The summer Intel fell behind / earnings for Apple, Google, Samsung / Nothing's Ear 1 earbuds

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Chaim Gartenberg discuss this week in tech news: quarterly earnings for the big tech companies, the state of Intel, and the Nothing's Ear 1 earbuds. Further reading: CDC reinstitutes mask recommendations for some vaccinated people Apple will require masks again in most of its US stores Communication around masks is still terrible Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine’s protection against severe disease holds steady over six months The pandemic made it even harder to check on the ocean’s vital signs Next Gen - the future belongs to young people The iPhone 12’s strong momentum helps Apple to another huge quarter Google sets all-time records as search and YouTube profits ... Microsoft reports weaker Surface and Windows revenue amid ... Samsung boosts profits and pledges to 'mainstream' foldables ... Amazon’s earnings show why Andy Jassy is now in charge The summer Intel fell behind Huawei’s P50 announced with Snapdragon 888 and HarmonyOS Leaked Surface Duo 2 photos reveal new triple camera system The Oppo Watch 2 launches in China with a promise of 16 days of battery life Nothing officially reveals its $99 Ear (1) true wireless earbuds Nothing Ear 1 earbuds review: almost something LG’s new true wireless earbuds have a privacy-conscious ‘Whispering Mode’ New Samsung Flip and Fold leaks show water resistance, renders, and an S Pen case White House says infrastructure deal includes $65 billion for broadband T-Mobile’s new prepaid offer is a direct play for the Boost customers it sold to Dish It’s not just you, streaming the Olympics is a mess Activision Blizzard employees walk out of work to protest rampant sexism and discrimination Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Alex Krantz and Heim Gartenberg join us to talk about earnings from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, and more. We go into what is happening at Intel. We talk about the Huawei P50, and we end with a little bit on Dish Network and T-Mobile. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, a flagship podcast of audio huddles.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  I should really make Slack pay me for that. That's... Anyway, I'm here. I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Dieter Böhm is here. I'm your EBITDA. Oh, you're generally accepted accounting principals. Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:11Alex Cranz?

  I am neither of those things, but I enjoy them. I don't know.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't enjoy counting and Heim Gartenberg is here.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's a lot going on this week. Every big tech company had earnings. They're doing fine. They're gonna, they're gonna make it one more quarter, guys. There's some rumors. There's some earbuds. There's just a lot to talk about. But I want to start where we always start, which is the pandemic, still the biggest story in the world. And it's back, everybody.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Yay.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  Aren't you excited? I feel bad for Delta Airlines, which currently has the worst branding in all of, all of industry.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, but they did. They did extend everybody's status for another year. They're just like, screw it. You can have it for another year.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  I didn't know that. And that's where the birch has is done, everybody. That's the most important news of the week.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  I was so sad about my status going away. I'm good.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  I mean, I got it. Maybe, maybe you didn't. I don't know.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Is Delta's status a thing to brag about?

• 3:08Nilay Patel?

  No, it's trivially easy to get.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  The only thing worse is United's status.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, the one thing about, this is already off the rails. The one thing about Delta's status is that if you live in New York City, you can make your entire personality Delta status and then go out and wander like the bars of New York City, finding other people with that personality. And you're like, here's how I got silver medallion. And someone's like, oh, I got gold this way. And you're like, how am I having a whole conversation about airline money?

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Wait a minute. I wouldn't even bother talking to somebody with silver. It's not even worth my time.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  You see what I'm saying?

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  It's just a real thing you can do in New York. And I've done it more than once, which I'm like, if you, if you saw me, you would notice I'm embarrassed by this. It's like a wave of embarrassment is washing over me. Anyhow, Delta variant, however, is rising. It's taking over. The CDC has reinstituted mask recommendations for some unvaccinated people in some areas. It is very confusing. It feels like the recommendation should be to just wear a mask. And then on top of that, big companies that were planning full on return to offices are now caught in a pickle because Delta is rising across the country. So Google is now going to require employees to be vaccinated. Facebook will require US office employees to be vaccinated.

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  Netflix is going to mandate vaccinations in all productions of the United States. I feel like I have to issue this disclosure. We are currently making a Netflix production. So like the other thing I do when I'm not doing this and Apple is going to require masks in its US stores. Apple also has a strange policy. Zoe Schiffer reported this yesterday.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  If you don't tell Apple you're vaccinated, they will assume you are not and they will put you into a different protocol as they return to work.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Well, they may. A bunch of, a bunch of companies, especially big tech companies like, you know what? Get vaccinated. If you, if you, you have to get vaccinated to come to the office. Whenever we figure out when we're opening up, you have to be vaccinated. If you're not, you have to mask or you're not coming to the office. Apple's internal HR site according to Zoe is if you don't provide your vaccination status, your vaccination status is assumed to be unvaccinated. Okay. If you're not fully vaccinated, working on site in an Apple building, additional health and safety protocols may apply.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That may is like an out, you know, like.

• 5:26Alex Cranz?

  It's doing a lot of work.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  A lot of like major Supreme Court opinions are like premised on the difference between may and shall.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:34Nilay Patel?

  And like the may is the out. It's like, I don't know. I, I think you can read it as Apple will do this.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  But if you're really nice to them, maybe they don't. So we'll see. I, I would expect Apple of all companies is, you know, the most energetic about coming to the office. It seems like they're going to mandate vaccines soon to be back in that office, but we'll see. And if you, if you are listening, you know, tell Zoe, cause she is trying to report that out. So just a lot going on with Delta and masks. We have a story. This headline speaks for itself. Communication around masks is still terrible. Like, we're just like, we're not doing a great job and we need to get vaccine numbers up. And so it goes, but Delta, it's here. It's like, we, you thought it was over, didn't you? Early summer, June, you're like, hmm. So we'll see. But the good news is hospitalizations and deaths are down because of the vaccines overall.

• 6:22Nilay Patel?

  The vaccines are still effective against Delta. It's just very communicable.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  You thought it was hot vac summer. Unfortunately, it's not vac summer.

• 6:30Alex Cranz?

  Hot mask summer.

• 6:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God. I will say we have another story. There was a study, you know, the vaccines have been out for a while, but Pfizer vaccine is still, still protects you against severe disease. After six months, there's a lot of data about that now, obviously. So that's good news. Second order effects, we always talk about these with the pandemic. The common cold is back because everyone just like went outside again. I will tell you, I have a cold and I look panicked. Like we like went and saw some friends, our kids played together, kids, the second other like little kids see each other, they get colds. Like it's like it visual range. They just like give each other colds. And then Max like sneezed in my face and like immediately had a cold. And like yesterday, I was like, crap, I have cold. So I got a COVID test and it's like just a cold. But the common cold is back. Like

• 7:15Nilay Patel?

  everybody now has a cold, which is super interesting, just from a sort of public health statistics perspective. And then this is like a 13th order effect. All the people who are out in the ocean doing measurements of ocean temperatures in the ocean biome came back. So our ability to, to see what is happening in the ocean has like completely dwindled. We had a great story about that on the site and how we're might be able to get that back. And the autonomous systems that have been deployed to replace our ocean sensors because the people aren't on ships anymore. There's like a quote in the story. It's like, we were out for like a long-term thing and we came in express steam cruiser back home the second COVID hit. So they're like, they're building all this technology

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  to, to measure the ocean, which I think is neat. Last thing before we get into it, we have a package that we internally have been calling Teen Verge all week. It's just, it's actually called Next Gen. It's on the site. We had a bunch of younger writers tell us about their experiences with technology, with, with software. We've written, we're starting to write about that stuff more. It's a really cool package with incredible art. Just incredible art. It's some of the best art we've ever done. Really eye-opening perspective on technology. If you don't regularly hang out with young people and talk to them about it. Okay. What's Churnings doing? Do you first, Peter?

• 8:33Speaker 03

  I kind of put it in the order I was thinking, but if you want to change that around.

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  That was an inside the show question. That was me segueing to you. Let me do it again.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  All right. What earnings do you want to do first here?

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, we should start with Apple. It was just, just big. Just every time Apple has a big quarter, we're all just like, money, Apple makes so much money. Whoo boy, hard to tell how much money Apple makes. You can't even like, put it into human context. This is one of those quarters. The, the story to me is, there's a few stories, but one, just like iPhone sales are up 50%. This iPhone 12 is very popular. And I personally think it's because it's a nicer design than the iPhone 10 based design.

• 9:20Nilay Patel?

  People were sick of that design.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  It's the purple one.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Like it. It could be the purple one. Everyone's just gonna be, oh, it's because 5G. Everyone, everyone just really wanted 5G. I know that like some, I don't know if Apple's internal, but like other companies have told me like, when they do consumer surveys, those surveys somehow tell them that consumers want 5G. So they have like, created this demand and now they are fulfilling it. And now the story that all of mobile, the mobile industry is telling themselves is 5G is a success because it's selling tons of phones and hooray.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, maybe that's true. They did a lot of marketing.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  People got confused. People think the vaccine gives you 5G. Like, yeah. The 5G marketing was a success across many dimensions, I would say. Have you seen the 5G horse flyer? Cause that's like my favorite. I think it's a joke. There's just a dumb flyer, like a picture of a flyer. And it's like 5G horse sighted in backyard. And it's like a ethereal horse. Like it's really dumb.

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  This is what happens when we do the show in the morning. I've got too much like dumb energy. So I buy that all of the hype around 5G created some demand for it. And if you gave people a list of reasons why they may have purchased a phone, the thing they could not have before ranked higher than all of the other things. Do you like, did you buy it for a better camera? Or did you buy it because of 5G? Like, I don't know. You can't.

• 10:45Alex Cranz?

  I bought it because it's purple and you didn't have that like on the list.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 10:49Alex Cranz?

  So I'm doing 5G.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  It looks nicer. That said, the 50% is incredible to me. I mean, Haim, you've been covering Apple earnings forever. That that is like surprising even not in COVID, not in a iPhone 12 5G year. That's just a huge number.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  It's a it's a huge number and especially a huge number for Q3 or whatever quarter Apple calls this one, the the June quarter over here, because this is typically the, oh, there's new iPhones coming out in two, three months. I'm gonna wait. Like, this is when like, you know, carriers are like literally giving away the phones because they're trying to clear stock on like the old models before they start hyping up the new ones. So the fact that they're up this much now is really impressive.

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, so there are a ton, and this is kind of that 5G, like back and forth, right? Like AT&T will just, if you like, open the AT&T website and you're an AT&T customer, they're like, do you want a phone? Any phone you want, it's free. Just take it away from us. Like, they will aggressively run promotions to get you onto their 5G network and give you a 5G phone, especially with an iPhone.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  So there is a little bit of that, like, discounting promotional stuff going on that might be driving these sales. And it might be good for Apple because their business is taking money out of every button that you buy on the iPhone. So, you know, I think we're used to, I'm curious for your perspective on this. I, we're used to like that two-year boom and bust cycle, right? You get the phone, you're, everyone gets a phone at the same time. You were historically on the regular cycle or the S-cycle with the iPhone, right? And then the contract would come and there'd be another spike in sales. Here, it's like, because of all the promotions, because of 5G, like, that cycle is very clearly broken. And Apple doesn't seem to care if the phone is discounted immediately. Because they're trying to make all the services revenue.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's like a big, a big key part of this is, is iPhones in pockets are iPhones that can buy Apple TV plus subscriptions.

• 12:50Alex Cranz?

  But will they?

• 12:52Speaker 04

  That's a different question, but that's, that's revenue that goes much farther than the purchase of the phone. It's, it's almost like a return to like the, the carrier subsidization model, but on the other side, where like before AT&T would just like pay for nine tenths of your phone because they'd lock you into a couple of years of paying for overpriced cell service. This is like, we will give you the phone somehow and then you'll pay for the cell services, but also pay for, for all the other stuff.

• 13:19Nilay Patel?

  And this is Dieter's whole argument of Apple turning into a carrier, right? Like if, as long as they get the hardware into your hand, they know they're going to make money in all these other places.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it looks like they're, they're making money on the hardware too, judging, judging by the.

• 13:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  They're, they're not doing badly on that front either.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Actually, we should talk about the other places. So Apple breaks down its revenue, its sales into iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, home and accessories is all one category, and then services. So, you know, iPhone, huge jump, you know, up across the board, whatever, but wearables, home and accessories edged out iPad and Mac, made more money there. And that was half of what they are pulling in in services. So like in order of it's, it's iPhone hardware money. And then the next one, about half as much is services. And then everything else is about half as much as that all grouped together, but wearables, home and accessories just edged out.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  And if you look like, I look at, uh, wearables, home and accessories and services as basically the money that Apple can extract out of iPhone users, either by selling you AirPods or by selling you services. It's not totally fair because like an Apple TV is not necessarily just a, you know, iPhone accessory, but neither is like a HomePod Mini, although I, I don't know. Do you, is anybody buying a HomePod Mini who doesn't have an iPhone?

• 14:44Alex Cranz?

  I have two. I bought them like immediately. I love my HomePod Mini. I'm, I'm the reason, I'm the reason here.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook is like, get crayons.

• 14:55Alex Cranz?

  He did it, nailed it and won. But like, why, what about wearables? Cause, cause we had this whole conversation all of last year and into this year about wearables and about like this potential magic ability to detect COVID and, and other diseases. And that was a huge part of the conversation. And now we're seeing that like wearables, which is a big part of that, that chunk sold and like the Apple Watch is the best selling wearable out there. And they all kind of saw their, I think their numbers tick up this year. So like, I wonder how much of that was also these watches?

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just think that the total market for wearables, home and accessories is the size of the iPhone market.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  Right. I guess these numbers are big enough that statistically, there's some Android user out there with HomePod minis.

• 15:36Alex Cranz?

  That's not me. That wasn't me.

• 15:38Nilay Patel?

  But like, you can't have an Apple Watch without an iPhone.

• 15:41Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  Right. And the other ones are so closely tied to it. So however big the market for the iPhone is, the market for wearables is some percentage of that.

• 15:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  However, big the market for the iPhone is, the market for services is some percentage of that with a multiplier that Apple can monkey with because they can be like, now iCloud costs $2.99 or whatever. And they just like turn on more money from you.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  The market for the Mac and the iPad, all the other stuff does not have that just sort of direct relationship to the size of the iPhone market. So you can see where they're going. They're making the iPhone market bigger. They're selling more iPhone stuff and they're happy to invest in the other things. But even at whatever percentage of the size of the iPhone market is, it's still a gigantic market. So there's just more people with iPhones to sell things to. Whereas like, I don't, I don't think of a Mac as an accessory to an iPhone and Macs are very expensive.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  iPhones are pretty expensive, too.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But did you see that chart that was floating around? It's like AirPods by themselves are a bigger business than like Netflix.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  I did not see that chart, but it's, it's a hard chart to work with because Apple doesn't release hard numbers for any of this stuff anymore, which is incredibly frustrating.

• 16:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. People argued about this chart for the reason that you are describing, but that Netflix's business is like a $7 billion business.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  So depending on what you think the biggest chunk of wearables revenue is, if you believe it's AirPods, you're like, oh, that's the whole business.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. Which is a lot to say about AirPods and a lot to say about the iPhone. This is, by the way, not to drill this with the USB C rant. This is why the iPhone's never getting USB C. Does it need it? It's no, it's why the iPhone doesn't, but why the iPad does. Because the iPhone market is too big and too important to let anyone mess with that without explicit permission.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  Or explicit tax collection.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. And rant, mini rant over.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  I just want to end this Apple section by calling out Elon Musk for being the only CEO in the world who will say on his own earnings call for Tesla, it is not our goal to create a walled garden and to use that to bludgeon our competitors, which is used by some companies. And then to literally do the cough take and say, Apple, he was like, on his own earnings call.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 17:53Nilay Patel?

  You can say what you want about Elon and everybody will. That was hilarious. Like, just the funniest thing.

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay, other companies also doing well. Google and YouTube are just, the ad dollars are moving away from TV and moving towards the digital platforms, which everyone said would happen 10 years ago, and it's definitely happening now.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, there's been a lot of dunking on Netflix. Like YouTube's revenue is like almost as much as Netflix's entire company.

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Apparently. The thing I wonder about, especially with the ad money is, is the big jump this quarter just, you know, everyone thought COVID was over and the economy's back and like, it's time to like, turn on the, the ad dollars and start making money again. And so because Google, Facebook, Amazon have such a huge portion of the online ad market that they just are the beneficiaries of it? Or is it like, I don't know, in particular, did more money happen to go to like Google especially because like, everyone knows that Google will figure out how to make ads work, whether or not people turn off app tracking on the iPhone?

• 19:01Nilay Patel?

  I think it's both.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, the, the story of the pandemic is everyone started shopping more from home, which made. Online advertising more valuable because it has this known return. Like this is my, I constantly joke that Instagram ads sucker me every time. But this is the, this is like the whole underlying argument of Facebook and small business and cookies and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is if you are a tiny inventor and you've invented a marginally better car mount, the cheapest way to acquire me as a customer is online advertising. It's not billboards or Olympics advertising or targeted cable advertising or whatever. Google is like right at the bottom of that funnel, right? You search for car mount and Google's like, here's a car mount. And like people, people are going to buy those ads left and right.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  If you have, if you're a traditional TV advertiser and you know, people are watching less TV and cord cutting continues unabated, where are you going to put your beautiful TV ads? You're just going to put them on YouTube.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  And that's like the other side of this puzzle and.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  You're certainly not going to put them on Peacock.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  The fact that Peacock has a tier that you can pay for that still has ads. I don't know, man. They're thinking over there. But yeah, you just look at these numbers and we sent the last few weeks on the show complaining about Google and it's going slow and it's like feels kind of stuck. And then you look at these numbers and like, oh, they're doing, they're fine.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're stuck because they can't get through all the money.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  It's gumming up the engine. It's like blocking the tires.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we've got this, um, we've got this tweet in our Google earnings story. In 2010, Google's second quarter revenue was 6.8 billion. In 2021, it was 61.9.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Wow.

• 20:41Nilay Patel?

  You go back one year, it was 38.3. Like it, like it's close to doubling, right? From one year ago.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  This is going to sound like I am like a freshman who just read his first Karl Marx essay. But.

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  I understand that the economy is not a zero sum game and that everything, like the pie can grow overall. But if you just step way back and like, is, should we be pursuing antitrust right now? The massive profits that these companies like this 10x in a decade or whatever. Is it possible that we would be doing better if some amount of that revenue was split up amongst more than five companies?

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's not, that's, I mean, I'm like a diehard capitalist. I say that on the show every week.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Right, but I'm just, I'm just saying like, oh man, big tech made a shit ton of money this quarter. Maybe that money should have gone elsewhere. Just at the, on the Facebook, it's like, well, why, what do you, what do you mean? And they, they, they worked hard. They, they built businesses. They should make money, but there is like, I don't know.

• 21:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Who's, I guess it's like, who's losing out on that money?

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Well, that's the thing. We don't know because they, they weren't able to exist because, uh, Apple captured the entire iPhone accessory and services market.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  I think a, a less existential way of saying this.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Which is difficult for the British cast because we tend to veer into existential as fast as we can.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  And RCS, but yeah.

• 22:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Guess what? Google isn't investing in.

• 22:06Nilay Patel?

  Google is, their business is being a middleman, right? They don't like to think of it that way. And I'm sure people will tweet and email me for calling them that because the, what the internet is supposed to do is disintermediate you. Google makes its money getting in the way of what you want from them, search results and placing advertising from other companies. And there isn't another competitor to that ad market. That's what all the antitrust pressure on Google really comes down to. Right? It's all, that's the suits from the state's attorney generals here. The state's attorneys general here in the United States is the ad market. The EU is the ad market and like the order of Google search results. It's Google being a middleman, right? You go to Google and you're supposed to go somewhere else. You go to Google and you want something and they show you an ad for something else.

• 22:51Nilay Patel?

  And so that middleman profit is historically the thing that the internet, internet disintermediates. And because they are such a monopoly, it is impossible to disintermediate Google from advertising on the internet.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 23:03Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  That's like just a problem. You can, and you can see that their ability to collect that tax is going higher and higher and higher. Right? The ad dollars want to move from TV. There's a lot of shopping going on online. Where are you going to spend it? You're going to spend it with Google and Facebook. You're not spending with Netflix. So that's why I keep dunking on Netflix. Like you can't give Netflix more money. They can just, they, they can just run out of people to charge.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:27Nilay Patel?

  Whereas Google can collect more taxes. With Apple, this is Apple's antitrust problem, right? They're a toll collector for a huge amount of economic activity on the phone. And that's why they're so. Invested in services because as Heim has written, wow, 5,000 times now, like, the biggest chunk of services revenue is like whales and Candy Crush.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  But should they be a tax collector of that size? Like, probably not. And I, the second order, like, what innovation didn't we see, right? It's like, it feels farther down the list to me than just saying like, yeah, look at these numbers. They just sit between people and what they want.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:05Nilay Patel?

  And they charge a toll for every one of those transactions. And that seems really problematic.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess I should say, disclosure, we are part of a media company that makes its money on advertising and has its own advertising product. And so there's a little piece of this. It's like, our company might be worth more if we weren't just picking up the crumbs of whatever people are just giving to Google by default.

• 24:26Alex Cranz?

  Right. I mean, like, Google took over where media traditionally existed. Those are the dollars it took, right? It took the dollars from TV. It took the dollars from newspapers. It took the dollar from digital media companies. And now it's, it's just very happy with that. And it's also taking the dollars from all these other places, too, besides just this big chunk that all of media lost.

• 24:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But like, if they take all the dollars from TV, right, which is, you want to make the big argument about cord cutting and the TV ad market and YouTube, like, now they're starting to take the dollars away from TV advertising. It isn't, regardless of how you feel about cable news, kind of many, it is probably good that there are multiple cable news channels.

• 25:11Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  Right? Instead of like, one algorithmically driven cable news channel, which is YouTube. If you coalesce all that money into YouTube, like YouTube has too much power.

• 25:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  So like, I don't know, like, I love these numbers. It's great. These companies are doing well. You can, you can see the A to B consequence, like, the pandemic happened. People started shopping from home. They bought more technology. The money followed suit. All that makes sense.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Should they be toll collectors of the size? Like, I have no idea. Facebook had earnings too. Their earnings are also up and like Mark Zuckerberg spent the entire time talking about the metaverse and not advertising. And you can tell he's like bored with his monopoly business, advertising. And he's like, what if I did the metaverse? Like, there's a part of this business that is unseemly. Like, they don't want to talk about it. They want to talk about consumer innovation, but it's their business. And I think there's a reason in particular. You see Google get distracted from the products we wish they would invest in, because at the end of it, they have to tend to the money and the money is out of control. Some more to get through. Time, you want to walk us through Microsoft and Samsung?

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah. Uh, Microsoft also made money, to the surprise of no one. Revenue was up 21%. They made a boatload of money. You can look up the numbers. The interesting thing with Microsoft is that a lot of that was with, actually, it's not that interesting. It was exactly as expected, which is a lot of it was from their cloud and office services, which were up. And then they experienced the hit from the global chip shortage. And like, you know, Surface and Surface revenue was down because, you know, you can't sell computers and you can't sell Windows licenses to OEMs. If they can't sell computers which need chips.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Also, it's been a hot minute since there's been an interesting Surface computer.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Maybe they, they just, they're taking a break because they're, they're, they're, they're just thinking about the Surface Duo in their hearts. They're just pondering it. There was that leak this week. Yeah, there was a leak this week that there's going to be a new Surface Duo. They're gonna, they're gonna give, I have many feelings about the new Surface Duo. But, you know, the, the Surface Pro, the main, like, the Surface that we all think of, it still has the big bezels and the design has been updated forever. We're going to get into Intel and its problems in a minute. But, you know, the Surface Pro X, is there the prettiest Surface? It, no one wants to buy it because the ARM and Windows is bad. They haven't done anything that's like, oh, man, the Surface is like a big deal if we care about it. If I were to go out and buy a PC today, Surface is not on,

• 27:33Speaker 03

  like, the, the list of things that I'm thinking of first right now. It's Acer, Asus, Razer.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  It feels like they're doing like some soul searching. Like, there's going to probably be a Windows ARM equivalent of Apple's M1 stuff at some point, or?

• 27:49Speaker 04

  A Windows.

• 27:50Alex Cranz?

  I love this optimism.

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  Qualcomm is gonna make it.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  Possibly. I don't know who's gonna make it, but I am optimistically assuming that someone will figure out what Apple has done here. Like, it cannot be some sort of magic thing that only the great minds of Cupertino are able to figure out. Like, it took Android some time, too, and it still needs four times the RAM, but they got there eventually. So like, someone will figure this out. I think Microsoft very much wants to be that someone, and that was the whole Surface X stuff. And I think they're just doing some soul searching and figuring out how to actually make that work.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, their soul searching is they told us the future was dual screens.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:30Nilay Patel?

  And then all that got blown up.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  And then they're like, rethink, like, you know, Nadella was on Decoder, and he's like, Windows is a platform for a platform. Like, they pivoted Windows, like, they're just like, I think they're changing their relationship to that stuff. And they don't have a Surface Neo. That was the big two-screen one.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:48Nilay Patel?

  And that thing just got shelved, and they kind of pivoted Windows. See, I would say it's soul searching, but we kind of know what it looks like, right?

• 28:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  I guess.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  Just not what the hardware looks like.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Xbox is doing fine. It's just not doing as well as PlayStation, which everyone could have predicted that.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:06Nilay Patel?

  Also can't sell it.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  I was about to say, it's, Xbox is doing exactly as well as the number of consoles they have physically been able to manufacture.

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  I had the moment this week, because, you know, Flight Simulator came out for the Xbox. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna buy an Xbox. And, you know, like, you just have that, like, oh, here's the reason I was gonna buy the thing. I'm gonna, like, open the web browser and buy the thing. And I was like, oh, what am I thinking? That's not how that works anymore. Now I'm gonna engage a network of scalpers and thieves to see, like, robots to see if I can get one of these things.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm gonna buy a Playdate, and I'm, I can't wait to get it in 2024, or whatever the queue looks like these days.

• 29:41Nilay Patel?

  That thing looks so cool. Okay. Samsung.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  Samsung also made money, if you're noting.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  There's a trend here. It's a good time to be selling, selling tech stuff. They made money. They noted that there were, you know, component shortages, which is the same story we've seen for, for a lot of these companies. They are starting to take more material hits on these. I think we're going to see more of that coming up in, in the next quarter, especially with the new stuff coming up. Apple's already started to be like, you know, we might have issues with supply. Microsoft has said AMD is like, you know, we're doing our best. Yeah. Samsung also like started teasing slash outlight, just saying, oh, we're going to have more foldables in like a week. In the, in the worst kept secret since the last Samsung announcement.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, they, they basically announced the phones in a letter, a blog post, and then they mentioned it again here. Wasn't the line that they're going to make it like more mainstream?

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Mainstreaming the foldable category and solidifying its leadership in the premium smartphone segment.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  That's a contradictory statement. If you're going to mainstream it, it needs to not just be the premium smartphone segment. You, there need, the, the flip needs to be like 800 bucks.

• 30:56Nilay Patel?

  That's hilarious. Like, that used to be very expensive.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  I know. Yeah, I know.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  I would just say, let's just pause for a minute and just react to using mainstreaming as a verb.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Damn it.

• 31:10Nilay Patel?

  What's going on there? Mainstreaming the foldable category is just like, can you imagine going to work as like a Samsung junior marketing associate and being like, I'm inspired by that phrase. Like, it's just not a vision. Like, everyone is going to have these phones, right? Eventually, all the phones are going to fold.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  Eventually, or they will fade away into the memory pit of, of bad tech ideas, like, like the 3D phones or?

• 31:40Speaker 03

  Are folding phones, are they 3D? Are they curved? Or are they, we already tried curved phones.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  We tried curved.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  I think all the phones are going to fold eventually. This, I fully believe it. Like, just like the, you know how like the metaverse came out of nowhere? Because, because the Oculus Quest 2 exists. And so now like a bunch of tech executives can be like, oh, I get it. Like, It's not anywhere close, but it's a sci, it's a sci fi vision. It's a product that people can see. Yeah. Understand in a way that 3D phones or whatever was were nonsense. Like this is a thing from movies. You have a small screen that folds into a big screen.

• 32:14Speaker 04

  So are holograms. Like sometimes the technology just isn't there. Like these are not, there's, there's not a lot of good ways to make like a durable thing that folds that doesn't like disintegrate after, after a year or two of use.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  The Wall Street Journal had an amazing article about, you know, bendable OLED screen technology and they had a, they had a prototype that was a tube and then the, the phone would roll out from the tube, you know? Like a, I don't know. If you could see me, you'd, I'm like pulling a phone out.

• 32:41Alex Cranz?

  It's like a scroll.

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And like, you know, bendable screens and like semi-transparent and like very, very cool. Like the technology exists and people could probably start making this stuff. By the way, this article was from 2001.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying if Samsung is getting to a place where they're using mainstreaming as a verb. Yeah. What they, I think what they're actually suggesting is a remarkable disregard for the conventions of the English language, first of all, which rolled. I appreciate you. And second, they know it's about to happen. Like it's about to flip. Like that's a big promise to make to your investors, especially ahead of an event where you have a bunch of products coming out. And I think it should be obvious that Samsung is, they also white label displays. Especially OLED displays. So I think they know that their display division is ready to ramp scale on a product that to Heim's point, like can survive.

• 33:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's just, this is just ready to be a component that Samsung sells and that means everyone's going to have them. Once that happens, it's, you know, it's the same as with anything. Once, once the form factor settles down, what is most important, the software, and then Samsung's right back where it started.

• 33:51Alex Cranz?

  But aren't they gonna, are they still gonna be delicate like the current ones are? Cause the current ones are like even more delicate than the phones we have now. Like our phones are getting more and more and more and more delicate. And that feels like we're going backwards, even though I'm excited to fold something and fit it in my pocket.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, we are, we are one generation out from the foldable that came with like an entire YouTube video detailing what not to do with this phone to like.

• 34:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Handle it with, handle it with kid gloves like a newborn child.

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Let's not forget Dieter's review. The first fold canceled the product. Yeah.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I get it. I'm just, but this is, this will be the third generation, right?

• 34:34Alex Cranz?

  Right. Yeah, this is three.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is, this is the third generation, but we are, the one that we are currently on is, is still one out and it still has issues. There was the whole video, like going around a couple of weeks ago of like the six month or the, or the nine months with, with a Z fold. And it's like, yeah, just crapped out one day. And, and now there's like this giant line in the middle of the screen.

• 34:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I just feel like the technology is still way far out. And also that like, I don't know, there's diminishing returns on the OLED. Like, everybody's demanding so much more from their phones. They want a good picture, but they also want good battery life. They want it to like, last longer than two days. And I feel like going super, super premium to something that you have to like coddle, isn't gonna actually do it for mainstream.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  For mainstreaming.

• 35:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, mainstreaming. Sorry, sorry. Sorry, Samson. I didn't mean that.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  I remain a folding enthusiast. I think it's clear that Heim is a folding pessimist.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  Am I the only one here that's actually spent his own personal money on folding phones? Cause I've done it.

• 35:37Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  What do you think? Well, yeah, you've been notably quiet.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I, I return them.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  I get texts from V D R's like, I did it. Okay. The third generation of tech products is historically when they get good. Okay. If you just like, look over the arc of time, right? It's like the third generation of any Microsoft product is the one where it gets good.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in this one.

• 36:01Alex Cranz?

  We are hearing that like, Apple is like, looking at these devices, right? And Apple is, is historically the one who finally figures it all out and makes people go, oh yeah, I would put this in my pocket. So.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  And there's, there's rumors that Google's making a folding Pixel and that's, that's the one that's gonna, you know, blow this market wide.

• 36:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wide open.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's just, it all, at the, all this display stuff comes down to, can one of two display companies make these things at scale, right?

• 36:26Alex Cranz?

  I'm, I'm still holding out for E Ink here. I think, you know, they got the color this year. We give it another 10 years. It's gonna look, it's gonna look almost like a real thing. It's gonna be great.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  Dream, Cranz.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Color Ying is also one of those ones where I think we could pull up an article from like 2001.

• 36:44Alex Cranz?

  No, it did totally change this year. They're doing more colors. Does it look like mud? Does it? Yes, yes, that's true. But it's closer. It's so close.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  I love this energy. I am waiting for a really good mirasol display.

• 37:01Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  Guys, Amazon hasn't put USB C on the Kindle yet. I would, I would maybe not get too far ahead of yourself. The most substantial upgrade the Kindle has gotten in six years was a color temperature backlight.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that Kindle sucks. Can I just be honest with you? I bought a Kindle Oasis for Becky on Prime Day because she's a Kindle addict. Yeah. I read no reviews. It was just cheap and I bought her the rose gold one and I gave it to her. And then like three days later, I was like, do you like your new Kindle expecting to like win that conversation? And she was like, it sucks.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 37:37Nilay Patel?

  Cause it has no battery life because of the stupid.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  You gotta keep it in the case.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  You gotta keep it in the case and you gotta turn off the one backlight function they added.

• 37:46Alex Cranz?

  Just use it under the sun. It's like a Game Boy Advance from 2001.

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  Meanwhile, Amazon made 131, 113.1 billion in revenue, growing 27% year over year.

• 37:59Alex Cranz?

  None of that was Kindle.

• 38:00Nilay Patel?

  And none of that.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  They hit their estimates, basically their guidance, but the investor class thought they were going to make way more. And someone was very like, like sad panda about it.

• 38:10Nilay Patel?

  They'll be, I think they'll be fine.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're gonna be fine. Yeah.

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh no.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  My heart goes out for them. Okay. Yeah. Amazon made a lot of money. We're taking a break. We'll be right back. We're going to talk about Intel.

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• 39:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Heim, you wrote a long piece this week about last summer for Intel that led to all the changes. New CEO, new executive team, new plan. They also had earnings, AMD had earnings. Tell us what's going on.

• 39:58Speaker 04

  All right, so earnings came first, actually. Earnings were last week. Intel made $18.5 billion, which was half a billion-ish above what they were expecting to make, up 2% year-over-year. They did fine. AMD made $3.8 billion. Revenue was up 99%. So obviously, we're in a little different categories there. But percentage-wise, AMD is also doing just fine. But the big thing from Intel wasn't actually earnings. It was on Monday, their new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, had an event called Accelerating Intel, or Intel Accelerated, I think, sorry. And it was to announce their new Intel Accelerated. It was to preview the next five years of Intel's roadmap in terms of...

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Their processor architectures and their processor nodes, their packaging technology. They also rebranded all of their stuff to make it look like they are not as behind as as they are in some respects. So they were doing, a lot of it is is is marketing, a lot of it is is damage control from last year's big thing, which is that Intel delayed its 7-nanometer, which is now called Intel 4. You can read, there's a whole breakdown on the site. But basically, last year, Intel was like, on their earnings this summer, about a year ago today, they're like, our next generation chips, which we're supposed to ship at the end of 2021, are not coming until 2023. We messed up a thing in the, in making them, and now they're super delayed.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Sorry, isn't this like the 15th time Intel has said something to that effect? We're gonna, the thing that, the smaller processes, we thought we had it, but no, turns out it's really hard, we screwed up a thing, it's gonna be longer.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Are you referring to the six years it's spent trying to get its 10-nanometer chips out the door?

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:42Alex Cranz?

  They're almost out the door.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  The 10-nanometer chips are mostly out the door. They still have not done it on desktop. That's, one of the problems of the desktop chips is that they're now doing like some 10-nanometer stuff on the 14-nanometer scale. There are like, some reviews are like, just by last year's, these are not as good because they have fewer cores. So, the big thing I wrote this week was kind of taking a look at last summer when everything kind of exploded for Intel, and then what they've been doing since. So there are three main things that happened, pretty much in the span of a month. Intel's like, Mr. Fix-It chip designer that they had hired, Jim Keller, left the company very, very suddenly. It was for personal reasons. Intel hasn't really given details, Keller hasn't really given details.

• 42:25Alex Cranz?

  Well, he's, he's opened his own company since then, hasn't he?

• 42:27Speaker 04

  No, he's, so he's working on a, on a new company on their board. He usually stays places short, but just to give a little background, he helped Apple design the A series chips, the A4 and A5 when they first came out. He helped AMD design its Zen architecture, which is what, let's, what AMD is like currently using to very aggressively compete with Intel. He helped Tesla design its self-driving computer chip. He has a really impressive resume for this kind of stuff. And then Intel brought Keller on to run its entire silicon engineering team in 2018. And he was like very much there to get everyone back on track. Literally like a month before he left, there's like this giant interview in Fortune with him about how like Intel was betting everything on Keller.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  And then three and a half weeks after that went up, he left the company. So it may have just been, you know, his time was up. He usually comes in for short times, unclear. A couple of days after that, Apple announces that it is no longer going to be using Intel processors in its Macs because it wants to let the Mac jump forwards that they can make better products. It was this big giant sign that said, we do not think your chips are good enough for us. And this was coming after a lot of frustration with Intel in the past. Bloomberg basically reported Apple was frustrated with Intel's roadmap. Cook had noted it in 2019 that, you know, they had issues with supply constraints from Intel stuff. It was not necessarily the vote of confidence or lack thereof that Intel needed at this

• 43:56Speaker 04

  point while they're in the middle of this big 10 nanometer rollout. They had finally gotten these chips out the door. And then the, then a couple of weeks after that, Intel had to announce that its next generation chips, the seven nanometer Intel four, whatever you want to call them, they are probably more on par with TSMC and Samsung's five nanometer chips. That's the whole marketing briefing.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  Can we just take a pause there? Again, the, the marketing hustle to call their seven nanometer Intel four because the other guys were five nanometers. Incredible. Zero percent of people bought it, but I respect the hustle.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's the 5GE of chips.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  So in Intel's defense, they do have some, some legs to stand on here in that all the, it, all the points are made up and none of this means anything anyway. There's no, if you take a five nanometer M1 chip that TSMC makes on their five nanometer processor, Apple, and you look at it under a really big microscope. There's not a single thing on that chip that's 5 nanometers in size. These are just like approximate terms to indicate jumps. The quote unquote 5 nanometer known is for EUV, which is ultraviolet etching technology that they're using. Intel is going to start using that on Intel 4. It's not entirely unfair to say that. It also doesn't change the fact that Intel is still on its 10 nanometer, 7 nanometer, whatever you want to call it, equivalent.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  And everyone else is already churning out 5 nanometer chips and has been for over a year, so.

• 45:23Alex Cranz?

  Well, it hasn't actually turned it out, though, yet, right? Like, it's still way behind.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  So, yeah, Intel is in the middle of its 10 nanometer, everyone else's 7 stage. Like, it hasn't gotten there on desktop yet versus, you know...

• 45:36Alex Cranz?

  Everybody else is looking at 5.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  You can buy a 7 nanometer AMD desktop chip and stick it in your gaming computer today if you can find one on a shelf, which I wish you good luck. So Intel isn't there yet, and even if they were, everyone else is already on the next thing. Like, you can buy a laptop with a 5 nanometer chip in it, using one right now. So Intel's big thing was, we're going to catch up. They cleared house after that. Their head of engineering, Dr. Murthy...

• 46:03Nilay Patel?

  We interviewed him.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  We interviewed him. He's no longer there. He left right after that announcement was made. They announced shortly after that that CEO Bob Swan, who was previously their chief financial officer, would be leaving, and they replaced him with Pat Gelsinger, who's the current CEO, who was Intel's original chief technology officer. It was really a shift back towards getting their leadership on the engineering side of things. They've been rehiring, you know, old designers, old hardware people who had since left the company in the last, you know, 10 years of delays. And they have this very ambitious roadmap, which aims to catch up to where everyone else is by 2024 and to jump ahead by 2025.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  And they are doing that by more or less releasing new architecture nodes every year for the next four or five years, which is very ambitious.

• 46:57Alex Cranz?

  So it's just like a tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

• 47:00Speaker 04

  Almost. It's not quite a tick, tick, tick. Like, Intel 3 is more of a talk. It still would be based on the upcoming thing, but it's going to be a fairly big jump.

• 47:11Nilay Patel?

  Wait, the numbers are going down?

• 47:13Speaker 04

  Yes, the numbers always go down. So, the roadmap is...

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  There, wait, there's just a logical endpoint to that plan, right?

• 47:21Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, it's, no, tell them, tell them, tell them about...

• 47:23Speaker 04

  Okay, I am so glad you asked that, actually. So, right now, Intel is on its second-generation 10-nanometer tech, which is 10-nanometer superfin. Previously, Intel had a system where they would use pluses, so you had 14-nanometer, 14-nanometer plus, you had 14-nanometer plus plus. It was not the best system. It kind of indicates how long the 14-nanometer era went on.

• 47:45Alex Cranz?

  Didn't they get to a 14-nanometer plus plus?

• 47:47Speaker 04

  I think there might have been. I have to double check.

• 47:50Alex Cranz?

  That's great.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  So, 10-nanometer plus would have been this current, the Tiger Lake stuff, which was renamed to 10-nanometer superfin to reflect the technology in it. Also, it sounds cooler than 10-nanometer plus. This year's chips were supposed to be 10-nanometer plus plus, the third-generation one. It's Alder Lake, which is coming out later this year and uses some interesting new technology. So, that's been renamed to Intel 7.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  The lakes are still there, right? It's still...

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Yes, so the lakes are the internal code names.

• 48:25Speaker 04

  So, that's coming later this year. Alder Lake is a big little styled chip that uses a hybrid, you know, performance core and efficiency core, similar to ARM products that we see. Intel had released an earlier version of that with the Lakefield chips. This is the second generation of that. It's the third generation of its 10-nanometer tech, and that'll be out later this year. So, that's Intel 7.

• 48:47Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 48:48Alex Cranz?

  Formerly known as 10-nanometer superfin.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  No, no, no. So, 10-nanometer superfin is now, is Tiger Lake.

• 48:55Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  Intel 7 is the third-generation 10-nanometer, which is Alder Lake, coming out at the end of this year. Intel 4 is what was previously, the architecture, the artist previously known as Intel 7-nanometer.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  Is Intel four, which was originally supposed to be out at the end of 2021, and will now be coming out in early 2023 with Meteor Lake, with production starting in the second half of 2022. They've already locked in a few things. And there are going to be big jumps at that. Like, that's the big jump that Intel's been waiting to do. So they're saying like a 20% jump in performance per watt, which is not inconsiderable. And cutting down on overall area of the chip, like, it will be a big jump when it comes. It will feature much, a much higher transistor density than even TSMC's current 5-nanometer node. So it will be a very interesting piece of technology when it comes in another year and a half, hopefully. But we're running out of numbers now.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  We are running out of numbers. So Intel 3 is the second generation of that 7-nanometer product. So it's the second generation of what would have been the 7-nanometer one. It is actually also promising a roughly 18% increase in performance per watt for Intel 4. So it's a talk in that it's a second generation thing, but it will also have a fairly big jump. Intel is expecting manufacturing in the second half of 2023, and it'll be available in 2024. Probably they haven't put a hard date on that yet. Now, as Neelai had pointed out, we are running out of numbers here. So these numbers are not really standing for anything. You notice they're not Intel 3-nanometer. They're not reclassifying as that. Because, again, the numbers as they stand right now

• 50:42Speaker 04

  don't actually stand for anything. There's no 5-nanometer or 7-nanometer transistors on these chips. That said, Intel, the next generation after Intel 3 is not Intel 2, but Intel 20A. Yes! Yes! We had, we really had to lay down the groundwork. So let me, let me give you a bit of an explanation here. So the 20A... Intel 20A is meant to evoke the Angstrom era of semiconductor design.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  What? Oh, I love it so much.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  So Angstrom is a unit of measurement that is smaller than a nanometer. Um, so 20 Angstrom is equivalent to two nanometers. Now, this is not a two nanometer scale thing, nor is it standing for 20 Angstrom. It is just meant to evoke that.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  So it's lying.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  With the A.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  No, you know what? Anytime a company just jumps its numbering system to 20, you know that they've given up. Samsung did this with the S20. You know what? Whatever. It's 20 now. We know it will always be bigger than the iPhone number.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. All joking aside, though, this is probably going to be the biggest jump in Intel's chips in like 25 years and like.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  But it's going to happen 25 years from now.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. Not 25 years, in like, in like 10, 15 years. Um, it's their first new transistor architecture since FinFET, which is the basic technology that every major transistor's been using since 2011. So this is the next really big jump forward. Uh, they're using something called ribbon FET, um, which is an all gate all around transistor. It allows for a lot greater transistor density, smaller sizes. Um, they are doing a lot of interesting stuff technically or are planning on it. Um, it'll be out sometime in 2024, 2025. Hopefully. Rampage is 2024. It'll probably be in hardware you can buy in 2025, hopefully, assuming that none of the delays that have plagued the company for the last 10 years pop up.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Wait, 20A? I just want to come back to this. 20A. 20A is 20 Angstroms or 2 nanometers.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  That number still has to come down.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  Indeed, it does.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  You don't want to go to 30A.

• 52:44Speaker 04

  So the generation after that is 18A, which is the farthest piece of the roadmap. Uh, it is the Vegas thing. So it's the second generation that'll use that ribbon FET technology. Uh, it is in development for early 2025 is the only thing Intel gave. At this point, we don't have hard numbers anymore for, for improvements that it's expecting in performance per watt. Um, and 18A is the most important piece because that is the part where Intel says that it will be back at the head of the pack, so. All this, all this was to say that Intel is not ahead right now. Like, as a fact, right now, Intel does not make the most technically advanced chips on the planet,

• 53:23Speaker 04

  and it expects to be making that again when 18A comes out in 2025, 2026-ish.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  Okay. What's smaller than an Angstrom?

• 53:33Speaker 04

  So, smaller than an Angstrom, I'm so glad you asked this. The Angstrom is not actually a scientific, uh, it's not an SI unit. Um, it is an alternative unit.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  It's Imperial.

• 53:42Speaker 04

  It's an Imperial unit. One Angstrom is 0.1 nanometers, but the metric scale generally only goes, uh, in units of three. So we go million, which is, you know, three billion, which is another three digits. So the next thing down is Pico, Pikometer, but we're probably a ways away from having to use that. Yeah.

• 54:00Alex Cranz?

  And Intel's even further.

• 54:01Nilay Patel?

  But somewhere on the Intel chart, they're like, 20P is coming.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  20P might be coming.

• 54:06Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Before the heat death of the universe.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  They should have just been like 200P. And then just like given themselves all of the numbers in between.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Look, when they switch to measuring things in Angstroms, I also think they need to get rid of lakes and switch to ponds.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta end this. I'm, I, I, every time I'm on the show, I'm like, explain the USB version numbers, or explain Intel's.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  And it's always so much more complicated than you could possibly imagine.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  And that's, and that's why I appreciate.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  I, I apologize to, to everyone for this.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  Amazing. Well, Heim is very much on the, the chip beat lately. If you're listening to this and you, you're the person at Intel in charge of picking Angstroms, uh, just email Heim, because I, many questions are coming your way. Uh, okay, we're gonna take one more break, and we got it. Dude, we have a lot of catch to talk about.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 55:05Speaker 06

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• 56:13Speaker 03

  We're back. Dieter, what gadgets do you want to start with? I want to start with the Huawei P50, which is launching for real. It's got Harmony OS. Because in an alternate universe where this thing didn't have Harmony OS, this would be the phone of like the fall, right? There, you know, iPhone is probably on some sort of S cycle, whatever number they give it. Samsung's going to make another Samsung phone. You know, Google's going to try for the Pixel, you know, like all the stuff. But like, up until the ban, Huawei was like gunning for Samsung in like major markets. And they were, they were the, that was the competition. It was Samsung versus Huawei. And then that just is gone. So this phone, the P50 and the P50 Pro is like from an alternate universe.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  You know, I'm sure it will do fine in China. You know, we've already talked about Harmony OS and how it's, it's not Android, but it's Android. And, you know, the cameras look ridiculous. I love how giant these, you know, camera modules are in the back of the phone. And they've had to, Huawei is in such a bad spot. One of the quotes here is like, 5G phones are beyond our reach. We have to go with 4G by removing the 5G module from our chip design, again, because of stuff.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  And so that's, I'm waving my hand at stuff a lot. So that's kind of what I have to say about this phone is like, I would love for this to have been the phone that makes like, puts Samsung on notice that like, is taking on the Ultra in a more serious way. Like, it would have been a huge clash of the titans. And instead, it's, it's an interesting side note. Yeah, I mean. That's what I got to say about the P50. The Harmony OS thing is like, we'll see, right? Like, yeah. If you're Samsung, you're watching to see if Huawei can peel off from Android. Right. And actually pull it off. Yeah. Because that indicates that maybe you could do the same thing, which is like, the big back and forth historical tension with Google.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and so the other thing I guess to pay attention to is can, can they get an app ecosystem going? You know, I'm sure, you know, Android compatible there, can they get a store going? Will people actually use and update that their apps on that store? Cause there's like, there's maybe a little bit of Android store competition potentially happening because, you know, the Amazon App Store is going to show up on Windows now when Windows runs Android apps. Huawei is going to be doing this thing on Harmony. It may be that that could be another interesting, like sideways thing that this does. I just, I don't want to give it that much credit quite yet, but I think you're right that Samsung is paying attention to that.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  Can this run the Amazon App Store for the same stuff?

• 58:48Speaker 03

  You know, I have no idea. If you were to just like sideload the Amazon App Store on Harmony OS, would it just like happen to work? I bet it would just happen to work. I've just, yeah. But like, no, like, no one would do that, of course.

• 59:02Alex Cranz?

  How many people in America are going to be buying this? Like this.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Zero people. With Dieter, Marquez.

• 59:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Two people are going to be buying it. Everybody else is going to be buying it in China, where it'll probably do really well because Huawei is like.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:17Alex Cranz?

  Huge there.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  No, this is, this is explicitly for the Chinese market, like to be clear. I'm just saying that like, in an alternate universe, it would have been for the world.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  And actually, you know, we just talked, we talked about Apple's earnings, like, Apple's biggest market is China.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  So in a very real way, the P50 is Apple's biggest competition.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 59:35Nilay Patel?

  But they are paying a lot of attention to this phone.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:38Alex Cranz?

  And I think you already are seeing, like, in China, like, their own app stores are really popular already. Like, everybody's kind of gotten used to having their own app stores, and you just go put your app on all 12 different stores for all 40 different products out there. So it feels like this is probably gonna do just fine in China, although the 5G thing is really weird.

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  The 5G thing, yeah, we were just, we were just talking about that.

• 1:00:03Alex Cranz?

  That's a big point of contention here in the United States.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 1:00:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  It just reminded me that the last time Apple had one of its, like, deep dive camera meetings, they talked about Huawei way more than I expected. And this all just brought it full circle for me.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  Because that's who they are competing with, like.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Nilay Patel?

  They care a lot about Samsung, they care a lot about Pixel, in one of their biggest markets, if not the biggest market quarter to quarter. Yeah, it's Huawei.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Well, and, and not for nothing, it may be that the Chinese government just, like, has a vested interest in seeing some success of Harmony OS and wants to do what it can to support it. And so that could also be a reason that it could be successful in some way. And they won't just default back to Android if they're ever allowed to again. And that, that could also create weird pressures on Samsung and Google.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, because Huawei is very friendly already.

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  They, you're gonna get an email from Huawei.

• 1:01:01Alex Cranz?

  I'm about to get an email.

• 1:01:02Nilay Patel?

  They, they don't like it when you say that, but they are very friendly. Lots of other gadgets, Oppo Watch 2 in China, Dieter, another, it's like another Dieter special.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  I mean, is it, sure, I mean, it's, look, it's, it's running, you know, the sort of same, whatever OS we, you know, have been seeing out of Oppo for its watches. It would, it would be very interesting if this thing ran, you know, a more standard OS. It looks fine, but I, it's, again, it just, it solidifies for me that the wearable accessory market for Android Users is just the most depressing thing at this precise moment.

• 1:01:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  You can get a Fitbit, you can get a bad Wear OS watch and the Wear OS watch like upgrade story is a fiasco. Don't buy a Wear OS watch right now, just do not. A very perishingly small number of them are even going to be upgradable and that upgrade process requires a hard reset. And like you just got to start over from scratch. Fossil is releasing watches this fall that will be upgradable, but they're not going to launch with Wear OS 3. We're expecting Samsung to announce some Wear OS 3 watches imminently, of course. But you know, like if you treat these watches as, I don't want to say disposable, but like if with all of these watches, the Apple Watch 2 included. You should just assume that what it does out of the box is what it does. Period.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  And if what it does out of the box is good, like long battery life, keeps time, counts steps decently, or at least halfway decently well. Then, you know, more power to you. Happy you got something that does what it said it would do out of the box. But do not expect it to be like a platform that you install apps and like it gains new capabilities over time. Not right now.

• 1:02:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, we'll see what this Wear OS 3 stuff looks like. Obviously, Google and Samsung, I mean, they got their asses kicked to come together in a way that you just wouldn't expect historically. So we'll see. Alex, tell us about these Nothing earbuds, which feel like they also came out of nowhere and were like a hype supernova this week.

• 1:03:03Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. I feel like we were, we've been hearing about them sort of for a while now, which is really annoying because the name is Nothing. And I just keep being like, oh, what like, there's just so many puns, like it's just inviting them. But new, new earbuds, they're, they look a lot like an AirPod Pro, but I think nicer. I personally like, I like, I think they look really cool. Yeah, they look cool as hell.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Alex Cranz?

  But they're only a hundred dollars instead of $250. But that also means, you know, you can't lose that much money and expect them to have the same quality. Like that just doesn't exist. So, so the big issue I think is that like the noise cancellation kind of sucks on them.

• 1:03:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, and they're buggy as hell.

• 1:03:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. The software is just like not, not great. It could be better, but they look cool and they got wireless charging and you don't have to like spend extra for that. And they're a hundred dollars.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:58Alex Cranz?

  That's, I think that's neat. That is not nothing.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  It is not nothing.

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  Whoa.

• 1:04:04Alex Cranz?

  All right, I gotta go now. See you later.

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  Like, if that made me groan, you know, it's bad. I just wanted, do you think these are gonna become like the default Android buds? Right? Because they like have the look.

• 1:04:16Alex Cranz?

  I don't.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  They have a look.

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  I think it's a problem for Google if these become the default Android buds.

• 1:04:21Alex Cranz?

  Is it Google or Samsung? Like, nobody.

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  Google or Samsung, both of whom sell earbuds.

• 1:04:27Alex Cranz?

  That are okay.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  Samsung's buds are really pretty solid defaults, although I will say that I bought the buds pro this week and just completely broken within a day.

• 1:04:39Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  The noise cancellation on one of the buds is just like, we're just gonna make some static noise now. So those are going back. But they're like the regular buds plus, like, as far as like lowest common denominator, you trust them to last a long time and sound decent and like not just be broken. They're great. I love them. So Samsung, I think, for Android users is like, probably like the, you know, one of the, I mean, there's a bunch. People like the Jabras, people like a bunch of, a bunch of the other ones. But this could be like the default cool one for at least a hot minute.

• 1:05:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but like for Android users.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  For Android, but like Bluetooth headphones are a huge business now, apparently. They make a ton of money for Apple. So it's, it's, when nothing came out, like, the first thing we're gonna make are are Bluetooth headphones. We're all like, ugh. But actually, maybe that's just, that's where the money is. Like, you.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  But also, you have to, you have to, for these to become like the next default for Android users, they have to find them. Like, these are sold right now through nothing's website. You're not, you're not rolling up in a Best Buy and deciding between these and a Samsung. You can't, they're not on Amazon or.

• 1:05:46Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they're trying to like replicate that OnePlus thing, right? Where, where all the Android users.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Super successful OnePlus strategy.

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  I was about to say, I was about to say, this feels, this feels a lot like OnePlus, which is not, not like a retail success. It has not broken through the phone market and unseated Samsung or.

• 1:06:06Alex Cranz?

  It'll be really popular with Android influencers.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  It's very hard to unseat Samsung, even if you make a better phone than Samsung, which you could argue that OnePlus did in some ways.

• 1:06:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  You've gotta get the carrier deal. Like, there's just a million steps between you and selling a thing.

• 1:06:20Nilay Patel?

  There's like other suits show up and demand whatever concessions. They're just like made some headphones and like there's a huge market of Android users and you could just sell cool headphones to them.

• 1:06:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, if you put these in Best Buy, I feel like they would do amazingly well.

• 1:06:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, they got to finish them first because they're very broken.

• 1:06:37Alex Cranz?

  They have to make that.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  I mean, the trick here to me is like make earbuds that kind of are cool because AirPods had a moment of like being cool, but now they're just kind of boring default.

• 1:06:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  I can't think of any other earbuds. I'm like, oh yeah, those look cool.

• 1:06:51Alex Cranz?

  They all look terrible.

• 1:06:52Speaker 04

  Beats, Beats used to be cool before Apple owned them.

• 1:06:55Alex Cranz?

  But not the earbuds.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Those are headphones. I'm talking about like earbuds.

• 1:06:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, AirPods, like you've got the Bose with your giant satellites on your ears.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Alex Cranz?

  And you've got like, you've got what? The, the Beams, the Samsung Beams. Those are.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  They didn't call them beans, man. This is very, this is dicey area on this show.

• 1:07:12Alex Cranz?

  Just gonna get wrecked.

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  They're definitely beans.

• 1:07:14Alex Cranz?

  But they do. I mean, those look cool. And yeah, like these look neat. These look like, these look like the next step in that Apple design, which we could all admit was probably really, really good.

• 1:07:26Nilay Patel?

  Have you been watching, if you watch the Olympics, just watching athletes not care for their AirPods is incredible. Like I was watching swimming last night and like dudes are just like pulling their AirPods out and just like throwing them loose in their pockets.

• 1:07:39Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, ah!

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm like freaking out.

• 1:07:45Alex Cranz?

  Just a full on horror movie.

• 1:07:49Nilay Patel?

  But that's like, that kind of marketing is impossible to, to like overcome, right? Like everyone has them. They're ubiquitous. They're white. People see them. Nothing has longer. It's, it's cool to see that kind of competition in a way that, you know, Verizon isn't involved in this transaction.

• 1:08:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I like the little pop of color. I like, like the, the metal elements of it. It's just, they just look neat.

• 1:08:13Speaker 03

  Well, hey, I want to talk about these LG earbuds real quick.

• 1:08:16Alex Cranz?

  Speaking of.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  They have this thing called Whisper Mode, um, where you can take the right one out and then hold it up to your mouth and whisper into it. And then it will, like, that will just work. It'll become like a dedicated microphone. So instead of being an earbud, it turns into a microphone.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  LG product designers have been watching a lot of TikTok.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  That's what I'm saying. Like, everybody on TikTok is like holding up their little microphone from their wired headphones up their mouth. And now you can just do it with a Bluetooth headphone. It's amazing.

• 1:08:41Nilay Patel?

  I love it. It's so dumb. It's great. It is great. It's just very funny that they had to brand it as whispering mode instead of like TikTok yelling mode. Yeah.

• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  TikTok rant mode. It's real good. Last few things. I mentioned the Olympics. Katie Keck, our new stream reporter, has a great piece on how hard it is to stream the Olympics. Disclosure Comcast, NBC Universal, invested in Vox Media, the verge, whatever. Nothing about this piece suggests that they were pleased with us. It is very hard to stream the Olympics. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Ridiculously hard. It is. And then like Peacock is a mess. The best thing to do, the best way to do it is to have cable and then use the NBC Sports app. But even that app is terrible. He didn't say it was a good way. He said it was the best way. You've got a number of bad options and your best one is the NBC Sports app. The thing that is for Katie, I was like, here's what I'm mad about.

• 1:09:39Nilay Patel?

  NHK, which is like the most advanced broadcaster in the world. Right. Is producing the games in Tokyo. NHK is a Japanese broadcaster. 200 hours of it on 8K. They're just like way ahead of the curve. And if you have an AK TV, you can actually watch it in AK on NHK in Japan. NBC taking the 1080p feeds and upscaling them to 4K in the United States. Amazing. Like, what are we doing, guys? Just dropping the ball. And it's very hard to get those 4K feeds. You either, you have to live in basically one of 50 cities in the United States. It's, uh, it's very messy and I don't like it. That said, if I, if I was able to watch the swimmers take their AirPods out loose and just like toss them out in higher resolution, like I might be dead. Yeah.

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  Lastly, uh, it seems like a giant infrastructure deal is going to go through Congress with 65 billion, uh, for broadband and a bunch of other stuff, including charging infrastructure for EVs has not passed yet, but it's coming. That's going to be a big story for us in the coming week. And then I, I feel like I end every episode of the show by updating on the calamity of the T-Mobile Sprint Dish Network deal.

• 1:10:47Nilay Patel?

  So stupid. Dish, I mentioned this last week. Dish signed a big deal with AT&T.

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:10:54Nilay Patel?

  And now to, because T-Mobile was supposed to provide them with service, but they suck at it. So Dish left and now T-Mobile is launching a competitive prepaid service.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:11:06Nilay Patel?

  To get back all the customers. It's sold to Dish as part of this deal with Boost Network.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  None of this worked. I just like, it didn't work. We tried to design some overly complicated system and now I have to know the phrase ORAN, Open Radio Access Network. It's just like a thing I have to know about now. We have to pay attention to the MVNO contracts of AT&T, T-Mobile and Dish.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  And there's only three carriers in America.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  So here's my question about this. Was this T-Mobile's secret evil plan all along? A.

• 1:11:39Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Just like very clearly yes.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  But what, but I have a different theory. What if it wasn't? They had good intentions or like, you know, non completely evil intentions and the deal was complicated enough and it was so obvious that like no one was paying attention that they just like forgot the deal was there. And so some random marketer somewhere inside the T-Mobile Goliath was like, you know what'd be cool is if we made a deal. And then they like, they created the deal and put it out there and forgot that they had promised never to do that. They just like, didn't occur to them that there was a thing because it was so, they were so unafraid of it having the, an actual force of law that it didn't like, there was no memo sent out to the company saying, hey, don't do this stuff.

• 1:12:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, maybe. I mean, big companies are messy and dumb, but I just remember when they, they had all these press conferences when they announced the T-Mobile's front deal and like, that was when John Ledger was still the CEO and Mike Seibert was there and like, people would ask John Ledger, like, are you, are you going to support Dish? And he'd be like, they can figure it out. And he would smile, right? Like, cause he's always smiling. Like, he was, he knew what was gonna happen. Yeah. John Langer, very clever man. And he, I think it's fair to say, he was smarter than the clowns at the FCC and FTC that created this nightmare of a deal. And now I have to know what ORAN is. And so do you, because you listen to the Vergecast. I just, we're gonna keep tracking it. It's just like, in the background of, of

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  everything, it is just true that we went from four national carriers to three. Yeah. And somewhere over there, Dish Network is attempting to set up something called Project Genesis, spelled with a five in the word Genesis. I think it's important to pay attention to. I just think it is also tiresome and annoying. Yeah. Very, I'm still upset about this. Okay. Last thing, there's a lot of news coming out of Activision Blizzard. Horrible working conditions at the company. There's a lawsuit from the state of California. There was a walkout. Zoe Schiffer went to that walkout. We have a story about that. Polygon is doing great job covering that story. We're gonna dip in and out of it. It's not 100% our world, but we're gonna do some coverage. But if you're interested in it, Polygon is doing a lot of coverage. And Chris Plant, the editor

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  of Polygon, and I have been talking about the best ways to cover it. So check out Polygon, check out Zoe's story. That thing is gonna keep building. And I think a lot of change is coming to the gaming industry because of this story. I just want to call it out. It's important. We didn't talk about it too much. On this episode, I get the sense we'll be talking about it a lot in the future. That's it. We did under an hour and a half. I was expecting to go, like, when we were, like, deep in Apple earnings, I was like, oh, man, five hour Vergecast. We did it. I'm proud of all of you.

• 1:14:17Alex Cranz?

  I'm proud of you.

• 1:14:18Nilay Patel?

  Especially Heim. When I think of Heim, I'm like, Heim 20A.

• 1:14:25Nilay Patel?

  You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless, Dieter's at Backlon, Alex is Alex H. Cranz with a Z, Heim is C. Gartenberg. On Decoder this week, we had Chuck Todd from NBC News speaking of Peacock. He's launching a bunch of shows on Peacock. That was a really interesting conversation. Next week, Neil Mohan, the chief product officer of YouTube. That one's gonna be spicy. That's my promise to you. And then we'll be back on Friday with the Vergecast. That's it. Thank you so much. Rock and roll. Please, please get a vaccine.

• 1:15:13Speaker 07

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• 1:15:44Speaker 08

  Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why The Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Three times a week, hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. And The Guardian is not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.