 Hello, and welcome to Control-Alt-Delete, a podcast that is now over. Awww. But that's in front of a live audience! Yeah! Thank you. Thank you. I am Nilay Patel, I'm the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and I'm joined as always by my friend, Verge Executive Editor, Recode Editor-at-Large, the Waltercation himself, Walter S. Mossberg. Hello, friend. Hello, friend. Alright, well, I don't think we have any other business to attend to. Let's just get started. So, this is the last Control-Alt-Delete. It's our 76th one. And, you know, I've been waiting, haven't said much about this, but I have to bring this up tonight. I have a huge grievance. And the grievance is... It's my whole life. That we have to say the name of a certain Verge employee in every episode of the podcast. I'm only going to say it, I'm retiring, I don't care. I'm only going to say it one more time. Dieter Bohm. Ladies and gentlemen. Turn it up! Can I say this before we came on? That's my song. When I think of Dieter, I think of the song that plays over a drone shot of spring break with someone just yelling, turn it up! Because that's what Dieter's like every day. Body shots. Every morning before work. Alright, let's do this podcast. We've had enough famous billionaires telling Walt how great he is. So on the last show, we talked big. Big ideas, future of computing, soaring pronouncements to the industry. That's because you finally gave me enough time to write a decent column. I gave you three fucking weeks, man. But since then, there's been the Code Conference. It was your last Code Conference. You founded the Code Conference in D. You had a bunch of people on stage talking to you. Andy Rubin talking about his new phone, Ambient OS. Well-named after your column about the future of ambient computing. And then we had WWDC. And both of you were there, I think it's ago, but both of you were there, and we saw a bunch of Apple's vision for what's coming next. So I want to not do too deep in the weeds on the actual news, because I'm pretty sure everybody here saw it. But I want to talk about those things in the context of bigger stuff. So you were at WWDC. Tell me what you saw. Well, this year I think Apple was intent on sending several. They were always intent on sending messages. But I think they were super strong. I think Dieter would agree with this, on sending a handful of particular messages. One was reassuring all the Mac users, particularly the Pro users, that although they had kind of maybe screwed up a little on the MacBook Pro and on not revising the Mac Pro for years, a lot, that they were doing it. Don't you talk about the headphone jacks. It still has one. And so they announced an iMac Pro. But this was a keynote. It lasted two and a half hours. We were trying to live-blog it, and they were going so fast. I was talking to some folks outside before. Apple keynotes are usually really chill. Because Apple really wants you to understand what they're doing. And so they go through it really, really deliberatively. Here's the thing. Here's why it matters. We're going to tell you about the thing. Here are the specs. Reminder. We told you about the thing. Here's the thing. Now we're going to do a demo. Here's why it matters again. And you can just write the news in the live-blog, and then write why it matters, and then make a joke, and then make a snarky joke, and then wait for Casey Newton to make a much funnier joke. Meanwhile, a Samsung keynote is like, what do you want? You want a washing machine? You want a dryer? We make nuclear power plants. We've got five phones. It's like, yeah. They're just very different styles. This Apple keynote felt like a Samsung keynote a little tiny bit. Yeah. Because they had a lot of stuff. It was so fast. They had so much stuff. So is this on? Yeah. Okay, good. So, I don't know. Well, it's a Samsung mic. I can't tell. Back off, man. Any minute now. Yeah. It's going to... So, they were like racing through the first part of this keynote. And then they really devoted a lot to the Mac, because that was one of their missions, was to say, we're still going to make Macs. We've got the memo. We're going to make them faster, better. We're doing this iMac Pro. I mean, the specs on it were just insane. So, that was one thing. The other thing was they continue to be on, and Tim Cook is personally extremely invested in this. They're still on this big crusade to make the iPad a true productivity device, not unlike what Microsoft is doing, except in really a different way. I mean, I would go so far as to say that if they were to succeed at this, it's really the replacement of the graphical user interface ultimately. Now, they may not ever succeed in it. Don't give me the no yet. No, they're not going to totally replace it. But the more tasks during a day that people do on the multi-touch interface, whether it's theirs or somebody else's, only they kind of have a lead on that on tablets right now. Sales are down, but they have a lead in the number of apps and developers. I think if it succeeds, one day it will be looked upon as the transition to the next UX. But so they spent time on that. I think, however, probably historically looking back on that keynote, the most interesting thing was the announcement of ARKit. Not the HomePod? No, not the HomePod. Although we should talk about that. ARKit is a foundational thing they've done to allow hundreds of millions of iOS devices to run augmented reality. It's got various APIs in the new iOS. It's got an SDK, right? And so they didn't announce a first party AR app. It's not like the Tango phone, which is the Android equivalent. But it's not like there's a million Tango phones. Am I right, Jeff? There's one Tango phone? Is that right? There's a Lenovo PR person. Lenovo PR right there in the front row. By the way, we see all the rest of you, too. We'll be calling out your products one by one. And so, no, I just think they said hundreds of millions of iOS devices will be able to use this. So it has backward compatibility. I talked to them later about it, and they said they think it's about 90% of their actively used devices will be able to use this. So, I mean, to me, maybe AR won't amount to anything. I doubt it. I think it's going to be a big deal. I'm not saying Apple is going to be the leader in it, but they sort of put their stake in the ground and said, hey, our approach is, you know, you can just go to town and all of these people in the install base, who, by the way, they made a point, as they do often, of saying all of them upgrade to the newest version within a matter of months, which is always a shot at Android. But if they do upgrade to this newest version, they'll have this AR capability. Did it feel like their shot at Android this year was like they were so rushed they didn't spend a lot of time on it? Like they do it every year, and this year Tim was like, yeah. Yeah, they had one slide. It's boring now. We make fun of Android. They had the upgrade. I think they only had the 7% Android devices are running the latest version, and 86% of iOS devices running. I think that was the only shot at Android. Well, they had a million other things to announce. But on ARKit, what's interesting to me, because we have been expecting this next iPhone to be such a radical change, ARKit on the existing iPhone and the iPad that they demoed it on is very good. Very good. But just using the camera on the phone, they had other sensors. Obviously, the plus size iPhone have two cameras, which lets you do other kinds of things. You can see how it can get even better. And that I think is the problem for the Android ecosystem, right? Because Google can't guarantee what kind of hardware you have. Apple can certainly guarantee what kind of hardware the next iPhone will have. Well, the other interesting thing is Google's play here is tango, which requires a suite of crazy sensors, special depth cameras, the whole thing. Apple has pulled that depth, not death, but maybe... Google is like, we're just fucking evil now. Sorry. I had a follow-up joke and I lost it. You're used to him. Apple stuff works on a bunch of current devices, because they figured out what stuff they needed that they could do with a depth camera on the iPhone 7 and what stuff actually works. When you do the ARKit on an iPhone, it doesn't create a full, perfect 3D map of the room or the universe that you're in the way that a tango phone does. Because they're like, yeah, we don't need that. We just need to know what surfaces there are that are flat and then we'll track those. And it turns out that getting 90% of the way there is pretty darn good. And that's really interesting and it sets them up in this... There's this next AR platform battle and the players are really weird, right? The ones you expect, Apple, Facebook, Google, and then there's Snapchat hanging out. Like, yeah, we're about to do this too. But Snapchat can just build all their stuff on ARKit, right? Snapchat, they're not... Please don't make a phone. Don't do that. That's a bad idea. So their app just runs on the iPhone so they can get... When we mention a company, will the representatives raise their hands? Right, but they're just going to keep putting an app on the phone. So they get the value out of this. That helps Snapchat in a very specific way. I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say, but Snapchat needs also... I don't know if the ARKit thing is true for them because Snapchat is a new company, just IPO'd, right? Not well. Not well. They need growth. That's what new companies do. And the iPhone is dominant in the US in certain ways, but around the world, they need Android. They need to actually start getting good at Android. Well, but there's nothing that says they can't use both. But see, if you're Apple, you're thinking... They can't put all their chips on ARKit in that case. But if you're thinking, if you're Apple, and remember, you guys know this very well, but Google makes its money over time when you use their services, including when you use them on an Apple device. Apple makes most, not all, but most of the money that they're going to make off you when you leave the store or make your monthly payments or however you buy the phone. And so if your Snapchat and ARKit is good, it's good for Apple. Apple can say, well, Snapchat stuff looks better on our phones because we have this thing, and on Google's phones, they have to kind of do their own code. It's going to be interesting. HomePod, we should talk about that for a minute. I think it's important, you know, as reporters and reviewers, we have to say, there's a whole lot we don't know about HomePod, especially the parts that will directly compete in artificial assistant kind of terms with the Echo and the Google Home. You all know that, I mean, I've been tweeting and also writing, but tweeting for a year about Siri fails, taking screenshots and putting them on Twitter. It's Siri and United Airlines. Yeah. That's Walt's whole Twitter feed. Will the United Airlines PR person raise their hand? Now we're turning the whole podcast around. So, you know, they have apparently gotten more serious about Siri, but to the extent that my understanding is they were building a music player. They said they've been working on it for years. It was pretty clear that the parts of it that did not have to do with music seem to have been added pretty much later because the slide was visible for about ten seconds. That said, oh, and it can also do all these things, you know, it can do all the things you expect. It's a musicologist. Musicologist. Every consumer walks into Best Buy saying, do you have any musicologists? And Best Buy says, yes, that person over there in the blue shirt in the magnolia section. Any time you're seeking the help of an ologist, there's something wrong with you. Right. So some of you may have read about this, but if you haven't, I'm going to say it anyway. You can just scan up to this and do it again. It's senior week, Walt. This is the last thing I'm doing. So at the event, they took the, I guess not all the journalists, but a selected group of journalists, broke us into groups of two or three, and we entered this little room they had set up inside the convention center where they had, they made it sort of a fake little living room, and they had a Sonos Play 3, which is a very good speaker for those who own one know this. I think it's very good. It's not for an audiophile lunatic like you, but for a normal person. For podcast listeners, I made the, eh, move. And they have had an Echo, which is a garbage speaker, but you don't expect, you don't buy an Echo thing, though I'm buying the best speaker in the world. And then they had this HomePod set up, and of course the HomePod literally blew them away. I mean, it just sounded fantastic. They went through a series of four or five songs. They pointed different things out. At one point, they combined two HomePods, I think on Hotel California, the acoustic version, and you could hear the... That's what the young people want. Spend $700 to get Hotel California rendered as excellently as ever. The acoustic version. Pretty sure people that want to listen to a perfect rendition of the acoustic version of Hotel California Live is the exact target market that they were originally thinking of for the HomePod. Could be. Yeah, a decade ago. Did you not think it sounded good? We got some claps, by the way. Open Discover Weekly. Like, expand your mind. I thought the HomePod sounded incredible. I think that whatever it is they're doing on a single speaker to craft the audio and bounce in different directions is very confusing. Neelay and I have had many fights about this. Many nerdy fights. I think that the Alexa sounded like garbage, but the Alexa was playing over Bluetooth instead of directly over Wi-Fi. Echo. Yeah, the Echo. Get it right. I'm sorry. No, I'm not. Everybody else calls Alexa. I can't do... Dead silence. I'm telling you. This room of nerds did not come with you on that one. They're like, it's an Echo time. I just kept quiet after I chastised you and waited for the audience. Well, my first appearance on Control of the Leaf is going just great. No, it is. So... It sounded good. It sounded good, Neelay. But the Sonos sounded weird. Yeah, I agree. And I was in a different session than you. And in our session, which had the great John Pachkowski there, used to be a colleague of mine, now is it BuzzFeed. We were both looking at each other and we actually both several times asked the Apple people, because they were saying, well, we took it out of the box, we tuned it, you know, how Sonos has a tuning system on your phone. And they said, oh, we level set everything. It's all, you know, and we're like, it doesn't sound like our Sonos. So... So the big question with HomePod is not, I'm sure it sounds great, right? I mean, it is just, it has better speaker stuff in it than the other speakers of its class. Whether or not you think it sounds better than various Sonos things, a matter of taste. Yeah. But I'm sure it is good. Yeah. At the high end of good. The real question is, how does it compete with the Amazon Echo and Alexa family of products? How does it compete with... I have zero information on that because they didn't show it. It isn't ready. Those parts of it, I suspect are not ready. Right. And so if they're expecting to fill in with, well, it also has Siri and you can just talk to Siri, that means your expectations are immediately low. Right. Because right now people are buying Amazon products and talking to them in their homes instead of talking to Siri on their phone. Right. Or they're buying a Google Home and talking to that instead of Siri on their phone. So why would you buy this other thing? And as far as I can tell, no information about that. No information. But I will say two things because I think you put it really well. I think one reason they don't talk to Siri on their phone is that it has disappointed them lots over the years. But the other reason is there is something to be said, and we've talked about this on this podcast and the Vergecast many times, that the idea of it being ambient in the home, it's not fully ambient because there's a device there, but still it's kind of ambient, you can talk to it, is a different use case, it's a different experience, and it's very engaging once you start doing it, as long as you believe it's not listening all the time and really it's not listening until the wake word is said. But that's the same as everybody else. Right. No, no way. I think that despite that experience which has made people want to talk to the Echo, I don't know anything about the sales of Google Home. I know I have a vague idea about the sales of the Echo just because of what analysts have been saying, and I guess I haven't read anything about the Google Home sales. It hasn't sold amazingly, but it's done pretty well, and I give Amazon a lot of credit for it. And yet most of the people who own an Echo do not use the 6,000 skills it has, which is their word for a voice-controlled app, because you have to say another trigger word after the main trigger word, and nobody can remember the other trigger words, and it's a whole thing. So, I mean, we're very early on all these things, and Apple jumping in now, presuming that they can make Siri fulfill its potential, it isn't too late to jump in. I mean, everybody knows that every product they did, which people ten years later think they invented, they really didn't invent, they just kind of perfected it or perfected it enough to commercialize it. You're just trying to goad me to talking about the Trio, and I'm not going to do it. I have no problem. We can devote the rest of this podcast to you and I defending the Trio and Neal and I not. The Trio is garbage. The other thing I want to point out is, I loved it too, Dieter. Go ahead, Dieter. I need to leave the stage. The thing about Siri on the HomePod is... Windows Mobile Trio, best Trio ever made. Actually, yes. Oh, God. Oh, God. You had to take it one step. That's not where I intended that to go. Did you know the Trio Pro was actually supposed to be the first Android prototype? Windows Mobile Trio. Yeah. Well, now they do. Yeah. Thank you, Dieter. A meaningful, quiet room after... Look, one guy said, wow. I'm taking that. I'm just running with that. The other thing that was interesting about Siri on the HomePod is the way Apple talked about it on stage. They talked about how Siri is going to support certain domains and they used that same language on the iPhone. And the way that Siri is going to open itself up to third parties, Amazon's like, any app you want. If you can remember the keyword, sure, what the hell, it can work. Google's like, well, we're going to try and make it work like the web and I don't know what that looks like, but we'll see. Apple seems to be somewhere in the middle. They want more control so that it isn't chaos, but doing that and getting a bunch of people to throw in in the way that everybody threw in, like what they did on the App Store is very, very difficult. And I don't know how they're going to do it. I would only point out to you that my... I sit here at my age and brain cells are dying every second we sit here, but as best as I can recall, the... because Siri, the original company app, Siri, which was before Apple bought it, debuted at my conference. They came and demoed it to me. I was in charge of the demo, so I put it on stage. They call them domains also and they had done deals because they were a little company. Nobody understood what they were doing. Nobody cared. So they had done deals with companies that aggregated sports scores, companies that did weather, companies that did movie... In fact, they had many more domain skills. Apple actually got rid of a bunch of them and I suspect... I can't... I don't know the history, but I think part of it might've even been legal. I'm not sure. Once... If it's a little startup company and they want to use your stuff, it's okay. It's fine. If it's a big company with deep pockets that wants to use your stuff, suddenly the calculus changes. But yeah, I think their use of the word domain is not unlike skills for Alexa. I want to talk about the Google version compared to the Apple version. I think we are... I'm just speaking for you all. We are probably familiar with how the Alexa works. Don't let him speak for you. You download the Alexa app, you go through the skills, you add the skills. You do it on an Echo, not on an Alexa. Alexa's just a... You go out with a pen, smart one down. Then there's the Apple version and the Apple version is... It seems like it's going to be the same as... Which we know nothing about. Which we know nothing about, but the way they talked about Siri and the way it will be extended is basically you download an app on your phone and that app will talk to Siri and then Siri can address that app. That is... Siri hit... As they've talked about for a couple of years now. You can do that with iOS 10 in so many ways. But the Apple's answer to every problem is we made an app store. What's a smart watch good for? An app store. What's iMessage good for? The wildly successful iMessage app store. But Google has this whole other idea. And I think you probably know more about it than anybody. Can you try to explain that? Google's idea is they want to make these assistants work like a website. So instead of saying, hey Google, I made this app for the Google Assistant. Put it on your thing. And them saying, yes, we approve of your app. Now it's available in our store for people to find. They just want you to say, hey, we made our Assistant app. It's over here at this web address. And they're like, cool. We'll look at it. Yeah, it works. Cool. Now you can ask for it. So they're trying to, the same way that you don't install a website on your phone, unless you're cool and have put the verge.com on your home screen. Let's take a five-minute break, everybody. They don't think that you should have to install a website on the Google Assistant. Now that's a very beautiful dream, which I don't believe they can actually pull off anywhere nearly as easily as they can. Because the Assistant gives you one answer. If you ask for a thing vocally and you get five results, you are super unhappy with that experience. So they're always going to give you the top result. And that top result could be garbage. And there's no transparency to whether that top result arrived because it won the search algorithm or because they made a backdoor deal with Google. So it's very hard to know where this is going to go. There is, like, you know, look, as I said before, I'm the king of pointing out Siri fails, I think. But it doesn't fail all the time. And if you ask it about sports, for instance, you get a beautifully, on the phone, where it's a visual experience, and again, don't know about HomePod, but it does have a screen on top. Strange place to have a screen. I don't know. What you want is a screen facing directly up in the corner of your room. Well, maybe it'll project onto the ceiling, like those alarm clocks that do that. Yeah, Apple built a 1986 Radio Shack alarm clock. Which, by the way, you can have for $350. Only place, Hotel California. But here's the thing. The domains they've chosen to really work on are presented in a better way, and I have found actually a more accurate way. If I say, how are the Red Sox doing, it's actually smart, which I do, for the most part. Or how are the Patriots doing? They're cheating. Those are the right teams. Really? Do you think that's, wait a minute, do you think that's the right answer? Because to me the right answer is they just won their fifth Super Bowl. I didn't say they did it. Just won their fifth Super Bowl. You guys are going to get super dark. You really want to throw down about this? How are the Vikings doing, Dieter? Are they doing well? You know, that's just not nice. No, but I was actually making a tech point using a heroic example, the Red Sox. So if I say, how are the Red Sox doing, and there's a game underway, Ciro will give me the score of the game. If I say, how are the Red Sox doing, and there's not a game underway at that moment, they'll give me the standings. And they'll actually say something, Ciro will actually say something intelligence, like the Red Sox are, they'll use verbs, like the Red Sox are creaming the Blue Jays or the Yankees are edging the Red Sox, whatever it is, you know. And it sounds almost like you're talking to a person with a funny voice, but you know, it's one of the better things they do, and that's I think one of the reasons they do this domain approach. The thing that Apple's about to run face first into is the thing that Google has really not done a great job messaging, which is Siri on the HomePod is going to be able to do a smaller set of things than what Siri on the phone can do. So when I talk to the Google Assistant on a phone, on my watch, or on Google Home, or in my car, it will randomly fail to achieve the thing I asked it to do because it doesn't work on that particular device. And Apple's already admitted it's going to do a smaller domain of things. Well, Siri already does different things on the different devices, even before HomePod comes out. Well, with the iPad too, but like having a speaker tell you, sorry, I can't do that when you know the phone can do it is incredibly frustrating. Right. It is frustrating, although, and this is not a debate because I agree with you, but I would just note that at least in my experience in our house, the Echo and the Google Home say I don't know that or I didn't understand that. And my favorite on the Echo has all the songs because you've connected it to some service. I'm actually, I think, on Amazon Music Service, whatever, and you ask for a song, and it gives you a version by somebody you've never heard of that's like a cover by, it's like, I don't know. You have to be really specific and then you try to get more specific. No, I want the, you know, I want Adele's version of Adele's number one hit. From the album 25 or whatever, you know, and then it says, well, I don't, the light goes out. It hasn't understood you. So, and it's insisting on playing the cover by somebody you've never heard of, and that kind of thing goes on. Well, I think the other thing that's interesting is Google is so far, I think, is the only company that's really figured out multiple users on the assistance. Apple is like surprisingly bad at knowing that more than one person lives in a house. Like the Apple TV is like, it's you. No, you're not. I'm your best friend. This is the only person I've ever encountered in this living room. You're misunderstanding. They want multiple Apple TVs sold into the house. There's yours, there's Becky's, there's your neighbors, what you have just in case they come over. Steve, it's you. I bought this for you. Right. But I think that's like another HomePod question, right? They haven't really solved multiple users' problems. So we're spending all this time talking about something we really have admitted six times we don't know too much about. But except what we know, what Dieter and I know, is that under certain controlled circumstances, it sounds amazingly good. Yeah. That's all I can tell you. And it has, you know, you can touch the top of it to change the volume. I know this. So zoom out for me a little. So you see the big future of ambient computing. You see all these little Apple moves. You see iOS 11 turning the iPad into something that looks more like a computer. Just wrap up where you think Apple's positioned now at this moment. Well, I think Apple, first of all, I can't prove what I'm about to say, but I believe Apple has a huge significant effort on AR. I think they have a smaller effort on VR. I think it's interesting to talk to people. I was just talking to somebody who knows a lot about it outside in the reception. I think there is a changing perception about VR and AR. Nobody thinks, I mean everybody thinks both of them are going to be significant. But I think people think AR is going to be the more broadly adopted thing both for consumers and for enterprise and verticals. Obviously VR will also have roles in both those domains to use the term. But Apple has a small VR effort. They did do a VR demo on what? The iMac? The iMac Pro? No, it was just the new iMac. Here's the regular new iMac which is also beefed up. But really I think they're putting their principal effort in AR. Now Google is doing, obviously famously has Daydream and some other VR things. But I think they're doing a huge effort on AR and I think really everybody, I think the secret story is that everybody is trying to get AR to look like this. And I think until it looks like this we're going to be seeing it on 2D screens until somebody can get this. And this by the way is not necessarily a ten year time frame. One big tech company talked to me about, and I don't know if they'll pull it off, but they talked to me about their hopes to do it in three or four years, something like that. And they actually had to have a timeline for it. So I think Apple wants to be in the AR game in a big way. And so even though we saw Big Mac demos and the HomePod which everybody wrote about and the iPad stuff, all of which they managed to make very impressive. And I'm sure it is. I mean you've got a chance, I've got a chance, our colleagues got a chance to hold those iPads. They're very nice and they, I said iPod didn't I, but I meant iPad. They, I mean the specs on the iPad are better than on a lot of laptops. The specs on the new iPad Pros just feel like Apple's just showing off. There's literally nobody on the planet that is within like, I don't know, three years of producing like a pure tablet experience except maybe the Surface which is sort of a different category. And Apple's like, yeah, well we just, we made it better because we had nothing else to do. Right. But I think, again, just to repeat and maybe we'll be done with WDC, but I just think that AR is one of the focus, you know, they're working, doing something with cars, I can't tell you what it is. But I think AR is a big focus for them. Yeah. So we were just a code, all of us together. Yeah. Great code, it was your last code. You just assume they all know what it is. Kafka knows what it is. It's a room full of billionaires. Just like this room. Same ticket price. There's no VIP reception though. No. You know, Kara and I killed that. Really? Yeah, some years ago. You should kill the open bar and make the billionaires pay for the booze. Right. Tell them it's the RF conference. Yeah, so, well, I mean, so Kara Swisher, who's a fantastic journalist and has been my business partner for years, and I in 2003 started this conference, the idea of which was to put the leaders of tech and media industry on stage and interview them. And we've done that. I think there's pretty much nobody major running a tech company you can think of who hasn't at least once been on our stage and some have been on multiple times. And we now call it the Code Conference. And it just finished and these guys were there. And you'd be amazed at the budget they have for tickets. I mean, that's just like incredible. And, you know, there always are a number of highlights. But for us, for purposes of this podcast, I think one of the interesting highlights, and we've talked about this a little before, is that Andy Rubin came. I interviewed him on stage. He, as you know, is the guy who invented Android and then sold it to Google and then ran it at Google for its most, you know, kind of its launch and then follow on period for about, what, 10 years, I think. A long time. Yeah. And really built the Android organization, the Android ecosystem. And but before that, he had another smartphone called the Sidekick. He really wanted to call it the Hip Top, which was the code name. The cool kids called it the Hip Top. No, T-Mobile vetoed it on them. And when you would go into their headquarters, it would be. This was before T-Mobile's renegade phase. There would be these pro Hip Top signs all over the place. But the company was called Danger and it was a cool thing. So Andy knows a lot about engineering. He knows a lot about, he loves hardware. He has a company that's kind of an incubator for hardware, other hardware companies. And then part of it, he explained on stage, is a studio where I guess they fiddle with their own things. He loves robots. He has some robotic stuff that we didn't talk too much about. And we didn't talk too much about it because they announced the day of his interview that they were bringing out a phone and a home device, like the ones we've been talking, maybe not, maybe better, who knows. They're talking about. And it's this Ambien OS you mentioned. And the phone is, well, Dieter, what did you think of the phone? Yeah, by the way, these are I think the only two people who don't work at that company who've played with them. Right. So what did you think? I thought that it felt a lot like an Android phone. No, it's a phone that knows what it is. And that's a weird thing to say. But it's kind of square and blocky. It doesn't try to have rounded edges. It's got a ceramic back, but it just feels like glass. But that's all like standard stuff, honestly. Well, titanium. Titanium. Sure. I want to be more impressed with the titanium, but it's like it's another metal. Like, I don't know. They make jet planes out of it. Don't show up in front of Dieter Bohn with just another metal. Yeah. They make jet planes out of it. It's not titanium. Then get out of my face. Ceramic, get out of here. But the gimmick insofar as it has a thing that differentiates it is one, it's made by Andy Rubin. Two, it has a couple of pogo pins on the back and a little magnet. Dieter, what's a pogo pin? Pogo pin is a little spring-loaded metal contact that you can use to charge things without having to actually plug it into a jack. Can I just use some inside baseball here? Yeah. So Walt has Andy on stage. So he's talking to Andy. Andy agrees with Walt to let us publish a bunch of information about this device the night before, which is very normal journalism stuff. Walt lets us know that this deal has been made, I would say, at 12.30 a.m. the night before. Dieter and I are sitting in the bar at the resort. And the embargo is 3 a.m. And the embargo is 3 a.m. We're sitting in the bar at the resort with the C-suite of our company, drinking whiskey. And we get a call from Walt, and he's like, get to work. So Dieter and I – this is a true story. So we did. So Dieter and I like trucked back to the resort. Yeah, but you understand I called you five minutes after I hung up from Andy. Yeah, I'm sure. It's not like I was like, I'll watch a TV show and then I'll call him. Five minutes after that. So Dieter and I are furiously blogging and we're drinking. And we just keep saying the words – He said drinking. You're wondering. I know. My mom's listening to this. We just ate a whole bunch of Skittles. And we just kept saying the word pogo pins to each other. And it just kept getting increasingly funny. Pogo pins, by the way, are not funny, in case you're wondering. They're just small, spring-loaded pins. Yeah. Yeah. But – Anyway, the pogo pins are just there for power. The story really ends on a low note. Because the reality of pogo pins sets in. What they're there to do is charge up a bunch of modules because he's trying to make a modular ecosystem of things that you can clip onto the phone or to the home screen. Or to the phone or to the home speaker or to your wall or to your sister. Like whatever. He wants to like – What? I don't know. It's very strange. Dieter's sister has wireless USB. He wants his modules everywhere. Oh my God. And I can get very nerdy about what I think of the wireless technology behind the modules. I'm just going to keep power through the – Yeah, got it. Yeah, keep going. Pogo pins, bro. Let's do this. I think it was better when we just said his name. I'm not sure. No, he's super smart. Okay, keep talking. Other than the fact that his name is Andy Rubin, what makes him think that he can launch a brand new OS, a home speaker, an Android phone and have any of them actually be successful? Okay, so I think that is the key question. Here's my take on it. So the phone is a little bit of an outlier. I think he just – well, I know this. He wanted to do a phone. He's wanted to do a phone for a few years now. He said in his blog post, which also ran oddly as a print ad – I mean, look, I work for a print newspaper for a long time, so I'm not going to knock print, but for a guy like him to buy a print ad in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times is a little bit odd. What are you looking for when you open the New York Times nowadays? Relief. Cell phone advertising. No, but you want relief from the news, so there it is. Oh, thank God. Anyway, he criticized Android and Android phones. I think he said Android makes you fight with yourself with something. And he said on stage with you, there are no good Android phones. Yeah. So he wanted to make a phone. I think at roughly the same time or a little bit afterward, he got this idea for this broader vision, which is really amazing. So the phone is Android. It's a nice Android phone. It could have been a Nexus or a Pixel coming out of Google. If he still was there, he probably would have done the thing with the pins on one of those phones. I think you have to put that to one side. The real story of what Andy is trying to do at this company, which is called Essential, is the Ambient OS, new platform designed for the era where we're heading toward ambient computing. We're heading toward the computer kind of controlling everything and being less of an object that you're focused on and being more of a, you know, I think ultimately the carpets, the walls, your clothing, everything will have sensors and chips. And you won't be talking into his device or the HomePod or the Echo or the Google Home. It'll just be sort of like you and I have both used this phrase in columns in the last few months. It'll be like on the Starship Enterprise. You just speak and the thing has a big, it'll talk back to you, and if it needs to, it can throw something on a giant screen. So I think that's a ways out, but the steps along the way are to try to be ambient. So I don't know what this OS is going to look like, and I don't think, I mean, he and his team may have some rough idea, but I don't know. But I think his intention is for it to be different than Android and iOS, not just because it would be insane. If it wasn't different, but because he's aiming at a different thing. Obviously Google and Apple think they can get there with modifications of what they've got. Obviously he thinks it's better to start fresh, and also maybe there's some legal issues. I don't know, but that's, so I think that's the more important thing. And I don't think the home device is his last device that he's going to try to do. I think he's going to try to do a kind of hardware ecosystem backed up by this new software platform, but we'll have to see. Well, it seems to me like the phone, you have to have the phone, right? No, he made the point, you don't have the phone for the rest of the stuff to work. No, no, I mean, if you are trying to launch this kind of company, regardless of what happens in the future with ambient computing, I think the screen in your pocket is tremendously important. Yeah, for the next ten years, I would agree with you, yeah. Sure, and then we'll just build the screens into our arms, and then Dieter's sister will wirelessly communicate with him. She's a very nice person, you guys. But no, but like if he wants to build this ecosystem of things, having the phone under his control means he's going to put Essential's assistant onto that phone. We didn't even mention that he also wants to do an assistant also. But his home device he claims it will interoperate with Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, I don't know, Bixby, which is the Samsung one. Actually, on stage Walt listed a bunch of them, and then he said, I didn't mention Bixby, and Andy Rubin said, thank you for not mentioning Bixby. Can we get him to record his phone call when he calls up Tim Cook and asks him to put Siri on his home speaker running ambient OS? I would love to be on a fly on that, Walt. So this is like the big question, and Walt and I basically just directly threatened Dieter that we'd make him talk about the open web. No. But I'm going to come at it sideways. We're now entering a world, you brought up the one true answer earlier, so you ask Google for a question that you kind of don't know why it's going to give you the answer, right? It's easier if you see it on a screen. It's easier if you see it on a screen. You can see a list. You can see the promoted advertising Google stuff, and here presumably is what the algorithm that everyone tries to game has delivered to you. Here's some other stuff. Here are some YouTube videos. You know where that stuff is coming from because you see it all in context. With an assistant, you get one true answer. There's been a lot of criticism, particularly of Google and how they deliver one true answer. But all of these assistants are fragmented in extremely serious ways. Do you see that ever interoperating the way that the web has trained us all to see interoperable devices and services? The way I see it, the metaphor is think of the assistants as your browser. So like Alexa is Navigator and there. Pretty much a Firefox. Siri is Safari. Google is Chrome. And the stuff that they go out to get is web pages or information off the web. The thing that makes Navigator, I don't know why. I'm just going with it. Navigator, Safari, Chrome. How many people in the audience were alive when Navigator was a big deal? We got one. A lot. If you're listening in your car, a lot of not raised hands. A lot of people furiously Googling. The thing that makes all those browsers work is when you make a web page, you're like, I'm making this web page and it's going to work in this way. It's going to adhere to this spec. Here's where the header is. Here's where this is. They're all standardized. Everybody agrees this is what it looks like. When you ask an assistant to go get you information, the thing that the assistant goes and seeks out is not standardized at all. The big question I have for Apple and Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Essential and who else is making assistants? Samsung. Our favorite robot dog. Oh, man. It sounds like a dog machine. None of them, so far as I can tell, are talking to each other about how this assistant should interoperate with apps or with information on the web or anything else. They're all just racing to build the best algorithm for their assistants to figure this stuff out on their own. And build deals. And build deals on the back end to make all of their assistants get you the information. And so one of the things that made our current tech revolution happen was that there was, for a period, I don't know if it still is here, but there was, for a period, a big open web where everybody competed on a level playing field. And as long as they could pay for servers to keep their website running, if they just made a better product, customers could just go to them and nobody would stop them. Like, for instance, the travel sites. Yes. What is the number one travel site? And I don't know the answer to this as of this moment, but I know it has changed every couple of years. Yeah, it would be Expedia, it would be Hipmunk, and then it would be blah, blah, blah. Kayak, whatever. Yeah, all the great names. Somebody comes up with a better one. In a world of ambient computing where you don't know how that information gets to your computer and if anybody is working to make sure there's a standard for it, I don't know that we have that open web thing. And I actually, even Google, who says they want to follow that model, I don't know if I trust that they're actually doing it. Well, and one of the limitations of Siri, and I think they've actually, it's one of the things they've actually fixed a little bit, still have a lot more work to do, is they started, Siri, the company, before Apple bought it and Apple kept this relationship, they had to deal with this outfit, Wolfram Alpha, which is a very, I think a very high quality, but it's limited in what kinds of things it knows, repository of site that has a lot of information on it. And that's where it initially drew a lot of answers. Then they did a deal with Bing, and for a while, Bing was in a very serious race. They never caught Google, but they were pouring a lot of money in, so they had a plausible base. I think now, as far as I can tell, Microsoft has not, if you're listening to Microsoft, I'm not saying you've officially given up on Bing, but I think as a priority, it's certainly a much lower priority than it once was at Microsoft. But it's what Siri goes to for a lot of information, because Apple and Google are competitors. So they're going to have to figure all that out. So your points, I agree with all your points about the web. I think we can't close off this part of the discussion. Are we done yet, by the way? No. You have an hour left. Thanks. We can't close up this part of the discussion without talking about privacy and security, because I think they're really important. There really is no proof, independent proof, that I've ever seen that these things are not listening and are not recording what you say until you say the wake word. They all say, don't worry, even though this is set up in your bedroom or your kitchen or wherever. Amazon's putting cameras on them, yeah. Amazon has one that is called the Echo Show that they actually want you to use in your bedroom because it can show whether you look good. The show is the screen and the look is the camera. I'm sorry, yeah, I'm sorry, the look. And supposedly it has the intelligence to say whether you look good in whatever you're wearing. When I think of Amazon, I think of a computer telling me if I look good. Yeah, right, exactly, in your bedroom. So, you know, I don't think Amazon would do this based on what I know about Jeff Bezos and the company, but there's no actual guarantee that somebody at Amazon didn't make a mistake, somehow they aren't listening, and even if they're being perfect and they don't ever do anything until you say Alexa. And by the way, I'm not singling them out. It could be just they made this thing for your bedroom with a camera. I don't know, but kind of. It's an aggressive move. It's an aggressive move. But the others will have the same issue. So the other problem is hacking. I mean, what's to stop someone, even if all these companies are doing exactly what they say and they're being really scrupulous about it, what is to stop somebody from hacking into either the servers or somehow into the devices? There's also government. Yeah, it's not just hacking. There's also governments like... Yeah, I consider them hackers. Hackers for the common good. This is what Walt's doing with the rest of his career. Look, look, look, we're not going to get into this subject, I swear, and I'll kill you guys if you try to get into it. But this subject. So James Comey is a big hero, but let us not forget that James Comey tried to make Apple make a version of iOS with a backdoor and said, don't worry, give it to the FBI, no one will ever get it. Three weeks ago, am I right, about three weeks ago, there was a global ransomware attack that was based on an exploit, supposedly locked up in some digital vault at the NSA, and somehow it was stolen. So, you know, yes, the government is a factor, hackers are a factor, rogue employees could be a factor, there's all kinds of factors. But with Alexa in particular, there has already been one criminal case where the government went to Amazon and said, give us the voice commands that this Echo device received so we can construct the timeline of when this person was home or not. It actually ended up going nowhere because I think the guy just confessed to Amazon and was like, well, we don't have to worry about this. But it's going to happen again and again and again. Right, but that was even asking, I mean, that was limited to asking what happened after you said the wake words and issued commands. I'm talking about what happens before you say the wake word. I mean, there are lots of people who don't want that thing in their kitchen or in their house because they are not 100% sure that somebody, whether it's the company or some intruder or the government, somebody isn't recording what you're basically putting a big microphone or an array of seven microphones, the HomePod has six, and what is the Google Home has three, two, two. You're basically putting a bunch of microphones, you're bugging your own house. That is what you're doing. You're really, you're bugging your own house. I wish I had written that in a column. That's a good phrase. You've got another couple of hours. I give it to you guys. It gets the work. You're bugging, that's a headline. You're bugging your own house and you're trusting that A, the bug won't record anything until you say some magic word that they give you, and B, once it does, it will only act on certain commands, and C, it will erase, it will only use the recording to improve its machine learning and then it will erase it. This is Apple's kind of like huge advantage because their business is selling you things discreetly. Right. And also services. I think you should all be aware that Apple's... Yeah, but they don't sell ads. Right. But Google's business is collecting the data and using it to do all this other stuff, particularly advertising. Right. Apple's business is... Yeah, I mean, Apple will tell you constantly that they're about privacy. Amazon, relative to Google, I think Amazon, they collect a lot, but they collect it in a particular, I'm going to use the word, domain, which has to do with what you buy. Obviously, they try to build psychographic profiles of you and all demographic profiles, but it's really about commerce, and so does Google, and certainly Apple knows what you bought from Apple, but Apple sells Apple stuff. They don't sell, you can't buy Tide from Apple. So there's a progression there. So $2.99 an app purchase, a year-long subscription. I have a question. Didn't Lenovo announce a really high-end speaker with Alexa at CES? We did. Is that coming out? Give me a due date. When? Soon. I'm trying to break some news here on the stage. It's not working. Those of you who are not journalists, first of all, congratulations. But secondly, that exchange with one of the best and most honest PR people I know is what happens. That's our life. When is that coming out? Soon. All right, so we've got a few minutes left before we take questions. We always do stay the state. I think we did stay the state in the last show. We talked to big companies. But give these people, the listeners, some advice. How should they start thinking about these companies? What should they expect from these companies? These companies are asking for our money, our time, our attention, our data in different ways. Explain, like, what's your view of what we should be asking for in return and what is too far? So first of all, you know, we've been mostly talking about the – and we really haven't talked much at all about Facebook, which by the way now has a hardware lab. Can you – raise your hand if you love Facebook. Raise your hand if you – one person. Raise your hand if you love Instagram. It's like, yeah. Okay. I think this is Facebook's biggest problem. I was talking about a lot. Raise your hand if you love Apple. Wow. Raise your hand if you love Microsoft. That was a lot of hands. Not like, but love. This is love. More than five. Okay. All right. That's fine. It's fine. No judgment. Pretend you're in your therapist's office. It's just – no judgment. It's just us, guys. Raise your hand if you love Google. Wow. All right. Fewer hands than Apple but more vocal. So – but I think your Facebook point is well taken. And what I was about to say is in addition to everything they do, including owning Instagram, as you pointed out, owning WhatsApp, owning Oculus, which is – you know, it's a hard work company and a software company with a fabulous app store, as I understand it. They – Do you have to do this closer now? I have to disclose that my wife, who's in the audience, works for Oculus' app store. It's my favorite app store. And I can now disclose that after I retire, I'm becoming their national spokesman for the Oculus app store because I am the demographic they want people to associate with. No, but Facebook does have this thing called Building 8. They hired this really smart woman who primarily is – who is a hardware engineer and used to run DARPA, the secret research agency at the Pentagon. She's really smart and really terrific to interview. Her name is Regina Dugan. And she's running a thing called Building 8. And I don't know what they're doing except what she – what did she say? They're going to eventually figure out or they're working on trying to figure out how you can type with your brain and some other stuff. You can hear with your skin, I think was the other one. Hear with your skin, yeah. Just pick a body part and then an idea and then – So to answer – yeah, thanks. Thanks for putting that in my head. So I don't want to – I'm not going to go through the list of companies and say this, this, about this one. But here's what we – with these big companies, which have a lot of power over a lot of aspects of your life and are going to get more, I think we need to expect a very high level of consumer care. And by that I don't just mean, oh, if it's broken, they'll fix it. If they have a bug in their software or there's some problem in their hardware, they'll take it back. I think what we need is for the big companies as well as the smaller startups like, I don't know, Tinder or something is one example, but there's many others. Sonos, we talked about, is a very good company, but it's not giant like these guys. And then a lot of companies whose names we don't know yet who are working on some of this stuff, the closer we get to ambient – and there are these steps. If you get AR glasses, if you get a home device that kind of literally is so good that it fades into the background in your mind and does a wide variety of things and knows a lot about you because that's the way it gets better, I think we have to have not like micromanagement kind of regulations, but we need at least a broad set of principles in a statute passed by the United States Congress. I'm laughing already. It's like Walt's retirement troll. He's like, Congress will do it. Passed by a United States Congress that might be inclined to actually be intelligent and do something bipartisan and think it through that would talk about – we're the only developed country in the world that has no privacy law. The Supreme Court has evinced a privacy doctrine, but there's no statute covering this kind of stuff. And also security. They may be one law. They may be two laws. I don't know. But it has to be written – you know this. How many times have you and I talked about it on this very podcast? The FCC keeps – depending who's in power, they keep jumping between titles of a very old telecommunications law to try to deal with net neutrality. We should pick the second one. Yes. I agree with you. But the point is I think there's a better solution, which is to have an actual – a law that directly addresses it because it's 2017 and it's going to be 2027, and we need a law that will be worth something in 2027. So, yeah, to answer your question, I think that's really important. I will tell you something. I think the companies – and I've talked to some of them about it – they would – as they move more and more into this ambient stuff, they kind of see the benefit of having some guardrails that they know they can live with. And stability in the market, right? Yeah. And of course they have lobbyists in Washington. They'll make sure the bill isn't too bad for them. As consumers in this room, in the regime that we currently live in, how do we ask those companies to get there? Is it just buy the right stuff? Yeah. I think you vote with your dollars. I mean, that's the most important thing. So, I mean, I'll just be – this is not a surprise to anybody, and I've actually answered it directly before. I carry an iPhone. It's not – I own a Google Pixel because I'm a tech reporter and I have to know about it. And I actually think it's quite a good phone. I gave it a good review. But I value – I, Walt Mossberg, personally value privacy more than necessarily – maybe – everybody has a different way of weighting these things. I weight privacy very highly. And I think Apple, because of the business model you explained, they're much less likely to be collecting stuff about me and certainly to be selling it or using it in a way that's bad. So – and the encryption is better on the phone because they don't really – they make their money, you know, as we said, when I walk out the door of the store or get it online. And so that's a big – for me personally, that's a big reason. I mean, I like iOS. I like the phones. I like the iPad a lot. There really isn't a competitor for the iPad. But a big part of it in my mind is privacy. You may have a different set of expectations. If there's something you want these companies to do, you should vote with your dollars and maybe not upgrade to the same thing next year and maybe switch to the one that you think is standing for something or acting in a way that you want to encourage and don't buy the one from a company you think is doing something you want to discourage – basic economics. That's great advice. But most stuff is free. It's hard, right? Vote with your attention. Yeah. Well, vote with – that's right. Go on theverbs.com and give us your attention. Where we respect all of your rights all the time. We do. Unless you are a jerk in my comments, in which case I will ban you. Okay, we're going to do some questions. We've got two mics right here. Get up. Line up. Yeah, you can't just raise your hand in the back. Sorry. You've got to come down here. All right, guys. All right, we've got one over here. Wow, there's just a lot happening. If you're listening – Yeah, there's a lot of people who want to ask questions. There's some people falling over the stage. It is the thunderdome in here. Folks, we're not here all night, but we'll take as many as we can. All right, let's start over here. Oh, you've got to turn this mic on. There we go. It has a switch. I know. Good. I just learned it from theverbs.com. Yeah. My question is that you guys talked about privacy and security a lot, but what about smart TVs tracking us also? I'm here for you. It's like really pervasive, right? I mean, they actually install the tracking at the display driver level, so before it ever comes onto your screen, they're analyzing the picture on your screen, and they know if you're playing a video game, they know what video game you're playing. You can turn it off, and I think it's becoming more and more important for us to explain how to turn it off, and it's becoming more and more important for the people who review TVs to say don't buy this one because it aggressively tracks you. I think it's really difficult because the TV manufacturers also want to sell the services, but they don't make the boxes, right? So Roku makes some TVs, but most people buy Samsung TVs and plug a Roku into it. That conversation hasn't happened at a real level yet, and I think it will actually take another entrant into the TV market who says we're not doing this, but our TV is just as good to actually make a change, but it's super pervasive. Yeah, because I have a Samsung, and turning that thing off is going through, I don't know, a whole bunch of things. Well, we did a whole control-alt-delete about how complicated the UI is on TVs after I bought an LG TV, which... I have the same TV. We like the picture on it, right? I'm speaking to my wife, Edie Mossberg, sitting there. I am the only person at this table who does not have a webOS TV. Yeah. And if you don't know the depth of the agony that causes him... We're going to use one? It's going to be bad for you. All right, over here. Hi. Sorry, I'm just recording this. Go ahead. Real quick. A couple episodes ago, you guys spoke about the fab five companies, you know, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft. I don't think we call them fab, but I get your point. I'm sorry. I made that up. Sorry. So how long do you think before a company can be successful without going through those five companies, and what do you think they would have to do? Well, you know, I mean, I can't tell you how long, but I think obviously in the first few decades of this whole thing, remember this whole personal computing thing that made the web possible, that made mobile possible, that is going to eventually make ambient computing possible, autonomous driving, that only started in 1977, which sounds like a long time ago for some people, but it's only 40 years ago. And when you compare that to, I don't know, the railroads, the automobile industry, you know, the textile industry, all these things are much older. So I think these weren't always the five big companies, and they may not always be the five big companies. There could be something that pops up that we don't know that gets into one of the leadership positions. And one of these or two of these guys may drop away. So I don't know how long it will take for there to be change, but I think change in business and particularly in the tech business is assured. I just don't know what the change will be or when it will happen. And I'm not hoping for any one particular one of these companies to go away, but what makes these companies big are they're all platforms, and that's different. You know, Samsung is a very powerful electronics company that also is a giant conglomerate that builds ships and buildings and makes chips and does other things, but it's not a platform. It's tried, constantly keeps trying, but it's not a platform. And these five companies are big because they're platforms for other companies. Right. Yeah. Over here. Hi, my name is Jonathan Walt. Thanks for taking a picture with me earlier. No problem. So my question is I've been watching your interviews with a lot of people since fifth grade, and I'm curious to know. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm curious to know. Can it, I mean, really. My wife is going, you're old. I'm curious to know. I hope you did something else in school. Not really. My mom would say not really. Yeah. I'm curious to know just because aside from the fact that you are a non-tech person reviewing tech products, what do you think makes your taste in products and how people interface with their products so perceptive and has become the trait that even tech moguls really admire and respect? I mean, Tony Fidel was talking about the- Yeah, we paid everyone in that video. Well, first of all, I spent ten years as a tech hobbyist at a time when, you know, to put memory in your computer, you had to buy the chips one by one and plug them into a board. At a time when you had to learn BASIC. This isn't well known about me, but I'm kind of a coder. I wrote like little games in BASIC. You got to distribute these. At what point? $79.99 on the App Store. The Mossberg Collection. And so, you know, when I started my column, I wasn't entirely for the time. I was pretty tech for that period of time. For somebody who didn't have a computer science degree and wasn't in any way an engineer, I knew a lot about the state of the technology then. And then I just kept up with it. But what- I don't know what made it click, but I will tell you that I got up every morning to read about tech and to write about tech thinking, what would a really smart person who doesn't really care about the insides of the thing and how the code works and how the hardware works, they just want it to work, what would they want to know about this? Whether they should buy it, whether they should not buy it. What are the things that make it great? What are the things that make it bad? And that was just the mindset I kind of put on my head every day when I would try to evaluate the stuff or write about the stuff. And, you know, other people eventually came around to doing that too. So that's the kind of- you can find that a lot of places now. I just kind of took that approach a little earlier than some other people. One piece of advice Walt has always given us is to balance out how much we treat our enthusiast audience with our big consumer audience. I think it should be clear that Dieter and I care about the enthusiast audience quite a bit. Let's go over here. Walt, out of all the podcasts, interviews, and conferences you did, if you can relive one moment in time, which one would that be? Yes, yes, yes Dieter and Eli. I would like to be redoing this one like Groundhog Day again and again. No, I mean look, if you're talking about the onstage interviews and the TV things and that kind of stuff, you know, the highlight was obviously getting the two people who you could arguably make the case made the computer revolution, the personal computer revolution happen. There were many other people who also did. And what you don't know when we got Gates and Jobs together on stage is that we called out in the audience four or five other big pioneers who were not in that interview but who were around at the time. But getting them on stage was probably the highlight onstage thing. The one I would, so I would do that again. I mean there's many variations of that interview you could do and I think a lot of them would have been good. Kara and I actually said to the two of them in the green room before they went on, and there's a whole story about how it almost derailed, which I'm not going to tell now. But we said to them, from our point of view, as producers of this conference, if you guys want to get up there and have just a giant cat fight, that's fine too. But they didn't. They were sort of like statesmen. The one, and then there have been some interviews that didn't go very well just because it didn't click or the person doing the interview was a very smart CEO, successful, but that doesn't mean they were good at talking to a reporter on a stage. I mean it's a different skill. One that I would have liked to have happened differently was with Mark Zuckerberg, who I do respect and think is really smart, and he just wasn't feeling well on one of his, he's been more than once to our conference and he was turning white onstage, not because he was afraid of us, but he just wasn't feeling well, literally. And we, Kara and I were both afraid he was going to faint on stage. And Kara asked him to, this is, I'm not telling a new story, this story is known. Kara, in fact, you can watch it happen on video, asked him to take off his hoodie because he looked like he was getting hot. It worked out okay, but it was, I sort of wish maybe we had known that he wasn't feeling well and we could have postponed it to the next day or done something to make it a better experience, not only for the audience and us, but especially for him. So that's your answer. Hey, thanks for doing this tonight, guys. So I work in the health space and on your recent kind of world tour, you mentioned that health might have been one of the areas that you would have covered if you didn't go into consumer tech. And eventually health tech last week at Code, Mary Meeker included a health section for, I believe, the first time in the state of the internet, which I think really exemplified how much health and big data are actually intertwined. Walt told me to tell people to ask a question. Oh, sorry. I was setting it up there. But so where do you see the kind of health tech space today and what do you think are its challenge or the biggest opportunity? Well, look, I have not written a ton about it, but partly I'll be really honest with you. Over the years I've had briefings with companies that are doing interesting things in health, and I've typically kind of shied away from doing a review where I recommended or didn't recommend something because I didn't feel that I had any medical qualifications. And the last thing I wanted to do was to give people what could be construed as medical advice. So I didn't do it. But I did a few things where I thought I knew something about it, but not for the most part. I think it's super exciting and important, and I think it's part of ambient computing in a way. And, you know, I think the FDA has got to get more modern in its approach to consumer tech medical devices, like glucometers or, you know, I don't know, just the stuff that people have to use who have different medical conditions to manage their health in a better way. But I also think there's an issue, there's a hubris in the valley, in Silicon Valley, where people who are very fit and very healthy think they can have figured out a way to, I don't know, cure cancer, cure diabetes, and they don't have the medical basis for it, and they just, you know, there are these fad diets. Somebody at our conference who I don't know or didn't, had just met, was proudly telling me that there were a couple of people at the conference that were fasting, literally fasting, for a week, and that this was good for their health and it was part of what his company was pushing, and I was like, I had a little argument with him, let's just be fair. And so, because even I said, how many doctors do you have, but what kind of doctors are they, and, you know, all that stuff. So, you know, I think those are kind of the push and pull of it, but it's going to be huge. All right, we have time for one more. We're going to sign a bunch of posters and giveaway T-shirts, so don't worry about it, but we have time for one more here. Thanks. Walt, with you retiring, it's very much like a changing of the guard. You know, there's two other people here who are smarter than me. We're not retiring. They can talk to us next week. All right. This is actually for all of you guys, because it's very much about the changing of the guard from you all to guys like these guys. Yeah. I like them okay. But, anyway, so I really want to know what you guys think about what the future of technology journalism looks like, because you guys spend a lot of time talking about technology. Okay. We should all talk about it, and Neelai and Dieter actually think about it more than I do, because, hell, I'm leaving, but. First of all, let me just say, and this is something I absolutely believe, and you can doubt me if you want, but these are two of the best journalists, and particularly the best tech journalists I've ever had the pleasure to work with, and remember who my business partner has been, the great Kara Swisher. She's fantastic. These guys are great, and they have a fantastic future ahead of them, and I'm on their back about certain things. It's very annoying. And I think, so, you know, tech journalism changes like tech changes. The principles, the ethical principles, the way you do journalism in tech journalism should not be different than the way you do journalism in sports journalism, political journalism, whatever. I mean, all this FUD that's been thrown up about fake news, and you can't trust, you know, mainstream media or whatever, there's just a lot of junk, but people at these news organizations are working very hard, and they are ethical, for the most part, like any other profession, there are going to be outliers and there are going to be problems. So I think the first thing is tech journalism has to stick to principles of good journalism, and then you have to go out and you have to do several things, one of which is you'd like to bring to your readers news before other people do, but I don't mean two minutes before in a sloppy way. I don't think that's very valuable, but I think if you can do it early and have the time to explain it, that's great, because then readers get the reward of learning something first on your site. Much more important is explaining it. Much more important is wading through, like we've been stumbling around trying to do on this podcast, what is the tech industry up to, because one of the lines, and it's a little more subtle even than what Nilay just described, but one of the lines is between a genuine enthusiasm for the technology. You heard Bill Gates in that video, which, by the way, was completely done without my knowledge, and I was stunned when they showed it at the Code Conference. One of the important things is to balance an enthusiasm for tech with a balanced approach to saying, this works in this product and this part of it doesn't work, and not be a cheerleader. Be happy and encouraging to the readers about the things tech can do, but not be a cheerleader for this company or that company or that company. I just want to say I convinced Walt to do the podcast with me ages ago. It has been just the ride of my life, an absolute honor to have you work at The Verge, do the show with me. I know last week at the Code Conference, Kara threw what she called Walterpalooza, and all the industry titans got to say goodbye to you, but I am very happy that the last thing you're doing with us is having an audience of consumers say goodbye to you. They are your audience. So thank you very much. Thanks for coming..
 Hello, and welcome to Control-Alt-Delete,
 a podcast that is now over.
 Awww.
 But that's in front of a live audience!
 Yeah!
 Thank you.
 Thank you.
 I am Nilay Patel,
 I'm the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge,
 and I'm joined as always by my friend,
 Verge Executive Editor, Recode Editor-at-Large,
 the Waltercation himself, Walter S. Mossberg.
 Hello, friend.
 Hello, friend.
 Alright, well, I don't think we have any other business to attend to.
 Let's just get started.
 So, this is the last Control-Alt-Delete.
 It's our 76th one.
 And, you know, I've been waiting,
 haven't said much about this,
 but I have to bring this up tonight.
 I have a huge grievance.
 And the grievance is...
 It's my whole life.
 That we have to say the name of a certain Verge employee
 in every episode of the podcast.
 I'm only going to say it,
 I'm retiring, I don't care.
 I'm only going to say it one more time.
 Dieter Bohm.
 Ladies and gentlemen.
 Turn it up!
 Can I say this before we came on?
 That's my song.
 When I think of Dieter,
 I think of the song that plays over a drone shot of spring break
 with someone just yelling, turn it up!
 Because that's what Dieter's like every day.
 Body shots.
 Every morning before work.
 Alright, let's do this podcast.
 We've had enough famous billionaires telling Walt how great he is.
 So on the last show,
 we talked big.
 Big ideas, future of computing,
 soaring pronouncements to the industry.
 That's because you finally gave me enough time to write a decent column.
 I gave you three fucking weeks, man.
 But since then, there's been the Code Conference.
 It was your last Code Conference.
 You founded the Code Conference in D.
 You had a bunch of people on stage talking to you.
 Andy Rubin talking about his new phone, Ambient OS.
 Well-named after your column about the future of ambient computing.
 And then we had WWDC.
 And both of you were there, I think it's ago,
 but both of you were there,
 and we saw a bunch of Apple's vision for what's coming next.
 So I want to not do too deep in the weeds on the actual news,
 because I'm pretty sure everybody here saw it.
 But I want to talk about those things in the context of bigger stuff.
 So you were at WWDC. Tell me what you saw.
 Well, this year I think Apple was intent on sending several.
 They were always intent on sending messages.
 But I think they were super strong.
 I think Dieter would agree with this,
 on sending a handful of particular messages.
 One was reassuring all the Mac users,
 particularly the Pro users,
 that although they had kind of maybe screwed up a little on the MacBook Pro
 and on not revising the Mac Pro for years, a lot,
 that they were doing it.
 Don't you talk about the headphone jacks.
 It still has one.
 And so they announced an iMac Pro.
 But this was a keynote.
 It lasted two and a half hours.
 We were trying to live-blog it, and they were going so fast.
 I was talking to some folks outside before.
 Apple keynotes are usually really chill.
 Because Apple really wants you to understand what they're doing.
 And so they go through it really, really deliberatively.
 Here's the thing. Here's why it matters.
 We're going to tell you about the thing.
 Here are the specs.
 Reminder. We told you about the thing. Here's the thing.
 Now we're going to do a demo. Here's why it matters again.
 And you can just write the news in the live-blog,
 and then write why it matters, and then make a joke,
 and then make a snarky joke,
 and then wait for Casey Newton to make a much funnier joke.
 Meanwhile, a Samsung keynote is like, what do you want?
 You want a washing machine? You want a dryer?
 We make nuclear power plants. We've got five phones.
 It's like, yeah.
 They're just very different styles.
 This Apple keynote felt like a Samsung keynote a little tiny bit.
 Yeah.
 Because they had a lot of stuff.
 It was so fast.
 They had so much stuff.
 So is this on?
 Yeah.
 Okay, good.
 So, I don't know.
 Well, it's a Samsung mic. I can't tell.
 Back off, man.
 Any minute now.
 Yeah.
 It's going to...
 So, they were like racing through the first part of this keynote.
 And then they really devoted a lot to the Mac,
 because that was one of their missions,
 was to say, we're still going to make Macs.
 We've got the memo.
 We're going to make them faster, better.
 We're doing this iMac Pro.
 I mean, the specs on it were just insane.
 So, that was one thing.
 The other thing was they continue to be on,
 and Tim Cook is personally extremely invested in this.
 They're still on this big crusade to make the iPad a true productivity device,
 not unlike what Microsoft is doing, except in really a different way.
 I mean, I would go so far as to say that if they were to succeed at this,
 it's really the replacement of the graphical user interface ultimately.
 Now, they may not ever succeed in it.
 Don't give me the no yet.
 No, they're not going to totally replace it.
 But the more tasks during a day that people do on the multi-touch interface,
 whether it's theirs or somebody else's,
 only they kind of have a lead on that on tablets right now.
 Sales are down, but they have a lead in the number of apps and developers.
 I think if it succeeds, one day it will be looked upon as the transition to the next UX.
 But so they spent time on that.
 I think, however, probably historically looking back on that keynote,
 the most interesting thing was the announcement of ARKit.
 Not the HomePod?
 No, not the HomePod.
 Although we should talk about that.
 ARKit is a foundational thing they've done to allow hundreds of millions of iOS devices to run augmented reality.
 It's got various APIs in the new iOS.
 It's got an SDK, right?
 And so they didn't announce a first party AR app.
 It's not like the Tango phone, which is the Android equivalent.
 But it's not like there's a million Tango phones.
 Am I right, Jeff?
 There's one Tango phone?
 Is that right?
 There's a Lenovo PR person.
 Lenovo PR right there in the front row.
 By the way, we see all the rest of you, too.
 We'll be calling out your products one by one.
 And so, no, I just think they said hundreds of millions of iOS devices will be able to use this.
 So it has backward compatibility.
 I talked to them later about it,
 and they said they think it's about 90% of their actively used devices will be able to use this.
 So, I mean, to me, maybe AR won't amount to anything.
 I doubt it.
 I think it's going to be a big deal.
 I'm not saying Apple is going to be the leader in it,
 but they sort of put their stake in the ground and said, hey, our approach is, you know,
 you can just go to town and all of these people in the install base,
 who, by the way, they made a point, as they do often,
 of saying all of them upgrade to the newest version within a matter of months,
 which is always a shot at Android.
 But if they do upgrade to this newest version, they'll have this AR capability.
 Did it feel like their shot at Android this year was like they were so rushed they didn't spend a lot of time on it?
 Like they do it every year, and this year Tim was like, yeah.
 Yeah, they had one slide.
 It's boring now.
 We make fun of Android.
 They had the upgrade.
 I think they only had the 7% Android devices are running the latest version,
 and 86% of iOS devices running.
 I think that was the only shot at Android.
 Well, they had a million other things to announce.
 But on ARKit, what's interesting to me,
 because we have been expecting this next iPhone to be such a radical change,
 ARKit on the existing iPhone and the iPad that they demoed it on is very good.
 Very good.
 But just using the camera on the phone, they had other sensors.
 Obviously, the plus size iPhone have two cameras, which lets you do other kinds of things.
 You can see how it can get even better.
 And that I think is the problem for the Android ecosystem, right?
 Because Google can't guarantee what kind of hardware you have.
 Apple can certainly guarantee what kind of hardware the next iPhone will have.
 Well, the other interesting thing is Google's play here is tango,
 which requires a suite of crazy sensors, special depth cameras, the whole thing.
 Apple has pulled that depth, not death, but maybe...
 Google is like, we're just fucking evil now.
 Sorry.
 I had a follow-up joke and I lost it.
 You're used to him.
 Apple stuff works on a bunch of current devices,
 because they figured out what stuff they needed that they could do with a depth camera on the iPhone 7
 and what stuff actually works.
 When you do the ARKit on an iPhone, it doesn't create a full, perfect 3D map of the room
 or the universe that you're in the way that a tango phone does.
 Because they're like, yeah, we don't need that.
 We just need to know what surfaces there are that are flat and then we'll track those.
 And it turns out that getting 90% of the way there is pretty darn good.
 And that's really interesting and it sets them up in this...
 There's this next AR platform battle and the players are really weird, right?
 The ones you expect, Apple, Facebook, Google, and then there's Snapchat hanging out.
 Like, yeah, we're about to do this too.
 But Snapchat can just build all their stuff on ARKit, right?
 Snapchat, they're not...
 Please don't make a phone.
 Don't do that.
 That's a bad idea.
 So their app just runs on the iPhone so they can get...
 When we mention a company, will the representatives raise their hands?
 Right, but they're just going to keep putting an app on the phone.
 So they get the value out of this.
 That helps Snapchat in a very specific way.
 I'm sorry, go ahead.
 No, I was going to say, but Snapchat needs also...
 I don't know if the ARKit thing is true for them because Snapchat is a new company,
 just IPO'd, right?
 Not well.
 Not well.
 They need growth.
 That's what new companies do.
 And the iPhone is dominant in the US in certain ways, but around the world, they need Android.
 They need to actually start getting good at Android.
 Well, but there's nothing that says they can't use both.
 But see, if you're Apple, you're thinking...
 They can't put all their chips on ARKit in that case.
 But if you're thinking, if you're Apple, and remember, you guys know this very well,
 but Google makes its money over time when you use their services,
 including when you use them on an Apple device.
 Apple makes most, not all, but most of the money that they're going to make off you
 when you leave the store or make your monthly payments or however you buy the phone.
 And so if your Snapchat and ARKit is good, it's good for Apple.
 Apple can say, well, Snapchat stuff looks better on our phones because we have this thing,
 and on Google's phones, they have to kind of do their own code.
 It's going to be interesting.
 HomePod, we should talk about that for a minute.
 I think it's important, you know, as reporters and reviewers, we have to say,
 there's a whole lot we don't know about HomePod,
 especially the parts that will directly compete in artificial assistant kind of terms
 with the Echo and the Google Home.
 You all know that, I mean, I've been tweeting and also writing,
 but tweeting for a year about Siri fails, taking screenshots and putting them on Twitter.
 It's Siri and United Airlines.
 Yeah.
 That's Walt's whole Twitter feed.
 Will the United Airlines PR person raise their hand?
 Now we're turning the whole podcast around.
 So, you know, they have apparently gotten more serious about Siri,
 but to the extent that my understanding is they were building a music player.
 They said they've been working on it for years.
 It was pretty clear that the parts of it that did not have to do with music
 seem to have been added pretty much later because the slide was visible for about ten seconds.
 That said, oh, and it can also do all these things, you know, it can do all the things you expect.
 It's a musicologist.
 Musicologist.
 Every consumer walks into Best Buy saying, do you have any musicologists?
 And Best Buy says, yes, that person over there in the blue shirt in the magnolia section.
 Any time you're seeking the help of an ologist, there's something wrong with you.
 Right.
 So some of you may have read about this, but if you haven't, I'm going to say it anyway.
 You can just scan up to this and do it again.
 It's senior week, Walt.
 This is the last thing I'm doing.
 So at the event, they took the, I guess not all the journalists,
 but a selected group of journalists, broke us into groups of two or three,
 and we entered this little room they had set up inside the convention center where they had,
 they made it sort of a fake little living room, and they had a Sonos Play 3,
 which is a very good speaker for those who own one know this.
 I think it's very good.
 It's not for an audiophile lunatic like you, but for a normal person.
 For podcast listeners, I made the, eh, move.
 And they have had an Echo, which is a garbage speaker,
 but you don't expect, you don't buy an Echo thing, though I'm buying the best speaker in the world.
 And then they had this HomePod set up, and of course the HomePod literally blew them away.
 I mean, it just sounded fantastic.
 They went through a series of four or five songs.
 They pointed different things out.
 At one point, they combined two HomePods, I think on Hotel California, the acoustic version,
 and you could hear the...
 That's what the young people want.
 Spend $700 to get Hotel California rendered as excellently as ever.
 The acoustic version.
 Pretty sure people that want to listen to a perfect rendition of the acoustic version of Hotel California Live
 is the exact target market that they were originally thinking of for the HomePod.
 Could be.
 Yeah, a decade ago.
 Did you not think it sounded good?
 We got some claps, by the way.
 Open Discover Weekly.
 Like, expand your mind.
 I thought the HomePod sounded incredible.
 I think that whatever it is they're doing on a single speaker to craft the audio and bounce in different directions is very confusing.
 Neelay and I have had many fights about this.
 Many nerdy fights.
 I think that the Alexa sounded like garbage, but the Alexa was playing over Bluetooth instead of directly over Wi-Fi.
 Echo.
 Yeah, the Echo.
 Get it right.
 I'm sorry.
 No, I'm not.
 Everybody else calls Alexa.
 I can't do...
 Dead silence.
 I'm telling you.
 This room of nerds did not come with you on that one.
 They're like, it's an Echo time.
 I just kept quiet after I chastised you and waited for the audience.
 Well, my first appearance on Control of the Leaf is going just great.
 No, it is.
 So...
 It sounded good.
 It sounded good, Neelay.
 But the Sonos sounded weird.
 Yeah, I agree.
 And I was in a different session than you.
 And in our session, which had the great John Pachkowski there, used to be a colleague of mine, now is it BuzzFeed.
 We were both looking at each other and we actually both several times asked the Apple people,
 because they were saying, well, we took it out of the box, we tuned it, you know, how Sonos has a tuning system on your phone.
 And they said, oh, we level set everything.
 It's all, you know, and we're like, it doesn't sound like our Sonos.
 So...
 So the big question with HomePod is not, I'm sure it sounds great, right?
 I mean, it is just, it has better speaker stuff in it than the other speakers of its class.
 Whether or not you think it sounds better than various Sonos things, a matter of taste.
 Yeah.
 But I'm sure it is good.
 Yeah.
 At the high end of good.
 The real question is, how does it compete with the Amazon Echo and Alexa family of products?
 How does it compete with...
 I have zero information on that because they didn't show it.
 It isn't ready.
 Those parts of it, I suspect are not ready.
 Right.
 And so if they're expecting to fill in with, well, it also has Siri and you can just talk to Siri,
 that means your expectations are immediately low.
 Right.
 Because right now people are buying Amazon products and talking to them in their homes instead of talking to Siri on their phone.
 Right.
 Or they're buying a Google Home and talking to that instead of Siri on their phone.
 So why would you buy this other thing?
 And as far as I can tell, no information about that.
 No information.
 But I will say two things because I think you put it really well.
 I think one reason they don't talk to Siri on their phone is that it has disappointed them lots over the years.
 But the other reason is there is something to be said, and we've talked about this on this podcast and the Vergecast many times,
 that the idea of it being ambient in the home,
 it's not fully ambient because there's a device there, but still it's kind of ambient, you can talk to it,
 is a different use case, it's a different experience, and it's very engaging once you start doing it,
 as long as you believe it's not listening all the time and really it's not listening until the wake word is said.
 But that's the same as everybody else.
 Right.
 No, no way.
 I think that despite that experience which has made people want to talk to the Echo,
 I don't know anything about the sales of Google Home.
 I know I have a vague idea about the sales of the Echo just because of what analysts have been saying,
 and I guess I haven't read anything about the Google Home sales.
 It hasn't sold amazingly, but it's done pretty well, and I give Amazon a lot of credit for it.
 And yet most of the people who own an Echo do not use the 6,000 skills it has,
 which is their word for a voice-controlled app,
 because you have to say another trigger word after the main trigger word,
 and nobody can remember the other trigger words, and it's a whole thing.
 So, I mean, we're very early on all these things, and Apple jumping in now,
 presuming that they can make Siri fulfill its potential, it isn't too late to jump in.
 I mean, everybody knows that every product they did, which people ten years later think they invented,
 they really didn't invent, they just kind of perfected it or perfected it enough to commercialize it.
 You're just trying to goad me to talking about the Trio, and I'm not going to do it.
 I have no problem.
 We can devote the rest of this podcast to you and I defending the Trio and Neal and I not.
 The Trio is garbage.
 The other thing I want to point out is, I loved it too, Dieter.
 Go ahead, Dieter.
 I need to leave the stage.
 The thing about Siri on the HomePod is...
 Windows Mobile Trio, best Trio ever made.
 Actually, yes.
 Oh, God.
 Oh, God.
 You had to take it one step.
 That's not where I intended that to go.
 Did you know the Trio Pro was actually supposed to be the first Android prototype?
 Windows Mobile Trio.
 Yeah.
 Well, now they do.
 Yeah.
 Thank you, Dieter.
 A meaningful, quiet room after...
 Look, one guy said, wow.
 I'm taking that.
 I'm just running with that.
 The other thing that was interesting about Siri on the HomePod is the way Apple talked
 about it on stage.
 They talked about how Siri is going to support certain domains and they used that same language
 on the iPhone.
 And the way that Siri is going to open itself up to third parties, Amazon's like, any app
 you want.
 If you can remember the keyword, sure, what the hell, it can work.
 Google's like, well, we're going to try and make it work like the web and I don't know
 what that looks like, but we'll see.
 Apple seems to be somewhere in the middle.
 They want more control so that it isn't chaos, but doing that and getting a bunch of people
 to throw in in the way that everybody threw in, like what they did on the App Store is
 very, very difficult.
 And I don't know how they're going to do it.
 I would only point out to you that my...
 I sit here at my age and brain cells are dying every second we sit here, but as best as I
 can recall, the... because Siri, the original company app, Siri, which was before Apple
 bought it, debuted at my conference.
 They came and demoed it to me.
 I was in charge of the demo, so I put it on stage.
 They call them domains also and they had done deals because they were a little company.
 Nobody understood what they were doing.
 Nobody cared.
 So they had done deals with companies that aggregated sports scores, companies that did
 weather, companies that did movie...
 In fact, they had many more domain skills.
 Apple actually got rid of a bunch of them and I suspect...
 I can't...
 I don't know the history, but I think part of it might've even been legal.
 I'm not sure.
 Once...
 If it's a little startup company and they want to use your stuff, it's okay.
 It's fine.
 If it's a big company with deep pockets that wants to use your stuff, suddenly the calculus
 changes.
 But yeah, I think their use of the word domain is not unlike skills for Alexa.
 I want to talk about the Google version compared to the Apple version.
 I think we are...
 I'm just speaking for you all.
 We are probably familiar with how the Alexa works.
 Don't let him speak for you.
 You download the Alexa app, you go through the skills, you add the skills.
 You do it on an Echo, not on an Alexa.
 Alexa's just a...
 You go out with a pen, smart one down.
 Then there's the Apple version and the Apple version is...
 It seems like it's going to be the same as...
 Which we know nothing about.
 Which we know nothing about, but the way they talked about Siri and the way it will be extended
 is basically you download an app on your phone and that app will talk to Siri and then Siri
 can address that app.
 That is...
 Siri hit...
 As they've talked about for a couple of years now.
 You can do that with iOS 10 in so many ways.
 But the Apple's answer to every problem is we made an app store.
 What's a smart watch good for?
 An app store.
 What's iMessage good for?
 The wildly successful iMessage app store.
 But Google has this whole other idea.
 And I think you probably know more about it than anybody.
 Can you try to explain that?
 Google's idea is they want to make these assistants work like a website.
 So instead of saying, hey Google, I made this app for the Google Assistant.
 Put it on your thing.
 And them saying, yes, we approve of your app.
 Now it's available in our store for people to find.
 They just want you to say, hey, we made our Assistant app.
 It's over here at this web address.
 And they're like, cool.
 We'll look at it.
 Yeah, it works.
 Cool.
 Now you can ask for it.
 So they're trying to, the same way that you don't install a website on your phone,
 unless you're cool and have put the verge.com on your home screen.
 Let's take a five-minute break, everybody.
 They don't think that you should have to install a website on the Google Assistant.
 Now that's a very beautiful dream, which I don't believe they can actually pull off
 anywhere nearly as easily as they can.
 Because the Assistant gives you one answer.
 If you ask for a thing vocally and you get five results, you are super unhappy with that experience.
 So they're always going to give you the top result.
 And that top result could be garbage.
 And there's no transparency to whether that top result arrived because it won the search algorithm
 or because they made a backdoor deal with Google.
 So it's very hard to know where this is going to go.
 There is, like, you know, look, as I said before, I'm the king of pointing out Siri fails, I think.
 But it doesn't fail all the time.
 And if you ask it about sports, for instance, you get a beautifully, on the phone,
 where it's a visual experience, and again, don't know about HomePod, but it does have a screen on top.
 Strange place to have a screen.
 I don't know.
 What you want is a screen facing directly up in the corner of your room.
 Well, maybe it'll project onto the ceiling, like those alarm clocks that do that.
 Yeah, Apple built a 1986 Radio Shack alarm clock.
 Which, by the way, you can have for $350.
 Only place, Hotel California.
 But here's the thing.
 The domains they've chosen to really work on are presented in a better way,
 and I have found actually a more accurate way.
 If I say, how are the Red Sox doing, it's actually smart, which I do, for the most part.
 Or how are the Patriots doing?
 They're cheating.
 Those are the right teams.
 Really?
 Do you think that's, wait a minute, do you think that's the right answer?
 Because to me the right answer is they just won their fifth Super Bowl.
 I didn't say they did it.
 Just won their fifth Super Bowl.
 You guys are going to get super dark.
 You really want to throw down about this?
 How are the Vikings doing, Dieter?
 Are they doing well?
 You know, that's just not nice.
 No, but I was actually making a tech point using a heroic example, the Red Sox.
 So if I say, how are the Red Sox doing, and there's a game underway,
 Ciro will give me the score of the game.
 If I say, how are the Red Sox doing, and there's not a game underway at that moment,
 they'll give me the standings.
 And they'll actually say something, Ciro will actually say something intelligence,
 like the Red Sox are, they'll use verbs, like the Red Sox are creaming the Blue Jays
 or the Yankees are edging the Red Sox, whatever it is, you know.
 And it sounds almost like you're talking to a person with a funny voice,
 but you know, it's one of the better things they do,
 and that's I think one of the reasons they do this domain approach.
 The thing that Apple's about to run face first into is the thing that Google has really not done a great job messaging,
 which is Siri on the HomePod is going to be able to do a smaller set of things than what Siri on the phone can do.
 So when I talk to the Google Assistant on a phone, on my watch, or on Google Home, or in my car,
 it will randomly fail to achieve the thing I asked it to do because it doesn't work on that particular device.
 And Apple's already admitted it's going to do a smaller domain of things.
 Well, Siri already does different things on the different devices, even before HomePod comes out.
 Well, with the iPad too, but like having a speaker tell you,
 sorry, I can't do that when you know the phone can do it is incredibly frustrating.
 Right. It is frustrating, although, and this is not a debate because I agree with you,
 but I would just note that at least in my experience in our house,
 the Echo and the Google Home say I don't know that or I didn't understand that.
 And my favorite on the Echo has all the songs because you've connected it to some service.
 I'm actually, I think, on Amazon Music Service, whatever, and you ask for a song,
 and it gives you a version by somebody you've never heard of that's like a cover by, it's like, I don't know.
 You have to be really specific and then you try to get more specific.
 No, I want the, you know, I want Adele's version of Adele's number one hit.
 From the album 25 or whatever, you know, and then it says, well, I don't, the light goes out.
 It hasn't understood you.
 So, and it's insisting on playing the cover by somebody you've never heard of, and that kind of thing goes on.
 Well, I think the other thing that's interesting is Google is so far, I think, is the only company that's really figured out multiple users on the assistance.
 Apple is like surprisingly bad at knowing that more than one person lives in a house.
 Like the Apple TV is like, it's you.
 No, you're not.
 I'm your best friend.
 This is the only person I've ever encountered in this living room.
 You're misunderstanding.
 They want multiple Apple TVs sold into the house.
 There's yours, there's Becky's, there's your neighbors, what you have just in case they come over.
 Steve, it's you.
 I bought this for you.
 Right.
 But I think that's like another HomePod question, right?
 They haven't really solved multiple users' problems.
 So we're spending all this time talking about something we really have admitted six times we don't know too much about.
 But except what we know, what Dieter and I know, is that under certain controlled circumstances, it sounds amazingly good.
 Yeah.
 That's all I can tell you.
 And it has, you know, you can touch the top of it to change the volume.
 I know this.
 So zoom out for me a little.
 So you see the big future of ambient computing.
 You see all these little Apple moves.
 You see iOS 11 turning the iPad into something that looks more like a computer.
 Just wrap up where you think Apple's positioned now at this moment.
 Well, I think Apple, first of all, I can't prove what I'm about to say, but I believe Apple has a huge significant effort on AR.
 I think they have a smaller effort on VR.
 I think it's interesting to talk to people.
 I was just talking to somebody who knows a lot about it outside in the reception.
 I think there is a changing perception about VR and AR.
 Nobody thinks, I mean everybody thinks both of them are going to be significant.
 But I think people think AR is going to be the more broadly adopted thing both for consumers and for enterprise and verticals.
 Obviously VR will also have roles in both those domains to use the term.
 But Apple has a small VR effort.
 They did do a VR demo on what?
 The iMac?
 The iMac Pro?
 No, it was just the new iMac.
 Here's the regular new iMac which is also beefed up.
 But really I think they're putting their principal effort in AR.
 Now Google is doing, obviously famously has Daydream and some other VR things.
 But I think they're doing a huge effort on AR and I think really everybody, I think the secret story is that everybody is trying to get AR to look like this.
 And I think until it looks like this we're going to be seeing it on 2D screens until somebody can get this.
 And this by the way is not necessarily a ten year time frame.
 One big tech company talked to me about, and I don't know if they'll pull it off, but they talked to me about their hopes to do it in three or four years, something like that.
 And they actually had to have a timeline for it.
 So I think Apple wants to be in the AR game in a big way.
 And so even though we saw Big Mac demos and the HomePod which everybody wrote about and the iPad stuff, all of which they managed to make very impressive.
 And I'm sure it is.
 I mean you've got a chance, I've got a chance, our colleagues got a chance to hold those iPads.
 They're very nice and they, I said iPod didn't I, but I meant iPad.
 They, I mean the specs on the iPad are better than on a lot of laptops.
 The specs on the new iPad Pros just feel like Apple's just showing off.
 There's literally nobody on the planet that is within like, I don't know, three years of producing like a pure tablet experience except maybe the Surface which is sort of a different category.
 And Apple's like, yeah, well we just, we made it better because we had nothing else to do.
 Right.
 But I think, again, just to repeat and maybe we'll be done with WDC, but I just think that AR is one of the focus, you know, they're working, doing something with cars, I can't tell you what it is.
 But I think AR is a big focus for them.
 Yeah.
 So we were just a code, all of us together.
 Yeah.
 Great code, it was your last code.
 You just assume they all know what it is.
 Kafka knows what it is.
 It's a room full of billionaires.
 Just like this room.
 Same ticket price.
 There's no VIP reception though.
 No.
 You know, Kara and I killed that.
 Really?
 Yeah, some years ago.
 You should kill the open bar and make the billionaires pay for the booze.
 Right.
 Tell them it's the RF conference.
 Yeah, so, well, I mean, so Kara Swisher, who's a fantastic journalist and has been my business partner for years, and I in 2003 started this conference, the idea of which was to put the leaders of tech and media industry on stage and interview them.
 And we've done that.
 I think there's pretty much nobody major running a tech company you can think of who hasn't at least once been on our stage and some have been on multiple times.
 And we now call it the Code Conference.
 And it just finished and these guys were there.
 And you'd be amazed at the budget they have for tickets.
 I mean, that's just like incredible.
 And, you know, there always are a number of highlights.
 But for us, for purposes of this podcast, I think one of the interesting highlights, and we've talked about this a little before, is that Andy Rubin came.
 I interviewed him on stage.
 He, as you know, is the guy who invented Android and then sold it to Google and then ran it at Google for its most, you know, kind of its launch and then follow on period for about, what, 10 years, I think.
 A long time.
 Yeah.
 And really built the Android organization, the Android ecosystem.
 And but before that, he had another smartphone called the Sidekick.
 He really wanted to call it the Hip Top, which was the code name.
 The cool kids called it the Hip Top.
 No, T-Mobile vetoed it on them.
 And when you would go into their headquarters, it would be.
 This was before T-Mobile's renegade phase.
 There would be these pro Hip Top signs all over the place.
 But the company was called Danger and it was a cool thing.
 So Andy knows a lot about engineering.
 He knows a lot about, he loves hardware.
 He has a company that's kind of an incubator for hardware, other hardware companies.
 And then part of it, he explained on stage, is a studio where I guess they fiddle with their own things.
 He loves robots.
 He has some robotic stuff that we didn't talk too much about.
 And we didn't talk too much about it because they announced the day of his interview that they were bringing out a phone and a home device, like the ones we've been talking, maybe not, maybe better, who knows.
 They're talking about.
 And it's this Ambien OS you mentioned.
 And the phone is, well, Dieter, what did you think of the phone?
 Yeah, by the way, these are I think the only two people who don't work at that company who've played with them.
 Right.
 So what did you think?
 I thought that it felt a lot like an Android phone.
 No, it's a phone that knows what it is.
 And that's a weird thing to say.
 But it's kind of square and blocky.
 It doesn't try to have rounded edges.
 It's got a ceramic back, but it just feels like glass.
 But that's all like standard stuff, honestly.
 Well, titanium.
 Titanium.
 Sure.
 I want to be more impressed with the titanium, but it's like it's another metal.
 Like, I don't know.
 They make jet planes out of it.
 Don't show up in front of Dieter Bohn with just another metal.
 Yeah.
 They make jet planes out of it.
 It's not titanium.
 Then get out of my face.
 Ceramic, get out of here.
 But the gimmick insofar as it has a thing that differentiates it is one, it's made by Andy Rubin.
 Two, it has a couple of pogo pins on the back and a little magnet.
 Dieter, what's a pogo pin?
 Pogo pin is a little spring-loaded metal contact that you can use to charge things without having to actually plug it into a jack.
 Can I just use some inside baseball here?
 Yeah.
 So Walt has Andy on stage.
 So he's talking to Andy.
 Andy agrees with Walt to let us publish a bunch of information about this device the night before, which is very normal journalism stuff.
 Walt lets us know that this deal has been made, I would say, at 12.30 a.m. the night before.
 Dieter and I are sitting in the bar at the resort.
 And the embargo is 3 a.m.
 And the embargo is 3 a.m.
 We're sitting in the bar at the resort with the C-suite of our company, drinking whiskey.
 And we get a call from Walt, and he's like, get to work.
 So Dieter and I – this is a true story.
 So we did.
 So Dieter and I like trucked back to the resort.
 Yeah, but you understand I called you five minutes after I hung up from Andy.
 Yeah, I'm sure.
 It's not like I was like, I'll watch a TV show and then I'll call him.
 Five minutes after that.
 So Dieter and I are furiously blogging and we're drinking.
 And we just keep saying the words –
 He said drinking.
 You're wondering.
 I know.
 My mom's listening to this.
 We just ate a whole bunch of Skittles.
 And we just kept saying the word pogo pins to each other.
 And it just kept getting increasingly funny.
 Pogo pins, by the way, are not funny, in case you're wondering.
 They're just small, spring-loaded pins.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 But –
 Anyway, the pogo pins are just there for power.
 The story really ends on a low note.
 Because the reality of pogo pins sets in.
 What they're there to do is charge up a bunch of modules because he's trying to make a modular ecosystem of things that you can clip onto the phone or to the home screen.
 Or to the phone or to the home speaker or to your wall or to your sister.
 Like whatever.
 He wants to like –
 What?
 I don't know.
 It's very strange.
 Dieter's sister has wireless USB.
 He wants his modules everywhere.
 Oh my God.
 And I can get very nerdy about what I think of the wireless technology behind the modules.
 I'm just going to keep power through the –
 Yeah, got it.
 Yeah, keep going.
 Pogo pins, bro.
 Let's do this.
 I think it was better when we just said his name.
 I'm not sure.
 No, he's super smart.
 Okay, keep talking.
 Other than the fact that his name is Andy Rubin, what makes him think that he can launch a brand new OS, a home speaker, an Android phone and have any of them actually be successful?
 Okay, so I think that is the key question.
 Here's my take on it.
 So the phone is a little bit of an outlier.
 I think he just – well, I know this.
 He wanted to do a phone.
 He's wanted to do a phone for a few years now.
 He said in his blog post, which also ran oddly as a print ad – I mean, look, I work for a print newspaper for a long time, so I'm not going to knock print, but for a guy like him to buy a print ad in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times is a little bit odd.
 What are you looking for when you open the New York Times nowadays?
 Relief.
 Cell phone advertising.
 No, but you want relief from the news, so there it is.
 Oh, thank God.
 Anyway, he criticized Android and Android phones.
 I think he said Android makes you fight with yourself with something.
 And he said on stage with you, there are no good Android phones.
 Yeah.
 So he wanted to make a phone.
 I think at roughly the same time or a little bit afterward, he got this idea for this broader vision, which is really amazing.
 So the phone is Android.
 It's a nice Android phone.
 It could have been a Nexus or a Pixel coming out of Google.
 If he still was there, he probably would have done the thing with the pins on one of those phones.
 I think you have to put that to one side.
 The real story of what Andy is trying to do at this company, which is called Essential,
 is the Ambient OS, new platform designed for the era where we're heading toward ambient computing.
 We're heading toward the computer kind of controlling everything and being less of an object that you're focused on
 and being more of a, you know, I think ultimately the carpets, the walls, your clothing, everything will have sensors and chips.
 And you won't be talking into his device or the HomePod or the Echo or the Google Home.
 It'll just be sort of like you and I have both used this phrase in columns in the last few months.
 It'll be like on the Starship Enterprise.
 You just speak and the thing has a big, it'll talk back to you, and if it needs to, it can throw something on a giant screen.
 So I think that's a ways out, but the steps along the way are to try to be ambient.
 So I don't know what this OS is going to look like, and I don't think, I mean, he and his team may have some rough idea, but I don't know.
 But I think his intention is for it to be different than Android and iOS, not just because it would be insane.
 If it wasn't different, but because he's aiming at a different thing.
 Obviously Google and Apple think they can get there with modifications of what they've got.
 Obviously he thinks it's better to start fresh, and also maybe there's some legal issues.
 I don't know, but that's, so I think that's the more important thing.
 And I don't think the home device is his last device that he's going to try to do.
 I think he's going to try to do a kind of hardware ecosystem backed up by this new software platform, but we'll have to see.
 Well, it seems to me like the phone, you have to have the phone, right?
 No, he made the point, you don't have the phone for the rest of the stuff to work.
 No, no, I mean, if you are trying to launch this kind of company, regardless of what happens in the future with ambient computing,
 I think the screen in your pocket is tremendously important.
 Yeah, for the next ten years, I would agree with you, yeah.
 Sure, and then we'll just build the screens into our arms, and then Dieter's sister will wirelessly communicate with him.
 She's a very nice person, you guys.
 But no, but like if he wants to build this ecosystem of things, having the phone under his control means he's going to put Essential's assistant onto that phone.
 We didn't even mention that he also wants to do an assistant also.
 But his home device he claims it will interoperate with Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, I don't know, Bixby, which is the Samsung one.
 Actually, on stage Walt listed a bunch of them, and then he said, I didn't mention Bixby, and Andy Rubin said, thank you for not mentioning Bixby.
 Can we get him to record his phone call when he calls up Tim Cook and asks him to put Siri on his home speaker running ambient OS?
 I would love to be on a fly on that, Walt.
 So this is like the big question, and Walt and I basically just directly threatened Dieter that we'd make him talk about the open web.
 No.
 But I'm going to come at it sideways.
 We're now entering a world, you brought up the one true answer earlier, so you ask Google for a question that you kind of don't know why it's going to give you the answer, right?
 It's easier if you see it on a screen.
 It's easier if you see it on a screen.
 You can see a list.
 You can see the promoted advertising Google stuff, and here presumably is what the algorithm that everyone tries to game has delivered to you.
 Here's some other stuff.
 Here are some YouTube videos.
 You know where that stuff is coming from because you see it all in context.
 With an assistant, you get one true answer.
 There's been a lot of criticism, particularly of Google and how they deliver one true answer.
 But all of these assistants are fragmented in extremely serious ways.
 Do you see that ever interoperating the way that the web has trained us all to see interoperable devices and services?
 The way I see it, the metaphor is think of the assistants as your browser.
 So like Alexa is Navigator and there.
 Pretty much a Firefox.
 Siri is Safari.
 Google is Chrome.
 And the stuff that they go out to get is web pages or information off the web.
 The thing that makes Navigator, I don't know why.
 I'm just going with it.
 Navigator, Safari, Chrome.
 How many people in the audience were alive when Navigator was a big deal?
 We got one.
 A lot.
 If you're listening in your car, a lot of not raised hands.
 A lot of people furiously Googling.
 The thing that makes all those browsers work is when you make a web page, you're like, I'm making this web page and it's going to work in this way.
 It's going to adhere to this spec.
 Here's where the header is.
 Here's where this is.
 They're all standardized.
 Everybody agrees this is what it looks like.
 When you ask an assistant to go get you information, the thing that the assistant goes and seeks out is not standardized at all.
 The big question I have for Apple and Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Essential and who else is making assistants?
 Samsung.
 Our favorite robot dog.
 Oh, man.
 It sounds like a dog machine.
 None of them, so far as I can tell, are talking to each other about how this assistant should interoperate with apps or with information on the web or anything else.
 They're all just racing to build the best algorithm for their assistants to figure this stuff out on their own.
 And build deals.
 And build deals on the back end to make all of their assistants get you the information.
 And so one of the things that made our current tech revolution happen was that there was, for a period, I don't know if it still is here,
 but there was, for a period, a big open web where everybody competed on a level playing field.
 And as long as they could pay for servers to keep their website running, if they just made a better product, customers could just go to them and nobody would stop them.
 Like, for instance, the travel sites.
 Yes.
 What is the number one travel site?
 And I don't know the answer to this as of this moment, but I know it has changed every couple of years.
 Yeah, it would be Expedia, it would be Hipmunk, and then it would be blah, blah, blah.
 Kayak, whatever.
 Yeah, all the great names.
 Somebody comes up with a better one.
 In a world of ambient computing where you don't know how that information gets to your computer and if anybody is working to make sure there's a standard for it,
 I don't know that we have that open web thing.
 And I actually, even Google, who says they want to follow that model, I don't know if I trust that they're actually doing it.
 Well, and one of the limitations of Siri, and I think they've actually, it's one of the things they've actually fixed a little bit, still have a lot more work to do,
 is they started, Siri, the company, before Apple bought it and Apple kept this relationship,
 they had to deal with this outfit, Wolfram Alpha, which is a very, I think a very high quality, but it's limited in what kinds of things it knows,
 repository of site that has a lot of information on it.
 And that's where it initially drew a lot of answers.
 Then they did a deal with Bing, and for a while, Bing was in a very serious race.
 They never caught Google, but they were pouring a lot of money in, so they had a plausible base.
 I think now, as far as I can tell, Microsoft has not, if you're listening to Microsoft, I'm not saying you've officially given up on Bing,
 but I think as a priority, it's certainly a much lower priority than it once was at Microsoft.
 But it's what Siri goes to for a lot of information, because Apple and Google are competitors.
 So they're going to have to figure all that out.
 So your points, I agree with all your points about the web.
 I think we can't close off this part of the discussion.
 Are we done yet, by the way?
 No.
 You have an hour left.
 Thanks.
 We can't close up this part of the discussion without talking about privacy and security, because I think they're really important.
 There really is no proof, independent proof, that I've ever seen that these things are not listening and are not recording what you say until you say the wake word.
 They all say, don't worry, even though this is set up in your bedroom or your kitchen or wherever.
 Amazon's putting cameras on them, yeah.
 Amazon has one that is called the Echo Show that they actually want you to use in your bedroom because it can show whether you look good.
 The show is the screen and the look is the camera.
 I'm sorry, yeah, I'm sorry, the look.
 And supposedly it has the intelligence to say whether you look good in whatever you're wearing.
 When I think of Amazon, I think of a computer telling me if I look good.
 Yeah, right, exactly, in your bedroom.
 So, you know, I don't think Amazon would do this based on what I know about Jeff Bezos and the company,
 but there's no actual guarantee that somebody at Amazon didn't make a mistake, somehow they aren't listening,
 and even if they're being perfect and they don't ever do anything until you say Alexa.
 And by the way, I'm not singling them out.
 It could be just they made this thing for your bedroom with a camera.
 I don't know, but kind of.
 It's an aggressive move.
 It's an aggressive move.
 But the others will have the same issue.
 So the other problem is hacking.
 I mean, what's to stop someone, even if all these companies are doing exactly what they say and they're being really scrupulous about it,
 what is to stop somebody from hacking into either the servers or somehow into the devices?
 There's also government.
 Yeah, it's not just hacking.
 There's also governments like...
 Yeah, I consider them hackers.
 Hackers for the common good.
 This is what Walt's doing with the rest of his career.
 Look, look, look, we're not going to get into this subject, I swear, and I'll kill you guys if you try to get into it.
 But this subject.
 So James Comey is a big hero, but let us not forget that James Comey tried to make Apple make a version of iOS with a backdoor
 and said, don't worry, give it to the FBI, no one will ever get it.
 Three weeks ago, am I right, about three weeks ago, there was a global ransomware attack that was based on an exploit,
 supposedly locked up in some digital vault at the NSA, and somehow it was stolen.
 So, you know, yes, the government is a factor, hackers are a factor, rogue employees could be a factor, there's all kinds of factors.
 But with Alexa in particular, there has already been one criminal case where the government went to Amazon and said,
 give us the voice commands that this Echo device received so we can construct the timeline of when this person was home or not.
 It actually ended up going nowhere because I think the guy just confessed to Amazon and was like, well, we don't have to worry about this.
 But it's going to happen again and again and again.
 Right, but that was even asking, I mean, that was limited to asking what happened after you said the wake words and issued commands.
 I'm talking about what happens before you say the wake word.
 I mean, there are lots of people who don't want that thing in their kitchen or in their house because they are not 100% sure that somebody,
 whether it's the company or some intruder or the government, somebody isn't recording what you're basically putting a big microphone
 or an array of seven microphones, the HomePod has six, and what is the Google Home has three, two, two.
 You're basically putting a bunch of microphones, you're bugging your own house.
 That is what you're doing.
 You're really, you're bugging your own house.
 I wish I had written that in a column.
 That's a good phrase.
 You've got another couple of hours.
 I give it to you guys.
 It gets the work.
 You're bugging, that's a headline.
 You're bugging your own house and you're trusting that A, the bug won't record anything until you say some magic word that they give you,
 and B, once it does, it will only act on certain commands, and C, it will erase, it will only use the recording to improve its machine learning
 and then it will erase it.
 This is Apple's kind of like huge advantage because their business is selling you things discreetly.
 Right.
 And also services.
 I think you should all be aware that Apple's...
 Yeah, but they don't sell ads.
 Right.
 But Google's business is collecting the data and using it to do all this other stuff, particularly advertising.
 Right.
 Apple's business is...
 Yeah, I mean, Apple will tell you constantly that they're about privacy.
 Amazon, relative to Google, I think Amazon, they collect a lot, but they collect it in a particular, I'm going to use the word, domain,
 which has to do with what you buy.
 Obviously, they try to build psychographic profiles of you and all demographic profiles, but it's really about commerce,
 and so does Google, and certainly Apple knows what you bought from Apple, but Apple sells Apple stuff.
 They don't sell, you can't buy Tide from Apple.
 So there's a progression there.
 So $2.99 an app purchase, a year-long subscription.
 I have a question.
 Didn't Lenovo announce a really high-end speaker with Alexa at CES?
 We did.
 Is that coming out?
 Give me a due date.
 When?
 Soon.
 I'm trying to break some news here on the stage.
 It's not working.
 Those of you who are not journalists, first of all, congratulations.
 But secondly, that exchange with one of the best and most honest PR people I know is what happens.
 That's our life.
 When is that coming out?
 Soon.
 All right, so we've got a few minutes left before we take questions.
 We always do stay the state.
 I think we did stay the state in the last show.
 We talked to big companies.
 But give these people, the listeners, some advice.
 How should they start thinking about these companies?
 What should they expect from these companies?
 These companies are asking for our money, our time, our attention, our data in different ways.
 Explain, like, what's your view of what we should be asking for in return and what is too far?
 So first of all, you know, we've been mostly talking about the – and we really haven't talked much at all about Facebook,
 which by the way now has a hardware lab.
 Can you – raise your hand if you love Facebook.
 Raise your hand if you – one person.
 Raise your hand if you love Instagram.
 It's like, yeah.
 Okay.
 I think this is Facebook's biggest problem.
 I was talking about a lot.
 Raise your hand if you love Apple.
 Wow.
 Raise your hand if you love Microsoft.
 That was a lot of hands.
 Not like, but love.
 This is love.
 More than five.
 Okay.
 All right.
 That's fine.
 It's fine.
 No judgment.
 Pretend you're in your therapist's office.
 It's just – no judgment.
 It's just us, guys.
 Raise your hand if you love Google.
 Wow.
 All right.
 Fewer hands than Apple but more vocal.
 So – but I think your Facebook point is well taken.
 And what I was about to say is in addition to everything they do, including owning Instagram, as you pointed out,
 owning WhatsApp, owning Oculus, which is – you know, it's a hard work company and a software company with a fabulous app store,
 as I understand it.
 They –
 Do you have to do this closer now?
 I have to disclose that my wife, who's in the audience, works for Oculus' app store.
 It's my favorite app store.
 And I can now disclose that after I retire, I'm becoming their national spokesman for the Oculus app store
 because I am the demographic they want people to associate with.
 No, but Facebook does have this thing called Building 8.
 They hired this really smart woman who primarily is – who is a hardware engineer and used to run DARPA,
 the secret research agency at the Pentagon.
 She's really smart and really terrific to interview.
 Her name is Regina Dugan.
 And she's running a thing called Building 8.
 And I don't know what they're doing except what she – what did she say?
 They're going to eventually figure out or they're working on trying to figure out how you can type with your brain and some other stuff.
 You can hear with your skin, I think was the other one.
 Hear with your skin, yeah.
 Just pick a body part and then an idea and then –
 So to answer – yeah, thanks.
 Thanks for putting that in my head.
 So I don't want to – I'm not going to go through the list of companies and say this, this, about this one.
 But here's what we – with these big companies, which have a lot of power over a lot of aspects of your life and are going to get more,
 I think we need to expect a very high level of consumer care.
 And by that I don't just mean, oh, if it's broken, they'll fix it.
 If they have a bug in their software or there's some problem in their hardware, they'll take it back.
 I think what we need is for the big companies as well as the smaller startups like, I don't know,
 Tinder or something is one example, but there's many others.
 Sonos, we talked about, is a very good company, but it's not giant like these guys.
 And then a lot of companies whose names we don't know yet who are working on some of this stuff,
 the closer we get to ambient – and there are these steps.
 If you get AR glasses, if you get a home device that kind of literally is so good that it fades into the background in your mind
 and does a wide variety of things and knows a lot about you because that's the way it gets better,
 I think we have to have not like micromanagement kind of regulations,
 but we need at least a broad set of principles in a statute passed by the United States Congress.
 I'm laughing already.
 It's like Walt's retirement troll. He's like, Congress will do it.
 Passed by a United States Congress that might be inclined to actually be intelligent
 and do something bipartisan and think it through that would talk about –
 we're the only developed country in the world that has no privacy law.
 The Supreme Court has evinced a privacy doctrine, but there's no statute covering this kind of stuff.
 And also security. They may be one law. They may be two laws. I don't know.
 But it has to be written – you know this.
 How many times have you and I talked about it on this very podcast?
 The FCC keeps – depending who's in power, they keep jumping between titles of a very old telecommunications law
 to try to deal with net neutrality.
 We should pick the second one.
 Yes. I agree with you. But the point is I think there's a better solution,
 which is to have an actual – a law that directly addresses it because it's 2017 and it's going to be 2027,
 and we need a law that will be worth something in 2027.
 So, yeah, to answer your question, I think that's really important.
 I will tell you something. I think the companies – and I've talked to some of them about it –
 they would – as they move more and more into this ambient stuff,
 they kind of see the benefit of having some guardrails that they know they can live with.
 And stability in the market, right?
 Yeah. And of course they have lobbyists in Washington. They'll make sure the bill isn't too bad for them.
 As consumers in this room, in the regime that we currently live in, how do we ask those companies to get there?
 Is it just buy the right stuff?
 Yeah. I think you vote with your dollars. I mean, that's the most important thing.
 So, I mean, I'll just be – this is not a surprise to anybody, and I've actually answered it directly before.
 I carry an iPhone. It's not – I own a Google Pixel because I'm a tech reporter and I have to know about it.
 And I actually think it's quite a good phone. I gave it a good review.
 But I value – I, Walt Mossberg, personally value privacy more than necessarily – maybe –
 everybody has a different way of weighting these things. I weight privacy very highly.
 And I think Apple, because of the business model you explained,
 they're much less likely to be collecting stuff about me and certainly to be selling it or using it in a way that's bad.
 So – and the encryption is better on the phone because they don't really – they make their money, you know,
 as we said, when I walk out the door of the store or get it online.
 And so that's a big – for me personally, that's a big reason.
 I mean, I like iOS. I like the phones. I like the iPad a lot. There really isn't a competitor for the iPad.
 But a big part of it in my mind is privacy.
 You may have a different set of expectations. If there's something you want these companies to do,
 you should vote with your dollars and maybe not upgrade to the same thing next year
 and maybe switch to the one that you think is standing for something or acting in a way that you want to encourage
 and don't buy the one from a company you think is doing something you want to discourage – basic economics.
 That's great advice. But most stuff is free. It's hard, right?
 Vote with your attention.
 Yeah.
 Well, vote with – that's right.
 Go on theverbs.com and give us your attention.
 Where we respect all of your rights all the time.
 We do. Unless you are a jerk in my comments, in which case I will ban you.
 Okay, we're going to do some questions. We've got two mics right here. Get up. Line up.
 Yeah, you can't just raise your hand in the back.
 Sorry.
 You've got to come down here.
 All right, guys.
 All right, we've got one over here.
 Wow, there's just a lot happening. If you're listening –
 Yeah, there's a lot of people who want to ask questions.
 There's some people falling over the stage. It is the thunderdome in here.
 Folks, we're not here all night, but we'll take as many as we can.
 All right, let's start over here.
 Oh, you've got to turn this mic on. There we go.
 It has a switch.
 I know.
 Good.
 I just learned it from theverbs.com.
 Yeah.
 My question is that you guys talked about privacy and security a lot,
 but what about smart TVs tracking us also?
 I'm here for you.
 It's like really pervasive, right?
 I mean, they actually install the tracking at the display driver level,
 so before it ever comes onto your screen, they're analyzing the picture on your screen,
 and they know if you're playing a video game, they know what video game you're playing.
 You can turn it off, and I think it's becoming more and more important for us
 to explain how to turn it off, and it's becoming more and more important for the people who review TVs
 to say don't buy this one because it aggressively tracks you.
 I think it's really difficult because the TV manufacturers also want to sell the services,
 but they don't make the boxes, right?
 So Roku makes some TVs, but most people buy Samsung TVs and plug a Roku into it.
 That conversation hasn't happened at a real level yet,
 and I think it will actually take another entrant into the TV market who says we're not doing this,
 but our TV is just as good to actually make a change, but it's super pervasive.
 Yeah, because I have a Samsung, and turning that thing off is going through, I don't know, a whole bunch of things.
 Well, we did a whole control-alt-delete about how complicated the UI is on TVs after I bought an LG TV, which...
 I have the same TV.
 We like the picture on it, right?
 I'm speaking to my wife, Edie Mossberg, sitting there.
 I am the only person at this table who does not have a webOS TV.
 Yeah.
 And if you don't know the depth of the agony that causes him...
 We're going to use one? It's going to be bad for you.
 All right, over here.
 Hi. Sorry, I'm just recording this.
 Go ahead.
 Real quick. A couple episodes ago, you guys spoke about the fab five companies,
 you know, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft.
 I don't think we call them fab, but I get your point.
 I'm sorry. I made that up. Sorry.
 So how long do you think before a company can be successful without going through those five companies,
 and what do you think they would have to do?
 Well, you know, I mean, I can't tell you how long, but I think obviously in the first few decades of this whole thing,
 remember this whole personal computing thing that made the web possible, that made mobile possible,
 that is going to eventually make ambient computing possible, autonomous driving,
 that only started in 1977, which sounds like a long time ago for some people, but it's only 40 years ago.
 And when you compare that to, I don't know, the railroads, the automobile industry, you know, the textile industry,
 all these things are much older.
 So I think these weren't always the five big companies, and they may not always be the five big companies.
 There could be something that pops up that we don't know that gets into one of the leadership positions.
 And one of these or two of these guys may drop away.
 So I don't know how long it will take for there to be change,
 but I think change in business and particularly in the tech business is assured.
 I just don't know what the change will be or when it will happen.
 And I'm not hoping for any one particular one of these companies to go away,
 but what makes these companies big are they're all platforms, and that's different.
 You know, Samsung is a very powerful electronics company that also is a giant conglomerate that builds ships
 and buildings and makes chips and does other things, but it's not a platform.
 It's tried, constantly keeps trying, but it's not a platform.
 And these five companies are big because they're platforms for other companies.
 Right. Yeah.
 Over here.
 Hi, my name is Jonathan Walt. Thanks for taking a picture with me earlier.
 No problem.
 So my question is I've been watching your interviews with a lot of people since fifth grade,
 and I'm curious to know. I'm serious. I'm serious. I'm curious to know.
 Can it, I mean, really.
 My wife is going, you're old.
 I'm curious to know.
 I hope you did something else in school.
 Not really. My mom would say not really.
 Yeah.
 I'm curious to know just because aside from the fact that you are a non-tech person reviewing tech products,
 what do you think makes your taste in products and how people interface with their products so perceptive
 and has become the trait that even tech moguls really admire and respect?
 I mean, Tony Fidel was talking about the-
 Yeah, we paid everyone in that video.
 Well, first of all, I spent ten years as a tech hobbyist at a time when, you know, to put memory in your computer,
 you had to buy the chips one by one and plug them into a board.
 At a time when you had to learn BASIC. This isn't well known about me, but I'm kind of a coder.
 I wrote like little games in BASIC.
 You got to distribute these.
 At what point?
 $79.99 on the App Store. The Mossberg Collection.
 And so, you know, when I started my column, I wasn't entirely for the time.
 I was pretty tech for that period of time.
 For somebody who didn't have a computer science degree and wasn't in any way an engineer,
 I knew a lot about the state of the technology then.
 And then I just kept up with it.
 But what- I don't know what made it click, but I will tell you that I got up every morning to read about tech
 and to write about tech thinking, what would a really smart person who doesn't really care about the insides of the thing
 and how the code works and how the hardware works, they just want it to work,
 what would they want to know about this?
 Whether they should buy it, whether they should not buy it.
 What are the things that make it great? What are the things that make it bad?
 And that was just the mindset I kind of put on my head every day when I would try to evaluate the stuff or write about the stuff.
 And, you know, other people eventually came around to doing that too.
 So that's the kind of- you can find that a lot of places now.
 I just kind of took that approach a little earlier than some other people.
 One piece of advice Walt has always given us is to balance out how much we treat our enthusiast audience with our big consumer audience.
 I think it should be clear that Dieter and I care about the enthusiast audience quite a bit.
 Let's go over here.
 Walt, out of all the podcasts, interviews, and conferences you did, if you can relive one moment in time, which one would that be?
 Yes, yes, yes Dieter and Eli.
 I would like to be redoing this one like Groundhog Day again and again.
 No, I mean look, if you're talking about the onstage interviews and the TV things and that kind of stuff,
 you know, the highlight was obviously getting the two people who you could arguably make the case made the computer revolution, the personal computer revolution happen.
 There were many other people who also did.
 And what you don't know when we got Gates and Jobs together on stage is that we called out in the audience four or five other big pioneers who were not in that interview but who were around at the time.
 But getting them on stage was probably the highlight onstage thing.
 The one I would, so I would do that again.
 I mean there's many variations of that interview you could do and I think a lot of them would have been good.
 Kara and I actually said to the two of them in the green room before they went on, and there's a whole story about how it almost derailed, which I'm not going to tell now.
 But we said to them, from our point of view, as producers of this conference, if you guys want to get up there and have just a giant cat fight, that's fine too.
 But they didn't.
 They were sort of like statesmen.
 The one, and then there have been some interviews that didn't go very well just because it didn't click or the person doing the interview was a very smart CEO, successful,
 but that doesn't mean they were good at talking to a reporter on a stage.
 I mean it's a different skill.
 One that I would have liked to have happened differently was with Mark Zuckerberg, who I do respect and think is really smart, and he just wasn't feeling well on one of his,
 he's been more than once to our conference and he was turning white onstage, not because he was afraid of us, but he just wasn't feeling well, literally.
 And we, Kara and I were both afraid he was going to faint on stage.
 And Kara asked him to, this is, I'm not telling a new story, this story is known.
 Kara, in fact, you can watch it happen on video, asked him to take off his hoodie because he looked like he was getting hot.
 It worked out okay, but it was, I sort of wish maybe we had known that he wasn't feeling well and we could have postponed it to the next day
 or done something to make it a better experience, not only for the audience and us, but especially for him.
 So that's your answer.
 Hey, thanks for doing this tonight, guys.
 So I work in the health space and on your recent kind of world tour, you mentioned that health might have been one of the areas that you would have covered if you didn't go into consumer tech.
 And eventually health tech last week at Code, Mary Meeker included a health section for, I believe, the first time in the state of the internet,
 which I think really exemplified how much health and big data are actually intertwined.
 Walt told me to tell people to ask a question.
 Oh, sorry.
 I was setting it up there.
 But so where do you see the kind of health tech space today and what do you think are its challenge or the biggest opportunity?
 Well, look, I have not written a ton about it, but partly I'll be really honest with you.
 Over the years I've had briefings with companies that are doing interesting things in health,
 and I've typically kind of shied away from doing a review where I recommended or didn't recommend something because I didn't feel that I had any medical qualifications.
 And the last thing I wanted to do was to give people what could be construed as medical advice.
 So I didn't do it.
 But I did a few things where I thought I knew something about it, but not for the most part.
 I think it's super exciting and important, and I think it's part of ambient computing in a way.
 And, you know, I think the FDA has got to get more modern in its approach to consumer tech medical devices,
 like glucometers or, you know, I don't know, just the stuff that people have to use who have different medical conditions to manage their health in a better way.
 But I also think there's an issue, there's a hubris in the valley, in Silicon Valley,
 where people who are very fit and very healthy think they can have figured out a way to, I don't know, cure cancer, cure diabetes,
 and they don't have the medical basis for it, and they just, you know, there are these fad diets.
 Somebody at our conference who I don't know or didn't, had just met, was proudly telling me that there were a couple of people at the conference that were fasting,
 literally fasting, for a week, and that this was good for their health and it was part of what his company was pushing,
 and I was like, I had a little argument with him, let's just be fair.
 And so, because even I said, how many doctors do you have, but what kind of doctors are they, and, you know, all that stuff.
 So, you know, I think those are kind of the push and pull of it, but it's going to be huge.
 All right, we have time for one more.
 We're going to sign a bunch of posters and giveaway T-shirts, so don't worry about it, but we have time for one more here.
 Thanks.
 Walt, with you retiring, it's very much like a changing of the guard.
 You know, there's two other people here who are smarter than me.
 We're not retiring.
 They can talk to us next week.
 All right.
 This is actually for all of you guys, because it's very much about the changing of the guard from you all to guys like these guys.
 Yeah.
 I like them okay.
 But, anyway, so I really want to know what you guys think about what the future of technology journalism looks like, because you guys spend a lot of time talking about technology.
 Okay.
 We should all talk about it, and Neelai and Dieter actually think about it more than I do, because, hell, I'm leaving, but.
 First of all, let me just say, and this is something I absolutely believe, and you can doubt me if you want,
 but these are two of the best journalists, and particularly the best tech journalists I've ever had the pleasure to work with,
 and remember who my business partner has been, the great Kara Swisher.
 She's fantastic.
 These guys are great, and they have a fantastic future ahead of them, and I'm on their back about certain things.
 It's very annoying.
 And I think, so, you know, tech journalism changes like tech changes.
 The principles, the ethical principles, the way you do journalism in tech journalism should not be different than the way you do journalism in sports journalism, political journalism, whatever.
 I mean, all this FUD that's been thrown up about fake news, and you can't trust, you know, mainstream media or whatever, there's just a lot of junk,
 but people at these news organizations are working very hard, and they are ethical, for the most part, like any other profession,
 there are going to be outliers and there are going to be problems.
 So I think the first thing is tech journalism has to stick to principles of good journalism,
 and then you have to go out and you have to do several things, one of which is you'd like to bring to your readers news before other people do,
 but I don't mean two minutes before in a sloppy way.
 I don't think that's very valuable, but I think if you can do it early and have the time to explain it, that's great,
 because then readers get the reward of learning something first on your site.
 Much more important is explaining it.
 Much more important is wading through, like we've been stumbling around trying to do on this podcast, what is the tech industry up to,
 because one of the lines, and it's a little more subtle even than what Nilay just described,
 but one of the lines is between a genuine enthusiasm for the technology.
 You heard Bill Gates in that video, which, by the way, was completely done without my knowledge,
 and I was stunned when they showed it at the Code Conference.
 One of the important things is to balance an enthusiasm for tech with a balanced approach to saying,
 this works in this product and this part of it doesn't work, and not be a cheerleader.
 Be happy and encouraging to the readers about the things tech can do,
 but not be a cheerleader for this company or that company or that company.
 I just want to say I convinced Walt to do the podcast with me ages ago.
 It has been just the ride of my life, an absolute honor to have you work at The Verge, do the show with me.
 I know last week at the Code Conference, Kara threw what she called Walterpalooza,
 and all the industry titans got to say goodbye to you,
 but I am very happy that the last thing you're doing with us is having an audience of consumers say goodbye to you.
 They are your audience. So thank you very much.
 Thanks for coming.
.