The 6G, modular, robot phones of the future

16:22Nilay Patel:is like a full generation ahead of the foldable phones available in the U.S. As you walk around NWC having used all of the foldable phones we can get in the U.S., does that still seem true? Are you seeing stuff that remains just way ahead of anything that is available in like a Verizon store in the U.S.?

16:39Paul Miller:Yeah, yeah. Just the abundance of them. I mean, all of the Chinese OEMs will have one. They're on the booth and they're super thin. You know, they've been through all the generations of foldables that we're at now. And we sort of are like, well, you've got Google or Samsung and you can take your pick. I think that Motorola getting into it, you know, even if it doesn't end up being the foldable to end all foldables is can only be good from that standpoint of like we just desperately need some competition to maybe spur Samsung to throw something else in the next one.

17:25Nilay Patel:you know totally so on that front actually let's let's do it let's do a sub one to five here on the razor fold specifically because i read your piece about the razor fold and i read through the list of specs ip 48 and 49 fine uh fast chip 50 megapixel camera 50 watt wireless charging like this seems like it's it's pretty close to the thing like if you were going to just other than the price which is obviously outrageous uh because they all are if you were to sort of write down a list of stuff you would want a foldable phone to have. This seems awfully close. How excited should I be getting about the Razer Fold right now?

18:02Paul Miller:I think like medium excited. Really, the silicon carbon battery is the thing that is really catching my eye the most.

18:10Nilay Patel:Can you explain what that is for people who don't know?

18:12Paul Miller:It's a different kind of battery technology that's much higher capacity and it can be much thinner. And so you get those crazy numbers like 6 ,000, maybe even 7 ,000 million powers, differs from a traditional lithium ion. And the U.S. manufacturers have been really hesitant about adopting it. And basically all the Chinese OEMs and OnePlus, you know, you can buy a OnePlus phone in the U.S. that has one of these batteries. there are concerns around like do they last as long they it tends to there's more stress on them as they go through charging cycles and there's like a concern that they don't hold up in the long run but I don't know an iPhone 14 pro like did the battery on that hold up like so many people have a phone from three or four years ago and they're like dude the battery sucks now um so i don't know this this is the one that's going to be interesting to see if motorola can kind of like open the floodgate i really obviously there's you know their parent company lenovo and based in china is maybe like the way that this kind of makes the technology come mainstream in the u.s but we'll see.

19:40Paul Miller:I'm glad someone's doing it.

19:42Nilay Patel:Yeah, I'm fascinated by this phone because it seems like if Motorola got all of these parts right and made a couple of correct technology bets, especially on the camera performance with the optical image stabilization and the battery in particular, this thing could be awesome or it could have a bunch of stuff that is too early and not quite right and it could end up just being a way too expensive like beta test for a bunch of things that might actually work out in three years. And I'm just fascinated to see which one it turns out to be. But I'm still like, there is a world in which this is the best foldable phone on the market and that just makes me very excited.

20:23Nilay Patel:All right, next one on my list. I have a couple more for you here. And actually you sort of alluded to this with the battery stuff. Everything's finally getting smaller is a thing that I've written down. We have some surprisingly thin tablets from Honor that are there. There's a really thin Xiaomi power bank. Suddenly, everybody seems actually interested in the idea of not how do we make these things more powerful or add more specs or whatever. But they're like, how do we make these things smaller? There's a smaller energy happening at MWC this year. And I know there are going to be people who are excited about this.

21:00Nilay Patel:So like one to five, how real is this?

21:04Paul Miller:I'll give it a four because.

21:06Nilay Patel:Really? That's exciting.

21:07Paul Miller:Apple did it. Yeah. I mean, when you have the iPhone Air, I was just.

21:12Nilay Patel:But the iPhone Air is kind of a science project.

21:14Paul Miller:Yeah. Yeah. But I think that kind of gives everybody else permission to do the science project. And there, you know, I was just over at the ZTE booth and, you know, they've got their iPhone Air clone. It has two cameras on the back. It manages to have a SIM tray. I don't know. It's like you sort of get the impetus out there of like, we're doing thin things now. And then maybe the next company that does it, it finds a way to add more to it or like make it so you're not having as many sacrifices. I think this the silicon carbon in an iPhone Air or Galaxy Edge is a very compelling. You know, you take one of the problems with those devices off the table if you can just figure out the battery.

22:06Paul Miller:And then from there, you're not sacrificing so much. So I'm intrigued. I do like I do think there is value in the phone that you carry every day all the time being a little lighter and a little thinner. It actually makes a difference. I just don't think right now the devices we have, the tradeoffs make sense. but they could.

22:31Nilay Patel:That seems right. Yeah, I've been doing this phone switching experiment trying to figure out what phone I want. And I went from an iPhone 16 to a Pixel 10 Pro, which is like, it's not the biggest phone in the world, but it's a pretty heavy phone.

22:45Paul Miller:Yeah.

22:45Nilay Patel:And I am shocked at the extent to which I noticed the difference holding the thing in my hand all day. It's nuts. Like even the little tiniest bit of weight difference, it means something in terms of what it feels like to hold the thing in your hand for a long time.

22:57Paul Miller:Yeah, exactly. You look at the numbers on a page, you're like, these are not that different. But in your hand and everyday use, yeah, you feel it.

23:05Nilay Patel:Yeah. I made fun of you when you said that about the iPhone Air. And I think I'm kind of coming around to what you said.

23:10Paul Miller:Good.

23:11Nilay Patel:I still stand by my making fun of you, even though you might have been right. All right. I have one more for you. And then I'm going to let you go here. The last one I have is another thing that you and I have talked about that has seemed many times like its time was almost coming, but it never did, which is the secondary e-ink display. this is this is a a long time staple of phone concepts and the only one i've seen so far this year is again from this company techno which did a very cool thing i don't know if you've seen this one the the sort of color changing e-ink background on on the techno phone i saw a version of the the

23:45Paul Miller:e-ink um back panel last year i don't know i i give that one like a two like it's fun like hell yeah let's put e-ink in all the things i want e-ink everything um but i don't know i don't see it like they kind of struggle to even give you a reason why like why why does someone want this what can it do and they're sort of like well you know it's cool um which i don't know props for making something cool and and trying it but yeah the reason i like the techno idea is because i

24:22Nilay Patel:I think it is actually very practical in a certain way that it lets you change the color of your phone. And it's not perfectly vibrant. It's not the equivalent of like actually repainting the metal on your phone. But it lets you express something different on your phone. And I think people like that. And I think that's important. I have been holding out hope for this in particular because I don't know if you've seen this tiny little it's like the XTE ink thing that is basically just like a little mag safe thing that you stick on the back of your phone. And it gives you a little tiny e-reader. all of my tech nerd friends think this is awesome and then they buy one and they use it two times and never touch it again but there is like it's exactly what you said there is something about it that you're like yes i want this give it to me and then it's like well what do you want this for

25:06Paul Miller:and it's not yeah clear i don't know it was a fun idea i know this to me is like every time i see a

25:13Nilay Patel:flip phone i'm like give me e-ink on phone on the outside phone on the inside this is this is what i

25:18Paul Miller:want i think i'm the only one but this is what i want you might be yeah um all right so before i

25:25Nilay Patel:let you go back into the the craziness of mwc um what else have you seen that's super exciting any other like booths you've walked past that kind of blew your mind god there's robots everywhere

25:37Paul Miller:and ces again i've seen the robots there was a robot um restaurant it was not clear it said temporarily closed. The robots were not making any food. It looked like they were serving food to each other. The robots don't need to eat food. I don't know. That wasn't the thing I'm excited about, but it has been the thing that has been like hit over my head at CES and here is like robots are happening.

26:01Nilay Patel:Well, so this means if we're doing CES again, I would say this means a couple of things. This means that all anybody wants to talk about is AI, but in kind of directionless ways where everybody is doing AI, but then you ask what that means and no one really knows. And it also means that the idea of gadgets that move, like physically move, has also really intoxicated the mobile industry. Because like the thing that's fascinating to me is everybody at CES is desperately trying to invent the thing after the smartphone so that they can not have to just play smartphone games right now. But what you're saying is even all the smartphone companies are now like, you know what the next big thing is, is robots.

26:37Paul Miller:Yeah. I mean, Honor put a robot, quote unquote, on the phone. they're yeah they're like this is it this is the next thing yeah have you seen anything at mwc that is like yes i do want a robot on my phone no i mean the gimbal aspect is cool um but so much of that is possible in software like the the s26 has that horizon lock feature where you can you can fully spin the phone 360 degrees and the picture does not move.

27:12Nilay Patel:Can I offer you a better answer? Sure. Tell me about the pet phone.

27:16Paul Miller:Oh God. Okay. Pet phone. Well, pet phone is a little tiny tracker device that sits on the collar of your pet and it has a microphone and a speaker and it connects to an app on your phone. Um, so you can have two-way communication with your pet. And so, I mean, there's like, you know, cameras and things you have in your home that you could maybe like talk to your dog on or something, but this is like on them all the time and the the wild thing is um they say that your pet can call you if you train them to jump in the air three times in six seconds so that rules out every cat because cats are not learning tricks um can you does that also rules out every happy dog who might just want to jump a lot they just jump what if a male man comes and they're jumping around and they butt dial you like this is i i have so many questions about how this works there's a subscription so you have to pay for your pet's phone bill which i think is insane why like why in this world um it was just yeah it was the gadget at it was kind of at the far end of one of these events where you go and see all of her like little cool stuff and i was just like oh we're here aren't

28:47Nilay Patel:we we're at pet phones yeah it's it's somewhere at the end of every road in technology there is

28:55Paul Miller:pet phone do you know what i mean yes all roads lead to pet phone i just love this because it

29:01Nilay Patel:would absolutely terrify my dog who like mostly just wants to snooze under a blanket on the couch all day and if i'm just like wandering around and i'm just like frida do you want any snacks she would just lose her mind. Like this is the worst. She would hate it. Yeah.

29:17Paul Miller:Yeah. It would actively terrify her.

29:20Nilay Patel:All right, Allison, you need to go back and look at more phones and don't get hit by any robots. That's my main task for you. We had some run-ins with robots at CES and I would like for MWC to be a less violent robot situation for all Verge staffers everywhere. We're going to take a break and Allison, you're going to be back soon to talk more phones because spoiler alert, as we're recording this, Apple just launched the iPhone 17e. So we're going to come back and talk about that another time. Allison, have fun in Barcelona. We'll see you soon.

29:50Paul Miller:Thank you. Thanks for having me.

29:51Nilay Patel:We'll be right back.

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32:48Nilay Patel:All right, we're back. The Verge's reporter, Jess Weatherbet, is here. Hi, Jess.

32:53Allison Johnson:Hi.

32:53Nilay Patel:I have been wanting to do this with you for months, ever since Apple put out this crossbody strap for the iPhone to, I would say, a mix of rapturous and deeply confused reactions. And I want to talk about why both of those things existed, because it turns out, as you've covered in bits and pieces since then, there is sort of an industry in these straps that to me, as somebody in the United States, basically does not exist. So I want to talk about this because I think this is like a big burgeoning gadget accessory that we should talk about. So let's just start at the very beginning here. Tell me what a...

33:32Nilay Patel:Are we calling them gadget straps? Is this the official title that we're going with?

33:36Allison Johnson:Yeah, it seems to be a bit of a coverall. So every time you look up the strap, it covers everything from the lanyards, from the wrist straps to the crossbody satchels. But everything generally just seems to have been gifted the word strap. So I think it's a general coverall.

33:49Nilay Patel:Okay, so tell me the thesis behind a gadget strap. What is this thing for?

33:55Allison Johnson:Multiple purposes. If we're talking about what it was originally for, it's because obviously the first kind of mobile phones before they were truly mobile were the massive things you had to carry over your shoulder. They were like a brick-sized thing. We had a continuation of that when they started actually getting a little bit more portable where everything had a wrist strap attached to it, like the kind of thing that you just attach to yourself. At that point, everything was so expensive, you really didn't want to drop this thing on the floor. So it's as much as a security thing. You don't want to get it stolen.

34:23Allison Johnson:It's a protective kind of accessory that you don't want it to fall out. It's a personal choice. Some people have been customizing these for decades now. It has so much utility for it. It really depends on which strap you're getting.

34:36Nilay Patel:So why a strap and not a bag? Like, obviously, we've done messenger bags exist. Purses exist. Fanny packs exist. One of the questions I wrote down is, didn't we already solve this problem with fanny packs, which you are free to answer or ignore however you'd like to. But why this particular instantiation of this thing, which is basically just something that goes around your neck or your wrist and just sort of loosely, openly holds your phone? Like functionally, that is what these things are. Why is that the correct form here and not all these other things that are available?

35:12Allison Johnson:the explanation i can give you is we'll also kind of um well explain why they haven't really taken off in america as much as they have in asia and europe and that's just because we use our phones for everything now if it's not in front of me um it's like it yeah it might be at the back of my mind but i am using it to check concert tickets to get map directions up i might be googling something while i'm walking around and if you live in an inherently walkable kind of society like like I do in Britain everything is like if I leave the house I don't necessarily want a massive bag with me that's going to be rattling around with pretty much nonsense in there I can pay for things on my phone I can I can open doors on my phone if I really wanted to like this is my entire life now just in in the size of a block I think the biggest driver behind this is also um I hate to always pull the card up but inherently sexism right because pockets just don't exist on women's clothing.

36:08Allison Johnson:Or if they do, they suck. You can't fit a phone in there.

36:12Nilay Patel:The last question I wrote down in my notes preparing for this is in all caps, and it just says, Jess, why can't we just give women pockets?

36:18Allison Johnson:Women had pockets, generous, huge, bountiful pockets right up until about the 50s, but that's only because they were literally tying them to their clothing. So you would have to, they weren't really built into clothes. You had to kind of like strap them around yourself. When it got to the point where form-fitting dresses were invented, some fashion designers in Milan or something I don't know all men not to you know call it out there but all men decided that pockets ruined silhouettes and we're kind of back into that stage now a lot of uh clothing trends particularly that we're seeing kind of like female fashion is very structured it's very form-fitting and yeah I don't want a massive brick hanging out the side of my dress or my like my pants or whatever it is I'm going to be wearing so I do kind of agree it does ruin um the look of something it's also uncomfortable right these when phones kind of shrunk down to the size where there were petite little cute things then yeah absolutely i'd carry that around in my pocket but now that i i love uh an iphone uh max i i like the big phones i like having a big screen again i live on this thing it's in front of my face 24 7 so i need a great big display in there but that does mean i can't cram that into anything and if i do find the pair of jeans or something that I can actually put my phone into.

37:30Allison Johnson:It's uncomfortable to walk in. I certainly can't ride a bike. That thing is just going to fall out. Like it's just not practical.

37:35Nilay Patel:So the strap then is kind of designed to be this, this like hard to find middle ground of almost as convenient as just holding your phone in your hand all the time. But you don't have to be holding it in your hand all the time. And right. I'm sort of the way you described the way you like move around in the world. I'm sort of imagining, you know, you're, you're walking along and you pull it out to tap on the train to use your ticket and then and then you pull it out again to pay for something and then you pull it out again to text your friend and it's like this constant battle of do I want to be digging into my purse every eight minutes all day or do I just want this thing sort of hanging at my side that I can just sort of swing up wherever it needs to be it's just a pure accessibility play without needing to hold your phone in your hand all day

38:19Allison Johnson:I feel so a lot of the explanations I've heard from like all of my other friends have said that they just wanted something hands-free, right? Either that's because they're going to lose the thing. I've had a couple of friends who've had phone straps. The reason they bought one is because they keep leaving their phones in taxis on a night out. Yeah. If you go out for like dancing or something and you go out clubbing, you don't want to bring a great big bag with you. I've seen mums discussing things that sometimes they just need to know where their phone is all the time. And if they put it down and then they leave the room, they might forget.

38:49Allison Johnson:The thing that converted me um i don't feel like this is specific to london this will probably be the case in a lot of the big cities which is where the walkable thing comes in but i spent a day in london uh constantly digging my phone out of my coat pocket it was raining i was having to dig everything out i was needing it to scan myself into the the tube to get on the train and then five minutes later i was needing it to buy a coffee and then the next minute i was needing it to to check my train tickets on the on the overground i was just constantly digging out and i was like if i could just have this around my neck or attached to my wrist or something where I know it's always going to be there.

39:22Allison Johnson:It's so much more practical. Some people do it for a security standpoint. I don't know how that stands up. I haven't tested having someone try to pretend to mug me, like wench my phone away. But a lot of reasons that people do that is if they're traveling to big cities and they just don't want to have to worry about people slipping their hands in their bag or their pocket and getting it out.

39:42Nilay Patel:Yeah, the security angle is interesting to me because on the one hand, yes, it is now physically attached to your body in a way that is productive, right? You see a lot of people who get their phones stolen just while they're holding them in their hands. Somebody walks by and just yoinks it out of your hand or they grab it out of your bag or your coat pocket or whatever. That is a real risk. And having it tethered to you, even if it's not a perfect solution, is, I think, straightforwardly better. On the flip side, you're just showing everybody your phone all the time. Like, this is the thing that I'm so struck by every time I see one of these is a I would be constantly worried about it banging up against everything and scratching and stuff.

40:16Nilay Patel:And there is some security that exists in my bag or my coat or my pocket that feels even if it's not actually safer that way, it feels safer that way than it does just sort of hanging here for everybody to see. But then the flip side is like it is I don't know. I'm just so torn between this idea of like having it accessible is useful, but I'm also just showing my phone to the world at all times. So is this what you see when you're out in the world? Like you're just walking around and everybody's phone is just kind of hanging there on their right hip and this is just normal and okay?

40:51Allison Johnson:I see a lot less of it in London than I do. I came back from Japan a couple of months ago and everyone there had some form of strap. Sometimes it was a lanyard around the neck. Sometimes it was just they were walking around and it was attached like around their wrist like a bracelet. That almost seems more like a combination of utility but also just personalization. If we think, like, I don't know, when I was at school, phone charms was a big thing because every mobile phone had that little thing where you could just cram as many little trinkets and stuff on there as possible. And that's still a big cultural aspect of a lot of areas where these straps are really, really popular.

41:26So sometimes they just want to match it with their outfit.

41:28Allison Johnson:It's a little mix of things, I think. Some people are just wanting to do it too, to accessorize and other people are genuinely concerned about like security or having access to it, especially if they're in an unfamiliar location, which is why we see a lot of these very popular recommendations for travels. Like traveling blogs will always say, you need to get one of these. It's always in front of you. You always know where it is. You don't have to go digging.

41:51Nilay Patel:Totally. And the I left it in a taxi thing is probably much more real for many more people than somebody grabbed it out of my hand, you know, as an actual security risk. But I'm glad you mentioned Tokyo because I went back through all the comments on the pieces that you've written about these things. And overwhelmingly, the city people mention is Tokyo as the example of how this is used. And I find that really fascinating because I think the utility stuff you're describing and the accessorization stuff you're describing go hand in hand. Right. And I think Tokyo is a city I've not been. But from what I understand, it is even more phone based than what you're describing about London.

42:28Nilay Patel:And so part of what I've been trying to figure out through all of this is why this is a thing in some places and not others like phone cases. is universal accessory, right? Anywhere you go, most people have a case on their phone. This is a much more sort of culturally different thing. And part of me wonders if it scales directly from how much of your day-to-day life involves tapping your phone on things. Like, I kind of wonder if it's that simple.

42:54Allison Johnson:Like, we know that a lot of the, like the strap culture for phones originated in Japan anyway. Like, going again, going from the... Yeah, they have a whole thing. Kitai, I believe. my pronunciation is terrible i'm so sorry for anyone that is japanese and listening to this keto uh is the japanese word for like mobile phone effectively but it kind of became condensed into uh just meaning like the the strap that you would attach to it there was a whole thing where um when phones again going back to the 80s massive thing you used to carry it on your shoulder and then things shrunk things were getting a little bit easier even when things were the size of like a cereal box you still had a strap on the back of it and as they continued to get smaller and smaller japan was kind of like one of the like the regions where if you bought a phone um right down to like the smaller nokia ones where we were actually getting to something that you could slip in your pocket they all still came with a strap it was just a whole thing where uh either for security purposes they didn't like the idea of if you drop this thing it might break and you've lost a lot of money but there was also a lot of conversation um we can't definitively point to something and say this started it this this is where it all kicked off but we know that Japan had a culture already of hanging trinkets because whereas in Western kind of like cultures particularly again Italy the UK we would tie pockets to our outfits or if you're if you're a chap your coat would have pockets already in there when we're talking about kimonos and robes and things there weren't really any pockets built into there so they would physically have to tie objects to themselves using bits of rope and it became quite popular just to have little little trinkets little dolls little customizations and things and when phones became a thing it was almost kind of a like the cooking pot was ready right it was a hey you're already a trinket kind of based uh culture in this you're gonna love this you're gonna love all the little doodads and you can put your favorite comic character on there or you can have a matching one with your bestie or your boyfriend or and it just really took off like it was kind of like the perfect environment for it to be cultured in as much as part of the aesthetic side of it and the utility side of it But because it is the other side of this, Japan is very walkable.

45:03Allison Johnson:You will spend a lot of time just on your feet. There are very, very few reasons why you would have to get in a car. For example, you'll be on a train. That means that if you're out on your feet all day, you don't want to have to lug a heavy bag around or hold a phone all the time. So straps just became kind of a ubiquitous thing. That's spread to a lot of other places in Asia. You mentioned actually that you do a lot of stuff on your phone in Japan now. But actually, we were always told before we went over there that you have to bring cash because not a lot of places take car payments. Apparently, that's changed within the last couple of years.

45:33Allison Johnson:But China had a huge push for mobile payments way, way before Japan did. So in places like China, Korea, Singapore, almost the aspect of living on your phone is even bigger than it is in Japan and has been for a long time. So you just had all of these places where it was just primed to take off.

45:52Nilay Patel:That's interesting. And it does that back and forth between the aesthetic appeal of it, that this thing is an accessory. People are going to see it for utility reasons, so you might as well make it something you care about. And then that coming back to the utility of it, but also giving you real incentive to like you've now made this thing into something that sort of reflects you as a person. Of course you want people to see it. So that actually having this thing dangling off of you all day is it's a feature, not a bug, right? Like in a real way, it sounds almost like you're describing sort of a piece of jewelry.

46:27Nilay Patel:It's just extremely functionally different kind of jewelry. But people are treating it essentially the same way.

46:33Allison Johnson:Yeah, a lot of it kind of we've had a bit of a resurgence of it over here. I think now that kind of America and parts of the UK are becoming aware of it is because it has a very nostalgic charm in terms of it being like a vibe. Right. It's what people used to wear. And you see a lot of younger stars started to wear the beaded phone charms during the pandemic, where people were making them all at home. And because all of these pictures were all over Instagram, all in vogue, there were people wearing these phone straps to the Met Gala in 2022. It's this kind of thing. They just kind of started leeching into the personal side of things because they looked cool before they became a utility.

47:10Allison Johnson:But then that became afterwards because you would tailor it to what you need. One of the examples I go with for the Apple one, because I think that's what I've got everyone talking. Why am I going to spend$60 on the strap? The magnetic design of it, because it's so flat and because it sits flush to your body, the first thing I thought of is, oh my God, that's going to be so much easier to ride my bike because I'm constantly worried my phone's going to fall out of my pocket. But every other strap is just like flopping around or it's smacking me in the back or something. You can actually tie that so it's really kind of flush to your chest.

47:43Allison Johnson:And then if you want to have it a little bit loose, you can loosen it up a bit. Just the practicality of that kind of thing. There was also a company, an American-based one, actually, that tends to be known for this stuff called Bandolier. They're based in California. You've had loads of celebrities rocking out a Zendaya. Taylor Swift had one back in 2016, and that kind of got that company known. But they're known for having not just the phone strap. It's got a little pocket on the back. So you've got a phone strap and a wallet. You don't ever have to have a separate thing to carry your cards around.

48:11Allison Johnson:You can slap your keys on there. It's just looking at all of these different straps and going, what do I actually need it for? Do I need it to look nice or do I need it to have a purpose? And no matter what you need, you can find one. There's a company that sells a strap that's made of a USB-C charger. Like, it's a two-in-one. Yeah. That's a great idea. Satechi or something. It's like a corded rope. Like, roughly the same kind of design, not flat aspect of the Apple one. But literally, they were like, you don't want to have to carry a charger around with you. So why don't we just have this thing hanging around your shoulder or your neck and you can charge your phone on it as well.

48:42Allison Johnson:There is so much utility and customization to all of it.

48:45Nilay Patel:Yeah, I love that. And one thing that really struck me about Apple in particular was that Apple seems to have gone out of its way to show the crossbody strap on men. And I think I was looking up a bunch of this other stuff and it is I'm on the Bandelier website right now, which I had not seen before. But it's like this just looks like a sort of fast fashion website, right? Like it is it is attractive women wearing attractive clothes wearing this thing. It looks like kind of every other fashion website you'd find anywhere. but we're starting to see a shift, right? You get a company like Peak Design, which you covered fairly recently, which I think is a much less sort of specifically gendered company making kind of great accessories and products like this.

49:28Nilay Patel:Apple, again, went out of its way to show this thing on men. And so I guess what I'm curious, what you think and what you've seen around the world even is whether this goes like phone cases, which is a sort of universal accessory that everybody has with kind of infinite options about what you want it to look like, or if this ends up being kind of largely a product for, frankly, people who don't have pockets.

49:52Allison Johnson:I think it's always going to be a mix of the two. Guys historically just haven't had the same pocket dimension issues that women have had. I think it's kind of taking a little while, particularly in the US where it doesn't occur to you that you might have to walk around, unless you're living in New York or one of the other kind of big cities where you can be on your feed walking around eight hours a day going from place to place constantly using your phone you wouldn't think why would i need to have this and have it accessible so quickly you need to be in those environments i think for it to click and for guys who cycle a lot like they will see some of the benefits in this again i'm constantly scared it's going to fall out of my uh my pocket every time i go riding a bike there's also part of me that wonders whether it's a midway point right because bags for men just generally carry bags beyond the usual boring plain uh very kind of like business standard satchel or rucksack or something we're like we're seeing a lot of guys actually wearing for lack of a better word handbags now or shoulder bags strap bags or something and they are they're taking off but they're nowhere near like kind of the um the the impact that they've had on on women um and like like outside of that kind of perspective so this might be kind of the law, as it were, kind of, hey, you need to carry something.

51:07Allison Johnson:Just try. Just try. You don't need to commit to a bag. People can honestly almost miss this if they wanted to.

51:17Nilay Patel:Yeah. The thing I keep thinking about here that strikes me as both the best and worst case scenario is the belt clips. There is a generation of men and a generation of phones that were clipped to men's belts. And I would just like to say out loud to all men everywhere, we can't do that again. Don't know. That was bad. That solved no problems. Like the upside of these gadget traps is they actually, they provide some utility, right? It is an easier version of access. It is that kind of security you're talking about. They can potentially look very cool. You can hold it while it's still in the thing.

51:56Nilay Patel:Belt clips just look bad and we shouldn't do them. And if that's controversial, I really look forward to getting in trouble on the internet for this. But that does suggest on the plus side that there is actually some appetite for, I would like this thing to be slightly more accessible. And maybe if we can figure out how to, you know, take gadget straps, but make them fashion for men, there might actually be something here. Like all the utility stuff you're describing, I'm very compelled by. And I was thinking as you were talking, a thing that happens to me all the time is when I'm driving, I like I will like throw the kids in the car and we get in and my phone is in my pocket and it falls out of my pocket into that like liminal space between the seats where nothing ever comes back.

52:41Nilay Patel:And so the amount of time I have spent at stoplights like digging down it wouldn't it be great if I could just have my phone here and not think about that ever again. And every time I get out of an Uber or a taxi, I have trained myself to open the door, get out, get all my stuff out, and then turn around and look down at the seat to make sure nothing has fallen out. And there is just a very basic amount of utility that would come into my life with one of these things. But then I'm like, I feel like I would look stupid wearing this. And so it's like, maybe I should be the change in the world, Jess.

53:13Nilay Patel:Maybe I need to get a cross-body strap and just wear it around everywhere.

53:17Allison Johnson:You could be so confident. I think like 90 % of starting any of this is confidence. It's not, I would say, it's not me you would have to convince. Because I love hip clips. I was literally thinking about them the other day where I was like, can you remember when everyone just used to walk around with their Walkman and it was attached to their belt loop or something? But then I had to actually think about it. I was like, I don't actually remember anyone doing it. I remember seeing a lot of pictures in catalogs of people telling me to do that. But it never really happened because if you jostled it around too much, everything would skip.

53:52Allison Johnson:But the new generation of Gen Z and everyone that's really into Y2K at the minute are seeing all of these old pictures and they're going, oh, wow, that looks so cool. And they are going to have to find out the hard way. And I feel that that is the next thing, right? Like we tried, like if we're not going to be able to strap or like crossbody or whatever, my mind went to how they tried to make the iPod shuffle really like appealing by just building it on a clip. You want to just have it in front of you, have it nearby. I feel like that will be the next thing. People will want to start either clipping their phone or like we used to do it with Game Boys as well.

54:32Allison Johnson:Everything had a hip clip at one point. I swear we used to walk around the little Game Boy printer. There was a kid at my school that had a Game Boy printer that was always like, this is the thing, right? Right. I think about it. I'm like, I don't think we thought he was cool at the time, but like in hindsight, you

54:47Nilay Patel:know, he did. And that's enough. You know what I mean? He knew he was cool. We just didn't know at the time.

54:52Allison Johnson:Yeah. And there's a generation of like nostalgic Y2K hipsters now that are looking back at that going, wow, I wish I wish that was me. Why don't we just do that? And it's going to happen. It's either that or we're going to start seeing like Batman utility belts everywhere. And I would rather a hip clip at that point because at least it's just one thing. You're not kind of cramming everything in there.

55:08Nilay Patel:Let's just do the straps, people. It's going to be OK. OK, so here's my last question for you. And I'm curious, particularly as you think about this in your own life and how you use this stuff right now, it seems to me that either this is a very cool accessory ecosystem whose time has come, right? Because the phone is still primary in our lives. We need it for more real world things than ever. especially as we do more sort of camera based AR stuff, having this kind of like anything you can do to shrink the distance between you and your phone being useful will work for people. So I like I'm very compelled by the idea of these things.

55:42Nilay Patel:I also wonder if they are a signal that actually then what we need is like the next kind of gadget, right? Because a lot of what you're describing is stuff that we were all supposed to be doing with our Apple watches and is the kind of thing people claim we're going to be doing with our AR glasses. And so So do you look at gadget straps as a sort of signal that we are ready to move on to the next thing? Or is this just the next big accessory because we are going to keep using our phones for this purpose and we all need to get on board?

56:14Allison Johnson:I think, contrastingly, I think this might actually be evidence that the promise of everything will be on our wrists or as some wearable glass and stuff, that the world just isn't ready for that yet. or maybe ever because we've already established that people love having the little screen on a slab that they can take around, they can put it away if they don't need it anymore. And the only not convenient thing about that for a lot of people was having access to it. And you can go on Amazon, you can buy something for like$6, right? If you really want to strap and you don't want to spend, those Bandolier ones start at like$100.

56:51Allison Johnson:So you don't have to get anything. Yeah, they're fancy. They are very fancy.

56:54Nilay Patel:But I love that all this exists, right? This is the case ecosystem all over again, right? You can buy the junky thing for a couple of dollars on Amazon all the way up to like truly luxurious designer thousands of dollar things. And that should exist. I actually think it's really good news that that whole spectrum exists.

57:10Allison Johnson:Absolutely. Yeah. There's something for almost going back to the like, can we get men on board to kind of do this? A lot of guys in Asia, Japan as well, they were all wearing these straps. They were very utilitarian. They were very typically kind of masculine colors. You're a lot of navy khaki, like black, not very accessorized and stuff. But they had the practical aspect of that. And I feel if we're at the point where we're looking at smart glasses or like my Apple Watch or something, I go, yeah, but it's just not convenient. And this would be easier on my phone. I just wish I could access my phone in three seconds.

57:41Allison Johnson:The constant having to take pictures. It was a game changer for vacation. Like just having it around my neck. And every time I was like, I need to translate this thing. Oh, my phone's here. I want to take a picture. Oh, my phone's here. I'm going to go swimming, but I don't have any pockets. Oh, my phone. Yeah, I can just swing it around. Like every part of it, I was like becoming kind of a convert more and more because I just drinking the sauce every time I was lifting it to my face going, oh, this is so cool. And at that point, I can't think of why I would choose wearables specifically over something that I could just effectively make my phone a wearable.

58:16Allison Johnson:That solves all of my problems. And I can do that for barely any money whatsoever. It makes everything better. I think this in a funny way, this might be the accessory that unlocks a bunch of new things for people.

58:29Nilay Patel:And I think in the US, maybe we're going to we're just going to start to see that happen. Okay, you've convinced me. But you have one more job to do here, which is it seems to me there are basically three kinds, right? There's the crossbody one. There's the lanyard sort of necklacy one. And then there's just a wrist strap. Which one should I buy? I'm going to buy whatever you tell me to buy. And I'm going to report back on how it goes. And you have to tell me which one to get right now.

58:50Allison Johnson:you need to get a crossbody if you're just looking for a bit of everything the wrist straps are only kind of useful if you're literally like holding your phone all the time and in London when I'm slamming it to get into trains whatever great those crossbody ones you can extend the length you can have it as tight or as like loose to your body as possible you can hide it under your coat if you're self-conscious and you don't want to see the people like and it's still you just open your jacket and you can fish it out and it's it's super easy so I feel like those are the uh like the standard line of if you're going to consider one get a crossbody you can do so much If you only want to loop it around your neck and you're going swimming or like paddling or something, you can do that.

59:23Allison Johnson:Like it's still just a big loop. Just shove your neck through it rather than your neck and your shoulder. Easy peasy.

59:28Nilay Patel:Okay. I'm in. I'm going to do it. I also just one other analog that makes me feel a lot of feelings that I was thinking about as you were talking is I was like, you're like, okay, how do we how do you make this appealing to men? And I was like, oh, they're going to make them that are just like big gold chains. And then I was like, oh, my God, we're doing wallet chains again.

59:44Allison Johnson:Yeah.

59:44Nilay Patel:Just we're doing wallet chains again.

59:46Allison Johnson:The little emo and punk. We're just doing wallet chains. Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's worth it. All the studded belts and everything. It's going to be fantastic.

59:53Nilay Patel:We're so back. I'm so excited about this.

59:56Allison Johnson:I'm so thrilled.

59:57Nilay Patel:All right, Jess, thank you. I know you did a bunch of research and stuff on where all this stuff came from, so I appreciate it. I think I'm going to read the Apple one, and I will report back on how it goes. Until then, we're going to take a break. Jess, thank you as always.

1:00:12Jess Weatherbed:Support for this show comes from Harvey AI.

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1:02:06Jess Weatherbed:Terms and conditions apply.

1:02:36Nilay Patel:correspondent was this a thing you did on purpose um sort of i think it's because i played a lot of

1:02:42Jess Weatherbed:fortnight and uh then i started reporting on stuff like fortnight and so here we are well is fortnight

1:02:48Nilay Patel:the metaverse is a question that i we we do not have time for today we can spend multiple episodes on that one yeah uh but here let me let me play the question we have today and then i think it actually it may touch on is fortnight the metaverse but let's let's play the question

1:03:01Jess Weatherbed:Hello, my name's Crosby and I'm 14 years old.

1:03:07Nilay Patel:And I was wondering, as the future of wearables and VR technologies progress, Vision Pro in five years, MetaQuest, whatever,

1:03:22Jess Weatherbed:will we be seeing platforms such as Roblox and other similar online hangout areas be growing into areas where people actually live in, like Mark Zuckerberg promised the metaverse a decade ago. Thank you.

1:03:40Nilay Patel:All right. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but Jay, I'm curious, your immediate reactions here.

1:03:44Jess Weatherbed:I think the answer is no. There's a couple reasons for that. Purely from a hardware perspective, I think VR headsets are still a really hard sell for a lot of people. You have to put a face computer in front of your face. you have to make the display good enough to be compelling interesting you have to make the battery last longer than like two or three hours and so like uh as a thing to live in for a long period of time even in five years i just i don't assume that that hardware is going to be ready or capable enough or whatever and then from like these places assume that's good enough the digital places for people to hang out they all want the people to hang out in their own place so like Like, Fortnite doesn't really want you to go to Roblox.

1:04:31Jess Weatherbed:Roblox doesn't want you to go to Fortnite. Meta doesn't want you to go from its horizon worlds to other stuff. So there's just too many barriers and walls and just things that get in the way that I don't think a metaverse-style place is something we're all going to live in or spend an exceedingly long amount of time in every single day.

1:04:52Nilay Patel:Can I tell you my theory about this? I've been thinking a lot about this since I first heard this question. And I think it's possible that if you could, you know, Thanos snap all Internet out of existence and we just like rebuild from scratch, that it is possible that the endpoint is something like this. I think there are reasons that these virtual worlds are interesting. Obviously, platform dynamics being what they are on the internet, things do tend to centralize like this over time. And often we end up with one very large player in a new thing that kind of subsumes the whole ecosystem. But I think the problem is what you just described.

1:05:33Nilay Patel:It's that there already are huge scale versions of this thing that have absolutely no interest in interoperating with each other. And unless you interoperate, the user experience of this is going to be awful, right? In order to move from one place to another, I have to close an app, open a new one, log in, and suddenly deal with an entirely new universe with different rules and expectations. That's an awful user experience. And so this thing only works if it is sort of one fully realized, like ready player one sized thought. And it doesn't work if not everybody's in it. It doesn't work if it's one platform that's actually lots of platforms.

1:06:16Nilay Patel:Like if you could just say to MetaQuest, no other technology exists except this, you could maybe get to something at scale that's interesting. I also think this is a bad idea and it's good that it's not happening. And I think if you go back, like, to me, the metaverse is such a pandemic phenomenon where, like, in 2020, there was this idea that, like, okay, no one is ever going to go outside again. And we're all just going to be in virtual worlds. And what we need is more human ways to be in virtual worlds. And that's, I think, incorrect. What we need is actually something closer to AR glasses, right?

1:06:55Nilay Patel:Which is, like, how do we put digitally useful information into the real world? That is much more clearly what people want than this whole idea of like blow up your life to sit on the couch and be in a virtual world. I think there is a time and place for that. And again, like is Fortnite the metaverse? There are things that Fortnite does that are those things, right? And it is very compelling to lots of people. But that next turn, I just don't see coming at all. Like to me, society is just out on this idea at large. And I don't know how it comes back.

1:07:29Jess Weatherbed:Yeah, I mean, I think the pandemic, like you said, it was kind of an early test of like, oh, is this like actually a reality that we could maybe possibly do? As soon as it was easier to go outside because of the pandemic, because everybody got vaccinated or whatever, everybody realized, oh, I actually want to hang out with people in real life outside. Like I don't want to spend my entire day on these virtual platforms. And I think that's why I think they're still more successful as gaming platforms, which is why Roblox and Fortnite are arguably like the biggest and most popular versions of these because they're things you maybe spend an hour or two of your time with, with your friends.

1:08:06Jess Weatherbed:You maybe bounce around from experience to experience dressed as, you know, somebody from Stranger Things or whatever. And then you go do something else because it's a video game and that's it, right? Yeah.

1:08:16Nilay Patel:To me, the Meta Horizon Worlds example is really telling here. You wrote a story about this a couple of weeks ago, Meta doing a big pivot in how it thinks about Horizon Worlds. What do you make of this change that Meta made? They basically, they built a VR thing and then said, never mind, this is not a VR thing. This is a mobile thing. And I have a hard time looking at that and not thinking this is like a complete 180 degree turn from what you thought you were building.

1:08:40Jess Weatherbed:Oh yeah, it 100 % is because I think they realize that VR as a market has a ceiling and it's ultimately a low ceiling compared to what's possible with mobile. Horizon World started as this like VR first immersive metaverse-y type place. And then a couple years after they launched, they also brought it to mobile. And it's been kind of sitting in this weird in-between of like, make it for VR, but also for mobile. And now Meta is just so clearly like the way this platform moves forward is as a mobile platform, which is where Roblox has seen a ton of success. And more recently, now like Fortnite's back on the iOS app store, Fortnite has also seen a ton of success.

1:09:21Jess Weatherbed:So mobile is where it's at, but that's not a VR immersive experience. It's just another thing to play on your phone, right? Okay.

1:09:27Nilay Patel:This is my one philosophical question that I will make you ask. Can mobile be the metaverse?

1:09:34Jess Weatherbed:i mean i guess we have to decide what the metaverse actually represents this is also again i i i we

1:09:41Nilay Patel:could do that for hours but i think to me it's like somewhere if you allow the metaverse to be a spectrum right between i'm wearing a headset that it takes up my entire field of view all the way down to like i don't think you can have the metaverse on a smartwatch but that's a fun debate if you want to talk about that to me it's just the idea of if i'm sitting here holding up a screen like this and 90 % of my field of view is not my phone this is now an AR device not a VR device and I think VR and the metaverse to me are the same thing but maybe I'm wrong can you do this metaverse thing in the way that people are describing through mobile um I think the answer is

1:10:19Jess Weatherbed:yes enough like I mean I think this the sci-finess of stuff like uh Snow Crash where it's this um or Ready Player One, where it's, you know, ultra immersive. The VR side of it, no, we're learning that that's not what the giant scale metaverse is going to be. But something that's on your phone that you, you know, like you said, takes up most of what you can see. Already these kind of different worlds where you can play as different characters and jump from place to place to place to place with, you know, all with your friends in one group, all at the same time. Like, we have to define what a metaverse is.

1:10:53Jess Weatherbed:And since it's kind of a made up term anyway, taken from a book, like who knows what it really means? And I think so I think the answer could be yes. I think they're just a more realistic way to think of these platforms still. It's just like these are just really giant gaming platforms that are trying to sell you digital items. And that's where the money comes in. And and that's ultimately what they are right now.

1:11:15Nilay Patel:Yeah. And I think that's fine and good. Right. It is. It's let that let that be what it is. And this actually brings me to my last question for you, which is, again, if you go back to the early days of the pandemic, 2020, 2021, there was this big theory about VR that it was going to be both its own thing, but also sort of a feature of AR. Right. I talked to a lot of people who were like, what this will actually be is sort of the lights off version of your AR glasses. You will be able to wear them and see the world through them or turn it off and be in a completely virtual space. And this is what we get with pass through on the vision pro and the quest.

1:11:50Nilay Patel:And I think in theory, a lot of people were saying this is like in AR glasses, you might still want to be able to turn off the world around you and fully be somewhere else outside of gaming. Do you still buy that theory? It seems to me that we've just skipped past it and everybody agrees that actually AR is the feature of AR and this middle thing, except for playing video games doesn't really exist. Is that how you see it too? Or do you think VR as a, as a feature of AR still works?

1:12:17Jess Weatherbed:I don't I don't think it works I mean I've used the vision pro occasionally and like it's a super impressive trick when you're in the immersive vr and you switch out of it and the pass-through is like pretty good on the quest 3 it's kind of good and it's a it's a it's a cool trick but I don't want to like walk around my house wearing that stuff I don't want to go outside wearing that stuff right I think I remember right when the vision pro came out uh Casey Neistat did that incredible video where he's just walking around New York City wearing the vision pro and it it's wild it's a great video it's not what anybody is ever going to do ever in real life and so um i think that's maybe why smart glasses have become so much more appealing and realistically when they become ar glasses at some point in the next five years uh i think people just don't want like you said ar stuff overlaid over the world they can see and the glasses the regular looking glasses that they're wearing they don't want to do the i'm in vr and then transfer to uh ar type thing yeah yeah

1:13:14Nilay Patel:Yeah, VR as video games continues to make sense to me. But compared to the way everybody talked about VR and still talks about the metaverse, that is like, that is this big an idea. Yes. You know what I mean? And I think that's fine. And maybe we should just get there with VR headsets much more quickly. Like, just let the Quest be a gaming system. It is a gaming system.

1:13:32Jess Weatherbed:We can all stop pretending anything else. I think, I mean, I think that's ultimately where meta is going with all of its changes. They're like, we're largely stepping back from making a lot of the content for this. We're going to support third-party developers who want to do so. We're going to continue to make really interesting and cool VR hardware. But that's kind of it. And instead, they're betting on stuff like their smart glasses or AI. Mark Zuckerberg has a great vision of stuff you see in your feed. It might be AI generated. You can send a game that you make with a prompt to your friends.

1:14:02Jess Weatherbed:Is that the metaverse? I don't know. You know, well, we still have to define what the metaverse actually is in reality.

1:14:08Nilay Patel:You're making me think of the meme with the guy with the butterfly. And he's just like, is this the metaverse? Is this the metaverse?

1:14:12Jess Weatherbed:That's exactly right. That's perfect. An absolutely perfect analogy for what this is.

1:14:18Nilay Patel:Well, I don't know that we've solved anything here, but I think we agree that are we all going to live in the metaverse anytime soon? Crosby, probably not. I think by the time you're 19, I do not think we will be living in the metaverse. And I think that's probably for the best.

1:14:31Jess Weatherbed:I would say, or maybe fortunately, that we're not all living in the metaverse.

1:14:34Nilay Patel:Yeah, I think it's going to be good. All right, Crosby, I hope that helps. Jay, thanks as always. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, that's it for the show. thank you to Jay and Jess and Allison for being here. And thank you as always for watching and listening. We have so much more to come this week. We're going to try and do this live show after the Apple event on Wednesday. So keep an eye out for that. Lots of fun coming. It'll be in the feed if that's how you get your podcasts, but we're going to, we're trying new stuff. It's fun to try new things here on the Vergecast. We also have a lot more coming on the Paramount and Warner Brothers story, the Anthropic and OpenAI and Department of War story.

1:15:07Nilay Patel:There's a lot of news happening. And actually a lot of, I would argue, sort of big picture consequential things going on. So we're going to dig into all of it. For now, the best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to The Verge, to get ad-free podcasts, including this one, and to support all of the journalism that The Verge is doing. It feels like a Verge-y moment in the world right now, my friends. Subscribe, be part of it, come hang out with us, yell at us in the comments. It's what we live for. Until then, The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:15:36Nilay Patel:This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. Neil and I will be back tomorrow, Wednesday, and then on Friday to talk about just all of the news, because all the news keeps happening. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.