Apple announces AirPods Max / Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon interview

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Chris Welch discuss Apple's announcement of their AirPods Max noise-canceling headphones and give their first impressions. Second half of the show, Nilay and Dieter talk with Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon about Qualcomm's new flagship processor the Snapdragon 888, the potential of 5G, and what he thinks about Apple's new M1 processor. COVID-19 vaccine starts working within two weeks after first shot Apple and Google’s COVID contact tracing tech is finally coming to their home state of California COVID-19 vaccine monitoring program may be at risk of false reports With guns drawn, police raid home and seize computers of COVID-19 data whistleblower Florida’s justification for raiding COVID data whistleblower Rebekah Jones is looking a little shaky The pandemic turned the volume down on ocean noise pollution Uber asks governors to give drivers early access to COVID-19 vaccines Apple announces $549 AirPods Max noise-canceling headphones, coming December 15th AirPods Max first look 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, Chris Welch joins us to talk about Apple's new AirPods Max, and then Dieter and I interview Qualcomm President Cristiano Aman.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of first-class headphone purchasers. That's how, that's a category, I think. I'm your friend Eli. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  I'm your second H1 chip. You don't know why you need me, but I'm there.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Chris Welch is here.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  And I'm your spatial audio experience.

• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  So this is, we're doing two episodes this week. On this episode, Dieter and Chris and I are going to talk about Apple's new $550 AirPods Max. I have them. I did a first look. They're in a box. They're on their way to Chris now for a full review. So we're going to talk about that a little bit. And then Dieter and I interviewed Qualcomm President Cristiano Aman. We're going to run that in the back half. We have a second episode this week. There was a lot of news. We have a second episode. The United States Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general, separately, both filed lawsuits against Facebook to break Facebook up. So I gathered Addie Robertson, Russell Brandham, and our friend Casey Newton. We have an entire episode about

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  what's going on with Facebook. That's also in your feed right now. We just realized it was too much to jam it all together one place. So this episode, we're going to talk about the AirPods. We're going to interview the president of Qualcomm. There's another episode where we talk about Facebook. As always, though, I want to start with COVID, the most important story in the world. Quite a lot of COVID news this week. It's all on the site. You can go check it out. There's a bunch of vaccine development occurring. The FDA is meeting right now in committee to approve the first vaccine. It's being administered in the UK now. We've learned that it starts working within two weeks after the first shot. You do need two shots, though. Mary Beth Greggs, our science editor, has an entire newsletter called Antivirus, which is very focused on vaccine development, distribution logistics, all of that. Go subscribe to it. It's theverge.com/antivirus.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  We've also learned a lot about the Apple-Google COVID contact tracing system that's in their phones. It's less effective than we would hope, especially because it hasn't been rolled out in very many places. It is just now coming out in California, which, Dieter, if I'm not mistaken, is where Apple and Google are headquartered.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. They're around. I mean, Apple has a spaceship and they could, maybe they can move it around, but they tend to leave it in Cupertino.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  It does fly away from time to time. It is out in New York. I, you know, I haven't gotten any alerts, but we're looking into how well that system is working. Obviously, as we go into the period of time where the vaccine is more widely available, the need for these programs is up in the air, but they're still important. There's also a lot of, Nicole Wetzman's gonna have a piece soon on just how well they're working. And one of the reasons they haven't worked so well is because the investment into contact tracing itself has not been so high. So all of that's happening and check that out on the site. And lastly, I keep talking about sort of second order effects of the pandemic. We have a great story. The volume of noise pollution in the ocean, like the sound of the ocean has gone

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  down since the pandemic because travel has been restricted. So second order effects still come in fast and furious as the pandemic continues to surge. As always, that is the most important story in the world. I don't want to ignore it. You can go to theverge.com/science. If you want, for all of our coverage there, if you want to keep up on vaccines, really encourage you to read our best newsletter, antivirus, at theverge.com/antivirus. Okay, so there's some headphones. Chris, you want to tell us what is going on with these headphones?

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I forget what day of the week it was that these were announced already, but

• 5:07Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't matter.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Seemingly out of nowhere, one morning, Apple announced the long rumored AirPods Max. We had thought they were going to be called the AirPod Studio for a long time, but they went with Max for whatever reason.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  Just to poke at me.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we got the name, then, then we got the price, which is largely dominated this entire thing so far about who these headphones were for. And yeah, it's, it's there. So they're $549, which is far more than their main competitors from Sony and Bose. And so it seems like Apple is pretty confident that they've got something people will want on their hands.

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  So let's put that price in context, because, you know, I put out the first look today, and it's true, those are the headphones we always think about. I think we recommend the Sony, I can never get the model name right. I got it wrong in the post even.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  It is the WH1000XM4.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  Some letters.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Rolls off the tongue.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Oh, so if you think of it as a thousand X, that way you, I always get the M and the X in the wrong order. So now I'll get it right.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  I just call them the WMX4s, which is related to nothing.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. It's just word like alphabet soup to me. The WH1000

• 6:18Speaker 02

  X.

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  XM4.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  M4.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  XM. Okay. There's Sony makes these headphones are very good. We recommend them all of the time. They're always on sale, right? And I think you can get them for 280 bucks. They're they list for 350. So the most you should pay for them is 350. You can often get them for 300 and right now you can get them for cheaper. Bose is like the industry leader. Like they created the noise cancelling headphone category. The Quiet Comfort 2s were dominant for years and years and years. They've now come out with their own poorly named product. The noise cancelling headphones 700.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  Which rolls right off the tongue.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  But the important thing about those is they they finally came back and like started competing directly with Sony. For a while Sony seemed to be running away with it. And we were like, Bose, you gonna update your headphones or what? And then they they did. And they're good.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  But I'm just imagining like Greg Joswiak in the naming meeting with the team. And they put up the names of the competitors and they're like, whatever AirPods Max, it doesn't even matter. Like, it's like, what are we competing against? Like, pure nonsense. But Bose is obviously there. They're a dominant brand as well. Those both live around 3 to 350 dollars. But Chris, there is a class of headphones that is far more expensive.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've got like your super audio file, high end, open back headphones that I don't have around the house very often. I mean, I'm more of a casual toss something in my bag headphone type person. So I don't really want to be tossing 700 or $1,000 set of headphones into my bag. But if you're one of those people who just like tends to lean back at home and listen to your Hi Fi DAC and your your flak library of music, then there's that upper tier of headphones that I think Apple is trying to say these might sound as good as.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm getting at. It's like, are we in the right context for the price?

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  I think that we are, but I do want to acknowledge there is a tier of like $800 headphones in the world. So the reason I don't want to just put the AirPods Max in that higher tier is I think of that higher tier, like Chris said, is audio file. I think it is a tier where you want to think about the quality of your audio through the entire

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Chain. And if one of the pieces in that chain is whatever codec happens to play over Bluetooth that you don't have 100% control over, you might not want that to be your audiophile headphone. Also, and we actually need to get into this pretty deeply, Apple's doing a lot of stuff to the music in the headphones algorithmically to try and improve the sound beyond just like, you know, spatial audio, you can turn your head and blah, blah, blah, blah. If you are an audiophile, my hunch is that you want to know exactly what's happening to the sound and potentially have control over it. So I am very reticent to say that this thing should be thought of as, you know, like the cinema display or the XDR fancy, whatever we're

• 9:04Speaker 02

  calling it now, is meant to like, they can compete with $30,000 reference monitors. It's like Kenya, I don't know, but it is in an interesting middle zone. I don't know if we should give these headphones the benefit of the doubt of being in that middle zone between true pro and like high end premium consumer in the same way that we ended up meaning to do for the the Pro Display XDR.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. Fundamentally, these are still like just wireless headphones that top out at 256 kilobit AAC. So like, there's no lossless kind of file that you can play over these. Whereas Sony has LDAC, which is almost CD quality. So if you've, so if you have like, so if you've got like Amazon HD, or if you got Tidal, lossless, you can technically play music that's almost CD quality on your wireless headphones, which is kind of cool. And these don't really have any kind of answer to that.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  It's just the bar is so low.

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  They also just.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Like CDs came out in like 1986.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  They don't have a headphone jack.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Right. So this is another $550 for the headphones. Honestly, I, when I was writing the first look last night, I forgot, I, Neelai Patel, forgot to mention the lack of an audio in on these headphones. And Dieter was like, who are you? And I'm just gonna say it was very late. But I haven't been in a plane in a long time. So I haven't thought about it. But if you travel in an airplane, all of the high end headphones have an audio in port, an analog audio in. So you can plug into the back of the seat back and plug into your headphones. The Sonys are, I think, superior because it's a 3.5 millimeter standard one. So a regular cable. Bose has gone with a 2.5 millimeter.

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  Jack, uh, just to make it harder. So like in the grand scheme of things, Apple is offering a $35, 3.5 to lightning plug. And I'm just going to say, is that all so different than Bose's weird 2.5 millimeter plug that you're also definitely going to lose? So like, maybe in the scheme of things, it's not so, so bad, but it is $35. It's not in the box. So your total investment, if you're somebody who flies a lot and wants to use your head, your excellent noise cancelling headphones on a plane, you're $585, which I will note is $15 less than an iPhone 11, which is crazy. Like, that is just a very expensive product that does the same

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  thing as much cheaper products.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Instead of buying the, the $35 thing, the, the airflies, and there's another brand, and there's also a bunch of knockoffs that you can get that are just Bluetooth, like bridges that you can plug in, they're around the same price. So if you want, you could plug one of those into the seat back. I've done that.

• 11:37Nilay Patel?

  If you want, you get more Bluetooth in your life. Would you like this cable? Or would you like some Bluetooth nonsense? That's a real, it's a real tough one.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's the cable, like some of these headphones actually support a USB C audio, but Apple has not supported that with this. So you can't plug in like the lightning cable to your USB C port on your computer and play audio. It's not going to work. So the only way to play wired audio is to get that 3.5 millimeter jack, as far as I understand it. So.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Do we know if the, um, the dongle works, 3.5 to lightning dongle that you can get for the iPhone?

• 12:08Speaker 03

  I don't think so, because I tried that with the Beats Pro, which is kind of the same situation. That's when this cable first came out was for the Beats Solo Pro. And I used two dongles on each side of a, of an aux cable to see if that would work. And it did not do anything. So I think you really need just the straightforward cable from one to the other to make it work.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Incredible. I know we're all over the place, but before we get too far into like, what are the features and qualities of the, these AirPods Max? You just mentioned Beats. I don't know. Just like, can we just take a moment to just feel sad for the Beats team? I don't know.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't think that Apple cares about Beats. I'm just going to say it out loud. We had, you know, opportunity to, you know, we, I have them. And so one of the questions I asked was, what about Beats? And like, the answer was more or less, Beats is a company.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't think there's any relationship between this product and what the Beats team is doing. I think the Beats team, the headphone team, they bought that company to launch Apple Music as a streaming service and they get, you know, a couple of months of saying Dr. Dre worked at Apple, which I think everyone was very happy about. And the headphone company was always a thing on the side and I think it just remains on the side.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  See, I think Beats itself is trying to carve out their own niche now that they see all this happening. Like they just did the Beats Flex $50 earbuds that use USB-C. So I think that says plenty on its own, right? That they're trying to kind of appeal more to the Android customer again, more so than they were for a long time.

• 13:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I do have them. They are going to Chris with a full review. I have not spent nearly enough time listening to them and especially listening to them in comparison to the other headphones that compete with it. So we've got to do the full review. I will say they sound very nice. Big, pleasing, wide soundstage, very crisp, no distortion when you turn the volume up all the way. Like the things you would expect from a $550 pair of headphones. I can't tell you that they like blew my mind the way that the first time I ever listened to high-end headphones, my mind was blown. They sound good. I think we have to test them and like really put them to test. What I will say is the design

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  is really strange. And like, it's strange in a way that sometimes Apple can just transcend the strangeness of its design and it becomes the new design. Like I think AirPods themselves are a perfect example of this. Like, they look silly and then they didn't. These are like, they're made of aluminum. They don't fold in any way. The headband has mesh over it. It's just like a unique design. The aluminum looks really, to me, not high-end. And the way, the best way I can think about this is, Apple traditionally reserves colors for its mid-range products. Just think about the iPhones right now.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  Right? All the bright colors are in the mid-range of the line. Like the consumer part of the line. And as you get higher in the line, everything gets a lot dimmer and blacker and more aluminum.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Same thing with the iPad Air.

• 14:58Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Bright colors want, this thing is really expensive, but it comes in all those colors because they made it out of anodized aluminum. And the silver one I have, and I'm dying to see the other colors. So maybe they look different, particularly maybe the space gray, the darker gray ones look different. This one, I was like, is that plastic? Like when I first took it out of the box, I thought it was plastic, even though I'd knew I'd read that it was aluminum. I was like, is this plastic? It has that feel of like painted plastic, which I don't think it's just very odd to me. And then the next thing, and Chris, I'm dying, when you get them tomorrow, I'm dying to see if you agree. The next thing is like, there's just a lot of slots. I don't know how else to describe it. There's just a lot of cutouts in the shell and the way that my Sony X 15 billion don't have any slots.

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  Like the Sonys are like not as nice. They're like floppy or they're, you know, they're, they're made more, they're more obviously plastic. But they're like, there's only one, two microphone holes in each side of the thing. And like the, the audio jack, this one is like,

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are nine microphones.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  There's nine microphones. So there's just slots all over the place for the microphones. There's two microphones inside. There's sensors inside. So there's more, there's two little holes inside the cups. The slots are, are asymmetrical. So on the left one, there's a short one on the top and a long one. And on the bottom, like they're just, it's all, there's buttons and knobs. It's like, there's so much stuff going on. The, you look at it, you're like, this, there's a long gray antenna line cutting through the bottom of the left side. It's, there's just, I've just never seen an Apple product where like, they didn't try to hide all the stuff, right? Like the iPhone, like iPhone antenna lines, like we've come to accept them. Um, the iPhone has

• 16:41Nilay Patel?

  however many cameras and mics and speakers all over it, but they're like integrated into the thing. And here it's like slots. Where you're looking at a slot. So.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Lots of slots and cutouts, but they're also heavy too. And that seems to be one of the main things people are saying about these is that.

• 16:53Nilay Patel?

  They're heavy. They're made of metal.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:55Nilay Patel?

  The ear cups come out magnetically. They're very comfortable. So I think I have a gigantic head.

• 17:02Nilay Patel?

  Just a real thing. I think all like, like I just got a lot of surface area. Is this a metaphor? No, I just think I have a lot of surface area to spread the weight out over and I've never noticed it. I don't, I don't know. I'm, I'm assuming there's like a head sized charred apple where they're like weight per size. What I, what I have noticed with my Sony is and with the, the Bose before then, they get hot, right? Cause you know, their padding is just like not breathable. This is made of memory foam. It seems much more breathable. Again, I didn't, I didn't wear, the way I would normally do this, I would go on a five hour plane ride to San Francisco and I'd wear the headphones and I would tell you exactly what I think of them. Cause that is the ultimate stress environment for these things. I sat on my couch and listened to some tunes. And I was like, this is great. So again,

• 17:45Nilay Patel?

  Chris has a lot of work to do, especially in comparison to the other, the other headphones. I will say that memory foam, and I put it in the first look, I'm wondering, Chris, by the time if they get to you, if it's gone. I pulled these things out of the box and my room filled with like new, new car smell. Like it's called off gassing. People tweeted at me. It's like, it is a product of memory foam. But like these things, they, they, they put them out right at the end, right at the end of the year. They just hit the deadline. It seems very obvious that these things got manufactured and slid into a box and then sent over. And like for, I don't know, it's, I don't usually comment on how a new phone smells. I'm not like, the iPhone smells of rosemary. I'm like,

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  right? It's just a, but like these, the memory foam, a byproduct of that. And people have told me AirPods Pro have a slight smell too. So I just look out for it. I'm curious if it lasts through another, another shipping adventure, Chris. Sure. Um, I do want to talk about spatial audio. You brought that up. Seems strange to me. It supports Atmos. If you have an iPhone. Or iPad. Or, or yeah, but if you have a device that moves, because spatial audio requires motion sensing in the device itself. Do you know what device does not have a motion sensor in the iOS ecosystem? The Apple TV. Yeah. So you, I don't think that you can listen to Atmos audio with your expensive $550 Apple headphones if you're watching a movie on your Apple TV.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Got it.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  I don't, that seems completely upside down to me. But you'll get it on your plane when you're watching it on your iPhone 12 mini.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is pretty cool. I mean, I've watched a few things here and there with my AirPods Pro, and I imagine it's more intense and much better on the AirPods Max than it is on those, since they're actually over your ears and they fully cover everything. And they've just got much bigger drivers. And so I think it's going to be better there. But it's kind of like a neat trick that like Sony and Bose can't really imagine. I mean, Sony has 3D audio for some music, but it's not nearly the same thing. Whereas here you can open up, I think there are a few apps that support it already. I think Disney Plus might support it. I think HBO Max does for sure. And so you can just, you can just watch movies and it sounds like a surround sound. Not quite as good as like a, you know, super hi-fi.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. A 7.1 system, but like for headphones and earbuds, it's, it's pretty amazing.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  And I've really enjoyed it on the AirPods Pro, the buds. The names now are very confusing, so we have to be very careful. I called them the AirPods Pro Max in a tweet and then, whoo, poke that dragon.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  One more thing I want to know about is the digital crown. If you asked me, is that a good way to control headphones? I would think that it would kind of suck because it'd be like this little knob. You got to reach up and twist and push. And like, I would much rather have really big, I don't know, gross is the word. I think I like gross movement, large movement controls, like a big dial, like on the Surface things or a giant touchpad that I could just like, without having to be fiddly, just swipe up for the volume or swipe ahead or just slap my hand on it to, you know, do the, you know, listen to the, the person on the plane or whatever. So is that little digital crown thing fiddly or is it fine?

• 20:52Speaker 03

  It's, it's fine. So it's a lot bigger than the one on the Apple Watch.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Right. Okay.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  So you expect that they would just reuse the parts. I don't know why I expected Apple to be like 1980s GM and just like parts been that, no, it's a different digital guy.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  So it's bigger. There's a button next to it. The button is the noise cancellation mode. So you get in transparency or noise cancellation.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  And then the crown, if you push it, it's play, pause. And if you hold it down, Siri, and then you rotate it. Here's the thing that, that.

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  Caught up to me that I just wasn't expecting. It is you move your finger forward to turn the volume up, which means you are turning the wheel counterclockwise.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I can't, I don't even, I, I will lose my mind if I try and like visualize.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's really hard to going on here. Yeah, like you, we think volume up is clockwise. But on your right, just put your finger up to your right ear.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:43Nilay Patel?

  And.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  This is the worst. It's the worst.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  So thankfully, there's a setting to change that I've seen in some hands on videos. So you can change it to the other way for the crown.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  So it's, it's very much the volume control equivalent of natural scrolling. Like your brain just either accepts it or it doesn't. And that just for a day, just like, or not a day, however many hours I had just threw me. Cause I was like, cause you, you think a volume control should be clockwise for up. But it makes just as much sense for forward to be up. I would love, if you work at Apple and you know what happened in the meeting where they default, they decided the default would be counterclock.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  There was no meeting, they didn't plan it, they didn't think about, this is the company that when you're in landscape mode on an iPad, you press the left button for volume like up. And then like you've turned it and then the meter goes in a different direction. Like they don't, it just happened.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, it was fine. I actually, I, I appreciate like my Sony headphones, you know, it's all the touch controls. I just never use them. I'm like, this is a mess. I don't like it. The, the Bose have buttons having, there's a reason people like that surface. That big wheel on the surface, it's tactile, it makes sense. You're, you're not going to accidentally touch it. So I, I was skeptical. I do think this sort of natural scrolling element of which direction it turns like it. Because you can change it, it means that you're going to pick up your friend's headphones. It's going to be backwards. It's literally, it felt to me literally like natural scrolling.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  What about the case?

• 23:10Nilay Patel?

  The case is one of the most deeply strange things Apple has ever made. And I, I put it on the list of deeply strange things with like the mouse that charges upside down. Yeah, I was like. They they definitely think this is a good idea. They definitely think it's just fine. Uh, and it's not. It's just isn't. It isn't any of those things that Max safe Duo charger is like, uh, so it's it's one piece of material.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Is it leather?

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  It's it's it's it. Maybe it is, but it feels like vinyl to me.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  So it's it's obviously like one piece of material they cut out and then they like origami it into a case. I do think it's cool that it looks like a purse when you put it in there, the handle.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:52Nilay Patel?

  The headphones like the hand. It's a very rigid band. Uh, that's clever. And it's like fun.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  I do wish it folded down to just a little bit smaller, the way you can like tuck a headphone in on other headphones. So it'll might more be more likely to fit in a bag pocket.

• 24:06Nilay Patel?

  Yes. What you're saying is I wish it was useful. Here's right. It's like ugly and not useful. Well, I keep saying it's origami because it has to attach to itself, right? To stay in that shape because it's one piece. And so you can just see all of the like glue seams. Like on the inside where like the pieces are glued together. The the middle comes through the back and that's folded over on the back and glued in. And it's just like, yo, $550. Like you gotta, where's my cool, hard case?

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the backlash to this has been pretty widespread. So I think like within a few weeks, you're going to see Apple start to sell like third party cases from its friends at the Apple Store. They'll probably cost a hundred dollars.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  And one of the challenges here is the case contains some magnets that when you put it in the case, it actually puts the thing immediately into low power mode, which if you don't have.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Because there's no power button.

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  There's no power button. And they it takes them a while to shift into low power mode on their own.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  You can't just manually turn it off?

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  I don't believe you.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  Not that I not that I found. Again, Chris, a lot of pressure on Chris. Chris has to discover all the things that I didn't discover. But my.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  I will try every scenario.

• 25:10Nilay Patel?

  He's gonna have to hold down all the buttons in different combinations. If you cover, if you use all ten of your fingers to cover up all the slots. I don't know. It's a weird product. I will say after all of this, I know I'm just sounding a bit leaking. It did sound good. Yeah. And that thing that Dieter, you're talking about, Apple calls computational audio. We just have to test it and see, especially against the other ones. But when Apple talks about computational photography, what they're talking about is overcoming the limits of a tiny sensor and a tiny lens at capture to get more data and to make a more realistic image. Right? That's the reason that we do computational photography. When they talk about computational audio, they're just like,

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  we're going to process the shit out of your signal to make it sound like what? And I think the big question is, what are they trying to make it sound like? We had some of those answers with the HomePod, right? They're processing the hell out of the HomePod sound. I know HomePod sounded nice. Some people don't. But like, it didn't work to sell the HomePod. Right? That emphasis on audio quality didn't work to sell the HomePod. I think these sound really good. They were fun to listen to. I wasn't displeased with the sound. But I think it, it bears some investigation over what all of those microphones are doing inside there to tailor the sound as you move around, how the noise cancelling affects it, all that stuff. Where I will just say this, AirPods, the regular AirPods, don't

• 26:36Nilay Patel?

  sound good. Right? It's like, Apple's history of making good sounding headphones, their most popular products, sound extremely medium. And so we'll just see if they've overcome that. Like I said, no pressure, Chris. I'm counting on you to get it right.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, it seems like people are buying these despite the, the price shock. Current, the current shipping estimate is 12 to 14 weeks. So they've got a backlog.

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  It is. You think they rushed them out for the holidays, but then they only made like 10. It's possible. Yeah. We'll see. But yeah, it's fun to like, it's a new product. We'll see how much they push everybody. It's not that there wasn't already fierce competition here, but Apple usually enters these markets and really, really ratchets them up. But Chris, we'll do the review. We'll have you back to talk about the AirPods Max when you get a chance to put them head to head with all the other ones.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Looking forward to it.

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna take a quick break. When I come back, Dieter and I interviewed Qualcomm President Cristiano Aman. Check it out.

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• 28:36Speaker 02

  Chris Hearn-Mon, you are the president of Qualcomm. Welcome to the Vergecast.

• 28:39Speaker 06

  Very happy to be here. Really a pleasure talking to you all.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  We're having you on because you just had your tech summit, not in Hawaii as usual, but virtually online. And you announced a new flagship processor, the Snapdragon 888. We covered it at a high level last week, but we wanted you to come on and actually tell us about it at a much deeper level. So what's the story with this new processor?

• 29:04Speaker 06

  Well, it is the latest, I think, premium platform for Qualcomm. It's interesting in so many ways, especially because we are in the 5G transition. And as, as we go to a new transition in technology, we have seen new use cases and really it changes the mobile experience. We're going to see a lot of things happening. And, and it is one of those opportunities that we have to redefine the premium smartphone experience. And that's how we talk about the Snapdragon 888. It redefines premium. It is also the first instance that we, in the premium tier, we integrated the modem and a premium modem into a single chip.

• 29:47Speaker 06

  And it is really delivering the next evolution, really, of 5G connectivity with a lot of advancements in, in graphics, in camera.

• 29:59Speaker 06

  And machine learning and many other features. And, you know, as, as I want to go deeper, I want to just start focusing in just on the connectivity alone. It breaks new records and speeds with taking 5G connectivity to 7.5 gigabit per second. But there's something we talk about at the new X60 modem, which is going to become extremely important, especially in markets like North America, but not only here, across the world, as it will allow the existing spectrum holdings of the carriers that have accumulated spectrum for years across 3G and 4G to more than an icon, deliver real 5G performance as they

• 30:39Speaker 06

  started to aggregate those spectrums into wider channels with the speeds and capacity of 5G. So a lot of good things coming and happy to go even deeper.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  I see you're wearing a 5G is real shirt there. Is that, that's, that's great. It looks, it's black. We have our email shirt, you have your 5G shirt. It's perfect. So I know you're, you're enabling sub six carrier aggregation. Could you just talk, what do you think the state of 5G is here specifically in the US? I'm not sure if you're aware, but Neil and I are, neither one of us have had great 5G experiences so far, based on where we happen to live. And I'm just wondering, how long is the road going to be to 5G feeling like the default that LTE does today?

• 31:22Speaker 06

  I think that 2020 was really the year the 5G gets to scale. The device ecosystem already switched. It's interesting, the market contracted due to the pandemic. Before the pandemic, we talk about, you know, 175 to 225 million 5G devices in 2020, and we're going to finish the year and we're on the higher end of that guide. So, so 5G definitely got scale and switch on the device side. 2021 is the year of coverage. And what are you going to see in 21? Is as we bring the ability now to reuse the existing spectrum holdings, existing

• 32:05Speaker 06

  base stations that have been built, as you can add an additional 5G equipment with care aggregation, as you add the C-band in the United States and you have more sites of millimeter wave that takes time, you're gonna see very broad coverage in performance, not just the icon. And that's gonna be 21.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  That's my question. Like, and I wanted to finish the answer, but the icon is, the icon's on my phone here in the middle of the woods. And I, what I am getting is relabeled 4G DSS and it's slow, right? And I'm just wondering, yep, you're gonna get the coverage, but you, haven't we all like missed our opportunity to make the icon switch mean something real?

• 32:48Speaker 06

  Well, I can't, I can talk about how, you know, some of the other companies feel about the, but I'll give you, I'll give you a, a very precise, you know, answer on this. So here's, here's one simple way to think about it. If you look at the, you know, the channels, how wide a channel was in frequency, when we were, you know, in the 3G era, we talked about channels that were like 1.25 megahertz wide, or maybe five megahertz wide. As we go from 3G to 4G, we had channels, maybe the channels became, some stay at five,

• 33:28Speaker 06

  then it went to 10 or 20 megahertz wide, and you started to aggregate them together. So you get 40, you get 60. Well, in 5G, the channels are start of 100, 200 megahertz wide, or even 800 megahertz wide. So without adding more spectrum, there's no way to get the performance of 5G. You need more spectrum. So what happened is the first, what is, what is good about DSS is the DSS allow an operator to deploy a brand new 5G equipment in that frequency. You get a new icon because you're getting now a 5G signal. And you can, in

• 34:07Speaker 06

  that frequency, which is a very narrow channel, right? You're getting the 5G technology, but the channel's still narrow. Now, what if?

• 34:18Speaker 06

  And as you convert all of your existing 3G and 4G channels to 5G and you aggregate them together, then I can get 100 or 200 megahertz wide. Then in addition of the channel, you're going to see the speed. That's why when I talk about Snapdragon 888, you know, we talk about the X60 modem doing DSS plus carrier aggregation. That's the big deal. Because then for the existing spectrum that is already deployed and cover everything, you can actually find a way to upgrade and get the performance. And then on top of that, you add the new spectrum like the C-band, and then you keep deploying millimeter wave stations that look like access point. Millimeter wave comes with massive amount of spectrum,

• 35:02Speaker 06

  almost unlimited capacity. But you have to deploy new sites. The good news is the sites for millimeter wave, they're not expensive. They look like Wi-Fi access points. That's the good news. The bad news is you need to get new sites and new site permits. And then you have to negotiate that municipality by municipality to get the approval, to get a site, and then deploy it. But it takes time, but we're going to get there. And that's why maybe I going back to answer in a simple way your question. To anyone, we're projecting there's going to be the year that we get broad coverage of 5G in the United States, as well in other countries as well.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  I'm curious, you are the dominant chipmaker for Android phones worldwide, and especially here in the US. And so I imagine you have a lot of sway, or your opinion carries a lot of weight, when all the carriers and Google and Samsung and you get in a room and be like, all right, how are we going to figure out what this 5G thing looks like? I'm curious what you think about the inclusion of millimeter wave on phones specifically? Because to me, it seems like we're in a little bit of a cart before the horse situation with millimeter wave on phones, that I can see really interesting use cases for it in other technologies. But for a phone, I would much rather see a huge emphasis on this DSS

• 36:25Speaker 02

  and carrier aggregation, because that to me is like, that solves a more urgent problem.

• 36:29Speaker 06

  So can I present maybe a different viewpoint? Okay. But I promise I'll, you know, make irrational compelling. I promise that. Okay. For what we have today, and I go back to the way you framed the question. It is true. I think we're very proud. It's not true that we're a dominant player, but it's true. We aspire, we aspire to be, you know, the best one, but, but yeah. Very competitive, very competitive market out there. And I'm sure our legal team will be very proud of my answer. But I'm proud of you. Yes, but let's go how you framed the question. It is true that we have an important role in the ecosystem.

• 37:12Speaker 06

  When we, when we set ourselves to let's accelerate 5G by one year. And, and we, from that idea, we had contacted, you know, the, the companies are part of pioneering that idea. And all of a sudden, we, you saw us make an announcement with 40 plus companies in MWC. And we changed the timeline of the industry and it's been an incredible journey. We're still there. So, and as we think about this technology, the technology has to not only bring new opportunities, but solve problems for existing industries. So we look at how we're going to design this technology. Said, okay, what do we need to, what are the things that we needed to bring to the mobile industry?

• 37:55Speaker 06

  So one, it's the society today, it's connected. Everybody has a smartphone and everybody wants speed, unlimited data, right? And reliability. So 5G starts with that. And, and it is about unlimited data and capacity. Think about when people, before the pandemic, people still go to sports events and concerts and, and like try to upload something on Instagram or was congested. You need to make that go away. You're going to be connected with the cloud. So 5G comes to solve that so that in a way, everything you do today is better. You already consume video in your smartphone, you stream video in your smartphone. But the reality

• 38:39Speaker 06

  Sometimes you buffer, sometimes you don't play at a highest possible resolution. But if it's music, you're there, right? Music, no matter where you are, is fine. Well, 5G with the higher speed performance is going to make video at a higher resolution. 4K video, 95% of the time, you're going to get a higher resolution. And you're going to do that in the other direction. When we announced Snapdragon 888, and I go back to about redefining premium. We put 120 frames per second autofocus camera. We're going to make everyone a broadcaster, that's our goal, right? But there are other things that are going to come. And you cannot get those other things without millimeter wave. And I'll give an example.

• 39:24Speaker 06

  One of the still-thinking consumer, one of the things that users, you know, look at their phone and it's communication. They also use it for entertainment. And as you have millimeter wave bandwidth and low latency and speed. You can play mainstream gamings on your mobile device. So we're going to make every smartphone a kind of a Nintendo Switch-type device, when you think about it. And for a developer, you're going to have to develop a mainstream game. It goes into the cloud and it doesn't matter. So almost in the way that we had said, maybe the next console is the last console, right? So millimeter wave is required to change the gaming industry.

• 40:10Speaker 06

  Millimeter wave is also required for a completely different experience. When you think about interaction with other people and collaboration.

• 40:19Nilay Patel?

  One question I have about 5G in general and Qualcomm's role in deploying it. And that's why I was laughing when you said we're not dominant. Qualcomm developed a lot of the standards, right? I mean, you have a massive patent portfolio around the 5G modem. You have a massive amount of research and development. There's a reason you have all the patents. Invented a lot of things, but as you think about your modem business, the 5G business, do you see competition for 5G modems emerging? Do you have a great direct competitor for 5G equipment?

• 40:51Speaker 06

  Yes, we look, we always had, we always had competition and the in today, the nature of the competition changes, right? You have, for example, I have competitors in China, which are kind of more focused towards the China domestic market, more focused towards the mid and the low tier. We have been more focused on the technology innovation, the high and the premium tier. We have customers that have their own modem and we have been successful in that relationship and it's been a very balanced relationship as the markets that require the latest technology, you know, our modems are the preferred platform. And I feel that we always going to have competitors in the space. It's a very competitive landscape,

• 41:34Speaker 06

  but we separate Qualcomm from all the other companies. And, and, and I say that sometimes, people have a hard time defining what we are. We are semiconductor company, are we licensing company? We're really, you know, a technology and a system, system engineering type company. We create, you know, we create standards that's we're not, we're not like an implementer of standards. And I think as that ability to continue driving the modem roadmap, which it changes every time as you bring new technology is what allow us to be highly differentiated and ahead of everybody else. And, and the proof, you know, it's there is not a single

• 42:17Speaker 06

  modem technology all the way back to 3G that we're not the first. And I think that's, that's kind of track record we have.

• 42:25Nilay Patel?

  So you mentioned China, but I just to bring it to United States where we are, I can't think of a phone we've gotten to review that doesn't have a Qualcomm modem in it. Who is your big competitor in the United States?

• 42:35Speaker 06

  I, I think I, my reaction to that is this speaks a lot about the quality of the US consumers and how much they care about technology.

• 42:45Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, it's us. We're great. When I, look, when I go to the Verizon store, I'm like, I need a Qualcomm modem.

• 42:51Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  And as far as I know, so does every other citizen in America.

• 42:55Speaker 06

  By the way, Qualcomm stands for quality.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. All right, we let you, we let you do the thing on millimeter wave. We're not letting you do that with the company's.

• 43:05Speaker 06

  I'll give you an answer. We have, you know, the same exact competitors that we have sometimes as it's a modem for one of our customers like a Samsung. Sometimes their, their phones, they're built with companies like, like MediaTek and we had competitors, which was also Huawei HiSilicon, right? But I think the, the key answer to your question, the result of what you said is the United States carriers, they actually, they're very, they care about the quality of the service that is offered in the network. Also they take full responsibility. They know you have a problem on your phone, they're going to call the carrier.

• 43:46Speaker 06

  So therefore they take all those things to very rigorous test and Qualcomm always comes on top. And I think that's, that's the result.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  So let's switch from 5G to the 88 itself, which is a processor. It is very powerful. You've got new cores in it. You've got a new GPU in it. One of the questions we were asking last week on the Vergecast. You know, Apple tells us a story very loudly about how their chip team works with their OS team and they can realize all of these performance gains and that their chip is very fast. Their phones are very fast. Their computers are very fast. Same kind of, same kind of question. I can't think of a high-end premium phone, Android phone that we've reviewed that doesn't have a Qualcomm chip in it. In the past 10 years, Dieter, it's been a while. It's been a while, right? Like the, the Snapdragon is dominant. Is there a conversation with Google about optimizing Android or the chip?

• 44:37Nilay Patel?

  To realize the kind of performance advantage that Apple tells us that it's getting?

• 44:43Speaker 06

  I think that is my, that's among one of my favorite questions of the, of this conversation. I will say the, the answer to the question is absolutely that there is not only with Google, also with Microsoft as, as we enter the PC space. The way we look at this is we're very, or at least we aspire to, we aspire to be very good at what we do and we're very focused. Like that's one of core. Premium mobile smartphones, the core competence of the company. And there are other companies also very good at what they do. And we create a model that we can work together and develop great solutions. And that's what you see in some of the devices that get built with Snapdragon. But I also wanna wanna point it out to something.

• 45:26Speaker 06

  When you do those comparisons, and I'll give you like a hint, if I may. When you do those comparisons, we design platforms for the consumer. We don't design platforms for benchmarks. We design for the consumer. So if you get, for example, some of the Qualcomm metrics, let's just pick one example, our Adreno GPU, right? What you can see when you put side by side all the other platforms is you're gonna play a game. And I hopefully gonna play like a more sophisticated game that's gonna make use of the GPU. And what are you gonna see? Is you gonna play that game for twenty, thirty minutes?

• 46:06Speaker 06

  And you're gonna see that there's a lot of platforms that advertise certain benchmarks. They can't sustain it. But Qualcomm will have like a flat curve of performance over the twenty minutes. We're not gonna power throttle. We're not gonna bring it up so when we think about the capabilities we advertise, we also design for the user. And you're gonna see that across the Snapdragon processor. And that's one of the things that differentiate us versus some of the competing platforms. And we do get the benefit of kind of working with our partners, whether it's an OEM or Google or Microsoft for the PC, really thinking about what would the user experience at the end?

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  But let me push you on that. You said you work with Google to optimize for Android. And you work with Microsoft to optimize for Windows. I'm not an expert. My understanding is that Windows and Android work very differently.

• 47:00Speaker 06

  That is correct.

• 47:01Nilay Patel?

  Right, just my lay understanding of operating systems. How can you optimize for both? Like it seems like you're once again being pulled in two different directions.

• 47:09Speaker 06

  That's a very good question. I'll say we optimize for more than two. For example, in the automotive space, for the dashboard, for the car dashboard, we run Q and X. And, and we also run.

• 47:22Nilay Patel?

  BlackBerry lives.

• 47:23Speaker 06

  Yes, we also run Linux. So, so, but the, but the key, I think the key to answer your question. For example, when you think about our graphics, right? When we do our graphics and we do Adreno GPU, we have our Adreno drivers. And we work with Microsoft and with Google. So Adreno drivers is part of the Android solution. It's part of the Microsoft solution to run on that. So, so think about the teams that work together. There's a very clear demarcation line on what we can do and we build the system together. And I think that's true when you look at some of the performance we could achieve. When you take a use case, you get Snapdragon and you put it on a PC.

• 48:05Speaker 06

  And you think about a use case of a PC is different than the use case of the phone, different than the car. And I think we're very fortunate to have, you know, the depth of hardware and software teams that can work and kind of virtually, you know, integrate into one end-to-end platform. And it's, it is, it's true when you think about all those things. I'll give you another practical example that should answer your question. When we got our into Windows, there's one thing to separate us for, for example, our competitor and the incumbent player in the PC space.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  You can say Intel, you're allowed. This is great.

• 48:42Speaker 06

  So, so the incumbent player in the PC space.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  That's what Intel stands for, actually. It's an acronym. Yeah, it's quality communications, I believe.

• 48:50Speaker 06

  Or maybe that's the dominant player, I would say.

• 48:54Speaker 06

  So when you look at that, what, what is different about Qualcomm, for example, our solution much richer on multimedia and richer, for example, in dedicated hardware for machine learning. So some of the machine learning applications that you could not do on Windows PCs because it's become CPU intensive, you can do now on Qualcomm. So one of the features we're showing to Microsoft, which is on. Qualcomm only you can do because you can run this on our NPU Snapdragon is when you're when you're talking on a Teams meeting, your eyes always look like you're looking at the person, even if I'm doing something on the side like this, you know, you actually have that connection by doing machine learning. And that's a great example of doing something

• 49:35Speaker 06

  very unique when the teams work together and make use of the hardware that we have and they put capabilities on the software and it becomes a unique solution.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  So, I mean, I have owned and used both Surface Pro X with the processor you co-developed with Microsoft SQ1. I haven't used the SQ2 yet. I've also used the Surface Pro 7. And generally speaking, the Surface Pro 7 has worse battery life, but it's faster and has fewer app compatibility problems. And we know with the M1 that Apple sort of got to have its cake and eat its two. So what lessons could Qualcomm and Microsoft take from what Apple did with the M1?

• 50:12Speaker 06

  So the one of the great things about the M1, it the way we look at it, we're super happy with that announcement, very happy. And kudos to Apple because it validates our belief. It basically validates our beliefs that, you know, the the mobile user is defining what they expect out of the PC experience. And when adding Apple to that conversation, you started to see that the ecosystem is moving. Great example, I believe, was not it was probably this week, if not the week before, that Adobe announced a bunch of applications that are all ARM native. And once you make it ARM native, you know, the performance increases, right?

• 50:56Speaker 06

  As you have no app compatibility. So that overall is a very good sign. The ecosystem is going to move and and it showed that Microsoft and Qualcomm were in the right trajectory. It's about is about battery life, is about connected, is about a whole different multimedia experience. And let me just talk about the pandemic in a way to prove that point in addition to the conversation we just had of M1 and the ecosystem. PCs change dramatically in the requirements, how we think about PC. I think PCs are in the process of being redesigned. And we're seeing that activity we have with our customers because of the pandemic.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  First of all, the CIO now has an opinion about your home computer. Because that's it's the process of the enterprise transformation of your home. The second thing that we see is camera, really important. This is, that's what we're doing right now. Hopefully you like what you see. We're using the snuff term camera on my Surface X. But the camera becomes really important for the PC use case. Then you're gonna, you work, you want to take a break, entertainment. Whether you want to watch, you know, things, when you want to run, you can run some of the mobile apps. Or on top of this, you have to deal with connectivity. And as extension of the enterprise, you need to be always connected.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  All of those things accelerated, even simple things about multimedia audio, you know, and, you know, how, you know, I see you with a headset and, you know, microphone becomes important. So all of those things are part of this redefinition. And I think that's a lesson learned for everybody about how we should think about those devices as the use cases are changing really fast.

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  When you talk about the, over the past 10 years, when, you know, when the, when executives from the dominant chipmaker come on the show, we always ask them about Moore's Law. Because that's the thing, that was their guy, Moore. And they've run into it, but you look at the past 10 years, they've gone from 10 nanometers to seven to now five. It does, I, I, do you see that? I mean, obviously a lot of other work happened and a lot of other improvements happened. There was a market and there was demand and the chips got more sophisticated across a number of axes, but one of the major ones was process transitions. That happened on a cadence and had very dramatic impact. Do you see that sequence of process transitions happening across the next 10 years?

• 53:25Speaker 06

  It continues. I all agree with you that there was many vectors of change and I some is a process technology, some is design technology, some are are kind of new innovation in standards or architecture. And there's no question that the rate of change and performance improvement on mobile SoCs have been probably highest in the industry. And specifically to your question is, I expect that to continue. Like, we were getting to to the end of lithography and then EUV came in. We're one of the pioneers with, you know, EUV lights based chipset.

• 54:06Nilay Patel?

  What does EUV stand for?

• 54:08Speaker 06

  It's Enhanced Ultraviolet, if I'm not mistaken. I think so. It's basically, it's an evolution of of the lights that you use in lithography. As you, as you, you know, at the foundry level, you basically produce and manufacture semiconductors. And there's, you know, next, there's a number of technologies to continue pushing the boundaries from from where we are right now, you know, into further shrinkage, going into 3 nanometers and beyond. So I expect the industry to continue. We are not at a point that we say there's not a room for leading node any further.

• 54:52Speaker 06

  I think the we have always focused our Snapdragon product line on leading transistor technology, both across our two suppliers, TSMC and Samsung. And we feel pretty good about the roadmap. We still have ways to go. And eventually, we shouldn't be talking anymore about just one transistor technology. As some of those smartphones have even more things going into it, you have a multitude of transistor technology. Just thinking, I'm just thinking about now, when when we look at the whole chipset that we provide with Snapdragon, including our Afron and with our Molder 2 antenna strategy, we have a multitude of components all with different process technology.

• 55:35Speaker 06

  And I think the industry is still very vibrant and we feel good about it.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  The other thing that's interesting to me about the 888 is the number of image processors and the capabilities of the image processors. It seems like there's a real, I don't know, lead-follow thing happening where there's a wacky new camera feature that a manufacturer tries and then everybody else is like, no, actually, that's good. And then eventually Qualcomm makes it sort of available to everybody that wants to be able to do it. And then the cycle continues. Is that a fair way to think about how camera technology is going to be going for a little while on phones? Because it does feel like we're at a point where we're waiting for another step change. And I'm wondering, do you think the 888 is it? Or is there going to be something else coming along?

• 56:16Speaker 06

  It's a good way to think it. I don't disagree with the way you approach this. You're going to have somebody, for example, who say, some of our customers had an insanely high number of megapixel, right? And those are going to be great things, and they're going to get over time. But you may not do this across every single phone. But I feel at this time with the 888, it was time to do a significant upgrade in camera and overall, not only photo, but video. We believe that 5G is going to do to video what 4G did to music. Everyone will be a broadcaster. Everyone will be able to record and send it to the cloud.

• 57:01Speaker 06

  You could not do in a phone, a lot of very high-size image files if you don't have good bandwidth. Because bandwidth becomes almost a necessity now for you to be able to store things on the cloud.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  How is that not true now, though? I mean, TikTok exists, and Instagram exists, and Facebook Live exists, Periscope. Like, what will be meaningfully different in a 5G ecosystem for services like that?

• 57:27Speaker 06

  How fast you can upload a very large file, and the ability to start broadcasting yourself and straight to their cloud. 5G bandwidth, we just carry that in an instant.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  But I guess in terms of the step change, it'll be faster. When you say what 4G did to music, I'm just curious.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  It's already happening. Is it just gonna happen faster? Or do you think there will be another second order effect because of faster?

• 57:57Speaker 06

  No, I understand exactly your question. With music, the transition is, I would say, probably complete. Unless, if you have CDs today, it's because you're vintage. And eventually, there are gonna be more vinyls than CD just because of the vintage aspects. People don't buy CDs anymore. Would you agree to that, right?

• 58:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 06

  What I think what 5G will do, because there's music in 3G. There's music phones in 3G. Some of the flip, I remember the LG Verizon music phone, that silver one that a lot of people had. But with 4G, it was just pervasive. 5G will do that. 5G will basically significantly change how we're gonna consume video. It's gonna be as easy to stream video in high definition, 4K video, high definition, the full frame rate with 5G because of the bandwidth. The next thing that it does, it allow cameras to go exponentially higher in the file size that you're gonna generate by higher resolution as video encode.

• 59:03Speaker 06

  For example, you can capture 4K HDR video and you can instantly broadcast yourself to a cloud service and your social friends can watch it in real time. And for that, you need bandwidth that you didn't have otherwise in 4G to do that. Or at least you could do it at a lower resolution and it's probably not as pervasive as you can do with 5G. The next answer to the question is, what is the next? And I think that's kinda the second part of the question. What are the next thing coming to camera? And we're just at the beginning, I think we talked about that during the tech summit, of adding more machine learning to camera. Because then you'll have the ability to do a lot of artificial intelligence

• 59:46Speaker 06

  with real speed post-processing of our image, or even going all the way to the cloud and come back in real time to be able to get access to information in the cloud, make decisions and overlay those in how you process image. So all the things we're gonna see coming. So I don't know if I'm answering your question.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think I'm curious. You're describing a lot of things that would be great. The reality is that AT&T's network streams everything in 480p today, right? Like, I'm curious how much the availability of the bandwidth or the availability of the capability will actually translate into real change, given the fact that you're not in... I'm confident that if you were in charge, we would just do all the things. But there's a carrier, there's an operating system vendor, there's Instagram won't make an iPad app. Like, there's just all these bizarre little roadblocks along the way that I'm wondering if the presence of more bandwidth will finally knock down.

• 1:00:44Speaker 06

  I, you know, I hear you. And, uh, and look, there are many more examples, and there are examples in many other industries, even beyond mobile, of, uh, taking a while for the benefits of technology to be adopted by the ecosystem. So I think the first answer is, uh, I'm always optimistic about those things. And, uh, and, uh, and when we're thinking Qualcomm, when we're gonna design something like 5G, we need to think about, you know, 10 years ahead. But the second part of your answer is, the speed that when the developer ecosystem moves, it's incredibly fast. You just needed to get that initial momentum. I will, I'll flip the conversation a bit, and I think you're gonna agree with me.

• 1:01:27Speaker 06

  We have invested with the same, uh, you know, Snapdragon technology. We had invested early in things like, uh, augmented reality and virtual reality. Very, very early. We're talking about this for years. And now, if you look at Oculus Quest, it is starting to reach an inflection point. The scale is really picking up, and you've started to get into a meaningful conversation. It's not like a handful of people using it. And you can see, as more and more people, users, that the speed of the development and the applications, and people thinking enterprise applications, consumer applications, that's my comment, for example, about video and gaming.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  The video applications, the video sharing, the social, uh, you know, networks, uh, use of people, you know, sharing their experiences will... We'll get modified and we'll get better as the broadband becomes broadly, you know, widely available. The problem you have, it's a chicken and the egg, right? If you only have, for example, high-speed 5G getting multiple gigabits per second in low latency just in Manhattan, it's going to take a while for a developer to be interested in developing this for the globe. But as I said, as we get coverage being deployed globally in 21, those things will start to change.

• 1:02:43Nilay Patel?

  Awesome. Well, Christiana, thank you so much for joining us. It's an amazing conversation. I'm excited for my 5G to finally become real.

• 1:02:50Speaker 06

  Very good. Well, it's my pleasure. I love talking to you guys. Thank you for the opportunity and happy to participate anytime.

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

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• 1:03:46Speaker 04

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• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  All right. Thank you to Cristiano Amon for joining us. He answered the questions, Dieter. Nerdy stuff. Yeah, that's why we did it on the Vergecast. Thanks again to Chris Welch for joining us to talk about the AirPods Max. Like I said, that review is coming. We'll have him back when that's done. And like I said, if you want to deep dive on the government's case to break up Facebook, check out the other episode of the Vergecast this week that's in your feed right now. Russell, Addy and Casey talked all about that. On Tuesday on Decoder, this is a fun one. I was very excited to do this episode. I interviewed Melissa Grady, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of Cadillac. And we actually really didn't talk about cars at all. I had her explain how advertising works to me across the internet and TV and all the other places because she has a big budget. She's the one who spends the money to buy ads.

• 1:05:08Nilay Patel?

  So I spent an hour with her just talking about how that works. Super fun. She's great. Check that out on Tuesday. It's just a big component of the online economy. I mean, I definitely asked her for an Eschleid like five times. Like, let's be honest, I really just wanted to ask for an Eschleid. She didn't give me one. That's coming on Tuesday. We'll be back next week with one more chat show, then we're at HDMI Holiday Spectacular. We're thinking about it. Yeah. It's coming. We got some ideas. I've got some really bad ideas. We're gonna see what happens. My ideas have mostly been just yelling at Andrew to put sleigh bells in it. So we gotta, we gotta really buckle down, but we're gonna do it. It's coming. Yeah. All I know is I'm definitely gonna trim a tree with HDMI cables. It's gonna be great. Oh my God. We gotta get you to light up HDMI cables.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay, you can tweet at us. Chris Welch is at Chris Welch. Dieter is at Backlon. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.

• 1:06:21Speaker 07

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