 Welcome to the Vergecast for the week of October 21st, 2013. I'm Joshua Topolsky. I'm Nilay Patel. And I'm, I guess I'm Paul Miller. I guess you are. You could be a lot of people today. You could be a series of people. I'm going to go with Paul Miller. In fact, when I came into the studio today, I was told, you're sitting in Paul Miller's seat. That was what I was told. Wow. Like the ghost of Paul Miller. You need to take your voice down a notch and just start providing some insights. You're already going into the Tim Cook voice? No, that was Paul. That was Paul being Tim Cook. No, that's not a Paul. You do a good Tim Cook, you don't do a good Paul Miller. That's true. No offense. I was just trying to be gentle with it. I know before we get going, my, my hair and my microphone are just, just aces right now. Like this could not be a better situation for me is in an entire lifetime. This is perfect. Can we just talk for a second? Everything is amazing. Can we just talk for a second about the fact that neither Josh nor Nilay are on this verge cast? And it's a little weird. Like it's, it's like a bloodless coup. I'm a little, I feel like I'm, I need to be, I need to be really angry because I'm in Josh's chair. You should be angry. Like I need to be mad about seltzer. I have very strong opinions about old sci-fi movies. Yes. And my hair just looks ridiculous all the time, but only to me. Only to you. Only to you. To everyone else. There was this one time where Josh actually wiped his face off with a phone. I think it was the, oh, that's been the most, that's the most jift verge cast moment of all time. And yes, I did just say jift. That's good. You can do that. Get out of this. If you're starting to shvitz, you can do that with a, I could do it with the Mac book. Yeah. I wrote a very nice review of the retina Mac book pro. I could just rub that all over my face. So should we talk about that? So all right, let's talk about Apple. So Apple, Apple had a thing this week. I don't know if you guys are here. Oh, okay, fine. I am actually David Pierce. Just so everyone knows before we get started here. And I'm Ellis hamburger. So no one is confused. And he, that's, this is Paul Miller. Yeah, I'm still Paul Miller. No, I'm Chris Ziegler. You may know me from a little show called the verge mobile show, which we do weekly on Tuesdays. Haven't heard of it. So a little, a little burn for my, for my programming. Nice. Yeah. Apple, Apple. So, okay. So I want to know what was like, so I was actually at the event, but what was the like watching the, you know, the Twitters and the news and the stuff during the event, what was the mood like? Cause I feel like an hour after the event ended, everybody just was like, Oh, that was boring. But like, did everybody say that during the event where people into it, what was going on? What do you think, Chris? Well, I think it played out exactly like every other Apple event in recent memory where it's like, there's this sense of where's the one more thing at the end. And then you go into this like quiet reflection period and then you're like, Oh wait, I am actually going to buy everything that you give up and buy it. And then they have a record quarter. This is, this cycle just repeats itself every year. Well, but the iPads, they, they went down, they sold fewer iPads than they did a year ago in the same quarter. So like that's, you know, That's what they're saying. We had peak iPad, right? Yeah. Well that's what, whoever they, they is, they is like Gene Munster. Are you guys, But they're going to make a television and then everything will be terrific. Are you guys going to get an iPad mini with retina or are you going to get a iPad air? What's the story? I'm going to get the retina. I, uh, when I got them, well I had the iPad three and I kept dropping it on my face when I was in bed, which was pretty much the only time I used it. The big one is painful, the small one less so. That's true. And you know, it wasn't just the face. It was the indentation it was making in my, in my, my upper body right here. I used to, I used to try and like roll up the smart cover and put it, put it right here and just tip over and it was, it was really, It's not quite the front edge of the Mac book air, which could cut cheese or people you don't like. But, uh, so anyway, not only that, but I just don't like moving my head to look at something that's the size of a textbook. I'm really into the, the, the soft cover book size for reading something, whether it's a article or a book. And so I inevitably ended up selling it while I was actually on a trip to San Francisco. Uh, I just impulse sold it on eBay from San Francisco. I was just hoping you were going to say, I like went out on the street corner. I was like, I'm paying for sale and somebody's like mine. You know what it's like to be a tech nerd. I mean, when you need something, you need it. Yeah. And when you need to get rid of something, you need to get rid of it. I had to get rid of it. I took in my hotel room. I took photos of my iPad third generation. I went to the Apple store, bought a mini and you know what? I don't use it very much. Um, I have to say there is a crazy black market for gadgets among Virgin employees. Like constantly like Dante D'Arrazio, one of our reporters is constantly selling some full frame camera on Craigslist. I just sold a couple to Aaron Soprouris involving international shipping. Did you do some Western union transfers and yeah, well yeah, we did some underhanded dealings and then he still had to pay this enormous. It was ridiculous. He had to pay like 30 bucks in tariffs when he, when he took delivery of it. You have to like smuggle it in on a cargo ship and then like, you know, blackmail a dude to take it for you basically. Right. The problem is that I'm not a drug dealer in my, my day job, so I'm not familiar with all these tactics. That's an enormous mistake. Right. And I also don't run a chop shop. You should rethink a lot of things about your life. I need to rethink my entire life. So to answer the question, finally, um, I'll be getting the retina. So what I found out was that I didn't use it much for reading or I used a, I use paper to draw stuff whenever I want to sketch things. But aside from that, uh, I just really liked my phone so much. I like being in bed and holding it four inches from my face and reading whatever I want to read and catching up on Twitter and I never am reaching into my bag. But what I, when I am reaching for it is when I want to play star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic on iOS for 30 hours straight. That game is terrible. Are you kidding me? Just, just, just you can keep moving at that game is terrible. Okay. We're going to have four minutes of that. We're going to have a long talk. I can't say that with any actual, we're going to have a long talk about nice field Republic. Uh, one to specify, not to, uh, after the verge cast and it's going to get ugly. It's going to come to blows. Uh, I love the iPad mini as a game console. I think it is fantastic. And if you look at something like, uh, XCOM, uh, which is a great game. It's a triple a game that hit iPad not too long after it hit consoles. It was just a matter of months, which for Knights of the Old Republic took 10 years. And uh, you know, the, the ironic thing is that it doesn't actually work well on the mini. Uh, it needs more horsepower and so I'm going to go get the iPad retina mini with all the horsepower I could ever want and just play retro games, play Knights of the Old Republic, play XCOM because it is just such a great size and it is so thin and so portable being on a plane with, with the set was at a seven, 7.9 7.9 inch screen is just fantastic. It reminds me of having just this massive game gear in my hands. How big was the screen on the game gear? It was tiny. It was probably like an inch and a half. Are you sure? It was really, I remember it being bigger. Well, no, I also remember like, but like if you look at an at a nexus one now it's like 3.2 square inches. Remember when square screens were a thing, I was like, are you telling me that the game gear screen was smaller than my iPhone screen? Yeah, like a lot smaller. That's outrageous. Anyway, but the game gear was like, I love the iPad mini as a game console and I think Apple's starting to really embrace that. So I will be buying that. There's your game gear by the way. Yeah. Oh Jesus. Oh, they have some classics. They got Mortal Kombat up there. Now, do you guys remember? The backlit Sonic, it just could not be beat. You could play it in the dark under your covers. My favorite thing, my favorite thing about the game gear was that they had like the impossible to get white model that I think was only a Japanese import and if you wanted to spend like seven or $800 you could get it from Japan. By which I'm assuming you did that. You know what I wanted from Japan was the WonderSwan. Have you heard of that? No. Worst name console in the history of the game. Yeah, I remember you talking about it. That was the thing? Look at this. Oh man. It's the coolest. It had all the... Why does it have two deep ads? That makes no sense. It actually is two and a half, Chris. They had all the... Just ten directions. What's the company? SNK or Neo Geo? They had all those arcade games on it. That's awesome. They had the one that had the WonderSwan color. So surprising that that name never made it out of Japan. I'm so glad we hit this tangent. I've just been waiting. So look, iPad Mini, do you also own a Kindle paperweight or no? No, I do not. Okay. Do you own a Kindle? I do, which is why I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up buying an iPad Air. Right, right. Because one of the big propositions for the Mini is... There was actually WonderSwan on screen. One of the big propositions for the Mini is, like you say, it's like soft cover mode, right? Yeah. For reading. And for me, that's the paperweight. So the iPad Air probably makes more sense. Do you guys still read a lot? I'm trying. I'm reading more than I used to. I used to not read anything. Yeah. I did this thing where for two years I read only the Hunger Games. Those are the only books I read over the course of two years. That's not something you admit on the air. And everything else... Well, so I read... On some level, like read for a living. There was a girl involved, I think. So I read a lot of news. I read magazine stuff. I read a lot of magazines. But I didn't read a book other than the Hunger Games for two years. And I was like, I'm gonna read books. So now I'm reading The Circle, Dave Eggers' new book. And it's weird reading a book. I get really antsy. I'm like, I need to read about something else right now. And then I'm like, no, it's just more book. It's very shabby. Yeah. It's really scary to me that as somebody who ostensibly reads and writes more than most people, it's hard to get through a few paragraphs. And there are a few writers I can read. Like for example, Steven Levy, who I can get through the piece. I get through it and I read it. I got through the piece. But there's just... I feel like we've trained ourselves so hard to always be needing another stimulus. And if the stimulus doesn't come, if growl doesn't notify you, if your pocket doesn't buzz, if you don't get some type of tweet deck notification, you're like, what's going on? I feel empty. Inside. I feel empty, right? And so it's hard to really immerse yourself in a book when you're just expecting that. I think the last book I really, really got into was Ready Player One, probably because it played just like a video game. And so I could... And I was reminded of how much fun it is to imagine these worlds for yourself. But I feel like a lot of people have forgotten about that. No, it's true. And I mean, that's why I love the Paperwhite. And I think the Paperwhite iPad Air combination is kind of perfect, especially because the iPad Air now is super portable. It's ridiculous how light and thin and good you feel. You fit in a manila envelope now. It really can. That's your original idea, right? Yeah. Well, that was the MacBook Air initially, wasn't it? Oh, that's right. That's right. That's right. I think now it's like they had the commercial where there's like a pencil and then the iPad appears beyond it. With Brian Cranston. With Brian Cranston. Because why not? Because racist. If it's good enough for Walter White, it's good enough for me. That's all I have to say. No, but so when I want to read, I read it in the Paperwhite for exactly the reason you just described, because if I don't get, like if I get one Twitter notification, I'm done. It's game over. It's over. I'm not reading anymore and that was that. Which is the worst gesture on the iPad, by the way, is the Minority Report style, fingers on the screen, swipe to the side for multitask. Yep. It's real dangerous. You could just at any moment reading a book, no, but then I'm like, oh, I'm in Twitter. I might as well check my email. And then I'm like, oh, I'll just go look at the internet. And then I'm like, oh, I'll just go watch TV. And somehow I'm like, I feel way away. Before you know it, you're like, what was I even doing? Yeah, right. But so the Paperwhite I can actually use to read. That's the only way I'm getting through this Dave Eggers book. This is why I use a Chromebook, by the way, because you can't do anything but write. Same reason. That's fair. Which we should also talk about Chromebooks because you may have, there may be a new one for you. But so the reason I think the iPad Air is awesome is like for all the reasons you love the Mini, I think the Air is even better. Like they're less different now, which is kind of weird because they have the same resolution screen. They have the same processor. Same guts. Graphically, the Air should be better. But like I don't think most games are like crippling the iPad as it is. But the I don't know. It's like $100 for a bigger screen. And that's cool. Yeah. But I don't know. I think most people are going to buy the Mini, even though it's way more expensive than it should be. But I'm going to buy it. It starts at $399, right? Yeah, which is a lot. You know what else starts at $399? To bump that up $70? The iPad 2? Well, yeah. That's just new hardware or old hardware. You choose. Yeah. Congratulations. Before we go to the iPad 2, which is interesting and Sean had a great piece on this. So tell me why you think you like the iPad Air more. It's the same. It's the same amount of pixels. It's the same guts as the iPad Mini. It just is a screen size different. They even made the bezels exactly the same. Why do you, I mean, is bigger just better? So for me, it's 100% a use case thing. Like if I, my small, so I use an iPad and an iPad Mini pretty regularly. And when I'm on the iPad, I'm always either playing a game or watching a movie. 95% of the time I'm doing one of those two things. On the iPad Mini, I'm reading. And the Paperwhite has totally replaced that for me. It's just a better reading device. And the bigger iPad, just by virtue of having more screen real estate, and this might be less true now that there's a retina mini and it has the same number of pixels and same super long battery life and same processor. But having more screen is just, I think, objectively better for watching a movie and for playing a game. And that's like, those are the two things I need a big tablet to do. Right. And you know, the iPad 3 and the iPad 4. Magazines look so good on that big iPad. You know, honestly, the Wall Street Journal app has taken a lot of heat in the past, but I actually love it. Like, I think it looks and works great on the iPad. Don't love the iPhone app. You're just reading about your stocks all day. Yeah. Bye. I'm on a beach trading stocks. No, so the iPad 3 and iPad 4, I think that the use case, the value proposition for the mini was particularly strong versus the 3 and 4, because the 3 and 4 are such thick, heavy tablets. I mean, thick, heavy tablets. Yeah, but I mean, like, they are. And also, like, I... They're cool. Five years ago, somebody would have been like, oh my god. Exactly. I have a really serious question for you. Okay. Does the iPad Air eliminate the air gap on the display of the 3 and 4? Because it's insane on the 3 and 4. So, okay, so these rooms... Let me just paint you a picture of this room at the Apple event. Yeah. It was a big black tent with two wooden tables in the middle of it. And so, with... And 100,000 people all with big cameras shooting things. So I have no idea. Okay. So I got to look at it and kind of go like this for a few minutes. And it looked really nice. But I don't know. I hope so. But I get like every single manufacturer on the planet is like, we've solved reflections on screens. And it's like, no, you didn't. Yeah. That is a lie. Is this a term I'm not familiar with? Well, it's like, you know how on the iPhone and on any high-end phone these days, like, there's no gap between the glass and the actual display. It's like laminated to it, right? Right. And on the iPad Air 4... And so the point is what that does is that makes it so it doesn't reflect light as much, because there are just fewer surfaces and there's fewer gaps for it to reflect. Right. And so the closer you get those two things together, the less reflection you get. And so Amazon comes out and they're like, you can read our tablet on the beach just like our Kindles. And it's just a lie. And I'm pretty sure Apple says the same thing. And it's just a lie. Yeah. Because it always is. But I hope so. Yeah. It'd be neat. Yeah. And they've mostly done it with the iPhone. Although that thing, I cannot... I have to turn the brightness all the way up before I can see it outdoors at all. And then all you're seeing is your fingerprints among this. Yeah, pretty much. It's really lovely. I think I've heard are worse on the 5S than on the 5. I don't know why that would be, but I've heard talk that it doesn't repel fingerprints as well. It's not as, quote, oleophobic. All right, let's move on. Okay. So, Ellis, you wrote a thing about Microsoft and Google and iWork. Yeah. That we got... I like to take credit for the fact that Microsoft's Frank Shaw got super duper angry about the whole thing. And why you take credit for this? I think you made him get very angry. I think I've decided it was your piece. So tell us... No, dude, my piece was after that. Was it? Yeah. Yeah, but Frank Shaw... He just saw it coming. Yeah, well, Frank Shaw... He was like, I bet Ellis is writing something. I gotta get out in front of this. No, he went forward in time about 24 hours, saw the piece, then went back in time and wrote the article. So here's the thesis of the piece, which I clearly didn't communicate well enough to many of our friendly Verge commenters. But in a nutshell... Wow, this is 900 comments. Yeah. Are people mad? They're real mad? You know, actually, they're not mad at me. That's actually the first time that's ever happened on our site. They're mad at each other, which means I did something right. I created a comparison with valid sides, hopefully. They're just mad at the world. This is true. So anyway, my argument was that Apple, for a lot of Apple features since the days of Steve Jobs, they want the marketing to be on point for everything. Remember when he pitched the iPhone, he said, it's a phone. It's an internet browser. It's a communication. Or it's an iPod. It's a phone. It's a communication device. Whatever it was that he said. Yeah, they're always super clear on this is what this is. Here's the messaging. He's laying out the very specific scenarios when you're gonna use this product. And it's arguable that Apple is or isn't afraid of the Surface and Microsoft. They certainly don't seem to be afraid. Tim Cook got up there and just burned the Surface left and right for an hour. So let's say they're not afraid of the hardware. What if they're saying maybe their marketing is a little on point with here is the next generation of productivity tools. It's a tablet or it's a tablet hybrid or what have you. And before Apple made iWork Free, they couldn't really say that out of the box, this is for word processing and spreadsheets and run your business. And now in a second, they probably lose very little money on making those apps free even though some of them were five or ten dollars. All of a sudden Apple and Microsoft can now both say, here's our productivity machine out of the box. You can do whatever you need to do. Whether it's making a photo book or making a book report or a document. So that was kind of my idea behind why they did that. They're thinking about this very holistically in terms of the scenario and the way that they're going to market this to people. Like their sizzle reel they had, they had a guy sticking out of a wind turbine using his iPad doing work. They're saying this isn't just for a temple run. And there's a dude on a farm. And a woman hanging out of the cliff. And a woman hanging out. That was awesome. That was my job. That last shot, I was like, every time I see those, I'm like, you are a crazy person. Not possible before the iPad. You can't hang off a cliff. There were no tents before the iPad. That's actually true. The iPad invented tents. Yeah. So Tim Cook said we're turning the market on its ear by offering both Mavericks and our quote premium, which I think a lot of people would disagree with, productivity apps for free. I mean, the point is, right, I think that Apple is, there's still sort of this idea coming especially from other companies, but also just out there in the world that the iPad is a consumption device. Like that was the burn at the beginning. And I think it's objectively less and less true. Editors and pundits. That was like the thing everybody said was like, oh, it's good for watching movies, but it's not going to replace your laptop. And I think Apple thinks it can and will. And this is their way of saying, well, you know, you want to do email and documents and spreadsheets. Well, what's really funny to me about this whole thing is that I think one of the biggest things that has enabled the iPad to become a productivity device is the third party keyboard cover. And it was widely. And we thought they were going to make one. Yes. And instead, you know, they spend a good, what they spent like 20 minutes on iWork or something. They spent a long time talking about it. They spent long, they did like individual feature demos for each one. They were like making fun of Eddie Q, which was kind of amazing. Yeah. That was the best part of the whole thing. That was pretty good. Yeah. Where they kept adjusting his invitation and they didn't reveal any accessories that helped make the iPad a better productivity device. So there's still, I guess, relying on third party vendors or assuming that people are just going to use their fingers. Dude, iPad Pro. It's coming. Yeah, there is. I think I can't think of a reason that they decide to call it the iPad air unless there was an iPad pro coming. So like I have no good. Hey David, we already have the iPad pro. It's the Mac book air. That's literally what they told me. I was standing in line and we were talking to somebody in Apple PR and we were just like joking around talking about rumors and stuff. We got there at like seven o'clock in the morning. So it was like dark outside and we're just standing there in the cold talking and we were like, so how about that big iPad? And like they got very sort of stern all of a sudden looked at us. They're like, we already make a big iPad. It's called the Mac book air. We were like, oh, oh, you're saying it's going to be bigger and have a keyboard or some new input device. Yes. Well, you have to agree with you. I mean, and Apple used to make a keyboard for the iPad. Like that long ago there was, they made a keyboard dock and it was like a big thing that they sold with the remade it and it's, they might, but it's totally absent from their marketing. They don't talk about it. It's not really there. But it just doesn't make sense that if it, that it's not coming, like that's such an obvious thing for them to do. And it's not like there are keyboards everywhere. I was on the plane coming back from that event and there were like a dozen people on my flight with iPads and keyboards. Yeah. And it's such an obvious thing. It's so obvious. Yeah. Just make a smart cover with a keyboard on the inside. Yeah. Logitech is fantastic. I've heard this. Yeah. But, but here's, here's my one thing. They should just buy Logitech. They should. I mean, we've heard the rumors they're going to do the gaming controller together at Logitech. That makes a pretty good universal remote. And Logitech is not in the best shape. They're not doing so great. They just offloaded Harmony recently to generate some cash. I mean, this is definitely happening, right? So they're just going to buy a Logitech. That's right that time. We heard it here first. Breaking news. Here's the thing about a Mac or excuse me, an iPad pro is you start to run into price pressure between, cause you know, obviously you're pricing it above the iPad Air and the bottom of the line a MacBook Air is 999 and they're easy to find for 899. Best Buy always has them on sale for 899. But there's that like save 699, 749 sweet spot where Apple doesn't sell anything. Like you can buy a super spec'd out iPad and today they don't release the skews I guess, but I can't imagine very many people buy those. But like if they could sell an entry level product at that price, it's like that just makes sense. And they have everything else up to like five grand, but not that. It seems mostly I just want one. I don't know why. I don't know what I do with it because I have a MacBook Air that I use all the time, but I want one. So let's talk about this real quick. One of Microsoft and one of Microsoft's arguments here is that you cannot be productive unless you can have windows side by side. How do you guys feel about that? I have never once in my life put two documents side by side. I don't know what the use case is for that. That's what they keep saying. They say it in surface marketing. They say it in Shaw's post. What do you guys do that for? When you're copy pasting. When you're, you know, this is a lot of copying and pasting. This is all Tab is for, bro. I never use Alt Tab. You never use Alt Tab. You darn feather me. So what do you just click on windows? What do you do? I do gestures. No I do this. I mean really most of my stuff is in Chrome. You just expose all day. No I click in my, in my doc over here. This is the worst. I am a, I do some productivity though. I got my Alfred set up. I'm done with you. For those who don't know about Alfred, Alfred is the coolest. And Dieter Bow knows everything about Alfred. Launcher basically replaces spotlight. So when you hit command space, you can type in basically whatever you want, whether it has to do with your own computer or the web. What happens if I Alfred L.S. Hamburger? And I got, I got David's stuff in my Alfred. I can Amazon search for L.S. Hamburger. Yeah and you get local files that come up. You can do custom searches. So I think a lot of us at the verge, we have one set up where you hit V then space, then you type in your term and it does a Google site search for the verge. All sorts of cool stuff. So anyway. Alfred's awesome. You were about to say that you do the multitasking. So I do all the time. Like research thing I'm writing. Just that's where I live. And I use Divi to do it on the Mac. It's great. But so while we're talking about Windows, it was kind of a big week for Windows and Windows phone and Microsoft and Nokia also. And so there was a surface two that was this week. And the surface pro two. Nokia did stuff at Nokia world. New tablets, new phones, apps, Instagram. It's coming to Windows phone. Life changing and vine, which looked awful. Am I crazy? Like I missed that a little in the, in the like before we were fine. But I saw it and I was like, oh no, they're trying to do like a Windows phone looking vine and it just doesn't work. They're calling it Vinay. Sorry. That was a horrible, horrible joke. No, but okay. So the, the Nokia stuff I think is, is super interesting. Like it mostly because it doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, you brought it back by yourself every time they, yeah. Every time they release a phone, not in cyan, I complain about it. And then the next phone is in cyan. And so now the, the 25 20 is prominently in cyan. Yeah. So that was also the best color for your character in halo one. Let it be known. I am. That was the first time I learned that word. I can't, I can't refute that. Uh, okay. So is, does any of that stuff matter? Do we care about Nokia? Nokia, I feel like is this weird dead company that's about to get bought by Microsoft and they make things, but they might not make things anymore, but these things exist, but I don't know how long they'll exist. I'm very confused by Nokia right now. You know, I think that they felt like they needed to compete in the, um, the phablet market. Um, if Neelai were here, he'd literally punched me for saying phablet. Um, but you should produce, you should punch yourself for saying phablet, but we need a better word. Can we come up with a better word for phablet right now? Extremely large phone. Excel phone. I don't know. Um, just X phone, but you know, uh, since the original galaxy note, they've just gotten such amazing traction with that device that everybody feels the need to do something in that form factor. The problem is that I think a big part of the value prop, it's like the 10th time I said value proposition during the show. I apologize. It's, you've been reading the Wall Street Journal too much. I have. One of the, the big selling points for the, for the note is of course the stylus and you lose, the only thing that the 1520 does for you is give you a larger display and it's enormous. So Microsoft touts the fact that they've tweaked windows phone in GDR three or they're calling it update three. I think they've tweaked it so that like you get a third column of home screen icons. Uh, and in some of the apps, I think like in the people app, you, you can see more people at the same time. So, you know, they, they've made some minor tweaks, but it's not like they've totally rethought the way you interact with the device based on the 1080p, five point whatever inch display. Um, yeah, I feel like that's the thing people missed about the galaxy note was what everybody seemed to like about the note. I'm amazed constantly by how many people I see with galaxy notes using the pen. They're everywhere. Yeah. It's not just a big screen. Like that's neat, but every phone has a big screen now. Like people actually want to use the pen, which is some type of nostalgic human fetish for wanting to have a notepad, like a digital notepad. You know who loves, you know who loves styli is Dieter bone. Yeah, really. He has almost, he has come this close to buying every generation of galaxy notes. Um, and where does he, a trio fan bro back in the day? Oh, big trio fan. Are you kidding me? I mean, Dieter ran trio central.com like we know that that's, that's actually a thing ran that program. And I think the only thing that has stopped him from getting a galaxy note three is the fake leather stitching on it, which is, it doesn't even feel like leather. No, it doesn't. It's a plastic, but it looks, they, they, they have like a stitching. Not even the rest of it. Just the worst. It's the worst. But anyway, back to Nokia, I, to me, I actually think the biggest deal with the 1520 is the 20 megapixel sensor, which is like a compromise between like a traditional, uh, camera phone sensor and like the 41 megapixel beast that doesn't make the phone thicker. It doesn't have a giant ass hump. Yeah, right. So we'll have to see how those pictures come out and shoots in raw now, which I actually think is a way bigger deal than any light throw to the refocus or whatever. Right. So it's like, okay, it's not fake light. They want you to think it's fake light. You just get to do it once and then you hit save and you're done. And that's it. How does it work exactly? So basically, so it's called, it's called refocus lens, right? Is that what it's called? Something like that. Sure. So it's, uh, it basically, if you have something in the foreground and the background, so if I have like my drink and then Chris, it takes two pictures, one where it focuses on my drink, one where it focuses on Chris, and then one where it like suit or I guess six, three pictures and one where it like super exposes and gets everything in focus. So you can then go through and it processes and you can like, I can tap on Chris and be like, I wanted to focus on Chris in this picture. Or I can be like, no, just kidding. My beer or everything in focus. It's almost like if the shutter's fast enough, you don't even need a light row. If the shutter's fast, kind of the whole fun of the light row is like this cool reveal when you get to look at the picture later, whereas now you just do it on the camera, you hit save and then you get the picture you want. So it's like, it's a neat way to not have to make sure you're focusing on the right thing, but it's not light, right? So light row needs to come out with a new light row. Yes. That just needs to happen forever. So my local target and I don't know if it's true with every target, but my local target in Chicago has like a permanent like light row kiosk. Really? Yeah. I haven't seen a light row. I have seen zero light rows in the wild. Just forget. Like it's, it's been shocked. What's the kiosk over there? It has like underneath hot dogs. It's like they have like a cabinet, a glass cabinet, completely shock full of light. I'm sure they haven't sold a single one because at the top of the kiosk it says three 99 99 who is walking into target with $400 to spend. Very fair. And you know, they just want to blow it on this weird looking camera. Looks like a stack of golf balls. I want it. It's $400. I mean it's, it's shiny. Yeah. Yeah. It's our, uh, John, uh, our, our producer, one of our many producers. I see like eight producers back there right now. Um, uh, picture it. He's like a genie. It looks like a kaleidoscope. Yeah, it is like a kaleidoscope. Yeah. And that was the part of the design aesthetic. Like they, I always ask them every time I meet with light row. So light row is constantly, they're big on like calling us and being like, Hey, something's happening. And their thing is just like, we work on your Mac better now when in fact they just need a new camera. Basically. Yeah. Just, I'm always like, just make a camera that looks like a camera or sell your stuff to somebody else. And also works when you have less than like the sun, like shining directly on the object that you're shooting. Yeah. They increased the resolution, didn't they? Which was good at least. Or did they not? I'm mistaken. Don't apologize for later. Okay. I'm an optimistic guy. Get it together. Light row. So anyway, the tablet, uh, the 25 20. Yeah. Here's my thing. Um, for some reason it is definitely not a light show. I am weirdly intrigued by the Dell venue pro, the two 99 running full windows 8.1. I have to say I'm amazed by how well windows works on a small screen like that. Like the live tiles and stuff look and work great when you can just like use your two thumbs to mess around. It's kind of raises the question why windows phone and windows RT aren't the same thing, but that's another story for another day. Um, I think that question may have been raised already. Yes. By one or two people. So the, the, my question is why would I buy the 25 20 or a surface to, I mean it depends on what you're looking for. I mean, I'm looking for like different strokes for different folks, but the, the, the, there's something very sexy about full windows 8.1 in an eight inch form factor for two 99, you know? And I, like I have no need for it. I have no need for windows at this point in my life, but I still might just buy one to, you know, mess around with it. That's fair. I'm not gonna buy a 25 20 even though it's in cyan. What? Maybe I will. You will. I think it's crazy that they're selling it LTE only. Like you can't buy it with wifi. That just blows my mind. And AT&T is going to sell it, right? I think. Yes. Is that the story? Kind of assume so. I think the 15 20 and the 25 20. But does anyone buy tablets at carrier stores? Is that a thing? No. I mean like for a long time I thought that was going away. Wasn't it? Like they tried briefly to like carrier brand tablets and then they were like, wait a second. Nobody buys tablets this way. And then they, they kind of like stop promoting that. And then now this. Yeah. I mean it does kind of make sense. Like with the family plan buckets and stuff where it's just $10 more to add on a tablet. It's kind of a great deal. And if Nokia pulls this off, it's really kind of awesome. So what I've actually started doing is I just have a, uh, like a spare SIM that's activated with the $10 add on. So like, you know, if I need some device that I need data on, that is not my phone, I pop it in. That's smart. Yeah. Yeah. Also Tom Warren just corrected me that refocus the Nokia thing. You can change it later after the fact. It's awesome. Blew up your entire argument. Suck it, Lytro. Nokia wins. Tom's like, David, but you're wrong. You're just wrong. Yeah. So while everybody else did cool stuff this weekend, a Blackberry kind of like blew everything all the time. It seems like, so tell me, Ellis, what happened with Blackberry this week? So after a very prolonged rollout for their iOS and Android versions of Blackberry messenger. That's like an enormous understatement by the way. It's BBM for iOS has been planned for like years. When did they originally tease it? Earlier. It was earlier this year, but like they've been saying for years that various people have been saying for years that either it's in the works or they should do it. It's been in the conversation for many, many months. Right. Right. It was always like an obvious thing that they should do. Yeah. It's like, that's the only good thing you have, Blackberry. Right. You should sell it to other people. And then it accidentally was released what, like three months ago and then they pulled it back. Yeah. So anyway, it's out, but like everything else these days that works on a server and is a messaging or mail app, you have to hop on a wait list. But what's crazy is that 10 million people downloaded the app already. That is pretty well. Which is insane. That's insane. That's a lot of people. I don't think I've ever heard of that for a new app. That's a crazy number. I mean, that's the kind of numbers a company looks for after like a year or two with their app. Yeah. That's all changed in the wake of Instagram. But it's pretty crazy demand. People are still, they still like the brand. They still remember what it was like to instant message on their phone for the first time. With an eight digit hex code. Because that's how you want to contact people. There was something nice about it. And you know, the keyboard was the fastest in the world. Yeah. Tapping away on that little plastic thing. I still miss my Blackberry keyboard every once in a while. Yeah. I was moving and in the process of moving, found a box of old phones, like half of which had QWERTY keyboards because I was obsessed with keyboards. And I just pulled it out and was just like messing around with Blackberry. And I was like, God, this keyboard is good. Yeah. The Curve 8300 was my baby. 8900 was the pinnacle of the platform. Was that the Bold? No, the Curve 8900. Oh, the Curve 8900. That was the one with the chrome surround. Oh, yeah. That was nice. That one had like a cushy couch-like keyboard. Is it tight like a couch? Oh, wait. No, no, no. I'm talking about a different one. Yeah. This one's really cool. Yeah. I like this one a lot. And that was one of the last. This is the sequel. Yeah. That was one of the last phones with a, one of the last Blackberries with a trackball instead of a trackpad. Right. And I was talking about the one with the, with the chrome rows across it, across each keyboard. That was right after the 8300. Oh, yeah. I remember that one. Anyway, so you, you can type like a speed demon on these things. And it was the first time you could really communicate with your friends on a phone as if you were IMing. Yeah. And you could also send photos digitally instead of over MMS, which sucked. True. And I mean, you have to remember that, you know, of course, iMessage didn't exist at this time and there weren't any apps like this that existed at the time, especially that all your friends probably had. And I remember a distinct period in my life, maybe sophomore year of college where every single person I knew had a Blackberry. And that was a really special time. It was maybe the only point in my life where everyone I knew, including my family members, was on the same messaging platform. You could group chat, you could have shared calendars, you could ping each other, you could screw around. And it was like bliss. It was messaging bliss. Yeah. And we don't have that anymore. iMessage is close. iMessage is close for a lot of people. But it's not as feature rich. Right. By which you mean it still kind of sucks. Yeah. I still constantly get iMessages like seven days later. Right. It's really wonderful. Lots of failed sends, which I guess 703 is supposed to fix, but we'll see. And so the verdict on BBM is that it's very underwhelming. It is not anywhere near as feature rich as any of the market leading apps, whether it be Hangouts or Line, WhatsApp especially, which amazingly I think 400 million people are using per month. Yeah. Which is pretty bonkers. Is that in the US or is that just everyone else in the world who's not? No, it's in the world. No, but I mean like are people in the US using it? Oh, I think WhatsApp is popular in the US, but I mean it's the de facto messaging app for a lot of places in the world. I mean there are certain places in the world where everybody uses Kick Out Talk or everybody uses Line. Right. There are certain places in Asia, but BBM is people remember it as this thing that they loved that worked really well and was very fast. And now it's basically just an app that looks ported from a BB10 with like little panes you could flip out and there's just nothing special about it anymore. Yeah. Which is so ridiculous. Like they had, this was Blackberry's- They had the biggest head start. Like, well, and this is their best, probably their best IP at this point. The most useful thing Blackberry offers to the world is BBM. And if they had come out with like a killer app that people loved and got into and started using and like I could convince all of my friends to go back to BBM if I wanted to. Because everybody knows what it is. There was, like you said, there was this two year period of my life where everyone I knew had a Blackberry and it was the best. Yeah. It was so fast, but it's still, it's as janky as ever to try and friend somebody. You're like, here's my barcode. Please scan my barcode. It takes 33 tasks. Scan me, baby. And then there's like you to take a picture and send it, you have to go to get another picture, accept it, and then go back and then take a picture. It's the worst setup ever. And if they had just nailed this, it could have like, it would have been the biggest win for Blackberry that they would have needed. Why is it so hard just to have a username? I don't know. I don't know. So the thing that they missed was they, uh, security. Here's what I'm thinking. They decided not to do Blackberry messenger, excuse me, on other platforms because they thought this is one of our best features. Why would we put it for free on other platforms? Because no one buys your phone. I think for them with this, it was kind of a lose, lose. It was like they could either accelerate their own demise because their operating systems just weren't anywhere near on par with competitors or they could accelerate their own demise in another way by not offering it. And so what they ended up doing was just making it way too late and it's just worthless. Yeah. So I'm on Blackberry and I am looking for somebody to buy me, which they are. Uh, and I want, you know, I want Google for instance, I think I'm worth buying. What better way to do it than to say, Oh, you have Hangouts. We have the thing that is a hundred times better than Hangouts. Buy us and we'll make Hangouts better. Like Google can afford whatever Blackberry costs just to make Hangouts better. But instead they're like, it's a slightly faster but really ugly and kind of terrible way. It works. It does work. It works. But I mean that's the hot spot right now is messaging apps. And there are a million of them and anybody, what do you use? Uh, you've used them all. I'm sure. Have you like actually landed on them? Well, so there are a lot of apps with really great features. Some let you video chat and audio chat and do whatever you want. Simultaneous. I'm all for the all in one communication solution and Hangouts is like moving towards that. But the iOS app is still really slow. Um, and doesn't load your conversation. So I mean the fact is most of the people that I'm friends with and that are in my family are using iPhones. So we inevitably use iMessage even though you can't even send your fricking location. Like here I am, can't do it. You know, you should use my friends. Just use Pat. I don't want to find friends with that. No, no, no. Thank you. So to answer your question, that's what I use. And there's so many great products out there. You need, if you want people to move to your platform for messaging and convince all their friends to move, you got to be seriously compelling in the feature department. Yeah. When you have to make it super easy. Like that's why a lot of people I know have started using Hangouts just because it's like, Oh, I already have a Hangouts account because I use Gmail and that's so easy. But now it's like, Oh, I spent an hour yesterday trying to remember my BBM pin from five years ago because apparently it still works. Seriously? If you're out there. Uh, like if you remember it, apparently you can still like it's still associated with you. And I couldn't remember it because why the hell would I remember that? I still know mine. Do you really? No, I'm just like, wow. No, but it's, I don't know. I'm really mad at Blackberry. And then apparently there were people after surfing their reviews. They said, they said it wasn't them. Um, that's their official comment. But they do have a very, very staunch group of supporters who may have just been, you know, doing it independently. I get that. And you know, what's the funny part is some of these reviews said, uh, I think it was the reviews were copy and pasted from the email and it w one of the reviews was like, dear Ahmed, please post this Blackberry review. And that was the actual name. And uh, I was like, oh, that's sad. Yeah. Well, you know, the best case scenario I think is that BBM, this cross platform BBM app is a stop loss for them and they don't need a stop loss. They need a hit. Right. Um, and this is not that. Well, they need a buyer. I feel like that's, that ship has sailed like Blackberry as a device maker, a company that can thrive and do great things is, is gone. Like I don't, I don't know how they come back from this. Yeah. Even like they, I think they compared to 10 point two came out this week. I just don't think they have the talent. I mean, not only is the Blackberry messenger app not that good, but it's also not on every platform like every other messaging app is. I mean, WhatsApp is on everything. Yeah. Everything. I mean, the windows phone app, I don't even care. I mean, WhatsApp, you got Nokia, you got Nokia Asha. Wow. Is that true? We got WhatsApp, you got the Nokia S 40, you got Symbian, you got windows phone, you got Blackberry, you got iPhone. And that makes sense because WhatsApp is really popular in a lot of emerging markets where Asha is huge. Yeah. Yeah. So that makes a lot of sense. And Blackberry is just with messenger. It's just a, unsurmounted, insurmountable. Insurmountable. Insurmountable challenge for them with this. Yeah. Unfortunately. Isn't it crazy though to think that everyone we knew, and Matt, is there any one thing that all your friends use? I guess we all use a toothbrush, but I don't know that all my friends use a toothbrush. I'm going to be honest. It's entirely possible that I have friends who don't use toothbrushes. Every single friend used a Blackberry. All you had to do was keep them. It's really true. But it was, yeah, it's been a long time since that's been the case. Maybe like- No, no. When I was in college, I was on, what phone did I have? I had like a Nokia 6280 or whatever. Like- Just Snake for days. Yeah. That was, Snake was our app. That was our only app. What about during peak Blackberry? What were you and your friends using? I was never on Blackberry. I went from a 60 to windows mobile to iPhone. Wait, was the Nokia 6280 the one with the slide out keyboard at the bottom? No, no. It was- Because that was, do you remember the phones in the matrix where they would like pop them up and then be like, hello. I wanted that phone so bad. And Nokia made one that was kind of like it. And I wanted it more than anything in the entire- But they made it look more matrix-y. No, that was the, what did they call that series? Remember they had like a high end, it cost like a thousand bucks. They made it, but it cost like a billion dollars. I had like a $19 voice stream wireless phone back in the day. Oh, Samsung made it. No, Samsung made the knockoff. That phone right there. That's the one. I wanted that phone so bad. No, no, no, no, no, dude. That's not even close. The one you wanted was the one that had- That phone is ridiculous. The one you wanted had like, it was the hard cover that was over the keypad and it was on a spring loaded mechanism. So you press the button and it went like that. So you know what I did was I bought the, was it the 3310? Was that the one that everyone on the planet had? Yeah. So I had one of those and then I bought on eBay a case with a little sliding cover on it. It was like $499 and I bought one, put it on and then it didn't do anything. It was literally just a cover. But before I answered every phone call, I would like shoot it down. And then it broke after like four minutes. Oh my God. There was the best next-tell phone. That Samsung one was the fake one from the Matrix too. Samsung struck like a marketing deal with the Matrix where they, it was a product placement thing and they sold that phone on Sprint and it sucked. It was the worst. No, but I, I miss the days of Blackberry being really cool. Yeah. It was such a headstart at that time. They did. I mean, and like, I think Blackberry gets compared to Nokia a lot and it's totally wrong. Like I think Nokia is still, they're sort of low but rising and they have all these other places they're doing great stuff. Blackberry is just dead. Like there's just nothing left for Blackberry. At that time, like all the phone software was bad compared to what would come a few years later. Once the iPhone totally threw a wrench into the like, I mean, you remember the Razer software? Oh, hey, using a Razer again, I wrote that status symbol for us. The using a Razer again was my favorite thing ever. I forgot. Razer is great. It was so nice to just have a phone. All the software is so bad. It was so bad. And they were able to become so popular because people, they shifted kind of from targeting corporations to also targeting normal people because people want to chat with their friends. But when you think about it, they weren't really in a position to pivot past that for great software. I think if I remember correctly, the Razer was initially a singular exclusive that was $599 on contract. And I remember I worked with a guy. This was a fashion phone. I worked at, yes, a fashion phone. I worked with a guy at GE who bought his wife one of these for Christmas. And he's like, I'm like, dude, what are you doing spending $600 on a phone? But I mean, you could throw it into a wall and it would stick like a knife. Yeah. No, it was, I mean, at that time it was like completely unprecedented for a phone to look like that. So Tom Warren just pointed out to me that the original matrix phone was the Nokia 7110. Man, Nokia was, oh yes. Yeah. I remember the 7110. This was the one that you could just kind of shoot down and you had to like break the hinge a little to get it to shoot and then it was great. Yep. Yeah. And apparently. Audio is so bad. Back when I made phone calls and I memorized people's numbers. You know what I realized yesterday is that I have not memorized a person's number in probably 10 years. Like I remember my girlfriend from seventh grade. I still remember her number. Yeah. But like, I don't know anybody's number. No me either. Which is terrible because if I'm ever in an emergency, I'm going to, they're going to call my seventh grade girlfriend. There's a startup. She's going to have to like solve all these problems for me. I just thought of a startup. So you have a number. Yeah. And so here's what it is. So no matter where you are, you have your number and you call it. Let's say it's only, I don't know, it's five digits or whatever. It's your seventh grade girlfriend. And they just direct you straight to her. And it is a voice activated interface that has your contacts built into it. And then you say, call dad or whatever, and then it puts you through. That's kind of a great idea. And it's just for emergencies. You just gave somebody this startup idea for free. You should have kept that up there, my friend. You got to say patent pending. Yeah. That solves all your problems. Patent pending. That's okay. We'll get our very scary legal team. That's kind of a cool idea though, right? That is a cool idea. Like I guess. Yeah. I'd use it like once and then forget that it existed because I'd forget the number is the problem. Well, I think- Like I don't remember numbers. It would be like 1-800-DAVID-RULES or something like that. Like you could pick it out. If everyone has to call 1-800-DAVID-RULES, I'm in. Like I'm 100% in on this startup. It's like Angie's List, David Rules. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I think there was this changeover moment where all of a sudden every phone was connected to some like online contact storage service, whether it be Google, whether it be iCloud, whatever. And then like phone numbers just ceased to matter. But before that, every time you changed phones, it was like this epic disaster because you needed to move all of your contacts over by hand. And it made more sense to know phone numbers back then. But now it's just like, I log into whatever and boom, everything is there. Right. Well, and now I've always done this thing with people's names where I'm like, hi, I'm David. And then as they're saying hi, I'm just like off somewhere else, not paying attention. And then not only do I not know their name, I just never learned it. Yeah. Should have bumped with them. It's the same. No. That's because you're wearing Google Glass. Here's your shot. You should get bumped to buy your startup and then you're golden. Bump? Who bought bump? Did somebody buy bump? Oh yeah. So basically we all work for Google now. That just happened. That is where we're going. Congratulations. We're all billionaires. That could be cool, by the way. I mean, in maybe two versions of Android ahead, you got Google bump. That's how you can share whatever you want. I mean, you can already do that with Beam. Is that a Samsung feature? Mm-hmm. S Beam. Right. So that feels like it could very much be a standard feature. No, but Android Beam is a built-in thing. But I think I remember somebody at Samsung telling me this. Apparently Android Beam sucks. Of course, they're biased. But I think the explanation was that Android Beam doesn't have any conduits to actually transfer anything useful. Also NFC is just dead. It is. I want it to be cool so badly and it's just dead. There are all these startups now that are doing the same thing but with audio. Clinkle, which I can't... I mean, every time I say Clinkle. Wait, is that a thing? Yeah. I have to key now, now that you said that. Yeah. And then there's bump. There's, you know. Yeah. So what they're all doing is they're using audio or they're just using your location, which for most places besides New York City is pretty fine. Yeah. That's fair, I guess. They know you're in the Chipotle. Right. But whereas in New York, you're walking down the street and they're like, are you in Chipotle or are you in the Duane Reade or are you at work? Right. There are 160 places you can do. Because there's 10 places in one building, Sim Tower style. So you're saying those are the three places you go. You go to Chipotle, Duane Reade, and work. That was a Freudian slip. That's where you find all those hamburgers. That's where you find all those hamburgers. That's a Freudian slip. I mean, that does kind of meet all of your needs when you think about it. I mean, where would you have to go in life besides Chipotle, Duane Reade, and work? Nowhere. Yeah. You're not wrong. So yeah, NFC is just getting blown away by all. I mean, if you look at what Square's doing, which is quickly becoming the mobile marketplace payments king, at least for indie merchants, they have no interest in NFC. No, I feel like NFC is going to keep being cool for tapping, pairing your phone with a speaker or something. We all love the idea of it. It's just figuring out the security with every carrier and every phone manufacturer has just clearly proven to be too much of a challenge. Every other way of moving stuff between my phone and your phone is terrible. Airdrop is the worst. I hate airdrop. I had a handspring, since we're going retro today, I had a handspring visor. That was another thing I really wanted. It was just the coolest. I couldn't afford to sub up on a crappy Palm. I would get my friend's Palm Pilot or whatever on an adjacent desk and we would just line them up perfectly. You remember in Star Trek Into Darkness, I can't believe I'm referencing this movie. I've blocked that out of my brain. When Kirk and, oh, I don't want to spoil it, but anyway, there's a ship jump. There's a ship jump between two ships and that's what you had to do with the two Palm Pilots with the infrared readers and you could just send 16 kilobytes or whatever you want to do. And it was great and that was probably the best system that has existed since then. Everything else is just terrible. Speaking of sci-fi. But you can scan my barcode. We should hit on Star Wars really quick, huh? Okay. Actually before we do that, Chris, you have to go get on an airplane. We have to kick you out. So there are two things going on here. One, I have to get on an aircraft and two, my replacement, the lovely and talented Ross Miller is far more... Would we call him lovely? I think he's lovely. I feel like he's more ruggedly handsome than he is lovely. You can be lovely and handsome and rugged, I think. That's the Ross Miller experience right there. Yeah, lovely and rugged. Lovely and rugged. That's going to be the name of his debut album, by the way. I'm in. I pre-ordered it just now. So Ross is more of a Star Wars... Before the show started, he's like, I have a lot to say about this. So I'm going to let him talk about this. I'm going to step away. I can see him over there. He's like twitching. This is Ross' time. He wants to talk about it so bad. I'm going to pull in Evan Rogers and just ninja his way onto the set here and then he'll just magically appear. But it has been absolutely fantastic chatting with you gentlemen. Yeah. And I wish you... It's been medium, I would say. Are you actually leaving right now? Is this it? I'm literally walking downstairs in my new cab. All right, dude. See you soon, I guess. Yeah. Travel safe. Very soon. I'm not going to shake your hand because I just don't... I don't respect you as much as I respect my man, Ellis. That's fair. I understand. Look, you guys are BBM bros and I'll just sit here and not be a BBM bro. I have Ellis' ID memorized. It's not true. So does Ellis. Meanwhile, all I have is my seventh grade girlfriend's phone number. You mean my PIN? Yeah, your PIN. Okay, good. Your hex, your eight digit hex code. That's the only way you can identify humans in the future. This is my friend C1640E. All right. Bye, Chris. Thank you very much. Bye, Chris. Thank you for being with us. My pleasure. So, okay, wait, Ellis, here's my theory. You don't know my theory. You just made me think of something. So we've written a bunch of times about having the one true identification thing where instead of your phone number and your email address and your Blackberry PIN, Blackberry kind of had that. That was my thing. That was the thing I gave to everybody so that we could be friends. They had your ID. They did. That was all I needed. It was some stupid numeric thing that I didn't know anymore. Are we still talking about Blackberry here? We are. I have a lot of thoughts about BBM. I don't know about talking about that Blackberry. It turns out I'm really angry at BBM for not being great. We don't get to talk about it. Are we still? It's just, it could be so good. I'm so tired of text messaging from my phone. Let it go. I'm so tired of it. Thanks, Will. Everyone, everyone on earth is like down on Blackberry right now. No, but so, okay, so. Just be nice. I don't, it's not even Blackberry's fault. Love Blackberry. Learn to love it. It's just everyone's fault because I wanted Blackberry to solve this. So I was sitting with my, I was texting with a buddy last night who I haven't talked to in forever and he texted me. He's like, how are you? And I was like, oh no, this is going to take me so long to respond to. And then I'm sitting there on my phone texting for like four and a half hours. It's stupid to say, I'm good. Thank you. How are you? No, no, we're, we have a, we have a sincere and loving relationship. Don't ever text me, Ellis. You'll get very short-cut responses. All right, fine. Let's talk about Star Wars. Ross, tell me about Star Wars. I want to talk about Star Wars. I have something I have to call you. I'm very angry at you. I'm very mad at you. Let's talk about this. First off, how are you? Tell me about your commute in the morning. Cause I read about your commute this morning. And you know what you do? You open your laptop on the subway. Dude, I'm that guy. I am so unabashedly that guy. Why? Do not be that guy. Subway is a crowded subway and you're that jerk sitting down with your laptop open playing Portal 2. That was the best. Okay, so I'm on the subway. Wait, is that for real? Yeah, yeah. No, that happened. It's not like you're like writing reviews or whatever. You're playing Portal. You are one step away from the guy who plays World of Warcraft at Starbucks with a desktop tower. That guy's badass. I like that guy. I would like to be friends with that guy. No, so, okay. So I'm on the subway yesterday coming to work and first they delay my subway. Then they redirect it. So I have to switch subways. Then they delay my other subway. Everybody else on the subway furious. I'm just sitting there. I was like, cool. I got like an hour and a half to play Portal now. It was the best. It was like the best part of my whole day was being delayed on the subway. What about the old woman? Because I had a MacBook Pro. The pregnant woman, the blind man, the guy with the... Look, there are so many other seats and I'm so comfortable that it's just not even my problem. How do you have a not crowded commute? What train are you using? What magical time are you going to work where it's not completely crowded? Oh no, it's completely crowded. And I just, I put in headphones and then it's not my problem anymore. That's all. That's all I'm saying. So let's talk about Star Wars. Tell me about Star Wars. What happened to Star Wars? There's not much to say about Star Wars except that they just completely changed the writers over. So they announced the cast. Minor detail. Just a little bit of a thing. Michael Arndt, who actually has a great career to Toy Story 3. He did Little Miss Sunshine. Yep. Great movie. He's out. No one knows why. But really he just... We don't know. We'll find out. Because he's good. It's not like he's very good. He's like some hack that they got rid of once they had money. They did get Lawrence Kasdan, who as we know wrote and directed Dreamcatcher, the Stephen King terrible horror movie. He also did Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. So it's a good cast. Tim, J.J. Abrams has a writing credit. Whatever that means. Right. It just means I have input I'm sure. I don't know if he's actually getting down with the script and the dialogue. I bet he is. I mean this is the most pressure in the world. Yeah. It really is. So the difference between... This and the last episode of Lost are the most terrifying things to ever do. Except he didn't write that, did he? And he blew the last episode of Lost. I don't even... He was hands off after Lost's first season. He literally... That's the J.J. Abrams way. Here's a mystery box. Bye. Exactly. Did you guys like... Fringe is good. Did you guys like Star Trek? Don't watch the end of it. The movie? Which one? The first one? Yeah, the reboot. Yeah, I liked that. Yeah. So I thought that on the first Star Trek, J.J.'s like, I'm at the helm of a really important franchise. I'm going to try hard. Right. And when he tries hard, he can do amazing stuff. And I thought that Into Darkness was a lot scrappier. I still enjoyed parts of it, but it just didn't feel like the level of effort from J.J. was on there. It was like, ah, I got this. And so you know what? I'm happy this is happening. I think that that dude is a smart dude. And I'm glad that it's completely within his control now as a director and perhaps co-writer. So but should we be worried that there's all this weird upheaval on Star Wars? I feel like Star Wars needs to be perfect and everybody needs to be in control and everything needs to be great. I don't think this is as bad as the Prometheus last minute release Scott brings in. Well, yeah. Damon Lindelof to kind of screw up the whole Alien Engineer script and not make it kind of like Aliens, but kind of make it like Aliens. Yeah. I mean, if you put out Lawrence Kasdan, who's a Star Wars veteran, everyone loves him. Yeah. I honestly think I don't know if it was Michael Arndt not wanting to be in it, but they just found someone better. It's so early. It's not shooting until spring 2015. They can screw with the script until then. They can screw with the script after that. Special effects are amazing these days. Yeah. No, I don't think it's bad news. There's not much else to say about it except one's out, one's in. So it's worth pointing out that if I'm on the- Oh, he did Mumford. I'm on the Internet Movie Database right now. It's a website. You may have heard of it. So if you look at Lawrence, I'm on here all the time and then I look and then because it's always available, I forget what I just looked at. Owned by Amazon. Fun fact. Is it really? True story. Look at that. Smart. Man. Bezos. It's super possible I just lied about that. No, I'm right. Did it. Apparently, Lawrence Kasdan has directed a couple of things I've never heard of in the last 10 years. But in terms of writing, this dude's been pretty off the map since he, I guess I hadn't heard of Dreamcatcher. I do not recommend Dreamcatcher. I really don't. But everything else here is wonderful. He did Mumford, which is actually kind of good. But it was 20 years ago. White Earth, The Bodyguard. Do you know these movies? I know a lot of these movies. You just made that up. I guess I was three when that one came out. Anyway, the dude's kind of been off the map for a while. Hopefully he's still got it in him. I mean, I think he'll be okay. You can either write or you can't write. Right. Exactly. So that's a good thing. That's fair. This is wonderful. I got some really deep thoughts from Ellis Hamburger. What they got to do is they got to, JJ and Lawrence, they got to get on YouTube and look up all those videos about like 10 ways to make the new Star Wars good. And they got to do all those things. I mean, isn't the first one in all of those things like murder George Lucas. Kill Jar Jar. Yeah. Blinded by lens flare. No, I can't. JJ's not doing it in lens flare anymore. He called himself out for it. Did he? He did. That happened. I love the lens flare. And it's the same director of photography. Same director of photography, yeah. So I'm sure they're going to want to. There's going to be so much lens flare. And they got John Williams in the score, of course, which is always going to be great. I mean, this is like all of the big deal people. None of this is going to matter. Like the big news that's going to come after this is like, we'll get the casting probably sometime next year, March-ish, April-ish. We'll start hearing some things outside of what I think Benedict Cumberbatch is a part of it. Maybe. Sure. I might be making that up. He's in every movie. He is. He's like the new Jude Law where you're like, oh, Benedict Cumberbatch is in this. You know what's always funny to me is that when the movie comes out, let's say we all think Benedict Cumberbatch is having a super hot time right now in theaters, right? He's in everything. You know when he was in everything? Two years ago when they signed him for all these movies in a row. That's how long these things have been in production. That's true. And that's what's crazy to me is it's almost like when you're looking at, well, this is, I'm not going to make that stupid. I was going to make a comparison about like when you see a star. When you see a star, it's actually that star, what it used to look like because it doesn't look like that anymore. That was stupid. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. This is the red dwarf acting. You're getting a lot of like idea. But that's what's crazy. Metaphysical here. I'm enjoying this. I'm enjoying this. His agent was going bonkers a year and a half, two years ago. It's not like he's doing all these movies now. These were all made a while ago and I bet everybody was talking about him back then and then he's in everything before you know it. It's kind of true. Yeah. He was like, you know what I do is Sherlock. That's pretty good. You should give me tons of movies and it worked. Sherlock's awesome. If you haven't seen it. So for those who don't have the article or who they haven't read it, they've got the director of photography from Star Trek into darkness. They've got the costume designer from Fight Club. All right. There's so much blood and guts and bruises. I was gonna say, are there costumes? I feel like everyone's just shirtless in athletic shorts beating the crap out of each other. Oh, in Fight Club. Yeah. Are there costumes in Star Wars? I imagine they're all shirtless. Here's a good one. Like the blood designer I'd be all in on. Yeah. For anybody who's into movies knows the production designer is very important. They basically design all the sets, all the props and things like that. They've got the dude from Avatar and Lincoln, which is good. Sure. They've got another production designer from Oblivion and Tron Legacy. So cool is going to be shining. We're getting into the weeds. We now know the productions. Oh, but we love the weeds. We love the weeds, but this is getting like, okay, he did Oblivion. It's going to be pretty in science fiction and futuristic. Wait, okay. Can we just be honest? This movie is definitely going to suck, right? It's just going to be awesome. It's going to be amazing. There's no way. Why? You can't Star Trek. You're saying you can't fulfill the expectations. Yes. I think no one can make a good Star Wars movie. That's my theory. I don't know. I think Star Wars is in this like Pantheon maybe, but it would be like making another Godfather movie. Actually, no, they made a terrible Godfather. If Godfather had lightsabers, then yes, that would be awesome. But they like Star Trek, there's so much Star Trek that they could do it. You can do different and do it well. Like it's a big enough universe that there's places you can go. The Star Wars universe is not that big. The Star Wars universe. Tons of games. The canon of Star Wars. The books, the themes on all that stuff. But like Star Wars is still three movies. Like you can talk about everything else, but Star Wars is five movies. No, it's not. It's three movies. It is five. Episodes two through six. No. They never made a one. It's okay. I forget. One, two, and three are terrible. I never saw it. No. Anything with Hayden Christensen in it is not a movie as far as I'm concerned. Shattered glass. It's like a- Done. And that's the first one. Just get out. No, but so like I really don't think this movie has any chance of being any good. And I think it's going to be so overwhelming. They're going to have so much money. They're going to have so much like canon they have to deal with, but also get away from, but also deal with and like the expectations. I just don't think I feel for JJ Abrams. I think he's totally screwed. I just can't wait for the like, we're like, we do one movie with no lightsabers. Not even exist. It'd be amazing. You'd be just change every single character. They're like, this is called Star Wars and it's actually about, you know, today it's a rom com with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zoe. It's a 500 days of summer sequel. It's called Star Wars. Have you read any of the books, the Star Wars books? It's been a long time. Because there are a lot that people considered. There are a few of them that people consider to be really good. Yeah. I know the one that was like always big was shadows of the empire. They made that into a video game, a great video game back in the days when like controllers had three prongs, the D pad, the joystick, the buds. You've read into the 64 controllers. It's the best thing ever. Wait, is there a subtitle for episode seven yet or is it just called Star Wars episode seven so far? I think it's just episode seven. Okay. Which they have to write it now because they now have new writers. So presumably whatever they've been doing, they're like, eh, we're going to try this again. And this is, and then Damon Lindelof is going to come in at the last minute and just ruin everything, and then there we're going to be. I can't believe this is my theory. It's going to be bad. It's going to be bad. It's going to be a bad movie. Man, you're just hating all over the place today. No, I like Damon Lindelof fine. I just think Prometheus was a bad movie. So now I get to make fun of him for the rest of my life. Those are the rules. If you make a bad movie that I go see at midnight the night it comes out and it sucks, I get to make fun of you for the rest of my life. If we're talking about creative works that get published at midnight and you have to go take your time to see it, I have a few reviews from Windows phones that I've seen you do that I really want to hate you forever for. I mean, that's fine. I'm going to make fun of me for the rest of my life as long as I get to do it to Damon Lindelof. David, does it feel good in the hand? That's what I want to know. It feels terrible in the hand. Just everybody should know that. Is there anything else we want to bring up today? We should talk about Netflix. Let's talk about Netflix. Netflix is doing some crazy things. It is now bigger than HBO. Which is massive. What is it, 30 million subscribers they have now? I think so. Something like that. I think that's the number. 31.1 million US subscribers. That's a crazy number. And like, nobody talks about Netflix, which is weird. Their stock did this. Nobody talks about Netflix. But as like a huge, crazy, amazing company, they get a lot of credit for the shows they make and stuff. But as a company, nobody really talks about them that much. But their stock is up. It's a record. You know what I love about this graph? They did a billion dollars in revenue last quarter. So if you look at the stock graph, that little line chart, I love this. You know why? Because you can see exactly when Quickster was announced. Yeah, there should just be a line that's like, oh, DVDs. We don't know what we're doing here. Let's just give it a new name. Where did Quickster come from? But all the same, they moved past that. Sorandos, one of the chief executive officers, not the CEO, he's one of the chief officers. Obviously Reed Hastings, they pulled this off. Good for them. Reed Hastings, new CEO of Microsoft. You know what's crazy to me about Netflix is that- Do they still have DVD subscribers? Yeah. Like 12 of them, I think. My parents are like the only ones left. What's amazing to me is that, okay, so true or false, in 20 years, people only pay for the content that they want. A la carte, in other words. False. 20 years? Is that too soon? Never. It's never going to happen. Never? As long as we have cable companies? No. That's not- Well, I think Netflix gets a lot of credit for- Disrupting the cable industry, but they're doing the same thing. That's what startups try and do is decouple these things that you don't need from the things that you want and try and streamline this experience. Does that make sense that this stuff is bundled? In some regards, it did a while ago. It's a lot harder to, let's say, start a new network if nobody has access to it for free. If you look at AMC, cable subscribers, when they watched AMC, they helped AMC become a powerhouse because they watched it. It's not like you can just free trial something online, except you can in some cases. Here's the thing. We had talked to, actually, Neil, I did an interview with someone. We'll have to later this month, or next month, rather. The thing is, the cable companies, when they started out in trying to build these networks, they needed channels. They came to channels saying, we need your help. At some point, the tables turned. You have someone like a USA and it's like, look, I'll put my channel on here, but you've got to get Bravo on also. I know no one's watching it, but you just got to trust me. The bundle came to exist in the networks and channels. They have the power to do that. We're not going to get rid of that too, because they need the extra money to get ESPN to an ESPN college, an ESPN cricket. Which almost definitely exists. It will exist one day. The thing is, I think, and people continue to do studies and look into this. Ultimately, if you wanted, let's say, if you just wanted ESPN, if you're like, screw the rest of this, I just want ESPN, that would probably be cheaper than your current cable bill. If you're like, I want ESPN and HBO and the broadcast networks and USA Today and Jersey Shore reruns on MTV, that's already probably more expensive than your cable bill. You're saying it's advantageous to wholesale it as the consumer. You're saying in a way it's better for the consumer the way that it is right now. It depends. That's something I hadn't considered. As long as I have what I hope. If you go to the History Channel, I'm going to give a discount on ESPN. Right. That's the thing. Ultimately, I think what might happen is you might start to see the really popular networks like ESPN and HBO start to go a la carte, and we're seeing bits and pieces of that from some of these companies. The History Channel is never going to go a la carte because people wouldn't pay for the History Channel, but people want to watch the History Channel. I say that, but- Not enough people would pay- We do have Game of Thrones with Vikings now. But not enough people would pay- That's awesome. It's fair. But not enough people would pay for it to keep it around in the way that it exists now. I think it's ultimately better, and I think people watch more TV and aimlessly channel surf a lot more than they realize. I certainly do. I think if I were to guess what I watch, it would probably be six channels. Then if I were to map what I actually watch, it would probably be 60 channels. Yeah. No, so I- By the time you get to there, it's just not... It's never going to make sense to pay a la carte for that. I am so scared to get cable, by the way. That reminds me. I am so scared to get it. I love having cable. I can't. My life will be over. I've had cable for a month now, and it is the best. It's so great. I go on vacation. Hotels have cable. I forget to go to the beach. I am watching House Hunters. Why am I watching House? It is so addicting. Who pays this much? When you're a 17-year-old college student in France on a freaking summer abroad, and you're like, I want to buy a place. Where do you get that money? That's how it's addicting. Fair. No, I think the real future of cable is what Netflix is doing, essentially, which is to say you pay us one price, and you get it everywhere. It's eventually going to be your cable won't just be on your TV at home, or you have to super clunky stream it through a Slingbox to an Apple TV to a Roku to something else. You'll just pay for it and get it everywhere. When ESPN is doing that, having one, I pay $110 for cable a month, which is ridiculous. But it's also like, now I can watch ESPN anywhere I am from any browser at any time. All I have to do is log in, and it's the best. That's what Netflix is. That's how Netflix got where it is, is by saying, we pay us $8 a month, and you can watch everything everywhere all the time. That's the easiest argument to make ever. Other people are going to see that coming. As Netflix gets bigger and starts doing more original programming, companies like ESPN are going to start to attack from the opposite point, where they're like, we have the programming, now we're going to give you the it's everywhere. I think what HBO is, HBO makes more money staying bundled and not pissing off the knower, because I get that. I think every old channel is going to, or premium, they get money from them. You pay extra, but you have to pay for cable as well. You can't just say, I want over the air. That's the reason they're not going to go so low. Right, because they get money out of it. It's a better economic deal. If you're a new channel, though, or a new network, you do think of this digital first tragedy. You think of this a la carte. There are channels I didn't realize existed, but Hulu tells me they exist. They have videos there, and they're advertising there. I think these channels, the future, they're not going to be bundled, because they don't have to worry about that business model. You've never had to be able to lean on that. But you pay for Hulu to get it anywhere other than in your browser with only a few things. You pay for Hulu. Those channels are bundled to that. It's lose-lose. Fair enough. All right, well, so we should go. Let's wrap this. And leave these poor people alone. We're very sorry. We love you all. They're watching our video. We're very sorry. Do not. Do not. But so we have some housekeeping. So first of all, this is Polygon's first birthday, which is ridiculous. I feel like Polygon has been around my entire life. I don't remember the world before Polygon. You mean like those six months you were hired before Polygon launched? Yeah, it was like a day and a half. Yeah, okay. Pretty much. And next week is a big week for us. Yes. And you know more about this than I do. Well, there's not much more to say. Next week is Vergecast 100, which is a huge deal. It's our 100th Vergecast, just to be super clear. 100th Vergecast. We didn't skip anything. We're doing 100 Vergecasts all in one day. It is a power hour of Vergecasts. So much hair checking, so many microphones, just dropping it. No, it's our 100th episode. That's a cool deal. It also happens to be the same day as our anniversary, our two-year anniversary. So we're a little excited. We're going to do a couple of special things. You'll see. We'll be back. Neal, I'll be back. They were out just wanting a day off. Naked on a beach somewhere. Naked on a beach. Ever since Josh brought that up, I just assumed that Josh is naked on a beach somewhere. So now Josh is actually out killing a family, like he always promised. Well, sure. So we'll have the carcasses next week. It's a special deal. It's a special Vergecast. That's fair. He finally makes good. He's going to bring the family here and prove to everyone what's going on. No, absolutely. Anyway. So that is the Vergecast. That's the Vergecast. Unfortunately. If you can email us and tell us how terrible everything is about us. And we will. Especially Chris Ziegler. We will. If you hate Chris Ziegler, email us at VergecastatheVerge.com. I'm piercedavid on Twitter, a fact for which I am deeply, deeply sorry. Ellis is at hamburger, the best thing that has ever happened to Twitter. And Ross is ono roscoe for reasons beyond all of us. No E. And I'm not sorry at all. No E. Is there somebody with an E? Can you get the E and just be like, hey, just kidding on the other ono roscoe. Someone got it for me and then just redirects. That's so nice. Whoever that is, just tell me because I just want to thank you. Good people. I'm not going to be on the internet. And that's it. And we wish the very, very best to you and your family unless Josh is out killing you right now, in which case we're very sorry. Paul.