Today on the flagship podcast of canceled-out cricket sounds: David, Andru, and Will react to prototype headphones that use AI to take noise cancellation to a whole new level. Michael Fisher, aka Mr. Mobile, joins the show to discuss mobile phones with physical keyboards and his latest project, “Clicks,” an iPhone case featuring an integrated keyboard.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00 Welcome to the Verge cast, the flagship podcast of cancelled out cricket sounds.
00:00:03 I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting in my basement about to watch Oppenheimer.
00:00:08 Actually, I should say that differently. I'm about to finish watching Oppenheimer.
00:00:12 I have been watching this movie for months, but something happens every time I sit down
00:00:17 to watch Oppenheimer, which admittedly is like three hours long. So life is busy. It's hard
00:00:21 to find three hours to watch a movie. But every single time I sit down to watch this movie,
00:00:26 somewhere between two and like 11 minutes later, something happens and I have to stop watching it.
00:00:32 It's gotten to the point where Peacock's algorithm took it out of my continue watching
00:00:38 row in the app because I just assumed Peacock was like, there's no way he's ever going to finish
00:00:42 this movie. He can't possibly care. We'll just get rid of it. But I do care and I'm going to
00:00:46 finish it. And today is the day. It's Monday morning, which is a super weird time to watch
00:00:51 this movie, but it's happening. I've got, I think like 40 minutes left. Today's the day.
00:00:56 It's going to be awesome. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We're
00:01:00 going to do two things. First, we're going to talk about active noise cancellation. You might
00:01:04 have seen a video that our team made last summer about kind of the state of the art in those like
00:01:10 over your headphones that try to cancel out subway sounds or airplane sounds or whatever else.
00:01:15 But it turns out the tech and science underneath all of that is actually more advanced than you
00:01:20 might see on some of those headphones. And we have a really fun story about it. Then we're going to
00:01:24 talk about keyboards, specifically iPhone keyboards and the cases that put physical keyboards back on
00:01:30 your iPhone. We're actually doing, I've realized kind of an accidental mini series in the next
00:01:36 several weeks about keyboards, just because I think they're fascinating and we don't talk about
00:01:40 them enough. The ways that we talk to our devices and the tools that we use to do that matters a
00:01:47 lot. Like when, when we switch to voice instead of typing on a keyboard, the way that we use our
00:01:52 devices changes. And when we switch from a physical keyboard to an onscreen keyboard, the way that we
00:01:58 use our phones changes. And so we're going to talk to one person who is trying to put a physical
00:02:03 keyboard back about how that works, what it means and what it changes. All that is coming up in just
00:02:09 a second. But like I said, I have 40 minutes of this movie to watch. No one else's home.
00:02:14 It's Oppenheimer time, baby. This is the Verge cast. We'll see you in a sec.
00:02:17 Welcome back. So last summer, our video team made a video all over New York city in which
00:02:25 they carried around this crazy looking like mannequin skull to test a bunch of headphones.
00:02:30 Noise canceling is hard to explain by just talking about it. So we're going to try to
00:02:34 share with you how it sounds by putting a bunch of noise canceling headphones on the KU100.
00:02:40 It's all about active noise cancellation and whether different kinds of headphones could hold
00:02:45 up. Super fun video. One of the best things we made last year. And I'm told that's actually
00:02:49 only the very beginning of the story of what ANC can do. Will Poore is here to help me explain.
00:02:54 Will, hello. Hello. Will, you made this video last summer. And as far as I can tell, you have
00:03:01 not stopped thinking about it ever since. Is that a fair characterization of what's been going on?
00:03:05 Yeah, kinda. There was an interview we did at the very end of the video that is the thing that
00:03:10 really stuck in my brain. It was with this guy that runs an audio testing lab where we sent all
00:03:15 these headphones and he ranked them for us by their ANC performance. But he also made the point
00:03:21 that the most noise cancellation is maybe not what people actually want. Like maybe we don't
00:03:27 want to walk around in this total vacuum of sound. I think. And he said that in the future, it'll be
00:03:33 about smarter noise cancellation, more user input into what you want to hear and what you don't.
00:03:39 So that's the idea I've been carrying around with me.
00:03:42 Okay, this is a good segue to a question that I have had for a very long time and have been too
00:03:46 afraid to loudly ask in public in front of people. Can't wait. What is active noise cancellation? I
00:03:52 know it's a thing. I sort of know roughly at a basic level, like there are noises and it cancels
00:03:57 them. Yes. What is and there are other kinds of noise cancellation that I also don't understand.
00:04:01 So like, what is ANC? What are we talking about here?
00:04:04 I am so glad you asked. And I brought Andrew along because when we did the video,
00:04:09 I had the same question and I just immediately asked him that.
00:04:12 Okay, good. Andrew Marino, welcome.
00:04:14 Hello.
00:04:15 What is ANC? Teach Will and I, please.
00:04:18 Right. So active noise cancellation takes sound coming from the environment and basically sends
00:04:26 an opposite version of that sound wave to your ear. So when combined, it basically cancels it out.
00:04:33 This is really easy to do with sounds like a loud airplane engine or subway sounds,
00:04:40 noise that's really predictable.
00:04:41 So the two of you have been on this beat for a while now and have been investigating this
00:04:47 question of how far have we come? How far can we go? And where do we actually want to go? Is that
00:04:54 right?
00:04:54 That's right. Yeah. When we started talking and thinking about smart noise cancellation,
00:04:59 I started looking for who's doing this right now. And the first place I looked is Apple
00:05:04 because their AirPods Pro have a bunch of these smart noise control settings.
00:05:09 They call their features adaptive audio. And it's kind of what we're talking about.
00:05:14 It's not like full, let's just cancel out all the sound. It's more, let's make some basic
00:05:21 decisions for you about making really loud sounds more comfortable or dipping your music when you
00:05:27 start talking to someone. I've been playing around with those features a bunch. And in practice,
00:05:32 it's not always super clear what it's actually doing. Like there's no fine tuning. There's no
00:05:38 user input. You just hit the button and it tries to magically like make a better soundscape for
00:05:44 you. So that's the like one place I looked and have been playing with that is out there in the
00:05:50 world. That's a product now that has some smarts, but I also played around with a really early
00:05:57 prototype and I have a bunch of tape that I brought to play.
00:06:00 Awesome.
00:06:01 This is super early stage, a device that could get a whole lot more specific when it comes to
00:06:08 what you want to hear, what you don't want to hear. So I want to play some of this
00:06:13 stuff and we can talk about it.
00:06:14 Yeah, let's go.
00:06:15 Okay, so first listen to this clip.
00:06:18 This is me sitting at a table alone in a room. I'm wearing these very prototype looking headphones.
00:06:30 They've got a lot of extra wires and tape and circuit boards attached to them. There's a vacuum
00:06:35 cleaner running right next to my chair and a few feet away, there's a door and someone outside is
00:06:40 knocking on that door. That sound that we just heard is just coming from a microphone that's
00:06:44 sitting on the table next to me. So that's just what the room sounds like. But while this is
00:06:49 happening, this sound clip, this is what I'm hearing right now. Just the knocks.
00:06:57 That's amazing. This is beyond what we have seen with noise cancelling headphones before.
00:07:03 If you want to just hear knocks, that is not something you can try to get.
00:07:08 You can't tell your AirPods Pro just knocks.
00:07:10 Where did you find this?
00:07:12 So this comes from the University of Washington, specifically their mobile intelligence lab in
00:07:16 the CS department. It's a project that they call semantic hearing. And I got this demo from a PhD
00:07:22 student named Malik Attani. He's one of the people who helped build the system. And he talked me
00:07:27 through how it all works.
00:07:28 There are these noise cancelling headphones, they're Bose QC Ultra. They're going to suppress
00:07:33 all of the sounds. And then what we do is we have these binaural microphones that capture...
00:07:38 Tape to the outside?
00:07:39 Yeah. They capture sound from your environment the way you hear it, because they're on both ears.
00:07:45 And then we pass this through a mobile CPU, an Orange Pi. This thing processes audio in some way
00:07:52 based on the targets that you select, and then feeds it back to the headphones where it's played.
00:07:56 So the starting point for this is a pair of headphones you actually can buy.
00:08:00 Yeah. So the prototype starts with off-the-shelf Bose headphones that use the existing ANC to just
00:08:07 create a clean audio slate.
00:08:09 I see.
00:08:09 And then the system on that Orange Pi listens to the full soundscape separately and picks
00:08:15 out just the specific sounds that it's listening for. In this case, a door knock.
00:08:19 We have a program that runs on the Orange Pi, which continuously just records audio
00:08:25 in chunks of eight milliseconds. Then it passes this to a neural network where it's processed
00:08:32 with the condition that this neural network tries to extract some target class.
00:08:38 This target class is what you select here.
00:08:40 Okay. We've got cat, cricket, dog, knock, and rooster.
00:08:44 Those are the classes that you have queued up right now.
00:08:46 Exactly.
00:08:47 All the most common noises in the world.
00:08:49 Right. Of course. Anything that you would want to be selecting and deselecting.
00:08:52 There's a smartphone screen that I have access to, and there are buttons for each one of those
00:08:57 categories. And in each one of those cases, Malek has fed a neural network a whole bunch of those
00:09:02 clips, different dog sounds and door knock sounds and everything else to train it to recognize that
00:09:07 specific sound. I actually asked Malek to share some of the sounds that he used out of curiosity.
00:09:13 I don't know what I was expecting to learn from that, but here are the cat sounds that he used.
00:09:17 Very familiar with those.
00:09:23 I had to ask because I just pictured him sifting through and he did this. He just sifted through
00:09:28 hundreds and hundreds of sourced cat sounds and cleaned them up and fed them into the system.
00:09:34 So the AI is trained on these categories now so that when I hit the cat button,
00:09:39 the system will mute every sound in the world except for cat meows.
00:09:43 So going back to the demo, I did that. I hit the cat button. Malek turned the vacuum cleaner back on
00:09:49 and he queued up a looping sound of that really annoying cat.
00:09:52 Yeah. Pretend like it's a regular day, lazy Sunday. You want to play with your cat.
00:09:57 But there's a noisy vacuum cleaner in the background.
00:09:59 I hate it when I'm vacuuming and playing with my cat at the same time.
00:10:03 Okay. Transparency mode. My poor cat is trying to get my attention,
00:10:09 but I can't hear him. So I'm going to flip to cat mode.
00:10:13 Wow. That's really impressive.
00:10:20 It's super impressive. The sound is a little odd. To me, it sounds like the cat is meowing in a
00:10:26 submarine, but it's super clear and the vacuum cleaner is totally gone. And for the record,
00:10:31 what you're hearing right now is actually a little bit better than what it sounds like in reality,
00:10:36 because in the room I'm wearing headphones and some of that vacuum cleaner sound is
00:10:40 making it through the headphones. And this is what the headphones
00:10:44 are outputting to your ears. Exactly.
00:10:46 Yeah. Will, you mentioned this is not for actual cats and vacuum cleaners. What is your sense of
00:10:52 what this is actually for? What are the folks working on this thinking they might be able to do
00:10:57 with it? Yeah. I mean, the most obvious example that comes up over and over again is you're
00:11:02 walking down the street and you want to be able to hear a car honking at you because that's a
00:11:09 safety thing. Sure.
00:11:10 But you don't want to hear all the other annoying sounds. Or the folks I talked to brought up
00:11:15 industrial settings where it's really loud and workers are wearing earplugs for safety,
00:11:20 but they want to be able to talk to each other or hear sounds over the intercom or whatever else.
00:11:25 So those are the really obvious use cases. And from playing with this really early demo,
00:11:30 it felt like even this early demo could do that much, which is super impressive.
00:11:35 So you mentioned also like crickets and dogs and other things. What are some other demos that you
00:11:41 were able to test out there? Yeah. So in theory, you can train
00:11:45 the AI on any sound and we played through a few different options that they had queued up.
00:11:52 None of it was perfect. Like there were these times where it was supposed to be
00:11:57 muting all voices, but my voice kind of clipped into the final mix that you can hear. We can play
00:12:03 that. Yeah, that's funky.
00:12:09 Yeah. So, you know, rough around the edges. We went back to the barnyard and listened to all
00:12:14 of those other different sound clips in a lot of different iterations just to see how good it was
00:12:20 at toggling between different sounds. Now that we've done cat and vacuum
00:12:24 cleaner, we'll move on to some other classes. Let's do cat and cricket.
00:12:27 All right. Here's transparency mode. A cat and a cricket are both trying
00:12:35 really hard to get my attention. That's enough out of your cat.
00:12:41 In this demo, you couldn't hear the cat at all. You just heard the crickets.
00:12:45 No, it was gone. Yeah. The big takeaway for me was that this system is already really good at
00:12:51 full isolation. It just needs to make the sounds that you are hearing sound more natural. Like
00:12:57 that's just to my ear. That's where the work was. It was already doing an unbelievable job
00:13:03 at canceling out the stuff you didn't want. I'm desperate to know what the like last demo
00:13:08 he gave you was because I got to assume he's like ramping up in difficulty here,
00:13:12 but there's definitely a point at which he knows this thing will fall apart. Like what was the most
00:13:17 intense demo he gave you? Oh, we did a big finish, which was dog and a rooster and a cat.
00:13:22 This is the most annoying farm in the world. Okay. All right. Just rooster.
00:13:31 It's interesting. Those two, and I could see how subjective this would all be. It feels like those
00:13:43 sounds are bleeding into each other a little bit more. I wonder if they're just a little more
00:13:48 similar than the others. I think it could be that some sounds are similar. Yeah. And finally,
00:13:54 we'll do dog and cat. This is very triggering. This is why I don't like working from home.
00:14:02 Okay. Sorry, cat. Okay. And now I'll just pay attention to the cat.
00:14:10 Okay. This is really impressive, but I'm stuck on two things. One is, is the idea that you will
00:14:21 carry around a smartphone constantly selecting the noises that you want to see? Should I walk around
00:14:27 saying, "Oh, it looks like that cat's trying to get my attention. Let me let the cat in."
00:14:31 Or is the future some sort of beautifully adaptive thing that understands as you're going? Did you
00:14:36 get a sense from them how they see this eventually working? Yes. And I talked to the head of this lab
00:14:42 all about that. But before we did that, we talked about how they're going to get to that point.
00:14:47 That was my other question is how do you take this from a pair of Bose headphones
00:14:51 with a bunch of junk taped on it to an actual thing that humans can buy?
00:14:56 So yeah, let's talk about their full roadmap from where they are now to what you're describing. The
00:15:01 first step in that process is just getting better at doing all of these tasks. And that means
00:15:08 feeding their model a whole lot more data. More cricket sounds.
00:15:11 So many more cricket sounds and grasshopper sounds and cicada sounds and just basically
00:15:16 train it to recognize a million more categories of sounds and to recognize all those individual
00:15:21 sounds just a lot more accurately. And if they can do that and do that super well,
00:15:26 then the possible use cases just explode. You could totally see this being applied to
00:15:33 different tasks. Like say, I want to not just listen to sounds, but specific people.
00:15:39 Like I want to listen to you in a conversation so I can maybe have some representation of how
00:15:44 you sound like and then I can just pick up your sound as we speak, as we have a conversation,
00:15:50 even if there's lots of other people around us. So all the current headphones right now,
00:15:55 they do it really well because they can predict when these sounds are coming.
00:16:00 So when you're in the airplane, you know these sounds are going to be 10 seconds from now
00:16:04 in 10 seconds before. But a bird sound, a cat meowing, crickets chirping, you don't know when
00:16:10 those are coming. So how would they be able to predict? They would have to move pretty fast
00:16:15 on the device. Exactly. That's the problem of what they call transient sounds. And that's a
00:16:22 big hurdle for existing ANC technology. This system is really good at it, but it needs to
00:16:29 process the incoming audio super, super fast. There's no time to send it to the cloud for
00:16:35 processing. There isn't really even time to send the incoming audio to your phone's processor over
00:16:41 Bluetooth. You would just end up with a lag between what you're hearing and what your eyes
00:16:47 are actually seeing, which is just a complete non-starter. So all of the work that we're
00:16:51 talking about doing has to happen on board the headphones themselves. If we can get this model
00:16:57 to be much, much more efficient through lots of just standard machine learning techniques,
00:17:02 then we can fit a more capable model into this small device. Another way to also help on the
00:17:08 hardware side is in the recent few years, there's been lots and lots of companies that work on
00:17:16 designing AI chips that can do a large, large amount of computation with very low power
00:17:22 consumption. And those things are very promising. So you've just made me imagine what amounts to
00:17:28 like a pair of headphones with a GPU attached, which I think is like literally what he's
00:17:34 describing. And that both seems cool. And like, maybe where all this is going, but also very
00:17:39 expensive, very big, and maybe very far away. What is the sense of how we get from literally
00:17:47 strapping like an NVIDIA GPU to my face to the thing he's describing? Which I think ultimately
00:17:53 it has to look like a pair of Bose headphones, right? Like we're not going to take anything
00:17:56 that doesn't look like a pair of Bose headphones. This is where we'll have to see. They're talking
00:18:00 about a hearing aid sized form factor. They want to go much, much smaller. And they think that
00:18:08 they can do it with these purpose built lightweight chips that are really good at running AI systems.
00:18:15 So they're playing with all of the chips that are very new and newly available. And they're sort of
00:18:20 doing all of these different things at the same time. They're doing the software optimization,
00:18:25 they're feeding the model all this more data, and they're working on the hardware too,
00:18:30 to shrink it as quickly as possible. And they think they have the raw materials to do that
00:18:34 pretty soon. So we have like an academic lab masquerading as like a full stack electronics
00:18:39 company here. Yeah, absolutely. That's the fun thing about this lab in particular is there.
00:18:43 That's very holistic. Oh, what about the user interface? Am I going to be like asking Siri
00:18:49 every 10 seconds? Like, did you hear my cat? Is my cat meowing? So they're thinking a lot
00:18:55 about this. Because even when I was playing with this demo, I was like, Oh, God, five buttons,
00:19:01 this is just five buttons. In the real world, you would need 5 million buttons to actually dial in
00:19:06 the soundscape that you want. So obviously, you need some sort of automation here. And the lab
00:19:12 is looking at different AI assisted ways to do this. So this whole thing is going to be AI's on
00:19:17 AI's. But I talked to the head of the mobile intelligence lab, Shyam Golakota, about exactly
00:19:23 this. We're going to have some systems in the next few months to a year on trying to go away
00:19:29 slowly from like actually having the user to like pick different kinds of sounds to less and less
00:19:35 involvement of the user itself. You can imagine a system where the AI automatically learns what
00:19:40 you want to listen to. And I think that's something which we are building towards. And I
00:19:43 think by the end of the year, hopefully, we can actually have a system where the AI would
00:19:47 automatically learn what you want to listen to. That is ambitious. Yeah, yeah, they're juggling a
00:19:53 lot of balls at the same time here. And the you know, the end goal that Shyam is envisioning is a
00:19:58 system that is using data from, say, your smartphone to think and learn about where you are,
00:20:05 what you're doing, and start to make those decisions kind of with as much or as little
00:20:11 input as you want as to what you're hearing and what you're not. So say, you know, again,
00:20:16 you're living in a busy city with lots of loud traffic, but you're inside your house.
00:20:21 So that's exactly the thing. Like, clearly, an AI can tell depending on my motion and my
00:20:26 IMU, whether I'm moving as much, where am I, it knows my GPS location. So it knows that I'm in a
00:20:32 house. Does it really need me to listen to like the sounds of the honks? Not really. But if I'm
00:20:38 on a street, maybe it can because I'm walking on the street or I'm in a car, it should potentially
00:20:44 be like, you need to hear these honks. Although then the next place my brain goes is how to make
00:20:50 sure that it's doing that safely and reliably. Because there's one thing we've watched from
00:20:54 Tesla autopilot to, you know, chat GPT hallucinating to whatever else. It's like,
00:21:00 there's an asterisk on so many of these tasks that we just sort of let the AI take care of.
00:21:07 And it strikes me that trusting your headphones to decide when you need to hear a car horn or not
00:21:13 could be a high stakes situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's definitely something which
00:21:19 has to be integrated in these systems. And it could be that certain things like if I'm actually
00:21:23 in the house, that's when you remove all these ambient sounds. But it's just like hard coded
00:21:28 saying that you cannot remove certain things in outdoor environments where you know that it's
00:21:32 important. But that's an extremely important point, which is like when we deploy these things
00:21:35 at scale and have this thing automatically learn, you got to have certain rules which
00:21:40 prioritize safety over functionality, I think. The thing that's being described here is so
00:21:46 beautiful and smart and so non existent in the real world that it's like it's like what we talk
00:21:51 about with self driving, right? Like if people weren't weird and didn't make strange decisions,
00:21:56 and pedestrians and bicycles didn't exist, self driving cars would be awesome. So easy, so great.
00:22:01 But the world is a weird, messy place full of edge cases. Yeah. And that's where we just haven't
00:22:07 seen that whole half of this prototype. They have proven out that they can make crickets go away,
00:22:13 which is impressive, which is impressive. And it's like you can see a roadmap to extracting
00:22:17 a million other sounds based on that. And then this bigger end state of dialing in exactly what
00:22:24 you want is the loftier thing. And there's there's a lot of work to be done there. But if they can
00:22:30 figure out even some of this stuff, you can imagine, you know, them getting to a really
00:22:36 interesting product. Xiom is interested in smart hearing aids. You can see how anyone with a
00:22:43 hearing aid could use even a portion of this technology. Anyone with a sound sensitivity.
00:22:50 I use noise cancellation just to turn the world down to keep my anxiety in check. So I would love
00:22:56 to be able to dial in that sound a little bit more. Xiom made the argument, too, that a lot of
00:23:03 us just live in a very noisy world and noise just as a thing that we're all confronted with is bad
00:23:09 for everybody. And it actually does impact your health. There are studies which say that noise
00:23:14 pollution affects your sleep and that ends up affecting your lifespan. So I do think that
00:23:21 having this kind of a capability where people can control their environment is just not a toy.
00:23:26 I think it actually can have a meaningful impact on the quality of life and sleep. And a lot of
00:23:32 things which I think are extremely important for humans to thrive and not just survive.
00:23:37 So, I mean, wherever this specific prototype lands, we're definitely leaving the fancy earplugs era
00:23:44 of noise cancellation and entering an era that is much more specific and bespoke and a little bit
00:23:51 smarter. What that looks like TBD. But I am very excited about that concept.
00:23:56 I am, too. And I wonder, Andrew, just to come all the way back around to this idea of what we were
00:24:02 talking about at the very beginning with what active noise cancellation does. It seems like
00:24:05 knowing this kind of stuff where you can say, like, not only is this an external sound and I
00:24:10 want to get rid of it, but I know specifically which external sound it is. I think even leaving
00:24:15 aside sort of that big, giant, grand vision, it just feels like that step alone does a lot.
00:24:21 Oh, totally. I mean, to be able to walk into a store and the headphones know I'm in a store
00:24:28 and I'm going to be talking to someone checking out, or I have a library of sounds that are unique
00:24:35 to my experience that I would like to tune out and the sounds are only at this specific coffee shop
00:24:41 that I go to study. That's super compelling to me. Do I want my headphones to know where I am at all
00:24:48 times? I'm not sure. But there's a lot of awesome possibilities of just tuning things out and
00:24:55 tuning things in wherever you are. Yeah. I think the self-driving example just keeps feeling more
00:25:02 and more true to me as we talk about this, that the first thing where it's like, okay, my car can
00:25:07 park itself and will stay in its lane if I try to drift out of it because I'm not paying attention,
00:25:12 right? Doable. Awesome. If you extend that all the way out to all the cars on the road will drive
00:25:17 themselves and robot taxis will be everywhere. Like you've sort of lost me. Maybe it'll happen
00:25:21 someday in the future, but that doesn't make the first thing any less cool. And I feel like there's
00:25:26 a lot of that in here too, where it's like, even just boil it all the way down, this is going to
00:25:30 make noise cancellation better because the cats get through my headphones now and they can stop
00:25:36 getting through my headphones once we get this tech. Totally. And I think that no matter how far
00:25:41 into that idealized end state they get, they're very confident that they can get a lot farther
00:25:47 very quickly. They have access to these chips. The software is improving very quickly. So they
00:25:54 have a lot of ambitions for this year. They think they can get to a much, much smaller form factor
00:25:58 by the end of this year, for example, and they have a lot more very specific ideas for that sort
00:26:05 of filtration step. So yeah, it's, you know, for me, that very, very limited demo was impressive
00:26:12 enough and they had enough plans for this year that I'm going to be following that lab and see
00:26:19 what they come up with next. Because I think it's going to be an interesting year for it.
00:26:22 >> Do you think at the end of this, they're going to try to sell me headphones? Like,
00:26:25 what's their game plan here? Are they going to spin out a company and try to be a headphone
00:26:29 player? Are they going to try and work with some of the folks out there? Did you get any sense of
00:26:33 how they want to get this out in the world? >> They seem to open to that. You know,
00:26:36 they're an academic department. They're talking about commercialization. You know,
00:26:40 they're like a lot of academics. They're walking this fine line between, you know,
00:26:45 just moving this technology forward and experimenting with it, but also like
00:26:49 knowing that they've got something and they feel like they are potentially ahead of a lot of big
00:26:54 tech companies on this. So they are thinking in those terms. And I think that's one of the
00:27:01 reasons they're trying to work as quickly as they are. >> Yeah, it does seem like this is happening
00:27:04 fast. I feel like, Andrew, you were the one running around New York with the head on the subway a year
00:27:10 ago. This strikes me as something that a lot of those companies building ANC headphones are
00:27:16 probably also thinking about. Like, do you think this is the next turn for a lot of those companies?
00:27:22 And is this going to be the next thing that makes these headphones better for people?
00:27:25 >> I think so. And I know Bose is thinking about it a lot as the next generation of
00:27:30 noise cancellation. Apple is already trying to do the adaptive things, as we mentioned.
00:27:35 But right now, it's just boosting things instead of taking things out. So if there's a world where
00:27:41 they can remove the dogs out of Will's room while he's recording a podcast, I mean, there's like
00:27:48 endless possibilities. >> There was a dog button on that prototype. We just need that prototype,
00:27:52 and we'll be fine. >> Well, by this time next year,
00:27:55 the Verge cast will be a listenable podcast. It's going to be great.
00:27:57 >> Thank you and sorry. >> All right. We got to take a quick break,
00:28:03 and then we're going to talk keyboards. We'll be right back.
00:28:05 All right, we're back. If you remember the smartphone world before the iPhone,
00:28:16 it was much wackier than it is today. Back then, there were lots of ideas about how a smartphone
00:28:22 should look and work. Some of them twisted open, some of them slid open, some of them flipped open,
00:28:27 and a lot of them had physical keyboards. And then the iPhone all at once kind of upended that.
00:28:33 Here's Steve Jobs at the original iPhone launch in 2007,
00:28:37 explaining what he saw as the problem with hardware keyboards.
00:28:40 >> Here's four smartphones, right? Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62,
00:28:46 the usual suspects. What's wrong with their user interfaces? Well, the problem with them
00:28:51 is really sort of in the bottom 40 there. It's this stuff right here. They all have these keyboards
00:28:57 that are there whether you need them or not to be there. And they all have these control buttons
00:29:03 that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants
00:29:08 a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons just for it. And what
00:29:14 happens if you think of a great idea six months from now? You can't run around and add a button
00:29:18 to these things. They're already shipped. >> It's a good take, right? And history
00:29:22 proved him pretty much correct, which is why virtually every phone on the planet now has a
00:29:27 virtual on-screen keyboard instead of a big physical one underneath. Jobs did definitely
00:29:33 have it right, but not all right, because there are things I think a lot of people miss about
00:29:38 physical keyboards. You can type faster on physical keyboards. That's just true. There's
00:29:43 plenty of evidence for that. You can type without looking at your phone so much. You can type
00:29:47 without the keyboard taking up like 40% of the screen. And so over the years, various people
00:29:52 have tried to bring back the keyboard to the smartphone. Remember way back when Ryan Seacrest
00:29:58 was out there hawking a case called Typo that put a keyboard back underneath your iPhone?
00:30:02 This is how he explained it in an interview with TechCrunch.
00:30:04 >> This has changed my life. I literally was suffocating thinking about how I was going to
00:30:11 work every day because this is my office. The tablet and the phone, that's how I work.
00:30:17 I have incoming emails from everybody that I work with and for my partners, and this is how I
00:30:21 respond and can respond quickly and be able to actually type more than two sentences.
00:30:25 >> I get it, Ryan. I feel that too. But Typo didn't really work out, and none of the other
00:30:31 projects trying to do this did either. And yet now, all these years later, there's another company
00:30:36 trying to pull it off. It's called Klix, and it's co-founded by a guy you might have heard of.
00:30:40 >> I'm Michael Fisher, aka Mr. Mobile or Captain Two Phones. Take a break.
00:30:45 >> Michael's a longtime creator and phone reviewer, and he knows this space better than most,
00:30:50 which made it frankly all the more surprising that this is a thing he decided to do.
00:30:54 So I brought him onto the show to figure out whether this idea has a chance to really succeed,
00:30:59 why he's convinced there's still room for a physical keyboard on your iPhone,
00:31:02 and what it takes to make a really great tiny little keyboard. And we just started the story
00:31:07 at the beginning. Why would you, in the year 2024, set out to build a physical smartphone keyboard?
00:31:13 >> Oddly, the thing that was the germ of Klix came to me. It didn't originate from my brain.
00:31:20 I got a call from a guy you probably are familiar with, Crackberry Kevin.
00:31:24 It's a guy who helped me build Mr. Mobile in the first place, kind of like one of my closer
00:31:28 friends in the business. And he said, "I got to show you something. I will absolutely kill you if
00:31:31 you show anybody else what this is." And he sends me this 3D render. And you know, you and I are in
00:31:37 the same business for a lot of my day. You know what it's like to get something in your inbox
00:31:41 that's like, you look at it, you take a beat, and you say, "Oh my God, you crazy bastards,
00:31:46 you actually did it." So I think that's what I said out loud. But it was just a render. It wasn't
00:31:51 even a product. It was just this very obviously an iPhone inserted into a case with a QWERTY
00:31:56 keyboard that looks nothing like it currently does. And I said, in a profound demonstration
00:32:01 of how little business foresight I have, I said, "You know Mr. Mobile has to have the exclusive on
00:32:05 this, right?" >> That's good. Always think in one step ahead, I guess. >> What an idiot. So
00:32:11 within a week though, you know, I'm giving so much product feedback. We're talking all the time.
00:32:14 It's very obvious that we should be working together on this. Turns out that's what Kevin
00:32:18 had in mind the whole time. So I come aboard, we finish building the company with the guys who,
00:32:23 full credit, deserve credit for the initial germ of this idea in the first place, the veterans
00:32:27 from FX Tech, the last company to make a truly great Android sliding keyboard smartphone. And
00:32:33 that was, dude, that was April of 2023. >> Oh wow, that was fast. >> Yeah, by January at CES,
00:32:38 we had a product that we were able to, we were ready to ship. So it went fast is right. It was
00:32:44 insane. >> What I like about that though is that is a group of people who are maybe most prone to
00:32:49 being incorrectly nostalgic about keyboards, right? You have some of the world's foremost
00:32:55 BlackBerry people. You have you, who has just never stopped making videos about the Palm Pre.
00:33:00 >> True. >> And you have a bunch of people who have made these things in the past. So how do you
00:33:07 check yourself against, like, boy, I wish the world still existed in which we wanted keyboards,
00:33:12 versus like, this is a thing we should do and bring it back? >> So... >> Or maybe you don't,
00:33:16 you just soldier through and hope other people feel the same way you do. >> I think there was
00:33:20 an element of that, really. I mean, one of the things we knew is we had a lot of smart people
00:33:23 on board, right? And I won't give you the whole marketing pitch of everything, but we really do
00:33:26 have the best people in the roles that need to be within the company and the most expertise there
00:33:30 is. And at no point, you know, did we check ourselves all the time? Yes, but at no point
00:33:34 did anyone say, you know, I don't think this is the time. Really, what I had to be sold on this,
00:33:38 because I was a little, I turned on my skepticism node for a hot second. I said, guys,
00:33:43 is this it? Like, no young person is going to even want a single physical button on this thing.
00:33:49 They're like, what's going on? And it turns out that the time was right, not only for a variety
00:33:54 of unrelated reasons, but because you can introduce this as a new concept to somebody like,
00:33:59 not to name drop, Max Weinbach, who was like our most difficult briefing at CES. He was like,
00:34:03 he's like 2022. And he's just like, I think this is ridiculous. But then you show him what happens
00:34:08 when you are using, you know, Instagram live and you have your entire screen there and you go to
00:34:13 type something and the virtual keyboard doesn't eat up 40% of it. Or you show somebody a keyboard
00:34:18 shortcut and you're like, wait, what did you do? I'm like, well, I just hit the spacebar and it
00:34:21 advanced the screen for me or I hit, you know, whatever, drop the notification shade. That's
00:34:25 part of the fun. All the BlackBerry people know this stuff already. All the, you know, the people
00:34:29 who had a Palm trio, like you and I maybe, uh, know all these things and to introduce it to
00:34:35 somebody who was not alive when the, uh, when the BlackBerry was a thing, it's pretty cool.
00:34:40 That's interesting. So we're actually like past nostalgia for a lot of people where it's so far
00:34:45 gone that it's actually a new thing again. Yeah. It's a full circle. Exactly right.
00:34:48 But I would imagine for you as somebody who has used these things, but not built them before,
00:34:52 part of the process is just sort of learning how to learn a keyboard and like the vocabulary of it.
00:34:58 And what it means for a keyboard to be good or bad. Cause I think as a user, you have this
00:35:03 instinctive feel, but I have to imagine that at some level there is like an objective measure of
00:35:08 a good keyboard that you have to learn how to reckon with in this process.
00:35:12 There is. So like the first prototype of clicks I got to use had these domed transparent key caps.
00:35:19 So we printed the characters below the surface of the key, like a Palm pre, right? And because I'm
00:35:25 so in forever in love with the Palm pre until I die, I loved it. And I was like, Oh, this looks
00:35:30 so good. And this is the language we should be going for. And perfect. Well, it turns out though,
00:35:35 that when you make a domed transparent key, that is perfectly circular in the design we were using,
00:35:40 it looks great from head on. And then you tilt that phone by 20 degrees and you can't tell what
00:35:46 the letter is because there's visual warping, right? There's this skewing that happens. You're
00:35:50 like, is that a semi-colon or a comma? I don't know what I'm doing anymore. So very quickly,
00:35:54 we had to make little decisions like that. Like, well, let's see what flat polycarbonate keys with,
00:36:00 you know, satin printed top layer paint looks like. Well, it turns out that's a lot better.
00:36:04 So there's kind of major changes early on. What I found surprising is you and I,
00:36:09 we've covered phones a long time. You know, how early on designs get locked in and you see people
00:36:15 talking about why didn't they just make this change? Because we were giving them feedback
00:36:18 after the, after the unveiling. And it's like, well, because they were been sitting at retail
00:36:22 boxes for three months at this point. With something like Klix though, we were making
00:36:26 changes right up until the end. At CES, we got the final keyboard while we were at the show.
00:36:31 The thing we showed everybody was kind of like a second to last revision. The final keyboard came
00:36:36 in. It wasn't even built into the case. We're carrying around like a, like a component with
00:36:40 no paint on it or anything. It's just like, okay, don't look at this. This is gross, but just close
00:36:43 your eyes and feel it. And everyone we showed that to, we got the final sign off on it. Kevin
00:36:48 was so excited. We were like, oh, that's it. Every nerd we trust has signed off on that. So dude,
00:36:53 I'm going forever. We had like a hundred revisions. It was crazy.
00:36:56 - I will say I am most fascinated by like the last handful, because I think I would assume,
00:37:01 and please correct me if I'm wrong, but that you get through kind of 80% of the problem
00:37:06 fairly quickly. And you, you settle on like the rough idea of the thing that you want.
00:37:10 And then you spend like the rest of your life until the heat death of the universe debating
00:37:15 like tiny millimeters of everything. But that stuff does matter in these really like hard to
00:37:20 understand ways. So like the last 10 revisions, I think must've been so interesting and weird
00:37:25 to go through. - They were so wild because you're fighting, you're trying to integrate your,
00:37:29 your personal history without being a, you know, without being slavish to it. Right? So a good
00:37:34 example is the shift and alt keys right up until close to the end, they were swapped. And I kept
00:37:39 trying to switch to alternate characters and I kept messing it up. And I'm like,
00:37:42 all right, is this muscle memory or what? And we talked about it. We kind of went back and forth,
00:37:46 got the whole team involved. And it was like, no, we got to swap those keys. And once we did
00:37:50 everything felt right again, because what do you know? You find the corner more easily.
00:37:53 My least favorite change, I think I talked about in my video was I want that old number pad. I want
00:38:00 the, you know, the, the three by three BlackBerry Palm Trio kind of number pad on the keyboard.
00:38:05 Somebody much smarter than me on the team said, look, if we're designing the best iPhone physical
00:38:09 keyboard, you got to design it like the iOS virtual keyboard. You got to give the number
00:38:13 row up top. And I said, I hate that. You're right. I hate it, but you're right. I can't say you're
00:38:18 wrong. That's what we got to do. So little tiny changes like that. Have you gone back and retested
00:38:24 all the old physical keyboards? It's so weird because I was using the Palm pre obviously,
00:38:29 most recently. And I was like, I remember writing for this keyboard back in the day when I owned it
00:38:34 in 2009. And I pick it up now and I'm like, Ooh, those keys barely move at all. And the Centro,
00:38:40 right. Where I was like, I could type fine on this in 2008. Nope. Even in 2008, I was like,
00:38:44 this is too small. I couldn't do it. But you could use the stylus on the buttons though,
00:38:49 which was great. That is true. But other surprises in the other way, I'll get off webOS in a second,
00:38:53 but real quick, the HP Vier, world's tiniest keyboard phone that a lot of people made fun of
00:38:59 very good keyboard for the footprint. And for me, best keyboard I ever used, but did not own
00:39:05 Sidekick 2. Oh yeah. They're like lovely clicky travel and feedback. And also covered in that
00:39:11 delightful silicone rubber that held onto your thumbs. And oh man. What's your favorite keyboard
00:39:18 of all time? If you don't mind me asking. I think if you made me pick two, it would be the Trio 650,
00:39:23 which I loved to pieces. I loved that phone and the Motorola Q, which I actually think if you made
00:39:29 me pick one is probably my answer. That keyboard was amazing. I love it. You know why I think the
00:39:34 Q worked is because you had this nice interplay of materials. They were plastic hard keys,
00:39:38 which doesn't sound nice, but the phone was soft touch. That's one of the things we were,
00:39:42 we were doing on clicks actually pretty late was once we had the keys locked in, I was like,
00:39:46 something's still weird and missing about this. And it turned out it's what's around back.
00:39:50 So we ended up putting that stamp, like vegan leather back plate on there to make it feel,
00:39:55 you know, to give you the entire tactile experience. Cause you got, you know,
00:39:58 eight other fingers that you got to worry about when you're typing. Right. What do they feel?
00:40:02 But if you look at those keys in cross-section, you'll notice they're domed over the top too.
00:40:06 And that helps with, with determining separation of keys by touch. So you'll always have an easier
00:40:11 time on a domed keyboard than you will on something where it's all crowded together.
00:40:15 Like on the bold and the bold didn't do that because it was a better typing experience.
00:40:18 The bold did that because BlackBerry wanted a narrower phone. So it was, that's why you had
00:40:22 those triangular frets in the corner. So they're like the science of this stuff is fascinating.
00:40:27 And I'm so glad it's not lost to history because you can still talk to the people who designed it
00:40:31 and be like, Oh, this is why you did this. These are smart ideas. It's good to bring some of them
00:40:35 back. Tell me also about doing this in kind of the iPhone era, because I think people have tried
00:40:40 and failed at this in part because the iPhone it's good at what it does already. Yes. How do you like
00:40:45 put those two things together? First of all, one, frankly, made our jobs a lot easier is that we,
00:40:52 you don't have to do anything with clicks. You don't have to install our app. If you don't want
00:40:56 to, you literally plug an iPhone in and the iPhone goes, you know, which uses a lightning
00:41:00 port or the USB port. And the iPhone says, Oh, that's a physical keyboard because all the hooks
00:41:04 that it needs are built into iOS to begin with. So you just start typing and it's like, okay,
00:41:08 well, it turns out this product can handle it very well. And it's not nothing that that's the case,
00:41:13 by the way. And I think, I think a lot of people would be surprised that that's the case because
00:41:17 there just isn't really a reason for the iPhone to do that, but it is surprisingly receptive to
00:41:22 the existence of a physical keyboard. I think in terms of like a philosophical thing, I had
00:41:28 a little bit of the same problem grasping it at first. It was like, gosh, what are we building?
00:41:32 And then somebody said something very smart. And they said, look, nobody looks twice. Nobody
00:41:37 thinks twice when you use an iPad with a magic keyboard. And then you say, well, I don't really
00:41:42 need the keyboard right now. So you take it off. And then later you're going to write an email and
00:41:45 you put the keyboard back on. Like that is the definition of normal use case for that product.
00:41:50 Why shouldn't the same thing be true of the phone? And the minute somebody put it in that lens for
00:41:55 me, I was like, oh, okay, good. And, you know, we kind of hedge a little bit too, because there's a
00:42:00 button on clicks you can hit to call up the virtual keyboard. So like, you know, there are times, man,
00:42:05 where I'm walking around and I'm like, I do not want to type on a physical keyboard with one hand.
00:42:09 It is annoying and slow and I don't like it. So that's the virtual keyboard. And I can swipe
00:42:12 around and stuff and I can use emojis and then I can put it away. So like, it's really about
00:42:17 the adaptability for me. Like, you know, it's eliminating buttons. Yeah, good call. Had to do
00:42:22 it. But turns out there's a lot that you miss. So why not just have buttons when you want them?
00:42:26 That was kind of our guiding philosophy after we figured out that we could actually make it.
00:42:30 What have you seen in terms of like, surprising, cool stuff that you can do on the iPhone? I mean,
00:42:36 one of the things, you know, you've mentioned and I've seen you talk about elsewhere is just
00:42:39 added screen real estate, right? Like, you don't realize how big your phone screen is
00:42:42 until you can actually see the whole thing. It's so annoying. Which I think is real. I also wonder,
00:42:48 like, you've been using these things longer than just about anybody, right? Like, what have you
00:42:51 seen in your own kind of phone usage life that is helped by a physical keyboard like this?
00:42:55 Yeah, one of the, so the example that they make me do, that my colleagues make me do on video,
00:43:00 because you're the creator, you're the influencer, do the live Instagram streaming thing and typing
00:43:05 while you're doing, I'm like, I don't, I don't care about that. What I care about is I'm in 85
00:43:08 group chats, right? And when you're in a group chat, and you're looking at all the context of
00:43:12 what people have said before, and then you go to respond, and that virtual keyboard pops up,
00:43:16 and then it clears half the screen, stop. So I love using clicks for that specifically. But it's
00:43:22 kind of like an Easter egg hunt. There are all the hotkey shortcuts that work on the magic keyboard,
00:43:26 or at least a lot of them work in clicks too. So there's that. And I go into every app, and I try
00:43:31 the old, the old BlackBerry shortcuts. Can I hit T to go to the top? No, I can't. What does spacebar
00:43:36 do? Oh, that scrolls. Okay. Well, this phone is really tall. And now with clicks, it's even
00:43:40 taller. So how do I get to the notification shade? Does globe N work? Weirdly, yes, it does. And
00:43:46 what about shift space? Oh, that goes the other way. And like, just there are so many little old
00:43:51 habits that I sort of forgot about from the days of reviewing all the old QWERTY phones. And again,
00:43:56 to iOS is great credit. They didn't rip any of that stuff out. It's all just sitting there,
00:44:01 waiting to be utilized. My favorite is globe N. You know, Safari's got a ton of them,
00:44:05 but I mostly just use the spacebar to scroll because I'm lazy.
00:44:08 Does it have the thing that I love so much about the BlackBerrys, which is that if you're on the
00:44:12 home screen, and you just start typing, something happens? So on iOS, you have to do, you have to
00:44:17 invoke spotlight like you would on a MacBook. So you do command space, and then you pop up. So
00:44:21 Craig Federighi, if you're listening, and I know that you are, just get rid of that. Just let me
00:44:26 start typing, and it should pop up the spotlight. Right. Do you remember that on the BlackBerry?
00:44:31 It was the best. It was the best. You're like, "I want to go to my calendar. I'm just going to
00:44:34 pull my phone out of my pocket and hit C-A-L, and it's going to take me to my calendar." But I think,
00:44:37 I mean, that comes back to kind of the question about, you know, all the other affordances we've
00:44:42 made for the ways that people use phones now, right? Like, I think the swipe typing is an
00:44:45 interesting one. And my sense is that has kind of come and gone. And just purely anecdotally,
00:44:50 everybody I know who uses Android knows about the swipe typing and uses it, especially when you're
00:44:55 using your phone with one hand. No one I know who uses an iPhone even knows that that's a thing you
00:44:59 can do. And like, the spacebar trick to move the cursor is my favorite party trick, because no one
00:45:05 knows that's a thing. And you show them, and it just blows their mind to pieces. But that's the
00:45:09 kind of stuff that all of these companies have spent this much time working on because they
00:45:13 didn't have physical keyboards. And in a funny way, they're trying to solve for the problems
00:45:17 of physical keyboards. But also, like, once you got rid of them, you had to figure out a better
00:45:22 way to move a cursor because you didn't have arrow buttons anymore. And like, you know,
00:45:24 what's great is arrow buttons. But now we've sort of come past that. And so now you have to go back
00:45:29 and say, okay, we have a physical keyboard. How do we make it do some touchscreen things?
00:45:34 Yes.
00:45:34 Which is an interesting challenge.
00:45:36 If you're utterly insane, how do we make an individual tiny touchscreen behind every button?
00:45:41 Which is what I want to do. I want you remember the Samsung alias?
00:45:45 I do. Yeah.
00:45:45 Yes. One of those. Let's put an E Ink screen behind it. Let's put an OLED behind every one
00:45:50 of these. Let's make a $500 clicks and see if anybody buys it. It'll be great.
00:45:54 That's the full lunacy keyboard thing that I'm very excited for.
00:45:59 I'm going to make that and then I'm going to retire and move to Mexico.
00:46:02 Why start on the iPhone, by the way, as opposed to starting with, you know, Galaxy phones or
00:46:06 Pixel phones or trying to do something that is sort of universally Android? Like, I've been
00:46:10 spending some time with the Backbone folks, and they've been doing some really interesting work
00:46:13 to try to figure out how do we make one thing that works for everybody. And I can imagine,
00:46:17 you know, if you build something that works for everybody, huge increase in the total
00:46:21 available market. But also, if you build something for Android, you are more likely to hit the sort
00:46:26 of phone nerd people who care about this stuff the way that you and I do. Why not start there?
00:46:31 It's really about numbers. You know, honestly, the total addressable market of iPhone users
00:46:36 is something like 1.3 billion. And we know that clicks is not for everybody. It's always fun when
00:46:42 somebody offers up some wisdom to me on social media, like, "Well, you know, this is... No one's
00:46:47 going to buy this." I'm like, "Okay, if one in 1,000 people buy it, and you're targeting a base
00:46:52 of, like, of iPhone users, like, just from a sheer numbers perspective, it's... I have preferred
00:46:56 Android for a long time. Partially because of the hardware diversity of that ecosystem, right?
00:47:01 So I want to build one eventually. But again, you got to work in stages, as you well know. You have
00:47:06 to start, build a great product, build a healthy business on the back of that, and then you can do
00:47:11 other things. To your other question about, like, why not make a one-size-fits-all one,
00:47:15 definitely considered that. I mean, we got close to announcing that. It'll probably come in the
00:47:20 future. There were just too many compromises. It doesn't look as good. You can't get as many
00:47:26 cool certifications when it's not built for a very specific type of iPhone, right?
00:47:30 Sure.
00:47:31 And I hate to keep harping on the aesthetics, but we really wanted to ship something that wasn't
00:47:35 this kind of kludgy... I won't name-drop any previous efforts, but, like, you know, something
00:47:39 that just doesn't look very good, doesn't feel like it was purpose-built for the phone you spent,
00:47:44 what, $1,100 on. So let's say, you know, launch goes well, everything comes out over the next
00:47:50 few months. What's next for Kliqs? Like, I know I've seen you're going to do... your plan is to
00:47:54 do more colors and do drops and that kind of stuff. But I also feel like the thing that I've
00:47:58 learned about hardware startups over the years is that getting the first one out the door is
00:48:02 borderline impossible. It's a huge amount of work. You have to talk to a bunch of manufacturers and
00:48:06 companies that don't know you and don't care about you. But then if you can do the thing,
00:48:12 prove you can do it, prove you're serious, like, the world kind of opens up to you a little bit.
00:48:16 And you strike me as somebody who has some pretty wild ideas about where all of this could go.
00:48:21 Do you feel like there is tons of runway left in, like, the footprint of a keyboard? Do you
00:48:26 have big ideas about other stuff you want to add in? Like, tease the future a little bit for me.
00:48:30 This is not true what I'm about to say.
00:48:33 Perfect.
00:48:37 But to an extent, you know, I almost wish the beginning portion was as harrowing as you
00:48:44 described. But because we have so many people in the right places, we don't have as many of
00:48:49 those problems as we might otherwise. So we've had to think ahead of time, ahead of when I would
00:48:54 prefer to think about these larger conceptual questions, these vision questions of, like,
00:48:59 at some point you have to ask yourself, well, what are we going to do? Like you just said,
00:49:02 are we just going to own buttons on mobile phones? Or are we going to be the kind of company that
00:49:07 asks, well, what else can click? Look, I have giant, crazy, dumb ideas in the latter category,
00:49:15 and we have a very solid opportunity to make a pretty good business in the former category. But
00:49:20 I'll be honest with you, it's not clear which direction we will go, because we still do have
00:49:25 to focus on getting, you know, we've shipped Founders Edition. That's thousands of units,
00:49:29 but it's not the main production run. So we're going to take the time that we have right now
00:49:34 to deliver the best possible Gen 1 product to all the people who want to buy them, and then
00:49:39 we'll have a better answer for you this time next year.
00:49:41 That's a very good and very diplomatic answer.
00:49:43 Thank you.
00:49:44 And I appreciate that. That is someone who has been in a company for a while,
00:49:48 and I'm proud of you for that.
00:49:49 Thanks, man.
00:49:50 Okay, so I won't ask you to tell me the future. Give me one huge, wild idea that there's absolutely
00:49:55 no chance you're ever going to build, because it's impossible for one reason or another.
00:49:59 You remember, there was an old Kyocera that ran Palm OS, didn't even have a color screen,
00:50:02 we're talking 2001, I think it was a 71 something, and it had a touch screen,
00:50:08 but it had a stowaway detachable numeric keypad that attached via a hinge on the bottom,
00:50:13 and if you didn't want to take it all the way off, you could flip it around back so it would
00:50:16 get out of the way.
00:50:17 This is a very 2001 device you're describing. I love it.
00:50:20 Thank you. That's all I'm here to do is bring back the path.
00:50:22 I want to make one of those for the Galaxy Flip 5 or the Razr. I want to make a Klix that flips
00:50:27 around back and then flips up forward and overlaps the screen and gives you a physical QWERTY
00:50:32 keyboard that you can then flip away and put around back. It would sell at least 127 units,
00:50:38 119 would probably fail, we will never build it, but I would like to build it.
00:50:42 Why not have more mechanisms?
00:50:44 That's right.
00:50:45 It's just like, what if instead of a hinge, we had several hinges?
00:50:47 Exactly. How many parts can you make move? How many points of failure
00:50:51 can you introduce into this product?
00:50:53 Well, Michael, thank you. This is incredibly fun. I really appreciate it.
00:50:56 This was a great time. Thank you, David.
00:50:59 All right, we got to take a break and we'll be right back with a question from the Vergecast
00:51:02 hotline. Be right back.
00:51:04 All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11 and the
00:51:18 email is vergecast@theverge.com. Send us all your questions, all your thoughts, all your feelings,
00:51:22 and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. First of all, again, thank you to
00:51:26 everybody who's calling in about TikTok and the Apple antitrust stuff. We're going to get back to
00:51:30 both of those a bunch in the next few weeks. So keep calling. Tell us everything you think we got
00:51:35 right. Tell us everything you think we got wrong. Tell us all of your feelings about all of it.
00:51:38 We want to hear everything. For now, we have a question from Michael.
00:51:42 This is Michael from Madison. So my parents are getting older and I'm looking to record
00:51:48 them sharing family stories so we have them for next generations. And I was looking for
00:51:55 advice on what to buy microphone-wise to record my parents talking like Ken Burns style,
00:52:01 like a cute couple. Any advice on what to do would be great. Thanks.
00:52:05 All right, first of all, I believe strongly that everyone should make Ken Burns documentaries about
00:52:09 their family. This is an extremely good idea. Second of all, Andrew Marino is here to help me
00:52:13 answer this question. Andrew, so much of you on the show today. This makes me very happy.
00:52:16 I know. What's up?
00:52:17 You have come prepared with what I assume is just a large slew of microphones.
00:52:22 This question gets more complicated the longer I think about it, which is why I'm very glad you're
00:52:26 here. So take us through it. What are your thoughts on this?
00:52:29 Okay. So I'm not sure what Michael is actually using to record. So I have a couple options
00:52:34 that will give a hybrid of options you can use. Right now, I'm actually using one of the
00:52:40 microphones, the Rode Wireless Me. Rode has like a slew of wireless microphones now that you could
00:52:48 just plug into your phone or plug into a camera or into an audio recorder. They are super easy to use.
00:52:55 They look a little square. You just kind of, oh, a big square.
00:52:59 It's a big square.
00:53:00 You clip onto your lapel.
00:53:02 These are the ones that have like the receiver you plug into your phone or computer or whatever,
00:53:07 and then the actual mic is what you put on whoever you're talking to, right? And then
00:53:11 they automatically connect to each other.
00:53:13 Yeah, exactly. So what I do a lot is I'll plug the receiver into my phone and I'll record a
00:53:20 voice memo or with Rode's recorder app or like take a video and it will take the audio from the
00:53:26 Rode Wireless for the audio input. That's a great option because it's very versatile if you want to
00:53:33 make video, if you want to be walking around, if your parents are like cooking dinner,
00:53:38 like moving around and all that.
00:53:40 Yeah, that's good.
00:53:41 The other one I have is the ATR2100X USB mic from Audio-Technica.
00:53:49 What I like about it is it's a USB microphone that's also an XLR microphone.
00:53:54 So if you want to plug into your laptop, into your tablet, into your phone, you can use this
00:54:00 microphone, but also you can just use it into any mobile audio recorder that has an XLR input or
00:54:05 your audio interface or anything. That's a great option. We send these mics to everyone on staff
00:54:11 for the Verge cast.
00:54:12 Yeah, this is the mic that I tell people, like if you don't want to spend
00:54:15 several hundred dollars on a pro podcasting mic, but you want 90% of the quality, I make people
00:54:21 buy this mic. Like I have recommended this mic to so many people who want to do podcasts.
00:54:26 Yeah, and they're very cheap. Right now I'm looking on B&H and it's $49.
00:54:31 Oh, wow.
00:54:32 Which is-
00:54:33 That's a really good deal.
00:54:34 Half the price of what they usually are.
00:54:36 Yeah, this thing is a good deal at $100, much less at $50. Okay.
00:54:40 I should also mention that the Rode Wireless packs range from $200 to $300,
00:54:45 depending what version you want to get. Those are a little more expensive.
00:54:49 So here's my question for you on this one, though. I feel like there's a version of this that is like
00:54:53 sit with your two parents, right? That's what you want to do. You want to have them sit on a couch
00:54:57 and talk to each other. Do you give them each a mic and plug it into a recorder or do you like
00:55:02 set the mic on a table and kind of point it between them?
00:55:05 Oh, that's a good question. So I actually did this with my friends recently. I interviewed
00:55:09 them at their kitchen table and I had two of the microphones, one for each person.
00:55:14 That's the ideal situation. That's like, I want the best recording. You can totally
00:55:19 just put table and have them talk into both of them, like a little press conference thing.
00:55:24 But since they're so cheap, like it's worth getting two,
00:55:28 maybe one for you, one for your guest kind of thing too.
00:55:32 Yeah. I mean, a hundred bucks, plug these two things into your computer. They each come with,
00:55:38 if memory serves, like a really crappy, but kind of useful little stand. So you could be kind of
00:55:43 all in for a hundred dollars on this project and have pretty solid audio.
00:55:47 Yeah. That's actually another reason why I recommend it is it comes with a stand.
00:55:51 It's not a good stand, but it is a stand and that counts for something.
00:55:54 All right. You said you had one more, right? What's the third option?
00:55:57 Okay. So this is the Sennheiser MKE 600. Right now it goes for about $350.
00:56:06 This is more of a professional microphone. I use this a lot for podcasting, field recordings,
00:56:12 or maybe I'm over someone's house and I'm interviewing them. I love the crispness of
00:56:18 this microphone. How do you think it sounds? It sounds really good. I can only see a little
00:56:23 bit of it on your screen, but this looks like a kind of proper shotgun mic.
00:56:28 Yes, exactly.
00:56:29 That like, this is the kind of thing that you stick on a boom arm and hold over somebody's head
00:56:33 on a film shoot. Like that's, this is a much more professional thing than either of the other two,
00:56:37 it seems.
00:56:37 Yeah. This is a great one for like indie filmmakers, even if you want to just put it
00:56:42 on top of the camera, but I love it just on a stand on a desk pointing right in front of the
00:56:48 person's mouth. It has just like a very detailed sound. If you want the Ken Burns documentary
00:56:54 style, then this is a great choice and it's affordable among the more professional microphones.
00:57:00 Yeah. The microphone world, especially in this realm of these like shotgun boom mics can get
00:57:06 really expensive really fast, but there's definitely, especially for our purposes here,
00:57:10 you hit the kind of diminishing returns plateau pretty fast. Like just hearing you now, this
00:57:15 sounds really good. I don't know that you would necessarily for like human archival purposes,
00:57:19 want something notably better than this.
00:57:22 Yeah, I think so. And this is just an XLR microphone, by the way. So you would need
00:57:27 either an audio interface or an audio recorder that has an XLR input, which is why I offer the
00:57:32 others.
00:57:33 Wait, I want you to do one test for me here really quickly though.
00:57:36 Yeah.
00:57:36 Just move around a little while you talk. Tell me, sorry, because this is the problem
00:57:40 with these shotgun mics, right? Is you have to be like sort of perfectly in front of it. And it
00:57:44 sounds amazing, but if you move, sometimes they get weird.
00:57:46 Yeah. So I'm talking to the left of it right now, which is off axis a little bit. You're
00:57:51 going to hear less of the clarity. I'm going back to the center and I'm going to the right,
00:57:56 go a little further back.
00:57:57 Okay.
00:57:58 Usually when they have this shotgun mic, you can go pretty far back because it can
00:58:02 catch your voice pretty far away.
00:58:05 Yeah. When you go back, you get quieter, but you're still very clear. But as soon as you
00:58:09 get off axis, like it starts veering into like I'm on AirPods kind of vibes that I'm listening to.
00:58:15 Yeah. So if you're interviewing two people, you're going to have to have them either switch
00:58:20 off between the microphone or you're going to have to boom it like a professional and move it around.
00:58:25 Yeah. It's always like you see the field producers for podcasts and whatever, and like half the job
00:58:31 is to just sort of shove the microphone in the face of whoever's talking.
00:58:34 Yeah.
00:58:34 And it sounds amazing, but it's a process. I'm torn between all of these. Actually,
00:58:39 this is a really funny three. As soon as you said the audio technical one, I was like, "Oh,
00:58:43 that's obviously going to be the answer." But I feel like the lapel mic is really useful for
00:58:48 somebody who is not used to talking into a mic in a way that it's just like it just sort of goes
00:58:52 with your body for somebody who is like moving around and isn't always focused on mic technique.
00:58:57 Having it just sort of live close to your mouth is always really useful. Then the audio technical
00:59:02 one is kind of a useful middle ground for not a lot of money. And then this one is clearly the
00:59:06 best sounding. Like it's actually notably better sounding than either of the other two, which I
00:59:09 didn't really expect to be the case.
00:59:11 Yeah. And you can keep going up. You can go to $10,000 if you want to get the best microphone.
00:59:16 But really like these ones are like very flexible in different environments. And that's why I chose
00:59:20 these.
00:59:21 Awesome. Well, Michael, I hope that helps. Please let us know which one you decide. And
00:59:26 we would love to hear the documentary when it's done. Andrew, thank you as always. That was
00:59:30 awesome.
00:59:30 No problem.
00:59:31 All right. That's it for The Verge cast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show. And
00:59:36 thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, including
00:59:39 that awesome video from our video team about noise cancellation, all this stuff about clicks.
00:59:44 We'll put it all in the show notes on theverge.com. But you know, read theverge.com.
00:59:48 It's a newsy time. There's a lot going on. Check it out. And as always, if you have thoughts,
00:59:53 feelings, questions, or other keyboards you want to see brought back to life, you can always email
00:59:58 us vergecasts@theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We want to hear everything from
01:00:03 you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Verge Cast is a
01:00:07 Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neal, I, Alex, and I will be back on
01:00:11 Friday to talk about probably more antitrust stuff, more TikTok stuff, and everything else going on
01:00:16 in tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.
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