 Hello and welcome to Circuit Breaker, the Verge's live gadget show. I'm Neal I. Patel, I'm the editor of The Verge. This is Paul Miller. We're here again. It's happening to you one more time. Hi, Mr. I. We actually have a huge show today. We've got a bunch of crazy Android phones from China, all the flagships, including the Mi Mix 2, which you can't buy here. So we're going to check that out. We've got a great Ask Circuit Breaker about the future of Google, which is going to be really interesting. The last segment of the show, I'm super excited about. We're bringing back emotional tech support. Yeah. So we probably can't help you with your tech problems, but Ashley's going to be here. And you can call us. That number up, it's 1-844-4EMOTION. And we'll just be there with you. Commiserate with you, I think, mostly. Yeah. So start calling. That's the last segment of the show. We're not going to get through it for a little bit. So call 1-844-4EMOTION. We'll do emotional tech support. But we're going to start with Haim and Android P. You've got to load it. This is what, a first gen Pixel? It's a first gen Pixel. We have the first early developer preview, which launched last week. It's loaded on here. It's a very early preview. If you're not a developer and you don't have like a spare device installed on, don't install this on your main phone. Yeah. One, there's nothing cool enough on here that's worth the hassle. And two, it's really unstable. I just like that there's a notch on this phone right now. So yeah, that is one of the big things you can do is simulate a notch. No longer do you have to use an Android device. Or like a piece of black tape. Yeah. So at MWC, which was just a couple weeks ago, we saw a whole bunch of new phones. I think Vlad wrote an article for us, bad iPhone notches are happening to good Android phones because the software so far is not ready for notches. So there is aping Apple with a notch. The hardware manufacturers are aping Apple, but Android is just like a mess because of these notches. Android P is going to make Android ready for the notch. You can actually see if you add the notch or take it away, it'll actually change how big this bar is on top. Android will be able to dynamically adjust itself for notches. There's some other UI stuff. The clock has moved over to the top left from the top right where it used to be. It handles notifications differently. Instead of getting this nice string of icons going across, it will only display four. But yeah, notches will work better. So the whole point of this is not that Android will automatically, because you can see it's just a software notch. This is for developers who are going to build for Android P so they can simulate a notch to see how their apps are going to... Exactly. Because right now the only things that run the Android P preview are pixels and pixels don't have notches, and if you want to test Android P on a hardware device with a notch, you need to do this. It's horrible. Yeah. The other new thing is... But you can change the look of that notch. Android phones have all kinds of different notches. You can actually change your simulated notch based on... I want to get 10 minutes of solid... Notch simulation. Notch simulation coverage. This is why we do a live show. This is why this is a live show. Yeah, you can actually not only change... These are in developer options. Yeah, this is in developer options. Right now the chat is just trying to guess what the P is going to stand for. My money is on Popsicle personally. Popsicle, we got Pi. Can we look at these different... Look at these actual different options. So you got... Wait, wait, wait. Just pull it up. This is very much an essential phone. This is like your essential phone. There's narrow display cutout, tall display cutout, wide display cutout. That's what they're calling it. So this is like you're building an app. What's it going to look like on the essential phone? And then you just ruin your own phone a little bit and you're good to go. Yeah, because you want to make sure that you're avoiding putting any crucial UI stuff up there. We got a peppermint guess here. Oh, peppermint's not bad. Yeah. There are a lot more options with P than with O. When we were doing the O guessing, we were just scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's like Google's either paying Oreo or nothing. P is for possibilities. Oh my God, Paul. All right. So we also have some hints of what might be some new UI. So if you look closely at the dock, the dock actually looks a little different. There's some rounded corners over here. The color is a little different to make it stand out more. The notification menu is very different. That's very Apple. It's very Apple. So is this the Android? You want to see very Apple is these very Apple rounded notification buttons. And then you can kind of tap on them. Is that very Apple? Pull it down. This is exactly how an iPhone notification works. This is very similar to what- Look, I'm all in favor of that. That pull down to quick reply is a great idea on the iPhone. Is this the Pixel version of Android that we're looking at or the stock Android? Because the Pixel version has diverged from what I think of as stock Android. We also don't know because the only devices that the P preview can run on are Pixels. So it could just be that this is what the Pixel one looks like. It could be that none of this is coming to any other versions. It could just be that this is early stuff and Google hasn't decided. It could be that there's a massive white rounded bubble overhaul of Android P and Google just isn't ready to show that off yet. Yeah. And there's a bunch of security stuff on the right. So the biggest thing on the security side is that Google's revoking the ability of apps that are no longer of apps that are idle to have access to the mic and camera, which is basically if you're someone who believes that Facebook is secretly listening to you and spying on all your conversations- Go back and forth on it. Lately I'm yes. So this should hopefully squish that rumor once and for all. And then you buy a Google Home Mini and just let Google Home do the- Google wants to be the only one that listens to you. That's right. Yeah. All right. So that's Android P. It's super early with Android P. Like Haim said, you can get it right now and put it on a Pixel if you have one, but you shouldn't on your primary. There's a long list of changes there, like API changes. This is something that a developer can call from Google software to enhance their apps. Yeah, so their apps are ready. So their apps are ready so that when they launch P, there's a bunch of P in all the apps. Yeah, for all the phones that will run Android P when it launches. Oh, yeah. All right. We'll get to that. All right. Haim, you've got another thing for us. It's a real P-themed show. P-themed show. Tomorrow is Pi Day. Tomorrow is Pi Day. 314. 314. So in honor of that, we have a Raspberry Pi. And I will say this to the audience. They won't tell me what's about to happen. I was made to leave the room during rehearsal. I was not shown the rundown. I don't know what Haim is about to do. And I'm very excited. So we have here, Paul can... So we're like, I basically want people to understand what is so cool about the Raspberry Pi. And I think it can be a little intimidating for people because they see exposed circuitry and like, well, that's not for me. But it's a $35 Linux computer that you can do cool hardware projects. So we're like, what's a cool hardware project? We sit right next to Ashley Carman, who has a wonderful podcast called Why'd You Push That Button. So we made a Why'd You Push That Button button. Okay. What does it do? Does it just entice you to push the button? Well, you're about to find out. I'll just see. All right. All right. Basically, if everything goes according to plan, you will push this button and you will hear the word why. All right. I'm ready. If everything doesn't go according to plan, you'll learn a lot about the Raspberry Pi in the process. It will light on fire and kill us all. All right. Let's see this. So let's just walk through what we have here. First of all, Raspberry Pi, Linux computer, everything's just kind of running off this tiny micro SD card is the whole operating system. So when you buy a Pi, it's like $35 or like you get a kit for a little bit more so you can get a case and stuff. And it will come typically with an SD card that has Linux pre-installed. So all you do is you literally plug it in the USB power, boot up, plug in, HDMI, plug in, mouse and keyboard, and you have a completely working computer. Wow. Is this the newest one? So this is the generation two. This is an older. So it's a little slower, but for the purposes of what we're doing, and that's one of the beauty of this is that for the purposes, it can handle really low power tests really well. So if you're just looking for like a computer to live in a hardware project, it's great for that. Yeah. So the computer breaker stuff that we've done, like when we built the smart mirror, the photo booth, those are all living off of Raspberry Pi because it's a great cheap way to get a computer that can run advanced code without necessarily needing to spend hundreds of dollars on building a small Windows computer. And if you want a really simple computer, there's the Pi Zero. This is what I built my wearable computer out of. Pi Zero is a slower processor, like smaller and fewer plugs, but it's a very similar concept. But what makes the Pi different than your average computer is these pins, which I will be honest with you, I've found very intimidating and never really did anything with until Pi taught me about those. Can you explain these pins? These are the GPIO pins. So these are input and output pins that you can use to easily hook up different hardware devices to a Pi. And combined with the fact that the Pi runs open source software, it makes it very easy to quickly add new hardware to your Pi, new hardware accessories, and configure software to do stuff with them. So like when we built our own DIY Amazon Echo, we plugged in a mic and light relay that was able to just add super good beamforming microphones to the Pi and a light ring for the Alexa part. So today we're actually going to plug in this giant red button and set that up. This is comically huge. So there's two parts to this button. So these two pins on the side are for the LED that will make it light up. And then these are for input output. So we're going to hook up this over here to this is going to go to power. If you're doing this at home, you'll note that we just have a bunch of exposed wires here. Sure do. Don't do that. It's low voltage, you're gonna be fine. It's low voltage, we'll be fine. If you're doing this at home. Famous last words, man. If you're doing this at home, get... We've crossed two of the wires. Don't worry about it. If you're doing this at home, you should get proper clips. They make them that attach. This is why we do it live so that when we do kill ourselves, there's evidence. So we're plugging into actually we're plugging in this one's going to power and then this other this blue wire is going to grounds to complete the circuit. And one simple way to think of it is the Pi is wired up so that you can like tell the Pi, hey, complete this circuit between these two bands. Or the Pi could be like, hey, tell me if this circuit is completed between these two bands. I'm just making a face. Well, it should have turned on and it didn't. So I'm actually going to duck under here and consult my handy. We could show this. We don't have to be secretive. So this is this is the pin diagram. So this shows what all the pins do. There's obviously a lot of things here. What are you looking for right now? I'm just making sure that this is hooked up. So this should be hooked up to power and it's not because it's hooked up to ground. So I'm just gonna move everything over. I did this during rehearsal too. And I promised I was not going to make that mistake live. The other thing that's nice, there are alternatives to the Pi. There's like the BeagleBone. There's a lot of fun tiny computers. And if you know what you're doing, it's flickering. So you can see it's live? Yeah. All right. All right. So this is so we found this Pi in Paul's desk. It is a little broken. If you nudge that sounds like something Paul has. If you nudge the power cable, it immediately reboots. Most Raspberry Pis don't do that. But ours is special. This is like maximum pressure situation. All right. So then we're going to hook this up. This is what this show is for. It's basically Mission Impossible-ing a Pi right now. Again, the amount of explosion talk that's just sort of lightly weaving its way through the segment is very disturbing. I don't think we'll explode. One thing I like, everything is back up. The Pi is back up. And our button is wired up. OK. So Paul, what happens on the Pi? So as you can see over here, you just rebooted it. I rebooted it again, but now I'm not going to touch it. So Paul, did you have to write code? If you look over here, you can see the Pi is booting Linux. Yeah. And it boots pretty fast. That's a nice thing. It's all running flash memory. So here's the important thing about the Pi and why the Pi is so special. It is so popular that everything that you want to do or almost everything you want to do has already been written for you. So we basically copy and pasted some code, and we got it to work. That's exactly what I'm going to show you right now. So let's pull up. The other nice thing is if you've ever used Python, Python is so, so difficult to install on a machine, and it comes pre-installed on both Python 2 and 3. So here's our code. I'll run it, and then I'll explain what's happening. So let's run. It says it's ready. All right. You want to push the button? I'm super ready. We need sound. Go ahead. Push the button. See what happens. Probably nothing's going to happen. Push the button. Oh, hey, look at that. It says it's playing, but... Look at that headphone jack. It has... Yeah. It's playing. It has... Yeah. Perfect. 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. Okay. Come standard. Be careful. Okay, so now... Why? Push it again. Why? Push it again. Why? Wait, so you just... It's randomly playing a sample? Yeah, so I'll show you the code here. Why? So let's walk through the code. Can I bring this to meetings? Absolutely. This is awesome. I want to show you the code, Neelay. Damn it, Paul. Okay. You can't do this to me. This is too much for me. Why? I'm turning off the speaker, Neelay. Damn it. Okay. I'm going to teach you how to code. I don't want your job to be taken by robots. I told you about this. Okay. So this is literally all I do. I know. I know. I've been replaced. Okay. GPS. GPS. GPS. Okay. GPIO, right? Those are these pins that we wired the button into, right? And then this is a sound mixer that we just imported Pygame. So then we set up the pin. We're going to use pin four. And then there's some weird stuff with power that I don't understand, so I just copied and pasted it. Then we take all our sound files out of a folder, and then we wrote this little function where it just randomly chooses among the sound files and plays it. And then we have this thing called add event detect. So we detect if this pin is falling, and then we just run a loop, and then every time we detect this event, we play the sound. So we see it calls back to the play function. So it's called to find a function, and then when it detects the button's been pressed, it plays it. Hi. There we go. Okay. By the way, Haim Lewis in the chat says that's the worst cable joint I've ever seen. He has not seen some of my other cable joints. So we have a special present for you and me. We're going to upgrade the button. Yeah. I mean, now what happens? Well, we're going to plug in a flash drive, and we're going to copy a file off the flash drive. We're definitely going to open it in the file manager. Are you going to use sound files in the file? Oh, yeah. Very exciting. There's a little bit of Airhorn.mp3. This is great. So let's just change the code a little bit. So let's just do... Now it's just going to search the desktop for any mp3 files. Okay. No. You didn't do this for me. Is it ready? I can't scroll down far enough. I don't know if it's ready. Yeah. Any two buttons. All right. I'm super excited. I'm super ready to learn how to code. That's the Raspberry Pi lifestyle. I just wanted people to get a vibe for it. I think it can be really scary, but there's a ton of resources online. Pine has done a bunch of projects. I've done some projects. We have tutorials on the site. It's a fun life. Yeah. You can make an Airhorn button or a Y button. Yeah. I mean, I will say that we talk so much about finished products on the show and apps and services. Just getting in and making your own really helps you understand what's going on. Yeah. And the stuff is cheap and fun. Yeah. It's like infinitely hackable. And tomorrow's Pi Day. Tomorrow's Pi Day. Something will happen. All right. We do a segment every week or lately called Ask Sugar Breaker where you ask us a question and Ashley and Jake answer that question. So let's take it away. Jake. I think you got to push the button one more time. There we go. Thank you for that wonderful intro. Last week we had a really great question come in while we were doing the phone call segment, but we didn't have time to get to it. It's a really big question with a lot to unpack. So we're going to do it now. The question comes from Jackson and it's basically about Google's giant Android ecosystem. And the question is with Google moving toward more closed systems like Android Go and Chromebooks that run Android apps, do we think that Google will eventually phase out Android in favor of something that works better or is Android just too big now if you put back in Pandora's box? This is a really interesting question and the place to start is what exactly it means that Google is partly closed. What is happening? Dieter, I thought you were in Austin. I'm back. This is important. If we're talking about something replacing Android, you have to start with Samsung. All things with Android start with Samsung. Now Samsung is not following the system they're supposed to to update Android. They never release updates. Google releases a new version of a dessert and then gets put on the processor and then the phone maker, they don't do it. So Google created this thing, follow the thread, they created Treble. And Treble is designed to put all of Samsung in this little box right here so that whenever Google wants to update it, they can. But really if you're talking about Android updates, don't look at the big updates. Don't look at this. Follow the thread to here, Google Play. Google Play is where all the really important stuff happens in Android. That's where Chrome gets updated, it's where apps get updated individually. It all just happens on its own. And so really you shouldn't be worried about do you have Android P, you should be worried you have Google Play apps version 72 or whatever. But meanwhile, they know this is happening but they also know that in order to make this work they have to have more phones to support it so they have released Android Go which is the latest version of Android One. Android One still exists but Android Go is another way that other manufacturers like Nokia can make Android phones. So that's really big in India but it's not so big in China because China doesn't use Google Play. And so there's other things that are going on here to pay attention to. Remember this, follow the thread, there's also Chrome OS. What's Chrome OS? It runs Google Chrome but it also runs Android apps through the Google Play Store. So this is going on but we follow the thread and there's something else happening. What is this? This is Fuchsia. Fuchsia is a next generation operating system that Google is developing. Nobody knows what it is, nobody knows what it does but as Paul reminds me all the time, Fuchsia runs on a microkernel. As you know, when kernels get hot, they pop like popcorn. And if you put caramel on popcorn, it's basically a dessert which means that Google could use Treble to make Android P, call it popcorn and then if you just follow what's happening here, Google will have Android, it will have Chrome OS, it will have Fuchsia and all three of them will duke it out. And if you want to know if Android is eventually going to get replaced, you just have to watch this fight. Simple. Did that answer your question, Jake? Did you make this? Oh no, I just have this around all the time. Dieter is here everybody. Hi, Dieter. Where did you come from? I just had my board, I was working on it and I heard the question so I came on. Well thanks everybody. That was Ask Circuit Breaker. If you have questions for us, leave them in the chat and then one of our employees will attack you. That would be great. Thanks Jake and Dieter. All right, Dan, speaking of China. Hey buddy. Yeah. That was quite a performance. I love this so much and I have so many Fuchsia thoughts. Can I tell you a very honest story? It's like a whole thing. Last night Dieter and I were walking to the bar and he just did that for real. He just pulled out his ball of yarn and put it on his board. That was just what we talked about on the way to the bar last night. That's accurate. All right, speaking of China, we've got a bunch of Chinese Android phones here from Chinese vendors. There's some drama happening with this Huawei one in particular. This is the Mi Mix 2, you can't get it here. But tell us what's happening here. Dan's here everybody. Hello. So what's in front of me are three high-end premium phones that are made by companies in China. Two of these you can buy in the US. This is the OnePlus 5T and the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. And then this is the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2, which you can't buy in the US, but you can get in a couple other markets across the world. Now Xiaomi says that they are coming to the US by the end of 2019, but they basically said they've been coming to the US for the past five years. So who knows if that'll happen, but that's where it stands today. And what's interesting about these is you kind of get like three different looks at how Chinese manufacturers are approaching software. In terms of hardware, they're all super high-end. They're all like top-of-the-line processors, high-resolution screens, nice well-built designs and everything. And I think they all have like six gigs of RAM or something. And they're all running Android 8.0 underneath all of this. The OnePlus 5T is going to be the most familiar to those of us in the US that might have been using a Pixel or Nexus phone. That looks really familiar. It's kind of like what we would call stock Android for lack of a better word. In what way is it not stock? There are some customizations. They've got like a separate launcher thing here. I don't know if it's enabled right now, but the off-screen has a different display mode. They've got some software in there for their camera and things that aren't like Google-specific. But if you're looking for like the look and feel of what you get on a Pixel, you're pretty close to it with the OnePlus. So how did you get that instead of a Pixel? Well this is $500. There you go. There you go. And you went and visited. You went to China. You visited China. I did, yeah. So OnePlus is actually owned by a larger company called BBK that also owns Oppo and Vivo, a couple other brands that are primarily in Asia. But this is what they do and they focus on one phone a year. This is the 5T, their latest phone. It's actually a very good device. We reviewed it a few months ago and really like it. It's very popular among enthusiasts. A couple of issues with the company in terms of like security and privacy and all these other concerns. But in terms of like hardware, it's pretty solid. And then this is the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. This is kind of like the conversation piece around Chinese phones. This is the bad boy. Yeah. This is the phone. Literally the United States government does not want you to have this phone. The man does not want you to have this phone. You can buy it in the US. You have to order it on lock. You can get it from like Amazon, Best Buy and Huawei directly. But there's no carrier that sells it which is kind of like a big deal. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Why do they desaturate their buttons at the bottom? I think this is just a theme that those buttons have that kind of color. There's a couple of different themes. So you're getting a look at the software here and it's a little bit of a mess. It's kind of like a – now I can't find the themes. It's kind of like a mixture of iOS and Android with like all of the bad parts, each one. It's kind of gross in my opinion. But you can definitely see where their influence was. I mean that is pure iOS right there. Yeah. A lot of this. And so like by default, right now this is configured to have an app launcher tray but like by default there's no app tray. It's just like iOS with all your apps on the home screen. But you can change like the color of the icons and things like that. I think that's just the theme on this particular one to answer your question, Paul. But this does have like full Google software and Play Store and everything like that. AT&T was originally going to be carrying this but that deal fell apart at the last minute thanks to – Right. So this is the conversation. Like we were at CES this year. We were expecting Huawei to put out this phone on a major US carrier and then it went away and Huawei's CEO got on stage and basically like yelled at everybody like a very emotional raw moment. He said the rest of the world trusts us. One day you will too. So maybe the phone icon is desaturated because Huawei is sad. I think Huawei – so the government basically scuttled AT&T from carrying this phone. Huawei put it out here unlocked anyway. But now the government is also telling consumers not to buy it. Yeah, there's – the heads of FBI and the CIA and other agencies have basically said consumers shouldn't buy Huawei products. And really like I don't think they're really concerned about this phone in particular. They're concerned about Huawei's bigger business which is network infrastructure. And so they don't want the phone to be a gateway for Huawei to sell its network infrastructure to AT&T for when 5G networks roll out. Huawei has a ton of 5G technologies planned. This provides a lot of network infrastructure across the world outside of the U.S. and the U.S. government does not want that to come into the U.S. for fear of providing back doors to the Chinese government because they allege that Huawei has a lot of ties to the Chinese government based on its origins. Well, in theory. That's very true. Look, there's a new head of the CIA today. Maybe she'll change her mind. So the story isn't really about – I mean this phone is kind of like the casualty of it all but there's a bigger piece behind that in that – about the network infrastructure that the government is going after. Tell me about these dual cameras here. So this is a Leica branded dual camera system and so unlike say what we see on the iPhone X or Galaxy S9 Plus, these are not a wide angle and a telephoto lens. It's actually a color camera and a black and white camera. And so it will take the data from both captures, combine them together to allegedly provide more detail and sharper image quality. The image quality is very good out of this. It's not quite as good as what you get from a Pixel or Samsung. Can you just take straight black and white photos? You can. Is that actually a Leica camera or is that just a branding deal? It's a branding deal. I mean Leica will – they'll say that like Leica helps develop it and all that jazz. But you know, Leica makes all of its cameras in Germany. This is not made in Germany. What is going on here? So I think that's – you found one of their customizations which is like a unique lock screen that gives you shortcuts. Wait, can you bring that up again? No. So let's hit the lock screen and then if you drag up from the bottom, you get shortcuts for your calculator or flashlight. So this is like stuck with the whole update problem, right? How often does this get updated? So this is running Android 8.0 right now. Huawei doesn't really do a great job of updating to the newer versions of Android. They'll launch their device on a certain version and then maybe it will get updated. Probably not. At least that's been our experience with the ones available. So what is this very beautiful phone? This is by far one of the most beautiful phones I've ever seen. Yeah, this is a really interesting device. It's a Mi Mix 2. The original Mi Mix from Huawei was one of the first that did this like all edge to edge design. This one is the second version of it so they've kind of like changed a little bit. They've toned it down a little bit but it's made out of ceramic. This is actually not glass, it's ceramic which is pretty wild. And this is kind of like a look at a software that is very popular in Asian markets whereas it is basically nothing like the Android that we're used to from Google and basically looks like iOS. This is about like as close to iOS as you're going to get if you even look at like the multitasking window is like very iOS like. And so you can very tell where their inspiration is. This version does run the Play Store. I think they sell this in India with the Play Store and Singapore outside of China. China does not have the Play Store but you can't buy this in the US yet. So here's the problem with this phone because I would get this phone in a heartbeat. The bezel game is strong. This is I mean it's just a beautiful. Is this camera any good? So you know. The front camera, I don't know if you can see this, is down here. Yeah. It's a little up the nose. No notch. You can see. So we just made the worst trade off ever because this is an LCD right? I believe it's an LCD. It might be an AMOLED but I believe this model is an LCD. So you've got your driver components on here. Yes. But when you can see this on Paul came and flip this around. This is not not super flat. Your thumb is about to get it's just going to happen. So what you're supposed to do. This is true. You're supposed to flip it over. Yeah. Problem solved. I don't know what you're complaining about. I don't know about that. Like that's literally the one thing. So like that's a discussion of like you know dealing with the notch right? Like they could have put it up here and there's been rumors of the next version of this phone where they put to a corner notch that we've seen some images out of China based on that we don't know if that's going to happen or not. Like the camera is up here in the corner and it does like a little corner cut out. By the way I took a black and white photo with this one. I love the black and white side of this. It's pretty cool. Yeah thanks buddy. That's that's how I feel. That's me on the inside. Wait everybody pause your YouTube real quick. Get out of here. That's enough Paul. All right. So this one is obviously popular. People buy it a lot. Is it someone actually in the chat right here. Marineco brought up. Obviously the government is blocking Huawei from doing this. But the government Donald Trump himself put out an executive order preventing Broadcom which is not a Chinese company a Singaporean company but preventing Broadcom from buying Qualcomm which is a U.S. company. Broadcom is going to respond to this by the way by redomiciling to the U.S. and becoming a U.S. company. We'll see if they saga continues. There's like oh there's a lot going on here in terms of particularly Asian companies coming to the U.S. and doing stuff here. So the one company that's not in this conversation right here is ZTE which is one of the larger companies not quite as big as Huawei but getting up to that scale and they provide infrastructure and things like that. And ZTE has had the same type of like government complaints against it but that hasn't stopped it from building a business in the U.S. which is very interesting to me. ZTE sells a lot of mid-range low end phones that are branded by T-Mobile branded by AT&T. They're all sold by the carriers. They don't really have many high end offerings but Huawei hasn't been able to get any of that which has been kind of fascinating to me. Yeah. I mean I think that I just think people care about those mid-range phones right. Those are the classic carrier branding deal where you go and you get some OEM to make you a phone. Yeah. I don't think there's a lot of government interest here. A big high end splashy we're going to market this phone. I think that's I think that's a little bit different in terms of just the options. I still don't understand it. I don't understand it. I mean I'm trying to understand it. What don't you understand? I don't know what specifically Huawei again when you point out ZTE has all the same ties to the Chinese government that Huawei has. What specific evils has Huawei done that we're specifically averting. I feel like it's very vague. So it might be a little a little naive to like ask the government for proof but like they haven't really come forward. It's all the agencies have said they allege these things they suspect these things but there's been no proof provided to the public. I don't I mean like personally for me I'm not taking what the government says as to whether I would use the Huawei phone or not. I'm like looking at it from a very consumer perspective of I wouldn't use this phone because the software is miserable. Like you should buy a different phone because the software is bad. Not because it might be spying on you. Here's a question from Nick. He asks why does China not have the Play Store. This is like a very long and complicated. Go ahead. Well so basically Google doesn't exist in China because all the companies that do exist in China have agreed to give the Chinese government access to their data and Google doesn't has not agreed to that. So Google doesn't exist in China. There's a Play Store. Yeah there's a number of American companies that don't exist in China. So therefore Google's Play Store does not exist in China either. So what's interesting about that is you know company does exist in China is Apple and Apple just agreed to move its iCloud data centers in China for Chinese customers to control a Chinese company. So Apple now contracts out iCloud from a Chinese company to service Chinese users. So moving to China because there are a lot of governmental restrictions on what you can do and a lot of that. The speaker was just like we're done with this. So it's interesting the Chinese government is playing the same game with American companies by requiring access to data. Yeah. The American government is kind of firing back. But I don't. Does that turn on whether you should buy a Huawei phone? Like the CEO's argument to CS and you should go watch this video. He wrote a long article about it. It's on theverge.com. His argument is like we're doing business in Africa. We're doing business in Europe. We're doing business in the Middle East. All of these other countries trust us and we're able to work with them. Well I do think it's interesting that we have so much of a hardware whether or not it's designed in China is built in China. And a lot of the engineering progress is happening in China. There's this total separation when it comes to software. I blame the Chinese government for big. You've not blamed two governments. Censorious. Paul's like I hate the US government. I don't trust them. Here's a free idea for governments. Don't spy on your citizens and don't censor them. You're a beautiful man. Just ideas. I wrote about Stipholid. John in the chat is asking is this Huawei's Kirin processor? Yes. This is using the Huawei I believe it's a Kirin 970 processor and then they like to market this coprocessor that's with it for doing AI processing but they all kind of like have these kind of coprocessors. These two are running Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. This one is just real beautiful. I'm so taken with this one. All right last question. Would you actually get one of these if you live in the States over a Pixel or an S9 or whatever? I think there's a really compelling argument for the OnePlus 5T in that it's only 500 bucks. Pixel 2 XL which is roughly the same size screen and everything is running 850 I believe last I checked. S9 Plus is in that neighborhood as well. So you do save a ton of money by going with the OnePlus. The thing that you're going to give up is support and local like if you drop and break the screen on this OnePlus is based in Shenzhen. There's no local place to go to get this fixed. Yeah you have free tickets. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that might be a concern. As I mentioned earlier OnePlus has had some issues late last year they had a security breach on the website where a bunch of I believe 40,000 customers credit card info was stolen. So they had to like shut that down and switch to PayPal. So they are not without issue which maybe gives you a reason to think twice. But I think the main reason someone would go with a OnePlus over a Pixel or over any other phone is going to be its cost. And what's the reason that Xiaomi doesn't come to the US? That's a good question. I believe the company's line is that they want to provide the best experience they can and they're trying to figure out the US market and how to enter it and everything. It could be you know there's been speculation for years that it's patent and IP issues given how similar it looks to maybe Apple products. Was it the original Xiaomi like originally made a splash by just completely ripping out the iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they've diverged obviously you know they've got their own ID now and like they're doing their own thing but the software is still very similar. The packaging is very similar. There's a lot of like similarities in how they present the company that you know maybe Apple might have issues with. I honestly think they don't have a great strategy for breaking into the US. And because the US is a very tough market if you are going to make any money and be any successful at all you really have to work with carriers which means that you have to go through the carrier certification processes and everything which are very difficult and very hard to do. So carrier certification processes that's where I end this segment. It's hard. That's the black hole of all interests. For example, OnePlus doesn't go through that. And so like you can't get a OnePlus phone that runs on Verizon because there's no OnePlus phone that will go through past Verizon security or certification services. So it's tough. It's hard out there. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. I'm going to take this phone from you. This one is mine now. Paul, you did a thing again. Yes. This is the second episode of Explain Yourself with your friend Paul Miller. Okay. After this we're going to take your calls for emotional tech support. Ashley is going to join us. So call 1-844-4EMOTION if you want to just bear your soul to us about what's happening in tech. But first let's watch whatever Paul did. Do you have a car? I do not. Do you have a car? No. Do you have a car? Not really. Oh, God, no. Do you have a car? Yes. How many cars? One car. Do you have a flying car? I do not have a flying car. Keep dreaming. Do you have a car? I do. Do you have a flying car? No. Do you wish you had a flying car? Of course. Do you have any flying cars though? I do not have any flying cars. Keep dreaming, buddy. Andy, looking so smug, writing about cars all the time. You're going to have to explain yourself. This sounds way more threatening than I intend to. Andrew Hawkins wrote two stories this week, or last week. The Pal5 Liberty claims to be the first commercially available flying car. This is very exciting, I think, uneducated about cars that I am. But here's another article. People are still trying to make cars that morph into helicopters. Well, this sounds like we're like just super over it and bored of flying cars. Which is it? Andy? Andy, hello. Oh, it's Paul. Hey, it's me, Paul. Hey, Paul, nice to see you. How's it going? It's going great. I'm going to have you do something that I call explain yourself. All right. Did you go to a car show last week? I didn't. Our colleague Vlad Savov went in Geneva. So you can say everything you know about these are just, this is just hearsay. Yeah, it's circumstantial. There's flying cars at the car show. There are, yes. So that's true? It is true, yes. There were a couple of so-called flying cars at the Geneva Motor Show. Okay, so flying cars are real? It depends on what you consider to be a flying car. Are they commercially viable? Also depends on what you consider to be commercially viable. There's a lot of different, lots of speculation around it, but there are a lot of people that are pursuing flying cars as a commercial product. All right, so this is where we get to explain yourself time. I feel like one of the articles made it sound like flying cars are boring and we're over them. And the other one is like, here's a flying car that you could buy and I'm not bored of it. I'm not over it. Explain yourself. Okay, so I think the one that is available to buy is called the PAL5 Liberty. And it's actually kind of a crossover between a helicopter or maybe a gyrocopter and a small smart style vehicle. And the company that makes it, it's based in the Netherlands and they say that you can start buying them by the end of the year. So if you were so inclined as to risk your life and want to get behind the wheel of one of these things and you have a pilot's license as well as a driver's license, you're welcome to do that. How much? I think it's probably in the six figure range. I was hearing somewhere around $300,000. Okay, and then the other article is like, flying cars, bored of this. So that's probably some of my skepticism leeching into the coverage and it's because I've been covering this issue for over a year now. And there are a lot of companies that are spending a lot of money claiming that flying cars are going to be a real product. I have some serious doubts. I wonder whether or not this is going to be anything outside of like very rich people buying these things and using them. And there's lots of people like Uber thinks it's going to be actually like a flying taxi service available in cities. They're setting it up in Dallas and in LA and Dubai. So we'll have to see. It's just like the technology isn't really there yet as far as making them all electric and able to fly. So there's a lot of pieces that still need to fall into place. If you had to guess which flying car will Paul Miller, a member of the firmly entrenched in the middle class, which one will I get into and will take me somewhere? If everything goes according to plan and this technology actually comes to fruition and there's actually flying taxis available in cities, I would say you're most likely to be in an Uber flying taxi more so than anywhere else because they seem to have the vision and the money to actually scale the product and make it available in cities. Thank you, Andrew. Your answers are very good. Thank you, Paul. I'm happy to do it. Well, that was Explain Yourself with your friend Paul Miller. I think we really got to the bottom of this one. Flying cars soon. You heard it here first. We're back. Paul, you're really onto something there. Acousting our reporters in the newsroom. Andy was very helpful. I learned a lot, I feel like. All right. Ashley, you're here. What's up? Hey. How are you? So you guys actually started Emotional Tech Support ages ago. It's back in the... If anybody remembers Facebook Live. Back in the Facebook Live. We're deep in the archives on our Facebook page. Couple of years ago. Look back, I had short hair back then. Yeah. All right. Tell the people what to expect. The number should be up on the screen. You really, really underwent hair transformation. I really. Well, both of you. Yeah, you're absolutely right. One of you did better than me. Emotional Tech Support. That's very true. Emotional Tech Support is you call us with your problems that can be about technology, but we're not going to fix your technology problem, but we hear you and we feel your pain. Is that a good... Yeah. We're not tech support, so we can't... We will say maybe try turning it off. Turn it back on. That might help. Try reinstalling your printer drivers. Yeah. But that's about as far as we're going to go. So let me offer you this one. We'll take some calls. So we're having a baby. Yes. That's great. Baby needs a room in my house. I've heard this about babies. It's important. We have to find space for her. So I had to totally throw out my office. That's the baby's room now. So I got rid of all the furniture, all the shelves, and I've just been throwing away gadgets and recycling them and throwing away wires. And Becky says that every time I throw one away, I take a wire and put it in the bag, I make soft moaning sounds. Because they're all little adventures. I remember when I plugged that into that one thing. Yeah. Remember when Firewire 400 was a really important piece of my life? How far back do these gadgets go? I mean, I threw away a SCSI cable, like an old... Was that for a scanner? No, it was for a hard drive. Ooh, a SCSI. An ancient... It's like that part of you that really feels like, what if I need this cable again and then I'll be a hero? The everyday... Isn't that what you were saving them for though? That's not why you were saving the cables. I just think the moments for you to be a hero in your life are very limited. If you can have a drawer of heroism, then you should have that in your life. Cable heroism. They're not just signifiers of good times gone by. It's not like I looked at them. I just had three drawers full of cables and gadgets. I brought a bunch of them around the set now. If anybody wants my Canon PowerShot S100, by all means let me know. It's sitting right over here. All right, we have our first call. Ken has an iPhone future expectations question. This is going to be emotional. Ken, what's up, man? All right, so iPhone 10, decent screen, not just terrible. Price is horrible. iPhone 10 Plus expected. What are we going to see that'll validate an increased price, the same shabby screen and overall just kind of boring? I mean, iOS is great. It's reliable. It's fast. It works with the hardware. The chipset, all that's good, but it's boring. I have this- Jenna, I want to just laser in on the emotion here. Boredom. Yeah. Frustration. Are you more frustrated? I am frustrated. I am underwhelmed and I'm overcharged. Wow. Wow. A lot of adjectives. So here's what I think you should do. I think you should find another gadget that isn't like where the market isn't quite as developed and fall into that. I think the phone market, we've had a solid decade of like super intense phone market, crazy competition. And now, by the way, I disagree with you that the screen is shabby. The notch is annoying. The screen is beautiful, except for the notch. But we've had a decade of like phone hyper enthusiasm. And now you want that to be like- So you're saying Kin should find a different industry that has that rapid iteration to focus on so he can enjoy progress again. So you can like feel fine where there's not going to be a winner. What do you think, Ashley? Well, I'm going through the same issue. Smart home accessories. No, man. Not smart home. I love smart home accessories. Like I have a lot of them. There's no fire in that industry. Maybe a drone. Yeah, a drone could be fun. Yeah, like back a small drone company that isn't going to win. You know, and like be really into that. I've gotten into modular synthesis a little bit. Been following that a little bit of the synthesizer world. But what were you saying? I'm in the exact same place as Kin where I need to replace my phone and I'm looking at the iPhone 10 and it still runs the same iOS I have on my 6S. So the software isn't a big differentiator for me. I see the notch. I see the big screen. And I'm like that price tag is insane. And I'm going through the same thing where I'm like, what do I do? I like it, but not that much. You feel like for a thousand dollars, it should change my life. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. We can find one for you. What's the thing that grabs you? And I know you're going to say smart home stand, but I'm telling you, once you install like the door lock and you're like, great, you got to you need an upgrade cycle. What are your dreams? What are my dreams? Listen, I'm big into phones. I have the Mavic Pro, which is more than I need. Honestly, the new DJI drones are good. They're great for kids. Mavic Pro is good. I got the Pixel 2X all over there. I got the S8 Plus. I got the Sony. I have the iPhone X. I'm all over the place because I'm looking for that. You know what happened? Remember when the Note 7 came out and there was finally a breath of fresh air and then it had that issue. And then the- Yeah, the breath of fresh air, by the way, was the air from an explosion whooshing by your feet. Yeah, that was smoke. Yeah. It was mostly smoke, but it was fresh air. You mentioned a couple of different products now. It sounds like you're into photography, right? You've got a flying camera. You've got some handheld cameras. Why not go all in- Yeah, do video and photo. Why not go all in on the Canon versus Nikon split or Sony's coming to disrupt them all? You want some deep emotions, get on a camera message board. Go on Nikonfans.com and be like, Canon for life. There is a great theory that I heard that Sony is holding itself back, that it's so far beyond Canon and Nikon that it's just trickling out features. And if they ever try to compete with Sony, Sony will slam down a large set of features. I'm also wondering if instead of boredom, you should try to have gratitude because you're bored, but at least the phones are good enough now where you're not like, this barely works. I'd like this. This is a really actually- Everyone's nicer than us. I should be happy that my current technology is so good that I don't have to upgrade it. Yeah. I think it is boring, but we're at that stage where it's like, well, it works and it's good. All right. Thank you so much, Ken. Thank you, Ken. I appreciate you guys. You guys do great work and I'll talk to you guys later. I'm going to wait. I don't know. I'm going to go grab the LGD30 and play with the walker. We just gave you all this advice about another thing, man. You got to stop the cycle. All right. Christian in the chat is asking, how do we feel about Apple versus Android, which is basically the same question, but I think the emotional tenor of that question is different. Right here. What do you feel about Apple versus Android? What are your emotions? We have a follow up in the chat here. What did it say? Someone suggested, Ashley, oh yeah, John suggested that you need to go to Android. I feel like there's a lot. I mean, I think- There's a lot tied up. I feel like a lot of us who are tied to the iPhone are tied into iMessage and there's so many emotions tied up with iMessage because all your friends are there. The group texts are way better on iMessage. That green bubble. Yeah. I will say I've been thinking about Android a lot because I feel like Android matches more of my core principles. Not Google as a company, but Android as software that's relatively open source, relatively customizable and hackable. So I've been really thinking about switching to that. The blue text messages in my family group chat specifically is where it's most important, was holding me to iOS, but my brother just switched to a dumb phone. He's going like Luddite. So he's already broken the family group text. So now I'm not the bad guy. I can switch to Android, go green text and still be better. So what are you guys doing about... So there's just no more group text. Your brother just killed the group text. Yeah, no, he's just dead to us. He's over. That's how I feel about Android phones. Every time I see Deidre on one of his cool Android phones, I just feel hard. We had to move the whole family to Google Photos. You can run Linux on your Android phone. You can do so many interesting different weird things with Android phones. All right. By the way, the number is 1-844-4EMOTION. Just call us with your emotional problems. Creighton, do we have somebody else on the line? I suspect that we do. Creighton, by the way, is back there screening away. So let's see what's going on. But Paul, you also probably have some emotions. All right. Creighton says we have one coming through. Oh, okay. I can tell almost before... His name apparently is Mr. Standby. I can tell a real quick story. My roommate has discovered that he can just yell things at Alexa and set alarms for me. Yeah. So it's like, Alexa, wake me up at 5 AM. Alexa, wake me up at 4 AM. We set like 10 alarms last night for me. Did it work? Well, yeah. Did you wake up? He woke up. All right. We have Sohan on the line. I'm being told this is an iPad question. Bring him on. Sohan, what you got? Okay. So it's been a couple months since iOS 11 came out, and I want to buy an iPad now. I've made that leap to leave macOS behind. I'm a student, so I don't really need a whole lot. And I don't know if I want to wait until WWDC to see if there's going to be a new iPad this year with like Face ID or Animoji, or if I should just buy the current iPad Pro. I mean, you've had a couple... There's rumors out there that a new one's coming in March. Let me ask you this. Why did you decide to leave macOS behind? I just don't like carrying around my 15-inch MacBook Pro. I have the Touch Bar version, and I feel like I don't need- Oh, I like that emotion. I don't need enough computing power to justify carrying four pounds of stuff in my backpack. Have you tried- I'm just lazy. Have you tried full-time iPad life? I have. I have. My mom has an iPad. Okay. All right. It's kind of- I have some general recommendations. Is it Mac Rumors that has the buying guide? Yeah. If you just Google it, there's a buying guide that you can search for, and it covers all Apple products and tells you when they typically get refreshed, and so it will kind of tell you like, this is a good time to buy or this is a bad time to buy. My general tech advice has always been, always wait until you need something. I will say, this chat is going crazy with Windows computer recommendations. You want to leave Mac OS behind. Tell me about that feeling. You're like, I just don't need this. I don't want it. Do you want to simplify? No. I'll still use Mac OS at home. I just don't need it for a portable type of device. I'll still use it when I'm at home, and I'm locked into iMessage, part of the Apple ecosystem, so can't leave that behind. You got the best of both worlds. You got everything. So you don't need an iPad for much. How much do you want to spend in your heart? Trying to make it emotional. In my heart? Yeah. In your heart, what's the biggest number that you'll spend? Probably like $700, $800, around there. Get a very good iPad for that. One nice thing is that as these new iPads come out, I don't know. Look at you. You're thinking about buying an iPad right now. No, no, no. I just bought an iPad. Here's... There it is. And I feel terrible about it. It's so expensive. It's so much money. The jump from $650 for the 64 gigabyte iPad Pro up to the 256 gigabyte. That's a $150 jump for an SD card worth of storage. Pissed me off. I got open box discount at Best Buy, so I'm doing okay. I feel sick to my stomach that I spent that much on a tablet computer though. When you can buy an Android tablet for like $100 or $200. But it's going to enrich your life. I hope so. What I hope you find in the iPad life is simplicity and streamlined thought process. And no back strain. Single tasking and no back strain. And dongles. Hundreds of thousands of dongles. All right, so I hope you figure it out, man. I cannot for the life... I think my emotion when I think about iPads is just confusion. Have you ever tried to work full time on an iPad? No. No, no, no. I need a laptop. I think phone and laptop combo is the strongest. That's the move. Phone and laptop. We have lots of tablet, full on tablet people here. All right, we have one more question. Austin has a question about Bluetooth and Android. And I feel like all Bluetooth questions I defer to Ashley Carman. So Austin, tell us what's going on. I'm a proud Android user. I love my Pixel 2. I also loved my Jaybird X2s until they died about two days ago. And they're still not a good replacement for them. You know, Apple, they have their positives are great. I mean, they don't fit in my ear, so I don't bother. But Pixel Buds, they just didn't live up. And I don't want to spend $160 on something that doesn't live up. I'm waiting for a good option. I don't want to know when that is. It makes me sad. Why did your Jaybirds die? They just died. They're gone. Yeah, I've had them for three years now. So maybe it was just their time. Do you feel like you've mourned your Jaybirds? No, no, no. Now my existence is pained because I spent $25 on a replacement and those hurt. And you're not really into living the USB-C headphone dongle life. Because the Pixel 2 dongle is just gross. Well, I mean, that's fine when I'm just sitting at my desk. But if I'm out running, I don't want to be tethered to a cord. It's going to fall out of my ears. And you want in-ears. I like to be able to crane my neck around in every direction. Have you heard of the Neck Speaker? Why can't you buy replacement ones? I'm confused why you can't just buy new ones. I mean, I could, but for the $50 that I would spend on a replacement pair of X2s, I might as well try to find that good option that has 5.0 and a quick pairing feature similar to the Pixel Buds and even better connectivity. But it doesn't seem to exist. Yeah, Qualcomm announced a new chip. So we're basically at CES. So we're still waiting for manufacturers to ship stuff with that new chip. The spec for audio over 5.0 isn't even out, isn't even ready yet. I feel like what I did is I got some Beats. And I'm using them with the iOS, obviously. But I got basically a relatively cheap pair. Like $99 Beats one. And I just don't listen to music. Sorry, Beats X, that's what I meant. They have the W one. Yes, correct. Yeah, just like basically, this is a time where music is not for me. This is a time where only spoken word until technology catches up with music from phones again. Basically, Austin, I think what I want to tell everyone is have courage. Because removing these headphone jacks was a great idea that everyone supports. And this problem never happens to anyone. No, I don't have any thoughts about that. I think Austin is telling me that laughter is the best medicine. Here, I'll tell you right now, you can listen to the Vergecast. Ashley's got a great show called Why'd You Push That Button. We're making spoken word content. But I will say about your J-birds, three years for a gadget, that's a lot. Especially a gadget that you work as hard as it. And it sounds like it worked well for you and that you're having trouble replacing. So just make sure you take a little bit of time and think about the loss in the end of that time. Or buy something cheap and wait for something to come out, which is always better. Find a store with a good return policy. All right, we got one last question. Thank you so much, Austin. I appreciate that one. Thanks, guys. There's nothing that riles us up more than headphones. I got to be honest with you. David has feelings about Google's messaging strategy. Hey, buddy. How are you? Doing well. How are you guys? All right. Tell us. Tell us your emotions. So my question for you guys is how much longer should I stick with Google Voice? I've been using it for four or five years now. And mostly that's because I work from home. It's really convenient to answer phone calls on the computer as well as send text messages. But that Hangouts experience is just getting worse and worse and worse. It's really terrible on Windows now. And it is not a fun app to use on Android. Google's been talking about messaging and their ideas for years and years. But we're not seeing it come to fruition. Should I stick with it? Should I finally give up and change my number? What do you guys think? Man, that's tough. That's like that is maybe the hardest, most emotionally because changing your phone number is a lot. That's a lot. But Google Voice is like abandonware at this point as near as I can tell. So I like I don't know what you use. Do you use the voice features of Google Voice? Do you have it like routed around to different phones? I don't use that. I have it come through to my personal phone, but I mostly use it for kind of answering phone calls on the on the computer or talking or sending text messages on the computer. It's nice to kind of have two numbers sometimes. But you know, at the end of the day, in voices, the voice app has started to see some updates. But Google keeps talking about how they're going to, you know, figure out voice and messaging and all of that. And it just doesn't seem like they they're going anywhere with it. If you're not careful, Deeter is going to wheel in another conspiracy board. This is all he thinks. Here's I'm going to I'm going to make a suggestion. Are you in you're on an Android phone, you're on an iPhone. I am. Wait, I use a Google Pixel XL. Here's my recommendation. It's going to be wild. You're not gonna like it. The chat's gonna hate it. Throw everything away fully into the iMessage ecosystem. No, don't do it. Just be bold, man. Stay strong. Stay strong. That list of things you said you do is the reason I can't switch away from iOS. Because I can text from my computer because the voicemail are not great, but they work. Other people have it. The apps are everywhere, at least on Apple's ecosystem. That lock in is strong. What you are feeling is the pain of having a neglectful jailer. I've been in this jail, I just wish you would pay attention to me. I'm distracted. Yeah, it's like I'm in your prison, man. Come on. Right. I think I have three Google Home devices spread throughout our house. And so it's like, I want to I want to live in Google's ecosystem. They just sometimes make it harder than it should be, maybe. You are urging Dieter to break into this. I don't think that there is another ecosystem that lets you do voice plus messaging the way that Google Voice did and the way that kind of Apple's thing does. Because Apple will let you take it from home. Because what I would recommend is to look around for like a beautiful prison that really wants you there. And that does seem to be Apple. I got you. I got you. Now, I think this is the question, in addition to how the hell do headphones work now, but the question of like the next moment in technology is, is there going to be a messaging service in the United States? Because outside United States, you have WhatsApp and LINE and Telegram. But in the United States, will there be another cohesive messaging service that can rival what Apple's doing with iMessage? The answer is near as I can tell is no. I feel like Facebook Messenger is... Do you use Messenger? No, I don't use Facebook. But I know a lot of people do. I could like hit you up on Instagram though. Instagram DMs. Yeah. Like I almost feel like there is an emerging usage pattern that is basically like find people where they spend their time. Like if someone's a Snap user, like message them on Snapchat. If they use Instagram a lot, message them on Instagram. They're a green bubble on Facebook, message them on Facebook. Because that means they're active. They like to message you and I message... Sorry. Another choice for you, David, is to refuse to be in any one prison. And just go to everyone else's prison. I appreciate David's loyalty. So David, I think you should feel proud of how loyal you are. You really didn't give up when you could have given up. Google lets you down. You don't let Google down. That's for sure. Exactly. All right. They're not rewarding that loyalty, but thanks guys. Thanks, David. I appreciate it, man. We got to wrap up. We have one more here. I'm just going to put this out there. Enough with Android and Apple. Let's talk about Microsoft. Microsoft's been rolling stuff to Android after the death of Windows phones. I mean, I'm sorry that Windows phone is dead, but you got to move on, man. You just got to let it go, Christian. I'm still sad about it. You know what? There is a point of hope. You know, Dieter was talking about Fuchsia in his crazy conspiracy theory board. It's a more modular operating system. And that was what really inspired me about Windows phone is this idea that developers can make small pieces that can be assembled by the operating system into a UI that can be kind of seamless instead of this bouncing in and out of apps for the rest of our lives. Or Windows phone will just come back. You can have hope in your heart. All right. That was Sugar Breaker. Thank you so much for everybody for watching. We brought it up a couple of times, but do listen to Ashley's podcast, when you push that button. Thank you. The episode came out today. Yeah. From South by. Live at South by. That was great. So listen to that. First cast on Thursday. We'll be doing that. It's an audio show. You can't watch that. You can watch the intro. I watched the first cast from South by. I watched the live stream. It's out there. It's out there. You can't hide from me. I tried to hide it. All right. We will be back next week with all sorts of crazy gadgets. Your questions, the chat, the whole thing. Sugar Breaker Live, four o'clock Eastern on Tuesdays. Thank you so much. Thank you to Haim, Dan and Dieter. Thank you especially to Dieter for just having a beautiful, a beautiful mind. But we'll be back next week. We'll see you there. Bye for now. You
 Hello and welcome to Circuit Breaker, the Verge's live gadget show.
 I'm Neal I. Patel, I'm the editor of The Verge.
 This is Paul Miller.
 We're here again.
 It's happening to you one more time.
 Hi, Mr. I. We actually have a huge show today.
 We've got a bunch of crazy Android phones from China, all the flagships, including the
 Mi Mix 2, which you can't buy here.
 So we're going to check that out.
 We've got a great Ask Circuit Breaker about the future of Google, which is going to be
 really interesting.
 The last segment of the show, I'm super excited about.
 We're bringing back emotional tech support.
 Yeah.
 So we probably can't help you with your tech problems, but Ashley's going to be here.
 And you can call us.
 That number up, it's 1-844-4EMOTION.
 And we'll just be there with you.
 Commiserate with you, I think, mostly.
 Yeah.
 So start calling.
 That's the last segment of the show.
 We're not going to get through it for a little bit.
 So call 1-844-4EMOTION.
 We'll do emotional tech support.
 But we're going to start with Haim and Android P. You've got to load it.
 This is what, a first gen Pixel?
 It's a first gen Pixel.
 We have the first early developer preview, which launched last week.
 It's loaded on here.
 It's a very early preview.
 If you're not a developer and you don't have like a spare device installed on, don't install
 this on your main phone.
 Yeah.
 One, there's nothing cool enough on here that's worth the hassle.
 And two, it's really unstable.
 I just like that there's a notch on this phone right now.
 So yeah, that is one of the big things you can do is simulate a notch.
 No longer do you have to use an Android device.
 Or like a piece of black tape.
 Yeah.
 So at MWC, which was just a couple weeks ago, we saw a whole bunch of new phones.
 I think Vlad wrote an article for us, bad iPhone notches are happening to good Android
 phones because the software so far is not ready for notches.
 So there is aping Apple with a notch.
 The hardware manufacturers are aping Apple, but Android is just like a mess because of
 these notches.
 Android P is going to make Android ready for the notch.
 You can actually see if you add the notch or take it away, it'll actually change how
 big this bar is on top.
 Android will be able to dynamically adjust itself for notches.
 There's some other UI stuff.
 The clock has moved over to the top left from the top right where it used to be.
 It handles notifications differently.
 Instead of getting this nice string of icons going across, it will only display four.
 But yeah, notches will work better.
 So the whole point of this is not that Android will automatically, because you can see it's
 just a software notch.
 This is for developers who are going to build for Android P so they can simulate a notch
 to see how their apps are going to...
 Exactly.
 Because right now the only things that run the Android P preview are pixels and pixels
 don't have notches, and if you want to test Android P on a hardware device with a notch,
 you need to do this.
 It's horrible.
 Yeah.
 The other new thing is...
 But you can change the look of that notch.
 Android phones have all kinds of different notches.
 You can actually change your simulated notch based on...
 I want to get 10 minutes of solid...
 Notch simulation.
 Notch simulation coverage.
 This is why we do a live show.
 This is why this is a live show.
 Yeah, you can actually not only change...
 These are in developer options.
 Yeah, this is in developer options.
 Right now the chat is just trying to guess what the P is going to stand for.
 My money is on Popsicle personally.
 Popsicle, we got Pi.
 Can we look at these different...
 Look at these actual different options.
 So you got...
 Wait, wait, wait.
 Just pull it up.
 This is very much an essential phone.
 This is like your essential phone.
 There's narrow display cutout, tall display cutout, wide display cutout.
 That's what they're calling it.
 So this is like you're building an app.
 What's it going to look like on the essential phone?
 And then you just ruin your own phone a little bit and you're good to go.
 Yeah, because you want to make sure that you're avoiding putting any crucial UI stuff up there.
 We got a peppermint guess here.
 Oh, peppermint's not bad.
 Yeah.
 There are a lot more options with P than with O. When we were doing the O guessing, we were
 just scraping the bottom of the barrel.
 It's like Google's either paying Oreo or nothing.
 P is for possibilities.
 Oh my God, Paul.
 All right.
 So we also have some hints of what might be some new UI.
 So if you look closely at the dock, the dock actually looks a little different.
 There's some rounded corners over here.
 The color is a little different to make it stand out more.
 The notification menu is very different.
 That's very Apple.
 It's very Apple.
 So is this the Android?
 You want to see very Apple is these very Apple rounded notification buttons.
 And then you can kind of tap on them.
 Is that very Apple?
 Pull it down.
 This is exactly how an iPhone notification works.
 This is very similar to what-
 Look, I'm all in favor of that.
 That pull down to quick reply is a great idea on the iPhone.
 Is this the Pixel version of Android that we're looking at or the stock Android?
 Because the Pixel version has diverged from what I think of as stock Android.
 We also don't know because the only devices that the P preview can run on are Pixels.
 So it could just be that this is what the Pixel one looks like.
 It could be that none of this is coming to any other versions.
 It could just be that this is early stuff and Google hasn't decided.
 It could be that there's a massive white rounded bubble overhaul of Android P and Google just
 isn't ready to show that off yet.
 Yeah.
 And there's a bunch of security stuff on the right.
 So the biggest thing on the security side is that Google's revoking the ability of apps
 that are no longer of apps that are idle to have access to the mic and camera, which is
 basically if you're someone who believes that Facebook is secretly listening to you and
 spying on all your conversations-
 Go back and forth on it.
 Lately I'm yes.
 So this should hopefully squish that rumor once and for all.
 And then you buy a Google Home Mini and just let Google Home do the-
 Google wants to be the only one that listens to you.
 That's right.
 Yeah.
 All right.
 So that's Android P. It's super early with Android P. Like Haim said, you can get it
 right now and put it on a Pixel if you have one, but you shouldn't on your primary.
 There's a long list of changes there, like API changes.
 This is something that a developer can call from Google software to enhance their apps.
 Yeah, so their apps are ready.
 So their apps are ready so that when they launch P, there's a bunch of P in all the
 apps.
 Yeah, for all the phones that will run Android P when it launches.
 Oh, yeah.
 All right.
 We'll get to that.
 All right.
 Haim, you've got another thing for us.
 It's a real P-themed show.
 P-themed show.
 Tomorrow is Pi Day.
 Tomorrow is Pi Day.
 314.
 314.
 So in honor of that, we have a Raspberry Pi.
 And I will say this to the audience.
 They won't tell me what's about to happen.
 I was made to leave the room during rehearsal.
 I was not shown the rundown.
 I don't know what Haim is about to do.
 And I'm very excited.
 So we have here, Paul can...
 So we're like, I basically want people to understand what is so cool about the Raspberry
 Pi.
 And I think it can be a little intimidating for people because they see exposed circuitry
 and like, well, that's not for me.
 But it's a $35 Linux computer that you can do cool hardware projects.
 So we're like, what's a cool hardware project?
 We sit right next to Ashley Carman, who has a wonderful podcast called Why'd You Push
 That Button.
 So we made a Why'd You Push That Button button.
 Okay.
 What does it do?
 Does it just entice you to push the button?
 Well, you're about to find out.
 I'll just see.
 All right.
 All right.
 Basically, if everything goes according to plan, you will push this button and you will
 hear the word why.
 All right.
 I'm ready.
 If everything doesn't go according to plan, you'll learn a lot about the Raspberry Pi
 in the process.
 It will light on fire and kill us all.
 All right.
 Let's see this.
 So let's just walk through what we have here.
 First of all, Raspberry Pi, Linux computer, everything's just kind of running off this
 tiny micro SD card is the whole operating system.
 So when you buy a Pi, it's like $35 or like you get a kit for a little bit more so you
 can get a case and stuff.
 And it will come typically with an SD card that has Linux pre-installed.
 So all you do is you literally plug it in the USB power, boot up, plug in, HDMI, plug
 in, mouse and keyboard, and you have a completely working computer.
 Wow.
 Is this the newest one?
 So this is the generation two.
 This is an older.
 So it's a little slower, but for the purposes of what we're doing, and that's one of the
 beauty of this is that for the purposes, it can handle really low power tests really well.
 So if you're just looking for like a computer to live in a hardware project, it's great
 for that.
 Yeah.
 So the computer breaker stuff that we've done, like when we built the smart mirror, the photo
 booth, those are all living off of Raspberry Pi because it's a great cheap way to get a
 computer that can run advanced code without necessarily needing to spend hundreds of dollars
 on building a small Windows computer.
 And if you want a really simple computer, there's the Pi Zero.
 This is what I built my wearable computer out of.
 Pi Zero is a slower processor, like smaller and fewer plugs, but it's a very similar concept.
 But what makes the Pi different than your average computer is these pins, which I will
 be honest with you, I've found very intimidating and never really did anything with until Pi
 taught me about those.
 Can you explain these pins?
 These are the GPIO pins.
 So these are input and output pins that you can use to easily hook up different hardware
 devices to a Pi.
 And combined with the fact that the Pi runs open source software, it makes it very easy
 to quickly add new hardware to your Pi, new hardware accessories, and configure software
 to do stuff with them.
 So like when we built our own DIY Amazon Echo, we plugged in a mic and light relay that was
 able to just add super good beamforming microphones to the Pi and a light ring for the Alexa part.
 So today we're actually going to plug in this giant red button and set that up.
 This is comically huge.
 So there's two parts to this button.
 So these two pins on the side are for the LED that will make it light up.
 And then these are for input output.
 So we're going to hook up this over here to this is going to go to power.
 If you're doing this at home, you'll note that we just have a bunch of exposed wires
 here.
 Sure do.
 Don't do that.
 It's low voltage, you're gonna be fine.
 It's low voltage, we'll be fine.
 If you're doing this at home.
 Famous last words, man.
 If you're doing this at home, get...
 We've crossed two of the wires.
 Don't worry about it.
 If you're doing this at home, you should get proper clips.
 They make them that attach.
 This is why we do it live so that when we do kill ourselves, there's evidence.
 So we're plugging into actually we're plugging in this one's going to power and then this
 other this blue wire is going to grounds to complete the circuit.
 And one simple way to think of it is the Pi is wired up so that you can like tell the
 Pi, hey, complete this circuit between these two bands.
 Or the Pi could be like, hey, tell me if this circuit is completed between these two bands.
 I'm just making a face.
 Well, it should have turned on and it didn't.
 So I'm actually going to duck under here and consult my handy.
 We could show this.
 We don't have to be secretive.
 So this is this is the pin diagram.
 So this shows what all the pins do.
 There's obviously a lot of things here.
 What are you looking for right now?
 I'm just making sure that this is hooked up.
 So this should be hooked up to power and it's not because it's hooked up to ground.
 So I'm just gonna move everything over.
 I did this during rehearsal too.
 And I promised I was not going to make that mistake live.
 The other thing that's nice, there are alternatives to the Pi.
 There's like the BeagleBone.
 There's a lot of fun tiny computers.
 And if you know what you're doing, it's flickering.
 So you can see it's live?
 Yeah.
 All right.
 All right.
 So this is so we found this Pi in Paul's desk.
 It is a little broken.
 If you nudge that sounds like something Paul has.
 If you nudge the power cable, it immediately reboots.
 Most Raspberry Pis don't do that.
 But ours is special.
 This is like maximum pressure situation.
 All right.
 So then we're going to hook this up.
 This is what this show is for.
 It's basically Mission Impossible-ing a Pi right now.
 Again, the amount of explosion talk that's just sort of lightly weaving its way through
 the segment is very disturbing.
 I don't think we'll explode.
 One thing I like, everything is back up.
 The Pi is back up.
 And our button is wired up.
 OK.
 So Paul, what happens on the Pi?
 So as you can see over here, you just rebooted it.
 I rebooted it again, but now I'm not going to touch it.
 So Paul, did you have to write code?
 If you look over here, you can see the Pi is booting Linux.
 Yeah.
 And it boots pretty fast.
 That's a nice thing.
 It's all running flash memory.
 So here's the important thing about the Pi and why the Pi is so special.
 It is so popular that everything that you want to do or almost everything you want to
 do has already been written for you.
 So we basically copy and pasted some code, and we got it to work.
 That's exactly what I'm going to show you right now.
 So let's pull up.
 The other nice thing is if you've ever used Python, Python is so, so difficult to install
 on a machine, and it comes pre-installed on both Python 2 and 3.
 So here's our code.
 I'll run it, and then I'll explain what's happening.
 So let's run.
 It says it's ready.
 All right.
 You want to push the button?
 I'm super ready.
 We need sound.
 Go ahead.
 Push the button.
 See what happens.
 Probably nothing's going to happen.
 Push the button.
 Oh, hey, look at that.
 It says it's playing, but...
 Look at that headphone jack.
 It has...
 Yeah.
 It's playing.
 It has...
 Yeah.
 Perfect.
 3.5 millimeter headphone jack.
 Okay.
 Come standard.
 Be careful.
 Okay, so now...
 Why?
 Push it again.
 Why?
 Push it again.
 Why?
 Wait, so you just...
 It's randomly playing a sample?
 Yeah, so I'll show you the code here.
 Why?
 So let's walk through the code.
 Can I bring this to meetings?
 Absolutely.
 This is awesome.
 I want to show you the code, Neelay.
 Damn it, Paul.
 Okay.
 You can't do this to me.
 This is too much for me.
 Why?
 I'm turning off the speaker, Neelay.
 Damn it.
 Okay.
 I'm going to teach you how to code.
 I don't want your job to be taken by robots.
 I told you about this.
 Okay.
 So this is literally all I do.
 I know.
 I know.
 I've been replaced.
 Okay.
 GPS.
 GPS.
 GPS.
 Okay.
 GPIO, right?
 Those are these pins that we wired the button into, right?
 And then this is a sound mixer that we just imported Pygame.
 So then we set up the pin.
 We're going to use pin four.
 And then there's some weird stuff with power that I don't understand, so I just copied
 and pasted it.
 Then we take all our sound files out of a folder, and then we wrote this little function
 where it just randomly chooses among the sound files and plays it.
 And then we have this thing called add event detect.
 So we detect if this pin is falling, and then we just run a loop, and then every time we
 detect this event, we play the sound.
 So we see it calls back to the play function.
 So it's called to find a function, and then when it detects the button's been pressed,
 it plays it.
 Hi.
 There we go.
 Okay.
 By the way, Haim Lewis in the chat says that's the worst cable joint I've ever seen.
 He has not seen some of my other cable joints.
 So we have a special present for you and me.
 We're going to upgrade the button.
 Yeah.
 I mean, now what happens?
 Well, we're going to plug in a flash drive, and we're going to copy a file off the flash
 drive.
 We're definitely going to open it in the file manager.
 Are you going to use sound files in the file?
 Oh, yeah.
 Very exciting.
 There's a little bit of Airhorn.mp3.
 This is great.
 So let's just change the code a little bit.
 So let's just do...
 Now it's just going to search the desktop for any mp3 files.
 Okay.
 No.
 You didn't do this for me.
 Is it ready?
 I can't scroll down far enough.
 I don't know if it's ready.
 Yeah.
 Any two buttons.
 All right.
 I'm super excited.
 I'm super ready to learn how to code.
 That's the Raspberry Pi lifestyle.
 I just wanted people to get a vibe for it.
 I think it can be really scary, but there's a ton of resources online.
 Pine has done a bunch of projects.
 I've done some projects.
 We have tutorials on the site.
 It's a fun life.
 Yeah.
 You can make an Airhorn button or a Y button.
 Yeah.
 I mean, I will say that we talk so much about finished products on the show and apps and
 services.
 Just getting in and making your own really helps you understand what's going on.
 Yeah.
 And the stuff is cheap and fun.
 Yeah.
 It's like infinitely hackable.
 And tomorrow's Pi Day.
 Tomorrow's Pi Day.
 Something will happen.
 All right.
 We do a segment every week or lately called Ask Sugar Breaker where you ask us a question
 and Ashley and Jake answer that question.
 So let's take it away.
 Jake.
 I think you got to push the button one more time.
 There we go.
 Thank you for that wonderful intro.
 Last week we had a really great question come in while we were doing the phone call segment,
 but we didn't have time to get to it.
 It's a really big question with a lot to unpack.
 So we're going to do it now.
 The question comes from Jackson and it's basically about Google's giant Android ecosystem.
 And the question is with Google moving toward more closed systems like Android Go and Chromebooks
 that run Android apps, do we think that Google will eventually phase out Android in favor
 of something that works better or is Android just too big now if you put back in Pandora's
 box?
 This is a really interesting question and the place to start is what exactly it means
 that Google is partly closed.
 What is happening?
 Dieter, I thought you were in Austin.
 I'm back.
 This is important.
 If we're talking about something replacing Android, you have to start with Samsung.
 All things with Android start with Samsung.
 Now Samsung is not following the system they're supposed to to update Android.
 They never release updates.
 Google releases a new version of a dessert and then gets put on the processor and then
 the phone maker, they don't do it.
 So Google created this thing, follow the thread, they created Treble.
 And Treble is designed to put all of Samsung in this little box right here so that whenever
 Google wants to update it, they can.
 But really if you're talking about Android updates, don't look at the big updates.
 Don't look at this.
 Follow the thread to here, Google Play.
 Google Play is where all the really important stuff happens in Android.
 That's where Chrome gets updated, it's where apps get updated individually.
 It all just happens on its own.
 And so really you shouldn't be worried about do you have Android P, you should be worried
 you have Google Play apps version 72 or whatever.
 But meanwhile, they know this is happening but they also know that in order to make this
 work they have to have more phones to support it so they have released Android Go which
 is the latest version of Android One.
 Android One still exists but Android Go is another way that other manufacturers like
 Nokia can make Android phones.
 So that's really big in India but it's not so big in China because China doesn't use
 Google Play.
 And so there's other things that are going on here to pay attention to.
 Remember this, follow the thread, there's also Chrome OS.
 What's Chrome OS?
 It runs Google Chrome but it also runs Android apps through the Google Play Store.
 So this is going on but we follow the thread and there's something else happening.
 What is this?
 This is Fuchsia.
 Fuchsia is a next generation operating system that Google is developing.
 Nobody knows what it is, nobody knows what it does but as Paul reminds me all the time,
 Fuchsia runs on a microkernel.
 As you know, when kernels get hot, they pop like popcorn.
 And if you put caramel on popcorn, it's basically a dessert which means that Google could use
 Treble to make Android P, call it popcorn and then if you just follow what's happening
 here, Google will have Android, it will have Chrome OS, it will have Fuchsia and all three
 of them will duke it out.
 And if you want to know if Android is eventually going to get replaced, you just have to watch
 this fight.
 Simple.
 Did that answer your question, Jake?
 Did you make this?
 Oh no, I just have this around all the time.
 Dieter is here everybody.
 Hi, Dieter.
 Where did you come from?
 I just had my board, I was working on it and I heard the question so I came on.
 Well thanks everybody.
 That was Ask Circuit Breaker.
 If you have questions for us, leave them in the chat and then one of our employees will
 attack you.
 That would be great.
 Thanks Jake and Dieter.
 All right, Dan, speaking of China.
 Hey buddy.
 Yeah.
 That was quite a performance.
 I love this so much and I have so many Fuchsia thoughts.
 Can I tell you a very honest story?
 It's like a whole thing.
 Last night Dieter and I were walking to the bar and he just did that for real.
 He just pulled out his ball of yarn and put it on his board.
 That was just what we talked about on the way to the bar last night.
 That's accurate.
 All right, speaking of China, we've got a bunch of Chinese Android phones here from
 Chinese vendors.
 There's some drama happening with this Huawei one in particular.
 This is the Mi Mix 2, you can't get it here.
 But tell us what's happening here.
 Dan's here everybody.
 Hello.
 So what's in front of me are three high-end premium phones that are made by companies in
 China.
 Two of these you can buy in the US.
 This is the OnePlus 5T and the Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
 And then this is the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2, which you can't buy in the US, but you can get in
 a couple other markets across the world.
 Now Xiaomi says that they are coming to the US by the end of 2019, but they basically
 said they've been coming to the US for the past five years.
 So who knows if that'll happen, but that's where it stands today.
 And what's interesting about these is you kind of get like three different looks at
 how Chinese manufacturers are approaching software.
 In terms of hardware, they're all super high-end.
 They're all like top-of-the-line processors, high-resolution screens, nice well-built designs
 and everything.
 And I think they all have like six gigs of RAM or something.
 And they're all running Android 8.0 underneath all of this.
 The OnePlus 5T is going to be the most familiar to those of us in the US that might have been
 using a Pixel or Nexus phone.
 That looks really familiar.
 It's kind of like what we would call stock Android for lack of a better word.
 In what way is it not stock?
 There are some customizations.
 They've got like a separate launcher thing here.
 I don't know if it's enabled right now, but the off-screen has a different display mode.
 They've got some software in there for their camera and things that aren't like Google-specific.
 But if you're looking for like the look and feel of what you get on a Pixel, you're pretty
 close to it with the OnePlus.
 So how did you get that instead of a Pixel?
 Well this is $500.
 There you go.
 There you go.
 And you went and visited.
 You went to China.
 You visited China.
 I did, yeah.
 So OnePlus is actually owned by a larger company called BBK that also owns Oppo and Vivo, a
 couple other brands that are primarily in Asia.
 But this is what they do and they focus on one phone a year.
 This is the 5T, their latest phone.
 It's actually a very good device.
 We reviewed it a few months ago and really like it.
 It's very popular among enthusiasts.
 A couple of issues with the company in terms of like security and privacy and all these
 other concerns.
 But in terms of like hardware, it's pretty solid.
 And then this is the Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
 This is kind of like the conversation piece around Chinese phones.
 This is the bad boy.
 Yeah.
 This is the phone.
 Literally the United States government does not want you to have this phone.
 The man does not want you to have this phone.
 You can buy it in the US.
 You have to order it on lock.
 You can get it from like Amazon, Best Buy and Huawei directly.
 But there's no carrier that sells it which is kind of like a big deal.
 Can I ask you a question?
 Yeah.
 Why do they desaturate their buttons at the bottom?
 I think this is just a theme that those buttons have that kind of color.
 There's a couple of different themes.
 So you're getting a look at the software here and it's a little bit of a mess.
 It's kind of like a – now I can't find the themes.
 It's kind of like a mixture of iOS and Android with like all of the bad parts, each one.
 It's kind of gross in my opinion.
 But you can definitely see where their influence was.
 I mean that is pure iOS right there.
 Yeah.
 A lot of this.
 And so like by default, right now this is configured to have an app launcher tray but
 like by default there's no app tray.
 It's just like iOS with all your apps on the home screen.
 But you can change like the color of the icons and things like that.
 I think that's just the theme on this particular one to answer your question, Paul.
 But this does have like full Google software and Play Store and everything like that.
 AT&T was originally going to be carrying this but that deal fell apart at the last minute
 thanks to –
 Right.
 So this is the conversation.
 Like we were at CES this year.
 We were expecting Huawei to put out this phone on a major US carrier and then it went away
 and Huawei's CEO got on stage and basically like yelled at everybody like a very emotional
 raw moment.
 He said the rest of the world trusts us.
 One day you will too.
 So maybe the phone icon is desaturated because Huawei is sad.
 I think Huawei – so the government basically scuttled AT&T from carrying this phone.
 Huawei put it out here unlocked anyway.
 But now the government is also telling consumers not to buy it.
 Yeah, there's – the heads of FBI and the CIA and other agencies have basically said
 consumers shouldn't buy Huawei products.
 And really like I don't think they're really concerned about this phone in particular.
 They're concerned about Huawei's bigger business which is network infrastructure.
 And so they don't want the phone to be a gateway for Huawei to sell its network infrastructure
 to AT&T for when 5G networks roll out.
 Huawei has a ton of 5G technologies planned.
 This provides a lot of network infrastructure across the world outside of the U.S. and the
 U.S. government does not want that to come into the U.S. for fear of providing back doors
 to the Chinese government because they allege that Huawei has a lot of ties to the Chinese
 government based on its origins.
 Well, in theory.
 That's very true.
 Look, there's a new head of the CIA today.
 Maybe she'll change her mind.
 So the story isn't really about – I mean this phone is kind of like the casualty of
 it all but there's a bigger piece behind that in that – about the network infrastructure
 that the government is going after.
 Tell me about these dual cameras here.
 So this is a Leica branded dual camera system and so unlike say what we see on the iPhone
 X or Galaxy S9 Plus, these are not a wide angle and a telephoto lens.
 It's actually a color camera and a black and white camera.
 And so it will take the data from both captures, combine them together to allegedly provide
 more detail and sharper image quality.
 The image quality is very good out of this.
 It's not quite as good as what you get from a Pixel or Samsung.
 Can you just take straight black and white photos?
 You can.
 Is that actually a Leica camera or is that just a branding deal?
 It's a branding deal.
 I mean Leica will – they'll say that like Leica helps develop it and all that jazz.
 But you know, Leica makes all of its cameras in Germany.
 This is not made in Germany.
 What is going on here?
 So I think that's – you found one of their customizations which is like a unique lock
 screen that gives you shortcuts.
 Wait, can you bring that up again?
 No.
 So let's hit the lock screen and then if you drag up from the bottom, you get shortcuts
 for your calculator or flashlight.
 So this is like stuck with the whole update problem, right?
 How often does this get updated?
 So this is running Android 8.0 right now.
 Huawei doesn't really do a great job of updating to the newer versions of Android.
 They'll launch their device on a certain version and then maybe it will get updated.
 Probably not.
 At least that's been our experience with the ones available.
 So what is this very beautiful phone?
 This is by far one of the most beautiful phones I've ever seen.
 Yeah, this is a really interesting device.
 It's a Mi Mix 2.
 The original Mi Mix from Huawei was one of the first that did this like all edge to edge
 design.
 This one is the second version of it so they've kind of like changed a little bit.
 They've toned it down a little bit but it's made out of ceramic.
 This is actually not glass, it's ceramic which is pretty wild.
 And this is kind of like a look at a software that is very popular in Asian markets whereas
 it is basically nothing like the Android that we're used to from Google and basically looks
 like iOS.
 This is about like as close to iOS as you're going to get if you even look at like the
 multitasking window is like very iOS like.
 And so you can very tell where their inspiration is.
 This version does run the Play Store.
 I think they sell this in India with the Play Store and Singapore outside of China.
 China does not have the Play Store but you can't buy this in the US yet.
 So here's the problem with this phone because I would get this phone in a heartbeat.
 The bezel game is strong.
 This is I mean it's just a beautiful.
 Is this camera any good?
 So you know.
 The front camera, I don't know if you can see this, is down here.
 Yeah.
 It's a little up the nose.
 No notch.
 You can see.
 So we just made the worst trade off ever because this is an LCD right?
 I believe it's an LCD.
 It might be an AMOLED but I believe this model is an LCD.
 So you've got your driver components on here.
 Yes.
 But when you can see this on Paul came and flip this around.
 This is not not super flat.
 Your thumb is about to get it's just going to happen.
 So what you're supposed to do.
 This is true.
 You're supposed to flip it over.
 Yeah.
 Problem solved.
 I don't know what you're complaining about.
 I don't know about that.
 Like that's literally the one thing.
 So like that's a discussion of like you know dealing with the notch right?
 Like they could have put it up here and there's been rumors of the next version of this phone
 where they put to a corner notch that we've seen some images out of China based on that
 we don't know if that's going to happen or not.
 Like the camera is up here in the corner and it does like a little corner cut out.
 By the way I took a black and white photo with this one.
 I love the black and white side of this.
 It's pretty cool.
 Yeah thanks buddy.
 That's that's how I feel.
 That's me on the inside.
 Wait everybody pause your YouTube real quick.
 Get out of here.
 That's enough Paul.
 All right.
 So this one is obviously popular.
 People buy it a lot.
 Is it someone actually in the chat right here.
 Marineco brought up.
 Obviously the government is blocking Huawei from doing this.
 But the government Donald Trump himself put out an executive order preventing Broadcom
 which is not a Chinese company a Singaporean company but preventing Broadcom from buying
 Qualcomm which is a U.S. company.
 Broadcom is going to respond to this by the way by redomiciling to the U.S. and becoming
 a U.S. company.
 We'll see if they saga continues.
 There's like oh there's a lot going on here in terms of particularly Asian companies coming
 to the U.S. and doing stuff here.
 So the one company that's not in this conversation right here is ZTE which is one of the larger
 companies not quite as big as Huawei but getting up to that scale and they provide infrastructure
 and things like that.
 And ZTE has had the same type of like government complaints against it but that hasn't stopped
 it from building a business in the U.S. which is very interesting to me.
 ZTE sells a lot of mid-range low end phones that are branded by T-Mobile branded by AT&T.
 They're all sold by the carriers.
 They don't really have many high end offerings but Huawei hasn't been able to get any of
 that which has been kind of fascinating to me.
 Yeah.
 I mean I think that I just think people care about those mid-range phones right.
 Those are the classic carrier branding deal where you go and you get some OEM to make
 you a phone.
 Yeah.
 I don't think there's a lot of government interest here.
 A big high end splashy we're going to market this phone.
 I think that's I think that's a little bit different in terms of just the options.
 I still don't understand it.
 I don't understand it.
 I mean I'm trying to understand it.
 What don't you understand?
 I don't know what specifically Huawei again when you point out ZTE has all the same ties
 to the Chinese government that Huawei has.
 What specific evils has Huawei done that we're specifically averting.
 I feel like it's very vague.
 So it might be a little a little naive to like ask the government for proof but like
 they haven't really come forward.
 It's all the agencies have said they allege these things they suspect these things but
 there's been no proof provided to the public.
 I don't I mean like personally for me I'm not taking what the government says as to
 whether I would use the Huawei phone or not.
 I'm like looking at it from a very consumer perspective of I wouldn't use this phone because
 the software is miserable.
 Like you should buy a different phone because the software is bad.
 Not because it might be spying on you.
 Here's a question from Nick.
 He asks why does China not have the Play Store.
 This is like a very long and complicated.
 Go ahead.
 Well so basically Google doesn't exist in China because all the companies that do exist
 in China have agreed to give the Chinese government access to their data and Google doesn't has
 not agreed to that.
 So Google doesn't exist in China.
 There's a Play Store.
 Yeah there's a number of American companies that don't exist in China.
 So therefore Google's Play Store does not exist in China either.
 So what's interesting about that is you know company does exist in China is Apple and Apple
 just agreed to move its iCloud data centers in China for Chinese customers to control
 a Chinese company.
 So Apple now contracts out iCloud from a Chinese company to service Chinese users.
 So moving to China because there are a lot of governmental restrictions on what you can
 do and a lot of that.
 The speaker was just like we're done with this.
 So it's interesting the Chinese government is playing the same game with American companies
 by requiring access to data.
 Yeah.
 The American government is kind of firing back.
 But I don't.
 Does that turn on whether you should buy a Huawei phone?
 Like the CEO's argument to CS and you should go watch this video.
 He wrote a long article about it.
 It's on theverge.com.
 His argument is like we're doing business in Africa.
 We're doing business in Europe.
 We're doing business in the Middle East.
 All of these other countries trust us and we're able to work with them.
 Well I do think it's interesting that we have so much of a hardware whether or not it's
 designed in China is built in China.
 And a lot of the engineering progress is happening in China.
 There's this total separation when it comes to software.
 I blame the Chinese government for big.
 You've not blamed two governments.
 Censorious.
 Paul's like I hate the US government.
 I don't trust them.
 Here's a free idea for governments.
 Don't spy on your citizens and don't censor them.
 You're a beautiful man.
 Just ideas.
 I wrote about Stipholid.
 John in the chat is asking is this Huawei's Kirin processor?
 Yes.
 This is using the Huawei I believe it's a Kirin 970 processor and then they like to
 market this coprocessor that's with it for doing AI processing but they all kind of like
 have these kind of coprocessors.
 These two are running Qualcomm Snapdragon 835.
 This one is just real beautiful.
 I'm so taken with this one.
 All right last question.
 Would you actually get one of these if you live in the States over a Pixel or an S9 or
 whatever?
 I think there's a really compelling argument for the OnePlus 5T in that it's only 500 bucks.
 Pixel 2 XL which is roughly the same size screen and everything is running 850 I believe
 last I checked.
 S9 Plus is in that neighborhood as well.
 So you do save a ton of money by going with the OnePlus.
 The thing that you're going to give up is support and local like if you drop and break
 the screen on this OnePlus is based in Shenzhen.
 There's no local place to go to get this fixed.
 Yeah you have free tickets.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 So that might be a concern.
 As I mentioned earlier OnePlus has had some issues late last year they had a security
 breach on the website where a bunch of I believe 40,000 customers credit card info was stolen.
 So they had to like shut that down and switch to PayPal.
 So they are not without issue which maybe gives you a reason to think twice.
 But I think the main reason someone would go with a OnePlus over a Pixel or over any
 other phone is going to be its cost.
 And what's the reason that Xiaomi doesn't come to the US?
 That's a good question.
 I believe the company's line is that they want to provide the best experience they can
 and they're trying to figure out the US market and how to enter it and everything.
 It could be you know there's been speculation for years that it's patent and IP issues given
 how similar it looks to maybe Apple products.
 Was it the original Xiaomi like originally made a splash by just completely ripping out
 the iPhone.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 So they've diverged obviously you know they've got their own ID now and like they're doing
 their own thing but the software is still very similar.
 The packaging is very similar.
 There's a lot of like similarities in how they present the company that you know maybe
 Apple might have issues with.
 I honestly think they don't have a great strategy for breaking into the US.
 And because the US is a very tough market if you are going to make any money and be
 any successful at all you really have to work with carriers which means that you have to
 go through the carrier certification processes and everything which are very difficult and
 very hard to do.
 So carrier certification processes that's where I end this segment.
 It's hard.
 That's the black hole of all interests.
 For example, OnePlus doesn't go through that.
 And so like you can't get a OnePlus phone that runs on Verizon because there's no OnePlus
 phone that will go through past Verizon security or certification services.
 So it's tough.
 It's hard out there.
 Thank you, Dan.
 Thank you.
 I'm going to take this phone from you.
 This one is mine now.
 Paul, you did a thing again.
 Yes.
 This is the second episode of Explain Yourself with your friend Paul Miller.
 Okay.
 After this we're going to take your calls for emotional tech support.
 Ashley is going to join us.
 So call 1-844-4EMOTION if you want to just bear your soul to us about what's happening
 in tech.
 But first let's watch whatever Paul did.
 Do you have a car?
 I do not.
 Do you have a car?
 No.
 Do you have a car?
 Not really.
 Oh, God, no.
 Do you have a car?
 Yes.
 How many cars?
 One car.
 Do you have a flying car?
 I do not have a flying car.
 Keep dreaming.
 Do you have a car?
 I do.
 Do you have a flying car?
 No.
 Do you wish you had a flying car?
 Of course.
 Do you have any flying cars though?
 I do not have any flying cars.
 Keep dreaming, buddy.
 Andy, looking so smug, writing about cars all the time.
 You're going to have to explain yourself.
 This sounds way more threatening than I intend to.
 Andrew Hawkins wrote two stories this week, or last week.
 The Pal5 Liberty claims to be the first commercially available flying car.
 This is very exciting, I think, uneducated about cars that I am.
 But here's another article.
 People are still trying to make cars that morph into helicopters.
 Well, this sounds like we're like just super over it and bored of flying cars.
 Which is it?
 Andy?
 Andy, hello.
 Oh, it's Paul.
 Hey, it's me, Paul.
 Hey, Paul, nice to see you.
 How's it going?
 It's going great.
 I'm going to have you do something that I call explain yourself.
 All right.
 Did you go to a car show last week?
 I didn't.
 Our colleague Vlad Savov went in Geneva.
 So you can say everything you know about these are just, this is just hearsay.
 Yeah, it's circumstantial.
 There's flying cars at the car show.
 There are, yes.
 So that's true?
 It is true, yes.
 There were a couple of so-called flying cars at the Geneva Motor Show.
 Okay, so flying cars are real?
 It depends on what you consider to be a flying car.
 Are they commercially viable?
 Also depends on what you consider to be commercially viable.
 There's a lot of different, lots of speculation around it, but there are a lot of people that
 are pursuing flying cars as a commercial product.
 All right, so this is where we get to explain yourself time.
 I feel like one of the articles made it sound like flying cars are boring and we're over
 them.
 And the other one is like, here's a flying car that you could buy and I'm not bored of
 it.
 I'm not over it.
 Explain yourself.
 Okay, so I think the one that is available to buy is called the PAL5 Liberty.
 And it's actually kind of a crossover between a helicopter or maybe a gyrocopter and a small
 smart style vehicle.
 And the company that makes it, it's based in the Netherlands and they say that you can
 start buying them by the end of the year.
 So if you were so inclined as to risk your life and want to get behind the wheel of one
 of these things and you have a pilot's license as well as a driver's license, you're welcome
 to do that.
 How much?
 I think it's probably in the six figure range.
 I was hearing somewhere around $300,000.
 Okay, and then the other article is like, flying cars, bored of this.
 So that's probably some of my skepticism leeching into the coverage and it's because I've been
 covering this issue for over a year now.
 And there are a lot of companies that are spending a lot of money claiming that flying
 cars are going to be a real product.
 I have some serious doubts.
 I wonder whether or not this is going to be anything outside of like very rich people
 buying these things and using them.
 And there's lots of people like Uber thinks it's going to be actually like a flying taxi
 service available in cities.
 They're setting it up in Dallas and in LA and Dubai.
 So we'll have to see.
 It's just like the technology isn't really there yet as far as making them all electric
 and able to fly.
 So there's a lot of pieces that still need to fall into place.
 If you had to guess which flying car will Paul Miller, a member of the firmly entrenched
 in the middle class, which one will I get into and will take me somewhere?
 If everything goes according to plan and this technology actually comes to fruition and
 there's actually flying taxis available in cities, I would say you're most likely to
 be in an Uber flying taxi more so than anywhere else because they seem to have the vision
 and the money to actually scale the product and make it available in cities.
 Thank you, Andrew.
 Your answers are very good.
 Thank you, Paul.
 I'm happy to do it.
 Well, that was Explain Yourself with your friend Paul Miller.
 I think we really got to the bottom of this one.
 Flying cars soon.
 You heard it here first.
 We're back.
 Paul, you're really onto something there.
 Acousting our reporters in the newsroom.
 Andy was very helpful.
 I learned a lot, I feel like.
 All right.
 Ashley, you're here.
 What's up?
 Hey.
 How are you?
 So you guys actually started Emotional Tech Support ages ago.
 It's back in the... If anybody remembers Facebook Live.
 Back in the Facebook Live.
 We're deep in the archives on our Facebook page.
 Couple of years ago.
 Look back, I had short hair back then.
 Yeah.
 All right.
 Tell the people what to expect.
 The number should be up on the screen.
 You really, really underwent hair transformation.
 I really.
 Well, both of you.
 Yeah, you're absolutely right.
 One of you did better than me.
 Emotional Tech Support.
 That's very true.
 Emotional Tech Support is you call us with your problems that can be about technology,
 but we're not going to fix your technology problem, but we hear you and we feel your
 pain.
 Is that a good... Yeah.
 We're not tech support, so we can't... We will say maybe try turning it off.
 Turn it back on.
 That might help.
 Try reinstalling your printer drivers.
 Yeah.
 But that's about as far as we're going to go.
 So let me offer you this one.
 We'll take some calls.
 So we're having a baby.
 Yes.
 That's great.
 Baby needs a room in my house.
 I've heard this about babies.
 It's important.
 We have to find space for her.
 So I had to totally throw out my office.
 That's the baby's room now.
 So I got rid of all the furniture, all the shelves, and I've just been throwing away
 gadgets and recycling them and throwing away wires.
 And Becky says that every time I throw one away, I take a wire and put it in the bag,
 I make soft moaning sounds.
 Because they're all little adventures.
 I remember when I plugged that into that one thing.
 Yeah.
 Remember when Firewire 400 was a really important piece of my life?
 How far back do these gadgets go?
 I mean, I threw away a SCSI cable, like an old...
 Was that for a scanner?
 No, it was for a hard drive.
 Ooh, a SCSI.
 An ancient...
 It's like that part of you that really feels like, what if I need this cable again and
 then I'll be a hero?
 The everyday...
 Isn't that what you were saving them for though?
 That's not why you were saving the cables.
 I just think the moments for you to be a hero in your life are very limited.
 If you can have a drawer of heroism, then you should have that in your life.
 Cable heroism.
 They're not just signifiers of good times gone by.
 It's not like I looked at them.
 I just had three drawers full of cables and gadgets.
 I brought a bunch of them around the set now.
 If anybody wants my Canon PowerShot S100, by all means let me know.
 It's sitting right over here.
 All right, we have our first call.
 Ken has an iPhone future expectations question.
 This is going to be emotional.
 Ken, what's up, man?
 All right, so iPhone 10, decent screen, not just terrible.
 Price is horrible.
 iPhone 10 Plus expected.
 What are we going to see that'll validate an increased price, the same shabby screen
 and overall just kind of boring?
 I mean, iOS is great.
 It's reliable.
 It's fast.
 It works with the hardware.
 The chipset, all that's good, but it's boring.
 I have this-
 Jenna, I want to just laser in on the emotion here.
 Boredom.
 Yeah.
 Frustration.
 Are you more frustrated?
 I am frustrated.
 I am underwhelmed and I'm overcharged.
 Wow.
 Wow.
 A lot of adjectives.
 So here's what I think you should do.
 I think you should find another gadget that isn't like where the market isn't quite as
 developed and fall into that.
 I think the phone market, we've had a solid decade of like super intense phone market,
 crazy competition.
 And now, by the way, I disagree with you that the screen is shabby.
 The notch is annoying.
 The screen is beautiful, except for the notch.
 But we've had a decade of like phone hyper enthusiasm.
 And now you want that to be like-
 So you're saying Kin should find a different industry that has that rapid iteration to
 focus on so he can enjoy progress again.
 So you can like feel fine where there's not going to be a winner.
 What do you think, Ashley?
 Well, I'm going through the same issue.
 Smart home accessories.
 No, man.
 Not smart home.
 I love smart home accessories.
 Like I have a lot of them.
 There's no fire in that industry.
 Maybe a drone.
 Yeah, a drone could be fun.
 Yeah, like back a small drone company that isn't going to win.
 You know, and like be really into that.
 I've gotten into modular synthesis a little bit.
 Been following that a little bit of the synthesizer world.
 But what were you saying?
 I'm in the exact same place as Kin where I need to replace my phone and I'm looking at
 the iPhone 10 and it still runs the same iOS I have on my 6S.
 So the software isn't a big differentiator for me.
 I see the notch.
 I see the big screen.
 And I'm like that price tag is insane.
 And I'm going through the same thing where I'm like, what do I do?
 I like it, but not that much.
 You feel like for a thousand dollars, it should change my life.
 Exactly.
 Exactly.
 Exactly.
 We can find one for you.
 What's the thing that grabs you?
 And I know you're going to say smart home stand, but I'm telling you, once you install
 like the door lock and you're like, great, you got to you need an upgrade cycle.
 What are your dreams?
 What are my dreams?
 Listen, I'm big into phones.
 I have the Mavic Pro, which is more than I need.
 Honestly, the new DJI drones are good.
 They're great for kids.
 Mavic Pro is good.
 I got the Pixel 2X all over there.
 I got the S8 Plus.
 I got the Sony.
 I have the iPhone X.
 I'm all over the place because I'm looking for that.
 You know what happened?
 Remember when the Note 7 came out and there was finally a breath of fresh air and then
 it had that issue.
 And then the-
 Yeah, the breath of fresh air, by the way, was the air from an explosion whooshing by
 your feet.
 Yeah, that was smoke.
 Yeah.
 It was mostly smoke, but it was fresh air.
 You mentioned a couple of different products now.
 It sounds like you're into photography, right?
 You've got a flying camera.
 You've got some handheld cameras.
 Why not go all in-
 Yeah, do video and photo.
 Why not go all in on the Canon versus Nikon split or Sony's coming to disrupt them all?
 You want some deep emotions, get on a camera message board.
 Go on Nikonfans.com and be like, Canon for life.
 There is a great theory that I heard that Sony is holding itself back, that it's so
 far beyond Canon and Nikon that it's just trickling out features.
 And if they ever try to compete with Sony, Sony will slam down a large set of features.
 I'm also wondering if instead of boredom, you should try to have gratitude because you're
 bored, but at least the phones are good enough now where you're not like, this barely works.
 I'd like this.
 This is a really actually-
 Everyone's nicer than us.
 I should be happy that my current technology is so good that I don't have to upgrade it.
 Yeah.
 I think it is boring, but we're at that stage where it's like, well, it works and it's good.
 All right.
 Thank you so much, Ken.
 Thank you, Ken.
 I appreciate you guys.
 You guys do great work and I'll talk to you guys later.
 I'm going to wait.
 I don't know.
 I'm going to go grab the LGD30 and play with the walker.
 We just gave you all this advice about another thing, man.
 You got to stop the cycle.
 All right.
 Christian in the chat is asking, how do we feel about Apple versus Android, which is
 basically the same question, but I think the emotional tenor of that question is different.
 Right here.
 What do you feel about Apple versus Android?
 What are your emotions?
 We have a follow up in the chat here.
 What did it say?
 Someone suggested, Ashley, oh yeah, John suggested that you need to go to Android.
 I feel like there's a lot.
 I mean, I think-
 There's a lot tied up.
 I feel like a lot of us who are tied to the iPhone are tied into iMessage and there's
 so many emotions tied up with iMessage because all your friends are there.
 The group texts are way better on iMessage.
 That green bubble.
 Yeah.
 I will say I've been thinking about Android a lot because I feel like Android matches
 more of my core principles.
 Not Google as a company, but Android as software that's relatively open source, relatively
 customizable and hackable.
 So I've been really thinking about switching to that.
 The blue text messages in my family group chat specifically is where it's most important,
 was holding me to iOS, but my brother just switched to a dumb phone.
 He's going like Luddite.
 So he's already broken the family group text.
 So now I'm not the bad guy.
 I can switch to Android, go green text and still be better.
 So what are you guys doing about... So there's just no more group text.
 Your brother just killed the group text.
 Yeah, no, he's just dead to us.
 He's over.
 That's how I feel about Android phones.
 Every time I see Deidre on one of his cool Android phones, I just feel hard.
 We had to move the whole family to Google Photos.
 You can run Linux on your Android phone.
 You can do so many interesting different weird things with Android phones.
 All right.
 By the way, the number is 1-844-4EMOTION.
 Just call us with your emotional problems.
 Creighton, do we have somebody else on the line?
 I suspect that we do.
 Creighton, by the way, is back there screening away.
 So let's see what's going on.
 But Paul, you also probably have some emotions.
 All right.
 Creighton says we have one coming through.
 Oh, okay.
 I can tell almost before... His name apparently is Mr. Standby.
 I can tell a real quick story.
 My roommate has discovered that he can just yell things at Alexa and set alarms for me.
 Yeah.
 So it's like, Alexa, wake me up at 5 AM.
 Alexa, wake me up at 4 AM.
 We set like 10 alarms last night for me.
 Did it work?
 Well, yeah.
 Did you wake up?
 He woke up.
 All right.
 We have Sohan on the line.
 I'm being told this is an iPad question.
 Bring him on.
 Sohan, what you got?
 Okay.
 So it's been a couple months since iOS 11 came out, and I want to buy an iPad now.
 I've made that leap to leave macOS behind.
 I'm a student, so I don't really need a whole lot.
 And I don't know if I want to wait until WWDC to see if there's going to be a new iPad this
 year with like Face ID or Animoji, or if I should just buy the current iPad Pro.
 I mean, you've had a couple... There's rumors out there that a new one's coming in March.
 Let me ask you this.
 Why did you decide to leave macOS behind?
 I just don't like carrying around my 15-inch MacBook Pro.
 I have the Touch Bar version, and I feel like I don't need-
 Oh, I like that emotion.
 I don't need enough computing power to justify carrying four pounds of stuff in my backpack.
 Have you tried-
 I'm just lazy.
 Have you tried full-time iPad life?
 I have.
 I have.
 My mom has an iPad.
 Okay.
 All right.
 It's kind of-
 I have some general recommendations.
 Is it Mac Rumors that has the buying guide?
 Yeah.
 If you just Google it, there's a buying guide that you can search for, and it covers all
 Apple products and tells you when they typically get refreshed, and so it will kind of tell
 you like, this is a good time to buy or this is a bad time to buy.
 My general tech advice has always been, always wait until you need something.
 I will say, this chat is going crazy with Windows computer recommendations.
 You want to leave Mac OS behind.
 Tell me about that feeling.
 You're like, I just don't need this.
 I don't want it.
 Do you want to simplify?
 No.
 I'll still use Mac OS at home.
 I just don't need it for a portable type of device.
 I'll still use it when I'm at home, and I'm locked into iMessage, part of the Apple ecosystem,
 so can't leave that behind.
 You got the best of both worlds.
 You got everything.
 So you don't need an iPad for much.
 How much do you want to spend in your heart?
 Trying to make it emotional.
 In my heart?
 Yeah.
 In your heart, what's the biggest number that you'll spend?
 Probably like $700, $800, around there.
 Get a very good iPad for that.
 One nice thing is that as these new iPads come out, I don't know.
 Look at you.
 You're thinking about buying an iPad right now.
 No, no, no.
 I just bought an iPad.
 Here's... There it is.
 And I feel terrible about it.
 It's so expensive.
 It's so much money.
 The jump from $650 for the 64 gigabyte iPad Pro up to the 256 gigabyte.
 That's a $150 jump for an SD card worth of storage.
 Pissed me off.
 I got open box discount at Best Buy, so I'm doing okay.
 I feel sick to my stomach that I spent that much on a tablet computer though.
 When you can buy an Android tablet for like $100 or $200.
 But it's going to enrich your life.
 I hope so.
 What I hope you find in the iPad life is simplicity and streamlined thought process.
 And no back strain.
 Single tasking and no back strain.
 And dongles.
 Hundreds of thousands of dongles.
 All right, so I hope you figure it out, man.
 I cannot for the life... I think my emotion when I think about iPads is just confusion.
 Have you ever tried to work full time on an iPad?
 No.
 No, no, no.
 I need a laptop.
 I think phone and laptop combo is the strongest.
 That's the move.
 Phone and laptop.
 We have lots of tablet, full on tablet people here.
 All right, we have one more question.
 Austin has a question about Bluetooth and Android.
 And I feel like all Bluetooth questions I defer to Ashley Carman.
 So Austin, tell us what's going on.
 I'm a proud Android user.
 I love my Pixel 2.
 I also loved my Jaybird X2s until they died about two days ago.
 And they're still not a good replacement for them.
 You know, Apple, they have their positives are great.
 I mean, they don't fit in my ear, so I don't bother.
 But Pixel Buds, they just didn't live up.
 And I don't want to spend $160 on something that doesn't live up.
 I'm waiting for a good option.
 I don't want to know when that is.
 It makes me sad.
 Why did your Jaybirds die?
 They just died.
 They're gone.
 Yeah, I've had them for three years now.
 So maybe it was just their time.
 Do you feel like you've mourned your Jaybirds?
 No, no, no.
 Now my existence is pained because I spent $25 on a replacement and those hurt.
 And you're not really into living the USB-C headphone dongle life.
 Because the Pixel 2 dongle is just gross.
 Well, I mean, that's fine when I'm just sitting at my desk.
 But if I'm out running, I don't want to be tethered to a cord.
 It's going to fall out of my ears.
 And you want in-ears.
 I like to be able to crane my neck around in every direction.
 Have you heard of the Neck Speaker?
 Why can't you buy replacement ones?
 I'm confused why you can't just buy new ones.
 I mean, I could, but for the $50 that I would spend on a replacement pair of X2s, I might
 as well try to find that good option that has 5.0 and a quick pairing feature similar
 to the Pixel Buds and even better connectivity.
 But it doesn't seem to exist.
 Yeah, Qualcomm announced a new chip.
 So we're basically at CES.
 So we're still waiting for manufacturers to ship stuff with that new chip.
 The spec for audio over 5.0 isn't even out, isn't even ready yet.
 I feel like what I did is I got some Beats.
 And I'm using them with the iOS, obviously.
 But I got basically a relatively cheap pair.
 Like $99 Beats one.
 And I just don't listen to music.
 Sorry, Beats X, that's what I meant.
 They have the W one.
 Yes, correct.
 Yeah, just like basically, this is a time where music is not for me.
 This is a time where only spoken word until technology catches up with music from phones
 again.
 Basically, Austin, I think what I want to tell everyone is have courage.
 Because removing these headphone jacks was a great idea that everyone supports.
 And this problem never happens to anyone.
 No, I don't have any thoughts about that.
 I think Austin is telling me that laughter is the best medicine.
 Here, I'll tell you right now, you can listen to the Vergecast.
 Ashley's got a great show called Why'd You Push That Button.
 We're making spoken word content.
 But I will say about your J-birds, three years for a gadget, that's a lot.
 Especially a gadget that you work as hard as it.
 And it sounds like it worked well for you and that you're having trouble replacing.
 So just make sure you take a little bit of time and think about the loss in the end of
 that time.
 Or buy something cheap and wait for something to come out, which is always better.
 Find a store with a good return policy.
 All right, we got one last question.
 Thank you so much, Austin.
 I appreciate that one.
 Thanks, guys.
 There's nothing that riles us up more than headphones.
 I got to be honest with you.
 David has feelings about Google's messaging strategy.
 Hey, buddy.
 How are you?
 Doing well.
 How are you guys?
 All right.
 Tell us.
 Tell us your emotions.
 So my question for you guys is how much longer should I stick with Google Voice?
 I've been using it for four or five years now.
 And mostly that's because I work from home.
 It's really convenient to answer phone calls on the computer as well as send text messages.
 But that Hangouts experience is just getting worse and worse and worse.
 It's really terrible on Windows now.
 And it is not a fun app to use on Android.
 Google's been talking about messaging and their ideas for years and years.
 But we're not seeing it come to fruition.
 Should I stick with it?
 Should I finally give up and change my number?
 What do you guys think?
 Man, that's tough.
 That's like that is maybe the hardest, most emotionally because changing your phone number
 is a lot.
 That's a lot.
 But Google Voice is like abandonware at this point as near as I can tell.
 So I like I don't know what you use.
 Do you use the voice features of Google Voice?
 Do you have it like routed around to different phones?
 I don't use that.
 I have it come through to my personal phone, but I mostly use it for kind of answering
 phone calls on the on the computer or talking or sending text messages on the computer.
 It's nice to kind of have two numbers sometimes.
 But you know, at the end of the day, in voices, the voice app has started to see some updates.
 But Google keeps talking about how they're going to, you know, figure out voice and messaging
 and all of that.
 And it just doesn't seem like they they're going anywhere with it.
 If you're not careful, Deeter is going to wheel in another conspiracy board.
 This is all he thinks.
 Here's I'm going to I'm going to make a suggestion.
 Are you in you're on an Android phone, you're on an iPhone.
 I am.
 Wait, I use a Google Pixel XL.
 Here's my recommendation.
 It's going to be wild.
 You're not gonna like it.
 The chat's gonna hate it.
 Throw everything away fully into the iMessage ecosystem.
 No, don't do it.
 Just be bold, man.
 Stay strong.
 Stay strong.
 That list of things you said you do is the reason I can't switch away from iOS.
 Because I can text from my computer because the voicemail are not great, but they work.
 Other people have it.
 The apps are everywhere, at least on Apple's ecosystem.
 That lock in is strong.
 What you are feeling is the pain of having a neglectful jailer.
 I've been in this jail, I just wish you would pay attention to me.
 I'm distracted.
 Yeah, it's like I'm in your prison, man.
 Come on.
 Right.
 I think I have three Google Home devices spread throughout our house.
 And so it's like, I want to I want to live in Google's ecosystem.
 They just sometimes make it harder than it should be, maybe.
 You are urging Dieter to break into this.
 I don't think that there is another ecosystem that lets you do voice plus messaging the
 way that Google Voice did and the way that kind of Apple's thing does.
 Because Apple will let you take it from home.
 Because what I would recommend is to look around for like a beautiful prison that really
 wants you there.
 And that does seem to be Apple.
 I got you.
 I got you.
 Now, I think this is the question, in addition to how the hell do headphones work now, but
 the question of like the next moment in technology is, is there going to be a messaging service
 in the United States?
 Because outside United States, you have WhatsApp and LINE and Telegram.
 But in the United States, will there be another cohesive messaging service that can rival
 what Apple's doing with iMessage?
 The answer is near as I can tell is no.
 I feel like Facebook Messenger is...
 Do you use Messenger?
 No, I don't use Facebook.
 But I know a lot of people do.
 I could like hit you up on Instagram though.
 Instagram DMs.
 Yeah.
 Like I almost feel like there is an emerging usage pattern that is basically like find
 people where they spend their time.
 Like if someone's a Snap user, like message them on Snapchat.
 If they use Instagram a lot, message them on Instagram.
 They're a green bubble on Facebook, message them on Facebook.
 Because that means they're active.
 They like to message you and I message...
 Sorry.
 Another choice for you, David, is to refuse to be in any one prison.
 And just go to everyone else's prison.
 I appreciate David's loyalty.
 So David, I think you should feel proud of how loyal you are.
 You really didn't give up when you could have given up.
 Google lets you down.
 You don't let Google down.
 That's for sure.
 Exactly.
 All right.
 They're not rewarding that loyalty, but thanks guys.
 Thanks, David.
 I appreciate it, man.
 We got to wrap up.
 We have one more here.
 I'm just going to put this out there.
 Enough with Android and Apple.
 Let's talk about Microsoft.
 Microsoft's been rolling stuff to Android after the death of Windows phones.
 I mean, I'm sorry that Windows phone is dead, but you got to move on, man.
 You just got to let it go, Christian.
 I'm still sad about it.
 You know what?
 There is a point of hope.
 You know, Dieter was talking about Fuchsia in his crazy conspiracy theory board.
 It's a more modular operating system.
 And that was what really inspired me about Windows phone is this idea that developers
 can make small pieces that can be assembled by the operating system into a UI that can
 be kind of seamless instead of this bouncing in and out of apps for the rest of our lives.
 Or Windows phone will just come back.
 You can have hope in your heart.
 All right.
 That was Sugar Breaker.
 Thank you so much for everybody for watching.
 We brought it up a couple of times, but do listen to Ashley's podcast, when you push
 that button.
 Thank you.
 The episode came out today.
 Yeah.
 From South by.
 Live at South by.
 That was great.
 So listen to that.
 First cast on Thursday.
 We'll be doing that.
 It's an audio show.
 You can't watch that.
 You can watch the intro.
 I watched the first cast from South by.
 I watched the live stream.
 It's out there.
 It's out there.
 You can't hide from me.
 I tried to hide it.
 All right.
 We will be back next week with all sorts of crazy gadgets.
 Your questions, the chat, the whole thing.
 Sugar Breaker Live, four o'clock Eastern on Tuesdays.
 Thank you so much.
 Thank you to Haim, Dan and Dieter.
 Thank you especially to Dieter for just having a beautiful, a beautiful mind.
 But we'll be back next week.
 We'll see you there.
 Bye for now.
 You