The Verge’s David Pierce tries to find out if those YouTube videos promising to remove water from your phone with sounds actually work. Then, David chats with The Verge’s Alex Heath about some AR glasses that are reportedly set to launch from Snap and Meta this fall. Later, David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about competition in the AI industry.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the verge cast the flagship podcast of the native resonance of your smartphone
00:00:04I'm your friend David Pierce and I am in our studio
00:00:08I mentioned on the show last week that we just got this new studio if you've been watching on YouTube. You've seen it
00:00:14I'm very jealous
00:00:15So I got on the Amtrak came all the way up and now I'm sitting in this like chair in the corner that exists
00:00:21For reasons as yet to be figured out, but it's very cool
00:00:25And this is our studio and we have a YouTube play button and I feel very fancy and also like I should be giving some
00:00:32Kind of like motivational life advice
00:00:35Anyway, I am here because we have podcasting to do today on the show
00:00:40We have a couple of really fun things to talk about
00:00:42We're gonna talk to Alex Heath about this like glut of headsets that is coming up. We're gonna get stuff from meta
00:00:48We're gonna get stuff from snap. There's been some news about the stuff that we're getting from meta
00:00:52That's pretty interesting. But in general the VR AR headset craze
00:00:57Continues and seems to be unstoppable and we're gonna talk about it
00:01:01We also have a story that I've been reporting kind of for months now
00:01:05All based on a YouTube video that claims to get the water out of your phone
00:01:09I have lots of questions and we're gonna get answers
00:01:12All of that is coming up in just a second along with an answer to your questions from the verge cast hotline
00:01:18But first there are lots of microphones in here and I have to go scream into the mall and see what trouble I can get
00:01:24Into this is the verge cast. We'll be right back
00:01:28Welcome back. So a few months ago. My family went to a town called Reedville, Virginia
00:01:33It's this very cute, but very tiny little fishing town with only a few hundred residents
00:01:39I have no idea why we went there. Honestly
00:01:41I think my mom just found a cool house on Airbnb for pretty cheap and was like sick house on the river for the weekend
00:01:48Out behind that Airbnb
00:01:50There was this little dock that stuck out into the water and the day after we got there
00:01:54My nephew went out onto the dock to fish. I was sitting on this little bench
00:02:00They had at the very end of the dock and I got lazy
00:02:03So I put my feet up cuz I was like, okay, I'm gonna relax and then also my phone
00:02:06I feel it this slip right out my pocket and it's falls and right into the water. That's Chris
00:02:11That's my nephew and his phone is a Samsung Galaxy s24
00:02:15Basically still brand-new so Chris drops his phone
00:02:19I saw a fall like as soon as it went past the dock. I saw it and then goes
00:02:24And it starts sinking down
00:02:26Just down down down and down. Did you think about jumping in? I immediately but I was like, that's a bad
00:02:33Yeah, I'm gonna go run back and tell him what happened
00:02:35I hope they can help me out
00:02:36Chris comes running inside the house where I'm hanging out with a bunch of our other family members and tells us what happens we all
00:02:43Immediately jump up go outside grab all the nets and stuff
00:02:47we can find and start scraping through the muck at the bottom of the river trying to find his phone and
00:02:53Miracle of miracles. We actually found it Caden
00:02:56My other nephew grabbed it in a big net and just pulled it up and there it was
00:03:00It's kind of amazing at the end of it all the phone had probably been underwater for 10
00:03:05Maybe 15 minutes and when it came up in that net the screen was actually on
00:03:10So it seemed like we might have avoided the worst but still everyone was worried right wet phones are bad
00:03:16No matter what the screen is currently doing and the s-24 did have that warning notification that said water had gotten inside
00:03:23We brought it inside. I believe we tried
00:03:26No
00:03:26We didn't try to write out because um someone brought up an idea that he had and we tried it out
00:03:30So we're literally what he did because it was cuz it was so little a little water
00:03:33It was still working properly
00:03:34He opened up a YouTube video and started playing this weird sound that like
00:03:37They changed like though
00:03:39I made the speakers like do a whole bunch of weird sounds and I ended up I think pushing out some of the water or
00:03:44At least loosing it up
00:03:45This is where our story really begins the somebody in question here is Gabe a friend who had come with us for the weekend
00:03:52So we're all standing in the kitchen trying to figure out what to do for Chris's phone and Gabe is just like oh
00:03:57There's this YouTube video that gets all the water out of your speakers
00:04:00I have been thinking about that YouTube video ever since and actually it's not just one video
00:04:05But a whole genre of them and they are shockingly popular
00:04:08There's sound to remove water from phone speaker parentheses all caps guaranteed, which has 45 million views
00:04:1645 million views water out of speaker sound iPhone parentheses 100% fix
00:04:213.9 million views
00:04:23165 Hertz test tone pure sine wave 5 min remove water from phone best version
00:04:2927 million views on and on and on
00:04:32hundreds of millions of views on these videos from all over the place and
00:04:36The comments honestly are the best part one just says I think this is the most important video on YouTube
00:04:42No matter how many years go through this vid will just keep getting more views and another one says damn
00:04:48We really the elite gang bringing our phones in the showers
00:04:51Another one at this point. This video is going to show up in my Spotify wrapped that one actually made me laugh really hard
00:04:57I'm still going to bring my phone in the shower again. So see you guys tomorrow
00:05:01That's another one, but here's my favorite one and you actually see a lot of these on these videos
00:05:06Everyone's saying how they drop theirs in a shower or a pool of water
00:05:09I dropped mine in cereal edit two months later and I'm back here again because I did the same thing again
00:05:14Edit two can't believe it's been a year since I've gotten some sort of liquid in my phone
00:05:18Well time to reset the counter because my phone magically landed into my pool
00:05:23The point is there are millions of people out here
00:05:25Apparently just cavalierly taking their phones into the shower the pool the rain
00:05:31Whatever and trusting that a YouTube video will fix it before we get too far
00:05:36I just want to play you a clip from one of these videos
00:05:39I'm only gonna play you a few seconds of it because it's not you know pleasant audio
00:05:43But just want to give you the idea of what this is doing
00:05:46So without further ado, here are the lush sounds of sound to remove water from phone charging port parentheses one-hour version
00:06:04Like I said, it's not nice to listen to but it's not really supposed to be it's supposed to do a job and ever since
00:06:10That day trying to fix Chris's phone
00:06:12I've been wondering if it really works
00:06:15Because on the one hand lots of people are using these videos and clearly their phones keep working. So great
00:06:20But on the other hand, maybe that's just because our phones have gotten impressively waterproof and generally durable over the years
00:06:28So the big question is did we get the water out of Chris's phone or did Samsung keep the water from ever getting in?
00:06:34I became obsessed with this question. I had to know
00:06:37So the first thing I did was reach out to a bunch of phone makers to see what they thought
00:06:40I didn't get much from Google or Samsung or Apple except for vague
00:06:45responses kind of along the lines of
00:06:47Seems like it might theoretically work a few companies did point me to their official support pages for liquid damage and what to do
00:06:53If your phone gets wet
00:06:54Apple's for instance says to tap it gently against your hand with the lightning or USB port facing down and then leave it in a
00:07:00Dry area. That's roughly the advice you'll get from most of these companies. That doesn't answer my question at all
00:07:06The most compelling piece of evidence I had for my specific question from the very beginning was actually the Apple watch
00:07:12It has this feature for swimmers where you can turn the digital crown to eject water out through the speakers
00:07:18Some other smart watches like the Samsung Galaxy watch do something similar
00:07:22This seems like in theory the same sort of idea
00:07:25But Apple presumably has access to all of the tech inside the watch to do that stuff
00:07:31So is it the same thing when you just play a video on YouTube?
00:07:34Actually to be honest
00:07:35The more I got into this and the more I researched and tried to figure out how all of this works
00:07:40The more I realized I don't even understand the basics of what's happening here. So I called up this guy
00:07:46I'm Eric Freeman and I'm a senior director of research at Bose in addition to his day job
00:07:52Eric literally teaches a class to Bose employees about how speakers work
00:07:55And so I tried to get him to tell me how speakers work, but I'm an idiot
00:07:59So I made him start at the most basic place possible
00:08:03Like what is a speaker? I know what it's for. I know what it does
00:08:07But if you actually opened up a speaker, what would you see inside?
00:08:11So I'm gonna start from the back of kind of a conventional speaker
00:08:15Which is the most common thing that you'll find it's in, you know
00:08:18The speakers that are in your Bluetooth speakers or your phone or even like pro audio equipment
00:08:25It's all the same technology for the most part. It's just tiny versus huge versus medium size
00:08:32So if we start from the back
00:08:34we've got a magnet and the
00:08:36magnet has some steel parts around it and the purpose of the steel parts is just to take the magnetic field lines and put them
00:08:43In a very specific location in that specific location. There's a coil of wire
00:08:48So you have a coil of wire
00:08:50Sitting inside of some magnetic field lines and it turns out that when you run electrical current through a wire
00:08:57It behaves like a magnet it creates a magnetic field
00:09:00So just like when you play with two magnets, you know
00:09:03You can stick them together or have them repel each other
00:09:06You can run current through a wire and have it attract to the permanent magnet or push away from the permanent magnet
00:09:14The long and short of it is this you're using that magnetic field
00:09:17He's talking about to essentially push and pull a little piston shaped thing
00:09:21Really really really fast about 20 times per second all the way to about 20,000 times per second
00:09:27The long and short of it is this you're using that magnetic field
00:09:30He's talking about to essentially push and pull a little piston shaped thing
00:09:34Really really fast somewhere between 20 and 20,000 times a second and every time you do it's moving air
00:09:41So 20 is the low frequency. So the base so like, you know 20 up to I don't know
00:09:46150 or so is generally considered the base range and then as the frequency of vibration gets higher you get into
00:09:53Higher tones so above that is kind of like the vocal range and where a lot of instruments sit
00:09:59It's called the mid-range like a lot of people are probably familiar with the there's a bass control the mid-range control and a treble
00:10:05Control right and as you go higher and higher and get into the thousands and tens of thousands of vibrations per second
00:10:12That's the treble to change the tone of a sound you change how fast that little piston is moving back and forth and to change
00:10:19The volume you change how much that little piston moves thus the bigger the speaker the more space the piston has to move
00:10:26So the more air it pushes around so the bigger and louder it can be
00:10:30Hypothetically Eric told me that if you want to get your speaker to move as much air as aggressively as possible
00:10:36You'd want to generate really low tones at really high volumes
00:10:39The lowest tone that that speaker can reproduce at the loudest level that it can play
00:10:45That will create the most air motion which will push on the water that's in trapped inside the phone
00:10:51So just super bassy music is just gonna move more air inside of your device than anything else you would think of
00:10:58Yes, that's right. So those YouTube videos if you listen to them
00:11:02It's not like really deep bass because your phone can't go super deep in the bass
00:11:07But it it plays kind of an in the low range of where a phone is able to make sound
00:11:12So it uses the range where the phone can move its speaker the most
00:11:17So if you have something in your phone, you don't want to be in there
00:11:19You play the lowest tones possible as loud as possible. Lots of air moves really intensely and boom you're done
00:11:25The science kind of tracks when I asked Eric what he thought about my YouTube video question
00:11:30He only really had one addendum to my theory
00:11:33I think the one caveat is
00:11:35You would want to hold your phone so that gravity is your friend, right?
00:11:39You would want the speaker to be facing down
00:11:41so the water that's trapped near the speaker would go as low as possible and probably like puddle against that little screen and
00:11:49Then you play that YouTube track with all that bass in this and the cone starts pumping
00:11:54I imagine what happens is, you know with the pressure behind the water
00:11:58It's pushed through the screen and it kind of spits out through the through the screen, right?
00:12:02and if you do that long enough the water is gonna jump around and jiggle around and eventually most of it's gonna get pushed through
00:12:08The screen and there's probably a little residual amount that just needs to evaporate over time
00:12:12Okay, so I'm almost certain an incredibly stupid question
00:12:16But with the better idea to be to put your phone
00:12:21right in front of or like inside of some much larger much more powerful speaker because if the goal is to push as much
00:12:28Air as forcefully as possible
00:12:30Should I do that or at this point am I I'm putting like an aluminum back in the way and I'm just gonna screw up
00:12:36That's a really interesting idea
00:12:38And I think if you if you were to stick your phone into a sealed
00:12:43Cavity that a big woofer was pumping on right and you develop all this pressure
00:12:47That's gonna push air in and out of that screen for sure
00:12:51Right, so I think you could get a setup like that to pump the water out
00:12:56The only danger is that really high pressure could damage the little speaker inside of your phone
00:13:01So it's much safer to use your own speaker up to the limit of its capability
00:13:07So at this point, I'm convinced that at least theoretically you can use a YouTube video to get water out of your phone
00:13:13But I'm still stuck on this idea of whether these videos are a placebo or not
00:13:17All these people using their phones in the shower or at the pool or whatever
00:13:20Are they actually fixing their phones this way or are they and my nephew Chris just really lucky that phones have gotten
00:13:27Impressively waterproof over time. The only way to figure this out is just to do some testing and luckily
00:13:32I found some folks willing to help I had first reached out to the team at iFixit when I hit up the phone manufacturers
00:13:38Basically just to ask does this theoretically make sense to you?
00:13:41I got an email back with a quote from iFixit repairability engineer Karsten Fraunheim
00:13:46He also made the connection to the Apple watch and said quote
00:13:49It's just a specific
00:13:51Oscillating tone that pushes the water out of the speaker grills
00:13:53Not sure how effective the third-party versions are for phones since they're probably not ideally tuned we could test
00:13:59That is music to my ears my friend
00:14:01So not long after that
00:14:02I got on the phone with Sharam Mokhtari the lead teardown technician at iFixit and he walked me through a theory
00:14:08He'd been developing ever since I sent that first email turns out he'd gone down kind of the same rabbit hole
00:14:13I had top of my notes here and I am absolutely shocked would never have occurred to me people are using their phones in the
00:14:19Sharam had been wrestling with a question that I hadn't even thought of if you can remove water from a phone using the speakers
00:14:26And if Apple already has this feature built into the Apple watch
00:14:30Why wouldn't it be built into the iPhone?
00:14:32This is definitely not something we should present as fact, but the watches are easier to waterproof and all of Apple's
00:14:39Terminology they say how their water resistant and not waterproof, which is technically accurate
00:14:44It's also been designed and has far fewer and limited cavities and holes in the watches than there are on the phones
00:14:51Which allows them to design to push the water out from those cavities?
00:14:55Whereas on the phone the speakers are located at the bottom and the top of the phone
00:15:00Which means you can't get cavities like the SIM card slot. It's just not possible to push water out from those cavities
00:15:07I think that's why they don't include the same feature on the phones
00:15:12Because it's just it's not gonna work
00:15:14Perfectly as it should or as they would want it to and I they don't want to mislead people in thinking
00:15:20Hey, your phone is waterproof again speculation and we'll do some testing on that to figure it out
00:15:25Like basically everyone else I had been talking to Sharam bought the overall theory that speakers can move water
00:15:31Though he did say it can get screwy if the speakers themselves are actually damaged by the water
00:15:36And that was just the first of a bunch of new caveats
00:15:39Question of whether fresh water and salt water makes a difference pops up in my mind
00:15:45Which is something I plan to investigate
00:15:47How long the water has been sitting in your phone is definitely going to make a difference because salt water mineral and salt
00:15:53Deposits are going to interfere with the function
00:15:56Where is it not able to push the water out from which cavities are we going to have the most trouble?
00:16:01What does the water damage on the inside look like and does this give people a false sense of confidence?
00:16:09In the water resistance capabilities of both phones and watches
00:16:14That last bit there is one of the things I've been wondering about this whole time
00:16:18It's definitely true that phones are more durable and waterproof than ever
00:16:21But it might actually be dangerous to trust that fact too much
00:16:25Your phone might survive a drop in the pool or the toilet or whatever
00:16:29But you still shouldn't drop your phone in the pool or the toilet or whatever because lots of other things can go wrong
00:16:36Phones also wear over time and lose some of that durability and impenetrability
00:16:40So telling people your phone is waterproof. So go nuts
00:16:43It's actually maybe not a good or helpful or even true thing
00:16:48Sharam at the end of our first conversation had a bunch of ideas for other tests
00:16:52He wanted to do and he also looped in Chetan Ritter a master's student in electrical engineering who has been working with I fix it
00:16:58He also had lots of ideas
00:17:00I may be thinking ahead with like a I don't I just want to throw it out there but a test that we could
00:17:04Do is we could get a phone we could dunk it in a have you seen a pressure tank like a diving?
00:17:09But we're just talking about that
00:17:10We need to get one of those for some of the other ingress test things
00:17:13We have but we could do is for the the test
00:17:15You could fill it with a UV reactive liquid like put some dye in the water
00:17:20Put the phone in there just dunk it and then take it out
00:17:23Maybe take it apart after and then shine a light on it to see where you would get water in there
00:17:28But that means you'd have to have like two phones and brand new phones. You'd have to buy
00:17:32I fix it has tons of phones lying around but they've all already been opened up. That's I fix its thing
00:17:38They're a company based on repairing electronics
00:17:40So they get things to open them up and figure out how to repair them
00:17:43And once you've pried a phone apart
00:17:45You've kind of compromised it
00:17:47So they just needed new phones to play with if this test was going to really feel like the real world
00:17:52Luckily, I had a drawer full of phones to play with
00:17:55I get a lot of phones for various reasons and sometimes the companies that ship them to us just don't want them back
00:18:01Often we'll donate them or find another use for them
00:18:04But sometimes they just sit around like forever in this case
00:18:07I have a box full of new and old phones that have just been moving around with me for years
00:18:13so I decided to donate a few devices to science and put four phones in a box and shipped them to I fix it for
00:18:20Sharam and Shaden to take apart the four phones, by the way are not particularly representative of anything
00:18:25Just what I had around and available to send
00:18:28it was a Google Pixel 7 Pro an iPhone 13 a Google Pixel 3 and a Nokia 7.1 that I think it's from
00:18:352018 so some old some new some fancy some less fancy just something to get us started a few weeks later
00:18:41I got an email from Sharam and Chaitin saying they had some answers for me. So we got back on a call
00:18:47We got the four phones that you sent us. I tested using a
00:18:51UV bath and we made that just by buying some of these so we got we got like several UV dyes
00:18:58The original one we started with didn't work out
00:19:00So we got these like boat like sewage tank things to like detect leaks if you're in the harbor and they were amazing
00:19:07It was I don't do you watch Futurama at all? A little bit. Yeah. Have you seen the you know, the drink slurm?
00:19:12I'm dying of thirst grab my feet and dunk my head in so I can drink. No, that's moronic fine
00:19:18I'll let go and swim around in the slurm and drink as much as I want
00:19:21I
00:19:25Just thought it was hilarious but these worked out great in case you haven't watched Futurama slurm and this UV bath are both of these
00:19:32Kind of toxic spill green looking liquids and in Chaitin's case
00:19:37The goal was to submerge a phone in the stuff
00:19:39Leave it there for about a minute and then take it out
00:19:41And if you look at your phone, you can probably guess where liquid is most likely to get in in that process
00:19:46It's around the power button the volume keys the port at the bottom and the speakers up top and down below
00:19:51That's where the phone is open and that's where stuff can get in
00:19:54So the idea was after a minute underwater Chaitin would pick the phone out gently tap it to get some of the water out
00:20:00Play one of our water ejecting YouTube videos and then leave the phone overnight
00:20:04This is basically what you do if you just dropped your phone in a river
00:20:08I think so it felt like a pretty good test
00:20:10But the slurm green stuff would leave a trace of wherever it had lingered which they'd then be able to see under a UV light
00:20:17So, you'd know where liquid had managed to get inside the phone and stay there long enough to leave this residue
00:20:22Anything that came in and then immediately was expelled wouldn't leave much trace
00:20:27I should say by the way that liquid getting inside of your phone isn't by definition the end of the world
00:20:32There are lots of different ways of waterproofing things and plenty of valid different approaches to keeping the really sensitive bits of your device
00:20:39Safe all these companies will tell you that the main goal is not to keep water out
00:20:44It's to keep your phone working no matter what happens
00:20:47But if you can you should probably try to keep everything out entirely
00:20:51Because sure your phone might be safe from a few drops of pure fresh water getting inside
00:20:56But oftentimes that's not what happens in the real world
00:20:59I would assume if you left your phone a little longer in there or you weren't as lucky
00:21:03We wouldn't be in the same situation. Also, we're talking about taking this thing into the shower repeatedly
00:21:09So one of these days you will take it in and it will fail
00:21:12Also, you got I don't know what what other stuff is in shampoo, but it's probably more conductive than just a new liquid like water
00:21:19Right. That's the other part of this is like very rarely
00:21:22Are you getting what amounts to perfectly fresh water inside of your eyes? It'll smell nice after yeah
00:21:28one of Apple's official recommendations actually if you get your phone submerged in liquid is to
00:21:33Immediately rinse it with tap water and it includes a picture of just shoving your phone under the kitchen faucet
00:21:39Samsung also suggests soaking your phone in tap water if something like that happens, which seems
00:21:44Wild to think about doing but that's actually the point these modern devices do do a lot to keep liquid out
00:21:50But if something gets in and it's corrosive or otherwise chemically in some way you're in much more trouble
00:21:57Anyway, Chetan started showing me all these pictures of the phones that he'd taken with the UV light on
00:22:03So you're just seeing basically the outline of the phone and these little neon green splotches everywhere that there had been liquid
00:22:09He started with the iPhone 13. So this is the inside of the screen and you can clearly see around this little hole
00:22:16There's a bunch of residue that was left behind now on our speakers here
00:22:20I was surprised that on the bottom speakers at least
00:22:22There wasn't as much as I thought there was gonna be and I opened these up
00:22:27there's a fine mesh in there and that mesh did a really good job of
00:22:31Preventing anything from going into the speaker cavity itself. It's either like a really fine mesh
00:22:37It felt like a mesh when I was rubbing a spider over it or tweezers
00:22:40but it could just be textured plastic and it did a
00:22:43Excellent job at keeping liquid out and that was for all of the rooms
00:22:47Huh?
00:22:47Because you would think that would be the most natural place for it to be there
00:22:51So I guess it makes sense that they would pay special attention to it
00:22:54Mm-hmm
00:22:55Jaden did say he was a little surprised to see the iPhone not keep everything out since the phone's a bit older
00:23:00Maybe the seal degraded or maybe it just wasn't a perfect seal in the first place
00:23:04But like we've been saying the phone still worked camera was fine. Everything was fine
00:23:07So maybe it's fine. Google's pixel 7 Pro was next and kind of crushed it
00:23:12So this one was interesting because when I opened it up, there was no liquid inside it at all
00:23:17It was dry like the none of the water like the detection stickers were triggered the pixel 3 though
00:23:24Not so good. This is the front you can see
00:23:27yeah, obviously there's a big green mark here and the on this be upper speaker and
00:23:31Microphone and then you can see the corners of the display, too
00:23:34So that's like you're gonna see a drop of water underneath your screen basically. Yeah, I have the device here
00:23:41it's not very visible when I'm holding it now, but if I sort of tilt it I can kind of see something and
00:23:47When I turned it on it wasn't as I mean you could if you really looked at you could detect it
00:23:52But it was sort of hard to see but regardless there's liquid in your display and that's not a good thing
00:23:57There was lots of residue all around the pixel 3 actually in the SIM card slot and the USB C port and lots of other places
00:24:04You just don't want liquid to be it didn't seem like any of it had gotten so deep as to totally destroy the phone
00:24:11Except maybe that bit in the display, but it's not great either way and the Nokia was even worse
00:24:17There was residue around the battery and the screen there was actually corrosion on the USB port and the liquid detection sticker
00:24:24Inside had triggered which is usually bad news for your warranty
00:24:27The other phones though didn't trigger that sticker even the ones that got a little liquid inside thought that was really interesting again
00:24:33There are plenty of reasons for the differences here
00:24:36Maybe the phone's just not that sealed in the first place or maybe it degraded over time
00:24:40Maybe it got banged up in shipping
00:24:42I don't know Chetan and Sharam both kept saying that they wanted to do more testing to test a phone the day it comes out
00:24:48And then test another model of the same phone six months or a year or two years later to see how things change over time
00:24:54It's a really cool idea and I hope they do it
00:24:56But it requires a lot of phones and it gets really expensive really fast
00:25:00But for my purposes, we're getting somewhere while he was testing the phones Chetan
00:25:04Also took these super close-up slow-motion videos of each phone as he played the YouTube video and you can actually see them working
00:25:12in almost every one of them the sound starts the phone starts buzzing and
00:25:16Immediately you get this burst of water coming out of the speaker grill
00:25:19It's like the tiniest little water fountain you've ever seen the effect slows down pretty fast
00:25:24But that initial whoosh of air really does fire some water out of the speakers
00:25:32The water comes out of both the top speaker and the bottom one which in Chetan's test were also the two places water was
00:25:38Most likely to get in in the first place
00:25:40It's literally like spitting water out as it plays that video. But as Chetan found it doesn't get everything out
00:25:47I wonder if
00:25:49Like once it got in there because that mesh does a really good job of keeping stuff out if if a little bit dead did
00:25:55Get in it's you know, it's just gonna keep it in there as well, too
00:25:57This is actually a pretty good summation of the situation here
00:26:01So recent phones, especially high-end ones have in fact gotten really good at keeping liquid out
00:26:06Your phone may not be completely waterproof forever in all situations, but frankly
00:26:11There's a good chance. You can drop it in the river and it'll come out working
00:26:15Okay
00:26:15But if liquid does get in it can be tricky to get back out because it has to go back through that same
00:26:21Nearly impenetrable seal that it had to go through to get into your phone in the first place
00:26:26But can playing a video on YouTube help?
00:26:28I think so at least a little you can shake or tap the phone to get some liquid out and see that when it's wet
00:26:35And playing a video like these does seem to generate some more powerful and forceful motion to get the droplets moving
00:26:41There's just no denying the evidence of those drops flying out when you play the video and the phone starts vibrating
00:26:47But it seems like it's only gonna help in spots near the speaker
00:26:51It's just not moving enough air to like push everything around the phone and out of the various holes
00:26:56Those grills at the bottom and top are the easiest place for liquid to get in and thus the easiest place to push them out
00:27:02They also happen to be right next to the speakers and what happens
00:27:06It seems is that after that first bit of liquid is initially ejected out
00:27:10What's left ends up just kind of getting sloshed around as the speaker keeps moving
00:27:14So yes a YouTube video might help a little but it won't solve all of your problems
00:27:19I say they kind of worry I can't hurt like but I don't see it being and I'll be all
00:27:24Fixed or a way to pull all the liquid out
00:27:27There are lots of good tips out there for getting liquid out of your phone many of which boil down to the same thing
00:27:32Try to get air moving with your mouth or a fan or canned air
00:27:35But don't do it so aggressively that you might break something inside of the device put it in rice sure use the silica beads fine
00:27:42There are a million strategies out there and many of them work at least a little but Chaitin and Sharam both offered the same advice
00:27:49Which is frankly pretty simple and pretty good advice. Don't take your phone in the shower
00:27:54It might survive you might play the video after you get out and it might be okay
00:27:58But next time it might not every time your phone gets wet in any way you are tempting fate and
00:28:04Eventually one time you're gonna do this and the liquid damage gods are not going to care how quickly you manage to get the YouTube
00:28:10App open but look I'll just level with you after going through this whole process and learning all of this about how speakers work
00:28:16I bookmarked one of these videos and just the other day
00:28:19I spilled like two-thirds of a can of seltzer right over top of my phone
00:28:23Immediately shook it out tapped it played the video and my phone still works
00:28:27I don't think my phone still works because I played that video
00:28:31But it certainly didn't hurt and it might have helped at least a little bit. It's all about getting air moving
00:28:36You know what? I mean? I'm sure I'll be back in those comments before too long next time. I spill some seltzer
00:28:49All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk about headsets we'll be right back
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00:30:12All right, we're back
00:30:14So I was gonna start this segment by saying it's almost gadget season because you know
00:30:19It's the end of August and usually it happens to be Labor Day and then it happens to be gadget season
00:30:24That's how it usually works. But right now we are in the middle of gadget season
00:30:29Samsung did its thing early Google did its thing early. We're barreling towards an Apple event AI stuff is everywhere
00:30:35It is firmly gadget season. And I think what we're actually about to start is headset season
00:30:42There's been some reporting that meta and snap and others are about to launch headsets and
00:30:48We're getting to a place where we've been doing this VR and AR thing
00:30:53Long enough that I think we can start to ask questions about what we're doing here about how far off this tech really is
00:31:00And about what these companies can do now that works the verges Alex
00:31:05Heath has been reporting on all of this both on the site and in his excellent newsletter command line
00:31:10Which you should absolutely subscribe to so I figured we'd bring him on and just try to talk through all of it Alex
00:31:15Hello. Hi
00:31:16so I want to talk about snap and I want to talk about meta and I think we should talk about snap because I
00:31:21Think we're only gonna talk a little bit about snap and then we're gonna talk a lot about meta
00:31:24But basically you reported both of these companies are going to launch big new headsets
00:31:29Kind of within what we think like a couple of weeks of each other in September
00:31:33Okay within a week of each other. So it's gonna be it's gonna be a thing
00:31:36I want to start with snap because for years my like
00:31:41Sneakiest hot take about the tech industry was that snap was way further ahead in all of this AR stuff than people realized and that
00:31:49At some point it was it was going to just release the thing and nobody would have seen it coming
00:31:53It sounds very much like all these years later. We are still not there. This might not be that thing. What are we doing here?
00:32:00Well, what is what is snap up to with spectacles?
00:32:03Like what is your sense of what's going on inside of snap as they think about this?
00:32:06Hardware thing that they've been working on all this time. Yeah, since I've been reporting on this since gosh
00:32:12Many years I've felt the same way like when is this finally going to arrive and it keeps getting pushed out snap and meta
00:32:19Are both showing these air glasses off that they've been working on but they're essentially
00:32:24glorified prototypes and
00:32:26Snap is repeating its playbook from 2021
00:32:29Where it released I say released in quotes because it showed AR spectacles and
00:32:37When we say that it's you know displays inside the lenses where you can see virtual objects on the real world
00:32:43It showed those off and pitched it as kind of a dev kit for its lens creators
00:32:47And I got to try them journalists got to try them
00:32:49But snap never sold them and they're they waffled a bit on whether they would sell the version
00:32:54They're about to announce in September the fifth generation
00:32:57Which I'm told is you know, it's it's a meaningful upgrade, but it's more of a like an s-type iPhone model
00:33:03It's more just a better faster
00:33:06Version of the design that they released in 2021, which would be something
00:33:10Yeah, like the one the one we saw a couple of years ago was very cool
00:33:13I got it in the most incredibly controlled demo. Yeah, and it overheated like every 10 minutes
00:33:18So it worked it was it was cool. Like the tech was fairly primitive, but pretty good
00:33:23There's a lot of good ideas in there
00:33:25That's what I remember and when you know
00:33:27I kept thinking wow like when they finally fixed the bugs here and the battery life and the display quality and the weight like
00:33:34The ideas in the interface and how you use this thing
00:33:38Really are compelling. It's just really hindered by the tech and I would say that's actually been the story of AR glasses since
00:33:45Snap and meta both started working on them around, you know in earnest around
00:33:492017 2016 2018 is that the tech just hasn't been ready for the vision of what these companies think these glasses can do and
00:33:57yes in the same way that snap invented a lot of social media concepts like stories and ephemeral messaging that we
00:34:03Use today in metas apps
00:34:05They have been very early to I wear with spectacles and smart glasses
00:34:09And now meta feels like it's starting to take that narrative away from them
00:34:14And I think they're hoping that especially by going out, you know a week before
00:34:18Zuckerberg is gonna show off his glasses
00:34:20Their prototype will wow people and kind of remind everyone that they were actually first and they're still moving ahead here
00:34:26But again, like they aren't selling these things. So they're they're glorified prototypes
00:34:31Yeah, do you think it even matters even if snap comes out and says, you know
00:34:35We've gone an order of magnitude ahead in technology. These things are super cool. Really exciting. What was it?
00:34:41You said they're not even planning to make 10,000 of them
00:34:43It's like it's it's a science project like it is just a science project and like I wonder at some point
00:34:49Why snap is gonna continue to release these things? Like what it what is spectacles doing for snap at this point in time?
00:34:56That's a very good question and one that a lot of people inside snap aren't even sure about to be perfectly honest
00:35:02I mean, this is Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy the two co-founders, baby
00:35:06This hardware division. They're spending a lot of money still on it and snap as a business. It's just not been doing well
00:35:12They've really struggled to scale their advertising business and build a sustainable profitable ads business on top of their, you know
00:35:19Messaging app which I should note is bigger than ever
00:35:22They have I believe it's over 800 million users globally snap as a as a social network is doing well
00:35:29It's just that it's business as not right
00:35:31And so investors are looking at their investment in hardware and going do you really have the leash and the ability?
00:35:38To compete here in such a capital intensive space where meta is invest investing
00:35:44you know billions and billions of dollars into AR and
00:35:49Snap is really the the David to the Goliath here and that's been their story in social media
00:35:54And I think Evan Spiegel the CEO thinks, you know that they have a shot even in hardware
00:35:58But I have become very skeptical especially in the last few years that snap can be a meaningful player here
00:36:04I mean my read from just talking to company insiders is that they want to have a seat at the table for what?
00:36:11Spiegel and Zuckerberg both agree could be the next major platform shift
00:36:14Which is you know us using smart glasses and AR glasses to augment
00:36:19You know how we use our phones and to eventually shift usage away from phones to wearables
00:36:23That has been the narrative that has been spun by both of them
00:36:27Like I said for eight years now, it still feels far away
00:36:31I think it's getting closer, but it's still not on the near horizon
00:36:35And the question is whether snap has the the leash to survive that long one that is investing so much
00:36:41It does seem very clear that snap thought this would all be ready much sooner than it turns out
00:36:48It's actually going to be right and that's not just that's everybody right like that is the whole industry
00:36:52It's like I think back to when all the like lifts and ubers and everybody were telling us that by 2020
00:36:58Taxis right like yeah, it's it's just the timeline of all of this just everybody turned out to be wrong
00:37:03You know, it's it's funny
00:37:04You said robo taxis though because I was thinking about that
00:37:07I was in Phoenix last weekend and I was seeing all the way mo's on the street there and they're starting to pop up here
00:37:12where I live in LA I see them in SF every time I go up there and
00:37:16You know thinking about yeah
00:37:17How long we had to deal with companies saying that self-driving was right around the corner and all of a sudden it's kind of here
00:37:25Right way mo's doing hundreds of thousands of rides. I think AR may be a similar story. I think yes
00:37:32they've been saying it for a long time and it's easy to feel like like, you know, it's just another year of
00:37:37Prototypes and vaporware and it's no closer, but I do feel like it's getting closer
00:37:42I think it may be a thing where we really don't see it at meaningful scale meeting millions of units a year until
00:37:49Towards the end of this decade like 2028 ish is I think when meta especially expects it to hit
00:37:54But I'm expecting these to be good demos
00:37:58Spectacles and met his classes and it wasn't here for a really long time until all of a sudden it was
00:38:03That's actually a good segue to meta because I think if there is going to be a company in
00:38:08The immediate future that is able to just sort of one day drop it on us
00:38:12It seems like it's gonna be meta
00:38:14Everything we're hearing out of Apple is that Apple's ability to make something that is very good and affordable is a long way out
00:38:21Snap I think we're both sort of slowly giving up on it
00:38:24Feels like if if there is a company that is going to figure this out in a like all of a sudden
00:38:30It's mainstream kind of way
00:38:31It's probably gonna be meta and my god would I not have been on that five years ago
00:38:35but it feels like it feels like here we are and especially the the Ray-Ban glasses have been so successful and it feels like
00:38:40That has shifted metas thinking about how to sequence some of this stuff in some ways
00:38:45Like what's your sense of what we're gonna see it connect in a couple of weeks?
00:38:48Yeah, you're right that Ray-Ban has shifted their view a little bit here because these last Ray-Ban smart glasses, which I have
00:38:56I don't know if you've used them the version two. Yeah, I have a pair. They're awesome. I use them all the time
00:39:00They're quite good. Um, and it's the first meta hardware product
00:39:03I see normal people using and talking about and they've been very pleasantly surprised with how well it's done and
00:39:10What they're going to show it connect is separate from the Ray-Ban line
00:39:14I'm expecting updated Ray-Ban stuff, but nothing meaningful
00:39:17But really what the big AR glasses thing is this project?
00:39:21They've been working on since 2018 called Orion and they have put billions of dollars into this product
00:39:27I actually don't think it's a stretch to say they have maybe invested snaps entire market cap as a public company
00:39:33Into this one pair of glasses like trying to invent new metals new battery technology to try to make a pair of
00:39:40Semi lightweight, they're not going to be lightweight
00:39:43They're about 4x the weight of regular glasses, but still that's a meaningful upgrade from like the early Magic Leap demos
00:39:48Well and like the vision pro or the quest like it's right much closer to glasses than those things very chunky
00:39:53Clark Kent looking glasses that do holograms let you virtually, you know
00:39:59Conference with people and integrate with metas other apps
00:40:02So having some 2d elements from other apps brought into there and it's a prototype. It's not something they're going to be selling
00:40:08They're making even fewer of them than snap spectacles. They cost a lot of money
00:40:13I mean both the new spectacles and the Orion glasses cost thousands of dollars to make per unit
00:40:19So this is very like out there tech that you know leaders at meta have told me it's prohibitively expensive
00:40:25To do this as a mainstream product meta hoped Zuckerberg hoped that Orion was going to be their first consumer AR glasses product
00:40:32They made the call about two years ago to make it a glorified prototype that they just show to the world
00:40:38And I think they're doing that because even though they don't have the same business pressure as snap
00:40:42They need to justify what they're doing here because this AR program has cost a lot of money
00:40:48And I think everyone looks at quest and goes. Oh like it's all VR. They have a lot of people working on these glasses and
00:40:55they're separate from Ray Ban, but I think you will see the Ray Ban stuff that they're doing and
00:41:01Orion converge in the coming years and
00:41:05They'll approach it from different angles
00:41:07But they'll have those kind of lower tech cheaper smart glasses without high-end displays and then the high-end display glasses
00:41:13And then those they hope will emerge towards the end of this decade
00:41:16But this is a big like moment in terms of just saying like we have something that works even though
00:41:22in a highly controlled demo and we're not selling it, but here it is and here's like a
00:41:27Marker of where we are in the progression of this technology, and I'm expecting Orion to be the most advanced
00:41:33You know a pair of AR glasses that that I will have tried that doesn't mean it's a good product, right?
00:41:39But it probably will mean it's a good demo. And I think that's all meta hopes for yeah
00:41:43The context of this moment is really interesting to me because I feel like if you rewind
00:41:47What a little over a year now meta like front-ran the vision Pro
00:41:53trying to basically get its thing out there before Apple did because there was this perception that Apple was gonna come out and just
00:41:58Instantly upend the market and change everything and be the only name anybody cared about in this space that
00:42:04Obviously did not happen
00:42:05Like I think you and I were on this show about a year ago talking about how that might happen and meta was
00:42:09Afraid and everybody was nervous about what Apple would do when it entered this market
00:42:13I think if anything Apple has actually made it harder on everybody else because the vision Pro
00:42:18Has not it hasn't done anything like I don't know that I'd call it a failure
00:42:21It's just like a nothing like no one no one talks about the vision Pro. It's just not there
00:42:26It doesn't exist in the world. So and now meta has this hit in the Ray-Ban glasses
00:42:33Mark Zuckerberg has been on like the the PR 180 of a lifetime
00:42:38So it feels like the the context for this company coming into this moment
00:42:42Like could not be more different than I think meta would have expected a year ago
00:42:47and so to some extent I wonder if this is gonna feel like
00:42:50Meta just sort of flexing on them much more so than being like look we're still in the game
00:42:55We're trying to be cool
00:42:56It's just gonna be like mark with a bunch of gold chains on just being like this cool thing
00:42:59I built I guarantee you there will be some chains, but I I don't know man
00:43:04I see that but I also just look at what they're announcing and it's not a product, right?
00:43:09so we are still on the like demo phase of AR glasses and I feel like we've been stuck in that since
00:43:15The first magic leap and it doesn't feel like this year will move us out of that phase
00:43:20It feels like we're still stuck there
00:43:22And it's hard to like, you know, I'm expecting to try Orion and the new spectacles and it's hard to feel about
00:43:29How do I write about these because it's kind of vaporware in a sense, right?
00:43:33It's not something that someone can buy and take home with them
00:43:36So what is the point and you know, I think each, you know company snap and meta has slightly different reasons for doing it
00:43:42But I think they both just want to say look we're still in this fight
00:43:46we're still in this race and we think there is a you know pot at the end of the rainbow here and
00:43:52The it keeps getting pushed further and further out. But here's what we've got and
00:43:57You know, I should note like Orion I think will be also different because meta has invested a lot in
00:44:04This wristband they're going to have that pairs with it that essentially allows you to control it with your thoughts. It's
00:44:10EMG technology
00:44:11It's not mind-reading but they bought a startup called control labs that we've covered a lot here on the verge years ago to do this
00:44:18And they've been working on some really novel input technology for wearables that I'm really interested in even beyond the actual
00:44:26Displays, so that's something to watch as well. And then the AI piece I think meta has
00:44:32meaningfully
00:44:33Accelerated on in the last year. I don't know. Have you used the the visual AI and the Ray Bans yet in bits and pieces?
00:44:39Yeah, yeah, it's really cool. It's yeah, it feels kind of sticky most of the time when I use it, but it is it is good
00:44:45It works like half the time for me, right? It still hallucinates. It still makes things up, but it's fast and it's made me realize like
00:44:52oh like a
00:44:54visual chad GPT like AI in my glasses that
00:44:58Understands the world around me is just a killer feature and when it works at scale will make me use my phone less
00:45:06And I don't even need displays for that
00:45:07I think that has seen that in the last six months even with how kind of rudimentary it is now and said wow like we
00:45:13Need to lean into this and they have I think just better tech in this regard than snap
00:45:18And I think for wearable glasses to take off really we've we've seen now in the last year that you need that AI piece
00:45:26And I think that's something metal will also keep leaning into very heavily at connect and after that it makes sense
00:45:33so I understand I think most of the motivation for why
00:45:37snap needs to talk about this stuff and kind of remind people that it's in the game and
00:45:41Still matters and get people to build for its platform and like I like I get that from snap side for meta
00:45:47I don't know that I get it quite as much because meta is is doing very well in AI
00:45:52Which are if you're an investor is the only thing anybody cares about if anything everybody views all this other stuff is a diversion
00:45:57So to keep doing this stuff basically out of the public view of Wall Street
00:46:02Seems like it sort of makes sense also like things are going well at meta
00:46:07So coming out and being like look we have this cool thing that we can't ship it
00:46:10Isn't it so cool?
00:46:10It just doesn't seem like it gains the company all that much
00:46:14But I guess to your point if they've been doing this now for six years
00:46:17Like literally maybe it's just for team morale. You eventually have to show the people what you're working on
00:46:21Like maybe it really is just that simple
00:46:23I think that's a huge piece of it and you know
00:46:26People don't like working on hardware that never ships and I think that was actually a big motivation with the vision Pro finally launching
00:46:32I think just after so many years
00:46:35you've got to have something to show and
00:46:37Yeah, I think meta being on its front foot versus its back foot this year
00:46:41It means that you know, they feel better about doing this
00:46:44But I think you know to your earlier point about like what's the motivation snap and metas, you know?
00:46:50big picture motivation is actually very similar, which is that they both grew their businesses under the thumb of Apple and Google and
00:46:58mobile phone app store control and
00:47:01If there is going to be a coming hardware shift where people use wearables at least as much as phones if not more
00:47:09They want to have a seat at the table and they want to control their own destiny and Zuckerberg
00:47:13Especially has been very clear about this and interviews with me and others
00:47:16That this is a huge motivating factor. I mean, he's been kind of Apple public enemy number one for a while now and
00:47:23You know, I don't think that if Apple, you know
00:47:26Finally releases our glasses in the coming years
00:47:28Like I don't think it's a given to assume that they would let metas apps on there and I don't think meta thinks it's given
00:47:34That they would do that. And so if
00:47:36You are maybe gonna get boxed out and future hardware shifts, you know
00:47:41You better play to win and you better have your own hardware and that's the motivation
00:47:45but the question is is that the right bet and is this actually going to be hardware that
00:47:51Normal people want to use in the coming years and I think the jury's definitely out on that
00:47:56Yeah that tracks but I but I do think I mean to your point if this is the sort of thing that is going to
00:48:01Happen you was what's the phrase slowly and then all at once?
00:48:04Yeah
00:48:05Being early is much safer than being late, right?
00:48:08Unless you're snapping you literally can't afford to have spent all this money like meta meta can afford to be early like literally with
00:48:14Dollars afford to be early in a way that I think it seems to be willing to do that
00:48:19Yeah, I mean look at Waymo and Google and self-driving, you know, they've plowed billions of dollars into Waymo
00:48:25There's been many years in the last decade where investors and the public are like, what are you doing? Just give up on this
00:48:31It's never gonna work all of a sudden. It's starting to work. People are getting picked up by Waymo's from the airport
00:48:36You know, they're out in the world working and now you know
00:48:40If it hits if it really hits and it hits scale and is like the next uber but cheaper to run
00:48:47And this is a huge business benefit to Google
00:48:50Everyone will forgive the last 10 years of you know sinking money into this for no result
00:48:54and I think AR is a similar story with perhaps an even greater return because
00:48:58You know VR is something that's isolating and you wear mostly inside and by yourself
00:49:03But the idea is that AR
00:49:05glasses are something you wear all day long and take with you and the time spent in them is is huge because you wear like
00:49:12If you're me you wear glasses almost all day and I think they see that as like a huge
00:49:18Potential way to create a new business and
00:49:22Yeah, I just think that I like that you brought up self-driving because I think there's a lot of analogies there
00:49:26Yeah
00:49:27No
00:49:27it makes sense and I do feel like the AR thing is so funny because it's like it's like the AI story in that
00:49:32The biggest version of the story you can tell is so damn big
00:49:36That you like seem ridiculous if you don't try to chase it in some way
00:49:39Even though the odds of it getting as big as you want like it seems to me to be just as likely that everybody says
00:49:44No, I don't want a screen on my face
00:49:46Thank you as they do to say
00:49:48Yes AR glasses forever
00:49:50But the possibility if it hits it's gonna hit so big that they're all of these companies are desperately afraid of not
00:49:57Chasing that thing, right and meta has the money to be able to make this kind of bet and snap increasingly does not and so
00:50:03The question is who is standing at the end of the next few years here and who has the ability to?
00:50:09To keep investing and I would put my money on meta right now. Yeah, I tend to agree
00:50:14Alright one more question and then I will let you go
00:50:16You mentioned these things are super expensive to make and that's one of the reasons these companies are not selling them
00:50:21There was also a report from the information a few days ago that meta scrapped what I think was supposed to be
00:50:26It's really high-end
00:50:27project because they just never figured out a way to do it at the price that they wanted to and
00:50:33Mark Zuckerberg has been saying to you and others for forever that price is really important in all of this stuff and that one of
00:50:39The things meta has been doing like he sort of intimated kind of in his many words
00:50:44We could have made a thing as good as the vision Pro
00:50:46But we chose not to because it would have been too expensive and I'm curious now
00:50:49Having seen what we saw from the vision Pro both in terms of like how good the thing is
00:50:54But also what it has done in the world
00:50:56What do you make of meta's kind of ongoing obsession with price like is this is this the right move even in the early days?
00:51:02Of these things to only want to sell things cheap, you know
00:51:05I thought it was but I don't know
00:51:08I think these things need to be better products before we start really caring about price. Well, that's the Apple bet, right?
00:51:13Like who we're gonna make the best thing possible
00:51:15Whatever it costs and then we'll figure out how to make it cheaper
00:51:17Yeah, and I think meta has maybe focused and is continuing to focus a little too much on price
00:51:22But it's not to say that the quest is not a good product per se, but it's not something that I want to use
00:51:29Let's put it that way
00:51:30And I think they have to figure out why people want to strap these things onto their face
00:51:37and that still has not really been figured out and price feels kind of secondary because it's like oh I have this
00:51:45Cheaper thing that you don't know how to use while you still don't know how to use it. So why would you buy it?
00:51:49It's an eighth the price and still sort of pointless for you. Do you want it now?
00:51:53Right, but I think long term it is a iOS versus Android thing all over again
00:51:57Meta is going to be the cheaper, you know, your margin is my opportunity player here
00:52:02Whereas Apple will be Apple and have Apple margins and
00:52:06charge a lot of money because they can and they have a built-in, you know loyalty base of people who will pay anything for a
00:52:12New Apple product and I don't see that changing. I see meta canceling
00:52:17you know, it's it's high-end kind of vision Pro competitor is more of a realization that this high-end market for
00:52:23These headsets and I'm drawing a distinction between these headsets and AR glasses
00:52:27But headsets at a high end even with great displays the markets just not there yet and the software ecosystem is not there
00:52:34We've seen that with the vision Pro in the last year and for meta
00:52:38I think it makes more sense for them to play at the lower end and let Apple have the higher end
00:52:42Yeah
00:52:43I mean that to me is the lesson of the Ray Bans right that it's like actually if you take something that does
00:52:49Substantially less but make it sort of socially workable and make it good
00:52:55You have something like that to me feels like a much saner starting point for what are they though?
00:53:01They're like 350 bucks. Yeah, and you can buy them with insurance and yeah
00:53:05Yeah
00:53:05And then it was like take that and start to just add stuff on top of it do more stuff at the cameras do more
00:53:10Stuff with like the biometrics you can get like that feels like a path to something very cool
00:53:15Much more directly than like we made this thing. It costs five grand. How do we make it cost $500?
00:53:20Yeah, I just don't that's like several physics miracles away, right?
00:53:24And I think I to me that's gonna be the thing
00:53:27I'm curious to see is like this Orion project is six years old and I wonder
00:53:31It like now with all of this hindsight both on how that has gone and what the Ray Bans thing has done
00:53:36What the what the roadmap internally starts to look like at meta is it's just gonna be fascinating
00:53:42Well, I can tell you a little bit before we go
00:53:44Which is just smart glasses with little displays like Google Glass viewfinder
00:53:48Coming out next year for meta and then the full-fledged consumer AR glasses not until at least
00:53:552027 maybe 28 and they're hoping to be shipping millions of those by like 2029 2030
00:54:01but the Ray Ban thing is a huge long-term strategic thing for them and
00:54:06To the point where they may be investing billions of dollars in the parent company of Ray Ban. Oh, that's right
00:54:11I forgot about that God the meta being like a part owner of the glasses company that runs the universe
00:54:17Yeah, I'll sorry to look Seneca which also just bought supreme so we may see supreme branded meta glasses
00:54:23I'm not kidding. This is how mark got his glow up. He's just gonna buy himself into the fashion
00:54:27and yeah and realizing that glasses are fashion and
00:54:31You have to lean into that if you want people to wear smart glasses
00:54:34And I think it's interesting and a twist of fate because snap
00:54:38Almost did the same thing almost did a partnership with Luxottica for smart glasses many many years ago and didn't and now meta
00:54:47has struck gold with it and
00:54:49It's been just fun for me to report on how snap and meta keep like crisscrossing each other here
00:54:55And they're both trying to get to the same destination in very different ways. All right
00:54:59Well, all of this is happening in September
00:55:01So I suspect we are gonna have many chances to check back in but thank you as always for doing this much appreciated
00:55:06Thanks. All right, we got to take a break. Then we'll come back to the first guys hotline
00:55:10You
00:55:16All right, we're back let's get to the verge cast hotline as always the number is 866 verge 1 1
00:55:22The email is verge cast at the verge comm you can hit me up on threads
00:55:26I don't know
00:55:27We're not that hard to reach here at the verge cast, but we want to hear all of your questions about everything
00:55:31We're gonna do a lot of I think buying stuff between now and the end of the year because it's like shopping season
00:55:37It's upgrade season. Everybody's getting new software
00:55:39So if you're trying to figure out should I buy this or that?
00:55:42How do I think about which one I should buy is eight gigs of RAM and my laptop really enough hit us up?
00:55:47We want to hear all of your questions this week. We have a question about AI
00:55:52Hi, this is Dan from San Francisco
00:55:54I've been thinking about the idea of the first mover advantage when it comes to AI and wondering if it's true
00:56:01Are there recent examples of it actually proving worthwhile as a theory and does it really matter for AI that some people are ahead?
00:56:10Right now or will a company you've never heard of probably be the winner in the long run. Thanks
00:56:15So this question comes at a really funny time because I just had a long conversation
00:56:20with someone in the tech industry about more or less this question the question of
00:56:26Whether or not the AI industry is going to calcify right on the one hand you have
00:56:33The fact that these things are vastly more expensive all the time to train. These models are super complicated
00:56:39Super humongous. You need a lot of NVIDIA chips that are hard to get like it is very very hard to go from nothing
00:56:46To a competitive in the AI world on the other hand
00:56:50It feels like it's moving faster than ever AI is going from meaning one thing to meaning lots of things
00:56:57There are lots of companies with lots of resources that have not started playing this game in this kind of way
00:57:02So it both feels like there are big players and like nothing has yet been decided
00:57:08But to the question of first mover advantage, I have two thoughts on this
00:57:12One is that I think pretty clearly there was some first mover advantage when chat GPT came out at the end of 2022
00:57:20That changed the industry right like you really cannot overstate the extent to which there is a tech industry
00:57:26Before the launch of chat GPT and there is a tech industry after the launch of chat GPT right or wrong
00:57:32Correct or incorrect the thing that happened when chat GPT came out and a hundred million people used it and went
00:57:38Oh my god
00:57:39This is the future changed everything right and all of these companies had to scramble to keep up
00:57:46Google basically completely changed its company around AI
00:57:50Microsoft started spinning up lots of new things
00:57:52It had some advantage just by virtue of its existing relationship with open AI
00:57:57all these other companies that had been working on AI stuff kind of in the background as a research project over the years like AI
00:58:02Is not a new thing
00:58:04But AI as a consumer product is new and chat GPT, which I feel like I've said this a million times
00:58:11But open AI did not understand the extent to which this is going to be a hit consumer product
00:58:15So it was not ready for this either
00:58:18But we've gotten to the point now where open AI is the biggest name in AI and it's not close
00:58:23I think you can have interesting arguments about whose tech is the best and who's best positioned and whatever
00:58:27But open AI is a household name and that is because of chat GPT chat GPT is a household name
00:58:32GPT as a thing is a household name people use that term like they do ATM. It's nuts
00:58:39I hate that we've allowed this to happen. But here we are. We just use GPT in conversation
00:58:44so I think to one extent
00:58:47Open AI bought itself a lot of time and a lot of reputation and a lot of runway by being first
00:58:53It was also better than pretty much everything else that came out right after
00:58:57Both because it went first and because it was just better opening. I had very good tech
00:59:02They've been working on this for a long time chat GPT was well ahead of everybody else. I don't think that's that true anymore
00:59:08It feels like for really the last I don't know year
00:59:11but especially over the last six months every couple of weeks some company has released a new model that they claim is, you know a
00:59:19Step better than all of the other models, right? You have open AI doing it with all the GPT's
00:59:24Anthropic is doing it with the various versions of Claude Google is doing it with Gemini meta is doing it with llama
00:59:29There's this incredible arms race as these models get bigger. They get faster. They get more efficient
00:59:35They get cheaper for developers to use they get cheaper for the companies to run
00:59:39So you we have this incredible sort of leapfrogging game happening between all of these companies on the one hand that
00:59:45Kind of negates the first-mover advantage, right? You can argue anthropic was late to this game
00:59:50But I think it's caught up in a really big way
00:59:52I hear a lot of people talking about Claude which is anthropics model kind of its version of chat GPT
00:59:59being better and more fun to use and more useful than chat GPT and
01:00:04Gemini I think because of the way that it's integrated with other Google services has some huge advantages
01:00:11What Microsoft is doing with copilot which is kind of associated with but not the same as open AI stuff is also the same, right?
01:00:18So you have these companies that have other huge advantages
01:00:20Which is basically they can attach AI to their products that is going to make it easy for them to catch up
01:00:26The flip side is that as these models get bigger and as they get more complicated and as they get more
01:00:33Impressive the cost to build one just goes through the roof
01:00:36Like these things are so unbelievably expensive to train
01:00:40Forget about running them and the cost every time somebody queries it and you have to actually process their information
01:00:45through this trained model the cost of training these models is so so so high and
01:00:51not gonna go down right the only way these things get better is if they get bigger and they do more and
01:00:57For these kind of catch-all models. It's just gonna be a few companies that can do it
01:01:01I don't think that's that different from what we've seen before. I mean think about like cloud resources, right?
01:01:06You have AWS you have Microsoft Azure and you have Google Cloud other companies can be in that game
01:01:12But you have to have unbelievable amounts of resources to have the amount of computing power just the number of data centers the number of
01:01:18Employees what it takes to really operate a global cloud network
01:01:22Just isn't available to most companies and the same is gonna be true with these like behemoth AI models
01:01:28But if you believe and I do believe that AI is not ultimately going to just be about these behemoth
01:01:34Like do-everything models, there's gonna be lots of room for other people to get in, right?
01:01:40so one metaphor says AI is like cloud services and
01:01:43There are going to be a bunch of huge companies and then a bunch of little companies that do specific things, right?
01:01:48If you need ultra secure cloud services, you might not use one of those big ones
01:01:52You might use a small firm, but those are kind of niche things
01:01:54There's another version of it that is like the internet, right?
01:01:57And you have a bunch of big companies that do big things
01:02:00Facebook is kind of all things to all people in the same way that maybe chat GPT is but there's also tons of
01:02:06Smaller and different and more specific things and if you think about AI in those terms
01:02:13We're just at the very beginning of a huge culture shift
01:02:16That doesn't actually depend all that much on the models that companies like open AI are generating as this stuff gets more open source
01:02:24There's gonna be more access for this stuff
01:02:25I think you were starting to see some of these models get
01:02:28commoditized to the point where having
01:02:30the biggest newest model is only going to be useful for some things and that most people will be perfectly happy with
01:02:35the local models that are able to run faster and locally on your computer or
01:02:39The simple models that can run on lower-end hardware that run on TVs and things like that
01:02:44So what you're looking at instead of a race to the top for these most impressive models
01:02:49You're looking at just this kind of incredible splintering around the whole industry and if that's what's gonna happen
01:02:55There won't be a first mover advantage in the same way that there wasn't a first mover advantage like being the first website on the internet
01:03:02It's cool. It comes with some upsides
01:03:04It might give you a lead but the thing that there is out there is way too big for any one company to win
01:03:10Anyway, I think it could go either way and I think right now if you're open AI you have so much
01:03:17Cache and so much
01:03:18upside and the fact that Sam Altman is like the face of AI as a thing is really useful to
01:03:24Open AI and will keep propelling open AI at the top of this industry and getting media coverage and getting
01:03:30Developer interest and all this stuff for a long time
01:03:32But if AI is not just for companies giving you models that you can do everything on but is actually as big as everybody says
01:03:40It's too big for any one company to be in charge of. I know that's not really an answer
01:03:45It's a little bit of both. There is a first mover advantage
01:03:48But I think it's gonna get away from everybody and I also think it's too complicated for that. I hope that helps
01:03:55All right, that is it for the verge cast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for
01:03:59Listening. Thank you to everybody
01:04:01By the way who has called and messaged and emailed with your productivity systems after hearing the episode on Sunday
01:04:06That has been super fun to see as always if you have thoughts
01:04:09Questions feelings or an AI model to sell me you can always email us at verge cast at the verge.com or call the hotline
01:04:15866 verge 1 1 we love hearing from you
01:04:18And like I said buying advice if you have buying thoughts hit us up
01:04:22We want to hear it all this show is produced by Andrew Marino Liam James and will pour the verge cast is a verge production
01:04:27And part of the Vox media podcast network
01:04:29We'll be back on Friday with Alex and Eli to talk about who even knows some gadgets some AI news
01:04:35Telegram it's just a crazy week. We'll get it all of it. We'll see you then rock and roll