Steam Deck review / Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review

Senior news editor Sean Hollister joins Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Alex Cranz to discuss his review of the Steam Deck, the latest portable gaming system. Verge reviewer Allison Johnson continues the gadget talk with her review of Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra. Further reading: Ukraine internet outages spark concerns of broader blackout US and Russia still tethered by International Space Station during Ukraine conflict Twitter accounts sharing video from Ukraine are being suspended when they’re needed most Steam Deck review: it’s not ready The official Steam Deck dock won’t be available at launch Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review: notably unique Dish says its 5G buildout is going great, thanks for asking, how are you? Apple will reportedly debut an M2 chip with four new Macs this year Spotify’s Car Thing goes on general sale for $90 Sony finally reveals the PlayStation VR2’s design Tesla CEO Elon Musk accuses the SEC of ‘leaking’ information Inside Pornhub Why Trump’s Truth Social may not survive the hype Inside Galactic Starcruiser, Disney's hotel where everyone becomes a Star Wars character 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, Sean Hollister joins us. We talk all about the Steam Deck. Boy, does he have feelings about that. Then Allison Johnson joins us. We talk about the Galaxy S22 Ultra review, what's going on with Dish Networks, 5G network, supposed 5G network. Let me do a little lightning round. That's the Vergecast. Come up now.

• 0:15Speaker 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.

• 1:00Speaker 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.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of being late, but then coincidentally being able to hit the Steam Deck review embargo. Yes. It's a very specific niche. We are the only contender, but we are definitely the flagship of that. We did it. We did. That's the one we found. You got to find Elaine and be the winner. I'm your friend Eli. I'm in the studio with Alex Krantz. Hey, Alex. Hey. Dita Bona is here. I am a rock solid 60 frames per second. Very good. Sean Hollister is here.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  I am a glorious mess.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  It is true, we are late, sorry. I was at a conference yesterday, we had Hot Pod Summit. Ashley Carman did an amazing job hosting Hot Pod Summit. Do you ever want to see some people wilding out about programmatic ad tech? Podcast industry is lit. Very fun, I was out of pocket, forgot to tweet that we're gonna be late, so we're coming out a little late today. But the good news is that means that the Steam Deck embargo will have passed.

• 2:45Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  Talking about time on a pre-recorded podcast is very difficult. The Steam Deck embargo, we wouldn't have been able to talk about it this week, had we not been late.

• 2:54Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  But we didn't actually plan it.

• 2:55Alex Cranz?

  No, we totally did, we totally did. This was all planned.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  You have to manifest luck. A thing that happens on Decoder all the time is like, everyone talks about manifestation. Like, Miss Excel is like, fully manifesting, that's like, wild. And then like, random executives are like, I manifested my business success.

• 3:11Alex Cranz?

  So we're manifesting luck today.

• 3:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're like, this just happened, you have an abundance.

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna find a hundred dollars on the street after this.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  Aaron Rodgers is gonna sell me a crystal, it's gonna be great.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Can you guys give me like, 15 minutes to come up with a software manifest pun for this thing before we move on?

• 3:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so we talk about Steam Deck with Sean, a little later, Allison Johnson's gonna join the show. She reviewed the S22, there's some other fun stuff. We would be remiss if we did not open by saying that Russia has invaded Ukraine, there's a war on the European continent. It's a big deal. We have some coverage on the site. It is kind of our first digital war of this kind. There are internet outages in Ukraine. You know, there's a space station, we have to collaborate with Russia on the space station, so Lauren Grush has been covering what's happening there. There are information challenges on all the various social platforms, there are technology sanctions against Russia. I keep hearing this very shaky rumor that the Ukraine wants the United States government to ban software updates to Russian devices.

• 4:11Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 4:11Nilay Patel?

  We haven't run it down, I'm telling you, it's just a shaky rumor, but like, all the stuff is in the mix. So it's on the site, we're not gonna spend a lot of time on it here. I was just saying to Dieter, I feel like we are well-practiced in making this hard-left turn out of very serious world news and into gadgets because of two years of the pandemic.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Never gets easier, though.

• 4:32Nilay Patel?

  It's always weird. I do wanna point out, our team is doing a great job of covering it, where it is Verge stuff, it's important. Now we're gonna make a hard-left turn into the Steam Deck. There, we have other great, the company Vox Media, if you just want to stay in the family, lots of other great podcasts that are full on Ukraine. Yep. So go, go listen to Today Explained and all that stuff, but. They're doing a great job on it. We are aware that some of what we provide here at The Verge has diversion. Other times, you're fully in it. But if there's stuff you want us to cover, if there's stuff you want us to talk about, we welcome your, this is new, so we welcome your feedback. You can tweet at Alex. Just me. Or me, whatever, or send us a note. We do appreciate it. We are taking it seriously. All right. Steam Deck. Here is my big plan for talking about the Steam Deck.

• 5:15Nilay Patel?

  Sean, talk about the Steam Deck. Go. You just reviewed it. I mean, this is like one, I, I just read the review before I came in here. It is an emotional journey, but begin.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  It's gonna go up about 45 minutes after we finish recording. It'll be up by the time you read this. And the first thing I want to say is that this is the hardest review I've ever done for The Verge or the other publications I've visited briefly between because Valve was constantly updating the thing. Every couple of days, there'd be a big update, sometimes multiple times a day, there would be a new update for the thing because it is the hottest, the software is coming in, the hottest of any device.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  Sean, what is the Steam Deck? Let's begin at the beginning.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Uh, it looks like a Nintendo Switch. It looks like a Nintendo Switch in photos. And if you actually pick one up, you'll find out that it is much bigger than a Nintendo Switch. But yes, there is a 7-inch 12, 800p screen flanked by two sets of controls. But inside, it is a Linux computer. And get this, a Linux computer that is running Windows games, not Linux games. It can also run Linux games in that Nintendo Switch-like interface. And so the first question you have is, one, how the heck does that work? How is Linux running the Windows games? Are they gonna be any good on this thing? Your second question might be, does it have any battery life? And the answer is, eee.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  We'll get to that. But it actually, it works because Valve, Valve spent years, like four years, working on a compatibility layer that's built on top of an existing compatibility layer called Wine, which lets you run some Windows games on Linux.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  W-I-N-E, like the thing you drink, not the thing you do, right?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Wine is not an emulator, I think is the acronym for it.

• 7:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a recursive acronym. It's like one of the first things I learned as a young computer nerd is that Wine is a great recursive acronym.

• 7:12Alex Cranz?

  I had no idea.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  Wine is not an emulator, it's a acronym, it's very good.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  And in many cases, it works amazingly well. I loaded up, well, let me see, I loaded up Fallout 4 in this thing, I loaded up God of War on this thing, 2018 God of War, just got ported to a PC. It works brilliantly well. And the controls, this thing has so many controls that a Nintendo Switch does not have, that a PC does not have. It has gyroscopic aiming. It has touchpads that you can customize six ways from Sunday and turn into like virtual trackballs. You can literally swipe across this touchpad, which is a flat surface, and it will feel and act like you have gone back to the early 90s, the late 80s, and have a genuine trackball in your hand, and you're flinging that cursor across the screen.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  And yes, I did use a trackball at one point, it was not my primary pointing device, but it's one of those kinds of things, okay? And that works great in 2D games that have a cursor, as long as the games actually have a cursor, because while a lot of games play through Proton, the compatibility layer, on Linux, based on Windows games, a lot of them do work, very often, they might mysteriously not. And in most cases, this manifests on the Steam Deck as they just don't launch, and that'll be the case for any big game that uses anti-cheat software. So your Destiny 2's not on here, and your Halo Infinite's not on here, and your PUBG's not on here, and your GTA V is not on here, but...

• 8:39Alex Cranz?

  So like the entire Ubisoft lineup?

• 8:41Speaker 02

  I think I got something running for Ubisoft, I'll have to remember what it is.

• 8:45Nilay Patel?

  Is that like a Valve hasn't gone to those publishers and figured it out problem? Is that a, the ELO'd out? Linux PC in the format or Nintendo Switch, we're just gonna see what happened like.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  This is a publishers are lazy and scared problem.

• 8:59Nilay Patel?

  Okay, wow.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Valve has explicitly explicitly reached out to the two big anti-cheat manufacturers, which are EAC, which is Easy Anti-cheat, it's made by Epic Games. So there you go, or bought by Epic Games and Battle Eye and said, hey, can you make these things work better in Proton? And they said, yes, we'll make these things work better in Proton. And then they went ahead and made these things work better in Proton. And in fact, the big new hit game that Andrew Webster just reviewed for the verge Elden Ring, literally has Easy Anti-cheat in it and will literally work, I believe tomorrow Valve says they'll push an update that makes that game work. So it's possible, it's totally possible. And Valve says it literally takes two clicks for these companies to enable it.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  So hang on, I need to stop you right there. Anytime a company says it takes literally two clicks, it takes more than two clicks.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  At least three.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  It takes, it takes an important business decision in this case, which is in Epic's case, the case of Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, who by the way owns Easy Anti-cheat and also runs Fortnite, one of the biggest games in the world. In his case, he said to me that this is basically not worth the amount of effort they would have to put into, to convince themselves that they wouldn't be inviting new hackers and cheaters into Fortnite. And so they, they, they have said, Epic Games has said, it is easy to do this. It is easy to enable your games. And yet the CEO of the company, Tim Sweeney, has also said, by the way, we're not going to do this

• 10:37Speaker 02

  because we don't think the Steam Deck is going to, you know, basically it's not going to sell enough to justify the amount of work they would have to do to convince themselves that it'll be okay.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  Right, so the problem isn't the two clicks or three clicks. It's this company is so big that to instruct someone to do the clicks requires meetings.

• 10:56Alex Cranz?

  So it does in fact require more than two clicks because you have to click on send.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you click on Outlook.

• 11:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:04Nilay Patel?

  Make new meeting.

• 11:05Alex Cranz?

  A lot of extra clicks in there. Lies to you.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  Someone's gotta click through PowerPoint and be like, pros and cons.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  And I guess I understand that there is like this, you can never anticipate the amount of risk because hackers will find a way into anything if you give them a long enough and cheaters have just this tremendous incentive. And companies like EA and Activision are constantly suing cheat makers out of existence to try and solve this problem, which has gotten worse and worse over the years, by the way. A lot of video game manufacturers are now building their own custom anti-cheat solutions because they don't even think Battle Eye and Easy Anti-cheat are good enough anymore. So, yeah, there's more to it than that. But a lot of this stuff doesn't work. And even some of the games that do work, because you have all these glorious controls

• 11:53Speaker 02

  that you don't have on a normal handheld gaming system or even a PC, and you can easily get a cursor in some games, they won't necessarily work on every game. I pulled up the original Tie Fighter. Do you remember Tie Fighter?

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  For PC? Oh, my God. That, ah, such a good Star Wars game.

• 12:12Alex Cranz?

  When did that come out again?

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Possibly the best Star Wars game ever made. I want to say like 95, 94, something like that. Anyhow, this game, it loads. The cutscenes look great. It looks phenomenal on the Steam Deck. But there's no mouse cursor, so you can't navigate the menus at all. I had to like, I had to move around invisible mouse cursor that, you know, I couldn't see on the screen to try and figure out how to get into the game. And once I did that, I got into the Tie Fighter and it just spun uncontrollably through space.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  I was horrible at that game. And from my understanding, from my experience, that's just the game.

• 12:51Alex Cranz?

  That's actually, yeah.

• 12:54Alex Cranz?

  Very finicky controls.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  So, okay, Sean, like, we've gone immediately into the deepest of weeds on this thing, which I love. It's a portable PC, running Linux with an emulation layer for Windows games. It has, like, decent performance, question mark? Like, you mentioned battery life is E. What sorts of games should a person looking to buy this thing expect? We'll come back to the bugs, which are myriad. But like, am I buying this thing to play Elden Ring? Am I buying this thing to play, like, emulator games? Am I buying this thing for all of the above? Am I buying this thing to just screw around?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Sir, I will let you know on Elden Ring tomorrow, when I can run it and have the online mode work. Technically, it launched last night, so they call it a Steam Deck verified. Anyhow, the performance is great. It's amazingly good. I don't see a crazy performance dip because of, you know, running Windows games on Linux. I don't know if there's any performance dip at all, not that I've gotten to test Windows on it, mind you. But I've tried other portables. I've tried the ION Neo that came out last year, and this thing is head and shoulders above that.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, so actually, can you put great in context? Because there's like, full-on PC gaming great, great. There's like, gaming laptop great. There's PS5 great. There's like, I don't know, Nintendo Switch, you could say runs great because the games are designed to run on, you know, something that's relatively underpowered. So when you say great, like, great for what?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  This is a giant level of detail above what you'd play on a Nintendo Switch. We're talking above PS4 quality here, above Xbox One quality here. We're probably in the PS4 Pro kind of graphics that you're looking coming out of the screen. But it's got one important caveat there. The important caveat is that the resolution is 1280 by 800, or 1280 by 720, you take your pick, on the actual screen. So it just has to drive so many fewer pixels. So if I want to run God of War here on medium settings, or Star Wars: Squadrons on medium settings, like, that looks better to my eyes than a PS4. It's in that PS4 Pro

• 15:06Speaker 02

  territory. Not quite as good as, you know, a really beefy gaming PC, but it's up there. But it has to run so many fewer pixels that if I blow that up onto a monitor, you're not going to get quite that same effect. If I blow that up on my, you know, desktop monitor, if I put that on a 4K TV, you don't get it.

• 15:22Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna put my 2019 gamer nerd hat on. Does it do ray tracing?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  I have not tried ray tracing on this thing. That is a great question.

• 15:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, it has some, it has a custom chip, right? Part of the whole, I mean, this thing is like an ultimate gadget.

• 15:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  We probably should have said at the top, like, one of the, there's like very few moments where there's an ultimate gadget.

• 15:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Nilay Patel?

  You know, and like the Steam Deck is firmly in the category of ultimate gadget. Like, it's a tiny little Linux PC that looks like a Switch that can run Windows games. It is buggy as all get out, but it's like.

• 15:58Alex Cranz?

  I immediately bought one.

• 15:59Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's also, it's what, it's 400 bucks, right?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  As did I.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it's fully in ultimate gadget territory. Like, you have to be a gadget nerd to appreciate it, but if you're a gadget nerd, like, there's not many boxes. Many boxes left to take.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Let's talk gadget nerdery for a moment here. This thing, this thing.

• 16:18Nilay Patel?

  Sean just picked it up.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Has.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  The love in his eyes, like, literally his eyes turned into cartoon hearts just now.

• 16:23Alex Cranz?

  His shoulders just kind of, like, shrugged under the weight of it.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  It is 1.47 pounds. It is sculpted in a way that I do not feel that weight constantly. Like, if I'm holding it above my head in bed, which is definitely a way I play this thing. Yeah, I do have this sense that maybe I'm going to drop it and brain myself, but in most other positions, my arms merely get tired after a while.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Okay, so this thing has a, it has, yeah, 1280 by 800 touchscreen, but it is a good screen. Like, this is a, like, the best small IPS screen I have seen on a device. It's not like OLED quality or anything like that, but the colors look good. It's sharp, it's crisp, it's refresh rate, there's not a lot of jelly effect to it. The speakers are loud and clear, and there are so many controls on this thing. I think, I, touchpads that can do all kinds of things. Touchsticks that have capacitive sensors on top, so you lay your finger on top of it, you lay your thumb on top of it, and all of a sudden you got the gyroscopic aiming. The triggers are not only, not only does it have triggers and bumpers and face buttons and D-pads, but the triggers are not. Analog triggers, very responsive analog triggers.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  The touchpads, you can press down on them and they've got, you know, your 32,000 levels of pressure sensitivity. Each of them has a linear actuator underneath. So they not only can give you some haptic feedback when you're scrolling, you can feel a little bit of texture, but in addition to that, they make sounds. The original Steam controller that this thing is based on could play like chiptune music out of its touchpads. And this one can too. It's got a custom AMD chip that not only is it is it custom and like exclusive valve, but it had AMD RDNA 2 graphics before any other laptop or handheld was allowed to get like the thin and light version of those. So while you could buy like a beefy gaming laptop with RDNA 2 graphics,

• 18:17Speaker 02

  or you could wait forever and scalp a graphic desktop graphics card, this thing has it for $400 and it's a great level of performance for $400. It's got a ginormous, really annoyingly loud fan in it, which has the wonderful side effect of making sure I never feel the heat. I don't feel the heat at all, never seen it overheat, never seen it throttle the GPU unless I was asking it to. And when you dive into the software for the deck, there's a single button you can press to see your framerate, your battery life, what all your CPUs and GPUs are doing. And at a moment's notice, you can say, wow, I'm only getting an hour of battery life out of this now.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  I can cut my framerate in half or throttle the GPU with like two presses. And this time I actually mean two presses, not the anti-cheat two presses.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  Sean, the next time you throttle the GPU, I'd like you to schedule a quick meeting with me, just to sync.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  I will do that.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  Just pros and cons. Let's make this decision rigorously.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  Are all of these controls overwhelming? Cause like, you know, a game designed for keyboard and mouse, or even just like a standard controller, like, are you spending just as much time fiddling with like 50 different ways you could configure what all these buttons and touchpads and gyroscopes do as you are actually playing the game? Or is it relatively easy to like, set it up and like, start playing the game and not be constantly fussing with it?

• 19:43Speaker 02

  I'll answer that two ways. And way number one is, I may have spent an hour, an hour and a half, personally configuring a custom profile for Destiny 2, which is a game that I can only play on the deck through Stadia, and I don't even own games on Stadia, except for like Life is for Strange 2. So I probably wasted an hour and a half just because it was fun to customize the controls to that degree.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  You can do incredible things with the amount of customization on here. There's macros and turbos, and it's dizzying. It's dizzying how much you can do, but you don't have to. When you pick it up, what you have in your hands is basically an Xbox 360 gamepad, an Xbox One gamepad. It's got two sticks, it's got all the buttons and D-pads exactly where you think they'll be. If you want to, you also have the touchpad right beneath the stick. There's your mouse, there's your gyro. But you can also dive into a quick settings menu and flip on gyroscopic control on the touchstick. You can flip on the back buttons. There's four back buttons on the back of the thing, and you can set those to do whatever you want. I set it up in Control. I set it up so I've got one of them, I double-tap one of the buttons on the

• 20:52Speaker 02

  back, and all of a sudden, my character's floating in the air, ready to rain down death on my foes. I tap another one. I summon a shield of debris all around my character. It's great. And I don't have to take my thumbs off the sticks to do any of that.

• 21:05Nilay Patel?

  Is it labeled "rain down death on my foes" in the settings?

• 21:09Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  I can definitely do that.

• 21:12Alex Cranz?

  Sean, I think it's really cool because it's got the same haptic, like, touchpads or whatever that the Steampad did, right?

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:21Alex Cranz?

  Is there a learning curve like there was on that because everybody decided that learning curve was stupid and stopped buying that controller? Is this just replicating that problem?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  If you want to use them, it's going to take a moment to like, okay, how do I want this touchpad to work? But there are a lot of presets, and again, you can just like pick it up and say, "I only want to use this like an Xbox controller," and you never have to think about it, which is super nice. The original Steam controller, they kind of like, "Oh shit, I guess we should add a..." A left thumbstick at like the very end of the development cycle for that. Valve showed so many versions of the original Steam controller prototypes. I have one at home that had two touchpads and nothing else. And they were like, "You are going to use our touchpads."

• 22:06Alex Cranz?

  That's the one I have.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, there we go. And at the end, they said, "I guess we should put a left analog stick on it." And now they've put the right analog stick on it too. So you don't have to use touchpads ever if you don't want to. You can just ignore them. It's fine. I played a whole bunch of games that way.

• 22:21Alex Cranz?

  But like, I mean, you compare it to the Xbox 360 controller, but the layout is very different from it, right? Because the joysticks on this are up by the D-pad. And I don't know what that other pad is called.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Oh, boy. If I want to get into some gadget history, the layout here is exactly like the Wikipad.

• 22:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, it's a very different. It's not an Xbox 360 layout. Where those would be is where those touchpads are. Like where the joysticks would be.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, in terms of like physically where you are reaching for it, I have found that it just feels completely natural to grab this thing and just my thumbs go where they should go. And the only place where the thumbs feel a little bit awkward is actually on those touchpads. They feel natural reaching for the sticks. They feel natural reaching for the face buttons and the D-pad. Everything is comfortable there. And then when I pull them down to the touchpads, I'm like, "Oh, maybe I should shift my grip on this controller a little bit. It'll feel a little bit less like a gamepad. Maybe I should flatten it out physically in my hands so that I can get that swipe across the touchpad instead."

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  This whole thing, like, you keep talking about configurability. Like, a lot of video games now, like, the first game you play is just setting up the controls.

• 23:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And then you get to set up your character?

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Never gonna play this game. But like, one of the things that jumps out at me about this, and it's kind of like ultimate gadget territory. Compared to the Switch or any Nintendo product, right? The control layout and the hardware is pretty much designed to make a game, like a one game work. Right? Like, the GameCube was like, have you heard of Luigi's Mansion? This controller was designed to play this game. It's gonna be weird for everything else, but we like nailed it. The Switch is kinda like, it has that element too, right? Nintendo's really good at this. The hardware and the software work really seamlessly together. That's the product. This is like, designed to run whatever? Maybe?

• 24:19Nilay Patel?

  If, like, right, like, there's an element here where the hardware is like over-designed, over-built, over-engineered, because the target software is whatever will run.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, the idea is you can, if they fix the cursor, go back to that original Tie Fighter and play it and not have to wonder whether the developer's ever going to add gamepad support. I went back to the original Half-Life 2, and I played a chunk of it using this. I went back to Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 from 1997.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  The 90s are back. This is like a whole theme. This is a vibe shift.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  It's like, I didn't have to think about, okay, I want to remap every single control, because I had a functional mouse right there. The game had mouse support back in the day, which helps. That was one of the early first-person shooters that had it. And Valve had a profile ready that was like, okay, here's the one you set it to if you want this to emulate a mouse and keyboard. Okay, there we go. It works. And then on top of that, I was like, okay, well, I want one extra button to do one extra thing. Mapped it in like a minute. And then if I wanted to go crazy, I can upload my own controller configurations to the Steam library. And the cool thing is, all that work that everybody did mapping out those old Steam controllers, all the cultists who sped, you know, huddled over their Steam controllers,

• 25:36Speaker 02

  spending hours mapping out configurations, those are in the store. And most of them just work on the Steam Deck, with a few exceptions like Tie Fighter where you spin uncontrollably through space.

• 25:46Alex Cranz?

  Do you ever, like, there are a lot of PC games that really don't care about controllers, you know, RTSs I'm thinking about, a lot of strategy games. Do you miss a keyboard and mouse with games like that?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  I would not miss a keyboard and mouse if I spent the time customizing the buttons, because there's enough buttons. There is something to say for-

• 26:08Nilay Patel?

  Real theme of this situation.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Something to say for, I have a number row and I know exactly where it is in my muscle memory. There's something for, to say for, I have spent over 20 years learning how to do first person shooters with a mouse and keyboard, and I am never going to be better on this than I am with a mouse and keyboard. There's something to say for, if I want to swing a sword or an axe in a game with like a swing of my mousing arm, I'm never going to quite replicate that-

• 26:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  -on a Steam Deck or Steam controller. I could, I could do cool things with it, things that'll wow you, but I don't know if it's going to be better necessarily. Cool thing about this is you can plug the mouse and keyboard in if you want, it's a full Linux computer.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm just going to point this out. Saying it's an ultimate gadget, Sean, you have a mellifluous voice, it sounds like you love the, like, the hard eyes are apparent, I think, even in audio. However, you gave it a 6.5 and you called it the hardest review you've ever done, and I don't think people should buy it. So, like, explain that side of the situation.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  As reviews editor Dan Seifert will gladly tell you at any moment, we do not review things for The Verge based on their potential. We review what's right in front of us, what we can see and touch. And what I can see and touch is a console that was constantly changing under me, where bugs were everywhere. I had some crashes, hard locks, black screens, and I broke an SD card using this thing.

• 27:38Alex Cranz?

  Like in half?

• 27:40Speaker 02

  It might as well have. I completely destroyed the partition tables. I tried many times to fix it. I have not found a way to fix it. Maybe a data recovery expert could help me with that. But it was my fault. I did, I did hard reset the thing while it was writing to the SD card. I was trying to format it because it wasn't working. And, and then I said, you know, F it. And, and now, now that SD card is going back to Amazon. Sorry, Amazon. It's unfit. I didn't get to try a lot of things. They were, they introduced new bugs while they were fixing old bugs. There were regressions, which I, as a former QA tester, a regression tester, I would have caught if I'd had the time to do it. But they're basically pushing

• 28:20Speaker 02

  nightly to this thing, multiple times a day. They do say they're going to reduce the cadence a little bit once this thing gets into the market. But they told me they're, they're gonna still do it, pretty much. They're, they're gonna kill, still push random fixes to this for weeks and months to come. And I'm not surprised because they have a long runway of early adopters that sold out for at least six months. I mean, a lot of people bought this thing sight unseen and they're gonna tolerate it if they buy it, instead of you not reading my review and deciding not to.

• 28:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I wonder how many people are actually gonna return theirs. Not just because I'm in the second tier and I want them to.

• 28:53Nilay Patel?

  Wandering the streets of New York. Are you unhappy with your Steam Deck? Call Alex Grant.

• 28:58Alex Cranz?

  Cancel that order right now. Everybody listening, cancel your order. No, it sounds, are they kind of just banking on the fact that their audience will be okay with the fact that it sounds like it's gonna be a buggy mess for the foreseeable future? Because normally

• 29:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:14Alex Cranz?

  we would be blogging just Steam Deck destroys itself again every week. But it sounds like they're banking on, that's fine. Our audience won't care.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  I really think that is largely true. I really think that is largely true. They, they told me in an interview, you know, Valve's Greg Coomer, who's been there forever, designer on a lot of games and hardware, the Steam Machines Initiative, he was, he was working closely in that, as I recall. He told me pretty much straight up that they are hoping to learn from their fans. It's one of those things. Deliver the features that they want. And like, I almost believed them because I did walk into the hands-on briefing for this back in August, and I walked up to some Valve developers and I said, "Hey, have you heard of this thing called AMD FSR? Are you going to use it in the Steam Deck to upscale your games and make them look beautiful on a monitor?" And nobody in the room had heard

• 30:08Speaker 02

  of it, and now it is a global feature on the Steam Deck. And while I'm not going to personally take credit for making this happen, I'm kind of going to take credit for making this happen.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  So, we talked a bit about the idea of early access on Steam itself. PUBG, people, Valveheim, people happily buying games that are like pre-beta to like participate in the experience of a new idea for what a game could be, bugs and all, and like even paying for it and just accepting that. And like, so the question here, with all of the bugs and problems with this thing, did it like, was it worth it in like that early access sense that you get to try something new and you're getting value out of it? Or was it just like, "Well, this will be nice when it isn't a buggy fiasco"?

• 30:52Speaker 02

  I am having so damn much fun.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:57Alex Cranz?

  Wrong person to ask.

• 30:59Speaker 04

  No one can tell.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  I'm having so much fun because, because I love that they are adding new features to it on the fly, like being able to switch between two apps, which was not available until like two nights before I wrote the review. It's great. I love that now I can do integer scaling and just have it look 1:1 on a, on an external monitor instead of blowing it up and making it look possibly sharper but weirder. That didn't exist until three days before the review. This, this is cool. They are fixing a bunch of the bugs as they go. Not some big ones, like my Bluetooth earbuds don't work properly and they haven't since day one. But like, there's, there's a lot of stuff that, that's been fixed. It's way smoother. The first time I loaded up, I was like, "What the heck is up with this

• 31:45Speaker 02

  janky scrolling and animations? Mostly better." I think what they were trying to do with this review process, and by the way, they sent this out to a lot of outlets. I think what they were trying to do with this review process is- We know it's not done. We've got to ship the thing because otherwise our processors are going to get stale. These awesome processors that have great performance are not going to look so great in six months. And we're just going to show you, all you reviewers, that we can fix things on the fly, that we are pushing so much into this, that we're going to be open and transparent with all your questions. And that is great for me as a reviewer, and it might be terrible for you as a buyer of the system.

• 32:20Alex Cranz?

  I kind of want to poke at the processor thing there because everything I'm hearing is that many of us may just be paying to participate, like, in that early access style thing. And then, six months, a year down the line, they're going to release a new product with faster processor, and all the hardware, like, problems fixed that may present themselves. And we're all going to be, like, expressing a little regret.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  Valve believes in iteration. They have an image, which I'm going to share later this week, that has, like, 40 prototypes of this thing sitting on a table, and they're all different. They've said repeatedly that they are going to produce a successor. They don't believe in the Osborne effect, these folks. They're not worried that folks are not going to buy this one because another one is coming. But yeah, I don't know if I'd put it at six months to a year, particularly given chip shortage, which has also affected the Steam Deck, they told me. But like, yes, there's another one of these things coming, unless this is an utter flop, and that one's going to be better. And it's going to have a faster chip, because they're going to keep working with AMD on this. And because other, you know, PC makers are going to want to build things like this, too. And it would

• 33:29Speaker 02

  behoove a lot of people to wait, unless you want to participate in the whole early access thing, which I love. And Alex, sounds like you're game four, but...

• 33:39Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I did buy the cheapest one, and I plan on immediately getting it and putting a better storage system in it.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Same here.

• 33:46Alex Cranz?

  Did you review the 64 gigabyte that has... The eMMC storage that's really slow, or did you review the nice one?

• 33:53Speaker 02

  They didn't send us the 64 gig. I asked for it. They didn't send us Windows to try. We don't have the dock yet. It's been delayed. I reviewed the 512 gigabyte model. Loading games from SD, which you're going to have to do on the 64 gig model unless you got it and replaced the SSD. Loading games is fine. Writing games to SD is kind of slow. I found transferring games had a bunch of issues, like my SD card only got half the rated write speed.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  Also, you broke it.

• 34:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Also, I broke one of them. The other ones haven't broken. Also, the day after I broke it, no, two days after I broke it, they did submit an email to me that says they fixed the SD formatting issue.

• 34:31Alex Cranz?

  Oh, there you go.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  So apparently I discovered a bug there, or somebody did, I don't know, and it's fixed, I hope, maybe. No other cards have broken since then.

• 34:39Alex Cranz?

  You see, the battery life is, eh. How is like playing while it's plugged in? Is like the plug in a friendly place, or is it an awful place where you're always having to do weird gymnastics to keep it plugged in while still playing?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Okay, we should ask. On this podcast, we've had the keyboard in the front versus keyboard in the back club. Let's talk about USB-C port on the top versus USB-C port on the bottom. Some of the rival portable gaming systems on the market said, F it, we're going to do both, and so they did. This one has it on the top. I love it on the top because I play prone in bed. I rest it on a desk. I never have to worry about the cable like shutting out from the bottom of the system. I think it's super easy. It charges great. I never see any throttling or any weird issues while it's plugged in. But the Switch has it on the bottom. That's what a lot of people are used to, is the USB-C charge port on the bottom.

• 35:29Alex Cranz?

  In fact, you said that, and I was like, well, I have to go cancel my order. Never mind.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to wrap this up. Sean, your final thoughts? I guess it's like, my question here is, we are very ideological on not reviewing our potential, right? That's like a hard and fast rule. But here, you are definitely buying the experience of potential, right? Like, that's kind of the promise here is like, well, this thing is going to be weird. You seem to enjoy that.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Two things. One, yes, yes, absolutely. I ate it up, and I am a glutton for punishment. I played 452 hours of Player Unknown's Battlegrounds, and I started when it was very buggy and broken and early access. That said, I personally don't entirely need to buy it on potential because I have played hours of games on it, hours that many of those hours just worked. Once I'd launched a game, gotten the control scheme in there, I knew it ran, I just played the game. They didn't crash in the middle of the game. I played two hours of Resident Evil 2 here, and I played two hours of control there, and I played four hours of Into the

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Breach there, which is a lovely indie game. Please buy Into the Breach. Slay the Spire, like, I just played them, and they worked, and they were great. And, and, you know, it's a lot of games that do work in my library, and then I just, I don't know about the whole rest of the library yet.

• 36:55Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, I love an ultimate gadget. It sounds like we're gonna, we're gonna have a long relationship with this thing. Twists and turns. We'll have you back the next time. We'll just like, we'll set a software update counter.

• 37:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Every, every 50 software updates at the pace of the going, we'll have you back on.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  We'll have a check-in. Thanks so much, Sean. This is great.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Take care.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  All right. We'll be back with Allison, talk about the S22.

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• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Allison, welcome.

• 38:34Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  You had a big week. You reviewed the S22 Ultra. There's some other phone stuff, you know. It's a big review. It's a huge phone. It has 400 cameras.

• 38:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, so many cameras. It was really cool. My arm hurts from hauling it around, obviously.

• 38:54Speaker 06

  No, it's a really powerful phone and I was impressed by a lot of different aspects of it. And ultimately, it's like, this is something I talked about with Dan. It's like the ultimate evolution of like the slab style smartphone, it sort of feels like. But I still, kind of my conclusion is like, I don't think it's for just anybody. I don't think it's like, you want the best, biggest Android phone, like just get this one. I think the S22 Plus will serve a lot of people very well. And the Ultra is kind of this like special, if you're really into these particular features. And, you know, credit to Dan, we

• 39:39Speaker 06

  talked about this, but it's sort of hard to imagine like, what else you could put on this phone. Could you put another camera? I don't think so. There's many cameras. Could it, you know, I'm sure there are things that will be added, like in generations, as you know, it's always, the next one's gonna get the newest Snapdragon processor, maybe the screen will get a little cooler in some way, but it feels like they're gonna be just little refinements at this point. Like you've got the S Pen, you've got two zoom lenses. It's just hard to imagine what else this form factor can have added on to it.

• 40:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Let's talk about the, I'm a camera nerd, so I gotta start with the cameras. You have this line that's like, well, this space zoom is still a gimmick, right? And like, they've been like at it for a long time. It seems like Samsung's look is way toned down, right? It's still pretty oversaturated, like that's Samsung, but it's not as like neon as it was two or three years ago. But I think all these phones just kind of like look like each other now. Like they've all just landed right in the middle. Whereas like maybe three years ago, I think an iPhone and a Samsung phone and a Pixel all looked remarkably different. That's just like my, I didn't review this phone. Is that kind of what you were feeling too? Cause I, as I was reading the camera part of your review, I was like, so it takes good pictures, right?

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's hard to be like, it has a Samsung look and I can evaluate the look.

• 41:11Speaker 06

  Right. I sort of feel like it's, it's getting to the point where really like camera cameras are, is like they're, they're all gonna take really good photos and there are things you can do if you are not like, I think there's still a little bit of a Samsung kind of like, wow, that sky is really blue and I've never, never seen that color in real life. You can, you can mess with that if you want to, but at the end of the day, they're, they're all really capable, especially at that like thousand dollar level and the, the refinements, like I was really impressed by the portrait mode refinements, which they talk about,

• 41:53Speaker 06

  are just, are pretty much AI enabled and it's just able to identify like very fine details on a subject better. So they were saying like down to the level of a single strand of hair, which in the briefing, we were kind of like, sure, that's, sounds great. It's real, like they really have done a very good job with that and you can, you can look side by side at what it was doing previously and it's, you have to look very closely, but the, so the differences are subtle, but they make an impact that it just looks more convincing and I'm more likely to,

• 42:38Speaker 06

  to take the phone out. I'm like, yeah, I will take a portrait mode photo in this moment. It's, it's not gonna look super unrealistic and fake.

• 42:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's, that's when you know. I always, I always look at my camera roll and I see what, cause on iOS anyway, it'll tell you how many photos are portrait mode. And I'm like, oh, that number has been going up.

• 42:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:59Nilay Patel?

  Right. And like, I think Apple got there maybe last year or the year before. It feels like Samsung got there this year.

• 43:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. And my test is like, is it, is this photo good enough to go on the grandparents' digital photo frame?

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  The answer is like literally any photo of a.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, that's a pretty low bar, is it not?

• 43:19Speaker 06

  It's really, it's my own, I'm like, I have high standards for what goes on the frame. And they're like, no, we just need more content.

• 43:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. For me, I was like, these are frame worthy.

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  On the portrait mode, how's the, how's the like, the, the drop off over distance? Does it, does it still sort of look like cut outy, like everything, they've cut out the hair nicely now. But is it still just like an even layer of blur? Or does it do the thing where it gets blurrier further back in the distance it goes?

• 43:52Speaker 06

  I think the, the telephoto lens, it does a better job. And I think that's just easier to make it look convincing. The wide angle still has that kind of like, the, the foreground is not blurred where it should be. And you do get that kind of like, here's a little cardboard cutout in a sea of like blurriness. Yeah. The telephoto, which I don't personally like, I would personally like to shoot with the wide more. But I found myself just picking the telephoto because it, it looks so much better. So it's, it's still not a hundred percent, but it's definitely up there with like the most convincing portrait mode photos I've seen.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  The other camera thing I wanted to ask about is this, um, this new, uh, computed raw stuff. And there's like a separate app that you gotta use the Galaxy store. Can you talk us through what's going on there?

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  They even made a separate light room.

• 44:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, a light room for Samsung. I did not know that existed. So yeah, so this feature is called Expert RAW. And it's essentially a, instead of a single frame, traditional RAW file, like you snap the shutter, you, you get one frame, one exposure. This is compiling information from multiple frames. So you get the benefits of computational photography, um, which is kind of the whole point of taking a picture with a smartphone. It's like, it can do all this awesome stuff.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  Right, right.

• 45:22Speaker 06

  So when, you know, previously, like you could shoot RAW, like traditional RAW on, on this phone or like most smartphones. Um, but it's sort of pointless because just use the JPEG, like it has more information. So this makes, this makes RAW not pointless on a phone. It's something Apple's been doing a little bit and OnePlus, I want to say, introduced it to. But Samsung's version is called Expert RAW. You have to download, it's only on the Ultra model. You have to download the Expert RAW app from the Galaxy Store. And then, so you, you use the camera app that way. And then you get a RAW file.

• 46:07Speaker 06

  It's a typical DMG file. So you can take it to like Snapseed or you can export it and edit on your computer. But the shortcut in the Expert RAW app is to Lightroom, like take it directly to Lightroom, but it's Samsung Lightroom from the Galaxy Store.

• 46:25Nilay Patel?

  That is just such like an instinctually Samsung thing to do.

• 46:28Alex Cranz?

  I didn't even know. I'm just still blown away that Samsung has a Lightroom.

• 46:32Nilay Patel?

  Is it just Lightroom Mobile, but it's just in their store?

• 46:34Speaker 06

  Like, yeah, yeah. It's like, it's your Adobe login and everything. It's like, it is the Lightroom app, but it just sits like Samsung.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  People had meetings. Every time I hear about this, I'm like, there were meetings, right? Like, lots of highly-paid Adobe and Samsung people got together and they're like, "We need a cross-marketing deal," and the Galaxy Store. And the engineers had to be like, "Well, this is the Galaxy Store support, same APIs as the place." Like, they had to do all this. And at the end, it's like, it's Lightroom. It's the same app as it was.

• 47:05Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  They just added a logo.

• 47:09Alex Cranz?

  We did it. Nailed it.

• 47:12Speaker 06

  We got it. In the fine print, you, as a Galaxy S22 Ultra owner, get two months free of the Lightroom trial through the Samsung for Lightroom. But after that, you have to pay for an Adobe license, just like everybody else, so.

• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  They could've just, they could've just used a coupon.

• 47:35Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing?

• 47:35Speaker 06

  Enter this code at checkout.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  They gotta get you in the Galaxy Store.

• 47:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this was all like, just go use, because it's on the Galaxy Store, not on the Play Store, right?

• 47:47Speaker 06

  Right.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of Samsung stuff, how are the ads in the interface? This is a $1,200 phone, and for years now, Samsung has been throwing ridiculous ads into core pieces of software. Have they, it seems like they've, they've started to learn their lesson? Have they learned it completely?

• 48:02Speaker 06

  Not completely. It is a little better. I think you pointed out the, um, the ads in the weather app, which is like, in last year's phones. And once you see them and you know you're there, it feels kind of icky. You're like, this is, don't make me look at an ad, I'm just checking the weather. Those are gone, so I'm thrilled with that. But I did get a pop-up or a notification at some point that I could preorder the S22 and get, and get some Samsung credit.

• 48:36Alex Cranz?

  On the S22?

• 48:38Speaker 06

  On the S22 Ultra, yeah, so I was like.

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  That's the end state of all ad targeting.

• 48:43Alex Cranz?

  Just get enough.

• 48:43Nilay Patel?

  You've already bought something. Would you like to see an ad for it? It's like, no matter how much technology you build. It always result, that's the result.

• 48:52Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  Okay, one camera question. So Samsung has been kind of the leader of the, we're gonna put a big sensor in it and pixel bin it. Right? And that's compared to Apple, which is like using this standard sensor compared to, Google is moving in that direction now too, but have they figured it out? Right? Cause now they're doing all this raw stuff. And you can get the full file, the full 108 megapixel. Image, right? They're like using more of the capabilities there. But it is just a very different approach. Right? And this is like Samsung's approach.

• 49:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I initially, I got pretty excited when they talked about this in the briefing. They call it adaptive pixel technology where it's it's doing some of the pixel binning. And they talk about it kind of in conjunction with, with nightography.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh God, no.

• 49:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  I was hoping we could avoid that. I asked this question, I didn't know it would go here and now I regret it. We're, we're gonna come back around to nightography.

• 49:52Speaker 06

  There it is. So the photography you do at night.

• 49:57Nilay Patel?

  Or nightography.

• 49:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:01Alex Cranz?

  Love some nightography.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  When you take a picture of your kids, it's called kidtography.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  This is the future of language.

• 50:08Alex Cranz?

  Portraitography.

• 50:10Speaker 06

  Everything is photography.

• 50:14Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I got kind of excited and I asked for a little clarification and it's it's only do, it's the difference between last year's model is limited to some specific situations. So you can now on, on both the S20, standard S22s and the Ultra, you can take a full, high resolution image with night mode, sort of like pixel binning applied, which you couldn't do before. But it, and it's something you can't trigger manually. It has to be actually really super dark. Which is sort of, sort of annoying. Cause I was like standing in a Starbucks and trying to take a picture of something. I was like, where's night mode?

• 50:59Speaker 06

  But it's up to the phone.

• 51:02Alex Cranz?

  So you had to go to the Starbucks and be like, please turn off the lights?

• 51:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. I was like, if you could just turn the lights off for me, that would be great. And they told me to leave.

• 51:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it is, it works. It's good, but it's sort of like I now have a 108 megapixel image of my bar cart in the middle of the night. And to see it, the, the use case is, is a little more limited than I was hoping. I was like, maybe this will be a really cool sort of.

• 51:34Alex Cranz?

  Where's like the cutoff, like outside well lit parking lot?

• 51:40Speaker 06

  I, I think it would depend. It's, it has to be very dark. Like I had a little, um, kind of like table lamp on in the living room and that was too much light for it.

• 51:53Alex Cranz?

  So you have to like increase the creep factor.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:57Speaker 04

  This is the emotional element of nightography is creeping around.

• 52:02Speaker 06

  They're just trying to get you into the headspace of like lurking around in the night, taking photos, so.

• 52:09Alex Cranz?

  To experience true nightography.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  Are you Batman? They're bidding the pixels. They're making choices for you about whether or not to turn on nightography. They're offering all this extra raw stuff. They're, you know, they're turning on the AI when you zoom in on stuff. They're like, they're cutting out human hairs, like all of this stuff. Samsung has always offered a million things in their cameras and 90% of the time I'm like, these things seem cool, but I'm annoyed because I don't trust you to just take a picture. It seems like you could just trust this thing to like take a really good picture.

• 52:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's definitely more times when I just feel like I'm taking the phone out to take a picture and I'm okay with it. I'm not sort of bracing myself for like, well, this is gonna, this is gonna look kind of crummy, but.

• 53:00Speaker 04

  What's Samsung gonna do to reality? Let's find out.

• 53:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I was really impressed by the, it's not new. It's new to me, but the 10 times zoom. Um, I was sort of like, oh, it's, it's just gonna be terrible, but it's really actually pretty good. And even 30 times, um, like digital zoom and whatever it's doing is okay. So definitely with the telephoto, I'm more like, oh, I could actually use this and like trust it and just, and I would put that on. Instagram or whatever and not be super embarrassed about it.

• 53:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta, we started talking about the software a little bit immediately in the context of ads, which I feel like tells you a lot about where Samsung is with one UI.

• 53:46Nilay Patel?

  But it's, you have, you have this like paragraph here that's like, you, you have to imagine things that you can't do with this phone and they can probably do them because the software has so many features now. Is it overwhelming? Like have they, have they made one UI? Every time I've used it, I'm like, wow, every surface of this interface is festooned with options.

• 54:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  And all of them are designed to make you like live the Galaxy lifestyle.

• 54:11Alex Cranz?

  Get a little hat.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:13Alex Cranz?

  Little sweater.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. Have they, have they kinda like brought that into focus?

• 54:18Speaker 06

  It is like option overload for me and I think that's just something that maybe the, the kind of person who's really interested, who had a note and who's really interested in the Ultra is sort of prepared for it and okay with. I think it's one of those things that makes me kind of steer like most people to the S22 plus. Just as an example, like if you're trying to write a note in handwriting mode and convert it to text, there's like four different ways you can do that.

• 54:57Speaker 06

  Like you can scribble it and then circle it and convert it, or you can go to the keyboard and put the keyboard in, in handwriting mode and convert it that way or, you know, it's sort of like, I, and I'm not sure everybody would dive into every option. You can kind of exist on the surface level and just, you know, pull the pen out and write a note. And it, it's not going to bother you with a lot of intense choices. But if you start digging in, it's sort of like, wow, there's a lot of stuff here.

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  All right. You gave it a nine. It's a great phone. I kind of feel you on the, like this is the end of history for slab phones.

• 55:38Alex Cranz?

  We're done.

• 55:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like I, we're obviously going to see further iterations. Like you said, more chips will come out. But I buy it. It's a great phone. Let's talk about where the action is, which is you also covered Dish's earnings call this week.

• 55:55Speaker 06

  Real story.

• 55:57Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. Phones, you know, you need to make a phone work, you need a network. Just to remind everybody, America is supposed to have four wireless networks. When T-Mobile bought Sprint, the Trump administration just concocted this plan whereby we would still have four wireless networks.

• 56:15Alex Cranz?

  And Dish O-Ran with it.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  You did it. That's my first guest, everybody.

• 56:20Alex Cranz?

  Good night.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  It's been great, Allison, you've been wonderful. Yeah, Dish is gonna concoct a fourth wireless network out of nothing. They are supposed to, it's like 20% coverage across the country, 25% by June of this year, which is but four months away.

• 56:37Speaker 04

  Because what you want out of your cellphone is for it to have signal 25% of the time.

• 56:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, I can go to Las Vegas and Baltimore. This works great, it's a true competitor. But they've, they've basically like got part of Vegas, Allison, you covered the earnings call, CEO said some stuff. What is up with Dish's open radio access network? That's O-Ran, it's a technology bet that no one has ever made work. What's going on with this thing?

• 57:05Speaker 06

  So they've been testing it in pilot in Vegas. It's been in this beta for friends and family since November, I think. And their update on the earnings call was, it works.

• 57:24Speaker 06

  But, but the quote, the quote from Ergen was, where it works, it works pretty well, or something like that.

• 57:33Alex Cranz?

  Really enthusiastic.

• 57:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're like, hold on. So tell us about the where it doesn't work part.

• 57:42Speaker 06

  And, you know, he, he kind of goes into, they had some setbacks, they're, they're behind schedule, they kind of missed every deadline that they set for themselves in 2021. But they're, they're still like, yep, we're on, on target for June, we're gonna light up 25 major metro areas. It's great, everything's going great.

• 58:05Alex Cranz?

  Is there like a, a legal, like, classification for major metro area? Or can they just like choose anywhere and say that's a major?

• 58:15Nilay Patel?

  It's a tiny town called major. They just found one in the interstate.

• 58:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, every Springfield in every state, they uh.

• 58:26Nilay Patel?

  His other quote, the other quote from Dish CEO Charlie Ergen, who is like a remarkably candid. Like, he's like a old school cowboy CEO.

• 58:34Alex Cranz?

  Love it.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  He's like, we have a lot of work to do to make the network work everywhere. Yeah. So they have this bet, right, on ORAN. So like, this is a thing that we should love, which is the idea that you can move a lot of the network infrastructure to cloud providers like AWS. They love to say AWS is involved in this network whenever they talk about it. It's like a magic wand.

• 58:54Alex Cranz?

  It fixes everything.

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Um, don't look behind the AWS curtain for our non-existent network, where we're torturing our friends and family in Las Vegas. But the idea is right now, you know, an 18th year Verizon basically has to buy all of its radio equipment from one vendor, and that vendor will like integrate it across the network, or they will outsource it to, the companies actually run the towers. The biggest tower company in America, by the way, is called TowerCo. It's a very unknown. So the idea here is that it's an open system. So you can buy parts from all kinds of vendors and like run it all in the cloud. Great. No one has ever made this work. I was just on a panel with the chairwoman of the FCC, Jessica Osnorcel, and she was like, we're really starting to look into this ORAN thing.

• 59:38Alex Cranz?

  Really good to hear.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  Aren't you?

• 59:41Alex Cranz?

  Six months before. That's exciting.

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I'm very curious about all this. We're supposed to have four carriers.

• 59:50Alex Cranz?

  Well, we're, there, there's like Mobile World Congress. ORAN is, is gonna be there. They, they, they're doing a keynote.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  We need it here. Mobile World Congress is in Barcelona.

• 1:00:02Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's in the cloud, man. You can just, they can just.

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just very funny.

• 1:00:06Alex Cranz?

  Fax it over.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  Like, there was an explicit bet made. They're like, we're so excited about this. This is gonna let them spin up a viable fourth network that will compete with AT&T, Verizon, and now massive T-Mobile.

• 1:00:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Nilay Patel?

  And it's because of ORAN and AWS, they're gonna do it right away. And like now, they're like, well, it kind of works.

• 1:00:28Alex Cranz?

  Real confidence there.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Whatever they mentioned AWS in relationship to this network, I think about, um, one time, disclosure, uh, my wife works for Meta, but she asked me, how do they paint the lines on the football fields? And I didn't know. So I just said, they use computers. Fighting about it ever since. Like, oh, it's computers, that's it. I just feel like they're just saying AWS is like, oh, yeah, it's just, you know.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, computers.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  The network will exist.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  It's amazing. We'll see if it ever happens. Um, also, I don't know if you guys saw this map today of T-Mobile's 5G footprint. It's amazing. So if you look at their coverage map.

• 1:01:04Alex Cranz?

  Pink and yellow?

• 1:01:04Nilay Patel?

  It's all, it's all pink, except literally the entire state of Nebraska is not pink.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, the shape of Nebraska, like, is not pink. And it's because, like, some random company owns the mid-band spectrum in Nebraska.

• 1:01:20Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Like, the state of US networks is just out of control, stupid. It's like, like, the FAA is like, I don't know, man, planes might fall out of the sky.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  T-Mobile's like, we forgot Nebraska.

• 1:01:35Alex Cranz?

  It's fine.

• 1:01:38Alex Cranz?

  Just drive up north or you can get around it.

• 1:01:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Nilay Patel?

  Let's bet the farm on this technology that we all forgot to invent. It's gonna be great. In the end, it's gonna, I probably, you know. Oran is the kind of technology that we should love.

• 1:01:51Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  Except that there's nothing to love.

• 1:01:54Alex Cranz?

  That there's nothing to Oran with.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 1:01:57Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna keep going with that. I'm so sorry.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  You are not.

• 1:02:01Alex Cranz?

  That was my last time on the Verge cast. Thank you. I had a great time. It was a good run.

• 1:02:06Nilay Patel?

  Oran yourself out of here.

• 1:02:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll be back with a little lightning round.

• 1:02:52Speaker 07

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

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  We're back. I'm just gonna call in people. We're over. What a surprise. Apple will reportedly debut an M2 chip in four new Macs this year. What do you think, Alex?

• 1:03:35Alex Cranz?

  Yes, they have to.

• 1:03:36Nilay Patel?

  Why do they have to?

• 1:03:37Alex Cranz?

  Because...

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  Is anyone catching up to them?

• 1:03:39Alex Cranz?

  Because what comes after M1 Max? Is it gonna be just the M1 Max with another X?

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm saying the M1 is so far ahead.

• 1:03:47Alex Cranz?

  That's true, that's true. It's so far ahead.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  That they could do nothing. Like Intel's like, we have a chip that will outperform the M1 Max. And then it's like, also it will light your house on fire.

• 1:03:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. But the thing is also, they are still kind of, I mean, they are competing with Intel. They are competing with AMD. They can't afford to give them any space because they are such a new competitor in this space. They have to keep like rubbing it in. If they don't rub it in, then like Intel and AMD will smell weakness and then we'll be just right back to an Intel or AMD chip in these computers.

• 1:04:18Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:04:19Alex Cranz?

  No, I don't think it's that dire. But I think like, the expected cadence is there from kind of everybody in the processor industry. And so if you're not like, keeping with that cadence, if you're not constantly innovating and moving at that like yearly cadence, what are you doing? Like, are you wasting our time here? And for Apple, it's also like, how else are they gonna, like, everybody's kind of, you know, the sales cycle for laptops is around the processors. How do you get people to upgrade?

• 1:04:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Alex Cranz?

  Put another, an M2.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think it's gonna be interesting when they have an M2 and then they do the Pro Max and they have M1 Maxes in them.

• 1:04:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm really like...

• 1:04:59Nilay Patel?

  Doing the numbers on these chips, I think, was a mistake.

• 1:05:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, 100%. And I think...

• 1:05:04Nilay Patel?

  They should've gone with Lakes. They should've just like...

• 1:05:07Alex Cranz?

  No, Wizards. They should've gone with Wizards.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  D and D character classes.

• 1:05:12Nilay Patel?

  So many people tweeted at me, they were like, it's alphabetical, the Intel thing. I was like, I know it's alphabetical. They still think Druid for D.

• 1:05:21Alex Cranz?

  Druid is way cooler than Celestials. But yeah, yeah, no, they like, I think it's gonna be really interesting to see when that M2 comes because Apple likes to tell a story when they do their presentations, right? They, and an absolute distraction is to be like, here is our new refreshed Mac Pro, finally on our new ARM-based chips, the M1 Max Pro. And then also, we have a new M2 chip over here.

• 1:05:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's weird.

• 1:05:47Alex Cranz?

  Like that messaging is gonna mess them up really badly.

• 1:05:50Nilay Patel?

  And I think the numbers are fine on the phones because they just like have a new one every year and like the old phone or the cheaper phone.

• 1:05:55Alex Cranz?

  And we don't really, I mean, Vergecast cares. But the vast majority of people don't really notice those numbers on a phone the way they will on a laptop.

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, see, I think this is actually, we'll find out. Yeah, like presumably they knew when they named it M1.

• 1:06:10Alex Cranz?

  That they would have. And two is coming.

• 1:06:12Nilay Patel?

  They bought this problem, you know? But I think it's interesting.

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  I'm imagining somebody busting into the meeting, just be like, wait, wait. Numbers go up.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  Let me tell you about ordinal math, everybody.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  Bill, we made a horrible mistake.

• 1:06:27Speaker 04

  The entire product strategy, all the designers like, oh no, what do we do? It's too late.

• 1:06:34Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. I just think it's gonna be weird when the most expensive ones have ones and the cheaper ones have twos. It's gonna be weird.

• 1:06:40Alex Cranz?

  It could be weird in like two weeks. We could, we could be seeing it as soon as March because there's, there's a rumored event in March.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:06:48Alex Cranz?

  We'll probably see a new Mac Mini with the M1 Max Pro in it. But everybody's saying, oh, there'll be a MacBook Air. Well, that would have to be in presumably an M2 MacBook Air. So we'll see. It's gonna be fun.

• 1:07:00Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:07:01Alex Cranz?

  And confusing.

• 1:07:02Nilay Patel?

  Spotify has a, the Car Thing, which honestly, I think we have, we have tried to kill several times as a publication. Ashley interviewed it once and she was like, what is this garbage? Spotify has a car, it's called the Car Thing. I'm not just saying Spotify has a Car Thing. I'm saying they have a product called Car Thing. It's $90, it's now for sale to everyone. It is a screen and a knob that you mount in your car. It connects to your phone. It is the most insane like aux adapter of all time.

• 1:07:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  So it plays music from your phone over Bluetooth and then plugs into your car.

• 1:07:38Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's.

• 1:07:39Nilay Patel?

  And you can like turn the wheel.

• 1:07:40Alex Cranz?

  That seems cool. That seems cool. Couldn't you just go buy a head unit? And install a head.

• 1:07:47Nilay Patel?

  Couldn't you just get a good car?

• 1:07:50Alex Cranz?

  Like, I feel like you can get like an inexpensive head unit for a little bit more.

• 1:07:54Nilay Patel?

  Were you like a car stereo girl like in Texas? Did you have like?

• 1:07:57Alex Cranz?

  You know what? We're not gonna, we're not gonna talk about, we're not gonna talk about my past.

• 1:08:00Nilay Patel?

  I see you. Someone had a Honda Civic that was bumping.

• 1:08:05Alex Cranz?

  Mitsubishi Eclipse, you know, like just. My friend had one. He had the big subs. Oh, my God. It was so good. But like, it's so easy to install. I mean, it's easy to install a head unit.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  It used to be. I guess if you have a car that's old enough where you like would need this thing, you probably have a car that's old enough to take a standard din car stereo and not have your heating and cooling integrated into the screen. But it won't be $90.

• 1:08:34Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 1:08:35Nilay Patel?

  I just, this thing is so unwieldy. I don't know why they, they've just insisted on like making it.

• 1:08:39Alex Cranz?

  Block an AC vent for music.

• 1:08:41Nilay Patel?

  We were saying the Steam Deck is like an ultimate gadget. This is like the opposite of an ultimate gadget. It's like.

• 1:08:47Alex Cranz?

  Just makes me angry.

• 1:08:49Speaker 06

  Wouldn't it, wouldn't it get stolen? Do you, do you leave it there all the time?

• 1:08:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's not gonna get stolen.

• 1:08:54Speaker 06

  It looks like candy for someone.

• 1:08:56Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's why it's $90. So you just go buy a new one.

• 1:09:00Speaker 06

  You just buy a new one.

• 1:09:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you just keep a stash in the back of your car where you could have really cool subs and, and you're fine.

• 1:09:06Nilay Patel?

  No, when you, when you go through the checkout process, you know, there's like the standard, like, do you want to buy the warranty? Then the warranty includes replacing the window that people smashed to get it. So it's like a whole package deal. Yeah. Joe Rogan comes to your house and fixes your car windows. Um, so integrated Spotify experience. My first car was my sister's Honda Accord that she had.

• 1:09:24Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:25Nilay Patel?

  And she.

• 1:09:26Alex Cranz?

  It's a good car.

• 1:09:28Alex Cranz?

  To put speakers in.

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  The GearShift had a sport mode that really put that 90 horsepower, four cylinder in the next level.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  But she lived in Chicago. So when I inherited it in Wisconsin, had lived on the south side of Chicago and she, the car radio got stolen so often. And she was embarrassed about it. So she kept like having various people to like replace the car radio with whatever junk and then it would get stolen again. This is just a real thing. So by the time I got it, there was just a hole in the dashboard where there was just a radio. Kind of like lying about because all the math, it was great.

• 1:10:03Alex Cranz?

  No, you put a computer speaker with a CD player.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  Truly loved that car.

• 1:10:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's so nice.

• 1:10:09Nilay Patel?

  My friends called it the bullet.

• 1:10:10Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:10:12Nilay Patel?

  Later I got a different car. Sony finally reveals the PlayStation VR 2's design. What do you think, Dieter?

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  It, it looks exactly like I thought it would look.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

  It looks good. Um, I'm hopeful that this will have just a cable sticking out of it instead of the original PlayStation VR, which was just like you, it was like playing Cat's Cradle with your PlayStation. Just like all the little extra boxes and cables and lines that you had to plug in to make the thing work. This looks much more elegant. Disclosure, my significant other.

• 1:10:41Nilay Patel?

  You already did it. You did it. You did it when you just mentioned her.

• 1:10:43Alex Cranz?

  Well, somebody might.

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't even a conflict. You're like, my wife who exists. Disclosure. It's a brand. Disclosure's a brand.

• 1:10:50Speaker 04

  Being careful.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  This Tesla story is out of control. So the timeline here is that back in the day Elon tweeted, should I sell my stock? And then he sold the stock.

• 1:11:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  And it was obvious that he was always going to sell the stock. So it was like, he's joking.

• 1:11:05Alex Cranz?

  SEC was like bad.

• 1:11:06Nilay Patel?

  And the SEC was bad. And then Elon filed a complaint with a judge that said the SEC, because they, you know, because for the, for many previous scandals, including the one where he was like, funding secured, I'm taking Tesla private.

• 1:11:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Well, didn't he also say if it hits 420, I'm gonna?

• 1:11:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but funding secured was, these are the words.

• 1:11:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  And then the SEC was like, you have a settlement, you can't tweet, you need like a monitor of your tweets. You have to be off the, like, it was bad.

• 1:11:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so then the SEC is like enforcing this. He has complained to a judge. The FCC is stifling his free speech. Then he accused the SEC of leaking information. And then it turns out the information that leaked is that the SEC is now, uh, investigating Elon and his brother Kimball for insider trading.

• 1:11:49Alex Cranz?

  Yikes.

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  It's like, oh, that's what was going on.

• 1:11:53Nilay Patel?

  I see now.

• 1:11:54Alex Cranz?

  Understood.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's crazy. I, um, Elon is great. The car, everyone likes the cars. The rockets land themselves is all very impressive. The man should stop tweeting.

• 1:12:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just never tweet.

• 1:12:06Nilay Patel?

  Like.

• 1:12:07Alex Cranz?

  Just delete.

• 1:12:08Nilay Patel?

  I learned on Decoder, by the way. I had, um, Tony Evans, who's a law professor. And we were talking about DAOs.

• 1:12:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  And like crypto organizations and like, you need a contract. And she's like, well, you could just look at the Discord logs and the judge could infer a contract. And I was like, that seems bad.

• 1:12:24Alex Cranz?

  That seems real bad.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  And then she was like, oh yeah, I mean, they've done it already with tweets. And so like, we should all stop tweeting. You don't know what kind of deal you're making on Twitter.

• 1:12:33Alex Cranz?

  I have signed so many contracts on accident.

• 1:12:37Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I gotta get off the internet right now.

• 1:12:40Speaker 06

  If I agree to write a story on Slack.

• 1:12:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you're contractually obligated now.

• 1:12:46Nilay Patel?

  Tell it to the judge, sister.

• 1:12:49Nilay Patel?

  That's it. We're over. We've got some stories. We have a big feature about the early days of content moderation at Pornhub. Which I encourage you to read. It's got some great art. By the way, we won a National Magazine Award yesterday.

• 1:13:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we did.

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  For our Verge 10 illustration. We were nominated for another one. That is, uh, we had, we just hired a killer new art director. Her name is Kristen Radke.

• 1:13:09Alex Cranz?

  She's wonderful.

• 1:13:09Nilay Patel?

  Now she's set the standard. She's been here for like 25 minutes. She's won two National Magazine. She got nominated for two and she got one one.

• 1:13:15Alex Cranz?

  I have won none since I got here. I'm feeling really bad.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  You made the O-Ran joke though, so that's a real lie.

• 1:13:22Alex Cranz?

  My award's in the mail.

• 1:13:23Nilay Patel?

  Um, anyway, the art on the Pornhub story is great. And then I gotta tell you the, you know, we're like diligent journalists. Surmised from this experience every week. We are diligent and rigorous journalists.

• 1:13:36Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  Um, so we like go to Pornhub for comment and they, they don't have real spokespeople. They have like anonymous. So a, a person identified only as Ian goes back and forth with our editors for 20 emails.

• 1:13:50Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  And is like, I will only comment if you can guarantee the piece will be unbiased. And we're like, well, yes, but can you just tell us who you are?

• 1:13:58Alex Cranz?

  Guarantee.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  One of the truly one of, and then so we published this in the sidebar, cause you know, we're like very transparent, as Dieter says, disclosures and brand. And then all these other reporters like, oh yeah, that, that definitely always happens. One of the strangest companies ever. Read that story. Uh, Truth Social launched. That's Trump's Twitter clone.

• 1:14:17Alex Cranz?

  I like that you assumed everybody knew what Truth Social was.

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have to know.

• 1:14:23Alex Cranz?

  We are, we are.

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  It's like one of those things. Casey wrote about it, McKenna wrote about it. It is pretty buggy and hard to use. It already, it came pre-populated with QAnon accounts, which is very funny.

• 1:14:34Alex Cranz?

  That's incredible.

• 1:14:35Nilay Patel?

  So, we'll see. It's, competition is good. This competition might be a little shakier than most. But we've got a lot of coverage of it on the site because we're heading into an election cycle and the man is gonna start tweeting again.

• 1:14:47Alex Cranz?

  I do really love-

• 1:14:47Nilay Patel?

  Or truthing again.

• 1:14:48Alex Cranz?

  The business decision to be like Twitter, the notoriously most successful of social media networks. That's what I wanna compete with.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  That is McKenna's point, actually. You should read that piece, it's really good. McKenna's piece and Casey's piece are actually in conversation with each other. Casey's is like, it won't survive its hype, the audience is inherently limited, it's also buggy as hell, and Twitter's a bad business. McKenna's piece is like, it doesn't matter because it is a broadcast mechanism for one dude.

• 1:15:15Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 1:15:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so that's like, we'll see how it goes. And then lastly, I'm Carter Quark went to Disneyland. That's it.

• 1:15:23Alex Cranz?

  He filed me over 3,000 words at 11 o'clock at night, and I was like, I'm not, I'm doing this at 6 o'clock in the morning, sorry.

• 1:15:31Nilay Patel?

  Technically, he went to the intergalactic Star Cruiser. Yeah. Which is, it seems like more like a video game than a hotel. It's like $6,000 to stay there.

• 1:15:40Alex Cranz?

  It's a LARP. You pay $6,000 to LARP Star Wars. It sounds incredible. I'd probably do it if paid enough.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  Did y'all have the, like, the living history thing in your hometown? Like, we had Colonial Williamsburg, I think?

• 1:15:51Alex Cranz?

  And the same awkwardness you felt then, you will presumably feel.

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  Where everyone was like in character from like the, yeah, but it's-

• 1:15:57Alex Cranz?

  But cool lightsabers. They're real lightsabers.

• 1:16:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You just can't escape it. All right. We gotta wrap it up. We are way over. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless, Dieter's at Backlon, Alex is Alex H. Krantz, Sean will happily talk to you about the Steam Deck. You can tweet at him. He's at Starfire2258, which is perfect and has been for over a decade. And Allison is AllisonJoe1. This is great. We'll see you next week on The Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:16:42Speaker 08

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