Apple's new iPhone SE, OnePlus 8 Pro review, and Verizon buys BlueJeans

Stories discussed this week: The Interface Live on Zoom: the hidden history of Instagram, with Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier In a self-isolated world, developers are learning to make games from home How GM and Ford switched out pickup trucks for breathing machines The search for COVID-19 treatments shows how messy science can be How Medium became the best and worst place for coronavirus news Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows How you’ll use Apple and Google’s coronavirus tracking tool Apple’s second-gen iPhone SE is here: all the news and details Even ‘small’ phones are big now The iPhone SE 2’s camera setup is going to lean on Apple’s software The new Moto G Stylus and G Power are surprisingly adept cameraphones Samsung’s Galaxy S10 Lite will launch in the US on April 17th for $650 Google’s midrange Pixel 4A could launch soon, and there may not be an XL version Apple is tweaking how MacBooks charge to extend battery lifespan Apple’s new Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro goes up for preorder, ships next week Apple’s over-ear headphones reportedly have swappable ear pads and headbands Here are five things with four wheels that cost less than the Mac Pro’s $700 wheel kit Go read this analysis of what the iPad Pro’s LIDAR sensor is capable of OnePlus 8 Pro review: big league OnePlus 8 review: familiar formula OnePlus announces the Bullets Wireless Z headphones The $579 RedMagic 5G is the first phone with a 144Hz display Verizon is buying BlueJeans, one of Zoom’s videoconferencing rivals Google is reportedly building its own processor for Pixels and Chromebooks Foxconn’s buildings in Wisconsin are still empty, one year later Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Today on Vergecast, Apple introduced the new iPhone SE. We talk about that, talk a little bit about that new magic keyboard for the iPad Pro. We get into the OnePlus 8 review and we talk a little bit about what's going on with Apple and Google's coronavirus tracing system. It's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:45Speaker 02

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  Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse. Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 1:03Speaker 04

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• 1:10Speaker 02

  Hi, I, uh, let's get you a basket.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of teeny tiny phones. Little ones, well, they're getting bigger every day. I'm your friend, Eli. I'm here. Dieter Bohn is here. Also your friend. Paul Miller is here.

• 1:29Speaker 05

  Hello. I would like to report that my application last week to be friends with people has been approved by the authorities and I'm now also people's friend.

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  Very well done. I'm happy for your friends.

• 1:42Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  We need community in times like this.

• 1:44Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  Real quick, I want to call out a thing that we're doing. We're trying something new. As you may remember, Casey was doing some Interface Live events before the current times, where he would meet in person, interview somebody. It's great. We're trying to do one virtually. We're doing Interface Live on Zoom. Casey's guest will be Bloomberg reporter Sarah Fryer. She's author of the new book, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, which I am told is very, very good. So you don't have to be where Casey is to watch this interview this time. You just join him on Zoom virtually. That's happening on Tuesday, April 21st, from 5:30 to 6:30 PM Pacific Time, 8:30, 9:30 Eastern. There's only space in the webinar for 500 people.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  This is a virtual scarcity. It's a concept that we're investigating. But anyway, sign up. You can just go to the verge.com/Interface, check it out. We're very excited to try this stuff. We might do some other things like it in the future. This is our first one. We're excited. Check it out. Interface Live with Casey and author of No Filter, Sarah Fryer. It's happening on Tuesday, April 21st. Also, before we start, people gave us an feedback that they do appreciate a little bit of virus news updates before we move on to things that aren't the virus. So I'm going to keep doing that. So first, unsurprisingly, you will note that it's Friday. The show comes out on Friday. Five weeks ago, on a Friday, the President of the United States

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  promised a website to be built, I believe, by 17,000 Google engineers. Seventeen thousand? It was 1700? 10 million Google engineers. Everyone at Google was going to make a website that allowed anyone to schedule a test at a drive-through testing center in the parking lot of one of our nation's major retailers and then get results on that same website. Dieter, does that website exist?

• 3:40Speaker 06

  No, there is a website. There's many websites.

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  There are many websites.

• 3:44Speaker 06

  Made by Google and Google's sister companies, but none of them, except for the one from Google's sister company, will definitely get you to a test. And even the one from Google's sister company, you gotta be in the Bay Area.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So there's a Sundar Pichai interview in Time Magazine today, and they asked him about it. And I would say one of the most skillful deflections of all time. He was like, we were all, we were working on things. And so we continued to work on them.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  So it goes. So that's website, five weeks. Some other stories, just want to call it from the site. Like I said, the second order effects of the virus are really interesting, what's happening to culture and society. So Megan Farukmanesh has a really interesting story about how game developers are learning to make games at home. And it's how everyone's working from home. Check that out. Sean O'Kane, I actually asked for this story because I was personally curious. Sean dug into ventilator tech, how they work, where the state of the art is, the different kinds of ventilator designs that exist. Can I just point out ventilator tech, way more complicated than you might have guessed. Super complicated, very hard to use, right? And so there's a big push to somehow make them smarter and easier to use. You can deploy them more widely. Sean dug into all of that,

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  also into how car companies like GM and Ford are well suited to spin up massive production of ventilators, and a little bit on Tesla's approach, which is more like modifying other kinds of, they're all basically pumps, right? So Tesla's modifying some other kinds of breathing apparatus to work as ventilators. So really great story. Like, again, it's one that I asked for because I was so curious on the technology of ventilators. So Sean did that. Nicole Wettsman, who was just on the Emergencies Podcast, you probably heard from her. She wrote a great story, kind of broadly showing how messy science is, and how we're all kind of like, living through a worldwide scientific race to better understand and treat the virus. And like, understanding that science is messy is really important. It's, it's one of those

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  like, big step backs. I really enjoyed it. It kind of puts everything in a perspective. So that's really interesting. Read that. And then Zoe Schiffer wrote a really great piece about Medium. As you know, we pay a lot of attention to how social platforms do content moderation. Medium has not had to do it really at the scale of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, but there's so much blogging about the virus happening on Medium that they had to roll out some very specific rules, and they're sort of enforcing them inconsistently, causing themselves some problems. Medium, one of the things in this piece that I think is really interesting is Medium's design makes everything on Medium look the same. Whether it's, we have friends who work at 1.0, which is Medium's tech publication, that

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  stuff is great. They're, that's a journalistically rigorous organization. Something that 1.0 publishes on Medium looks almost exactly the same as something a stranger publishes on Medium. And that flattening of design actually leads to some... Some consequences that Medium is having to grapple with. That piece is really interesting. Zoe put it up yesterday. Check that out. And then this one is sort of my favorite. It's like right in the verge of strike zone. McKenna Kelly dug deep into unemployment systems around the country. I think there's over a dozen states that she found where their unemployment, the backend unemployment databases are written in COBOL, which is like 60-ish years old. Paul, before the show last week, Paul was, we were talking about the syntax

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  of COBOL. It's a very hard language to write in. It's very good at math. Like it's, it has, it has fixed point math in it. So it can actually do a bunch of these calculations very accurately, very quickly, in a way that modern languages kind of aren't able to do. But the systems are old. They, they're not well documented. The people who made them are maybe not around anymore. And this flood to get COBOL programmers to help update these systems, let them deal with demand, let them, the surging demand of unemployment claims is actually a big deal. And you just look at the, the sort of like stats on searches for COBOL, the rates for COBOL developers, they're all, they're all just skyrocketing.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  There's definitely a lot of developers I follow on Twitter that are like, I should learn COBOL. Ha, ha, ha. Unless, I think they've got like a hello world COBOL program. But you know, it's like, there's learning the language, which I think there's thousands or maybe millions of developers that could probably get up to speed on a new language in like a month or two. But then learning, like doing the archaeology on a really old system without breaking it, right?

• 8:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  That's really tough.

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  And so in all this sort of modern software engineering practices that you would do to make something scale fast, COBOL programs are all running on mainframes. You can't just make them scale. Like it doesn't, it doesn't, you can't just like move it all to an AWS server and then like ramp up scale.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  I think mainframe emulators running COBOL are gonna be, gonna be a hot thing this year.

• 8:36Nilay Patel?

  So someone told me that AWS Lambda actually supports Kible now. And they can do these like automated ports, but you can't, you can't risk it. Right? Like, that's actually the problem. The, the problem is the, the willingness to risk actual downtime, to actually break it, right? It's very low. Someone, and if you are this person, please tweet at me again, because I cannot for life for me find it. Someone tweeted me that one approach that people are talking about is to actually build a modern front end that can cope with demand and then have it feed, feed the data into the Kible backend at a fixed rate. Right. So you build sort of the front end on AWS and can deal with a surging demand. And then it sort of rate limits with the Kible server. Is that how the IRS website's working right now?

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  The IRS, we actually, Addy wrote about it yesterday. This is, it's like a masterpiece of bad error messages. It is unbelievable. What, the error message, what is the error message? Uh, payment status not available. Payment status not available. So if you were, if you were qualified for the $1,200 payment that was supposed to go out to, to everybody, the IRS started processing those. You know, you get a direct deposit, it's way faster than getting the physical check in the mail. And so people are checking, some people have gotten them. We, we've heard from some people who've gotten these direct deposits. A lot of people are just getting this catch-all error message, which is just. Schrodinger's payment status. It's like, what does this mean? There's a link to an FAQ. If you go halfway down the FAQ, it gives you like five reasons that have nothing to do with

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  each other for why you might have this message. And then Addy pointed out that also it says, other reasons available on IRS.gov, but there's no link, even though it's the same website that you're on. It's like, go somewhere else on this website. So just like a bad design decision. Like, we know that error messages should be verbose and helpful. And our nation's government did not get that memo in 1995. When, when Microsoft sent it to everyone. So there's just a lot of that going on and a lot, Reid McKenna's, Addy's piece is really interesting because of the design story about the error message. McKenna's piece is, she did a lot of reporting. She talked to a lot of state governments that are dealing with COBOL issues, trying to scale up demand.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  The governor of New Jersey is on television asking for COBOL programmers, like that's where we are right now. And one thing that was really cool about this, people started reaching out to McKenna, asking how they can help, how they, they might, they're like retired COBOL programmers or they're willing to learn. So we're going to do a story next week, just some resources for, if you have the time and ability, the experience, we're going to help, we're going to do a story that helps you direct that. So that you might help. We're figuring out the best ways people can help. So we're working on that pretty hard. Okay. And then the last big virus thing that we should talk about, we did the emergency podcast with Casey Addy and Nicole about the Apple, Google contact tracing system.

• 11:27Nilay Patel?

  We have since learned more, Casey's been covering this really closely. We've all been paying attention to it, but we've learned a little bit more about how the system will work. The two things to me that really stood out, one, Dieter, I think Google said they're actually going to distribute the update via Google Play, which is critically important.

• 11:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I actually got some follow up from them on this. So they are distributing via Google Play instead of just a straight up Android update, which is, thank God, because it's a straight up Android update. Never know if you'll ever get that ever. And you gotta wait for all sorts of carrier stuff. So that'll just go out. It will support everything from Android 6.0, Marshmallow and up. So it goes back pretty far, which is great. I think it probably goes back further than like when Bluetooth LE started hitting Android phones. But the, the important thing to know is distributing via Google Play is great, but not all Android phones run Google Play. And there's like two big ones to think about or worry about in that category. One is every single phone sown in China.

• 12:25Speaker 06

  Whether or not China really wants an anonymous system for people is an open question perhaps. But two, the other category of phones that it can't hit are Huawei phones sold outside of China. So what's going to happen there? Well, Android is open source for the most part, but not everything through Google Play is, but they do have this thing that they call Project Mainline, which lets them. Distribute Android updates via the Google Play infrastructure. And for Chinese companies, what they do is they just open source those updates. And then if the Chinese companies also happen to want to, you know, just do the same thing with their infrastructure, it's relatively easy for them to do. And it seems like that's what the plan is going to be for this system as well.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is like the ultimate Android fragmentation story.

• 13:12Speaker 05

  I would love if this is open source, like, obviously, like, when Google and Apple actually distribute software to phones, it's a binary. So, you know, we can't audit it, like, coming from them. But just, you know, a lot of, for me, all of the gold standard in cryptography and like cryptocurrency type stuff, all of that is open source because you want so many eyes on it, looking for the potential flaws, like, oh, actually, you thought you had an anonymous system, but an attacker with this set of information could actually identify people. Uh oh, you know?

• 13:52Speaker 06

  So I maybe spoke a little bit inaccurately there. I don't know that this this specific system is going to be open source. In fact, I kind of suspect the answer is that it won't be. When I asked specifically about that, I was told that Google's going to offer code audits to, you know, to other organizations that want to create a similar system or, you know, use the seems like mainline sort of thing. So that doesn't mean that may mean that, like, it won't be.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  So Google might just help them create something that would be API compatible?

• 14:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. And also, here's the thing, whatever Google wants to do in order to support Huawei, it just like, it can't do it directly. Google's not allowed to provide software to Huawei, full stop. So they have to make a system that they believe in their hearts Huawei could use if it wanted to.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  Or they just don't, right? I mean, like, yeah, see, all their choice, right? You'd look at the market share Huawei phones outside of China and shrugy, right? On balance, the danger of someone gaming the system and issuing a false positive is very dangerous, right? So I think the instincts here are to keep it relatively locked down. I think they're tempering that by knowing that they need a lot of big name security researchers, big name consultants and experts to beat up on this thing. And they're, I think they're being open with the spec, they're being open with stuff. But I think the actual code. The idea, the ideas of how it will interact with the server, I think they're going to be pretty tight with because if you issue that false positive, this was Casey was saying, like, the real danger here is the false positive rate. If you make a bunch of people stay home

• 15:27Nilay Patel?

  that don't need to, or you scare a bunch of people and you haven't told them in person, people are going to stop using the system. The other thing that I think was more confusing to me, I think this was always their plan, and I think they needed to clarify it because it was confusing to me and I think a bunch of other people. They initially said, we're going to put out an API that apps can use, and then later we'll build it into the OS. And I think that just does, it never quite made any sense to me. Like, it sounded like first everyone would have to download an app, and then they would, later the system would get it. What they have since clarified, and which makes far more sense, I think they just didn't say it this way, but they've since clarified, they're building, Apple and Google are collaborating on the exchange of Bluetooth keys, so the format of those

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  keys. They're building that level of key detection and transmission into the operating system from the jump. It's like, the thing that is happening is the operating systems are getting the underlying Bluetooth key exchange system built. And then, an API is being created for apps to use that system. Then later, when they say built into the operating system, they're going to build a user interface into the operating system for that Bluetooth system. So I think that's like, was not made abundantly clear from the beginning. Like, they're, they're actually building the architecture into the OS from the first day, because you have to, to light up the radios. It's just, other apps will

• 16:51Nilay Patel?

  be able to turn it on, control it. Later, it will get pushed by the user, which makes sense, right? The hard part is, the part that you want out is the exchange of Bluetooth keys anonymously, and then sending to a server. The user interface can come later.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  We know that they've said that they're going to use, they're going to allow approved entities per government to, to release these apps. Obviously, Apple has a pretty good hold, not perfect, but pretty good hold on who can release an app on iOS. How is Google going to, to lock that down?

• 17:24Speaker 06

  Well, Google, Google can control the Google Play Store. Google also can scan for apps and remotely take them off of your phone if they want to. And they do that for malware regularly, even if they weren't installed via the Google Play Store. If you have Google Play services and you don't actively try and stop it, your phone is getting scanned all the time for known malware. It's not, maybe not as good as like a full on, you know, virus malware protection, whatever, but it's pretty solid. And so in theory, if they wanted to, they could just like, if something, if somebody starts distributing something that's malfeasant, they could just yank it.

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that level of control is like, here, here it is, like, like almost everything else with the virus. It's like, let's rethink all of our assumptions. Like, how much do you want Google to control the apps on your phone? How much do you want Apple to control? Right, zero. But when you say, in order to, to let people like go back to normal.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  That's always, that's always how they take your freedoms. In order for you to be more free, you gotta give up some of your freedoms. I, I, I don't know. I, it creeps me out. Like, I don't want them to control my phone. I don't want them to delete things off of my phone. I want to have, and so I would hope that they could build some sort of system that is not reliant on everybody in the system entirely perfectly behaved. Because if everybody has to be entirely perfectly behaved to interact with the system, then you have to control all the actions of every actor in the system.

• 18:57Speaker 06

  Well, if they can, if they can certify and limit who's allowed to upload a positive result to the server, then like that's, that's another layer of protection here. So they, if they can stop it there, then they don't need to like reach into your phone and, and shake it, Paul. They could just like not let the, the dirty app upload the data and it should be fine. But like, this is still, we're what, a month away from like the first phase of this thing getting released if they manage to hit their deadlines. So there are still just like open questions and not open questions, like how dare they just like, people gotta figure this shit out. And the other thing I'll say that's like most important is even if they get this a thousand percent right, they, they nail every single technical aspect of it.

• 19:40Speaker 06

  Bluetooth contact tracing, this, this entire system. Will only be one piece of a larger set of solutions that are going to require cooperation and solidarity amongst mass populations across state and like country lines. Like if people are waiting for this thing and they think that Google and Apple's framework for key anonymous Bluetooth keys is going to like solve our isolation problem? No, it's not.

• 20:07Nilay Patel?

  No. And in in in call me at this point, a dozen times on the emergency podcast, she just kept saying like, all this depends on massively scaled up testing.

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Yes. And I do want to say, because I'm sound, I'm pretty complaining right now. I do really appreciate how seriously Google and Apple seem to be taking privacy and security with this. I just think that ultimately you get the best privacy and security, not through obscurity.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  10 out of 10, I would agree with you normally, right? Like, yep, that's, that's, I believe that I'm idealistically believe in that. I think this moment is one of those, Nicole said this on the emergency podcast, public health has a different bar of privacy ethics, right? Like, if you were to do this manually, you would send people to everyone's house, knock on the door and be like, do you have a fever? Like, that's just a different way of thinking about how we collect information. And I think that the these conversations are just running into each other with this system. We got a month, it's opt in, you know, the the worst case scenario is that like, the system gets compromised and a bunch of location data leaks out, like, then you end up with this surveillance and and you're still trying to solve the test and trace problem. So, yeah, Paul, I'm like rethink my assumptions

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  is like one of those, it's, I've had to do it more because of the current situation than I've had to in a long time. It's like, in many ways, I think it's healthy, but this system, I think, is going to really shine a light on some of those core assumptions of how we build computers, who who we want to protect us from bad actors with our specific devices in our hand. Because there people are going to be interested in attacking the system when it rolls out. Because of course they are. That's what have we learned about computers? Okay, that's all of our stuff. There's not, there's a little iPhone to talk about. Let's take a break. We'll come back. Let's talk about the iPhone SE.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Welcome to Sephora.

• 22:29Speaker 07

  I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  I got you.

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  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.

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• 22:52Speaker 02

  Hi, I, uh...

• 22:54Speaker 07

  Let's get you a basket.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter.

• 22:59Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 23:00Nilay Patel?

  So is it the iPhone SE 2020? Is it the iPhone SE 2? Do they call it Edition Special?

• 23:06Speaker 06

  Oh, shouldn't it be the, oh my God. Apple refers to it as the... Maybe they don't use the because Apple hates articles, but it's second generation iPhone SE. They must use the for second generation. It's the second generation. However, is any, is everybody going to be writing the second generation iPhone SE? No, they're not. So I'm sure Apple is just hoping we'll just call it the iPhone SE.

• 23:29Nilay Patel?

  No, Apple, Apple hates the idea that if they haven't given it a number, that the number exists.

• 23:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  Like the previous iPhone SE no longer exists. Right? There, there was a, there was a, there was a guy named Eric. Now there's a new Eric. We're never going to talk about old Eric again. There's only this Eric.

• 23:45Speaker 05

  Well, the MacBook and MacBook Pro version of that is you, you typically do the years in parentheses.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  But Apple will like admit. It's weird, right? They will admit that they put out a MacBook in 2016 and then another MacBook in late 2018 or whatever. With this, they're just like iPhone SE.

• 24:02Speaker 05

  Can we call it the iPhone SE Touch Bar?

• 24:06Nilay Patel?

  All right. So it's an iPhone SE, whatever this thing is. I'm, I'm gonna call it the iPhone SE 2020. That's what I've settled on in my head.

• 24:12Speaker 06

  I can tell you what this thing is if you're familiar with iPhones in three bullet points.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 24:18Speaker 06

  iPhone eight body, iPhone 10 R hardware for the camera, iPhone 11 processor, which parentheses helps improve the camera.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  Okay, because of the, the neural engine.

• 24:33Speaker 06

  So the, the things that are new, I don't, I like finding the matrix of what the iPhone eight could do with the camera and what the iPhone 10 R could do and what this one could do. I like actually have to look it up a little bit. But they are doing depth portrait on both the single lens on the back and the single lens on the front on the selfie camera. It's like monocular depth, something, something, whatever. So they are doing a little bit more computational stuff. And that enables it to do, do a few more photo modes or whatever. So in theory, this should take better photos than say like an iPhone 10 R. We are assuming it's the same like sensor and camera setup as the iPhone 10 R. We don't have that dead to rights, but that seems to be.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  I will say this, Engadget has it confirmed from Apple that it is at least not the same sensor as the 11.

• 25:22Speaker 06

  Okay, great.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, that, that's a big deal.

• 25:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, you can get to it, but like the 11 sensor was a dramatic improvement from the, the XS and 10 R.

• 25:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's true. So there's a bunch of stuff to talk about beyond the camera, but like, we need to talk about the size because it is not tiny like the original iPhone SE. It is the iPhone six size. It is the exact same design as the iPhone six, into the iPhone success, into the seven, into the eight. We've had this design since 2014. This design, by the way, was a big fricking deal back then because it was big. This phone, which everyone's like, oh, they made it, they made, they're like keeping the small one, was the big phone. And that is, it was a huge watershed moment for Apple.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  Just to be clear, because it's not the eight plus.

• 26:07Speaker 06

  No, there's not going to be a plus version of the SE. The eight plus is still going to be sold in certain markets. It's like, there's like inventory out there. The reason I'm harping on the size thing, like, you know, people, you gripe about design or whatever, but basically every Android phone now has found a way to decrease the size of the bezels on the top and the bottom. And it, you get a much bigger phone in a smaller body. And it's not like a, it's not a stupid thing. It's like actually matters to have that extra screen space or to have the smaller phone. And Apple could have, had they wanted to, put in the work to redesign this, you know, basic phone body that they've had since 2014 to somehow make the bezels smaller. They could have moved, they could have moved

• 26:52Speaker 06

  the home button. God knows they wouldn't want to do that. They could have gone ahead and, you know, I don't know, some other method. They could have put an in-screen fingerprint sensor. They would never do that. They could have, you know, like everyone else is doing it.

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  They could have changed, I mean, it appears to be the same display.

• 27:07Speaker 06

  It appears to be the same display. It's got True Tone. You know, we asked about this, there was a call with press and, you know, Apple will never confirm, oh, this is the exact same part. But it's like, you ask, hey, is this the exact same part? And they're like, this is an amazing, you know, display that 500 million people have loved.

• 27:24Speaker 05

  Can I spin a tale that's wildly optimistic? This is a parts bin phone. Apple looked at what it's got. How do we make a $400 phone? Here, here are the components. Oh dang, it's really good because we got this fast processor and we just have plenty of it. $400, wildly successful. Then, Apple makes a phone with no bezels, the exact same size as this, keeps the metal unibody because it's just beautiful. And I actually really like, I was picking up my iPhone 7 recently and it's just, it's light compared to my Pixel and it's smaller and feels good in the hand, you know. It's a, it is a great design. I

• 28:04Speaker 05

  do still miss like the iPhone 5. I prefer the iPhone 5 to the iPhone 4. I would buy an iPhone 5 SE in a heartbeat. But you could see, if Apple was so successful, then like they could come back at this with like, the price is the, is the parts bin aspect, right?

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  Right. They've been making this phone for so long that all of the tooling in the factory to make this basic phone. Is like paid for 10 times over, right? When, when they make a new phone, they have to do new tooling. They have to build a new factory line. They have to like many, many things have to happen that they have to pay for. And then they just keep making it. And then the tool like that's not just paid for and they can lower the price and keep the margin. Right? That's the basic model here, which is why they keep their phones around for so long. Right? They just drop the price year over year. I also think there's a lot of antenna stuff here. Like I would love an iPhone five or an iPhone four. And iPhone four is my favorite, right? I would love that. I do not think they can cram the necessary LTE antennas into that body.

• 29:08Nilay Patel?

  They could barely cram the necessary 3G antennas outside that body. If you will, remember the iPhone four. I think that antenna work is we often overlook it. But I think here they had an LTE antenna design for this body they could just use.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  When I worked for a wireless adjacent company, I got tipped off from like a, a rumor of a rumor that the reason phones had to be big is because the antennas have to be big. And I dug into antenna technology and I could not confirm it. I love it as a theory, but I really don't understand antennas enough to not to really know why. But it, it really since LTE, we've had big phones.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, at first because they needed big batteries. There's a reason the iPhone 11 and then the, the 10R are the size they are, right? They're the big, cheap phones. As much as we go on about their, people want small phones and certainly we have lots of people on our staff. We're like, why can't I just get an iPhone that I can use with one hand? We, we hear it all over the place. 50% of this, the population in the world is women. They often say they want small phones, like we, it's a thing that we hear. And then people's revealed preferences in the store are like, I'd like the big, cheap one, please. Right? Like, I think everybody in the world should have an OLED TV. People go to the store and they're like, how much, how much gray LCD can I get for 350 bucks? Right? And that is the thing that sells the most. And like, so it goes, but I think can it be smaller?

• 30:34Nilay Patel?

  Is directly tied to how much technology do you need to fit in it? How big is the battery and, and where do the antennas go? And is there a market for that actually smaller thing?

• 30:43Speaker 06

  And I've been pretty effusive about the idea of this phone since they announced it because it has the A13 Bionic processor, the same processors as in the iPhone 11 Pro. And you people like, they actually did this with the original iPhone SE. I completely kind of whiffed it. I like, in my head, when I knew that this was rumored, I expected them to like, throw an A12 in there. I mean, hell, there's an A12 in the iPad Pro, right? A12Z or whatever the hell it is. So when it came out that they're using the same processor, it's just like, it hit me like a lightning bolt. Like, you can spend 400 bucks on this thing and have a phone that is going to work for another four to five years and probably work pretty well. Like, I've got the OG iPhone SE. I still use it from time to time. I'd like turn it on for, you know, what's this announcement?

• 31:27Speaker 06

  Like, reset it up again and like, it's great, it's fine, totally fine. I mean, it's tiny, but it's fine. And the thing that occurs to me is, it's not that it's $300, $400. It's that it's $400 that you have, you can spend if you want to, once every five years. If you buy a $400 Android phone, you're buying another $400 Android phone in a year or two. You just are. And so like, that's, that's an incredible value that like, Apple doesn't get enough credit for. And also, just like, what does the iPhone 11 go for? It's 700 bucks, I think?

• 31:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. So like, $300 difference. Like, you really see where like, the costs are. It's the tooling, it's the screen, it's the camera, it's that, I mean, there it is, right? And like, battery size, I guess. For all, for most people, they'll, they'll be able to do the exact same stuff they could do with an iPhone 11 on this phone for 300 bucks less. And there are many, many cheap Android phones. Like, I'm not a super fanboy here.

• 32:19Speaker 05

  And they can unlock it while wearing a mask.

• 32:21Speaker 06

  That's very true. Also, like, the combo platter of Apple stuff, this is your headphone jack point, but like, you can get an iPhone SE, a cheap Apple Watch, and some AirPods, and you still haven't bought an iPhone 11 Pro. Like, you've still got some money left over, and you have basically the same experience, minus like, uh, face unlock, right? That's a pretty compelling Apple ecosystem story, even if I think the cheap phones should definitely have a headphone jack. Because forcing people to spend money on your proprietary Bluetooth headphones, you know, you know how that sits with me. The pandemic hasn't made me rethink that assumption. I gotta tell you that right now.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  The camera part is the one that's right. If it was the same sensor, I bet this is the no brainer, right? We're gonna have to review it and see. The iPhone, if it's the same sensor as the XR or the XS, we'll see what the software does, but that sensor itself was insanely noisy, right? Like, I did not think that camera was good regardless of the Smart HDR, whatever. Like, they've changed some of that tuning, they've made the pictures look different. The thing that got me, they had to do so much noise reduction to get those pictures to not look noisy, that they just blew out details all over the place. Like, that was the thing I remembered from the XS review. Like, what is the real problem here? It's Smart HDR is really, really aggressive and everything looks a little fake. Okay, they fixed that

• 33:45Nilay Patel?

  generation to generation. I think the 11 is great. The details are gone. Like, they couldn't fix it. They switched the sensor in the 11. They got a lot of that detail back. We'll see if, like, you know, the sensor, the processor, the image processing stack, those are all a unit. They're all combined. We'll see how that goes. But that sensor itself, and I remember talking to the Halide folks, they're like, the sensor is very noisy. It was, it was not a secret that the iPhone XR sensor or the XS sensor was super noisy. So we'll see, we gotta review it. We're, it's like, photos of inside will be what we use it to review.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  We can't do our usual tricks, but that it's

• 34:25Speaker 06

  Oh, no, I have, I bought a bike. I've got, I've got a bicycle, so I can, I can go Do take pictures of your bike inside of your apartment?

• 34:32Nilay Patel?

  It's hard to get closer than six feet to me when I'm on a bicycle. What I, I wanna see this review, just photos of your bike in different surprising locations. Oh, I, done. We can make that happen. There's a bike in my OnePlus review. You can see it. Anyway. Was it in a surprising location? Yes, it was in a surreal parallel universe of color filter. We'll get to that later. Okay, fine. Yeah, that's the question. Everything's great. I agree with Theeter, like, incredible value, incredible lifetime value, because, you know, the chip is new, so they'll probably support it forever. But, man. But if you're, if the camera turns out to be meh, like, that's, it's like, that's a hard thing to live with for four years. And the other thing, you know, like, just It's the 5G transition is upon us. I don't know if you know if it's a race.

• 35:17Nilay Patel?

  We're racing, racing a 5G. Okay, if you buy the cheap LTE phone and you're expecting to hold on to it over the course of the next five years, depending on how carriers manage your networks, your LTE performance might degrade, right? So like, we'll see. That certainly happened with what they euphemistically called 4G in LTE. Like, I see the 4G indicator on my iPhone now. I'm like, oh, my, my network's gonna suck. So like, that's a, just in this moment, you gotta man, you gotta maybe consider that, depending on how long you're gonna keep it.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  My naive thought of, of the rollout is that they're gonna put a 5G antenna somewhere, probably where they already have rights, so next to their 4G antenna. And they're gonna have to run more bandwidth. So one at the 4, like, one at the LTE just benefit from that?

• 36:09Nilay Patel?

  It, it just depends on when they decide to switch some of their spectrum over. So like, who, who knows? It's, it's just, it, this only matters if you're intending to buy the phone for $400 and then keep it for five years, right? Like, five years from now, what will be the state of the, the mythical dish network LTE, or 5G network? What will be the state of the, the T, I, I don't know.

• 36:29Speaker 05

  Well, you'd still have a pretty good iPod Touch.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  And that's really all you need, because we're all just inside using the Wi-Fi.

• 36:34Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  Do you know, there's some other, uh, this MacBook battery thing seems really interesting to me. What is going on here?

• 36:43Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. So this was sort of like, uh, out of the, out of the blue, Apple's like, hey, we're gonna have some news. And so here's, here's what it is. For Thunderbolt 3 and higher MacBook Pro, MacBooks, so this is like MacBook Air since 2018 and MacBook Pro since, I think, 2016. They're doing a thing where they want to extend the, the lifespan of the battery, how many years a battery lasts before it really starts degrading. And one of the things that actually is bad for batteries, it turns out, is just like leaving them charged all the way to 100% all the time. Just like that, that's bad, hard on the chemicals.

• 37:18Speaker 06

  And so you might know that your phone sometimes won't charge all the way to 100% overnight until like an hour before you wake up. Like this is the smart charging thing that a bunch of phones do now. So what Apple is doing is they're using like local temperature data and like your charging history on the Mac. They don't send it up to the server unless you'd let them to be like, oh, you know what? If we, this person never unplugs their MacBook, like ever. They're just like sitting on a desk and maybe they'll like unplug it and walk over to the couch and plug it in again. So we're just not going to charge this all the way. Like, nope. And so what will happen is the percentage meter in your menu bar will say 100%. But that 100% doesn't mean that your battery is at 100% of its possible charge anymore. I don't like this. This is how they take your freedoms.

• 38:04Speaker 06

  That's right. What it means now is it's 100% of what Apple thinks is the appropriate charge for your battery to take in order to maximize its possible lifespan, which is amazing. You could turn it off, by the way.

• 38:17Speaker 05

  Do we have any vibe on what that is? Is that 80? Is that 90? Like?

• 38:23Speaker 06

  We don't know. I, I, Apple did not provide that detail. I don't know how many people are likely to like have this thing turned on for them. It's unclear if it's going to be like everybody or just this tiny subset of people. It sounds like it's not going to be most people, but it depends on how often you unplug, I guess. And I don't know what they will be like 95%, 90%? What is, what is a percent anyway, when the battery started degrading, right? Like it's, it's, it's, it's just a feeling. It's a, it's an urge. It's a hunch. It's not really a number.

• 38:58Speaker 05

  I remember a couple of years ago, Ashley Carmen like did like this big like investigation, talking to battery experts about whether you should leave your phone plugged in or not. Like, should you try? And I think the kind of the consensus was, yeah, it might be best to like not. Keep it pegged at a hundred percent, but that's so hard to do. So like, don't worry. I don't know. But obviously I I've just always.

• 39:22Nilay Patel?

  I'm glad that you paid attention to Ashley's video.

• 39:25Speaker 05

  I did. I did. I feel like that was the the takeaway like.

• 39:30Nilay Patel?

  It was don't worry so much, but no one can stop worrying.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that was, I just absorbed this worry. And so like, when I see my computer plugged in, I'm like, ah, that's not good. And then like, I unplug it and I run it straight to zero and like, I, my MacBook Pro, like 2015, has been really one of the best computer, one of the best technology items of my life battery wise. It tells me I need to service it, but I still get like four or five hours of battery life. It's wonderful. But I run it to zero and and then I recharge it to a hundred. I know that's bad for it. So I just feel like everything I do is bad for my battery. So I I I find this comforting, even if Apple does want to lie to me.

• 40:13Nilay Patel?

  I think what's really like, right now, this laptop that I'm using is plugged in all the time. I just leave it in this room in an effort to have like different spaces of where I work and where I like, because I'm just here all the time. You know what I mean? So I'm trying to leave the laptop here. So it makes sense. Don't charge us all the way. In a world where like, uh, remember planes, like I used to go on planes all the time. They were great. I mean, I didn't love them, but now they seem wonderful. But like the night before I go on the plane, I want to tell this thing like, actually charge it all the way. And like, that's, it's just that little bit of customization. I think I want to make sure. It would be better if they were like, if 100 was, if it was more like a video game,

• 40:54Nilay Patel?

  where 100 is like where they thought it should be, but you'd be like, I need 120, right? And you'll go boop, boop, boop. Like, that's what I'm looking for. The old whimsical Apple would have done that. They would have been like, do you want to go to 105?

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Which which Apple, which era are you referring to?

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  There was like a whimsical era of Apple where they'd be like.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  The Dalmatian spot iMac?

• 41:14Nilay Patel?

  Yes, that era of Apple where they're like, this iMac is called Flower Power would have been like 105. It's hilarious. So, okay, we'll see. When does it, when does it roll out?

• 41:26Speaker 06

  Uh, it's in the developer seed right now and it'll be in an upcoming version of everyone's favorite operating system, macOS Catalina.

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  Operating system that hates being there. It just doesn't like it. It's like, why? It literally is like, why do I, am I doing this again today? It's a perfect operating system for quarantine. It's just like, it's just at angst with itself at all times. Uh, speaking of, uh, MacBooks and planes, the thing that I'm most excited for to try on a plane is the magic keyboard for the iPad Pro, which they just shoved up the release date.

• 42:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's coming out early. It should be out, um, as you listen, if you listen to this on time, it should be out next week, uh, which is much sooner. Um, although I think it got backordered pretty quickly.

• 42:11Nilay Patel?

  Instantly.

• 42:11Speaker 06

  What size you want?

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I almost bought this thing 500 times. And the first time I was spotted, it was showing me a two to four day ship week. And by the end of the time I was trying to buy it, it was three to four weeks.

• 42:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:23Nilay Patel?

  And that was just in the span of like a couple of hours.

• 42:26Speaker 06

  I'm very excited to review this thing. We haven't touched it. We've talked about it a lot. Uh, obviously I have feelings about iPads and whether or not they are computers or not. Yeah. I mean, we'll see. Uh, I'm, I think, I think that Apple hasn't told us what they weigh, which, uh, has me a little bit worried, but we'll see.

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  Now that I can't have it tomorrow.

• 42:44Speaker 06

  You want it?

• 42:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm extremely annoyed that I didn't buy it, but it's so expensive.

• 42:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's 300 or 350, uh, which is like basically an iPhone SE.

• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  It's an iPhone. It costs as much as an iPhone.

• 42:56Speaker 05

  Can I make a request for who's, who's reviewing this?

• 42:59Speaker 06

  Who knows?

• 43:00Speaker 05

  Okay. Well, for whoever reviews this at the bird. All right.

• 43:03Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the tension between me and.

• 43:05Speaker 05

  Look up, look up measurements for airplane seat spacing, tray table height, and reconstructed airplane scenario in your apartment. Will you be paid extra for this work? Absolutely. Welcome to D-Live.

• 43:21Speaker 06

  Oh no, Paul, Paul, think about it. The screen floats, right? Like it, it comes up like a laptop and then it like kicks out a little bit and then the screen floats. So when the back of the airplane seat comes down, it has a little bit of room to push down. And if it comes down really hard, maybe it will pop the iPad out of the case and break the case instead of breaking your iPad. Think about it.

• 43:43Speaker 05

  Okay. So enlist a, a child or a significant other to suddenly lean back the fore chair and see what happens.

• 43:54Speaker 06

  There's a couple of rumors. There's a rumor that those over your headphones, which aren't Beats branded, because Apple hates, I don't, I don't know, whatever, they're going to be over your headphones. And the rumor is from Mark German that you're going to be able to swap out the like ear pads and the headbands because they'll be like magnetic. So you can like customize them.

• 44:12Nilay Patel?

  Okay, like Fortnite.

• 44:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:14Nilay Patel?

  You gotta wonder when, when Eddie Q went to Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre and Trent Reznor, the people who owned Beats. And they're like, he's like, I want to buy your streaming service. And like, we have a billion dollar headphone company. Was he like, yeah, we're going to treat them like second class citizens the entire time.

• 44:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, probably. I mean, of course.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  Like for a while, like they didn't even have like lightning connectors.

• 44:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  We won't give you these.

• 44:39Speaker 06

  But like, so these headphones, like they're going to be expensive, right?

• 44:42Nilay Patel?

  Of course. Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 06

  So I don't understand because in addition to these headphones, which will probably be expensive, you can now buy the Mac, the Mac Pro $700 wheel kit? How does Apple decide what it, when it's going to gouge you and when it's not? Like, like where's like, you know, like AirPods not that expensive. Like now they, they seem like fairly priced, right? Wheels are like, the posts are like $300.

• 45:07Nilay Patel?

  Wait, this pricing is out of control. So what Dieter is referencing is previously to get wheels on a Mac Pro, you had to buy them with the Mac Pro. They were like 400 bucks, 500 bucks.

• 45:18Speaker 06

  I forget. Yeah, it was a BTO option. Yeah.

• 45:20Nilay Patel?

  But you couldn't buy them separately. Now you can buy them separately. My strong belief is that Apple is selling these just because people want to buy them.

• 45:29Speaker 06

  Oh my God.

• 45:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't have any insight into this. I just know there are some people who are like, yeah, I'll buy some wheels. I want those wheels. The wheels alone cost $700. So if you don't buy them with your Mac Pro, you just have to eat in it like an additional $300 for the wheels, which is amazing.

• 45:49Speaker 06

  I'm going to buy the wheels and I'm going to buy the stand for the Pro Display XDR. And I'm just going to put them on my desk.

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  But I just, but, but then if you bought, if you bought the, the Mac Pro with the wheels and you regret it, and you're like, I wish it wasn't rolling everywhere because the wheels don't lock. And you want just the, the standard feet, you can now buy those. And that's like another 300 bucks, right?

• 46:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  I don't think anyone is buying the, the feet. Like I, some people are just gonna buy the, I promise you, someone's gonna just stunt by the wheels and Apple have made their money. If you just buy four aluminum sticks, like you have made a mistake. Like just go to Home Depot and just buy like a rod of aluminum and just cut it and then you have it.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  Okay, imagine this, it's called the path to Mac Pro and you buy the Mac Pro piece by piece, right? You buy the wheels, you buy the case, buy a motherboard, you buy a graphics card and you've invented computers.

• 46:51Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, you've invented the Apple one and you make a wooden case for it. Oh yeah, the feet are, the feet are $299 and the wheels are $699. Uh, we have a post on the site, uh, Taylor Lyles wrote it. She pointed out that you can just buy four wheels and tires for your car for $294. That's cheaper than the Mac Pro. That's great. I love it. I hope some people, I hope people all over America decide they just want some wheels. Maybe they were like, you know, people are at home, they're like picking up new hobbies, they're building like cars for their kids. We should put some nice wheels on the market.

• 47:25Speaker 06

  I mean, I, I own a fidget cube, you know, just like something to do, just like, you know, roll a little knob around and push the little buttons on the fidget cube.

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but here, but here's the list of prices. Whole ass iPhone with an A13 processor, $400. Wheels, $700. Four aluminum posts, $300. It's a very, keyboard, $300. It's very, it is a very confusing list of prices.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  Once they get those Mac Pro factories really revved up and they've paid for the supply chain, you could get wheels for, for two, wheels SE for $299.

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna have to sell those wheels for like 35 years.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  That's great. I'm sure all of this pricing makes sense in some universe. We're certainly not supposed to compare it. An iPhone SE to wheels, but it is, they just keep handing it to us. All right. And then lastly, the, the Halide folks, they put out a new app called Esper.

• 48:28Speaker 06

  Oh, this looks fascinating. Yeah.

• 48:29Nilay Patel?

  So we, the iPad Pro, the new one has that LiDAR sensor on it. They did this great write-up of what it's good for. You should go read it. Really interesting. But they put out an experimental app called Esper that like, does scans of objects. It can't do anything. They're like, I can't really do anything smaller than furniture, but it can like, this app can like, scan a piece of furniture. It can move it around. That's neat. And then it can like, scan the entire room and then glue the room back on the room and then do effects. So it looks like you're walking through a cartoon. Like, it's just a neat proof of concept demo of what this LiDAR sensor can do.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  I still don't know what it's for, but it's super cool. Like, no one has this iPad. I think Dieter has a review and I think Sam Byford on our team bought one. So you two are gonna have a lot of fun with this app, I think.

• 49:18Speaker 06

  But what's, what's interesting is that it, the, when you look at the map that the lasers draw for the LiDAR, that anything smaller than a chair, it's kind of really can't get.

• 49:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, is that, is that the scale that we want our AR to be working at? Cause you would think they'd want a little bit more there. And especially on the iPad Pro, like, it's not hurting for battery. They could have, they could have gone a little bit harder on that, but they didn't, apparently. Anyway, this app looks amazing. I'm looking to try it.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't, I, I'm not sure what the relationship between fine-grained LiDAR sensing and battery life is. Are you suggesting that it needs more lasers?

• 49:56Speaker 06

  More lasers cost more money? I don't know. I'm like, charge more. I don't know.

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I want to see from someone. Someone buy the fully kitted out iPad Pro, running about $3,000. And then attach the four wheels to it.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  Just do it. Be like, this is the most intense I've had that Apple sells.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  And then, and then mail it to the YouTube channel, Braille, Braille Skateboarding, and they'll skate it. They'll skate anything.

• 50:24Nilay Patel?

  There you go. See?

• 50:25Speaker 06

  I bet you money that I have a cow print gateway tower in my parents attic. I'm gonna buy the wheels and attach it to that 1995 gateway.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  See, look at this. It's been like 20 minutes. I've already sold like five sets of wheels. Come on. This is the easiest money Tim Cook ever made. All right, we gotta take a break and we gotta talk about this one plus eight. Be right back.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 51:21Speaker 07

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• 51:26Speaker 02

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  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.

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• 51:46Speaker 08

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• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller.

• 51:53Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  In these troubled times.

• 51:56Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 51:56Nilay Patel?

  Consistency of the following segment is a light. It's called.

• 52:00Speaker 05

  More hurts than you can handle, old man.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  Why? It's funny, the segment every week just like attacks Americans.

• 52:08Speaker 05

  No, it's a, it's an attack on myself. It's a self criticism.

• 52:12Speaker 06

  Also, why, why isn't the segment called hurts so good?

• 52:16Speaker 05

  It's fine. That's fine. Maybe one, one of these weeks I'll do that. Okay? For you. That's a treat.

• 52:24Speaker 06

  Horrible.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  So this Red Magic 5G $579 phone, first phone with an 144 Hz display. Also, also, it has 240 Hz touch sampling. This is, this is a phone for gamers, people. And.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  So the 240 Hz touch sampling is not impressive because that's like standard for 820 Hz refresh rate display. In fact, normally, I'm pretty sure that the touch sampling is usually double the refresh rate. So they maybe just cranked up the, I don't know that it's like a fact across all phones, but most of the ones that I've noticed, I've seen, I do that.

• 53:08Speaker 05

  Okay, that's good to know. Also, liquid cooling, of course. Also, full on turbo fan inside and there's a vent on the side of the phone. I think we've seen one of these gaming phones with a fan inside. This is the obvious evolution. Like if you're really, if you're a real gamer and your phone isn't whirring, like, like with, like just a subtle fan whine, I doubt you're that serious.

• 53:37Speaker 06

  Every time we talk about one of these gaming phones, I beg our listeners, if you're a hardcore gamer that needs a hardcore Android phone for your hardcore Android gaming, to please tell me who you are so that I know you exist, because I don't believe that you do. So if you are that person, please just tweet me at Future Paul and tell me about your life.

• 54:01Nilay Patel?

  But you need a proffer, you need a proof. I don't, I want to, I want a video of you gaming on an Android phone.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  Okay, here's, here's, here's what I want. In your online multiplayer shooting game of choice, so whether it be Fortnite or PUBG or whatever, you need to get a winner winner chicken dinner on camera on your phone to show that you're a true gamer. And then, I don't know, I feel like you should win sort of, sort of prize.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  You really set yourself up to give out some prizes, Paul.

• 54:34Speaker 05

  Eli will buy you Apple.

• 54:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm not part of this.

• 54:37Speaker 05

  Mac Pro wheels.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  There's a part of me that wants to agree to this, but I'm not, I'm not at this time going to agree with this. All right, Dieter. Speaking of hardcore phones. Yeah, OnePlus Pro 8, Pro 8 Plus.

• 54:53Speaker 06

  There's the OnePlus 8 Pro and the OnePlus 8.

• 54:56Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 54:57Speaker 06

  And they both were released. They both exist in the world. I reviewed the OnePlus 8 Pro. John Porter reviewed the OnePlus 8. According to the YouTube comments, he is more handsome than I am.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 55:09Speaker 06

  That is fine. I agree with that assessment. And look, so the OnePlus 8, what's fascinating about this phone is it's getting distributed on Verizon. There's a special edition that works with Verizon's ultra wideband 5G millimeter wave stuff. And but it's first time like OnePlus has been on Verizon, which means that they are on T-Mobile and Verizon. And they're also just making a phone that's like really good. So I think they're coming for Samsung. Now, the OnePlus 8 Pro, which is what I reviewed, is not being sold on carriers. It's being sold on Amazon and OnePlus.com. And it's just a great phone. Like, it's just really good. The knock, of course, because, you know, it's always the knock is like the camera is like B+.

• 55:54Nilay Patel?

  You know? What? B+ relative to the current level of flagship cameras?

• 55:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, to the current level of because, again, the OnePlus 8 Pro costs $900. And so historically, OnePlus phones, you're like, it's a OnePlus phone. So like they they cut a couple of corners and then you get to save $300. Hooray. And that's kind of the OnePlus 8. Like, the corners aren't really cut that much. You lose wireless charging and the camera quality dips is like the main stuff, I would say. The screen is like not quite as fast. It's a 90 instead of 120, I think, for the refresh rate. But at $900 for the OnePlus 8 Pro, like, you don't get to cut any corners anymore. You don't get to say, oh, well, you know, you're saving some money, so it's fine. So there's nothing to hide behind when you're trying to stack up against, you know, like a flagship Samsung Galaxy S20. And for the most part, I think that it like holds its own.

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  So this is the first time they're on carriers.

• 56:45Speaker 06

  I think. Well, the OnePlus 7 Pro, a couple of OnePlus 7s were on T-Mobile. They like started as like a pretty tentative, like toe in the water experiment. Then it got a little bit more serious, but now it's like quite serious because they're on Verizon and T-Mo.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  So it's Dan Seepert, who constantly reminds us, never play, pay full price for Samsung phone.

• 57:07Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 57:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. Samsung phones come out, they come out at ridiculous prices and then within, you know, three to six months, the prices are much lower.

• 57:15Speaker 06

  Dude, like three to six weeks, like they're, they're dropping like, like super fast. Samsung supposedly cutting production. Samsung will give you trade-in value for older Samsung phones up to like four or $500 for phones that are like, you could go buy an eBay for like $250 right now.

• 57:31Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Someone's doing a work from home arbitrage scheme.

• 57:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like Samsung prices collapse very fast. Um, I mean, every carrier at some point is like, buy one, we'll give you another one for free. Like they just, they're handing out Samsung phones. The question I have is will this price fall as fast? Because if they hold steady at 900 and then you can get a Galaxy S, what are they at 35? You can get a new Galaxy phone for way less, but it's still the flagship. Like that's a huge problem for OnePlus.

• 58:08Speaker 06

  It is. I have no idea. We, I think that there's prices have held relatively steady, but they also haven't been at this level before where they're like head on, head to head, taking on the S20 on every level of feature and every spec. Uh, so it could be. And like, look, you can get like the, the Galaxy S20, the regular size one is smaller in this phone. I don't think they're directly competitive. The S20 plus is, and it, you know, it's going to get discounted at the same price as, as the OnePlus A Pro if it hasn't already. Like it's, it's gonna be. Um, and so that's a, that's like a tough heads up decision in my opinion between those two phones.

• 58:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. To me, that it always just breaks on the camera for me.

• 58:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  But I was, I was, I've not been in love with the S20 camera either. So.

• 58:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. No, the, the S20 Ultra camera is a massive disappointment. The S20 camera is like. Good, but it's not like a, it's not a huge, the huge win that Samsung hoped it would be. It would both, especially the Ultra, we're supposed to be big test of Samsung sensors. So the OnePlus 8 Pro is using, I forget the exact numbers, IMAX 689? No, whatever the newest Sony sensor is, it's, you know, bigger physically in area, it's 48 megapixels. With like slightly better processing software, I think that this could be amazing. Someone is going to end up hacking like the GCAM, Google Photo Camera app onto this thing. And I'll be very interested to see what that looks like.

• 59:32Speaker 06

  They're getting pretty good detail, but they are like OnePlus's processing is a little bit weird. It's like hard to put your finger on. It'll paint faces too much in like dim lighting. It, I think the detail is actually pretty good. The macro performance is incredible, but just sometimes they just, they just kind of overdo it a little bit. Especially with like colors.

• 59:55Speaker 06

  So, but you know, in the same way that like you, like you get a Samsung phone and you're like, oh, huh. I guess that's, that's what you do, isn't it? Okay, I could deal with that. Like you have to like learn that in a whole different way with OnePlus phones. But OnePlus phones, you also have to learn it a whole different way with every phone because they're changing their camera much more rapidly to improve, to catch up than Samsung is in some ways. So look at the cameras, like it's not as consistent in a good way, because I do think they're improving year over year.

• 1:00:24Speaker 05

  Just got a few quality of life questions. First, how cool is this charger?

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  Oh my God, the charger, so it wirelessly charges at 30 watts. The charger, the cable, speaking of quality of life, is like, I think three feet long, maybe four. And you cannot detach it either on the wall wart side or the charging dock side.

• 1:00:48Speaker 05

  Can you do like a USB C power delivery extension cable or something?

• 1:00:52Speaker 06

  No, no, it's, it's hardwired on both. That's so weird. It's not even like a barrel plug you can not plug. It's hardwired. So if you want to string the wire like through like a drawer hole or something like I do and like my drawer like, you know, you just can't.

• 1:01:09Speaker 06

  No. And it has a vent. Like there's a fan. Other wireless chargers have fans, so I don't want to duck on the fan. But there's a vent that holds the phone out from the the edge, the side of the dock so that it can pull air along the phone.

• 1:01:23Speaker 05

  Yes. A fan means you're a real gamer, Dieter.

• 1:01:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 05

  Amazing.

• 1:01:28Speaker 06

  No, I think this is a great phone. I think that if you are in the market for a big Android phone, you probably are gonna want to buy this. It's got a ringer switch. The ringer switch is dope.

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  Oh dude, I would love to have one of those. Curved edges. Like I have a hard enough time when I'm holding my too large phone, like accidentally touching the bottom corner of the screen with my like the, what's it called? When your palm, the part of your palm that connects to your thumb. Like I'm always accidentally touching the bottom right of my phone with that.

• 1:01:58Speaker 06

  That, that is, that is a killer on this phone. It's like, you get used to it, but it takes a while. It's, and the trend on other phones is to get a little bit less like that, but not here.

• 1:02:08Speaker 05

  And then one more is that, so it's got a camera bump down the middle, which a lot of phones are putting off the side. So is it, can it balance? In the center. If you lay it down flat on the table, is it balanced?

• 1:02:25Speaker 06

  You know how like when the camera bump was first arrived, we were like, oh God, this is terrible. I hate this so much. And then we just sort of like got a nerd to it and now we accept ridiculous camera bumps. That's where I live with this camera bump. Like, yes, I should have feelings about it, but like, we live in a hell world of camera bumps and they're never going away. So maybe while it was on the table, who cares?

• 1:02:45Speaker 05

  Wait, one day, the whole back of the phone could be a camera bump, but then it will finally rest flat again.

• 1:02:50Speaker 06

  See Paul, I'm trying to, I'm trying to praise this phone and you just, you like made me bring out all the nitpicks, but there they are.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  That's what we do.

• 1:02:56Speaker 06

  Successfully pick nits.

• 1:02:57Speaker 05

  Everybody go buy a OnePlus 8 and then $700 wheels and then do a skateboard thing. It's great.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  All right. Some little news things to pick up. Uh, this one obviously personally poignant for me. Verizon, you might remember Verizon, uh, telecom company. They also own AOL for some reason. Uh, they're buying BlueJeans, which one of Zoom's big competitors. BlueJeans has been around for a long time. BlueJeans has a wild history, actually. It didn't start as a self-contained video conferencing product. It was connector software so that if you had some weird enterprise video conferencing solution in your office and some other company has their own weird proprietary video conferencing solution, you would buy BlueJeans and it would be the, it would be the middleware that connected them both. Do you know this? I didn't know this. They've been around for a long, and now they're just like a full Zoom competitor.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  They're not obviously as big as Zoom. I would not say the world has had a BlueJeans moment the way that we've had a Zoom moment. No, we're all wearing sweatpants right now. Thank you very much. It's like the wrong name for this moment in history, but Verizon is buying BlueJeans, uh, Wall Street Journal reported a little less than $500 million. Hans Vestberg was on CNBC today. Really, actually, I will disclose that I'm a CNBC contributor, but watching CNBC do those interviews now is wild, right? Cause all their anchors are in different places. Right. And then Hans is just like at his house, right? Cause everyone's just like, so they cut between the anchors in different locations to ask some questions. I hadn't watched that happen. It was like, you just watch it. It's like a very entertaining way to make television.

• 1:04:35Nilay Patel?

  So they asked him questions. They asked him directly if 5G causes a coronavirus and he was like, that's a fake news. He's like, screw this. But he said this thing about buying BlueJeans, which just like strikes at my net neutrality heart directly. Let's hear it. He's like, we're already, Verizon Enterprise already has all these customers. We already sell it as part of the thing. It's already integrated with our systems. We were already working with them, blah, blah. We're gonna build it into our 5G network. I have no idea what that means. BlueJeans at the edge. That's basically what he said, right? Like here are some buzzwords that we have. What he means is there's only one, there's only one reason you buy a company, right? You think you're gonna make more money. You don't buy a company because you think you're gonna lose money.

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean Verizon has bought, they did buy AOL and then bought Yahoo. So. I guess I would immediately take that back. Verizon also launched Go90, but Hans is the new guy. That was the, those are the old guys. Hans Vestberg is the new guy. He was like, why are we doing this and shut it all down? So one assumes that he's doing telecom stuff to make telecom money. Uh, it's, it's been his focus. It's obvious what they're gonna do. They're gonna prioritize BlueJeans traffic on their network.

• 1:05:47Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  So that if you're a Verizon enterprise customer, you buy their product and it's like guaranteed to work and has traffic priority. And all of the other solutions, including Zoom, do not have that priority unless you pay up or Zoom pays up. That is, that is literally the net neutrality nightmare. And that's basically what they said today.

• 1:06:05Speaker 06

  What if Comcast decides to retaliate and like, and like limits BlueJeans performance on its network? Would then you be teleconferencing via cutoffs?

• 1:06:16Nilay Patel?

  That's horrible, Dean. It's very bad. It's very bad. I didn't want to, my immediate reaction was to just let it slide. But I must, I have to live up to my ideals.

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  There's a like a, I don't know perverse part of me that wants like the, the, the net neutrality nightmare as like a commercial. Where it's like BlueJeans, like, like someone's like, like all blocky and garbled on a Zoom call. And the, and then the smart person on the other end says, hey, why don't we switch this to Blue, BlueJeans? And then, and then now you're on BlueJeans. It's like, oh, it's so clear. What an excellent network and service this is integrated. Wow.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's what they're gonna do.

• 1:06:56Speaker 06

  They're gonna change the name of it. They're not gonna keep calling it BlueJeans.

• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's gonna be called like Verizon enterprise conferencing.

• 1:07:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're way too stuffed.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  And they will advertise the net neutrality nightmare. They're going to say gets priority on Verizon 5G. Integrated with, built into a 5G network is an enterprise grade video conferencing solution for the future of work. Uh, and then they will say something happy about everybody working from home. That isn't like your fear of disease. They're, they're gonna be like, in a world of, of ever like, now that work has been recalibrated, you need enterprise class conferencing. Verizon is there. And it's like, yeah, what you're doing is prioritizing your own product.

• 1:07:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. And like the, they'll be like, it works ideally on 5G phones. And by the way, when you're on a 5G phone on a conference call, your portrait video is really annoying. So make sure you go 90. That's great. They bring back the gun 90 tech. A delight. That's what I will see.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  Is there, I've been trying to think, what does it mean to integrate into 5G? What actually, is there some like fig leaf, some pretend thing they could say is technically necessary for like the packets to work better?

• 1:08:03Speaker 05

  I think it has, I really do think the edge is more than a buzzword in the sense that we've been living in the cloud era where we have very highly centralized data centers. Can the carrier see 5G as an opportunity to compete with the cloud by putting little, like medium sized or small data centers, very close to the towers or very close to the actual access points. And so they can become the next cloud by bundling, delivery and that sort of hosting.

• 1:08:40Nilay Patel?

  I have literally sat through a Verizon dinner where they like laid that strategy out, like straight up. That's the Verizon's big strategy is we need to do millimeter wave and all the other stuff. We actually need data processing facility near the towers. We'll just overbuild it and sell that property, that ability, low latency to do all this other stuff. That's like the plan. Okay. So maybe blue jeans will happen there, but like, okay, well, will Zoom get free access to run in your little, you like distributed data center cluster, like without paying or blue jeans come for free? Like those I think are just huge questions of internet government, governance that it's, I don't know how Zoom competes with that, but there's no market dynamic that lets Zoom or Webex or whatever

• 1:09:24Nilay Patel?

  compete with that, short of just paying the, paying up. So there's like, we'll see. The other one that's on the same note, McKenna and I interviewed Jessica Rosen-Worcel a few weeks ago, and we were talking about the FCC's Keep America Connected pledge, where Ajit Pai just like went to all the carriers and made them promise it wouldn't disconnect people for non-payment, all this stuff. Carrier's doing it anyway. And their claim, McKenna's writing this up, their claim is you have to tell us not to do it. So if you don't, if you don't pay your bill, but don't tell us, we'll still disconnect you because there's, that pledge is not enforceable because the FCC has given up all of its enforcement and oversight authority. So like, we're just entering just like very clearly like a Wild West era of internet government. Like, I could not tell you right now if Verizon is throttling Zoom. They have

• 1:10:09Nilay Patel?

  no, there's no requirement for them to say it. I could not tell you if Comcast, which disclosure, investment, the whole thing, I couldn't tell you if they're throttling Zoom. And like, one question is like, well, Zoom works, then why would you complain? But like, I don't know if Zoom is working as well as it could, even though I rely on it to do my work, because they don't have to tell me and then have to tell the OCC. So just a lot wrapped up. This was supposed to be a news byte. It was not. I apologize. It was not a news byte.

• 1:10:35Speaker 06

  Well, it's gone on long enough that I thought I was gonna be able to come up with a stonewash pun, but I just couldn't get there, so.

• 1:10:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm glad that I defeated you. Dieter, Google reportedly building its own processors for Pixels and Chromebooks, which is very surprising, because I thought they wound down that team.

• 1:10:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, so they, they make the, the tensor processing unit, right? The TPU, which is like machine learning customized stuff. I am very surprised by this, too. The question is, are they gonna like, go the media tech route and just build low-end stuff? Are they just building more co-processors? Like, they do the, they do the, the pixel imaging processing chip or whatever. So they make some custom chips, but they've never made like, the main app processor. And I think making the a main app processor is super hard, because you have to deal with Qualcomm patents and like, it's also just hard. Like, if it were not hard, we would have Exynos processors in all our phones in the US. But we don't. Samsung literally makes this, this processor, develops it year

• 1:11:34Speaker 06

  after year, uses it in their phones in other parts of the world. They could very easily, if they wanted to, you would think, sell it here, and they would prefer to, but they don't. And so if Samsung, which sells tens and hundreds of millions of phones, can't figure out how to get around Qualcomm?

• 1:11:55Speaker 06

  Google's chances of doing it seems smaller.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Also, Apple couldn't get around Qualcomm. They ended up paying them.

• 1:12:03Speaker 06

  But I mean, Apple's paying them for the modems.

• 1:12:05Speaker 05

  Google also, don't they still have like a patent war chest that could be at some sort of cool, cool standoff with Qualcomm?

• 1:12:12Speaker 06

  Who knows, man? I mean, look, the, this is the year of the Pixel 5. And there's no way this chip, if it exists, is going into the Pixel 5. Like, it's too soon for that. I'd be shocked. But this is definitely the year where like, we get to decide if Google is actually serious about trying to get people to buy Pixels or not. Right? The 4, like, they're trying, but the, didn't quite get there. Either like, the 5 is it, or it's like, the Pixel is just Nexus, but Google happens to make it. Right? And if that's what it is, that's fine. Just say so. And then, once you've done that, then like, go ahead and build your own wacky processor for it. And like, take a flyer on it and just see what happens.

• 1:12:51Speaker 06

  And if it bombs, no one's mad because you took a shot on your weird little experimental hardware hobby that you do on the side. Like, that's all fine. But if they're serious about like, the Pixel is gonna compete with all, with the iPhone head on. And like, we're gonna sell in big numbers and we're gonna make real money off of it. Then this, you know, reported custom processor is a much bigger risk.

• 1:13:13Speaker 05

  I feel like making your own processor is a bet on yourself moment. Like, that's like, uh, we, we, we do wanna go big. And I mean, if, I feel like Apple moving to making its own processor and controlling as much of that as possible seems like one of the most genius things in the world, in hindsight, given, especially, obviously, it worked out performance-wise, and they're just winning, like, their, their own processors are, are faster than most of their laptops. But it also gives you so much flexibility, control, and like, Google's obviously moving in this direction. You mentioned those little chips, like, I, I, it's just becoming increasingly obvious that

• 1:13:54Speaker 05

  a lot of the way forward for us to get more performance is going to be, uh, Apple, application-specific hardware. It's hardware that's designed to accelerate very specific applications on your, on your computer or your phone. And so, it makes a lot of sense for Google to get into that, if they're very serious about phones. So if this is true, this sounds very serious about phones.

• 1:14:18Speaker 06

  And maybe it'll be like they'll put it in like the the 6A and not the full on 6 and that's how they're going to handle it. Like, there's many options for them. And I want the Qualcomm monopoly to get like challenged in a serious way. I really do. But I don't know if I trust Google to be that serious, because they have not to date proven that they are that serious.

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  It's interesting that there isn't an AMD to the Qualcomm Intel, right?

• 1:14:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Nilay Patel?

  It's, I mean, there's like MediaTek, there's like

• 1:14:44Speaker 06

  And Samsung.

• 1:14:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Samsung isn't here and MediaTek is in the low end. Like, where is the competitor that pushes Qualcomm forward? And maybe it's just Apple and that's the way the mobile market has shaken out and maybe Google's gonna come at it. I look at this and I'm like, yeah, they're gonna make, I think it's more like what Paul said, they're gonna make some weird custom processor units. They're gonna, they're gonna accelerate the things that they care about because like, straight ahead Android gaming processing is like, that's not the problem they have with the Pixel.

• 1:15:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Nilay Patel?

  The problem with Pixel is like, marketing, distribution, selling a bunch of them.

• 1:15:15Speaker 06

  A little, a little like, like hardware quality. It doesn't feel quite as like primo as the other Android competition. And with the Pixel 4, I was like, this is their aesthetic. I get it. It like, there's a certain like, honesty and humility to it. It's just a phone. Like, it can feel like just a phone. But it's not working. Like, I think it's fine. I actually like the aesthetic just fine. But it doesn't feel like it's luxurious and fancy and whatever. And very clearly, you need to if you want a cell phone that costs more than, you know, $800, $900.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  There's another good news bite. Really, really got through that one quickly. Okay, I am gonna do this one fast. We did it on Sunday, Sun, this past Sunday, one year anniversary of Foxconn promising a statement or correction. We asked them, we went out, we said, do you have a, they didn't reply. So, that's where that is. One year, we actually, Matt Jewell is a professor at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, and he rode his bike past the building, took another photo. The building is emptier than it was a year ago, which is like my personal, like, if you remember a year ago, there was like a laptop on a table.

• 1:16:18Speaker 06

  And to be clear, this isn't like social distancing empty. This is like, there's literally

• 1:16:22Nilay Patel?

  Spare concrete.

• 1:16:23Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:16:23Nilay Patel?

  Even, even though like, there's a person here taking measurements, that has been cleared out. We looked up building permits, most of the places don't have any building permits. The factory, however, is supposed to open in May. They apparently had an open house, which I saw some photos online, very much like a, like a low grade CES. They just invited people to like, look at AK TVs mounted on a wall inside of a booth. This is a real thing they did at the factory. They like set up a little CES and people came and looked at stuff. Have not yet said what they will be building when they open in May. Don't know. This factory is supposed to open and we, we asked like various officials in Wisconsin, like, do you know what they're, and they're like, we do not know. Foxon has not yet told us. So the Foxon Wisconsin story continues into its next round of mystery.

• 1:17:07Speaker 05

  What if it the whole time was just a dream factory and what they're building are dreams?

• 1:17:12Nilay Patel?

  That's clearly what they're building. At this point, it seems very obvious. The dreams of, of tax subsidies is what they're building. Um, they have claimed, Foxon claimed that they've hired enough people to qualify for their subsidy payments this year, but they hired them all in a rush in December. Like over 70% of the people were hired in a rush in December just to meet the target. So the state is like, are they doing anything? Are these, because last year they, they claimed the same thing and the state actually found it was less. So another turn of the Foxon story. I'm very excited to see what they, what are they going to make in May? It's like, that's all I want to know. All right.

• 1:17:49Speaker 05

  Can I drop a positive, a positive note? The Moto G stylus and G Power, Verge reviewed those, Cameron Faulkner. And, uh, they sound amazing for $300, $250. If Apple's $400 phone is too rich for you, you want Android. Or OnePlus is not what you're looking, it sounds like they've got way better cameras. Um, you know, they're budget phones. They're not waterproof. You know, a lot, a lot of drawbacks, but they're, I feel like if I was in the market for a phone right now, I think this is what I'd go for. It's just such, seems like such a good deal.

• 1:18:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, we, I didn't, I haven't, uh, given them a ton of thought. I really do want to look at it more. It's funny, like the, the, the camera quality is like the thing, right?

• 1:18:35Nilay Patel?

  If they can, if they can just get up to like a B, then all of a sudden it's like, it's a really big deal. It seems like they're getting there. Yeah. All right. That's it. It's the Vergecast. I want to tell you about Casey's Interface Live again Tuesday, April 21st, 5:30, 6:30 Pacific, 8:30, 9:30 Eastern. Go sign up for that. There's only 500 slots in the webinar. It should be really good. Sarah Frier, that book, the Instagram book, No Filter, very good. So Interface Live with Casey and Sarah Frier, who wrote No Filter, April 21st. Go sign up for that. Subscribe to Dieter's newsletter, Processor. And then we have a new, speaking of good news, on that note, TC Sodik, our executive editor, has a new newsletter called Home Screen, which is just full of fun stuff, because we know people want some fun stuff. Full

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  of fun stuff that's happening on the internet. Go subscribe to that. All right. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll. Paul. Promote code.

• 1:19:44Speaker 09

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.

• 1:20:15Speaker 10

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.