Pixel 3 Lite leaks, Apple releases new battery cases, and Samsung readies the S10

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter run through a week of gadget news. Images of the Google Pixel 3 “Lite” and the Samsung Galaxy S10 have leaked, starting up a new season of phone releases. The crew also looks forward to what Google will do with its investment in Fossil’s smartwatch tech, Microsoft’s experiment with foldable devices, and how the Federal Trade Commission will react to Tim Cook’s call to give consumers more privacy. There’s a whole lot more in this week’s episode — including Paul’s weekly segment “Please replace magenta” — so listen to it all to stay informed. You can also check out our new narrative fiction series Better Worlds, featuring 10 stories by 10 different fiction writers about the future and hope. YouTube Verge Extras The Verge dot com 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Company spend can be complicated. Managing it shouldn't be. Amex Corporate connects cards, expenses, and payments all in one place. That's less time managing work and more time doing work that matters. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash Amex Corporate. Terms apply.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. I am your host, Dr. Neelai Patel.

• 0:43Nilay Patel?

  I just want to make my mom proud. Dieter Bohn is here. Hey, buddy.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  You know, the fact that I never got my PhD is one of the great regrets in my life. One, because I didn't get the PhD and I threw away seven years of my life. But two, no one gets to call me Dr. Bone.

• 0:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I will for the rest of the show. Adjacent to Dr. Bone, Professor Paul Miller. I don't know what this is. Hey, Paul.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  I'm a high school dropout. I'm basically like a child in Horatio Alger. You know, I made good.

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you did all right. Paul, it's good to talk to you, man. It's been a couple of weeks.

• 1:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. How you been? What's been new with you guys?

• 1:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, so you might notice that we don't sound quite so sleepy as we have for the past few weeks because we're home from CES, which was a ride. I've been on a few other podcasts. We did this big fiction package called Better Worlds, which everyone should go and check out. We've got 11 sci-fi stories about brighter futures, optimistic uses of technology. Some of them are videos, which are on YouTube page. They're like remarkable animated shorts. We got some podcasts coming. If you go to the Verge extras feeds, it's been rebranded as Better Worlds. We got five short stories. We're going to drop some on the Vergecast feed. But anyway, so I'm like out promoting Better Worlds, like appeared on Sci-Fi Talk Podcast. It'll be out this weekend. And so we start talking about that. And then the host is like, so you want CES? What's the future like? And I was like, hmm, the same.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot. Are you into smart plugs? And all I could come up with is like, this is the year where everything is gonna, where all the companies know they need to like work together better.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  I really enjoyed Dieter's video where you got kind of creeped out by all the companies working together. It's like there are, there has to be something nefarious about that, right?

• 2:27Speaker 02

  You always assume something nefarious when there's cooperation, but you definitely assume it when it happens at CES because CES, as I said, is, is the land of platform battles. And no one fought a platform battle this year. It was very strange.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  It's not that Amazon and Google are interoperating, right? It's the, the set of vendors underneath them are basically saying, we don't, we don't want to pick a side. Like, we're not, we're not interested in this. Cause if you are, if you're Balkan, you don't want to make three different products for three different platforms. You certainly don't want to just like restrict yourself to one of the smart home platforms.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Well, that was kind of the case. For a while, it seemed like you did have to pick a side. You had to pick Amazon or Google. You had to pick Zigbee or Z-Wave.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Well, so that's the thing. All that, that whole Zigbee versus Z-Wave thing just sort of like frittered out, right? It got abstracted away to another fight between Google and Amazon and someday Apple and Cortana, who knows? And they just, and SmartThings is in there. Bixby. And so all of like, they all just ended up basically supporting everything. And so we don't have to worry about, you know, Brillo anymore, which is frankly, a relief.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  It's almost like all computers down deep in the mathematical principles of the thing are the exact same thing. It's almost like Turing was right.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Well, IBM did try and, and show off a, a quantum computer. It looks cool. They like, they made a special case for it that protects it from, I don't know, quantum interference or something. I'm getting it wrong, but it, they made, they made a cool looking box for their quantum computer.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  It does look really cool.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  Pilot, which point out, no quantum computers work. They fundamentally made a cool looking box.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  I mean, isn't that? What CES is all about.

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  It's true. That's true. My favorite product in CES like five years ago was a light up Sony box. It was literally a box with a light and they're like, this one has 4K movies in it.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Quantum computers work. Quantum computers that disrupt the world don't really exist yet. But IBM makes real working quantum computers.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  I was literally, I spent a lot of time on Monday at Microsoft. I saw Sachin Adella, saw their quantum computing team. Paul, I was gonna say, I saw Jaron Lanier, he was like at this dinner at the end of the day. I'm gonna try to get him on the podcast next week because I really want everyone to hear what I say. But he pointed out that the Turing test hilariously has two outcomes that no one ever talks about. So the first outcome is that the computer fools you. The computer is smart enough to fool the human observer. The second outcome is that the human observer is stupid and just can't tell the difference. And the third outcome is that the other human competing against the computer starts acting like the computer and is thus undiscernible from a computer.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  But that's, that's the Turing test.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  What I'm talking about is the Turing completeness. The idea that you can make a computer in Minecraft. And if you have unlimited memory and unlimited time, the computer that you build in Minecraft can run Xbox 360 games and Xbox One games. And every, you know, it's all the same, you know, the land of calculus and all computing is the same thing. In a sense.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Somebody should build that because then if that happened, there'd be somebody that was playing Xbox One games.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  Also, I have to say, we need a new metric that's like time to Vergecast. Because this might be the fastest time to Vergecast we've ever Vergecasted.

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, uh, Microsoft showed me their quantum computer, which does not, they're not ready. They have a whole different idea about how it should work, but I had this very revelatory moment where they were showing me how it works and you know, make a qubit operate. You've got to build a cold space because you need supercomputers. And they're like, this part of our computer gets, it's like 0.7 Kelvin or something. It's, they're like, it's colder than outer space. And they're like, when it's operating, we believe this is the coldest thing in the universe. Like it's the coldest known thing in the universe. And I was like, this is just like in a basement at Microsoft. It was, it was, it was like a wild mind expanding moment. Anyway, so I'm going to answer a box for the quantum computer.

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  But a bunch of other stuff happened this, this week. We don't have to keep talking about CS. Should we start with Google? Cause that's like, it feels like the biggest new, like the newsiest news thing is them buying this fossil group.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  So it's very strange. They bought a bunch of intellectual property and technology and then are an R and D. And some portion of the R and D team at fossil is going to go work for Google now. And apparently it came out of the technology that fossil was developing based on its purchase of misfit.

• 7:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  And they do in fact have a real product that they're working on that's going to come to market under the fossil brand and under fossils, many other, you know, watch brands. But because Google bought the IP, that means that they can also take this technology and put it in other wearables that use Wear OS or whatever. So I don't think this, you can draw a direct line. The thing everybody wants to do is draw a direct line from this to like, okay, they're finally making the pixel watch. Um, I think it's more likely that fossil figured something out, uh, or misfit figured something out about health tracking or about modularized modularizing smart watch componentry. So you could just make a million different cases on the, the same basic guts, which is the move that fossil makes with all of its smart watches or something that Google's

• 8:11Speaker 02

  like, oh yeah, well, we should just buy that and do that. Uh, because nobody else, except for fossil and tick watch are bothering to make where OS devices anymore. So if we do this and make it a little bit easier, maybe we can finally convince, you know, LG and Huawei and Samsung to like, make this again.

• 8:28Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying they bought a bunch of IP and they bought it, they like aqua hired a team, right?

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  And then they're going to keep making something. We don't know what it is. And then Google's gonna give that something to other people? Or they're gonna put it like in the OS? I guess we don't know what this something is.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Like a, like a reference platform that will be easy for other people to manufacture?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  So here's the quote that I'm basing this on from wearable.com, which got the exclusive on this. This guy named Kelvin. The Fossil Group will bring the product to market across our full breadth of brands over time. And then in true Google fashion, the technology will be expanded across the industry over time to benefit all.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Like AMP.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  Didn't they just do the same kind of thing with HTC? Where they, they like acquired a bunch of HTC engineers and a bunch of HTC patents and something, something, something, something is gonna happen?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  I mean, here's my joke. Google wants to fix Wear OS. They want to do better. They want to make more stuff. They want to improve the technology. In order to do that, you need engineers who have some experience in working with Wear OS. And if you look around the industry, who are the engineers that have experience working on Wear OS? Who actually bothers to work with Wear OS? It's Google employees and Fossil. The end.

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  And tick, and tick watch. I mean, to be fair, but like, I think that's part of it. They just, they needed, they probably just needed warm bodies that knew how the platform worked.

• 9:52Nilay Patel?

  So it's like, they were like in a meeting and they're, and they're like, uh, you know, we need three more headcount for Wear OS. And they're like, all right. Then HR took it and they came back and like, everyone that you want for this job works at Fossil. And then Sundar was like, ah, just buy Fossil. Like that, that, cause that's what that feels like.

• 10:09Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a joke. I don't actually think that's what happened. There is clearly some thing they wanted here. Cause this whole thing is focused on like the R and D team and the new product innovation that has not yet hit the market and whatever. So there's like, there's a tangible thing that Google wanted to have the rights to be able to put on other Wear OS watches, not just stuff Fossil made. But yeah, I, I don't know.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  I will say, I do squeeze my pixel. So HTC's secret tech really paid off. In fact, I don't actually know how to activate the assistant other than squeezing the pixel. Or like, I guess you can hold the fake software home button. How else do you get the assistant up?

• 10:49Speaker 02

  You can tap the little assistant button on the search bar. Or you can say, hey, Google. Or you could say, okay.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  I try to say, hey, Google, and it doesn't do anything. It's like I haven't set it up or something.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  It's really fussy about it, especially when it's locked. And they say that they're like, they fixed that, so it just does never seems to work for me. Anyway. Anyway, squeezing paid off. That was an aqua hire well worth it.

• 11:16Nilay Patel?

  We were told pretty explicitly, like, the Pixel 3 wasn't the HTC one, right?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  They, those people showed up on the day that they were like, well, we're putting these in boxes. You can work on the next one. So hopefully with the next.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  But isn't the squeezing tech HTC stuff?

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's all kind of like, you know, they build the things on other people's reference designs. So HTC just like had it. You know, like you buy like a Lincoln and it's still like a, has Ford switches in it because it's all just Ford.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 11:45Nilay Patel?

  I think it's like that kind of part spin relationship. But now they're actually like design the phone. Speaking of the Pixel, Pixel 3 Lite, it can't be a Pixel phone unless it leaks massively in Europe first.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And on like a site that never existed before this leak, like they went to see, yes, apparently it's Android news. And everyone was like, who are you? But yeah, they got one. And I gotta say, like, there's a bunch about it. That's definitely like low rent, right? No dual speakers, probably, you know, a slightly bigger bezel, lower resolution display, you know, down the line, slower processor chief among those like low rent things. I think it's supposed to be the Snapdragon 670. But you know what? A relatively lightweight Snapdragon 670 Android phone, as long as there's not a heavy skin on it. Fast enough for most people and actually pretty good battery life. And then if it has the Pixel camera, like I, I don't know who I recommend the Pixel to over Pixel 3 to over this.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  You know, if any of the previous words I said makes sense to you, you're probably a Pixel 3 person.

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  But there is a whole giant group of people where if they can get the price down on this thing to something pretty cheap, this thing would be great for. Like how cheap? Is this a $300 phone? That all depends on the camera. If it's more than $400, they deeply screwed up.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think 400 is a max. What if it's the Pixel 2 camera in there? Just like a hypothetical. A Pixel 3 with a Pixel 2 camera is still like a pretty great device, right? And that's like one way to bring the cost down.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and the hardware differences between the two and the three are actually not that great. They're not that large, I mean. So again, that could be still make this a great phone. Now, what's confusing is supposedly it's going to be launching on Verizon. That's been one of the rumors. And it's also launching like, I don't know, middle of the year, or who knows when sometime in the near future. Maybe they'll announce it at Mobile World Congress in late February. So it's just landing in like a weird zone in terms of the year. And they really are going to need to figure out what they're going to do with it to compete with OnePlus, because I think that the OnePlus phones, like the thing that this will have over OnePlus is the camera, but they're really going to have to push that hard in order to make the sale for this thing. Otherwise, it's just sort of a confusing low end phone

• 13:56Speaker 02

  that comes out way after their high end phones, which is a theme this year.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Google could sell me like, like a chunk off of a two by four, and if it had call screening, it would still be worth it. Call screening is the only good thing in my entire life.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  The only reason I live.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  I get a lot of spam calls, and I take such joy in hanging up on them from, from my watch. I hadn't worn the watch in like quite some time, and I got one.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  It's pretty nice.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  Over the holidays, and I'm always just like, boop, boop. It's great.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  No, I'm telling you, man, call screening gives you way more joy. You're not supposed to answer the spam calls, to be clear. You're not supposed to do that, because it like encourages them to call you back. But if you get a spam call, you're annoyed by it, that annoyance, you're like, ah, and then you're like, ah, heh, heh, heh, you hit the screen call button, and then you just know that somebody on the other end, maybe a computer, maybe not, who knows, is having to listen to your computer talk to them. It's always a computer. And so you get to watch your computer and their computer fight on your screen in real time, and then hang up when you're bored. It's the best. It's a little cathartic.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  I want to do a button on Google's call screening thing that just says, waste as much of this person's time as possible.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. Deploy robot forces.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Deploy your robot forces, fight back on my behalf. I'm busy on my computer anyways. And until I get another phone call, you can go ahead and just waste this person's time.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  So here's the thing about this Pixel 3 Lite.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  You guys know and love Sean Hollister.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  To the verge. He bought a Pixel 3. He is not switching away from his, you know, old Motorola phone because he can attach the battery module to it and the thing lasts like four days. So he still wants that long battery life. That's the most important thing to him. But he wants a good camera and so he bought a Pixel 3 instead of going out and buying a like an RX 100. Just because he can, you know, it can do some other stuff in a pinch and that is now his camera. I could foresee if Google wanted to like buy this as your burner phone, buy this as your spare camera, even if you have an iPhone. Think about it.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm thinking about it.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  I mean, it's not realistic, but yeah.

• 16:04Nilay Patel?

  So I have a Pixel 3 in my house, a lot of the cameras, got a baby. It's fun to like take pictures of the baby. Moved the family to Google Photos and reeled them in with the baby. It's like, we're all there. Yeah. I don't know. I still don't pick up the Pixel 3 to take photos of her. I still reach for the real camera. And then we're out and the iPhone just takes, I still think the iPhone XS just takes crazy photos. Like they just like, they just continue to look like they're fake, but we do them. And I like the way the Pixel 3 photos look, but at the end of the day, when I look at them on a big screen. Yeah, it's not my pocket. And when I look at them on a big screen, I'm still like, these are cell phone photos. Vlad was tweeting about this this week too. He's like, I got a new monitor and it's, this is the thing that makes me realize these cameras have a long way to go.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  So I wouldn't spend that money on a Pixel just to use it in my camera when you can buy a real camera. You get more headache.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:55Nilay Patel?

  You'll definitely get more headache out of it, but it just, it's, they're not quite there. I want them to be there so badly, but they're just not, they're not quite there. My sense of the Pixel 3 overall is that it is not nearly as beloved as the Pixel 2.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so either. I mean, what are the beloved, you know, Nexus and Google phones? The, I mean, the Nexus one only because it had a trackball and I think that's. I actually loved the Samsung Galaxy, whatever that Nexus was, the Galaxy Nexus.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  I used it for a super long time. You could take the battery door off the back, get an extended battery, or you could take the battery door off the back and then rip the inductive charger off of a Palm Pre and slap it onto the Galaxy Nexus, and then you could get wireless charging on the Galaxy Nexus.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  That was, that was a move I did. I gotta say, the Nexus 5.

• 17:41Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  The plastic one, the orange, was beloved by all. The original Pixel, I don't know if it was beloved, it was more like, huh, okay. But yeah, the Pixel 2 people deeply loved.

• 17:50Nilay Patel?

  The Pixel 2 people loved so much, the anticipation on Pixel 3 might have been too high.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's true.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  Because the Pixel 2 was beloved and it had like, one notable flaw, which was a not great screen.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:01Nilay Patel?

  So I think everyone just assumed they would fix the one thing and the rest, and then you end up with a gigantic notch, which is still ugly. I don't care what you say.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  I use a little one because the notch is ugly, and I wanted a little fun.

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  There was a bunch of software problems that seemed to be getting addressed over time. I feel like Google didn't hit it quite as hard as they wanted to with the Pixel 3. So the idea of a Pixel 3 Lite getting to like, reset that narrative a little bit is not a bad one.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Well, I've been hoping for a long time that they would come back to the "Google makes an inexpensive phone." Like, that was one of the reasons the Nexus 5 in particular was so beloved, is you got a great phone for not a lot of money, and then it took, it went away, and it took a while for other Android companies to make really good phones around that price point. Um, so like, we had this period where we, like, saw the future of like, all phones are gonna be amazing and they're gonna cost $400, and then we missed it. We lost it for a while, and it's only just now coming back.

• 18:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. How much was the Nexus 6P? I have a Nexus 6P at my house.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  The weird Huawei one, with like, the full body bump at the top.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  I don't, that was pretty expensive. The Nexus 6, the whale, the Motorola whale was also pretty expensive.

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  It was called Chamu, it was like, literally its code name.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, speaking of inexpensive phones that do a lot for your money, Motorola is putting out a $1,500 limited edition Razr.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:20Nilay Patel?

  Which people were super into. You think it's gonna have a folding screen?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Wall Street Journal says it's gonna have a folding screen. Why not? Here's the problem with folding screens. They don't fold perfectly flat. They don't, and so like the whole point of a Razr is it's little. And so if this thing doesn't fold perfectly flat, I mean, we're, we're, we're looking at a real droid Razr situation here where

• 19:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  It takes a storied brand and, and just ruins it.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  You could have two screens.

• 19:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the idea that it's a folding smartphone or a folding screen is, right? This is like one of those details that eludes, like you can, it can get lost. Cause there's like this big narrative about folding screens out in the world right now. And then some Motorola PR person's like, yeah, we're making a folding phone. And that just like goes sideways real fast. Cause the Razr was a flip phone.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  The, the, the second sentence in the Wall Street Journal report is the once popular flip phone is being revived as a smartphone with a foldable screen. So there, there it is. And it's gonna be the, the Royale.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Could mean, could mean anything.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  It literally could mean anything. I just, I don't buy it. I don't know why I don't buy it. There's something like, there's something about this that just doesn't, that's not Lenovo's game with Motorola, right? Like Motorola phones are low price, weird modularity, like they're just like really good mid-range Android phones. A $1,500 phone with a piece of display tech that Motorola doesn't make and that the, the screen makers have yet to deploy at scale just seems crazy. Right? Like Samsung's like, this isn't ready yet. LG is like, yeah, ours is really big and it rolls up into a tube. It's a TV like, you know? And then there's FlexPai, which is like, this software is garbage. Enjoy.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. The idea that you take the, the thing that is most iconic, other than maybe the MacBook Air, I would say way more actually than the MacBook Air. Iconic for thin gadget. And you're gonna put something inside of it that makes it not thin, which is a folding screen, is the most ridiculous thing in the world.

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, every time I look at that FlexPai Royale. I'm like, I still want this. Like, I still want the phone that goes boop boop and then it's like a really big thing. I, I feel that. I, I'm into that in a big way. But I just don't think Motorola or Lenovo is the company that, that cracks it with the big screen to the masses. It reminds me of like the early days of smartphones when everyone thought another new hardware feature would be like the one that got everyone. And so like the mid pack brands would like rush out and be like, we also have a sliding keyboard. And you're like, that's, that's not a good idea.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  I'm stoked on this. Well, one, I wasn't around for the whole invention of the mega notch, which can I just, full disclosure? I feel kind of like, I feel pretty dumb. I've been thinking of all different ways to do notches. And the one I didn't think of is put the, literally think outside the box, literally put the camera outside of the rectangle. I, egg on my face, but uh, the, what was it? The Oppo is coming out with like a 10x zoom. That seems like an exciting new thing for phones to do is have optical zoom by putting little periscopes in the body of the, of the phone, right?

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  It feels like we're, we're in, in like wacky season for phone cameras and displays, right? Like phones.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  I'm here for it.

• 22:35Nilay Patel?

  We, yeah, exactly. Like we got to rectangles. Everything's a black rectangle. And then it's like, what if we, what if the black rectangle was more dominant in this device? And so now we're doing notches and hole punches, like trying to make the rectangle bigger. And then it's, and then the other, what's the other thing people care about is the cameras. So like, what's the most insane camera that we can put together? And then you get folding periscopes. You get Nokia with like, what if nine cameras?

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? There's Apple rumors that they're gonna add a third one.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  I think nine or three cameras is important.

• 23:06Nilay Patel?

  It's gotta be an odd number though. That's the important thing.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think periscopes are, are important. I think you, you gotta find new ways to get more light into this thing.

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, the peris, wouldn't the periscope reduce the amount of light? Like moment lenses effectively cut the amount of light coming, not a lot. But you know, like you put glass in front of the sensor.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  But for a zoom, yes, zooms typically are like, have less light hitting the sensor. But they have more of the light from the portion of the image that you're zooming in on hitting the sensor, right?

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't think so. But you're collecting, you're right, but no, like zoom is just sort of like collect less, especially if you have a regular camera lens and a sensor and then you put another lens in front of it, which is what this would be. Like if you replace the lens housing and put a zoom in front of it, that might be

• 23:57Speaker 03

  I'm not saying you end up with more light net. I'm saying you end up with more light related to the portion of the image that you care about, which is the thing you zoomed in on.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just don't, I don't know. Maybe somebody smarter than us can, which is everyone. So if you're listening to this right now, just stop and tell us. It's just fine. It's like everyone is smarter than us, but I, I think I, I get what you're saying. I just, I think these sensors are really small and really noisy inherently, and anything that cuts the total amount of light is dangerous. That's just, that's just my general sense of camera sensors, but.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  So, but I mean, like the larger point is we're going to have weird camera stuff. Especially this Apple thing turns out there's the Nokia thing. We'll have weird camera stuff. There's a bunch of sliders, sliders are coming back and like you slide up the, you know, the selfie camera.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Which is very fun, uh, cause I love fidgeting with devices. And then screens. So we already have the Royal. We've got this razor. Microsoft is rumored to be working on a foldable device. Tom Warren had a story about that. And we know that Samsung, uh, is going to be doing its, uh, foldable phone that it's already teased. And I don't think we're anywhere near done. I think that the whole year is just going to be wacky screen things and wacky cameras and it's fun.

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  You know, like we, we, we have done it. We have made the slab. We've made the black slab phone. And now we're going to try and make something else for a while.

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  The thing that makes me happiest is like the smartphone sales plateau that everyone is hitting. Means they have to try really hard to get you to upgrade. And so that means half of the industry is going to do like 3D TV. Right, like just crazy nonsense will occur because that's how the TV industry reacted to like TV sales falling. They're like, what if, what if it was 3D? And they're like, no, and like, what if it was curved? And like, we just went through years of that. But then there was a bunch of like great upgrades, like 4K and HDR and all this other stuff. So like, I don't know which one it's gonna go, but I think that plateau means even Apple has to compete harder to get your dollars now. Samsung has to compete harder to get your dollars. LG has to compete harder to get your dollars.

• 26:00Nilay Patel?

  And you've got all these like mid-tier vendors who are like licensed to be insane because they know that it's not a guarantee that everyone's gonna go buy an iPhone or a Note or whatever. So like, I, I think there's gonna be a lot of action in this market to just, just because they know you have to try really hard to convince somebody to buy a new phone. And that means you have to deliver something that's tangible instead of it's an iPhone with, with another camera. It's a

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  Galaxy with more RAM. Although, to be fair, people do love buying a Galaxy phone with more RAM. That's just like facts.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Do you want to talk about this Microsoft foldable Windows thing? I mean, I do, but I also like, it's, it's a whole lot of like fairy dust in my mind. Like it, I'm, I'm, you know, one of the olds that still like remembers the courier concept that was never real. But the interesting thing to know, I think, and Tom references this in his piece, is that there's this Microsoft Composable Shell thing. So it's still got like the Windows Core OS in it, but they're able to do more experimentation with the UI on top of that. And so I do think that it's gonna be more than just a PC that folds out and it's gonna be not a phone. I don't think they're gonna go right to phones yet. They, their, their heart still hurts from, from Windows Phone. And so does mine, frankly.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  But so I'll be really curious to see how they solve the interface problem. Because the interface problem for a foldable screen for a phone, especially running Android, is pretty simple. Just like make it bigger and people know how to use phone apps and they'll accept like the tablet, expanding tablet apps. The interface problem for a small, tiny device for Windows is way, way harder. I mean, I'm, I'm the person who bought a Surface Go and I will just tell you that Microsoft hasn't fully figured out how to make Windows look good on tiny screens. So they, they can't just have it be a straight Windows interface. And I'm very curious to see what they're gonna do. Let me blow some minds. What if they just do Android? Well, huh.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  What if they just do Android? I mean, I don't know. They could. Yeah. They've got plenty of good Microsoft apps for Android. I mean. Although, yeah. Hmm. But like, right, what if they just made some Android stuff? That'd be fine. Like, would anyone truly care? And then you're like, still using Office? And they like preload Outlook?

• 28:14Speaker 03

  This rumor is based on the idea that there's leaks of Windows till, Windows 10 builds coming out for new hardware. Right? So like, th- these rumors are based on Windows 10 be adapt, being adapted. So it makes probably more sense for Microsoft to make it based on Android, but sounds like they're basing it on Windows.

• 28:35Nilay Patel?

  Which they, which they should do because they own Windows. Just to be clear, I'm just throw, I'm throwing out the craziest idea.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  They're so embarrassed by Windows. They fit, I, I, I just get this vibe that Microsoft thinks of Windows as this old thing that they used to do as a company, and it's not where the future is. I, I get a really, I think Microsoft has a bad attitude about its operating system.

• 29:00Nilay Patel?

  So again, I, I was there, saw a bunch of Microsoft executives, I saw Nadella.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Did they seem to have a bad attitude to you?

• 29:08Nilay Patel?

  No, I would say my trip to Microsoft was just, it was me and a bunch of other journalists. Um, I think Adam Washin, Washinsky wrote up a brief summary in, in Fortune and uh, Ben Thompson, the great analyst, actually published like a full transcript of what Nadella talked to us about, which was 8,000 words. The other reason I haven't published anything, uh, to be perfectly honest, is there was nothing tangibly new. Right? So. Right. I, I sat down to write a headline and I, Nadella says things I've heard confidently is like, not a great news headline. So, um, maybe I'll do something. But anyway, the, the point of this was they were super confident. Like, Microsoft is a very confident company.

• 29:48Nilay Patel?

  They, they just wanted, uh, my sense of that event, then they were very clear, like, we, we just want you to come here and like, see the spread of things that we do. And like, meet the executives, you know, they're flying high, the stock's really high. They were like, most valuable company. For a minute, you know, they're trading back and forth with Amazon, but you know, the business is going well. You know, people think Nadell is a good CEO. I think he's a very confident CEO. I think he's gotten much more confident. You know, he knows what he's doing, right? He knows what his business is. My sense of like, you know, they had a hardware presentation for us. They talked about the surface line. They talked about the their big dreams of what they want to build an interaction and they're like, Windows, like this is what Windows is for, like we own it. They talked about Xbox, like we have as good of a shot to build

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  a high-end game streaming service as anybody and we're going to try. And it turns out that's a client of Azure. So like this all works together. Do you see like? So my sense of this event was, it was great. I was there. I was happy to be invited, like happy to talk to everybody, but there's a, there were a lot of reporters there who don't otherwise think about Microsoft's breadth. And this was like a good showcase of like, we do all this stuff that Google and Amazon and Apple do as well. And we do it at a high level and it's true. I didn't get the sense that they're like, Windows, I think what you're sensing, Paul, Windows used to be the thing. It was their business, right? Now Windows is just one of their businesses. It's not even their, like their driver, the way that it used to be. It's like Azure is their driver.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft 365 is their driver. Windows just just happens to be another thing that they make that's important.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  It's like, it's like an implementation detail.

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  It's simple. And this is the reason to maybe be up, there's two ways to look at that. If Windows is just another thing that Microsoft does, it's not their primary focus. It's not like the existential thing that they have to make perfect and it has to win. Then like they're going to ignore it and that seems scary and bad for people that like Windows. But the, the possible upside there is not to put too fine a point on it, but like it lost. It lost to Android. More people use Android phones than use Windows computers right now. And so if Windows is no longer the like must win, must destroy everybody else existential thing for Microsoft. It's just another thing that it does. That could theoretically free them up to try more stuff and do more stuff that they wouldn't otherwise do. If they were, you know, in a fight to the death to like win desktops or phones or whatever.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  And I don't know. If that's actually how it's going to play out, there are like, sometimes there's positive signs, sometimes there's negative signs. So there's been a bunch of negative signs that they were really going to use Windows to push a whole bunch of other Microsoft services that I don't care about. Namely like Cortana and Bing search, but you know, we just saw that the next version of Windows, they're going to split out search from Cortana. And maybe that's just them admitting that, you know, maybe someday someone's going to want to not use Cortana on a Windows machine, but use Lexa or, you know, whatever else.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  So they were also very clear that like, it's, we have Cortana, we're great, but we're not interested in being in a consumer platform war with Amazon, Google, which you can see because they have that deal with Amazon, right?

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, we don't know how this is going to shake out. We need to be in the space because maybe you don't want your assistant at work to be the same as your assistant at home. We need to build skills and like, we need to understand what we're doing here, but we're not interested in like, competing for that. And so I really came away with the sense that their consumer offering fundamentally is Surface and Xbox. And everything else, and that is just radically different than where they used to live. You know what I would point to more specifically? And I'm not saying like Windows is the best thing ever, like, you could certainly use some, some polish in some places, but

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  understatement of the century.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Huge understatement.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  But Microsoft revitalized the Windows hardware market with Surface. And they plowed a ton of money into doing that, right? Remember the first Surface came out and they had to like write off like a billion dollars? They like stuck with it and like Windows laptops are great now. And that just wasn't going to be the case five years ago until Microsoft decided to fix it by doing Surface, by like, putting their hardware stuff in the world by frankly, being cool with their hardware vendors, like ripping off Surface stuff. It's like Lenovo put out a Surface Studio clone, like I can't, I just can't imagine the people at Microsoft who's on the Surface Studio are like, correct.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, you just see it, like the whole Microsoft hardware ecosystem around Windows is stronger. And so much of it looks like what Microsoft did. So I, I think that commitment is there. I just think they don't talk about it. They don't talk about it like they're the winners, which is Dieter's point. They talk about like, it's a thing that they do and they're going to keep doing until there's another paradigm shift and they're going to be there. But, you know, when you talk to Nadella, it's like, the drinking game is how many, how many like rhetorical pivots till we talk about Azure again? And it's usually like two.

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  Because that's, that's the money and it's going great for them. I went from Google Pixel 3 light leaks to Microsoft Azure. Time to Vergecast. We just like did it again.

• 34:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about some Apple stuff.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in 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.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  I said we're gonna talk about some Apple stuff, but we should talk about the cell carrier tracking thing. Cause that leads into today in time. So Motherboard, which is a great site, which I encourage everyone to read. They're all good, lovely people, good friends of ours. Published a report saying it is trivial to buy location data from carriers, sourced from carriers around a phone number. So if I have Dieter's number, I can go to some shady data broker and like it will just tell me where Dieter's phone is.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  They literally just hired a bounty hunter, got permission from the person they were tracking. And the bounty hunter said, give me 300 bucks, went to a shady data broker and like was able to track this person's location in basically real time and like find out where they were. And that exposed this thing that people sort of vaguely knew that carriers track your location. And just blew it open and be like, not only do the carriers know where you are, but they're happy to sell it to people. And it doesn't take very many links in the sell to people chain before it just becomes a thing that anybody can go get.

• 36:34Nilay Patel?

  Which is horrifying. Yeah, the carriers all responded sort of one by one. We're gonna stop doing it. AT&T had the most AT&T response, which was we're gonna turn this off even for uses that we believe have benefited the consumer.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  I just want you to provide me a data connection. There's no other benefits, please. Please put all your other benefits away.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Would that be like a 911 reverse tracking sort of thing?

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  No, it was pretty ambiguous. There were, there were some stuff like that. There were some, but then none of that has to do with resale of data. Like, of course they know where I am.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Ad target, you know, a lot of people believe that ad targeting is actually, it's the kind thing to do.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What every user-

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Ads that you care about.

• 37:19Nilay Patel?

  I just, look, I walk through the streets of New York. I'm sure this happens to you in Washington and I just hear people clamoring. Why aren't these ads more relevant?

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  It's just like the shriek of the user on the subways of New York.

• 37:33Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, so 18 states, there's not doing Verizon. It's Congress and credit where it's due. The Republicans, the House Republicans are like, we need hearings on this. So they're asking for it. And then Ajit Pai is like, I can't come, I can't do anything because the government shut down. Which, like, I don't think he's personally shut down, but he's like, I can't, I couldn't possibly-

• 37:54Speaker 03

  I thought the FCC was pretty, pretty shut. Didn't Russell do a piece on that? That you can, um, you can hack your wifi router and start blasting all sorts of bizarre frequencies until-

• 38:05Nilay Patel?

  Until the cops come back? Yeah.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Until they come back?

• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  That story is super funny, right? That's more of like a, a user behavior story. Like, it wasn't like the FCC was like war driving, looking for illegal. Right? You just like shouldn't do it and the fines if you got caught were really high. But the FCC is like, not in the office. Like, they did shut down the FCC because it shut down. We all got a press release about it. So then people responded by saying, now I can do this because the cops are like out of work. So they're, they're, it wasn't, it wasn't like every router suddenly like got a software switch that allowed it to happen. It's just people, people are crazy. But the FCC is like-

• 38:44Speaker 03

  It's, it's the purge, but for your routers.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  It's router frequency purge. A script that I've been pitching for some time. It just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Anyway, so Frank Pallone is Democrat from New Jersey, sent a letter to Pi requesting an emergency briefing. Pi refused to hold the briefing.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  He said, "These egregious actions are not a threat to the safety of human life or property that the FCC will address during the Trump shutdown." That is wild to me because I just, this dude, I feel like his goal in life is for the FCC to be shut down. And like, I think this happened and he was like, "Well, that was easy." And I was just like.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  The only, the only thing about the FCC being shut down that Ajit Pai is sad about is they locked the doors to the office and that's where his Reese's coffee cup is.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, hopefully the government will open again. It really does seem like the, the privacy, their year of, of consequences for the privacy stories of the last year. It's here. You know what I mean? Like, we spent a year with Facebook data privacy. We spent a year talking about Google. This year opened with this, this motherboard report. There's a new Congress. There's all this energy. As soon as the government begins again, it seems like the reckoning will come.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  I will say, can we get rid of phone numbers?

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, what's that gonna do?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Well, it's a public identifier that you have to give out sometimes to people. Like, I, nobody's asking for my MAC address, right? Like, your devices are probably pretty easy to track. Like, I'm sure the carrier could track you by your MAC address. Right? But I don't have to give out my MAC address when I'm like signing up for like, like a spa or something like that, you know? So I'm giving out a very, what turns out to be an extremely personal piece of data. Like, it turns out my phone number is a password that sprinkled a little, some dollars on it, and now you know where I live, or where I am all the time.

• 40:44Nilay Patel?

  Right. Can we, you're saying, can we abstract the, the hardware identifier from this number? Like the phone number is a hardware identification key. Dieter, would you like to?

• 40:53Speaker 02

  We've just been begging for this for 15 years. I wrote about this with the Palm phone, that it's dumb that we have to pay, you know, a per-device fee just to have a phone number enabled on it.

• 41:03Nilay Patel?

  I just want to clarify which Palm phone you mean.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 41:07Nilay Patel?

  Because you said 15 years and then you said Palm phone.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  You didn't write about it. You wrote about it like two months ago.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Last year, yeah. When I told Neelai, hey, this is my, this is my thing about the Palm phone. He's like, yeah, dude, I wrote that. This is my next. Here's, here's the link. I said we should get rid of phone numbers and it was going to get replaced by Skype.

• 41:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, okay, I didn't get it.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Chat handles.

• 41:30Nilay Patel?

  You know what they're, you know what they're embarrassed by? It's not Windows, it's Skype.

• 41:35Nilay Patel?

  They're like, we still operate Skype.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Like, I don't like email, but at least with email, like, I've got this hot new email address, for service spam at gmail.com. I'm very proud of it.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  So like, at least with email, you could like have extra email addresses to like, to do dumps. Like, you know, you could have different avatars, you know, different representations of yourself. But phone numbers, unless you like, use like a Google Voice number or something, you have that one number and it's, it's really you.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Although, I will say if you call my phone now, it will ring this watch, it will ring my laptop, it will ring the, like, AT&T has an abstraction service. You just pay for it in a variety of ways. Including having to use AT&T software to set up number sync, which, yeah, a little dicey. Well, so the point I wanted to make is, it's the, the, the heat is on.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  It's on the street.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We both went there. And it, it feels like this Congress, you know, Ro Khanna, the representative from California, was on the bridge house last year. He said, within six months of the new Congress, we'll do it, we'll have a data privacy law. Maybe that'll be true or not. But you know who else believes that is one Mr. Tim Cook?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  Who published an editorial in Time Magazine today. Time Magazine owned by Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. So a real Silicon Valley get-together there. But Tim Cook wrote an article saying, we need data privacy. I want, I want this stuff to be more transparent. And to some extent, he said he wanted it to be illegal, which cuts right at the heart of. You know, the internet.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, he repeated his four principles, which, great, I like, I like the idea that there are four principles. I think that they get fuzzy real fast in the details. The thing that was new for him, that was new from his speech last year, where he stated those four principles this year, was he specifically went after data brokers. And I don't know if he was drafting off of the location stuff with data brokers from the motherboard report, or if it's just been a thing that's on his mind. But I think for him, where he wants this, this thing, like, if, if company A collects your data, fine, they should tell you everything that they've collected, and they should let you delete it from them and so on. But once that goes from company A that you have, you know, you agreed to give your data to, we've consented to give your data to,

• 43:50Speaker 02

  to company B, C, D, E, and F, you lose track of it. So I think, to him, the principle that, in the legislation he wants is, it needs to, like, you need to explicitly give consent for your data to go from company A to company B to company C, which, you know, effectively, nobody will ever do, right? Like, would you?

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  First of all, I don't think Tim Cook wrote this without talking to Apple's lobbying group, right? They have a team of attorneys, and I mean lobbying, not in like the evil way, but like, there's a team of policy people at Apple, and they advocate for things, and some of them are in fact lobbyists. But Tim Cook has a big platform, he's gonna write an article for Time Magazine, those people are involved. So this is a specific regulation that Apple, as a company, wants to see pushed forward.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:37Nilay Patel?

  And then there's the sort of like real problem here, which is, let's say, the government creates a data broker clearinghouse, as Cook recommends in this piece. Someone will run it. The Federal Trade Commission will now run a data broker clearinghouse. What does that really look like? Oh, it probably looks like a website. It's like, right, where you can like look stuff up, you can make requests. Probably looks like a bunch of... Punch of well-meaning kids fresh out of college, like, doing paperwork. And the companies all do that. Is any consumer gonna go look at that? No, it's the people who are gonna do it are the press and other regulators. Mostly the press. And then what are they gonna do? So it's like, it'll be easier to find out the bad actions are happening, which is good. But then this piece where it's like you have to give consent, well, you kind of are anyway. Like, every Terms of Service includes this clause.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  We may share your data with other people. So then you have to write some law that makes that paragraph more meaningful, or gets rid of it altogether and says, when Google wants to send your data somewhere else. So Google talks to Netflix, and Netflix says, we're gonna send some of your data to Google so we can display, watch the next episode of you on the Home Hub.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:47Nilay Patel?

  That is recommendation data. It's not just like an API call, right? Like, they're gonna send you some data so Google can predict what you might want to do in your day? Well, you would probably just say yes to that. That's the problem, right? The amount of utility you can provide by sending the data around is high. It's that next step that's like, Facebook is gonna let Cambridge Analytica run a thing on their service, and then Cambridge Analytica is gonna have collected a bunch of Facebook poll data that they sell to another person, that there's another person, and then there's Brexit. Like, that. Like, I don't think you get a bunch of consumers saying no to that one.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  You wanted more gems for like a Bejeweled-type game that you were playing, and so you gave Facebook permission to look at your other contacts so you could share, like, invite them so you could earn gems.

• 46:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  And that's how you... Is the solution to make a very fine-grained... Because I'm so sick of saying that I'm okay with cookies.

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  And then GDPR did it again, where I had to say that I was okay or not okay with a million different things. And now, am I gonna have to say if I'm okay with every single thing? Because in a sense, that does seem like the moral thing to do. It'd be nicer if they just didn't want to spread my data around all the time.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I'm not saying Cook's plan is unworkable. I'm saying that it's great to write that, and then the details look like, okay, we're gonna start a new government website that basically only Russell Brandam will look at, right? A bunch of policy journalists will look at, a bunch of security journalists will look at, and we're gonna start asking users to make more decisions more often. And none of that seems like the solution to the problem of like pervasive tracking. So like if Tim Cook really wants to stop this right now, you know what he does? He bans a bunch of weather apps from the App Store because every weather app is selling the backend of that location data.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  He also stops taking billions of dollars from Google to make Google the default search on Safari on the iPhone.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  Also, he leaves China. Yeah, I saw that.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  So one of my new favorite kind of tweets to do is like very ambiguous tweets. Just because people, you just never know. So I tweeted a link, number one was a link to Tim Cook's thing. And then number two was a list of the top free apps in the App Store, which are Netflix, Gmail, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat. And people, mostly people like what they picked up on was that I have the iCloud icon next to my Facebook. Because it's the one I've deleted.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  And then there was this discussion of like, could Tim Cook just like kick Facebook off the App Store? Right? Like, could you, could you just say like, you know what? I hate, I hate what you're doing. And I, I think the answer is no, like fundamentally it's no.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Well, it can't be.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  Because Facebook is the thing that makes the iPhone valuable, right? The reason people want iPhones is to communicate. Every one of those apps, save Netflix, is like an app to communicate.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:36Nilay Patel?

  He can't be like, I'm making the iPhone less valuable. And so how does he influence how those companies operate? Well, I think he can change the App Store terms and conditions. I think he should absolutely find a way to write an App Store regulation that prevents weather apps and flashlight apps from selling your location. That seems very obvious to me. He just banned weather apps. You know what's built into the iPhone? A weather app. He could just ban. It's not as good as Dark Sky, though. Sure, but like, okay, buy Dark Sky. You, they have billions of dollars in cash. Like this is, that one's a problem they can solve, right? If they want, if they want it to be this harsh. But the question of how do you get Facebook to be a better actor using the power your platform and your control over the store offers you? I think it's really quite tricky and it won't help any Android users.

• 49:19Nilay Patel?

  So if you are really like good hearted, you're saying, well, the government should do it. And then the real question becomes what, like what, like what does that policy look like? And I think the answer is honestly, if they boil down to it should be more transparent and you should have more choices, then I actually don't think that we'll get to any better solution because people will just start wording those questions in more devious ways.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  Or they'll ask you to make the choice more often.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Well, my other fear is that like a GDPR style, there's like, there's rules that you can't do this as a company, but there's also rules that add obligations to companies. And my fear is that there's incidental accidental data collection or that's just part of running a service that you do act, get information about people, that it can be very hard to set up the infrastructure to give everybody the ability to like retract that data at any time. Like in a sense, you need like an ID way, like a way to track everybody's personal information for the lifetime of that information, but information doesn't really work like that. It's easy to strip off some metadata from information and keep copying it. So it's easy to lose its origin.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  And also theoretically, you want to lose the origin. It just turns out sometimes, even though you tried to strip off metadata, it works in such a way that you can backtrack it and now you know where I live.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. So one of my, one of my favorite Google Maps features, it's kind of like little known is like it predicts traffic. So you can, you can tell like, I'm going to make this trip at noon tomorrow. How long do you think it's going to take, right? Obviously that is built off of years of Google Maps data, of people driving around Google Maps open and like the various vendors they bought that data from. So if I'm just like, I'm going to opt my data out of that data set, right? Like I've taken the strip 100 times before, I'm going to take it tomorrow at noon. Oh, by the way, I want you to delete my data. Like, what does that actually look like for, for Google? Right? Like, what does it mean for them to not know the aggregate or like to take one set of data out of that calculation? Like, that's a very complicated problem.

• 51:24Nilay Patel?

  And also, does it even matter? Like, maybe it's like a disassociation. Like, just don't. You can still know that a car went here, but I need you to disassociate me from it. It's not the same as deleting that data.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  It has to be scrubbed.

• 51:36Nilay Patel?

  It's all crazy.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  Could we come up with a scrubbing standard?

• 51:40Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  My fear is, I wouldn't want a law that's easier for Facebook, Apple, and Google to comply with than it is for smaller upstarts.

• 51:48Nilay Patel?

  I don't think, I don't think you're ever gonna get that.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Because I, well, I think GDPR was kind of like that.

• 51:53Nilay Patel?

  It's easier. No, you know, that's exactly right. It is easier. It is always easier for a big company to comply with a new regulation, right? Because they can just like hire one more lawyer. A small company like has to exert some resources. But at the end of the day, you know, there's like a lot of regulations around cars in this country. And like Tesla exists. A bunch of car makers that literally can't ship one car exists now, right? Like, there's still an explosion of interest in the sector because there's opportunity. So you just have to, I think you just have to make sure you don't foreclose opportunity. And right now, it's like, you just want to squeeze the balloon and put all the interest somewhere else. All the energy somewhere else. Like, you want to squeeze the balloon and say like, collecting data to make money by reselling user data is no longer allowed.

• 52:36Nilay Patel?

  So take your, take your like capitalist instincts and try something else.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  And it's definitely not cool.

• 52:46Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  We just run PSAs where like, bad, bad egg companies are collecting data. But the cool, hip ones don't do drugs and also don't collect data.

• 52:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Paul, I know you haven't worked fully at The Virgin sometime, but you ever want to come back and just make a bunch of weird PSAs? It's our new video strategy. It's aggressive PSAs from Paul.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  You fly me to New York and I'll do a whole string of PSAs with a VHS camcorder.

• 53:17Nilay Patel?

  Beautiful. All right, well, I said we're gonna talk about Apple, but actually, we're gonna take a break, come back and talk about these batter cases.

• 53:26Speaker 05

  Purchase new carpet from The Home Depot and get it installed for free right now. Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorator's Collection, Traffic Master, or Life Proof with Pet Proof Technology and see for yourself why nobody beats our prices. Enjoy new carpet with free installation right now at The Home Depot. Offer valid October 15th through November 1st, 2026. Exclusions apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com/license numbers.

• 53:58Speaker 06

  The action's on the court, and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prices, and details.

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Dieter, can you walk me through this Apple battery case shenanigans?

• 54:33Speaker 02

  So, they surprise released battery cases for the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, which nobody was really like sure if they were gonna do or not. And because they were like surprise released, there was a whole lot of questions. And, full disclosure, we got this wrong in our initial article, we had to correct it, and a bunch of other people, like most other people, got something wrong about these battery cases. Because, well, first of all, here's what's cool about them. They have a wireless charging pass-through, so that there's a coil on the back behind the battery and then it's able to wirelessly charge. They can also wirelessly charge on their own. One of the things that people got wrong at first, because it didn't seem to work right away, it may or may not work with an iPhone X. It should or it shouldn't. It does. Sometimes it pops up an error. For

• 55:17Speaker 02

  some people, it didn't. And then there was the question of the battery capacity, because the way that most people refer to battery capacity is in milliamps. When you look at the milliamp rating inside the thing, it says it's really small. So we're like, oh, wow, these batteries are really small. They don't add that much. But then it turns out that you need to like do- The full, you know, calculation with watt hours, you know, amps times volts, eagles, watts, blah, blah, blah. And then it turns out they're actually have more battery capacity and able to charge faster, blah, blah, blah, than previous cases. It turned into this whole big mess where Heim Gartenberg, electrical engineer, basically had to re-educate the entire Verge staff on how electricity works. And we had to like do a whole big, long back and forth to like, figure out just what are these cases?

• 56:01Speaker 02

  How much power do they have? How much do they provide? And how do they work? How do they actually do, you know, wireless charging? It was just a whole falderol.

• 56:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  The end of the story is that Apple is making some battery cases for the phones. They seem good. They should be able to get you up to 75% across all these phones. If you have an iPhone XR and you put a battery case on this thing, I mean, it'll just last like three months. Cause the 10R has great battery life. And most importantly, more important than any of the questions about how math and electricity works, is they moved the hump for the battery all the way down to the bottom instead of having a weird like thing, bulge sticking on the back.

• 56:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like it's a fully rounded thing instead of like a square glued on the back.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Yes, which I'm very happy about.

• 56:49Nilay Patel?

  So did Apple just print the number wrong on the inside?

• 56:52Speaker 02

  It's possible that the number on the inside is referring to one of two cells that are located inside the battery case. Because they, and that is why, since there's two of them, they just have to print the size of one of the batteries. Because there being two cells means that like when you're like, I don't know, that's, that's like one idea. It's very confusing.

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm gonna get one for my XS and then I'm never gonna charge again.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  The thing that gets me about all of these Apple accessories is it's just so obvious that they choke out their third parties so they can make their own. Right? Like there's not other, like Mophie just put out a case and it finally allows lightning pass through for audio. Right? Like it's just kind of obvious that Apple like waits and waits and waits until it's, they need to serve the market. And then they're like, here's, here's some ones that we like neutered from our, our third party MFI program. And then here's the one that you want from us.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:47Nilay Patel?

  They're just not good at ecosystems in that way. It's so funny to think of Apple's not good as ecosystems because their app ecosystem is so good, but the hardware ecosystem around their products is like always so messy, especially when it's one of the things they control.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  Well, it's been messy with USB-C, right? I was really hoping that when they switched the Macs to USB-C, not just the little MacBook, but they went across the whole line with it, that would mean that like all that stuff would settle down. And it super didn't. And this is why fundamentally I'm mad at them for not switching the iPhone to USB-C because that would have been a good forcing function for the industry to get it back together. And that still hasn't happened. Sigh.

• 58:22Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I tell you how Mophie solved their lightning port problem? And I didn't realize this. So, Apple made their case that has a lightning port at the bottom.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  And then it plugs into the lightning port of your phone. So, it's like a lightning pass-through. So, it charges your phone. And if you need to do lightning data or lightning audio, you plug into the lightning port and you can charge it from a charger. Mophie, which is not allowed to do a lightning pass-through, just left the lightning port open on the bottom of the phone. And they, their new battery case charges through Qi.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Charges your phone quote-unquote wirelessly.

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, you just play it in.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  It's gotta be super slow.

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  Which is way slower than a regular. But come on. Like.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  And wasteful, right? That's gotta be. I mean, I'm no Heim. I don't understand electricity, but that sounds like really wasteful.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  Heim Gartenberg understands electricity. Yeah. I mean, it's like that, right? Like, if you want to have partners in your ecosystem, let them make good products and not hacks. Right? Like, that's a hack. Like, Mophie made a hack to solve this problem. I still maintain the fact that there's not a single case with an integrated audio jack. Like, come on. Like, you're just neutering this ecosystem from existing. Because what? Because you want to sell your case? Like, you sell the $1,000 phone. Like, let someone else solve a problem and make some money. Like, it just drives me crazy. By the way, this entire segment, I realize, looking at this list, is about Apple and batteries.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  The whole thing. Because they revealed that one of the reasons they didn't sell as many iPhones last quarter as they want is normally they replace 1 to 2 million batteries. But then they announced the battery swap program after it was revealed that batteries make the processor slow down. And they did 10 million battery swaps?

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  I think it's 11. 11 million.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  11 million battery swaps.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  Revealed this. Yeah.

• 1:00:12Nilay Patel?

  Which is insane.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  It's a lot.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  And I think speaks so much to the conspiracy theory, which I still believe is a conspiracy theory, that Apple slowed down your phone to make you buy a new one. And the reason I say it speaks to it is, you know, people did, instead of buying a new phone, they replaced the battery for way cheaper and their phone got faster.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. How much of the, this big number was people like, just not realizing that that was even an option for them? That's the conspiracy theory, if it's a conspiracy that I believe in. I just think that when this drama hit, people heard about it, and then Apple announced this program, people were like, "Oh, you can do that? And it might actually work?" And that's why that number hit 11 million instead of 1 million. Cause like, it was like a, a cool insider hot tip, hot tip, secret trick that only a million people knew. And now everybody knows that if your phone is slowing down, you don't want to buy a new phone, you can spend way less money, get the battery replaced, and it might be worth a shot to see if it'll just feel good again.

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  My read on it is, nobody, nobody made the association between battery life and performance before.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:14Nilay Patel?

  So I think a lot, it's, it's fairly hard to live in a city or go to a mall and not see like an iPhone repair shop. They're around. Like, they just, they appear in the wild. And of course they're going to change your battery. So I think people knew, "My battery life is sucking, I can, I can replace the battery." No one thought, "My phone is slow and crappy, I should replace the battery."

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  So I think there was an education there. I don't know that Apple can, I, I, I really and truly believe that they, they were slowing their phones down for the reasons they said. Right? Like, we've said it on the show many times, like, Apple is many things, they're very frustrating, they have never just like openly lied to us in this way. So I truly believe that they were like, "Look, the phones would just turn off." Right? And they, they said they're going to do it again with the iPhones 10.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Like, they're gonna, they're gonna modulate performance to make sure the phones don't just like randomly turn off when you, when the battery capacity is diminished. So you, you, I believe them. But I don't think they were prepared for, everyone thinks their phone is fast enough. If you can just like keep performing at that level, then they're not going to say, "I need a A12 Bionic."

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:16Nilay Patel?

  Every one of these phones already has so much headroom beyond what people are doing with them. Which, by the way, if you remember that list of apps, is Netflix, Gmail, Instagram Messenger, Stat Chat, TikTok, like, you don't need an H12 Bionic for that stuff.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  And they're never gonna be able to unring this bell, right? Like, you know, going back to the concern about their cordial numbers and how many iPhones do they sell and whatever, and I don't care how many iPhones they sell, I fundamentally don't. But, from now on, when a new iPhone comes out, one of the default things that people will say is, "I don't need that, I'm just gonna replace my battery."

• 1:02:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  Like, that's a new response to the iPhone coming out that didn't exist a year and a half ago, two years ago, and that's gonna have an effect on them forever.

• 1:03:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, or they can just raise the price of battery swaps. I mean, like, it turns out this battery, Johnny Ive, he milled it himself out of aluminum. It's $700. Okay, so that's batteries, and then, AirPower, we talked about the new battery case, instruction manual for the new battery case mentions AirPower, says you can charge it on an AirPower charging mat, and there's a rumor that it's gonna be in production now, it's gonna happen. You recall that the reason it didn't happen, by the way, the rumor was that it was starting on fire. So presumably, they've solved that problem at scale.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  AirPower is like, it's like one of those running jokes.

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  Like, you know how I do a segment every week and it always has the same name? That's, for Apple, it's called AirPower.

• 1:03:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, my question is, and Paul, we should get to that segment, my question is, how many people at Christmas got, like, a knockoff? Like, my sister got one. She got a Qi charging pad that has a spot for her watch and a spot for her phone, and it works. So, how many people are gonna buy an AirPower that already got this thing? Cause there's endless variety of AirPower knockoffs that are just a little crappier. Cause, you know, the thing with AirPower is that you can put it anywhere for $129. But if you just buy the crap one on Amazon for like $35, you have to put them in specific spots.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Nilay Patel?

  So like, I just, you gotta wonder. Anyway, Paul. My man, every week, you just mentioned it, it's called AirPower.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's called AirPower, usually.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  It's usually called Air Power, but this, this week I wanted to call it, please replace Magenta. Because this is, I, I didn't make it all the way through both of your, or all of your CES podcast episodes, but I didn't hear you guys talk about the inkjet printer for your face.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  No, we did not on the podcast, no.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  Procter and Gamble's Opti Wand, that's O P T E. It's like an inkjet printer for your face. It's you just, I don't know how it really works, but it seems like you just drag it across your face and then it looks at your face and it looks for blemishes and then it covers them over with tone appropriate makeup in that one spot. It's very exciting. It's like an inkjet printer for your face. That's basically all that needs to be said.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  The comments on this thing, on the, on this thing were really heartening. My face has gotten red because I'm old and so like I will wear sunscreen that's got a little tint to it sometimes. But when I'm on camera, I gotta like powder. And, you know, typically when you see a bunch of sites write about some sort of beauty gadget, there's a bunch of, you know, I'm just gonna say like a bunch of guys that are just like, screw this thing, this is stupid. And, uh, you know, like the, the default reaction to beauty gadgets is usually like, yes, this is dumb. But everyone's like, oh yeah, actually, sure, I could use this. This is interesting. Like this, this could actually make, make it easier because like figuring out what, you know, kind of, you know, foundation color, what tone I might want is a thing that a lot

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  of people are just really dumb about and a thing that like can automate that and is also a neat little tech gadget that can, you know, customize it to where it is on your face and so on. I was, I was really pleased by the reaction that I saw to this thing. This thing itself might be complete, complete garbage and terrible and will burn a hole through your cheek. Like, to be clear, I'm not endorsing this thing. I'm endorsing the reaction that I saw of a surprising amount of interest and acceptance in the idea of this thing.

• 1:06:43Nilay Patel?

  Can I give you my admittedly somewhat addled theory to where, where some of this acceptance is coming from? Everyone spends more time on camera now than ever before. It doesn't matter who you are. Right, like you have a, you point a camera at yourself, you like, you have some dream of being a YouTuber in the back of your mind. You are on Instagram stories, other people and you're like, ah, oh, I should have covered that up.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, yeah, you know, there's like 50% of the population has been doing that for a long time.

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  Maybe I should do that too.

• 1:07:23Nilay Patel?

  It's like, you can, you can just like see it coming, like the, you know, the YouTubers, they're like, as always ahead of the curve a little bit. They're like, oh, I should look, I should look better than I do because there's a camera pointed at me all the time.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  It's, it's so tough. So I, you know, all of us have done a lot of like being on camera. And so we get makeup for that. And I always feel like I look a lot better on camera after I get makeup. But then I always like, and it's so, it's so important to me to take it all off. And then I see other photos of me and they look terrible. And well, it's because I don't have makeup, but I don't know. I really go back and forth on, on this whole thing.

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna send you an inkjet printer for your face that will definitely fry a hole through your skin.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  Maybe this will finally, yeah, maybe, maybe accept that I could just.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  Fix it.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  Be a little, just a little bit more, if, if there was a slider and it just made me 5% more beautiful.

• 1:08:14Nilay Patel?

  Look, I have two requests for, uh, our sort of shared social video aesthetic. One, everyone just get over it, touch it up a little bit. And two, for God's sake, fix the white balance. The dominant video aesthetic in this world is like shitty orange white balance. We're gonna, we're all gonna wake up 15 years from now and be like, 2019 was orange, as far as we can tell. And it's like when little kids are like, was the world black and white in the old days? They're all gonna be like, was the world bright orange for a few years on the internet? Those are the two things I requested you do. Fix your white balance. Touch it, touch it right up with an inkjet printer for your face. All right. Can we end on Samsung?

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, we should probably, we should probably make it pretty quick, but I just, there's been enough Samsung stuff that I really wanted to talk about it. They announced their event, I believe it's February 20th. We, we've already shown off a prototype of the folding phone. I'm hoping we see something final on February 20th. And they're going to be announcing, of course, the S10. It's the 10 year anniversary of the Galaxy phones. And according to the Wall Street Journal, you like count up how many phones that they are planning on having this year, maybe even at this event. And it's five.

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  So there's the S10 and the S10 Plus. Those are to be expected. There's a new, like, another one that they mentioned that was like a low end one or a mid-range one, or it's not very clear. There's a rumor like the, it won't have the in-screen fingerprint sensor, but it'll be on the power button on the side and, you know, we don't know. It's sort of, I don't know, I don't know what, where to categorize that. That's three. And then there's a fourth one, which is they're gonna launch a 5G phone on Verizon. Probably later in the spring, they could announce that as well. And then the fifth one is the, the foldable phone. So, two S10s, another one that's a new kind of S10 or something. The foldable phone and the 5G phone. That's a lot. That's just a lot.

• 1:10:08Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, Apple announced three. So, I mean, it's like, this is just two more than Apple, but still.

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, the foldable phone and the 5G phone are, are vanity projects. They're concept cars, right?

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're Corvettes.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's three phones and two Corvettes.

• 1:10:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then everyone's gonna end up in the Chevy Cruze, which was like the $400.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  Our Corvette, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm not a phone, a car expert, but Corvettes are concept cars?

• 1:10:35Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no. That's, I said concept car, but that's not what I meant. Okay. The foldable phone is a concept car.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  Right? They announce it, it's gonna be on stage, everyone's gonna be like, hey, look at that foldable phone. Dream big. I have better thoughts about Samsung than I did before.

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  Like, they're steering, like BMW announced a car where the steering wheel is, is an iPod.

• 1:10:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like, you're crazy, man. Samsung, those are dreamers. I'd like to associate myself with them.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:11:01Nilay Patel?

  It's a concept car. Then you got your Corvette, which is the 5G phone. Which is like horribly impractical unless you live in Dallas.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  The bad gas mileage.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like,

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  Shows a certain lack of taste.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:11:16Nilay Patel?

  Can I say that?

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Is that, is that true?

• 1:11:18Nilay Patel?

  I hate you both so much.

• 1:11:22Nilay Patel?

  And then you got your like Silverado, which is like the S10 plus, like your pickup truck.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a Silverado. Is that a pickup?

• 1:11:30Nilay Patel?

  That's the Chevy's pickup truck.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  It's a big, yeah.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  Right? So you got your best sellers.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  And then, and then you got your like Chevy Cruze, which is like your $400. You walked in thinking you were buying Corvette and you're like, looked at your wallet and you're like, I'll take your midsize reasonable car. But you know, it makes me think that I'm in the brand halo of this foldable phone.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:11:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, that is actually how car makers think. I have no idea if that's how Samsung thinks. I'm also pleasantly surprised at how many, how many popular Chevys I'm aware of.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's wild. You didn't mention the Malibu, which I'm impressed by. Um.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  Looks so bad. Well, dude, whenever people are like, the American car makers are ceasing production of sedans because all people want are trucks. And then you like, look at Honda and Toyota's sedan sales and they're just fine. It's like, yeah, because they didn't make their cars look like whales.

• 1:12:24Nilay Patel?

  They actually look like angry spaceships and apparently that's what people want. Anyway, so that's, is that February 20th? So like a month from now?

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. And that's right before Mobile World Congress. So presumably Samsung is not going to be doing much at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is right after. It's like February 23rd, I think.

• 1:12:41Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm excited for the S10, if only because I'm excited to try one UI with its giant headers.

• 1:12:49Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  I'm also interested to see if they can like catch up on cameras a little bit because they, there might be some extra, who knows how many lenses they're going to put on these things. Um, but the, the de facto opinion for the past, you know, a couple of years now has been Pixel wins, iPhones a close second. So is the S9, sorta. Um, so is the Note 9, sorta. And I would love for Samsung to like, get back in that mix a little bit more aggressively in terms of camera quality. They've always been up there as like in that, in that mix of the top three. Um, but they haven't definitively won in quite a while. And I'd like to see them try to take a crack at it.

• 1:13:30Nilay Patel?

  They have to stop doing their crazy smoothing choices.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Well, there's that.

• 1:13:34Nilay Patel?

  That's the, that's the thing that keeps them out of it. The race. Although, when Marques Brownlee did his huge bake off of cameras.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  That was the best.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  The worst cameras one because they took the brightest photos and it feels like Samsung could just like turn that knob. Just like, it's the same camera, but the default exposure setting is like two ticks up. Uh, they would win every, they would win every comparison.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  We haven't talked about the most important thing.

• 1:13:58Nilay Patel?

  What's that?

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  It's gonna be hole punch. And I thought I saw a picture of like a double hole punch, uh, in some cases.

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  The flagship S10 is gonna be hole punch.

• 1:14:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, with an in-display sensor. I love the hole punch.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Would I rather have a notch than a hole punch?

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Why not?

• 1:14:13Nilay Patel?

  The hole punch, if done correctly, and the status bar just looks like another icon, which is dope.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Uh, I see what you're saying. Okay.

• 1:14:20Nilay Patel?

  So if you get it right, it just looks like another thing in your, in your icon tray.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  You're making an aesthetic argument, not like a screen real estate argument.

• 1:14:28Nilay Patel?

  Because the screen real estate argument has been a lie the entire time.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  How tall is your notification bar, Neelai? It looks nothing like an icon.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  No, no, I'm saying if you get it right, if they do the software right and they make the thing, you know, like they do, like, the pixel notch is gigantic and they're still making the screen space argument, right? So if you make the notification shade, like, do it right, or the menu bar, correct, and they size up all the other icons, then it's like, alright, there's another cool icon that's actually like a hardware sensor. That's neat. I don't know if they're gonna do that.

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  Neelai, you, you assign a story to me every Vergecast. I'm assigning a story to you. And here's the title. You already have enough pixels.

• 1:15:08Nilay Patel?

  No, I can't write that story. I don't feel that. I have no passion in my heart for that story.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  You're gonna knock down the argument that like notches and hole punches are about getting more screen real estate. It's not about getting more pixels. It's about making it look good.

• 1:15:20Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm with you on that. I do not, I cannot, and I think the listeners of the show know, that I do not believe you have enough pixels.

• 1:15:28Nilay Patel?

  You need more of them. We should get more of them as, as a, as a, as a culture, as a people.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Okay.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  My problem with the hole punch is I think my most used app other than 3's is YouTube, right?

• 1:15:40Nilay Patel?

  Other than 3's?

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Top left, if, if you're looking at a full screen video in YouTube on Android, top left exits out of full screen. Top right is like the three dots. Bottom right also exits out of full screen. Bottom left is the, I, I, I don't know, you can't cover up one of these quarters, it seems like.

• 1:16:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, corner is historically the most valuable real estate on the screen. Among the most valuable real estate on the screen, especially for UI stuff. So we'll see how it goes. I'm just saying, if you get it right, it might look like it's not even there, which is, which is the goal, right? Like, the real goal is you completely hide it behind screen and it only appears when you need it. Which would be cool.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  I think, I think, what if it is just a little thing that sticks out the top like on these laptops? The mega notch. I'm ready for a mega notch phone.

• 1:16:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm super pro mega notch on phones. I would, I would be down for it. I think that would look like retro future cool. Well, that's the Vergecast, everyone. We've started saying mega notch too much.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  Little bunny ears. You can put one, one on each side. So you have, it's symmetrical. Well, bunny ear, or what, what's the, the trio? The trio had a huge, like mega notch, which was an antenna. Remember antennas?

• 1:16:53Nilay Patel?

  I was gonna say. Want to bring back a tennis stubs?

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. And put a little camera on them.

• 1:16:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna just go ahead and say, this has been among the most Vergecasts of all Vergecasts. Paul's like, still going.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  I missed the 5GE. I missed 5GE. That happened during CES. And I just wanted to make sure we're all on it. Like.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm not, I don't use AT&T.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  AT&T can do whatever they want, right? But at least to me, this means AT&T thinks that the people, its users are total idiots.

• 1:17:25Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  Right? Like, you're so dumb that we can sell you something and just change the name of it. It's like selling, it's like selling people Corvettes, but really they're Malibus.

• 1:17:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  They just switched the logo on it and they're like, it looked, look, we got you a Corvette. Like, so how do we publicly shame AT&T better? That's all I'm wondering.

• 1:17:49Nilay Patel?

  We're doing it right now.

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:17:51Nilay Patel?

  We've been working really hard. I think about it every morning when I wake up.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:17:56Nilay Patel?

  They have no shame and their CEOs out there being like, I'm so proud of the fact that we changed the narrative in the industry. Yeah, he said, I'm glad I have beachfront property in my competitors' heads. And I think, and I think Verizon's like, I'm, I'm glad we have a 5G network. Like.

• 1:18:11Nilay Patel?

  I think it's just, it's just that time. And I think all we can do is point out they're not selling you shit. Like Paul, if there's ever an argument for a little bit of like government standards body action, it's this. It's what you say should be true and it should be rooted in some meeting and you should be punished if you lie. And wireless standards have just never had that in this country. Right. In Europe, like they all pick and they have to say what they're doing. Even their phones, right? It's like, it says H plus and then it says 4G and then it says 4G plus for LTA. Like, we don't do it. So AT&T is like, what about 5GE?

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  I just want them to suffer for being liars.

• 1:18:52Nilay Patel?

  You know, when you said we should be on it, I was gonna ask Dieter if he's on Verizon? Because technically he probably is. Cause if you have LTA on Verizon, you're on what AT&T is calling 5GE.

• 1:19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't know what version of LTM on Verizon right now.

• 1:19:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, you're like a major American city.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  Something.

• 1:19:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like, it's not working. Anyhow, look, if you've taken one thing away from this podcast, it's to do what Paul says. It's to take a minute out of your day and shame AT&T. Just like find a way to do it. But like in a polite way, like don't walk into an AT&T store and like scream at it. Like they're cool.

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  It's probably like a fun, cute way to shame them for being liars.

• 1:19:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. Everybody work on it and tweet at Paul with your ideas. Don't.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  Also what car he should buy. Cause I don't, I don't think that he's pulled that off.

• 1:19:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's obviously a Corvette. Okay. Please go listen to Better Worlds. If you're not on the verge extra feed already, jump over to it. Uh, our first podcast went up. It's just such a fun project. It's going to run through mid February. We got videos. Uh, they're amazing little animated shorts going up on the YouTube channel. We got stories on the website. We got podcasts in the extra feed. So go over there right now, subscribe to it. We, we would love it if you listen and let us know what you think. I'm super excited to be doing something that's just like big and positive for the world at this moment. So, uh, go check that out. Please follow us Twitter, Instagram. I'm, uh, at reckless Dieters, at backlon Pauls, at future Paul. We'd love to hear from you. Go give us five stars on Apple Podcasts. That'd be wonderful.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  We've earned it.

• 1:20:15Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of Apple Podcasts, go listen to all of season three of Why'd You Push That Button? It wrapped up. They did a cool show at CES that is definitely worth listening to. So check that out. You can also check out Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Check out Function with Neil Dash, which is super fun. All of those part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we will see you next week. Rock and roll.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  Paul.

• 1:20:37Nilay Patel?

  Promo code.

• 1:20:56Speaker 07

  Fall savings are happening now at The Home Depot. Save up to $500 on select appliances. Plus, enjoy free delivery when you spend $998 or more. From prepping to cooking to cleaning up, Frigidaire has you covered. The custom Flex Temp drawer switches from fridge to freezer. With more than 15 cooking modes, including stone baked pizza mode, you can enjoy restaurant-quality pizza in as little as two minutes. Then clean up with the Frigidaire Dishwasher, featuring the industry's fastest normal wash cycle. Shop fall savings now at The Home Depot. Off the ballot through October 21st. U.S. only. See store online for details.