Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of the Verge.com. The dot com is a reference to our website, but the Verge actually exists on multiple media channels. We're on Peach. Do you think of the Verge as the Verge?
Or do you think of it as the Verge? I think of it as the Verge. But I think all of us can notically think of it as the Verge.com. Was there any question that you would go with dot com?
Did you ever throw around dot org? There is a real moment when we weren't going to get that domain name. Oh yeah? Oh yeah.
There's a whole... What was there like somebody squatting on it? The domain name we wanted was Verge.com. Okay.
Well, so we were... This is not news. We were going to talk about all that. But first, a long digression in how to naming the site five years ago.
No, we wanted... This is actually Apple News. We were called this is my next. So we're like, we should buy next dot com and just call this site next.
It turns out, appleownsnext.com, dude, they're like, you know, a company resurrecting purchase of next from Steve Jobs. They were not willing to sell the domain. I wrote an email. I was like, hey guys, this is actually not a review unit.
I was wondering if we could buy next dot com. It didn't... They said no. I'm actually going on Lauren's show to embarrass to ask to talk about WWC.
And we're taping that like two hours from now. So Lauren should be here. But if you want to hear Lauren and I talk about WWC, tune in to her show. Carol will be there every fun.
But anyway, we got... Here's our crew. Deeter, Jake, you were at dub dub. Jake, this was your first Apple event.
This is also the first time that I found out that people just colloquially call it dub dub, which I'm not on the web. People do not do that elsewhere. I swear I've not heard that outside. They will break you.
I thought it as well. Somebody had a shirt that said dub dub. Why? I also thought this.
It's definitely easy that hard to... Well, first of all, yes. And two, they will just... You can't fight it.
Yeah, like the next... It just happens. It's like calling them neck buds. It's just...
There's no way around it. You just have to take it. Anyway, but it's your first Apple event. Yeah, it was.
The first Apple event period, which is crazy because I've been watching the keynote streamed for years and years and years. The in-person experience is dramatically different. It is like so energetic and also very hectic at times. Just enormous amounts of people all trying to get to the same space at once, but also a ton of actual in-person energy.
It's very strange. Is the energy coming from the developers or from the stage? They're definitely playing off each other once you get into the room. It's weird because by the end, I think people are wiped out.
I was sweating. I had to unbutton my shirt. But then I don't know if there's buzz going on once people have stuff to talk about after the entire one is done. Yeah, it was...
This is the first one I even got into in ages. So I was here in the office and my body was having physical reactions. I was all ready to live vlog. I was hearing music and I was like, I don't have anything to do.
So what I did instead was I incessantly bothered Jake about the first thing. Yeah, I know. It says that we were like in a sports car and I'm driving and he was like, pedal to the metal. I'm cutting.
Faster. Faster. He does every 30 seconds. He'll be like, crank the shutter speed.
Don't be afraid. You can do this. That's accurate. That's super accurate.
Anyway, that's not about the news. A huge show. That's enough for aggression. But here's five more minutes for it to make the purchase history.
You know, that's not about the news. Tons of news. We got to start with it. HomePod.
HomePod. Deeter, you under some very strange rules were allowed to listen to the HomePod. It tells what is and what happened in the small room that you were ushered into out of. So the HomePod is a speaker and I'm actually at a loss to describe the size of it.
I said it was the size of like two grapefruit stacked, but it might be a little bit bigger than that. And it's a speaker that is basically designed for music and then Apple's like, oh wait, we should put Siri on here too. At least that's my impression because they talked about music in, you know, forever and talked about the quality of the speakers and the seven tweeters and one big subwoofer and blah, blah, blah. It's not even a subwoofer.
It's a four inch woofer. They call it a high excursion woofer. I will tell you, it produces more base than it has any right to given its size. Those are audio tricks made by the A8 chip driving seven independent tweeters.
Oh my God. That's my favorite. Anyway, it is a speaker, which I think at least in the control demo in which I heard it sounds pretty good. Whether doing lots of audio jiggery pokery.
It also is a Siri smart speaker. The interesting thing about doing with Siri, it felt really tacked on in the keynote and we haven't seen it demoed. It has, and we should talk about this, it has a thing on the top that isn't an LCD, but does appear to be a touch panel and does light up. So I guess it's like a one pixel touchscreen.
One gigantic pixel. Yeah. It's a little Siri waveform. What Apple is doing is somewhere in between what Amazon is doing with Alexa where you don't just let anybody do anything and figure out your keywords in your own.
Google is trying to make Google home into basically the web where nothing gets specifically programmed to do it. You don't want to turn on apps. You just ask what you want. It goes out on the internet and tries to figure it out.
Apple is in the middle where they say they're going to have specific quote unquote domains of things that Siri can do. Those include sitting alarms, checking the weather, sending a timer, asking a general question about how tall is LeBron James, stuff like that. It's not clear how many of those domains are going to be open to third-party developers and how quickly they're going to expand it into other stuff like, I don't know, Spotify. You can't play Spotify over AirPlay 2.
As far as I know, the only thing in AirPlay 2 is there's a 2 on the end of the word. There are literally no technical documentation. Look, I will say this before we talk about the rest of the ABC. There's a whole conference going on.
There's sessions, developers are learning things. Apple's redesigned its documentation site. I think it looks pretty nice. Yeah.
So there's a bunch of, they say it. It's not particularly public right now. But I will say the amount of time they spend on AirPlay 2 was a concept was nil. They just announced that there's AirPlay 2 now.
Well, AirPlay 2, I think the thing that's new in AirPlay 2 is the speakers become aware of what room they're in and aware of each other. So if you have two home pods, they can turn into stereo speakers. You can tell the home pods you're in the living room and I have another one in the bedroom. And then AirPlay 2 can manage where the sound is going, what room it's in and how many speakers are in each of those rooms.
The other thing that's interesting about AirPlay 2 is it's on the Apple TV properly. So you can now stream music more easily to the Apple TV when it's hooked up to your TV. There's like, I still have to wear it. Yeah, and I have third-party speakers with AirPlay 2 just since they're with AirPlay.
A large open question about AirPlay 2 is whether they have rethought it conceptually to match what Google Cast does or Spotify Connect does, which is instead of you streaming bits of audio from your phone to a speaker, what you're actually doing is sending a URL and the speaker is retrieving that URL from the internet and playing it back, which has, at least in my experience, proven to be a much more robust idea for how we should control things. Google Cast has wacky problems where your phone forgets that it ever said that. Like, gaslights you. It's like, I don't know, I didn't tell anyone to play music, whatever.
And then you'd have to pretend that you know what you're doing. Anyway, the HomePod. But I want to finish AirPlay 2 for a second. All of that is confusing because of what you're about to say, which is the HomePod is a computer, has an A8 chip in it, and it has series, so you can tell it to play the music.
Right. But right now I believe it only directly supports Apple music when you tell it to play the music. Sure, but it still has to know the URL taxonomy of Apple music, so when you say play a song, it understands how to find it. Is the Bowers and Wilkins speaker that has AirPlay 2 going to do the same thing?
Very unclear. That's true, I have no idea. That's kind of the open issue with AirPlay 2. At least in the...
AirPlay 2 has nothing to do with asking Siri to do stuff. AirPlay 2, if you have a speaker with AirPlay 2 that doesn't make it a smart speaker, if you have a speaker with AirPlay 2, it means you can send music to it and we don't know if it's grabbing the URL or not. Right. But if you have a speaker with Google Pass or Spotify Connect and you send it to it, it will go fetch the song.
Correct. So it's a Wi-Fi speaker. And so is the HomePod. Yeah.
So the demo that I heard was a HomePod up against Alexa playing over Bluetooth and up against the Sonos that I feel pretty strongly was mistuned. But obviously I can't prove that. I don't want to use Apple who sent up the demo intentionally like nerfing the Sonos 3. But obviously the HomePod sounded better because that was the intention of the demo.
But we actually do need to test it ourselves. In terms of sound, here are the two interesting things. I already mentioned that if you have two of them, it'll do proper stereo separation. I'm like, you really hear it.
If you just have one in the room, Apple is not using those seven tweeters around in a circle to send some music to the right, some music to the left. What it does is it listens to the audio that's playing and then it can guess the shape of the room based on the echoes. And then it will send different frequencies of the music to different tweeters to try and create a more bigger immersive sound. And the terminology here is very fuzzy.
But it's like if there's a song with strong vocals and a piano, they'll shoot the piano to bounce off the back wall so it feels like it's ambient. And they'll be informed the vocals directly into the center of the room so you can hear them a little more crisply. Yeah. Dude and I got a few talking about it.
I will say it sounds good. But if you care very much about tweaking exactly how your surround sound works and where different things come from, you're probably not going to be happy because Apple has made very specific audio choices with this thing. That's probably going to please the vast majority of people. But if you're the kind of person who actually has eight speakers in your living room and a subwoofer and you tune them all and do all the crap with them, it's probably going to annoy you.
This to me is very exciting. But it also would be really annoyed by it. This is showing up somebody's house and their TV is on 120 Hertz. It's like I get it.
It's doing more. It's showing you so many more. There's more technology happening. It's supposed to be.
I'm just going to turn this on. I'm just going to go. We had a whole conversation about how good of a friend it would be to turn that off or somebody. The link will be in the show notes.
Yeah. But this idea, a lot more can be done with this room mapping because the best way to listen to music is two speakers, two nice bookshelf speakers with an amplifier that are aimed pretty much at your head and you sit at a fixed distance from them and one hits your one ear and one hits the other ear more or less. That's what people in studios do to engineer music. You can hear music how it was engineered.
You can hear what it was supposed to sound like. If you aren't doing that, music is bouncing around your room and it's messing up. There is real potential for a detailed map of a room and understanding the materials in a room and really good bounce shots to actually make and also tracking where you are to make music sound really good. I'm just going to briefly say a thing and then watch Paul and the I said explode.
I fundamentally think that the myth of the author of authorial intent also applies to audio and the idea that we should try and perfectly match whatever an engine sound engineer heard is ridiculous. You experience music in the moment you hear it in the same way you experience a book in particular context and trying to get back to the perfect intent of what the person who created the thing was is a mistake. But that is like wrong. I agree with you.
I just think this is going to be really weird. That is like very rockist. You're having an argument with an imaginary rockist from the past. That's not how modern music is made at all.
Bruno Mars keeps it escalating its driveway. It's a master's album on because he knows most people, he's like there's a great rolling stunt profile that he's like I need a new car but I'm going to keep this car forever because this is the car that I make my music in. They know that people listen to it on shit headphones. They know that people listen to it on laptop speakers.
The goal of the audio engineers to make it sound good wherever you are. That's a modern, I don't know, Jimmy Plant was like you have to buy the speaker. That's a whole thing in the past. I love that I throw this fire bomb into the ice brain and he wants to move on and talk about the iPad and he just can't.
I think you put it in the framework but we don't have to argue it all day. You teed it up right. There are some questions about what it's doing. We have to talk about Siri on this.
That's more and more. But in terms of what it's doing with sound, it's got these seven tweeters that can be informed the tweeters. Lots of things can do that. That is not a particularly novel.
You can buy a Yamaha sound bar with 140 speakers in it and it can create surround sound in your home. It can do virtual setting channels. The Sonos that they had in there, every Sonos has True Tone which I believe is designed to make you appear to be a complete buffoon because you start it and the speaker starts chirping at you and you are supposed to walk around your room with your phone and there's a video and you're waving at the phone up and down in the air as you do laps of your room and your phone collects all the data and sends it back and it tunes. So, I think the speaker is done in the room, it's probably a little bit clunkier than this because it sounds like Apple is doing it in real time.
Creating virtual sound spaces with a single speaker has been done probably a little bit clunkier because there's only a seven tweeters. I just have a lot of questions about what methods they're using if they represent massive changes over existing methods and fundamentally, if that sounds good, if that sounds the way you want. I think they're banking on people trusting Apple to make something that sounds the way they want it to sound. Right.
No, I don't doubt it. The way they're talking about it is no one has ever considered using multiple drivers to tune audio to a room is very Apple. It's just very Apple. But there are no issues with doing that.
So, I have seven speakers in my house and if I play music and turn on virtual surround, it will do the thing. It will wrap the vocals to the center speaker, it will play some guitar tingles over the back speakers. Does that sound better than just two speakers? Has that been done in this kind of solo form though?
What you're describing is mostly stuff to augment your TV or multi-piece surround sound systems. Apple, yeah, I can do stereo but I feel like they're pitching this as like, hey, you kind of want a speaker that's going to sound good just somewhere in your house. Just buy this, don't think about it. Yeah.
If I had an Apple TV, can I replace my sound bar with this thing? The Apple TV will rattle the audio to it. Completely unknown. So, there's a lot of unknowns there.
And that's just the audio side. We have yet to talk about the series side and the controls on top of the thing. But, Nila, it's not Siri. I mean, it's Siri but don't think of Siri as an assistant.
Think of Siri as a musicologist. I know he just had this conversation but it's almost unacceptable to me. I'm not going to talk to your assistant. If your assistant has multiple personalities depending on which device I've picked up to talk to that.
Like my mom is my mom with our emailer, texture, caller, talk to one person. It's the same person. Yeah. If your mom's in a car or she's a driver, you can't be like driving to the store if your mom's in a plane.
I got you. I can't be driving to the store if I'm about to. If your mom's in a car, you can tell her to drive you to the store. But if your mom's in a plane, you can't be like a passenger, you're right.
You're right. Depending on what she's in, this is way up the rails. If you, Paul, if you're in this room, I can be like, please podcast with me. But if you and I were looking at bar, I can go start podcasting.
Yeah, it's called anger. Anyway, do you think of me? That's all I can do. I'm going to have to talk about different things.
I don't know what to tell you. They're focusing more on plug into Apple TVs, smart playlists. It's unclear if there are any different Apple music on your phone. I don't really think they are.
And then you can ask it to assist and stuff. And to me, the most interesting part of this is I think they said it's coming out in December. Is that right? When does this be coming out?
It's coming out. It's unclear. But they obviously wanted it after the holidays. Yeah.
And it's $350. Right. So that's a price worth talking about. The way that Phil Schiller did the math on stage was- Make no sense.
It made a little bit of sense. They're like, he pointed out the Sonos plate. He brought up with the Sonos in the Echo on a slide on stage. And he was like, the Sonos costs $2.99.
And the Echo costs $109. And if you just add that together, you get $3.29. That was basically his math. Right?
And our prices better. But obviously those are radically different products. It is worth noting, although the prices are close. It's fair to compare.
But it is worth noting. The Sonos Play 3 is their oldest product, generally regarded as the worst sounding Sonos product. They play one, I think, sounds better. But I don't think that's why people buy Amazon Echoes.
I don't think they buy it for great music. I don't think that's why people go out to Google Home when they announce the Google Home, Google said it sounds better than the Echo. Literally because anything can sound better than the Echo. Okay, so that's really a question though, right?
If Apple is selling a speaker, how many people want a $350 speaker? I think a lot of people want a $350 speaker. I feel like people just want a speaker. How many people are going to...
I don't know. The UE Megaboom is one of the most popular Bluetooth speakers. It is $2.99. Right?
Apple stores are like wall to wall full of $200 to $400 speakers. It seems like a very hard sell if you're like, well, I can get an Echo for $179. It does basically the same thing. It's clear to me now that we have no idea how much Amazon Echoes.
Because they're always changing. The most wave radio, I feel like, is the classic item in this genre that was then the iPod high-five was $350, but the most wave radios have been around that price. My one thing is people like these little pill Bluetooth speakers that carry around, but also a lot more people than right now than ever have wireless headphones. Yeah.
And in their home are listening to music on headphones. Yeah, I think those are just deeply different use cases. I think being able to say it in Echo or Home right now, Hey, plays some music is really valuable. That's true.
Being able to say that and then having music sound great is really valuable. You know when the Echo got really useful? When they turned on Spotify by default. Right?
And I think I've said this on the show like a hundred times. Apple music is great. It's actually the thing I use. I have no problem with this thing defaulting to Apple music.
I mean, it has become, I need to write this post. Maybe now's a good peg for it. Is it the big fonts that really puts me around? Huge font.
No, it's the only service that respects the idea that you might have local music. It's the only the service that respects the idea that you have a collection, a library. Spotify is totally play the space. Title is very confusing in my mind.
But Apple is just really good at saying this is your library. And whether that library is on the cloud or your phone, it all logically is the same thing. And then it's good saying here's a view of your library is it exists on your phone, which is very useful to me because I'm always on a trainer. So I'm fine with that.
But that means their total addressable market for this product is like 27 million Apple music people, which is not the normal size of an Apple market. Right? Like the Apple market usually is like all 6 million people on Earth will eventually have this product. Right?
So they have to figure that out. They have to figure out how to get Siri to address Spotify, which maybe they could do. Or they have to figure out how to make Apple music much bigger. And maybe that is going to happen because everyone is going to want this product.
But that little part of the loop to me is not closed. And also the whole home kit side of what Siri can do with this thing. Again, it's WWC. So they're rolling out new things.
I think Jake, you talked about home kit probably a little bit. I did not actually catch up with them on this stuff, but they talked about it a little bit on stage. So I think you can control all the basic stuff that your phone can control from home kit. It's a general home kit controller, which is nice.
It's a nice bonus. But I also think that unlike the Echo Dot, which you can just put a ton of them around your house if you have a bunch of smart home stuff, I don't imagine that people are going to have a ton of these things in their home because they're $350 speakers and you don't need a $350 speaker in every room. So I think that makes the smart home proposition a little bit harder. What happens if you say, hey Siri, I'm sure this has been solved.
I just thought of it now. What happens if you say, hey Siri in your phone and your speaker right there? Do they both try that answer? No, no, Apple, they talked about this.
I heard Craig Fegritt and Phil Schiller were on a podcast. They do the same thing as Google. They just do it locally. So every device listens to you and they negotiate as to which one is closest to you and one lights up.
So they know that's a problem. This is like Apple's thing, what they're trying to do as much of this locally as they can. I appreciate it. Yeah, and that's to save your privacy on this.
But if they're choosing which one, not all series can do the same things. Right, some series are in the book. Right. Yes, some series are on a mobile play.
Yeah, I mean, who knows. I find it very puzzling that the Siri and HomePod is more limited than the series elsewhere. That does not make sense to me. Google does the same thing though.
Google's notoriously doing the same thing with the home. Up until very recently, you couldn't set a reminder on the globe. You couldn't make a calendar. Because they had to enable multiple voices and we have no idea if HomePod will support multiple voices.
That is a great point. No one knows. Can you talk about the top of the home pod? Can you address this burbling controversy that exists in our world?
I've seen two different versions of the top of the home pod. The version they showed on stage and the big public demo room had a circular, like, glowy zone that waves around a little bit. It almost looks like, imagine, like, if you were trying to project that classic Siri waveform with a literal projector underneath it, it kind of looks like that. So it moves, but it's not like a screen.
I saw another version which was more production that had a giant plus and minus button on top of it. I was like, what's the deal with that? I'm told you will be able to adjust the volume directly on the thing. You don't have to ask Siri.
So it will be a touch panel. It's unclear if you're going to be tapping those zones or if you're going to rotate your finger on it like you do on the Google home. But it looks to me like what it is, is a touch panel that lights up. On Apple's website, it says you can touch the top for volume and playback.
But we don't know. We don't have the screens. I don't think it's a screen. It doesn't look like a screen to me.
So you'd say, hey, Siri, tell the server. They can change your mind. I'm here listening. It might have a couple different states.
It might turn blue or whatever. I don't know. But it's a very simplistic. It's not going to display.
What is it? No, there's an argument out in the world. The Echo Show came out with a touch screen. Then there was a bunch of rumors about the HomePod that said it won't have a screen.
Phil Schiller said we don't think these devices should have a screen. And then now it has a display. And we are arguing semantically over whether that constitutes a screen. The Echo has a display.
Right. The light. It's got a ring of light. And then it changes color.
It's got a little bit of information. And in fact, it's a lot easier to see information on the side of a thing than on the top of a thing. So the top of the thing, the Echo is a touch screen. It's basically.
I think all about it slightly domed on top. It is like domed. Yes. You can sort of see it from the side.
Yeah. My point here, regardless of this very entertaining semantic argument, is what most people think of a touch screen is the iPhone screen. Right. A big display that shows you interface elements that you can touch and interact with.
Or like a palm trio. Or like a palm trio. This does not appear to have that. Right.
Why did they put a physical keyboard on the HomePod? That's what I wanted. It doesn't have a line in. That is true.
It does not have a line in. Are you kidding? Of course it's not. What are you talking about?
It doesn't have like a Bluetooth. Does it have USB? No, it's AC powered. And it doesn't have Bluetooth.
From what we know at this moment, it does not have Bluetooth. So the ways you can get this thing to play music are limited to Siri activating Apple Music locally on the thing, which is fine. So it definitely kind of work as a home movie speaker. Nobody has AirPlay too.
Oh, of course. So whatever that is. Yeah. But this gets to Neelike's point that the addressable market for this thing are iPhone users that have Apple Music are willing to switch to Apple Music right now.
Like if you're an Apple Music user on Android, first of all, call me. I'm very curious to hear what your life is like. It's great. I love it.
I love everything about it. Sorry for your luck. This thing is not designed for you. It's designed for iPhone people.
That's fine. That's a totally legitimate thing for Apple to do. But it is curious. You can't set it up without an iPhone.
Well, you can't say, hey Siri, play some music unless you can set it up without an iPhone. But then you can't play Spotify on it. Right? If you have an Android phone with Apple Music, the step between you taking this thing out of the box and pairing it to your Wi-Fi is unclear because the setup they demoed was like you wave your iPhone near it and it takes the pairing information.
But if you have Apple Music, it will work. So you can buy Apple Music just for this thing. Here's what I'm trying to get the audience to understand. This thing looks neat.
It is just an endless series of questions about how it will work in practice after that. And Dearest, one demo would sound great. That's cool. But all of the little bits and pieces that make it work in your life are kind of trailing off into question marks.
Would you say it's the size of a basketball or small? No, it's smaller than a basketball. Like a woman's basketball? Smaller than that.
I feel like I should read an ad. Yeah. Well, I was in the high Sierra or the new iPads or the Mac Pro. There's so many things.
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Save $30 if you pre-order the Core before July 1st. That's Norton.com slash VergeCast. So before we come back to the show and Apple News, I wanted to make sure we talked to Ben Popper about the DJ Spark, which is DJ I see in the store and it's $5.00. It's super cool.
Ben did a whole review of it. So we're going to talk to Ben for 15 minutes or so and we'll come back, finish up with all the Apple News. A little break. Just pure gadget bliss with Ben Popper.
All right. I've been Popper. Hello everybody. How's it going?
This is special interlude. We did a Vlad interlude a couple of days ago, but the Vlad interlude was like free association of Vlad. Yes. But you, I want product to talk about.
The product that is so interesting and important to me that I wanted to interrupt the WWDC VergeCast special and do this segment just focused on it. DJI Spark. It's a magical little product. Right here in the office, I know it attracted your attention and then we had Ezra Klein from Vox and then you wanted to show it off to him.
I wanted to show it to everybody. That's the experience of it. So you're taking it out and you can pull it out of a pocket. Nobody knows you have a drone.
You're like, oh, I have a drone. They're like, whoa. And then you put it in your hand and you want to see it. They're like, what do you mean?
You just take off from your hand and then you go into Jedi mode and you start moving it around. And then immediately they're like, can I try? Yeah, you can do that. And then somebody knows nothing about technology drones, puts their hands up and then they're like, flying a drone.
That's crazy. It's amazing. Poor Ezra. He's like in the middle of the most morale draining administration in political history.
And he we're just like playing with drones. And he goes, man, the Verge just has the most fun. Hey, it's good for traffic. Trump has good for traffic.
Tell the listener what this product is and what is going on in DJI. Sure. So DJI back in 2013 released the Phantom which was kind of the first drone that made it pretty easy to fly. Or that's what it felt like in 2013.
You took it out of the box, you didn't have to assemble it or like screw something on or fix some crazy wires. And then you got it up in the air and you could do some smart things like hover in place and go out and then return to home. This is the first Phantom. The first Phantom.
Wow, that's such an accessible consumer product. Now, fast forward to 2017 and the Phantom looks like this crazy big thing that you would only use if you were professional. And you've got the DJI Mavic that came out in March of last year and everyone was like, wow, this drone is so small and accessible. We've really come a long way and then six months later you've got this part and you're like, wow, this thing is like the size of a cell phone, the weight of a soda can.
And you can fly it with no remote and no phone. We're getting closer and closer to that sort of actual consumer drone meaning any consumer could pick it up and use it with no training and get some interesting results and really great results. And then you say, this is the drone that finally DJI was like, all right, we're going to compromise a little. We're going to have worse video quality, less range, a couple of things we'll have to cut back if you want to hit a $500 price point and 300 gram weight.
So with the Mavic they made it smaller than all these things but actually it was arguably better than the Phantom at the time. It had more range. This is so sad for me. This is so sad for me.
I bought a Phantom 4 like three weeks before Mavic came out. We always have a few things in the reviews closet. It's taken on the weekends. But yeah, I think this is one that where it works just as well, maybe even arguably better as kind of a toy.
The best way to use it is to pull it out, fly it in gesture mode, snap some great selfies and you're done. You can then extend that connected by Wi-Fi to the phone and get more epic stuff. They're eventually going to sell it with a remote and you could fly it a mile and a half off, which I would never do for the drone this small because it will never come back to you. But you're starting to be able to, and this feels like one you could definitely use indoors.
It's very safe. We've been flying it. Indoor is a ton. Constantly flying all over the office.
Yeah. It feels like the kind of thing you're going to see at clubs in Miami or something like that. Or the dance floor, take a picture or whatever. And I watch WWDC and there's obviously new product, the speaker coming out that I think might do well, might do poorly, but it's interesting it's a new product or whatever.
It's like, I didn't really see any like, it didn't make big leaps over other smart speakers or whatever. With drones, I think this is probably really something you know a lot about. Phones for a while got smaller and smaller and smaller. And then we were like, got to point where we kind of went with screens on them.
Let's make them bigger and bigger and bigger. We figured out what is a certain size of phone and screen that you want. And you don't want to make any smaller. Then you're kind of missing out.
With drones, we haven't really hit the point where we don't want to make them any smaller. So the phantom came out, then the phantom fork came out, then the mavic came out. That was half the size of the phantom. And then the spark came out.
That was half the size of the mavic. They could definitely and probably will make a little matchbox size nano drum. But it's knocked over in the wind. Even the spark.
I watch your video video today. You can see the shake from the wind. Yeah, you know, again, it depends on what you want to do. If you're flying indoors, the nano is going to be ideal.
Yeah, drone that small probably not going to want to fly outdoors. There's always a trade off. The smaller drone has less battery life. It has less range.
But you might actually end up using it a lot more. That was my experience with the spark was like, I ended up using it every day. I don't think I've done with the drone before. I could always just throw it in my bag.
I went to the acupuncture for my pinch nerve. She was like, what do you do? I'm a tech reporter. What are you working on?
I was like, you want to see? I pulled it out right there and the acupuncture office and launched it. And then she flew in just a minute. And that was just kind of amazing.
I was like, this is a drone. Here you go. I mean, to me, you're absolutely right. I have a fan of four.
I love it. It's the most fun. But it is a huge project to take it out, charge the massive battery, plug the iPad into the controller, launch the... It's not complicated.
It's just many steps. And then when you launch it, it's an event. And people are afraid to fly it. And again, I love the thing.
But it's big and heavy and it's a project. This seems like not a project. Yeah. I think we're still learning what is the optimal form factor for a drone that the most people use.
For some people, I mean, an interesting comparison would be for $499, the price of the spark. You could also now get the Phantom 3 standard. So if you wanted a drone that goes really far and has a 3-axis gimbal and shoots 2.7K video, you can get that for 500 bucks. But you might not use it that much and you might not want that.
If you want the drone that does great selfies and the safe to fly indoors and can be controlled with your hand, go get the spark, right? Like it's the exact same price point. So really, now you have just a choice of what lifestyle, what are you looking to accomplish with this drone? And I guess the other thing I would say is the spark is something where I feel safe flying around people and I don't always feel that way with the Phantom.
You have to get people to give you a lot of room and that makes it less. It just makes it more difficult to use. It's less social. It's not as fun.
You don't want to crash into somebody. You don't want to injure somebody. And that's not the way I feel when I'm using the spark. You mentioned the power-up thing.
So I took the spark on a trip and I'm halfway then and I'm like, oh my god, I forgot the wall charger. Normally that would mean one flight and then I'm done for the weekend vacation room or whatever. This one you can just charge up with a micro-USB. What is it about?
It's rated for 16 minutes. If you put it in the air and just hopper it there, you would get 16 minutes. And then you would get 15 minutes flying around, probably more like 14 minutes and then if they're strong winds, then to 12 minutes. How long does it take to charge over?
It takes 45 minutes and then micro-USB takes more like two or three hours. So, you know, like use it, drive somewhere or use it and charge it over and out with the micro-USB. But you could have the spark and three batteries and it would still be less weight than the Mavic. So you could bring a whole bunch of batteries with you and they sell it with a charger that does three batteries at once.
I know a lot of people who bought the Mavic. They love the Mavic. What's interesting to me is the most people mostly use the Mavic the same way they use the Phantom. It's just a little more convenient.
This to me feels like a, I don't know, not quite a step change but a massive enabling change where the classic Phantom footage is over a beach in the mountains following a car down a twisty lane. This feels like the footage is going to be another type of footage entirely. I think that's right. I wouldn't feel comfortable sending this out over the ocean.
The way that a Phantom is like, yeah, go find some dolphins. Right, right. Yeah, I think that's totally right. I mean, I think you can see the limitation.
So, like, they have a bunch of pre-programmed shots on there. You know, it'll do the classic Joni Flyaway, the Rocket Up in the air, the Circle Around you or what I'd call the Michael Bay, like never expanding, you know, Helix of Epicness. But if you use those pre-programmed shots with the Wi-Fi and the phone, the remote actually isn't available for purchase yet, it often just disconnects. It starts doing the cool move and then it gets about two, three hundred feet away.
It's like, oops, I'm back home now, you know, and it comes back home really safely and it lands perfectly. But, you know, if you're a beginner, that's like a terrifying moment and even if you're not, that's kind of annoying that like, it doesn't know it's own limitations, right? Like, I feel like it should get out there and it's like, well, I'm about to lose signal. It should probably stop doing what it's doing and like, you know, give it the chance to check in and maybe change.
But yeah, I think that that is definitely, you sort of nailed it, which is to say like, the Mavic did just what the FAN of did with a really cool form factor that was much smaller. And the Mavic is now going to be sort of like their leading consumer drone, the FAN of their moving up to be like a more professional thing, charging more about adding like more sensors and hiring cameras and all this jazz. And then the Spark is, you know, way more of a consumer drone, almost a toy. And I think that, you know, their strategy now is let's get as many products in the market at a possible at different price points and then you're going to find, you know, one that matches you and then you're going to be in the DJI ecosystem and maybe end up buying more than one.
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's why I want to end this. DJI, I was just at the co-conference. In-tow was there.
They were shown off a bunch of their drone stuff. They have a super cool industrial drone. It is probably the coolest, fastest, most responsive drone I have ever flown. Right.
They won't even disclose the price because you don't, you actually don't buy the drone. Right. The people who buy this thing are like BP or Exxon buys this and they fly it out over oil rigs. It's got, you know, they mount literally, I'm not even kidding, a full-on Sony a7s, right?
Right. With like a custom firmware controller, but you don't buy the drone. What you actually end up buying is like data processing for all the, all the drone captures. Right.
And that is their market. They're very confident. They've had like unique typhoons with real-sense cameras. And it just feels like that is, they cannot win against DJI.
No. Who is DJI's real competitor? Are they just competing in themselves? Are they going for full dominance?
Are they just super excited about drones? They can't stop making them? Yeah. I mean, I think on the consumer side, I would say that they don't have any real competition except for themselves.
I mean, like, you know, there will always be other options. I mean, you know, people who run a hobby shop or even the best buy whatever, they won't have multiple choices up on the wall. But for a long time, DJI consumer drones have been the best on the industrial commercial sort of industrial side, DJI's not making that stuff, but I don't think that they have the expertise in terms of selling to big enterprise and hand-holding and all that stuff. Like, I think on the hardware side, they're probably making enterprise drones now that are just as good.
But yeah, I think that that is a place where it comes into like Intel could come into challenge until also smartly bought Mobidius, which is the chip company that powers the fandom board and the magazine. So there's Intel inside, even though you may not know it. I mean, and I guess the other thing is like, there's just this really interesting having where the, you know, I was mentioning how the size of the drones got smaller so quickly and the quality of the drones has gotten better and the computer imaging computer vision. I just read this crazy story about how the Israeli Defense Forces, the military there, are now going to start buying Mavix and giving them out like standard to every cohort of troops and they will learn how to use them and take them out.
And that's kind of the thing where I feel like that's DJI's opportunity is if the consumer drones get good enough, somebody might decide, hey, let's buy a hundred of these thousand drones instead of buying one hundred thousand dollar drone and see what we can do with that. Yeah, I mean, I just, the Mavix in particular, it is just in that complete sweet spot. Like if you are, if you're a virtual guest listener, the spark is fun and I'm sure you would love it if you bought it. Right.
But I bet that you're just nerdy enough to want to buy the Mavix, right? And like, that's their whole game. They're stepping you up $500 at a time. I cut a stylist.
If you are interested in buying a Phantom 4, just tweet me. I've got one. Maybe flown two dozen times. Yeah, it's almost in perfect condition.
I'll throw in an SD card about a phone case. Anything you want. Just give us a coffee can. Who are their competitors though?
Who are DJI competitors? Yeah, I mean, again, with Intel, what they're selling is a data center. They have a great drone, but the thing they're actually selling to you is data center capability. DJI is not going to do that.
Yeah. I mean, on the consumer side, they don't really have great competition. You know, where competition has always been to sort of say, well, DJI hasn't been making this form factor, so let's do that. Like, let's make them more heavy duty, you know, rainproof drone, they haven't done that.
Or in the case of CES this year, it was, hey, let's make the really small sub $500 drone that launches from the palm of your hand. DJI hasn't done that. So that's like, you know, in Greenfield we can go to. The problem is, it's like some slater DJI.
We'll do that. But that is your opportunity. You have a few months before DJI makes that kind of drone you can get in there and sell some units. Yeah.
Well, I mean, we got to see us every year. And it's two years ago, everyone's just making clones, literally clones the Phantom. Right. I mean, is this just another, you know, like the Facebook of drones, they're just going to eat everyone until we're there.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the Phantom came out of nowhere. DJI was just like a, you know, a person making a company making flight controllers for other drone manufacturers and drones that you were supposed to attach your GoPro to.
Right. I mean, there was this moment in time right before the release of the Phantom. We're just going to be like GoPro drone made by DJI branded GoPro. Like actually maybe we should just do this ourselves.
Rest is history. So yeah. So what's the future? What should people be looking for to other than yet another small drone?
Yeah. I mean, I think the future is really the computer vision. That's the exciting part to me is that that's what it enables it to do things like palm takeoff and landing and gesture control. And I do think that you know, there's some things that can't change.
So like the battery life can't change. The smaller the drone gets the lower the battery life. That's a, you know, constraint you have to work with the wind, right? Like the smaller the drone, the harder it is for it to fight the wind.