A gadget lover's guide to the great outdoors
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Welcome to the Verge cast, the flagship podcast of van toilets. I'm your friend David Pierce. And can I just complain about something just for one quick second? When did video games become homework? So it was just the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, which means I spent a few days mostly not in front of screens playing games with my family and reading. It was also my kid's birthday. So we did a lot of birthday stuff.

And then I come back and I turn on my Switch to play some FIFA or EA Sports FC, whatever you want to call it. And it's like, here's all the limited edition Black Friday stuff that you missed. And now everyone you play against is way ahead of you because they got all these cool upgrades and things that you didn't because you weren't on your console for 12 hours a day all weekend.

I generally love that video games are more multiplayer than ever and are more sort of global than ever and that there are lots of different modes and ways to compete and you're kind of doing other things against real people all the time. But that comes now with this idea that you have to be in it all the time or risk being left behind. I get why the game companies do it. I hate it. I hate the feeling like I have to be in a Discord and I have to grind. People call it a grind now. Video games are not supposed to be a grind.

I hate it. I'm going to keep doing it and I'm going to keep playing it because ultimately I like the game and the game is fun when you're good at it and it's less fun when you're bad at it. And that is what these companies know and it's how they get you. But it drives me nuts. Anyway, that is not what we're here to talk about today. We are here to do two things. We're back from Thanksgiving. We got lots to do. News is still happening. Lots to talk about.

First, we're going to talk to Thomas Ricker, who is The Verge's, I guess, like unofficial van life correspondent. He is going to tell us about his adventures with new outdoor batteries. He's tested a backpack a lot of people are really interested in. He tested Starlink Mini, which I have lots of questions about. He's going to give us the rundown on all the new stuff for kind of outdoor adventurous living. Then

Then we're going to talk to Andrew Marino about microphones. We've done a lot of these tests with Andrew, and I'm actually really excited about this one. He's been testing some of the new creator mics, the DJI ones and the Rode ones, the ones that you can just kind of clip to a collar and connect to your phone or your camera that make it really easy to get good audio almost anywhere. He has some really fun takeaways, and I'm going to quiz him and we're going to hear on some of how these actually sound.

The answer, spoiler alert, is don't use that stupid one that everybody uses on TikTok, the like lapel mic that people just hold like this. Drives me nuts. As you're going to hear, it sounds awful. Don't use it. We also have a hotline about web browsers that I'm very excited about because as you know, web browsers are near and dear to my heart. All of that is coming up in just a second.

But first, even as I'm saying this, I realize I have to go play FIFA now because there's like some stuff I need to get and some XP I got to get in order to catch up. So I'm going to go finish that, get caught up, and then we're going to get into it. This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back. Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.

How much money do you make? My name is Vivian Tu, better known as Your Rich BFF and your favorite Wall Street girly. My podcast, Net Worth and Chill, is back and better than ever for season two. We've got finance experts and your favorite celebs answering all those taboo money questions you've been too afraid or too embarrassed to ask. With new episodes dropping every Wednesday, you can watch or listen. Sit back and relax and get ready to net worth and chill.

Welcome back. All right, I have played some EA Sports FC. I've done my best. I still missed a bunch of stuff, but I'm slightly caught up. I am doing my best to not spend a lot of money inside of this game. So help me stay strong, and we will aggressively lose to very good players together all the time. All right, let's get into it. First up, van life. Thomas Ricker was on the show a while ago to talk about some of the gear that he's been using on his adventures. Thomas is...

the coolest person at The Verge. He's always like on a Friday afternoon, like, oh, I have to leave a few minutes early. I'm going kite surfing for the weekend or like, oh, I'm going to be out of touch for nine days because I'm glacier hiking or whatever. He is

is forever on adventures and is forever trying to find the right tech to take on his adventures. It's been a minute since we caught up with him, and he's also been reviewing a whole bunch of interesting stuff, whether it's power sources or batteries that go with those power sources, or he did a really fun review of some cooking gear on the site.

He got a new Peak Design backpack people are excited about. So I figured we'd just have him on and run down some of what's new, what's made it into his setup, how he's feeling about his adventures, what works, what doesn't, where we can go next. And listen, I can't have his adventures. I'm not cool enough, but I can live vicariously through Thomas. So that's what we're going to do here. Let's get into it. Thomas Ricker, hello. Hello, David Pierce. How are you doing? I'm good. You are the only person...

I think this is a fun question to ask on a podcast, but where in the world are you right now?

Today, I'm actually at home in Amsterdam. I am arranging to pick up my van. Hopefully, next week, I got a couple weeks off. Had a lot of holiday that accumulated by the end of the year. So, hopefully, I can maybe disappear into the black forest of Germany. I don't know. We'll see what happens. Well, okay. I was going to ask, is the van being worked on? But this is where I actually want to start. You haven't been on the show in a while, and the last time you were on...

You just kind of gave us a rundown of like your van life gear. And I have some stuff I want to talk about. You've been reviewing a lot of gadgets, but mostly I just want to get like a current picture of the setup. What's in your van slash bag slash, I don't know, bike sack these days? What's new to the setup? I'm not, man. I'm not even sure that we had bought the van last time we spoke. But at the beginning of the summer, we, actually, I guess it was in the spring, we

We pulled the trigger on a kind of a lifelong dream we've been saving for a long time, and we bought a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. It sounds fancy because it's Mercedes-Benz, but this is basically the delivery truck that DHL uses and everybody else here in Europe.

It's a cargo van. So I'm also old now. And while it was really interesting, the idea of rebuilding it myself, learning how to do that, I don't have time to make a bunch of mistakes. I also don't have a garage to do that work. So I farmed it out to a local van builder. I've actually written a few stories with this guy. That's how I met him. So just decided to hire him to help with the build.

But we're doing it in phases. That's why. So we did a first phase. We traveled around Portugal and northern Spain for the summer. That was like that took a month or two to do that build. And now it's back to get ready for winter because we want to take it like park at a ski resort and just go snowboarding for a few weeks.

There's a certain amount of freedom and things you can do, hobbies you can pursue if you have your whole home with you. So that's kind of what we're doing. Okay. So what's in this current build? Like you said, getting it ready for the winter. What does that actually entail?

So the big thing is getting the diesel heater set up. Right now, we're just using the standard heater that comes with the Mercedes-Benz. It's an optional thing. Van builders, there's a wide variety of heating options. You often do an aftermarket thing that you stick under a seat. Ours comes standard or ours comes from Mercedes. So it's nice because you can use it from an app. You can like

turn it on when you're remote you can have it running and you can monitor the temperature while you're on the ski slopes for example um but we put a storage bench on top of it and inside that storage bench is our toilet so we have to properly route that heating so it doesn't heat up our toilet too much because like a like a warm toilet is a nice thing a too warm toilet problems you

Yeah, and this is a small space and there are smell issues potentially. So we're trying to do that. So that's what he's doing. And he says he's got it ready for a first test. So I'll hopefully have that ready this weekend. Okay, that's really exciting. Is this like, I would imagine the moment you get the van for the winter is like a real sort of sending off on your voyage kind of moment, like setting sail on the ship hundreds of years ago kind of vibe.

Yeah. And I'm brand new to this. So I have a lot of questions. I mean, we put on these big rugged four by four off-road tires. We have a lift kit on it. But like certain countries have certain requirements for chains. Like, do I need to put chains when I'm driving through Austria? Yeah.

So there's just a lot of preparation that has to take place to even get onto the road for the first time. But then there's also a matter of packing and unpacking because it is a small amount of space for a van. It is a huge, what we call the garage. So all that space for storage in the back. But now we're swapping out like our kite surfing gear for snowboarding stuff, things

We have to figure out what to do when the boots are wet and icy and snowy and how we can collect that moisture that's going to develop when things melt inside the van. What do we store on the outside of the van? We also have cargo like attached to the back, which looks really, really cool. I'm not sure how functional it's going to be yet, but we're going to find out. Like, I don't know if like, do I put my boots back there? Are they going to be frozen when I pick them up in the morning? Do I have to keep those inside? So yeah.

Yeah, like I said, I'm totally new to this, so it's a big learning curve, but there are so many great forums and a community as well that's very willing to help. I'm struck by how much more sort of straightforwardly practical a lot of this stuff is than I would think. Like, I think when you see, you know, YouTube videos are like,

that they've made over the years about making this kind of stuff. And it's all like cool, flashy stuff that you can do and interesting like bells and whistles you can add to these things. But you're talking about like heating. And I was going back through a bunch of stories you've written through this journey. And you're like, you are obsessed with how to power things. And it's just, it's such a simple thing. But in the guise of what you're talking about, like,

It's just so simple and straightforward. And you're thinking a lot less about like, do I use Alexa or do I use HomeKit? And you're just like, where does the water go? Oh, exactly. And like even on the electricity side, you have to decide, are you going to do a 12 volt or 48 volt system and the pros and cons of that because there's weight limits, right?

You go with the higher voltage and you can do smaller gauge wires. Or is it higher gauge? I never can remember. Anyways, the narrower cables. And as a result, you have less weight. And there's weight restrictions, at least in Europe. And so if you go over the weight, then suddenly you need a different kind of class of driver's license. So there's a lot of small things you have to consider just to get on the road and then to keep everything powered. But yeah, water for the winter.

What do you do so it doesn't freeze? Some people put these giant water containers below their vans, or at least it's in uninsulated parts of the van. And if it's not heated, it's going to freeze, and then you don't have any water when you part.

Yeah, it's just a tremendous amount you have to think about. But for me, it's fun. It's a massive puzzle and it's a big learning curve. But it's all stuff. I mean, it's tech. It's all stuff I like to do anyways. And the amount of gadgets that I've uncovered through this, it's just a whole new playground to explore. Yeah, I want to talk about all of those. But let's talk about power first. You, I know, for years have been on this, like, how do I do...

battery solar power combinations in a way that is like relatively cheap, relatively light and as effective as possible. Is that a good summation of the journey here? Yeah, yeah. And stuff that you can reuse as well because if you put it in one location and it's nice to be able to use it somewhere else because like...

You can have a system installed in your house, and wouldn't it be nice if you disappear in your RV for the summer that you can remove that? Because it's a huge investment, and you can put it in the RV, and then you can reuse it there. So power is a big thing that I believe is changing. I think you have these dedicated—well, I call them solar generators—

But anyways, they're giant batteries and they have solar controllers so you can attach a system of solar panels onto your roof. You can do folding panels as well that you have out on the side. But it's going to collect that and manage the voltage properly so it charges those batteries at the most optimum way that it can. But these are all self-contained batteries. The other route is to go with something in van world. It's mostly from a company called Victron Systems. And then you have

You need an electrician

or at least that level of knowledge to figure out all the components that you need to hook up and all the wiring and everything else. Now it's all self-contained in these boxes that are sold by EcoFlow and Blue Eddy and a number of other companies. I mean, the list is growing every day. My problem is all these companies, although some of them have US addresses, every one of them comes out of China because those lithium ion battery packs, that's where everything is produced. And that's where all the solar panels are increasingly coming from.

The nice thing about that, having all this capacity and all this product, is that the prices have been coming down. But now the tariffs are being applied on top of that, so it's kind of difficult. But at least at the moment, historically, the prices are way cheaper for batteries and solar than ever. Solar is way more efficient.

So instead of doing these piecemeal systems from the companies like Victron Systems, I think the way to go is to get these self-contained boxes, these solar generators. You can use it at home. EcoFlow makes a balcony solar system.

So when you're home, you can have it charging and pumping energy back into the house. Now, that's a controversial thing. It is, at least in most of Europe, it is considered safe within limits. I think they go up to between 600 and 800 watts. That's legal. Because they just plug right into your electrical system.

socket in your house. So it seems super weird, but it's... That's a bold thing to just plug into the wall. It felt really bad. And I asked lots and lots of questions. I talked to all my engineering friends and my electrician friends and they said, oh, it should be okay. And it's approved.

So I did it slowly, but then, but anyways, but then, you know, you can have it charging at home. You have that big battery because those batteries are like 50 cents to, you know, between 50 and 70 cents per watt hour. And they're like the one that I'm testing right now in the van is eight kilowatt hours. So that's a $5,000 battery. Wow.

You don't want that just sitting idle. You want to be able to use that as much as you can. So it's here in the house when connected to a balcony system, when I'm at home, and then when I'm in the van, I can just wheel it out of the house. It's not light. It's like 100 pounds or more.

but then I can put it in the van and continue to use it then. If you get one of these Victron systems, it's just stuck in the van all the time. And yeah, that's not ideal. And that does seem like a good outcome, actually, to have something that is sort of scalable in the way that you're describing. Like, I feel like for you, the white whale is then to be able to take

sort of one part out of that system and put it in a backpack for your weekend. And I feel like all of the stories about this stuff that I see you writing are like, that's the one piece that's missing where you're like, they've done this thing that I can, it can, it can heat a room. It works on electricity. It's great. It is too damn big to carry with you anywhere. And it's like that, that is the one sort of magical piece of this system that still seems to be missing. Yeah. The physics of needing giant batteries to,

handle all that capacity that you need that that just can require a giant heavy block that's going to take up space but when you mention backpacks i mean that brings me to starlink mini i was just about to ask about this yeah which i which i just recently reviewed um i bought my own i've been testing or i've been using the starlink it's called a standard actuated dish it's the kind of the the dish that you think about when you think of starlink i've been using that for two years and

That was a review unit that The Verge bought, but then we didn't have an option to send it back. So I just took over the monthly payment. The Starlink Mini I purchased on my own because I knew immediately once I saw it, it was going to be something that I could use. It's just...

I don't even know where to begin. It is my favorite, absolute favorite piece of technology. And it just blows me away that there's like these, you know, what is it, four or five thousand satellites now flying overhead at 17,000 miles per hour. You have a little laptop sized dish, which is now the Starlink Mini. It has the Wi-Fi router built into it. It's about the size of a thick laptop.

I can plop it in my backpack and I can connect. I can walk around with, you know, satellite space internet. It's just, it blows my mind every time I do it. Now, that is not a common usage scenario. In fact, I can't imagine. There's not often that I need to do that. In fact, I've never needed to do that. I just did it for the review to see if you can. But you can now, Thomas. And that's the point. You can now. Exactly. It's that...

Well, what I did do is I did put it in a backpack with a small battery. It's like 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 100 watts output. Right.

And then the largest battery that you can carry on to an airplane, I think it's 99 watt hours. So it's not very big, but that battery connected to the Starlink Mini will power that thing for three hours. You bring a solar panel and connect it, a little portable solar panel, connect it to that battery and you have a sunny day and you can probably get maybe five, six, seven hours out of it, maybe, under the ideal conditions and you're constantly readjusting to the angle of the sun.

But I put all that into a, into a backpack. Um, and you know, I, I took the van to the end of the road and the rest of it was a walking trail and I continued walking on and, uh, and I, and I set it up and I sat there with some food, lunch, worked for a couple hours just to see if I could. And it was, it was like, it was like a,

I don't know, this epiphany moment. Like, you know, we talk about work from home. That's even a label that we have at The Verge. But if you have a job that allows you to work from home, then you can really work from anywhere if you can get away. And I've been working from home for 20 years now, going back to when I started at Engadget to co-founding The Verge.

So the advent of space internet and cheap solar and cheap batteries has just really made it possible to work from anywhere. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. And I think the thing that surprised me the most about the Starlink Mini was that it feels like, in theory, it would be huge increase in portability, big decrease in performance, right? Like that's what you get from all of these things. They make it smaller and it gets a little worse, but it's a lot smaller. And that's like a trade you have to decide how to make.

It seems like you barely had to make that trade at all. There was hardly any downside to adopting the Starluck Mini. When I did the speed test, like side by side with the actuated dish, the one that's motorized and it's like four times the size, and the Wi-Fi router is a separate box. For my needs, like using it in a van, even testing it at home, there was hardly any performance degradation whatsoever.

Sometimes it would be due to like being too far away from the Wi-Fi dish. Sometimes it would just be due to the antenna not being able to connect to enough satellites or not being able to pull down enough data. But it wasn't noticeable, right? It was only noticeable when I was like doing the speed test. But day to day, like when I'm on a Zoom conference or when I'm like streaming 4K video, it

It doesn't make any difference. And gaming already sucks on, well, it doesn't suck. You can't do anything that requires like really light latency because the latency is, I don't know, 30 milliseconds up to 100. But for everything else, for working remotely, if you're a digital nomad or van lifer, there's hardly any downside. And it sets up really fast.

because it's just, you plug in the USB-C cable. You can even set it on your dashboard. And if you have a big enough window, which most vans and RVs do, and you can use it just like that. You don't have to mount it on your roof or anything. And you can use it while you're driving if you're an idiot. I have to say, well, yeah, don't do that. But you can, because again, now you can. The dashboard picture was the thing that caught me. You had a picture in your interview where you basically took the Mini and just sort of slotted it into that space between the dashboard and the windshield. Yep.

And it sounds like that works really well. And for me, it's like, oh...

this is now just a thing I can just pop out of the backpack, press a button and use in a way that feels like magical and is, is not even with Starlink has not been my experience. And I confess I have, I'm a little out of the loop on Starlink. So maybe in general, it's much more reliable than it once was. But the thing where you can just pull over to the side of the road, stick the thing in the dashboard and be online is like, like you're saying that, that feeling of I can now do this anywhere is very powerful and super exciting. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think, well, it probably is more reliable than at the beginning. And the big thing that sets off many users from everybody else is that if there's a tree, we can move because trees will defeat a Starlink every day. But you can always pick it up and move it. You can change your location. That could be a problem if, you know, you're charging your solar panels or whatever. But if you're charging your solar panels, you should have complete, you know, clear view of the sky. So then Starlink should work as well if the angle is correct. Yeah.

It is an unbelievable device and a game changer if you're, yeah, if you want to live and work remotely. Yeah, it's the, it's the first thing I've seen where I'm like, yeah, I could just screw off to the woods and maybe nobody would notice for a long time. It's like,

It's pretty compelling. And the other thing about it, like we kind of – or maybe it's different in the U.S. because you have broad sections of the U.S. that are just isolated. And so you're not going to have a big cell phone tower or, you know, 4G, 5G coverage. Europe is much more densely populated. But I find just driving around – places I want to be, like on, you know, abandoned ski resorts on the tops of mountains or the beach, you know, on some lonely stretch in northern Spain –

you just, you also don't have coverage there. And when you do, it's really light. And just for the peace of mind and security that I know when I, you know, log in at 8.30 in the morning, I'm going to have coverage from one of three, you know, because I also have two phones with two plans that I carry with me just as backups. But,

I was driving around for, I think it was eight weeks this summer, and it was just bulletproof everywhere. And I visited like eight countries all the way from Denmark to the tip of Portugal. That's awesome. It was just incredibly reliable. It's funny that you say that because that's actually been the thing for me where we had a pretty good run of just going to, I don't know, Airbnbs for long weekends, right? Just sort of small getaways. And we did a lot of those. And I came to this place.

I was like, oh, I can count on there being connection almost anywhere. But it sucks. A lot of like the U.S. not only has lots of spaces with no connection, it has huge rural swaths of just awful connection, like really old copper DSL lines are what people are passing off as like, quote unquote, broadband Internet connection.

And like for me, that's just it's unworkable. Right. Like I can't I can't sit on a Zoom call for an hour if I need to on that connection. And so that thing you're describing, that peace of mind of like, OK, worst case, I'm just going to have to drive down the street away from this tree. Best case, I'm just going to sit here and have great Internet all day. It's like there is freedom in that that is is extraordinary.

extremely exciting. Yeah, absolutely. And I should mention that I'm not paying for like priority access because those are, you know, there are different fee tiers that you could pay for with Starlink. I'm just using the regular metered connection with a lot, where they give you lots of warnings that, you know, if it's, if the system is overtaxed, you'll be deprioritized. It's, no, I never had any problems. But, you know, your mileage,

May vary. Yeah. And I think there's still the thing where like it's useless to me at home. So it becomes it's an extra big purchase to do just for the kind of trips that I take. So that that cost benefit analysis, I think for you is like a person who is going to throw it all away and live in a Sprinter van forever.

And I think the startling challenge is going to be like, how do we get the sort of occasional traveler to think this makes sense for them? And I don't know if there is an answer there, but I suspect things like the mini seem like it starts to get closer to that. Yeah. And the thing that really helps is the way that the subscription works. You can cancel it for the months you're not using it. It's not a day-to-day or by hour cancellation. So like I'm not using it for the month of November. So I put a cancel on it. So I at least saved...

I think my subscription costs 70 euro per month. But it's much more expensive in the U.S. just for a variety of reasons. They're trying, yeah, they would rather people in the U.S. use a residential dish. If you go to Guatemala, for example, you look at, you go to the website, I think it's like 20 euro a month.

Really? Yeah. It's by region. And, you know, everybody said, you know, it's now available in the U.S. Those are the news. Those are the headlines. But it's already been in South American countries. I think there were five countries before the U.S. because that's their primary market for the mini. Right.

Right. So it's priced accordingly. Yeah. Okay. All right. Two more things I want to ask you about, and then I'm going to let you go here. The first is the Peak Design backpack that you and for years, like years, every bag nerd I knew talked about the Peak Design 25 liter backpack. It was like just enough of a camera first bag that I never bought one, but I feel like I should have. And now there's a new one. Everybody seems to love it. Tell me about it. Why is this thing so great?

Oh, I ran into the problem of going back to my review from eight years ago and I called it perfect. Right. And eight years ago, it was perfect for me. It was perfect for my needs.

But as we've been talking about, I like to go remote now and I can't carry two or three different bags with me. I need one bag that can do everything. The Peak Design, the new bag, the old bag is a camera bag. So it's heavy, it's durable. It has all the camera, the flexible inserts already built into it, right?

The new bag, which, by the way, the review unit they sent me is in white, Arctic white. And it looks like I'm walking through, I don't know, 2001, A Space Odyssey. It's this sci-fi white color. It's just fantastic. Totally impractical. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I would never... Maybe I would buy it. Viren bought it, our video producer. He bought it. I don't know if I would. The fact that even the company is like...

Yeah, it's going to turn yellow over time is a real is a real turnoff for me. I'm not going to lie. It looks great when you first get it, though. It looks so good. It looks fantastic. But OK, so first impressions, it lacks that structure of the old of the old bag. So it took me a while to get to figure out what this thing was because it's a it's a it's basically a lightweight nylon bag with a laptop sleeve.

And it's not until you delve into the ecosystem of Peak Design products that this thing becomes really good. Because sometimes you only want that lightweight nylon bag. Like if you're going to the gym, you stuff some things in there. You have maybe a day trip, day hike. You're only bringing maybe a drone. It already has its own protective case, so you can use that. But if you're really a camera nerd or you've got lots of gadgets, maybe you're carrying a drone, action cam, and some other stuff, you're going to want to use this.

They have the camera insert, camera cubes is what they call them. But that's another, like the Smedium, as they call it. It's not quite small, not quite medium, but the Smedium, and it fits perfect in the 25 liter Peak Design Outdoor bag.

That is another 70 euro on top of the, I forget what it was, 230 something. I think it's 250. So you're already up to 300. And then if you start adding a couple more accessories, you can easily push this thing up to 400 euro. So it's not cheap, but camera bags are not cheap. I was going to say, in the scheme of really good camera bags, that's like...

upper middle class I've seen much crazier exactly and they do have a lifetime warranty so if anything breaks any of the straps any of those things the yellowing is not covered if you get the white one unfortunately it comes in black and some kind of purplish color so

But using it for... God, I had it for two months because there were some complications receiving it and whatnot. And I also wanted to wait before posting it until it got off the Kickstarter campaign because I hate sending people to Kickstarter for a purchase. But the day that it went live on the Peak Design website is when we posted a review. And I had been using it for, I don't know, yeah, two months at that point. And I absolutely love it. Absolutely love it. So I feel really bad about...

I can't pull the trigger myself because I feel like I'm betraying my old Peak Design bag that I bought. So I put it on my Christmas list and then I'll let hopefully my wife do it for me. That's fair. So the modular thing is the thing I was most torn on reading your review. Because on the one hand, the thing you're describing sort of makes sense, right? It can be a bunch of different things depending on what you need. On the other hand...

That just sounds like a lot of work. And I feel like what I don't want to do is like manage my cargo day in and day out. Like the thing I have loved about bags that I've had is the ones that I find that on purpose or by accident just already have the pouches for everything I need where they're like, oh, David, you need a place to put your gross sneakers. Here's a place that we made for you. Like those are the things that I love. And I can see the appeal of sort of building that yourself, but it also just feels like it might be a lot of

And like you said, a lot of additional things to buy on top of the expensive thing that I've already bought. Yeah. I mean, that's a good point. But what I, what I settled on is like, I don't always need all my camera stuff. I don't need my, all my drones. So if I can have a container for that, a soft shell container, put everything in, it's already organized for me. And I just remove that in and out. And I always know where all my tech gear, and this is really important when you're in a van, because you have to know where all that stuff is.

So for me, I can just take that cube out. I can put it aside. I then take the bag and I can just load it up with all my day hiking material. Or I can put it back in if I'm doing like a verge review or something. I'll put that in with all my other stuff. So for me, that modularity was a key selling point.

So you think of it like the camera lives in the cube all the time, and then you just sort of stack whatever cubes you need for that day into the bag. Exactly. And you can get multiple cubes. It actually fits two different cubes, and they also have soft shell bags that you can store gear in if you want to do that. But again, if you're living in a van, everything is kind of modular anyway, so it's a nice extension for the bag. But for my needs...

This is now a better bag. I felt bad calling it perfect because it's I got a lot of I'm always going to have lots of complaints like the drawstring that pulls the top pouch closes. I think it's a bit inelegant. The cord get in the way when you're pulling a jacket in and out or whatever. But, you know, you're looking for perfection when you're spending 300 euro or $300 on a bag. Totally. Yeah, that's fair. All right. And you mentioned the last thing I want to talk about, which is that you've become a drone guy.

I am not a drone guy. I am a selfie drone guy. Oh, interesting. Okay. I tried drones in the past and I, nobody seems to talk about how bad DJI software is. I think it's atrocious. I think the user experience is just terrible.

But drone people have been living with these drones for a long time. They understand how the software works. I think it's like Photoshop now where it's like if you don't if you've never seen it before, it is literally borderline unusable. But there are people now who have spent a long time trying to figure it out. But also one of my theories is that DJI figured out a long time ago that it was easier to teach the drones to fly themselves than it was to make them.

better software. So they've just done that. So they're like, their hope is that you just don't even have to use the app because the drone is fine. Don't even worry about it. Man. I mean, that's the thing. So I, um, I went, I did a bike packing trick trip, um, the summer with a friend of mine and, you know, I don't want to, I see DC rainmaker and people, they've got the controller mounted on their handlebars and they're, you know, they're, they're talking to, they're doing all this stuff all the time, but he's, he's been doing this stuff for, I don't know, a decade. Um,

I just want something super simple. I push a button, set it up to fly, and then it'll film me, right? And this also works for gadgets. Like if I have to do a backpack, some of my backpack photos are taken by drones because, you know, I can either ask my wife to do it. She's not a huge fan of that or a friend. Or I just do it myself, and I'd rather just be self-sufficient and do it myself. Yeah.

But no controller required. It just selects between one of six modes. If I want to, I can tweak it in the app, but it's very rare that I have to do that. And now we have two of these really great selfie drones. There's the original Hover Air. I guess it's not even the original. It's like second generation Hover Air X1. They just came out with two new ones, Max and Pro, I think they are. But now they're really expensive. The nice thing about the old ones, I think they were $299, $349 or something, depending upon the sales.

But this DJI Neo that just came out, now it was a little undercooked when they launched it. Like you couldn't do vertical video. It wasn't fast enough to chase you on a bike, for example. But they've recently, just in the two or three months since it launched, they've already updated the firmware to do all those things. And it only costs $199, which is insane. And you can buy a controller if you want. And you can buy goggles if you want to do, what is it, FPV, first-person viewing? Mm-hmm.

I don't know what that's called. I don't care about that. I have no interest in doing that. I just want something that's going to, you know, follow me, take pictures, upload it to Instagram or whatever. You know, maybe I'm going to have a van life influencer account at some point, who knows. But it's just dumb. It's so dumb. It's so easy. It just makes me love it. But as soon as I have to use a controller, I'm out. I'm done. Yeah, I have landed in the same place. And I actually, I sort of turned out of drones for a long time because it was just...

more complicated than it was fun for me. And it was like, I didn't have a purpose for it. I even, even the photography of it was just purely sort of fun. I wasn't doing anything with any of it. And it got to the point where I was like, this is so fiddly and so just annoying that even the fun stuff I get out of it is not, the juice is not worth the squeeze, you know? And then this is why I'm so interested in the Neo because like you said, two

$200 and does a bunch of cool stuff without any worries or requiring any work on your part. That to me is like when drones start to get really interesting. Yeah, I do worry. I think the headline on the news article was basically, oh God, these things are going to be everywhere. I do think that there's this risk that

that we're just going to pollute national parks and whatever with these selfie drones. And they are noisy, right? You can't get away from it. And they're going to bump into people. If you pass somebody on a trail, like I've come close to passing somebody on a trail on a bike. I had to stop, pull over, but then the drone's just hovering there right above the trail. I had to run over and grab it and flip it over. And I'm just one guy at the beginning, but what's going to happen when

After Christmas, you know, everybody's got a 199 Neo and they're flooding the parks and the ski slopes and whatever. And there's this weird gray area of regulation. They're probably illegal, but it doesn't feel like it's illegal. Like I'm not, I'm just pushing a button. I set it aloft, right? It doesn't feel like a huge risk. But, and then, yeah, well, in Europe, it's complicated as you're traveling between countries. Do I have to register or do I not? But yeah.

Yeah, it's sometimes the technology comes along before the regulation is ready. And this is definitely going to be one of those cases. Yeah. And it is it is both more and less complicated than like the bigger drones that you can fly further. Right. We're like those. We should have lots of rules about those. I can fly this drone theoretically miles away from me. Like we should have lots of rules about those drones. But this thing that is just circling my head as I go on a bike path. You're right. It doesn't feel right.

That just feels like a thing that I have. That doesn't feel like a thing anyone else even needs to be worried about. But you add one of those to every person you see on the path, and suddenly we have a whole new set of problems. And I do agree, it does feel like that's coming. Yeah, and they do go fast now. Now that the Neo software has been updated, it'll go like...

32 kilometers per hour. I figured that isn't, that's like over 20 miles per hour, I believe. That's like fast for sure. Yeah. And if that's following you and slams into somebody that you're passing, that is a collision that's going to hurt. Even though the props are covered with guards, it's going to hurt. So yeah, there's a risk here.

Yeah, fair enough. All right, well, I should let you go. But once you've done this winter tour with the Sprinter, you got to come back and give us a Sprinter review. God, if I survive, I absolutely will. Maybe we'll do it from the top of a ski slope and you can just write off that whole trip as a work expense. It'll be amazing. I'll have a Starlink Mini in a backpack and the drone hovering overhead. It's the life, man. All right, Thomas, thank you as always. Take care. Bye. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about microphones. We'll be right back.

Support for this episode comes from AWS. With the power of AWS generative AI, teams can get relevant, fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results. Power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud. All right, we're back. So Andrew Marino, former VergeCast producer, is now working with our video team. And for his latest video, he made a really great comparison of a bunch of different platforms

portable microphones, the kinds you can clip onto your jacket or your hat or your lapel that make it easy to connect to your phone or your camera and get good audio just about anywhere. These are things you see everywhere. They're the kind of things that are so ubiquitous now that you don't even really notice them, even though it's like a giant square plastic brick on someone's chest as they talk to you. But these things are also really useful. We use them for VergeCast things all the time. We use them for our video team all the time. So Andrew put all these to the test and I figured,

Now would be a good time to have him come on and both play a little bit for us and we can see how it all sounds and decide which one of these is actually worth, you know, sticking onto your chest when you two are making videos. Let's get into it. Andrew Marino, welcome back to the show. Hey, David. It's been a minute. It's nice to have you back on the Verge cast. Yeah, what's up? You left us, rudely, to go make videos about microphones. And now I've brought you back because this is what happens to you. You can't avoid us forever. Yeah.

It's a full circle. Exactly. So, okay, I realized in just recording the intro for this that I don't even know what to call this class of microphones that you've been testing here. So what are these things? How do you think about these mics? Yeah, they're like wireless microphone systems for your phone. It's like consumer-grade wireless microphone systems. That's pretty good. We've had wireless microphone systems in broadcasting and video production.

Now it's a lot easier to just use it plugging into your phone or whatever your little computers are. Okay. Do you remember years ago when I think it was Shure made that thing that actually plugged into the lightning port and had that little like flippy microphone? I loved that thing. I used that thing every day.

every day. I still have it. I still have it. Yeah, I love it. It sounded great. Yeah, it really did. And it was like as a like voice memo thing. It was it was great. I remember I did a thing with NPR one time on the phone and they were so excited about how good I sounded. And I was like, it was like the great reveal of my life that I got to tell a public radio producer that I was on this incredible Shure microphone. But anyway, so the

What I see these microphones mostly used for is like social clips, right? These are like the little plastic squares you see on everyone's shirt and sweater and hat all over social. Is that the main use case for these? Yeah, totally. Like we wouldn't, these companies wouldn't be making all these if it weren't for TikTok and Instagram and all that. And they've gotten...

Pretty fast, it seems to me. Yes. Even just within the year, these companies like Rode and DJI are just upgrading these models to be lighter or like have more features, have better charging cases. It's all very exciting. Like this past two years of audio technology.

Yeah, it's cool. So yeah, what is kind of the state of the art right now? Like you got five or six of them in. What do they have in common? Like what's the good stuff you can get now? Yeah, so the big ones are like these are coming in like AirPod cases. Basically, you have these little transmitters that have mics on them. You pop them in a little case and then you have a little receiver that you pop right into your phone. So Rode just came out with a Rode Wireless Micro.

That is just a, it's like a little bigger than AirPods case and it plugs right into your phone. I really liked that one. Shure also makes one that's a little case that you can just pair via Bluetooth to your phone. And DJI of course has the mic two and the mic mini, which are these little microphones that you can plug into basically anything. So it's all like very versatile and, um,

pretty well made versus what we were having to deal with before with Bluetooth headphones and stuff. Yeah, I mean, I have a set here that is like a thing that plugs into a headphone jack that my phone doesn't have anymore. And then...

a whole receiver. And it's like, there's like four cables associated with it. It's just a bad time. It sounds good, but it is like I had to carry a bag of gear just to get this thing. Right. Yeah. It's a lot, it was a lot clunkier before. And it's getting more easier to just like not have to tie a rubber band around your phone to keep all this gear attached to your stuff. What about on the phone side? Do these all have like companion apps or are they just supposed to be

better microphones. I've always been torn about like, do I want a bunch of fancy features or do I just want this thing to pretend to be my microphone on my phone and just sound better? Yes, this is where the differences come in here. DJI has all their wireless microphones. You can do a lot of the customization like gain and turning on noise cancellation through just the hardware receiver.

Rode, their little micro wireless microphone, you can only control the gain and all that stuff through the app. They also have like a video app that they want you to use when you're making video with these things. The video doesn't look as good as the native iPhone app when I was trying it, which was concerning. That also just seems instinctively kind of weird, the idea that I'm going to make videos with

in an app based on which microphone I'm using just feels like the wrong order of operations of how I'm going to do stuff. Totally. And then also, if you're making this stuff within these video creation apps like TikTok and Instagram, like you don't want to go back and forth between apps to like adjust the gain and all that. Yeah. Yeah. The thing you describe about having some of the controls on the case itself is

feels like the right one, right? Yeah. If the receiver that you just plug in the bottom of your phone, you can adjust the gain on this little knob on the DJI Mic Mini and

And so when you're recording, say, within the TikTok app, you can adjust the game from there and you don't have to switch apps or anything like that. Yeah, that is really handy. So let's just cut right to the chase here. Which one's the best? You've tested them all. Everybody expected you to not pick one in the video. This is my favorite thing about the video you made is you just ruthlessly trolled everyone.

on the internet who refuses to just pick winners. Who won? Yes. So when we factor in price and audio quality and functionality, state that there, I went with the DJI Mic Mini, which has this nice carrying case and the mics are really tiny now. So when you clip them on your shirt,

They're not as noticeable as those big squares you notice on all these videos. So I really like that, the compactness. And it is $170, which is, you know, compared to a lot of these, they go up to in the $350 range. I think Shure's, the whole package is $500. So price, audio quality, and functionality, like DJI Mac Mini was really impressive. Yeah.

How small is it? Like you've mentioned, you mentioned that it's small. It's that matters more to me than I expected. Having now used these a lot. I notice every like percentage of an ounce because it just it just like pulls on your shirt and they seem huge. Like how small are we talking that this thing has actually gotten?

Yes. So it's about half the size as they were before. And the thing also is like a lot of these you could just tuck underneath your shirt and then use the magnet without a clip to just.

hold onto your shirt that way. I never really liked doing that because you have to deal with your clothes rustling and all that, and it gets a little muffled. So I always like keeping them outside of the clothes, like in the open air. So, which is why I don't usually like the bigger ones. I usually would like to prefer to plug in an external wireless lavalier. Sometimes it gets a little annoying.

We did a whole video shoot in, we went from San Francisco to LA in our hydrogen car. If Verge listeners may remember, we talked to a lot of car drivers that were like going in to pump their gas. And we wanted to talk to them really quickly. And I just wanted like, here, I need to put this on your shirt really quickly. And like a lot of, if you look at the video, a lot of them have these big chunky squares on their shirt. And.

and now that the dji ones are a lot smaller um it's less noticeable you know it's just a little it's not distracting in the video yeah and it is i will say all a huge improvement over what it was before which is snaking a wire up someone's back and you as the producer having to say sorry i just have to reach up your shirt for a second here and i'm gonna touch your butt while i clip this thing to it and uh

It is very good that we seem to be leaving those days behind. Yes, I have done that in a traditional broadcast setting, and it is very awkward experience. Yeah, it's not a good time. So you mentioned that the DJI is kind of the best combination of things. Does it have competitors that beat it in one way or another? Like, if all I care about is pure, raw, best sound, don't care what else. Yeah.

Is it somebody other than DJI who wins? Oh, yeah. I would like to just mention now, I'm currently recording with the DJI Mic Mini for this whole recording. Okay. So the one that I really like, and it's a company that is known for its audio quality, is Sennheiser. They just came out with this thing called the Profile Wireless. It is just a big stick microphone.

audio thing. But you can just press this little, there's a little button, has all these little receivers in here that you can just clip on. Oh, clever. So the thing you're holding looks like a sort of chunky handheld microphone. Yeah. And you can use it as that. It sounds like if you want to, but then you can also just pull the little receiver out and clip it on. Yep. And then you can, yeah, the transmitter. The transmitter, yeah. And then you can pop the receiver out to...

plug that right into your phone and Sennheiser, that one was the best audio quality to me. It also has one of my favorite features on these is a backup recording button. So you can just press this little red button on the device, on the transmitter, and it will record the audio locally onto the mic. Oh, that's helpful. So

You don't have to go through wireless, you know, run into any issues with signal to noise ratios and all that. And it's perfectly there. If something happens on your recorder, you have this backup recording. That's actually helped me so many times in these kinds of situations. I was just about to say, I had not thought about this until you just mentioned that. But the problem I've had with these microphones over the years, including all the way back to that, that Shure one that I could plug into my phone was sometimes,

My phone just wouldn't use it. I would press record on something, and it would just pick a different microphone to record from. And I wouldn't notice until afterwards because the thing was connected. It all seemed to be working, but then it was like I opened voice memos and hit record, and the wrong mic picks up, and...

you're just sort of hosed because phones are not very good at like giving you a menu to tell you when it's switching from microphone to microphone. Has that gotten better in general? Like are phones better at this game than they used to be? I think so. I was very skeptical of this. It's like the iPhone is like,

It's hard to, when you're in the phone app or the camera app, it's hard to like know what audio source you're using. Right. So you kind of just have to trust it, recognize it. Android is a little better at this. You can actually like choose the audio source. But I was always scared of that. So I would always use an extern, like another app to confirm because, you know, the Rhodes app will tell you what specifically the interface you're using is.

But phones have gotten a lot better at this. That being said, phones, microphones have gotten a lot better in general. So there's that too. Yeah, that's actually a good question. How do you feel like these compare? Obviously, there's a usability difference where you don't have to hold your phone up to your face, which goes a really long way. But in terms of audio quality, you're right that the internal microphone on your phone, if you have a recent high-end phone, is probably very good compared

Are these still kind of like a full level or two up from that, even as they get smaller and cheaper and easier to use? Yeah, totally. I think so. There's some plus and minuses. Like in smartphones, you get stereo recording a lot. So if you really want like an ambient track when you're like recording a scene with your phone, I like using that stereo recording sometimes. Yeah.

But there is a lot of color, especially the iPhone is a lot brighter sounding. It's a lot of high-end in the recordings. It's a little less controllable.

So I, in general, like especially Sennheiser and Shure, like they've been developing this technology for so long. So they do sound a lot better than the traditional just holding your phone up to your face, especially in post-production. Yeah. Are these companies doing something different with these mics because of the way that they're going to be used? I mean, you know, Sennheiser and Rode and all these other companies make a...

other microphones i'm on a i'm on a sure mic on a road stand right now recording this so they all know how to make like a high-end microphone but these are like you're saying at the beginning sort of a very specific thing for a very specific use case as you test them can you tell these are like designs to be used on tiktok in some meaningful way not not really i mean more when you looking at the uh

the app side of it. But these are all like omnidirectional microphones that, you know, lavaliers on like any, you know, live set have been using for, for decades. So there's not much different for that. It is like, because you're moving around and you're outside and you want to make sure it's, you know, it's on your shirt, it's getting you when you're turning your head and all that. So it's more like the performance side of it. Yeah.

That makes sense. Yeah, I do wonder how much they're learning to do to compensate for people who don't have a ton of experience using mics who are suddenly clipping mics to themselves. And like the thing you just said about being able to sort of swivel your head is like, that's a big one, right? You most people have terrible mic technique, and understanding how to talk into a microphone is a thing that takes real practice. And so for something like this, like,

I would assume a lot of these companies are spending time trying to think about, okay, what weird places are people going to stick this and how are they going to use it and how can we account for that? And again, I think it makes sense that a lot of that is going into the software and stuff that's actually being built into phones. Yeah, totally. Like there's 32-bit float, which is like recording at a bit rate that is going to prevent you from clipping audio, which is a big problem in like any...

where you're not monitoring the levels of these microphones with your headphones or even seeing levels on any of these. There's that. And then there's also the noise cancellation. So I should have mentioned that. DJI has a noise softener, basically. It will take a lot of the background noise out, which is something you're not going to be going in your computer and trying to dial down.

If you're just going into TikTok most of the time. Right. Not everybody has a you to make everything sound incredible all the time. I highly recommend it, by the way. If you can have an Andrew to do it, I recommend having an Andrew. Um,

I want to hear a couple of these and test them a little bit, but I am curious, are there any other sort of standout features from some of the ones that you tested that you're like, oh, if only I could borrow this and stick it on the DJI, it would be even better? Yeah, so what DJI Mic 2 has is like audio levels. You can see the audio levels on the receiver. That's a really nifty one. Also being able to plug in an external lavalier, which some of the higher end of these do, the Rode Wireless...

models do and of course the backup feature like that like onboard recording is so it's just like once you have that you don't want to not use it anymore yeah that makes total sense you know what I mean alright so you're on the DJI which sounds very good I'm super impressed cool

I want to try the worst one you tried. But before we do that, can we try just like one of the others? I'm curious to see kind of the range of quality we're looking at here. So let's just switch to one of the other ones you liked like slightly less. And I'm just curious if I can even tell the difference in the audio. Sure. Yeah. Let's use the Rode Wireless Micro, which is just plugs right into with USB-C.

All right, so now you're on the Rode Micro, is that what you called it? Yes, the Rode Wireless Micro. It just came out last month. Okay. I would say we're kind of in range. I mean, you're in a pretty quiet room. Yeah. But this sounds...

I don't know, like maybe slightly more compressed, but I also think I'm probably listening for it. Yeah, I doubt you'll hear much of a difference if listeners are listening on their phone or a Bluetooth speaker or something like that. Whenever we do these, I think about my wife who listens to podcasts just out the speaker of her four-year-old phone. And I'm like, this must sound like nothing to you, Anna. She's just like, what do you mean? These all sound terrible. Yeah.

Yeah, so it's really nifty, but I like it because it's super compact. I just keep it in my pocket, like, all the time. And, like, I plugged it in my laptop, which is cool, which I didn't get to in the video. But, yeah, you plug it in via USB-C. You can also plug it into your laptop if you have that. That is actually pretty handy, being able to, like, yay for universal charging ports, right? But being able to just kind of have a plug-and-play mic into any device that you have goes a surprising long way. Like, I give...

a lot of people the same speech about how important it is to sound good on video calls. And this is the kind of thing that you might even like if you're giving a presentation or at work, this might be useful in that same way. Yeah, people have told me that they want something like that for home for their like Zoom calls. I'm like, oh, it's it's interesting. You're going to like walk around your kitchen while you're on the call. Just have it clipped to your

to your shirt. So yeah, that's cool. It's kind of a good idea. You could sound like you're sitting right at your computer, but just be like aimlessly wandering around your house with AirPods and a fancy microphone. The mic doesn't move. You do. That's pretty good. We should start a company and that's the tagline. It's going to be incredible. All right, let's try one more. And the one I want to try is the TikTok microphone. I think everybody knows the one I'm talking about, but you got the one that is the one.

And I would like to hear how it sounds. Okay, let's do it. All right. You're now in the software that I'm seeing as USB Audio 1.0, which already feels alarming. How are we doing? Okay, can you hear me now? Oh, yeah. This is what I knew this was going to... It's bad. It's like... It's just bad. It's... You sound...

like someone who put their airpods in wrong uh i've been noticing a lot that people wear their airpods wrong have you ever noticed this the people who wear them so that they're sort of sticking directly out of their head it's like they've screwed them in too far into their ear canals and they just it's like it's like you have antenna coming out of your ears that's what you sound like yeah i have seen someone in the office not gonna lie wearing airpods like that it's a name and shame andrew it's time uh so first of all what is this mike

Uh, it's a good question because I don't really know. Uh, the box that came in says the K eight wireless microphone. Okay. Uh, I've seen this on Tik TOK without that branding, the same box without that branding. Um, it is just kind of this generic wireless microphone that you plug into your phone has, and then one little other thing that you clip on your shirt with the mic.

And, uh, I've like, people are like hawking these on Tik TOK for five bucks. Yeah. It's the one you can find a million identical looking ones on like Ali express and the Tik TOK shop and Amazon. And like, I assume they're all the same thing from like a giant bin in a factory somewhere in China. That's what it seems to be. Yeah. I went, I bought another one, uh, recently just to see if it was the same and it was exactly the same. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. Uh,

And this is this has become the TikTok microphone. Is it just because it's cheap? Like everybody's just like, oh, this sounds better than my phone. And it's cheap, even though I would say it demonstrably does not sound better than your phone. Yeah, totally. It's like because it was, you know, sold on one of these like bulk shops where you can get a whole bunch and drop ship them. But, you know, it isolates your voice more. It does. It's like the phone is going to be like.

It's going to pick up a lot of other things in the room. A lot of people record in their car. So this, if you hold this up to your mouth in the car, maybe you won't get as like a boxier sound than usual. Yeah. And there is something to that, that at least you have something sort of close and directional and that's helpful. Like that is the basic mic technique we give most people. But I still feel like this is much worse than this.

holding up the white earpod microphone to your mouth. Like if you're going to hold a microphone, that one sounds much better than this one does. Totally. Yeah. I guess it is $20 versus $5. But like, I'm going to go ahead and say that's worth a $15 investment. Yeah. And who knows how long these are going to be for that price? Like I've seen them on Amazon for like $30. Yeah. That's fair. All right. Switch back to the good mic so I don't have to listen to this anymore. And then I have a couple more questions. We'll let you go. Okay, great.

All right. Are we back to a good mic? I think so. Oh, we're back to a good mic. This sounds good. Is this the DJI again? This is the Sennheiser Profire Wireless. I figured since I mentioned it, I wanted to demonstrate how it sounded. It does sound good. Yeah, they're all kind of right in range. Yeah. Which is good news, honestly. Especially, I feel like DJI's thing is...

Just as good, a little wacky to figure out, and cheaper. It's like, keeps working for me. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was skeptical of their mics because they're not a microphone company. But yeah, they're pretty good. Yeah, that's super exciting. So, okay, you think if I'm like a creator starting a TikTok channel, DJI into my phone, into the TikTok app is like a perfectly viable solution?

mic video strategy. We feel good about that? Yes, totally. Yeah? That's awesome. That feels like a win. This is like, that's a big level up for a lot of people pretty fast. Yeah, and also if you end up like getting a better camera and you're not using just your phone, you can still use this with another camera, which is really what

is a big difference between that and the Rode Mini or the Rode Micro because you can only use this with the USB, like something with the USB port taking audio in. Yeah. Yeah, that's very cool. So are you using these mics in your own gear now? What's your new setup? Yeah.

Yes, this past year or two, we've kind of like stopped carrying around the bulky professional wireless microphone systems when we're like running around. I remember at CES last year, we didn't really use those. We use the road, the wireless go to for most of our stuff we were doing out in the field.

And, yeah, and for CES, I would love to carry around the Sennheiser kit because it's super compact. It's got this neat carrying case. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it goes a really long way. And I think to me, the next step then, it kind of feels like getting much smaller is maybe not super useful. It feels like the next step is starting to solve some of the UI stuff, right? Because I feel like especially the things that are connected to the phone, right?

There's just not great sort of really fine-grained manual control in the way that you can do like

Pretty professional stuff with your video camera at this point. It feels like audio still has a little bit of catching up there, but maybe that's the next thing. Yeah, I think you're sacrificing a lot of stuff by making them smaller. So there's going to be some happy medium there where like maybe the receiver is a little bigger that you can adjust some settings, but the mics are still kind of tiny so they don't show up on screen, you know? That is fair. OK, last thing and then you're going to go. You have...

You are the person who knows the answer to this question. Where is the correct place on your person to put the mic to do this? So I always like going like two buttons down on like a dress shirt. Okay. It's a very specific...

type of way to dress. So it's not accurate for everyone. But you're kind of like right at like mid chest height, it seems like. Yeah, totally. Like if you just you put it where you're, you know, where your heart is, is like a good. Oh, yeah. OK. Right in the middle. Yeah, totally. OK. So not on the brim of my hat, which is a thing that I saw somebody do and thought that was very cool and wanted to steal. Yeah, it's an interesting idea. They're omnidirectional. So it's not it's not going to not pick up

up your voice, but it's a little silly. It's obviously for aesthetic purposes. Okay.

All right. All right. Well, this is as someone who ends up always putting it on my collar and then it like droops all weird. This is good advice. Yeah. Yeah. Like wherever your hand goes when you say the Pledge of Allegiance, that's where you put the mic. Yeah, totally. And now these have mic little magnets on them. You can really just you can clip them on anywhere on your clothing. Yeah. Yeah. The magnet over the clip thing is a huge upgrade. Yeah. Cannot recommend that enough. All right. Andrew, thank you for coming back. It's nice to see you. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and do a segment on the Vergecast Hotline. We'll be right back. Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud. Okay, we're back. Let's get started.

Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love all of your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. A reminder, next week, we are doing a full meta episode about The Verge Cast and The Verge.

So if you have questions, we've gotten a bunch of really fun ones already. But if there's ever something you've wanted to know about how the Verge cast works, how we make the show, how we decide what goes on in the show, what we're doing when we're not recording the show, how the Verge works, the future of media, all kinds of stuff, anything you want to know, call us 866-VERGE11, email us vergecastsattheverge.com. We love hearing all of your questions. And we're going to do as many of the meta ones as we can next week. This week, we have a question about web browsers.

Hi, this is Joey from Portland, Oregon. And I have a question about web browsers. I was just watching your latest, or listening to your latest broadcast about, you know, Chrome. And I was just thinking, just recently I started switching from using Chrome to Safari on my MacBook Air, I'm all. And, you know, just heard that, like, it's more efficient and, you know, it's a little faster, but definitely supposedly uses less battery. And I haven't really noticed that.

I mean, I haven't done extensive testing, but like most people, I live in the browser for the most part. And I use Safari extensions. I use Safari extensions. And it seems like it's about the same battery life. It doesn't seem any faster. So is that really true? Is Safari really noticeably more efficient? I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks. All right.

One of the reasons I really like this question is that it's really hard to test this question. Browsers are complicated because they're so much more than just one individual thing. Like the way that you use your browser is so personal and so unique to you that

Maybe even in ways that you don't understand, right? Think about the number of tabs that you have open, whether you tend to use multiple windows with tabs or just have one window with a thousand tabs in it. Are you a bookmarks person? Do you have lots of extensions? Are you constantly running like really intense web apps like Gmail or Figma or Kodak?

Canva or things like that? Or are you the kind of person who is just like opening a web browser, going to CNN.com, looking at some news and then moving on into your day? Maybe no other piece of software is so varied in its use that way than a web browser. So it's very hard for anyone to say,

Here is the best web browser for X, Y, or Z reason, right? I think one reason people think Safari is the best Mac browser is just that it's so well integrated with all of Apple's other products and its operating systems. There's actually not real evidence anywhere that I can find that Safari is faster or more performant or better for battery life in any meaningful way.

It's just that it is so sort of deeply integrated inside of the system that it feels better. The share sheet works better. You can open things and move them around more quickly. It feels the Mac-iest of the Mac browsers, and it feels the iPhone-iest of the iPhone browsers, the same way that Chrome does on Android. Like you can run other browsers on a Chromebook than Chrome, but it's going to feel worse, even if it's just as fast. So all of that is to say, I think,

figuring out which browser is for you, you should think much more about UI and which services you use than really throwing your lot behind one product or another. Like I said, there aren't a lot of ways to kind of apples to apples compare one browser to the other, but there is one benchmark that I like. It's called Speedometer 3.0 from BrowserBench, and it tries to mimic...

using a web app. It's like a to-do list thing that is trying to move stuff around. So it executes JavaScript and tries to run stuff in the background and also, you know, loads news pages. And the idea is just a sort of normal web usage.

It's not a perfect benchmark. I don't think any benchmark of anything is perfect, but at least you get some kind of apples to apples rough performance metric for how a browser works. I tested it on seven browsers on my Mac mini. And let me just read you the scores. So higher is better. Chrome came in first with 48.2. Safari got 47.4, not super far down. Then there was Brave 44.7, Edge 44.5. So basically the same between those two.

Firefox, 41.4. Arc, 38.3. And DuckDuckGo, 38.1. Reasonable range top to bottom there, but they all have a bit of a margin of error in them. And realistically...

You might notice a performance difference between like Chrome at the very top and DuckDuckGo at the very bottom. But like, should you use Chrome or Safari based on the 0.8 points between them? No, there are other reasons that that browser will feel better or worse to you than the raw performance score of how it does on this one benchmark.

All of this is to say, I think browsers are fascinating for this exact reason, right? It's not a question of optimizing ruthlessly for one specific use case. Browsers are all things to all people. And what I would do is basically try to figure out the UI that works for you, whether you want...

Chrome, which has more sort of accessibility to extensions and does a better job, I think, with some bookmarklets. Or you want Safari, which is simple to a fault and just keeps everything very straightforward. Or you want something like Arc, which has really weird ideas about UI. Or you want Brave, which has a lot of additional features and stuff built into the browser. You kind of can't pick wrong, right? There are a lot of browsers out there. A bunch of them are really good.

None of them have any sort of obviously huge increase in killer app over any of the others. So ultimately, what I would say is try a bunch of different browsers and just see what works for you. And don't really worry about spending a ton of time trying to optimize for performance. I will say, if you open a lot of tabs, it will crush your memory and it will crush your battery life. And I

So anecdotally, I cannot prove this, but anecdotally, Chrome seems to be the worst at that. That when I have 100 Chrome tabs open, it just destroys every computer I've ever used in a way that no other browser does. I can't prove that, but that is how it feels to me. But in general, the best thing you can do for your performance and your battery life is manage your tabs slightly better so that you're not running so many different versions of any of these browsers at a time.

But beyond that, just pick the browser you like the best and use it. And don't worry about the rest. And that is actually a pretty good place to be. Lots of different ideas about browsers out there. Give them all a try. I have seven on my computer now because I downloaded them all. And I'm going to keep them. I'm going to try them because this is the life I've chosen for myself.

Anyway, that is it for the Verge cast today. Thank you to everyone who's on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about. All of Thomas Ricker's reviews, Andrew Marino's great videos, lots of stuff that we've done on browsers, all of that I'll put in the show notes. But as always, read the website. It's December, but the news keeps happening. We have tons of great gift guides. Some of the like Cyber Monday, Black Friday deals are still kicking around. So keep it locked on the website. Lots of good stuff going on. And like I said before, if you have thoughts, comments,

questions, feelings, or other browsers I should download, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Like I said, we're doing a meta episode about all things Verge and VergeCast and the future of media and podcasts and whatever else you want to talk about next Tuesday. So get in your questions as soon as you can, and we will answer as many of them on the show as we possibly can.

This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nila and I will be back on Friday to talk about all the news, the Intel CEO stuff, some crazy stuff going on in the streaming world, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. ♪

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