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The reason that we're here doing river restoration is because for 30, 40, 50, 60 years, they've been clearing out the large wood out of the stream for various reasons. When you remove these roughness elements, the river responds by getting further removed from the floodplain. And what we really want is the water out on the floodplain. That gives us the habitat complexity and diversity that juvenile salmon sealhead need. To immediately see that biological response is tremendously rewarding. |
So everybody thanks for being a nerd and clicking to watch the extra footage from the hyperlapse video. This is, uh, oh, I'm Ryan Manning. We should say who's here. I'm Ryan Manning. I'm John Logo Marciano. I'm Tom Connors. I'm Jimmy Shelton. Jimmy is the person who was on the glide cam in this video and I'm the one that was on the hyperlapse. So we just wanted to talk about how crazy hyperlapse is. Like the way it's the way that hyperlapse stabilizes is like, so like it knows my gyroscope and my phone knows where my hand is right now. And then it's like, oh, see, you're kind of janky and rid and choppy when you're moving around. I'm just going to make that smooth for you. Cause I know where your hand should have moved to be smooth as opposed to like warp stabilizer or any other image stabilizer stabilizer that like looks at the planes in the image and sort of tries to figure it out after the fact. It's pretty crazy. It's only, it only is a exists for like the phone right now. Yeah. You can see what right there. I like to point out that that shot is like really hard to do really hard. Yeah. So Jimmy, this is, this is a glide cam and Jimmy on the glide cam and then it was warp stabilized and you could see it sort of like pulsing there. And that's something you would never get when you're using. Yeah that's something you would never get when you're using like a hyperlapse because you don't have to actually, yeah. Like when you use warp stabilizer, it can be tricked if something. So I think what it was doing in that shot was actually latching onto Sam's body instead of the scene, which messes up a background. Yeah. And that happens all the time with warp stabilizer. Where I like what we're looking at here. That's Ryan by the way, in the, in the blue. Yeah. That's me guys. Um, so you can see like even this isn't low light at all in this shot and like you can still sort of see the weird blurry things from when I. It's still like more passable than what warp stabilizer will do to some shots. Yeah. Which is like, I would see warp stabilizers are kind of messing up in this shot. But yeah, so I'm just trying to show you like what my hands did and then the shot that came from it. So that's how I moved. So like when you use hyperlapse, you still have to look like an idiot and have like a weird face. Like it's not, it's not like you can just casually shoot, but you have to sort of still get into it. But like the results are pretty crazy when you do get into it and act. You still try to be as stable as you can. Did you guys film this shot with the C100 on the glide cam? No. Because I'm pretty sure it would fail really hard with all that detail happening. Like there are. Yeah, there's no way. There are like lines to track onto, but I'm pretty sure the feet moving, which completely destroy that shot. And having to run up the stairs and then land. Yeah. It's a hard shot to hit anyway. So like, yeah, the fact that like warp stabilizer could work in the dark, it doesn't need something to look at to track onto. All it needs is like the like motion from your, the gyroscope, which is crazy. But like you were saying the other day, when it's in the dark, it also has to use a really wide shutter or a slow shutter rather. And what happens then is when it does stabilize, you get motion blur that gets stabilized. And so it's like kind of the telltale when you see some blurriness happen and the frame doesn't move. Do you have anything like that? Where it's like locked off shot and then it's just blurry? Yeah. Uh, maybe. Cause that's the stuff to me that's like a dead giveaway. Yeah. And like what they're going to have to. It's so insane. It's insane. The only thing that like that ruins this for me is that it's so deep. If there was somehow to make this somewhat shallow, like you can do on like a C300 or C100. Oh, well that's the thing. The only reason this is a problem is because like the phone's camera isn't that great. Yeah. You put this, you put this kind of stabilization technology into any like C100 or larger camera and you're going to get the same results, but a better camera. I know. And it's going to put me out of a job. This is crazy. This shot when I saw this, I was like, holy shit. This technology is crazy. So like I was shaking so much on this shot before it was like shaky as heck. Yeah, I mean these kind of shots, you could do these classic like. You look like a creep. Yeah. I don't know if I've seen this shot. I don't think this was in the video. Oh my God. Are you kidding me? That's great. That's great. That's insane. Oh yeah. This is weird too. Like if you shoot in a car or something, it's actually, it's stabilizing to like the earth and not necessarily like the taxi you're in. So like the taxi jump like. Whoa. Jump around. That's great. The street stays stable. So like that's a crazy effect. You can do some, there's, because it's like a new kind of stabilization, there are lots of like weird quirks that we could, people could figure out. Do you have any of the videos that you shot, the Havana? Oh no. Yeah. If you like, if you lock onto somebody's face, like get really close to them and focus on their face and then just like, just zoom in and out really fast, like with your arms, just like pushing it out. It looks really weird. It's a, it's a weird thing. I mean, maybe I'll put it in. How's this going to go? I'll throw it in after this. Oh yeah. This is crazy. So like I was running full speed here. This is like the shaky version. I was going full speed, one handed. We don't have an alternate angle of how it was running, but I was running full speed on this and I think this is where you actually. Oh my God. I mean, it's not great. You see it breaking down. But there are moments where it's like passable. Right there is a moment that's passable. Yeah. There's like a. I'm not sure if I would still use it. I wouldn't use it. In one of our videos, but like. Sure. But like. I mean, I'm a kid riding like a motorized unit. Okay. So here's like. Well, if this is your kid riding a motorized unicycle, I'd question your parenting. Yeah. I mean, this is markedly better. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think once you get to like high speeds and very shaky, you can't really use it. Especially when you go to like one hand and you have to run the like tilting of your hand affects it so much more dramatically than a glidecam would. Tom, was this you doing this? No, this is me. No, this is me. This is great. Um, but yeah, then, then like, like kind of, it was kind of shaky. I put warp stabilizer and it fixed it. So like this. Even like warp stabilizer gives it like this kind of surreal bend to the image, which I don't think hyperlapse is even doing like hyperlapse. It does at times, but it's more like a sharp, like you'll notice that it feels like a sharp twitch rather than like the bending. Yeah. Like that might also have to do with that winning smile. Yeah. This is crazy too. Like I'm. Anyway, listen to this. Go try this. It's wild. Just run really fast with it pointing at your face. Wow. That's the main thing in my mind. I still don't know what it's doing because like my mind is so used to it having to track onto the image. So I don't even know why it's doing it that way. It's it just knows where it is. Like imagine it re imagine the phone moving like shitty. This is actually, you can see why like hyperlapse will never like solve all the problems. And this one, because like, there's some weirdness on the fence here. Watch when I, Tom asked me to like jump up and down. It's a little bit, but it's now that's weird. It's weird, but it's an effect I haven't seen before, which I think is really interesting about this. Um, but like, Jimmy, just imagine like you see all these banks and stuff. Just imagine that your phone knows how you, how you moved through the space, but then it goes back through it and sort of adds like, does the opposite move. Right. Like, um, have you ever in illustrator drawn like a crappy janky line and then there's like the thing that says like, smooth it all out. Like it just smooths out your hand in space. Like imagine it going back through the exact same shot, but smoothing out all of the points, which is actually like a much easier thing to process than going through and analyzing the footage. Yeah. The speed, which is also amazing to me because of how long it takes to stabilize footage in premiere to how quick hyperlapse is able to do it. I look, cause it doesn't have to do image processing. It's just doing spatial taking the data that already exists. We should look this up before we did this, but, uh, we've heard about a thing that goes into a little dongle that goes into like the hot shoe on a professional camera that would collect the same kind of data and then using software could correct, say for like one of our C100s or a 5D or something. So that that's super interesting. Somebody is making a device that is just like a gyroscope that would, I guess, have a third party app that you plug the data into and then your footage, and then it would do the smoothing this way. This is wild. Yeah. This is like this. I was on a bike. I was riding really dangerously. Oh, yeah. But then anyway, that was crazy. I was riding on a bike and shooting and it was really janky. Here's like, I was like, here's like shitty like concert footage and like, you can see my hand is shaking. I was doing like sort of a fake tracking move, like a fake jib move. But it's pretty, it was pretty dark. And you'll see like, there aren't a lot of, even for being this dark, I don't see much of the blurring. You might see it every once in a while on the amp light. You could see like it's sort of blurring, but it's pretty smooth guys. I mean, the unfortunate thing though is that you're still using a phone's camera. So yeah, that is the unfortunate thing. Even though the motion looks great, the exposure just isn't good here. Right. And like, that's going to always be the problem. But like, it's just, it to me is like the hope of this for the future is crazy good. And like Jimmy said, it does feel like my job will get like taken away soon because all of a sudden this computer will take over what we do. What if GoPro had this built in? Yeah, I mean, no joke. We, I had the contact to somebody at GoPro and I was like, why aren't you guys doing this now? Like right now? Because that's been like the biggest problem with GoPro is that it's shaky. And like, how hard would it be to put a gyroscope into the GoPro? Not hard. It would be hard to be to put a gyroscope in any camera. Like this, this technology is like the inevitable future of all cameras. The stabilization the way we used to do it will still be around, but it'll be completely secondary to this kind of stabilization. You can get away with so many more bumps. Yeah, it's great. Basically, well, I guess the other thing though is that you need to be rolling then at a resolution that's much higher than you need to do it. Well, you need to be like, like the future of this is really, really high shutter speed. This is a good example of bad warp stabilizer. Yeah, warp stabilizer fucking up going in and out. Like it's terrible. Warp stabilizer is cool, but this is why warp stabilizer is going to die. Stuff like that. Well, all right. I guess it's over. That was an abrupt ending. But thanks, Rhonda. Yeah, Rhonda. Thank you. Thanks for watching. See you later. See you next. |
If you're recording video in 2014, it's more likely than not you're using a phone. You're literally just holding a rectangle up in front of your face. And in that position, you can't help but have a little handshake, especially when you're walking. We're humans. We're shaky. But there's a free app that can take your shaky footage and make it look something like a Terrence Malick film. Like a shot from the tree of life. Professional solutions to this shake problem have come in many forms. Tracks, jibs, cranes, crazy vests, and um... this. But those are all extremely expensive and also are you really going to attach your phone to a stabilization rig? Do you really want to be this guy? No app has made the Verge video team as happy as Hyperlapse. When Instagram released the app earlier this year, the focus was on these really cool time lapses. And don't get me wrong, those are very cool. But it has a second function that's just as interesting. Amazing stabilization that turns this into this. Shaky shot. Fixed. Got the jitters. And they're gone. This into this. Okay wow, this is crazy. If you just set the slider to 1x, it plays back your videos in real time with sounds, but perfectly stabilized. Basically the app captures 1080p video but only outputs a 720p file. Hyperlapse uses data from the phone's gyroscope along with the excess footage from around the frame and, well, math to remove all that extra wiggle. This is opposed to traditional stabilization techniques that analyze frames after the fact without the benefit of knowing how your hand was moving. We even tested it against our best Glidecam operator, Jimmy Shelton. This was shot with $10,000 worth of professional equipment and years of experience. And this? This was just a phone. Okay, here's some tips for the clean shots. Make sure you use focus and exposure lock if you can. This keeps it from flicking through different exposures, a dead giveaway on a phone, and it just looks bad. The effect works best in bright sunlight, as is the case with most photography. If you're too shaky in low light, you begin to see weird blurry throbs. It makes it seem like there's a glitch in the matrix. Actually, that could be kinda cool, in the right setting. And we're really just scratching the surface here. There's an even more advanced version of this technology being developed by Microsoft, for example, that recreates a 3D environment and reconstructs the video using different frames at different times. So now instead of having to use crazy, complex contraptions to get stable shots, we can just use our phones and crazy, complex math. |
I'd be afraid to go with the cops. So about 15 seconds out clear. He puts that red wand up in the air at that point. Once again I would press your head against that rear headrest. Thank you. We're going to get about 3.6 in this car. I like it. I like it a lot. Yeah, it's spectacular. It really is. These engineers are wizards, they really are. So we're going into autopilot mode now. So much like cruise control, just going to turn it on. At that point my hands are off the wheel, my foot's off the accelerator, off the brake. The top camera is going to read that 30 mile per hour sign. It's going to adjust the speed while navigating through the lane course. Once again, not touching a thing. The car's driving itself. So that bottom camera is reviewing the lines, top camera is reading signs. It's going to read that 25 mile per hour sign. Once it straightens out, she's going to slow down automatically. I'm going to press the blinker. She's going to initiate a lane change automatically, all by herself. And the Model S now she'll react to traffic conditions. So it's going to sense the car up ahead, start slowing down, and once again, not touching anything. She'll come to a complete stop by herself. It's amazing. That's it. Truly amazing. Put your foot in the brake, disengages it just like cruise control, and you're back to driving yourself. Wow. Really? That's a lot of speed. Really? |
Hey, this is Jake with The Verge and this is the Xperia Z3V. This is a new variant of the Xperia Z3 that's been designed for Verizon. There are some small design changes. Most notably you'll see the sides are no longer all metal. It's sort of a soft touch plastic with instead a metal band along each side. It's still a really nice design though. It feels really nice. Same 5.2 inch display. The battery is very slightly larger in this model at 3200 milliamp hours. It's still supposed to last over a day which is one of the defining features of the Z3. The really big change for the Verizon model is that it now supports Qi wireless charging which will make it really easy to charge this thing. Otherwise this is basically the Z3 that you already know and that includes the fact that it's waterproof and that it can stream PS4 games as long as you're in your home. Separately Sony is selling a mount that allows you to attach this phone to a PS4 controller. There's no technology in it. It's literally just a suction cup that you stick it onto. Sony doesn't have anything to say about the Z3 Compact coming to Verizon but for now the Z3 V is going to be available on October 23rd for $199.99 on a two year contract. It will be available in black and white. |
Remember what they did with the dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park? They like found it in a tree, sewed it all up, rebooted the dinosaurs from scratch, and then they had Nylonded dinosaurs that killed everybody. It turns out the basic theory behind that methodology is actually totally sound. It's just a question of whether we can make it work. They didn't really mention this in the movie, but the problem with dinosaurs is that their DNA is really old. You'd never be able to find a good sample. Mammoths on the other hand, people are a little more optimistic about. We've had mammoth fossils for a while, and we've actually got mammoth hair, mammoth protein, we know lots about them. But the DNA samples are pretty broken up from all those years inside of that layer of permafrost. If you look hard enough though, you can get a sense of how they all fit together. It's also pretty convenient that a mammoth's DNA is 99% the same as an African elephant. So we actually have a pretty good roadmap of how to build this thing. We can start with the elephant DNA, and we'll all just plug in the mammoth DNA wherever it looks different. So we've got the DNA, we put the DNA in an elephant egg, put the egg in an elephant, add some sperm, and then there's your mammoth. This sounds crazy, but people get really excited about this idea. Picture somebody who's studied mammoths for their whole life. Like what do they eat, how do they move, how do they smell? Now you're actually standing next to a mammoth. It's got the tusks, the hair, it smells pretty terrible actually, it's real. We brought it back, we're the coolest dudes in the universe. But then your scientist buddy says, wait, that's not actually a mammoth. That, my friend, is a genetically engineered elephant. You just messed with its DNA so it would look like a mammoth. The other problem is that she's lived her whole life in a lab or a zoo, so she can't actually teach you how mammoths behave in the wild. If you want to do an actual de-extinction, yes that's a word, you've got to go for the whole package. You need a real mammoth habitat with a bunch of actual mammoths that are all like having a mammoth party. And then there's genetic diversity so that they can actually breed with each other and create a real mammoth community. It's hard enough to arrange all that for endangered species that are still around today. We just can't do all that for mammoths. But maybe we could do it for other animals that are much easier to take care of. There's a group right now trying to bring back passenger pigeons, building aviaries in state forests where they could live. They want to train them with real homing pigeons and gradually reintroduce them back into the wild. It's kind of a long shot, but with enough time and enough science, they actually have a chance of making it happen. If they do, it'll be the first time in human history that we brought a whole species back from the dead. Then we can focus on the mammoths. |
We think a lot about the future. Of course, you don't know what's going to happen in the future. That's why it's the future. So you end up with a lot of questions. Are we going to make it to Mars? Is that really going to happen? Are we all going to be hanging out with mammoths and supercharging our brains? What are we going to eat? How are we going to live? I don't know. I mean, we'll find out together. Whatever happens, big things are coming in the next hundred years. |
Portland's biking infrastructure is widely emulated. With 300 miles of bike lanes, the city is carefully laid out for cyclists. But the lack of bike data stands in the way of perfection. So the Oregon Department of Transportation recently collaborated with Strava, a popular biking app, in an attempt to make the city better and safer for cyclists. Going through many meetings through the Oregon Department of Transportation and sitting in meetings, we were having conversations of, well, what is the level of service for bicycles and what is the level of service for pedestrians? We really just don't have any good data for that. It's very hard to plan for a multimodal agency when you lack bike data. So with that problem in mind and going to meetings, I was joining a ride with friends and I realized that everyone was pulling out their cell phones before the ride and using an app. And there's a couple different apps there, but in particular, an app that's popular in Portland is called Strava. Strava is a software company based in San Francisco. We developed mobile apps and a website for cyclists, runners, endurance athletes to track their workouts, have a social experience, get motivated and hopefully help make people enjoy cycling and running more. So all of a sudden I thought to myself, well, where is that data going? All these people are recording their rides. Why can't we use that data? From two points of view, we recognized there was a need here. There was an opportunity to work together with Oregon to try to build that the Strava data set for this purpose. It's really interesting to use Strava data, but I think that I would push ODOT to try to actually look at who's biking and where the demand for bicycling is rather than where the existing people who are kind of tapped into the system already are. I mean, I think ODOT has a lot of resources at its disposal, but it also, it's like the people who work at ODOT are not necessarily going to be attuned to the needs of people who live along Southeast Howell today or who need to cross it every day or who would ride a bike except that that street is impassable. It's like a wall. Bicycles are increasingly visible in Portland. Since 2001, overall bike traffic is up 211%. In recent years, over 300 miles of bike lanes have been laid out across the city to encourage cyclists. Hawthorne Bridge, one of the many bike-friendly bridges in the city, supports an average of 1.7 million bike trips a year. With buying this data, we are unable to control sample bias. There's a certain amount of users that use Strava. They may not be a complete subset of the population. So knowing that, we had to kind of work out those issues internally and both with my peers and colleagues to say we recognize that the sample size may not be perfect, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is a lot of good data. I think there's a bike movement happening around the country and even around the world. It takes on a bunch of different forms, but there is a rising tide right now for bicycle transportation to become a real normal part of daily life in a lot of communities. And one thing that I've been seeing happen is that Portland is a model of that, and I wish that we would do it better because I see other people copying this model and achieving the same benefits as we have, but also making the same mistakes as we have. And one of the mistakes that we've made in Portland is we've really left out large parts of the population. Unfortunately, that's often correlated to class and race. So let's take that debate, let's hear the both sides of that debate right now. So the people who are on the side of Strava data is not representative are guessing that we have mostly elite cyclists who tend to go out for pleasure rides or go out for training rides, not commuters inside Strava. That's a myth, first of all. So when we look at the data in metro regions, about 50 percent of the activities that are uploaded to Strava are commutes. So Strava is being used by commuters. There's another argument because we charge for our service, it's not affordable by people with less economic means. And that again is a myth. Our service is free. You can upgrade to premium if you choose to, but it's not required to participate in Strava. You can be on free as long as you like. I think that big data is really something that public agencies need to embrace, and it's new to all of us because again we can't control the data set, but big data or app data is the future. There's so many people using apps, there's so many people using phones, so we have to continue to be innovative and think outside of the box and reach out to all of these app companies and start forming these partnerships. We both can benefit from learning from each other and sharing the data if we figure out the right partnerships and the right agreements to move forward and build better cities and better places to travel. |
Unicycles have long been the go-to vehicle for clowns, thrill seekers, and that weird kid from my dorm freshman year of college. And today, none of that changes. So this is the SVU, the self-balancing unicycle, by a company called Focus Designs. It is an electric unicycle that has an accelerometer in it, very similar to how a Segway works. It's a pretty nice design, it's got two pegs for your feet that just sort of fold out. It's got the power button, and it has a lock here so you can lock it and when you turn on the power button it won't turn on. And it's got its charging port. The seat is replaceable, which is nice, and the seat that the SVU comes with is not at all comfortable. I've been riding this thing for about a week and I am definitely sore. So once you learn how to ride this thing, it's actually really simple. Just put the pegs down, you turn it on, you get on and you just lean, and hold your balance, and yeah, that's basically it. And the more you lean forward, obviously the faster you're going to go. And we're actually going uphill right now. And the way I learned to do it is you just sort of throw your hands around to keep the balance going. And like I said, you just lean forward and you really just take off. It goes 12 and a half miles an hour, and it lasts probably like 6 to 10 miles depending on how many hills you're climbing. The one thing I'll say though is that lots and lots of people just sort of give you a double take. I've had lots of interactions with strangers asking questions about it. So in that aspect, it's pretty cool. It costs $1,800, which is pretty expensive for a toy like this. But if you have $1,800 lying around to spend on something cool, this is definitely something cool to buy. I was just messing with this thing and the seat was off, right? And I turned it on and noticed that when you – that happens. Can't really explain what that is. I think it's the unicycle trying to compensate itself and it gets in an endless feedback loop. And will just go harder and harder each way until it gets off the ground and stops. It weighs 26 pounds, which is extremely heavy for a thing like this. I mean, carrying it up the subway stairs definitely is tiring. Carrying it back up to my apartment is also pretty tiring. It's obviously not as sleek as just something like a skateboard. And it's not nearly as light as a skateboard either. This thing will definitely power you through the city. |
There is a rising tide right now for bicycle transportation to become a real normal part of daily life. Straddle is a software company based in San Francisco and we develop mobile apps and a website for cyclists, runners, endurance athletes to track their workouts. We both can benefit from learning from each other and sharing the data if we figure out the right partnerships and the right agreements to move forward and build better cities and better places to travel. |
Webcams are pretty much everywhere now. You just don't buy them anymore. They come built into your laptop lid and the front of your phone. But cameras designed solely to stream video are still here and they're adding features you normally find in home security systems. For about $200, you can get one that can record a day or even a week of footage. It doesn't do everything a home security system can, but it's getting close. The best one out there right now is the Dropcam Pro. It's a small camera with a built-in stand that connects over Wi-Fi. For $200, plus about $100 a year, it will record and store a full week of footage in the cloud. You can watch it on your phone or computer and even turn it into a live webcam if you want to transform your living room or just your fish tank into a reality show. But more importantly, Dropcam does the best job of telling you what it's seeing and the most ways to customize your alerts. You can set up zones around your house for it to keep an eye on things like your front door or windows. You can set up alerts to go off only when it sees something in those zones, while ignoring everything else. Dropcam can also use your location, so it only starts recording when you leave your house. If there are any drawbacks, it's that Dropcam's 720p video stream takes its toll on your monthly internet use. Another thing to consider is the price of the service. Using one of these cameras is about half the price of the hardware every year. Now, if you want to save $50 up front and potentially more on the price of storing recordings in the cloud, you should check out ARKSOFT's $150 Simplicam. It does close to everything that Dropcam does, plus facial detection. So beyond telling you if something moved, it can look for eyes, nose, and a mouth. What I like best about the Simplicam is that you can do everything on the app that you can do on the website. There's no difference. That means creating, saving, and sharing clips. The other great thing is that there's a one-day plan that costs $49 a year. Unless you're going on vacation and end up having your house broken into, that's a great amount of space. It isn't as sharp as the Dropcam Pro, and it's not as wide. You're missing out on programmable zones to track and monitor activity, and things like Bluetooth, which Dropcam uses to make setting up easier on your smartphone, isn't there. If these things matter to you, you should spend a little extra on the Dropcam. Now if you don't want to spend anything on the service, there's Belkin's $130 Netcam HD+. Like the Dropcam Pro, it's got an all-glass lens that captures sharp video. The big difference is that you're not going to pay for the recording service, at least for now. The downside? The interface is a little crummy, and the notifications aren't as useful as what you get on these other cameras. One last thing. If you're looking for something a little closer to an actual security system, there's Piper. For $199, you get a 180-degree fisheye lens, an actual motion detector, and a siren for scaring thieves away. It can also control the lights in your house, run for two to three hours on batteries, and will even keep an eye on the temperature. This all sounds great, but I found the mobile software fussy, and right now the only way to check things out is on the app and not on a website. None of these things are as good as keeping an eye on your home as a human or a robot someday, but until then, this is about as good as you're gonna get without buying a full-fledged alarm system. Dropcam does a lot of the same stuff, but cheaper. Right now, there are a million options out there, but Dropcam's the best. can't |
Hurricane Sandy wiped out thousands of homes, businesses, and city infrastructure. In the aftermath, the Department of Housing and Development set up a task force to rebuild the city. A Dutch water management expert joined the force and launched a contest called Rebuild by Design to promote innovation and provide resiliency with the hope that the winning designs would make the city less vulnerable in the face of the next disaster. So water management is very complex. Water does exactly what it wants. It goes everywhere. So you can protect, let's say, your own house, but then the water just goes to your neighbors. When I started working in the U.S., the first question I got from a reporter was, okay, Mr. Oving, are you going to save New York by building a storm surge barrier next to the Verrazano Bridge? And that idea was, I think, exactly the problem we all face all over the world. We want simple solutions. We want the silver bullet, which is the wrong approach because there is no silver bullet when it comes to water. If you would embrace water as part of your life, as part of the economy and the culture, you will come up with a multitude of solutions that altogether form a comprehensive plan. The competition invited designers, scientists, engineers, thinkers and leaders to reinvent solutions and safety measures for the New York, New Jersey region. Out of 148 entries, the six winners balanced local needs with aesthetic and functional value. The first thing we said to the teams in their design phase was, stop designing. The first thing you have to do is build a coalition. And don't design for them, but, you know, work with them to get to a design that's inclusive of this community, that also builds in the needs and the understanding and the capacity of the neighborhood and informed by the process your design. One of the most ambitious projects is the Big U, a protective system designed for lower Manhattan which was hit hard by the hurricane. The team proposes to shield the low-lying region from floods and future storms with elevated beams and pavilions with folding doors. The Big U will stretch across 10 continuous miles and provide social and environmental benefits to a high-risk region. So the idea is that the Big U is almost like a chameleon, that it changes character and color every time it encounters a new neighborhood. In the East River Park, it's really like the park terrain races towards the highway, protecting the park from the noise of the highway, but also protecting the city from flooding. Then as you move down and you get under the FDR, the elevated highway, in some places we have placed pavilions with galleries or marketplaces. Inside them they have these sleeves so that they're always open, there's always space between the pavilions, but in the case of a flood, out of these sleeves giant doors can come out and create a continuous flood barrier. Through our dialogue with the local communities, even though the Big U is one continuous effort, it really changes character all the time so you'll never be able to see it as a big piece of infrastructure, rather it's the social infrastructure of that community that really changes its character and its appearance. We owe it to these communities, we owe it to ourselves and our next generations to make a better place. I think in the end if you look at what a city is all about, is a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures, a lot of different nationalities coming together in a restricted space to try to maximize the possibilities for each and every individual to unfold themselves, to express themselves. And what we try to do with the Big U is to really in a way turn this public participation process into something that actually improves the design, something that generates design, something that generates diversity, something that generates surprises. We are in a very intelligent, smart, competitive region. We have the minds here, we have the hearts here, we have the understanding here. We don't have an excuse not to create a better region. There's only one way forward. Thank you. Thank you. |
So here I've got a mouse pointer, I'm using the mouse, I click start, I get a start menu, I launch mail, here's a universal outlook, it runs in a window, just as I've been showing you already. Now when I remove the keyboard and mouse, it prompts, should I enter the tablet mode? And when you say yes, the app is maximized, the taskbar adds a back button for switching, and when you touch start with your finger, it switches itself into the large start mode so that it's really easy for you to pick other apps and navigate around and watch them. So here we launched OneNote, OneNote is, it knows that it's in the touch mode, the UI adjusts, I say new page and I can do something like use the pen to ink right in my OneNote. If I want to switch apps, I can go back to start, or I can use the familiar taskbar that I've known for years, and I have a simple, convenient way to do this. When I bring the keyboard and mouse back, I'm prompted again to exit tablet mode, and when I do, the start menu comes back to its small mode where I last left it, and the apps that I ran are still present on the device in their windowed mode because now I'm using it like a laptop. When we've shown this to people, we've shown this to a lot of partners, enterprises, OEMs, people say... |
Water management is very complex. Water does exactly what it wants. We want simple solutions. We want the silver bullet, which is the wrong approach. There is no silver bullet. And what we tried to do with the Big U is to really, in a way, turn this public participation process into something that actually improves the design. We have the minds here. We have the hearts here. We have the understanding here. We don't have an excuse. Are you going to save New York? |
I probably don't have to convince you to buy a smartphone. You probably know that having your email, your music, your games, your maps, your photos, your documents, your everything all in one device in your pocket is awesome. And if you have a smartphone, you probably use it all the time, which is why you know it's incredibly important to get the right one, maybe more so than with any other device. Getting a phone with the right combination of hardware design, software, apps, camera, ecosystem and battery life is really, really crucial. It's also really easy. Just buy an iPhone 6. No, the iPhone 6 isn't the most exciting phone on earth. There's nothing shocking or incredible or earth shatteringly different about it. It has a 4.7 inch HD display, which actually makes it smaller than a lot of today's flagship phones. The display is gorgeous though, laminated right to the glass and curved ever so slightly so that it feels great to your fingers. Basically, the iPhone 6 is the best phone on the market because it does everything and it does it all well. It has a phenomenal, absolutely best in class 8 megapixel camera and thanks to new slow motion and time lapse video modes, plus a new focusing mechanism, it takes better pictures and video than ever. The battery easily lasts a day, more if you're not staring at Twitter all the time. Touch ID is super useful now, letting you unlock your phone, secure your apps and soon pay for things all by just putting your finger on the home button. The 6 is fast and powerful and as simple to use as iOS always has been. And iOS still has the best app ecosystem with more and better apps and games than absolutely any other platform. The thing about the iPhone 6 is that it just doesn't have problems. It has a big screen, great performance, great battery life, great camera, great apps all in one really nice package. It's not a revolutionary phone, but it is the best phone you can buy. There's a shockingly close second place though and it's the Moto X. The Moto X is definitely the best Android phone out there. Like the iPhone 6, the Moto X has almost no compromises. It has a great screen, a fast processor and a beautiful high-end design. It has a lot to set it apart too, like the super customizable design and really cool voice control and always-on notification features. Its battery life is good but not great though and its camera can still be frustratingly inconsistent. But in every respect the Moto X does its job and it has some really neat extra features too. If you don't want an iPhone or if you want some more color or a lot more Android, you should absolutely get a Moto X. From there, the list of really good phones is really long. The HTC One is a beautiful museum piece of a cell phone with some useful extra software and really good battery life. If only it had a better camera. The LG G3 is a different kind of hardware achievement with almost no bezels and just this big beautiful screen staring at you. Then there's this whole class of huge phones that some people like and some people hate, like the iPhone 6 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note series. You might love them and there are lots of good reasons to, but don't buy a huge phone until you've tried it. There's also Samsung's Galaxy S5, which is a very good smartphone but is entirely unexceptional without anything to set it apart, or the Nexus 5, which is the purest Android phone but it's more expensive up front and getting support can be tough. The list of Android phones goes forever and honestly most of them are pretty good. It's really hard to find a bad smartphone these days, but it's worth getting the best ones even if it costs a little more. Windows Phone is getting better and better, but whether it's the Lumia icon or the 1320, what they offer is less important than what they're missing. And seriously, just don't buy a Blackberry. Just don't. If you buy the right smartphone, you'll use it constantly and you'll use it for everything and you'll love it. So make sure you get the right one. And the easiest way to do that is to buy the iPhone 6. It's not perfect, but it's the best thing out there. |
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Hey guys, Chris Stigler with The Verge here. I brought this banana with me to the office today, and when I took it out of my pocket, let's say it was a little bent, so I just wanted to try applying pressure here to see if I could bend it more. See what happens. Uh-huh. And look at that, you'll notice the banana's kind of straightened out, and we have some damage along the edge here, so I'm going to repair that, but it's probably not going to be cheap. |
Hey guys, this is Neil Iver with The Verge. I'm here with Matt McCray, the CTO of Visio. And we're here with the new P Series, which is a thousand dollar 4K TV. You guys announced it in CES, it's about 10 months later, and here we are. So first of all, what took so long? We wanted to get it right. So we showed our demos at CES, and we're showing a lot of picture processing demos here, and we wanted to make sure that the resolution was right, the motion capture was right, the color was right. So it's really been just fine tuning the details, and not only ship an amazingly priced 4K TV, but one that actually blows away the competition on picture quality. So that's the big question. How did you make a thousand dollar 15 inch 4K TV when everyone else is like two thousand dollars, four thousand dollars? What's the secret here? Well, it wasn't easy. We spent a lot of time doing engineering work specific to our product. So probably the biggest thing we did is we developed our own backlights. So we talked about that at CES, where we do full array local dimming across all our product lines, and by designing them ourselves, we were able to not only raise the picture quality, but actually lower the price. Wait, how does all that work to let you lower the price if you're doing all that engineering work? Because of the component price. So yeah, we spent a lot of engineering time and development effort, but the actual component price and the innovation that we did was to create a full array local dimming, right, where we got LEDs going all the way through the backlight, but actually reduced the component count by 40% at the same time. So there's a lot of integration happening where the glass meets the LEDs, meets the driver boards. We were able to reduce that overall cost through that innovation. And again, the picture quality goes up, but cost goes down. So the big question with 4K is how are you going to get content? And you guys are betting almost exclusively on streaming, right? Yeah, we've decided since our first smart TVs launched six years ago that streaming was going to be one of the primary ways people are going to get any content. And we've streamed billions of hours of video content to our smart TVs now. And 4K is not going to be different. So there will be 4K Blu-ray players in the future. There will be 4K set-top boxes in the future. This has HDMI 2.0 and will support all that. But we do believe that one of the primary ways, and probably the primary way people will get content are going to be from sources like Netflix and Amazon and UltraFlix and some of the partners we've announced today. And we had a demo in the other room and you can see that it's pretty nice. I mean, 10 to 15 megabits per second is gorgeous. And that's what you need, right? Otherwise you get a little too compressed? Yeah, it starts at about 9 point something, almost 10 megabits per second. And then it steps up all the way to 15. And by the time you're at 12 to 15 megabits per second, it is substantially better than 1080p. Really? And do you think it's going to be as good on disc? It'll be a little bit different. You'll see different artifacts. It won't be quite as good as a disc because the bit rate will be so much higher. But it's already showing a massive upgrade against what you're seeing on 1080p. And remember, it's not just going from 7 megabits a second on 1080p to 15 on 4K, a doubling of it. Because we're also using HEVC, which is a much more compressed format, it's a new format for extreme units, you're getting the double of the bandwidth, but you're also getting another doubling of efficiency. So it's actually four times the effective throughput and it looks really good. And you're building your own chips to it? We are. We have the Vizio V6 processor, which is a six core processor we're using to do all this. And we have the VM50, which is our picture processing engine that's doing all of the color, fidelity, the contrast, our pixel mapping and everything that we're doing. And that was the other way that we decided, even though it would take a little bit more time, but to not only beat people on price, but beat them on picture quality, we had to actually bring our own technology to market. So that's the question, once you start talking about processors and cores and that kind of technology and a TV, I get worried about how long until I have to replace it with a faster processor and a faster, better pixel engine and better software. How long do you think this TV is going to last? It'll last a long time. The chips that we can buy off the shelf were dual core. This is six cores. So again, one of our choices was to actually put more horsepower than we need today to make it a platform that can last quite a while. The investment, like you keep mentioning, how do you guys do it, how do you guys do it, there was definitely a very large upfront investment, but we're not passing that on to consumers. That investment we made not only for this TV, but future TVs. So we're spreading that very small across all of the platforms. So first TVs got flat and everybody rushed out and bought new form factors. And then there's been this desperate search for the next thing that's going to make everybody buy again. Don't say curved. Curved. Then there's 3D. You guys have taken 3D completely out of the picture now. You're just giving up on 3D? So what I'll tell you is one of the things we pride ourselves on is really listening and watching consumers, but listening to what they really want in a television. So there was actually two reasons. One is we looked at how many people are actually using our 3D TVs and how many people actually thought that was a very important feature set and it was pretty low. Also if you look at the 4K, if you do 4K right, if you do ultra high def with the right picture processing, you'll swear it's 3D. And we've had other people come through this gallery already and kind of look at it and say is that 3D? And it's because of the depth that we're able to produce through the picture processing. So for us, putting our investment resources towards improving the picture quality, not in a 2D, but making it so clear and the motion resolution so good that it actually looks 3D was much more important. You get to curved and things like that. Again, our opinion is curved as a gimmick. It actually hurts picture quality and causes a lot of problems so you won't see us do curved. We try and find a way to actually improve the user's experience and charge them less. Not figure out how to make their experience worse and charge them more. So for us, it's complete opposite of what we focus on. So do you think 4K is going to kick off another adoption cycle? Is that why you priced so low to get to the front of the market? Well I think what would have happened without Vizio is we would have seen maybe a three to four year, maybe five year even, transition cycle from 1080p to 4K. At least on 50 inch and above where you can really tell the difference. Our goal is to try and make that transition one to two years and get most people buying 4K TVs at those sizes by next year. And hopefully this year we're already going to get a big chunk of the market. So one of the things we like to do is actually drive transitions faster. Is use disruptive technology to get people the latest technology. Maybe they thought they couldn't afford now. And that's part of the pricing strategy is to take that market by storm. So we've talked to you a bunch of times. This feels like a refocusing on the core of Vizio which has always been televisions. You've diversified a few places. You're in sound bars. You're doing really well there. But you did laptops for a minute. You've played with phones. Is this Vizio coming all the way back to TVs or are you going to keep trying to broaden out? Yeah, a bit. What I would say is this took a lot of effort. So for the last year and a half, two years, we've actually spent a bulk of our resources perfecting UHD. And again, making sure we hit the prices that we want to hit. But really setting a new bar for quality. We think it's really, really important. So that has been the bulk of it. Also our sound bars and our audio equipment. We're the number one sound bar manufacturer as well. That's been a big focus. But I think what you can say fairly is that for the last year and a half, at least from an engineering and R&D side, we decided that there was some really cool technology coming forward and that focusing on the living room, again, was really important because we saw this transition coming. Having said that, you'll see some interesting stuff coming in the next year or two that I can't talk about. So we won't predominantly stay in the living room, but it was important to actually take a leadership position in UHD and continue that position in audio as well. So if the living room is getting interesting again because of the 4K transition, no one's cracked it, right? Everyone's still poking around the edges of it. How are you guys going to maintain that leadership position, even if everyone else is coming at you? Because they're all going to keep coming at you. Yeah. The best way and the reason we spent so much time on this is quality. You can try and be the best price forever and that's great and it will decline quick and that's something we do naturally anyways, is price aggressively. That's great. But that can also be fleeting. What really matters is actually shipping a world class product. So if you have a world class product where you've actually beaten products that are twice as expensive as you, you're going to have staying power and you're going to actually have a pretty good chunk of that market. So we have a good initial foray with these and you're going to see us continue to innovate in UHD. And again, our goal is to get people to transition into an ultra high-def living room quickly. So the last question, world class product, the other TV you showed at CS was the reference series. What's the timeline on that? Coming soon. Can't tell you exactly. We're perfecting that as well. Yeah. 40 under the air? A lot of probably not shipping. That's going to be really close. And so we may actually wait a little bit longer, give it some breathing room. But a lot of the fine tuning that went into P-Series is going into our reference series and then we have a whole other order of magnitude that we're doing for that product. And it's beautiful. I can't say too much. But the demos we showed at CES on the reference series were pretty jaw dropping and it's only gotten much better from there. Also the reference series, we want to make sure that when we launched the P-Series, we want to make sure there was content. So Netflix has great content. We've got Amazon and Ultra Fix climbing. So even if you don't have a 4K Blu-ray player yet, there's a lot of content. On the reference series, we're doing the same thing where we want to make sure that there's high dynamic range, ultra wide color gamut content when we launch. And some of that stuff's being created and mastered right now. And so we don't want to launch a TV and then not have content to actually show with it. So it's another reason why maybe waiting a few months would make more sense. So this guy's $1,000. $1,000, $999. The big one is, how big and how much? The 65 inch is $21.99 and the 70 inch is $24.99. Wow, that's aggressive. And these are going to be in stores now? Yeah, actually a few websites are already selling them live. There's some pre-orders that a few snuck out and our retailers will have them starting tomorrow but some are already on the shelf. And you're going to be able to keep them in stock? What I think is going to happen based on what we're seeing online is that we're going to sell out for a while and then we've got a whole other huge boatload coming and that's when we'll kick off our advertising and things like that in October. Awesome. Matt McCray, Vizio P-Series, $1,000, 4K. Awesome. Thanks, man. You're welcome. |
A serious question of safety is being asked after a fire hydrant failed during a Hazelton firefight. In the case of a fire, there's a chance the hydrant in front of your home won't function. Is the fire hydrant in your neighborhood working? Hundreds upon hundreds remain out of service in Kansas City. Defective hydrants risk lives. While technology and other firefighting equipment has been revamped, the hydrant has not been redesigned in over a century. Which ones work and which ones don't? They tried not one but two fire hydrants. The fire hydrant in front of this house failed. This hydrant right in front of the house was not working. So a former New York City firefighter has designed a hydrant that is virtually indestructible. As a firefighter, New York City firefighter, I recognized the need that there had to be a change in the reliability of a fire hydrant was. In a hundred years, there hasn't been no real significant change, even though we know where the issues and problems are. Well, fire hydrants are the critical part of the fire extinguishment tactic. A hydrant is as important as a firefighter. We have standards. We get to the scene within four minutes. We have set up time, which means connecting to a hydrant, stretching all his lines, another four minutes. And we expect that water to be on the fire in eight minutes. And when the hydrant is broken, we don't accomplish that. Through better engineering and better materials, we've come up with the solution. It's called the Sigilak Spartan Fire Hydrant. Here's your basic standard, conventional fire hydrant. And you can see how the corrosion on there exists, because they just put regular paint on there. It's totally vulnerable and accessible. These things can get damaged and bent. These can get cross-threaded. They throw debris inside. But the integrity of this hydrant is easily compromised, because everything's accessible and exposed to the elements. What I've done is I've deconstructed the fire hydrant and identified all the vulnerable parts of a hydrant that are known to break down and fail consistently. Now you can see, obviously, just by appearance how much different they look. You can notice that the water's going to come out as much higher, which is better for the firefighter to be able to put his thing on there. You have the snow pole. And all the integral parts are encapsulated inside the hydrant. So there's nothing where the elements can get to it. You can't put wrenches. There's nowhere to put a wrench on. You need a special tool to do that. So what I always do is come up with this tool, crack that open like that, spin that off, take that off. Now that everything's out of your way, the hydrant's in perfect working order. If I want to get water, it comes out like that. And then take the caps off. They come right off. Inside, up on top, you see there's a grease fitting. So it's a very simple, less complicated hydrant. And we're within 10 to 20 percent of the cost of a traditional hydrant. So we're not even that much more, but we do so much more. So cradle to grave, you can't afford not to have our hydrant in the ground. So we're in about a dozen U.S. states right now. We have 150 hydrants in the ground in those 12 states. And the reason there aren't more is because typically a municipality will want to buy one or two and put it through its paces over a four-season cycle and determine for themselves, let the fire department work on them extensively and determine that it doesn't leak, it doesn't freeze in the wintertime, it won't rust or corrode or break down. And then once that happens, they start to order more hydrants. People don't realize the need for hydrants until it's their house that's on fire and all of a sudden that hydrant's not working. And people yelling, screaming out of the building. And firefighters are putting their lives at risk. You know, and it's unnecessary. It's something that time has come. People believe they're just an ordinary fixture in the street. They are life-saving fire department appliances. They shouldn't be used, you know, for washing cars or for cleaning streets. People do not understand the importance of these types. When you're at a fire and a hydrant doesn't work and the firefighters are standing around and no one can get water out of the hose, then you understand how important a fire hydrant is. |
We're in Colon, Michigan, the magic capital of the world. One of the town fathers just flipped open the dictionary and saw colon. And he said, that's it. You know, I call it the lower bowel of the state. And it's also the upper digestive tract of magic. It's a town of 1,200 people, and it doubles in size during magic week. A lot of people say it's like Vegas coming to Mayberry. It's just a wonderful thing that happens. One week out of the year, everybody just shows up. Here you guys are. If you compare it to music festivals, this is like the Woodstock. So awesome. This is Christmas to me. I would skip Christmas for this, for real. OK, I'm Greg Bordner, and I'm the president of Abbott Magic Company here in Colon, Michigan. My name is Rick Fisher. I'm the owner and president of the Fab Magic Manufacturing Company here in Colon, Michigan. My name is John Sterlini, and I own Sterlini Magic Manufacturing here in beautiful Colon, Michigan. I mean, we have one stoplight, and we have three magic shops. Go figure. My dad came along in 1934. He was the money behind Percy Abbott. So they started the Abbott Magic Company downtown Colon. My dad took over in 1961, and he passed away in 1981, and I've been running it ever since. My folks brought me up here in 65, my sister and I. We did some fishing. They took me over to Abbott's. I was seven years old, got a couple magic tricks, came home, absolutely fell in love with magic, could not get enough of it. The Abbott children were good friends of mine, and so they were the first to jump on board and say, what can we do to help you open up a new magic company? Some of the other Abbott family wanted to help him along to start the Fab Magic Company. So he has been separate from us and completely different from us ever since. This is like his 10th or 11th year in business. One year after the get-togethers, Saturday night, I thought, hey, I wonder if there's a building available for sale here in town. Next week, came out and checked it out, and about a year later, we moved in. I feel animosity. I mean, this is my home. The owner of Abbott seems to think that they have no right to be in town. Well, this is United States of America. I don't want to get into that. I mean, to me, it's where I grew up. I mean, I played on a football team with a fighting rabbit on my helmet. You know, I mean, it's like I know the people in the cemetery personally. They had an open house when they started in 1934, and they called it the get-together. And they've invited magicians that they knew in the area to come and have fun and have a party and see their newest shop. But they had a great time. They had fun. And really, that's the whole basis of this whole thing, even to this day, 80 years later. It's like a big family reunion that you want to go to. The magic is secondary here. The people that come here, they've been coming 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years. And it's all about the relationships that people have here. It's the camaraderie. That's more important than the magic. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. And this is really beautiful. Yes. And there was no tradition that had been popular back here. This was a mixture of traditional and traditional and traditional. Mary Mary And this is what was brought me up here. This is where I grew up. I did something that I love to do. I love to fish, I love boating, I love water, I love magic, and this is what it combines. My mom used to bring me up here. There's a dealer room where we can buy new magic. And then each evening, there's a big show in the high school. There's magicians on that act. The top cruise ship entertainers, top Vegas entertainers. It's a top-notch show that you see. My first time I was here was 1974. And then I came back the following year, and I started to be in the competition. I feel like I'm going through town. Oh, welcome to golden Michigan, you know. You should have, like, you know, set your watches back 200 years. I'll go on stage, and people will go, Oh, we know him. It's like just coming home. It's like in your own living room. That's what this is like to me. It's very homey. Hey, Doc, come here. They want to interview somebody really important. That's Dr. Smolarz. He's a local dentist. Magic is not illegal. But when you stop in the middle of the road to do your trick, then it becomes illegal. So, yeah. Magic Week is always a big influx of people. In town. You know, normally we have a couple horse and buggies going through during the day. We don't have fights over parking spots or, you know, things like that. But it's never a major problem. But for the locals, that is serious. They want to get their mail, things like that. People stop in the middle of the road to go talk to somebody that they haven't seen since last year. And I believe it was in 2003, we had a magician start crossing the street and actually get hit. Because he just got so excited about seeing somebody, he just walked out and luckily the car wasn't going fast enough. You know, everybody has their routine here. You get the same people at the same restaurants at the same time every morning. And then you have this influx of additional people that take up their spot at the restaurant or their spot parking at the post office. We deal with it, it's four days a year and we're okay. A town of 1,000 people in the middle of absolutely nowhere, halfway between Detroit and Chicago, has three magic shops. I don't think they have that many in New York City, I'm not sure. For a while there, there was some cooperation. We don't see that cooperation now. And that's too bad. Because we want to see, it's for the betterment of Kola. There's a new kids, you know, trespassing, if you will, but I guess it's just too big, I can't stop it. You know, in the Magic Capital there should be magic everywhere. If you go to an antique capital or a city that's known for antiques, there's more than one antique shop. It's not a competition, it's let's try to enhance what we can for the community, for the magic community, and take it from there. I had a cochlear implant. I got it turned on December 21, 2009. People that know me, just a couple days ago, came here. You can hear now? I was wondering because you're talking so much better. He didn't even know. I went from profoundly hard of hearing to deaf between about the age of 17 and 20. So that's when I found magic at the same time. When you lose one of your senses like that, whether it's blind or deaf, people close in, you know, they avoid social interaction, you know, so they feel uncomfortable. But because I was getting into magic, I craved to get in front of people, to do magic for them. So that kind of kept me out of my shell, and I didn't have to hear them. I became kind of attention, so they listened to me. So if I didn't go deaf, I probably wouldn't be in this thing right now. Go like you say, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. I was a bully as a kid. I used to pick on this one kid. One day he just went off on me and beat me up and changed my life. And so I thought, well, what is, I got to figure out a better way. And then one day I went to school, and there was a big circle around this one kid. And I went over and he was doing a very basic trick that he had gotten from the drugstore. So I asked him, I said, hey, can you show it to me? And then he showed me how it was done, and it was right then and there. I was 11 years old. I said, well, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to do this for the rest of my life, guaranteed. You want to get out now, buddy? No, you don't want to get out? I never got the opportunity to come here until I was old enough to get myself here, get the money to come here. I'm not sure if this town didn't exist. I might be putting gas lines in mobile homes, hating my life right now. I did that actually for a while. ¶¶ I think everyone as a kid has a magic set or gets a magic set. And then we either stick with it for some reason like we did or we didn't, you know. I'm 19 years old. I'm a freshman in college right now. I actually started to do magic when I was in 7th grade as a way to pick up girls, no joke. Just like as an icebreaker, and it really, you know, it didn't work too well. ¶¶ The word trainspotter in England is a guy that stands on the end of a station and when the trains come through, writes down the numbers on the trains. They're usually a bit, ooo, they're a bit mad these days. And they're what we call trainspotters in England. Magicians, I think, are one step above trainspotters. You know, we have that strange fascination and that ability to work on some little tiny card slide. So that's kind of what it is. We're doing something which we really enjoy and we get a buzz out of doing it perfectly. And that's kind of what the magic world is all about. ¶¶ Whoa. Almost. Almost. Johnny Carson was a magician and he said he liked being a magician. Even though he was very shy, it allowed him to be the center of attention without being himself. It kind of gives them a confidence that they can express to a group of audience. They probably all had some kind of complex when they were younger, you know what I mean? And the hobby gave you the outlet to compensate for it. And so you grow with it and then you, through magic, you become a total different person at the end, you know? One, two, three and four. This is really fun. Just for you. As they change. We're going to be 400s. That's whatever we want, right? I think magicians always want to show people something that they've never seen before. And I love to make people laugh. I love to entertain them. And I think when we get together here, there is that brotherhood of magicians. We live in a world where things are changing so rapidly. And every year when we come to Colon, there's things that are still the same. ¶¶ You know, magic is bigger than you might think. I have somebody else's heart. And it really is touching to be alive today. I mean, God said you must keep this going. It's how I feel. Really I've been chosen to keep this get-together going. ¶¶ Magic is such a universal thing. It's so amazing. You can take someone who's a genius and they're fascinated by the puzzles of it, the magic happening. You can see little kids, their mouth falls open, their eyes get big when you do the easiest, smallest of tricks. It brings back a sense of childhood again. I've got goosebumps on my arm talking about it. ¶¶ Santa Claus used to come and visit me every year for Christmas. And that is like the most magical thing in the whole world. And I think every magician, you try to capture that. You try to, this is something that's just not possible, but yet I'm doing it for you and creating that wow, that was cool. If you can create something and do it in their hands right in front of them, wow, we're going to have some fun right now. We're going to forget about everything that's going on in life and just be kids again. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ |
For years, Blackberry was a smartphone for getting stuff done. The ideal Blackberry user doesn't have time to mess around, doesn't have time for games, and definitely doesn't have time for your nonsense. Blackberry's new Passport is just a smartphone for that person, but for the rest of us, it's one of the strangest phones on shelves today. The $249 Passport, or $599 unlocked, is what you would get if you took a classic Blackberry and stretched it in all four corners, making it a giant square slab of a device. It weighs nearly 7 ounces, measures over 5 inches tall, and over 3 and a half inches wide. It's actually the same size as a standard international Passport. It's a solid, hefty device, it's got a steel frame and a soft touch finish, and it's wider than almost every other phone you can buy, including Samsung's new Galaxy Note 4 and the new Apple iPhone 6 Plus. The Passport is awkward in your hands and awkward in your pockets, and I definitely dropped it once or twice in the few weeks I've been using it. Its awkward dimensions are thanks to its giant square display. It has a 4.5 inch high resolution IPS LCD panel with 1440 by 1440 pixels and a dense 453 PPI. It looks great, it's got wide viewing angles and no visible pixels, and you can really see a lot on this screen. It's great for reading, great for navigating spreadsheets, and great for plowing through email. But unsurprisingly, it's not great for watching video or playing most games, because no matter what you do, there are annoying black bars above and below whatever you're watching. But if you live your life in a spreadsheet, the square screen is perfect for that. Below the display is a three row physical keyboard. It's an honest to goodness throwback to what Blackberry is best known for. It's similar to the Blackberry keyboards of yesterday, but it's not really as good, because it's too wide and it's impossible to type on with one hand. Worse, the space bar is strangely jammed up into the last row of keys instead of below the letters like every other keyboard ever. It's something I can never get used to and I'm still way faster on a good virtual keyboard. I'm wondering why Blackberry just didn't extend the phone another quarter inch and put in a fourth row, considering the Passport's already a massive phone. The keyboard does have some cool tricks. It's got a capacitive touch layer so you can swipe on it to scroll through web pages and email, and you can also use it to move the cursor around when you're typing, but I found it's just easier to use the touch screen for doing things like that. The Passport runs Blackberry OS 10.3. It's been refined and tweaked and looks a whole lot nicer than it did a couple of years ago. But it's still the same interface, heavily reliant on swipes and gestures, and it's not particularly intuitive. Blackberry 10 centers around widgets, app icons, and the hub. The hub's a good idea. It attempts to group all of your notifications in one place, but it's still not as good a notification experience as Android or even iOS. Little things like marking a bunch of Twitter notifications as red still take way too many taps, and for some reason it insists on showing all of the appointments in all of my shared calendars instead of just the ones I actually want to see. It's the area where Blackberry has the most potential, but it's still unfulfilled. But the biggest new feature in Blackberry 10.3 is the new virtual assistant. It's like Siri, it's like Google Now, it's like Cortana, but it's just not as good. This virtual assistant can perform web searches, make calendar appointments, set reminders, and do more with just your voice. It's intelligent and it's got good voice parsing technology, but it's often slower than the options on other platforms. To fix its longstanding problem of no apps, Blackberry is now preloading the Amazon App Store on the Passport. It's a huge step forward, the Amazon Store has many more apps than Blackberry Store ever did, but it's still missing popular options like Instagram, Snapchat, and more. Installing apps from the Amazon Store is a chore. It requires multiple screens, button presses, and loading bars before the app is actually usable. For the people that this phone is built for, the Amazon App Store provides more than enough apps, but if you want to use the latest messaging app or post photos to Instagram, you should probably look elsewhere. The Passport is the most powerful hardware Blackberry has ever put in a phone. It's fast most of the time and the browser is really quick and responsive, but if I try to multitask or do a lot of things at once, the system definitely slows down. Opening the camera can take multiple seconds and sometimes it just doesn't happen at all. That's pretty unacceptable for a high end device in 2014, and certainly not one with as much RAM as the Passport. The camera is the best camera Blackberry has ever used, but that's not really saying much. It's a 16 megapixel unit with flash and autofocus and it can shoot 1080p video at 30 or 60 frames per second. Image quality is okay, it's not great, but the bigger problem is it's just slow and it defaults to the Passport's odd square format, even though you can't share any of those square photos to Instagram. You can't change the Passport's battery, but the integrated cell is really big and it lasts for a really long time. There wasn't a single day where the Passport didn't last all day for me, and many times I could go two days without plugging it in. Two days of getting stuff done, just like Blackberry intended. But when everything is added up, the Blackberry Passport is a niche smartphone if there ever was one. Blackberry's built a phone that's a shrine to everything the company has done for the past decade and a half. It's a big, productivity powerhouse that's designed more for work than fun. It even looks like it's wearing a suit. But despite getting a number of things right, the Passport fails on some obvious ones, like the keyboard that makes no sense and its giant, awkward to use dimensions. It's the perfect phone for a very select few people, and it's clearly the best that Blackberry can do. But for the rest of us that left Blackberry's behind years ago, Blackberry's best isn't good enough, and there's nothing in the Passport that's going to bring us back. |
We're in Colon, Michigan, the magic capital of the world. One of the town fathers just flipped up in the dictionary and saw colon, and he said, that's it. You know, I call it the lower bowel of the state, and it's also the upper digestive tract of magic. It's a town of 1200 people and it doubles in size during magic week. If you compare it to music festivals, this is like the Woodstock. |
The battle to create the connected home has been going on for years, but it seems like nobody's really cracked the code that will get consumers excited. Over the last couple of months, a new dark horse competitor has emerged as sort of a front runner. Wink is a company that's spun out of a partnership between Quirky and GE, and they've created a whole range of products and a central hub that allows you to create one integrated intelligent apartment. So this is a Wink loft. We're in Soho, New York. We really tried to construct this place to have a kind of very look and feel that everyone could kind of feel comfortable in. So we built a garage door, we built a whole new entryway. It's really kind of exemplifying and bringing to life all the different products on the Wink platform. Okay, so right now the whole home is kind of asleep. We're about to go in. You unlock the door and what happens? So I'm going to unlock the door. That lamp is going to turn on. The radio will turn on. The shade will go up and then the big shades behind me will all go up as well just from the swipe of this one button. So unlocking my Schlage lock. One of the things I think is really interesting about the smart home is that people have been trying to solve this puzzle for a long time and nobody seems to have gotten a lot of traction to the point where it feels like it's easy to integrate all the different smart devices in your home. Obviously the idea of the smart home has been around for quite some time. There's been a number of different radio frequencies that have been out there or a number of different people that have tried. And I think one of the things that was missing was that many of the brands that people know and rely on and already have in the house hadn't been connected yet. We're seeing them kind of all come online. In fact in Home Depot they have over 600 different connected products that are sold either in store and online today. This radio isn't a smart radio. It's just plugged into a smart switch. This light isn't a smart light. It's just plugged into a smart dimmer. And again, these are from Levittown and Lutron, two brands who have historically competed with each other but all came together under kind of the Wink platform. So this is like the mothership here. This is the hub, right? What is the purpose of this and how does it control everything in the house? Sure. So the Wink hub has got six different radios in it. It works with all these different radio frequencies that don't have kind of internet access. So for some reasons you can't have a Wi-Fi chip in different products because of the power or the cost of it. And so it allows it to kind of interpret those different radio frequencies and let you control it all from your phone. Is there an idea that these devices will sort of come to learn your schedule or be personalized to you, that they'll work together in some way? We have smart schedules, so kind of knowing when certain actions should happen based on time-based triggers. We also have geolocation, so if you're coming home to turn on your AC before you actually arrive, when you're in a certain distance. We have robots, which we kind of think of as if-then triggers. They can kind of do things for you. So open your door, turn on your lights, turn on your radio. What's the approach to privacy or security when it comes to having all of these smart devices living in your home, on your Wi-Fi network, and connected to your phone? We take security of the utmost importance, whether that be from two-factor authentication to bank-level encryptions. So we're never going to share your data or shell your data. You don't have to share your geolocation or things of that nature. So it's all kind of opt-in. And of course we'll never share that with anyone else. So I think the toughest part might be in making sure that you're always making the product simple and easy to use. There's lots of different things you can do with the smart home or with each product, and making sure that you're offering the consumer the simplest and easiest experience to make sure that they're getting the most out of the interactions and know out of the gates how to use these products and find that value right away. |
Apple's calling iOS 8 its biggest update ever, and while it may not look like it on the surface, there are enough changes here to justify that claim. iOS 8 represents a big change for Apple, it's finally becoming a modern mobile operating system. If you've used iOS 7, iOS 8 is going to feel instantly recognizable and comfortable. In fact you have to dig quite deep into iOS 8 before you find what's actually different compared to iOS 7. Unlike last year's complete visual overhaul, iOS 8 is a refinement, with few actual visual changes. It's a recent contact picker when you open the multitasking menu, notification center has shrunk from a confusing three tabs to a much more logical two, and the animations are ever so slightly faster than before. You can also respond to notifications right from notification center, and apps can insert widgets of their own right in there too. But iOS 8 looks and feels just like iOS 7, nobody upgrading from one to the other is really going to be completely lost. Spotlight has been updated to provide results from Wikipedia, news sources, maps, iTunes and more based on your location and other pieces of context. It's the universal search app Spotlight should have always been. iMessage is now more like Snapchat and other hot messaging apps of the day with audio messages, video clips and location sharing. You can finally manage group messages, you can silence your noisy friend or leave the annoying group chat that never seems to end, but we did have some issues getting that to work on our end. iOS 8's new health app acts as a central hub for all of your personal health data, whether it comes from a connected scale, your Fitbit, a heart rate monitor, or the iPhone's own built in step tracking. It's a more comprehensive look at all of the quantified life statistics you might track these days than other platforms have done and it lets third party apps share their data with it. But without third party apps supplying data, health doesn't do much on its own right now, but it's really going to be a big deal when Apple releases its watch next year. Apple's Safari browser has been upgraded with a new desktop mode and the ability to send links to other apps so you can save a webpage to Evernote without ever leaving Safari. It's a really fast browser and a great mobile experience, but you still can't set a different browser as your default in iOS 8, which is frustrating. Apple's upgraded the virtual keyboard with next word suggestions which appear above the keyboard as you type. They're pretty good, not quite as eerily predictive as SwiftKey, but iOS 8 now lets you install third party keyboards, so if you really want SwiftKey's crazy smart predictions or Swype's useful tracing features, you can just download them from the app store. Android has had this capability for years, but it's definitely a welcome first for iOS. Apps can put widgets right in the notification center, so you can get a prediction from Yahoo Weather or the latest headlines from New York Times Now without ever opening an app. This can either be super useful like Evernotes, which lets you create notes right away, or kinda pointless like Dropbox, but thankfully by default they're disabled and you can pick and choose which widgets you want to display. Third party apps can now talk to each other in more ways than ever, letting you do things like share pictures and send data from one app to another. I can save articles to Pocket or Instapaper right from the New York Times app without ever having to do an annoying copy and paste dance, but like Messages, we found this to be a bit unreliable, at least for now. Photos can now be edited with third party apps right from the main camera roll. It takes more taps to get at the editing tools of an app like Lightly than it really should, but it's still more convenient than having to switch around apps. Again, Android users aren't going to be impressed with these capabilities, but they're entirely new for the iOS world. iOS 8 represents a great leap in connectivity between your iPhone and iPad and your Mac. Apple's calling this continuity. Once OS X Yosemite launches, sometime later this year, you'll be able to answer incoming calls, reply to text messages, and do more right from your desktop. But right now you can actually use your iPad to answer calls made to your iPhone. The new handoff feature lets you start something on one device and pick up where you left off on another, whether that's browsing a webpage, or composing an email, or reading an article in a third party app like Pocket. It makes everything in your life more cohesive and connected, if you're fully bought into Apple's world. But we'll have to wait until later in the year to see the full benefits of it. That's the story with iOS 8. It's not a massive visual overhaul like iOS 7, but Apple did enough things under the hood to make this one of the most significant OS updates ever. iOS 8 is more open, plays nicer with others, and just feels like a much more modern mobile platform than its predecessors. And frankly, that's exactly what Apple needed to do. |
People don't realize the need for hydrant till it's their house that's on fire and also that hydrant's not working. In a hundred years there hasn't been no real significant change even though we know where the issues and problems are. A hydrant is as important as a firefighter. Through better engineering and better materials we've come up with a solution. It's called the Sigilak Spot and Firehive. |
Hello. How are you doing? Welcome to the Vergecast. That's usually the next line. I don't know. He was doing a thing. Yeah. You gotta, hello, welcome to the Vergecast. This is our show. It is a show about just a bunch of guys having a good time. I don't know. Is that what it's about? No. What is life about? It's a show about me having a small existential crisis once a week with good friends. That's right. And technology and news and pretty much us arguing at the end of Breaking Bad, which I've discovered recently can just send us into a tailspin of disaster, and other ideas. In fact, in figures, emotions. This is the Vergecast. Look at all this negotiation I have to do to get this beer up to my mouth. Yeah. It's really bad. Here's what I'm saying about the Vergecast. It's back. We've been gone for a long time. We did a Hack Week podcast. We threw together one last week and now we're just back. It's just gonna keep happening. We've got kind of a different set going on here based on- The French Cafe set. The French- It's very nice. It's a salon. We kind of looked at our numbers and like how people were consuming the Vergecast. We realized most of you were downloading it on audio, so we're gonna be focused on making a really great sort of like audio thing. Are we unattractive? No. Is this- No, I have a theory about the internet. Do you? This is the only one you have. No, I think, I believe the internet has radically changed consumption media. Fact. That's true. Don't even argue with me. Are we gonna talk about Taylor Swift right now? We can. We can in a minute. But if you think about how people used to consume information in their lives, it was they would wake up in the morning and read a newspaper and they would go to work and presumably be productive and then they would come home at night and like watch television. Right? And if you just look- I just- That happened. Just keep going. I feel like there was a lot of Minesweeper in the middle of there. Yeah, but like, whatever. But then what happened, then the internet arrived and now everybody wakes up in the morning and like plays with their phone and they get to work and read our website all day long. Bless you. Which is true. Our highest like traffic is like at noon. Yeah. And then they go home and like play games and like all of information is like we've moved it from like the beginning end of the day to like the dead center of the day. And that is what to do with podcasting? Well, hear me out. I think people listen to podcasts on their way to work. They listen to podcasts at work while they're ignoring their jobs and then they listen to it on the way home from work. Yeah. And those are all bad places to watch video. And when they're doing dishes. And apparently dishes. Yep. Basically you listen- Big podcasting time. Whenever you are- Whenever you should be doing something else, you should be listening to a podcast. I mean that's definitely when I listen to podcasts. Like I listen to one- Basically one podcast a day in three chunks. It's like when I'm getting ready in the morning on my way to work and on my way home from work. Yeah. You know an hour and ten minutes every time. Do you listen at regular speed or do you speed it up? See I listen at regular speed. I speed it up. I speed it up. Yeah. It's actually pretty good. Like the- What is it? Pocketcast that I use is like it- People don't sound crazy. I use an app that people made people just sound horrible. So you know that Marco Amens podcast thing. It speeds it up but it also removes the silences. And so it sounds really natural. Apparently really neat. That is neat. But yeah we should just talk 1.5 speed just to troll the people that listen. I mean I have friends who basically talk at 1.5 speed. I feel like we all talk at 1.5 speed. Everyone I know is like please stop talking so fast. But I have so many facts and figures. So anyway the point of that digression was that we know most people are consuming us on audio. So we are gonna figure out what to do with video. I think what we should do is we should let this be a podcast. And then when we want to make TV shows or video shows or whatever shows we should make those differently. Which is a radical idea I know. Let each media be true to itself he proclaimed. Although we are starting this audio only format with a live show that is on camera. But if you want to see us sitting around being jerks. Revealing the lie behind all language. No this is like yes right. Everything is a symbol that means we are gonna die. No but if you want to watch us be goofballs together you can tune into us live and we will have the replays on livestream. So if you want to hang out with us now. Now is a good time. 4.30 pm eastern on Thursdays. Anyway Vergecast is back. Those are some facts about the Vergecast. Tell me some figures about the Vergecast. There are three of them on it right now. There are three people on the Vergecast. It is very tall. It is 12 feet tall. Very wide. It has a blue ox as a pet. It is straight to Paul Bunyan. What? Deeders from Minnesota. He always immediately references something Minnesota. Everything in Minnesota is either Prince or Paul Bunyan. And Prince isn't very tall. Funny story. Same guy. Huge. Actually Prince is very small. Tiny man. Paul Bunyan by the way. Is it like two princes stacked on top of each other with a trench coat is Paul Bunyan? No one gives Paul Bunyan credit for being an excellent guitarist. I mean he is really good with an axe. Alright we are done. Shut it down. We are never doing this again. Okay let's talk about speaking of enormous things. There is actually a lot of news to talk about this week. I am holding a gigantic iPhone. I have a less gigantic iPhone. I don't have an iPhone. Do you want like a little iPhone? I am taking this one out of the case. That is my 5S. Does this have a big crack in the middle? Here is my plan with the 5S. I am not going to switch it, my SIM card, until that phone explodes. Because it is so close. You are on your way to that happening. It is so close to being completely trashed. Anyway so this was reviews week for us with the iPhones. iOS 8 review is coming next week because there is so much to unpack there. Yeah it was really like, and we kind of thought this was going to be the case and it totally proved out that like so much of iOS 8 didn't get unlocked until all these developers started updating their apps. And like there is all kinds of cool stuff going on that was not there for us before. So like iOS feels, even now like I am still waiting for a bunch of widgets that I know are coming and I really want to use. And like it is starting to finish now which is cool. But yeah so that is coming Monday. I would say most of the apps, we should get into the actual reviews but a lot of the apps that have updated have not updated for the 6 plus yet. I think developers were actually surprised by the screen size. Interesting. Which is weird. Yeah because you are just saying you are still getting four tweets on Twitter. Yeah my Twitter is like literally to show you four. Oh so it looks like Twitter on the iPad. Yeah it is very. Which is just. Twitter. Other than that they just rolled out a bunch of new stuff. Anyway let's talk about these reviews and then Dieter you played with a bunch of Amazon new stuff yesterday. Yeah yeah. And there is all kinds of stuff going on with the website. Wait so okay here is where we need to start because I feel like this is the only question anybody wants to ask and we should actually just talk about it is like which one should people buy? The 6 or the 6 plus? The big one. The 6 plus. Why? So I am. Plus. Here the 6 plus. Thanks Dieter. So also wait can I just back up real quick. So my favorite thing about this phone is that everyone almost everyone picks it up and immediately knows which one they want. Right like you pick up the big one and you are like this is way too big or you are like this is perfect. Let me tell you a story about the 6 plus. Hold on let me finish. Damn it. Except for Dieter Boehn. He picked it up and just immediately had a panic attack. It happens when I pick up everything though. It is not the iPhone's fault. Oh my God what do I do? This is the existential crises I have watched you go through over the last week. I settled on just the 6 and I immediately regretted it. Oh you pre-ordered one. Yeah yeah. Which one did you get? The 6. You should have gotten the 6 plus. Again but I regret it. But I got the right color. Yeah black. Space gray. Space gray. Well black. Yeah the white I think the white makes the phones look bigger than they are and the gold I think looks terrible. Fair. That is just where I am at. So apparently and this is totally anecdotal and may not be true but is what I have seen is that people who got gold got it immediately which is the exact opposite of last year. There was no wait people came on a day late. Yeah there was only like 10 people wanted them. Well but last year there weren't any. Right. But I guess there was a supply shortage so I don't know. But space gray is a little bit delayed and silver is super delayed. Yeah. Which is really weird and not at all what I would have guessed. Yeah I just don't think the white looks great. Well white and silver. I think the space gray is where it is at because if they are bigger you want them to look smaller. I think the gold looks terrible. Yeah I agree but I thought that last year and lots of people liked it. No last year the gold was like flashy and new and it worked with the design and it was all angled and Johnny was like it looks like jewelry. You know like I don't know why he's a mobster. He's definitely a mobster. He's gone through a rough patch in his life. He needed the money and then he joined the mob. He doesn't need the money. I don't know. That joke makes no sense. Well let's talk about the design. Let's just start. So I think the answer is a six plus. I have many reasons for this. I will say that today I went to lunch with Trey Brindrette our product officer at Fox and I pulled out the phone and we drew a crowd. People like we were just standing in line to like order hamburgers. I thought you meant you literally like held it and drew a crowd. Yeah I was like Trey let me show you what I'd like my friends to look like and I drew a picture of people that I thought were my friends. I want this many friends. You're an engineer right? Make me friends. No it was like we know like people crowded around us and like played with the phone and asked us about it and they're like how do you have it already? And like it was like we were doing shtick like Trey put his like iPhone 4 on it and like the screen is bigger than an entire iPhone 4. People are very excited about a gigantic iPhone and I think the big iPhone the six plus is like it's the first time I've gotten an iPhone where I thought to myself this is a new experience. Right. Whereas with Android phones because you switch manufacturers you switch skins you whatever every time you get your Android phone it's like kind of a new experience. With the iPhone it's like this is slightly nicer. Nothing is different now. Yeah I mean even the 3.5 to 4 inch screen difference was like nice but didn't actually meaningfully change anything. Right and I think the six plus is like it's exciting because it is so different. Right but difference not always good like you like different for different sake. Yeah. Like you think it's hilarious that it's humongous and I mean it's like walking around. It's a really simple like decision. Do you want a phone or do you want a little like everything computer almost tablet thing that you can run more most of your life off of. I mean do you want something that you can conceivably use as both a ping pong paddle and like a deadly weapon and a laptop. When you put it like that it's kind of. It is this is this thing is comically huge. I said in an interview I think the Galaxy Note 3 is actually easier to hold because it's a little bit thicker. It is squatter it's like square. Yeah this is really it's top heavy in a weird way. Well because you're holding it feels like it's going to just slip out of my head. They kept the home button the same and so it's got the big thing at the top and the bottom so it looks symmetrical. But that means it just feels super tall. Right and it's ridiculous that the speaker is still like there's just the one speaker on the bottom. Like Apple took their hardware design and like literally did a pinch zoom. We made a big phone everybody. Yeah I think it is. I think the iPhone 3G and 3G S are like by far the ugliest iPhones ever made. Agreed. But I would put this like this is in that pantheon. Like I don't think it's really. I do not. I mean I don't think it's anywhere near as beautiful as the 5 and 5S but like I don't think it's ugly. I hate the outlines on the back. I mean these outlines on the back are. Like this is like Johnny I was like hammered. He was like look I have to go drive my Jaguar and then he like left and they were like no just do the lines. He handed somebody a magic marker. Did you read the big business week profile on Apple that came out yesterday that they hilariously called an interview. It's very confusing. No interview. But it was a profile of Tim Cook and Apple. It was a good piece and it was great. Really well done. Brad Stone and somebody else. But really like really well done piece. And the criticism of Tim Cook's reign at Apple is things that you like designers have left in a specific complaint that they said the business week was where I used to sit in like a meeting with Steve Jobs and we would like hash out like button design. Right. Yeah. I have these tiny particulars of icons right now. We have these like gigantic sprawling teams and things are less focused than before. And I could not tell you if that affected the design of the iPhone 6 and the 6 plus but I can tell you that I wouldn't be surprised if like that's how we got this intended design. Sure. Right. Because it's not. I just don't. I don't see this happening. Right. But if you look at the iPhone 4 it's like just a beautiful thing. If you look at the iPhone 5 and 5S it is there. They're beautiful in their way although far less durable in my opinion the iPhone 4. Yeah. Really? Yeah. All right. Fair. They just like the iPhone 5 like the black one just like turned silver over time. I mean I've dinged my 5S to hell. So I will defend the 6 and the 6 plus from a design standpoint in that they're not as beautiful as the 5 and the 4 but I think they're way more approachable. Like the 5 and the 4 are like I am an art object and you must like bow to me and this is like I'm designed for you to hold in your hand. The 5 got nice curved sides and a really like natural feeling screen and it just they feel like because they made them so big if they had stuck with that like stark design I think they would have felt insanely imposing. Right. I said this to I asked some folks at Apple about this was like because the big question we went in with was why don't you just make it thicker and make the battery longer. That's the question for Apple. Right. Well and I have this camera bulge. Well yeah. But that's a separate thing. What camera bulge? I don't see any camera bulge on Apple's website. I don't know what you're talking about. So I asked them this and the answer and the answer I got from two different people was it would have been horrible. And like whether or not that's true I don't know but they were like we played with or they you know they looked at just blowing up the design of the 5S because everybody liked it presumably including Apple. And what they found was that you're exactly right that a phone that looks like that and is that sort of stark and sharp and rectangular bigger would just feel like crap. I will say that which I agree with. We ask a lot of questions of a lot of like product managers and product designers and the one answer that I always am like I believe you. I accept it and don't immediately assume it's total garbage is we tried that and it sucked. Right. Yeah. I mean I don't know. Here's the thing. You know we read a lot of reviews of the phone because once you're recently want to read everybody else's reviews and everybody talks about these phones in terms of Apple had to do this to catch up the competition. Even iOS 8 in many ways it's like they had to start adding sensibility. They start they had to start adding third party technology. Words and like widgets and like actual notifications like they had fallen behind in a way and just here with the sheer screen size of the thing they felt we had David. I had an argument because his review we were editing each other's reviews. Your view is like Apple had to make a big phone and I was like no they had to make a regular phone. Right. What they were making the whole time was a smartphone. Right. And they had to just get to normal. They're still smaller than the S5. They're still smaller than the Nexus 5. They're still smaller than any. Everyone else's flagship phone is bigger than the iPhone. Yeah somewhere between 5 and 5.2 now. Yeah everyone like that's just where they planted and then the Android big phone market is even bigger than this right. The Note 4 is 5.7. Right. They've like Apple's just gotten to parity with everybody. Right. And that's like that is kind of the story of these phones. Right. Like they're just they've caught up now. It's also like the I mean that that's half the story right. The other half is like Apple has all these entrenched advantages that it's been winning with for so long like the camera and the app store and like the general polish of iOS that doesn't exist in Android. Right. And so like in some cynical way they're like OK well we have we do these four things better than anybody. If we do everything else exactly as well as everybody we're going to do these four things better and thus be the best. Right. And it's like that's a deeply boring way to design a phone which is kind of what I think they did here. But it does work. Yeah. Like it's a successful strategy. Right. And what's I mean they're I mean like for example like the Note 4 screen is beautiful. Yes it is. The there's other beautiful screens in the world. Lots of them. LG makes a beautiful screen. HTC makes a beautiful screen. This screen is really like it's really good. Yeah it is. It's less pixels per inch than just about everybody. Actually it's less than everybody. Everyone else is like 441. Yeah. This is 401. But they like Apple like what the small stuff like this is a joke I made in the review like everyone else is in a pixel resolution race and a pixel density race. And nobody is in a how thin is your lamination race. Right. Because there are no specs. How close can you get to the glass race. Right. And it's like if there is only a spec. Yeah. If only Apple would be like we have X nanometers precision lamination so that Samsung would be like yeah we beat that. Yeah. But because they don't like Samsung's like whatever and like the Note the Note 3 screen definitely looks sunk below a layer of glass. The Note 4 I think is a little bit the same. And it's like Apple's just really good at the little like that little thing makes this screen great. Yeah. Well and I mean it's little things like we've talked about this too with the fact that it just curves a little right at the edge like. Yeah. There's nothing I can't explain that to somebody. But like you pick it up and it just feels right. So 20 degree radial curve. Come on Samsung. What Apple needs 46 degrees makeup. They need to make up fake tech specs. Yeah. Just like pretend stuff so that Samsung loses their mind trying to beat them. I mean retina. Well they did that. They need to do it more. I mean it worked like Apple did it and then Samsung was like oh right. What about 11 times retina in your face. No one can see it in the app scale. But try this out. Look at all those pixels. And that's it. So the thing with the six is like it is just the next iPhone right. And Apple's really good at putting up the next iPhone right. And they bumped a spec and they like the app scale and it's fine. Like it's not I don't think it's perfect but it's fine. Like the scaling you mean. Yeah. If you look for it it's there. Right. But for the most part it's fine. It's like the 6 plus in Chrome. It's the same thing as I tell everybody. It's like you're like this is too big but it's not a problem. Right. You never notice. And then you know the apps get updated and whatever. Right. With the 6 plus the scaling I think looks terrible. Well what was it the dialer that is just hilariously full of white space now. I mean this phone is comedy gold. Just let me be clear. It is very much points to a future of like hybrid devices. It like has a brilliant camera. It has a great screen. Like all these things. The battery is great. There are many reasons why it's the phone I want to buy. And then there are many reasons like I'm literally sitting here giggling it like how doofy it is all the time. Doofy. You keep walking on it. I'm just like you are not caught up with the doofy stuff. I mean it's just like. 2.5 more doofies. Give it a minute. I mean here it is. Like do do do. Like that's the phone. Like do do do. Like it's just a big lumbering beast of a phone. And like the apps like the Kindle app like is like gives you a headache. The scaling in the Kindle app is so bad it's like this is blurry. It's like looking through. What's the thing like it's like the wavy text on a TV screen. Like it's blurry. It's just like headache inducing. The Twitter app just got updated and they updated it in so far as the menu bar doesn't scale the status bar doesn't scale now but like it still shows you four tweets. The landscape keyboard is like I don't even know what sort of like comedy moment Apple was going for with that. The landscape keyboard is a perfect example of like just because you have more space doesn't mean that you should fill it. And they were really good especially with iOS 7 at not doing that. They're like it's okay to have white space. Right. But they're like oh it's a keyboard. That's like a functional area. We should cram it full of crap. Well here's like a decision on the landscape. There's two decisions on the landscape keyboard that are just mystifying. One is the paste icon which is to be clear is an icon of a bottle of glue. And Apple thinks you the consumer do not understand the difference between paste and glue. And I think that is probably accurate because I do not understand. I was going to ask you to explain it to me. But I know paste you it's got a little. Right I know that paste does not come out of a glue bottle like that. It's just obviously true. Right it's just something I know. Well I mean like right like paste is like a dip whatever. And then there is the fact that of all of the formatting choices you can put in a button they picked bold. There's a button just to bold text. And I look at it and it's just a bold B. It's just a bold B. Which is going to be cool because you know it's going to happen a lot. People are going to go to type B and it's just going to do nothing. They're going to be like that's a B. I would like to type that. It's like you get the feeling that Tim Cook personally sends a lot of emails with bold text in it. And he was just like listen Johnny. I know you're in charge of design. I know Steve Jobs structured this company so that you know and can tell you what to do. But I want a fucking bold button. And there it is. It's just so confusing. And then the keyboard trolls the hell out of you. Because when you rotate it from portrait to landscape the position of the emoji button the emoji keyboard button and they switch to numbers and symbols literally flips from portrait to landscape. No way. It's numbers on the outside emoji on the inside. Yeah. And then you turn it and it switches. Just click on my account. There you go. Just click on my face. Click on my face. Just click on your face. No it's just like that to me is like they made this keyboard and like they made it. They had to figure out how to now rotate it. Come on. Like I don't understand that at all. Wait a minute. No the emoji stays on the left. Oh yeah but they do flip. Yeah. Just to confuse you a little bit more. Also this is not rotating super fast. No I did. I don't know. Can I tweet from your account right now? No please please not do that. I mean yeah there are definitely things about pooping. You can pay. If I poop into you live on the Vergecast. Stay away from my property. Get off my lawn. I'm just saying like I'm like these are all my complaints about the iPhone 6 Plus. You've just heard all of them. You just ran out of big lists and then you're like buy like it's stupid and weird and there's bad software. Buy it. Well the bad software is like. Don't buy the one that doesn't have any of those problems. For every other company when they put out a phone with bad software I'm like don't buy it. I'd kill them for bad software. Sure. Samsung puts out a phone on AT&T of bad software. I'm like you are doomed for six months to experience this bad software. With Apple it's like probably in two weeks all the apps will be updated and Apple will like fix that keyboard issue. Well actually no. They didn't fix the shift key button. Yeah. So I have no faith. Still insane. Whatever. Don't buy an iPhone. Here's what you should do. Throw away all your phones. Go on eBay. Look up RAZR. Yeah. Buy a Sony Ericsson W810i. Yes. Yes. And just live a life knowing that that is the pinnacle of technology. Yeah I can't disagree with that at all. I mean it's a phone and a Walkman. So do you try to use a six plus one handed? Because that's the reason I didn't get it. Yeah. Is like I've got big enough hands to do it but it's awkward and I would just drop the thing and I've shattered two phones in the past month and so it was time for me to admit that I am a huge klutz. Yeah. And I would drop that and I'm less likely to drop a small one. That's why I got the small one. I actually wrote the exact, independently wrote the exact same paragraph in our reviews which was these are the first iPhones that are better in cases. Yeah. And I'm just gonna say it. I've never had a case on my phone before. Ever. Never. And like you kind of need to do it. Yeah. I mean I'm just gonna say it. When you put the big one in a case it looks like a Samsung phone. Yeah it does. Like just does. Yep. There's like there's an element of I mean it's like the way the cases are shaped and like the white and the color like that's how Samsung phones. So we got a close up on the camera there. Let's struggle to put a phone in a case. Yay. Yay. These cases feel really nice by the way. I got a lot of questions about like how they're gonna hold up over time and the answer is I have no idea but they feel really nice. Yeah. Yeah. The leather. I'm into the leather. The leather on the Moto X. I'm really happy. The leather on this like it's really nice. Yeah. Now let's look here. It's a Samsung phone. Yeah flip it over like you cannot tell that that's not a Samsung phone. Right. And well it's a case. Yeah. But there's like an element to this this specific aesthetic of the phone that is very Samsungy. Yeah. Which because it's a giant phone in the case. Samsung. Look here's the thing. All of these complaints aside what I know about this phone is that I'm never gonna use my iPad mini again and never even consider buying another iPad mini. There is a shot in our video you should go watch it where if you watch a 16 by 9 video on the iPad mini the actual because it's letterboxed the actual size of the video you're watching is only marginally bigger than a video on this phone which is like that's the game. That's why I have an iPad mini. Right. Because I want to like watch things in a bigger screen. I have an iPad Air which I like very fond of. I am struggling to think of reasons to like get it now because it's all it really offers me is a yet another bigger screen and I think that's like super interesting. Yeah. But we need to see iOS on the iPad Air start to do some like proper stuff. No that's what I'm saying. I think there's a world in which the little phone becomes like a little phone. This becomes a primary computing platform thing and the iPad becomes like a truck. To like stretch that metaphor. The iPad becomes they focus on actual productivity with the iPad the way that Microsoft quite frankly has been focused on with the Surface Pro this whole time. Well that's when the like split screen multitasking comes in. Or maybe user switching. Which is the thing that this is not big enough to pull off. Yeah. That would be great. Just come on. Yeah. I mean I'm telling you Dieter and you're engaged now and you just don't you just don't want to share that device. Nope. I'm kidding. I have no idea. Because at least it's always like pooping. No if you give it to your kid. Whatever. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on the 6? I feel like I've rambled on about the 6 Plus. I mean my thing about the 6 is like it's the 6 Plus is way more interesting in terms of like what it could and might someday be. I mean what you said that I've been thinking about a lot about over the last few days is that your argument is that in three years this will just be the iPhone. Yeah. That there won't be a smaller one. It'll just be that that you buy. Yeah. And like I actually think you're right. I hope you're not but I think you are. But for me it's like this is like there are a lot of bad things about the fact that this is just another iPhone. But it's also like I don't need something else. Right. Like I sit at my laptop all the time and when I'm on the subway I want like a thing I can hold in one hand and like play games on or read on or whatever and this is that. Right. Like I don't need this giant productivity machine. Well actually you kind of do because you've been slacking. That's more reviews. I think the like this makes sense to me in a lot of markets where for most people their phones are already their primary computers and that's just like a thing and that's a growing thing in the world. But for me personally that's just not how I operate. I'm excited for this to become my primary computer. Yes. I think that's insane. No. Why is that insane? It's only insane because the software isn't good enough for it to be that yet. That's the only reason it's insane. Right. And like Samsung's like trying to do that with a note. I mean the problem just straight out is that Samsung is not as good at software. Right. Like they have really interesting ideas about how to do all that stuff on the note and I actually I mean I like the note. Every time I see one on the subway or out in the world I'm like I love big screens and then I like play with the software. I'm like I hate your software. Yeah. And that's that's the only problem with the note is that yeah it's cool to do split screen and like resize the apps and do the swipey thing to make a little phone on the screen and use it like that would all be great if it was like smooth and worked well. Well that's what I'm saying like Samsung is at least trying and like I forever will think that the Samsung Note Edge is the most interesting phone that's come out recently because it's weird and probably not going to work but it's different and they're trying stuff. Yeah. Like Samsung you can say a lot of things about Samsung but they try stuff. Yeah. And they're not trying anything here. Like this is literally all this is is like you're getting a slightly bigger version of the video that I'm getting on here. And what I'm getting is like a more ergonomic thing that actually fits in my pocket. And that doesn't obscure your face when I try to take a picture. But that for me is a really easy trade off. So like in three years I might be happy to buy this. And I when it when they make it worth being slightly bigger or when the watch comes out and makes it so that I'm not taking my phone out of my bag very often. Great. And there are a million reasons this is useful to have. But for right now for like a thing I use constantly in short bursts all the time I'd rather have the thing that fits if the experience is the same and the experience is the same. Right. They haven't done enough with the software to make the experience different. No. All you get is like a two paned messages window which doesn't really do anything for me. Yeah. I mean they are. That's the thing. I like the feeling Apple like made some concessions to how big the phone was instead of having a plan. Right. And the email I've gotten a few times is that like that's that's the talk. Right. Like this is the tech where they're like here's this crazy weird new thing and then the next time they're going to come out and like here's stuff to do with it. Yeah. And that's that may well be the case but that's. It doesn't make this better now. That's why I think I'll get that one when they when they get the right. Like in three years I will gladly buy this phone. But for right now it's like it's not worth the trade off of it. Have we talked you out of this phone yet. No sitting awkwardly. I have one more trump card. Oh here it is. Which is the camera slightly better. And that and I the experience of taking photos like I like using this phone has made me understand why people take photos with tablets because it's like wow I just became a much better photographer just by having the ability to frame stuff better. It's true. You should get glasses. Well no I should get a gigantic screen. Super easy. I should wear glasses like a nerd or I can get a huge phone like a bigger. Why wear glasses. Nailed it. You know I know I'm wearing contact lenses now. I'm sorry. Do you want to try my giant phone. If you try and hand that phone to me now I'll drop it. I can't see anything. Who's that laughing at me over there. What's going on. I mean look I'm just saying I think this is the one. Like oh mostly for the fact that it is so different and I you're right. I appreciate different. Well you just appreciate different because you haven't had different because you've been no I like I love my Nexus 5. I think that's a great phone. If that phone had a great camera I don't know. Nexus 5 that apparently is prone to the screen chattering. Yeah people mean when you drop it on the ground it shatters. I dropped it like a foot. If you buy it from Google Play like that you can like the people on Twitter told me about this you can like trick your way into like having them just fix that for you. Yeah fair. So here's what I think is which like we have you know differences of opinion but which is going to sell better. Where they they pre-ordered four million of them. The big one. The small one. I think it's the small one. I don't even think it's going to be close. I think a lot of people are going to return the big one and get the small one. Really. That's what I think. I think a lot of people don't understand how much bigger than their iPhone 5 this is. I mean it is like the screen is as tall as an entire iPhone 5. Yeah I mean it's like this is comedy. Like I'm talking to. No and I think like there are a lot of people at least people that I know who are going to be upgrading from like a 4s to this and it's going to feel terrible. And I think people will like would get used to it. But in the 15 day return period are going to take it back and get a 6. I disagree. Because I've had so many people who I hand this to and they're like oh my god that's way too big. And it's like that's the small one. Sorry about your life. There's no I mean this is barely even perceptible to me. If I wasn't holding a 5s in one hand and a 6 in the other I would just tell you this is a 5 like the same size of a 5. I don't know. That's my. So other than other than the adapting to screen size how do you guys feel about iOS 8? I haven't used it yet. I've been waiting for the 6 to come so I can get it. iOS 8 it definitely just feels like they thought it through this time. Mm-hmm. Right and it's like David saying this stuff we're just now seeing the apps take advantage of it. Right. And all the keyboard people are ready to go which is like adorable. I know. But I think like understanding how photo apps are going to plug into the extensibility I think until Yosemite comes out and we can play with like handoff and continuity and all that stuff. I mean that's the one thing like we kind of said this is WWDC that like that's the one thing that's game changing. Everything else is like cool and should have been there and my thing is like I love almost everything about iOS 8 and it doesn't make any sense to me why they didn't release it a year ago. But handoff and continuity are the two things that are like no one is doing that and that's like if that's why you buy into an Apple ecosystem is for that stuff. Right. And that's huge. Taking a phone call from a Mac is like it will just bring the pain of making a phone call on AT&T to every part of my life. Yeah I mean I do this like jacked up thing all the time where I'll open a Google Maps link on Chrome on my computer and then I go to Chrome on my phone and then open up Chrome and then I'm like oh there are devices and then I wait for it to refresh and then I open that tab up again and just being able to go and like swipe up from the bottom left corner and there's my map is huge. Yeah. That's amazing. Too bad it's Apple Maps. Yeah so I won't get where I'm going. I know. But at least it'll look cool. No I mean that's the stuff like iOS 8 is like a clear like iOS 7 was very messy in places. Yeah. I think everyone just admits it now. iOS 8 clearly refines all the broken parts of it and makes it more extensible and bigger but it's as with all of these things it's like when will the app developers show up and the answer right now appears to be right away. Yeah. Yeah. I mean this is why they did this is why they talked about our WWDC right they were like go build this stuff we can't tell you why but it's gonna be great. I will say the iOS 8 on my 5s feels very small. Yeah. Like the adding the extra row of predictive text about the keyboard the keyboard now takes up you know 55% of the screen which is crazy and then like you pull down and if I have like eight widgets and it takes like an hour and a half to scroll through them all and all this stuff is like it's clearly designed for bigger devices which makes sense that's what they sell now. Yeah. But it's like it updating was. My phone my 5s won't update. Why I don't know just erroring out. It just hates you? Yeah whatever I mean it's so broken it knows it's not long for this world I mean I'm sorry. I'm legitimately worried to know what my iPad mini is gonna do with iOS 8. It's gonna die. Whatever. It's gonna die. They want you to buy a new one or they want you to buy a Kindle tablet hey. Oh. All right you played with a bunch of the Amazon stuff. Yeah Amazon announced like 50 things yesterday. Yeah. So there's a new HDX 8.9 inch tablet it's a spec bump I don't care about it. I'm sorry. They announced new HD HD 7 and HD 6 tablets so it's like super low end tablets and the HD 6 which is like bordering on can you even call it a tablet. Yeah. 6 inch screen. It's 99 bucks. It's an iPod touch. It's an iPod touch. It's the iPod touch. It's actually kind of insane for 99 bucks and you got already on Amazon Prime membership because of course you do. You've got like a hundred dollar thing that you can watch Amazon video on you can like chuck it and it's more durable than other Android tablets. It's like relatively sturdy and if you lose it it's a hundred bucks. Yeah I mean this is what I've been saying forever is like and this is the you know the logic of Amazon giving away for free and in a real way a hundred dollars is like a huge step in that direction but like Amazon has this big trove of content. Yeah. And if you pay a hundred dollars a year it's all free. Yeah. Right. And so nobody is more set up to have an iPod touch than Amazon. Yeah. So the thing about the 6 and the 7 is like they're low end Android tablets are running some media tech processor. It's the truest sign of quality. Well it might they might be terrible but I think when I think good user experience I think media tech. But FireOS seems smooth on it but who knows. Like Amazon has crappy games and a media tech processor will stream your video and music and the end. So the thing is slow and jaggy and whatever as long as it will play that video I don't care. Right. It's a hundred dollars and I'm gonna be able to pull it out on a plane and watch the Amazon Prime video that I have downloaded. Because you can watch that you can watch that download you can download Amazon Prime videos or a bunch of them. I mean I'm just saying I don't understand like I think Amazon software strategy is not good. It's not great. The content strategy is really good and their content strategy is also not going anywhere so their kids strategy is better than anybody else's and it's super weird but so you can buy the kid version of these tablets fifty bucks more. You get this giant bouncy case that kids can hold but you also get a two year warranty like literally you can take the tablet smash with the ball peen hammer send it back. They'll send you a new one saw it in half. Make sure you send at least fifty one percent back. They'll send you a new one for two years. No questions we don't care. So like you can buy this thing for a hundred bucks turn on all the parental controls of like what kind of apps you can use no in app purchases blah blah blah. Get the free year of like you get to watch Dora or whatever. Yeah. What are Nickelodeon. They got a bunch of stuff. I think they got Disney in free time. Yeah. Yeah. It's not just like here's a hundred dollar tablet and you are free to destroy it. Go away. The best parenting tool in the history of time. And then America. All good things end with you telling your kids go away. Yeah. Go child. Yeah. Learn from this tablet. No explore. Teaches people how to speak Spanish. So don't you hate on door. Teaches people the Diego is just useless. Really. I'm just saying like I've watched a lot of Dora with my niece and nephew. There were well your niece and nephew. Thankfully there's time. Man Diego dude get it together. Just like get your shit together Diego. Like you're always lost. So like you're just you're never in the right place. Tell me the truth about the swiper. The swiper actually like scary. No I was a kid. I was like a wreck. Villains were like scary. No swipers are getting adorable raccoon. He's like whatever. And doors like oh man you're swiping like whatever door. I have a question. Yeah. Can we pivot this podcast just be recaps of door to the Explorer. Oh oh. Really. Large untapped mark. I know. Dora Dora and Diego go to a place. Diego screws up catastrophically. Someone else swiper no swiping and then everything is resolved. Well Dora uses her bilingual skills. And she says pack pack. Right. I mean Dora is legit. Like yeah. Like as a lady like she's like she's on her game right. Like hold on. I'm just gonna take that. What. What. I'm saying like Dora. It's clear that children should idolize Dora. Yeah. I'm saying that if you're if you are into Diego you are headed down a life of misery. Right. That's your wrong role model. So I flushed along. It's just a thing that happened in my life. No keep going. I feel like this has been waiting inside you for a long time. Diego's bullshit. That's all right. The best thing Amazon announced was the Voyage the Kindle Voyage. Yeah. It's really good. Okay wait. I don't understand because I have a paper way and it's a pile of garbage. Perfect. It is. I have zero problem. I've never had fewer problems with a device. So many problems. Why? It is slow. The screen is not flushed. The screen is plastic and scratches easily. And it does scratch easily. It's not too heavy. It's too thick. It's too heavy. Uh huh. Is this the game we're about to play? And like paper white is too heavy. Yes. Crap. You're crazy. And the screen is not 300 pixels per inch. That's true. I'll give you that. And it refreshes too slowly. And it doesn't have physical buttons that you can just like squeeze it. Yeah wait. How does that actually work? I don't understand that. That's it. That's like there's no bezel physically. You like physically just like give a little tiny squeeze to the bezel like not too hard and then there's like haptic feedback. The other reason your paper white sucks is it doesn't have auto adjusting on the brightness. And even if it did, it still sucks because if you're reading in bed in the dark, it doesn't get dimmer over time because it knows your eyes are adjusting to the darkness. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I ordered one. Did you? Yeah. Zeder texted me last night and he's like, I bought a voyage and then I felt, I would say like a deep American materialistic, like a what? A purchase can be made and I haven't, I'm not, the president might know that I haven't done my duty. My Cadillac has bigger fins on it than yours. Here's, here's my dream fleet right now. 2001 Escalade, used Escalade. I saw one on a weekend trip for a sale for $9,000 and I thought to myself, I bet I could talk to the $7,000 and then it would be a deal. And seriously, they've like been eBay on eBay motors looking at 2001 Escalades for some time now. Why would you want dude? I don't know. Impala Impala. No, no. The slate is like a critical element of a fleet. And then a new Mustang. The 2015 Mustang? Yeah. You will, you will drive. The only time you will drive it is when you're moving parking spots because you live in New York. No, I'll drive the Mustang to the garage with a 2001 Escalade that's constantly being repaired. And then you'll just roll down the East side. I'm just saying like, I think the verge should own an Escalade. I'm fine with that. What? Cause then we can all get in it and like go places. Only if you convert it to run off of like, like crickets or like biodiesel biodiesel. No crickets. Crickets. Crickets is like hard. Just crickets. Biodiesel is like, isn't, you can like just roll up like, and that like, let me paint you a scene. We're all in our suite Escalade. Okay, hold on. I'm going to close my eyes. All right. And then we just like, we're like driving around. It smells like French fries because we're doing biodiesel. Who's driving? It doesn't matter. We all take turns, right? And then like the rest of us are just like hanging out. Your eyes are open. And then we were like, man, we're like out of gas. And then we like roll up behind a McDonald's and like steal their oil. And then like, that's how we, no. Okay. It got weird at the end. I was with you for so long there. That's the biodiesel stories. Like you're constantly like going to McDonald's or like fusion powered. We could do fusion like a mystery. We need mr. Fusion. Yeah. What if, what if we get on 2001 escalate to over to like pimp my ride style or 2001. We should actually talk about it. So Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are like in a rocket ship war, right? Like didn't, didn't, uh, Bezos did something else with like spaceship blue or whatever something is called. Uh, and then Elon Musk, like I love the idea that like billionaires desperately want to go to space. Is this a place where, um, that's right. They is this a place where like capitalism and competition is the best thing? Yeah. I mean it is, but like maybe if they worked together, it would be cheaper and we would get up there faster with cooler stuff. No, but they want to each be in their own. I mean like they're, they're like months away from like mounting guns on one of our spaceship and like having like billion hair laser fights in space. That would be so sick. I mean that is definitely like a sci-fi show waiting to happen. I mean, yeah, I'm kind of in the idea of Elon Musk, my ride moon. Yeah, it's called moon raker. No, here's an idea. This one's free for everybody. You get billionaires and you make him play laser tech. That's the whole show. Billionaire laser fight. Do they get to like design their own laser tag as a kid? I was not allowed to have laser tag as a kid, but I was allowed to have the version of laser tag that was with like an actual like replica Beretta. It looked like a gun, like a real gun. You and I grew up in the era where guns were allowed to look like guns. We like, we want it. We played guns. That was what you did as a kid. They didn't have like orange caps. No, no, no. They would, they would, it looked like, it looked like a gun. Yeah. I actually just owned it. It was actually, it was just an unloaded fire on the toilet. Uh, no, I had my nest zapper was gray. And then like two years later they made them all orange. Yeah. No, but I was not allowed to own laser tag, but there are many laser tech facilities in the region. Oh yeah. That's what we had too. Yeah. But did you play the laser tag where you shoot each other or the laser tag where you all just shoot at targets? Uh, each other. Of course each other. Cause it was like, we shoot at targets. Now all it is is targets. That sucks. Yeah. It's like, let's run around and look at each other while we shoot at targets. Yeah. And if there's fun laser tag out there, I will go anywhere in America to play fun laser tag in our 2000. Yes. That gets phenomenal gas mileage. Uh, but yeah, there's like targets up in the corner of the room and you just run around and shoot those. Yeah. Which just sounds horrible. How do you, so you just become the first person they've ruined laser tag. Well, like they can still shoot you, but you don't get points by shooting them. Like if, if, if you're shooting at the target, I shoot you and then you have to like go away and recharge and then come back and keep shooting the target instead of like, how many people did you kill? So you can be like, so you can be like the world's ultimate griefer. Basically like not shoot the targets, just kill everybody. Yes. Cool. Oh, we should talk about minecraft. Speaking of grievers, that's all. Let's wrap up on minecraft. So somebody explained minecraft to me. Uh, the game or the event that happened surrounding it? All of it. Uh, the game is awesome and you should play it. Yeah. It's fun and creative and helps kids learn and helps you build castles in the sky. Okay. Here's the question. I don't know the answer to. How does minecraft make money? They, they sell games. Yeah. They sell expansion packs. That, that was like the basics of minecraft is free, right? Right. But they sell more, right? And they also like license like collectibles. Yeah. It's a, just a franchise. Right. But is that, is that worth a 2 billion? It was $2 billion, right? Yeah. 2.5. Oh, that's right. It was 2.5. So it's like $2 billion to Microsoft. Uh, because it's like, it's the, it's the future of Lego. Like it's like the, like the number. Is it like minecraft can be cool for 50 years? Yes. Really? Yeah. I don't know, man. I know. Like if you talk to all of the various VOX dads who like play Minecraft with their kids, they're like all super into it. Yeah. No, that's definitely true is there's like this whole army of nine year olds who are super obsessed with Minecraft. Yeah. And they have like their own servers and like their own communities and like that all I get it's just, I maybe I should play the game more. Here's my dream. I've been thinking about this. Uh, so notch quit mojang, right? Uh, when they sold it to Microsoft, he said, I don't want to be responsible. By the way, Minecraft is not free on every platform. It's like depending on the platform or cost. Oh really? Okay, fair enough. Um, so notch quit, he wrote this like very emotional letter about like, I don't want to be a part of this. Like I don't want to take responsibility. I just want to play games. And he's like, but like, it's like, it's a really easy thing to write after you sell your company for $2.5 billion. Like not to be cynical about it, but like if, if you're like, I don't want to be part of this, then just leave. Don't sell for $2.5 billion. What are you going to do? Like, would you rather he just like lit the whole thing on fire? No, but like you don't get to take, no, no, that was his, that's like why he sold it. Yeah. He sold it because he was in charge and he was like, I, this needs a steward. Right. And the only steward is like this company. So I'm selling it and that's fine. It's all, that's fine. Well, and it just felt, I don't know, the, the letter felt very holier than vow to me in a way that I don't think it needed to watch the, I mean the, he, he referenced that, that the 20 minute video or about Phil fish or 10 minute video about Phil fish about like how he's become a symbol of like the internet's ability to like hate famous people on the internet. Oh yeah. Yeah. And like, it's actually, it's a really smart thing. And so if this guy like is honest and he says, I do not want to be the figurehead in charge of this game and also manage this whole game, like selling it to me seems like a relatively virtuous thing to do. All right. That's fair. That's fair. If that's legit. Yeah. If that's what he was after, that's fine. I'm just saying, I think we should get, we should get Paul Miller to interview Notch and just talk about like leaving. Yeah. Yeah. Like the vibe to me was very much. Paul Miller invented the internet and then left. It's true. He wired the first ethernet cables. No, the vibe, when I read that letter, the vibe was very much when Paul left the internet and I was like, we should get these people in the room. Paul, if you're out there, I know that you are. Paul. Love you buddy. Notch, I don't know what you're doing now. Probably reclining on a bed of money. Not feeling not responsible for anything. Talk to me. Let's get at me. Yeah. Let's all, let's all be in a room together talking. It won't be awkward at all. No one will bring up Dora or Escalades. What else? Anything else going on? There's some Windows stuff coming up at the end of the month. Yeah. Windows 9. Yeah. We had a little preview and then we also, Tom Warren put up some, we had some screenshots of an upcoming version of Office that has a little help box that is reminiscent, although not cartoony of Clippy. New Clippy? Yeah. Not Clippy. It's like Clippy-esque. It's new Clippy. It's Clippy-esque. I mean, can Microsoft get away with doing anything Clippy-esque without people calling it Clippy? No. No. Tom will be here next week. We should put him on the show. That's true. We can do it. We'll do a long Windows preview with Tom Warren. Yeah. It looks good. Did you see, he retweeted somebody's Vine where it's like, I got a copy of Windows 9 and you open it up and it's a Windows 7 DVD with a, sorry for Windows 8. It's pretty great. Man, Windows 8. Yeah. You know, I have a Surface Pro 2 in my house. I was playing with it the other day. I just had one. And man, that's so close, so far. Like, so close. I like the Surface Pro 3. Do you know what I mean? You know my theory about like Apple fanboys? I think Apple fanboys are beginning to root for Microsoft because they're tired of being like the big dogs and they hate Google and they need a new underdog to replace Google. That's interesting. It's like a psychological theory that I have. I mean, I also think that, and we've been saying this for a long time, that I think Microsoft is attempting to do a lot of the right things. Yeah, like this is why I- Like what Apple is doing, like the story you tell about this is the same story that Microsoft tells about the Surface, they just did it wrong. Yeah. And it's like if Windows 9 is them figuring out how to do it, that's awesome. It's not. It's them walking Windows 8 all the way back. Just all the way back. You think so? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a start menu again. Like it's all this stuff. They're taking all the ideas from Windows 8 and putting them in a box inside the start menu. Like how is that not the best metaphor? Oh man. Oh, Microsoft. You're going to get there someday, I promise you. Before we go, I want to talk about the Apple Watch, because we haven't talked about the watch yet. We talked about the watch all last week. You just weren't here. Oh, I wasn't here. I will say, I'm going to actually- Have you changed your mind? I have not changed my mind. Actually, I am more and more convinced the watch is a disaster the more and more I think about it. Wow. I have approximately 23 opinions about the watch, and I want to just put them all on a page. I just haven't done it. Fair enough. I cannot get away from the idea that it is a watch with a right click. That is just weird to me. I don't understand it. Force Touch, bad brand. It's just a collection of- Fair enough. This is going to sound really weird. Here's the thing. I look at the watch, and I think of the incredible collection of A-player talent they've assembled. Now freely, obviously, enter the fashion market with the watch. The thing I'm thinking about is all of these people are in charge. You can't hire the CEO of Burberry and the CEO of Yves Saint Laurent and a VP from Adobe. The Businessweek article said Tim Cook had his number one guy be in charge. Johnny Ive is still there, and Phil Schiller is still there. None of those people are... All of them are in charge, and none of them are in charge. That is the clear- Yeah, you don't hire those people by saying you work for so and so. Right. Maybe they're in charge of slices, but there isn't one person. That's what I think about the watch. It looks to me like one person wasn't in charge. That is just expressed in the idea that you can force touch it, which is it is just a weird interaction paradigm, and it is not the right one. Dude, Force Touch is coming to iOS. It's the worst name. It's coming to the iPhone. Dude, this is the thing. Get ready. It's coming. If you described it as a screen technology, that is the next thing they're going to do for screen technology. No, but you know how you make a big screen work better in one hand is Force Touch. You let you do more things by touching the parts of the screen that you can touch. This is a company that literally only had one button on its mice for 20 years. That's what I mean. Philosophically, I don't understand this paradigm. Oh, sure. I'm just agreeing with Dieter. Force Touch is coming to the iPhone. You're disagreeing or just agreeing? No, I'm agreeing with Dieter. You're just agreeing. No, I'm just like, that's fine. Yeah, I use right click on my Mac all the time now. Long pressing isn't interesting, but I just cannot get away from the idea, and this is somebody very smart said this to me, smaller screens demand fewer interaction methods. Sure. This one has so... That's why they invented multitouch. It's the smallest screen and it has the most interaction methods. That's why they used multitouch. Can you pinch to zoom on the Apple Watch? No, you have to use the crown. You use a dial, but can you also pinch to zoom? I think you can also pinch to zoom. That's great. I'm just saying all of that, and I understand the argument that they haven't shown us all the software, that they're still working on it. I don't think it's going to come out for a long time. I understand that maybe it's really expensive and it's a market, whatever. What I do absolutely know is that it is impossible from what we have seen so far to explain to somebody how to use it, and that is crazy. That is not... That's so far out of the zone for Apple that I... People pick up an iPhone and they figured out how to use it instantly. I was actually thinking about this. When the iPhone first got announced and then it came out, they had that however many month period where they were just blasting commercials and all the commercials were was, here's the iPhone, here's how to do stuff on it. But here's the thing about those commercials. Every single one of them was like, holy crap, that looks awesome. I need to do that. Those are things I like to do. I see how easy that is. Give me that. Yeah. The commercial, they weren't instructions. Yeah. They were like, look at how easy it is. Yeah. They were instructions that were also like advertisements for a thing that you want. Right. I don't know how those commercials would work for the Apple Watch. You've got this watch and you really want to look at a map on it. I don't know. I'm just like, I... It's the photos that gets me every time. They're like, we've found ways for you to carry your photos around. And then he scrolls out and it's just a million one pixel icons of photos. I don't know. I'm wearing a watch. You know who that's useful to? It's Justin. Yeah. This watch is a crown. It's like the last thing I want to do is monkey with this knob on my watch. You're not supposed to monkey with it all that often. I don't know. I am deeply, deeply skeptical. It's not because Apple didn't have a killer app. It's not because I think it should be cheaper. None of that stuff. I'm skeptical because I think there's too many ways to interact with it. And I think that all seems really messy to me. I mean luckily, they have probably what, 10 months to figure it out. Maybe they will. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I don't think it's going to be until June. I kind of doubt it. But we'll see. I mean, they're not shying away from the fact that this is historic. Tim Cook is betting his legacy on this watch. So he has proven to be a smart CEO in the past. I'm assuming that he's putting resources against this. Yeah. I mean, they're not going to bail on this. Like they'll- Just kidding. Yeah. The first one, they're like, sorry guys. Bad move. We're done. Right. But- Just put it on the shelf next to your folio. Right. But you kind of hope that in Tim Cook's office, there's like a huge glass display case. And in it, there's just two objects. There's a Newton and there's an iPhone. And he's like, man, we got to do this one. Because the Newton was a great idea and it had tons of potential. And another CEO made it who wasn't Steve Jobs. And if they had just kept grinding on the Newton, it would have turned into something. It probably would have turned into the iPhone. I don't know about that. But Steve Jobs came back- It would have turned into the trio. Right. It was a lot of really good ideas about that paradigm. And it would have just kept going. And nobody would have faulted them for continuing. And then there's the iPhone, which was like a revolution. Right. And you just have to think- So Apple could have either been Blackberry or Apple. Right. Exactly. You have to think, this watch, we know so little about it. It's either the world's best Moto 360 or the world's best Pebble, or it's a revolution. And you just hope that Tim Cook is actually thinking in those terms. Yeah. Fair. Because what he's saying over and over again is this is a revolution. And then you look at it and it's like, but why is it that thing? It's just a pretty good- That, as far as I can tell, is not the answer at all. We want a revolution. And Apple is the... They're all doing what they can. Right. We're done. This is over. I'm getting in my 2001 escalator. I'm going home. I'm sorry. We were listening to U2 album. It was right there. All right. Are we going to talk about the U2 album? No. I mean- No. That's fine. The U2 album is like, it is like a year ago if Apple had given everybody a free U2 album, nobody would have cared. Yeah. But after the NSA and iCloud leaks and like, was the government looking... Apple just dumping stuff on your phone is terrifying. Yeah. Right? If Dropbox, everybody's Dropbox, now has a U2 album in it, nobody would have cared. I would have cared. Not if they didn't take your storage and you could just like, here's a link and you can open it and it's just there. Or they didn't take your storage, I suppose. But if they shot that stuff, shit down to my computer, because that's how Dropbox works, it syncs to your computer. That's fair. That's like, to me, that's probably the U2 album is like, that's like 20 megabytes of stuff that I would like to keep on open for pictures. Yeah. I mean, also the album is bad. Also the idea that what people, like Apple thinks what people want is like to download MP3 files. Yeah. Yeah. There's many things about that. I mean like- Well, the other thing- Yeah. I mean, why didn't Jimmy Iovine stop this? Why didn't they put it on Beats Music? Yeah. Just put it on Beats. Because they probably can't yet. Because- Well, but Apple's already- What Apple wanted- They're talking a lot about Beats Music. Yeah. Like Tim Cook went on Charlie Rose and talked a lot about Beats Music. It was in this Business Week profile. Right. They're just not ready. It's on Apple TV now. That's a thing. That's what I thought. It could have been, even if you don't subscribe to Beats, you can listen to this U2 album on the Beats app for free for eternity. Yeah. Go ahead and make sure you open your Beats app. Right. Because that doesn't make U2 any money. That's what it's about. At the end of the day- No, what makes U2- At the end of the day is Apple. I mean, don't you think Apple paid U2 for this? Apple made U2 money. Yeah. No, but U2 wants to run out. It's like objects. I mean, U2 wants reach. They want 500 million people to have their phone home. They want all the people to have it. Right. They want like, Beats Music is in every country. They have the new show, blah, blah, blah. And they want to be able to say, this is the most downloaded album ever. Right. Or the biggest selling album since X. And Apple paid them for that. They gave them that marketing. They got in trouble for it, but at least they tried and they put it on Beats. It's like U2 sold out to sell Beats. And that is a different... You know, but the Samsung deal with the Jay-Z? Yeah. Didn't hurt him. Well, he's Jay-Z. Yeah, he's Jay-Z. No, honestly, if there's anyone on earth who's immune to that, it's Jay-Z. But at the same time, nobody's mad at U2. I'm not saying... I mean, the album sucks, but I'm not saying anybody's using U2. When I see memes, it's always like Bono's head with a little speech bubble. Yeah. Coming out of it going, ha ha. That's all I see. Well, U2 got paid, like whatever. They made a pretty mediocre record and they got paid. Good for U2. Pretty mediocre is the kindest thing that I've said about that record. This is the most mediocre. It's right there in the middle. Well, I heard... My favorite solution to this whole problem was... I forget where I heard it, but somebody was like, what if they just put better U2 albums on instead? Everybody gets the Joshua Tree. We'll solve this by giving you other U2 albums. No, I mean, it's U2, man. It's fine. It's just nothing. U2 came after a credit card service. Yeah. In the scope of that presentation, it was like, we're gonna change the world with Mastercard and Amex and Visa and here's U2, everybody. This is weird. The Edge's guitar tone is the best, though. That's wonderful. It was so good. I was out of the room by then. I stayed for eight seconds just to let him envelope me in his Vox AC30. It was really... And you wept. It was great. And then you left. It was very nice. It was a very nice guitar sound. But whatever, U2. Apple needs to get to Beats Music. They need to get to a place with Beats Music where U2 wants to put out free albums on there instead of being like, let's pump them through iTunes. But how do you... They are just not there yet. Right, but there's no way to do that but to do it. If Apple has proven one thing, it's that it, in four seconds, can make something huge. No, not that yet. Why? Just not yet. Why? It took them five years to make iTunes radio. It's like I talked to Jimmy Iovine at that event. They're slow, but this is what I'm saying. If they take a thing... But you just said they're fast. No, they're fast at taking something that exists and making it mainstream. They came out with Apple Pay, which everyone has already done, and they said, Apple Pay, and then suddenly... Right, but it took them years. We'll see. I saw Jimmy Iovine at the event, and I was like, how's it going? And he's like, it's my sixth week. Right. Fair. Sixth week being the editor-in-chief of The Verge, and then we had a hilarious fish out of water story moment. Can you just stop with the Jimmy Iovine humblebrags, please? Just for a minute. I'm a big fan of Jimmy Iovine. You guys fucked Jimmy Iovine. I got Gwen Stefani hitting me in the shoulder when she walked by. She was shooting me out of the way. You guys are friends now? No, it was a get the hell out of my way, useless, nobody. That's fair. Yeah. Right. I was friends with the guy in Sublime. That's what Gwen Stefani is thinking of herself all the time. Like, I need that dude, and you never can. I'm awesome. I'm awesome, because I would like to know that guy. I went through a Sublime phase. It's super dark. It's not that dark. I just listened to that record again recently. I was like, 40 Hours of Freedom? Yeah. It's a good record. That one and then the Sublime record. It just came on. It was like we were in a house. It was beachy. I was like, we should listen to some Sublime. And then we did, and that was great. Sweet story. I knew that story, everybody. No, I tried super hard to creep on Angela Aaron's talking to Will.i.am. And it was just impossible. I feel like there's a force field around that. It's a force field of tall, terrifying women who just sort of like just crowd you. They just get up on you and they're like, oh, I'm not allowed to stand here anymore. I guess I'll go. Okay, that was Vergecast. Thank you for listening to us. That's always nice. We never introduced ourselves. I just realized that. Oh, at the end. Yeah, I'm Neil. We're going to introduce ourselves. Yeah, introductions. Yeah, this is I'm Neal. I'm David. I am Dieter. Yeah. You can find us on Twitter. He's Pierce David. He's reckless. I'm Backlund. Yeah. And this is Vergecast every Thursday, 430 streaming on our site. And then we'll have the audio up very shortly after. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. |
So, you're like me. You'd rather watch a video about productivity than actually be productive. Here's the good news. To-do list apps today are powerful and beautiful enough to actually make us want to get out of our ruts and start working. At its most basic, a to-do list app couldn't be simpler. It's just a checkbox with some text next to it. But great developers take them much further, letting you organize huge projects, manage recurring tasks, and even set location-based reminders. They also integrate with other services in your life and help you focus on the things that you can get done now. There are hundreds of to-do lists cluttering up the app stores, but which one is the best? Wunderlist is the best to-do list app for most people. It's available on every major platform, it has a beautiful design, and it's powerful without feeling overly complicated. It's also free. And while a paid option will get you a handful more features, like uploading large files and customizing the look of the app, Wunderlist is a powerful solution even if you never subscribe to the premium version. A big part of staying on top of your task list is being able to capture the thought at any moment, and Wunderlist makes great apps for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and the web, and makes good native clients for macOS and Windows 8. At its heart, it's just a simple list, but it offers a perfect foundation to build on. The mobile apps do a good job of letting you add tasks quickly, and the desktop and web clients offer a huge canvas for drilling deeper, organizing big projects, and delegating tasks to others. Many of Wunderlist's competitors share those virtues, but Wunderlist is usually more intuitive, with all of its key features never more than a tap or two away. You can add notes via email and Google Now, but not Siri, at least not for now. But it's easy to set and manage recurring tasks, and while other apps will charge you $20 or more, Wunderlist gives away nearly everything for free. Other apps boast more granular controls or more specialized features, but if you're looking for a powerful, free, cross-platform app for managing your tasks, Wunderlist is absolutely the place to start. Todoist is another thoughtfully designed, powerful, and intuitive app for managing your tasks. It just costs more, $29 a year for basic features like search, reminder notifications, and adding tasks via email. But if you spend a lot of time manicuring your task list, give Todoist a look. You can set up custom labels and filters for your tasks, location-based reminders, and even templates for recurring projects. It's a lot of firepower, but it also encourages you to spend a lot of time fiddling with your tasks. And while the design is clean, it's just a bit too spare for my tastes. Still, Todoist is an easy recommendation. Any do's claim to fame is what it calls the moment, a push notification each morning telling you to plan your day. I find the push a bit too pushy, but lots of people seem to like it. But the app is less intuitive than it should be, and its feature set isn't as robust as its peers. OmniFocus is sometimes called the Ferrari of Todoist apps. It packs an incredible amount of firepower and charges a premium for it. It's actually the app I use every day. But all that power makes for a steep learning curve, and most people will prefer a simpler option. Three other options to consider are Remember the Milk, Clear, and Todo. They have varying degrees of power, but suffer from dated or confusing interfaces, and are generally less intuitive than their peers. Todoist apps help you get things done by getting tasks off your mind and into a place where they can be organized and managed more easily. None of them will actually do your tasks for you, but they will get you started. Wonderlist offers the best balance between power and ease of use, and it's mostly free. So stop watching videos about productivity, and go get something done. |
The We're officially out of Reykjavik and into the Icelandic countryside, one of my favorite places in the world. We are headed for a waterfall. Should get there just around sunset and we'll be testing some slow motion and some other stuff. It's going to be a really awesome place to do that. Alright, so we have this side-by-side rig with the 5S and the 6 shooting with the 6 Plus and this is going to be awesome for testing stabilizer, pano mode, all kinds of stuff because we can do real-time side-by-side comparison. The amazing thing about Iceland is it can be storming and raining like crazy and then you can just drive a mile and clouds are opening up and it creates this beautiful scene. Looks like it's about right. It's so fun to be playing with this device that makes it easy to capture great images. We are rolling up on a beautiful area called Þórsmurk, which is a playground of Thor in Icelandic. I was looking at just the way that the light is hitting the piece and thought it might be an awesome area to test the time-lapse. So we're doing that and it's pretty easy. You just switch it into time-lapse mode and hit go and it takes care of everything else and I think it's going to turn into a really awesome piece. We just pulled up at the Iceland Coast Guard Flight Operations Center and we are about to board a training mission where they will be hoisting people outside the chopper. I may even get hoisted. I don't know what's going to happen. To be proficient we have to train this certain amount, certain many times every month. So that's what this is going to be tonight. I'm going to hoist you and I'll give you a thumbs up. The only thing that can't go wrong is if you're holding the race or putting your hands up. So you can't hold onto this. Can I hold a camera? Yes. Good morning. We are here at the Jokulsárlón Glacial Lagoon. The glaciers are floating in this lagoon and it's really beautiful. They also move, they float around so we decided to time-lapse of it. Just drove up a random hill. By random I mean we were driving and we saw a street and we said hey let's try that. And drove for about 30 minutes and ended up at the top of this mountain and also at an enormous glacier. We're going to be able to get back up. Incredible glacier. Got some killer images of it. The tones, there's a few shots that are literally zero color. It looks like I've already converted it to black and white but it's shot full color. Anyway we got out on the ice a little bit and it was really really special. We're on the southwestern most tip of Iceland and this is a really special place and it's one of my favorite places I've ever seen the lights. But it's also beautiful for sunsets and just coastal. 30 frames a second. Now it's close. We just finished a continuous autofocus test with the iPhone 6 Plus versus the iPhone 5S. It was a pretty impressive test actually. What we did is we have the cameras mounted side by side. iPhone 5S and iPhone 6 Plus. As you can see the cameras are as close as possible to each other. And we held a rock in front of the cameras. Started them rolling at the same time. And they were tack sharp on the rock at the time it was thrown. And actually by the time it landed the iPhone 6 Plus was able to refocus on the water and was tack sharp on the splash. And the iPhone 5S actually never did refocus. So it's a pretty impressive improvement versus what we've had in the past. We are here. It's the end of the week and everything comes down to this. I've been dumping footage and editing pictures and assembling everything all night. Actually I haven't slept yet. And we'll be posting my review here in just a couple of hours. I hope you've enjoyed it so far and check out the in-depth review on my blog. Bye. |
Amazon is announcing a bunch of new tablets today and these are two of them. This is the Kindle HD 6 and the HD 7. These are low end tablets but they don't have a low end feel to them. So the HD 6 for example starts at $99 which is pretty crazy and it actually doesn't really feel like a $99 tablet. It's really fast, it's got a pretty good 1280 by 800 screen and yes it is very thick and relatively heavy but at this price point it's pretty difficult to complain about that actually. The other thing about these tablets is they're running Amazon Fire OS 4.0. It's based on Android KitKat which is really good for developers. It gives them some benefits like speed and it also gives them another benefit, they're able to work off of the profile system which is built into Android. Amazon's made it better, it's much faster and it means that you can log into multiple profiles very easily and that also means that you can have a kid's profile which leads us to the other tablet that they've announced. This is the exact same thing that we just looked at but it's a kid's edition and for $50 more than you pay for the standard HD 6 or HD 7 you get a kid's edition so of course they've got the kid's profile here and you get a kid mode and that's standard for any Fire tablet but with this version you get this $25 bounty case and you also get a free year of free time which is their content service for kid's content like videos and books and stuff. It's actually a pretty good deal. The last crazy thing about the kid's edition is that for two years you've got a no questions ax, you send them the broken tablet that your kid stepped on or threw into a lake and you fished it out or had the dog eat and they will send you back a replacement no questions asked which is pretty wild. And that's the other thing about all of these HD 6 and HD 7 tablets is they seem to be much more durable, Amazon's really pushing that durability, they've been throwing them around dropping them on the ground here at this event and it hasn't seemed to be a problem. So all three of these tablets should be available in October. They start at $99 for the HD 6 version, if you go up to the HD 7 version you are looking at $139 and then again it's $50 more for the kids edition. |
It may not be the most popular tablet that Amazon has announced today, but it's definitely the highest spec. This is the new Kindle Fire HDX. It's the 8.9 inch version, and they've made a bunch of under the hood improvements. So it's very thin. They claim it's 20% lighter than an iPad, and that's thanks to a magnesium frame. But it's basically the same look and feel as the previous HDX. You've got this weird angles on the back. You've got the power button on the back and so on. The screen is 2560 by 1600 pixels, and it looks pretty good to me. It's also quite fast. It's got a Snapdragon 805 processor to speed things up. And the other thing that's new with the HDX is that it's running the Fire OS 4.0. And so that gives you a few new features, one of which is that it now supports Firefly. Just like the Fire phone, you can point it at stuff and it will be able to tell you what it is. It can even do optical character recognition and translation if you point it at like a PDF or a printout or something. In addition to that, it also supports family libraries. So if you and your significant other both have Amazon Prime accounts and you've got a book and she's got a book, you can share the books or you can share the videos amongst each other. The other thing that they've added to this, which I can't show on video, is they say that it supports Dolby Atmos for sound. So they virtualize the experience of having sound above you and beneath you and left and right when you put in headphones. We gave it a listen. It actually sounded pretty good. It was pretty impressive. Another thing that they added to the HDX, it's actually really cool, is they've added a new light sensor. What it does is it detects the color temperature of the light that's shining on it and adjusts the color of the white on the background so that it's a little bit less glaring on your eyes. You can see here this book in the kinderlap just turned to a yellow background so that it wouldn't be this blue underneath the lamp that happens to be shining on it. That's the high points of this. It is a very fast, very capable tablet. Amazon really likes to position it up against the iPad Air. They say it has a million more pixels. They say it's 20% lighter. And it's cheap. It's $379. It's available in October. You can preorder it right now. If you want to get the 4G edition, that's going to be $100 more. Kindle Fire HDX 8.9. |
Amazon has decided to unleash a slew of tablets and the most exciting one isn't a tablet, it's actually this reader. It's called the Kindle Voyage and it's available in October. You can pre-order it now. And the big deal with the Kindle Voyage is it has this new screen. It's 300 pixels per inch, which is an upgrade over the Paperwhite's 221 pixels per inch. And it's just gorgeous looking. You can take the text settings and drop it all the way down to the smallest and the thing is still completely readable. It's great. The screen is also completely flush with the rest of the Kindle, so it's all the touch screen and everything is all flat. It's a glass that has a special finish on it so that it's not reflective in the sun, which is pretty impressive. And then the other thing you'll note is there's these lines on the side and this dot. And you can just sort of squeeze the sides of the Kindle and it will page turn for you and then you squeeze the dot to go back a page. It works on either the left or the right side. And you don't have to squeeze very hard, so you don't have to move your thumb. And there's a tiny little haptic feedback that happens when you squeeze it as well. The other thing that's really great about the Voyage is they have changed the backlight on it. It gets much, much brighter, which is great. But the thing that I'm excited about is it's got an auto-brightness option. And so instead of just having to set the brightness manually, you can hit auto-brightness. And what's really cool is if you're reading in bed, it will dim, but then as you're reading, as it's on for longer and longer, it knows that your eyes are adjusting to the darkness and will actually continually dim the screen down lower and lower so that it's not getting too bright for your eyes. So there you go. That is the new Kindle Voyage. It is way lighter as well as thinner as the previous Kindle Paperwhite. It's got this magnesium shell. It's available for $199 with Kindle offers. You can pre-order it right now, and it should be shipping in October. |
In the past few decades, Silicon Valley has quickly become one of the most economically vibrant places on earth. Because of this, localized inflation has caused the cost of living in San Francisco to skyrocket. There are many non-profits serving the homeless and low-income communities, but there are certain needs that simply can't be met by large organizations. Enter HandUp, the public benefit company that acts like a kickstarter for people in need. Homelessness is not just one thing. It's not just the typical stereotype people think of. People who are homeless, who have full-time jobs, who are sick, who are all coming from all walks of life. Housing is a huge issue. It's just so expensive to live here. It's a great place to live. But it just, yeah, the cost of rents are escalating. They already were high, escalating really quickly. Our clients have all kinds of challenges in their lives, but even the ones who do awesome and who get this great full-time job, even then, it's really hard to raise a family here. It's just the incomes are not on par at all with the cost of living. So HandUp is a direct donation system for homeless people and other people in need that lets you donate directly to a specific person that you want to help. And then 100% of the funds go directly towards food, medical care, housing, and other basic needs for that person. So this is the HandUp homepage. We really try to emphasize the human connections as much as possible. So we see this banner of a lot of our members. And this is totally a random selection of members. What we're doing is using technology to help create a bridge so that the community can help directly. We are building technology for people in poverty and for human service organizations. And we're also a for-profit technology startup. But we are a new kind of for-profit called a public benefit corporation. And so that lets us have the growth of a traditional for-profit while also having the values of a socially driven organization. So the way HandUp works is we build the technology and we partner with nonprofits that already serve the homeless and at-risk community. So we sign up an organization like Compass Family Services, teach them how to use our software, and then the case managers will administer the site. My name is Kevin and I hope to get into a one bedroom apartment. What I want most of all, especially for Christmas, I don't want two front teeth, I want a whole set. And I hope to receive a bed. Scientific tools like box open end wrenches, socket ratchets, breaker bars, pipe wrench, crescent wrench, screwdriver, micrometer. Currently looking for employment. I don't have any codes for the interview. Any kind of job, you have to have teeth. And you just look really funny and sound really funny when you don't have your teeth. So being employed again is on my list. One of HandUp's many success stories is single mother Janelle, who needed a computer to finish her online school. So I'm a single mother of two boys and I work in San Francisco for a human service agency. And I go to school at San Francisco City College. I had enrolled in an online class and I didn't have a computer so I was using the computer at work, don't tell anyone, to do my assignments. And so I was like, no, you need a computer. So she told me about HandUp and she said you should just create a profile and see if they can help you. I did that and my request was granted in like 24 hours. The donors were just awesome. They were just, I don't know, happy to help. I think she put in a request for about $500 for a computer and someone donated $400 to her right off the bat. And just knowing that there are people out there who would do that, and you know, just for a stranger, I think that's been really cool and really surprising to see. One thing that HandUp does is tries to create this two-way communication between our members and their donors. So on the bottom we see the most recent update that Janelle sent, thanking the donors for all the help that they've given. So on the right side we see this is how you can donate to Janelle's account. And then there's also the option to add a $5 tip to HandUp and this is basically how we support our operations. We even cover the credit card processing costs so we make sure that if you select $50 then $50 goes to Janelle. And then I have the opportunity to respond here as a donor and write Janelle a little message so it really starts to create this community feel and the support network a lot like your Facebook friends would. Technology isn't a silver bullet. It's not going to completely solve poverty, but just in my experience working in nonprofits, working with incredibly vulnerable populations, it's so powerful as a tool to reach more people and really importantly for our model is sharing the story. With an estimated 3.5 million homeless people in the United States and countless more tatering on the brink, low-income America needs all the help it can get. Hopefully for-profit models like HandUp are able to both maintain profitability and more importantly adhere to their founding documents. |
People want big phones. First that idea was silly, then it was a little bit true, now it's just kind of obvious. We don't use our phones to make calls, we use them to watch movies and read books and get work done and send weird videos on Snapchat. So we want phones with big screens and great cameras and good battery life and lots of apps. So Apple made that. Exactly that. This is the iPhone 6. There's really nothing more accurate to say about the iPhone 6 than it's a big iPhone. It's taller and wider and slightly heavier than last year's iPhone 5s, though it's actually a bit thinner. It comes in the same three colors as the 5s, silver, gold, and space gray, plus three storage options. You either get 16GB, though I wish the base option were 32, plus 64 or 128GB if you upgrade. It has much slimmer, rounder edges than the 5s, which makes it both a little more comfortable and a little less starkly impressive. Because it's thinner, it's still easy enough to hold in one hand, though I definitely have more trouble using it than the 5s. It's about the size of your average flagship Android phone, somewhere in between last year's Moto X and this year's HTC One M8. Moving up from a 4-inch phone takes a minute to get used to, but it really is worth it. The iPhone 6 looks a bit like the very first iPhone, actually. There's no question this is an Apple product. It's really well made, sturdy and high end, and even the buttons feel better than they ever have. The power button is on the right side now, which took forever for my fingers to relearn, but it's definitely the right location. And the volume buttons are a little longer and a lot clickier. The only real design flaw in my mind is the stripes along the back where the antennas go. They outline the top and bottom of the iPhone 6, and they almost look out of place on an otherwise clean design. Same goes for the protruding camera lens, which looks a little odd and makes the phone wobble slightly if you put it down on a flat surface, but it's really not that big a deal. The front of the phone is all about the new 4.7-inch 1334x750 screen. It looks great, like iPhone screens have for a while. I can't make out individual pixels, and it's totally visible outdoors. The screen curves into the edges of the phone, which makes swiping and tapping feel a lot more natural. The iPhone 6 doesn't feel like a box with a screen on top. It feels more authentic somehow. Most apps upscale pretty simply onto the bigger display. Developers can change them to suit the screen, or text and pictures just all get a little bigger, but I imagine most developers will pretty quickly update to show more at once instead of just the same but bigger. In some places, having a big screen makes a huge difference. I instantly started typing both faster and more accurately on the larger display since there's just more room. Movies look better, framing photos is easier, you can see more emails at a time on the screen. It's great. But I can't help but wonder if Apple could or should have done more with this big screen. You get an extra row of icons on the home screen, a neat recent menu in your multitasking window, and not that much else. There's a strange but sort of useful reachability mode where you double tap the home button and the screen literally slides down so you can reach it. On the iPhone 6 Plus, there are a few other changes like landscape mode in a few apps, but on the 6 even though there's a bigger display and a lot more space to play with, nothing really changes. It's bigger and better, but it's the same. That idea really persists across everything about the iPhone 6. It supports faster LTE, voice over LTE, Wi-Fi calling, and a handful of other new standards and upgrades. There's a new A8 chip which is noticeably faster than even last year's A7, and the M8 motion processor can tell you how many flights of stairs you've climbed in addition to your steps and lots of other health data. Even the speaker is louder, which I actually really appreciate. The battery is a little bigger and noticeably better. I could charge it one night and then not need to again until midday two days later, and that's with pretty heavy use. I'm still charging it every night, but I can forget and not worry about it. Those are all updates you won't really see, though. They just run in the background and make the iPhone 6 slightly better and faster than the 5S. The one you will see is the camera. It's still 8 megapixels, but the camera's been upgraded in a bunch of great ways. It uses what Apple calls Focus Pixels to do phase detect autofocus, and it is just insanely fast. You can't really notice it focusing, yet shots always come out right. You can take higher resolution panoramas now thanks to the faster processor, and they look amazing. But my two favorite features both have to do with video. One is that you can shoot slow motion video up to 240 frames per second, which turns quick moving action into this epic replay footage. The other is cinematic video stabilization, which does an incredible job of taking your shaky handheld video and making it still and smooth. You can see the frame warp and bend a bit as it works, but the effect is amazing. There's lots of new software here, time lapse videos, burst selfies, a new photos app, and more. The camera has always been the iPhone's killer app, and the iPhone 6 is a big upgrade. The rest of the story of the iPhone 6 is the story of iOS 8. There's now predictive typing on the keyboard, which is sometimes useful and sometimes hilariously not useful. The Health app plugs into the M8 processor and eventually into the Apple Watch to tell you your steps, your elevation, and all sorts of other fitness data. Messages lets you talk with your voice and leave group messages, which, thank God. My favorite upgrade, though, is to Spotlight, which now also searches the App Store, the web, Wikipedia, and more, all from the one pull-down window. It's just super handy. Apple's software and its app ecosystem have always been what set the iPhone apart, and that hasn't changed here. The iPhone 6 is weird. On one hand, nearly everything about it is better. Bigger screen, faster processor, more impressive and versatile camera. It's the best iPhone yet, and it's the one I suspect most people will buy. For me, at least, the 6 Plus is just too big. I was hoping that when it made a bigger phone, Apple would do things or change its plan to really show off the promise of a larger screen, to make it easier to use and take full advantage of. But it didn't. Apple just made a bigger iPhone, the same thing I've used for years. That's okay, and again, this may well be the best smartphone on the market. But the iPhone 6 doesn't quite feel like a revolutionary device. It feels like Apple playing catch-up, just giving the people what they want and nothing more. I wish Apple had really taken the chance to rethink how we use a phone now that our phones are so big. Instead, we just got a really great big phone. Nothing less and nothing more. |
The only thing you really need to know about the iPhone 6 Plus is that it's a big iPhone. A really big iPhone. After years of mocking Samsung and others for putting out giant phones, Apple's finally caved to the clear demand for enormous screens. And it turns out that an iPhone with a huge screen is pretty great. The iPhone 6 Plus is enormous. Although it's a similar size to the Galaxy Note 3, it feels bigger than the Samsung when you hold it. It's taller and thinner and getting your hand all the way around it isn't easy. Between the size and the slippery curved aluminum edges, I prefer using it in Apple's leather case. This might be the first iPhone that's better in a case, actually. I'm not a big fan of the weird antenna lines and protruding camera lens on the back of the phone, and a case hides all those things nicely. Of course, the reason this thing is so big is the 5.5 inch 1920 by 1080 Retina HD display, which looks fantastic. It's the highest pixel density screen Apple's ever shipped on a phone, and it's definitely brighter and sharper than the previous Retina displays. It's not as super saturated as Samsung's screens, but it looks far more accurate, especially when you're taking photos. Until apps are updated to support this bigger screen, you'll definitely see some fuzziness since the phone just makes everything about old apps bigger. Even the menu bar gets bigger, which makes it feel like you're using a phone for old people. Blown up apps look fine for the most part, but some get pretty fuzzy looking. Gmail is particularly bad. But I'd expect most software developers to update their apps relatively soon. But you don't need these updated apps to appreciate the screen right away. It's just so big and gorgeous, and browsing the web and watching videos on it is a joy. Video in particular is terrific. I watched a Packers game for a couple hours on the 6 Plus and never thought about switching to a TV. It's that good. Of course, watching video on any big screen phone is great, so it's up to Apple to figure out how to take better advantage of this new size that's in between an iPhone and iPad. It's starting slowly. Apps that are updated for the bigger screen can take advantage of some new features that make the iPhone 6 Plus almost like a smaller iPad. There's a new two column view in landscape that shows you more information in various apps and a new landscape keyboard that includes arrow keys and dedicated cut, copy, and paste buttons. It's all very useful, even if the icon in this paste button is terrible. Seriously, this is awful. Come on. Once there are apps that take advantage of this new size properly, I can't see ever using my iPad Mini again. The iPhone 6 Plus is almost as big, has an awesome screen, and is also my phone, which is a huge advantage. And the iPhone 6 Plus battery seems to last forever. If you're a frequent traveler, the 6 Plus is a no brainer. The 6 Plus also has a killer new camera, which is now so good I can't imagine ever using a point and shoot camera ever again. It's still 8 megapixels, but Apple's added what it calls focus pixels for faster focusing, and it really works. This thing takes pictures fast. You can also take 240 frames per second slow motion videos, which is awesome, and the 6 Plus has optical image stabilization, which makes it even better in low light than the iPhone 6. It's just an amazing little camera. But apart from the huge screen and terrific camera upgrades, the iPhone 6 Plus is still very much an iPhone. iOS 8 offers a wealth of new improvements to the basic experience of using an iPhone, but there's nothing drastically new here. Apple Pay looks like it will be the first successful mobile payment system ever, but it's not rolling out for another month or so. And new features like Wi-Fi calling and voice over LTE might finally bring voice calling into the modern era, but the carriers have to support them first. So right now the iPhone 6 Plus is really just an iPhone with a huge screen. If that's what you're looking for, you should get one. You won't regret it. But eventually the iPhone 6 Plus has the potential to be much more. After being on the road for a few days, I found myself using it for everything. My laptop and my iPad remain safely tucked away in my bag. This is the future of phones, and it's a future Samsung and others have been chasing for a while. The iPhone 6 Plus might be late to the game, but it's off to a great start. |
Homelessness is not just one thing. It's not just the typical stereotype people think of. It's just, it's so expensive to live here. It's a great place to live, I love it, but the cost of rents are escalating. They already were high, escalating really quickly. There's a lot of money in the city, clearly. And there's a lot of, also a lot of interest in issues like poverty, homelessness, and so it feels like the kind of place where people are willing to throw money at a problem and come up with all these different creative ways to fix it. Technology isn't a silver bullet. What we're doing is using technology to help the community help directly. |
Headphones are your smartphone's best friend. They're nearly as ubiquitous as smartphones themselves, and they let you listen to music, games, or video, and make and receive hands-free calls without disturbing those around you. Many smartphones, including the iPhone, come with a basic set of headphones that have a microphone and remote on their cords. But most included headphones, like Apple's EarPods, kinda suck, with a poor fit, mediocre sound and a cable that turns into knots right in your pocket. You can spend hundreds of dollars on getting great headphones to go with your new smartphone, but if you just want something better than came with the phone and don't want to spend a fortune, there are countless options available for under 50 bucks. A good replacement headphone offers three things. Great sound, great fit, and a microphone, so you can still make phone calls. Some offer volume controls, but that's not as common in this price range, and the compatibility with volume controls varies from smartphone to smartphone. And they should be cheap and easily replaceable, so it's not a problem if you lose them, send them through the washing machine, or just wear them out over the course of a year or two. If you're looking to replace your EarPods or other bundled headphones, the best overall option are Panasonic's TCM125. These basic black headphones are super lightweight, comfortable to wear for extended periods of time, and most importantly, sound fantastic. They include a microphone and remote for play and pause controls, but unfortunately no volume, and they come with three different size tips to fit a variety of ears. The Panasonic stayed put in my ears, whether I was swiftly moving to catch the next subway train or flapping my jaw on a long conference call. The Panasonic's also have a balanced sound profile for a variety of music and audio sources. They sound great for pop, rock, metal, classical, hip-hop, podcasts, and more. They sound so good that I often forgot I was wearing inexpensive headphones and not more high-end models. And the best part about the TCM125 is just how cheap they actually are. You can easily find these for about half the cost of Apple's $29 EarPods. It's not a big deal if you lose or break these, you just buy another pair. The one area where the TCM125s don't blow away the competition is with heavy bass response. If you want more bass in your headphones, the Sony MDR-XB50 are the ones you should get. They're a bit more expensive than our top pick, but they offer a lot more bass response than the Panasonic's. The downside is they don't sound as good overall and aren't as versatile for different types of music. They're also a bit heavier and larger than the Panasonic's, but they're still comfortable and fit in my ears well and didn't really fall out. These also have a nice cord that resists turning into a ball of knots in my pocket. There are many other options across the field, but none of them really fit as well or sounded as good as our top picks. The Earbuds Inspire 400 are sweat proof and designed for wear during a workout. They do a really good job of staying in your ears while moving. They also have a remote with volume control that works with the iPhone, but they just weren't as comfortable or as good sounding as the Panasonic's. Similarly, the Urban Ears Kransen are packed with nifty design features like the ability to lock the earbuds together for storage, a fabric covered cord, and a built in cable tie so you don't have to worry about knots. They do a good job of staying in my ears, but they don't sound as nice overall compared to my top picks. The others that we tested all had a tendency to just fall out of my ears whenever I moved, turned my head, or just took a sip from a water bottle. It was difficult to get many of them to make a proper seal, which leads to lower quality sound and makes them fall out easier. The best options, like the ones we already mentioned, have designs that lock the headphones in your ears so they don't fall out. It turns out you don't have to settle for Apple or Samsung's inferior headphones. Almost every option we tested were better than the headphones that come with your smartphone. And if you just want the best overall headphones without spending more than 50 bucks, you should get the Panasonic TCM125. |
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