 Oh, hello! Bones and a Circuit Breaker Live! The best show about dental hygiene on YouTube. I'm assuming there are no other shows about dental hygiene on YouTube. I hope there are several. Anyway, this is The Verge's Gadget Show. I'm Neal Apatow, the editor-in-chief of The Verge. Paul Miller's here. Hey, Paul. Hello. We're just... We have a loaded show today, so we're just gonna get right into it. Ashley Carman is here, and you have brought us toothbrushes. Yep. I brought you a bunch of connected toothbrushes. I feel like... By the way, the chat's going. Ask us questions in the chat about the segments, and we'll answer the questions. If you ask unrelated things, I will look at them. You might see a smile cross my face, and then I won't answer them. So ask about the segments. At the end, we'll do open questions. But, Ashley, I feel like your beat is... Basically, we put a chip in it, and now what happens? Yeah. And proprietary things. And proprietary things. Lots of proprietary gadgets. So if you put a chip in a toothbrush, what happens? Toothbrushing sucks more than it already did. Oh, no. But I'm very excited about these toothbrushes. Okay. So this is the Play Brush. I actually saw it said CES. Okay. And instead of a full-blown smart toothbrush, which are these over here, this is literally just a Bluetooth dongle, if I can use it. It's a dongle for your toothbrush? Yeah. So you can put any regular plain toothbrush inside this dongle. Okay. And then it has a companion app. Of course. So I can show you guys the companion app. Does it track your brushing data and send it to Google? I don't know if it sends it to Google, but yeah, your parents will know. The ultimate big brother. So, Paul. Yes? One of the big things about this toothbrush is it's for kids, and kids hate to brush their teeth, and you want them to brush for two minutes, so you have to play games to get them to do this. When did this two-minute thing come into play? Do you not brush your teeth for two minutes? I feel like if you... Two minutes is a really long time. Just touch all the surfaces and then you're out. That's not how it works. Okay. Play the game. I guess that's what you're about to learn, so let's put this... Okay, so I'm going to put this here. So people can see what we're doing here. Oh, boy. All right. So this is my avatar. Yep, this is you, Paul, wearing a nice Knight's outfit. Okay. And how do I know what to do now? Okay, so I'm going to press play. Somebody says, Gabe says, how do you dongle a toothbrush? You literally just stick it on the end of the toothbrush. Yeah, there's just a literal Bluetooth chip that you just slip right on. You can pry an accelerometer and a Bluetooth chip. Yeah, exactly. But I have to do all the work. Two minutes. Okay, so I'm going to press play. I'm not going to brush for two minutes, that's for sure. Okay, it's saying brush twice a day. Cool. All right, three. Let me see if I can get this volume up, two. Okay. There's some great music. So you'll see there's some, like, enemies coming up. You got to figure out... How do I kill the enemies? You're going the wrong way. So yeah, see, you have to have the toothbrush in a very specific direction. Okay. Now they come from over there. You got this, Paul. You got to figure this out. I'm not... I'm just brushing the side of my tongue. That's what they wanted me to do. Oh, no. Yeah, so this is the thing about this, the play brush, is it's not too... I don't think it's super accurate. I don't think it gives you the best clean. But if the whole point is just you want your kids to have a toothbrush in their mouth for two minutes, they will. I'm killing it when I fake it. Yeah. I just brush the side of my tongue. I feel like kids love to fake it. When you were a kid, did you fake washing your hands? It's all about tongue brushing. Yeah, kids just don't want to do anything responsible. You never fake washing your hands? No. It's like a thing. Your mom's got to check your hands. My niece and nephew just turn on the water and then turn it off. And clever. They didn't do the full minute and a half hand wash. Okay, how did you unscore? You got seven of nine rewards. You did a terrible job, though. So it caught you. And so then... Oh, no. What I really love about this is they've gamified the entire experience. These are just random kids from around the world. Yeah. I'm coming for you, Tim. You're first in your own game. Michael Singletary says, I can't wait for the first smart toothbrush company data breach. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so let's just show people the dongle here because people are asking about it. So just that's all it is. It's just an accelerometer. This part is rubber. And it's not also just glue. Yeah, you can take this out. And then there's a little micro USB here. Oh, my God. Is that how you charge it? Yeah. I can get it. There it goes. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Let's all just have a moment and accept what this product is. That you have to plug it into micro USB. Somebody's about to be a parent. I don't want this near my child. Well, and then they want to sell you on a subscription service. So you get one game for free. But if you want all the games, you can pay $2.99 a month. And then they sell another service where they'll mail you toothbrushes. I feel like your beat is also the darker side of all business models. Here's the great thing. This is the cheap alternative here. Yeah. This is only $30. And there is one free game. There is a free game. Yeah. OK. All right. What do we got next? We'll work our way up. So this is the Colgate E1 right here. You've maybe heard about this because it's Apple's first health type product that they're selling in there for your. So this connects to Health Kit on an iPhone or whatever? Yeah. The health app? Yeah. Well, I don't know actually if it does. I don't think it does. But it's just there. It's only on iOS. Like you can't buy this for Android. Oh, really? Yeah. And it sells in like Apple stores. Yeah. So this is an iOS-only toothbrush. I want everyone to be extraordinarily clear about what it is. It's made by the brand Colbrie that makes an Android version. But Colgate has branded the iOS version. And it's in Apple stores. I'm going to accept this. It only runs Apple Music. Yeah. Right. OK. So you've got another app. So this is another app. And this one's a little bit more like they accept that parents and kids will play this. So you have Coach Plus. Like Coach, this will guide adults through their brushing. And then you have the kids games, which obviously you're going to play. Yeah, hit me. OK. We're going to do this game, Go Pirate. All right. Go, go. All right. I feel like when I want to start brushing my teeth, I like using an iPad app. Yeah. Well, that's the whole thing. I've been using it. It says put toothbrush. So we did that. I got the toothbrush in my mouth. And then you turn on. And then you're going to do the same. Yeah, down here, this visualizes it for you. OK. I'm winning. Yeah, you're doing great. You're getting the gold coins. This game is not very hard. OK. OK. Hey! There you go. All right. Great. I don't really use this kind of visualization. This toothbrush is very ticklish. You've got this, Neelay. You've got this. All right. All right. All right. I'm winning. I'm generating a lot of spit. And we didn't plan for that. All right. There you go. There you go. And then you'll basically go for two minutes. You'll keep collecting these coins. Well, we'll just go ahead and assume that I won. Yeah, it wants you to keep going. But you're going to rebel. So this is just like a really basic collection. Yeah, so this is just, again, like an accelerometer inside. And then it's just one type of brush head, which you'll see it with our next toothbrush. It's kind of like a bummer. Yeah. Because it's not really special. How much is this situation? That one's $100. Is there like an epidemic in America of people not brushing their teeth? What are we trying to help here? Try to gamify it, Nilay. Yeah. Yeah. And I think for kids it makes sense. I don't know if adults really need this much particular help. Maybe they do. OK. I grew up in the 80s, and I was taught to brush my teeth. Did you? Yes. Hmm. John says at least there is an argument for a dedicated bathroom tablet now. Oh, yeah. That's what you want. You build that into the, oh, finally a reason to use the smart mirror. Yeah. You load the tooth brushing app into the smart mirror. And it tells you how good your job you're doing. Yeah. Well, I'm an optimist in this. Positive reinforcement. All right. But what if you actually are, I would say, a fancy person? A fancy person. Well, then I have a $220 smart toothbrush for you. This is the Sonicare Diamond Clean Smart. Diamond. These have different brush heads. These all do different things. This is the tongue scraper. Oh, my. And every brush head, the smart ones, because you can use regular ones, have a little RFID chip inside. So when you put it on top of the handle, it recognizes immediately. So this brush head is for whitening. So you can see it immediately lights up like it's in the white program. If I did the tongue scraper, it would be a shorter program. Things like that. Now there's an app on this right here. I'll get the phone. Yeah, there's always an app. I've been actually testing this for a month or two now. And I never sync it with my phone. Really? Because I don't bring my phone in the bathroom in the morning. I'm just like, I just need to go brush my teeth. It's like a thing. It's a means to an end. Yeah. Can you show me those lights again? So this is for adults. There's no game. Yeah, there's no game. This is truly like just you need to brush. This is the area you need to brush. If you want to set goals for your plaque or... It doesn't measure any of that, though. It keeps track of it for you. What were those other modes that you had? Oh, there they are. So if I just take this off, let's do the tongue scraper, which I've already seen Ashley put on her tongue some very totally weird things. So it lit up there. It goes to tongue mode. Yeah. And when does that change exactly? There we go. Well, so now if I use the tongue mode, which I can... Hi. Hi. Oh, and it's moving as you move your head. Great. These are the horrible disgusting things that were on your tongue. Yeah, they blasted off your... Can I just be very honest with you? Tongue scrapers are like very Indian, like Indian families have them. They're just like little loops of metal that cost like five cents. A lot of Instagram influencers have really been pushing the tongue scrapers. I bought a regular... Like I had one of those. A manual toothbrush on Amazon, and it just has like rubber scrappy parts on the back of the... Yeah. But what you want is an app with an animation and a timeline. So this is 220 bucks? Yeah. Are any of these people making medical claims beyond we will incentivize you to brush your teeth? I don't think so. They say you can work with your dentist. Like if your dentist says to you, hey, you really need to focus on your lower teeth. And now it's harder to lie to your dentist. Right. They could work with you. It's better. I want to see it. So now you're sending data to your dentist. I feel bad for the dentist. I have to like sit down and... Also, each of these smart brush cuts cost more than $10, and they want you to replace them with a new one. So this is the reason that we care, right? Let's be honest. Right. So this is its wireless charging cup. Pop it in there. That's pretty cool. It's charging. And I was like, okay. What is it about this wireless charging cup? Eli, can we... Oh, because I have an iPhone X? Yes. So it's Qi? Look at that. Qi. So you can also charge your phone. That's a lot. I don't know if we've solved any problems here today, but I do like this. I like the idea that you're like, you know what I want is a glass of water. Let me just throw my phone down on this electricity. Just move on. Yeah. Your charging cup. This is great. I think I feel good about this. So you've been using this one in particular. Yeah. Have you gotten into it? So I've actually been using electric toothbrushes since forever. My parents are very big on the electric toothbrush. That's supposed to be better for you then. Yeah. It's definitely better than a manual toothbrush. But I just don't want to sink an app. I'm not going to look at my screen. I don't bring my phone in the bathroom with me right when I wake up in the morning. I just go straight to the bathroom and then brush my teeth. So it's like I'm not going to look at my phone. Well, just tell your phone about how you did later on. Yeah. You can go back and revisit like, oh, you missed this spot. You can tell. It's in your mouth. If you don't know where you missed when you brushed your teeth, you need to just pay more attention to yourself. How will you pirates get all the coins, Mila? All right. Zayn says, I like it. So you got one customer out there. We actually have a super packed show for all of you. We've got to move right on. Heim Gartenberg is going to join us. We're going to take apart an iPod and replace its hard drive with some SD cards. Donnie is going to be here. We're going to play with some Bluetooth styluses and see where that leads us. But next, Ashley is going to run over there to the Ask Circuit Breaker corner. And Ashley and Jake are going to answer the questions that people have been sending in all this week. That's right. We have a new segment, Ask Circuit Breaker. The news is dead. The news is done. We've moved on. Literally nothing happened this past week. So this is why we had to fill this in. But we got some questions from people over the past week. We had some good questions. Yeah. Twitter came through. We may or may not answer them. We've only promised that we will ask the big questions. But our first question is about smart homes and how do you get started with them, which I think is a good question, something that I think about probably a little bit too often for just my own purposes, even though I already have some. I just want to imagine you on the couch. I'm just like, what advice should I give past me? But I actually think the answer for this is getting like easier and easier. So first things first is an Echo Dot. You can get one for like $30 on sale basically all the time. And that will give you a sense of whether you like, I mean, voice control is basically the way to control smart home products right now. And that'll give you a sense of if you're comfortable with that, if that feels natural to you, and you know, you'll get a sense of. If it's going to become a thing that you're going to make your brand. I thought I'd be very uncomfortable with it. I'm still a little uncomfortable with it, but it grows more and more natural. And then I would say the second thing to get is some smart lights. My favorite are the Philips Hue. They are really easy to set up. They're very reliable, which is the most important thing here. And they're very expandable. So if you decide that you do really like smart lights, there are a ton of different options you can get. I would not necessarily start out with the multicolor ones that are like really expensive. I don't, you said you like them. I think they're cool. I don't need like a purple living room. You have to know what you're doing with color and wall lights. Yeah, I'm a multicolor lighting expert. I can manage the like blue to orange ones that are like, choose your tone, relax. I mean, I have a light at home that I've been testing the Soul from GE, and it has an Alexa actually built into the light. And I love the smart light aspect of it, but only because I use actually its app. So when I'm on the way into my apartment, I'm connected to my Wi-Fi. So I'm like walking up the stairs and I turn on the light from the hallway, which feels like a hack to me. I'm like, I did it. It does feel super cool. I made it. Yeah, I don't use the Alexa. I actually use the Alexa the whole time. That's great. I mean, I do feel a little creeped out about the always on stuff, but it's just so convenient. I never open the app. Yeah. So if you're going to get started with a smart home, it's like, get a smart speaker. Just try it out. See if you like it. You're not putting that much money up front for the Dot. For sure. And then there are some like obvious next steps if this is all going well for you. Nest's thermostat and smoke detector are really cool. Ring has doorbells. So there are some really natural places to expand to if you decide that you kind of like what's going on there. Yeah. So our second question of the week as circuit breaker is, do we think that phones are getting more delicate over time? I really love this question. Yeah, me too. Because it's something I hadn't really thought about exactly in this way. It's interesting because you have the media phone that came to mind was iPhone 10. It's like, oh, my God, you don't want to drop that thing. The glass on the back is more expensive to replace than the actual screen. And that that's the same with AppleCare, too. So it's like, OK, that's a really delicate phone that you just cherish it, hold it close to your heart at all times. Maybe even put a case on it. Same with the other iPhone 8. But then at the same time, you have a bunch of phones now that are waterproof. And that's a really like great utility use where whereas before, if you dropped in the shower, the toilet, the pool, whatever, your phone was dead. It was gone. Now it's like you can take photos like me. Waterproof, I think, is like a great argument for phones being more sturdy because this is like a serious quality of life improvement. People were like constantly worried. I like one of my earlier phones nearly died because I was I got rained on. And that's just not a thing I had to worry about. I was like taking pictures outside the other day with my Pixel because it was raining and it was beautiful. Did not have to worry about it getting dripped on. That's great. Yeah. And I think, too, like our phones now are kind of our main accessories. Right. And so back in the day when we had our big bulky plastic or whatever, our massive phones that we could drop from rooftops and they would survive. It's like those didn't look good. Yeah. Even if you could get that now as a smartphone, you probably wouldn't want it because you're like, I'd look. No, it just doesn't look good. Our design sensibilities have changed. Also, now phones are just infinitely more expensive. So whether or not they've gotten more delicate, you definitely want to just take care of it more. It's scarier to break. Yeah, exactly. Like where's where you're like, eh, right. The cracks. OK. Now it's like, no, that cost me a thousand dollars. So the answer is like, yes and no. Yeah, it's a little bit of both. Yeah. You know, they're always just saying there's new Gorilla Glass. It's like, OK, sure. Every year. I'm so excited for the new Gorilla Glass. Yeah. So that's Ask Circa Breaker. Be sure to send us your questions. Write them in the comments. As you might notice, YouTube people, these were all tweets this week. Do not be upstaged by our Twitter followers. This is on you. Any good questions in the comments, YouTube, on this video, if you're watching it right now. We'll see you next week. And back to them. All right. Hi. Thank you, Ashley and Jake, by the way. We had a question in the chat, by the way, that said, do you need an upgraded router for smart home stuff? I will say that until I got a mesh network system, I have an Eero, but I think anything would work. All of my smart home experiments failed. They all have tiny little Wi-Fi antennas hidden in tiny little spots. You need the coverage. They can't pull the weeks. Anyway, hi. I'm here. I'm here. You have brought us a number of iPods in a state of disarray. And I just want to explain what is happening here. We're going to take out the hard drive of one of these iPods in real time. And you're going to replace it with this custom board that has micro SD cards in it. It's basically an SSD upgrade. Yeah. So here's the story. Here's why this is happening this week. I am like this story, by the way, is called My Friend, Ryan Johnson. By Neelay Patel. It is. That's why. Thank you for the title. No one ever gets the title right. No. I love looking at eBay for weird old gadgets. I was looking at iPods, and I noticed there's this huge booming market for upgraded iPods. And I tweeted, I might buy one of these because I am a sucker and I will buy anything. And I love the new Star Wars book. And Ryan Johnson, who directed The Force Awakens, tweeted back at us. Last Jedi. Last Jedi. I'm sorry. Ryan Johnson, who directed Last Jedi, tweeted back at us, he has one. And he's showing us a picture of it. And he loves it. It's like a cloud, beautiful cloudless lane. Sorry, I can't believe I got to move around. But he and I have been just chatting about how much we like not having streaming services in our lives and like having music. So we figured we got to just show people how this works. So Hyen, show us how this works. All right. So we're going to start out with our iPod, which we had you select, which is a fifth generation 30 gigabyte iPod. This is the iPod video. This was the last generation before Apple switched to the generally, in my opinion, inferior aluminum fronted, you know, boring iPod classic. This is still your, you know, classic platonic white iPod right click wheel. Let's look over here. So this is the first one with the mechanical quick wheel. This is where they've landed. This is a classic. Yeah. What you want is a fifth gen. Yeah. Because the fifth gen had the best DAC, it had a Wolfson. People like the fifth gen the best of all these, and apparently it's very hard to open this one. Yeah. The fifth generation also has a big advantage, which is this is really hard to take apart. The classic is just bolted on here. So we're actually just going to go get right in. We're going to take our trusty iFixit makes a repair kit, which is this beautifully arrayed thing for tools for cracking open your devices. So we're going to take this bespoke plastic iPod opening tool, and we're going to just crack open the case here. You've already got it started. Yeah, I've started this because this is a bit of an annoying process. It will sound like you're breaking your iPod. Don't break your iPod is my best advice. And be patient. This is why we do this live, because this is now terrifying. I mean, I'm not even doing it, I'm afraid for you. So, Neelai, when you're hanging out with your best friend Ryan Johnson, what else do you guys like to talk about? Today we shared each other photos of our record players. Oh. That's where we are. That's where our friendship is. It's a very early stages. It's mostly complaining about streaming services. Would you say this has something to do with being like sort of like a Luddite or like a hipster? What does this come from? I think for me, in particular with music, it's I hate being locked in. I've always hated DRM. I love the iTunes store and the app that came out sold. Remember Steve Jobs wrote an entire letter that's like against DRM. And he convinced the music industry to drop DRM. There was just a sense that you would buy files, you would own them. Buy files. They were standards, right? Like they were some sort of Amazon sells MP3s, iTunes store sold AACs. And you had them and you could just play them on any device you wanted. Right. And Apple's big advantage was that this was a better music player than all the other music players. And that was what they had to compete on. It's what they eventually won on. But it wasn't, hey, you're an Apple music subscriber, now you can just buy this one thing. And then you can just play Spotify. There was news today Spotify is working on its own hardware. Right. Like all that's just lock in. And like that to me, I'm over it. I just want to point out, I don't want to cheat. I've got it by the way. Yeah, we've got it. We distracted the audience with our radical open ideology. So I'm actually open to this thing. The corner over here is the power supply. All right. We got it. This corner right here. We're about to yank the power supply from the base. Very carefully. Amazing. I mean, I'm so nervous right now. Terrifying. Get in here with our tweezers. My God. So what are you what are you just connecting here? So now we're disconnecting power, which is this tiny little gray thing over here. And the goal is to get it out without ripping out the entire board. If we mangle this cable, it's not a huge deal, though, because while we're in here, we're also going to remove the battery. I'm just like holding my breath. I know. I'm pretty excited. Got it. All right. Nailed it. OK. I'm Gartenberg, everybody. Could you possibly believe that this is actually more convenient, though, than just putting songs onto your iPhone with like Apple Music or smartphone? I don't think it's about convenience. I think convenience is... Like principle? It's about... It's also about focus. When I listen to streaming music services, they just like zone out into playlists. All right. So here we go. Now we have the we are inside an iPod right over here. This big chunk is our hard drive. Do you think Johnny Ive picked the shade of blue? Honestly, very, very probably. He and Steve Jobs are like, I don't know. Can we see 10 more shades? So we're going to peel off these rubber bumpers. Now, the next thing we got to do, this cord over here is super important. This is the headphones. So if we break that, this basically becomes useless. We're going to undo this little latch right here and just slide that right out. Yeah. All right. Look at that. So this is your back of an iPod case. Again, we're going with the 30 gigabyte for a few reasons. One is... Can we just take one minute? This is... I mean, this is a lot. I mean, this hard drive is huge. We have one here. This is like all of the weight of a hard drive. If you think about the size of the components in your phone now, it's like all battery in this board powers everything that a phone does. A board of this size, basically. Even smaller in some cases. It's like kind of remarkable. But remember, this, the iPods played breakout. That's true. They had the one... Oh, this is the video iPod. Yeah, this is the video iPod. You can put videos on here. This is pretty quality stuff. Okay. So you just took out the battery. So I just took out the battery, which is literally just glued to this board. We went to iFixit and bought a reputable new battery. How much is the replacement battery? So the replacement battery is about 15 bucks. Okay. Which is, yeah, not that bad. So I'm just going to get this lined up. You're basically gluing it in there? It comes pre-made with good old-fashioned 3M adhesive. Okay. So I'm just going to peel that sticker and slot it into place. Press down. Yeah. All right. Nice. So now battery replacement is done. Now we get to the fun part. So this is, again, this is a 30-gigabyte hard drive. There's two reasons we're using the 30-gig. One is that it's thinner and lighter. And two is here. We have over here, this is an 80-gig video iPod. So you can see it's like much chunkier. Yeah. I always bought those and I never bought these. Yeah. And they showed me this one, and it's kind of way smaller. So we're going to get rid of this hard drive. I was always the person who bought the biggest iPod they could. Did you fill it? It came close. I definitely have never had 30 gigabytes of music on any one device. It was as I started ripping my CDs into higher and higher quality. Okay. Hard drive out. Hard drive is out. So now what happens? Now we're going to take this. This is the iFlash quads. This is the company that actually makes these bespoke boards. As you can see, perfectly designed to fit right here into this iPod. But they basically sell a whole bunch of these. They have ones for SATA hard drives. They have ones for full size SD cards. We went with micro SD cards because micro SD cards are super cheap. So we're just going to slot these in. These are two 128 gigabyte Samsung micro SD cards. And now this is a 256 gigabyte hard drive. This was 30. That's crazy. How far we've come. How far we've come. In a previous life, Paul and I would write posts all the time like, a new bigger micro SD card is coming out. Dude, it's a little known secret of Circuit Breaker. If you didn't know this, by the way, people who are watching on YouTube, Circuit Breaker is also a website that you can go to. If you go to theverge.com.circuitbreaker, we write about technology too. And storage posts are big hits. Well, every time. There's like a hot new SSD right now, like a 30 terabyte 2.5 inch SSD. Yeah. Top of the site. It's a huge hit for us. Everything you're doing is filling me with dread. Just like absolute insane. Now we're just reattaching. As long as you apply enough pressure. Is this like a position that you need to know that you're in? No. I'm just trying to get the pressure on the cable without ripping out the cable. So this is our in. Okay. So one of the reasons this hack works so well is if you look under this board, we're not touching any of the core circuitry here. That's how the screen connects. But this is still the same memory, same firmware. All we're doing is we're taking this, which is a hard drive, and we're just kind of swapping in this. So like replacing a SATA drive. Yeah, exactly like replacing a SATA drive. So at the end of the day, when we plug this into iTunes at the end, and yes, you have to use iTunes. It's the one downside. It's your one sacrifice. Back to iTunes. It's just showing up as, oh, this iPod has a lot of storage, but it shows up the same. It actually gets us into one of the weird quirks here, which is you can put as much storage as you want. You have a terabyte worth of micro SD cards. Throw them in here. There's actually a track limit, though, of how many songs you can put on. The quantity. Yeah, which is basically defined by the iTunes database size, like the metadata. So this is the 30 gigabyte one. So this can take about 20,000 songs, give or take a few for metadata, regardless of how much storage. If you put like a terabyte of storage on here, you're still stuck with 20,000 as the hard limit. One of the weird quirks of this process, actually, the firmware on this has a hard cap of 120 gigabytes of storage on almost all classics with exception of a couple, which is another reason that the fifth gen is good for this project, is that this does not have that limit. So you can put, you know, as many songs, not as many songs, you can put 20,000. An interesting thing is the 80 gigabyte version, because it was designed to hold more stuff, has more memory. So this actually can fit like 50,000 if you have the storage for it. This is all bonkers. I think 20,000 songs on my custom SD iPod, that's all you need at the party, man. Yeah. I mean, so for 250 gigabytes, we ran the numbers, you can get like 14 megabytes a song to hit the 20,000 limit, which is already in like Apple lossless territory. So you should be fine. Do iPods play Apple lossless? iPods do play Apple lossless. They do not play flag. They don't play flag. So now we're going to reconnect our headphone cable over here. Again, very carefully. Alexander says, I like my Windows phone. Just out there. Me too, Alexander. There's one stand in every chat. So yeah, that's already reconnected, hopefully. Now we're just going to take this bumper from the hard drive. I'm just going to wedge that in there so that this doesn't bang around. Since generally mysterious rattling noise is coming from your iPods is bad. Yep. You were saying the foam on these originals was because you're actually trying to reduce the motion because this is a spinning platter. Yeah. So you'll notice ours doesn't really need the foam because there's no spinning platter. This is all flash. Didn't the iPod have like a cache for like skip protection? Like it would spin down the hard drive. It was moving. It had 32 megs of skip protection. They put it at a time when people understood CD players. So your CD players have like three minutes of skip protection. That was a real arms race. That was a moment. So then Apple, when they put out the iPod, they were like, that's five minutes of skip protection. What are you going to do, CD players? You remove spinning discs. All right. So now we're pretty much done. This is going way, way better than I expected. All you have left to do is this is our battery cable. We just need to slot it into this terminal over here and then literally just snap everything back together. All right. Wait, what about that pad? Oh, right. Good call. We don't need the foam. The foam over here was again to protect that from bouncing around. For skip protection, we don't need this. But there is this pad that we're going to stick on, which is literally just going to space against the back of the iPod so that it doesn't like crash around. We've removed a lot of volume from this thing. All right. So now we're just going to flip this over. It is funny. I've held the ones with the hard drive and I held one with these SD cards in it. So much lighter. It's surprisingly lighter. And also, might I point out that iPods fit in your pocket better than a phone does. Yeah, much smaller. The length of the phone is the real problem. This is terrifying. Everything you're doing is terrifying. I mean, I really want to do it because it's the sort of thing I like doing. But I think what I'm discovering now is I like watching you do it because what I really like is the terror. Wait, what's the overall cost of this hobby if you just like ripping open iPods and putting SD cards in them? That's it. Nailed it. All right. So now you just plug this thing. Look at that. Wow. Snap all the clips back in. Wow. So now you just plug this thing back in iTunes. So now it's going to turn on. It is going to tell us that it is going to have a freak out and that you need to restore it with iTunes because we just basically took out the entire hard drive. That's wild. iTunes will fully recognize it. So to cost before we get into it, before we pull out a computer and start formatting this. So cost. You need to have an iPod which generally can run you for the 5th Gen, for the 5th Gen 30, somewhere between 30 and 60 bucks on eBay. You need the board, which was roughly $45 on also on eBay. The battery is 15 from iFixit if you want to replace the battery, which while you're in there might as well. Get a fresh battery. This also will get better battery life than the hard drive because these pull less power. So you'll get roughly 20 percent more battery life. But all in, what's the number? So all in, what's the number? Probably around 200, 150, 200, all things. SD cards. What I think is remarkable, and you have one that works. TV Magic. We don't have one that's format. We don't have time to format this, but this is a finished one. This is Circuit Pod 1. You can see over here we're not lying. This has 240 gigabytes of memory. This one just broke. You know what's remarkable about this? So you think about Apple, they're the closed company, everything's sealed. This was the product that started it all. Literally everything in consumer technology is descended, in this moment, is descended from the iPod and Apple strategy iPod. But this is just a little Linux computer. It's running that Portal Player OS. You can just crack it open and put in standardized storage. You plug it in the computer. The computer isn't doing some weird hardware DRM thing. It's almost like it's your own iPod. Yeah. This is like, people are asking in the chat why I'm so into this, and this is why. Because it feels like something that belongs to us. This is also just a nice product. It's like one of the best products ever. Paul, what are you doing? To celebrate Haim's amazing achievement, I pulled – this is a little product I like to call the HomePod. This is the Apple Hi-Fi. Check this out. Check this out. It's got audio in. Who would have thunk? Who thought it was possible? But it's got a little dock right up here. You plugged it in. It didn't boot. That's a 30-pin. No, it's a speaker. You just plug it in. You just plug it in. It works. It's not finding its spatial place in the room. I mean, I'm just going to play something that's going to get us completely lost. Its spatial place in the room is to rock the party. So while you're looking for something, the other advantage to the solid state drives is we had our producer, Creighton, who is a huge iPod fan. We had him take this for a test drive over the last day, and he says that it is much snappier than the hard drive, loads things faster. Well, in honor of the HomePod reviews report, I'll just slap that in there. Sounds beautiful. All right. We made it work. May it work? All right. Now we have to stop it because we'll get to it. Thank you very much, Haim. Pleasure. So impressed. I'm super into this. I'm very happy that this has inspired so many people on our staff to buy iPods because they're starting to flow into the office now at a weird rate. Paul. Yeah. You have started making videos, and no one seems able to stop you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last week, I premiered a new series that's called Explain Yourself, and I can say, without a doubt, glowing reception across the Internet. This week, I did a different video that has nothing to do with Explain Yourself, but it's also great, and I think you're going to really like what happened. Oh, no. Hello. I'm Paul Miller, and today we're going to do the one-thumb test. Everybody knows you're supposed to be able to open a laptop using only one thumb and no knuckles. So I have bandaged my hands to make sure that I don't cheat. This is my personal laptop. This is how it's supposed to work. Put the thumb right there. We had a little bit of sliding, but we're okay. The chewy. We're going to get two attempts per. That's a fail. Okay, that was one. Nope. That one really doesn't count because it's for old people. This is a Microsoft Surface laptop. This is a pretty important one. Hey, good job, Microsoft. Way to go. How about Lenovo? Nope. Try number two. Nope. Got a Pixel. Hey, hey, hey. There's a kickstand on this one. That's not going to, that's never going to fly. But we got a Spectre 360. Nope. Nope. The original Chromebook. A little bit of wobble, but it's safe. Sliding. Well, it's cheating if it's got the backstop. Let's put that at half, half mast. This one's interesting. This guy actually has a latch. That works. This is not going to work at all. I don't know if I can get it, I don't know if I can get this open with two hands. There we go. That's the future of laptops. Not. Not really. Pixelbook. Saw that little slide there. Going to dock points for that. I'm going to say half mast. Whew, getting tired, getting tired. Just going to fight through the pain, keep going. The slide, the slide is always what gets you. What do we got here? A lot of Chromebooks it turns out. That's not a Chromebook. Is that a Chromebook? I don't even know. That worked. We got Huawei. NSA hates them. Oh no. Nope. Samsung. It's in on a classic ThinkPad. We got latches on the side. This is back before we knew. This one is kind of like a trap. Because you open one side. Yeah, this is never going to work. So we just tested 21 laptops. Eight of them, full point. Great job everybody. Five of them, you just got to imagine. Five of them got half points. That's not that bad. That's not that bad. I think in a couple of years with the, you know, the forward march, Moore's law and the forward march of technology, we're going to get it 100% very soon. I'm convinced. Thank you for watching. Enjoy the rest of the show. Well, Paul, did it again. Got him. No one can stop you. All right. Dami is here. I want to start asking questions. It's the end of this. We're going to take your questions to wrap up the show. Just think of some questions you want to ask. But first, Dami, you have brought us, I think this is the most circuit breaker of all circuit breaker segments, accessories that plug into headphone jacks. Yeah, it's a really novel concept. One that I miss dearly. Today I'm here to talk about the Sonar Pen, which is a headphone connected stylus. And what makes this better than the Apple Pencil is Apple Pencil is ninety nine dollars and it only works with iPad Pro. This one is only thirty dollars. Granted, it is a Kickstarter project, but it's really cheap and it works with all iPads released after 2011. So I specifically had to buy the iPad Pro just to use with the stylus. But before I begin with this, let's go back and take a look at all the other headphone connected accessories that have paved the way for this. So first thing, I think everyone pretty much knows what this is. It's a square card reader. They released this little thing for free to like business owners just because they can take like a small kind of transactions. So many iced coffees. Yeah. Yeah. What's that thing? So this is really interesting. It's a smart Geiger counter and it connects to usually it would be a headphone jack, but my phone doesn't have one. But it also works with the lighting dongle. The dongle saved us. So it works with the companion app and it helps you detect radiation in your home. You have to be so dedicated to detecting radiation. What's the highest radiation thing you found in our office so far? In the office so far, it's not much. It's if I just put it up to this iPad here, it should flash like a warning bright red and it's like slightly high at point A. That's what happens when you put the Geiger counter up to slightly radioactive things. Put it up on Neeli. Humans are radioactive. He's fine. We're good. We're safe. What up? So basically nobody should really use this as a real Geiger counter. The reviews on Amazon were not great. People were like, I had this next to my TV and it's giving me super high readings and I should be dead by now. So it's not super accurate. You should just use this as a toy to gauge what things are more radioactive than others. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. All right. Let's talk about this stylus. Okay. So let's go back to the stylus. And this stylus for 30 bucks, it's really hard to find. It's really hard to find styluses at 30 bucks that can also like detect pressure sensitivity and also have palm rejection. So right now it only works with two apps. This is an app called Zed Brush 2 and it kind of mimics like East Asian calligraphy. And it's a really cool app. But the only downside is that it only works with two colors. But super simple to use. Let me just draw like. So you guys should all know is Dami in addition to working at The Verge is a super talented cartoonist. Her cartoon is called As Per Usual. She should follow on Instagram. She won't let me plug her book but I'll just let her email the visual book forthcoming. So is this better or worse than what you use to make As Per Usual? This is definitely worse. I mean the app is worse. The stylus I think works great. There's no Bluetooth. You don't have to charge it. I do have this cable. It kind of gets in my way sometimes but it does have this advantage over the pencil where you can remap like a little button here. So you can do like undo. Right now it's undoing my strokes. But yeah it's only 30 bucks. It's really great for kids or any iPads like old iPads you have flying around. So you don't have to go out and like buy a new iPad Pro. Would you switch from your. Right now you have a Wacom as I said. Yeah. Would you switch from your Wacom to this thing? This pen? Yeah. No. But good for kids and just having fun. I feel like you've been coming on the show with different drawing devices for a long time and nothing's replaced the Wacom. The Wacom is the top. It's just the best. But if you want to find a really cheapy stylus it's only 30 bucks. Anything else like we have this like a Donnet Jot Pro. That's the same weirdo tech. Yeah it's like this weird like plastic disc. But these work as dumb styluses meaning there's no pressure sensitivity or palm rejection. And no charging. No charging but it works with any app. But this is 30 bucks. If you want to get something like with actual features you have to go up to at least 75. You can find those with like the Wacom Intuos creative stylus or the Donnet Pixel. Yeah. So that's basically it. Is this Pikachu? Yeah. This is my version of this show. I just want to be clear. It's my version. Today we're going to be sued by the Pokemon people and the Eagles. This is the best lawsuit. This is a remix. A remix. This is my version. He's got like a Mario mustache. I just deleted my. Oh there we go. We're sorry to the Eagles. I would say we were playing a remix of Hotel California as well. Yes you are the Eagles lawyers. Yep. This is great. This is beautiful. I love this app. So here's the thing. We had a lot of fun when we found out about the Geiger account. I was like well what else is there for the headphone jack? Did you do something else? Turns out not a lot. There's a laser pointer for the headphone jack. We couldn't get it in time but it's fine. There's an app for the laser pointer for the headphone jack. This sonar pen thing is like it works in a really cool way. It's definitely the most interesting thing we found. But I also found my favorite category which is basically devices that allow you to use an iPad in bed. Yeah. Wait what? Yeah. So like. How do you need help to do that? Well everybody's been there right? You're holding the iPad in bed and then your hand slips off and then you get hit by the iPad. It's like you're doing an infomercial now. Should I demonstrate it again? One more time. Oh no. It's so hard to hold the thing. All this bruises. Okay. So here's a. This is called the iPivo pad pillow. This is $21.46. Stop it. Is this your company? No. It's just. Stop showing pillows man. Okay well you don't like the pillow? You don't like the pillow? I got more. What is this noise happening? All this clanking noise. There's a lot of noises happening. Tommy I'm so sorry. This is the Bamboo bathtub cabbie. This is just some Bed Bath & Beyond shit man. So I know. I'm going to look at this and you're like well where do I put my wine glass? Well this has a little slot right here. Slide in your wine glass. Very secure. So this will go across the bathtub. But I don't. I'm more of a shower kind of guy. But. I just want to register my complete disapproval. Put this in bed. It's like one of those old timey lawn cushions. The fact that you're doing this and then the thing that you're showing us. Look at the convenience. Put all your snacks right here. What are you doing in the bath? This is not good enough for you. No this is for the bed. Here we go. This one we've called the SpyFood. This is a tab lift. So you put your tablet in here. Right. In the body. The body. Yes. The human body. If I walked into someone's bedroom and I saw that. I would leave. I would run so fast. There's a problem with this right. Imagine the human posture right here. You have to be almost upright. And when I'm watching Netflix on my iPad. I want to be fully prone. Which is what? Oh yes. Go ahead. I just keep doing what you're doing man. Okay. I mean I have a lot of questions. Okay. Well this. What is that? This is the SpyGeek tablet phone stand. So this has an adjustable little holder here. So you can put stuff in. This is a company that tried to be a tripod company and failed. That's what you're looking at. I feel like my dad had like the world's cheapest tripod. And it was made by these people for sure. Did they invent these like previously for books? Like when people read books in bed. Were they like try this book spider. Yeah absolutely. So this is adjustable. No I don't think they made these for books is what I'm saying. I think iPads made us horrible and lazy and now you can buy an iPad. Loosen it up. Loosen it up. Oh look. Your iPad is a table now. Right? How convenient. But best of all. Is it going to be best of all? This solves the fully prone problem. Oh good. Tommy's got the fall cam. We've got a pillow. Check it out. Let's see. So you just put this right past your head. That looks super comfortable. Oh wait. You got to turn it around. Paul. Yeah. Paul. Look how comfortable I am. Neal have you seen the new Netflix show Altered Carbon? Paul. Paul. Paul. Let's get you some friends buddy. This is $21.99 on Amazon. All right. Well you just stay there. We've got a few minutes of show left. We want your questions. We can see them here. Let's see what you got. Ask us questions. We'll answer and we're just going to leave. Paul. Martin says this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. I want you to know that. Okay. You want me to help with questions? Also Michael says Paul is clearly an Amazon seller and plugging his own wares. Chris says Paul Miller 2020. So that's happening. Yeah. What you don't know is I'm in all your affiliate links. Josh says what is your editorial budget? How much did you spend on this nonsense? Well all of these iPad stands were between $20 and $40. That's reasonable. Yeah. So less than your stupid iPods. I thought we could find this at Bed Bath and Beyond. It's true. Just get that like 20% off coupon in there. Which of the four of these would seem most convenient and useful to you? Probably this one. No. Stop it. Stop hawking your Etsy store. Put this away. Just like a little wine glass right there. Put my goldfish like here. All right. Paul. This is a real question for you. Sam Church says what do you think of Mycroft? Mycroft is the open source voice assistant that you wrote about over the weekend. Here's the thing. Everybody knows that one of the big advantages that companies like Google and Amazon have with AI is vast amounts of data collection. And that's like the scary thing but it's also one of the reasons they can get good. Yeah. And it's actually one of the things that holds Apple back because they do a lot less data collection. So to do an open source voice assistant, this Mycroft thing is it already exists as software but they're doing their second generation of actual hardware. You can opt in to let this open source project collect your data but it's definitely almost positively not going to work as well. But I just want to try it out. I want them to send me one when it's going to ship in December of 2018 and I'll play around with it. It might be super bad but I would just like this. You know, we were talking with the iPod. It's nice to have a computer that you own. You can take it apart. You can put it back together. I want similar things with software. So I'm going to check this out and see how well it works. Donnie Jr. asks, is this a tight end? What? Which part? The whole thing. No, it's not. Someone asked what are the best in-ear headphones with the headphone jack. That's an impossible question to answer because there's just too many. In-ear? Yeah. The ones that we have recommended the most are the Zero Carbon Tenor which are on Amazon. They're pretty cheap. I bought those. Vlad wrote about them a long time ago. Now we're all locked into whatever Bluetooth nonsense we're all locked into. Yeah. I was trying to use those and then my dongle died. I bought a new dongle and that one died. So I can't use those headphones anymore but they're great. Yeah. Is Haim still here? We got a question. How many practice attempts did Haim have to do the iPod upgrade? One. That's the answer as far as I know. The one he had in his pocket is the one he did before. We bought four of them. We bought three for the show and then I bid on one on eBay and accidentally won. Okay. So that was a mistake. So we have four of them. Mine is I think Weng Yun from China but we bought a whole bunch. They made all the classics and other things. I think we can all agree that was an impressive display. Haim is a superstar. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. Okay, Dami, I know you don't want to talk about it but John says where can we buy Dami's book or when? Where and when? August. It's out in August. Pre-orders should be available soon. Look for it on Amazon. If we follow you on Instagram. Yes, you'll hear about it. It's my name, Dami underscore Lee. Yeah. Someone keeps asking me, T-Shark keeps asking what are the favorite gadgets from Black Panther. I can't see what that is. I couldn't even get tickets to it. Like I went to the theater and there was like a super long line and I couldn't see it. I saw Shape of Water. That was great. Yeah, it's real hard in New York right now. Have you seen it? No. We got Black Panther content all over the site. So look at the verge. You'll see some Black Panther stuff. Hopefully I will see it soon. I love all the phones in them. I love phones. I don't know what newer phones are, Anun, so I can't answer that question. All right. Bring back the scissor vodka t-shirt. A lot of Vergecast fans in the chat. What else we got? Wow, the Black Panther question just keeps coming. We got some Black Panther astroturfers in our chat right now. Step off, this is my Amazon affiliate marketing channel. All right. I saw a question like what is your favorite notes taking up? I always like to plug Google Keep. It's a really good one. I write down all my comic ideas on there, tweets that I can't make it out onto Twitter, just like every little thing. That's on the web and an app. Yeah. I feel like it's important to plug the Google services, like the little known Google services you use, so they keep them alive. Yeah. Yeah. The DAUs don't take that away. If those DAUs don't go up, you're like, well, Google Keep is gone. So how do you use Google Keep? It's just like a little Post-it note. I would show you guys if I could, but I don't want everyone reading my thoughts. Right, right. But it's just like a Post-it note app kind of. I use Simple Note, which has a website and also native apps for everything. But it also used to sync with Notational Velocity, but nobody updates Notational Velocity anymore. And then the new version of Mac OS broke Notational Velocity, and it's really sad. It's all over. I use Simple Note. It's great. The people who run it, they run it because they want it, and they're all like relatives. Yeah, it's affiliated with like the WordPress people. They've got all that PHP WordPress. They do. It works for me. Paul, do you think that Puras and laptops are worth the price given the added security features or should I get a Chromebook? So you actually reviewed the Puras and laptops. Yeah, they weren't worth it for me, and the default OS that it came with was kind of for the sake of security kind of like stripped down, so therefore like kind of harder to use. I've actually like spent more time with Linux since then. I feel like I'd be better at it now. But it's definitely not nearly as convenient as using like a Windows or Mac laptop. So you have to know that you need and want those security features. Otherwise, I mean, Chromebook is not Linux. That's important to know. You can do some of the stuff you can do on Linux, but it is pretty difficult as well. If you want a true Linux laptop, there's a, what is it, System76 or something like that. I think that, and then there's also people who like will just help you like put Linux on your Dell XPS 13 or something. Yeah. People are really asking about HomePods and EchoDots and HomeMaxes. Just buy whatever you like, man. Just turn it up. Get it from California. Buy it from the actual store. Just listen to that one song over and over again. I can't tell you. Like the answer is buy the thing. You're locked into an ecosystem. Yeah. Look around at the prison walls around you, the small cell that you're in. Mike says, can Paul Miller explain himself? Let's see one more. Let's see. This one's for me. This is in 4G news. It's impossible to agree on the headphone jack problem. The world should be wireless. Don't you agree? And I do not, sir. I do not agree. I think that we need open standards to connect everything because that's just who I am. Here you go, Neelai. Oh, no. Here you go. What's going to happen now? The original headphone jack accessory. I actually had these headphones. This is off into the sunset, Neelai. Yeah, I went to headphones. The thing is I have an iPhone X. And I'm living the Bluetooth life. I'm just disappointed almost every single day about something breaking. All right. That, unfortunately, is our show. Thank you so much for watching. We'll be back next week. We didn't have the Cabo on this week, the crazy AI remote control thing, because it's just really hard to set up. And we didn't have enough time because yesterday was a holiday. So we're going to have the Cabo on next week. That'll be a fun demo. We have a bunch of other stuff going on. Tuesday is 4 p.m. Thanks for being here. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next week. Bye. Bye.