful people, which I think we all do. That's it. code iTunes.com slash the Verge. All the shows are there. Give them five stars. Rate, review, do all the good stuff. Okay, Google. Turn off the Verge cast. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul. Final scream. It was a final scream. You can't have two final screams. Oh my god.