Everything Old Is New Again

It doesn’t take much to make people nostalgic anymore. With the rapid pace of technological advancement, folks get whimsical for even their clunky cell phones from 2005 or a defunct video service that went away just four years ago. Nostalgia sells—especially when you imbue a familiar screen with a bleeding-edge, high-tech foldable display. Companies are building devices meant to make you feel like you’re bounding into the future, while still invoking those good ol' days. But does sentimentality make for a good product? Or is this all just marketing bluster?

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED staff writer Louise Matsakis about Byte, the reboot of the six-second video service Vine. Then, a conversation with WIRED senior associate editor Julian Chokkattu about the new Motorola Razr (but with a folding screen!).

Read Louise's story about Byte here. Read more about the folding Razr here. Read Brian Barrett’s story about why you should wait for glass in foldable devices here.

Julian recommends the show Giri / Haji on Netflix. Lauren recommends following Megan Molteni’s coverage of the coronavirus. Mike recommends the Foodsaver space saving vacuum sealer.

Louise Matsakis can be found on Twitter @lmatsakis. Julian Chokkattu is @JulianChokkattu. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Lauren is @LaurenGoode. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our consulting executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Lauren Goode: Oh, boy, it’s folding phones that sent me over the edge. Folding phones sent me over the beveled edge!

[Intro music]

LG: Hi, everyone. I'm Lauren Goode, a senior writer at WIRED and you're listening to Gadget Lab. I'm here, as always, with WIRED senior editor Michael Calore.

Michael Calore: Aloha.

LG: Aloha. Joining us from our studio in New York this week is WIRED staff writer Louise Matsakis. Hi, Louise. Thanks for joining us.

Louise Matsakis: Hey. Thanks for having me.

LG: So, today on the show, we're going to be talking about old products making a comeback in new forms. These are the ghosts of products past, whether those are popular social media apps that just won't die or our favorite phones from the early 2000s come back to life. We're going to talk about why these products keep resurfacing, what it means to have a product iterate in new forms, and whether or not something that's that old can ever really truly be new again. Later on in the show, our WIRED colleague Julian Chokkattu is going to join us.

But first: This week, a “new” media service launched. I say new with, like, air quotes because it's not really new. It's Byte, with a Y. B-Y-T-E. This is the rebirth of Vine, which was the six-second video service that was hugely popular and then shut down in 2016. Louise, you wrote a story about Byte for WIRED.com, so tell us first what it is.

LM: This is the reincarnation of Vine, like you said. Dom Hofmann, who was one of the cofounders of Vine, for the last couple of years, on and off, has been trying to relaunch the service in some form or another.

You might remember that in 2018 it was called v2, then that project was put on indefinite hold, so now we have Byte, which is like a shorter TikTok/Instagram Stories kind of vibe. A lot of former Vine people are flocking to it. It's super nostalgic and still the six-second loop that was super popular back then.

MC: Louise, what sorts of things are on there? Is it all like the old Vine stuff where it's crazy comedy and people doing little mini skits, or is it closer to the sorts of things that you see on TikTok these days?

LM: I'm a huge TikTok addict and, honestly, Byte feels really short because a lot of the stuff I watch on TikTok, like makeup tutorials or funny dances, you just can't really fit in six seconds. It's interesting because I think that at the time, that six-second loop was really perfect, and you could share those on Twitter, they got a lot of clout on Instagram, whereas now, you can't really do that longer format informational stuff on Byte.

Yeah, it's exactly what you said, it's, really, sketch comedy. Someone photoshopped Kanye West FaceTiming with a hamster. There's a girl crashing her Target shopping cart that she's riding in into a bush, just really classic super comedy stuff. I also noticed that it's pretty male-centric, and it seems to be a lot of people who are older than Gen Z, which is not exactly surprising because a lot of the teens on TikTok probably don't remember Vine, so it's a lot of people coming over who remember Vine. It's a super-nostalgic service. Whether or not it will actually be able to succeed is still up in the air. I think it's pretty unlikely, but it is fun to have this relic of the old internet back.

LG: That does make me feel old to think that teens are not old enough to remember what Vine was. Are they like, "What's Twitter, too?" Probably, if you're like, "Twitter bought Vine," they're like, "What's that?"

LM: I think Twitter still has so much cultural relevance, like the president is tweeting. I think that even if you're not on Twitter, you're hyper-aware of it. Vine was this always, was this really—even though they had 200 million users or so—it was still this really weird space that if you weren't super-online, that you probably weren't aware of.

I think it's really akin to Tumblr in a lot of ways, so it has that really nostalgic vibe. It's where a lot of really big internet celebrities were born and I think it's part of the reason that Dom and some of these other people are still invested in it, because it had so much clout at the time.

LG: Wow. Tumblr. Now, we're really throwing back here. OK, Louise, what I'm curious about is how the social media environment is different from 2016 when Vine last existed or even 2018 when Dom and his team launched this experimental app. I know when I go to check apps on my phone now, I feel generally pretty overloaded by the number of apps that are on my phone, and for me, at least, things like TikTok and Byte, as much as I find them enjoyable so far, they're not high-priority for me.

I think that's largely because of the network effect. A lot of my friends and family are on something like Instagram, so I'm more inclined to go there for the connection, the dopamine hit, whatever you want to call it. I think for what people are saying, the network effect is still pretty important in social media in general.

In something like Byte, though, it doesn't seem like it's super easy to find people. Also, it doesn't show you follower accounts. I'm just wondering, the climate of social media right now, how much of a chance Byte has to stand out to be successful and how they're approaching things differently?

LM: I think the network effect is still really important for a lot of social media apps, but I actually think that TikTok is more akin to something like Netflix. It's something that people sit and watch for hours. A lot of people's bios actually say, "If you know me from school, don't follow me on here." People aren't on that platform to talk with and meet people they already know in real life.

I think that that's the same environment that Byte is going for, but because the videos are so short, it's tough to have that same level of engagement. I also think that, I don't know how to put this, but I just think that that kind of weird humor is thriving on other platforms better right now and it's just too hard to encapsulate enough in six seconds.

The big problem with Vine is that people felt constrained by that format in the end. They ended up leaving for YouTube or Instagram where they could make more money, get brand sponsorships, and also just make bigger and more ambitious content that didn't have to be constrained in that tiny format. In the time since Vine has left, your Twitter has made the character count larger, right? All of these platforms like, "Yeah, we want you to make bigger, we want you to do more stuff." Vine is like, "No, we want to keep this really strict, small format." I just don't know if that really works anymore, especially where people have more data, it's more easy to copy and paste TikToks and longer YouTube videos. I think it's just going to be really hard.

At the same time, what I talk about in the piece is that, hey, vinyl records came back, right? There's definitely a big market for nostalgia, and whether or not Byte can capitalize on that is what I think will really make or break them, even if it's just always a bespoke service and not a real competitor to TikTok or Instagram.

MC: I think the thing that you mentioned is really interesting to me is that people are reposting TikToks, they're copying and pasting TikToks onto Byte. I know the Byte community, if you can actually call it that, there is a small community there, they're very against that. People rip on each other when they start posting TikToks to their account.

The other thing that I've noticed, I downloaded the app and I've been playing with it for a few days. I've had a really hard time finding things that are interesting. I think the discovery still has a long way to go. For example, the things that I loved about Vine, the things that I always look for whenever I first go into any new video-based social network is, first of all, weird art, music, and skateboarding videos, because I think those are things that work really well in the short format. I had a really hard time finding those things on Byte. Even after I told the app that that's what I wanted by following those people and liking their videos, it still wouldn't show me any more.

The other thing that I noticed is that there are crazy numbers of bots on Byte. I made a Byte and I posted it and I got three likes before the six seconds were up. I posted it and then within five or six seconds, I got three accounts liking my post. It was obvious they hadn't even really watched it all the way to the end. It was a mechanical like, if anything.

I don't know. I think the bots are also a problem that you see people talking about. There's a lot of videos about "We need to get rid of the bots on Byte," so you're in this weird loop where the community is talking to the creators of the social network, telling them what they need to do better. They need to do better about helping you find things, they need to do better about eradicating bots.

LM: Yeah, there was a huge spam problem within the first 36 hours after Byte launched. The team is really small. Last year, they only had six people. It's unclear how many more people they really have than that right now. Yeah, those sorts of things are definitely going to be an issue.

I also wrote in the article about the discovery problem. I think that what's really made TikTok so successful is their super-powerful algorithm, right? You can just sit there and it will feed you entertaining content for hours. Of course, part of the problem with Byte right now, like you said, Mike, is the fact that there's only a million or so people who have downloaded it. I think it's 1.3 million right now, so of course there's not going to be that much skateboarding content that you can watch, or art content.

However, I do think that there's a real issue with they haven't leaned in so much into that algorithmic timeline, so you can't just open the app and find a bunch of new stuff, you have to work for it. I think historically, that model doesn't really work very well if you're not going to also find your friends on it, right?

MC: Right.

LG: Well, it sounds like some of the things we're seeing with Byte are definitely not new: six-second video clips, bots, spam, algorithmically-served content, but maybe the content itself will find a way to differentiate. We'll see. I'm sure Louise will be tracking it. Louise, thank you so much for joining us on this week's Gadget Lab.

LM: Thanks for having me.

LG: All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we're going to come back and talk about a real throwback, the Motorola Razr phone, except it's a new Razr, and you're about to hear why.

[Break]

LG: Welcome back. We're joined by WIRED senior associate editor Julian Chokkattu, who's dialing in from New York. Hey, Julian.

Julian Chokkattu: Hey.

LG: Julian reviews a lot of phones for us at WIRED.com, so this conversation really hinges on him.

MC: Is that a joke?

LG: Mike's raising his eyebrows at me. It's a joke. All right, if you haven't figured it out, yes, I am talking about folding phones. They're coming, whether you like them or not, whether you can afford them or not. Today, we're talking about the Motorola Razr, which was that really popular flip phone in the early 2000s. It's getting a reboot, because now when you flip it open, it's all just one display. It's a flexible polymer display, not unlike the Samsung Galaxy Fold. Julian has been tracking this. We're going to continue to track it. Julian, what do you make of the comeback of the Motorola Razr?

JC: This is one of the more interesting ones. So far, we've seen the Samsung Galaxy Fold, which is a big phone, chunky phone, too, and it expands into a bigger screen size, this one is a small phone and you open it up and it becomes sort of like a normal 6.2-inch screen, a normal-sized phone. I think this one might actually be a little more popular with certain types of people who think phones are getting too big, which I always hear, but apparently, the evidence seems to suggest that people still like buying the bigger phones. I don't get it, but maybe this is going to be the phone to get for the people that always complain about how phones are getting too big and they want something smaller.

I think this kind of tech is going to be very much a part of our future in that I don't necessarily think that folding phones are gimmicky or companies are just running out of ideas necessarily, that they're trying to evolve the smartphone to something like this, but I do think that this is just a natural evolution because they've been talking about folding tech for a long time and I think inherently in phone design, we've always had different types of form factors, especially when you go back pre-smartphone days, you've had sliding-out phones and flip phones and all these kinds of other types of forms that now, we're getting to a point where the traditional smartphone is so mature that we can experiment with something that is different in terms of how it looks and how it feels and how you use it.

I think this is a fun, creative phase that we're entering, but obviously, it's still going to take some time because the whole process is still very finicky with all those Samsung Galaxy Folds breaking. The tech just really has to mature.

LG: Julian, am I hearing correctly, you don't think this is a gimmick?

JC: I think at the moment, maybe there's some gimmicky features on some of these phones, and I think we will see gimmicky versions of these phones, but I think folding technology inherently is not necessarily going to be a tech that fades out pretty soon. I think it's going to be something that it will apply to all sorts of contexts, because we've already seen that happening, especially with things like Lenovo's folding computer. I think it'll engross all types of technology. Yeah, at the moment, it might be gimmicky, but I don't think the tech, in general, will be.

LG: I agree with you, by the way, that the whole idea of having a 6.2-inch, a normal-sized screen, and then folding that into something smaller so that it fits into your pocket, is really the way to go. After using the Samsung Galaxy Fold for about a month—because as some of you might know, there were some issues with the early units of Galaxy Folds and Samsung really wanted to get them out of our hands as quickly as possible so we couldn't have them forever and then eventually see them break—but I did use it for a brief period of time, and one of the things I found with it was that when it's closed, it's not easy to text message on or just use, really, any app on because that front screen, the cover screen, is so tiny.

Then when it's unfolded, because it's about a seven-inch tablet, it's awkward to hold in one hand and get stuff done on too, so when it unfurled itself, I mean, sure, it's great, I guess, for watching video, but even just basic things like texting and making a phone call seemed unnecessarily complicated with that size. I think at this point, we're all pretty accustomed to having something that's about six inches as the primary slab in our pockets or bags, right. So having that exist but then closing into something smaller seems infinitely more convenient.

MC: Yeah. Lauren, I think what you're getting at with the whole movement is that this is something that is not for everybody. There are a lot of people who, like me are going to look at these devices and say, "No, thank you," because it's too bulky or it's too weird or you can't fit it into your pocket the way that you can fit an iPhone into your pocket.

I think that that's fine. There are always people who are going to want the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, if you will, device. Right now, those devices are all these ones with flexible screens.

I think probably the reason this is happening en masse is because of economics. I think that companies, Samsung in particular, Apple, have pushed the cost of a premium, regular smartphone about as high as it can go, which is about 11 … $1,200. You can't really push it beyond that. If you want to make a whole lot more money on a device, you have to do something really wacky and zany.

At the same time, there are a lot more phones that are perfectly great phones that are around $500, $600 like the A series Pixel, the A series Galaxy phone from Samsung, the G series from Motorola. Those are all great phones that we really like that are like half the cost of a premium flagship model smartphone, so as more people come online and as more people need a smartphone, they're going to buy the cheaper one, so you need to have something at the high end of the market to fill in the dollar gap.

Now, I mean, obviously they're selling 10 times or maybe 100 times more of those cheap phones than they are selling of these crazy-wacky phones, but these crazy-wacky phones are always going to be crazy-wacky. Right now, it's flexible screens. In two or three years, it's going to be some other weird, brand-new technology that we haven't seen before that everybody who is into that stuff is going to want. It's a bizarre time right now, because these phones are not great, and they're not for everybody, but there is like the 1 percent of smartphone buyers who are just dying to get them.

LG: Right. Part of the reason why they're not great yet either has to do with the software, of course. I mean, if it is the case with the Galaxy Fold, it's going to be the case with the Lenovo folding laptop, the X1 ThinkPad folds. It could potentially be the case for, really, any of these devices that are, like, the Microsoft dual-screen devices that we saw last year.

They're going to stretch in terms of their form factors, but really, what people want to do on these devices is just get stuff done and use the software and the apps that they want to use that are ingrained into their every day. If you don't have an optimal experience with the software because you're folding between sizes and the app doesn't expand or move or do the thing you just want it to do and the way that you're used to, I think that that could be a barrier to these things just being really useful.

I should note, too, that there are still some material limitations around this. The ones that we've seen so far, the implementations of folding screens are using polymer displays, these are just layers of polymer with some type of reinforcement underneath to try to keep the thing durable, but Brian Barrett has written for us on WIRED.com, and you should all go to WIRED.com and read this story, that you should wait for glass because as he wrote, plastic is much less hard than glass, it makes it easier to scratch and ding, the plastic is going to crease over time.

He also wrote that Corning is said to be working on an ultrathin folding glass, which is still not ready yet, but you can picture a world in which we have devices that fold but they actually have the durability and quality of the premium phones we've already gotten used to.

MC: Julian, which one are you most excited about getting, which folding device? Either the ones that have already been announced to the ones that have been leaked?

JC: That's a good question. I think for me, I would go for something like the Motorola Razr or the newly-leaked Galaxy Z Flip, if that's what it's going to be called because for me, I think I would like something smaller that I can fit it in my pocket and then expand to get a bigger screen, but I would also then love a laptop, kind of like the Lenovo folding laptop that I can expand out and still also close and carry around with my hand, like a notebook, because right now, I'm carrying the 16-inch MacBook Pro and as much as I like it, it is definitely way too big and wearing down on me a lot lately, so I think having something where I could just fold up into the size of a little notebook and maybe expand out when I get want to get some work done.

JC: That's my ideal scenario, that I can have a dual-folding setup. Maybe that might be Microsoft's upcoming Surface Duo and Surface Neo combo. Who knows?

LG: Julian, do you think that the Razr's branding is going to win at any points with a crowd of people who just have an affection towards the Razr because of their experience with the old phone?

JC: Yeah, I think there's always going to be that group of people that just buy things because it reminds them of the past and nostalgia tech. I think that is going to do a lot of favors for Motorola with this phone specifically.

So far, to be honest, I don't really like how it looks. I think it's a little ugly and I think that's sort of a theme with most folding phones at the moment. They're all not really the prettiest. The Galaxy Z Flip, if that's what it ends up looking like, that actually looks pretty good, but I'll wait to see what that looks like. Outside of that, I think yeah, definitely, people are going to get the Razr because of that iconic brand name and because it looks the way it does.

LG: Julian also mentioned this upcoming Samsung phone, the rumored Samsung phone. We should note that we'll be at that Samsung event on February 11th in San Francisco and we'll have all kinds of coverage on WIRED.com, so be sure to check back in a couple of weeks. I don't think it's just going to be about folding phones, as rumored. I think that we're going to see some other flagship phones, too.

MC: There will be a folding car.

LG: That's right, probably folding TV set, you can just pick it up and carry it like a briefcase. You can go to your Super Bowl party with it, it's going to be really cool. I guess Super Bowl will be over by then.

JC: Yeah, that'll be a couple weeks late.

LG: It's a great idea. Super Bowl 2021, okay? I do think that if they have a flip phone and they call it the Flip, they should call it the Flips. You know how Samsung uses S in their naming convention?

MC: Oh, yeah, yeah.

LG: They usually do the S. I guess it would be Galaxy S. If they do the Flip S, then it's actually called the Flips. That's a terrible idea.

MC: That's... Yeah. Yeah.

LG: All right, Julian, stick around because we want to hear your recommendation for the week. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to tell you what you should be watching, reading, eating, buying, everything you need to know. Also, we're going to have probably more terrible jokes, or at least I will.

[Break]

LG: Welcome back. Julian, give us your recommendation for the week.

JC: I discovered a Netflix show that apparently hasn't been talked about too much. It's called Giri/Haji. It's a Netflix thriller. It's about a Japanese cop searching for his brother in London. I haven't finished it so far, I don't want to give too much away, but the premise is that his brother killed the nephew of a Yakuza boss and he framed it as though the nephew was murdered by another Yakuza family. To prevent Tokyo from being eclipsed in an all-out Yakuza war, the cop is trying to find his brother and bring him back to Tokyo to face justice while also dealing with his own morality.

LG: How did you discover this one?

JC: I was just browsing Netflix because I was bored and I'm a fan of all things Japan-related, so it caught my eye.

LG: Cool. This is a series or a movie?

JC: This is a series.

LG: Ah, so you can binge-watch it. Nice. That's a good one. Mike, what's yours?

MC: I would like to recommend a gadget for your kitchen. It's something that you should be particularly interested in if you cook a lot or if you do a lot of batch-cooking.

It's a food saver, it's a vacuum sealer. The brand is FoodSaver and they make these vacuum sealers where you put food into a bag. Then you put the end of the bag into the contraption, you press a button, it sucks all the air out, and then it seals it so you have a, surprise, vacuum-sealed, whatever, a piece of steak, a couple pieces of chicken, a bunch of asparagus. Then you can keep it in the fridge or you can throw it into the freezer, and it preserves it for longer than it would if you put it in like a Tupperware or just in a regular old Ziploc bag.

These are particularly good if you buy a big main ingredient, like let's say if you buy like a whole chicken but you don't want to roast the whole chicken because you're not going to eat an entire chicken in a week, maybe you just want like a leg and a thigh now and the rest for later, so you can cut up the chicken and vacuum seal it and then throw it in the freezer until a week or four days or four weeks from now when you're ready to take it out and actually cook it.

I do this a lot. I do a lot of batch cooking. I'll buy a lot of one thing, I'll buy a lot of salmon, then vacuum seal most of the salmon, and just eat it over the next month or two. It's really great. It cuts down on food waste. It's also something that you can use for more than just food. I know people who vacuum seal their loose change, so they just have a package full of pennies and they just carry that around, it's like $5 worth of pennies vacuum-sealed, which is a waste of plastic.

It is one thing to notice that the bags are plastic, so you are introducing more plastic into the ecosystem by using this, but I think the advantages of having more food available to you without wasting it outweigh the downsides of using more plastic.

The one that I would recommend, if you go to look for a FoodSaver, there's six or seven or eight models choose from, the one that I would recommend is the FoodSaver Space Saving Vacuum Sealer. That's what it's called. It's $100. It uses eight-inch bags, bags that are eight inches across. They're not the super-big ones, they're a little bit smaller, which is perfectly fine for most people. Also, it's one of the cheaper devices at only a hundred bucks. That's my recommendation.

LG: It doesn't have an app? It's not internet-connected?

MC: Correct.

LG: There's nothing smart about it, so it's not like you have to worry that in a few years, you're going to lose support for your products.

MC: Correct.

LG: Great.

MC: It will make your kitchen smarter without connecting your kitchen to the Internet.

LG: Isn't it funny how that happens? Supposedly dumb products actually ended up being incredibly smart and not frustrating because they just do the thing.

MC: Oh, that's what we strive for.

LG: All right.

LG: All right. I like that recommendation. Okay, my recommendation this week is for you to go to WIRED.com and check out Megan Molteni's coverage of the coronavirus. Megan Molteni is one of our science and health writers and she's a fantastic reporter and writer and she has really been covering this quite closely and, of course, it's a pretty serious issue right now. We're updating it as much as we possibly can.

I know there's just a lot of interest around that right now, so go to WIRED.com, look for Megan Molteni, and read everything that she has written so far, including about how an AI researcher actually had predicted the coronavirus before it really happened.

She also wrote the story about the first human-to-human transmission that we learned about this week, the first case of a human-to-human transmission. Really, it's just an evolving story, so go check it out. That's my recommendation.

MC: Definitely great stuff.

LG: All right, that's our show for this week. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you, Julian, for joining us again.

JC: Thanks for having me.

LG: If our listeners have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter, just check the show notes. This show is produced by Boone Ashworth. Our consulting executive producer is Alex Kapelman. We'll be back next week.

[Outro music]

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