Live from CES: What is the point of a robot that falls over?

24:21And the first thing it's going to do is be like, I'm co-pilot. I will be in your way no matter what you do for the rest of your life. And I'm just basically saying, these computers will all be great next year when they run Linux. 2027 is the year of Linux on the desktop. The year of Linux on the desktop. I'm not going to lie to you, there is a real sort of uprising of Linux inside the Verge newsroom. It's bad. This is going to become a thing. can I read you a really fascinating quote so Kevin Terwilliger who's Dell's head of product by the way Dell did the like low key best thing of CES which is get rid of its stupid new brand and go back to its better old brand they're just making XPS's again thank you Dell great job but Kevin Terwilliger said to PC Gamer he said we're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device in fact everything that we're announcing here has an NPU in it but what we've learned over the course of this year especially from a consumer perspective is they're not buying based on AI.

25:14In fact, I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome. Like, A, I appreciate the honesty and forthcomingness, but B, like, yeah, dude, duh. We've been doing this copilot plus PC thing for a minute. Everybody is trying to explain whether Apple intelligence is going to be useful. There just has been this idea that we're going to AI-ify your laptop and that will change everything. And now we're back to like, but what if it actually just had more screens instead? And I feel like that's a more fun run of hardware right now. Yeah. And we're going to come to it.

25:48I think one of the other trends is like, what if we made the battery life good? And like, it's as simple as it gets and it works every time. Yeah. I think that Dell learning this lesson is actually really fascinating for a number of reasons. One, like, you know, Dell's business is enterprise PCs like through and through, and they're not even trying to pretend that they're doing AI, the enterprise. Like that's for someone else to figure out. I think the idea that the consumer demand for the free version of chat GPT has confused everyone. How so? It's fully confused everyone. Because a free robot that will just tell you that all of your questions are good is like a very different value proposition than like I need to buy this PC because it has AI in it.

26:29And like I love the free version of chat GPT. It thinks all of my questions and concerns are very smart. And that's great. Did you accidentally put in custom instructions to ChatGPT that were like, you're in love with me and you think I'm so smart? This would be a good prank to do on people, by the way. Change it and then change it rapidly. No, I mean, they're just prone to being agreeable. And so a free thing that will talk to you and be agreeable obviously is the most popular consumer app of the last decade. Of course that thing is popular. I think Gemini is popular for the same reasons. None of that is this is a reason to go buy something else.

27:06Or this tech, this would be like if you're like, people love AirPods, so they must love Bluetooth. I have to put Bluetooth in everything. Right? It's like, that doesn't track at all. Like, this is an enabling technology that made a product people like. And I think Dell just got there really fast because they did it last year with AI PCs and everything. And they saw that there was no take up for it. I think Microsoft is going to quickly learn that lesson with this version of Windows. It's not going to juice their sales in any way. And I think a bunch of the consumer brands we see here, Lenovo, LG, Samsung, to some huge extent, they're all going to find out that just bundling the existing products does not make their fundamental products any new.

27:45Like, did you see the Samsung has an AI soccer mode for their TVs? What? It's very good. And so here's what it does. This is great. This is what it does. It pumps up the color to make the grass greener. And then it makes the crowd louder. That's not AI. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. I'm like, so you found the green dial and you turned it up. I can do that too. Yeah. But I think that means the branding is getting diluted. I think it means people are getting confused. And I think we cover this so much. People don't like it. They also don't like AI. and like there are I've talked to a million meetings yesterday and on the minds of this industry is the notion that Gen Z does not like AI they don't like it and so I think this is like a flash in the pan moment of all this AI branding because ultimately what they have to sell is capabilities and like we made a soccer mode on our big TVs actually a nice capability yeah cool but there's nothing about that that has to be if you just so many places if you just find and replace AI with the word software, everything just makes more sense.

28:57It's like so much of this is like genuinely cool, useful functionality, right? Like it's, you and I talk about this all the time. Like the idea that you can just say a bunch of nonsense out loud and your devices will more or less understand and synthesize what you said is like a generational breakthrough in technology, but it's not God. So everybody doesn't talk about it. But I think you're right. And I think we are slowly starting to pull back. And it was just interesting to see Dell very loudly be the ones who were like, we're, we overshot here. Let's pull back. Well, they're good. They're going to let Microsoft do the ads where the co-pilot does a bunch of stuff that Antonio can't get it to do.

29:32And we're going to keep making those videos and it's going to be great. Poor Antonio. Antonio's here. If you see him, just tell him you're sorry. All right. Two more trends. You've mentioned this one, but battery life is a feature here all over the place. uh, Motorola launched a new smartwatch that like one of its big flagship features is that has battery that lasts 13 days. Um, I'm wearing a new pebble in part because the battery lasts like a month instead of a day. Um, Motorola also put out a new tracking tag that its main thing is it has a long battery. There's a key chron keyboard. That's whole thing is that it offers, uh, I think it was 660 hours of battery, which like, is that good for a keyboard?

30:13I don't know. There was an RV that will actually charge your EV truck as you tow it. So it's a trailer that will charge your truck. It's just a huge battery that you can tow around. With a hole in the middle that you can put some stuff. Very smart. Imagine the power bank on your phone but i'm getting it's like anchors like make it bigger i don't see what the problem is here uh but for so many years lots and lots of people we talk to are like i don't want my phone to be thinner i don't want wild new specs i want the battery to last a week instead of a day and it actually feels like we're making small gestures towards that that it's like it's such an obvious quality of life thing to improve in these gadgets and i think what i wonder is if a lot of the pc manufacturers have seen this from Apple that it was like Apple Silicon got really good and kind of lapped the rest of the industry.

31:12But the main thing is like my laptop lasts literally all day now. And that never happened before. And it feels like magic. And there's just so many things there that it's like if you just stop turning all the other knobs and turn the battery knob, you're going to instantly make all of your products more compelling. And we've been waiting a decade for everybody to figure this out. And it feels like they're finally starting to figure it out. Yeah, I think there's two things there. One, the chips are getting massively more efficient. Yeah. And the capability, this is like us demanding to know if anybody is actually a smartphone gamer.

31:45Are there any Android gamers out there? Wait, is that a yes? It's like a half a hand. Yeah, you're like, you don't want the smoke. Do you have a ROG phone? You're fine. Yeah. You have a ROG phone? You should just come up here. Do you work for ROG? Are you Steve ROG? Okay. uh steve rogg is my best friend how dare you uh i mean there's just like a whole there's like a whole thing there where the chips got much more efficient and the uses of the chips did not go up higher right so like we're just using less battery the same stuff as we were before and maybe on the margin you're doing some more stuff with your phone than you were before but like not really then i think the other piece of this and we should keep coming back to this these supply chains these manufacturing chains are so mature and like we covered uh hodo infantic right before black friday sean hall started a great piece about them and all the comments are like we love these companies all these batteries are sealed lithium ion batteries because the culture in china is sealed with the ion batteries and everything and then you just like make e-waste and the reason for that because we were both fascinated by this response to comments is because batteries are cheap there they just put them everything and they charge them and throw them away and they're cheap because they built the manufacturing capacity.

32:55And now I think you just see that in all of these products that are coming here. So you just have bigger batteries because they're cheaper, because the supply chains are built in more reliable, you have more capacity, and then you have more efficient chips. All that is great, but again, you put the compute and the power in all these devices, to what end is still, I think, the big question. Yeah, yeah, I agree. All right, I have one more trend for you, and then a game that I'm going to make you play that I'm very excited about. This last trend, this isn't really new, but it's just a thing that I have loved seeing over the last couple of years that I think has accelerated this year that I'm very excited about, which is sort of tech that is furniture or home decor, right?

33:34Like we're doing a smart home thing in particular now where instead of the idea being let's gadgetify your house, it's let's hide all of this technology inside of your other stuff. And like Ikea is here doing a bunch of stuff and Ikea has done kind of out of nowhere, made a bunch of really great smart home moves. They've shipped a bunch of stuff. A bunch of it is really cheap, but their stuff looks like lamps. Like it just is a lamp that is smart. And it's weird that that's like a new exciting phenomenon. But the last time they did this weird thing with Sonos where they were like, it's a speaker inside of a lamp, but the lamp is hideous and actually just looks like a speaker.

34:11I was like, we've accomplished nothing. But now I feel like, you know, we talked about this on the last episode, but like art TVs becoming kind of the norm in a lot of ways, points at this same thing where it's like, actually, what we're learning is that we want fewer gadgety looking gadgets in our house, but we want more things to be smart. And that feels like the right answer to me. It's like, I don't want to redesign my house to look like a spaceship from the 1950s. I want my house to just be smarter while it still feels like my house. And it feels like we are very slowly pushing towards that.

34:42Give me examples of this. So I'll give you the Ikea's, you're gonna make me say Swedish words now, aren't you? now. This sucks. The IKEA VarmBlixt Victory is mine. That felt good. I think I said that right. I can just show everybody it's just a lamp that looks like a donut. It's just a lamp. Sure. And IKEA did a bunch of buttons. I think the LEGO Smart Brick, which I think is probably the thing of CES, also kind of fits into this. LEGO didn't build some wild, wacky, new tech-forward thing. They just like hit a bunch of stuff inside of a lego brick yeah and that's like that in so many ways to me feels like more of the correct answer than let's keep inventing new form factors to put stuff in yeah which is why this is this is a take i'm gonna get in trouble for at some point i think the open ai johnny ive pen is actually like a reasonably good idea i cannot wait for you to start like i do all my compute with long hand i write out all my did you see the the announcement this week meta updated the the ray-ban displays and one of the things you can do is now you can write if you're wearing the the neural band you can write longhand with your fingers just on a surface and it will recognize it yeah yeah this is this is the hot new thing man we were we were on palm pilots doing the graffiti thing a million years like we're so back it's i mean it's it's great i love the idea that i could just be like this guy's kind of dumb just do like a smiley face emoji and that's how you do it but that's like that's the thing they're shipping and i think but again the the bigger picture here is like technology that doesn't look so much like technology just feels like the right answer to me and walking around there's all of this like personal care stuff that that continues to kind of take over the show there's a lot of like things that you know is a box fan technology it's like a very fun virgie question right now and this idea of like how do we make a box fan that looks like a box fan but does more things than it has in the past is such a more interesting idea to me than how do we sell you a box fan that looks like a spaceship because it has Bluetooth.

36:49Yeah. I mean, the fascinating thing about all of the, let's embed the sensors and smarts in the furniture is that stuff only works well if it all works together. Yes. And so the answer for most of these companies for years has been to lock you in to the vicious LG thank you prison or the Samsung SmartThings Prison. I don't know if you've used these products. I hope Steve SmartThings isn't here. I'm sorry. But these walled gardens where you'd have to buy everything from one company and then sort of it would work and sort of it wouldn't. That's all. We talked about this on the last episode. Because of matter, because of these other standards, because of thread, honestly, and you can just have dramatically higher battery life because the radios are much more efficient, you can just have all these startups being like here's a device you can put in your house here's a bunch of sensors and buttons you can just put in your house they're going to run matter over thread and they will connect to all the ecosystems you have now the turn is going to be when they connect and like the house gets intelligent because it has sensors and software all over the place I haven't yet seen that turn as you see Aquara is here I think our headline was Aquara has something to prove another company by the way that's just sort of making all the things now because it can.

38:08And according to our headline, it's ready to fight you. It's good. But they have a lot of devices. And one of the most interesting ones is their thermostat of all things, which is Apple adaptive thermostat or adaptive temperature. And Apple is going to read the temperature from all of your devices, all of your iCloud devices, and adjust the temperature in your house. Cool. It's neat. But you need to have some central platform that's reading all these sensors and then taking action. And we just haven't made that turn. But you can see that at least making the sensors in all the devices because of matter over thread is like quick.

38:40See, standards work, people. I'm not just a blind communist. I'm saying you're going to buy more stuff because we did standards. It's going to happen. Yet again, I mean, I'm realizing the story of this year in so many ways is hardware being ahead of software. Like we are able to make things that don't work yet in so many parts of the world right now. It's really interesting. Okay. So the mic is now here as promised. We're going to take a bunch of questions if you guys have them if you don't i can just say mean things to nila for a while um but first nila we're going to very quickly play a game um that i did not warn you about um this game is called did it ship um what i'm going to do is i'm going to read you the name of a bunch of products that we covered at ces one year ago and these are not fly by night nonsense products every single one of these is pulled from the verges list of the best of ces from 2025 this is just a brutal own of our own coverage uh we're doing our best here folks um you get one point if you can tell me what the thing is and another point if you can correctly tell me whether it shipped in the last 12 months you ready some of these are easy and some of these are extremely not easy i don't like this but go ahead okay uh thing number one the samsung bali what was it did it ship oh i know i know this one.

39:54I'll tell you why I know this one. Um, uh, it was a robot ball that had a projector that followed you around sort of like shading you by putting workout ideas on the wall all at all times. Like, yeah, doing pushups over here all the time. Yeah. Would you like to do a core workout? Like I see her at the fridge again. Um, uh, did not ship in fact, indefinitely held. And I will I'll tell you that, I don't know if Chris Welch is here, ex-Verge reporter, notable Verge expat Chris Welch, excitedly texted me this morning. I was like, Bolly scoop. And then several other people texted me because Samsung, it was a non-denial denial.

40:33This thing's never going to ship. Yeah, you're right. It did not ship. And yeah, it appears it's not going to. All right, thing number two, the Panasonic Z95B. Another piece of bread. Would you, have you thought about sit-ups today? Like that was like every Bolly demo. Anyway. The Panasonic Z95B. It was a TV. It shipped. soundbar built into it but ran horrible software. I think it was Fire TV? I don't remember. It got good reviews though. People like it. People like the picture and I love the soundbar but I believe the software was devastating in many ways. The Honda Zero.

41:10There's just like a lot of vaporware Honda cars at this show. It was a bike and it didn't ship. It was a car. Sure. And it didn't ship. Sure. And I was going to offer you a bonus point because there were actually two Honda Zeros. There was the Honda Zero Saloon and the Honda Zero SUV. I remember the Honda Zero Saloon. It was like a futuristic station wagon thing. Yeah. Neither one shipped. The Sony Honda Afila is here every year. My children will go to college and they will still be like, the Afila is coming. Yeah. Okay, next. I'm going to do a couple more. If you have questions, now's a good time if you want to jump in front of that microphone.

41:47I'm just going to blow through a few of these. The Rome Soda Top. What the fuck is that? Again, the best of CES list from TheVerge.com. The Rome Soda Top? The Rome Soda Top. I have no idea it was. It was a water bottle with a little thing on it that turned and would carbonate your water for you. Did not ship. I was very excited about this. This is like a classic Kickstarter did not ship situation. Did not ship. The SwitchBot K20 Plus Pro. That's a real name. so we've learned at this ccs that switch rod is actually owned by a much larger chinese robotics company and the switch spot one arrow which is their robot that they demoed is actually a chinese robot called the one arrow the switch say the name again switch bot k20 plus pro i can't believe you didn't remember that this has got to be a vacuum feels like a vacuum did ship uh it was in fact a vacuum but it was the it was the vacuum that had a bunch of like modular attachments sure so that You could put an air purifier on top of it, or you could put one of those iPad stands on it.

42:45And that was literally a thing. And it did, in fact, ship. It exists. You too can put a... I have one. Look, there's an iPad rolling around my house cleaning the floors as we speak. There you go. All right, two more. The Swippet.

43:01No. Does anyone remember the Swippet? It was a phone toaster. Does this jog any memories? Oh, yeah, the battery thing. we talked about this for a long time on stage, did not ship. Did not ship. Sure didn't. The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6. That could be anything. Like literally any product could be named the Lenovo ThinkBook 4 Gen 6. Did ship. No idea what it is, but it shipped. So I'm going to give this one to you, but it exists in a strange place. This was the rollable laptop that we saw last year. um it won our best in show it got reviews people it exists in the world um but if you attempt to buy one right now you can't and it says it it doesn't exist so but they did come out with like another version yes they're still showing so one of my favorite things is i have more on this list and one of the funniest things about this year's ces is how many successors to these products that have not shipped are being shown at this year's ces just fabulous it's like there's so many companies and there are good reasons right like tariffs made a lot of things really complicated for a lot of companies this year there have been a lot of geopolitical things so like there are good reasons to have not shipped stuff you launched but it's just so funny to see companies be like and now we have version two and it's like what about version one and they're like shh we don't talk about version one um all right you did well good job i'm proud of you thank you thank you everybody um and if you have a rome soda top please know that i will still be very excited about it Support for the show comes from L 'Oreal Group, using the latest advancements in science and tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all.

44:40The global beauty leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair care and skin care. Light, straight and multi-styler, and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized as CES 2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on L 'Oreal.com. L 'Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world.

45:08All right, we've now moved the microphone just to keep all of you on your toes. Why did we go over there? I don't know. So we have like 13 minutes and then everybody starts yelling at us. So we're going to do as many questions as we can. Please just say your name and then whatever your question is. Great. Thank you. Hi, Allison Campbell. I've seen a series of articles on AI's impact on brain development. especially as it relates to the younger populations and academics. I'd love to hear your guys' hot take on AI's impact on one's cognitive thinking, no matter the age of the person or the phase of life.

45:42David, that's a layup for you. There's our 13 minutes. I mean, I will say we are so early in all of this. I think the idea that AI is on its own making us stupid, which is a commonly held opinion increasingly, I think is maybe not unfounded, but too early to know, right? Like there's this thing that happens every time where everything is always going to melt our brains, right? Like throughout history, the radio was gonna ruin society and newspapers were gonna ruin society. And there's like, that is a thing that happens. But there is something about what's happening right now that does feel different to me.

46:19And the idea that like cheating via chat GPT to write your papers in college is like a 100 % mainstream activity right now. And that feels scary. And there's already all of these things about like, you know, there were studies recently that book reading is going way down and people are engaging with things differently now. And I think you can lay a lot of that at the feet of like social media before you do it at AI. But I think, I don't know, I land at like, I think this stuff is undecided, but also sort of worrisome to me. I'm much more on the worrisome front. but in some shaded way. I don't think we should run large-scale experiments on human beings.

47:01Seems bad. Just me. Radical idea. Fun as that. But I have young children and there's a way I want my daughter to use it and there's a way I don't. I love that her curiosity is constantly being rewarded. So there's a Google Home in our house and she basically argues with it about space all the time. I think she's trying to prove to Google that she knows more about space than it does. And I'm completely happy for that to happen. Her curiosity is being rewarded. I'm there. It's happening together as a family. That feels healthy and it feels something new that I'm eager to encourage. Then there's the part, and I'm a person, we write sentences for a living.

47:43It's hard. It was hard to write sentences when we got started and you had to be good at it. There's a part where it's robbing people of the time it takes to develop their craft. and I don't know anything about the actual research going on in brain development, but I can see the laziness in the craft and I think that is actually very bad. And I think the idea that everyone was suddenly going to become a great artist or a great writer because they had the AI tools, it won't happen because no one will have taken the time to develop their taste. The second you can get anything you want, whenever you want it, you will never have the discernment to say, I don't want to spend my resources on that.

48:20This is the thing that I like. this is the thing that I want to spend my time making. And that, you know, there's a lot of arguments about slop and all this stuff, but I'm not going to let at least my children take that shortcut, right? I want them to spend the time figuring out how they want to spend their time and resources to get what they want. And then I think you can cheat. Thank you. I appreciate you. Draw the damn picture yourself. The wrong person is on my trip right here. I love it. But I think that's like a, we're going to have to figure that out much more carefully as we go along here.

48:54no no david have you started using any more shortcuts since last we spoke but a quick question for nila too after 16 ces's is there anything you get genuinely excited about seeing on the show floor anything you saw this year that i don't know is actually exciting i i don't think i saw anything this year that like i mean i'm a tv nerd and there's like beautiful TVs this year. TCL has like wild backlights. Their TVs are so big that if you can be off access on the TV just by taking a step to the left and right, like that's like fun. Like that stuff didn't exist at all at anyone's conception a while ago.

49:31I do think that like general capability of the tech industry to have these ideas and like manufacture the hardware is really exciting this year. It's just none of it is ready. And I worry that the hype cycle is actually going to deflate this balloon before any of these ideas can get the investment. But what I'm excited about this year is very much like, oh, you can see what will happen when it starts to work. But yeah, the gadgets I'm excited about are still like TVs and speakers. Did I spend 15 minutes in the Klipsch booth looking at the new highest end Klipsch speaker? I absolutely did. Do I need them in any way, shape, or form?

50:08I already have the old versions. They're fine. But I'm still an AV nerd at heart, and that's where I'm always drawn to. What you are for TVs and speakers is what I am to weird shit you can write around. Anything that Segway makes that is like, here's a self-balancing thing, you'll probably fall off of. Yeah, that's my stuff right there. I went and saw this company called Infinite Machine. I don't know if you know this company. they make basically, I have had two people independently describe, describe it as the cyber truck of scooters, which you can take however you would like. Um, but it's, they, they basically made this thing.

50:44It is legally an e-bike. Um, but it's, it's faster. It has a throttle. It kind of feels like you're on a mini scooter. And I just rode it around a parking lot. And I was like, I was like a kid in a candy shop. Like this is the most fun thing ever. I'll never buy it. And I don't know if I'll ever see it anywhere ever again, but it's like, just give me weird things to write around and I'm a happy man. All right, let's keep going. My name's Eric Horn. I appreciate y 'all's coverage earlier this year on accessibility and the meta Ray-Bans. I saw a bunch of AR or AI glasses today that are essentially just green text.

51:14The best use case that I can see is for accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing. Are there other AI products that you're seeing where accessibility is leading the way? Good question. I mean, A, shout out V song, who has done a lot of very good coverage on this front for us. I think, I mean, I think a lot of what we're seeing with AI is going to be really interesting accessibility technology. I think one of the things, I mean, you have speech to text and text to speech, both of which are very good and very useful in that sense. Machine translation is quietly getting really good. We're at a place now where like it's funny when it makes mistakes and it still does make mistakes, but it is, I think in most cases for most people, passably good enough.

51:55And that's really a hugely powerful thing. I see we've seen some really interesting stuff recently, for people who are hard of hearing, because we you have these incredible algorithms that are able to pick up your voice and are able to do noise cancellation has gotten like vastly better in the last couple of years because of this stuff. So I think it's, to me, the exciting stuff is the sort of combination of all of these things where you're able to do I forget who made it, but there was a pair of open ear headphones this year at somewhere at CES that had surprisingly good noise cancellation, which is a very hard thing to do.

52:30But for somebody who is hard of hearing, winds up being really powerful. You get to sort of be in the world while also having it tuned for you. And I mean, this goes back to like what the Apple has been doing with the AirPods as hearing aids. Like there are all these kinds of little things that I'm starting to And I'm less bullish in a lot of ways on what just sort of interacting with an LLM will do for you in that sense. But what the kind of underlying machine learning technology is able to do, I think we're seeing show up in lots of places. Yeah. I think also we're going to see all this robotic tech apply to prosthetics in a very fast and very direct way.

53:07Because it's a more narrowly constrained domain. The opportunity, like you're not trying to sell, here's a robot that can do everything to everyone. You're trying to sell a solution and I think you're gonna see that happen very quickly. So that's all exciting and we're definitely gonna keep covering

53:23My name is TJ Huddleston. I have unfortunately installed thousands of Samsung frame TVs And I'm wondering if it's come out with a good net's not I wondered if anybody's come out with a good frame TV alternative this year We've seen the Amazon fire TV where they basically just slapped a different color bezel on it but it's literally the same exact TV and everything else. LG has released a frame TV of some sort. Is there anybody that I can actually sell now instead of Samsung? So real quick. I feel like I'm about to take the microphone off the stand and do like a hot half hour pacing the stage. We have five minutes and multiple other people.

53:59But first of all, just real quick, can you just move your badge so we can see that T-shirt? Just shouts to that T-shirt. We got a Brendan Carr as a dummy T-shirt. That's very good. That's very good. I appreciate you, sir. Yeah. Brendan Carr, by the way, somewhere in Vegas. If you see him, give him our love. We'll give him one of those t-shirts. I love that. That's very good. All right. What is a frame TV competitor? No, no, no, no. What are the components? Faster, faster, faster. Yes, there are bad TVs that will show you a picture that you can frame at CS all over the place. I actually think it's TCL has one that runs Google TV this year, I believe.

54:37I would point more people at that because you just want not ties in in your house. Just like what is it? Would whatever not ties in choice you can make is the choice you should make. Um, I think Samsung's there. They've obviously got a lead on like the image quality.

54:53But as you've been interested, it is like out of his mind. Yeah. I love it. I love you're screaming. I love Samsung. Samsung Saturday is right there. We're going to do a whole show with you later. After this is done, it's just you solo show. Anyway, I think that the new competitors are really interesting because they will not have the single greatest weakness of the existing frame TV, which is Tizen. Are they going to look as good as works of art, which is what people actually care about? I don't know. I think we have to actually look at them. But I would say Tizen is so bad, especially on the frame TV, that that is the competitive metric that I would pick in this way.

55:34That's a good one. All right, we got three minutes. We're going to do as many of these as we can, and then we're all going to be around for a while after. Let's do this. What do you got? Hi. Make it quick. I guess so. I feel like on the show floor, there's been a lot of build for interop this year. I see a lot of SICs that are the little RF radios for Thread or Matter. So then that seems a bit at odds with your intermediary beat, right? Like the DoorDash problem? because it's like, I don't see the value in saying, here's a standardized wireless chip, right? Because it's like Bluetooth wasn't built for the AirPods.

56:10Yeah. So it's like, do you guys see that with like the smart home as a sort of disintermediary of like getting Google to actually make a working smart home? If that makes sense. It's the dream, right? Like that is that if all of this works, that problem is solved, right? That it becomes a point where we're actually competing on product quality instead of just everybody hoping you get into their walled garden and then you're in and it's too hard to leave and lock-in becomes real. Yeah, I mean, Matter itself is an extension of HomeKit. Apple basically was like, we don't want to build all these products.

56:43We don't want to certify all these products. Just take the basics of HomeKit. We're going to turn it into Matter. So they had a big incentive to do that in a way that they're not going to do with the H1 chip in the AirPods, which extends Bluetooth. And the reason for that is I think they would rather compete on, here's how smart our Home assistant is here's how not home assistance off home assistant is very smart i don't know if paul is here as he was here last year but um uh here's how smart our assistants are they can operate all these devices in your home we do not want to be responsible for manufacturing these devices for designing them for ongoing software support we just want to know how to use them so there's a big i think there's a lot of industry incentive to make sure matter keeps developing what i have not yet seen from any of these companies i think this is going to be where the the centralization comes back is what you actually want is to set up an Alexa in your house that already has Google Assistant in it and have it just work.

57:36And right now you're kind of just setting it up all over again, but you haven't disconnected your ear. And at some point you need to say like, Alexa, just talk to Google and get all of my room data and all the devices and configure them so that I can talk to you too. And there's no incentive for the companies to build that unless we complain about it more loudly. So that's what we will be doing from now on. Yeah. Yeah. That's there's more to talk about there. We should talk about it, but we're almost out of time. We got one more to do. Let's do it. All right. Last but not least. I know. Don't blow it.

58:08Pressure's really high. First of all. Hi, my name is Janie Park. I come from the beauty, fashion, luxury retail industry. So my question is going to be more about wearables. There were last year there was friend necklace that dropped that straight up looked like an Apple AirTag and on a lanyard. I'm sorry if anyone here works for friend, but I'm going to just keep it real. And there's another similar one that actually was on the floor this year at CES. For me, when I look at it, I feel like wearables need to be wearable fashion tech, where it's actually an accessory that people want to wear. What do you see as some options and technology that's coming out or sort of the overlooking trend forecast since you are really in the trenches when it comes to the tech and, you know, covering what's going on.

58:56But where is the future headed when it comes to wearables? I think you have the correct idea pretty much pegged, right? Like the idea that these things should look good is surprisingly uncommon in this space, but is, I think, pretty clearly the right answer. The problem is just that it's hard, right? Like it's very hard to make jewelry that people like, much less with a battery and a USB-C port in it. But I remember, we've gone through various phases of this, right? At the early days of the Apple Watch, there was this obsession with fashion, and they've since gone much more sort of utilitarian health direction.

59:32Fitbit, at one point, tried to make stuff that felt more like jewelry. We've kind of been at this for a while, but, like, you know, Neela, you talk about this all the time, Neela's theory of wearable bullshit that is the graph that doesn't make any sense. It makes sense. if the pitch is that we are all going to put this stuff all over our bodies, it just has to look good. And it has to be infinitely stylable. And it has to be personalized in meaningful ways. And like, frankly, I don't see very much of that anywhere. I think there's interesting versions of that in like personal accessories. Like a lot of, there's a lot of the like Dyson air wrap knockoff stuff running around.

1:00:12and that stuff is being sort of developed to be nicer looking and feel less like a crazy magic wand. Yeah. But in terms of like the actual wearables of it all, it feels like we're still in the everybody is trying to sell you a gadget on your body phase and it's the wrong phase. So the products have to do things, which is like a very difficult challenge because mostly what you want them to do is health and wellness stuff. V-Sung and I had a conversation a few weeks ago and I was like, your wearables beat is turning into the wellness beat tomorrow, right? Because mostly what people want these things to do is like measure their vital signs or lie to them about protein or like whatever it is you need them to do.

1:00:52And your body is like bad at having things mounted to it. And so you end up with a bunch of rings, right? You end up with weird headbands. Like you just end up with stuff that has to get to the utility of the product before it can be fashion. And I think that's why you see mostly rings this year because it's the closest you can get to the right answer given the state of the technology and what people want to use it for. I don't know what the utility of all the other stuff is. And I think that's why it tends to fail because once you're like, we're going to make sure the product is beautiful, but that's going to compromise what it's for.

1:01:26You might as well not have it and pick something that you actually want that is truly beautiful. And I think that dynamic is going to keep playing out until we figure out some other use for wearables that isn't just wellness. and then the wellness category is I mean that's just a weird unregulated pharmaceutical industry that's going to tell you lies about whatever it needs to tell you lies about and that's going to accelerate until V goes crazy I love you V. Do you remember Project Jacquard Google's thing with the they like wove something into the fabric of your jacket that let you use it conductively like there's something in that right that it's like it doesn't look or feel different but it gives you some new capability that's where this has to go and I don't think we figured out either what the capability is or how to get there in most cases but it's it's an interesting direction all right we've got to get out of here um we are so grateful to all of you for coming out thank you to everybody for being here this has been incredibly fun thank you uh all 30 to 40 ,000 of you who are here we're very grateful there it is very good uh we've got more ces stuff coming our team is still chugging away uh but we we've got other stuff to do.

1:02:35We're going to get out of here. So we will see you next time, Nilay. Rock and roll.

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