AI headphones and clicky phone keys

23:48So I would love to be able to dial in that sound a little bit more. Shiam made the argument, too, that a lot of us just live in a very noisy world and noise just as a thing that we're all confronted with is bad for everybody. And it actually does impact your health. There are studies which say the noise pollution affects your sleep and that ends up affecting your lifespan. So I do think that having this kind of a capability where people can control their environment is just not a toy. I think it actually can have a meaningful impact on the quality of life and sleep. And a lot of things which I think are extremely important for humans to thrive and not just survive.

24:31So, I mean, wherever this specific prototype lands, we're definitely leaving the fancy earplugs era of noise cancellation and entering an era that is much more specific and bespoke and a little bit smarter. What that looks like, TBD. But I am very excited about that concept. I am too. And I wonder, Andrew, just to come all the way back around to this idea of what we were talking about at the very beginning with what active noise cancellation does. It seems like knowing this kind of stuff where you can say like, not only is this an external sound and I want to get rid of it, but I know specifically which external sound it is.

25:08I think even leaving aside sort of that big giant grand vision, it just feels like that step alone does a lot. Oh, totally. I mean, to be able to walk into a store and the headphones know I'm in a store and I'm going to be talking to someone checking out. Or I have a library of sounds that are unique to my experience that I would like to tune out. And the sounds are only at this specific coffee shop that I go to study. That's super compelling to me. Do I want my headphones to know where I am at all times? I'm not sure. But there's a lot of awesome possibilities of just tuning things out and tuning things in wherever you are.

25:52Yeah, I think the self-driving example just keeps feeling more and more true to me as we talk about this, that the first thing where it's like, okay, my car can park itself and will stay in its lane if I try to drift out of it because I'm not paying attention, right? Doable, awesome. If you extend that all the way out to all the cars on the road will drive themselves and robot taxis will be everywhere, like you've sort of lost me. Maybe it'll happen someday in the future, but that doesn't make the first thing any less cool. And I feel like there's a lot of that in here, too, where it's like even just boil it all the way down.

26:24This is going to make noise cancellation better because the cats get through my headphones now and they can stop getting through my headphones once we get this tech. And I think that no matter how far into that idealized end state they get, they're very confident that they can get a lot farther very quickly. They have access to these chips. The software is improving very quickly. So they have a lot of ambitions for this year. They think they can get to a much, much smaller form factor by the end of this year, for example. And they have a lot more very specific ideas for that sort of filtration step.

27:01So, yeah, it's, you know, for me, that very, very limited demo was impressive enough. And they had enough plans for this year that I'm going to be following that lab and see what they come up with next, because I think it's going to be an interesting year for it. Do you think at the end of this, they're going to try to sell me headphones? Like, what's their game plan here? Are they going to spin out a company and try to be a headphone player? Are they going to try and work with some of the folks out there? Did you get any sense of how they want to get this out in the world? They seemed open to that.

27:30You know, they're an academic department. They're talking about commercialization. You know, they're like a lot of academics. They're walking this fine line between, you know, just moving this technology forward and experimenting with it, but also like knowing that they've got something and they feel like they are potentially ahead of a lot of big tech companies on this. So they are thinking in those terms. And I think that's one of the reasons they're trying to work as quickly as they are. Yeah, it doesn't seem like this is happening fast. I feel like, Andrew, you were the one running around New York with the head on the subway a year ago.

28:05This strikes me as something that a lot of those companies building ANC headphones are probably also thinking about. Like, do you think this is the next turn for a lot of those companies? And is this going to be the next thing that makes these headphones better for people? I think so. And I know Bose is thinking about it a lot as the next generation of noise cancellation. Apple is already trying to do the adaptive things, as we mentioned. But right now it's just boosting things instead of taking things out. So if there's a world where they can remove the dogs out of Will's room while he's recording a podcast.

28:41I mean, there's like endless possibilities. There was a dog button on that prototype. We just need that prototype and we'll be fine. Well, by this time next year, the Vergecast will be a listenable podcast. It's going to be great. Thank you and sorry. All right, we got to take a quick break and then we're going to talk keyboards. We'll be right back.

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32:38All right, we're back. If you remember the smartphone world before the iPhone, it was much wackier than it is today. Back then, there were lots of ideas about how a smartphone should look and work. Some of them twisted open, some of them slid open, some of them flipped open, and a lot of them had physical keyboards. And then the iPhone all at once kind of upended that. Here's Steve Jobs at the original iPhone launch in 2007, explaining what he saw as the problem with hardware keyboards. Here's four smartphones, right? Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62, the usual suspects. What's wrong with their user interfaces?

33:16Well, the problem with them is really sort of in the bottom 40 there. It's this stuff right here. They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons just for it. And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can't run around and add a button to these things. They're already shipped. It's a good take, right? And history proved him pretty much correct, which is why virtually every phone on the planet now has a virtual on-screen keyboard instead of a big physical one underneath.

33:59Jobs did definitely have it right, but not all right. Because there are things I think a lot of people miss about physical keyboards. You can type faster on physical keyboards. That's just true. There's plenty of evidence for that. You can type without looking at your phone so much. You can type without the keyboard taking up like 40 % of the screen. And so over the years, various people have tried to bring back the keyboard to the smartphone. Remember way back when Ryan Seacrest was out there hawking a case called Typo that put a keyboard back underneath your iPhone? This is how we explained it in an interview with TechCrunch.

34:32This has changed my life. I literally was suffocating thinking about how I was going to work every day because this is my office. You know, the tablet and the phone, that's how I work. I have incoming emails from everybody that I work with and for my partners. And this is how I respond and can respond quickly and be able to actually type more than two sentences. I get it, Ryan. I feel that, too. But typo didn't really work out. And none of the other projects trying to do this did either. And yet now, all these years later, there's another company trying to pull it off. It's called Clicks, and it's co-founded by a guy you might have heard of.

35:08I'm Michael Fisher, a.k.a. Mr. Mobile or Captain Two Phones. Take your pick. Michael's a longtime creator and phone reviewer, and he knows this space better than most, which made it frankly all the more surprising that this is a thing he decided to do. So I brought him onto the show to figure out whether this idea has a chance to really succeed, why he's convinced there's still room for a physical keyboard on your iPhone, and what it takes to make a really great tiny little keyboard. And we just started the story at the beginning. Why would you, in the year 2024, set out to build a physical smartphone keyboard?

35:41Oddly, the thing that was the germ of clicks came to me. It didn't originate from my brain. I got a call from a guy you probably are familiar with, Crackberry Kevin. It's a guy who helped me build Mr. Mobile in the first place, kind of like one of my closer friends in the business. And he said, I've got to show you something. I will absolutely kill you if you show anybody else what this is. And he sends me this 3D render. And you know, you and I are in the same business for a lot of my day. You know what it's like to get something in your inbox that's like, you look at it, you take a beat and you say, oh my God, you crazy bastards, you actually did it.

36:15So I think that's what I said out loud. But it was just a render. It wasn't even a product. It was just this very obviously an iPhone inserted into a case with a QWERTY keyboard that looks nothing like it currently does. And I said in a profound demonstration of how little business foresight I have, I said, you know, Mr. Mobile has to have the exclusive on this, right? That's good. Always thinking one step ahead. I guess. What an idiot. So within a week, though, you know, I'm giving so much product feedback. We're talking all the time. It's very obvious that we should be working together on this.

36:44Turns out that's what Kevin had in mind the whole time. So I come aboard. We finish building the company with the guys who, full credit, deserve credit for the initial germ of this idea in the first place. The veterans from FX Tech, the last company to make a truly great Android, you know, sliding keyboard smartphone. And that was, dude, that was April of 2023. Oh, wow. That was fast. Yeah, by January at CES, we had a product that we were able to, we were ready to ship. So fast is right. It was insane. What I like about that, though, is that is a group of people who are maybe most prone to being incorrectly nostalgic about keyboards, right?

37:19You have like some of the world's foremost BlackBerry people. You have you, who has just never stopped making videos about the Palm Pre. True. And you have a bunch of people who have like made these things in the past. So how do you check yourself against like, boy, I wish the world still existed in which we wanted keyboards versus like this is a thing we should do and bring it back? So or maybe you don't. You just soldier through and hope other people feel the same way you do. I think there was an element of that, really. I mean, one of the things we knew is we had a lot of smart people on board.

37:50Right. And I won't give you the whole marketing pitch of everything, but we really do have the best people in the roles that need to be within the company and the most expertise there is. And at no point, you know, did we check ourselves all the time? Yes, but at no point did anyone say, you know, I don't think this is the time. Really, I had to be sold on this because I was a little, I turned on my skepticism node for a hot second. I said, guys, is this it? Like no young person is going to even want a single physical button on this thing. They're like, what's going on? And it turns out that the time was right, not only for a variety of unrelated reasons, but because you can introduce this as a new concept to somebody like, not to name drop, Max Weinbach, who was like our most difficult briefing at CES.

38:29He's like 20, 22. And he's just like, I think this is ridiculous. But then you show him what happens when you are using, you know, Instagram Live and you have your entire screen there. And you go to type something and the virtual keyboard doesn't eat up 40 % of it. Or you show somebody a keyboard shortcut and you're like, wait, what did you do? And I'm like, well, I just hit the space bar and it advanced the screen for me. Or I hit, you know, whatever. Drop the notification shade. That's part of the fun. All the BlackBerry people know this stuff already. All the, you know, the people who had a Palm Trio, like you and I, maybe.

38:59know all these things and to introduce it to somebody who was not alive when the BlackBerry was a thing. It's pretty cool. That's interesting. So we're actually like past nostalgia for a lot of people where it's so far gone that it's actually a new thing again. Yeah, it's a full circle. Exactly right. But I would imagine for you as somebody who has used these things, but not built them before, part of the process is just sort of learning how to learn a keyboard and like the vocabulary of it and what it means for a keyboard to be good or bad. Because I think as a user, you have this instinctive feel, but I have to imagine that at some level, there is like an objective measure of a good keyboard that you have to learn how to reckon with in this process.

39:39There is. So like the first prototype of clicks I got to use had these domed transparent keycaps. So we printed the characters below the surface of the key, like a palm pre, right? And because I'm so forever in love with the Palm Pre until I die, I loved it. And I was like, oh, this looks so good. And this is the language we should be going for. And perfect. Well, it turns out, though, that when you make a domed transparent key that is perfectly circular in the design we were using, it looks great from head on. And then you tilt that phone by 20 degrees and you can't tell what the letter is because there's visual warping, right?

40:15There's the skewing that happens. Is that a semicolon or a comma? I don't know what I'm doing anymore. So very quickly, we had to make little decisions like that, like, well, let's see what flat polycarbonate keys with, you know, satin printed top layer paint looks like. Well, it turns out that's a lot better. So there's kind of major changes early on. What I found surprising is you and I, we've covered phones a long time. You know how early on designs get locked in. And you see people talking about, why didn't they just make this change? Because we were giving them feedback after the unveiling.

40:47It's like, well, because they've been sitting at retail boxes for three months at this point. With something like Clix, though, we were making changes right up until the end. At CES, we got the final keyboard while we were at the show. The thing we showed everybody was kind of like a second-to-last revision. The final keyboard came in. It wasn't even built into the case. We're carrying around like a component with no paint on it or anything. It's just like, okay, don't look at this. This is gross. But just close your eyes and feel it. And everyone we showed that to, we got the final sign-off on it.

41:14Kevin was so excited. We're like, oh, that's it. every nerd we trust has signed off on that. So, dude, I'm going forever. We had like 100 revisions. It was crazy. I will say I am most fascinated by like the last handful because I think I would assume, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but that you get through kind of 80 % of the problem fairly quickly. And you settle on like the rough idea of the thing that you want. And then you spend like the rest of your life until the heat death of the universe debating like tiny millimeters of everything. but that stuff does matter in these really like hard to understand ways.

41:48So like the last 10 revisions, I think must've been so interesting and weird to go through. They were so wild because you're fighting, you're trying to integrate your, your personal history without being a, you know, without being slavish to it. Right. So a good example is the shift and alt keys right up until close to the end, they were swapped. And I kept trying to switch to alternate characters and I kept messing it up. And I'm like, all right, is this muscle memory or what? And we talked about it. We kind of went back and forth, got the whole team involved. and it was like, no, we got to swap those keys.

42:16And once we did, everything felt right again because what do you know, you find the corner more easily. My least favorite change, I think I talked about in my video, was I want that old number pad. I want the, you know, the three by three BlackBerry Palm Trio kind of number pad on the keyboard. Somebody much smarter than me on the team said, look, if we're designing the best iPhone physical keyboard, you got to design it like the iOS virtual keyboard. You got to give the number row up top. And I said, I hate that you're right. I hate it, but you're right. I can't say you're wrong. That's what we got to do.

42:46So little tiny changes like that. Have you gone back and retested all the old physical keyboards? It's so weird because I was using the Palm Pre, obviously, most recently. And I was like, I remember writing for this keyboard back in the day when I owned it in 2009. And I pick it up now and I'm like, oh, those keys barely move at all. And the Centro, right, where I was like, I could type fine on this in 2008. Nope. Even in 2008, I was like, this is too small. with the central. I couldn't do it. Yeah. Well, you could use the stylus on the buttons though, which was great. That is true. But other surprises in the other way, I'll get off webOS in a second, but real quick, the HP Veer, world's tiniest keyboard phone that a lot of people made fun of, very good keyboard for the footprint.

43:28And for me, best keyboard I ever used, but did not own, Sidekick 2. Oh yeah. They're like lovely clicky travel and feedback and also covered in that delightful silicone rubber that held onto your thumbs. Oh, man. What's your favorite keyboard of all time, if you don't mind me asking? I think if you made me pick two, it would be the Trio 650, which I loved to pieces. I loved that phone. And the Motorola Q, which I actually think if you made me pick one is probably my answer. That keyboard was amazing. I love it. Why I think the Q worked is because you had this nice interplay of materials. They were plastic hard keys, which doesn't sound nice, but the phone was soft touch.

44:08That's one of the things we were doing on clicks actually pretty late was once we had the keys locked in, I was like, there's something still weird and missing about this. And it turned out it's what's around back. So we ended up putting that stamped like vegan leather backplate on there to make it feel, you know, to give you the entire tactile experience because you got, you know, eight other fingers that you got to worry about when you're typing, right? What do they feel? But if you look at those keys in cross section, you'll notice they're domed over the top too. And that helps with with determining separation of keys by touch.

44:37So you'll always have an easier time on a domed keyboard than you will on something where it's all crowded together, like on the Bold. And the Bold didn't do that because it was a better typing experience. The Bold did that because BlackBerry wanted a narrower phone. So it was, that's why you had those triangular frets in the corners. So they're like, the science of this stuff is fascinating. And I'm so glad it's not lost to history because you can still talk to the people who designed it. And be like, oh, this is why you did this. These are smart ideas. It's good to bring some of them back. Tell me also about doing this in kind of the iPhone era, because I think people have tried and failed at this in part because the iPhone, it's good at what it does already.

45:11Yes. How do you like put those two things together? First of all, one, frankly, made our jobs a lot easier is that we you don't have to do anything with clicks. You don't have to install our app if you don't want to. You literally plug an iPhone in and the iPhone goes, you know, which uses a lightning port or the USB port. And the iPhone says, oh, that's a physical keyboard because all the hooks that it needs are built into iOS to begin with. So you just start typing and it's like, OK, well, it turns out this product can handle it very well. And it's not nothing that that's the case, by the way.

45:40And I think I think a lot of people would be surprised that that's the case because there just isn't really a reason for the iPhone to do that. But it is surprisingly receptive to the existence of a physical keyboard. I think in terms of like a philosophical thing, I had a little bit of the same problem grasping it at first. It was like, gosh, what are we building? And then somebody said something very smart. And they said, look, nobody looks twice. Nobody thinks twice. When you use an iPad with a magic keyboard and then you say, well, I don't really need the keyboard right now. So you take it off.

46:11And then later you're going to write an email and you put the keyboard back on. Like that is the definition of normal use case for that product. Why shouldn't the same thing be true of the phone? And the minute somebody put it in that lens for me, I was like, oh, OK, good. And, you know, we kind of hedge a little bit, too, because there's a button unclicks you can hit to call up the virtual keyboard. So, like, you know, there are times, man, where I'm walking around and I'm like, I do not want to type on a physical keyboard with one hand. It is annoying and slow and I don't like it. So that's the virtual keyboard.

46:39And I can swipe around and stuff and I can use emojis and then I can put it away. So, like, it's really about the adaptability for me. Like, you know, it's eliminating buttons. Yeah, good call. Had to do it. But it turns out there's a lot that you miss. So why not just have buttons when you want them? That was kind of our guiding philosophy after we figured out that we could actually make it. What have you seen in terms of like surprising cool stuff that you can do on the iPhone? I mean, one of the things you've mentioned and I've seen you talk about elsewhere is just added screen real estate, right?

47:07Like you don't realize how big your phone screen is until you can actually see the whole thing. It's so annoying. Which I think is real. I also wonder like you've been using these things longer than just about anybody, right? What have you seen in your own kind of phone usage life that is helped by a physical keyboard like this? Yeah. So the example that they make me do, that my colleagues make me do on video, because you're the creator. You're the influencer. Do the live Instagram streaming thing and typing while you do it. And I'm like, I don't care about that. What I care about is I'm in 85 group chats, right?

47:36And when you're in a group chat and you're looking at all the context of what people have said before, and then you go to respond, and that virtual keyboard pops up, and then it clears half the screen. Stop. So I love using clicks for that specifically, but it's kind of like an Easter egg hunt. There are all the hotkey shortcuts that work on the Magic Keyboard, or at least a lot of them, work in clicks, too. So there's that. And I go into every app and I try the old BlackBerry shortcuts. Can I hit T to go to the top? No, I can't. What does spacebar do? Oh, that scrolls. Okay. Well, this phone is really tall, and now with clicks, it's even taller.

48:07So how do I get to the notification shade? Does globe N work? Weirdly, yes, it does. And what about shift space? Oh, that goes the other way. And like just there are so many little old habits that I sort of forgot about from the days of reviewing all the old QWERTY phones. And again, to iOS is great credit. They didn't rip any of that stuff out. It's all just sitting there waiting to be utilized. My favorite is Globe and, you know, Safari's got a ton of them, but I mostly just use the space bar to scroll because I'm lazy. Does it have the thing that I love so much about the BlackBerrys, which is that if you're on the home screen and you just start typing, something happens.

48:42So on iOS, you have to invoke Spotlight like you would on a MacBook. So you do command space and then you pop up. So Craig Federighi, if you're listening, and I know that you are, just get rid of that. Just let me start typing and it should pop up the Spotlight. Right. Do you remember that on the Blackboard? It was the best. It was the best. You're like, I want to go to my calendar. I'm just going to pull my phone out of my pocket and hit C-A-L and it's going to take me to my calendar. But I think, I mean, that comes back to kind of the question about, you know, all the other affordances we've made for the ways that people use phones now.

49:11Right. Like I think the swipe typing is an interesting one. And my sense is that has kind of come and gone. And just purely anecdotally, everybody I know who uses Android knows about the swipe typing and uses it, especially when you're using your phone with one hand. No one I know who uses an iPhone even knows that that's a thing you can do. And like the space bar trick to move the cursor is my favorite party trick because no one knows that's a thing. And you show them and it just blows their mind to pieces. But that's the kind of stuff that all of these companies have spent this much time working on because they didn't have physical keyboards.

49:41And in a funny way, they're trying to solve for the problems of physical keyboards. Right. But also like once you got rid of them, you had to figure out a better way to move a cursor because you didn't have arrow buttons anymore. And like, you know, what's great is arrow buttons. But now we've sort of come past that. And so now you have to go back and say, okay, we have a physical keyboard. How do we make it do some touchscreen things? Yes. Which is an interesting challenge. If you're utterly insane, how do we make an individual tiny touchscreen behind every button? which is what I want to do.

50:10You remember the Samsung Alias? I do, yeah. Yeah, it's one of those. Let's put an E-Ink screen behind it. Let's put an OLED behind every one of these. Let's make a$500 clicks and see if anybody buys it. It'll be great. That's the full lunacy keyboard thing that I'm very excited for. I'm going to make that and then retire and move to Mexico. Why start on the iPhone, by the way, as opposed to starting with, you know, Galaxy phones or Pixel phones or trying to do something that is sort of universally Android? Like I've been spending some time with the backbone folks, and they've been doing some really interesting work to try to figure out how do we make one thing that works for everybody.

50:43And I can imagine, you know, if you build something that works for everybody, huge increase in the total available market. But also, if you build something for Android, you are more likely to hit the sort of phone nerd people who care about this stuff the way that you and I do. Why not start there? It's really about numbers. You know, honestly, the total addressable market of iPhone users is something like 1.3 billion. And we know that clicks is not for everybody. It's always fun when somebody offers up some wisdom to me on social media. Like, you know, this is no one's going to buy this. I'm like, OK, if one in 1000 people buy it and you're targeting a base of like of iPhone users, like just from a sheer numbers perspective, it's I have preferred Android for a long time.

51:24Sure. Partially because of the hardware diversity of that ecosystem. Right. So I want to build one eventually. But again, you've got to work in stages, as you well know. You have to start, build a great product, build a healthy business on the back of that, and then you can do other things. To your other question about, like, why not make a one-size-fits-all one, definitely considered that. I mean, we got close to announcing that. It'll probably come in the future. There were just too many compromises. It doesn't look as good. You can't get as many cool certifications when it's not built for a very specific type of iPhone.

51:57Sure. And I hate to keep harping on the aesthetics, but we really wanted to ship something that wasn't this kind of kludgy. I won't name drop any previous efforts, but like, you know, something that just doesn't look very good, doesn't feel like it was purpose built for the phone you spent, what,$1 ,100 on. So let's say, you know, launch goes well, everything comes out over the next few months. What's next for clicks? Like, I know I've seen you're going to do your plan is to do more colors and do drops and that kind of stuff. But I also feel like the thing that I've learned about hardware startups over the years is that getting the first one out the door is borderline impossible.

52:30It's a huge amount of work. You have to talk to a bunch of manufacturers and companies that don't know you and don't care about you. But then if you can do the thing, prove you can do it, prove you're serious, like the world kind of opens up to you a little bit. And you strike me as somebody who has some pretty wild ideas about where all of this could go. Do you feel like there is tons of runway left in like the footprint of a keyboard? Do you have big ideas about other stuff you want to add in? Like tease the future a little bit for me. This is not true what I'm about to say. Perfect. But to an extent, you know, I almost wish the beginning portion was as harrowing as you described.

53:11But because we have so many people in the right places, we don't have as many of those problems as we might otherwise. So we've had to think ahead of time, ahead of when I would prefer to think about these larger conceptual questions, these vision questions of like, at some point you have to ask yourself, well, what are we going to do? Like you just said, are we just going to own buttons on mobile phones or are we going to be the kind of company that asks, well, what else can click? Look, I have giant, crazy, dumb ideas in the latter category and we have a very solid opportunity to make a pretty good business in the former category.

53:47But I'll be honest with you, it's not clear which direction we will go because we still do have to focus on getting, you know, we've shipped Founders Edition. That's thousands of units, but it's not the main production run. So we're going to take the time that we have right now to deliver the best possible Gen 1 product to all the people who want to buy them. And then we'll have a better answer for you this time next year. That's a very good and very diplomatic answer. Thank you. And I appreciate that. That is someone who has been in a company for a while, and I'm proud of you for that. Thanks, man.

54:17Okay. So I won't ask you to tell me the future. Give me one huge, wild idea that there's absolutely no chance you're ever going to build because it's impossible for one reason or another. You remember there was an old Kia Cera that ran Palm OS. It didn't even have a color screen. We're talking 2001. I think it was the 71 something. And it had a touchscreen, but it had a stowaway detachable numeric keypad that attached via a hinge on the bottom. And if you didn't want to take it all the way off, you could flip it around back so it would get out of the way. This is a very 2001 device you're describing.

54:46I love it. Thank you. That's all I'm here to do is bring back the path. I want to make one of those for the Galaxy Flip 5 or the Razer. I want to make a Clix that flips around back and then flips up forward and overlaps the screen and gives you a physical QWERTY keyboard that you can then flip away and put around back. It would sell at least 127 units. 119 would probably fail. We will never build it, but I would like to build it. Why not have more mechanisms? That's right. It's just like, what if instead of a hinge, we had several hinges? Exactly. How many parts can you make move? How many points of failure can you introduce into this product?

55:20Well, Michael, thank you. This is incredibly fun. I really appreciate it. This was a great time. Thank you, David. All right, we got to take a break and we'll be right back with a question from the Vergecast Hall. Be right back.

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59:14All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11 and the email is vergecast at theverge.com. Send us all your questions, all your thoughts, all your feelings, and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. First of all, again, thank you to everybody who's calling in about TikTok and the Apple antitrust stuff. We're going to get back to both of those a bunch in the next few weeks. So keep calling. Tell us everything you think we got right. Tell us everything you think we got wrong. Tell us all of your feelings about all of it. We want to hear everything.

59:41For now, we have a question from Michael. This is Michael from Madison. So my parents are getting older and I'm looking to record them sharing family stories. So we have them for next generations. and I was looking for advice on what to buy microphone-wise to record my parents talking like Ken Burns style, like a cute couple. Any advice on what to do would be great. Thanks. All right. First of all, I believe strongly that everyone should make Ken Burns documentaries about their family. This is an extremely good idea. Second of all, Andrew Marino is here to help me answer this question. Andrew, so much of you on the show today, this makes me very happy.

1:00:18I know. What's up? You have come prepared with what I assume is just a large slew of microphones. This question gets more complicated the longer I think about it, which is why I'm very glad you're here. So take us through it. What are your thoughts on this? Okay, so I'm not sure what Michael is actually using to record. So I have a couple options that will give a hybrid of options you can use. Right now, I'm actually using one of the microphones, the Rode Wireless Me. Rode has like a slew of wireless microphones now. that you could just plug into your phone or plug into a camera or into an audio recorder.

1:00:55They are super easy to use. There's like a little square. You just kind of, oh, a big square. It's a big square. You clip onto your lapel. These are the ones that have like the receiver you plug into your phone or computer or whatever. And then the actual mic is what you put on whoever you're talking to, right? And then they automatically connect to each other. Yeah, exactly. So what I do a lot is I'll plug the receiver into my phone and I'll record a voice memo or with Rode's recorder app or like take a video and we'll take the audio from the Rode wireless for the audio input. That's a great option because you can, it's very versatile if you want to make video, if you want to be walking around, if you're like parents are like cooking dinner, like moving around and all that.

1:01:42Yeah, that's good. The other one I have is the ATR2100X USB mic from Audio-Technica. What I like about it is it's a USB microphone that's also an XLR microphone. So if you want to plug into your laptop, into your tablet, into your phone, you can use this microphone. But also you can just use it into any mobile audio recorder that has an XLR input or your audio interface or anything. That's a great option. we send these mics to everyone on staff for the Vergecast. Yeah, this is the mic that I tell people, if you don't want to spend several hundred dollars on a pro podcasting mic, but you want 90 % of the quality, I make people buy this mic.

1:02:24I have recommended this mic to so many people who want to do podcasts. Yeah, and they're very cheap. Right now I'm looking on B &H and it's$49. Oh, wow. That's a really good deal. Half the price of what they usually are. Yeah, this thing is a good deal at$100, much less at$50. Okay. I should also mention that the Rode wireless packs range from$200 to$300, depending what version you want to get. Those are a little more expensive. So here's my question for you on this one, though. I feel like there's a version of this that is like sit with your two parents, right? That's what you want to do. You want to have them sit on a couch and talk to each other.

1:03:00Do you give them each a mic and plug it into a recorder? Or do you like set the mic on a table and kind of point it between them? Oh, that's a good question. So I actually did this with my friends recently. I interviewed them at their kitchen table and I had two of the microphones, one for each person. That's the ideal situation. That's like, I want the best recording. You can totally just put table and have them talk into both of them, like a little press conference thing. But since they're so cheap, like it's worth getting two, maybe one for you, one for your guest kind of thing too. Yeah, I mean,$100, plug these two things into your computer.

1:03:38They each come with, if memory serves, like a really crappy but kind of useful little stand. So you could be kind of all in for$100 on this project and have pretty solid audio. Yeah, that's actually another reason why I recommend it is it comes with a stand. It's not a good stand, but it is a stand. And that comes for something. All right, you said you had one more, right? What's the third option? Okay. So this is the Sennheiser MKE 600. Right now it goes for about$350. This is more of a professional microphone. I use this a lot for podcasting field recordings, or maybe I'm over someone's house and I'm interviewing them.

1:04:18I love the crispness of this microphone. How do you think it sounds? It sounds really good. I can only see a little bit of it on your screen, but this looks like a kind of proper shotgun mic. Yes, exactly. That like, this is the kind of thing that you stick on a boom arm and hold over somebody's head on a film shoot. Like that, that's, this is a much more professional thing than either of the other two, it seems. Yeah. This is a great one for like indie filmmakers, even if you want to just put it on top of the camera, but I love it just on a stand on a desk pointing right in front of the person's mouth has just like a very detailed sound.

1:04:53If you want the Ken Burns documentary style, then this is a great choice and it's affordable. among the more professional microphones. Yeah, the microphone world, especially in this realm of these like shotgun boom mics can get really expensive really fast. But there's definitely, especially for our purposes here, you hit the kind of diminishing returns plateau pretty fast. Like just hearing you now, this sounds really good. I don't know that you would necessarily for like human archival purposes want something notably better than this. Yeah, I think so. And this is just an XLR microphone, by the way.

1:05:28So you would need either an audio interface or an audio recorder that has an XLR input. Okay. Which is why I offer the others. Wait, I want you to do one test for me here really quickly though. Yeah. Just move around a little while you talk. Tell me, sorry, because this is the problem with these shotgun mics, right? Is you have to be like sort of perfectly in front of it. And it sounds amazing. But if you move, sometimes they get weird. Yeah. So I'm talking to the left of it right now, which is off axis a little bit. You're going to hear less of the clarity. I'm going back to the center and I'm going to the right.

1:05:57go a little further back. Okay. Usually when they have this shotgun mic, you can go pretty far back because it can catch your voice pretty far away. Yeah, when you go back, you get quieter, but you're still very clear. But as soon as you get off access, it starts veering into like, I'm on AirPods kind of vibes that I'm listening to. Yeah, so if you're interviewing two people, you're going to have to have them either switch off between the microphone or you're going to have to boom it like a professional and move it around. yeah it's i always like you you see the the like field producers for podcasts and whatever and like half the job is to just sort of shove the microphone in the face of whoever's talking yeah and it sounds amazing but it's a process i'm torn between all of these actually this is a really funny three as soon as you said the audio technical one i was like oh that's obviously going to be the answer but i feel like the lapel mic is really useful for somebody who is not used to talking into a mic in a way that it's just like it just sort of goes with your body for somebody who was like moving around and isn't always focused on mic technique, having it just sort of live close to your mouth is always really useful.

1:07:02Then the audio technical one is kind of a useful middle ground for not a lot of money. And then this one is clearly the best sounding. Like it's actually notably better sounding than either of the other two, which I didn't really expect to be the case. Yeah. And you can keep going up. You can go to$10 ,000 if you want to to get the best microphone. But really like these ones are like very flexible in different environments. And that's why I chose these. Awesome. Well, Michael, I hope that helps. Please let us know which one you decide. And we would love to hear the documentary when it's done. Andrew, thank you as always.

1:07:31That was awesome. No problem. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show. And thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, including that awesome video from our video team about noise cancellation, all the stuff about clicks. We'll put it all in the show notes on theverge.com. But you know, read theverge.com. It's a newsy time. There's a lot going on. Check it out. And as always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, or other keyboards you want to see brought back to life, you can always email us, vergecasttotheverge.com, or call the hotline 866-VERGE11.

1:08:03We want to hear everything from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about probably more antitrust stuff, more TikTok stuff, and everything else going on in tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

1:08:47Thank you. Jira to learn more. That's A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N.com slash J-I-R-A. Atlassian.com slash Jira.

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