Julian.

Lauren.

Julian, if Google makes gobs of money off of advertising, why does it bother making phones?

It wants to be Apple?

That's a good one.

Wait, should I Google that?

Does Google want to be Apple?

All right, we're going to talk about that on the show this week.

Hey, everyone, welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired. My usual co-host, Michael Clory, is out this week. Hopefully he's getting some rest and relaxation. But luckily, we have Wired Senior Associate Editor Julian Chakatu to fill his place. I said

that this was going to become the Julian show at some point. I feel even more emboldened by this

statement now. Hey, Julian, thanks for joining me. Hello, happy to be here. So Julian, we talk about tech

events a lot on this show, although of of course, in 2020, they've changed,

and we're no longer traveling to report on the ground. We're reporting in our jammies. But for the past

three weeks, we've seen hardware announcements from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and there's

been a lot of emphasis on gadgets and services for the home. And I think maybe the most

noteworthy example is Amazon's flying home security drone, which we're going to talk about.

But this all raises the question, right, of why do these tech companies want to literally be

hovering in our homes? In some ways, they're using the pandemic as part of their marketing,

right? We're all home,

so you need this tech. But it's also another way, of course, to learn more about us as, quote,

unquote, users. Yes, I just watched the social dilemma. We're all users. As you share more and more

of your personal data with these companies. So let's talk about Google first, because that was just this past Wednesday.

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