Rabbit, Ballie, and the other gadgets of CES 2024

26:22Yes. Just a huge... It's only going to cost 2.3 billion dollars. Probably. Don't worry about hail. You'll be fine. It was not full last night. It was, in fact, mostly empty. Yeah. Is that because I was just like, magnetically drawn to the screen. Regardless of what was on the screen, I would have been happy. Postcard from Earth, I think, is not drawing a crowd. No. Anyhow. We've got to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about some gadgets. We've got some standards. CES, stay tuned for the first test. We'll be right back.

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28:11All right, we're back. Vergecast day two at CS. The Kia connected home. It's actually like CS day four. It's just the second Vergecast. Yeah. I've been doing this for 15 years, and I still have no idea how to number any of these things. We've been here for eight days. It's CES day three. Yeah. None of it makes any sense. I spent the whole day thinking it was Friday. The only thing that makes sense is the sphere, David. The giant, ridiculous spectacle. When you walk into the sphere.

28:39Like the lobby of the sphere is like bathed in blue light. There's like bad robots talking about the future at you. And you're like, oh, you just made like an Epcot center. Like you went to the warehouse of old Epcot technologies. Do you ride on a little train and get to see like the caveman? No, they ran out of money well before that happened. Yeah. That's what the postcard from Earth is supposed to be, I guess. Yeah. Right at the Spaceship Earth where you go up. Yeah. Right. No, there's a definite vibe at the Sphere where you're like, well, this is where they ran out of money. They built the screen and they're like, hmm, this carpet.

29:11Just porta-potties everywhere. If you are in Vegas, please, if you're listening to this and you're ever coming to Vegas, just go look at the screen. It's an insane screen. Don't look at Postcard from Earth, I think is what I would say. Yeah, that's right. I think Fish is coming in April. Go see Fish. That's the move. That's appropriate. Oh, that's very good. Actually, speaking, we've got to talk about standards. There's a bunch of standards news here at CS. But speaking of just screen mishaps, you and I both saw Samsung Bolly demos. Poor Bolly. And we saw different mishaps. What was yours? From a first time people at Bolly.

29:45So Bolly is the sort of little rolling home robot that Samsung is making. We saw it last year and we saw a new version of it this year. And its new thing is basically it's a robot assistant projector. Yeah. So last year it had no projector. Right. Yeah. Okay. And this year, the demo is actually sort of convincing. It's like this little thing that will follow you around, and you're like, oh, I'm doing a workout, and it'll project your workout on the wall. And then he went to do sit-ups, and so it started projecting the workout on the ceiling. And I was like, that's awesome. And it can make calls for you.

30:16It knows your schedule. It's just like it's a little adorable smart speaker that just kind of like ambles around your house. Like, I'm into it. I love it. The demo I saw, so they were doing these as shows, like once an hour. It was like Bolly will appear. And Bolly comes out. They do the first half of the demo. It's going fine. And then Bollie is supposed to, I believe the first time it went wrong, Bollie was supposed to make a phone call. And what Bollie is supposed to do is project the phone call like up on the wall. So you can see who you're talking to whatever. Bollie projected it upside down and about three inches off the ground.

30:51So all you could see was the word like flower shop upside down on the wall. and then Bollie went around to try and you know help him see his calendar upside down and teeny tiny and then for the last part of the demo rolls it back over the wall and the guy's like oh show me what's in my fridge so I can decide what to make leaving aside that his fridge is literally standing front fridge to him yeah like he could have reached out with his left hand and opened the fridge and instead he's like Bollie what's inside the fridge Bollie projects nothing on the wall just nothing and this poor guy who clearly has a script to follow stands there and he goes hmm, so I have some apples.

31:29And that was the moment that like the panic level among all the Samsung employees just started to spike and the demo ended very quickly after that. Yeah, it's over. I saw the same Bali show. I thought the Call the Flower Shop demo was very fun. It was just the same way we were talking about the rabbit. He's like, what's on my calendar? And Bali shows a calendar. It's like it's your anniversary. And he's like, okay, call the flower shop. And he just says call the flower shop. and if you've ever done a search in your life, you know that is not a thing. You can just instruct any assistant to do. There's not a thing on Google Maps called the flower shop.

32:03Yeah, it's like 10 ,000 sponsored listings later and then he calls the flower shop. He makes the phone call and like this is, you know, it's a demo, it's fake, but whatever. But he's like, any dozen roses and like come in right your way and hang up. I was like, that's not how that works at all. And then he's like, I'm gonna make dinner. He does the apple thing. And then in mine, the mishap was, he went to go watch a cooking video and Bollie was supposed to Oh, I didn't even get that far. Shut yours down. Mine, he was like, I'm going to do some cooking. And it was supposed to project it above the kitchen sink.

32:36But Bollie missed and presented it teeny tiny on the side of the cabinet. And he just kept going as though that wasn't happening. Just keep looking down, double checking all your instructions. It's very good. I love the idea of Bollie. I think it would be very fun to have a little projector that follows you around showing you things. My favorite thing about it was every time he would ask it a question, it would project little arrows on the ground telling you, like, follow me over to this wall so I can show you. And it was great. And he's just, like, chasing this little ball around the living room.

33:05It was so good. There's a real workout demo. Yeah. Did this happen? It sounds like your demo was much higher stakes than mine. Mine mostly went fine. The workout demo is like, time for my workout. And he's, like, stretching. And he's standing in front of a television. Yeah. And said Bali rolled to the left of the television, projected the workout video on the wall next to the TV, which everyone has, just a wide blank wall next to the TV. Yeah, same. And then just insisted on making us watch a Meghan Trainor video on the television. I was like, this isn't what I want at all. I don't want this experience.

33:37Yes. It was very good. All right, so that's Bali. It was good. It's cute. Yeah, it's cute. Yeah. All right, we should talk about some standards. So lots of smart home stuff happening in CS, eating toilets, clumsy projector robots, what have you. Let's start with just some smart home stuff. So Jen, too, is here, our smart home reviewer. She's killing it as always. Basic stuff. So matter and thread are always a big deal. At CS, we're into, what, year 35 of trying to make matter a thing. It's going to happen this year. This year's for sure. The big news around Matter is that Matter is supposed to work with a wireless standard called Thread.

34:19Thread is built into all kinds of things now. The iPhone 15 Pro has a Thread radio in it for totally mysterious reasons. But the Apple TV has it. The Nest Hubs have it. The issue is that Thread is supposed to form a low-power mesh network in your house. So you get an Apple TV. You've got a Thread device. You get a Nest Hub. You get an Eero. they all sort of form one pretty good resilient thread network. And up until yesterday, the specification did not allow that to happen. So instead they would all create their own. Competing little networks. Yeah, and you would have like this fight. Like my Eero has a different thread network running in my house than my Apple TV.

34:59And I just shut the thread radios off my Eero because this is useless. That is bad because there's more Eeros in my house than Apple TVs. and so that should just be the good network. Right. But you can't pass the credit. It's like all just a mess. So the news here at CS is that Thread, the Thread Group, which definitely sounds like a consulting company that Jason Bourne works for, they've murdered a number of high-value targets and they've also released a specification that lets all of those devices pass credentials to one another, which Jen specifically has been saying is the thing that needs to happen.

35:35Yeah. Nothing has shipped with it yet. It's a software update. They're all going to do it. But this is some, like, baseline spec news at CS that I think is very important. Because it's going to get you to the place where in your house you have a Wi-Fi network for high power usage, high data usage, and a thread network for smart locks and light switches. We'll see. Fingers crossed. As someone who relies on a thread network. What's on your thread network? I have my fingers the light for the entryway so I can climb up the stairs at night at my apartment. I like to be able to see. Yeah. Seems reasonable.

36:08Yeah. Sometimes it doesn't work and I'm like, okay, cool. I've got the Schlage door locks on a thread network with the Apple TV. Yeah. I don't know why. Yeah. I just like knowing it's on a different network than the Wi-Fi. Yeah. These batteries last 30 % longer. Nailed it. These were more expensive than the other smart locks. Then there's a bunch of just sort of like basic stuff standards-wise as it comes to smart homes. So with Matter, Matter is extending. It's going to do robot vacuums this year. It just keeps getting bigger. And then dear sweet Amazon announced that instead of using Chromecast or AirPlay, it will now support casting content from Prime Video with Matter, which no one else supports.

36:51It's one of those things that it's like if we had all decided to do this a long time ago, the world would be a better place. It is patently absurd that you have 11 different technologies just to send a thing from your phone to your television. But we're out on that one. It's like people who are like, Dorak keyboards are better than QWERTY. That's great for you. It's irrelevant. I don't care anymore. We should put the accelerator on the left. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe we should have done that in 1915. But we didn't. Yeah, exactly. And so now you have yet another way to send prime video to things, which I'm sure tons of people do all the time.

37:31So Amazon makes its own TVs. Yeah. They can insist on it. Really popular set-top box, too. Yeah, the Fire TV is popular. I want to joke about this thing a lot, but also Amazon's right behind Roku with one of the most popular set-top situations. I'm excited for Andy Jassy to have a meeting with Tim Cook where he's like, we'd love for you to support Mattercasting. on iOS. I don't think that's going to happen. I just assume he'll close his laptop. Tim Cook just puts on his Vision Pro. He's like, I am on the top of a volcano now, sir. He just puts on the screensaver thing on the outside. He's like, I'm done.

38:08His eyes are just playing. This meeting's over. Just looking at Tim Cook's dead virtual eyes while he just disassociates from this conversation. That's exactly what's going to happen. That sounds about right. So, similar note, LG is supporting Google Cast. This is a big announcement. Samsung is not. This is the silliest thing. Yeah. Like, so Google has Nearby Share. I'm like, there's a 100 % chance I'm going to get all these names wrong. Google has Nearby Share. Samsung has Quick Share. Google is now renaming Nearby Share to Quick Share and just giving it to Samsung. Yeah, and they're just going to put them together.

38:42And then LG is just off to the side being like, we don't have any of this anymore. We don't make phones, but we're going to use Google Casts on our TVs. Samsung is like, we're partnering with Google on Quick Share, but we're not going to put Google Cast on. It's just a mess. This whole thing is a mess, which is why basically AirPlay 2 continues to be the thing that people gravitate to. And then Google Cast is the thing on Android, the thing people gravitate to, except for Amazon Prime Video. And then lastly, just on smart home gadgets, we still live in a world of hubs and bridges. They're inescapable.

39:16But a thing that's happening is they're all kind of converging and the idea that you will have just one kind of main hub. Thank God. In your house. It's not quite there yet, but Aquara, which is sort of an upstart smart home company. I've got Aquara Smartbox in addition to my Slade. Super expensive thread ones for no reason. They're very good. They go on sale every – they're constantly on sale. They're motion sensors. They're great. Yeah, and they're a really interesting company. They've got an interesting proximity sensor. But they've got a new hub, the Hub M3. We've been talking about it for a year or more.

39:50It's a Zigbee hub for all the Zigbee devices. It's also a thread border router, and it is a matter controller if you want to be a matter thing. So this is the thing that should be able to control like hue lights and eaveshades and work with your Nest thermostat. And not require you to use Home Assistant because Home Assistant has a similar hub, but it requires you to use Home Assistant. and a lot of people aren't as nerdy as myself. A lot of Home Assistant stans are about to get real mad at you. Yeah. I mean, I'm one of you. I use Home Assistant. I love it. I have the Home Assistant yellow. But like a lot of people don't want that.

40:24They want something a little more turnkey. Yeah, this is the like non-sick hacker version. Yeah. If it works. If it works. I just want to point out, Thread and Matter, like every year at TS we track like, okay, there's a bunch of smart home products. The standards are growing. The big companies are still all over the place with things like – as simple as like I'm watching a video on my phone. I want it on TV. Still a mess, right? Like still fundamentally a mess unless you are pretty firmly in the Apple ecosystem, which is Apple's argument to be fair. This is Apple. Like stay in this prison and we will care for you.

40:56Three hots that caught in consistent, reliable video casting. That's the Apple way. But it's getting better and some of these products are interesting. Okay, so that's the smart home stuff. You want to talk about Wi-Fi 7 or Alex, do you want to talk about ATSC 3.0? I will talk about ATSC 3.0 forever. I mean, this is Alex's baby. Yeah. You saw a pretty cool demo. Yeah, I saw a really cool demo. ATSC 3.0 famously came out many, many years ago and nothing happened because no one wanted to spend the money to upgrade all of their broadcast towers to ATSC 3.0 because it's expensive and all you would get was like slightly higher quality.

41:32And they're like, well, why would I want to do that? That's dumb. Yeah. And so this company, Roxy, thinks it's figured out a way, which is that – It's Roxy with an I, by the way. It's Roxy with an I. Very important. Very important. R-O-X-I. It's good. Yeah. They also do like a music app, and so they're bringing that music app as a channel. And so right now as we're recording, if you're in Vegas and you happen to have an ATSC 3.0 tuner on your TV – Which you almost certainly don't. You could if you recently bought an LG, but not this year's, just last year. If you're one of three people in Vegas to whom this applies.

42:05Yeah, you can go and you can watch this channel. And then you can pause the music on the channel. You can skip tracks. You can choose other like stations within the channel itself. All in the channel, all broadcast. And I was like, okay, well, do you need Wi-Fi? And they said Wi-Fi will like increase the quality, the visual quality, but like the interactivity, no, you don't need it. Really? It's all broadcast. That's just not how I would expect that to work. Yeah, and I was like, oh, cool. They're claiming that they basically put, they called it a transitory app. just a little tiny app that goes onto the TV and operates on the TV while you're on the channel.

42:40And then it leaves the short-term memory once you leave the channel. So ATC 3.0 increases the bandwidth? Yeah. It's a digital signal. And part of the spec has the storage in there. It can send you the bits to run a little baby app. Yeah. That's pretty neat. How does it send a signal back to the TV station if you want to buy something? So they're having to use AWS. They're going through servers. So that all is happening. And the money side of it was my other question there. They figured out instead of using broadcast ads, which I guess don't make as much money, they can use streaming TV ads. So they can use a more lucrative ad on it.

43:12And they're partnering with Sinclair, who has like 40 % of broadcast standard. Like they own 40 % of broadcast stations in the United States. They can't own any more because then they'd be a monopoly. So that's the only reason they haven't purchased more. They're partnering with it. They're super excited about it. And they're insisting that it's going to be on all in every market that has ATSC 3.0 by the end of this quarter. I'm really curious about that because there's 60 % of markets that aren't completely owned by Sinclair. But they're like, no, no, no, we got this. So the guy was like very, very emphatic about that.

43:49So we'll see if that actually happens. But like this is cool. I would love to be able to, you know, you could think about it. Like Max could theoretically, not your child, but. I mean, I love her dearly and every now and again I regret naming her Max. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, she could become a new broadcast channel. But like theoretically Max could like be on this. Their examples were QVC or something like that. Of course. Like, yeah. There's always transactions. Transaction, buy stuff, choose the weather, skip to your actual weather on the station while still watching the news, that sort of thing.

44:22So, like, this has been a promise for a very long time, and nobody's actually, like, shipped it. And so that's why this is really, really exciting. So this is, like, over-the-air interactive television. Over-the-air interactive television. No internet required. No internet required. And that's, I think, super crucial because there's so many people in the United States who don't have easy, cheap access to internet. Yeah. So, like, they don't get to go watch all the cool stuff we get to watch. And this would theoretically, if everybody adopted it, would give them more opportunities. It is super cool.

44:50I think all of the interactive stuff, though, I wonder about because like on the streaming side of it, there's no reason that hasn't been possible for forever. And still nobody has – like Amazon cannot figure out how to do a good job of letting you be like, I would like to buy the chips in this ad, please. Like you're showing me a commercial for Fritos. Please allow me to buy these Fritos. Amazon doesn't know how to do that yet. And so the idea that they're all going to figure this out on – We're doing that with Prime Video. They're getting there. Yeah. Yeah. Slowly. Yeah. I suspect that one, like, right now it's just going to be this Roxy Music app.

45:27That's all we're going to – or the Roxy Music channel. That's all we're going to see. You know, maybe they could work with QVC and QVC and them could put their heads together and figure this out. Okay. But here's my question. Yeah. It's always QVC. It's always shopping. It's always QVC. Right? The other thing you could do with ATS3 Pruno is improve the picture quality. Yeah. Well, that's the part I think is exciting. Please, someone improve the picture quality. Like, to your point about the broadband stuff. The idea that just, A, you're going to be able to send what amounts to streaming services over broadband is really exciting for all the reasons you're talking about.

45:56Over broadcast, sorry. Yeah. Is super exciting. And then also the fact that the picture quality could be better. But I just wonder if any of the stakeholders involved in this care enough about ATSC3 anymore to pick this fight. It's like the matter casting. Like, we should have done this a decade ago and everything would be better. Sinclair needs it. Like, if Sinclair doesn't figure this out, like, they're done. You know, 10 years from now, broadcast TV is dead. Like last year we did a lot of reporting about how people were watching less broadcast TV. So it's on its last legs. It needs something.

46:26And if this can get those companies – and a lot of these streaming companies own broadcast networks, right? Like ABC or Disney does. Paramount does. I believe Max owns a lot of cable channels. There is certainly opportunity for these people and the fact that this company has figured out this tech. This is lucrative spectrum. Yeah. You should be able to do something good with it. Right. Ideally, you increase the picture quality and stop broadcasting football on 720p. Instead, you're going to buy. But instead, we're doing QVC. Yeah. It's great. All right. Let's talk about some other standards. By the way, you should go watch just the glee on Alex's face.

46:58That's the best. It's a video. Just watch the video. The way that I felt at the sphere, Alex felt downloading ATSC 3.0 interactivity. People stopped to watch because I think I was just that excited. Yeah. People coming into the booth. A little bit later today, I'm going to go look at some party speakers. and I feel like I'm going to be the most excited person to go through the party speaker tour. They're going to just join you. People are just going to follow you. Feel your enthusiasm. And they're like, why? Just some other quick standards to talk about. Chi 2, it's the magnetic wireless standard that is basically mag safe.

47:30It's here. There's some products. Yeah, there's a lot of it. The good news is less about a specific product and more about it. It just feels like everybody has decided to embrace Chi 2, which is awesome. Including Apple, which is the big one. Right, including Apple. We're going to start to see a lot of Android phones with it this year. Everybody thinks that new Pixel is going to have it. The momentum on this is super real and happening fast to the point where I think, and we've talked a lot on this show about how cool it will be when we have a bunch of unified systems for accessories, and we're getting it with USB-C, we're getting it with Qi2.

48:02It's going to be good things. Yeah, so we've got some photos of Docs from Sateshi and other companies. There's a Belkin thing that works with Apple's new Doc Kit. Yeah. I absolutely forgot Dock Kit was a thing. Yeah. Apple is like, we made an accessory standard, and you're so used to being like, and that'll be one company will try it. But now because of USB-C and she too, companies are free to try it. It's like less costly in a way. So Belkin made a camera dock. You put it on it, and Dock Kit motorized is the dock while you're in FaceTime mode. So it'll follow you around. I don't know if that's cool.

48:36I think it's cool that people made a thing. Yeah. Yeah, that works really cool. Is this anything that's David's? Yeah, is this anything? I will say, I hate, I hate the webcams that automatically move to keep you in the center of the frame. It is the worst experience to be on a call with somebody while their camera is constantly moving every time they move their head. But it's like, it's just pan and zoom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, or pan and scan, right? But like, if you watch something that is constantly panning and scanning, it sucks. Hey, Bella Porch built an entire TikTok career off that effect, man.

49:06What are you doing? Fair enough. All right. Alex, what is going on with Wi-Fi 7? It's everywhere. It's like having a moment. It's having a moment. It's faster. Yeah. Okay. But it's faster because it can do a thing, right? It can use multiple radio channels at the same time. It's faster. It can use multiple radio channels. The big thing is that – I don't know what other feature you want from Wi-Fi other than faster. No one wants anything else from Wi-Fi. It's also a delivery service. Go fast. It's now interactive. You can connect QVC with it and buy all sorts of things. You can look at Macs on it now.

49:43Which one? All of them. But, yeah, I think the big thing is that it's going to be smarter about how it handles your traffic. So if you're on the 5 gigahertz and it's getting jammed with stuff, it'll switch you over automatically to 6. And this is just like – but the main thing is it's just it's faster. It's getting a lot faster. It's getting smarter about how it handles all those packets. Yeah. And you can probably, like, you're going to find laptops with it now because a bunch of the laptops announced it to the point where I was like, oh, I guess it's just everywhere now. The cheaper laptops don't have it, but anything like the XPS line has it.

50:20Almost all of the gaming laptops that were announced have it. Is it just all the stuff with the new Intel? Yeah, it seems like primarily the new Intel. But you still have to have, like, the Wi-Fi chip, and that's expensive. Right. And so, like, sometimes they're like, no, we're not going to put the new Wi-Fi in. Yeah, that's fair. But yeah, so it's going to be available this year. I'm hesitant to tell people to go out and buy those Wi-Fi 7 routers. I think you can still – Well, they've only just started certifying. Yeah. So you can buy them now, but they're uncertified, and the promise is that a software update will certify them.

50:50We just got – was it Wi-Fi 6E like last year or something? I only know that because I bought a Wi-Fi 6 router, and then it was immediately that out 6E, and I was very bitter about it. That's how I feel too. I just bought new Eros and their Wi-Fi 6 because I was like, who needs 6E? Like, that's barely anything. Yeah, now they're like 7. And now I'm looking at 7. I'm like, I'm two generations behind now. So this is all just, this is like the Wi-Fi companies are doing what the TV companies did where they just want to make you jealous every year. Yeah. So you're like, okay, I guess I better go spend$3 ,000 on a new router.

51:19Yeah, I would wait until there's the second generation of routers when things calm down. The last thing you want is for there to be software instability in your network infrastructure. No fair. So like unless you need for some reason like a two gigabit per second Wi-Fi link. If you live like in an apartment. Which we all do. By yourself. Really small. Your router's old. You see one of these like giant – because it's going to be all like the giant gaming routers. You want to spend$400 or$500 on that thing? You know, I'm not going to judge you. I've done that. Not for 7, but I've definitely done that.

51:54But otherwise, probably wait. No, the Eero Max 7 is not$400 or$500. It's like – Oh, no. I'm thinking like the gaming. The gaming ones are also like – they usually start at$400 or$500, but then they immediately go up. A single Eero Max 7 is$600, and the three-pack is$1 ,700. That's outrageous. Just wait. Don't spend that much money on a router. Like it's fast, but is it that much faster than six? Particularly because you're still going to be like hampered by the fact that you have to pay your ISP, who probably is going to give you garbage internet. So unless you're just moving a lot of big files on your Plex server, you're probably fine.

52:32My local network is sick now. I'm pre-ordering a 17-meter all around. I haven't pre-ordered any, I swear. But Wi-Fi 7 is here. It seems like it's going to be the next. 6E seems very transitory. I also have a 6E network, and I feel very annoyed. Yeah. Whatever. Next year. Next year. And then lastly, on the standards front, I will say the Verge team was the most irrationally excited about this. I don't know why, but Thunderbolt 5 is here. And we have a lot of pictures of USB-C ports with stickers on them that indicate they support Thunderbolt 5. They're just pictures of USB-C ports. Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't run pictures of USB-C ports here at The Verge.

53:12I am perhaps the most guilty of publishing photos of ports on our website and excitedly telling people that the future is here. I've done it a lot. But I'm just telling you, it's not even a different shape of port. Yeah. It's a USB-C port with a sticker on it. They're Thunderbolt 5. Thunderbolt 5 offers 240-watt charging, 120 gigabit per second data transfer, and will support monitors up to 540 hertz refresh rates on the new version. Can you bring a 240-watt charger on a plane? That's like past FAA rules, right? No, that's the battery size. You can't bring more than a 100-watt hour battery. Okay, so this is fine.

53:49Yeah, you can put two of those together. But you need it for some of the GPUs that you need to support 540 hertz refresh rates. This is the next standard. There are some laptops here. Again, you can look at the photos of the ports with the stickers on them on the website. But Thunderbolt 5 is here. And Sean talked to the person at Intel responsible for Mr. Thunderbolt, who he referred to in print on our website as Mr. Thunderbolt. Wow. And I refuse to learn his real name. Intel's Mr. Thunderbolt, when asked if Apple would support Thunderbolt 5, simply said to Sean, will they support every other one?

54:24That's all you need to know. We also have a photo of our Thunderbolt 5 cable. It looks like a Thunderbolt cable. I'm telling you, like, our whole team is so excited. Like, there was, like, a hunt to get that first picture of a Thunderbolt 5. Look, man, like, two weeks ago, we made a whole VergeCast episode about how stupid USB-C is. This is not stupid USB-C. This is the good USB-C. So we should be excited about this. I'm excited about it. It's very good. Yeah. All right. We got to take a break. That was the standards lightning round here at the Vergecast Episode 2 CES Day 4. Still unsponsored.

54:56Still unsponsored. Well, no, we're here at the Kia Connected home. Yeah, that's true. Very good. We'll be back. We got another car lightning round to come in David's rubric of things that are not screens. Cars is next. We'll be right back.

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56:30All right, we're back. CES Vergecast 2, day four. Month one. Hour 12. Year 2024. last little lightning round of CS coverage. This show over the years has become a car show. There's just cars everywhere. We're literally sitting in the Kia connected home. There's cars all around us. Every kind of car tech that you can think of is being demoed here. I saw a power steering pump on the show floor the other day. The Bosch. Wow. Sure. Like, here's a thing. And I was like, that's consumer technology. I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. Consumers love steering wheels. Yeah. Literally every piece of the car is being recontextualized to be connected, to be smart, to be an EV.

57:17David, run us through some of the highlights here. So that thing you said is actually kind of why I think the car stuff is really interesting because it feels like we got a bunch of cars. There's like new versions of existing cars, right? There's a lot of that at CES every year. There's a lot of that this year. This year felt unusually also like we got a bunch of things that are shaped like cars that are barely cars. Yes. Yes. And I think like the Sony Afila, which is probably the first one we should talk about, is to me the closest version of that thing. This is like borderline not a car. It just looks like a car.

57:51But it's like a lounge area that runs places. Theoretically. But the car part seems to be the least important and least fleshed out part of this car. They've spent a lot of time thinking about the seats. Yeah. And that's about it. I just think that's weird. We're in this like strange time with cars where like Honda has this very cool new concept series called Honda Zero. Hyundai and Kia are doing interesting stuff. They're all over the place. There's just like a Bugatti chilling on the floor for reasons that I don't totally understand. But it just feels like a lot of the cars here aren't cars.

58:27I saw a tank. My tank. You saw a tank? There's like a little like tiny tank over. There's a company here called Dodge Brothers with e-bikes, but they bought a Dodge Challenger. And everyone's like, what's this for? And they're like, we just brought it to get attention. It's very good. It's just a good car. So the way I always thought about this for years was at CS we saw the future of the inside of cars. And then the Detroit Auto shows in a few weeks here. Well, that's where we'll see the outside of cars. Oh, I like that. The thing that is, I think, not the case anymore. Because I think what is happening in a big way is the outside cars are going retro.

58:59There's cool design stuff. Like these Honda concepts are really cool. The inside of cars, that is what is selling the cars now. So if you just think, like I love watching car reviews on YouTube. You watch Doug DeMiro. You watch Forrest Auto Reviews. Miles Summerall is on the MKBH team I saw the other day. He makes great TikTok car reviews. Everyone's like flipping buttons and counting cup holders and like pushing, right? Like quirks and futures is the thing. Because that's where you spend your time. Because you're inside the car. Yeah. So that whole thing has moved to the Detroit, because that's how you're going to sell cars now.

59:28right it's like and is that just because especially as things go ev like the the experience of what it's going to be like to drive this thing just compresses to the point where like driving an ev is going to be like driving an ev is going to be like driving an ev you see how the car companies talk about mobility yeah because they're like you're gonna get the car it's gonna drive you where do you want to go and in the meantime you'll be awash in a sea of sony ip just transacting you'll be spider-man just right spider-man's a flyer on the car and you're gonna be watching in our streaming service.

59:59If you could put Braviacore in the Sony Afila, I'll buy it. 80 megabits per second in the Sony Afila. I guarantee you that's a thing. Do you think it's because I'm at CS? I've been wondering this all week. Braviacore usage has to have dropped by like 200 % because I'm not at home. Who's watching Spider-Man? Anyhow, so the Afila is really interesting because I kind of get what Sony needs from Honda. Can you make us a car? What I've been wondering is what does Honda get from Sony? And the answer is a universe of screens and content. But that just doesn't feel like enough to sell me a car. I mean, but also most of the car makers, most, not all, are garbage at, like, the software side of things.

1:00:42Right, so you see why Honda would turn to noted software experience provider, Sony. I mean, if you're garbage at it, it makes sense. Can you imagine if, like, the interface of the Sony of Fila is the same menu structure as, like, any Sony camera? You just spend 45 minutes every time you get in your car or even go anywhere. Terrific image quality. You have to format your car before you go into drive. You brought the wrong format card. Sorry. It's actually memory sticks. We're doing weird Sony memory formats. So that's Afila, which is interesting. You look at the pictures. But it's very much less about the car, more about will you watch a bunch of Sony content on these Sony screens.

1:01:23And I think the answer is, well, I have a phone. so no. And it will just, it's not, it's the most vaporware of the vapor cars. Like this year, instead of a picture of it, you can like look at one. Yeah, you can sit in the passenger seat. Yeah, but it's still, I guess that's part of what is like leaving me cold with a lot of stuff is it doesn't really feel like any of this is getting more real year after year. Like I think we're in a phase with car design that I think is not going to last forever where everybody is just designing cars that are like the capital F future. You know what I mean? Like everything looks like a Blade Runner prop now.

1:01:59And that's fun, but eventually we'll like start making EVs that look like cars again. Like that will happen. We'll come back to it. We'll see. You don't think so? You think we're just going to stay in this like the year 3000 phase? It all depends on autonomy. I think right now we're on the cusp of what feels like a really fun design renaissance in cars. Cars are real ugly for a long time. Oh, yeah. Like the angry robot car was just everywhere for a minute. Yeah. And now there's like some very cool like smoothed out retro designs are all over the place. The Honda ones we're talking about. Hyundai and Kia.

1:02:33There's that Hyundai N concept that kind of looks like a DeLorean. Like that stuff is really cool. You know, we're sitting above an EV9. People keep coming and looking at the EV9. You can just see like car companies are getting the new Prius. Yeah. It's like a surprisingly cool looking car. Yeah. Finally. Dog slow and surprisingly cool looking car. We were just on the cusp of what I think is a good moment for car design. And it's because you can read the EV stuff lets you repackage cars and think about them a different way. And they want them to look different from what came before because they want to signal consumers like these aren't just cars.

1:03:06And then on top of that, you might get to autonomy, which is a real coin flip and one that will happen. And then you get to really repackage the car into the thing that looks nothing like a car. So I totally agree with that. But like this Honda concept is just the Batmobile. Like they just made the Batmobile. Yeah, there's a lot of that going around here. I just think we might have swung the pendulum a little far. Yeah. I mean it's a concept. But now I'm looking at the picture of this and this thing is hot. It's hot. Maybe I'm wrong. I was like I would have had that on my wall when I was like eight.

1:03:35Right. But these are all concepts. They're all out in the world. And you look at what's actually being announced. It's like BMW put an LLM in the voice assistant. Okay. There's a bunch of AR features in the new BMW. It's like, why? Yeah. Right? Volkswagen is letting you talk to chat GPT inside the car, which I am told people have just been doing anyway on, like, the streets of San Francisco. I'm going to try it on my road trip. Like, someone told me yesterday, like, more people, more tech people in San Francisco are driving around just chatting to chat GPT instead of listening to podcasts than you think.

1:04:09Don't they have, like, siblings, parents, loved ones? This makes me think of like every once in a while there's like an app that comes out that's like turn all of your emails into a daily podcast. And I'm like who wants that? And then it's these people it turns out. Yeah. I just like the idea that people are getting out of their cars just woefully misinformed. Yeah. Just utterly be like I know a lot of facts that this robot made. But none of the numbers are right. A whole list of books that don't exist that they're going to read. Exactly. They're like ready to read books that have never been written.

1:04:40on the flip side of that there is a lot of just infrastructure here at CS Intel I think this can only be read as a threat Intel had a whole keynote where they announced a bunch of AI stuff and then the quote is we are bringing the AI PC to the car whether you like it or not Intel wants this to be a big market for them you can see that they would like to bring car makers to use their chips they're very late NVIDIA is very dominant all over the cars But this notion that a car should be one sort of unified computer from the body control module all the infotainment stack, I think Intel sees as an opportunity.

1:05:16And then let's just end here. We should just talk about Will.i.am and Mercedes. Do we have to? So I was sent a video by a good friend of the Mercedes event, which I'm told was very expensive to produce. and will.i.am comes out and he rapped a song about cars he just did it and then the feature they announced is that this is actually cool I don't know if you've seen this video or any demos of it it's an interactive musical experience in the car so it's like playing a track and will.i.am obviously has chosen all the samples and if you speed up the track gets more exciting oh I don't want that and it feels like it's just going to make you drive really fast I was like my car just screaming at me as I drive down the road.

1:06:05Have you ever seen the movie Baby Driver? Yeah. Yeah. Like the thing in that movie that's so cool is the music is matched up to what's going on. So like he's steering on beat and drifting on beat and it just – it rips, dude. Like it's so fun the whole time. Can you imagine – I could do that. You watch that. You watch Fast and Furious. You get in this car. Immediate accident. Like you're going 100 miles per hour straight out. You're like I can drift around this corner in my neighborhood. Will.i.am yelling at you the whole way home. So it's the MBUX sound drive or MBUX sound drive. It links the music that you're listening to is driving.

1:06:41So it's a bunch of tracks, a bunch of samples, and things like energy recuperation, acceleration, steering, braking, and turning all linked to what is being played. And Will.i.am refers to this as the automotive orchestra. Okay. I love it. There was a thing a bunch of years ago, and it's possible. I'm going to get all of the details of this wrong, where I think it was Spotify did a thing with Tiesto that had basically adaptive Tiesto songs to your workout so that the faster you were moving, the faster Tiesto would go. Yeah. And I tried it out, and it was pretty cool because it keeps up with the beat as you're running and you fall into the right pace.

1:07:22100 % everyone is going to crash their cars as soon as they start using it. Well, there's other things that happen too. For example, if it's raining and you turn on your windshield wipers, it'll play lo-fi beats at you. So you can drive home sadly in the rain. So you drive slow. I was in love once. In my Mercedes Benz. If you get in the car and you, like, roll into the McDonald's drive-thru, like, what does it start playing? Mercedes wants SoundDrive to be an open music platform so that any musician create their own auditory soundscape for driving using the MBUX operating system. This is, like, why I'm at CES.

1:07:54I want to be very clear. this specific nonsensical idea with Will.i.am. Just mash it all. I'm surprised they haven't put the words AI in this in any way, shape, or form. I'm just imagining being a kid in this car. You know when you'd sit in the back and you'd like, when it's raining on your car, you're just thinking really heavy thoughts in the back of the car as a little kid. But now you'll have this soundtrack going with it, like the lo-fi soundtrack. I just want it to like play me depressing music while I like shove Taco Bell in my face on a long road trip. like what's the vibe there one hand on the wheel tacos in the other hand like yeah the one where Will.i.am is like you got broken up with you can buy a taco and a burrito you know what I'm saying like that Crunchwrap alone ain't gonna ain't gonna take this home we've all been there all right that's the Verge Cast day two episode two day four at CES 2024 right seems good it was a good CES yeah I will say it was good, and I got to go sit in the sphere.

1:08:57Almost religious experience, capped off by an almost religious movie. Thank you for joining us. Thank you to Kia for letting us use our space to do shows. Thank you. The whole Verge team has just been killing it this week. Please read the site. Check out our Best of CES stuff. The Best of CES. It's coming right now. It's going up. The TikTok channel is full of really fun videos. CES is really fun every year. It's a great way to start the year. There's just a bunch of tech. So it's been really fun. thanks for listening thanks for watching see you next week bye for long

1:09:32and that's a wrap for Vergecast this week hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866-VERGE-11 the Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network the show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James this episode was mixed and edited by Zandra Adams and that's it we'll see you next week

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