Picking the perfect portable console

27:01I used docs from like JSA, JSA UX, great company with an alphabet soup name, surprisingly, 40, 50 bucks. And those docs are do all the things you'd want from a doc. It's really easy once you get one of those things to get it up there. The question is, is your TV like 4K and you're expecting 4K visuals from a console that normally plays at 800 because it's not going to look as good up on a big 4K TV. I will say, and Liam or producer can vouch for this the least verge casty thing about me is i don't care all that much about pixel density so the idea of playing like at you know medium settings and having it work okay is completely fine with me i just heard neilai screaming this is the last time you'll ever hear from me on the verge cast uh but that is that is where i'm at and especially with something like this like battery life is much more important to me than like getting 10 extra frames per second uh and so i think again the customizability of the steam deck to be able to like dial that up and down as i want it seems useful.

27:59You want a Steam Deck OLED. Like, get the Steam Deck OLED. Every once in a while, you'll plug it into the TV. You'll be like, oh, I did it. This looks kind of shitty. And then you'll unplug it and go back to the really pretty OLED display and be very happy. I do suspect my Switch experience has been that I set it up in such a way that it was going to be really easy to dock. It was going to be great. And then most of the time I would sit on my couch in front of the TV and just play on my lap. And I would assume the Steam Deck will end up being kind of the same way yep it's so good my we'll watch watch some shows together with my wife and i'll have my hand held out and get to do some some gaming at the same time it's great okay are there any other like crazy wild card possibilities coming that we know of that might win like you you mentioned the the rog ally x seems like a possible improvement if not sort of equal to the steam deck is there anything else on the horizon that in three months i'm going to be like oh this is the one i needed I don't think so, but there are two very different directions you could go.

28:59And I don't have one of them here in front of me. But one of them is a 10.1-inch laptop with, like, keys that actually feel good. Full-size SD card reader. You could actually shove the SD card all the way inside. We've got full-size USB-A ports. It has more ports than a MacBook. USB-C ports. There's an Oculink port, HDMI. It is your dock built into it. And then you take these little things off and you got joysticks, a D-pad, and even this menu button in the center acts like an Xbox button, which for some reason, none of the other Windows handhelds have. And this thing is way expensive. I mean, it's twice the price of your Steam Deck.

29:40It costs more than any of the other handhelds, but it doubles as a laptop that has the power of one of those other gaming handhelds. And a decent sized battery, all this stuff. But Sean, how is it to play? It is a laptop first and a game handheld second. It's such a perfect gadget because that is both the stupidest thing I've ever seen and I want it so bad. Yeah, right? It's beautiful. It's like, what if instead of the touch bar, we just put a PlayStation controller in pieces? Like, I love it. I can't get over the boss mode. Like, you got this thing and you're like, no, I can't show my gamepad at work.

30:18Let's take this little metal. Let's take this little slip of metal out of the back of the thing and drop it on top. Boss mode. It's a physical boss mode. Yeah. OK. Moving on from that. OK. So your other possibility is you could embrace you could embrace software piracy and you could buy one of these things, which looks like a Game Boy Advance SP. This is the Enverneck thing, but actually just comes with thousands of pirated games. and so you could play all your Game Boy Advance and PlayStation games on this and you'd delete the pirated games first and dump your own ROMs or something like that.

30:54As I always do. As you do, yes. I feel like Anabricks already gonna get wrecked for you just saying, yeah, it comes with all of the pirated games on it. Every time Sean talks about one of these, there was, I think you did a TikTok Sean talking about the new Anabricks thing and every single comment was like, Sean, be cool, man. Stop telling people about this. Give me my free game. It really was. TikTok shop is all over this things. Like, it's been snitched on enough. Just to illustrate, though, that the EA, the EA FIFA game is not a Steam Deck problem. The top comment on EA Sports FC 24 is EA FC 24 not launching on PC after anti-cheat back to EA app.

31:34So it's not a Steam Deck thing so much as it is an EA doesn't care thing. Interesting. Okay, so it truly is. EA is like, there are ways you could get around the rules that we have. So we're just taking our ball and going home. Yep. That doesn't feel like it's getting better anytime soon. That does not give me hope for improvements coming here. Which also means, listen, there's a lot of sports games this means I can't play anymore. But now I'm going to have to get into, like, cool nerd games. It's going to be great. You can play them streaming. That's true. Steam Deck plus Game Pass, I think, is starting to feel like the realist answer I have here.

32:07You'll have Halo and FIFA. Like, you will be the hit of every frat party you go to. Okay, last question. And then we have to go. Am I stupid for buying a Steam Deck right now in the same way that I might be stupid for buying a Switch right now? Where are we in the Steam Deck cycle? We're fine, right? We're mid, yeah. We're mid-cycle. We're not late yet. The thing that Valve needs, they've told us, like told me to my face, what they need to see is they need to see a major improvement in performance without sacrificing battery life from a chip manufacturer before they start building the next true Steam Deck.

32:48And I've heard this from other companies, too, like Asus with the ROG LIX. They were like, we don't think we can get it right now, so we're going to ship the ROG LIX with the same chip. And I don't think Qualcomm has changed that calculus at all with the Snapdragon. And even if it has, we're a ways away from that actually appearing inside of a product. Yeah, I think we're probably a good—we're at least a year out. I think you'll have one beautiful, blissful year before you get FOMO, at least. Okay. And that's—I mean, honestly, in gadget world, that's all you can ask for. I was like a year is an eternity in gadget world.

33:22I mean, listen, I've made it this far into the PS5 cycle without upgrading. Like it turns out I can manage my FOMO on this one. I am so impressed. Thank you. That's actually the other question I should ask is like, am I being ridiculous? Should I just buy a PS5 and move on with my life? Oh, I mean, if you have infinite money, yes. If I buy a PS5, I almost certainly will end up buying a portal. And I hate myself for it, but it will probably happen. Then I say don't, because I want to save you from the portal. You could buy a used Steam Deck LCD for the price of a portal and also have a portal built into it with an app.

33:56Oh, well, that's very compelling. But PS5, like, if you do love that I'm sitting on my couch with my 4K OLED TV experience, it's hard to beat the PS5 for that. I'm playing Spider-Man 2 on it right now on just a gorgeous new OLED panel that was deep discounted recently. and wow, the pop of that city, the lights at night. It's really something. Yeah. And I do love that, but I think I am increasingly coming around to having a thing with me is more important than the sort of very best possible experience. I would love to have both, but I don't think you can really have both right now in the world we live in.

34:36And if you really want to have that thing with you, I don't think there's anything that beats the Steam Deck. There's just so much you can now take with you that you can't, the same way through the Windows handhelds, you can't really with Android. All right. Well, we have ended where we began, which I find very frustrating, but also sort of telling. I'm going to buy a Steam Deck. Yeah. I probably should have bought a Steam Deck a really long time ago. I'm going to buy a Steam Deck and I will start yelling loudly at EA. I will report back. I'm so excited for you. Everybody's excited about the EA, though.

35:06Do you have any immediate setup tips? Before we talk again, I will have purchased a Steam Deck. What should I do immediately out of the box with my brand new Steam Deck OLED? I have so many nerdy suggestions. I don't want nerdy suggestions. Sean, I say this with love. I want to get to playing games well as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Like, I am worried about the Steam Deck because I'm worried it's so fidgety and finicky that I'm going to spend my whole life goofing with the joysticks and not playing games. So Steam Deck has this, like, on the Steam Deck, they have compatibility for games.

35:37And you can also see it on the Steam software. So like you can just go download Steam ahead of time, find some games you like, make sure they're compatible, and then it'll be just out of the box ready to go. Anything that's like yellow or red, you'll have to mess with a little bit. That's where you have to start tweaking things. Like I try to play Crusader Kings on it. Don't. That's it's not for the Steam Deck. It's terrible. There's even a tab in the store where you can just like only show me games that work well with the Steam Deck. And for the most part, they do. Yeah. And it's a lot of stuff, right?

36:07Like it's a ton of stuff. The ones that don't is stuff that's like Mass Effect, which is an EA game. So you know why it doesn't work. I will say the other game in my life that I have loved with my whole heart, the way that I have loved FIFA with my whole heart, is Portal. And the idea of having a Steam thing that will let me play the Portal games forever is very exciting. And it will just straight out of the box, you'll be off to the races having a great time. Yeah, it really is so easy to just get going on the Steam Deck, provided you already own games. Elden Ring plays well there. Ori and the Will of the Wisps, if you haven't played that yet, play that on the Deco Lit.

36:44Oh my god, it looks brilliant on the Deco Lit. That game is made for HDR. Persona 5, have you played any Persona games? Bits and pieces, but never super deeply. Okay, get Persona 5 or Persona 5 Royal, whichever one is better for your budget. Play that on Steam Deck. It's epic. We could spend the rest, you've spent another hour talking about games to play on. Yeah, I was about to say, have you played Final Fantasy Remake yet? Like, beautiful on the Steam Deck. Okay. All right. My list is long and none of them are the only game that I need it. But, you know, we're doing the best we can here. You can get FIFA 23 fairly easily on the Steam Deck.

37:20Okay. That might help. Maybe that's like my gateway drug out of being obsessed with FIFA. I'll just play old games enough to satiate me and then go play better games. You get Ted Lasso in that one. You'll be fine. Exactly. All right. Thank you both. This was very helpful. I'm going to go spend a bunch of money. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk wearables, specifically one feature about wearables. We'll be right back.

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41:36Welcome back. So before we get into the next thing, one last note on that last segment. Listening back to it, I realize, I don't know that I actually solved any of my problems. It was a really interesting discussion, and I think the place we landed is the right one for almost everybody. But I was realizing, listening back, that actually one of the games I'm most excited about this year is the new college football game, which is also an EA game and is also probably not going to be on the Steam Deck. So for me now, I go from one game that I play a ton that doesn't work on the Steam Deck to two games that I'm probably going to play a ton that won't be on the Steam Deck.

42:12So I don't know what to do. I think I'll probably still buy a Steam Deck. ideally with a good return policy just to really get into it and play with it and get used to it. But I don't know that I've solved my problem. And I think I'm not alone. These are very popular games. The EA stuff is huge. Game streaming is going to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people, but hasn't yet. So I'm still stuck. I haven't bought anything yet. If you have ideas, please let me know. Vergecast at the verge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. What do you think I should buy? Tell me everything. I'm still so torn.

42:42I think Sean and Alex gave really good advice, but I don't know if I've actually solved my problem yet. Anyway, let's get into the next thing. Every once in a while on the show, we like to test some microphones. I think this stuff really matters and it doesn't get talked about a lot when we talk about headphones and when we talk about wearable devices. We talk to our gadgets a lot. And if you believe that AI is the future of how we talk to gadgets, it's going to get more vocal over time. Microphones really matter, whether you're just talking to Siri to set reminders, which is a thing I do constantly all day, every day, or is going to be how you talk to chat GPT or your robot AI best friend for forever.

43:21Microphones really matter. And we've tested a lot of earbuds. We actually probably overdue for an earbuds test. But the thing that we haven't really done is maybe one of the wearable categories I'm most excited about, which I'll say, broadly speaking, is face gadgets. You have things like the MetaQuest 3 and the Vision Pro. You also have things like the MetaSmart glasses and Amazon's Echo Frames and the idea of just a thing you wear on front of your eyes on your face that is a super powerful computer. I think we're at the very beginning of that genre of gadget, but I already think there's a lot of interesting stuff out there.

43:59So as we do, it's time to do a microphone test. I asked V song who has almost all of these gadgets somewhat remarkably just lying around her house to come on and do some tests with us. So we're going to hear how it all sounds. Let's go. V song. Welcome back. Thanks for having me again. You and I have done so much stuff together recently. This is very exciting. This is terrible for you and great for me. I'm happy about it. So I have brought you here for the thing I have been like very excited to do for months because what I have discovered in my own life is that now when I take a phone call and I'm at home, instead of holding my phone to my ear, I actually put on the meta smart glasses.

44:38And that is now my like hands-free phone experience and I love it very much and I have found myself wondering a lot how I sound to other people when I do that so you and I are going to do I think maybe the most ambitious microphone test we've ever done on this show because it involves a deeply weird set of gadgets and I'm very excited about it I spent so much time yesterday and this morning prepping the gadgets just for the technical logistics of all of it and I looked ridiculous at every step of the way. So as it should be. So, yeah. OK, run me through the list of all the stuff we're about to test, which is basically like every weird face gadget in V's house.

45:18You know, it's a very thoughtful selection of the weird face gadgets in my house. So we have the Razer Anzu, which are a productivity pair of smart glasses. You know, they market it as basically like smart glasses for hands-free calls. And when you're on your computer that has blue light. what do you call these lenses so we have those uh then we have the ray-ban meta smart glasses we have the apple vision pro and we have the meta quest 3 amazing i will say the only one in this category i feel like we don't have in here is probably the echo frames i think anecdotally no one seems to care about the echo frames so i don't feel that bad leaving it out but i do think it's like it's like the one in this category that i'm curious about that we're not testing so we'll have to come back and do that another time yeah well i do have a pair i just moved not that long ago and then did spring cleaning so the charger where is the charger i have been tearing my house apart for the charger because it's a it's a weird charger okay this is a good point it's not just a usbc port which is what all chargers should be it's a stupid like stand that you have to stick them on top of and if you don't push them down at the right angle in the right way It doesn't work.

46:32It's one of the worst chargers I've ever used. I hate it. It's also the glasses that stay on my face the least because I have a low nose bridge and it just slips down. That's my problem with the meta smart glasses. So I'm sort of hoping that the meta ones don't win so that I can convince myself to buy something else. But we're going to see how this goes. So before we dive in, I think the one caveat we should provide here is that so far you're talking into your podcast, Mike. So I would say this is kind of the gold standard of the audio that you should hear. Anything that we test is going to be compared to this.

47:04There are a couple that we're about to test that are Bluetooth devices. So you're going to be pairing Bluetooth devices to your computer. So you're going to get whatever Bluetooth weirdness exists. But I would say that's fine because that's pretty indicative of normal Bluetooth weirdness. Like most of the time people are talking through Bluetooth gadgets. So we're going to do that. But then there's a couple. I think the headsets are going to be basically treated like microphones on computers because we're actually going to be able to do it natively inside of the device. So we'll talk about those when we get to those, but let's just dive in.

47:34Which one do you want to do first? I've got the Anzu on right now. So let's just do that because I swear to God, this is going to be a logistical nightmare when we're switching. I cannot wait. This is, this is one of those times where podcast editing becomes very, very, very helpful because you don't have to listen to us fiddle with Bluetooth settings. But all right, let's, let's dive in. Let's go. All right. I am talking. I am saying a sentence and your face is like saying that it does not sound good. This is terrible. This is like, okay, how would I describe it? You sound like you're on a phone call on speakerphone, but you've done the thing where you put your phone down on the kitchen counter while we're talking.

48:15And then you've like walked into the other room. Cool. Love it. I can imagine what that sounds like. And you know, I don't, I not really sure where the mics are on this particular thing, but I don't think they're like the meta Ray-Bounds where the mic is in the nose bridge. So it's like kind of close to your mouth. It says that they have omni-directional mics, probably in the temples. So if they're in the temples, that's, you know, pretty far away from the actual sound source. And actually, in a certain way, sort of defeats the purpose of why I'm excited about these devices. Because as you're talking about, one of the nice things about glasses is just that they're closer to your mouth, right?

48:51We have all these Bluetooth headphones and stuff. They are constrained by the fact that they're on your ears. So they have the stems that point towards your mouth and that kind of helps and they're getting smarter with the software but fundamentally like the way to get a good microphone is to put it closer to your mouth where the sound is coming from and it feels like razor just sort of beefed this one so to razors credit i guess defense slightly these aren't necessarily meant for this kind of like communication sorts of calls right these are things you're supposed to wear like at your desk to make it a little less painful to look at a screen all day um so they you know there's like a while where Razer was just like, we're not just gaming, we do productivity stuff too.

49:32Yay for the office. And I think this was part of that push. Like, yeah, they do have blue light lenses so that if you're looking at the screen a lot, it's easier for you. They are your typical pair of glasses that are also headphones. So you can just listen to stuff. But you know, like when I took the briefing a couple years ago and was testing this, it was just basically like, yeah, it is meant for like productivity in the office. So you can take phone calls and you'll sound really great. So obviously, that was some marketing spiel. Because clearly, judging by your reaction, I do not sound that great.

50:06Yeah, you will not sound really great. I can tell you that now with with great confidence. Andrew Marino, I don't usually get to do this when we're here. But Andrew is is our sound expert and podcast editor. Andrew, I want you to weigh in on all of these with me. What do you think of this one okay so these aren't as bad as i thought it is a obviously a clear difference between the podcast microphone and and this but i don't hear a lot of background noise that is true that is good i would actually like to hear how this sounds compared to like someone wearing airpods though too because would you prefer hearing airpods microphones or would you prefer hearing the glasses microphones i was just thinking about that actually and i think the thing that the airpods do that these aren't doing is at least the AirPods push the voice more to the center of the mix, right?

50:56Like it's trying really hard to like raise the volume of your voice as opposed to everything else. This feels flatter in a way that is like probably more pleasant in a certain way, but also just means I can like hear you less well. I also wonder what it would be like if, you know, the other proposition for glasses is that like you're on a walk, you can go outside and take the phone call as well. And, you know, outside there's a lot more ambient noise, there's cars, there's wind. I wonder what this would sound like if you were on a walk. Because I've taken calls on the Meta Ray-Bans while I'm on a walk and people think they're pretty decent, pretty good, just because of where the microphone is situated.

51:31So I, you know, they always claim that they're great for wind. And I'm always like, but are they? Are they? Yeah, we should say you're in your house in what I would call like a relatively quiet space. This is kind of as good as it's gonna be we'll we'll have to come back and do this another time with worse environments but i think particularly because we had some of the headsets and these are like things you're mostly going to be doing inside we wanted to give it its best shot yeah but okay i'm done with these these are not great let's let's move on let's do let's do the ray-ban ones next that feels like a good one-to-one comparison here let's switch to those all right okay this is me in the meta and i just want you to know that i'm blind because i have my contacts on and these are prescription lenses so you are just a big blob on my phone this sounds way better like night and day to the last one this is actually like the sound i was hoping that this was going to give me it's not like amazing it's it's definitely i'm hearing a lot of compression on your voice it's it's like clearly trying very hard to get your voice and cancel even not a lot of background noise but this sounds great i should say also you're on your phone to do this normally record these things your computer, but because of the weirdness of these glasses, you had an easier time connecting them to your phone than to your computer because Bluetooth is dumb and bad and complicated and nobody is good at it.

52:53But you sound really good to me. Yeah. So this was like one of the limitations that Becca pointed out when we were both doing the Ray-Ban meta testing and she like went all in on the microphone testing for these. And it's just not really all that easy to, you know, connect with your computer while having these on. This is just a very phone first kind of pairing situation, which is a little annoying, but great if you want to take these outside, I think, and just like walk around and take calls while you're, I do that all the time. Like I'll be on a walk and a friend will call and I'll just gab and people will look at me crazy because I don't have the social cue of having AirPods in my ear.

53:34And these just look like a normal pair of glasses. so i just look like a psycho well and right now you have sunglasses on indoors which i would say it's like an extremely cool move is it is it is it cool uh who can say also like yeah so i got these sent with uh prescription lenses as sunglasses and i was like i would have loved it if these were the transition lenses but alas i have the transitions and they're awesome my dad who does not have smart glasses just has transition lenses in his regular glasses and we made fun of him about it for so long because it's like you go inside and for four minutes you just have sunglasses on and we always used to make fun of it and like boy has history proven him right like congrats dad you made transition lenses a thing they are great i'm a fan so the thing that i like about these this is the one where they put the microphone like right next to your nose right So it's sort of perfectly where it should be to sound good here.

54:32Yeah, I believe there's five microphones in the glasses at various points. But the one that captures your voice is just right in the nose bridge. So it's like right above your mouth. So I think that was the kind of low-key genius move that they did with these compared to the other smart glasses that I've tested. So I got to say, I really enjoy these as my outdoor walk, outdoor. I wear these while running too. And it's pretty great as like a pair of open ear headphones. I can take calls. The sunglasses are great. The sound quality is great. So I just wish I had transition lenses because then I could just use these all the time.

55:10That'd be great. Andrew, what do you think? Yeah, these sound better than the Razer ones. I wouldn't be mad at all about this as far as like Bluetooth goes. It's pretty, pretty good. Yeah, I agree. This is definitely one that is like notably better than AirPods. and it just you feel much closer which is really nice like a lot of the things and this is the challenge with the the razor one is a lot of bluetooth headphones just make you feel sort of far away because you are far away this one you you feel much closer to the mic which makes you feel much closer like to me as we're talking which is which is very cool this one i'm calling a victory let's let's move on to some of the other ones what do we have next we have your pick of which headset the vision pro or the meta quest let's start with the quest because i would assume that the vision pro is going to sound better but also i think more people have quests so let's let's start with the quest this is going to be logistically fraught so we're going to play some hold music we'll be back in like 45 minutes once we get this set okay let's do it all right meta quest is this the quest two or the quest three that we're on here v quest three i believe Yeah, Quest 3.

56:16All right. Let's hear it. How do we sound? I am talking. Supposedly, you can hear me, even though this gave me a lot of grief about there being no microphone while logging into this. So it's very confusing. Okay, this sounds really good. This is kind of right in line with the smart glasses, actually, which I'm realizing now it's two meta products that sit on your face. Maybe there's some shared technology there, but I don't know how that didn't occur to me until just now. But yeah, you sound pretty good. This is just another like big microphone on your face. And this is another one that I think they put the microphone pretty centrally on the thing.

56:52So it might even be closer to your mouth than the smart glasses. Oh, it certainly is weighing on my head. So it feels like it's falling on my face more than the smart glasses. It's going to be on top of your mouth here in a couple of minutes as you're trying to talk. It'll be good. Yeah, it's actually it's because I don't have it super tight on the back because I get headaches when these are too tight oh there we go there we go okay so what i what i also want to know is tell me about the experience of getting into this call from the quest because there's like one of the things that meta would really like to convince you of is that eventually a vr headset is going to be a work tool and you can you just like open up a browser and use it for google meet or whatever i have never done that one time and i'm very curious how it's going for you so um i I basically had to log into Slack, right?

57:42Because I need a link to this meeting. And so how am I going to get a link to this particular meeting? So, you know, like either you have to have your calendar in here in some capacity or you have to basically go into the browser, go into your Google Calendar and whatnot. But then I was just like, oh, God. Okay. So I went into Slack, which in our workplace, because things are secure, was real effing annoying. because two factor authentication in a headset not a solved problem two factor authentication in a headset let me tell you it's not fun and i was a good box media employee i have a very complicated password for my work thing so i'm just going in in this 13 14 15 character long i don't know how long it is it's long but i'm just like punching it in with this stupid little keyboard just going in capital oh that's not a capital i have to re-enter all of this then we have two-factor authentication and I have to go thankfully I get it sent to my watch so I get it boom into the watch I'm like yeah cool awesome then I'm in slack and then I have to go like in the browser and slack land to go okay now I gotta go to the link that I know is in this dm and then okay I gotta scroll in the dm click on the link that opens up riverside in the browser and then I'm like cool I'm gonna just log in even though it's saying that there is no mic or camera detected.

59:04So yeah, Andrew helped me test this before. It is quite a project. So okay, Andrew, I'm really curious for your thoughts on this one, because I want to know how you feel about this versus the smart glasses, because what I'm hearing is very similar, but this sounds like it's compressing harder to me. But what are you hearing? There's a bit of compression here. I'm also wondering if it's Riverside's echo cancellation here, but it is not significantly better than the meta ray bands this is a great sound for taking a meeting call but if v was like hey can i join the podcast with the quest 3 i'd be like uh well can you use your phone right i think that's right like none of this has gotten even up to like wired earpods quality but at least so far this is definitely better than razor but i would say not quite as good as the meta ones my theory i wonder about the echo cancellation too but i also wonder if because meta assumes you're going to be playing games all the time on this thing that it's going to have audio all the time and so they've just turned up the echo cancellation on the device itself just so it's trying to noise cancel against what's coming out of the speakers all the time because it's just it is compressing this pretty aggressively it does sound like there is some processing happening yeah before it gets to hear v how are the speakers on this like the actual listening experience is pretty solid right i feel like yeah yeah so this this i agree it would work in a pinch in a meeting but uh andrew would not allow you on the verge cast in the headset under normal circumstances also like if you're reaching for a headset in a pinch for a meeting something has gone terribly wrong consider your something has gone terribly wrong terribly terribly wrong because where's your phone There's just easier things to do than to swap on a headset.

1:00:57And then, you know, like I had gotten logged out of my account because the spouse logged into this at some point and was playing games. Then it was just like, where's my account? Oh, I forgot. I don't remember what my Facebook password is. Oh, you're telling me I have to log into this with that, that this was an ordeal yesterday, getting this prepped for today. Well, in the name of making everything simpler and better, let's make it more complicated. Let's switch and do the vision prep. Let's try that next. Oh, good Lord. You know, actually, that might be slightly easier than this one. Okay. All right.

1:01:26Well, we'll go back to the hold music. We'll be right back. All right. Hold on. All right. Well, it took some digging in settings and some app rebooting, but we got it working, and now your persona is here, and I hate this already. But I'm going to not look. I'm just going to listen. How do we sound? How are we doing? This was a nightmare. This is a nightmare. Everything's a nightmare. air. I can't stop looking at my horrible persona. Why is my hair so lumpy? My eyebrows are also misaligned. So I just look dubious. The good news is you sound great. I'm actually like amazed by how good this sounds.

1:02:06I suppose it's a$3 ,500 headset. Again, it's a thing on your face. There are a lot of microphones. Apple's pretty good at noise cancellation. I sort of figured this would be just in terms of raw audio the best one but it is i would say like a full leap be above anything else we've tested so far is surprising just because of how annoying it was to get into this app there's definitely some compression i will say that that i'm hearing more and more as you talk it's doing a lot of the same like processing and and cancellation stuff but still sounds very good And it's very central. Like you are right in the middle of the mix and it sounds like you're talking to me instead of shouting at a phone from several rooms away, which is very nice.

1:02:52I will say that whenever I've done my cursed Vision Pro FaceTimes with Wes, everything sounds great. Like because he's obviously in the Vision Pro and using that mic. And it's always sounded like he's in the room with me, which is uncanny and freaky. On top of his mustache that won't move. Yeah, the real takeaway from this is FaceTime audio is your friend on the Vision Pro, not FaceTime video. And that is the way to live your life on the Vision Pro. Now, half the time our FaceTimes are like, oh, why do I have this over my mouth? This cloud, because my hand is there. All right, well, it sounds good.

1:03:33Let's get you out of your misery here. I do. We weren't planning to do this, but we should test AirPods last just as kind of a control on the rest of it. Do you have a pair of AirPods lying around? I do. All right. Let's go get those. Take off this godforsaken headset and let's try those. Thank you. Thank you for letting me leave virtual jail.

1:03:59I don't know what is happening right now, but your voice is sped up like twice. like 100x yeah i'm gonna have to kick you out v and then you're gonna have to come back in i can't even understand what yeah i got nothing yeah just kick her out yeah uh v you're back with airpods on my airpods pro uh usbc version so i guess the latest versions of the airpods pro you can have okay so i have to say this is this sounds comparatively worse than i actually expect it i would say i would put this like pretty close to the very first the razor ones that we listen to in the sense that it is it kind of sounds like a far away omnidirectional microphone and like you sound fine i can hear you i can hear everything you're saying but like i expected this to come on and me to be like oh yeah this sounds kind of like the the ray-ban smart glasses this is like demonstrably worse than those at least to my ears andrew is that am i way off here no Oh, absolutely.

1:04:57I actually would like to hear how the Razer 1 sound again, because those were a lot more fuller sounding in a frequency range than these. These kind of sound pretty tinny, actually, in comparison. Yeah, I mean, I do have an assortment of just gadgets in my, strewn across my room, which is like my office, rather, which is a freaking, it's a disaster zone. It's like late in the week, so I haven't put my gadgets away like a naughty, naughty gadget reviewer. so it's literally right here i can put them back on if you want let's let's do it really quickly let's just do it yeah just really really quick and then we'll let you go okay all right i'm back in these glasses which you guys say look fine on me but i think i look a little like i look a little bit like the grandpa from up first of all that's a compliment you should be psyched to look like the grandpa from up but yeah andrew i'm i'm kind of hearing what it sounds like you were saying that like this is a little fuller but to me a little sort of further back where like it sounds further away but in a certain sense better yeah so it's probably like they're worse microphones but they are closer to the face so you get a little more detail of what he is saying i mean yeah there's a trade-off there but like if i'm on a call like i would almost prefer these not on a podcast but in a meeting Yeah, you do sound clearer in this.

1:06:24I feel like I hear your voice more clearly. It just sounds to me like you're further away from it. That's really interesting. Big win for headsets today. I expected AirPods to come somewhere in the middle, but I think you could make a pretty compelling case that all four of the things you just tried are better microphones for talking to people than a pair of AirPods. Wow, that's a big boon to the smart glasses category. Yeah, right? this is also a big win for you and me wearing glasses, walking around, talking to ourselves like maniacs kind of situation. You know, my neighbors have seen me do walk and talk, like just filming social videos.

1:07:02And just, I did a social video while doing a walk and talk. And someone was just like, this, this hoe, really just be walking out here talking to thin air. And I was just like, yeah, you know what? This is the future, baby. Everything's a microphone. I really hope you say that to people. You just say, this is the future, baby. And then you just high five them and move on. I love it. All right. Well, we need to get out of here. But big giant win for smart glasses today. I'm going to say in terms of like the combination of you don't look like a lunatic and you sound pretty good. I think the meta smart glasses here are probably the winner for me in terms of like, what would I tell you to go get for a good microphone?

1:07:43Andrew, what's your read? Yes. I would like to note that, V, how much are the Razer and Zoo, how much do they cost? On Amazon, you can get them for$40. Jesus Christ. Right. That's pretty cheap. That's really cheap for that. That is really cheap. If someone was like, should I get the$250 meta glasses or should I get these$40 glasses that I can take calls with? I might just say get those. That is fair. That's a big price difference. The meta ones definitely sound better. But yeah, for$50 as a thing to just throw on when you have a phone call, the Razer one's not a terrible choice. That's shocking to me.

1:08:22That's like, obviously, I've tested these a long time ago, so I didn't remember. But that's just, wow. Talk about bang for your buck. The thing that I use the Meta smart glasses for a lot is it's like I was in a car accident a couple of weeks ago. So I spent a lot of time on hold with the claims department. and rather than wear headphones, I can just like throw them on and sit on hold and then I can like listen to music in the room or whatever and actually for sitting on hold, a pair of smart glasses is like weirdly great. So I think in that case, again, like the$50 Anzus are also a pretty solid choice.

1:08:56But I feel like raw sort of quality and usability meta, but Andrew, you make a good point. $50 for this is not the worst deal in the world. And you get to look like the grandpa from Up, which is an incredible huge victory jury's out on how how these look on me like you guys say it looks fine but it's one to think about uh all right v we gotta let you go thank you so much as always for doing this and putting up with all of our bluetooth nonsense thank you i'm just gonna lie down and take a break and recalibrate my vision pros all right we gotta take a break then we're gonna come back we'll do a question with the hotline we'll be right back

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1:13:02Welcome back. All right, let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love all of your questions. please keep sending us all of your wildest, weirdest questions about technology. Also, in particular, I'm really eager to start doing more like teeny tiny tech mysteries. So if you have a weird tech problem that you can't solve and we might be able to help with, let us know. This week, we have a question which seemed fitting about glasses. Hey, David, it's Ruby from the UK. okay, I have that eyesight, and I wear glasses all the time, and it's getting to the point where I really need new glasses.

1:13:43But I told myself I wouldn't buy new frames unless they were smart glasses. I don't like Meta, so those are out of the question. But I don't know if it was you, but The Verge reviewed a pair of smart glasses called Focals by a company called North. It got bought by Google, and they have a little laser projector that just gave you a HUD. And from those reviews, it looked pretty cool. Do you think that's maybe something we might see in the near future? And maybe even an AI version of it, that's not stupid. Thanks, and take care. Okay, so real quick, if you don't remember the North Focals, and you'd be forgiven for not remembering the North Focals.

1:14:20Basically, the way that they worked was instead of being two screens in front of your eyes, there was a little laser projector off to the right, I think, of the glasses. So it would project the laser onto this little polymer in the middle of the right lens, which would then reflect that light back into your eyes. So instead of looking at a screen, you were getting what amounted to, I think it was a 300 pixel by 300 pixel display kind of right in the middle of your right eye. And you could see through it when it wasn't projecting. It looked just like a little smudge on the lens itself. It was a very clever system.

1:14:55North had a real problem making these things work, though. For one, it's expensive technology. It's a startup. They ended up trying to sell these things, I think, for$1 ,000, which most people are just not going to spend$1 ,000 on a pair of glasses. Google ended up buying North, I think, mostly for the technology. But obviously, Google has a complicated relationship with smart glasses all the way back to Google Glass. I do think the company is committed to doing some kind of ARXR thing. The company keeps teasing it and talking about it. There was that thing in the Project Astra video where you can see the glasses like it's it's out there.

1:15:32Google is still thinking about this stuff. But what North did was really clever, honestly, and I'm sort of sad to have seen the company go. But it was tough, right? Not only was it really expensive, but North famously had trouble with people with longer eyelashes. And evidently the display struggled when people were wearing mascara. So this stuff is hard, is my point. It's hard and it's expensive. And there is just not a lot of progress being made towards putting this kind of technology in something that looks and feels and costs like a normal pair of glasses. All that said, I do think something like the Focals is probably where we're headed in the immediate future.

1:16:14Like, look, sure, someday the whole Vision Pro meta quest thing might be the future, but it's only going to be the future when those things look like a pair of glasses. And I think we're just a bunch of huge technical innovations away from that being the case. So what we're going to see instead, I think, is something that feels more like a heads up display, right? Something that projects little bits of information at a time onto your face. And as we've been talking about this whole episode, if you believe that chat and particular voice in voice out chat with AI systems is going to be a key part of how we talk to computers, something like that becomes really powerful, right?

1:16:54It can display your text message and you can respond to it. It can show you the answer to a question that you asked, it can show you the information that you asked for, it becomes this really useful thing in a way that even North five years ago, was trying to like awkwardly rewrite apps to make them make sense on this tiny display in a way that was just really hard. Now we have a confluence of things, whether it's voice, or we've had a lot of work with widgets on, you know, lock screens and home screens of phones. That stuff has also been transferred to smartwatches, which have made a lot of progress in the last five years, put all of that together.

1:17:31And you can sort of see how the interface for a pair of glasses, that is just listening to you talk, maybe doing some gesture control. Again, we have these new smart rings, like the galaxy ring that are starting to experiment with maybe you can use your fingers to control devices just with your hands. Meta is also working on this kind of stuff. Mark Zuckerberg even said that there is a new wearable that the company has been working on, that it's getting ready to release, that is going to be a new way to control gadgets. So again, all of this is just coming together. The question is going to be, can anyone make a product out of it?

1:18:02Can you do North's thing where North also had a little ring joystick thing that was kind of neat, but also kind of got in the way? Can you do that well with a smart ring? Can you figure out the interface in a way that is useful and will make people want to spend the extra money on it without being too much extra money to the point where people just don't want it in addition to their regular pair of glasses? Can you make the battery last long enough that it doesn't feel like I have to charge my glasses twice a day because that's a terrible experience? And then I think there's the biggest question, which is just that we haven't solved how any of this is supposed to work.

1:18:34a google executive a few years ago said to me that one of the most challenging things about ar is figuring out kind of the relative noise level of an ar system and i mean noise in the sense of like how in your face it is and involved it is in your life right sometimes you want lots of information you want it to be telling you what's going on around you you want it to point you to the coffee shop down the street or the cool place that you totally should go or the fact that your friend is over there. And then other times you want it to just shut up and go away. And you want all of that to happen automatically and seamlessly and without you having to decide what you want, like your phone, you can just leave somewhere else, you can walk away from your phone in a way that you can't walk away from a pair of glasses, especially if they're corrective if you need them.

1:19:20And so all these interfaces are going to have to be automatic, and perfect and uncomplicated in ways that just no one has figured out yet, right? Like if you got as many notifications on your face as you get on your phone every day, you would stop wearing glasses the very first day. You just would, we all would. It's a bad interface when it is literally in front of your eyes whenever you get a notification. And that stuff I think is gonna take longer to solve because it's about who we are as people and how we use technology and what we care about and what we don't care about. And putting all those pieces together, I think is actually the hardest part of all of this.

1:19:57Because again, you have rings, which I think are doing interesting gesture and sensing stuff. You have other devices doing that. Who knows, we might get like brain computer interfaces soon enough. I think the glasses technology is getting better pretty quickly. North's projector was not amazing, but it was pretty good. And that was a while ago. And frankly, it's a bummer that we haven't gotten to see five years of progress there. We also are seeing companies like Meta really start to bet on the smart glasses space. I think the idea that we were going to get headsets and we were all going to learn how to live inside of headsets was just the wrong one.

1:20:31And I think even the success that Meta has said it's seeing from the smart glasses is proof that what we're doing is saying, how do we make glasses that look like glasses and work like glasses and feel like glasses? And then how do we make them more useful over time? And I think that is a really interesting road that is going to lead to interesting things fairly quickly. So I would say to your question specifically, I think if you need a pair of glasses today, you should just buy a pair of glasses. There's not anything that is so smart and so good, even at doing one thing beyond being a pair of glasses, that it feels worth making a huge bet on.

1:21:07but it's kind of like the one after this one, right? Like someday in, you know, a couple of years when you lose these glasses or need to increase your prescription or they break or whatever, I think at that point we might be somewhere where there is a heads-up display in your glasses that is pretty useful. It won't do everything. It won't be a full-on metaverse AR experience where you can like play games in the world around you, but it'll be something. Maybe it'll just show you your text messages, but that'll be something. And I think that'll be pretty cool. There are companies out there working on this.

1:21:39I think Google has intimated that there's stuff going on. There's some indication from reporting that we've seen from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg and others that Apple is starting to really work on smart glasses. Meta is very clearly investing in this more and more over time. There's a company called Brilliant Labs that is doing some interesting work here on trying to create a whole ecosystem of these smart glasses. So like, I think this is coming and I think you're on to the right idea that just a little display, a little bit of information, a little bit of sort of additive interface over top of the real world is the next thing and feels achievable.

1:22:14But I just can't think of something I would tell you to buy right this minute that feels like it's the answer. So maybe go buy like, you know, the junkiest pair of glasses you can find that still look good and work well. And then just try to keep them around until you find the right thing. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, from the gaming handhelds to all of our reviews of all of those wearable face pewter thingies at TheVerge.com. I'll put some links in the show notes.

1:22:46But as always, read TheVerge.com. There is a lot going on right now. So go check out the site. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or handheld gaming consoles that I should buy, email us, vergecast at theverge.com, or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We'd love hearing from you. It's my favorite. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about all the AI news, all the Apple public beta stuff, and everything else happening this week.

1:23:20We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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