Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Samsung Frame TV being bad and also the only TV that exists anymore in the entire world. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay Patel is here. Hey buddy.
Hey. It's been like two weeks. How are you? How was your holidays?
It was good. We went home to Chicago. We went to the balloon museum in Chicago. Again, you can't pay us to say anything, so this is a very sincere recommendation. You should go to the balloon museum.
What is a balloon museum?
It is perfectly calibrated to appeal to both me and my seven-year-old daughter.
In the sense that it is basically just a large warehouse full of balloon exhibits with little signs that insist the balloon exhibits are actually like very pretentious pieces of art.
So, there's a sign that's like this giant balloon is covered in pencils that mark the walls to make you consider the nature of impermanence. And then Max gets to go knock a giant balloon around and get dirty. And you see how those things combine perfectly.
Yes. Anna, my wife, one of her main theories as long as I have known her is that every museum should just be filled with things you can touch. And if you can't touch it, what's the point? I can just look at it on the internet. And I think this is a terrific point about the world. And every museum should just be tactile in some weird way.
This was very tactile. There was just a room full of bubbles. And there's, you know, a sign about how the bubble should make you feel. There's one room, it's a giant ball pit. And if I remember correctly, the sign before you enter the giant ball pit stated that it was designed to make you feel every emotion in human existence. And I think the answer was that it did because first you feel elation that it's a giant ball pit. Then you feel excitement, and then your daughter says, 'I lost my shoe in the giant ball pit.' And then you feel fear and anger, and then you find the shoe, and you feel happiness and elation. It's a lot. And then there's a woman standing there goes, 'Take your AirPods out of your pocket. If the AirPods fall out of your pocket, we will not find your AirPods.'
And that's our whole job. There's just thousands of AirPods down at the bottom of this thing.
Anyway, that was our trip home. It was very good.
But that is pretty good. Is that one of those museums that was like explicitly created to be Instagrammed because that is a trend I do not enjoy.
It is absolutely Instagram bait.
Like the ice cream museums. You remember those when it was just all it was was to take pictures in various places. Yeah, that's again little signs that say these are actually art exhibits. And I don't doubt that these are actually meaningful works of art. It's just when you put them all together in the same building and then let children run through it and another thing happens to the art.
Yeah. It's not to say it doesn't work, right? Is it craven and gross? Sure. But boy does it work. Boy, does it work.
It was very good. And we also went to the Field Museum. We saw Sue the Dinosaur. It's great. You know, the biggest or the most complete T-Rex you can find. And then you read about the backstory of Sue the dinosaur. Verge listeners will know this so I won't go into it but you're like that dinosaur is cool. Also someone went to jail for finding this dinosaur and you're like I shouldn't tell my daughter about this part.
It's fun. I'm at the stage of parenthood where all I'm looking for is large rooms because I have one kid who just wants to run around in places and one kid who needs to be pushed around in strollers because that's the only way he falls asleep. So all of our life is just calibrated to what large room can we go to and cause the least damage by being loud and touching things. So we spent a lot of time at the Air and Space Museum outside of Washington. It was just a delight. No notes on the Air and Space Museum.
So we're back and it is CES week. This feels like an unusually fast explosion back into CES time. Like it always comes up too early, but this time it's like we went from everyone is still on vacation to everyone is in Vegas in 24 hours. Brutal. And usually the keynotes and announcements happen early in the week, but there's a whole list of embargos and pre-events and because everybody can just shove AI into stuff this year. There's just a lot of gadgets. Like I love a gadget. Every year I say the gadgets are back at CES, but this is the most, to quote David Pierce, is this a thing AI gadget explosion that we have seen in quite a while. And most of it is fully ridiculous. So we're going to do two episodes this week. One, we should say, is our live event in Vegas on Wednesday at the Brooklyn Bowl. So if you can come out, please come out. It's going to be very fun. We're also doing a Decoder, right? You're going to be there doing fancy things before then.
Yes. Decoder is with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan. Razer always has a bunch of wild announcements at CES.
No company better at is this a thing at CES than Razer, I would say.
I'm dying to ask how he makes decisions in this specific context. So that'll be fun. That's also you can go to theverge.com/decoderlive. We'll try to get as many people in the door as we can. But that'll be a good one. All at Brooklyn Bowl, back-to-back podcasts. It's going to be a great time. And there is bowling, much to Nilay's chagrin. I won and there will be bowling.
But so okay, so here's what we're gonna do over these two shows. I think what normally happens at CES is there is just a deluge of stuff and then we spend a couple of days walking around and talking to people and kind of digesting all the news and then we get to sort of look at trends and see some bigger pictures. We're going to do some of the bigger picture stuff on Wednesday and try to sort of put a lot of this in context. What I want to do now is just talk about just an ocean of gadget announcements. Does that sound okay? We're just going to fly through a billion announcements that just happened. And we're just going to ask is this a thing over and over and over again for the rest of this show.
You wanted to start with robots because robots I think of all of the Is this a thing?
Robots might be the loudest one at CES this year. The loudest and also the most obviously nonsensical. Like nonsensical to the point where you can just watch the demos or the concept videos these companies are showing off and be like, 'Well, that doesn't work.' Like I don't even that's dumb.
Like we used to start with the LG one. Yeah. Cloyd.
So it's a home robot. It's at CES. It's supposed to be folding laundry. Everyone is promising that these robots will make breakfast, which we will come to. Terrifying. I just want to call out our former AI reporter, James Vincent, who's one of my favorite reporters in all of Earth history. He just wrote a long piece for Harper's magazine about AI and robots. And he has this line in there that is just I want everyone to think about as we talk about all these robots. He's like, 'If you were to just blank sheet design a machine to wash your dishes, you would invent a dishwasher. Right? You would say, I need a waterproof box and it's just going to hose the dishes down until they're clean and then the dishes will be clean.' You would not at all design a humanoid robot. That's just not what you would do, right?
You would have the solution that we have. The problem is we have all those boxes in our houses and you want one robot to like use them all.
So, you end up with all these humanoid robots and you look at them and they are absolutely not ready to actually use these appliances. And so LG's big demo of Cloyd was on stage in real time, the live demo. The presenter handed it a towel, one single towel, which it took away from him gingerly. Like I thought he was going to throw the towel and it was going to catch it, and we were all going to burst into applause. No, he very carefully approaches, hands it the towel, and then it turns to the washing machine, and it can't open the door of the washing machine. LG had to make a washing machine with a motorized door. So then the door of the washing machine opens for the robot and it stuffs the towel in the washing machine and the door closes automatically. And this is what I mean. Even if you watch the demo, you're like, 'Well, that's not any good. You shouldn't have washing machine lock-in for your robot.' There's so many things about this. So I first encountered this on TikTok from a supercut that our video team made. Can I just play you a brief part of this supercut from TikTok? Everything about this just makes me crazy.
I facilitate convenience and comfort by orchestrating devices and spaces to manage chores like toasting your croissant just the way you like it, clearing the dishes after meals, and keeping your day flowing smoothly.
Okay, real quick. Pause. The way it said smoothly is like full on the last thing you hear before you die.
That's just a guy. Like, you know, that's not it can't actually do that. That's just a guy.
And keeping your day flowing smoothly.
I'm not saying they didn't hire a murderer. I'm saying it's just a guy. This robot just told me that if I get off schedule, it will kill me in my own house. Anyway, I'm just going to keep playing this.
What powers motor movement are actuators, built on LG's legacy of motion innovation.
You mind taking this wet towel from me?
I'll get the laundry started. Let me show everyone what I...
This dude is like, 'Should I give it to him?'
He has. The guy walks all the way over to the robot. I would.
But he stops. He's like, 'You need to come get the towel or what?' And it doesn't do it. It just stares at him.
And I know he wants to impress everybody out there.
There it is. See, the washing machine opened for the robot.
Yeah. And I guarantee you that only works if you are fully locked in to the LG ThinQ platform.
That the whole point of the humanoid robot is you can just use this stuff. Just like the whole point of all the AI agents is just like go out on the web and do stuff.
But none of them can actually do that, right? So you have to have the LG washing machine that is on the same network as your robot to accept the API command to open a door when the robot is holding but a single towel. This is all ridiculous.
Yeah. Well, and this is also, I think, a theme that is immediately emerging from CES is that actually the story of AI, as we've been talking about for years now, is not sort of doing the task at the end of the rainbow, right? Like, teaching a computer to do a thing, not actually that complicated. Largely solved problem, right? Like how to press order and have McDonald's come to your house, not complicated on computers anymore. What we're trying to do now is build these like incredible orchestration layers of everything that can make all of it make sense and can problem solve and can be proactive and can do things for you. And the only way your dishwasher becomes more than a dishwasher is if it can do those things for you. Right? If it can clear the table and wash the dishes, now we've accomplished something. But there are so many like unbelievable technological breakthroughs between here and it can clear the table and wash the dishes that the idea that it can just sort of slowly roll over to an automatically opening washing machine. It's just that's so far from the solution to the problem here. We've solved all the easy problems actually in that demo. All the easy problems are solved and all the difficult ones aren't even on stage.
This is what I was saying about James pointing out that you would invent a dishwasher if you just wanted to get the dishes clean automatically.
Yeah. The hard part is actually washing the dishes.
We should talk about the SwitchBot robot, which has a complicated backstory, but this is another fully fantastical concept video. This is actually just a rebrand of a Chinese robot called the Onero. Like the company is called Onero.
This video they put out, their concept video, fully fantastical. None of this works. And there's a part where it holds out a plate of toast and eggs and it's like there's no way this thing can make scrambled eggs. Like maybe it can put bread in a toaster, but actually like have you watched the Gordon Ramsay scrambled eggs video? Like it can't do it. It just can't. There's no way. There's no way it has a sensor to it. There's another one where it's squeegeeing a window.
And like squeegeeing a window is one of those things. We have a glass shower, so we have to squeegee it a lot. I think about this all the time. It's one of those things where you actually have to put the right amount of pressure on the window to make the squeegee work. Otherwise, you're just making a mess. Another thing I learned from my seven-year-old daughter who wants to do this task and has not yet learned that she has to actually push down.
There's no way it can do it.
Zero percent chance it can do all of these things. And the claims that AI is going to make them all better at that is equally fantastical because as we've seen, there's not enough world model training data to actually get the models to do these things. You need to get a robot in Joanna Stern's house being remotely operated by a guy who kind of sucks for a long time before these. But you watch this video and it is mind-blowing the things they are claiming.
Yeah, but you're going to let it use fire, right?
But that's the thing is unless it does, it's useless, right? I think one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is when people are surveyed over and over about what they want robots to do in their house, it is these like menial tasks of being alive, right? Like wash my dishes, fold my laundry, do the sort of basic administrative tasks of life so that I don't have to. Great. That's I think you could argue that like that is a terrific use of a robot's time and attention so that I can do other things. It only works if it can do all of them, right? Because the idea that I'm going to have a robot to wash my dishes and a robot to do the cooking and like the fleet of home robots, I think, is not the correct answer in anyone's mind. So, you need something that is actually an all-purpose thing or else it's kind of useless to you. It's just mostly taking up space in your house. And that does not feel like it is remotely close. But it is interesting that everyone is pushing on this same idea even harder. Like there is a sense that if this is going to happen, the AI that is being worked on now is going to be what enables it. And this feels to me so much like the first time we did the voice assistant revolution where everybody's like, 'Okay, we have the tech. What do we do with it?' And we're in such a version of that this year at CES that is like we have this fascinating new underlying technological architecture for everything. What can we do on top of it? And it's so obvious that everyone's coolest, most exciting idea is humanoid robots in your house washing dishes.
Yeah. And again, cooking eggs, which requires the robot to use fire. There's no way I would let this thing make fire for me. Like watch these videos and you're like, 'No, I don't believe you. That doesn't work.' Which is really the theme of all of our AI coverage. You know, there's the idea that you're talking about, which is like there's a cool technology and where can we put it to make it work? You know, you remember the year that everything had a microphone and a speaker in it because everything was going to be Alexa.
And we ended up with like smoke detectors with Alexa in them for no reason and that was enough. Like you could just talk to Alexa in every room.
I hate to tell you buddy, we're doing that again this year. We're going to get to that.
Hooray. You know, right next to all these robots is Elon Musk saying that Optimus will exist and revolutionize the world. And Optimus is obviously being teleoperated all the time. Have you seen the video of the guy taking his headset off and the Optimus robot falls down? I mean, come on. Like, the companies spending the most money are nowhere close. And I don't think SwitchBot rebranding a Chinese robot is going to beat them to the punch of I will allow this robot to make eggs using fire. And I don't know what the point is. SwitchBot announced a whole bunch of other stuff at CES. So it probably is just to get hype.
Yeah. But at some point like the bill comes due, right? Like you can't keep announcing stuff that never comes to pass, right? All this stuff I think is very much just demo. SwitchBot says it's going to take orders for this thing.
I wouldn't do it. I sure wouldn't.
They say they're going to take pre-orders for it.
Yeah, it's not great. The one other robot I want to mention before we move on is this company Zeroth, it's an AI robotic startup, has actually licensed Wall-E from Disney to build a Wall-E robot. And the Wall-E one is only available in China for now. But there's another one, I guess, coming to the rest of the world. It costs $5,600. I'm not super clear on what it does. But it's very cute. But there is one thing that I just immediately keep thinking of, which is when Wall-E first came out, Andrew Stanton, who directed the movie for Pixar, gave a lot of interviews, as they do, and one of the things he talked about all the time was how they spent years working on the eyes for Wall-E. That like the way that each eye sort of individually articulated and the way that his eyes moved and the way that they communicated things. It was like their big discovery was there's actually nothing you can't do without dialogue, which was the whole reason that movie works. But it's because they spent all of this time building the character of the thing through the eyes. And then you look at the picture of this Zeroth robot, it has none of that. And so it's like I think and again this is the thing we talk about with AI a lot, right? It's like if it is convincing and fun to use that actually buys you a ton of runway for the product not working very well. Like that is the story of ChatGPT. People like talking to it. So it doesn't really matter if it's any good. But the bar for that with like a robot running around my house is really different. And there's just doing that in real life is going to be very different from doing it in a Pixar movie where you can just control what the thing does at every individual second. And it's just like that gap between here's the thing that I saw in a movie and here's the thing that I can put in your living room that's actually much creepier and sort of dead in the eyes does not give me great hope.
Look, Seth says the W1 can transport items, follow you around, serve as a game host, and take 13 megapixel photos. I just got to the part where it travels at a maximum speed of 1.1 miles an hour, which means it will follow you around as long as you very slowly shuffle around your house.
Yeah. Anyway, we should move on. That's the I think robots so much of the like meta story of CES and technology to me is built in these robots, but there's a ton of other stuff happening, including it's Monday afternoon as we're doing this. So, I am reluctant to call this now, but I think there's a chance that we already know the gadget of CES and that it's the Clicks Communicator.
Really? I really think it's possible.
Just a mid-range Android phone.
It's the I saw a post the other day from somebody on Threads who was like, 'This is the phone that you would make if you're somebody who has been grumpily reviewing phones for years because it just has all the things that they took away from the phones.' It has it's basically it looks like a BlackBerry. Clicks is run by the guy who used to run CrackBerry, loves BlackBerrys. Like this is the legacy there is very long. And it's designed to be sort of a companion phone, but is also very much it's able to be its own standalone phone. I'm a little confused on the value prop, but it's $500. It has a physical keyboard. It has a headphone jack. It has all of the things that everyone thought they would want very badly in like 2007.
Our commenters are very excited about it. I would say our commenters are suspicious that this thing exists and will ship. It notably doesn't say anywhere how much RAM it has. That's unfair. I will point out there's been a lot of vaporware lately.
Yes, a lot. We just spent some time talking about some of the deepest most ridiculous vaporware that we've ever talked about. And so much AI stuff is vaporware. Mid-range Android phones are not difficult to bring up.
Sure, you can just do a five. Like the only person who can't figure out how to ship a mid-range Android phone is Donald Trump Jr. Maybe the only person in the whole ecosystem that hasn't figured out how to ship. Clicks is better at this than Donald Trump Jr.
I guarantee you the Clicks Communicator will come out before the Trump phone ships whatever the Trump phone is.
Yes. Strongly agree. So I just you know and there are physical prototypes of the thing.
Yeah. Yep. We're going to see them this week. And I think I don't know I'm a sucker for a device like this. This idea of a sort of more minimalist, more specific companion device. They show it. It's running a special launcher that they made with Niagara that's designed to be a little more relaxed and it's all about messaging and their whole idea is like this is the phone for when you just want to talk to people and not with maps.
That's what I get what they're doing.
You say that like it's a joke and I'm like yes, David, you single-handedly made the BS Palma happen for like an enormous number of people. You gave that company such a complex or like we're doing it again with Clicks and it's like nope you got it wrong.
I get No, I think I'm just saying Gadget of CES is a little I get it. Maybe it's a gadget of CES because it's the one that's most likely to ship for the price they're saying. Maybe it's a gadget of CES just because they've already announced the price and it's not insane. 500 bucks feels right for this thing.
So the issue here, right, is that it's a secondary phone or it's meant to be a secondary phone. And that works great if you have an Android phone because you can just log it into Google Messages and you're probably fine or WhatsApp or whatever you're using. And if you have an iPhone, you're screwed because they're not doing any iMessage hacks.
Yeah, it's basically useless to you if you have an iPhone. In the United States, this is where everybody starts to write the email to me saying, 'Actually, outside of the United States, everybody just uses WhatsApp. Please know that I know this.' And it is just not helpful for all of the people in the United States who use iMessage where it is essentially ubiquitous among iPhone users.
So fine, it is pretty. And I think I just love the idea of it. Basically, they went back and were like, what are all the cool things that we've gotten rid of? We got rid of the physical mute switch. We got rid of the headphone jack. We got rid of external storage. We got rid of physical keyboards. I don't know if I said that already, but it bears repeating. We're putting them all back. We're going to do funky colors. There are a bunch of systemic reasons this thing will be harder for people to use than they want it to be. Carriers don't make it easy to move things between devices easily as you move around. I hope this thing does well. I really do. And I think this is as good a version of this idea as I've seen. I also think I was kind of underwhelmed by the last Clicks thing. So I'm we...
That was just a case, right? Because their other thing is a case but cooler.
Yes, this Well, now the case has battery and it magnets to the back of your phone instead of being a whole case.
Big improvement. Very good idea.
And you can use it in landscape, which is adorable.
It is. Do you remember the LG was it called the Wing? The phone that sort of opened into a T like that. That's what the Clicks looks like now. It's awesome.
I was never a physical keyboard person. And I know everybody has all these feelings about these things and I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but I was just never a physical keyboard person.
Are you more excited about the Samsung Z Trifold?
I am excited about the Samsung Z Trifold, which was previously announced, right? It was announced in Korea. People got to use it in Korea. You know me. I'm still Give me one phone and I get to the office, I can unfold it and it's my computer. This is all I want.
Yep. And then you look at how thick it is when it's folded and you're like maybe I don't. My favorite part is you have to fold it in a specific order, right? Like it which makes sense. It opens into three panes and you have to do one pane and then the other and if you do the wrong one first, the phone yells at you, which to me is like of course that's how it works, right? You need the cameras oriented in the right place. It all makes perfect sense, but it is such a funny little quirk of these kinds of devices that you're folding it wrong is like just a thing that's going to happen. And it's a weird time. Every time this comes up, Travis, our producer, just sends me a message and is like, 'Who is this for?' And the answer, I think he's right, is essentially no one. But I don't care.
No, I think it's kind of for a lot of people.
So gadget people are people too, Travis. I spent a lot of years on this debate between is the correct future that I have one device to rule them all, right? And I essentially have a computer and an accessory system and that's everything that I need forever. Or is the answer that everything is a computer and all I actually need is like my login info and every device everywhere becomes my computer. I think the one device to rule them all people lost that battle a long time ago.
Yeah, I agree. And this is very much a one device to rule them all kind of play that I just don't think sort of works for the world that we live in and are going to continue to move towards.
Well, there are some meaningful questions here, right? Like it hasn't actually been out. We have no idea how reliable it actually is. We have no idea how delicate that screen actually is. Samsung's gotten better at this over the years with Z Folds. Maybe it's better, but one wrong fold. And the opportunities for wrong folds, as you've noted, are manifest here. We have no idea what the battery life is going to be with all this extra screen. So, if you use the thing as intended and you're unfolding it all the time and running more screen on what at most looks like twice the battery given how thin everything is, like who knows? And that's where like one device to rule them all really falls apart, right? You have a phone and an iPad. The iPad is living its own life, right? You have a phone and a tablet. The tablet's living its own life. Your phone battery isn't killing your tablet battery.
This is a big trade-off here. So, I'm very curious. Obviously, I'm excited to see it this week, but I agree with you. I think the two devices is kind of where it's at. I, you know, the aspect ratio of the fold is still, I think, up for grabs.
Yes, I totally agree with that.
Right. Do you want the big phone that gets smaller or do you want the big phone that gets bigger is like a still I think still an open question. Again, I want to be the person who doesn't carry anything but a phone. But if you're the person who needs to have a tablet sometimes, it also feels like you're going to annoy everyone around you when you're like, 'Sorry guys, I don't have my laptop. I just have this dumb thing.'
Yeah. So, all right. Before we switch gears, the biggest things that this show does are TVs and nonsense. And we're going to do those after we take a break. But before we get to TVs and nonsense, we got to talk about smart home stuff because that's the other thing I think that CES has pretty aggressively become the last few years because it's a gadget show. Smart home stuff is all gadgets.
Well, and it's like if this is the new what mobile accessories were 10 years ago, right, which is the most sort of simple easy technology to make lots of is now smart home gadgets. It's pretty easy to make a bunch of water ingress sensors that you can put in a house, right? There's a lot of ways you can get into this market if you're a small company or trying to do new stuff. So what we have is just a truly wild amount of smart home stuff from...
I feel like I'm obligated by Vergecast law to point out that the reason for that is that the standards have started working.
Yeah, Matter as a you were Mr. Poo-poo Matter. It's going to go away.
I'm thrilled to have been wrong. I really...
Matter as a standard has enabled all kinds of companies to make all kinds of new stuff. The new smart lock standard which is called AALO which is very silly that is official now. I think we're going to see many more kinds of locks. And it's just because you can plug this stuff into HomeKit, into Google Home, into SmartThings, into whatever you want, into Alexa. It works with both Android and iOS. Like the standard enabled more companies to participate, which again, if you're a VC listener, you know that we have won. We have vanquished capitalism.
We've made these companies develop a standard. They all work together, and that means actually there's more competition, which is good.
Yeah. No, I agree. So, we've seen a ton of gadgets. I would say big things we've seen are there's a lot of smart lock stuff happening here. Using your face to unlock your front door, using your veins to unlock your front door, using all kinds of...
Now with needles, with scans, you hold your hand over it. You don't just to be clear.
I don't like it either way.
Either one. All of this to me is just like I've been re-watching the Mission Impossible movies and all of this to me is like it just feels like somebody is trying to do Mission Impossible when actually a long time ago we realized that keys are really good. They're just not as cool on camera.
No, we have the Schlage locks the previous ones and beeping it with an Apple Watch or a phone tremendously useful.
I'll give you that. And even like the NFC tap stuff like one of the reasons I think AALO is going to be exciting is that it makes that sort of quick contact thing work, right? And the idea that I should be able to walk up, touch my phone or my wrist or whatever to the front door and it opens. Awesome. The idea that what I actually want is to stand in front of it while it does a retinal scan is like, no. I don't work in a clean room in the CIA. No, that is not required to get into my house. But anyway, did anything of the smart home stuff excite you? Is there anything in here that you're looking for? There's a lot of smart shades there.
That's what I was going to call out. We didn't realize this, but the data shows Vergecast listeners are very into smart shades.
Yes, it does. Who knew? So Lutron has new wood...
blinds in its Cassetta line, which you know, I'm not a wood blinds person, but their pricing is really interesting. It's just a flat cost for every size. Every other, if you go and try to like, if you go on Amazon and get the ones that I bought, as you enter in the specs, the pricing changes and it gets, it seems like it gets really expensive really fast.
So Lutron is just like whatever, they cost this much. Cassetta stuff is really reliable because Lutron owns its own RF frequencies, like they bought spectrum and they run it. So that's great, Matter, but they integrate with all the platforms. And then GE, or is it GE Lighting, a different division of a different conglomerate? Who knows at this point.
The 30 Rock jokes just write themselves. They really do.
All these brands have been split up and bought by PE and weird Chinese conglomerates. GE Lighting, to be specific, has Matter-compatible shades at 300. That's great. I mean, again, this is what I mean by the standards are enabling more companies to just enter these markets and bring these prices down. If you were going to ship the proprietary Zigbee shades or whatever people are using, no one is going to buy them because it wouldn't integrate anything and you would have to maintain the software bridges to blah blah blah to connect to HomeKit. Now it's just Matter, so you can just ship the stuff. I'm confident this is a rebranding of whatever. I'm dying to buy this to figure out what it's a rebrand of because undoubtedly a rebrand of something. Yeah. But you see that there's just more entrants in the market and the pricing is going to come down or become more rational.
Like Lutron pricing everything at the same number regardless of size, I think is in the world of smart shades like a big deal. It means the prices are going to come down on the bigger stuff.
There's also a bunch of other neat stuff. Do you see this Lutron mirror? That is just like a Matter-compatible mirror with like lights in it that you can plug into the wall. They have a new dimmer switch which looks bananas. It's also a Matter controller. A lot of pressure is going to end up on Apple to make these Matter buttons work better.
So I have a scene controller in my house that just has like five buttons on it, four buttons on it. And what you want is to assign each of those buttons to a light, right? And so when you push it, it turns on. When you push it, it turns off. Do you know HomeKit does not natively support that functionality? What does it do? The way it's designed right now is that you need one scene that's on and one scene that's off and you assign one button to on and off. So to control one light, you have to use two buttons, which is bananas. Or you're going to love this. You can write a shortcut. It checks the state of the light and says if light is on, turn off. If light is off, turn on. And so you end up writing this like little basic program. And this is all ridiculous. Like Apple needs to figure this stuff out because there's now a flood of these devices and the other platforms are going to get better at it real fast because they have incentives to get better at it real fast. So you just see like, oh, there's something happening here that's really interesting where there's new kinds of controllers, new kinds of tools, new kinds of lights, new kinds of shades and the platforms themselves now have incentive to help people get use out of it. The really interesting one here. Do you see this MU board?
Yes. Jen's all-time favorite gadget in history. It appears this has been Jen's like white whale of a smart home controller for as long as I have known Jen.
I mean, it's just a plank of wood that you mount on the wall. I'm very curious to see what it looks like in person because when you touch it, it lights up behind your finger.
It's like a capacitive touchscreen underneath a wood plank essentially, right?
But does it have like dots drilled into the wood? Like how is the light getting through the wood? It's a really good question.
Or is it just really, really thin veneer? I'm just dying to know. It looks like it's just really, really thin veneer over a screen.
Yeah, like a dot matrix display.
But this thing itself is a Matter controller.
So the question I have is when you say it's a Matter controller, does that mean you have to add all of your stuff to this thing's Matter platform as well or can it just read your Apple and Google ones or your Alexa ones? At some point you run into this, oh, everything's interoperable, but I'm still adding devices to two independent ecosystems for no reason. Whereas what it should be is I have one ecosystem and all of these tools can control it, right? And we're not there at all yet. That like I've been dealing with this. So I bought a bunch of these IKEA buttons with no idea what I was going to do with them. They were just eight bucks a piece and I was like, 'Sure, I'll buy some IKEA buttons.' And the process of getting them to work and do the things they're supposed to do is so much easier than the process of figuring out how I manage the settings of the thing. Do you know what I mean? It's like the administration of this network is vastly more complicated than actually operating the network.
Again, like as Matter gets more ubiquitous and gets more robust, like all this stuff starts to get better, but it does rely on Amazon and Apple and Google and all of these other providers having actual lots of work left to do to make this happen. And this brings me to, we're going to talk a lot more about Alexa Plus on Wednesday because I have a lot of feelings about it that I need to go use a bunch of devices to really sort out. But just one more smart home gadget I want to mention is a new coffee machine from Bosch. It's called the Personal AI Barista, which I hate. Just hate that. And it's basically an Alexa Plus coffee machine. And Bosch has had Alexa-enabled coffee machines before. And what Jen discovered in attempting to use this thing is that Alexa Plus is much worse at understanding basic coffee instructions than Alexa. And this goes back to a lot of things we've been talking about, right? But it's like actually what Alexa Plus is really good at is like open-ended conversation and sort of understanding complicated inputs.
What I need from my coffee machine is latte, skin milk. And that's actually much better suited to the last generation of voice assistants. And with all of these things, I think again we're talking sort of at these different layers of AI, right? It's like what I want some things to do is be open-ended and conversational and thoughtful. And then with other ones, I want the Star Trek thing. Tea, Earl Grey, hot. That is as complex as my interaction with my coffee maker needs to be. And it feels like what we're seeing here in many ways is we're just like way overshooting conversationality. And what we actually need to get back to is like just make the thing easy to use. And with all of the smart home stuff, it's like, but there's so much new stuff it can do. And I'm just like, does it turn the light on and off when I push the button? That's at this point me saying that smart home is Canary in the coal mine for AI is like a Vergecast meme.
Travis wants to vibe code the bingo card. It goes there. I need to correct you by the way. It's very important that I correct you. It's actually called the Personal AI Barista powered by Alexa Plus.
And it is not a product. It is a software capability coming to the Bosch 800 series of fully automatic espresso machines.
I will not be doing that software upgrade. So instead of just something that's understandable, you actually have a complicated.
You're going to wake up one morning and instead of being useful, your coffee maker is going to be like, 'What's up, dude? How you doing today? Hold on.' And you're like, 'Do you love me?' And you're going to fall down the rabbit hole.
I'm just going to stand there and yell coffee at it until something happens. Look, this is the promise. This is why everybody's so excited about AI or at least LLM AI, which is all of this stuff is brittle. Like fundamentally, all computers are brittle. And if you put the wrong inputs in the API, the API crashes out and nothing happens. If you misprogram your IR blaster automation in your 1995 home theater, the TV doesn't turn off. Like it's all brittle. It all falls apart if the inputs and the outputs don't match up. If the system gets the wrong input and the whole point of AI is to reduce the brittleness of the input, as far as I can tell, that's what we're trying to get to. And then you can make a whole bunch of claims about how Claude Opus is now alive or whatever people are saying on X. Yeah. In between whatever sex bot scandal we're doing on X. I don't think it's actually working out. I think we've reduced the perception of the brittleness. But then you're like, make me an espresso and it can't do it as well as the previous brittle system. That's the big mismatch.
Well, isn't it that both things that you just said can be true, right? That it is better at understanding unclear communication and worse at understanding clear communication. It is like the tacit assumption of every one of these AI bots is that something complicated is happening and I have to address all of this complexity with lots of context and all of this information and I have to go look on the web and it's like, no, actually all you need to do is hear me say the word coffee and make a coffee.
Wait, can I do this by analogy? Sure. This is a really dumb analogy. So we lived in the woods for three years, right? In the pandemic, we moved upstate to the middle of nowhere in New York. We lived on an unpaved road. We had no trash service. We had our own well. We had all these people come to our house to like fix stuff that was broken. And one of them was an exterminator because we lived in the woods and our house was surrounded by the woods and bugs and stuff were like in the house. And no matter what I said to the exterminator, he was like, 'Yeah.' And then he would go to his truck and he would get a tank and he would like spray stuff, right? Like that, like really. And I was like, I basically have a subscription to that tank of chemicals. Like I say that there are spiders and then that tank of chemicals shows up and it doesn't matter what I say. That dude's going to show up with that tank of chemicals and he's going to spray around my house and I don't want to know what's in that tank and I don't want to handle that stuff myself. But like at the end of the day, what I have is a subscription to that tank of chemicals.
And the whole point of my analogy here is the actual human being whose job it was to keep the bugs out of my house was accepting all kinds of unstructured, chaotic, extremely emotional input about the number of ladybugs in our house. And then he was like, I know what to do. And he would do the very deterministic thing, which was go to the truck, get the chemicals, and spray the chemicals in the house and be like, that'll work until you call me the next time. And these AI systems can't actually do that next step. They're always starting from scratch, right? So you're like, 'Make me the coffee.' You're like, 'I need coffee or tea, Earl Grey, hot.' And it's like, 'How do I do that?' Which is essentially the same as me being like, 'I'm going to get the chemicals,' which no one wants me to do that.
And to like really beat this analogy to death, there is an open question whether your exterminator knowing all of the details of the spiders in the woods is useful, right? Like yes, it can know in much richer, greater detail all of the things around your house, but if the answer is just a bucket of chemicals, have we solved any new problems?
You might have been mixing up new batches of different blends. You know, this one had a much more floral top note. Like, I don't know, man. I just know what it looked like, which is the chemicals showed up and got sprayed on the house all the time. And all I'm saying is what you pay for there is expertise.
Right. This is the thing. You pay the plumber a ton of money to come and it takes them two minutes and it's because they know what they're doing and that's the thing you're paying for. These AI systems do not have the expertise. And so I think even in the coffee example, which is very dumb, it doesn't know how to make coffee. It knows that there's a coffee machine with API inputs and it might have some ability to use those API inputs. Actually unclear how this is all working in the background, but you tell it I want this coffee and it's kind of starting from scratch every time. And I think that's why we're seeing the LLMs breakdown in the smart home so much.
They don't know, like no matter what you're saying, you want the hallway lights to be turned on. That's actually what you're trying to get to. Like you can just like shut up, shut up, the lights are on, right? Like yeah, the previous systems were kind of like, yeah, I did it right. I heard the keywords and that's why people would talk in that clip to Alexa voice because you learn that you just needed to say the keywords and that was much more efficient and much more reliable than this thing, this like can I run 10,000 GPUs as hot as they can for a minute to not make me coffee.
Yeah, I know. Well, again, we're going to see a lot of Alexa Plus at the show. Amazon is there, there's other Amazon stuff to talk about. Gemini is coming to TVs. Like this is the bet. Is this a thing? And on the other end of it, particularly in smart home, I think we just keep seeing that gap between we've reduced the brittleness of the input and increased the brittleness of the output. Yeah, agreed. All right. By the way, I think a very fun thing to do would be to take a fog horn into the convention center and just start yelling Alexa commands and just see how many booths respond. All right. We need to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk TVs because, Nilay, you have won the future and I'm furious about it. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Nilay, the Frame TV is just, it's just art TVs now. We've done art TVs. This is the story of CES, it appears. Sometimes it's big TVs. Sometimes it's new acronyms about TVs that I don't understand and you have to explain to me on the show. This year it appears the story of CES is art TVs.
Yeah. Everyone realized you can take your five-year-old panel and sell it for high numbers and that will be great. I think a lot of these TV companies looked at Samsung selling an ancient edge-lit LCD panel with a subscription for art and thought, that's dumb. Check out our new OLEDs. That's what the people want. They want high quality colors and brightness and resolution and black blacks. And Samsung's like, you know what they want? They want a five-year-old panel with a subscription to an art store and a lot of influencer marketing saying that this is the best TV for your house because you don't actually watch TV. You watch TikTok. Here we are.
Yep. So they all figured it out that actually making a huge profit margin on old technology is better than making a small profit margin on new technology. To me, it's quite a list. The moment that made this feel sort of obviously mainstream was when Amazon announced that it was making an art TV, the Ember Artline TV. It is just purely a Samsung Frame TV running Fire TV from Amazon. And that to me is like this, when this is when we've reached sort of full market penetration is when Amazon, a company not particularly interested in selling you luxury goods, is in on this.
