In the past few weeks, we’ve seen hardware announcements from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. In them, there’s been a lot of emphasis on gadgets and services for the home. (Like Amazon's crazy indoor security drone.) But it all raises the question—why do these tech companies want to be literally hovering in your house? In some ways they’re using the pandemic as part of their marketing: We’re all home, so use this tech! But it’s also another way, of course, to learn more about you as a “user” as you share more of your personal data.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior associate editor Julian Chokkattu comes on the show to talk about Google's latest announcements and how they stack up with the other tech companies that want to live in your house.
See everything Google announced at its hardware event here and more about Pixel phones here. Read more about Amazon’s home drone here.
Julian recommends building your own PC. Lauren recommends Apple TV+.
Julian Chokkattu can be found on Twitter @JulianChokkattu. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Lauren Goode: Julian.
Julian Chokkattu: Lauren.
LG: Julian, if Google makes gobs of money off of advertising, why does it bother making phones?
JC: It wants to be Apple?
LG: That's a good one. Wait, should I Google that? Does Google want to be Apple? All right. We're going to talk about that on the show this week.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music]
LG: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED. My usual cohost, Michael Calore, is out this week. Hopefully he's getting some rest and relaxation, but luckily we have WIRED senior associate editor, Julian Chokkattu, to fill his place. I said that this was going to become the Julian show at some point. I feel even more emboldened by this statement now. Hey Julian, thanks for joining me.
JC: Hello. Happy to be here.
LG: So Julian, we talk about tech events a lot on this show. Although, of course in 2020, they've changed and we're no longer traveling to report on the ground. We're reporting in our jammies, but for the past three weeks, we've seen hardware announcements from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and there's been a lot of emphasis on gadgets and services for the home. I think maybe the most noteworthy example is Amazon's flying home security drone, which we're going to talk about. But this all raises the question, right, of why do these tech companies want to literally be hovering in our homes? In some ways they're using the pandemic as part of their marketing, right? "We're all home so you need this tech," but it's also another way, of course, to learn more about us as "users." Yes. I just watched The Social Dilemma, we're all users, as you share more and more of your personal data with these companies. So let's talk about Google first, because that was just this past Wednesday. Julian, what were some of the announcements that stood out to you?
JC: The two big ones, of course, is that everyone usually tunes into Google for are its Pixel phones, and this time they are doing something a little different. Instead of a Pixel and a Pixel XL version, this year we got a Pixel 4A 5G and a Pixel 5. So if you haven't been keeping up with Pixel phones, there was a Pixel 4A that they announced in August, which usually would have happened in May. Basically everything got pushed around and so it kind of threw their entire product line into a wrench, and now we're stuck with a slightly different version of that Pixel 4A that came out in August and the new next generation Pixel 5. But it's all kind of weird and confusing because the Pixel 4A 5G is kind of similar to the Pixel 5. Anyway, all in all the most interesting tidbit out of that is that Google is not using the big flagship processor for the Pixel 5.
It's using a Snapdragon 765 chip set, which is kind of a mid-range chip, and this is sort of signaling that, "Hey, we're not going to make flagship $1,000 phones anymore, or at least not this year. We're going to make a more affordable phone." This phone is indeed a little cheaper than last year's Pixel 4. It starts at $699. So it's about a $100 less. So that was the big Pixel phone announcement. It's a pretty, I'd say, bare bones phone in terms of the feature set that it has. There are a couple of new software features, some improvements to the camera software, but otherwise nothing too crazy or nothing that rocks the boat, unlike many of the other phones we saw this year.
LG: Yeah. It's perhaps unsurprising both that the cameras might be some of the best elements of these phones because Pixel phones do have reputations for having fantastic cameras, and also that Google got a little weird with its naming convention. I mean, these phones are actually like the Pixel 4A 5G and the Pixel 5 5G. They just didn't want to call the Pixel 5 5G. Right?
JC: I mean, they could have done Pixel 5G, but I feel like that also would have been very confusing.
LG: Well, is it that all Pixel 5s are 5G phones?
JC: Yes. So that's the other big thing, I guess. 5G is a thing. These are the first Pixel phones with 5G. 5G is the next gen networking technology that's following 4G LTE. But the problem is as many of the Android phones that are coming out these days that have 5G support, it doesn't really matter yet because chances are you probably can't access 5G anywhere in the U.S. I mean, there are slivers of tiny pockets of cities where you can go outside with your phone and you might be able to connect to 5G. Sometimes it will give you definitely a lot faster speeds than 4G LTE, but for the most part, most people aren't going to be using 5G constantly the way they are using 4G LTE for maybe another year or two, I'd say. Maybe even more than that.
LG: There were two other gadgets from Google announced this week. One is a smart speaker, the other is something for your TV. Talk about it please.
JC: Yeah. So the Chromecast with Google TV. This one's, I think, the more interesting one of the lot, because they had ... Google has this thing called Android TV. It bundles it to TVs that other manufacturers make and sell, and that's just sort of a software interface for TVs. The Chromecast, as a lot of people might know as this cheap dongle that you just plug into your smart or dumb TV, and it just gives you the ability to cast content from your phone straight to the TV so you can just cast the Netflix video, no need to use a remote or anything like that. Now it's bringing that Android TV layer, which it's now rebranding ... I should say, re-rebranding because it originally was called Google TV.
LG: Oh, yeah. Back in like 2010.
JC: Yeah. Then they changed it to Android TV, and now it's Google TV again. So they're actually going to phase out Android TV over the next two years and completely just change it over to Google TV. I feel like every year they just hire someone new and it's like, "I want to change it back." They just got to get it together. So basically it's Google TV and you get an interface much like a Fire Stick or a Roku and you have a remote. So you can actually use that remote to talk to an Assistant and control certain things, or you can also still cast content from your phone if you want to do it that way. I think it's around 50 bucks and you can buy it right now.
The other thing was the Nest Audio speaker. It's kind of replacing the original Google Home that came out basically. Kind of looks like the Google Home Max that they announced a few years ago, but it's a lot smaller and it's just a smart speaker that does what all other smart speakers do. It plays music pretty well, and it lets you talk to Google Assistant and ask for the weather and all sorts of things like that.
LG: Julian, the Google Assistant is something that I think ties a lot of these products together and I think it's in literally every single one of the products that they announced earlier this week, but we didn't hear about too many updates to Assistant this week. I remember back at IO a couple of years ago, the stuff that Google was showing off with regards to its artificial intelligence was mind blowing, right? It's going to make a reservation for you. Then last year we heard about how it's going to effectively block spam calls for you and do all this crazy stuff. There's a little bit of that this week, but not a whole lot.
JC: Yeah. I mean, if you go back to last year's announcement, Pixel 4, it was basically the announcement of that next gen Google Assistant, which was going to be a lot faster responding to you. Fast forward a year later and I feel like they didn't even touch about that. They didn't talk about anything related to that. It really boiled down to one of the bigger announcements with Assistant related stuff was Hold For Me, which is a new feature in the Pixel phones specifically. It basically allows you to use Google Assistant to be on the call while someone puts you on hold so you don't need to listen to that elevator music anymore. You can just sort of put the phone down, Assistant will sort of be in your place, and then when the person on the other end comes back, it'll give you a ping or something, alerting you to the fact that, "Hey, you should pick up your phone now."
But as exciting and as cool as that sounds, because who wants to listen to the same song over and over again for two hours, that seems kind of small compared to stuff that we've seen in past years. It just is a very weird difference from last year where it was Assistant everywhere to this year where it felt more like they were focusing a little more on the products rather than the software side of things. Lauren, you've also been to so many Pixel events. What do you think that they should have announced? Or did you have something in mind that you really wanted to see that they haven't asked before or something you think that they should look at? Is there something that you missed here?
LG: Yeah. To me, I'm always keeping an ear out for what companies don't talk about at their events. Because I think that tends to say a lot. In this case, I was listening to see if Google would say anything about wearables. They didn't. You might remember that Google acquired Fitbit about a year ago, but that's been undergoing some pretty intense regulatory scrutiny. So at the time of this taping, the deal had not been approved and it feels like Google's and a bit of a holding pattern with consumer wearables while it figures out the Fitbit deal. Google will say, "Well, we have headphones and so that's wearable," which is true, but I mean, in terms of something that goes on the wrist or as a health tracker or competes directly with Apple watch, they haven't really said anything about that. They didn't say anything, of course, when they announced Nest Audio about the Sonos lawsuit that's ongoing. Sonos alleges that Google has infringed on its patents for wireless audio.
Google also didn't mention anything related to laptops or two in ones, which is kind of a surprise, Julian, because you probably remember then in recent years, they've put out Pixel books and Pixel slates and things like that. We haven't heard anything about that. But I think in general, we're kind of at the point with these tech product releases that even small things, they can be a big deal, right? I mean, all these products are internet connected. They're processing your data in some way, they connect to the cloud and they kind of underpin the business models of these companies that are being scrutinized really closely right now. So even small products you have to think about in the context of who it is that they're really serving.
JC: Yeah. I'd say they're not as playful as in recent years, especially when it comes to their phones. You you look at them and they're perfectly fine, solid, probably going to be our top picks just like the previous Pixels, but they're not weird or quirky, or even the colors aren't bright or flashy like they used to be. So definitely an understated year.
LG: Not a very Google-ly event, all things considered. All right, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about the drone that wants to fly inside your home.
[Break]
LG: All right, we're back, and since we took a break, approximately seven more smart speakers have launched into the market. But really, before the Google event this week, there was last week's Amazon hardware event. Now, Amazon for the past few years has done this kind of rapid fire deluge of hardware products each fall and its strategy is a little bit similar to Google's, right? It wants to be inside your home in every element of your life. Julian, give us a quick rundown of what Amazon announced at its event last week.
JC: Yeah. I mean, it was the usual barrage of new Echo speakers. There's one with a screen now that sort of rotates to wherever you're facing in the room. There's a Ring car alarm. There's an Eero Wifi 6 router, and also there was a surprise announcement of a game streaming service called Luna. it's very much like Google Stadia or Microsoft xCloud, which basically lets you ... with a high-speed internet connection, you can stream games from the cloud to your TV phone browser just about anywhere. It's basically Amazon diving into games more. They have their own game studio. They came out with a game recently and they're developing many more games, and of course, they own Twitch. So this is a natural way to get all the millions of people that watch Twitch streams of other people playing games integrated into this game streaming service as well.
LG: We have to talk about the drone. Now, the drone is part of Amazon's Ring brand. Amazon acquired Ring. Ring is known for its home security cameras. It's a popular home security camera. Also a little bit controversial because Amazon has forged these partnerships with hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country to share the video if customers agree or opt in to have their video clips shared with, say, the local police. So some civil rights advocates and other organizations and even lawmakers have said that Amazon should stop this practice, but they continue. In the meantime, Amazon continues to ship products under the Ring brand and this new drone is one of those. So it's called the ... what is it? It's the Always On Cam and it's-
JC: I think it's called the Always Home Cam.
LG: Always Home Cam. Not "always on" because that would be even creepier. So it's docked in your home and when it's docked, there is a camera, but the camera is covered by the dock and then you can program it so that if there's movement or some kind of activity in another room of the home, the drone just kind of rises up out of its dock and flies to that part of your home and starts recording the incident, which in my conversation with Amazon hardware executive, Dave Limp, he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "But it could record something as benign as a raccoon that's gotten in your house," which one of our editors actually had that happen in her house this week. I was like, "that doesn't happen, does it?"
But then it actually happened. Or it could be something more serious, such as an intruder in your home. Naturally, and perhaps then surprisingly, people reacted pretty strongly to this drone, myself included. My initial thought was, "Nope, don't want a drone flying around the house." But Julian, what did you think of it?
JC: Yeah. I mean, it's sort of ... I understand some of the benefits. I saw someone on Twitter saying, "What if you have old people in the home and you want to use something remotely to take care of them without having to configure a bunch of cameras and things like that?" Sure, makes sense, I guess I just. They kind of have even touted this feature that like, "Hey, it makes the sound so you know that it's coming." So you can, I guess, be prepared to have this flying thing coming into your room, but that freaks me out even more. I just don't want to walk around or I'm just hanging out and suddenly this super loud buzzing sound like a murder hornet comes flying around in my home. That just would freak me out. Not to mention people have pets and this thing is either going to freak your dog out or your cat's going to destroy it in five seconds.
LG: How would your dog feel about this?
JC: He would probably bark like crazy and then bark even more and then go hide under the bed.
LG: Amazon would probably make the argument that that's the desired intention. You'll know if someone's in the house because the dog is going to be barking at the drone, which is then going to be flying out of your bedroom into the living room or wherever it is. Imagine if you have teenagers who aren't coming downstairs for dinner and it's like you just send the drone, it just hovers over them while they're making TikToks or something. It's like, "You have to come down to dinner." I don't know. There's just so many weird ... It's a drone in your house. It's a drone inside your house that you have allowed into your home and you've programmed to do the thing that it's going to do. Amazon is saying that it's private because because its rotors make noise and because also when it's docked, the dock happens to block the camera. That's not privacy-first design. That's just the way the thing works. But they're like, "Don't worry. Those are the privacy features." Wow, Amazon.
JC: I mean, that's a good point. At the end of the day, they can say that their clouds are secure and all that, but it's still an internet connected product and there have been a lot of Ring breaches before. So you can imagine even being more terrified of having this moving camera in your home that has ... nothing is perfect. This thing could very well be hacked and someone could control the drone in your house.
LG: Yes. Yeah. Just the other day my Apple TV suddenly went on for no reason. I mean, I didn't turn it on and then a passcode appeared. So the only thing I could think of is that a neighbor who lives close enough was trying to cast from an iDevice to my Apple TV, picked up on the wireless network somehow and was trying to cast my TV. I was like, "Now, imagine if that happened, but instead of just your Apple TV turning on, it was a noisy drone flying around your living room." What the actual ... Now, I should say that initially I asked Amazon about the Ring partnership and whether or not this Always Home drone camera, if the Ring partnership with law enforcement would extend to that camera. They initially said yes and then later on came back and emailed and said, "Actually, no, the drone is not going to be a part of that partnership program."
So as I understand it right now, or whenever it launches later this year, you will not have the option as a consumer to share those videos with law enforcement. Amazon also said that now all Ring videos will be end to end encrypted by the fourth quarter of this year. So they are starting to take steps to make the footage that's captured on the Ring camera more private and more secure, which is good. It's been a long time coming and that's a good thing. But I think a lot of people are going to buy this drone as a novelty, just to see what it's like. But I just have a hard time thinking that this would be a real value add to your home.
JC: It's also $200 or $250 or something like that. It's expensive. So it's not even a relatively affordable thing at Amazon, which is usually what it offers.
LG: Right, and part of their reasoning for making it was ... well. For some people, if you want a Ring camera or some kind of security camera at home that you would normally put in your window sill or outside or wherever it is, and maybe you want one in every room, but you can't afford to buy a $200 camera for every single room of your home, so instead you use the flying drone. That still doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I would still say probably just get a couple extra cameras if you can, and just use those. Yeah. OK. So drone aside, which is a nice little slice of our dystopian future, what stands out to me, particularly when you look at the Google events and the Amazon events back to back, is how much it feels like their hardware strategies are starting to merge a little bit.
I'm wondering if you agree with this because when Google first announced the Pixel line, it had done the nexus phones, which were sort of cheaper, mid-range phones. Then it said it was doing the Pixel and then it made the Pixel really nice for a couple of years and was charging $800 for it. The question was whether they were going to be able to compete with Apple in hardware. Now it seems like Google is scaling back a little bit and really going for either the middle of the market or even the low end of the market. I mean the Chromecast, for example, it's still not as inexpensive as an Amazon Fire Stick or some of the Roku products, but it's only 50 bucks and it has a remote. Rick Osterloh from Google said, "We don't think the world needs another $1,000 phone right now." So I think Google is very clearly sort of putting its stake in the mid range market for phones.
JC: Yeah. I think they're being a little smart about it because I think usually what people have always said hysterically about Pixel funds is that they're overpriced because if you compare it to a Samsung, which is ... you can compare the specs to a fine degree and they're almost always way better on the Samsung, even though at the end of the day they're both good phones. But Samsung pushes all this new hardware versus Google, sort of settles down then and maybe it doesn't include the best wifi chip or something like that, but it priced them very similarly to other flagships. But now I think this price point is a lot more stomachable for a lot more people. It just kind of just make sense with what they're offering. But also I've thought of Google hardware as sort of a reference for what everyone else does because I think Google's intention is still very similar to its Nexus days in that it wants to produce something good that people can buy and use.
But this is also pushing software that they're providing for so many thousands of other companies, whether it's a TV maker that's using the new Google TV or other Android makers that want to do their own thing. This is the software that's powering it all and I think this is a good way of Google saying, "Here's what you can do with Android 11," or, "Here's what you can do with Google TV." Then these other companies can sort of take it, add layers over it and improve it or do their own thing and improve it in some way.
LG: Right. Amazon and Google have slightly different end goals, right? Which is that Amazon wants you to shop and buy more things and it wants to use the data that it has to get you to shop more and buy more things. Google sells ads, as we mentioned at the very top of the show, but they're both using low cost hardware as sort of delivery mechanisms for your data in order to accomplish those goals.
JC: Yeah. Compared to Apple who prides itself on not sharing your data at all, so it justifies the higher price for being able to secure your data in that way.
LG: Right. All right. Julian, one last question for you. Of all of the products that we've seen announced in the past few weeks, and you had to choose one product from each company, so that would be Apple, Amazon, Google, and then Microsoft, which we didn't really get to talk about much, but Microsoft put out the weird Duo recently, which of these would you choose?
JC: Well from Google, I'd probably pick the ... Well, I actually did just by the Chromecast because I've used a Chromecast all my life and I feel like this would be cool to experience Chromecast with a remote and actually have an interface on my TV. From Amazon, I feel like I'd want the drone just to see what it's like, but I probably would have regretted it immediately and would go for something like the game streaming service, just because that's an interesting field that's kind of growing lately. Then from Microsoft, probably the Surface Duo. I didn't rate it too highly and I feel like it had a lot of issues, but they're promising to improve it. I just really liked Microsoft's approach there and I think I really liked the hardware. I just wish it wasn't as buggy. I guess from Apple, I'd probably pick the iPad Air because that thing looks amazing.
LG: Oh, these are good choices. OK.
JC: What about you? What would you pick?
LG: OK. From Google, I agree with you on the Chromecast. would definitely get the Chromecast, primarily because it now has remote and I wish that I could use the Google Chromecast remote on my Apple TV, if that was possible, and just throw the Apple TV remote out the window. From Amazon, they didn't talk about this at the hardware event, but a couple of weeks before, they announced the super-weird wearable called the Halo band. I'm intrigued enough by that, that I would probably try that. Apple, I think I would try the Fitness+ service when that launches so not a piece of hardware, but a service because I, I don't know, like digital fitness stuff and I think that would be fun to try out and see if it's really a Peloton killer.
Then Microsoft, I'm going to agree with you on that too. I would go with the Duo. Now, I wouldn't actually buy the Duo. I wouldn't actually spend $1,400 on it, but I have this vision of owning the Duo and then someday many years from now, my grandkids will be going through my gadget library and they'll be like, "What's this, Grandma? I'll be like, "Well, kids, back in the pandemic of 2020, Microsoft put out a phone, but it's not a phone. Don't call it a phone. That's this bizarre oddity, a dual screen device with a giant hinge down the middle, running Android and charged people $1,400 for it. And that was innovation in 2020." It just think it'd be hilarious. This is just a weird thing that I want to try. So yeah, those are my choices. So those are the things that we would buy, but we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to do recommendations of what we actually do own or are going to buy or ... just stayed tuned.
[Break]
LG: All right. Julian, what's your actual recommendation this week?
JC: It's kind of hard to ... it's basically building a PC, which is kind of a statement more than a product or something to recommend. There is no one component I can say that you should get. We do have a recommendation on WIRED.com of what components that you might want to look into if you want to get started building your own PC. But I recently built one for my girlfriend because she was using a laptop. She was having back pains and muscle pain because she was just basically craning her neck down all the time, staring at this little thing that wasn't very powerful. Me sitting with my giant desktop PC right next to her, I was like, "You know what? I should build her a PC too."
LG: Aw, that's love.
JC: So I built her a PC and she definitely now has a dual monitor setup because it can empower that kind of thing and it just basically ... it was a lot of fun building it. It was kind of cathartic and relaxing and it was just very nice overall. But I also understand that's not going to be the case for you because it can also feel very overwhelming and scary because these are computer components that can totally fry and burn if you do the wrong thing. Sorry, I hope I didn't scare you away, but basically just watch a video on YouTube or something. Read our guide and get into some PC building. It's fun.
LG: I love that recommendation.
JC: What about you? What are you recommending?
LG: Well, remember a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about bundles and we were saying, "Curse the bundle!"
JC: Yes.
LG: Yes. Well, I have to admit something. So Apple TV+. It's a lot better than I expected.
JC: Oh no.
LG: It's very good. If you are one of those people like me who recently bought Apple hardware and as a result, you got free access to Apple TV+ because they're doing lots of promotions around it in the early days, then maybe check out the library if you are not going many places these days because of the pandemic and you're looking for things to watch. I'm also still watching Schitt's Creek, which I love, but I recommended that a couple of weeks ago. So yeah. All right. Well, Julian, thank you so much for joining me on this week's show. I think Mike, we miss him and everything, but this has been really fun.
JC: This has been fun. Thank you so much for having me on as a co-host.
LG: And thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. We'll put our Twitter handles in the show notes and feel free to leave us a review as well. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth, who is going to make sense of this episode and we are eternally grateful to him for that. Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman. goodbye for now, and we'll be back next week.
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