It's gadget season again

24:14I know at least a couple of people tried and failed multiple times to get ERA's tickets. Richard is being suspiciously quiet, which makes me think he's definitely a Swiftie for sure. I was like, hmm, look at Richard's off looking in a corner. Richard? Yeah, I just don't know what's going on here. I'm very happy for you, though. The cultural event of the summer and fall and winter and the rest of our lives. I'm sure. This movie might be in theaters for a decade, Richard. She fixed the economy. They keep being like, oh, yeah, the Eris tour increased spending. It fixed the economy. I don't think it fixed the economy, but it increased spending.

24:48What if she lowers the rent? What if she changes the world with this tour? I fully believe in her economic prowess. Oh, I agree. At some point, when the Eras tour ends, we're going to find somebody fun to talk to about this. And we're going to go through the insane, stratospheric records that this tour has set. And nothing will ever top it ever again. And the things she has... It's insane and wild. And I'm very excited about this movie. And that's all. Everybody, you probably can't get tickets if you're hearing this now. Well, it created congressional hearings about Ticketmaster. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah.

25:25Yeah. She broke Ticketmaster. She's going to make AMC the most valuable company in the universe now. This is she runs the economy. This is what it is. All right. Kranz, you're up. What do you got? OK. iPhones come in two weeks. I'm really I bought an iPhone 14 Pro last year and I was really excited about it. And I was like, I'll be fine. I don't need the next one. And now the next one sounds like it's almost definitely going to have USB-C. And the FOMO is extreme for me at the moment. And like I'm locked into this payment plan for another year. So it's not like I'm cheap. I'm not going to be going and buying it, but I'm going to be regretting my life choices a lot.

26:00Like come two weeks from now. You didn't get the iPhone upgrade plan? No, I want to pay in cash because it didn't work with my Apple Pay card, I think. And I want my 3%. I like imagining that you just walk in with a bag of nickels and just like throw it on the desk in the Apple store. And you're like, give me an iPhone. I just whip it across the genius bar, Adam. Yeah. But it seems exciting. I don't know. iPhones are kind of weird in a weird place, right? Yeah, they're in a weird place. Last year, the exciting thing was the Dynamic Island. And we enjoyed the island. But try explaining to anyone who doesn't listen to the Verge cast what the Dynamic Island is.

26:38And that's a less fun conversation. Yeah, they'll just say it's that thing at the top of the screen that screws up all the apps sometimes. Yeah, they're just kind of annoyed with you. But like USB-C, I'm beyond excited about USB-C. I just got a new USB-C charger from Anchor, and it charges my phone, or not my phone, it charges my computer, it charges my Steam Deck, it charges just everything I own that I can plug USB-C into, and it's wonderful. And I'm like, oh, I want my phone to do that, too. That seems cool. So USB-C alone has me pumped for it. And we're getting USB-C on the AirPod case. I'm not going to buy it because, again, like if my phone doesn't do USB-C, I refuse to let my AirPods case do USB-C.

27:27It has to wait in line. But this is like exciting. If you like USB-C, it's going to be a big event. If you like anything else, it's going to be an iPhone event. Well, also, if you like wireless charging, I mean, we'll talk to John in a bit. But the big news at IFA is these wireless chargers that are getting announced with the Qi 2 standard that the iPhone 15 may support. I guess we'll find out and allow kind of non MagSafe chargers to charge iPhones at the same rate as MagSafe. And also, you know, kind of other devices, other phones that support 15 watt wireless charging. So if you like wireless charging, this is your moment.

28:01I got a wireless charger, too. I spent like one hundred and fifty dollars. Or if you want to buy a new charging stand or something like that. Yeah, don't for like the next. Don't don't be me. I bought it last month. I do not read our website enough is what happened there. A lot of regret. I was talking to somebody at one of the charging companies the other day, and they were basically saying that the USB-C thing is cool, but it's a mirage because wireless is the real thing. That it's like the actual arc that we're on is wireless charging taking over. And it would have been great if USB-C had been ready, you know, 12 years ago, and we could have just gone straight to that.

28:36But we didn't, and that's fine. But where we're actually headed, and I think where Apple has pretty clearly been wanting to head for a long time, is wireless charging. Wireless charging is mostly still very bad and not as good or fast as wired charging. So I think we still have a ways to go. But I agree. I think especially some of the stuff we're seeing at IFA that we're going to talk about a little later is pretty exciting. Richard, do you care about this iPhone? Convince me to care about this iPhone. I had more things to convince you about the iPhone. Oh, you're not done. Okay. You didn't talk about the action button yet.

29:06Hit me. Yeah, I was about to say the action button. I think it's the stupidest thing in the world and I'm not excited about the action button. I would be excited about the action button if it didn't replace the mute button. And like, if I'm just going to have to program it to be the mute button, then it's not an action button. It's just a mute button that I had to like do an extra step to make a mute button. I want both. I just straight up had to look at my phone to see if it still had a mute button. That thing has been on mute since the minute I took it out of the package and I have not touched it since.

29:36Anyone who lets their phone ring loud is 75 years old. Blanket rule of the universe. If your phone rings, you are 100 years old. And don't you like being able to just go, oh, is it on mute? Take a quick look or like reach into your pocket and go and kind of hit the little switch while you're walking down the street and be like, yeah, it's on mute. I just want I want that. I like that. I don't want to have to like pull my phone out, program the mute button and then hit mute. You don't miss the art of ring of ringtones? They're trying to bring ringtones back by getting rid of the mute button. No, maybe it's the opposite.

30:09Maybe they're killing it forever. It's like your phone can no longer make noise when it rings would be like truly Apple's most innovative feature in years. They have to go to my mother's house and explain that to her. Like, I'm not doing it. I'm not letting anyone at the like Apple. It's Tim Cook has to fly to my mother's house and explain to her why her phone doesn't ring anymore. Does your mom have the ringtone that rings like an old timey phone? My mother in law has that ringtone and it drives me nuts. Oh, yeah. She's got the ringtone and she's got it on her watch, too. which she answers in the supermarket I learned so sorry to all the H-E-B's shoppers of Texas for having to listen to all of my conversations with my mom while she's picking up groceries it's great all right before we go to break Alex you wrote down one other one in the fall things coming up that you're excited about give us 30 seconds then we're going yes Starfield it's the new Bethesda game like all other Bethesda games I think it's going to be stupid but then I'm reading all the reviews and now I really want to play it but I also know like every other Bethesda game.

31:11I'm going to play it for 100, 200 hours, never finish it and tell everybody it sucks. I'm so excited. So stupid is not the word you're looking for here. It's going to be stupid. It's going to be like, the characters look stupid. I feel stupid playing it because I'm like, oh, you don't look dumb. Like the Bethesda characters look dumb. And that's a bummer. And so far, that seems to be the case for this game as well. But also, I want to travel around delivering coffee in space. That seems cool. I don't want to do that in real life, but I want to do that in space. Richard's just like, if it's not Overwatch, don't even talk to me.

31:45Yeah, I'm sorry. I want another games-as-a-service shooter. Just something I can play in 15-minute increments. You just want to play Redfall forever. If it weren't so terrible, if it were just any slight bit less terrible, I would be playing it right now. I like it. Alright, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna come back, and we're gonna talk about all the other mishmash of nonsense happening in the tech world this week. We'll be right back.

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34:46all right we're back so lots of little news this week there was some threads news it seems like we're getting search sony raised the prices on playstation plus we've got some x doing sketchy stuff. I don't really want to talk about that anymore. Wireless carriers doing weird stuff again. Call of Duty using AI to moderate voice chats, which is just America's worst idea in years. Let's just blast through all this. We can't get to all of this. So let's just lightning round this again. Kranz, you're still on the roll. You get to go first. I'm so excited. So Dolby just announced this thing. It's called Dolby Atmos Flex Connect.

35:25And the name is very stupid. That's okay. because what it could do could potentially be very, very cool, which is that it will automatically just make your speakers, your wireless speakers, work with your TV, provided they both support Dolby Atmos Flex Connect, and only one TV will support that in the next year that we know of, and it's from TCL. So it's not going to work with any of your current stuff, and it's probably not going to work with most of your stuff next year. But five years from now, this is going to be sick as hell. And I'm actually excited about it because Sonos has done a lot of this stuff in the past.

35:59They do the automatic calibration and everything like that. But it's just Sonos and you have to use Sonos speakers and you're stuck in that. And this means like, OK, I can go get any speaker, like any wireless speaker I want. And it's going to bounce. It's going to take and ping the audio from that speaker. The TV's got its own microphones built in. It's going to receive it and it's going to go, oh, and fix it all. You don't have to worry about a stupid soundbar because soundbars are bad. I'm sorry. even though I own one. You don't have to worry about like messing with anything. It should just all work.

36:31And for like the last, what, 20 years, TV audio has not just worked. So that feels appealing. Even though you're still like now going to have to buy additional speakers for your TV, at least it should make it a lot easier and more natural and hopefully cheaper than the Soto solution, which is why I'm not buying a new iPhone this year. So the idea seems to be, if I'm understanding this correctly, and I'm genuinely not sure that I am, but if I'm understanding this correctly, it's that you don't have to buy like a full surround sound set. You don't have to buy that one gigantic box at Best Buy. You can sort of bring your own speakers, And essentially, as long as they are compatible with this one FlexConnect spec, Dolby will be able to stitch them all together.

37:23You'll be able to put them in a system and it'll work. Yeah, that's it. Theoretically, if Vizio supports this, you can go get those super cheap but decent Vizio speakers, set it all up. and then instead of like getting all weird and finicky and trying to use the not very good super cheap Vizio technology to make the speaker sound good just have Dolby do it and do it well and it'll all sound well so this seems great this also seems like a thing that shouldn't be that hard to do and probably should have happened 15 years ago right yeah yeah like Sonos does it now and Sonos is wildly expensive the TV companies have not really cared about speaker like they haven't cared about this.

38:05They haven't needed to because they're like, okay, for them, there's three TV buyers, right? There's the people who spend all of their time in AV Forum. It's like me and Eli. We're over there and we're going to go buy a bunch of stuff and we're going to spend 12 years working on our system and it's going to sound beautiful. And people will ask us how much we spent and we'll have to run from the room screaming and saying, you don't need to know that. That's us. Then there's like me a couple of years ago and a lot of people, probably most people listening to this were like, I want speakers that sound good.

38:40So you go and you buy some speakers, their Sonos or Vizio or whatever, and you plug them into your TV and it sounds reasonably good. Probably not as good as any CRT TV you had 20 years ago, but decent. and then there's everybody else who doesn't listen to the verge cast and doesn't know that all speakers and tvs suck because speakers require space and tvs don't give them any and so they go and they buy a tv and they're like wow the speakers stop so they turn the volume way up they turn on the subtitles and they're just like why can't i hear anything anymore and while part of that is definitely the fault of hollywood so much of it is the fault of bad tv bakers not caring and they're like, well, if you care that much, go be one of those people who buys speakers from us and puts them in the back.

39:23We don't care enough to like make it nice, but do it. There was this post I saw. I forget which social platform it was on. There's too many of them at this point. But there was somebody who was like, guys, you don't even know. The reason you think Netflix sounds so bad is because by default, its sound is turned to 5.1. And if you are using your built in speakers, that means you're not getting the right ones. Just go and switch it to stereo and everything will be amazing and this post went like hugely viral and everybody's like oh my god you've solved it and i was just like my guy like this ain't it you didn't do it you just had a setting wrong on your netflix like i don't know what to tell you that is not it and also you're gonna put it on stereo and you're gonna be like oh now it sounds bad in stereo from two sides instead of five uh i don't know richard you're a guy who lives in av forums and owns 30 or 40 televisions does this idea excite you?

40:14I think it sounds great from the idea that, okay, so you can just go get some speakers and press the button and it'll say, all right, I'll get the sound figured out. And that's kind of always been the promise of Atmos is that they've programmed in the sound so it doesn't need like, okay, so how many channels do you have? Do you have two channels? Do you have 2.1? Do you have 5.1? Do you have 7.1? Do you have 9.1? 8.2. No, I have some speakers. Do it for me. Yeah. And you'll do it. Also, they have never gotten surround sound audio right ever at any point. It has never been seamless. It has never worked the way that it should.

40:48So I don't know why we should expect that it will. I'm an optimist at heart, Richard. The thing is, the technology exists. This should be possible. This is the kind of thing that with a microphone and the TV, with speakers with the right technology, you could do it. I'm sure that it will make Dolby money as they get licensing fees from all the speakers that are now compatible. How long it'll be until I can use this in my own living room, I'm not so sure. Well, you know, if it sucks, which it very well could, but it's a good idea, somebody else could go and be like, oh. Like, Physio could just go and do that.

41:23Well, it'll be DTS, not FlexConnect. Yeah. DTS FlexConnect. Yeah, I always think about the Ultimate Ears Boom series are the best Bluetooth speakers on the planet. And one of the things that they've done really well is you can actually daisy chain a bunch of them together. And it's not terribly complicated. It just synchronizes the sound coming out of a bunch of speakers, right? So if you have a big house and you don't want to rig up a whole speaker system, you can just put four Bluetooth speakers around the house, sync them all together, and it plays. And the fact that that alone is like an innovative feature in speakers is bananas.

41:59Like, you can do this with Bluetooth. You can do this with Wi-Fi. Like, this is not a complicated technological problem. We've done much harder things than make speakers play. And I think like to Richard's point about, you know, a million different kinds of surround sound, none of them that have ever been done very well. I think just the fact that it's as difficult as it is to buy like two pretty good speakers, stick them on the either side of your television and have it work is nuts. Like that's the reason I tell people to buy soundbars because you don't have to program it. You know where it goes.

42:28Just don't worry about it. Even buying two speakers ends up being more work than it's worth for not that much better sound most of the time. So I think the idea that it's going to like perfectly correctly tune your room, I agree. I don't trust, but I really hope it works. Like I super, super, super hope it works because it would be awesome. Five years from now, it'll be cheaper than Sonos and not as good, but better than nothing. I mean, I'll take it. Which is the entire story of a home theater audio at this point. As is, Dolby almost got it right. That's like, that's Dolby's slogan. Like we almost got it this time.

43:04No, we're not going to. We're going to read it for the last second. Screw it up. Sorry, guys. Yeah. Richard, what's your next one? Yeah. My thing is Google's duet AI becoming available in Docs and Gmail and other workspace apps. You reported on this this week. I want to hear more from you about the people you talked to and all the things they said. But what strikes me is the price. We saw this with the Microsoft Bing AI and then making it available in Microsoft 365. And it looks like Google's going about the same way. they're charging, it looks like$30 per person per month. That's a lot of money.

43:37And as soon as I saw that with the Microsoft thing, and now I see it with Google, I understand why they're pushing AI so hard, because they're going to make a lot of money from it. The bad news is that the companies who buy it, they're probably going to want to save money somewhere else. Whether or not these AI tools actually work or make people more productive or do not, they're going to be spending a lot of money on them. So there's going to be cuts somewhere else. And it just seems like that's assured. Is it$30 per month per head? User. Like per account? Yes. Yep. No. Yeah. No. Hard pass. That's a no for me.

44:11It would have to be magic. Yeah. Can you just think for a second how good it would have to be to justify that price? It would have to be magic. There's a set of people who will just get this because it's useful. And there's a set of these things that I think are time-saving in a way that will actually be meaningful to people. Right? The idea that I can, I don't know, take a Google Doc and say, duet, turn this into a spreadsheet and it'll turn it into like a remedial but functional Google Slides deck in 45 seconds is like, there are a lot of people to whom that is worth$30 a month. Easily. There are a lot of people who essentially do that one thing for a living.

44:53And I think the question of what happens to those people, to your point, is really interesting and really complicated and probably really messy and bad in the long run for those people. but I tend to agree that I think the number of people for whom there are$30 a month worth of good features in Google Duet is going to be smaller than Google thinks. And I think it's going to be the same with Copilot that like, if you just give it to people, they'll use it because having a thing that can, you know, clean up my email grammar or make a graph out of my spreadsheet data for me is useful. And I would use that if it was just there.

45:29But paying what amounts to like 3x the price of Google Workspace for that is super, super, super steep. And I don't know that Google has made a particularly convincing case that this is going to like work. Like we've all used Bard in the last six months. I don't really have any reason to believe this thing is going to be as good as they say it is. Is it going to work with like your calendar? What do you mean? The only thing I would pay$30 a month for is an AI that just understood and did all my calendar scheduling for me. Including the polite DMs to people to be like, can I put some time on your calendar?

46:04Is this okay? I wanted to just do all of that. If it did all of that, I personally would pay$30. I don't know if I could get Vox Media to agree to pay$30, but I'd be like, oh, I'll see you all the check. Let's do that on the side. There's an app called Motion. I think it's motion.io. I think that does exactly that. And I think it's like$15 a month. But is it trustworthy? I haven't used it in a while, but by all accounts, it's actually pretty good. I hate those apps. Like even as a person who is like obsessed with my calendar and spends way too much time like managing the blocks in my calendar.

46:37I can't trust them. No, because it's like, tell us about your flow state and we'll schedule it. And I'm like, I don't know. It like depends on what I eat for lunch that day. Like, leave me alone, calendar. I was like, no, you should just know. Like, I basically want an assistant, but it's only$30 a month. I am the problem with the economy. I am why they're all so excited. You're literally the reason they built Duet AI. Like, here's the best we can do. But I don't trust it. Like a person, I would be like, hey, don't do that in the future. And they'd be like, yeah, pay me more than$30 a month. And I'd be like, fair, fair.

47:11But like, I just can't imagine trusting it because when it would screw up, it would probably screw up in the worst way. It would probably decline an invite from an Apple event, which would be hysterical, and be like, no, you're not going to that. Decline it and be like, you've got to go do your performance review. And I'll be like, no, those are two different things. And one matters more in this moment. Performance reviews always matter, but not on the same day as Apple events. I don't know. I just think my initial read of Duet is very much that this is clear evidence that Google has not figured out what the killer app for AI is for.

47:51And it's the same with Microsoft, where they've come up with a lot of relatively small, mostly useful sounding things that these tools can do without anything that you're immediately like, oh, I need that in my life. I'm also cognizant of the fact that the three of us do not have real jobs and that most jobs involve email, spreadsheets, and slide decks. and most people and most companies would be willing to pay a lot of money to make any of those three things slightly more efficient. And like Google's bet is essentially like, okay, if we can make each one of those a little tiny bit better, we can help you write emails faster.

48:30We can help you like get more actual data out of your spreadsheet. We can help you make more beautiful decks on deadline. Like that might work. All they have to do is be like, we'll do the pivot tables and you'll never have to understand what a pivot table is. Like a lot of places would probably be like, yeah,$30 a month. Never have to learn about a pivot table. Yeah. And then every just out of business school employee on planet Earth just got fired. Like right as I was saying that sentence, they all lost their jobs. Yeah. Sorry, guys. Yeah. If you are a like junior account executive at a marketing company, like you're so screwed.

49:07I'm so sorry. Fortunately, the thing that you'll, that we'll be replacing you, our boss asked Bard, what's the coolest thing anyone could do and receive some answers? Can you just read the list? Some cool things people have done. It's so good. Include walking to a destination, even if it's 3 ,000 miles away. Playing World of Warcraft for 100 hours in a week. Yes, I'm cool. Being in a movie with Will Smith. Pretty cool, pretty cool. Cool things in the world include chewing gum, skateboards, and co-ord outfits. I don't know what those are. I guess I'm not cool enough. You're not cool enough. The Bard knows.

49:43Don't feel bad. Who knew we were all so cool for like 1995 with a chewing gum and a skateboard? We were badasses. You know, there's like a, there's a marketing person at like a fashion agency right now who is furiously Googling what is the coolest thing anyone can do. And just being like, I would not pay$30 a month for this. This is it. And I just, I very much enjoyed that Neelize, when he posted that, he was like, I can't believe it didn't say a backflip, which is objectively the coolest thing. It is. Yeah, it's very good. But I like all of this stuff to me just says none of this is finished yet.

50:20And it's kind of wild to see who is willing to pay for this stuff, even though it's at the very, very, very, very beginning of whatever it's going to someday be. And who is going to say at the end of their free trial, this is neat, not worth$30 a month per person for my entire company. And if I were a betting man, I would bet on that second thing being a lot more true than either Google or Microsoft think. How long is the trial? I don't know. Because if it's like a year-long trial, maybe they have a shot. They can take the year to figure out how to make it useful. If it's a one-month trial, like, yo, what are you doing?

50:57You gave Richard more time than you're giving these people. Come on. I think it might be 30 days. I think that might be how long it is. I think their bet is that the executive who makes the decision is the person who's going to find it really useful right away. And they'll just say, yeah, we'll sign off on it and we'll fire 100 other people. It doesn't matter how well it works or does not work. And we just saw this week, I think Walmart announced that they're going to roll out AI for basically all their office employees. And they didn't say which one they're using or how much they're paying or anything.

51:25But I wonder how much, how long they'll stick with it and how many people will continue to have access to it. It's going to be the Walmart AI. That's what it's going to be called. And they're not going to pay it very well. but it's going to do the job and then the rest of us will subsidize it with our tax dollars and there will be one in your town before you know it yeah there'll be one in every town it's going to be great it's going to get rid of all the other little little uh mom and pop ai stores in your town i'm so sorry the ai needs to unionize now that is going to be when this gets really interesting the ai labor movement for the ais themselves i don't know yeah we'll come back to that.

52:05My lightning round thing for this segment is I feel obligated to be the one continuing to chronicle the ever consuming normalization of all of these video apps in which they just all slowly become the exact same thing. And the version of this this week is that Instagram appears to be working on a version of Instagram reels that lets you upload videos up to 10 minutes long, which you can now do on TikTok, which TikTok did in order to be more like YouTube, where people have always been able to watch, you know, longer videos. And people on YouTube, of course, have started making shorter videos for shorts, which was created to compete with TikTok.

52:42Reels is also created to... I could do this forever. The point is, all of these apps are the goddamn same thing now. And it's driving me nuts. And Alex, I want to get to why you're wrong very shortly here. But the last thing I want to say about this is, I think 10 minute vertical videos are actually an extremely good idea. One weird thing that I have discovered is that I just really like watching vertical things. Like there's something to this sort of flow of like how you swipe and how you watch and all that stuff. But also like, I think for a long time, there was this idea that you can't do as much in a vertical frame.

53:17And in certain ways, that's true. But also like, I don't mind, I found myself sitting watching longer things on vertical screens than I thought. And like, I'm holding my phone the way I normally hold my phone. And so the idea that like somebody is going to come out and make like a show out of one of these 10 minutes at a time, I actually think is not crazy. You mean like, like Quibi? Dude. So I listened to a podcast this week. It's called The Big Flop or something like that. Oh, yeah. I saw about this. The first episode is about Quibi. And the single wildest take that I will say on this show to this week is that it it convinced me that quibi didn't actually miss by that much i i would agree honestly i remember seeing quibi at the time and being like this feels like it could be a really good idea if it's executed well and that it was just executed terribly and also released at the worst possible moment an app of that nature could have ever been released in the history of the world okay so that's reasons two and three reason one is it It's called Quibi.

54:22Like, that's the first thing that ruined Quibi. Like, if Quibi had been called Max, it would have had a real chance, right? It would have. If they hadn't spent a trillion dollars on content at the beginning. On, like, Flip My Murder House. Giving some YouTubers, like, 50 bucks. The Rachel Brishonahan show where she just, the silver arm. But this is what I'm saying. Bring Quibis back as 10-minute reels and I'm into it. But yeah, no. Vertical video is, it's a little limiting. but it also is a little bit more focused. And I think people generally do it better. It does work. It has a place. But I kind of lean David's way, Alex.

54:59They all just become TV shows eventually. Yeah. And I'm a person who's never watched 10-minute videos on YouTube, so I'm not going to watch them on Instagram. I'm not going to watch them on TikTok. I just won't do it. Oh, I watch them on TikTok all the time. But it's the same ones I watch on YouTube, only now they're vertical. And the dude doesn't trim it to make it vertical. So a lot of times it's just blank space, and you can hear him doing things because he's not in the frame. And I'm like, yes. It's just like his left hand in the frame. And that's all you can see. Just a left hand cutting something.

55:26And you're like, yeah, this is great. It's so soothing. Because I already watched it on YouTube. But I was going to say, there is one big differentiator between all of these. And that is YouTube still does horizontal video. And the other ones don't. I mean, YouTube does. TikTok does do horizontal video. You can have videos that rotate. Yeah. I just, I guess I haven't been presented with them. Am I supposed to be watching this guy in horizontal all this time? If you upload a widescreen video on TikTok, I think it'll give you the option. So it depends on how they upload it and what they do. But yeah, it definitely can do it.

55:58I have watched so many videos on TikTok that are the little horizontal video in the middle. Because it's like a clip from a YouTube video. And then just gigantic letterboxes on top. You're telling me I could have been doing it better this whole time? I think there's times I'll tell you, like, hey, turn your phone. This is service journalism here at The Verge. This is also my favorite TikTok genre is people explaining little known features of TikTok. Like the thing where if you put your thumb on the left side of the screen, it plays at 2x speed. Mind blowing. Yeah. Yeah. Learn how to use TikTok on TikTok.

56:30It's like the YouTubers being mad at YouTube. Like that's what they do on TikTok. It's great. Incredible. Yeah. All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to go through some of the biggest announcements coming out of IFA, the gigantic European gadget show that is happening as we speak. We'll be right back.

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59:21All right, we're back. So none of us is at IFA this year. John Porter and Gentoo were there. They did a lot of really great coverage for the site. There's a stream of all the stuff that they found. They went and just had adventures with vacuums and lights. and headphones and speakers. And now they're sleeping. And now they're sleeping. It really is how it goes. You basically, you go, you touch gadgets for three days with no sleep or food, and then you drink heavily and go to sleep. And that's pretty much the run of one of those shows. So they are hopefully at this moment in the sleep phase. Not the drinking kids.

59:54Listen, it's a win-win. Yeah, it's either way. But let's, there was a bunch of things going on, but we've kind of figured out how to divide it into three categories of interesting stuff. And Richard, you alluded to one of them earlier. So take us through the charging world of IFA this year. Yeah, it's all kind of centered around the iPhone 15 launch because Apple is finally going to release a phone, we think, with a USB-C port, first of all. So Lightning and tons of docks, tons of chargers, tons of stands that people have, when they get a new phone starting this fall, those won't apply anymore.

1:00:30They're going to need new chargers. They're going to need new things. They're going to need new cables. So, of course, all the companies that make those are just ready with new products. And beyond that, there's also this new standard Qi 2 to replace the wireless Qi standard that, assuming Apple supports it, could allow outside makers' chargers to charge iPhones at up to 15 watts, you know, just by touching it. Which would be like twice what it has been before, right? Yeah, it was 7.5. If you weren't a MagSafe charger, it was half the rate. So, and, you know, these things, they throttle kind of as it goes to the charging.

1:01:02So like, it's not just going to be twice as fast, but it'll be faster and you'll love it. Anchor and Belkin are two of the companies that have announced Qi2 products. One of the things that I noticed about these announcements is that everyone who's announcing Qi2 products does not have a date for when they'll be released. They don't have a price. They don't really have anything. It's coming later this year, probably maybe early next year for some things, but eventually. And I think we'll probably get a lot more clarity once the iPhone 15 is actually announced. But we've got stuff like battery packs.

1:01:30Anchor, they've got it all branded under their Maggo line. They've got new stands. They've got different chargers, different kind of desktop chargers, all kinds of things. And the same thing for Belkin. And I think that this new Q2 standard is going to be the kind of thing that you will actually replace several of the chargers that you have probably within your reach on your desk right now. I just realized as you were talking that this is kind of about to be the most exciting moment for phone accessories like ever. That there has ever been. Yeah, for the first time, if I'm an accessory maker, I can make something that works with your phone, your laptop, your tablet, your other phone, your partner's phone.

1:02:09Like you can build something that is going to work for everything and is going to last because I think you can reliably assume we're going to be on USB-C at least a few years from now. And so I have a feeling we're about to see like a glut of stuff. and like lord knows anchor alone is going to make 700 different usbc products between now and like september 12th yeah and of course it's not all and if it's usbc you can work with whatever but they they have like a little thing that kind of latches onto the bottom of your iphone with usbc it does they can't show it connecting to an iphone yet but you know what it is um and and that's just kind of where where we are with those products so there's just there's going to be even more and even better, I think, kind of charging stuff.

1:02:53So if you're the kind of person who, when it's one of those Amazon deal days or something, you're like, okay, yeah, I'm going to go get some chargers. It's time. It's going to be your time very soon. Kranz, this must make you so happy. I'm not happy at all because I just bought so much wireless charging stuff like two months ago. I feel so dumb. I'm just like, it was like reading all of the news out of IFA being like, rookie move, Kranz. It's every time when the prices are really good and you're like, okay, I'll get it. It's all on sale i i should i should buy these i got that wireless charger slash battery from anchor that thing is great the little cube yeah that like oh it's beautiful i love that thing i love it and now i'm like well damn it there's another one and i want that one more because it's got like a little screen on it now yeah i'm like so if anybody needs a a generation one charger uh i'm in the market to to sell it at cost i do wonder if there's going to be like a black market for old old chargers and docs going forward.

1:03:51Like all the people who just desperately hold on to their iPhone 8 minis. I'm re-gifting it all to family. Christmas is going to be really crummy for them and great for me. Before we're done with this, I want to make the case for slow wireless chargers. I have the older Pixel stand near my bed. Now see, if you're one of those people who you want to go to sleep and stop using your phone, one way to do that, put the wireless charger out of your reach. So if you have to decide, am I going to put the phone on the stand and let it charge overnight so that it's not empty? The battery isn't empty when I wake up.

1:04:25Or am I going to use the phone and maybe fall asleep with it in my hand, wake up with a phone on zero and I don't have a fast charger to charge it up? That's good. That's stress. It will improve your life. That's smart. Get yourself a slow charger. No, disagree. I really like, I think the single most like aspirational thing I have done over the years is try to be a person who charges my phone outside of my bedroom. So many times I have tried to be this person. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to have a stack of like print books and magazines. And that's what I'm going to read before bed. I'm not going to sit here and like scroll Reddit until I fall asleep.

1:04:57And after like three days, inevitably, I'm like, how did my charger get right back into my room and next to my bed? And I'm scrolling Reddit again. Like, I don't remember ever putting it back in here. And yet it has arrived. And I swear I've tried this 25 times in my life. And I think it shows real personal growth that I have stopped trying. Like, I think it says a lot about me as a person. But are you, I mean, you're not a very lazy person. So is he just putting it on the other side of the, because putting it on the charger on the other side of the room, that's enough for me. I'm that lazy that like, once it's on there, I'm not getting out of bed again.

1:05:30For me, it's not getting, it's not even the laziness factor. It's like the, the actual feeling of getting out of bed is so awful. It's the taking off the covers. Like even if my charger was right there, but I had to take off the covers to get it, I wouldn't do it. Sometimes, there was one time where I did that, but I army crawled across the floor with the cover still on a single foot, being like, ugh! I'm not technically out of bed. Yeah, it worked. It was fine. It was fine. It's very good. But yeah, I suspect it's about to be a very, very, very exciting six months in the accessory world. And the other thing I will say is this is just a PSA to everyone now.

1:06:06Don't buy any accessories. Don't buy any accessories the day Apple launches things. don't buy any accessories the day it ships because what's going to happen is between now and christmas there's going to be this unbelievable glut of cool new stuff that comes out and it's going to happen really fast because all these companies are already making usbc stuff so they're not going to have to get used to a completely new connector apple will have some weird tweak to it because it always does but there's going to be just a run of new things that all these companies are ready for and so whatever you buy today or tomorrow or on september 12th or september 20 whatever when the iPhone ships, there will be something in November that is better.

1:06:43And by Black Friday, it will cost$5. So Alex Kranz, stop buying accessories. And like you were talking, I was like, actually, maybe it was good that I just bought all of this stuff because we're not going to be buying. I'm like, I can't. I just bought a new dining room table and four like wireless chargers. I'm broke for the next year. Like, it's great. There you go. There we go. All right. You go next, Kranz. What did you look up for, Aoife? So there was a lot of smart home stuff, a ton of stuff. That's why my Jen was there and she was doing incredible work. A lot of stuff coming out from Phillips Hue, who historically just does lights.

1:07:17And if you, like me, are tired of spending so much money on Hue lights, there's a lot of competitors in the space now. There's a ton of other really good lights. I've got some like little candelabra lights. They're beautiful. They do like the pride flag. It doesn't actually look like the pride flag. But in July or in June, I was like, yeah, cool. Is Hue still the best one, though? I confess I'm slightly behind the times on my own personal smart home gear, but my read was always, Hue is the best. It's also twice the price of everything else. Yeah, it's like the Apple deal for a long time where you're like, well, sure, I'm paying twice the price, but I can smugly say it works.

1:07:55Can you say that, Richard? Fair. In your Windows machine? That hurt. Can I say that about my Mac lately? No. But yeah, so it typically just works, but it costs a ton more. But there's so much stuff out now in the space that really does also just work. Like I was using adding stuff both to Home Assistant and to HomeKit, zero issue, like totally flawless. Even the stuff that some people complain about, like Nanoleaf, can sometimes be a little buggy. Works. And so Hue has a whole bunch of stuff. They've got track lighting now, which is big. That's exciting because oftentimes track lighting, you can't replace.

1:08:42There's no little bulbs to go in there and replace that you probably would make if they could. So you have to get the whole thing. So that's cool. And they got into security cameras, which is a big deal for them. They've just been a company that does lights. And now they're doing security cameras, predictably expensive security cameras. Yeah. It's very telling to me that that's where they went, actually. that like I think it's pretty obvious that if you're a company that wants to do smart home stuff, lights is the place to start, right? It is kind of the it's like the gateway drug to the smart home for basically everybody.

1:09:14And it's very interesting to me that after all this time, the Hue team looked around and was like, OK, what's the next thing we want to do? And decided it was security cameras, not like other sensors or weird things for your garage door or things for your car. It's just they're just like security cameras. Yeah. And these are very expensive. It's got end-to-end encryption. It currently does not work out of the box or won't work out of the box with Alexa and Google Assistant's home security camera integrations. So you won't be able to just like play it on your little Google speaker anywhere. That kind of sucks.

1:09:50It won't work with HomeKit until Matter starts supporting video for security cameras, because that's the only way it's going to work with HomeKit. It won't work with HomeKit's secure video platform, which isn't actually very good to begin with. So that's not the worst one. That one, you're like, oh, that kind of sucks, but also I'm fine with that. Or at least I am. But it will work with Matter. and the most exciting part of all the Phillips Hue news is it finally is going to start supporting Matter. It's pushing out an update next month. I am unreasonably excited. I've been spending this whole week being like, I cannot DM Jen because she's very busy working and all I want to do is be like, Jen, Jen, Jen, Jen, Jen, this is such a good moment.

1:10:36So I'm like being very patient and waiting until she comes back and gets over her hangover and is having a good time. And then I'm going to just assail her with it. But that's exciting. Like, it's been ages since they promised matter. And the stuff I use that where matter works is wonderful. I'm in the future. I'm having the best day of my life. I've set up my entire system. Oh, it doesn't work with matter. I hate everything and everyone. And I want it all to die, especially my robot vacuum cleaner. which there were also a bunch of at ifa i just love that robot vacuums are becoming like an outrageously competitive space there are so many good robot vacuums out there now i love it this was the first one i'd ever like i tried one 10 years ago and it was garbage and i was like i'm okay i can just walk around with a vacuum cleaner like a normal person and back this summer somebody was like oh go get a robot vacuum cleaner they're really good now and this was a person that I trust.

1:11:33And so I was like, you generally aren't stupid. And I went and I got one on sale and I was like, oh, it's really good now. Like my house is just clean. That's with a dog. That's not common. So they're good now. And now there's a, the robot lawnmower industry is booming. I think Jen and John saw one of those. It's starting to boom. Yeah. There was, she, she was, she saw a robot lawnmower. The problem with robot lawnmowers is they generally have really crappy range. And American lawns tend to be pretty big. There's a lot of space. There's a lot of stuff going on in them. And these weren't doing it very well.

1:12:13They're really meant for those little tiny postage stamp size lawns in Europe. And so this can do half an acre, which I would have loved at the age of 13 when I had to hop on the riding lawnmower and mow the front in the backyard and in the garden. It was the worst time of my life. My family still talks about how much I complained about it. This would have been amazing. I would have been campaigning for it immediately. So I'm so excited. All you kids out there listening, I know there's a lot of 13-year-olds that listen to The Vergecast, and I know you're very excited about this. Start campaigning now.

1:12:45This is a great Christmas gift for you. Probably not. Your parents will not buy it because it's like$2 ,000, but aspirational, aspirational. Yeah. Everybody talks about how kids are not going to grow up and learn how to drive, and they're going to miss a key part of life. And And I just feel like if your parents never force you to mow the lawn, you've missed something. Yeah, you really have. It's like 111 degrees. It's called highs. And you have a push mower that barely works. And they're like, shut up. We're going to pay you$1. Go mow for five hours, David. And then rake all the leaves. It's fine.

1:13:17My childhood is fine. I hated the leaves. It's fine. It's the worst. The leaves. Look, man, spending 45 minutes trying to get that thing to start is character building. That's exactly right. You feel like you're a mechanic afterwards. where it's like when somebody's car breaks down, you're like, hold up. I've jump started a lawnmower. I think I can help. You can't. It doesn't work that way. Is there a thing I can pull on really hard and hope that starts it? All right. The last thing from Eva, which I should just run through real fast, was there were a few headphone and speaker announcements, but a couple were actually very cool.

1:13:50So I just want to basically call out two. One is new Jabra headphones. They're called the Elite 10s and the Elite 8s. they're basically new wireless earbuds i think jabra in general does not get the shine it deserves in the headphone space everybody talks about airpods and pixel buds and galaxy buds and kind of all the stuff that's like bundled with devices jabra does a really good job of making just like very good headphones that work with everything it supports like all of the open standards it can it has really good noise cancellation the mics tend to be pretty good the battery life is pretty good the audio is good yeah like they're very good headphones but they're big they sit like Like if you have tiny ear canals.

1:14:28That's why I don't use them. My ear canals are too small. So that's actually one of the things that I think is exciting about these new ones. The Elite 10s, which are the higher end one, I think they're$250. They have a semi-open design, which in theory should help with that feeling of being sort of smushed in your ear. Personally, I end up using very few of those kind of closed ear headphones because I get the same thing. My ear canals start to hurt after a while if I listen to those. Like I got the Sony link buds and they caught, they like cause pain or they fall out. I love that pain that like, you're like, Oh, it fits so good.

1:15:05Agony, agony, agony. But this Taylor sounds lovely. Oh, it sounds amazing. Yeah. But I like after 30 minutes, I'm like, Oh, I'm going to lose both of my ears. Like this is cool. And they feel like they're bleeding. Yeah. But so the elite tens seem cool. Sound great. They have six mics. I think, uh, the, the audio quality should be good. They're supposedly one of the best they've, that job has ever made. And then there's the Elite 8, I think it's technically called the Elite 8 Active, that are IP68 rated, which is like more or less everything you would need as a person. Yeah, you can get disgusting.

1:15:37Yeah, exactly. It's like you can throw it in the wash and they'll come out fine. And they're just super, super rugged. And personally, like I lost a pair of AirPods because I got caught in a rainstorm. I lost another pair of AirPods because I dropped one of them in a puddle and then put it back in the charger and it ruined everything. which if you're wondering yes it was stupid but this is the life i lead you had to charge it yeah and so just i like blew on it a bunch of times and then put it back in the case and then about 45 minutes later was like that was the dumbest thing i could have possibly done but now here we are but so the idea of like a super ruggedized pair of pretty good headphones uh i actually sound very exciting but they both do wireless charging they both do multi-point bluetooth they both do the mono mode so you can just wear one earbud at a time they just like have all the features and i think like in general if you're shopping for wireless headphones most people don't think of jabra uh and you should but the other thing which i think is much more exciting is this new jbl uh i think it's called the authentix speaker they look nice they do right the 200 the 300 and the 400 they're all stupid expensive they're like anywhere from 330 to 700 dollars for a bluetooth speaker which is preposterous can't put a price on fashion but not only are they great looking they are they have this like cool sort of fabric retro thing going on but they also have alexa and google assistant in one device and it can hear both wake words at the same time you don't have to do the sonos thing where in setup you pick which one you want to use you can use both and you can tell it with one to start the music and with the other to stop the music and they found some ways in which that gets weird like if you start a timer with alexa and then you try to use google to stop the timer that doesn't quite work but it worked if the timer was going off but if you like started a timer and then you're like oh no i didn't want to do that timer and try to tell it to stop yeah john like i guess he got he got to play with one and apparently just had a whole list of ways he was going to screw with this thing i love it and just went through his whole list he chronicled it all in his piece and i was just like yeah just like chanting as i read it it was great yeah his piece is really great and he uh also he asked google like should I take this as the beginning of a trend?

1:17:47Is this going to actually be the sort of interoperable voice assistant world we've been wanting to live in? And the Google representative was sort of sketchy about it. And so who knows? And then ran away fleeing. Yeah, I mean, basically, but the at least this proves that like this is a thing that can be done. And here's hoping that it's not just on this one set of expensive JBL speakers. Do you think Sonos is going to do it at some point, like a good version. I think at this point, Sonos and Google are at such odds that I would be surprised if Google was interested in playing along with Sonos.

1:18:20They would rather just get rid of it entirely if it would piss off. But like, could the next UE Boom that I buy, because I'm inevitably going to buy 500 more of those in my life, could that have both? That would be awesome. Like the speaker world is big and wide. And imagine if you could have them with the Dolby stuff that worked all over your house and you could talk to each individual one with whatever voice assistant you wanted. Like, how is that not the world we live in? This is the world we should live in. That's the future. That's what I want. That's the interoperable future I want. Yeah.

1:18:52I just want to yell whatever I want at my speakers and they have to listen. I do not want to do that. I don't want to talk to my speakers ever about anything, but I do love these. They look incredible. Like if you remember how speakers looked, those old seventies and eighties speakers, you do have to look at these. Finally, someone's bringing that back i don't know why they didn't before but they are now and i like it yeah it's based on the l100s right from the 70s yeah after like two decades of trying to make speakers look like spaceships now we're back to making them look like speakers and it makes me very happy like these yeah these look great the one has a handle on it which is basically just to remind you like yes you can pick this thing up it's allowed they have they have actual knobs for all of the different levels it's just wonderful like what a world yeah i'm not saying that you should do cocaine off of these speakers, but like if you wanted to.

1:19:41If you wanted to. Yeah, they've got some good, there's some good flat spaces there for a nice line. We don't endorse cocaine on the Vergecast. All right, well, now that we've gone well and fully off the rails, it is time to end the Vergecast. Just in case this is the last episode you ever listened to, this is what I want to leave you with. It's snowing somewhere. All right. A lot of good stuff on the site this week. We had the most recent piece in our big series investigating the effect of Google in the world. Ryan Broderick wrote a really great piece called The End of the Googleverse. Really interesting.

1:20:15It's full of old internet heads reminiscing on the weird things people used to do with Google in the early 2000s. It's really fun. Our video team and our producer, Andrew Marino, made an amazing video with one of those heads that does binaural audio and noise-canceling headphones to really test how good noise-canceling is. It's a wild video with like lots of graphs that I didn't understand and tons of interesting people. And Andrew sweating to death on a summer in New York City. It's a really great video. Andrew also did another piece on the button of the month about a USB button that helped people win Jeopardy.

1:20:53It's delightful. And I want one just to like mute and unmute my microphone now. I have no use for it, but I want it. I want one real bad. The latest Land of the Giants episode is out. It's about Tesla in China. It's very good. That whole season has been really great. Like Land of the Giants is always really great, but I actually think this might be my favorite season we've ever done. It's really good. Everybody should go listen to it. We are going to be off next Wednesday because it's Labor Day, but then we're going to be back next Friday. We're going to have more Apple to talk about. Like I said, there is just a massive tidal wave of gadgets and tech news coming in the next three months.

1:21:25So we're going to be doing a ton. It's going to be a lot of fun. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

1:21:36And that's a wrap for VergeCast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. The VergeCast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our Senior Audio Director, Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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