Galaxy S20 review and leaks of iOS 14, watchOS 7, and Pixel 4a

Stories discussed this week: Dr Disrespect is the villain who could change the future of TV This backpack has it all: Kevlar, batteries, and a federal investigation The art and craft of scientific glassblowing Samsung Galaxy S20 review: just right Leaked watchOS 7 code reveals new ‘International’ watchface Apple watchOS 7 features leak: sleep tracking, watchface sharing, and more Apple Watches may soon detect blood oxygen levels More iOS 14 leaks hint at next Apple hardware and a new home screen view iOS 14 will reportedly have improved mouse cursor support New MacBook models with scissor-switch keyboards are reportedly coming soon Google Pixel 4A hands-on reveals specs, camera, and a possible release window Google can reportedly revoke Android licenses if TV makers also partner with Amazon A sneaky attempt to end encryption is worming its way through Congress Congress takes aim at Google search in antitrust hearing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, we talk about Dieter's Samsung Galaxy S20 review. We go through the latest Apple leaks, Apple Watch, iOS 14, maybe an ARM MacBook, and we end with a little bit of Android TV. That's The Vergecast coming up now.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Real innovation is powered by real people. This is AMEX Corporate. Trusted experts, smarter technology, 24/7 dedicated support from day one to answer questions, help set up policies and approvals, and consult on spend capacity as your business needs evolve. Plus, on-demand resources help level up operations at every stage. That's the trusted service you've come to expect. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate.

• 0:47Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of isitcancelledyet.com, a website where things are listed and it says yes, no, or uh-oh.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it turns out, I looked at the source code, it just says yes.

• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Isitcancelledyet.com, by the way, a real website you can go to, was set up by Verge executive editor TC Sodik, hilariously because we had our standard sort of end-of-day editors' meeting, and we're like, should we make a list? And we decided we weren't going to make a list. It just didn't make sense as a story for us. And then he went and made it a website.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  And it's gone viral and it's ruined his life. There's so much happening.

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  It's very entertaining to watch that go. Anyway, I'm Neelai, I'm your friend. That's Dieter.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  I'm Dieter. I'm podcasting from home. It's exciting.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Paul Mill and I are together. We are not socially distanced ourselves.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  No, no. This is social... What's the opposite of social distance?

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  Social cuddling.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Social proximity. We'll just say it from the jump, the big news in the world is the coronavirus pandemic. This is almost certainly the last episode of The Vergecast that we're going to tape in a studio together like this. Everyone else's offices in the tech industry, we're being encouraged to work from home. So, next week might sound a little weird. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, but I think we'll be fine. And- I do want to say, we're not going to talk a lot about the virus and the pandemic on this episode of The Vergecast. Just this past Tuesday, we had Liz Lopato and Nicole Wetzman. On the interview episode, they went through it at length with us, both from the science and health side, and the sort of business and supply chain side. One of my favorite episodes, I gotta hand it to Nicole, is her first episode of The Vergecast. She's brand

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  new, she just started with us in December. But her first time on the show, in the middle of just an absolute deluge of news that she has to handle, and she did an amazing job explaining the story. So, go and listen to that. The facts of the story are changing minute by minute, right? There's sort of this two-part experience of trying to cover this story. One is that something crazy happens every day. Something gets canceled, or the White House contradicts itself, or something nuts happens every day. And that's very dynamic, and we're covering that. But then the sort of core facts that you need to know are relatively static, right? Wash your hands, stay away from large crowds, be safe. Don't do a podcast in the same studio as somebody else. Don't just crawl into Paul's lap and start breathing on him. Like, some basic stuff.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Please don't hoard things that you don't necessarily need, especially things like masks, other medical supplies. I also think it's odd that people are hoarding toilet paper, frankly, but we'll let that go. I encourage people to buy a bidet in the processor newsletter this week, and I stand by that recommendation.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  That's fundamentally a tech story, what you were talking about there. Right, don't overly panic, but there are some core facts about the virus, where it came from, how it spreads, all that stuff, that are static. We're gonna try our best as a news site to emphasize the static facts that we know that are reliable, even while covering the sort of rapidly changing dynamic stuff that's happening elsewhere. So, we talked about all that stuff on Tuesday. I know people need a break, so we're gonna try to do whatever tech news we can today on the show. I also want to call out some other big stories on our site that are worth reading and paying attention to this week, because they are very good, very deeply reported. And if not for the virus, there'd be all we were talking about. So first, Bijan Stevens profiled Dr. Disrespect, who is an excellent streamer

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  on Twitch. That profile, months in the making. The doc, as Bijan calls him in the piece over and over again, just signed a two-year, he re-upped a two-year deal with Twitch. So the story's really about that economy of streamers, which I think is super interesting. It's blowing up, it's very rich. Go read that, it's really good. Ashley Carmen wrote a story about a backpack.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  You know a story is going to be good when at one point the reporter like comes to you and is like, "Well, the cops are involved?" So that also, months in the making, Ashley found a crowdfunded backpack called the iBackpack, which had a bunch of compartments, a Kevlar system, just this, one of these crowdfunded promises. It went totally, raised a bunch of money, went totally sideways. She went, interviewed the creator, talked to a bunch of backers, was on the phone with the Federal Trade Commission. All this stuff. Great story, amazing profile. Go read that. And then we had a great story from our science team that was not about the pandemic, about how a lot of the glassware used in science is still hand-blown by glassmakers who are like generation, like family generations of glassmakers.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  That is a really cool video. It's a really cool story. I realize, and you know, we get it, that everyone is very understandably distracted by the pandemic, but if you need a break, and it's fine to take a break, there's some other stuff to go read and listen to on our site in addition to the news about the virus.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  And then there's- We're going to talk about pixel binning.

• 5:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then we're going to, we're going to talk about cell phones on this show. But we're paying attention to it. Like I said, if you want to go listen to Tuesday's episode to get deep on the virus, it's there for you. The site is there for you. We're going to try to talk about tech today.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  I have some personal Kickstarter news. I've mentioned this multiple times on the podcast because I ordered it like three or four years ago, but the open source voice assistant has been delayed again.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  What a surprise.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  An open source community of action projects-

• 6:07Speaker 02

  We know. This is as disappointing for you as it is for us.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  It's great. What's it called?

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Mycroft.

• 6:14Nilay Patel?

  Mycroft.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  We're still rooting for you guys.

• 6:17Nilay Patel?

  Mycroft is like Bixby's older brother. Can't quite get it together. It's like, that's what that name makes me think of.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  But open source.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of things you can depend on, year after year, without fail. Dieter, you have a million phones to review. Last week, we talked about the Ultra at length, and this, this week, it was sort of the more default choice, the Galaxy S20.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  And where the Ultra was reaching for this, you know, you reach for the stars and maybe you get the sky. What's this phrase? Ultra, let's just say it like blew up on the launchpad. It's a fine phone, but it's not a great phone. They tried to do too much and they failed. The S20 though, turns out Samsung has been making Galaxy phones for, you know, 11 years now and they've gotten good at it.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Would you say that the Ultra lacked focus?

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  Wow, harsh burn.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  I wish I had, actually.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Although, to my credit, I'd like literally five minutes before publish, I'm like, I still don't have a good headline. And then it popped into my head, we'll call it shutterbug, which is great.

• 7:19Nilay Patel?

  It was really good.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. The S20, which is in my mind, really just an S11, it's an iterative update over the S10. And Samsung doesn't try and do too much with it. It's got a more traditional camera. And it is way more successful as a result of not trying to do too much. I really love this phone and my biggest complaint about it is that I think it costs like 150 or 200 bucks more than I would like it to. Because I think that there's a premium you have to pay for 5G. And although I've had a bunch of readers tell me that they've got 5G in their area and they deeply love it. I think the vast majority of people don't benefit from 5G yet and probably won't benefit it to it from it until, you know, the end of the year at best.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think it's longer than that. I think it's 18 months.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Well, T-Mobile's got it and it's okay. It's like T-Mobile's doing okay with it, but yeah.

• 8:05Nilay Patel?

  I just want to walk through the five, because this part is confusing. We've talked about it before, but I just want to get everybody on the same page. The S20 has mid-band 5G.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. So the S20 supports mid-band, all of them support mid-band. The S20 Plus and the S20 Ultra support millimeter wave, which I have, I've basically stopped being shy about saying that I think millimeter wave is a scam.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  It's like a demo.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a tech demo. You can only use it on like street corners. If you look at the maps, they're ridiculous. If you go to one of the places on like, say, for example Verizon's map in New York City, you have to stand there and be looking at the tower. And if you like, you know, do a little shuffle step to the side, it might break down. I, that millimeter wave will not be really real for three years at best. And even then, I don't, I just, I don't see it. I don't think it's, it's gonna happen for consumer phones. It could apply to lots of other things. You could still be doing your, you know, tele-remote surgery on 5G with millimeter wave, sure. Point-to-point, static, whatever. But for phones, I just, I think it's a tech demo.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  You don't think they're like deployed in like stadiums and stuff like that, that kind of stuff where it's like helps handle excess demand?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Theoretically, yeah, but like when you actually use it, if you look at it in a stadium, it needs to be, there would need to be like 50 of them in a stadium.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  For it to work. And maybe they'll do that. But it really is at a point where it's like, the only thing that 5G millimeter wave has over wifi is that you don't have to log in and deal with like wifi problems.

• 9:45Nilay Patel?

  What, what are wifi problems? Oh, you mean like when you're out and about?

• 9:49Speaker 03

  When you're out and about, the networks get saturated, you can't log in, you gotta ask for the password.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Capital.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  It's a danger, captive portal, hacking, all that. So 5G millimeter wave gets rid of that. But in terms of like range, I don't see it being that much more useful. And again, I could be proven wrong. I'm almost nervous to say all of this stuff because we've had five years of like hype about 5G and so somebody somewhere is like, no, he doesn't understand, he's an idiot, it's real. And I will, I will happily say I'm an idiot and that I didn't understand when it becomes real, but I don't see that happening for a while.

• 10:23Nilay Patel?

  I feel like that's just like a, it's like a core element of tech journalism right now is like just looking at the hype and being like, but the thing isn't there.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, you can't have it, it's not there.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  You bought a phone, or you didn't buy this one, but you're reviewing a phone that costs 200 ish extra dollars and it says 5G on the box and 5G is not helping your experience.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Basically.

• 10:47Nilay Patel?

  But it's like at every level, it's like you're gonna launch the folding phone and you're like, well, it broke.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Hey, the folding phone does fold.

• 10:57Nilay Patel?

  It does fold, that's true. The other example that just keeps coming to mind, for obvious reasons for me, is Foxconn. Where they keep insisting that there's an LCD plant in Wisconsin.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  And like, there isn't. It's not, people yell at us when we're like, there isn't a plan. I'm like, it's not my fault. Like, you should be mad at the people who didn't build an LCD plant. Even if I wanted to build an LCD plant, I lack the resources to do so.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  To be clear, T-Mobile is the one that, the carrier that's super into mid-band.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, T-Mobile's got a great mid-band network. It's not significantly like millimeter wave faster, but it does tend to be faster in my experience in most testing. But it's not like change the universe faster.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  But it's a win.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  It's a win. And I think that if you're on T-Mobile, there's more of a case for it. I think AT&T might be catching up a little bit. But again, like, I don't think any of this stuff, we're gonna know what's gonna shake out in terms of coverage. And especially in terms of like backhaul and what your actual like reliable speeds are gonna be. Until more of the network is built out and more people get on the network. Right now, if you're lucky enough to have 5G, it's like you, like you're the one. Nobody else has got it. So you got it all to yourself. Hooray.

• 12:03Nilay Patel?

  And the network is great. This is the, this is a story of early LTE too, right? You would be the first person to get LTE in, I don't know, say, New York City. And you're like, this network is great. And now in 2020, it's like, I'm getting four down on AT&T. Because everyone else in New York City has LTE. And I think part of the promise of 5G is better capacity management. Obviously, they will re-farm the LTE spectrum at the appropriate time. So you get even more.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  And theoretically, this rollout involved more, more backhaul.

• 12:32Nilay Patel?

  Theoretically, right? So there's, there's just a lot of promise. But I think to Deirdre's point, like, you can buy the phone and use the network right now. And it's, especially I think on T-Mobile mid-band, it is faster, right? It's like significantly faster than an LTE network. But I think that is just like you're alone on an empty highway.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  At least that's, at least, like you said, it's all about what you actually experience. And if that's something that you can experience, that's cool that at least that's possible.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And if, if mid-band, here's my, here's my metaphor. Okay. Mid-band 5G is like being alone on an empty highway. Just put the, put the hammer down.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  And you just want, life, life is a highway.

• 13:11Nilay Patel?

  Life is a highway.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Ride it all night long.

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  You think of 5G and you're like, give me, give me, give me, give me, yeah.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  I, I love this song. I'm just trying to figure out what, what millimeter wave is in this metaphor.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  The key with your starter metaphor is that you don't know where you're going.

• 13:28Nilay Patel?

  You just needed it. Oh, no. Well, now he distracts me. Life is a highway. You have to know how I feel about life is a highway. I almost started singing.

• 13:39Nilay Patel?

  So you're on an empty highway. So, yeah, mid-band is your alone and empty highway, hammered down, life in the distance. Everything's good. Right. And that's because you know that most of the places you are, you'll get mid-band 5G.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Millimeter wave is the... Oh, I got it. Millimeter wave is the rest stop. You can't move. You have to pull over in your car at the rest stop and go eat at like the weird McDonald's at the rest stop that's not quite as good as a regular McDonald's, which, let's be honest, it's McDonald's in the first place.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna go with millimeter wave is a treadmill that's stuck on high. Cause you're speeding, but you are not going anywhere.

• 14:15Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's what I was going for.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 14:18Nilay Patel?

  Really, really fast, but you're not allowed to move. Right, right. Or like a drag race. Get like a set path. And you're done. Yeah. You live life a quarter mile at a time.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  The thing that, the thing that undergirds all of this discussion is if you want in 2020 to buy an Android phone that has Qualcomm's best and fastest processors, or at least like their current processors, you have to get 5G. You can't opt out.

• 14:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Because the Snapdragon 865, and then there's like gonna be some 700 series that I'm actually more interested in for reasons we can get into again, doesn't come with a modem. It's not built into the chip. And so you have to have a separate modem. And the only modem that's compatible with Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 is a 5G modem. So like there, if I wanted to be a conspiracy theorist about like Qualcomm's chip roadmap, I would say that somebody in a carrier gave Qualcomm a little money under the table to just be like, you know what, you're only gonna offer 5G. And then Qualcomm was like, cool, that means we can charge more. And everyone was like, yay. And then the smoke-filled room was filled with handshakes and guffaws.

• 15:27Nilay Patel?

  Yes. If they were only gonna offer 5G, why'd they make it a separate part?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Lovely, excellent question. I think that we might be underselling just how difficult it is to build a 5G. 5G radio and modem and the antennas and the entire system like it's very complex. It is. You remember the early, the first 4G phones and they were just gigantic and battery hogs and like completely nuts. The first 5G phones, the very, very first ones weren't actually as bad as that. And the second, you know, maybe technically called third generation of 5G phones, now that they're actually mainstream on the S20.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Even unless you're like standing at a millimeter wave street corner, even when I was on 5G mid-band in New York, I didn't see a huge significant difference in battery. I haven't tested this enough to say it definitively, but I think they've done a better job with battery on the initial 5G stuff than they did in the initial 4G stuff. However, that doesn't mean that it's like, you know, it's a piece of easy for them to just make an integrated chip that includes the modem and the main processor, right? Like that's just, that's a hard thing and like this is still relatively new. We're, you know, just a few years into consumer products that have got this stuff. So I think it's just gonna take a more time.

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think the sort of big takeaway, well, first of all, your smoke filled room thing I think is

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  closer to true than not. That smoke filled room usually is at MWC in Barcelona. So like, like two years ago, that smoke rolled room absolutely occurred, right? Where maybe there wasn't any smoke in the room. It was just.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  It was ham.

• 16:56Nilay Patel?

  It was just a delicious smell of averical ham. But like, yeah, the carriers sit down with the chip vendors and the phone makers and they plot out their roadmap because the chipmaker has to support the networks that are gonna get built. And the handset vendors are obviously deeply involved in that sort of conversation. So I do think there's some sort of natural alignment here. I think the other part of it, which is relates to a thing that we always talk about is like, like Qualcomm doesn't have a competitor. So like there isn't, there isn't, I don't know, a TI or somebody being like, we made a chip that's just as fast. It doesn't carry this burden of an integrated modem. Handset maker, do you want to make a phone with the performances and other thing? Like you're basically scooting along Qualcomm's roadmap.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  But I do think Samsung is like very happy for you to upgrade your phone. So they're not complaining.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  It doesn't have a competitor, a viable competitor to the US. There's like MediaTek in the world. Samsung's got its chips. There's Kirin chips and so on and so on. But at least here at the US, like it is full on a straight up monopoly, especially on Android phones.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  It is strange. Yeah, I don't know.

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  There might be an X-nos in like a random Tyson TV.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 18:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm sure someone will fact check. Yes, it is true. Like a $400 Tyson TV has like an X-nos in it. But you know, that's not what I meant. Anyway, we've like completely sidetracked from the phone. So 5G is there. The big takeaway is it's just gonna be there on a lot of flagship phones.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  Now. Great. Hopefully the network is there to support it. What else about the phone?

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Uh, Samsung just nailed all the fundamentals. Uh, I was very worried about two things. I was worried about camera, obviously, because the Ultra was, uh, was overextended itself. And I was worried about battery life because this thing has a 120 Hz refresh rate screen. And I am incapable, physically incapable of using a phone that has that option and not turning it on. I would die. It's so much nicer and better that if I, if I had the option there and I didn't turn it on, I would literally just melt right there because I would want it on. And in both cases, I was pleasantly surprised. Uh, not like totally surprised because like, you want to trust that Samsung knows how to do this by now. And they do. Uh, the camera is a standard 12 megapixel thing. It's got your standard dual pixel autofocus, so it doesn't hunt for focus.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Um, the, the sensor, I believe, is a little bit larger than the S10. So it actually overperforms my expectations in low light. Um, it's actually pretty solid in incredibly low light and like completely respectable in standard night mode kind of low light situations. It still smooths faces. And I was very angry at the S20 Ultra for this. I'm pretty angry at the S20 for this because if you put it in pro mode, all those problems go away. It doesn't over brighten. It doesn't over smooth. It's great.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  Does it still do HDR tricks in pro mode?

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Not as much.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  I don't think. But this is one of those things where like you could take a thousand photos and not be able to definitively answer that. Like, we would need to actually talk to the camera engineer that knows what it's done, you know?

• 19:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, because the reason I ask is I have no, we, we talk a lot about the looks of cameras.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:54Nilay Patel?

  Right? And the Samsung has its own. Smoothed look in auto mode. But one sort of clear look that I see everywhere now, because most of the flagship phones are doing aggressive HDR, is when you shoot somebody against a window, it exposes the window and exposes the face. And I never see like blown out backgrounds anymore. They're just, they're gone. Like they don't, like only traditional cameras do blown out backgrounds that way because they're not doing HDR.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  In shots like that, you can really see where Samsung has yet to catch up to Google and maybe even Apple in terms of software processing. Samsung really has solved a lot of its camera stuff with just a bigger sensor, bigger image sensor. Because especially on HDR backlit photos, you can see that halo.

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  Oh, really?

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Even on the S20, that little halo is there. I do think in terms of face smoothing and HDR, but especially face smoothing, I think it's slightly better than the Ultra. And I'm sure somebody is going to do some extensive testing and then we're like going to have a debate if I'm wrong on this or not. But in my testing so far, it seems like it's slightly chiller is the word I use. It's just like, it's less try hard. And I think it's because Samsung just needs to do less stuff. Because I know that the image sensor on the 108 megapixel in the Ultra is binning on the sensor and then just giving Samsung software a 12 megapixel photo. But I still just get the sense that like, it just needs to do more crap to process that image than it does with the more traditional 12 megapixel sensor.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  This could just be like me projecting all of my feelings about how, you know, big megapixel sensors work. But I am seeing like slightly less annoying results. But bottom line is like, I switch it to pro mode as often as I can remember, especially when I'm taking a picture of a face or if I have an extra second to do it and I'm like perfectly happy with it.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  What is, is there a specific difference that pro mode like enables? Is it just like turn off the stuff or does it give you manual controls? Like what's the story?

• 21:50Speaker 03

  It gives you a ton of, it gives you manual controls over everything. So when you go into pro mode, you've got manual control over ISO, you've got manual control over white balance, you've got manual control over the autofocus method, you've got manual control over exposure, you can change all sorts of other temperature settings and contrast settings as you want. You've got manual control over like aperture, like you can do all that. But when you first go into manual, all of those settings are set to auto. So if you just go into pro mode. And then hit the shutter button with all the settings set to auto. It takes a better shot than if you're in proper standard auto mode. And I think that's because when you go into pro mode, it turns off the face filter stuff that you can't turn off in regular standard auto mode.

• 22:33Nilay Patel?

  Like the scene detection goes.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Well, there's three levels to this shit.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Level one, Bixby scene detection.

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  Good night, everybody. That was Vergecast.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  It shows you a picture of a dog or a face or a landscape or whatever. And there's a little button and it like tells you what the thing's a scene is. When you take a photo of a face with Bixby scene detector on, white balance goes haywire. And it does more extra smoothing and a bunch of other stuff.

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  Bixby is just a dog. I was supposed to know.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  He doesn't know. Dogs don't even see in color.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  All right. So you can turn off Bixby and just take standard auto photos, but you still get face smoothing and face lightning in those situations. And there's no setting to turn it off. And I know the setting is there because you can turn it off on the selfie camera.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  So then you go to pro mode and that seems to be the way to turn off the face smoothing and face lightning stuff.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Is turning off face smoothing going to be the next turning off motion smoothing at your, like, on your parents' TV?

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, because, but when you turn off motion smoothing, you should like quietly do it and they never know. Like this is like, you need to tell someone to.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, but the reason it is, Paul, is because there are a bunch of people. Samsung does it for a reason. And when I show photos to people until I zoom in and be like, look, it looks like it's painted there. They're like, no, I like this one better. So like, a lot of people do like it better. I think it's worse. I think that you are better off getting a more detailed photo that you can adjust if you want to. But if you just want something that's going to look good on a, you know, five inch screen, you might actually prefer Samsung's smoothing. That's what they've optimized for.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  We have this conversation, I think, every, every year, five times a year, every time a new high-end phone comes out with a fancy camera idea, which is. Most of these photos get taken and then like put on Facebook or Instagram. There's zero edits. And so there is a huge incentive for the phone makers to just pre-edit the photo for you. And like, maybe in Samsung's case, it's like a full-on 1995 fashion magazine edit. They're like, "Where did your arm go? Your face is perfect. You're wearing a different color shirt. Like, here we go." And I think there's just like a spectrum of that. But I keep coming back to, and I think most of the people who are listening to the show, like, just from the feedback, is most people would prefer that not to happen.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Right. Well, it sounds like a lot of Dieter's concerns could be solved by you, there's like, a, like, one of those, it's like a dot-dot-dot menu, so you have no idea what you'll get, but you tap that, then it says Settings. You tap Settings, then you say, "Which defaults do you want when you launch the camera app?"

• 25:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  And that seems like it would solve most of your problems, because you could set what the camera is when you launch it. And obviously, you could always tweak it for the specific scenario, but what is the camera when you launch it? Someone who cares about it can set it, someone who doesn't care can have smooth faces.

• 25:32Nilay Patel?

  Truly what Samsung needs is another setting screen.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  That's what I was gonna say. It's incredible. We're asking Samsung for more settings, which is like, I never would have imagined in the world.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so this, off the camera for once, I think everyone sort of understands what a Samsung camera. We've beaten it to death for years, of one decade of Samsung camera understanding. There's another line of review that really stuck out to me, which was Samsung's software pendulum is swinging back towards messy. And that, I don't understand. Like, what's going on there?

• 26:02Speaker 03

  There's just, all the stuff that Samsung has ever made is still on this phone. Like, it's still there. And they've just, they got good at like burying a bunch of it under Settings, and like, every now and then they'll change the defaults, and you don't, you gotta go looking for it, because whatever. But they managed to like, do a good job of burying stuff in Settings and organizing that. And the presentation they gave you in one UI was much cleaner. But it turns out that if you don't throw your wacky new Settings in people's faces, then they don't know it's there, and then you don't get your kickback from McAfee or whatever. Which, by the way, is like here, right? Like, you get prompted to like turn on virus detection in the like Device Care section. It's like, I don't care.

• 26:40Nilay Patel?

  Aren't you protected by NOX?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Oh, my god. So

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  There's a logo on the phone, man.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so like, I wish they would tone that down. I think the pendulum is going to continue to swing in that direction. The other problem that Samsung has, and this applies to Bixby, it applies to Samsung Daily, which is the new left of home screen, like feed of content. You know, Google's got it. Apple's is a widget screen, which I prefer, whatever. It also applies to some of their new sharing options. So they have a new link sharing option and a new quick share option and a new music share option.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  In lieu of the share sheet or in addition?

• 27:17Speaker 03

  No, they're, they're in addition to the share sheet. So link share, just like you just get free cloud storage to throw up to two gigs a day to like, put your shit in the cloud, get a link and give that link to somebody. It's great, actually. I think that's a stupendous service. It only lasts a day. They don't charge you for it. It's just here. There's two gigs in the cloud for free. Whenever you need it, we'll make a link for whatever you throw up there in a folder. You don't have to like sign up for OneDrive or Dropbox or Google Drive or iCloud or any of that crap. Just your phone has it built in. Throw something in the cloud real quick if you want it. That is awesome. Quick share and music share are basically, well, quick share is Samsung's version of airdrop, but it only works with Galaxy phones. And like that and Bixby, like I don't want to begrudge any company trying to build its

• 28:01Speaker 03

  own ecosystem. You've got Samsung Health and Bixby and blah. And we're like, oh, screw those guys. Why would anybody use them? Ha, ha, ha. But then in the very next section of the podcast, we complain about Apple and Google being monopolies and like everyone having to use their services.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  Diverged.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't want to begrudge Samsung for trying, but they need to be smarter about the way that they try. Like if you're going to make a new airdrop competitor, like actually work with Google on it, uh, cause Google's got one coming or release an app so that it can work for non-Galaxy phones, because not everybody has a Galaxy phone.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Be the, the, the Signal or the WhatsApp version of it. Like we're going to be the most cross-platform and like safe and good.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  I feel like Samsung desperate with that stuff, they desperately want to copy Apple's lock-in. Cause of, of course, like staring at it. You're like, we want to build a Samsung ecosystem that locks you in only buying Samsung phones, which is fun for two reasons. One, they already have it because people, Android buyers only buy Samsung phones.

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  It's just like a sad fact.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  So they've they've only got like 20% market share in the US. So iPhone is somewhere around 50 in the US. Samsung is 20 and then the rest is like a smattering of other people is is one of the recent numbers I checked.

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  For these phones, it's all Samsung.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that's one, like, they want the thing that Apple has. They don't realize that they kind of already have it. But then second, they didn't learn the big lesson from Apple, which is like, put iTunes on Windows, which is what you're saying. Like, they could fill all the gaps in Google's ecosystem if they just distributed widely and became the cross-platform thing and then.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Lock in step two.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  Right, and then they just whispered, everybody, by the way, this works even better on a Samsung phone. This thing that you we made that you love, it works even better.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  You do what Apple did with iTunes. You put it on Windows and then you slow then you abandon it. You let it rot, you know, and it leads people to come to your platform.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  You're like, this hog is slowly choking you.

• 29:58Nilay Patel?

  Interesting. Didn't expect that.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  You own all this music, but it's so hard to listen to.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  With Bixby, the problem there is they just they they needed they they had an original vision for Bixby that that differentiated it from the Google Assistant. And then they immediately abandoned that vision and tried to have it do anything and everything. They need to do what Microsoft is doing with Cortana and they need to do it real fast, which is Cortana went from like, what if we just competed directly with Siri and the Google Assistant and Alexa? And they tried that. It failed. They're like, OK, just kidding. Cortana is the AI for Office. Every everything else can get handled by the other people that do a better job. And Samsung needs to find a way to make Bixby like have a purpose that isn't compete directly with the Google Assistant, because it's going to lose every day forever.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I that's it's funny that you brought up Siri in that conversation. Like Siri is not beloved. It's just the default, right? And you can install another default and like, you can put the Google Assistant app or the Alexa app on your phone and like, it's a little more annoying, but Siri's still there.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Just chirping at you every time you move your wrist wrong on your watch. This happens to me four times a day.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, on Android, you can you can set Alexa or the Google Assistant or Bixby to be your default thing if you want, because, you know, they let you set defaults on Android.

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  That's great. But Microsoft's whole like reason for being is like making you productive. So it kind of makes sense that they're like, okay, we figured out what our assistant can do. It will know this complicated productivity software better than Alexa ever could.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  What is, what does Samsung even view like its users as being like?

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  I would love to see that deck.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Who do they think we are?

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  No, so every big company has these like persona decks. Yeah, this is where Mobile Accomplisher came from. It's where Mobile, um, when, uh, Microsoft launched the Zune, I think they just like outright, no, it was Windows Phone. They just outright, the presentation was their internal decks.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? They're like, this is Rachel. She loves coffee. She owns three dogs and has a red car. This phone is for her. And I was like, that is super weird. And then I got all these analysts being like, no, that's actually how they think internally. They make up these characters. Okay, that's fine. That's a fine way to, to build a product. Like you imagine your user. I would love to see Samsung's decks.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like it has to be, it can't just be like a picture of like Casey Neistat.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  Like it's got to be built out to some extent.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  You can see it in some of their like really cringey commercials. Like remember that they did this, uh, they did this Imagine a World commercial with folding phones like three years ago? And it was like a cool hipster dude, uh, business guy in a like a skinny suit at a bar. And he's like sitting there and he like opened his phone up and then the girl at the end of the bar was like, oh, wow, who's that guy? That photo's amazing. I need to talk to him. It's that reductive. I think that's how they see it.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I think at the end of the day, it's like they, I mean, we know this because they, they more or less tell us. They desperately want to be seen as the, the most credible competitor to the flagship Apple product. Right? And they're, and they're trying to leech that market away and they want to be that premium.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  They are.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, yes, they are, but like, what do they want most of all is to not just like flex? And I think on the other side, we see it, we do see it from Apple that they are deeply aware of the competition, especially in, in the Chinese market. Right? They're deeply aware of what the flagship phones in the Chinese market offer and they're deeply aware. So like, I think that's all working out. I just think Samsung, like you cannot force an ecosystem into being. You have to provide utility. But that's what I was saying about Cortana, like. If you, if the dream is you open Excel and you're looking at a spreadsheet and all you say is Cortana and you need to make a graph out of this and you don't actually have to know how that function works in Excel

• 33:50Nilay Patel?

  and that the bot is going to do it for you, that is amazing. There's no way that Alexa can get there.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Right, but like, to be clear, like, Microsoft backed into that idea, it hasn't executed on it yet. They only had, they had to fail at the first one and they're like, oh, let's do the, let's do the other one that makes more sense now.

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  But at least that's like a great idea. Like, I totally buy that idea and I buy the idea that actually the voice assistants should all talk. So you're like, you're still using Alexa and it knows there's another assistant with a deeper domain that it can go talk to and you're like, whatever. Bixby is like, what is Bixby's domain?

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Bixby's domain was supposed to be understanding all of Samsung's settings. That was what it was. It was supposed to be the thing that helped you like navigate the phone itself because it was so fricking complicated.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and so you got Bixby scene assistant, which is like, it's blue outside.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, this is, so I want to talk about the score real quick because I read your review and I was like, this is a nine, but you're dinging it a half for the, for the software stuff.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Dinged it a half for the software stuff, maybe like, I don't know, two of those points are like, uh, camera face smoothing. It's, it's still not up to pixel in terms of like raw photo quality in a lot of cases and it's still not up to the iPhone in terms of video quality. Uh, but yeah, it's, it's the software stuff, but it's also, um, Samsung is only committing to two years of major up, no, sorry. Two major updates, which basically amounts to two years of major updates. And then they'll probably do security updates for a little bit longer. And so I ding Samsung for that. They should commit to three. I actually think they should commit to more than three, but I don't know what, where to stop. So Google does three. Uh, Apple doesn't really say, but it nets out, given their history, to like four or five.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  It's like five, yeah.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Well, the iPhone SE might not get 14. I don't know.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  If it will or not. So like, that's, that's like three, that's like four and a half or so. So I think that the whole industry could be held to account a little bit better on that. That said, for all of my griping about how the, the infrastructure of the way Android updates works is make, is gonna make it impossible to ever achieve Apple levels. I still think that's true. The industry has done better in the past year, thanks to things like Tango, not Tango. What's the?

• 36:12Nilay Patel?

  Treble.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Treble and mainline. Samsung got their beta out like a month earlier than usual. A bunch of, a bunch of updates are coming earlier than usual. And so like, it's gotten better by like, I don't know, call it 20%. It still should be way better than it is, but I think the next move is to stop harping on how fast are you getting the updates out? And start harping on how long are you going to continue putting updates out? Because again, this thing starts at a thousand bucks and your thousand dollar phone should last more than a couple of years of software updates.

• 36:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, I think Apple has a, the, its service, you know, there's like, how much complexity can we get into? But Apple has an entire line of services revenue off the phone. And so like, I think they're, they're more willing to let you keep the hardware for longer. Because they're just milking you 499, 499 a month for Apple Arcade or whatever it is. And that's great. I mean, that's great. It's just, Samsung does not have that line of business.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  That's their plan going forward, but Apple's been good with the software updates before they had these, these services.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I, you know, the services arc started a couple of years ago. So it, it is true. I'm just saying, Apple has put itself in a position very intentionally to say, okay, the upgrade curve is flattened out. We know it. We're happy about it. We're gonna charge you for, I don't know, Apple News Plus. I don't know. They're never gonna charge anybody for Apple News Plus. It's mostly like Apple Care or the App Store. Like Samsung doesn't operate an App Store that has like tons of whales buying Candy Crush and app purchases. And Apple can just depend on that in a way that Samsung can't.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  I do one more sort of meta review thing, which is battery life. I think it's great. I've seen other reviews saying that expressing a little bit of concern about it, but most of those have been based on like video play down benchmarks and like maybe webpage refresh benchmarks. In actual use, I haven't had a problem. I suspect there are people that are able to push a phone a little bit harder and have worse battery life and not and actually be a little bit more concerned about it. But one of the reasons I'm not concerned even on the smallest one is there are so many ways to turn down battery usage on this phone. You can turn off the higher refresh rate. You can lower the resolution. Samsung actually has a ton of battery options that are actually like not bad.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  And so even even if you find that you are not getting through a full day, which I don't think would happen to you, but even if you are, there's plenty of options to get through a full day that don't radically degrade your experience of the phone. And so I am overall pretty pleased with battery life.

• 38:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that is surprising and wonderful. I was expecting this phone to just destroy its battery. I don't really know why. I mean, Samsung has to know that that's unacceptable, but.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Well, it's because you're locked at 120 hertz. It's not that they don't try and like adjust it based on what you're doing. It's just screw you, we're 120 hertz now, bam. But they they ratchet down the screen and they do that. But yeah, it's like, it was like a thing that I was worried about. And again, there are going to be other reviews out there that are like, no, the battery life is not acceptable on the small one. But I I think that for most people, especially by the small one, you're going to be fine. And if you're not, you can adjust it so you are. And for the plus and the ultra, you're definitely going to be fine.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  You're saying this is the best Android phone and might be the best Android phone of its generation.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Well, I'm saying it's the best Android phone right now at this moment on March 12th, 2020. But I'm also saying that for the subsequent phones that come out that are going to have the same processor, are going to have a higher refresh rate screen, going to have like compete on camera, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is the bar they have to meet. And this bar is actually surprisingly hard to meet. Like especially when you look at like fit, finish, build, quality, the whole package. It's going to be a tough, it's going to be tough. So I'm not saying it's the best phone of 2020, but it is the best phone of March 2020.

• 39:56Nilay Patel?

  It's a, it's a good narrow. I like it. You really, really left that door open.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  If I had to bet money, I would say that there is better than even chance that I, this phone will continue to be the best Android phone. If you don't include the cost of it for the next six months, for sure. I could be wrong. Like there's lots of, there's lots of things that are coming. But I'm very impressed with this phone.

• 40:19Nilay Patel?

  Cool. All right. We're going to take a break and come back. We actually have some Apple rumors to talk about. We'll just write the next thing.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 40:59Nilay Patel?

  Okay. It seems like Apple software is out in the world.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  Just based on the number of leaks. It seems like watch OS 7, iOS 14 are out. There's some MacBook rumors. Let's start with the watch. Dieter, what is going on with watch OS 7?

• 41:14Speaker 03

  So there are apparently going to be international watch faces. There's always do watch faces. Fine. You're going to be able to share watch faces. So you could be like, I made this watch face. Do you want it? And I'll be like, yeah, I do. And then I'll send it to you. But it'll be the watch face that you configure, not like you make your own watch face. Not the thing people want? Yeah, I mean, I could be wrong, but that's kind of what we're expecting, what I would expect. And then for me, there's also like, might be able to type oxygen blood level could be important. Depends on how reliable it is, what they actually do with that. To me, the interesting one is sleep tracking. I use my Apple Watch for sleep tracking right now. I use it as an alarm clock right now. It's my favorite alarm clock and I have mixed feelings about that. I'm glad they're doing it. I'm sure they'll do it in a way that it feels like more integrated and nicer.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  But, you know, like I like my little sleep plus plus app and I would like to see the current sleep apps on the Apple Watch have equal access to continue to succeed when the new sleep thing comes out. That won't happen, but that's my mixed feeling.

• 42:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like that they are now at a very difficult place with the watch because the they have their always on screen. The screen got bigger. I was not persuaded to go from my fourth gen watch to the fifth gen because they always on screen. Just wasn't. It seems really cool, but it wasn't enough to get me to spend the money. You could add sleep tracking and more health features. And I'm still kind of like, but this one's fine. Like it shows me notifications and I have the app that does my two factor codes that those are the things I use the watch for. That seems like they've hit that point where they're actually going to sell more because like the fourth gen watch will get cheaper or whatever.

• 42:58Nilay Patel?

  Like they're, they're going to do their pricing curve, but the high end of the watch is sort of like, these are very iterative features in a way that I think always on screen was like drove a lot of people to upgrade. Maybe not me, but a lot of people upgraded because they always on screen.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that a lot of people also upgraded because the, the third generation watch got so cheap. I think that Apple Watch, the big, there's, there's like questions in tech that get asked every year and after a while you're just like, oh God, stop it. Like will Android and Chrome OS merge? Oh God, stop it. Who knows? And for the Apple Watch, it's will they try and make it independent from the iPhone in some way? And

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Maybe, but maybe that's like not thinking about it right. You know, my personal desire is to have the Apple Watch to work with more than one iPhone at a time. So I could switch to my little iPhone SE every now and then. That's like very much a first world problem. Nobody actually needs that.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  But like, could the Apple Watch have a iTunes on Windows moment? By making it able to be set up and do things on its own paired to an Android phone? Or not paired to a phone at all? I don't know what that looks like, but it's been, people have been talking about it literally since the first one. And I have yet to see anybody sort of elucidate a product need for that thing. That like fully explains what it is. That doesn't just seem like a lame Kickstarter. Right? And so that would be the next like unlock, sell hundreds of millions more than they did before moment for the Apple Watch. But I don't know like what they could do, what, you know, what benefit, if it would actually work. You know what I mean?

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think there's a, there's not like a tech or product feature benefit. There's a very obvious business benefit, which is, as you are very fond of reminding people. There are more Android phones in the world than anything else. Like just like gaze at the world and be like, well, all of those people we will never sell this product to. Isn't, is just a miss, like an obvious miss. And like, if you look at the success of another Apple product, like AirPods, like AirPods, same deal. It works better with an iPhone because of its proprietary stack, blah, blah, blah. But you could just sell, you can just, they just sell them to Android phone owners too. And they just blew through headphones. The watch obviously is way more tied to ecosystem.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  It's obviously an extension of the phone. But at some point, you're going to max out the sort of like attach rate of iPhone owners to a watch. And then the watch doesn't generate revenue over time. So you sell a third gen watch to someone. You sold it once. Like they're gonna hold it for quite a while, even if they get new phones, whatever. That's pretty fine. Like Apple makes a lot of money. I'm assuming they... Do you think Apple does all of its like financial modeling and numbers?

• 45:48Speaker 02

  What?

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  You know, like their own bad spreadsheet app?

• 45:51Speaker 02

  I thought you meant like numbers. I'm like, yeah, they use numbers, Neil. I...

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  They're not using... Numbers. I meant the consumer grade, the never updated consumer grade spreadsheet that ships on the iPad. There are, look, there are these Excel spreadsheets all over Apple, I'm sure. And I'm actually sure they're using Excel and not numbers. But that's like, the question is like, can you, where have you maxed out your sales to iPhone owners? Like what percentage of iPhone owners ever are gonna buy a watch? Once you get close to that number, you have to open a new market, and that market is Android phone owners. It's like very obvious. Or are you just happy keeping people locked in? Cause once you sell them a watch, you've guaranteed another iPhone sale.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Speaking of ongoing revenue, there's another rumor that Apple's gonna do, there's this thing called Seabore. It's like some sort of fitness

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  video thing that does seem to tie in with the watch. Like the watch can tell what you're doing.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like Peloton, but on a phone.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  That's, I've heard it described like that, but then I read the actual descriptions, like this sounds nothing like Peloton.

• 46:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like a little coach that's like you're on your treadmill or your bike.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  The whole, isn't the whole point of Pel, I've never used Peloton. Isn't the whole point of Peloton that you have a live coach? Like a real person?

• 47:05Speaker 03

  A live person that yells at you. That's the point of Peloton, yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  And like music, that's like licensed music and stuff?

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, some of them are live and some of them are pre-recorded.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Right. Okay. Alright.

• 47:16Nilay Patel?

  That's like, Peloton is like, what they've done is they've glued a tablet to a treadmill and like this costs $7,000.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 47:23Nilay Patel?

  Great. But you can like go out and get the, it is by the way. It's a big patent case there. That was, that was a fun one. But like you can go out and get the app and use it with a regular treadmill. So I think Apple's basically building that tied into its watch for the health tracking.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  So that could be some ongoing revenue.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  That becomes the hot Around the watch.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  The hot new thing to do, yeah.

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I just think that the, you can do that and you can extract a couple of dollars from your existing base, which is Apple's skills, like millions of dollars. But overall, your sales are, there's a point at which they cap out. Right, which is some fraction of the iPhone installed base.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  Right, you're just being stubborn to not sell it to Android.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or you've calculated that, once you sell somebody a watch, you have guaranteed an iPhone upgrade. That they're not going to switch platforms.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  And that might just be totally worth it to you.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  I think that's the, I think that's the answer.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  And that is like the Apple thing, like I don't even begrudge them for it. I begrudge Apple for a lot of lock-in things, but you made a great hardware product that works with your thing and it inspires people to buy, to stay in your ecosystem is like, how mad can you get? I'm mad at them for not letting them, for not letting anyone else build a watch that works with the phone in terms of messages or notifications, like I think a little competition would be good. But then you look at the state of competition where you can do that on Android. And it's like, well, who would even, who would even show up?

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, who cares about this? Like, uh, Fossil's gonna make a great smartwatch that connects to iPhone, like, sure. Like, so I, I think the watch is like one of those where all of my normal complaints about Apple's lock-in are, they're just kind of like exploded by the state of the market, right? Like, it's not like there's a great Android smartwatch. I'm like, oh, I wish I could just use it with my iPhone. And that is a bigger market. And so like, I don't know, like, there's just, it's like one of those where reality, just like, my bubble of idealistic, capitalistic competition is like, well, the competitors suck. Like, what am I missing out on here? Okay, so that's a watch. I, I do, I do think this generation watch will be very interesting, right? Like, if they just iterate on the health stuff and they don't do, like, there are some rumors that they were gonna change the way apps work on this one, right?

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  They were gonna be more native. There are some rumors about ways developers could, could like more independently run the apps. But like, doesn't this, doesn't this generation feel like the pure iterative generation?

• 49:42Speaker 03

  I think so. If they do give more access to third-party apps to do a little bit more stuff, like, I would appreciate that. I still think that Spotify and the Apple Watch is not where it could be. And I think that there's like, Spotify wants to be where it could be there and just isn't quite able to get there. So I'd like to see that. And maybe there's some real pressure on Apple to let them do that. So that could be fun. But, um, I think you should expect an iterative update for the Apple Watch.

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  This year.

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It seems like iOS 14 is a much bigger update, though, overall. Especially on the iPad side of things.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Well, on the iPad side of things, who knows what the hell is going on? So Craig Figuridi in a stock call was like, if you like what we were doing so far, just wait. And all of the Apple blogosphere is mad, like, came to the realization that, uh, that the iPad multitasking, windowing system is confusing, which is like, y'all, I've been saying. And now there's like, there's, there's a rumor of the trackpad and, um, you know, mouse support.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  That they're gonna do a case with a trackpad and real mouse support for the iPad.

• 50:44Speaker 03

  Right. And so what does that mean? Like, what, what are you gonna be able to do with that trackpad? Are you gonna be able to scroll? Well, sure. Are you gonna be able to go to multitasking view? Sure. Are you gonna be able to drag windows around? I don't know. Are you gonna be able to type? Yes. You can do the like text select, like, use like, just start going on a list of things you do with the mouse. We've talked about this and I don't know where they're gonna stop because at the end of that list is you've made a Mac and they can't go that far.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, so this, this is the other rumor this week. This is why I wanted to talk about this in particular. I mean, like, there's, just to say, like, the other iOS stuff is like, there'll be a list view for apps on the phone, which will be cool because then you'll be able to find your apps on the phone. And you can already see that list view on the watch. So I imagine it'll look a lot like that. There's a hint of new over ear headphones, which if, if you're the one person in the world who cares about the drama between the Apple headphones team and the Beats headphones team, get ready. Um, your, your life is gonna be interesting. But the main one is there's the rumor that there'll be an ARM Mac by sort of like the end of the year. And if you're gonna do an ARM Mac on one side and an iPad with a, a trackpad on the other side,

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  like, that is, that seems like a very hard definitional problem.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Well, and it's a hard definitional problem that Apple has tried to brute force its way through for the past three or four years. This is again, one of those like perennial questions in tech, like Android and Chrome merging, that, uh, is like annoying but real, right? What are they gonna do about the difference between an iPad and a Mac? What are they gonna do about the fact that the iPad still like hits a wall that you can't get past? And the Mac just doesn't have a touchscreen and is like sometimes weirdly complicated in its own way? Like, as they get closer together, the desire for people to help have them differentiate them more clearly is gonna get even stronger.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  So there's a way of thinking of the iPad where it's like, it's a tablet when it doesn't have a keyboard connected to it. And then you connect. A keyboard that also has a touchpad now in this wild new future. And it now it's more laptop-y. And so I'm wondering, are there any-

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  It's like a, it's like a flat plane that you touch, like a, like a surface.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  The thing I was thinking, obviously, Microsoft has been doing some stuff for a while where it's like, okay, this is a more of a touch mode, this is more of a desktop mode. But I'm thinking, what, which, what was the, was it Pixel Go? What was the tablet-

• 53:15Nilay Patel?

  Pixelbook Go?

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Pixelbook Go.

• 53:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Speaker 02

  Are there, are there any cautionary tales-

• 53:20Nilay Patel?

  No, wait, you're thinking of the Pixel C.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  I'm thinking of-

• 53:22Speaker 03

  No, he's thinking of the Pixelbook Go.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Or not Pixelbook Go, the Pixels, the Pixel Slate.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh.

• 53:28Nilay Patel?

  None of these worked.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Google made it-

• 53:30Nilay Patel?

  Whichever Google tablet you were thinking of-

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Google made a product that was a little bit more of a Chromebook when it was docked, and it was more of a touchscreen tablet when it wasn't docked. Like, is that a fundamentally hard problem? Or is it just a problem that's crying out for Apple to try to do it?

• 53:49Speaker 03

  I would leave Google's attempt to turn the Chromebook into a tablet out of it, because the less that's said about that, the better for everybody. And I would, I would look more at the surface. The, the fact that Microsoft tried to have, I mean, Windows 8, it was Windows 8. And then they, they tried to like have tablet mode versus windowed mode. And I think even if people are using it as a tablet, I think the vast majority of people don't bother with tablet mode. I could be wrong, the data gets something different. I never bother with it. It's, the, the hassle of switching between those two modes is like, it's actually pretty annoying. Because when you go back to Windows, everything is like in weird spots. And I think that Apple fundamentally, the idea that they would make an iPad

• 54:31Speaker 03

  that has like a pro mode with windowing and a non-pro mode as a tablet, that there'd be two different, completely different ways of interacting with it. I mean, that's just anathema to them. They, they won't even let us rearrange icons on the home screen so that they don't flow from upper left to bottom right. Do you think that they would ever allow like two different, completely different modes of interacting?

• 54:51Nilay Patel?

  Free-form windowing?

• 54:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, come on.

• 54:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, look, Apple has this, by the way, I'm looking at Dieter's Pixel C review from 2015.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Oh, from 20-

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  It is brutal. Here's the first line of this review. "A funny thing happened on the way to inventing the future of touchscreen computing. Everyone is botching it."

• 55:12Speaker 03

  That's just the first line.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  So like, like, in my mind, I would have a very clear reason to pick this future iPad that has an optional keyboard cover that includes a touchpad and our MacBook Pro. Or, sorry, it wouldn't be a MacBook Pro probably, yeah, it'd be the MacBook or MacBook Air, whatever. Like, I would get that, the ARM MacBook for coding, and I would get the new iPad for the music and drawing and stuff like that.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm actually less, like, interested, we'll see what they do with the iPad, they'll figure it out. I'm less worried about, like, iPad versus Mac and can they get that definition clear by the end of the year when the ARMAC comes out than I am that it seems clear that they're gonna release a Scissor Switch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro in the near future, at least I'm hoping they are. But when's the last time that Apple's released a MacBook laptop and you knew in the back of your mind that, like, something that was completely different and probably better was coming in the next, like, six to eight months?

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Usually, it's like, they're not gonna update this for, like, three years.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. And better is, like, better is unclear, because who knows how the ARM stuff is gonna turn out, but, yeah.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  No, but I have a theory on this. I think they're pretty wedded to Intel processors for better or worse, or at least x86, right? Like, they, to manage a transition at scale is very hard, from Intel to ARM. They're gonna try to do it. The best way for them to do it is to not try to just, like, boil the ocean. So I think, okay, we're putting out a new MacBook Air with a better keyboard. That's like, all the more that people want, like, honestly, from a MacBook Air. Like, the keyboard doesn't break, it's a MacBook Air, great, you're gonna buy it, you're gonna go to college, you're gonna be great, as you study from home because of the pandemic. A MacBook Pro, you, you actually need a little bit more horsepower, that's why you're upgrading to that model, it's got a reliable keyboard,

• 57:08Nilay Patel?

  you're good to go. Like, they're stuck with x86 there. And even with x86, like, what do we keep saying, like, Adobe is not optimized for Apple's version of x86, right? Like, there's just a lot of work to do on that side of the house. Then there's, like, the ultra-portable zone, like, the old MacBook, the 12-inch MacBook, like, one of my favorite computers ever. They haven't had anything in that category since 2017, and you can definitely put an ARM chip in there and be like, "Look, this is gonna be slow when it's emulating Photoshop." But it was already slow because of this dumb Intel processor we're using. Like, you've lost nothing. You've gained an enormous amount of, like, battery life. You've gained an enormous amount of, like, other performance benefits

• 57:48Nilay Patel?

  because we made the chip for the thing. So in this constrained envelope of performance, this product is better. And it might have, like, built-in LTE because Apple makes those chips. Like, there's all the stuff they can do with a Mac once they move it to ARM in that way, that they don't want to do with Intel. The problem is, and I think this is a really tough problem for them, what are people gonna want to do on that computer? They're gonna want to run Chrome. They're gonna want to run Electron apps, and that thing is gonna just, like, they, Apple's ARM architecture has never had to deal with that. Right? The iPhone and the iPad have never had to deal with Chrome, because Apple won't let them. So you build a Mac with an ARM processor, all of a sudden, then someone

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  tries to run Chrome, built for x86, emulated ARM, like, maybe this battery doesn't last very long at all.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  Microsoft got Chromium running on their ARM processor.

• 58:41Nilay Patel?

  Because they switched their entire browser stack to Chromium and then built their own browser.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, but the Chromium has got, like, ARM. There's, like, there's an ARM version of Chrome, Chromium out there, and eventually Chrome will support ARM natively. But that's on Windows. Who knows about Mac?

• 58:56Speaker 02

  I've run, so Visual Studio Code, which is made by Microsoft and based on Electron, so based on Chromium, I have run that in Crustini on a Chromebook.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Do the lights dim?

• 59:09Speaker 02

  I think there's an ARM version. I'm pretty sure there's an ARM version of VS Code. I don't know. I don't think that sounds ridiculous. The thing is, what you're describing is sort of the playing-it-safe way of, like, how Microsoft does it. Like, "Hey, let's dabble in this world, and everybody hates it, we'll pretend it never happened," you know? Or Apple likes to show up like, "This is your life now." Better learn how to like it.

• 59:37Nilay Patel?

  How do you ship, how are you shipping $54,000 Mac Pros as Xeon processors and saying we're doing an architecture shift?

• 59:43Speaker 02

  Well, if you, if, if, if you can, I, I don't know that they would truly do it top to bottom.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  But I think it is very conceivable that Apple could have, so right now, there's like some server processors coming out, like 80 core ARM processors that are like basically possibly the best thing you can get. And so like if you give a lot of power to a chip designer with ARM, they can make something super competitive. So if Apple has decided to go all in on ARM, they could have a very competitive MacBook Pro processor, MacBook Air processor, MacBook processor, like they could have the whole lineup if they wanted to. And obviously, people have been talking about for a while that the iPad feels way faster than like low level MacBooks in those like basic apps.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  So it seems, it seems very plausible to me that Apple could, could just force, like, like do a shift and like, in like one or two years, have nearly every Mac on ARM if they really wanted to. But you know, they, they, I'm sure they know better the roadmap. I mean, you know, I, I feel like they're leaving stuff on the table by not having AMD in the Mac Pro. So like, you know, it, it would, it would require a will, but I just feel like Apple's way of approaching these things is, is going all in. Like, I feel like it's not very Apple-like to split, split the baby and have X86 Max and ARM Max on an ongoing basis.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I buy that argument too. Right? Like eventually what they want is to live on one processor architecture. But at the same time, right this second, they live on two. Right? They live on the Intel one and they live on the ARM one and they're building catalyst to bridge the gap. I think, I, I don't think that's like a Microsoft playing it safe. I think that's like a, the high-end ARM performance server stuff is totally unproven. So if it happens, it happens, but.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  Amazon makes, is on its second generation ARM, ARM chip. Like, it seems like it's winning.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  It's winning, but Amazon is designing it for its AWS, right?

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:51Nilay Patel?

  That makes sense. Apple's using those server class chips to run Photoshop and Final Cut.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Or try it on the Mac Pro.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just saying, like, they're repurposing a server chip for whatever they're doing.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  For better or worse, that's what they're doing. And sort of in the mid-zone, I think you could see ARM conquest that really fast. But they got to ship one, and the known compromises of shipping the first one are very obvious. Right, like, if this 16-inch MacBook Pro in front of me, if they shipped it tomorrow with a high-end, unproven ARM chip, that entire review would be like, "This app didn't work. This app didn't work. That app didn't work."

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  I see what you're saying.

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  So, I think they need, and that's how they manage the power PC to Intel transition.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  Low end up?

• 1:02:32Nilay Patel?

  The first one they shipped was an iMac. Well, there was a developer unit that was a Tower.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  But then the first one they shipped was the MacBook Pro, like, a 15-inch MacBook Pro and an iMac. And those are the first two, and they were like, "We'll see how it goes." And then, like, within a year, they'd transition the rest of the line, but they just did the two models first. I think with ARM, what do you get out of ARM most of all is battery. That's at least what I perceive.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Well, but that's the thing. Battery life is the same thing as performance. Because if you want to do one block of work, right, and it requires 400 watts to do that, or it requires 25 watts to do that same amount of work, you could conceive of that as battery life, or you could conceive of that as performance, because it's like a performance per watt, which is obviously what server people are looking at, but also, just in the desktop, how much can you cool this processor? How powerful is your power supply?

• 1:03:29Nilay Patel?

  I just want a 12-inch MacBook.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  I'm sorry.

• 1:03:33Nilay Patel?

  Just give me the thing I want.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:03:35Nilay Patel?

  Like, Intel's never gonna make that chip. Apple's gonna make that chip.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Intel's been trying to make that chip for so long.

• 1:03:43Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna happen one day. All right, we're gonna take a break and wrap this thing up.

• 1:03:51Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Yo.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, this segment has not been doing a good job of holding America together.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  Everybody's at home with their families right now.

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  If I had to be really honest, I would say your segment has torn America apart.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I think I'm gonna turn it around because this week, like every week, the segment is called, "Take Me To Your Metaverse, Mr. Sweeney."

• 1:04:15Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Tim Sweeney has, who is the CEO of Epic Games, which makes Fortnite and also the Unreal Engine, and the Epic Games Store. He's very outspoken, and he is really going off on this Metaverse idea. I don't even know if The Verge covered this, because it's like, he's been talking about Metaverse for a while. But he was on this podcast I was listening to. I just really like the term Metaverse for a way of thinking of like, connecting all your social experiences. The thing he's thinking about is this idea of, you know, you're playing Fortnite with your friends, right? Now, that same friend group wants to play a Steam game.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Do you have to hang up on your Fortnite call and then communicate through Steam? And then hang up on that call and then, you know, obviously, a lot of people use Discord to maintain this communication, or if you're on a console, you know, you might be using the console social, you know, stuff to keep you together. But this idea of, of some sort of interoperability, and it's cool, because it sounds, he's obviously in a position to work on this, and he's really into it, and it sounds like he's maybe making some headway. Like, maybe you'll be able to like, keep your party together, jumping from Fortnite to like, a Ubisoft game or something like that. So, I don't know, it's interesting, but what it made me think about is my current chat situation. And I realized, in a single day, I used...

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Discord, Slack, Signal, Zulip, iMessage.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  What the hell is Zulip?

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Zulip is amazing. It'll change your life. It's really the best thing on this list.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm looking at Zulip.

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  Is it spelled like tulip? Yes, with a Z. Discord, Slack, Signal, Zulip, iMessage, Twitter DMs, Instagram DMs, and regular SMS. I used all of those things to communicate in one day. And also, I also use, sometimes, but not always, there's Matrix, which is like open source peer-to-peer federated chat stuff, Telegram, LinkedIn, and Keybase. And I just feel like, I feel like it's too many. And there's no way to pair back because none of them talk to each other. Matrix bridges to IRC. So.

• 1:06:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm just looking at Zulip, and it seems like it's Slack with threads?

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, Zulip is all about threads and topics. And so you don't have that thing where you're in a room and two people are having two different conversations. It's all about creating a new topic per thing. Absolutely love it.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  Are you shilling for Zulip?

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  I'm shilling for Zulip. No, but I'm just saying this chat situation is ridiculous. Speaking of Electron apps, like a lot of these are Electron apps. I've got like five Electron apps open.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  That's a dream.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  Just to do basic communications.

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  A funny thing happened on the way to the future of computing. Everyone's botching it.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  It's awful. So, Tim Sweetie, take me to your metaverse.

• 1:07:24Nilay Patel?

  The thing about Tim Sweetie in particular is like, dude knows he's got the leverage because of Fortnite. And he is, with that leverage, he's actively trying to make the world more competitive. And I think that's extremely cool.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, he does so many wonderful things with his Fortnite bucks.

• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Also, he does these like paid exclusives. Like to get the Epic Games Store off the ground, they spent a ton of money and they pissed a lot of people off who just want to play everything on Steam because that's where they are. That's their corner of the metaverse. I don't know. I feel like he talks really high-minded when it helps him. But also, he's done so many good things that I can't fault him.

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  He's his CEO.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  He's a CEO of a big company.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  Surprising. No, but I think that like, I get why people are mad about paid exclusives. But I think that that natural, this is like YouTube. Like you and I are like tweeting about like YouTube today. Like, everyone wants everything to be on YouTube, and then YouTube has all the power and YouTube screws everybody over. If you just had like Fortnite money and you're like, I'm build a competitor to YouTube by paying a lot of people to be here. The first thing people would complain about is like, I just want my stuff on YouTube. And so I think you have to accept that pain to like build the competitor, which is what he's doing.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  My playbook for creating, I've had this on the podcast before. You spend a billion dollars to create a YouTube competitor. You pay people, you match what they're already earning on YouTube and you don't require them to take it off YouTube. I think that's the key. You create incredible amount of goodwill and you get all the content. So you have the same amount of content, and so then, then you just have to compete on being better. And so, and I hope you were trying to be better in the first place. And so if you could do that, you spend a billion dollars, but I think you're pretty far to having a YouTube competitor.

• 1:09:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Or you could just turn the screws, ever retire, and just win. All right. A few more things to wrap up here. Dieter, there's some Pixel leaks in the world. You were like, people are mad about the 4A.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  Well, people are mad at me about the 4A because I suggested that I thought that 399 was higher than I was hoping. I recognize that that is the price it was expected to be, and I recognize that it's a reasonable price, especially given the camera and the processor that is rumored for it, and the fact that they've gone for a sort of a notchless hole punch display. Nevertheless, I still pine for the days of the Nexus phones that cost like 350. And last year, we saw a lot of incredibly good Android phones that came in at that 299, 350 mark. On the flip side, if Google had actually priced it that aggressively, assuming they do, given the rumors, they're, you know what I mean, we'd be complaining about them using their market power to steal market share. So, you know, you win some, you lose some.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  It's funny you say the camera, right? Because the camera, in its way, is not costly for Google. It's costly on the R and D side. It's costly in terms of software engineering. But the actual part is not costly.

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  I wonder what would happen if Google actually tried to distribute that technology and build it into Android. You know, there's GCAM in the world for all sorts of different phones. It's sort of a pain to configure, but like, the community makes it work. XDA developers make it work. What would happen if they just were like, you know what? We want all Android phones to have really good cameras. Everybody can just use this now. I wonder.

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  They would never sell another Pixel again.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  I mean, probably.

• 1:10:49Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I believe in this goodwill aspect. I feel like you... When did you become the happy idealist?

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  I know, I don't believe that companies act this way. I'm saying that I feel like they could get a long way by...

• 1:11:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  By acting this way. Why does anybody not spit when they hear the word Microsoft? Because they've done a lot of idealistic things with open source. And yeah, sure, maybe they've sort of taken over Linux from within and now they're dominating as a corporate sponsor. Sure.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  Maybe you go to work by getting your job on LinkedIn and you show up at work and you use the Office Suite on your Windows computer and then file to GitHub.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  That's not a good way... That's not a recipe for goodwill.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  And then you go home and you use your Xbox. But they like you. I will... You are not wrong. We just did a tech survey. Microsoft is like beloved again. It's because they're like friendly. But they also don't like... They're not trying to extract consumer revenue except on Xbox. I think that's like a big part of it. Like, they're just like a happy, friendly giant that makes Windows.

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  Going back to the Pixel, I do want to point out that it's not as easy as we might think for Google to just be like, sure, everyone can have the Pixel camera algorithms because the way that the camera stuff works on Android phones is so, so, so, so, so fragmented. It's not... They can't like... Not everyone would just be able to plug and play that stuff. Like Moment, for example, bailed on their Android app that you cannot buy... Android app for moment lenses. You you have to like use a third party app. Some of them will do the correction or you gotta do the correction on your own for the, you know, the lens distortion.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  I feel like I don't know all the nuts and bolts, but imagine like maybe there's like some machine learning model that Google could release. And so like, here's how to here's how to tune the app to your sensor using this, these machinations.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, in the bring up of the phone, the manufacturers could probably use Google's code.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  But that's obviously we're asking a lot of Google.

• 1:12:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think they really want the Pixel to be a success, whether or not it actually is a success. I my read on the four A's, it's probably a more interesting phone than the four.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  Well, and so that bodes ill for the Pixel five, right? Like the Pixel four, like I have this whole rant where like Google needs to commit to the high end or bail on it, right? The they either need to like take on the Galaxy S20 at the high end, make the phone that genuinely feels like a thousand bucks instead of just costing a thousand bucks. And the Pixel four was supposed to be it. It's got the higher refresh rate screen. It's got the face unlock and it just like it didn't quite get there. And so if they're not gonna get there with the Pixel five, then they'll release another Pixel five and everyone will be like, cool, wait for the five A. That's what's gonna happen to them this year if they're not very careful.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I was the four has not been a success. Like they're not, I don't think they're in a mode where they have to worry about sales. Like they just have to like get a hit.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  They gotta get a hit and the three A is doing pretty darn well. But look, when when they started this hardware division, I like got in a room with Rick Oslerlo and said, when do you have to be successful? I got I took a walk around Google's campus with Sundar Pichai and said, what's your timeline for making money on hardware? And the answer was the standard answer in all of tech, five years. Well, guess what? The Pixel five is five years.

• 1:14:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, I can't wait for the Pixel five launch event. Deer with his arms crossed in the back of the room.

• 1:14:19Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of, there's another big Google story. This one protocol, Yango Rutgers are a great story. It's a TV story, so I'm like, ready to go. We've been at it for an hour. You ready to go for another hour? I rant about TV operating systems. But there's a deep relationship to how Google ran Android here, which I think is really interesting. So if, basically, Yango's story was, if you are a Google TV licensee, and there's actually more than you think, because, yep, it's Sony makes Android TVs, but there's a bunch of cable boxes and stuff. If you have a license to Android for TVs, and even in some case for mobile, you are not allowed to use forks of Android in any other product, which includes Fire TV.

• 1:14:59Nilay Patel?

  Because Fire TV is an Android fork. So there's all these companies that would like to make Fire TVs, but because they want to use Android in other places, Google will not let them. And so like, I think on the one read, I have many reactions.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Here's my first one. Somewhere inside Roku, there was a guy who's like, "This would be so much easier if we just built this on Android." Because like, "We're doing all this crap with our OS, we just let Android handle it." And everybody else is like, "Nooo!" And this is why.

• 1:15:26Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. I mean, I think Roku's pretty happy owning their stack, right? It's still like Linux. And it's built to where it needs to go. I don't think they have aspirations to make a phone. Certainly don't have aspirations to make beautiful apps. Like, that's not a thing that they care about. But like, they're dominant. So it's like, this is this heated battle for like, second place at best. Samsung uses Tizen, and they want Tizen, like, Samsung is a dominant TV vendor. They want Tizen to be a meaningful hedge against Android. That's important to them. And so that building it out for TV lets them recoup their investment in Tizen development. So like, Samsung's never gonna switch. Like, they're on Tizen.

• 1:16:09Nilay Patel?

  Who's left? Well, Sony's already on Android. You could get, I'm sure Vizio is like, "Well, we made this huge weird bet on Chromecast." Like, they could just switch to Android. It's probably, it would be a lot easier than going to Fire. Isn't there a rumor that Google's switching to Android with Chromecast?

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  There's a Chromecast Ultra that's gonna run Android TV.

• 1:16:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then it's gonna have a remote. So, but it's like Google, like, Google's not gonna ship a Fire TV box. Sure, sure. So, like, who, like, who is, like, meaningful to us? It's like LG. Like, LG is the prize here. And then, like, whatever, like, house brands, Insignia, Element, whatever. But their last huge prize in this market of the biggest vendors, it's Vizio, Sony, LG, right? Those are the big TV vendors. LG has, like, WebOS.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, this whole thing, you don't wanna talk about Fire TV. You just wanna troll me into talking about WebOS. This is just a long-ass walk up to make me mad about WebOS.

• 1:17:03Nilay Patel?

  I got you. I didn't realize you were already gonna be so mad about the Pixel. Because now it's like, the nuclear inferno? But, like, that's, that's gotta be, like, the, the battle here is LG is like, "Oh, this didn't work. No one wants to build a 15th app for our weird platform with Bean Bird. Like, we would like to do a riff on Android TV, or we'd like to do a riff on Fire, because Fire is dominant. And they can't, because they make Android phones."

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  That's gotta be it.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  TCL also is in this mix. A lot of TCL phones get sold.

• 1:17:37Nilay Patel?

  TCL's on Roku, so they're not...

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, maybe they would wanna be on Fire TV, too. You don't know.

• 1:17:42Nilay Patel?

  But...

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  Maybe they wanna bail on Roku.

• 1:17:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, well, yeah, I wonder. I mean, like, they're doing so well making Roku TVs.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Amazon would be happy to subsidize all sorts of TV makers to get Fire TV more market share.

• 1:17:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  Are you kidding? They would love to do that.

• 1:17:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but TCL is like, those are the big three, right? In terms of sales, it's Vizio, Sony, LG. And then TCL's coming up, but they're coming up because of Roku. Because they're the high-end Roku TV. They're gonna do an OLED this year. Like, an OLED Roku TV is, like, a very attractive idea of a product, right? But can you imagine, like, if you're the Amazon people, and you're like, "Let's go to TCL and, like, get them to do it." And they're like, "We can't, because we make Android phones."

• 1:18:23Nilay Patel?

  So all of this is related. Do you remember like, was it last year? The EU said to Google, "You cannot do this anymore in phones." "You cannot bar people from forking Android to get play services." But they can still... But they're doing it in TVs. Have it for TVs. So I just think, like, this story to me, like, it hit all the right buttons for me. Uh, but it's so funny because, like, everyone's in, like, 45th place to Roku. So everyone's just, like, battling for scraps. And as somebody who owns a Sony Android TV, I'm not even like, "Yeah, it's, it's definitely a TV that runs Android." Sometimes it just crashes out to, like, a honeycomb.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  That's why it's so, that's why it's so interesting to me that, uh, Google would actually put it on its Comcast, because that seems to imply that they might be passionate about it.

• 1:19:12Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever seen a, a $3,500 OLED TV display, like, a gingerbread-level UI element? Because I have, on the regular. No, I think Google, like, knows. The streaming wars are here. You just, like, point a microphone at Julia, you get an hour of streaming wars. Like, it's happening at extremely high rates. Owning that interface is the next battleground. Because you get to extract... Uh, Anco has actually made this point too, which I think is really smart. In the old days, you, the consumer, would pay Comcast. You'd pay them some money, you'd get a Comcast box, uh, cable box. And then Comcast would distribute some of your money to ESPN. Right? Yeah, to get ESPN on this box, Comcast owes Disney $11 or some insanely high rate.

• 1:19:57Nilay Patel?

  Roku is like, they're gonna give you the box. You just get a Roku box for $8. And then ESPN pays the money to be on the Roku box. Which is a totally upset version of the market. And then you pay ESPN. And then you pay ESPN. So like, it's just like, that whole market is inverting. And owning the interface, you become the gatekeeper to the consumer in a very real way. And I think there's just that race to own that interface in a way that... I know, Apple owned the iOS interface and the store gives them enormous amount of power.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  Is anybody trying to do, I'm sorry to be so, such a hack. But is anybody doing that open source version of this of like, like I would imagine if you're ESPN, like you don't want to pay for access. I mean, we know this really well from Facebook. Like Facebook decided at some point where it's like, you know what? All these things that are showing up on people's walls. What if we charged brands to get there, you know? So like, people don't want to be in that scenario.

• 1:21:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, this is when I would point out like, the Nvidia Shield exists, but the Nvidia Shield.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  Runs Android TV, yeah.

• 1:21:08Nilay Patel?

  So there's not like a great open source. I mean, I'm sure there is.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  And I guess Android TV.

• 1:21:13Nilay Patel?

  But they haven't attracted those.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  Is kind of this in the sense that Android TV currently is not charging ESPN, is not paid to play like Roku is.

• 1:21:21Nilay Patel?

  Right? Well, it's the store.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  It's just the traditional Android store.

• 1:21:25Nilay Patel?

  It's just a store. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's an app store. And I think people don't perceive Roku is having that app store dynamic. But it absolutely does, which is why like Fox was dropped before the Super Bowl and all that stuff. It's just like, I hadn't really considered how much that market had flipped from the traditional cable model. And now you see like, everybody gets it, like the streaming wars are here. We need to own the operating system and the home screen. Cause that will give us the power that, I don't know, Apple and Google have in mobile. And I think Amazon, to Dieter's point, like Amazon wants that bad.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  I just want all the CEOs out there, just take a little break, pull over in your car and think about how you could serve the customer rather than control the customer.

• 1:22:08Nilay Patel?

  That's the verge.

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  If you're a CEO, ask your driver to pull over.

• 1:22:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, look, we've run long, but the last three stories I had here are all like regulatory stories. Like there was a big hearing, antitrust hearing in Congress this week that Addy covered. That was really focused on Google search and preferential treatment and unbundling platforms from the products. It's like, could we write a law that shifts the boundaries of like how Google is allowed to promote its own stuff? Without somehow also prohibiting Apple from preloading any apps on the iPhone? Like that's a complicated, so that hearing took place, that's moving along. There was a 230 encryption hearing. Where Congress is debating this bill called the Earn It Act. Earn It. Which is horrible. Basically, they'll take away 230 protections unless the platform's giving them a backdoor to encryption,

• 1:22:59Nilay Patel?

  which seems like the worst trade in the world. Yeah, it's so scummy and bad. It's all happening. And then the Team Little Sprint is happening because California dropped its appeal. So like, that stuff is all happening in the world. Like, how do we allow platforms to compete? How do we protect the consumer? How do we spy on our citizens? You know, the usual stuff. Well, so, you know, the spy on our citizens, but the angle they've taken into it, it's like protecting children from the beast. You know, but is, you know who messages on those platforms? Children. Yeah. Like, maybe it's good that that's encrypted. Oh, because you're not spying on kids? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know, man. Like, the Earn It Act, it's gonna be, it's been very hard this week in particular.

• 1:23:44Nilay Patel?

  If you read Casey's newsletter, I think Thursday, today, the day it came out, he opens with like, "It's very hard to pay attention to everything because of the coronavirus." But this stuff is happening. Like, Congress is holding these hearings, they're advancing this legislation. Go read it. The Earn It Act stuff that Addy is doing is really good. We're paying a lot of attention to it. Obviously, it's out of the interface, Casey's paying attention to it. But it is, it is definitely not on pause because of the pandemic. And the Earn It Act in particular, I think, a lot of attention is coming towards. And the Anarchist stuff just keeps moving, this like nondiscrimination idea that if you own the platform, you shouldn't be able to discriminate against your competitors. It's picking up, picking up some steam. All right. That was a very long, very winding episode of Verchast. I don't know if anybody noticed, but I was just so excited to talk about anything that wasn't the virus for an hour,

• 1:24:29Nilay Patel?

  that we were all over the place. So sorry if we were a little sloppy. We'll be back on Tuesday with the interview episode. We are currently scheduled, I'm very excited about this, to get FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. But who can know the future? Who can know what will happen between now and the date that we're scheduled to conduct that interview? But I'm hoping everything just lines up and we do it. That'll be exciting. She really wants to talk about, right now, in the moment of the virus, we are straining our broadband networks higher than ever because everyone's at home, working from home. So I'm excited to have that conversation. And then we're gonna keep doing the chat show. We'll just be a little bit more distributed from each other. So apologies if our sound quality goes a little sideways. I suspect every podcast is gonna be making this apology. So just tweet at me with your best podcast sound quality apology because I'm in the market for best practices.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  I'm gonna need one for this episode in particular because it turns out that my backup recording took, but my main recording didn't. So this'll be fun.

• 1:25:21Nilay Patel?

  Okay, you can tweet at us. I'm Reckless, Dieter's Backlon, Paul's future Paul. We'll see you on the other side. Rock and roll.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  Paul. Wash your hands.

• 1:25:48Speaker 05

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