The Verge's Thomas Ricker joins the show with an update on his question to live the #vanlife. He shares stories about Starlink Mini, the new Peak Design backpack everyone loves, converting a Sprinter van to a mobile apartment, and more. Then, The Verge's Andru Marino takes us through his tests on a bunch of new creator- and social-friendly microphones, which plug into your phone and promise to make everything sound better. Finally, we answer a question about web browsers on the Vergecast Hotline.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the Verge cast, the flagship podcast of Van Toilets. I'm your friend David Pierce,
00:00:05and can I just complain about something just for one quick second? When did video games become
00:00:10homework? So it was just the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, which means I spent
00:00:14a few days mostly not in front of screens, playing games with my family and reading.
00:00:19It was also my kid's birthday, so we did a lot of birthday stuff. And then I come back and I
00:00:25turn on my Switch to play some FIFA or EA Sports FC, whatever you want to call it,
00:00:30and it's like, here's all the limited edition Black Friday stuff that you missed,
00:00:33and now everyone you play against is way ahead of you because they got all these cool
00:00:37upgrades and things that you didn't because you weren't on your console for 12 hours a day
00:00:42all weekend. I generally love that video games are more multiplayer than ever and are more sort
00:00:47of global than ever, and that there are lots of different modes and ways to compete, and you're
00:00:52kind of doing other things against real people all the time. But that comes now with this idea
00:00:57that you have to be in it all the time or risk being left behind. I get why the game companies
00:01:02do it. I hate it. I hate the feeling like I have to be in a Discord and I have to grind. People
00:01:08call it a grind now. Video games are not supposed to be a grind. I hate it. I'm going to keep doing
00:01:15it and I'm going to keep playing it because ultimately I like the game and the game is fun
00:01:18when you're good at it and it's less fun when you're bad at it, and that is what these companies
00:01:21know and it's how they get you. But it drives me nuts. Anyway, that is not what we're here to talk
00:01:27about today. We are here to do two things. We're back from Thanksgiving. We got lots to do. News is
00:01:32still happening. Lots to talk about. First, we're going to talk to Thomas Ricker, who is The Verge's,
00:01:37I guess, like unofficial van life correspondent. He is going to tell us about his adventures with
00:01:42new outdoor batteries. He's tested a backpack a lot of people are really interested in.
00:01:46He tested Starlink Mini, which I have lots of questions about. He's going to give us the
00:01:50rundown on all the new stuff for kind of outdoor adventurous living. Then we're going to talk to
00:01:55Andrew Marino about microphones. We've done a lot of these tests with Andrew and I'm actually
00:02:00really excited about this one. He's been testing some of the new creator mics, the DJI ones and
00:02:05the Rode ones, the ones that you can just kind of clip to a collar and connect to your phone or your
00:02:08camera that make it really easy to get good audio almost anywhere. He has some really fun takeaways
00:02:15and I'm going to quiz him and we're going to hear on some of how these actually sound.
00:02:20The answer, spoiler alert, is don't use that stupid one that everybody uses on TikTok,
00:02:24the like lapel mic that people just hold like this drives me nuts. As you're going to hear,
00:02:29it sounds awful. Don't use it. We also have a hotline about web browsers that I'm very excited
00:02:34about because, as you know, web browsers are near and dear to my heart. All of that is coming up in
00:02:38just a second. But first, even as I'm saying this, I realize I have to go play FIFA now because
00:02:43there's like some stuff I need to get and some XP I got to get in order to catch up.
00:02:48So I'm going to go finish that, get caught up, and then we're going to get into it.
00:02:51This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.
00:02:54Welcome back. All right. I have played some EA Sports FC. I've done my best. I still missed a
00:03:01bunch of stuff, but I'm slightly caught up. I am doing my best to not spend a lot of money inside
00:03:06of this game. So help me stay strong and we will aggressively lose to very good players together
00:03:12all the time. All right, let's get into it. First up, van life. Thomas Ricker was on the show a
00:03:17while ago to talk about some of the gear that he's been using on his adventures. Thomas is
00:03:22potentially the coolest person at the Verge. He's always like on a Friday afternoon, like,
00:03:27oh, I have to leave a few minutes early. I'm going kite surfing for the weekend or like,
00:03:32oh, I'm going to be out of touch for nine days because I'm glacier hiking or whatever. He is
00:03:38forever on adventures and is forever trying to find the right tech to take on his adventures.
00:03:43It's been a minute since we caught up with him, and he's also been reviewing a whole bunch of
00:03:47interesting stuff, whether it's power sources or batteries that go with those power sources, or
00:03:53he did a really fun review of some cooking gear on the site. He got a new Peak Design backpack
00:03:59people are excited about. So I figured we'd just have him on and run down some of what's new,
00:04:03what's made it into his setup, how he's feeling about his adventures, what works, what doesn't,
00:04:08where we can go next. And listen, I can't have his adventures. I'm not cool enough,
00:04:13but I can live vicariously through Thomas. So that's what we're going to do here. Let's get
00:04:17into it. Thomas Ricker. Hello. Hello, David Pierce. How are you doing? I'm good. You are the
00:04:22only person. I think this is a fun question to ask on a podcast, but where in the world are you
00:04:28right now? Today, I'm actually at home in Amsterdam. I am arranging to pick up my van.
00:04:33Hopefully next week, I got a couple weeks off, had a lot of holiday that accumulated by the end
00:04:39of the year. So hopefully I can maybe disappear into the black forest of Germany. I don't know.
00:04:44We'll see what happens. Well, okay. I was going to ask, is the van being worked on,
00:04:48but this is where I actually want to start. You haven't been on the show in a while. And the last
00:04:52time you were on, you just kind of gave us a rundown of like your van life gear. And I have
00:04:58some stuff I want to talk about. You've been reviewing a lot of gadgets, but mostly I just
00:05:02want to get like a current picture of the setup. What's in your van slash bag slash, I don't know,
00:05:10bike sack these days. What's new to the setup? I'm not mad. I'm not even sure that we had bought
00:05:15the van last time we spoke, but at the beginning of the summer, we actually, I guess it was in the
00:05:21spring. We pulled the trigger on a kind of a lifelong dream we've been saving for a long time.
00:05:27And we bought a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. It sounds fancy because it's a Mercedes-Benz,
00:05:33but this is basically the delivery truck that DHL uses and everybody else here in Europe.
00:05:39It's a cargo van. So I'm also old now. And while it was really interesting, the idea of rebuilding
00:05:47it myself, learning how to do that, I don't have time to make a bunch of mistakes. I also don't
00:05:52have a garage to do that work. So I farmed it out to a local van builder. I've actually written a
00:05:58few stories with this guy. That's how I met him. So just decided to hire him to help with the build,
00:06:05but we're doing it in phases. That's why, so we did a first phase. We traveled around Portugal
00:06:09and Northern Spain for the summer. That was like, that took a month or two to do that build.
00:06:14And now it's back to get it ready for winter. Cause we want to take it to like park at a ski
00:06:20resort and just go snowboarding for a few weeks. There's a certain amount of freedom and things you
00:06:26can do, hobbies you can pursue if you have your whole home with you. So that's kind of what we're
00:06:31doing. Okay. So what's in this current build? Like you said, getting it ready for the winter,
00:06:35what does that actually entail? So the big thing is getting the diesel heater set up right now.
00:06:43We're just using the standard heater that comes with the Mercedes-Benz. It's an optional thing.
00:06:48Van builders, there's a wide variety of heating options. You often do an aftermarket thing that
00:06:53you stick under a seat. Ours comes standard or ours comes from Mercedes. So it's nice because
00:06:58you can use it from an app. You can like turn it on when you're remote, you can have it running and
00:07:03you can monitor the temperature while you're on the ski slopes, for example. But we put a storage
00:07:10bench on top of it and inside that storage bench is our toilet. So we have to properly route that
00:07:16heating so it doesn't heat up our toilet too much. Because like a warm toilet is a nice thing.
00:07:24Too warm toilet problems. Yeah. And this is a small space and there are smell issues potentially.
00:07:30So we're trying to do that. So that's what he's doing. And he says he's got it ready for a first
00:07:37test. So I'll hopefully have that ready this weekend. Okay. That's really exciting. Is this
00:07:43I would imagine the moment you get the van for the winter is like a real sort of sending off
00:07:50on your voyage kind of moment, like setting sail on the ship hundreds of years ago kind of vibe.
00:07:55Yeah. And I'm brand new to this. So I've had a lot of questions. I mean, we put on these big
00:08:00rugged four by four off-road tires. We have a lift kit on it. But like certain countries have
00:08:06certain requirements for chains. Like do I need to put chains when I'm driving through Austria?
00:08:10So there's just a lot of preparation that has to take place to even get onto the road for the first
00:08:16time. But then there's also a matter of packing and unpacking because it is a small amount of
00:08:21space for a van. It is a huge, what we call the garage. So all that space for storage in the back,
00:08:26but now we're swapping out like our kite surfing gear for snowboarding stuff.
00:08:30We have to figure out what to do when the boots are wet and icy and snowy and how we can
00:08:35collect that moisture that's going to develop when things melt inside the van.
00:08:39What do we store on the outside of the van? We also have cargo like attached to the back,
00:08:43which looks really, really cool. I'm not sure how functional it's going to be yet,
00:08:47but we're going to find out. Like, I don't know if like, do I put my boots back there?
00:08:51Are they going to be frozen when I pick them up in the morning? Do I have to keep those inside?
00:08:54So yeah, like I said, I'm totally new to this. So it's a big learning curve,
00:08:58but there's so many great forums and a community as well. That's very willing to help.
00:09:05I'm struck by how much more sort of straightforwardly practical a lot of this
00:09:10stuff is than I would think. Like, I think when you see, you know, YouTube videos or like
00:09:16shows that they've made over the years about making this kind of stuff, and it's all like
00:09:19cool, flashy stuff that you can do and interesting like bells and whistles you can add to these
00:09:24things. But you're talking about like heating. And I was going back through a bunch of stories
00:09:28you've written through this journey, and you're like, you are obsessed with how to power things.
00:09:33And it's just, it's such a simple thing. But in the guise of what you're talking about, like,
00:09:38it's just so simple and straightforward. And you're thinking a lot less about like,
00:09:41do I use Alexa or do I use HomeKit? And you're just like, where does the water go?
00:09:47Oh, exactly. And like, even on the electricity side, you have to decide,
00:09:50are you going to do a 12 volt or 48 volt system? And the pros and cons of that,
00:09:54because there's weight limits. You go with the higher voltage and you can do
00:09:59smaller gauge wires, or is it higher gauge? I never can remember. Anyways, the narrower
00:10:03cables. And as a result, you have less weight and there's weight restrictions,
00:10:07at least in Europe. And so if you go over the weight, then suddenly you need a different kind
00:10:11of class of driver's license. So there's a lot of small things you have to consider just to get on
00:10:16the road and then to keep everything powered. But yeah, water for the winter, what do you do
00:10:21so it doesn't freeze? Some people put these giant water containers below their vans, or at least
00:10:28it's in uninsulated parts of the van. And if it's not heated, it's going to freeze. And then you
00:10:33don't have any water when you're parked. But yeah, it's just such a medicine that you have
00:10:37to think about. But for me, it's fun. It's a massive puzzle and it's a big learning curve,
00:10:42but it's all stuff. I mean, it's tech. It's all stuff I like to do anyways. And the amount of
00:10:47gadgets that I've uncovered through this, it's just a whole new playground to explore.
00:10:53Yeah. I want to talk about all of those, but let's talk about power first. You, I know,
00:10:56for years have been on this, how do I do battery solar power combinations in a way that is
00:11:05relatively cheap, relatively light, and as effective as possible? Is that a good summation
00:11:10of the journey here? Yeah. And stuff that you can reuse as well. Because if you put it in one
00:11:16location and it's nice to be able to use it somewhere else, because if you can have a system
00:11:22installed in your house and wouldn't it be nice if you disappear in your RV for the summer, that
00:11:27you can remove that because it's a huge investment and you can put it in the RV and then you can
00:11:30reuse it there. So power is a big thing that I believe is changing. I think there's, you have
00:11:37these dedicated, well, I call them solar generators, but anyways, they're giant batteries and they have
00:11:44solar controllers. So you can attach a system of solar panels onto your roof.
00:11:50You can do folding panels as well that you have out on the side, but it's going to collect that
00:11:55and manage the voltage properly. So it charges those batteries at the most optimum way that it
00:12:00can. But these are all self-contained batteries. The other route is to go with something in van
00:12:06world. It's mostly from a company called Victron Systems. And then you have, you need an electrician
00:12:12or at least that level of knowledge to figure out all the components that you need to hook up
00:12:17and all the wiring and everything else. Now it's all self-contained in these boxes that are sold
00:12:21by EcoFlow and Blue Eddy and a number of other companies. I mean, the list is growing every day.
00:12:28My problem is all these companies, although some of them have US addresses, every one of them comes
00:12:33out of China because those lithium ion battery packs, that's where everything is produced. And
00:12:38that's where all the solar panels are increasingly coming from. The nice thing about that having all
00:12:44this capacity and all this product is that the prices have been coming down, but now the tariffs
00:12:50are being applied on top of that. So it's kind of difficult, but at least at the moment, historically,
00:12:55the prices are way cheaper for batteries and solar than ever. Solar is way more efficient.
00:13:00So instead of doing these piecemeal systems from the companies like Victron Systems, I think the
00:13:06way to go is to get these self-contained boxes, these solar generators. You can use it at home,
00:13:11like EcoFlow makes a balcony solar system. So when you're home, you can have it charging and
00:13:19pumping energy back into the house. Now that's a controversial thing. It is, at least in most
00:13:25of Europe, it is considered safe within limits. I think they go up to between 600 and 800 watts.
00:13:32That's legal. Because they just plug right into your electrical socket in your house. So it seems
00:13:38super weird, but it's- That's a bold thing to just plug into the wall.
00:13:44It felt really bad. And I asked lots and lots of questions. I talked to all my engineering
00:13:48friends and my electrician friends, and they said, oh, it should be okay. And it's approved.
00:13:53So I did it slowly. But anyways, but then you can have it charging at home. You have that big
00:13:59battery, because those batteries are between 50 and 70 cents per watt hour. And the one that I'm
00:14:06testing right now in the van is eight kilowatt hours. So that's a $5,000 battery. You don't want
00:14:14that just sitting idle. You want to be able to use that as much as you can. So it's here in the house
00:14:20connected to a balcony system when I'm at home. And then when I'm in the van, I can just wheel
00:14:26it out of the house. It's not light. It's like 100 pounds or more. But then I can put it in the
00:14:30van and continue to use it then. If you get one of these Victron systems, it's just stuck in the van
00:14:35all the time. And yeah, that's not ideal. And that does seem like a good outcome,
00:14:41actually, to have something that is sort of scalable in the way that you're describing.
00:14:44I feel like for you, the white whale is then to be able to take sort of one part out of that system
00:14:49and put it in a backpack for your weekend. And I feel like all of the stories about this stuff
00:14:53that I see you writing are like, that's the one piece that's missing where you're like,
00:14:57they've done this thing that it can heat a room. It works on electricity. It's great. It is too
00:15:04damn big to carry with you anywhere. And it's like that is the one sort of magical piece of this
00:15:08system that still seems to be missing. Yeah. The physics of needing giant batteries to handle all
00:15:15that capacity that you need, that just can require a giant heavy block that's going to take up space.
00:15:22But when you mentioned backpacks, I mean, that brings me to Starlink Mini.
00:15:25I was just about to ask about this. Yeah. Which I just recently reviewed. I bought my own. I've
00:15:31been testing or I've been using the Starlink, it's called a standard actuated dish. It's the
00:15:35kind of the dish that you think about when you think of Starlink. I've been using that for two
00:15:39years. That was a review unit that the Verge bought, but then we didn't have an option to
00:15:45send it back. So I just took over the monthly payment. The Starlink Mini I purchased on my own
00:15:51because I knew immediately once I saw it, it was going to be something that I could use.
00:15:55It's just, I don't even know where to begin. It is my favorite, absolute favorite piece of
00:16:03technology. And it just blows me away that there's like these, you know, what is it?
00:16:07Four or 5,000 satellites now flying overhead at 17,000 miles per hour. You have a little
00:16:12laptop sized dish, which is now the Starlink Mini. It has the wifi router built into it. It's
00:16:18about the size of a thick laptop. I can pop it in my backpack and I can connect and I can walk
00:16:24around with, you know, satellite space internet. It's just, it blows my mind every time I do it.
00:16:29Now that, that is not a common usage scenario. In fact, I can't imagine. There's not often
00:16:35that I need to do that. In fact, I've never needed to do that. I just did it for the,
00:16:39for the review to see if you can. But you can now, Thomas. And that's the point. You can.
00:16:44Exactly. Well, what I did do is I did put it in a backpack with a, with a small battery. It's
00:16:51like a USB-C PD. God, I got to get all my acronyms right. USB-C PD 3.0. So it has to be capable of
00:16:59a hundred Watts output. And then the largest battery that you can carry on to an airplane,
00:17:04I think it's 99 watt hours. So it's not very big, but that battery connected to the Starlink mini
00:17:10will power that thing for three hours. You bring a solar panel and connect it a little portable
00:17:16folding solar panel connected to that battery. And you have a sunny day and you can probably get
00:17:22maybe five, six, seven hours out of it, maybe under the ideal conditions. And you're constantly
00:17:27readjusting to the angle of the sun. But I put all that into a, into a backpack. And you know,
00:17:34I took the van to the end of the road and the rest of it was a walking trail. And I continued
00:17:38walking on and, and I, and I set it up and I sat there with some food, lunch, worked for a couple
00:17:42hours just to see if I could. And it was, it was like, it was like a, I don't know, this epiphany
00:17:48moment. Like, you know, we talk about work from home. That's a, that's even a label that we have
00:17:53at The Verge. But if you have a job that allows you to work from home, then you can really work
00:17:58from anywhere if you can get away. And I've been working from home for 20 years now, going back to
00:18:06when I started at Engadget to co-founding The Verge. It's, so the advent of, of, of space
00:18:13internet and cheap solar and cheap batteries has just really made it possible to work from anywhere.
00:18:19Yeah, it's, it's pretty awesome. And I think the thing that surprised me the most about the Starlink
00:18:23Mini was that it feels like, in theory, it would be huge increase in portability,
00:18:30big decrease in performance, right? Like that's what you get from all of these things. They make
00:18:33it smaller and it gets a little worse, but it's a lot smaller. And that's like a trade you have
00:18:37to decide how to make. It seems like you barely had to make that trade at all.
00:18:42There was, there was hardly any downside to adopting the Starlink Mini. I had, when I did
00:18:47the speed test, like side by side with the actuated dish, the one that's motorized and
00:18:52it's like four times the size and the wifi router is a separate box. For my needs, like,
00:18:58like using it in a van, even testing it at home, there was hardly any performance degradation.
00:19:05Sometimes it would be due to like being too far away from the wifi dish. Sometimes it would just
00:19:10be due to the antenna not being able to connect to enough satellites or not being able to pull
00:19:14down enough data, but it wasn't noticeable, right? It was only noticeable when I was like doing the,
00:19:19the speed test, but day to day, like when I'm on a zoom conference or when I'm like streaming 4k
00:19:25video it doesn't make any difference. And gaming already sucks on, well, it doesn't suck. You can't
00:19:31do anything that requires like really light latency because you're, the latency is, I don't
00:19:36know, 30 milliseconds up to a hundred. Right. But for everything else, for working remotely,
00:19:43if you're a digital nomad or van lifer, there's just, there's, there's hardly any downside and
00:19:48it sets up really fast because it's just, you plug in the USB-C cable. You can even set it on
00:19:53your dashboard. And if you have a big enough window, which most vans and RVs do, and you can
00:19:58use it just like that. You don't have to mount it on your roof or anything. And you can use it while
00:20:01you're driving if you're an idiot. I have to say, well, yeah, don't do that, but you can, because
00:20:06again, now you can. The, the dashboard picture was the thing that got me there. You had a picture
00:20:11interview where you basically took the mini and just sort of slotted it into that space between
00:20:16the dashboard and the windshield. And it sounds like that works really well. And for me, it's like,
00:20:20oh, this is now just a thing I can just pop out of the backpack, press a button and use in a way
00:20:27that feels like magical and is, is not even with Starlink has not been my experience. And I confess
00:20:34I have, I'm a little out of the loop on Starlink. So maybe in general, it's much more reliable than
00:20:37it once was, but the thing where you can just pull over to the side of the road, stick the thing in
00:20:42the dashboard and be online is like, like you're saying that, that feeling of, I can now do this
00:20:47anywhere is very powerful and super exciting. Yeah. I don't think, well, it probably is more
00:20:52reliable than at the beginning. And the big thing that, that sets off many users from everybody else
00:20:57is that if there's a tree we can move because trees will defeat a Starlink every day, but you
00:21:04can always pick it up and move it. You can change your location. That could be a problem. If you
00:21:08know, you're charging your solar panels or whatever. But if you're charging your solar
00:21:12panels, you should have complete, you know, clear view of the sky. So then Starlink should work as
00:21:16well. If the angle is correct, it is an unbelievable device and a game changer. If you're yeah. If you
00:21:21want to live and work remotely. Yeah. It's the, the, it's the first thing I've seen where I'm
00:21:27like, yeah, I could just screw off to the woods and maybe nobody would notice for a long time.
00:21:31It's like, it's pretty, it's pretty compelling. And the other thing, the other thing about it,
00:21:35like we, we kind of, or maybe it's different in the U S because you have broad sections of the
00:21:39U S that are just isolated. And so you're not going to have a big cell phone tower or, you know,
00:21:434g 5g coverage. Europe is much more densely populated, but I find just driving around places.
00:21:50I want to be like on, you know, abandoned ski resorts on the tops of mountains or the beach,
00:21:56you know, on some lonely stretch in, in, in Northern Spain, you just, you also don't have
00:22:02coverage there. And when you do, it's really light. And just for the peace of mind and security
00:22:07that I know when I, you know, log in at eight 30 in the morning, I'm going to have coverage from
00:22:12one of three, you know, cause I also have two phones with two plans that I carry with me just
00:22:16as backups. But I was driving around for, I think it was eight weeks this summer and it was, it was
00:22:22just bulletproof everywhere. And I, I visited like eight countries all the way from Denmark to
00:22:27the tip of Portugal. So that's awesome. It was, uh, yeah, just incredibly reliable.
00:22:32It's funny that you said, cause that's actually been the thing for me where like we, we had a
00:22:35pretty good run of just going to like, I don't know, Airbnb is for long weekends, right? Just
00:22:41sort of small getaways. Uh, and we, we did a lot of those and I came to this place where I was like,
00:22:46Oh, I can count on there being connection almost anywhere, but it sucks a lot of play. Like the,
00:22:54the U S not only has lots of spaces with no connection, it has huge rural swaths of just
00:23:00awful connection. Like really old copper DSL lines are what people are passing off as like,
00:23:06quote unquote, broadband internet. And like, for me, that's just, it's unworkable, right? Like I
00:23:11can't, I can't sit on a zoom call for an hour if I need to on that connection. And so that thing
00:23:18you're describing that peace of mind of like, okay, worst case, I'm just going to have to drive
00:23:22down the street away from this tree. Best case, I'm just going to sit here and have great internet
00:23:26all day. It's like, there is freedom in that. That is, is extremely, extremely exciting.
00:23:31Yeah, absolutely. And I should mention that I'm not paying for like priority access because those
00:23:35are, you know, there are different fee tiers that you could pay for with Starlink. I'm just using
00:23:39the regular metered connection with a lot where they give you lots of warnings that, you know,
00:23:45if it's a, if it's, if the system is overtaxed, you'll be deprioritized. It's no, I never had
00:23:50any problems, but you know, your mileage may vary. Yeah. And I think there's still the thing
00:23:54where like, it's useless to me at home. So it becomes, it's an extra big purchase to do just
00:23:59for the kind of trips that I take. So that, that cost benefit analysis, I think for you is like
00:24:05a person who is going to throw it all away and live in a Sprinter van easier. And I think the,
00:24:09the startling challenge is going to be like, how do we get the sort of occasional traveler
00:24:14to think this makes sense for them? And I don't know if there is an answer there, but I suspect
00:24:19things like the mini seem like it starts to get closer to that.
00:24:22Yeah. And the thing that really helps is the way that the subscription works. You can cancel it
00:24:26for the months you're not using it. It's not a day to day or by hour cancellation. So like I'm
00:24:31not using it for the, for the month of November. So I put a cancel on it. So I at least saved,
00:24:37I think my, my subscription costs 70 euro per month, but it's much more expensive in the U S
00:24:43just for a variety of reasons. They're trying, yeah, they're, they would rather people in the
00:24:48U S use a residential dish. If you go to Guatemala, for example, you look at, you go to
00:24:53the website. I think it's a, it's like 20 euro a month. So yeah, it's a, it's by region and you
00:24:59know, everybody said that, you know, it's now, now available in the U S those are the news.
00:25:02Those are the headlines, but it already been in South American countries. I think there were five
00:25:07countries before the U S cause that's their primary market for the mini. Right. So it's
00:25:10priced accordingly. Yeah. Okay. All right. Two more things I want to ask you about, and then
00:25:14I'm gonna let you go here. The first is, uh, the peak design backpack that you and for years,
00:25:21like years, every bag nerd I knew talked about the peak design 25 liter backpack. It was like
00:25:29just enough of a camera first bag that I never bought one, but I feel like I should have.
00:25:35And now there's a new one. Everybody seems to love it. Tell me about it. Why is this thing so great?
00:25:40Oh, I ran it. I ran into the problem of going back to my review from eight years ago and I
00:25:46called it perfect. Right. And eight years ago, it was perfect for me. It was perfect for my needs.
00:25:53But as we've been talking about, I like to go remote now. Um, and I can't carry two or three
00:25:59different bags with me. Uh, I need one bag that can do everything. The peak design, the new bag,
00:26:04the old bag is, is a camera bag. So it's heavy. It's durable. It has the, all the camera,
00:26:10the flexible inserts already built into it, right? The new bag, which by the way, the review unit
00:26:17they sent me is in white Arctic white. And it looks like I'm walking through, I don't know,
00:26:212001, a space odyssey. It's just sci-fi white color. It's just fantastic. Totally impractical.
00:26:26It's I would never, maybe I would buy it. Viren bought it. Our video producer, he bought it.
00:26:32I don't know if I would. The fact that even the company is like,
00:26:36eh, it's going to turn yellow over time is, is a real, is a real turnoff for me. I'm not going to
00:26:40lie. It looks great when you first get it though. It looks so good. It looks fantastic, but okay.
00:26:45So first impressions, it, it lacks that structure of the old, of the old bag. So it took me a while
00:26:52to get, to figure out what this thing was. Cause it's a, it's a, it's basically a lightweight
00:26:56nylon bag with a laptop sleeve. And it's not until you delve into the ecosystem of Peak Design
00:27:03products that this thing becomes really good. Because sometimes you only want that lightweight
00:27:09nylon bag. Like if you're going to the gym, you stuff some things in there. You have a,
00:27:13maybe a day trip, day hike. You're only bringing maybe a drone. It already has its own protective
00:27:18case. So you can use that. But if you're really a camera nerd, or you've got lots of gadgets,
00:27:23you've got all the, maybe you're carrying a drone action cam and some other stuff.
00:27:28They have the, the camera insert, camera cubes is what they call them. But that's another,
00:27:34like the Smedium, as they call it. It's not quite small, not quite medium, but the Smedium,
00:27:37and it fits perfect in the 25 liter Peak Design outdoor bag. That is another 70 Euro on top of
00:27:44the, I forget what it was, 230 something. So. I think it's 250.
00:27:49So you're already up to 300. And then if you start adding a couple more accessories,
00:27:52you can easily push this thing up to 400 Euro. So it's not cheap, but camera bags are not cheap.
00:27:58I was going to say it's the, in the scheme of really good camera bags, that's like
00:28:03upper middle class. I've seen much crazier.
00:28:06Exactly. And they do have a lifetime warranty. So if anything breaks, any of the straps,
00:28:09any of those things, the yellowing is not covered. If you get the white one,
00:28:12unfortunately it comes in black and some kind of purplish color, but using it for God,
00:28:18I had it for two months because there was some complications receiving it and whatnot.
00:28:22And I also wanted to wait before posting it until it got off the Kickstarter campaign,
00:28:25because I hate sending people to Kickstarter for a purchase.
00:28:29But the day that it went live on the Peak Design website is when we posted a review
00:28:33and I had been using it for, I don't know, yeah, two months at that point.
00:28:38And I absolutely love it. Absolutely love it. So I feel really bad about like,
00:28:45like I can't pull the trigger myself because I feel like I'm betraying
00:28:49my old Peak Design bag that I bought. So I put it on my Christmas list and then I'll let
00:28:55hopefully my wife do it for me.
00:28:57That's fair. So the modular thing is the thing I was most torn on reading your review. Because
00:29:02on the one hand, the thing you're describing sort of makes sense, right? It can be a bunch
00:29:07of different things depending on what you need. On the other hand, that just sounds like a lot of
00:29:12work. And I feel like what I don't want to do is like manage my cargo day in and day out.
00:29:18The thing I have loved about bags that I've had is the ones that I find that on purpose or by
00:29:22accident, just already have the pouches for everything I need, where they're like, Oh,
00:29:26David, you need a place to put your gross sneakers. Here's a place that we made for you.
00:29:30Those are the things that I love. And I can see the appeal of sort of building that yourself,
00:29:35but it also just feels like it might be a lot of work. And like you said, a lot of additional
00:29:39things to buy on top of the expensive thing that I've already bought.
00:29:42Yeah. I mean, that's a good point, but what I settled on is like, I don't always need all my
00:29:48camera stuff. I don't need all my drones. So if I can have a container for that, a soft shell
00:29:54container, put everything in, it's already organized for me. And I just remove that in
00:29:59and out. And I always know where all my tech gear, and this is really important when you're in a van
00:30:03because you have to know where all that stuff is. So for me, I can just take that cube out.
00:30:07I can put it aside. I then take the bag and I can just load it up with all my day hiking material,
00:30:13or I can put it back in if I'm doing like a Verge review or something. I'll put that in with all my
00:30:18other stuff. So for me, that modularity was a key selling point. So you think of it like the camera
00:30:24lives in the cube all the time, and then you just sort of stack whatever cubes you need for that day
00:30:28into the bag. Exactly. And you can get multiple cubes. It actually fits two different cubes,
00:30:32and they also have soft shell bags that you can store gear in if you want to do that. But again,
00:30:41if you're living in a van, everything is kind of modular anyway, so it's a nice extension for the
00:30:47bag. But for my needs, this is now a better bag. I felt bad calling it perfect because I got a lot
00:30:54of, I'm always going to have lots of complaints. Like the drawstring that pulls the top pouch
00:30:59closes. I think it's a bit inelegant. The cord get in the way when you're pulling a jacket in
00:31:03and out or whatever. But you're looking for perfection when you're spending 300 euro or
00:31:07$300 on a bag. Totally. Yeah, that's fair. All right. And you mentioned the last thing I want
00:31:13to talk about, which is that you've become a drone guy. I am not a drone guy. I am a selfie
00:31:19drone guy. Oh, interesting. Okay. I tried drones in the past, and nobody seems to talk about how
00:31:25bad DJI software is. I think it's atrocious. I think the user experience is just terrible.
00:31:32But drone people have been living with these drones for a long time. They understand how the
00:31:35software works. I think it's like Photoshop now where it's like, if you've never seen it before,
00:31:40it is literally borderline unusable. But there are people now who have spent a long time
00:31:46trying to figure it out. But also one of my theories is that DJI figured out a long time ago
00:31:51that it was easier to teach the drones to fly themselves than it was to make better software.
00:31:56So they've just done that. So their hope is that you just don't even have to use the app because
00:32:00the drone is fine. Don't even worry about it. Man, I mean, that's the thing. So I did a bike
00:32:05packing trip this summer with a friend of mine. I see DC Rainmaker and people, they've got the
00:32:11controller mounted on their handlebars, and they're talking. They're doing all this stuff
00:32:15all the time. But he's been doing this stuff for, I don't know, a decade. I just want something
00:32:21super simple. I push a button, set it up to fly, and then it'll film me, right? And this also works
00:32:26for gadgets. Like if I have to do a backpack, some of my backpack photos are taken by drones
00:32:30because I can either ask my wife to do it. She's not a huge fan of that. Or a friend. Or I just do
00:32:36it myself. And I'd rather just be self-sufficient and do it myself. But no controller required.
00:32:42It just selects between one of six modes. If I want to, I can tweak it in the app. But it's
00:32:47very rare that I have to do that. And now we have two of these really great selfie drones.
00:32:52There's the original Hover Air. I guess it's not even the original. It's like second generation
00:32:56Hover Air X1. They just came out with two new ones. Max and Pro, I think they are. But now
00:33:01they're really expensive. The nice thing about the old ones, I think they were $299, $349 or
00:33:07something, depending upon the sales. But this DJI Neo that just came out, now it was a little
00:33:13undercooked when they launched it. Like you couldn't do vertical video. It wasn't fast
00:33:16enough to chase you on a bike, for example. But they've recently, just in the two or three
00:33:21months since it launched, they've already updated the firmware to do all those things. And it only
00:33:26costs $199, which is insane. And you can buy a controller if you want. And you can buy goggles
00:33:33if you want to do, what is it? First FPV? First-person viewing? I don't know what that's
00:33:38called. I don't care about that. I have no interest in doing that. I just want something that's going
00:33:44follow me, take pictures, upload it to Instagram or whatever. Maybe I'm going to have a van life
00:33:50influencer account at some point. Who knows? But it's just dumb. It's so dumb. It's so easy. It
00:33:55just makes me love it. But as soon as you have to use a controller, I'm out. I'm done.
00:33:59Yeah. I have landed in the same place. And I actually, I sort of turned out of drones for
00:34:05a long time because it was just more complicated than it was fun for me. And it was like, I didn't
00:34:10have a purpose for it. Even the photography of it was just purely sort of fun. I wasn't doing
00:34:16anything with any of it. And it got to the point where I was like, this is so fiddly and so just
00:34:21annoying that even the fun stuff I get out of it is not, the juice is not worth the squeeze, you
00:34:25know? And then this is why I'm so interested in the NEO because like you said, $200 and does a
00:34:32bunch of cool stuff without any worries or requiring any work on your part. That to me is
00:34:39when drones start to get really interesting. Yeah. I do worry. I think the headline on the
00:34:44news article was basically, oh God, these things are going to be everywhere. I do think that
00:34:49there's this risk that we're just going to pollute national parks and whatever with these selfie
00:34:55drones. And they are noisy, right? You can't get away from it. And they're going to bump into
00:34:59people. If you pass somebody on a trail, like I've come close to passing somebody on a trail on a
00:35:03bike. I had to stop, pull over, but then the drone's just hovering there right above the trail.
00:35:08And I had to run over and grab it and flip it over. And I'm just one guy at the beginning,
00:35:13but what's going to happen when after Christmas, everybody's got a 199 NEO and they're flooding
00:35:20the parks and the ski slopes and whatever. And this weird gray area of regulation,
00:35:25they're probably illegal, but it doesn't feel like it's illegal. I'm just pushing a button.
00:35:31I set it aloft. It doesn't feel like a huge risk. And then, yeah, well, in Europe, it's
00:35:36complicated as you're traveling between countries. Do I have to register it? Do I not? But yeah,
00:35:41it's sometimes the technology comes along before the regulation is ready. And this is definitely
00:35:46going to be one of those cases. Yeah. And it is both more and less complicated than the bigger
00:35:52drones that you can fly further. We're like, those, we should have lots of rules about those.
00:35:58Like I can fly this drone theoretically miles away from me. Like we should have lots of rules
00:36:04about those drones. But this thing that is just circling my head as I go on a bike path,
00:36:08you're right. It doesn't feel, that just feels like a thing that I have. That doesn't feel like
00:36:12a thing anyone else even needs to be worried about. But you add one of those to every person
00:36:17you see on the path and suddenly we have a whole new set of problems. And I do agree. It does feel
00:36:21like that's coming. Yeah. And they do go fast now that once, now that the NEO software has been
00:36:26updated, it'll go like 32 kilometers per hour. I think that is, that's like over 20 miles per
00:36:32hour, I believe. Yeah. That's bike fast for sure. Yeah. And if that's following you and slams into
00:36:37somebody that you're passing, that is a collision that's going to hurt. Even though the props are
00:36:40covered with guards, it's going to hurt. So yeah, there's a risk here. Yeah. Fair enough. All right.
00:36:46Well, I should let you go, but once you've done this winter tour with the Sprinter, you got to
00:36:51come back and give us a Sprinter review. God, if I survive, I absolutely will. Maybe we'll do it
00:36:56from the top of a ski slope and you can just, you can just write off that whole trip as a work
00:37:00expense. It'll be amazing. I'll have a Starlink mini and a backpack and the drone hovering
00:37:04overhead. It's the life, man. All right, Thomas. Thank you as always. Take care. Bye. All right.
00:37:10We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about microphones. We'll be
00:37:14right back. All right, we're back. So Andrew Marino, former Vergecast producer is now working
00:37:24with our video team. And for his latest video, he made a really great comparison of a bunch of
00:37:29different microphones, portable microphones, the kinds you can clip onto your jacket or your hat
00:37:35or your lapel that make it easy to connect to your phone or your camera and get good audio just
00:37:40about anywhere. These are things you see everywhere. They're the kind of things that are so ubiquitous
00:37:45now that you don't even really notice them, even though it's like a giant square plastic brick on
00:37:50someone's chest as they talk to you. But these things are also really useful. We use them for
00:37:54Vergecast things all the time. We use them for our video team all the time. So Andrew put all
00:37:58these to the test and I figured now would be a good time to have him come on and both play a
00:38:03little bit for us and we can see how it all sounds and decide which one of these is actually worth,
00:38:09you know, sticking onto your chest when you two are making videos. Let's get into it. Andrew
00:38:14Marino, welcome back to the show. Hey, David. It's been a minute. It's nice to have you back
00:38:18on the Vergecast. Yeah, what's up? You left us rudely to go make videos about microphones and
00:38:24now I've brought you back because this is what happens to you. You can't avoid us forever.
00:38:28It's a full circle. Exactly. So, okay, I realized in just recording the intro for this that I don't
00:38:35even know what to call this like class of microphones that you've been testing here.
00:38:39So like what what are these things? How do you think about these mics? Yeah, they're like
00:38:43wireless microphone systems for your phone. It's like consumer grade wireless microphone
00:38:49systems. That's pretty good. We've had wireless microphone systems in broadcasting and video
00:38:53production. Now it's a lot easier. Just use it plugging into your phone or your whatever your
00:38:58little computers are. Okay. Do you remember years ago when I think it was sure made that thing that
00:39:03actually plugged into the lightning port and had that little like flippy microphone that you could
00:39:07I loved that thing. I use that thing every day. I still have it. Yeah, I still have it. Yeah,
00:39:12I love it. It sounded great. Yeah, it really did. And it was like as a like voice memo thing. It was
00:39:17it was great. I remember I did a thing with NPR one time on the phone and they were so excited
00:39:22about how good I sounded and I was like, it was like the great reveal of my life that I got to
00:39:26tell a public radio producer that I was on this incredible shirt microphone. But anyway, so what
00:39:32I see these microphones mostly used for is like social clips, right? These are like the like
00:39:37little plastic squares you see on everyone's shirt and sweater and hat all over social. Is that
00:39:43the main use case for these? Yeah, totally. Like we wouldn't these companies wouldn't be making
00:39:48all these if it weren't for TikTok and Instagram and all that. And they've gotten better pretty
00:39:53fast, it seems to me. Yes. With even just within the year, these companies like Rode and DJI are
00:40:01just upgrading these models to be lighter or like have more features, have better charging cases.
00:40:09It's all very exciting. Like this past two years of of audio devices. Yeah, it's cool. So yeah,
00:40:15what is kind of the state of the art right now? Like you got five or six of them in. What do
00:40:19they have in common? Like what's the good stuff you can get now? Yeah, so the big ones are like
00:40:24these are coming in like AirPod cases. Basically, you have these little transmitters that have
00:40:30mics on them. You pop them in a little case and then you have a little receiver that you pop
00:40:36right into your phone. So Rode just came out with a Rode wireless micro that is just it's like a
00:40:44little bigger than AirPods case and it plugs right into your phone. I really like that one.
00:40:48Shure also makes one that's a little case that you can just pair via Bluetooth to your phone.
00:40:54And DJI of course has the mic two and a mic mini which are these little microphones that you can
00:41:02plug into basically anything. So it's all like very versatile and pretty well made versus what
00:41:11we are having to deal with before with Bluetooth headphones and stuff. Yeah, I mean I have a set
00:41:16here that is like a thing that plugs into a headphone jack that my phone doesn't have anymore
00:41:23and then a whole receiver and it's like there's like four cables associated with it. It's just a
00:41:28bad time. It sounds good, but it is like I had to carry a bag of gear just to get this thing.
00:41:33Right? Yeah, it's a lot. It was a lot clunkier before and it's getting more easier to just like
00:41:39not have to tie a rubber band around your phone to keep all this gear attached to your stuff.
00:41:45What about on the phone side? Do these all have like companion apps or are they just supposed to
00:41:50be better microphones? I've always been torn about like do I want a bunch of fancy features or do I
00:41:54just want this thing to pretend to be my microphone on my phone and just sound better? Yes, this is
00:42:01where the differences come in here. DJI has all their wireless microphones. You can do a lot of
00:42:09the customization like gain and turning on noise cancellation through just the hardware receiver.
00:42:18Rode, their little micro wireless microphone, you can only control the gain and all that stuff
00:42:25through the app. They also have like a video app that they want you to use when you're making video
00:42:32with these things. The video doesn't look as good as the native iPhone app when I was trying it,
00:42:38which was concerning. That also just seems instinctively kind of weird, the idea that I'm
00:42:43going to make videos in an app based on which microphone I'm using just feels like the wrong
00:42:49order of operations of how I'm going to do stuff. Totally, and also if you're making this stuff
00:42:54within these video creation apps like TikTok and Instagram, you don't want to go back and forth
00:43:01between apps to adjust the gain and all that. Yeah, the thing you describe about having some
00:43:05of the controls on the case itself feels like the right one, right? Yeah, if the receiver that you
00:43:12just plug in the bottom of your phone, you can adjust the gain on this little knob on the DJI
00:43:16mic mini. And so when you're recording, say within the TikTok app, you can adjust the gain from there
00:43:22and you don't have to switch apps or anything like that. Yeah, that is really handy. So let's just
00:43:27cut right to the chase here. Which one's the best? You've tested them all. Everybody expected you to
00:43:32not pick one in the video. This is my favorite thing about the video you made is you just
00:43:36ruthlessly trolled everyone on the Internet who refuses to just pick winners. Who won? Yes. So
00:43:43when we factor in price and audio quality and functionality, state that there. I went with the
00:43:50DJI mic mini, which has this nice carrying case and the mics are really tiny now. So when you clip
00:43:58them on your shirt, they're not as noticeable as those big squares you notice on all these videos.
00:44:05So I really like that compactness and it is $170, which is, you know, compared to a lot of these,
00:44:13they go up to in the 350 range. Yeah. I think Shure's the whole package is $500. So
00:44:22price, audio quality and functionality like DJI mic mini was really impressive.
00:44:27How small is it? Like you've mentioned, you mentioned that it's small. It's
00:44:31all that matters more to me than I expected. Having now used these a lot. I notice every
00:44:38like percentage of an ounce because it just it just like pulls on your shirt and they seem huge.
00:44:44Like how small are we talking that this thing has actually gotten? Yes. So it's about half the size
00:44:49as they were before. And the thing also is like a lot of these you could just tuck underneath your
00:44:56shirt and then use the magnet without a clip to just hold onto your shirt that way. I never really
00:45:03like doing that because you have to deal with your clothes rustling and all that and it gets
00:45:07a little muffled. So I was like keeping them outside of the clothes like in the open air.
00:45:13So which is why I don't usually like the bigger ones. I usually would like to prefer to plug in
00:45:19an external wireless lavalier. Sometimes it gets a little annoying. We did a whole video shoot in
00:45:25we went from San Francisco to LA in our hydrogen car. If you Verge listeners may remember, we talked
00:45:32to a lot of car drivers that were like going in to pump their gas and we wanted to talk to them
00:45:37really quickly. And I just wanted like here put I need to put this on your shirt really quickly.
00:45:43And like a lot of if you look at the video, a lot of them have these big chunky squares on
00:45:47their shirt. And now that the DJI ones are a lot smaller, it's less noticeable. You know,
00:45:53it's just a little it's not distracting in the video. Yeah, and it is I will say all a huge
00:45:58improvement over what it was before, which is snaking a wire up someone's back and you as the
00:46:05producer having to say, sorry, I just have to reach up your shirt for a second here and I'm
00:46:10going to touch your butt while I clip this thing to it. And it is very good that we seem to be
00:46:15leaving those days behind. Yes, I have done that in a traditional broadcast setting and it is very
00:46:22awkward experience. Yeah, it's not a good time. So you mentioned that the DJI is kind of the best
00:46:29combination of things. Are there does it have competitors that beat it in one way or another?
00:46:34Like if all I care about is pure raw best sound don't care what else is it somebody other than
00:46:39DJI who wins? Oh, yeah. Okay. I would like to just mention now I'm currently recording
00:46:45with the DJI mic mini for this whole recording. Okay. So the one that I really like and it's a
00:46:52company that is known for its audio quality is Sennheiser. They just came out with this thing
00:46:58called the profile wireless. It's it is just a big like stick audio thing, but you can just
00:47:07press this little there's a little button has all these little receivers in here that you just clip
00:47:14on. Oh clever. So the the thing you're holding looks like a sort of chunky handheld microphone.
00:47:21Yeah, and you can use it as that. It's not like if you want to but then you can also just pull
00:47:26the little receiver out and clip it on. Yep. And then you can yeah the transmitter or the transmitter.
00:47:31Yeah, and then you can pop the receiver out to plug that right into your phone and Sennheiser
00:47:40that one was the best audio quality to me. It also has one of my favorite features on these is a
00:47:45backup recording button. So you can just press this little red button on the device on the
00:47:52transmitter and it will record the audio locally onto the mic. Oh, that's helpful. So you don't
00:47:58have to go through wireless, you know run into any issues with signal to noise ratios and all that
00:48:06and it's perfectly there. If you something happens on your recorder you have this backup recording
00:48:11that's actually helped me so many times in these kinds of situations. I was just about to say I had
00:48:17not thought about this until you just mentioned that but the problem I've had with these microphones
00:48:21over the years including all the way back to that that sure one that I could plug into my phone
00:48:25was sometimes my phone just wouldn't use it. I would I would press record on something and it
00:48:32would just pick a different microphone to record from and I wouldn't notice until afterwards
00:48:36because the thing was connected it all seemed to be working but then it was like I opened
00:48:40voice memos and hit record and the wrong mic picks up and you're just sort of hosed because
00:48:45phones are not very good at like giving you a menu to tell you when it's switching from microphone
00:48:50to microphone has that gotten better in general like our phones better at this game than they
00:48:54used to be? I think so I was very skeptical of this as like the iPhone is like it's hard to
00:49:02when you're in the phone app or the camera app it's hard to like you know what audio source
00:49:08you're using right so you kind of just have to trust it recognized it android is a little better
00:49:13at this you can actually like choose the audio source but I was always scared of that so I would
00:49:19always use an extern like another app to confirm because you know the roads app will tell you what
00:49:25specifically the interface you're using is but it has phones have gotten a lot better at this
00:49:31that being said phones microphones have gotten a lot better than in general so there's that too
00:49:37yeah that's actually a good question how do you feel like these compare obviously there's a
00:49:42usability difference where you don't have to hold your phone up to your face which goes a really
00:49:45long way but in terms of audio quality you're right that the internal microphone on your phone
00:49:52if you have a recent high-end phone is probably very good are these still kind of like a like a
00:49:59full level or two up from that even as they get smaller and cheaper and easier to use yeah
00:50:04totally I think so um there's there's some plus and minuses like in smartphones you get stereo
00:50:10recording a lot so if you really want like an ambient track uh when you're like recording a
00:50:16scene with your phone um that I like using that stereo recording sometimes but there is some a
00:50:22lot of color especially the iPhone is a lot like uh brighter sounding like it's a lot of high end
00:50:29in the recordings it's a little less controllable so I in general like especially Sennheiser and
00:50:35Shure like they've been developing this technology for so long so um they do sound a lot better than
00:50:41the traditional just holding your phone up to your face especially in post-production yeah are these
00:50:46companies doing something different with these mics because of the way that they're going to
00:50:51be used I mean you know Sennheiser and Rode and all these other companies make other microphones
00:50:56I'm on a I'm on a Shure mic on a Rode stand right now recording this so they all know how to make
00:51:02like a high-end microphone but these are like you're saying at the beginning sort of a very
00:51:05specific thing for a very specific use case as you test them can you tell these are like
00:51:11designed to be used on TikTok in some meaningful way not not really I mean more when you're looking
00:51:18at the uh the app side of it but these are all like omnidirectional microphones that you know
00:51:24lavaliers on like any you know live set have been using for for decades so there's not much
00:51:31different for that it is like because you're moving around and you're outside and you want
00:51:36to make sure it's you know it's on your shirt it's getting you when you're turning your head
00:51:40and all that so it's more like the performance side of it that makes sense yeah I do wonder
00:51:46how much they're learning to do to compensate for people who don't have a ton of experience
00:51:52using mics who are suddenly clipping mics to themselves and sure like the thing you just said
00:51:56about being able to sort of swivel your head is like that's a big one right you most people have
00:52:00terrible mic technique and understanding how to talk into a microphone is a thing that takes real
00:52:05practice and so for something like this like I would assume a lot of these companies are spending
00:52:10time trying to think about okay what weird places are people going to stick this and how are they
00:52:14going to use it and how can we account for that and and again I think it makes sense that a lot
00:52:18of that is going into the software and stuff that's actually being built into phones yeah
00:52:23totally like there's 32-bit flow which is like recording at a bit rate that is going to prevent
00:52:30you from clipping audio which is a big problem in like any microphone where you're not yeah you're
00:52:39not monitoring the levels of these microphones with your headphones or even seeing levels on
00:52:44any of these there's that and then there's also the noise cancellation so I should have mentioned
00:52:49that like dji has a noise softener basically will take a lot of the background noise out which you
00:52:55know is something you're not going to be going in your computer and trying to dial down if you're
00:53:02just going into tiktok most of the time right not everybody has a u to make everything sound
00:53:06incredible all the time I highly recommend it by the way if you can have an andrew to do it I
00:53:11recommend having an andrew um let's I want to hear a couple of these and and test them a little bit
00:53:17but I am curious to have are there any other sort of standout features from some of the ones that
00:53:21you tested that you're like oh if only I could borrow this and stick it on the dji it would be
00:53:25even better yeah so what dji mic 2 has is like audio levels you can see the audio levels on the
00:53:33receiver that's a really nifty one also being able to plug in an external lavalier which a lot
00:53:40some of the higher end of these do the road wireless models do and of course the backup
00:53:46feature like right uh that like on board recording is so it's just like once you have that you don't
00:53:52want to not use it anymore yeah that that makes sense all right so you're on the dji uh which
00:53:59sounds very good I'm super impressed um I wanted I want to try the worst one you tried but before
00:54:06we do that what can we try just like one of the others I'm curious to see kind of the range of
00:54:11quality we're looking at here so let's let's just switch to one of the other ones you liked like
00:54:14slightly less and I'm just curious if I can even tell the difference in the audio sure yeah let's
00:54:19use the road wireless micro which is just uh plugs right into with usbc all right so now you're on
00:54:26you're on the road the road micro is that we called it yes the road wireless micro just came out uh
00:54:31last month okay I would say it's we're like kind of in range this feels I mean you're you're in a
00:54:36pretty quiet room yeah uh but this this sounds I don't know like maybe slightly more compressed
00:54:43but I also think I'm probably listening for it yeah I I doubt you'll hear much of a difference
00:54:49like if like listeners are listening on their phone or bluetooth speaker or something like that
00:54:53whenever we do these I think about my wife who listens to podcasts just out the speaker of her
00:54:57four-year-old phone yeah and I'm like this must sound like nothing to you and I'm like
00:55:02she's just like what do you mean these all sound terrible
00:55:05uh yeah so uh it's it's really nifty but I like it because it's super compact I just keep in my
00:55:11pocket like all the time um and like I plugged in my laptop which is cool um which I didn't get to
00:55:16in the video but yeah you plug it in via usbc you can also plug it into your laptop if you have that
00:55:21so that is actually pretty handy being able to like yay for universal charging ports right but
00:55:26being able to just kind of have a plug and play mic into any device that you have goes a surprising
00:55:32long way like I've I give a lot of people the same speech about how important it is to sound
00:55:39good on video calls uh and this is the kind of thing that you might even like if you're giving
00:55:43a presentation or at work this might be useful in that same way yeah people have told me that
00:55:48they want something like that for home uh for their like zoom calls I'm like oh it's it's
00:55:53interesting you're gonna like walk around your kitchen while you're on the call um just have it
00:55:58clipped to your to your shirt so yeah that's cool it's kind of a good idea you could sound like
00:56:02you're sitting right at your computer but just be like aimlessly wandering around your house with
00:56:06airpods and a fancy microphone the mic doesn't move you do yeah that's pretty good we should
00:56:12start a company and that's the tagline it's gonna be incredible um all right let's try one more and
00:56:17the one I want to try is the the like the tick tock microphone um I think everybody knows the
00:56:24one I'm talking about but you got the one that is the one and I would like to hear how it sounds
00:56:30okay let's do it all right you're now in the software that I'm seeing as usb audio 1.0 which
00:56:36already feels alarming uh how we doing okay can you hear me now oh yeah this is what I knew this
00:56:43is gonna it's bad it's like it's just it's just bad it's uh you sound like someone who put their
00:56:52airpods in wrong uh I've been noticing a lot that people wear their airpods wrong have you ever
00:56:57noticed this the people who wear them and so that they're sort of sticking directly out of their
00:57:01head it's like they've screwed them in too far into their ear canals and they just it's like it's
00:57:05like you have antenna coming out of your ears that's what you sound like yeah I've seen someone
00:57:09in the office not gonna lie like that it's a name and shame andrew it's time uh so first of all
00:57:18what is this mike uh it's a good question because I don't really know uh the box that came in says
00:57:25the k8 wireless microphone okay uh I've seen this on tiktok without that branding the same box
00:57:32without that branding um it is just kind of this generic wireless microphone that you plug into
00:57:39your phone has and then one little other thing that you clip on your shirt with the mic and uh
00:57:46I've like people are like hawking these on tiktok for five bucks yeah it's the one you can find a
00:57:52million identical looking ones on like aliexpress and the tiktok shop and amazon and like I assume
00:57:59they're all the same thing from like a giant bin in a factory somewhere in china that's what it
00:58:05seems to be yeah I went I bought another one uh recently just to see if it was the same and it
00:58:10was exactly the same oh interesting okay yeah uh and this is this has become the tiktok microphone
00:58:16is it just because it's cheap like everybody's just like oh this sounds better than my phone
00:58:20and it's cheap even though I would say it demonstrably does not sound better than your phone
00:58:24yeah totally it's like uh because it was you know sold on one of these like bulk shops where
00:58:30you can get a whole bunch and and drop ship them but you know it isolates your voice more
00:58:37it does like the phone is going to be like it's going to pick up a lot of other things in the
00:58:42room a lot of people record in their car so this if you hold this up to your your mouth in the car
00:58:50maybe you won't get as like a boxier sound than usual yeah and there is something to that that at
00:58:56least you have something sort of close and directional and that's helpful like that is
00:59:00the basic mic technique we give most people but I still feel like this is much worse than holding up
00:59:06the the white earpod microphone to your mouth like if you're gonna hold a microphone that one
00:59:11sounds much better than this one does totally yeah I guess it is twenty dollars versus five
00:59:16dollars but like I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and say that's worth the fifteen dollar investment
00:59:19yeah and who knows how long these are gonna be for that price like I've seen them on Amazon for
00:59:24like thirty dollars yeah yeah that's fair um all right switch back to the good mic so I don't have
00:59:30to listen to this anymore and then I have a couple more questions we'll let you go okay great all
00:59:34right are we back to a good mic I think so oh we're back to a good mic this sounds good is this
00:59:39the DJI again this is the Sennheiser profile wireless I figured since uh we I mentioned it I
00:59:44wanted to uh demonstrate how it sounded it does sound good I yeah they're all kind of right in
00:59:50range yeah yeah this is which is good news honestly uh especially I feel like DJI's thing
00:59:57is just as good a little wacky to figure out and cheaper it's like keeps working for me yeah
01:00:04yeah yeah I was skeptical of their mics because they're not a microphone company but
01:00:08yeah they they're pretty good yeah that's that's super exciting so okay you think if I'm if I'm like
01:00:14a creator starting a TikTok channel DJI into my phone into the TikTok app is like a perfectly
01:00:22viable mic video strategy we feel good about that yes totally yeah that's awesome that feels like a
01:00:28win this is like that is a that's a big level up for a lot of people pretty fast yeah and also if
01:00:33you end up like getting a better camera and you're not using just your phone you can still use this
01:00:38with another camera which is is really what is a big difference between that and the rode mini
01:00:45or the rode micro because you can only use this with the us like something with the usb port
01:00:50taking audio in yeah yeah that's that's very cool so are you are you using these mics in your own
01:00:56gear now what's your new setup yes this past year or two we've kind of like stopped carrying around
01:01:01the bulky um professional wireless microphone systems when we're like running around I remember
01:01:08at ces last year we didn't really use those we use the road the wireless go to for most of our uh
01:01:15stuff we were doing out in the field and uh yeah and for ces I would love to carry around this
01:01:21sennheiser um kit because it's super compact it's got this neat carrying case yeah yeah that I mean
01:01:29it goes a really long way and I think to me the next step then uh it kind of feels like
01:01:35getting much smaller is maybe not super useful it feels like the next step is
01:01:40starting to solve some of the ui stuff right because I feel like especially the things that
01:01:43are connected to the phone there's just not great sort of really fine grain manual control
01:01:49in the way that you can do like pretty professional stuff with your video camera at this point it
01:01:54feels like audio still has a little bit of catching up there but maybe that's the next thing
01:01:58yeah I think you're sacrificing a lot of stuff by making them smaller so there's gonna be some
01:02:02happy medium there where like maybe the receiver's a little bigger that you can
01:02:07adjust some settings but the mics are still kind of tiny so they don't show up on screen you know
01:02:12that is fair okay last thing and then you're gonna go you have you are the person who knows the
01:02:17answer to this question where is the correct place on your person to put the mic to do this
01:02:23so I always like going like two buttons down um on on like a dress shirt okay it's a very specific
01:02:32type of way to dress so it's not accurate for everyone but you're kind of like right at like
01:02:37mid chest height it seems like at that yeah totally like if you just you put it where you're
01:02:41you know where your heart is is like a good oh yeah okay right in the middle yeah totally okay
01:02:48so not on the brim of my hat which is a thing that I saw somebody do and thought that was very cool
01:02:52and wanted to steal yeah it's an interesting idea they're omni-directional so it's not it's
01:02:58not gonna not pick up your voice but it'll it's a little silly it's obviously for for uh aesthetic
01:03:06purposes okay all right all right well this is as someone who ends up always putting it on my
01:03:11collar and then it like droops all weird this is good advice yeah yeah like wherever your your hand
01:03:16goes when you say the pledge of allegiance that's where you put the mic yeah totally and now these
01:03:20have mic uh little magnets on them you can really just you can clip them on anywhere on your
01:03:25clothing yeah yeah the magnet over the clip thing is a huge upgrade yeah cannot recommend that
01:03:29enough all right andrew thank you for coming back it's nice to see you yeah thanks for having me
01:03:35all right we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna come back and do a segment
01:03:38on the verge cast hotline we'll be right back okay we're back let's get to the hotline as
01:03:51always the number is 866 verge 11 the email is vergecast at the verge.com we love all of your
01:03:56questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week a reminder next week we are doing a
01:04:02full meta episode about the verge cast and the verge so if you have questions we've gotten a
01:04:07bunch of really fun ones already but if there's ever something you've wanted to know about how the
01:04:10verge cast works how we make the show how we decide what goes on the show what we're doing
01:04:16when we're not recording the show how the verge works the future of media all kinds of stuff
01:04:21anything you want to know call us 866 verge 11 email us vergecast at the verge.com we love hearing
01:04:27all of your questions and we're going to do as many of the meta ones as we can next week this
01:04:32week we have a question about web browsers hi this is joey from portland oregon and i have a
01:04:38question about web browsers uh just watching your latest or listening to your latest broadcast about
01:04:43uh you know chrome and and i was just thinking just recently i i started switching i'm using uh
01:04:50chrome to safari on my macbook air m1 and you know just heard that like it's more efficient
01:04:57and you know it's a little faster but definitely mostly uses less battery and i haven't really
01:05:02noticed that um i mean i haven't done extensive testing but i like most people i live in the
01:05:08browser for the most part and uh i use Safari extensions i use Safari extensions and it seems
01:05:15like it's about the same battery life doesn't really deceive any faster um so is that really
01:05:21true is safari really noticeably like more efficient uh be curious to hear your thoughts
01:05:28uh thanks bye one of the reasons i really like this question is that it's really hard to test
01:05:34this question browsers are complicated because they're so much more than just one individual
01:05:40thing like the way that you use your browser is so personal and so unique to you maybe even in
01:05:49ways that you don't understand right think about the number of tabs that you have open whether you
01:05:54tend to use multiple windows with tabs or just have one window with a thousand tabs in it are
01:06:01you a bookmarks person do you have lots of extensions are you constantly running like
01:06:06really intense web apps like gmail or figma or canva or things like that or are you the kind of
01:06:12person who is just like opening a web browser going to cnn.com looking at some news and then
01:06:17moving on into your day maybe no other piece of software is so varied in its use that way
01:06:24than a web browser so it's very hard for anyone to say here is the best web browser for x y or
01:06:31z reason right i think one reason people think safari is the best mac browser is just that it's
01:06:37so well integrated with all of apple's other products and its operating systems there's
01:06:43actually not real evidence anywhere that i can find that safari is faster or more performant or
01:06:49better for battery life in any meaningful way it's just that it is so sort of deeply integrated
01:06:54inside of the system that it feels better the share sheet works better you can open things
01:06:59and move them around more quickly it feels the mackiest of the mac browsers and it feels the
01:07:05iphone-iest of the iphone browsers the same way that chrome does on android like you can run
01:07:10other browsers on a chromebook than chrome but it's gonna feel worse even if it's just as fast
01:07:16so all of that is to say i think figuring out which browser is for you you should think much
01:07:22more about ui and which services you use than really throwing your lot behind one product or
01:07:29another like i said there aren't a lot of ways to kind of apples to apples compare one browser to
01:07:35the other but there is one benchmark that i like it's called speedometer 3.0 from browserbench
01:07:41and it tries to mimic using a web app it's like a to-do list thing that is trying to move stuff
01:07:46around so it executes javascript and tries to run stuff in the background and also you know loads
01:07:51news pages and the idea is just a sort of normal web usage it's not a perfect benchmark i don't
01:07:57think any benchmark of anything is perfect but at least you get some kind of apples to apples
01:08:02rough performance metric for how a browser works i tested it on seven browsers on my mac mini and
01:08:09let me just read you the scores so higher is better chrome came in first with 48.2 safari
01:08:15got 47.4 not super far down then there was brave 44.7 edge 44.5 so basically the same between those
01:08:24firefox 41.4 arc 38.3 and duckduckgo 38.1 reasonable range top to bottom there but
01:08:32they all have a bit of a margin of error in them and realistically you might notice a performance
01:08:39difference between like chrome at the very top and duckduckgo at the very bottom but like should
01:08:44you use chrome or safari based on the point eight points between them no there are other reasons
01:08:50that that browser will feel better or worse to you than the raw performance score of how it does
01:08:56on this one benchmark all of this is to say i think browsers are fascinating for this exact reason
01:09:01right it's not a question of optimizing ruthlessly for one specific use case browsers are all things
01:09:09to all people and what i would do is basically try to figure out the ui that works for you
01:09:16whether you want chrome which has more sort of accessibility to extensions and does a better job
01:09:22i think with some bookmarklets or you want safari which is simple to a fault and just keeps
01:09:27everything very straightforward or you want something like arc which has really weird ideas
01:09:31about ui or you want brave which has a lot of additional features and stuff built into the
01:09:36browser you kind of can't pick wrong right there are a lot of browsers out there a bunch of them
01:09:40are really good none of them have any sort of obviously huge increase and killer app over any
01:09:48of the others so ultimately what i would say is try a bunch of different browsers and just see
01:09:53what works for you and don't really worry about spending a ton of time trying to optimize for
01:09:58performance i will say if you open a lot of tabs it will crush your memory and it will crush your
01:10:05battery life and anecdotally i cannot prove this but anecdotally chrome seems to be the worst at
01:10:11that that when i have a hundred chrome tabs open it just destroys every computer i've ever used
01:10:17in a way that no other browser does i can't prove that but that is how it feels to me but in general
01:10:23the best thing you can do for your performance and your battery life is manage your tabs slightly
01:10:27better so that you're not running so many different versions of any of these browsers at a time
01:10:33but beyond that just pick the browser you like the best and use it and don't worry about the rest
01:10:38and that is actually a pretty good place to be lots of different ideas about browsers out there
01:10:43give them all a try i have seven on my computer now because i downloaded them all and i'm going
01:10:47to keep them i'm going to try them because this is the life i've chosen for myself anyway that
01:10:52is it for the verge cast today thank you to everyone who's on the show and thank you as always
01:10:55for listening there's lots more on everything we talked about all of thomas ricker's reviews
01:10:59andrew marino's great videos lots of stuff that we've done on browsers all of that i'll put in
01:11:04the show notes but as always read the website it's december but the news keeps happening we
01:11:09have tons of great gift guides some of the like cyber monday black friday deals are still kicking
01:11:14around so keep it locked on the website lots of good stuff going on and like i said before if you
01:11:19have thoughts questions feelings or other browsers i should download you can always email us at
01:11:24at the verge.com or call the hotline 866 verge 11 like i said we're doing a meta episode about
01:11:30all things verge and verge cast in the future of media and podcasts and whatever else you want to
01:11:34talk about next tuesday so get in your questions as soon as you can and we will answer as many of
01:11:38them on the show as we possibly can this show is produced by liam james will poor and eric gomez
01:11:44the verge cast is a verge production and part of the vox media podcast network nila and i will be
01:11:48back on friday to talk about all the news the intel ceo stuff some crazy stuff going on in the
01:11:54streaming world and lots more we'll see you then rock and roll