A gadget lover's guide to the great outdoors

24:46I'm just using the regular metered connection where they give you lots of warnings that if the system is overtaxed, you'll be deprioritized. No, I never had any problems, but your mileage may vary. Yeah, and I think there's still the thing where it's useless to me at home, so it's an extra big purchase to do just for the kind of trips that I take. So that cost-benefit analysis, I think for you as a person who is going to throw it all away and live in a sprinter van, easier. And I think the startling challenge is going to be like, how do we get the sort of occasional traveler to think this makes sense for them?

25:23And I don't know if there is an answer there, but I suspect things like the mini seem like it starts to get closer to that. Yeah. And the thing that really helps is the way that the subscription works. You can cancel it for the months you're not using it. It's not a day to day or by hour cancellation. So like I'm not using it for the for the month of November. So I put a cancel on it. So I at least saved, I think my subscription costs 70 euro per month. But it's much more expensive in the U.S. just for a variety of reasons. They're trying, yeah, they would rather people in the U.S. use a residential dish.

25:57If you go to Guatemala, for example, you go to the website, I think it's like 20 euro a month. Really? Yeah, it's by region. And, you know, everybody said, you know, it's now available in the U.S. Those are the news. Those are the headlines. but it had already been in South American countries. I think there were five countries before the U.S. because that's their primary market for the Mini. So it's priced accordingly. Yeah, okay. All right, two more things I want to ask you about and then I'm going to let you go here. The first is the Peak Design backpack that you and for years, like years, every bag nerd I knew talked about the Peak Design 25 liter backpack.

26:35It was like just enough of a camera first bag that I never bought one. but I feel like I should have. And now there's a new one. Everybody seems to love it. Tell me about it. Why is this thing so great? I ran into the problem of going back to my review from eight years ago, and I called it perfect, right? And eight years ago, it was perfect for me. It was perfect for my needs. But as we've been talking about, I like to go remote now. And I can't carry two or three different bags with me. I need one bag that can do everything. The Peak Design, the new bag, the old bag is a camera bag. So it's heavy.

27:14It's durable. It has all the camera, the flexible inserts already built into it, right? The new bag, which, by the way, the review unit they sent me is in white, Arctic white. And it looks like I'm walking through, I don't know, 2001, a space odyssey. It's this sci-fi white color. It's just fantastic. Totally impractical. It's pretty cool. I would never, maybe I would buy it. Viren bought it, our video producer. or he bought it. I don't know if I would. The fact that even the company is like, it's going to turn yellow over time is a real turnoff for me. I'm not going to lie. It looks great when you first get it, though.

27:49It looks so good. It looks fantastic. But, okay, so first impressions, it lacks that structure of the old bag. So it took me a while to figure out what this thing was because it's basically a lightweight nylon bag with a laptop sleeve. And it's not until you delve into the ecosystem of Peak Design products that this thing becomes really good. Because sometimes you only want that lightweight nylon bag. Like if you're going to the gym, you stuff some things in there. You have maybe a day trip, day hike. You're only bringing maybe a drone. It already has its own protective case, so you can use that.

28:27But if you're really a camera nerd or you've got lots of gadgets, maybe you're carrying a drone, action cam, and some other stuff. They have the camera insert, camera cubes is what they call them. But that's another, like the Smedium, as they call it. It's not quite small, not quite medium. But the Smedium, it fits perfect in the 25-liter Peak Design Outdoor bag. That is another 70 euro on top of the, I forget what it was, 230 something. I think it's 250, yeah. So you're already up to 300. And then if you start adding a couple more accessories, you can easily push this thing up to 400 euro. So it's not cheap.

29:03But camera bags are not cheap. I was going to say, in the scheme of really good camera bags, that's like upper middle class. I've seen much crazier prices. Exactly. And they do have a lifetime warranty. So if anything breaks, any of the straps, any of those things, the yellowing is not covered if you get the white one. Unfortunately, it comes in black and some kind of purplish color. But using it for, God, I had it for two months because there were some complications receiving it and whatnot. And I also wanted to wait before posting it until it got off the Kickstarter campaign because I hate sending people to Kickstarter for a purchase.

29:35But the day that it went live on the Peak Design website is when we posted a review. And I had been using it for, I don't know, yeah, two months at that point. And I absolutely love it. Absolutely love it. So I feel really bad about, like, I can't pull the trigger myself because I feel like I'm betraying my old Peak Design bag that I bought. So I put it on my Christmas list and then I'll let hopefully my wife do it for me. That's fair. So the modular thing is the thing I was most torn on reading your review. Because on the one hand, the thing you're describing sort of makes sense, right? It can be a bunch of different things depending on what you need.

30:16On the other hand, that just sounds like a lot of work. And I feel like what I don't want to do is manage my cargo day in and day out. The thing I have loved about bags that I've had is the ones that I find that on purpose or by accident just already have the pouches for everything I need where they're like, oh, David, you need a place to put your gross sneakers. Here's a place that we made for you. Those are the things that I love. And I can see the appeal of sort of building that yourself, but it also just feels like it might be a lot of work and, like you said, a lot of additional things to buy on top of the expensive thing that I've already bought.

30:48Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. But what I settled on is, like, I don't always need all my camera stuff. I don't need all my drones. So if I can have a container for that, a soft shell container, put everything in, it's already organized for me, and I just remove that in and out, and I always know where all my tech gear, and this is really important when you're in a van, because you have to know where all that stuff is. So for me, I can just take that cube out, I can put it aside, I then take the bag, and I can just load it up with all my day hiking material. Or I can put it back in if I'm doing like a Verge review or something.

31:23I'll put that in with all my other stuff. So for me, that modularity was a key selling point. So you think of it like the camera lives in the cube all the time and then you just sort of stack whatever cubes you need for that day into the bag. Exactly. And you can get multiple cubes. It actually fits two different cubes and they also have soft shell bags that you can store gear in if you want to do that. But again, if you're living in a van, everything is condomodular anyway. So it's a nice extension for the bag. But for my needs, this is now a better bag. I felt bad calling it perfect because I got a lot of...

32:01I'm always going to have lots of complaints. Like the drawstring that pulls the top pouch closed, I think it's a bit inelegant. The cord get in the way when you're pulling a jacket in and out or whatever. But, you know, you're looking for perfection when you're spending 300 euro or$300 on a bag. Totally. Yeah, that's fair. All right. And you mentioned the last thing I want to talk about, which is that you've become a drone guy. I am not a drone guy. I am a selfie drone guy. Oh, interesting. Okay. I tried drones in the past and nobody seems to talk about how bad DJI software is. I think it's atrocious.

32:35I think the user experience is just terrible. But drone people have been living with these drones for a long time. They understand how the software works. I think it's like Photoshop now, where it's like, if you don't, if you've never seen it before, it is literally borderline unusable. But there are people now who have spent a long time trying to figure it out. But also one of my theories is that DJI figured out a long time ago that it was easier to teach the drones to fly themselves than it was to make better software. So they've just done that. So they're like, their hope is that you just don't even have to use the app because the drone is fine.

33:07Don't even worry about it. Man, I mean, that's the thing. So I did a bikepacking trip this summer with a friend of mine. And I don't want to – I see DC Rainmaker and people. They've got the controller mounted on their handlebars and they're talking. They're doing all this stuff all the time. But he's been doing this stuff for, I don't know, a decade. I just want something super simple. I push a button, set it up to fly, and then it'll film me, right? And this also works for gadgets. Like if I have to do a backpack, some of my backpack photos are taken by drones because, you know, I can either ask my wife to do it.

33:39She's not a huge fan of that or a friend. Or I just do it myself. And I'd rather just be self-sufficient and do it myself. But no controller required. It just selects between one of six modes. If I want to, I can tweak it in the app. But it's very rare that I have to do that. And now we have two of these really great selfie drones. There's the original Hover Air. I guess it's not even the original. It's like second generation Hover Air. x1 they just came out with two new ones max and pro i think they are but now they're really expensive the nice thing about the old ones i think they were 299 349 or something depending upon the sales but this dji neo that just came out now it was a little undercooked when they launched it like you couldn't do vertical video it wasn't fast enough to chase you on a bike for example um but they've recently just in the two or three months since it launched they've already updated the firmware to do all those things.

34:32And it only costs$199, which is insane. And you can buy a controller if you want. And you can buy goggles if you want to do, what is it? First FPV? First person viewing? I don't know what that's called. I don't care about that. I have no interest in doing that. I just want something that's going to follow me, take pictures, upload it to Instagram or whatever. Maybe I'm going to have a van life influencer account at some point, who knows, but it's just dumb. It's so dumb. It's so easy. It just makes me love it. But as soon as you have to use a controller, I'm out. I'm done. Yeah. I have landed in the same place.

35:09And I actually, I sort of turned out of drones for a long time because it was just more complicated than it was fun for me. And it was like, I didn't have a purpose for it. I even, even the photography of it was just purely sort of fun. I wasn't doing anything with any of it. And it got to the point where I was like, this is so fiddly and so just annoying that even the fun stuff I get out of it is not, the juice is not worth the squeeze, you know? And then this is why I'm so interested in the Neo, because like you said,$200 and does a bunch of cool stuff without any worries or requiring any work on your part.

35:44That to me is like when drones start to get really interesting. Yeah. I do worry. I think the headline on the news article was basically, oh God, these things are going to be everywhere. I do think that there's this risk that we're just going to pollute national parks and whatever with these selfie drones. And they are noisy, right? You can't get away from it. And they're going to bump into people. If you pass somebody on a trail, like I've come close to passing somebody on a trail on a bike. I had to stop, pull over, but then the drone's just hovering there right above the trail. And I had to run over and grab it and flip it over.

36:17And I'm just one guy at the beginning, but what's going to happen when after Christmas, you know, everybody's got a 199 NIO and they're flooding the parks and the ski slopes and whatever. And there's this weird gray area of regulation that probably illegal, but it doesn't feel like it's illegal. Like I'm not doing, I'm just pushing a button. I set it aloft, right. It doesn't feel like a huge risk, but, and then, yeah, I mean, well, in Europe it's complicated as you're traveling between countries. Do I have to register do I not? But yeah, it's sometimes the technology comes along before the regulation is ready.

36:52And this is definitely going to be one of those cases. Yeah. And it is it is both more and less complicated than like the bigger drones that you can fly further. Right. We're like those. We should have lots of rules about those. Like I can fly this drone theoretically miles away from me. Like we should have lots of rules about those drones. But this thing that is just circling my head as I go on a bike path. You're right. It doesn't feel, that just feels like a thing that I have. That doesn't feel like a thing anyone else even needs to be worried about. But you add one of those to every person you see on the path and suddenly we have a whole new set of problems.

37:26And I do agree. It does feel like that's coming. Yeah. And they do go fast now. Now that the Neo software has been updated, it'll go like 32 kilometers per hour. I think that's like over 20 miles per hour, I believe. Yeah. That's bike fast for sure. Yeah. And if that's following you and slams into somebody that you're passing, that is a collision that's going to hurt. Even though the props are covered with guards, it's going to hurt. So yeah, there's a risk here. Yeah, fair enough. All right, well, I should let you go, but once you've done this winter tour with the Sprinter, you got to come back and give us a Sprinter review.

38:00God, if I survive, I absolutely will. Maybe we'll do it from the top of a ski slope and you can just write off that whole trip as a work expense. It'll be amazing. I'll have a Starlink Mini in a backpack and the drone hovering overhead. It's the life, man. All right, Thomas, thank you as always. Take care. Bye. All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk about microphones. We'll be right back.

38:25Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place. But still, we stick it out. And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place. And maybe the most common one, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work? But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry.me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you go from where you are to where you actually want to be.

39:12Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, create a plan, build your confidence, and keeps you accountable along the way. So don't leave your career to chance. Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. That's strawberry.me slash unstuck. All right, we're back. So Andrew Marino, former VergeCast producer, is now working with our video team. And for his latest video, he made a really great comparison of a bunch of different microphones, portable microphones, the kinds you can clip onto your jacket or your hat or your lapel that make it easy to connect to your phone or your camera and get good audio just about anywhere.

39:58These are things you see everywhere. They're the kind of things that are so ubiquitous now that you don't even really notice them, even though it's like a giant square plastic brick on someone's chest as they talk to you. But these things are also really useful. We use them for VergeCast things all the time. We use them for our video team all the time. So Andrew put all these to the test, and I figured now would be a good time to have him come on and both play a little bit for us, and we can see how it all sounds, and decide which one of these is actually worth, you know, sticking onto your chest when you two are making videos.

40:30let's get into it. Andrew Marino, welcome back to the show. Hey, David. It's been a minute. It's nice to have you back on the Vergecast. Yeah, what's up? You left us, rudely, to go make videos about microphones, and now I've brought you back because this is what happens to you. You can't avoid us forever. It's a full circle. Exactly. So, okay, I realized in just recording the intro for this that I don't even know what to call this, like, class of microphones that you've been testing here. So, like, what are these things? How do you think about these mics? Yeah, they're like wireless microphone systems for your phone.

41:03It's like consumer grade wireless microphone systems. That's pretty good. We've had wireless microphone systems in broadcasting and video production. Now it's a lot easier just use it plugging into your phone or whatever your little computers are. Okay. Do you remember years ago when I think it was Shure made that thing that actually plugged into the lightning port and had that little like flippy microphone? I loved that thing. I use that thing every day. I still have it. I still have it here. Yeah, I love it. It sounded great. It really did. And it was like as a voice memo thing, it was great.

41:35I remember I did a thing with NPR one time on the phone and they were so excited about how good I sounded. And it was like the great reveal of my life that I got to tell a public radio producer that I was on this incredible Shure microphone. But anyway, so what I see these microphones mostly used for is like social clips, right? These are like the little plastic squares you see on everyone's shirt and sweater and hat all over social. Is that the main use case for these? Yeah, totally. Like we wouldn't, these companies wouldn't be making all these if it weren't for TikTok and Instagram and all that.

42:08And they've gotten better pretty fast, it seems to me. Yes. Even just within the year, these companies like Rode and DJI are just upgrading these models to be lighter or like have more features, have better charging cases. It's all very exciting, like this past two years of audio devices. Yeah, it's cool. So yeah, what is kind of the state of the art right now? Like you got five or six of them in. What do they have in common? Like what's the good stuff you can get now? Yeah, so the big ones are like, these are coming in like AirPod cases, basically. You have these little transmitters that have mics on them.

42:49You pop them in a little case, and then you have a little receiver that you pop right into your phone. So, Rode just came out with a Rode wireless micro. That is just a, it's like a little bigger than an AirPod's case, and it plugs right into your phone. I really like that one. Shure also makes one that's a little case that you can just pair via Bluetooth to your phone. And DJI, of course, has the Mic 2 and the Mic Mini, which are these little microphones that you can plug into basically anything. So it's all like very versatile and pretty well made versus what we were having to deal with before with Bluetooth headphones and stuff.

43:32Yeah, I mean, I have a set here that is like a thing that plugs into a headphone jack that my phone doesn't have anymore. And then a whole receiver. And it's like there's like four cables associated with it. It's just a bad time. It sounds good, but it is like I had to carry a bag of gear just to get this thing. Right. Yeah, it was a lot clunkier before, and it's getting easier to just not have to tie a rubber band around your phone to keep all this gear attached to your stuff. What about on the phone side? Do these all have companion apps, or are they just supposed to be better microphones? I've always been torn about, do I want a bunch of fancy features, or do I just want this thing to pretend to be my microphone on my phone and just sound better?

44:17Yes, this is where the differences come in here. DJI has all their wireless microphones. You can do a lot of the customization, like gain and turning on noise cancellation, through just the hardware receiver. Rode, their little micro wireless microphone, you can only control the gain and all that stuff through the app. They also have like a video app that they want you to use when you're making video with these things. The video doesn't look as good as the native iPhone app when I was trying it, which was concerning. That also just seems instinctively kind of weird. The idea that I'm going to make videos in an app based on which microphone I'm using just feels like the wrong order of operations of how I'm going to do stuff.

45:09Totally. And also, if you're making this stuff within these video creation apps like TikTok and Instagram, you don't want to go back and forth between apps to adjust the gain and all that. Yeah. The thing you described about having some of the controls on the case itself feels like the right one, right? Right. Yeah. If the receiver that you just plug in the bottom of your phone, you can adjust the gain on this little knob on the DJI mic mini. And so when you're recording, say within the TikTok app, you can adjust the gain from there and you don't have to switch apps or anything like that. Yeah, that is really handy.

45:43So let's just cut right to the chase here. Which one's the best? You've tested them all. Everybody expected you to not pick one in the video. This is my favorite thing about the video you made is you just ruthlessly trolled everyone on the internet who refuses to just pick winners. Who won? Yes. So when we factor in price and audio quality and functionality, state that there. I went with the DJI Mic Mini, which has this nice carrying case and the mics are really tiny now. So when you clip them on your shirt, they're not as noticeable as those big squares you notice on all these videos. So I really like that compactness.

46:24And it is$170, which is, you know, compared to a lot of these, they go up to in the$350 range. I think Shure's, the whole package is$500. So price, audio quality, and functionality, like DJI McMinnie was really impressive. How small is it? Like you've mentioned, you mentioned that it's small. It's, that matters more to me than I expected. Having now used these a lot, I notice every percentage of an ounce because it just pulls on your shirt and they seem huge. How small are we talking that this thing has actually gotten? Yes. So it's about half the size as they were before. And the thing also is a lot of these you could just tuck underneath your shirt and then use the magnet without a clip to just hold on to your shirt that way.

47:19I never really liked doing that because you have to deal with your clothes rustling and all that, and it gets a little muffled. So I always like keeping them outside of the clothes, like in the open air, which is why I don't usually like the bigger ones. I usually would like to prefer to plug in an external wireless lavalier. Sometimes it gets a little annoying. We did a whole video shoot. We went from San Francisco to L.A. in our hydrogen car, if Verge listeners may remember. we talked to a lot of car drivers that were like going in to pump their gas and we wanted to talk to them really quickly and i just wanted like here put i need to put this on your shirt really quickly and like a lot of if you look at the video a lot of them have these big chunky squares on their shirt and now that the dji ones are a lot smaller um it's less noticeable you know it's just a little it's not distracting in the video yeah and it is i will say all a huge improvement over what it was before, which is snaking a wire up someone's back and you as the producer having to say, sorry, I just have to reach up your shirt for a second here and I'm going to touch your butt while I clip this thing to it.

48:30And it is very good that we seem to be leaving those days behind. Yes, I have done that in a traditional broadcast setting and it is very awkward experience. Yeah, it's not a good time. So you mentioned that the DJI is kind of the best combination of things. Are there, does it have competitors that beat it in one way or another? Like if all I care about is pure raw best sound, don't care what else. Is it somebody other than DJI who wins? Oh, yeah. I would like to just mention now, I'm currently recording with the DJI Mic Mini for this whole recording. Okay. So the one that I really like, and it's a company that is known for its audio quality, is Sennheiser.

49:14They just came out with this thing called the Profile Wireless. It is just a big stick audio thing. But you can just press this little, there's a little button, has all these little receivers in here that you could just clip on. Oh, clever. So the thing you're holding looks like a sort of chunky handheld microphone. Yeah. And you can use it as that, it sounds like, if you want to. But then you can also just pull the little receiver out and clip it on. Yep. And then you can, yeah, the transmitter. The transmitter, yeah. And then you can pop the receiver out too, plug that right into your phone.

49:55And Sennheiser, that one was the best audio quality to me. It also has one of my favorite features on these is a backup recording button. So you can just press this little red button on the device, on the transmitter, and it will record the audio locally onto the mic. Oh, that's helpful. So you don't have to go through wireless, you know, run into any issues with signal to noise ratios and all that. And it's perfectly there. If something happens on your recorder, you have this backup recording. That's actually helped me so many times in these kinds of situations. I was just about to say, I had not thought about this until you just mentioned that.

50:37But the problem I've had with these microphones over the years, including all the way back to that Shure one that I could plug into my phone, was sometimes my phone just wouldn't use it. I would press record on something and it would just pick a different microphone to record from. And I wouldn't notice until afterwards because the thing was connected. It all seemed to be working. But then it was like, I opened voice memos and hit record and the wrong mic picks up and you're just sort of hosed because phones are not very good at like giving you a menu to tell you when it's switching from microphone to microphone.

51:08Has that gotten better in general? Like are phones better at this game than they used to be? I think so. I was very skeptical of this. It's like the iPhone is like, it's hard to, when you're in the phone app or the camera app, it's hard to like know what audio source you're using. Right. So you kind of just have to trust it, recognize it. Android is a little better at this. You can actually choose the audio source. But I was always scared of that. So I would always use an external, like another app to confirm because the Rhodes app will tell you what specifically the interface you're using is.

51:46But phones have gotten a lot better at this. That being said, phones, microphones have gotten a lot better in general. So there's that too. Yeah, that's actually a good question. How do you feel like these compare? Obviously, there's a usability difference where you don't have to hold your phone up to your face, which goes a really long way. But in terms of audio quality, you're right that the internal microphone on your phone, if you have a recent high end phone, is probably very good. Are these still kind of like a like a full level or two up from that, even as they get smaller and cheaper and easier to use?

52:21Yeah, totally. I think so. There's some plus and minuses. In smartphones, you get stereo recording a lot. So if you really want an ambient track when you're recording a scene with your phone, I like using that stereo recording sometimes. but there is some a lot of color especially the iphone is a lot like uh brighter sounding like it's a lot of high end in the recordings it's a little less controllable so i in general like especially sennheiser and sure like they've been developing this technology for so long so um they do sound a lot better than the traditional just holding your phone up to your face especially in post-production.

53:03Yeah. Are these companies doing something different with these mics because of the way that they're going to be used? I mean, you know, Sennheiser and Rode and all these other companies make other microphones. I'm on a Shure mic on a Rode stand right now recording this. So they all know how to make like a high-end microphone. But these are, like you were saying at the beginning, sort of a very specific thing for a very specific use case. As you test them, can you tell these are like designs to be used on TikTok in some meaningful way that's not really i mean more when you're looking at the uh the app side of it but these are all like omnidirectional microphones that you know lavaliers on like any you know live set have been using for for decades so there's not much different for that it is like because you're moving around and you're outside and you want to make sure it's you know it's on your shirt it's getting you when you're turning your head and all that so it's more like the performance side of bit.

54:01That makes sense. Yeah, I do wonder how much they're learning to do to compensate for people who don't have a ton of experience using mics who are suddenly clipping mics to themselves. And like the thing you just said about being able to sort of swivel your head is like, that's a big one, right? Most people have terrible mic technique. And understanding how to talk into a microphone is a thing that takes real practice. And so for something like this, like, I would assume a lot of these companies are spending time trying to think about, okay, what weird places are people going to stick this and how are they going to use it and how can we account for that?

54:34And again, I think it makes sense that a lot of that is going into the software and stuff that's actually being built into phones. Yeah, totally. There's 32-bit flow, which is recording at a bit rate that is going to prevent you from clipping audio, which is a big problem in any microphone where you're not monitoring the levels of these microphones with your headphones. or even seeing levels on any of these. There's that. And then there's also the noise cancellation. So I should have mentioned that. Like DJI has a noise softener, basically. We'll take a lot of the background noise out, which is something you're not going to be going in your computer and trying to dial down if you're just going into TikTok most of the time.

55:21Right. Not everybody has a U to make everything sound incredible all the time. I highly recommend it, by the way. If you can have an Andrew to do it, I recommend having an Andrew. Um, let's, I want to hear a couple of these and test them a little bit, but I am curious to have, are there any other sort of standout features from some of the ones that you tested that you're like, oh, if only I could borrow this and stick it on the DJI, it would be even better. Yeah. So what DJI Mic 2 has is like audio levels. You can see the audio levels on the receiver. That's a really nifty one. um also being able to plug in an external lavalier which a lot some of the higher end of these do the road wireless models do and of course the backup feature like uh that like onboard recording is so it's just like once you have that you don't want to not use it anymore yeah that that makes all right so you're on the dji uh which sounds very good i'm i'm super impressed um i wanted i I want to try the worst one you tried.

56:23But before we do that, can we try just like one of the others? I'm curious to see kind of the range of quality we're looking at here. So let's just switch to one of the other ones you liked like slightly less. And I'm just curious if I can even tell the difference in the audio. Sure, yeah. Let's use the Rode Wireless Micro, which just plugs right into with USB-C. All right. So now you're on the Rode Micro? Is that what you called it? Yes, the Rode Wireless Micro just came out last month. Okay. I would say it's we're like kind of in range. This feels I mean, you're in a pretty quiet room. Yeah.

56:56But this this sounds, I don't know, like maybe slightly more compressed. But I also think I'm probably listening for it. Yeah, I doubt you'll hear much of a difference. Like if like listeners are listening on their phone or Bluetooth speaker or something like that. Whenever we do these, I think about my wife who listens to podcasts just out the speaker of her four year old phone. Yeah. And I'm like, this must sound like nothing to you. And I'm like, it's just like, what do you mean? These all sound terrible. Yeah, so it's really nifty, but I like it because it's super compact. I just keep in my pocket like all the time.

57:30And like I plugged in my laptop, which is cool, which I didn't get to in the video. But yeah, you plug it in via USB-C. You can also plug it into your laptop if you have that. That is actually pretty handy being able to like yay for universal charging ports, right? But being able to just kind of have a plug and play mic into any device that you have goes a surprising long way. Like I give a lot of people the same speech about how important it is to sound good on video calls. And this is the kind of thing that you might even like if you're giving a presentation or at work, this might be useful in that same way.

58:04Yeah, people have told me that they want something like that for home for their like Zoom calls. I'm like, oh, it's interesting. You're going to like walk around your kitchen while you're on the call. Just have it clipped to your shirt. So yeah, that's cool. It's kind of a good idea. You could sound like you're sitting right at your computer, but just be like aimlessly wandering around your house with AirPods and a fancy microphone. The mic doesn't move. You do. That's pretty good. We should start a company. And that's the tagline. It's going to be incredible. All right, let's try one more. And the one I want to try is the TikTok microphone.

58:40I think everybody knows the one I'm talking about, but you got the one that is the one. And I would like to hear how it sounds. Okay, let's do it. All right. You're now in the software that I'm seeing as USB Audio 1.0, which already feels alarming. How are we doing? Okay, can you hear me now? Oh, yeah. This is what I knew this was going to... It's bad. It's like, it's just, it's just bad. is you sound like someone who put their AirPods in wrong. I've been noticing a lot that people wear their AirPods wrong. Have you ever noticed this? The people who wear them so that they're sort of sticking directly out of their head.

59:19It's like they've screwed them in too far into their ear canals and they just, it's like you have antenna coming out of your ears. That's what you sound like. Yeah, I've seen someone in the office, not going to lie, wearing AirPods like that. It's a name and shame, Andrew. It's time. Uh, so first of all, what is this mic? Uh, it's a good question because I don't really know. Uh, the box that came in says the K eight wireless microphone. Okay. Uh, I've seen this on Tik TOK without that branding, the same box without that branding. Um, it is just kind of this generic wireless microphone that you plug into your phone has, and then one little other thing that you clip on your shirt with the mic.

1:00:03and uh i've like people are like hawking these on tiktok for five bucks yeah it's the one you can find a million identical looking ones on like aliexpress and the tiktok shop and amazon and like i assume they're all the same thing from like a giant bin in a factory somewhere in china that's what it seems to be yeah i went i bought another one uh recently just to see if it was the Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. And this is, this has become the TikTok microphone. Is it just because it's cheap? Like everybody's just like, Oh, this sounds better than my phone and it's cheap. Even though I would say it demonstrably does not sound better than your phone.

1:00:42Yeah, totally. It's like, uh, because it was, you know, sold on one of these like bulk shops where you can get a whole bunch and drop ship them. But you know, it isolates your voice more. versus like the phone is going to be like, it's going to pick up a lot of other things in the room. A lot of people record in their car. So this, if you hold this up to your mouth in the car, maybe you won't get as like a boxier sound than usual. Yeah. And there is something to that, that at least you have something sort of close and directional and that's helpful. Like that is the basic mic technique we give most people.

1:01:20But I still feel like this is much worse than holding up the white EarPod microphone to your mouth. Like if you're going to hold a microphone, that one sounds much better than this one does. Totally, yeah. I guess it is$20 versus$5, but like I'm going to go ahead and say that's worth a$15 investment. Yeah, and who knows how long these are going to be for that price. Like I've seen them on Amazon for like$30. Yeah, that's fair. All right, switch back to the good mic so I don't have to listen to this anymore. And then I have a couple more questions and we'll let you go. Okay, great. All right. Are we back to a good mic?

1:01:53I think so. This sounds good. Is this the DJI again? This is the Sennheiser Profile Wireless. I figured since I mentioned it, I wanted to demonstrate how it sounded. It does sound good. Yeah, they're all kind of right in range. Yeah. Which is good news, honestly. Especially, I feel like DJI's thing is just as good, a little wacky to figure out, and cheaper. it's like keeps working for yeah yeah yeah i was skeptical of their mics because they're not a microphone company but yeah they they're pretty good yeah that's that's super exciting so okay you think if i'm if i'm like a creator starting a tiktok channel dji into my phone into the tiktok app is like a perfectly viable mic video strategy we feel good about that yes totally yeah that's awesome that feels like a win this is like that is a that's a big level up for a lot of people pretty fast yeah and also if you end up like getting a better camera and you're not using just your phone you can still use this with another camera which is is really what is a big difference between that and the road mini or the road micro because you can only use this with the use like something with the usb port taking audio in yeah yeah that's that's very cool so are you Are you using these mics in your own gear now?

1:03:14What's your new setup? Yes, this past year or two, we've kind of like stopped carrying around the bulky professional wireless microphone systems when we're like running around. I remember at CES last year, we didn't really use those. We use the road, the wireless go to for most of our stuff we were doing out in the field. And yeah, and for CES, I would love to carry around the Sennheiser kit. because it's super compact. It's got this neat carrying case. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it goes a really long way. And I think to me, the next step then, it kind of feels like getting much smaller is maybe not super useful.

1:03:55It feels like the next step is starting to solve some of the UI stuff, right? Because I feel like especially the things that are connected to the phone, there's just not great sort of really fine-grained manual control in the way that you can do like pretty professional stuff with your video camera at this point. It feels like audio still has a little bit of catching up there, but maybe that's the next thing. Yeah, I think you're sacrificing a lot of stuff by making them smaller. So there's going to be some happy medium there where like maybe the receiver is a little bigger that you can adjust some settings, but the mics are still kind of tiny so they don't show up on screen, you know, that is fair.

1:04:30OK, last thing. And then you're going to go. You have you are the person who knows the answer to this question. Where is the correct place on your person to put the mic to do this? So I always like going like two buttons down on like a dress shirt. Okay. It's a very specific type of way to dress. So it's not accurate for everyone. But you're kind of like right at like mid chest height, it seems like at that point. Yeah, totally. Like if you just, you put it where you're, you know, where your heart is, is like a good. Oh yeah, okay. Right in the middle. Yeah, totally. Okay. Okay. So not on the brim of my hat, which is a thing that I saw somebody do and thought that was very cool and wanted to steal.

1:05:11Yeah, it's an interesting idea. They're omnidirectional, so it's not going to not pick up your voice, but it's a little silly. It's obviously for aesthetic purposes. Okay. All right. All right. Well, as someone who ends up always putting it on my collar and then it droops all weird, this is good advice. Yeah. Yeah. Like wherever your hand goes when you say the Pledge of Allegiance, that's where you put the mic. Yeah, totally. And now that these have little magnets on them, you can really just, you can clip them on anywhere on your clothing. Yeah. Yeah, the magnet over the clip thing is a huge upgrade.

1:05:46Yeah. Cannot recommend that enough. All right, Andrew, thank you for coming back. It's nice to see you. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and do a segment on the VergeCast Hotline. We'll be right back.

1:06:01Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.

1:06:36Okay, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love all of your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. A reminder, next week we are doing a full meta episode about the Vergecast and the Verge. So if you have questions, we've gotten a bunch of really fun ones already, but if there's ever something you've wanted to know about how the Vergecast works, how we make the show, how we decide what goes on in the show, what we're doing when we're not recording the show, how The Verge works, the future of media, all kinds of stuff.

1:07:08Anything you want to know, call us 866-VERGE11, email us vergecastatheverge.com. We love hearing all of your questions. And we're going to do as many of the meta ones as we can next week. This week, we have a question about web browsers. Hi, this is Joey from Portland, Oregon. And I have a question about web browsers. was just watching your latest broadcast about Chrome. And I was just thinking, just recently, I started switching from using Chrome to Safari on my MacBook Air ML. And, you know, just heard that, like, it's more efficient. And, you know, it's a little faster, but definitely mostly uses less battery.

1:07:49And I haven't really noticed that. I mean, I haven't done extensive testing. But like most people, I live in the browser for the most part. And I use some pro extensions. I use some pro extensions. And it seems like it's about the same salary life. It doesn't seem any faster. So is that really true? Is Samar really noticeably more efficient? I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks. Bye. One of the reasons I really like this question is that it's really hard to test this question. Browsers are complicated because they're so much more than just one individual thing. Like the way that you use your browser is so personal and so unique to you, maybe even in ways that you don't understand, right?

1:08:38Think about the number of tabs that you have open, whether you tend to use multiple windows with tabs or just have one window with a thousand tabs in it. Are you a bookmarks person? Do you have lots of extensions? are you constantly running like really intense web apps like Gmail or Figma or Canva or things like that? Or are you the kind of person who is just like opening a web browser, going to CNN.com, looking at some news and then moving on into your day? Maybe no other piece of software is so varied in its use that way than a web browser. So it's very hard for anyone to say, here is the best web browser for X, Y, or Z reason, right?

1:09:19I think one reason people think Safari is the best Mac browser is just that it's so well integrated with all of Apple's other products and its operating systems. There's actually not real evidence anywhere that I can find that Safari is faster or more performant or better for battery life in any meaningful way. It's just that it is so sort of deeply integrated inside of the system that it feels better. The share sheet works better. You can open things and move them around more quickly. It feels the Mac-iest of the Mac browsers, and it feels the iPhone-iest of the iPhone browsers, the same way that Chrome does on Android.

1:09:57Like, you can run other browsers on a Chromebook than Chrome, but it's going to feel worse, even if it's just as fast. So all of that is to say, I think figuring out which browser is for you, you should think much more about UI and which services you use than really throwing your lot behind one product or another. Like I said, there aren't a lot of ways to kind of apples to apples compare one browser to the other. But there is one benchmark that I like. It's called Speedometer 3.0 from Browser Bench. And it tries to mimic using a web app. It's like a to do list thing that is trying to move stuff around.

1:10:34So it executes JavaScript and tries to run stuff in the background and also, you know, loads news pages. And the idea is just a sort of normal web usage. It's not a perfect benchmark. I don't think any benchmark of anything is perfect, but at least you get some kind of apples to apples rough performance metric for how a browser works. I tested it on seven browsers on my Mac mini. And let me just read you the scores. So higher is better. Chrome came in first with 48.2. Safari got 47.4, not super far down. Then there was Brave 44.7, Edge 44.5. So basically the same between those two. Firefox 41.4, Arc 38.3, and DuckDuckGo 38.1.

1:11:17Reasonable range top to bottom there, but they all have a bit of a margin of error in them. And realistically, you might notice a performance difference between like Chrome at the very top and DuckDuckGo at the very bottom. But like, should you use Chrome or Safari based on the point eight points between them? No, there are other reasons that that browser will feel better or worse to you than the raw performance score of how it does on this one benchmark. All of this is to say, I think browsers are fascinating for this exact reason, right? It's not a question of optimizing ruthlessly for one specific use case.

1:11:55Browsers are all things to all people. And what I would do is basically try to figure out the UI that works for you, whether you want Chrome, which has more sort of accessibility to extensions and does a better job, I think, with some bookmarklets, or you want Safari, which is simple to a fault and just keeps everything very straightforward. or you want something like Arc, which has really weird ideas about UI, or you want Brave, which has a lot of additional features and stuff built into the browser, you kind of can't pick wrong, right? There are a lot of browsers out there. A bunch of them are really good.

1:12:30None of them have any sort of obviously huge increase in killer app over any of the others. So ultimately, what I would say is try a bunch of different browsers and just see what works for you. And don't really worry about spending a ton of time trying to optimize for performance. I will say, if you open a lot of tabs, it will crush your memory and it will crush your battery life. And anecdotally, I cannot prove this, but anecdotally, Chrome seems to be the worst at that. That when I have 100 Chrome tabs open, it just destroys every computer I've ever used in a way that no other browser does. I can't prove that, but that is how it feels to me.

1:13:09But in general, the best thing you can do for your performance and your battery life is manage your tabs slightly better so that you're not running so many different versions of any of these browsers at a time. But beyond that, just pick the browser you like the best and use it and don't worry about the rest. And that is actually a pretty good place to be. Lots of different ideas about browsers out there. Give them all a try. I have seven on my computer now because I downloaded them all and I'm going to keep them. I'm going to try them because this is the life I've chosen for myself. Anyway, that is it for the Vergecast today.

1:13:41Thank you to everyone who's on the show. And thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about all of Thomas Ricker's reviews, Andrew Marino's great videos, lots of stuff that we've done on browsers. All of that I'll put in the show notes. But as always, read the website. It's December, but the news keeps happening. We have tons of great gift guides. Some of the like Cyber Monday, Black Friday deals are still kicking around. So keep it locked on the website. Lots of good stuff going on. And like I said before, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other browsers I should download.

1:14:10You can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Like I said, we're doing a meta episode about all things Verge and Vergecast and the future of media and podcasts and whatever else you want to talk about next Tuesday. So get in your questions as soon as you can and we will answer as many of them on the show as we possibly can. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all the news, the Intel CEO stuff some crazy stuff going on in the streaming world and lots more.

1:14:44We'll see you then Rock and Roll

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