Google Pixel 5a review / Facebook's metaverse for work / Apple, Epic, and Google emails

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, Allison Johnson, and Dan Seifert discuss reviews for the Google Pixel 5a, Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Z Fold 3, and the T-Mobile data breach that exposed personal info of more than 47 million people. Second half of the show, the crew discuss Facebook's new metaverse conference software, the emails from the Apple vs Epic trial, and Intel's new PC gaming GPUs. Further reading: COVID-19 booster shots will be offered to Americans in September, Biden administration says Immunocompromised people should get a third COVID-19 vaccine dose, CDC committee says Go read this deep dive on why US public health data systems couldn’t handle COVID-19 Google Pixel 5a review: boring, but better than ever Google Pixel 5A comes with a bigger battery and screen, smaller price tag The Google Pixel 6 won’t ship with a charger Galaxy Watch 4 review: welcome to Samsung’s garden Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 3 is the first folding phone for normal people There’s still a place for the Note in Samsung’s Galaxy Samsung confirms it’s removing ads from its stock apps later this year How the latest and greatest Samsung and Apple earbuds lock you into their world T-Mobile data breach exposed the personal info of more than 47 million people Microsoft is making it harder to switch default browsers in Windows 11 Apple’s been playing it too MagSafe Apple’s attempt at podcast subscriptions is off to a messy start FTC says Facebook has been a monopoly ‘since at least 2011’ in amended antitrust complaint Inside Facebook’s metaverse for work Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store, Epic filing claims Google gave phone makers extra money to ditch third-party app stores Google secretly had a giant gaming vision that includes bringing games to Mac Sweetheart deals and plastic knives: all the best emails from the Apple vs. Epic trial Steve Jobs email confirms Apple was working on an ‘iPhone nano’ Intel enters the PC gaming GPU battle with Arc Intel shows off its answer to Nvidia’s DLSS, coming to Arc GPUs in 2022 Intel previews its Alder Lake chip, promises hybrid CPUs for desktops and laptops Water shortages loom over future semiconductor fabs in Arizona Why Intel and TSMC are building water-dependent chip factories in one of the driest U. S. states GM and AT&T are teaming up to bring 5G to Chevy, Cadillac, and GMC cars by 2024 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, Allison Johnson, Dan Seifert, and Alex Krantz join the show. We talk about our Samsung Z Flip and Z Fold 3 reviews, Allison's Pixel 5A review, whatever is going on with Apple, Epic, and Google. Lots came out on that front this week, and Facebook's Metaverse for work. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:19Speaker 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.

• 1:04Speaker 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.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Platform Lock-in. Every time you listen to our show, it gets harder to listen to a different show. That's everyone, they compound. We only work with certain brands of headphones. I'm Neelai, I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your default HTTPS handler.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  So much more accurate than you know. I don't know what that means. Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:16Alex Cranz?

  I am your credit card processor.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  Wow, you got some strict rules.

• 2:19Alex Cranz?

  I got, yeah, real strict.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  Charging those rates. Dan Seifert is here.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Good, Dan.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  I don't have a quip. I wasn't ready. Nobody told me, bring a quip.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  We do the beginning of this show the same every week.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  I've only done this like a decade. Nobody told me.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  Allison Johnson is here. Hey, Allison. Hello. I don't have a quip either. You don't need one. Dan has much higher, right? He's been around for a longer time.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  All right, there's a lot to talk about. Allison, you reviewed the new Pixel 5A. We reviewed the Galaxy Watch 4, the Z Flip, the Z Fold, the, there's a lot of Z stuff. We have a pay into the Galaxy Note that we need to discuss. Then there's a tremendous amount of lawsuit news, basically. We got unredacted complaints in Google versus Epic. Lots to talk about there. There's Apple versus Epic news that just never stops happening. A lot to talk about this week on the Vergecast. I do, however, as always, want to start with COVID. We are in a very strange time in our COVID experience, our shared COVID experience that we've been going through for over a year, far too long now. We are in the midst of the Delta variant spike across the world. We are hearing more about breakthrough cases.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  Two senators today, actually, tested positive for COVID. They're both vaccinated. Breakthrough cases. What I will remind you, breakthrough cases are vanishingly rare among the vaccinated, and you are much safer if you get vaccinated. So we have a story about the sort of certainty, the mathematical certainty that there will be breakthrough cases as more people get vaccinated, combined with Delta. I just remind and beg every week on the show, please get vaccinated. It does make things better. The vaccines are extraordinarily effective. But as you hear that news, we have some stories on how to contextualize it, how to understand it. On the same note, Biden administration announced, we started talking about this a bit last week, we all saw it coming, Biden administration announced booster shots will

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  be available to Americans, starting in September, starting with the elderly. The CDC said amino compromised people should get a third shot if you were part of the two dose vaccine. And then we have a deep dive, we keep talking about COVID as part of, as a systems problem, a data problem, a technology problem, on why our public health data systems have not, even after all this time, been up to the task of helping us understand the data on COVID. So, we're still in it, we get your shot, eventually we'll come out of it. It's just hold, hold tight. Here's what I'm looking forward to. We're gonna have a birthday party in October, lots of cool guests announced, people are coming, we're gonna check vaccine statuses. I want to have that party. It's only gonna happen. I want to have a 10th birthday

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  party for The Verge in New York with lots and lots of people. It's only gonna happen if vaccine rates go up, cases go down. Like, we're doing it, we're, we're charging ahead.

• 5:05Alex Cranz?

  Love it.

• 5:05Nilay Patel?

  But, everyone's gotta help me out. I've been looking forward to that party for 10 years.

• 5:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  You know what I mean? Come on.

• 5:11Alex Cranz?

  Don't mess up with the party, guys. Get vaxxed.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  Don't mess up my party. Priorities.

• 5:16Alex Cranz?

  I have a priority. I want to party, get vaxxed. But also, it's safe and good. Do it.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but also, also the other things.

• 5:22Alex Cranz?

  Also the other stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  Look, you gotta, gotta meet Americans where they are. All this high-minded stuff about public safety and health and dude, no, no, no. Do you want to rage? Get the shot.

• 5:33Alex Cranz?

  Exactly. That's all I was thinking.

• 5:35Nilay Patel?

  All right. Let's talk about phones. A lot of phones this week. Dieter, you wanna, you wanna drive this one?

• 5:41Speaker 04

  I think that the, the most interesting phone, but also, like, weirdly not, but is, but it's not, it's just dichotomy. It's, it's, it's a tale of opposites, is the Pixel 5A. So, Allison, you reviewed it. Am I weird to think that, like, this is, at the exact same time, fascinating and boring?

• 6:00Speaker 05

  That's how I would put it, really. It's, it's a real short list of updates, so on the face of it, it doesn't sound like much. So, comparing to Pixel 4A 5G, you get a little bit bigger screen, it's a 6.3 4-inch panel now. You get a, a pretty sizable battery boost, which has been like, not the strongest point for Pixel phones in the past. And then you get IP 67 waterproofing. And like, ta-da, that's it.

• 6:32Speaker 05

  It's when you kind of step back and you look at all the pieces together and it's really impressive and it's cheaper this year. It's $450 and I think the 4A 5G came out at $500.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  So that's like what sounds boring on the face of it, but to me what's interesting is you look at sub $500 phones and every phone has its gimmick and it seems like the Pixel 5A's gimmick is we do everything you care about well.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's not flashy. It's like, it's kind of hard to market, I think.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  But yeah, it's just a really good all-rounder and there's, there's really nothing you can fault it for. Like there's, it's not the biggest phone, you know, some people want a really huge screen. There's definitely budget phones out there that can do that. If you want a fast refresh rate screen, the Samsung A52 5G will do that for you. The TCL 20 Pro, which I looked at pretty recently, is like very snazzy looking with a curved display, kind of flagship-y. Pixel 5A is not that. It is very, just kind of standard and bland, but like really good.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  The software has always been like a really strong suit for it. You're going to get super fast updates, feature drops, a good length of security, update support. But that's not exciting.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Well, okay, you say there's nothing to complain about, but this is a Vergecast, so we have to. I think there's two things to complain about. One is like my hobby horse of why doesn't Google try hard to sell these things? So we got to get to that. But before we get to that, can you explain this confusion with the 5G support? Not the fact that Google like just puts up the wrong specs on its spec page on its website, which is hilarious, by the way. They just flat out got like three different specs wrong on their own website for this phone.

• 8:39Alex Cranz?

  It's incredible. Like, is there no copy editor at Google?

• 8:43Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  No, it's an AI.

• 8:46Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  Copy and paste on Android is really hard, right? You have a long press, the thing pops up, it's confusing. So anyway, but before we get to complaining about Google's insanity, what's the deal with its 5G compatibility? Because it's not perfect, right?

• 9:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a couple of weird things about it. The first is kind of less of a concern. There's no millimeter wave. Last year's model, there was a separate version of millimeter wave sold through Verizon. It was more expensive. Chances are you don't have a millimeter wave signal around you, so it's not a big deal. So that's just, they're just not doing that this year. So it's all sub 6 gigahertz. But the weird thing is, is the C-band support, and C-band is the good stuff that's coming, especially for Verizon and AT&T customers.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Would you say that when the C-band, the new C-band stuff gets here, then we're really in a race?

• 9:43Speaker 05

  The race starts, yeah. It's actually, this whole past five years has just been like a warm-up race.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  They were just stretching. It's like in NASCAR when they do the lap before the actual start happens.

• 9:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. I think that's what's been happening.

• 10:01Nilay Patel?

  How many NASCAR races have you watched in your life?

• 10:03Speaker 04

  I have been in person to one NASCAR race, actually attended, camped out there, it was super fun. And I have watched, I don't know, a dozen.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  Okay, just checking.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:16Alex Cranz?

  Way more than I have.

• 10:17Nilay Patel?

  Because they don't always do a rolling start, but I guess only in a context of 5G.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I want to keep going with the NASCAR metaphor, I just want to make sure everyone's with me.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  I could keep going, I just said, maybe not.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  The good stuff.

• 10:30Speaker 05

  The good stuff. So that's allegedly, it's going to get really good in the US, the 5G. So that starts rolling out in December. So phones now are, it's becoming more and more common to see support for it on them, because you can hold on to your phone a couple of years, you're probably going to be able to use it. So the Pixel 5A supports the right bands for C-band on the hardware level. It has the FCC certification to use C-band.

• 11:04Speaker 05

  But Google is doing a weird thing where they are just not committing to making a software update that it would require to use C-band. And that makes no sense.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  Don't the Pixel 4s have C-band support?

• 11:20Speaker 05

  The Pixel 5, I think, was one of the early phones that they're like, we're bringing C-band.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  Does it just have like a wacky radio and they just, they don't want to deal with making the driver for the modem that it happens to have or something? Like, it makes no sense to me.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  I mean, they've been using this, this modem and radio for a little while now.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Seeing as it's exactly the same as last year's phone. So I don't know if that's much of an excuse.

• 11:43Alex Cranz?

  Are they just gonna like come around in two months and say for $25 more?

• 11:51Speaker 05

  C-band plus.

• 11:52Nilay Patel?

  What did they say when you asked them about it?

• 11:54Speaker 05

  I laid out all these points. I was like, okay, so you got the hardware, you got the FCC, you're not committing to the software update. And they're like, yes.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  So it's, it's like, it's really hard to imagine that they won't update, but it's sort of like, I don't want to second guess them on that. So that's kind of is what it is. Like, all the facts laid out there, it has the right components and approval to use C-band. So just kind of a weird question mark on that right now.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay, whatever, Google.

• 12:29Alex Cranz?

  Is this where like the Android community can get involved? Can they, can they make C-band happen? Just some like big Pixel fans?

• 12:37Speaker 04

  If enough of them buy it.

• 12:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, if enough of them buy it. Also, the networks don't exist yet. A huge part of the 5G story in America is that all the networks are fake. T-Mobile's network is not fake. That's

• 12:51Alex Cranz?

  Even Gen 5 sis?

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  The Gen 5 sis deeply fake.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, yeah, I don't know. Anyhow, the race is great. The race is doing really well.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  The last thing is, um, where can I buy one?

• 13:05Speaker 05

  Well, Dieter, first of all, you need to live in the US or Japan.

• 13:11Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  Um, otherwise you're out of luck.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  Great.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  Uh, and then it's not being sold through carriers this year. It's Google Store and um, their wireless brand and that's it. That's where you can get it. You can't tell your uncle to go pick one up when his like two-year contract is over at Verizon. Um, yeah, it's kinda, it kinda sucks. I wanna be like, this is a phone that a lot of people should buy and it's sort of hard to track down.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Why? So actually like, the, the, the, the big question is, why didn't they just like, cut the price on the 4A 5G or, you know, whatever and not make this phone since they can't get it into carriers anyway? Like, and they've got the six coming, which is the high-end one.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  That they have promised to market.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, which they have promised to market. Yeah, yeah. So there's a little bit of like, why does this phone exist for Google? Um, which is like the perennial question for Pixel phones.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I don't know if they wanna get it out there with a new number on it and that's gonna be exciting to a small amount of people or, I mean, they did talk a lot about um, the chip shortage and um, supply chain constraints making this harder to distribute. So it's possible they wanted to go bigger on this and just didn't have the resources to do it. Yeah, so we kind of landed in this weird like, limbo of it exists, but it's only in these limited channels and.

• 14:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, sort of too bad.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  It's interesting to me that Google isn't putting more of an effort on this model and that all of its kind of hopes and dreams and plans for the Pixel line seem to be tied up with the Pixel 6, considering so far, the Pixel models that have sold are the A series. Like, they're the ones that they sell a lot more of than the Pixel 4 and the Pixel 5 and so on. So you'd think, if you're looking at it from like a business perspective, that maybe we put more of our effort behind the A series and we do the flagship as like an aspirational supercar, whatever. We don't really expect anyone to buy it, but we market the heck out of the A series and that's the one that people buy. But like, they are not

• 15:34Speaker 03

  doing that at all, at least as far as we can tell.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:37Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, I'm just hung up on you calling the Pixel a supercar.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Maybe it will be. I don't know.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  We're doing a lot of car metaphors today and this is, it's killing me.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Look, Jeff Gordon drives a supercar, or Jeff Gordon drives a Pixel 6, and then everyone buys Pixel 5 As, right? That sold a lot of Ford Tauruses.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  Wow. Okay.

• 15:55Alex Cranz?

  Just an infinity.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Neil is staring at me through the Zoom call.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  The very, very, very, very last Pixel thing. We have to get out this car metaphor. Although cars have batteries, I'm not, I'm not gonna try and do it. The audience cared just as much about the fact that Google's not putting a Walwart charger in the Pixel 6 box as they did about this review. Yeah. Okay, they're doing the same thing that Samsung has done and that Apple did first and okay, but like everyone, I don't know, is real mad or I don't, it's, I don't know. It was obvious that this was going to happen to me.

• 16:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. Maybe it still just kind of stings when you feel like you're entitled to that thing.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  You know, you paid for your phone, you get a charger in the box, and then they tell you, no, you don't get one anymore, but the phone's not cheaper. So I don't know. Maybe we just, we just need to have a collective moment of that every time we find out that another, another manufacturer is taking the charger away. But yeah, kind of inevitable.

• 16:56Alex Cranz?

  Will they include the cord?

• 16:58Speaker 03

  They better. They have to. I feel like we're we're another cycle away from them taking the cord away.

• 17:04Alex Cranz?

  If they keep the cord, I'm fine because like I have a little a little wool wart that has me like I can do like three or four cords into it. And that's what I use. I don't I don't need.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  The cords are kind of consumable. Like you use a cord for a couple of years, they kind of tend to break. They tear out, they get gross. You want it to be replaced.

• 17:22Alex Cranz?

  The warts last forever. I have stepped on so many in my house that I just like forget I own.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  Do you have a drawer?

• 17:28Alex Cranz?

  No, I had a box.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  I had to organize mine into big Ziploc bags. So USB A, USB C.

• 17:36Alex Cranz?

  Smart.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, let me just have a question about the price here. So 450, it's good. It's competitive. It's got all the features. We're expecting a very high end $1,000 plus Pixel 6 to come out. There's a pretty big hole in the middle of Google's lineup, right? Like 450 is, you know, just I'm assuming most people are familiar with Apple's lineup, but Samsung's lineup is the same. Like at every 50 or $100 price point, there is a phone available for you from Apple or Samsung. Google's like, here's this extremely weird set of compromises at $450. And then here's the promise of us actually trying. And Dieter, I think we're just assuming it'll be plus $1,000.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  I think the plot, the pro will be, I think that the regular Pixel 6, I've kind of been there, but I might be the only one who thinks that it could potentially cost a thousand bucks. They might make the pick the regular Pixel 6 a little bit less expensive, but who knows?

• 18:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, you had that conversation with Rick Osterloh and he, you know, he was like, we're gonna try now. And then they're like, but not yet.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, I don't know, like the the rolling start metaphor is just in my brain now. Like, yep. You do the rolling start. So you're just like, you're ready to go. And there's no way that this is a rolling start. Right? This is just like a, they're like, well, we just got to get this thing out of the way so we can put all our attention over here.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you look at the most popular iPhone model, it's the iPhone 12, right? Which is 700 bucks and or eight, uh, 730 or 830, whatever. It's in that mid-range. And then like the most popular Samsung models are their A series, which are anywhere from, uh, Alison, you know, that's better than I do, but what $300 on up to $650. So like, there is definitely like a gap where you could be like, well, why don't they just keep selling the Pixel 5 for 700 bucks? But then you realize that nobody's going to buy a Pixel 5 for $700 in like 2021, are they? So I don't know. They're kind of in a pickle where they got to get like a lineup going to be able to fill those gaps.

• 19:37Speaker 05

  I think it's a weird gap and maybe particularly in the US market too, because I was just writing about OnePlus bringing yet another phone not to the US. Uh, that's sort of in that, that like upper mid-range kind of price bracket where it's like, has several features that are like really nice upgrades from kind of the, the 500 mid-range. And they've just said, see, uh, we're not bringing this kind of phone to the US. It's either super budget or you're going to buy a flagship. I don't know if that's like been decided for us or if we decided that.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  I have a theory. Increasingly, I believe that the US market is wackadoo compared to the rest of the world. Uh, and like Samsung, we're going to get into Samsung and how their S, S sales have just plummeted and the big beneficiary of it, you might not realize here in the US, because they don't sell here really, is Xiaomi. Uh, so they have been just skyrocketing. Um, and we just have no idea. Uh, OnePlus, they sell a few phones here in the US, but really they're putting a bunch of their effort in other markets. Um, so there's something about, uh, the US that makes companies not want to compete here. It's almost like the competition is hard. It's almost like there's gatekeepers, like, like maybe carriers or something are trying to stop, stop it. It's very strange.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  Fascinating. Someone should look into that.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  No comment. All right, okay. That's the Pixel 5A coming out somehow. It's a mystery. It's a challenge, really. It's like finding a Pokémon to get it. And then Dieter, you reviewed the Fold 3?

• 21:17Speaker 04

  I reviewed the Fold 3. That review will come out next week, but I know enough to talk about it this week, and we just, we gotta get this thing done, so we're gonna talk about that one. Dan's also here because he reviewed the Flip, and then I also reviewed the Watch.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  Let's just knock, knock the Watch out, because we talked about it at lunch last week, and I feel like, I read the review, it's what we talked about.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Everything we said last week was true. It is a, it is a Samsung Watch for Samsung phones. And one thing I want to make clear is, that's fine. It's okay that Samsung made a watch for Samsung phones. It's only frustrating because the platform it's using is the one that we know is supposed to be the good platform for all Android phones. It's just not, this is not that watch. And so, I'm not saying it's inherently bad because it's a Samsung Watch for Samsung phones. There are inherent problems with Samsung ecosystem, AKA Bixby, but it's not the thing that people might have been hoping for, and I needed to be really clear about that in discussing it, because I don't want anyone to think that they should

• 22:19Speaker 04

  buy this thing for a OnePlus phone, or a Pixel, or whatever, because you're just not gonna have a good time. But if you've got a Samsung phone, go for it, it's great. You know, assuming that you trust their privacy policy, which...

• 22:31Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, I received a lot of slacks from Dieter during the course of his review, where he was like, "This is nuts." And then like, five seconds later, he'd be like, "Ah, maybe it's fine." And then like, a couple minutes later, he'd be like, "That's nuts."

• 22:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  Because it's impossible to read and understand.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Well, it's not only that, but I spent all weekend just pressing Samsung, and these poor people were like, answering my emails over the weekend, all weekend. They are ended encrypting their health data. They are not sharing it with third parties. You have to be the one to explicitly do that. They do not, they say, have access to your health data unless you explicitly give them permission to look at it. But none of that information is clear in their privacy policy, because their privacy policy was... Written to protect Samsung, you know, just in case they happen to look at something right or happen to be wrong about whatever. And so I, the big problem with their privacy policy isn't necessarily what Samsung does with the data. It's that Samsung isn't clear enough about what you can do to make sure that it doesn't have access to your data. Because there are ways,

• 23:29Speaker 04

  you know, assuming they're telling me the truth to do that, to use their health platform and have all your data be fully encrypted and inaccessible to Samsung or anybody else. But Samsung doesn't make it clear how to do that. That's how they get you. Yeah. Somewhere right now, Eric Samsung is like Dieter's heart is beating. That's the name of the project manager. Okay. Okay, let's talk about the flip. Dan. Yes. Is it time?

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Uh, it feels like if you are buying a new phone and you're buying a new Samsung phone, and you are willing, wanting to spend a thousand bucks on it.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  And it's the, the moon is in its gibbets phase.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  And maybe you've got a phone you're trading in. You could theoretically buy a flip and not feel like you are making a big mistake. Like, I mean, it's, it's, I don't want to downplay, it is a really big inflection point, but most of that inflection point is because they cut $450 off the price. So now the flip three is a thousand bucks, which is the same price as a Galaxy S21 plus and an iPhone 12. And we all know that. And then on top of that, the carriers are being super thirsty with trade in plans. Samsung's being super thirsty with trade in plans. You can basically hand them an iPhone 3G and they will give you $500 or whatever. And you can walk out

• 24:53Speaker 03

  with a flip for, you know, a very aggressive price, maybe less than a Pixel 5A. So like, you know, it's, it's like, there's a lot of incentive to buy this. But there could be a lot of incentive to buy it. And then maybe you make a bad decision. Like there is an incentive to buy a Surface Duo at half price, but that's still a very bad decision. But the flip three is like, kind of like boringly good. Like we were talking about how like the 5A is kind of boring. The flip Is similar, which is silly to say about a phone that folds in half, but there's like no big gotchas with it. There's the price is kind of normal. The screen is really good. The processor is really fast.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  I had no problems with battery life. It lasted four to five hours of screen time every day. Went to bed, had like 25% battery. So it lasted me all day long. The cameras are fine. They're not class leading. If you really care that much about cameras, you're not buying a flip anyways. But it's like, you can now have a phone that folds in half and fits in your pocket. And the one big lingering question is, is that screen going to break in six months? And I can't answer that for you yet. Samsung is more confident than ever that it won't. And you can get it wet now, which is also kind of a nice thing that you couldn't do before. But like where a year ago, if you were buying a flip or a fold or any of the folding phones, you were kind of walking into this being like, okay, I'm taking a flyer on this.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  It may break. It probably will break. A lot of people's broke. I'm getting like last generation hardware. I'm getting last generation cameras. I'm paying through the teeth for it. Not getting many discounts. I am buying this because I want to be the first person to have this phone. And now, just a year later, it's like, oh, you know, a lot of people could buy these this fall and then a lot of people have flips. And like that pace of acceleration of iteration just seems way faster than I think anybody anticipated for these folding phones. And so that was kind of like my takeaway. It was like, it just felt normal. Like, it's like, oh, I could live with this. Like this is normal. There's nothing really to complain about. If you like the idea of something that has a big screen that fits in your pocket because you can fold it in half. This is now a viable option for you.

• 27:02Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that just sounds cool. I'm sorry. That just sounds like

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is very cool.

• 27:07Alex Cranz?

  Hell, like, like, I know we're all like shrugging, but like, it's a phone and it folds in half.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. And you can get it wet, which is like

• 27:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  A pretty. Remarkable accomplishment like like I don't want to downplay that and I don't want to downplay the fact that they put this whole package together at a price that most people would feel fine paying for a phone because at this point we've established people pay eight hundred to a thousand dollars for phones all the time, right? Like that hasn't stopped sales of the iPhone, hasn't stopped sales of anything really. And so they brought it to this price point where it's just like this isn't a novelty. This is normal. And and that's like a kind of a pretty major inflection point for this kind of technology. Now, it could be in six months when all of them break, or if all of them break that it's like, okay, that was a mistake. We're not there yet. And like, not that many people

• 27:56Speaker 03

  should be buying them or whatever. But like, at this stage, it's pretty, pretty wild to see and that they iterated this quickly. And I think this is what Samsung is really good at, is that just relentless in iteration on their idea. We saw them do it with the curved screens years ago. And we saw them do it with like, the Note for years. And now we're seeing them do it at a faster pace with the folding phones. And I think there's to Dieter's point earlier about how their lunch is getting eaten all over the world by Xiaomi, there's, there's more incentive for them to accelerate this path path of iteration. But like, I wouldn't feel too scared buying this myself. Like if I were buying a phone, like, I can totally understand why other people might and they want to want

• 28:39Speaker 03

  to take a beat. And it's probably smart to take a beat with any sort of new technology. But this is getting to the point where it doesn't feel like new technology anymore. It feels like normal technology.

• 28:47Nilay Patel?

  But that's because you will buy a new phone in six months.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's yeah.

• 28:51Nilay Patel?

  There's like 0% chance that you're gonna have a phone for a year.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  I'm still the early adopter, right? And so like, but like, even even last year, buying one, I would buy it if I bought it. I didn't buy one last year, a flip at least. You'd go in knowing that you're making compromises on it. And now you would go in buying it and really getting everything that you would get from a comparable thousand dollar flagship smartphone that doesn't fold in half.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they rushed into it? Right? We went through the marketing cycle where Motorola was like, it's a new razor. All the influencers come to a party. And like, Samsung was on the Today Show and like, the products were not ready.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  Not even close. And now we're like, the product's ready. And everyone's like, oh, another folding phone. And we just like, we

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, they totally like, you know, shot themselves in the foot a little bit. But like, if you look at like, the razor and those first, like, to that point, like, the razor. Was $1,400, had kind of a lousy screen, had a mid-range processor, definitely had lousy cameras. You were buying this specifically because it folded in half and looked like the old Razer. If you bought it, nobody really bought that phone, but like if you were buying it, that's why you were buying it. And like you, you were like, I'm going to compromise on all these other features. But now it's like, okay, I'm buying this because I like that it folds in half. And also I don't have to compromise on the screen and I don't have to compromise on the fact that it's water resistant. And I don't have to compromise on the processor and the performance and the battery life and all that fun stuff. And now it's just like, I can buy a folding phone that is my normal phone.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  And like, like that's a huge point to reach, but this perception, and we think we've seen this in reaction to from the audience and everything is that like, but I don't know, so a lot of them break. So like, like there's this like huge reticence from, from the general public.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Well, that's why I think the, the 999 price point is, I don't want to give Samsung too much credit. I mean, more than anybody, I'm like, once these phones are cheap, then that's like the main thing. They gotta, they gotta bring the price down. So they did it. But because the, they're also water sealed, the only people that can feasibly repair one of these things is Samsung. Right. And so you, you maybe should think about pricing in the Samsung extended warranty fold protection program, whatever the heck they're calling it into the cost of this phone. I think that would be, I know that extended warranties are a thing and they're often a ripoff and whatever. But I think it might be prudent in this case, if you think you're going to hang on to this phone for a while, to pay that extra money and price that into the cost of this phone.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And if you preorder it, like, like I said, Samsung is super thirsty to get everyone to buy these. They'll, Samsung will give you a year of that service for free. And then if you break the screen, I think it's a $250 deductible and they will repair that screen three times. So if you do it, if you, if you damage the screen, they'll do that. If you don't have that coverage, uh, Samsung gave me some pricing on repairs. Uh, a flip three costs 369 bucks to repair the inside screen. Uh, if you're out of warranty and you don't have their Samsung care or whatever, which is not that much different than the cost to fix an iPhone 12 screen, if I remember correctly. Uh, and less than it costs to fix the back of an iPhone 12, which is always hilarious. So it is expensive to fix and you're right, the Samsung's the only one that can fix it.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  You are more than likely going to be shipping your phone somewhere and. Crossing your fingers and hope that it comes back in a few days and whatnot. But it might be, you know, if you are that concerned about it, a lot of people buy extended, you know, protection plans, Apple Care is very popular on their phones anyways. But it might be extra prudent to do so. This is like, we mentioned that it's water resistant a bunch. It is not dust resistant at all. So in the review, I wrote, take it to the pool. Don't take it to the beach. Like, you're going to want to be careful in that respect.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  Last question, and then I want to talk about the fold. Tell me about this cover screen. Is it good? Is it all of my dreams? Is it?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  I think the cover screen is probably where they still have the most room for improvement. Like.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  So not all of my dreams.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  It's not, it's not.

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  Do your, do your dreams involve replying to texts with Bixby?

• 32:54Nilay Patel?

  I got weird dreams.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the cover screen is bigger. They had to do that. The last one was kind of a joke. So they made the cover screen bigger. You can customize the look of it with different animations and stuff, which is fun. You can put widgets on there to see your calendar and weather. And if you're playing music, you can control it with the music and you can read notifications now. But there's no like quick reply messages. Like if you want to reply to a message, there's nothing like that say like, okay, or I'm on my way or any of those canned message type of things. You have to either use Bixby Voice Command, which I think we all know is probably not going to work. And or B, open the thing. So the cover screen still is there as like a stopgap before you open the thing. You can't really use it without opening. And that's one of my critiques against this design.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  Is that it is less convenient to use than a standard slab smartphone that you can just pull out of your pocket, one handed unlock and like reply to a message or make a phone call or whatever you want to do. Like you have to stop. You have to more than likely use two hands to open the thing. You can kind of nudge it open with your thumb, but it's hard and it'll probably fall out of your hand if you do that. And you also kind of feel like you're going to be like scratching the screen with your thumb when you do it. So you like, you're using two hands to open it, unlock it, all that fun stuff. So it is a different use case than what we're used to and what we're commonly familiar with. But if you want to have a big screen and you want to have a phone fit in your pocket, you will, you know, learn to use a folding phone, I guess. I mean, like, that's kind of the trade off that you're making.

• 34:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think, I just think calibrating that cover screen is so interesting, right? Like, part of the appeal of this whole thing for me is that you close it and then you're done and the internet can't hurt you anymore. Right? Like, I'm just goodbye all these people.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  I would want the cover screen twice as big.

• 34:41Nilay Patel?

  But then now, now you're just like, now I have a little phone.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I have a little phone for little phone stuff.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  That like leads me directly into the fold.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, like, that's, that's kind of what I would want because then I can, okay, I can reply to a message without having to open the phone, without having to really stop what I'm doing or whatever. Uh, I can, you know, get more context or information about whatever it is I'm seeing. Maybe I can read the whole notification instead of only getting half of it without opening the phone.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  But aren't you wearing a smartwatch?

• 35:07Speaker 03

  I'm wearing a smartwatch. Is everyone?

• 35:09Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's a real dance here between what's happening on your wrist, what's happening on the little screen, and actually opening the phone.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  The other rub with that is they designed the interface of the cover screen to basically mimic what you can do on a smartwatch. It looks like a smartwatch's interface if you have a Samsung smartwatch.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  They should have just gone all the way.

• 35:27Alex Cranz?

  No screen, no screen.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  They, they should have just made the cover screen of the watch. They should have just taken the watch, screen, the circle, and the whole thing.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  That'd be cool.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  Separate processor.

• 35:38Nilay Patel?

  A phone that runs two operating systems.

• 35:41Alex Cranz?

  It would've been awesome.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  I'm dead serious. They should have just done that.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  It's all Android.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  It's not all Android. It's like, where Otaizen or whatever it's called. That's what I want, a phone that runs two operating systems.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yes.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  The other area they could still improve is the cameras. They, they kind of just went status quo with the cameras. They're the same as last year. They're not bad, but like, you can get better cameras very easily from a Pixel or Samsung's own phones or an iPhone.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, speaking of, uh, cover screens, the fold is a little Android phone that opens into an Android tablet. Like, it's hard to like, escape that now, especially that they've fixed some of the tablet stuff.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, I mean, everything Dan said about the flip basically applies to the fold. Uh, the resistance, the durability is the, actually, maybe now's the time sort of sense of it. The spec updates here, like faster refresh rate on the outer screen, the cameras are pretty meh. Uh, you can use a stylus on the inside screen, but, uh, it's very wobbly out of table. And it also, um, I don't know, it's. It's not the note. With a note, part of the appeal is you can whip the stylus out, take a quick note, put the stylus back, and you're done. With this, you have to open it up and then get the stylus out of wherever you're keeping that stylus and then start writing on the screen. But really, Samsung has been iterating on this idea of this form factor with the little screen on the outside, bigger screen on the inside, it's got a

• 37:03Speaker 04

  crease, it's got a little bit of a gap when it's closed, for three and a half generations now, maybe four. And I don't think it gets much better without some huge technological breakthrough. That's how I'll just warn you, Virg, Castle, that's how I'm gonna end my review. I think this is as good as this idea gets. They could improve the cameras, they could make the stylus work on the outside, they could do some other stuff. But fundamentally, it doesn't get much better than this for this idea. And so if you like the idea of having a big tablet or a mini tablet in your pocket, and you're willing to pay 1,800 bucks or more for it, and you're willing to have a thing that's pretty thick when it's closed, the only thing that should hold you back, besides those two things, which

• 37:48Speaker 04

  are very real, is, do you trust it to hold up for six to eight months? Because the screen feels great, everything about it is like, good. The multitasking is good. It works essentially in the same way that the iPad 15 multitasking works, where you can tap a lozenge and have a button pop up. But if you prefer to drag windows around, you can. You can have three up in any orientation that you want. You can have pop-up windows, you can drag stuff around. It feels very, very fluid, because it's using the Snapdragon 888. You can have a dock on the side of the phone if you want. There's a million options, but they're not completely overwhelming. And Samsung enabled this Labs feature that

• 38:30Speaker 04

  basically makes Android apps that haven't been coded properly to work in windowing systems. It forces them to do it, and it works. Instagram is great. I can have it be the full width of the phone, I can multitask with it, and it works at different aspect ratios when you drag the sliders around to change the size of your tiled windows. The multitasking here is very good. And as the other line from my review, I'll just tell you, "I feel just as weird and uncomfortable saying multitasking on an Android tablet as good as you do hearing me say it."

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:01Nilay Patel?

  I don't believe you. I've already seen the video. I was like, I don't, none of this is happening.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  I mean, I.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  Dieter green screened it.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  It's very strange.

• 39:09Alex Cranz?

  Dieter, how do you take photos with it? Like, you open it, do you close it? Are you like the, the dill hole with an iPad at the concert?

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Yes, but that is great because you can do selfies with it. So, okay, there are three ways to take a selfie. Okay. I mean, you could take regular photos with the closer with it open and having it open is awesome. Don't, don't be shamed into not taking.

• 39:28Alex Cranz?

  Be shamed.

• 39:30Speaker 04

  Don't be shamed.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  You can take a selfie with the good cameras on the back. You like, start the selfie mode with the clothes and then you like, open it up and then you're taking selfies with good cameras. There's a 10 megapixel selfie camera on the outside for, to just taking regular selfies. And then my friends, there is a selfie camera on the inside, on the big screen. It is four megapixels, which is terrible, but I don't care about that. Like, you just use it for video calls. If you want to take a good picture, use the good cameras. But it's a under-screen selfie camera. Samsung thought that was a good idea. Samsung was wrong.

• 40:03Alex Cranz?

  Is it?

• 40:03Speaker 04

  It's terrible. It, it has, it looks like a, like a screen door. It looks like the opposite of pixel density. It looks like a zit. And it, because it has that screen door effect, it's got the more effect. And so it draws your eye. I think I complained about this last week. It just draws your eye.

• 40:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. It just, it's just like a magnet. It's just as bad a week later as it was when I first looked at it. It doesn't go away and it's a huge mistake.

• 40:27Nilay Patel?

  And you can't just like, kill it so it's a pinhole all the time.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Nope. Big mistake. Like, it's like, if they made a setting to turn it off, I would be a little bit more like, eager to tell people that this is the one. It's, it's just too experimental feature to have put on this thing. It's just dumb.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm shocked, I mean, within minutes, right? Someone's gonna write an Android utility that just.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. Someone will, someone will figure that Android utility out. Yeah, I mean, there's an Android utility to dbixby the thing. You know, you can dbixby any Samsung phone now. It's not too hard. If you've got a Windows computer, it actually like, handles the rooting for you so that it just works really, really cleanly.

• 41:03Alex Cranz?

  And there isn't a place to put the stylus. That's the thing that's like.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  It's weird, right?

• 41:07Alex Cranz?

  Like, I feel like I should be able to close it, the stylus should just go boop, right in the gap.

• 41:13Alex Cranz?

  Or like in the hinge.

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Well, there is a case that has a silo for it on the hinge, on the back.

• 41:20Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Which I haven't seen yet, but yeah, I mean, this gets into like, are they gonna, are they gonna bring the Note back? To me, the answer is, and Alison, you could actually speak to this, like, they should just make the Note a cheap phone, right? Just bring it back and just, it's fine. Make it, make it the cheap phone to compete with the other cheap stylus phones, right?

• 41:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, they, they don't need like 20 flagship souped up, you know, phones that have like variations on the coolest and best specs, like just drop the Note out of there. It's fine.

• 41:53Nilay Patel?

  I mean, people love gigantic, cheap screens. In doing tech journalism for a decade, there's only one thing I know to be absolutely true. And if you show people a big screen and then you're like, it's cheap, that will always be the most popular one. You can tell them anything, you're like, this one will kill your family. And they're like, is it 80 inches? $300? I'm gonna risk it. Right? They're into it. And like Samsung has that opening with the Note. I think they, it was their flagship for so long that, you know, the meetings are probably very emotional.

• 42:26Alex Cranz?

  Like that, that, that one product manager who's like, this is the flagship. Eric is just sobbing. Cause it's like, why are you, you're taking it from me?

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Alex Cranz?

  You're making it $300? Are you out of your mind?

• 42:37Nilay Patel?

  He's like, remember when they used to explode?

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Dieter, I have one question for you on the, on the fold. And, you know, the, the trajectory we've seen from smartphones over the past decade and plus is that they have consolidated all of a bunch of different devices into one thing. But most people would agree that, you know, a smartphone is not a tablet. It's not a desktop or laptop computer. Does the fold get us closer to this single device where now it's like, okay, you don't really need a tablet. You could use decks on this thing. You don't need a computer as well. You just have this one expensive

• 43:13Nilay Patel?

  Decks.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  thing that you keep in your pocket? Or are we still two, three generations away?

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  There are gonna be a dozen people that do that, that like plug it into a monitor and use decks and it becomes their sole computer and they're living in the future.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  I don't think that that it's it's gonna be that device, really. The screen's not big enough. You want a big screen for your laptop, right?

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  But what I will say is, the moment when you're like, "Ah, this phone isn't doing it, I need to go use my laptop", is like pushed way back with this thing, because like, you can do a bunch of tablet stuff with it. Like, I don't know, this is really dumb, but like, PDFs are actually usable on this thing in a way that they never are even on the biggest iPhone, right? You can actually read a PDF without having to scroll around and pinch and zoom and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just like a little page on a nice little tablet. So it's, it's stuff like that. Like, it's all the things that make big screen phones nice. This is that times, you know, 1.5.

• 44:12Nilay Patel?

  And you can like circle things with a pen.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  And you can circle things with a pen. That's true.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  Alright, I'm gonna buy this phone.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  Circling PDFs, that's like all I do.

• 44:21Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm here for. Alright, before we go, Alison, you cover the carriers as well as reviewing phones for us. There's a gigantic T-Mobile data breach that kind of flew under the radar. There's a lot of other news happening this week. Tell us what's going on with T-Mobile.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's pretty bad. So, what T-Mobile has confirmed is that about 47 million customer accounts were affected. This is a data breach where some hackers got a hold of, you know, stuff you don't want to give away, like your social security number, first and last names, driver's license, ID numbers. Yeah, that kind of thing. So, it's all wrapped up in people who've applied for credit through T-Mobile. So it's current customers, postpaid, but also some former customer accounts, or some people who

• 45:17Speaker 05

  applied for credit and just never opened an account with T-Mobile. So, that is not great. And they've got a support page set up. If you were affected, you can go there and get some tips on, you know, they want you to reset your PIN and your password, and then you can get your two-year trial of McAfee, whatnot. But yeah, it sucks, and I think like, if you are concerned and you think you've been affected by this, like freezing your credit is not a terrible idea. That's something they suggest on their site.

• 45:53Nilay Patel?

  T-Mobile has a really bad track record with this, doesn't it?

• 45:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is like the fourth one.

• 45:59Nilay Patel?

  Fourth one, yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 05

  The thing that kind of killed me on the, on their page about it is like, so none of your financial information is out there. They didn't get your, you know, your credit card number, but social security number, maybe it was like.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the one you can't change.

• 46:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they can just get a whole other card in your name.

• 46:22Speaker 05

  Right, yeah.

• 46:23Nilay Patel?

  Just be a different person.

• 46:26Speaker 05

  Assume a different identity.

• 46:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. Well, our nation's carriers is always the most trustworthy actors in the entire tech ecosystem. I love it. We gotta take a break. We gotta fold this phone up. Eh?

• 46:40Alex Cranz?

  Eh.

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  Thank you, Alex.

• 46:42Alex Cranz?

  I loved it.

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  I appreciate your concern. Uh, Dan, Allison, thank you so much for being on. Thank you.

• 46:49Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna take a break. We're gonna talk about software locking for a long time. When we come back, we'll be right back.

• 46:59Speaker 06

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• 48:09Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Like I said at the top of the show, actually, a lot of things happened today.

• 48:14Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Right. It was like a pretty sleepy week and then today was like a tsunami. So with part of it is our fault. We published a huge piece. Sean Hall's been working on it for months. Ever since the Apple and Epic trial was over, he has been diligently reading every email that came out of discovery in that trial.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:34Nilay Patel?

  And sorting them. So he put up a huge piece today that's, did he end up at 107?

• 48:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, over 100.

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  It's like 107, just like revelations from this. We're not going to go through all of them. You should read the piece. It's amazing. He's got all the PDFs, like all the receipts you could ever want. Like Sean's got a store. It's called the Receipt Store and it's just receipts from Apple versus Epic. And just like a lot, like Steve Jobs wanted to build an iPhone Nano. He had Johnny Ive present mockups at a conference. Steve Jobs, a brilliant man, did not learn the lesson about big cheap screens. Took them a long time to learn the lesson about big cheap screens and now they're all over it. But that's in there. Apple has like extremely tried to lock down its store.

• 49:20Nilay Patel?

  They've discussed iMessage and Android many times and they've always returned to, we want to keep people here. They do gift cards in promotions and we have emails proving it. They, they give gift cards during promotions because they want you to buy more apps and music and stuff from their stores because it makes it harder to switch. You knew this. I knew this. We all felt it. Now I've got an email that we're like, this is what we're doing. So just like an incredible amount of this going on. You should read that piece. That's one thing we did. At the same time, I would remind you that Epic is also suing Google.

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  The case has just been burning in the background. And then today, the judge in that case ordered the complaints to be unredacted. So now we like have a clearer picture of what's going on.

• 50:11Nilay Patel?

  You just, I didn't want to say it.

• 50:14Speaker 04

  All right, I will say it. Part of the unredacted emails includes a program that Epic was complaining about inside Google called Project Hug.

• 50:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so there is this project, still not gonna say it. So Epic is like, they're gonna leave the Play Store, they're gonna do Fortnite, right? Android's open, they can do their own store. Google, I can't believe they called it this.

• 50:43Alex Cranz?

  PH, PH.

• 50:45Nilay Patel?

  PH. Google launches Project Hug.

• 50:50Nilay Patel?

  To hug the other game developers.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:53Nilay Patel?

  To like, pay them money and give them free marketing so they won't go into Epic Store or any other store. Google's teams are like worried, they've got, we've got in the complaint, they're worried that Epic's gonna go arrange a deal with Samsung, other phone makers get better splits on revenue, basically have their store preloaded with Fortnite, which they kinda did with Samsung for a minute there. So, part of this game, this is a quote, "A hug, it's hug developers close and show love plan. A surge plan to throw extra love slash promotion to top developers in games, including other Tencent portfolio companies." Because Tencent, big investor in Epic. Basically this amounts to, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  on secret deals with 20 developers that, quote, "They had deemed risk of falling to Epic's contagion."

• 51:44Speaker 04

  Contagion.

• 51:45Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 51:46Nilay Patel?

  This is all like for a plan called Project Hug.

• 51:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  This gets very dramatic very quickly.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  So here's the thing that stood out to me, I mean, besides the name and whatever, that it's, that the amount of money that we're talking about here, it was hundreds of millions of dollars that they paid. We've always, we've always said, you know, like Microsoft, when it was trying to get app stores going for Windows, we're like, just pay the money. And now we have a sense of like, how much money often gets doled out in these, these deals, these backroom deals. It's a lot. The other numbers that jumped out at me was the stuff that... Google was apparently worried they lose. So they're like, from the Epic Games Store, and if, you know, other things start to, you know, contagion spreads, it could be 350 million to 1.4 billion by 2022. And then if like, you know, the dam breaks and there's a Samsung App Store and Amazon

• 52:36Speaker 04

  App Store and all sorts of other app stores and everybody gets traction, they were worried they could lose anywhere from 1.1 billion to $6 billion, which is just a lot more money than you maybe were thinking of in terms of scale for the Play Store.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So notably, this is just unredacted complaint. Nothing has actually happened in this case. They just took the blackouts of the complaint because the judge says the complaint should be unredacted. Google gave a statement to us, did not deny Project Hug exists. It's real, everybody. Google's statement, "These programs are a sign of healthy competition between operating systems and app stores and benefit developers tremendously." This is true. It's true. If you just had two stores, if you had Target and Walmart, Target and Walmart compete ferociously to get the best products in their stores that compete on rates. This is, Google also controls the operating system and they make the deals with the number one vendor of phones in the ecosystem in this country.

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's true, but it's like, also extremely a lie by omission, right? Like, it's true that programs like this are a sign of competition. They're worried about competition, they're going to spend them. But if you're Samsung, right, like, you're also negotiating to merge your watch operating systems with Google's watch operating, like, the level, the layers of control across the entire ecosystem are like massive for Google. And they've got a war chest of money that they're clearly just spending to provide all this extra promotion in their store. So like, is it, it's competition? Is it fair competition? Is it meaningful competition? Like, I don't know the answers to those questions.

• 54:15Nilay Patel?

  I would just point out they did not deny that it was called Project Hug. That's really my main takeaway from the story. Similarly.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  Well, and also to your second point, the next thing.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, similarly, connected to that same kind of point. Underacted complaint reveals Google had a program called the premier device program that gave Android filmmakers a greater share of search revenue than they would ordinarily receive. Remember, they give Android away for free. They monetize it because people use Google apps and services. They see Google ads. They can give kickbacks to the filmmakers on top of that. So many ways for your Android filmmaker, Google's paying you to use Android. But in exchange for this higher rate of search revenue, they all agreed to ship their phones without any third-party app stores pre-installed. When I like, when I say it's like, yes, it's competition. It's like Google's working every angle it can to protect its

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  premium status on your phone. And this is just one of those, man, it's icky, right? It's just like, Dieter, you and I have talked for years about like, every time we use one of these modern devices, like, we know there's like some sequence of deals in the background.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:21Nilay Patel?

  That is preventing us from having like real choices. And this is, well, here is the deal.

• 55:26Alex Cranz?

  But is this also why, like, a lot of that bloatware that carriers used to just shove on your phone that you hated? Is that why it's gone?

• 55:34Speaker 04

  I mean, that might be part of it. It's also gone just because we yelled a lot and we started buying phones that didn't have it. Like, we, there, there is some effect of like consumers choosing the things that are good and rejecting the things that are bad. But the, the layers of sort of these, I call them kickbacks, you know, compare the, the premier device program, you know, giving more search revenue to, to companies that only include one app store to, we, we had, was this like two years ago, there were a bunch of carrier deals got revealed in like France, and it was related to Google Play services and like requiring that you, you know, don't make non-Google versions

• 56:17Speaker 04

  of Android. And there were like, there was money spun up in that as well. So this is not, Google gives away the operating system, you know, and then Samsung or Xiaomi or whomever picks it up and then makes a phone and everybody's happy. This is a very complicated set of deals behind all of these phones.

• 56:36Nilay Patel?

  And I think what, what makes this worse for Google, we've obviously spent a lot of time talking about Apple and Epic. Because that trial happened. But Apple and Epic, like, the fight is very narrowly about the App Store, Apple's control of it, their arguments for needing to control the App Store. And, you know, that you can just fall down the rabbit hole of whether Apple can have a monopoly over the iPhone, right? Like, that is a very complicated argument to understand. Some people in, like, Epic obviously believes that Apple obviously uses its control in various ways that feel anti-competitive, but at the heart of it, they're like, "It's our phone, deal with it." With Google, they have all of these deals. It's their operating system that they have given away for free, that they have touted

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  as being open, that they are proud of, you know, the amount of competition, all these other App Stores, they point to all this stuff. And then there are an endless series of deals and documents where Google is controlling the ecosystem that runs on its open platform in order to benefit itself. And so just, it feels like it should be easier for Google because they can just say, "Well, there's another App Store." But what is actually happening is they are using all of their other levers to make sure their App Store is the preferred App Store and really the only thing that matters on Android. And there's more evidence because the ecosystem is wider and Google has to use the other levers to maintain the control. In some ways, it feels like this whole thing will break worse for Google than it will for Apple. Right.

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  Or we will hear more about how Google does it. Whereas, you know, Apple's emails are like, "Why would it do that? People would switch from the iPhone." And like, just like, rationally, this makes sense. Like, yeah, that's like a normal, like, Google's like, "We can't possibly have anyone use a different Wi-Fi stack," which is like a real thing they used to do, or a GPS stack. And then they're like, "Put the boot down on Motorola," and this is like a lawsuit they've had. And like, we've gone through this with Google before. And the fact that they have to use the control, the fact that their control is influencing a bunch of partners means that it's very obvious when they exert the control. Whereas like, Phil Schiller sending Craig Federighi an email being like, "Ah, that's a bad idea," does not feel like an exertion of control. Right. We'll see.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  I think, like I said, I think this one's gonna be a lot wackier. Last revelation from this also revealed that Google had a gigantic plan to counteract Epic by building its own gaming division that would indeed also ship games on the Mac, which is very funny to me.

• 59:06Alex Cranz?

  Finally, someone's gonna break that one. They're gonna figure it out.

• 59:10Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty good. I don't know. They also tried to, they also tried to horse trade it back to get Fortnite on Stadia. And that people's like, no.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  That's not a lot. Yeah, I think I said, just a lot coming out of these two trials, a lot of emails, a lot, a lot of evidence that these companies are in fact trying to control your experience on the phone.

• 59:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  That brings us to Dieter's new segment.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  Our new weekly segment, I think it has to be weekly, that we call This Week in Lock In.

• 59:42Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, what's, what's happening this week in Lock In?

• 59:45Speaker 04

  Well, Tom Warren broke the news wide open of just how Microsoft is changing Windows to make it even more difficult to change your default browser away from Edge.

• 59:56Nilay Patel?

  It, it's so petty.

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  It's so, so normally you just like, you have a pop up, you click the one you want, you're done, and then, oh, wait, I gotta, I wanna change it. You like go into settings, you find wherever the default browser thing is in settings and whatever. But what, the way that all of these defaults work, they're like handlers, right? So like, when you click a link that has HTTP or, you know, dot, dot, whatever, Twitter slash slash or whatever, that's what tells the operating system, use this app to open that thing.

• 1:00:27Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  And so what Microsoft has done is, instead of just having default browser for all the stuff you would want your browser to open, they make you go into settings and change each one of those handlers individually.

• 1:00:41Nilay Patel?

  And also, if you don't click, remember this setting, the dialog box goes away, it reverts to Edge, and then you have to like wander through the operating system to find it again.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. And just to be clear, even if you do all of this, that doesn't mean that Edge goes away, because when you do stuff with the, like, you know, Windows search or clicking links in like Windows widgets or whatever, those are hardcoded to Edge. And so Edge still appears unless you come up with some, you know, hacky workarounds, which do exist.

• 1:01:10Alex Cranz?

  I feel like Microsoft should have learned from like, the last time they had a big browser that they wanted to be the best and everybody use. You'd think they would like, maybe not be so aggro. I guess this is less, this is definitely less aggro, but like.

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  I think Microsoft is like looking at the iPhone and being like, well, they do it.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, like the whole lesson here was Microsoft got slapped for browser bundling in the 90s. And then everyone was like, whoo, everybody, everybody relax. And then.

• 1:01:39Nilay Patel?

  I will say this flies in the face of Nadella coming on Decoder and saying, we're the open platform for open competition. We have a distribution advantage for Edge, but if you want any, anything to be a first class citizen of Windows, that is what we're doing. That is the culture of the company.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Nilay Patel?

  That dude said that to me and then I'm like, looking at the screenshot, I'm like.

• 1:01:57Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, what happened to that idea?

• 1:02:01Alex Cranz?

  This happened afterwards.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  You know, who else is mad about this is the, the head of Chrome publicly tweeting Hiroshi Lockheimer, saying this from the company that claims to be the most open with, quote, "the most choice," unquote. I hope this is just a developer preview thing.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because he definitely knows the guy at Microsoft who runs Windows.

• 1:02:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like Panos Panay runs Windows. Like, do you remember when they made the Surface Duo and they both like, followed each other on Twitter and like did a bunch of heart eyes emojis?

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Maybe they've lost each other's phone numbers.

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, every good breakup requires you to tweet at your ex about how she doesn't live up to her values.

• 1:02:40Alex Cranz?

  Get messy.

• 1:02:43Alex Cranz?

  Let's see it.

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  There's like, okay, we, we pointed out just how locked in Samsung's and Apple's earbuds are to their respective ecosystems. Just go look at the chart. It's, it's very sad. We pointed out that nobody is making good MagSafe things because Apple just doesn't make it easy to do MFI proper MagSafe things.

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  So in order to get a 15 watt MagSafe charger, you need a part from Apple.

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  And I will tell you, like, Apple has learned this lesson before. It, Apple's executives don't turn over.

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:03:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's all the same dudes.

• 1:03:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  Who like learned the lesson from AirPlay, now failing to apply what they learned to MagSafe. So if you will remember, the first versions of AirPlay, there were no AirPlay speakers. They just didn't exist. Thomas Ricker wrote about this like 2012 for us. He would like wander the halls of CES and be like, do these speakers support AirPlay? And then people would look sad at him. Eventually, well, someone told him that the reason nothing supported AirPlay was to make AirPlay work, you needed to buy a single supplier piece of hardware that was blessed by Apple. It was so expensive and didn't work and it wasn't small, so nobody used

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  it. Years later, Apple's like, crap, our TV strategy has failed. AirPlay 2 will now be everywhere. They re-engineered AirPlay to support video on all the TVs it wants it and to make it easier for basically anything to have it. Now, everything has AirPlay 2. When we publish a story about a device that doesn't have AirPlay 2, everyone's like, this thing is DOA. Yeah. I want AirPlay 2 to, I wouldn't even consider it. And it's like, well, did you, have you taken a step back, Eddie? Just thought about what happened here? Like, he might be too busy with podcasts. I don't know if it's Eddie. I'm just doing e-names today.

• 1:04:38Alex Cranz?

  Didn't the same thing happen with the lightning cable? Because the original lightning cable, didn't it need like a very specific Apple-approved part? And so the, all the other ones would like melt and were terrible and people were complaining about it and then Apple?

• 1:04:50Nilay Patel?

  Even Apple's own lightning cables melt and are terrible. No, but it definitely, it had a, it had a controller in the cable. It was definitely a thing.

• 1:04:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And then eventually they're like, oh, we can't keep doing this because everybody keeps yelling when they buy the much cheaper cable and it breaks and they're mad at us and we should stop that. Like, Apple knows they don't have to do this.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  You know how when there's a big tech event, we have like a, a plan? We have like a template and, you know, we customize it and blah, blah, blah. Like, we're like, okay, there's another tech event, they're going to announce some stuff, let's get ready. And we know how this is going to go. We know the order that it's likely to be announced. We know like how the event will go, there'll be a live blog. We know we'll need to do like, you know, this, that, the other thing. Wait, we plan these things? I just show up. You just show up. We do all the work. Alex actually does the work now.

• 1:05:37Alex Cranz?

  Just Dieter and I in a huddle.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm here to be charming.

• 1:05:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, but we know like what the week looks like, right? The event, the announcements, the like analysis, the like devices show up a week later, you review the things and blah, blah, blah, blah. We've got like a two week game plan that we just know how it's gonna go.

• 1:05:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  Do you think Apple has like a three year game plan for each one of these like technologies? That like they just know how it's gonna go?

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  We're gonna release a thing, it's only gonna work with our stuff, we say it'll work with other stuff, but it really won't. And then like a couple will work with a couple of partners just so that we can say that it does. And so Logitech and Balcon will make a thing. And then six months later, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then two years later, we will redo it again. So it's actually open this time. They just like, they just have a playbook.

• 1:06:15Alex Cranz?

  But what's the gain from that?

• 1:06:17Speaker 04

  They get two years of exclusivity.

• 1:06:20Nilay Patel?

  Where the gain is, everybody buys Apple accessories, which are enormously high margin when they buy the new phones.

• 1:06:26Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  The gain is people, this is like, you weigh it, you decide how important you think this is. But Apple's like, we can't guarantee safety if we just like open this thing up and let people charge it the full 15 watts. They'll buy bad chargers and their phones will explode. I've heard this from them a handful of times. I don't know, but maybe we believe that, maybe don't. But that's the thing that they say. And then I think the final gain is they want to control the ecosystem. What they want is the line out the door of accessory manufacturers waiting to pay the money. And then a huge vibrant ecosystem of people going through their toll booth. And what actually happens is people

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  tweet crazy shit from Alibaba at me and say, this ecosystem is fine. And I'm like, I hope your family is safe.

• 1:07:18Nilay Patel?

  And then like somewhere down the line, Apple like gives in and like they will bless more products with a cheaper rate or something. And the entire made for iPhone ecosystem is full of people who are terrified. They will not talk. We, Heim Gartenberg has been trying to report out the story of how MFI really works for 10 years. Right? He's been talking to accessory makers. They all talked to him off the record, but like, we can't get that story out of his brain and onto the verge.com because everyone's like, no, no, no, I'm afraid my entire business will tank if Apple thinks I'm violating the NDA and they yank the like, the business will disappear. So like the amount of control that Apple exerts over this ecosystem is like out of control.

• 1:08:00Nilay Patel?

  That said, it is at the end of the day, Qi charging and magnets. There are lots of devices that work with it. The one that's the funniest to me is like Belkin makes a stand.

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  That does 7.5 watt mag Qi charging with magnets because you can't lock out magnets. It's like a line that kind of like, this is the most open standard in the world. Anyone can build a magnet, but if you don't have the software, if you don't have the little hardware chip, the iPhone software will lock you out of 15 watts. So they have a different one that's 15 watt mag safe.

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  Two products in the same, from the same company that look identical with one has more expensive, here's a different part in it. That is ridiculous.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Yep. And then I don't know how much we want to get into this because you don't want to hear me complain about RSS much, but Ashley had an incredible story about what a mess Apple's podcast subscription platform has been. Everyone has to upload their podcasts to Apple separately and like deal with their fields and they're really complicated and everybody never really screws it up and like podcasts are disappearing. People are losing like 30% of their listenership just from like technical error. That's real businesses. Just whoops. Oh, well.

• 1:09:08Nilay Patel?

  My favorite part of this whole story, anytime we do a story that has a good like dumb file format in it. I'm like, we accomplished our goal. Like this is what we founded the verge for. It's like, we're going to do two paragraphs and why how the real problem here is a file format. So use Apple's tool, you upload to their service, you pay their cut when people subscribe in their app. And then if you want any data about how this is going, there's not like a nice dashboard. There's like a G zipped Excel file in like, no, like all these podcasters, like, I don't, I don't know, man, I solve crimes. Like, I don't, I don't know what this is. Yeah. So like, all these people are getting this data in this file format, they have no idea how to access or read, really, and they have no idea what to do with in the data.

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  And Apple's just like dumping CSVs on the podcast industry, I mean, like, see, we're doing great. And it's like, Apple, it's getting to the scale now, and we'll talk about Facebook in a minute, but like, Facebook has been a platform company for a long time. YouTube has been a platform company for a long time. And like, if you listen to Neil Mohan and Decoder, like, platform company executives, they know that they have to be very careful in how they like, address their audience about what the platform is gonna do. Because they've, they've just been taking the hits for a decade. And they have to build the tools. Actually, one of the things Neil said to me about how YouTube makes decisions is he's like, on the backend,

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  when we provide data to YouTubers, we think carefully about where in YouTube Studio it will be. Right? Do we want to put it on the first screen or the second screen? Do we want to walk people to an understanding of the data they're seeing? And that's like, the kind of product review he's in. Apple's like, the podcast industry depends on our app. We're doing paid subscriptions. Here's an Excel file. And like, they just don't have the muscles to serve that kind of audience yet. And as they start to do things like make TV shows, they're gonna like, run into all these other kinds of problems. The child protection stuff, they're running into this problem where their standard way of talking, which is to not say anything, and just like, ship another iPhone and be like, what more do you want from us?

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's just like, running into the stuff the other platforms are good at.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  And I think that they maybe blinded themselves, or we just assumed they would be okay at this, because iTunes has been the default directory of all podcasts since forever, right? It's like, that is a place where you know you can find everything. It's a place where the podcasts have just gone, right? You might put yourself in other apps or other directories, but the thing is, being the default directory of all podcast feeds, literally, it's just an iCloud folder full of text files. That's it. It's just RSS feeds that people upload to Apple and they update the latest one when they put up their new thing. It's just a big ass directory of text files that

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  they use to build their public facing podcast directory off of. And sure, it's more complicated than that, but the actual podcasts themselves are hosted someplace else. And so the switch to subscriptions, part of the deal here, it's the same deal with Spotify needing to monetize, is they need to move away from that very simple RSS XML format so that they can start collecting more data about which ads you listen to and when they get inserted, et cetera, et cetera, how long you listen to the things, and so on, and so on. And so that has been the big overarching story of what's happening to podcasts over the last year, is where everyone's trying to dump the format, replace it with something that's smarter. But it turns out when you

• 1:12:47Speaker 04

  dump a simple, universal format that anything can use and go to something smarter, you also happen to introduce lock-in.

• 1:12:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's happening in two ways. I don't think people love Spotify's podcast player. They're the other player. If you're listening to this in Spotify, thank you. I appreciate you. Please listen to the ads at half speed. But people, the feedback we get is Spotify's podcast experience is like, fine, not great. People like Apple's podcast experience until this last update. Now they hate it. But what both companies are trying to do is get basically exclusives on podcasts. Spotify is literally buying them. Apple's saying, well, everyone's already in our app. Just have them subscribe here. Now they belong to us. Upload your audio to us and we will deliver it to them.

• 1:13:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:13:34Nilay Patel?

  The flip side of this is like, right now, if you're listening to this in Overcast or Podcasts or something, yep, there's a directory of RSS feeds, like Dieter said. That directory points you at the Vergecast, which is served by our hosting provider megaphone, which is owned by Spotify. Damn it. That's the way it goes. But there are other hosting providers. Those hosting providers spit out a bunch of metrics. They're competing to provide better metrics and ad integrations. And then there's an ecosystem of companies around them that like will sell you other podcast metrics and ad integrations, all this stuff. And you see the stack is like, yep, there's a stack of providers that will help you record a podcast. There's a stack of providers that will help you monetize a podcast. There's a stack that will help you distribute it. And then there's like two endpoints in Apple and Spotify.

• 1:14:19Nilay Patel?

  And then the other podcast providers are much smaller. Apple's just trying to like eat up that chain and they're not doing a good job. Spotify is trying to eat up that chain and they're not doing a great job. And like, they could do a good job, but they're so confident that because they own the last link in the chain, they don't have to. And that's, that's like always the problem for me. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back and talk about Facebook getting sued in VR. That's a good mashup. We'll be right back.

• 1:14:51Speaker 06

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• 1:16:07Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Two pieces of Facebook news today, and I promise you they happened simultaneously for a reason, right? Sure. Yeah. If you remember, the Federal Trade Commission and a collection of states all sued to break up Facebook and Instagram once. Their complaints got tossed out. The states, go away, you're done, too late, you had your chance, you blew it in 2011 or whatever. Judge says to the Federal Trade Commission, which was under the previous chairman, the Trump-appointed chairman, hey, you forgot to make the case of Facebook as a monopoly. Like, the quote was like, this whole thing feels like everyone thinks Facebook is a monopoly, therefore it is, let's break them up. Like, you gotta make the case that they're monopolizing something here. And so he dismissed it. Today was the deadline for the FTC to refile the case. In the meantime,

• 1:16:53Nilay Patel?

  right, Joe Biden appoints Lena Kahn to be the chairman of the FTC. Lena Kahn does not like Facebook and Amazon. Facebook asks the FTC to make Lena Kahn recuse herself from this case. I don't know why they thought that was gonna work. She's like, no, I'm in charge of the thing. Her response in this refiled complaint today is, well, there's a judge. Like, my job is to sue you. Your job is to defend yourself, and the judge will decide, not me. Right. Like, you're gonna get your due process, but my job is to sue you. So that's her whole response. And then lays out this, like, scorching, like, refiled complaint, Russell read it up, but scorching definition of what she thinks the relevant market is. If you think about it, the judge basically said, you didn't do this part right, do it better. Yeah.

• 1:17:38Nilay Patel?

  So they did that part way better. The definition is very narrow. Personal social networking. And the complaint tries to explain why, like, TikTok is not a competitor to Facebook, because it doesn't, it's not about your friends and family. Right. And like, why Reddit isn't, and YouTube is really just a video distribution platform. And so the whole point is, Facebook is about your friends and family. Right. And then it's like Twitter is there to help users keep up with the news. And I'm like, no, these are, I made some friends on Twitter. Have yet to make any family on Twitter. This is happening today. Everyone knows it's gonna happen today, because it's the last day. Right. You gotta do it today. All indications are today. So then this morning, a man, Marky Z, shows up on CBS with Gayle King and announces, Facebook has built conference rooms in VR.

• 1:18:23Nilay Patel?

  It's called Facebook Horizon Workspace. And he like, they do the interview in VR on CBS this morning. It's like, it's hilarious. Alex, he wrote it up. We've got some clips of Zuck and Boz from Facebook talking about it.

• 1:18:36Alex Cranz?

  In VR?

• 1:18:37Nilay Patel?

  In VR. I used it today. I've got a Quest 2, I plugged it in. Like, what's really funny about it is if other people don't have VR headsets, there's like fake Zoom in VR. It's like you're sitting in a virtual conference room and you're like a cartoon avatar.

• 1:18:50Alex Cranz?

  And there's just a dude.

• 1:18:52Nilay Patel?

  Sean Hollister is like on a screen, like on a fake TV in VR in front of you. It's hilarious. The whole thing is hilarious. I'm kind of, Alex, I'm gonna make us start doing our meetings.

• 1:19:03Alex Cranz?

  I've got my Quest 2, I'm ready to go.

• 1:19:07Nilay Patel?

  Disclosure, I'm not saying anything about any of this ridiculous stuff. Cause my wife works for Facebook.

• 1:19:12Alex Cranz?

  He's just listening.

• 1:19:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but anyway, it was just a very naked, like, it's a cool product. It's worth talking about, right? We had Zuckerberg talking to Casey on the Verchess a few weeks ago about the metaverse and this long range plan to get there. This is but one more step. It's a good flashy demo.

• 1:19:30Alex Cranz?

  And he's been like promising VR office meetings for like years at the Oculus developer conferences.

• 1:19:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, Facebook executives insist that they have all their meetings in VR.

• 1:19:42Alex Cranz?

  I refuse to believe that.

• 1:19:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a good question.

• 1:19:46Alex Cranz?

  That's not true.

• 1:19:47Nilay Patel?

  That's, you can decide in your heart whether Zuck is really doing all those meetings in VR. But they say it's better. I'll say that in my 15 minutes in VR today doing a meeting, I like, thought it was really weird. It's just a really weird way to go like.

• 1:20:03Alex Cranz?

  How does it feel to be a cartoon?

• 1:20:04Nilay Patel?

  Uh, super weird. Here, can I just say this?

• 1:20:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:08Nilay Patel?

  Every time any software product is like, make an avatar of yourself. I have a moment of pure crisis where I'm like, I don't know what my nose looks like. Shut up.

• 1:20:21Nilay Patel?

  What are you saying? Pick your eyebrows. When was the last time I considered the shape of my eyelashes? No, I don't know what I look like.

• 1:20:31Alex Cranz?

  Just in a mirror?

• 1:20:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Alex Cranz?

  Pulling your Oculus Quest headset off over and over again to reference yourself?

• 1:20:39Nilay Patel?

  It's such a weird demand. It keeps coming up. Like I have the new Madden. It's like make an avatar of yourself. It's like, why? Where is this gonna be useful?

• 1:20:49Alex Cranz?

  Do you play in Madden as yourself?

• 1:20:51Nilay Patel?

  You can. I don't because first of all, I was very flattering to myself when I made my Madden avatar. That dude is jacked. It's just every time, every time something asks me to make an avatar of myself, I'm like, I don't know, man.

• 1:21:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh yeah, same.

• 1:21:09Nilay Patel?

  Beard guy. Can you pick? Can I just pick a beard guy? It'll be fine. Everyone will know what I'm talking about.

• 1:21:15Alex Cranz?

  Just lady with glasses. Go.

• 1:21:17Nilay Patel?

  On the screen in workspace where you're making the avatar, there's this incredible disclaimer. It says, all product features might not support legs.

• 1:21:31Nilay Patel?

  Just to be curious, like, wow. Well, that's a real problem, isn't it?

• 1:21:37Alex Cranz?

  That's okay.

• 1:21:40Nilay Patel?

  And like, it's funny because when you're sitting at the table, you don't see anyone's legs.

• 1:21:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Nilay Patel?

  So like, no product features support legs.

• 1:21:48Nilay Patel?

  But you can turn around, you can go to a whiteboard behind you. So I mean, like the actual product in use, technologically amazing. So you sit down, you're like, if you've ever used Oculus, like it can, you know, it has pass through mode. So you can kind of see a grainy, black and white around you.

• 1:22:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Nilay Patel?

  So you tell it where your desk is, you know, draw a box over your real desk.

• 1:22:08Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:22:09Nilay Patel?

  It can detect your keyboard. You tell it what model of laptop you have.

• 1:22:13Alex Cranz?

  Oh no.

• 1:22:13Nilay Patel?

  You're like, I have a 16 inch space gray MacBook Pro.

• 1:22:16Alex Cranz?

  Does it support mechanical keyboards?

• 1:22:21Alex Cranz?

  I might be in

• 1:22:22Nilay Patel?

  It's like all the way to the bottom of the list, you're like, I'm a mechanical keyboard nerd. So you can tell it what model and it will detect your laptop. It will place your laptop in VR.

• 1:22:31Alex Cranz?

  Incredible.

• 1:22:32Nilay Patel?

  You can say, I want a whiteboard and you can, you can get up and walk to another part of your room and pass through, draw a whiteboard, like a big virtual whiteboard. And then when you're sitting, you get pass through of just your desk. So you can see all the stuff on your real desk.

• 1:22:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:47Nilay Patel?

  You can see where your laptop is. And then incredibly, because it's a conference room, you need to have a laptop dongle. There's an app you can run on your laptop, Oculus Remote Desktop, that will mirror your laptop display in like, you know, full res in front of you in VR. So you can type in your laptop, you can see what's happening on your laptop, look around this conference room and push a button, walk somewhere else and like draw on a whiteboard with a controller.

• 1:23:12Alex Cranz?

  That's cool.

• 1:23:13Nilay Patel?

  All this is nuts, right? And like your laptop hates this. Like it's like the fan's running.

• 1:23:19Alex Cranz?

  Just isn't a jet at my house? No, it's just my laptop.

• 1:23:22Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, all of this is like technically stunning.

• 1:23:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? All of it is also extremely distracting because the hand tracking is like, you know, it's like a beta. So like your hands are like flying, like cartoon hands are flying all over the place.

• 1:23:34Alex Cranz?

  Flying over your head while you're trying to type.

• 1:23:37Nilay Patel?

  And everyone else is just like, they're video conferencing, like normal human beings, taking screenshots of your cartoon, just like freaking out all the time.

• 1:23:45Alex Cranz?

  Just Sean staring at you. It's credible.

• 1:23:49Nilay Patel?

  It's entertaining is what I would say. I don't know that we should actually have meetings in it yet, but I was, I was very entertained by playing with it today.

• 1:23:56Alex Cranz?

  Get the Quest 2s out to everybody. It'll be great.

• 1:23:59Nilay Patel?

  You know, the Quest 2 is like, I've said it on the show many times, like it is a remarkable product. It is like a complete excellent consumer product that happens to be made by a company with a litany of other problems, but it's, it is a remarkable thing that exists.

• 1:24:15Alex Cranz?

  I use mine like almost every other day. I adore it.

• 1:24:18Nilay Patel?

  What do you use it for?

• 1:24:19Alex Cranz?

  I use it for Supernatural.

• 1:24:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah. Supernatural's great.

• 1:24:22Alex Cranz?

  It's fantastic. I love it. I use it all of the time. I hate that I have to like use Facebook. Like, I hate that, like, Facebook is a part of it, but I love everything about it. One day I will finish playing, like, the Jurassic Park game. It got too scary for me. I had to stop. Too many dinosaurs.

• 1:24:41Nilay Patel?

  I tried to play the one, um, where you're in a space station and something bad happened to you. And I was like, I'm very nauseous and also I don't like these kinds of games. Okay, so that's Facebook. They, they were successful, right? I spent more time talking about VR than their antitrust complaint. Facebook, for its part, says the antitrust complaint will fail. The thing's already been dismissed. They tend to believe that the market definition is still too broad, that they have a lot of competitors. I think they have a pretty good case to make that Facebook actually competes with a lot of different things. Like TikTok is a real competitor of Facebook.

• 1:25:15Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:25:15Nilay Patel?

  Is it the kind of thing that Facebook is? It is not.

• 1:25:18Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's why they just launched Reels today, too, right?

• 1:25:22Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, Reels and, and actual Facebook.

• 1:25:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, or in the United States. So like, they, they know it's a, it's a competitor.

• 1:25:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the, the thing people will say is it is ridiculous to think that the market, for all things, is just attention, full stop.

• 1:25:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:37Nilay Patel?

  Like, there are different kinds of products that occupy your attention in different ways. And if you just define the market as attention, then everything is competitive with everything all the time.

• 1:25:45Speaker 04

  Can I, I, I just closed, but I just want to point out that as part of my full Z Fold 3 review, uh, I opened up a split screen with TikTok on the left and Instagram Reels on the right. I just had that experience for 20 minutes.

• 1:25:57Nilay Patel?

  That's incredible.

• 1:25:58Speaker 04

  It's amazing.

• 1:25:59Alex Cranz?

  Just go.

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  Sometimes it felt like they were interacting with each other. Like, there was like, there was like, the bad knockoff reel on the right and the good TikTok on the left.

• 1:26:06Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's really good.

• 1:26:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was really solid.

• 1:26:08Alex Cranz?

  Content being piped into your eyeballs.

• 1:26:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta wrap this up. But Alex, there's like a lot of Intel GPU news this week. You want to just take us through it real fast?

• 1:26:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a lot of things happened. Not a lot, actually. What happened is every, every year, Intel does like three pre-announcements. Like, I think Google is just like taking from their playbook with the Pixel 3, where they're like, this is coming, this is coming. And then like later on, it'll be like, okay, it's finally here. So today, they, or yesterday, I believe, they, they had this big thing. They invited all the journalists and stuff. Heimgartenberg went and, and, and listened in on everything and they announced that.

• 1:26:47Alex Cranz?

  The Alder Lake chip, which is like a new CPU that's on Intel 7, which is not 7 nanometer. Oh, God. But 10 nanometer because it's Intel. And it's actually kind of a cool chip because it's trying to compete both with like Apple and all the ARM-based stuff that Apple's done that's really, really good at battery. And also trying to compete with AMD and Ryzen, which is really, really good at power. And so it's saying, okay, we're going to do like, we're going to start doing big and little cores. Essentially, they're going to have like an efficient core and a power core and merge them together in this chip and it's going to do be really, really good at battery life and also really, really fast.

• 1:27:29Alex Cranz?

  Not a whole lot of details beyond that, especially on things like numbers, like how fast. They were crucially comparing it to some older CPUs because they always do that every time. They're like, it's 70% faster than this CPU from seven years ago. So we still don't know a lot about it, but it's, it's, it's just neat. It's just neat that they're, they're trying, they're, they're thinking a little bit outside the box because for like the last five or six years, Intel's whole plan has been, we're going to make this 14 nanometer chip just more and more and more and more and more efficient. And so now they're having to actually do like some weird, cool architecture stuff. And there's some really cool architecture stuff happening there. Heim did a fantastic kind of breakdown of it.

• 1:28:14Alex Cranz?

  Highly recommend you go read it. He also learned all about their new GPU, which they've been announced, they've announced like three years ago. Yeah. And it's a little closer now. So this time they were like, okay, we're going to now talk about like the name of these GPUs. And specifically it's called, hold on. ARC. ARC. Well, it's called ARC. It's the stupidest name in the world because like.

• 1:28:40Alex Cranz?

  It's like the, the, the architecture this time is called Alchemist.

• 1:28:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:28:45Alex Cranz?

  And then later there's gonna be Battle Mage, just in case you're concerned about like where we're coming. And then Celestial, and then finally Druid.

• 1:28:56Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:28:56Alex Cranz?

  This is like the next three or four years, I think, of, of this, this roadmap of architecture.

• 1:29:01Speaker 04

  But they're, they're promising that they're gonna, they're gonna, they're gonna be like selling to consumers. And this is where I get a little bit stuck because new chips, they sell through blah, blah, blah. But like, what has Intel successfully sold directly to consumers in recent memory? Like, they just canceled RealSense, not that that really was ever meant for consumers.

• 1:29:20Alex Cranz?

  They sell CPUs.

• 1:29:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's it, right? Everything else they've not been able to do. And so is selling a GPU close enough to selling a CPU that they'll be able to pull it off? Or not?

• 1:29:32Alex Cranz?

  They assume so, right? Like, they, they think that they're gonna do it because they, they look at AMD, who has a much, much smaller market share. And they're like, well, AMD did it, can do it and is very quickly coming for us in a lot of different spaces. And so we're gonna do it too. And like, the interesting thing is the money for them isn't in these GPUs that they're selling to consumers. Like, the Alchemist and the Battle Mage and stuff, that's not where they're gonna make money. They're gonna make, they're trying to really compete, not with AMD, but with Nvidia in the, the server space and the enterprise space. Because Nvidia is just like taking everybody to school when it comes to these big GPUs that everybody needs for AI processing. And so that's like, that's what Intel's actually trying to do.

• 1:30:15Alex Cranz?

  But they're also like, oh yeah, and also we're gonna do like GPUs for everybody else. And we'll be able to package it together like AMD and it's gonna be super great. And you're gonna love us and we will continue to be the biggest name here, even though we've sat on our laurels for so long. They rotted, we fell. Like, it's, Rotten Laurels rot.

• 1:30:36Speaker 04

  They are literally organic, you know?

• 1:30:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they, they probably rotted. And like, Intel has just really screwed up for years and years, really like, didn't pay attention to, to their competitors and where their competitors were going and is now quickly trying to play catch up. And. Maybe they'll do it. You know, these, these GPUs they're saying are really fast.

• 1:31:00Nilay Patel?

  Maybe they'll do it. The Intel story.

• 1:31:03Alex Cranz?

  They're providing some cool, like, software solutions, the way that Nvidia does with, like, DLSS. So they're, they're kind of their own competitor to that in the works. And something that they do really well, that AMD has really struggled with and only kind of caught up in the last year or so, is that software integration. Like, they're really good at integrating the software and, and making all the different parts of a computer work together well. So it could be a real viable competitor to AMD and Nvidia. But we'll have to see when it actually comes out because we still don't know enough about it to, like, actually know anything besides neat.

• 1:31:42Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I feel like the Intel story is like, Intel, you're going to love us again. Yeah.

• 1:31:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Nilay Patel?

  And to be fair, they have a new CEO. Yeah. Who I've been trying to get on Decoder for months.

• 1:31:52Alex Cranz?

  Pat, come on. Talk to Neelai, please.

• 1:31:55Nilay Patel?

  We've, we've been doing Decoder for almost a year and like the, the push and pull of getting CEOs to show up on the show is like very interesting. Like, everyone wants to come in riding on the high and I want everyone to come in with the most embattled.

• 1:32:08Nilay Patel?

  Because the most interesting question is how are you going to fix it, right? Yeah. So I think they're waiting.

• 1:32:14Alex Cranz?

  And like, the thing is, all of this stuff that's happening right now, he didn't really have any part in. Like, this was all in process for years now. And, and so his thing is like, some of the other moves he's been making with like, making deals with smaller manufacturers to produce their chips and stuff like that. Like, that's where he's coming from.

• 1:32:35Nilay Patel?

  And begging the government for money. Yeah.

• 1:32:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and begging the government and being like, look at all the stuff we're doing in Arizona to compete with China.

• 1:32:41Nilay Patel?

  Which Justine Calma has written a very good article about how both Intel and TSMC want to build these chip factories. But there's a giant water shortage and chip factories require a ton of water.

• 1:32:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52Nilay Patel?

  So my first question is, why are you building the chip factory in the hot, dry place? But it turns out that there's a lot of sun, which is very good for solar power, for powering these factories. And also because they just have like built up a little industry, little parts of the world end up randomly being good at certain kinds of industries and Arizona is randomly good at, you know, making ships and having, you know, chip experts at the university and whatever. But this water crisis on the West Coast is getting very real and it's going to be very real for Arizona. And I don't know how viable it is to be wanting to build lots and lots of gigantic water dependent chip factories out there. Anyway, Justine's story is great. You should read it.

• 1:33:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, go read it. I think she does a really good job of explaining the issue. And you know, I think it's really about like, there's that initial cost of water for these companies, but they've gotten really, really good at recycling that water and, and reusing it and stuff. So they've got like giant pools, basically that, and it's just, they fill it up. And so that initial thing is going to be, it may take longer, who knows? But yeah, go read her story. It does a way better job explaining it and just fantastic work.

• 1:34:04Nilay Patel?

  Can I just point out that Intel TSMC, real company is the real product with shockingly huge demand, cut sweetheart deals with Arizona to build their chip factories. They want to cut additional sweetheart deals. They built a network of suppliers and a talent base in a state that didn't have it before. A critical component is water, but they've got a plan to get water in the desert. And Foxconn built a factory in Wisconsin with no products on the roadmap and built no labor base, but managed to literally build a pipe from the Great Lakes to their empty building.

• 1:34:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Nilay Patel?

  I Killing me here, man.

• 1:34:47Speaker 04

  I have a solution. We're coming up on the end of the Vergecast and I think I know what needs to happen because it's the end of the Vergecast. This just came to me. I think that they should make ORAN. The Foxconn factory in Wisconsin should make ORAN chips for Gen 5 sis.

• 1:35:03Nilay Patel?

  A Japanese carrier called Rakuten literally put out a brochure this week that has been tweeted at me numerous times. It's like, ORAN's real, our network runs on it. And I'm trying to figure out why they put out this lengthy blog post. And I can only surmise that someone there's listening to our show because like, who are you convincing except for the eight people who make it to the end? And they're like, I'm skeptical about ORAN.

• 1:35:30Alex Cranz?

  Just whispering to theater.

• 1:35:32Nilay Patel?

  I'll send it to everyone. Okay, I want to end on this piece of news. It's my favorite piece of news from the week. It really sums up a lot about the largest companies in America. GM and AT&T have announced a plan to bring 5G to Chevy Cadillac and GMC Vehicles by 2024.

• 1:35:52Nilay Patel?

  You're doing great, guys. We won't be halfway through the 6G hype cycle. It's amazing. Okay, that's it. We went long. We did it. Yeah, I'm proud of us. Yeah, we love hearing from you. You can tweet at us. I'm at reckless theaters at back lawn. Alex is Alex H. Cranz with Z. Dan is DCC for Allison. Allison Joe one. Thanks again for coming on. Decoder next week. Give me a good one. Doug Demuro, YouTube car reviewer. We got into it. Yeah, my hand talks in smack. Did you talk about the quirks and features of his business? We talked a lot about the quirks and features of his business. If you're interested in being a YouTuber, you've got to get good at Excel. That's what I'm telling you. And he talks a

• 1:36:35Nilay Patel?

  lot about what he tracks and how he thinks about things. But he also just like talks some smack. It was great. It's gonna be a great episode. That's coming on Tuesday. We'll be back next week with more Vergecast. I'm assuming more. We're like, the news is coming, right? End of August into fall hardware season.

• 1:36:51Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it's gonna be.

• 1:36:52Nilay Patel?

  Get ready.

• 1:36:53Alex Cranz?

  Four hour Vergecast. Get ready.

• 1:36:55Nilay Patel?

  It's never gonna stop. That's it. Rock and roll. Get a vaccine.

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• 1:38:06Speaker 09

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