It's gadget season again! _ The Vergecast
The World of Interoperable Voice Assistants: A Future Worth Exploring
As I sat in the crowded room, surrounded by the latest gadgets and gizmos from tech giants, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. The conversation turned to Google's new voice assistant, which was being showcased on a sleek set of JBL speakers. One attendee, John, seemed particularly enthusiastic about the device, and as he demonstrated its features, it became clear that this was just the beginning of something big.
John had compiled a list of ways in which he believed this technology could be used to create a more interoperable voice assistant world. He chronicled his findings in a piece, which I had the pleasure of reading later on. As I devoured his words, I couldn't help but feel a sense of wonder at the possibilities that lay before us. Would this be the start of a trend? Could we soon have our favorite voice assistants working seamlessly together across different devices and platforms?
The conversation turned to Sonos, which had long been a rival to Google's tech giants. While some might argue that Sonos and Google are at odds, I believe that it's possible for them to put their differences aside and create something truly remarkable. Imagine being able to control your entire smart home ecosystem with the sound of your voice, effortlessly switching between different devices and assistants as you see fit.
The speaker market is a big and wide world, full of possibilities and innovations waiting to be explored. The latest JBL speakers, which drew inspiration from the iconic L-100 models from the 1970s, are a testament to this. With their sleek designs and tactile controls, they're a breath of fresh air in an industry that often seems to prioritize style over substance. And let's not forget about the Dolby technology, which has long been a staple of high-quality audio.
As we delved deeper into the conversation, it became clear that there was something special about these speakers. They had a certain je ne sais quoi, a quality that set them apart from their more modern counterparts. The fact that they featured knobs and handles added a touch of nostalgia to an industry that often seems to prioritize sleek design over practicality.
But what really got me excited was the prospect of being able to talk to my speakers in ways I never thought possible. No longer would I be limited by the constraints of a single voice assistant or platform. With interoperable technology on the horizon, I envision a future where I can yell at my speakers, and they'll respond with the perfect amount of volume and tone.
This is the world we should live in – a world where our devices are intuitive, responsive, and ready to serve us at a moment's notice. It's a world that prioritizes user experience and innovation over profit and prestige. And it's a world that Google, Sonos, and other tech giants can help create.
In Other News
Ryan Broderick recently wrote an article for our series investigating the effect of Google on the world. His piece is full of interesting insights into the company's history and the impact it has had on our daily lives. It's a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the role that Google plays in shaping our digital landscape.
We also caught up with Andrew Marino, our video team producer, who created an amazing binaural audio video exploring the capabilities of noise-canceling headphones. The result is a wild and fascinating ride full of graphs, interviews, and behind-the-scenes insights into the world of sound design.
Finally, our latest episode of Land of Giants is out now. This season has been one of our best yet, with Tesla in China being the standout episode. If you're a fan of tech and business, be sure to check it out – it's packed with interesting stories and insights from some of the world's most fascinating companies.
A Word from Our Host
As I wrap up this article, I want to take a moment to thank our team for all their hard work on our latest projects. From Ryan's research to Andrew's video magic, every single person played a crucial role in bringing these stories to life.
Of course, we couldn't have done it without our loyal listeners and viewers. Your support means the world to us, and we're grateful for your enthusiasm and engagement with our content. Until next time, when we'll be back with more Apple news and tech updates, thanks for tuning in!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign welcome to the vergecast the flagship podcast of techtember and techtober and techvember and text Ember and all of the other months to come it's about to get wild in the tech World y'all and we're gonna be here for all of it Alex Kranz is still here hi Alex hi what about to lie to lie no if we have to lie we're never gonna make it to techtember don't don't do this to me uh Richard Lawler's here hi Richard hello I just want you to know that both I and everyone who listens to the vergecast prefers you to nili so I would just say this is an enormous upgrade over what we had just before the break I get that a lot what's your take on bananas how many times have you done surgery on a banana I guarantee No Bananas takes you don't have any takes on bananas now now I feel obligated to press on this Theory you don't have any takes on bananas Rally's banana shakes yes bananas no that's good I can't argue with that so we have a lot to cover this is like the last week of Summer it's about to truly get Bonkers in the tech world like we have this big run of events about to happen so this was kind of a mix of leaks and information about what's coming this fall plus the last of this like grab bag of news we've been talking about all summer like get all your stuff out before Apple announces the iPhone event because basically as soon as that happens like it is the fall and Chaos rains forever so we're gonna go through a lot I kind of think IFA is now the most interesting Tech trade show in the world like CES has kind of gone away from me but ifa's pretty cool would agree so we have a lot to get through but the the first thing I want to do is is talk about some of the stuff that's coming this fall and before we were coming into this I made a list of all of the events of like the next six weeks and I can I just read them to you and I need you all to feel the feelings that it made me feel to write this list down are you guys ready do I need like a drink first if you're gonna need several drinks during and after take a shot for every time you're gonna have to work too much in the next song so you'll die okay here's what we have IFA is happening right now the Toronto International Film Festival which is a surprisingly cool source of movies especially like smaller stuff you might not have heard of starts September 7th the Apple event where we're going to see the iPhone 15 is on September 12th the Detroit Auto Show is on September 13th Amazon is having an event presumably one of those where they just launched 200 things that run Alexa on September 20th the next day on the 21st Microsoft is having an event probably some surfaces the code conference which we're obviously a huge part of starts on September 26th meta connect is on September 27th we're going to see the quest 3. there's a Google event we're probably going to see the pixel 8 on October 4th and then the next day on October 5th is Samsung's developer conference where I assume they'll just like talk about Bixby a bunch and that's that's just between now and the first week of October so like for all the people who write to the vergecast email and are like hey can you talk more about gadgets like oh boy it's coming it's coming y'all we missed the gadgets too and they're about to come back with a true vengeance are we like is this good are we excited about this I like I I'm always excited about this time of year because I like all the travel I like the hustle and bustle I like how you're just moving and then like Thanksgiving comes and you're like just an off switch and you just stop functioning for a week ideally and that's really really nice like and you just get all these cool things to play with for a month and a half and that's fun I like that I like playing with all the stuff I wish there were more like things that I really enjoy like not phones but I'm still excited like I want e-readers and and weird tablets yeah real lack of Kobo events this fall for crayons yes where are the Kobo events okay where's the Nook event like I I want a Samsung event but I just want it to be TVs and speakers that's it and I don't want to have to wait till January for that I'm imagining a Nook launch is just like one person at a Barnes and Noble who like spots the new Nook on her shelf and is like oh look a new Nook and then the CEO just bursts out from a display of books and it's like we made it for you like some music playing like the lights start changing exactly like if you want to get to some snacks they're right in the back at this at the knock off Starbucks that we put back there in every one of our stores uh I don't know Richard how do you feel about this well and I love that and I love the events the pace of it not so much to travel covering them from at home much better but also it's the time when all of that stuff that came out at CES and that it was announced really early in the year then you never heard about it again and companies acted like they never announced it all when you ask them they're like like what's that I don't we I would remember if you if you if we said that but I don't now it's coming up like Samsung's like oh yeah remember we launched 200 gaming monitors and we said they were going to be released now now you can actually buy them maybe they might be at your local Best Buy so there's kind of both parts you have these announcements of products that are about to come out and we'll be out very soon and you also have these things that you've been waiting for so long that you probably forgot about them but here they are that's true the thing that precedes all of this actually is like back to school season which we've been in the throes of for like three weeks now and that's when everybody who's like selling large TVs and large computer monitors and like wants to sell you a thing with gaming lights on it like back to school season is their sweet spot so we've we've been in this like remember that thing you heard about at CES space for the last few weeks and I agree it's been delightful Samsung being like remember that big screen we told you about look at it here it is I love it I'm in on that you put it outside it's great it's bright exactly um okay so we're gonna have plenty of time over the next six weeks to cover all of this stuff so we're just gonna like lightning round it for now let's we we pulled out a bunch of stuff that's happening this fall let's we each picked one and we're just gonna talk about it for a little bit here now just kind of what's on our mind as a little preview as we go into the fall uh Richard would you pick the pixel 8 uh first of all Google just can't stop leaking its own Foams the pixel 8 uh Pro showed up on Google store website uh a little bit early fortunately we didn't have to wonder whether or not it was the pixel 8 Pro or not because it had some alt text that very clearly described it as the pixel April is also probably wearing a new pixel watch if you take a look closely it's to be deliberate they did the alt text like you don't mess that up it might be but they also have a track record of doing this that's so long that they might just be that incompetent it's the perfect crime what if that's what if that's actually not incompetence what if that's the plan like it's always been the plan so everybody's like oh man they're always leak What's it gonna be this time I'll get excited this time I don't think it's a good plan but like I think it could be the plan was it last year with the pixel 7 that Google ended up just tweeting out like yeah here it is like weeks ahead of the launch they were just like yeah you've seen it enough times here it is enjoy I think that was last year I can't remember if that was the seven or the seven eight but I think you're right that was the seven they were just like yeah look you know what it is like it looks like the last one whatever um the bad news unfortunately this week about the pixel is you know if you bought a pixel 6 and you subscribed to pixelpass like I did thinking that you'd be able to easily upgrade because Google said you would be able to they said you would you won't uh you couldn't upgrade for two years it was locked you would have to wait two years to upgrade to a new device it is now one year and about ten and a half months and Google says yeah we're not doing that anymore the pixel pass is over bait and switched I feel baiting something I don't know switched exactly because before this like before we started recording you were like I'm not that upset about it but you're like like walk me through that why aren't you that upset about well there's kind of two parts to it what what people paid for what I paid for I got I bought a phone that I paid for over the course of several months uh also paid a kind of bundle discounted price for a bunch of services like cloud storage that I don't really use YouTube music that I do use a YouTube premium it's pretty nice to forget that YouTube has ads got all that and even after the pixel pass goes away they'll still have a discounted rate for those Services uh and also insurance for the phone and stuff like that like it was all in one thing sweet but when they announced it they said that it was going to give you easy device upgrades and you could do it after two years and now no one look at that like it's not even like they're cutting it off and some people took advantage some people didn't zero there is zero of that which you can still get like a zero percent APR phone if you want to get it like and pay it over the course of months or something but you just can't do this package again I think you're way under selling this I think this is outrageous like I honestly believe this is one of the like crueler and more cynical things Google has done in a series of cruel and cynical things to people who bought its products and cared about them like to say to people and they framed this in in the course of building up the pixel over the years as like another way to believe that Google is going to continue to care about its Hardware right like it has said over and over for years now like we are in this for real we are going to take care of customers we're going to keep giving you reasons to be part of this we're going to keep making the deals better on and on and on and this is like the most deliberate shitty rug pull of a move I can imagine even if everyone more or less like you're saying comes out of it whole which I actually don't really think is true because I think there are a lot of people who are now going to go through much more messy and complicated upgrade programs than it would have been if I could have just clicked a button and shipped my thing to Google and gotten a new phone like that's a win in a way that like even if I have to go to my carrier store and do a trade-in is more complicated so even just making it harder is a loss but I just think like from a pure like showing people you don't care about them move this is such a crappy thing for Google to do and and the people who are the most dedicated to the brand like probably the biggest pixel fans who were like okay yeah I'll get one and then two years from now I'll get another one I'm I'm willing to sign up let me do it I think it's a mischaracterization to call you guys the biggest pixel fans I think just pixel fans who's a bigger pixel fan but like are there people are there like above a pixel fan I think like pix being a pixel fan in itself makes you a big pixel fan so you're saying like there is no such thing as a small pixel fan yeah there's no such thing as a small pixel fan like you have to have passion there are no small pixel fans only small people like there's it's like eating there's no such thing as a small e-ink fan like you can't be like oh that's a like I'm not a Big E fan I'm an eating fan because there's not a lot of us there's not enough of us for there to be like big ones and little ones now you know what I think there are kind of uh pixel casuals okay it doesn't work who are the pixel casuals and and many of them may have picked up the pixel pass because again it was it was a pretty good deal um and a decent way to buy a phone it was like oh you know you can click a button and you can get all the things in one thing not your carrier you can go bring that how you want or you could get Google fi and get another five dollars off but now those people are just oh not happening it's like was just super I don't know I am I know you're processing it and I know you're in a place where you're like it's fine it's chill but I really hope like next week we come back we're like Richard how are you feeling about it I hope you're like mad because I'm so mad on your behalf I'm just like they like I'm with David I'm like they they bait and switched y'all they were like hey come and do this not a psych we don't give a crap about you guys we're not even gonna last two years like it feels like disingenuous marketing it just feels gross believing that Google would actually come through on something that they promised is basically doing it to yourself that's known better I've got to take the L on that one I just that should should have seen that coming that was that was not a 5000 IQ plug it really it really is like terrifying how true that it's like I I wrote I wrote a thing I think it was last week about Google keep their note-taking app uh which has gotten a couple of like really nice upgrades it's a good app it's kind of a thing people don't like know or use but the people who do really love it because it's a really good simple note-taking app and like overwhelmingly the comments on the story were like don't talk about keep Google will remember it exists and kill it like if a Google executive reads this the one engineer who is still building features will get fired and they'll kill this app and it's like that's how people think about this stuff like we literally cannot have nice things from Google anymore because it just ruthlessly kills all of them and I think if I'm the hardware team they're still in this position of people don't believe them that they're serious and with with good reason and lots of evidence and so like I If I Was Google I would have gone way out of my way to say this thing is going to continue to exist where if we even if we can't think of a way to make it worthwhile for the people who already got it even if they've already been made whole we're going to come up with something new because what we need you to do is be loyal to us and trust that we're going to be loyal to you and instead they're just like never mind you get YouTube how do they how can like I feel like I had this exact conversation two years ago with Dieter on the vergecast about like when when that pixel 6 came out because that was the big moment where where that was what the fourth iteration of no we really care about Hardware now this is the moment and we're like okay and they did the pixel pass it was like okay they feel like they and then they they pulled the rug again so it's like how do you build that trust you keep like destroying that trust every time you get a little bit of it you go and you like poop on it and say oh pixel fans the 12 of you that exist including Richard like get out of here we don't like you but like how do you I just don't see how they can they come back from this well I think the I think the writing really was on the wall because when you look like when the pixel folds came out and people asked about the pixel pass they were told basically the same language that they they announced this week that yeah no um not so much happening um and I think that's part of what makes it worse is that they could have announced this six months ago but people were like oh people were sitting back they saw they said they saw the rumors they were like oh pixel age is coming out I'll just be able to get that check no no you will not you have felt better if they'd done it six months ago if they just like so you could have like prepared emotionally emotionally yes I could have could have healed a little yeah okay um all right let's let's move on we're gonna have a lot of time to yell at Google between now and October do we know anything about the eight Pro yet by the way Richard is there any we saw the one picture in the ad are there like yes we've seen because we've seen the renders we've seen specs uh there's some reason it'll have Wi-Fi seven it'll probably still have the same the FCC uh filings came out this week also so we know that it's basically like the previous ones where like the pro has uh Ultra wide band but the regular one does not we've seen kind of hardware specs about the chips it's a pixel you you know how these go the the real question is like what are the software features going to be and there's spin leaks or something like video unblur so just like Photo and blur but for videos that's cool uh I just want to say I was out sick for the last two days and somehow Wi-Fi seven happened while I was gone for two days so that's cool and fun and I'll catch up on that over here but I do think that I'm actually more interested in the pixel than the iPhone this year because like Google has been saying this thing about like on device AI for you know years now and this seems like one of the first years that if it wants to do some like really genuinely wild on-device AI stuff it might actually be able to so I think that's going to be very interesting but again we have lots of time to talk about that uh I'm gonna go next because I want to talk about Taylor Swift and Krantz you can go left um the true events of the Fall I think we can agree is that Taylor Swift's era's tour is coming to AMC Theaters across the country in October uh as far as I know at least from what I've seen so far this is all kind of Just Happening we don't know for how long we just know that they're doing at least four showings a day at every theater and that AMC has upgraded its ticket capabilities for five times as much demand as it has had before because of all the swifties who did or did not get tickets to the era store I honestly believe this might be like the biggest movie of all time if it was allowed to be it's a like concert movie right it's it's not live streams yeah so from just like the little tiny bits I've seen you can see some snippets on like Taylor Swift's Tick Tock account was I think where I saw it it looks basically like a super well produced concert film I love that yeah that sounds great it's it's amazing and you'll get to see it in like a gigantic theater with you know cool surround sound and it'll be a million swifties like they even said bring the friendship bracelets dress in all the eras stuff like you better believe I will be there giving people bracelets I I won't be there but I will support all of you are there swifties besides you and nili I think sneakily like two-thirds of The Verge is swifties uh I know at least a couple of people tried and failed multiple times to get era's tickets Richard is being suspiciously quiet which makes me think he's definitely a Swifty for sure I was like hmm look at Richard's off looking in a corner Richard yeah I just don't know what's going on here I'm very happy for you the cultural event of the summer and fall and winter and the restrooms this movie might be in theaters for a decade Richard she fixed the economy like like they keep being like Oh yeah the eras tour increased spending like it fixed the economy I don't think it fixed the economy but it increased spending what if she like lowers the rent what if she what if she like changes the world with this tour I fully believe in her her economic prowess oh I agree at some point when the when the era's tour ends we're gonna find somebody fun to talk to about this and we're gonna go through like the insane like stratospheric records that this tour has set and nothing will ever top it ever again and like the things she has it's insane and wild and I'm very excited about this movie um and that's all everybody you probably can't get tickets if you're hearing this now well it created Congressional hearings about Ticketmaster oh yeah well yeah yeah she broke Ticketmaster she's gonna make AMC the most valuable company in the universe now this is she runs the economy this is what it is all right crayons you're up what do you got okay iPhones come in two weeks I'm really mad I bought an iPhone 14 pro last year and I was really excited about it and I was like I'll be fine I don't need the next one and now the next one sounds like it's almost definitely gonna have USBC and the fomo is Extreme for me at the moment and like I'm locked into this payment plan for another year so it's not like I'm not I'm cheap I'm not gonna be going and buying it but I'm going to be regretting My Life Choices you didn't get the iPhone upgrade plan like come two weeks from now you gotta get the upgrade plan I want to pay in cash because it didn't work with my Apple pay card I think and I want my three percent I like imagining that you just walk in with a bag of nickels and just like throw it on the desk in the Apple Store and you're like give me an iPhone I just whip it across the The Genius Bar Adam yeah like let's go but I like it seems exciting I I don't know iPhones are kind of weird in a weird place right like they yeah they're in a weird place last year the exciting thing was the dynamic Island and we we enjoyed the island but try explaining to anyone who doesn't listen to The Verge cast with the dynamic island is and that's a less fun conversation yeah they'll just say it's that thing at the top of the screen that screws up all the apps sometimes yeah there's kind of like Beyond excited about USBC I just got a new USBC charger from from anchor and I'm so like it charges my phone or not my phone it charges like my my computer it charges my steam deck it charges just everything I own that I can plug USBC into and it's wonderful and I'm like oh I want my phone to do that too that seems cool so the USBC alone has has me pumped for it and we're going to USBC on the airpod case I'm not gonna buy it because again like if my phone doesn't do USBC I refuse to let my airpods case do USBC it has to wait in line but this is like exciting if you like USBC it's going to be a big event if you like anything else it's going to be an iPhone event well also if you like wireless charging the big news at IFA is these wireless chargers that are getting announced with the g2 standard that the iPhone 15 May support well I guess we'll find out and allow kind of non-magsafe chargers to charge iPhones at the same rate as magsafe and also you know kind of other devices other phones that support 15 watt wireless charging so if you like wireless charging uh this is your moment oh I got a wireless charger too I spent like 150 dollars Game Changer or if you want to buy a new charging stand or something like that yeah don't for like the next couple don't don't be me I bought it last month I do not read our website enough is what happened there a lot of regrets I was talking to somebody one of the charging companies the other day and and they were basically saying that the USBC thing is cool but it's a mirage because Wireless is the real thing that it's like the actual Arc that we're on is wireless charging taking over and it would have been great if USBC had been ready you know 12 years ago and we could have just gone straight to that but we didn't and that's fine but where we're actually headed and I think where Apple has pretty clearly been wanting to head for a long time is wireless charging wireless charging is mostly still very bad and not as good or fast as wired charging so I think we still have a ways to go but I agree I think I think especially some of the stuff we're seeing at IFA that we're going to talk about a little later is it's pretty exciting Richard do you care about this iPhone convince me to care about this iPhone but I had more things to convince you about the iPhone oh you're not done okay you didn't talk about it actually they're not done yeah I was about to say the action button I think it's the stupidest thing in the world and I'm not excited about the action button because I love my because I would be excited about the action button if it didn't replace the mute button and like if I'm just gonna have to program it to be the mute button then it's not an action button it's just a mute button that I had to like do an extra step to make a mute button I just I want both straight up had to look at my phone to see if it still had a mute button that thing has been on mute since the minute I took it out of the package and I have not touched it since anyone who lets their phone ring loud is 75 years old that's blanket rule of the universe if your phone rings you are a hundred years old and should don't you like being able to just go oh is it on mute take a quick look or like reach into your pocket and go and kind of hit the little switch while you're walking down the street and be like yeah it's on mute I I just want I want that I like that I don't have to like pull my phone out and be like mute or pull my phone out program the mute button and then hit mute you don't miss the art of Ring of ringtones they're trying to bring ringtones back by getting rid of the mute button no maybe it's the opposite maybe they're killing it forever it's like your phone can no longer make noise when it rings would be like truly Apple's most Innovative feature in years they have to go to my mother's house and explain that to her like I'm not doing it I'm not letting anyone at the like apple it's Tim Cook has to fly to my mother's house and explain to her why her phone doesn't ring anymore does your mom have the ringtone that Rings like an old-timey phone my mother-in-law has that ringtone and it drives me nuts oh yeah she's got the ringtone and she's got it on her watch too which she answers in the supermarket I learned so sorry to all the HEB Shoppers of Texas for having to listen to all of my conversations with my mom while she's picking up groceries amazing it's great amazing all right before we get a break Alex you wrote down one other one in the fall things coming up that you're excited about give us 30 seconds then we're going yes Starfield it's the new Bethesda game like all other Bethesda games I think it's going to be stupid but then I'm reading all the reviews and now I really want to play it but I also know like every other Bethesda game I'm gonna play it for 100 200 hours never finish it and tell everybody it sucks I'm so excited so stupid is not the word you're looking for here it's gonna be stupid it's gonna be like the characters look stupid I feel stupid playing it because I'm like oh you can't look dumb you're like the Bethesda characters look dumb and that's a bummer and so far that seems to be the case for this game as well but also I want to travel around delivering coffee in space that seems cool I don't want to do that in real life but I want to do that in space Richard's just like if it's not overwatched don't even talk to me yeah I'm sorry I I want another games as a service shooter just something I can play in 15 minute increments you just want to play Red fall forever like that's all Richard does if it weren't so terrible if it were just any slight bit less terrible I would I would be playing it right now I like it all right we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about all the other mishmash of nonsense happening in the tech world this week we'll be right back all right we're back so lots of little news this week there was some threads news it seems like we're getting search Sony raised the prices on PlayStation Plus we've got some X doing sketchy stuff I don't really want to talk about that anymore Wireless carriers doing weird stuff again Call of Duty using AI to moderate voice chats which is just America's worst idea in years uh let's let's just blast through office we can't get to all of this so let's just lightning round this again uh Krantz you're you were you're still on the roll you get to go first I'm so excited so Dolby just announced this thing it's called Dolby Atmos Flex connect and the name is very stupid that's okay because what it could do could potentially be very very cool which is that it will automatically like just make your speakers your wireless speakers work with your TV provided they both support doli Atmos Flex connect and only one of TV will support that in the next year that we know of and it's from TCL so it's not going to work with any of your current stuff and it's probably not going to work with most of your stuff next year but like five years from now this is gonna be sick as hell and I'm I'm I'm actually excited about it because like Sonos has done a lot of this stuff in the past they do the automatic calibration and everything like that but it's just Sonos and you have to use Sonos speakers and you're stuck in that and this means like okay I can go get any speaker like any wireless speaker I want and it's gonna bounce It's Gonna Take and ping the audio from that speaker the TV's got its own microphones built in it's going to receive it and it's gonna go oh and fix it all you don't have to worry about a stupid sound bar because sound bars are bad I'm sorry you even though I own one you don't have to worry about like messing with anything it should just all work and for like the last what 20 years TV audio has not just worked so that feels appealing even though you're still like now gonna have to buy additional speakers for your TV at least it should make it a lot easier and more natural and hopefully cheaper than the soda solution which is why I'm not buying a new iPhone this year so the idea seems to be if I'm understanding this correctly and I'm genuinely not sure that I am but if I if I'm understanding this correctly it's that you don't have to buy like a full surround sound set you don't have to buy that one gigantic box at Best Buy you can you can sort of bring your own speakers and essentially as long as they are like compatible with this one Flex connect spec Dolby will be able to stitch them all together you'll be able to put them in a system right and it'll work yeah that that's it like theoretically if Vizio supports this you can go get those super cheap but decent Vizio speakers set it all up and then instead of like getting all weird and finicky and trying to use the not very good super cheap Vizio technology to make the speakers sound good just have Dolby do it and do it well and it'll all sound well so this seems great this also seems like a thing that shouldn't be that hard to do and probably should have happened 15 years ago right yeah yeah like Sonos does it now and Sonos is wildly expensive the TV companies have not really cared about speaker like they haven't cared about this they haven't needed to because they're like okay for them there's three there's three like TV buyers right there's the people who spend all of their time in AV Forum it's like me and Eli like we're over we're over there and when we're gonna go buy a bunch of stuff and we're gonna spend 12 years working on our system and it's gonna sound beautiful and people will ask us how much we spent and we'll have to run from the room screaming and saying you don't need to know that that's us then there's like me a couple of years ago and a lot of people probably most people listening to this were like I want speakers that sound good so you go and you buy some speakers they're Sonos or Vizio or whatever and you plug them into your TV and it sounds reasonably good probably not as good as any CRT TV you had 20 years ago but decent and then there's everybody else who doesn't listen to the vergecast and doesn't know that all speakers and TVs suck because speakers require space and TVs don't give them any and so they go and they buy a TV and they're like wow the speaker's up so they turn the volume way up they turn on the subtitles and they're just like why can't I hear anything anymore and while part of that is definitely the fault of Hollywood so much of it is the fault of bad TV bakers not caring and they're like well if you care that much go be one of those people who buys speakers from us and puts them in the back we don't care enough to like make it nice but do it there was this post I saw I forget Which social platform it was on there's too many of them at this point but there was somebody who was like guys you don't even know the reason you think Netflix sounds so bad is because by default its sound is turned to 5.1 and if you are using your built-in speakers that means you're not getting the right ones just go and switch it to stereo and everything will be amazing and this post went like hugely viral and everybody was like oh my God you've solved it and I was just like my guy like this ain't it you didn't do it you just had a setting wrong on your Netflix like I don't know what to tell you that is not it and also you're gonna put it on stereo and you're gonna be like oh now it sounds bad in Stereo from two sides instead of five uh I don't know Richard you're a guy who lives in AV forums and owns 30 or 40 televisions does this idea excite you I think it sounds great from the idea that okay so you can just go get some speakers and press the button and it'll say all right I'll get I'll get the sound figured out and that's kind of always been the problems of Atmos is that they've programmed in the sound so it doesn't need like okay so how many channels do you have do you have two channels do you have 2.1 do you have 5.1 do you have 7.1 you have 9.1 6.2 I have some speakers Do It For Me Yeah and you'll do it um also they have never uh gotten Surround Sound audio right ever at any point it has never been seamless it has never worked the way that it should so I don't know why we should expect that it will and I'm optimistic I think this could like let me be Optimus the technology exists like this should be possible this is this is the kind of thing that like with a microphone in the TV with speakers with the right technology you could do it I'm sure that it will make Dolby money as they get licensing fees from all the speakers that are now compatible how long it'll be until I can use this in my own living room I'm not so sure well you know else could go like can be like oh like physio could just go and do that well it'll be DTS uh not Flex connect yeah DTS flux connect perfect yeah I just I always think about like the so the the Ultimate Ears Boom series are like the best Bluetooth speakers on the planet uh and one of the things that they've done really well is you can actually daisy chain a bunch of them together uh and it's not terribly complicated it just like synchronizes the sound coming out of a bunch of speakers right so if you have a big house and you don't want to rig up a whole speaker system you can just put four Bluetooth speakers around the house sync them all together and it plays and the fact that that alone is like an Innovative feature in speakers is bananas like you can do this with Bluetooth you can do this with Wi-Fi like this is not a complicated technological problem we've done much harder things than make speakers play and I think like to Richard's point about you know a million different kinds of surround sound none of them that have ever been done very well I think just the fact that it's as difficult as it is to buy like two pretty good speakers stick them on the either side of your television and have it work is nuts like that's the reason I tell people to buy sound bars because you don't have to program it you know where it goes just don't worry about it even buying two speakers ends up being more work than it's worth for not that much better sound most of the time so I think the idea that it's going to like perfectly correctly tune your room I I agree I don't trust but I really hope it works like I super super super hope it works because it would be awesome five years from now it'll be it'll be cheaper than Sonos and not as good but better than nothing which is the entire story of a home theater audio at this point as is Dolby almost got it right that's like that's dolby's slogan like we all we almost got it this time no we're not gonna we're gonna we're gonna run for the last second screw it up sorry guys yeah uh Richard what's your next one yeah you know my thing is Google's duet AI becoming available in docs and Gmail and other workspace apps uh you know you reported on this this week I want to hear more from you about the people you talk to and all the things they said but what strikes me is the price um we saw this with the Microsoft Bing Ai and then making it available in Microsoft 365 and it looks like Google's going about the same same way they're charging it looks like 30 per person per month I understand why they're pushing AI so hard because they're going to make a lot of money from it um the bad news is that the companies who buy it they're probably going to want to save money somewhere else whether or not these AI tools actually work or make people more productive or do not they're going to be spending a lot of money on them so there's going to be cut somewhere else and it just seems like that's assured is it thirty dollars per month per head user like per account yes yep no yeah nope hard pass that's a no for me I I it would have to be magic can you just think for a second how good it would have to be to justify that price it would have to be magic people who will just get this because it's useful and there's a set of these things that I think are like time saving in a way that will actually be meaningful to people right like the the idea that I can uh I don't know take a Google doc and say duet turn this into a spreadsheet and it'll turn it into like a remedial but functional Google Slides deck in 45 seconds is like there are a lot of people to whom that is worth 30 a month easily there are a lot of people who essentially do that one thing for a living uh and I think the question of what happens to those people to your point is really interesting and really complicated and probably really messy and bad in the long run for those people but I tend to agree that I think the number of people for whom there are thirty dollars a month worth of good features in Google duet is going to be smaller than Google thinks and I think it's going to be the same with co-pilot that like if you just give it to people they'll use it because having a thing that can you know clean up my email grammar or make a graph out of my spreadsheet data for me is useful and I I would use that if it was just there but paying what amounts to like 3x the price of Google workspace for that is super super super Steep and I don't know that Google has made a particularly convincing case that this is gonna like work like we've all used Bard in the last six months I don't really have any reason to believe this thing is going to be as good as they say it is is it going to work with like your calendar what do you mean like the only thing I would pay 30 a month for is an AI that just understood and did all my calendar scheduling for me like including the polite DMS to people to be like can I put some time on your calendar is this okay all like I wanted to just do all of that if it did all of that I I personally would pay 30 dollars I don't know if I could get VOX media to agree to pay thirty dollars but like I'd be like oh I'll see you'll check it's still on the side there's an app called motion I think it's motion dot IO I think that does exactly that and I think it's like 15 a month but is it trustworthy I haven't used it in a while but by all accounts it's actually pretty good uh I hate those apps like even as a person who's like obsessed with my calendar and spends way too much time like managing faster no because it's like it's like tell us about your Flow State and we'll schedule it and I'm like I don't know it like depends on what I eat for lunch that day like leave me alone calendar I was like no you should just know like I basically want an assistant but it's only 30 a month I have the problem with the economy I am why they're all so excited you're literally the reason they built duete yes we can do but I don't trust it like a person I would be like hey don't do that in the future and then be like yeah pay me more than thirty dollars a month but it'll be unfair fair but like I I just can't imagine trusting it because when it would screw up it would probably screw up in the worst way it would probably like decline an invite from an Apple event which would be hysterical and be like no you're not going to that decline it and be like you've got to go do your performance review and I'll be like no those are two different things and one matters more in this moment performance reviews always matter but not on the same day as Apple events I don't know I just think like like my initial read of duet is very much that like this is clear evidence that Google has not figured out what the killer app for AI is for and it's the same with Microsoft where they've come up with a lot of relatively small mostly useful sounding things that these tools can do without anything that you're immediately like oh I need that in my life uh I'm also cognizant of the fact that the three of us do not have real jobs uh and that most jobs involve email spreadsheets and slide decks and most people and most companies would be willing to pay a lot of money to make any of those three things slightly more efficient and like Google's bet is essentially like okay if we can make each one of those a little tiny bit better we can help you write emails faster we can help you like get more actual data out of your spreadsheet we can help you make more beautiful decks on Deadline like that might work all they have to do is be like we'll do the pivot tables and you'll never have to understand what a pivot table is like a lot of places would probably be like yeah thirty dollars a month never have to learn about a pivot table Yeah and then every just out of business school employee on planet Earth just got fired like right as I was saying that sentence they all lost their jobs yeah sorry guys yeah if you are a like Junior account executive at a marketing company like you're so screwed I'm so sorry unfortunately the thing that you'll that will be replacing you uh our boss asked Bard what's the coolest thing anyone could do and receive some answers include uh walking to a destination even if it's 3 000 miles away uh playing World of Warcraft for 100 hours in a week yes I'm cool uh being in a movie with Will Smith pretty cool pretty cool agreed uh cool things in the world include chewing gum uh skateboards and coord outfits I don't know I don't know what those are I guess I'm not cool enough yeah don't feel bad were also cool for like 19.95 but the chewing gum and a skateboard we were badasses you know there's like a there's a marketing person at like a fashion agency right now who is furiously Googling what is the coolest thing anyone can do and just being like I would not pay 30 a month for this this is it and I just I very much enjoyed that nilas when he posted that he was like I can't believe it didn't say a backflip which is objectively the coolest thing it is uh yeah it's very good but I I like all of this stuff to me just says none of this is finished yet and it's kind of wild to see who is willing to pay for this stuff even though it's at the very very very very beginning of whatever it's gonna someday be and who is going to say at the end of their free trial this is neat not worth 30 a month per person for my entire company and if I were a betting man I would bet on that second thing being a lot more true than either Google or Microsoft think how long is the trial I don't know long trial maybe they have a shot they can take the year to figure out how to make it useful if it's a one month trial like yo what are you doing you gave you gave Richard more time than you're given these people come on I think it might be 30 days I think that is I think that might be how long it is I think their bet is that the executive who makes the decision is the person who's going to find it really useful right away and they'll just say yeah we'll sign off on it and we'll fire 100 other people it doesn't matter how well it works or does not work and we just saw this week of I think Walmart announced that they're going to roll out AI for basically all their office employees yeah and they didn't say which one they're using or how much they're paying or anything but I wonder how how much how long they'll stick with it and how many people will continue to have access to it it's going to be the Walmart AI that's what it's going to be called and they're not going to pay it very well but it's gonna do the job and then the rest of us will subsidize and there will be one in your town before you know it yeah there'll be one in every town it's gonna be great it's gonna get rid of all the other little little uh mom and pop AI stores in your town I'm so sorry hey I need to unionize now that is going to be when this gets really interesting the AI labor movement for the AIS themselves yeah we'll come back to that uh my lightning round thing for this segment is um I feel obligated to be the one continuing to Chronicle the ever consuming normalization of all of these video apps in which they just all slowly become the exact same thing and the version of this this week is that Instagram appears to be working on a version of Instagram reels that lets you upload videos up to 10 minutes long uh which you can now do on Tick Tock which Tick Tock did in order to be more like YouTube where people have always been able to watch you know longer videos and people on YouTube of course have started making shorter videos for shorts which was created to compete with Tick Tock and reels is also created I could do this forever the point is all of these apps are the goddamn same thing now they're not though driving me nuts and I I Alex I I when it gets why you're wrong very shortly here so right is I think 10 minute vertical videos are actually an extremely good idea uh one weird thing that I have discovered is that I just really like watching vertical things like there's something to this sort of flow of like how you swipe and how you watch and all that stuff but also like I think for a long time there was this idea that you can't do as much in a vertical frame and in certain ways that's true but also like I don't mind I found myself sitting watching longer things on vertical screens than I thought and like I'm holding my phone the way I normally hold my phone and so the idea that like somebody's gonna come out and make like a show out of one of these 10 minutes at a time I actually think it's you mean like crazy like quibby dude so I listened to a podcast this week it's called the big flop or something like that oh yeah I saw about this um the first episode is about quippy and the single wildest take that I will say on this show to this week is that it it convinced me that quibby didn't actually miss by that much I I would agree honestly I remember seeing Quimby at the time and being like this feels like it could be a really good idea if it's executed well and then it was just executed terribly and also released at the worst possible moment an app of that nature could have ever been released in the history of the world okay so that's reasons two and three reason one is if it's called quibby like that's the that's the first thing that ruined quibby like if quibby had been called Max it would have had a real chance right like and if they hadn't spent a trillion dollars on content at the beginning on like flip my Murder House the Rachel brashanahan show where she just the silver arm yeah yeah okay but this is what I'm saying bring quivies back as 10 minute reels and I'm into it it's a it's a little limiting but it also is a little bit more focused and I think people generally do it better it it does work it has a place but I I kind of leaned David's way Alex they've they all just become TV shows eventually yeah I'm a person who's never watched 10 minute videos on YouTube so I'm not going to watch them on Instagram and I can watch them on Tick Tock I just won't do it I refuse oh I watch them on Tick Tock all the time but it's the same ones I watch on YouTube only now they're vertical and and the dude doesn't like cut like trim it to make it vertical so a lot of times it's just like blank space and you can hear him doing things because he's not in the frame and I'm like yes it's just like his left hand in the frame you see like just a left hand cutting something you're like yes this is great it's so soothing because I already watched it on YouTube but I was gonna say like there is one big differentiator between all of these and that is YouTube still does horizontal video and the other ones don't I mean YouTube does does do horizontal video you can have videos that that rotate yeah I just I guess I haven't been presented with them am I supposed to be watching this guy and horizontal all this time if you upload a widescreen video on Tick Tock I think it'll like give you the option so like it depends on how they uploaded and what they did but yeah it definitely can do it I have watched so many videos on Tick Tock that are the little horizontal video in the middle because it's like yeah it's like clip from a YouTube video and then just Gigantic letterboxes on top you're telling me I could have been doing it better at this I think sometimes I'll like tell you like hey turn you turn your phone what it's like yeah this is service journalism here at the verge this is also my favorite Tick Tock genre is people explaining little known features of tick tock like the thing where if you put your thumb on the left side of the screen it plays at 2x speed mind blowing yeah yeah learn how to use tick tock on Tick Tock it's like the it's it's like the YouTubers being mad at YouTube like that's what they do on Tick Tock it's great incredible yeah all right we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna go through some of the biggest announcements coming out of IFA the gigantic European Gadget show that is happening as we speak we'll be right back all right we're back so none of us is atifa this year um John Porter and Gen 2 we were there they did a lot of really great coverage for the site there's a stream of all the stuff that they found they went and just had adventures with vacuums and lights and headphones and speakers and now they're sleeping and now they're sleeping it really is how it goes you basically you go you touch gadgets for three days with no sleep or food and then you drink heavily and go to sleep and that's pretty much the Run of one of those shows so they are hopefully at this moment in the Sleep phase listen it's a win-win yeah it's either way uh but let's there was a bunch of things going on but we we've kind of figured out how to divide it into three categories of interesting stuff and Richard you alluded to one of them earlier so uh take us through the the like charging world of IFA this year yeah it's all kind of centered around the iPhone 15 launch because apple is finally going to release a phone we think with a usb-c port first of all so lightning and not tons of docks tons of chargers tons of stands that people have when they get a new phone starting this fall those won't apply anymore they're going to need new charges they're going to need new things they're going to need new cables so of course all the companies that make those are just ready with new products and beyond that there's also this new standard G2 to replace the wireless Qi standard that assuming Apple supports it could allow outside makers Chargers to to charge iPhones at up to 15 watts you know just by touching it which would be like twice what it has been before right yeah it was 7.5 if you weren't on magsafe charger it was half the rate so and and you know these things they throttle kind of as it goes to the charging so like it's not just going to be twice as fast but it'll be faster and you'll you'll love it uh anchor and Belkin are two of the companies that uh have announced T2 products one of the things that I noticed about these announcements is that everyone who's announcing chi2 products does not have a date for when they will be released they don't have a price they don't really have anything it's coming later this year probably maybe early next year or some things but eventually and I think we'll probably get a lot more clarity once the iPhone 15 is actually announced but we've got stuff like battery packs um anchor they've got it all branded under their mango line they've got new stands they've got you know different charges different kind of desktop charges all kinds of things and the same thing for Belkin and I think that this new G2 standard is going to be the kind of thing that you will actually replace several of the Chargers that you have probably within your ritual on your desk right now I just realized as you were talking that this is kind of about to be the most exciting moment for phone accessories like ever that there has ever been yeah for the first time if I'm an accessory maker I can make something that works with your phone your laptop your tablet your other phone your partner's phone like you can build something that is going to work for everything and is going to last because I think you can reliably assume we're going to be on USBC at least a few years from now and so I have a feeling we're about to see like a glut of stuff uh and like Lord knows anchor alone is going to make 700 different USBC products between now and like September 12th yeah and of course it's not all if it's USBC you can work with whatever but they they have like a little thing that kind of latches onto the bottom of your iPhone with USBC it does it does they can't show it connecting to an iPhone yet but you know what it is um and that's just kind of where we are with those products so there's just there's going to be even more and even better I think kind of charging stuff so if you're the kind of person who wins one of those Amazon Deal days or something you're like okay yeah I'm gonna go get some Chargers it's time it's going to be your time very soon friends this must make you so happy I'm I'm not happy at all because I just bought so much wireless charging stuff like two months ago I feel so dumb I'm just like it was like reading all of the news out of IFA being like rookie move crayons just it's every time when the prices are really good and you're like okay I'll get it it's all on sale I I should I should buy these I got that wireless charger slash battery from Anker that thing is great the little Cube yeah that like oh it's beautiful I love that thing I love it and now I'm like well damn it there's another one and I want that one more because it's got like a little and it has a screen on it now yeah I'm like so if anybody needs a a generation one charger uh I'm in the market to sell it I do wonder if there's gonna be like a black market for old old Chargers and docks going forward like all the people who just desperately hold on to their iPhone 8 minis I'm re-gifting it all to family Christmas is gonna be really crummy for them and great for me before we're done with this I want to make uh the case for slow wireless chargers I have the the older pixel stand near my bed now see if you're one of those people who you want to go to sleep and stop using your phone one way to do that put the wireless charger out of your reach yes so if you have to decide am I going to put the phone on the stand and let it charge overnight so that it's not empty the battery's empty when I wake up or am I going to use the phone to maybe fall asleep with it in my hand wake up with a phone on xero and I don't have a fast charger to charge it up good it's that stress it it will it will improve it smart get yourself a slow charger no disagree I really like I think the single most like aspirational thing I have done over the years is try to be a person who charges my phone outside of my bedroom so many times I have tried to be this person I'm like okay I'm gonna have a stack of like print books and magazines and that's what I'm gonna read before bed I'm not gonna sit here and like scroll Reddit until I fall asleep and after like three days inevitably I'm like how did my charger get right back into my room and next to my bed and I'm scrolling Reddit again like I don't remember ever putting it back in here and yet it has arrived and I've I've I swear I've tried this 25 times in my life and I think it shows real personal growth that I have stopped trying like I think it says it says a lot about me as a person I mean you're not a very lazy person so is just putting it on the other side of the because putting it on the charger on the other side of the room that's enough for me I'm that lazy that like once it's on I'm not getting up I'm not getting out of bed again for me it's not getting it's not even the laziness factor it's like the the actual feeling of getting out of bed is so awful it's the taking off the covers like even if my charger was right there but I had to take off the covers to get it I wouldn't do it it is sometimes there's one time where I did that but like I like Army crawled across the floor with like the cover still on a single foot being like I'm not technically out of bed yeah it worked it was fine it was fine it's very good it's very good uh but yeah I suspect it's about to be a very very very exciting like six months in the accessory world and the other thing I will say is this is just a PSA to everyone now don't buy any accessories don't buy any accessories the day Apple launches things don't buy any accessories the day it ships because what's going to happen is between now and Christmas there's going to be this unbelievable glut of cool new stuff that comes out and it's going to happen really fast because all these companies are already making USBC stuff so they're not going to have to get used to a completely new connector Apple will have some weird tweak to it because it always does but there's going to be just a run of new things that all these companies are ready for and so whatever you buy today or tomorrow or on September 12th or September 20 whatever when the iPhone ships there will be something in November that is better and by Black Friday it will cost five dollars so Alex Kranz stop buying accessories and like you were talking I was like actually maybe it was good that I just bought all of this stuff because we're not gonna be buying I'm like I can't I just bought a new dining room table and four like wireless chargers I'm broke for the next year like it's great there you go there we go um all right you go next friends what what did you look up for Eva so there was a lot of smart home stuff a ton of stuff that's why my Jen was there and she was doing incredible work a lot of stuff coming out of from Philips Hue who historically just does lights and if you like me are tired of spending so much money on Hue Lights there's a lot of competitors in the space now there's a ton of other really good Lights I've got some like little candelabra lights they're beautiful they do like the pride flag it doesn't actually look like the pride flag but in July or in June I was like yeah cool is Hugh still the best one though I I confess I'm slightly behind the times on my own personal smart home gear but my read was always who is the best it's also twice the price of everything else yeah like like it's it's like the Apple deal for a long time where you're like well sure I'm paying twice the price but I can smugly say it works can you say that Richard Fair in your Windows machine but can I say that about my Mac lately no but but yeah so it typically just works but it costs a ton more but there's a there's so much stuff out now in the space that really does also just work like I was using it adding stuff both to home assistant and to to home kit zero issue like totally Flawless even the stuff that some people complain about like nanoleaf can sometimes be a little buggy works and so Hugh has a whole bunch of stuff they've got track lighting now which is Big that's exciting because oftentimes track lighting you can't replace like there's no little bulbs to go in there in real place that you probably would make if they could so you have to get the whole thing so that's cool uh and they they got into to security cameras which is a big deal for them they've they've just been a company that does lights and now they're doing security cameras predictably expensive security cameras yeah it's very telling to me that that's where they went actually that uh like I think it's it's pretty obvious that if you're a company that wants to do smart home stuff lights is the place to start right it is kind of the it's like the gateway drug to the smart home for basically everybody and it's very interesting to me that after all this time the the Hue team looked around and was like okay what's the next thing we want to do and decided to security cameras not like other sensors or weird things for your garage door or things for your car it's just it they're just like security cameras yeah and and these are very expensive it's got end-to-end encryption it currently won't work out of the box with Alexa and Google assistance home security camera Integrations so you won't be able to just like play it on your little Google speaker anywhere that kind of sucks it won't work with home kit and tell matter start supporting video for security cameras because that's the only way it's going to work with homekit it won't work with like home kits secure video platform which isn't actually very good to begin with so that's not the worst one like that one you're like oh that kind of sucks but also I'm fine with that um or at least I am uh but it will work with matter and the most exciting part of all the Philips Hue news is it finally is going to start supporting matter it's pushing out an update next month I am unreasonably excited I've been spending this whole week being like I cannot DM Jen because she's very busy working and all I want to do is be like this is such a good moment um so I'm like being very patient and waiting until she comes back and gets over her hangover and and is having a good time and then I'm gonna um just assail her with it but that's exciting like it's been ages since they promised matter and the stuff I use that where matter works is wonderful I'm in the future I'm having the best day of my life I've set up my entire system oh it doesn't work with matter I hate everything and everyone and I want it all to die especially my Robot vacuum cleaner ah yeah yeah which there were also a bunch of adifa I just love that the robot vacuums are becoming like an outrageously competitive space and there are so many good robot vacuums out there now I love it this was the first one I'd ever like I tried one 10 years ago and it was garbage and I was like I'm okay I can just walk around with a vacuum cleaner like a normal person and back this summer somebody was like oh go get a robot vacuum cleaner they're really good now and this was a person that I trust and so I was like you you generally aren't stupid and I went and I got one on sale and I was like oh it's really good now it like my house is just clean that's in with a dog that's not common so they're good now and now there's a they're the robot lawnmower industry is booming I think Jen and John saw one of those it's starting to boom yeah there was she she was she saw a robot uh lawnmower the problem with robot lawn mowers is they generally have really crappy range and American Lawns tend to be pretty big like they they there's a lot of space there's a lot of stuff going on in them and these weren't doing it very well they're really meant for those little tiny like postage stamp size lawns in Europe and so this can do like half an acre which I would have loved at the age of 13 when I had to hop on the riding lawnmower and like mow the front in the backyard and then the garden it was the worst time of my life my family still talks about how much I complained about it this would have been amazing um I would have like been campaigning for it immediately so I'm so excited all you kids out there listening I know there's a lot of 13 year olds that listen to the vergecast and I know you're very excited about this start campaigning now this is a great Christmas gift for you probably not your parents will not buy it because it's like two thousand dollars but aspirational aspirational yeah everybody talks about how like kids are not gonna grow up and learn how to drive and they're going to miss like a key part of life and I just feel like if if your parents never force you to mow the lawn like you you've you've missed something yeah you really have it's like 111 degrees and you have a push mower that barely works we're gonna pay you one dollar go mow for five hours David and then break all the leaves it's fine my channel is fine it's fine that's the worst spending spending 45 minutes trying to get that thing to start is character building it's exactly right you feel like you're a mechanic afterwards like when somebody's car breaks down you're like hold up I've jump started a lawnmower I think I can help you can't it doesn't work that way is there a thing I can pull on really hard and hope that starts it um all right the last thing from Eva which I should just run through real fast was uh there were a few headphone and speaker announcements um but a couple were actually very cool so I just want to basically call out two one is uh new Jabra headphones they're called the elite tens and the elite eights they're basically new wireless earbuds uh I think Jabra in general does not get the shine it deserves in the headphone space everybody talks about airpods and pixel Buds and Galaxy Buds and kind of all the stuff that's like bundled with devices Jabra does a really good job of making just like very good headphones that work with everything it supports like all of the Open Standards it can it has really good noise cancellation the mics tend to be pretty good the battery life is pretty good yeah like they're very good headphones they sit like if you have tiny ear canals that's that's why I don't use them it's my ear so that's actually one of the things that I think is exciting about these new ones um the elite tens which are the higher end one I think they're 250 bucks they have a like semi-open design which uh in theory should help with that feeling of being sort of smushed in your ear personally I end up using very few of those kind of close to your headphones because I get the same thing like my ear canals start to hurt after a while if I listen to those like I got the they just follow Sony link Buds and they caught they like cause pain or they fall out yeah I love that pain that like you're like oh it fits so good Agony Agony Agony but this the Taylor sounds lovely oh it sounds amazing yeah but I like after 30 minutes I'm like oh I'm gonna lose both of my ears like this is cool they feel like they're bleeding yeah but so the elite tens seem cool sound great they have six mics I think uh the the audio quality should be good they're supposedly one of the best they've that droppers ever made and then there's the elite eight uh I think it's technically called the elite eight active that are ip68 rated which is like more or less everything you would need as a person yeah you can get disgusting but yeah exactly it's like you can throw it in the wash and they'll come out fine you can mow the lawn and they're just super super rugged and personally like I lost a pair of air pods because I got caught in a rainstorm I lost another pair of airpods because I dropped one of them in a puddle and then put it back in the charger and it ruined everything uh which if you're wondering yes it was stupid but this is the life I lead you had to charge it yeah and so just I like blew on it a bunch of times and then put it back in the case and then about 45 minutes later it was like that was the dumbest thing I could have possibly done uh but now here we are but so the idea of like a super ruggedized pair of pretty good headphones uh I actually sound very exciting but they both do wireless charging they both do multi-point Bluetooth they both do the mono mode so you can just wear one earbud at a time they just like have all the features and I think like in general if you're shopping for wireless headphones most people don't think of Jabra uh and you should but the other thing which I think is much more exciting is this new JBL uh I think it's called the Authentics speakers they look nice they do right the 200 the 300 and the 400. they're all stupid expensive they're like anywhere from 330 to 700 for a Bluetooth speaker which is preposterone can't put a price on fashion but not only are they great looking they are they have this like cool sort of fabricy retro thing going on but they also have Alexa and Google assistant in one device and it can hear both wake words at the same time you don't have to do the Sonos thing where in setup you pick which one you want to use you can use both and you can tell it with one to start the music and with the other to stop the music and they found some ways in which that gets weird like if you start a timer with Alexa and then you try to use Google to stop the timer that doesn't quite work but it worked if the timer was going off but if you like started a timer and then you're like no I didn't want to do that timer and try to tell it to stop yeah John like I guess he got X he got to play with one and apparently just had a whole list of ways he was gonna screw with this thing I love it and just went through his whole list he chronicled it all in his piece and I was just like yeah yeah just like chanting as I read it it was great yeah his piece was really great and he uh also he asked Google like should I take this as the beginning of a trend is this gonna actually be the sort of interoperable voice assistant World we've been wanting to live in and the Google representative was sort of sketchy about it who knows yeah I mean basically but the at least this proves that like this is a thing that can be done and here's hoping that it's not just on this one set of expensive JBL speakers do you think Sonos is going to do it at some point like a good version I think at this point Sonos and Google are at such odds that I would be surprised if Google was interested in playing along with Sonos they would rather just get rid of it entirely if it would piss off but like could the next UE Boom that I buy because I'm inevitably gonna buy 500 more of those in my life uh could that have both that would be awesome uh like the the speaker world is big and wide and imagine if you could have them with the Dolby stuff that worked all over your house and you could talk to each individual one with whatever Voice Assistant you wanted like how is that not the world we live in this is the world we should live in that's the future that's what I want that's the interoperable future I want yeah I just want to yell whatever I want at my speakers and they have to listen I do not want to do that I don't want to talk to my speakers ever about anything but I do love these they look incredible like if you remember how speakers looked at those old 70s and 80s speakers you do have to look at these finally someone's bringing that back I don't know why they didn't before but they are now and I like it yeah it's based on the l-100s right from the 70s yeah after like two decades of trying to make speakers look like spaceships now we're back to making them look like speakers and it makes me very happy like these yeah these look great the one has a handle on it which is basically just to remind you like yes you can pick this thing up it's allowed they have they have actual knobs for all of the different levels it's just wonderful like we're not saying that you should do cocaine off of these speakers but like if you wanted to if you wanted to yeah they've got some good there's some good flat spaces there for a nice a nice line where don't endorse cocaine on the vergecast all right well now that we've gone well and fully off the rails it is time to end the First cast this is the last episode you ever listened to this is what I want to leave you with no one somewhere all right um a lot of good stuff I'm gonna say this week we had the most recent piece in our big series investigating the effect of Google in the world Ryan Broderick wrote a really great piece called the end of the Google verse really interesting it's full of like old internet heads Reminiscing on like the weird things people used to do with Google in the early 2000s it's really fun uh our video team and our producer Andrew Marino made an amazing video with one of those heads that does binaural audio and noise canceling headphones to like really test how good noise canceling is it's a wild video with like lots of graphs that I didn't understand and tons of interesting people and Andrew sweating to death on a summer in New York City it's a really great video uh Andrew also did another piece on the button of the month about a USB button uh that helped people win Jeopardy it's delightful and I want one just to like mute and unmute my microphone now real bad but I want it uh the latest Land of the Giants episode is out it's about Tesla in China it's very good that whole season has been really great like Land of the Giants is always really great but I actually think this might be my favorite season we've ever done it's really good everybody just go listen to it we are going to be off next Wednesday because it's Labor day but then we're going to be back next Friday we're going to have more Apple to talk about like I said there is just a massive Title Wave of gadgets and Tech news coming in the next three months so we're going to be doing a ton it's gonna be a lot of fun we'll see you then rock and roll goodforeign welcome to the vergecast the flagship podcast of techtember and techtober and techvember and text Ember and all of the other months to come it's about to get wild in the tech World y'all and we're gonna be here for all of it Alex Kranz is still here hi Alex hi what about to lie to lie no if we have to lie we're never gonna make it to techtember don't don't do this to me uh Richard Lawler's here hi Richard hello I just want you to know that both I and everyone who listens to the vergecast prefers you to nili so I would just say this is an enormous upgrade over what we had just before the break I get that a lot what's your take on bananas how many times have you done surgery on a banana I guarantee No Bananas takes you don't have any takes on bananas now now I feel obligated to press on this Theory you don't have any takes on bananas Rally's banana shakes yes bananas no that's good I can't argue with that so we have a lot to cover this is like the last week of Summer it's about to truly get Bonkers in the tech world like we have this big run of events about to happen so this was kind of a mix of leaks and information about what's coming this fall plus the last of this like grab bag of news we've been talking about all summer like get all your stuff out before Apple announces the iPhone event because basically as soon as that happens like it is the fall and Chaos rains forever so we're gonna go through a lot I kind of think IFA is now the most interesting Tech trade show in the world like CES has kind of gone away from me but ifa's pretty cool would agree so we have a lot to get through but the the first thing I want to do is is talk about some of the stuff that's coming this fall and before we were coming into this I made a list of all of the events of like the next six weeks and I can I just read them to you and I need you all to feel the feelings that it made me feel to write this list down are you guys ready do I need like a drink first if you're gonna need several drinks during and after take a shot for every time you're gonna have to work too much in the next song so you'll die okay here's what we have IFA is happening right now the Toronto International Film Festival which is a surprisingly cool source of movies especially like smaller stuff you might not have heard of starts September 7th the Apple event where we're going to see the iPhone 15 is on September 12th the Detroit Auto Show is on September 13th Amazon is having an event presumably one of those where they just launched 200 things that run Alexa on September 20th the next day on the 21st Microsoft is having an event probably some surfaces the code conference which we're obviously a huge part of starts on September 26th meta connect is on September 27th we're going to see the quest 3. there's a Google event we're probably going to see the pixel 8 on October 4th and then the next day on October 5th is Samsung's developer conference where I assume they'll just like talk about Bixby a bunch and that's that's just between now and the first week of October so like for all the people who write to the vergecast email and are like hey can you talk more about gadgets like oh boy it's coming it's coming y'all we missed the gadgets too and they're about to come back with a true vengeance are we like is this good are we excited about this I like I I'm always excited about this time of year because I like all the travel I like the hustle and bustle I like how you're just moving and then like Thanksgiving comes and you're like just an off switch and you just stop functioning for a week ideally and that's really really nice like and you just get all these cool things to play with for a month and a half and that's fun I like that I like playing with all the stuff I wish there were more like things that I really enjoy like not phones but I'm still excited like I want e-readers and and weird tablets yeah real lack of Kobo events this fall for crayons yes where are the Kobo events okay where's the Nook event like I I want a Samsung event but I just want it to be TVs and speakers that's it and I don't want to have to wait till January for that I'm imagining a Nook launch is just like one person at a Barnes and Noble who like spots the new Nook on her shelf and is like oh look a new Nook and then the CEO just bursts out from a display of books and it's like we made it for you like some music playing like the lights start changing exactly like if you want to get to some snacks they're right in the back at this at the knock off Starbucks that we put back there in every one of our stores uh I don't know Richard how do you feel about this well and I love that and I love the events the pace of it not so much to travel covering them from at home much better but also it's the time when all of that stuff that came out at CES and that it was announced really early in the year then you never heard about it again and companies acted like they never announced it all when you ask them they're like like what's that I don't we I would remember if you if you if we said that but I don't now it's coming up like Samsung's like oh yeah remember we launched 200 gaming monitors and we said they were going to be released now now you can actually buy them maybe they might be at your local Best Buy so there's kind of both parts you have these announcements of products that are about to come out and we'll be out very soon and you also have these things that you've been waiting for so long that you probably forgot about them but here they are that's true the thing that precedes all of this actually is like back to school season which we've been in the throes of for like three weeks now and that's when everybody who's like selling large TVs and large computer monitors and like wants to sell you a thing with gaming lights on it like back to school season is their sweet spot so we've we've been in this like remember that thing you heard about at CES space for the last few weeks and I agree it's been delightful Samsung being like remember that big screen we told you about look at it here it is I love it I'm in on that you put it outside it's great it's bright exactly um okay so we're gonna have plenty of time over the next six weeks to cover all of this stuff so we're just gonna like lightning round it for now let's we we pulled out a bunch of stuff that's happening this fall let's we each picked one and we're just gonna talk about it for a little bit here now just kind of what's on our mind as a little preview as we go into the fall uh Richard would you pick the pixel 8 uh first of all Google just can't stop leaking its own Foams the pixel 8 uh Pro showed up on Google store website uh a little bit early fortunately we didn't have to wonder whether or not it was the pixel 8 Pro or not because it had some alt text that very clearly described it as the pixel April is also probably wearing a new pixel watch if you take a look closely it's to be deliberate they did the alt text like you don't mess that up it might be but they also have a track record of doing this that's so long that they might just be that incompetent it's the perfect crime what if that's what if that's actually not incompetence what if that's the plan like it's always been the plan so everybody's like oh man they're always leak What's it gonna be this time I'll get excited this time I don't think it's a good plan but like I think it could be the plan was it last year with the pixel 7 that Google ended up just tweeting out like yeah here it is like weeks ahead of the launch they were just like yeah you've seen it enough times here it is enjoy I think that was last year I can't remember if that was the seven or the seven eight but I think you're right that was the seven they were just like yeah look you know what it is like it looks like the last one whatever um the bad news unfortunately this week about the pixel is you know if you bought a pixel 6 and you subscribed to pixelpass like I did thinking that you'd be able to easily upgrade because Google said you would be able to they said you would you won't uh you couldn't upgrade for two years it was locked you would have to wait two years to upgrade to a new device it is now one year and about ten and a half months and Google says yeah we're not doing that anymore the pixel pass is over bait and switched I feel baiting something I don't know switched exactly because before this like before we started recording you were like I'm not that upset about it but you're like like walk me through that why aren't you that upset about well there's kind of two parts to it what what people paid for what I paid for I got I bought a phone that I paid for over the course of several months uh also paid a kind of bundle discounted price for a bunch of services like cloud storage that I don't really use YouTube music that I do use a YouTube premium it's pretty nice to forget that YouTube has ads got all that and even after the pixel pass goes away they'll still have a discounted rate for those Services uh and also insurance for the phone and stuff like that like it was all in one thing sweet but when they announced it they said that it was going to give you easy device upgrades and you could do it after two years and now no one look at that like it's not even like they're cutting it off and some people took advantage some people didn't zero there is zero of that which you can still get like a zero percent APR phone if you want to get it like and pay it over the course of months or something but you just can't do this package again I think you're way under selling this I think this is outrageous like I honestly believe this is one of the like crueler and more cynical things Google has done in a series of cruel and cynical things to people who bought its products and cared about them like to say to people and they framed this in in the course of building up the pixel over the years as like another way to believe that Google is going to continue to care about its Hardware right like it has said over and over for years now like we are in this for real we are going to take care of customers we're going to keep giving you reasons to be part of this we're going to keep making the deals better on and on and on and this is like the most deliberate shitty rug pull of a move I can imagine even if everyone more or less like you're saying comes out of it whole which I actually don't really think is true because I think there are a lot of people who are now going to go through much more messy and complicated upgrade programs than it would have been if I could have just clicked a button and shipped my thing to Google and gotten a new phone like that's a win in a way that like even if I have to go to my carrier store and do a trade-in is more complicated so even just making it harder is a loss but I just think like from a pure like showing people you don't care about them move this is such a crappy thing for Google to do and and the people who are the most dedicated to the brand like probably the biggest pixel fans who were like okay yeah I'll get one and then two years from now I'll get another one I'm I'm willing to sign up let me do it I think it's a mischaracterization to call you guys the biggest pixel fans I think just pixel fans who's a bigger pixel fan but like are there people are there like above a pixel fan I think like pix being a pixel fan in itself makes you a big pixel fan so you're saying like there is no such thing as a small pixel fan yeah there's no such thing as a small pixel fan like you have to have passion there are no small pixel fans only small people like there's it's like eating there's no such thing as a small e-ink fan like you can't be like oh that's a like I'm not a Big E fan I'm an eating fan because there's not a lot of us there's not enough of us for there to be like big ones and little ones now you know what I think there are kind of uh pixel casuals okay it doesn't work who are the pixel casuals and and many of them may have picked up the pixel pass because again it was it was a pretty good deal um and a decent way to buy a phone it was like oh you know you can click a button and you can get all the things in one thing not your carrier you can go bring that how you want or you could get Google fi and get another five dollars off but now those people are just oh not happening it's like was just super I don't know I am I know you're processing it and I know you're in a place where you're like it's fine it's chill but I really hope like next week we come back we're like Richard how are you feeling about it I hope you're like mad because I'm so mad on your behalf I'm just like they like I'm with David I'm like they they bait and switched y'all they were like hey come and do this not a psych we don't give a crap about you guys we're not even gonna last two years like it feels like disingenuous marketing it just feels gross believing that Google would actually come through on something that they promised is basically doing it to yourself that's known better I've got to take the L on that one I just that should should have seen that coming that was that was not a 5000 IQ plug it really it really is like terrifying how true that it's like I I wrote I wrote a thing I think it was last week about Google keep their note-taking app uh which has gotten a couple of like really nice upgrades it's a good app it's kind of a thing people don't like know or use but the people who do really love it because it's a really good simple note-taking app and like overwhelmingly the comments on the story were like don't talk about keep Google will remember it exists and kill it like if a Google executive reads this the one engineer who is still building features will get fired and they'll kill this app and it's like that's how people think about this stuff like we literally cannot have nice things from Google anymore because it just ruthlessly kills all of them and I think if I'm the hardware team they're still in this position of people don't believe them that they're serious and with with good reason and lots of evidence and so like I If I Was Google I would have gone way out of my way to say this thing is going to continue to exist where if we even if we can't think of a way to make it worthwhile for the people who already got it even if they've already been made whole we're going to come up with something new because what we need you to do is be loyal to us and trust that we're going to be loyal to you and instead they're just like never mind you get YouTube how do they how can like I feel like I had this exact conversation two years ago with Dieter on the vergecast about like when when that pixel 6 came out because that was the big moment where where that was what the fourth iteration of no we really care about Hardware now this is the moment and we're like okay and they did the pixel pass it was like okay they feel like they and then they they pulled the rug again so it's like how do you build that trust you keep like destroying that trust every time you get a little bit of it you go and you like poop on it and say oh pixel fans the 12 of you that exist including Richard like get out of here we don't like you but like how do you I just don't see how they can they come back from this well I think the I think the writing really was on the wall because when you look like when the pixel folds came out and people asked about the pixel pass they were told basically the same language that they they announced this week that yeah no um not so much happening um and I think that's part of what makes it worse is that they could have announced this six months ago but people were like oh people were sitting back they saw they said they saw the rumors they were like oh pixel age is coming out I'll just be able to get that check no no you will not you have felt better if they'd done it six months ago if they just like so you could have like prepared emotionally emotionally yes I could have could have healed a little yeah okay um all right let's let's move on we're gonna have a lot of time to yell at Google between now and October do we know anything about the eight Pro yet by the way Richard is there any we saw the one picture in the ad are there like yes we've seen because we've seen the renders we've seen specs uh there's some reason it'll have Wi-Fi seven it'll probably still have the same the FCC uh filings came out this week also so we know that it's basically like the previous ones where like the pro has uh Ultra wide band but the regular one does not we've seen kind of hardware specs about the chips it's a pixel you you know how these go the the real question is like what are the software features going to be and there's spin leaks or something like video unblur so just like Photo and blur but for videos that's cool uh I just want to say I was out sick for the last two days and somehow Wi-Fi seven happened while I was gone for two days so that's cool and fun and I'll catch up on that over here but I do think that I'm actually more interested in the pixel than the iPhone this year because like Google has been saying this thing about like on device AI for you know years now and this seems like one of the first years that if it wants to do some like really genuinely wild on-device AI stuff it might actually be able to so I think that's going to be very interesting but again we have lots of time to talk about that uh I'm gonna go next because I want to talk about Taylor Swift and Krantz you can go left um the true events of the Fall I think we can agree is that Taylor Swift's era's tour is coming to AMC Theaters across the country in October uh as far as I know at least from what I've seen so far this is all kind of Just Happening we don't know for how long we just know that they're doing at least four showings a day at every theater and that AMC has upgraded its ticket capabilities for five times as much demand as it has had before because of all the swifties who did or did not get tickets to the era store I honestly believe this might be like the biggest movie of all time if it was allowed to be it's a like concert movie right it's it's not live streams yeah so from just like the little tiny bits I've seen you can see some snippets on like Taylor Swift's Tick Tock account was I think where I saw it it looks basically like a super well produced concert film I love that yeah that sounds great it's it's amazing and you'll get to see it in like a gigantic theater with you know cool surround sound and it'll be a million swifties like they even said bring the friendship bracelets dress in all the eras stuff like you better believe I will be there giving people bracelets I I won't be there but I will support all of you are there swifties besides you and nili I think sneakily like two-thirds of The Verge is swifties uh I know at least a couple of people tried and failed multiple times to get era's tickets Richard is being suspiciously quiet which makes me think he's definitely a Swifty for sure I was like hmm look at Richard's off looking in a corner Richard yeah I just don't know what's going on here I'm very happy for you the cultural event of the summer and fall and winter and the restrooms this movie might be in theaters for a decade Richard she fixed the economy like like they keep being like Oh yeah the eras tour increased spending like it fixed the economy I don't think it fixed the economy but it increased spending what if she like lowers the rent what if she what if she like changes the world with this tour I fully believe in her her economic prowess oh I agree at some point when the when the era's tour ends we're gonna find somebody fun to talk to about this and we're gonna go through like the insane like stratospheric records that this tour has set and nothing will ever top it ever again and like the things she has it's insane and wild and I'm very excited about this movie um and that's all everybody you probably can't get tickets if you're hearing this now well it created Congressional hearings about Ticketmaster oh yeah well yeah yeah she broke Ticketmaster she's gonna make AMC the most valuable company in the universe now this is she runs the economy this is what it is all right crayons you're up what do you got okay iPhones come in two weeks I'm really mad I bought an iPhone 14 pro last year and I was really excited about it and I was like I'll be fine I don't need the next one and now the next one sounds like it's almost definitely gonna have USBC and the fomo is Extreme for me at the moment and like I'm locked into this payment plan for another year so it's not like I'm not I'm cheap I'm not gonna be going and buying it but I'm going to be regretting My Life Choices you didn't get the iPhone upgrade plan like come two weeks from now you gotta get the upgrade plan I want to pay in cash because it didn't work with my Apple pay card I think and I want my three percent I like imagining that you just walk in with a bag of nickels and just like throw it on the desk in the Apple Store and you're like give me an iPhone I just whip it across the The Genius Bar Adam yeah like let's go but I like it seems exciting I I don't know iPhones are kind of weird in a weird place right like they yeah they're in a weird place last year the exciting thing was the dynamic Island and we we enjoyed the island but try explaining to anyone who doesn't listen to The Verge cast with the dynamic island is and that's a less fun conversation yeah they'll just say it's that thing at the top of the screen that screws up all the apps sometimes yeah there's kind of like Beyond excited about USBC I just got a new USBC charger from from anchor and I'm so like it charges my phone or not my phone it charges like my my computer it charges my steam deck it charges just everything I own that I can plug USBC into and it's wonderful and I'm like oh I want my phone to do that too that seems cool so the USBC alone has has me pumped for it and we're going to USBC on the airpod case I'm not gonna buy it because again like if my phone doesn't do USBC I refuse to let my airpods case do USBC it has to wait in line but this is like exciting if you like USBC it's going to be a big event if you like anything else it's going to be an iPhone event well also if you like wireless charging the big news at IFA is these wireless chargers that are getting announced with the g2 standard that the iPhone 15 May support well I guess we'll find out and allow kind of non-magsafe chargers to charge iPhones at the same rate as magsafe and also you know kind of other devices other phones that support 15 watt wireless charging so if you like wireless charging uh this is your moment oh I got a wireless charger too I spent like 150 dollars Game Changer or if you want to buy a new charging stand or something like that yeah don't for like the next couple don't don't be me I bought it last month I do not read our website enough is what happened there a lot of regrets I was talking to somebody one of the charging companies the other day and and they were basically saying that the USBC thing is cool but it's a mirage because Wireless is the real thing that it's like the actual Arc that we're on is wireless charging taking over and it would have been great if USBC had been ready you know 12 years ago and we could have just gone straight to that but we didn't and that's fine but where we're actually headed and I think where Apple has pretty clearly been wanting to head for a long time is wireless charging wireless charging is mostly still very bad and not as good or fast as wired charging so I think we still have a ways to go but I agree I think I think especially some of the stuff we're seeing at IFA that we're going to talk about a little later is it's pretty exciting Richard do you care about this iPhone convince me to care about this iPhone but I had more things to convince you about the iPhone oh you're not done okay you didn't talk about it actually they're not done yeah I was about to say the action button I think it's the stupidest thing in the world and I'm not excited about the action button because I love my because I would be excited about the action button if it didn't replace the mute button and like if I'm just gonna have to program it to be the mute button then it's not an action button it's just a mute button that I had to like do an extra step to make a mute button I just I want both straight up had to look at my phone to see if it still had a mute button that thing has been on mute since the minute I took it out of the package and I have not touched it since anyone who lets their phone ring loud is 75 years old that's blanket rule of the universe if your phone rings you are a hundred years old and should don't you like being able to just go oh is it on mute take a quick look or like reach into your pocket and go and kind of hit the little switch while you're walking down the street and be like yeah it's on mute I I just want I want that I like that I don't have to like pull my phone out and be like mute or pull my phone out program the mute button and then hit mute you don't miss the art of Ring of ringtones they're trying to bring ringtones back by getting rid of the mute button no maybe it's the opposite maybe they're killing it forever it's like your phone can no longer make noise when it rings would be like truly Apple's most Innovative feature in years they have to go to my mother's house and explain that to her like I'm not doing it I'm not letting anyone at the like apple it's Tim Cook has to fly to my mother's house and explain to her why her phone doesn't ring anymore does your mom have the ringtone that Rings like an old-timey phone my mother-in-law has that ringtone and it drives me nuts oh yeah she's got the ringtone and she's got it on her watch too which she answers in the supermarket I learned so sorry to all the HEB Shoppers of Texas for having to listen to all of my conversations with my mom while she's picking up groceries amazing it's great amazing all right before we get a break Alex you wrote down one other one in the fall things coming up that you're excited about give us 30 seconds then we're going yes Starfield it's the new Bethesda game like all other Bethesda games I think it's going to be stupid but then I'm reading all the reviews and now I really want to play it but I also know like every other Bethesda game I'm gonna play it for 100 200 hours never finish it and tell everybody it sucks I'm so excited so stupid is not the word you're looking for here it's gonna be stupid it's gonna be like the characters look stupid I feel stupid playing it because I'm like oh you can't look dumb you're like the Bethesda characters look dumb and that's a bummer and so far that seems to be the case for this game as well but also I want to travel around delivering coffee in space that seems cool I don't want to do that in real life but I want to do that in space Richard's just like if it's not overwatched don't even talk to me yeah I'm sorry I I want another games as a service shooter just something I can play in 15 minute increments you just want to play Red fall forever like that's all Richard does if it weren't so terrible if it were just any slight bit less terrible I would I would be playing it right now I like it all right we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about all the other mishmash of nonsense happening in the tech world this week we'll be right back all right we're back so lots of little news this week there was some threads news it seems like we're getting search Sony raised the prices on PlayStation Plus we've got some X doing sketchy stuff I don't really want to talk about that anymore Wireless carriers doing weird stuff again Call of Duty using AI to moderate voice chats which is just America's worst idea in years uh let's let's just blast through office we can't get to all of this so let's just lightning round this again uh Krantz you're you were you're still on the roll you get to go first I'm so excited so Dolby just announced this thing it's called Dolby Atmos Flex connect and the name is very stupid that's okay because what it could do could potentially be very very cool which is that it will automatically like just make your speakers your wireless speakers work with your TV provided they both support doli Atmos Flex connect and only one of TV will support that in the next year that we know of and it's from TCL so it's not going to work with any of your current stuff and it's probably not going to work with most of your stuff next year but like five years from now this is gonna be sick as hell and I'm I'm I'm actually excited about it because like Sonos has done a lot of this stuff in the past they do the automatic calibration and everything like that but it's just Sonos and you have to use Sonos speakers and you're stuck in that and this means like okay I can go get any speaker like any wireless speaker I want and it's gonna bounce It's Gonna Take and ping the audio from that speaker the TV's got its own microphones built in it's going to receive it and it's gonna go oh and fix it all you don't have to worry about a stupid sound bar because sound bars are bad I'm sorry you even though I own one you don't have to worry about like messing with anything it should just all work and for like the last what 20 years TV audio has not just worked so that feels appealing even though you're still like now gonna have to buy additional speakers for your TV at least it should make it a lot easier and more natural and hopefully cheaper than the soda solution which is why I'm not buying a new iPhone this year so the idea seems to be if I'm understanding this correctly and I'm genuinely not sure that I am but if I if I'm understanding this correctly it's that you don't have to buy like a full surround sound set you don't have to buy that one gigantic box at Best Buy you can you can sort of bring your own speakers and essentially as long as they are like compatible with this one Flex connect spec Dolby will be able to stitch them all together you'll be able to put them in a system right and it'll work yeah that that's it like theoretically if Vizio supports this you can go get those super cheap but decent Vizio speakers set it all up and then instead of like getting all weird and finicky and trying to use the not very good super cheap Vizio technology to make the speakers sound good just have Dolby do it and do it well and it'll all sound well so this seems great this also seems like a thing that shouldn't be that hard to do and probably should have happened 15 years ago right yeah yeah like Sonos does it now and Sonos is wildly expensive the TV companies have not really cared about speaker like they haven't cared about this they haven't needed to because they're like okay for them there's three there's three like TV buyers right there's the people who spend all of their time in AV Forum it's like me and Eli like we're over we're over there and when we're gonna go buy a bunch of stuff and we're gonna spend 12 years working on our system and it's gonna sound beautiful and people will ask us how much we spent and we'll have to run from the room screaming and saying you don't need to know that that's us then there's like me a couple of years ago and a lot of people probably most people listening to this were like I want speakers that sound good so you go and you buy some speakers they're Sonos or Vizio or whatever and you plug them into your TV and it sounds reasonably good probably not as good as any CRT TV you had 20 years ago but decent and then there's everybody else who doesn't listen to the vergecast and doesn't know that all speakers and TVs suck because speakers require space and TVs don't give them any and so they go and they buy a TV and they're like wow the speaker's up so they turn the volume way up they turn on the subtitles and they're just like why can't I hear anything anymore and while part of that is definitely the fault of Hollywood so much of it is the fault of bad TV bakers not caring and they're like well if you care that much go be one of those people who buys speakers from us and puts them in the back we don't care enough to like make it nice but do it there was this post I saw I forget Which social platform it was on there's too many of them at this point but there was somebody who was like guys you don't even know the reason you think Netflix sounds so bad is because by default its sound is turned to 5.1 and if you are using your built-in speakers that means you're not getting the right ones just go and switch it to stereo and everything will be amazing and this post went like hugely viral and everybody was like oh my God you've solved it and I was just like my guy like this ain't it you didn't do it you just had a setting wrong on your Netflix like I don't know what to tell you that is not it and also you're gonna put it on stereo and you're gonna be like oh now it sounds bad in Stereo from two sides instead of five uh I don't know Richard you're a guy who lives in AV forums and owns 30 or 40 televisions does this idea excite you I think it sounds great from the idea that okay so you can just go get some speakers and press the button and it'll say all right I'll get I'll get the sound figured out and that's kind of always been the problems of Atmos is that they've programmed in the sound so it doesn't need like okay so how many channels do you have do you have two channels do you have 2.1 do you have 5.1 do you have 7.1 you have 9.1 6.2 I have some speakers Do It For Me Yeah and you'll do it um also they have never uh gotten Surround Sound audio right ever at any point it has never been seamless it has never worked the way that it should so I don't know why we should expect that it will and I'm optimistic I think this could like let me be Optimus the technology exists like this should be possible this is this is the kind of thing that like with a microphone in the TV with speakers with the right technology you could do it I'm sure that it will make Dolby money as they get licensing fees from all the speakers that are now compatible how long it'll be until I can use this in my own living room I'm not so sure well you know else could go like can be like oh like physio could just go and do that well it'll be DTS uh not Flex connect yeah DTS flux connect perfect yeah I just I always think about like the so the the Ultimate Ears Boom series are like the best Bluetooth speakers on the planet uh and one of the things that they've done really well is you can actually daisy chain a bunch of them together uh and it's not terribly complicated it just like synchronizes the sound coming out of a bunch of speakers right so if you have a big house and you don't want to rig up a whole speaker system you can just put four Bluetooth speakers around the house sync them all together and it plays and the fact that that alone is like an Innovative feature in speakers is bananas like you can do this with Bluetooth you can do this with Wi-Fi like this is not a complicated technological problem we've done much harder things than make speakers play and I think like to Richard's point about you know a million different kinds of surround sound none of them that have ever been done very well I think just the fact that it's as difficult as it is to buy like two pretty good speakers stick them on the either side of your television and have it work is nuts like that's the reason I tell people to buy sound bars because you don't have to program it you know where it goes just don't worry about it even buying two speakers ends up being more work than it's worth for not that much better sound most of the time so I think the idea that it's going to like perfectly correctly tune your room I I agree I don't trust but I really hope it works like I super super super hope it works because it would be awesome five years from now it'll be it'll be cheaper than Sonos and not as good but better than nothing which is the entire story of a home theater audio at this point as is Dolby almost got it right that's like that's dolby's slogan like we all we almost got it this time no we're not gonna we're gonna we're gonna run for the last second screw it up sorry guys yeah uh Richard what's your next one yeah you know my thing is Google's duet AI becoming available in docs and Gmail and other workspace apps uh you know you reported on this this week I want to hear more from you about the people you talk to and all the things they said but what strikes me is the price um we saw this with the Microsoft Bing Ai and then making it available in Microsoft 365 and it looks like Google's going about the same same way they're charging it looks like 30 per person per month I understand why they're pushing AI so hard because they're going to make a lot of money from it um the bad news is that the companies who buy it they're probably going to want to save money somewhere else whether or not these AI tools actually work or make people more productive or do not they're going to be spending a lot of money on them so there's going to be cut somewhere else and it just seems like that's assured is it thirty dollars per month per head user like per account yes yep no yeah nope hard pass that's a no for me I I it would have to be magic can you just think for a second how good it would have to be to justify that price it would have to be magic people who will just get this because it's useful and there's a set of these things that I think are like time saving in a way that will actually be meaningful to people right like the the idea that I can uh I don't know take a Google doc and say duet turn this into a spreadsheet and it'll turn it into like a remedial but functional Google Slides deck in 45 seconds is like there are a lot of people to whom that is worth 30 a month easily there are a lot of people who essentially do that one thing for a living uh and I think the question of what happens to those people to your point is really interesting and really complicated and probably really messy and bad in the long run for those people but I tend to agree that I think the number of people for whom there are thirty dollars a month worth of good features in Google duet is going to be smaller than Google thinks and I think it's going to be the same with co-pilot that like if you just give it to people they'll use it because having a thing that can you know clean up my email grammar or make a graph out of my spreadsheet data for me is useful and I I would use that if it was just there but paying what amounts to like 3x the price of Google workspace for that is super super super Steep and I don't know that Google has made a particularly convincing case that this is gonna like work like we've all used Bard in the last six months I don't really have any reason to believe this thing is going to be as good as they say it is is it going to work with like your calendar what do you mean like the only thing I would pay 30 a month for is an AI that just understood and did all my calendar scheduling for me like including the polite DMS to people to be like can I put some time on your calendar is this okay all like I wanted to just do all of that if it did all of that I I personally would pay 30 dollars I don't know if I could get VOX media to agree to pay thirty dollars but like I'd be like oh I'll see you'll check it's still on the side there's an app called motion I think it's motion dot IO I think that does exactly that and I think it's like 15 a month but is it trustworthy I haven't used it in a while but by all accounts it's actually pretty good uh I hate those apps like even as a person who's like obsessed with my calendar and spends way too much time like managing faster no because it's like it's like tell us about your Flow State and we'll schedule it and I'm like I don't know it like depends on what I eat for lunch that day like leave me alone calendar I was like no you should just know like I basically want an assistant but it's only 30 a month I have the problem with the economy I am why they're all so excited you're literally the reason they built duete yes we can do but I don't trust it like a person I would be like hey don't do that in the future and then be like yeah pay me more than thirty dollars a month but it'll be unfair fair but like I I just can't imagine trusting it because when it would screw up it would probably screw up in the worst way it would probably like decline an invite from an Apple event which would be hysterical and be like no you're not going to that decline it and be like you've got to go do your performance review and I'll be like no those are two different things and one matters more in this moment performance reviews always matter but not on the same day as Apple events I don't know I just think like like my initial read of duet is very much that like this is clear evidence that Google has not figured out what the killer app for AI is for and it's the same with Microsoft where they've come up with a lot of relatively small mostly useful sounding things that these tools can do without anything that you're immediately like oh I need that in my life uh I'm also cognizant of the fact that the three of us do not have real jobs uh and that most jobs involve email spreadsheets and slide decks and most people and most companies would be willing to pay a lot of money to make any of those three things slightly more efficient and like Google's bet is essentially like okay if we can make each one of those a little tiny bit better we can help you write emails faster we can help you like get more actual data out of your spreadsheet we can help you make more beautiful decks on Deadline like that might work all they have to do is be like we'll do the pivot tables and you'll never have to understand what a pivot table is like a lot of places would probably be like yeah thirty dollars a month never have to learn about a pivot table Yeah and then every just out of business school employee on planet Earth just got fired like right as I was saying that sentence they all lost their jobs yeah sorry guys yeah if you are a like Junior account executive at a marketing company like you're so screwed I'm so sorry unfortunately the thing that you'll that will be replacing you uh our boss asked Bard what's the coolest thing anyone could do and receive some answers include uh walking to a destination even if it's 3 000 miles away uh playing World of Warcraft for 100 hours in a week yes I'm cool uh being in a movie with Will Smith pretty cool pretty cool agreed uh cool things in the world include chewing gum uh skateboards and coord outfits I don't know I don't know what those are I guess I'm not cool enough yeah don't feel bad were also cool for like 19.95 but the chewing gum and a skateboard we were badasses you know there's like a there's a marketing person at like a fashion agency right now who is furiously Googling what is the coolest thing anyone can do and just being like I would not pay 30 a month for this this is it and I just I very much enjoyed that nilas when he posted that he was like I can't believe it didn't say a backflip which is objectively the coolest thing it is uh yeah it's very good but I I like all of this stuff to me just says none of this is finished yet and it's kind of wild to see who is willing to pay for this stuff even though it's at the very very very very beginning of whatever it's gonna someday be and who is going to say at the end of their free trial this is neat not worth 30 a month per person for my entire company and if I were a betting man I would bet on that second thing being a lot more true than either Google or Microsoft think how long is the trial I don't know long trial maybe they have a shot they can take the year to figure out how to make it useful if it's a one month trial like yo what are you doing you gave you gave Richard more time than you're given these people come on I think it might be 30 days I think that is I think that might be how long it is I think their bet is that the executive who makes the decision is the person who's going to find it really useful right away and they'll just say yeah we'll sign off on it and we'll fire 100 other people it doesn't matter how well it works or does not work and we just saw this week of I think Walmart announced that they're going to roll out AI for basically all their office employees yeah and they didn't say which one they're using or how much they're paying or anything but I wonder how how much how long they'll stick with it and how many people will continue to have access to it it's going to be the Walmart AI that's what it's going to be called and they're not going to pay it very well but it's gonna do the job and then the rest of us will subsidize and there will be one in your town before you know it yeah there'll be one in every town it's gonna be great it's gonna get rid of all the other little little uh mom and pop AI stores in your town I'm so sorry hey I need to unionize now that is going to be when this gets really interesting the AI labor movement for the AIS themselves yeah we'll come back to that uh my lightning round thing for this segment is um I feel obligated to be the one continuing to Chronicle the ever consuming normalization of all of these video apps in which they just all slowly become the exact same thing and the version of this this week is that Instagram appears to be working on a version of Instagram reels that lets you upload videos up to 10 minutes long uh which you can now do on Tick Tock which Tick Tock did in order to be more like YouTube where people have always been able to watch you know longer videos and people on YouTube of course have started making shorter videos for shorts which was created to compete with Tick Tock and reels is also created I could do this forever the point is all of these apps are the goddamn same thing now they're not though driving me nuts and I I Alex I I when it gets why you're wrong very shortly here so right is I think 10 minute vertical videos are actually an extremely good idea uh one weird thing that I have discovered is that I just really like watching vertical things like there's something to this sort of flow of like how you swipe and how you watch and all that stuff but also like I think for a long time there was this idea that you can't do as much in a vertical frame and in certain ways that's true but also like I don't mind I found myself sitting watching longer things on vertical screens than I thought and like I'm holding my phone the way I normally hold my phone and so the idea that like somebody's gonna come out and make like a show out of one of these 10 minutes at a time I actually think it's you mean like crazy like quibby dude so I listened to a podcast this week it's called the big flop or something like that oh yeah I saw about this um the first episode is about quippy and the single wildest take that I will say on this show to this week is that it it convinced me that quibby didn't actually miss by that much I I would agree honestly I remember seeing Quimby at the time and being like this feels like it could be a really good idea if it's executed well and then it was just executed terribly and also released at the worst possible moment an app of that nature could have ever been released in the history of the world okay so that's reasons two and three reason one is if it's called quibby like that's the that's the first thing that ruined quibby like if quibby had been called Max it would have had a real chance right like and if they hadn't spent a trillion dollars on content at the beginning on like flip my Murder House the Rachel brashanahan show where she just the silver arm yeah yeah okay but this is what I'm saying bring quivies back as 10 minute reels and I'm into it it's a it's a little limiting but it also is a little bit more focused and I think people generally do it better it it does work it has a place but I I kind of leaned David's way Alex they've they all just become TV shows eventually yeah I'm a person who's never watched 10 minute videos on YouTube so I'm not going to watch them on Instagram and I can watch them on Tick Tock I just won't do it I refuse oh I watch them on Tick Tock all the time but it's the same ones I watch on YouTube only now they're vertical and and the dude doesn't like cut like trim it to make it vertical so a lot of times it's just like blank space and you can hear him doing things because he's not in the frame and I'm like yes it's just like his left hand in the frame you see like just a left hand cutting something you're like yes this is great it's so soothing because I already watched it on YouTube but I was gonna say like there is one big differentiator between all of these and that is YouTube still does horizontal video and the other ones don't I mean YouTube does does do horizontal video you can have videos that that rotate yeah I just I guess I haven't been presented with them am I supposed to be watching this guy and horizontal all this time if you upload a widescreen video on Tick Tock I think it'll like give you the option so like it depends on how they uploaded and what they did but yeah it definitely can do it I have watched so many videos on Tick Tock that are the little horizontal video in the middle because it's like yeah it's like clip from a YouTube video and then just Gigantic letterboxes on top you're telling me I could have been doing it better at this I think sometimes I'll like tell you like hey turn you turn your phone what it's like yeah this is service journalism here at the verge this is also my favorite Tick Tock genre is people explaining little known features of tick tock like the thing where if you put your thumb on the left side of the screen it plays at 2x speed mind blowing yeah yeah learn how to use tick tock on Tick Tock it's like the it's it's like the YouTubers being mad at YouTube like that's what they do on Tick Tock it's great incredible yeah all right we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna go through some of the biggest announcements coming out of IFA the gigantic European Gadget show that is happening as we speak we'll be right back all right we're back so none of us is atifa this year um John Porter and Gen 2 we were there they did a lot of really great coverage for the site there's a stream of all the stuff that they found they went and just had adventures with vacuums and lights and headphones and speakers and now they're sleeping and now they're sleeping it really is how it goes you basically you go you touch gadgets for three days with no sleep or food and then you drink heavily and go to sleep and that's pretty much the Run of one of those shows so they are hopefully at this moment in the Sleep phase listen it's a win-win yeah it's either way uh but let's there was a bunch of things going on but we we've kind of figured out how to divide it into three categories of interesting stuff and Richard you alluded to one of them earlier so uh take us through the the like charging world of IFA this year yeah it's all kind of centered around the iPhone 15 launch because apple is finally going to release a phone we think with a usb-c port first of all so lightning and not tons of docks tons of chargers tons of stands that people have when they get a new phone starting this fall those won't apply anymore they're going to need new charges they're going to need new things they're going to need new cables so of course all the companies that make those are just ready with new products and beyond that there's also this new standard G2 to replace the wireless Qi standard that assuming Apple supports it could allow outside makers Chargers to to charge iPhones at up to 15 watts you know just by touching it which would be like twice what it has been before right yeah it was 7.5 if you weren't on magsafe charger it was half the rate so and and you know these things they throttle kind of as it goes to the charging so like it's not just going to be twice as fast but it'll be faster and you'll you'll love it uh anchor and Belkin are two of the companies that uh have announced T2 products one of the things that I noticed about these announcements is that everyone who's announcing chi2 products does not have a date for when they will be released they don't have a price they don't really have anything it's coming later this year probably maybe early next year or some things but eventually and I think we'll probably get a lot more clarity once the iPhone 15 is actually announced but we've got stuff like battery packs um anchor they've got it all branded under their mango line they've got new stands they've got you know different charges different kind of desktop charges all kinds of things and the same thing for Belkin and I think that this new G2 standard is going to be the kind of thing that you will actually replace several of the Chargers that you have probably within your ritual on your desk right now I just realized as you were talking that this is kind of about to be the most exciting moment for phone accessories like ever that there has ever been yeah for the first time if I'm an accessory maker I can make something that works with your phone your laptop your tablet your other phone your partner's phone like you can build something that is going to work for everything and is going to last because I think you can reliably assume we're going to be on USBC at least a few years from now and so I have a feeling we're about to see like a glut of stuff uh and like Lord knows anchor alone is going to make 700 different USBC products between now and like September 12th yeah and of course it's not all if it's USBC you can work with whatever but they they have like a little thing that kind of latches onto the bottom of your iPhone with USBC it does it does they can't show it connecting to an iPhone yet but you know what it is um and that's just kind of where we are with those products so there's just there's going to be even more and even better I think kind of charging stuff so if you're the kind of person who wins one of those Amazon Deal days or something you're like okay yeah I'm gonna go get some Chargers it's time it's going to be your time very soon friends this must make you so happy I'm I'm not happy at all because I just bought so much wireless charging stuff like two months ago I feel so dumb I'm just like it was like reading all of the news out of IFA being like rookie move crayons just it's every time when the prices are really good and you're like okay I'll get it it's all on sale I I should I should buy these I got that wireless charger slash battery from Anker that thing is great the little Cube yeah that like oh it's beautiful I love that thing I love it and now I'm like well damn it there's another one and I want that one more because it's got like a little and it has a screen on it now yeah I'm like so if anybody needs a a generation one charger uh I'm in the market to sell it I do wonder if there's gonna be like a black market for old old Chargers and docks going forward like all the people who just desperately hold on to their iPhone 8 minis I'm re-gifting it all to family Christmas is gonna be really crummy for them and great for me before we're done with this I want to make uh the case for slow wireless chargers I have the the older pixel stand near my bed now see if you're one of those people who you want to go to sleep and stop using your phone one way to do that put the wireless charger out of your reach yes so if you have to decide am I going to put the phone on the stand and let it charge overnight so that it's not empty the battery's empty when I wake up or am I going to use the phone to maybe fall asleep with it in my hand wake up with a phone on xero and I don't have a fast charger to charge it up good it's that stress it it will it will improve it smart get yourself a slow charger no disagree I really like I think the single most like aspirational thing I have done over the years is try to be a person who charges my phone outside of my bedroom so many times I have tried to be this person I'm like okay I'm gonna have a stack of like print books and magazines and that's what I'm gonna read before bed I'm not gonna sit here and like scroll Reddit until I fall asleep and after like three days inevitably I'm like how did my charger get right back into my room and next to my bed and I'm scrolling Reddit again like I don't remember ever putting it back in here and yet it has arrived and I've I've I swear I've tried this 25 times in my life and I think it shows real personal growth that I have stopped trying like I think it says it says a lot about me as a person I mean you're not a very lazy person so is just putting it on the other side of the because putting it on the charger on the other side of the room that's enough for me I'm that lazy that like once it's on I'm not getting up I'm not getting out of bed again for me it's not getting it's not even the laziness factor it's like the the actual feeling of getting out of bed is so awful it's the taking off the covers like even if my charger was right there but I had to take off the covers to get it I wouldn't do it it is sometimes there's one time where I did that but like I like Army crawled across the floor with like the cover still on a single foot being like I'm not technically out of bed yeah it worked it was fine it was fine it's very good it's very good uh but yeah I suspect it's about to be a very very very exciting like six months in the accessory world and the other thing I will say is this is just a PSA to everyone now don't buy any accessories don't buy any accessories the day Apple launches things don't buy any accessories the day it ships because what's going to happen is between now and Christmas there's going to be this unbelievable glut of cool new stuff that comes out and it's going to happen really fast because all these companies are already making USBC stuff so they're not going to have to get used to a completely new connector Apple will have some weird tweak to it because it always does but there's going to be just a run of new things that all these companies are ready for and so whatever you buy today or tomorrow or on September 12th or September 20 whatever when the iPhone ships there will be something in November that is better and by Black Friday it will cost five dollars so Alex Kranz stop buying accessories and like you were talking I was like actually maybe it was good that I just bought all of this stuff because we're not gonna be buying I'm like I can't I just bought a new dining room table and four like wireless chargers I'm broke for the next year like it's great there you go there we go um all right you go next friends what what did you look up for Eva so there was a lot of smart home stuff a ton of stuff that's why my Jen was there and she was doing incredible work a lot of stuff coming out of from Philips Hue who historically just does lights and if you like me are tired of spending so much money on Hue Lights there's a lot of competitors in the space now there's a ton of other really good Lights I've got some like little candelabra lights they're beautiful they do like the pride flag it doesn't actually look like the pride flag but in July or in June I was like yeah cool is Hugh still the best one though I I confess I'm slightly behind the times on my own personal smart home gear but my read was always who is the best it's also twice the price of everything else yeah like like it's it's like the Apple deal for a long time where you're like well sure I'm paying twice the price but I can smugly say it works can you say that Richard Fair in your Windows machine but can I say that about my Mac lately no but but yeah so it typically just works but it costs a ton more but there's a there's so much stuff out now in the space that really does also just work like I was using it adding stuff both to home assistant and to to home kit zero issue like totally Flawless even the stuff that some people complain about like nanoleaf can sometimes be a little buggy works and so Hugh has a whole bunch of stuff they've got track lighting now which is Big that's exciting because oftentimes track lighting you can't replace like there's no little bulbs to go in there in real place that you probably would make if they could so you have to get the whole thing so that's cool uh and they they got into to security cameras which is a big deal for them they've they've just been a company that does lights and now they're doing security cameras predictably expensive security cameras yeah it's very telling to me that that's where they went actually that uh like I think it's it's pretty obvious that if you're a company that wants to do smart home stuff lights is the place to start right it is kind of the it's like the gateway drug to the smart home for basically everybody and it's very interesting to me that after all this time the the Hue team looked around and was like okay what's the next thing we want to do and decided to security cameras not like other sensors or weird things for your garage door or things for your car it's just it they're just like security cameras yeah and and these are very expensive it's got end-to-end encryption it currently won't work out of the box with Alexa and Google assistance home security camera Integrations so you won't be able to just like play it on your little Google speaker anywhere that kind of sucks it won't work with home kit and tell matter start supporting video for security cameras because that's the only way it's going to work with homekit it won't work with like home kits secure video platform which isn't actually very good to begin with so that's not the worst one like that one you're like oh that kind of sucks but also I'm fine with that um or at least I am uh but it will work with matter and the most exciting part of all the Philips Hue news is it finally is going to start supporting matter it's pushing out an update next month I am unreasonably excited I've been spending this whole week being like I cannot DM Jen because she's very busy working and all I want to do is be like this is such a good moment um so I'm like being very patient and waiting until she comes back and gets over her hangover and and is having a good time and then I'm gonna um just assail her with it but that's exciting like it's been ages since they promised matter and the stuff I use that where matter works is wonderful I'm in the future I'm having the best day of my life I've set up my entire system oh it doesn't work with matter I hate everything and everyone and I want it all to die especially my Robot vacuum cleaner ah yeah yeah which there were also a bunch of adifa I just love that the robot vacuums are becoming like an outrageously competitive space and there are so many good robot vacuums out there now I love it this was the first one I'd ever like I tried one 10 years ago and it was garbage and I was like I'm okay I can just walk around with a vacuum cleaner like a normal person and back this summer somebody was like oh go get a robot vacuum cleaner they're really good now and this was a person that I trust and so I was like you you generally aren't stupid and I went and I got one on sale and I was like oh it's really good now it like my house is just clean that's in with a dog that's not common so they're good now and now there's a they're the robot lawnmower industry is booming I think Jen and John saw one of those it's starting to boom yeah there was she she was she saw a robot uh lawnmower the problem with robot lawn mowers is they generally have really crappy range and American Lawns tend to be pretty big like they they there's a lot of space there's a lot of stuff going on in them and these weren't doing it very well they're really meant for those little tiny like postage stamp size lawns in Europe and so this can do like half an acre which I would have loved at the age of 13 when I had to hop on the riding lawnmower and like mow the front in the backyard and then the garden it was the worst time of my life my family still talks about how much I complained about it this would have been amazing um I would have like been campaigning for it immediately so I'm so excited all you kids out there listening I know there's a lot of 13 year olds that listen to the vergecast and I know you're very excited about this start campaigning now this is a great Christmas gift for you probably not your parents will not buy it because it's like two thousand dollars but aspirational aspirational yeah everybody talks about how like kids are not gonna grow up and learn how to drive and they're going to miss like a key part of life and I just feel like if if your parents never force you to mow the lawn like you you've you've missed something yeah you really have it's like 111 degrees and you have a push mower that barely works we're gonna pay you one dollar go mow for five hours David and then break all the leaves it's fine my channel is fine it's fine that's the worst spending spending 45 minutes trying to get that thing to start is character building it's exactly right you feel like you're a mechanic afterwards like when somebody's car breaks down you're like hold up I've jump started a lawnmower I think I can help you can't it doesn't work that way is there a thing I can pull on really hard and hope that starts it um all right the last thing from Eva which I should just run through real fast was uh there were a few headphone and speaker announcements um but a couple were actually very cool so I just want to basically call out two one is uh new Jabra headphones they're called the elite tens and the elite eights they're basically new wireless earbuds uh I think Jabra in general does not get the shine it deserves in the headphone space everybody talks about airpods and pixel Buds and Galaxy Buds and kind of all the stuff that's like bundled with devices Jabra does a really good job of making just like very good headphones that work with everything it supports like all of the Open Standards it can it has really good noise cancellation the mics tend to be pretty good the battery life is pretty good yeah like they're very good headphones they sit like if you have tiny ear canals that's that's why I don't use them it's my ear so that's actually one of the things that I think is exciting about these new ones um the elite tens which are the higher end one I think they're 250 bucks they have a like semi-open design which uh in theory should help with that feeling of being sort of smushed in your ear personally I end up using very few of those kind of close to your headphones because I get the same thing like my ear canals start to hurt after a while if I listen to those like I got the they just follow Sony link Buds and they caught they like cause pain or they fall out yeah I love that pain that like you're like oh it fits so good Agony Agony Agony but this the Taylor sounds lovely oh it sounds amazing yeah but I like after 30 minutes I'm like oh I'm gonna lose both of my ears like this is cool they feel like they're bleeding yeah but so the elite tens seem cool sound great they have six mics I think uh the the audio quality should be good they're supposedly one of the best they've that droppers ever made and then there's the elite eight uh I think it's technically called the elite eight active that are ip68 rated which is like more or less everything you would need as a person yeah you can get disgusting but yeah exactly it's like you can throw it in the wash and they'll come out fine you can mow the lawn and they're just super super rugged and personally like I lost a pair of air pods because I got caught in a rainstorm I lost another pair of airpods because I dropped one of them in a puddle and then put it back in the charger and it ruined everything uh which if you're wondering yes it was stupid but this is the life I lead you had to charge it yeah and so just I like blew on it a bunch of times and then put it back in the case and then about 45 minutes later it was like that was the dumbest thing I could have possibly done uh but now here we are but so the idea of like a super ruggedized pair of pretty good headphones uh I actually sound very exciting but they both do wireless charging they both do multi-point Bluetooth they both do the mono mode so you can just wear one earbud at a time they just like have all the features and I think like in general if you're shopping for wireless headphones most people don't think of Jabra uh and you should but the other thing which I think is much more exciting is this new JBL uh I think it's called the Authentics speakers they look nice they do right the 200 the 300 and the 400. they're all stupid expensive they're like anywhere from 330 to 700 for a Bluetooth speaker which is preposterone can't put a price on fashion but not only are they great looking they are they have this like cool sort of fabricy retro thing going on but they also have Alexa and Google assistant in one device and it can hear both wake words at the same time you don't have to do the Sonos thing where in setup you pick which one you want to use you can use both and you can tell it with one to start the music and with the other to stop the music and they found some ways in which that gets weird like if you start a timer with Alexa and then you try to use Google to stop the timer that doesn't quite work but it worked if the timer was going off but if you like started a timer and then you're like no I didn't want to do that timer and try to tell it to stop yeah John like I guess he got X he got to play with one and apparently just had a whole list of ways he was gonna screw with this thing I love it and just went through his whole list he chronicled it all in his piece and I was just like yeah yeah just like chanting as I read it it was great yeah his piece was really great and he uh also he asked Google like should I take this as the beginning of a trend is this gonna actually be the sort of interoperable voice assistant World we've been wanting to live in and the Google representative was sort of sketchy about it who knows yeah I mean basically but the at least this proves that like this is a thing that can be done and here's hoping that it's not just on this one set of expensive JBL speakers do you think Sonos is going to do it at some point like a good version I think at this point Sonos and Google are at such odds that I would be surprised if Google was interested in playing along with Sonos they would rather just get rid of it entirely if it would piss off but like could the next UE Boom that I buy because I'm inevitably gonna buy 500 more of those in my life uh could that have both that would be awesome uh like the the speaker world is big and wide and imagine if you could have them with the Dolby stuff that worked all over your house and you could talk to each individual one with whatever Voice Assistant you wanted like how is that not the world we live in this is the world we should live in that's the future that's what I want that's the interoperable future I want yeah I just want to yell whatever I want at my speakers and they have to listen I do not want to do that I don't want to talk to my speakers ever about anything but I do love these they look incredible like if you remember how speakers looked at those old 70s and 80s speakers you do have to look at these finally someone's bringing that back I don't know why they didn't before but they are now and I like it yeah it's based on the l-100s right from the 70s yeah after like two decades of trying to make speakers look like spaceships now we're back to making them look like speakers and it makes me very happy like these yeah these look great the one has a handle on it which is basically just to remind you like yes you can pick this thing up it's allowed they have they have actual knobs for all of the different levels it's just wonderful like we're not saying that you should do cocaine off of these speakers but like if you wanted to if you wanted to yeah they've got some good there's some good flat spaces there for a nice a nice line where don't endorse cocaine on the vergecast all right well now that we've gone well and fully off the rails it is time to end the First cast this is the last episode you ever listened to this is what I want to leave you with no one somewhere all right um a lot of good stuff I'm gonna say this week we had the most recent piece in our big series investigating the effect of Google in the world Ryan Broderick wrote a really great piece called the end of the Google verse really interesting it's full of like old internet heads Reminiscing on like the weird things people used to do with Google in the early 2000s it's really fun uh our video team and our producer Andrew Marino made an amazing video with one of those heads that does binaural audio and noise canceling headphones to like really test how good noise canceling is it's a wild video with like lots of graphs that I didn't understand and tons of interesting people and Andrew sweating to death on a summer in New York City it's a really great video uh Andrew also did another piece on the button of the month about a USB button uh that helped people win Jeopardy it's delightful and I want one just to like mute and unmute my microphone now real bad but I want it uh the latest Land of the Giants episode is out it's about Tesla in China it's very good that whole season has been really great like Land of the Giants is always really great but I actually think this might be my favorite season we've ever done it's really good everybody just go listen to it we are going to be off next Wednesday because it's Labor day but then we're going to be back next Friday we're going to have more Apple to talk about like I said there is just a massive Title Wave of gadgets and Tech news coming in the next three months so we're going to be doing a ton it's gonna be a lot of fun we'll see you then rock and roll goodforeign welcome to the vergecast the flagship podcast of techtember and techtober and techvember and text Ember and all of the other months to come it's about to get wild in the tech World y'all and we're gonna be here for all of it Alex Kranz is still here hi Alex hi what about to lie to lie no if we have to lie we're never gonna make it to techtember don't don't do this to me uh Richard Lawler's here hi Richard hello I just want you to know that both I and everyone who listens to the vergecast prefers you to nili so I would just say this is an enormous upgrade over what we had just before the break I get that a lot what's your take on bananas how many times have you done surgery on a banana I guarantee No Bananas takes you don't have any takes on bananas now now I feel obligated to press on this Theory you don't have any takes on bananas Rally's banana shakes yes bananas no that's good I can't argue with that so we have a lot to cover this is like the last week of Summer it's about to truly get Bonkers in the tech world like we have this big run of events about to happen so this was kind of a mix of leaks and information about what's coming this fall plus the last of this like grab bag of news we've been talking about all summer like get all your stuff out before Apple announces the iPhone event because basically as soon as that happens like it is the fall and Chaos rains forever so we're gonna go through a lot I kind of think IFA is now the most interesting Tech trade show in the world like CES has kind of gone away from me but ifa's pretty cool would agree so we have a lot to get through but the the first thing I want to do is is talk about some of the stuff that's coming this fall and before we were coming into this I made a list of all of the events of like the next six weeks and I can I just read them to you and I need you all to feel the feelings that it made me feel to write this list down are you guys ready do I need like a drink first if you're gonna need several drinks during and after take a shot for every time you're gonna have to work too much in the next song so you'll die okay here's what we have IFA is happening right now the Toronto International Film Festival which is a surprisingly cool source of movies especially like smaller stuff you might not have heard of starts September 7th the Apple event where we're going to see the iPhone 15 is on September 12th the Detroit Auto Show is on September 13th Amazon is having an event presumably one of those where they just launched 200 things that run Alexa on September 20th the next day on the 21st Microsoft is having an event probably some surfaces the code conference which we're obviously a huge part of starts on September 26th meta connect is on September 27th we're going to see the quest 3. there's a Google event we're probably going to see the pixel 8 on October 4th and then the next day on October 5th is Samsung's developer conference where I assume they'll just like talk about Bixby a bunch and that's that's just between now and the first week of October so like for all the people who write to the vergecast email and are like hey can you talk more about gadgets like oh boy it's coming it's coming y'all we missed the gadgets too and they're about to come back with a true vengeance are we like is this good are we excited about this I like I I'm always excited about this time of year because I like all the travel I like the hustle and bustle I like how you're just moving and then like Thanksgiving comes and you're like just an off switch and you just stop functioning for a week ideally and that's really really nice like and you just get all these cool things to play with for a month and a half and that's fun I like that I like playing with all the stuff I wish there were more like things that I really enjoy like not phones but I'm still excited like I want e-readers and and weird tablets yeah real lack of Kobo events this fall for crayons yes where are the Kobo events okay where's the Nook event like I I want a Samsung event but I just want it to be TVs and speakers that's it and I don't want to have to wait till January for that I'm imagining a Nook launch is just like one person at a Barnes and Noble who like spots the new Nook on her shelf and is like oh look a new Nook and then the CEO just bursts out from a display of books and it's like we made it for you like some music playing like the lights start changing exactly like if you want to get to some snacks they're right in the back at this at the knock off Starbucks that we put back there in every one of our stores uh I don't know Richard how do you feel about this well and I love that and I love the events the pace of it not so much to travel covering them from at home much better but also it's the time when all of that stuff that came out at CES and that it was announced really early in the year then you never heard about it again and companies acted like they never announced it all when you ask them they're like like what's that I don't we I would remember if you if you if we said that but I don't now it's coming up like Samsung's like oh yeah remember we launched 200 gaming monitors and we said they were going to be released now now you can actually buy them maybe they might be at your local Best Buy so there's kind of both parts you have these announcements of products that are about to come out and we'll be out very soon and you also have these things that you've been waiting for so long that you probably forgot about them but here they are that's true the thing that precedes all of this actually is like back to school season which we've been in the throes of for like three weeks now and that's when everybody who's like selling large TVs and large computer monitors and like wants to sell you a thing with gaming lights on it like back to school season is their sweet spot so we've we've been in this like remember that thing you heard about at CES space for the last few weeks and I agree it's been delightful Samsung being like remember that big screen we told you about look at it here it is I love it I'm in on that you put it outside it's great it's bright exactly um okay so we're gonna have plenty of time over the next six weeks to cover all of this stuff so we're just gonna like lightning round it for now let's we we pulled out a bunch of stuff that's happening this fall let's we each picked one and we're just gonna talk about it for a little bit here now just kind of what's on our mind as a little preview as we go into the fall uh Richard would you pick the pixel 8 uh first of all Google just can't stop leaking its own Foams the pixel 8 uh Pro showed up on Google store website uh a little bit early fortunately we didn't have to wonder whether or not it was the pixel 8 Pro or not because it had some alt text that very clearly described it as the pixel April is also probably wearing a new pixel watch if you take a look closely it's to be deliberate they did the alt text like you don't mess that up it might be but they also have a track record of doing this that's so long that they might just be that incompetent it's the perfect crime what if that's what if that's actually not incompetence what if that's the plan like it's always been the plan so everybody's like oh man they're always leak What's it gonna be this time I'll get excited this time I don't think it's a good plan but like I think it could be the plan was it last year with the pixel 7 that Google ended up just tweeting out like yeah here it is like weeks ahead of the launch they were just like yeah you've seen it enough times here it is enjoy I think that was last year I can't remember if that was the seven or the seven eight but I think you're right that was the seven they were just like yeah look you know what it is like it looks like the last one whatever um the bad news unfortunately this week about the pixel is you know if you bought a pixel 6 and you subscribed to pixelpass like I did thinking that you'd be able to easily upgrade because Google said you would be able to they said you would you won't uh you couldn't upgrade for two years it was locked you would have to wait two years to upgrade to a new device it is now one year and about ten and a half months and Google says yeah we're not doing that anymore the pixel pass is over bait and switched I feel baiting something I don't know switched exactly because before this like before we started recording you were like I'm not that upset about it but you're like like walk me through that why aren't you that upset about well there's kind of two parts to it what what people paid for what I paid for I got I bought a phone that I paid for over the course of several months uh also paid a kind of bundle discounted price for a bunch of services like cloud storage that I don't really use YouTube music that I do use a YouTube premium it's pretty nice to forget that YouTube has ads got all that and even after the pixel pass goes away they'll still have a discounted rate for those Services uh and also insurance for the phone and stuff like that like it was all in one thing sweet but when they announced it they said that it was going to give you easy device upgrades and you could do it after two years and now no one look at that like it's not even like they're cutting it off and some people took advantage some people didn't zero there is zero of that which you can still get like a zero percent APR phone if you want to get it like and pay it over the course of months or something but you just can't do this package again I think you're way under selling this I think this is outrageous like I honestly believe this is one of the like crueler and more cynical things Google has done in a series of cruel and cynical things to people who bought its products and cared about them like to say to people and they framed this in in the course of building up the pixel over the years as like another way to believe that Google is going to continue to care about its Hardware right like it has said over and over for years now like we are in this for real we are going to take care of customers we're going to keep giving you reasons to be part of this we're going to keep making the deals better on and on and on and this is like the most deliberate shitty rug pull of a move I can imagine even if everyone more or less like you're saying comes out of it whole which I actually don't really think is true because I think there are a lot of people who are now going to go through much more messy and complicated upgrade programs than it would have been if I could have just clicked a button and shipped my thing to Google and gotten a new phone like that's a win in a way that like even if I have to go to my carrier store and do a trade-in is more complicated so even just making it harder is a loss but I just think like from a pure like showing people you don't care about them move this is such a crappy thing for Google to do and and the people who are the most dedicated to the brand like probably the biggest pixel fans who were like okay yeah I'll get one and then two years from now I'll get another one I'm I'm willing to sign up let me do it I think it's a mischaracterization to call you guys the biggest pixel fans I think just pixel fans who's a bigger pixel fan but like are there people are there like above a pixel fan I think like pix being a pixel fan in itself makes you a big pixel fan so you're saying like there is no such thing as a small pixel fan yeah there's no such thing as a small pixel fan like you have to have passion there are no small pixel fans only small people like there's it's like eating there's no such thing as a small e-ink fan like you can't be like oh that's a like I'm not a Big E fan I'm an eating fan because there's not a lot of us there's not enough of us for there to be like big ones and little ones now you know what I think there are kind of uh pixel casuals okay it doesn't work who are the pixel casuals and and many of them may have picked up the pixel pass because again it was it was a pretty good deal um and a decent way to buy a phone it was like oh you know you can click a button and you can get all the things in one thing not your carrier you can go bring that how you want or you could get Google fi and get another five dollars off but now those people are just oh not happening it's like was just super I don't know I am I know you're processing it and I know you're in a place where you're like it's fine it's chill but I really hope like next week we come back we're like Richard how are you feeling about it I hope you're like mad because I'm so mad on your behalf I'm just like they like I'm with David I'm like they they bait and switched y'all they were like hey come and do this not a psych we don't give a crap about you guys we're not even gonna last two years like it feels like disingenuous marketing it just feels gross believing that Google would actually come through on something that they promised is basically doing it to yourself that's known better I've got to take the L on that one I just that should should have seen that coming that was that was not a 5000 IQ plug it really it really is like terrifying how true that it's like I I wrote I wrote a thing I think it was last week about Google keep their note-taking app uh which has gotten a couple of like really nice upgrades it's a good app it's kind of a thing people don't like know or use but the people who do really love it because it's a really good simple note-taking app and like overwhelmingly the comments on the story were like don't talk about keep Google will remember it exists and kill it like if a Google executive reads this the one engineer who is still building features will get fired and they'll kill this app and it's like that's how people think about this stuff like we literally cannot have nice things from Google anymore because it just ruthlessly kills all of them and I think if I'm the hardware team they're still in this position of people don't believe them that they're serious and with with good reason and lots of evidence and so like I If I Was Google I would have gone way out of my way to say this thing is going to continue to exist where if we even if we can't think of a way to make it worthwhile for the people who already got it even if they've already been made whole we're going to come up with something new because what we need you to do is be loyal to us and trust that we're going to be loyal to you and instead they're just like never mind you get YouTube how do they how can like I feel like I had this exact conversation two years ago with Dieter on the vergecast about like when when that pixel 6 came out because that was the big moment where where that was what the fourth iteration of no we really care about Hardware now this is the moment and we're like okay and they did the pixel pass it was like okay they feel like they and then they they pulled the rug again so it's like how do you build that trust you keep like destroying that trust every time you get a little bit of it you go and you like poop on it and say oh pixel fans the 12 of you that exist including Richard like get out of here we don't like you but like how do you I just don't see how they can they come back from this well I think the I think the writing really was on the wall because when you look like when the pixel folds came out and people asked about the pixel pass they were told basically the same language that they they announced this week that yeah no um not so much happening um and I think that's part of what makes it worse is that they could have announced this six months ago but people were like oh people were sitting back they saw they said they saw the rumors they were like oh pixel age is coming out I'll just be able to get that check no no you will not you have felt better if they'd done it six months ago if they just like so you could have like prepared emotionally emotionally yes I could have could have healed a little yeah okay um all right let's let's move on we're gonna have a lot of time to yell at Google between now and October do we know anything about the eight Pro yet by the way Richard is there any we saw the one picture in the ad are there like yes we've seen because we've seen the renders we've seen specs uh there's some reason it'll have Wi-Fi seven it'll probably still have the same the FCC uh filings came out this week also so we know that it's basically like the previous ones where like the pro has uh Ultra wide band but the regular one does not we've seen kind of hardware specs about the chips it's a pixel you you know how these go the the real question is like what are the software features going to be and there's spin leaks or something like video unblur so just like Photo and blur but for videos that's cool uh I just want to say I was out sick for the last two days and somehow Wi-Fi seven happened while I was gone for two days so that's cool and fun and I'll catch up on that over here but I do think that I'm actually more interested in the pixel than the iPhone this year because like Google has been saying this thing about like on device AI for you know years now and this seems like one of the first years that if it wants to do some like really genuinely wild on-device AI stuff it might actually be able to so I think that's going to be very interesting but again we have lots of time to talk about that uh I'm gonna go next because I want to talk about Taylor Swift and Krantz you can go left um the true events of the Fall I think we can agree is that Taylor Swift's era's tour is coming to AMC Theaters across the country in October uh as far as I know at least from what I've seen so far this is all kind of Just Happening we don't know for how long we just know that they're doing at least four showings a day at every theater and that AMC has upgraded its ticket capabilities for five times as much demand as it has had before because of all the swifties who did or did not get tickets to the era store I honestly believe this might be like the biggest movie of all time if it was allowed to be it's a like concert movie right it's it's not live streams yeah so from just like the little tiny bits I've seen you can see some snippets on like Taylor Swift's Tick Tock account was I think where I saw it it looks basically like a super well produced concert film I love that yeah that sounds great it's it's amazing and you'll get to see it in like a gigantic theater with you know cool surround sound and it'll be a million swifties like they even said bring the friendship bracelets dress in all the eras stuff like you better believe I will be there giving people bracelets I I won't be there but I will support all of you are there swifties besides you and nili I think sneakily like two-thirds of The Verge is swifties uh I know at least a couple of people tried and failed multiple times to get era's tickets Richard is being suspiciously quiet which makes me think he's definitely a Swifty for sure I was like hmm look at Richard's off looking in a corner Richard yeah I just don't know what's going on here I'm very happy for you the cultural event of the summer and fall and winter and the restrooms this movie might be in theaters for a decade Richard she fixed the economy like like they keep being like Oh yeah the eras tour increased spending like it fixed the economy I don't think it fixed the economy but it increased spending what if she like lowers the rent what if she what if she like changes the world with this tour I fully believe in her her economic prowess oh I agree at some point when the when the era's tour ends we're gonna find somebody fun to talk to about this and we're gonna go through like the insane like stratospheric records that this tour has set and nothing will ever top it ever again and like the things she has it's insane and wild and I'm very excited about this movie um and that's all everybody you probably can't get tickets if you're hearing this now well it created Congressional hearings about Ticketmaster oh yeah well yeah yeah she broke Ticketmaster she's gonna make AMC the most valuable company in the universe now this is she runs the economy this is what it is all right crayons you're up what do you got okay iPhones come in two weeks I'm really mad I bought an iPhone 14 pro last year and I was really excited about it and I was like I'll be fine I don't need the next one and now the next one sounds like it's almost definitely gonna have USBC and the fomo is Extreme for me at the moment and like I'm locked into this payment plan for another year so it's not like I'm not I'm cheap I'm not gonna be going and buying it but I'm going to be regretting My Life Choices you didn't get the iPhone upgrade plan like come two weeks from now you gotta get the upgrade plan I want to pay in cash because it didn't work with my Apple pay card I think and I want my three percent I like imagining that you just walk in with a bag of nickels and just like throw it on the desk in the Apple Store and you're like give me an iPhone I just whip it across the The Genius Bar Adam yeah like let's go but I like it seems exciting I I don't know iPhones are kind of weird in a weird place right like they yeah they're in a weird place last year the exciting thing was the dynamic Island and we we enjoyed the island but try explaining to anyone who doesn't listen to The Verge cast with the dynamic island is and that's a less fun conversation yeah they'll just say it's that thing at the top of the screen that screws up all the apps sometimes yeah there's kind of like Beyond excited about USBC I just got a new USBC charger from from anchor and I'm so like it charges my phone or not my phone it charges like my my computer it charges my steam deck it charges just everything I own that I can plug USBC into and it's wonderful and I'm like oh I want my phone to do that too that seems cool so the USBC alone has has me pumped for it and we're going to USBC on the airpod case I'm not gonna buy it because again like if my phone doesn't do USBC I refuse to let my airpods case do USBC it has to wait in line but this is like exciting if you like USBC it's going to be a big event if you like anything else it's going to be an iPhone event well also if you like wireless charging the big news at IFA is these wireless chargers that are getting announced with the g2 standard that the iPhone 15 May support well I guess we'll find out and allow kind of non-magsafe chargers to charge iPhones at the same rate as magsafe and also you know kind of other devices other phones that support 15 watt wireless charging so if you like wireless charging uh this is your moment oh I got a wireless charger too I spent like 150 dollars Game Changer or if you want to buy a new charging stand or something like that yeah don't for like the next couple don't don't be me I bought it last month I do not read our website enough is what happened there a lot of regrets I was talking to somebody one of the charging companies the other day and and they were basically saying that the USBC thing is cool but it's a mirage because Wireless is the real thing that it's like the actual Arc that we're on is wireless charging taking over and it would have been great if USBC had been ready you know 12 years ago and we could have just gone straight to that but we didn't and that's fine but where we're actually headed and I think where Apple has pretty clearly been wanting to head for a long time is wireless charging wireless charging is mostly still very bad and not as good or fast as wired charging so I think we still have a ways to go but I agree I think I think especially some of the stuff we're seeing at IFA that we're going to talk about a little later is it's pretty exciting Richard do you care about this iPhone convince me to care about this iPhone but I had more things to convince you about the iPhone oh you're not done okay you didn't talk about it actually they're not done yeah I was about to say the action button I think it's the stupidest thing in the world and I'm not excited about the action button because I love my because I would be excited about the action button if it didn't replace the mute button and like if I'm just gonna have to program it to be the mute button then it's not an action button it's just a mute button that I had to like do an extra step to make a mute button I just I want both straight up had to look at my phone to see if it still had a mute button that thing has been on mute since the minute I took it out of the package and I have not touched it since anyone who lets their phone ring loud is 75 years old that's blanket rule of the universe if your phone rings you are a hundred years old and should don't you like being able to just go oh is it on mute take a quick look or like reach into your pocket and go and kind of hit the little switch while you're walking down the street and be like yeah it's on mute I I just want I want that I like that I don't have to like pull my phone out and be like mute or pull my phone out program the mute button and then hit mute you don't miss the art of Ring of ringtones they're trying to bring ringtones back by getting rid of the mute button no maybe it's the opposite maybe they're killing it forever it's like your phone can no longer make noise when it rings would be like truly Apple's most Innovative feature in years they have to go to my mother's house and explain that to her like I'm not doing it I'm not letting anyone at the like apple it's Tim Cook has to fly to my mother's house and explain to her why her phone doesn't ring anymore does your mom have the ringtone that Rings like an old-timey phone my mother-in-law has that ringtone and it drives me nuts oh yeah she's got the ringtone and she's got it on her watch too which she answers in the supermarket I learned so sorry to all the HEB Shoppers of Texas for having to listen to all of my conversations with my mom while she's picking up groceries amazing it's great amazing all right before we get a break Alex you wrote down one other one in the fall things coming up that you're excited about give us 30 seconds then we're going yes Starfield it's the new Bethesda game like all other Bethesda games I think it's going to be stupid but then I'm reading all the reviews and now I really want to play it but I also know like every other Bethesda game I'm gonna play it for 100 200 hours never finish it and tell everybody it sucks I'm so excited so stupid is not the word you're looking for here it's gonna be stupid it's gonna be like the characters look stupid I feel stupid playing it because I'm like oh you can't look dumb you're like the Bethesda characters look dumb and that's a bummer and so far that seems to be the case for this game as well but also I want to travel around delivering coffee in space that seems cool I don't want to do that in real life but I want to do that in space Richard's just like if it's not overwatched don't even talk to me yeah I'm sorry I I want another games as a service shooter just something I can play in 15 minute increments you just want to play Red fall forever like that's all Richard does if it weren't so terrible if it were just any slight bit less terrible I would I would be playing it right now I like it all right we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about all the other mishmash of nonsense happening in the tech world this week we'll be right back all right we're back so lots of little news this week there was some threads news it seems like we're getting search Sony raised the prices on PlayStation Plus we've got some X doing sketchy stuff I don't really want to talk about that anymore Wireless carriers doing weird stuff again Call of Duty using AI to moderate voice chats which is just America's worst idea in years uh let's let's just blast through office we can't get to all of this so let's just lightning round this again uh Krantz you're you were you're still on the roll you get to go first I'm so excited so Dolby just announced this thing it's called Dolby Atmos Flex connect and the name is very stupid that's okay because what it could do could potentially be very very cool which is that it will automatically like just make your speakers your wireless speakers work with your TV provided they both support doli Atmos Flex connect and only one of TV will support that in the next year that we know of and it's from TCL so it's not going to work with any of your current stuff and it's probably not going to work with most of your stuff next year but like five years from now this is gonna be sick as hell and I'm I'm I'm actually excited about it because like Sonos has done a lot of this stuff in the past they do the automatic calibration and everything like that but it's just Sonos and you have to use Sonos speakers and you're stuck in that and this means like okay I can go get any speaker like any wireless speaker I want and it's gonna bounce It's Gonna Take and ping the audio from that speaker the TV's got its own microphones built in it's going to receive it and it's gonna go oh and fix it all you don't have to worry about a stupid sound bar because sound bars are bad I'm sorry you even though I own one you don't have to worry about like messing with anything it should just all work and for like the last what 20 years TV audio has not just worked so that feels appealing even though you're still like now gonna have to buy additional speakers for your TV at least it should make it a lot easier and more natural and hopefully cheaper than the soda solution which is why I'm not buying a new iPhone this year so the idea seems to be if I'm understanding this correctly and I'm genuinely not sure that I am but if I if I'm understanding this correctly it's that you don't have to buy like a full surround sound set you don't have to buy that one gigantic box at Best Buy you can you can sort of bring your own speakers and essentially as long as they are like compatible with this one Flex connect spec Dolby will be able to stitch them all together you'll be able to put them in a system right and it'll work yeah that that's it like theoretically if Vizio supports this you can go get those super cheap but decent Vizio speakers set it all up and then instead of like getting all weird and finicky and trying to use the not very good super cheap Vizio technology to make the speakers sound good just have Dolby do it and do it well and it'll all sound well so this seems great this also seems like a thing that shouldn't be that hard to do and probably should have happened 15 years ago right yeah yeah like Sonos does it now and Sonos is wildly expensive the TV companies have not really cared about speaker like they haven't cared about this they haven't needed to because they're like okay for them there's three there's three like TV buyers right there's the people who spend all of their time in AV Forum it's like me and Eli like we're over we're over there and when we're gonna go buy a bunch of stuff and we're gonna spend 12 years working on our system and it's gonna sound beautiful and people will ask us how much we spent and we'll have to run from the room screaming and saying you don't need to know that that's us then there's like me a couple of years ago and a lot of people probably most people listening to this were like I want speakers that sound good so you go and you buy some speakers they're Sonos or Vizio or whatever and you plug them into your TV and it sounds reasonably good probably not as good as any CRT TV you had 20 years ago but decent and then there's everybody else who doesn't listen to the vergecast and doesn't know that all speakers and TVs suck because speakers require space and TVs don't give them any and so they go and they buy a TV and they're like wow the speaker's up so they turn the volume way up they turn on the subtitles and they're just like why can't I hear anything anymore and while part of that is definitely the fault of Hollywood so much of it is the fault of bad TV bakers not caring and they're like well if you care that much go be one of those people who buys speakers from us and puts them in the back we don't care enough to like make it nice but do it there was this post I saw I forget Which social platform it was on there's too many of them at this point but there was somebody who was like guys you don't even know the reason you think Netflix sounds so bad is because by default its sound is turned to 5.1 and if you are using your built-in speakers that means you're not getting the right ones just go and switch it to stereo and everything will be amazing and this post went like hugely viral and everybody was like oh my God you've solved it and I was just like my guy like this ain't it you didn't do it you just had a setting wrong on your Netflix like I don't know what to tell you that is not it and also you're gonna put it on stereo and you're gonna be like oh now it sounds bad in Stereo from two sides instead of five uh I don't know Richard you're a guy who lives in AV forums and owns 30 or 40 televisions does this idea excite you I think it sounds great from the idea that okay so you can just go get some speakers and press the button and it'll say all right I'll get I'll get the sound figured out and that's kind of always been the problems of Atmos is that they've programmed in the sound so it doesn't need like okay so how many channels do you have do you have two channels do you have 2.1 do you have 5.1 do you have 7.1 you have 9.1 6.2 I have some speakers Do It For Me Yeah and you'll do it um also they have never uh gotten Surround Sound audio right ever at any point it has never been seamless it has never worked the way that it should so I don't know why we should expect that it will and I'm optimistic I think this could like let me be Optimus the technology exists like this should be possible this is this is the kind of thing that like with a microphone in the TV with speakers with the right technology you could do it I'm sure that it will make Dolby money as they get licensing fees from all the speakers that are now compatible how long it'll be until I can use this in my own living room I'm not so sure well you know else could go like can be like oh like physio could just go and do that well it'll be DTS uh not Flex connect yeah DTS flux connect perfect yeah I just I always think about like the so the the Ultimate Ears Boom series are like the best Bluetooth speakers on the planet uh and one of the things that they've done really well is you can actually daisy chain a bunch of them together uh and it's not terribly complicated it just like synchronizes the sound coming out of a bunch of speakers right so if you have a big house and you don't want to rig up a whole speaker system you can just put four Bluetooth speakers around the house sync them all together and it plays and the fact that that alone is like an Innovative feature in speakers is bananas like you can do this with Bluetooth you can do this with Wi-Fi like this is not a complicated technological problem we've done much harder things than make speakers play and I think like to Richard's point about you know a million different kinds of surround sound none of them that have ever been done very well I think just the fact that it's as difficult as it is to buy like two pretty good speakers stick them on the either side of your television and have it work is nuts like that's the reason I tell people to buy sound bars because you don't have to program it you know where it goes just don't worry about it even buying two speakers ends up being more work than it's worth for not that much better sound most of the time so I think the idea that it's going to like perfectly correctly tune your room I I agree I don't trust but I really hope it works like I super super super hope it works because it would be awesome five years from now it'll be it'll be cheaper than Sonos and not as good but better than nothing which is the entire story of a home theater audio at this point as is Dolby almost got it right that's like that's dolby's slogan like we all we almost got it this time no we're not gonna we're gonna we're gonna run for the last second screw it up sorry guys yeah uh Richard what's your next one yeah you know my thing is Google's duet AI becoming available in docs and Gmail and other workspace apps uh you know you reported on this this week I want to hear more from you about the people you talk to and all the things they said but what strikes me is the price um we saw this with the Microsoft Bing Ai and then making it available in Microsoft 365 and it looks like Google's going about the same same way they're charging it looks like 30 per person per month I understand why they're pushing AI so hard because they're going to make a lot of money from it um the bad news is that the companies who buy it they're probably going to want to save money somewhere else whether or not these AI tools actually work or make people more productive or do not they're going to be spending a lot of money on them so there's going to be cut somewhere else and it just seems like that's assured is it thirty dollars per month per head user like per account yes yep no yeah nope hard pass that's a no for me I I it would have to be magic can you just think for a second how good it would have to be to justify that price it would have to be magic people who will just get this because it's useful and there's a set of these things that I think are like time saving in a way that will actually be meaningful to people right like the the idea that I can uh I don't know take a Google doc and say duet turn this into a spreadsheet and it'll turn it into like a remedial but functional Google Slides deck in 45 seconds is like there are a lot of people to whom that is worth 30 a month easily there are a lot of people who essentially do that one thing for a living uh and I think the question of what happens to those people to your point is really interesting and really complicated and probably really messy and bad in the long run for those people but I tend to agree that I think the number of people for whom there are thirty dollars a month worth of good features in Google duet is going to be smaller than Google thinks and I think it's going to be the same with co-pilot that like if you just give it to people they'll use it because having a thing that can you know clean up my email grammar or make a graph out of my spreadsheet data for me is useful and I I would use that if it was just there but paying what amounts to like 3x the price of Google workspace for that is super super super Steep and I don't know that Google has made a particularly convincing case that this is gonna like work like we've all used Bard in the last six months I don't really have any reason to believe this thing is going to be as good as they say it is is it going to work with like your calendar what do you mean like the only thing I would pay 30 a month for is an AI that just understood and did all my calendar scheduling for me like including the polite DMS to people to be like can I put some time on your calendar is this okay all like I wanted to just do all of that if it did all of that I I personally would pay 30 dollars I don't know if I could get VOX media to agree to pay thirty dollars but like I'd be like oh I'll see you'll check it's still on the side there's an app called motion I think it's motion dot IO I think that does exactly that and I think it's like 15 a month but is it trustworthy I haven't used it in a while but by all accounts it's actually pretty good uh I hate those apps like even as a person who's like obsessed with my calendar and spends way too much time like managing faster no because it's like it's like tell us about your Flow State and we'll schedule it and I'm like I don't know it like depends on what I eat for lunch that day like leave me alone calendar I was like no you should just know like I basically want an assistant but it's only 30 a month I have the problem with the economy I am why they're all so excited you're literally the reason they built duete yes we can do but I don't trust it like a person I would be like hey don't do that in the future and then be like yeah pay me more than thirty dollars a month but it'll be unfair fair but like I I just can't imagine trusting it because when it would screw up it would probably screw up in the worst way it would probably like decline an invite from an Apple event which would be hysterical and be like no you're not going to that decline it and be like you've got to go do your performance review and I'll be like no those are two different things and one matters more in this moment performance reviews always matter but not on the same day as Apple events I don't know I just think like like my initial read of duet is very much that like this is clear evidence that Google has not figured out what the killer app for AI is for and it's the same with Microsoft where they've come up with a lot of relatively small mostly useful sounding things that these tools can do without anything that you're immediately like oh I need that in my life uh I'm also cognizant of the fact that the three of us do not have real jobs uh and that most jobs involve email spreadsheets and slide decks and most people and most companies would be willing to pay a lot of money to make any of those three things slightly more efficient and like Google's bet is essentially like okay if we can make each one of those a little tiny bit better we can help you write emails faster we can help you like get more actual data out of your spreadsheet we can help you make more beautiful decks on Deadline like that might work all they have to do is be like we'll do the pivot tables and you'll never have to understand what a pivot table is like a lot of places would probably be like yeah thirty dollars a month never have to learn about a pivot table Yeah and then every just out of business school employee on planet Earth just got fired like right as I was saying that sentence they all lost their jobs yeah sorry guys yeah if you are a like Junior account executive at a marketing company like you're so screwed I'm so sorry unfortunately the thing that you'll that will be replacing you uh our boss asked Bard what's the coolest thing anyone could do and receive some answers include uh walking to a destination even if it's 3 000 miles away uh playing World of Warcraft for 100 hours in a week yes I'm cool uh being in a movie with Will Smith pretty cool pretty cool agreed uh cool things in the world include chewing gum uh skateboards and coord outfits I don't know I don't know what those are I guess I'm not cool enough yeah don't feel bad were also cool for like 19.95 but the chewing gum and a skateboard we were badasses you know there's like a there's a marketing person at like a fashion agency right now who is furiously Googling what is the coolest thing anyone can do and just being like I would not pay 30 a month for this this is it and I just I very much enjoyed that nilas when he posted that he was like I can't believe it didn't say a backflip which is objectively the coolest thing it is uh yeah it's very good but I I like all of this stuff to me just says none of this is finished yet and it's kind of wild to see who is willing to pay for this stuff even though it's at the very very very very beginning of whatever it's gonna someday be and who is going to say at the end of their free trial this is neat not worth 30 a month per person for my entire company and if I were a betting man I would bet on that second thing being a lot more true than either Google or Microsoft think how long is the trial I don't know long trial maybe they have a shot they can take the year to figure out how to make it useful if it's a one month trial like yo what are you doing you gave you gave Richard more time than you're given these people come on I think it might be 30 days I think that is I think that might be how long it is I think their bet is that the executive who makes the decision is the person who's going to find it really useful right away and they'll just say yeah we'll sign off on it and we'll fire 100 other people it doesn't matter how well it works or does not work and we just saw this week of I think Walmart announced that they're going to roll out AI for basically all their office employees yeah and they didn't say which one they're using or how much they're paying or anything but I wonder how how much how long they'll stick with it and how many people will continue to have access to it it's going to be the Walmart AI that's what it's going to be called and they're not going to pay it very well but it's gonna do the job and then the rest of us will subsidize and there will be one in your town before you know it yeah there'll be one in every town it's gonna be great it's gonna get rid of all the other little little uh mom and pop AI stores in your town I'm so sorry hey I need to unionize now that is going to be when this gets really interesting the AI labor movement for the AIS themselves yeah we'll come back to that uh my lightning round thing for this segment is um I feel obligated to be the one continuing to Chronicle the ever consuming normalization of all of these video apps in which they just all slowly become the exact same thing and the version of this this week is that Instagram appears to be working on a version of Instagram reels that lets you upload videos up to 10 minutes long uh which you can now do on Tick Tock which Tick Tock did in order to be more like YouTube where people have always been able to watch you know longer videos and people on YouTube of course have started making shorter videos for shorts which was created to compete with Tick Tock and reels is also created I could do this forever the point is all of these apps are the goddamn same thing now they're not though driving me nuts and I I Alex I I when it gets why you're wrong very shortly here so right is I think 10 minute vertical videos are actually an extremely good idea uh one weird thing that I have discovered is that I just really like watching vertical things like there's something to this sort of flow of like how you swipe and how you watch and all that stuff but also like I think for a long time there was this idea that you can't do as much in a vertical frame and in certain ways that's true but also like I don't mind I found myself sitting watching longer things on vertical screens than I thought and like I'm holding my phone the way I normally hold my phone and so the idea that like somebody's gonna come out and make like a show out of one of these 10 minutes at a time I actually think it's you mean like crazy like quibby dude so I listened to a podcast this week it's called the big flop or something like that oh yeah I saw about this um the first episode is about quippy and the single wildest take that I will say on this show to this week is that it it convinced me that quibby didn't actually miss by that much I I would agree honestly I remember seeing Quimby at the time and being like this feels like it could be a really good idea if it's executed well and then it was just executed terribly and also released at the worst possible moment an app of that nature could have ever been released in the history of the world okay so that's reasons two and three reason one is if it's called quibby like that's the that's the first thing that ruined quibby like if quibby had been called Max it would have had a real chance right like and if they hadn't spent a trillion dollars on content at the beginning on like flip my Murder House the Rachel brashanahan show where she just the silver arm yeah yeah okay but this is what I'm saying bring quivies back as 10 minute reels and I'm into it it's a it's a little limiting but it also is a little bit more focused and I think people generally do it better it it does work it has a place but I I kind of leaned David's way Alex they've they all just become TV shows eventually yeah I'm a person who's never watched 10 minute videos on YouTube so I'm not going to watch them on Instagram and I can watch them on Tick Tock I just won't do it I refuse oh I watch them on Tick Tock all the time but it's the same ones I watch on YouTube only now they're vertical and and the dude doesn't like cut like trim it to make it vertical so a lot of times it's just like blank space and you can hear him doing things because he's not in the frame and I'm like yes it's just like his left hand in the frame you see like just a left hand cutting something you're like yes this is great it's so soothing because I already watched it on YouTube but I was gonna say like there is one big differentiator between all of these and that is YouTube still does horizontal video and the other ones don't I mean YouTube does does do horizontal video you can have videos that that rotate yeah I just I guess I haven't been presented with them am I supposed to be watching this guy and horizontal all this time if you upload a widescreen video on Tick Tock I think it'll like give you the option so like it depends on how they uploaded and what they did but yeah it definitely can do it I have watched so many videos on Tick Tock that are the little horizontal video in the middle because it's like yeah it's like clip from a YouTube video and then just Gigantic letterboxes on top you're telling me I could have been doing it better at this I think sometimes I'll like tell you like hey turn you turn your phone what it's like yeah this is service journalism here at the verge this is also my favorite Tick Tock genre is people explaining little known features of tick tock like the thing where if you put your thumb on the left side of the screen it plays at 2x speed mind blowing yeah yeah learn how to use tick tock on Tick Tock it's like the it's it's like the YouTubers being mad at YouTube like that's what they do on Tick Tock it's great incredible yeah all right we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna go through some of the biggest announcements coming out of IFA the gigantic European Gadget show that is happening as we speak we'll be right back all right we're back so none of us is atifa this year um John Porter and Gen 2 we were there they did a lot of really great coverage for the site there's a stream of all the stuff that they found they went and just had adventures with vacuums and lights and headphones and speakers and now they're sleeping and now they're sleeping it really is how it goes you basically you go you touch gadgets for three days with no sleep or food and then you drink heavily and go to sleep and that's pretty much the Run of one of those shows so they are hopefully at this moment in the Sleep phase listen it's a win-win yeah it's either way uh but let's there was a bunch of things going on but we we've kind of figured out how to divide it into three categories of interesting stuff and Richard you alluded to one of them earlier so uh take us through the the like charging world of IFA this year yeah it's all kind of centered around the iPhone 15 launch because apple is finally going to release a phone we think with a usb-c port first of all so lightning and not tons of docks tons of chargers tons of stands that people have when they get a new phone starting this fall those won't apply anymore they're going to need new charges they're going to need new things they're going to need new cables so of course all the companies that make those are just ready with new products and beyond that there's also this new standard G2 to replace the wireless Qi standard that assuming Apple supports it could allow outside makers Chargers to to charge iPhones at up to 15 watts you know just by touching it which would be like twice what it has been before right yeah it was 7.5 if you weren't on magsafe charger it was half the rate so and and you know these things they throttle kind of as it goes to the charging so like it's not just going to be twice as fast but it'll be faster and you'll you'll love it uh anchor and Belkin are two of the companies that uh have announced T2 products one of the things that I noticed about these announcements is that everyone who's announcing chi2 products does not have a date for when they will be released they don't have a price they don't really have anything it's coming later this year probably maybe early next year or some things but eventually and I think we'll probably get a lot more clarity once the iPhone 15 is actually announced but we've got stuff like battery packs um anchor they've got it all branded under their mango line they've got new stands they've got you know different charges different kind of desktop charges all kinds of things and the same thing for Belkin and I think that this new G2 standard is going to be the kind of thing that you will actually replace several of the Chargers that you have probably within your ritual on your desk right now I just realized as you were talking that this is kind of about to be the most exciting moment for phone accessories like ever that there has ever been yeah for the first time if I'm an accessory maker I can make something that works with your phone your laptop your tablet your other phone your partner's phone like you can build something that is going to work for everything and is going to last because I think you can reliably assume we're going to be on USBC at least a few years from now and so I have a feeling we're about to see like a glut of stuff uh and like Lord knows anchor alone is going to make 700 different USBC products between now and like September 12th yeah and of course it's not all if it's USBC you can work with whatever but they they have like a little thing that kind of latches onto the bottom of your iPhone with USBC it does it does they can't show it connecting to an iPhone yet but you know what it is um and that's just kind of where we are with those products so there's just there's going to be even more and even better I think kind of charging stuff so if you're the kind of person who wins one of those Amazon Deal days or something you're like okay yeah I'm gonna go get some Chargers it's time it's going to be your time very soon friends this must make you so happy I'm I'm not happy at all because I just bought so much wireless charging stuff like two months ago I feel so dumb I'm just like it was like reading all of the news out of IFA being like rookie move crayons just it's every time when the prices are really good and you're like okay I'll get it it's all on sale I I should I should buy these I got that wireless charger slash battery from Anker that thing is great the little Cube yeah that like oh it's beautiful I love that thing I love it and now I'm like well damn it there's another one and I want that one more because it's got like a little and it has a screen on it now yeah I'm like so if anybody needs a a generation one charger uh I'm in the market to sell it I do wonder if there's gonna be like a black market for old old Chargers and docks going forward like all the people who just desperately hold on to their iPhone 8 minis I'm re-gifting it all to family Christmas is gonna be really crummy for them and great for me before we're done with this I want to make uh the case for slow wireless chargers I have the the older pixel stand near my bed now see if you're one of those people who you want to go to sleep and stop using your phone one way to do that put the wireless charger out of your reach yes so if you have to decide am I going to put the phone on the stand and let it charge overnight so that it's not empty the battery's empty when I wake up or am I going to use the phone to maybe fall asleep with it in my hand wake up with a phone on xero and I don't have a fast charger to charge it up good it's that stress it it will it will improve it smart get yourself a slow charger no disagree I really like I think the single most like aspirational thing I have done over the years is try to be a person who charges my phone outside of my bedroom so many times I have tried to be this person I'm like okay I'm gonna have a stack of like print books and magazines and that's what I'm gonna read before bed I'm not gonna sit here and like scroll Reddit until I fall asleep and after like three days inevitably I'm like how did my charger get right back into my room and next to my bed and I'm scrolling Reddit again like I don't remember ever putting it back in here and yet it has arrived and I've I've I swear I've tried this 25 times in my life and I think it shows real personal growth that I have stopped trying like I think it says it says a lot about me as a person I mean you're not a very lazy person so is just putting it on the other side of the because putting it on the charger on the other side of the room that's enough for me I'm that lazy that like once it's on I'm not getting up I'm not getting out of bed again for me it's not getting it's not even the laziness factor it's like the the actual feeling of getting out of bed is so awful it's the taking off the covers like even if my charger was right there but I had to take off the covers to get it I wouldn't do it it is sometimes there's one time where I did that but like I like Army crawled across the floor with like the cover still on a single foot being like I'm not technically out of bed yeah it worked it was fine it was fine it's very good it's very good uh but yeah I suspect it's about to be a very very very exciting like six months in the accessory world and the other thing I will say is this is just a PSA to everyone now don't buy any accessories don't buy any accessories the day Apple launches things don't buy any accessories the day it ships because what's going to happen is between now and Christmas there's going to be this unbelievable glut of cool new stuff that comes out and it's going to happen really fast because all these companies are already making USBC stuff so they're not going to have to get used to a completely new connector Apple will have some weird tweak to it because it always does but there's going to be just a run of new things that all these companies are ready for and so whatever you buy today or tomorrow or on September 12th or September 20 whatever when the iPhone ships there will be something in November that is better and by Black Friday it will cost five dollars so Alex Kranz stop buying accessories and like you were talking I was like actually maybe it was good that I just bought all of this stuff because we're not gonna be buying I'm like I can't I just bought a new dining room table and four like wireless chargers I'm broke for the next year like it's great there you go there we go um all right you go next friends what what did you look up for Eva so there was a lot of smart home stuff a ton of stuff that's why my Jen was there and she was doing incredible work a lot of stuff coming out of from Philips Hue who historically just does lights and if you like me are tired of spending so much money on Hue Lights there's a lot of competitors in the space now there's a ton of other really good Lights I've got some like little candelabra lights they're beautiful they do like the pride flag it doesn't actually look like the pride flag but in July or in June I was like yeah cool is Hugh still the best one though I I confess I'm slightly behind the times on my own personal smart home gear but my read was always who is the best it's also twice the price of everything else yeah like like it's it's like the Apple deal for a long time where you're like well sure I'm paying twice the price but I can smugly say it works can you say that Richard Fair in your Windows machine but can I say that about my Mac lately no but but yeah so it typically just works but it costs a ton more but there's a there's so much stuff out now in the space that really does also just work like I was using it adding stuff both to home assistant and to to home kit zero issue like totally Flawless even the stuff that some people complain about like nanoleaf can sometimes be a little buggy works and so Hugh has a whole bunch of stuff they've got track lighting now which is Big that's exciting because oftentimes track lighting you can't replace like there's no little bulbs to go in there in real place that you probably would make if they could so you have to get the whole thing so that's cool uh and they they got into to security cameras which is a big deal for them they've they've just been a company that does lights and now they're doing security cameras predictably expensive security cameras yeah it's very telling to me that that's where they went actually that uh like I think it's it's pretty obvious that if you're a company that wants to do smart home stuff lights is the place to start right it is kind of the it's like the gateway drug to the smart home for basically everybody and it's very interesting to me that after all this time the the Hue team looked around and was like okay what's the next thing we want to do and decided to security cameras not like other sensors or weird things for your garage door or things for your car it's just it they're just like security cameras yeah and and these are very expensive it's got end-to-end encryption it currently won't work out of the box with Alexa and Google assistance home security camera Integrations so you won't be able to just like play it on your little Google speaker anywhere that kind of sucks it won't work with home kit and tell matter start supporting video for security cameras because that's the only way it's going to work with homekit it won't work with like home kits secure video platform which isn't actually very good to begin with so that's not the worst one like that one you're like oh that kind of sucks but also I'm fine with that um or at least I am uh but it will work with matter and the most exciting part of all the Philips Hue news is it finally is going to start supporting matter it's pushing out an update next month I am unreasonably excited I've been spending this whole week being like I cannot DM Jen because she's very busy working and all I want to do is be like this is such a good moment um so I'm like being very patient and waiting until she comes back and gets over her hangover and and is having a good time and then I'm gonna um just assail her with it but that's exciting like it's been ages since they promised matter and the stuff I use that where matter works is wonderful I'm in the future I'm having the best day of my life I've set up my entire system oh it doesn't work with matter I hate everything and everyone and I want it all to die especially my Robot vacuum cleaner ah yeah yeah which there were also a bunch of adifa I just love that the robot vacuums are becoming like an outrageously competitive space and there are so many good robot vacuums out there now I love it this was the first one I'd ever like I tried one 10 years ago and it was garbage and I was like I'm okay I can just walk around with a vacuum cleaner like a normal person and back this summer somebody was like oh go get a robot vacuum cleaner they're really good now and this was a person that I trust and so I was like you you generally aren't stupid and I went and I got one on sale and I was like oh it's really good now it like my house is just clean that's in with a dog that's not common so they're good now and now there's a they're the robot lawnmower industry is booming I think Jen and John saw one of those it's starting to boom yeah there was she she was she saw a robot uh lawnmower the problem with robot lawn mowers is they generally have really crappy range and American Lawns tend to be pretty big like they they there's a lot of space there's a lot of stuff going on in them and these weren't doing it very well they're really meant for those little tiny like postage stamp size lawns in Europe and so this can do like half an acre which I would have loved at the age of 13 when I had to hop on the riding lawnmower and like mow the front in the backyard and then the garden it was the worst time of my life my family still talks about how much I complained about it this would have been amazing um I would have like been campaigning for it immediately so I'm so excited all you kids out there listening I know there's a lot of 13 year olds that listen to the vergecast and I know you're very excited about this start campaigning now this is a great Christmas gift for you probably not your parents will not buy it because it's like two thousand dollars but aspirational aspirational yeah everybody talks about how like kids are not gonna grow up and learn how to drive and they're going to miss like a key part of life and I just feel like if if your parents never force you to mow the lawn like you you've you've missed something yeah you really have it's like 111 degrees and you have a push mower that barely works we're gonna pay you one dollar go mow for five hours David and then break all the leaves it's fine my channel is fine it's fine that's the worst spending spending 45 minutes trying to get that thing to start is character building it's exactly right you feel like you're a mechanic afterwards like when somebody's car breaks down you're like hold up I've jump started a lawnmower I think I can help you can't it doesn't work that way is there a thing I can pull on really hard and hope that starts it um all right the last thing from Eva which I should just run through real fast was uh there were a few headphone and speaker announcements um but a couple were actually very cool so I just want to basically call out two one is uh new Jabra headphones they're called the elite tens and the elite eights they're basically new wireless earbuds uh I think Jabra in general does not get the shine it deserves in the headphone space everybody talks about airpods and pixel Buds and Galaxy Buds and kind of all the stuff that's like bundled with devices Jabra does a really good job of making just like very good headphones that work with everything it supports like all of the Open Standards it can it has really good noise cancellation the mics tend to be pretty good the battery life is pretty good yeah like they're very good headphones they sit like if you have tiny ear canals that's that's why I don't use them it's my ear so that's actually one of the things that I think is exciting about these new ones um the elite tens which are the higher end one I think they're 250 bucks they have a like semi-open design which uh in theory should help with that feeling of being sort of smushed in your ear personally I end up using very few of those kind of close to your headphones because I get the same thing like my ear canals start to hurt after a while if I listen to those like I got the they just follow Sony link Buds and they caught they like cause pain or they fall out yeah I love that pain that like you're like oh it fits so good Agony Agony Agony but this the Taylor sounds lovely oh it sounds amazing yeah but I like after 30 minutes I'm like oh I'm gonna lose both of my ears like this is cool they feel like they're bleeding yeah but so the elite tens seem cool sound great they have six mics I think uh the the audio quality should be good they're supposedly one of the best they've that droppers ever made and then there's the elite eight uh I think it's technically called the elite eight active that are ip68 rated which is like more or less everything you would need as a person yeah you can get disgusting but yeah exactly it's like you can throw it in the wash and they'll come out fine you can mow the lawn and they're just super super rugged and personally like I lost a pair of air pods because I got caught in a rainstorm I lost another pair of airpods because I dropped one of them in a puddle and then put it back in the charger and it ruined everything uh which if you're wondering yes it was stupid but this is the life I lead you had to charge it yeah and so just I like blew on it a bunch of times and then put it back in the case and then about 45 minutes later it was like that was the dumbest thing I could have possibly done uh but now here we are but so the idea of like a super ruggedized pair of pretty good headphones uh I actually sound very exciting but they both do wireless charging they both do multi-point Bluetooth they both do the mono mode so you can just wear one earbud at a time they just like have all the features and I think like in general if you're shopping for wireless headphones most people don't think of Jabra uh and you should but the other thing which I think is much more exciting is this new JBL uh I think it's called the Authentics speakers they look nice they do right the 200 the 300 and the 400. they're all stupid expensive they're like anywhere from 330 to 700 for a Bluetooth speaker which is preposterone can't put a price on fashion but not only are they great looking they are they have this like cool sort of fabricy retro thing going on but they also have Alexa and Google assistant in one device and it can hear both wake words at the same time you don't have to do the Sonos thing where in setup you pick which one you want to use you can use both and you can tell it with one to start the music and with the other to stop the music and they found some ways in which that gets weird like if you start a timer with Alexa and then you try to use Google to stop the timer that doesn't quite work but it worked if the timer was going off but if you like started a timer and then you're like no I didn't want to do that timer and try to tell it to stop yeah John like I guess he got X he got to play with one and apparently just had a whole list of ways he was gonna screw with this thing I love it and just went through his whole list he chronicled it all in his piece and I was just like yeah yeah just like chanting as I read it it was great yeah his piece was really great and he uh also he asked Google like should I take this as the beginning of a trend is this gonna actually be the sort of interoperable voice assistant World we've been wanting to live in and the Google representative was sort of sketchy about it who knows yeah I mean basically but the at least this proves that like this is a thing that can be done and here's hoping that it's not just on this one set of expensive JBL speakers do you think Sonos is going to do it at some point like a good version I think at this point Sonos and Google are at such odds that I would be surprised if Google was interested in playing along with Sonos they would rather just get rid of it entirely if it would piss off but like could the next UE Boom that I buy because I'm inevitably gonna buy 500 more of those in my life uh could that have both that would be awesome uh like the the speaker world is big and wide and imagine if you could have them with the Dolby stuff that worked all over your house and you could talk to each individual one with whatever Voice Assistant you wanted like how is that not the world we live in this is the world we should live in that's the future that's what I want that's the interoperable future I want yeah I just want to yell whatever I want at my speakers and they have to listen I do not want to do that I don't want to talk to my speakers ever about anything but I do love these they look incredible like if you remember how speakers looked at those old 70s and 80s speakers you do have to look at these finally someone's bringing that back I don't know why they didn't before but they are now and I like it yeah it's based on the l-100s right from the 70s yeah after like two decades of trying to make speakers look like spaceships now we're back to making them look like speakers and it makes me very happy like these yeah these look great the one has a handle on it which is basically just to remind you like yes you can pick this thing up it's allowed they have they have actual knobs for all of the different levels it's just wonderful like we're not saying that you should do cocaine off of these speakers but like if you wanted to if you wanted to yeah they've got some good there's some good flat spaces there for a nice a nice line where don't endorse cocaine on the vergecast all right well now that we've gone well and fully off the rails it is time to end the First cast this is the last episode you ever listened to this is what I want to leave you with no one somewhere all right um a lot of good stuff I'm gonna say this week we had the most recent piece in our big series investigating the effect of Google in the world Ryan Broderick wrote a really great piece called the end of the Google verse really interesting it's full of like old internet heads Reminiscing on like the weird things people used to do with Google in the early 2000s it's really fun uh our video team and our producer Andrew Marino made an amazing video with one of those heads that does binaural audio and noise canceling headphones to like really test how good noise canceling is it's a wild video with like lots of graphs that I didn't understand and tons of interesting people and Andrew sweating to death on a summer in New York City it's a really great video uh Andrew also did another piece on the button of the month about a USB button uh that helped people win Jeopardy it's delightful and I want one just to like mute and unmute my microphone now real bad but I want it uh the latest Land of the Giants episode is out it's about Tesla in China it's very good that whole season has been really great like Land of the Giants is always really great but I actually think this might be my favorite season we've ever done it's really good everybody just go listen to it we are going to be off next Wednesday because it's Labor day but then we're going to be back next Friday we're going to have more Apple to talk about like I said there is just a massive Title Wave of gadgets and Tech news coming in the next three months so we're going to be doing a ton it's gonna be a lot of fun we'll see you then rock and roll good\n"