Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 review / Android 11 review / Xbox Series S and X preview

Nilay, Dieter, and Tom discuss reviews of Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 2, Microsoft's Surface Duo, and Android 11. Also, previews of the Xbox Series X and Series S. Stories from this week: White House reportedly moves to eliminate COVID-19 security theater at airports Trump’s latest attack on Section 230 is really about censoring speech Microsoft Surface Duo review: double troubles How Microsoft built its folding Android phone Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 review: an extravagant success Android 11 review: features by the dozen Welcome to the next generation of gaming Microsoft’s new Xbox Series S is surprisingly small in size and price A first look at Microsoft’s new Xbox Series X console Microsoft confirms $299 Xbox Series S console Microsoft reveals Xbox Series S specs, promises four times the processing power of Xbox One Xbox Series X launches on November 10th for $499 Your move, PS5 Xbox Game Pass is adding EA’s Play subscription service at no extra cost Xbox Game Pass for PC is doubling its price next week A closer look at Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 Apple announces ‘Time Flies’ event for September 15th Apple Music for Android contains mentions of rumored ‘Apple One’ services bundle iPhone 12: everything we think we know about Apple’s 2020 5G iPhones 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, Tom Warren joins me and Dieter. We talk about the Surface Duo review, Galaxy Z Fold 2 review, Android 11, get into the new Xbox, the Series S and Series X. Pricing was revealed, and there's an Apple event next week. You got to preview that. Coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:43Speaker 02

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• 1:17Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of ever-changing hardware form factors. See, see what I did? Yeah. It's a riff on your, your video. Yeah. Cause it's the future. All right. I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm also your friend this week, for sure. The audience has such a testy relationship with you. I'm very tired. I don't know what to tell you. Dieter made like five videos this week. It's been a lot. Yeah. Tom Warren is here. Hey, Tom.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Hello. I am from Britain. Hello, old chaps.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  Sorry, I have to say that every time I come here.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  A lot to talk about this week. Surface Duo, Galaxy Z Fold 2, Android 11. That's why Dieter has been so busy. Tom has been cranking away an Xbox news. There's an Apple event next week. Just a lot to get through. We obviously have our usual set of updates. I'm going to start with some Verge news. Yay. That's a, that's a new thing. We don't usually do that. But you might have seen if you're on Twitter today, or for some reason you were watching the advertising focused podcast upfronts. And we had, some of you were, some of you work at agencies. I, we have some news. I feel weird because it's about me. I'm usually very confident when it comes to the Verge. When it's about me, I like just have lost my bearings. But here's the news. Kara Swisher is launching a new podcast at the New York Times called Sway. You can go listen to it. It's gonna be great.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  She's leaving Recode Decode, her podcast at Vox Media. We're taking the feed. Yeah. It's a thing we're gonna do. And we're launching a new show called Decoder with Neelai Patel on the Recode Decode feed next month. This is very exciting. It's very exciting. We added one letter to the name. Very clever. Decoder with Neelai Patel. So basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the interview episodes that we've been doing for over a year now on the Vergecast. I wanna expand it a little bit. I wanna get a little bit more into the business side of things. But we're gonna take the interview episodes, move them into a new show called Decoder with Neelai Patel on the Decode feed, and just kind of expand out into the way tech is changing business, like across the board. So on the Vergecast, we're really focused on tech. We've obviously talked a lot about policy recently. It's like impossible to avoid.

• 3:20Nilay Patel?

  There's a bunch of other stuff that we haven't been able to quite get to. I'm really interested in the number of businesses that have just managed to build themselves like a robust business using things like Facebook and Instagram, using things like Shopify. I'm interested in Shopify. That's not something we would normally talk about. On the Vergecast, it's not consumer tech. So we're just gonna expand the, the frame a little bit and really get into tech and business. Still talk the same kinds of characters we've been talking to, CEOs, leaders, policymakers, basically any Warner Media executive who will dare to come on the show. But we're taking the interview episode, changing the name Decoder with Neelai Patel, moving it to Recode Decode. That's happening in October. I'm very excited about it. Obviously taking over Kara Swisher's feed.

• 4:06Nilay Patel?

  I could screw it up. I'm hoping not to. That's my plan. Hey, be fine. We made a plan. It's one point. It says, don't screw it up.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, we'll get through it. But that's happening in October. What we're gonna do in the meantime, next week will be our, my last interview episode on the feed. Then Dieter's gonna do some Tuesday shows while we build up the new show. And then that, the new show Decoder will launch in October. And then we're gonna figure out something else to do as a second show. Right. I don't know what it is. If you, if you have ideas, let us know. I got, I got one, but we'll, we'll see what happens.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Verge, Mary Bob Podcast.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great. We had an Engadget, we had like the Engadget HD podcast. Yeah.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  You just talked about Blu-ray versus HD nonstop.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Wait, I've got it. I've got it. Verge 8K 5G podcast.

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  AI into the Verge Fox Podcast. Every week Josh, Josh is like, well, they still haven't built a factory. No news to report. Anyway, that's how happening Decoder. It's very exciting, coming in October, starting with news about ourselves. So it goes, we, we don't do it usually. So I apologize, but I'm excited about it. If people want to subscribe to your new show, Neelai, what, what should they do? So right now, you could go subscribe to the Recode Decode feed. You get, right now, they're running Kara's Greatest Hits. So that's very interesting. You go subscribe to Recode Decode. And then October, we'll do a whole thing about Decoder. I promise. It's coming. I'm just like very worried this company's gonna put my face on like the side of a bus. Like, Oh, I can't wait. It's gonna be great. This company puts your face on a like 300 foot tall electronic billboard in Las Vegas

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  once, Neelai. And for some reason, I was like, that's cool. And then for this one, I'm like,

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, and you loved it.

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  I loved every second of it. It was amazing. But it was Vegas. We were like in a different time. Anyhow, so that's that news. I'm excited about it. If you have thoughts about it, tweet at me, I'm reckless, I'm at reckless, obviously interested in your feedback on ways to sort of expand the frame of our interview episodes. Okay, that's our news. Moving on to regular news, as always. Got to start the show. And where we start the show. It's been 26 weeks since Donald Trump said there would be a testing site. That's exactly half a year, right? Uh, yes, it's it's one half of a year. Obviously, this week, there's the revelations that he Trump was downplaying the virus and the controversy about it. I will just come back to this over and over again. The way to solve it is a comprehensive testing plan that most people can access.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  It is very hard to do that. That website does not exist. 26 weeks since 45 million Google engineers were tasked with building such a website. They have not yet produced it. Other COVID updates. Nicole Wettsman actually had a great piece about COVID security theater at airports. So the White House is moving to eliminate COVID temperature checks, symptom checks at airports for international travelers, which sounds bad. Uh, but if you read her piece, she makes a great point. Given the the scale of virus in this country versus other countries, the travelers to America stand a better chance of getting it from America than bringing it to it. But read it, it's a security theater is one of those things I think about all the time. Uh, just because I'm a brown man in the airport, my bag gets checked a lot. Uh, it's a real thing that happens.

• 7:14Nilay Patel?

  It is really interesting to think of the value of doing those kinds of checks at airports. She wrote a great piece about it. Uh, and then Mary Beth had a great piece about pharmaceutical companies signing a vaccine safety pledge as they go into trials on vaccines. Uh, obviously, that there was a vaccine this week already that was the testing was halted because of an adverse effect on a patient. The development of vaccines, how they work, where they come from, how they're tested, um, is an engineering problem in like a massive way. Even once it's developed, it has to be scaled and manufactured and built in a way that should be familiar to people who think about products the way we do. Um, and we're going to keep really close track of that as we go. Uh, one last little bit of policy news. There's just more 230 noise in the world. There's some new bills this week. McKenna wrote about one.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  Trump calls for the repeal of section 230, which hilariously is a Joe Biden's policy proposal. I don't know that he has a lot of depth underneath it, to be honest with Biden. Um, but Casey read a great piece on just the vagary of what all these proposals are for. You should just read it to keep up on it because I think it will start to heat up as we go into the election is Facebook moderation, Twitter moderation gets hotter and hotter. So that's the policy stuff for this week, the COVID stuff for this week. Check it out on the site. Again, I say this every week. These are the things that are going to last out of 2020. I don't think the Surface Duo is, but Whoa. I don't think we're gonna look back in 2020 and be like, that was the year the Surface Duo came out, but

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  maybe we will. So we have to talk about it. So Dieter, you have just been in full review mode.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I only talk about and touch folding phones now. So Surface Duo, the Z Fold 2, I guess the Z Flip. So you want to start with the Duo?

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  Let's start with the Duo. The Duo, so if you've been listening to the Vergecast, you know the Duo had this, you know, the Duo had this very strange embargo. Where lots of people had the hardware and they were not allowed to talk about the software. And so we knew what was happening. We were not allowed to discuss it. But it suddenly is very clear why Microsoft had this strange embargo, because the hardware is great, interesting novel, and the software has been, I mean, the software is a whole story.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I mean, so the hardware is great, although you can find lots of things to quibble with. I don't know, I just discovered that I had, have a tiny chip on the fingerprint sensor just now, after I published a review. Don't know how or why or what I did. So that's a thing. But like the other hardware quibble is the screens have different color temperatures. And I thought it was just me, but like other reviewers are saying the same thing. The left one is a little bit redder, pinker than the right one.

• 9:48Nilay Patel?

  Is it consistently the left one?

• 9:50Speaker 04

  Apparently, yes. This is what everyone, like, I've seen more than one report of this.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  They were supposed to have solved that as well.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, you'd think that it would just be like a, like a roll of the dice, but nope, it's like the left one.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  That's so weird.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  And OLEDs are super hard to get right, because like, getting them to, getting an OLED to look like it has good color temperature is one thing. Getting two OLEDs to sit side by side to look like they have the same color temperature is something else entirely. And I think it's more difficult than it would be with an LCD. So like, it's not like it's an easy problem. But anyway, yes, the hardware, very good, or at least, I don't know, but the camera is very good. A very compelling device, really interesting. When we were not allowed to talk about the software, the software was so bad that it would, the plan was just like, destroy this thing. Just, nope, can't use it. Everything is crashy, everything is buggy, everything is laggy.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  Nothing, nothing seems to work consistently for more than five minutes before you run into a huge problem.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  And this was true across the sort of ecosystem of reviewers that we know.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Pretty much every review said the same thing.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so the plan was, well, there's going to be a software update on release day. And I was like, cool. Well, you know what I'm not going to do, Microsoft, is say, don't worry, there's going to be a software update and it'll make things better when I say that it's bad, because we never trust those things. And they're like, ah. And then they gave us a software update. I believe it was for the Friday afternoon, the 4th, or whatever that day is, before we're recording right now, which was great, because I had literally just finished shooting the entire review video.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  I will say, this is like a champagne, like,

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Oh, no, yeah, I know.

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's job, like, our jobs are like, play with new things before they come out. But Dieter was very mad.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  I was like, well, I mean, I had to go back in and redo the entire thing the next day, which is fine. Like, the engineers at Microsoft, who like, made sure that software update could actually get out in time, worked way harder than I did. But, you know, I had to redo a bunch of stuff. And what's fascinating is, this is one of the very, very, very few, like, we promised that this software update that's coming out, that's going to fix the things that you've been seeing before the thing gets released, will fix it, actually worked. Like, I don't know, 35% better, maybe 40% better in terms of lags and bugs and weirdness. Not completely gone, still problems. But it went from, well, this is trash, I can't use this, to, oh, like, this,

• 12:23Speaker 04

  I'm having the moments that Panos talked about, where you like, experience the flow and like, things of like, it's really exciting. And then you still hit the lag or whatever. But it's still, it still hit a point where I could actually talk about the ideas that Microsoft was chasing, instead of just talking about their failures to get anything right in the software.

• 12:42Nilay Patel?

  So, Tom, you obviously have a window into Microsoft.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  They announced this thing last October.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  A window?

• 12:49Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. I can't, we can't, I'm canceling the show. I'm starting a new podcast. No, but they announced this thing in October. You wrote an entire story about, you know, how it came to be about their attempts to build it with Windows.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  With previous device. How do they land in October of 2020, and it's still not quite ready on the software side?

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I mean, that's what I want to know, to be honest, because it's strange. They dropped the update on Friday. So like the usual way that the software goes is they'll have, you know, an alpha, a beta and sort of channels of progression before it hits devices. So like, they must have had this update ready for weeks. So like, why would they not just put that on the review units if they knew they were going to ship it day one? So kind of strange. But broadly, I don't know how they've got to this point. Like, if they finalized the hardware in, it would have been before October to show those units. And maybe they're doing some tweaking on the PCBs and batteries and whatever else. I don't understand why it's taken nearly a year to like finalize that that software.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Well, so in addition to that year there, on this device specifically, Tom, can you just like, I think that unless you're paying really close attention, you don't actually know that there's like a secret history to this device with Andromeda and the Surface Mini. Like, Microsoft's decision to switch over to Android and then switch over to this particular kind of device is a big deal because for a long time before that, they were trying to do some other stuff.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they were for a little while. So essentially, this go back to the time of like 2014, they're about to launch the Surface Pro 3, which no one really knew about. It was pretty secret, but everyone knew about the Surface Mini, which was supposed to be their tiny little tablet. And that was going to be a single screen device, kind of maybe fit in your pocket, but kind of not like it's eight inch, you know, whatever. And they canceled it, like only a few weeks out, probably like three or four weeks, I think it was. They canned it and then they immediately swiveled towards the Duo. Well, not immediately, I mean, six months. But it wasn't the Duo. It was something called Andromeda, which

• 14:57Speaker 03

  was essentially a sort of fatter version, if you will, a thicker version, a chunky version of the Surface Duo. Two screens, it's the same sort of basic ideas, just not as refined, but running Windows and running, running not just, you know, your Windows 10 or whatever, a custom Andromeda OS, like a custom variant of Windows that was specifically for all this sort of stuff, which kind of. We saw kind of took this as a sort of form of Windows 10 X on the Neo some years later. But that was basically where that kind of all started. Now, I don't know exactly when they made the decision to switch to Android. And I feel like there was a story this week, I think from David, David Pierce over at Protocol.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  I don't know if they, I don't think they dated in there exactly when they made the switch to Android, though.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  No, they didn't date when they made the switch, but they did say that it was this past summer or that past summer in 2019 when they brought in Hiroshi Lockheimer from Google and said, "Look what we've got." And Hiroshi's like, "Oh, whoa, hey."

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Hiroshi said, "Uh-oh."

• 16:02Speaker 03

  And that makes sense and that lines up with like the history that I know as a side of the device. But like Microsoft has never done an Android device, right? Like they obviously had Nokia and Nokia, however you want to say it, before they obviously dabbled with some Android stuff, but they've not really gone full on into the Android space. So this is, this is the equivalent of them also like on the edge side, they've gone into Chromium, which is something they, you know, they know about, but they don't, they don't know the actual, the dev process like as deeply as Google obviously does. And the same with Android, you know, they're not an Android phone maker. So they've had a year to like really align all of their dead processes and really get on that code base and understand how to make software for it.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, if you, if you think about Microsoft's most important platforms, you've got Windows and Office, Azure, and then I would argue that Edge, the web browser is an important platform for them. And now they've got their phone platform, or call it quote unquote a phone platform.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Two out of their five most important platforms from like my rough count are actually Google products.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's not as if like the vast majority of Azure is running Windows, you know, like it's all Linux. But yeah, like they're obviously not familiar with developing Android like all up, but obviously they do a ton of Android apps, like they're one of the biggest Android developers and stuff. So, so there's the expertise there, but I think there's definitely obviously been some learning over the past year and some troubles. And I think that's what we're seeing, but I don't understand. I can understand how it took so long, but I don't understand why you would then launch the device in that state.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  Launching the device in this state is very, that's what's confusing to me.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Their Android apps are very good. Microsoft's Android apps, I'm actually a huge fan of. The, the thing that confuses me is, why'd they launch it? Microsoft is, I've tried to get at this in the review, but the way that Microsoft is trying to handle the multitasking, you know, Google built the foundational stuff of like multi Windows possible, apps can like resize to fit the viewport, you know, like they built that.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 04

  But the UI for it is like completely up to the manufacturer. And so Samsung and Microsoft have done two completely different things. LG is doing its own thing, blah, blah. You look at all the different ways people are trying to like do new weird stuff on top of Android or make Android do new weird stuff. The one that to me is doing the right, doing it the right way is Microsoft with the Duo. It is built into the way that you swipe up, that's built into the way that Windows appear when you try to multitask or, you know, quote unquote, Windows. You can actually like drag stuff around in the right way. So it's like they've, they picked the right thing, but the thing that they picked to do is also like the hardest thing. Samsung is just like, whoa, we'll just make our own interface on top of it and that'll be fine. And like, they did it and it's fine.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  But it's, it's an interface on top of it. Microsoft tried to build it into the core and.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they're like compared to Samsung, Samsung's essentially like a bigger screen, so they have to like optimize for like a tablet essentially. Whereas Microsoft has to build APIs, like Hingeware APIs and stuff like for those postures. So that when you do open it up and try and take a picture that is like, oh, okay, I know what this dude's trying to do. He's trying to take a picture, but at the moment you open it up and it's like, oh, hey, do you want a selfie? And then you spin it around and it's like, I don't know what you're doing.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  And you spin it around again and it like, it's, it's just a bit, you know, it's, it's just like a mess.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  That Hinge awareness that Microsoft worked on is I think what the thing is that Google is like rolled into Android 11. So like they, they are working together on stuff. It's just clear that they need more time. Apparently, summer of 2019 to now is not enough time to do it. And that also makes sense.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Which kind of makes sense, yeah. I don't know. I don't think Android 11 is drastically going to improve things, but I think it's interesting that Microsoft and Google have this like new partnership across Chromium and Android. And where they're upstreaming a lot of this work in directly into Android. So even whatever they do, if LG does a phone where it's not just like, you know, a snap on screen or whatever. Like they actually do something like the Duo, then they have all those hinge aware APIs to use directly in Android if Microsoft has upstreamed everything. And I think that's kind of interesting. That's cool. Like, that's good. And I hope, like, the work that Microsoft's been doing with Samsung, they've been working very closely together.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  On a lot of different sort of, not even just beyond the marketing stuff, but like bundling directly into their gallery software. I hope that they managed to come up with something that improves Android for like dual screens and foldables. And they're all like working in, this is like the perfect dream. Samsung, Google, and Microsoft working together, right?

• 20:50Speaker 04

  But the question is, are Samsung and Microsoft going to work together on like making foldables good and work the same? Or would they each rather sort of build up their own little ecosystems?

• 21:01Nilay Patel?

  As I read your Duo review and then the Z Fold 2 review, it seems like Microsoft, obviously the hinge stuff is very complicated to deliver. But Microsoft did itself a massive favor in saying, we're just going to have two independent screens. Because they never actually have to window anything.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. They're just like, this app is on this screen and that app is on that screen. And sometimes it's on both screens, but like.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  You have immediate compatibility, right? Because those apps are designed for that, for that display and aspect ratio. But it's not necessarily designed to be great on the, on the folds aspect ratio. So that I think they took like the the more I wouldn't say the more like harder engineering effort, but like I'd say it's a little bit more complex to do what they're trying to achieve. And we're seeing like the downsides to that.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Well, so what Microsoft did with the decision to go with Android and the decision to go with two independent screens instead of like one big screen that they window like the fold. They saw they avoided the two like historical problems that have vexed both Android and Microsoft itself, which is getting developers to make apps for a new platform or to make apps for a new screen size. Google's never been able to get a critical mass of developers to remake their apps for Android tablets, which leads to this vicious cycle of not being Android tablets, you know, because there's no Android tablets, not worth it for developers. Because developers don't do it. Nobody wants to buy an Android tablet and it rolls. And that's sort of take that out of the context of tablets and just like, should a developer work on an app for your platform? That's what happened to Windows Phone, right?

• 22:34Speaker 04

  And so Microsoft knows that problem very, very intimately.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  And so they avoided it, which is great. But then they picked up this other problem, which is let's make multi-screen on Android not tacked on, but feel integral to the entire experience of the OS. And that they just can't quite get yet.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  And I think a lot of it was like trying to avoid the the initial problems that Samsung had with the Galaxy Fold, right? The the screen technology, like I spoke to Stevie Batish, he's like, they're basically the chief scientist. He's like super intelligent guy. Like, he knows his shit. It's been there years, like 20 odd years or whatever. And he was just saying, he was just talking about glass and, you know, like going deep into how you can't bend it and like all these different things. And he was, I don't want to say he was laughing about like the idea of a foldable display, but he was, he was basically, he said, like, you know, we were laughing at OLED for like years, like until it became a thing and it took, it took a long time for it to happen. And we're in the

• 23:35Speaker 03

  same sort of thing. A lot of research is going to have to take place, a lot of experimentation. But it's just not quite there yet for them.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  I'll say this, it's a year later, so I will ever so slightly betray this confidence. Last year, when Pat As was in our studio, remember when we had a studio, we would like go places, people would visit us. And we were talking about the Duo. If you go back, that was a year ago. Famously, he was like, you're going to be happy with the price on that episode. So.

• 23:59Nilay Patel?

  Are you happy with the price, Neelai?

• 24:01Speaker 04

  No.

• 24:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's ridiculous, but I've been thinking about that episode a lot because he said that. And I remember that we had the first fold in the office that day and he looked at it and he said,

• 24:13Speaker 04

  I knew it.

• 24:14Nilay Patel?

  And he was like, I knew it. He's like, they have all the problems that that we have seen, foreseen with this tech. It's not ready yet. We've got to get to folding glass to make this work. And I was all, it was all just like off the rack. We were just like hanging out before the show. But it's a year later and we're on to the second fold and the duo is at, so I'm going to just slightly say that that happened. I won't say exactly what it is. I'd be, he was like, I knew it. Yeah. And that would to me was like, that was a light bulb moment for me that every, like, what does Samsung do? It races out ahead of the hardware being ready.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  Right. They're a hardware innovation company and Microsoft waited to, to get a software experience.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  But so like the, Tom, they're, they're doing it with OLED. So Samsung races ahead. You could, you could say Samsung is a company that's like unafraid to make the embarrassing hardware. Right. They race out ahead in foldables. They race out ahead in OLED, I guess you could say. They race out ahead of big phones. They just want to make the new thing. And if it like, turns out that like, and sometimes they're right. And people are like, oh, well, now we'll have to follow them. And it happens a couple of years later.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  I don't think enough people give Samsung enough credit for like being, they are, they are into innovative. That's just a little bit early sometimes.

• 25:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Samsung is like, we put an Android tablet in our refrigerator. Is this what you want? We're going to make it for three years and like, that's, I, that's like, that's their function. I think it's very interesting. I think that's not Microsoft's function. And importantly, that is really not how they have been talking about the duo. Right. They have been saying this is a new form factor. It's a new way of thinking. Panos has, what's the joke about the surface? The third one is always the best one. It takes three generations of the hardware to get there.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  And he's been saying, you know, internally, this is our third generation. Like, we're ready to go. And I just think that there's a disconnect between that and the reality of the product.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. The most amazing thing is that Microsoft is a software company. Like, that's literally the heart of Microsoft, right? And like in a parallel universe where this was perfect software. Like, what would the reviews have been like? Like, would it been, you know, this is a truly crazy experience? And like, okay, the camera's bad, but we can forgive that. Like, I don't know. But like, the fact that they've fallen over on software is just...

• 26:31Speaker 04

  But, I mean, Microsoft has fallen on software and other stuff in the past. Like, the, you know, the knock on Windows 10 is you just scratch it and all of a sudden you're back in, you know, Windows NT, right?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  You're back in the registry. Just like, just get a little scratch.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  Wait, Dieter, so actually address that. There are glimmers here. What are the glimmers you see? Because I asked you, when you had it and the software is bad and you were mad on that Friday that you had to redo it. I was like, is it so bad that it's a, like, one device bad? Or like, category killed bad?

• 27:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  And you were like, I don't... And then the software came out and now it seems like it's not category killed bad. It's like, one device is a little lumpy.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, my original debate was, am I, like, gonna be, like, very angry parent? That's like, you failed and you're out of the family? Or am I gonna be like, disappointed parent? That's like, I know you can do better, but I'm really disappointed in what you pulled off here.

• 27:24Nilay Patel?

  Out of the family?

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Which is way more, way, way harder. Like, feels worse to have the disappointed than the angry. Anyway, we're in the disappointment zone, is where we're at.

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  So the glimmers are, you think, right now, that I don't need two, I don't need two screens on my phone, that's dumb. And I am telling you that sometimes you do. And the reason you don't think you need it, or you want it, is like, it doesn't occur to you, or it's hard to do on your phone. But when it's just, when the other screen is just sitting there, and you could just launch another app on it, it turns out it's great. And it's great in the same way. It has that same sort of vibe as your laptop, or maybe a tablet, where opening up a second thing, there's no friction to it. There's no, there's nothing stopping you from doing it. And then, because it's so easy to do, and it doesn't take you out of the first thing that you're doing, all of a sudden, you are opening up new ways of using your device,

• 28:19Speaker 04

  or new things that you wouldn't have bothered to do before. It definitely happens. But it only happens after you, like, slog through the keyboard randomly appearing when you don't want it to.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  But well, I want to get to the Z. We haven't even talked about.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  We got. Oh, there's so much to talk about with the Z full two.

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  There's glimmers in the Surface Duo.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  They've got to solve the software. The camera is bad.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  Camera is atrocious.

• 28:45Nilay Patel?

  Maybe Mark Lavoie's universal camera app is just going to solve this problem for every time. You never know.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  It's so bad.

• 28:50Nilay Patel?

  But there's like glimmers of two screens, the Kindle app. Every time I see the Kindle app at anybody's review videos, I'm like, oh, I want that thing. Okay, they're going to keep going, but it's a totally different. The Z full two is one big screen and Samsung is a year ahead of the development curve. Where, where do these things land right now?

• 29:10Speaker 04

  So the, actually the Z evil two, the most important screen in the Z full two is maybe the cover display is actually usable. So like you don't, it doesn't feel cheap on the outside. The inside is technically glass, but it feels like plastic is like, there's like seven layers on the thing, but only one of those is glass and the rest of them are plastic. So it's like, it's glass. The thing that's interesting about the way Samsung does it is you do have the big stretched out apps. But sometimes that's just nice to have a bigger screen. Just, you just want the bigger screen, even if the app interface looks kind of dumb. And I don't love the way Samsung is sort of like half Android, half iPad. Like you pull out this little sidebar and then you can drag stuff around

• 29:50Speaker 04

  to like position it. And then you like tap on a certain three dots and it does one thing and tap on another one. And then you can like, you know, move them around or whatever. All of that said, their execution of what I don't, that interface that I don't love, compared to last year seems way better. So if you are willing to learn the little slide out doc, learn where to drag the icons around, learn, you know, how that all that works and learn specifically that Android apps don't necessarily look good on the big screen, but if you just like, take a second to like, you know, save an app pair in that side doc, then you could just always open up, I don't know, Slack and Twitter next to each other or whatever, then it's great.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  But I feel like, well, two things. One, it, it asks a lot of you and that's okay for a device like the Z full two, because you know, it's a nerdy device. It's expensive for nerds. And so like, I'm a nerd. I get it. And it's going to be okay. But two, like, man, it's 2000 bucks and.

• 30:47Speaker 04

  The Duo is 1400 bucks. And in both cases, if you just look at the functionality you get out of spending that extra money over a $700 phone, or even a $350 phone, what you are buying is not, oh, I can do this new stuff that wasn't possible before. What you're buying is, I have a cool thing that feels cool that lets me open it up. And that is worth some money, and if that's worth $2,000 or $1,400 to you, God bless you. But I can't sit here and say that even with the cool two-screen stuff you can do on the Duo, or even with the split-screen stuff you can do on the Fold, or like the Flex Mode,

• 31:29Speaker 04

  take a picture stuff, whatever, you can do all that stuff on your phone right now. You just can. It's not as elegant or fun, and it doesn't feel as awesome, but you could, you just do it, except if you have an iPhone, because they can't split-screen, because Apple's not.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  I have a Note 25G now. This is just a long, dumb story, but AT&T's website is so bad that I tried to sign up for Dire TV Sunday Ticket, and somehow I ended up trading in my dad's iPhone SE for a Note 25. I don't even know how that just happened.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  I'm so unhappy that you bought one.

• 31:58Nilay Patel?

  I still haven't signed up for Sunday Ticket. I still can't figure it out. But this phone arrived, and it is just massively powerful. It can split-screen apps. It can do anything.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  The split-screen app on the Note 20 Ultra, by the way, is the exact same interface as the Fold.

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  And I get why Samsung's doing it, right? They're teaching everybody who has their power user phone how to use the interface, so that when they inevitably kill the Fold and make the Note the Fold, which is the obvious place for the brands to go.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  Well, they might kill the Note and make the Fold the Note. I mean, or you know what I mean.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the one that unfolds will be called the Note. Like, that's what it should be.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  Okay, sure.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, that seems like the correct way for them to go.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Oh, no, they're just gonna use both brands, because it's Samsung. It's gonna be Galaxy Z Fold Note 5G.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Oh, God, it will. There's definitely convergence gonna happen there, though, for sure.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Right, because like, what do you really want to do with the, you want to write on it, right?

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have to solve that hardware problem of writing on a, on a plastic screen.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  Oh, they've, they solved it. They just, they haven't released it yet. They wouldn't have teased, they teased it literally in the announcement of the Z Note 2. They had TM Roh come on stage and do a little, you know, quote, quote unquote, interview. And he's like, it'd be pretty great if there was a stylus on here, wouldn't it? And he's like, yep, yep, it would. We're going to keep innovating. It's like, okay, so you've got one.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  That, that would be, that would be impressive if they solved that, for sure.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  Anyway, I'm just saying that what they're doing is they're teaching people to use the Samsung multitasking interface. And right now, in your Android 11 review, you're like, one of the cons you listed was fragmentation is here. The fragmentation is managing multitasking because the switching cost, if you learn Samsung's way, and then you're like, ah, this hardware isn't right, I'm interested in the service duo, you have to relearn how to multitask. That's a nightmare.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  I, I gotta say, I said this on Twitter the other day, it was probably slightly trolly, but Google's nowhere near innovative enough with Android. Like, it genuinely feels a lot of the time that they follow iOS. And I don't think that's like healthy for the Android ecosystem, developers, app developers. Like, a lot of people will sit there and say that Android apps aren't as good on, on Android as they are on iOS. And yeah, it's true. But like, this is, you can't blame the app developers. Like, and like, Google really needs to push on Android. They need to start being a bit more innovative.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  The, the, I'll, I'll push back on that in a couple of places. With developers, yes, I think developers need more support from Google. Google's big thing is pushing everybody towards Kotlin now, um, in the same way that Apple's pushing people towards Swift, uh, but they need to work harder at that, I think. And they need to provide more support to make those apps just, I don't think, I'm not saying Kotlin makes your apps better, but they, they need to help developers make these apps for these new form factors and just make them higher quality in general. So that's A, yes. B, in terms of innovation on the OS, I think it's, it's a split. I think that in terms of privacy features, in terms of, uh, security stuff, uh, in terms of like updates, that yeah, they're following iOS or they're behind.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  But they're way more willing to try out some like random stuff, um, in other areas. So the notification system specifically for like chat apps in Android 11 is so good. I'm literally angry at every phone that doesn't have it now. You can have Priority conversations, so like the specific threads from the people you care most about like are at the top and give you a different kind of notification. And then you've got all the rest of your chat apps sitting right there. You could have them up in bubbles if you want. And the thing about the bubble system for chat apps in Android 11 is it has solved in a certain weird notification-y way, the problem that Android has with multiple messaging apps. Everybody on Apple uses the iPhone.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Everybody Android has to use five or 10 different apps. Well, with this new priority conversation thing, with this new conversations up in the top notifications, and with the fact that you can have bubbles, if you turn bubbles on, you have one icon to tap, and that opens up a little tabbed interface that could have WhatsApp and Telegram and Facebook Messenger and Android Messages. They're just all in one place. You're technically running all those different apps, but it feels just like one thing that you're doing.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  It's like a floating widget, right?

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it's like a floating widget. So, you know, back in the day, if we wanted to, we could talk about how WebOS was amazing because they integrated every single chat service into a single app via synergy, and it was great.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  And then Windows Phone copied that.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  And then Windows Phone copied that. Those days are gone, that's never coming back. What Google has done is replicated that in the notifications area and with bubbles.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  I'm at the point where like, I just feel like iOS notifications should just be disabled because they're just so bad.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  They're so bad.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  You know, Tom, your point, like, I don't know, I just installed Android 11 on my Pixel, and then I found myself like having to read Dieter's piece to find all the new things.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:57Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, which is fine, like, almost always end up doing that, but this time they were particularly subsumed, right? It's usually with Android, they just like move things around, you're like, oh, that's new. Like swiping up from the bottom does something totally different this year, that's fun, I'm gonna learn that. This year, it's like very subsumed. I think they're in a state where, one, everyone is building on their platform, and then, two, everything is so mature. That big revolutionary changes are too costly. And then to get switchers from iOS, they have to lower that switching cost. So why does the power menu and the smart home stuff look a little too much like Control Center? So your average iOS user is like, oh, I get it. I don't have to think about this.

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  It's basically the same thing.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  It's at like the fundamental level I've always found when I switch to Android. And I do it like probably once a month, like I'll play with Android for like a few days. And it's just like gestures, animations, like cool, like really cool, basic stuff like that. They obviously followed on the iPhone X and all that stuff. And that's obviously well documented, but it's just, it's fundamental stuff that I feel like they just haven't really addressed over the years. And I know that it's like a bunch of different Android hardware. So like, it's difficult and it's the Windows problem as well. Like Windows feels a bit more messier than macOS because it's legacy and it supports a bunch of devices and wow, wow, wow. But like, I just feel like there's nothing I miss when I'm on an iPhone.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  I'm like, oh damn, like, apart from the openness of Android itself, but like, there's no like dedicated, like stuff in the software OS. I'm like, God, I really need Android.

• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  But you're looking, you're looking at pixels, right?

• 38:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'd like, Samsung does some great stuff as well, but pixels.

• 38:38Nilay Patel?

  Samsung phones are crazy.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's what they're good at. They're like, now this camera has 45 new modes. Let's try one of those. And like, Google isn't doing that work. And I don't think Google thinks it's its responsibility.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  I don't know, like, I feel like, like, I think that's why I'm kind of excited at the fact that Microsoft and Samsung and Google, if they can like, start working together a bit more and like, stop trying to bully each other.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  It's the opposite side of the antitrust argument.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. If those three merge and they end up going with Microsoft's smartphone as like their like iPhone competitor, you know what we'd have? A duopoly.

• 39:13Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  And that was the last episode of the Vergecast. It was great.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  That's the sort of thing you say for tweets, do you?

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  All right, we've gone too long talking about Android phones. The reviews are out. Dieter has been cranking away on them. He had to, he heard it, he had to reshoot the whole duet one. Go watch it. We're going to take a break, come back, we got to talk about the Xbox. We'll be right back.

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• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  All right, Tom.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  You have just like dummy Xboxes at your house?

• 41:08Speaker 03

  I do.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  What is going on? You just have like plastic shelves? You're just making videos with like?

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Shall I tell you the story of my week?

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  Yes, please do.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  So they arrived on Monday morning. And like, you know, like, I'm a grumpy, I mean, I wouldn't say I'm old, but I'm like, I get a new phone or I get a new laptop and it does not excite me. And I know that sounds like really elitist and, and I'm like, I'm in a really fortunate position. But like, once you've seen so much stuff, once you've visited a location so many times, it just doesn't, it's not exciting, right? So it's very rare for me to get excited about technology. But like, genuinely, when I opened up the Series S, I was like, wow, this is like, I was like, woo.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  You are not excited by a brand new laptop with the latest graphics card and a super fast processor and a ton of RAM and a beautiful 4K screen, but you were excited by a plastic dummy box of the Xbox Series S.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, and I don't know why, but it was like, it was, I don't know. Like, it sounds really like fanboy or something. It sounds like, but it was like Christmas. I was like, oh, this is so, there's something, because I hadn't seen it before. And I knew other people hadn't seen it before. So there was like an element of that. But it was also just like, oh, my God, this thing is so small. And like, how did, how did they do this? So that was like, that was my immediate thing was like, oh, how are they like, what? I wanted to know everything about it, right? And they hadn't told me anything about it at this point. So they just sent me these damn dummy units. And I was just like, huh?

• 42:32Speaker 03

  But yeah, so the dummy units arrived. They were supposed to be, I mean, they were supposed to be announcing this thing next week. So there was going to be a bunch of like, highly technical embargo sessions where, you know, briefings with the press. So they give us the full information so that we'd have articles that were like pretty informative for people to read. That's great for everyone involved because like, it just means that I can explain things better. Readers get better picture. But then it leaked. So I woke up, I can't even remember which day it leaked because it's just been such a week. But it leaked at some point on his Tuesday, Wednesday. And I woke up and I was like, oh, God, like, this will happen. And then like, that obviously kicked Microsoft into like panic mode. We need to announce everything because everything's leaked. So they like just dumped the whole thing. The Xbox pricing, everything.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  This is a trend because Google does this now. When the thing leaks, they're just like, oh, yeah, okay.

• 43:21Nilay Patel?

  Here it is. LG just did it with the wing.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I mean, LG, LG announces every single product it makes 50 times. So like, that doesn't really count.

• 43:30Nilay Patel?

  But you know, it's a, it's a pattern. It leaked, we might as well just announce it. We're done.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  I mean, I think, I think with Microsoft's case is that I've been rumoring this for like, what, two years, alongside a bunch of other reporters as well. But like, I think for them, it was like, they needed to explain this thing because like, a lot of the, a lot of the thing, so let's explain what this is. The Xbox Series S is basically a smaller, more budget friendly and, and let's say less performant Xbox console than the bigger Xbox Series X, which I'm sure most people that are listening to this are probably familiar with by now. And it's basically designed for 1440p gaming. So like, that's, I mean, I'd say the vast majority of monitors out there at 1080 that people are gaming on at the moment.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  I don't know the exact on on TVs and stuff, but like this, they say it's a pretty good, it's a sweet spot for 400p right now. Both on the PC side and probably on the console side. So it's like a good target. And like they're basically promising a similar sort of architecture and a lot of the next gen improvements from the Series X, like the better CPU is clocked slightly under by like 200 megahertz.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  The thing I care about is, does it have the the fast SSD that the Series X does?

• 44:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does, but it's 512 storage instead of one terabyte. So.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  And there's no drive, right?

• 44:47Speaker 03

  There's no drive. So it's this, it's diskless, it's all digital. It's 299 bucks, which is, which is a good price. I think it's like, that's, that's a pretty impressive price. But there's obviously the drawbacks to it. No discs, all digital. Digital prices of games are typically higher. You obviously can't use used games. I think they, I'd love to see Sony and Microsoft solve that in some way. I'd love to be able to just send my disc to Microsoft and Sony and just digitize it as well. I think we spoke about that last time. The way I look at like the Series S is, I think it's great like for, if you've got a kid who plays Fortnite like 24/7 in their bedroom with a 1080p TV. Cause you haven't spent, you know, 2000 bucks on a 4K OLED for them, surprisingly.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Like, I think it's, I think it's great for that sort of market. Like having like, you, you buy that for 300 bucks and they get the new CPU, the new SSDs, so the load times. And the performance overall will be like way better than an Xbox One. But like, it just depends how it compares to the, to the, to the Series X. I think like they're doing some upscaling stuff for 4K if you really want to attach it to 4K. But I don't know how good that's going to be. But I think that that misses the point. Like it's, it's, it's a different market.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  But what is the market for 1440p game? I mean, when you say monitors, I get it, but most people with 1440p monitors are plugging PCs into them.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  Not consoles.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's 1440p at the max. So like, I think the market is really 1080p, which is, which is the a lot of TVs are still 1080p. Like, I would probably imagine that 40% are still 1080p out there at the moment. And I think that goes wildly up when you look at bedrooms and like kids rooms, like where you're buying a typically smaller TV and you're not going to get, you can't even buy it like a smaller, like, you know, a 20 inch 4K TV or anything. It's just, they just don't exist, right? Although, I mean, maybe they do, but like, they just don't sell a volume. And I think it's that, that's the market. That's the market that I see. It's like, they're definitely going for like, the mums and the pops, the shopping around at Christmas and they

• 46:53Speaker 03

  want to get their kid a console. And they want to get something that's new and stuff. And this thing's only going to come down in price. So.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  To me, the market for the Series S is, well, I definitely have to buy a PlayStation because I want to get those games. And if it's good, if I'm going to buy a PlayStation, maybe I'll get the best one because I don't know what's going on with the cheaper one and what they're going to do there. And so if I've done that, well, I still kind of want an Xbox because I'm thinking about getting this Xbox Game Pass thing because you get all these games on it. But I don't want to have two big ass consoles in my living room. So I'll just, I'll get the cheaper Xbox. So I'll get the cheaper Xbox to play Xbox Game Pass games. And then I'll get the more expensive PS5 to be like my main console that I get like my kick ass 4K stuff on.

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  It is so blindingly clear which one of you has a child and which one doesn't.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  Just putting that out there.

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  Very obvious how your perspectives have shifted. So like, I would say Game Pass is the thing, Tom, to your point, the Game Pass is the thing here, right? Like, if this is a box for your second TV or your kid's TV, then what you need is a cloud gaming service that can address all the Xboxes, right? And if you don't have a disc, like, it doesn't matter because all the games are on the cloud anyway, and you're just moving those licenses around. And maybe you're going to get to, to streaming games and this thing will be able to just stream the games, right? Like. You kind of see where they're going is that these are just sort of client units for an Xbox service with different GPUs.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Like it's different. I mean, the memory is slightly different. You can argue a bunch of specs and people have been tweeting me a thousand times a minute this week, but you can argue a bunch of stuff, but the essential difference between the two is that one's targeting low resolution monitors and TVs and the other's targeting 4K. Like that's, that's basically the basic gist of the, if you were really simplifying it. And I think the cheaper one is really going to appeal to the Xbox Game Pass market. Like that, that is probably the best value in gaming right now. Like I think it's very.

• 48:55Nilay Patel?

  Are you saying it's not Apple Arcade?

• 48:59Speaker 03

  I like, I like they just added EA Play, although they didn't add it to base Xbox Game Passes to the ultimate. So you have to, you have to pay the ultimate.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  All of the Xbox names are bad and confusing. Well, and then there's the PC, there's the version that you can also play it on PC, which now costs more, right?

• 49:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that's going to be 10 bucks a month, but I feel like that's, I mean, if you've got Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, that, that covers you on PC anyway. So I feel like you just, I don't know, most people would go for the ultimate anyway, I think.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  So you've got the, the, the Series S, the, the, we'll call it the 1080p model, because I think that's functionally what it is, even though.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  It's 299. The Series X, which is the 4K high refresh rate refrigerator, refrigerator model, uh, model with model is 499, which is actually still very aggressive in my mind, just based on what it can do. And then X Pass, X Pass, the name is bad. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  Is 25 bucks a month. And then there's.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  15 a month.

• 49:58Nilay Patel?

  It's 15 a month.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:00Nilay Patel?

  But if you pay more and then you get a box out of it too.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Right. For, for 24 months, you, you, you pay the subsidized, you, it's like a phone plan, basically. You get, you, you pay a little bit more and then you are paying down your hardware installments and it's basically.

• 50:14Nilay Patel?

  The tech industry only has one business model, which is to be AT&T in 2004. Yeah, but right, but that's a killer deal, right?

• 50:21Speaker 03

  It's yeah, you actually end up paying less over the 24 months than you would if you bought them separately.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  Right, and you can get either, right, for the

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Yep, you can get the X, which I think is 34.99 a month, I think. Yeah, 35, 35 basically a month, or 25 for the S.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  Like, I, I see that, I'm like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna get the X. It wa- it's like, whatever, like, I, I'm gonna do the dumb Starbucks math, which is like, it's three coffees a week, or like, whatever. And like, and then I'll ha- and that is just like a brilliant move for Microsoft, right?

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:52Nilay Patel?

  To basically make an expensive thing seem cheap, even though it's maybe in the end, it's only slightly cheaper than just buying everything outright. And then we have no idea what Sony's gonna do.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  No, I mean, like, I, I think at the very aggressive end, Sony could go 399 on the digital edition, and like, I mean, they, they could do that, um, and try and make up, you know, the loss, because Microsoft's losing money, I think they're probably losing money on both those consoles, to be honest. Um, and I think if Sony goes 399, they'd 100% be losing money, um, but they can make it up with digital sales, right? Like, they, they're getting the 30% cut, you know, the Apple cut, um, on, on everything, so, so they can make it up. But like, that's an aggressive price point. I'd, I'd be really surprised if they go 399, but I think 449 is probably more likely. Um, but 399 would be, 399 would be like a headline, you know, like, that would be a truly, truly crazy price.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  And it's not, it's not, you know, beyond the realms of that happening, so.

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  When are we expecting Sony to respond?

• 51:52Speaker 03

  I don't know, because I, I'm, I'm, so, because Microsoft was supposed to do this stuff next week, I'm sure Sony knows that, um, because, you know, that's the, the way this stuff works. So maybe next week for Sony, maybe we're gonna like respond.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's here, it's like fall, it's console season, it's like

• 52:07Speaker 03

  Like, i- it's, it's gotta be real soon, because Microsoft's starting pre-orders on the 22nd of September, I believe.

• 52:13Nilay Patel?

  That's right, yep.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  So, um, Sony's gonna have to announce before then, surely, they don't want people just

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  I can just feel myself signing up for Game Pass Ultimate, a Series X for 35, on the sh- like It's the dumbest money I'm going to spend this year.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, I still haven't played half of the games I bought for my PS4 this year.

• 52:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're gonna, you're gonna be paying 35 bucks a month for this hardware, 15 of which is like a game subscription, and then you're just gonna buy Madden and only play Madden.

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I think, EA sent me a code, I don't have to buy it.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Oh, right, that's right, yeah, yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  Like, it is, it is kind of crazy value. Plus, basically, all of those games that are on Xbox Game Pass, Ultimate, you'll also be able to stream on XCloud.

• 52:54Nilay Patel?

  And that's like, that's the...

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Which is cool as well, right?

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think that if Microsoft is gonna find a way to win this generation, it will be with that thing.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, Xbox Game Pass is 100% key to, to what they're doing, so.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  And actually, just to put a tiny, tiny little, like, callback to our last segment, you said that there's, you, there's, when you're, you're on your iPhone, you don't miss anything from Android, streaming video games and a little bit of Fortnite is definitely the thing that is like bringing me back to two things, Android and big screens. I'm like, I'm back to being a big screen phone guy specifically because of XCloud and a little bit of Stadia.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, Google's, Google's openness to cloud game streaming and like just all the Windows integration really is like tempting me over to Android, I must say. But like, there's just the lock-in, isn't it? So, but yeah, I, Game Pass is just, I'm impressed with what they're doing. There's a general meme, isn't there? Like, Xbox doesn't have any games. And like, there was, I, I think it would be very different if Halo Infinite was launching with this console and stuff, like 299 for a console and you, you can get Xbox Game Pass and you get Halo. Like, that would be, I think Halo would have possibly been a system seller if they'd actually, you know, launched it properly. But yeah, it's not, and they've got to fall back on to EA and to Game Pass to, to sort of make this favorable.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  But, but I mean, it's, it's good for everyone, right? Like, you get such a, such value out of Game Pass. You get, you get all of Microsoft's first-person games. Which in itself is kind of crazy. But you get EA Play Now and just like 100 other games. It's, it's, it's pretty impressive.

• 54:25Speaker 04

  So that's the context on the console side. Tom, you also looked at the Nvidia RTX 3080 this week.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  I did, yeah.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  It seems like the PC side is accelerating. In a different direction.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  What's going on there?

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Nvidia kind of promising a breakthrough, essentially, like the biggest breakthrough in PC gaming since nineteen ninety nine. Which is, which is, you know, quite the statement. I think like the story of the thirty eight is it's coming now with these next gen consoles, like basically alongside them. And I think it's coming at the right time, like they did the twenty eighty a couple of years ago. And with the twenty eighty, they tried to promise ray tracing, DLSS, all these, DLSS essentially is like AI over some, the super sampling of of games and the ray tracing stuff wasn't there, like I couldn't even review both these things back then.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Like it was all just super early, the games weren't ready, game developers weren't ready, consoles just didn't have ray tracing, right? But all this stuff is there now. So like they've got all their like ducks in a row, like everything is in Nvidia's place for PC gaming this year. And they've also got the performance jump. So I think they're going to get all the people who are on like the ten eighty series cards upgrading. They're promising double the performance of the twenty eighty, more performance than the twenty eighty TI. Like there's, there's a lot of bold claims, which obviously need to be proven out in review.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  But I think it's, I think it's going to be essentially if, if all the performance is correct. It's going to be the point where you could buy a four K gaming PC at more reasonable cost now. Cause like you had to go with a twenty T eighty TI last time and that was twelve hundred bucks, which was, you know, what was it? Thirteen hundred bucks? Twelve ninety nine, I think something like that, around that amount, which is a crazy amount of money for a graphics card. And I think it kind of, that sticker shock was like felt throughout the, the industry. Everyone was like, whoa. And the twenty eighty was just wasn't, just wasn't there for four K gaming, really. The sort of frame rates you'd expect, whereas the thirty eight should be. And like really give you a pretty, pretty good experience there. And I think that's going to be the story.

• 56:33Speaker 04

  Well, and I mean, if that, if that turns out to be true and they can get the frame rates at four K. Like that is going to change a million things about the PC industry and gaming PC industry. Like if I want to go.

• 56:44Nilay Patel?

  Buy a good gaming monitor right now. I like absolutely do not want a 4K monitor. Just nope, do not. I'm looking for a refresh rate, looking for 1080. I'm looking at a bunch of other specs. But if all of a sudden I trust that my graphics card can push 4K, I'm now waiting for the monitor industry to catch up. And so there'll be a, a cycle of other things that come from this card. If in fact it pans out, it's very important.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  You should push the prices of 4K monitors down, especially the ones that deliver like, you know, your 144, all that sort of stuff that look like the real gaming monitors. But it also like, I really hope that it pushes Microsoft to sell out Windows on 4K because it's, it's not very good. The experience of like plugging a 4K monitor into, into the 38 was not fun.

• 57:30Nilay Patel?

  Can either the, the Series X or the PS5 do high refresh rate 4K? They can, right?

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they can do, I think it's 120 FPS and like they're using AMD stuff. So like, that's essentially FreeSync to the monitors, to the TVs.

• 57:47Nilay Patel?

  So you need a FreeSync TV. I'm just saying that the split here, right? It's like, kind of interesting. You've got the cheaper consoles, which obviously have these subsidized gaming business models behind them, right? Plugging into a generation of TVs that isn't quite there. Like we had a deal on, we posted a deal about Sony OLEDs, say they're cheap, but like, and I would just like flippantly bought it. But it can't do 120 hertz of 4K, right? Like you shouldn't, if you're that kind of person, you shouldn't buy that thing right now. If you're going to plug a Roku into it, you should, right? But like.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  Just to underline that, if you are going to buy a TV, you actually need to do a little bit of extra research. Don't assume that if it says like PlayStation 5 ready or Xbox Series X ready, that it actually means for sure that it will do all the stuff. Cause some TV makers are playing a little bit fast and loose with some of that terminology.

• 58:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. You, you want like HDMI 2.1, some of these, some of these TVs are coming with G Sync support as well. Like there's a lot of stuff going on. I don't think there's like the perfect monitor yet personally.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  No, it, it hasn't come out. And what, but what's interesting is the split on the console side and the PC side.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like we're kind of talking about the same things, which has never really happened on the PC and the, and the console side before. We're talking about 4K, high refresh rate, right? Like iframe rate. But the business models are so different that the price points are radically different. And then the displays just live in different universes of cost.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:10Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like you should be able to buy the next generation Vizio with all the specs in 2.1 for like 700 bucks. But it's a Vizio TV and the Pixel Lenses all over the place compared to a gaming monitor. Right. Like, because they're just bigger.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, like the way that they're the generate this generation, like it's crazy close. Like I, I think for like, for the vast majority of people that pick up a PS5 or Xbox Series X, that's going to be more powerful, more capable than, you know, the vast majority of people who are playing Steam games, which are playing at 1080p on like a 1060 or whatever they're playing on. Like it's gonna be those, those consoles are gonna be way more capable. And like I do, I do wonder how many people go from PC to console. Like I, I think, I think there would be more of that sort of switch if there was more better keyboard and mouse support. Cause I think that's, that's why a lot of people like PC gaming rather than using the sticks. But yeah, I mean, they're getting so close. It's, it's going to be a super interesting generation, especially now that they all like,

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  I think, I think a key thing is that they all, they're all going to have like SSD capabilities. Like the next gen consoles are just straight up SSD, but like PCs obviously still have to support a bunch of different drives. But I think, I think there's going to be a point in this generation where we'll definitely see games that are like, you have to have an SSD on the PC. Um, so that that's going to push that for sure. Whereas PC CPUs have already, have always pushed, you know, the, the CPU side of games in the past. So like it's, it's like a more of a level playing ground, but, but obviously the PC is still far ahead. But it's especially what Sony's doing with the SSD tech as well. Like they've, they're really like going leaps and bounds over what, what's happening in the PC space yet. Um, so it's gonna be interesting.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  It's funny that we started all this because you just have two empty plastic boxes. Like soon Tom will fill in the boxes and we'll know more. We gotta take a break. We gotta talk about this Apple event next week. We'll be right back.

• 1:01:02Speaker 06

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• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, Apple event next week. This was a, I feel like the underlying theme of this week's episode is big company PR operations just being upside down.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  So we were expecting some kind of Apple event soon. It's time. We knew that like there's a bunch of rumors, a bunch of stuff is coming. And then Like apple.com/events or some URL like that appears appears.

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  This cannot have been the plan.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  People see it on Twitter and you go to the page and it says, you know, the date and the time of the Apple event and at the headline, the big H1 title of the page is Apple event. It's like, okay, there's going to be an Apple event and like, let's bam, everyone goes.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  The September Apple event machinery across the tech media landscape kicked into gear. What happens in September? They put out a new iPhone. Like it was like hitting the knee with a hammer. Everyone just kicked. Yeah. Like same reflex just happened.

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  The thing is, it's not unreasonable because we knew that they had said in the last earnings call that we should think about iPhones not coming till October. But Apple has announced things well ahead of releasing them in the past. And like, who knows what the rules are with the pandemic right now.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  And that sounded like a launch, like not a launch thing, but like a ship day. Yeah.

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:54Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so everyone goes, we go, Garmin and Bloomberg goes, the whole world goes iPhones in September. And then like the whisper network kicks in. Like all of a sudden, like, oh yeah, like literally the birds start tweeting, an owl landed on my window and was like, no iPhones. Like, uh, so everyone gets this information at the same time, which is, hold your horses, go back and listen to earnings call. It's not, this is not that. And then they, the invites come and the invites say, time flies.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:04:23Nilay Patel?

  And then everyone's like, oh shit, they're just going to do the watch. So next week, September 15th, there's an Apple event. We now feel fairly confident in saying, given that it's called time flies, that we will mostly be seeing an Apple watch. There are some whispers of potentially an iPad. The Apple Music for Android app was updated with rumors of this Apple One services bundle. Maybe we're going to hear about that. There's this tile tracker thing that they've been working like, maybe some of this other stuff, but it feels like there's a watch event, they'll bundle some other stuff into it. And the big iPhone event that we usually see in September is going to happen a few weeks later in October.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Honestly, the more things that they decide to like, just chuck into this event, AirTags, a little baby HomePod, the Apple One service bundle, the more that they chuck into this event, the bigger a deal the iPhone's going to be. If this turns out to just be like, Apple Watch, iPad were out, then it's like, oh, so you're gonna, all this other stuff that we're waiting on, you're gonna like, have in the iPhone event? Well, that means you're not gonna have a lot of time to talk about the iPhones. So maybe they're not that exciting.

• 1:05:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think Apple has the same, so there was a rumor that Apple is ordering more iPhones than usual. They're expecting a wave of sales.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's this, you know, the iPhone 11, we don't think they're gonna do an 11S. Right? And then the way they've been doing their models, they're sort of like repackaging. They're not selling the old one for cheaper anymore. You know what I mean?

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  They've moved sort of the iPhone 8, the iPhone SC into that zone of the cheaper one. Okay, so then you think they're gonna do a 5G iPhone. We've already heard rumors about all this stuff. They have four screen sizes, whatever. 55 cameras, three light R sensors.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  Forty-five million Google engineers.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. But like, the thing is, it'll have a new design in 5G. Those are the things you're gonna get. And it makes sense because 5G would necessitate an antenna redesign, which sort of inherently with all these phones necessitates a form factor redesign. So anytime the form factor shifts, they sell more phones. That's just the way it has consistently gone for Apple over the years. It goes for every filmmaker. Despite everything that we have been telling you on the Vergecast, market, people who have like, actual consumer market data research say that people are actually looking for 5G. Who?

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  Have you saw?

• 1:06:44Nilay Patel?

  The only people they're surveying are like the CEOs of telecom companies.

• 1:06:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've asked companies like, why are you pushing 5G? It's not ready and like it, this is annoying. And like, well, that's like when we get the top five list of what customers are actually asking for in carrier stores. 5G is like out or near the top.

• 1:06:58Nilay Patel?

  No, that's just, there's a wandering in the store confused. They're looking for solace. They're like, what is 5G? Why do I want it?

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  It's because they've been, there's such a hype around it, or there was around it just being everywhere on yours. You know, in your frigging freezer.

• 1:07:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like, they, they think that Bill Gates is doing it to cause COVID. They don't know what it is, or they've heard that they don't need home broadband anymore. Like.

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  Meanwhile, here in the US, uh, I think it was PC mag did the test and like 5G is slower than 4G in a lot of areas in the US.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  You see in the UK, we just burn the phone mask that are 5G. I'm about to just go out and do that after the, after we're done here.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Tom, don't, don't make that joke.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot of, lot of 5G conspiracy, dangerous stories. Anyway, new form factor iPhone is a thing that we're expecting, which means it makes sense that they would pack in all the little stuff.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  So that the iPhone gets its whole moment. And maybe this Apple one thing where you pay the money, you get all the services, you get a new iPhone every year. A new way to buy an iPhone is a whole moment. What I think is underneath that, the question mark I have against all this is let's say it is a 5G iPhone and that's its feature.

• 1:08:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  Who will use it?

• 1:08:12Speaker 04

  Cause we're all at home with wifi.

• 1:08:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they were all at home with wifi and the networks aren't quite there. And like that question, maybe around the world, it's different. The rest of the world, uh, in those places have comprehensive national testing plans. They didn't, they didn't just surprise Google with a website idea that they had on a flow chart. But okay, maybe around the world, maybe in China, other places, rap, those big markets, they will be able to do it. But is that, is this the time to drive that stuff? And I think that's like the open question. For the October event. And I think next week, like you said, if they pack next week with stuff, then we know where the focus is. If next week is, here's a new watch, it's got some new features. Here's a new iPad, it looks kind of like the iPad Pro, we'll, we'll kind of know how this breaks.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  I'd be, I'd be surprised if they do the Apple tax thing next week. I feel like that's going to be intrinsically linked to the iPhone, right?

• 1:09:05Nilay Patel?

  My guess is next week will be focused. They'll, they'll do the watch, they'll update the watch. And they'll, and they might do this iPad, there are rumors.

• 1:09:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:12Nilay Patel?

  But like, here's, here's another problem they got to solve. Usually there's the iPhone event and then in October, there's the iPad update event. And all the OSs are already out because they all come out alongside the iPhone. They cannot put out iOS 14 ahead of the new iPhone.

• 1:09:27Speaker 04

  Well, they might not be able to put out the new Apple Watch without the new iOS version. Because often those things are tied together. So like the timing and the Tik Tok of when, when their OS updates are going to hit and when their products are going to hit is like, who knows what's, what the plan is.

• 1:09:41Nilay Patel?

  Right. Do you announce a new iPad and put an iPad OS 14 ahead of iOS 14?

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  Like that, that seems nonsense. Or do you just announce the stuff and say it's all coming out in mid October?

• 1:09:53Speaker 04

  I mean, that could be. Can we talk about the watch for just a second? Uh, cause so there's two things I'm curious about. One, there's a rumor that they're going to just do a lower cost version instead of just selling one that's a couple of years old as a low cost version, which is parallel to the trend with the iPhone itself, which is really interesting. So I'm wondering if that'll happen and if that'll work and sure. But two, uh, the Apple Watch is a health focused device. And so Apple is going to have to walk this tightrope of talking about a health focused device in the midst of a pandemic, when the only health anybody is thinking about is whether or not they, you know, are getting tested for COVID.

• 1:10:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 04

  I don't know how they walk that tightrope, but it's going to be tough.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  I feel like there's got to be some new hardware or some, like, I, I need a reason to get an Apple Watch Series 6. I think I'm on the four and like the five was like, yeah, cool, the screen. But like, there has to be something, um, health focused, I think.

• 1:10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. And there's nothing else for them to throw on there that would be really compelling for people at this point, I don't think.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's basically a wellbeing device, it's health and fitness and your notifications from your phone. That's basically what you use it for.

• 1:10:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We'll see. I mean, if they make the screen bigger again, I'll be very happy. Right. I mean, they they've got a little bezel left to go. So I think they're happy with this. But like, there's, there's iterative changes. But I think the reason I finally bought one was when the four came out and the screen got bigger. And then, right, the five was like, okay, great. The great. It's like, the screen's on all the time. There's like, just that quality of life usage. Like, the screen's a little better than the always on display can do a little bit more. Dieter, I think you're right. They can't really talk about how healthy it's going to make you without also being like, also, we run this exposure notification program with Google because of the pandemic.

• 1:11:29Speaker 04

  Well, it's like, in previous years when Apple is like touted health features, they've had to walk this line of, you know, it's FDA approved, but it's not like FDA, you know, whatever the language is. The FDA is like, looked at it and said, you're not going to kill people, but it doesn't mean that it's actually a health device. And so selling people on health features in normal times is tricky because you need to make sure you're not over claiming what it can do. And I think that just applies doubly right now.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And then I think this potentially this, this new iPad, we'll, I mean, we'll see. Like, there, there are just a lot of rumors. You can go look at them. But the real question for me is, is if it's just a form factor shift. And it's just a replacement for like, the base iPad, then they've got the iPad Air sitting there that.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I actually think it's going to be flipped. I think, I think they're going to keep the base, the base iPad iPad because it's, they, they, they can make that thing so cheap. And they want to get that into schools. So they like, they just want that price to go down, down, down. And they'll keep that same form factor forever if they have to. And the, the more likely thing is they'll replace the iPad Air with, with this form factor.

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's, that's way more likely.

• 1:12:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter, what port will it have?

• 1:12:41Speaker 04

  What, the, the iPad?

• 1:12:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Oh, because, hmm, oh, God. What if they, what if they go with the iPad Pro form factor, the iPad Pro's smart connector on the back, but they stay with Lightning? I will, I will, I know it's a virtual event, but I will get in my car and drive down and socially distance protest outside. The Apple campus holding up a sign that just says USB C. I'm just gonna, it's gonna be like.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  You hold up an iPad Pro with USB C.

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's gonna be like John Cusack with the boombox, but it's just gonna be me with a sign that says USB C. Just that's have that image in your head.

• 1:13:20Nilay Patel?

  I've, it's like the thing I've been like that form factor. If they put a lightning for it, like they've, they've maintained that the pro thing is USB C and that.

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Nilay Patel?

  That's where they've stayed.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  I just want the USB C on the iPhone.

• 1:13:33Speaker 04

  Thank you. Yes.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  Come on.

• 1:13:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm over USB C. I want to write a stunning takedown of USB C.

• 1:13:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Nilay Patel?

  When I get all, when I get some free time.

• 1:13:41Speaker 04

  What are you gonna, what are you gonna replace it with?

• 1:13:43Nilay Patel?

  It's just a mess.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  It does. That is true.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  The cardinal sin of USB C is trying to send enough power through it to run a laptop.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  If they just kept it, oh yeah, if they had just not tried to do that.

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  Let me introduce you to all the different USB C generations as well.

• 1:14:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know. I mean, it's just like not, but like that's, it's so the thing that keeps it from doing all the things that A did with a better connector. And then obviously like Apple, like shoving Thunderbolt into it. It's all confusing, but on a laptop in particular, it's, I have a 16 inch MacBook Pro. You can't send 96 watts through everything.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  So Neil, I, I think the, the reason you feel like that is because you have a lightning cable to charge your iPhone. And as a person that has a USB C port on their phone, having the same cable, I could just like unplug my laptop and plug my phone into it and get a real fast charge, incredibly fast charge on my phone off of that same cable without any fuss is pretty amazing. That is why Apple should put USB C on the iPhone.

• 1:14:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  And, and to finish, all the problems with USB C will be fixed with years before, right?

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, of course. There'll be no problems whatsoever. So that's the last episode of the version. I don't know why I keep saying that. The first cast is gonna continue. Next week's gonna be big. As Tom said, expecting some PS5 news, maybe, but we definitely know there's an Apple event. This is gonna happen. We'll be back on Tuesday. We've got one last interview show coming on Tuesday. And then we're taking our break before Decoder, Fridge Cast. It's all, it's growing. It's all happening. Uh, Tom, thank you for being here this week.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  No worries.

• 1:15:16Nilay Patel?

  You can tweet at us, Dieter's at Backlon, Tom's at Tom Warren, I'm at Reckless. We're running a survey right now. Go to voxmedia.com/podsurvey. We're just every so, you know this, every so often we look for feedback on our shows. What makes you listen, what you like, don't like. Voxmedia.com/podsurvey. Interested in your feedback. Dieter's got a newsletter called Processor. It's theverge.com/newsletter. Casey's got one on democracy, basically. Usually we say social media and democracy, but is there any difference? It's called the Interface. It's theverge.com-interface. We'll be back next week and then with the chat show. It's next week's gonna be big. Lock on that next week. Pay attention. That's it. Rock and roll. Wear a mask. EU.

• 1:16:16Speaker 08

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• 1:16:57Speaker 05

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