How Roomba got stuck
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Welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of the E-Ink tech stack. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am currently spending my morning going around my basement, putting little tiny pieces of electrical tape on all of the glowing lights in this room. So my parents were here this weekend, and...

There are just lights everywhere, I discovered. This is the guest room where people sleep. And I realized that even when you turn off all the lights in this room, there's stuff just glowing everywhere. Like I have computer speakers that have this really unnecessarily bright green light. I have the thing that I plug my mic and headphones into, and it has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven lights.

eight, nine different things illuminated right now. Why? I have a MetaQuest 3 back there that I think has five lights that are on at all times. My TV glows when it's off for no reason. Thank you, TCL, for that terrible decision. There's just a lot of lights.

And I think that is bad. And so I'm going around and just putting little tiny pieces of tape on every single one that I can find. And we're going to put darkness back in this room. And I'm very excited about it. And also, if you're a product maker and you find yourself at some point being like, oh, should I have a green light on this that glows 24 hours a day? The answer is no. Just stop it. Go find something else to do.

That is the only thing I have learned, is that you don't need the green lights, and we can all move on with our lives. Anyway, we are not here on The Verge Cast to talk about lights, at least not more than, you know, we normally do on this podcast. Today we're going to do two things. First, we're going to talk to Jen Tuohy about the story of iRobot and the Roomba, because in a certain way that story has come to an end, and it's been a really interesting one, and we're going to talk through as much of it as we can.

Then I'm going to talk to Michael Tamblyn, who is the CEO of Kobo, about e-ink and e-readers and what people want from a device that isn't their smartphone. I really enjoyed talking to Michael, and I think you'll enjoy hearing it. We also have a really fun hotline question. Lots to get to. So much going on. News continues to be nuts, but we're going to have some fun today. All that is coming up in just a second. But first, I'm sure there's like 85 more lights, and so I have more electrical taping to do. This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. So to explain the story I want to get into right now, I just want to read you two headlines on The Verge. So this is from two weeks ago, March 11th. It says iRobot launches eight new Roombas and finally adds LiDAR mapping. Great. Exciting. Cool. We love a new robot vacuum. The next day, like 17 hours later, iRobot tells investors its future is in doubt.

How does that make sense? How do you put these two stories next to each other? iRobot, Meek and Roomba's forever, super successful, biggest name in the whole space. It is the thing everybody calls all the other devices. It's the Kleenex or the Google of robot vacuums. And yet iRobot is falling apart. This company can't keep up anymore. How did this happen? How did we get here? And how is it this company...

that both set this market off to what it is and doesn't seem to be able to keep up. Jen Tuohy wrote both of those articles that I just read the headlines of, and she is going to help me dig into the history of this company and how it all went wrong. So let's get into it.

Jen Tui, welcome to the show. Hello, happy to be here. I don't know if we're here to do like a funeral for the Roomba or a retrospective or like a celebration of life or a something. But I want to talk about Roomba.

Which I feel like is going through a bit of a challenging time right now after a very long and I would say epic run of being a really fascinating gadget. But it's tough times in Roomba land right now.

It is. It's been a hard week. Well, an exciting week and then a hard week last week where they launched a bunch of new robots and then the next day said we might go out of business. So it was kind of like one of those, woof. It's a real shot chaser moment there. Yeah. And it's sad. It's sad times. I mean, I remember buying, I think when I've moved into my first home, a

long time ago, we got a Roomba and I was so excited. And so I've had Roombas in my life for decades. And yeah, they're still in my life. They're not gone yet.

Yeah. So let's just start at the very beginning. Before there was the Roomba, there was the company that made the Roomba called iRobot. But if I understand correctly, this company did not like set out to build vacuums. Like what was iRobot before it was the Roomba company? Yeah.

Yeah. So they originally were founded. So actually, it's a Silicon Valley tale based in Massachusetts. So it was founded by three MIT grads. They were grad students, I believe, when they actually founded it. So they were roboticists. It was Colin Angle, Helen Greenier, and Rodney Brooks. And it was

It was founded in 1990. And you're right. The idea wasn't, they weren't even thinking about vacuums for your house at the time. They were basically trying to sort of start making robots of any type because in the 90s, we didn't really have, you know, beyond maybe dishwashers and washing machines, that we didn't have robots in our home. But there also weren't a lot of really single purpose, interesting robots in society.

spaces that could use them. So they were kind of looking to fill gaps with building robots that could help specifically in areas where people can't go or don't want to go.

I mean, they were a startup. Most of their original robots were developed in partnership with different organizations. So they worked with NASA and actually helped develop the original Mars rover. They worked with the U.S. government, DARPA, to develop a stair climbing robot that could go into rubble, into places that humans couldn't go, try and help humans.

you know, things like bomb disposal, hazmat, search and rescue, those types of things where having a robot put them in a dangerous situation that would be better than putting a human in. So they did a lot of really interesting things. Again, startups, so they were working with

organizations that could help fund them. So they spent about 12 years building robots for the military, law enforcement, energy sector, industrial, cleaning, even some toys. And this is in the 90s. So like way ahead of the game on a lot of this stuff. Way ahead of the game. Yes, exactly. And really, they were very, very innovative. I mean, none of these robots were... And actually, this was something that Colin Angle, the CEO, was kind of quite specific about. He was never trying to build the humanoid robot. He was

They were always trying to build a purpose robot, like a robot to solve a problem or to be able to do something that humans didn't want to or shouldn't do. Interesting. Wait, that's very funny because I think...

The Rosie the Robot comparison to Roomba in particular from, you know, Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons. This is like everybody's idea of the like robot helper around the house. And I feel like that has been put next to Roomba.

For as long as I can remember. But you're telling me that's not ever what actually they were trying to build. No, in fact, when I was doing some research for today, I found some old interviews and iRobot specifically said the idea of trying to build a humanoid robot that would push a vacuum around is just so difficult.

Like, it's just not really realistic. And it'd be so expensive, which we've, and we've seen this 30 years later, and the sort of nascent attempts of humanoid robots, that the concept is just not that viable. And even if some, even if you can build it, which you can, because we've seen humanoid robots, you know, your average American consumer isn't going to be spending, you know,

$15,000 on a robot to push a vacuum around their house. It makes much more sense to take technology and solve a specific problem, such as floor cleaning. And this is where they... So actually, they first started in the floor cleaning realm. They had an engineer, his name was Joe Jones, who's also from MIT, who had been tinkering with developing a floor sweeping robot for years. His original prototype before he started working for iRobot was...

Oh, wow.

this large space, we need it cleaned and it costs a lot to hire a person to do it. So if we could build a robot, we, you know, so they had been working on that partnership with SC Johnson, I think it was. And then that didn't work out, but they ended up working with a few different companies who sort of helped them

focus in and then realize, actually, this is what we can do. We can build a small circular disc that just rolls around your house and sucks up dirt, which is apparently a much more complicated and difficult thing to do than it sounds. So it took them a while. But yeah, eventually in 2002, so 12 years after first founding the company, they launched the first consumer robot vacuum in the U.S.,

There had been one prior in Europe from Electrolux, but it didn't last long. And then, yeah, sort of the main thing it featured was bump sensors. So basically it would bump around your house, if everyone remembers. I mean, some of them still do that. And cliff sensors so that it wouldn't throw itself down the stairs or off a balcony. And, yeah, that was only $200. Yeah.

In 2002. Oh, wow. I assumed it was going to be like three grand, those first ones. I mean, that was the push, really. This has to be a consumer robot, a consumable so that people can afford it. Although the next one, and I think the one I ended up buying, got a lot more expensive. I'm not really sure what happened in between. Yeah, Roombas haven't been $200 in a very long time. Yeah, so that was sort of the entry into the market, and it was very successful.

Part of the reason I'm so fascinated by Roomba is like it is it is the Kleenex of this space, right? Like everybody calls all the other ones Roombas. Yeah. And I think that has been true, certainly for as long as I can remember and have been paying attention to this space. So like, did iRobot get that just by being first and having a cool product name? Or was it like, did they invent something sort of spectacular and new that made this thing amazing from the very beginning?

They did invent technology that had never been invented before. So, yes. And they did something very smart, which I'm sure most companies do, but they patented everything. So they have like...

Thousands of patents, patents, patents, sorry, my US English, UK English is going back and forth here. We'll allow it, yeah. So they have one patent in particular that was basically for the entire robot vacuum system that really meant that was one of the reasons why we did not see...

lot of competition for a long time. They actually very fiercely enforced those patents as well. So they had some competition come along, but they either, you know, were sort of shot down or got bought. One of the questions I had for you was like, why did all the competition take so long to appear?

Is that the answer that essentially iRobot managed to own the idea of a robot vacuum for a long time? I think so. I mean, I'm not a patent law expert, but it does seem that that is sort of what happened. I mean, a lot of these patents, I think, expired in the last few years, which is one reason why you've seen a resurgence or you see more and more robots arriving. I did find a really interesting anecdote. Apparently,

There was, it was sometime in like 2020, there was a, My Genie was a Chinese company that had a robot that they launched. And it enforced its patents and sued them. And apparently people came and ripped the robots off the show floor at IFA once they'd won the patent battle. Because, yeah, they really did.

enforce it. You know, okay, fair enough. It's their intellectual property and people were copying them. And you can see people have copied them if you look today at all the robots out there. They all look basically like Roombas. No one's really come up with a brand new design. There is a company we've covered called Matic that has sort of come up with a new look for the robot vacuum and a new, it has different technology, uses entirely camera-based

And it actually looks like, has one of those, looks like a traditional vacuum in the front. Like it has a little head that it pushes around. But yeah, things, I mean, Shark Ninja, Dyson, Samsung, they all came out with, if you look at those, their robot vacuums are different looking than all the big companies you might be used to seeing like Roborock and Ecovacs because they, I think, deliberately had to design around robots.

avoiding iRobot's patents. That's why we have those products came out looking a little different. Like the first Samsung one looked like a stormtrooper. Oh, I remember that. The Dyson ones are very unique and very purple. And then Neato was the other one and it came out with a square pattern

robot, which actually makes more sense when you think about trying to get into corners. But I've heard from many people that square robots have significant navigation issues. And that's something I personally experienced when testing a Nito. And then sadly, Nito went out of business a few years ago. It was another US-based company and it very much suffered, I think, from a lot of the same market pressures that iRobot has suffered from. But iRobot was in a much stronger position

deal with those for longer than I think Nito was, unfortunately. Yeah. So let's talk about those market pressures, actually, because I think that's kind of the next turn in the Roomba story, right? It sort of won the market. It was the market for like, I don't know, 10 years, maybe? Yeah. Somewhere up to almost 10 years. I'm thinking like,

I don't know, 2010-ish. I feel like it was the Roomba's world and we all just lived in it. And then kind of slowly and then all at once, this market went from

just the Roomba to, oh my God, look at all of these robot dragons. What happened? How did that, where did that all come from? Yeah. So just sort of from iRobot's perspective, they had decided to really focus just on consumer robots. So they got rid of their military and exploratory space arm. They sold that off and really focused on the Roombas. And

We produced one or two new models every year, which at that time, you know, we're going from like 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016. We had a new one pretty much every year, each one improving on the last. They added Wi-Fi in 2013, 2014, around there with the 880 and the 900. They added...

And the 980, they were, the naming has never got better. Oh, I know. Terrible. It's so funny because they nailed it with Roomba. Like Roomba, unbelievably great name. And then it all just fell apart.

Yeah. So they added a lot of interesting technology. They were trying to always make it better. I think kind of a pinnacle moment was like 2018 when they introduced the i7. And this was the first one that could remember where it had been. So it stopped just bouncing randomly around your house. You actually would create a map for you so you could send it to clean specific areas and specific rooms and didn't get confused just because you picked it up and moved it. I don't know

if you've ever had that experience with the robot vacuum. You pick it up because it ran into your shoe and then it's just like, I don't know where I am. Save me. So that was the i7. And then they also introduced the auto-empty dock, which was a game changer. It really, truly was. I have one of those upstairs. And that was the first time I was like, okay, I will spend whatever it costs to get one of these things. Because now...

I don't have to do any work. I just like every, every once in a while I have to take the bag out and otherwise my floors are just fine. Like it really was life changing. That one innovation. That was when I came back to the Roomba because the one I had had, I think in 2003 or four, um, well,

I would come home from work and it would have stopped somewhere and not made it anywhere. And you had to buy the little towers to stop it from going certain places. And it was just too complicated unless you had like nothing in your house. But then they just, you know, they have done a lot to make the robot

Actually, I mean, they say their words are complete its mission because that was, you know, it's a great technology, but if it doesn't finish what it started, it becomes a frustrating technology. So, yes, so they had gradually been increasing the development on the robot, coming up with interesting new elements for it, starting to implement AI machine learning. I mean, robot vacuums really are some of the beginnings of AI in the home, which is an interesting thing.

Maybe side note. And then by 2019, it had an estimated 88% market share. So, I mean, we're talking completely dominant. Okay, so that's even later than I expected. Yeah, it was still very, very dominant. And then the pandemic was sort of like a double-edged sword. From what I understand, you know, I think by this point...

We'd sold something like 30 million robots, so that's a significant number. And like you say, it was the Kleenex. Everyone referred to anything that rolled around your house and sucked up dirt as a Roomba, wherever it came from. And then we were starting to see Chinese competition come in. We still had a lot of competition in America as well, Nito and Shark Ninja and a couple others. And then pandemic hit and

there was this huge surge because remember, we're all back home. We're all at our home. Sure. And we're all wanting to look after our home and clean our home because we're spending all our time in our home. But also, when you're in your home and your robot vacuum's running, you're not a happy person. No. Because they can be really annoying. So it was kind of a double-edged sword. And then...

The other thing that hit it was the tariffs, which apparently they had to pay millions of dollars in tariffs. So there was kind of like this moment where they were doing really, really well. And then suddenly they were sort of squashed. And this was right around the time that the Chinese manufacturers were really ramping up.

And I, again, I don't know the particulars of the patent law, but I think right around this time too, there were some patents that had expired. So it was possible for a lot of these manufacturers to come in and do very similar things and for a lot less money. One thing Roomba didn't do as it increased its technology and made its...

complete was make prices cheaper. There were never, like you said, I don't think we ever saw a $200 Roomba again until, I mean, there were some of, it's very low-end models you could get for around that price, but they didn't have mapping, that you still needed to buy $100 tower things to keep it out of rooms. Yeah, I don't count that as a $200 Roomba, yeah. Yeah.

That point, yeah, it's just not worth it. So yeah, and then we got, so Roborock arrived in the US in 2018. Ecovacs had come along a little bit before that. That's the D-Bot robots. And then from then on, we just like every month there was a new robot vacuum manufacturer. We got Dreamy. We had

Shark Ninja, Narwhal, Anka came out with their Eufy brand. TP-Link has their Tapo brand now. I mean, there are dozens of them. And also Samsung has been working in this space too. So there was competition coming from all angles. And this is where, I mean, what went wrong? Did they not innovate? That's what people say a lot. There was a key difference between Roombas and all of the competition. And that was how they navigated.

So Roomba had developed a technology for – so all robot vacuums use something called simultaneous localization and mapping, SLAM. Roomba used VSLAM, which is visual simultaneous localization and mapping, with a camera on the top of the robot that looked up in the sky. And that's why you always had to have the lights on when you ran your Roombas a while ago. Oh, sure. Yeah.

And this was how they mapped and navigated your home. The new manufacturers coming in all used LiDAR, which is, again, the same technology, but not using cameras, using lasers. It's just like, I mean, it's like self-driving cars. And when Roomba started, that technology was really expensive. So I think they looked for a different way to implement technology.

navigation. But the market has very much shifted entirely to LiDAR. And I would always hear complaints from readers about, why doesn't Roomba have LiDAR? Why doesn't Roomba have LiDAR? And I think what started to happen is that every other robot had it and Roomba didn't. And I think a lot of people started to think, well, I want the LiDAR. I want the little tower. And so there was a kind of shift. I don't know. I don't personally agree that LiDAR is better.

But that could be an entire whole podcast. For sure. But I actually think Roomba's mapping has got very, very good. It doesn't get lost like a lot of the LiDAR robots do, and it doesn't try and escape like a lot of the LiDAR raiders do, because they think they use their navigation, as I said, with lasers. So if it can see out a door or out a window, it thinks that's a room. And if you don't

set the map to tell it not to go that way, it will jump the fence and just go off into the distance. So yeah, but that's definitely been an area where I think, I don't know if they made the wrong choice there by not going with LIDAR sooner. Side note,

Their new robots that came out last week all use LiDAR. Oh, interesting. We'll get to that. Yeah. And then they also, so one thing they were very insistent on, and I talked to the CEO, Colin Angle, about this when these products started to come out, was that the idea of a combination robot vacuum and robot mop was like an abomination. Yeah.

They said, back to this single purpose idea. They had a robot vacuum and they had a robot mop. And they said, these work really well together. Buy them both. Let the robot vacuum and then the robot mop. And in some ways, that was a good solution. More expensive, obviously.

And the Brava Jet had some issues, like it couldn't get over a transition that was like this high. So if you had anything in your house, it wasn't going to, any kind of transition in your house, it was going to be stuck in one room. And so it really stuck to that idea for a long time as these other companies came in with these dual purpose robots, which...

not great initially at doing both of those things. So I think Roomba felt like, well, we were right. Ours are better. Also, yours are three times the price. So this is where the market forces come in. If you can get a robot vacuum that can mop for $400, why would you buy two separate devices to do the same thing? So that's an area where they sort of fell down, I think. They were focusing much more on the software.

than on the hardware. I think they felt like we've solved the hardware, our vacuums are cleaning your house. Now we're going to make them do it better by using software, by using things like AI-powered obstacle detection to avoid getting tripped up by cables and pet poop and anything else that might be lying around your house.

And that, you know, that was a great innovation. And now all the other robot manufacturers have copied that and are working on that. But I still think iRobot has the best in that class. They were also working towards this kind of larger smart home vision. They had bought an air purifier company. They were working. They released their iRobot OS, they call it. So they had like an operating system for their robot vacuums that worked.

gave all these extra levels of intelligence, things like dirt detect, carpet detect, things that just make the robot able to do more. But I think those are harder cells to a consumer who has to sort of read through the fine print or really understand what the benefit is of a dirt detect. I mean, it's neat when the robot finds something that's like a pile of dirt, instead of just plowing through it like most will, it'll stop.

and go back and forth and back and forth, you know, and that's what you want. But again, versus a product that has

More bells and whistles, more visible bells and whistles and higher suction power. And to be fair, I mean, it is still one of the dominant in the market, except it's just that the pie got a lot smaller. I mean, its slice of the pie got a lot smaller. So the pie, you know, a lot more people came in and now it's like 13. Actually, they just released...

One industry analysis company released some statistics today to show that for the first time, Roborock is now globally has a larger market share than iRobot. So just continuing that downward trend. But back to my point is that Roomba has...

I think they focused very much, like I said, on the software rather than developing the hardware. And then when they got caught behind on the hardware side, they tried too little too late with their dual, their combo mopping robots that came out. They never really, I mean, they were kind of ingenious. They have this little...

robotic arm that lifts up and scoots itself under the robot and goes and mops. And then when it hits a carpet, it lifts the arm back up over the top of the robot and vacuums. And that's neat. But the mop is like two millimeters wide. So it takes a really long time to mop a big downstairs hardwood floor area compared to like the latest Roborocks or Dreamies

They have these giant spinning mop pads, which as of last week, Roombas now have. You can see a trend here. Yeah. So I do want to get to what launched last week, but I think there's one more piece of the transition here. Take me through the Amazon iRobot saga quickly. Yes. So...

So right around the time iRobot was starting to see a drop in revenue, starting to struggle a little bit and see a huge pressure from the Chinese manufacturers and others entering the market. So right after the pandemic, really. Was this right around the time you first had a house full of...

Robot vacuum. I tracked this by like how many vacuums are in the picture that Jen posts in Slack. And I feel like that was right around the time. It's like there are just a dozen of these running around Jen's living room. It is. It is. When the robot uprising happens, I am the first to go. A hundred percent. It's been so nice knowing you, but that's absolutely correct.

Yeah, there are more robots than people in my house by a long shot. And pets, more robots than people than pets. Although my newest pet actually is starting to enjoy riding on them, which I'm so excited about. Oh, you're, well, then the one pet's fine. Yeah.

King of the robots. Yes. The rest of you are toast. But yeah, so like around 2022, I think is when iRobot actually first saw a decline in revenue and an operating loss. So this was when things started to go a little south. And I think, I don't know exactly what's, you know, the timeline of...

how long they'd been in talks. I mean, Amazon and iRobot had always had quite a close relationship. iRobot was one of the first companies to successfully, and it did it very well, implement Alexa voice control. So they'd obviously been sort of partnering for a few years. But I think it was 22 that iRobot was beginning to dip. And I think you can imagine they were like, well, you know,

you know, we've had a good run. We've been here almost 30 years. This is the time to kind of, we need not an exit, but at least, you know, we need help to push to the next level. I think, as I mentioned, the hardware was an issue, like developing and being able to manufacture software

more impressive hardware. They focused on the software, but they hadn't really pushed on the hardware front. So they needed, I think they needed a cash injection. They'd spent so much time on R&D and a lot of their money went towards R&D. But then you need the money, you need the capital to actually go out and build this type of product. And a natural partner for that is a big...

multi-billion dollar corporation like Amazon. So, but then there was an awful lot of concern when Amazon announced it was going to buy iRobot that this would cause, well, there were two big concerns. There was a privacy concern and there was a regulatory concern around whether this would kind of exterminate the competition.

My take is the competition was very well established already. And I don't, I mean, iRobot had seen its share drop from, as we said, like almost 90% down to that. I think at the point where iRobot, where Amazon was going to buy it, was down to like 33%.

So it had taken a big tumble. Even though it was still the market leader, it was nowhere near as dominant as it had been before. And all signs were pointing to more competition, not less. Exactly. Yes. I mean, new robot. So Dreamy had just entered the market in 2022, and that's now one of the top three. So we've got the top four. So you've got Roborock, iRobot, Ecovacs, and Dreamy, and then all the others. So, yeah, it was very much...

at a sort of tipping point for the company. And Amazon came in with a $1.7 billion deal, which then for the next, I think it was almost two years until it actually went

fell apart under regulatory scrutiny. And it was the EU specifically that caused the biggest delay in this. And that two years of not knowing where the company was going, I think really put a toll on production, manufacture. They had to take out a $200 million loan. They were really struggling and without a clear path for the future. And

is when everything kind of fell apart. The company laid off almost half its workforce. The CEO, Colin Angle, he exited left and then they had a new CEO come in. I think Colin Angle said this when he exited, he said, "We need someone here who knows how to turn around the company from a financial perspective." And that is what the new CEO has been doing

by stripping back

all of their other focus. So they got rid of all of the other elements that they had gone into in terms of the air purifiers. They'd also tried to do a robot lawnmower. They got rid of anything that wasn't focused on cleaning your home. Cut back on research and development. I mean, it was like they basically gutted the company and just turned it to streamline on creating the core product in the hope, I believe, the understanding to sort of bring its fortunes back. And this is where the new

Product line has come from. So you've traced two lines that I think are super interesting and exactly land us on this recent announcement. Because on the one hand, you have Roomba, which was sort of, it was the thing. And for a bunch of reasons that I think were...

kind of the company's fault and kind of outside of its control. Like the thing that happens where you get locked up during two years of an acquisition that ultimately falls apart is crushing. We have seen companies go through it and it is hard and it is there is only so much of it that you can actually do anything about. But that's so that's all happening. And meanwhile, at the exact same time,

the rest of this market coming out of China and elsewhere is growing faster than ever. Gangbusters, yeah. Going totally wild. Yeah, like you're saying, every time you turn around, there's a new company with a name you've never heard of selling you one of these things. New ideas, new products. The market's growing really fast. And it seems like basically iRobot hires a new CEO who turns around and goes, just make those. Yeah. And that's where we are. Yeah, he was like, I don't know if he said this, but my impression is

okay, fine, you did great to this point. It's not working anymore. Let's just start from scratch because that's what these new robots look like. And it's like they've thrown away all of the innovation and all of the hardware that Roomba had worked on over the years. The software, it seems like, is still there, but entirely new hardware. They are using a new manufacturer too. And oh my goodness, these robots look like every other robot out there that it makes it very hard for me to believe that these are...

original designs. I mean, when I actually asked iRobot this question, they said, well, they already copied us. That's why we look like them, because they copied us originally. I'm like, yes, that was true, like five years ago. But these new robots that Roomba launched this last week have the spinning mop pads, they have the auto wash, empty, dry docks, which are

Roomba did not have, and that's exactly what Roborock invented that, essentially. And the new Roomba docks look a lot like the original Roborock docks. So it's... I mean, from a business perspective, it's probably the right move. It's what people are asking for. People want LiDAR. They want suction specs, like we were talking about when they're looking on Amazon at which robot they're going to buy. That's what they've been trained to look for. But it is... It just feels like this... I mean...

And robot vacuums have become commodities, right? That's what's happened. And Roomba is like, well, we can still salvage some of our business because we have a name that everyone recognizes. And now if we do what everyone else is doing and less expensive, they are coming in significantly lower than the competition right now. But then the competition has increased.

arms, but that's a separate thing. So yeah, there's, if they're able to turn the company around, perhaps they could go back to the sort of innovation and the spirit of entrepreneurship and really exciting things that the company was able to do over the last 30 years and maybe invent the next great thing, you know, the stair climbing robot vacuum. But yeah,

The competition is just so fierce. It's really hard to see a strong pathway for them. I think I would like to have seen what happened if Amazon had bought the company. I know there were, and I alluded to this before, significant concerns around things like privacy. These robot vacuums have cameras in your home. Yeah.

Roombas know everything about your home, how many rooms you have, what furnace you have. And this is probably one reason why Amazon wanted to buy them for that kind of data. But when you take, from the smart home perspective, when you take that data...

and pair it with a smart home platform, with a voice assistant that's getting smarter, such as Alexa and the new Alexa Plus, you could just see where that symbiosis could have come together. And that's what the smart home needs is context. You need to know that I'm standing in the kitchen and I've just dropped a pan of

baked beans on the floor and you say, you know, Alexa, clean up the beans. And it knows that you're in the kitchen because it has all of that context from things like the Roomba, the maps, and then the Roomba just trundles over and sucks up the beans, although it can't do that yet. But that could have been the next innovation, wet vacuuming. So I would love to have seen where it could have gone. There is still a chance that Roomba will get bought by a company. Yeah.

That's sort of the next. So the CEO said in the financial reports that they launched last week that the two biggest ways out of their current situation is for lots of people to buy the new robots or for it to get bought. And I wouldn't be surprised to see a robot manufacturer actually come in and take them. I mean, they did actually used to have a partnership briefly with Ecovacs. So that could be one. Oh, interesting.

I mean, Amazon's not going to be allowed to buy it. None of the big smart home companies are going to be allowed to buy it. So their pool has definitely shrunk. And also, you can basically buy them for parts right now. So probably a really good deal. Well, it's the name, right? It really does feel like everything you just described is that this company has sort of nuked everything about itself that was unique except for the name Roomba.

But at this point, I think you're right that all of this market has become so commoditized. And yet everybody still calls them Roombas, right? Which is very powerful. And so I think the theory you just described, right, where it's like, okay, we're going to come back all the way down to the market and we're just going to make the thing everybody else is making, but we're going to call it Roomba.

It might work. Like, I don't I find that argument sort of a bummer. Like, it's not it's not an interesting way to make product, but it might work. Yeah. And I can see how this company would get there. I just think given the history of this company and the things they have been trying to do, that's just sort of unfortunate because and this is the last thing I want to talk about before I let you go.

The thing you just described, that this is the centerpiece of the smart home, that this is the thing that gives the context that knows where you are and what is going on, that's how we get to Rosie the Robot. The thing iRobot didn't want to build, it has sort of been...

building towards for 30 years. Whether it wanted to or not, this is what they're doing, right? And they've talked about wanting to build the operating system for the smart home and be the centerpiece of the thing. The thing that can move around inside of your house is so powerful. Like you and I have talked about this before. If there is a thing that can reach me physically, that becomes an incredibly powerful addition to my smart home. And so what I wonder is,

And without iRobot pushing on this in the way that I think the company has sort of uniquely been able to for a really long time, who is? Like, are we just at the point where a robot vacuum is a robot vacuum is a robot vacuum? And we're going to just bail on the idea that actually this is the robot that runs your smart home because the Roomba can't do it?

Yeah, I mean, so Amazon had started to... Amazon had its robot, the Astro, which was basically this kind of idea. But if it had been a vacuum, it would have been a much better product. Yeah, it would have done things. Right, because this is the problem. And this goes back to what Colin Angle said when he originally launched the company. It was like, robots need to have a purpose. They're not...

There's no point if it's just a personality in your home. I mean, we've seen that with all the robotic companies that have gone out of business because they built robots that didn't really do anything, but they look cute. Well, they had a personality. And so, yeah, the kind of the idea of having a robot in your home that is going to be useful. I'm in two minds. I don't really personally think the full humanoid robot is something anyone really wants.

But, you know, and I think it's a long way away as well. And I think we all would like something that can do the function of a Rosie the Robot sooner in our lifetimes, ideally. So I think...

The next, I mean, there are a lot of companies that could step up in this space. I think it could come from one of these robot manufacturers. We saw at CES this year, SwitchBot came out with its multi-modal, multi-functional robot vacuum that pushed different devices around the house. So an air purifier, it could bring you a drink. It could move your iPad around for you. I mean, it was kind of gimmicky, but it's the starting point of technology.

a multifunctional robot that perhaps whether Colin Angle and iRobot didn't want to develop the Rosie the Robot originally, I think they've definitely built the foundations for it. And it's the intelligence that's important as much as the function. And that really is where they laid the foundations because the machine learning that these

The difference between the one I had in my home in 2003 and the ones I have in my home today is exponential. And they are so much smarter. And you can see the long tail of where that could take us could be really exciting and really interesting. All right, Jen, thank you so much for doing this to me. This was really fun. You're welcome. Thanks. I enjoyed myself. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about e-readers. Love talking about e-readers. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. All right, let's talk e-readers. It's actually kind of an interesting time in the e-reader space right now. You have companies like Bookshop coming out trying to be big competitors to Amazon. Amazon announced a bunch of new Kindles, like the biggest rev in the history of the Kindle line earlier this year. You have companies like Books just out here selling every imaginable screen size of e-ink device.

And then you have what happened a couple of weeks ago, which is that Amazon, I don't want to say announced, but sort of quietly announced

intimated that the way it was thinking about ownership of digital goods had changed. They deleted this tool that would let you easily download your books to put them on a new device and also at the same time changed what happens when you buy a book. Now, instead of, you know, buying a book, it says you're buying a license to this book and that license can be revoked. The way we think about these devices has changed and

And so I wanted to talk to somebody who is living this space all the time to see how it might change, which led me to Michael Tamblyn, who's the CEO of Kobo, which is one of the longest running and most interesting competitors to the Kindle. There are new Kobos as of last year, I think. There are some really interesting new ideas about what a reading device should be coming out of the company. They've been selling digital books around the world for forever.

I just figured I'd get his read on things. And we started by talking about devices, because one of the things I find odd about e-readers is that they're both wonderful devices and very good at the thing that they do well, but it doesn't seem like they've changed in a sort of meaningful way in a really long time. Like, if you look at your phone now and your phone eight years ago, they're very different. And your laptop or your smartwatch or pick another gadget is

E-readers have changed in small ways, but don't feel like they've changed in big ways in a really, really, really, really, really long time. And I just asked Michael why.

I think there are a couple of factors. One is just screen innovation is super hard. And screen innovation, especially in this low-power e-paper space that we're in, is even harder, both because of the constraints. Like the whole idea is you should have a screen that you can charge once in weeks and it continues to work. And at the same time, unlike, say...

or LCD panels or anything else, the volumes aren't giant. So it's not like you're amortizing research out over 400 million screens a year. So it's like us and our friends in Seattle and a few folks in China and we're the market that are creating the volume for this. So there's a certain incrementality to the innovation that comes from that. But then beyond that, there was just this slow ramp on

on getting black and white better. So if we look back over the last 10 years, you'll see this kind of slow marching forward of we had E Ink Pearl screens and then we had E Ink Carta screens, Carta 1100, Carta 1200, like sort of these little steps forward

while they were also working on color. And so like a lot of the color technology we're seeing in the market now has been in labs and in manufacturing paths now for like four or five years. It's just that they couldn't get that combination of performance and price right.

So we had screens that look like the screens that we now have out in the market with like Kobo Libre Color, Kobo Clara Color. Those screens were around three years ago or more, but they were still astronomically expensive. And so until they could get the manufacturing right and they could get the yields right and they could get the prices right, we just couldn't offer them at a price that anybody would find really interesting. But what's kind of cool now is there

There's a whole bunch of stuff that's just sitting on the horizon that not just from like the manufacturer, but from all of these other companies that have started to work on low power screens. And so you have some contenders now and contenders mean competition, competition mean things start to move faster and you can start to get some price pressure. So I think after having, yeah, almost like a decade of very incremental progress, I

We now start to see a whole, like, we're going to have some really exciting years over the next few years as all of this stuff lands.

So you get that far, then can you get to something that is getting closer to the kinds of refresh rates that you see in LCD panels, for example. And then you can make the interactions on the screens better than you can make them right now. But it's interesting because I don't ever see us coming to a place where you have the regular screen panel world and the

the e-ink or e-paper world converging because the use cases are so different. And not just for people like

You and I who have a Samsung frame and like, you know, like are willing to make certain compromises in our TVs. But the the extent to which you want a low power device on one side and you want perfect color fidelity on the other. Just kind of the technology just diverges as you're trying to solve those two problems.

Yeah. And it does seem like part of the, I don't know if it's a challenge or not, but sort of the truth of this market is just that everyone decided a while ago to make a certain set of decisions. Like we hit a price point pretty quickly with a lot of this stuff where I think it's like, my question to you on the screen stuff is going to be, well, why not just sell one of these awesome color screens that was available in a $600 Kobo? And

I assume the response is because absolutely nobody would buy it, which is like, fair enough. That is true. Sure. But I think it's a really interesting piece of this because I think like you look at almost any other category and there's this like massive price banding depending on how new the technology is and how many features you get and how much stuff you get. And the sort of acceptable set of prices in e-readers is so comparatively tiny that I feel like it does force you into kind of

strange boxes where you're like, okay, we have to get this sweet spot of technology in order to have it hit this price point because if we raise it $100 to do this amazing new thing, nobody will buy it. There's just no other market really like that. Well, it's true. And I mean...

Some of that I think we're responsible for. In some ways, when Kobo came into 2010, we repriced the e-ink market. So we were the first ones to bring in a sub $150 e-reader. Up until then, e-readers were $250, $350, $400. And part of that was just wanting it to be accessible not to this super narrow niche of enthusiasts, but just like, let's make this accessible.

a general part of the book market. And then even again, we were the ones who went, okay, having done that, let's now look at premium e-readers. So let's make the screens bigger and let's put waterproofing on them and all of that kind of stuff. So to walk that price point up again, but you're right, there's a certain limit that you bump into where you've kind of got like the bottom of the iPad market and the top of the e-reader market. And there's a

there's a certain point of friction in there that psychologically people seem to bump into. And so that, in a way, becomes like the pricing box that we work in. But there's also something about, I think, selling a single-purpose device. Like, we really just do want this to do one thing. And I do think that affects people's, like,

like mental pricing math a little bit. And you're also selling a small thing. So it's, you know, it's not like we're, you know, we're selling a, you know, a giant 4k television that's going to, that's going to cover someone's wall. But we do have some of that same kind of value psychology going on, like a person who reads it on an e-reader and,

isn't a person who reads one book a year, mostly. They're a person who reads a book every week. And so you are selling to that enthusiast the same way that someone will ditch the earbuds that come with their phone and buy great headphones because they love listening to music. So you've got some of that enthusiast logic going on, but it only allows us to push it so far. So yeah, we work with it.

If the goal is you're reading books, and I want to come back to why it's just books, because I don't think it's just books. And I want to convince you that it's not. But if it is just books, how big do you think that is? Like, what does that mean you have to do well? Sure. And just to touch on what you were saying earlier, I also have a theory on why we've ended up with this space being defined the way it is. And it's from some very particular technology choices that got made in about like 2010. So we can come back to that.

that. But like, you know, what has to be done well with this comes so much to like, what is the experience that people want to have when they pick one of these up?

This is the kind of thing we actually do research on. We bring people together and we interview them and we survey them. And you really have four-ish kinds of customers. You have those people who are reading for escape, who are just like, fiction or a biography, it's taking me away. It's taking me out of this place and putting me somewhere else. And that requires both

an extremely inobtrusive technology sitting behind it. Like you just have to get everything out of the way and an absolute rock solid reliability in the experience itself because any problem jars you out of that moment. And you go from having a beautiful moment to an annoying moment like in an instant. And then you've got the, you have the people who are reading more for information or for education

education. And that's a different set of technology problems as well as a different set of interactions. The reason that we started putting styluses in e-readers came from interviews that we were doing non-fiction readers. And we were trying to solve this sales mystery of

why are e-books so overweighted into fiction relative to nonfiction? Oh, fascinating. Because we can kind of look at what happens in a regular physical store and how they sell, and then we look at what we're selling. Fiction is so much higher. And as we talked to people, they said, well, when I'm reading something to engage with it for information—

I'm not just trying to like put myself in the story. I'm actively engaging with it. I'm highlighting and I'm making notes in the margins and I'm like, I'm trying to kind of consume it and extract things from it at the same time. And that's hard for me to do with an ebook unless we give you some extra tools to do that. So let's make highlighting and notes and all of this stuff.

become a thing that you can do as easily. Plus, there's some benefits to that. It's not just stuck on the page. You can take it off and do something else with it. So different use cases for different kinds of readers. And there are some, as we dig into that, that also explain places where e-books just haven't become

as popular, like reading for children. Okay, color screens, amazing. Finally get children's books. No. And not because they don't look good. And we also have them on apps. You can read them on an iPad or an Android tablet or whatever. No, because children's books live in the gift economy. And they are what parents give to children. And you want to walk into a child's room and see books all around you as a sign that you are a good parent and they may grow up to be literate one day. And all

All of that kind of works against the idea of having that be something that you read in digital. And that's okay. And the same with all of those books that are loved for the object that they are as much as for the content that they have. The books that you have on your coffee table and have on your shelves exist with a whole different set of values behind them in addition to the stuff that's in them. And it's funny, if you look at a bookstore, you can kind of

look at how the books themselves are produced and get a sense of their likelihood of getting consumed in digital. Like the more cheaply it's put together, like, you know, the romance novel and the, you know, crime thriller that's just got covers wrapped around it. It's all about the story.

Those have gone to digital much more quickly than the beautiful book that's about, you know, architecture. And yeah, so different use cases kind of drive you into digital in different ways. And it's also why print has coexisted much more kind of harmoniously with digital than the other big format shifts that we've seen, like with music and with video. Yeah. Is there...

Is there a world in which you think digital eventually takes that whole spectrum? Like, I think about I have a two year old and we have 100 million books in his room and all the ones he likes best are the ones where it's like the train pops up off the thing and he can play with it as he moves. And it's like I'm never getting that on an e-reader or an iPad or anything like there's no screenplay.

screen that physically can do that thing that turns out to be very important. So is there a spectrum of this where you're like, okay, in this giant sort of sweep of what a book can be, we think digital can do sort of, you know, the middle two-thirds or whatever? Yeah, I think there's a long-term and a mid-term view to it. Like, the long-term view is, like, do you still believe that 50 years from now, we're going to be cutting down trees and pressing ink into them, and that's going to be the way that we move rewards around? Um...

And I think if you take the timeline out that far, people go, eh, probably not. And so then you're just arguing about where the inflection points are that might kind of tip you over to that. There will definitely always be some physical books that people want to have because they're beautiful and because they say something about who we are and they create an environment that we like. Well, that's the stuff you're talking about where the object is actually more important than the person.

book, like almost calling it a book. And it's the same with like a lot of coffee table books and stuff, right? Like it's not, that's a piece of art as much as it is like a bunch of words in a row on pages. Or the design is a part of the content and the design amplifies the message that the author's trying to send. What was cool about seeing publishing react to digital like through the 2010s and into the 2020s was all of a sudden like everybody stepped up their game

on making books just more beautiful physically. So like you, you know, you didn't have walls of cheap paperbacks anymore. Like, and, and now even more, you've got the idea of books as collectibles and you've got special editions and all this other stuff. And it's, it's,

publishers frantically trying to figure out the balance between keeping bookstores alive and relevant while more things go to online and then e-books are in there, like carving out certain segments. So they're doing a delicate dance. And then at the same time, we're trying to say, well, hey, we just put out color screens and all of a sudden cookbooks look gorgeous on an e-reader. And they do. And so there was a segment where we kind of couldn't

like really meet the customer where they wanted to be. And now we can. And so all of a sudden you see, you know, more digital cookbook sales happening, which is cool.

Yeah, what are you seeing in terms of what color in particular is doing? Because I think one thing I've heard from book people over the years is that part of the challenge with e-readers is that they're so customizable in the sense that screens are different and people pick different font sizes and people pick different colors and margins. And so attempting to be sort of opinionated and thoughtful about e-book design was kind of a waste of time. My sense is with color, maybe not with everything, but with some things that would give people a chance to

put some more work into how those things look and feel. Are we starting to see that as color grows? Yeah. I mean, at the most basic level, we had publishers who used to take like color images out and turn them into black and white and send those to us, like just to keep file sizes down and everything else. It's like, nope. It's like, we would like the whole thing now. Give us that. But it's a little bit of everything. It's,

suddenly more graphic novel sales suddenly more cookbook sales like maybe not the gorgeous coffee table book but the book that's about knitting patterns or the book that's about mending your own clothes that was like kind of color photo imagery is suddenly more saleable so like all of those are ticking up and then there's just something about like you can now see your library in color and like people like publishers sweat about covers for a reason like they're you know

They're gorgeous. They should be. And now we can show that to people. And so that all helps as well. And then it's very different from market to market too. So what we're talking about mostly is what I call kind of like North American publisher behavior. We look at some markets like Japan is not an e-reader market at all. And it's a huge one for us, but it's all happening on smartphones. And their color's never been a problem and it doesn't change at all.

Right. And I think the smartphone thing is really interesting to me because one of the main reasons I hear from people that the people who are mad that e-book readers aren't better, I would say overwhelmingly what they say is because all the companies that make them are bookstores first and device makers second. And I think to a large extent, that's true.

I think that's, I don't know if that's true for you. I don't know if you feel that way, but I think like Amazon, I know feels that way. I can tell you with great confidence, Amazon cares a lot more about selling books than selling Kindles. And then, and I think, especially when you're starting to think about, okay, how does this experience work on smartphones? How does it work on the web reader? You get to the point where it's like, okay, we actually can't just be focused on the one thing in part because customers want it to be lots of different places. And in part, because that's not what our business is.

Is it is it possible to have your cake and eat it, too, in that sense? Like, can you be a great hardware business that is also mostly a really good bookstore or do you end up having to choose one or the other? No, you totally can't. Like, that's that's the part that I don't think I get. Like the whole thing.

In some ways, we treat them as two different things, or at least we treat them as two different objectives. Like, we have a lot of people who buy a Kobo e-reader who never buy anything from us at all. They hook it up to a public library, they bring their own books along, they...

muck around on the internet. They find things that they probably should have bought. We know all of these things happen. Purely legally and correctly with no problems, always the right way. Public domain. Exactly. Jane Eyre and Sherlock Holmes. Everybody's just reading Frankenstein. Yeah, exactly. Everyone is reading Pride and Prejudice all day long. And they have their own special version that they bring to us. And so those people bought an e-reader. They shelled out their cash and that's the way they're engaging with us.

And we need them to be happy, even though they never hit the store at all. And then at the same time, we are a bookstore. We do sell the content. And whether that's the actual e-commerce experience itself or running Kobo Plus, the subscription service, or running Kobo Writing Life, like our self-publishing program, like all of that stuff has to work together to make a really great store.

Because that's just another part of the flywheel that we're trying to keep spinning. And they need to work together really well, too. So that's why we don't just treat it as, you know, kind of a dumb hardware platform. Like we want to thoughtfully integrate those two things together. Sure. But like the thing Amazon always says, right, is like we don't make money when you buy our gadgets. We make money when you use them. And in the Kindle's case, they totally make money when they absolutely do.

Fair enough. But I think that seems to be at least sort of philosophically the way that they think about it, right? They're like, they are more interested in giving you a thing that you will buy books on than in giving you a thing to happily read things that didn't come from Amazon, which is objectively true given all of their product decisions that we should talk about. Yes.

Are you is that is that not the case for you? Like, how do you design a business around this so that that's not the case so that you don't have to force me to buy 10 books before this thing makes sense for you as a business? Well, part of it is just the economics of e-readers themselves, like unlike laptop screens or smartphone screens or anything else. They're expensive to make like those e-ink panels.

are not cheap and make the margins on e-readers relatively thin. And one of the reasons that

We weren't just trying to drive them down to become commodity hardware, like, you know, kind of the race to the $99 e-reader and below and thought that there was room for a premium segment. Like, let's make a great seven-inch e-reader. Let's make a great eight-inch e-reader was to like to create some more pricing headroom so that the.

e-readers themselves could be valuable objects and could be interesting objects because if you can bring the price up a little bit, you can experiment with materials and you can, you know, kind of change the screen, like the screen technology that you're using. All of that to say then you can start to have like a spectrum of e-readers at different price points and have them stand on their own from an economics perspective so that you're not trying to make, you know, these

these kind of like one-way doors where, okay, you've bought our thing. Now you have to buy all of your content from us too. And that like, so the content should be our ability to sell books well, should be able to stand on its own in terms of how we make money and the margins that we have on it. And our ability to make hardware should be able to stand on its own, knowing that some people are going to buy hardware and never buy books from us.

And that should be okay. So we shouldn't be trying to structure this as a roach motel. And you should be able to kind of engage with it the ways that you want to. And maybe your e-reader is something that you're using to do documents from work. And maybe you're using it as something to buy books from us or to hook up a subscription. Or you're a public library fan and you want to use Libby. And we're good with that too. Yeah. And I think...

That explanation makes total sense to me, even though I have a books palmist sitting here I would very much like to talk to you about. But I think, to me, the both biggest opportunity and maybe most interesting challenge here is that kind of getting stuff into and off of a device like this problem. Because I think especially like you talked about the people who read nonfiction and that they just interact with this information differently. Yeah.

One of those things is like I hear over and over from people who are like, I use whatever app just because it syncs to my notion. Like you're just saying, right? And then I can search for all of my stuff or I get, I don't know, spaced repetition flashcards sent to my email every week or like whatever. People have these sort of wild information collection systems and they want their long form reading to be part of it. And by and large, these devices are the most disconnected from the rest of that. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's like one of the reasons that we that we put stuff like Dropbox support on there is like, let's look at popular file systems that people already use that synchronize well, that have things like, you know, the ability to email into a directory, like all of that stuff is there. Sure. Yeah.

So that A, we're not rolling our own because nobody wants another one of these. Everybody has eight already. And then the question is, how much farther do you have to go? Is it, okay, we also should do box or we also should do OneDrive or whatever the other ones that people want? Well, that is the problem, right? There is an infinite well of those things. There are infinite wells. Yeah. And so at a certain point, you have to saw it off.

And then similarly, in terms of the material itself, you've done a whole series on note-taking solutions and knowledge management systems, and everybody wants their thing to go directly into that thing. And I understand why. As a Notion user, I love these things to just be piped in. But

can we get them out in standardized formats? Can we get them out in ways that are kind of easy to manage and manipulate? And so whether that means that you are then kicking them into the knowledge management system you have, feeding them into an LLM, or doing whatever else you're doing with them, let's make sure that the inputs and outputs are relatively clean and easy so that you can get stuff out. And that's

you know, we've kind of been nudging around this at different times, but getting things out is an important part of this. We would like you not, we don't want you to have your stuff trapped inside.

Well, and to that point, this is a bit of a diversion, but I know it's a thing you've been thinking about and talking about. There's been, I would say, a kerfuffle in the e-book reading world over the last couple of weeks, which is not a thing that happens often. It's true. So it's very exciting when there's e-book kerfuffles. Like, it's good stuff. Where I think because of this Amazon announcement of they were shutting down the download and transfer thing where you can get your books easily off of your Kindle onto another device,

That's all very messy, but I think it has changed a lot of people's ideas about what it means to have stuff on a device like this. There is this feeling of like, okay, my e-reader is a thing filled with my books. And I think a couple of times over the years, Kindle owners in particular have been reminded that that is not actually the case. And now...

I think when you go to buy a book on Amazon, it's like it says you're buying a license to a book, not the book itself. And like we talk a lot about digital goods at The Verge and the idea of like, what are they? What do you own? What are you buying? What of this matters? We got weird in the NFTs for a minute. It was a whole thing. But I do think like this question of people's information on a Kobo device and in the Kobo ecosystem matters.

What is your responsibility to all of that stuff, whether it's books that I'm buying or PDFs that I'm adding? Like, how are users supposed to understand what all of that means inside of Kobo's universe? It's one of those places that I'm like, I'm kind of proud we've been able to stick to our guns over the years, because from the very beginning, as we were first framing out what Kobo was going to do.

We thought you should be able to read your books on any device. We'd like it to be ours or we'd like it to be in our app, but it doesn't have to be. You should be able to buy something and take it somewhere else if you want to. And you're right, that question of licensing versus owning is a whole other can of worms. Publishers only let us sell licenses mostly, and some let us sell without DRM.

Some, especially in the EU, use watermarks that are embedded but leave the files on DRM. So it's always really hard to say you own your e-books the way you own your paper books. But we can do the next best thing, which is to say you can take them with you. You can download them, you can put them on a USB key, you can bury them in a mine shaft or hide them in a hollow tree. We still have to protect them with DRM because the publishers want us to do that. But

Lots of other e-readers support DRM. You can take it and read it on one of those. And I think that's good for us because it makes us compete on the experience. You have to want to stay.

And we have to earn your time and your attention and your next e-reader to replace the one that you bought eight years ago. And that keeps us honest. And it does, I think, give a certain sense of security to the person who's buying an e-book, which does already feel less tangible than a physical book. Is that a hard line to hold over time? We haven't found it to be. Like, we had to fight hard for it at the very beginning.

But I think publishers feel both sides of the pressure on that. One being, it's better not to lock people into ecosystems. And at the same time, we really want to make sure that our intellectual property is protected and not firehosed around the internet. And I get both of those. But for us, and especially as ebooks were just getting started, that notion of

you know, how do we create a sense of safety around these very intangible objects is really important. Like there are standard DRM solutions. This, this is a solved problem. And you have them like fairly well standardized across markets and countries. Like none of that is actually an issue.

it's like some people really want you to stay on one platform and never go anywhere again. Some people. Some people, yeah. Where do those people live? They're more West Coast-based, I find. And I don't know if there's something about proximity to the heirs of the Pacific that make that happen. There's a big needle somewhere in the city, I think. Yeah, I forget. But it is one of those, like you talk about things that kind of stifle e-book innovation. You've got those people

Those certain platform dependencies that like that's the thing that makes this hard. It's it's not the screen. That's not the technology to a certain degree. It's people wanting to keep things inside certain walled gardens. Right. OK, so to that end, I have two more things I want to talk to you about. And I'm gonna let you go. OK, number one is technology.

The funniest thing about Kobo to me is that you are in every single e-book reader buying guide under the same heading, which is the best non-Amazon e-book reader. I mean, everywhere you look on the internet, there is the best Kindle and there's the best not Kindle. Does that drive you crazy? How do you feel about that designation? In a real way, you do kind of exist in opposition to Amazon. Is that frustrating? In so many ways. In every way. Yeah.

And so what's been great to see is how that those lists have evolved because it used to be, you know, best e-readers and they would always put the Kindle one at the top because that was the most popular one. And then they'd put us below and now they just have two categories.

best Kindles and best other e-readers of which we are the best ones on those. And, and I think we see perception on that shifting a bit of, well, maybe, maybe I don't want that. Maybe I do want the, the alternative one. And, and,

And especially as controversies like the ones we've seen over the last few weeks have come up, it makes more people look at that second column, which is fantastic for us. But the other thing that's interesting about that is that that's really only a U.S. and U.K. phenomenon. That's fair. Yeah. And it's like some of that comes back to.

just where our friends in Seattle are dominant. They run the e-book show in exactly two markets, US and the UK. And then in every other territory...

there is at least one local retailer who's doing as well in eBooks as they are. Like they're toe-to-toe, comparable market shares. And almost all of those are being powered by us. So you have this really interesting case of there's kind of one world inside that bubble and one world outside of it where we're all just like fighting away all day long. And those lists look very different when you come outside of the bubble, which is awesome.

All right, last thing, and then I'm going to let you go. I would like to read you a Threads post that you did last August. I'm ready. I'm terrified, but I'm ready. Somebody posted, as per the latest Verge cast, which I believe this was me ranting about how bad the Kindle is at allowing you to send web articles to the Kindle. All I want on Earth, Michael, is just a good way to take all of the stuff I want to read on the internet and put it on my e-reader. This is...

This doesn't seem like a hard problem, and yet no one has done this for me in a way that is any good at all. Okay, I'm ready. So this person posted, as per the latest Vergecast, will Kobo make a good reading app a la Readwise for all types of files? And CC'd you, and you responded, working on it. Yes. Do tell. So we have two parts. We have one, which is the integration which we have with Pocket today, which does a really good job of the web clipping side of it.

And so you can take all of that stuff that you've, you know, the long read article that you don't want to read on your phone and throw it over to your e-reader that way. Super simple. Is that a good enough answer to that problem for you? I think it's 75% of that answer. Okay. The other use cases that say, like, kind of live around ReadWise as an example, we have an integration with ReadWise, so we can do some of that stuff.

And then the rest is some of the rest is PDF management, which we keep taking these big jumps on in terms of how we manage and take care of them. Now we allow you to write on your PDFs and annotate them the same way that we do with an ebook. So that's all getting better. And then like, I think the last things that we can keep working on are just like, how do we make that as fluid and as clean as possible?

Because right now it's spread across a couple of experiences. It's not kind of like, you know, all exactly to one place. We have to use a part of it. So like we do have to use a different renderer for a PDF than we use for like a webpage, for example. So like all of that stuff is sort of in the mix, but we get the question and we understand the...

um the desire of like can't i just have all of my reading in this one calm beautiful place where alerts aren't going off and your notifications aren't coming up like you can read on a smartphone today so like you can get you can get all of your kobo books on a on a smartphone right now so that the portal to reading through that multi-function device exists today and that

That's a signal. Like, that tells us something. When somebody buys an e-reader, they are stepping back from what, in almost 100% of cases, is the device they already own. And so then at that point, you've got the question of what are the other layers of experience you can add to that that will actually...

augment and enhance that experience as opposed to taking people closer to the thing that they're trying to escape from. And so like we, you know, if audiobooks in the e-reader experience, because we feel that those are just two kinds of reading and they should be kept close together, but we've specifically and deliberately said no to a lot of other stuff that could wrap around that, both because they already have a home on your phone that's very well served and

or the kind of interaction that you would do with them is one that's just not well-suited to the hardware environment of an e-reader, but mostly because we are trying to get people that escape, and we do want them to step away from it. And when they do, they tend to read more, which is the thing that we like as people who also sell books. So that's where the two sides of the ecosystem do come together, is that when we do put an e-reader in someone's hand, they buy more books and

And their reading time is longer than a comparable customer holding a phone in their hand who has access to our store. And so giving people that little bit of haven of attention is just good for someone's reading life. And we think that's, you know, for all kinds of reasons, also just a good thing in the world in general. Like we need more little pockets of non-distraction. I think it's always a good thing. All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to take a question from the first cast hotline. We'll be right back.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Mario's Bistro. The special tonight is the beef carpaccio. With the Venmo debit card, you can turn the basketball game tickets your friends paid you back for into a romantic dinner that you can earn up to 5% cash back on. Use your Venmo balance to pay for the things you love to do. Visit venmo.me slash debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. Pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Terms apply. Dosh cash back terms apply.

The PC gave us computing power at home, the internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift.

a new podcast for Microsoft Azure. I'm your host, Susan Etlinger. In each episode, leaders will share what they're learning to help you navigate all this change with confidence. Please join us. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director, and I'm excited to be joining the hosts of our flagship podcast, Uncanny Valley. ♪

It's a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. It's hosted by some amazing Wired writers and editors, where each week they discuss the influence of technology and culture from the Valley on our everyday lives. But we're also adding another episode to that feed, hosted by me. Each week, I'll have an urgent conversation with one of our extremely busy Wired reporters or editors about this week in news.

All right, we're back.

Let's get to the hotline. As always, you can email vergecasts at theverge.com with your questions. You can call 866-VERGE-11 with your questions. We truly, truly love hearing from you. We have a couple that are sparking bigger stories. I think you're going to hear one of those in the next couple of weeks.

Super fun. We've really enjoyed hearing from you. And especially right now where it feels like so many things in tech and in the news and in everything else are just kind of up in the air. It's been really fun to just hear you think through stuff. So keep sending us questions. Keep sending us thoughts. We love hearing from you. Today, we have a question about televisions.

Hey, Verge Gas. This is Andrew calling from Southern California. I've got a question about TVs. I know there's been a lot of recent discussion that a lot of TV brands are making TVs

less quality TV's that are designed only to serve you ads and not necessarily to be good presentation machines. But I'm in the market for a new one. I currently have an eight-year-old Vizio M50. It's a

Polar Ray LED, but it's got a dimming zone that's about to die, and I'm looking for something new. I was going to see if you guys could recommend me some sort of TV or where I should start doing research. I don't really have a budget, but I guess it's really I want something that's

high quality but not necessarily top of the line. I can't really afford an A95 like Neely, even though I would love to have one. But basically I use an Apple TV, pass through a sound bar, a top box, so I don't really need something with a crazy good OS.

Sometimes I'll play video games on an Xbox Series X, and I'm really starting to get into 4K Blu-rays, and eventually I want to buy my own standalone player. So really, I was just going to see if you guys could recommend me anything or any sort of technologies I should look for in a good quality TV. Thanks. Chris Welch is here. Hello, Chris. Hello. It's good to be here.

As you know, I am woefully unqualified to be the person to answer this question. Nilad just makes fun of me for this crappy Roku TCL that sits behind me that I hate slightly more every single day. But I really like this question because it's two questions, right? It's like, I want a nice TV, but I don't want to spend several paychecks on a television. But it's also like, if I just want to buy a pretty good TV...

Where do I start? So I want to I want to end with like a specific recommendation as we can give our friend Andrew here. But let's start kind of bigger picture. If you're just like in the market for a pretty good TV right now, where would you start?

First of all, shout out to Vizio. You know, sad fall from grace, but they used to make great TV. So Andrew, he did. Good choice back in the day. But now it's time for an upgrade. And there are two brands that kind of live in this zone. They are Hisense and TCL, the leading mini LED TV makers. We always talk about mini LED being like a great value for what you pay.

You can get like a 65-inch model for like under $1,000 right now from like either company with fantastic picture, great contrasts, all the specs you want, 4K, HDR, super bright picture. And it's a great value for the money. They both ship with the Google TV OS, which is fine, I think. It's like probably my favorite onboard TV OS. But if you're using your Apple TV 4K, you can always just go right to that input and totally ignore it.

And so, yeah, I think Hisense and TCL are kind of, this is their lane, this is where they live, this is where they dominate. And so, yeah, that's where I would steer you. Totally, yeah. And I think the buy a TV and then buy a separate box and plug it straight into the, like, go straight to that

when you do it is 100% the right move. Like even sometimes there are certain TVs like Sony TVs, like their apps on Sony TVs, like use like special processing for like picture performance and enhancement. Like you don't get that same processing if you use like an external box. So if you have a Sony TV, that's like very specific. But so that's one reason to like use the onboard apps. And most of them are pretty similar to like what your streaming gadgets can do these days, but they're more up to date on the streaming boxes and stuff like that. And you can also just ignore all the ads if you've got a Roku TV or you

you know, these ones from Google that also do like full screen ads. I got a full screen Starbucks ad the other day on my Google TV. So, you know, they're out there. It's rough out there. Yeah. I do feel like I am increasingly being radicalized against Roku's operating system, but that's for another day. We'll come back to that. Sure. Yeah. So is mini LED the one, like if you're just recommending a TV to most people, is a mini LED TV the place to be? That's where I would start. Like, unless you want to pay...

quite a bit more for an OLED from LG or Samsung than I would certainly say stick with the mini... Okay. ...mini LED for what you're getting for the value. So, yeah. So I would say Hisense has the...

U8N, that's their flagship mini LED TV. TCL has the QM8. They both have 8 in the name, so it's very confusing for some reason. And then Sony also has a pretty good mini LED called the Bravia 7, which is like their...

Kind of mid-tier model. Not quite as many zones, the other ones, but it's like a great performing set for what you're paying for it. So those would be my models I'd recommend. But like even like their lower ones, like if you step down from theirs, like they still have great picture, especially coming up to like a five-year-old Vizio or like a 10-year-old Vizio, you're going to have like a huge jump up and like overall, you know.

quality and performance. And HDR is just, yeah, it's good. It's good. Especially, you know, the 4K Blu-ray discs. Good choice there. I hope that's still around in a few years, you know. It seems like physical media is having a tough go, but I respect the endeavor. So, yeah. Okay. So I feel like I was thinking about this, listening to this question, that, like, I have a very clear sense of

what to tell people to spend money on sort of as you want to upgrade, right? Like you have the sort of base. I know the screen size I want. I know I want it to be mini LED, right? Like, great. Those are two good decisions to make very quickly. Then it's like, how do I sort of slowly step up? What is worth paying a little bit more for? What is just nonsense that you don't care about? Do you have a sort of rubric in your head of like how to sort of move up the spec line of TVs? Yeah.

It's really just brightness. It's all brightness wars these days when it comes to TCL, Hisense, Sony, and even OLEDs. Year after year, it's just getting brighter and brighter and brighter. It's like, do you want like an eye-searing brightness level? Then you would buy the UM8 Hisense. Like those top tier models, they're too bright for some rooms. Like my living room, it's kind of absurd. But if you want like the most impactful HDR, that's why you buy those TVs. Plus blooming HD.

These have like so many zones in their TVs now. It's like how they control those like dimming zones and like try and cut down on blooming effect where you have like a halo around text or captions and stuff like that. That's something to look out for as you're shopping. So like all these top tier TVs all have great algorithms that kind of like cut down on blooming and other like bad side effects of having so many dimming zones there in the sets.

Okay. What do you think is the right sort of starting budget for people? I feel like generally speaking, if all you have is $300 to spend on a TV, buy a $300 TV, right? Like that's fine. But where do you feel like the very good televisions range starts? So I'd say like $1,000 is a pretty good sweet spot right now as far as that can get you a 65-inch model from the ones I talked about. If you want bigger...

You know, these companies all make bigger sets. I'm happy with a super modest 65-incher, but I know the trend is going towards bigger and bigger and bigger sizes. So that'll cost you, you know, $2,000 more if you want like a 75-incher bigger. But if you want just like a nice...

very bright 65 inch TV. You can spend like 900 bucks or a thousand bucks and be very, very happy for many, many years to come. So, okay. Okay. Well, this is good, Andrew. I hope that helps. Now I have a question for you specifically about me and my own television needs. So as you can see behind me, I have, I have a very bright window.

Uh, and the very bright window stares directly at my television. And so what happens is anytime it is not like pitch black outside, there's just a third of my screen that is just glared to death. I have just come to accept this as like the price of the layout of this room behind me. But this TV is, I don't know, it was crappy five years ago when I bought it and now it's this, uh,

If I spend $1,000 on a TV right now, can I solve at least enough of my glare problem that I can see things on the TV because it'll be bright enough and better? I'd say so. Yeah? For sure. If you want a true solution, you could buy one of Samsung's OLED TVs because they have a matte coating on them now. Sheer brightness can help, obviously. But as far as the actual coating on the display, Samsung's OLEDs have an anti-glare etched glass cover.

type thing and also that's going to come to this year's lcd sets so those shouldn't be quite as expensive probably not like a thousand dollars cheap but better uh so i would say try those if you want uh but tyson os is kind of like a headache uh yeah it's not my favorite so that's where you go with the apple tv or some other box to plug in uh but that would do a great job but kind of

Yeah, that window spot is rough. So I feel for you. It's tough, man. And it really I was I was trying to watch The Gorge, that Apple TV movie the other day down here. And that like a solid third of that movie is basically in pitch darkness. Yeah. And I couldn't see it. I literally had to stop the movie because like I can't. It's all happening in that like bottom third of the screen that I just can't see. I had to pause the movie and I was like, it's probably time for a new television.

Can't you use some curtains or some like smart home sliding something over? I know that during movie time. The actual answer is curtains, but the much more fun technology answer is buy a needlessly expensive television. So I'm going to do that instead. That's why we're here. Yeah. All right, Chris, thank you very much. Andrew, I hope that helps. Let us know what you end up getting and we'll tell you if you made a good decision or not. Thanks, guys. Thank you.

All right, that's it for the VergeCast this week. Thank you to everybody who was on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. As always, there's lots more on everything we talked about. All of Jen's robot vacuum coverage. We have Kobo coverage on the site. We have coverage of all the Amazon stuff.

We'll put a lot of stuff in the show notes, but, you know, keep it locked on the website. Things going on right now. And if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other robot vacuum features you'd like to see, you can always email vergecasts at theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We really, really, really, really love hearing from you.

This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Will Poore. The VergeCast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news, whatever Brendan Carr is up to this week. Lots more gadgets. AirPods Max happened. We're going to talk about those and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. ♪

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