Today we're talking about the mystery behind Ferrari hiring famed Apple product designer Jony Ive and his design firm: will he be designing the Italian brand's first electric car, or a new luxury accessory line, or… something else? Then we discuss the growing popularity of livestream shopping: especially during the pandemic, many commerce brands and outlets have taken to livestream video interfaces through which viewers can buy products being discussed...as they're being discussed. Is this a trend, or is livestream shopping here to stay? And we finish with physical biometric security keys: the company Yubico has released a fingerprint-scanning USB dongle that acts as an additional level of security when you're logging in to stuff on your laptop. Is this viable tech for average consumers, or too clunky to adopt in the mainstream?
Ferrari hires Jony Ive, livestream shopping's rising popularity, and a biometric security dongle.
Episode Navigation:
02:41 – Ferrari Hires Jony Ive and Marc Newson
17:45 – Is Livestream Shopping... a Thing?
30:08 – Yubico's New Biometric Security Dongles
Featured and Related:
Nick Caruso:
This is The Gear Patrol podcast for Friday, October 8th, 2021. I'm Nick Caruso. And I'm just getting over a bit of a head cold. So if I sound like I have corks in my nose, that's why.
Nick Caruso:
Today we're talking about the mystery behind Ferrari hiring celebrity Apple product designer, Jony Ive, and his design firm. Will he be designing the Italian brand's first electric car or a new luxury accessory line or something else?
Nick Caruso:
And then we'll discuss the growing popularity of livestream shopping. Commerce of course happens online. And especially during the pandemic so many brands and outlets have taken to livestream video interfaces through which consumers, viewers can buy products that are being discussed in real-time. Is this a trend or is livestream shopping here to stay?
Nick Caruso:
And then we finish with physical biometric security keys. The company Yubico has released a pretty affordable USB dongle that reads fingerprints as an additional level of security when you're logging into stuff on your laptop or computer. So is this viable tech for average consumers or is it too clunky to adopt in the mainstream?
Nick Caruso:
With me to explore these headlines and more is Gear Patrol's Associate Director of Production Design, Henry Phillips. Heya, Henry.
Henry Phillips:
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Nick Caruso:
Hello. And also Platform's Producer, Scott Ulrich. Scott, what up?
Scott Ulrich:
What's up? It's fall y'all. Hey, I'm good.
Nick Caruso:
It's fall y'all. It really is, man. This is real. This is my time to thrive. This is ... I think I may have mentioned this last week, but this is like Autumn Man, The Onion article about-
Scott Ulrich:
Oh yeah.
Nick Caruso:
Autumn Man. This is my prime.
Scott Ulrich:
That would be me if I didn't live in Georgia where the cicada and grasshoppers are still singing at night and it's like getting up into the 80s still each day, but I'm still ... I'm still living. I still love it.
Nick Caruso:
That's okay. Henry and I will put on plaid over shirts and high five and the under the color of the changing leaves for you.
Henry Phillips:
So many light layers that we have.
Nick Caruso:
I know. It's just ... It's glorious the layers, the patterns, the textures. It's great. It's boot weather already.
Nick Caruso:
Okay. Let's get on with this. We're here to talk about products. And the first story we're discussing today is speculation around an announcement made by Ferrari. Ferrari is entering this multiyear partnership with LoveFrom ... I just want to say love form, which actually makes more sense to me, but LoveFrom, which is the design firm founded by Jony Ive and Marc Newson. The partnership will, according to it, the release, which is very light on details, it will "bring together Ferrari's legendary performance and excellence with LoveFrom's unrivaled experience and creativity that has defined extraordinary world-changing products," which is really a nice sentence, but it doesn't say much. So that's really all we know.
Nick Caruso:
So speculation has been rampant from the firm maybe designing Ferrari's first all-electric car to possibly just a line of luxury product ala Porsche design. Henry Phillips, what do you think these fellows are up to?
Henry Phillips:
That's a great question. And I think it's so hard to tell. I tried to think of what it could possibly be. And it's got to just be like a really high-end consultancy or something. I hope they're just given carte blanche to design something really rad and really big and really expensive, but I don't know. Are they just going to design a little user interface for the center dash screen? Maybe. But ...
Nick Caruso:
Yeah.
Henry Phillips:
I don't really understand super hotshot boutique design firms in a lot of ways.
Nick Caruso:
Tell me more. What do you mean?
Henry Phillips:
Well, no, it's just like, these guys are two absolute legends who are probably happily doing their own shit. And then they form this company and their first client is Airbnb which, who knows what that means. And then their second client is Ferrari, which is cool. And they have some experience with concepts around cars and obviously digital user interfaces and stuff. So it's really hard to tell.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I guess, my gut reaction to this has always been like, they're definitely not going to be designing an entire car. That is as prolific as they both are, Marc and Jony, if I can use their first names. Designing cars is very specialized and is a lot. There are aerodynamics involved. There are not aerodynamics involved in iPhones and IMAX and such. So that's a different sort of sphere.
Nick Caruso:
But in terms of things that you look at and touch that are part of the automobile world, I feel like they could ... Their specific brand of design could really sort of tweak things in a very beautiful direction for a company, Ferrari, who has resisted going electric for one, but resisted sort of that main, that future state, but maybe wants to do it in a very luxurious way.
Nick Caruso:
Scott, what do you think?
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah. It's interesting, and I think that in many ways it does make a lot of sense. From a very young age when I interacted with my first Apple product, I think one of the main takeaways that I had was that it felt very luxurious. And I think that that's something that has really helped Apple become what it has become, is just bringing this very luxurious feeling, these very luxurious feeling products to just average consumers that they can interact with every day.
Scott Ulrich:
And for a luxury car company like Ferrari, I think that makes a lot of sense, whatever it is that they end up designing. Whether it's an interface that's going on a screen in a car, I could see that being a really good fit. Or if it's just kind of an overview hand in designing aspects of a car. I don't know how much they know about cars. And I can't imagine that that would be easy, but ... And maybe it's more along the lines of what Porsche is doing with just the auxiliary merchandise and products that they're coming out with. Maybe Ferrari is angling to make stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, I guess I have to imagine that these two would be a great pair for designing those things.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. You know I-
Henry Phillips:
[crosstalk 00:07:32]
Nick Caruso:
Go ahead Henry.
Henry Phillips:
Oh, no, this is a tangential interruption. We'll just [crosstalk 00:07:37] for a while.
Nick Caruso:
I love it. It's what I want.
Henry Phillips:
Did you guys ever ... I was trying to think of what experience either of these two have with car design.
Nick Caruso:
Okay.
Henry Phillips:
And I remember that Marc Newson did this awesome little concept car for Ford. I don't know if you guys-
Nick Caruso:
Wait, really-
Henry Phillips:
... ever remember it or saw it. Yeah. It looks like some delightful little like Jetsons kind of Space Age friendly car. It's amazing.
Nick Caruso:
Okay. This is-
Henry Phillips:
I encourage everyone listening at home to check it out. But it reminds me a lot. Honda came out with a concept car not too long ago. It was kind of small and boxy and cute. And this is smaller and boxier and cuter.
Scott Ulrich:
Oh, yeah, it is very cute.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. Look at that. It's in late '90s. The Ford 021C assembled by Ghia, which actually makes a lot of sense given the look of it, very ... I don't know. It is very cute, right?
Henry Phillips:
Very cute. Gauges are by Ikepod, which is Marc Newson's watch company. They couldn't figure out how to do a stereo so they just threw some Alpine head unit in there.
Nick Caruso:
Of course.
Henry Phillips:
No, it's cool. And I hope that Ferrari brings them on for interesting kind of user experience, user interface type touches, and not like a sick Ferrari bookshelf display thing.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. Right. Like bookends. That was kind of ... We've circled around this a little bit already, but if I were Ferrari and I wanted to, how could I incorporate these guys into my product? I'd say, yeah, the things that you touch and look at, not the steering wheel, but the other things, you said basically the infotainment or the shift knob, the dials, the mirrors, the little ... the form factors of not even peripherals, but just sort of secondary items inside a car cabin and maybe a couple other elements outside the car that just need a little shaping. Give these guys carte blanche to kind of reform those. That'd be cool. But it would be fun if it were like the only thing that comes of this is the new key fob.
Henry Phillips:
It could totally be that too.
Nick Caruso:
It really could-
Scott Ulrich:
Or just like a little Jetsonsy cartoon Ferrari. I'd love to see that.
Henry Phillips:
It'd be adorable.
Scott Ulrich:
It'd be very interesting.
Scott Ulrich:
But I mean, I feel like a lot of the cars that I've been in recently, I really don't like a lot of the infotainment setups. I don't like the center console. A lot of them are just really weird to use. I mean, I hate mine and I don't think it's a very good one. I don't think anyone likes it-
Nick Caruso:
What do you drive?
Scott Ulrich:
I drive a Ford Fiesta.
Nick Caruso:
Oh yeah, stink.
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah. It's awful. It's so bad to use, I can't believe that in the year 2016, someone green lit that. But not just that one. I'm failing to come up with any specific examples, but like, I don't know. I think that a lot of cars could use that sort of direction.
Henry Phillips:
Oh sure. I mean, yeah, there's a reason and it's ... I didn't even put two and two together until about 10 seconds ago, but yeah, like CarPlay rules.
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah. Right?
Henry Phillips:
And probably not entirely uninfluenced by our man, Mr. Ive.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I mean, that's something I'd always thought for a long time. I feel like ... I don't mean to suggest that I sort of like came up with the idea of Apple CarPlay, but I was always, as a younger man interested in cars. I was like, "All these interfaces suck. Why don't they just hire Microsoft or Apple, someone who knows how to design a computer interface to make the thing in the car." So then, I manifested CarPlay and Android Auto.
Nick Caruso:
But these guys aren't designing interfaces, the digital interfaces rather, but they could have something to do with the physical layout of things. Yeah. Put ... The way we interact with buttons and stuff in a car has to be intuitive, but also does in a way need to be beautiful. I think those things are kind of intrinsically linked. Right? So that would be a really good direction to sort of point these guys in, in the space.
Nick Caruso:
Though, I will say that, Henry, I know you'll be familiar. Scott, I don't know if you know, are familiar with the Ferrari Roma, the newer model from Ferrari has this sort of futuristic look to it. And I don't really know how to continue my thought process here, but these two things seem along the same track. Like they have this ... The Roma has this kind of beautiful alien sort of quality to it that may be related to this sort of very forward-thinking designee stuff. So I think Ferrari's been on this tract for a while, and incorporating this kind of genius and popularity into their products could be a hit if they do it right.
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah. And I'm looking at pictures of the dashboard right now. And it looks very good, but it definitely does look kind of busy. I mean, think about like ... I mean, of course it's just pure speculation because we have no clue what he's going to actually be working on, and I know that I'm just kind of getting hung up on this, but think about what an MP3 player or a music player looked like before the iPod and how people, I mean, you guys probably remember how you regarded looking at an iPod for the first time. Well, I remember, so I'm sure you guys remember. But like-
Nick Caruso:
Of course.
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah. It was just totally just such a departure from the standardized buttons. It's totally reimagined. And yeah, I know it'd be very interesting to see a treatment of a dashboard or infotainment with just way fewer buttons and options. I mean, even with products that I don't know if Jony Ive or Marc Newson had anything to do with, like the Apple TV remote, but it's like the average TV remote and the Apple TV remote just couldn't be more different from each other.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of the Bauhaus futurist sort of minimalist, essentialist, beauty vocation of stuff. Yeah. I think it could ... I don't want to see a click wheel in a car. I don't feel big, like a big dinner plate size click wheel to select stuff like a rotary telephone. But that essentialism and beauty is always, of course, in a Ferrari, in a $200,000 car, you want that kind of beauty in there. So would be very welcome.
Henry Phillips:
I've got a little trivia tidbit for you.
Nick Caruso:
Drop it.
Henry Phillips:
These are the kind of things that stick in my brain for no reason at all for 10 years.
Nick Caruso:
Okay.
Henry Phillips:
Ferrari was one of the launch partners for CarPlay.
Scott Ulrich:
Oh wow.
Henry Phillips:
There were like two car brands that had CarPlay when CarPlay launched. And it was like Ferrari and I don't even know, like Kia or something.
Nick Caruso:
Right. No, I do remember.
Scott Ulrich:
When was that?
Henry Phillips:
It was in 2014, way back when. Granted, Ferrari's implementation of it was terrible. They did it very poorly. They put in a tiny little screen in the dashboard, in the gauge cluster. But anyway. No, it's interesting to me, and I'm sure there's kind of some longstanding relationship and kind of curious to see where it goes.
Nick Caruso:
Ferrari has this weird thing. I mean, I was going to try to wrap this, but that provides a good opportunity for a tangent. Ferrari has that second dashboard display in front of the passenger. That's neat. I've never really known how to feel about that. They've got ... You can see the ... Isn't it like the rev counters over there, like the-
Henry Phillips:
Like the most Italian thing on earth.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. Just like a little entertainment for the passengers to watch your revs or your speed or whatever, your G forces accumulate on a digital display in front of you as you scramble to find a grab handle.
Nick Caruso:
Well, interesting. We'll have to see what comes of it. We don't know when it's going to happen, what it's going to be. And I hate to suggest that we'll be disappointed, but who knows what'll come of this. If anybody listening has any speculation, I would love to hear it. Tweet at us or email us, podcast@gearpatrol.com and tell us your thoughts.
Nick Caruso:
But for now let's move on from this and talk about livestream shopping. At least people of my generation and older are familiar with QVC, the television channel that's literally dedicated completely to home shopping. It involves people getting in front of a camera with a table full of jewelry or home goods or clothes or whatever, and talking about it until people call in and buy it all in real-time for inflated prices and it's all usually junk.
Nick Caruso:
But anyway, regardless of the product, the level of products, that model has hit the internet in earnest now. It's been around in a lot of forms for about a decade in China, but it really picked up steam, of course, thanks to the pandemic. No one could go to stores, but we could all go to the internet. And we were seeing, even before the pandemic, that we were seeing flashes of the model in kind of mainstream areas. Like Amazon has this livestream shopping built into some of its efforts and the like. So we're seeing it pop up on things like TikTok and just across the web.
Nick Caruso:
Scott, you manage Gear Patrol's social media. You've got your finger on the pulse, right? What's your take on the viability or just being able to implement this kind of interface and approach into shopping moving forward? Is it a fad? Is it here to stay? What do you think?
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah. This Wall Street Journal article is titled, Is livestream shopping the future of retail? And my gut reaction was to say, no, it's not because that ... I don't think. That's always just like been a niche as far as I've understood it. And I don't know anyone that has ever done this or even really heard of it. But after looking into it a little bit more, I realized that that's definitely a very ... I don't know, just like USA-centric way of thinking, because this already is really big in China and other places, as you mentioned. It sounds like it's generating billions of dollars of revenue and has been since like the mid-2000s, just involving influencers and stuff.
Scott Ulrich:
And, the more that I started thinking about it, the more I'm realizing, I mean, think about the videos and content that kids today are growing up on, like YouTube videos of unboxing, little kid influencers that show them the toys that they have and how they play with them. I've never really watched shopping channels. I have seen them. I know what they are. But like, yeah. So that's never been me, but I actually could see this becoming like a bigger, bigger and bigger thing. And while I don't think that's necessarily the future of retail, I could definitely see it become much more commonplace, especially with like, I don't know, just the influencer culture we have and how much money there is to be made.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I mean, I have trouble wrapping my head around it. I mean, it's like ... The idea of QVC especially seemed to me always ... You'd have to tune in at a certain time to ... You'd have to time it right to find a thing you really want. If I'm in the mood for new boots or something for the fall, for the winter, where do I go right now to look at someone live streaming footwear, right? And how are they going to make sure to address my specific needs and my specific tastes and all that this? I don't quite understand the logistics here.
Scott Ulrich:
Right. And I think that-
Nick Caruso:
That wasn't a helpful thing to say, I guess. I just sort of like rambling. Yeah.
Scott Ulrich:
All we do is talk about it. But I think that something, I mean, QVC probably failed to really grab us because I think it's been pretty much geared for older people. I think, it really tries to get like retirees that are watching a lot of daytime television, selling products. I mean, I can't even really think of examples, but not something that younger people are going to want to buy a lot of the time.
Scott Ulrich:
But I mean, think about the Instagram app. It took away some of the bottom tabs. And now one of those one, two, three, four, five tabs is a shopping tab.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah.
Scott Ulrich:
And that's not going away. People didn't like it, but too bad. It's there now. It's going to be there forever, unless it just becomes ... unless it gets narrowed down to two tabs and shopping's going to be one of them. This is the way that things are going. It's easy.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I mean, does it seem like, you're kind of like automatic, you open your phone, unlock your phone, you automatically tap on Instagram, whatever. I wonder if the future state is that we all automatically, we look at our feed and maybe we'll look at the shopping tab and see what's happening there. And someone's just like live streaming a product. And we're like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I'll buy that." Seems like that's the daytime TV channel flipping land on QVC version of today, I guess, yeah.
Scott Ulrich:
And that definitely sounds like dystopian and scary. And it probably is.
Nick Caruso:
It does. Yes, it does.
Scott Ulrich:
But at the same time, something that I make myself laugh about is like, I get mad at data privacy and stuff, but I kind of like having some of these ads that are targeted to me. I've found several products. It's like, "Oh, I'm actually totally in the market for that. That looks great." I buy it. And then I love it.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. Same. Yeah, same.
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, it is scary and I don't like that I'm being, that I'm preyed for some companies, but like, hey, if it brings me cool products. I work at Gear Patrol. I'm into that, you know?
Nick Caruso:
Yeah.
Henry Phillips:
I mean, I'm so curious about this because it's like, I think I kind of took the same trajectory as Scott where I dismissed it early as like, "Oh, this is just QVC and people will be talking to me trying to sell me something that I don't necessarily want." And then you start to think about how this could actually work in a way that would be fairly compelling probably, which is like, I don't know, like our whole business is as Gear Patrol is recommending products.
Nick Caruso:
Right.
Henry Phillips:
So you like, what if you just like, I mean, we're going to take a handful of strong leaps here, but if Gear Patrol is represented by a singular person, like Gear Patrol was an influencer, and that influencer lived on, I don't know, Twitch for six hours a day and it was just like, "Hey, we're going to go through a bunch of cool shit. If you have questions or have anything you're wondering what you should buy, here it is. And some of it'll be sponsored, some of it'll be paid, some of it'll be whatever." That feels kind of viable in a way that the idea of kind of real-time somewhat influenced, somewhat editorialized product recommendations, that doesn't seem that unrealistic.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I guess that kind of gels what I was rambling about earlier, is that does seem ... The model, the actual structure of it seems very doable. It makes a lot of sense, right? There's a person. They're talking about a bunch to different stuff. They'll go through all the details. They'll show it to you. They'll discuss how it was made, how it's used, et cetera, how it feels.
Nick Caruso:
But the one thing I don't, I can't quite wrap my head around is timing. Like, how do you ... And maybe this is my media brain and not my consumer brain speaking, but how do you make sure that a person who wants the thing is listening at the right time for that thing? The logistics don't quite make sense to me. I guess you'd have to, in our modern world, you could have notifications, like tune in soon, we're talking about shirts, or whatever, air fryers, the best air fryers. And then just, yeah, tune in.
Scott Ulrich:
I would envision a bunch of different channels, and each one just covering like, yeah, kind of the specific area. But I don't know. I mean, it's hard to envision, especially when I haven't even really encountered this specifically yet. It still feels so strange and alien and hard to imagine it entering into the culture at large, but also, think about what TikTok was. It was a merger of musically, which is like a lip-syncing app. And that's like the biggest thing in the world now.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah.
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah, which is crazy.
Nick Caruso:
The other logistical hurdle here is that, if this is how we're going to be buying stuff in the future, I don't understand how I can do that in a meeting. Like, am I going to be just watching TV in a meeting now instead of just clicking through Amazon, like I do now?
Scott Ulrich:
That's a very good point.
Nick Caruso:
I'm kidding. If anybody who signs my paychecks is listening, which I know you're not, I've never done that ever, never.
Scott Ulrich:
But you know what, Nick? Now that we're meeting just through the computer, you might be able to get away with that.
Nick Caruso:
Oh, I hadn't thought about. Yeah, maybe I could just do a little internet shopping while I work.
Scott Ulrich:
Brave new world.
Henry Phillips:
Nobody's ever done that before. I thought that's like a novel.
Nick Caruso:
See, I came up with Apple CarPlay and a way to shop while you work.
Henry Phillips:
And fucking off during meetings.
Nick Caruso:
That's right. Yeah. And it's multitasking. I came up with multitasking. I came up with it people, 2021.
Nick Caruso:
All right. Well, we'll see. I guess, I mean, your point, Scott is one for the ages, right? We didn't see X coming and here it is. It wasn't a thing until it was. So often this is how things go. Honestly, we take a lot of cues on the internet and in app culture and commerce culture from China specifically. And this has been big in China for a long time, sort of comes into the mainstream and adopts in a big way. That's just one reason to really pay attention to this. So maybe this is the future. I guess we'll have to wait for our next meeting to see if it happens.
Nick Caruso:
Schedule more meetings and we'll figure it out. That's like ... What's the meme? I guess like this meeting could have been an email, like this meeting could have been an air fryer. I don't know, maybe an air fryer. Okay. Let's move on. Pardon me.
Nick Caruso:
The last headline we're going to deal with today revolves around the sexy world of biometric security. The company Yubico just released its first physical biometric security device of this type. It's a tiny little USB dongle, plugs right into a port USB-C, USB other type port. And it's got a little fingerprint reader. So you plug it in, and when you're logging into something and need a password, you either use it to supplement that password or in place of the password so that it's very secure because, I don't know if you guys know this, but no two fingerprints are alike. You guys ever head that? Yeah.
Scott Ulrich:
I actually have the fingerprinting merit badge from Boy Scouts.
Nick Caruso:
So oh, no kidding.
Scott Ulrich:
I'm way ahead of you there. Yeah.
Nick Caruso:
Maybe. So I came up with CarPlay. Did you come up with this, biometric security?
Scott Ulrich:
No, I was a little bit late to the party on that one.
Nick Caruso:
Okay. I just envisioned a bunch of Cub Scouts, like with a bunch of dude sticks and twine coming up with a security system for the CIA.
Nick Caruso:
Henry, I don't know why, but I feel like you're going to have an opinion here. Is this an adequate solution to personal security concerns? Is this something you see people using personally putting on their key chain and logging into stuff with in the future?
Henry Phillips:
I don't think I live an interesting enough life for this to be particularly relevant to me.
Nick Caruso:
Don't sell yourself short.
Henry Phillips:
I don't have various Central European bank accounts, but I do ... I've always liked the idea of physical kind of authentication keys. I always kind of found text-based or app-based two-factor authentication kind of weird in some ways. And I do like the idea that there's enough cryptographic tools to do it just through a fingerprint or through whatever.
Henry Phillips:
But the USB keys, at least for the mainstream consumer, kind of feel like a stop gap to me. I like them and I think they're cool, but if my phone could be the fingerprint reader or I could use my face or something, then perhaps that's the ultimate end game, as opposed to having a dongle sticking out of a port of a computer that is not necessarily in reach right now.
Nick Caruso:
Right.
Henry Phillips:
I don't know. I do like it.
Nick Caruso:
I think I just ... I'm just realizing this now. I think in the last few days, I watched some shitty movie where this literally was a thing in it. Like someone had to plug a fingerprint reader into a computer and use this. So it seemed clunky then, it feels a little clunky now. But I don't know. Did you guys look at the Slack thread that I linked to?
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah.
Nick Caruso:
I asked our tech editor, Eric Limer to sort of give his opinion on this kind of tech. And he points out that a) it's more like enterprise stuff. This is like for corporate, right? If you got your business, you need to log into stuff on your computer at work or whatever, you can use this for company secrets and all that. But he also says, in terms of this reaching the mainstream, maybe not because "Interest isn't there because they require you to buy a boring thing and/or change your behavior for no benefit, other than 'bad thing might not happen to you' and insurance is never sexy." He also equates these two paper straws, kind of like the stop gap of environmentalism. Some interesting takes there. But Scott, what do you think about biometric dongles?
Scott Ulrich:
For such a futuristic feeling thing, it looks weirdly dated. I think just because ... It kind of looks like a flash drive, or I guess if it's reading your fingerprint, maybe thumb drive is the better term to use, but ... Yeah, I don't know-
Nick Caruso:
We don't allow ... We actually don't allow puns on the podcast.
Scott Ulrich:
I'm sorry. You can edit that out. But yeah, it seems like kind of a clunky attempt at something that does solve though a pretty big problem. And it sounds like Google and a lot of things are just trending towards passwords being left behind, as they probably should be, because people are really bad about passwords. Passwords are apparently really easy to just guess in ways that I have never really actually understood, but they just are.
Scott Ulrich:
And I know, for me, I have a bunch of different versions of passwords that I have to remember and keep straight. And it's very frustrating and I have to change them all the time, especially for accounts that are just like ... Look, I don't care if someone hacks into my, I don't know, my amc.com. I don't know. I don't have any like money in that. Yeah, like whatever. But yeah, it's so much to keep straight, and the sooner that we can move past that, I think, yeah, it's going to be more secure and just better overall.
Scott Ulrich:
And we already saw fingerprint stuff work great with that era of iPhone, an era that I have talked about in the past, I really, really miss. I think that the fingerprint reader to unlock your iPhone was so much better than the face ID, just because I have trouble with face ID all the time, whether it's sunglasses or whatever. And just pulling your phone out of your pocket and grabbing it by that little fingerprint reader and your phone's already unlocked by the time that you're pulling it out, that was super, super easy to use. And so, yeah. I don't know. It'll be interesting to see if they can make this accessible for most people and most things, but I would love to see it work out.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, speaking of phones, something else I asked Eric about was this doesn't ... Obviously phones have this built in oftentimes, but you can't use this dongle on a phone. So it is really kind of a limited tech.
Nick Caruso:
Something I did find interesting though, just on a sort of product level is that these are difficult to ... or these are very secure because the fingerprint itself, the information isn't hackable, because it's stored separately on the hardware level. So you can't actually, no one can actually access the fingerprint itself and get into your stuff, which is why it's so secure and you can change it. When you set it up, you can change it and all that. It's really interesting.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. What do you think ... This sort of brings up another topic that people have been talking about in terms of iPhone for a long time? Do we think we're going to get the thumbprint/fingerprint ID, touch ID back anytime soon? Is that coming Henry?
Henry Phillips:
It's been rumored for so long. And I imagine that kind of COVID and chip shortages and stuff probably didn't help. But I also wonder if they've reevaluated based on how face ID has been received, which I think is generally really pretty positive, though I think definitely some hiccups around all sorts of other use cases. But it'd be cool. I think the idea of fingerprint reader underneath screen has always been this kind of white whale.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah.
Henry Phillips:
I think-
Scott Ulrich:
The thing that we all really ... The thing we all really want is the spy movie, put your eye up to a camera and the green laser goes up and down your eye.
Henry Phillips:
The retinal scan.
Scott Ulrich:
That's what I want.
Nick Caruso:
We want retinal scans and we want the only way you can hack someone else's thing is when you like in a movie when you murder someone and take their actual eyeball.
Scott Ulrich:
Yes.
Nick Caruso:
Like Minority Report-
Scott Ulrich:
That's what you have to do to get into my AMC account.
Nick Caruso:
That's right.
Scott Ulrich:
Murder me and ...
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. You could have my free small popcorn over my dead body. Oh, that's perfect.
Nick Caruso:
All right. Well, we solved that. We've really exhausted this topic, haven't we? I think all. When I was in ... I took a debate class long ago, and the ultimate end to any debate was always nuclear war, like everything always ends in nuclear war, which I think we've just kind of done. Every product discussion always ends in murder and pushing an eyeball up to, yeah, a discussion of Minority Report.
Nick Caruso:
Well, great. That's a gross, weird way to end this conversation, but I think we've kind of covered a lot of stuff here. There's some good, good food for thought. I'm really churning about the Ferrari stuff still. I'm going to be thinking about that for the rest of the day.
Henry Phillips:
I'm excited. It's cool.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I really want to know what the heck they're going to make.
Scott Ulrich:
I can't wait to buy that superb designed key fob.
Nick Caruso:
Right. And maybe it's going to have touch ID on the door handle of your Ferrari. Maybe that's what it is.
Henry Phillips:
Like the worst part is that there is absolutely a reality where it is the key fob. Like that's so-
Nick Caruso:
100%-
Henry Phillips:
... potentially like the case.
Nick Caruso:
Absolutely. Well, you heard it here first folks from the guy who invented Apple CarPlay. We know what Johy Ive is-
Henry Phillips:
And multitasking.
Nick Caruso:
And multitasking.
Henry Phillips:
Not on your phone, but in general.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah.
Scott Ulrich:
In general.
Nick Caruso:
I purchased seven air fryers in the past 10 minutes. I just can't stop doing it. So we better quit before I get to my eighth. So that is it for today's discussion of the product news.
Nick Caruso:
Thank you everybody for tuning in. Thanks for listening. We love that you're here. If you want any more information about any of the stories or tangents we discussed, we will do our best to include every last link in the show notes. And if you're on the website listening right now on gearpatrol.com, it'll be in the show, in the post that you can click on.
Nick Caruso:
And if you like what you hear, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice. And if you do that, or even if you don't, I guess, you could still rate us and we would really appreciate a five-star review. They'll make sure that you keep hearing nuggets of wisdom and predictions and hot takes from yours truly and my very fine colleagues.
Nick Caruso:
You can tell us what you do and don't like on social media. You can find us. Our handle everywhere is gearpatrol. It's one word. Or you can email us at podcast@gearpatrol.com. Not enough of you email us by the way. Still looking for more of those. So email us, tell what you think, say hi. And I've been joined today by Henry Phillips and Scott Ulrich. Guys, thanks so much for being here.
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah. It's a pleasure to be-
Henry Phillips:
Thank you-
Scott Ulrich:
... talking with the person that invented CarPlay.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. I wish I could sign autographs next time we're in person, and I hope you get fall sometimes soon, Scott.
Scott Ulrich:
Yeah, fingers crossed.
Nick Caruso:
Yeah. For Gear Patrol, I'm Nick Caruso, and until next time, take care.