327: Pixel 3 review, the new Palm phone, and Google antitrust violations

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• 0:00Nilay Patel?

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• 0:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, Ericsson is about to change the game in cellular networking with high-speed, low-latency 5G. Find out what the future looks like at ericsson.com/5g. That's Ericsson, e-r-i-c-s-s-o-n.com/5g.

• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast for the week of whatever week this is. We've never gotten that right either. Anyway, this is the flagship podcast of verge.com. We're back up to two podcasts because Why'd You Push That Button, Season 3 is out. Ashley and Caitlin, the tough topics of modern life on the internet. Why'd You Push That Button is back. I love that show. I'm so happy it's back. I'm so happy that I can say that we have, once again, a fleet of audio programming for you. So stop listening to this, pull over in your car, stop listening to this, go find Why'd You Push That Button? Listen to that. Their first episode of Season 3 is, Why Do You Delete Your Tweets? It's a spicy one. They get into it. It's really good. You should go listen to it, subscribe. But we're here. I'm Neelai, your friend. Paul is here. Hello.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  Dieter Bohn is here. Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Yes. Dieter cut a palm scoop.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  That's what happened. Pre-Central Zone, Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  How are you, buddy? Dieter, you actually had two big stories this week. There's like a lot going on in the mobile.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Three, Eli. It was three, thank you very much.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  Was the third one?

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Uh, Intel's story.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that went up today.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  That one's not so big. Yeah, but it's there.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  I haven't read that one.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I'd say it's medium sized, not, you know, necessarily large like a laptop, but not small like a phone, just kind of a medium sized story.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  There are like two sides to it that you could like fold up to go, yeah.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  All right. Anyway, well, maybe we'll get to Intel later. I would say there are a few huge stories. This is basically going to be a mobile mobile phone oriented show today. The Pixel 3 review, which Dieter did. Google changed the way that Android is licensed in Europe, which is a huge deal that we're going to talk about. And then I thought this was going to be really silly, but the audience interest in this blew me away, which is that Palm has released a little baby phone to go with your big phone. And there's like photos of Steph Curry wearing it around his neck like a necklace. And people love it. They are freaking out over it. So we got to talk about the Palm phone. And then there's an Apple event on the 30th, and that got announced today. So there's just a lot going on.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  And, uh, Dieter went to Intel. Just, just, just to remind you. All right. Let's start with, let's start with the Pixel. We have been talking about this phone for so long, and now you have it, you reviewed it. There was a wave of coverage between the event and sort of reviews coming out. But I think your review is actually the review. So what do you think?

• 3:29Speaker 01

  I think that it is a stupendous phone. Shout out to people that remember when I called the last Pixel stupendous, or the first Pixel stupendous. Palm, Palm, god damn it.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Google.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Google took all the things that people were unhappy about with the Pixel 2 and then it fixed them.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  That's like, that's, yeah, that honestly is the big, the big takeaway for me. It changed the way the camera works a little bit. It fixed the screens, uh, made the bezels smaller, which, you know, you end up with a notch, which I'm sure we can talk about quite a bit. But the smaller Pixel 2, for example, it just looked crappy, right? It looked like a cheap phone. It just did. It had big fat bezels and it was just kinda meh. And now the smaller Pixel 3, it feels like it, you know, might deserve to cost, what is it? 750 bucks or something? It actually like is a phone that looks like it deserves to cost that much money. And yeah, I, I don't know, like we can, we can really get into like anything you want, but the big takeaway is they took the stuff that was like not great about the Pixel 2 and they fixed it. And then they also introduced a notch.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Okay, so something that really stood out to me with this, now that you've actually used it for a while, was performance. And this is, you know, I think we all agree that this is not as fast under the hood as the iPhone. And it doesn't have as much RAM as certain phones out there. So I was really curious about if this felt good and how confident are you that it will stay fast?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  So it feels very good. My confidence in it staying fast is not as high as I would have guessed six months ago, I guess, because the, the Pixel 2 started to be a little bit draggy. But it does, it does feel quite fast. Now, it is not anywhere near as powerful under the hood as an iPhone XS. But I guess like, I don't know what Android would do with that much power, honestly. There's stuff they could do that they're not able to do, I suppose, in terms of like gaming and VR, but it's more than fast enough for me. It feels definitely faster than even like an S9. An S9 is plenty fast, don't get me wrong. But like this feels a little bit smoother. It just feels more optimized, just at the like a really base software layer. About the RAM? Shut up.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  I don't care that it only has 4G RAM. I just don't. Everyone that's like, it only has 4G RAM, shut up. Just shut up. It's, it's faster RAM. It's LPDDR4X or something. And so it's lower power and faster, whatever. Not a problem. The like, I haven't had stuff forced close on me. I'm sure that if you wanted to, you could, you could do it. But I think that's a, that's a nothing burger of a drama, nothing burger of a gate. There is a gate that other people have said is a nothing burger that I think is an actual problem with this phone, which is it scratches really easily. And anybody who says otherwise is fooling themselves.

• 6:16Nilay Patel?

  Dieter and Dan came up to me during the interview period and said, hey, put this phone in your pocket. And I put my phone, which is the white one into my pocket with my keys, just like shook my pocket with my hand, like very lightly. And then I pulled it out and it was scratched in a way that does not come out like immediately without question scratched. Which I keep my phones in cases now. I've just become a case person. So it kind of doesn't bother me, but.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:41Nilay Patel?

  It, I mean, it's, it scratches like instantly.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you can mark it up really easily. So if you like lightly drag a key across it, you'll see a mark that is like, oh my God, terrifying, but it'll wipe off. But anything harder than that, or any, any more pressure than that, like the matte glass on the back, they did this matte finish. It totally does scratch. In fact, I kind of think the glossy part of that also is a little bit scratch prone. So I have for a wedding ring, a tungsten carbide ring, which is the hardest metal that you can get it on a wedding ring. When you buy it for $8 from Amazon, there's probably harder metals, but it's an $8 Amazon wedding ring, uh, which is great. Cause when I lose it, I can just buy another one and nobody will know.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And I just like super lightly pulled it across the back of both the glossy part and the matte finish. And that scratched it. Now that's not fair because tungsten carbide is definitely harder than Gorilla Glass 5. However, I did the same thing on the back of an iPhone XS and it did not do a thing. Same pressure, same, you know, whatever. So yeah, sorry. Like get a case.

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it comes down to the matte being a thing.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so here's a funny thing. I ended up choosing the Pixel 3 instead of the Pixel 3 XL. Not because of the notch, but because I knew I'd want to definitely put a case on this phone. And I would rather have a case on a small phone than a case on a big phone.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's interesting because I, I only have the little one and I desperately want to switch and try the big one for a while now.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  The alternate way to do this is you just scrap, you, you take it out of the box, you take your keys, you put a nice big scratch in the back. And then you never have to stress about it.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like it's already scratched. I'm done.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Like the, the paint is chipping off of my iPhone 7. Like I'm going to have a phone for a while. I've never successfully resold a phone. So I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna live with it.

• 8:25Nilay Patel?

  If you are a phone reselling company and like to buy ads on the Vergecast, this is, would be where I would mention some of you, but I will not at this time. They exist, though. Um, that's not how that would work at all, but think about it. Anyway, Paul, you asked about the scratching.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  No, I asked about performance and Dieter somehow segued that into scratching.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's just not that much to say about it, like performs really well. So Paul, you asked about performance. My read on it in staying fast, my read on it is iPhones have so much headroom that you never actually use their performance until the way end of the life cycle. So right now, in this moment, on this day, I don't think the 10 and the 10S have a noticeable performance difference outside of some 10S neural engine stuff, right? That they can, they're doing with the camera, for example. Right. AR stuff is faster because of the neural engine, but that stuff to me seems pretty marginal. Opening webpages and reading email and looking at Instagram is exactly the same.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, that's the thing, though. That's the problem with the world as it exists currently. Opening webpages is the hardest thing that your phone has to do constantly. It's constantly cycling hundreds of megabytes of JavaScript in and out of memory and just-in-time compiling JavaScript for ads that track you all over the internet. And it's really frustrating. I'm sorry, but you need as much performance as you can.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  The A12 has a, has a lightning-fast JavaScript engine. It's way faster than even like a MacBook Pro now. It's crazy. So that is improved, but I just think over, saying Apple has a lead in performance versus a Snapdragon right now is like, they will feel qualitatively the same to you, but three years from now, your iPhone will hold up and you know, you know, your Android phone is kind of operating at its limit the day you buy it. Right, and I think that's, that's really the thing.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I could argue that, that iPhone can't feel faster at like some operations. But I think that a much bigger impact on your experience of the software is going to be the, the tuning of the software, how they choose to open up animations, can the thing actually open up apps relatively quickly? And I think that you'll get much more out of that on how they tune and optimize the software, Android versus iOS, than you will out of more clock speed.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Dieter, I'm going to ask you about the display minus the notch.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  So the Pixel 2 display, can we just all agree, now that the Pixel 3 is out, can we just all agree the Pixel 2 display was not good?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  The Pixel 2 XL display was not good. Nope, not good.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  They didn't want to admit it.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 11:03Nilay Patel?

  And they said we were overblowing it.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  They hit very hard that it was color accurate. And the very first thing I did was I set down Pixel 3 XL next to a Pixel 2 XL, set them both to the natural color profile and just looked at them. And you know what? One of them was brown and muddy and grainy, and one of them was sharp and clear and vibrant.

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Is that enough? Like, I would have used a Pixel 2 this whole time much more happily, because I didn't like looking at the screen, which is a really important thing on a phone.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I, I used a Pixel 2 all year, and I don't know, you get used to it, man.

• 11:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Who are you going to believe? Your lying eyes? The spec sheet. So they fixed the display.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  So the screens, the, the 2, the 3 XL is made by Samsung, but apparently the Pixel 3, according to iFixit, is made by LG, on, on both of their teardowns. Which is fascinating to me, because they, to my lying eyes, look very, very similar. I don't see a massive disparity between them. And when I talked to Google for the review, because, I mean, I'll just tell you, if you go to the home screen, have the big white home button, and then you immediately go to a gray screen, which was the thing that caused the burn-in scare last year, you can see the afterimage of the home button. Now, it goes away, and they've done a bunch of stuff in software to like mitigate against burn-in. So for example, like half, Google's almost hit 50/50 parity for whether the nav bar on the bottom will be black or white, depending on what Google app you use.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  I think they're at like 48/52 technically right now. So that helps mitigate burn-in, but I do not expect there to be a burn-in drama or controversy here. One of the things that they've done is I think they're paying much more attention to yields, and they're, they're much more likely to take the good stuff off the line than they are to take the, like, the garbage castoffs that I think they got for the, the Pixel 2 XL.

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, now we have to talk about the notch. It's huge. I haven't seen you. You were here for the event. You went back to San Francisco sometime and then you like, you know, published a review and I read it and you're like, you just get used to it. And I was like, what happened to him?

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Walk us, walk us through the timeline.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Do you, are you, are you or are you not used to the notch on the iPhone X?

• 13:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm used to it. I will say, one, it is very much smaller.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  So I look at the notch in the same way that I look at like a silly word or just a normal word. Like you'll just be looking at a word like, I don't know, blue. And then you're staring at it. And then all of a sudden, it doesn't even look like a word anymore. It just looks like some weird squiggly lines and like, it ceases to like, have that immediate like, oh, you don't see the word. You just see the idea color blue, but then you're actually looking at the, the actual letters on the page and like, it looks strange. If you look at the notch, it looks doofy as hell. It just looks dumb. If you just look at the screen, the notch eventually does the thing that the word blue does when you don't like, look at it as a thing on a page. It just becomes like the idea of the word blue. It just becomes a screen.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  But how long? How long? Is that a 30 minute process?

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Paul wants the timeline. I'm telling you that I disagree with your philosophical trickery, my friend.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  I will say that I saw on Reddit that there is a term for that thing that happens when you think about a word too much.

• 14:18Nilay Patel?

  Willful blindness?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:20Nilay Patel?

  Fanboy regression?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Can I give you guys a little piece of inside baseball? I chose to call this notch doofy instead of goofy. Cause I think doofy is a funnier sounding word. It's a combination. It's like, it comes from nowhere, right? But like in my head, it's like goofy, but also it's dumb. So it's doofy. So TechMeme decided to link to the story. Thank you very much, TechMeme. But they rewrote, they always rewrite their headlines. And so they rewrote doofy to goofy. They said the notch looked goofy. And so I like, I messaged them on Twitter. I was like, no, the word is doofy.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Did they change it?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  And they changed it.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  Beautiful. All right. So what is the timeline? Answer Paul's question.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Like half an hour. But the, the thing is, There's an option in developer settings to hide the notch, but what they need to do is make an option to, that's better for hiding the notch, where it will just put status icons up there, but leave it black, and then still give you an extended screen. Instead, it just pushes everything down and just completely eliminates the notch.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  Wait, really?

• 15:16Speaker 01

  You want a middle, yeah, well, that's a developer setting. So it's not an actual official setting that they've released to hide the notch. It's a thing that you do if you want to test Android phones to see if your app will work with various sizes of notches. So people are, people have been saying, like, there's a developer setting to fix it. And it's like, that's not what it's for. The developer setting is there to test phones against various notch sizes, and you're repurposing it. Google has said they're going to release a setting to do something with the notch. And if and when they do, I'm hoping they'll have a more elegant solution to what to do with that space if you want to hide the notch.

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  But philosophically, it's the color, it's the word "blue." And if you just refuse to acknowledge its composition, then it just fades into a conceptual reality for you that you, you can live with.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Look, if you're in your car, I want you to pull over, and I want you to look at the clock on your dashboard. And don't just look at, don't just read the time. Look at the actual numbers. Look at the, like, the 2, or whatever time it is right now. And just, it's a weird, just glyph, and it kind of looks funny, right? Now, you're good, you're driving, drive again, you're allowed to drive again.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  Drive again.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  And in five minutes, you're gonna check the time, you're gonna look, gonna look at the clock, you're not gonna see what the, you know, the clock looks like, you're just gonna see the time. That's how the screen works.

• 16:31Nilay Patel?

  Again, you're, I think that you're, you're making it, it's an elegant conflation.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Metaphor, yeah. It's also complete bullshit, because this, the notch looks stupid.

• 16:41Nilay Patel?

  Right, because the glyph, the 2, which looks silly when you consider it qua itself, actually is like, provides utility. Whereas the notch just looks, as you have already said, doofy.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so this is where we, like, did Google justify the notch? You get a louder speaker, the speakers sound great, and you get a wide-angle selfie. And here, I will suggest that Neelai is being a hypocrite, because he is super hyped for the wide-angle selfie.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I have a smaller phone that has no notch. I got, I got all the things you got, and I got none of that going on. But it is true, we should just go to the cameras, because we're never gonna, we're never gonna, we're never gonna convince anyone that this thing is good or bad. You either like it, or you don't. Or you can look past it, or you can't.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  I don't think anybody likes it. I think you either you either accept it or you don't.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  You know who doesn't, this is kind of a tangent, but you know who doesn't accept their notch? Apple. I'm so sick of that commercial with that stupid planet audit that hides the notch. That is, that's basically lies.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Everyone does it, though. Everyone does like a dark background to like, kind of get away with it. Anyway, cameras. So, uh, agree. Dieter and I, I literally, the comment in the Google Doc when I was editing the review was, we're gonna have this fight about the wide angle camera.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Well, and then by the time I read the comment, I'd already changed my mind. I had written something, I had written something that I was like, you know, it's, it's fine. It's wide angle. I don't care that much. And then like, as I like, was sitting on it and using it just a little bit more, I was like, oh wait, no, this is great.

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  To me, I think Google's entire framing of, of Google at this event was, we're here to help you. We've identified some problems you have, and then we have like, built some solutions for those problems, right? And everything they did with the phone, uh, kind of fits into that frame extremely well. So, there is call screening, which we can talk about, but you get a lot of robo calls. Now, Google robot will answer your phone for you. That's great. The wide angle selfie one to me is an even more brilliant kind of approach, because people take a lot of selfies and we know that the demand to take selfies from slightly farther away is so great that you can just buy it. You can literally buy a stick to make your camera go farther away from you.

• 18:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? So if you like, if you're just looking at that, there's enough market demand here that selfie sticks exist. Then of course you're gonna put another lens on the front and let people zoom out. And when you demo that to people, when I've showed people the phone, that's the thing they're most excited about. The call screening thing, which is arguably much more intense and impressive and cool, is just kind of like, oh, whatever. I just hang up on people anyway. This is like, oh, I want that. That's a thing I want on my phone.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  What snowblinded me to it, I think, was I've seen, and this like gets into the story of everything else they've added to the camera, but I've, we've seen so many Android phone makers release, come out with a new phone and be like, look at all the crap the camera can do. And it's all stupid.

• 19:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And some of those people, some of those Android manufacturers have made wide-angle selfie lenses and given them stupid names. And so I was sort of terrified testing this phone that I was gonna, it was gonna feel Samsung-y. Now, I don't think that's the case at all, and I don't think that's the case with the wide-angle selfie camera either. But I also don't wanna like, give Google credit for being a masterful genius and coming up with, you know, nobody's thought to do this before. Yeah, lots of people have, but they just like, they did a meh job of it. Like, Google did a pretty good job of it. Although, the wide-angle selfie camera is not quite as good a quality as the main selfie camera, in my opinion.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  No, I think, I think you're absolutely right. It's, it's clearly a worse camera. And neither one of them is particularly brilliant to begin with, but it's super useful. And I think people will pick useful over quality in everything in technology, 10 out of 10 times.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  The MP3 story.

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  To that point, like, cause I've seen a lot of this on Twitter, like, oh, everybody's so excited about this phone, but all these other phones already have this feature. Like, I think this is important, this is why it's interesting to me that Google's making a phone. Now, they've done it three times. That it's an integrated experience, it's an all-in-one experience. This is what I've always liked about Apple, is that they have thought about your whole experience end-to-end. And when they add a feature, they're gonna integrate it with the whole experience, it's gonna feel native and natural, and it's not gonna feel like a Tacton gimmick.

• 21:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's an element to that where it's still Android, you know what I mean, where they can't. And I don't mean that, I don't mean, that sounds way more pejorative than I meant.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Wait, explain that, please.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  So like, Apple, Apple controls the entire experience with an iron fist. So they're like, we're gonna change how email works on the iPhone. And they just like change it at the OS level. And, and then sometimes you're like, I'm gonna send an email and you're dumped into Apple's email experience, right? Like, there's no way out of it. Apple's like, here's how sharing works now. And that share sheet is just, it's full of, you know what I mean? Like.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  You know what? My, my big pet peeve on Apple right now is on iOS. Every time I click a YouTube link, it opens the in-app browser. Then I click the Safari icon, it loads Safari. And then I have to scroll, pull down to get that open in YouTube, like little banner. And so it's like, it's a lot of work to, to open YouTube on iOS.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  I, I have different problems. So that's like a really good example, right? How Apple handles deep linking in its system is oftentimes it doesn't work. And sometimes you get these weird redirect loops.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, my favorite was when I go back to open Safari and then like it, the last thing I had opened was a YouTube link. And all of a sudden YouTube opens and I don't know why.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it just dumps you over. So that's like, that's like a good example of Apple is like tightly in control of this experience. And sometimes it works really well and sometimes it's crazy. With Android, I don't, Google philosophically does not want to be in control of that experience in that way. Right? So they can build features and they integrate them into the system, but they don't push them into everything the way that Apple does. So I, I agree, like again, I didn't mean that to sound negative. It's still just Android. It's just, there's more Google stuff there to fill in the gaps of Android. As opposed to, say, a Samsung phone where you're like, I'd like to send an email. And you get a picture of four email clients, Verizon's email client. And then like some like weird Samsung experience that you didn't want.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  Like, that doesn't happen because Google's cleaned that up. But the ability for that to happen is still there, which I think is is is good.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Well, that, yeah, that's what why I'm very seriously planning on buying a the Pixel 3. I want some of this flexibility. I have lacked flexibility for so long. I want flexibility, but at the same time, I want a manufacturer to think through the experience end to end. At least have one user flow in mind. And if I want to go off the reservation, I can, but at least they've thought through one full use case.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. So we should talk about the back camera, which is the, I mean, it's the thing.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  So here's a, here's a thing that is going to make Neelai talk for 20 minutes straight. The most surprising thing to me about testing the rear camera on the Pixel 3 was how much I dislike the back camera on the iPhone XS. I was just like, oh, wow. Like, the, the, the Pixel 3 is an iterative update in quality over the Pixel 2, for sure. It's better for me in low light for some reason, especially with like handshake. I don't know if they've done anything in particular to resolve that. They've warmed up the colors a little bit, which we could have debates over. There are some cases where I think the Pixel 2 looks a little bit nicer, just because it's like more dramatic in some way or more photographic is the thing. James Barham on our team keeps saying, and I think he's right. But it looks probably nicer on a phone to be a little bit warmer.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  And in general, like, there's a bunch of features that we can talk about, we can get into all of them. But like, in terms of raw quality, it's like, it's a step up, it's nice, and they, they change these things a little bit. But mostly what I was doing was like, for the first time, doing a head to head between the iPhone XS and the Pixel 3. Because I didn't do that with the, um, the XS and the Pixel 2, because I wasn't involved in that review. So I didn't like see with my own eyes, like, man, the, the XS is just like, it's just, it's try hard. It is a try hard camera. It's trying way too hard.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  It does a lot. It occurred to me playing with the Pixel 3. It's really only like the, the second generation of these computational photography cameras, right?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, they didn't, I mean, the Pixel 1 camera was good, but it wasn't anything like the Pixel 2 in terms of quality.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  And it's Apple's first crack at it, really. They did HDR before, but this sort of like, honestly, the way these cameras work now is more like a video camera than a still camera. So if you want my like deeply philosophical read on this, these cameras are no longer capturing a moment in time, right? Like you think about an SLR, you push the button, it goes chink and like however long that shutter is open is the moment in time you've captured and thus it shall be. These cameras are taking basically videos, right? They're they're frame by frame, they're adjusting the setting of that capture, but they're capturing four frames into a buffer and then they're constructing a photo. They're basically video cameras. Like, someone's gonna tell me I'm wrong and I probably

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  am on a specific level.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  The only little twist there is video is kind of like a series of still images.

• 26:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. Okay. So go with me on this. This is where I was going.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  But video doesn't record a series of still images anymore. It now like records the changes in the images.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it does all kinds of interlacing and the iPhone will do interframes at different exposures when you record in 24.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  So cameras have become video cameras and video cameras have become.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  The software thing.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  The only reason I bring this up is the idea that you're gonna take basically a series of frames, a video, and then collapse that into an image that's supposed to represent a moment in time is brand new. Like, it didn't really exist before, especially not in real time. Like HDR existed. Even with HDR, you were you were taking a long exposure and a short exposure and you were merging back highlights into your short exposure, right? Here, or the other way around. Here, you're it's just it's just doing something else. It's.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Well, this is like the whole question. What does a what does a raw image mean in this in this world? Like, there was the whole long blog post from Halide, and then there's like the computational raw that you can get out of the Pixel 3. It's like, what does it even mean for it to be a raw image? Because it's still combining a bunch of images together.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. So computational raw on the Pixel. So they have a thing called computational raw which will spit out a DNG file, which is Adobe's RAW format. It is everything through the HDR chain, except the compression to JPEG.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:27Nilay Patel?

  So it takes the raw thing and puts it through the HDR chain and then it just doesn't deliver you a JPEG.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  I think it doesn't do as much coloring as the JPEG, at least the example I saw. But I haven't been experimenting that much.

• 27:43Nilay Patel?

  Right at that JPEG compression stage, it does the final like, it sets a bunch of levels.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 27:49Nilay Patel?

  Compresses JPEG and throws everything else out. So it doesn't do that last tweak to say, okay, here's how the JPEG should look. We're gonna throw away all the other dynamic range. So you can, you get a DNG that's like, the HDR merge from the Pixel, and then you can do that stuff on your own. You can do that with Apples, when you shoot raw with Halide on a 10 or 10S or whatever, you get that too. Anyway, my point of all this is, I'm really picky and I'm very harsh on the 10S camera, I know. But like, there's a part of me that's forgiving because literally no one else has ever tried to do this before. And these cameras are like fundamentally magic. Like, when you like really think about how small these sensors are, and what Google can do with like their zoom function to

• 28:30Nilay Patel?

  to measure handshake and get extra resolution, it is crazy town. So I'm like, there's a part of me that wants to be more forgiving. And then there's a part of me that looks at a 10S comparison photo with a Pixel 3 and says, the hell are you doing? Just like, let me stop doing this. And I, you know, eventually the 10R will come out and we'll get another crack at it and we'll do it all over again with the Pixel 3. I will say that in many of the comparison photos of the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 3, I prefer the Pixel 2.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  For no reasons other than aesthetics. I think the Pixel 2 just, those photos are crunchier and more contrasty and more dramatic in a way that I really, by the way, Dieter was like, you know, I was gonna talk for 20 minutes and I've just been rambling.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  I do wonder what's gonna happen when the software updates come to the Pixel 2, if they're gonna adjust the Pixel 2's like color temperature and overall stuff to be closer to what the Pixel 3 does.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  That's like a super interesting, because they're adding a bunch of camera features back to the Pixel 2.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't, I can't remember the list of what is and isn't getting added back, I'm sorry. I should know, but I don't remember. There's like, half of them are.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  The big one is the night sight, which we, no one has yet, right? The long, the long exposure nighttime stuff. Anyway, look, I don't- I don't quite get what Apple's doing. They're very confident in what they're doing. But I just find that camera to be noisy, basically. And then their noise reduction makes everything look like a mosaic of colors. Google is pretty good at preserving detail, but the Pixel 3, we haven't actually said this yet. The Pixel 3 looks more iPhone-y than the Pixel 2, right? So it brings out more shadow detail. It's a little warmer. It's a little less contrasty. They're, they're getting towards a more pleasing image as opposed to the very dramatic sort of art shots of the Pixel 2.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  I, I would like an option, maybe there's an option, I just don't know. It's just, some of these sample photos from the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 3 look a little more HDR than I'm necessarily comfortable with. And so they look very pleasing immediately, but on examination, it's like, everything is just so perfectly exposed. And that's just not, that's not photography. And it kind of almost matches how it feels to see where, when you're looking with your eyes. Everything seems to be correctly exposed because you adjust so quickly. But photography typically has-

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  You can turn off the HDR, but I don't know how much you lose in terms of the other stuff when you turn off the auto HDR. I think it becomes much more like a standard dumb camera when you do that. When you turn off HDR on the XS, it produces basically garbage. Like, it's not great. Even though the sensor's bigger-

• 30:59Speaker 02

  I just want to dial, I just want to turn it down 50%.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  That question you're asking, like, does this look like photography or does it look like your eyes? Another deeply philosophical question about cameras on this episode of The Vergecast. The camera makers will tell you, they're going for eyes. They are going for what your eye, what your eye sees. That's what we want to capture. And I don't know if that's everyone's expectation. I don't know if that is good.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  It just depends on the, on the mood. Like, the zoom aspect, that was something that, for me, that's like, these are things I can see in the world that I want to be able to zoom in on them better. And so that's really exciting. And so I don't, in every case, want something that looks like a photograph. But every once in a while, it's nice.

• 31:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  I mean, that's the whole depth of field aspect, right? It's just to look like a photograph. It's not how it feels to see.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, your eyes don't produce, like, beautiful bokeh. But people really like it and we're spending a lot of time trying to recreate it in these cameras. Okay, Dieter, wrap up the Pixel 3. What's your, what's your big takeaway? This is the phone to get?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  If you don't want an iPhone, then I think yes. I think this is the best Android phone and like running away. Now, there's, you know, other stuff coming out. There's a new Mate phone that Vlad's gonna review and it's got eight, no, it's not eight. It's, I think it's got three cameras on the back and there's other things that are gonna beat it on specs. The one big knock on it besides the scratching is the price. You can get pretty much everything on this phone minus the camera quality for like 500 bucks, right? Maybe even less if you get something a little bit used. So if you are not here for the camera and you're not that, you don't care that much about like really nice integrated software stuff,

• 32:39Speaker 01

  you can get the same specs as this phone minus the great camera for way, way less, which is cool, you know? But if, you know, price is no object and you want an Android phone, this is bar none, the phone I'd recommend to people.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  And would there be any reservations if you're not on Verizon or you don't want to join Project Fi?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  No.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Just buying it unlocked? Like, there's no reason to worry about that, right?

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Insofar as like it's a hassle to get it repaired if something happens because you gotta find like your local you break, I fix shop or something, which is a thing I've done. Like, that sucks. But if you're not worried about getting it fixed if you crack the screen or something, the unlocked phones, they've got wideband support. I had no problem with the Pixel 2 throwing multiple different kinds of SIM cards in it and having it work just fine on multiple carriers.

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  I love that phone manufacturers have figured this out with LTE because when LTE first rolled out, this was not a guarantee that they would be able to design antennas for every band of LTE and now it seems to not be a problem.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  Which is a delight. All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna listen to an ad from Ericsson who's sponsoring the show. Then Liz is gonna do This Week in Elon. And then I'm gonna tell you all about antitrust policy in Android in Europe. It's gonna be riveting. We'll be back.

• 34:02Speaker 03

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• 34:23Speaker 03

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• 34:57Speaker 03

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• 35:22Speaker 03

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• 35:25Speaker 03

  Lie back. Be present. Focus on real connections. Ericsson is bringing 5G to life. Breathe in. And breathe out. Repeat your mantra and feel the calm wash over you. 5G is here.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else, welcome to This Week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lopato, deputy editor at The Verge. This week, we will be talking about tequila.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  So Tesla Kila started as part of an April Fool's Day joke. You might remember, this is a series of posts that Elon Musk made on Twitter, you know, with himself propped up next to a Model 3, saying he'd been found, quote, "surrounded by Tesla Kila bottles." Anyway, he filed a patent for Tesla Kila. He says it's coming soon, which actually makes it a lot like the other merchandising efforts Musk has made this year via, well, this year and last year, via The Boring Company, right? So The Boring Company sold hats, then it sold flamethrowers, and it raised a bunch of money. So merch is pretty actually normal for high-end automakers. You'll notice that BMW sells hats, thermoses, luggages, and for some reason, $61 golf balls. Porsche actually created its own subsidiary for merch

• 36:54Speaker 04

  and sells everything from quilted jackets to Porsche-designed branded phones. Ferrari sells hats, driving gloves, $42 keychains, and $55 earbuds. But if the Ferrari keychain seems expensive to you, definitely check out the Maserati keychain, which retails at $163. So like, the reason why this happens is you don't have to be able to afford a BMW, a Ferrari, a Maserati, or a Porsche to be able to buy the merch. And you don't need to be able to afford a Tesla to buy the Tesla Kila. You can participate in the lifestyle. So Tesla does have its own accessory shop, where you can buy mostly men's and women's apparel,

• 37:39Speaker 04

  though not as of right now, short shorts. But there's like toy versions of the Model S, infant onesies, some mugs. So there seems to be an interested market for Musk-related collectibles throughout his companies, not just at The Boring Company, but also at Tesla. I do think it's a little weird, after all these years of campaigning against drunk driving, for a car company to sell alcohol, but it just looks like bad optics. It's not actually illegal or anything. And Elon Musk isn't actually opening himself up to any liability lawsuits unless, you know, he's personally serving the tequila and then encouraging people to drive their Teslas home afterwards, which I don't think he's going to do. I hope he's not going to do. So, you know, it's like a little weird, but it's Tesla. Weird it comes with the territory.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  So let's talk a little bit about tequila. So for those of you who don't know, it's a type of mezcal made exclusively from blue agave in Mexico. And mostly, it's people who drink it are in the US. And it's been really, really popular lately. It's been, you know, its sales have more than doubled since 2002. And celebrities are super into it. In fact, they have their own tequila brands. So you've got-- this is just going to be a funny list. I'm really sorry. You have Sammy Hagar, you have George Clooney, you have Justin Timberlake, you have P. Diddy, and even AC/DC has a tequila. Okay? So celebrity tequila is definitely a thing. But, you know, the thing that interests me about Musk's tequila is that it fits with another pattern in his businesses, which is that he likes to really do the hard thing. And tequila is, not only is it a fairly saturated market with a lot of like celebrity

• 39:08Speaker 04

  products in it, it's actually pretty hard to make. There's a long period of time that it takes agave to mature. And then on top of that, tequila has to be aged. Whereas if you were to pick something like vodka, you can make that out of literally anything, even agave if you wanted. And you don't have to age it. It works right away. So this is, this sort of fits with Elon's general interest in doing the hard thing. And there are like a couple of like, you know, things that are a little weird, right, about tequila generally, right? So, you know, there's the trade war, not just for China, where Tesla recently purchased ground for a new Gigafactory. I guess Donald Trump's hostile rhetoric towards Mexico has a number of tequila producers trying to see if they can expand outside the US market.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Again, like a lot of Musk's projects, this is tough, it's not impossible. And as branding tie-ins go, I think it's probably better than golf balls. Because one of the things that happens with merch is you start to see how companies like view the people who use their products, right? So there are people who golf. They're usually older, maybe not as hip. Whereas basically anybody who's over the age of 21 drinks tequila. So I think that actually Tesla tequila is a pretty good idea, and I am personally looking forward to tasting it. And that's This Week in Elon. I'm Elizabeth Lopato. Thank you very much.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we're back. Big thing happened this week. Huge. Could change Android forever in Europe. That's my setup. Are you guys appropriately wowed? So the European Commission fined Google 5 billion euro and said, "You have to break apart how Android is licensed." "You can no longer tie Android to the Play Store to Chrome in Search." So previously, if you want to make an Android phone, you sign up for the Android open source license. That's great. You get Android. You just do stuff with Android. But if you want to make stuff with the Play Store, you had to promise Google that you would not make any devices that ran a forked version of Android.

• 41:14Nilay Patel?

  So the forked version of Android I'm just going to keep referring to here is Amazon's Fire OS. Because it's the most famous one I can think of. It just is. There's lots and lots of other ones. But so like Samsung has ties in. The reason ties in is in a fork of Android is because it gets Samsung around this deal with Google.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's like a, there's a special exception where you can, you can do whatever you need to do in China.

• 41:39Nilay Patel?

  Because there's no Play Store in China. So that's, it's not an exception. It's just like reality.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  They won't knock you for releasing a forked version of Android in China because you got it.

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, people have no choice. But I'll come to China momentarily. So Google says, "If you want to use the Play Store and Chrome in Search, you cannot make Fire OS. You can't use any forked versions of Android." So that's one big restriction Google had. The second restriction was if you want the Play Store, which is the place where all of the apps are, and Play Services, which is where all the updates and APIs live, then you have to have Chrome as your browser and Google Search, and we'll pay you some money to put them on the home screen. The European Commission says to Google, "These are illegal ties. This is antitrust violation. You are illegally tying your products together." So you have to let people make forked versions of Android.

• 42:31Nilay Patel?

  You have to let Samsung make a Fire OS phone in Europe, in addition to their Google Android phones. And you cannot demand the inclusion of Chrome in search if people want the Play Store. You have to separate these three things.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Can I just say that I know you're trying to like very deliberately and carefully explain the situation here in terms that we can actually discuss it and like I commend you for it.

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  Thank you, Frank.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  But the fact that you just put the idea in my head that someday Samsung, the software quality expert, will release a Fire OS phone.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  100%.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Has me shook, just shook.

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  The word I used to describe that product, that hypothetical product in our post yesterday, was wackadoo. If Samsung wants to release a wackadoo Fire phone, they will, and I know that they will.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  By the way, the hierarchy and ridiculousness, like wackadoo is definitely in order of magnitude crazier than doofy, just to be clear.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's wackadoo. That's where they are. Okay, so Google says, all right, we have to comply with this thing. Here's what we're gonna do. They announced their plan. I'm gonna say this very directly to all of the people at Google who I know are listening to this. The blog post that was drafted, I believe, for Hiroshi announcing how they're dealing with Android in Europe is one of the most confusing and bad blog posts ever written. So you read it and you have no idea what's going on.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Do you think that that was intentional?

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  I have no idea, but we figured it out. We figured it out. It took us, me and Jake, the better part of the day making phone calls. We figured it all out. Here is what is happening with Google and Android in Europe. You can now license, you can just take Android open source and go and do whatever you're gonna do. You can take Android open source and you can get the Play Store and what's called Google Mobile Services, which is their collection of apps. So that's Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, all that sort of thing. You have to pay for that, right? Because the way Google makes money is Chrome in search. So now you can get an Android phone. You're in Europe, you're Samsung, you want to sell a phone in the UK. Well, not, UK is a bad example because Brexit.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  You want to sell a phone in Italy. You can build an Android phone that has the Play Store and YouTube and Maps and Calendar and never put Chrome in search on there. If you have Chrome in search for how Google made money, now they're going to charge you a license fee for the Google Mobile Services. So, think, just think in your mind, separate out the Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, whatever else. That's called Google Mobile Services, that's GMS. And then there's Chrome in the search app. Then, once you get the GMS license, you can further, if you want, get a Chrome in search license. Does that also cost money? That is free.

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  And if you are wanting to do some business with Google, you can go back to Google and say, "Hey, Google, we will put Chrome in search on the home screen like we used to if you pay us." And Google will happily pay you. I wonder if they'll pay you a similar amount of money to what you just had to pay to get Google Mobile Services? I, I am almost 100% certain that that is the case. When we talked to some folks yesterday, I would describe the response to that as kind of deflection.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  So, just to be clear again, the way Google works now, European device manufacturers always have to pay to get the Play Store on their phones. We don't know how much. I would love to find out. If you know, please tell me. So, you got to pay a license fee to get Play Store, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, all that stuff. You can then take Chrome in search for free, once you've licensed GMS. Can you get Chrome in search without the Play Store? You cannot get Chrome in search without the Play Store for obvious reasons. Namely, I think Chrome is deeply tied to the Play Services universe. Yes. Right? That was a quiz. You got, you passed. I nailed it. And you can get Google to pay you for placement of Chrome in search on your phone.

• 46:27Nilay Patel?

  Which suggests you might be able to get all the way back to zero. Which further suggests that the European Union accomplished nothing, but that's where I want Paul to jump in.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Just to make this more complicated, I want an edge case here.

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Chrome and Google Search are free.

• 46:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  But if you use Chrome and Google Search, if you set it as a default, or in some scenario, Google will pay you. Is there a scenario where you just have Chrome and Google Search, but you haven't checked all the right boxes, so you don't get paid?

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  The only box that you would not check in that scenario is did I ask Google for money? Right? If you're a device vendor, and you're giving up, if you're giving up spots on your default home screen for free, like you're, you're, you're just, you deserve to go out of business, right? Like.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Jimmy at LG is in big trouble because he always forgets to cash the checks.

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like Jimmy did it again. Jimmy, did you call Google? Come on, man. What are you doing?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  Lucky and Gold Star mad at you.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  This makes a lot of sense. I, I really, I really like the idea of Google selling a product.

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  So this was, so I would say the responses to this broke down into three main categories of things. One, this is stupid. The European Union is stupid because Google has just constructed a licensing scheme at which nothing will change. And that there's some validity to that, although I, I disagree on some, in some important ways. Two, this is good because now Google is actually selling a product, right? They're, they're, this is a revenue stream like that. So they're incentivized to make that a good product and not have be data collection. Well, I'm a little shakier on that one. And then the, sort of the third one was, is this just going to result in higher prices for consumers? Right? If you

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  have to pay $2 per device, or potentially way more, but if you're Samsung, you gotta pay some licensing fee per device, are you going to say, well, I gotta pay this licensing fee so that the Galaxy S10 is going to be $2 more now? All of that is unclear. I would say the first one, which is, this is stupid. We just ended up back at zero. The reason that one, to me, doesn't hit home is the opportunity for Samsung to go make FireOS phones didn't exist before. So there's an opportunity now for the biggest phone vendors in the world to take Android and do different things with it, which is. Yeah. I think really good. Well, and actually, I just want to point out that the, that opportunity is important because.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Android is 85% of the worldwide market. It's how like, it's like you get a huge app compatibility bonus. And so you remember like, I don't know, Sailfish, you like, like Migo, all the stuff that like, at the tail end of the smartphone wars, when BlackBerry and Palm and Windows Phone were finally dying. Nobody will ever be able to make another operating system again, because the first thing that we'll do on the verge.com is say, where's Instagram? And they'll go, huh, zip-a-dah. Yeah. And then we'll say, well, you're going to fail. And then they will. But if you're able to fork Android and still have some access to Android apps, you might, you'll have to open your own store and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then that is potentially the very first competition

• 49:46Speaker 01

  that Android has had in the worldwide market in, I don't know how long. This was Jake, Jake Cashnakas wrote a really good article to that effect on our site. Anyway, sorry.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Again, clarifying edge case. So now you can make your Fire Phone wackadoo. And then you can make your like, I don't know, like DuckDuckGo phone with F-Droid on it as your, your app store. And but you could also still make a Google blessed phone, right? You can do all of those simultaneously now.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Okay, two weeks ago, before this came out, Samsung was not able to make any Android-based phones in Europe that were not Google phones. They didn't have the full GMS license, didn't have the Play Store, didn't have Chrome in search. Well, it, it could have, but it chose not to, because then it would not be able to also sell Google phones. So Amazon did, could, did this and it failed. So the Samsung Galaxy wackadoo, they could have done it at any point, but it was too big a risk because they would not have been able to sell Google phones. Right, because their money is the S9. So if you want to make money selling Android phone, you needed the Play Store because you need the, you need the apps. You maybe didn't want Chrome and maybe you didn't want search. For example, say you are Microsoft

• 50:58Speaker 01

  and you would prefer to release a phone with Edge and Bing, but you know, based on your own history with attracting app developers to your mobile platform, that that's a pretty hard road. So now, this is, I think, the, the most interesting middle case in Europe. Microsoft could make a Surface phone that has the Play Store, but does not have Chrome in search.

• 51:21Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  That has Edge and Bing preloaded and Microsoft has enough money to like pay the fee for each device, which is hilarious because Microsoft will be licensing an operating system effectively. But just go with it.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  This is great.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  Um, but Microsoft could make a Surface phone that has the App Store and the various Google apps on it, but then their own browser and their own search engine preloaded onto and on Android. That is not possible in America, right? If you want to get access to the Play Store, Google demands that you have Chrome. That's just how that contract works here. So in Europe, they've broken it apart. So I think there's some argument that, yeah, the vast majority of Android phone manufacturers are going to take the money, right? And it's going to look exactly the same as it did before, but you've got some big, powerful players who can now provide real competition.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  And so I will say, there are so many exciting things. I totally could see a Microsoft Android phone very quickly.

• 52:19Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Paul, you just got excited about EU regulatory behavior. I just want to, I want to put a pin in that for the Vergecast audience.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  I, I am carrying my own pin. I am carrying my own pin for that.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  This is clearly a case of a government agency just picking winners and losers. Think of who wins here. All the people who are in some, in many ways, not in all ways, because they do rely on Google for Android, but in many ways competitors. And so the EU said-

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  They gotta go win. They have the opportunity to win. They have the opportunity to compete.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but they did it before.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  Picking winners and losers. You don't win because you, you don't, you don't lose because you suddenly have competition. Right? Like- They just got, they're just allowed to get to the starting line.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  No, it's kind of like, you know, the, the score is 90 to 30 and the game is over. And the referee named EU walks out of the court and blows his whistle and he says, I invented more quarters. Now you've got a chance.

• 53:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the, okay, just to map that hypothetical to reality.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:29Nilay Patel?

  Time does not end in reality.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  The, the European government did not invent more time for, like, the game isn't over. The game never ends. And that is maybe the most depressing thing I've ever said on this show. Right. So like the idea that you were gonna for all time like Google win because of what appears to be an unfair contract. The big philosophical distinction.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  All these parties, all these parties entered that contract willingly in the first place.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  No, they didn't. Right. They complained. They complained to the regulator. They complained to the state about the fact that these contracts were unfair and were foreclosing competition. And who else are you gonna complain to?

• 54:08Speaker 02

  Complaining to a ref during a game is different than starting a game with certain rules.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I love you, but this metaphor is so broken.

• 54:20Nilay Patel?

  But there's no, right. Like, it's just more time. It's more competition. So the EU's antitrust policy is very different than the United States antitrust policy in that it is dedicated to the idea that there should be competition in the market. Right? It's not the consumer welfare standard that we have in the United States. Actually, the FTC just held a hearing earlier this week to talk about that standard. Ben Thompson, who's sort of friend of the verge, writes for Techere, it's a great newsletter and blog that you can go read. You should read it. He spoke at that hearing and his takeaway was the United States is overly wedded to the consumer welfare standard that says prices have to go up for consumers for the government to regulate because everything is free now. Right? So that's like the United States where

• 55:01Nilay Patel?

  like in this moment, a philosophical change or just at least debate about that. In Europe, the idea is there should be competition. Right? And they're very aggressive with that. And I think here what they've created is the opportunity for competition because they think that more than dictating prices or dictating behavior will result in better consumer outcomes. I think that's like fair, especially when you're here and you're saying, well, Samsung can't even make a FireOS phone. Like, Google, Google has monopolized Samsung.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  Did you guys ever read that story with the chicken and she's making a meal and she asks all the other farm animals if they'll help her make the meal? And they're like, no, I'm busy doing other things on the farm. And then she finishes the meal and everybody wants to eat the meal. And the chicken's like, well, you didn't help anybody. Help me make a meal.

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  I feel very strongly that you've gone from a baseball game to a farm.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  No, it was a basketball game originally, to be clear. Now it's a farm.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Wait, where does like Wilbur the pig fit into this?

• 56:06Nilay Patel?

  Is that just a retailing animal farm?

• 56:08Speaker 02

  No, it's, there's a chicken and she's making food. I don't know. But the idea, it's just the idea, Google made this. Nobody forced Google to make this thing. It is an extremely valuable, important thing in our world. And so now that they've succeeded, now that they're important, now that they have a dominant market share, yes, dominant. Now they're under attack and they have to change everything up.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I think that's a, that's an absolute one way to look at it. I think the other way to look at it, which is the way that our government looked at Microsoft and Internet Explorer was it is anti-competitive to take your powerful thing and use it to prop up your less powerful thing. Right? It is anti-competitive to use your dominance in one sector of the economy to crush competitors in another one through contractual arrangements. So Microsoft makes Windows, it's great. We can bundle Explorer onto it. By the way, Windows PC manufacturers, if you want a reasonable license rate for Windows, you have to pre-install Internet Explorer and not put Netscape on your computer. Right? Yeah, they made Windows. They were, that's what, that's what they did. They were really successful at that.

• 57:19Nilay Patel?

  Should they be able to leverage that success and success in other fields?

• 57:22Speaker 02

  And look at them now. They're like, they're the third-rate, fourth-rate tech giant. They're almost a joke.

• 57:30Nilay Patel?

  I don't think, wow.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  That's the spiciest Microsoft take we've had on the show in a long time. You can follow Paul on Twitter.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  No, but I'm saying the government picked a loser. Yeah, because it's going to be hilarious. It's going to have the best Outlook integration of anything. It's got Excel spreadsheets all over the place, little like, I don't know. The government picked a winner and picked a loser. In that case, the loser was Microsoft.

• 57:59Nilay Patel?

  I don't agree that that's how winners and losers are defined. I don't think saying there's going to be competition. I'll come back to basketball, right? The Golden State Warriors win a lot, right? They won last year. Should they, are they just, should they just be the winner? Or should they have to play another season to try to win again?

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Paul, do you believe in the draft system?

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Uh, not really.

• 58:22Nilay Patel?

  Wait, for, for the military or for basketball?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  No, for sports, for sports teams.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  I want a sport, well, at least one sport to have a pure free market and no salary cap.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  No, no drafting.

• 58:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna, can I just button this whole conversation up by saying, right before we started the Vergecast, Paul, Paul and I were talking about Bitcoin and the combination of Bitcoin in a pure free market sport is like perfectly aligned. Bitcoin basketball with Paul Miller.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  All I know is I want to buy a Samsung Wackadoo now. Thanks a lot.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, please. Well, you'll have to go to Europe for that.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  I am less sympathetic to giant corporations and whether or not they should be allowed to win forever. I am more sympathetic to when people pay money for things. Do they have a range of options? Can they pick the best one? Can the market decide a winner as opposed to entrenched dominance, right? Without the necessity of major disruptive platform form factor shifts. So Microsoft, if mobile had not happened, I assure you that Microsoft's dominance would have happened, continued unchecked for some time, right? If the iPhone didn't happen, if we didn't shift this, if they weren't late to that. If Steve Ballmer hadn't been the CEO at that time, like, there's a lot of ways they could have won that fight, right? And they could have just kept winning. They didn't. So that's great.

• 59:41Nilay Patel?

  But there's not another one of those coming for phones. So I would rather that people have more options, whether those options are insane Galaxy Wackadoodles or Surface phones or whatever. And not for nothing, this is the one time, Paul, where I think you and I get literal international state level experiments to look at, right? Because the United States is not changing. So the, whatever happens, the US market, whatever happens in the European market, we're gonna diverge.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  A little A B test.

• 1:00:11Nilay Patel?

  A little A B test. With, with Britain in the middle, just super confused.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, uh, we should move right on. We really just did 30 minutes on Android licensing. I told you it was gonna be exciting. There was a basketball game.

• 1:00:31Nilay Patel?

  There's a farm. So many things happen. All right, Paul.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  Every week.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:37Nilay Patel?

  You hit us with a segment. It's been consistent. Same name, same idea.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Always.

• 1:00:41Nilay Patel?

  What you got?

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  It's called Playm this, and I'm stealing Dieter's thunder because we're about to talk about the Playm phone. But in the meantime, before you think about that, think about this, the world's thinnest phone. Dokomo is releasing a Kyocera phone called the Card Phone. K Y hyphen.

• 1:01:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  One L.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  Wow. See, now I think the government should pick a winner and a loser.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  It always goes. It's got a 2.8 inch e Ink screen. This is actually what's most exciting to me. I mean, at some point, I don't need my phone to be any thinner, but I do want an e Ink phone. I'm always excited to see someone mess around with the e Ink phone. This is an e L T E tiny phone that runs Android. It's got a whole web browser on it, which is obviously garbage.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  But it's a lot of fun. It looks like it's Japanese only, about $300. But there's a, there's a video on the site. You can check it out.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  I think we should go.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  The birds.com.

• 1:01:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  It's got, yeah, it makes beeps every time they do anything. Every time they touch the phone, it beeps. It's really interesting.

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  You know, there's nothing I miss more than that sort of like mid, late 90s to mid 2000s. The beep happens just like a half breath after you do something on a device. Or like, you know, like that's slow. Yeah, the little, that little like feedback latency that just made you feel like you were really using something. Like, I'm really punching these buttons right now. By the way, Dieter, I want you to talk about the palm phone. But we didn't mention this about the Pixel. Pixel has great haptics.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, the haptics are really good.

• 1:02:24Nilay Patel?

  Some of the best I've ever used on Android phone and.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's damning with faint praise.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  No, they're, they're, they're really good. I think LG had really good ones. And I think, I think there's LG screen, maybe a little LG haptic situation in there. They're really good. Anyway, palm phone.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:40Nilay Patel?

  This is your time, man. I got to rant about cameras. I got to rant about

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  EU regulatory behavior.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  If you, if you haven't seen the news, there's a little company in San Francisco funded by Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors and others decided they wanted to make a little phone, just an itty bitty tiny little phone. And so they went out in the world and they said, hey, we want to make this itty bitty tiny little phone. Oh, hey, it looks like an iPhone, whatever. And they needed to get it made. So they went over to China and they said, hey, which you guys want to make our itty bitty tiny little phone? And TCL said, hey, we're down to do pretty much anything for anyone ever. We'll do it. And these guys did the startup, the, who were like, you know, former Samsung guys are like, cool. Oh, by the way, we don't know what we're going to call this thing. And TCL was like, you know,

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  we promised the world that we were going to do something with this Palm brand, and that was a lie. We have no idea what to do with this Palm brand. Do you want it? And they were like, sure. That sounds great. We're going to call this thing the Palm co-pilot. And then Stephen Curry said, no, just call it Palm. It's like, it's like, they're taking the the off of Facebook. And they're like, cool, Stefan. That's, that's great. We totally agree.

• 1:03:50Nilay Patel?

  Isn't it? Wait, hold on. Dieter, isn't it Stephen Curry?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yes, but the story is funnier if I mispronounce it every time I say his name. And I have a different pronunciation every time. It is.

• 1:03:59Nilay Patel?

  Okay, just keep going with it.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  So then, these, these two guys now own, own the Palm brand. They licensed it from TCL. They're like, all right, now we got to release this thing. What are we going to do? I know. Let's make it carrier exclusive. And then they went around and they went to all the different phone carriers and they said, hey, you want this phone? We don't want anybody to buy it. We only want them to buy it if they have another phone and it's going to be their time well spent phone. It's going to be the tiny little phone they take when they don't want to use a big phone. And all the carriers went, nah. And then Verizon went, you know, we destroyed Palm twice. Not once, but twice we ruined that company. We ruined them when we didn't take the pre in the first place. And we ruined them again when we told them we were going to take the pre plus and make it our iPhone killer.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  But instead, we were just using that to play Google and then we put all our money into the Motorola Droid. So you know what? We owe you one. We owe Palm one. And the guy's like, you know, we're not. Not really Palm, right? And Verizon's like, shut up. We're releasing your phone. Please put all our software on it. And the guy said, uh, Verizon said, yes, everyone wants Verizon message plus for texting. And the guy said, okay.

• 1:05:07Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Wait, and then someone's like, oh, shoot, we're free out to put a logo on the phone. How do we, how do we spell Palm? I can't remember where does the L go? And so they wrote Plan.

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  That's true. And then they got Steph Curry to be their creative director.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Yes, he's their creative director.

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  Which is amazing. Uh, Harry McCracken, who's a great tech writer, wrote a big profile on Fasco, where he got to hang out with Steph Curry while he designed armbands. And he said, I'm really involved. This is a real thing. It's not just a joke. All of this sounds ridiculous. I will say, and I, I want Dieter to describe the, the, the experience of turning on Verizon message plus, because that is also a delight, but I'm just

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  It's all ridiculous, but people are super into it.

• 1:05:50Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's the one.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  I think we were all super surprised at the response to this story. Ezra Klein tweeted like, this is what happens when you look at smartphones as an addiction. Like this is the product that's, which is, that's a lot to say about the Plan phone. It is the most interesting sort of, hey, this is, this is a thing I didn't know I want. I wanted, but now I, now I want it because it solves a problem. Reaction to what is essentially just a very small Android phone. It's still an Android phone. You can put all the things on it.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  You can totally not time well spent your time with this phone if you want to.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's just, it's, all it is, is the framing of the phone as the one where you leave your phone behind is, is so resonant. Here is a reason to leave your phone at home.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  And now they've done, they've done a few things to make it like a useful second phone. So it shares your phone number and it also has hashtag life mode.

• 1:06:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Hashtag life mode, guys, where it's a combination of battery saver, do not disturb, and like weird airplane mode. So it turns on do not disturb for everything, but then when you turn the screen off, it actually shuts the radios off. So the thing just becomes completely nothing. And then when you hit the power to turn the screen back on, then the radios spin back up again so you can do stuff.

• 1:07:18Nilay Patel?

  So here, here's my question. Could you not at this time go on, I don't know, the Ebays, buy an iPhone SE for like 150 or 200 bucks?

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Stop it. I know what you're doing right now. You are trying to make me go on a rant about carrier phone number lock-in, and then once I've done it, I will be forced to write an article about it before the podcast goes up, and I'm not gonna do it. No.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  I think you should, first of all.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Damn it.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  No, but here's another thing that's true. If you have iMessage in your life, you're already an iPhone person.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  You can-

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  This thing looks like a tiny iPhone.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Right. You can just get an old iPhone, an SE that's small. You can turn off most of its notifications. You can not install a bunch of apps. You can even have, iMessage will send a text from your other number. If you have multiple iOS devices, you can say send from your primary number, and then you just have a little phone that you can leave your big phone behind.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  But nobody can call you.

• 1:08:12Nilay Patel?

  Meh. They can, they can FaceTime audio your iCloud address, man. There's ways.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  This is the frustrating thing. This is what I've realized with phones, that people think that their family members are going to be in a horrible accident and that they're gonna need to get called by a hospital. And so they think they need to have their phone with them and on and tied to their phone number at all times. Like, you run through your checklist of what you need your phone for that night, and you're like, ah, I'm not gonna use Apple Pay. Ah, I don't need that Instagram. I'm just gonna live in the moment. And like, ah, but hospitals, how are they gonna get ahold of me? I really think that is like the key.

• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  Right. So Dieter had this, Dieter had a line in his, in his preview, thinking of this as a really big smartwatch. It's like another choice you have is you could just get an Apple Watch with LTE and just leave. And not have any phone of any size. And then the hospital can call you.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  This is why this thing is so compelling is because people think they want just a dumb phone. They think they just want a dumb phone or they just want a watch. But they don't because in their heart, deep down in their heart, they know they're going to look at Instagram. They know they need it. And so they want to have the option. Or maybe it's on Instagram, maybe it's they know they need to call an Uber, right? Or they might have to check a work email. And so this thing lets you believe that you are getting the phone that lets you disconnect. But really, you don't have to. Like it's, it's, it's letting you have your, your cake and not eat it. Or no, it's letting you eat your cake and not have it. There's some variation on that.

• 1:09:50Nilay Patel?

  Letting you have a giant cake and a small cake and pretending the small cake is carrots, right? Like.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Yes, that's it, that's it.

• 1:09:57Nilay Patel?

  Like it's, it's just not, it's not a deep metaphor. It's like, it's just, you just eat, you just have more cake and you're like, that's not cake at all. Uh, no, this is me turning on, um, you know, the app timers on the iPhone and hitting give me 15 more minutes every 15 minutes. Like it's not effective. It's, it makes me ever so slightly consider my behavior. But then I'm like, no, I really do want to watch a little bit more YouTube right now. And I just keep doing it and that's the end of that.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:23Speaker 02

  Um, but I, I would push back on, it is a very silly, expensive, overwrought way to solve a problem of using your phone too much. At the same time, it's a signal to other people and to yourself that you're trying to use your phone less. And it will likely result in some improved behavior with your phone. If you think you have problem with how you currently use your phone.

• 1:10:48Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I think the fact that it's in fact, very small with, will make you not watch a bunch of video on it. Right? Like you're not going to use it as a TV unless.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  I wish they would just sell this phone. Just let me buy it unlocked. Just let, let me, let me, some people will just want this to be their phone. But you can't. You can only buy it as a phone for your phone. It's amazing.

• 1:11:07Nilay Patel?

  So tell me about the Verizon experience because you have to share the number and have the texting and

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Right, so if you are a iPhone user, again, just to like be really clear, you cannot use Get iMessages on this because it's an Android phone. Now, it's possible that, I haven't tested this, so it's possible you can use the default chat app and have your messages synced across, you know, something. And maybe someday when RCS chat launches for real, I'm still waiting on an answer from Google on when that's going to happen, that that will work and you'll be able to pick whatever, you know, RCS texting app you want. But right now, if you want to have your messages arrive on both phones and be synced across both phones, you need to use Verizon Message Plus, which is their carrier custom texting app, which is, it solves the iMessage problem but for text messages. They

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  get synced across multiple devices and that's a really nice thing to have. However, Verizon Message Plus wants to collect location data to give to the rest of Oath for directed advertising. It has an integrated eGift card feature. It gives you the option, if you would like, to have certain words in your, the text messages you receive be underlined so you can click on them to buy stuff.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  I was gonna make a joke, does it to give all your data to Oath?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  Of course it does.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Of course it does.

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  Without, without, without question, without complexion, without hesitation, my friend, Yahoo Sports has your text messages now.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you would like to not use the native camera on your phone to take a picture inside the app, you have the option to use the camera that Verizon has developed inside the app, which presumably has, you know, Verizon stickers and features and whatnot. That camera is called the Canvas Camera, Canvas with a K.

• 1:12:59Nilay Patel?

  Of course.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  They have their own custom emojis.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, what kind of stickers you got?

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  I don't know, man. They've got integration with Glimpse, G-L-Y-M-P-S-E, which is Verizon's Tell Your Family Where You Are at All Times feature.

• 1:13:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh my.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just goes on and on and on. So I'm not looking forward to that.

• 1:13:17Nilay Patel?

  You know, when Steph Curry announced the phone, he definitely tweeted from an iPhone. I'm just putting that out there.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  The people at Palm saw my tweet dunking. I got to say I dunked on Steph Curry, which is great. And they say that is, that was intentional because it's a second phone for your main phone. So sometimes you're going to use your main phone for social media, but you wouldn't use your Palm phone for social media. Cause that's your chilling phone. That's your life mode phone. So you would never tweet from your life mode phone. You'd only tweet from your iPhone, that thing that distracts you.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  But you wouldn't tweet from say your Android phone that syncs your text messages and uses the same app store.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  I think the moral of the story here is because we're all going to eventually get on this boat where we have like three different phones for different moods of, or different moods, basically. We gotta stop text messaging. Everybody needs to pick. It's going to be WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal. Can't be iMessage because it's not cross-platform. Can't be Facebook Messenger because Facebook is garbage.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Signal only works on one phone at a time.

• 1:14:20Nilay Patel?

  Our, our good friend Joanna Stern today in the Wall Street Journal,

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  wrote an entire story about trying to leave iMessage and how hard it is. And it was very funny to me because we, we like took our, we took Max to New Jersey to like visit Joanna's baby and like have cute baby photos over the weekend. And I was like, man, she's just not returning my texts. And then finally I realized that she had put her SIM in her Pixel. And I texted, I sent, sent his text message and she went on a long rant. And then that turned into a Wall Street Journal column.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  Which is amazing. But yeah, I mean, if Apple really, really cared about its users, they would put iMessage somewhere else. Right? Like that's like a, at the end of the day, if you want people to have a good experience, if you want to be, you want to be dominant in that way, you should just put iMessage on Android. I don't think they ever will because those blue bubbles lock people into their phones.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  Here's the most kumbaya thing Apple could ever do. They could say, hey, we've been waiting for an Android phone that we thought had security as strong as our secure element. And we think Google has finally achieved that with their Titan, whatever it's called, security chip in the Pixel 3. And now iMessage is available on the Pixel 3.

• 1:15:37Nilay Patel?

  Why would they bless their competitor that way?

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  I wasn't describing a kumayama, I was just dreaming, like a personal.

• 1:15:45Nilay Patel?

  How are you telling me that the state shouldn't regulate people and on the other hand, you're having fantasies about completely impossible corporate behavior? What is wrong with you?

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  By the way, the book I was thinking of is called The Little Red Hen.

• 1:15:59Nilay Patel?

  Alright.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  It was one of those little golden books back in the day. I'm sure Max would love it.

• 1:16:03Nilay Patel?

  There you go. And it's about capitalism on a farm.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:16:09Nilay Patel?

  Alright, I'm definitely reading Max this book. I'm raising Max to be a ruthless industrialist.

• 1:16:15Nilay Patel?

  Let's be clear. I know how the game is played. She's gonna achieve a dominant operating system share, and then you're gonna have to use her messaging platform.

• 1:16:24Nilay Patel?

  So it's already working in our family. Now, look, you can make an argument for why Apple Music is on Android, right? It is almost impossible to distinguish why iMessage is not, except Apple knows it locks people into their phones.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  The only reason that Apple Music is on Android is because it was there when they bought Beats and they felt bad.

• 1:16:44Nilay Patel?

  No, that's not why. Because they would just lose to Spotify if they were only converting their own phones.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  Right? If you want to roll up to Taylor Swift and say, "Sign an exclusive. By the way, 85% of the phones in the world will have access to your music." You can't make that deal, right? So you need that scale. So every argument you can make about Apple Music, you should be able to make about iMessage.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  What we need is celebrity exclusives for messaging apps. Think about it. Just think about it.

• 1:17:14Nilay Patel?

  I feel like you just saying that out loud means it's gonna happen. It's like Halloween time and you just conjured a spooky ghost out of nowhere.

• 1:17:28Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to wrap, we're running way over time here. Apple event on the 30th?

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:33Nilay Patel?

  Apple also did something kinda wacky. They invited Ashley to get another hands-on with the iPhone XR. Ashley and a bunch of influencers, Sarah Dichi, who has been on the show, she was on Circuit Breaker and I was on her podcast. Sarah Dichi was great, made a little hands-on video with the iPhone XR. Ashley's lives on our Instagram channel, it's on our Twitter, so go check out the XR again. It's a phone. I think it's the one that I think in this round of device reviews, it's sort of the linchpin, like, depending on how that phone goes, I think we're gonna, the other phones will get recontextualized, I'm excited for that one. But then this event on the 30th, I think we're expecting, what, iPads?

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  iPads and I hope the new Mac, the new MacBook. And then they'll show a picture of the Mac Mini and they'll just go, nah!

• 1:18:20Nilay Patel?

  Are they late on their Mac Pro or do they say that was coming next year?

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  I think the next year, they're not late on the Mac Pro.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. Didn't they miss the deadline on it, though? No, they went to, they put out, they did a story with Matt Penzinger on TechCrunch saying, "We're gonna be next year."

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  They said it won't be released this year and I was like, "Oh, so next year?" And they're like,

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  and then it turned out, yeah, that's what happened.

• 1:18:41Nilay Patel?

  So the invites for this event, everyone got a different one, like different renderings, the Apple logo, like different drawings, like some 3D ones. Obviously suggesting this is like a creative-focused thing. Photoshop on the iPad came out last week in Adobe Max. Actually, Dami Lee and I interviewed Scott Belsky on this podcast, the Chief Product Officer of Adobe, about Photoshop on the iPad. When they announced Photoshop on the iPad, Phil Schiller was on stage at the conference quoting Steve Jobs about how great Photoshop on the iPad is, which is wild. So you have to assume the iPad event, new iPad Pro, they're gonna show Photoshop, they're gonna draw a bunch on it. My invite, my Apple logo rendering is the most insane one that I've seen. It's something that I like to call "Apple Urban Camo."

• 1:19:24Nilay Patel?

  It just looks wild and I really hope they make a jacket in that pattern. But that's the 30th, so a couple of weeks from now. But I think new iPads. There's already been some renderings leaked?

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, of the iPads, there have been some renderings, or some, it's very clear that it's gonna be Face ID and no Home button, but that there won't be a notch for it, but it'll have thinner bezels and then they'll be in the bezels. And there was some concern that would only unlock in portrait mode, but Rambo on Twitter was like, "No, it will unlock in both, everybody relax."

• 1:19:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No headphone jack.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  I've got a dongle life update on that. I am, my new way to listen to Spotify is I've got some pretty nice headphones, I plug them into my iPad and then I use my iPhone, because I'm just playing threes all the time, and I control Spotify from my iPhone, but I'm listening to music because the iPad has a-

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Your entire iPad is now just a iPod that you can control from your phone.

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  It's an eight, $800 headphone dongle.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  All right, incredible.

• 1:20:26Nilay Patel?

  We gotta end it there. There's some stuff I want to tell you about. Why'd You Push That Button is back, it's at the top of the show. Go listen to Why'd You Push That Button? It's one of my favorite shows, one of my favorite things The Verge makes. So that is great. You can listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, you can listen to Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, and you can listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. Those are all excellent shows, available. Our Instagram, The Verge Instagram, this is a true story, we're at @verge on Instagram, hit a million followers today. Look at that. That is run by our wonderful social team, including Maria Abdolkoff, Ruben Salvadore, Kaitlyn Hatton. Like, they're doing great stuff over on Instagram, so go check it out. It's a lot of fun. And Ashley actually hosts a little Instagram news roundup every week. So go, go follow us on Instagram. Find a million of your friends and get us to 2 million.

• 1:21:11Nilay Patel?

  You can tweet at us, I'm at RecklessPaul, Paul's at FuturePaul, Dieter's at Backlawn. Paul definitely wants to hear about your basketball antitrust metaphors. Hey, did you buy a car?

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  No. I got my bike fixed up, but I'm, I'm just fine. I don't want a car.

• 1:21:25Nilay Patel?

  Just let me know, if you tweeted, "Get a bike" to Paul, and then he got a bike, let me know. Anyway, that's it for us this week. Thank you so much, that was Verge Cast. Rock and roll.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Paul.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Farewell, mobile accomplishers.

• 1:21:36Nilay Patel?

  That's so sad, Dieter.

• 1:21:55Nilay Patel?

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