IFA 2020 gadgets / Intel announces 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs / Nvidia announces RTX 3080 and 3090

Nilay, Dieter, Chaim, and Chris dive deep into all the gadget news that dominated this week, including all the announcements at IFA 2020's virtual event showcase. Stories discussed this week: Apple and Google announce new automatic app system to track COVID exposures Apple releases iOS 13.7 with support for new automatic COVID-19 notification system The CDC’s testing guidance will make the pandemic worse Emergency COVID-19 vaccines will have to convince a skeptical public Robert Pattinson reportedly has COVID-19, and The Batman has halted production Super Mario 3D World and other classic Mario games are coming to the Switch Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is a Switch racer that uses RC cars Nintendo is releasing a 35th anniversary Super Mario Bros. Game and Watch Intel announces its new 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs, available ... Intel debuts a new logo alongside its 11th Gen chips Asus’ latest ZenBook laptops feature Intel’s 11th Gen CPUs and Thunderbolt 4 ports Acer’s new Swift laptops include Intel’s 11th Gen processors Toshiba laptops are no more, but here are Dynabook’s new notebooks with Intel’s 11th Gen parts Samsung launches Galaxy Book Flex 5G, the first 5G Intel Evo laptop Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080: launching September 17th for … Nvidia's new RTX 3090 is a $1,499 monster GPU designed for ... Qualcomm's next budget Snapdragon 4-series chips could ... Qualcomm’s 8cx Gen 2 5G processor promises a new wave of better ARM-based laptops Qualcomm hopes to topple AirPods Pro with ‘adaptive’ noise cancellation for true wireless earbuds Sonos patent gives possible first look at unannounced headphones Bang & Olufsen’s $800 noise-canceling headphones copy the best part of Microsoft’s Surface Headphones Samsung announces The Premiere, a luxury ultra-short throw 4K laser projector The new Philips Hue lightstrip mounts to your TV and syncs with what’s on-screen Lenovo Smart Clock 8BitDo made a mod-friendly, wireless arcade stick for the Nintendo Switch and Asus Zenfone 7 Pro review: fun flipping cameras with a bulky phone attached Samsung announces its cheapest 5G phone and new Trio … We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Heim Gartenberg and Chris Welch join the show to talk about Intel's new 11th gen Tiger Lake CPUs, the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090, all the gadgets that are coming out of IFA, and then a little bit of Dieter's emotions about folding phones. That's coming up now on The Vergecast.

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• 0:47Speaker 02

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• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Nintendo of America. They don't know it yet, but we're gonna, you just, you just conquer the territory you want. That's my feeling. I'm Neil, I'm your friend, Dieter Bohn is here. Howdy. Wow. Heim Gartenberg is here. Hello. And Chris Welch is here. Good day, once again. We have, there's a lot of gadget news in this world, so I wanted Heim and Welch to join us, go through, IFA is technically this week. It's a huge European gadget show.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  And they're actually sort of doing it? There's like real things that you can go sort of attend virtually and even some real world stuff?

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  There you go. So there's, there's a flood of news. This is the, in September, we've entered sort of the fall hardware season. It's time. So we're gonna get into all that. There's some cool Nintendo stuff to talk about, and then Dieter. Either just, I think every week, we're just gonna make you think about folding phones until the reviews are here. But as always, I want to start with the two biggest stories in the world. It is, it's funny, it's 20, 25 weeks. It's a nice round number. 25 weeks since Donald Trump and Dr. Deborah Birx promised us a national testing plan involving a website that would be built, I think by Sundar Pichai at Google himself. Right. He was, you know, he's like, look, I was the architect of many of Google's cloud services. I worked on the Chrome team. I'm going to make this website for you. And then he forgot his Squarespace login.

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, you know, the trick was that you just hit escape on the homepage.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  25 weeks since that happened. That is good context for some of the other stuff that is going on with COVID right now, which is the administration is sort of promising a vaccine around the time of the election. I think I've been harping and banging away on this, on this website joke for so long, just to make it clear that we have to hold people accountable for these promises. So that's very obviously like a stunt that is happening, this promise of a vaccine. The CDC has been giving guidance. I think we wrote a piece, Addie wrote a piece. The headline was just the CDC's testing guidance will make the pandemic worse. The New York Times wrote a piece that was like, gee, we should just, it's time to stop listening to CDC. All that's bad. All of it comes down to, we need a proper test and taste, test and trace program

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  in this country before we can get beyond the pandemic, get beyond, you know, until a real vaccine that has been properly tested hits. Nicole had a piece for us this week on vaccines, on how these emergency developed vaccines are going to have to convince a public that is already a little skeptical of vaccines. That's a big deal. That's a big cultural problem to solve. And then on the test and trace side, we've been covering this for a long time now. Apple and Google obviously announced that contact tracing exposure notification, I think is what they're technically calling it, exposure notification system. The APIs for that system were released a while ago. There were some apps across some states that use those APIs. And by some, you mean like app, or maybe two, or like not enough?

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, not enough. So then the next step of the Apple, Google exposure notification system is going to add, it's good. It is also very complicated. So they've built the APIs. The phones can do exposure notification. They can trade the Bluetooth keys and they can check those, you know, if you, the list of keys on your phone gets checked against a database if any of those keys. In the database are registered as having tested positive, you get, you know, a notification that says you were notified per some parameters or that you were exposed per some parameters that different states can set. That initially required you to have an app on your phone. So the system was working in the background, but to do something like submit a positive test for yourself, you needed an app from public health authority. Apple and Google

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  are now taking the next step. So iOS 13.7 just came out. It now has the interface for that stuff built into the app. If your local health authority wants to enable it in some way. The, the Google side is just very different and it's very Android in its way. That your local health authorities can give the phones a set of parameters that will then auto generate an Android app that works with the framework.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Very complicated.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Wait, why is that complicated?

• 5:32Nilay Patel?

  It's just, it's so Android in that they can't really bake it into the UI of the operating system without going through all of the update machinations of Android. So it is easier to like dynamically compile an application on the phone that touches. I mean, that's like hilarious, right?

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 5:48Nilay Patel?

  Whereas Apple is just like, is pushing it. You know, I, we've been covering it very closely. I imagine if you've been listening to the show or reading The Verge, you're aware of it. If you just read these stories and read how it works, I worry that it's so complicated. All of this stuff is so complicated and requires so many, so many different sorts of agencies and public health authorities and hospitals and people to understand how it works to make it effective. I think now that it's here, it's time to kind of hammer on that. So I think that's kind of the next step here. But that's good news. Overall, the system has been in development. Apple and Google, for all of the other noise around those companies and all their challenges and all their congressional testimonies, they appear to be just making steady incremental progress on this, which I think is great.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Can I just say one thing about these things, these situations being complicated, these software solutions being complicated? Needing them to be simple isn't just for simplicity's sake. It isn't just for aesthetic reasons that simple things are nicer or even just easier to understand. It's that in a situation where there are bad faith actors who will use any complicated thing, anything that's difficult to understand as a cudgel against it, or as a way to like muddy the waters. Complicated things actually become really problematic. It's harder to muddy the waters with a simple thing than it is with a complicated thing.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And here, you know, the the nature of the thing is that I you don't think of your phone having a relationship with your local government. That is just phones exist outside of that framework. And here they need to have a very deep relationship with your local government because that's the scale of the problem. And that's really how our responses worked. And we're just going to find out how good local governments around the country are

• 7:40Nilay Patel?

  at working with app vendors and operating system vendors. Anyway, but it's happening. That's generally good news. And then last bits of COVID 19 news, Robert Pattinson tested positive for COVID 19. The Batman halted production and The Rock announced that he, in his hard time, tested positive. And then he was mad about masks. I only bring this up to remind you that if The Rock and Batman can get COVID 19, it is very likely that you can too, and you should be very careful. That's the COVID stuff. The other side of it is the movement for racial justice in this country, which, you know, I think these are the two stories that we'll take away from 2020. Not so much Tiger Lake, but we're going to talk about Tiger Lake. We obviously talked to Bijan and Maria about our huge Capturing the Police project on the interview show this week. I encourage you to listen to that. It was it was really good conversation.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's very hard when you are interviewing your own reporters about a project you edited. I'm just making spawn con. And then it actually turned into a really good and meaty conversation. So check that out. Check out Capturing the Police Project. We worked on that for months. Almost everybody on the site touched it in some way. It's just a big deal. And I keep coming back to how deeply intertwined everything that we talk about on the show is with this movement. It's cameras, it's social media distribution, it's who gets to moderate, it's who gets to take it down, it's how the platforms operate, what they surface, what they make viral. It's all wrapped up in there. So go check out that project, check out that conversation with Bijan and Maria. We're very proud of it. Okay, the business aside, the biggest gadget news of the week, I think we have to we

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  have to just say it out loud at the top. It's the Nintendo released Mario Kart Live.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to, I mean, I just assumed you'd freak out over this.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  So the, the, it's Mario Kart, but what you do is you actually have little remote control carts with cameras on the top and then they drive around your living, you drive them around your living room and they map out a virtual Mario Kart track in your living room.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  So I don't know how they do that.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  So there's, there's clearly gates, right? So that you, you can set gates and then the track needs to go through the gate, one, two, three, four. But I think you could also map out the thing because they've showed a little thing where there was like a weird curly Q track, right? And they, they can do stuff like if you get hit with a shell, you let your cart slows down. So it's possible that if you go off the track, they will slow the cart down and that's how they enforce staying on the track in between the gates or whatever. But it seems pretty cool.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  This, this is legitimately the only AR thing I've ever been like, oh, that'll work. People were like that. Everything else is like, eh, yeah, I'm going to put this couch in my living room.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  What's so clever about it is it fits so well into like what's capable and possible with AR right now. So you can see the other carts and then you can have digital effects on those carts, but they're not trying to map anything wild on, you know, curved surfaces or whatever. What you see is like what the cart sees and the, the things that are digital are the things that you'd expect to be digital from the game. And then the things that are real, they just like, it just needs to be a floor, right?

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  So the cart has a little camera on it.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  The cart has a little camera, but it doesn't need to do like real time rendering of 3D surfaces while the car, cart is in motion. They've got those gates and so camera will be able to recognize those gates. It'll be able to recognize other carts. But you just, if you just have little, you know, the equivalent of QR codes on that stuff, you can do that really fast and on the fly. And so it, the take what's possible in AR and then come up with clever solutions for making it seem like you've done something bigger than you actually have. And then make it Mario Kart, because who doesn't love Mario Kart? Literally, I don't know anybody.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  If you haven't watched the video, go, look at the post, watch the video on the site that, so it's a cart, a little Mario Kart with a little Mario in it, a little like F1 racer shaped thing. And then right below the wing, above Mario's head is a camera. So just the steps here are the camera has to stream video to the switch. Somehow, that's a thing that probably has to happen. You you play it on the switch. You you drive around and the cart moves or anything. The game has to know the layout of your living room. It has to stream video to your switch. The switch has to overlay graphics on the video it's streaming in. And then you can play with another person with another cart. So all of that has to talk to each other. All of this seems like not the most challenging problem.

• 12:00Nilay Patel?

  But that sense of this, there's just a lot going on in terms of network performance and processing to get to here, like that just blew me away. Like, it's a toy, but the amount of like just tech that has to happen for that toy to work seems mind blowing. I also noticed that the video, I don't know if this is like, these are like a bunch of cameramen on the show this week, but the room was very bright. The first thing I thought was, I wonder how this is gonna go in the dark or at night with like one lamp turned on?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:30Nilay Patel?

  It's like, huh, there's a lot of sunlight in this room. Also, that couch is perfectly positioned in the center of the room. But I can't wait. But I, it's like, of all the gadgets we saw this week, this one was by far the one that to me is just like totally new. Like, I haven't seen anything like this before.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  There was the, what's the, the, the company that eventually turned into Anki? And, you know, made a little, they, they-

• 12:51Speaker 04

  Anki Drive.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, Anki Drive. They had that, you know, and that was at the Apple keynote. So this is sort of a logical extension of that, but this is, this feels way more advanced or just way more clever in how it integrates AR into like the existing system of, you know.

• 13:06Nilay Patel?

  Can I admit something to you? I still have no idea what Anki Drive was. Tim Cook came on stage at Apple keynote. He was like, I want to show you something amazing. And it was like a micro machine racing around in a circle. And he's like, this is the next frontier of AI. And I still do not know what he was talking about. And the company, the company folded, right? It's gone.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  And I think that is the problem. I think, I think there's a clear link. Between not having any idea what's going on in the company, not, the cars are supposed to like drive around each other.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, they used, they used AI to like do some of the twitchy things that so you wouldn't have to do it, like drive around each other and, you know, stay, you know, within certain parameters and whatever. And, you know, eventually they, they took that idea and they made a robot that you were just supposed to hang out with that didn't do anything. It was very cute. I had, I got one. And it made you feel good that you had a little robot that would chirp at you when you walked in the door. But that turns out is not a real business. Mario Kart, however, you could just make money on that anytime you want. You just have Mario make a cute little Mario noise and, and you're done.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is all this is coming out in the context of Super Mario Brothers train 35. They've released new versions of it. There's remastered versions of various Mario games coming to Switch. There's a game and watch, like a little handheld that plays Super Mario Brothers. I'm definitely gonna buy that.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. People are gonna have a chance that haven't to play Super Mario Sunshine, the, the most unfairly hated of the Mario, 3D Mario games. And I'm excited. I love Super Mario Sunshine. Everybody that hates Super Mario Sunshine can go away.

• 14:44Nilay Patel?

  All right. I'm excited. I'm excited for the verge to become a Super Mario Sunshine blog. It's gonna be great. So that's Nintendo stuff. I just think it's amazing that this little Mario, like, go watch that video and think about all of the, all of this AR conversation we've had. The iPad has a LiDAR sensor. And we're like, why? And Nintendo's like, this little crappy car can run around your house. Like, they beat, they beat them to the punch in a serious way. And it looks amazing. And also, I just love this contrast of you got Sony and Microsoft saying, here come our groundbreaking, powerful new consoles. And here's Nintendo saying, well, here's Mario and some RC cars. And we're gonna sell bull loads of these things. We're just gonna throw Mario at people. That's our strategy. Yeah. Here's a Super Mario game from 35 years ago, re-released. Go ahead and buy

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  that one. It's great. Real, real trip there. All right. My gadget news. Actually, a big week of processor news in the broadest sense. Intel announced Tiger Lake, the 11th generation Tiger Lake. Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 3080. Qualcomm has some stuff. There's headphone chips. Let's start with Intel. Heim, did they explain to you why they made their new logo in Microsoft Word?

• 15:53Speaker 04

  The new logo is the future and the fact that it looks like it was made in Microsoft Word can only lead me to assume that Intel believes that Microsoft Word is the future of computing.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  It's not wrong.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  It's not a coincidence that the only real performance metric they gave the Tiger Lake chips was that it does office productivity like 20% better than the 10th gen stuff.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  No.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  Because Microsoft Word is the key.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  I love it. That was really their metric?

• 16:21Speaker 04

  That was the metric. The metric they gave is that it is 20% faster speeds on day-to-day office productivity and a 20% increase in system level power, where there are two metrics on the processor side. They are more excited about the graphics than the processor.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. So walk us through 11th gen Tiger Lake.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  All right. So 11th gen Tiger Lake. This is, you know, the classic Intel TikTok mechanism. Last year, they jumped to a new architecture. They were, they finally released their 10 nanometer chips. And so this is the refinement of that. They announced actually in their last earnings call that they're not going to hit seven nanometer for at least another, you know, year plus. That's delayed. So this is a refined kind of version of last year's stuff. But Intel is hyping this up as a very big jump forward. And one of the reasons that they're doing that is that they're finally rolling out their new Z graphics, which are Intel's really big graphics push for the first time in a very long time. It's going to start rolling out. They're doing dedicated GPUs and external GPUs, which is a thing

• 17:21Speaker 04

  that they haven't done for a very long time slash ever, depending on what you count like one weird project from a while back. But this is, this is, you know, the first wave of that. It's the integrated graphics. This is actually the worst of all their stuff. They have much more powerful stuff on their roadmap, but they're promising like big stuff. They're claiming that, you know, it'll run a bunch of like AAA games at 1080p on an Ultrabook, which is impressive if it works, which we'll have to see. But yeah, that's that's sort of where they're they're starting from is, you know, they're claiming 2X better graphics and that's sort of the base point.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  So the TLDR here is the processors themselves are a little bit faster, but the integrated graphics that you'll get with most of these processors is in theory way better. It's hard for me to, I mean, you said, if you believe that, that's sort of the question for me is like, how much better? Like better so that, you know, I guess I was just about to say MacBook Air, but. Better so that an ultrabook that's really thin and light doesn't sort of feel like it's chugging if I do anything more than open up, you know, an edge tab or whatever. Or is it actually better to run games and do something that I normally would never would have done on an ultrabook?

• 18:38Speaker 04

  So Intel is claiming the second. I mean, we haven't tried out these machines yet. They're going to start shipping in the next couple of weeks. I'm sure our whole reviews team is going to be, you know, putting them through their paces. But Intel is really saying, you know, video productivity, you know, video editing, actual games that we're showing off, you know, Doom, PUBG. Like, you're not going to be playing, you know, Battlefield, whatever the new Battlefield that they're releasing is at, you know, 4K graphics, you know, 60 frames per second or 120 frames per second. But for, for, you know, middle of the road stuff, you'll be able to play it, I think, well, is sort of the goal here.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  The gap between, because of all the TikTok sale drama, like, I've just been playing with TikTok, and the gap between like the TikTok or the Instagram reels, video editor, or Snapchat, in terms of what they can do in real time, editing a video feed, at almost any laptop, is so dramatically huge now. So for Intel to be like, this laptop is better at video editing, I don't think the comparison is to previous laptops. It is, it has to be to phones, right? And I, I wonder just how, how much of a whole, like, an entire generation of kids is going to like grow up expecting their phones to do real time video effects and like AR effects and Snapchat?

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  And their laptops are like, just, they just explode because they just don't have the horse. Like, that's like the next step for graphics and laptops is to just catch up to where phones have been for a couple of years now. Not necessarily in the game front, but in the, when you talk about video editing. The other reason I bring that up is obviously Apple's going to bring out ARM laptops very soon. And presumably they will just bring those capabilities to their laptops.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  That's sort of the difference that we're seeing, and we'll get to that later, with, between the Intel stuff and the Qualcomm stuff. Qualcomm is pushing its ability, you know, offer this real time AI processing and, and camera stuff. The stuff that its mobile chips are already very good at. We've seen stuff like, you know, the eye tracking and the AI replacement is the demo that always gets thrown around on the Surface Pro X. It's the kind of tasks that, you know, we've optimized, we spent years optimizing our mobile processors for, which are very easy to bring to laptops. And that's, I think, sort of where that breakdown is going to come.

• 20:46Nilay Patel?

  I feel like Intel has always been just like chasing the glory of the past. In many, almost every way. So like, once upon a time, Centrino laptops were a thing. Then they tried to make ultrabooks a thing. And now they've got a new thing called EVO.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  You forgot about Athena, which was not a thing. They said it was a thing, then they said, no, no, it's not a thing. Don't call it a thing. And then we said, why isn't it a thing? And they're like, yeah, just kidding. It's a thing. And now they've forgotten about that being a thing. And so now we have EVO.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  EVO is, is the thingification of Project Athena in a way.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  That's the most in the weeds thing that we've said on the Verchast in like, six months.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  It is taking Project Athena and it is putting a name. It's going to be a sticker that you're going to see on your Intel laptops.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  It's gonna be, you know, a brand, with the new logo and everything. It is pretty similar to Athena. It's a little stricter. It's, you know.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  We should just say what it is. It's, it's basically a certification that your laptop meets certain criteria that Intel has set for performance and battery life and graphics or whatever. So is it, you, you have an EVO laptop or it's an EVO certified laptop?

• 21:53Speaker 04

  It's an EVO verified design.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  EVO verified design.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  It means that you'll get nine hours of quote, "real world" use, according to Intel's tests on a single charge on a 1080p display. That it'll fast charge for up to four hours of charge in 30 minutes. That it'll support Wi-Fi 6, Thunderbolt 4. That will have system wake in less than a second. And that it has an 11th gen Tiger Lake processor, the only ones they're certifying with it right now.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  That battery life claim is actually a big deal. It feels like nine hours is a floor. And I think their, their claim is like, this is a real test, not a fake test.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  They have, you know, an internal test that they do on it, apparently. That is, that is how they're defining it. It's not, manufacturer says this lasts for nine hours. Trust us. Intel is doing some sort of actual verification here.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  It's sad that nine hours is, I'm like, oh, that's pretty good. Because I just feel like battery, battery life on laptops has been dropping for a while. So a question I have is, you know, with your 20% better office performance, are you gonna get, actually get nine hours out of this thing?

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Well, so actually, I gotta, I gotta point out, like, all that list of requirements sounds great, but they just, they just kind of snuck Thunderbolt 4 in there, didn't they?

• 23:03Speaker 04

  I mean, Thunderbolt 4 is default on anything with its 11th gen system is also a requirement, and all 11th gen systems have Thunderbolt 4. This just means like you can't get an Intel Evo stamp, I guess, if you had an AMD processor, but I don't think you can get one anyway.

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  What is meaningfully different from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 4?

• 23:24Speaker 04

  Uh, Thunderbolt 4 is faster and it supports more screens.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  Fair.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  It raises the bar again on power and speed and the amount of displays that you can hook up to a thing. It also might finally mean that we're gonna start to see like actual real USB-C hubs that let you add more ports to stuff between Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4. But that is a different rabbit hole that's not directly related to.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  Every time you come on the show, I feel like I assign you the what the fuck USB-C post because it's such a mess, but I'll wait, I'll wait for Thunderbolt 4. But then there's actual laptops, right?

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, as is, as is tradition, there is a wave of laptops that are already announced. Intel says that there will be 150 different designs in the coming months. Acer, Asus, Dell, Dynabook, HP Lenovo, LG MSI, Razer, and Samsung have already promised on board. There's a handful of those already announced today. A lot of them are refreshes. Acer Swift 5 and Swift 3, they look like the old ones, they have, you know, the new chips. ZenBook's old ones, new chips. Toshiba's Dynabook is back, sort of.

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  Sort of.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  And, you know, again, they look pretty similar to the old ones, but they have, Tiger like. The most interesting, though, of, of the new batch is Samsung's actually, which is the Samsung Galaxy Book Flex 5G. So, significant, it is the first 5G Intel Evo laptop. Intel, I mean, 5G laptops are early on. The only one that's been out so far is a Qualcomm one that uses Qualcomm stuff. This is, you know, the first one that is Intel, that is not directly related to Qualcomm. It doesn't do a lot of 5G, it does Sub6, it doesn't do millimeter wave, but it is at least a start and it's, you know, a way for Intel to be like, you can get a regular Intel

• 25:11Speaker 04

  laptop that has a regular Intel processor, but it'll have 5G.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  I mean, that's good. That's important. Here's my question. Imagine you work inside Samsung and you you make you've made an amazing product. I don't know. You've made the most incredible microwave ever, right? And you take it to your boss and you're like, look at what this microwave can do. And your boss will say, does it have 5G? And you'll say, uh, what? And then your boss will smash your microwave and fire you on the spot.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  My version of working at Samsung, I think every time there's a new Samsung product, we all imagine what it's like to. It's like you made this laptop and you're like, man, we did it. We get the first EVO verified laptop. That's a thing that's meaningful. Go with me on this. It's got a 5G modem. I passed that test. What should we call it? And then someone is like, you know, it's a great word to put in the name of a laptop. Flex. And then everyone on on whatever Samsung clone zoom that they're using.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:14Nilay Patel?

  Was like, yes. And then they named a laptop after literally the worst thing that the laptop hardware can do. Which is flex.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm fine with it. I mean, it's a weird flex, but okay.

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  I hate you.

• 26:27Speaker 05

  The same people that brought you the Galaxy Buds Live instead of the Galaxy Beans.

• 26:31Nilay Patel?

  So it's been. That's true.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  It's been quite a year for Samsung's marketing team.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Do you think they were just like, we can't just call it the Galaxy Book? People need to know it's a different one.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  There are other Galaxy Books out there. There's the Galaxy Book. There's the Galaxy Book S. There's the Galaxy Book Flex Alpha, which is a different one than this one. There's a lot of these.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  We need to.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  Samsung's flex in here.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  That's what I that's why I wanted to stop it before you got right there. All right. So that's the Intel stuff. Obviously, a lot of laptops coming. As Heim said, our reviews team is going to be all over them. Carry on with chip news. Nvidia has the GeForce RTX 3080. Heim, walk us through that really quick.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  So GeForce RTX 3080 and also the GeForce RTX 3090. These are the next generation Nvidia GPUs. These are their big flagship cards. These are the, you know, ones if you must have the best gaming PC known to mankind. This is what you're putting in. They are physically just enormous. They're based on Nvidia's new Ampere architecture. They're promising twice the performance of the RTX 2080, their old flagship. It'll be even faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, 10GB of GDDR6 memory. That's on the 3080. It is just a big, beefy graphics card.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  It doesn't necessarily do a lot different. The 3080 is just a lot better at it. And then the 3090 is really the, the big wacky one. It costs $1,500, more than presumably whatever an Xbox Series X and a PlayStation 5 will cost combined. $1,500, 24GB of memory. And Nvidia says that this can do 60FPS gaming at 8K resolution, which is a first, really? I'm not sure entirely who that's for or what games it's even worth playing at 8K 60FPS. Like, it is going to take time for the market to catch up, especially given that, you know, we're still waiting for these new consoles to come out and the consoles sort of help

• 28:39Speaker 04

  drive that bar higher because at the end of the day, there are very few gaming companies making AAA games just for PC that, you know, will run on only $1,500 graphics cards. But like, you know, if you have those big games, you know, when Cyberpunk comes out, it will probably look very, very good on this.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  How well does this play Microsoft Flight Simulator? That's my question.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  I think it can just barely run Flight Simulator.

• 29:04Nilay Patel?

  Flight Simulator, we should do an entire show on Flight Simulator. It is, it's so interesting and so cool and so much is happening and then it's so inaccessible until the next Xbox comes out. Like, you have to have a monster PC, so it's like...

• 29:17Speaker 03

  I think the whole dynamic is so interesting. What I keep bringing up the 3080 because it's so much cheaper than the 2080. And the demo of Doom that they were running, where it's just like, holding over 100 FPS and pretty much staying at 120 at 4K is like, pretty amazing.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, so part of that is, is really, they've really focused on updating the thermals and the cooling versus, you know, just raw increases in, in memory or power, at least on the 3080. That's one of the reasons why this is so big is, you know, bigger fans, more cooling.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  So it actually has like, two fans and like, the amount of heat this thing must be kicking out, it's gotta be off the charts. And they even, they're switching to the, every time I read about new graphics cards from Nvidia, like, oh, and now we finally have the 12-pin connector instead of dual 8-pin connectors. And they're saying that's to free up space for heat, too. Like, how much of this, it's like, this and Intel are both like, we can go faster if we can let it get hotter. And with, with Nvidia, they just have the benefit of, they don't have to worry about your battery life, so they could just make it bigger and hotter. And it's like, everybody else will just bend around them. So they can, nobody, nobody's mad at Nvidia, and the same with the people who are mad

• 30:33Speaker 03

  at Intel, because Nvidia, like, no one expects them to have to like, compromise on other things. They could just, they just make it bigger and hotter.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  I mean, if you had to carry around an RTX, you know, 3080 glued to your laptop, you would probably start to look a little less kindly at Nvidia.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Fair. I mean, that is true that they just, because they don't have that constraint, they can push it. The real question is whether any of that can come, right? Like, PC gaming is a big segment, it's growing, there's a lot of interest in it, especially right now. But it's just funny to see, like, that's one world, then there's like, consoles in the middle, which are the consumer world, and then the big consumer world of mobile is just in a different ecosystem entirely.

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  All right. So that was Nvidia. Speaking of mobile, there's just a little bit of Qualcomm news and then we should take a break. Dieter, you want to walk us through this Qualcomm stuff?

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Oh, so they've got a budget Snapdragon that will support 5G. Here's where I've landed on 5G. I don't think you should care about it still now, but I think, I think that you should care about it soon. I don't care that it's going to be on the next iPhones, but I think that eventually like 5G will matter in the US, especially on sub six. I'm going to say late next year. Right now, it's like barely faster if you can get it. But I think by late next year, we'll start to see more network build out. Verizon just won a huge big ass auction to like get a little, you know, more bandwidth for its sub six network.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  And so if you're buying a phone, the reason to care about 5G is in theory, in a year and a half or so, the networks will be there where you start to see some benefit. So if you're going to keep your phone for two to three years, you maybe want to get a 5G phone, maybe.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  And the flip side of that argument that you were making is don't buy a phone this year.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I think that that's not a terrible thing to not do. This like, yeah, it'd be fine to not buy a phone.

• 32:31Nilay Patel?

  Did you see, I think Joanna did her like drive around in an RV video, testing 5G around the country. Like your perspective is Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal. But like that perspective of it's not ready yet is such a US centric perspective. Cause if you look at the charts of US 5G speeds compared to everywhere else in the world, my dudes, we have lost the race.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  I'm here to report.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Part of it is the the chips aren't there yet. Like Qualcomm still doesn't integrate a 5G modem into its, you know, core Snapdragon chip. If you buy a Galaxy S20 today, it has a separate modem chip in it still. That's, you know, sapping power. We're not even at the point where the best processor has built in 5G. They have the the step down one does, but like the the biggest, best processor that you're putting in your flagship phones, which are the big expensive phones that people want to buy, don't even have the best form of, you know, Just hardware on a very basic level that they can yet.

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think that is worrying about a problem that seems solvable because you can, you as a person, might be able to buy one phone or another. Worrying about the network is just waiting on Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile to like, finish the job. The spectrum fights are real. Verizon, AT&T have been complaining that T-Mobile has like too much spectrum now, which is very like choice, considering that merger just went down. So I think like the infrastructure, wanting the cost extra processor, heat, all that stuff, is in wait of the infrastructure to get built out. And that's still, I mean, we've been saying that forever. All right, we gotta take a break. We gotta come back and talk about some gadgets, Efa. We'll be right back.

• 34:11Speaker 06

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• 35:12Nilay Patel?

  All right, it's Efa. What does Efa stand for?

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a German word and you're gonna look at me because I got the German name to do it and I super can't.

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, Efa's happening. Focusing on the actual trade show aspect of the trade show is whatever. Lots of gadget news. Let's start. We were talking with Qualcomm. Let's start with Qualcomm. Chris Welch, they're gonna, they're gonna come after Apple with some headphone chips.

• 35:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it turns out there are quite a few companies that use Qualcomm's chips for their two wireless earbuds. You rattle off some of these. There's Jabra, Skull Candy, Sennheiser, B and O. So there are quite a few brands that kind of depend on them. So we've seen a lot of earbuds that have noise cancellation, but usually it's like an on or off thing. So Qualcomm is trying to do is kind of copy what Apple's doing with the AirPods Pro. If you ever look at the AirPods Pro website, it says that they adjust the noise cancellation 200 times per second. I don't know how any human being could ever confirm that that's what happens, but that's what Apple says. And so now Qualcomm says they're gonna do something similar. So like, if your fit or seal isn't perfect, I always talk about how important the seal is for good bass and good noise cancellation. So if that's not quite perfect, this new chip is gonna help

• 36:18Speaker 05

  you out and just kind of adjust things on the fly. So it'll all sound better and be more effective. And so we'll see how well it works. But like I said, there are a lot of companies, I think Sony and Samsung, of course, use their own chips for this kind of stuff. So they're gonna be involved here, but this could help out many, many brands over the next year or so.

• 36:34Nilay Patel?

  It's interesting to think that we now need to pay attention to headphone chips in the same way that, like, the capability of the standard headphone chip will determine the capabilities of many, many, many products. Does Qualcomm have competitors besides sort of the custom Sony, Samsung, like?

• 36:50Speaker 05

  Sony, Samsung, Apple. I'm not really sure who else would also be in there, but, uh, but yeah.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you just know how I feel about competition. Like, is there like a, is there like a Broadcom in the mix, like pushing Qualcomm along? I guess not. Then there's actually new Bang & Olufsen headphones?

• 37:07Speaker 05

  Yes, these are $800 noise cancelling headphones. If you buy $800 headphones, I think you're in a different tax bracket than I am, ever so slightly, but I think I'll stick with the Sony 1000 X144s. But they did steal at least one very good idea from Microsoft Surface Headphones. They have those dials on the left and right cups that you can just turn to adjust the volume and And C levels. And so they stole that idea. They said that they were inspired by the aperture ring on cameras. And I said in my post, you know, just give the company credit for a good idea for once and say, Microsoft did this really well. And, you know, we just want to take that and build upon it. But no, they said it came from aperture rings. Okay. But these look really nice. I'm sure they sound amazing.

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  I did not like how the Surface Headphones sounded at all.

• 37:53Speaker 05

  Really?

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I love the knob. I thought that was so much fun. It was like, I've never adjusted the volume of my headphones so much. But I did not like the way they they were just really muddy to me.

• 38:03Speaker 05

  The Surface Headphones 2 sounded a bit better, so it might be worth checking out. And then there was, there was a patent for the Sonos headphones that we've been hearing about for a long, long time. And so I'm kind of excited for these. I think we know what the big trick is going to be. Like, you're going to have them on, you're going to walk into your house, and then your music is going to just move to your Sonos speakers. And that'll be the big wahoo fancy trick, I think, of the Sonos headphones. But we have an idea of what they look like. We don't know how much they'll cost, but.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Isn't it supposed to maybe, it's also supposed to support both Alexa and Google at the same time? Maybe not at the same time. I don't know. That's.

• 38:36Nilay Patel?

  There's a little bit of a lawsuit over that.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  There's a little bit of a thing there.

• 38:39Nilay Patel?

  Little tiny antitrust lawsuit situation going on there. I wonder if they've delayed it because marketing a product about you can leave your house and come back seamlessly is like a little.

• 38:53Speaker 05

  Not quite the moment.

• 38:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  Do you think they're going to be targetable in the way any other Sonos speaker is targetable from, you know, the Sonos app or from Spotify? Like, are they going to be like full on Wi-Fi headphones? Because to me, like, there's no point, if it's literally just Bluetooth headphones with the Sonos badge, and it like, it can like somehow communicate to a speaker over Bluetooth or something to like, pass it off. Like, that's not enough. I actually want to be able to like, hit the source button that looks at, sees all the Sonos targets and choose the headphones.

• 39:23Speaker 05

  Why? Yeah, we'll see how it works out. Because I mean, it could like, always also like, move too soon from headphones to your speaker, like before you're even fully inside. So it'll, they'll have to kind of smooth that out and see how well it works. But I'm excited for new, new Sonos gadgets. You know, the Move is a really good speaker that I enjoy a lot. And so it's fun to see them kind of just branching out more.

• 39:41Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, why do you want to have music streamed to like, your headphones and to some speakers in your house?

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Well, or speakers. I want to be able to switch it from the speakers to my headphones. Or I want to be able to like. I don't have the headphone, like, ask the digital assistant or something to have it go there. In Spotify, it, when you, you can tap your targets and like having the headphones be there via Sonos is interesting. There, it just, it feels more integrated than having headphones that are connected to your phone via one system. And then your house speakers that are connected to your music ecosystem via an entirely other system. They should just all talk to each other.

• 40:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, the reason that's crazy is that it would imply that the headphones need enough processing power to go and fetch an audio stream from the cloud themselves.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, why not?

• 40:29Nilay Patel?

  Sure. Now the headphones have fans. Like, that's, soon the headphones will have ray tracing. Like, let's do it. Let's get out there. Chris, there's a bunch of TVs. Well, not a bunch, but I, I mean, you know, I'm a sucker with TV stuff. New projectors, new Hugh stuff. What's going on there?

• 40:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, Samsung has a new short throw 4K projector for all of us who are turning our garages into home movie theaters and whatnot. This is coming later on this year. There's no price. It's probably going to be very expensive because it's part of their lifestyle lineup with the Seraph and the Frame and all that stuff, but.

• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  Isn't the Frame relatively inexpensive?

• 41:04Speaker 05

  Uh, the Frame's inexpensive, but.

• 41:07Speaker 04

  You can buy an LG OLED for like half the cost of what a Frame costs.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  No, you can get a 65 inch Frame for $1,500.

• 41:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, the Frame is pretty cheap, but it's still kind of pricey for like LCD standards, I think.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  But this thing is definitely going to be up there. I mean, they say it's a luxury product, so when Samsung says something is a luxury product, they tend not to mess around.

• 41:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm surprised there hasn't been more, I mean, I think the first really great short throw projector we saw was from Sony and CS like years ago. I'm surprised that hasn't matured out more, right? Like, this is a product that, right now, it's like, you can have a gigantic screen in your living room and it won't take up your actual wall. Seems like a very, it's a, it's just a promising thing to market right now. It just hasn't seemed to hit.

• 41:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. I think LG announced one not too long ago that has pretty close specs to this one, so.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  For me, it's, uh, like, I just, I don't, I don't think it's going to have the lumens that I need for, for my living room. I, I very much want to switch to a projector. I am like, super tired. Like, I have, I have a big TV. It's a Vizio. I hate it because the software is terrible. Uh, I love that it's big. I would happily ditch it for a projector. Yeah, if I felt like I'd be able to watch it in the afternoon. Like, I'm ready.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is the world's first HDR 10 plus projector, so you will be able to watch approximately nothing on it.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  And then, Chris, we gotta talk about these two lights. I mean, they're so silly.

• 42:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, they've had these before, I think, but now they can show more than one color. So you, so Philips, he just announced a new light strip that goes in the back of your HDTV, and it'll match the colors that are on screen and put those on your walls. You need the strip, which starts at around $230, I think. And then you also need the $230 HDMI switch sync box. So all told, you're gonna spend over $400 to have pretty lights behind your TV, but I just bought new LG C10, so I wouldn't mind giving this a shot.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  You bought a C10?

• 43:02Speaker 05

  Bought a C10, and it doesn't get very bright. So I'm starting to learn that OLED, that is indeed the downside of OLED.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Are these just really fancy bias lights? Because like, you can get these for like 15 bucks.

• 43:13Speaker 05

  I'm sure there are cheaper options, but you know, it's part of the huge ecosystem, and it'll, it'll just work once you spend all the money on all the, all the bits.

• 43:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just love that it's like you, the last step before plugging the HDMI cable into your TV is plugging it into this box so that your lights can flash in the correct colors?

• 43:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's pretty good. I'll take it.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  But also, you gotta pick what HDMI gets the pretty lights. Do you pick the Xbox? Do you pick the cable box? What HDMI goes into the pretty box?

• 43:44Nilay Patel?

  And then you can't use your built-in, your built-in apps.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Do you buy an HDMI switcher to go in front of the HDMI box? And then, like, you're living in that world?

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 43:52Speaker 03

  Yeah?

• 43:54Nilay Patel?

  Obviously, no, don't buy a cabo.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  It's good. It's just, it's definitely an Android computer that lives under your TV.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  Sounds like a problem for the YouTubers to figure out, because the only people I've, people I've ever seen with these lights on their TVs are YouTube content creators.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  No, I gotta say, the amount of gamer lights proliferating across the Verge staff is very high. Like, streamer lights. Like, when I did a podcast with Bijan earlier this week, I was like, do you have streamer lights? He's like, I'm on Twitch. McKenna has streamer lights, like it's all over the place. All right, Dieter, tell me about this flipping phone. You reviewed a flipping phone?

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, talk about this already. So it's the Zenfone 7 Pro. John Porter reviewed it and you know, the cameras, they flip. So you don't have selfie camera that the good cameras on the back flip around. Only they're not that, they're not that good. Just like, they're okay. Which, you know, what do you, what do you really expect? Asus has never like been known for amazing cameras on its phones. It's just, you want it to be, you want it to step up just a little bit. Because they moved it up a price tier, right? Like they've added the 90 hertz display. There's still a huge battery on it. And so it went from like the phone, like, oh, wow, this thing is great. Last year to this year being like, yep, you did it again. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with doing it again.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  I just wish that the camera stuff were just a little bit better. I, yeah, that's it. That's all I want. Just like improve the cameras just a little bit. And then this thing, I'd be super, super into it. You do lose IP ratings because it's got moving parts. But really, who's going, who's going anywhere near water right now anyway? Let's be honest.

• 45:32Nilay Patel?

  Quite a few people. I mean, the promise here is that you get to use a real camera for selfie, right? I mean, that's the whole, whole game. Is it better than the iPhone selfie camera?

• 45:41Speaker 03

  That I don't know. I mean, yes, in terms of just like basic quality of the sensor, I'm sure. But in terms of like image tuning, I think I've got a little bit more faith in Apple than I do in Asus. So you, I mean, you look at John Sample photos and you kind of see what I mean. It's like, oh yeah, you're not quite there. Apple compensates better for its tiny sensor than this thing can pull off with its big sensor.

• 46:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. And then, so Hyam, and then you are very excited about this smart. Where's this like gadget grab bag out of IFA? There's a, there's a smart clock. Tell me about it.

• 46:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a clock. It doesn't do anything else, doesn't have a camera, doesn't have a screen. It shows you the time, it shows you the weather, you can set an alarm and it can play music and like do basic Google Assistant stuff like.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  So it's not like the smart clock that's actually a Google center display where you can see photos of your loved ones. It's literally just like, it's got like the classic like LED eight. You have like old school LED numbers.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  Sometimes I just need the time and I don't need the time on like a hard to read background because my loved ones are there.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  I love my family and friends, but sometimes I just need to know like.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  I can't see the weather because of this dumb baby.

• 46:55Nilay Patel?

  I love it. I mean, it's, you know, it's interesting is that the Google's ecosystem is technically more open than Amazon. So you can buy a bunch of weird Alexa stuff. You can buy a bunch of weird Google stuff, but like, Amazon has more form factors for Alexa.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  I mean, Amazon has one of these.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but the little, the spot, the little round.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, the little echo with the clock on it, which is also a great idea. And just like.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  It's just funny that Google needed to go like third blessed third party approach to let's add a clock to the Echo Dot or to the Nest Mini. I have that old Lenovo smart clock with the screen.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  And it makes it, it's sitting on my desk at the office, which I will just never, never see again. It's just been showing photos of Max to no one this whole time.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  It's very depressing. And then Dieter, tell me about, tell me about this arcade stick.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Okay. So 8bit do, 8bit do, 8bit, 8bit do, whatever. They're the company that makes a bunch of different like retro Bluetooth game controllers. And you should start looking at them because you're about, we're about to get X cloud, game pass ultimate, whatever for Android. Stadia still exists. And so I've been looking a lot more at game controllers. And so of course they pop up on the radar. They're making an Xbox controller. So they made this classic arcade controller that's completely programmable. You can go in and do all sorts of wacky stuff to it. And it has the aesthetic of the, the arcade controller for the original NES, just with a million more buttons.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  And I kind of want one because playing games with like, like those huge buttons and like being able to like really move the joystick around is super fun. And it's super programmable. It's 90 bucks, so it's not cheap as far as these things go. But if, if you want to like build your own little, you know, arcade system, uh, you know, you could just go get the thing, trust that the buttons are good. And then you can really start messing around with it. Take it apart, rewire it. It looks like it's a blast.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  I just had a deep flashback to getting the NES advantage and just being the happiest.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  Oh, it's called the advantage. That's right. Yeah.

• 49:00Nilay Patel?

  The NES, it was like a sensation. And they had the other one called the NES Max that had the weird circle that was the wrong choice. Like the advantage is a cultural touchdown and the NES Max is a. It's something that only I remember.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't believe it ever existed.

• 49:15Nilay Patel?

  It didn't work? All right, let's take a break and then we're gonna let Dieter, Dieter just have emotions about folding fans.

• 49:27Speaker 06

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• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, you're in the midst.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  I'm amidst, in the middle.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  These are some of the weirdest embargoes we've ever dealt with.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's no embargo at all on the Z Fold 2. I could tell you as much as you want to hear about with the Z Fold 2, although I'm trying to write the review, so the more I tell you, the like, less I feel like I've said original things in the review. But the duo is still under the I can talk about the hardware, but not the software embargo. But I could talk about the software in theory because I know from looking at it from when we had a hands-on a year ago.

• 50:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, let's, let's, let's wait for the review. I mean, both these reviews are, they're incoming, so we'll have that moment. But, okay, you've now, like, does he, Z Fold 2? What these names?

• 51:07Speaker 03

  No, just, just think of it as that, just, just pretend that it's French.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  I just, the Samsung marketing department.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2. Which, which fold is that one? Oh, it's Z Fold 2.

• 51:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  All right. So you've now, so that's like, you know, the second iteration, they've had time to polish it up. And then you've had this other one, uh, the duo. Where are you at? Is, are these the future? Cause like, we talked about a flipping phone. There's that LG wing phone. We're obviously in a moment of phone hardware rethink.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  Potentially, or it could all just, it could all fail.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, uh, man, there's so many things we could say here. I am going to say that it's not the future until something costs less than a thousand bucks. That's how I like ended the, the video I just made, the, looking at the, the three versions of this hardware that are, that have momentum right now. There's just, this just costs too much. Uh, and until it comes down and then when it comes down in price, more people will have them and then we'll start to understand what people actually want instead of, you know, super nerdy early adapters like me. So that's number one. Uh, number two, and I think this is, I'm going to have a lot more to say about this because I am obsessed with the UI.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  The way that these companies are approaching turning Android into something that works on a folding screen or a bigger screen or on two screens, they all have different approaches and they're not all the same. And they all feel like they're just layers on top of Android instead of Android. Android has the rep of being bad on tablets and that's still true. And it's true at like a deep level, not just that the apps don't size the way you want. Like, say you want to multitask, you go to the thing where you can look at the little cards that you can choose, right? On the iPad, when you go to that view, what you see are like, oh, I've got Twitter and Slack together here. And I've got Office and a web browser Safari here.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  And I've got like, you know, this other game full screen, your splits are all like put together. Android doesn't understand that, that, that world is possible. It doesn't believe that anything exists other than a phone. And so like, when you go to multitasking view, you've got to like, figure out a way to take that floating window card thing and fit it to your world of split screens or dual screens or floating screens or whatever the hell. And everyone's got a different solution for that.

• 53:40Nilay Patel?

  Which one is the best so far?

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, none of them are good. Bad.

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  Is this like a Google to solve it at the platform level problem? Or is it a Google's gonna let everybody experiment and then cherry pick the best one? And make that the default solution?

• 53:59Speaker 03

  Either one would be fine with me, honestly. Pick one, I don't care. Pick one.

• 54:03Nilay Patel?

  But well, one implies like a season of chaos.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, we're already we're in the season of chaos. It's just that the only people that experience the chaos are people that are willing to spend 13 to $2,000 on a device.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  I am experiencing the chaos and I am like, I'm like pre nervous about it for everybody else if these things ever end up costing less than a thousand bucks. You remember like I bought the very first itty bitty MacBook? And I had this USB C thing and I was like, you guys pay attention. This is, this is a problem. These dongles are going to be a problem. And everyone's like, ah, Dieter, you're just an early adopter. What are you talking about? Uh, and then I, I was right.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  That's how I feel about, uh, interfaces for fancy weird new form factors on top of Android.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm, I don't know. I, it's weird that Google seemed like he was getting ahead of it with the folding stuff.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, they were, they were like before the, the fold was even announced, the original one, Google's like, you know? Form factors are changing and we're ready for it. It's like, are you? Yeah. Okay. And they kind of were, but now they're like, it's like, it's getting away from them.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  So what does Samsung actually, not to get too deep into it, but just briefly, what have they been able to actually refine about the?

• 55:13Speaker 03

  So if you remember Samsung has a system where you pull, you slide in this dock from the right hand side from the edge, and then you can drag icons out to the left or the right. And then there's a split pane and then you tap a little dots in the split pane and you can move stuff around and then you can bring in a third one. What they've done is they've made that all feel just a little bit more fluid, um, which sounds like whatever, but it actually is hugely important because if you lose your window state, you got to recreate it again and you want it to be fast and easy. And you can also now save app pairs in that dock. So you can quickly get back some setup that you had before. So it feels almost a little bit like the iPad when you bring it stock up and then you drag an app icon out to do something with.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  It's just theirs is on the right and a completely separate subsystem relative to like the standard Android dock and home screen.

• 56:03Nilay Patel?

  And this has to make more sense when you're looking at it.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  It makes more sense when you're looking at it like you drag the deck out, dock out, you drag the icon out and there's like drop zones. So left, right, center. And then you let it go and like a thing happens.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  But like here, there's left, right, and then there's like, then you can split into three if you want. And then there's a center one that makes the app a pop up window that then turns into a bubble. If you want to minimize it. And you can also choose to have that pop up window be semi translucent if you want.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  Please, please stop.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  Samsung is not afraid to give you options.

• 56:34Nilay Patel?

  I need this to kind of end. Like all of that, which sounds great. Like. If the Android app ecosystem was like. Quickly updating for the latest features of a thing.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Oh, and it also sounds great if like, if I said the word bubble and I know what that means, if you don't, if you're not intimately familiar with the history of bubbles and how like Facebook started chat heads and then Google like started to do it on Android and then took it away and is going to put it back again. And the relationship between Google's idea of bubbles and Samsung's idea of bubbles and Facebook's idea of bubbles, like if none of that makes sense to you, what I just said. Then this is going to be like a pain, like it requires way too much knowledge of like the history of Android UX to understand what's going on on the fold too. But if you do, it's great.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  It's just so funny because one obvious answer to this is just like. Windows, like this problem is deeply solved on other large screen, multiple screen computers.

• 57:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, Neo. It's a 7.6 inch screen. So like, do you really want windows on it? If you do, Neel, you could just do it. You could just like drag stuff into that center and pop out windows.

• 57:38Nilay Patel?

  Of course you can. What was I thinking? It's just funny, like the duo is like a dual screen computer and they're trying to reinvent, right? But it doesn't just have windows from the company that makes. Windows.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Well, you're asking for, for some kind of phone that runs Windows, Neelai?

• 57:57Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  Like a Windows phone?

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  All right, I've come full circle. No, I think about this with the iPad too. What is the one thing I want my iPad Pro to do to just have overlapping windows that I can switch between?

• 58:15Speaker 03

  What size do you want the windows? What size screen? Because I will tell you, just having windows on the 7.6 inch screen, which is like the size of an iPad mini, basically, would be a nightmare. It's like the fingers and shave your finger down like Steve Jobs make the joke and it would suck. But at like the 11 inch iPad, I'm like, yeah, actually, Windows would be great. But also it's a trackpad. So like.

• 58:38Speaker 04

  Isn't that just an ARM Mac that runs iPad apps in Windows with a trackpad?

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You can really see how Craig Federighi got there. It's like at the whiteboard, he's doing the flowchart. He's like, yeah, that's just that. Circle that. He's like, just make me one of those. Speaking of Apple, we should wrap up on some Apple rumors. Mark Gurman, he says orders for the next iPhones are placing high, high orders. 75 to 80 million 5G iPhones this year is, Gurman says Apple's ordering. That's basically where they are, maybe slightly above the last couple of years.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  Disgressive.

• 59:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, see, that's a big bet on people wanting 5G phones. And, you know, we started out by saying, maybe this is a year to just not buy a new phone.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I will tell you that, like, I ask, I always ask the question, why are you pushing 5G? Is it because the carriers are forcing you to? Like, that's like every time I do a product briefing, I ask that. And the answer is always, no, no, when we do like market research, like number one is screen size, number two is battery life, number three is 5G.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean.

• 59:40Speaker 03

  Which is weird. Stop wanting 5G, everybody.

• 59:44Speaker 05

  Sounds like there's just a ton of stuff coming this fall. I mean, they're saying four new iPhones, two Apple Watches, there's new iPad Air that has the same bezels as the Pro and those long rumored Apple headphones are still supposed to come this year as well. So.

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's funny, Apple bought Beats and yes, we know they bought them for the streaming side of it. But then they turn that into Apple Music and like really nothing of Beats persists. Right? Like remember Beats had like the personalization bubbles like all that is gone. I don't know like what they really bought. It's still like unclear what value. Jimmy Iovine is not wandering around Apple campus being like, I'm Jimmy. Like that's not happening. Dr. Dre, as far as I could tell, no longer works at Apple. And then they had the headphone business, which was a huge business and they've just slowly crushed it. Yeah. They crushed it with AirPods and they're they're gonna do their own sort of AirPods over ear headphones. And then what remains of Beats is like just an open question. They still make the neck buds.

• 1:00:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. For now.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  The neck buds and the Power Beats Pro are great.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  The Power Beats Pro are super good. Is Beats just a low end Apple headphone line? Right? It's like just a weird place for that brand to have lain. Like they invented the premium.

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  I mean, they're not priced low end is the thing. Like these are still two, $300 headphones. I think it's it's just the the lifestyle Apple line. It's, you know, if you want the sporty, you want the sporty headphones or the or the cool headphones, then you get Beats. And if you want the nerdy headphones with noise cancelling, you get AirPods.

• 1:01:13Nilay Patel?

  I don't think AirPods are that nerdy. I'm trying to go with you, but anyway, it's just interesting to see where Apple has just decided that Beats is not where its ambitions lie. You know, like they're gonna make their own. And then there's a rumor of a smaller, cheaper HomePod, which I think is great. I just like they're committed. They're gonna they're gonna try it again.

• 1:01:33Speaker 04

  Does it have a clock built in? Cause I'm on board.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  Like it needs a clock. They need desperately to make the HomePod work better with the TV. Yeah, like make make it so that that's an always on voice assistant that does TV stuff. Or there's like a connection between the TV and your HomePod to play audio, like many opportunities await them with the HomePod. Little baby HomePod surrounds. Little baby HomePod surrounds would be great. A HomePod soundbar. Like, I mean. They, I don't know.

• 1:02:01Speaker 04

  Sonos, but make it Apple.

• 1:02:02Nilay Patel?

  I mean, every other company is doing that, right? Like, Amazon is just straight up doing that stuff.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  We, we talk a lot about, uh, regulation from Congress on this podcast. And all I want at this point, forget antitrust, forget breaking them up, forget privacy regulation. All I want is to have a frickin' law that says that the rooms in the Sonos system, the Google system, the Amazon system and the Apple system and the Google system all have to be the same. Like, they all have to interoperate their rooms. The end. That's all I want. Pass that law.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's Law.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  But everyone will call it Dieter's Law and they'll understand what it means. They'll think it's about food.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, so just a flood of Apple stuff.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Should we talk about the fact that there's gonna be four iPhones? And like, one of them's gonna be small, apparently, like 5.4 inches? And that one's gonna be huge?

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  I'm very excited for the small iPhone. I'm mad that they're making the smaller Pro One bigger. Like, the 5.8 was good and now it's a 6.1. But like, this is the smallest iPhone since 2016.

• 1:03:04Speaker 05

  I don't know, the Pixel 4A has kind of shown me that I have moved on from small phones. It's fun and it's cute and it's a good phone, but it's just, it's tiny. And I have large hands and so I think I'm firmly going for the giant iPhone 12 whenever it's available. So.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, I'm definitely getting the biggest one. I'm just like, this thing is my computer half of the time, right? Like, might as well just have the biggest screen.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  Bigger screen means Windows.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  If it had Windows, it would be incredible.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Well, no, that's the thing. If it's at 6.7 inches, you should be expecting something more than just blown up apps, phone apps. You should be expecting tablet interfaces, right?

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  I mean, they've been trying that, they've been trying that for years. Like, ever since they first did the 6 Plus. Like, you know, the 6 Plus had, you know, a sidebar and, and, you know, you turned it sideways and it's just never gone anywhere.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Should you expect split screen on a 6.7 inch device?

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  I mean, it can do picture-in-picture already. That's, that's coming to all of them.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  I mean, I could do split screen on my Galaxy S20. I'd just do it.

• 1:03:59Nilay Patel?

  My S10?

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  I don't think, until they have the confidence to say what they want to do with iOS on the iPad screen, which they do not. I don't think they should monkey with the iPhone.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Maybe it's time to stop complaining about Android tablet apps and start complaining about, um, uh, tablet apps on the iPhone. That's a, that's a reasonable thing to have.

• 1:04:21Nilay Patel?

  It's the next generation of Virgcat. Virgcat 2021. These iPad sized apps on the iPhone are bad.

• 1:04:26Speaker 05

  Where's my Instagram app? That's all I've wanted for 10 years.

• 1:04:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, the iPad has a weather widget now, but not a, not a weather app.

• 1:04:34Speaker 05

  That's good to see. The small size is now just like part of the lineup and not like an SE every two or three years kind of thing. So now it's like firmly part of the lineup. And so like moving forward, I guess next year there'll be another small iPhone every year from now on. So that's good to see for people who do tend to prefer.

• 1:04:47Nilay Patel?

  So I, I think the question I have about the screen sizes here is where we, this conversation has sort of assumed the bezel sizes will stay the same. But I think it's reasonable to think the bezel sizes will yet shrink in these screen size increases are actually the same sort of form factor size, which would be, I mean, that is, how, how much has Apple told us that that's always what they wanted is like, you just hold like a sheet of glass. The real question is whether they can do anything about the notch. And there's been, as far as you can tell, zero notch related rumors.

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Even though Apple did for a minute have like under, and we've seen one now, a camera under the, the screen, some sensors under the screen. That's the real dream.

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  I wonder if they like, will Apple be willing to do an in-screen fingerprint sensor at some point and just have both? Cause I will tell you, I think I've said this before, wearing a mask, the, the phone that annoys me the least is a phone with a fingerprint sensor.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that's funny because all of Face ID was about just making you set it up so you didn't have to worry about a code and make it easier. And now it's like, oh, I type in that code 5,000 times a day.

• 1:05:47Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:05:48Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, I think obviously what's most important here is the small home pod. So.

• 1:05:52Speaker 05

  That's the ticket.

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  Dedicated small home pod event. That would be the best. Do you remember when Steve Jobs held an entire event for the iPod Hi-Fi?

• 1:06:00Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:06:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that was like the height. He was like, everybody get together. I made a boombox.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. The iPod Hi-Fi was a underrated classic. I am.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  I have a friend who still uses his Hi-Fi.

• 1:06:13Speaker 04

  I would still use one if someone had installed in college.

• 1:06:17Speaker 05

  Woof. I'm sorry. That's terrible.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. Someone stole an iPod Hi-Fi in my Zune collection. So they really, they really made off, they really made off like a bandit.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:06:28Speaker 04

  I just, I just like picture the look on this guy's face when he got to like the pawn shop or whatever. And it's like, look at all this stuff I have.

• 1:06:36Speaker 05

  Not getting many bites on Craigslist for this stuff. What's going on?

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  I would buy that Zune collection right now. Dude, you can buy an iPod Hi-Fi for $135 on eBay right now.

• 1:06:45Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  That is bad. That is bad information for me to have.

• 1:06:51Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, we're going to end this so I can start shopping. Uh, that was the first cast. Uh, thank you, gentlemen. We, you can tweet at everybody. Dieter's at Backlon. Heim is at C Gartenberg. Chris is at Chris Welch. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. Efa continues. There's going to be tons more gadget covers on the site. So check that out. We have a little flood of reviews coming. And then there's all the, all the rest of our coverage around all the other things happening. Uh, I'm being told that we have a new podcast survey. Uh, so please take it. Go to voxmedia.com/podsurvey. We're just trying to craft our shows. We're thinking about some new shows, some expansions. So your feedback is just invaluable. So go to voxmedia.com/podsurvey. Please take that. You can read Dieter's newsletter called Processor at theverge.com/newsletter.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Casey has the interface. It's verge.com-interface. I'm pretty excited about this. Our Tuesday episode next week, the interview show, Mark Lavoy.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:44Nilay Patel?

  Ex-Google Pixel Camera Engineer jumped to Adobe to make, quote, "a universal camera app." We're going to ask him what on earth that means. Uh, so that's kind of on Tuesday. Very excited about that. Other than that, we'll see you next week. It's Verge Cast. Rock and roll.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  Wear a mask.

• 1:08:20Speaker 11

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• 1:08:49Speaker 12

  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.