In short
The Vergecast: Episode Summary
Podcast Title: The Vergecast Episode Title: The TVs, monitors, and laptops at CES 2024 Hosts: Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz Episode Date: [Insert Date]
Episode Overview In this episode, the hosts discuss the latest innovations and announcements from CES 2024, focusing on devices featuring screens including TVs, monitors, and gaming laptops. They dive into various products from leading tech companies like Samsung and LG, while also touching on the broader implications for the tech industry.
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Key Points and Discussions
Introduction to CES 2024
- Setting: The hosts are live from CES, the largest consumer electronics trade show, held annually in Las Vegas.
- CES Overview: A mix of new gadgets and tech showcases, featuring innovative ideas often described in buzzwords like "AI", "5G", and "8K".
Focus on Screen Gadgets
- The episode is divided into discussions about gadgets with screens and those without, establishing a framework for their CES coverage.
TV Technology Highlights
- LG's Transparent OLED TV:
- Introduced a new model that can switch between transparent and opaque states.
- Received mixed opinions regarding motion smoothing when displaying content.
- Samsung Innovations:
- Introduced a transparent display technology as well, alongside new anti-glare OLED TVs.
- Emphasis on the popularity and improvements of Mini-LED technology in TVs, which may be taking over the market by offering larger sizes at lower prices.
- Market Trends:
- Notable growth in demand for larger TVs (e.g., 98-inch models).
- Discussion of the dominance of Samsung's "The Frame" TV, which features art displays and lacks competitive pressure due to its popularity.
Gaming and Laptop Innovations
- Intel's 14th Gen Mobile Processors:
- Set to power upcoming gaming laptops in 2024.
- Observations on how laptops are becoming sleeker and more practical for daily use, moving away from bulky designs.
- Razer's New Offerings:
- Introduced a haptic cushion for gaming but lacks groundbreaking new products.
- MSI Claw:
- A new handheld gaming PC competing with Valve's Steam Deck.
- Features the latest Intel processors but struggles with input designs compared to the Steam Deck.
Apple Vision Pro Discussion
- New details on the Apple Vision Pro, set to launch on February 2, 2024, at a price of $3,499.
- Features Overview:
- Equipped with enhanced eye tracking and immersive environments.
- Positioned as a tool for productivity and entertainment but raises questions about the practical applications of spatial computing.
- Market Implications:
- The hosts speculate on the Vision Pro’s potential success and its competition within the AR/VR landscape.
- Predictions about the challenges Apple may face in defining its purpose, given the mixed responses to existing AR/VR devices.
Closing Remarks
- The discussion highlights the ongoing evolution within technology showcases, emphasizing the significance of practical applications over gimmicky features.
- The anticipation of further developments in the tech industry as CES progresses, with a follow-up episode planned focusing on non-screen gadgets.
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Key Takeaways
- TV Trends: The market is shifting toward larger, more accessible screen sizes with the rise of Mini-LED technology.
- Gaming Laptops: Manufacturers are prioritizing sleek, functional designs without compromising performance.
- Apple's Vision Pro: Represents a significant investment in spatial computing, but its practical applications are still being defined, with potential hurdles in market acceptance.
Additional Resources
- Further coverage on CES 2024 can be accessed on The Verge's website.
- For listener feedback, email vergecast@theverge.com or call 866-VERGE11.
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Note: This episode encapsulates the fast-paced innovations of CES 2024, revealing trends that may shape the tech landscape in the coming year.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. Success is never a given, especially in tech, where everything is evolving at breakneck speed. And if you're trying something that's never been done before, chances of success are even smaller. The difference between victory and catastrophe can sometimes all come down to following a counterintuitive instinct or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision. That's what Crucible Moments is all about. Crucible Moments is back with a new season telling the unlikely triumphs at tech giants like Supercell and Palo Alto Networks.
0:38New episodes out now and available everywhere you get your podcasts. And at cruciblemoments.com. Listen to Crucible Moments today.
0:59Hello and welcome to Rich Hast, the flagship podcast of mobility solutions here at CES 2024. for. That's if you spend enough time at CES, you just start to talk like that. Yeah. You just can't help it. You start saying the word innovative. Yeah. Like as all parts of speech and just lose all track of what's actually words. You just look around. There's companies here. No one's ever heard of. Enabled by AI. Enabled by AI to solutionize the future of innovation. Yeah. With HK. With 8K and 5G. With 8K and 5G. It's all happening all at once. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. I'm here at CES. We're here in a Kia connected home, which means we're above a number of Kias downstairs, which I'm told are powering the home.
1:43Which is kind of cool. We also have a view that I would call like regal above CES. Oh, yeah. We're sort of gazing upon our kingdom. I feel very powerful. We're slightly above the Google booth right next door. That's right. It feels right. What's up, Android? David Pierce is here. Hi. Alex Franz is here. Hi. There's a whole Verge team here at CES. A huge number of people. We've been out on the show floor. It's the day after all the press conferences. There's an awful lot of news here at CES. Yeah. And David, you have some sort of gambit to organize our two CES shows. I do. So we have to do two shows this week at CES.
2:19And the thing about CES is it's just a grab bag of things. Yeah. And so we broke it into two things. Today we're going to talk about things that are mostly screens. I believe you called them screen gadgets. Yeah. And then on Thursday, we're going to talk about all the things that aren't screens. Yeah. Do these things blur together? Yes. All the time. Is the Venn diagram of them mostly nonsensical and made up in my head? Yes. But this is what we're going to do. So today is the screens day. Yeah. There's like a version of this where we were like, okay, it's kind of a car show. It's kind of a TV show.
2:53Let's talk about those things. But it's just like we're going to do screens and no screens. That's a better organizing principle than CS has for itself. which this year is just a mishmash of ideas like ai do you want ai to do it uh at one point vw announced that you could just talk to chat gpt in the car sure which seems like i don't know if you guys are aware of this chat gpt often makes things up so just being confidently lied to while you drive is now a feature of the new vw there's so much of that this year where somebody is just It's like, well, we made a product last year and now that product, but also ChatGPT.
3:31And nothing else. Is that new? Yeah. Is that what you want? Like telly, the free TV we talked a bunch about on the show. Their new thing is you can talk to ChatGPT to get like recommendations for stuff to watch, which I think is hilarious because to your point, ChatGPT loves to like make up movies that don't exist. So you can just like invent movies out of whole cloth and then not watch them on your free television. while shows advertising to you. We should actually start with TVs. So if you don't know, CES is a consumer electronics show. We're here in Las Vegas. It is the biggest industry trade show there is.
4:05That does not mean the entire industry is here in an odd way. Apple, for example, is not here, but Apple loves to upstage CES. So they announced the Vision Pro early this week. We'll get to that later in the show. Microsoft isn't here. They all have employees here and people here wandering around. But in terms of announcements, CS waxes and wanes. Yeah, that's right. Google is here, but Google didn't make a lot of announcements. But everything runs Android. So technically, millions of Android products were announced here at CS. So it's a real grab bag of things. The good thing about it is that everyone is here.
4:39Everyone's talking. If you're a tech reporter, this is fish in a barrel. You're just in Las Vegas, and everyone is holding a drink and ready to tell you a story about something. And in fact, ready to tell you how much they think the Vision Pro costs to build, which has been the best gossip of the week for me. Just people yelling numbers and making up numbers out of them. But the history of CS is that this is a show where TVs are announced. Yeah. Like in the long history of CS, the one constant that has held the show together and really given it its sort of center of gravity is the TV industry shows up here.
5:11They show you new TVs. the buyers from retailers like Best Buy and Amazon and, I don't know, Circuit City. Circuit City still exists. They show up. RCA has a big booth here. Everybody's coming back. Liam is telling me Circuit City no longer exists. Rip Circuit City. But anyway, the buyers from those big retailers show up. They debate about what will be the hot trends in TVs to sell this year. They place their orders, and then later in the year, the TVs show up on the retailer shelves. That's been the pattern. Still the pattern here at CS. Although, interestingly, Sony has broken this pattern now two years in a row.
5:42Yeah. No TVs at CS. And the big Sony booth at the end of the hall has no TVs in it. Wow. Like there are TVs to show you other Sony stuff, but there's not even like a whisper of like Sony's TV models. Right. It's like PlayStation stuff, some camera stuff, half a car, then the rest of the car that Sony's building with Honda, which we'll talk about on Thursday. They're just out of the game. Like Sony wants the high, high end of the TV market. And then the rest of it is kind of up for grabs. Yeah. So we should start with the other announcements. But that to me is just the fascinating turn of the show as I think about the tech industry.
6:16This has been the place where TVs get announced and Sony's opting out. Samsung and LG, which obviously dominate the TV market, they are doing stuff. But they're kind of like, what if the TV was clear? It's like they're in that zone with it. And then the cheaper brands, the TCLs, the Hisenses, I want to talk a lot about Mini-LED. They're coming up fast. Yeah, it feels like for the big companies, they've gotten kind of less and less practical over time with what they show off. These are just sort of like tech demos. Some of them are very cool tech demos. Well, I think they plateaued, right? Like the technology has plateaued.
6:51Well, so I don't think that's true, but I think people don't care anymore. The technology keeps getting better, but my ability to experience said technology has like long since plateaued. So the only thing to do is like get real weird with it. Yeah. And I think part of what we were going to talk about a little while is like monitors, which are now on this run of like getting better to the point where you're not going to start to notice the difference anymore. But there was just like more to do with computer monitors. Whereas like if you want to kick ass TV that is too high res for you to know the difference anyway, you've had that for a while.
7:23Oh, my friend, I'm ready to talk about some news because I think there's this year. It's yes. I think that has been true for a minute. It's about to stop being true again in a really exciting way. um so the news samsung lg lg has a new transparent oled tv uh it's the t the oled t the oled t that's tv t tv t that's that's what they're calling it uh t for c through it's clear it has like a black thing that you can motorize pull down to make it not clear but then you can make it clear again uh chris welch looked through it he was blown away you can read that piece i went and looked at it on the show floor it's just out did you notice a crucial thing about it no so one of one of them they had they're playing like wheel of time on it yeah and they had motion smoothing on on their like invisible well transparent tv that everybody should care about motion smoothing that was just like somewhere tom cruise is furious i didn't i was furious i didn't actually see content i just saw like ces demo reels yeah it was like water falling you know flowers opening they were beautiful yeah this is such and then you saw real content yeah there was like there was one tv like in a corner and it was playing just some of wheel of time being like isn't amazon prime great and i was like hmm is it and also motion smoothing yikes i turned into tom cruise for a moment i almost kicked the tv in does the transparent tv have filmmaker mode because i'd like to enable it please i was like can i have a remote real quick i just need to fix something for you show up at cs with an lg remote just like so that's that's lg's big announcement uh samsung has its own riff on a transparent display they're very excited about all that uh samsung has samsung famously is now doing qd oleds quantum dot oleds that's the panel sony's using and it's it's high end oleds uh they're doing anti-glare on that here's my argument to you about all these tvs oled is hitting a weird interesting peak so the sort of base technology of oled is like where it's at samsung displays putting quantum dots in front of oled pixels to make them brighter uh lg is doing the microlens array, which is I mean, all this is really cool.
9:28They're just like trying to make the OLEDs brighter. But the fundamental technology has hit its point. And it's gotten about 77 inches, and that's kind of how big they can get them. LG can get to like 83. But do you need bigger? So here's what's happening. And those are expensive. Like a big OLED TV is like pretty expensive. Like a Sony A80 is like a pretty expensive TV. That's four grand, right? And that's about as big as an OLED TV. Like 83 is, right? That's basically it. If you walk on the show floor, you see mini LED TVs are everywhere. TCL is all in on them. Hisense is all in on them. Hisense is picking up from Samsung.
10:07They know that people think OLED is good. So Hisense is like, ours are U-Leds. Yeah. This is the longest time Samsung was like Q-Leds. It's like, you think people are so stupid. Truly, you think people are so dumb. They'll do it. So if you're not caught up on this, the thing that is happening with backlights on LCD TVs, an LCD TV can't make light by itself. It can make the color. So you need to put a backlight behind it. Those backlights have basically gotten more and more advanced over the years. They started out with literally fluorescent lights on the side of the TV. They didn't look great.
10:43Like old, old LCDs, literally fluorescent lights on the side of the panels. Then you got into like LEDs behind the panels. That's where you get LED TVs. That's what people are always talking about. then you started adding local dimming you started turning those leds on and off in zones then there was a hilarious spec race over how many zones of local dimming you can have that's the best that was good which is thousands of zones right and then you what do you what's the next thing you make the leds themselves smaller you pack more on you get more zones you're now up to like 6 000 zones 60 000 zones is like one of the claims i don't know if that's true or not it's too many zones looking at this thing i was like i don't know the same company put a u in in front of the LED to confuse people.
11:21Like whatever you want, man. So this thing, if you look at these TVs, the backlights are really bright. They have really, really, really well-controlled local dimming. And they look amazing. They do. And they're cheap as hell to make because they're just still LCD TVs. And the core LCD technology is all the way at the bottom of the cost curve. Like all the way above. Because we've been doing this for a long time. Doing it forever. And what we've been iterating on is the backlight. So now the backlight is starting to come down the cost curve. This mini LED, and this is like year three or four that we've been talking about the other day.
11:51This is the year that it's down the cost curve. And the thing that these manufacturers are doing is they're not saying we've made a better, cheaper 65-inch TV. They're saying, what if you bought a 98-inch TV? Oh, that's too much. And TCL has a giant display that's like, we are the number one provider of 98-inch TVs in the country. And this is our fastest growing model. There's this amazing graph in the TCL booth that they have printed up next to one of their TVs. that is like percentage growth of various sizes. And all the other ones are, you know, like steady growth from 60 to 70, steady growth, steady growth.
12:27And then the highest one is like 398 % growth. And it's like, first of all, that means you sold 16 TVs and now you sold 40 TVs. So like, cool, great job. Get out of here, you math magician. But I do think like we've talked about this before and like you in particular are kind of an OLED purist. Yeah. I came very close to buying an LAD Sony, and I couldn't do it. But I think all these companies are correctly betting that most people are less obnoxious than you about TVs, and thus will buy something that is 95 % as good as OLED for a literal fraction of the price. And brighter. And this is the thing.
13:11Basically, what you lose is off-axis viewing. So an OLED looks perfect from basically any angle. LCD screen, you're familiar with LCD screens. You get wide enough, things get weird. But it's still pretty good on these TVs, especially when the TVs are huge. It's actually very hard to get off access on a 98-inch TV. You need a big couch. I'm four miles away to the left. So you have this huge TV. It's really bright because you can make an LCD really bright. And you have to go look for the blooming on some of these. Not all of them. They're going to be all prices and shapes. but i'm just telling you this is the year that that technology just like enters the mainstream and i think it will probably take the default big tv size from 65 maybe not to 98 but it'll go from 65 to 75 pretty fast because it's going to be cheaper bigger and brighter and it's going to look in a store almost as good as the OLED yeah like almost as good as the OLED like i really had to look on the show floor and the show floor is like a bad environment it's like bright and crazy and all the TVs are cranked up to 9 ,000 nits or whatever.
14:12And they're playing like the best content to make the TV look good. Yeah. There are no blacks. You cannot see. No, so this is the demo that in particular T-Sale is doing. There's a big TV and it's like, you know, it's a flower over black. Yeah, or like an Edison light bulb just kind of lighting up in the middle of it. So they're trying to stress the TV. And they have a few that are settings. Were you playing with the button? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can push the button and you can basically put it in a mode that simulates an old backlight and you turn it on and it does the mini LED backlight and it looks really good.
14:39Now, this is a totally controlled demo. I'm just remembering, I'm not going to promise you that this is perfect, huh? Do you remember like 10 years ago when Vizio did their 100, I think it was like 120 inch TV? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it was the ugliest. And everybody was like, this is preposterous. Like you could only check it out like in a giant warehouse because that's the only place the TV would fit. And it was garbage TV. Yeah. It was just the ugliest TV possible. That's when they, that's when people started doing really intense local dimming demos. Yeah. And TV companies will still, like, at the drop of a hat, a TV company will go to someone and be like, here's a TV without the TV.
15:12It's just the backlight. And they'll show you, like, half the screen has a TV on it and the other half is just the backlight. Yeah. Look at the backlight move with the image. And you just watch Sandra Bullock, like, spiral out and turn into lights. Pretty good. Pretty good demo all around. I'm just saying this is the year you see it on the show floor this year. It's everywhere. And, you know, my prediction is always rooted in my firm belief that people will pick big, cheap screens. And so if you can give people a screen at 65, say, that is almost as good as an OLED, but cheaper, they're going to pick that one.
15:43Right. Especially they can't tell. And then if you get, and it's brighter, which is always the thing. To that point, actually, it makes me think of the test Marques Brownlee does every year with the smartphone cameras. And every year what wins is just the brightest camera. Yeah. It's like people don't want anything else, but it's just if it's bright and there's lots of colors. That's it. And it's the same thing. You see it in a store. It's the same thing. It's why they crank the brightness to 50 ,000%. But the thing that I think is just like really interesting is like, oh man, like what if the baseline size of a TV gets even bigger next year?
16:18And you're no longer picking 55 and 65. You're picking between like 65, 75 and 98. This could be kind of wild. My wife steadfastly refuses to buy a TV above 50 inches for our house. She just thinks anything over 50 inches is like outrageous and unnecessary and no one should have it. And the number of choices that we have under 50 inches is getting so small. Yeah. So like it's crazy. And the TVs aren't very good at that size. No, they're trash. You can't buy a good TV. Which is why we have to get to 55 crappy TCL Roku. Could you tell Anna this, please? Yeah. Can you like black out the 65 inch on the box and just.
16:58Yeah. Don't worry about it. I thought the other one was 50. be like no that one's 30 you're like see they measure them differently don't measure it don't measure the tv so that actually brings us to like the next thing that's happening here which is for all of this talk about fancy backlight technologies and good looking pictures the best-selling tv in the country is the frame tv your nemesis it's the proud owner of frame tv those those two things totally square for me right like if you're gonna put this increasingly humongous thing in your home like an 85 inch black panel just looks ridiculous i see in my mind it looks like a symbol of success stability uh but you are correct most people do not just want a wall of black in their house uh they would prefer to have a middling single backlight extremely bad lcd panel just throwing some art uh the frame is wildly successful yeah uh it is it dominates samsung's tv sales they they love it uh it is i'm just gonna tell you it is not a great tv like it's a find it will do the job they've updated it nothing this year because it is basically fine and they're just they're flying off the shelves the update for the frame this year is that now in art mode the refresh rate lowers to 60 hertz instead of just staying at 120 sick if you have been following like cell phones for any period of time you're like oh this is four generations behind variable refresh tech in cell phones and samsung's like no no this is plugged into the wall all the time we're going down to 60 to show a static image of a painting the frame is a monopoly i'm just telling you right now the frame is a monopoly they feel no competitive pressure and they're like whatever you want some art yeah everybody's out here now making things that they want to be frame competitors yeah and what they are is just televisions right so tcl has an art store it's unclear what that is they have a there's just a sign on the show floor it says tcl art yeah and art is written in like marker font and all it is on the booth is a tv with a bunch of paintings around it and it's like i think you fundamentally misunderstand what the frame is doing uh hisense has a it looks like a jetson's tv that's their art tv yeah okay so everyone's trying to come at this idea which is the tv should look good once off and i think samsung just has such a dominant position here that they just do not care it would be cool if the tv was better well but that's also one of the reasons i think the transparent displays are interesting it's because like this is the stuff we were talking about last week too that these things are sort of increasingly furniture and there's a feeling like this should blend into the rest of my house instead of just being a gigantic black thing to the point the lg one is is furniture like Right, and they're actually going to be like, sewing it with all this other stuff on the stand.
19:47And yeah, I think that's really cool. I think it's like very, very cool. I would almost want to get one. But like Chris Welch pointed out, the picture's kind of garbage when you just want to watch TV. It's like, it's worse. But it's better than the frame, at least. So is everything. No bar, but better than the frame. No, I think that's right. But I think that trend, I think, is super interesting, even though we're not getting what we should have. Because the transparent thing is also going to cost a billion dollars. and it kind of sits in a really awkward way in that it's actually going to call more attention to itself than a normal TV would because we're all kind of conditioned to not notice TVs.
20:24You just have a fireplace on for it the whole time. You're like, I have a wireframe fireplace. Don't worry about it. The fish tank mode, just 24-7. Yeah, I love it. The fish tank thing is so cool. I swear, that was the moment it clicked for me because I was like, oh, this is going to fancy doctor's offices. Yeah. That's who's going to use this. That's what you want. The bleeding edge of OLED technology. You're like, we'll get some fish in your doctor's office. All right. Samsung did announce some other stuff in the TV zone. I'm just going to read you one. And here's what I'm going to do. First, I'm just going to say this word to you.
20:53I want you to guess what you think this feature is. Oh, boy. Samsung announced that its new 24 TVs will feature, in addition to workout tracker and techno gym, which I think are self-perfectly understandable. Yeah, I get those. Samsung tail. Samsung tail. Tail. t-a-i-l yeah is it an acronym nope is it like paw patrol is it like for children oh that's good it's not for children okay it's not for children it's like okay this is this is my series of cops that are dogs it's with tails it's it's pet mode for your television oh yeah instead of turning it all the way off and showing art you show like puppies running around that's good squirrels It's wrong.
21:37It's good. It's dead wrong. Alex, what's your guess? Well, it was Paw Patrol, but no. It's just the Paw Patrol. Just Paw Patrol. You push the button, dogs come running out and solve crimes. It'd be great. I would love that. Ooh, something related to Wi-Fi? No. No? No. HDR. I'm just going to start listing words. Those are just features of the TV. Oops. All right. Samsung Tail enables real-time video consultation with a vet in the comfort of the user's home. See, we were close. From basic care tips to advanced advice, Dr. Tail has a range of questions covered. Users can act with veterinary experts in real time whenever they need.
22:21This is a startup that Samsung saw at like a Samsung Dev Day. And they're like, yeah, Dr. Tail, you're part of the TVs now. And now it's just part of the TVs. That's so good. That's so good. most samsung thing do you remember when samsung had all those apps called like milk yeah you get milk music yeah and it's just like samsung sees a weirdly named startup and it's like yes that's it let's do it that's like on our gadgets that's a good business model you just like come up with a startup that's wouldn't make sense put a weird name on it be like samsung yeah would you like to bundle this big tech companies very few of them can buy companies anymore all right this is a problem lena con's really ruin it unless it's dr tail and samsung tv in which case she's fine last piece of samsung news speaking the frame such a hit uh samsung expanding the franchise they've made a frame speaker which i still find utterly perplexing because it's just a speaker behind a picture yeah that's it it really is like imagine you took a picture a tooth speaker and just hit it behind a painting.
23:26This is what I'm saying. Samsung did it for you. Right. So I'll be honest, I don't hate this at all. It does not need to exist, but I love that it does. It's like Ikea makes some of this stuff too, where they're like, what if our lamp was also a Sonos speaker? And I'm like, what if? What if Ikea? It's a great question. It does seem like Samsung has made one turn more innovative than Sonos and Ikea in that it appears you can pick your own picture in the Samsung frame speaker, which I don't know if you've been following frame technology, key element in the analog frame world. Huge fan of that. IQ was like, no, this is just one picture of sparkles.
24:07Yeah. IQ was like, do you want it to look like a hotel room in your house all the time? We got you. Let's go. Yeah. So that's TV news. It's, again, I wouldn't, I'm not saying there's like one standout TV here apart from the transparent one. it's not like the year that like plasma tvs were introduced to the year that you know oled kind of broke and we're like oh this is the future i do think you're right though that this is like we're gonna look back at this as like the oh this was the year we saw all the mini led tvs yeah yeah and then i think this is the year that tv sizes start to get bigger and i think that's fascinating like if you are running a movie theater chain and you're looking at people buying 98 inch tvs for their house that look really good i don't know man what do you put that on though.
24:47A 102 inch wall. I'm just like, I'm thinking of the furniture situation there. I need a, basically for me specifically, I just need a much larger credenza to put a TV that big on it. That sounds right. Yeah. We'll come back next week for the AV furniture show. Yeah. We'll be back. It's just me with a measuring tape. All right, we got to take a break. The frame is a monopoly. All right, I'm just telling you right now, if you are out there, you're a TV maker, put some competitive pressure on Samsung. This thing needs local dimming tomorrow. We'll be right back.
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26:39All right, we're back. Vergecast CES 1, the Kia connected home, gazing out. I don't see Dieter out there. We are reliably told he was there at some point. I 100 % saw Dieter out there earlier. Shaking my fist in the direction of the Google booth. Lots of other gadgets here at CES. Lots. Alex, you've been paying a lot of attention to laptops, monitors, the gaming gadgets. Yeah. What's going on in Windows World? Gaming, first of all, has been kind of like weirdly the story of CES, right? really here like used to you could have one person kind of cover gaming stuff reliably and now it's like oh maybe i need to assign more people to cover this next year because and it also kind of felt like gaming stuff was always sort of off on its own it was like here's like the gamer section of ces yeah but now it feels like even these like extremely mainstream brands are mostly making gamer things yes they all are like hp's doing it and and and dell and i mean they were already doing it but lenovo like is even kind of leaning more into their gaming stuff they they even introduced another one of those external gpus that everybody does every couple of years we're all like yeah this will be the year and it's never the year but lenovo's out there doing it i think they're remaining thinking more for professional reasons like using the gpus for ai but i think that's also why we're seeing more gaming stuff is because you need really powerful gpus for ai and also for gaming and so it's like okay yeah and that would also explain i guess why it seems like a lot of all this gamery stuff is getting slightly less gamery like my theory with gaming stuff has always been that it's just those are the people willing to spend money on fancy things and high-end oh no i have a way spice your take oh yeah what's your spice your take if you want to make a young person buy a windows computer it has to be a gaming computer yep well that's interesting and that's why like all all the gaming laptops that's like 25 spicer than needs to be please direct your emails to alex.crans i agree with him i totally agree with him uh but no so we saw like a lot of gaming laptops this year and they were all like i wouldn't feel weird pulling it out at a coffee shop like i'm older now i don't really want to pull out something and it's got a bajillion lights on it yeah you can hear it from space because it sounds like it's about to go into space i'm trying to like avoid that in my life now and you still want to play sick games at the coffee shop yeah yeah i still want to play boulders escape forever at the coffee shop until they ask me politely to leave.
29:00And it feels like that's much more possible now. One, because the processors have gotten better. The CPUs are a lot better. The GPUs have gotten smaller and are very efficient. The batteries are getting a little bit better. And two, they just start making these laptops and thinking about the rest of us. Or more specifically, they're thinking about, as I heard over and over and over again, this will work really well in your dorm room and i was like my dorm room okay mine no not mine someone's dorm room and and so that that's really what they're positioning for it's for the college kids who who are coming in and they don't want like an adult the laptop their parents have right but they also just don't necessarily want like neon green lights and stuff all over their laptop they want to like play games but also take the thing to class yeah and so we're seeing a lot of laptops a lot of them have new white colorways.
29:48That was a big thing for, I think, both HP and Legion were both introducing laptops that were like white and they look really, really nice. And you can turn it, you know, you've got RGB keyboards and then if you don't want that, you can turn it off. And that just seems really, really nice. But we saw one from Legion or we saw one from Lenovo. We saw one from HP, Alienware, the Dell one. They actually, they used to have a really big exhaust fan on the back and they still do for their more powerful ones. But the new, the M16R2, they got rid of the butt there's like a big butt on the back of the laptop and they just said nope classic alien or move yeah they like chopping the butt chopping the butt alien well first you add the butt right they've got two moves the CEO's like this is the butt year and then the next year he's like get rid of the butt it's like you know they used to make the iPod like skinny and fat then wide and narrow pull it every year it's actually very accurate that is what happens a A lot of times they're like, the butt got too big.
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30:44We have to shrink the butt. And so this year they like they took it completely off. They've still got it for their for their higher end ones. But for like the 4070 and below, they're like, we don't actually for the NVIDIA 4070 and below. They're like, we don't actually need to have all of that exhaust. We don't need all that heat and stuff. We're fine. You can do enough for gaming. And that's true. Like most games nowadays aren't as demanding, like the really popular ones, you know, the Fortnite, the Baldur's Gate, just not as demanding. It feels like after all these years of trying to make like the one laptop that could be all things to all people, ultra powerful and ultra portable and everything, they're finally finding like a pretty good middle ground that isn't for anybody at either side, but actually hits like the middle 80 percent.
31:25Yeah. In a way better way. Yeah. And like I consider myself a gamer. I play a lot of video games. I don't want the huge, giant laptop. Right. I don't want to carry it. It's super heavy. I don't want to try to power it. some of the times you can't even bring the chargers on the plane like i want i want something that i can play most of my games at reasonable enough that's why i like the steam deck that's why it's a really fun device that's why we're seeing a lot more of these like little handheld pcs where you can play that like the msi claw was the new one this time which i really really like not as much as sean sean loves the msi claw yeah but also i i don't like it because the controls on it have you seen the controls i haven't seen it okay so steam like the steam deck has the little the little touch pads and you can control it and it works like a mouse everybody else who's doing this right now has just joysticks and and a d-pad and it's just not as good i'm like part of why i like the steam deck is i have a bajillion inputs and now it's like and they're all super customizable so you can do any kind of weird thing you want with your steam deck yeah and said they're now like okay what we're going to do is pack in like a little intel processor we're going to make this thing really really fast and not give you super great controls but you are getting much better displays like the msi one the msi claw has like a variable refresh rate it's got a decently sized battery and it's got the hall effect uh joystick so you don't get the drift and stuff wait so there's something like intel processor news you said that the claws it's got a newer intel processor in it right so it's got its new 14th gen mobile processors here that's sort of yeah making all these gaming laptops they announced it like i think a week ago two weeks ago they announced it right before CES.
33:02And it's the new Meteor Lake. And they're just really, really good processors. I feel like for the last couple of years, you would always go to an event and everybody would be like, we're going to make really thin laptops next year, like fan-free, really cool laptops, just like Apple. And it's going to be awesome. And it never happened. And now it's like, oh no, they can actually do it. Like Meteor Lake gives you these really, really thin laptops. It's giving you these really, really cool handheld gaming devices where you can actually have a lot power in a fairly small thing and and still have the good thermals because that's also the big limitation like you can't do really fast gaming if the processor overheats which it will if your device is on fire it doesn't play games your hands are melting holding on to it that's bad and and they've they've it seems like with with meteor like they finally found that balance and like i'm we haven't gotten to check out a lot of these things i was gonna say i feel like I've heard that specific story so many times.
33:57Yeah. And Qualcomm is out here being like, we did it, guys. But I think our batteries last 37 hours. I think the difference is typically the laptop makers don't like buy into that hype. Like the Intel will come out and tell you this is a year. And the laptop makers generally will be like, this is not the year. We may release like one is like a pity. Right. They'll often run like a whole generation behind just for that reason, because they're like, we don't trust this new thing. We're going to wait this out a minute. Yeah, because they're the ones that are going to get yelled at. Everybody is ready now.
34:25But this year, everybody jumped on it. Everybody has stuff. They're really, really embracing it. So it feels like we're finally, like, I think it was 2017, 2018, where I was seeing these super thin laptops. And they'd be like, next year, this is going to come out. We're going to show you this for real. And I'm like, cool. And it never happened. And then this year, like, it really feels like it's happening. And it's not just with the gaming ones, too. It's also, like, Lenovo's got a new ThinkBook 13X, I believe it's called. And it is just, like, it's super, super thin. It only weighs like 2.2 pounds.
34:56It's got a magnesium body. So it's like stainless magnesium. So it doesn't get fingerprints at all. Everything else in the Lenovo booth was covered in fingerprints. And that one worked. I was like, hey, it does work. And it was just like, it feels like a toy, but it was a full laptop. And I was like, I just covered this. I just want to own this laptop now because it is so thin and so light. It was like the old MacBook. Yeah. And I was like, oh, it's that. I really hope that's true. because it's like to me running around looking at a bunch of these laptops there's been the sort of normal ces glut of just like weird ideas about laptops where there's some that they're like what if we had foldable screens and you saw a lenovo one that runs windows and android and sometimes they're just like what if everything about the laptop we just moved six inches to the left and then that was a laptop but there's also just a bunch of them this year that they're just like, oh no, we just made a better laptop that is good.
35:51And it feels like, especially what, the last three years, Apple has just like run away with the best laptop to use every day as a regular person. This is what I'm saying about the gaming PCs. If you want someone, if you want to knock someone off the default of buying a MacBook Air, you need to show up with video games. Right. Which is, I think, part of why Apple is now pushing the Mac as a gaming platform harder than ever because they're trying to undo that a little bit but that only works for the windows manufacturers to the extent that you have also made a pretty good laptop yeah because like i'll figure out another way to play games and like microsoft is doing game pass which is going to be playable on these other devices so like that specific thing is going to fall apart if these windows manufacturers can't figure out how to make just like an everyday very good laptop that is also better for gaming and like that is it's starting to spin but let me ask about the most incredible device here at css it's the lenovo thinkbook which i believe you've seen i've seen all of the lenovos yeah sorry can i just can i just stop you real fast yeah it's called the thinkbook plus gen 5 hybrid please it's very important my apologies the gen 5 hybrid family i'll be releasing this as a gen four can get out of here as you know i've always valued the contributions of the gen five hybrid family i i meant no disrespect i have so many gen five hybrid friends uh your best friend is gen five it's like somehow i'm gonna take this joke actually canceling myself i don't know how but it's coming no you saw this thing yeah It is literally two computers attached with a hinge.
37:39Yeah. Wait, really? Yeah. So it has a Qualcomm processor in the screen and an Intel processor in the base, right? Yeah. Yeah. The base of it is just a Windows machine. And then the top of it is a tablet. And when you pick it up, you're like, oh, yeah, that's a tablet up there. Because it kind of like has that little wobble. It's not as bad as sometimes. Remember the early ones where they put the tablet up and then the horrible little keyboard. and you'd pick it up and you'd be like, I could never use this. It's a little more balanced than that, but it's still got that like heft to it because it's got a 14-inch tablet like in the top of it.
38:12And what was interesting was you really just like pull it off. You don't have to press a button. You don't have to do anything. You just like grab it and yank. Because it's its own computer. It's got its own battery. It's got two batteries. Yeah, it's got two batteries. I love this product. Do you remember the Microsoft Surface Book? Yeah. That was one of those things that like I don't think anyone bought it except for like six people but those six people my niece and nephew had surfaced that had like a rabid fan base of people who liked it for exactly that reason it's like the base had a battery and a gpu right yeah so that's made this the base of the lenovo thinkbook plus gen 5 hybrid it's a windows it's just a full-on windows computer just a whole one i actually really love this it's like It's a weird, fun idea.
38:58We asked, hey, can you communicate between the two? If you're working on something and you pull the tablet off, you can keep working? They're like, no. It's two computers. It's like a full Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde computer. Yeah, you will have to transfer all of your files in order to do it. They didn't even build an app to fake it? They're working on that. They're working on that. There was also separating the two was a little difficult because it's a sample. It's not ready for release yet. They said it's absolutely going to be better when the thing finally comes out. So I'm excited to try that out.
39:31$2 ,000. And they haven't figured out the detach. I mean, just read from Alex. She's being nice. This is very nice. The converting process was also dead simple. Just yank on the tablet until it disengages. The sample version I tried would sometimes need some coaxing to separate it. Just a little. I was like, at one point, I was like, maybe it just doesn't come off. Maybe like this isn't the laptop I'm supposed to be looking at. Maybe this isn't the Gen 5 hybrid. And then the guy came over and was like, no, no. You just got to want it. Yeah. That's great. And then it worked fine after that. This is a classic CS product.
40:05As somebody who like rode really hard for the Asus Transformer lineup for years where you could dock your phone into a tablet and then dock that tablet into a keyboard and it was just all the devices all at once. I'm so happy this thing exists. CES exists, again, to sell TVs to the unwitting masses, and also to have the Motorola, what was it, the Axiom? The Atrix. The Atrix, the greatest phone of all time. The Atrix, which they had a lap dock in that open. I wanted it so bad. And then the Transformer, and then this guy. Just if you can shove two computers into one computer, CES is the place for you.
40:40I was describing CES to somebody this morning as half just a place to show off things that Best Buy might want to buy. and then half just companies saying is this anything it's just they're just like uh v song wrote a whole thing about like a wood paneled litter box that will also weigh your cat it's like that is the most is this anything gadget i've seen in forever and i love cms for that i have a question you just walk by and it's people who are like i'm from france is this anything does it weigh your cat before and after like given the nature of a litter box really good question by all accounts you could also back into weighing something else.
41:21Right, it would know what's left. It's a really good question. I don't know what that data is for. Why would you need that? I just know her cat's apparently too large to use it. Samsung Tail will tell you. My apologies. Yeah, she's going to have to hold it up to Samsung Tail. Okay, so I want to ask about two more things. Every year, Razor usually - They do a thing. They do a thing, right? It's like a project, but it seems like they're pretty chill this year. Pretty chill. They did have a pad that you can sit on for your seat, and it will like kick you in the butt when you play video games. You would say it's a haptic cushion.
41:52Yeah. I think they called it. And that's, Sean was kind of impressed by it. He was like, this is fun. But that technology has been around for a while. Like a lot of people have done that before. And as with a lot of these Razer CES things, they never come to fruition. They're very good at getting attention. Yeah, they're very, I mean, I love it. Like the year they brought in the Razer laptop and it had three screens. And I was like, next year, this is going to exist. It never. No. speaking of things you'd love to take into chemistry class yeah hell yeah and then there's a samsung flip phone called the flip ball okay what is this once again nila i am in the position of having to correct you on very important naming things there are two new samsung display folding screens uh i am on the record as i believe flip phones are the future and folding phones are mostly stupid samsung has two new flip phone concepts both of which basically go not quite 360 degrees because it runs into each other but it like folds all the way open uh one is called the flex in and out all one word yeah and the other is called we should we should talk about this the other one is either called the flex lipple okay or the flex lipple i just want to point out that flipple is a better name it is a better uh it is i believe a portmanteau of the words light and simple oh no so lipo has to be it because lipo's hysterical it does have to be lipo yeah you're right it's not better lipo sounds like a medical condition doctor like that's what you take for your heart lipo's like the thing you get diagnosed with yeah i think that's right but these things are like it also rhymes with something I think we all know what's getting diagnosed when you have lipple, okay?
43:38We all know a part of the body is getting diagnosed. We got David. We broke David. We broke David. It's day one of the CS show. We broke David Pierce. It's gone. I just... But so you like the phones? Yeah, you like them. The L-I-P-L-E. Yeah, just again, it's like on the is this anything scale. Everybody comes every year to CBS and is just like, look at this crazy thing we made a screen do. LG has a big booth of the bending OLEDs. The competition for like wildest array of screens this year is kind of a bummer, actually. Yeah, they really toned it down. LG and Samsung have really toned it down. Yeah, normally they're just like, we have a wave of 600 televisions that you can walk through.
44:23And this year, LG's thing was just like, I don't know, 20 of the transparent TVs that just move back and forth. Not a single tunnel. Not that cool. Yeah. But anyway, so I think Samsung is doing stuff with phones that I continue to think is really interesting. And part of the appeal of something like this is that because it can fold all the way around, you don't need an outside screen and an inside screen, which could in theory make this thing cheaper and easier to manufacture. But then what happens to the inside when you unfold it? It becomes the outside. So it's just nothing. You can customize it.
44:57Yes. Beautiful pictures of Will.i.am and his Mercedes. I do and we'll talk about this on Thursday Alex is doing some important foreshadowing here yes will I am wrote a song about infotainment systems CS everybody we have until Thursday to figure out a fair use way to play the whole song on the first cast alright we gotta take a break we should talk about the vision pronouns it did hit this week we'll be back we'll talk about that
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46:42All right, we're back. CS, day one. It's day one. One-ish. Yesterday was day zero. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I get this wrong every year. I've been coming here. This is like my 15th year, and I still don't quite know what day of the show it is. I think it's day one. Lots to talk about at CS. We've got another show coming later this week with all the rest of it. There's still news happening. We should end, though, this episode by talking about the thing that didn't happen here, but that will probably dominate the year in tech coverage, no matter what, the Apple Vision Pro. Yeah, which is a screen gadget and thus fits the rubric of our episode.
47:17It's like mini screens. The most screens. Right. I heard a rumor, like I said at the top of the show, people at CS are just full of speculation over the screens in the Vision Pro, how much this thing costs to build, whether Apple is making any money on it, whether they're not making any money on it. So we already knew the price. Yep. Industry should take it out from Apple. Apple announces things like here's a price in a release window. They said early 24 and they meant it. Yeah. So they said early 2024 and they meant it. End of January, they announced February 2nd, this thing's shipping. Yep. $34.99,$3 ,500 for a 256 gigabyte model.
47:57Unclear if you need more storage in your face computer. Who knows? To be fair, that's going to be like four minutes of spatial video, as far as I can tell. Spatial video on iPhone, you can record it right now. It's 130 megabytes per minute. It's real big. Yeah. It's not small. You've got to think in TikTok minutes. I see. That's fair. Okay. Real minutes. Right. Yeah, I would say that the press release announcing Vision Pro, deeply confusing, does not have any AR or MR apps really mentioned. Apps mentioned in the press release include Fantastical and Slack. It really seems like this is an iPad for your face.
48:37And what we've heard from developers is that Apple is going way out of its way to tell them not to call it AR or VR or MR or XR or any of the other thousands of things. Like Apple is very specific that these are spatial computing apps. And I don't think that's going to work. I've been wrong about Apple's ability to make things into buzzwords before. But that one doesn't really work for me. But it really does seem like, at least at the beginning, I've been talking to developers really for the last six months about this, and the number of folks that I've talked to who are either sitting it out at the very beginning because they haven't spent enough time with it and aren't sure what to do with it and don't want to ship a crappy app just to have something there the first day, or people who are saying, basically everything we're doing is based on an iPad app anyway.
49:27That's kind of the starting point for these Vision Pro apps. We're just going to ship the iPad app and we'll figure it out from there. Yeah. But I just want to give you the list. So Apple's own press release. I'm just going off very directly. Here's how Apple is communicating about the Vision Pro. They say it's shipping. It's coming out. Revolutionary operating system and user interface. Vision OS. You can use your pinchy pinch to select things. Eye tracking. Eye tracking, when I saw it, was amazing. Then they're like, you can immerse yourself in environments, which is a straight up VR feature.
49:57Yep. Right? That's interesting. The first thing that they tell you about it is that you can put yourself somewhere else. So it's a VR headset. Fascinating to consider. It's the first thing I say. Then they say, here's all the stuff you can do. Bullet list. An infinite canvas for productivity. First bullet in the list. Fantastic All Freeform, Jigspace, Microsoft 365, and Slack. It's like, all right, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to Haleakala and I'm going to Slack. Right? If you just read the press release, that's where you land in Apple's own messaging. I think this is fascinating.
50:31Maybe this is the best Slack experience anyone has ever had in their entire life. It's just interesting that this is what they're landing on. Then, the ultimate entertainment experience. They're very proud of these displays, more than 4K TV, free try. Apple TV +, Disney +, Max, all their services on a screen that feels 100 feet wide. Okay, that's with HDR video. Can I tell you a fun conspiracy theory I have about this? which is that Apple deliberately doesn't mention Netflix because Apple and Netflix are beefing over all the stuff in the Apple TV Plus app. I have no evidence for this. That's how I feel.
51:03I would believe that, 100%. Users can also enjoy new interactive experiences like Encounter Dinosaurs, a VR app. So, again, I'm just reading their press release. I'm not saying these things are good or bad. I'm just saying if you just read how they're talking about it, they have described to you a VR headset. Yep. Yes. fascinating uh then gaming experiences access games in the app store including 250 250 titles on apple arcade this is where i think the ipad for your face comes in yeah because what what do we know about the quest the thing that sells a quest is games fundamentally games and uh supernatural which is a fitness game yep that's what even matter refers to the quest as games console it is by far that you might think the vision pro is going to blow the quest away but it is currently the market leader so it's the thing you compare to super fruit ninja what the golf these are ipad games right like yeah it's just i'm just and then the next one is memories brought to life uh spatial videos and photos this is fascinating the people i know who have tried this thing say it is very convincing i'm very excited to try it i've been taking some spatial videos excited to try it when we get our hands on one of these things but that's limited to people who own an iphone 15 pro right so that very like it mean the thing costs 3500 i'm assuming that's a pretty big overlap of apple customers and then it's the then it's the stuff right spatial face time where you get your avatar you can talk to but you need two vision pros to pull this off fascinating if a user is wearing vision pro while on facetime they appear as their persona while others joining from mac ipod ipad or iphone appear in a tile okay like we just have to see this stuff work but that's still like this is the cutting edge stuff and you can't really use it yeah because you yourself will not experience this right right right it's actually possible the persona to someone else right if you're on a vision pro and everybody else is on a different apple device for face tiles it's it's actually not going to be a great experience right it'll be fine but like it won't be again it's it's a face ipad that's what that will feel like what will you look and then uh that's it by the way uh then then we get breakthrough design and we can talk about that stuff.
53:10But that, in terms of experiences you can have in the headset, that's Apple's list. So iPad stuff and VR stuff. And it's, yeah, it's just funny that the first thing they describe is you will go somewhere else, just totally VR. And then they describe productivity. Then you can play games from the App Store. And then this Personas thing. You know, like I, again, I've worn one of these things. It was very compelling when I wore it. It's the best VR experience I've ever had. Yeah. But if Apple wants to break through into the spatial computing and they think the future is augmented reality, actually very unclear where the augmented reality part of this headset comes in.
53:45Yeah, I think the productivity is probably going to be the closest thing that we see there. Yeah. I mean, one thing I noticed, and again, it's possible this is just like the way that it's written in the press releases, Apple mentions that there are sort of specific spatial games like made for the Vision Pro and doesn't say that about any other app. So it's like, I think there's a decent chance that what we're going to get is like fantastical with a different border in the vision pro and i think that's going to be a lot of these apps where like translucent they're just going to get rid of the chrome in their apps so that it feels more like a floating rectangle and that's going to be the vision pro app yeah and i think this question of like what does a spatial calendar look like is going to take a while and i don't know if that's a thing people want or if that's worth working on or if it's going to be meaningfully better than an ipad app in front of your face but it doesn't seem like anyone has really cracked that yeah and i think apple is betting that some combination of facetime and just like the interface is going to be the killer app for people because like to your point the eye tracking is awesome yeah the pinchy pinch thing at least in the demos that we've gotten is fantastic like it's just fun to use the thing and i think for at least this first version of a$3 ,500 gadget, that might get Apple far enough?
55:03Yeah, my theory is that Apple does not really want people to buy this one. Like, it's scale, right? They're going to make$500 ,000, maybe? I think that's the rumor I heard in terms of like... I was like, that's a lot. I was going to say that's the thing I've been hearing a bunch this week is how many does Apple think it's going to sell? Yeah. That's the other number everybody's talking about. And the thing I heard yesterday is they're actually capped by how many displays that can be made. We'll see. They're at the bleeding edge of display tech. uh so we'll see i just think that apple does not want this to be this version of this thing to be a mass consumer because it's it's a developer's kit like yeah they just polished it up to yeah that's why we don't that's why everything in it is is kind of weird and and we don't know what the killer app is because they don't know what the killer app is so they're like here's our thing please don't call it vr or ar even though that's what it is yeah and and i i get why they're doing that they want to like they're late to that game and so they don't want to be feel like they're late to that game so spatial computing is the thing and it sounds like it is really really cool but it's also just very clear that they don't know what they're doing entirely yeah and so let me just tell you what you get for your 3 500 bucks you get uh the headset you get the solo knit band and the dual loop band sick which are the headbands put around your head a light seal and two light seal cushions the light seal seems like a thing that you gotta finagle with and get exactly right because you gotta block out all the light the vision pro cover very important uh polishing cloth don't just skip over that it's like 20 bucks it's a lot i know free polished cloth the battery the usbc charging cable and the usbc adapter i think we continually forget vision pro is two and a half hour battery life with an external battery pack that you wear on in your pocket on a cable i'm just saying i agree with you i think this is a developer kit i think they need developers to get their hands on this thing they need people to start using it they need to collect some data about what it's for why it's why it exists and i think that is just the most unlike apple i've seen any product in quite a while even the watch which i criticized heavily at the beginning and it took them three tries to figure out the watch yeah and now it's a huge success everybody knows it's a huge success but the watch was like a shotgun blast of ideas about what you could do with a computer on your wrist down to you will flirt with people in school by sending them your heartbeat but that was like a complete johnny ive thought yes not a good thought it's a fun thought not a thought that landed anywhere but he was like here's what you're gonna do you know put your fingers on your wrist then you're gonna read your heartbeat and someone else is gonna feel your heartbeat and they will know that you want to go to the movies the vision pro is like comparatively a little is this anything yeah it's got that vibe yeah and what's weird is there's nothing at ces trying to compete with it like there's a couple of things so he announced a fake headset that doesn't exist in real but that that they're just imagining as like a content creation device it's it's a camera more than it is anything but then yeah we saw xreal which is making the sort of like ar display glasses it's doing more like degrees of freedom and they can see depth and all this stuff like they're pushing towards this thing but everybody else is still on this like we're gonna take something that looks passively like glasses and then try to make it more and more powerful over time no one at least as far as i've seen is trying to do the whole swing so far i mean meta is very clear like meta is right oh sure but meta's not really here doing stuff either i think the thing is apple we're looking at it as like oh is apple why is nobody competing with apple here and that's because apple is late to the party and apple has to actually compete with everyone else already launched their failed vr headsets two years ago.
58:37And three and four and five years ago. Yeah. But no, and I also think what I've heard from a bunch of people this week that the fact that the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, the ones that actually look like real glasses, have been such a hit with people is changing a lot of folks' mind about actually the way to approach this. And I've gotten a lot of confidence from people over the last couple of months, but even including at this show, who think the Vision Pro is wrong in a way that people don't usually bet against Apple products and are convinced that if we can take something that is closer to looking like a normal thing you'd wear out at a place like CES and not a pair of ski goggles on your face, we can get that to powerful faster than Apple can get the Vision Pro to like socially cool.
59:21Yeah. And I think Apple usually wins that race, but this is kind of the hardest it has ever had to try to do that. And I just think it's going to be so fascinating. but i am sort of bummed that no one here like this is the year samsung should have been like there's a rumor that it's it doesn't have local dimming uh but it'll show you artwork anywhere you want uh there's a rumor saying google and samsung are gonna do something again yeah we'll see because that went great the last time like i said everybody had one of those we've run this we've run this experiment before maybe we'll see but that is i will say we're cs is great I love the gadgets.
59:59I love talking about TVs and laptops that are actually two laptops bolted together. Put them together. Exhibit would be so happy. But I suspect we're going to spend the year talking about the Vision Pro. I think that's right. Because it really, you know, Apple's betting on it. It's their big new category. A lot of ideas contain that thing. And I agree. I think there's something to the fact that the Meta glasses are doing well and people like them in a way that I usually don't see this. Sean Halster is here. He's taking a lot of videos at a lot of the little events. He's been wearing a phone sort of like on a chest mount so he could like show people with his hands.
1:00:32And our commenters on TikTok and on the social platforms are assuming that he's taking with the Meta Glasses. Oh, interesting. Which is super fascinating. Like they've already broken into consciousness such that people think that that's the camera he's using. And like Vera and our director is like, no, that's an iPhone on his chest. All right. I think that's it for day one. Is it day one, Liam? Day one. Day one of CS. It's always day one. there's lots more on the show we got to do an entire show about not screens yeah uh and alex has to talk about a 3.0 some of the non-screens we haven't talked about a car yet right yeah and they're all it's all cars here at cs uh which have are not screens for david's rubric they're not screen gadgets but they do have screens shut up don't worry about it it's gonna be fine things that roll and things that don't that's the news but we'll be back a little later this week with that episode.
1:01:23In the meantime, if there's stuff you want us to go check out at CS, you have questions about some of the stuff you're seeing, we're here. Like I said, from a tech reporter standpoint, this is fish in a barrel. We can go find out almost anything you want, except what the Vision Pro is for. That'll be for later. All right, that's it. That's VergeCast. And that's it for the VergeCast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The VergeCast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.
From the publisher
The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz are discuss all the things with screens announced at CES 2024.
Further reading:
I’ve looked through LG’s new transparent OLED TV and seen something special
Samsung’s got its own transparent display.
Samsung’s new OLED TV could make annoying glare a thing of the past
Samsung finally puts the TV at the heart of its smart home
The Frame has become such a hit that Samsung is making a speaker version
Intel’s new 14th Gen mobile processors are here for 2024’s gaming laptops
Lenovo’s latest 2-in-1 crams Windows and Android into one device
Razer gaming laptops at CES 2024: Blade spec bumps and display upgrades
Alienware’s M16 R2 trims the behind for less power and more portability
MSI Claw hands-on: the Steam Deck rival with Intel inside
MSI’s Claw is an Intel-powered Windows competitor to Valve’s Steam Deck
What if your Samsung flip phone could flip further?
Apple Vision Pro launches February 2nd
Apple Vision Pro prescription lenses will cost $149 extra
Xreal’s new AR glasses are aimed at the Apple Vision Pro
Asus targets Apple’s Vision Pro (with M2) with the AirVision M1
Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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