Tesla’s big, epic, confusing future

24:05Oh, that's a good one. idea of this like big broad network of teslas and what that can be in the world feels like it's about to get tested in a pretty real way after a lot of talk over the last few years and obviously autopilot and self-driving is part of that because like the first part of robo taxi means there's not a person this is not an uber for tesla thing this is a very different thing tesla is trying to go for and like it feels like that's coming to a head here pretty fast no yeah i mean it just sort of goes back to this idea that I put forward, which is that they're trying to explore many ways in which they can continue to hype Tesla and to justify the valuation that it's received over the years in ways that don't sort of expose kind of like the fundamental reality of what the company is, which is that it's a car company.

24:54But as soon as you put Tesla alongside of its fellow peers in the auto industry alongside, I don't know, Ford and GM, Chevy, Buick, Audi, Mercedes, it kind of loses its luster in a lot of ways because we know about car companies. We've seen them for decades and decades. You know, over a century now we've had car companies and there's just nothing that the story really doesn't lend itself so well to that kind of like excitement that has surrounded Tesla, but also Musk himself as someone who is like a futurist and is going to help usher in kind of like this more, this better future that we have planned for us.

25:30But, you know, I think it's just really kind of like this tension. And I think that that's why he's talking about things like robotics and AI, but even like the AWS stuff. I mean, that's just him spitballing. And I've spoken to a number of experts that have said, you know, that that's like the fact that Tesla vehicles are cars that they move around and go from place to place and don't have like a fixed location necessarily. It sort of undermines the idea of using it as some sort of distributed network from which to get more bang for your buck in terms of what an actual electric car can be used for, which I think sort of ignores some of the real potential behind EVs, which I think a lot of the other car makers have kind of seized upon, which is things like virtual power plants and sending energy back into the grid or using your EV as sort of like a mobile power generator that can help you out.

26:22If there's a blackout, there's a heat wave on the East Coast this week. There's going to be heat waves as part of our future fundamentally. We have to really kind of get used to that. And EVs could be a real good way to help make sure that people who do lose power don't lose the things that they really need the most, refrigeration and AC and things like that during these times. So there's a lot of things that EVs can be used for beyond just driving from A to B. And it doesn't seem like he really has, or the company really has much interest in those things. Yeah, that makes sense. So to that point, actually, my impression of Tesla for years has been that it was very early to a lot of things and was right about a lot of where things were going beforehand, even leaving all of the good and bad of Elon Musk aside.

27:08Tesla was right about the future pretty early on and correctly bet on a bunch of things, including electric vehicles. The story around Tesla the last few years seems to be that it has given up a lot of that lead as a car company, right? And that it's the sort of moat that it built for itself has like withered and dried up, I guess, to just like destroy that metaphor. Is that fair? Like, what is Tesla's moat as a car company at this point? And again, the answer is not allowed to be Elon Musk because we're going to come back to that. But as a pure technology and car company, does it have some of that moat and advantage still, or has the landscape around it just changed?

27:47Yeah, I think it's kind of a complicated answer, because I think in some aspects it does. Because I think we've seen, you know, the thing that was most often described as Tesla's moat was its supercharger network, right? That it made these cars that people wanted, you know, they were expensive and they were futuristic looking. But none of that would have worked if there was not the infrastructure, the charging infrastructure to support the ownership of those vehicles. And so Tesla very smartly realized that it needed to build that itself, that it was not going to get the help from the government or from maybe even like the supplier network and the third party aftermarket industry that exists.

28:23It needed to do it itself. And it did. It created what is still stands today as being the best and most reliable and most distributed EV charging network that exists on the planet. And they not only did that, but then they opened up that standard, the charging standard that they saw as being sort of more streamlined and cheaper and more sort of technologically proficient. and they opened it up to the rest of the industry. And they said, okay, this is not just ours anymore. This is the North American charging standard, the NACS. You all can use this. And Ford was the first to jump on board, and then GM followed, and then all the dominoes soon followed afterwards.

29:00And now we have every single major automaker in the world saying that not only will they give their own customers, their own EV owners, access to Tesla's network, but they will also adopt the plug for themselves on their future EVs. So we're going to start seeing Ford vehicles and GM vehicles come out with Tesla's plug versus the one that exists today, which is the CCS plug. And so that is, in a lot of ways, Tesla's moat and still stands today as Tesla's moat in protection against the future. But it was always going to be the case that it was not going to be able to maintain the market share that it had.

29:33I mean, it had the advantage of being first. So therefore, you know, I think at the most it had over 75 % of the EV sales as Tesla's. Eventually, and if it was successful, if it could guarantee the fact that it was successful, Other companies were going to inevitably follow its lead and make their own electric cars. And now you're starting to see that market share shrink. It's now around 50 percent. Its sales are down. Its revenue is down. Its profits have shrank. And so there's, you know, there's a lot of concern about, you know, sort of Tesla's future as a car company, which it's still for all the bluster about AI and robotics.

30:08It still is fundamentally a car company. Right. And is that because Tesla has lost some of its swagger or because everybody else has finally caught up or a little bit of both? I think a little bit of both. I think you've got the fact that it's not just a Tesla anymore. You can go out, you can take a look at these really great electric Hyundais and these great electric Kias. The Ford Mustang Mach-E remains a very popular vehicle. Now you've got electric trucks. You've got the electric F-150 and the Silverado, and there's more to come. And then if you don't even like some of those old, dusty old legacy car companies, there's Rivian and there's Polestar and there's all these other sort of newer Tesla light companies that have maybe as much of a sheen on them as Tesla did.

30:48And maybe you don't like the kind of things that Elon Musk stands for. You don't like the things he says on X. You don't like his positions, his political positions, which have obviously become more conservative and right wing over the last few years. And he's not shy about sharing those with the world. And so you find that to be abhorrent. You can, you know, there's plenty of other places for you to go. And I think that as we've seen in this presidential election now with electric vehicles becoming so politicized that if Republicans are railing against EVs in what you're left with is an entirely a progressive or democratic or left leaning customer demographic.

31:24Those people are not going to be willingly gobbling up Tesla's left and right. Maybe they begrudgingly will buy a Tesla because of how good the charging network is or the prices, which have come down significantly in the last few years. And now you can get a Tesla, especially a used one, for around$20 ,000,$25 ,000 in a lot of ways. The$25 ,000 EV exists, and it just happens to be a used Model 3. So I think in some ways that's become a lot more complicated, but in a lot of other ways, this is the way that it was always going to go, especially if Tesla was as successful as it has proven to be. Right.

31:59So you've brought me to my last Elon Musk question, and then I will let you go. I think a lot of this roadmap is really interesting to me. And Tesla deserves credit over the years for pulling off a lot of what it said it was going to do. It's been much weirder than we expected, but Tesla did a lot of the stuff it said it was going to do. And so to the extent that I want to give the company the benefit of the doubt that it has been able to do this in the past and might be able to do it again, that's one thing. But we've talked about this so much over the years that Elon Musk is Tesla and Tesla is Elon Musk.

32:26And I feel like what that means has changed. So I'm curious for your read right now in 2024, even different from what it was in 2018, the first time shareholders voted to give him all this money. What is your read on what Elon Musk means to Tesla in sort of this next phase? Like, is that that close association was undeniably good for Tesla for a really long time? Say what you will, it just it just was whether you were a person who liked electric vehicles or a person who owned Tesla stock. Victory's all around for a long time there. Do you think that's still the case in the next phase of this company, or has it sort of inexorably changed since 2018?

33:03I think it's still the case because if you look at the vote totals, you look at the way that people voted their shares, which there were billions of shares that were voted during this past shareholder vote. Over 70 % voted in favor of awarding him this pay package, which is a pretty strong sign that people see Tesla, and not only Tesla as it is today, but Tesla's future as some sort of undefined robotics company or whatever it is in the future, as being inextricably linked to Elon Musk and his ability to be the one that sort of is guiding that ship. So I think that that was a pretty clear sign.

33:37If we had seen, and it was pretty much, I think, the same percent that first awarded him that pay package back in 2018. So there's been six years, right, between these two votes. And we're seeing basically an unchanged vote total. That said, and I talked to a couple of experts in the midst of this, if you're someone who bought Tesla shares back in 2011, you are really happy with Elon Musk and the way that he's been leading this company. If you're someone who bought shares in 2023, you have probably a lot of questions. And you're probably wondering about what the post-Musk future is for Tesla. And he was asked that during the shareholder meeting, which he stood on stage and took a lot of questions.

34:15Many of them were not great questions. They left a lot to be desired. You know, as one can imagine at a Tesla event of this kind, you're going to get a lot of like, you know, sort of overt displays of fealty. I call them the how are you so terrific questions. Exactly. Yes. I call them sycophant questions. But anyway, you got a lot of those types of questions. But somebody did ask him something along the lines of like, you know, you're not going to live forever, which maybe Musk might disagree with. I know, right? He might. I know a lot of him and his friends are working on that problem right now.

34:48But that said, they're like, how's your health or something along the lines of that? And what's going to be the future of Tesla? And he gave the vaguest answer. He's like, I'm very excited and confident in the future of Tesla. There's just no one being lined up to take the reins of this company. In fact, most of the people that could have, I think, were fired in the last round of layoffs that they had. Most of the C-suite executives have departed. There's new people that have just come in. It just does not seem that they have any interest in grooming somebody. And that's it. I mean, Musk is not that old.

35:20He's still in his 50s and probably has long years ahead of him running this company. And it's very clear that that's what the shareholders want, which is why they voted in this way. So it just seems like, yes, the people who have said that Musk is Tesla and Tesla is Musk, that is more accurate today than it ever has been. And I think it's just a question of does he still see himself leading this company? And if so, what is his vision of the future? Because that's the one clearly that most people are interested in following. Right. And it sounds like very much under that world in which Elon Musk and Tesla are more connected than ever.

35:57Tesla is going to look less and less like a car company as time goes on. Yeah, it's possible. It's very possible that it becomes, you know, that the car aspect of its business shrinks. But if that's the case, they need to really start to think about how they're going to replace those revenues. because right now they're in a bit of a bind because it's over 80 % of their revenues are automotive. They still obviously pull in some revenue from the energy side of the business and from battery storage. The solar aspect of their business has remained pretty flat. It's not growing nearly as much as I'm sure a lot of analysts would like to see it grow.

36:32So there's just nothing really to replace the money yet. And obviously robotics and autonomy and the Tesla network and self-driving cars and the robo-taxi and all these things remain just far too theoretical for anyone to sort of like hang anything solid on. So I just think that if it wants to be this company that it's setting itself up for, it needs to start to demonstrate how it's actually going to make money. Otherwise, I think a lot of shareholders are going to feel very much like bag holders at the end of all of this. Yeah. At some point, you got to start selling stuff. That's how it works.

37:05That's how I'm told. There's a lot of that going on with AI in general. right now is it's all very shiny. And at some point you got to start selling stuff. And I think I have a feeling we're headed for a couple of years of reckoning on what you can and can't sell when it comes to AI stuff. That sounds about right. All right, Andy, thank you as always. It's my pleasure. Thanks, David. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about wearables.

37:30Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

38:05Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping.

38:43Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with, hey, where are you going?

39:16To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade-in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just$25 a line. with 24-month legal credits and four eligible portings on essentials for well-qualified customers auto pay plus taxes fees and$35 device connection chart credits and imbalance do if you pay off earlier cancel contact us finance agreement 256 gigabytes 830 dollars required visit tmovil.com support for this show comes from zapier when people talk about ai they often talk about the future how will ai affect the economy what will ai's potential be in the future will ai be able to make popular art?

39:54But the more important question is, what can AI actually do for your business today? If you're looking for concrete implementation of AI for your business, you can try Zapier. Zapier says they can help you and your team actually reap the benefits of AI, not just talk about it. With Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to your work. Connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the apps your team already uses, so you can add AI exactly where you need it. Whether that's automatically enriching leads, coaching your sales rep, resolving IT tickets, or more, you can do it all with Zapier.

40:30Zapier is for everyone, tech expert or not. No IT bottlenecks, no complexity, no AI hype, just results. Teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. Join the 3.4 million companies already automating with Zapier and transform how you work with Zapier in AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com slash verge. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash verge.

41:04All right, we're back. So it's now been a week since WWDC, Apple's annual developer conference. We've talked about it a lot on this show. I still think that the fact that they announced rest days for watchOS might be the single most exciting announcement to me. The personalization even extends to your activity rings, where you can now adjust your goals by the day of the week. Or if you have an injury that's making it harder to close your rings, or maybe you just need a day off, you can pause them for a rest day, week, or more, and keep your award streak going. the thing where i'm lying on the couch feeling sick or tired or just haven't had time that day to go exercise and my watch is like yelling at me about not closing my rings is the thing that makes me want to take off my apple watch i've actually turned off a lot of the goals i just try to not worry about that stuff anymore but i like the idea of being able to care about it and then not care about it but anyway that is just one piece of a lot of wearable news in the last few weeks.

42:04We've gotten lawsuits from Samsung over Aura's smart rings. We've gotten Pixel Watch leaks. We've gotten a new Samsung Galaxy Watch. We've gotten a bunch of FDA news. V song has been covering all of this and is deep in the wearable space as anyone who listens to this show will know. So I figured I'd have her just come on and we're just going to plow through some news and talk about how big a deal any of this really is and take a victory lap on rest days. V song. Welcome back. Thanks for having me. You did it. This is the biggest news in the history of the song at WWDC this year. We're going to do, I have Apple stuff, Samsung stuff, and Google stuff I want to talk about.

42:44But we got to start with Apple. I'm just, the floor is yours. You can laugh, you can cry, you can be happy. It's rest days. We got rest days, V. I was screaming so loud in my house. And like, so I have this one cat who loves to like, just annoy me in my room. He likes to sit with me in my office. And as soon as they're like, oh, and rest days, they're going to be a thing now. I was like, yes! So loud. And I was just like typing in the Verge Slack with like so many typos just because I was going like, ha! And I saw that you mentioned in the live blog that somewhere I was like fist pumping. Yes, all of that was happening.

43:20And if it wasn't for the fact that I had to like get the watchOS 11 blog out, I would have probably just like run around like a crazy person in my office just going like, oh, yes, finally. This is so great on so many levels. I could, it's just like, and I'm here to wax poetic on it. So I will, but like, this has been 10 years of the Apple Watch and it, it has been like a feature that I have been wanting for at least eight of those years, just because it's, oh my God, where do I start? There's just so many reasons why you need a rest day. And the big one is that we're not machines. And I actually think streaks are quite toxic for the average person because we all know that one Apple Watch person who's just like, oh, yeah, I was sick, but there's no way I'm breaking my streak.

44:09So I just lowered it and went for a walk. And I was like, I hear that story so many times. And I'm just like, that is the opposite of improving your health. That is actively not doing the best thing for your health and your body in that point in time. And then there's for other people, those notifications are actually extremely demoralizing. So when I had COVID, I had it pretty bad. I couldn't really think properly. I don't actually remember a lot of having COVID because it was like a bad time. But one thing I really do remember was getting a buzz on my wrist looking and it's like, you can still do it.

44:45You can take a 27 minute walk and close that ring. The thing where it's like, just go for an 11 mile walk. It's only 9 p.m. You'll be fine. It's like, what? No. And it's like, no, actually, I am. I have COVID right now. And so I was just so annoyed and I took the watch off and I put it on the charger because that's just how type A I am. I was just like, oh, I'm not going to throw it across the room. I'm going to put it very gently on the charger. but that that kind of impulse and i have also heard from several of my friends that on their wedding days they either wore their apple watch on their ankles or gave it to their spouse to carry for them because they were not going to break that streak even though it was their wedding day and i was just like i think i think we've gotten to a point where the streak is no longer helpful if you are at that point i think we have lost sight of what the streak is supposed to be It is a motivational tool.

45:42And yeah, of course, like it is a great way to kind of visualize your consistency. But you know, you can have a weekly streak, you can have a monthly streak. It doesn't have to be a daily streak. And after a certain point, it's actually counterintuitive. Like the more into training you go, you're supposed to have rest days, you're supposed to have days where you do absolutely nothing. and on days where you do absolutely nothing let me tell you if you have your move ring set at like a thousand calories like some people do you're not going to get a thousand calories of exercise or you should not get a thousand calories of exercise on a rest day especially when you're doing something like physically taxing like any kind of race training any kind of especially if you're doing a marathon those rest days are really important because some people are out here and they're and they're pounding the pavement for four hour long runs you're putting an incredible amount of stress on your body, any athlete will tell you rest is incredibly important.

46:37And that's why so many athletes gravitate toward the whoop. They gravitate towards the Oura Ring because those are prioritizing rest. And everybody else in the industry for the past three, four years has been prioritizing rest in some form and capacity. So to have Apple lag so far behind on that, it was just, it's like the most glaring thing because the Apple Watch is the leader in the smartwatch world right it is like the one that everyone points to it's the one that's popular it's you know apple does something with smartwatches everybody follows but the one thing that they really weren't doing for the longest time was sleep tracking and then on top of sleep tracking rest and recovery was just like close your rings or else yeah it really it gets like menacing and then the the notification that really did me in was the one the next morning where you You wake up and it's like, oh, you only closed two rings yesterday.

47:30Like parentheses, you pathetic monster. Let's try and do better today. And I get those when I don't wear my watch for a day. And it's like, come on, watch. Like, I just wasn't, I didn't have this on. And then I get to the point where I'm like, I go for a walk and I'm not wearing the watch. And all of a sudden you have that feeling of like, oh, it didn't count because I'm, and then it's like, those are the moments where I'm like, oh, this is no longer serving the purpose that I got this to serve for me. Yeah. You know, I had that exact experience this weekend. I forgot my watch when my friend and I went out to a park and then we went for a hike at that park.

48:03And I was like, the entire time in my head, I was like, it's not going to count. It's not going to count. And I really hate that that's not going to count because this is a very steep hill. And I'm not getting credit for that. But that's actually, it's super counterintuitive because I still did the hike. I still did the thing that was very good for my body. just because the Apple Watch didn't acknowledge it, you know? And I think we have to really examine what streaks mean. So like before Apple introduced this ability to pause your rings, which I downloaded the beta and I've used it since. And I like really was just like, oh my God, this is such a nice feeling that I'm not getting punished for that.

48:41But before that, I would just every once in a while, once I got a streak up to like 90 days, I would purposefully break it. Interesting. For your own sanity. Just for my own sanity and just to teach myself that like the streak is not the streak is not how I define my consistency. Because like I can tell you for the last six years, I haven't gone a week without running or some sort of physical exercise. So I would say that I am consistent in my fitness routine. But, you know, life and I'll get a little vulnerable with everybody. My life has not been super easy the last few years just because I've had a lot of like circumstances, namely my entire immediate family died, like kind of one after another.

49:19And when you go through those life circumstances, the last thing you need is the Apple Watch going, you didn't close two of your rings yesterday. What happened? And you're like, well, well, Apple Watch, there was a funeral yesterday. That's what happened. I did not go and train my little legs out because I was not having a good day that day. So, you know, I think having that flexibility, allowing that to be within the Alpha watch and then to also have the other fitness features that they introduced, like training load, which, you know, that's not new. Garmin's had that for forever. All like the Polars have had that forever.

49:55But just like the acknowledgement that there are going to be times where you should not push it, where you should ease off the gas and that overall that will be good for you is just like, I'm just like, yes. Yes. Well, yeah, that that context is a really interesting way to think about all of the watch stuff. And like you said, I think the Apple Watch, we pay attention to it more than most smartwatches, but we should because it is the one sort of driving this whole industry in a lot of ways. it really feels like a sort of vibe shift in the Apple Watch from like, how do we get you to do more and turn everyone into super athletes and put more and more and more data into here?

50:34And there's still some of that, right? And it's like, if you want to know all of the teeny tiny details of your body, like the watch is getting better and better at that. But at the same time, there is this recognition of like, okay, actually, maybe the watch's job as it starts to understand you better is to help you not push you and that those are not the same thing. The struggle that every single smartwatch or fitness tracker has that no other gadget device has is that it is trying to affect behavioral change. And behavioral change is very difficult. We are very ingrained in our habits and building a new habit doesn't actually take 21 days like some people say.

51:08It can take 21 days. It could take 66. It could take half a year. so like building change like that especially when it's physical activity and exercise which is notoriously you know we are not like evolution has not made us crave exercise if anything evolution has made us crave the couch and a bag of potato chips because you know that's that's just how it is and so even though you know it's good for you you know there are people who love streaks there are people who love gamification there are signs that gamification does work to an extent there are also people like me who are just like bundles of anxiety and nerves and full of burnout.

51:45The world is full of things that will make you burn out. Streaks for me personally are a source of burnout. If I am chasing a streak, that is how I've gotten every single running injury in the past two, three years. That's how I've gotten my calf injuries. That's how I've gotten shin splints. It has been trying to keep streaks going counter to like my Achilles tendon or my calf or whatever saying like, we're a little ouchy right now. Could you take a break? Could you walk instead of going on a six mile run? And I'd be like, no body. I will, I have a streak to maintain. I wish they had just called it like, leave me alone.

52:20That's all I want from the activity thing is every time it sends a notification, one of the buttons should just be leave me alone. And then it's just like, my bad, sorry, I'll leave you alone. And then it comes back the next day and it's like, are we cool now? Can we hang out? Like that's the relationship I want to have with my Apple Watch. I mean, same. Before we move on, anything else about watchOS 11 that got you particularly excited? Live activities. I think that's going to be really fun and cool. I kind of want to see how well it does because it really depends on the intelligence being able to tell or suggest a really cool thing to you while the live activities are going.

52:55But I'm very curious to see how that plays out on the wrist. Yeah, that's a good one. So, okay, competitor time. All of these, I would say, are the ones trying to do Android Apple Watches. There are going to be people who don't like that description, but that is what is going on. It's what they're doing. It's just what it is. Let's start with the Pixel Watch. So we got both some new stuff for the Pixel Watch 2 and some leaks for the Pixel Watch 3. Anything exciting for you in Pixel Watch land right now? I think bigger Pixel Watch. The rumor is that it's going to be called Pixel Watch XL. So I'm praying for my future self in a video going, the Pixel Watch 3 XL, if that's actually what they're calling it, because that's a mouthful.

53:38But just in terms of that is the biggest complaint that we had with the Pixel Watch 2 is that it was only one size. And ironically, it was the smaller size. And so people are like, we want a bigger one. When historically, smartwatch size complaints have been, this is too big. This is too bulky. Make one smaller. So this is like an ongoing conflict that we've had. But I think it just kind of shows that you really can't do one size fits all with smart watches. So for them to have a bigger size, I'm stoked for people. I had a lot of readers just be like, but I have a bigger arm and the Pixel Watch looks stupid on it.

54:15And I was like, you know what? Fair. Purely anecdotally, I will say I see Apple Watch Ultras everywhere, like in much higher volume than I expected because it's a it's a big watch. but I see them everywhere on people of all sizes and all fashion senses like the willingness to do the big watch I guess for extra battery and some extra features like way more of that than I expected when the ultra came out are you wearing ultra right now is that what I just saw uh that is an ultra too and you are not what I would call a large armed person I am not a large person I have very tiny bird wrists but um what I will say is that I have been acclimatized to really big watches over the years, wearing a lot of garments.

54:56So I'm kind of used to the weight at this point. But also my eyesight is so notoriously bad that people keep asking me, like, why is your iPhone on the largest font possible? It's like, because I can't read well. And the Ultra has a gigantic screen. Eli has made fun of me many times. He's like, you know, I can read everything on your Apple Watch. It's like, yes, yes. And you know what? So can I. And that's the point. That's the dream. yeah that's the dream no i agree i think i think the bigger pixel watch will be a victory if only again because it's just more options and i feel like for me the pixel watch yes kind of landed in the right zone it's like about the size i want a smart watch to be uh and i like the round like i was very happy even with the first one but you're absolutely right that the only way to do this is to have lots of them because people are different and it's like it gets all the weirder when you get the glasses.

55:46And we'll talk about that another day. But like, this is just where we are now. The other thing with the Pixel Watch that it's like a very small thing, but for me as a wearable reviewer, I went, huh, is the fact that car crash detection is coming to the Pixel Watch too, because we don't have that on Android yet. And I was like, is this the first time that we're going to have car crash detection on a smartwatch on Android? And yes, yes, it is. So that I think is significant in the sense that like, you know, Google was starting so far behind Apple and so far behind Samsung when the Pixel Watch was launched, like, soon to be three years ago.

56:17So a lot of the times when we get these new features, it's like, eh, it's been done already. And yes, that is true. This is still true here. But the gap is getting smaller. And for me, I'm like, yes, finally, the gap is getting smaller. I'm so excited about that. So that's just like a tiny thing. Because Samsung doesn't have car crash detection for its watches yet. So for Google to be like, hey, we got this. It's progress. Yeah, it's progress. And I'm excited to see. It's just like a very small thing that I'm excited to see. Yeah, no, it's a good one. And I think you're right that Google basically just systematically doing Apple Watch things is the correct thing to do.

56:56Especially if then it can turn around and be like, oh, now it has all the Gemini stuff and we're going to finally figure out Fitbit, even though I've essentially given up on the possibility of the Fitbit integration ever making any sense. You can see the path. This is the thing about the Pixel Watch that drives me so crazy. You can see the path to it being great. And I'm hopeful at least that Google still seems to care about it. So that's something. But the Fitbit thing will never stop driving either of us crazy. I don't think. It's sad. One can pray. One can pray. Yeah. That's enough about Fitbit on this particular podcast.

57:26Let's talk about Samsung for a minute. You brought up Samsung. It's the one with the new watch. That was the news of, I think, last week. Now, the Galaxy Watch FE. Anything exciting there? It's cheaper. Yay for cheaper. It's cheaper, which, you know, that's notable. because the last two years we've seen price increases for the base galaxy watch five and the six because inflation samsung's not immune and that was kind of sad at the time because you know the galaxy watch has historically been kind of competitively priced underpriced for what it is so it would just be like oh yeah you could get the base model for less than 300 and that's pretty it's pretty solid uh and that's like not really the case anymore it's i believe it's about 300 now for the base model.

58:10So to get the FE, which is$199 for the Bluetooth only version, that's a solid$200 watch, which, you know, the Apple Watch SE is$250 starting price. So you're looking at that and you're like, oh, okay, okay. But what it really is, is that it's a rebadged Galaxy Watch 4. So that's kind of interesting, like spec-wise. Spec-wise, you are getting the last gen chip. and I think once you kind of look at the specs, you're like, oh, you're not really giving that much up, but at the same time, it's not that exciting because the design is very similar. So what are we actually looking here? And we are looking at Samsung once again, throwing spaghetti at the wall with its lineup and trying to figure out what the hell is going to work.

58:55And I think they're identifying very realistically that, you know, Apple does kind of have a winning combination by having a entry-level watch for kids and for elderly relatives that people use it for, having the base model, and then just having this massive ultra for people who want the bestest and the greatest and are imagining themselves to be hardcore elite athletes, or maybe they are hardcore elite athletes. And I think what we can tell from leaks so far is that Samsung is very much aligning itself to kind of have the same lineup. So we have the FE now. And I think it's very telling that that's coming ahead of Unpacked because we're going to have the ostensibly the Galaxy Watch 7 and then the Galaxy Watch Ultra is, I think, the rumored name for it.

59:43It's this squircle looking thing from the leaks and the renders that we've seen. I don't think it like Galaxy Watch FE, Galaxy Watch Ultra. I think we can point to the other company that they're kind of taking, let's say, inspiration from. They're just leaning into it. They're just leaning into it. And I don't think it's a wrong move. I think it's actually quite smart to kind of position themselves as, like you say, the Android of the Apple watch of Android is kind of what they're fashioning themselves as. They're just kind of leaning into that. Again, some people are going to be upset about that.

1:00:16I don't think they really should be. There are worse things to be at this particular moment in time. I think they're just kind of going, I think this is what people want. We'll give them what they want. And then on top of that, we're expecting the Galaxy Ring. So that's one way that Samsung can go like, ha ha, suck it, Google. Suck it, Apple. We got something that you don't. And it's a Galaxy ring. And so I'm really stoked and excited to see what that's going to look like, especially since they preemptively sued Aura. This was the next thing I wanted to talk about. Which to me was just like, oh, OK, that's fun.

1:00:51I just got a new smart ring in the mail. I'm currently wearing three. Yes, I'm wearing three at the moment. so I'll be wearing four just to get like so I know all the competitors when it ever where it is I'm very excited to see how that goes down for Aura because this is the this is the first time I think that they've had a competitor that could really you know let's let's be real because really fuck up their you know the thing that they've had for a long time they've been going out and you know this the Samsung case the patent case they were just like listen you done sued Rincon you You done sued UltraHuman.

1:01:26You done sued Circular. That's the other one. And Samsung just came out and they're like, yeah, we see what you're doing. You have this pattern of just suing people for doing what a smart ring ought to do. So we just want to preemptively say that we're not infringing on your patent so you can't sue us. Which is an amazing lawsuit to file, by the way. Very good. I just can't wait to see what happens because Samsung doing that, that's going to set a precedent for the other smaller companies. I would be a little stressed if I was Aura. And you can tell they are stressed because they just keep dropping features.

1:02:01They keep coming out and being like, we got this new thing and we got this other thing. We can tell how old your heart is now. We can do this and we have science. And so I'm just really interested to see how that drama is going to play out over the next few months. Yeah, I'm really excited about the Galaxy Ring in particular. I think it's shaping up to be a pretty fun year for watches in that I think, to your point, we're going to have three pretty competitive lineups of smartwatches if all of the leaks and stuff come true which i think is very exciting but i think the galaxy ring is going to be really the first like mainstream walk into an electronic store and it's going to be on a shelf in front of you from a company you've heard of smart ring uh and i think that's very exciting and from what we've seen so far it seems to look nice and it's not humongous like i actually have pretty high hopes for this thing and i think if it's good we might start to see this market take off pretty fast i i think so if it is i want to say 50 as good as what the aura ring is is bringing to the table with the convenience of just like integrating with your samsung products already if i was aura i would be scared v thank you as always thanks for having me all right we got to take one more break and then we're going to do a question from the verticast hotline

1:03:19Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

1:03:54Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

1:04:31Support for the show comes from Framer. Are you still jumping between a host of different tools just to update your website? Framer unifies design, CMS, and publishing on one canvas. No handoff, no hassle. Everything you need to design and publish in one place. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful, production-ready websites, and it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas-based design tool, Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all-in-one design platform, from social assets, to campaign visuals, to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site.

1:05:09Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. Ready to design, iterate, and publish all in one tool? Start creating for free at framer.com slash design and use code VERGE for a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com slash design and use promo code VERGE. Framer.com slash design. Promo code VERGE. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for this show comes from Figma. Figma is the collaborative design platform where teams come together to turn ideas into the world's best digital apps, websites, and experiences. And now there's a faster way to bring those ideas to life. Introducing Figma Make, an AI-powered prompt-to-code tool that helps you turn ideas into something real fast.

1:06:02Figma Make is a different kind of vibe coding tool. With just a few prompts, you can turn any idea into a code-backed prototype or app that anyone can explore, iterate on, and share. And it's all connected to Figma. So you can start from scratch or from your design file. Figma Make is made for designers, product managers, and builders who want to move fast and explore more ideas. Try it now and see how quickly you can make your ideas real with Figma Make. Just go to Figma.com slash Vergecast. That's F-I-G-M-A dot com slash Vergecast.

1:06:44All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We try to answer at least one on the show every week. I love hearing from you. It is my favorite thing. This week, we have a question about the weather. Hey, Verge. This is Steve, and I live in Dallas, Texas, where we've had a ton of weather this month. And once again, I'm looking outside at a thunderstorm, and my weather app says it's sunny. So the Apple weather app is just terrible. And ever since Apple bought Blue Sky, I have just been struggling for a good app that doesn't sell my privacy.

1:07:23So I'm wondering if The Verge has a 2024 recommendation on a good, solid weather app on the iPhone that doesn't sell my privacy away. I hope to hear your answers on air. Thanks. Steve, you have come to the right place. I am here to tell you you have come to the right place. Liam James is here. Liam, is it fair to say you are The Verge's preeminent weather nerd? Like, is that a fair accusation? I would say I am doing my best to fill the very large shoes of Dan Seifert, but I am very into the weather. How's the weather station, first of all? The weather station is doing great. It's still same batteries installed on the roof of my New York City apartment building illegally, but still sending a signal down to my weather station.

1:08:10I love it. So part of the reason I brought you on here is that I wonder if we are going to get to a point where we tell people that the best thing you should do in order to get a good forecast is install a weather station on your roof like a maniac. Is this a reasonable recommendation you would give to people? No, it is a completely ridiculous situation. But what can I say? I love gadgets. It all started with our Father's Day gift guide. So really, I mean, we've created our own problem to solve here. This is what we do. Okay, so I have two things I want to talk about here. One is that, and I think you and I are going to agree on this, the single best and most important piece of advice that I can give you here is a website called Forecast Advisor.

1:08:50Yes. Which people don't know about and people should know about. You go and you plug in either your zip code or your city and your state, and it will tell you which of the many data sources that exist is most accurate historically for where you are. Do you use this, Liam? Have you ever run this test on yourself? Oh, absolutely. Okay. I believe it was actually Dan Seiford who introduced me to this. But yeah, it's not the app so much as it is the source of data your app is pulling from. Yeah. So, okay, let's just do this live for our buddy Steve here. So we'll go to forecastadvisor.com. We type in Dallas, Texas, where it is currently as we are recording this 95 degrees.

1:09:29Steve, I'm so, so sorry. And what this says is that for the last month, so May 2024, the NWS, the National Weather Service, digital forecast was the most accurate data source at 71.86 % of forecasts. A low number says a lot about forecasts that the best one is only 71 % accurate. There are three here that are all basically identical. They're all 71 point something percent accurate. It's the National Weather Service, the Weather Channel, and AERIS Weather. And then it goes all the way down to, like, the reason this is good is, let's see, there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten other ones.

1:10:08And the one all the way at the bottom, which is called Persistence, was only right 45.71 % of the time. So this is like you are looking at a weather forecast that is literally only half accurate. I believe the current Apple built-in weather app uses the Weather Channel, if I'm correct. What was the score for the Weather Channel in Dallas, Texas? So that's second on the list here at 71.51%. Second at 71%. Yeah, it's tough. Well, what's interesting about this, though, is one of the things that Forecast Advisor shows, I think, and I'm extrapolating a little bit here, but if you look at it over the last year, and again, we're still in Dallas, Texas, Microsoft, I don't know what it just says, Microsoft, which is apparently a weather source, was accurate 84 % of the time.

1:10:53So what it seems like is what we just had in May might have been like an extra volatile month of weather, especially in Dallas, Texas. But like, let's let's look where you are, Liam. You're in New York, New York. For you, it's the Weather Channel is number one, 83.6%. So, yeah, Dallas just has some wonky weather going on. Everybody's struggling with Dallas. Yeah, it's usually in my experience because I've used this service in many cities and the National Weather Service is not usually your top pick. For you, the National Weather Service is like fully halfway down the list. Yeah, I was surprised to see that be the topic for Dallas.

1:11:31But yeah, it's not the app you're using so much as it is the source. Some of the more nerdy weather apps will allow you to pick from a list of sources. I use the nerdiest of all iOS weather apps, which is Carrot Weather. And it has a list of, it looks like, almost a dozen sources here for me to choose from. So Carrot was one of the ones I was going to bring up because it is a beloved app. And it's also, I would say, like you said, maybe the wonkiest of weather apps, just in terms of like the amount of stuff that you can see if you want to. I don't use Carrot personally, but you, I would assume as a giant weather nerd, love it very much.

1:12:10Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people use Carrot weather because it was the first out of the gate with Apple Watch support. But I've stuck with it because they add so many niche nerdy features, like being able to pick your sources, but also just like you can completely customize the layout for what you want. Things that I'm constantly wanting to see are the humidity percentage and also just like the UV index because it wildly swings in New York City. And so it's kind of good to know when you should probably put some sunscreen on because you're going to get burnt to a crisp when you go outside.

1:12:47Totally. And that's actually another good customization point that not only is the data source really important, but knowing which parts of the forecast you care about. I remember when I was in California during all the wildfires, the air quality index became very important. And so that was then a thing that I paid a lot of attention to in the forecast. And having something where you can surface that into either the home screen of your app or even a widget on your home screen goes a really long way. Because glanceability is the whole thing. You should not have to spend 45 seconds in your weather app to get a sense of what do I need to know before I go outside.

1:13:19So that's a very good one. And Carrot does do that very well. Carrot, we should say, also just got a big update that people are very excited about. I honestly think that's a pretty good place to start. It's a really good weather app. Yeah, it's a great weather app. They just released a new update that, again, allows more customization of that main screen you see when it comes out. I think there's a few other odds and ends goodies that were in there. My backup weather app is just about the nerdiest one you can get. It is called Ambient Weather, and it connects over the internet to that weather station you were asking me about earlier.

1:13:54So I have a weather station on my roof that reads all the weather information that you could possibly want. This app allows me to access that weather station from anywhere. So regardless of where I am, I can pull up the same information that's on the cute little LCD screen that's on my desk. So that's my backup weather app. That's pretty good. I did a big tour of weather apps maybe a year ago. There are a lot of good ones out there, honestly. Like, especially if you're somebody who really likes to see like weather news and you want to keep up on sort of weather more broadly, the Weather Channel app has actually gotten a lot better over time and is actually pretty good now.

1:14:29They did a big redesign, I think, earlier this year. It's still kind of too much for my taste, but it's a very good app. But what I landed on is an app called Hello Weather, which I would say is a lot like Carrot, but just kind of less. It's very designy. They have a bunch of really beautiful widgets. But my thing is it has this incredibly good kind of glanceable hour by hour forecast, which I discovered is the only thing I ever actually care about. It's just like I wake up in the morning. I'm like, when is it going to be hot? When is it going to rain? The end. Like, especially for where we are.

1:14:58Those are the only two questions that ever really matter. And Hello Weather, like Carrot, lets you pick from a bunch of different sources. So I did the forecast advisor thing I went through. I picked the most accurate source for me. and at that point it's just about kind of aesthetics right like all the data is the same and i there's just something about the sort of cleanliness of hello weather that i have come to really like so the the biggest question i have about this app the hour by hour weather data is it the feels like temperature or is it the actual temperature liam that's such a good question it's such a good question i'm so glad you asked it is the actual temperature which is the wrong answer it should be that feels like temperature but what it gives you at the top is it'll show you the actual temperature in big letters and then right underneath it that feels like temperature so right now as we're recording this it is 87 degrees it feels like 100 cool love summer 2024 but it doesn't give you that hour by hour and i would argue that it should but what i like that it gives you is a a sort of running change in what matters so when it's not going to rain it'll show you the uv index in the in the bar graph but when it's going to rain it'll show you the precipitation amounts per hour so the hour by hour forecast actually shifts based on what is most likely to happen so on a sunny day like today the it tells me the uv index so they've just done a bunch of very clever things and again all of this is dependent on the data source to be accurate but i've gone in and figured out which data source is most accurate and so now i have this thing the one thing i hate about hello weather is that each data source spews different texts so in they they all have this like structured data that just flows into the app but then they all will also have a description of the forecast and the data source that i picked is accuweather which at least the last time i checked was most accurate for where i am pumps out these really long sort of unhelpful stupid things like this one just says partly sunny and hot semicolon a thunderstorm in spots late this afternoon semicolon hottest day so far this year semicolon stay hydrated semicolon storm can bring small hail and damaging winds that all comes directly from accuweather and is just obnoxious.

1:17:01And I found other ones that are much nicer written. Some are funny. I hate AccuWeathers, but that's not HelloWeathers' fault. And so here we are. Yeah, that's really weird. Yeah, but it's a very good app and it has really good widgets. So I have a widget that I can just swipe over and it shows me the hourly and that is most of how I check my weather. And I like it very much. But basically, I think the way to start is to figure out which data source you care about and then figure out which apps support that data source and then just kind of find the one you like looking at the most, right? Is that a reductive way to put it?

1:17:30Yeah, absolutely. If you don't travel a lot, maybe you find your weather source and just download that weather sources app. But if you do travel a lot, you're going to want an app like the ones David and I are talking about where you can go in and set the source that is most accurate for where you are in the world. Yeah, I agree. Don't use Apple weather. I like Apple weather less and less as time goes on. There are lots of better ones out there. And I will say a bunch of them cost money, but most of them don't cost very much money. And I think for as often as I check a weather app, you know, 10 or 20 bucks a year seems pretty easily worth it.

1:18:02Yeah, totally agree. Sweet. All right, Liam, thank you as always. Of course. Go back to your weather station. I will. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who was on the show today. And thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, rest days, Tesla, all of it at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes. I don't know if you're seeing those every time they go up, but we have a post with all the links to everything we talk about. I find it very helpful. I hope you do, too. But also, in general, read TheVerge.com. It's a cool website.

1:18:32As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or Tesla vehicles you'd like to see, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. I know I keep saying that, but I love hearing from you. And I think we're going to do another all-hotline episode at some point this summer. So keep all your questions coming. 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. Neil, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about more Apple news, more AI news, the thing where McDonald's isn't testing AI anymore, which I have a lot of thoughts about, and much more.

1:19:06We'll see you then. Rock and roll.